Leviathan takes out most of Brockton Bay and most of her Wards. The city is evacuating, not rebuilding. The Protectorate is stretched thin, thin enough that Kid Win is in danger of slipping through the cracks. He really shouldn't be doing hero work, but what else does he have?
At least he's made a breakthrough with his Tinkering.
Forenote Hi, everyone. I'm new to Sufficient Velocity, please be kind to me. I like the community ethos here and wanted a chance to participate in this side of the Worm fandom, so I'm porting over chapters from the original manuscript release of Endo here. I hope you'll like my fic!
I walked into the workshop. The door closed behind me with a soft hiss. Mental math: arrived at 6, I'll have maybe two hours to myself. Fine.
Anyone who had been inside a Tinker workshop could tell that something wasn't right in this room. Too clean. No notes, no half-finished projects. The surfaces which I would have normally let collect Tinker-grime and messy sketches were pristine. There wasn't even a computer, but I fixed that defect in short order.
I decided to put it on the central desk. As much personality as everything in the room, a standard-issue briefcase PC from the Protectorate. I had requisitioned it yesterday, and it had arrived without ceremony in the little makeshift mailroom next to the dorms.
Nothing to do here but draw up plans. Raw material, machining equipment, and old projects would arrive later. (The no-actual-timeline kind of later.) I got into a little groove, installing some crappy CAD software and starting to doodle. A billet of aluminium, some channels… It's been a while since I worked with fluid, maybe there's something there. Containment foam gadgetry? Supercritical water?
The sketch coalesced into an idea after a half-hour of work. I stood up and took a walk around. Plenty of space for pacing in the empty workshop.
A few laps of the perimeter in, I remembered the pill bottle in my pocket. Right, the new ADHD meds. I stalked off in the direction of the mess hall for some water. Some days I'd get the thought that I could crush up a few and get high, a kind of pharmaceutical call of the void.
I dismissed the thought.
There were people around, none of them really familiar. Plenty of PRT agents had transferred in, milling around in greater numbers than normal. Patrols switched at 8, so unless an emergency was called, there wouldn't be many people around until then. Anyway, the only person I really knew here was Miss Militia, who was the constant-action kind of cape. She was probably out patrolling.
In the mess hall, still nobody. I got my paper cup, filled it up, and gulped down the pill.
There was a window here that faced east, toward what would have been the scenic sunrise if not for the carcass blocking the view.
The Old Rig, an immense thing. I was close to it, so close that the structure was truly imposing. It lay on its side in the bay, half-sunk, bent 40˚ at the middle section. I could imagine the sea water washing over it, corroding what it could, filling rooms with water.
They built another one, slightly bigger, closer to the coast. Where I now ate, slept, and worked. Protectorate Tinkers would probably come to salve what was left of the carcass, rip out the dangerous tech and put it to rest, as if nothing ever happened. That there ever was an Old Rig would be a footnote on tours of the Protectorate ENE Headquarters. The building that the Brockton Bay Wards called home might not even merit a footnote.
I went back to the workstation. The sketch was crap, so I tossed it. I needed to look at something, get some inspiration, to get myself on the right track.
I scrolled through a library of technical manuals and textbooks. What did I need to make?
Anything. I had no tech except the visor covering my face. I was useless in an engagement. Not just right now, but always. Guns failed, I couldn't take a hit, the Hoverboard was probably embedded in the sea floor. The less said about the unwieldy Alternator Cannon, the better.
I thought too slowly, I couldn't do anything useful. My gadgets were easy to lose. I was easy to disarm, and I was nothing without armament. I had experimented with a return-to-me function on some of my pistols, but it always came out taking too much space, unwieldy.
There was a thought. I could always have my gadgets with me.
That vague idea coalesced into an actual design. Gauntlets, to start. Actuators to enhance strength, power distribution throughout. Attachment points for guns, grappling hooks, thrusters. Integrated energy shields.
All in my head, for now. I stopped scrolling through the books, settling on a digitized anatomy textbook. It was easy enough to integrate into the CAD software. With better gear, I could probably scan my actual arms to get micron-accurate measurements and material property data– Best not get carried away. The generic arm model was fine for this prototype.
The first limiting factor for man-portable gadgets was a power source. Fine, you could Tinker around that, or at least I could. The harder thing was operator safety. I knocked out the thrust-vectoring system for the old hoverboard inside a couple days. Making it perform safely in simulations and passing real-world testing for the small throng of eggheads in charge of approving the design… long, boring weeks.
On a whim, I looked closer at the arm model. It was super detailed: skin, with an option to show different collagen patterns as they would appear in a scar; muscles, tendons, and ligaments; nerves; blood vessels; bones. A woven tapestry of individual cells, working together towards a single purpose.
I wondered what Carlos' arms had looked like. Both the same? Did the damage he could put up with leave noticeable marks? How could he heal so quickly? How much punishment could he have taken?
Designing for Aegis, I could run the thrusters at at least 3 times the power. Maybe 10. Heat dissipation would be less critical if third-degree burns were harder to inflict. The design wouldn't have to have so much shielding or direct shrapnel away from the user when pushed beyond its limits.
Something to think about.
