When a mysterious visitor offers Cassandra Rolins, listless college dropout, an invitation to live out all manner of wish-fulfillment fantasies, she jumps at the chance. Wish fulfillment has a bad rap to it as fiction, sure, but experiencing it yourself is something else. What's not to like about getting everything you want?
It's tempting to preface this story with an apology, as self-conscious authors are wont to do. I know exactly why I feel that way: it's a story that I knew, even before I started writing it, would have a lot of things that would cause people to immediately click away. It's in first person. It features a self-insert. It's a multi-crossover. It's based on Jumpchain. It starts with an apology, or at least something similar enough to one that I expect some people to be put off by it.
If you're still here, thanks for bearing with me.
Because you know what? I'm not sorry I wrote it, and unless I get completely roasted, I don't think I'll be sorry I posted it. I had a lot of fun writing this, and I hope at least some of that comes through to those who read it. Besides, the more stagnant and cliche-saturated the genre, the more room there is to subvert expectations, provide commentary on those expectations, and otherwise turn what would otherwise be just more dross into art.
I'm not confident enough to claim that I've done that, but I might have.
I tried, at least.
If you're willing to give it a chance: thank you for reading.
The author avatar of yours truly (some blemishes removed) is offered the chance for wish fulfillment beyond her wildest dreams: a spot on a Jumpchain bounding through the multiverse. Join her as she tries to decide whether escapist wish fulfillment is all it's cracked up to be.
This is a derivative work, based on the Jumpchain CYOA Community, which itself consists of a large number of both derivative and original works.
The views of the characters in this work are not necessarily the views of the author. Yes, that even applies to the Authorial Self-Insert.
The story currently lacks beta-reading or other editing. Any errors are purely my own. Thanks to a team of lovely beta readers, nine out of ten errors are caught before they hit the page. I hold them responsible for the last one.
This version of the story is a 'living document'. That means it bites when startled details may be retconned in the future. Sorry.
For fans of Jumpchain who want to know how and why things are weird. Can be safely ignored.
The Warehouse only accessable from properties Jumper & Co. own.
Out of Context, You Say? [MODIFIED]
Outside Context Powers are less effective.
Slot-o-matic / Slot Locker / Slot-o-matic JR
Jumper and Companions must buy Perk Slots of various sizes. Perks must be slotted to function, and must match the size of the slot. Unslotted perks have no effect.
AN: Let's dive right in. I'll be posting the first six chapters all at once.
PROLOGUE
The day I met Max was otherwise a perfectly ordinary Thursday, a bright, clear morning in early May. At the time, I was sitting alone at a table for two in a breakfast cafe near my house, enjoying a plate of eggs benedict. I paid no attention when he walked in, and barely noticed when he stopped beside my table, even though I was sitting on the bench along the wall facing the rest of the room.
"Cassandra Rolins?" he asked, prompting me to actually look up from my food.
The first thing I noticed was that he's pronounced my last name correctly: RAW-lins rather than ROH-lins. Then my mind caught up to the fact that he'd called me Cassandra; less than a dozen people knew to call me that. I wiped a bit of hollandaise sauce off my chin, feeling extraordinarily self-conscious of the stubble I hadn't bothered to shave that morning. Having someone call me 'Cassandra' in public felt like having a megawatt spotlight pointed directly at me, and I had to look around the room to reassure myself that people weren't staring at us. Thankfully, everyone else in the diner was paying as little attention to us as I had been to them, so I pushed down the anxiety in my gut and returned my attention to my 'caller'.
He was an older man, though I've always been reluctant to try to assign an actual age to someone based on appearances. Qualitatively: he was clean-shaven, his handsomeness accentuated rather than lessened by the thin wrinkles lining his face, his hair had gone entirely gray, and he looked great in a well-fitting suit. The phrase that came to mind was 'silver fox'.
"Uh, yes?"
"May I join you?" he asked.
I hesitated; this man was a complete stranger, and yet knew far more about me than anyone but my closest friends and family. On the other hand, we were in a public venue where I had a hard time imagining anything untoward happening, so I said, "Sure, why not?"
He grinned and sat down across the small table. A waitress offered him a menu, which he waved off with a simple "Just coffee for me, thanks," before turning back to me. "Please, don't let me interrupt you," he said with a glance at my unfinished eggs. I went back to my meal while the waitress poured him a cup of coffee.
Neither of us spoke until I'd finished the eggs and fried potatoes and pushed my plate away from me with a contented sigh. Being able to finish my meal in peace had relaxed me, and my initial panic had been replaced with wary curiosity. "So, how can I help you?" I asked.
"Cass—may I call you Cass?"
I nodded, hardly surprised that he already knew my preferred nickname.
"My name is Max, and I have something of an… unusual offer for you."
"If this is a multi-level marketing thing, you're wasting your time." I immediately regretted the words; he probably didn't deserve me being confrontationally snarky right out of the gate.
Max took the comment in good humor, though, chuckling softly as he shook his head. "No, no, nothing like that. It's more of an…" he hesitated again. "It's hard to explain exactly. Think of it as an invitation. To… adventure."
"That's very, uh, vague."
"Yeah. Hmm." He pushed his coffee cup and utensils to the edges of the table to clear a space to lean forward intently. "Look, rather than beating around the bush, I'll be direct, which means I'm about to say some things that will probably sound, well, crazy. You know the saying about extraordinary claims and evidence?"
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," I quoted.
"That's it. I'm going to say some pretty crazy things, but I assure you, I have the evidence to back it up if you can keep an open mind. That seem fair?"
"Yeah, sure." I was definitely curious now, though I was increasingly suspicious that this was some kind of scam.
Max muttered something under his breath before clearing his throat and plunging right into the crazy. "I'm an interdimensional traveller," he said, completely straight-faced. "I go from world to world collecting skills, technology, and magic while trying to help out where I can, and occasionally invite people I meet to join me in my travels."
I waited for him to laugh and admit he was playing a prank on me, but he just continued staring at me expectantly. "Okay," I said. "That's… that's pretty unbelievable. So your evidence is what? Taking me to see your TARDIS?"
He grinned; I guess I was taking this better than he'd expected. "It's not quite a TARDIS, but I can certainly do that, if you'd like."
"Sorry, but you're going to have to show me a lot of 'extraordinary evidence' before I'm willing to follow you somewhere where you will, by your own admission, 'disappear' me." The best case scenario at that point would be walking onto the set of some bizarre prank show; I didn't want to think about the worst.
"Of course." He made a small gesture, and the salt shaker on the table flew into his waiting hand. He offered it to me, allowing me to check it for wires or other stage magician tricks; I, predictably, found nothing. Once I was satisfied, he repeated the gesture to whisk it out of my hand and back to his, then left it floating in the air above the table. I prodded it, causing it to bob and spin slightly before coming to a stop.
"That's…" I began, but I was well and truly speechless. As I watched, a single-serving coffee creamer cup and an ice-cube from my water glass joined the salt-shaker, and the three objects began to orbit a point above the center of the table. Rather than grapple with the complete impossibility in front of me, I focused on Max himself. He was smiling at my bewilderment, managing to look charmingly satisfied with himself without crossing over into 'smug'.
He'd certainly showed me something I couldn't explain, but I wasn't ready to accept his story at face value yet. I decided to suspend my disbelief for the moment and treat his offer as though it was real. "Ok. Let's say I believe you. Why approach me?"
"The same reason I invite anyone: I think I'd enjoy having you along."
"Why me, though?"
Max's grin faltered. "Ah, you see… before coming here, I was able to observe the course events would take without me, and you featured heavily in the future I saw. I think I have a good idea of who you are, and that makes me think you'd fit right in with us."
Precognition—or time travel, his description could fit either—wasn't any more unbelievable than anything else he'd claimed, so I didn't challenge it. "And this 'future knowledge' is how you knew my name."
"Yes."
"Which I've told almost no one, and have only been using for a month or so."
He gave me a sheepish shrug. "Sorry. I didn't think about that."
"It's fine. Just more 'extraordinary evidence', I guess."
"You would have been really confused if I'd approached you a couple months ago, huh?"
"Yeah." The melting water from the ice-cube wasn't dripping like it should, instead blobbing around the ice like the entire thing was in zero gravity. I looked around the cafe again, wondering if his display had attracted any attention, and found that no one was looking at us at all. "How is no one noticing this?" I asked as I plucked the coffee creamer out of the air and gave it the same inspection I'd given the salt shaker.
"Muggle-repelling charm," Max said without missing a beat.
"Funny," I snarked, frowning as I failed to find anything at all suspicious about the tiny plastic cup. Two more of the things had already replaced it, so I returned it to its dish with a sigh. It was getting harder and harder to maintain my healthy skepticism, and to my knowledge, Max hadn't cracked a joke since he'd sat down. "That wasn't actually a joke, was it?"
"It was not."
"You're actually offering me a magical, multidimensional adventure." The tightness in my chest was a very strange sort of anxiety: anticipation, eagerness, and the terrible sense of waiting for the other shoe to drop. "And if you know me as well as you say, you know I'd jump at the chance."
Max smiled widely. "Then you accept?"
"I—" I wanted to say yes. I really, really wanted to say yes. I was terrified of saying yes. "I have… responsibilities. My cats…"
"You don't have to worry about that," he said. "If you decide to join me, you can spend hundreds of years with us and still return to the very second you left."
"I won't grow old over hundreds of years?" I asked.
"Not unless you want to," Max said. "And you'll have the opportunity to gain skills, magic and technology just like I do along the way."
I stared at him for a long while. Try as I might, couldn't find any indication that he wasn't completely sincere. The salt shaker was still floating around the table with the two coffee creamer cups and a blob of water that had been the ice-cube. My chest felt tight like a vice, and I realized I was barely breathing; I took deep, calming breaths until the feeling faded and I was able to think clearly again. Logic was contraindicated by the blatant violations of physics orbiting over the table. Emotionally, Max was offering me my ultimate escapist wish fulfillment on a silver platter. That was really the crux of the matter, though: no matter how much I wanted to believe him, the offer was too good to be true.
"This is too good to be true," I said.
"I can understand why you'd think that," he said. "To be honest, one of the reasons I'm offering is simply because I know you'd enjoy it." The floating objects returned to their rightful places as Max steepled his fingers and leaned forwards over the table again. "Let me ask you this, then: if my offer was as good as I've said, would you accept?"
I licked my lips nervously. The feeling of the spotlight was back, a hundred times stronger than before. If this was real, there was no way I could pass it up. If it was fake… I drew a blank. I had no idea what kind of game, trap, or con would involve such a strange offer. If I accepted that I had been shown real, actual magic, I had no context for what sort of pitfalls could exist. "If there were no strings attached, and no hidden catches or tricks, yes, I would."
"In that case, would you allow me to present some more of my 'extraordinary evidence'?"
I was too skeptical—too scared—to say yes. I would never forgive myself for saying no. "What are you planning?" I asked.
Max stood up and put a pair of twenties on the table; enough to cover the cost of our food and drink twice over. "I'll show you my 'TARDIS', as you put it," he said, beckoning me towards the back of the cafe. I followed mechanically, wondering what the hell I was doing. Was I really about to follow this strange man out into a back alley?
I didn't have to go that far. He stopped in front of the restrooms and, after checking once again to make sure no one was paying attention to us, pushed the door open to reveal a space that absolutely should not have been there.
It was, in a word, impossible. Impossibly huge, impossibly designed, impossibly located. The first thing that came to mind was the Citadel in Mass Effect: the area was half neighborhood, half park, under a sky that was clearly artificial but still warm and welcoming. Most of the space I could see was taken up by low, rolling artificial hills hemmed in by buildings in a bizarre mishmash of styles—ranging from unpainted wooden structures that wouldn't look out of place in a fantasy movie to gleaming 'modern' glass-and-metal facades—along what I assumed were the 'walls' of the space. The area around the entrance was covered by a wide, tranquil stream criss-crossed by footbridges, further cementing the comparison in my mind to the Presidium. Benches lined the paths beneath trees that offered shade from the warm simulated sun overhead.
It was only when I heard the door shut behind me that I realized I'd wandered a dozen steps into the room in a daze. I turned around to see a young man, perhaps a year or two younger than me, smiling widely at my reaction. I wasn't sure how I knew, but I knew it was Max; maybe it was that he was still damnably handsome, looking impeccable even in a loose-fitting tee shirt and jeans.
"What is this place?" I asked.
"It's our interdimensional home away from home. A pocket dimension that goes wherever we go, one we've spent a great deal of effort making as comfortable as possible." He strode forward onto the gently arching footbridge in front of me as he spoke, turning to face me when he reached its mild apex. The insane, otherworldly vista formed the perfect background for the end of his introductory speech. "It's grown far beyond just being a space to store our loot, but we still just call it: 'the Warehouse'."
I could feel my face twitch as everything suddenly and violently fell into place.
"You're on a fucking Jumpchain!?"
———X==X==X———
Jumpchains. Where to begin on fucking Jumpchains?
Fanfiction had a bad rap because most of it was terrible. Most of it was terrible because most of it was author-insert wish fulfillment. Jumpchains were a specific form of fanfiction that were, in short, that specific sort of wish fulfillment distilled down to its most base, wank-y elements. The protagonist—by which I meant the author avatar—was given a bunch of space-coins to buy superpowers, then dropped into various settings to mess around with the worlds, characters, and plots with abandon.
Perhaps I was being unfair. The idea of the Jumpchain as a genre was a highly collaborative thing, with people creating 'jump documents' of varying quality to describe exactly what sort of superpowers the protagonist and friends could buy in any given setting, 'expansions' (in the boardgame sense) to the basic setup—like the Warehouse, which was so common as to be ubiquitous—as well as a bunch of other rules which largely boil down to: "If you die and don't have an item or ability that nullifies that death, Game Over." In theory, this meant that there were still stakes, that the author-avatar had to judge their desire to visit a work of fiction or visit specific changes on it against their ability to survive those things. In practice… I was willing to admit there were probably well written Jumpchains floating around the internet, perhaps even some legitimately great ones, but I'd read enough of them to feel like I had a good sample size and found them largely repetitive and unimaginative.
The actual concept was pretty simple, my terribly snarky previous description aside. The protagonist is contracted by some sort of bored interdimensional quasi-deity and offered the chance to travel between universes for that being's amusement. Before each 'jump', the 'Jumper' is given their choice of several jump documents, each of which defines the point-buy 'character creation' options for a specific fictional universe. The Jumper spends their points on their character and equipment, then has ten years in that setting to do whatever they want, provided they don't die. One of those 'whatevers' is recruiting 'companions', who are usually important characters to the story the Jumper is visiting. Companions follow the Jumper from universe to universe and can join the Jumper in being inserted into any universe with a jump document that offers the option. At the end of those ten years, the Jumper selects another universe and the process repeats.
The reason I considered Jumpchains such a tepid wish-fulfillment scenario was pretty simple. If you give someone the option to point-buy an ideal character for a self-insert, you're going to see characters who run roughshod over the plot, characters, and setting. If you allow those upgrades to carry over, letting the character snowball more and more power with each jump, conflict dies pretty quickly. There was also the problem that the jumps usually read like a summary in a book report rather than a proper story, but that might have been more a matter of the people who wrote them. As I said, there are probably well-written Jumpchains. Somewhere.
All of this exposition serves to explain the two extremely uncomfortable conclusions that leapt into my head at that moment, looking at Max on his bridge. First, I, and likely everyone I knew, were fictional characters relative to the world of the author, and likely relative to that of the character of Max as well, given that he had meta-knowledge of my world. Second, I was now in the even less enviable position of being a fanfictional character in a work of dubious quality.
"You're familiar with the Jumpchain?" Max asked. It was disarming seeing him like this, in the form of someone my age. He looked like exactly the kind of person I might hang out with on weekends playing boardgames or Dungeons & Dragons. I had to remind myself that, judging by the amount of upgrades he'd poured into the Warehouse, he must have been hundreds, maybe even thousands of years old.
"It's a…" I hesitated, unsure of how to compress my conception of Jumpchains as a genre into a nice, neat package. "…a collaborative fanfiction thing," I finished.
"Ah," Max said. He scratched his chin in thought. "Yeah, that makes sense. I can see it. Sort of a choose-your-own-adventure-slash-multicross thing?"
"More or less." It seemed Max wasn't familiar with Jumpchains outside of his own. I tried to remember if any of the Jumpchains I'd read had a protagonist who'd known what a Jumpchain was before they got isekai'd and came up with a negative; the chain being explained to the Jumper was something of a staple part of the exposition. I wonder what it meant that I was familiar with them; probably just that the author wouldn't need to have his character explain something the audience already knew.
"So, how about it?" Max asked. "You in?"
"Yeah." Hell yes, I was in. "When do we leave?"
"As soon as you're ready."
"In that case, could I run home just for a moment?"
"Sure thing." Max moved back past me to the door and swung it open, revealing my kitchen. "Just use the same door when you're done."
"That's kind of creepy," I complained. "Convenient, though."
I waved goodbye to Max as he shut the door, which I then immediately opened. "Just checking," I said, which got a laugh. I shut the door again.
I knew I'd be returning to the moment I left, but I would still feel weird leaving for an adventure without doing some things. So I tidied up the house, made sure the cats had food and water, and left a note. I also said goodbye to the cats; it would be a blink of an eye for them, but I would miss the little fuzzballs.
The note was the hardest part. What was I supposed to say? The only reason anyone would read it is if, for some reason, I never came back. With that in mind, I settled on the most direct version of the truth I could manage without sounding like I'd had a complete mental breakdown. No one would believe it, but at least it would be there.
I taped the note somewhere it would be clearly visible to anyone entering the front door, then headed back to the kitchen and through the metaphorical looking glass.
———X==X==X———
AN: Apart from 'the obvious', the largest divergence re: SI-Self vs. Authorial-Self is what "I"/I have read, fanfiction-wise (and Jumpchain-wise)—this is actually relevant much, much later. To be honest, these are more or less the opinions I had about Jumpchain before I 'tried' it, and I wrote this chapter in part to acknowledge the 'negative assumptions' I had. To those who write Jumpchains, just assume "I" never happened across y'all's works, k?
The Warehouse was amazing. Max gave me the full tour, pointing out this and that, while I trailed along behind and absorbed barely any of it, far too busy marveling at everything. It was significantly larger than I'd first thought, the large 'park' I'd seen from the entrance taking up only half the space. Past the first row of buildings on one side of the park was a town square, cobbled with flagstones around a massive, decorative marble fountain. Beyond that lay even more buildings, in styles just as varied as those surrounding the park; most of them had been claimed by other companions for whatever they wanted. If I understood the gist of Max's explanation correctly, new buildings sprung up whenever all available space had been claimed; the only scarcity was how far you'd have to walk to get to your space, and the solution they'd decided on for that was to randomize the buildings every jump. It was a casual display of reality-altering power that was mind-boggling in its mundanity.
Our tour ended in one of the largest buildings in the Warehouse, an absolutely gorgeous hotel named the Traveler's Palace, which opened both onto the park and the town square depending on which exit you took. "You'll be staying here until you decide you want to design yourself a house," Max said as he showed me into a fancy hotel suite. From the door, a short hallway led to a large room with a king-sized bed, drawers and a closet for clothes, and a couple of desks and chairs. A large flat-screen TV sat at the foot of the bed, and on the opposite side of the room from the door was a large, sliding glass door. Max opened the door on one side of the entrance hall to present an equally luxurious bathroom, tiled with swirly rose-colored marble. "Laundry's done by magic," he said as he pointed to the cloth hamper in the near corner of the bathroom. "Throw your stuff in there and it'll reappear in the drawers,"
I walked over to the drawers and opened one to find a large number of tee- and long- sleeved shirts that wouldn't have been at all out of place in my own wardrobe. "I suppose these just come from magic as well?" I asked, pulling out a graphic tee bearing an image of a hexagonal grid evoking Settlers of Catan with the text 'The Sheep Must Flow' printed over it.
"Yup. Automatically tailored to your tastes. They'll disappear if you take them off for too long outside the Warehouse, though, so you'll want to acquire a real wardrobe as well." Max walked over to one of the small side tables bearing a decidedly mundane looking corded phone and picked up a menu. "Room service is also magic, but I recommend dining downstairs anyway. Good way to get to know everyone."
The hotel seemed to have a pretty good grasp of just how little taste in clothes I had; well, graphic tees and shapeless hoodies were a stereotype, after all. I walked back to the bathroom and threw the unfolded shirt into the hamper, where it disappeared before my eyes. "Is this an upgrade for the Warehouse you bought, or did you somehow loot an entire luxury hotel?"
"Mostly the latter." Max laughed at my disbelieving expression. "It's a long story. The Palace imports with me into any compatible jump, where I'll automatically own it—or an entire hotel chain, depending on the setting."
"So it gets its own proper history as part of the setting, the same way jump imports do?"
"And real staff rather than convenient Warehouse automated magic, et cetera et cetera."
"I'm surprised you can do that." I walked over to the sliding glass door and let myself out onto the balcony. A couple pieces of patio furniture gave us somewhere to sit, but I opted to head over to the railing. It was a beautiful, tropical view of— "Holy crap, you have an entire ocean in here?"
"It's just scenery, I'm afraid," Max admitted as he joined me leaning against the balcony railing. "We should be facing the wall of the warehouse, but the Palace is too fancy for that, so it conjures up nice vistas instead. They vary from room to room, too. If you get bored, you can close the curtains, and you'll have a new one when you open them again.
"As for how I got the hotel: it was something I was offered, not something I rules-lawyered in. When I said something similar, Management mentioned that it's possible to get an entire death-world to-go." He snorted. "I didn't ask."
"Huh." Why would anyone even want that? "Wait, who's 'Management'?"
Max sighed. "Management is just what I call whoever or whatever's running the show. You'll meet them when we get ready for our next jump."
"Any idea where we're going?" I asked.
"I learn the same time you do: whenever Management decides our vacation is over. Probably a week or two." I was getting the sense that Max had a less than amicable relationship with whoever this 'Management' was, which was not what I expected. I wasn't sure how to ask about it, though, so we lapsed into silence, enjoying the tropical sunshine.
"Well, I'm going to go check on how everyone's doing," Max said. "Oh, by the way, feel free to explore anywhere you'd like. The only places you shouldn't go will be locked tight." He left the railing and walked back through the hotel room. "Bye!" he called from the door.
"Bye!"
"Don't be a strang—" the closing door cut him off.
I sighed, idly wondering if I would get sunburn staying out on the patio like this or if some other weird aspect of the Warehouse would prevent it. Heading back into the hotel room and flopping down on the massive hotel bed made the question irrelevant.
I'm on a fucking Jumpchain.
In many self-insert fics, there's some point early on where the protagonist struggles to come to terms with what is and isn't real, given the fact that they've found themselves in a world that they know as fiction. I'd never enjoyed reading those sections, but now I was going through my own. Unless I had totally misread my entire interaction with Max, I was a character in some book, game, or TV show—or my future self would have been, if Max and company hadn't knocked whatever plot was brewing right off the rails. Did that mean I was fictional?
The answer was another question: Did it matter? Sure, somewhere out there was a show, book, game, or whatever that matched my world, but even if my life existed in a 'fictional context' somewhere, I'd still experienced it. Or, looking at it from the other direction: given what I knew about Jumpchains, odds were everything in the Warehouse was (fan)fictional, so why worry about it? I was just as real—or not—as everything and everyone else here, and that was that.
Once I was satisfied with my interpretation of reality, I got up off the bed and headed out of the hotel. It was time to explore.
———X==X==X———
I wasn't ready to start barging into buildings just yet, so my 'exploring' mostly consisted of wandering around the park area. There wasn't a whole lot to see.
The park was pretty, there was no doubt about that. The artificial sky less than fifty feet overhead and the weird panoply of buildings gave it an otherworldly feel I wouldn't find back on 'my Earth'. But aside from the superficial, there wasn't much to see or do there.
It was already late afternoon in the Warehouse by the time I stopped walking; either I'd lost track of time while I'd wandered or it wasn't synched up to my time zone. I took a rest on a grassy hill overlooking the 'town', for lack of a better word: the grouping of low buildings around the city square near the 'center' of the Warehouse. Aside from a dirt path leading to the peak, the only thing on the hill was a single cherry tree in full bloom. I sat down on the grass near the edge of the tree's shade, looking down at the square.
There was definitely something weird going on with the perspective here: I hadn't climbed anywhere near high enough for the view I was seeing, and another mountain rose behind me despite it not being visible from anywhere else. It had to be another scenery trick, like the ocean view from my room, and I really wasn't sure how to feel about it.
The cherry tree was the real sticking point: having a perpetually blossoming cherry tree on a hill with a magically faked view seemed to say something unflattering about the whole enterprise. "Wasn't there a bit in one of Pratchett's books about keeping a cherry tree blossoming through magic?" I asked the branches overhead. "Something about how part of the beauty of cherry blossoms was in how fleeting they were, and the people who kept them around were missing the point?"
"The tree only blooms at the end of each Jump," someone said from behind me. I started, craning my neck around to see the speaker: a girl in her late teens or early twenties with strongly Japanese features. Her long black hair was tied with a ribbon, and she had striking indigo eyes; she wore a simple button-down white shirt with a black skirt and no obvious jewelry. She wasn't looking at me as she spoke, instead staring out at the vista I'd been looking at with her hands clasped behind her back. "And the book you're thinking of is Thief of Time," she added.
"Thanks?"
The girl nodded, her eyes flicking to me for a moment before returning to the town below us. "I like it up here," she said.
"Yeah, it's nice." I agreed. The silence that followed was more awkward than peaceful, so I decided to speak up. "I'm Cassandra."
"Rolins?" She looked me over. "Huh. You are a trap."
"Excuse me!?" I yelled, twisting my entire body to face her. "What the fuck? Why would you say that?"
The girl seemed confused by my reaction, the corners of her mouth twitching downward in a barely-perceptible frown. "I didn't mean any offense—"
"Well then don't say that!" I snapped. "It's pretty fucking offensive!"
"Sorry," she said without much conviction; my glare was having next to no effect, as well. "If you don't mind me asking, why is it offensive?"
"Because it implies I'm being dishonest about who I am!" I snapped. "It forms an association between trans women and sexual predators! That's the kind of association that the 'gay panic' defense relies on!"
"Oh." She sighed, stepping forward to stand abreast of me so I didn't have to twist around to address her. "I apologize. I wasn't aware it was considered such a rude term."
"It's—" I stopped, because it wasn't 'fine'. "I accept your apology," I said instead.
The silence returned. It was even more uncomfortable than before, but it gave me an opportunity to calm down before I spoke up again. "I'm sort of surprised it never came up." A point in favor of representation in media, I supposed. "Do you always import as your own gender?"
"Not always," she said. "However, once we import, we are that person. I've never met someone who was, uh, 'in-between'?"
"I'm not—!" I bit off my response and took a deep breath. Ignorance, not malice. "I mean, you could say that I'm mid-transition, but as a matter of identity, I am not 'in-between'."
I took the time to put my thoughts in order; I needed to give an explanation, not another rant. "There are people who do identify as 'in-between', or 'neither', or any number of other ways, and those are all perfectly valid ways to feel. The fact that there are people who do feel that way makes it even less fair to lump all trans people into that category. Okay?"
"I see." Woman of few words, this one. "Again, I apologize."
"And I accept." I stood up and dusted myself off absentmindedly. "We got off on the wrong foot. Let's start over. Cassandra Rolins." I held out my hand.
She took it. "Akemi Homura."
"Nice to meet you," I said on autopilot, because my brain had immediately ground to a halt. I hadn't thought through the full consequences of joining the Jumpchain: that I was likely going to meet people that I knew from fiction; fiction that existed in my world as well as Max's (or his un-inserted authorial self, if I went down that rabbit hole). "The magical girl?" I asked stupidly, because my brain was only now beginning to catch up and really how many Akemi Homuras was I likely to meet, even factoring in the fact that I was now touring the multiverse on some sort of superpowered pocket-dimension cruise ship?
"Yes," she said with a nod. I relaxed slightly once it was apparent I hadn't committed some major faux pas in asking. "You're familiar with my world, then?"
"Yeah." It wasn't a happy story. "Are you 'familiar' with mine?"
"I am. I always thought…" she trailed off. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said anything."
"Why not?"
"Talking about the worlds we came from, what would have happened without Max—Maxine—" she added with a twitch of the lips that I was going to call a smile, "—is taboo for most of us. If you're familiar with my world, you know what would have happened without Max's intervention. She tries to help, no matter where she goes, and for the most part she does. She makes things better than they would have been. Do you really want to know all the pain and suffering you'd have gone through without her?"
"I suppose not," I admitted. "Then—" I was barely smart enough not to ask 'is Madoka here too?'. The way she was acting gave me a pretty good guess as to the answer, and that was a wound I did not want to poke.
"Yes?"
"Uh, penny for your thoughts?" I asked lamely. Damn it. Of all the people I might have run into, I'd ended up meeting someone who I not only recognized and respected, but whose 'story' had had a tremendous emotional impact on me. The surprise—and maybe a little hero worship—had left me badly off balance.
Akemi took a deep breath and let it out in a slow sigh. "I find myself wanting to undo this entire conversation."
"Really?" I asked. "Please don't."
"I won't. All else aside, it wouldn't be fair to you if I could remember a conversation you'd never had. It was merely an idle thought."
I nodded in understanding. "You're still used to talking to the same people over and over again, even if they don't remember you," I guessed.
Akemi actually turned her head to look at me. "It's weird actually having you do that."
"What?"
"It's not bad," she continued, looking back down at the town. "Just odd to be on the receiving end. But you're right; I spent a very long time talking to the same people, people I knew better than they knew themselves. Even once I joined Max, the… perspective afforded by the Jumps means I rarely make mistakes like that. But I'll manage."
"Like the rest of us mortals?" I joked.
"I don't think any of us can really claim to be mortal anymore," Akemi said. "Some of us even less so than others," she added softly, fiddling with the ring on her finger.
There was nothing I could offer for that issue, so I tried to change the subject. "I do accept your apology. I trust you weren't trying to be hurtful, and I'm not going to hold it against you."
She turned her head towards me again so I could see one eyebrow move infinitesimally upwards. "You changed what you were going to say at the time."
"Yeah, I did. My default response to someone apologizing is 'it's fine', because a lot of things don't bother me, but this did. This whole…" I waved a hand at nothing in particular, "…thing is still pretty raw, and I'm prickly about it. But I mean it when I say that I accept your apology. If I want to dismiss an apology that I'm not happy with, I'll say 'I'll get over it' instead."
"Because it is dismissive enough to sound like forgiveness, while clearly implying that you are not yet 'over it' and thus still bear a grudge over the offense," Akemi reasoned. "I see."
"Exactly." I smiled, searching for another conversation topic. "You come up here a lot?"
"Every so often," she said. "It's a rough recreation of a hill near Mount Fuji."
I turned around to take another look at the mountain behind me, which didn't look anything like Mount Fuji.
"It's only a rough recreation," Akemi clarified, following my gaze up the somewhat unimpressive mountain—which was somehow around a thousand feet high and fit under the fifty foot ceiling. Trying to figure that out was making my eyes cross, so I gave up and turned back to Akemi herself.
"How often is often?" I asked.
"Once a jump, when the tree blooms. It's a nice spot to be alone."
"Ah." Now I felt like I was intruding. "Should I go?"
Akemi hesitated. "If you wouldn't mind," she decided.
"It's fine. Plenty more to see." I turned back down the dirt path as casually as I could manage, feeling like a bit of an ass for not getting the hint sooner. I couldn't help glancing back up the hill as I descended; the path led away from the town before spiraling back around the hill, so Akemi's back was to me. Seeing her standing there under the cherry blossoms was so anime it was downright surreal.
She looked so damned lonely, standing all by herself at the top of the hill. But what could I do to help? I was still an outsider, and she'd asked me to leave.
I turned back to the path, and soon lost sight of her among the strange, not-quite-euclidean hills.
———X==X==X———
Having gotten a good look around the exterior, I picked one of the buildings facing the town square at random. The door was unlocked, and opened to reveal a sort of arcade-slash-games-room. One wall was dedicated to 'barroom games': there were tables for billiards, air hockey, and ping pong, plus a massive line of pinball machines. The rest of the room was full of arcade cabinets of all shapes, sizes, and colors, all of which appeared to be off.
The whole building seemed empty, and I was about to leave when I heard noises coming from one of the back rooms. I walked past the various games into the next room, which had rows of computers set up for gaming, then followed the sounds into a hallway; they were coming from a door that had been left ajar. It sounded like Japanese.
"Hello?"
"Douzo—I mean, come in!"
I pushed the door open, and looked inside. The room was as small as the placement of the hallway doors had suggested; I'd actually expected it to be bigger on the inside. The only pieces of furniture were an unassuming beige couch against the opposite wall and a TV on a stand next to the door. Slouching on the couch was an albino woman with long white hair, pale skin, and red eyes, wearing a baggy tee-shirt and yoga pants. She was holding a controller lazily in one hand and gave me a casual wave with the other. "Good timing! I just finished a boss fight. You must be the new gu—er, girl. Cassandra?"
"Yeah," I said awkwardly. "That's me."
"Nice, Max finally found you! Or he gave up and just knocked on your door rather than trying to 'run into you' around town. Name's Zero, by the way."
She'd looked familiar, but it took the name to jog my memory. "The, uh… invoker?"
"Intoner, but yeah, close enough. Oh, hold on, I love this part!"
I stepped inside so I could look at the television screen and was surprised to see that Zero was literally playing herself. Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised that she wasn't bothered by it, but personally, I found the thought of playing through a game of my own life way too weird to consider.
The game was set to Japanese, so I couldn't understand exactly what the characters were saying, but I recognized the scene; the airship gave it away. As expected, the on-screen Zero stopped and staggered, feigning confusion; and poor, gullible, still-probably-an-evil-bitch Four ran past her bodyguard to embrace her dazed sister. I didn't need the dialogue to follow the fact that Zero used the moment of unguarded affection to impale Four through the chest with her sword, then proceeded to mutilate the dying girl with further furious slashes, spraying blood across the screen with every hit.
Zero—the one in the room with me (oh god she was in the room with me)—was cackling like a madwoman the whole time. "Ahahahahaha! Oh my god, that never gets old! I still can't believe she fell for that!" She leaned back into the couch, kicking her feet in laughter. "The look on her face, haha! Seeing that again is almost as good as when I actually did it for real! Ahh, the graphics don't do it justice…" She descended into incoherent giggling, giving me the strong urge to be absolutely anywhere else but alone in a room with her. I started edging back towards the door, but alas, I was too far into the tiny room to escape unnoticed.
"Haha, sorry, heh. What can I do for you?" Zero skipped to the stage score screen and tossed the controller onto the couch, then stood up and stretched, rolling her shoulders to loosen up after however long she'd spent gaming. When she looked at me again, it was an appraising one. "Down to fuck? That's usually why people disturb me."
I opened my mouth and absolutely nothing came out. Zero held my gaze for a few seconds as my cheeks got redder and redder, until she finally cracked and doubled over, howling with mirth all over again, which only made me even more embarrassed and uncomfortable. "Sorry!" she yelled between fits of wheezing laughter. "Everyone around here is so blasé after a couple decades, I couldn't resist winding up a prude! Your face! Hahaha!"
She was laughing too hard to prevent me from fleeing, so flee I did. I was too damned disturbed to do anything else.
———X==X==X———
I headed straight back to my hotel room after I escaped the games building. I was still rattled from my encounter with Zero, so I chickened out of joining everyone for dinner and ordered room service; to my considerable lack of surprise, the dinner spread appeared at my door on its rolling table the moment I put down the phone. Like nearly everything about the Traveler's Palace, the food was unrealistically good.
It wasn't until after I'd finished dinner and wheeled the table back into the hallway that I realized I'd forgotten something important when I was wasting time at home. Fortunately, the Warehouse had a fully stocked pharmacy, and when I say fully stocked, I mean fully stocked: I'm pretty sure I saw a box of Fallout stimpacks on one of the upper shelves, somewhere among hundreds of barely-distinguishable health potions. Of course, they also had every 'mundane' drug imaginable, so I was able to grab the things I should have packed from home, rather than tidying up uselessly.
Hormones, antidepressants, and sleeping pills; bottoms up! I washed everything down with a bottle of water taken from the minifridge, which was just as magically refilling as everything else in the hotel. It was probably a little early to go to bed, but I'd had a hell of a day, and my sleeping schedule was largely pharmaceutical-dependent anyway. Fuck insomnia.
I did feel a little bad about skipping out on dinner, so I resolved to actually go down for breakfast the next day; I couldn't let myself turn into a shut-in now of all times. Which is why, after some more baseline-functioning-human pills and my morning grooming—which today included shaving the beard stubble I was still cursed with—I headed down to the Palace's restaurant for breakfast, which was, for some reason, also called 'The Palace'. And oh boy, what an experience it was.
The door to the restaurant led to a waiting area that would probably be useful in whatever iterations of the hotel actually existed as functioning businesses, but was only decorative here. Speaking of decoration, the area was just as lavish as the rest of the hotel; the floor was made of beautifully carved marble tiles, the walls dark, paneled wood, and the furniture equally beautiful wood and fine plush cushions. All together, it looked like the kind of place where even the busboys wore suits worth more than my entire wardrobe, and I felt extremely underdressed in a random graphic tee and jeans. I was actually somewhat thankful there were no wait-staff, human or otherwise; I would have felt judged even if they were tuxedo-clad roombas.
The waiting area I'd entered was a small square room with benches along the left and far walls. To the right was a heavy wooden desk, where the greeter or whatever they were called would sit when not showing people to their tables; behind it, the floor opened up into a large, long room running off and away to the left of the desk. The entire wall parallel to the door was currently occupied by a buffet, while the rest of the area was filled with tables full of people eating, talking, and laughing. For some reason, the windows on the long wall facing the entrance were showing a city street that was nearly completely obscured by a blizzard, recognizable mostly by the stubborn glow of street lamps behind the curtain of snow.
I wasn't sure how long I stood in the doorway, waffling on whether or not to enter, but eventually hunger won out. Sometimes, when you're really anxious, the best thing you can do is pretend you're not and hope your body gets the message, so I walked into the restaurant with confidence I absolutely did not feel. No one seemed to notice, not that I needed anyone to: it was a breakfast buffet with a 'seat yourself' sign facing the entrance, and the food was obviously free.
The first thing I thought was, there are so many people. On second thought, though, it wasn't the size of the crowd that was bothering me; the dining halls at college had been much busier than this. It was the question of who these people were that had me so intimidated. They were heroes, sidekicks, maybe even villains, and I was… me. Unimpressive. Scrawny. Ugly. Freakish. No! I was fine, fine, and I'd soon not have to deal with this stupid body any longer. Wish fulfillment, natch.
I headed over to the food and piled a plate with crepes, bacon, fruit, and pastries, then started wandering through the tables looking for somewhere to sit. I wasn't eager to sit down and introduce myself to a group, but I couldn't find any tables that weren't already partially occupied. It was with great relief that I spied someone I recognized, and I beelined towards Max with the particular desperation of an introvert in a crowd of strangers, slipping into the free seat at his table of four with a mumbled "Hope-you-don't-mind-if-sit-here-thanks."
"Morning, Cass," Max said, seeming happy with my intrusion. He was wearing a tacky Hawaiian shirt today, for some reason. "Oh, introductions!" He waved an arm at the other two people at the table. "Guys, this is Cassandra Rolins, the new girl."
"Bob," the man next to me said around a mouthful of food. He was a white guy, slightly older than me with brown hair and a linebacker's build, and was wearing an even more tacky Hawaiian shirt. I nodded politely to him, then did a double-take at the person sitting across from him.
On the one hand, of course not everyone here would be human. On the other hand, I was actually sitting down for breakfast with an alien. Computer graphics and sci-fi television had not prepared me to actually meet a member of another species, and I tried very hard not to stare… and probably failed.
He was a turian—a lizard/avian-like species from Mass Effect who were covered in dark gray plates, with a pair of expressive mandible-like flaps near the mouth and crest a running backwards along the top of the head. At least, that was what males looked like; I didn't know if females looked the same or simply weren't in the game I'd played. As for his identity, I had a pretty good guess who he was, which was confirmed when he introduced himself. "Garrus." Holy shit, it's Garrus fucking Vakarian. If meeting Akemi hadn't already blown my mind, that would have done it.
"Nice to meet you," I said, giving in the urge to look at him more closely in the name of eye contact. There was something weird about him even beyond the fact that he was an actual alien, and it took me a moment to realize that I'd never seen a turian shown wearing anything but body armor. The fact that he was also wearing a Hawaiian shirt only made it weirder.
"We were just talking about places we'd want to visit," Max said, once I'd shaken their hands and gotten a chance to start on my own food. "Management doesn't give us a lot of warning, or any real choice in the matter, but I think we all have our wishlists."
"And sometimes we get what we want," Garrus said.
"Maybe you do!" Bob grumbled. "Last jump was boring as hell."
"Yeah, blame Max for that one. At least I got an action figure."
"Of himself," Max strage-whispered to me. "He collects them."
"One from every universe they sell them in," Bob added. "How the hell this bird-brain ended up with an ego larger than mine is a mystery for the ages."
"It's just a hobby," Garrus said defensively.
"Where would you want to go, then?" I asked Bob
He didn't have to think about that one at all. "I want to visit Roshar someday."
"God, that would be amazing," I agreed. "I love that series."
"He doesn't care. He just wants to loot some shards," Garrus said, pointing his fork across the table accusingly.
"We've already got plenty of power armor," Max said.
"It's different when it's designed for knights," Bob argued. "Can you imagine the kind of hell I could raise in a suit of shardplate? Not to mention the chasmfiend hunts! Where else could I have that kind of fun?"
"No blade?" Max asked.
Both Garrus and Bob shook their heads. "Nah, shard-hammer's more the ol' meat-head's style," Garrus said.
"You want to stay two klicks away looking down that rifle of yours, that's fine. The real warriors will get the job done without you!"
I looked at Bob, feeling a hunch starting to form. No way. Is that—?
My musing was interrupted by the start of a food fight at an adjacent table. Bob suffered an errant glob of yogurt to the back of the head and immediately retaliated with an entire fried egg, standing up to join the fray. Garrus just sighed and grabbed his plate to-go, stopping to snag a few more items off the buffet table on his way out.
"Does this happen often?" I asked Max, who shrugged, completely unconcerned with the chaos that was rapidly spreading through the room. The occasional stray piece of food that headed our way simply splattered on the surface of an invisible shield, allowing us to continue our meals in peace, if not quiet.
"This is tame. We're immortal and easily bored; serious roughhousing can end in dismemberment." At the look on my face, Max immediately reassured me, "Don't worry. No one is going to start anything you aren't comfortable with. Rivalries are a two-way street. Take Garrus and Bob, for example; those two bicker the way only old friends can."
"And the rest?" I asked, waving my hand at the battle which now included the entire restaurant.
"Letting off steam after a decade in a low-power, low-combat setting. It's harmless fun."
I shoved more food in my mouth as an excuse to take time to think. "Where did they meet?" I asked, fishing for more clues to Bob's identity.
Max saw straight through my ruse. "You can just ask, you know." He smirked at my sheepish grin. "Or not, and make a game of figuring it out yourself. Up to you."
"All right, then." I leaned forward. "If I can 'just ask': what franchise am I from?"
He laughed. "Usually takes a couple Jumps before people ask that. Here, take a look at your 'show of origin'." He pulled a DVD case out of thin air and offered it to me. I took it gingerly, not sure I really wanted to know what I was about to learn, but curiosity got the better of me.
I looked.
And looked.
And looked.
Stared, really.
The DVD I was holding was an anime.
A giant robot anime.
"Are you serious?" I turned the case over in my hands to read the blurb on the back. The Year is 2057, and one robot is all that stands between Freedom and Tyranny— "Is this a joke?" I still didn't have a feel for Max's sense of humor, and though he'd been straight with me during the recruitment pitch, I had a feeling I was going to get hazed eventually. The solution to Brexit is the UK re-annexing their American colonies? The US splits on whether to rejoin, then fights a civil war with giant robots? Who wrote this?
"Nope," he said happily. "It's an American-made 'anime-style' show hoping to ride the coattails of At-La. More or less 'the American Revolutionary War with giant robots'. Set in Arizona, for some reason—probably where the studio was based. It was… okay? Managed to last eight seasons, somehow."
"My world was 'okay'. Awesome. Great to hear." I flipped the case back over to look at the cast, who were posing dramatically in the shadow of the starring robot. "Do I actually appear anywhere on here?"
Max laughed again and reached over the table to tap one of the characters standing near the back of the line-up—a middle-aged-but-still-generically-attractive anime blonde who appeared to be wearing a lab coat over a rather full sports bra. "Are you serious?" I repeated, grabbing the last pastry off my plate with my free hand. "She looks like someone decided Ritsuko ought to have been played by an older Darkness."
"You called?" the crusader in question asked, popping up behind Max with remarkable timing and making me choke on my food. Darkness was absolutely covered in fruit juice, jam, syrup, and other sticky substances; bits of hash browns and other foods were caught in her hair, which I only knew was blond under the mess because I'd seen her 'show of origin'. She'd clearly been enjoying the 'entertainment'.
Max grabbed the DVD case and passed it to her. "Cass thinks her future self looks like someone decided to cast your mother as Ritsuko," he said.
She stared at the cover for a few seconds, thinking. "Yeah, I can see it," she decided, then handed the case back to Max, who returned it to me. "Any idea where Maeve is hiding?"
"None at all!" he chirped. Darkness huffed and stalked off towards the entrance, allowing Max and I to resume our conversation. "It's funny you said that," he continued. "That's pretty much her role: she keeps the mech running, provides exposition, and produces a lot of low-brow humor while our plucky young protagonist actually gets in the damn robot."
"Low-brow humor? Really?"
"You like puns," Max said with a smirk. "A lot."
Of course that would be what people remembered me for. I wanted to argue that other people set up puns and I just point them out, but I didn't think Max would care about the distinction. "It was a robot, right?" I asked instead. "I mean, a mechanical robot?"
"Yes, it was, don't worry. The show wasn't… terribly imaginative. Entertaining all the same, though."
"Puns," I mumbled as I turned the DVD case over again, noticing with distaste that Darkness had left syrup where she'd touched it. I wet my napkin and did my best to clean the sticky fingerprints off the plastic while I thought. Despite the conversation with Akemi the previous day, there was a certain morbid curiosity tempting me to actually watch the thing. It seemed so far away from anything real that I wasn't sure I'd have any real attachment to the events. On the other hand, I wasn't sure I wanted to know what utterly crazy sequence of events would lead to me gaining the skills to build a giant combat mech, much less actually do it.
Max continued to describe her—me—once I was done grumbling. "She also gives a lot of speeches about thoughts and feelings and how people think about the world. She analyzes others and works through their thoughts and biases to get them to improve as people, bringing antagonists around to the side of good after your nephew is done turning their robot into scrap. But mostly people remember the puns."
"Wonderful," I said with as much sarcasm as I could fit into a single word. "I mean, I guess 'support staff slash tactical assault therapist with a terrible sense of humor' isn't the worst character to play on a show, but you don't make it sound great."
"Hey, there is a reason I sought you out!" Max said. "Maybe I'll show you the Jump Document someday. You've got perks named after you."
"Maybe," I hedged. The morbid curiosity had died out; I was pretty sure I never wanted to learn anything about my canonical future ever again.
I offered the somewhat-cleaned DVD case back to Max, and he popped it back into whatever pocket dimension he'd drawn it out from. Then I got up and went back for a second helping, moving quickly to avoid becoming a target in the war that was only now winding down. As I walked, I saw similar islands of calm in the sea of chaos, and wondered if the shield that had protected Max and I was his doing, as I'd assumed, or some property of the restaurant itself. Regardless, the battle was ending and the spilled food was rapidly fading away through whatever magic kept the Palace tidy; by the time I got back to the table, the only sign that the fight had taken place was the mess still stuck to the participants.
"She actually has a perk for that," Max said as I sat back down.
"What?" Who?
"Popping up when people mention her."
Oh. "Why?" I asked.
"Why did she take the perk, or why does that perk exist?" Max asked.
"Yes."
"'Because it's funny' and 'because it's funny', obviously."
"Obviously." I tucked into my food, then asked, "Did she say 'Maeve'? Like… that Maeve? The winter Faerie?"
"Yeah. Dresden Files' interpretation, to be specific: the Lady of Air and Darkness." Convenient for me, since that's the version I'm familiar with. Scary as hell, too. "If the buildings weren't soundproofed already, we'd have had to do it when they shacked up."
The comment sent me into a coughing fit as I mis-swallowed my next bite. "I didn't ask and I don't want to know."
"Sounds like they're doing denial kink again," Max continued blandly.
I was tempted to ask how that even worked with whatever weird, over-the-top strawman masochism Darkness had going on in her head, but… "I said I didn't want to know," I repeated.
"Spoilsport," he said with a joking grin, then let me finish my breakfast in peace.
The last bits of food had only just disappeared when two more people stopped by the table—a pair of somewhat rugged-looking men, one very tall, one very short. Both had more than a bit of food stuck to them, though neither looked like they'd been dipped the way Darkness had. "Doctor Rolins?" the tall one asked, tipping his fedora in greeting.
Doctor? "Call me Cass, please. I'm about as close to a doctorate as I am to President."
He chuckled politely at my quip. "Apologies, kid. Name's Joe." Joe offered his hand, and I shook it. His accent was… strange, and I couldn't place it at all.
"Nice to meet you, Joe."
"Hoss," the shorter man said, stepping up and shaking my hand as well. "Glad to have you aboard." He spoke with a Scottish accent faint enough that I only noticed because Joe's weird twang had me looking for it.
"Nice to meet you too. Happy to be here." I have no freaking idea who these people are.
Joe addressed Max and I as Hoss stepped back. "The rest of the gang's waiting on us, but I wanted to stop by and say, 'Wa koming gut.'"
"Same to you?" I guessed. That was a greeting, right?
"Oyedeng," Max added. The two men waved as they left, leaving me completely bewildered. What language even was that? Russian? Vietnamese? I didn't have a clue.
They'd barely made it out the door before Max said, "I'll be going, too. Don't be afraid to ask anyone you see for help; we're a friendly bunch. Mostly."
"Mostly?" I repeated, my alarm 'mostly' feigned.
Max just grinned as he stood up and headed for the door. I briefly considered calling after him, but was distracted by his utensils, napkin, and dishes vanishing into thin air. Wow. Magic was clearly going to take some getting used to if table service managed to impress me this much.
None of my friends, games, or other 'leisurely obligations' were waiting for me back in the hotel, so I spent a while digesting my food and crowd-watching as more people filed out. Less of them were wearing food than I expected, but that could have been because they'd already cleaned up through magic of their own. Pretty soon, the room was empty except for myself and the odd person still eating here and there.
What was I going to do today without my normal time-wasters?
"I guess one does simply walk into more doors."
———X==X==X———
AN: I am inordinately fond of the phrase 'tactical assault therapist'.
