Cubicle Superheroes

[Redcoat_Officer]

Cubicle Superheroes​

Chapter 1

Stuck in the morning traffic of San Francisco, I watched through the windshield of my compact hatchback as a cape flew overhead on pristine white wings. Ivory Angel was a fairly recent addition to the San Francisco Wards roster, no doubt enjoying a brief moment of freedom before the start of the school day.

At that moment, she resembled a harpy in form, with wings replacing her arms and her feet shifted into birdlike talons. She danced through the sky, gliding down the length of the street before rising up, pirouetting and spinning off down another block to continue her patrol.

All the while, people on either side of the street raised their cell phones to immortalise the sight with a photographs, while others cheered right along with her as she grinned down at the crowds.

In official Protectorate terminology, she was on a "high visibility overflight patrol." Those patrols typically served two purposes. The first was to provide a visible Protectorate – or in this case Wards – presence over strategically important areas; in this case the city centre, but the principle could be and was applied just as easily to high-crime neighbourhoods, where a costumed figure soaring overhead would dissuade those who thought to commit crimes under their sight.

The second purpose was one tied to the intrinsic principles of the Protetorate's mission statement; to make Parahumans something normal, something accepted. Even something liked. Ivory Angel – flying overhead in her resplendent gold and white costume – wasn't here to intimidate the city centre. After all, she was still only a teenager and this deep in the city centre the crime rate was negligible at best. Instead, she was a symbol of the Protectorate; living proof that while Parahumans may never be normal, they do not need to be feared.

Simply by allowing her this time to cut loose and fly freely – something psychological studies had shown her and all other Parahuman flyers loved to do – she was advancing the mission of the PRT and playing a vital role in ensuring the world kept turning in spite of the new wonders of this Parahuman era.

It's also the direct antithesis of my own role in the PRT's mission, I couldn't help but think as I turned the corner and saw the looming edifice of Watchdog's headquarters swing into view.

Built opposite the Federal Building in downtown San Francisco, it was a slab-sided skyscraper coated in darkened windows that simply reflected their surroundings back at the viewer. There was no branding on the building, no architectural flourishes or grand super-scientific quirks that were ubiquitous on all Protectorate buildings. The only identifying mark was a simple brass plaque next to the door, a foot and a half across and bearing Watchdog's acronym; WEDGDG. Even that was more for the benefit of the mailman than the public or Watchdog's employees.

The size of the building itself was another outlier. Technically, the Protectorate was headquartered in New York, but their headquarters in that city was largely the same in its components as any other Protectorate office in the nation's sixty largest cities. Ultimately, each of them answered to their closest PRT department, and as such differed greatly in character and methodology.

Watchdog was not scattered across the country, at the beck and call of dozens of local directors. While we maintained the occasional satellite outpost, the majority of our employees worked out of this one building, and whilst we might consider the requests of the regional Directors, ultimately the only authority we answered to was that of the Chief Director herself. After all, it was part of our remit to monitor those Directors, Commanders, Senators, Members of Parliament. Even Presidents.

I ignored the entrance to the building's underground parking lot – much like the front door, it was little more than a simple smokescreen – and instead made my way into the underground parking lot of the San Francisco Federal Building on the other side of the street.

That way, all of Watchdog's traffic simply blended into that of the dozens of other federal departments that worked out of the building, making it next to impossible to identify our employees by such pedestrian methods as tailing cars.

Similarly, the ID I used to pass the barrier identified me as an employee of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, not Watchdog. From there, I checked my reflection in the mirror to make sure everything was in place, before straightening my tie and joining the flow of people into the building.

I never actually entered the federal building itself, however. Instead, my route took me through an underground tunnel that ran beneath the plaza and the road before emerging into a short hall with a security office on one side and a row of reinforced glass turnstiles – like glass tubes that were open on one side and that rotated to trap their occupant until their ID was cleared.

As the door swung shut behind me, I pressed my Watchdog ID against the scanner and looked over at the security guards in their reinforced office, both of them dressed in grey PRT uniforms. One of them was staring intently, and I saw his eyes widen as he put two and two together.

Clearly he's new here, I thought, with a sense of inward satisfaction. I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy unnerving people, but then that's part of why I ended up in Watchdog. Amongst other, more political reasons.

Beyond that single entryway, the solitary Watchdog building immediately fragmented into a warren of distinct corridors, hallways and compartmentalised clearance levels. From the outside, Watchdog was a single, solitary bastion when compared to the scattered forts of the Protectorate, but beneath that layer lay a labyrinthine spiderweb of think tanks, analyst groups, jurisdictional areas and mandates that overlapped and – at times – competed, or even existed in direct opposition to each other.

Some of our agents and analysts worked in teams, spending the entire day in open-plan offices where ideas and theories could be swapped freely, while others worked in solitary offices without even knowing the names of their immediate neighbours. I fell into the latter category, and my office was on the thirteenth floor of the Watchdog building.

It had an exterior wall, but I gained no benefit from that positioning. The skyscraper's windows were nothing more than a decoration layered over steel armour, sheets of lead plating and reinforced concrete two feet thick. Ours was an entirely insular world of dark corridors and dull lighting, shut off from the vibrant sunshine of San Francisco. There had been some consideration given to adding screens on the wall hooked up to camera feeds of the building's exterior, but it had been determined that this could potentially be used as a vector of attack by memetic threats.