Every flier I knew told me the same thing, or near enough: It's great. Feels like freedom, like sex, like a base desire you never even knew you had got fulfilled.
They were only partially full of shit. I got that feeling with the Hoverboard, or some pleasant thing like it, but it could never make it to true flyer territory. Riding the board, I still got that feet-on-the-ground feeling. Surfing the air, not quite flying.
My suit was a horrible barely-working mess. The controls had a tendency to pitch down and some of the thrusters were off balance. No defenses against anything with more stopping power than a birdstrike. My conscience wouldn't have let people other than me operate it, let alone do a night flight like this.
All the same, it worked. I'd settled into a nice and low cruising altitude above the city, ready to feel exhilarated or free, or whatever. It didn't take.
Below me lay what had become of Brockton Bay. I could hardly see through the tiny rectangle of visor in the bulky helmet, but it was easy to make out the main landmark.
A large crater in the centre of the Boardwalk, flooded and wrecked buildings. The scene was painted in grey and brown. The people moving around looked like ants, travelling in small groups. If anything, the miniscule field of view reflected the reality of the experience. Confining and miserable. No context to go off, too far gone to remember what the buildings and streets had looked like before.
My flight wasn't sanctioned, exactly, but the people on the Rig knew where I was and what I was doing. They probably wouldn't come up here to stop me, and might not even mention it in the next meeting. Capes were given a little bit of latitude, more after a traumatic event. Just needed to not push it too much.
Even if someone wanted to discipline me for not filling out enough forms and doing enough safety work, it wouldn't bother me. They couldn't come up with a punishment worse than the week after Leviathan.
Still, there was work to do. I checked off a few items as tested-working on my design checklist. Most of the problems the suit was designed to solve, it did adequately. The inside kept a consistent room temperature even at high altitude. Wind didn't get in, and nothing short of a hurricane should significantly affect flight control. There was more than enough juice to fly the length of Brockton Bay a hundred times.
I was alive and comfortable, even if the suit looked ugly as sin.
I called the suit "Zephyr," foregoing originality. This model made its wearer look a bit like a mattress-man. I'd only had access to primitive insulation, and gave up on force-field tech. Stuff to cram into the next prototype. It had almost nothing in terms of weapons or gadgets, just stark utility. White-on-white polymer insulation kept me warm, electro-thruster packs I'd designed half from memory kept me moving. (Rest in peace, Hoverboard Mk2, you were a fundamentally flawed thing with cool jets.)
To really get a feel for how this thing flew, imagine shooting a stream of air out of your back, feet, and hands while falling. It's workable if you keep moving in one direction, but there's no lift to speak of. No thrusters? No flight. My backup plan was a set of parachutes, including one I wore underneath the suit, and several joints in the frame that would come apart explosively to release me from the wreck.
So, it sucked. I roared into the clouds to push the limits of the avionics, keeping an eye on the temperature and pressure. So far, so good. I took off the limiter, screw it, and pushed the thrusters into uncharted, unsimulated territory. At some point I'd ice over, but that wouldn't affect anything critical.
I flew into the clouds, and something inside me told me that mammals weren't designed to go this high up. White on all sides, until I broke through like a dolphin breaking water. I passed the clouds, and kept going up. The white sea below fell further and further away.
I felt the wind now. A gust knocked into my left hand and turned me. Before I could compensate, another threw my entire body forward. Not enough time to react. The winds came from all sides, constantly, overwhelming what little instinct I had for flying the thing and sent me in a careening downward tumble.
I tried to keep myself going straight, but with each gust, 'straight' became more and more lateral. Maybe the helmet blocked out too much sound: the descent was deathly silent. The only thing I could hear was my own breathing, and the blood pumping past my ears.
I turned off all thrust and fell down, hoping to clear the gusts. What surfaces I could see of my suit, the arms, legs, and chest, were all covered with a thin veneer of ice, sometimes smeared or blown off by the blasts of wind.
I fell to just beneath the clouds, realizing too late that I'd frozen and zoned out in fear. I was falling. No gusts. No lift.
I powered up the thrusters again, and pulled up more detailed flight metrics on my visor. The number indicating the descent velocity had too many places, but–
The horizon did flips. I was turning head-over-heels again, like I was a human wheel mounted on a bellybutton hub. The thrusters on my left side worked, but not on the right, sending me into another spin. I powered off again, and cursed myself for forgetting to include any indication of damaged equipment.
Imitating someone who knew how to skydive, I turned my belly to the ground and spread out my arms. I still had the parachute, but I was pretty sure I could land this. Blast off from the working side, compensate for the centre of mass…
And I was stable!
I let out a triumphant yell. My heart was trying to play a drumroll. My lungs hurt from overexertion. I was sore in most of my body. But I made it.
I was "standing" on one leg in midair in my ugly suit, trying to keep the right half of my body from launching me into another spin. If I stopped moving laterally, I'd lose stability, so I kept a steady forward course. I was probably the worst flyer the Brockton Bay Wards had ever produced.
I'd confirmed that the design was more or less sound, and had notes for the next iteration; so many notes. Time to go back.