This chapter has a notable oddity in that what started as an exploration of the value of representation—trans representation, in this case, but fully generalizable to other issues—ended up successfully predicting an error that popped up in the very thread I originally posted this snippet in a few weeks afterwards. I would later remark to a friend that I had 'called my shot' in regards to ignorance of these things in the community.
Having made my decision, I headed back to the town square for more mystery building roulette. The building to the right of the games center was an Olympic-scale ice-skating rink, which I left in a hurry when I saw who was currently using it. I had to wonder why the giant arena full of ice wasn't the first place Darkness went looking for her girlfriend, though.
I wandered down a few doors at random before trying again. This building had a card-shop sort of atmosphere, with large tables for miniatures gaming, smaller tables for board games and roleplaying games, and still smaller tables for card games. Unlike the game room yesterday, there were about a dozen people making use of the space, and I spent more than an hour watching Bob and a middle-aged man he introduced as 'Karl, with a K' grind tiny plastic armies into each other on one of the larger tables. The entire thing was fascinating to watch; someone had given the hundreds of centimeter-high plastic pieces the full Wizarding Chess treatment, and they acted out the results of the dice with as much ham as they could wring out of their tiny, mute forms.
The table was equally magical, manifesting miniature handicraft terrain that deformed in reaction to the fighting. The end of the game caused it to revert from a felt-and-styrofoam simulation of muddy, rock-strewn fields and hills to a plain plastic surface covered in a grid of one-inch squares, and the armies began to run back to their respective commanders for retrieval. Even the 'dead' popped back up without much fuss, many of them stopping to find and reattach tiny plastic limbs.
As for the battle itself, it ended in classic Imperial Guard fashion.
"What do you mean, 'Victory'? You lost ninety percent of your army!" Bob argued. "Nearly an entire company died to your own basilisks! What kind of strategy is that?"
"The winning kind," Karl replied calmly as he swept the returning troops into a large plastic box. "If we were scoring based on how many troops we had left over, I wouldn't have needed to aim danger close. You didn't commit your entire force to the objective because you didn't think I'd be willing to shell my own men, and you were wrong."
"I know, I watched you do it! But it only worked because it's a game. Real wars don't end the second you capture a hill or kill the enemy VIP."
"Yours did."
Bob jabbed his thumb into his chest. "I walked away with a fighting-fit army at my back, and it was still a slog to finish the job. You—" he jabbed a finger at Karl, "—wiped what was left of your side out nearly completely just to keep me out of the objective zone. If not for the rules declaring you the winner, what's left of your men would be utterly destroyed in a few turns."
"What do you think?" Karl asked me.
I rubbed my chin in thought. "Ignoring the strict rules interpretation in favor of logic? Canonically, the Imperium can afford to replace millions of troops, and we have to assume that whatever the objective was, it was achieved by fulfilling the win condition, no matter what happens next. Imperial Victory."
"The rules we're playing under assume our armies are equally valuable," Bob said.
"They also state that the first one to successfully capture the objective wins, regardless of board state," Karl replied. "Rules or world logic, I won either way. Personally, I think you're getting a bit too fond of your little green men."
"Seems you're both getting into character," I quipped.
Bob laughed, packing away his troops with only slightly more care than his opponent. He stopped when he reached his commander, holding it up to his face so the overhead lights gleamed on a masterfully painted Eldar figure smaller than my thumb. The model preened under the attention. "I suppose that's the price I pay for enjoying the romanticism of a civilization in its twilight years. Reminds me of me."
"Hear, hear!" Karl said. He dropped the last of his pieces into the plastic tub with a clatter. "You up for a game, kid?"
"I've played, like, twice," I said.
"Relax. You can play defense, and Bob'll give you a hand. The pieces take care of most of their own rules, anyway." Karl pulled another plastic bin out from under the table and offered it to us; it seemed we would be playing Chaos. "Random barren world, please."
The table rippled, the grid changing into a gently sloping plain covered in a fine layer of ash-gray felt snow. Bob dumped the Chaos forces out of the box, and under our direction they began further reshaping the terrain, forming miniature modeling-foam trenches, erecting plastic gun emplacements, and sowing mines under the felt—or perhaps sewing mines, if I wanted to be clever. Karl let us fortify for a few minutes before he began bringing troops down not far outside our lines. With Bob and I working together, we managed to fare even worse than the previous battle.
"You can't do that!" Bob bellowed. "This isn't chess! You can't promote a unit in the middle of the game by running it to the other side of the field!"
Karl waved a piece of notepaper at us. "She's listed in my ORBAT as a Saint. I just haven't needed to use any flashy abilities until now." He radiated smugness as the small glowing figure curbstomped our Tzeentchian Sorcerer into the dirt. "How did you think that platoon managed to punch through so far, so fast?"
"Gimme that!" Bob grabbed the paper and scowled at it, then looked down at the hole the Saint and her squad had managed to plow through our defensive lines. It was an impressively ballsy gambit, running a squad so far forward without proper support, but it had worked. Headshotting the Sorcerer effectively ended the battle: all along the trenches, the Chaos forces were breaking as they failed leadership checks in response to their commander's death. If it had failed, though, I had little doubt the imperial troops would be faring just as poorly.
Bob had apparently come to the same conclusion. "Bullshit. Bullshit and the gods' own luck! We mined that entire approach!" He pointed to a cluster of craters a couple feet up the table. "You were one bad scatter die away from mortaring your own Saint!"
"The Emperor protects," Karl and I chorused, which earned me a high-five.
"Traitor," Bob groused. "Right, we concede." The table reverted again, and the armies disengaged and began to hike back towards the bins. The Saint continued to flit about like a pixie on wings of fire, occasionally swooping down to help reassemble some of the more badly mauled models.
"I think the lesson here is that giving Karl access to any sort of indirect-fire support weapons is a losing proposition," I said. "He wins when he's unlucky, and wins harder when he isn't."
"No," Bob said, "the lesson is that we need to stop giving him win conditions he can game his way around. Or through."
"No," Karl, said, "the real lesson is…" He trailed off, then snapped a pointer finger into my face and bellowed like a Drill Instructor: "Kid, maxim twenty!"
"Uh…" I didn't know them by number, but I could guess which one he meant from context. "'If you're not willing to shell your own position, you're not willing to win'?"
"Holy hell, she actually got that!" Karl made a show of ignoring me as he told Bob, "I like this kid! We're keeping her, right?"
"Tagon," I said. "You're Karl Tagon!" The 'chain must have visited Schlock Mercenary at some point. Their friendship was another point in favor of my 'theory of Bob', as well; they'd both been military men past their prime when Max had wandered by.
"Hullnuts! I gave it away!" Karl swung his fist in mock frustration. "Maybe next time we should do the whole Fate thing, really screw with the new meat. What do you think, Rider?"
"Why am I Rider?" Bob and I asked simultaneously. We exchanged glances, then glared at Karl.
"Because it got you two to do that," Karl said.
———X==X==X———
The lounge was one of the few buildings I remembered from Max's tour, though I'd never been inside it. It looked a lot like someone had taken a typical American kitchen-living room set-up and scaled it up to accommodate two dozen people. The furniture was arranged like it had been set up for a photoshoot for a catalogue: there were four different groups of couches, armchairs, and coffee and side tables, each tastefully matched in color and shape.
It was also mostly empty; the exceptions being Max and another man sitting on a large, beige couch in the cluster closest to the entrance, talking softly and sipping from beer bottles. There were two couches and two armchairs forming a rectangle around the long, narrow oval table. Max was angled more towards the door, and so saw me first. "Cass! Come on in, sit down!"
"Hi, Max." I accepted his invitation and plopped onto thge armchair on the side closer to Max. "Who's this?" I asked.
"Name's Arnold, but my friends call me Ace. Nice to meet you, Miss Rolins."
"Just Cass, please." We stood up and shook hands before returning to our seats.
"So, 'Just Cass', how're you doing on meeting the crew?" Max asked.
"Well, yesterday I met Akemi Homura up in the park, then ran into, uh, 'Zero-from-Drakengard' in the games room." I phrased the name as a question, since I wasn't sure how many people calling themselves 'Zero' were running around here.
"Just Zero is fine. There's only one Zero here," Max said. He chuckled at the phrase 'one zero' before asking, "I assume you mean the arcade, rather than the games room?"
"Huh? Oh, yeah." I made a note of the terminology; I'd been thinking of them as the 'games room' and 'card shop'.
"How did that go?"
"She had a good laugh at my expense and I ran off."
Ace winced. "Don't get me wrong, I love that woman, but she is not the gentlest introduction to the team."
"What did she say?" Max asked.
"Uh," I stammered, not particularly wanting to relive the experience. Max leaned forward expectantly, so I just blurted out: "She offered to sleep with me and then laughed way too hard at the face I made."
"That sounds like Zero, all right," Ace said with a sigh.
"Sounds like you need to be working harder," Max said, elbowing Ace in the side. "Eh? Harder?"
"Moving on," I said forcefully. "Today I ran into Karl Tagon, and he absolutely crushed me and Bob at wargaming."
"He does that," Ace said.
"Did he introduce himself, or did you recognize him?" Max asked.
"Gave me his first name, I figured out the last."
"Cool. Do you recognize him yet?"
"Bob?" I asked.
"Ace."
"Hmm." I took a good look at Ace as he leaned forward to give me a better view. He had a slight British accent and the sort of over-the-top presence (and hair) that made me think 'action hero', but very few other clues. "I think I'm going to need a hint."
"No one ever recognizes me," he told Max with the tone of a man long since inured to disappointment.
"Hey now, you were quite a bit before her time. And it was a bit part in a comedy that was barely about you."
That was the hint I needed. "Arnold… Ace… Rimmer? Ace Rimmer? 'What a guy!' Ace Rimmer?" 'Bit part' was right; he was a born-lucky James Bond expy whose main role was to emphasize how much his Primary Universe counterpart sucked.
Ace dropped his head into his hands theatrically. "'Bit part', he says, and she gets it immediately," he moaned. He popped back up quickly, flashing a smile to prove he wasn't actually bothered. What a–Goddamnit that has to be memetic or something!
"Hey, Ace, grab us some more beers, would you?" Max asked. "Root beer for Cass," he corrected before I could speak up. Ace happily obliged, wandering over to the kitchen area, which was to a normal household kitchen what that kitchen was to a studio apartment kitchenette.
"Was that really in the show?" I asked Max.
"It was a kid's show. They wanted to put a beer in your hand without showing someone drinking alcohol, so: root beer. Your Trademark Favorite Food."
"Are you kidding me?" All the complicated reasons I abstained from alcohol—and the unrelated and relatively uncomplicated reasons I abstained from soda, except for one specific vice—reduced to that?
"Nope. Heh, that reminds me: Jennifer once described the show as being the product of someone who'd watched Evangelion and played Metal Wolf Chaos while delirious with fever, and was subsequently unable to keep the two stories or their characters straight in their head. It explains a lot."
"I don't want to know." It felt like I was saying that a lot around Max. "Also, please never explain any significant aspect of my life as a result of 'writers just using tropes' ever again."
"You definitely don't want to ask about your gender, then. Oh, have you met Jenn yet? That wasn't a pun. She loves you, practically begged me to find you when she saw where we were headed. Not that I wouldn't have anyway, I mean—oh, thanks," he said as Ace handed us our drinks.
"You're just teasing me now," I said as I twisted the cap off my bottle. "And no, I haven't. Oh, this is really good."
"Everything here is really good," Ace said as he sipped his own drink.
"Yeah. How do you guys adjust when it's time to jump back into some shithole?"
"The same way people adjust to coming back from vacation," Max said. "Grudgingly, and probably nursing a hangover."
"Present company excepted," Ace noted with a nod in my direction.
"Like you're not all immune to hangovers anyway," I said.
"We can be immune to alcohol," Max explained, "but if we want to get drunk, we have to turn off that immunity. We've got literal magic cures for everything that could possibly be wrong with a person, but they're hard to administer to yourself while your brain is trying to hate you to death, and we're a surprisingly spiteful lot when it comes to making our peers pay for their indulgences."
"Usually because we're still holding grudges for what they did while drunk," Ace added.
"Of course, we party like crazy when we get back, too," Max continued "It's a little tamer now than it usually is, since you're technically a few days late."
Ace nodded. "Plus, last jump was a lot gentler than most—oh, hi, Darkness. You find Maeve yet?"
I'd chosen a chair facing only slightly away from the door, so I didn't have to move much to see that Darkness had indeed just entered the lounge. "No. Have you seen her?" she asked hopefully.
"She's in the ice-skating rink," I said.
"Of course she's in the ice-skating rink!" Darkness said, exasperated. "The problem is that she keeps moving it!"
Oh, right, the buildings can move. "It was next to the games room a few hours ago," I offered.
"A few—no, that's no good, she'll have already moved it again. Gah!" She threw up her hands as she turned to leave. "That woman! What kind of cruel, uncaring monster—" The closing door cut off her rant before she could get too into things, thankfully.
I looked at my companions—Max was clearly holding in laughter, while Ace simply rolled his eyes at her antics—then buried my face in my hands. "This is going to be a thing, isn't it?" When neither of them answered, I tried another question. "How does Maeve move the ice rink around?"
"It's sort of her demesne," Max said.
"How did that happen?"
"Long story," Ace said.
"It's not that long." Max set his beer down as he launched into story mode. "I stuck her in one of the unused rooms while I dealt with her corruption, and by the time I was done she'd claimed it as hers and refused to leave."
"That's something of a theme, here," Ace said.
"Quiet. Anyway, that's been her space ever since. She has a lot more control over it than usual for the Warehouse, and she likes it that way."
"Why an ice-skating rink, though?" I would have expected something a lot more arctic and foreboding.
"Why don't you ask her?" Max suggested.
"Don't be mean," Ace told him. To me, he said, "It's been an ice-skating rink ever since the Yuri on Ice Jump. She had a lot of fun with that one."
Max nodded. "She put an entire judging panel into a coma with one of her routines."
"He's just messing with you," Ace said.
"One of the judges put out his eyes, knowing he'd never see something as beautiful as that ever again."
"While in a coma?" I asked doubtfully. Max pouted at my logic. "What did you mean, 'something of a theme'?" I asked Ace.
"Maeve wouldn't leave her new digs. Darkness wouldn't leave Maeve. Jennifer—"
"Would have left if I'd wanted her to," Max said.
"Jennifer wouldn't leave your heart, you big lunk," Ace said.
"Who's Jennifer?" I asked.
"One of the kids he picked up on from some post-apocalyptic jump," Ace answered me.
"We eventually found homes for most of them in more peaceful jumps—" Max said.
"But he'd already more or less adopted her before the jump even ended," Ace finished.
Max sighed and stared into his beer bottle. "Man, that jump was fucked," he mumbled, knocking back the rest of the bottle in one swing.
"That bad?" I asked.
"It started with the apocalypse and got steadily weirder and more nightmarish from there."
"Are we talking End of Evangelion nightmarish, or a more Junji Ito sort of thing?"
"Yes."
"Oh."
"Yeah. It was… unpleasant." Max chucked his empty bottle over his shoulder, hitting a wastebasket twenty feet away without effort. "Your turn for drinks, Cass."
"Sure." I walked over to the fridge I'd seen Ace use and grabbed another couple of beers, as well as a soda for myself.
"You know we don't just visit anime, right?" Ace asked once I'd returned with the bottles.
"I know. It's just what's on my mind after Max ripped the curtain off the madhouse that is my life. Would have been my life? Whatever." We opened our drinks. "Say, if the show takes place in the 2050's, why were there in 2019?"
"Badly written jump document."
"Really?"
"It specified the latest year we could insert, but not the earliest," Ace said.
"Management put their foot down and ruled that we couldn't insert before the date the show started airing, so we ended up in 2009," Max continued.
"So 2009 was where my world started to diverge from sensible history?" I took a moment to consider that. "God, that explains way too much about the last decade."
That led into the topic of what, exactly, Max's presence in my timeline had changed. I listened more than I spoke as Ace and Max talked about their time in my world and how it compared to some of the other divergent timelines they'd visited. From context, it seemed all their work behind the scenes hadn't changed much in the short term. They'd gone after the key players in the upcoming conflicts, but discrediting them, exposing their crimes, or otherwise sabotaging their rise to prominence hadn't suddenly fixed any of the other current, very real problems in the world.
"It's easy to look at individuals and think 'this person deserves my help' or 'that person doesn't care about the suffering they are going to cause', but when it comes to the bigger picture it's hard to judge where we fall on the scale of duty-to-help versus cultural imperialism," Max admitted. "It may be hypocritical of me, but I felt a lot less comfortable rolling over and forcefully reforming what is effectively the world I was raised in than I would a world that's more foreign or alien."
That comment led to a discussion of politics, free will, and the few times he had steamrolled a society that was simply too backwards, toxic, or otherwise damaged to stomach letting it stand. Learning that he'd culturally dismantled the Batarians in Mass Effect didn't bother me, but the fact that he'd done more or less the same to the Krogan did; that dissonance sparked another spirited conversation about morality, values systems, biases, and the justifications for and consequences of declaring a culture 'abhorrent'. Midway through that diversion we broke for lunch, by which I mean Max grabbed a bunch of prepackaged sandwiches out of another fridge. Despite looking like convenience store food, they were almost as good as the Palace's restaurant.
———X==X==X———
Eventually, the conversation wound down until it was just the three of us sitting quietly and sipping our drinks in companionable silence. "So, Cass," Max said. "Aren't you going to ask?"
"About what?"
"Your gender."
"You mean the thing you told me not to ask about earlier?"
"Yup."
"Max…" Ace said warningly.
Max waved him off. "Aren't you curious?"
"Max…" Ace said, louder.
"Fine," I said, "since you're so eager to tell me, what about it?"
"Continuity error in promotional materials."
I very slowly placed my bottle on the coffee table. "What do you mean, 'continuity error'?" I asked carefully.
Ace cut in. "It's not just a 'continuity error', there were plenty of hints in the show—"
"Which they only added once the internet picked up on it," Max interrupted.
"There's no way for you to prove it wasn't intended—"
"They couldn't show alcohol, you think they really 'decided' to slip in a trans character when they were planning the show? Anyway," Max said as he refocused on me, "the actual error was that one of the promotional images showed your nephew looking at a picture of you and his mom as kids, and it clearly showed a girl and a boy. Maybe they initially planned to have you be his dad's sister instead of his mom's? Anyway, since his mom had clearly had a kid, that implied—"
"I get it!" I snapped. Max shut up.
I'd decided it didn't matter whether or not I was part of a story and dismissed the idea that the show existing changed the 'realness' of my experiences. I hadn't thought through the consequences, though, just like when I'd been surprised to meet Akemi; I hadn't stopped to consider that my life, my choices and traumas, were written, created deliberately by someone for entertainment. And worse was the idea that this, something that had been dragging me down my entire life from the recesses of my mind, was all from some mistake? Something thrown in for the hell of it? It burned.
Ace tried to help, I'll give him that much. "Look, Cassandra, it doesn't matter how things came to be 'written'—"
"Stop. Just… stop talking." I stood up stiffly, pretending I wasn't a hair's breadth away from bursting into tears from the confusing mess of emotions I was feeling. "I just… I'm going for a walk." And I left.
———X==X==X———
I ended up going back to the hill overlooking the town. The cherry blossoms had almost completely fallen overnight, giving me a nice pink carpet to sulk on. Akemi had been right: it was a nice place to be alone.
It may sound strange to some people, but I've always had trouble getting angry. Not in the sense that I had an 'anger problem' but in the sense that I didn't get angry, even when it would be appropriate. I knew why: anger was scary. How many times had I seen anger be presented as the 'evil' emotion, the path to the Dark Side? How many times had I been terrified by my parents' anger, even when it wasn't directed at me? Too many times, for such an impressionable kid. So I'd learned not to feel anger, because it was 'bad', because I was scared of it. What I felt towards Max was more along the lines of resentment; a cold, uncomfortable bitterness.
Speaking of Max… "Cass?" he called as he climbed the hill.
I didn't respond for a while, wondering if he'd go away, but when I heard his footsteps getting closer I gave up on avoiding the conversation. "Yeah, I'm here," I said without turning around.
The footsteps stopped. "Hey," he said.
"Hey," I said back.
"I wanted to apologize for what I said earlier. It was cruel of me to do that. So, well," he cleared his throat. "I'm sorry. Sincerely."
I sighed and gave him a shrug. "I'll get over it."
"Good, good." He stayed quiet for a bit, allowing me to almost pretend he wasn't still standing behind me. "So, I talked to Akemi, and she mentioned your conversation, and I wanted to point out that we have the full medical center upgrade. It's advertised as being capable of doing 'any medical procedure necessary', so, you know, if you want…"
"I get the hint," I interrupted before he could spell it out in unnecessary detail, "but I also really do not want to have this conversation with you right now, okay?"
"Okay, yeah, I get it. Sorry."
"I'll get over it," I repeated.
"Right. I'll just… let you be." I tracked his departure as best I could by his footsteps until they faded completely.
I wasn't sure if the breath I let out was a laugh or a sob. That was his peace offering? Really? What the fuck? I leaned back and lay down completely, wiping more emotional tears from my eyes and staring at the sky through the mostly-bare branches. What was he thinking? Probably that he could just 'fix' the problem and everything would be better. And… maybe it would help. I'd been quick to dismiss it, because these kinds of problems aren't something that you can just fix, but it might make me a little less… sensitive? A little more comfortable? And if I wasn't ready to do it today, well, it wasn't like it was a limited time offer.
On the other hand… when the next jump started, I'd be someone else. I wouldn't have to deal with the question at all. And I was self-aware enough to recognize that if there was one thing I'd mastered to the point of pathology, it was ignoring problems until they went away. It was what I'd come up here to do originally, sitting alone until the wound was no longer raw and the resentment faded on its own.
The 'alone' part of the plan wasn't going so well, since Max had only been gone for a minute or so before I had another visitor. "Ms. Rolins?" Akemi called.
"'Cassandra' is fine," I answered, still lying on my back. Like I had with Max, I tracked her through her footsteps until she stopped a couple yards away. Unlike with Max, I had enough courtesy to turn my head to face her rather than talking to the air, though not more than that. "Am I in your spot again?"
"No. I came up here to talk to you."
"Should I get up?"
"No. This is fine."
I hummed. "What did you want to talk about?"
"I told Max I thought you'd be up here. I hope you don't mind."
"It's fine," I said, and Akemi smiled—by which I mean her lips twitched ever so slightly upward. "What?"
"I was remembering our previous conversation. I passed Max on the way up; you actually told her you'd 'get over it'."
I smiled too. "I did."
"She took that to mean you'd accepted her apology."
"Did you correct him?"
"No."
I chuckled. Laughing was nice; I felt a little lighter, a little less bitter. Something bugged me about the conversation, though, and when I replayed it in my head, I noticed the problem. I had no idea how Max felt about… their identity. Something to ask later, for sure. "Did you just come up here to make sure I wouldn't be upset that you pointed Max at me, or was there something else?"
"There was something else. I thought of something that might cheer you up."
It couldn't be worse than Max's idea, so I stood up and brushed the cherry blossoms off as best I could. "All right. Where to?"
———X==X==X———
Akemi pushed the door open to what I could only describe as an indoor waterpark. The space inside was several times larger than the building's exterior, but I'd seen that enough times in the twenty-four hours I'd been here that it didn't even phase me anymore. I followed Akemi as she walked over to the side of the nearest pool and cupped her hands around her mouth to yell, "Jennifer!"
I immediately second-guessed my decision to follow her here.
"Coming!" The shout was badly distorted, since it was coming from a long, meandering waterslide pipe, but it was still identifiably young and female. Moments later, a slip of a girl shot out into the pool, making a splash that had me backpedaling. I needn't have bothered: the water stopped at the edge of the pool like it had hit a glass pane, sliding down back into the pool without splashing a drop on Akemi.
"Hi Homura! Who's that?" The girl I assumed was Jennifer swam over to the side of the pool. I was surprised by just how young she looked; physically, she couldn't have been much older than twelve. She looked me over in turn, confusion suddenly replaced by excitement. "Is that—!?" She grabbed onto the edge of the pool and vaulted straight into a standing position, grabbing my hand and shaking it eagerly. "Oh my god, Dr. Rolins! Oh my god! You're actually here! This is so cool!" Jennifer released my hand to dance around in excitement. "Oh, this is so cool. You were my favorite character! But…" she trailed off and stopped bouncing. "Oh, this is weird! I mean, it's good weird! But still, it's weird!"
"Why is—?"
"You're so young!" she yelled. It was a very strange thing to hear from someone in the body of a tweenager, especially one who acted the part. "It's like, like… like meeting teenage Dumbledore! You're all young and awkward instead of old and wise and stuff! Heck, you're younger than me! I never really thought about that!"
I mouthed How old? to Akemi while Jennifer resumed jumping around, but didn't get a response.
"But that's cool too! I don't act my age anyway! We can have so much fun! Oh, oops!" She stopped, and extended a hand in front of her; without any visible effort, all the water still on her flowed up to her palm. Even the water she'd left on my hand from her greeting or inadvertently sprinkled about in her excitement joined the sphere in her hand, which she then threw back into the pool. "There! All dry!" she announced, looking to me like, well, like a child showing off a new skill.
"That's a cool trick," I said. It was also a somewhat uncomfortable reminder that pretty much everyone I met here was superhuman to some degree or another, but I pushed that aside and focused on the wonder I felt at seeing such a casual use of magic. I hoped that feeling would never go away.
"I'm a waterbender!" she said. "And I know you don't like to get wet!" Jennifer paused. "Or did whatever caused that not happen yet? Oh no, should I not have said that?" She drew her arms to her chest and shrank into herself like she expected to be scolded.
I just laughed and patted her on her swim-capped head. "It's not a phobia or anything, I just don't like feeling soggy and cold."
"Ahhhhh," Jennifer said, nodding earnestly. She took off the swimming cap to reveal a head of shoulder-length wavy brown hair, which she somehow styled perfectly with a single brush from her hand. "Yeah, I'm not sure I would like swimming much either if I couldn't cheat! Hmm, what should we do if you don't like swimming? Do you like board games, or arcade games? Or we could go to the skating rink, but Maeve's scary. What do you want to do?"
"Let's start with the arcade? I already visited the board games room today."
"Okay! Oh, hold on, I need to get changed!" I expected her to run off to a changing room, but instead a cloud of smoke appeared around her from nowhere; when it cleared a second later, she was already wearing a blouse and floral skirt. "Ready!" Jennifer yelled as she ran over to the exit, only to stop and look back at me impatiently. I held up a finger in the universal 'just a moment' signal, then turned to Akemi.
"This wasn't what I was expecting," I said, "but it was certainly distracting. Thanks, Akemi—uh…san?" Stupid. I should have just gone with 'Ms. Akemi'; I wasn't enough of a weeb to be mucking around with honorifics.
She took any faux pas I may have made in stride. "You may call me 'Homura' if you wish, Cassandra."
"In that case: thank you, Homura." I waved goodbye as I followed Jennifer out of the waterpark.
———X==X==X———
AN: It's very tempting to troll companions with your metaknowledge. It is also often mean.
The vague "tell instead of show" bit in the Lounge scene is largely due to the fact that including any… specifics about present/future events and Max's actions surrounding them would open up a big can of politics. I'm not here to start fights, and I will stand by that claim no matter how much evidence you find to the contrary.
Also, +1 to everyone who spots the shout-out in the first scene.
Days passed like minutes as I fell into a pattern. After breakfast, I spent the mornings working my way through the various arcade and board games the Warehouse had in stock, usually with Jennifer as my guide. We even braved the ice rink once, though that mostly served to show me that ice skating was not as close to rollerblading as I'd assumed. I had barely gotten onto the ice before I fell and nearly broke my wrist; we left pretty quickly after that.
The afternoons were my 'training montage', as Max called it. Mostly, it consisted of an unwelcome amount of cardio and general strength training, which I resented both because I was in bad enough shape that even the tame routine I was put through left me feeling like I'd been run over by a truck, and because, as Max admitted when I asked him about it, it wouldn't carry over to any of my other bodies. If it wasn't already obvious, I wasn't planning to use this one much.
Getting stronger did help with my 'martial arts' training—which was more about how to not break my wrist every time something knocked me over rather than actually fighting anyone—with 'David', who I was pretty sure wasn't Eidolon but otherwise couldn't place. He also gave me a crash course in gun safety and handling, which wasn't enough to make me a good shot but did mean I wouldn't be a hazard to myself or others if I did find myself holding a loaded gun. Well, unless I wanted to be, because gun.
Speaking of martial arts, I more or less confirmed my theory on Bob's identity when I walked into the sparring area of the gym a few minutes early and saw the last few moments of a fight in which he flattened Zero and Darkness two-on-one with nothing but a heavy warhammer and shield. Ol' Bobby B didn't need shardplate to raise hell, although Darkness being Darkness she may well have been more of a handicap to Zero than a teammate. For all I knew, she had actually been on Bob's team and blundered into friendly fire.
As for Max, I didn't take him up on his offer, but I did 'get over it' as I'd said. He'd thought I'd find it as amusing as he did, and honestly, if I had a little more distance from my problems, I might have. There was something darkly funny about such a huge part of someone's life coming from such a small thing; it was mostly the fact that it happened to me that kept me from appreciating the humor. I did forgive him in the end, though. I can honestly say that there is only one person I've ever borne a real, lasting grudge against, and Max's insensitively offensive teasing didn't hold a candle to that.
I also remembered to ask him about his pronouns when we ran into each other in the games room, and it is with that insight that I specifically say 'ask him about his pronouns'. "Honestly, I stopped thinking about it a long time ago," he said. "Most people just use whatever they used for the person they first knew me as. Habits like that are hard to break."
"I am well aware of that," I said.
"Sorry."
"No, I mean, you're right, it's hard to change. I've been on both sides of that. It's not something you have to apologize for." I paused. "So, he/him?"
"Yeah."
"Great." And so it was settled.
Time flies when you're having fun. What seemed like only a day or two but was actually a week and a half after I arrived, we were called to assemble in the conference room to speak to Management.
———X==X==X———
The room in question was on the second floor of the Traveler's Palace. It was, as the name suggested, a conference room: a space dedicated to a single table that had way more chairs surrounding it than its size should have allowed. "It's a 1080 degree circle," Jennifer told me without prompting as we approached it and took our seats. Indeed, everything looked normal if I simply looked in at any given seat, but trying to pan my head smoothly from one side of the table to the other was mildly nauseating, and I quickly stopped trying.
The table itself was empty except for a single, mundane-looking conference speaker-phone at the very center. Once everyone had taken their seats—of which there were exactly the right number, of course—the speaker crackled to life.
"Well, I hope you had fun on your 'vacation'," it said. The voice wasn't clearly identifiable as either male or female, and there was something about it that was subtly off compared to normal speech, like hearing in a different font. The intonation came through loud and clear all the same, though, and many of the people around the table shifted uncomfortably at the rebuke.
"In any case, I'm sure you're eager to learn where you're going next. Good news! Since you had so much fun mucking about in twenty-first century Earth, I figured I would give you another round." A digital tablet appeared in front of every seat. There was no clatter of settling objects, no pop of displaced air; from one instant to the next, they were simply there. I picked mine up and read the header.
"Generic Highschool Harem Jump!?" I, and probably around half the table, yelled in consternation. Scrolling down—to see just how badly this was going to go—showed that the document simply ended after the barest boilerplate description of the cliches involved.
"Where's the rest of it?" Max asked.
"Given that you've demonstrated the impressive ability to go off the rails even in the complete absence of rails, I've decided that I'll be handling this one for you. Here's how this is going to work: this jump will be for a single year, rather than ten. You will be randomly shuffled about into a number of overlapping romantically-entangled clusterfucks. You will have no out-of-jump powers—"
"Woah, hold on—" Max interrupted.
"Don't worry, I will guarantee that there will be no 'accidents' that could imperil your 'chain. You will all be staying alive; no 'leaving early to avoid the rush'," the voice continued. "Your memories of the Jumpchain and each other will also be partially suppressed for the duration of the jump, though not completely; it won't be interesting if you're not yourselves, after all."
"Like you're not going to be messing with our heads anyway?" someone asked sarcastically.
"I won't need to. Your natures will take care of that; you'll be high school students, obviously. Seniors, to be specific."
"I'm staying out of this one," Joe or Hoss—I couldn't remember which of them was the tall one—said, to a chorus of agreement.
"You will be importing, all of you; this is mandatory."
There was quite a bit of protest at the announcement. "That's not fair!" Zero yelled. "Plenty of us didn't even import last Jump!"
"'I was freeloading in the Warehouse all decade' is not a convincing argument for leniency."
"What about Cass?" Jennifer asked, and I winced. As much as I appreciated her going to bat for me, I really did not want to be singled out right now. "She hadn't even joined yet!"
"She's part of the team, and that means taking hits with the rest of you. She benefited quite a bit from your shenanigans, as well."
"It's not like Max did it for her sake," a woman somewhere to my left said bitterly. "He just goes and has his fun without any thought as to who he runs over in the process. Her being here at all was an afterthought."
"She's part of the team now, but you're angry at the rest of us for something we did ten years ago!" Jennifer said. "It's not fair to punish her for something we did a decade before she met us!"
"Fine. Ms. Rolins, and only Ms. Rolins, is excused. Ms. Rolins? I advise you to use your time on one of the side jumps. It will be a very lonely year, otherwise." My tablet display changed to a web browser displaying what looked almost exactly like a Google Drive folder, except it was labeled 'Jump Drive' instead. I raised an eyebrow at the formatting. Is this a deliberate nod to my familiarity with Jumpchains, or a reflection of the nature of this 'reality' as just another fan work? Or maybe Management is just having a laugh at my expense. "The rest of you will be participating, regardless of how involved you may or may not have been with the previous jump. You have the rest of the month to get ready, although since there are no decisions to be made, I suggest you simply get it over with."
"Just a minute," Max said. "Can you be more specific than 'overlapping romantically-entangled clusterfucks'?"
"Yes," the voice said, and hung up. No one said anything for a few seconds. I took the time to try and judge the mood of the room; Zero seemed to find the whole thing hilarious, unsurprisingly, but most of the faces I could see were scowling at their unhelpful tablets.
Jennifer leaned over to me and whispered, "I think we made Management mad."
———X==X==X———
Ace caught me on his way out of the building. "Don't pay too much attention to Kara," he said. "She's never really forgiven Max for how he handled her jump."
"She was the one complaining about him just 'running over' people?"
"Yeah." He nodded. "She wasn't trying to be mean to you, so don't let it bother you, okay?"
"It didn't."
"Good." He clapped me on the shoulder and turned away before I called out to him.
"Hey, Ace? Who is Kara?" She'd looked familiar, and with that name…
"Hmm?" Ace turned back to me. "Kara Thrace, from—"
"Battlestar Galactica?" I interrupted. "Starbuck? That Kara Thrace?"
"Yeah. Are you a fan?" Ace asked with a grin.
"Well, uh, yeah. I kinda… named my cat after her. What?" I added, when Jennifer giggled from beside me.
"I think this is what I looked like when I met you," she said.
"Hush, you." To Ace, I said, "Maybe don't pass that on?"
"No promises!" he said with a grin, and headed off.
I turned back to my tablet while I walked through the lobby to the lounge. Everyone else had left theirs on the table, since they had exactly zero choice in the punishment Management had chosen for them, but I had taken mine with me, and I scrolled through the various documents as I wandered over to one of the couches and sunk into it with a sigh. It was mostly 'generic' jumps on offer, which meant there wasn't much to immediately catch my eye. Opening a few up and skimming them didn't help; I'd never really paid attention to the fact that jump documents were dense. Going through them like this was a bit like trying to read a tabletop rulebook cover to cover.
My eyes had glazed over by the time Max stopped by to check on me. "Any idea what you're going to do?" he asked.
"None. Reading through the jumps like this isn't helping, either."
"Then may I make a suggestion?" he asked, holding a hand out for the tablet. I handed it over, and he made a few inputs before handing it back to me.
To be honest, it looked pretty good. The perks were certainly attractive, and living a video-game-style adventure sounded awesome. The 'Start Building' button replaced the document with a page of radio buttons and drop-down menus; I tapped 'Gender' and chuckled at the options: 'Stay Female: Free' and 'Switch to Male: Free'. Odd place for validation, but I'll take it.
I scooted over on the couch to make room and looked up at Max. "You gonna sit down and help me plan this thing out?"
Max sat, and I held the tablet between us so we could both see the screen.
———X==X==X———
I had read Jumpchains before finding myself on one, and I'd almost always skimmed over the character building. Most of my grumbling about Jumpchains being mostly fan wankery came from the repeated experience of seeing a Jump update where more time is spent min-maxing than actually describing the events in the universe the fic is visiting. I understood the exercise was part of the Jumpchain format, but it seemed like an excessive amount of 'crunch'—to borrow a tabletop term—for what was, in my eyes, a fundamentally creative exercise.
Actually taking the time to do it myself gave me some perspective. Working through the document, weighing the pros and cons of origins and classes, optimizing for the maximum amount of discounts while still getting what you want—it's a classic character optimization puzzle, and that's fun in its own right. Of course, my experience here was a little different, but the general principle still applied.
I'd skimmed over the build documents because I figured they existed for the writer, rather than the reader, but I'd just been the wrong kind of reader. I'd missed the point: it wasn't supposed to be fanfiction in the narrative sense. It was a thought experiment, a logic puzzle. It was called a Choose Your Own Adventure, after all. The build was the choices, and what I'd dismissed as often bland and boring narratives were really more akin to debriefings or after-actions reports for that adventure. Jumpchain was a game more than it was a writing prompt.
In hindsight, reading build documents would likely have been more interesting if I'd read the jump documents as well, so I would know all the options the Jumper was giving up for the selections they made. Without knowing the opportunity costs, the build documents just read like a list of powers ordered off a menu, with a bit of discussion around the selections. And speaking of opportunity costs…
"You know what sort of class you want to be?" Max asked.
"Well, my first instinct is 'get the magic'," I admitted, "but I'm second-guessing myself there. Maybe I should be focusing on skills first, and not abilities. Especially given that it's incredibly vague on the magic system I'll be using. Getting stuck with a fixed RPG spell list and having to yell the spell's name every time I use it would be a letdown."
"You're thinking along the right lines," Max said. "Getting magic is always tempting, probably doubly so since it's your first opportunity, but there are a lot more things that can prevent you from using magic than physical skills like sword fighting or martial arts. It's also way less effective in non-magical settings."
I filed the bit about non-magical settings away for later. "So skills are a better foundation. And if I understand how these things work, getting 'Basic Fitness' here will apply to every body, unless something specifically negates previous purchases."
"You'll have to slot it, though."
"Slot it?" I repeated.
"Yeah. Here." Max poked at the tablet a bit, then frowned. "It's not showing up… oh, this is your first jump, so you don't have anything to slot anyway. Here, look." He reached over and pulled his own tablet out of thin air, then clicked through to another menu. "We get five hundred points at the start of each jump to buy 'perk slots' that can hold perks from previous jumps. You can also take drawbacks for 'jump points' instead of 'choice points' at half their value, if you need more slots."
"That's a hell of a lot more limiting than the Jumpchains I'm familiar with." I reached over to his tablet to scroll through the list. "Although maybe not? You've got more than twenty thousand points worth of slots there."
"I've been at this a while."
"No kidding. So are they locked in there for good, or…"
"Switched out at the start of every jump."
"I see. Well, I guess I've also got to be thinking about what I'm going to be able to slot in next jump." I handed his tablet back and looked back at the Generic RPG document. "If I just load up on expensive perks, I won't actually be able to use them."
"Yeah. You might be better off taking a bunch of cheaper perks for versatility rather than going for straight power. Keep in mind that skills are always retained, though, as long as they're not superhuman, or super-whatever-you-are-that-jump."
"Really? That just makes the skills versus ability debate swing even harder towards skills."
"Not necessarily," Max warned me. "Some skills won't work as well without the reflexes, intuition, or whatnot a lot of perks provide—maybe not at all. Sounds like you already have some ideas about what you want, though…"
"I'm thinking martial arts. I can't be disarmed if my weapons are my fists, and in future jumps I won't have to worry about carrying a sword through a modern city."
"Makes sense to me. Let's load up on drawbacks first."
I raised an eyebrow. "Load up?"
"Yeah. There's no limit on drawbacks in this one, so you can really bulk up on perks and slots. Worse comes to worst you get dumped back here early and come visit us as a nice, sane, non-imported person who can actually escape all the inevitable contrived bullshit we'll be living with for a year."
"You mean if I die?" I asked nervously.
"Or otherwise hit some sort of loss condition, yeah." He shrugged. "You're a companion, you're guaranteed to respawn after every jump and can't permanently fail."
"But do I keep everything I purchased even if I die?"
Max opened his mouth to confirm, then stopped. "Actually, I'm not sure. I don't think it's come up before. Abusing side-jumps like this usually comes with a safety net, but there won't be anyone around in the Warehouse to bail you out."
"That's kind of an important thing to know before I go into this," I said. The tablet dinged with a text message, and I opened it with a swipe and read aloud, "'As long as I don't think you're deliberately gaming the fact that you'll respawn, I'll let you keep your goodies.' Signed, Management."
Max chuckled. "I guess that's an answer."
"A vague one that depends entirely on the goodwill of the unknowably powerful extra-dimensional entity you managed to royally piss off."
"When you say it like that, it sounds like my fault."
"Isn't it?" I asked. Max had the good grace to look embarrassed. "Let's go into this assuming I need to survive and see what we can get."
"Fair enough. Oh, I should mention, you're not going to be able to remember which drawbacks you take, though you'll have a general idea of what was available."
"What? You mean my memory will be erased?"
"Suppressed. You'll get it back afterward."
"That doesn't make me feel much better."
Max looked up from the tablet, giving me his full attention. "Cass, I understand it's a bit weird, but you're going to have to get used to the idea that memory and identity are… pliable? Things can be added and removed. Hell, most of us gain an entirely new life every time we enter a new world."
"I think it's going to take a while for me to get used to the idea that I'm not write-protected."
"You'll adjust," he said confidently. "Now let's see about those drawbacks."
The tablet dinged with another message.
"What's it say?" Max asked.
"It's a new drawback. 'Deuteragonist'. Exclusive with all other drawbacks, I'll be a recruitable party member rather than the hero, and no matter how much I try, I won't be able to prevent myself from being drawn into the plot. In fact, the more I try to resist, the more the universe will conspire against me to force me back onto the rails."
"How much is that worth?"
I checked. "Uh, two hundred CP, one hundred CP, and one free item."
"It says two different CP values?"
"Yeah." I pointed to the message. "What's up with that?"
"Even Management sometimes makes errors with what they send us," Max said. The tablet pinged again.
"You may take one or both payments as Jump Points," I read aloud.
"Ah, that makes sense. Usually you can't split that up. Which item did it give?"
"It just said 'one free item'."
"That's suspiciously generous. Does it apply to Divine Weapon? Because that's another six hundred CP for free, if it does."
"I don't know. It doesn't say I can't." We both waited for the tablet to ding a correction. It didn't.
"I think that's a 'yes'," Max said. He frowned. "Trap?"
"It's obviously a trap. But…" I leaned back, drumming my fingers on the arm of the couch. "It's hard to argue with what's almost a thousand extra CP. I know it's a trap, the fact that I can't find the catch means it's probably even worse than I think, but I still think I'm going to do it."
"I think it's pretty easy to find the catch. You might get saddled with a hero who's completely intolerable."
"Ugh. Good point. Maybe it'd be better to just use the 'normal' drawbacks." I looked at Deuteragonist again. "Actually, it technically doesn't say I have to join the hero, just that I 'will be recruitable' and won't be able to 'avoid the plot'. If I really can't stand him, I should be able to shadow the party and play the enigmatic ally who never actually joins the team but still contributes to saving the world. And if he's so bad that the world would be better off without him, I'll knock him down a pit and deal with the plot myself."
"Weren't you just telling me off for pulling one over on Management?"
"No, I was telling you off for getting punished. If Management isn't happy with my interpretation, they're free to correct me." The tablet did not ding.
Max rolled his eyes. "Fine, take the drawback. Wait, if it's exclusive with other drawbacks, does that mean you can't be forced to take 'Absurdly Dangerous High Fantasy Death World'?"
Ding. "Let's see… hah. 'Nice try. No.'"
He laughed. "It was worth a shot. Now, for your actual perks…"
And so we got down into the gritty, crunchy details. I may not have been interested in jump builds before, but doing my own build would have been a lot of fun even if I wasn't going to get the chance to actually do it. It wasn't easy by any stretch, though. It took a while, but with Max's help, I was able to make a build I was happy with.
We checked our work, Max said goodbye, and I was left with the odd thought that if I'd been reading my own adventure, I'd probably have skimmed over the last few hours to get to the 'story'.
———X==X==X———
I originally planned to take both sets of Drawback CP as Jump Points, but ended up taking the full value as CP once I'd started spending. It would have been different if we got the JP at the end of the jump, but receiving 500 up front meant I'd already have 1000 to spend to prepare for the next jump even if I didn't take Drawbacks then. I also had 200 more CP from… somewhere. Max just mentioned it being 'default' and moved on.
For class I went with a Multiclass Martial Scout. Multiclassing to Martial was solely to abuse the Martial Training perk; multiclassing cost the same amount as buying the perk off-class, and getting it as a freebie meant I got 3 specializations instead of one. I took one-handed blades (swords and daggers, basically), throwing knives, and unarmed. It also gave me the Basic Weaboo Scrolls for free, which was handy, even if the name felt like a dig.
Scout had most of the stuff I really wanted. Evasion and Grace appealed to me a lot more than just being able to soak hits, and at 100 and 200 were perfectly priced for dealing with the Perk Slots. It also gave me Tools of the Trade for free, which was written like a perk but apparently counted as an item, or perhaps a bunch of items in potentia. And of course the freebie perk, Scout Training, was pretty good too. I took wilderness survival, tracking, and stealth as my specializations there.
From there, it was on to the Origin perks. I took Mysterious Foreigner, and then bought out the whole tree. A Wanderer's Heart didn't seem that useful, but it was free, so in it went. A Sage's Memories would doubtlessly be useful in the future; memory perks for immortals were a must, right? A Childish Dream sounded underwhelming on paper but the idea of being immune to despair made me pick it up anyway. And the Capstone, A Jumper's Wisdom, was pretty much a perfect first-jump pickup for protecting the fragility of value, and I considered it essential. I would almost certainly be getting a 400 point slot as soon as possible.
I was tempted to spend my last 200 points on Fortune's Favored, but I decided I needed Strong Heart instead. The ability to keep a cool head in a crisis was not something I'd been given naturally. That left me with a spare 100 points, so I grabbed Noble Visage out of a combination of vanity and lack of other things to buy.
From there I moved on to items. I started with the Journal and Map for 100, and the Portable Campsite for 200. I got the aforementioned Scrolls and Tools for free, as well as the Memento from the Mysterious Foreigner background, which I applied to my watch; it had been a gift, and was probably the item with the most sentimental value out of everything I owned. The Airship was extremely tempting, but since I was going to be railroaded anyway, it didn't seem that important; Max assured me he already had several I could borrow if I needed one later. I was also tempted to grab the Haversack of Holding, but I ended up blowing the last 200 on Keepsake and Heirloom, the freebies from the other origins, just to make my watch that much more magical. I wasn't particularly fussed about getting the most possible power, especially given I wasn't going into a high-stakes situation. The rest of the things I got were free: some basic supplies common to adventurers and a decent amount of cash, which I was sure I'd be able to go through in a hurry if I wasn't careful.
Lastly, I checked off the Divine Weapon for my wildcard freebie, and felt a definite sense of foreboding when the form accepted that without complaint.
———X==X==X———
After a bunch of discussion I wasn't involved in, the group decided they'd wait only another day before biting the bullet and Jumping into what had come to be known as the 'Punishment Detail'. I waved goodbye as the entire population of the Warehouse vanished between seconds, then turned to my tablet and its large, glowing 'INSERT' button. My finger hovered over the button, wavering.
"Hey, Management?" I spoke to the empty square as I lifted the tablet. "Could you, uh, make this a book?" The weight in my hand changed, and I was left holding a small, sturdy hardcover book without a sleeve. I opened it and grinned when I saw the linking image, putting my palm to the page without hesitation. It even made the sound—
WhoOoOoOom (vwish vwish vwish)…
—and then I was in.
I found myself a simple dirt wood, a forest at my back and town barely visible on the horizon to my front. A single step forward brought me to a halt as I realized my balance was very different.
I was a girl.
I was a girl!
The excitement sent a full-body shiver coursing through me. "This is actually happening," I said out loud, then shivered again at the fact that I sounded different, too! No more stupid speech impediment or deep male voice! Calm down, Cass! I scolded myself. Random encounters are a thing!
With that in mind, I quickly checked myself over for my purchases. My armor was… well, hopefully genre conventions meant it would protect me properly despite the alarming lack of material over some vital areas. The journal and map appeared and disappeared with a thought, while the campsite diorama was in the courier-style canvas bag slung over my shoulder with the rest of my supplies. My watch was physically unchanged and, as best I could judge, already set to local time. The last item was something Max had loaned me from the 'armory', for lack of a better word: the Portable Mini-Fridge, a keychain-dongle sized fridge that could expand to walk-in size and deliver any food I could have gotten in the Warehouse. I didn't see my Divine Weapon, though, which was weird.
—X=X—
Something hit the ground in front of me, and I sank down to my knees and averted my eyes from the sheer, terrifying glory of the angel who was literally radiating anger in beams of searing light. Before I could start groveling properly or totally lose my mind, her eyes flashed, and a dissociating calm settled over me.
"Who are you?" the angel demanded.
"Cassandra Rolins," I said.
"Where did you come from?"
"The Warehouse."
"Where is that?"
"Outside."
"IDIOT GIRL!" I didn't react as she set me on fire, then quickly extinguished the flames and undid the damage to my clothes and person. "Do you have any idea who I am?"
"No."
"No!?"That surprised her. "You appear out of nowhere, with no idea of who I am… you're not from this world. When you said 'outside', you meant outside the world itself!" She paused. "Why are you here?"
"To help the hero."
Her eyes narrowed suspiciously. "Why?"
"I get stronger. I gain skills, strength, speed. Experience."
"You came here to level grind," she repeated in mingled disbelief and exasperation. "Why did you come here? If you can travel between worlds, why did you come to mine?"
"I didn't choose the world. I set out to join a hero on a quest so that I could become stronger, and I was sent here."
"And you have no idea where you are?"
"I am on a road between a forest and a village."
"Hmm."The angel began to pace circles around me. As my eyes remained forward, I only saw her when she wandered through my field of view during her circuits. "If you're lying… no, if you could resist me, you would not have submitted to me in the first place. And if you're telling the truth…" she trailed off, remaining silent until she finished another circle and came to a stop in front of me. "I suppose I should think of you as a gift. It seems there is another deity somewhere who looks fondly upon my world, as well they should." She smirked at her own compliment.