So we laboured in a timeless void, with irregular shift patterns ensuring the building was fully staffed at all hours of the day. Each office in the building was largely identical, and almost all went undecorated. Few people brought their home lives with them into the building. I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of family photos I'd seen since starting work here.

I logged into my desktop at eight fifty seven. Three minutes later – so regular I could set my watch to it – there was a knock at my door as a uniformed officer arrived with a secure lockbox on a cart. I signed for the box – writing 'Isolate' on the officer's clipboard in a neat cursive font – and set it down on the floor beside my desk before opening it. Within were several objects, ranging from the innocuous to the bizarre. A hand axe, a crystalline shard, and the skull of a monster lay at the top of the box, with more on the layers beneath.

Each of them were created or affected by a power, and that meant I could use my power on them. I focused on the objects, one by one, gleaming information from them and noting it down in neat reports on the computer. The objects were numbered, rather than labelled, with no other identifying information whatsoever.

So too were my reports, the numbers dutifully copied down into a database where I was able to access the relevant file and see what exactly I was supposed to be gleaming from each artefact.

Some of the objects were familiar a dozen times over, yet I still dutifully noted down the same redundant information that had been set down a thousand times before, purely so that it would be immediately obvious in the reports if anything had changed.

The longer I spent with those objects in view – spread out across the floor in front of my desk – the more insights I gleamed about the power that made them and the person that wielded it. I noted down their physical state – the maker of the crystal shard had her cheek held together by stitches – their psyche – the man who imbued the hand axe with hidden power was currently asleep, with the effects of a strong hallucinogenic drug and alcoholic spirits still present in his grey matter – and even the areas that the powers had operated in the recent past, and by extrapolation the location of the Parahuman that wielded them – the man who made the monster's skull still sat immobile beneath his throne in the centre of Ellisburg, New York State.

Other objects did not require location data, or health information. They belonged to Protectorate Parahumans whose powers left a permanent or even long-lasting effect on objects. With them, the most useful information wasn't the details of how their powers worked – though I noted that down all the same – but their mental stability, to put it bluntly. Whether they had any hidden doubts gnawing away at their psyche, how they thought of their comrades. Whether they were lying when they spoke to their superiors, their subordinates, their psychologists.

It was the one piece of data whose purpose I knew; part of a database that was meant to use a sample set of Protectorate Parahumans to judge the morale of the organisation as a whole. If morale within the organisation was allowed to rapidly deteriorate on a large scale, it could cause mass desertions, broken contracts, defections to criminal organisations or foreign governments and affect the stability of the PRT as a whole.

But all of the data was used, in one way or another. Someone, somewhere had decided which objects were worth requesting from the secure vaults of PRT departments across North America. Which objects were worth my time, in essence. Similarly, my intelligence reports on the objects were catalogued and archived to be accessed by teams of analysts, psychological profilers, other Watchdog Thinkers and even occasionally cleared for release to Protectorate Strike Squads. It was much easier to execute a kill order if the killers knew where the target slept at night, after all.

Everything I did was important to someone, somewhere, but that didn't make it interesting work. In fact, it was fatiguing. Even spreading out my power-given analysis over some hours, I was unable to resist the headache that slowly crept throughout my entire body.

It meant that the abrupt arrival of an internal message seventeen minutes before midday came as a blissful distraction, rather than an annoyance. That mild relief turned into curiosity when I saw that it was from my Section Chief, inviting me to an urgent meeting five floors up.

I drummed my fingers on the table for a moment, listening to the sound of ceramic on faux-wood as I wondered just what this was about. In the end, I decided it didn't matter. I had done nothing to draw unfavourable attention to myself, and the day was dragging on for long enough that any break from the tedium was welcome.

It wasn't the work itself. There was a degree of satisfaction to be found in playing the omnipotent spymaster, and it provided plenty of opportunities to learn about people. How they acted and reacted, for example. Each and every day I gained a window into the lives of dozens of Parahumans, gaining insight into what they thought about their lives and the people in them. It was enlightening, but part of me was frustrated that I so rarely got to do anything with that information.

But that was the tradeoff I made years ago, when I was debating whether to hand myself into the PRT or to try and contact the Elite.

The meeting room was in one of the few parts of the building I was familiar with, consisting as it did entirely of similar rooms that various different departments could book as and when they needed to meet face to face. I passed a few people in the halls as I made my way there, but nobody I recognised. Still I saw in them the same hurried pace of my own stride. Watchdog's corridors were oppressively bare, with walls coated in dark wood-pattern panels, minimal lighting and grey carpeted floors that seemed to soak up the sound in the air.

It was not the sort of environment in which people lingered to catch up with old friends, or swap stories over the water cooler.

For similar reasons, I didn't knock when I reached the meeting room. I was expected, after all. Inside, the room was identical to every other Watchdog meeting room, with a long table dominating the length of the room. It was minimalist in style, made from a glossy black materiel with a raised section running down the middle – about an inch above the rest of the table – that concealed a light bar that illuminated the desk while leaving the people seated at it in comparative gloom.

Behind the top of the table, the seal of Watchdog hung on the wall – a stylised, winged eye of dull metal on a slate grey background – flanked on either side by the flags of the United States of America and the Dominion of Canada, the way they were draped mixing with the positioning of the light to cast deep shadows on the bold red, white and blue colours.

