After filling out an online CYOA build to aid them with inspiration for their next fic, an author discovers that said CYOA wasn't a CYOA at all, but rather a job application.
One for the position of Vassal for a down-on-his-luck Former Overlord with one 'hell' of an axe to grind against a certain overpowered Entity, and is looking for someone to enact some well-deserved revenge on his behalf.
His —now her— task, whether she chooses to accept it or not?
To fight, to grow, to develop her powers.. and then defeat and kill Scion.
New Thread Complete!
We're now up to date with the rewrite, feel free to post!
(For those of you who don't read snippet threads, I've been posting Defiance snips for some time now. Said story has now passed well over the 50k words mark (or would have, if you counted the Prologue that got axed) so I decided it was high time for a cleanup, editing overhaul / minor rewrite, and it's own thread.)
The title here needs a bit of explanation, because this is not a Disgaea 6 fic.
It's more of a 'mixed' Disgaea fic, with a heavy weighting towards Disgaea 5 but also including game mechanics and setting elements from all of the mainline games, and many of the wider semi-interconnected Nippon Ichi games as well, such as Makai Kingdom, Phantom Brave, La Pucelle, and Guided Fate Paradox just to name a few of the ones I've actually played.
In short, the fic's title is actually a rather amusing case of parallel development.
Defiance actually got its start as little more a couple of silly scenes and plot bunnies way back during the Disgaea 5 days, long before Disgaea 6 had even been announced. It wasn't even until I'd gotten inspired and wrote about.. 3 full chapters and a prologue I think it was.. before it even made its way into my published snippets thread. At the time that happened, I hadn't even been aware that Disgaea 6 had been announced when I suddenly needed a name for the thing.
The fic's title is, thus, not a reference to Disgaea 6's own tagline, but rather to the idea that the MC has an awful lot of metaknowledge and is more than happy to overturn anything and everything she possibly can of the 'story's general plot and both Taylor and Earth Bet's presumed eventual fates.
As an aside, if the start seems very abrupt, that's because it is. Originally, the snippet version had a Prologue that involved the MC actually filling out the CYOA, but after so much time a huge chunk of it was obsolete, both between new Disgaea games (3 of them!) and the CYOA itself updating major versions. It also didn't add much, so it got the axe.
I came to with a sudden jerk, heaving in a lungful of air like a drowning man breaching the surface.
This caused me to bang my head painfully against the ground, which in turn alerted me to the fact that I was lying face up —and extremely uncomfortably— on my back. Confused, and wondering how the fuck I'd ended up.. wherever here was, I then made the mistake of trying to roll over and heave myself upright, causing several very sharp pains to tear their way through my body, namely my upper and lower back.
Now, I am not the type of person to be shy about acting in a way that some might call 'unmanly'. Frankly, in my opinion worrying about that sort of thing is pretty dumb. So I'm not gonna deny it: I let out a small scream. Partly this was due to shock and surprise, but most of it was because holy shit did that fucking hurt. And by that I mean the 'oh god why what are you doing please stop now ' kind of sickening pain you feel when you've either torn, sprained, herniated, or are otherwise about to bend something in a way that you really, really, really shouldn't.
Moreover, this pain had clearly originated from places on my body which had heretofore not existed. That in and of itself was a concern, but, perhaps surprisingly, what really caught my attention was that wasn't my voice.
I do not sound like a twenty something year old woman trying to impersonate a teenager. I mean, okay, yes; I'll admit I have been mistaken for a woman on the phone from time to time, and I've also heard plenty of recordings of myself and know that I sound more than a bit like my mother. Which was no doubt the reason for said misunderstandings. But this? This was something very far and away indeed from what I should sound like.
Given said pain, I immediately aborted my attempt to stand, and instead elected to continue lying on my back while I blinked the spots out of my vision.
During this brief respite as I gathered my wits, and swiftly became aware of several things.
First, I seemed to be lying in an alleyway. Specifically between two multi-story buildings, sans fire escapes, and goodgod was it rank. Like, rottingdumpster rank.
Second, it was clearly nighttime, or perhaps very early morning, and yet I could still see perfectly fine despite a total absence of nearby street lamps. Third, and very much most importantly, I appeared to be in possession of certain bits of anatomy that I had heretofore previously lacked.
You know that saying, about how not being bothered by something can bother you? The one about the cognitive dissonance you can get when you know that something should feel wrong or off or disturbing or whatever, but that's not currently the case, and the fact that it doesn't feel that way does concern you, because it makes you feel like something probably is wrong after all?
Well, I know that feeling quite well, and I was definitely feeling it now.
This was because now that I was abruptly much more awake, I knew what had caused those unpleasantly severe jolts of pain: In my confused state I'd tried to roll over improperly, and thus all at the same time had awkwardly crushed my breasts against my armor, folded my tail, wrenched my wing joint the wrong way, and ground a patch of membrane into the asphalt with my elbow.
Wings, tail, breasts. All of these felt completely normal for me to have, like they were supposed to be there, despite definitively not having any of them prior til now. I was also wearing some sort of… fancy armored battle dress..? In red, black, and gold, complete with thigh highs and absolute territory, along with a veritable mane of long, golden-blond hair which was currently spread out in disarray upon the ground around me.
"Hang on a minute..." I muttered aloud to myself, still feeling more than a little dazed. "Why does that sound so familiar..?"
Realization was slow to dawn, but dawn it did a few moments later.
"Wait. The CYOA…?"
The last thing I remembered with any clarity was me playing around with an online AI Art generator. I'd been trying to create a hybridized image of Rozalin and Stella Grossular from the Disgaea series, after having been inspired by a Worm CYOA of all things, and had uploaded one I'd particularly liked as the profile image just before… I think I passed out?
…Oh.
Oh shit.
Before I could even begin to think about panicking, there was a sound like a quiet blend of ring and hum that drew my attention upwards. A tiny gyroscope of light and colored mist appeared floating above me, causing me to twitch in both surprise and recognition as it dropped a small envelope onto my stomach before fading away.
I stared at said envelope like it was some sort of viper for at least a solid minute, before finally biting the bullet and opening it.
Greetings And Salutations, Wanderer!
I've always wanted to say that. I know, I know... you aren't a wanderer. In fact you're pretty much the opposite, seeing as you haven't left your house in weeks. That's besides the point.
What is the point, as I'm sure you've realized by now, is that you've won the grand prize! That's right, out of all the applicants, I've chosen you to do my dirty work. And no, you don't have any choice in the matter. Refuse, or just wander off and not come back, and I'll make sure you regret it. Baal owes me an exceptionally minor favor, and I figure torching some nobody and their insignificant netherworld will take about 0.000001 seconds of his time, so if you make me call that in, I will.
Eyes transfixed on the sheets of paper before me, a feeling of dread confirmation and gnawing horror began rising within me.
So here's the sticky: Ol' Goldenrod made the mistake of visiting my Netherworld a few Cycles back while I was off on holiday. Needless to say, he and his silver girlfriend left it in a bit of a state when they finally took off, which I was not pleased to hear about in the slightest.
It's taken me quite a lot of bribes and a not-inconsiderable amount of time, effort, and most of my remaining mana just to find out where they fucked off to. And can you believe it? I've discovered an entire subregion of the multiverse, way, way out in the boonies, which has never even seen so much as a single demon. Honestly it's kind of incredible how boring this place is. No rocketships, no magic, no interdimensional resorts... You guys don't even know what Mana is, much less fundamental forces like Fear and Awe Energy! And yet somehow several of your miserable little worlds are absolutely swimming in the stuff.
Fortunately for you, I'm not in a position to take advantage of that. Because damn are you guys ripe for the picking. I'd be all over that like a Prinny on sardines, except that Goldilocks would probably throw an absolute shit-fit the second I showed my face anywhere within several billion realities.
See, I may have already managed to knock off his girlfriend. Unfortunately things didn't go quite as planned, and instead of them both dying, the boytoy survived just fine, and I'm pretty much out of juice, which means I'm in need of a strong vassal to finish taking my revenge for me.
A litany of colorful curses started up in my mind. I knew what was happening, what had happened, and I hated it.
Mostly. A little, anyway.
I was no stranger to worldview-shattering revelations. Had weathered such three times in the past, actually, though obviously they'd been nowhere near this scale, even if one of them did land me in a mental hospital for a week due to acute depression. And it wasn't like I had all that many attachments to home; I already spent pretty much ninety percent of my time indulging in escapism to get away from my shitty, socially isolated life. Much of that was spent reading books or playing games, many of which made various use of multiple-realities tropes. So being shanghai'd and remade by an honest-to-god, real-life ROB wasn't that terrible or difficult a concept to get my head around just on its own. The prospect could even be considered a bit exciting, a golden opportunity for a do-over.
But... this was Worm. Why did it have to be a Worm CYOA of all things? That setting is basically hell. Disgaea takes place in what's literally hell. So that was two hells. That's right, I'd gone and found Double Hell. Tycho and Gabe would be proud.
I kept reading, unable to look away.
See, you and your entire dimension happen to have a vested interest in Goldmember there getting taken down a few million pegs, even if you didn't know it. Cuz' guess what? That Wildbow guy? Turns out he's some kind of seer. Whether he's a parahuman with some really strong postcog and precog powers, or simply a natural talent of some sort, I couldn't tell you, but I manage to get my hands on some of his other drips and drabs that never saw publishing, and they totally checked out.
Point is, your world? One of those on the chopping block for when Gold Morning hits. No, it hasn't happened yet, because the flow of time across multiversal barriers can be weird like that. But it will, and soon.
Here's the thing, though: precognition ain't perfect. It literally can't be. The fundamental base nature of the multiverse prevents it. It's why the really hardcore simulation shards like Dinah's express results in possibilities, why Contessa is still fallible, and why Eden couldn't foresee her own demise. Even hardcore magic-based oracles like Pram get things wrong from time to time, because the farther you go the harder it is to get things right unless you're only looking at big-picture, 'Destiny' -type stuff. And that's without adding time travel shenanigans into the mix.
Wildbow? His prediction spanned threeyears, and even he thought Taylor would barely win by the skin of her teeth. A fraction of a percent chance of success, and one that would succeed due to sheer, bloody luck more than anything else. Add to that the man's liberal use of artistic license in order to turn his visions into a good story? The real chance is going to be even smaller.
And if Khepri fails to happen and Golden Boy manages to succeed in sterilizing your planet and its variants... well, OK, I don't actually care what happens to you all —human worlds are a dime a dozen— but that would make it pretty much impossible for me to take my revenge after everything I've spent to get here. And that's just not kosher for an Overlord like me. I have standards to uphold! Besides, me just letting Taylor go about her business and hoping for the best lacks that personal touch, you know?
Anywho, I set up that whole CYOA thing because I needed a strong vassal to act as my proxy, and I wanted to see who might come up with the most entertai I mean effective plan for dealing with the problem. And whaddaya know? Some no-name monkey who somehow has a sorta-kinda inkling about how the multiverse really works shows up, wanting to be an Overlord.
That's you, by the way.
Well. I couldn't let such a perfect opportunity for poetic justice just walk away, and so here you are! Congratulations, you won the prize! A new body, a pile of HL and Mana, a gate key that leads to an empty netherworld I had lying around, and a Rosen Queen Co. contract. Oh, plus a curse that's rapidly turning your soul into that of an Overlord-tier demon. It's a bit like the one that False Zenon guy liked to throw around, except tailored a bit just for you. As requested.
I've got no clue what all you'll get out of it, by the way. You'll get something, everybody does, but until the curse fully settles in properly, it'll be a bit up in the air. The good news is that you can influence it through what skills you put to use over the next few days, so I highly recommend you pay a visit to your Netherworld ASAP. It wasn't easy, but I managed to bribe enough folks in the Dark Assembly to get you temporary access to Rosen Queen's Ultra-Secret Secret Scroll Skill Shop. Use it wisely.
I'm sure you can figure the rest out, so if you want to have any kind of say in what sort of Overlord you are, you'd best hop to it right away.
As my eyes reached the end of the final page, the was another flash of light, orange this time, and the paper burst into flames. I flinched automatically, but it didn't hurt at all, a fact that barely registered on my mind. Largely this was because I was too busy being horrified at the prospect of Earth Bet being a real place. I'm fairly certain I started to hyperventilate, and I definitely started in on a bit of a panic attack.
Thankfully I've some experience with those. Enough that I'd once had a bit of training in therapy regarding how to identify and counter them with a series of mental gymnastics and breathing exercises. I reflexively began putting those techniques to work, because wherever in Brockton I currently was, the middle of a dilapidated alley was definitely not a safe place to be incapacitated.
Once my mind was... well mostly clear at least, and my heartbeat relatively stabilized, I opened my eyes and hauled myself to my feet with a groan. Properly, this time, which was more complicated than you'd think; I had to do a weird mixture of butt-lift, imbalanced sit-up, and side-roll with my hip, all the while simultaneously operating three sort-of-but-not-actually unfamiliar limbs, just to get my wings out from under me while I flipped myself over and got my palms on the ground. Without painfully crushing and scraping the inner membrane of my wings across the concrete, twisting a joint in the wrong direction, or creasing my tail again.
Note to self: From now on, sleep on my side, and never, ever on my back. At least, not without draping my wings across something first. Oh man, and that meant chairs are gonna suck too, aren't they? Why did I think a tail and wings would be cool again? Ugh.
Once I'd managed to get myself flipped over, I stood up and took stock of myself. I shook my arms and wings out, stretched a bit, and rolled my shoulders. It felt surprisingly natural to do. That was followed by brushing myself down; making a brief, unsuccessful attempt at getting the tangles out of my hair; and finally experimenting briefly with how much range of motion I had in my.. armor. Which turned out to be a bit of a surprise as to how comfortable it was to move around in. Loose and breathable, with a whole lot more give than one might expect; I wasn't sure what the stuff was made of, but even the armor plates were light and highly flexible, more like armor-shaped clothes instead something made from steel.
Which.. honestly probably shouldn't surprise me as much as it did, given the kind of ridiculous aerial acrobatics you see people get up to in the games. I had specified something of the sort in my CYOA notes, too, after all. Disgaea wasn't one of those games that changed people's sprites based on what they're using for gear, either, apart from weapons anyway, whether you were wearing literally nothing but jewelry or using a ridiculous combination of two full sets of plate mail, a gigantic tower shield, and two axes, both of which required two hands to use.
The actual effectiveness of that sort of thing and whether or not it would apply here remained to be seen and would be something to look into, but later, once I'd gotten my bearings.
A quick glance at the sky told me that what at first had seemed like full nighttime was, in fact, early morning twilight: I could see the sky just beginning to lighten. That meant, what? Maybe six, six-thirty in the morning? Give or take a half hour or so? I wasn't exactly an expert astronomer, with detailed knowledge of sunrise times at this latitude and time of year.
Well, whatever. It wasn't important. What was important was figuring out where the hell in Brockton Bay I was, at least relatively speaking. If I was in the middle of Lung's territory, for example, I needed to know, stat.
On the bright side, that was an easily solved problem thanks to my new set of limbs.
After several experimental flexes, following what felt natural to me I dropped into a crouch, then positively launched myself up into the air with a powerful thrust of my legs. This caused me to let out something of a surprised yelp as I shot up nearly twice the height of the buildings I'd been surrounded by. Apparently that jumping power I'd picked had gotten me more than just a bit of a boost. In fact, the speed with which I hurled myself high into the air was so surprising that I nearly forgot to extend my wings as I reached the apex of my jump. Fortunately for me, though, my new body seemed to know the drill and instead of flailing wildly newly-imprinted muscle memory took over.
In short order, I was beating my way steadily higher. Surging upwards, I whooped with laughter as I ascended in a wide spiral, consciously allowing my implanted memories of how to properly move in this form to take over and keep me from making mistakes.
Part of me was absolutely thrilled to be flying under my own power; the nighttime view of the Rig, and its forcefield out in the Bay, with light just beginning to peek up over the horizon, was absolutely gorgeous. Likewise, the sensation of shooting through the sky, with the chilled morning air rushing over my wings, blowing through my hair, and dragging along my bares thighs and tail... it just felt so right, so fantastic, that I couldn't put it properly into words.
While I indulged myself, the smarter, more rational part of me that wasn't busy ogling the scenery kept an eye out for any kind of identifiable landmarks. The Rig itself was an obvious one. So was Captain's Hill. The distant strips of brightly-lit beachfront property I could see no doubt formed the Boardwalk and the Lord's Market. Medhall was pretty easy to identify too, or at least what I thought might be Medhall; in most fics it was alleged to be the tallest skyscraper in the city, although I couldn't recall offhand what canon had to say on that front, so I could have been wrong. I could also kind of spot what was probably the Ship's Graveyard way in the distance at the nearer edge of the Bay, and it was simple enough to pick out the derelict maze of old boxcars and rusting storage containers that was the Trainyard far to the north.
Those were all really big landmarks, though. Smaller locations weren't so easy. Nothing leapt out at me as maybe being Winslow, Weymouth Mall, Arcadia, Brockton General, the PRTHQ, or any other of half a dozen specific locales that had been named over the course of the story. Not that that was terribly surprising; it wasn't like I was going to spot a hole-in-the-wall dive like Somer's Rock from really high up, even if I'd known where it was generally located. The big stuff was easy, but if it didn't have a nice big neon sign saying 'major landmark here', I'd probably have to look it up on a map or at least ask someone.
Still... it was enough to get my bearings. I was pretty clearly in the very southeastern tip of... I think the official map had called it 'Docks South', though whether or not that was an official in-universe subdivision or suburb name or what have you, I didn't know. I'd often wondered, because on the map 'Docks South' had actually been more or less on the northwest side of town, and Taylor tended to just describe the north half of the city as 'the docks', which you'd think would be, you know, adjacent to the water or at the very least the east side of the city. On the other hand, regardless of the logic, what's canon was what Wildbow said was canon, and that map was the official one.
Or, well, for the story, anyway. How things would be in reality was anyone's guess, especially if as Caskelis had said, Wildbow had taken a lot of liberties. And wasn't that thought going to cause me a lot of headaches…
Anyway, I was somewhere near the border of there and what the locals would probably consider to be Downtown, judging by the steadily growing density of larger buildings to my immediate south, with Medhall in the distance. That put me... huh, almost right smack in the middle of the official map, or pretty close to it. It wasn't the actual middle of the city, of course; I knew that Word of God held that there were outskirts and sparse suburbs scattered around the edges that we never saw and thus didn't make it onto the map, and could see as much myself from the air.
At least I wasn't in gang territory to the best of my knowledge, but it occurred to me that might be a good idea to get back out of sight, just in case my appearing here, specifically, wasn't a coincidence. Learning where everything was could wait til later. Caskelis had recommended I visit my netherworld, and as much as I resented him for forcing this on me without asking, this being Worm I needed to get started training and leveling ASAP. The shit was about to hit the fan in this city, and I needed to be ready if I was going to live through it.
I swooped back downwards, beelining for the closest alleyway, and discovered in the process that once I was close to the ground, I could hover. Although by that I didn't mean 'beat my wings rapidly to remain aloft', so much as I meant 'idly flap them to hover in place in all defiance of normal physics'.
That's Disgaea demons for you, I guess. Or maybe game physics. Or powers. Honestly, I didn't even know which one applied right now. Caskelis was a bit light on details there, after all; for all I know he's a typical isekai ROB playing Overlord and I have some kind of Gamer's Body type deal going on, or I'm now powered by some kind of innate magic, or maybe even unconsciously utilizing real-life 'Fear Energy', which was something the fourth game had been a bit... vague about, even if it did get mentions elsewhere. Regardless, in the games there's a number of otherwise normal-looking humanoids who simply just float there if they feel like it, not unlike many of the members of New Wave.
Maybe I have something similar going on, who knows. It wasn't really important.
Physics defying or not though my wingbeats still managed to disturb several bits of loose newspaper, blowing them about the alleyway, and as I dropped to the ground one of them slapped up against the wall next to me in such a way that I just so happened to get a good look at the headline.
"Ball Drop?" I wondered aloud as the page fell back to the ground. "Like, the Times Square Ball? Is that even still a thing after Behemoth trashed the place?"
I bent over and snatched up the page out of curiosity. It was rather filthy, and the lower half had been torn away, but it was still quite legible, barely faded at all. Flattening it out, I could see from the lead that yes, it would seem that the New Year's Ball Drop was in fact a thing on Earth Bet, but apparently it had been moved to LA. Probably due to Behemoth, I assumed. Though maybe it had been there all along; there's probably a whole mountain's worth of minor differences between here and home.
A sudden thought crossed my mind, and I frowned. This paper was recent. It had to be. Sure, it had a number of tears and who-knows-what dried on the back, but it was legible.
According to my CYOA choices, it should be April. April 7th to specific, just a few days before Taylor was due to fight Lung. One day before the Trio pushed hard enough that she decides to go out earlier than planned. Up til now, I'd been unconsciously assuming that the mild chill in the air was simply due to being so far north, whereas I'm used to much warmer weather.
Except... I'd forgotten that Brockton Bay was supposed to be unseasonably warm for a city so for north. Or perhaps more accurately, I, like everyone else who has issues with the minutiae of the story, was under the belief that Wildbow just hadn't thought to research what the weather should be like based on the general geography, kind of like how his treatment of the aquifer had been based on a layman's (incorrect) understanding of them.
But what if that wasn't the case? A littered newspaper that's been blowing around in the wind for three months should have been completely illegible. At a minimum it ought to have been badly affected by water damage, assuming it had somehow miraculously survived intact and wasn't instead just a clump of mush lying in a gutter somewhere. This scrap wasn't really anything more than mildly dirty.
With a sudden certainty, I knew I needed to find out the date. Like right the fuck now, because Disgaea is a series deliberately filled with narrative tropes and plenty of self-awareness of that fact. It would be exactly like a Disgaea-related ROB to drop me in at some other 'significant' date, with nothing more than a cheeky grin and a loud 'oops'. For that matter, time travel mishaps are canon to the series, so it might not even be his fault.
Growling under my breath, I launched myself back up into the air, this time sticking to just above rooftop level. It took me only a few minutes to find what I was looking for: a plastic-covered bus stop, one with several of those brightly-colored newspaper dispensers that contain papers from local printers that nobody's ever heard of.
Despite the fact I'd been hoping to find one, that I did so so readily vaguely surprised me. You'd think the crime rate in Brockton Bay would be so bad that nobody would bother with the things, especially with the ubiquity of cellphones these days. I'd have thought they'd be vandalized constantly by gang members who wanted to get at the money, or that people just wouldn't bother to use them. Then again, compared to Aleph or back home, Bet was supposed to be behind the curve a bit technologically, so maybe cellphones and web-based news services weren't quite as widespread yet. Or it could be more mundane, and the money in the pay-only machines just wasn't worth the effort involved or something.
I performed a quick flyover first, checking for any obvious security cameras and to make sure nobody was around before I came in for a landing. Not seeing anyone, I touched down in front of a blue box that was offensively labeled 'FREE!' in large, friendly, neon greencomic-sans, and removed one of the papers.
I checked the date, and sure enough, my heart sank.
January 3rd, 2011.
Otherwise known as 'Locker Day'.
The realization that a real person, with a life and hopes and dreams and everything, was imminently going to be shoved into and trapped inside a locker-full of what was effectively biohazardous waste hit me like a bucketful of ice water directly to the face. It snuffed out just about every other consideration beyond Taylor's trigger hasn't happened yet.
I had to put a stop to it. That wasn't even remotely up for debate. Yes, I knew I'd be denying Taylor her power and her chance to be a hero. I get that. Some fanfic authors try and turn her trigger event into some kind of grand philosophical question about having the right to intervene in someone's life or not, or about whether she'd want you to just take control and make decisions for her or not without her say-so.
As far as I'm concerned, that's bullshit. It's a cop out, a rationalization for either callousness or for allowing Taylor to keep her power so that the MC can encounter her later and play buddy-cop with her, or even use her like some kind of backup plan.
Those arguments forget the very most basic of basics: Taylor, if given a choice, would never ever in a million years ask for something like the locker to happen to her.
Why do I say that? Because I've suffered abuse and serious emotional trauma both. I know what it's like, what it does to you. I've met others with similar stories. And not one of us would ever tell you 'you know what I'm glad for? That nobody intervened.'
In Taylor's specific case? Standing by and letting it happen is evenworse than just denying her choice or whatever other bullshit philosophy is being espoused. By deliberately ignoring her plight, you become an activeparticipant in her trigger event. Fanfic writers and readers both often forget, because it's not really applicable to altpowers: Word of God is that Taylor triggered with the powers she did because she felt completely abandoned, because even screaming her lungs out in a cramped, befouled, metal coffin, nobody came to help her. She triggered not from the bullying itself, or due to the physical or sensory trauma of the locker, but from the knowledge that dozens if not hundreds of people were literally walking right past her, knowing full well she was in there, while deliberately choosing not to help. That's why she ended up with a Master power instead of a Tinker one: because in that moment, she knew with complete certainty that she was utterly alone in life.
It's a big part of the reason why, in the end, she consciously chose to go villain instead of going through with writing to Miss Militia or confessing to Danny when he confronted her: she realized that the Undersiders were literally the first and only people to care about her in what felt like forever. That they were the first people in years that she trusted, people who'd extended friendship and comfort to her despite how she'd been holding herself back from accepting it fully, maintaining a degree of distance. She realized that she craved that company and trust and friendship far more than she cared about mending any of the merrily burning bridges she'd set aflame with her misplaced good intentions.
Leaving Taylor to her trigger? That's quite literally being no better than people like Blackwell and Gladly and all the others who should have intervened as authority figures in her life, but didn't. You know... the people who pretty much everyone agrees were negligent enough to deserve serious jail time? I know for a fact that back home, shit on that scale that has actually happened, with appropriate arrests and/or lawsuits for hundreds of thousands of dollars involved. I looked it up once, as part of research for a fic; turns out there are several anti-bullying websites that track that kind of thing, and if you really want to go the extra mile and see the legal records yourself you can even get them from PACER and whatnot if you're willing to shell out a little money. And that's not even getting into how in New Hampshire it's a crime to simply know about an upcoming bullying attempt, much less an felony-assault-level one, and not report it to the police or school admin.
So... yeah. No fucking way was I just leaving Taylor to her fate. Just... no. Not happening.
But how to intervene?
Leaving aside the question of how to even find Winslow in time —something that was extremely unlikely, given the potential time of day and the fact that high schools usually start their day very early— me just showing up at the school and bulling my way through the student body to get to her locker was highly unlikely to go over well. The PRT would be all over an unknown parahuman busting their way into a school pretty damn fast, and that'd be one hell of an awful first impression. At a minimum it would make any future meetings a pain in the ass, assuming things didn't immediately go downhill and end in a fight.
There's also the possibility that my mere presence would spook Sophia into donning her costume and having a go at me herself. Which, just like the previous option, given my current complete lack of weapons or skills was unlikely to go well for me. The semi-brute thing might help, but I also didn't want to test that for the very first time in a combat situation against a person I absolutely loathed, even if pseudo-parasocially. As satisfying as it might be to imagine smashing Sophia into paste, I needed to remember that these were real people, not storybook characters to kill with impunity.
There were other problems with intervening personally as well. My very presence in the city was going to kick up a hell of a fuss soon enough, what with the absolutely bonkers powersets available to Disgaea demons. Depending on what game features I ended up with access to, at a minimum I was probably looking at building up a well-funded, fully independent hero team, with every one of us being assigned Trump, Blaster, and Striker ratings as high as it gets. Every villain in the city, in multiple states even, was going to be wanting a piece of that pie, or else to put me out of business the second they got the chance.
If any of them got wind of me having personally intervened in a teenager's life as part of my first appearance, someone was bound to get the bright idea that Taylor was important to me, and try to use her as leverage. Which was a problem, because again, parasocially she kind of was. I may not know her for real, but from a certain point of view she also hardly counts as a stranger. It's entirely possible that some Thinker somewhere might be able to puzzle that out. Lisa absolutely could, if she managed to get ahold of any security footage that caught sight me on my way there.