"You seem strong enough, but you'll need a weapon. Let's see…" The angel waved one hand, and a lightning bolt struck her palm, leaving behind a pair of thick, golden bangles that she tossed to me. I caught them without blinking."There, now you're properly equipped." She waited expectant for a moment, then snapped, "Thank me, you ungrateful cow!"
"Thank you," I said.
"You're welcome," she said sweetly. "Having a pretty girl like you around could have benefits even if you're a paper tiger; maybe you'll keep his eyes from wandering to the inhumans. Just make sure you don't make any actual moves on Luka, are we clear?"
"Yes."
"Good. Once I leave, forget everything about meeting me." Her eyes flashed again, and she shot into the sky.
—X=X—
Oh, there they are. I slipped the bangles onto my arms, where they shrank down to fit snugly against my wrists, and shivered once more as I felt the power of the blessed items settle over me. With a spring in my step, I set out towards the town.
———X==X==X———
AN: As much as I wanted to be really clever and hide all that text in the closing section, I couldn't think of a way that wouldn't annoy someone, so it's just marked off with indents and some mini-scene-break-bars. I was tempted to spoiler-tag it, but I don't think it really 'works' stylistically. As for what it actually says: "I" have no idea what "I'm" in for.
I'd probably run screaming for the hills if I did. My SI character is the butt of a lot of the jokes in this story, particularly early on. The next chapter starts after the end of that Jump for what may be obvious reasons.
"I—" I announced, popping the cap off my root beer, "—am going to do my damnedest to pretend that the entirety of the last jump never happened."
Dozens of voices shouted affirmations as bottles, glasses, and mugs were raised in toast. We were gathered in the Palace's restaurant, which had manifested an open bar along the length of one wall for the occasion. Despite it being part of the restaurant, and thus subject to the standard magic automation of the hotel, Ace and Max were tending bar while the rest of us did our best to repress our memories of the last year. I guess it was for the human element.
"Was yours really that bad?" Garrus asked. He was back in turian form; I was still using the body I'd gained from my first jump. I had some complaints about it, but less so now that I had some proper clothes. "Yo, barkeep!" He called as he waved his empty glass at Max.
"Management set me up," I grumbled.
"What do you mean?" Max asked. He pulled a glass out from beneath the counter and poured Garrus another beer from the tap, sliding it across the bar with the flourish.
"That damn drawback. I didn't jump into a 'generic' JRPG at all."
"Well, we knew it was a trap, right?" Max asked. He glanced down the bar and sighed. "I'll get the rest of the story later, duty calls."
"What was a trap?" Garrus asked.
I sighed. "Max pointed me at the Generic RPG jump, and while we were discussing how to get the most out of it, I got offered a new drawback called 'Deuteragonist' that was worth way more CP than it should have been for the relatively low cost of not being the starring character."
"That doesn't seem so bad. Being a party member has a lot of perks!"
"I know, right? Even if we have to save the world, not having to be in charge is a load off your shoulders. But it was worth nine hundred CP: three hundred flat and an item worth six!"
"Nine hundred?" His mandibles twitched. "Anything over six is usually 'do not take under any circumstances' levels of bad. What did you get hit with for nine?"
"I ended up in a goddamn fetish-porn game!"
"Ahahahaha, seriously?" Zero asked, cutting in on my other side to lean on the counter. She had an unlabeled liquor bottle in one hand and was well on her way to being drunk, if she wasn't there already. "H-game, eh? I guess that explains your…" she set her bottle down and made groping motions towards her chest while I did my best to ignore her. "Wait, wait…" she leaned forward, way into my personal space like she was trying to smell me, then burst into laughter again. "You… you spent ten years in a universe that literally runs on porn logic," she choked out, "and you're still a virgin?"
"Zero, be nice," Ace scolded her, grabbing her bottle away as he passed.
Zero pouted after him before turning her attention back to me. "Whatever. That's fucking hilarious! How the fuck does that even happen?"
"First off, it was only a year, like your jump, and I wasn't even there the whole time. Management threw me a bone and let me go when the plot finished." Zero started cracking up again when I said 'bone', and I sat and regretted my choice of words while she got her breathing under control. "As I was saying: I ran out the remainder of the year in a proper, non-adult-only setting.
"Secondly, I was lucky enough that things never got past 'lewd'. Maybe Management was merciful enough to drop me in a censored release, or maybe it was Yander-vine intervention. I dunno."
"Yan-divine—hold on, hold on, I know this one!" Zero's face scrunched up as she wracked her brain.
"I thought you got to customize the world with the generic jumps," Garrus said. "How'd you end up in a porn game by accident?"
"It wasn't an 'accident'," I grumbled. "Management did it deliberately, I'm sure of it. If the drawback didn't do it directly, then it gave them enough authority over the plot and setting to do it that way."
"The drawback was a trap, and Management are master baiters!" Zero crowed.
I leaned forward to rest my forehead against the counter. "Zero, no."
She cackled at my dismay. "Oh, I've got it!" She snapped her fingers, ending the gesture with a finger-gun pointing right at me. "Monster Girl Quest!"
I sat up just so she could see me roll my eyes. "Why am I not surprised you would be able to recognize an H-game from only one barely-relevant comment?"
"The better question is, how did you recognize it?" she asked, wiggling her eyebrows suggestively. "You must know what it is if you know if I guessed right!"
"I didn't recognize it immediately." Zero locked eyes with me and raised an eyebrow. "It… shows up in fanfic," I mumbled. Zero starting laughing at me again, and I sighed and rested my forehead in one hand, massaging my temples with my forefinger and thumb.
"So," she asked, "how did you do?"
"I remained alive and mostly unmolested, which is about all I could ask."
It was Zero's turn to roll her eyes. "No, I mean, did you manage to get all the way to the end?"
"I assume so. I don't know the entire plot—I read a single non-explicit MGQ fic—" I ignored Zero's mumble of 'prude', "—a couple months ago, and all I had to go on was what I could remember from that. I mostly just cheated by following what the SI had done, but it stopped before the halfway point, so I had to wing it from there. Bribing Alice with Warehouse food was probably a bit unfair, but I needed every advantage I could get."
"Well, I suppose that's one way to make up for inexperience!"
I groaned. "How are you so sure I'm a virgin, anyway?"
"It's a secret."
"White court vampire in Dresden Files," Ace said as he replaced my empty bottle of soda with a new one. Zero took the opportunity to reach over the counter and grab him in a grip that was somewhere between an embrace and a headlock.
"I said it was a secret," Zero said.
"It's not a secret if she's the only person here who doesn't know," Ace protested as he struggled to free himself.
"I don't care. Now gimme my alcohol back."
"I think you've had enough, dear."
"I can still see straight. Give me my alcohol back."
I turned back to Garrus. "So, how was your year?"
"It was… fine. Annoying and undignified, but nowhere near as bad as everyone's acting." He shrugged and took another sip from his beer.
"Anything interesting happen?"
"Let me think… oh, Darkness got hit by a bus."
"By accident?" I asked. Normal people don't have to clarify this kind of thing.
"Yep! She was chasing Maeve through traffic."
"Yeah, that sounds like her. What happened?"
"The entire jump was slapstick physics, so she ended up swaddled in bandages but was otherwise fine." He smiled wistfully. "Maeve freaked out, though; it was actually kind of sweet, in a terrifying way."
I nodded and sipped at my drink. "Any other good stories?"
"Let's see… Max tried to make a move on Maeve once, and she dumped her iced drink down his pants in front of the whole school. That was pretty funny." Garrus took another drink, then continued, "Stories… hmm. I'm not sure who the protagonist was supposed to be, in genre terms. Max was closer to the rich-boy romantic-rival archetype; he was set to inherit a multi-billion-dollar hotel chain, because of course he would, with Jenn as his incredibly bratty eight year old sister.
"Who else do you know? Zero was tsundere as hell, with twin-tails to match. Homura was the mysterious transfer student slash aloof dark-haired girl, because everyone has to be typecast as much as possible… which is why Hoss and company were the school delinquents, I guess. All the extracurriculars were typecast, too: Erin was a volleyball star, Maeve ran the literature club, and Bob, Ace, and I were football jocks. I was the kicker." He chuckled. "Sometimes I wonder if there's anything in Management's dossier on me besides 'sniper'."
"What was Karl doing?" I asked.
"Uh… chess club, I think."
"Figures."
"Yeah, you got the idea. Anyway, Ace was the star receiver, and Bob the star linebacker—"
"I'm losing track," I said. "Was this highschool running on American highschool tropes or Japanese highschool tropes?"
Garrus shrugged. "Whichever would be the most amusing at the time? It wasn't really defined where any of this was taking place."
"That sounds kind of weird."
"None of us noticed while we were there. It was like how in dreams, you don't notice things that would be really weird while awake."
I hummed noncommittally. "There was a lot of drama, though?"
"Inevitably. Everyone had the hots for everyone else. There were a few exceptions: Maeve and Darkness had this weird yandere requited-unrequited love-from-afar thing going on for the whole thing. Ace and Zero hooked up early, but they've always had an open relationship, so it's not like that decreased the sexual tension any. Zero was a cheerleader, of course." He rolled his eyes.
"Sounds like pure cliches."
"Cliches, angst, and bad communication. I don't think I could stomach a single episode of the clusterfuck we just participated in." He took a long drink. "Still, if it wasn't for all the teenage hormones, it would've been a nice vacation."
"That doesn't sound too bad," I said.
"It was…" Garrus trailed off, swirling the dregs of his beer around while he thought. "Demeaning," he finished. "It wasn't that bad, all things considered, but I think Management's made their point."
"You really think they learned anything from this?"
He looked at me, then looked past me to where Ace and Zero were fighting for control of a liquor bottle while Bob struggled to pull them apart.
"Not a damn thing," he said.
———X==X==X———
Eventually things started wrapping up, as people walked, staggered, or were carried out of the bar. Max and I retired to the lounge, which was somehow attached to the Palace through its non-existent kitchen despite the two buildings being on opposite sides of the square. We were joined by Ace, Zero, Homura, and Garrus, and the more talkative jumpers began taking turns dragging the entire story of my time in MGQ out of me.
"…so it turned out that Divine Weapons are 'Super Effective' against the beings that empowered them… and their servants, too. And since my weapons were backed by jump points, Ilias couldn't break them or use them against me, even though she was convinced she'd been the one to give them to me."
"So the Divine Weapon option wasn't a trap," Max said.
"Sounds like it was the 'out', instead," Garrus agreed.
I snorted. "They still caused a lot of problems early on. Alice nearly killed me over them the second she saw me."
"How'd you stop her?" Zero asked. "Even a divine weapon wouldn't have done much for you without the levels to back it up."
"Luka bought enough time arguing that I was able to deploy an entire breakfast buffet from the port-a-fridge. She forgave me once I explained that the item would stop working if she killed me."
"Forgave," Max repeated, making quote marks with his fingers.
"Clever," Zero said. "I guess you'd realized where you were by that point?"
"That was it, actually—I mean, Alice was what let me figure out what was up."
"But in the end, the bangles were worth it?" Ace asked.
"Absolutely—well, 'worth it' is a funny term, since I got them for free, but I definitely used the hell out of them. Alice taught me how to use them to apply the same sealing effect Angel Halo has, and I wouldn't have made it through the final section without 'em. They even granted me some resistance to all the hypnotic mind-control bullshit the more powerful characters could pull off—not complete immunity, but enough that I could fight through it, or at least hold myself still until someone pulled my ass out of the fire."
"So how did it end?" Zero asked. "I assume you managed to save the world."
"Yeah, we did. I was supposed to show up to Luka's wedding, but I bailed."
"Ooooooh?" she asked. "Who was he getting married to?"
"Alice, all four Heavenly Knights, a few extras… and me, if Alice had her way. I'd said no, but apparently she had a plan to trick me into it once we were in the chapel. Tamano warned me off; she was extremely eager to take my place, thank god."
Zero scowled fiercely. "And you let her?" she demanded. "Sleeping with someone under false pretenses, such as by disguising yourself as someone else, is a form of rape!"
"Are you fucking serious Zero!"
Her facade shattered at my outburst, and she started howling with laughter again.
Max hummed. "Say, Cass, can I check something?"
"What?"
"I want to take a peek into your head. Normally I have all my privacy-invading powers on strict lockdown in the Warehouse, but now that you've mentioned it I'd like to check you over, make sure nothing snuck past the D-W or otherwise stuck to you."
I grimaced. "Isn't all that shit supposed to end when the jump does?"
"Supposed to, yes. We've had, let's call them 'edge cases' before. Things that aren't technically 'ongoing effects', like altered memories staying altered." He waved a hand reassuringly. "Nothing I've caught in the past would have caused problems, but I'm still curious. I'd only be looking for changes to your mind or memories, not the memories themselves, but I understand if you don't want me to."
On the one hand, mental powers were freaky. On the other… "If you're just looking for tampering without digging through my actual memories, I guess I can live with that."
"Great, hold on." He fixed his eyes on me, and after a moment in which nothing happened other than a gradually growing discomfort at being stared at—
—ILIAS—
"—Gah!" I yelled and recoiled as a bunch of memories I hadn't had before slammed back into my head.
Several of the others made similar sounds of surprise at my outburst. "I'm sorry!" Max said frantically. "I was just trying to figure out what that was, I didn't mean to—"
"I'm fine, I'm fine! Just wasn't expecting that!" I shook myself, letting the pain and fear I suddenly remembered work itself out as I breathed. "Holy shit. I almost got squished the second I inserted!"
"What happened?" Zero asked, clearly eager to learn another fascinating tidbit about my adventures in rape-fetish-land.
"Ilias noticed me appear out of nowhere and dropped down right on top of me. She set me on fire when she thought I was being intentionally difficult because she'd hypnotized me into giving short, unhelpfully concise answers!"
"I can see why she'd want to remove your memory of that," Zero said with a laugh.
"I think… I think I was literally saved by my lack of meta-knowledge. If I'd known where I was and who she was when she was picking my brain, she'd have utterly destroyed me." I rubbed my arms and suddenly remembered the bangles I was still wearing. "Shit. She did give these to me!"
"I thought you said those were jump-bought," Garrus said.
"They were, which was why she couldn't depower them or bind me with them when Luka and I refused to follow her little plan. But when I first arrived I couldn't find them, and then they were suddenly in my hands—because Ilias gave them to me and then ordered me to forget meeting her!"
Zero guffawed.
"I've never heard of a lack of meta-knowledge being an advantage before," Ace said.
"That's because we don't jump in blindly," Max replied.
"Yeah," I snarked. "What kind of idiot would do that?"
"That's not what I meant—"
"I know, I'm just ribbing you. I was deliberately set up."
"You got pranked," Zero told me.
"Pranks are supposed to be funny," I said.
"Well I'm laughing."
"To both parties," I added.
"Don't worry," Ace said. "You'll look back on this and laugh, someday."
Max reached over and patted me on the arm. "Buck up," he said. "You didn't hide in the Warehouse all year. That's something."
"Only because I took a perk that would make me eager for adventure, since I am clearly a complete idiot."
"No you didn't," Max said. "'Wanderer's Heart' sounds like it would do that, but the perk you're thinking of is 'Call to Adventure'."
"You sure?"
"One hundred percent."
I stared at him. "…shit."
"You were still half right," Homura deadpanned.
———X==X==X———
I spent this inter-jump vacation much like I'd spent the last one, with two major exceptions.
First, now that I actually had some level of skill in combat beyond 'falling down without further hurting myself'—which I had almost mastered in the two weeks I'd had David throwing me to mat on a daily basis—I was able to actually spar against some of the other companions. Zero, Max, Bob, and David quickly proved that they were still a couple hundred levels too high for me to even scratch; they literally couldn't hold back enough to give me a convincing fight. They could let me win, but even the slightest bit of actual effort meant that I hit nothing and ate dirt.
From there, I went through a few other potential training partners looking for someone who could hold back enough to give me a good match. Garrus could, but he was a little too competitive to ever let me win, which drove me nuts. Ace could, but he and Zero had been welded at the hip since the end of the harem jump and rarely separated. Darkness had likewise disappeared with Maeve, so I didn't even get a chance to ask her. Neither Jennifer nor I felt comfortable hitting the other, although for very different reasons. Homura turned out to be my best sparring partner; despite having more raw power than most of the people already mentioned, she was not specialized for hand-to-hand combat at all. Without augmenting herself with magic or other powers, she was 'only' a few ranks ahead of me in skill.
I still lost nine out of ten matches.
The second major difference was that, now that I'd satisfied Max's fitness requirements, he agreed to start teaching me magic, although he almost immediately fobbed me off on Jennifer. Apparently all companions were automatically assumed to have the necessary 'potential' for Potterverse magic, and that meant I would be able to learn magic without any jump purchases. Of course, it wasn't fast or easy. The Warehouse only had the wands they'd brought with them from the jump, none of which were a great match for me, and according to Jennifer it was a lot harder for adults to learn than children. It took me a full week just to make Lumos do anything at all, but the feeling I got when I finally managed a sputter of light from the tip of the wand defies description. I was years, maybe centuries from proficiency, but what did that matter? I had all the time in the world.
There were also numerous smaller differences. Being magically fit let me keep up better with people in the more physical games, including the Jumpchain's very own LARP group. Jenn had to talk me into going, since I'd literally just gotten back from not one but two different RPG 'adventures', but I was glad I did; it turned out to be less 'Role Playing' in the game sense and more 'Full Contact Improvisational Theater'. It was way more laid back than sparring, and improv was a skill that was bound to be useful in the future. Incidentally, that was what made me realize that one of the perks I'd picked up had nearly cured my social anxiety, which was… what was the meme? 'A surprise, to be sure, but a welcome one.'
I also had one notably unpleasant adventure, although that didn't happen until after we'd learned our next destination.
———X==X==X———
Once more, we assembled in the conference room. This time, I found myself sitting in a group of empty seats between Homura and Garrus. Jennifer was nowhere in sight, nor were Darkness, Maeve, or several other people I knew by name; there were more than two dozen empty chairs at the table when the speaker crackled to life.
"I hope you all enjoyed your extra-special extended vacation!" Management said chipperly. "In the event that you decided to take further liberties with good faith interpretations of my Documents, I will be sure to reward you appropriately!" There was no annoyance or frustration in their voice; only schadenfreude.
"Where is everyone else?" I whispered to Homura.
"Attendance is not required. It is recommended, because it allows the group to ask questions and receive answers together rather than bothering me with the same questions over and over again all through the next two weeks, but every jump there are a few people who skip the meeting and either don't insert or have to catch up later." Management said. "However, I insisted Max gather everyone for the previous meeting, for obvious reasons. Also, stop whispering; it interferes with the 'ask questions and receive answers together' schtick."
"Sorry!"
"Now, for your next jump, may I present…" an actual drum-roll sounded through the speakers before the tablets appeared. Mine was still a book, with an accompanying fountain pen and inkwell. "Worm!"
I grabbed my book eagerly and flipped to the first page. 'You are headed to a little place called Earth Bet—' Yes. One of my favorite settings. Trauma and superpowers, here I come! Wait, no, I was getting ahead of myself.
"How do you decide who gets to go?" I asked.
Max fielded this one. "Technically, anyone can 'go'—you're free to leave the Warehouse and wander around the world as much as you like. As for actual imports, the rules were that I would have to purchase each 'slot' from the jump document, which usually capped out at eight slots, but a while ago there was a, uh…"
"Just call it a 'rules patch'," Management said.
"Right. A 'rules patch' that as long as I buy the maximum number of companion slots or the largest available 'bulk' option, everyone who doesn't get a slot gets the option to insert with a free origin and three hundred points. Those points come at the cost that companions only respawn at the end of each jump, though."
"What, like a drawback?"
"More or less."
Interesting. "Are those kinds of 'patches' common?"
"No." Max and Management said together. "Another jumper haggled it out with her staff, and a number of us have started offering the policy," Management explained.
"Speaking of rules patches," Max said, "how's the out-of-context-power-nerf going to behave for this one?"
"Point nine ex for all powers that fit within the setting, point two for everything else."
"What does 'fit within the setting' mean, exactly?" I asked.
"Anything that can be reasonably replicated by canon-consistent parahuman powers."
"That's hardly a penalty at all, considering how much that covers," Max said. "That only excludes psychic and magical abilities, and not even all of them."
"Indeed."
Max groaned. "We're going to need it, aren't we?" he asked rhetorically.
I looked back at the jump document. The origins included powers, but the non-freebie perks started at three hundred, so even discounted they would be prohibitively expensive for 'guest spots'. "How do you allocate the…" I flipped through to the companions section, "eight purchased spots?"
"First and foremost, the people who show up for the meeting get priority. Two spots are reserved for the least senior companions by number of times inserted; for the last couple dozen jumps, that's been Darkness, Jennifer, and Maeve in descending order—it's been at least that long since we've had anyone join, and those three rarely insert—but now that you're here you've bumped Darkness off the short list, but that doesn't matter much since she's skipped this meeting anyway, and because one spot is always reserved for the newest—"
"To get to the point," Management butted in, "by the arcane and illogical rules your Jumper has created over the years to determine such things, you have first 'dibs' on a fully financed spot, should you wish it."
"Awesome!" I cleared my throat, internally cringing at my outburst. Calm down before you make an even bigger fool of yourself, fangirl. "What I meant is, yes, I would like a spot."
"So it would seem. I will remain on the line while you browse the jump document. Direct any questions to the speakerphone."
I started going through the document. I knew what I wanted: villain, Brockton Bay. Ten years as a cliche self-insert with the canon cast of characters. But what was I going to get? "You know what you want to do, Max?"
"Still figuring it out, why?"
"Just wondering," I hedged.
Max raised an eyebrow, but said nothing.
"Only four options per power classification?" Ace asked.
"You are welcome to ask for a wildcard in any category," Management said. "I will do my best to get… creative."
"Creative as in 'interesting', 'weird', or 'vindictive'?" Garrus asked.
"I suppose that depends on how charitable I feel towards whoever wants to trust in my tender mercies. Feeling lucky?"
He snickered. "Not a bit."
"Pity."
"I know I would land squarely in 'vindictive'," Max said.
"Personally, I'll be avoiding 'mystery prizes' in the future," I said, "Last jump wasn't as bad as you could have made it for me, but you definitely had a laugh at my expense."
"You were more concerned with getting the most power and loot from the jump than you were with where you'd end up, and I facilitated that. If you aren't happy with the result, then you should have gone in with different priorities."
"So you were teaching me a lesson?"
"I would argue that any lessons you may have been taught were you learning from your mistakes."
"I'll be going in, but I won't need a spot," David said. "I'm not taking powers from this jump. Do I get points back for not taking a powered origin?"
"No."
"Not at all?"
"No. You want points, take drawbacks."
"Fine." He tapped a few things, then stood up and walked out, leaving his tablet behind.
"So, about this 'reroll duplicate powers' thing—" I started to ask.
"You're wondering if being the last person to roll gives you an advantage in getting you what you want," Management said. "It doesn't. Collisions allow either party to reroll, regardless of who rolled first."
"Generous," I said cautiously.
"The powers within the categories go from one to eight, but the document says to roll a d12," Max said.
"It's a d12 for power classification and a d8 for the powers themselves."
"It says d12 for both."
"Well, I say it's a d12 and a d8."
"You gave me 2d12." Max held up a hand, showing off two large, shiny metal dodecahedra.
"Fine. The last four numbers get the wildcard special. Or you may roll a d8, as intended." Said d8 dropped onto the table with a clatter.
Max rolled the d12s. "Double ones… mover, instantaneous, rapid short-distance teleport spam. That sounds fun."
Ace used the d8. "Transporter. Path to victory, but only for moving something somewhere. That's boring." He frowned. "I think David had the right idea. I'm going unpowered as well. PRT."
Homura rolled the d12s. "Five and nine… blaster, wildcard. I'll spend the points to swap to Sting."
Then it was my turn. I looked at the three dice cautiously. "If last time was a 'serves you right' for focusing more on what I could get than the experience itself, then rolling with the wildcards would be the opposite of that, right? You wouldn't have a reason to screw with me."
"Are you trying to munchkin me?"
"I'm trying to model you. The better I understand what you do and do not like, the less likely I am to do something that attracts retribution."
"Just roll the fucking dice, Cassandra."
I rolled the d12s. "Double fours… toon physics? That's… goofy."
"Goofy?" Garrus asked.
"Yeah. Don't get me wrong, it's an awesome set of powers, but it's all comic relief. That's not really what I was hoping for."
"Wildcard option is still free."
"Hmm. Tempting."
"Really?" Max asked. "What happened to avoiding mystery prizes?"
"I'm assuming I've gathered at least a tiny bit of good will from playing along with the last jump. This is a show of faith; if it doesn't work out, I won't be fooled again."
"You're thinking along the right lines. You are all, ultimately, here for the amusement of myself and my peers," Management said. "It's less about whether you're focused on the rewards you're getting and more about whether you're setting yourself up for an entertaining journey. Your last jump was worth a few laughs, even if you did play it dreadfully safe considering you didn't have to worry about dying permanently."
"Dying was the least worrying thing that could have happened to me in that world!"
Garrus interrupted us. "Breaker, wildcard," he said from further along the table. "Does this mean one of us gets to reroll?"
"If Cassandra commits to the wildcard, you may reroll."
"I… hmm." Did I really want to trust Management again? Come to think of it, did I really want to give up something that made me 'the next best thing to unkillable'? "I don't suppose you could just… I dunno, 'science it up' a bit?"
"Don't let the flippant description fool you, it's still a setting-appropriate power."
"Okay, then, I'll keep it."
With that settled, I turned my attention to the origin and perk options, taking notes on a pad of legal paper that had appeared the moment I'd thought to ask for one. None of the items really interested me; it might make things harder, but I'd prefer to earn what I could in-jump rather than drop in with a full kit. I would absolutely take the free costume, though. As for the rest, I knew what sort of build I'd take if it was just me, but I wasn't the only one inserting. There would almost certainly be at least eight other people running around, and I didn't want to step on any toes, or have mine stepped on in turn.
"What're you planning?" Max asked me. He'd walked over to behind my chair, tablet in hand.
"I'm not sure," I admitted. "My first instinct was to go Brockton Villain, just do the self-insert thing with the Undersiders, but I'm not sure where everyone else is going."
"You're a big fan of the book, aren't you?"
"Yeah."
"Go for it," he said.
"Just like that?"
"I got free choice, so I'm heading to Denver. I want to see what happened to my hometown in this timeline. I don't think anyone else has particularly strong feelings about the canon main characters, although there are a few fans of the setting." He clapped a hand on my shoulder. "Have fun!"
I tore the page off the legal pad and started my planning all over again.
———X==X==X———
I found the ice rink near sunset a couple days before our insertion, by virtue of the door hanging open out into the street. The building was dark and empty, the only light coming through the false windows along the west wall. Normally, I wouldn't have intruded, but I hadn't seen Darkness since the end of the previous jump, and I was curious if she'd been shacked up with Maeve the whole time. I was a little nervous about walking in on something I'd regret seeing, but curiosity won out, so I wandered deeper into the building, feeling goosebumps prickle on my skin from the cold. Hopefully they'd remembered to lock the door if they were up to something intimate.
Still, it wouldn't do to sneak up on them. "Hello?" I called as I walked through the shadowy space. "Anyone home?" When no one answered, I shrugged and walked out onto the rink, the balance perks from the previous jump keeping me steady and stable even on the supernaturally smooth ice. I wasn't sure why I was looking here, in the middle of an ice-skating rink I could clearly see was empty, but some instinct had me walk out to the center.
"Hello?" I called again from the middle of the arena. I felt silly, talking to empty space like this, so I busied myself by looking around. The lack of activity and the shadows cast by the setting 'sun' gave the area a melancholic, abandoned feeling, accentuated by the dust-like layer of frost that had settled onto everything. Overhead, the electric lights hung despondently, cables stretching across bare girders like tendons on a rotting corpse. Underneath my feet, Darkness loomed out of the foggy ice, a frozen scream on her face, one arm reaching desperately for the surface.
What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fuck WHATTHEFUCK—
"Like what you see?" a voice purred into my ear, and I screamed and bolted. The ice shifted under my feet, fouling my footing with sinister intent, a fissure yawning wide to swallow me as I desperately tried to keep my balance and failed, stumbling and falling, desperately reaching upwards even as the ice slammed shut around me—
Sleep.
"—andra? Cassandra?"
I blinked sluggishly. Jennifer was calling me, trying to wake me. I groaned as I sat up, blinking fog out of my eyes. "M'awake." I shivered. "Guh. Cold."
"I know. Here, drink this, I need to deal with Darkness." She shoved a steaming mug into my hands, burning hot even through the thick ceramic, then wrapped a heavy blanket around my shoulders before walking away. I took a sip of the drink and nearly spit it out; it tasted like someone had tried to make tea out of pure black pepper. Swallowing it made me feel better, though, so I continued to choke it down. Each sip restored a bit more feeling to my numb fingers.
What had happened? I'd sparred with Homura, lost predictably, then I'd been headed back to the hotel when I'd noticed one of the building's doors had been left open and—
"Maeve!" I yelled.
"Me," Maeve drawled from somewhere to my left. I turned my head, taking in where I actually was. I'd been lying on the floor near the edge of the ice rink, which had been wrecked, the ice crushed so fine it would be better described as slush. Jennifer was standing over Darkness, working some sort of magic to thaw and wake her just as she'd done to me. Max stood next to her, scowling at the scene and holding another steaming mug. And Maeve was slouched on one of the stools used for donning and doffing ice skates, pouting at the intrusion into her space.
I'd never actually seen her up close; she was pale like snow, thin, lithe, and beautiful in a terrible, inhuman way. It wasn't merely the catlike eyes or elfin ears, but her entire being: cold, ethereal, and untouchable. Her voice was similarly alien; a breathy, sensual whisper I recognized from the instant of panic before my interment.
The fact that she was wearing pink bunny pajamas with matching slippers only made her alien-ness that much creepier.
"Aaah! C-c-cold!" Darkness shot upright, shivering uncontrollably. Max handed Jennifer the mug, which she pushed into Darkness's hands before wrapping her in another blanket. Darkness sipped the drink obediently. "Aaah! Hot!" She fumbled the mug, almost dropping it, but managed to recover without spilling any of the tea.
"You remember what happened?" Max asked us.
Darkness spoke first. "I was trapped by an evil witch, preserved like a fly in amber away from the dangers of the world, so that, for all eternity, my beauty could satisfy her—!" Mercifully, Jennifer slapped her hand over Darkness's mouth. The woman flushed and squirmed under her blanket, while I just nodded and directed my attention anywhere else.
"How long?" I asked.
"For you, about twenty-four hours. Jennifer spent all day looking for you; she was worried you'd suddenly decided to avoid her." Max's voice was light, but his expression remained thunderous.
"I wasn't worried!" Jennifer insisted. She pulled her hand away from Darkness's mouth and steered the mug into place instead. "Drink. Anyway, I knew Cass wouldn't ditch me like that! Something had to have happened to her."
"Someone," I said.
"Maeve," Max growled.
"Me," Maeve repeated.
Silence reigned, broken only by the sounds of sipping tea—and Darkness's occasional moan, which I continued to ignore as best I was able. Mostly, I sipped my tea and worked on getting properly, justifiably angry: a nice, hot rage. Maeve had kept me on ice for a full day, and I didn't think for a second she'd have let me go anytime soon if someone hadn't arrived to pull me out.
Max broke the silence once we'd finished our drinks. "Cass, what were you doing in here, anyway?"
"I'd been wondering where Darkness was, and the door was open," I said. Max shot Maeve a questioning look.
The faerie shrugged glibly. "I leave it open sometimes. It's not like I have to pay for air conditioning."
"Of course," he said sarcastically. "You two feeling better?"
"Give me a moment." I stood up slowly, but even that wasn't enough to avoid the rush of lightheadedness. Jennifer helped steady me, and I took the opportunity to foist my empty mug on her. I wasn't cold anymore: not the bone-deep, all-consuming chill of the grave I'd woken to, or even the natural, not-dressed-for-the-weather cold I'd felt when I'd first walked into the ice skating rink. "What was in that mug?"
"Pepper-up potion, my own recipe," Jennifer said proudly. "Took me years, but I managed to get rid of the side effects!"
"Side effects?" I asked nervously. She raised one hand to her ear, then raised it, fluttering her fingers as she did. Steam from the ears, right.
"Are you going to apologize?" Max asked Maeve.
"That would require me to be sorry," she said.
"You had Darkness trapped in ice for a month."
"My sex life is none of your concern. Unless you're offering to make it your concern?" she asked lecherously.
"What about me?" I demanded.
"You trespassed in my demesne."
"Bullshit. We're both guests here, unless you've forgotten, and one of the first things Max told me was that I was welcome anywhere that wasn't locked. And your door was open."
Maeve recoiled like she'd been slapped.
And well she should; I'd just accused her of breaking guest-right, one of the most serious business rules her sort of Faerie followed. The reaction told me I'd guessed correctly: she still played by those rules, and the accusation had weight enough to create a debt. Pissing her off like this should have scared the shit out of me, but between my own anger and the presence of Jenn and Max at my back, I didn't really care.
"What do you want?" she hissed.
"Favors. You like doing things in threes, right?"
"I kept you only a single day."
"You took an entire day from me; that means a lot more to someone who's still within a mortal lifespan. And that's only what you managed to do. If Jennifer hadn't found me, how much longer would you have kept me there? A week? A month? A jump? Forever?"
"Regardless!" Maeve snapped. "One favor. One task."
"If I'm only getting one task, it's not going to be a favor, it's going to be a labor."
"Like Eurystheus and Heracles?" she asked, then laughed in my face. "You overreach."
"Is it not equal to the offense you've given me?" I demanded, changing my language to what I imagined was 'appropriate' for this kind of thing without really thinking about it. Her mirth disappeared, and I could hear her teeth grinding like glaciers in the silence that followed. "Is it unequal?"
"No," she spat. "But the labor must be possible, and it must be finite. I will not be trapped in some Sisyphean task."
I nodded. "You may refuse a task you know to be impossible, or which lacks a defined point at which it is over and done."
"Or a task of a nature in which success cannot be adequately judged, or which could continue indefinitely, even if its goal is clear," she insisted.
"Very well. Otherwise, you will carry out my instructions to the best of your abilities, sparing no expense in any capacity, in the way you judge most likely to satisfy me, in both the letter and spirit of the order, until such time as the task is complete, however long it takes. Only then is the debt discharged."
Maeve seemed to be trying very hard to hate me to death. "I will grant you this favor, in the manner you describe, provided you use it in the next ten years, as reckoned by our host, after which the debt will be discharged in any case."
"Acceptable." I had no idea what I was going to ask for, anyway; I'd swung at her because I wanted to make it clear I wasn't a chew-toy, not because I needed the favor.
"And provided that you make a pun worthy of me before you leave the room."
Max groaned. "Maeve, why?"
She smirked and told him, "Consider this your punishment for intervening in my affairs." To me, she asked, "Do we have a deal?"
"We do."
Negotiations concluded, I sat down on another stool and thought, trying to ignore the four people waiting for me. It took a couple minutes before I had a pun I was happy with. "Hey, Darkness," I asked, "if you die, does Maeve get your stuff?"
Darkness frowned. "We're immortal," she pointed out. I shrugged and remained silent, smiling at my own cleverness.
Maeve sat on her stool and looked at me expectantly. "Since it seems I must ask," she said eventually, "why have you asked after my consort's affairs?"
"Why, because that would make you the Lady and Heir of Darkness, of course."
Her laugh sounded like a frozen lake cracking underfoot.
———X==X==X———
AN: [Chekhov's Gun Cocks]
Some good puns in this one. By which I mean bad puns, obviously.
Funny note: Cass's comment about 'Yander-vine intervention' may have some merit: Ilias explicitly forbid her from 'making moves' on Luka, and it's not that much of a stretch to think she might have had her spies meddle a bit just to make sure the random dimensional wanderer didn't get any ideas. Or maybe it was a censored release. Or maybe it was just less lewd than she'd feared. Only Management knows.
Lastly, shoutout to... damn it, I've forgotten who it was, but to whoever suggests find/replace for BBCode conversion. The power of Export To Markdown and Regex has served me well, to the point that I ended up writing a Perl script to handle paragraph spacing, italics, and boldface all at once, which is basically 90% of the formatting work.
I woke up shivering. Somehow, my blankets had fallen off the bed overnight; the perils of being a restless sleeper, I suppose. I got up and threw them back onto the bed with a sigh, distracted by the absolutely bizarre dream I'd had.
I'd been living in a different world—one with no capes, for one thing—before being invited along to adventure through different works of fiction like the old Reading Rainbow television show, although I hadn't actually gotten far enough to drop into any books I recognized. How typical, that a dream promised awesomeness only for me to wake up before it could deliver. It had been vividly real, though, lacking the strange, disconnected logic I usually associated with dreams. The memories of what I'd lived through weren't the most concerning part, though; it was what I'd known about my own future that stuck with me. It had been just another book, one with a horrifying ending. The end of the world. I shook my head as I stumbled into the bathroom to wash up.
The dream didn't fade, but that wasn't terribly unusual given I was still thinking about it. However, the more I thought about it, the more it made sense as an extension of my normal thoughts. I'd been forced to move to a strange city, so I dreamed about wandering through different worlds. I missed my friends, so I invented new ones and adventures to share with them. I kicked my blankets off, and dreamed that I'd been trapped in a block of ice for a day. I was worried about starting at a new school, so I imagined it as a wretched hive of crime and evil. I'd lost almost everything, and I dreamed about the end of the world.
The dream had been vivid and detailed—and long, as I not only remembered being nearly twice my actual age, but also spending almost a year in a place that likely says some uncomfortable things about my relationship with sex and sexuality—but it was still a dream, just the product of a restless mind. I didn't suddenly know the future, or the identity of some Protectorate heroes, and if there was a girl named Taylor at school, it wouldn't be the one my dream had conjured up. I already had a power, and it wasn't precognition.
No, my power allowed me to screw with the way my body interacted with physics. The first thing I'd learned to do—by instinct, really—was to change my inertial and gravitational mass at will. Independently, which was cool both because it was useful and because I was a huge nerd who cared about that sort of thing. That was only the start; I could also mess with the way my body and clothes interacted with other matter, changing their friction and adding or subtracting from the normal force. I could treat thin air like solid ground, although looking down made me lose concentration and fall. I could also mess with the way molecules bonded together to change my body's rigidity, letting me deform myself like rubber. I couldn't change shape, exactly, but it was an amazing defense: I could take a hit like a rubber tire, if for some reason I didn't want to tank it with arbitrarily high inertial mass, and I didn't need to worry about dislocating joints or breaking bones when I could tie my arms in knots anyway. That defense was the only reason I was still alive. The finishing touch was being able to apply most of those effects to things I touched, as well, though I hadn't tried doing it to people, for obvious reasons.
All told, it was a bit more eclectic than some powers, and less flashy, but overall it let me do some cool things. Boosting and reducing friction let me control my movements while messing with my inertia, and for more mundane utility, I could make my skin and hair hydrophobic, so water just slid right off me after I finished a shower.
As a bonus, it also gave me perfect balance, gracefulness, and the ability to support and move myself no matter how high I cranked my mass. I could approximate a flying brick decently enough by soaring through the air in low gravity, then turn my inertia up so high that I became an unstoppable force or immovable object, depending on the frame of reference. It wasn't quite the same, though.
Yeah, I'd wanted to be Alexandria when I grew up. Didn't every girl? I was getting off track. The point was: my dream was just a dream. I was Kasey Hudson, it was the first day of 2011, and in two days, I'd be attending Winslow High School as a senior. Hopefully, by the time I got to school, I'd have forgotten all about this stupid dream.
There were a lot of other things I'd like to forget as well, but unlike the dream, those weren't going anywhere. The fact that I'd colonized the shower in the smaller bathroom, the one without a tub, was just one faucet of that.
Pun fully intended.
———X==X==X———
How does one get such an amazing superpower as the ability to lie to the universe about your weight? Well, you have a really, really bad day. The worst day of your life, a day so bad, something in your mind… changes. As far as I know, science doesn't have an explanation for why it happens, though they've done thousands of studies on when, so all we have are crackpot theories. Maybe you manage to tap into some higher understanding of the universe and impose your will on it, or you push past a barrier that prevents normal people from breaking physics over their knees with their brains, or you survive some sort of evolutionary filter that swats the thousands of other people that don't manage to 'trigger' in a similarly life-or-death situation. Maybe it's a couple aliens fucking with traumatized kids by planting extra organs in their brains like some sort of sick science fair experiment—that was from my dream, don't take it seriously.
My bad day started like my good days, in a sleepy little town on the edge of the great American pancake known as flyover country, a town notable only for its token Protectorate presence, a train station that saw frequent freight traffic, and the fact that it housed most of the workers for the hydroelectric dam a few miles up the river flowing down out of the Rockies. I'd woken up like any other day, gone to school like any other day, talked and laughed with my friends like any other day. We'd been sitting on the lunch benches debating the merits of hit points in tabletop games when we'd heard a rumbling, and everything had suddenly… ended.
Usually you wouldn't want to build a town downriver of a dam for obvious reasons, but the town had been there before the dam went up and would remain after the dam went down… for the approximately four minutes it took for the floodwaters to reach it and wipe it completely off the map, killing everyone in it.
Well, almost everyone.
———X==X==X———
"Morning, Kasey."
"Morning, Emily."
Emily was my older sister, by about twenty minutes. She'd been out of state when the flood hit. Mom had been on a business trip, which was honestly the default state of the world; we saw her maybe two weeks out of the year. Combined with my miraculous (read: power-enabled) survival, we were among the few families to come through mostly intact. The fact that the number of survivors who had actually been in the path of the water reached the high tens in a town of several thousand was probably the more salient fact.
Was that a pun? Reservoirs are fresh water, although by the time it hit the town it was mostly mud. No, wait, a salient was a geography thing, not something related to salinity. Or maybe it a geometry thing? I should have stayed in school. Oh, right, I did; it was the school that wasn't there anymore.
Back to the present: unlike me, Emily wasn't going to be attending high school. Despite being twins, she'd graduated a year ahead of me—that was a whole thing, don't ask. She'd been attending Brockton Bay University for less than a month when the disaster happened, and had elected to move out of the dorms into a proper house to look after me, since Mom was still working and didn't trust me not to get up to trouble in the big city. While I hated that I'd messed up her school year and resented the fact that Mom trusted her more, I really didn't mind having her looking after me. Emily was cool. Case in point: she'd apparently spent the time I'd taken getting myself presentable to cook up an impressive stack of pancakes for us.
"Happy New Year," she said.
"Happy New Year," I said.
It really wasn't. We hadn't celebrated; most of the 31st had been spent moving into our new house. There were still more boxes unopened than unpacked, and I wasn't sure that was going to change anytime soon. I didn't have much interest in unpacking anything I wasn't going to be personally using. Emily was probably daydreaming about moving out again. Mom was somewhere in California—her work wasn't local, so she'd barely been affected—and Dad… hadn't made it.
Thinking that hurt.
If I looked on the bright side, we had boxes with stuff in them and a home to unpack them in, which was more than I'd had a couple months ago. Some of it was even our stuff; our house had been barely up and out of the path of the floodwaters, and though the erosion the flood caused had sent it tumbling down, it had left us something to pick through for scraps of our old lives.
Ignoring the siren song of fresh pancakes for a moment, I walked over to one of the boxes along the wall and dug through it for a framed picture I'd manage to pull out of the rubble. It was of myself and my friends, a group photo we'd taken on to celebrate the start of our senior year of highschool. To me, it was one of the most important things I still owned; it was all I had to remember them by.
I regretted taking it out almost immediately. In my dream—that damn dream—they'd been there, part of my other life; alive, healthy, waiting for my return. Waking up was like losing them all over again, and it hurt. I set the picture on the bare, uncluttered shelf near the kitchen table, carefully angled so that I couldn't see it from my seat, then sat down to eat.
"Thanks for making pancakes," I said as I took a couple.
"I didn't really make them," she said, taking a few herself.
"Thanks anyway." Pancakes were pancakes, box mix or not, and these were actually really good.
Neither of us spoke while we ate our breakfast. Normally, we'd find something to talk about, but I just wasn't feeling it this morning, and Emily either felt the same, or respected my mood enough not to force it. Every so often, one of us would look up like we were about to start a conversation, only to think better of it and return to our meal in silence.
Emily and I were fraternal twins, but we were still very obviously sisters. We had the same brown hair and green eyes. Our skin was somewhere on the Starbucks scale, courtesy of our grandmother. We were both thin and athletic; Dad had valued healthy outdoor living growing up, which was probably why I'd rebelled by turning into a nerdy shut-in bookworm whenever I could get away with it. Style was where we really diverged. Emily wore her long hair tied back with a ribbon and preferred skirts. I was a tomboy; I wore my hair short and preferred pants.
I stood up and cleared my place, rinsing the plate and utensils in the sink and washing the sticky syrup residue off my hands. Heck, in my dream, I'd been a boy. For some of it. Sort of? It had been confusing and uncomfortable, and not something I particularly wanted to dwell on—which is probably why I couldn't stop dwelling on it.
"Are you okay, Kasey?" Emily asked.
I shut the water off in a hurry. I'd gotten lost in thought; the distraction a single, stupid dream was causing me was getting ridiculous. "Yeah," I said. "Just… a little off."
"If you need help, I'm here."
"I know. I appreciate it." I put the dirty dishes in the dishwasher, then walked back to the table. "You want a hand cleaning this stuff up?"
She shook her head. "No, I've got it."
"All right, if you're sure. Thanks again for the pancakes."
"You're welcome."
———X==X==X———
After breakfast, I headed back up to my room and started unpacking in earnest. Most of the stuff in my boxes were clothes or books, which meant I first spent an hour and a half assembling the bookshelf and dresser that were still in their own cardboard shipping boxes. Then it was a challenge of organization, working out what would go in the drawers and what would go in the closet, figuring out which configuration of shelves left the right amount of room for my variously sized books, and generally making me hope that I'd never have to do this ever again. Leviathan, my dream said, and I ignored it with a vengeance.
They were all new; most of the things that had survived the destruction of our house had been ruined by the elements before they'd let us back onto the property to claim them. The clothes were an eclectic mix of mail-order and thrift shop purchases, rather than having any real style; I needed to actually go shopping at some point now that things were approaching normal. As for the books, Mom had taken it upon herself to replace my 'library' once we'd finalized the move. On the one hand, it was something of a waste, since I wasn't anywhere near as avid a 're-reader' as I was a reader. On the other hand, when I finished unpacking and stepped back to look over my collection, I appreciated being able to see mostly the same books I'd had in my old room. Familiarity was a hell of a comfort blanket.
I then nearly walked into the wall, because the door of my new bedroom was in a totally different place.
———X==X==X———
"I'm going out for a run."
"'Kay."
One of the perks of being babysat by an elder sibling is that sometimes, they don't care enough to stop you from doing things they should probably stop you from doing. Mom had explicitly told Emily to make sure I stayed out of trouble, but Emily trusted me enough that she didn't think I needed supervision. Or she just didn't want to be bothered. I was fine with either, to be honest; it meant I could go play with my powers.
Our house was smaller than our old home, but that had been one of the 'Midwest mansions' that cropped up in places where space was plentiful and land was cheap. The new house was only 'small' relative to that, in a decent, if fading, neighborhood on the west edge of the city: an area where the paint on the fences was peeling but the yards were still kept and the streets well-maintained. I headed down three blocks and across four more before reaching a small children's park I'd noticed when we'd driven in the day before, complete with an old, questionably-safe wood-and-steel play structure. At the back of the park was a small but dense forested area, and I slipped into the trees before pulling my mask out of my pocket.
It was nothing more than a bandana with some eye holes in it, but with my hair tucked into my hat and my body hidden in a formless sweatshirt, I shouldn't be too recognizable. Besides, I didn't intend to attract any real scrutiny. Going out in the middle of the day was a calculated risk: I'd be more visible, but I was less likely to get into actual trouble. I hadn't lied to Emily; I wanted to go for a run. I just wanted to use my powers while I was at it.
I started slow, just jogging a few blocks until I was warmed up. Then I started flexing my power, subtly lengthening my legs as I pushed for extra force, amping up the normal force on my soles to propel me that much faster, raising and lowering my inertia in time with my strides to lower the amount of work I had to put in. Once I was out of the residential area I left the sidewalks entirely, jumping upwards in low gravity and bounding across the rooftops. More friction let me push harder; lower inertia during each step meant the force moved me that much more, while higher inertia during the bound meant air resistance couldn't drag me down. Before long I was cruising along at highway speeds, buildings whipping by beneath me as I touched only one in every four. I pushed off hard, lowering my personal gravity as much as I could, and whooped as I soared across the sky, clearing a dozen city blocks in a single bound. I'd misjudged slightly, though, and to avoid bouncing off the side of a building I bottomed out my inertial mass and raised air resistance to its maximum, air-braking to a dead stop above an office building somewhere in the middle of downtown, laughing.
I'd practiced my powers before, but something about today made it feel new, like it was the first time I'd really gotten to cut loose and run. Maybe it was the new city, or the relief of finally having a permanent house after so long spent in disaster relief tents and month-to-month rentals. Maybe—No. Ignore the dream, Kasey.
I walked over to the edge of the building and sat down, kicking my feet over the edge of the four-story drop. It was the middle of the day, by now, and the streets below were full of people, going about their day in total ignorance of my adventure. They looked like ants from up here, but if I went down there each and every one of them would have their own story. I wasn't just looking down at a city; I was looking down at people.
Such tiny, vulnerable people.
It's so fragile. I wasn't sure if I meant the people, the city, or civilization itself. We were living in a world with monsters who could wipe a city like Brockton Bay off the map in a matter of hours. And people put their heads down and got on with their lives, mourning or gossiping about or laughing at or ignoring the latest 'mass casualty event', pretending it couldn't just as easily happen to them.
I wondered if, having lived through one, I'd ever be able to do that again.
On impulse, I slipped forward off the side of the building, lowering my personal gravity to almost nothing and making the soles of my shoes adhesive. After a few awkward bounces, I managed to stop myself and stand 'up' on the solid wall of the building, looking 'forward' at the ground below me. I slowly took a 'step', managing the physics of my feet carefully, and managed to toddle forwards. It wasn't useful, but it might be good for making an impression. Unfortunately, even with my gravity practically a non-factor, it was still pointing the 'wrong' direction, which made any kind of movement extremely disorienting. And I couldn't do anything about that.
Could I?
I focused on the sensation in my head I associated with gravitation, twisting it rather than the simple 'push' and 'pull' I used to raise or lower my weight, and suddenly I was standing on the wall, gravity holding me to the surface as easily as if it was the ground. In my surprise, I lost focus, and fell a couple stories before I managed to turn gravity around and carry myself back up to the roof, laughing as I went. I'd set out on a whim to try to distract myself, and managed to discover an entirely new aspect of the power I'd had for months. Standing on the edge of the roof, I oriented myself towards home, grabbed my gravity sense, and turned. I shot out into the sky, tumbling as I lost and regained my grip on this new ability, screaming the whole way home.