Before that seal, those flags, sat three people. At the head of the table sat a Native American – or First Nation Canadian – man with greying hair, a red tie over a white shirt and a slate grey suit. To his left sat the only person in the room I recognised – my Section Chief, Deputy Assistant Director Wallace – a stern-faced, aged Caucasian man with a faint Texan accent still defiantly clinging to his voice. His own suit was tan, with a light blue shirt.

The other person in the room was seated to the right, and she was a Parahuman. Not that I would have been able to tell without my power, since she was unmasked and dressed in a plain grey suit. The Protectorate's anonymity came from a great masquerade of obfuscations, of half-masks with false lines to hide the bone structure of the face, of wigs, make-up and other cosmetic tricks. They were a necessary solution to the problem of protecting the identity of living symbols, but Watchdog moved in a very different world.

Our anonymity was that of the face in the crowd. With a thousand employees in this building alone, it was impossible to pick out who amongst the flow of suited individuals was a Parahuman. Unless, of course, you had a power-given trick of your own.

I could feel my power latching onto the Japanese-American woman, and I knew that it would feed me information unless I actively willed it to ignore her, which I had no intention of doing.

"Isolate," Wallace gestured to the seat at the opposite end of the table. "Please, take a seat. Let me introduce you to Assistant Director Sarazin, the regional co-ordinator for Canada."

"Sir," I nodded in greeting as I sat down, remembering after a moment to open my jaw as I spoke. Simultaneously, my power saw the Parahuman's fascination with me. It wasn't the shock of someone seeing me for the first time, however; no doubt she'd simply been briefed beforehand and was intrigued to see me in the flesh… so to speak.

"A situation has arisen in Edmonton," Wallace continued. "One we have reason to believe you are well placed to resolve."

"A situation, sir?" I asked, my tone level.

"A Parahuman serial killer," the Assistant Director picked up Wallace's thread, his Canadian accent exotic to my ears. "Over the past three months, mutated creatures have been appearing in the city. Typically, they've been found in hard to reach places – locked apartments, alleyways – but each hunts down any human or animal it sees."

The woman is a Thinker, I realised, as my power fed me another piece of information.

"I see," I said. "A Master or a biological Tinker, obviously. Either would be hard to find. Why has it taken so long to draw our eye?"

"The incidents had been isolated," Sarazin clarified. "Six creatures found over a three month period. Department Northwest-North believed they could handle it in-house."

"So what changed?"

Sarazin checked his watch before answering.

"Fifty-six minutes ago, eleven creatures emerged from the offices of an Edmonton-based law firm. The staff inside had been massacred. The PRT has put in a request for Watchdog support."

"We have been unable to determine the location of the Parahuman in question," the Parahuman spoke, as my power revealed a broken rib on the right side of her chest that had never properly healed. "But at present, we have consensus that if no intervention is made, the situation poses a significant threat to life on a city-wide scale."

"I see," I said. "You wish me to analyse the carcass of one of these creatures."

Sarazin shook his head. "They disintegrated into slurry shortly after being killed, and the slurry evaporated far faster than it should have."

"The Edmonton Protectorate will take one alive, then?" I asked, only to be met with blank stares and a quick glance between the two men.

"Pythia's Think Tank has provided an initial analysis of the situation," Wallace explained, finally identifying the woman. "The reading improves significantly if an Intervention Team is deployed within the next forty-eight hours. If not, we may be looking at an A-Class response."

As the location of Pythia's apartment crept into my mind, I forced my power away from her, the meeting now finally holding my full attention. The instinctual stab of fear that rose in my chest was nothing compared to the eagerness that had spread throughout my body, almost pressing against my shell.

"You want me to go there," I said, and I'd be smiling if I was able. "I assume I'm not going alone?"

"Your team" – I was glad I couldn't smile when Wallace said 'your.' It would be unprofessional – "consists of four personnel, yourself included. Four Watchdog Parahumans, all trained Special Agents."

"Anyone I know?"

"No, they're from Surveillance, rather than Analytics." Wallace pulled out a Watchdog-issue tablet out from beneath the table and sent it sliding along the surface to me. "But we've provided you with their personnel files. If you need any additional analysts or staffers, requisition them from Northwest-North."

"This team has been chosen because it offers the most favourable predictions," Pythia said, "but it does not guarantee success."

"Nothing ever does," I retorted. "When do I leave?"

"Immediately," Sarazin said. "A transport to the airport is waiting for you and your team in the garage. Then a PRT jet will take you to Edmonton."

"Then I won't waste any more time." I tucked the tablet under one arm as I stood, nodding to the three before leaving the room.

In the elevator down to the garage, I quickly scanned the headings of the files I'd been given, matching names to faces – though with one of the files, I quickly realised how useless that would be.

So when I stepped out into the expansive parking lot, with its fleet of inconspicuous surveillance vehicles, unmarked black SUVs with tinted windows and a couple of armoured personnel carriers – just in case – I had no trouble picking out the trio of figures standing next to one of the SUVs, each of them dressed in inconspicuous businesswear, with a PRT driver leaning against the door.