So intervening directly was probably out. But that meant doing it indirectly, and I had no idea how I'd do that. I mean, presumably I could try and bribe a student somehow, but given that Sophia and Emma would be threatening the student body into silence I had no guarantee that would work, and it was at least somewhat possible the administration wouldn't take action even when prompted. Not to mention that if I tried to flag down some random kid off the street, they might just run at the sight of me and call the—
Oh.
I could do that, couldn't I?
There was even a payphone righthere at the stop, ostensibly for the use of people who were taking the bus.
"Go to the police, you stupid woman," I quoted, facepalming while I muttered under my breath. "Why does nobody ever just go to the police?"
Blink really had been a great episode.
Right. OK. I could just do the sensible thing people should do when confronted with an imminent assault: call 911. Assuming payphones work the same way here, I shouldn't even need money, which is a very good thing because I didn't have any.
The question was.... did I want the police, or the PRT? I could probably get the police to go investigate if I just lied and pretended to be a student, and told them there was a horrible smell on the third floor and I'd overheard some mean girls whispering about hurting someone. But that wasn't a guarantee — this was Winslow we were talking about here, and they might ask me awkward questions I couldn't answer, like who I was and why I wasn't informing the school staff. There's also the issue that, again assuming the system works in a similar fashion here as it did back home, making a 911 call from a payphone will immediately show the operator that I'm calling from nowhere near Winslow. Maybe that wouldn't make a difference, SWATing was a thing back home after all, but I couldn't be sure.
The other option was seeing if 911 would connect me to the PRT. Presumably, if I called and told the operator that I was a parahuman trying to report a crime in progress, that would get me kicked over to the PRT as a matter of procedure. If that didn't do the trick though, no big deal, I could probably just spin the police the story anyway. If it did, then the real issue became convincing the PRT to take action. It also wasn't inconceivable that if I made it out to be a civilian crime, they might not have jurisdiction.
Although… I could make sure to name drop Sophia, without letting on that I knew she was a cape. That would definitely light a fire under their ass, if only because it coming out that a Ward deliberately assaulted a civilian would be a scandal of epic proportions, and even without the Ward angle they might still be forced to bench Sophia permanently, something that according to Wildbow Piggot was extremely loathe to do.
I rubbed at my face a bit while I considered my options. I definitely could do it that way. While I had little love for the PRT in the story, I wasn't actually all that concerned about them knowing I was around. I'd rather stay off their radar for a bit if possible, but it didn't need to be a priority for any reason I could think of, and Word of God has always held that they aren't nearly half as aggressive with new capes as fanon likes to make them out to be. And rereads of the story more or less bore that out, barring certain specific events. Taylor's initial encounter with Armsmaster for example was fairly positive, all things considered.
If I presented myself as someone willing to play by the rules, someone who called them rather than take matters into my own hands, that may well defuse any knee-jerk reactions. I'd need a convincing reason to be calling though. A precog power, maybe? It was a semi-accurate label, after all. I'd taken acting classes at one point in my life, too, so alongside that partial truth I might be able to spin a story good enough to fool even the likes of Alexandria or Armsmaster, seeing as I really did know stuff I shouldn't. And it wasn't like Colin would have any biometric or body language data to go with his voice analysis, which I was pretty confident in being able to fake.
I could play it up, make myself seem accurate enough and thorough enough that the PRT would take a chance on an unknown in the hopes they could get their hands on a valuable Thinker, something the ENE currently lacked. They might not be convinced enough to bust Sophia on my word, but as long as I play along it ought to be enough for them to at minimum send someone over, and that would be enough to get the ball rolling. Word of God held Sophia was pretty damn careful to hide her activities; she wouldn't be so dumb as to push Taylor into that mess with one of the Protectorate poking around nearby.
I thought it over for a couple of minutes, settling what my story would be. Once I'd gotten it fixed in my mind, along with a sequence of misleading claims and possible answers to probable questions, I picked up the receiver and dialed 911.
Sure enough, it worked; I was swiftly connected with an operator, who in turn connected me to the PRT emergency dispatch line as soon as I identified myself as a parahuman.
A woman with a no-nonsense kind of voice came on the line, inquiring as to the nature of my call.
I affected a lighter than normal tone for her, deliberately trying to make myself sound unsure and inexperienced, and maybe a little naive. It's surprising how many people would take that at face value to mean you were being honest.
"Hi, yes, this is... um, well, I guess you can call me Oracle for now? I'm uh, kind of new at the whole heroing thing, and I wanted to know if there's a way to report a crime that hasn't happened yet, but is going to?"
"Miss, this is the emergency line, I hope you realize—"
I interrupted. "I know faking a 911 call is a crime. I'm not faking. My power is... That is I'm... I think you guys call it a Thinker? I get these... visions. Of bad stuff that's going to happen really soon. Like, in the next hour or so. And something really, really bad is gonna happen to someone. Something so bad that somebody's gonna trigger from it. I don't... I don't want anyone to have to go through that."
The voice on the line turned stern.
"Miss, nobody can predict—"
I interrupted again. "Well I can!" I half-shouted, trying to sound petulant without being overbearing. "I mean, I can't see what happens, or what powers she'll get, or anything like that, but I know it happens because when it does my power goes all weird and I get the most godawful headache! You gotta believe me, or someone might die!"
The operator was quiet for long enough that for a moment I worried I'd gone for something a little too unbelievable and they'd hung up on me, but after a few tense moments I got a grudging response.
"Please hold."
The line went quiet again briefly. Oddly, there was no boring hold music, nor an automated infomercial voice, just a sort of quiet low-pitched hum so you'd know the call hadn't been dropped. It didn't last particularly long, though, as a new voice quickly picked up.
"Miss Militia here. I'm told you have some information for us?"
I grinned to myself and gave a silent fist pump. Score. Hannah was someone I could definitely work with. She would be willing to bring down the hammer on Sophia. And thanks to Wildbow's interludes, I knew exactly how to get her attention.
"Hi yes. Um, I need to report a crime that's going to happen in like... I dunno, less than an hour? I'm not sure exactly. But right about the time school starts."
"Alright," Miss Militia replied. Her tone was even and professional, like she was taking notes. Which in all likelyhood, she was. "First, just for the record, what should I call you?"
"Umm, I guess Oracle for now? I might want to change it later though. If that's OK."
"That's perfectly fine, Oracle, I just need something to put on the paperwork," Miss Militia reassured me. "Now, you said you can see the future?"
"Yeah. Like I told the other lady, I get these visions. Like full on lucid dream type stuff, but while I'm awake."
"And how long do these visions last?"
Ahh, Hannah. Already digging for information like a good little PRT stooge. Too bad for you I'm entirely making this part up.
"Oh, um, only a few seconds of real time, but they can cover up to an hour or two, tops," I bit my lip as I replied, trying to sound concerned about the delay. "I can't see very far, I guess you'd say?"
"Alright. So you saw a crime being committed?" she asked.
"Yeah, a really, really bad one," I replied.
"Describe it for me."
"OK, so there's these three girls. They go to... I guess it's probably Winslow High, because the place was really shabby, with these giant lockers that look like they were built ages ago, and there was graffiti all over the place."
Miss Militia made a vague noise of agreement.
Yep. Totally taking notes.
"They were whispering to each other as they went up the stairs to the third floor, where there's this really awful smell. Like, I would've barfed if I'd been able."
"So you could smell?" Miss Militia asked. "Do you mean to say you have full sensory perception during these visions of yours?"
"Weelll..." I drawled, ducking my head from side to side, "Sort of? Not full, exactly. I'm not actually there, just watching, so while I can feel hot and cold or wind I can't like, deliberately touch stuff, so unless its one of those smells that's so strong you can kinda taste it, there's no taste either."
"Alright, continue."
"OK so, these girls are whispering and giggling to each other, pretty obviously up to something, and they go around a corner and hide behind it. Then they wait for this other girl to come down the hall."
"Can you describe these girls?"
"Uhh, yeah. So like, the one they're waiting for, she's real tall, with super-long, curly, black hair, wearing ratty jeans and a grey hoodie. Really skinny too, and she looks like a wreck. Super stressed out, so I can't help but wonder if they've been doing horrible stuff to her for awhile. I didn't catch her name."
I continued. "Then there's the three, well, I'm pretty sure they're bullies. They've got the look. One's got red hair, and she's absolutely gorgeous, with high-end clothes. We're talking model levels of pretty, for a teenager anyway. Definitely a Queen Bee type. Number two is rather short, petite really, with brown hair and these cute little blue barettes. The last one is a black girl who's super athletic-looking. She's in great shape, really well toned. Definitely track or swim team, I'd bet money on it."
"Alright."
"So for them I did get names. Kinda. The short girl I think got called 'Mads' once, which I assume is short for something. Madison, probably. The redhead was definitely 'Emma', and the last one, the black girl, her friends kept calling her 'Sophia', but this one guy they passed in the hallway called out to her and used the name 'Hess', which, since she responded to it, I'm guessing is her last name. So she'd be Sophia Hess."
Dead. Silence.
I grinned to myself once again.
After a moment, Miss Militia spoke up again, and I had to give her props, she didn't sound concerned or surprised in the slightest. Same calm, even tone she'd been using.
"OK, so just to be clear, you heard them call each other by these names? And you're sure those names were Mads, Emma, and Sophia Hess?"
"That's right," I replied.
"Alright, continue."
"OK, so these girls, they hide around the corner and wait for the fourth girl to show up. She goes to one of the lockers —I don't know which, couldn't read the number, but they'd gone up two sets of stairs, so third floor— and she looks just crushed, like she knows there's something awful in it. But she opens it anyway and... and it's filled with... with..."
I make a sound like I'm gagging, just for effect.
"Oh man just thinking about it..." I take a shuddering breath, as if steadying myself.
"...It's been filled with... with just absolute filth. Bloody tampons and rotten food and trash and there's bugs everywhere and it's just oozing all this horrible stuff, half of which falls out onto the floor when the girl opens it up."
Miss Militia's professional demeanor must have cracked somewhat at that, because she makes a small noise that I wasn't able to place, but which was no doubt one of disgust.
I kept on going. "And so the girl just pukes all over the floor, right then and there, and I can tell you I'd have been right there with her if it'd been me. But then those other three girls, who've been watching the whole time looking like its Christmas twice over, they run up behind her and that Sophia girl grabs her by the shoulders, shoves her into the locker, slams the door shut, and then puts the lock back on it."
"What?!" Miss Militia exclaims, clearly aghast.
"Yeah. And of course the girl just starts freaking out and screaming and crying in there, but there's no banging because there's probably not even any room for her to move. And there's all these other kids watching, and they just let it happen because that Sophia girl throws around a bunch of glares and everyone just fucks off like its not their business. Then those... those horrible girls just start laughing, taunt the girl in the locker for a bit, and then leave. Without letting her out."
"Christ. That's a hell of a story."
"Oh, I'm not done."
I pause for a beat, then deliver the kicker.
"The girl? She's in there for a good long while. My vision kept going for... well, I dunno how long, cause it's not like I had a watch. Maybe twenty minutes? Thirty? It was awful, being stuck there just listening to her gag and wretch and cry and beg for help. But nobody did anything, they just kept on walking by. It went on like that for some time, until all of a sudden my vision ends because she triggers."
Miss Militia hmm'ed, sounding a bit disapproving like she didn't actually believe that last bit. Hardly surprising, but I wasn't worried. I had a secret weapon, after all.
"Yes..." she replied. "Dispatch says here that you claimed something of that nature. You do realize there has never been a recorded case of—."
Trying not to let my inner grin show in my voice, I delivered what Hannah, Miss Perfect Memory herself, would take as proof positive that I wasn't bullshitting her. Because she remembered.
"'Claimed', nothing," I told her indignantly. "I know what I saw. Everything was all fine and dandy —for me, I mean, not the girl, obviously— and then boom, I'm spinning through space and there's these things, these giant worm-blob-whale things and they're just... just wrong. It's hard to describe, like they're there and not there all at once, and made of those whatchamacallits, fractals, and billions of bits of them are spraying off and falling towards me. And I get a glimpse of that happening for just a moment before my vision goes all weird and blurry, enough to make me reallly nauseous, before my power cuts off abruptly and I get this huuuuuuge headache and can barely see straight. And that's a trigger event, I know because I saw the same thing when I got my powers and... and..."
I trailed off towards the end, trying to sound upset. Nobody liked to bring up their own trigger event, after all.
"You gotta do something," I ended quietly.
Miss Militia remained quiet for a moment, no doubt absolutely shocked at a complete unknown describing something she knew rather intimately, something no other cape she'd ever asked seemed to remember experiencing.
"...I believe you." she said finally.
Ding ding ding, we have a winner!
"You do?" I asked, feigning a mix of relief, hope, and surprise. "So... so you'll stop those girls? Cause nobody should have to go through... through that. How anyone could even think of doing something like that to someone else...."
Miss Militia's voice hardened. "I assure you, Oracle, I'll be passing this on to the Director immediately so she can send an appropriate team out to the school right away." Damn, she sounded pissed now. Nice work, me. "You said this is going to happen soon?"
"Yeah," I said quietly. "Less than an hour probably? The bell went off just before... before she triggered. I...uh... I don't know Winslow's schedule, since I don't go there."
"Oh, so you go to a different school?"
Wow, digging for ID already? Haha, nice try.
"Oh no, I'm homeschooled," I lied. That one would almost certainly flag Armsmaster's software, assuming it gets used and even could be used remotely. Which it might not, but at least there was an obvious motivation of privacy there, so I wasn't worried.
"I see," she replied in an agreeable tone. "Well, you've been very helpful, Oracle, I'll pass this on right away. Would it be possible for you to come down to the PRT building to give us a detailed statement sometime in the next few days? It's nothing onerous, just a normal part of reporting a crime, so that when arrests are made we can make sure they're prosecuted properly."
Smooth segue into the recruitment process there, Hannah. But no, I'm not falling for that either.
"Sure, I can do that," I replied brightly, not having any intention of doing so. Though who knows, maybe I would. Plans can change, and I could think of a few reasons I might do so.
"Then I'd better get this to the Director," Miss Militia told me. "Hopefully I'll talk to you again soon."
"I'll look forward to it, you're my favorite! Bye~" I clicked the receiver back down into its holster.
With Taylor's excessively unpleasant fate averted, it was time for me to get to work. As much as part of me wanted to wallow in worry and take some time to mourn the end of my previous life, Caskelis had said that I only had a few days to shape what powers I would get, and I intended to not waste that opportunity. Most especially, I needed to make sure I didn't get saddled with something particularly bizarre or relatively useless.
See, characters in Disgaea have a few different categories of abilities. Aside from basic stuff like raw stats, every unit, recruitable or not, gets a variety of Evil Abilities and/or Special Skills, with Overlords also getting something called an Overload.
Evil Abilities, or 'Evilities' as the English version of the game calls them, were passive effects that did all sorts of different things, anywhere from minor personal stat boosts to massive global debuffs, and they further divided into two categories: Unique and Common. Common Evilities were ones that everyone could learn, and you could equip a fairly significant number at the same time. Unique Evilities on the other hand, while not always technically unique, were very much harder to come by; For most, not only did you have to pass certain challenges with the character you wanted to learn them, you also had to master a particular class in full before you could access it outside of having the class equipped.
But here's the thing: Story characters had Unique Evilities that were always equipped and nobody else could learn, because they had unique classes, which normal units and other story and DLC characters couldn't access. They also had Common Evilities that they could learn which you couldn't get anywhere else, except with the added benefit that once they learned them, they could at least teach them to other units. That meant, if at all possible, I wanted to create a really solid set of Evilities of my own, either specifically tailored to whatever build I wanted to pursue or at least ones that had a high potential for synergy.
Then there were the Special Skills. These also fell into categories, of the Unique, Weapon, and Common varieties. Weapon skills were ones that basically anyone could learn just by picking up a weapon and using it long enough. Weapon Mastery, which measured a character's particular aptitude for a given weapon type, was also a thing, but basically all that really controlled was how fast you learned — Even a Skull, your basic magic-user, could eventually fully master Axes and Armor and still be a strong spellcaster. It'd just take him way, way longer to learn the higher level skills than if you gave that same axe to say, a Heavy Knight.
Common Skills meanwhile were a bit different. Those were almost always spells of some sort, mostly really basic buff, debuff, and elemental damage spells such as Braveheart, Heal, Silence, Fire, and the like. Very few didn't fall into one of those categories with almost all of the exceptions being the various Tower and Geo Panel -related skills.
Commons wouldn't be difficult to get access to. A significant percentage of classes got at least some kind of common skills by default, even if it was only one or two of them, but once you'd learned them it was pretty trivial to teach them to other party members. Very much so, even: in most versions of the game all you needed to do was just put the teacher and student into the same grouping or squad, and then stand them next to each other in battle, which caused the skill to appear in the student's list of skills. Then once they've cast it enough to rank it up to level 1 —which could be anywhere from three to sixteen times, depending on game— they'd learn it for good.
Unique Special Skills on the other hand were a completely different beast. Unlike Unique Evilities, those couldn't be learned at all. The only way to be able to use them was to have the class that granted it equipped as your primary class, full stop, and that was true whether you were talking about Story characters or Generics.
It was that bit that made prioritizing influencing my powers right away something of prime importance. Once again, on the offhand chance that any kind of game-like elements were in force, I couldn't imagine that I wouldn't count as a story character, and unlike an ordinary recruit, story characters can't reincarnate into a new class. They're pretty much stuck with their normal one unless they somehow manage to evolve it, which means your first two Unique Evility slots are locked-in, and you can't wield other class' Unique Special Skills, only your own. So even if I, say, picked up Sorcerer as my sub-class and mastered it, I could learn its Unique Evility, but I couldn't learn, or even use, the skill 'Curse Storm', because it requires that Sorcerer be my primary class.
Very few exceptions to that rule existed, with only a handful of certain spells that technically were Common Skills, but just so happened to initially appeared on just one class. Target Lock, for instance, only ever appeared naturally on Professors, but could be subsequently taught or turned into a scroll just like any other spell.
Last of all, and perhaps crucially.. some of the classes and characters in Disgaea were just, well.. silly, whilst others were absolute badasses. I mean, who wants to get saddled with an ability like Tink's Sonic Roll, which barely does more damage, over the same area even, than the very first sword skill, or something uncomfortable and disturbing like Etna's Sexy Beam, when you could instead be wielding something like Laharl's ridiculously overpowered Meteor Impact? Or better yet, some of the fairly rare and very powerful combo skills, like Conflagration Fury, which had a damage level that started at SS-Tier.
No, it was definitely best to not end up saddled with a weird class like 'Dirty Frog' or 'Raspberyl's Lackey'. Better to pick a solid theme early on and stick with it. I already had some ideas on that front, but first I needed to see what I had to work with. And that meant figuring out where my Gate Key was.
Caskelis' letter had said I was getting one. But there hadn't been one with the letter itself. Which... presumably meant it was in my inventory? Assuming I even had one.
Touching down in yet another secluded alleyway —the things were all over the place, apparently, which was kind of a novelty for my entirely-suburban-raised self — I started off by giving myself something of a pat down. Not the sexy kind, mind you; as stacked as I apparently was now, that could come later when I wasn't stressed and pressed for time. Rather, this was just a quick check-over to figure out if I even had pockets in this getup, which I didn't, and also to see if simply intending to access an item worked, because Disgaea characters pulled improbably large weapons from nowhere on a semi-regular basis.
When that particular method failed, I decided to try an old standby common to LitRPG everywhere: voice commands.
"Status."
Nothing.
"Inventory."
Still nothing.
"Interface?"
Nope.
"Menu?"
There we go. Game powers confirmed, I guess?
As soon as I gave the correct command, a window with a mixed background of blue, purple, and black smoke adorned with geometric sigils appeared in my peripheral vision, and as soon as I focused my attention on it, it shifted to right in front of me. Unlike the standard Disgaea 5 menu, this one only had two options: Characters, and Inventory.
"Characters."
A short list of names and portraits appeared, and I was only moderately surprised to note that my entry was not the only one present: Several Prinny portraits sat just below my own. Not only that, but it seemed that I had gotten a rather larger than usual set of starter Prinnies alongside everything else.
For the unaware, a Prinny is perhaps best described as a person-sized, doll-like penguin plushie with peg-legs and tiny, purple bat wings. They're usually a standard shade of blue, but occasionally you'll come across other colors, and on very rare occasions they can end up with additional physical features. They are, in a word, cute as fuck. The mascots of the Disgaea series as a whole.
They're also, in my humble opinion, existentially terrifying considering the lore behind them.
See, according to the, well, early Disgaea games, Prinnies as a whole were created 'from the souls of thieves, murderers, and those who've led otherwise worthless lives,' ones that have died and gone through whatever passes for divine judgement in their particular region of the multiverse. Albeit this was later expanded to include basically all sinners.
Point was, if the soul in question is found wanting, it would be forced into sort of golem, a 'prinny suit', by whomever is currently in charge of said judgement. From there, the newly-animated Prinny got shipped off to one of the infinite Netherworlds or to Celestia to serve as a soldier, slave, or servant until they manage to either work off their karmic debt through suffering, or else convince a powerful demon or angel to reincarnate them. Mostly this was done by 'paying off' their afterlife sentence by, in the case of a Netherworld Prinny, amassing enough wealth to buy their reincarnation from an Overlord, or in the case of a Celestian, performing good deeds to convince a Seraph they've learned their lesson.
Of course, such things are never so simple. While we don't get to see much at all of the Celestian side of things except through Flonne's dialgue, Disgaea demons, while not the horrifically evil soul-devouring monstrosities modern fiction often portrays them as, are nevertheless characterized as being a lazy, treacherous, violent, greedy lot. More specifically, having a definite 'might makes right' kind of society, it isn't like they have anyone around to enforce labor laws or make sure everyone gets fair pay. To make matters worse, Prinnies combine being perennially upbeat with being nigh-universally lazy, irresponsible, and hopelessly naive, alongside being desperate for even the slightest taste of sardines.
This means that to a Netherworld demon, Prinnies are an endlessly exploitable source of labor, who can easily be convinced to work for almost nothing, and very often for something they'll eat instead of the HL they need to get themselves reincarnated. And that's assuming the Prinny in question doesn't simply spend all their money on sardines in the first place. As a result, most Netherworld Prinnies end up effectively trapped in an endless cycle of manipulation, outright lies, and hospital fees, where they get treated as little more than disposable cannon fodder that's good for nothing but scutwork.
Luckily for my Prinnies, I find that kind of manipulation eminently reprehensible and thus wasn't planning on being like most demons. No, if I'd been assigned a Prinny Squad, I'd treat them right, like Killia and Usalia. Maybe even train some up to have actually-marketable skills, like Usalia's curry-chef, whose name currently escaped me. And if not... well, I could always reincarnate them into something more useful.
However, that would be something to deal with later. So, continuing my exploration, I selected myself in the character menu.
The screen changed, displaying an image on one side of the new me from the chest-upwards, as seen from an angle, while the rest of the screen was dominated by my stats.
Aptitudes
HP 130 SP 130
Atk 130 Def 120
Int 120 Res 130
Hit 130 Spd 100
Affinity Fire 90% Wind 25% Ice 50% Star 0%
Weapon Resistance
(All 20%)
Weapon Mastery
(All A's)
My eyes bugged out a little.
Holy shit were my starting stats good. I mean sure, Zetta had all but two at 24+ and multiple in the low thirties, but he's kind of a special case, you know? And those aptitudes! They aren't as quite as absurd as the Disgaea DS versions of Adell, Rozalin, or Zeta, but they were pretty damn close.
And I've got a freaking ninety in Fire Affinity? How on earth did that—
Oh. Wait. No, I knew that one. Stella started with maxed-out fire affinity, didn't she? But my Wind and Ice were wrong for them to be a one to one copy, so how…?
After a few moments, it clicked.
I couldn't be sure, because I was going off a certain degree of imperfect memory here, but from the salient details I could recall clearly, it looked to me like Caskelis had looked at my CYOA picks, and then proceeded to take the laziest route he possibly could to recreate them, in a manner that just so happened to benefit me in the best possible way.
My movement stats? Straight up taken from the best flyer in the game, the Disgaea 5 version of the Winged Warrior. Weapon Mastery and Weapon Resistances? That'd be right out of my own notes; the Disgaea 3 Majin because I'd selected Sword Art Offline. And from the look of things, I my Aptitudes reflected Stella's melee prowess and Rozalin's magical.
The only thing that didn't quite line up was the raw stats, but there was a clear explanation there. Stella had had high HP but middling SP for all that she made for an insanely good Magic Knight, and D6 Rozalin's HIT and SPD had been just silly good. Given that and the other reflections of my CYOA picks I'd seen so far, I could probably safety assume that Caskelis dumped my reincarnation bonuses into recreating the Brute package I'd selected with my leftover CP. It would certainly explain why my RES was so stupidly high in comparison to both girls' normal array.
…I could absolutely work with this.
That starting RES was insane, and with that aptitude was practically calling to me,. For one, the vast majority of non-Brute powers should be affected by it, as RES was the 'Non-Physical' defense, so to speak. Better still, there are Evilities that interact with it in the best of ways.
RES Arrows in particular was a personal favorite of mine. Normally, Bows keyed off of ATK and HIT, but the RES Arrows common Evility that Clerics got change that to RES/HIT.. and Orbs boosted RES to super high levels even in the early game. A common tactic for farming early XP and Mana was to purchase RES Arrows for your Cleric (who have a solid Bow Mastery rating despite being casters), the load up their accessory slots with Orbs, which are ostensibly for boosting your healing, because they give you a hefty chunk of RES and SP.
Except even the very first of the Orbs you can buy boost RES way, way more than basic Belts or Glasses or Shoes boost their own respective stats, to the point that RES Arrows will then turn said Cleric into an absolute monster of a murder machine, able to one-shot practically anything within half a map's range.
I'd need to look at what else I had available to start off with, and my Evilities would certainly influence things, but if I could get my hands on my own copy of RES Arrows, and/or some of its partner skills…? Especially with that ridiculously high base stat and whopping 130% aptitude for RES gear?
I'd be set for early level grinding.
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Moving in, I quickly scanned through the other tabs, and confirmed that my evilities, special skills, assigned squads, etc, were all currently empty, before switching over to the 'Items' section of the main menu.
I frowned.
I had zero HL, and no items at all. That wasn't right; I should have a stockpile of cash, at least enough to get me up and running. I'd taken the Wealthy perk, after all. For that matter, I'd seen on the previous screen that my personal Mana was still at zero, and Caskelis had confirmed in his letter that he'd given that stuff to me, so where the hell was it?
Much, much more importantly, how the hell was I supposed to access my Netherworld without the Gate Key?
"Fuck," I muttered under my breath as I thought furiously. I knew it wasn't on me when I'd woken up; my armor didn't even have pockets. It wasn't in the letter either, and it clearly wasn't sitting in my inventory. Nor was it equipped to me or any of the Prinnies. For that matter, even if they did have it, how the hell was I supposed find them?
A sudden thought struck me then, and I couldn't help but snort at the absurdity of it. I mean, it was basically how the first game had opened, more or less, right? And totally the sort of thing you'd expect from the series. I mean sure, this was real life, not a game, but.. well, I did have a menu.
Ahhhh, what the heck. It worked for Etna, right? Not like anyone was around to see.
I heaved in a large lungful of air, struck a ridiculous anime pose.. and called out:
"Prinny Squad, Assemble!"
I felt completely ridiculous for a brief moment when nothing happened, but then realized I'd forgotten the second part, which was of course to shift my posture, stamp my foot angrily, and bellow:
"Get your butts out here! NOW!"
That did it.
As if from nowhere, which it very well may have been, all nine of my Prinnies converged on my position from multiple directions: jumping off rooftops, scampering around corners, rattling down fire escapes... and in one particularly notable case, launching itself out from a nearby trashcan. This was followed by a mad scramble as they tried to form up into something vaguely approximating two lines, with the trashcan Prinny standing out in front, still wearing the lid on his head.
Once they were, if one were being very generous, in formation, collectively they offered me what were probably some of the sloppiest salutes I've ever encountered. Given that in highschool JROTC I'd been an officer in charge of numerous freshman teenagers who'd signed up only because taking the minimum two years allowed them to avoid taking Phys Ed.... Well, needless to say I've seen some pretty sad efforts at salutes in my time, so that's saying something.