———X==X==X———
In hindsight, the screaming was a bad idea if I wanted to avoid attracting attention. Armsmaster must have spotted me at some point during my flight over the city, although I didn't notice him until I air-braked to a stop near the edge of downtown and saw him looking up at me.
"Are you well?" he asked as I dropped down to land next to his motorcycle in the parking lot of a Seven Eleven.
"Yeah. Um, sir…?" Was I supposed to treat him like a cop, a celebrity, or what?
One corner of his mouth twitched upward at my fumbling. "What exactly were you doing?"
"I was experimenting," I said, a little defensively.
"Was this a successful experiment or a failed experiment?" Armsmaster asked, a raised eyebrow audible in his voice.
"A success, I guess. Why?"
"You were screaming like you expected to die," he pointed out reasonably.
"How did you even hear that?"
"My suit's sensors can filter out sounds of distress from background noise, even at very low intensity, such as over a great distance or through obstructions."
"I wasn't distressed! I was… enthusiastically… panicking okay yes I was a bit distressed but I wasn't in any danger!"
"Evidently."
I tried to decide whether or not he was mocking me, but his deadpan tone and mostly-face-obscuring helmet made him a tough nut to crack. He remained on his motorcycle, staring at me, or maybe not looking at me at all; I couldn't see his eyes to judge.
"Being able to detect screaming people seems pretty useful for a first responder," I offered.
Armsmaster nodded confidently. "It's proven very effective in both disaster relief and detecting crimes in progress."
"Cool," I said, like the totally smooth person I am. "Can I, uh, go?"
"Are you planning to commit any crimes?"
"No…?"
"Have a good day, then, Miss." He turned away slightly, casting his gaze back towards the city center.
I should have probably just left. Instead, I asked, "Would you have arrested me if I'd said yes?"
"No, but I would have strongly advised you to reconsider." He paused, then decided to elaborate: "Proving conspiracy based only on a single yes-or-no question would be infeasible, as I would be required to show which crime or crimes you were planning to commit, in order to demonstrate that your plans were factually illegal."
"Uh huh," I said, and then—because I clearly wasn't thinking straight after my adrenaline-pumping ballistic odyssey—asked, "Is it true you have a lie-detector in your helmet?"
"Where did you hear that?" he asked suspiciously.
"I read it on the internet." Technically true, if one didn't examine things too closely. "I remembered it because otherwise you asking me straight out whether I was going to commit crimes doesn't make much sense, considering I probably would have lied if I was."
"Probably?" he asked.
"I mean, I might have had an attack of conscience? If I were planning to commit a crime. Which I'm not." Why, guilty conscience, why? "Honest."
"I know you're not. My lie detector confirmed it."
I chuckled. "You were just messing with me, weren't you?"
"Don't be ridiculous. I am far too serious and professional to do any such thing," Armsmaster said with a grin.
"So you actually have a lie detector?"
"I do. I didn't intend for it to become common knowledge, but someone in the PRT decided to add it to one of the recent 'fact sheets' they gave Debright—the company that makes the collectible Hero Cards," he clarified at my look of confusion. "It works whether people know about it or not, though, so I won't complain."
"Huh." That was a fun bit of trivia, if nothing else.
He turned his head slightly to indicate that he was listening to something I couldn't hear, then cleared his throat. "Well, I must be off. Duty calls." He kicked off and headed through the parking lot with a quiet hum of electrical motors before merging smoothly into traffic and opening up the throttle with a roar.
I slipped into an alley, removed my mask and hat, then walked the rest of the way home like a normal teen.
———X==X==X———
I exchanged a brief greeting with Emily when I got home, then headed upstairs to shower off the sweat I'd worked up during my jog. I may be justifiably averse to water, but showering was one of those things that you can't avoid and still be welcome in polite society, and just repelling sweat never quite got me all the way back to 'fresh'. Luckily, I could tolerate it; being sprayed with water was just far enough from being submerged in it that it didn't send me into conniptions. I still hated being wet, but being able to send the water right off my skin meant I didn't have to stay wet any longer than necessary.
"That's a cool trick," I said.
"I'm a waterbender!" she said. "And I know you don't like to get wet!" Jennifer paused. "Or did whatever caused that not happen yet? Oh no, should I not have said that?" She drew her arms to her chest and shrank into herself like she expected to be scolded.
I just laughed and patted her on her swim-capped head. "It's not a phobia or anything, I just don't like feeling soggy and cold."
"Not a phobia, huh?" I asked the empty room as I stepped out of the shower. "Yeah, right." Who was I kidding? I had a phobia. I was more hydrophobic mentally than I could be physically. Who would blame me?
It wasn't like swimming was required in everyday life, and I had it under control enough that I wouldn't panic and drown if I was somehow swept into the ocean. We were too far north for hurricanes unless a weather controller decided they wanted a kill order, and tsunamis were more of a Pacific Coast phenomenon due to all the volcanism and fault lines. I didn't like being caught in the rain, but that's hardly uncommon. It wasn't going to be a problem.
Leviathan.
No, no, no! Why was this sticking with me so hard? It was starting to affect the way I thought, the things I said—like asking Armsmaster about his lie detector. I don't think I ever heard or read anything like that, so why would I think to ask him about it?
Why had I been right?
I must have read it somewhere. I'd looked up the city and its heroes as soon as I heard we'd bought the house; I must have come across it somewhere online. Because what was the alternative? That I'd somehow pulled that detail out of nothing?
That my dream was real? Then I'd been put here… or I'd put myself here. Had Kasey Hudson ever existed, or had she been written in for me? Had Emily been an only child until some unknowable force rewrote her life to include me? Or had she been created as well for my 'convenience'?
The alternative was even worse: that I was a fake, convinced that I was Kasey even though the real Kasey had been overwritten. Or maybe, if I took that logic in the opposite direction, I was still Kasey Hudson, actual person and victim of some interdimensional tourist slamming a gestalt of herself into my brain. That would be at least a little less existentially horrifying, right?
Or I could just admit that I was going insane. That seemed safe.
———X==X==X———
Emily was making herself a sandwich when I finally came down, and I happily purloined some of the fixings to make my own. We worked silently, passing items back and forth with barely a word spoken. I put away the condiments and leftover sandwich fillings, then joined Emily on the couch to eat. We sat facing the TV that was still in its box on the floor against the wall, the cardboard proudly advertising its features to a captive and extremely bored audience.
"Are you sure you're okay?" she asked once I'd sat down and started on my sandwich.
"Yeah," I said. "I just woke up a little… disoriented, this morning. It'll pass."
"That's normal. It's always weird the first time," she said.
"Waking up in a strange bed?"
She reached over and flicked me on my forehead. "Jumping into an identity with its own memories, doofus."
My brain broke.
AN: Not long after writing this chapter, I had a dream that was more or less This Chapter, including the Jumpchain, waking up, and then all the way to the 'reveal' at the end. Then I woke up from that. Needless to say, I was very fucking disoriented that morning.
I wasn't being flippant. I needed some time to work through the… ramifications. She'd said nine words and forced me to completely reevaluate everything.
Nine words, and one of them had been 'doofus'.
It wasn't just trying to sort out all the existential quandaries I'd pushed off. I also had to sort through an extra lifetime worth of memories—a lifetime significantly longer than the one I'd been treating as mine. Whatever barriers I'd erected in my head had come down, filling my past with a strange sort of double-vision. If I tried to remember what I'd done yesterday, I got two completely different answers, and they were both right, from certain points of view. At least I had food to keep myself busy: chewing gave me an excuse to stay quiet.
By the time I had my thoughts in order, the sandwich was long gone, and I'd already put the plate in the dishwasher and returned to the couch beside Emily. "So," I began, "when I woke up this morning, I had the entire experience of everything except 'me'—" I made quotes with my fingers, "—reduced to a dream. I really thought I'd invented the whole thing."
"That's odd," Emily said. "Are you feeling okay now?"
"I'm still a little… confused? I've got questions, existential ones, but I think I've good for now."
She scooted over on the couch and put an arm around my shoulders. "That's good. I know import memories can be rough to adjust to, but I've never heard of anyone having that sort of 'confusion' before."
"I suppose everyone else takes some sort of perk to manage these things? Wait, I took a perk to manage these things!" I could even recall the exact text. "'You will never get overwhelmed by the torrent of experience you receive when inserting into an established background in future jumps or potential reincarnations', my ass!"
"What perk is that?"
"Sage's Wisdom, from the Generic RPG jump."
Emily frowned. "Maybe it worked too well," she said.
"You mean, it made the transition so smooth that my brain just assumed all that came before 'twas but a dream?"
"Are you quoting something?"
"I think I'm mangling Shakespeare, but I'm not sure. Sometimes I just say things." I almost made a comment like 'You know how I am,' but second-guessing myself stopped me. It was weird; despite having years of memories growing up with Emily, I didn't actually know who she was, in the… let's call it the 'greater context of things'. The thought made me pull away from her slightly, and she removed her arm and pulled back to give me my space. "What should I call you?" I asked.
"Emily. It's less confusing like that."
Digging For Information skill: zero.
"What are you thinking about?" she asked.
Who you actually are. "What I'm going to do," I said instead, since that was another pressing question. "It's January first. I could head to Winslow right now and clean up the biohazardous compost heap before Taylor gets shoved into it."
"But…?"
"But. It's… how did Max put it? There's some balance between the duty to help, and the rights of the people we're interfering with. If we just start walking all over what should—no, wrong word, what would happen—we're sort of playing God, aren't we?"
I slumped in my seat. "Or am I just trying to justify letting something awful happen because I'm more interested in meeting the girl who survived it than the girl who hasn't experienced it yet?"
Emily took her time before responding. "Well, I can't answer the second question, but for the first: our duty to help is only what we choose to take on ourselves. We don't have to do anything. Max might—Management wants to be entertained, after all—but the rest of us are here because it would be a horribly lonely existence, otherwise. We're called 'companions' for a reason. Beyond that, we don't have an obligation to interfere at all." She paused. "You can't fix everything, Kasey, and sometimes, trying only makes things hurt more. Some things, people need to live through to understand."
When I didn't respond, she continued, "If we had arrived years ago, would you have the 'duty' to try and prevent Annette from dying?"
"I… I think I would tried."
"Do you judge Max for not taking the 'Forgot My Cell Phone' option, then?"
Oh, right, that exists. "I… I guess not," I said, thinking through the question out loud. "Taylor would have her mother, her friend, and a nice, fiat-guaranteed pleasant life so long as we managed to deal with Zion, but on the other hand, she'd grow into such a completely different person it could be argued we'd killed the person she'd have become otherwise." I turned my head to look at Emily directly. "How on earth is anyone supposed to use this kind of power responsibly?"
"I'm not sure there is a responsible use for 'this kind of power'. All we can do is use our best judgment."
"That's not very comforting." I leaned my head back to stare at the ceiling for a bit. "On a slightly different topic: is there a greater plan in motion that I should be aware of?"
I could barely see Emily shake her head in my peripheral vision. "Nothing we need to worry about," she said. "Max and company are going to spent a month or so immersing themselves in the world, then start going after high-power threats. You're free to befriend the local persons of interest and keep to street-level conflict."
"That's easy enough. What will you be doing?"
"Max suggested we have someone keep an eye on you, and I volunteered."
I snickered. "So you're babysitting me, just like Mom wants."
That got Emily to snicker too. "I wouldn't put it that way, but I suppose you're not wrong."
"I don't mind. It'll be nice having someone to fall back on if things get bad. Assuming I can actually work my way in with the Undersiders in the first place." Sure, I had social perks, but I wasn't willing to take anything for granted. That reminded me of another problem. "Do we have a good way to deal with Coil?"
Emily pulled a very large, very shiny handgun from behind the shield that was suddenly on her wrist and set it on the coffee table with a thud. "I shoot him in the head from time-stop the moment you give the word," she said flatly.
"Uh." Fact one: Emily Hudson was Akemi Homura. Now that I was looking for it, I recognized the ribbon in her hair.
Fact two: She was perfectly happy to put a bullet in a man's head the moment it was most convenient for me. That was… discomforting. I'd fought and killed during the Generic RPG—both the prank one and the proper setting I'd gotten a chance to tour afterwards—but that had been in the heat of the moment, when it was me or my enemy. Premeditated murder sat a bit differently in my gut.
Rather than dwell on that, I took a closer look at the gun, and my jaw dropped. "Is that a fucking Lex?"
"Prime." Emily/Akemi—clever bit of wordplay with the name, I get it—picked it up, flipped it over, and offered it to me by the barrel.
I did not take the gun. "I don't want to be in the same building as you when you fire that thing. In fact, I'm pretty sure I don't want to be in the same city as someone firing that thing."
"Relax. It's quite controllable." She returned the ludicrous handcannon to her pocket dimension and vanished the shield. "That's not even close to the largest gun I have on hand."
"I'm still not sure anything in this city requires that level of firepower."
"Well, I'm fairly sure it won't over-penetrate an Endbringer."
"'Fairly sure'!?"
She smirked. "I have not tested it, obviously."
I rolled my eyes, which got an actual giggle out of her. "You're a lot more expressive like this," I said.
"That's hardly my fault," she teased. "You've been acting very silly."
"I mean, I know I've been acting odd, but I think 'silly' is going a little far."
"You thought I'd made a dozen pancakes by hand in a kitchen with no pots or pans."
Oh. "So when you said you hadn't made the pancakes, you meant you hadn't made the pancakes."
"Statements like that are exactly why I say you're being silly."
"I mean—fine, I've been silly. You're not exactly acting like yourself either, Akemi."
She shrugged. "Jump identities do that, sometimes. I'm still Akemi, but I'm also Emily."
"And you're just… okay with that?"
"Yes?" She tilted her head quizzically, then just shrugged again. "It happens every jump, especially the first day or two. I'll be back to normal soon enough."
I sighed. "That's fine, I'll just be over here, worrying about continuity of consciousness and what it means to be real."
Emily leaned over and reached her arm around me again; I thought she was offering me another comforting hug, but instead she pulled me into a headlock and started giving me a noogie. "You think too much," she said.
"Emily, nooo! Staaaaaaaaahp!"
———X==X==X———
We ended up spending most of the weekend unpacking. Pictures began to populate the shelves and walls. The TV was unboxed and mounted, furniture assembled, the family computer hooked up, and the kitchen stocked with appliances and cooking implements. Given Emily was clearly willing to just raid the Warehouse for food, and said food was likely better than anything either of us could make, I wasn't sure the last bit was going to be useful, but at least it helped make the house look lived in.
Jennifer popped in from the Warehouse on Sunday morning to check out the house and poke fun at my new look. She also dropped off my wand and gave me some self-study for magic, including a pile of padlocks to practice the unlocking charm on. The rest of the time, Emily and I had the place to ourselves.
Sunday evening, I found my 'jump stuff' in the back of my closet—all my 'normal' stuff had been left in the middle of the floor, so I hadn't checked for boxes in the closet itself. It contained the training scrolls from the RPG jump, which gave me a few tricks for fighting with my powers in hand-to-hand; a key with an address attached to it, which was probably related to the lair I thought I'd actually declined. The scout's tools included a keychain, so I added that to the ring and let it disappear back into hammerspace. The basic adventurer's kit and portable camp from the RPG jump, I left in the box; the Journal and Map from the same jump joined the key in hammerspace; and the Divine Bangles went onto the vanity, since they could pass for normal, if slightly gaudy jewelry.
It also contained my costume, which was nothing like I expected and everything like I wanted. The underlayer was a pair of dark, padded long under underwear, like I was used to using when I went skiing; it went on over my regular underwear and under the tight one-piece armored bodysuit that went from cuffs that tucked into my boots all the way up to my neck. The bodysuit was mainly black and a deep, rich blue, accented by linework in brighter blue and off-white sprayed across it. A matching, high-collared leather jacket that came down just past my waist hid the zipper and provided most of the pocket space; the belt and bodysuit had no pockets or pouches to speak of. The matching mask left my nose, mouth, chin, and cheeks exposed, while covering and protecting the rest of my head and neck; it tucked securely into the collar of the bodysuit and included a jaunty white-and-ice-blue gel-spiked wig that was much longer than my own hair, though still short compared to Emily's. The suit's gloves were my 'weapons', padded for hand-to-hand fighting while still being thin enough not to affect my dexterity, and my Bangles could be hidden under the armored panels on the forearms, which were themselves hidden by the jacket. The boots were steel-toed, extended up to protect my shins, and had two-inch heels that would have been horrible to run or fight in, if I wasn't a cheating cheater who cheats. The finishing touch was a pair of thick, one-pane reflective goggles to protect and obscure my eyes. I shot myself a cheeky grin in the mirror, and I looked like I could have wandered straight out of a comic book, if I do say so myself. It was awesome, seriously, and I obviously had to go out in it immediately.
I went straight out of town, this time, into the sparsely forested area west of the city. It was a good thing I did, because I demolished a bunch of trees by sheer accident and ended up wrapped around a massive old pine like a mangled car wreck. Genius that I am, I decided to try applying the 'twisting motion' to some of the other forces I could alter, and it turns out having friction accelerate you any direction other than 'against motion' was a disastrously self-perpetuating feedback loop of acceleration and terror. I resolved to think through the consequences before experimenting after that mistake; then I started wondering what would happen if I twisted my inertial mass the way I'd twisted my gravitational mass—I could feel the possibility, the 'muscle' that would do it—and was downright horrified.
I limped home and went to bed. Then it was Monday, and that meant school.
———X==X==X———
In my… let's just call it my 'first life' for simplicity's sake. In my first life, my highschool experience could probably best be described as 'idyllic'. It was a tiny school, too small for cliques, where everyone knew everyone and no one was left out, excluded, or bullied. Well, that wasn't quite true: I excluded myself. I'd been bullied relentlessly before moving schools, and between that and being wrapped up in my own head with all sorts of other mental issues, I never opened up enough to experience much of the friendship I was being offered. It was a missed opportunity, and I still felt some lingering regret. Not too much; I'd still had a few friends, it had been years, and I'd managed to get out of my shell enough to find friends in college despite social anxiety that still hadn't been properly addressed by that point. But I could have experienced a lot more of highschool if I'd been willing to let my walls down a bit.
'What sort of mental issues could you have possibly had, Cassandra?' I imagine some nebulous observer asking, to which I respond, Read between the fucking lines.
Anyway, my life here, on Bet, had been… I use the word loosely, but it had been streamlined. Many of the significant events in my first life had some analogue in my new history, and the same was true for the people I knew. My (as Hudson) Dad had been a composite character of my (as Rolins) parents, since Mrs. Hudson was a non-entity except on holidays. I'd gone to school with all my friends from back home; the ones I'd known in elementary school, the ones I'd met in highschool, the ones I'd made in college, the ones I'd met after college. We'd been a happy group of kids, brought together by the same interests that had brought us together the first time I'd experienced it. The kind of big, inclusive group I could have had the first time through highschool, except better, because it was magically matched to people I'd picked out from a significantly larger crowd than a tiny little school like that ought to offer.
And then they'd all died, because Bet wasn't content to only sort of kick you in the teeth. It wouldn't have been enough to survive a bunch of people I only remembered knowing. No, I had to experience the deaths of people I had intimate, personal connections to in both lives. Otherwise it wouldn't count, right? Fuck this world. I can't believe I'd wanted to come here.
I don't really have a point with all that, except to say that whatever my first two highschools were like, Winslow was going to be different. Not as different as I'd expected, though. Sure, the school building was old to the point that whether it was structurally sound was questionable. The classes were huge, the hallways too small, and just about everything was battered and worn. It was a shitty inner city highschool—but it wasn't a cesspool. People didn't wear gang colors openly, and if there were some suspiciously monoracial groups of white and asian kids eyeing each other sideways in the halls, they were still outnumbered by diversely inclusive groups giving both sides the stink-eye.
I spent the morning before school in the principal's office, getting my class schedule and a lecture about the school rules, so I was well out of the way of what I knew was happening elsewhere. Most of the lecture was centered on the zero tolerance policy on gang associated clothing and behavior. Reading between the lines, it seemed that the administration had cottoned on to the idea that establishing a policy that anyone wearing gang colors got suspended resulted in the gangers immediately doing so, receiving their suspension, and becoming someone else's problem. Turning the violent kids out into the streets just pushed the problem on to the police instead, but it was honestly the best an underfunded school could do with what they had.
The one thing about Winslow that met my expectations perfectly was that school was woefully, miserably boring. I'd been through highschool once, and no matter how I felt about my experience, it wasn't worth redoing. At least I didn't have to worry about doing any schoolwork; I'd decided going into this that I wasn't going to spend a single bit of time outside of class worrying about grades. If anyone asked, I'd blame it on the months of school I'd missed, but I gave myself pretty good odds that no one would care. I'd probably test out before the end of the year, anyway.
I might not even bother with that. Even if I wasn't leaving, it's not like you need a highschool diploma to be a cape. A highschool education was certainly useful, but I already had that, and no one was going to ask if I had a document to prove it while I was punching their teeth in.
Given my aforementioned resolution to ignore homework, I was strongly tempted to just throw my backpack in my locker at the end of the day. There were two reasons I didn't: first, I felt like I should at least go through the motions of school to blend in, including bringing homework home, even if I didn't do a bit of it. The second was that this was still Winslow, and there was always a chance I'd piss someone off enough to wreck my things without knowing I'd done it until I arrived to a locker full of pigs' blood or something. In the end, it was just as well I bothered, because that meant I was still in front of my locker, moving books around and trying to decide on some sort of organizational system, when someone decided to start up a conversation.
"You're the new girl, right?"
"Yep, that's me." I put the book I was holding back in my bag and turned around to see who was talking to me. It was a girl from my grade—C-something, Connie? Cathy?—along with what looked like a freshman, sophomore, and junior. Student council representatives, maybe? "Surprised you could tell, with how crowded this place is."
The junior, a redhead about my height, laughed. "Ah, this is nothing. Maybe it's more than you're used to, but believe me, you haven't seen a crowd yet." She stepped forward and nudged me playfully. "I love your bracelets. Where did you get them?"
Was she flirting with me? Did I want her to be flirting with me? She was a teenager and I a reincarnation of a thirty-ish-year-old questionably-mortal woman, which made the age difference obviously inappropriate. The teenage part of me didn't care, and was distractingly aware that she was hot. "Ah, thanks," I said awkwardly, feeling a blush forming on my face. I toyed with one of my bangles self-consciously. "They're from home."
"Is it true your entire town was destroyed by a supervillain?" the sophomore asked, killing the mood like an axe to the face. It felt a bit like being punched in the gut, and I mumbled something unintelligible—even to myself—and spun back around to my locker. Well, that went from zero to what-the-fuck real quick, I thought, rearranging my books with slightly excessive force.
It took a moment before the redhead broke the awkward silence sophomore girl's question had left. "Oh my god, Julia," she snapped, "you can't just ask her that!"
"C'mon, that's the only reason we wanted to talk to her in the first place."
The penny dropped. Oh hell. Honestly, 'hot redhead' should have tripped every warning flag I had, but I'd been so distracted by the sheer normalcy of the school I'd gotten complacent.
I took a deep breath. Improv time.
"The answer is 'yes'," I bit out. I didn't need to fake the fact that I was very unhappy with the sudden turn in the conversation; even if treating the situation like I was playing a character made things easier, this was still my past, and it sucked. "A cape fight miles away from me destroyed a dam, which washed my entire town away and killed almost everyone I've ever known. Any other questions?" I slammed my locker for emphasis and turned back to face the onlookers—of which there were now a dozen, since I'd gone and made a scene. Whoops.
Julia, for her part, looked properly embarrassed. Carla was still mid-cringe. Emma recovered more gracefully. "I'm sorry about Julia, she doesn't think before she speaks."
"Hey!" Julia yelled.
"I'll get over it." I had a feeling I was going to be getting a lot of mileage out of that phrase this jump.
"Great." Emma nodded like the matter was resolved. "Besides, you survived it, and that's what's important, right?"
"My friends didn't," I said before I could stop myself. Getting off script there, Kasey. I'd had a… well, not a plan, per se, but at least an outline of how I'd wanted a conversation with this group to go. Emma looked away awkwardly, giving me a chance to scan the crowd and confirm I had the audience I expected. There, lurking in the back like a shadow. How appropriate. I cleared my throat. "Anyway, I'm Kasey Hudson. The tactless one is Julia. You're…?"
"Emma. Emma Barnes. You know Caroline—" I'd been close, at least? "—and this is Madison." She waved at the one I'd mistaken for a freshman, who smiled and bobbed her head.
"Nice to meet you," I lied. "I oughta go, my sister will be waiting. Walk with me?" Emma agreed, and her shadow detached herself from the crowd as we headed down the hall. Caroline, Julia, and Madison went off on their own, which didn't matter. I had the audience I wanted; it was time for a bit of theatre. "Do you know a gym with a large swimming pool?" I asked. "That isn't… 'crowded'?"
"Yeah, I know one. Membership's a little pricey, though. You like swimming?"
"No," I said sharply. "I wasn't much of a swimmer before, and ever since the flood I panic at more than a few inches of water. I can't even take a bath—it's been showers only—and to be honest I'm not that comfortable being wet at all, anymore." I paused as we pushed through the set of double doors out of the building, then pounded a fist into my palm. "And now that my life is finally coming back together, that weak-ass shit isn't going to stand. I'm gonna swim."
Emma ate it up, but it wasn't her I was putting on a show for. She hadn't introduced Sophia yet, but she'd continued trailing behind us even as we headed out into the parking lot, and I didn't doubt for a second she was listening.
"My parents have a membership at the Pacific Halo gym. It's out on the west side of the city, on the other side of the hill. I can bring you along as a plus one if you want to check it out," Emma offered. I nodded; that was conveniently close to my house. "Sophia and I go there sometimes—have you met Sophia?" Emma stopped walking, spun around and waved. "Sophia, say hi!"
Sophia Hess stepped forward and suffered through Emma's introduction. She offered me a handshake, which I accepted. She tried to squeeze my hand; I squeezed back. I'm pretty sure I won. "Nice to meet you," I lied again.
"Same," she said, with equal sincerity, carefully not nursing her hand. "You really want to go swimming just to prove you're not scared?"
"Nah, I know I'm scared. That's why I gotta do it. Can't let the fear win, right?" Sophia nodded in what might have been agreement. I decided to gamble on overplaying my hand. "Do you do martial arts?"
"What makes you ask?"
"You've got a hell of a grip."
She snorted. "Show-off. Yeah, I do, a bit."
"They have sparring equipment at Pacific Halo?"
"You think you can take me?" Sophia asked. She smiled; the glint in her eye made it scarier than her normal scowl. "Sure, let's do it. I'd love to show you a thing or two."
"Awesome!" I pumped my fist and pretended not to notice the murderous subtext. "I'm new here, obviously, so I don't have any after-school activities or—"
A car horn cut me off. "Kasey! C'mon, let's go!" The three of us turned to see Emily waiting in her car. And what a car it was.
I'm not a car person. When it came to my own car, the only things I cared about were comfort, and it turning on when I wanted it to. I couldn't tell you the first thing about makes or models, what different engines or transmissions meant, or anything like that. All I knew was that this car… this car was one of the most beautiful machines I had ever seen. It was a convertible, sleek, painted a deep, vibrant red that seemed to glow from within. I traced my eyes over it longingly, starting at the front bumper, over the smooth curves of the hood where it accommodated the wheel wells, up the crystal clear windshield, into the voluptuously upholstered interior, back to the harsher yet still graceful angles of the rear body, and, lastly, down to the gleaming ruby taillights. Simultaneously angular and elegant, it made only a gentle purring sound as it idled in front of us; yet something about the shape of it promised speed and noise, like a runner on the starting blocks, like a lion opening its jaws to roar.
I realized after a moment I was drooling, and hastily wiped my chin before checking to see if I'd bloodied my dignity in front of the school's resident sharks. I hadn't. They both had their eyes locked firmly on the sanity-destroying beauty of Emily's ride.
"Tomorrow, after school?" I asked.
"Yeah," Sophia said.
"Guh," Emma agreed.
Neither of them had blinked since they'd set eyes on the car.
I shrugged and hopped into the passenger seat, and Emily tore out of the parking lot with a rumble I felt through the seat as much as I heard. We split lanes like a motorcycle, slipping between cars in impossible ways and cutting through traffic like a hot knife through butter. The fact that this wasn't accompanied by a cacophony meant that something was keeping people from noticing our antics, as well. "What the hell is up with this car?"
Emily grinned. "It's from a street racing jump, some game where your score was modified by how 'cool' your ride was. Max decided to go wild by taking the fanciest car in the game and putting as much emphasis on Style as she possibly could. More or less won everything just by showing up. I figured driving off in it might leave an impression."
"Yeah, I think it did." I had to hold on to my bag as we swerved violently around a garbage truck. "Does that mean it's not actually a great car?"
"What do you think?" she asked as we blew through a red light, sliding between the crossing traffic like a ghost. A quick glance at the dash showed we were going just over a hundred and fifty miles an hour—barely a quarter of the way around the dial.
"I think it's literally magic. Do you just have it for the day, or what?"
"Max has hundreds of cars. Well, not hundreds, but close enough. I asked to borrow it for a decade and she didn't even blink. Besides, it's insured."
"How do you insure a supernaturally beautiful, magical, extradimensional car?"
"Management."
"Oh. Right." I spend a few moments just enjoying the ride as the wind whipped past. "You know they're going to think I'm absolutely loaded now, right?"
"We are. Even more so once things get going. Max will be collecting the bounty on the Nine pretty soon."
"Max's going after the Nine?" I asked.
"Not personally, but she's going to claim the bounty when Snake catches up to them."
"Snake?"
Emily took her eyes off the road to give me a hard look. "Don't tell me you don't know who Snake is."
"Are we talking Metal Gear? Solid, Naked, Venom—"
"Solid."
I snorted. "Really? Solid Snake?"
"You didn't recognize him?"
"Who?"
"David."
"What?" What. "You mean I spent a month getting my ass kicked by Solid Snake himself?"
"He was coddling you."
"That's not the point!" I had to wonder whether I'd ever stop being surprised by these people. On second thought, I hoped I didn't; it was thrilling to learn who I had the privilege of traveling with. Then I realized that this was how Jennifer thought about me, and that was scary and also something precious that I would never, ever betray.
Emily turned off the main street, and I realized we were already home; the drive had taken less than barely five minutes. She hit a button on the dash, and the attached one-car garage opened to reveal a massive space that I recognized as part of the Warehouse. We pulled in, hopped out of the car, and went through a door to end up right where we would have been if we'd actually come from the garage. Convenient.
Emily set the bags of groceries she'd pulled from the trunk on the counter and started putting things into the fridge. I threw my bag on the table and picked up the conversation where we'd left off. "Okay, so Snake went in without powers so he could gank Jack and friends. That's way off topic. Showing up in that car will have set some expectations."
"Is that a problem?"
I gave it some thought. "Okay, how about this: what I'm actually worried about is whether we 'make sense'. Does that make sense?"
"No."
"Okay. Look. This is a pretty nice house—" I gestured to our pretty nice house, "—but does it look like the sort of house someone who owns that car would live in?"
"Rich people are perfectly capable of living modestly, except for the few things they choose to indulge in," Emily said dismissively from halfway inside a cabinet. "And we are rich, at least enough to cash the checks flaunting the car would write. Mom's one of the top executives at the Palace."
I slapped a hand to my forehead. I knew where Mom worked, but I hadn't connected it to the jumpchain until Emily had mentioned it. "I guess." I sighed and stretched. "So," I said, switching topics, "I can 'rotate' my gravitational mass to fall in directions other than down. Do you have any idea what rotating my inertial mass in the same way would do? I can feel the option to try it."
Emily closed the cabinet with a click, then folded the paper bags up and placed them in another cabinet. "No," she said slowly, then added, "Don't try it in the house."
"I won't. Messing around like that was how I wrecked myself yesterday."
"I'm not surprised. If you're going to be hanging out with your friends after school, should I still pick you up?"
"Nah. We won't all fit in the car."
"We have other cars," she said.
"I think that would raise more questions than I want to answer."
"Suit yourself."
"I appreciate the offer though," I reassured her. "And thanks for the ride today, by the way." I headed for the stairs.
"Can I ask you something?"
I stopped and turned around so we were facing each other. "Shoot."
"When Max said you'd be mostly hanging out with the local characters, I didn't think she meant those two."
"Ah." I could definitely understand that. "I mean, it wasn't exactly a priority, but I did consider what I'd do if they approached me. I'm… curious, I guess? I mean, they aren't sociopaths. They have feelings and can form connections with others. They just… do monstrous things, because they need to affirm that they can. Honestly, I feel more pity for them than anything else."
"Do you think you can redeem them?" Emily asked skeptically.
"No. Maybe? I mean… okay, maybe I'm playing God here a little. I might not be able to redeem them—no, I can't redeem them. They have to redeem themselves. But, maybe… if I can nudge them onto the path, that's not a bad thing, right?"
"That's…" she trailed off, considering. "Well, I suppose I can't fault the intent, and the approach isn't unreasonable. Just make sure you manage your expectations." She nodded to herself. "What are you going to do the rest of the day?"
"Homework," I said, and headed upstairs to practice the unlocking charm.
AN: I have a soft spot for Sophia, even canon Sophia, because when I read between the lines I see a character who could have been given a sympathetic backstory and redemption arc if the story had gone that way. She doesn't get one, and maybe she doesn't deserve one, but she had the potential to be at least as interesting a character as Taylor herself. The fact that the conflict moved beyond bullying meant that she gets shafted, hard, and it's satisfying to watch because she really is an unrepentant, evil bitch. I'm fascinated by her character anyways, though. Some of that may be because, during a discussion on Semblances, it occurred to me that my Semblance (or my Powers, in an AU where I'd triggered rather than just getting PTSD) could have been very similar to hers. But we'll get into my interpretation of her trigger much later.
I hadn't expected much from the Winslow cafeteria in terms of food, and I'd still been disappointed. The sorry square pizza on display Monday had been about what I expected, and I was thankful I'd brought my own lunch. Usually, that would mean making myself a sandwich before school, but Emily had shown me I could be way lazier. Turns out our fridge worked almost exactly like the portable fridge that had saved my ass back in crazy-monster-girl-world, with the caveat that it always dispensed refrigerated food. Meaning it could dispense the same sandwiches we had in the lounge. Obviously, I took one of those to school, because I am a cheating cheater who cheats.
(I'd asked Emily why she'd bothered stocking the fridge and pantry if we have access to unlimited magic food, and she'd pointed out that having a perfect bare kitchen would look far weirder than anything she might get up to with the car. I'd conceded the point.)
As for the cafeteria dining space: it was a single, huge rectangular room that reminded me more of a gymnasium than an eating space; probably due to the harsh fluorescent lights and bare ceiling that exposed the sprinkler pipes. The lunch counter was along one of the shorter walls, and the tables, integrated table-benches that wouldn't have looked out of place in an outdoor park, were arranged parallel to it. The tables were in four columns, with three walking aisles between them; the outermost columns were shorter and ran right up against the walls. The size of the space would have made it a good space to hold school assemblies if the tables hadn't been bolted to the floor.
I was eating my sandwich alone in the cafeteria the next day when Emma invited herself and her posse to my table. Speaking of Emma: I'd assumed that, as a sophomore, Emma wouldn't have any pull with the upperclassmen, and that Taylor's assertion that Emma had the entire school behind her was an exaggeration. As it turned out, Taylor was closer to the truth, because as far as I could tell social circles didn't divide among age or grade lines as much as I'd expected. Sure, most of Emma's circle were sophomores, but Caroline and Vivian were both seniors who seemed perfectly happy just to be included in her little 'court'. Reading between the lines over the next few days, I would come to the conclusion that introducing me was what had finally earned Caroline a seat at the 'royal table'. Jostling for position within the group was a strange game of politics with no stakes and no quarter given.
But that was later. At the time, I wasn't sure what to expect from the conversation, but I needn't have worried, because all Emma wanted to talk about was Emily's fucking car.
"What kind of car is that?" Emma demanded, not for the first time.
"I really don't know," I said, not for the last time.
"I didn't know you cared about cars," Madison said testily. She was undoubtedly the least friendly of the three, which was surprising considering she was competing with Hess for the title. Maybe she was worried the wind was blowing against her? A mysterious transfer student arrives and instantly bonds with her… 'friends' is probably the wrong word. 'Meal tickets'? Instantly bonds with her meal tickets, disrupts the group dynamic, and suddenly all anyone wants to talk about are the newcomer's (presumed) interests… oh god, she thought I was a Mary Sue. And she was arguably right, too. Joke was still on her: I didn't care about cars any more than she did.
I tuned back in while Emma was gushing about the car again. "…had to have been there, Mads. I can't possibly describe it to you. Kasey, is your sister picking you up again today?" Emma asked eagerly.
"Uh, we're going to the gym after school, right? I told her not to pick me up."
She visibly deflated. "But you'll have to pay the bus fair," she whined, as though she could argue me into having told Emily to come.
"Like that's a problem for her," Sophia grumbled. "Why are you even here, anyway?"
"What?" I asked.
"Here." She waved a hand at the room around us. "You're obviously rich enough for a nicer school." Ah. It seemed the 'expectations' I had worried about were in play. Emily may have boosted my social standing, but it was equal parts obsession over her supernaturally sexy car and 'let's be friends with the rich girl', which was… well, it was a shortcut, but nothing more.
I had a ready explanation for my presence at Winslow. "No time to arrange anything else. I moved into town on New Year's Eve." I nodded at Emma. "What about her?"
"What about me?" she asked defensively.
"Your dad's some hotshot lawyer, isn't he?"
"Oh, of course he is," Emma said, preening at the recognition, "but really, this school isn't that bad. I'm not planning on an academic career anyway, and I'd hate to leave my friends behind." I choked on my food. It's too bad your friend didn't leave you behind. Luckily, Emma misinterpreted my reaction. "Sorry. I shouldn't have mentioned… ugh, I'm such a drag."
"No, no. No need to tip-toe around me," I said, waving her apology away. "I'll get over it." Emma didn't seem convinced, so I decided to change the topic. "Do you actually like my bracelets, or were you just breaking the ice, yesterday?"
"Well…" Emma said cautiously, "they're a bit… ostentatious? But if that's your style, that's fine. I mean, I wouldn't wear them personally—"
"They're tacky as hell," Madison said. "They're probably actual gold, too, right?"
"Well, somewhat." There were also partly lightning.
"You don't have to explain alloys to us," Sophia said irritably. "Honestly, Hudson, you best be careful where you walk showing that kind of wealth."
"I can protect myself," I said confidently.
She smiled, teeth bared. "I look forward to seeing it."
———X==X==X———
The Pacific Halo was a large, impressive building. The gym's logo was, perhaps unsurprisingly, a stylized image of a barbell superimposed over an erupting volcano, surrounded by a thick yellow ring; the words 'Pacific' and 'Halo' wrapped around the top and bottom of the ring, respectively. Since Sophia was Emma's plus one, I had to pay $60 for a single day's pass, which I did without comment. Hess didn't say anything, but I could feel her eyes on me while I paid.
I'd brought a swimsuit in my school bag that morning, and went straight to the locker room to change. Sophia and Emma were waiting impatiently for me when I emerged; apparently, my sloppy, self-administered exposure therapy was going to be a spectator sport. Which was what I had planned, although I was having second thoughts now. If I made a fool of myself here, I'd lose my best shot at connecting with either of them. At least Emma had decided to contribute by checking towels out from the front desk—I'd brought my own with the understanding that I'd be able to cheat, so it wasn't nearly as large or absorbent as those on offer.
I'd already given myself a bit of therapy over the weekend, starting with visualization exercises, and had gone all the way to joining Jennifer in her indoor water park the previous evening in preparation. It was nowhere near as comfortable or effective as having a proper therapist, but I wasn't sure I'd be able to really open up to a therapist considering how weird my lives were; the fact that I have lives, plural, was just the start. The jump memories—and traumas—were significantly weaker in the Warehouse, as well, so I found myself less prepared than I'd have liked to face the large, olympic swimming pool. I probably would have stood there for ages if Sophia hadn't been accidentally helpful.
"Chickening out?" she asked mockingly.
"No," I said, snapping out of my daze and stepping off the tile into the pool.
The water was cold, colder than I'd expected, and I exhaled in surprise, which immediately lead to flailing as I fought my way back to the surface for more air. I emerged sputtering and gasping, and immediately swam over to cling to the edge of the pool for dear life, running through every mental exercise I'd ever learned to deal with the overwhelming panic. When that didn't work, I pulled myself up and lay on the tiles, staring up at the girls standing over me.
"The hell was that?" Sophia asked.
"My first try," I said from the ground. Safely back on dry land, the anxiety was already fading, helped by breathing exercises and tapping my fingers against my legs. When I was finally calm, I stood up and turned back to the pool. A glance over my shoulder showed both girls watching me dispassionately, ready to judge my next move.
"I told you I was scared," I said. "I didn't come here because I had something to prove. I came here because I had something to change."
I stepped back into the pool.
———X==X==X———
I called it quits after about half an hour of increasingly longer sessions in the pool. I was most certainly not 'cured', but I could swim the whole length of the pool while 'only' feeling horrible, gut-churning anxiety, which was good enough for one day.
I'd expected the girls to get bored of watching me enter and exit the pool, but they'd both stayed the entire time—though I think Emma was texting on her phone while I wasn't looking. I have no idea what they thought of my floundering, but I don't think I managed to deliver the lesson I was trying to demonstrate.
It turned out Pacific Halo didn't have any sparring equipment, so after I'd dried out and changed, we took another bus back into the city, to a dojo Sophia frequented on the edge of downtown. The proprietor was an imposing, bald black man Sophia greeted as 'Curly'. He showed us to one of the mats without comment, though I think I caught him giving me a pitying look for squaring up against Hess.
My jacket, scarf, and hat went into my bag, along with my shoes, my watch, the bangles I'd been wearing as jewelry, and my jeans. I'd dressed for the occasion, so I was left in a sports top and shorts; Sophia had pulled her sweatshirt off to reveal much the same.
"I hope you don't think I'm going to go easy on you," she warned me.
"Don't worry," I said. "I'll be sure to give you a chance."
We faced each other on the mat, gave each other the barest nod of respect, and went at it.
Somehow, getting my ass kicked several times a day had managed to give me an inflated opinion of myself. I'd actually meant what I'd said: I'd been prepared to sandbag a bit to make sure I didn't completely outclass her. I didn't need to. I still won—I was a year older than her, and perk-bought skill was overpowered even before further training—but I didn't need to hold back to keep it competitive. Some of that, I could blame on needing to focus to make sure I didn't use my power, even subtly, or reveal the strength I had from the previous jump. Some on the fact that this was the first time I'd fought as Kasey, and it felt a hell of a lot different than fighting as Cassandra; I was nearly a foot shorter than the statuesque amazon I'd been before.
The truth of the matter was that Sophia was damned good at fighting. Neither of us were pulling our punches; we'd escalated to full-on brawling before the first point was scored. By the end of the fourth match, our knuckles were bloody, Sophia was nursing a split lip, and I had a bleeding gash above my eye that was making vision difficult. I slammed her into the mat with a bit more force than necessary in the hope that she wouldn't push for best five out of nine.
We stayed down for a moment before she tapped out. I released her, flopping into a sitting position on the sweat-slick mat, breathing hard. "Had enough?" I asked between puffs of air.
"Yeah," Sophia groaned. She hadn't gotten up either, only pulled herself to a sitting position facing me. "Emma! Towels!" Sophia caught her towel and water bottle easily, while mine hit me in the back of the head; Emma was playing favorites. I wiped the sweat off my face, frowning as I smeared blood onto the towel. That couldn't be sanitary. "You're paying for the towels," Sophia said as she dabbed at her lip, and I nodded and started guzzling down water.
"The first time, I wasn't taking you seriously," she said. "The second time could have been luck." She poked at her lip and scowled when it kept bleeding. "Where's a rich bitch like you learn to fight?"
"Mixed Martial Arts classes," I lied.
"Why, though?"
"Dunno if you've noticed, pumpkin, but the world out there sucks."
She gave a huff of laughter as she stood up, still nursing her lip. Then she surprised me by offering me a hand; I took it, and she pulled me to my feet easily. "You're pretty tough for a rich girl, Hudson."
I smirked. "Yeah, well, you're a bitch, Hess."
She laughed and socked me in the arm. We grabbed our things, and I put Bangles on, as well as the watch that immediately started dispelling my tiredness and all the sweat and grime. As we passed the front desk, Curly tapped a sign that read "Bloody Towels: $5", and I passed him a ten. That meant we got to keep the towels, which was handy, since Hess' lip was still bleeding. We hadn't put our clean clothes back on after the sweat we'd worked up, so neither of us were keen to head out into the cold January air.
"You should call your sister to pick us up," Emma suggested.
"She'd have to bring another car. The convertible only seats two."
"She has other cars?" Emma asked eagerly, and I found myself sharing a suffering look with Sophia, of all people.
"Is she going to be like this forever?" I asked.
"You best hope not," Sophia said. "If your sister broke my friend, we're gonna have problems."
———X==X==X———
Emily showed up in a perfectly mundane old minivan, to Emma's immeasurable disappointment. She perked up a bit when I ceded shotgun, and began to pester Emily with an avalanche of questions about the Adonisean convertible. I didn't pay attention to the conversation; I was busy sharing a contemplative staring contest with Sophia in the back seat.
What had I accomplished today? I'd learned that doing exercises in the Warehouse to try to deal with my fear of water wasn't as effective as I'd thought. I'd made a little progress on dealing with that fear at the gym, although I wasn't sure it would stick. I'd beaten the stuffing out of Sophia, which had been fun in a way I wasn't entirely comfortable with.
What kind of impression had I left on them? None of the perks I'd taken came with tooltips. Did they see me as someone who wasn't letting a traumatic experience keep her down, or an idiot flailing around in a pool? Sophia, at least, respected my ability to fight, but I wasn't sure if that meant she saw me as a potential friend, a peer, or a rival. Unfortunately, just coming out and asking would likely ruin any goodwill I may have managed to gain, so I sat in silence and dared Sophia to speak first. She did the same to me.
I hadn't gained any insight by the time we dropped the girls off in front of the Barnes' house. We said our goodbyes and see-you-tomorrow's, and I hopped into the front seat. "You hanging out with those two makes a little more sense now," Emily said as we pulled away from the curb.
"How so?"
"I mean if your plan was to punch Hess in the face without consequences, you've succeeded brilliantly." She shot me a teasing grin. "Well, not exactly 'without consequences'."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean you've made a friend."
"How can you tell?" I asked.
"You two sitting in comfortable silence for a whole car ride didn't tip you off?"
"That was comfortable?"
"Well, she was comfortable."
"Huh." I suppose she hadn't been glaring at me; that was almost like friendship. "She doesn't seem particularly thrilled that I'm a 'rich bitch'."
"Her words?"
"Yeah."
Emily drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. "What's your read of her?" she asked.
"She's… set, in how she sees the world. She hates people who let themselves be victimized. That much I knew from the text.
"She's also got a chip on her shoulder about rich and poor, which I didn't expect, but isn't terribly surprising, I guess? She said… I was tough, 'for a rich girl.' Scratch that; I think she'd assumed the rich have it too easy to be 'tough' the way she is, and I surprised her. What do you think?"
"Sounds about right. What I felt coming out of Hess was mostly respect, and a little affection. Friendship, basically. No resentment, so I don't think the 'rich' thing is an issue. Maybe a bit of admiration or wariness, but those can be hard to sort from respect."
"Empath?"
"Yeah. It's kinda loud, though, so I usually leave it off."
"Well, thanks for the insight." Emily hummed an acknowledgment. "What about Emma?"
"Two hundred decibels of lust towards that fucking car."
I laughed at her suffering.
———X==X==X———
School continued to be boring. The two bright spots were that none of the teachers seemed to notice or care that I wasn't turning in half the work, and that Emma had gotten most of her interest in the glamoured car out of her system by Wednesday. Come Thursday, she was back to normal.
Sophia, meanwhile, was significantly more subdued, and kept shooting me looks when she thought I wouldn't notice. It was awkward as hell, because I knew the reason, and there was absolutely no way for me to plausibly have any knowledge of it whatsoever.
Max had set up a chat room for us on the Warehouse's intranet, which I browsed when I was bored, and I happened to be online for the following conversation on Wednesday evening:
EN: whos been hanging out with ss
CR: Shadow Stalker?
EN: yeah
CR: I have
CR: Why?
EN: you trigger in a flood?
CR: Yes?
EN: k so
EN: i got introduced to the wards today
EN: and we must sound alike or somethg
CR: I don't like where this story is going
EN: bc after the intro she came up to me and asked if id triggered in a flood
AR: oh no
EN: and i was like yes???
EN: how do you know that?
EN: @AR yes
CR: you too??
EN: she took of her mask and said hi im sophia
EN: real smug
EN: and i took off mine an said
EN: im ellen. nice to meet you???
AR: oh no!
EN: and she just stood there and stared at me
EN: like ?????
00: oh god
CR: oh boy
RB: hahaha
AR: :|
00: thats hilarious
EN: it was honestly p awkward
CR: She's going to be pissed
In the end, I decided to bite the bullet and ask her directly. "Hey, Sophia, do I have a pimple or something?" I asked as I drew alongside her on our way to the cafeteria that Thursday.
"Huh?"
"You've been looking at me funny all day."
She looked away. "It's nothing."
"Don't bullshit me, Hess. What's up?"
Sophia glanced around, then pulled me to one side of the hallway, into an alcove for a pair of water fountains that probably hadn't worked in ten years. "How did you survive the flood?" she asked.
I swallowed nervously. "I got lucky, I guess." I said. I'd known this confrontation was coming, but it felt too soon. One week had given me barely any time to get a feel for Sophia as a person, rather than a character. I was out of time, though; Taylor should be coming back next week, and there wasn't a chance in hell I was going to side with Emma and company over her.
"That's it? Just luck?" Sophia looked at me like I was stupid—no, she looked at me like I was playing dumb. "You and your sister are both a-okay, when a flood kills everybody else?"
"I—you—" I stuttered. "Emily was out of town, thank god!" If I did a mutual unmask, going in with the Undersiders in the future it would be a clusterfuck of epic proportions.
"So that's all there was to it?" she asked.
"I mean, sometimes luck's all you have, right? I… you saw me flailing around in the pool, it's not like I'm a great swimmer." On the other hand, this might be the best way to actually get Sophia to connect with me, and give me a proper inroad into actually trying to get her to let go of her stupid black-and-white interpretation of the world.
"You were in the floodwaters, though?" she pressed.
"Just say want you want to say, Hess," I snapped. Back to the first hand, if Sophia knew, I wasn't sure I could count on her to keep Emma out of the loop, and Emma was stupid when she let her emotions get the better of her; which was always, when Taylor was involved.
"Look, Hudson, you seem pretty cool. Maybe even a little too cool. So I wanna know: was it just dumb luck? Are you the one-in-a-million kid who gets swept miles downriver, threading the needle through every piece of debris in the state?" Sophia leaned in to whisper in my ear: "Or are you a Cape?"