The smart thing to do was to go immediately, before any more of the suit broke down. After the aerobatics, I wasn't doing 'smart,' moreso exhilirated. I felt compelled to look down a bit longer.
I saw more from higher up. The outline was cleaner. The whole of the coast looked as big as the span of my hand. It was the same ruined city. Some flying capes had survived the disaster, but none were out in the skies with me. Maybe they all left.
The matter-of-fact statistic, "one in four die," had sounded reasonable to me, at some point. Somehow. It invoked heroism, defiance in the face of apocalypse, action movie stuff. It didn't get across the devastation, or the feeling in the pit of my stomach that I could never go back to anything that I had had before.
The statistic wasn't even accurate. Everyone I loved was gone.
BnL's Ed Robertson said:
…From the ceiling, my coffee cup drips
While out my window, the horizon does flips
The worst part was hitting the ground…
Phew. The start is always hardest. At some point you've gotta swallow your fear of failure, stop editing, and shoot your shot. Hopefully it's readable.
That said, thanks for reading! Or if it wasn't readable, thanks for scrolling down to this section, which probably is.
Would you go on a joyride in Chris' flying Michelin Man costume?
Endnote II: Endnote Harder Question: How can I create new tags? I would like to tag this thread with the main character featured in my fanfiction, Kid Win, and also tag this as a post-Leviathan story. Help would be appreciated. 😁
Here I go again. Welcome to Endo, my latest Worm fic. Table stakes: Expect a rousing two-to-three chapters and a disappearing author. First chapter is intentionally shorter than the rest. More to follow tomorrow, and so on, and so on.
On the off chance I make it past 20,000 50,000 words, I'll commission a grand Victory Banner from an artisan of high repute, hang it up above my headboard, and pray to it every night.
Fic/Thread Info
The content above this heading was the original contents of this informational post. Oh, how far we've come. This info post was last updated as of the publication of 1.9a.
I also publish Endo on Archive of Our Own. I've got all the chapters posted up now, seemingly without any horrible formatting snafus. If you'd like to read Endo on an e-reader, you can use their Download feature to get an e-book file of the story so far.
Endo is pretty much a pure-Worm AU fanfic, that is to say, this is not a crossover, nor a self-insert fic. (Although some may question my characterization of Kid Win, I don't intend to write him as Chris-in-Name-Only.) I try to stick to the canon of Worm fairly closely, but I'm no lore scholar and I've gotten several things wrong at this point. Original characters may be introduced as we go on, but as of the end of Arc 1 I haven't included any.
(Some) Content Warnings
The Worm fandom tends to produce works that are Worm-like in tone, which is to say, they come with the same kind of blanket content warning as is found on Wildbow's website. This fic is no exception, but I've listed out some common things that people might be watching out for. I can write up a more exhaustive list of content warnings if someone requests it, but these are the obvious ones off the get-go. I also try to mark chapters that are particularly out of the ordinary with a little forenote. The inline spoilers in the following list detail the context for the warning.
General warnings:
Major character death, grief — Should be obvious why if you read the synopsis in the thread description, or the first chapter.
Self-harming ideation
Blood and gore — I think I'm prone to writing a little gratuitously about injury. I try to make myself cringe out of sympathy when describing wounds.
Amputation — We don't see the act itself, but the result.
Vomit/Emetophobia — In one chapter, a character coughs up an eyeball.
Somewhat-inherited from Worm itself:
Guns, gunshots
Overt racism — The Chosen are featured in one chapter.
Body horror, completely-transformative — Think monstrous parahumans and various Bonesaw creations from Worm.
Other Topics
On Word of God
Expect my answers to plot questions raised in this thread to only reference facts already established in the fic so far. But please, ask away! Other readers in the thread might be interested in hypothesizing. I just don't like to make any Word of God statements that would in some sense spoil later parts of the story.
On the Publishing Schedule
Ha, ha — Unfortunately, there isn't one. I usually write with no backlog, and I balance writing Endo with a day job, somewhat-active social life, and numerous other hobbies. I try to not go longer than two months between chapters, but so far I haven't been able to hold myself to any kind of regularity. Feel free to reach out via forum PM if you're curious about when the next chapter will release.
On Beta Readers
Chapters tend to come out better-written if they've had someone other than me give them an editing pass. I am always looking for more beta readers, people who are willing to read and critique drafts of upcoming chapters. Please give me a message on the forums if you'd like to throw your hat into the ring and become a regular beta reader. You can also contact me via the Cauldron Discord server, or via the SpaceBattles Discord server. I try to put a shout-out to all the betas that helped out with a chapter in the endnote.
…Out of sheer desperation, I am now keeping a link to an open-season Google Doc containing the half-edited draft of the current chapter in my forum signature. Maybe I should take the hint at this point and stop asking so often.
Ephemera
Old Thread Description
Leviathan wrecks Brockton Bay beyond recognition, and probably beyond repair. The Wards are all gone, save Kid Win and Shadow Stalker. The Protectorate is stretched too thin, and Kid's outlook is bleak.
But hey, at least he's made a breakthrough with his Tinkering.
…where, if you stick with it long enough, you get to see some bone. (Eagle-eyed readers will point out we already have seen some bone, but I'm technically correct nonetheless. Wait no! It wasn't an open fracture. I fool myself.)