Each of them had a black dufflebag either in their hand or sitting by their feet, no doubt containing enough clothes for a few days and all the extra pieces of equipment a Watchdog Parahuman might need in the field. There was another black bag by the driver, which I presumed was for me. The irregular nature of Thinker warnings meant that Watchdog was well used to putting together a response on short-notice, right down to standardised go-bags kept in the building's stores.

Gossamer was the first to notice me. He had taken on the form of a heavyset, middle-aged man, shorter than average and wearing a suit that was too tight in some places and too loose in others. As I expected, he bore absolutely no resemblance to the pre-trigger mugshot in his file. He was the oldest amongst them, but his false appearance was even older than his real age.

He drew Toxoplasma's attention to me with a whispered word. Her duffle bag was on the ground, and she had her arms crossed in front of her as she turned to look at me. The eager expression on her face didn't match the severe bun she kept her blonde hair in, and her lips curled up in a smile as her hands fell to her hips. I didn't need my power to tell me she was eager, and from the look of her I had to guess she'd only recently aged out of the Wards. I wondered why she'd chosen to join Watchdog, rather than the Protectorate.

With his two colleagues now looking at me, Basilisk let his power drop and I properly saw him for the first time. Before, it was as if he was there but unworthy of any particular attention. Even my power had seemingly ignored him before now. Basilisk looked to be about college age, with a slouch in his stance that didn't quite match the musculature I could see in the cut of his navy blue suit. His own hair was close-cropped like a soldier's and he looked at me with professional curiosity, but not much more than that.

"My name is Isolate," I began, as my power drip-fed me the first glimpses of information. Gossamer lived five miles away, in a home large enough for a family. Toxoplasma was a Changer. Basilisk's power had prevented mine from latching on, for now.

"I trust you've all been briefed?" I asked, though I already knew the answer.

"That's right," Toxoplasma confirmed as I picked up my dufflebag and threw it into the back of the SUV.

"Then let's go," I said, even as I clambered up into the front passenger seat. "We have a flight to catch."

As the driver took us out of the underground garage and into the streets of San Francisco, I began looking through the files on the tablet in greater detail. Catching sight of my reflection in the screen, I was struck by a sudden whim and reached up to pull the wig off my head, wondering what to do with it for a moment before trying – mostly successfully – to stuff it into the pocket of my suit. I'd put it in my bag later.

With the same hand, I then reached into the opposite pocket and wrapped my articulated fingers around the packet of wet-wipes I always kept there.

I brought the wipe up to my face and brushed off the discretely-coloured make-up that slightly darkened my cheeks and lips, as well as disguising the glossy sheen of my shell.

When I was done, I checked my reflection in the tablet's screen again and saw a facsimile of a person looking up at me, with a tan-coloured ceramic casing for skin that broke apart with visible seams around my mouth and neck, where the parts interlocked. I opened my mouth and saw nothing within but white fungal growth; the same growth that filled my shell in its entirety.

It was the face I had seen when I awoke for the first time, reflected in a chipped mirror that had been left to gestate in the corner of my creator's garage, hidden away from where his parents could see. I began as nothing more than a fungal seed and a nutrient solution, my shell held together by an adhesive until fungal growth had taken its place afterwards.

I had learned that long after the fact, as I poured over the DVD recordings my creator had made to chart his work, that same ceramic face half-visible in the TV screen as a dead sixteen year old babbled to himself with obvious glee on his face as he described each modern miracle he had committed. The DVDs hadn't offered any solution to my deteriorating body – in fact, I'd barely been able to understand them at all.

But then none of that mattered anymore. In my despair at my own mortality, I found I suddenly understood more than most.

I could lie to myself and say that I chose to go without my mask because this was the first field mission I had ever led, and I wanted to be true to myself for it. The truth was much less noble; I am a manipulator at heart, one who enjoys the reactions his appearance has on people.

Besides, whatever the framed piece of paper on the wall of my apartment may say, I'm not human. I never have been. I might as well use that to my advantage.​

 

[Redcoat_Officer]

Chapter 2

"So what's the play?" Toxoplasma asked as we were on our final approach to Edmonton, slumping down into the seat next to me as I looked up from my tablet. "Because I see you're not trying to hide, so I was wondering if we should do the same."

I leant back in my seat as I thought it over, turning away from her in favour of staring out the windows of the small PRT jet as we crossed over Edmonton. The sun had set, but it was still the early evening and the streets and offices of Edmonton still glittered with light.

It looked like an island, or perhaps a fortress out in the wilderness. The ring-road that circled it was the wall, with the lights dropping off sharply into the darkness of the surrounding prairie. Edmonton was more northernly than I had ever been and from what I could see the ground beneath the streetlights was blanketed in snow, though the local government had cleared it away from the roads.

"We're here as reassurance," I said, turning back to Toxoplasma. "As much as anything else. Four Watchdog analysts wouldn't reassure a Director with dozens of her own on staff, but four Watchdog Parahumans would be valued more highly, even by the PRT. We'll put on a show for them."

"You're the boss," Toxoplasma shrugged her shoulders, but she was grinning. "I'll change into my costume."

"I wasn't aware our operatives wore costumes," I pointed out.

"I'm a Changer," Toxoplasma explained, before her eyes darted down to the tablet I'd shut off the moment she sat next to me, "though you probably already knew that. I stretch out a lot and I don't want to ruin my suit."