She pulled away, and we stared at each other across the foot of space we'd claimed. I looked around; the hallway was almost empty, but there were still a few kids milling through. No one was paying attention to us, but that didn't matter; some things weren't talked about in public, no matter who was around to overhear.
I made a snap decision.
"Not here," I said. She nodded, and followed me back down the hall, up the stairs to the roof. I walked over to the edge and looked out over the drop. Sophia followed me, joining me at the lip to look down at the scraggly, unkempt lawn in front of the school. There was no one in sight; not surprising, given that the temperature was just north of freezing.
"You're awfully comfortable following someone you think is a cape to a place like this," I said. "Who are you?"
"Wouldn't you like to know?" Sophia asked with a smirk.
"I can guess if I have to, Stalker."
"That's your guess?" she asked. She had a hell of a poker face, I had to give her that; if I didn't already know the answer, I'd probably be wondering if I'd guessed wrong.
"There aren't that many capes in the city. You and the Empire go together like fuel and fire, and no one would start digging into a cape's identity and then stand next to a three-story drop unless they were sure they'd survive the fall." The lip surrounding the edge of the roof was only a few inches high. "I bet if I threw you off the roof you'd be back up here in a minute or less, ready to drag me in for attempted murder," I continued casually.
"Is it really attempted murder if you know I'll survive, though?" Sophia asked.
The question surprised me. "Why do you ask?"
"Because no one would start digging into a cape's identity and then stand next to a three-story drop unless they were sure they'd survive the fall," she echoed, and pushed me off the roof as hard as she could. Repeating my entire line ruined the element of surprise; I'd immediately upped my inertia a hundredfold, so Sophia only succeeded at knocking herself on her ass. I smirked and offered her a hand up, which she took grudgingly. "Shit. Should've known you'd be a brute."
"Sorry I lied. And I'm a breaker, actually."
"Lied?" she asked as she dusted herself off.
"The other reason to stand next to a three-story drop is if you're sure you're not going to fall at all."
"You're a regular fucking comedian, ain't you?" she snarked. "Breaker?"
"Yeah. I can make myself immobile. Well, unaccelerateable, technically."
"Sheeet." She drew out the word like a whistle. "Was that fight all you, then?"
"I wasn't going to use my powers in a spar against someone I thought was a civvie," I said defensively.
Sophia chuckled. "I would."
"Then you care too much about winning and not enough about learning," I said.
"The fuck does that mean?"
"If I need powers to win a fight with you—a hypothetical you without powers, since you have them," I amended confidently, "then I'm in trouble when I get into a cape fight, because I could be fighting someone equally skilled who can also teleport, or throw fireballs, or something."
"You got the ABB on the brain today?"
"What? Oh, no, those were just the first two things that came to mind."
"If you say so," she said doubtfully.
"My point is, I need to be skilled enough to deal with the skills of whoever I'm fighting, in case I need all my powers just to deal with their powers. Does that make sense?"
"Whatever."
I checked my watch. Lunch was almost half over. "We should get going," I said, heading back towards the door, "but first, does anyone else around here know?"
"You think I went and told someone about you in the last ten minutes?"
I spun around and grabbed her by the neck; she barely had time to squawk in surprise before I'd taken her down onto the hard rubberized roof much the same way I'd driven her to the mat a few days earlier. "You started digging," I growled, putting just enough pressure on her throat to make her extremely uncomfortable without actually cutting off her air. "I came clean. Now stop playing dumb with me." I was faking my anger, which was lucky for both of us. It was hard enough to resist the urge to channel power through my bracelets when I was only acting, and I'm pretty sure the Divine Lightning would have literally killed her. Sophia's hands beat uselessly against me for a few seconds before she gave up and slammed them down against the roof as she turned intangible, launching herself up and through me. She turned back to normal a few feet away, rubbing her neck but otherwise none the worse for wear.
"Christ, Hudson, you have absolutely no chill when you go to throw down, you know that?"
"When I 'go to throw down', it's because I have to put a bitch on the floor," I said. "Does anyone else around here know about you?"
Sophia rolled her neck back and forth, considering whether or not to answer. "Emma," she said at last.
"She doesn't hear anything about me," I said.
"She's not stupid," she shot back. "What are we going to tell her about where we were?"
"You'd better come up with something good, or I'll tell her you propositioned me, I accepted, and you're currently wondering whether or not you have a hickey."
Sophia stopped rubbing her neck, eyes wide, then let out a cackle. "Oh, we're definitely going with that! I want to see her reaction."
I laughed because I thought she was bluffing. She wasn't.
"Where were you two?" Emma asked when we finally showed up to lunch, only twenty minutes before the bell.
"Oh, you know," Sophia said, exaggeratedly casual. "Around." She leaned in closer to Emma and whispered, "Emma, quick: do I have a hickey?"
"Hmm?" Emma looked at her, then at me. When I didn't meet her eyes, she gasped. "Kasey! I should have known, the way you acted when we met!" She clapped her hands together. "You two will be an adorable couple!"
Sophia sputtered and started frantically denying her own implication over Emma's increasingly obnoxious enthusiasm.
"I'm really not sure who's fucking with who, anymore," I said to no one in particular. This time it was Julia who gave me a look of commiseration.
———X==X==X———
School days passed with glacial slowness, yet somehow the week had managed to pass quickly. I had another sparring session with Sophia after school on Friday. She wanted to find a place to try fighting with powers, but I pointed out that a powered fight between us would be among the most boring things we could do, given that we could each completely no-sell the other's attacks. Instead, we headed back to Curly's dojo, where Sophia proved she'd learned enough from our previous session to score a couple points on me. We turned it down from our previous melee, so neither of us was bleeding by the time we called it quits. That saved me ten bucks in towels.
Emma took Sophia, Madison, Caroline, and I to the mall the next day. Or perhaps I should say that I was badgered into taking them, since they were fairly transparent about trying to get me to pay for things. I paid for lunch (at Panda Express, because cheap food-court chinese-food chains apparently transcend dimensions) and a set of matching hats for us all (my idea; they were cheap, tacky, and fun), but was otherwise unyielding. I had no doubt they'd take a mile if I gave an inch. Implications of selfishness over how many clothes I was buying for myself were quickly squashed by the observation that I was still replacing what I'd lost in the disaster.
Eventually, we called it a day and went out to the curb to be picked up by our parents and/or siblings. Caroline simply drove herself home. Emily showed up in that damned convertible, which thrilled Emma and left Madison a drooling vegetable.
I arrived home with a full set of new clothes for everyday wear and the uncomfortable realization that I'd honestly had fun. Emma was likeable, honestly likeable. It shouldn't have surprised me; she wouldn't have gotten anywhere if she wasn't. But in the entire time I'd known her, the cruelest 'joke' I'd seen her play was trying to get Sophia and I into the photo booth for photos of our 'date' despite our protests that we weren't actually interested in each other. Sophia had been amicable since our spar on Tuesday, and downright friendly after our rooftop heart-to-heart. I didn't have any classes with her, so I wasn't around her that much during school, but she'd not once bullied anyone in front of me. The fact that I couldn't spot any of the cruelty I expected of them was disturbing: either they were a far better actors than I'd given them credit for, I a worse judge of character than I'd thought, or my base assumptions were horribly wrong.
Most of Sunday, I spent in the Warehouse with Jenn. I'd found myself thinking about her and her view of me a lot; I wasn't the character—person, whatever—she was familiar with, and I probably never would be, but she knew that and didn't care. She was ecstatic whenever I deigned to spend time with her, and whatever else I might feel, that was its own reward.
Sunday evening, I costumed up and headed out into the city. I wasn't automatically an outlaw just because I'd chosen to be a Villain, and really, I was planning to be an Anti-Villain at worst. I wasn't out to be a Hero, though, so I wasn't patrolling for crime or anything like that. I probably have stepped in if I'd seen a murder or something similarly heinous, but I didn't, so I didn't have to make that decision. Mostly, I just wanted to stretch my legs and go roof-hopping all over town. I didn't see any other capes, and I don't think anyone saw me; Brockton Bay was large, and smart capes laid low whenever they could. Which was a point against the heroes, now that I thought about it.
The exercise helped me sleep, but I still headed to school the next day with a sick sense of foreboding in my stomach. It grew steadily larger through the day, as class period after class period went by with nothing happening. Taylor wasn't back. Emma was charming. Sophia wasn't physically manhandling people. Madison was obsessed with the car. Everything was nice and normal and wrong.
Until lunch.
The first warning I had that things were changing was Sophia striding purposefully past me as we made our way down the hallway. I raised an eyebrow as she left me in the dust, body-checking someone out of the way as she passed. The victim didn't have a backpack, and cried out in dismay as her books, pens, and papers went everywhere. I started grabbing as much of the fallen stuff as I could, even as other people trampled obliviously over it.
It wasn't until I went to hand the girl her things that I realized who Sophia had hit. There was no polite way to say it: Taylor looked like shit. She was gaunt, pale, and poorly groomed; there were bags under her eyes large enough to keep books in, and her eyes themselves were bloodshot and not-quite-focused. If I had to guess, she'd barely slept for the last week, and the look of fear she was giving me only made her look more disheveled.
"Here you go!" I said brightly, doing my best to ignore her sorry state as I held her things out to her. Taylor stared at me, then at her things, clearly searching for the trap. "I'm Kasey. I moved here last week."
The fact that I was new gave her the confidence to reach out and take her things. "Thanks," she mumbled, then turned and hurried away.
"Nice to meet you!" I called after her. She didn't react, and was quickly lost in the crowd.
I grabbed my own lunch and stuck my head in the cafeteria. Emma, Sophia, and company were in what had become our usual spot, and were talking among themselves like usual. Taylor wasn't there—or anywhere else I thought to check—and I didn't want to associate with her bullies right now, so I ate my sandwich on the roof alone.
———X==X==X———
"Where were you at lunch?" Emma asked me after school. She and Sophia had found me crouched in front of my locker while I struggled with my books. The tall, narrow lockers were far less convenient than the shorter, wider lockers I was used to, since they forced you to stack things. I could probably put a set of free-standing shelves to fix that, but given how engaged I was with my education, it probably wasn't worth the effort.
"I stopped to clean up Sophia's mess," I said while I struggled to remove a book from the bottom of the stack. I could apply my power to it, but if I wasn't careful it might end up shooting across the room or something, so I was relying on pure baseline physical force and getting nowhere.
Emma didn't respond immediately; I think she was looking at Sophia for clarification, which she didn't get. "What do you mean?" she asked.
"She ran over some girl on the way to lunch and knocked her stuff everywhere."
"Ah. Tall? Thin?" I nodded at each. "Looks like a strung-out hooker?"
"Come again?" I shot her a disapproving look over my shoulder. "She looked rough, yeah, but that's uncalled for."
"That's how she always looks," Sophia said. "Don't waste your time on her. She's worthless."
"So you walk through her instead of around her?" Sophia didn't answer, so I moved the conversation forward while I transfered books from my locker to the floor beside me like an incredibly shitty tower of hanoi. "Was she here last week?"
I didn't get a response until I turned around and stared Emma down. "No," she said. I kept staring. "Why don't you ask her, if you care so much?"
"Maybe I will." I gave up and stuffed the displaced books back into the locker, shutting the door and slinging my bag over one shoulder. It's not like it mattered anyway. "Do you know where she disappears to? I didn't see her at lunch."
"Did you really spend all lunch looking for her? You shouldn't bother," Emma said. "She barely takes care of herself, and she's a compulsive liar. You can't trust anything she says."
"Oh?"
"Yeah. She's constantly trying to get other people in trouble. She likes being miserable and wants to drag as many people down with her as possible."
"So she might, for example, claim someone body-checked her and sent her things flying across the hallway?" I asked, looking directly as Sophia. She stopped looking bored and starting glaring right back at me.
"She should've stayed out of my way."
"I'm fairly certain that the person who can see the other is the one who's supposed to yield," I said. "Is this why she wasn't here last week? Did you put her in the hospital or something?" I knew they had; I just needed to have a reason to know that before I could go on.
"It was just a prank," Emma said dismissively. "Honestly, it's not our fault she couldn't take a joke."
"Pranks are supposed to be funny." Wow, deja vu. "To both parties. If the victim isn't laughing after you reveal the trick, it's just bullying." Neither of them spoke. "What the fuck kind of prank takes someone out of school for a full week? You shove her in front of a fucking bus or something?"
"We're not trying to kill her!" Emma snapped. "It was a fucking joke. We stuck her in a locker."
"Is she claustrophobic? Because that would be as bad as pushing me off a pier into the ocean, and I'd fucking break anyone who did that to me." I was surprised to realize that I really meant that. I could dismiss Sophia trying to shove me off the goddamn roof, but if she'd pushed me into the pool I'd have broken her nose.
Sophia laughed. "We hardly have to worry about that. She's too weak and scared to fight back. She just takes everything anyone does to her and runs off to cry."
I opened my mouth again, but my good sense made me stop to think things through. All week, they'd been actually, authentically nice to me. I could blame a certain amount of that on being able to present myself in a way I knew would appeal to them, and more on the perks I had, but that didn't explain the fact that they hadn't done anything in front of me until now.
Wait. The perks.
I hadn't seen them do anything because I was warping their behavior just by being around them. I wasn't sure if it was actually changing their base behavior or if they were moderating themselves because they had some sense I wouldn't approve, but if I assumed that I was the cause of their good behavior, it explained a lot.
The first question I needed answered was how it worked. Was it like some kind of subtle master aura, pulling people into alignment with my ethics like a needle in a magnetic field? The thought made me feel sick. No, I told myself, it shouldn't be that powerful. I'd just made myself an attractive enough friend—mostly by virtue of being obviously rich, thanks Emily—that they'd put on the mask they thought would appeal to me. And it had worked.
It also meant that my presence was causing problems with my measurements, but I didn't have a solution for that.
The silence had stretched long enough to be awkward, so I decided to make my exit. "So," I said, looking at each of them in turn, "that's who you are, when you're not trying to impress the rich, naive country girl." I turned on my heel and walked away, and neither of them moved to stop me.
AN: It may not be attempted murder if you expect them to survive, but you could probably make a case for assault anyway.
Interesting take, writing from the companion's point of view
I actually forgot this was a SI for a moment there and was gonna say that the author wrote the protagonist like an actual person. XD
I also had to be corrected on the "trap" thing. I was under the impression it was a specific lifestyle and also a kink; and not folks beeing insulting, thus what I though was a compliment and mild flirting ended up setting off a nuke. (Then again I had to have people explain yolo to me too. Signs of getting old when you have to look things up on the urban dictionary I guess. )
I also like the premise of we are right now in an anime plot setup. Only the most deranged japanese write-by-lsd comitee could come up with what's happening.
The monster girl jump combined with "punishment game" prone management would have been a red flag but for the way it was actually handled quite well.
Derailing the Worm clusterfuck is always nice and I like the introspective takes.
School had been a bit awkward after my 'falling out' with Emma and company. Being welcomed into Emma's inner circle so readily had made me enough of a social fixture that tales of our 'spat' were nearly the only thing the 'in girls'—as I'd taken to thinking of them as—were gossiping about the next day. We weren't fighting, exactly, but we weren't speaking, either, and I was back to eating alone at lunch. Sophia and I still sparred a few times a week after school, but it was more of a club activity than a friendly one.
During school, Emma was content to ignore me, and I could guess why. Anything she could do with her well-established position, I could do by flaunting my wealth, so any social conflict would end with both of us destroying the other and someone like Julia laughing over the smoldering remains of the old social order. Not that I was willing to buy friends—I valued money more highly than that—but like any good cold war, the threat of force was what really mattered.
Taylor remained elusive, and I decided to give her a bit of space before ambushing her again with my relentless good cheer. Winslow had only six class periods, compared to the eight I was used to; the only things I knew about Taylor's schedule were that she had Computers first thing in the morning, and World Issues fourth period, right before lunch. I could probably have figured out which classrooms she'd be in, since I knew what teachers she had, but while I was trying to figure out how to learn her schedule without anyone noticing I was curious, I realized I was well into 'stalker' territory and aborted the mission. I'd just have to keep an eye out for her in the halls.
In the end, I happened to run into Taylor completely coincidentally; unbeknownst to me, our Sixth period classes were right across the hall from each other, and that Friday we exited the classrooms at the same time. "Hey!" I said cheerfully as I darted over to her. I saw Emma scowling at me from further into the room and made a face at her; the mind is a plaything of the body, and I cannot be blamed for my immaturity. "I ran into you on Monday, but I didn't get your name. I'm Kasey!" I help out my hand.
Taylor looked a lot better than she had on Monday. Her hair was properly washed and brushed, the bags under her eyes had mostly faded, and her color was back. It wasn't enough to make her look good—that would take confidence and some properly-fitting clothes, at a bare minimum—but she didn't look like she was about to drop dead. She did look like she thought I might be venomous. "Taylor," she said, not taking my hand.
"Nice to meet you, Taylor." I gave up on the handshake and moved aside slightly to let her pass. She took the opportunity immediately, and had the poor manners to look unhappy when I kept pace with her. "You look a lot better today. Less sick, I mean."
"Yeah," she muttered.
"Have you lived in Brockton Bay long? I'm new here."
"Yeah," she muttered.
"I bet you know all sorts of things about the city, then."
"Yeah," she muttered.
Come on Taylor, befriending Sophia was easier than this. Oh, speak of the Devil. Sophia and Julia were blocking the way ahead of us, and Emma was behind us with 'reinforcements'. This was about to get interesting.
"Hudson," Sophia said. "Hebert." I got a nod of respect with my name; Taylor got a sneer.
"Hess," I responded neutrally. Taylor said nothing.
"Do you always pick up strays, Kasey?" Emma asked from behind us. "It's not safe, you know. Some of them are feral." I turned around to face her, but didn't say anything. Her expression grew increasingly unhappy as I failed to react.
"I should have known she was the bleeding heart type," Julia said.
"From the way we met?" I shot back before I could stop myself. Someone disguised a chuckle as a cough. Well, in for a penny… "How did that go again?" I put my voice into a stereotypical brainless-beauty valley-girl cadence. "Hey, new girl, is it true a supervillain destroyed your town and killed all your friends? What's that like?"
"I didn't say that!" Julia stomped her foot. I looked at Sophia for backup, but she wasn't doing anything but serving as a barrier, content to see how this played out. I found another witness instead.
"Hey, Madison, what did she say?" I asked.
Poor Madison wanted nothing less than to become a social battlefield. "Well, ah, it was two weeks ago," she said weakly.
"Honestly, Hudson, I'm trying to do you a favor here," Emma said. "You don't want to be near someone like her. People like that rub off on you."
I turned back around to look at her—being surrounded was annoying—which put Taylor in my field of vision. Fuck! I'd been so wrapped up in trying to get one over on them I'd forgotten who I was trying to actually help. And the best way to help Taylor right now was to leave.
"Listen, Emma. We got off on a bad start." I nodded my head back towards Julia. "But I think we were friendly after that, right?"
"Sure," she said.
"Great. Let's keep it that way. We're leaving now." I threw an arm around Taylor and steered her between Sophia and Julia, making sure to keep myself closer to Sophia. Julia wasn't physically confident enough to try and stop us alone, and Sophia knew better than to try to hit me, so we were able to get through without incident. Once we'd turned the corner, I pulled up against the hallway wall to listen in. Taylor didn't say or do anything, which made hearing the argument coming from behind us really easy.
"Why didn't you stop her?" Emma demanded.
"Why are you asking me?" Julia yelled back. "Why didn't you stop her?"
There was a pause, and I strained to make sure I didn't miss the response. "No use picking a fight over it when she's gonna find out anyway," Sophia said.
Someone said something I didn't catch.
"Fuck off!" Sophia yelled. The three of them began talking over each other, and I couldn't pick more than a few swear words here and there.
"Can we go now?" Taylor asked, so softly I might have missed it if I wasn't already eavesdropping.
"Yeah, sorry, just curious how…" I trailed off. "Where to?"
"Uh, could you just… let go? You squeeze kinda hard."
I let go immediately. "Sorry! I just—" I didn't get a chance to make an excuse before Taylor rushed off. Damnit. No matter the perks, I seemed to be making an utter mess of things. I resisted the urge to punch a wall in favor of a more tempting target just around the corner.
"Hess! Curly's in an hour or you're a coward!"
———X==X==X———
Sophia had improved in her matchup against me; unfortunately I was in a particularly foul mood and wanted nothing more than to slam her into the mat over and over again. So that was what I did for most of an hour.
"You've got… to be cheating… somehow…" Sophia panted after my sixth or seventh consecutive point.
"No powers," I mouthed. It was only technically true; I was cheating. I still had the low brute rating from the RPG and was wearing my magic watch, so I looked and felt relatively fresh while Hess was nearly spent. I'd made the fight almost entirely grapples, and while Sophia was damned good, she couldn't keep up forever. The first few bouts, she'd put up a fight, but soon enough, fatigue had slowed her down to the point I could floor her without much resistance. So I did. Repeatedly.
"Bullshit…" she groaned.
"This is the power of the Dark Side, Hess," I said, bouncing on the balls of my feet, letting her get up again. "Hate, anger, all that noise."
"Please. You're about… as hateful… as a kitten."
"Wrong. You know what I hate, Hess?" I let her set her stance, then blitzed past her guard and slammed her back down again. The clearest indication she was running on fumes was that she tapped out promptly rather than trying to throw me the way she had in the beginning. I didn't let her go immediately, though. "I hate bullies," I murmured in her ear before releasing her and returning to my ready stance.
"What…do you call… this?" Sophia wheezed.
My mouth flapped like a fish. I dropped onto my ass, leaning back on my hands. "Shit." Her wheezing turned into laughter.
"See? This is the way the world works," Sophia said, once she'd caught her breath. "You're strong, you want to show you're strong, so you go out and do it."
"I guess that's why we're both villains, then," I said.
"The fuck—?"
"That's classic villain thinking, Hess!" I interrupted. "They think, 'I'm stronger than these people. I don't have to follow their rules. I'm gonna do what I want and damn anyone who tells me to stop.' It works great until someone stronger comes along. Sound familiar?"
"That's not it at all!" Sophia said. "Look: when things get bad, you either fight, or you roll over and die. Doesn't even really matter if you win or not, as long as you've got the guts to go down swinging. If you can't do that much, you're just a fucking statistic that hasn't been counted yet."
"That's your 'two kind of people in the world'?"
"Whatever." She wanted to drop the subject, so I moved on for now.
"You get along well with the rest of—" the Wards "—your club?" I asked. "They know how to fight, right?"
"With pads and fucking training wheels." Sophia shook her head dismissively, dreadlocks spraying more sweat onto the mat. "It's all 'rules' this and 'regulations' that. They don't get it."
"But you're stronger than them, so you don't have to follow their rules. You do what you want—"
"Shut it!" she snapped.
"Make me."
For a moment I thought she was going to stand back up for another round, but in the end she sagged. "Fuck off," she said, without any real heat behind it.
"Two kinds of people in this world."
"Huh?"
"What's your philosophy, Hess? What're your 'two kinds of people'? Predators and prey?"
"Not quite." Sophia waggled her hand in a so-so gesture. "Like, you think a deer is a prey animal, right, but a buck can seriously fuck up a wolf if it fights back. That's the key. Survivors fight. Victims die."
"So if Hebert punched you in the face, you'd just accept her with open arms?"
She snorted dismissively. "Even if you could get her to try, which I doubt, she'd still fold in an actual fight. She's too scared."
"You're wrong."
"Oh?" Sophia asked.
I frowned, trying to find an angle that would work without claiming knowledge I shouldn't have. "Fear isn't the only reason someone won't fight. Hell, fear is half the reason a lot of people fight at all. Cornered rats and whatnot."
"Too weak, then," she said.
"If she was weak, she wouldn't have come back to school at all."
"Nah. Skipping class would be doing something. She just keeps coming back like a lamb to the slaughter."
"Hmm." I got up and tossed Sophia her towel and water bottle before grabbing my own, drinking deeply. "Pride," I said.
"Huh?"
"Pride. She's too proud to change. If she stops coming to class, that's giving up. If she fights back, she's admitting your way of doing things is right."
"Whatever," Sophia said, slightly more forcefully. This time, I didn't push it. She groaned as she pulled herself to her feet, and we dropped our soiled-but-not-bloody towels off at the front desk before heading out towards the bus stop, spending the wait in silence. "What are your 'two kinds of people', Hudson?" Sophia asked as her bus pulled up.
"Those who prey on those weaker than them," I said, "and those who protect them." I wasn't sure which I was yet; as much as I wanted to think well of myself, I'd never had the power to do either. I selected 'Villain' more for the people I wanted to meet than any real desire to do harm, but maybe that in itself said something about my priorities.
Sophia shook her head. "The victims will die on you all the same," she said. "No matter how many times you save them, they just go right back to where they were." That sounds like fatalism borne of experience. Now wasn't the right time to ask, though, so I simply nodded in farewell as she got on the bus.
———X==X==X———
I kept trying to be friendly to Taylor every chance I got, but I was scared of coming on too strongly and pushing her farther away, so I didn't make much progress. It wasn't until the last day of January that Taylor said more than two words to me at a time, and it was mostly coincidence that made it happen: we'd both picked the same day and place to eat on the roof. I was surprised when the door opened just after I'd sat down, and turned around to find Taylor staring at me like a deer in headlights. I just patted the space next to me, and Taylor surprised me again by deciding to accept my offer. Maybe she figured there was nothing more to lose now that one of her hiding places had been found; I wasn't going to question my good fortune.
My third surprise was that Taylor was the one to break the silence. "I heard you were Emma's friend," she told me.
"Past tense?" I asked.
"Yeah." She took out her own sandwich. "I heard you had a fight or something."
"Or something, yeah." It was a fight the way the Cold War was a war.
We ate in silence for a bit. "She was my friend too, once," Taylor said.
"Doesn't surprise me," I said.
"It doesn't?"
"Not really." I was tempted to elaborate, but I had the feeling Taylor would react better to someone a little less forthcoming. It would take pressure off her to reciprocate. It also made me less likely to put my foot in my mouth. When she didn't ask me to explain, I changed the subject. "What do you do for fun?" I didn't actually have much idea of what Taylor liked to spend her time doing, beyond not being abused.
"I like to read, I guess."
"Oh, me too! Fiction or nonfiction?"
"Fiction."
"Literary or genre? I can appreciate good literary fiction, but I really like speculative fiction the most."
Taylor shrugged. "Literary, I guess? My mom was an English professor…" she trailed off.
Remember when I said keeping quiet would make me less likely to put my foot in my mouth? That was working out just great. "I'm sorry," I said. Taylor didn't acknowledge me, just staring off into the distance while she chewed. "It's your turn to ask me something," I prompted her, before the silence could get too awkward. Hopefully letting her choose the topic would make it less likely to hit something she didn't want to talk about.
"What did you fight about?" Taylor looked surprised she'd spoken. "You don't have to tell me," she added quickly.
"No, it's fine." I paused as I realized that letting her choose the topic hadn't been a good idea either. "Actually, fair warning: you might not want to hear it."
"Why not?"
"We were arguing about pranks."
Taylor's eyes narrowed. "Pranks in general, or a prank?"
"Uh… both?"
"You heard what they did to me?" she asked.
"I heard their version," I hedged. I knew for a fact that they'd left out the most heinous details, but I couldn't source that knowledge.
"Which was?"
"That they shoved you into a locker and locked you in. I said that doing that to someone who was claustrophobic would be as bad as pushing me off a pier into the ocean." I belatedly realized that Taylor didn't have context for that, so I added, "I have a severe phobia of water, for context."
Taylor didn't seem interested in my problems. "They said I was claustrophobic?"
"No, that was—I was making the point that you can't assume doing something to someone is okay just because you don't think it would be that bad if it happened to you."
She barked out a bitter laugh. "Nobody would think what they did 'wasn't that bad'."
I knew that, damnit, but I'd been talking about their edited version of the event. "I figured there had to be more to it, if it took you out of school for a whole week." She shuddered. I moved to put my hand on her shoulder, but stopped when she flinched away. "You don't have to talk about it, if you don't want to," I told her, although if she did talk about it I would at least be able to stop dancing around the issue.
"I… yeah. Thanks."
We went back to silence, but I thought it might have been a little more comfortable than before. Taylor finished her sandwich before I'd finished half of mine. "Want some of my sandwich?" I asked, proffering the untouched half.
She looked at me suspiciously. "No thanks. I'm good."
"If you're sure."
"I've got more food." Taylor opened up a zip-lock bag full of potato chips. "Why aren't you eating in the cafeteria?" she asked.
"Uh…" Fuck it, let's try honesty. "I was wondering where you snuck off to during lunch. I knew the roof access doors weren't locked, so I checked up here. You weren't here, obviously. It's a nice place to eat, though, right?"
"Cold, though."
"Yeah."
Munch, munch, munch. I finished my half a sandwich and started on the rest; I could survive on one-tenth of a normal diet, but there was no reason to limit myself.
"Why were you looking for me?" she asked, once she'd finished the rest of her meal.
"A lot of reasons. Curiosity. Concern. Because Emma told me not to." That got a chuckle. "Why don't you eat in the cafeteria?"
"Because those bitches won't leave me alone," Taylor said bitterly. "If I show my face in there, they spill juice all over me, or someone 'accidentally' knocks my lunch to the floor, or whatever they think of that day."
"That's some bullshit."
"It's true!" she yelled.
"No, no! I mean it's bullshit that they do that to you!" I held my hand up in a placating gesture. "No one should have to put up with that shit." Poor girl was so used to people fobbing her off that she'd mistaken my sympathy for disbelief.
Taylor glared at me for a few seconds before deflating. "You really got in a fight with Emma?" she asked.
"It wasn't really a 'fight'. More like a 'falling out'."
"But you're not friends anymore?"
I frowned. "I mean, I guess I'm not opposed to being her friend in general? She can be really likable when she wants to be. But I don't want to be friends with anyone who abuses people just because she can get away with it." I looked up to find Taylor staring intently at me. "What?"
"I'm trying to decide whether or not I believe you," she said bluntly.
"Oh."
"I mean, a month is a long time to fake not being friends just to set me up for something. Like eating something nasty." She gestured to the second half of my sandwich, which I had nearly finished. "But you're eating it, so it's not like you tampered with it or anything."
"I wouldn't do that," I said. Taylor ignored my interruption.
"But… they would have had to have been planning…" she shuddered again, "…that since before the break. So I know they're willing to play the long game."
"She's obsessed, isn't she?" I asked.
That shocked Taylor out of her monologue. "What?"
"Emma. She managed to fool me for an entire week with her nice, everybody's-friend personality, but the moment you came back she literally couldn't restrain herself from starting shit."
"Huh." Taylor mulled that over for a bit while I finished my sandwich. "Why did you move here?" she asked.
"You mean why did I move to Brockton Bay specifically?" I asked. "My sister's attending the university. I didn't have anywhere else to go, after…"
"After what?"
I scowled. "Maybe there are some things that I don't want to talk about."
"Sorry," she said. I grunted. Figures. Taylor actually takes some conversational initiative, and manages to hit the biggest sore spot I have.
I took a few keep breaths and then ripped the band-aid off. "My entire town was destroyed. I'm one of the only survivors. My mom and sister were out of town, but all my friends, my Dad… they're all gone."
Taylor made a strangled noise. My sob story killed the conversation, and neither of us said anything for a while.
"I think you're the first person I've talked to since I got here who didn't know that," I said.
"Really?"
"Yeah. There was a lot of gossip when I showed up, I guess."
"Who would I be gossiping with?" Taylor asked. "It's not like I have friends."
"What about me?"
"We're not friends."
"I'm hoping there's a 'yet' in there," I said.
"Why?" Taylor asked, then pressed on before I could answer; "I don't need your charity, or pity, or anything like that. I don't want it. If everyone could just leave me alone, that'd be perfect."
"Sounds lonely."
"I don't need friends," she said stubbornly. "Why are you so set on being mine?"
I sighed. There were a lot of ways I could answer that question. Some of them were believable, and some of them were true, but the two didn't overlap as much as they should. "I… I was bullied a lot, when I was little," I said.
"You?" Taylor said dubiously.
"Yeah." She scoffed. "What?"
"You're rich and pretty."
"That matters less than you think," I said. It was tricky, trying to include the lessons I'd learned as Cassandra into the history of Kasey Hudson; the parallels only went so far. "Being pretty is more about how you dress and act than anything else. Plus, I got held back a grade—well, sorta."
"Sorta?"
I nodded. It was something that seemed to have happened solely for congruity with my other life, although the circumstances had been wildly different. "I have a twin, and she's just… better than me, at most things. She skipped a grade in elementary school, and they figured I should as well, but… well, I couldn't keep up. So technically I'm in the 'right' grade—I was young for my grade to begin with—but as far as most people were concerned I'd been kicked back.
"I've been treated as the baby ever since, especially by Mom. We're twenty minutes apart, but you'd think Emily was two years older, the way Mom acts." I stopped as I realized just how much I'd said, and how bitter I'd sounded. "Sorry, didn't mean to lay all that on you."
"That's some pretty shitty luck," Taylor said without irony. It was my turn to scoff. "What?"
"You went from turning green with envy to pitying me in under a minute."
"I… guess I did, didn't I."
"Enough depressing shit," I announced. "Are we friends yet?"
"I don't know. You're so…" she trailed off, searching for the right word. She didn't find it.
"So… what?" I asked. Taylor shrugged.
We were brought out of our reverie by the bell signaling the end of lunch. "Hey, Taylor, will you join me up here for lunch again? Tomorrow, maybe?"
"Maybe," she hedged. I considered that a victory, and was subsequently disappointed when she didn't show up the next day. It was cold and occasionally wet, but I kept stubbornly eating in the same spot, hoping Taylor would decide to reappear. February went by without her.
———X==X==X———
I could have been more proactive in seeking Taylor out, but I was preoccupied by other things. Sophia and I were still sparing on Tuesdays and Fridays, and while it wasn't as friendly as it had been, it was still more polite than the brawl we'd had the first time. At home, Emily was growing more taciturn by the day as she settled into old habits, rather than defaulting to her new, more personable identity; several times, I caught myself thinking of her as 'Akemi' when I ran into her around the house. I got a membership at Pacific Halo, for the pool, and actually started seeing a therapist for assistance with my phobia of water. As for my 'extracurriculars', I was struggling with the fact that while I had a frankly amazing costume, I still didn't have a name.
Coming up with a cape name is hard. Whenever someone debuts with a particularly groan-worthy one, there are a lot of jokes about how 'all the good names are taken', but that ignores a simple fact: there's no actual requirement that cape names be unique. As long as you aren't infringing on anyone local enough or famous enough that people would've already heard of them, no one cares. The disambiguation pages on the more common names were more than thirty entries long.
That certainly doesn't mean people don't try. Even if you're not harboring the ambition to become a household name (on either side of the fence), having a name that's yours carries a certain amount of respectability. Uniqueness had ruled out quite a few names for me, of which my favorite had been 'Havok'. It could be as silly or serious as I wanted to play it, and suggested villainy without being blatantly edgy. Plus, it made sense even if you didn't understand the reference, which meant it could be my own private joke. Unfortunately, there were more Havoks running amuck than there were States in the Union, so I kept looking.
Cape names are also closely tied to the identity you want to present: a name that's too grim or too cheery can typecast you into a role you don't want to play. The same goes for heroism and villainy, silliness versus stoicism, and so on. Perhaps the hardest part of the equation is deciding how you want your name to represent your powers. Alexandria could've claimed the name 'Indestructible Woman' and lived up to it. Instead, she'd decided to name herself for a famous library, to emphasize that her mind was as immutable and unerring as her body. I thought it was perhaps a poor choice, considering that among other things the Library was famous for being destroyed, but I suppose when you'd win a head-on collision with a continental plate you might get a little cocky.
That was the logic that had me pouring over physics concepts looking for something that stood out. I considered variations on 'Kinetic', including butchered spellings like 'Kinetique', as well as applying similar logic to other terms, but couldn't find anything I liked. 'Vector' was closer to my tastes, but was too similar to Viktor to use in Brockton Bay. Damn Nazis.
Sometimes you didn't want to pick a name that's too descriptive; if your name gives too much insight on your powers, you'll have a harder time keeping an ace up your sleeve, and your enemies will be better able to prepare against you. That ruled out anything 'toon'-y, especially since an odd interaction between my power and Tools of the Trade meant I could pull just about anything out of hammerspace as long as I only needed to use it for a moment—the perfect amount of time for a visual gag, when I finally gave up and relegated myself to the local clown.
In my opinion, the best names were things that only really made sense once you knew the power, rather than telling you about the power. Vista was the best local example of that sort of name. That was a lot easier to describe than it was to do, though.
After weeks of agonizing over it, I finally settled on "Flux". I'd been surprised that that name hadn't been taken; I mean, I wasn't the first Cape to ever called myself Flux, but the Parahumans wiki had two dead links to Flux (San Francisco) and Flux (Kearney), a stub on the late Flux (Milwaukee), and nothing else. It was as close to unused as a name that simple could be.
There were also some interesting things starting to pop up in the news. A new independent team calling itself GUARD had been formed in Glendale, Colorado; the press conference featured a hero named Aspect, introducing his team with the mission statement of 'handling inter-regional threats throughout the country'. His costume was a fairly generic hero-blue body-glove with white and gold stripes down the sides, but I recognized Max from the way he spoke. The reaction was decidedly lukewarm until their first major victory two weeks later.
'SLAUGHTERHOUSE NONE' was the page-filling headline of the New York Times, above eight artist's-rendition mugshots covered with red 'X's. It had been a short but incredible bloody affair. GUARD had arrived on-site shortly after the Slaughterhouse Nine had attacked a town in Michigan, and the resulting battle had leveled the area and claimed the lives of two of GUARD's founding members. In the end, the Nine had been killed nearly to the last: Jack, Crawler, Hatchet Face, Mannequin, Burnscar, Shatterbird, and Bonesaw were all confirmed dead. The Siberean hadn't left a body behind, but the fact that the tiger-striped woman wasn't carving a path through the heart of America in revenge for her team's death was enough proof for most people that GUARD hadn't missed her. Only the Nine's most recent recruit had been spared: a formerly small-time villain named Sandstream had surrendered early in the battle, claiming—not unreasonably—that he had only joined under extreme duress. His mugshot was an actual photograph, and had a red 'O' over it instead.
On GUARD's side, they had lost a power armor tinker named Reinhardt, who I gave fifty-fifty odds of being the actual Overwatch character or Bob cosplaying for shits and giggles, and a woman named Kaleidoscope, whose identity was a complete mystery to me at the time. Max, as Aspect, saluted their courage at the press conference following the battle, while reiterating GUARD's commitment to tackling the worst threats the American people faced.
"You lost twenty percent of your members on your first engagement," a particularly tactless reporter had asked. "Do you really believe you can continue to sustain such serious losses?"
Aspect had responded harshly. "We can rebuild," he'd said. "The Slaughterhouse Nine will never return."
PHO was abuzz in the aftermath of the Nine's demise, having given it the rather tasteless title of 'the Slaughterdome'. Some people claimed the Siberian was merely hiding, planning her revenge, but most people accepted the argument that the cannibal serial killer had never showed a hint of subtly before and was unlikely to start now. The only reason for the Siberian to hide was if GUARD had a way to kill her; and if GUARD had a way to kill her, it wasn't unreasonable to believe that they'd managed to use it.
There was a loud movement, which I quietly approved of, that discouraged dwelling on the Nine and instead focused on the two lost Heroes. It reminded me of the way people back 'home' would try to keep the names of mass shooters out of the news. "THESE ARE THE PEOPLE TO REMEMBER" were the watchwords of the group, and they popped up (often in all caps) in the comments on news articles and photos of the memorials. If this world had invented Twitter, it would have been trending all month. They only got louder once GUARD released the civilian names of the fallen heroes: Robert Bastille and Katherine Tanner. The announcement answered my question about who they'd been.
There was also a lot of speculation on who GUARD would go after next; the Fallen were a popular theory, as were the numerous Gesellschaft offshoots that cluttered up the northeast seaboard, of which Brockton's own Empire Eighty-Eight was but one example. There was a massive flame war over whether they would be able to go after non-US-based villains like Heartbreaker, with armchair lawyers getting themselves infracted or banned by the dozen. The point became irrelevant when Vasil was shot dead in early March, likely by one of us—but I'm getting ahead of myself, because there was another important problem I had to deal with: I was getting restless.
Along with the powers themselves, all parahumans get some form of compulsion to use their powers. Usually, this includes a predisposition towards conflict; this didn't necessarily mean violent conflict, but I was likely one of the ones who were biased towards violence, since my power let me take hits and survive. Violence and using my powers separately had worked for a while, but by Valentine's Day, sparring with Sophia and running around the city was no longer enough to scratch the itch. I needed a cape fight.
I really, really, did not want to be in a cape fight. I knew I'd survived two different crazy fantasy deathworlds, and remembered fighting monsters and gods to the death and being the one to walk away. But those memories still felt less real than anything I'd experienced since I woke up on Bet, and I was still damned scared of getting into a real knock-down, drag-out cape fight. There were 'rules' to being a villain, but like all rules, people didn't get punished for breaking them; they got punished for getting caught.
You were 'supposed' to not go out of your way to kill someone, especially when they're already down. Body counts attracted the sort of attention smart capes don't want. On the other hand, a lot of powers are very, very easy to kill with. Who's to say you didn't end up mortally wounding the guy just trying to stop him from doing the same to you?
You were 'supposed' to let your opponents go if they tried to retreat, since you'd proven you were stronger and could take what you wanted. Too bad a lot of villains weren't the sort to stop and accept surrender once you'd pissed them off, and the frequency with which capes would refuse to swallow their pride and live to fight another day offered a lot of plausible deniability. Who's to say the scorch mark that had once been another cape hadn't decided to fight to the bitter end?
Obviously, heroes had to play by a much stricter set of rules—and were protected by a much stricter set in return, as the government had their back—but I didn't really want to fight them. Actively trying to start shit with any of the established gangs was unappealing for very different reasons. Still, I needed to get into some trouble, so on the last weekend of the month I did something reckless: I headed to the Palanquin.
AN: Another dialog-heavy chapter, with a brief glance at the wider 'chain at the end.
I love this with all my heart. I usually avoid jumpchains because the technical/gaming aspects of it turn me off but this is actually brilliant.
The main character is not the mover of the story of the Jumpchain and it's all the more better for it because allows for introspection and character interaction that is usually not seen in a jumpchain story! And that's awesome!
The best fake ID in the world wouldn't get Kasey Hudson in through the front doors of a nightclub, no matter how disreputable—and for all that it was owned by a group of villains, the Palanquin was a pretty classy scene. I went dressed to the nines in my cape costume and jacket, and the bouncer didn't even ask my name before letting me through. Somewhat of a letdown, since half the reason I'd gone through the trouble to finally pick one was for this excursion.
The club was crowded, but it wasn't packed, so there was plenty of space to move across the dance floor to the bar on the wall opposite the entrance. I did my best to stay out of the way of the people dancing, but I also didn't give an inch if someone bumped me. Any anger people felt at running into a random wall in the middle of the floor dried up fast when they realized they were about to start yelling at a strange cape. The club's security would step in fast if a fight broke out, but probably not fast enough to save your ass if you pissed off someone with super strength and a hair-trigger temper. I was almost disappointed that no one started anything, if only because I would have loved to laugh in their face and get away with it.
Overall, I'd attracted less attention than I expected by the time I took a seat at the bar. Being all cape'd up raised an interesting question: how do you card someone when they're specifically broadcasting their anonymity? The answer was simple: you don't, and everyone ignores the problem. Mostly.
"You old enough to drink, girl?" asked the bartender, a burly, graying old man who could have passed for a bouncer if he'd been a decade or two younger. I'm pretty sure that's what he said; the music was loud enough that I was relying more on lip-reading than actual sound to understand him.
"Nope!" I said cheerfully. "Gimme something fruity and virgin." He mixed up some kind of smoothie-like drink; it was okay, but not amazing, and probably not worth the money.
"Most people would have lied," the person next to me shouted over the music. "No one's gonna challenge it."
"'Most people' must want to get drunk," I yelled back, then did a spit-take when I looked over at the speaker.
"What? Something on my mask?"
"Wondering how I missed you when I sat down." It wasn't too surprising that I hadn't noticed; the pounding music and flashing lights were playing hell with my situational awareness. The frilly white and silver costume was splattered in distracting rainbow hues by the overhead lights, and the Venetian mask hadn't been visible from the back. I leaned in slightly closer and rested a cheek on one hand, obscuring my lips from other observers. "Bit of a shock to realize I sat down next to the second most dangerous master in the city," I murmured at the top of my lungs.
"That would be a bigger complement if there were more than two masters in the city," Regent snarked.
"Four, by my count," I corrected.
"Semantics." He waved his hand dismissively. "Not that I want to be 'dangerous', of course."
I nodded. "'Effective' is better. More success, less trouble."
"Good work earns more work, though."
"Of course, the Master creed: 'why do yourself what others can do for you?'"
The joke fell flat. "You know me, but I've never heard of you," he said with a scowl. "Your costume says speedster, your attitude says brute, and your drink says poser. Who are you?"
I bit back a sharp retort. "Name's Flux. Just someone new in town looking for a bit of trouble."
"Looking for trouble, eh?" Regent looked like he wanted to say more, but instead grumbled, "Ah, hell, that's my cue to leave." He dropped a roll of bills on the counter and slouched off into the crowd. I tracked him for a few moments, then realized he'd seen something behind me before taking off, and turned around just in time to meet Faultline face-to-face.
The owner of the Palanquin was a woman with an eye for practicality in her gear. Her 'costume' was half dress, half riot gear, featuring a bulletproof vest over a martial-arts-uniform-esque skirt that probably concealed more armor on her legs. Gray and black predominated, and her face was covered by a solid welding mask with a single massive rent for her eyes where the visor should be; the result looked like she'd narrowly escaped having her head taken off by a twelve-foot-tall cassowary.
Faultline cut straight to business. "Don't see many new faces showing up with a full suit like that. What's your name, kid?" It was even harder to understand her than Regent or the bartender, since that damn welding mask muffled her voice and obscured her lips. I was really guessing on some of those words.
"Flux. You must be Faultline." I offered a hand, and she shook it; my opinion of her rose slightly when she declined to engage in any bullshit grip-strength posturing. In the background, the current song wound down and was replaced by something slower, although still bowel-shakingly loud. At least it was slightly easier to hear people talk.
"New in town, or just passing through?" she asked brusquely.
"New. Here to stay, barring unforeseen circumstances. Looking for a bit of freelance work." I pulled out a card from my jacket, bearing just the name 'Flux' and a phone number. "I won't answer; leave a voicemail with a way to contact you."
She took the card and crushed it in one hand; there was a brief flare of light before she dumped the resulting confetti onto the already-dirty floor. "We don't hire freelancers," she said.
Ouch. "You also don't do jobs in the city. Don't shit where you eat, I get it." It was hard to read her under all that armor, so I had no idea how close she was to kicking me out—or kicking my ass. "But, I figure that might mean you need a little plausible deniability, sometimes. Keep me in mind?" I drew out another card and set it on the counter, playing it as cool as I could.
"Look, kid, I don't know how things work where you come from, but that sort of thing doesn't fly around here. If you'd come here looking to sign up, we could have worked something out, but I run a team, not a temp agency. Your bravado isn't making you any friends, either."
Part of me wanted to call her out over calling me 'kid' when I was older than she was, and I had to remind myself that I wasn't—physically, anyway. Instead, I took a deep breath and set the card down on the counter calmly. "Didn't mean to offend, ma'am," I said, dialing the arrogance way down. "You've got a reputation for success, and I was hoping to share in a bit of that while I settled in. You're right, though, I'm not looking to join up."
"Well, if you do decide to throw your lot in with a team, maybe you'll keep us in mind," Faultline said, picking up the card and tucking it into a pocket on the front of her flak jacket.
I did my best to conceal my surprise at the sudden reversal in attitude. "I might," I said, "but I'm not looking to travel too much."
She nodded in understanding. "At least we're unlikely to meet as enemies, then. You seem an alright sort. Not many capes can keep a cool enough head to back down from a pissing match, especially teenagers."
I'm at least five years your senior, asshole. "I appreciate the sentiment," I lied, "but if it's all the same, could you turn down the condescension? You already called me 'kid' twice."
She snorted, which made a strange hollow sound inside her helmet. "If you're mature enough to ask politely, I suppose I owe you that much. Hope you enjoy the Palanquin… Flux." Faultline headed back towards the Staff Only door, pausing to exchange a few words with the bartender, and I turned back to my drink. It had already gotten watery from the melting ice while we talked. Oh well, I hadn't been particularly fond of it anyway.
"What's my bill?" I asked as the barkeeper passed by.
"On the house," he yelled back. I passed him a ten, hopped off the stool, and made my way out of the club, heart pounding.
Intellectually, I knew I hadn't been in any real danger. Even if I'd offended Faultline enough to get myself thrown out, she was extremely unlikely to start a potentially damaging fight in the middle of her own club unless I escalated first. But facing down a cape in full costume was still a bit like staring down a lion. I'd kept cool as a cucumber during the confrontation, but once the moment had passed the adrenaline had made itself felt. I made sure to get out of sight before the shaking started to show.
"Where have you been?" Homura asked neutrally when I got home a couple hours after midnight.
"Palanquin." I didn't see any reason to lie; teenage body or not, I was a grown woman. I could damn well spend a night out, especially if I wasn't drinking. She must have thought similarly, since she didn't feel the need to critique my choices.
"Anything happen?"
"I think I made a good impression on Faultline, somehow. Oh, and I ran into Regent at the bar."
"One moment." She pulled an item out of her shield's pocket dimension and pushed it into my hands. "Hold this."
"What is it?"
"Rolodex." She stared at it for a few seconds, then took it back. "Thanks."
"Sure, no problem." I had no idea what I had just done, and wasn't particularly curious. "Goodnight, Hom—I mean, Emily."
"Goodnight."
———X==X==X———
I felt much better the following week. The stress of mingling with people who had the power and/or authority to kick me across the room had satisfied my craving for conflict, at least for now. It would be back, and it would want more, but that was a problem for another day.
Taylor finally showed up on the seventh; a Monday. The first 'warning' I had that she was coming was the fact that the bugs that normally annoyed me on the roof were absent, but I only realized that in hindsight, after she'd pushed open the roof door.
"You've been eating up here every day for a month," she said.
I didn't bother asking how she knew that. "I was hoping you'd show up," I said truthfully. The statement made Taylor uncomfortable, but I figured bullshitting her wouldn't endear me to her. She sat down next to me and pulled out a tupperware container full of salad.
"How did it work, for you?" she asked after a few minutes of eating in silence.
"What?"
"You said you were bullied when you were young. How'd you make it stop?"
"That's a long story, if you've got time." Taylor shot me a look that conveyed quite clearly that she had nothing better to do. "Right. Where should I start?"