"Prinny Squads Albacore and Bonito reporting for duty, dood!" announced Trashcan-Prinny in that cheerfully cutesy, high pitched tone of voice I'd recognize anywhere.
"Albacore and Bonito?" I deadpanned. "Really?"
"Of course, dood!"
"Why so many of you?" I asked, curious.
"Master Caskelis sent us over because he couldn't afford to keep paying us anymore, dood," one of others replied.
"He's dead broke, dood," affirmed another.
"I assume I'm supposed to be picking up your contracts, then?" I asked.
They all made various affirmative noises. The ones who were still paying attention, anyway; several of them had been distracted by flies, and I was pretty sure that one of them had even managed to already fall asleep standing up.
"And what was Caskelis paying you?" I asked, raising an eyebrow. Not that I didn't know the answer given was bound to be something utterly outrageous, because Prinnies, but there was a method to dealing with their idiosyncrasies.
"One hundred million a month, dood!"
"Uh huh," I commented dryly. "Well, how about instead of paying you an amount I'm sure was never mentioned by Caskelis at all—"
"Oh no, she's onto us, dood!" one of them wailed, trembling.
"—In exchange for your services this week, I'll pay you five sardines, each, at the end of the week, after which we'll renegotiate for something even better. Sound good?"
A chorus of gasps greeted my words, followed by most of the Prinnies trying to stand to attention and salute again.
"F-Five, dood?!"
It may have sounded cheap, but to a Prinny it was practically a fortune. Seraphina once hired an entire platoon of Prinnies to fight the The Lost's army, complete with all its tanks and airships, for twenty hours, all for a grand total of one sardine. Not one each, one. Which I'm pretty sure she never even gave to the few who survived the encounter.
"Five," I confirmed. "I'm gonna need some human money to get them first, though. And I'm not sure how I'll accomplish that just yet."
"Human money?" they cried excitedly. "We already found some, dood!"
The Prinny directly behind Trashcan performed what could only be described as a pirouette, before yanking an absolutely filthy wad of bills out of its leather pouch and thrusting it up into the air.
"Do I even want to know where you got that from?" I asked, revolted.
"Some stinky drunk guy under a car said we could have it, dood."
I sighed. Translation: they'd been lurking around somewhere and stumbled across a passed-out Merchant and robbed him blind. No doubt he'd 'agreed' by virtue of being too drunk or high to do anything about it. Or, you know, to realize they weren't a hallucination, given they were being talked to by a bunch of giant, stuffed bat-penguins.
The bills were mixed denominations, and disturbingly wet for some reason, but there was just under a hundred bucks here. However, while I didn't exactly feel too terrible about them robbing a random gang member —I hoped— if I didn't cut this off at the pass then pretty soon they'd be hassling old ladies and robbing convenience stores the second my back was turned.
"Well done," I told the Prinnies. "So well done, in fact, that I'm going to add some kipper snacks to this week's payment, and you'll even get them by the end of the day if I can manage it." They immediately perked up. "However," I stated firmly, raising a finger, "I want you to promise me to not go around robbing people. No mugging, no stealing, no violence at all. Not unless they've attacked you unprovoked. Then it's OK, at least for now."
"You got it, dood!" Most of them stood as straight as they could and saluted again.
"I mean it," I said severely, looming. "I catch you doing anything a Seraph would disapprove of, and I'll dock your pay."
They shivered dramatically, wailing in unison. "Noooo, not my sardines, dood!" "Anything but that, dood!" "We'll be good, dood!"
It wasn't likely to stick, because Prinnies had the attention span of a goldfish with Alzheimer's, but I suppose that would be good enough for now.
"Alright. You." I pointed to the front and center Prinny, the one who seemed the most coherent and incidentally had the trash can lid hat. "What's your name?"
"Insert Name, dood!"
I stared at the Prinny for a few moments, flabbergasted. They actually got given names like that? I mean, I guess I shouldn't be surprised, this was Disgaea we were talking about, but come on. Videogame stats were one thing, but I honestly hadn't expected that level of... I dunno, verisimilitude? between a game and the reality I was being faced with. Then again, I supposed Etna's solution for just yelling for her Prinnies had worked liked a charm. What's next, live-action turn-based combat?
I rubbed my forehead a bit in exasperation before continuing.
"You know what? No. Your name is now Trashcan Pete, and I'm promoting you to the position of Dimension Guide."
Said Prinny swelled with pride to the point that I worried he might explode. And I mean that literally: In the game, the body of a Prinny is so unstable that picking them up and throwing them will cause them to explode like a bomb, killing them instantly and doing damage based on their HP to everyone and everything in a fairly large radius, completely ignoring all defensive stats and abilities. There were specific character builds for them that revolved around turning them into what amounted to repeatable a mini-nuke.
"In that case," I told him, "your first task will be to show me how to get us back home. Unfortunately, as Caskelis seems to have neglected to give me the gate key, I have no idea how to do that."
"We got it right here, dood!"
The Prinnies went into a huddle, after which they all turned back around and Pete presented me with an oddly-shaped key. Well, sort of a key. To be honest it didn't look much like a key at all, but rather more like a short, avant-garde desk lamp, what with the bulbous orb of red glass at the top, and the twisty spiral of coppery metal.
Still, I recognized it from the icon it had in the game. So that solved that problem. Though how they could have it and it wasn't in my inventory, or equipped on them, I had no idea. Videogame Logic, I guess.
Key Item Obtained!
1x Gate Key [Lvl 10]!
Sigh. Of course I was going to have to deal with pop ups. That was going to be a lot more annoying in real life than in some random fic. Oh well. I'd just have to learn to live with it. At least they were relatively rare in Disgaea. Though as funny as they sometimes were, if I had to sit through any of those ridiculous 'episode previews', someone was going to get stabbed.
Grumbling to myself a little, I checked my inventory, and sure enough, the Gate Key was now listed there. Interestingly, it was also level 10 already, meaning that someone, presumably Caskelis, had taken it through the Item World once so that it was capable of manipulating a locked portal.
Which brought up an interesting question. I mean, in the games it was obviously a narrative device used to slow down how many features the game introduced to you at one time. But how the hell did Hoggmeister have a lock on his castle, when literally everywhere else you could just portal in and out without obstruction? I mean, he wasn't even an Overlord, just a contender, even if he was filthy rich.
Eh, might as well ask my new Dimension Guide?
"So, Pete.. I'm guessing our gate has barrier that needs a level ten key, right?"
"That's totally right, dood!" Pete replied, beaming.
"And that means nobody can use a different portal to get in?"
"Right again, dood!"
"Does that interference apply to portals other than standard dimension gates?" I asked. "'Cause there's some real jerks around here that don't know how to mind their own business, and they've got a completely different system."
"It wouldn't be much of a barrier if you could just teleport right through, dood," Pete replied dubiously.
"Oh, so is that why Overlords like to use rocketships to invade each other? Or just fly their Netherworlds close enough to attack directly, if they're mobile enough?"
"It sure is, dood!" Pete replied, beaming. "Master Ashkari is really smart, dood!"
Mentally, I gave my best Mr. Burns impression.
Excellent. Fuck you, Cauldron.
"Good to know." I told Pete. Then I equipped the Gate Key, which caused it to disappear from my hands. Interesting.
"Now, let's see… how do I go about using this?"
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In Douglas Adams' (in)famous Hitchhiker's Guide, Ford Prefect once described entering hyperspace as feeling like being drunk like a glass of water.
Stepping through a Dimension Gate taught me just what that was like, albeit thankfully in practice it that that particular sensation turned out not to be as terribly unpleasant as it sounded in paper. It was just odd more than anything else, as my view of the world unraveled into blue light briefly, swirled around a little, and then swirled back in as I stepped out. Or it would have, had there been anything to see.
It seemed that when Caskelis said he had an empty Netherworld lying around, he'd meant it. There was literally nothing here except for the tiny patch of plain stone flooring we'd appeared on. And I did mean nothing; claiming we were surrounded by endless void or some other trite nonsense would have been entirely incorrect, because this wasn't a case of just being out in empty space. Rather, beyond the edges of the platform the boundaries of the micro-universe we were in just.. stopped. It was an incredibly surreal, mildly nauseating, and certainly mind-bending thing to 'see', and quite frankly impossible to describe.
Briefly, I wondered if this place might be what had been left over of Abaddon's Glory after it had collapsed. That was the word that was nearly always used in the games when a Netherworld got destroyed: collapsed. Maybe that was meant to be taken literally, given each Netherworld was technically supposed to be it's own reality? Though I had no idea how that was supposed to jive with the whole 'literally flying through space to invade' bit.
Whatever the case was, something inside me stirred the moment my foot touched down on the platform surrounding the Gate terminus. My newly demonic blood sang with a need to take control, to make this place mine.
Acting practically on auto-pilot, mostly thanks to a level of instinct I hadn't known was there, I mentally seized the boundaries of the space around us and pushed. A red-orange aura of power erupted around me, and the light of it crashed over the entire space like a wave, outlining everything, including the Prinnies.
A second push, and I watched with no small sense of satisfaction as reality itself bent to my will and intent. The tiny platform we had been standing on surged outwards, pushing back the boundaries of my Netherworld, the floor expanding rapidly outwards and taking on the form of a circular stone platform perhaps a hundred feet across.
The beginnings of a basic floorplan formed in my mind, and with an upward pull of my hands, four daises arose from the floor at cardinal points in the center of the room, with a large open space in the middle between them.
I then began to pace along the edges of what would be my new Hub Room, raising walls and setting arched ceilings into place to hide the frankly unnerving not-space outside. Every so often, I stopped briefly to add the occasional pair of alcoves with cloth coverings jutting out overhead, just like a market stall. Once the walls were complete, I then crossed to each of the intercardinals, where I set set large pairs of reinforced double doors so as to nicely line up with what would eventually be the four primary gate platforms: Dimensions, Item World, Chara World, and, most like although I rather dreaded the idea of eventually opening that particular can of worms, Carnage.
Afterwards, once I'd completed my circuit and sealed the whole of the central hub into a single room, I took a bit of time to add some extra bits, such as hallways that radiated outwards from the doors where I could add living space, with each one in turn terminating in a staircase that led upwards into a larger sized, if basic, room roughly twenty feet across. I wasn't sure what I'd use it for yet, but presumably base functions like the Innocent Farm would need to go somewhere, however they ended up working. We'd also probably want some sort of office space and or staging room, and I highly doubted the hospital would end up being literally just a random pair of beds or what have you.
I tried conjuring up some basic furnishings, but for one reason or another, that failed. Most likely because I lacked any actual Mana stockpiles to spend in fancier materials; while the games had never elaborated, it stood to reason that higher order angels and demons needed something to fuel their matter creation abilities.
I supposed it could have just been simple exhaustion. While the entire process so far had been remarkably quick, and all I'd done had been limited to basic worked stone with a bit of wood and cloth mixed in, I was already feeling rather winded. Mana or not, though. My lack of stamina in that regards wasn't too surprising though, if I had to be honest; I was basically a scrub-tier demon at the moment, Overlord status or no.
Whatever the case, having at least some temporary rooms that would serve later needs complete, I returned to the central hub to find the Prinnies meandering around aimlessly. The ones who hadn't fallen asleep, or weren't just standing around staring off into space and drooling, anyway.
I took a seat at edge of one of the daises to catch my breath, and began handing out orders. First to Pete, instructing him to move the Dimension Gate over to the north platform, and then to several of the other Prinnies, whom I told to remain on standby to help Rosen Queen's people get set up whenever and however they arrived.
A question which was answered almost the very second Pete finished doing whatever it was Dimension Guides do, as the moment the gate settled into its new home, it brightened and began to pulse.
How did the Rosen Queen Company know that my Gate was active and I was ready to receive them? Fuck if I knew. And frankly, with the omnipresent nature of their franchise, which according to the games could be found even in worlds with wildly different metaphysics and even bizarre, abstract 'places' like the Item and Character Worlds, I didn't want to.
Regardless, the Gate began pulsing almost immediately, which I presumed must be the way it signaled that someone wanted access. After looking to me for confirmation, Pete did something I didn't catch, and a Warrior stepped through.
Now, up til this point, I hadn't been entirely certain how well the generic humanoid classes were going to conform to the game, as Disgaea 5 had let you change the color palettes pretty much any way you liked. There were also numerous story and side characters who had elements of different classes and species mixed in with their design, whilst still being wildly different. My particular batch of Prinnies were all identical, sure, barring Pete's 'hat' anyway, but then again Prinnies were literally manufactured beings. Loose souls effectively possessing a golem body. So they weren't a good measure of what to expect.
This particular Warrior, though?
Most definitely a bog standard, normal palette Warrior: Tall and muscular, with medium-light skin and brown hair, and dressed in baggy cargo pants, a wide belt, and a red bandana. Complete with no shirt so as to better show off his rock-solid abs.
Behind said Warrior followed a sizable number of other demons, all of whom were equally as recognizable to me: a cheerful, blond-haired Archer girl; a boyish, green-robed mage kid known as a Skull; and a sturdy woman in heavy steel armor shaped that inexplicably showed off her ass-crack, known as an Armor Knight. There were even a handful of monster-type demons, such as the trio of squat, brown-furred Slumber Cats who were carrying crates full of assorted goods.
Just to name a few.
I was also very pleasantly surprised to see said Slumber Cats be accompanied by a rather scantily clad, fire haired woman with vaguely leonine features and a long, thin tufted tail, and a second surpise: a red-jacketed, be-stetson'd woman with a pair of pistols strapped to her waist.
This was very good news to me, because the former, a Beast Master, hadn't made an appearance since Disgaea 4, while the latter, a Gunslinger and the female version of the Gunner class, had until very recently with Disgaea 7 appeared in only a single game, Disgaea 3. Which meant I probably had access to all the classes rather than those from one specific game, just like I'd been planning with my CYOA choices. That might even extend to mechanics, too. Time would tell.
The initial Warrior who'd cone through swaggered over to me while my Prinnies began showing the newcomers to where they could set up, and gave me something of a lazy, insouciant salute.
"Hey, there," he began. "Seeing as you're the only non-Prinny around, I assume you'd be Ashkari?
Huh.. It hadn't really registered to me, but that had been what my status screen called me. I guess Caskelis filched it along with my other CYOA notes when he'd reincarnated me. Not like I wasn't used to responding to 'Ash' in various games' voice chat. It was pretty gender-neutral, too, so didn't conflict went with my new womanly state.
… Still weird how that particular change didn't bother me whatsoever, but I wasn't gonna complain about a lack of gender dysphoria.
"That's me," I confirmed.
"Cool. Here ya go." He held out a small, translucent blue orb to me, and I reflexively stuck out a hand to accept it.
You Received Caskelis' Care Package!
Obtained Key Item, [Rosen Queen Contract]!
Obtained Key Item, [USSSSS One-Time Pass]!
Obtained 1,000,000 HL!
Obtained 10x Mana Potion V!
Obtained 10x Angel Dust!
Obtained 10x Bomb!
Obtained 10x Chloroform!
Obtained 10x Gold Bar!
Obtained 10x Hard Liquor!
The warrior turned and walked away without a further word, but I wasn't paying attention.
That… cheapskate. So much for Caskelis giving me everything I'd put in my notes. Maybe he really had beggared himself locating Scion and Eden. That level of Hell and Mana came to a mere tenth of what I'd put down for my Wealthy perk. I mean OK, sure, it was still a pretty sweet starter package for a newly-incarnated demon, but still.
Oh well.
At least the addition of the, ahem, bribes, was a boon that mostly made up for it. Rare quality ones, too, with the gold names and everything. The Dark Assembly could be a real bitch to deal with even when you weren't trying to pass one of the super-unpopular bills, such as 'Just Give Me Money', and even simple stuff like trying to open up new classes or increase the Product Level of your shop could have up to a 60% chance of failure as a baseline, because a lot of demons were just contrary-hearted bastards. Unless you had piles of mana to burn trying repeatedly to pass a bill, bribes were pretty much a requirement — and the rarer an item, the higher impact on voting behavior.
Speaking of the Assembly...
I panned my gaze across the hall, briefly noting each individual demon and checking to see if one individual in particular was present. Someone who themselves would be a boon, if I could recruit her, but who would also be a sign of potential trouble to come.
There.
I found her standing over near the southeastern doors: A pale, thin girl, dressed in a white, strapless one-piece skirt with red trim and similarly colored thigh-highs and shoes. A large red bow shaped a bit like tall bunny ears was threaded through her blue hair, and as always she was hugging her eerie, red-eyed stuffed rabbit to her chest like a protective talisman while she watched everyone else with a quietly blank expression.
Pleinair Allaprima.
She was something of a mascot for the series. Well, more than just 'something of', seeing as it was her in-game class, but I meant in a marketing sense, too, both in-game and out. Canonically she was ultra-popular among the Netherworlds for mysterious reasons that were never explained, plus she was one of a handful of characters used by Nippon Ichi Software to promote their brand in general. She'd been present in every main line game, had roles or cameos in a huge number of spinoffs or side-series, and, excluding Disgaea 2, was always the person you'd access the Assembly from. She was also an extremely effective gunslinger and mage, and depending on the game, had some very nice Evilities, such as Acceleration Mascot, which boosted the move speed of every ally on the map by 2 (including her own).
For context, Witches and other generic primary casters usually have a base MV of three.
Pleinair's presence was both good and bad. Good, because if I could recruit her, she'd be a valuable addition to the team. Bad, because if she was around, that meant other story characters might be, and there were a lot of them I really, really didn't want to deal with, or meet. Most of the Disgaea 4 and 5 main cast would be fine. So would Adell and Rozalin, probably. But Mao? Zetta? Priere?
No thank you. It's like tsunderes in anime: for all that I enjoy watching their antics, they'd be an absolute nightmare to put up with in real life, and many of them would get me in hot water with local authorities right quick. Prinnies were bad enough; I didn't need the Protectorate coming down on my head because Laharl decided he was bored and launched slash rode a giant meteor across the city skyline, shattering windows for miles around and detonating it against the Protectorate's forcefield, all because doing it that way happened to be more convenient than walking.
Vicky didn't have anything on demons when it comes to collateral damage.
Maybe if I was lucky I could avoid anyone else showing up…?
"Oh, who am I kidding," I muttered to myself. "This is Disgaea and Worm. One's a hellhole of a world and the other's full of narrative tropes, and I'm not even sure which to call which…."
Shaking my head, I approached Pleinair.
"Hey." I greeted the shy girl with a wave.
"..." she replied with a stare.
"Do you need anything in particular for the Assembly?" I asked. "Like, for me to set up a room for them or anything? I guess I don't really know how that stuff is supposed to work."
"...Usagi-san," she whispered, squeezing her stuffed rabbit tightly.
Right. I'd forgotten about that. Despite her canon idol status, in some versions of the game she's so cripplingly shy that she barely ever talks, and even then mostly in one-word replies, if at all.
Apparently this was one of those Pleinairs.
I tried again. "Let me rephrase. Would you like me to reserve that hallway behind you for the Assembly?"
"...Happy."
That was close enough to a 'positive' response for me, so I gave the girl a nod. "Okay, then. I'll reshape it a bit and leave it to you, then."
Suiting action to words, I used up what little strength I'd recovered over the past couple of minutes to essentially shrink the entire southeastern hallway back down out of existence, so that the door instead led directly to a staircase with an attached chamber. For the chamber itself, I pushed the dimensions out a bit further and raised up two rings of basic stone tables to surround a wooden podium, so that prospective senators would have somewhere leap up onto while they were yelling out their votes.
Leave it to demons to have a 'voting' process that was really just a competition to see who could bellow the loudest, one which more often than not was more properly resolved through either a hefty degree of bribery or outright physical violence in order to achieve your desired outcome. I mean yeah, okay, demons, but still.
Heading back to the hub, I informed the Prinnies of the change in layout and sought out the Warrior I'd spoken to before. He'd taken up residence in one of the alcoves, and had already erected a small countertop with a display case filled with armor and weapons. The Item Shop was similarly set up in the next alcove over, albeit it was laid out more like the inside of a convenience store, with a sloped wooden counter that had a number products laid out in small cubbyholes, while behind it stood two glass-faced refrigerators and a pair of vending machines.
When I stepped up to the counter of the Equipment Shop, I froze briefly as some kind of menu hologram popped up, covering my view of roughly half of said countertop. Cleary displayed was a long list of items available, my current balance of HL, the currency simply known as 'Hell', and with my current customer and products ranks, both of which were sitting at a big fat zero.
Not entirely unexpected, but it would've been nice if I didn't have to start at rock bottom.
In the games the Rosen Queen Company had used a structured system that limited what you could buy at any given time. Presumably, as multiversal monopoly it was part of their business strategy, since whenever you happened to stumble across one of their special vendors out in the Item or Chara Worlds you only got one chance to buy up anything they had in stock. It you foolishly closed out the menu to try and look at your character's stats and abilities first? Welp, too bad, no more shopping!
That meant that especially for cases like the Consumable or Bribery Shops, it was just better to buy out their whole stock and carry around a mountain of stuff, and any spares to bribe the Dark Assembly with. Not really an issue, because past a point money wasn't at all hard to get, but as a general rule that's how it worked with most vendors you encountered outside those in your own base, whom you could visit whenever but who usually only had only run-of-the-mill common stuff.
The other half to their business model was their Ranking system.
See, every item in the game had multiple types of 'ranks' attached to it. 'Item Rank' had a fairly broad effect on what could be found in the item's Item World, with examples being things like what types of Innocents could inhabit the item, what level said Innocents could be, and the level of the enemies you'd find.
There was also something called 'Product Rank', which determined which Customer Rank the item would appear at for purchase in your Netherworld's local shops. As an example, a 'Pot Lid' was a PR0 shield, which meant it was available at the start of the game. Light Shields then became available when you met both PR02, and CR02, and Round Shields at PR/CR 05. And so on.
Those ranks were determined by two things: Customer Rank was a measure of how much money you'd spent at the shops, and your minimum and maximum available Product Rank was determined by passing bills at the Dark Assembly.
All this filtered through my mind fairly quickly as I processed what I was looking at. Once again, I'd honestly failed to expect things to be quite so.. gamified. I mean, it wasn't like I wasn't familiar with Isekai LitRPG or anything, and I know I selected a 'Gamer' type power from the CYOA, and I'd already seen my own, personal menu screen and then there was the thing with the Prinnies… but I'd still been sort of unconsciously assuming that those things were unique to me. Some sort of parahuman power, maybe, seeing as I'd selected an Eden Shard for the CYOA, or else some sort of personal Gamer System forced on me by Caskelis The Actually-A-ROB, who was just cosplaying as an Overlord or something for fun, because those options better fit the general narrative of the isekai stories I was most familiar with.
I'd joked in my head about it before, sure, but.. well, only now was is starting to properly sink in that maybe, just maybe, Caskelis wasn't some random, generic Isekai ROB dicking around and cosplaying as an Overlord for the fun of it, but a real, actual, factual Overlord. And that, by extension, my new life —and quite possibly the multiverse in general— actually ran on Disgaea game logic.
Because, goddamnit, this was clearly a Disgaea item shop interface, and I'd be exposed to the all other stuff and my new instincts for long enough that I was getting a very distinct, nagging feeling that my Prinnies and the demons around me weren't just some kind of ROB fuckery or a figment of a parahuman power.
For one thing, shards just… didn't hand out powers on the scale I was seeing. More to the point, they were absolute garbage at picking up on major media, social cues, and concepts like that. That was why, despite the fact that shards tried to derive context from our minds to shape the powers given out, people never seemed to end up with powers that were derivative powersets of figures of classical myth, or identical to pop culture monsters like vampires and werewolves: They were just.. bad at understanding people.
It was also why the average monster cape tended to be horrible and gigeresque: Sometimes a shard managed to fuck things up so royally during the connection process that you weren't even remotely human afterwards. Or you know, died, in the case of Cauldron vials or broken triggers.
If Caskelis really was 'just' an Overlord —and thinking about it now I couldn't see any real reason for him to lie— everything he'd said or implied was, in all probability, accurate. And since he hadn't said he'd arranged a shard for me but rather inflicted some kind of curse...
I wasn't sure what to feel about that. Relief, in some ways, because it meant I didn't have a piece of a hostile alien parasite lodged in my brain, manipulating my emotions and thoughts in the background. On the other hand, it also meant that something sort of like heaven and hell was very, very real, and instead of moving on through the cycle of reincarnation I was now cursed to live on as a demon for, well, not forever necessarily, as it was possible to move from demon to angel or human and vice versa, even for story characters… but it wasn't easy.
I decided to yank the brakes on that train of thought. Once again.. no sense worrying myself into an existential crisis when I had shit that needed doing. Besides, saving ten to the eighty-something Earths all in one go had to be worth something, karma-wise, right?
With an effort of will, I pushed my train of thought back to the screen sitting in front of me.
Could things like this really be how things normal worked for everyone? If so, why was it so different for Earth? Or was this a technology thing? Makai Kingdom had had stuff like rifles and mechs and tanks, and the EDF from Disgaea 1 had spaceships and robots, and demons themselves had a fondness for rocketships and bombs. Maybe this was just some kind of hidden hologram projector? I knew the Dimension Gate was supposed to be some sort of magictech, not just a freestanding, permanent spell after all.
Ah what the hell. I could just ask, I supposed.
The Warrior manning the shop had been lounging against a pile of crates, half-sitting, half-standing, looking bored with the world while mostly not paying attention to me, but he was willing to answer my question.
"Oh yeah, you're new to the whole demon thing, aren't you?" he commented. "Corporate warned us about that. Said you might be confused about how some things worked around here, and to not take it personally since you're a client and all."
"Sooo...?" I inquired.
He shrugged. "Simple. It's a mana thing. Out here ya'll aren't used to it, cuz you never evolved to take advantage of it naturally. Not even sure how that's possible, really. Like, where do your souls go when you die if you aren't part of the system? Who knows. Not my wheelhouse, I just sell things. Point is, mana's important. It's good for all sorts of stuff."
He waved a hand vaguely. "The really big names? You know, Seraphs like Flonne and Lamington and the big, scary Overlords like Gig and Zetta and Baal? They've got so much mana to their names that they literally get to dictate reality for the rest of us."
"The way I hear it, a big council of the biggest of big shots gets together every couple thousand years to decide on how things are gonna be for everyone. And they've consistently decided that having a solid, mana-based measuring stick for what everybody can do is the way to go. My theory is that it's so they can all keep an eye on each other without toes getting stepped on too much. But who knows. Anyway, now that you've finally absorbed a tiny bit mana of your own, you're part of the system, and can finally see the screens and whatnot."
I blinked a moment or two, stunned, before finally replying. "Okay," I told him, "that.. raises a ridiculously large number of other questions, but I'm just gonna roll with it for now. To business: I need to buy a whole bunch of stuff. Mostly weapons, but armor too. How do I do that?"
"Same as everything else. Just focus on the screen a little and you can manipulate it with your hands. Oh, and a word of advice: it's kind of rude to examine other people's stats, so you should probably do it all the time."
Sigh. Disgaea demons, everyone: if it was socially inappropriate, it was expected. I was going to have to make sure none of them wandered around Earth Bet unsupervised, wasn't I? That or make the herculean effort to make sure the personalities of everyone I recruited were more like Krichevskoy, Usalia, and Lieze rather than Laharl or Mao. Demons could be upstanding individuals. It was just... really, really rare. Rare enough that demons being tsundere about showing love and kindness to each other, and angels being shocked that such was even possible for a demon, were a recurring theme.
Ignoring his comment, I quickly spun my way through the interface and snagged a number of items I knew I'd need soon. While I likely wouldn't have the recruiter available right away, I might as well get the basics done. I didn't want to waste initial funds on slightly-higher-than-junk-tier weapons, though, so I just bought several starter PR0 ones that I knew I could use for initial class unlocks.
First, I grabbed two weapons for each of the four starting class types, Brawler, Fighter, Mage, and Healer. Those would go to my initial recruits, which for me tended to be Valkyrie, Witch, Fight Mistress, and Cleric. I also included a second set of bows for a Maid on the off-chance I really did have access to everything.