…where Kid Win! has a series of increasingly bad times, and where the author tries not to push past the believability threshold too much… and fails sometimes.
…where Kid Win! has suffered a Major Leviathan Event, and in its aftermath frequently gives Tattletale the chance to show off how awesome she is. Funny how that works out.
Assault cleared his throat and pressed a finger to one of his earbuds. "Corner of Aldridge and Chestnut," he said, "Everyone's assembled, let's head."
The intersection looked sufficiently battered as to pass for any part of the Brockton core. That he could identify the pile of weathered concrete and rubble we were walking through as Aldridge and Chestnut spoke to his years of patrol experience.
"Start patrol," said a voice through my earpiece. "This is Ashfield on console."
Ashfield, not a hero name. Huh, I never actually thought about who was the Protectorate heroes' console minder.
"New guy, huh," said Assault, hand on his hip. "Battery, we ever get an Ashfield?"
"Don't think so," she said. "Lots of rookies and transfers in Brockton now. What's the plan?"
"Take our own rookies down the coast and up again," he said, looking us over, "We get the second quarter, up till Lord Street."
I could almost feel Shadow Stalker's vein popping at being called a 'rookie,' but she made the tiniest hint of a grunt and had no further input. In contrast to Assault and Battery's "true experience," we were fast-tracked through Protectorate membership via a program I wasn't entirely sure existed. Probably a good thing. It wouldn't be good to bench Shadow Stalker right after the disaster. She'd probably kill someone.
The real reason was pragmatism – all the forces of good were struggling after the attack. Unscrupulous villains in other northeastern cities took advantage of their rivals leaving to fight Leviathan in Brockton. If you were a smart enough villain, you'd see the opportunity a mile away – the Endbringers' precog blindspot made for a perfect timing window for big offensives. The Truce kept the peace, but some skirted the edge of acceptable behaviour, attacking immediately after Leviathan walked back into the ocean. The Elite capitalized hard in New York, sending in heavy hitters to claim much of the city as theirs. Boston suffered a rampage at the hands of the Teeth. We weren't the only disaster around. All that, plus the fact that Brockton got hit as hard as it did, made capes who would have stayed to help out leave quickly.
We'd been moving in a square formation, by default more than any conscious impulse. Assault and Battery in the front, Shadow Stalker and me following behind.
All things considered, it was a pretty stupid patrol setup. Too many people, for one — HQ was being careful and putting heroes in large groups. Then were the obvious experience and rapport issues… We'd never even trained together with Assault and Battery. I was just glad I could get off the damn Rig.
Our team leader set the pace. Assault walked briskly, and had Battery flit out to scout the blocks to the left and right of our group. We moved in a crescent, tracing the outline of the Crater, Brockton's newest landmark.
Five blocks in, Shadow Stalker piped up after Battery bolted left to scout. "Haven't been out since Leviathan," she said. "Looks like shit."
"It doesn't look like Brockton anymore," Battery said through the radio. "Power's off, hardly any people around."
"I don't know why we even bother," she said. "More people died or left than stayed. At this point, we're just keeping company for the villains who haven't figured it out yet, and giving handouts to the rats who were too scared and weak to leave. I would've left the day after the attack, if they'd let me."
"Hey, keep up morale," said Assault. "Should get easier to recover every year. More Tinkers to help rebuild, faster evacuation, more warning before the storm. It got bad, but the response was better than ever."
At the mention of Tinkers, I turned to look at him. He shot me a smile. Optimist.
"S'been two weeks since. Look around, see any Tinkers rebuilding?" asked Shadow Stalker, pointing at the rubble.
Leviathan attacks were part-tsunami, so it was expected that the effects would be the worst near the coast. And the areas that had been made into coast. City blocks looked un-done. Buildings fell apart and poured bits of their façades onto sinking streets. More cars were flipped over than upright, tossed around like Tonka trucks by waves, leaking oil and gas into the street, turning puddles an iridescent brownish black.
Shadow Stalker pointed at the building directly to our left, a recently-finished shopping mall. Built with large staircases leading up to an elevated plaza with water features, green space, and jumbotrons hung on two of the walls, it once must have sparkled of an architect's renderite dreams.
Now? The wide staircases and promenade sloped in a shallow 'V' whose point hugged a fallen-over flagpole radiating cracks throughout the masonry. All surfaces had cracked, broken, and rapidly weathered. The whole thing was covered in bits of broken concrete and glass, garnished with a speckling of exposed, rusting rebar.
"We were always patrolling a shithole, and now it looks it, too," she said.
I agreed, a bit. Nobody would be moving to Brockton Bay for years. The engineering challenge alone was enormous, and not worth solving if nobody was around to benefit from the public works.
"There's still people to help, and a job to do," said Assault. "It'll get better, complaining won't help."
I suppressed a sigh. Team lead. Good that he got the last word in, but I didn't share his confidence.
Assault took us on a diagonal path, further from the completely-wrecked buildings around the coast. The city looked significantly more habitable with every block we travelled inward, eventually reaching the point where the streets were rough, but drivable.