The bullying I'd had as Kasey had just sort of disappeared somewhere, like a dropped plot thread. My life back home would make a far better answer, although I'd have to fudge a few details. "When I was in middle school—I was probably twelve or so at the time—my parents saw that I was struggling to get along with other kids and put me in an after-school program for 'poorly socialized children'. That mostly meant kids who were bullying others, rather than the kids being bullied. There are a lot of reasons kids become bullies. Some of them just don't know how to act around other kids, so they become aggressive and confrontational. Some kids are taking out their insecurity or self-hatred on others, some kids do it because they need to feel like they have power or control. And some kids are probably actual sociopaths who just like causing pain, although I don't think I've ever one of those.
"Sorry, got off track. Back to my story: being put in a small group with four to six kids who were 'poorly socialized', mostly in the first sense of 'didn't know how to act nice so acted mean instead', was a bit of a trial-by-fire for me, but it taught me a lot about how to relate to other people, and how to not get angry when someone said or did something that was, well, 'not nice', for lack of a better word. In school, I stopped crying when they taunted me, so they didn't have any encouragement to continue. More than that, I started engaging with the bullies socially. I acted like I was already part of their group, and they just adapted to that. I learned to laugh at myself, so when they made fun of me, they were laughing with me, rather than at me; and I learned how to tell those kinds of jokes, so they'd have to laugh at themselves, too. By the time middle school ended, the kids who'd bullied me in sixth grade were almost my friends."
Taylor hadn't reacted at all to my rambling, long-winded recounting. She eventually asked, "You just forced them to be your friends?"
I made a face. "That makes it sound sinister. I'd say it was more of a 'fake it 'til you make it' sort of situation. I acted like I belonged, and they decided to let me."
"And that worked?"
"Yeah. It wasn't easy, and I wasn't perfect. I slapped a kid at one point. But eventually I managed to fit in." I sighed. "I get the feeling that wouldn't work for you, though," I admitted.
"Why's that?"
"Because you've been singled out. I wouldn't have described my bullying as a 'campaign'; it was just something they did because I was there, like kicking a rock down the road. Emma seems really focused on you, though, so what worked for me probably wouldn't work for you. Not reacting isn't going to make her give up, no matter how long you last." Taylor slumped as I finished speaking, curling into a ball around her chicken Caesar. Shit, that was her plan A, wasn't it?
"I just want them to leave me alone," she muttered.
"I know," I said. "Can I help?"
Taylor shook her head.
"Let me rephrase that. I want to help. Will you let me?"
She stared at me for a long time before shaking her head again. "Why are you so…" She let the question hang unfinished.
"Persistent?" I guessed.
"Convenient," she corrected irritably. "If I fantasized about having someone swoop in and save me from all this bullshit, it would be someone like you. Pretty much exactly like you. Rich, pretty, smart. Older and wiser. Protective." Taylor's gaze was intense, to the point it felt like I was being dissected. "You are too good to be true. Who are you, that you're such a perfect answer to my problems?"
"I… I'm Kasey." Was I feeling killing intent from Taylor? I took a breath and rallied. "Maybe it's because I'm such a good answer to your problems that I want to help! I'm trying to rebuild my life, you know! This is something I can do. At least one good thing can come out of all that shit."
She wasn't impressed, but I carried on anyway. "I get that you're suspicious—you've probably been burned before—but I swear to you that I'm on the level. I'm not here to set you up for a fall or take advantage of you. I want to be your friend."
Taylor kept staring, and I looked away rather than try to keep up the staring contest. When I finally looked back, she'd gone back to her normal, timid self, protectively huddled around her lunch. I went back to eating, and after a moment, she followed suit.
"They're going to target you too, if they see you spending time with me," Taylor said after we'd finished.
"Let 'em try," I said.
"I'm not going to be a very good friend."
"I'll be the judge of that."
"I don't even know what friends do, anymore," she whispered.
"Well, then," I said. "Do you want to come over to my house after school?"
———X==X==X———
I called Emily to let her know that I'd be bringing a friend home with me. I expected her to show up in the van she'd used back in January; instead, she showed up in a luxury car that, while lacking the absurd come-hither aura of that fucking car, was nevertheless a very nice, very expensive ride. This was a problem because Taylor emerged from her last period class covered in glue from head to toe.
I whisked her back into the school building, into one of the bathrooms, and began sponging the glue off with wet paper towels. I absolutely cheated: the hand I was using to 'steady' her under my aggressive cleaning let me temporarily change the physics of her skin and clothes to repel the sticky crap, while my hand on the paper towel did the opposite. By the time I was done, she was as clean as if she'd never suffered the indignity in the first place; I was even able to get it out of her hair.
"How did you clean that up so well?" she asked as I balled up the last of the soiled paper towels.
"I was diagnosed with OCD in seventh grade," I deflected. "They were able to mostly eliminate it, since they'd caught it before it could become ingrained, but I still have a few obsessive tendencies, particularly around stickiness. I hate having any sort of sticky feeling, especially on my hands." It was all true, just completely irrelevant, but if she noticed I hadn't actually answered her question, she didn't call me on it. I took her back out to the curb, introduced her to Emily, and we piled into the car and drove off.
It took almost half an hour to get home, since Emily wasn't using any magical traffic-ignoring properties this car may have had. We pulled into our entirely mundane, normal-dimensional garage, and I started showing Taylor around the house. Murphy saw to it that she immediately singled out the group photo I'd unpacked the first day I'd been here. "Who are they?" she asked, picking the frame up off the shelf. She was too focused on the picture to see the face I made at the question.
"My friends," I said simply, taking the picture out of her hands to hold it myself. Taylor stepped around behind me, using her height to peer over my shoulder. I pointed at the photo. "That's Kevin, Rachel, Jack…" One by one, I named each of the dozen people in the photograph. All people I'd known back home, recreated with me here on Bet and then erased. I didn't want to think too hard about what that meant, as far as how much this world had changed to accommodate me, and what sort of responsibility that left me with. "…and me," I finished, pointing to myself at the right edge of the group.
"You look happy," she said.
"We were," I agreed.
Taylor cringed. "Oh." She hesitated, but ultimately asked, "Did any of them…?"
"The flood got them all." My eyes were dry, but my voice still wavered slightly. "This is all I have left of them."
Taylor reached out and put her hand on my shoulder. It was an awkward, uncertain movement with slightly too much force behind it, but she tried. "I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't mean to bring up painful memories."
"I'm okay," I said stubbornly. "They're good memories, even if they hurt. I was lucky to know them." I ran a hand over the photograph, leaving fingerprints on the protective plastic. "It helps to remind myself that they're not really gone. I'll see them again someday."
"Uh," Taylor said, and I mentally kicked myself for getting so lost in thought I forgot who I was speaking to. "My family… isn't religious," she said awkwardly.
"Forget I said anything," I told her, meaning it literally. I put the photo back on the shelf and wiped a finger under my eyes to make sure they were still dry.
We spent an hour playing boardgames and talking about nothing. Music, books, current events; I did most of the talking, but I made sure Taylor was at least engaged enough to offer an opinion on the topics, moving on if she wasn't. Time flew, and soon Taylor pointed out that she needed to be back by the time her dad got home from work. Emily took us both back into the city to drop her off at home.
"If you're the same age, why does only she drive?" Taylor asked me on the way.
"Remember what I said about being the baby of the family?"
She frowned. "That doesn't seem very fair."
"She's not serious," Emily said from the front seat. "Kasey could borrow my car if she wanted. She just likes being chauffeured around."
"You have a car. I don't," I said.
"I was away at college. You always borrowed…" she trailed off.
I swallowed a lump in my throat. "I know, 'Ellie," I said. "You know I love you."
"Love you too, nerd." Taylor smiled at the byplay, and I grinned right back.
———X==X==X———
I spent the next week encouraging Taylor to brave the school cafeteria. I don't think she actually believed I'd be able to stop her bullies from abusing her, but by Friday she was sick enough of my nagging that she agreed. "It won't be as bad as you think, trust me," I told her as we sat down at a table along one of the walls, across from a couple of freshman who didn't acknowledge our presence at all. I had my sandwich in one hand and a tiny compact mirror in the other; much more subtle than constantly glancing over my shoulder.
"I'd think twice about that if I were you," I announced to the air five minutes later. In the mirror, I saw Julia stiffen and glance at the open carton of milk in her hand, then spin on her heel and head back to her table. I used my power to flex the mirror, 'zooming in' on the scene. After a few moments, Emma and Sophia stood up. "Don't look now, but trouble's coming," I told Taylor. "We can leave, if you want." She shook her head. "I've got your back if you want to speak up, but you don't have to say anything. Just try not to panic, okay?" She was already panicking, but she nodded anyway; she was a tough one, no mistake.
I relaxed slightly when I saw that neither girl had any food in hand, but that just made it less likely I'd have to physically restrain one of them from doing something stupid. Once they'd gotten close enough, I said, "I'd be very careful what you say around me, Emma." Like Julia, the pair stiffened at my sudden address, but unlike her, they soldiered on. Taylor had turned her body around by this point, and as they closed the distance I did the same.
"Neat trick," Emma said. "You using a mirror or something?"
I smiled sheepishly. "Got it in one," I said, displaying the mirror for her to see. It was an actual accident that I reflected the glare from the overhead lights right into her eyes, but my apology wasn't very sincere. "Sorry."
She clicked her tongue. "When I saw you back here, I thought you'd finally given up, but I guess you're more stubborn than I thought. What made you think dragging her in here was a good idea?"
I glanced at Taylor, but her expression was blank and unreadable. "I thought I'd be able to prove that she didn't have to live in constant fear of harassment. I guess you just can't control yourselves." I deliberately echoed Emma's wording.
Emma sneered at me. "I don't think you should be talking to me about self-control. How many pounds of mayonnaise did you put on that sandwich?"
"I suppose your model for self-control is your gag reflex," I shot back. Taylor stifled a laugh.
"The fuck are you laughing at?" Sophia demanded. She leaned forward; I put an arm out between her and Taylor, who'd made an 'eep' noise at the blatant threat display.
"Back off." To Taylor's visible surprise, Sophia did. "Sorry, that was too easy," I told Emma, which only made her more angry. "What I meant to say is: you could have kept me completely fooled if you'd just held back enough to not be a bitch where I could see it."
"I'm not trying to 'fool' anybody," Emma retorted. "This is how the world works. Better people rise to the top. Her? She's trash. You can lie to her all you want, but she doesn't deserve anything but what she gets."
"How very fascist of you."
"Fuck you!" Emma pulled a hand back to hit me, but Sophia got a hand on her wrist in time.
"You don't want to hit her," Sophia hissed. "Cool it." Emma looked between Sophia and me. I could see the moment where she remembered how well I'd done against Sophia in a fight, because she flinched slightly before she lowered her hand.
"Listen to her," I said. "And listen to me. You may not be a Nazi, but if you're going to start separating people into 'worthy' and 'unworthy', or talk about 'betters' and 'lessors', that's not a good look."
"Some people aren't worth the time," Sophia said. "It's not about race, for fuck's sake. If you can't swim, you're gonna sink to the bottom."
"You mean you push me to the bottom!" Taylor yelled, the emotions she'd been holding back suddenly boiling over. "I can't very well 'swim' with you holding me down! You never—!"
I wasn't fast enough to block, this time; Sophia stepped forward and sucker-punched Taylor in the gut as hard as she could. I had just enough time to get my hand on Taylor's arm before Sophia's fist met an immovable object. The crack of breaking bones was clearly audible.
Oh fuck. I just did that.
Sophia hissed in pain and clutched her broken wrist. Taylor recoiled, looking from her stomach to Sophia in confusion. Emma was completely lost. "The fuck?" she asked. "What the fuck just happened?"
"Nothing," Sophia spat. She was glaring daggers at me—she'd realized what I'd done. "Fucked up my wrist."
Emma sniffed disdainfully. "You won't be laughing later," she told us, before the two girls turned and left the cafeteria, probably heading to the nurse's office. I stayed poised and confident until they'd disappeared into the crowd, then dropped my face into my hands.
"I could have handled that better," I said.
"That was unpleasant," Taylor said. I looked up to see that she still looked confused. "I think you hit a nerve there."
"So did you. Shit. I wonder if Sophia's going to show this afternoon."
"Huh?"
I shook my head. "Sorry, thinking out loud. We usually spar on Fridays."
Taylor's brow furrowed. "I thought you weren't friends anymore."
"I don't have to be friends with someone to spar with them. It's not like beating the crap out of someone is a very friendly activity."
"Then why…" she started to ask, then switched questions. "I didn't imagine that, did I? She broke her wrist."
"I think so, yeah." I sat there, waiting for Taylor to ask, to demand to know what the hell had happened.
She didn't. We spent the rest of the lunch period in silence, undisturbed.
———X==X==X———
Sophia showed up to the sparring session with a cast on her wrist. "Hudson."
"Hess."
"I'm not throwing any punches like this. Let's walk." I followed her out into the street. The temperature had risen a bit, but it was still cold, and recent rains had left puddles on the streets and sidewalks. "The fuck did you do?" she asked.
"Something stupid," I said.
She snorted. "No shit." We kept walking. "You said she was a breaker."
"What?"
"You know… the cape."
Ah, so that's how she was going to play it. "I did."
"Striker, too, huh?"
"Yeah. What I—what she can do to herself, she can do to anyone she touches."
"Can she kill someone by making them too heavy?" she asked.
"No. It works for them the same way it does for m—for her. She can still breath even if she's unmoveable." I hadn't actually tested whether that applied to other people, which was just one reason why what I'd done had been stupid. I'd acted on instinct, trusted the mechanics of the power to make sure I didn't accidentally kill someone with their own body mass, and the fact that I'd been right didn't retroactively make it less of a stupid thing to do.
"Huh." Sophia didn't say anything while another man passed us on the sidewalk. "Hebert knows what's up, then?" she asked once he was out of earshot.
"I don't think I can hide it, if she pushes, but she hasn't yet."
"See what I mean?" Sophia asked. "Compare me and Hebert. I suspect, and I go straight to you. You actually do something to her, and she sticks her head in the sand and ignores it?"
"You weren't exactly direct," I shot back.
"I was as direct as you can be, when you're dealing with shit like this."
I frowned. "Fair enough," I allowed.
"Yeah. Identity shit is fucking weird. S'why we talk about things in the third person. Deniability, see? 'Just gossiping.'" Sophia paused to see if I understood, so I nodded. "I beat around the bush a bit, trying to feel you out, but when push came to shove I asked what I wanted to ask. You think Hebert would push like that? You think she'd follow you up to the roof?"
"I think she would, if she hadn't spent two years learning not to confront anyone."
Sophia snickered. "I bet she'd follow you off the roof if you asked her to. She's so desperate she'd do anything for the first person to show her even a lick of kindness. Like a lost puppy."
"You think that's funny?" I asked harshly. "You think it's funny that you managed to break someone down like that, to the point where they can't have normal, healthy social interaction?"
"That's who she is," Sophia said. "She was always gonna break. Don't blame me just because I was the first thing that happened to do it."
I stopped and grabbed her shoulder roughly, turned her to face me. "She was right."
"What—"
"What she said, what made you hit her. She hit a nerve, didn't she? You say victims like her always end up back in the same place, but I say you made sure to put her there, each and every time she started to climb out!"
"You don't know shit!" Sophia yelled.
"What's wrong? You don't want to think about the fact that you're the 'place' the victim keeps ending—"
"SHUT THE FUCK UP!" She slapped me as hard as she could with her good hand. I let it happen, took the hit on my cheek, turning my head with the blow and adjusting myself slightly to lessen the impact without bending like rubber or breaking her other hand. The slap rang like a bell in the silence that followed.
I turned my head back to neutral with a grimace, rolling my neck as I did so. "Sore spot," I said, massaging my cheek with one hand.
"Shut the fuck up unless you want to get hit again."
"I didn't break your other hand. Don't make me regret that."
We glared at each other for a few seconds before I stood down. "Who was it?" I asked.
The question caught her off guard. "What?"
"Who was it who wouldn't stay saved?" Sophia bristled harder, which I didn't think was possible. I took half a step back; not in retreat, but to settle into my stance. It wasn't necessary; she turned away and resumed her walk down the street, and I followed a step behind her.
"You just can't stay out of other people's business, can you?" she asked.
"I'm nosy," I admitted. "I shouldn't have asked, though."
"Yeah, no shit."
Cass is finally starting to make friends and influence people.
The Car (alternately that fucking car) is, to me, one of the funniest things in this story, which is really the only reason it exists. I forgot to point it out at the time, but its introduction in chapter 6 is hands-down the smuttiest thing I have ever written.
I'm interested to hear what people think of my interpretations of canon characters: Taylor, Sophia, Faultline, etc. I'm trying to avoid falling into the fanon pigeonholes.
While writing conversations with Taylor, I tried to keep track of her perspective even when I wrote from Cass's/Kasey's. Looking back on these chapters, I sort of wish I'd actually written Taylor's POV down, if only because it would make an interesting 'special feature' or similar. I could go back and do it now, but I don't think it would be the same.
Thanks for writing this. The different take on the Worm cast is nice, and with it not being Taylor's viewpoint, I can see how the characters still match the story with the outside perspective.
I slammed through the door with the force of a semi-truck. The pair of goons inside were still turning around when I sighted down the pistol and pulled the trigger; two shots each dropped them like abandoned puppets. Another one opened the door to my left, reacting to the sudden noise, and one failure-to-stop drill later I left three bodies behind, replacing the half-empty magazine as I went. I was tempted to go through the wall, now that the gunshots would have alerted everyone in the building, but there was only so much damage I was willing to do to the place.
A hail of bullets greeted me at the next door, which was why I'd been careful not to be standing in front of it when I'd kicked it off its hinges. Rather than stepping into the doorway, I grabbed the doorframe and pulled, stretching the opening sideways and allowing me to fire one-handed through a gap that physically shouldn't exist. Three of the fuckers dropped, but the last ran out of the room before I could sight on him, disappearing deeper into the building. I hurried after him, reloading as I ran, and burst into a long hallway with three enemies at the far end, including the runner. They aimed for center of mass; I dropped onto my back from a full sprint, sliding frictionlessly as I fired from a supine position. My aim was sloppy, though, and I had to fumble another magazine into the pistol before executing the one I'd only wounded. He'd still been reaching for his weapon, rather than trying to stem his bleeding gut wound like I'd expect a real person to do.
"Cass?" Jenn called from the room behind me. "You in here?"
"Yeah! I'll be right out!" I yelled as I pulled the AR goggles off. They only overlayed images on the visor, rather than creating a full environment; without them, the building looked almost exactly the same, except for the lack of bullet holes, blood, and bodies. The gun I'd been using had recoil, noise, and handling accurate to the Glock it was based on, but fired gooey, less-lethal training bullets that stuck to walls like paste; the resulting mess actually looked a bit like bullet holes from a distance. They still hurt like a bitch if they hit you, as David had demonstrated; immediately after showing me how to set up the course, he'd shot me in the gut with the training pistol (to demonstrate that I still needed to be careful), then manhandled me when I tried to smack him for it.
The sim tracked me and my gun through cameras in the corners of the rooms, and where I fired by looking for the bright blue gunk. The enemies were virtual, so I wasn't actually being shot at, but getting 'hit' meant failing the course. We had a full holodeck, but it was always occupied, while I'd only seen anyone else in here once. The holodeck was a little uncanny-valley, anyway; it was too good at simulating people for me to be comfortable shooting up a place. The combat course enemies were still recognizably simulated.
The building would reset itself the next time someone started a run, but I still picked up my brass on my way back to the entrance, where I found Jennifer hard at work setting the door I'd knocked off its hinges back in place. "Sorry about that," I said. "I got kinda carried away."
"That's what the building is for," she said, stepping back as the self-repair magic-and-or-technology took over reattaching it to the frame. "What were you running?"
"Beginner action-hero exercises," I said. "Almost through the rookie courses." Running combat sims with my powers helped a lot with my general restlessness. Emily had pointed the option out to me following my trip out to the Palanquin; I was embarrassed that I hadn't thought of it myself. I returned the goggles, pistol, and ammo to the racks in the course antechamber, and we headed out into the Warehouse proper. "What's up?" I asked.
"Max just got back. I thought you might want to catch up."
"Will you be coming?"
"Am I invited?" Jennifer asked hopefully.
"Absolutely."
"Cool."
The combat course was a couple streets away from the lounge on another side of the square, so we had a couple minute's walk to chat. "Do all the potions in the pharmacy work?" I asked. "Like, outside their normal world?"
"Well, yes and no," Jenn said. "They work on us, but if you gave one to someone in the current world, it wouldn't do anything. I have to brew potions from scratch in the world if I want them to work on people."
"Ah." That was a pretty seriously limit on how effectively we could provide medical aid.
"Yeah. We have some stuff that's fiat-backed, if you really need emergency medical supplies, but otherwise you'll have to order them in advance."
I raised an eyebrow. "Order them, huh? From who?"
"Me!" Jenn said proudly. "I'm the resident potions expert. You need something made, just give the word!"
"I don't suppose I could just ask for some general health potions for emergencies?"
Jenn made a face. "Health potions are tricky. Worm doesn't have a concept of 'health', you know, so anything I make is going to be a lot weaker than it should be. Stamina potions are a-okay, though."
"Why stamina, but not health?"
"'Cause caffeine exists, I guess," she said, which got me to laugh.
We were just crossing the main square when someone called out to me. "Rolins!"
"Yeah?" I stopped and turned to see Kara Thrace leaning against the back of the fountain. Jenn waved goodbye and kept walking, leaving us to talk in relative privacy. Kara Thrace is talking to you. Be cool, Kasey! "Ah, hello. I thought you'd died."
"So?"
"Huh?"
"Is that a problem?" she demanded.
"No?" This conversation was not going as I'd hoped. "I just thought you'd be out for the rest of the jump, that's all."
"Frack that. I don't stay dead."
"I… see…" I lied.
Kara ignored my confusion. "Rimmer said you'd named your cat after me."
"I, uh, well…" I stammered. "I did ask that he not mention that."
"You actually named your cat after me?"
"Yeah. Well, sorta? I named her Starbuck."
She snorted. "I thought he was kidding."
"Nope." For some reason, I went on to volunteer, "I call her Buckles."
Kara gave me an odd look that I could only quantify as 'disbelief'. "I ever catch you calling me that, I'm'a pop you in the frackin' mouth."
"I'll keep that in mind," I said cheerfully.
"You're not supposed to be happy about that!"
"Sorry."
Kara rolled her eyes and stalked off. I kept grinning as I made my way to the lounge. Being threatened with physical harm by Kara Fracking Thrace herself was one of the coolest things that had happened to me thus far, and I wasn't going to ruin it by thinking too hard about that.
"—genocide is a reasonable option," Max was saying to Ace as I finally walked into the lounge. "Oh, hi, Cass. Kasey?"
"Whichever." I walked over and dropped into the couch across from Ace; Max and Jennifer had the armchairs on the other two sides of the rectangle. Zero was lying across Ace's couch with her head in his lap, pounding away on a handheld game console, bare feet hanging off the side of the couch towards Jenn. "Hey, Max, Ace, Zero." I got a couple 'hey's back. "What was that about genocide?"
"I was saying that this is the first jump in which I was actually considering genocide to be a reasonable solution. Let me finish!" he said preemptively. "The problem is that even if we deal with Zion, there are still amoral, omnicidal space-whales flitting through the multiverse like planet-sucking mosquitoes."
"Do you have a way of affecting any of them?" I asked. "They're way out there; even ignoring the distances involved, the dimensions they're in may be well off the 'human' part of the multiverse."
"That is the problem," he admitted.
"Planning a Chichen Itza?" Ace asked.
"Fuck no!" Max said immediately.
"I didn't mean literal ritual sacrifice," Ace clarified, "I meant a general sort of universe-wide Entity-killing effect."
"I'd consider it if I had one," Max admitted. "The problem is the outside-context downgrade. Obviously, there aren't any 'parahuman-like' abilities that would let me do that, so I have to deal with the penalty. Trying to wipe the entities out would be extremely taxing without that; as it is, I'd need to find a way to pump five times as much power into any ritual or spell I might use, to make up for the point two multiplier. I'm not sure I can get that kind of power without dipping into some downright questionable sources."
"Questionable?" Jenn asked.
"Evil," Ace said.
"Even if you drag Scion to the altar?" I asked.
"I don't think 'love conquers all' fits this situation," Zero snarked.
"Har har," Max said. "To answer your question, Cass: as far as I can tell, entities have fuck-all spiritual weight. For all their world-shaking power, they have the souls of cockroaches."
"Because they're not sapient?" I asked.
He shrugged. "Probably. You know, now that I'm thinking about it, there actually is something that could solve this whole mess neatly. But I didn't get it, because I thought I'd never want to use it."
"What are you thinking of?" Ace asked.
"If I'd taken the 'evil' scenario from Dark Souls, I could apply the Darksign to Zion and use him as a sympathetic link to spread it back to the rest of the Entities. They all go hollow in a few months, and then wither away to nothing."
"I'd expect that to be worse than what we have now," I said.
"What do you think would happen?" Max asked
"I have no idea, but I don't think spreading the curse of undeath would ever improve things."
"I've got to agree with Cass on this one," Zero said without looking up from her game.
He shook his head. "Lordran was as fucked as it was because the fire was dying. The universe was literally dying of old age, with only the cycle keeping it on life support. By the time the Darksign becomes an actual issue and the Entities stop staying dead, the universe would have burned itself down to embers. We're talking trillions of years. If Multivac hasn't found a way to reverse entropy at that point, the entities are irrelevant."
"Would the Darksign even do anything before that, though?" I asked.
"Yeah. It's a constant spiritual drain, even while the fire's lit. It's much less severe, though; to a human, it would manifest like a mild form of depression, and could be alleviated the same way; hell, with the multiplier, it would hardly be noticeable. But the entities have such meager souls, they wouldn't have time to adapt before they fell into the sleep of death until the end of time."
"None of that matters if you can't actually do it," Ace said.
"Yeah. It's all theory and no praxis." Max took a deep breath and blew it out through pursed lips. "I hate the thought that I might end up leaving without a solution."
"A final solution," Ace said neutrally.
"I suppose I was the one who called it genocide."
"If you're going to consider it, it's important to call it what it is," I said.
"I know. I can't rule out the possibility that there are sentient 'mutations' of Entities out there, but I don't think I can leave the entire universe to die, just on the off chance they exist."
"Wouldn't that ruin the Darksign plan?" Ace asked.
"Hmm. Probably. It wasn't really a plan to begin with, though; more of a thought experiment."
"Do we make plans?" I asked, to polite chuckling.
Ace answered, "It's not exactly a plan in and of itself, but I'm moving up the PRT ladder pretty quickly. I was already on the short list for the Phoenix directorship when I imported; I think I can get the whole Southwest region under my belt pretty soon."
Max nodded approvingly. "Your organization perks will really start paying dividends when you've got whole states running under your watch."
"I'm not a governor," Ace said. "Should I have gone into politics?"
"I think applying your anti-corruption perks at a high level of office would drive the nation into toxic shock from all the liquidated officials."
"They don't suddenly apoptosize!"
"That would be fucking sick to watch, though!" Zero added.
Max ignored her. "I was thinking more along the lines that having every corruption scandal happen at once would break the courts."
"That's probably true," Ace admitted. There was a lull in the conversation; only Zero's continued button mashing disturbed the silence. Jenn reached over to try and tickle her feet, and got kicked in the face for her troubles.
Ace changed the topic. "What's next for GUARD?"
"Nothing, for a while," Max said. "Right now we're using disposable identities to try and put west Asia back into some semblance of order." He yawned and stretched. "God, this place is a mess," he groaned. "It's been three months and I feel like we should be close to halfway done."
"You okay?" Jenn asked.
"Don't worry, I'll be fine. A lot of the pain on this jump is frontloaded. It'll get better the more S-Class threats we manage to drop."
"Oh, shit!" I said. "I completely forgot! What happened in Canberra?"
"We won," Max said proudly. "Hard—intercepted her at high altitude and kept her away from the city. No dome going up this time. Still lost dozens of defenders in the fight, but by Endbringer standards the death toll was pretty low.
"We might have been able to kill the bitch," he continued, "but we didn't have the contingencies set up to make sure another Endbringer wouldn't appear, so we didn't have a trap set up to keep her from fucking off back to high orbit. We'll be ready for Levi in May, though."
"What sort of contingencies?" I asked.
"We're not completely sure why Behemoth's canon death triggered more Endbringers." Max raised one hand. "It's possible it was specific to Scion being the one to kill it; Eidolon's shard might have reacted to the knowledge that Scion had proven measurably superior to a foe Eidolon had faced a dozen times without success, tried to make sure Eid still got his fights in. The best case scenario is that us killing an Endbringer makes him relax with the knowledge that there are other capes out there who can pick up the slack his fading powers are leaving."
Max raised his other hand. "On the other hand, it might bother him that he's fading out, being replaced by a new generation. Or maybe his shard will react badly to one of the Endbringers being killed regardless of how he feels about it." He shrugged and dropped his hands. "The first contingency is making sure we have a close eye on Eidolon before and after the battle; Ace making Regional Director would put Houston under his watch."
"Houston is Southwest?" I asked.
"Texas to Kansas to California," Ace answered.
Max ignored the interruption. "That only addresses the case that he's subconsciously forming new Endbringers; trying to monitor the shard is going to be a lot harder. That's the second contingency. The third contingency is that we need to be prepared for the possibility that we won't be able to actually stop a new Endbringer from forming until we see it happen once, which would be… rough."
"Couldn't you just kill that one, too?" Jennifer asked.
"They adapt," Ace and I said over each other. I motioned for him to continue. "Canonically, the Endbringers changed tactics after Behemoth's death, making their attacks short and precisely targeted so that Scion wouldn't arrive in time to engage them. The Fourth Endbringer had a powerset specifically designed for hyper-mobility, creating a days-long hit-and-run fight that spanned continents."
"I'm not sure I want to see what the Endbringers would do against us," Max said. "In the worst case, we could end up dealing with a God Hand situation."
"A what now?" I asked.
"Needing a unique attack vector for every fight," Ace explained.
"In which case we have to stop them from forming before we run out of tricks, or we're fucked," Max continued.
"So how do you stop them from forming?" Jenn asked.
Max's silence was telling.
"Eidolon's death would do it," Zero said. The rest of us looked at her with varying degrees of shock and unease. "I'm not suggesting we just murder him—not until we've tried everything else we can think of—but if we gave him the choice, he'd be willing to die, right?"
"To die for the sake of the world?" Max frowned. "Yeah. He'd probably accept that, I think," he said grudgingly.
"He effectively committed suicide when Scion told him," Ace said. "If you explained the entire situation, I think stopping him from dying would be harder."
"Would him dying now would stop the Endbringers immediately?" I asked. Ace and Max exchanged a glance, and then shrugged.
"Too many variables," Ace said.
"That sums up this entire mess," Max said. "We need to do a traceback on Eid's shard connection, see if we can figure out how it links him to the various powers it gives him. Then we need to find the shard responsible for the EBs and monitor that, both idle and during an attack, then see if it starts acting differently after we kill one of them. Then maybe we can actually form a proper plan."
"You have any idea how Eidolon's shard actually works?" I asked.
Max shook his head. "Nope. Do you?"
"Well, it's just a theory—"
"I'm running off fan theories anyway," he said. "Let's hear it."
I cleared my throat self-consciously. "Well, I always liked the theory that Eidolon got an 'index' shard, or at least a piece of one—a card catalogue, basically. His brain-dead agent grabs powers erratically from the list on the intact index fragment based on his current needs, sort-of 'hyperlinking' him to various other damaged or fading shards. I think the Endbringers come from one of those shards that kept running in the background."
"So he starts Endbringer dot ee-ex-ee by accident and it just runs in the background until Scion logs him out?" Ace asked.
"I said it was just a theory," I said defensively.
"Sorry, I didn't mean to criticize. It's as good a theory as any."
"If that's the case, we should be able to destroy the Endbringer shard without any backlash landing on Eidolon at all," Max said.
Ace nodded. "Unfortunately, if he's not actually connecting to the EndShard, a trans-dimensional trace won't help."
"Not necessarily," Max said. "We know there's still a connection because the Endbringers changed after he died. It's just not 'active'."
"Point."
"There's a problem with your Theory of Eidolon," Zero said. She still hadn't looked away from her game the entire time I'd been here. "It's reasonable to assume the existence of a Shard Index, but it would be a Shard Index, not a power index. The Shards customize themselves to grant a subset of their abilities as powers during the trigger event."
"That's true," I admitted. "Well, it was just a theory."
"Depending on the nature of the 'hyperlink', as Cass put it, it could still work," Ace said. "The shards might be treating each new connection as cause to reconfigure their ability subset."
"If that process is taxing, it would explain why the shards are running out of power so fast," Max added.
"I don't think it is," Ace said. "More likely, they're just damaged, or they weren't earmarked for dispersal, and weren't 'charged' before Eden hit."
"Still, I like the sound of this," Max said. "If you can get Lauren in a room with Eidolon for an hour, she should be able to get a good look at his shard and any connections it may have, see if we're on the right track."
"Who's she?"
"Modulus."
Ace sucked in a breath through his teeth, then blew it out in a huff. "Putting an independent power copier in a room with one of the Triumvirate isn't going to go over well."
"I wouldn't need your help if it was going to be easy."
"'Course not." Ace looked over at me. "How are things going in Brockton?"
"Uh, good?"
"If you need help, don't be afraid to call," Max said. "I know we just finished talking about some pretty high-stakes shit, but that doesn't mean we don't have time to drop by."
"I'm always down for some violence," Zero chimed in.
"No, I'm good," I insisted. "Nothing's even happened yet."
"Homura's looking out for her," Jenn reminded them.
"Doesn't mean you can't be preemptive," Max said. "We're still in the phase where meta-knowledge outweighs the butterflies. Aren't you forgetting something?"
"Uh…"
"The Travelers," Ace said.
"Oh. Shit."
"Don't worry. I've already gone a plan for them." Max stood up and stretched. "Well, I'm going to get back to work. Good luck, everyone."
Ace said, "I should get—"
"Nope," Zero said.
"Honey, I have a meeting in an hour."
"Telecommute."
"Jenn, gimme a hand here?"
Jennifer stood up, grabbed Zero by the ankles, and threw her across the room like an Olympic hammer thrower. Zero didn't take her eyes off her handheld at all.
———X==X==X———
I spent most of the weekend in the Warehouse, burning off the nervous energy Friday's encounters had left we with. It also let me run into Erin the next time she stopped by. This jump, Erin was Ellen, a woman in her late twenties with shoulder-length brown hair… who I had known as Miss Nolan, the school Science and Technologies teacher back in Wisconsin. She'd been on the road back into town after running off to purchase some props from Home Depot for her next period class, and found the entire town underwater. She'd triggered as a meta-tinker in her horror, and promptly ripped her car apart and created a search and rescue submersible.
That explained Shadow Stalker's earlier confusion: pitch and tone are simple enough to change, but we both had Wisconsin accents.
Speaking of which: Taylor and Sophia both had my number. Neither of them called.
I didn't see Taylor at all the following week. I figured she was avoiding me, but when I met with Sophia on Friday for our third not-sparring session, I learned she hadn't been at school at all. "Maybe you finally scared her off," she said.
I didn't try to hide how unhappy that thought made me. "You really think friendship is what would finally keep her away?"
"It's not just friendship, is it?"
"What!?" No way did she just suggest that.
"Chill, Hudson," Sophia said sharply. "What's the issue? You didn't have a problem when Emma was playing at matchmaking us, so I know you're not a bigot."
"It's not that!"
"Didn't think so. You're gay as a rainbow."
I coughed nervously. "…you're not wrong."
"So what's the problem?"
I hadn't minded Emma's silliness because everyone involved had known it was a joke and treated it as such. Unfortunately, I couldn't exactly explain the age issue. "She's vulnerable."
Sophia chuckled. "You flipped out because you're going motherly on her, ain't you?"
"I am not!" I said. "Maybe," I admitted.
"That wasn't what I meant anyway. I meant that she's wondering if she's been making friends with a big scary cape."
"She spent a full year with a much scarier cape as an enemy."
"Flattery won't save you when this cast comes off, Hudson."
"How long is that going to take to heal?" I asked.
"Already healed. Shadow Stalker needs both hands." Sophia scratched at the plaster absently. "They actually made her slip into the same cast after her patrol. I'm gonna have this thing for a full month. I almost admire the lengths they go through to maintain this whole charade."
"Doesn't make it suck any less, does it?"
"Nope."
We arrived at an intersection and waited in silence for the light to change.
"For what it's worth, I'm sorry." I said as we resumed our walk towards the bay. "I didn't think it through."
"Lucky you," she snarked. "Normally when I don't think things through, I'm the one who gets hurt."
"That's harsh."
"True, though."
"As demonstrated by the cast?"
"Bitch," she said. It was almost affectionate.
I changed the subject. "You really think Taylor would skip school just to avoid me, after everything you've put her through?"
"You're asking me?"
"I don't have anyone else to ask." That wasn't completely true, but I didn't really want to go to Emily with my social problems.
"That's pretty sad, Hudson," Sophia said.
"Fuck you."
"Not gay."
I shoved her irritably, and she shoved me right back.
"You going to answer the question?" I asked.
Sophia grumbled a bit, then said, "No, I don't think she'd skip school just because her bestie accidentally outed herself as a cape." I relaxed slightly at her words. "Actually… hit me with it?"
"What?"
"Whatever you did to her. I want to know what it felt like."
"We should probably stop walking, just in case," I said. She nodded, and we stopped, stepping off the main sidewalk below the eaves of a watch repair shop. I grabbed her arm and gave her the same inertial inviolability I'd given Taylor, just for a split second.
"Huh. Barely feels like anything."
"Hard to notice?"
"Eh." Sophia shrugged. "Not something I'd miss, but not, like, full-body weirdness or anything."
"You are the expert on full-body weirdness."
"Bitch," she said again. I laughed and resumed walking, and she followed alongside me.
The street was quiet, only a car or two a minute disturbing the silence. It wasn't a particularly nice part of downtown, but it was still downtown, Protectorate territory. Windows weren't boarded, and rarely barred, and the walls were mostly lacking in graffiti. Not quite home, but certainly not the docks.
"It was my mother," she said about a block later.
"What?"
"You asked who it was who wouldn't stay saved. It was my mother."
"Oh." I'd forgotten I'd asked. "You don't have to tell me, if you don't want to."
"I mean, it's only fair, since I know your trigger, right?" She shrugged, like it wasn't a big deal. I wasn't going to argue if she was willing to share, so I just nodded, and she started her story.
"My dad died when I was very young. Too young to remember him, although Mom used to talk about him a lot. He worked construction, died in an accident on a build site. The company had cut corners, so they were liable for a load of cash. Mom was careful with the money, so we didn't have to worry about affording food or clothes even though her job didn't pay worth shit.
"It was just the three of us for a while: my mom, my brother, and me. Then when I was in fifth grade, Mom meets a guy." Her fists clenched at her sides. "She dates him, falls in love with him, agrees to marry him. Catches him in bed with one of her bridesmaids two weeks before the wedding." We'd been heading east, towards the bay; a gust of cold ocean wind hit us dead on as though to punctuate her story, bringing with it the smell of salt and garbage. "Of course, there's a massive fight. He apologizes, begs, promises it will never happen again, that it was a single moment of weakness.
"Mom forgave him. They got married. She got pregnant. He had an affair with his boss's secretary." Sophia stopped and sat down on a bench in front of a shuttered law office. I joined her a respectful distance away. "They had another fight. Screaming, crying, threatening divorce. It lasted days. And in the end, she forgave him. He said he was in love. He promised to change, to go to therapy. Turns out those 'therapy' sessions were him fucking more women.
"When Mom finally kicked him out of the house, I thought that was it. That she'd finally realized he wasn't going to change. Then he came back a month later with flowers and chocolate, and she let him move back in. I begged her not to, told her he was just going to cheat on her again, and she slapped me. She never hit us, even if we deserved it—and we were right little shits, sometimes—but for him, she slapped me!" Sophia pounded her cast-wrapped hand on the bench. "Ow!"
"Sorry."
"Shut up." Sophia shook out her 'injured' hand and dabbed at her eyes with her other. I didn't remind her that she'd already admitted her wrist had been healed; if she wanted to pretend the wetness in her eyes was from pain, I'd let her. "Stupid. Should be used to this kind of shit."
"You break a lot of bones?"
"I said shut up." I rolled my eyes, but I shut up. Sophia took her time making sure her eyes were dry before she resumed her story. "For two years, it was constant, non-stop fights. He fucked every woman who crossed his path, and every time, there was a shouting match, Mom throwing things, him begging for forgiveness. She'd kick him out, he'd make a tearful apology, she'd let him move back, he'd cheat again. Over and over." She swallowed. "Even when they were happy, I could never relax, because I knew it would happen again. It could happen any day, and if not then, then next week, or next month. I just wanted to escape, to get away from the fighting, the yelling, the anger, and one day I could." She flickered for a moment, then carried on without noticing she'd done so. "The next time he cheated, I confronted Mom, told her I'd kill him if he came by again. She was terrified of me—I might have been waving a knife around? I wasn't in my right mind. Well, obviously he came around again, but this time she shut the door in his face." I'd have expected her to say that with satisfaction, but she just sounded tired.
"Sixth months later, Mom started dating another guy. Didn't last long before she caught him in bed with some woman he'd met online." Sophia shook her head sadly. "She forgave him. Twice. After the third time, she ran back into his arms for comfort. I didn't bother trying to argue, because I realized it didn't matter. If she finally kicked him to the curb, it would just be the same shit with some other guy instead. It was her who was never going to change."
Sophia was to my right, which meant I was properly placed to put my hand on her good one. She didn't protest when I did. I wanted to say something, but 'Sorry' wouldn't cut it, so I stayed silent.
I could understand now, why she hated the perpetrators even as she blamed the victims. Watching her mother go through the cycle of abuse, allowing herself to be drawn back in time after time; Sophia had been broken just as much as Taylor had. She'd learned a harsh, warped lesson, and taken it upon herself to instruct others. And I'd taken it upon myself to try to fix that, because I thought I was equipped to handle it. I'd never felt less prepared.
I'm not sure how long we sat like that before Sophia broke the silence. "Do you really think people can change?" She asked. "You think you can get Hebert to shape up and stop being a loser?"
"You can't change people who don't want to change," I said carefully, "but anyone who's willing to learn can be taught."
"You think she's willing."
"I do."
Sophia considered that. "Why doesn't she learn?" she asked.
She'd gone back to talking about her mother. "Some people don't want to change," I said.
"Why?"
"I don't know."
She glanced over at me. "I thought you had all the answers."
I said, "I just like to pretend I do."
There was another long pause.
"You're trying to teach me too, aren't you?"
"I'm trying, yes. Are you willing to learn?"
Sophia didn't answer. But she still hadn't removed my hand from hers, and I couldn't help but see that as a good sign.
———X==X==X———
I finally heard from Taylor on Sunday, while I was lying on the couch at home after starting on and immediately failing the Intermediate Action Hero Exercises. ? Turning in circles, been caught in a stasis— ?
"Hello?"
"Kasey?"
"Taylor?"
"Yeah. Hi."
"Hi yourself."
There was an awkward pause.
"I had the flu all week," Taylor said.
"Oh," I said.
"You sound happy about that."
"I'm not happy about it!" I said. "I… was worried you were avoiding me, though."
"Oh," she said.
"Was there something you wanted to talk about?" I asked.
There was a long delay before Taylor spoke.
"Are we going to eat in the cafeteria again tomorrow?"
"We don't have to. I shouldn't have pushed you into that." It wasn't just that I regretted the result; I needed to pay more attention to her boundaries.
"I don't mind," she said.
"It's your choice." I sorta wished I was on a corded phone, just so I'd have something to fidget with.
"Dad thinks I got sick because I was eating on the roof all week."
He might have a point. "Cafeteria, then?"
"Yeah."
Surely she was going to ask about what had happened last Friday now, right?
"Goodbye," Taylor said.
"Goodbye," I said.
The call clicked off.
"Goddamnit, Taylor," I mumbled as I put the cellphone away. "This can't be any less stressful for you than it is for me." I stared at my purse for a moment, then took the phone back out and dialed. A male voice answered the phone.
"Hello?"
"Hello." Did I have the wrong number? "Uh, is Sophia there?"
"She's not home right now."
"Oh. Would you tell her Kasey Hudson called?"
"Sure. School friend?"
"Yeah."
"Cool. I'll tell her."
"Thanks. Bye."
"Bye."
I put the phone down, only for it to ring again less than a minute later. "Hello?"
"Hudson?"
"That was fast."
"It's called a cellphone, dumbass," Sophia said.
"You gave me your home number, dumbass."
"Because I didn't want to be disturbed, asshole."
I rolled my eyes. "Well, now that you're good and disturbed, can we have a civil chat?"
"What do you want?"
"Taylor's coming back to school tomorrow. Can you keep Emma on a goddamn leash?"
"Why should I?"
"Because I only have so much patience before I resort to physical violence, and I don't think dangling her off the school roof is going to leave any room for reconciliation later."
Sophia made a noise that might have been laughter. "Don't you dare."
"It's not my first choice, believe me."
She muttered something I didn't catch. "Fine. You work on making Hebert less pathetic, and I'll try to keep Emma distracted. She's got a modeling gig coming up anyway, should be way easier than your job."
"Thanks for the encouragement."
"Whatever." She hung up without saying goodbye.
———X==X==X———
Lunch passed without incident.
"I can't believe they're staying away," Taylor said. Sophia had kept her word; Emma was so distracted she hadn't even dispatched any minions our way. Or she was so eager for their attention they'd decided that hovering around her would score more points than wandering off on a Taylor-bullying mission. The amount of independent action her cronies were capable of varied widely among the group.
"Confession time?" I asked.
"What?" she asked cautiously.
I double-checked that no-one was paying us any attention, then leaned in and whispered, "I called Sophia and told her to keep Emma on a leash this week."
Taylor's eyes widened. "Did you really?" she whispered back.
I grinned. "Yeah."
"And she agreed?"
"She respects me," I said without thinking.
"Why?" Taylor asked. It wasn't accusatory, the way she usually was when I mentioned associating with her bullies; she was actually curious.
"Because we fought and I won."
"When was this?"
"First week after break, I challenged her sparring match after school."
Taylor gave me a flat look. "You've very confident."
"I didn't realize exactly what I was getting into," I lied. "I still won, though."
"And that's it?" she asked.
"She was pretty friendly after that, yeah." I couldn't be sure if she was trying to imply that Sophia had figured out I was a cape, or if she was just dubious about Sophia being friendly in the first place.
Taylor was frowning in the way she usually did while she was thinking. "Do you think… no, nevermind."
"What?"
"I was going to ask, if you taught me to fight… but I don't think I could beat her, no matter how well you trained me."
I'd been planning to start with getting Taylor to stand her ground, but she was ready to skip straight to martial arts lessons. As proud as I was of her, I couldn't help but wonder if her shard was pushing her towards it.
I didn't let any of my thoughts show on my face. "I know some pretty good trainers," I said.
"I bet." What do you mean, 'I bet'? Taylor was still frowning, which meant she wasn't down thinking yet. "Do you think I could earn her respect?" she asked.
"I'm sure you could," I said firmly. "Do you want her respect?"
"Would it stop her from bullying me?"
"I can't be sure, but… yes, I think it would."
Taylor looked surprised. "I thought you said your way wouldn't work for me."
"This isn't my way. Not even close. But it could be yours, if you want to try it."
She nodded. "I do."
"My house after school again?"
"If that's a good place to learn."
"We can make it work," I said. "I just need to make a quick call."
———X==X==X———
David was waiting for us on the porch when Emily pulled up to the curb. "This is David Kanes," I said, stumbling only slightly over the fact that he'd actually ended up with an anagram of 'Snake' for his surname. I could see the resemblance, now that I was looking for it, but without the mullet I'd never have recognized him on my own. "Friend of the family. He got me started learning how to fight, way back when." A year ago.
"I got you started on learning how to fall," he corrected as he offered Taylor a handshake. By the look on her face, he'd given her the squeeze treatment. "My friends call me Dave."
"Taylor. You live in Brockton Bay?" Taylor asked.
Dave shook his head. "Boston, since oh-eight."
"What are you doing up here?"
"Kasey called me and told me she wanted to help a friend, since I'd given her a few lessons back when I was still in the army. I told her I wouldn't trust her to train a puppy and drove on up."
Taylor looked at me questioningly. "Yeah, he actually said that," I said with a scowl.
Dave motioned us up the driveway. "I took the liberty of setting up mats in the garage. Let's go." We obediently followed him into the garage, where he'd nearly covered the entire room in gym padding. Then it was two hours of alternating instruction and Taylor getting tossed about like a ragdoll; when she needed a break, he threw me around instead. I tried not to be annoyed at the fact that Taylor was clearly learning faster than I had, which was a lot harder than it needed to be because David would not stop bringing it up.
"You're doing great, kid. At this rate, you'll be ready to start learning some actual martial arts by the end of the week," he announced as Taylor lay on her back, gasping for air. "I spent a whole month throwing Cass around and she barely learned a thing!"
"As you keep reminding me," I said testily. "And it's Kasey." The least he could do is actually call me by my current name, given that we were in universe at the moment.
He shrugged. "Kid's in a lot better shape than you were, Cassie."
"Are you serious?" Taylor wheezed.
"Yeeup. She was weak as a newborn lamb. 'Least you've got some stamina." Dave checked his watch, then blew the small referee-style pea whistle he'd insisted on using. "Five o'clock. Training's over for the day."
"Five—!" Taylor shot bolt upright. "Oh, crap, I have to call my dad!" I hurried over to pull my cell out of my purse, but Dave had his out faster, courtesy of having actual fucking pockets. Taylor grabbed the phone and dialed quickly. "Dad?" She winced. "I'm fine, dad, really. I'm over at a friend's house." A pause. "…Anne Rose Hebert." She rolled her eyes. "I'm fine. I made a new friend at school, and she's introduced me to some of her friends." I grinned and waved pointlessly.
Taylor smiled at my antics as she listened to her Dad. "They seem like good people," she said, dropping the bottom straight out of my stomach.
Ah, the Danger Room Cold Open. Truly the laziest trick in the book. I'm a hack.
There was quite a bit of "Who's Kathrine Tanner?" during the February timeskip, so here's the answer confirmed: It's Kara Thrace. And speaking of Starbuck, what the fuck was her deal in BSG anyway?
Zero's playing Mortal Kombat on the Switch, if anyone cares.
For discussion, I present the big one, the elephant in the room: my interpretation of Sophia's trigger. Thoughts?
"You made a face while I was talking to my dad," she said, "and now you're driving me home."
"I didn't want to disturb Emily." She'd been working overtime the last few weeks, doing… I wasn't actually sure. It was all in timestop; she'd walk out the door fully rested, then walk back in seconds later looking haggard. I wasn't going to interrupt her sleep. "And when did I make a face?"
"When I said you were good people."
I'd held out the faint hope that she hadn't been paying attention. "Well, that's… something I've heard before."