And no, I didn't always recruit girl characters. That's not me being facetious, sometimes I picked up a Warrior to use as an Axe-wielder. It was just that for Generics, the female classes all had better starting Evilities. Better Evilities in general, really, though there were exceptions, like Pirate and Dark Knight.
Items Purchased!
2x Thimble (Wpn-Fist): A thimble— er, SYMBOL of your handcraftiness.
1x Old Bamboo Spear (Wpn-Spear): Roll your feet over it to relieve stress.
4x Driftwood Bow (Wpn-Bow): I don't like the sound it makes when you draw it...
1x Pebble Axe (Wpn-Axe): I found it in a man down by the river!
2x Just A Stick (Wpn-Staff): Is that really the best name they could come up with?
Then I snagged some armor and Shoes to boost everyone's move speed and defense, at least enough to give everyone in the squad one each. The humanoid squad anyway; I didn't forsee using the Prinnies much at all. Their lives were hard enough without me sending them into the meat grinder all the time.
Items Purchased!
5x Pot Lid (Etc-Armor): To use this as armor...? It's genius!
5x Slippers (Etc-Shoes): Mostly good for just wearing around the house.
I'd buy an extra staff and gun for Pleinair, later, if I managed to recruit her. Assuming she didn't come with a unique one, which special characters often did.
As for myself... well, there was barely any decision to be made, now, was there?
With A-Rank Weapon Mastery Growth across the board and my phenomenal aptitudes, I could do basically anything I wanted. But, as noted previously, my RES was absurdly good, and my affinity for it was —pun totally intended— equally Stellar.
A high starting RES all on its own could be used to turn a unit into an effective healer, anti-magic tank, and/or support caster under normal circumstances. And a solid affinity for it made that even better.
But there were also a whole host of different Evilities throughout the games that would let you key various other mechanics off of RES, instead of whatever their normal stat was. And those choices tended to produce extreme-offense builds, because, unlike ATK, RES appeared on all sorts of different item types.
The foremost of these being Orbs.
Accessories in Disgaea were divided into a few… well, I'd call them 'themed roles'. In the case of 'caster' equipment, you generally only had Staves, the weapon for healers and mages; Glasses, which boosted INT and HIT and thus were the 'offense' option; and Orbs, which boosted SP and RES, thus being the 'support and/or defense' option of sorts. There were also 'cloth' armors that has both DEF and RES, as opposed to 'metal' armors that simply had very high DEF, but those weren't really specific to casters in the same way they might've been in other RPGs.
But back to Orbs. Ostensibly, Orbs had originally been designed as a means to help you keep your team up and running for longer. The RES boost would help your healers and item users heal better, as well as kept your own casters from getting one-shot sniped by enemy mages, while the SP boost kept all your casters contributing longer, as once you started ranking up spells in the Skill Shop, things got very expensive very quickly indeed.
Thing was, like all Disgaea defense-oriented items, Orbs gave way better raw numbers than other items of a comparable tier. More to the point, it was very easy indeed to acquire higher tier Orbs than other items early on, and they were generally easy to level up in the Item World, too.
All combined, this had a side effect of making certain Evilities such as the Cleric's RES Arrows a very attractive option indeed for the discerning min-maxer, because you could easily triple or quadruple your primary damage stat in comparison to ATK or INT, turning you into a nigh-unstoppable, one-man killing machine thanks to the combination of stupidly high RES and DEF alongside keying both your weapon attacks and healing spells off of said RES.
Sure, RES Arrows itself only applied to basic attacks, but when you were one-shotting literally everything both on your turn and outside of it thanks to ranged counterattacks?
Not like that was much of a 'limitation' now was it?
However… all that assumed that I just did something basic, like learn RES Arrows from a Cleric. There were other Evilities for RES swapping, and some of them did apply to skills, or even defenses. I knew, for example, that someone got a version for fists. Didn't recall who offhand, but I know there was one.
Which in turn made both weapons, that is to say, Fists and Bows, very attractive prospects, because Fists were normally ATK and SPD, while Bows were ATK and HIT… and I had Rozalin's phenomenal growth in both of the latter to look forward to. I even had a naturally high Crit and Counter. Equipping a fist weapon and doing some Chara world training could boost those further, and might even let me pull off a Wonder Woman and parry fucking bullets with my bare hands.
For that matter, why not go a step further? Dark Knights got Ripple Impact, which turned attacks against adjacent targets into chain spells, as well as another Evility that literally halved all damage they received. The former could get pretty wild on a fist weilder too, since it applied to counterattacks just as much as everything else. I'd done that particular one myself before; It was funny as hell to just walk a character out into a group of enemies and let them mob you, only to counter the first couple strikes made against you, and you obliterated half the group out of turn.
Magic Knights would also combo well with my stats, and with a more weapon-focused, counter-heavy build. Some versions could auto-cast offensive spells as a free attack after striking with a weapon, including during counters, and most versions got Echo, an Evility which gave them a chance to double-cast any action they took — another thing that combo'd hilariously well with Ripple Impact.
Better still, most of them could boost their own Elemental Affinities, while at the same time turning all non-elemental attacks into elemental ones, and then adding their affinity as a damage bonus on top.
Guess who's a motherfuckingdragon and has a whopping 90% Fire Affinity?
This girl, that's who.
If I could influence my growth to get me a version of those that work with RES Arrows or whatever the Fists version was? And better still, get one of the versions that applied to skills, too?
I'd be goddamn unstoppable. Didn't hurt that I absolutely had a thing for battlemages and arcane archers in fantasy, either. Hell, I was even wearing an appropriate outfit already, by anime standards at least.
Which hilariously, now that I waa thinking about it, might actually,legitimately help me acquire the skills I was looking for, if Disgaea style game-logic really was the order of the day. I even had some personal experience with fencing, martial arts, and archery, too, so I wouldn't be starting from scratch.
Nodding to myself, I firmed my resolve and mentally set my course.
Since these would be my personal weapons and my first forays onto Earth Bet would be solo ones —I didn't trust the Prinnies not to wreak minor havoc on Bet— I went ahead and bought the slightly more expensive PR01versions. I also picked up a few accessories I could swap in and out as needed, eg Glasses and Shoes, since until I could pick up at least RES Arrows and started hunting for orbs, the base damage of my fists would be calculated from the average of ATK and SPD, while Bows were calculated from ATK and HIT.
Items Purchased!
1x Old Gloves (Wpn-Fist): They were shoved into the back of the closet.
1x Small Bow (Wpn-Bow): Where does this extra screw go?
1x Cute Wand (Wpn-Staff): Well... at least it's cute.
2x Vinyl Cloth (Etc-Armor): Made from a clear trash bag.
1x Glasses (Etc-Glasses): Increases accuracy at bargain basement prices!
1x Slippers (Etc-Shoes): Mostly good for just wearing around the house.
I immediately equipped the gloves as my primary, with the bow set to secondary. I'd almost certainly end up switching that around since RES Arrows was child's play to acquire —all you needed to do was get your Cleric to Tier 2, and then just buy the Evility and pay some extra mana to turn it into a Scroll— but for now I didn't want to go putting arrows into people until I was confident I could do it without accidentally maiming or killing them.
As for my accessory slots, for now I decided to start off with one of the trashbag armors, a set of slippers for just that little bit extra MV, and finally, the Gate Key itself in my last slot.
No, I don't know how I can have it equipped while the Dimension Guide is still using it to run the Gate. The answer is either 'magic' or 'because Disgaea' and to be frank, I don't care. It gives me a whopping +16 to every stat right now, thanks to being pre-leveled, which is nearly a 50% boost to most of them. I'm not going to question it.
Moving on, I finally stepped over to the Item shop, which was being run by the Warrior's female counterpart, a Valkyrie with bright green hair, dressed in their typical… well, 'outfit' was maybe rather generous, since it was literally composed of nothing but armored boots, a pair of hot pants, and a whole lot of belts, but whatever.
She greeted me cheerfully and professionally.
"Hello there! Welcome to the Rosen Queen Co., Pocket Netherworld Branch. We carry healing items, stealing hands, and attack items. When you need help the most, we've got you covered! Do you need an explanation?"
"No thanks, I'm good," I responded. "Just here to grab some basic heals and some knives."
"Excellent choices, ma'am."
Items Purchased
10x Mint Gum (Item): Recovers HP.
10x Unopened Soda (Item): Recovers SP.
10x Fairy Dust (Item): Cures all ailments.
10x Throwing Knife (Attack Item [HIT]): Not too powerful, but useful as a diversion.
Items and Gear prep finished, I stepped over to the final alcove, the Skill Vendor. This one was manned by a tall, buff woman wearing heavy armor not dissimilar in shape to my own. She was an Armor Knight, an extremely sturdy melee combatant that specialized in taking blows in place of their allies. They were a key staple of many early-game teams since they had a good set of area denial and defensive Evilities, without needing to combo with other classes. For that matter, they were used for many end-game builds, too, especially for specific boss fights, thanks to just how downright durable they were.
As I stepped up to the counter, she straightened up and pushed her shoulder-length purple hair back, gesturing to the pile of giant, unpacked crates and barrels stacked around her.
"I'm sorry, but I'm still preparing the Skill Shop," she told me, rather bluntly.
"I don't suppose you could give me an estimate of when you'll be ready?" I asked.
"A few hours."
Not entirely unexpected, but much better than I'd been worried about.
"That's fine," I told her, pulling out my USSSSS Ticket and showing it her. "Question though. I received this from the Company, but nobody's told me how to use it. Since skill scrolls are more or less under your purview, do I do that here once you're open, or....?"
Her eyebrows rose as she looked at the pass. "Huh, haven't ever seen one of those before. But yeah, I can tell you. This is a ticket for a specific Mystery Room. Wait for the Item World gate to get set up, and then enter the ticket. The shop will be on Floor 5. If you're really lucky, you might be able to find it again later somewhere between there and Floor 100, but I wouldn't bet on it."
Hmm. Unfortunate that I'd need to wait, but potentially fortunate, too, because past a certain point it wasn't exactly hard to fight all the way down, and there were ways to boost your chance of finding mystery rooms. With a bit of luck I might even be able to make more than one trip. Doubly unfortunate though because it still meant waiting and then having to fight my way to the shop before I could get access.
Oh well. Not much to be done about it right now.
"Thanks for the information," I told her with a nod, dropping the ticket back into my inventory.
With my visits to the basic vendors squared away, I stepped over to the 'hospital', as it was generally referred to, noting with some dismay that it was, in fact, little more than a handful of basic steel-framed beds with one of the series' ever-ubiquitous clerics standing by.
Though there was one notable difference.
Unlike my other min— er, employees, I'd spoken to so far, this particular cleric wasn't sporting the usual default coloration.
She wasn't no lowly, tier-1 Healer. She was a Saint, a top-ranking member of the Cleric class, if I was remembering my colors right. She was also rather shorter than I'd expected, but still wore the class' signature chest-hugging black robes, with its feathered collar, deep v-neck, and the weird, almost gear-shaped flare of materiel that pooled around her feet. How Clerics walked around without instantly tripping over themselves, I honestly had no clue. She also had those broken-shackle cuffs they all sported.
Where the differences began was that instead of the expected red trim and white feathers, both trim and feathers were a light purple, and her hair —normally golden blonde for a first tier— was shock white. Plus unlike most healers, she was wearing said hair up in that twisted bun you often see in anime, in the style I always thought of as 'chopstick hair'.
Also unlike most healers, she wasn't just standing there passively. Instead, she had both hands clasped behind her back, and she was humming some airy tune happily to herself as she bounced lightly and swayed slowly back and forth to the beat. Which, I had to say, did some absolutely wonderful things to her... figure.
Ahem. Apparently I had a thing for shapely demon girls with impossibly white hair. Who knew? Also: turns out that while Caskelis had changed my gender and sex, he hadn't done anything to change my sexuality, because after forcing my eyes back up to her face, it was a real struggle to keep them there. Enough so that my attention on her caused my UI to pop up, informing me that her name was Illuminata.
"How can I help you, Overlord?" she asked simply, giving me a slight smirk.
Oops, caught.
"Eheh, sorry," I apologized, giving her a sheepish look. "Just looking for a top-up. New gear and all that."
"Certainly," she replied, giving me a smile that made my heart race a bit. She gestured to the bed beside her. "Have a seat."
The next few minutes —something I suspected she deliberately drew out longer than necessary— of Illuminata channeling magic into me were intensely uncomfortable as I struggled to keep my thoughts and eyes to myself. I mean, yes, fine, it'd been years for me, but it wasn't like I'd felt hard up or anything. I'd made my peace with being single a long time ago. Then again, new body, new hormone cocktail to deal with, maybe? Whatever the case, deeply, deeply inappropriate to go hitting on the staff, me. Even if they are demons and would probably go for it. No, bad. You hush, brain, go away.
After those few torturous minutes were up I was released, a stifled snicker pursuing me alongside a cheerfully singsonged 'Don't be a stranger now!' as I escaped to the relative safety of the central hub. Once there, I surveyed the room, looking for a distraction.
What else was there...? I'd checked the basic vendors, and didn't see any sign yet of the really critical stuff like the Curry, Innocent, or Squad Shops. The Item and Chara World Gates weren't open yet, and likely won't be for a little while as I didn't see anyone even near those platforms. I couldn't see anyone who jumped out at me as maybe being part of the Interrogation Room or the Nether Research Squad, either, though I hadn't yet constructed facilities for those anyway.
Ah! That's right, the Quest Shop. That was usually run by a Skull like the one I'd seen among the initial incoming group. And sure enough, after a look around the room I spotted him standing by a large cork billboard. One that looked like it already had a fair number of flyers tacked onto it.
I made may way over.
"Ah, you're here for the Quest Shop?" the Skull asked, his words spilling out, rapid-fire. "I'm Clive! Are you going to accept a request? I'm glad! Everyone seems to be posting requests, but no one's completed any yet. If you complete a request, you'll get a nice reward, so please complete a lot of them!"
"I have to ask," I replied in a dry tone, "how would anyone have had time to complete a request yet? You just got here."
He pulled a flyer down and handed it to me.
Quest Accepted!
⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ To Get Outside
Sorry for the letter. I work in home security. I want to go shopping, but I don't have any clothes to wear. Please prepare some clothes for me. Please.
— Home Security Mage, Mokosu
I sighed. Should've seen that coming. Quests to just go buy some trivial thing from a vendor were one of the most common starter quests that could show up on the board. Most weren't worth the bother, though occasionally a few were. Still, might as well humor the guy and do this one since I'd already 'accepted' it.
I walked over to the equipment shop, bought a set of clothes, and then immediately turned in the 'quest' for a 'profit' of about 150 HL. A drop in the bucket, admittedly, but free money was free money.
"Thanks!" Clive told me cheerfully. "I'll get this delivered to the client right away. Here's your reward!"
I accepted the HL, and briefly looked over the remaining requests.
Quests Available!
Learn How To Fight
Who Needs Tutorials?
Stealing Specialist
Hunter Intern
Seeking Partner
Impregnable Guard
Magical Warrior
Don't Sharpen Nails
Trying to Cook
Muscle! Muscle!
Working Hard?
It's Really Cool To Get Outside
Thirsty
You Work, You Lose
Sounds Excellent 💕
Relax and Cheat!
Hmm. These were pretty standard. Learn How To Fight was the ever-present 'go do the first stage' mission, and just rewarded a bit of extra HL. Ditto for the Quest after it. Mildly concerning to me to see that there were quests for that sort of thing, but whatever.
The next five quests were all default class mastery ones that would unlock the Thief, Archer, Gunner, Armor Knight, and Magic Knight classes respectively. Guess that answered how class unlocks were going to work: the Disgaea 5 method of 'do a quest that impresses the members of this class somehow.'
The others were a variety of fetch quests or requests to kill X number of some monster. The latter I didn't think I could do any of just yet, seeing as demons weren't exactly native to Earth Bet and I didn't currently have access to the Item World. As for the former... well, those varied.
Most of them I couldn't do thanks to lacking the appropriate product and customer ranks, although I would soon. Others I wouldn't be able to do for a long while because they wanted me to find hard-to-get or specifically rare-quality versions of specific items. And yet others were kind of pointless, offering rewards I simply didn't care about.
There were, however, two that I did care about. Quite a lot, even:
Quests Accepted!
⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ It's Really Cool
There are too many sultry people around me, but no one's cool. Aren't there any cool items around here?
— Cool Gunner, Isaac
⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ Sounds Excellent 💕
Isn't Medal of Unworth an excellent name for an item? I like this item a lot and give them out as gifts, but I ran out. If you bring me one, I'll teach you my magic.
— Super Succubus, Estel
Requirement: 3x Medal of Unworth Reward: Secret Scroll: Heal
⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡
I could even do these immediately, because their target items were both available in the Equipment Shop already. The medal was one of two starting types of 'Monster Weapons', while the Water-Element weapon could be fulfilled with one of the starter guns.
Which just so happened to be, well… a water pistol.
…
Disgaea puns, everybody. Expect more where that came from, they're all over the place.
Shaking my head in chagrin but also thanking my good fortune, I accepted the two quests, followed by immediately heading over and buying the requested items.
Items Purchased!
1x Water Pistol (Wpn-Gun): Agh-! Hey, Knock it off! That water is freezing!
3x Medal of Unworth (Wpn-Monster): Now all your neighbors are gonna laugh at you!
Returning to the Quest Shop, I turned them in and in exchange received a pair of green scroll cases, of the type where the scroll within was wound around inside on some kind of spring.
Interestingly enough, using the Ice Scroll wasn't like you get in most Gamer fics, where you just activate the item and just magically have the knowledge downloaded into your brain.
Instead, it was a step-by-step set of instructions, a bare bones guide on how to manipulate one's own innate magical power in order to achieve the desired effect. Thankfully, since I already knew the basics of at least how to access my magic from my earlier reality manipulation, however instinctive it may have been, it wasn't terribly difficult to follow along and commit the instructions to memory.
Only then, after I'd gone over the instructions flawlessly a few time in my head without looking, did the scroll turn to ash in my hands.
Using the Heal Scroll was much the same.
Briefly I had a thought about testing the two spells out on a Prinny, just to make sure, but immediately discarded it. While I'm sure a great many demons wouldn't hesitate to stoop that low, and it wasn't like I couldn't immediately rez them at the hospital, in several of the games having any deliberate Ally Kills could leave you a single mistake short of a Bad End. That meant that even had such a thing not been morally repugnant to me, testing out new spells on my allies was a capital-letter Bad Idea.
On a separate whim, though, I checked my status screen. Sure enough, both spells were now listed, sitting at zero skill XP. Ice had a base power grade of F, while heal was even lower at G. That would change, in time.
I nodded to myself and closed out my menu screen. Weapons, armor, starter spells…. I believed now had all that I was going to get at this stage. Time to get started.
Taking a steadying breath, I grabbed the two relevant quests and stepped up to the Dimension Gate.
Quests Accepted!
⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡
Quest: Learn How To Fight
You could say that Master Ashkari is "extremely new" at combat, dood. They say the best way to learn is by doing, so get out there and fight! We beg you, dood.
— The Prinny Squad
Requirement: Deafeat Stage 1-1.
Reward: 500 HL
⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡
Quest: Who Needs Tutorials?
Every hero's journey starts with a gang member. Probably several of them. They're all over the place, so it should be easy to find some.
— Former Overlord Caskelis
So the math on damage for this one is slightly wrong.
Yes, that does mean I am using actual damage and leveling formulas for Disgaea for this, namely from Disgaea 5, because I discovered they're known and it was quick & easy to set up a spreadsheet to do all the work for me.
Well.. I say actual formulas, but technically the ones I'm using are a bit simplified to make my life easier; I skipped the random damage ranges, for example, and stat growth from levels is set at a hard .5 instead of a random range of .41-.5, but I'm using them.
Anyway, if anyone is actually that familiar with Disgaea for w/e reason, you might notice damage seems a bit off in this chapter. There's a reason for that, and it's because the story has gone through several major rewrites, from me overhauling Ash's baseline, to at one point having forgotten what class I used for gang members' baselines.
In the spirit of getting things out on time, though, I elected not to bother re-writing the events of the fight scene on account of new damage values, seeing as it really didn't make a difference in the long run. They're just mooks, after all.
Anyhow, this means that the new character sheets have been copy/pasted in, but the damage numbers are a little off from what they should be, this time around.
After unsurprisingly being told by Trashcan Pete that there was currently only one destination available due to.. well, frankly typical Disgaea excuses that I just tuned out, I took a steadying breath and stepped back through it and into Brockton Bay.
It was a rather tense moment for me.
When I'd originally filled out the CYOA, I'd made a deliberate decision to not waste loads points trying to pick up Cloak or Blank or the like, mostly based on the premise that I'd be the one writing the story. Out Of Context Problems, and all that. It's a rather common tactic for fanfic authors, who use that as a sidestep or lampshade in order to safely ignore a number of problems that crop up whenever you're writing a precog-heavy setting like Worm.
Unfortunately, I now had reason to believe that I almost certainly lacked such a shield.
After carefully checking to make sure I wasn't being snuck up on by any giant silver women or fashionably dressed milliners, I stretched, gave a few experimental flaps, and launched myself into the sky while I contemplated more of my new existence.
…
I could probably safely assume that on account of having already encountered one Netherworld previously, at the very least Scion wasn't likely to descend upon my ass so he could dissect me like a particularly interesting bug and get access to magic. Unfortunately, that wasn't especially the consolation it could have been.
Realistically, the best I could probably hope for was indifference. And that sucked.
The issue boiled down to one of Worm's biggest precog questions, one that people seldom seemed to want to talk about: Namely, if Ziz/The Eye/Scion/whoever had had such incredible powers of precognition… how the hell was Taylor never interfered with?
Contessa I could kind of understand. She was working under an extensive set of restrictions, and there's a solid argument to be made that she either couldn't see any specifics of Gold Morning (Never you mind that Dinah had been able to see big chunks and multiple variations of it), or else that Amy fucking with Taylor's brain meats had been either close enough to a trigger event, or legitimately blurred the line between Person and Titan, to the point that PtV had run aground on said restrictions one way or another.
Alternatively, maybe she had seen something of Taylor, and just decided that since she was both a survivor and the type to fight Scion anyway, then there was no reason to interfere with her. Dunno why that so rarely seems to occur to people, but it had to me.
Scion himself was also explainable. Canon held that he was deeply concerned with energy conservation, and that powers like PtV and Clairvoyant were very expensive to use on any kind of scale, such that he avoided doing so even during Gold Morning, right up until Eidolon finally got his shit together and started draining other capes to power himself up and made himself an actual threat. Glaistig Uaine had even stated that if the heroes truly forced the Warrior to expend energy to the point where his lifespan became threatened, he'd just leave and go into hibernation on the offhand chance that some other entity would eventually stumble across Earth and help him reboot the Cycle.
There was also the handful of trigger visions we saw, some of which demonstrated fairly conclusively that the entities had a bad habit in general of waiting til the very last minute to flip the table or else take their toys and go elsewhere; Earth Bet wasn't remotely the first place things had gone seriously sideways. So that was also a potential shield if I didn't make too many waves too fast.
…
I paused my train of thought for a moment as I reached the apex of my flight, high enough most people wouldn't notice me but still low enough to actually see what was happening on the ground. Pumping my wings a little harder before settling into a glide, I began spiraling outwards, and kept an eye out for anything of interest, whether that might be a crime in progress, or an important location I should remember for later.
Then I resumed.
…
The Simurgh, unfortunately, was a much more complicated potential problem.
Really, the issue lay in not knowing what, exactly, her true goals and methods were.
There had been an awful lot of fanon, fan theories, and contradictory Word of God floating around on that particular subject back home. Some readers had wonder if Khepri herself had in fact been a Simurgh Plot, based on the fact that Taylor had interacted a great deal with both known and potential 'Ziz bombs', like the Travelers, Mannequin, Valefor, and Tagg. Plenty of opportunity there for ol' Simmy to affect her indirectly, if not directly, when they camped out during Good Morning. There's also the fact the latter tried to seize control of Titan Fortuna's newborn shard network for her own; it was possible that at some point she decided that Scion had to go in order for the Cycle to continue, and arranged for Taylor to kill him.
Wildbow meanwhile had spent a fair bit of time asserting later on that, in contrast to what fanon (and most of Earth Bet) believes, Ziz didn't carefully arrange sprawling, complex plots that spanned months or years, but rather just peeked a little into both past events and possible futures, picked out a person with some deeply situated trauma or personal issue, and then poked at it until they were guaranteed to snap. No overarching goal or anything, she merely set up a few dominos, pushed one over, and then let whatever happened, happen. A kind of shotgun, 'fire and forget' sort of chaos, for all it looked from the outside like she was some kind of devious mastermind.
Those weren't the only theories, though, and to be frank, Wildbow's own assertions had been full of holes when looked at through an 'after the fact' lens once both stories were finished. And I had no way to know which of said myriad theories might be true, or how the addition of Disgaea bullshit would influence things.
The latter, especially, was unclear. While Wildbow had been pretty consistent on the Entities' SOP should they ever encounter a form of magic, I had no idea how long they'd been on Abaddon's Glory. How much progress they might've made on their analysis.
Barring common spells and generic classes, demon magic was as a deeply personal and individualized thing, and it evolved over time, so it was entirely possible that for the next few Cycles any simulations that tried to account for it would end up very fuzzy very quickly, assuming its effects could be predicted at all and didn't have the same issue predicting other shards did. And that wasn't getting into the fact that my Netherworld had some kind of dimensional shielding, which might interfere with shards trying to look in, or it could even be distant enough from Earth spatially that they couldn't reach it at all.
Hell, for all I knew my pocket realm was physically situated half a galaxy away.
…
I pulled up short in my flight, falling into a simple hover while I slapped a palm to my face.
Right.
Note to self.
The very second I manage to figure out how to fly my Netherworld around, go and do that. At a minimum, I should atleast go park my base in an Item World somewhere or something. Anywhere not in tentacle reach of Earth. That should fuck with their precognition. Probably not enough to save my ass should I draw direct attention —shards were too good at modeling the short term— but I bet it would fuck pretty hard with someone like Coil if he wasn't staring right at me, and it should prevent me from showing up clearly on any long-term simulations.
Right. Okay.
Yes. Good.
Problem… not solved, but maybe improved?
Letting out a shaky breath, I started moving again, and tried to focus a bit more of my attention on actually patrolling. Or at least keep an eye out for other flyers. No sense running into Rune or Purity or something and having to deal with them assuming I'm a 'supporter of the cause' or some bullshit like that, all because demons happen to look good in black and red.
Stupid Earth Bet and its stupid obsession with judging books by their cover….
…
It was as I was vaguely contemplating that last bit, gliding over a portion of the northwestern suburbs, that the inevitable finally occurred: A series of loud reports echoed in the distance off to my left, immediately followed by an eruption of screams.
!!!
Mind abruptly focused, I banked sharply and pulled out of my glide, pumping my wings furiously and leaning into a slight dive to put on even more speed.
Several additional sharp reports followed as I homed in on their source: Pistols, judging from the sound and cadence. Wait, no… that last one was much louder than the others; a shotgun blast?
I pumped harder.
Once again shots rang out, allowing me to further home in on the situation, and when I arrived...
"What the ever-loving fuck, that shit actually happens here?!?!"
A truck-full of skinheads brandishing pistols and wearing the previously mentioned red-and-black of the E88 had pulled up in the parking lot of a strip shopping center amidst a rundown, almost ghetto-looking area of town, and had simply opened up on two of the shops!
In broad fucking daylight.
This wasn't even a 'mere' drive-by, the dumbasses had gotten out of the car so they could take their time to do as much damage as possible.
Even worse, they hadn't given two shits about bystanders: As I came in low, I spotted two obvious casualties lying on the ground outside, unmoving amidst some shattered safety glass, and a number of other figures huddling in terror within the building. The sole 'defense' being mounted appeared to be in the form of, according to my UI, a single aging barkeep of African descent, armed with a shotgun.
A towering fury like I'd never known before filled me with pure rage.
Screw the rules of engagement. I didn't care what Bet's laws turned out to actually be — in my metropolitan hometown, this shit would not fly, and it would be one hundred percent legal for any bystander to respond to something like this with lethal force in defense of others. I'd try to pull my punches, but I sure as fuck wasn't going to dick around trying to go easy on a bunch of fuckingNazis when civilian bystanders might be bleeding out fifty feet away from me.