I nodded, but she was already making her way to the back of the aircraft, even as the seatbelt sign flickered on overhead. Apart from the pilots, there was a single PRT officer responsible for the main cabin, but he had largely chosen to ignore us for the flight over. I am nowhere near as good at reading people as I am Parahumans, without my power to assist me, but it seemed to be a mixture of protocol, fear and standoffishness.

I watched our final approach to the Canadian military airfield north of the city, ignoring the much larger international airport to the south in favour of an anonymous entry. The plane shuddered a little as it touched down, but the runway had been kept clear of ice and frost and soon the crewman stood up to open the door.

As I led the way down the short stairs, onto the concrete expanse of the airfield, I found myself dwelling on the picture we presented to the Edmonton PRT personnel who were gathered a short distance away, in front of a pair of armoured trucks with flashing green and white lights cutting through the darkness.

Stripped of my cosmetic disguise, my inhuman appearance was clear to see above the collar of my business suit. The only item I wore that was even close to being considered a costume was a dark grey jacket with WEDGDG written on the back and above my heart in stark white letters.

Besides me, Toxoplasma was an almost leonine figure, seven feet tall on gangly, digitigrade legs. She wore a bulletproof vest over stretchy grey spandex, but her feet and hands were bare – and tipped with razor-sharp claws – while the sharp features, slit pupils, elongated ears and thin fur covering her head were left uncovered by any mask.

They would not have been able to notice any specific details about Basilisk unless they were looking very hard at him. Their eyes would drift over his features, almost refusing to acknowledge his existence, but they were expecting four Parahumans and that missing link would stick in their mind.

But Gossamer would perhaps be the most interesting of all, appearing to be nothing more than an ordinary human in the same blue jacket as me. Unmasked, but without the changed features or power-given abilities that render a mask unnecessary. He would unsettle them the most, I decided, if they were any good at their jobs.

"Sir?" a middle-aged woman asked, hesitantly. She was standing at the head of their group, dressed in a suit while the rest of them were in uniform. The jacket she wore over it was the make as my own.

"I am Isolate," I said by way of introduction. "I am a Senior Special Agent with Watchdog. With me are Special Agents Toxoplasma, Basilisk and Gossamer, of our covert intervention division. I take it you're here to escort me to the regional headquarters?"

"That's correct," she nodded. "I'm Special Agent Tanner, with Northwest-North's Investigations department. I'll be acting as your liaison throughout the investigation, but first Director McCrae wants to speak with you."

"Naturally," I said, moving towards one of the waiting vehicles. "It is her city, after all."

■​

Director Adeline McCrae's office was warm, as far as offices went. To my eyes – used to the sterile neutrality of the WEDGDG – it was also much too personable, with notable awards on the walls from her time in the Canadian military, including a bar of medals and a beret in United Nations blue, resting on a shelf.

There was a photo on her wooden desk with its back turned to me, positioned to be clearly visible at all times of day. I wondered how many kids I'd see if I reached across the desk and turned it around. My clearance level does not offer me the privilege of access to PRT personnel files, and my power offers no insights on the unpowered, but I am a trained agent of Watchdog and it isn't hard to read someone who allows their heart to decorate their walls.

"So you're who they sent," she began, her left hand resting neutrally on the desk even as her right lightly tapped against the wood. Her accent was unsurprisingly Canadian, but not necessarily local – I couldn't tell for sure. "Four Parahumans seems like a small response to me, but I suppose Watchdog will have given some thought to the matter. Although it is easy to forget about us this far north."

"Watchdog doesn't make a move without consultation, ma'am," I said, trying to smooth over any issues. "This team was deemed optimal for the task at hand by our Think Tanks."

"Watchdog seems very reliant on its Parahumans," she mused. At first I was wary, but I couldn't pick up any prejudice in her features or tone. Just the usual slight discomfort at my non-human features, at the way my words don't line up with the movements of my semi-articulated mouth. A typical reaction, and to be frank an understandable one.

"We deal in esoteric problems that require esoteric solutions. Problems like a serial killer who cannot be tracked, and whose minions disappear after they are killed."

"Quite," she nodded, conceding the point. "We've provided your team with an office here at headquarters, and I've instructed my officers and the Edmonton Protectorate to assist you in any way they can. These killings are causing panic in the streets, and the sooner we can find the person responsible the better."

"Your cooperation is appreciated, ma'am," I said. "I assure you, I will keep you well informed of our progress. There is one thing I would like to request, however."

"Name it."

"I've been reading the files your analysts have put together on this killer. Before this recent attack, all of the prior minions were found in isolated places or locked rooms, correct?"

"That's right," she nodded.

"I suggest you contact local charities and welfare programmes. If they have any lonely clients who haven't been in touch for a while, conduct welfare checks. You might find another monster, and if you do I want it taken alive."

"Can I ask why?"

"My power allows me to analyse Parahumans, or… the creations of Parahumans. If this Parahuman has a lair in the city, I will know where it is within an hour at most."

She frowned.

"It's a high-risk strategy. I'd have to spread my officers thin on the ground."

"Think of it as clearing a minefield," I said. "I've looked at the files; these creatures have been left in the forgotten areas of busy population centres. Locked apartments, an empty lot in a strip mall, beneath a sewer grate on a busy road. If the PRT doesn't find them, a civilian will stumble across them eventually. Or the creatures will grow hungry and break free to hunt. Better they are met with armed officer who can retreat in good order and call in reinforcements."