My suit was a genuine Tinkertech marvel now, not just a padded flying coffin. I looked like an off-brand Armsmaster, and could do more than imitate an airplane. I'd finally cracked force fields (with a little cribbing from physics papers) and changed the design around to look less "marshmallow man" and more "kickass robot-assisted mensch."
The suit's helmet enlarged a map in the corner of my vision, and highlighted several moving targets to our left. Kind of a silly idea, I was glad it actually worked – reflection sonar. I could track movement in the city without light by bouncing sound waves off of buildings. I fiddled with the interface for a moment and got the sonar readout to show up on the main display. I saw the pings as if I had a weak form of x-ray vision. Red shapes ahead and to the left of us, visible through the buildings.
"Battery," I said, pointing towards the blobs, "What's four blocks that way?"
She was gone before I could register her departure. I heard her reply over the radio.
"Supply convoy, one of ours. Console?"
"Checking it," Ashfield said, typing loud enough for us to hear. "PRT trucks, coming in on schedule. No heroes escorting it, but this area was marked safe as of yesterday."
"Hm," said Assault. "Seems like the only life around here."
I took a closer look at my map, and managed to get the software to overlay PRT incident report locations overtop of it. Nothing in this area.
"Don't tell me we're going to babysit the handout marines," said Shadow Stalker.
"With how sparse the rest of the city is, eh," began Assault, moving his hands as though he were weighing the option, "I say yes, we'll follow the most interesting thing."
Shadow Stalker groaned, not even trying to hide it. Assault shot her a warning glance.
"Good spotting, Kid," he said. "Should've gotten wind of this in our patrol brief, though."
"Catch up, team," said Battery. "Watch over them from the rooftops."
Assault leapt, hitting the ground and bouncing off it like a supersonic rubber ball. Shadow Stalker took off in a run and scaled a rickety fire escape at speed, getting on top of a mostly-intact apartment complex in her Breaker state.
I powered up for flight. Calf-mounted thrusters pointed straight down and put out a pleasing orange-red exhaust plume and spooled up to full power. Starting with a high-pitched whine and getting up to a bassy roar, I took them from idle to VTOL. Wings deployed from my back and stubby control surfaces extended from my forearms.
Go time.
I shot off the ground and reached rooftop height quicker than either Assault or Shadow Stalker. My flying could use some work, but it wasn't half-bad with computer assistance. I started to burn sideways for the 90˚ turn a full two stories before I got clear of the buildings, trusting my work on the flight assist to stop me from splatting into the glass.
"Whoa," yelled Assault, close enough that I could hear his actual voice, but only make out the words over radio. We flew side-by-side for a moment, then our paths diverged. "Nice work, Kid!"
I didn't splat. At the apex, I got a stomach-turning two feet away from the edge of the building, barely clearing it. Maybe a bit more margin for error would be best, but that's for later-me. Now-me… Now-me was a fucking rocket.
From takeoff to landing, I was grinning. The flight path was nearly ballistic, and I rode an adrenaline high through the computer's instruction to turn off all thrust and coast. With a clear view of the, well, still-ruined Brockton Bay downtown core, I got a shot of that 'flier feeling.' Trusting your power, or your tech, to carry you faster than any human was ever meant to go, and going. Yeah, that was a special kind of high.
I got ahead of the convoy in no time, turning my body backwards and braking with the thrusters. About four blocks ahead of the lead truck, I hung on to a balcony on one side of the street and watched the trucks.
"Convoy in sight!" I yelled.
"Patching you in to convoy comms, team," said Ashfield. A moment later, a gruff voice, filtered through scratchy CB radio equipment, joined the conversation in the headset.
"Lead driver of the convoy reporting, hello escort."
"Wish this was planned just a bit better," said Assault, "Good we've got you looped in. Nothing to worry about yet."
It was probably a rough ride in there. The road bounced up and down, and the suspension on the trucks didn't look like it damped much of the shaking. It looked like they were having trouble keeping to one side of the road, but at least there were no sinkholes or impassable sections along this stretch. It was a testament to those tasked with building fortifications to absorb Leviathan's waves that any part of the city could handle road traffic.
I looked ahead, and saw more red blobs.
"Three, uh, four more targets up ahead," I said.
Assault landed on the roof of the building opposite the one I was clinging to.
"Gonna scout ahead," Battery said, then a second later, "Shit!"
A heartbeat later, Battery was up here with us. "Chosen ambush," she said. "Looks like Hookwolf, Cricket, and a Blaster I didn't get a good look at."
"Our favourite Nazis," said Assault. "You get hit?"
"Grazed, not hurt," she said, pointing to a rip in her bodysuit at the left shoulder. "Blaster. They know we're here now."
"Too bad. Ashfield, we're stepping in to protect the convoy. Hate to ask, but Kid, you got weapons in that thing?"
"Laser cannon and a stun phaser," I said. "Er, they're mostly untested."
I had some misgivings about those weapons. The laser was… frankly a liability. It required enough power that I couldn't fly while shooting, and there were few situations that called for utter destruction by concentrated light. The 'stun phaser' was a beefier version of my old spark pistol, designed half from memory, half from reverse-engineering my own scrap. It boasted a frustratingly long wind-up time and several firing modes.