Running on instinct, partly because I was pissed, partly because demon, and, well, partly because Disgaea, I chose to go with dramatics for my entrance. I slammed my way downwards into the pavement, sending fragments flying as I released a beastial roar and flared my wings for all to see.
The gangers, of course, flinched and began to turn. One of them then had just enough time to (stereotypically) react by yelling 'Cape!' in a panicked voice...
…And then the entire world shattered.
⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡
Everyone on the field, bystanders, gangers, and even myself, froze in total surprise as the very world around us peeled away like shards of broken glass, only to flex and explode back into normalcy, with the exception that the parking lot and nearby shops were now surrounded by a red-hued, bounded energy field that extended for maybe fifty meters in all directions.
I paused.
I looked down at my feet.
I looked up at the gang members, who appeared to be frozen in place, futilely straining against non-existent bonds.
I looked back down at my feet again, and the piercingly blue, brightly glowing square I was now apparently standing upon.
.…A shark-like grin slowly stole its way across my face.
One that only grew wider, with barely restrained glee, when I looked back up and attempted to take a step forward, and wasn't prevented.
I had been being facetious about it previously. I had zero ideas on how such a thing could even be possible. But damned if I wasn't going to complain about an advantage like this.
Not. In. The. Slightest.
Live-action turn-based battle powers… GET!
I might even kiss Zetta for this, if I ever met him for real.
First, though, I did the smart thing and took a brief moment to carefully examine one of the gangers.
Micky, E88 Member
Name: Micky Henderson
Class: Empire Grunt
Race: Human
Level: 2
Status
Hp 43 Sp 9
Atk 22 Def 22
Int 9 Res 13
Hit 21 Spd 17
Equip
Main Weapon: Junk Shooter
Sub Weapon: (None)
Armor: Wrinkly Clothes
Armor: Worn Shoes
Armor: (None)
Special Skills
(None)
Evilities
(None)
My grin grew a bit wider. Sucked to be them! Not only was this particular asshole more or less weak to my entire current repertoire, a quick sweep across their stats as a group showed that every single one of them had stats that were, apart from SPD, half or worse of mine, in large part thanks to my ridiculous starting stats, but also because the Gate Key was increasing them to two or three times higher than a non-Overlord unit of my level would typically have. Effectively, Micky here would be matching his average attack value of 25 to my defense of 45.
His gun? Basically worthless against me. Oh, sure, I'd take a little bit of damage, maybe, but not much. Likely a nasty bruise at worst, though: a greater-than-2x opposing stat matchup was effectively a death sentence. If all four of them shot me and rolled critical hits, I might want to drop a heal, but I easily had the upper hand here.
My punches, meanwhile? They'd be devastating.
I launched myself through the air towards him with a flap of my wings, crossing the distance in a flash. At the last second, I swerved around poor old now-terrified Mickey in order to angle myself such that after my attack, I'd be facing the rest of them head-on. Then, having already seen how much stronger I was now compared to my previous life, I struck him once, at maybe half strength, right about where I thought his diaphragm should be. Just in case it mattered, I also concentrated hard on the fact that I would honestly rather avoid killing him if possible, despite my anger.
54!
Mickey evaporated into a puff of purple particles.
Oops.
So much for poor Mickey.
Maybe, anyway; it was a bit early to tell. Disgaea was more than a little inconsistent about what actually happened to defeated units after combat was over, hence my concentration on specific thoughts. I'd keep it up as a just in case, but frankly? If he'd died, oh well. Callous, maybe, but these are Nazi shitheads who are out shooting civilians. My conscience will be clean, at any rate. Mostly.
Since I wasn't planning on bringing any Prinnies out of the Base Panel —hopefully never— my turn ended automatically rather than me needing to make some kind of effort to do so. The gangers thus found themselves abruptly freed from their inability to move without warning, causing two of them to immediately fall on their assess before they managed to pick themselves up. Once on their feet, they started sprinting away after the third, the three of them leaving their car behind.
Couldn't say I blamed them, really, after having just watched one of their friends get punched so hard he was vaporized.
Of course, they didn't get far. The battlefield was only roughly fifteen panels across — it's something I can actually see, very faintly overlaid upon the ground — but these mooks' MV is only 5; bog standard for someone with shoes. That meant they only got a little over halfway from their central starting point before they jerked to a halt, unable to move any further. Internally, I chuckled at their immediate confusion as they discovered that they could still move around just fine... they just couldn't progress past a certain point, as if they were surrounded by invisible walls.
I took a brief moment while my opponents were busy with their game of mime-in-a-box to investigate what I could do off-turn. Which wasn't much, as it turned out; even my menu wouldn't function. I could still examine my opponents' stats by concentrating, though, and a few seconds of experimentation uncovered that I could move just a little bit, provided I did so with the specific intent of staying roughly where I was. That is to say, if I concentrated on not going anywhere I could shift my stance a little, or pose, or even talk, but I couldn't move more than a few inches or attempt an attack. Even so much as intending to do so, or to try and get around said rules by moving only an inch at a time caused my body to lock up entirely until I stopped trying.
After a few more seconds of experimenting I decided that yes, the 'rules' of the battleground were probably pretty well ironclad. I mean, if the system really had been designed by the likes of Zetta and Baal, demons so powerful they could literally wish entire planets into existence, that wasn't exactly a shocker. Ditto for whoever the most powerful Seraphs and Archangels were out there.
Seeing the gangers beginning to panic even further, and a bit tired of just standing there, I called out to them.
"OK, boys—," I began, entirely intent on taunting them a bit first, but the one directly across from me immediately jerked and spun wildly in place, ripping off a shot in my general direction.
The bullet took me square in the chest.
2!
OK, yeah, that stung a bit. Didn't penetrate or anything, just flattened itself against my armor with a spark, but I sure as hell felt the kick.
Not that I let that show on my face.
As soon as… Benedict Maxwell, apparently.. let off his shot, he immediately froze, turn complete. The others them reacted to his gunshot, also spinning around to face me. They raised their own weapons.. and then looked at each other and their frozen friend in confusion when their pistols refused to fire.
Huh.
So while in my 'field', weapons actually conform to the firing ranges of the game? That was very, very good to know. One of the reasons I hadn't really liked guns as weapons for the vast majority of characters was that while they did have a longer range, in the later games they could only be fired in straight lines in cardinal directions, while bows had only marginally less range but full 360-degree coverage. Since by that point in the series all ranged weapons could counterattack versus spells and other ranged attacks, but only if the originating attack was within normal attack range, that in turn meant that bows were usually the superior option unless the character in question had stat growth specifically optimized for gun use. Which itself was a nuisance, guns being HIT/SPD, two stats that were challenging in and of themselves to gear for as a pair. Didn't help that gun base damage always seemed to end up garbage, too…
Weapon preferences aside, I had to hand it to the pair of Empire goons: as soon as their immediate confusion wore off, they got their act together and finally realized that there were rules in play here. The one on the left, whose name was Clifton, aimed at me once or twice, then pointed at the ground in front of him and said something to the other guy. Then he stepped in front of Benedict before trying to take a shot at me again.
2!
Yep. Called it. He noticed an attack shadow and made an educated guess. And it appeared that 'Luke' there seemed to agree, because he took a few steps to stand in front of Clifton, and let off a shot of his own.
3!
Not that it helped them much. Though I was kind of impressed they were managing to do even as much damage as they were. With that kind of stat disparity, I'd kind of expected nothing but nicks, the Disgaea equivalent of a crit fail that wasn't an outright miss.
With their respective turns finished, each of them froze.
I started my rush straight towards Luke, only to... abruptly lock in place?!
An absolutely deafening blast of noise from off to one side answered my confusion as the barkeep, who'd been hiding behind the remains of his shopfront window this whole time, let off a shotgun blast, vaulted over said remains, and just booked it to take cover behind the gangers' abandoned truck, neatly putting both me and the car between him and the now two remaining gangers.
He gave me a sharp nod as it became my turn again, and a brief scan of him showed me he had a yellow overlay on his health bar — meaning he was a non-ally combatant that wasn't currently hostile to me.
Huh. Well good on him. I gave him a nod back, and then tried to sprint forward again. This time it worked, only I didn't go for a punch. I was planning on some kind of elemental-based build, and that no doubt meant using elemental attacks alongside my weapons. Since I wasn't wearing a staff currently for the range bonus, I slipped around to Benedict's side just like I'd done to Mickey and threw out a point-blank Ice spell at him.
Despite it being my first time casting a proper spell and the relatively complexity of the casting circle I needed to fix in my mind, I performed it flawlessly. With a high-pitched hum, an intricate blue-white runic circle spun up beneath my feet and Benedict was enveloped in a swirling blast of frost that chilled him to the bone.
41!
Huh. Well what do you know, he survived. Barely. Maybe I should've moved behind him for that extra +20% damage. Not that it terribly mattered, as with the ending of my turn Benedict just dropped like someone cut the stings on a puppet. He wasn't actually dead or anything; rather it just seemed that either my spell or being at 2 HP had left him in so much pain he couldn't stand up anymore.
I didn't have very long to contemplate what that meant in terms of turn completions though, since Clifton immediately decided to use his turn to sidestep and shoot me in the head.
Critical! 6!
Motherfucker!
If I'd been able to move, the blow probably would've knocked me to the ground. It was so loud as to be physically painful, and the bullet struck me like a hammer to the temple, for all the lack of real damage it did. As it was, all it did was stagger me slightly, and unfortunately for Clifton, mere moments afterwards I was not only abruptly able to move out of turn as he froze, but I instinctively felt myself turning to lash out automatically one hand in a counterattack.
I followed through.
45!
Goodbye, Clifton. You were the smart (ish) one, but not smart enough to surrender immediately.
Speaking of, I looked down at Benedict, who was still just lying on the ground, curled up, whimpering and shivering uncontrollably.
Briefly, I wondered if they could see their own HP thanks to whatever bizarre weirdness was occurring here to create the battlefield. He seemed pretty shell-shocked, in addition to terrified and deep-frozen, and moreso than I'd've expected. Near-death experience trauma, maybe?
I nudged him gently with my boot.
"Your friends are gone," I told him bluntly. "Surrender, and I'll heal you enough you'll live to talk to the police."
...
…At least he had enough in him to nod rapidly. Rapidly for a guy who was three-quarters frozen to death, anyway.
⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡
With Benedict's surrender, several things immediately happened at once.
The first of these was that the world shifted in some indefinable way as the barrier around the battlefield dropped. No shattering-glass effect this time, but something had definitely changed, although it was possible that I was simply feeing the cessation of whatever strange, physics-altering shaker effect my presence apparently exerted on combat.
As the field dropped, I was also bombarded by a series of, well, I suppose in LitRPG terms they were notifications. Disgaea had something called a 'Bonus Meter' which was affected by all sorts of things, from damage taken to Geo Chains to combo attacks and more. It was what determined your loot drops at the end of fight and could award other things as well, like bonus XP. This was that, but I wasn't given any time to investigate because the three, er... dispersed gang members also reappeared, only to collapse into heaps upon the asphalt.
Then, as I was swiftly closing out my winnings screen so I could check on the surviving civilians, three police cars and two EMT vehicles came screaming their way into the parking lot.
The last one was kind of impressive, honestly. Wherever they had dispatched from must have been damn close. That or fanon's assumptions about response times in the poorer areas Brockton Bay were way off base. Although, thinking about it, Armsmaster did show up within mere minutes of Lung and Skitter kicking off that fist night. And that was despite the Undersiders' prior skirmish with Oni Lee making noise elsewhere, and Colin himself seemingly not being out looking for them at the time.
In the interests of not causing a scene, I caught the eye of the barkeep —whose name I finally noticed was Jato— and motioned for him to go talk to the incoming emergency services, even as I ran to check on the victims.
If EMS was here, the gang members could wait.
Thankfully the first of the downed civilians I reached —one of the two women who'd collapsed outside the bar— turned out not to be too badly hurt. According to my UI, she'd lost about half her health and was suffering a minor bleed effect from her shoulder wound, but was still conscious; she'd simply had the presence of mind to stay the hell down and not draw additional fire.
Since she seemed stable enough, I gave her a quick word of encouragement to hang in there as I quickly moved to check the other victim.
A mere glance told me she was far worse off than the other woman. To my (admittedly inexperienced) eye, it looked like a lung shot with no pass-through: the front of her blouse was covered in blood, her back wasn't, and she was weakly coughing up wet dribbles of more. Her HP was deep in the red, but unfortunately I wasn't sure if it was even safe to heal her if there was still a bullet inside her.
Ok... Ok. Calm. Deep breaths. I knew this. I'd gone through first-aid certification on multiple occasions, even if the last had been quite some time ago. Pressure is paramount above all, but chest wounds need sealing ASAP, to minimize air being sucked into the chest cavity. Otherwise the patient is in serious risk of a collapsed lung, if they didn't have one already.
I could do that much, so I dropped to my knees as I de-equipped my Vinyl Cloth 'armor' and simply yanked it right of my inventory. It really did look like part of a plastic trash bag, so I just folded a corner of it up and pressed it down against the woman's injury while murmuring reassurances to her that help was here and that she should just focus on breathing.
As for the paramedics, I turned my head and let off a piercing whistle to get their attention as soon as the first pair were out of their vehicle. When they looked my way, I jerked my head towards the woman and called out to them.
"This one first! She's in bad shape!"
Whatever reservations they may have had about an unknown cape being present, that got them moving, and they rushed in my direction. Guess even paramedics are subject to the 'be firm in a crisis' rule.
I kept my hands in place until they signaled me to let them take over assisting the critically injured woman, and only then moved over to the ones assisting the other woman with her shoulder wound.
"I have a strong healing ability," I informed them as I got out of the first group's way. "If the bullet's not in there, I can close her up fine."
"Don't recognize you," one of them grunted as he tore off a long strip of medical tape from the roll he was carrying, and handed it to his partner. "Color?"
"Sorry?" I asked in confusion.
"Card color?" he repeated.
"I'm sorry, I don't know what you mean."
He paused for a brief moment, actually looking at me properly and taking in my mildly inhuman facial features, and it was only then that I realized that not only had I forgotten I had specified in the CYOA that I wanted to be able to retract my wings like Rozalin, but that at some point I had, if once again only instinctually. Probably when I'd kneeled down to assist the woman. If he hadn't noticed my tail, he may well have taken me for a typical cape, seeing as my ears and horns were largely hidden by my hair and my eyes and teeth weren't obvious except up close.
Surprise flitted briefly across the man's face, but that was quickly followed by one of understanding.
"Ah."
Turning back to assisting the woman, he spoke again. "I was referring to your parahuman healing license. If you don't have one, don't use your powers to heal anyone unless they are in danger of immediate death. And I do mean immediate, you get me?"
"OK...?" I replied hesitantly. This had the sound of something that had just never made it into canon thanks to Taylor's limited experience and unreliable perspective.
"Good." he said firmly. "Better you stand aside. Just let us and the police do our jobs now we're here."
Then he bobbed his head to one side in an apologetic dip, without looking away from where he was handing things to his partner.
"Sorry, nothin' personal," he apologized. "But the law's the law. You did good helping these people."
"No, I get it," I replied. Wasn't happy about it, sure, but it didn't take a lot of imagination to see the PRT being ultra-paranoid about any power being used on civilians. Even something like healing, seeing as Panacea's power was practically unique in that it only healed instead of being a part of some other, broader powerset. As far as the PRT knew anyway.
Or well… no, that wasn't accurate, either, just a bit of nastily persistent fanon that didn't actually have any real basis.
While what exactly was canon regarding the extent of knowledge the PRT had about the girl's true capabilities was kind of up in the air, she had threatened a gang member with impotence, and Skitter with cancer, and had gone off on her about it after Leviathan, so it wasn't at all the case that Amy had terrified herself into silence about being able to use her powers as a weapon, like fanon tends to put forth.
She didn't even try to hide the extent of her abilities, whenever it came up. The best example being, in that same scene at the hospital after Leviathan, she fucking confirmed, to Skitter's face with zero hesitation, while a PRT agent was in the room, that she was more than capable of fucking with people's biology in a bad way.
And said agent didn't say shit about that fact, or her openly admitting to having threatened someone with cancer at the bank. So it seemed more than a bit disingenuous to me to assert that the PRT wasn't aware of, or at least suspected, what she could do even if we were never given any true answer one way or the other.
But I was letting myself get distracted again, so I forced my attention back to the matter at hand.
"I assume it's a, er, powers-slash-malpractice kind of thing?" I asked the paramedic I'd been talking to, getting a short 'mhm' and a nod in reply as he placed a few things back in his medical case.
"One last question then," I asked as I stood and backed off, since they seemed to be wrapping up. "How hard is it to get licensed? My power is a strong one. I'd hate for it to go to waste only healing myself."
The pair stood as well, and the one I'd been talking to didn't answer for a moment as he and his partner carefully lifted the woman onto a gurney. He jerked his head for me to follow him, so I did.
We moved towards the ambulances quickly, but not so quickly as to jostle the woman. As we did, he answered.
"Depends on the power. To use some local examples, for ones like Panacea's or Othala's that fix the whole body all at once, gettin' licensed is pretty easy."
"Wait, Othala is a licensed healer?" I asked, shocked.
"Sure is," he told me. "She volunteers quite a bit actually."
Then his expression darkened. "It's one o' the reasons the Empire's so god-damned popular in this town," he muttered. "Healin' somebody's a big deal to the person gettin' healed. No more medical costs plus preventin' or removin' long term aftereffects generates a lot o' goodwill from the average person on the street, e'n moreso when it cures ya of something you've been dealing with half your life. Lot o' folks out there who'll be more'n happy to let a healer rebreak something so as to heal it up properly, too, and those... people... aren't shy about offering."
He paused for a bit while he assisted his partner in loading the woman into one of ambulances alongside the one who was in critical condition, and I was content to wait and stay out of their way off to one side. By that time, a second pair of ambulances had arrived, and looking around I saw that a general area had been set up to assist anyone with non-critical wounds and treat people for shock. The bar's owner, Jato, was standing off to one side speaking the police, who'd already rounded up all the gang members. Well, except for Benedict, who appeared to be getting treated by the paramedics. Probably for hypothermia or frostbite, I assumed.
My attention was drawn back to... Dave, apparently... as he spoke up again.
"Anyway, powers like Othala's don't take much more'n a few hours to check over. Actual license won't come in for a week or so, 'cause the PRT gets all tetchy about possible Master effects and so we gotta hold and monitor the test subjects for a bit, but the actual testing's pretty fast as long as you can round up enough volunteers."
I gave him a wry smile. "And how hard is that? I can't imagine there's a lot of people around who're willing to be subjected to an unknown power."
"You'd be surprised," he told me as we moved towards the general triage area. "Unless the power's pretty out there, plenty 'o folks're willin' to be guinea pigs for the same reason the Empire Eighty-Eight does volunteer work: money. Medical costs can be ruinous. The chance to avoid all that, maybe even make a little cash on the side? A big deal for lotsa people. 'Nough of one to take some risks, anyhow."
"I guess that's true," I admitted. "Still... it's that easy?"
"If you have a power that's just straight up healing the other person, like regenerating a limb or something," Dave stressed, raising a finger. "If it's somethin' weird, like... I dunno, turning someone into a tree for half a day and then when they change back they're cured, things get rather a bit more involved."
I snorted in amusement at his example, but hey, superpowers were pretty bizarre to begin with on Bet, and Rachel's power basically worked exactly like that on her dogs. She and Skitter had used it to cure them of worms, once, I think. Would use it? No, wait. I had cut that one off at the pass; Goddamn time travel, always making verbs complicated.
"But yes," Dave continued. "It really is that easy, even for the weird, hyper-specialized stuff. Healin's high in demand, to say the least, not to mention excessively rare to begin with. Enough so that if you're willing to play ball and get your powers checked over, the government is happy to look away even when it's a known villain doing it. Can't say as I approve, but they very badly want them available for.. well, you know."
I did, and it made a lot of sense honestly. It was also well in line with how the PRT tended to let slide those villains who consistently kept a low profile, especially if they contributed to Endbringer fights. They had bigger fish to fry, after all. A three-stories tall one, even.
"Of course, you still need to find someone to administer the tests," Dave continued as we reached the triage tables. "Which requires a specialist in parahuman medicine, which often isn't easy to come by."
"Hmm... Brockton General, I'm guessing?"
"No, actually. Fairmont. But good guess."
"I don't think I know that one," I told him. It wasn't a name I remembered from canon. Then again, it was probably like the schools thing. We were given four high school names, but it seemed unlikely that there were only four in a city of 350,000 people unless they were extremely overcrowded. Not impossible, mind you, as the city was pretty small in terms of square milage, and my own high school had been the same requisite degree of overcrowded.. but then again we'd also been something of a special case, and I'd always thought it unlikely that all of Brockton Bay's schools would be that way. Especially Immaculata and Arcadia, given the former was a private school and the latter might as well be.
Dave paused for a brief moment, pursing his lips and tilting his head as he considered something. After a moment, he spoke back up.
"Is this something you're looking to do right away, or...?"
Well I did have a few hours to kill before the Skill Shop was available. I could patrol more, but a chance to level up Heal wasn't a bad plan either. Though I'd likely want to compensate later maybe with some other training.
"I wouldn't say no," I told him.
He gave me a nod. "Alright. So, I can't allow you into the ambulance, that's family only, but Fairmont's where we're headed. You could prob'ly get a ride from one of the escorting officers, though. They're gonna want to talk to you anyway. No reason you can't do that from the back of the wagon while they're escortin' us back. Once we get these folks squared away, I can bring you up with Dr. Stevens, either to get you an appointment, or if she isn't too busy you could just do a walk-in."
I considered the offer for a brief moment.
"Is the PRT gonna get involved if I do?" I asked, followed by giving Dave a chuckle. "It's been a bit of a morning already, and I don't really fancy having to deal with them just yet."
"Couldn't really say, but honestly I've only ever seen them show up if villains were involved," he replied with a shrug.
My statement to the police was mercifully short, which meant the rest of the trip down to what I learned was called the Fairmont Urgent Care Center gave me the opportunity to look into the alerts I'd gotten after the fight. And, while the results themselves had long since been dismissed, since I didn't actually have much yet it wasn't exactly hard to figure out.
First, my Bonus Rank. I had a new item in my inventory, a Pebble Axe, the base PR0 axe. I was also now level two, and since to the best of my knowledge I hadn't leveled mid-fight, I could only assume that I'd also gotten a small bit of bonus EXP as a post-fight reward. That meant two rewards, so I'd probably made Bonus Rank 1, because the meter started at Rank 0 with a reward just for, you know, not losing.
Finally, I'd been paid… I think it was about 500 HL… for what was called the 'Destroy Bonus', which as the name implies was tied to how many units and/or objects you destroyed, and their levels. Since I hadn't been paying attention much to what I'd spent so far, it wasn't easy for me to tell exactly how much, but five hundred sounded about right for a starter-tier fight.
After a brief period of the police escort speeding through the northwestern streets of town, we arrived at the hospital. The ambulances had to get their passengers into the ER, of course, so I was was told to go around to the main lobby and wait there for someone to come speak with me. That took maybe ten minutes, during which period I stoically ignored the occasional double take or person shying away from my presence.
Eventually though, I was approached by a somewhat rotund, dark-haired hispanic woman.
"Ah... Ashkari, is it? I'm told you're interested in applying for a Parahuman Healing License?"
I stood and shook her outstretched hand. "Yes, that's right. Doctor Stephens, I'm guessing? One of the EMTs told me I needed one to volunteer my services."
"That's correct," she replied, gesturing for me to follow. "Please, come with me."
We made our way through the halls and into an empty office, where Doctor Stephens sat me down in a chair across from her, before pulling a stack of papers out from a nearby desk. Clicking a pen open, she addressed me formally.
"So, tell me a bit about your powers. How do you think they'll be able to heal others?"
"Before I answer," I replied, having given some prior consideration as to what extent I was willing to reveal things, "I'd like to know how much of this information is going to end up in PRT hands. I understand that they'll obviously need the details on how my healing functions, but what about ancillary details I may reveal? There are considerations to my powers that might make me even more of a target than normal, beyond just being valuable as a healer, and I'd rather those not go on record. At least not until I've had time to prepare for that level of attention."
"It would depend on what they are," Stephens told me frankly. "If it's something actually tied to the healing process, or a result of it, I'd have to report it. If on the other hand it's something you're telling me for context, like a broader usage or a full explanation of a Tinker specialty or manufacturing process, I can leave that out."
I shook my head. "I'm not a Tinker. At least, not in technical terms. Though I suspect the PRT will consider the distinction meaningless."
"Oh?" she replied, raising an eyebrow.
I pursed my lips, thinking, and ultimately decided to just be honest, if a tad misleading. As with when I called the PRT, I knew that trying to keep a lid on things forever was essentially futile, especially once Protectorate Thinkers inevitably get involved, and it wasn't out of the realm of possibility that being upfront might benefit me in the long run. Of course, on the other hand simply telling people that I could learn and use magic and had access to what amounted to healing potions would get me laughed at, regardless of the truth of the matter.
"Ok, so off the record for moment….?"
"Certainly," Doctor Stephens replied. "This kind of licensing involves a lot of medical tests, and that may well include some for you, depending on your power, which means patient confidentiality applies to the whole process. Only those details actually relevant to the license will be forwarded to the PRT, though I must warn you that, as per usual, I'm obligated to report anything I believe to be of immediate danger to someone."
Good enough, I supposed.
"OK, well, glossing over an awful lot of details," I temporized, "my power is rather like that of Dauntless. I'm a Trump, and like him I make use of specialized, empowered equipment. That's the pseudo-Tinker aspect. Unlike him though, my power also affects myself, meaning I occasionally gain new powers or improvements to existing ones over time."
"So," I finished as the woman across from me gave me a look of interest, "I have a few different things that I imagine will need testing, but we may need to adjust things as we go along, or do more testing in a few days. I'd rather not have the why of that get included in any logs or reports, though, at least for now."
"That shouldn't be an issue," Stephens replied.
"Alright. Then to summarize: Currently I have a ranged, regenerative healing power that should affect any physical injury, and unlike Panacea's it shouldn't require any biomass from the patient. I also have some... let's call it 'empowered bubblegum' that should function the same way at a reduced capacity, though I'm not completely sure it will affect anyone other than myself. I am confident it won't cause anyone problems if it fails to heal them, though, as it really is just chewing gum."
"Gum?" Stephens asked, astonished.
I chuckled at her expression. "Yep. Weird, I know, but at least it's easy to administer. Technically speaking, they don't even need to chew it; just placing it in their mouth works."
I continued. "I also have a kind of empowered sugar dust, which, assuming the gum works for other people and not just me, can be added to food or drink, put into pill form, or even just swallowed directly. That one's a little more… conceptual in what it does, though."
"And that means?" Stephens asked.
I paused, trying to put it into words that didn't amount to 'videogame status effects'.
"I guess you'd call it a, well, no pun intended but a panacea in the technical sense of the word. According to my power it should clear up all sorts health issues, like poisoning, insect bites, paralysis due to nerve damage, and muscle weakness; it should wake people from unconsciousness like smelling salts and can boost memory retention. It should outright cure Alzheimers, possibly cancer, and maybe even all pathogen-based disease. It does… just all sorts of things, honestly. The issue is, being a conceptual panacea, I honestly have no idea what the stuff might end up considering a 'negative health condition,' and you certainly don't need to tell me all the ways that could potentially go wrong or cause unintended effects."
I shrugged. "On the bright side though, like with the gum if doesn't work on a given problem then at worst all you've done is consume the equivalent of a pixie stix."
"Finally," I concluded, "I have reason to fully expect that my healing powers will develop a similar capability as the powder with extended use. Possibly even today if testing runs long enough."
The woman blinked kind of owlishly at me for a few moments before chuckling and shaking her head in slight disbelief.
"What is it about this town and healing capes?" she joked rhetorically. "Only a few dozen capes capable of full-spectrum, no consequence healing known in the world, and now we have six of them."