"I see your point," she nodded. "Very well, I'll put the word out. Keep me updated on your investigation."

"Of course, Director," I said as I rose from the seat, departing the room without another word as the woman in charge of Northwest-North turned her attention back to her desktop.

■​

The Edmonton PRT was headquartered in a fairly nondescript building, twelve stories tall with a glass frontage, with the Protectorate based out of a more ostentatious tower closer to the city centre. Tanner had sequestered us into a space on the ninth floor, with temporary wall dividers set up to create a little enclave for us in the otherwise open-plan office space.

My team had made themselves at home, claiming swivel chairs and bulky PRT-issue desktops as they set up the secure link back to Watchdog's internal database. On the divider wall, someone had pinned a large map of the city and marked out the sites of each attack with numbered pins linked to photographs that were scattered around the map, showing wound patterns, the scanned IDs of the victims and the occasional still from PRT or police body cameras.

Toxoplasma was looking out the window, still in her costume and Changed form. Beyond her reflection in the glass, the city of Edmonton stretched out before us, a landscape of blocky apartment buildings that were largely wider than they were tall, a far cry from the jumbled streets and spindly skyscrapers of San Francisco. The city was huddled in on itself in spite of the vast space around it, as if to keep itself warm and safe in the frozen north.

It was late at night, but there were more lights on than I was expecting. The city was restless; braced for more massacres to come.

"So, Isolate," Basilisk began, leaning against a desk, "what's the plan?"

"For now, we wait and see," I answered, moving to look out the window as my hands naturally drifted behind my back. "The PRT and local police are going to be conducting welfare checks in hopes of finding more minions, but those won't begin at one o'clock in the morning."

I turned, taking in my team. Three Parahumans and one liaison officer, to hunt a single person in a city of over a million.

"Get some sleep, all of you," I said to the Parahumans. "In the morning, I want you to embed yourselves into the search operation as and where you see fit. You're all combat capable" – some more than others, I thought to myself – "but your absolute priority has to be to capture one of these creatures. I need it alive."

"We've set you up with a room in the PRT barracks," Tanner said, pulling three keycards out of her jacket pocket and handing them to the capes. "It's on sublevel three, just below the garage."

"Good," I nodded. "In the meantime, I'll stay here and get started on the data Northwest-North has managed to gather."

Toxoplasma and Basilisk slunk off immediately, throwing their duffel bags over their shoulders as they hunted through the elevator. Gossamer stayed, looking at me with an intense expression on his furrowed face.

"You aren't going to get some sleep yourself?" he asked.

"I don't need it," I explained, pulling out a chair and logging into one of the terminals. For a moment I thought Gossamer was satisfied with my answer, but he still lingered.

"If you don't mind me asking… what are you?"

I let out a short, sharp laugh, all too aware of how incongruous that noise was when paired with a face that was incapable of smiling.

"I'm as human as you are," I answered, savouring the uncertain look that passed across his false face. "I have a certificate on my wall that says as much," I elaborated. "I have citizenship, a social security number, a security clearance. A savings account. Biological realities don't mean much in the face of legal ones."

He nodded, looking surprisingly sheepish for someone with perfect control of his expressions. "I can understand that. Sorry for asking."

"You have nothing to apologise for," I shrugged my shoulders. "If I wanted to hide what I am I wouldn't have taken off my make-up. Instead, I've weaponised my nature."

The corner of his lip curled up in a grin, before he too left the room.

"You don't have to stay either," I said to Tanner, who had been hovering in the corner of the room.

"I'm on the night shift anyway," she countered. "Someone will be along to replace me in the morning."

"Then I have something for you to do." I turned my attention to the screen as my login cleared and the connection to Watchdog's database was established. I began pulling up the Northwest-North files on the case, looking through the catalogues variations of the minions they'd found. More importantly, I saw what wasn't there.

"I assume the law firm is still a sealed crime scene?"

"That's right," she nodded. "There's just a skeleton crew there at the moment, though. To keep away trespassers."

"Go there. Take as many hard drives as you can find and bring them back. If they're encrypted, I'll get in touch with Watchdog. We might not be the NSA, but we still have teams of codebreakers."

"What are you hoping to find?" she asked.

"I don't think the law firm was picked at random," I said, glancing up at the map. "The lone minions have all been found within a broad geographical area, but the firm is right on the edge of that area, and the scale of the attack was completely different. It's just a hypothesis, but I think the lone attacks were the result of the Parahuman testing the limits of their power."

"So the law firm was personal," Tanner observed. "Revenge, basically."

"All Parahumans want revenge for something," I chuckled. "Not all of them can act on it, or choose to."

Tanner grinned, and there was something else in her eyes. Satisfaction?

"I've got to say, it feels good to be going on the attack. We don't normally go after Capes' identities until they're in custody," she clarified, and there was a hint of bitterness in her tone.

It was perhaps understandable, even if it showed that she fundamentally misunderstood the role of departments like Northwest-North. Trying to stop all crime in any given city was a losing game, and the same applied to Parahuman crime. The role of the PRT wasn't to charge after every Villain they came across, but to contain the Villains with a slow, creeping net until they were trapped in a cage of their own creation, convinced that all they wanted in the world was petty authority over their lackeys rather than massacring whole streets and upending the very rule of law itself.