He tilted his head and shrugged. "It'll do. Man, who I'd kill for actual briefings. Stretched too thin. Battery, make a lap around where you saw 'em, see who you can see. Safe distance."
She was off.
"Hello convoy," Assault said, pressing a finger to his earpiece, "Team of four capes here to support, Assault speaking. There's an ambush ahead, please stop the train and form up to defend. Are we the only escorts?"
"Yes sir, you and a squad car," said the lead driver, "Good to hear from you. Stopping now."
A team of PRT soldiers got out of a black tank-looking thing in the middle of the convoy. Four people to a side, they stood ready to fire on whatever came out ahead.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw another blip on the sonar – behind and above me, a green point-up triangle.
"Could've waited," Shadow Stalker said.
"The hand you're dealt, rookie," Assault said, "Alright, both of you, non-lethal engagement, get out of dodge if it gets too hot. They start anything, convoy's gonna evacuate and we'll be protecting property, which ain't worth killing heroes over. Got it?"
Stalker and I both nodded. "Alright," he said, "Let's get down."
At that, Shadow Stalker took on a peeved tone. "Hey, team leader? Just gonna throw away the stealth option right now?"
Assault looked back at her and paused for a beat. I got the feeling that he wasn't used to teenage backtalk. "They. Know. We're. Here," he said, starting to slide down the building he clung to. "Just get down."
And that was that. Assault had a point, they had seen Battery already. If it came to blows, it would be a straight fight.
Each of us came down, forming a lopsided 'V' with Assault at the centre. So far, it was quiet at street level.
Looking ahead, I saw that the Chosen had announced themselves, stepping out of the alleys and lining up in the middle of the street a full block away from us. Left-to-right: Cricket, laughing to herself; Hookwolf, arms crossed; Stormtiger, clenching his fists and half-activating his compressed-air claws like a stress toy. Backing them up, a mob full of skinhead hooligans.
Far from their heyday, the Nazis before us looked haggard. None of the capes wore costumes as such, opting for casual clothing and face coverings. Their clothes hadn't seen the inside of a washing machine since probably before Leviathan. Hookwolf's riveted-together metal mask had an unsightly crack in its bottom, and I could swear that Cricket's metal-cage helmet getup was rusting around the crevices.
Ech. I wasn't excited to find out what the two bare-chested animal-themed Nazis smelled like after a week of hygiene ranking close to last on their priority list — hopefully I wouldn't get into fisticuffs with either of them.
Their foot soldier skinheads looked like skinheads. A few had pistols drawn, others wielded tire irons and Halligan bars.
Stormtiger hocked a bit of spit at the ground and yelled across to us, "Fuck off, idiots. This is Chosen territory."
"Now, now, heroes," said Hookwolf, backing up his teammate. "We won't warn you twice, don't pick this fight. Let your people in the convoy know their supplies are our property."
The detachment of Nazis behind the villains made a mix of jeering sounds and "Yuh"s in response.
Shadow Stalker stepped in front of Assault. "Attacking a supply train, and you call us idiots," she said.
"Black chick keeps mouthing off, this won't end so good for you," said Stormtiger. Mirroring her motion, he stepped out of the line of Nazis and pointed one of his arms at her, compressed-air claws extending from his clenched fist.
Assault put his arm out in front of Shadow Stalker, as though that would defuse the situation. "We can't both get what we want, folks," he said. "It's four verse three, plus the normals. Take your chances if you like, but we're not rolling over for villains."
"So be it," said Hookwolf. "Stormtiger, if you would?"
Go time. Battery had been charging for the duration of the conversation, and shot into motion to flank Cricket, Shadow Stalker went Breaker, and I unhinged my jaw as I realized that Stormtiger was aiming his air-claws at the centre of the group: Assault and me. He'd been charging the blast since he pointed his fist our way. Not good.
I fired thrusters up and ahead, aiming at nothing in particular, but it was too late. I felt the familiar too-many-gees sensation in my stomach, then a heavy impact in my left foot, travelling up the rest of my body. Stormtiger's blast struck true as I was going up, sending me into a head-over-heels spin. In the air, I started charging my left gauntlet — the stun phaser — hoping it would work outside the lab.
The forcefields definitely worked, which was a relief. My leg wasn't puréed by the impact, and I wasn't punctured by the few bullets that hit the suit as I shot up.
A half-second later, I discovered that the flight computer also worked, correcting for the spin and maintaining my trajectory. That would put me between the villains and their crowd of skinheads. Or, it would have put me there, in a controlled environment.
I watched Assault do just about the same get-out-the-way manoeuvre that I was attempting, but better. Instead of jumping above the Chosen, he aimed sideways and bounced off an apartment building to our left, aiming to separate Hookwolf from his teammates and take him into an alley to the right.
In contrast to his graceful bounce-tackle, I sailed gaily through the air in unpowered flight. Stormtiger shot me in mid-air with a just-as-strong blast that must have come from his other arm. It hit my upper back and sent me tumbling again, upwards. My suit helpfully played a 'ding' noise, as though it wanted to put an exclamation point on the 'BLAM' of the impact.