"Six?" I asked, astounded. "I know of Panacea of course, and I was told Othala was licensed too because she can grant regeneration, but who are the others?"
The woman scowled and made a noise of disgust. "Over the years Victor's stolen enough medical knowledge from people that he could probably get licensed as an actual doctor, but he applied for and got a healing license instead to shield himself from repercussions."
I winced slightly. I could see how said cape might be a personal hot-button issue for skilled professionals everywhere.
"The other two would be Uber and Leet. Uber for similar reasons as Victor, and Leet because of his Tinkering speciality. Those two don't really volunteer, though, and Leet's license is a yellow-class that has a lot of caveats."
That... made a lot of sense, actually. Uber or Leet being able to heal wasn't something that had come up in the story, but then neither had the license thing and they'd more or less only ever had two scenes. And I could certainly see Leet building heart containers or brewing healing potions, though I wouldn't have thought Uber's power to have been comprehensive enough to manage healing except maybe to perform expert first aid. Wildbow had been rather insistent that he emulated specific techniques, as opposed to full-blown professional skills.
Admittedly, despite that insistence I'd never been convinced there was a difference. After all, if you're capable of performing every single maneuver of a martial art flawlessly as needed, how is it that you weren't the equivalent a full master of it? The footwork thing during the fight with the Undersiders had seemed particularly egregious to me, because as someone who's personally taken martial arts classes, there is definitely 'technique' involved in fighting stances because maintaining proper balance is absolutely critical. If his power provides the muscle memory sufficient to do a proper kip-up from a prone position, it should help with footwork and everything else, too.
My attention shifted back to the conversation at hand.
"A yellow-class license?" I inquired. "The EMT who directed me here mentioned something about color codes. What's that all about?"
With that as an opening, Doctor Stephens gave me the rundown on what exactly Parahuman Healing Licenses were for, what getting one entailed, and the benefits thereof while I asked for occasional clarification.
In short, what Dave had told me was entirely correct. With the advent of the Endbringers and other S-Class threats, the government — or maybe it was the PRT or even Cauldron— had been so desperate to keep parahumans who were capable of safe triage-level healing around that some enterprising soul had successfully pushed through legislature that created a federal-level licensing program for parahuman healers, complete with legal protections and even guarantees of safety for villains mixed in.
First, it allowed the holder to legally function in a limited capacity as if they were an actual medical practitioner, complete with the various protections and responsibilities thereof, at least when they were operating as a healer. This meant that things like doctor-patient confidentiality and good samaritan laws applied to parahuman healing, and that since the government knew what your power did, if someone wanted to sue you for malpractice or assault with a parahuman power or what have you, then they had to prove you'd used your power on them both improperly and in spite of knowing about some complicating factor they'd previously informed you of.
It also provided a kind of mini-Truce clause: stipulations and conditions for safe passage and protections from law enforcement for both heroes and villains traveling to and from volunteering locations. Breaking those had severe repercussions; it seemed that fanon's infatuation with 'harming Panacea is a one-way trip to the Birdcage' wasn't too far off-base.
Secondly, and relevant to Dave's initial question to me, the licenses were categorized into various tiers, so that trained medical personnel knew what to do with you in a crisis, and they were color-coded for quick reference. There were four general colors:
White cards were for all-purpose, general-use powers with a wide array of applications and little-to-no downsides. This tier was, as a general rule, reserved solely for either high end regenerative powers like Panacea's or Othala's, Tinkers who could produce tech that provided similar, or Thinker powers like Victor's which turned the user into the equivalent of a properly trained doctor or surgeon. As one might surmise, this tier of license was stupidly rare.
Blue cards were for the hyper-specialists, those capes whose powers were deemed safe but applied to very specific injuries or situations. Sanguine came to mind there; his blood control was primarily limited to cleansing the bloodstream of contaminants and stopping bleeding, and not much else. It made him great in a triage situation since you could hand the worst-off patients to him to make sure their blood stayed in their body and went where it needed to go, thus keeping their brain oxygenated long enough for them to get help, but he wasn't any good for actually healing the injuries beyond a degree of assistance with clotting.
Blue were the most commonly seen licenses. Hardly a surprise, given that healing others was almost always an accidental byproduct of another power.
Then there were the yellow-tier powers: those with potent effects but which were either even more limited in scope than the blues, or else had certain risks involved. The... Ward?... known as Scapegoat was a perfect example that came to mind there: while he could cure all manner of conditions and injuries, his power not only forced him to take them into himself unless or until he inflicted them on someone else, but even then there was a serious chance the effects of his power would only be temporary. Worse, he had to stay within a short distance of the target for several hours, too, or the effect would break automatically. Ergo, he could only realistically heal one person every few hours in an emergency, or else had to very carefully manage who and what he healed.
Leet's power meanwhile fell into the second category: He would have had a white-tier license, if only it weren't for his tech's tendency to malfunction in extremely dangerous ways if he made something too close to a previous work. That sort of thing made the PRT understandably nervous, so he was only granted a yellow-tier license despite his tech's potential versatility.
While yellow was considered the last of the 'real' licenses, the actual final tier were the red cards. They were still technically licensed, but the parahumans they were given to had powers that came with severe side-effects or a major price to pay on the part of the person being cured, such as a baked-in Master effect. Essentially, these were the 'desperate and/or emergency use only' types of powers that required express, preferably written consent from the person being healed; good-samaritan laws simply did notapply to them, even in an Endbringer battle. As such, most red-card holders didn't do much in the way of public volunteering at all, instead offering private services for those desperate enough to come looking. Many of them were also heavily monitored by the government, or had had severe restrictions placed upon their usage.
There were also a handful of sub-classifications that were common to all of the licenses, but those were primarily there to assist the people who ended up in charge of the medical tents during Endbringer fights. Since I knew that when the time came I'd be fighting on the front lines rather than working medical, they weren't terribly important to me, and so I didn't inquire after them in any real detail.
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After covering licenses, expectations, methods, and so on, we took a short break while the hospital located some volunteers.
Eventually, I was brought to the first pair, who to my surprise ended up being two of the on-duty nursing staff; the very first test would be on the simplest of simple injuries: minor scrapes and bruises.
It made sense, of course; they'd want to make sure I actually could heal, and since my magic worked via restoring 'hit points', I could only assume it was a kind of general whole-body wellness effect. As such, we were basically starting at the bottom and working our way up.
Before I was allowed to do anything though, the test subjects were first given a baseline exam in private and had some blood and urine samples taken, and only then was I allowed to heal the two nurses of a skinned knuckle and a barked shin, respectively. Even this was done under intense scrutiny, to the point that Doctor Stephens used some sort of limb-sized, microscope-like contraption to directly observe what she could of the process.
Afterwards, the two were taken away for a second, far more detailed exam and observation period by some of the other staff, while I was returned to a private waiting room to await preliminary results.
Once it was established that on the surface there didn't seem to be any obvious side effects, I was allowed to move on to other injuries. These tests followed the same general process of establishing baselines, then healing the patient, who then went through a second battery of tests and questionnaires while I waited, before finally moving on to the next case.
First I healed a basic sprain, a teen who'd been out jogging and just taken a bad spill. After that, a kid who'd gotten into a fight and would have otherwise needed some stitches. That was followed by a several different patients with various broken bones, one of whom had only just come in to the ER on their own and was all for not having to pay anything at all, since if it was for testing purposes the PRT covered the costs for anyone who had to stay for observation.
Some time around that point, I leveled up again. Along with the commensurate increases to my stats, not to mention the convenient refilling of my stamina points, I also had the first of my natural abilities come in.
I automatically learned Heal's companion spell, Espoir.
Espoir, as practically anyone who's ever played a JRPG would likely know, is an all-purpose cleansing spell. It cures status effects. All of them, usually, and that was definitely the case for Disgaea. After informing Dr. Stephens that I'd 'gained some confidence that my power would now cover toxins, diseases, and even some mental health issues', she took me on a second round of testing where we visited a few patients such as a middle-schooler who had a bee allergy and was recovering from anaphylactic shock, an eldery woman with a truly nasty case of the flu, and an adult male who'd been suffering from chronic pneumonia. Then we did a third round similar to the first and second to test the gum and the faerie powder.
We were about to head up to the cancer ward for the last of the physical ailment tests when an unexpected call rang out over the PA system.
"Doctor Stephens and associate to Room 1106, Code Cyan, Doctor Stephens and associate to Room 1106, Code Cyan."
My escort came to an immediate dead stop, then changed directions, striding quickly down a side hallway as she beckoned to me.
"What's going on?" I asked, following.
"Code Cyan means a potentially life-threatening patient emergency that requires specialist knowledge," Dr. Stephens told me. "If they're calling for both of us—"
"Both of us?"
"You'd be the 'and associate'."
"Oh."
She continued as if I hadn't interrupted. "It likely means either a parahuman is involved, or there's someone in a critical enough situation that the attending wants your help, since some of the staff will know there's testing happening. Possibly both."
"Is that... legal?" I asked. "I thought we weren't supposed to be doing any high-urgency cases?"
"It is if the patient or their guardian verbally agrees to the risks," Dr. Stephens replied. "We avoid it where possible as a safety precaution, because it's still a potential liability risk for the hospital, but emergencies are what they are and there's no actual requirement."
I nodded.
After half-jogging our way through several twists and turns, including a short elevator trip, I found myself following the doctor back into the ER wing, where we were met by a harried-looking nurse.
I froze for a brief moment when we turned the corner and spotted a costumed man standing in the hall, who, by his iconic Halberd and blue-white power armor, could be none other than Collin Wallis himself.
Recovering, as Doctor Stephens and the nurse stepped up to the door he was standing across from, I inclined my head towards him.
"Armsmaster."
He cocked his head at me, looking me up and down in a way that made me sure he was either scanning me with something, or maybe taking video for whatever file on me he was no doubt already opening.
"Do I know you?" he asked.
"Nope!" I replied, giving him a cheerful smile. No reason to be rude. Yet, anyway. "I'm new. The name's Ashkari. I'm here to get a healer's license, though, so I'm sure you'll be familiarizing yourself with my powers soon enough. For that matter, you probably have a report or two on me headed to your desk right now. I intervened in an Empire drive-by maybe an hour ago."
"I... see. If you are still in testing, why are you here?"
"No clue," I replied, giving him a shrug. I jerked a thumb over one shoulder, indicating Dr. Stephens, who had stepped away to speak with yet another pair of nurses in low tones. "They called us down here over the PA; Presumably they want me to heal someone. You?"
Armsmaster paused for a brief moment, no doubt debating how much he should say. Apparently developing a rapport with a new face — land a healer especially, no doubt— won out, because his reply was more informative than I'd really expected.
"We received a tip from the local police that a particularly unusual violent crime had been committed at a nearby school. In such cases, when possible the PRT likes to send someone to interview the victim as a matter of procedure."
I made a small noise of understanding.
"To check for parahuman involvement. Makes sense." While true, I also knew what he wasn't saying: According to Wildbow, the PRT also had a habit of paying visits to the victims of unusual crimes, or extraordinary violence or disaster, in order to investigate whether or not they might have triggered and give them a softball recruitment pitch in the guise of 'helping' them.
Kind of invasive, in my opinion, and a rather self-serving kind of 'empathy', but that was the PRT for you. Being a government organization, they tended to just go through the motions, so to speak. Take Taylor for instance. Wildbow said they did visit her, but when she turned out to be too insensate to talk they just—
Oh.
The bottom dropped put of my stomach.
Oh no.
My eyes flicked over to the closed door, and the two doctors standing outside it. Then they flicked back to Armsmaster, who was now looking at me with a slight frown, then back to the door again.
Pleasepleaseplease please let me be wrong...
My mouth dry, I swallowed once before addressing the man, attempting to portray a level of nonchalance I most definitely wasn't feeling. "You... wouldn't happen to be here because of a tipoff from a cape named Oracle... would you?"
"Who?" The confusion in his voice sounded entirely genuine.
I pressed him further, being careful with my words. "You know, Oracle? New cape, precog?"
He shook his head. "I am unfamiliar with that name." His voice tone turned to one of extreme interest. "A precog you say?"
I closed my eyes for a brief moment, trying to force down my steadily rising panic attack, and swayed slightly under the onslaught of minor vertigo.
"So..." I asked slowly, "you're telling me that you weren't sent over to Winslow High school by the PRT to stop a crime from happening?"
Armsmaster gave me a slightly deeper frown. "That is an oddly specific question. But no. I happened to be in the area when an automatic process brought things to my attention, and I redirected myself here to investigate."
The man paused briefly, then spoke again, his voice slightly accusatory. "It is, however, related to an occurrence at Winslow High School. How did you come to acquire this information?"
I reeled.
He hadn't even been told?!
No.
No, she couldn't have... there's no way that woman could be that callous. Right? Right!?
Apparently, she could.
Fuck standing about waiting, I had to know. Now.
I stepped up to Doctor Stephens, whose eyes widened in alarm upon seeing my no doubt slightly wild expression. I jerked a thumb in the general direction of the door.
"Is the patient Taylor Hebert?" I asked insistently.
Alarm shifted to surprise. "Why, yes. How did you—?"
"I know what's wrong," I told her bluntly, then turned on my heel and pushed open the door.
…
It was so much worse than I'd imagined. And that was coming from someone who'd always argued that, given the little that Taylor had described, Wildbow had definitely papered over the realities of what should have happened in favor of artistic license.
She was literally strapped down onto her bed, wearing nothing more than a hospital gown, surrounded on all sides by various medical paraphernalia. Tubes in her nose, multiple bandages visible on her arms and legs, multiple IVs, machines I recognized as pressure and heart monitors, plus more than one I didn't…. It was clear that this was a hell of a lot more serious than the Taylor of the story had ever let on to. Even her beloved hair had been shaved off, no doubt because the staff couldn't very well wash it in the insensate condition she was in, nor could they leave it contaminated with bug-infested, potentially infectious waste. Then there was that fact that even tied down and sedated as she was, Taylor was still trying to thrash around, whimpering all the while with her eyes open wide and unseeing as she strained against the sensory overload she was no doubt experiencing.
Sitting up from having slumped over Taylor's legs was the man I assumed was Danny Hebert: dark hair, thin, and balding, with glasses and tear-streaked green eyes. As soon as he laid eyes on me, he shot to his feet.
"Y-They said you can help?" The raw desperation in his voice was clear.
I took a moment to try and push down the sheer rage that rose up inside me, directed against the Trio, against Winslow, against the PRT... against an entire godforsaken world that would let something like this happen, before turning to the nurse that was present and the others that had come in behind me.
"Everyone out." I commanded. "Patient confidentiality."
The nurses fled the room, as did everyone except Danny, for obvious reasons, Armsmaster, nosy bastard that he was, and Doctor Stephens, who gave me a slightly wary look. Couldn't blame the latter really; I was absolutely seething, if functional. No doubt it showed.
I turned my baleful gaze on Armsmaster. "That means you, too."
He opened his mouth, no doubt to protest, but I just pushed on regardless.
"Unless you actually have a warrant for the information, which I know you don't, this relates to a patient's medical condition and you have not been given explicit permission to attend a private diagnosis. I'm here to apply for a healing license, which means following proper procedure. So, out."
I narrowed my eyes at him. "If you want to know what's going on, I strongly suggest you go and call up the Director, given this is her mess I'm about to clean up. And you can tell her that I guarantee she will be hearing from me about her blatant dereliction of duty. Quite possibly via news crew, or with Brandish as legal representation. Because I. am. not. happy. in the slightest."
He closed his mouth, and after a moment or two's hesitation —probably due to him checking his lie detector and becoming rather alarmed to discover I'd been stating the truth the entire time I'd been speaking to him— he nodded curtly and left the room.
With that out of the way, I turned to Doctor Stephens.
"I can heal her injuries easily enough," I gritted out, looking her in the eye, "but that isn't going to solve the problem. I do know what it is, and there is something I can do, but not here. We need to unhook her."
"Wh-what's going on?" Danny asked, wringing his hands. "What's wrong with my daughter!?"
I'd already spilled the beans to the fuckingPRT… so I guessed it wasn't like that particular secret was going to stay secret for long.
"I've seen it before," I told them, as I stepped up to the window on the far side of the room and mimed peering about as if checking for something, before nodding to myself. A bit of a white lie, albeit kind of the truth given how many variations of Taylor trigger I'd read over the years. There wasn't actually anything to see outside, but the appearance of seeking confirmation would get my point across from context better and make it look more like I knew what I was talking about.
"Miss Hebert has triggered as a parahuman," I explained with authority in my tone as I turned back to them. "With a Master power; insect control, to judge by what I can see. Or something very much like it. More critically, powers of that sort often have a strong Thinker component, a sensory feedback loop where the Master sees or hears everything experienced by whatever their power is connecting them to. There's probably thousands of insects in our general vicinity, and magnitudes more if she's got any kind of range. That's bad, because it means her power is literally driving her mad with information overload, pouring the experiences of all those bugs right into her head simultaneously."
I shook my head. "Frankly, we're unbelievably lucky that we aren't drowning in bees or something right now. Given she was attacked at school, if she'd instinctively called some kind of swarm to defend herself...."
Doctor Stephens paled and took a step back, and I leveled a frank look in her direction. "The only way to stop the overload for now is to remove her from the source of it. That will but her time for me to arrange a more permanent solution, but as I said, that cannot happen here."
"I don't know if..." Dr. Stephenson started hesitantly.
"It's either that or leave her here and simply hope she recovers," I replied.
I looked to Danny. "Which isn't a guarantee," I finished. "Powers can and do adapt to their user's needs sometimes... but many don't. Parahuman asylums like the one in Pennsylvania exist for a reason."
A bit of a lie, but only maybe. It was never completely clear to me whether Taylor's so-called 'double trigger' actually happened back-to-back in the locker, or if she had the first trigger in it and then a sort of half-triggered again later on in the hospital when she proved unable to handle the feedback. Or if she even had something like that. Word of God was a little inconsistent and vague on the matter of what, exactly, her trigger was other than 'definitely non-standard,' but to me that had always smacked of him making up excuses because he'd designed the rules for triggers after the fact, and then later on discovered he needed a reason for Cauldron to refuse to help Taylor second trigger.
Though that explanation was obviously no longer applicable, given, you know… Earth Bet was apparently a real place.
Regardless, at a minimum I could at least provide the poor girl with some immediate relief, and potentially a great deal more than just that. Whether that ended up being assisting her to acclimate slowly, possibly leading to a stronger power than normal, whether it changed nothing, or whether I took the more radical option and she ended up with something else altogether different? Well, that depended on a few things. Worst come to worst though she could ride things out in the relative comfort of her home, with her and her father at least knowing what was happening, rather than racking up bills due to a stay in a mental hospital.
"You're sure you can help?" Danny asked me, tension clearly running through him, but he looked me square in the eyes.
"One hundred percent," I replied evenly, meeting his gaze.
"Then do whatever you need to. Just help my daughter," he pleaded, desperation creeping back into his tone.
I stepped up to Taylor's bed, and began pulling monitor patches off of her. After a few moments of wordless hesitation, Dr. Stephenson moved to assist me, and once the machines and IV's were unhooked, I had Danny and the doctor hold Taylor down while I unstrapped her and scooped her up into my arms with my superior strength. I did get a painful elbow in the boob from Taylor's mindless thrashing in the process, but I was hardly going to judge her for that and managed to bundle her up into a somewhat awkward bridal carry, even if I did have to use a bit of my enhanced strength to keep her from thrashing too much.
I looked to the other two adults in the room. "Doctor, I'll come back another day to finish up any additional testing I might need. Danny, you're with me."
Then I formed the spell diagram in my head, the one Trashcan Pete had shown me, and with a twist of my magic a spiral of light formed in the air.
Carrying Taylor, I stepped through, and Danny followed.
The second we stepped out of the portal and into my Netherworld, Taylor gave a single, full-body jerk before abruptly going completely limp.
I nearly panicked then and there, worried that somehow the transition had killed the girl, but no, I hadn't; moments later she twitched, taking a deep, shuddering breath just as Danny stepped through the portal behind me and I was forced to move away.
Thankfully, it appeared that my hunch had been correct: removing Taylor to my Netherworld had resulted in one of two possible outcomes: Either the complete and utter lack of earth insects etc in my Netherworld had provided instant relief from the overstimulation, or else my Netherworld was in fact far enough removed spatially and dimensionally from Earth Bet that the girl had been temporarily depowered as her shard went into 'low-power' mode to just maintain the connection.
Or, well… it was still possible it had disconnected entirely; Wildbow had never been clear on what exactly happened when you went too far out, although his explanation about how Sphere's attempts at a moonbase and potential Mars colony would have worked strongly implied it wouldn't outright kill you, which is why I hadn't initially been concerned with the possibility.
Something to look into the specifics of, but later. Currently there were more pressing things to worry about, like getting Taylor healed up and figuring out how the hell this had happened. I had my suspicions, and I didn't like any of them.
I moved over to where Illuminata was waiting, still bobbing up and down and humming to herself. Her demeanor immediately turned serious as I laid Taylor down gently on the hospital bed, and she clucked disapprovingly as she began fussing over the girl.
"Oh, poor baby~.What did they do to you? Don't you worry, I'll have you fixed up in a jiffy."
Internally I snorted at her mothering manner, but set that aside and turned to Danny. Who... was still standing in front of the Gate, having frozen as he stared at the assortment of demons wandering about. With Taylor being ministered to by Illuminata for the moment, I walked over and grabbed him gently by the shoulder, startling him, and used that opportunity to steer him back over to my Dimension Guide.
"Hey Pete," I asked, "do we have enough of a lock on things yet to target somewhere specific? Mr. Hebert here needs to get a few things from his home."
Danny gaped at the giant, adorable stuffed penguin I was seemingly addressing, a combination of shock, confusion, and bewilderment writ large across his face.
"I... I do?" he asked tremulously.
"You daughter is wearing nothing more than a hospital gown," I reminded him. "Given the lengthy conversation you're going to be having, I suspect she'd appreciate some actual clothes."
Taylor's father flushed with embarrassment. "O-oh. Right," he replied.
I looked back to the Prinny. "Pete?"
"Sure thing, Master Ashkari, dood!" Trashcan Pete told me cheerily. "Opening it to somewhere you've already been is easy, dood."
"Alright then, go ahead," I indicated.
The Prinny fiddled with the Gate for a few moments, during which it pulsed several times before settling. Once it was fully open, I gently pushed Danny through, stepping in behind him to find myself standing in what was clearly the kitchen of a mildly dilapidated suburban home.
I took a seat. "Go on, grab what you think she'll need," I told him. "I'll wait here."
"R-right."
Danny walked over to the front hall and made his way up the stairs, while I leaned on my elbows and sighed while pinching at the bridge of my nose. Damn Director Piggot for putting me in this situation. I didn't know if this was a case of deliberate malfeasance on her part, or if there was some kind of Disgaea-esque, 'Destiny'-type bullshit at play, aimed at keeping Taylor involved, or perhaps both, but either way I was incredibly pissed off at life in general right now.
I'd really hoped to spare Taylor from having to go through the absolute mountain of bullshit that was the course her life would normally take. Not that I couldn't still do some of that, necessarily, because there were plenty of different means of cutting canon off at the knees. Taking down Lung or Coil early would be the obvious ones, for example. Actually getting the ball rolling on an investigation into Sophia probably would, too. At the very least, I could always try and recruit Taylor for my own team, so that she didn't end up in Coil's clutches.
Which… might actually be a viable option, now that I was considering it. I'd need to talk with Pleinair and make a few inquiries, but if I could recruit her, that might well solve a whole mess of the problems she was now going to be facing. She'd certainly be far better off joining me than going independent in a city like Brockton Bay, and I'd honestly doubt her sanity if she was willing to join the Wards once she had the whole story regarding Sophia — something I would be telling her about. Under most circumstances I'd keep a cape's true identity to myself, but this was a bit of a special case since Taylor sure as hell didn't deserve to be forced to work alongside one of her abusers. She had both a need and a right to know, in my book.
I suppose that offering her a spot on my team also had the benefit of giving her some actual agency in the direction her life would be going. I mean, I'd rather she heal, move on, and get to live a normal life, but that ship had sailed, now. At any rate, I could still make sure sure she got to make an informed choice about her various options, including joining the Wards while siccing the Youth Guard on Piggot if Taylor wanted to go that route.
"Though I suppose that's still an option even if she doesn't join them…" I muttered under my breath.
"Doesn't join who?" came Danny's voice, and I looked up to see that he'd already returned, bundle of clothes in hand.
"The Wards," I told him.
Danny frowned. "Assuming I let her go out in costume at all, the Wards would be the safest option, right?"
I barked a short, mirthless laugh. "Hah. In this city? If only. Piggot regularly denies Triumph's requests for inter-regional cross training for the Wards on the grounds that — and these are her exact words — 'additional training would be frivolous'. Whether that's because she's incompetent, uncaring, or just strapped for funding is anyone's guess. Regardless, despite the Wards' supposed mandate to be a safe place to learn how to use their powers, she'd rather have them out on the streets fighting supervillains whose powers they don't even know, without Protectorate backup, even."
"That can't…" Danny began to reply, but I cut him off with a shake of my head.
"I assure you, it's a thing she does and will continue to do. But enough of that for the moment; let's get Taylor squared away first. Then the pair of you will have a few decisions to make."
I stood, and with a twist of magic I reopened the Dimension Gate, gesturing for Danny to step through. I then led him over to the hospital area, where Taylor was being helped upright into a proper sitting position. Interestingly, whatever spells Illuminata had used to heal her up had at least partially restored her hair: no longer shorn down to almost nothing, it was now just long enough to brush her shoulders.
As we approached, I had an abrupt thought: Taylor needed to change, and the 'hospital' here —and I used the term loosely— lacked any kind of privacy at all. Nor had I installed any bathrooms or waste bins anywhere in the Gate Hub, for that matter.
Deciding to rectify that, I stepped towards the back wall, and with a flare of power opened up a hole to reveal the not-space behind it and force some additional stonework into existence. Gradually, a short hallway formed, one with four alcoves, two to either side. In each one I placed a full-length mirror, with a large bench and some storage compartments, before walling them off with thick curtains.
I then pushed further, creating a bit of more space beyond the changing booths, where I installed a pair of bathrooms. Thankfully it appeared that my reality-warping powers didn't care terribly about my lack of explicit knowledge on the construction of showers, toilets, piping, water, or septic tanks, only the intended result, so they came out fully furnished, right down to the plumbing and hot water.
That held some possibilities for later, now that I'd considered it, and went some ways to explain why Netherworlds were usually so wildly different from one another.
Task completed, I turned around to see Danny looking slightly green as he stared dumbfounded at the space behind me. More importantly, Taylor was sitting upright on the hospice bed with a similar expression.
"What the fuck was that?" the girl mumbled half to herself. Then she flushed bright red as her eyes went wide, and she clapped her hands over her mouth.
I smirked internally with a degree of amusement. Good to see that fanon's love of having Taylor just blurt things out accidentally has some basis in reality. It was kind of adorable.
Danny meanwhile just snorted at his daughter's outburst, but Taylor went into full-blown social panic mode.
"I-I-I'm sorry, I-I didn't—" she stuttered, but I waved her off.
"Perfectly understandable." I responded. "Even I think looking at the boundary line of a universe is more than a little disconcerting."
"A universe?" Danny mouthed.
"Sure," I told him. "You're familiar with Earth Aleph, I assume. Possibly less so with extradimensional storage powers like Circus,' or the pocket dimension that Toybox runs out of? They're all essentially similar when you get right down to it."
"But what did you do?" Taylor asked. Then she ducked her head timidly. "I mean uh, if… uh… no, nevermind."
"Nonsense, Taylor," I replied with a smile, eliciting something of a shy squeak from the girl. "Questions are perfectly fine. To answer, we're currently inside a micro-universe that's not unlike a pocket dimension, albeit one that is exceptionally malleable. With proper application of willpower and energy from… we'll call them 'sufficiently empowered individuals' for now… its boundaries can be adjusted or expanded, and physical objects can be modified or even created out of thin air and set into place as desired."