"From a friend?"
Not quite. "From someone you wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley," I said. It was technically true.
I pulled off the expressway onto the main street leading towards Taylor's neighborhood. Blocks passed in silence. Ask me about the damn cafeteria incident already!
"How do you know Dave?" she asked instead.
It took me a moment to remember the lie we'd come up with. "His older sister dated my dad in college." It was conveniently unverifiable, not that I expected Taylor to do a background check on me or anything. Maybe I should; it didn't look like she'd be bringing any of her concerns to me directly. "He could have been my uncle."
"Huh," Taylor said.
I took another turn, this time onto the single-lane road into the neighborhood itself. "You're going to have to guide me from here."
"Left in three blocks," she said. I nodded, drumming my fingers on the steering wheel. "Next street… here. Then left in two blocks. It's in the middle of the block." I followed her directions, and within five minutes I'd pulled up in front of a slightly run-down two-story house.
Taylor didn't get out immediately. She was frowning harder than usual, probably trying to decide whether or not to invite me in. I was tempted to say something about how her Dad was still waiting, but I restrained myself; she didn't need more pressure to decide whether to introduce her strange maybe-a-cape friend to her family. "Thanks for the ride," she said finally, opening the door of the car and climbing out.
"Taylor, you know you can ask me anything, right?" I said.
She stared at me for a bit. "Right," she said, and closed the car door.
———X==X==X———
Taylor came by every day after school; now that her dad knew she'd be staying over, David kept her training until six o'clock. As promised, he started teaching her how to throw punches the very next week. "Now, the first thing you learn in martial arts is when to walk away," he said. "You don't learn Karate or Judo to get into fights. You learn it to defend yourself when you have to, and only when you absolutely have to. If someone's not threatening you, you take whatever bullshit they're throwing and thank them for it."
"I understand," Taylor said respectfully.
"That so?" he asked. "Too bad! I'm not here to teach that Jedi bullshit. I'm here to teach you how to fight. You need to break someone's face? Make sure it's worth whatever comes your way, and I won't judge. Now, show me how you make a fist…"
Two weeks passed, and I learned my new favorite thing about Bet: no one 'celebrated' April Fool's Day. It was still a thing, socially, but no companies sent out prank newsletters or launched joke products. I didn't have to write off a whole day as being nothing but stupid 'jokes'.
Unfortunately, Emma didn't stay distracted forever. The first I heard of her bothering Taylor again was a message left on my cell phone the following Wednesday. "Hey, Kasey? It's Taylor. I won't be at lunch today. I got suspended." Returning the call that evening got a curt notice from her dad that she was grounded. It sounded like he blamed me, and I had to admit he wasn't exactly wrong to do so.
I messaged David. "You had to give her permission to hit someone, didn't you?"
"She's old enough to pick her battles," he responded.
Lunch was lonely without her, that week. I did see Julia walking around with a massive shiner, so maybe it was worth it; I'd have to ask Taylor when she got back. Until then, I had other things to worry about: namely, a very important meeting with destiny just after midnight on the eleventh.
———X==X==X———
"I want these kids dead, clear?" Lung snarled. "Not scared. Not humiliated. Dead. If you see one of the children, just shoot. Doesn't matter your aim, just shoot. You see one lying on the ground? Shoot the little bitch twice more to be sure. We give them no chances to be clever or lucky, understand?"
Was that the same speech Lung gave in canon? Yeah, he called them kids, but taking him literally was a bit of a stretch. It wasn't like the Merchants or Empire only accepted adults! Assuming the targets of this little raid were innocent wasn't just naive, it took willful ignorance. Another point in favor of the suicide-by-cape character interpretation. Hopefully Taylor was feeling better this time.
Lung finally started to make his move while I was pondering, which meant it was almost time for Flux to make her debut. The butterflies in my stomach had vanished. I was suited up, kitted out, and ready to throw down. I was still totally unprepared for the massive swarm of bugs that hit the gangsters like a tidal wave.
Are you fucking serious!? How the fuck had I not managed to butterfly this away? I mean, I hadn't gone out of my way to make sure Taylor wouldn't be here; I'd just assumed that between my friendship, taking time out of her costume-making, and general chaos theory, she wouldn't be in this specific place at this specific time. But here she was, because apparently that's just how things go around here!
I sat back and watched. If I remembered correctly, things were going great for Skitter—Unnamed Bug Girl, I guess—up until Lung manages to hear her crunching on the roof. I look across to the opposite side of the alley, searching for the cape I assume is there. I didn't find her until I activate the IR mode on the goggles; her costume was damn good camouflage.
Lung setting himself and his friends on fire ruined the IR mode for me, so I switched it off and waited. I didn't hear anything over the flames, but I could tell when Lung did. He roared, spinning around and leaping up towards the side of the building. I leapt as well.
I elbow dropped on him while he was still climbing, hitting him at more than a hundred times my normal weight and mass. He went down hard, slamming into the ground face-first and making a dent deep enough that his back was flush with the surface. For a single, fearful moment, I thought I'd managed to kill him. Then he was digging himself out, clawing himself to his feet while sending a massive wave of fire at me. I ignored it, raising my specific temperature as high as it would go, and drove a super-massive fist into his chest. He responded by breaking half the bones in his arm punching me in the head; I was at maximum inertia and he still knocked me back half a step! Only my weird elasticity saved me from a concussion. I hit him in the head this time, and he went down; when he got back up, I knocked him down again with another headshot from my left. When he got up from that, I switched things up with an uppercut to his chin; using my power to decrease his mass on contact meant the blow tossed him into the air like we were in a fighting game. On his way down, I manifested a baseball bat and swung for the bleachers, hitting him hard enough to send him flying down the length of the alley and back out into the street on the other side. He slid to a halt more than a hundred feet away, shredding pavement at he tumbled, before he rolled back to his feet, screamed an unintelligible challenge, and barreled back towards me at a lurching but still terrifyingly fast pace.
He never made it. A second before Lung would have hit me—and likely ruined both of our days—a monster the size of a minivan landed on him like he was a goomba, flattening him mid-stride. His forward momentum carved a trench in the pavement with his face as he slid past me out into the street. Another monster joined seconds later, and the two of them dragged him around the corner and out of sight. Half a dozen car alarms began going off in quick succession, only to fall silent as the collateral damage intensified.
"Hey, Loony-Toons, up here!" I blinked rapidly, trying to restore my night vision after Lung's fire had ruined it; above me, I could barely make out a shadowy shape against the night sky. I flipped my gravity around a bit and managed to come in for a mostly-controlled landing on the roof of the building.
The Undersiders were all in attendance. Grue was in front, black smoke billowing off his signature motorcycle leathers. His costume wasn't the best, but the darkness more than made up for it, hiding the cheap materials and making his skull-shaped helmet appear to float out of the gloom. Tattletale was right beside him; her costume was nothing like I'd expected. I'd imagined a black suit with purple highlights, but it was the opposite: mostly purple, with thick black bars meeting at right angles across the chest and stomach. The distance I was at was just right to see that they formed a pair of stylized 'T's, one upper case, one lower case; the eye symbol sat on the bar of the capital T. Regent, I'd seen before, although he looked a lot different in less colorful light. His costume was white and silver with white ruffles, all of which had been garishly painted by the rave lighting. He also had on a coronet that he hadn't been wearing in the club, and carried his stun-gun scepter in one hand. Bitch… was Bitch; she looked like a homeless kickboxer with a cheap Halloween mask. Only two of her dogs were fighting Lung; the third loomed behind the group. The depictions of her dogs I'd seen tended to make them scaly and lizard-like, downplaying the body horror of the exposed flesh and bone; while I didn't doubt the bony plates and calcified flesh were functional protection, they did little to hide the red, wet muscle underneath. It felt a bit like being menaced by a massive slab of raw steak studded with fist-sized gravel, with a gaping maw full of pointy teeth at the business end.
TaySkitUnnamed Bug Girl was standing across from them; she was impossible to read behind her mask. That spider-silk costume was a lot creepier-looking in person, though, holy shit. Especially the face, with its unblinking yellow eyes and mandibles along the chin. I did my best not to look at her.
"Hi!" I said chipperly.
"Hi," Grue said. "You two really did us a favor tonight, you know."
"Oh?" I prompted.
"Yeah. When we heard Lung was gunning for us, we were pretty freaked. Spent ages arguing about what to do before we decided, fuck it, we'll go out and meet him on our terms. Wing it, basically. Not our usual style, but… yeah. Not a lot of great options when you've got a dragon chasing you.
"We found Oni Lee and half a dozen guys, but Lung never showed up. Lee's scary, but there's a reason he's not in charge. When his boss didn't show up, he turned tail and fled. We've got you two to thank for that, I guess?"
"I jumped in when the fight started," I said. "But it was her who kicked things off." I nodded at Unnamed Bug Girl.
There was another crash from the street, prompting us all to look down as the two dogs continued to maul Lung. "He's really getting creamed down there," Grue said. "What did you do to him?"
"Wasp and bee stings plus spider and ant bites from Bug, alongside a lot of brute force trauma from Loony," Tattletale rattled off. More crashes split the night as one of the dogs used Lung to flatten another parked car. "A lot of brute force trauma. Shit, you hit him hard." She glanced at me, before returning her eyes to the fight. "With all that poison in his system interfering with his regeneration, he's feeling the pain now, and he's going to feel worse tomorrow."
Grue clapped his hands. "Introductions!" he announced, pointing to his teammates by turns. "That's Tattletale. I'm Grue. The girl with the dogs, we call Bitch—her preference. Last and certainly least, we have Regent."
"Fuck you, dude."
"You're the Undersiders," I said unnecessarily.
"You're Flux!" Regent said, finally recognizing me. I bowed theatrically.
"How did you—what—when was that?" Tattletale asked, interrupting her own questions with more questions.
Regent shrugged. "February." Grue and Tattletale were both glaring at him, now—well, I assumed Grue was glaring, the full-face helmet made it hard to tell. "What? It's not like you two tell me every part of your day."
Tattletale opened her mouth to say more, but Grue cut her off. "Later," he said sharply, before turning back to us. "Flux, is it?"
"Flux, freelance troublemaker, at your service." I offered him one of my cards with an elaborate flourish. He took it curiously, looking it over before passing it to Tattletale.
"You're a pretty heavy hitter for a 'freelancer'," Regent said.
"I aim to please."
"Ahem!" Grue said, not even trying to disguise it as a cough. "You still haven't introduced yourself," he told Bug Girl. When she didn't say anything, he asked, "Are you hurt?"
"She's not hurt, she's just shy," Tattletale said. "Knows how to throw a punch, though." Bug stiffened. "First night out?" Tattletale asked, to no response.
"Anyway, we owe you guys a favor," Grue said, bringing the conversation back on track. "If you need something—"
"Heads up, we gotta scram," Tattletale interrupted him. Bitch whistled, and the two dogs who'd been savaging Lung bounded onto the roof in a pair of impacts that shook the entire building. The Undersiders climbed onto the dogs. "You need a ride?" Tattletale asked us from her seat behind Bitch. "If a hero shows up to the scene of a few bad guys duking it out, they're not just going to let some of them walk away."
I looked at Bug. Bug looked at me. "Yeah, sure," she said.
What. Thank god for my goggles, because I was definitely goggling at her then.
"Right." Tattletale slid back off her dog. "Flux, take my spot. You, with me." I obeyed numbly, using the same handholds Tattletale had used to place myself behind Bitch. Tattletale climbed onto the third dog, then reached down and dragged Bug into position behind her. Where the hell are we going? Wait, did I even agree to th—
The dog started moving suddenly, and I gave a decidedly un-bad-ass yelp of surprise and focused on resisting the urge to try to drag it down with me rather than being carried off. The ride was halfway between a horseback ride and a rollercoaster, and I'd never cared for either, so I was very glad when it ended on a roof a couple of miles south-west. I dismounted with shaky legs. Bug didn't seem fazed at all.
"I am never doing that again," I declared. "Why did I agree to that? I can fucking fly!" Regent laughed at my misfortune, and I swear he used his power to subtly mess with me as I stumbled around trying to remember how to walk.
Tattletale took a moment to circle the roof we'd landed on. "No one's going to disturb us here for a while," she announced. "We've got plenty of time to talk."
"Great," Grue said. "As I was saying, we owe you two a favor. I know we're all villains here, but so long as we don't step on each others' toes, there's no reason we can't get along, right?"
I gave Bug a chance to answer, but she stayed silent. "What made you so sure I was a villain?" I asked.
"You're wearing pure, pitch black," Regent said. I looked down at myself in surprise and realized that I was entirely covered in soot. Of all the stupid tropes—! I used my power to repel the gunk from my clothes, which gave me a truly impressive sneezing fit as the fine particles drifted free. At least I was clean once I could control my breathing again. "God, she really is a Loony-Toons character," Regent mock-whispered to Tattletale.
"That is a somewhat heroic color scheme," Grue said carefully.
"Still a lot of black," Regent said.
I shrugged. "I freelance," I said, as though that explained anything.
"Not looking for a team?" Tattletale asked.
"I wasn't." I shrugged, then asked, "Are you hiring?"
"No," Bitch said immediately.
"Bitch," Grue said irritably.
"You said we all have to agree on new members. I say 'no'."
"It'll be cheaper than hiring her per-job," Tattletale said.
"No."
"She took out Lung," Regent said.
"No."
"She took out Lung," I said, pointing a thumb over my shoulder at Bug. "I just kept him entertained while the poison went to work."
They weren't listening to me. "Having a brute like her on the team would make things a lot safer for your dogs," Tattletale argued.
"No."
"I'm not a brute," I said to the zero people paying attention to me. Since nobody was listening anyway, I went over to Bug, doing my best to ignore how creepy she was. "You doing okay?"
"Yeah," she said. "I thought I was done for when Lung heard me on the roof." She rubbed at her arms anxiously; her emoting at all massively decreased the creep factor of the costume, which I was thankful for. "I… uh… thank you, K—Flux," she caught herself.
I pulled the goggles up. "No problem, Skitter."
"Skitter?"
"You don't have a name yet, right?"
"No. Isn't that kinda lame, though? And villainous, too."
"I'm kinda villainous," I said.
"Oh."
"Only kinda!"
"Kinda lame, too."
I guffawed. It wasn't the best comeback, but her giving me lip was great progress as far as her social skills went.
Skitter let out a cough that might have been a laugh of her own. "Why did you pull your goggles up?"
"Not much point covering my face if you already know my name."
She shifted uncomfortably. "Are you going to ask about that?"
"You spent the whole last month not asking me shit," I shot back. She didn't say or do anything for a while after that. I really wished I could see the expression on her face… oh well.
"Flux?" Grue called. I pulled the goggles back down and turned to face the group. Bitch was standing slightly apart from the group, arms folded across her chest. She clearly didn't like the decision, but had stopped fighting it.
"'Sup, Bob?" I asked.
He straightened and folded his arms, ignoring the nickname. Unlike Bitch's stubbornness, it was a businesslike pose. "We're prepared to offer you a place with the Undersiders, if you're interested."
I raised an eyebrow, realized it couldn't be seen behind my goggles, and tilted my head quizzically instead. I really wished I had a power that let me keep track of what Skitter was feeling and/or doing behind me.
"Right, benefits. You draw a salary of two grand a month just for being on the team. We do one to two jobs a month, and haul in anywhere from ten to thirty five grand a job. That gets split five ways, so call it about four grand per person per job.
"If you're a full member, you get to vote on what jobs we take, you go on the jobs, and you stay active and on-call if we need you. Any questions?"
"Only a couple. First, where is the salary coming from?" Coil had maybe a month to live, though he didn't know it yet. He was not going to enjoy the next few weeks.
"We've got a boss who runs the show," Grue said. "He pays the bills and offers us jobs, but we have the freedom to turn them down if we want."
"Do I get to meet your 'boss' if I join?"
"No. He keeps us at arms length. Deniability, in case we get caught." Grue did a good job of making it sound normal, like a mysterious sponsor lurking in the shadows was something lots of villain teams had to deal with. "Of course, with our record, we may actually get to meet him, soon. No promises, though."
"Fine. About the jobs, then," I said. "I freelance for capes, against capes. And anyone who chooses to fight capes, of course; I'll tussle with gangsters or PRT troopers. But I don't hit civilians."
Grue looked to Tattletale, who nodded once. "That shouldn't be a problem," he said.
I risked a glance back towards Skitter, who nodded. Really? Okay then. "Is there one spot, or two?" I asked.
"No," Bitch said.
"Salary isn't split, right?"
"No…" Grue said, uncertain where I was going with that line of questioning.
"Then what if wave my share of the job payouts?" I asked Bitch.
"Why?" Bitch asked.
"I'm in this for the excitement, not the money."
"That means you have no incentive to actually do any jobs," Grue pointed out.
"Excitement?" I repeated.
Tattletale shook her head. "Our first rule is that no one on the team gets special treatment. That means no one gets paid more or less than anyone else."
Bitch put her foot down. "I didn't want to split money five ways. I am not going to split it six."
"We'll be able to take riskier jobs with six people," Grue said. "Higher payouts even after the split."
"Riskier jobs mean more chances my dogs get hurt."
"Not if I'm in front taking the hits they usually take," I said.
Skitter stepped past me and spoke up for the first time. "Is there any requirement that we all go on every job?"
"With the four of us, we can't do jobs if anyone is sitting out," Tattletale said. "With six… we could probably get away with not fielding the whole team."
"Then you can recruit both of us, and as long as only five people go on a job, you won't have to divide the money further."
"It's a trick," Bitch said. "You're trying to fool me."
"What's your name, again?" Regent asked.
Tattletale decided to answer. "She doesn't—"
"Skitter," Skitter said, cutting Tattletale off.
"I don't care," Bitch said. "You're not joining."
"It's getting late," Grue said. "How about we finish this conversation another time?" After we've discussed this among ourselves went unsaid.
"Sure," I said. "You have my number. I won't answer; just leave a message with a way to get in contact with you and I'll follow up within a day."
"Good system," he said. "Well, thank you two again. Have a good night."
As the Undersiders climbed back onto the dogs, I was struck by a flash of half-remembered inspiration. "Happy St. Patrick's Day!" I called as they departed.
"What?" Skitter asked.
"I'll tell you in a month."
"St. Patrick's Day is in March, not May."
"Tell you in a month anyway." I couldn't see her eyes behind her mask, but I imagined that if I could, I'd have seen her roll them. "You want a lift home?"
"Can you carry people?"
"Yeah. It might be a little uncomfortable, though," I warned her.
"It can't be worse than riding those… dog… things," she said. "I trust you."
Way to melt my heart, Taylor. "All right. Grab my hand and don't let go."
———X==X==X———
Brian pulled off his helmet the moment the Undersiders made it back to the loft. "I think that went well," he announced to the room. Rachel's response was to push past him roughly, knocking him sideways and making him drop the helmet. He grumbled but didn't make an issue of it.
"Someone disagrees," Alec said from behind him.
"She'll come around." Brian grabbed his dropped helmet and headed deeper into the loft to change.
Alec just took off his mask and coronet before sprawling out across one of the couches. He reached for the remote to turn on the television, but Lisa grabbed it first, taking it with her as she sat on the other couch. She'd doffed her mask and stripped her suit down to the waist, revealing some kind of thermal underlayer; that counted for 'changing out of costume' for the moment. "Debrief first. What the hell did you tell her?"
"What?" Alec asked.
"Flux!"
"What?" he asked again.
"This feels pretty intrusive," I said.
"More intrusive than having already read the entire novel?" Diane asked from the other side of my couch. Her eyes were closed; she was focused on projecting her clairvoyance onto the television screen. Emily was between us, paying half a mind to the show as she worked her way through cleaning enough firearms to equip a small country.
The three of us were in my lair, a well-furnished basement apartment under a dilapidated old building near the border between the Docks and the Trainyard, only two blocks from the coast. It was about a thousand square feet, including a bedroom, bathroom, and kitchenette. Furniture included a writing desk and dining table and their matching chairs, plus a fancy home theatre system in front of a comfortable couch; that was where we were at the moment. Max had visited the lair back in January and coated the entire place in runic anti-scrying wards; he'd admitted the coverage was overkill, but we didn't want to take any chances with the decreased effectiveness of magic. It was also unplottable, or whatever twenty percent of unplottability meant.
To be clear, the anti-scrying wards were one-way. They might not have stopped Diane anyway; she was apparently the person to go to for all things psychic-power related. I wasn't sure exactly where she was from, but since she hadn't actually imported this Jump, she looked like the same person I'd seen around the Warehouse: a middle-aged white woman with curly brown hair. After returning home from dropping Skitter off at her house, I'd mentioned to Emily that I wished I could be a fly on the wall when the Undersiders discussed our meeting. I'd meant it as a pun, but she'd suggested asking Diane to eavesdrop, and as an incurable busybody, I'd agreed. I was having second thoughts about that now.
"Yeah." I thought about it for a moment. "Is that wrong? I mean, at least I'm not in anyone's head like this."
"That's your call. Do you want to stop watching?" I shook my head; I was too damn nosy to pass this up.
Back on the screen, Brian had returned from changing. "What's up, Lisa?" he asked.
"Flux!"
He raised an eyebrow. "What about her?"
"The fact that Alec never mentioned meeting her, for starters!"
"I told you!" Alec said. "We talked for maybe thirty seconds before I left!"
"Well you must leak secrets like a sieve, then, because she knew way too much about us!"
Alec paled slightly. "What do you mean?" he asked with feigned disinterest.
"I mean that she knows way more about us, personally, than she should, and you're the only source she'd have on us."
"I talked to her for thirty seconds!"
"About what?"
"Uh… she called me one of the most dangerous masters in the city?"
"What were her exact words?"
"I don't remember!"
"How many masters does she know of?"
"I don't know!"
Alec was sprawled out over an entire couch, so Brian took a seat on the other couch as well. "Lisa, calm down."
"How can I calm down? She said—" Lisa cut herself off.
"What did she say?"
"Nevermind." She began chewing on her lip.
Brian and Alec exchanged a look. "It's probably not too late to rescind the invitation to join. She didn't actually accept yet."
"Raich would love that," Alec said.
"No, that's not…" Lisa trailed off and shook her head. "Flux likes us."
"Is that a problem?" Brian asked.
"Yeah, sorta. She knows us."
Alec actually sat up at that. "What do you mean, 'knows us'?"
"I mean she knows us, like we're already friends or something. That's either a thinker or master ability, and I have no idea what the actual mechanics are."
"You don't know?" Brian asked.
"No idea. Alec, did anything odd happen after you talked to her?"
"I mean, a lot of odd things happen," Alec hedged.
"Like what? …are you fucking serious?"
"What?" Brian asked.
"Nevermind, that's not important right now."
"What?" he repeated.
"Not. Important." Lisa smacked her hand against her head. "I'm going to have a hell of a headache tomorrow."
Alec flopped back down on his couch. "I get the thinker bit, but not the master bit."
"It's not a hard master effect like the ones you're thinking of. More of a master/stranger thing, making herself someone's friend just by being there."
"So you think the 'friendship' you detected could be a power-inflicted thing?" Brian asked.
"Oh, shit!" Alec yelled, lurching upright again. "She called me the 'second most dangerous master in the city'!" Brian and Lisa blanched.
"That's not what I meant," I groaned from the other side of my spy-screen.
"Do we still want her on the team?" Brian asked.
"It won't matter unless we can bring Rachel around. Flux and Bug—I mean, Skitter—are a package," Lisa replied. "You know, I don't think Flux was talking about herself as the most dangerous master."
"Skitter?" Brian asked.
"Yeah. Flux is tough, but she was just playing clean up. She admitted as much when we were talking. Skitter nearly brought down Lung on her own." Lisa kept thinking. "But that would mean Flux knew about Skitter back in… when was this? February?"
"End of the month, yeah."
"That's not surprising, if they're working together," Brian said.
"They're not working together," Lisa said. "At least, Skitter wasn't working with Flux. She was out there alone, and Flux was telling the truth about jumping into a fight Skitter started without her. But Flux knew there would be a fight there; that was the whole reason she was there at all."
"Thinkers, am I right?" Alec said.
"Not helping, Alec," Brian snapped. To Lisa, he asked, "Could it be the same thing you felt towards us? That weird super-friendship thing?"
"Maybe."
"I, for one, welcome our new carebear overlord," Alec said.
"Still not helping," Lisa said. She rubbed her hand on her forehead, wincing at her headache. "We're getting off track. Again."
"All right. Let's answer the biggest question," Brian said. "Do we—as in the three of us, nevermind Rachel—want her on the team?"
"Yes," Lisa said without hesitation.
"Just like that?" Alec asked. "Where'd the paranoia go?"
"Yeah. She's either genuine, or her bullshit is so strong I want it on our side regardless."
"Alec?" Brian prompted.
"I don't care. Less work would be nice."
"Then it's decided," he said. "I'll work on Rachel. Leese, see if you can dig up anything else on either of them, try to figure out who we're working with."
"Tomorrow."
"Sure, take all the time you need." He turned to the last member of the team. "Alec… slack off." Ah, the classic leadership tactic of only giving instructions you know will be obeyed.
"Yes, sir!"
Diane stopped her scrying now that they were no longer talking about me. "Seems like things are going well for you," she said.
"Yeah. Thanks for the creepy spy thing."
"No problem. Call me if you need it again." She opened a doorway to the Warehouse through the bathroom door and disappeared.
———X==X==X———
There was no mistaking it. Taylor was swaggering the next day at school.
"Have a good weekend?" I asked as she sat down at the lunch table to my right.
"You could say that," she said with a smirk. "The ending sucked, though." I winced. Turned out Taylor didn't like 'falling with style' at all, even less than she liked riding. At least she hadn't had anything in her stomach.
"Sorry." I'd have to see if I could find a way to make it more comfortable for 'passengers'. "You're okay, though? With… things?"
Taylor nodded. "I am," she said firmly. "I'll follow your lead."
"I'll follow your lead," I said. "If you don't want to do this, we won't."
"You like them," Taylor said.
I laughed nervously. "Yeah, I guess so."
"Then I'll follow you." She turned her attention back to her cold pasta salad. "They seem nice."
"Like good people?"
"Is that phrase a problem for you?" she asked.
"It stuck with me." I finished unwrapping my sandwich and took a bite.
"Kasey?" I looked up. "Were you following me, last night?"
"No," I said truthfully.
"Oh." She picked at her lunch a bit. "I know I said it before, but… thank you."
"You're welcome," I said with a grin. "Oh, hell, trouble's coming." Sophia was making her way over to our table. Taylor steeled herself, mouth set in a hard line.
To both our surprise, Sophia simply seated herself on my left and started eating her depressing microwaved-freezer-patty-in-a-bun. Taylor stubbornly returned to her meal as well, leaving me sandwiched between two girls who were aggressively ignoring each other.
"Your cast's off," I said, when I couldn't take the silence any longer. Sophia grunted. "Where's Emma?"
"Busy."
My patience ended there. "There a reason you're sitting here today?" I asked sharply.
She chuckled. "Was that so hard?"
"I'll remember not to be polite in the future."
"Heh." Sophia washed her current bite down with some juice. "I came over to congratulate Hebert, actually."
"Why?" Taylor asked.
"You learned how to punch pretty quick. Kasey teach you that?"
"Yeah," she lied.
"I told her she was wasting her time trying to teach you." Sophia grinned. "Turns out the only thing that got wasted was Julia's face."
"I shouldn't have done that," Taylor said morosely. "I got suspended, and now I'm grounded for a month."
"So? Suspension's already over. The month will end. Julia's not going to be giving you shit again."
Taylor shook her head. "Emma will find someone else, and if I get suspended again, I'll be grounded until I'm thirty."
"So? You can sneak out, right?" Sophia asked. Taylor kicked me under the table. I didn't give anything away!
"Not everyone can just slip through a window," Taylor told Sophia. Sophia kicked me under the table. This isn't my fault, damnit!
"Go through the front door if it bugs you that much." I got kicked again. Could she not have used ANY OTHER WORD?
"I'd still have to open it." I got kicked again. Goddamnit!
"Stop. Kicking. Me," I growled. The girls quickly became very interested in their meals, shooting suspicious glances at each other behind my back. The freshman across the table from me paled and decided to find somewhere else to sit. Oops. Sorry, kid.
"It's kinda funny," I said to break the silence. "One of the first things Taylor asked me about learning to fight was whether it would earn your respect."
"I assume you told her it would?" Sophia said.
"I said I thought it would. Didn't want to put words in your mouth."
"Good, 'cause she's not there." Sophia leaned towards me. "When you think she's ready," she stage-whispered, "let me know. I could always use a new sparring partner."
Taylor turned white as a sheet.
You all knew this was coming.
I realize lampshading Stations of Canon doesn't give me a free pass, but there are some contributing factors here; Taylor's suspension, mostly, which gave her all the extra time she needed to finish her costume and a real need to go out and act.
In other news, my brain is really not cooperating on this and my buffer is starting to shrink. Very frustrating.
Taylor caught up to me as classes let out. "Hi, Kasey."
"Hey, Taylor. How's it going?" I was at my locker, going through the motions of swapping out books I would never read. At this point I only did it because it let people find me.
"Well, the good news is I'm not grounded anymore."
"That was fast." Having been found, I gave up and shut my locker, shouldering my bag.
"Yeah. We had a long talk this morning about how violence is wrong, and punching bullies in the face is the best time to be wrong."
"Sound like your dad's been wrong a few times himself," I joked.
"Maybe," Taylor allowed. "I was going to tell you at lunch, but, uh, I got distracted."
"I can imagine why. Is there bad news as well?"
"Well… I'm still not allowed to do it again?" I got the feeling there was more, but left it alone. It might be something… sensitive, and if she didn't want to tell me now I could always ask again later. We pushed through the crowd, out the doors and down to the parking lot pickup area. I made a beeline for Emily, who stood out, as always, in that fucking car.
My first thought was, ah, crap, there's no room for Taylor.
My second thought was, ah, crap, Taylor hasn't seen the car before.
I had to double back and pull on her arm to get her moving again. "Guh?" Taylor said.
"It's just a car," I whispered.
"Car," Taylor repeated. Oh dear. I had to physically drag her the last few feet to the car to talk to Emily.
"Can you take Taylor home?" I asked. "I can make my own way."
Emily raised an eyebrow. "How much have you read her in?"
"Enough for a fast trip," I said, pushing Taylor towards the car. Emily opened the door for her, and she got in mechanically, running her hands over the upholstery like she wasn't sure it was real. I threw my bag in after her. "See you in ten?"
"See you." Emily pulled away from the curb, and I headed down the street. One more inconvenience I hadn't learned until this jump: we could only access the Warehouse from places we owned. Some weird perk in a long-ago jump made Max a real estate mogul in every world, which offered a lot of flexibility when it came to what, exactly, we owned; unfortunately Winslow wasn't near any of his properties, so I couldn't pop in to change.
I always kept a spare ski-mask in my pocket, folded up with my power, so all I needed was privacy and I'd have a quick-and-dirty disguise. It wasn't fool-proof, but as long as I wasn't wearing anything too distinctive, it was good enough for roof-hopping. I managed to stay almost even with Emily's car for most of the trip home.
Taylor's infatuation with the car had been totally exhausted during the trip, and she jumped out before Emily had brought it to a complete stop. "I take it back," she said as she stumbled over to the front door. "Your weird flying thing is awesome. We should do that instead."
"Are you okay?"
"Yeah." She was not okay; her face was nearly green. "Peachy." I was definitely going to ask Emily what the hell she'd done on the ride home. Later.
"If you say so." I opened the door and followed her inside. We set our bags on the kitchen table and sat down across from each other. "Anything you want to talk about?"
"Does your sister know I'm a cape?"
"Yeah. I didn't tell her, if that matters."
"Not really." She was think-frowning again. "She's a cape."
"Yeah."
"Villain?"
I opened my mouth, then realized… "I don't actually know."
Taylor stumbled over my response. "What? How do you not know?"
"By not asking?" I mean, I probably should have, but hindsight is 20-20.
She shook her head. "Even if you weren't family, I can't believe you'd live with someone you know is a cape for months and not even check if they're a hero or a villain."
"I trust her," I said. "Whatever she's doing, she's doing for a reason."
"I am," Emily said as she came into the room. "You need a pick-me-up, Taylor?"
"A what?"
"Take my hand." Taylor obeyed, and her eyes widened.
"Woah." She pulled her hand back, looking at it with wonder. "I feel like I just got a whole week's worth of sleep… and not motion-sick at all."
"Call me if you need me again." Emily walked back towards the stairs at the front of the house.
Taylor watched her go in silence, before resting her forehead in one hand. "This is crazy. You're all crazy."
I chuckled. "Welcome to parahumans: sanity is deprecated. So, what do you want to do today?"
"I don't know. I was thinking I should get back to training, but David probably went back to Boston, huh?"
"Maybe." I had no idea whether David actually lived in Boston at all, or if he'd made that up. Of course, if he wasn't busy, we had a lot of ways to get around quickly, but I wasn't going to be able to explain that away easily. Wait, yes I could. "Hold tight just a minute." I fished my cell phone out of my backpack and flipped through the contacts.
Code:
David
Taylors ungrounded. Can
you pop over today
Yeah
How should I arrive
Doesnt matter as long as
its quiet.
Ill be there in 10
"He'll be here in ten minutes," I said.
She frowned in thought. "Is everyone you know a cape?"
"He isn't."
"What?"
"David's not a cape. He works for one, though."
"Who?"
I opted to dodge the question. "You can ask him, but I'm not sure he'll answer."
Taylor frowned harder at that. "Fine. Why do you want to join a villain team?"
Because I don't associate heroes with good people. Because I know who I care about, and who I don't. I sighed; Taylor had skipped the meeting with Armsmaster; so she hadn't started her disillusionment with the heroes. The Undersiders being friendly had thrown her off, but she wasn't ready to jump ship yet. If I wanted her to go fully over, I'd have to break the pedestal, and I didn't want to do that to her. "I… I like them, I guess," I mumbled awkwardly.
Taylor huffed. "You 'like' them," she repeated. "Have you met them before?"
I had to stop and think before I replied. There was no good way to explain why I wanted to help the Undersiders without opening a segue into why I'd helped Taylor, and that was a place I did not want this conversation to go. "Not… exactly," I said slowly. "I can't explain it, not now… maybe not later, either. But I think they're good company, even if they're villains."
"Good company?"
"You know, the type of people you'd get along with. Friend material."
"How do you know any of that?"
The irony was that Lisa was probably still hard at work trying to figure that out. "I can't explain it," I repeated.
"You mean you don't want to explain it."
"…yes, that is what I mean." I chewed my lip for a moment. "It's weird and not something I really want to talk about. Sorry."
It wasn't a matter of secrecy related to the Chain, or at least not only that; I didn't want to try to answer any of the existential questions raised by experiencing a world in a fictional context the way I had hers… or Max had mine. I'd handled that particular revelation but grabbing onto the idea that Max had 'just happened' to watch a show that matched my world and that the existence of the show didn't matter. After all, being told something is fiction doesn't make it not real, and sometimes people come up with lies that just happen to line up with a true story. Sure, in his world it was fiction—or, to put it another way, he'd experienced it in a fictional context—but in my world, it was reality, and maybe his world was fiction. Odds were we were both in some kind of overarching fictional narrative anyway, so what did it matter?
Of course, then he'd gone and starting explaining bits of my world, things that clearly fit the mold of 'deliberately written', and my flimsily constructed framework had started to crumble. If I was honest with myself, I didn't just want to avoid answering others' questions; I wanted to avoid facing my own. Fucking continuity error, really? Better not to think about things at all, at that point, or I might've spent the next month having a nervous breakdown in the hotel, screaming into a pillow.
"So…" I said, searching for a topic. "Your costume is super cool, don't get me wrong, but you know it's incredibly creepy, right?"
She hung her head. "I didn't really think about how it would when it all came together," she said. "It's not really a surprise they mistook me for a villain."
The way that she said that gave me pause. "It's not too late, you know."
"Huh?"
"If you want to be a hero. We haven't signed on yet—they're probably still arguing about whether they want to expand the team from four to six. Nothing we've done yet is villainous, aside from fleeing the scene of a fight, and they couldn't get you for that unless they also admitted that you were the one who beat Lung. Taylor?" She looked up when I called her name, so I could look directly into her eyes. "You don't have to do anything. I'm not here to tell you how to live, okay?"
Taylor was back to frowning. "I followed your lead last night, because you saved me and I trust you. They seem okay, I guess, but… when I realized I had powers, I thought I could finally make a difference, somehow. Help people the way I wanted to be helped." She gave a bitter laugh. "Then I got help, and it was from a villain."
"Not really," I said. "It's not like I walked into the school in costume, right? Without the mask, I'm just a student, like you."
"But you don't want to be a hero."
"I mean, not working for the law doesn't mean being evil, right?"
"That's called being a vigilante," she pointed out.
"I guess." That was a fair point, I had to admit. "Listen. If you want to be a hero, we can tell them we're not interested. There are plenty of other options. The Wards, independent heroing; hell, you could start your team."
"What about you?" Taylor asked. "If you join them without me, we'll be enemies. If you don't, I'm taking you away from people you want to be friends with."
"Don't base your decision on what I want," I said. "We don't have to make the same choice. So what if we're enemies in costume? We'll still have this." I waved my hands in a gesture that encompassed the entirety of the mundane world. "That's the magic of the whole secret identity thing. If we run into each other in costume, we each do our best, and then we'll meet for ice-cream afterwards and laugh about it."
"Laugh about it?"
"Sure. It's not like I'm going to be pushing little old ladies into traffic; I'd aim for a mischievous sort of villainy, at least when I'm not beating down capes who deserve far worse.
"I'm serious, though: it's your choice. You don't need to justify yourself to me. If you want to be a hero, don't let me hold you back. Okay?"
"Yeah. Sure." She didn't sound sure, but there wasn't much more assurance I could offer. "Say, Kasey?"
"What?"
Taylor locked eyes with me; suddenly, she had the same intensity I'd felt on the roof months ago, and it had my fight or flight instincts going haywire. "Why don't you want to be a hero?"
The question slapped me in the face.
Why don't I want to be a hero?
"Hello?" Taylor snapped me out of my trance.
"Sorry, what?" Damn, how long had I been lost in thought, there?
"Should we have stayed?"
"Stayed?"
"On the roof," she said, "after the fight."
That was also a good question. "I don't know. It would have changed some things."
"Like what?"
"Well, Armsmaster was coming. We'd have met him, for one thing."
"That would have been cool," Taylor said.
"No, it wouldn't," I said. She pouted, and I hurried to explain, "Think about it from his perspective. He's answering a call that Lung is fighting someone. Now, a lot of people talk about capes like they're just some number; not necessarily a rating, but in the sense that A beats B ten times out of ten. When you actually factor in different powers, though, cape fights are more like rock paper scissors. Lung is a rock, and he'll always be a rock." I made a fist and set it on the table. "He's a really, really high level rock, but he still has rock strengths and rock weaknesses, right?
"The real power for Tinkers like Armsmaster is that they're flexible. He can create tinkertech for any situation, but there's a lead time where he has to actually build his gear. That's the cost of being a tinker: total bullshit, but only if you know you'll need it a week ahead of time. Now, he's in the same city as Lung, so chances are he's been building 'paper' equipment for ages, just dying for a chance to use it." I brought my left hand into the scene, flat like paper.
"So. Armsmaster's expecting to fight Lung. He'd have grabbed every anti-brute, anti-regenerator, anti-pyrokinetic gadget he has, right? He's all geared up." I moved my 'paper' steadily closer to the 'rock'. "Now, he's still going to be antsy, because this is Lung, the rockiest rock in the Bay, so he's psyching himself up for a fight. But when he gets to the scene, he doesn't find Lung."
I changed my right hand from a fist to having two fingers extended, realized it looked like scissors, and extended my forefinger and thumb instead. "He finds two total unknowns—both with clearly villainous costumes, since I'd still have been pitch black, and you're… edgy?" She nodded glumly. "He's already hyped up on adrenaline, because he was expecting Lung, and now he's in a situation where he has no information, no preparation, and no idea what sort of equipment he would have had to have started building last week to be ready to face us. All he knows is that we beat Lung, which means he's found a pair of villains more dangerous than he'd originally expected, and his type advantage is completely gone, to boot."
"You think he would have attacked us?" Taylor asked, stricken.
"No, but only because he'd be too wary to make the first move. But even if we'd identified ourselves as heroes, he'd still be coming off all that adrenaline, and that's a recipe for a terrible first impression on both sides."
"You'd have called yourself a hero?" she asked.
"Err… I haven't actually done anything he can prove, at least?" My plan A had been to let Bug talk to Armsmaster; my plan B had been to pass myself off as unaligned. "Anyway, even if we didn't fight, it wouldn't have been congratulations all around or anything. He'd still want to take all the credit for bringing in Lung, even if he had the people in front of him who'd actually done the job." Armsmaster had taken full credit for 'subduing Lung following an engagement with one or more unknown parahumans'; there was no mention of the fact that Lung had been unconscious when he'd arrived.
"Why?"
"Because taking Lung down solo is a huge feather in his cap. Personal pride aside, remember the other Tinker problem: your powers scale with your budget. For independents, that might mean bounties, or donations, or private wealth. Protectorate Tinker's budgets are set by some faceless committee of bureaucrats who blow in the winds of media soundbites."
She slumped in her seat. "So even for the heroes, it's about money."
"And reputation, esteem—people are people. Being a hero doesn't make you a good person, and there's no requirement that only good people can become heroes. I'm not saying Armsmaster is bad or anything, but he's human, and he has his own priorities, ambitions, and all that." Now that I thought about it, avoiding the post-Lung Armsmaster encounter may have derailed his redemption arc entirely; I'd have to ask Max about that. "That doesn't mean you shouldn't be a hero, though," I added.
"Right."
The awkward silence was interrupted by David's arrival, heralded by him blowing his damn gym-teacher whistle as he walked into the kitchen. "Sorry I'm late," he said. "We don't have pads set up today, so we'll have to use the Dojo. Is that going to be a problem?"
"Dojo?" Taylor
"It's a gym in a pocket dimension," I said. "And no, it shouldn't be a problem."
"Great. Let's go, kid." Taylor made to grab her bag, but I shook my head; we'd be coming back here to drive her home, after all. David opened the front door and stepped through into the Dojo.
"Woah," Taylor said. She poked a finger across the threshold. "I can't tell there's a portal there at all."
"It's not a portal," I said. "It's all continuous space; the space just doesn't lead to where it should, right now."
"So there's no risk of getting caught when it closes?"
"It can't close until the door does," I assured her. She stepped through, and I followed.
The Dojo was one of the spaces in the Warehouse that seemed like it had been left behind at some point, as far as upgrades went. It was a featureless gray box, with gym padding along the lower half of three walls. When facing those three walls, the right side of the room sported a raised boxing ring, while the left half had mats on the floor that ran all the way to the walls. Various punching bags and other training targets lined the far wall, and the wall behind you, which wasn't padded, was covered with a single, massive mirror, interrupted only by the door in one corner. It honestly looked exactly like I'd expect from the phrase 'pocket dimension gym': namely, that we'd been stuck in somebody's pocket with a bare minimum of furnishings and forgotten about. As long as Taylor didn't go exploring, there was nothing to suggest it was part of a larger space at all.
Of course, that raised some of its own questions, such as the one Taylor asked once she'd gotten over her surprise. "Why do you have a gym in a pocket dimension?"
"This is my day job," David said. "Some people are willing to pay me fifteen hundred an hour to beat the shit out of them."
"Fifteen hundred an hour!?" she yelled.
"Yeah. I'm doing this for free as a favor, so you best pay attention!" Taylor looked like she was about to faint. I nudged her forward, and she stepped up onto the mat.
———X==X==X———
"Fifteen hundred an hour," Taylor mumbled as we crossed back into the Hudson house. "Who pays fifteen hundred an hour for anything?"
"Capes, mostly."
She laughed mirthlessly. "You're saying capes will pay a normal guy fifteen hundred dollars an hour to demolish them in hand-to-hand combat."
"Yeah. It's worth it, right? You're doing better than someone with a year's worth of normal instruction under their belt." I'd asked David about that while Taylor had been grounded; it turns out there were a lot of perks—some of which were applied to the Dojo itself—that allowed you to train someone incredibly fast at 'any task they were physically and mentally capable of performing'. My first month, those perks had deemed my weak, muscle-less form to be physically incapable of martial arts, and left me out in the cold.
I really, really resented that.
"Does he charge so much because of the risk that one of his clients loses their cool and rips him in half?"
I shuddered. "I hadn't actually considered that. Thanks for giving me something new to worry about." Sure, he'd be back, but it was still a very unpleasant mental image.
"Is he actually your friend?" she asked.
"Huh? Of course."
"So he's actually doing this for free?"
"As opposed to what?" I asked.
"Uh… I don't know, nevermind." Taylor walked back to the kitchen and picked up her bag. I thought about what it might look like from her perspective, and stifled a chuckle. She was worried I'd been paying for her training and lying about it to spare her feelings.
"He trained me for free, too, you know," I said.
"Was it true, what you said about how you knew him?"
"How? No," I admitted, "that was a lie." I waited to see if she'd keep asking questions, but she seemed to have satisfying her curiosity for the time being… or given up on getting answers. "You ready to go home?"
"Yeah."
I grabbed the car keys, and we climbed into the sedan and drove off. "So…" Taylor began.
"Yeah?"
"I think… well, I'm not sure I want to be a villain."
"That's good," I said sincerely.
"Really?"
"Yeah. Are you going to join the Wards, or go independent?"
"I don't really want to join the Wards, either." I glanced over at her; she was staring out the passenger window at the city going by. "You really think I can start my own team?"
"Yeah. You've already got me—"
"No," she interrupted me. "You don't have to do that."
I didn't respond.
———X==X==X———
Twenty minutes later, I pulled up to the curb and put the car in park. "Here we are," I announced.
Taylor cleared her throat. "So, uh, when I got ungrounded…" She took a deep breath and let it out, slumping down in her seat as she deflated. "Dad said he'd let me go back over to your house as long as you came by ours, so he could meet you."
"Was that the bad news you didn't tell me earlier?" I asked. Taylor nodded. I couldn't resist; I reached over and ruffled her hair. She swatted at my hand halfheartedly. "You don't have to act like you're sending me on a suicide mission."
"That depends on Dad."
"I took a hit from Lung."
"I fought Lung, too. I never fight with my dad."
I couldn't argue with that logic.
I locked the car and got out, then walked around to open the door for Taylor, who still hadn't moved. We approached the house together; I remembered one of the porch steps was rotten, but not which, so I just made myself super-light as I walked up. Taylor was reaching for the doorknob when the door opened from the inside.
My first impression of Danny Hebert was that he looked a lot like the father from Calvin and Hobbes. He was tall, thin, and balding, had a strong nose and weak chin, and wore a pair of thick-rimmed glasses. Danny looked at me, then at Taylor, then did a double-take back at me. I wasn't too surprised; for all that I was a dastardly freelance villain, I looked, well, 'preppy'. No piercings or tattoos, a light cardigan and modest floral blouse over well-fitting jeans, the sort of subtle makeup that guys tended to mistake for 'natural'; certainly not the dangerous sort of thug you wouldn't want your child associating with. "You must be Kasey," he said, though there was a hint of a question to it.
"Pleased to meet you, Mr. Hebert." I shook his hand.
"Well, why don't you girls come in." He moved out of the doorway, and Taylor and I stepped inside. I followed her through a short hallway into the kitchen; she sat down at the table, and I followed suit across from her. Danny headed over to the stove, where he resumed stirring something simmering in a pan.
I took the opportunity to look around the house, at least the parts I could see from the kitchen. Calling it cozy would have been too charitable; calling it shabby would have been too harsh. While not much smaller than my own house, the low ceilings and narrow doorways made it feel a lot more cramped. If I looked closely, I could see signs of age—peeling paint, warped woodwork, and well-used appliances—but the space was kept in good order, so I couldn't fault the little blemishes too much.
"I understand you've been teaching Taylor to fight," Danny said at last.
"Not personally," I admitted. "I introduced her to one of my dad's friends." Feeling the need to defend Taylor a bit, I added, "And I would say she's been learning to defend herself."
"She punched one of her classmates in the face."
"Good for her," I said. Taylor blushed and ducked her head. "I've met the girl she hit. It's a wonder someone didn't do it sooner."
"Do you solve a lot of problems with violence?" he asked. His voice was calm, but it was clear my attempts to keep Taylor's spirits up were not endearing me to her father.
"No," I said, "but if I don't have other options, or if the other party resorts to violence first, I know how to take care of myself." Danny didn't object, so I decided to try to bridge the gap between soothing him and soothing Taylor. "It's always better to walk away, but if someone won't let you leave…" I trailed off, trying to figure out how to finish that thought. "Sometimes you need to resort to force," I finished awkwardly.
He frowned. "So it's better to just leave?"
"Sure." I shrugged, not sure why he wouldn't approve of that.
"The way Taylor snuck out last night?"
Taylor went ramrod straight; I wasn't able to hide my own twitch of surprise, either. I clamped down on my instinctive denial, waiting to see what he had to say first. "You look like a nice, respectable girl, so tell me: what were you two doing in the middle of the night?" I looked at Taylor for cues, but she was staring at her lap.
"Talking," I said. "Fighting." She started again, looking at me in surprise. "Taylor missed her sparring lessons. I'm not a great instructor, but it was better than nothing."
"At midnight?" He asked Taylor.
"I was grounded," she muttered, looking back down at her lap.
Danny sighed. "I figured as much." He turned the heat down on the stove and walked over the table, sitting down at its head. "Taylor," he said, prompting her to lift her head again. "If I let you keep going to your lessons, can you promise me you'll stop sneaking out at night?"
Taylor swallowed nervously. "I, uh…" She looked at me, then back at her father, and let out a sigh. "…no," she admitted.
"Damnit, Taylor!" he snapped. His eyes widened at his own outburst, and he lowered his voice so that he was pleading rather than shouting. "Do you have any idea how dangerous it is out there? It's bad enough I let you run in the mornings. Anything could happen to you out there in the dark."
"I'm tired of being scared," Taylor said to her lap. "All day at school, I'm scared of the bullies. You want me to be scared of the city, of the dark. Can't I just not be scared, for a little while?"
It was Danny's turn to swallow a lump of emotion. "I'm sorry," he said. "I wish we didn't have to be scared. But the world isn't nice, or fair, no matter how much we wish it were." He reached out a hand, and after a moment, Taylor took it in hers.
"I know, Dad. But I can take care of myself. And I have Kasey looking after me. She knows what she's doing; she'll keep me safe."
He turned his attention back to me, looking me over. "Is that so?"
"I'll look after her, Mr. Hebert. I'll make sure she's okay." One of the reasons Emily had chosen to look after me was that she had a set of perks perfectly geared towards protecting others, even from afar, and she'd included Taylor in those after the first time I'd brought her home. I had every confidence that Taylor would come through okay, whatever happened.
"You believe that," he acknowledged, "but what happens if a mugger approaches you with a gun?"
"I'd give him my wallet."