Bad. I didn't like being juggled. The suit once again corrected for the spin, but I needed to think quick. I activated all of the thrusters and went into a powered hover. I saw a blur travelling directly at my head and felt an almost-whiplash in my neck as my suit activated all of the left-side thrusters to full burn. Enough to dodge Stormtiger's weak follow-up shot.
Thankful as I was for the flight computer, it clearly needed some adjustment – I'd be feeling all those gees when we got back to the Rig. Or maybe I needed some practice with the manual controls.
My stun phaser had been charged up for half of the involuntary aerial acrobatic performance, (the ding!) and I had finally stopped tumbling for long enough to shoot it. With a loud pew, the gun in my gauntlet shot out a greenish-blue blast and struck Stormtiger's bare chest, making him keel over.
A hit! He wasn't knocked out, but getting the Blaster out of the fight was good news. I was about to tell Battery, but she was there already. A heartbeat after Stormtiger bent down to catch his breath, she came up behind him, preparing a burst of blue lightning–
Only for him to blast her away with a weak shot from his left hand. A split second after the blast connected, he punched her with the other hand, also bearing claws. He yelled — probably an animal-themed-cape thing, Hookwolf was also growling and shouting in the distance — and shot off a stronger claw at his now-airborne target.
Bah. Of course it wouldn't be that easy.
Battery was sent flying away, and stayed in the air for longer than should be possible. Stormtiger must have blasted her away with a follow-up gust of wind. She landed on her feet and darted deep into an alley, out of sight. Judging by her costume's waning glow, she was mere seconds away from her charge running out, and had planned her follow-up to my blast assuming that Stormtiger would be much more indisposed. Score none for my weapons.
With Battery away and my stun gun was still charging, Stormtiger was set to take advantage of the break in the action. He stomped his feet and charged up columns of air around his calves. I aimed my stun gun right at his stupid tiger-face mask, waiting for the charge. I heard the report of a quick volley of shots from the Nazi crowd, felt the light tap against the force-fields, nearly charged– 'ding!'–
The shot was set to hit his head, but his super-jump came just in time. The stun field struck a gun-carrying skinhead behind Stormtiger, making his hand squeeze the trigger and put a bullet hole into a still-upright trash can on the sidewalk.
I'd never seen Stormtiger do that in PRT briefing footage or anything. I made a quick mental note to check the bodycam afterwards.
No time to think – There was a missing Blaster. I looked around in a hurry, trying to ignore Cricket fighting Shadow Stalker to the left and the power couple hemming in Hookwolf to the right. A little too late, I remembered my sonar, helpfully informing me of a target far above me and at 5 o'clock.
I looked at him just in time to get hit. I lost all of my senses for what, in the moment, seemed like eternity. My head was emptied of thoughts.
Then, one smug idiot part of my brain chimed in with, Everyone has a plan until they get shot in the face.
Back on the ball, I gained awareness of my body just in time to take control of the spin-adjustment before the computer could get to it. I was tumbling, feet higher than my head. Stormtiger would more than likely hit the follow-up shot, but I could avoid another headshot. I fired thrusters all over the suit, setting myself spinning on a different axis, then setting the thrusters to fire in a different direction a half-second later.
Of course, he hit the follow-up, anyway. It wasn't as bad as the first.
In the moment of pain after the shot, I gained newfound awareness of my head and right knee. Both were throbbing. The spin-move worked, so at least my head wasn't double-throbbing. The armour's force-fields saved them from deadly compressed air shockwaves, but let through the plain blunt-force trauma. I hoped I wasn't concussed.
My delayed move was smart, though I didn't have the best aim. I opened my eyes too many moments after the last shot connected, and quickly saw two things: Stormtiger, seemingly standing on air (another one for the bodycam footage rewind party) and the rapidly-approaching wall of the closest building. The Blaster had completely failed to predict my controlled flight into terrain, and missed with his follow-up claws. I didn't count the shots, but hoped he wouldn't have a claw ready in the next two seconds.
With far too little space between the brick and my elbow, my panicked course correction straightened out my trajectory, now drawing a line that ran parallel to the building. No shots came, though I remained tense, flinching at another 'ding.' I turned the corner, making it in time to my destination, an alley which I hoped would provide cover from Stormtiger.
I caught my breath. The battle ambience was quiet up here. Even the chatter on the comms had gone quiet.
Shadow Stalker broke the silence, yelling, "Motherf–," pausing as if her speech was censored, then continuing,"–cunt goddamn Nazi. Get Stormtiger!" Phasing in and out, I bet. Not good.
Assault and Battery were busy with Hookwolf, and Shadow Stalker was fighting Cricket. I was now one half of a Flier-versus-Flier fight. A not-quite-plan formed in my head. I flew to the other corner of the building and looked through the building, at the red blob which had to be Stormtiger. I double-checked the sonar view, two o' clock. I'd have maybe one attempt here.
I yelled, "Battery, watch for falling bodies!"
Full thrust. I'd been squeezing the trigger inside the suit from the moment I started accelerating, counting on maybe a quarter-second to actually aim once I was up from the ledge. I adjusted my aim to get as close to Stormtiger's head as possible, and didn't stop to watch the projectile. Already, there was compressed air coming my way, and all I could do was duck down.