Parahumans start their lives as cornered animals, left with no way out from the very moment of their trigger. Get too close, or too far, and they'll lash out in desperation or overconfidence. But manage them with the careful skill of a lion tamer, and the damage can be minimised, even directed.

"Capes don't normally massacre an entire office building," I explained. "And besides, I work for Watchdog, not the Protectorate. They're a shield and a sword, we're a dagger."

Tanner nodded, scrolling through her PRT-issue phone for a moment before leaving me alone in the makeshift field office. I turned my attention back to the computer, looking through Northwest-North's files on the types of creatures they'd encountered so far.

What I found was a clear pattern; each creature was individually unique, but there were clear similarities that categorised them into distinct archetypes. It could mean that we were dealing with a Tinker who had a biological speciality, but then I would expect the creatures to be either more uniform or more unique – batch-produced or artisanal.

I pulled up recorded footage from a mobile phone camera, collected from the social media profile of a self-titled "urban explorer." The shot was focused on a friend of the camera's owner, balancing on a support beam high above the floor of a factory. As he edged his way along the beam, pausing to sit down and dangle his legs over the edge, there was a faint scraping noise – barely audible over the sound of the camera – and the shot panned to reveal a dog-like creature emerge from a pile of rusted scrap metal.

The two teenage men stared at it for a few moments as it started to lope forwards, like a wolf trying its luck. What little visible flesh there was on the creature seemed to have pulled back almost to the bone, but the most distinctive feature of its appearance was the coating of jagged metal that stuck to its body like a layer of irregular scales, glittering faintly with pieces of newer metal poking through the rusted mass. It was shards of flat steel, bent nails, staples, small strands of wire, sticking to the Scraphound – as Northwest North's staff had named it – as if it were magnetic.

The hound let out a low, sickly, growl and the cameraman broke through his hesitation. He turned and fled, the footage devolving into a useless, blurred mess as he ran. The microphone was still adequate, however, and beneath the pounding of his feet and the shouts of his friend in the rafters the sound of metal-coated paws skittering off a concrete floor could be heard.

When the image finally stabilised, the cameraman had scrambled up onto an old office in the corner of the warehouse, with the hound leaping ineffectually against the walls. His friend in the rafters was on his feet, one hand wrapped tightly around a support pillar as he shouted down for the cameraman to call the cops, at which point the video ended.

I pulled up another image, a still photograph snapped by a pedestrian, showing two Edmonton Police Service officers in black uniforms and peaked caps, caught in the middle of a welfare check that had gone wrong. They were standing in the corridor of a residential building, with apartment doors running along its length. One of those doors had been shoved off its hinges, a grotesque figure stepping over the debris as it lurched into the corridor.

It had a humanoid form that had been distended and twisted to the point where such minor details as race or gender couldn't be discerned through the puffy red skin, if it had even been formed from a human in the first place. Its skin was rent and torn, pockmarked by black scabs. Claw marks covered its torso and legs, while the bite marks on its arm matched the gnarled growths of its teeth.

It had been shot, the bullet passing through the minion and dousing the doorframe in a spray of brackish black blood. I found myself magnifying the image, looking at the exit wound in the creature's torso and the clumps of flesh and blood oozing down the wall. I dove into the files again, pulling up crime scene photographs and the written testimony of the officers involved.

The creature had torn off its own arm before it expired, the limb clawing its way towards the officers even as the rest of the monster rapidly dissolved into a slurry, which rotted away at a rapid pace until nothing was left – even the stain on the wall disappearing. The arm had followed suit after it had been shot full of holes.

I found myself wondering how a minion could be so viscerally biological in nature and yet turn so ephemeral when killed. The PRT had named this variant as a Mutilator; they had encountered one other of the type before the attack on the law firm, and six since.

I pulled up the images, setting them side by side. With biological Tinkers, there was always some variation in creations that had been grown rather than made. I had examined more than a few such minions, but while a degree of variation was expected these minions were well beyond the norm. The different distention patterns and lesions were to be expected, but radically different heights and weights suggested that they were either the product of artisanal rather than batch production, or that each had at its base a human being, with random genetic variations in height and the effects of differing lifestyles on weight and build.

The footage of the attack on the law firm was brutal in its scale. One moment, the office was quiet, the next a gibbering swarm of monsters burst through the doors and windows along the front of the building, crawling over desks in order to close on the screaming office workers. There were perhaps a dozen Scraphounds in the attack, as well as the six Mutilators.

I watched the carnage unfold through the scant camera coverage of the office – one camera covering the front desk and entrance, and another covering each open-plan office on the five floors of the building. The individual offices, meeting rooms and corridors were entirely without coverage, which made the flow of events difficult to discern.

Still I found my eyes drawn to one monster amongst many. It has once been a man – that much was clear to see – but its musculature had bulged and lengthened until it stood at around seven feet tall. It moved through the carnage with a deliberate gait, crawling over desks on all four limbs and ignoring the defenceless victims it clambered over.

It had torn its eyes out of its sockets, tying the severed optic nerves through a patch of skin on its shoulder so that the eyeballs dangled like trophies, swaying as it moved through the room. Its attention was focused on a single man, seemingly no different from half the other staff as he staggered back from his desk in shock.