"And if he wants more than that?"
"I'd let him get close, disarm him, and probably break a few more bones than strictly necessary while I did so."
"And if there's more than one?"
"You may not believe me, Mr. Hebert, but I've actually drilled for exactly these kinds of situations. Including protecting others." The martial arts I'd learned from the scrolls this jump had included skills for facing multiple opponents with knives, pistols, and rifles. As for protecting others: in addition to David forcing me to defend Taylor while she caught her breath during her lessons, the intermediate action-hero courses had added bean-bag hostages to the list of things I had to worry about.
"Forgive my rudeness, but you don't really look the type," he said.
"I don't go out looking for fights," I lied. "But if a fight finds me, I am fully ready to win it."
"In the middle of the night?"
"Mr. Hebert, I'm not saying I can walk into a drug den and clear the place out—" although I could, "—I'm saying that I can keep us safe if we're walking through the neighborhood after dark."
Danny held my gaze, then turned back to Taylor, who was still holding his hand. "It's been so long since you've spent any time with your friends," he told her. "The last thing I want to do is tell you to stop. But I'm scared. I'm always scared. I know how it feels, to be tired of worrying, but I can't just stop." He rubbed his free hand over his thinning hair.
"I can't stop you from sneaking out. I'd only push you away if I tried. But maybe… maybe it's time you got a phone. At least I can be sure you'd be able to call for help, if you needed it." I squirmed uncomfortably in my seat. Was the aura of People Getting Over Their Problems really this strong, just passively? It was starting to make me distinctly uncomfortable. I knew it was a hundred times more benevolent than Glory Girl's aura—ah, hell, I needed to ask Max about Panacea, too.
"Sorry," Danny said to me. "I didn't mean for things to get so personal. Must be kinda awkward for you, huh?"
"A bit," I said, embarrassed that he'd caught my discomfort. "It's okay, though."
"Good. I should thank you," he said. "I don't think I've seen Taylor this happy in months." He shot her a smile, which she returned. "Do you need to go, or can you stay for dinner?"
I flicked my eyes over to Taylor, who nodded encouragingly. "If it's no trouble."
"None at all. I've got spaghetti on the stove already, I'm sure there's enough for three."
"You haven't seen her eat yet," Taylor warned him. I gave her a thoroughly exaggerated pout. "The sandwiches she brings to school could feed a family of four!"
"Don't you get on my case too!" I whined. Danny laughed as he got up and went back to work on the stove, turning the heat back up on the sauce he'd been preparing. Our timing had been good; less than ten minutes after we'd arrived, dinner was served. It was simple food, pasta and hamburger meat in sauce, but it was hearty and well-made.
The conversation started with small talk before moving on to the news. The Dockworkers were still struggling, but enough local fishing boats and private shipping had been coming in to port to keep unemployment manageable. The Empire Eighty-Eight were expected to be off their game for a while after one of the oligarchs in charge of Gesellschaft's finances had his accounts emptied by a vigilante hacker. GUARD had taken the opportunity to hit the Sons of Odin, the most prominent Neo-Nazi group in Pennsylvania, and there was some concern that the remnants who had escaped the round-up would head east into New York, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. And, of course, the elephant in the room.
"I never thought the Protectorate would actually catch Lung," Danny said. "He's been untouchable for so long, I'd long since accepted the Bay would never be rid of him." Taylor didn't meet his eyes, instead focusing on the pasta still on her plate. He noticed her discomfort and came to a reasonable—and therefore wrong—conclusion. "He's not what I was worrying about, honey," he told her. "I know you're smart enough not to run into a cape fight, but even normal people can be dangerous." Taylor only drooped further. He took a bite of pasta, then continued, "We have to trust that the Protectorate will deal with the capes. Maybe they actually can, if Armsmaster can finally bring down Lung."
"It's not all good news," I said. "There's a power vacuum now, both in the gang and in the city."
"That's way over my head," he said. "I'm sure the PRT and Protectorate are going to be working overtime trying to keep everything under control. I'm just hoping I'll have a little less to worry about each day."
"Maybe the heroes will fill the vacuum," Taylor said.
"That would be best," I agreed.
The conversation moved on to safer topics from there.
"A reasonable—and therefore wrong—conclusion" is one of the running themes in the Worm portion of the Chain, because it's just so ripe for comedy. It was only a matter of time until I got a chance to call it out directly. But let's talk about Armsmaster.
Fanon Armsmaster is a robot. Incapable of connecting with people. Unreasonably inflexible. Businesslike to the point of parody, with the sense of humor of a Sunday school nun's ruler. There's a basis for this; in his first appearance after the Lung fight, he's unsociable to the point of hostility.
To me, this raises the question of how he came to a leadership position at all, given that he's apparently incapable of not saying exactly what he thinks at any given time. Now, he's clearly competent enough at his job, but you have to work office politics at least a little to turn performance into recognition, so he has to have some sort of charisma. So what's the deal?
Armsmaster has, thus far, appeared once in this fic, in which he cracks a joke and pokes fun at Kasey's clumsy flying. That's how I imagine 'day-to-day' Armsmaster; he may feel isolated and unable to connect with people in the quiet of his own head, but he's able to put on the public face of a charismatic hero when he needs to. I think the most reasonable explanation for Armsmaster as a person in a living world is that he's normally able to navigate social situations fine, even if it's not comfortable; it's his actions in his original appearance (which would go on to define the fanon characterization) that are 'out of character' for him. And the explanation Kasey gives in this chapter is why: he's off-balance. All his plans, his contingencies, his contingencies' contingencies—all worthless. For a careful, methodical planner like him, uncertainty is anathema. He's alarmed, not because he fears for his own safety (though that is a concern) but because he has suddenly encountered a Black Swan, and he doesn't know what's going to happen next. "Are you going to fight me?" is a reasonable thing to ask—though perhaps not in those exact words, but being sociable is the last thing on his mind at the moment.
I have just been informed that I may lose power for up to 7 days. This will affect the story posting. I apologize.
EDIT: It's now 12 hours after the scheduled outage and the lights are still on. No new updates from the utility company. Fingers crossed that I won't be affected.
"Because it forms an association between trans women and sexual predators! Because it justifies hate crimes and violence on the basis of 'gay panic'! It promotes a way of thinking that literally gets trans people killed!"
Wut? Sexual predators? What did I miss? Or is this an American thing? Anyway, this character doesn't qualify as trap, even if he/she doesn't understand what trap means.
Jumpchains are one of those things that are usually never done good, but only because they are resting on a mountain of potential no one seems to want to touch.
I love finding jumpchains like this that do something different beyond, "this time I have little points and it will be hard," or, "this time I have all the points and why didn't I just write about myself as a god?" It's only once you get passed that stuff that you can actually explore all the potential it has.
It's also actually a story with a robust word count instead of just brief min-maxing essays, as the story itself noted. I can't believe I have to include "the presence of a story at all" as an unusually goood trait for a story, but yeah.
Keep up the good work. I hope this goes on for a while.
Jumpchains are one of those things that are usually never done good, but only because they are resting on a mountain of potential no one seems to want to touch.
I love finding jumpchains like this that do something different beyond, "this time I have little points and it will be hard," or, "this time I have all the points and why didn't I just write about myself as a god?" It's only once you get passed that stuff that you can actually explore all the potential it has.
It's also actually a story with a robust word count instead of just brief min-maxing essays, as the story itself noted. I can't believe I have to include "the presence of a story at all" as an unusually goood trait for a story, but yeah.
Keep up the good work. I hope this goes on for a while.
Thank you for the kind words. I started this project as a sort of 'critical examination' of Jumpchains. That's one of the largest reasons to put my SI in as a companion, rather than a Jumper: to get an outside view of this weird, crazy system. It also allows me to focus on 'street level' character interaction even in worlds with massive conflicts, because the Jumper is dealing with the big shit off-screen.
Wut? Sexual predators? What did I miss? Or is this an American thing? Anyway, this character doesn't qualify as trap, even if he/she doesn't understand what trap means.
As for this... I'm not really sure the spirit in which this was intended, but it's pretty damn insulting to be told I don't know what 'trap' means, to say nothing of the deliberate tweak at her gender. I absolutely know what it means, and so does Cass. If you want to learn, this is a pretty good video, but I'll try to hit the main points here for anyone who doesn't want to open a video for whatever reason:
'Trap' is a western term that began somewhere in 4-chan and imageboard culture. It started by mixing the old Star Wars 'It's a Trap!' meme with images of crossdressing anime characters and metastasized to cover transgender women in general. Whatever it may have 'originally' meant, the current meaning isn't really up for debate, unless you want to fight a losing prescriptivist battle against language.
The term implies intentional deceit, that is, that the person being referred to is lying about who or what they are. That's an inherently transphobic view, because it separates 'them' from 'real' women, who aren't 'lying' about themselves.
Further than that, it implies predation, an intent to harm. The term promotes a view of transgender women as 'lying in wait' to 'trick' a man into lusting after and/or sleeping with her. This is the sexual predator component: an implicit suggestion that trans women are 'out to get' straight men (or gay women). Spreading the idea that trans people are 'out to get' someone—that it's the straight men who are the 'real' victims—literally gets trans people killed. It suggests that the 'trapped' person ought to defend themselves and excuses—or even encourages—hate crimes.
It also gets the killers lighter sentences. The term promotes and validates the "Gay (or Trans) Panic Defense", in which people claim that the revelation of someone's sexuality or gender is so shocking that they lost control and killed the victim in a fit of madness. To quote that link directly: "[the defense] asks a jury to find that a victim's sexual orientation or gender identity/expression is to blame for a defendant's violent reaction, including murder." (Emphasis added.) Using the term promotes the narrative that the people being murdered are at fault for "being wrong", rather than victims of hate crimes.
And, of course, it's a slur. It is widely used by people who are blatantly transphobic as a form of attack against openly trans individuals. It's used like a slur, by people who would use a slur, when people would use a slur. It's a slur.
As for this... I'm not really sure the spirit in which this was intended, but it's pretty damn insulting to be told I don't know what 'trap' means, to say nothing of the deliberate tweak at her gender. I absolutely know what it means, and so does Cass. If you want to learn, this is a pretty good video, but I'll try to hit the main points here for anyone who doesn't want to open a video for whatever reason:
'Trap' is a western term that began somewhere in 4-chan and imageboard culture. It started by mixing the old Star Wars 'It's a Trap!' meme with images of crossdressing anime characters and metastasized to cover transgender women in general. Whatever it may have 'originally' meant, the current meaning isn't really up for debate, unless you want to fight a losing prescriptivist battle against language.
The term implies intentional deceit, that is, that the person being referred to is lying about who or what they are. That's an inherently transphobic view, because it separates 'them' from 'real' women, who aren't 'lying' about themselves.
Further than that, it implies predation, an intent to harm. The term promotes a view of transgender women as 'lying in wait' to 'trick' a man into lusting after and/or sleeping with her. This is the sexual predator component: an implicit suggestion that trans women are 'out to get' straight men (or gay women). Spreading the idea that trans people are 'out to get' someone—that it's the straight men who are the 'real' victims—literally gets trans people killed. It suggests that the 'trapped' person ought to defend themselves and excuses—or even encourages—hate crimes.
It also gets the killers lighter sentences. The term promotes and validates the "Gay (or Trans) Panic Defense", in which people claim that the revelation of someone's sexuality or gender is so shocking that they lost control and killed the victim in a fit of madness. To quote that link directly: "[the defense] asks a jury to find that a victim's sexual orientation or gender identity/expression is to blame for a defendant's violent reaction, including murder." (Emphasis added.) Using the term promotes the narrative that the people being murdered are at fault for "being wrong", rather than victims of hate crimes.
And, of course, it's a slur. It is widely used by people who are blatantly transphobic as a form of attack against openly trans individuals. It's used like a slur, by people who would use a slur, when people would use a slur. It's a slur.
Traps have nothing to do with transgender men or woman, and while there exists some that may wrongfully use it as a slur to refer to such individuals, the term itself isn't meant for them. That you go to the point of citing murders as if it had anything to do with this is something I find really low.
Anyway, accusing those that willingly identify as traps of being sexual predators goes well and beyond the rules of civility I expect to see in this forum. That you go and add that anyone who uses the term is transphobic is simply a show of closed mindedness and lack of knowledge. Keep your insults and offending comparisons to yourself, the world is a far larger place than you think.
Traps have nothing to do with transgender men or woman, and while there exists some that may wrongfully use it as a slur to refer to such individuals, the term itself isn't meant for them. That you go to the point of citing murders as if it had anything to do with this is something I find really low.
Anyway, accusing those that willingly identify as traps of being sexual predators goes well and beyond the rules of civility I expect to see in this forum. That you go and add that anyone who uses the term is transphobic is simply a show of closed mindedness and lack of knowledge. Keep your insults and offending comparisons to yourself, the world is a far larger place than you think.
Who died and made you the king of English language? The meaning of words come from how they are used to convey information. Not how you think they should be used. (For examples look up Euphemism treadmill).
As noted above the word "Trap" has inherently negative connotations due to its plain meaning as a "a device or hole for catching animals or people and preventing their escape" or a "a dangerous or unpleasant situation which you have got into and from which it is difficult or impossible to escape".
I'm aware (from when this nonsense started up in the WTR thread) that "trap" is used by a subset of gay culture to refer to a situation where gay people cross-dress and seduce straight people until they get in bed together and the ruse is revealed as a cruel prank. This behaviour while technically not sexual predation (since the manipulator has no intention of engaging in actual sexual contact with the victim) is still abusive and abhorrent. Transgender individuals have special reason to hate it because they get conflated with such people (due to cross-dressing and the trickster hardly sticks around to explain the specifics of their sexuality & gender when faced with a mad victim).
In regards to the rules of civility on this forum you should re-read them.
Rules and Procedures of SV Rule 2 Don't be hateful said:
The Fine Print
"Don't be hateful" is about how what you say speaks to groups of people. For example, while slurs might offend a specific individual, they also generally offend communities. You are mindful not because of specific individuals, but because of all those who might be affected by what you say.
We expect, for example, that you will gender everyone appropriately. We expect that you will not refer to anyone by what might reasonably be considered a slur: don't use "retard", "japs", or "traps", for example.
I think we're all said our piece, so I'm going to ask that we set aside the topic before tempers flare out of hand. Maybe we can discuss the new chapter, instead?
Chapter 13: Questions
"Hey, Cass. How are things going?" Max asked as I walked into the lounge. Tonight, he was drinking with David, Garrus, and two people I didn't know. David was in one of the Armchairs, Garrus on the couch next to Max himself, and the pair of strangers, a man and a woman who were acting like a couple, on the opposite couch. I was only slightly surprised to see that Garrus was in his 'normal' form, rather than his jump form. One more inconvenience I hadn't expected: no alt-forms unless you slot them, and the slots cost the same resources as perk slots, too! I didn't begrudge him the expenditure one bit, though; if my 'normal' form was that different from human, I'd have gone crazy if I couldn't switch back.
"Pretty good, personally," I said. I grabbed myself a soda from the fridge, then sat down in the remaining armchair. "But I have a few things I was worried about." I popped the cap off the bottle with my power and took a drink. "First, though: introductions?"
"Ah, right. Sorry!" Max said. "Cass, this is James and Sonoshee. James, Sonoshee: Cassandra."
"Charmed," James said as he shook my hand. Sonoshee leaned over him to shake my hand as well.
"Pleased to meet you," I said.
"So, Cass, you said you had some worries?" Max asked.
"Yeah. I butterflied the canonical Skitter/Armsmaster meeting away, and I'm wondering if I just ruined Armsmaster's redemption arc."
"You should ask Erin about that. She'd know."
"Ah, right, she had that run-in with Shadow Stalker back in January." I'd forgotten about that conversation, even though it had ultimately lead to Sophia and I more-or-less unmasking to each other. "What's she up to?"
"Tinkering," James said unhelpfully.
"And trying to steal Colin from Dragon, I expect," Sonoshee added.
I gave a short, choked laugh of surprise. "Really?"
"She might not be trying to woo him," James said, throwing an arm around Sonoshee, "but he's one of her favorite characters. I would be shocked if she hasn't been trying to work her way into his personal life."
"Might not be," Sonoshee repeated with a grin.
"What personal life?" I joked.
"You know what he means," Max said. "His business."
"His affairs?" I asked.
"You said that, not me."
I gave him the most guileless look I could manage. "Well, it sounds like I don't have to worry too much about him. What about Panacea?"
"Now that is more your department," he said. "It's you, Emily, and Erin—Ellen, this jump—in Brockton, and that's it. You're going in with the Undersiders, right? So you can mitigate the bank debacle."
"Yeah, I guess? I mean, that's still kinda up in the air." I took another drink while I thought. I'd been gung-ho about trying to connect with Sophia and Emma, but Amy had years of some of the worst emotional parental abuse I could imagine, served with a side dish of having her serotonin system regularly microwaved by Glory Girl's aura. And that was only the start of her issues. "The whole People Get Over Their Issues aura seems pretty strong—a lot stronger than I expected, to the point it's kind of weirding me out—but I have very little confidence in my ability to connect with Amy at all. I'd probably have done better as Cass; Kasey is completely the wrong identity to approach her as."
"Perky, rich, and blonde?" David rattled off. "Yeah, I can see that not being a great match."
"Blonde?" I asked, poking at my light but definitely brown hair.
"Close enough. Your cape identity won't work?"
"Not unless someone can help her get over her black-and-white world-view first." I said. "Otherwise she's not going to give a villain, even a totally harmless one, the time of day. And I am most certainly not going to be 'harmless' after I rob a bank."
"Wouldn't Erin be able to help?" James asked. "She'd have some contact with New Wave, right?"
"Maybe. I'll ask her about that, too." I relaxed back in my chair. "How're things?"
"We ended up in London," he said. "Things are pretty quiet, honestly. I expected more action."
"My power's not as interesting as I'd hoped," Sonoshee said. "I rolled vehicle tinker naturally, and thought, 'wow, perfect!' But it turns out there's just not a lot of new stuff there."
"I'm enjoying it," James said.
"Of course you are."
"GUARD's doing well," Max said. "We're dealing with the Blasphemies next, through proxies, alternate identities, and whoever happened to end up in Europe." He nodded at the pair across from him. "Nilbog's on the list; the real question there is how to glass the town without angering the government. We're going through the S-Class threats pretty quickly, all things considered."
"Akemi and I are going to be going after Saint soon," David said.
"How?" Garrus asked. "Are you going to roll up, off the three of them, and run the show yourselves while trying to crack Dragon's code, or do it more publicly with a capture? If you leave them alive, they're going to talk."
Max's voice was hard. "For all their supposed good intentions, they've done enough damage—and would do so much more, if they had the chance—that I'm perfectly happy to just kill them."
"Great," David said with a sigh. "More wetwork."
"You went after Jack Slash, right?" I asked.
"Yeah. Took the shot from the roof of a nearby motel, then GUARD moved in to clean up. We got a clean sweep—eight dead, one captured."
"So they're all really dead then?" I asked.
"We're not hiding any cape-sicles in the Warehouse, no," Max said.
"Ah. To be honest, I'm kinda bummed that Bonesaw died," I said. "Out of all the long-standing members of the Nine, she was probably the only one with a real path to redemption."
"That's on me," Max admitted. "Could we have taken her in and rehabilitated her? Probably. But just the possibility of redemption doesn't mean she's innocent. A lot of better people had already died at her hands."
I didn't like that logic one bit. "That sounds like vengeance. A death sentence, in the judicial sense."
"I wasn't the one who sentenced her," he argued. "That's what a kill order is—a death sentence handed down in absentia, to be carried out by the first person in a position to do so."
"But by your own admission, you could have not done so. You could have brought her in alive. You had the legal authority to kill her, but that doesn't mean you had the moral authority."
"You really want to get into a debate on morality? In Worm?" Max leaned forward, the challenge clear. I groaned and covered my face with one hand. "I didn't think so. Keeping to this specific example, you're arguing the case that we should have devoted significant time and effort to redeeming and rehabilitating one person who, I need to remind you, is a mass murderer on a scale you'd be hard-pressed to find on any world without superpowers or similar abilities."
"I… let's say I am," I said.
"You are. And I get that, I do. But what you're saying is, ultimately, that we should have saved this one specific person."
"And?"
"So why stop there? Why start there? We're softballing this world, honestly. Some of this is actual limitations, some is just respecting the fact that there are institutions that are at least mostly functional, and some is that we're trying to ease the world through a transition to a generally less shitty place without flipping the table entirely.
"But the fact is that we're metaphorically breaking a few eggs, here. We could have gone in guns blazing, hit every S-Class threat at once, domed Eidolon, and thrown Cauldron into a deep, dark hole. Between all of us, we could probably get rid of every major villain in the entire world within a month. It would be bloody, barbaric, and a total perversion of every justice system ever invented, but we could do it. Every day we don't, innocent people die instead."
"You're describing a trolley problem," I argued. "What you're saying amounts to not pulling the switch."
"Because there are other things in play besides just the people," Max responded heatedly. "If we flip the switch, we're also running over law and order, making ourselves the ultimate authority, beholden only to ourselves. You've read Ward, right?"
"No."
"Then—really? Okay, nevermind. The point is that the trolley tracks extend beyond the people tied to them, and taking control means declaring that we have the right to permanently change the course of history to our liking."
"I think you're mangling the metaphor a bit," Garrus said.
"We're getting off track—" I started.
"This isn't the time for puns," Max interrupted.
"I—damn it," I groaned. "That wasn't intentional, I swear. What I meant is that you're arguing against heavy-handed global intervention, when we were talking about one specific case."
"The point I was trying to make is that you only care about this one specific case because you know the character," he said. "She's—what's the word—"
"She's in your monkeysphere," Garrus said.
"Exactly. All the faceless civilians she's killed weren't—"
"That's not fair—"
"Let me finish!" Max said over me. "Fine. We'll ignore the matter of guilt. You're still focusing on one person among god-knows-how-many people died that day."
"Because, by your own admission, you could have spared her and didn't. That's not a matter of non-intervention, or a problem of opportunity. You chose to kill her rather than save her, and that's one more death than there needed to be."
"You're focused on who she could have been, Cass. Yes, she had a path to redemption. A path that required literal Plot-Bullshit-To-Victory to set in motion. As she was, at that moment, she deserved that kill order."
He leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. His voice was much calmer when he resumed speaking. "What would we have done with her if we'd captured her? We avoided any potential biological kill-switches by glassing her and everything within a dozen yards of her. Taking her in alive means dealing with the tinker-tech plagues she'd got brewing under her skin, plus the augmentations that make her a literal killing machine. Yes, we can deal with all of that, but it would be a constant risk for as long as she was alive.
"And what next? She had a kill order. If we hand her over to the law, she dies anyway. If we stop them from killing her, we'd burn every bridge we'd ever have. We'd need to fake her death convincingly enough people to stop looking—possible, but again, risky—and we'd still have a walking bomb on our hands. Who's going to rehabilitate her? You?"
"I—no, I couldn't," I admitted. "You're telling me we don't have anyone with super-therapy powers?"
"Of course we do." Max didn't look annoyed anymore; lying back on the couch with his eyes closed, he looked tired. "But those take time, and we'd have to be on high alert the entire time, because she is a literal walking bomb. I could have slammed remorse or compassion down her throat, but that's closer to mind-rape than therapy, and runs into death-of-personality issues as well. Killing her would be the merciful option compared to that."
He took a deep breath and opened his eyes to meet mine. "But that's not the real issue. This is all just me attempted to justify my decision in hindsight. In the moment, I scanned her mind, and all she could feel was glee at what she was going to do to those people. I took the shot."
"Oh." I finished my drink in silence while Max grabbed another round for the four of us. "I'm sorry," I said. "I shouldn't have started second-guessing you."
"No, I'm sorry," Max said. "I've been doubting myself, and I got more upset with you than I should have." Garrus reached out and put a hand on Max's knee, giving it an encouraging squeeze. "And you always have the right to second-guess me, all of you. You're as much my advisers as you are my friends, and sometimes I need perspective."
"But you don't need people parroting your own uncertainties back at you," I said, embarrassed.
He shrugged. "Maybe someday I will."
"I'll drink to that," James said. We clinked bottles.
———X==X==X———
I called Erin on my way out of the Warehouse. She was well aware of Amy's issues, and assured me that she'd handle it. I promised to do my best to make sure the robbery didn't turn into the clusterfuck it had in canon—assuming I was involved, which was pretty likely—and that was that.
My phone buzzed a couple hours after midnight: I'd arranged for a autocaller to dial me whenever someone left a message on the answering machine I'd set up for my cape persona. I pulled the burner phone out of my costume jacket and dialed in immediately.
"Loony? This is T. I'll be at the Blue Sky cafe on Shoreline from noon to one today if you can find time to stop by. No dress code, if you catch my drift. Just you and me. Hope to see you there."
Tattletale wanted to meet me. One-on-one, out of costume. She knew Skitter and I were a pair, and she knew I wouldn't commit to anything without Skitter there, so this wasn't recruitment related.
Fact-finding, then? It made sense. Meeting me out of costume was almost certainly a ploy to get as much information as she could. Unmasking was generally seen as an equivalent exchange, but with her power she could expect to learn a lot more about whoever she was meeting. Of course, I already knew more about her than she'd ever want me to know, so it wasn't like I had to worry about it being fair.
I headed upstairs and knocked on Emily's door. "Emily? You in?"
"Come in." I opened the door and stepped through. Emily was sitting on her bed, sharpening a sword longer than she was tall. She slipped it back into her shield as I entered, which looked damn weird. "What can I do for you?"
I'd come up here to ask her to call me out sick, because that was what one did, right? Now that I was here, though, it seemed absolutely laughable. Emily wasn't my guardian, no one cared that Kasey Hudson was well on her way to failing every class, and they wouldn't care if she didn't show up tomorrow. "How are you doing?" I asked instead.
"I'm fine," she said.
"Are you sure?"
"Yes."
I snorted and sat down on the bed next to her. "I told Max I was feeling weirded out by having all these social perks just sorta… make people open up to me, but I think I'm starting to rely on it."
"Oh?"
"Yeah. How are you? Really? You getting enough sleep?"
Emily rolled her eyes. "I don't need sleep. Fifteen minutes of meditation a day."
"Ah. Cool." Too bad none of my social perks appeared to include social skills. "I can 'get by' on one hour a night, but I still sleep six. There's just not much to do at night except mess around in the Warehouse or go caping, and I've been trying to keep a low profile."
"There's nothing wrong with that," she said.
I gave her a smile, because the alternative was frowning at my own awkwardness. "How are you, Homura?"
"I'm fine."
"Are you?" She raised one eyebrow. "I mean… I get that this is 'normal' for you, and the Emily I got to know in January was more of an overlay than anything else, but… I feel like you're, you're… closed off."
"I'm sorry. I didn't think about how it looked to you. This is your first import, so you're going to be feeling the jump memories much stronger than most of us. It must have seemed like your sister was just fading away, being replaced—"
"That's not what I'm worried about," I interrupted. "It's weird, yes, but I'm asking about you. Are you okay? Really okay?"
"Why would I not be okay?" she asked.
I swallowed. "Can I ask you something personal?" I broke eye contact, looking away at the plain white walls instead. "Like, very personal."
She didn't answer for a few moments. "You can ask," she said finally.
"How did you come to join up with Max?"
There was a long silence.
"I failed," she said. I risked a glance back, but she wasn't looking at me; she was staring straight ahead, lost in memory. "So I got ready to try again. Max stopped me, warned me that she wouldn't be there next time. I didn't really care… but she offered me an alternative. A chance to leave Earth for a while, and come back with enough power to save anyone. To save everyone. How could I refuse?"
My first instinct was to hug her, but I settled for resting one of my hands on hers, much as I had for Sophia after dragging her life story out of her. "You'll make it," I said. "I know you will." Homura's 'build' made a lot of sense considering she planned to go back. No wonder she'd focused on protective perks so heavily.
"I will," she repeated. "I'd almost given up hope. I failed so many times… but this time, everybody lives."
"Everybody," I repeated.
"Everybody," she said. "No matter how stubbornly they try to get themselves killed."
She was probably thinking of Sayaka. "Damn straight," I said. "Uh, if you don't mind me asking, how many times—"
"I do mind." She pulled her hand away and returned it to her lap.
"Sorry." Fuck.
I fidgeted, tapping my fingers on the bed beneath me. "So, uh, what do you think?"
"Of what?"
"The adventure."
"It's been fine."
I nudged her with my elbow. "Come on. 'Fine'? That's it?"
"It's a means to an end," she said.
"What about the people you've met along the way?"
"I…" Homura hesitated. "I've tried not to get too attached," she admitted. "It would be so easy to just leave everything behind. But I can't. I can't. But if I get too attached… to Max… to everyone… I might not go back."
That sounds lonely. I'd thought that, at least, being part of the Jumpchain would give her a chance to make lasting friendships that didn't reset, but she was deliberately holding herself apart.
Deliberately.
"Is that…" I stopped. Did I really want to say that?
No. Some questions were too personal, too loaded. "Are you feeling okay?" I asked instead. "Talking about this?"
"I'm fine." Homura manifested her soul gem in her left hand, while pulling something out of her shield with her right. It looked like a small glass bauble, and when she touched it to her gem, a single mote of darkness flittered from the gem into the bauble. "See?"
"Is that a Clear Seed?"
"That's what Max called it." She held it up for me to see, though she kept it safely in her own hands.
"Huh. So that's what a Clear Seed looks like."
"You hadn't seen one before?" she asked.
"Nope"
Homura hummed, looking at the seed. "Expanded universe?" she asked.
"Fanfic, actually."
Somehow, her body language went from that of someone holding a precious treasure to that of someone holding a smelly sock without moving a muscle. "I see."
"It's a good fanfic?"
"I shouldn't have asked." She slipped the seed back into her shield. "Was that all?"
The question I'd stopped myself from asking echoed in my mind.
Is that why you stopped being Emily?
It wasn't a fair question, and I knew it. The last thing I wanted was to guilt Homura into forming a bond that she'd have to break.
"What sort of build did you make, this jump?" I asked instead.
"Rogue for the freebies and Enlightened Self Interest, two hundred points on choosing the power, then six hundred on Shard Administration. I've been looking for a power-sharing perk for a while, and the only way it could be better is if I retained the abilities."
"You're all business, then," I teased her.
"I took the rogue origin," she said. "I'm an assassin."
"Oh." I looked away awkwardly. "You mean, literally?"
"Yes." She started ticking off her fingers. "Manton. Teacher. Bakuda. Heartbreaker—"
"That was you?"
"Yeah."
I wasn't sure I wanted to know, especially after my earlier conversation with Max, but I had to ask. "What happened to his victims?"
"Max has a perk specifically for undoing mind-alteration powers, as long as she can launch a single physical attack on the source. She smacked him from time-stop, then I put five rounds in him. That took care of all the dead-man's switches as well.
"As far as anyone knows, Heartbreaker's power didn't quite work on someone in his inner circle, then reversed itself fully with his death."
"Wow." I was starting to feel like the perks I'd had a chance to take were on the low end of the scale, bullshit-wise. "How'd you track him down?"
"Regent pointed me in the right direction."
"He did? How did you contact him? The… what was it, the address book?" There had been an item for sale in the jump document that had contact information; I thought it was free to the Cauldron origin, but I wasn't sure that was right.
"It doesn't contain contact information for capes who don't want to be contacted. I used this." She pulled out a small plastic box and flipped the lid open, revealing an old-fashioned Rolodex. "It has contact details for everyone it's holder has ever met, provided they know their name."
That was the object she'd shoved into my hands back in February. I'd come home and mentioned Regent, and she'd shoved it into my hands to get his contact details. Then she'd called him up… was that Tattletale had been on about last night? He'd been approached by a strange cape offering to kill his father, he'd cooperated, his father had ended up dead… of course he'd been spooked by the concept he was 'leaking' information, he had more secrets than Lisa did by this point. And she'd been rapidly learning them, and had not appreciated being out of the loop one bit.
While I'd been connecting the dots, Homura had pulled out a notebook and was flipping through it. On closer examination, I realized it was the Journal from the RPG jump—I'd forgotten I had one of those. "Sorry for bringing all that up," I said.
"It's fine."
"As in 'it was never a problem', or 'I want to pretend it didn't happen'?"
"It's fine," she repeated, and I left it alone. I had someone else to worry about.
Worry about pranking, that is.
"Hey, do you have anything you can give out that would make it harder for Tattletale to read me?"
———X==X==X———
___FORMATTING IS SUFFERING__ COMPLETED QUESTS
► [X]_A Shoulder to Fly On ____________________________________ (COMPLETE) Befriend Taylor
I get flies with a little help from my friends.
______________________________ ACTIVE QUESTS
▼ [ ]_ Not a Messiah
Redeem the Schoolyard Bullies _______________________________________ [0/2] __ ▼ [ ]_ Sophia: _____ ► [X]_Befriend Sophia _____ • [X]_Discover Sophia's past _____ ▼ [ ]_ Convince Sophia to reconsider her world view ________ • [ ]_ Have Taylor defeat Sophia in a spar _______________ –OR– ________ • [ ]_ Convince Taylor to unmask to Sophia _______________ –OR– ________ • [ ]_ ??? (Undiscovered)
▼ [ ]_ Eye of the Tiger
Train Taylor __ • [X]_Arrange for a personal trainer for Taylor __ • [ ]_ Train Taylor until she can defeat Sophia (84%)
▼ [ ]_ Membership Benefits Join the Undersiders __ • [X]_Meet the Undersiders __ • [X]_Convince the Undersiders to invite you to the team __ • [ ]_ Wait for the invitation __ • [ ]+ Meet Lisa at noon (optional) __ • [ ]+ Convince Taylor to join (optional)
▼ [ ]_ Bio Hazard
Stop Panacea from going off the deep end __ • [ ]_ ??? __ • [ ]+ Contact Erin (optional)
———X==X==X———
In addition to tracking all of my current goals, my 'Quest Log' managed to offer at least one alternative I hadn't thought of. Trying to get Taylor and Sophia to unmask to each other was a recipe for disaster, but the fact that there was a social path around having the two of them beat the crap out of each other was interesting, if nothing else. And there were more options, as well, although apparently I had to figure them out on my own.
More importantly, it told me two things I hadn't known. First, that Taylor was 'eighty-four percent' ready to face down Sophia. David had estimated his training multiplier at about thirty times normal, which turned three weeks of training into almost two years—not unreasonable that she'd be almost good enough after that.
The second was that I had apparently failed to befriend Emma. Back when I'd first arrived in Brockton, I'd complained that I didn't have a good sense of what my social perks were actually doing. I'd forgotten that the Journal also had profile pages for all of the people I'd met, with more details coming the longer I'd spent with them. Emma, Sophia, and Taylor's pages were more or less completely filled out, and Emma's page confirmed what the quest tracker had suggested: not only was Emma unfriendly towards me, there was a growing rift between her and Sophia because she was worried Sophia had betrayed her for a new, cooler friend. I might have appreciated the irony if it didn't feel like a personal failing. It didn't seem like it was hopeless, since there was still another objective beneath that, but it wasn't promising.
As for Taylor and Sophia, the Journal actually tracked all their neuroses, with recent modifiers listed. Having it all quantified made it even more creepy; I comforted myself with the thought that it would all be for their benefit in the end.
I really hoped that was true.
———X==X==X———
I ambushed Taylor on her way back from her morning run, 'running' into her on the corner of the block her house was on. "Hey, Taylor!"
She skidded to a halt in front of me. "Kasey? What are you doing here?" Taylor was dressed in great sweats and running shoes, a sheen of sweat on her forehead despite the cool morning.
"I wanted to give you a heads up: I'm skipping school today."
"Why?"
"I got a message from… one of our mutual acquaintances. She wants to meet me downtown today."
"Just you." Taylor said.
None of that now, Taylor! "It's a power dynamic thing. I don't think the meeting is… membership related, anyway."
"Do you need backup?" she asked immediately.
"I shouldn't. And I really shouldn't encourage you to miss school." I grinned. "But if you want to come, provide overwatch or something, I'll give you a ride."
Taylor didn't hesitate. "When do we leave?"
———X==X==X———
I picked Taylor up a few minutes after ten o'clock. "You think she'll already be there?" She asked as she slid into the passenger seat.
"Probably. Trying to one-up her on arrival is a losing strategy. I'm going to play this cool, arrive five minutes late. We'll be ten miles away until we have to go to make it right in time for the meeting." I left the car in park and popped the Adventurer's Map out of hammerspace. Taylor's eyes widened as I spread the map out and zoomed in on Shoreline, the aptly-named street than ran along the coast from the Boardwalk to the defunct south ferry terminal. Shoreline was associated with the Boardwalk and was thus 'tourist territory', meaning it was well-policed by both the literal police department and the Protectorate, despite only brushing against the Boardwalk itself at its northern end. Blue Sky was a small outdoor cafe only a couple blocks south of the Boardwalk proper, with seating facing the water for a picturesque view of the Protectorate HQ in the bay.
"I'll park a block away, here." I pointed to a parking garage. "Then I'll walk over to the cafe." With a thought, the map zoomed in further, then swooped down to a Google-Streetview like perspective from the cafe itself. I panned the map back and forth for a second.
"Where do you get your Tinkertech?" Taylor asked.
"Favors owed," I hedged. Given how much I'd suffered to get my Generic RPG goods, it was almost true. "What's your range?"
"Hm?"
"On your power."
"About two blocks," she said.
"How far is that?"
"Two blocks," Taylor repeated flatly. "I don't know how many feet that is."
"Right." I frowned at the map; I remembered her range as being larger than that, but that was probably later, after she'd had time to grow into it. "You can catch a movie here," I pointed to a theatre on the other side of the block across from the cafe. "That'll put us safely in your range, right?"
"Yeah, it should."
"Great. You can listen in through this." I reached into the back seat and grabbed a bag; I pulled out a box and opened it to reveal a pair of small, earplug-shaped devices, one of which I took for myself before handing the box to her. "It can't do subvocalization without a throat mic, unfortunately, so you'll have to talk out loud to transmit. The good news is it that it'll catch what our contact says, so I won't have to repeat it to you." I bent down so she could watch me put it in my ear, then helped her do the same. I reached back into the bag and stuffed a few more goodies into my jacket pockets before tossing the empty bag back into the back seat of the car.
One of the reasons I'd come so early was to leave myself time to both make sure I had an accurate understanding of how far Taylor had developed her power without me, and then give Taylor a crash course in her own power. "How well can you sense through your bugs? Sight, hearing, that sort of thing?"
"Not well. I can get splotchy colors and distorted sounds, but it gives me a headache to try to interpret it. Bug senses don't work like human senses."
"Hmm." I moved the map down a block, panning the view around again while I pretended to think her words over. "You might be able to train that, if it's just a matter of interpreting the information. We'll talk about that later. What else can you sense through them?"
"Well," Taylor said, scrunching her face in thought. "I know what kind of bugs they are, and how they work, enough to recognize a stinger or silk gland and keep them fed and breathing. I know where they are—"
"How precisely?" I cut in.
"Like they're part of my own body."
"Proprioception?" I put on a grin. "Nice. That's killer. Better than sight, even."
"How's that better that sight?"
"Because of what you can do with it. You can feel your way around in pitch blackness, like you've got a million detachable fingers to guide you."
"That's gross."
"You control bugs, who's the gross one here?"
"Bugs aren't gross!" she insisted.
I cleared my throat loudly. "Back on topic: you can feel your way around with bugs, or just coat everything in an area with bugs if you're not trying to be subtle. Use enough fliers and you get a negative space map: wherever your bugs are is empty space, and everything else is solid. Plus, if you know what any given bug is touching, you know where that object is."
"None of that is useful if I'm not going to coat the cafe in bugs," Taylor said.
I sighed. "Yeah, that's true. Hmm." I feigned a few more moments of thought. "There are bugs small enough that people won't notice them, right? You could put bugs on people, and track them for as long as they stay in your range." Taylor nodded.
"I can put a spider in your hair—"
"Don't you dare!" I yelled. "Ahem. I mean, I would prefer if any bugs remained on my clothing, and not be spiders. I don't like bugs in general, but spiders in particular, ugh."
Taylor gave me a flat look. "You're arachnophobic."
"Yeah."
"You are terrible at choosing friends," she declared with utmost seriousness.
"You're the best friend an arachnophobe could have, because you can keep them way the hell away from me," I pointed out.
"I could…"
"If I catch you sneaking spiders onto my person I will tell David to train you wrong on purpose."
———X==X==X———
Lisa was highly visible, given that the cafe wasn't doing much business today. She was the only customer sitting out on the patio, perched on one of the overly-tall chairs that were inexplicably popular at outdoor cafes in the Bay, blonde hair in a long braid, sipping an iced drink through a straw in total defiance of the cold, overcast weather. Her eyes slid right over me as I moved through the crowd, only picking me out once I'd exited the cafe back onto the patio, hot chocolate in hand. She immediately grimaced like her drink had gone sour. "What the hell are you doing?" she hissed as I approached.
"What?"
"Don't 'What?' me! I look at you and I get mariachi music!"
Oops. "I'll, uh, turn that down, then?"
"Please," Lisa said. I felt for the 'knob' that had appeared in my head along the normal feelings for my own powers and dialed it down until she stopped scowling at me. "Thank you," Lisa said petulantly. She scanned me, eyes roving from head to toe. "You're mic'd up," she said accusingly. "And you've got backup. I told you to come alone." I turned the dial back up a bit.
"I did." When Lisa started to object, I clarified, "I am not unobserved. It's just me, here—backup is intel only. It seemed fair."
"And the music?"
I buried my face in my cup. "I… didn't realize it would do that."
"You are a weird one, Loony."
"Kasey," I said, holding out a hand. "Kasey Hudson."
"Lisa." She didn't give me a last name, and I didn't ask. We shook, and I sat down—which is to say I hopped up and managed to perch my ass on the seat enough to pull myself back into a proper sitting position
Lisa was wearing a similar outfit to mine; a cold-weather jacket over a solid color long-sleeved shirt and jeans. She was pretty, in that sort of no-obvious-flaws comic-book superheroine way; combined with the fact that I really cared whether she liked me for a number of entirely non-romantic reasons—she was probably my favorite of the core cast, even edging out Taylor herself—I was more than a little self-conscious. "Uh, since you asked me out here alone, I assume this is a meet and greet, not a membership thing."
"Yeah." She brushed a few loose strands of hair out of her face, then shot me a warm smile. "Sorry, about the attitude. I didn't get much sleep last night, as you can probably imagine."
"I figured as much." Even knowing that people were biased towards liking me by phenomenal cosmic powers, the actual effect was sometimes a little disconcerting. At least I could try and earn that favor. I reached into the pocket of my jacket and pulled out a small phial. "Tinker stims," I lied as I passed the brilliant green potion over. "Good as a full night's rest." Jenn had indeed come through on the Stamina potions.
"Side effects?"
"Not for a single dose." The potion couldn't replace sleep entirely, and trying was a bad idea, but there were no side effects from the potion itself. For a single shot, there was nothing to worry about.
"So, what, I put it in my coffee?"
"If you really want to ruin the coffee. Take it like a shot." She looked at the vial, then at me, then back at the vial. Then she pulled the cork and swallowed the whole thing in one gulp.
"Blech, that's bitter. Woah." She blinked, then stared at the vial again. "How much of this stuff do you have?"
"Enough to use it as a peace offering, not enough to supply an addict."
She pouted and tossed the empty vial back to me. I stuck it back in my pocket while she washed the flavor away with the remainder of her coffee. "Freelancing has done well for you," she said.
"Yeah." I wasn't sure exactly how far I could push the truth, even with the Obfuscation power Emily had loaned me, but if she assumed my various assortment of goods had been picked up as payment for services rendered, I wasn't going to argue.
"You know we don't have stuff like that on offer, right?" Lisa stirred her coffee'd ice with her straw as she spoke. "Being part of the team means not taking odd jobs in return for favors."
"I know. Freelancing is great, but a steady paycheck and reliable teammates sound pretty nice too."
"Your friend isn't reliable?"
"We met last night." It was technically true.
"You certainly bonded fast," Lisa said. She was still smiling, and her tone made it sound like a compliment, but I knew she was fishing for information.
I slurped up more hot chocolate to cover my hesitation. "Fighting for your life will do that?"
"That's true." She picked up her sorry cup of slush and looked at it in disappointment. "Well, this was a waste."
"Why the iced drink?"
"To jolt me awake when caffeine alone wasn't doing the job. That's why it was a waste." She set the cup back down and grinned at me. "Shall we take a walk?"
"Trying to ditch my backup?" I asked jovially.
Her grin turned sly. "Or maybe I'm trying to scout out just far she can see."
"I could invite her over and you could ask her yourself," I suggested.
"How far away is she?"
"I'll be there in five minutes," Taylor said in my ear.
"She'll be here—"
"In five minutes," Lisa finished for me. I rolled my eyes.
"If you keep showing off, I'm going to start returning the favor."
"You're in public," Taylor reminded me.
"Relax," I muttered.
Lisa chuckled as she hopped off her stool. "Let's go. She can just shadow us. I did call you out here alone, after all." I finished my drink and followed her, and we tossed our cups in the trash on the way out.
She lead us to the right: north, into the Boardwalk proper. Even in the dreary spring weather, the Boardwalk was bustling, people moving to and fro, stopping to gawk at the displays in the store windows. We spent about twenty minutes just wandering and making small talk, dodging through the crowd. I wasn't paying as much attention as I should have been, since Lisa bumped into me several times, and had to pull me out of the way of other groups a couple more.
"You know," Lisa said after nudging me around another group, "I get the feeling this isn't exactly your scene."
"Not exactly," I admitted.
"Yeah. Let's do something else, then." She pointed across the thoroughfare, at a bright neon sign above a rugged-looking building. Arcade.
I grinned. "Sweet. Let's go."
Lisa must have a pretty good read of me, because she immediately went for the light-gun games. Practicing with a real weapon wasn't like using a light-gun, but it had definitely improved my reaction time and ability to point a weapon where I wanted it to aim. Between training and whatever Lisa was drawing her performance from, we tore through Time Crisis 2 with a nearly flawless performance, to the amazement of the three college kids who had stopped to watch.
"Seriously?" she asked, when I punched F L X into the high score table, fourth from the top.
"Why not?" I asked. Lisa rolled her eyes, then grudgingly shot T T L in hers. I turned to our spectators and asked, "You guys want a turn?"
They glanced at each other. "Nah, we're good," the tallest one said. "That was a hell of a thing to watch."
"Don't see a lot of girls in here," his friend added. "You must play a lot."
"Yeah." I grinned at Lisa. "Regular couple of gunslingers, we are."
"You come here a lot?" he asked. "I usually come in on weekends—"
"Don't mind him," the first speaker said, jabbing his friend with an elbow.
"What?" he asked.
"See you around!" the third kid said, as he and kid one pulled their protesting friend away. The group disappeared around the corner without an explanation.
"Huh," I said. Lisa just laughed. "So I know what my deal is. How'd you become light-gun John Wick?"
"Who?"
Shit, I'd fucked up the dates on that reference. "How are you so good at that game?"
Lisa elbowed me. "You really think anyone spends any time at all around my friend without getting dragged into an arcade at some point?"
"That's fair."
"Why are you so good at it?"
"Practice." I looked around the dim room, taking a look at the various games on offer. "What's next?"
"Hmm…" Lisa put her hand on her chin, holding her elbow with other. "I'm thinking you like Skeeball."
I laughed, because she had me down pat. "You are absolutely cheating!" I said, then let her drag me off all the same.
"You are absolutely cheating!" Lisa echoed five minutes later, as I outscored her two to one.
"I'm really not! It wouldn't even help!" That wasn't exactly true: I wasn't doing anything with my power, but something about the senses I had helped me line up exactly the right line throw after throw. "Again?"
"No way," she said, looking over the machines herself. "We're racing now!" She hauled me over to one of those racing game cabinets with the full chair-wheel-stick-pedals setup, and promptly repaid me the humiliating defeat I had just handed her. Unlike her, I was not smart enough to decline the rematch, and ended up losing four races in quick succession, which ran me out of quarters.
We headed over to feed another five dollars to the change machine, but someone else had taken the racing the game by the time we got back. "Just as well," I said. "You were only going to make the arcade a bunch of money, anyway."
"Because you can't cheat a fully electronic game," Lisa said.
"I wasn't cheating," I said stubbornly.
"Sure you weren't. Hey, you think you can cheat at the claw game?"
"I wasn't cheating!"
I couldn't cheat the claw game either, in fact. I won her a stupid little cat plushie anyway, but it took enough quarters that I probably could have bought a better one for cheaper.
We'd been in the arcade for nearly an hour, at this point, so we grabbed our jackets and headed back out into the afternoon sunlight. Lisa stopped to buy a cup of coffee—hot, this time—from one of the food trucks that littered the main 'street', sighing contentedly as she warmed her hands on the cup. We headed out to one of the benches facing the water and sat down, rather than having Lisa try to drink while she walked.
"I assumed from the fact that you wanted to meet me that you weren't able to learn as much as you wanted Sunday night," I said conversationally. "Did it help?"
"Yes and no." She drank her coffee with relish. "You're infuriatingly hard to read. I have twice as many new questions as I have answers."
I gave a sheepish laugh. "I can try to answer some of them."
"Well, I suppose there's no harm in asking." She turned her head to look me in the eyes. "Why do you want to be on the team?"
"I like you guys," I answered honestly.
"You don't know us," Lisa countered.
"I like you anyway."
Lisa broke eye contact and sipped in silence for a bit. "You don't need the money. You don't need our help." She sloshed the dregs of her coffee around absentmindedly. "Is it really that simple?"
"Yeah."
She hummed in thought, then leaned over and wrapped an arm around my shoulders. "You're lucky I like you too. We're not quite ready to give you the formal offer, but it's as good as yours by this point. How do you feel about meeting the rest of the team? Say, after school on Friday?"
I waited for Taylor to speak up. "Go for it," she said.
"Great," Lisa said without waiting for me to relay the message. "I'll leave another message with the meet-up point tomorrow or Thursday." She polished off the last of the coffee and stood up, cat plush tucked under one arm; I followed suit. Lisa offered me her hand, and we shook again. "See you then, Kasey."
"Looking forward to it, Lisa."
I wonder what people think of Max, here.
Slowly filling in some more Companions, and Kasey is getting closer to the Undersiders. Taylor is skeptical.
One of the main reasons the Worm component of this Jumpchain grew so long is that I went into it juggling too many things. Cass is still getting used to the Jumpchain and the behavior of Max and company, plus she's dealing with a lot of questions regarding her chosen role as a self-insert within the context of Earth Bet. If I were to really go back to the beginning and substantially re-write the Fic, I'd probably hold off on Worm for another jump or two, simply so that I could deal with the various levels of culture shock (the Jumpchain itself, Max and Friends, Moral Questions, and her Favorite Setting) separately.
The other reason it grew like a weed is that I kept cannibalizing half-finished fragments of other Worm fics I never properly wrote for story beats, so there's just a lot of things lying around waiting to happen.