"Mind you," I concluded, "some things are harder than others; the floors and walls were fairly trivial but rest was decidedly more difficult." And it had been; I may not have looked it, but the bathrooms in particular had left me every bit as winded as the entire rest of the hub had. Probably because they required stainless steel and ceramic tile rather than simple wood and stone.
"But… why bathrooms?"
"Because I hadn't made any yet," I commented as I took the bundle of clothes from Danny, and held them out to her. After a moment's confusion, Taylor looked down at herself. Then, realizing the state she was in, she squawked adorably before snatching her clothes out of my hands and practically launched herself through one of the bathroom doors.
"See?" I asked Danny. He merely chuckled in slightly reply.
Several minutes later Taylor shuffled her way back out, hair lightly damp and clad in her standard dark jeans and grey hoodie. I started to guide her back over to sitting down on one of the hospital beds, but when we got back out into the main 'room', she stopped abruptly as what she was really seeing in terms of the rest of the Gate Hub finally sank in.
Damn I wish I had a camera, I thought with an inner grin as I tried not to laugh as Taylor's eyes grew wider and wider at they flicked between the various shop stalls, demons, and Prinnies wandering about the place. A whole parade of different emotions played out across her face, too, everything from sheer amazement and delight to curiosity to being upset with a slight tinge of fear. Finally, she seemingly settled on 'mild confusion', her eyebrows drawing together as she slowly lowered herself onto the edge of one of the beds.
After a few mumbled starts and stops, followed by a bit of shivering, Taylor finally scrunched her face up, took a deep breath, and then looked me in the eye. "What… what happened to me? I… I thought I was dying, or going insane or… or…." She started to tear up, but visibly forced her emotions down. "…And where the hell are we?"
Unintentional pun aside… right to the point then, I guess. I reached behind me to arrange my tail comfortably as I sat down at the foot of the same bed as Taylor, and gestured for Danny to take a seat across from us.
"To be brief, Taylor," I explained with a sigh, "you underwent a trigger event. Otherwise known as the universe's consolation prize for surviving the worst day of your life. Unfortunately, the powers you gained—"
"I have powers?!" Taylor blurted out, eyes wide as she interrupted me.
"Yes, but I'm afraid there were some complications," I replied, causing Taylor to deflate.
"Of course there were," she muttered fatalistically.
I chuckled. "Cheer up, Taylor, it's not as bad as it sounds. Far from it, actually. Arthropokinesis is a pretty badass powerset, especially with the kind of range you've got."
"Arthropo-what-now?"
"Think of it as bug control," I said. "You've gained the ability to sense, hear though, see through, and control, the minds of every arthropod within a very large area. And by that I mean every type of insect, spider, or crustacean, plus a few extra non-arthropoda like annelida, even. Likely anything within a given size range that has a very simple brain and an exoskeleton."
A mix of emotions flickered over Taylor's face, the chief among them being disgust and disappointment.
I looked Taylor in the eye. "Taylor, believe me when I say your power is strong. While it might not sound especially heroic on the surface, as you are right now you have the potential to be either absolutely goddamn terrifying, or Mouse Protector levels of completely ridiculous, and everything else in between. Want to go full-on vigilante antihero? Take the fight to the gangs with biblical-sized swarms of every venomous insect known to man. Want to be a rogue who serves as an information broker? Become Brockton Bay's very own Spider Queen who sees and hears all. Want to be a family-friendly government hero who's popular with kids? Stick to silly costumes and use butterflies, dragonflies, and ladybugs while you focus on command-and-control or search-and-rescue. Trust me, you have a huge number of potential options."
"I… I do?" Taylor asked with a mix of both hope and trepidation.
"You do," I replied, giving her a firm nod. "The complications I was referring to are thankfully temporary, even if entirely unpleasant for you. Your current issue lies in the fact that human brains aren't really wired to handle the level of information feedback that you get from your power. That's why it felt like you were going completely mad; you couldn't separate the you from, well, all the who knows how many hundreds of thousands of bugs your power was latching onto. But I do promise you, you can learn to handle it."
"But… I'm not feeling anything now?" Taylor replied, her eyebrows drawing together as she frowned in concentration.
I gave her a grin. "That's why I brought you here, since the doctors at the hospital didn't know how to help: No bugs to be found anywhere. This way I could see that you got healed up properly, could make sure you knew what was really happening, and could give you some time to adjust and decide where you want to go from here."
"So, I… I really can be a hero?" Taylor asked haltingly, her voice now more hopeful than before.
"Most definitely," I replied.
"How does one even go about signing up for the Wards?" Danny asked, finally speaking up.
He didn't look especially happy. In fact, he looked like he'd swallowed a lemon. At least he hadn't outright tried to ban Taylor from going out yet, though I supposed that fit with Wildbow's assertion that if it hadn't been Armsmaster who'd met her first, she would have ended up in the Wards. Danny would have obviously had to have signed the paperwork in that case, so hopefully he at least recognized that she needed to be using her powers, one way or another.
Still, I grimaced at the suggestion of Taylor in the Wards, for the obvious reasons. "Well, as far as I'm aware they'll take pretty much anyone, so I imagine there's either some kind of hotline, or you just call them up and make an appointment. I also know that sometimes the Youth Guard will pass you on to the PRT. Not actually sure why that's only sometimes, though. But regardless, I'm afraid that joining them probably isn't a very good idea."
"What? Why?" they both asked at nearly the same time.
I sighed. "A couple of reasons, most of which really boil down to the same thing, alongside a sneaking suspicion that there is something else very rotten going on."
At the inquiring looks I got, I closed my eyes and sighed, leaning my head back preparing to ask the question I honestly didn't want to know the answer to, because I was very much afraid I already knew it. But it needed to be asked; this was Taylor's choice and I really shouldn't prejudice her by making assumptions.
Finally, I opened my eyes again. "Let me ask you this first, Taylor: Do you know who pushed you into your locker?"
Instead of replying, Taylor glanced at her father and visibly shrank in on herself.
I placed a hand on her shoulder. "Please, Taylor," I told her gently. "I know it's hard and you probably would rather not think or talk about it. But this is important. I need to know. Was it Sophia? Or was Sophia not there?"
She looked up at me, startled. "H-how—?"
"—did I know?" I finished for her, giving her a sad smile. "It has to do with my powers. Sometimes I just know things. Strange things, often secrets that people shouldn't be able to know. But I'm not perfect. I can get things wrong sometimes, if I'm missing important details. So I really, really need to know before I say anything more: Was Sophia there?"
Taylor's gaze dropped to her lap again. "N-no. She wasn't. I... I thought it was strange, because they're always there in the mornings, but then... then Emma, she... she...."
Taylor burst into tears.
"Shh, shh," I said, scooting over and wrapping an arm around her as I pulled her in for a hug. "It's alright. I can infer the rest, no need to say anything more. That's all I needed to know."
"W-why...?!" Taylor wailed, leaning into me. "Why would anyone... H-how could she..."
Danny meanwhile looked completely aghast. "Emma did this? But she's—"
I held up my free hand, interrupting him as Taylor went from 'merely' crying to great heaving sobs as she clutched at the cloth frills lining my armor.
I used said hand to rub her back gently for a minutes, making soothing noises while I just let her cry for a bit before continuing.
"...Taylor?" I eventually asked, softly. "Will you allow me to use my powers to explain what's been going on to your father? That way you don't have to?"
After a few moments, she nodded into my shoulder.
Having received permission, I began to give Danny a very basic overview of what Taylor had been going through. How when Taylor had come back from summer camp, Emma had seemingly acquired a new best friend. How they started picking on Taylor, first in small ways, then in larger. How at first Taylor had hoped that Emma would come to her senses, and how after her failed attempts at getting the school involved things just devolved to her trying to get through each day as best could as her bullies continued to escalate. How she'd started keeping a log of everything they'd been doing, in the hopes of maybe going to the police or the media.
"Your powers are bullshit," Taylor miserably mumbled the classic meme into my chest, before finally pulling away and sitting up, sniffling. "How can you possibly know... all that?" she asked as I handed her a piece of cloth from an end-table to blow her nose with.
I gave her a wry smile. "'It's complicated' doesn't even begin to cover it, I'm afraid. Don't worry about the specifics."
Then I sighed, looking over to Danny. "What you should be worried about is how the locker was even allowed to happen. Because it shouldn't have. And I'm not just talking about the school completely failing at doing their jobs, either."
"Without going into too much detail," I explained, deciding to lie a little, "I'm something of a minor precog. Among other things. Early this morning I… had a vision, let's say. Of what was going to happen to Taylor. But I didn't know how to find her, so I didn't have any way to warn her. Didn't know where her school was, or where she lived, et cetera. So I called the PRT and warned them, so that they could stop it from happening. Andtheydidn't, despite Miss Militia's assurances to the contrary."
"What…What are you saying?" Danny asked.
I clenched my fists in my lap to keep a hold on my rising anger. "What I'm saying is that if Sophia wasn't there like she was 'supposed' to be, then Director Piggot in her infinite wisdom must have decided that rather than sending someone over to arrest those girls before they could assault Taylor, she would arrange things such that instead of losing a Ward, she'd gain one. Because she's apparently desperate enough for capes to field that she'd try and condemn a traumatized teenager to working alongside the very person who inflicted that trauma."
"Wait… you mean..." the look on Taylor's face was one of abject horror.
I closed my eyes, sighing. "…I'm really sorry to have to tell you this, Taylor... but… yes. Sophia Hess is none other than Shadow Stalker, a member of the Brockton Bay Wards."
I opened my eyes again and sighed again. "Worse, she's on probation, or at least something like it, after having been charged for manslaughter and attempted murder. I can't speak as to why the school never did anything when you first reported things, but I do know that ever since Sophia got forced into the Wards as part of a plea deal, the PRT has been pressuring Blackwell to go soft on her as long as she at least toes the line."
"Unfortunately," I continued, "ENE Director Emily Piggot is the kind of person who honestly doesn't care much about the mental wellbeing of the people under her command. Or so I can only assume, because I have it on good authority thanks to power shenanigans that if someone in a situation just like yours were to join the Wards, Taylor, Piggot would not kick Sophia to the curb, because she sees the girl as far too useful and effective, despite how awful she is for team morale. I mean, we're talking about a woman who is entirely fine with threatening teenagers with jail time, primarily because 'public perception' is more important to her than actually stopping villains. As if somehow stopping then wouldn't do wonders for how the PRT is viewed in this city.
"Furthermore, as I told your father earlier, she also regularly denies the Wards their requests for additional training because she thinks it's 'frivolous' and she'd rather have them out on the streets getting shot at by gang members instead of spending her precious funding. And while Piggot isn't specifically guilty of such to my knowledge, we're also talking about an organization that is apparently totally OK with signing off on publicly outing the identity of a supervillain previously accused of murder and hostage-taking, and doing it in the middle of a school, while class is in session."
Danny's mouth opened and closed a few times wordlessly. And as for Taylor... she just looked... well, resigned was probably the best word. Like somehow the fact that the so-called 'good guys' really weren't didn't surprise her much at all.
If only she knew just how deep the rot went.
I sighed yet again. "So yeah.… Take all that, mix in the fact that Sophia wasn't there this morning to see the results of her hard work like she 'should' have been, and that Armsmaster hadn't even been aware of my call... well. I can only assume that Piggot decided to call Sophia in on some excuse and then not only deliberately didn't send someone over to check on things, but she didn't bother to notify the police, either."
I shook my head. "I'd say that maybe it's because she simply didn't believe me about you undergoing a trigger event, but then why call Sophia in instead of just sending someone over to investigate? It can't be because she thought it was a trap of some kind, because if it was then she'd have been abandoning a school-full of kids to who knows what for no benefit. The only two things that make any sense to me is if it was either an incredibly incompetent attempt at covering up Sophia's involvement —and believe me the PRT is normally really good at that sort of thing— or it's because, well..."
"She wanted another Ward," Danny practically hissed. By this point he was actually shaking with impotent rage.
"I'm afraid so," I concluded with another aggrieved sigh. "I suspect she hoped you'd either go on the attack because you were scared and trapped, and the PRT would then be able to force you to join by threatening legal action against you, or you wouldn't, in which case since they already knew who you were they could just approach your father and either try to bribe him with the financial support being a Ward can bring, or simply scare him into signing you up regardless of your wishes by telling him a few horror stories and waving a bunch of statistics at him."
"So... what do I do, then?" Taylor managed to ask after a few moments. "If… if they already know I've got powers, what does that mean... for me? Because I refuse to work with Sophia." She clenched her fists in her lap and looked down. "Not even if means I have to become a villain."
I gave the girl a wry smile. "Well there I have some good-news-bad-news for you. The good news is that the PRT can't just up and make you join. They might try to intimidate you into signing on, but they can't force you unless you've actually committed a crime they can prove first."
"And the bad news?" she asked.
"The bad news is that the PRT in Brockton Bay leaks like a damn sieve," I told them, "and I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest to learn that Coil, at least, has already learned everything the PRT has — about both of us. And while I'm not terribly concerned for my own safety there, well… yours is a different matter entirely."
"Who's Coil?" Danny asked.
"Your classic Mastermind-type Bond Villain, basically," I explained. "Has a huge underground secret base somewhere downtown, wants to rule the city both politically and criminally, has his fingers in all sorts of pies, even has something like... uh..."
I counted quickly on my fingers for a brief second. "...seven? Yeah. By now it should be seven different capes working for him — and maybe one or two more, I'm not sure — plus he's working on getting another five or six under his thumb."
Taylor's eyes bugged out a little. "You mean there's a whole team of villains the size of the Empire in the city that nobody even knows about!?"
"Eh," I replied, waggling a hand back and forth. "They aren't part of a united front or anything like that, not like the Empire. Most of them are pretty low-key, and half of them don't even know about each other because Coil uses them for different things. Still, most of them are known to the PRT to some degree, namely Circus, the Travelers, and the Undersiders. Maybe some of the others. The main thing is that the PRT isn't aware that they're working for Coil. Heck, some of the villains don't know they're working for Coil."
"That and the Travelers should be in Boston under Accord right now. At least until April," I added. "More importantly for us, though, is that the man has multiple moles in the PRT, and he loves the idea of getting more Thinkers on his side. He's also very much okay with forcing them to work for him whether they want to or not. Tattletale for instance was more or less recruited at literal gunpoint, being told she could either work for him or eat a bullet."
"In fact," I added with a scowl, and gesturing towards Danny, "that's one of the statistics that the PRT is likely to break out while trying to convince your Dad to sign you up. Supposedly they have a tendency to try and point out that most independents end up facing forced recruitment attempts. Of course, they completely neglect to mention that it's thePRT doing the forcing more often than not. Especially in this city."
"What do you mean?" Taylor asked, curiosity written on her face.
I shrugged, "Eh… it's kind of a long-winded explanation. But what it boils down to is that outside of Coil and technically Lung, the gangs in the city don't actually forcibly recruit parahumans. It makes for bad blood and generally represents a serious security risk: All it takes is one slip-up and suddenly you've got someone who's familiar with your operations and member's identities, who's now running off to turn state's evidence to the PRT in exchange for protective custody, you know? And the gangs already have their own means of recruitment anyhow. Faultline is a merc; she's actually pretty okay for a villain and only picks up strays and Case 53's who're in a bad spot. The Empire is practically a family operation, Lung hasn't recruited anyone new in years, and contrary to popular belief the Merchants don't normally forcibly addict people to drugs — instead, their roster is simply made up of those who just don't have anywhere else to go."
"Wait, the Empire is…?" Taylor asked, eyes wide.
"Basically all family members and networking," I confirmed with a nod. "Kaiser, Purity, Fenja and Menja, plus their dead members Iron Rain and Allfather, are all related to each other in various ways. Victor and Othala are married, with Rune being Othala's second cousin. All three of them, plus a fourth dead family member whose name I never learned are from an extended family group that's had ties to the Empire and other white supremacist movements for years, and lately Kaiser's been trying to set up his own son with Rune in an attempt to strengthen ties with said group even more. Meanwhile, the other half of their membership is primarily formed of two trios: Hookwolf, Cricket, and Stormtiger are all ex-members of some fight club thing and ended up taking refuge with the Empire for whatever reason, while Kreig, Night, and Fog all have ties to Gesellschaft. Who, if you don't know, are a major Neo-Nazi group based out of Germany that occasionally sends support to the Empire. The only real outliers are Crusader and Alabaster, but as with the Gesellschaft trio they're both die-hard Neo-Nazis anyhow and fit right in. There isn't a single forced recruit among the lot of them."
Taylor stared at me. "How can you know all this?" she finally asked.
I shrugged. "Same way I now know weird stuff about you, or members of New Wave, or the PRT, or any number of other cape groups: Thinker bullshit."
After a moment, I decided to change the subject. "Anyway, that's not terribly important right now. What is important is that now you have some decisions you need to me to make. Like where you want to go from here."
"What do you mean?" Taylor asked, seemingly choosing not to comment.
"Well, first off, you need to decide what you want to do with yourself. Like I said before, your specific power provides you a wealth of options. Which would you rather do? Use your power to make money? Be a hero? Be a villain? Maybe something in be—"
"A hero," Taylor replied firmly. "I want to be a hero." Looking down, she wrung her hands in her lap. "But, how can I, if…if Sophia…"
I chuckled lightly. "There's more hero options than just the Wards, Taylor. For one thing, while I realize your father is stubborn, I suspect if you really wanted to be a Ward, you could talk him into moving cities, if only for your sake. It would be one of the safer choices."
"On which note…," I said, giving Danny a Look, capital L, thanks to his earlier comment. "Taylor will end up using her powers, one way or another, Danny. All parahumans are psychologically driven to use their powers, usually in a violent manner. If you care at all about your daughter, you won't try to prevent her from using them. I guarantee you it wont end well."
From the look on his face, he'd been contemplating just that. At least had the good grace to look a bit ashamed.
I turned back to Taylor. "Moving would also have the benefit of getting you away from your bullies, and Winslow, although I suspect that won't be a problem for much longer. But more on that later.
"Another option that would involve moving would be signing up for a hero team with a corporate sponsorship. Unfortunately, I can't say much on the viability of that because I don't know anything about the laws surrounding them; for all I know you'd have to be an adult first. I do gather that most of them aren't really proper heroes, though. They're more like PR props who occasionally participate in charities and stuff. I'm guessing that wouldn't be your cup of tea, but it is an option, and probably a safer one since you'd likely end up mostly fighting the occasional street level thug or very minor villain."
Taylor shook her head. "I'd really rather not move unless I had to. And… I want to be a real hero," she stated firmly after a moment, balling her fists at her side.
"Alright, then," I conceded. "More locally, there's the option of joining New Wave. While your identity is probably safe at the public level for the most part, as I mentioned before thanks to Piggot's actions the PRT already have reason to assume you have powers. That unfortunately also makes it a virtual guarantee that at least one supervillain either already has or will end up with that information. It's a risky move, but deliberately outing yourself willingly lets you take control of that situation, and means you can put into place defensive measures you might otherwise be unable to for fear of giving yourself away — something I'm sure New Wave has plenty of practice with. You also have some insanely strong synergy with Panacea."
"I… I do?"
"Yep," I replied with a nod. "New Wave plays up the healer angle pretty hard, but they don't actually hide the fact that she can manipulate anything biological, Taylor. As long as she stuck to making them sterile, she could make you an entire legion of superbugs for all sorts of specialized tasks, and the PRT couldn't really do much about it."
I ticked off several fingers. "Just off the top of my head, you could shoot for things like dragonflies capable of spinning ultra-strong silk at insane rates, flies with better-developed senses for spying, wasps that can inject ketamine or other drugs, an armored beetle big enough to ride… there's a ton of potential there."
Taylor's eyes grew wide.
"Whether Brandish would authorize something like that is a different matter," I concluded. "Unfortunately, the woman is kind of a bitch and has some really skewed ideas about the moral lines between heroes and villains. On the other hand, she isn't the one who calls the shots for the team, Lady Photon does, and it isn't like Panacea couldn't also help you make your more useful bugs look a whole lot more family-friendly, so… could go either way, I guess."
I shrugged.
"You could also go independent. While I definitely wouldn't advise trying to go solo in a city as violent as Brockton Bay, there are other independents out there, like Sere and Dovetail. You could maybe try and team up with them."
Taylor mumbled something, ducking her head as she looked away.
"Hmm?" I asked.
She sighed and mumbled something a second time, this time shaking her head.
I bumped the girl's shoulder with my own. "Come on, Taylor, no need to be shy. I'm here to help; if you have a question or a suggestion, speak up. I won't judge, promise."
She hunched her shoulders slightly, followed by, to my partial amusement, doing something I've never actually seen someone do in real life: the whole anxious-anime-girl thing, where the girl pokes their forefingers together as they avoid looking you in the eye.
"What about… that is… could… could I…," she stuttered, before finishing all in a rush.
And there we go! Revamp / Rewrite / whatever you want to call it complete. Just need to add the informational post regarding Taylor & Ash's full character sheets, and make the announcement post in my snips thread and I'll be all caught up!
I really should have expected this. I mean, Taylor hadn't exactly dived in to joining the Undersiders head-first, per se, instead first rationalizing it as going undercover to get info on Coil, but she went native pretty damn quick. It took a mere three weeks for her to make the realization that she absolutely craved the companionship of the only people who'd been nice to her in nearly two years, and that she'd rather stay with the Undersiders than try to mend any of the merrily burning bridges she'd surrounded herself with.
My internal thoughts aside, Taylor seemed to start panicking a little when I didn't respond immediately.
"I-I-I mean y-you look strong and said I was strong too and you seem to know a lot about m-my power and s-so I thought maybe we could work together and that you could teach me how to use it and—"
I held up a hand to interrupt her.
"Yes, Taylor, I would be delighted to have you on the team."
She froze, eyes wide. "You… you would?"
Danny meanwhile looked equally surprised.
I nodded firmly. "I would. In fact, I was already considering offering you a spot, albeit after we covered a few things."
"You were?!"
"Most definitely," I affirmed once again. "However, there are some things you should know before deciding," — and here I rubbed the back of my neck a bit self-consciously — "but… ahh… well… I know your father is going to want you to be as safe as you possibly can, and there's an option involved in joining me that would mean you'd be astoundingly safer in comparison to any other possible option, but, uh… it's going to be far more than a little unbelievable from your perspective, and I'm not really sure how to explain it in a way that won't make it sound like I'm some kind of religious nut-job."
Danny frowned. "If it means she's safer…."
I chuckled, if a bit nervously. "Oh, she'd definitely be safer all right. I'm not exaggerating even a little bit there. My powers are… uh… transmissible, I guess you could say, and part of that is one hell of a Brute package."
Taylors eyes practically bugged out.
I smiled a bit wryly, turning my head and tapping the side of my temple. "An Empire thug shot me right here less than two hours ago, at near point blank range. Hurt like an absolute bitch, if you'll pardon my language, but as you can see it didn't even leave a bruise. And that is very much the barest tip of the iceberg when it comes to my powers."
"What's the catch?" Danny asked, crossing his arms, disapproval laden in his voice. "I don't really follow cape stuff, but I know there's always a catch with… what does the PRT call them? Trump powers? Like that fellow who got sent to the Birdcage after assassinating the Vice President."
I nodded. "Yeah, you're thinking of Teacher. The idea that all Trump powers have a catch isn't strictly accurate though, depending on your definition of 'catch'. Eidolon's considered a Trump, for example, and the only catch to his power is that he can only have three powers a time, and doesn't have total control over what he gets. Hardly a negative, there."
…Not that I was being entirely truthful with that statement, as one could definitely consider Eidolon's powers having a slight Endbringer problem to be one hell of a catch. But they didn't need to know that, and to be perfectly frank the Endbringers were more a side effect of Eidolon's own personal problems than it was the fault of his specific powerset.
I continued. "Other examples would include Hatchet Face, whose only limitation is his range, and Othala, who unlike the other two actually does grant powers to other people. And her power doesn't really have a downside for the person using the gifted ability beyond the fact that it isn't permanent and she can't use her power on herself."
Danny opened his mouth to reply, but I held up a hand again to forestall another interruption.
"However, you are correct in this case," I told them. "There is a catch, though it isn't a Master effect. In fact, it's an entirely benign catch in my book, although it's possible you might feel differently."
I shook my head. "No, the real issue is explaining how it actually works and having you believe me. Honestly, if I wasn't living it personally, I wouldn't believe it either if I was in your shoes."
Looking to Taylor, I gave her a half-nod, "I will add that joining my team is not contingent on accepting. It's just that things will be much, much more dangerous for you without it, likely far more so than were you try to go solo independent. It would mean playing a more limited role on the team."
"You still haven't told us what the catch is," she pointed out.
I blew out a sigh. "Yeah, I know. It's just…"
I paused, then shifted track as something new occurred to me.
"Actually, you know what? Before I explain, Let me go check on something. There's an aspect to the process that I'm not sure whether or not will even matter, but one of my, er, employees should know the answer. It also may or may not clear up the whole 'overwhelmed by your own powers' thing, which as things stand now will come back when we leave."
"What?!" Taylor and Danny exclaimed, both of them looking a little panicked.
"I did say that what Taylor needed was to be removed from the source of the overstimulation," I admonished Danny. "Namely not being surrounded by bugs for miles around, bugs that don't exist here. It's also why I said I was planning to offer her a spot only after we discussed some other stuff. This is part of that."
"How would accepting your powers fix that?" Danny demanded.
I sighed again. "By, potentially mind you, removing her existing powers and replacing them with ones like my own."
"You… you can remove powers?! he shouted. "Why the hell didn't you mention that in the first place?! Taylor doesn't need to be a cape at all in that case!"
I stood abruptly, letting my Overlord's aura leak into my bearing a little as I towered over Danny, who blanched as I reminded him that he was, in fact, yelling at someone who might well be able to obliterate him in the blink of an eye.
"First," I began bitingly, "Parent or not, after the hell she's been through you really ought to give more weight to what Taylor wants out of her life before unilaterally deciding for her what she will and will not be doing. Second, it doesn't work like that. Third, do you really want her to be helpless, powerless, when Coil's mercs come banging down your door? He's not going to take 'But I'm not a cape!' for an answer. Not until he's thoroughly proven she isn't, at which point he'll dispose of the evidence. Or have you already forgotten that thanks to Piggot's actions he probably already believes she triggered?"
If she was lucky, Coil would just use a disposable 'timeline' for the whole thing, but he also might not. It was possible he'd just choose to throw her to Mr. Pitter afterwards to be used as a… a plaything, after using multiple timelines to torture her repeatedly to provoke a reaction. I could also see him trying to ransom her instead, just so he could get his claws into the DWA for whatever reason.
Not that Danny knew any of that, but he blanched all the same, and Taylor wasn't much better off. Though at least she looked more angry than scared. Whether that was at her father, or at Coil, I couldn't say, but I was glad to see at least some fire was left in her.
Danny stammered for a second or two before finally deflating. "I… No. No, you're right. I-I'm sorry, Taylor. I know you've always dreamed of being a hero, and I… I shouldn't get in the way of that. I just… I just don't wan't to lose you."
"… I almost did, today," he finished quietly, looking down at his lap.
Well, shit, I thought to myself. Now I kinda feel like an asshole. Sigh. Really gotta remember that despite how well they're holding up, today's been traumatic for both of them.
I pushed my anger away. "Being concerned for your daughter is understandable," I chided, albeit gently this time. "Good, even. Just don't let it get in the way of her happiness, or her pursuing her dreams."
Danny simply nodded morosely without looking up. Taylor meanwhile seemingly came to some kind of decision, and got up from the bed to cross over and give her father a hug.
I supposed that was as good an opportunity as any.
"Look," I said, "it might not even matter anyway; Like I was trying to say, I don't actually know if Taylor would keep her current powers or not, or if it would even be safe to remove them. Pleinair might know, though. I'll leave you two here for a few minutes while I go talk to her."
I turned away and went in search of the demon-girl in question, giving a nod to Illuminata as I passed by, only to realize that she'd apparently withdrawn a ways some time ago, in order to given the group of us some privacy. Oddly considerate behavior for a demon, that, but I wasn't going to complain.
Pleinair was, of course, 'busily' manning her station and standing mutely outside the doors of the room I'd set aside for the Dark Assembly.