Still, when he turned and fled the creature lunged at him, raking his claws through the young lawyer's dark blue suit jacket, which quickly began to stain with blood. But he was quick, and adrenaline can drive someone to perform incredible feats. He slipped through the melee, sprinting off into the corridors.

I watched as the eyeless creature followed its target through the hellscape that the office building had become, following him with unerring accuracy no matter how far ahead its target managed to get. When the lawyer managed to double back on himself and slip out a second story window, I found my attempts to follow him further stymied by the lack of any archived footage from cameras outside the law firm.

I sighed, leaning back in my seat. There was an unkind stereotype within Watchdog that the PRT and the Protectorate were nothing more than foot solders – good for storming hostile positions, but ineffective without a guiding hand to direct their actions. It was partly organisational pride and partly confirmation bias, but it was undeniable that the PRT's qualities as an investigative service were… somewhat lacking.

The clue was in the name. The 'PRT' had originated from a number of different response teams formed by urban police departments in the late eighties, when Parahuman crime began to make its mark on the city. They were trained officers, typically already part of a SWAT unit, who were called upon to respond to Parahuman attacks.

When the Department of Homeland Security was formed in the late eighties, the Parahuman Response Teams became an arm of the federal government. In nineteen ninety three, they became an independent agency in their own right and the Protectorate and Watchdog were expanded and placed under their remit. But their organisational ethos still bore the legacy of their origins, and to be frank their departments were busy enough with visible Parahuman crime to hunt for the invisible ones.

So when presented with a situation like the attack on the law firm, they focused solely on the mechanics of the issue. How do you counter a hostage situation where the hostages are being actively killed? Was the correct balance met between the speed and preparedness of the response? Six officers were wounded clearing the building; how did it happen and how can it be prevented in future?

The little details took a lower priority when there were still Edmonton's existing Parahuman threats to worry about, but nobody in the office had been so uniquely singled out like that lawyer was.

I took out my Watchdog-issue smartphone, thumbing through my sparse contacts list until I found the most recent addition. She answered on the second ring.

"Tanner speaking."

"It's Isolate," I began, flicking back through the footage. "Are you on the scene?"

"For about five minutes, why?"

"I need you to get to the first floor. Three rows back from the window, the fourth desk from the elevator."

"On it. Found something interesting?"

"One of the victims was not like the others. Our Parahuman sent some sort of hunter-killer minion to target him specifically. I want to know who he was, and I want a copy of his files. It could be he's the target of this revenge."

"You're in luck," she said. "He left his wallet on the desk. His name's Christian Prince, it says here he's a family lawyer."

I chuckled. "That would do it. Are there any pictures on his desk? A partner? Children?"

"Not that I can see. It's pretty sparse overall, though."

"Alright then, get in touch with operations and put out an all-points bulletin for him, I don't care that it's the middle of the night; he escaped the building, but that's where the footage ends and not all the dead have been identified yet. If he is alive, then his life is in imminent danger. Worst case, we just wake up his widow with some bad news. And grab his hard drive."

"Copy that," she said, and I suspected she was grinning. The thrill of the hunt, no doubt.

Leaning back in my seat, I found myself looking up at the map of the city. A million people called this city home, and it was my job to find just one of them. If the target was determined to hide, it would be an impossible task. They could blend into the population and disappear forever, becoming another uncaught serial killer. But those were a rare breed, and for a Parahuman serial killer to just disappear like that was almost unheard of.

Our target was on a personal vendetta. The scattered attacks of the last three months had simply been the side-effects of their preparations for the main event; when they rise from the shadows and take vengeance on all those who wronged them. It meant sacrificing the security of anonymity; tugging on the strands of the life they lost with every revenge killing.

It was the job of any good investigator – it was my job – to put themself at the centre of the tangled web of society, listening to the vibrations as they narrowed down the connections until a million potential killers became just one.

Of course, none of this was strictly necessary. My power let me bypass the web entirely, but it meant waiting for another attack to happen, another death. It meant being reactive, rather than proactive, and twiddling my thumbs when I could instead be advancing the investigation.

I had spend most of the first six months of my life sitting dormant, waiting for orders. I was no less sapient than I am now, but I knew I existed only to serve the will of my creator. When he died, that overriding imperative failed, and in the six years since I have never been content to sit idle. When I wasn't analysing objects for Watchdog, I was condensing a lifetime's worth of education into evening classes and spending my nights reading casefiles and Watchdog handbooks.

All Parahumans want revenge, but I wasn't sure who I wanted revenge on. My creator had been murdered, but I felt no particular animosity for his killer. I could hate my creator – there were certainly more than enough books and films that suggested it was the thing to do in my position – but I could only blame him so much for dying.

If I hated anything, it was my own ignorance. I had been forced to confront both my own mortality and the knowledge that there was nothing I could do to slow or stop my imminent death. I had nothing; no knowledge, no resources. The DVD containing the video notes my creator had made during my creation had been snapped by an errant spasm of my failing finger joints.

I was truly helpless… and once I had put myself back together I resolved to never be helpless again.

 

[VehicularZombie]

Now this is a take on Worm we don't see often- a story told through the eyes of an investigator in the shadows, rather than a superhero in the limelight. I definitely can't wait to see where you go with this, and the focus on detective work over street brawls is a breath of fresh air.

 

[Tsureai]

I find this story fascinating. Worm is familiar ground but all these characters are new!