"Question," I declared-slash-asked. "Do you have any idea what would happen if I had a parahuman reincarnated into a demon?"
She tilted her head at me.
"…?"
I jerked a thumb over my shoulder in the direction of the hospital. "The girl I brought in, Taylor. She wants to join my party, but it'd help if she had full access to all the benefits of being a demon. The thing is, her brain is hooked up to, well, a kind of alien supercomputer that gives her special powers. Before I have her reincarnated, I need to know if doing so is going to have any side effects. Will she lose her current powers? Could it kill her? For that matter, as a native of Earth Bet can she even be reincarnated in the first place?"
Pleinair blinked rather owlishly at me, and I abruptly had the distinct impression that she was calling me a moron.
I nearly laughed. So it was like that, huh? In some of the later games, she'd had interactions where she exhibited some kind of vague, almost telempathic ability to communicate simple ideas and feelings on top of just mumbling single-word replies. Of course, the question then was why she thought I was I was being a moron…
After a moment's consideration, it clicked.
"Let me guess, it doesn't matter if it kills her because we'd already be in the process of pulling her soul out and reincarnating her, huh?"
"Happy…"
Guess that answers that.
"Okay, fine. But what about the rest, like her powers?"
This time, after thinking about it for a second, she reached out and grabbed a passing Prinny, and pushed him over to stand next to me. Then she mimed something, where she reached out to my chest, made a fist, and withdrew it before punching the Prinny in its chest with said fist.
Said Prinny fell over like a stiff board, letting out squawk of complaint, but I ignored its antics to try and figure out what Pleinair was trying to explain.
She performed the motion again, and I realized it wasn't so much punching something as it was unplugging and replugging it… in different places.
And suddenly, I understood.
Because Reincarnation isn't just you taking an existing body and transforming it, you're giving their soul a new body entirely. And something all the games except Disgaea 2 glossed over was that the process involved briefly placing your soul in a Prinny body first, and then transmigrating you into the new, intended one.
Moreover, Prinnies aren't just some kind of transformed human, their bodies are manufactured.
And, as we knew from canon, reconnection to a host has a critical genetic component. Hell, when Bonesaw, who was probably the foremost expert in the world on the brain-shard interface, was creating the S9000 clones, she had to take all sorts of different measures just to get them to re-trigger, and even then her results were sometimes far from perfect. Valkyrie ran into a similar issue in Ward, too, where her attempts to revive Lady Photon, Clockblocker, and other members of.. I think they called themselves The Flock?.. didn't come out quite right.
If I reincarnate Taylor, as far as her shard should be concerned, she will have died, full stop, and her new body will be entirely unconnected to the old one, nor will it have even remotely human genetics afterwards.
I repeated this to Pleinair, and she basically shrugged, followed by an unconcerned nod.
Close enough. No reason she'd be familiar with parahumans in general, after all. Guesses were all she had, obviously
"Right. So, uh.. is the Assembly even available yet? I'd like to get this out of the way as soon as I can."
Pleinair hugged Usagi to her, and nodded.
"In that case, uh… how do I go about submitting a request, then?"
The girl merely waved her hand, and a rather familiar interface appeared.
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"So!" I announced cheerfully as I finally stepped back into the hospital area. "Good news bad news good news, although the bad news is also good news, and some of the good news might also be bad news. It all depends on your perspective!"
"Um." was Taylors only response to my levity.
"I know, I know. I am a font of exceptional clarity of thought," I joked self-deprecatingly, before coughing lightly into a fist. "Ahem. Anyway. Jokes aside.. that catch I was I was talking about earlier—"
"We, uh, talked a bit," Taylor spoke up, looking mildly hesitant. "I know you said my power is strong, but.. well.. it's not like I'm attached to bug powers, you know? So.. I guess it doesn't really matter to me if I lose them if I'm copying yours? So.. um.."
Then she straightened, took a steadying breath, and looked me in the eye, her face and tone both serious and determined.
"As long as the side effect isn't a Master one and it means I'm safer, then… it's fine."
I raised an eyebrow. "Even if it means not really being human anymore?"
"Yes." Taylor's response was immediate.
Surprised, my other eyebrow joined the first, causing Taylor to look away, ducking her head shyly a little. "We, um. Illuminata let us take a small look around, and we realized there were some, ah, common traits, among most of the people here, and figured that was what you meant."
I chuckled. "Well observed. While not the whole of it, you are nevertheless correct. There will definitely be some.. ahhh.. physical changes, involved. Ones that may or may not be concealable. I can hide my wings, for example, but—"
"Wait, you have wings?"
"Sure do," I confirmed with a nod. "Take a look."
I flexed, in that weird, semi-magical manner that allowed them to manifest, and flared them wide so Taylor could get a good look, before hopping into the air for a few seconds of hovering.
When I dropped back down, Taylor's eyes were practically shining.
"You… you can fly…" she whispered, and belatedly, I remembered how often in fanon she was portrayed as having flight near the top of her list of beloved superpowers.
With another flex, my wings faded from sight, and smiled at the girl. "While I can't strictly promise you'll end up with wings yourself, I can tell you that it's very common, especially for women. And even if you don't get them, I know several other means to acquire you the ability to fly if that's something you're interested in."
"Yes! So much yes!"
Danny, for his part, chuckled. "She used to pretend she was Alexandria as a kid, and would—mmph!"
Taylor leaped across the gap and tried to silence him by shoving both hands over his mouth. "Dad! No!"
I chuckled. "I can hardly blame you. Flying is pretty great. And I'm pretty sure most girls on Bet have done something similar at one point or another."
I took a seat on one of the hospital beds, and patted it, gesturing for Taylor to come sit down. She did so.
"Now," I began. "There's a few other things you'll want to know. The first is that, at least for the next day or two, Taylor is going to want to stick with me while she develops her new powers. It's not entirely an instant thing. The appearance changes will be, but she'll lack most of the rather critical Brute rating you're looking for at first. To make a rather extremely long-winded explanation much shorter, what I'm offering Taylor isn't so much a specific set of powers in and of themselves, but the ability to acquire and enhance any powers she so chooses. Think Dauntless, except applied to both oneself and their gear, with way more direct choice involved."
Taylor's eyes went wide.
"Wha..? But.. but that's—!"
"Totally unfair bullshit hax? Entirely too OP?" I responded with a grin. "Absolutely. But the drawback to it, if you could call it such, is that our powers take a bit of time to settle in, and moreso to develop fully, although thankfully that happens at a rate far, far faster than Dauntless' frankly pathetic growth rate."
"However, there is a lot of training involved. Getting you the basic ability to toss ice spears around or heal broken bones would be child's play. With a bit of luck, we could do that by the end of the day. But something like, say, gaining the ability to fire off a giant, fuck-off swarm of laser beams that'd give Legend himself pause? Not so simple. Potentially doable, mind you, but it's not something that'll happen overnight."
"You can do that?" Danny asked.
"Well, not me personally, but that girl over there, the one with the blue hair and the stuffed bunny?" I replied, pointing in Pleinair's general direction. "She totally can."
"What, her?"
"Yep. She calls that one "'Deicide Shooter', apparently. Sadly, she's not part of the team, she's just here to run the— well, nevermind. That's a whole other explanation. Suffice to say that, excepting the Prinnies, everyone you've seen here so far are noncombatant employees under contract with the Rosen Queen Company. They're umm…"
I paused for a moment, thinking, before the perfect analogy came to me. "Actually, a good way of putting it is they're a lot like the Dockworkers, really. They're basically contractors. They provide both goods and services for my team, which I'm still in the process of putting together. I'm technically in charge, but I don't really have much say in their day to day, nor do I pay their salaries. I just buy their goods and submit work orders, and they get the job done on their own, so to speak."
"I think I understand," Danny responded, giving me a nod.
I nodded. "Anyway, back to powers. My point was, Taylor won't be able to just perfectly tank gunfire right out the door, not without at least a day or two's worth of dedicated training, so it's probably better if she stays here at least until then. Afterwards, we can work out how exactly things will go. I can't give you any more details than that just yet, because I don't actually know all the limitations of the gate tech Rosen Queen brought with them. Usually in cases like mine everybody lives here at the base, but I don't see any reason that has to be the case, and I'm assuming you'll be wanting Taylor to still live at home on account of her age."
Taylor shrugged, like she honestly didn't care one way or another. Her father definitely noticed, wincing a little to himself.
"I'll.. discuss that with her later," he said, clearly uncomfortable with the revelation, and I guessed from the look on his face he'd realized just why Taylor didn't seem terribly opposed to the idea of living away from home, and felt guilty as shit about it.
Which, fair. On both sides. While unlike many members of the Worm fandom I didn't quite subscribe to the idea that Danny's behavior constituted truly abusive levels of neglect, and instead preferred to believe he was at least trying and was just really shit at parenting, I'll admit there was definitely room for interpretation to be had there, and couldn't really blame canon Taylor's easy willingness to just straight up run away to live with the Undersiders.
I'd withhold judgement in that until I'd seen them interact more. But that was me letting my thoughts get sidetracked yet again.
"That's fine," I agreed instead. "Any questions so far?"
"Umm… what will we do about, you know. Me being a public cape, and all that?" Taylor asked.
I sighed, leaning back on my arms and pursing my lips a little. "That.. is something of a complex subject. In all honesty, I'm probably not the best person to ask; As far as I'm concerned, being a cape is my identity, and I don't have a civilian life, so there's nothing to separate. I'm also of the opinion that unless you're trying to be a Rogue or going solo independent, given the state of cape politics in the US there really isn't a whole lot of point to school or aiming for higher education. New Wave aside, it's not exactly easy to go out and get a nine to five job as an open cape, especially if you're one with nonstandard physical features. As an non-open independent, simply keeping such a job without outing yourself is practically impossible, and as for the Protectorate, being a cape is their nine to five. Personally, the whole masquerade thing just seems silly to me unless you're a straight up villain."
I shook my head. "No, if you want to maintain some kind of civilian life, you're better off talking to New Wave, and maybe even the PRT, to scout out good strategies for keeping you family and friends safe and to help you work out what's actually legal for you to do. For the former I'd suggest either contacting Lady Photon directly, or if you'd rather keep some distance, messaging either Glitzglam or Point_Me_At_The_Sky on PHO and asking them for casual advice. That's Laserdream and Glory Girl's respectively, by the way."
"At a minimum, however.. I'd suggest finding a really good lawyer with expertise in parahuman matters. Brandish may or may not be a good choice there. Depends on what her actual specialty is, and whether or not she serves as her own team's legal defense. I don't actually know. Normally it's definitely a bad idea to represent yourself, but with how backwards cape law and society in general can be, I imagine that knowledgeable, sympathetic defense lawyers with specialties in parahuman law aren't exactly easy to come by. She probably direct you to someone, though."
I hummed in thought for a moment or two.
"Other things I could suggest… get a cellphone, immediately if you don't have one, and keep it on you at all times. Once I get things off the ground here, I'll try and supply you with a, ah, special phone that has a connection to the gate terminal so you can either call for reinforcements or emergency evac from anywhere, but that might take a bit. You should also probably seriously consider reinforcing your house; windows and doors especially. And install some of those home security motion detector cameras that can link up with your phone."
"Aren't those really expensive?" Danny asked with a frown.
I paused.
More expensive than reinforcing your house? I wondered, momentarily confused by his response. Such things were stupid cheap back home. Like, a set of four might run you fifty bucks total for a basic value set.
Then again.. the whole Smarthome Revolution thing would have started around, well, now, 2010-ish Earth Me time, but Bet was supposed to be a fair bit behind the curve, technologically speaking. So wifi-capable, miniature home security systems that interfaced with your phone might legitimately be the domain of tinkertech here.
Eh, worst comes to worst, I could just pay for it myself. Not like money was gonna matter in the long—
Hang on a second, what was I thinking? I was already wealthy by Bet standards! Just.. you know, not in terms of cash. I was flush with gold!
And gold could be pawned.
After mentally facepalming for a brief second, I changed tacks, and held up a finger as I mentally accessed my menu.
"It occurs to me that money will rapidly become a non-issue once I start offering paid healing services, and as a member of the team, Taylor has a stake in that. On which note..."
With a flourish, I withdrew a single gold bar from my inventory.
"Consider this a, ahh.. well, a signing bonus, an advance, and an investment in my new teammate's safety, as it were, all rolled into one."
Taylor and her father's jaws both dropped, the latter nearly fumbling the twenty-plus pound length of bullion as I handed it over. He ended up needing both hands just to shift the thing into his lap.
"You'll want to take that to a gold buyer. Might need an online one, as I have no idea if there are any still around in the Bay. A bank won't take it since its not stamped with a mark they recognize, so you won't be able to get full value, but it should go for about half a mil if my math is right."
Danny stuttered wildly. "W-W-Wha—? But—! I can't just—"
"You can and will," I stressed, closing his hands over the bar with my own and looking him in the eye, "because it is for ensuring your daughter's safety."
With a click of his jaw, that stopped any further protests right quick, though I had to suppress a laugh at just how bewildered and close to fainting Danny looked at holding something he'd probably only ever seen in movies.
…I should probably give the poor man a chance to recover from all the emotional gut-punches he's been handed today, shouldn't I? It wasn't like he needed to know all the sordid details on whole demon thing. Taylor did, sure, it was her life, but she also might appreciate the opportunity to ask questions without her parental figure around…..
Eh, I suppose this was as good a moment as any.
I stood, and clapped once.
"Right! So. With that out of the way, how about I drop you off back home so you can secure that somewhere safe, and start looking into lawyers and such, because I'm sure the PRT is gonna come knocking on your door sooner rather than later. In the meantime, I'll see about getting Taylor her upgrades, and then bring her by the house as soon as we're done so you two can hash out how you want to proceed. We can work out the rest of the arrangements then."
"Sound good?"
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…In a positively shocking twist that I'm sure will no doubt surprise absolutely nobody, it turns out that yes, Taylor is in fact story character material.
"Wheee!"
This was clearly evidenced by the fact that there was now a giggling, teenaged demon girl buzzing excitedly around the gate hub's ceiling, showing every indication of thoroughly enjoying her brand new pair of shiny, golden insect wings.
They were actually rather fetching, all things considered, with a black-edged, gold forewing and a slightly thinner, equally black-edged, white and gold hindwing. Like a pair of dragonfly wings, they buzzed and vibrated while in use, and yet folded downwards into something like a cloak when at rest, as a set of moth wings might.
They also paired quite nicely with her rigid, scarab-like antennae and armored outfit, the latter of which was composed of a set of golden breastplate, gauntlets, and greaves worn over black leathers in a way that showed off just a touch of skin.
Her status sheet claimed she was a "Papillon Demon", which from anime I knew was sometimes a kind of butterfly-themed monster girl. Fitting, I supposed, even if she clearly had far more than just butterfly features.
Not that that really mattered in the strictest sense; plenty of story characters didn't correlate to a generic species whatsoever, and even among those that did, anomalous features weren't uncommon. Hell, Fuuka's whole thing revolved around the people responsible for Judgement running out of Prinny Hide to make Prinny Suits, and so they just slapped a Prinny Hat on her head, left her looking like a human, and called it a day.
My musing was interrupted by Taylor dropping down in front of me in a mostly controlled landing, where she proceeded to turn her slight stumble into a full-on glomping.
"Thankyouthankyouthankyou… !"
Laughing, I accepted the hug for what it was and gave her one in return. "You're very welcome, Taylor. I take it you're happy with the changes?"
Pulling away, Taylor gave me a rather emphatic "Yes!" as she jumped and bounced around repeatedly in a double twirl, buzzing her wings as she went, before taking off again to do another lap around the room.
It warmed my heart to see the girl so damn cheerful, especially after the rollercoaster of a morning she'd had. No sign of lingering trauma at all, or of brooding over any of the emotional bombs I'd ended up dropping on her. Not sure if that was something to with the shift to demonhood and whatever new brain chemistry that involved, the reincarnation process itself, or just having someone supportive giving her something to actually be excited over for a change… but whatever the reason was, I'd take it.
Shaking my head and smiling to myself more than a little, I decided to leave Taylor to explore her newfound mobility on her own for a few minutes, and stepped over to the quest board to hand in the quests I'd 'completed' earlier that morning while I contemplated the events of the past half-hour.
Quests Completed!
Obtained 1000 HL!
In yet another move that definitely shouldn't have surprised me, and yet somehow did anyway, there hadn't really been much in the way of pushback from Taylor regarding the whole 'I want to reincarnate you as a demon' thing.
Instead, after some initial skepticism and being given the barest of rundowns, she'd jumped about ten steps forward in the logic chain, and asked after her mother.
Again, I really shouldn't have been surprised. Pretty sure most people would jump to wanting to see lost loved ones again.
Sadly, I wasn't able to give her a definitive answer, primarily because I had no idea whatsoever about how to go about finding her. Most likely she'd have been turned into a Prinny somewhere by now. She'd been a Lustrumite after all, even if canon hadn't been very clear on whether she had actually been part of the gang or just your typical college girl who was a supporter of the local feminist club or what have you. However, the later Disgaea games made it pretty clear that you basically had to be a freaking saint to avoid Prinnydom, so it was a good bet, but either way actually finding a particular person after their death wasn't something I knew how to do.
Realistically, the only inkling of an idea I had was to just go find Valvatorez and, well.. ask. The dude was so goddamn nice that if he knew where she'd gotten stationed he'd probably just tell us. Assuming he was in charge of training Earth Bet's deceased, anyhow, and it wasn't against those Prinny Rules of his. Neither of which was a guarantee, and I didn't really know how I'd go about finding him.
Taylor, though, had been rather.. well, Taylor, about the whole thing. She'd just up and declared that as long as there was a chance, any chance at all, that she could see her mom again, then she'd fucking do it, and damn the consequences. Told me that as long as I agreed to give her time off occasionally and/or provided the resources to make the attempt, then she simply didn't care about the rest and would learn as she went.
Distinctly amused on account of having read many a fanfic featuring just those sorts of events, I'd decided that I knew better than to argue with one of those Taylors, agreed to her 'demands', and that was that. One reincarnation later, and here we were:
Taylor Hebert, newly minted Papillon Demon.. The Escalation Queen.
Yeah, the multiverse definitely has a sense of humor. Who'd have thought, Disgaea, who'd've thought...
Weapon Mastery
Fist D Spr B Bow C Staff A
Swd D Axe D Gun B Arm C
MnP C MnM S
This class counts as both Humanoid and Monster.
This class can Magichange into a bow.
This class enters a special Dual Magichange as Taylor + Winged Warrior.
Range: 3 (Free). Hits a cross-shaped area. What do you mean, wasps aren't poisonous?
Evilities
Unique: 2 / 2
Common: 0 / 5
Skittering Swarm (Unique, Inherent) — Unit's non-elemental attacks have a 30% chance to inflict a random status ailment.
Omnipresence (Unique, Inherent) — While equipped with a Monster Weapon, Rng increases by 4 and Evilities treat unit as adjacent.
Gear
Weapon 1: (None) Weapon 2: (None)
Etc 1: (None) Etc 2: (None) Etc 3: (None)
Her base stats were damn solid. Definitely above average, heavily weighed towards a support or caster role, and with a rather absurd speed that was no doubt related to her insect heritage. Mothmen, also known as Winged Warriors, were pretty much the definition of 'speed demon', no pun intended.
Interesting to see she counted as both a humanoid and a monster. Echoes of Titanization, maybe? Whatever the reason, the fact that she could Magichange into a bow was extremely serendipitous. That may well have been templated from Mothman just like her speed stat and movement; they'd been bows in some of the earlier games.
The weakness to guns (also a Mothman thing) was unfortunate, given their prevalence among the gangs, but that was very much counterbalanced by all of her other resistances. Fists were the weapon of choice of many brutes, and most blaster and striker powers should fall into the categories of Staff, Monster Weapon, or Fist. Axes meanwhile tended to include improvised heavy weapons like nailbats and clubs.
If the choice was to be resistant to either gang members' guns, or else a wide swathe of parahuman powers and lesser gang weapons, I'd take the latter pick any day of the week.
Taylor's starting Evilities were solid, too, although nothing stellar offhand.
Skittering Swarm had potential if it rolled the chance separately for each enemy in an AoE, and the first half of Omnipresence was nice, if nothing to write home about since it would really only affect basic attacks.
The second half of the latter could be both really good and really bad, though, depending on situation.
Good, because there was all sorts of bullshit I could think of off the top of my head to abuse being adjacent to every enemy on the field. Like that one Sorcerer evility that transmits status ailments afflicting you onto enemy units.
Bad, because there were also plenty of generic classes that get Evilities that debuff you. As an example, she'd always be at a disadvantage when fighting Eryngi; They reduced the stats of any adjacent female characters by 20% — and that sort of thing stacks up to a limit of -50%.
Still, nothing said she couldn't just, you know, switch weapons as the situation demanded, so there was that.
It remained to be seen how useful her Unique Commons would end up being, but the skill shop was currently unavailable, so I couldn't check those just yet. But given the rest, I was cautiously optimistic. At the very minimum, having her subclass into Winged Warrior, Chimera, and Sorcerer would go a long way to making her an absolutely brutal powerhouse of an Ailment Master.
…
Something to go over with her later, then, but for now it looked like the girl was finally wearing out her overabundance of energy, because she came in for a landing, looking a bit winded from her manic zooming around.
I chuckled a bit to myself as she leaned over, hands on her knees, and tried to catch her breath.
"Got it out of your system finally?" I asked with a grin.
"Y-yeah." she puffed lightly, before straightening with a slightly embarrassed look on her face. "Yeah, I think so. So what's next?"
"We need to check in with your dad," I told her, "but first let me show you how to access your status sheet…."
Warning: Spoilers Ahead
If you haven't read up to [Chapter 07], the below may or may not spoil events that have occurred in the story.
(Additional Warning For Chapter 07)
Taylor's purchasable Unique Common Evilities are currently a WIP. They're mostly picked out, but aren't by any means set in stone at the moment. So read that portion at your own risk.
They are included in this post because they are a part of her Master Reference File, and Unique Commons are something that for story characters is normally immediately visible from Level 1 in the Skill Shop, on account of story characters not having Class Tiers to gate them behind.)
I've gone ahead and spoilered that part of her sheet since it's a quick & easy edit, but be advised if spoilers are something you're concerned about.
(Edit: Hmm, interesting. Due to a bug in copy pasting with a missed tag, SV centered the stat blocks. Looks pretty good on mobile that way, especially since SV eats all my spacing tabs and I didn't want to mess with ugly-ass Xtables.
Might keep it that way. Gonna leave the bug as-is and think on it, come back in a few days and decided whether to fix it or make the change for the chapter versions.)
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⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ ⟡ Ashkari's Party Menu (Currently excludes inventory screen, because I haven't gotten to that yet.)
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Range: 3 (Free). Hits a cross-shaped area. What do you mean, wasps aren't poisonous?
Evilities
Unique: 2 / 2
Common: 0 / 5
Skittering Swarm (Unique, Inherent) — Unit's non-elemental attacks have a 30% chance to inflict a random status ailment.
Omnipresence (Unique, Inherent) — While equipped with a Monster Weapon, Rng increases by 4 and Evilities treat unit as adjacent.
Unpurchased Unique Commons
At the time of this writing, this section is partially subject to change. Some of the below Evilities are not set in stone, and I've got several other ideas I'm considering. (Ideally, I want to make all of her Evilities somehow quote related, even if Disgaea doesn't actually do flavor text for every ability.)
I just wanted to stop waffling and get the chapter out, so have left this area from my notes as-is since the Evility Shop hasn't opened yet for Ash or Taylor to view them.
Fun NonCanon Quotes:
• You never can tell, with bees.
• Just your friendly, neighborhood warlord.
• When someone asks if you'd bully a god, you say yes.
Fun Canon Quotes:
• Cut Ties. I'm Sorry.
• We're so very small, in the end.
• She's fucking blind?!
• Fucking Tinkers!
Evility Cutting Floor: The Way Is Through (Slots 3, Cost 1000) — Increase stats by 3% for every enemy on map. Increase stats by 3% for every fallen ally on map.
Unending Tide (Slots 3, Cost 100) — If Monster Weapon is equipped, normal attacks are performed an additional time. You knew it would come to this.
Cunning Pragmatist (Slots 3, Cost 250) — Increased damage dealt to units suffering from an ailment by 25%. You carved out his eyes?!
Resourceful Warlord (Slots 4, Cost 1000) — When using an ailment skill on a target, decrease a random stat that wasn't decreased by 30% for 3 turns.
Inevitable (Slots 4, Cost 5000) —
Increase stats by 3% per ailment inflicted on enemies. Not a promise, not an oath, or a malediction or a curse.
Khepri Ascendant (Slots 5, Cost 30,000) — When successfully inflicting an ailment, 5% chance to inflict Puppet instead. Finally, everyone was working together.
For the curious, regarding where Ash's various baseline stats came from:
The below section is just to help track how I came up with the various starting stats that Ash ended up with.
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Stats & Masteries
• Majin Weapon Mastery — Takes all A's from the Majin's baseline, effectively.
• 'Majin' Weapon Resistance — Since the Majin has no canon WR (since it didnt exist in those games), I fanwanked the D6 Mecha Girl, who has mastery was similar to the Majin's, but at a worse letter grade. (C vs A). Their base Resistance is All 10, so I doubled that.
• Winged Warrior's Fly & Jump
• Stella & Roz' best affinities (with Roz filling in Wind too)
• Stella's melee aptitiudes (hp, att, def, spd)
• Roz' caster aptitudes (sp, int, res, hit)
• A random(ish) mix of each of their stat lines that encourages Ash to go RES Fist/Bow
• +10 Res, +1 Throw, +1 Counter
"CYOA Perks" (Alleged, since the prologue got cut)
• Sword Art Offline (Majin)
• Mover T4 Powers (Winged Warrior)
• Brute T4 Powers (res/throw/counter)
I found her standing over near the southeastern doors: A pale, thin girl, dressed in a white, strapless one-piece skirt with red trim and similarly colored thigh-highs and shoes. A large red bow shaped a bit like tall bunny ears was threaded through her blue hair, and as always she was hugging her eerie, red-eyed stuffed rabbit to her chest like a protective talisman while she watched everyone else with a quietly blank expression.
Like I said I don't know anything about Disgaea so I don't know if "Master" is the general honorific for everyone or if using "Mistress" or "Lady" have different connotations.
Like I said I don't know anything about Disgaea so I don't know if "Master" is the general honorific for everyone or if using "Mistress" or "Lady" have different connotations.
It actually varies a whole bunch, to the point that I've questioned whether or not I should use that honorific or not.
In Disgaea 1, for example (and indeed many of the other games where she has appearances), the English translation has the Prinnies referring to Etna as 'Master Etna'.
Usalia in Disgaea 5 is also referred to as 'Master' by her Prinnies.
Seraphina (also from 5) however, gets referred to as 'Madam' and sometimes 'Lady', Flonne also gets called 'Lady' by a Prinny on some official physical merch, and by some angels in-game in later stories / dlcs, but I don't recall what the Prinnies call her in general in game.
As for Ash, here, I settled on 'Master Ashkari' here because I felt it rolled off the tongue a bit better, much like it does for 'Master Etna'.
Works fine for me? May well be that weird image link issue for mobile that crops ip from time to time with wikia image links. Try opening it in a separate window, sometimes that works. (I mean, you could also just google her name, though, it'll come up)
It's the extra stuff at the end. It's all stuff from the article you pulled the link from for tracking picture size and version updates. We aren't coming from that article so that doesn't hook into anything so just dangles loose and makes the site confused.
For posting wikia pictures you want to get rid of everything after the png/gif/jpeg.
I really like the whole Parahuman Healing License setup and Taylor look really happy with her new form and power.
Anyway I'm hoping we could get Flandre Missy or Angel Missy if that possible though that would mean the girl have to be dying get her out of the Wards and onto the Ashkari's team.
Works fine for me? May well be that weird image link issue for mobile that crops ip from time to time with wikia image links. Try opening it in a separate window, sometimes that works. (I mean, you could also just google her name, though, it'll come up)
In both that and the other dead image (I forgot which one, but I think it's in the same chapter), it works if you go into the URL and change 'static' to 'vignette.'
That's just not how I roll.