I flew back to the street and caught a peek at Stormtiger's limp body just as Battery entered into motion. Score one for my weapons. She bounced off one of the buildings, knocking some bricks loose, and caught the unconscious Nazi in time. He was lucky to have stayed at rooftop level. Battery caught him and set him down on a nearby roof, then carried him down the face of the building, disappearing from view.
"Tiger's in the dumpster," she said with a hint of satisfaction.
Right after I stopped to gawk, the mob's gun-toters shot another volley at me with renewed fury, and just as little effect as their first try.
Flying low to the ground, I set the stun-phaser to 'wide beam' mode and shot off rounds at the crowd. It didn't incapacitate as well as the focused version, being more annoying than anything, but one shot was plenty for general crowd control. The Nazis in the front stepped back, some even fleeing entirely.
I heard a guttural roar from my right, followed by something that I could actually make out as words:
"I'LL KILL ALL THE COWARDS, STAND YOUR GROUND!"
Hookwolf, not a great employer. The crowd was dispersing, despite his directions, and none of the Nazis could fire their weapons.
Battery was back on the scene, now bouncing between the Changer and the throng of Nazis. She managed to disarm the ones with pistols for good within a few seconds, effecting even more attrition. Out of juice, she stepped into an alcove to recharge, only for Hookwolf to advance on Assault, pushing him forward a metre at a time.
Before I could think to help, I felt, then heard, then saw a horrible and primal noise that seemed to come from all around me.
My vision filled with pulsating red blobs.
"Shit!" I cried. The noise stopped, but my head was still ringing, and I wasn't sure which way was up. I ran through the list of villains in the fray – this was Cricket's power. I got my face out of the grimace I didn't notice I'd been making and quickly turned off the 'x-ray' sonar display, unblinding myself and trying to shake off the nauseous feeling.
Stupid past self, writing flaky code. Powers were powers, but that shouldn't have blinded me.
Way too late, I realized what Shadow Stalker meant in the pre-fight conversation. With better coordination and more time to get to know his team, Assault might have kept her hidden instead of putting her out in the open.
Might have been good to keep me in the wings too, but I didn't trust my aim that much.
As is, she wasn't doing well against Cricket. I heard Shadow Stalker's crossbow twang as she shot a bolt that should have hit Cricket. Instead, the villain bent to the ground as though she was playing Limbo, dodging the shot. With supernaturally precise footwork, she stepped backwards and turned the extreme bending motion into a leap towards Shadow Stalker.
Then, she charged towards Shadow Stalker and yelled in a horrible rasping timbre.
The hero was in her Breaker state, ready to phase into a brick wall, so it was hard to tell what Cricket was hoping to accomplish — until she emitted another drone. Coming from up close, the sound made Shadow Stalker stumble and press her free hand up to her head before she could get off a crossbow shot. She stopped phasing, flickering in and out of her wispy form.
"Fucking bitch!" she yelled.
"Watch out!" I shouted at Shadow Stalker, burning hard towards Cricket. It wasn't an effective warning, but Shadow Stalker got her wits about her in time anyway, and managed to dodge the kama coming at her left side…
Only to get headbutted in the stomach by the villain's metal-cage helmet.
Shadow Stalker rolled with the hit and phased through the brick wall, getting out of Cricket's range.
Leaving me to deal with her.
I flew fast, noting that "gun ready" indicator for the stun blaster was lit up on my visor. Cricket's sonic blast had covered up the stupid 'ding' sound.
She knew I was coming. I realized that twice on my approach: Once when I shot the stun blast at her and she made the smallest dodge possible that would get her out of the way, and again when I was five feet away, not quite far enough to dodge one of her kama flying directly at me. It struck my helmet and embedded in the outer acrylic layer of the visor.
I made some undignified noises and hoped they didn't come through.
The same motion that threw her kama spun her around. She was facing me, giggling a little at the ineffective Tinker.
I yanked her kama out of my newly dented and scratched visor. The heads-up display broke apart in spots, which made me glad that I didn't go with the camera-feed display.
I made a circle around her, trying to bait her into throwing the second kama. No dice. She made the blast again, and I regained control just in time to shoot her with the wide-beam stun blast.
No reaction. Probably a low-level Brute, great. More undocumented powersets.
She timed her sonic blast well. I came to just barely in time to avoid crashing to the ground. Then, she struck. First, a clean strike to disarm me, reclaiming her kama. Then, a big overhead swing aimed at my neck.
Luck, intuition, more secret powers (Was she a Combat Thinker? I hoped not), whatever it was, her strike would have been fairly catastrophic. Three plates of shielding overlapped at my neck, and had to flex in order to accomodate my head's range of motion. Flexible forcefields were weak forcefields, and some complicated physics made the three-overlap arrangement uniquely bad. My mind was running at full speed, trying to anticipate what would happen. With all my might, I slammed on the thruster controls, which would have sent me flying backwards and above.
The impact never came. Shadow Stalker shot a shadow-shrouded stun-bolt at her face, just in time. Cricket deftly moved out of the overhead-swinging motion, leaving me unscathed. I flew back into a slightly-higher orbit around the villain, high on adrenaline.
Now hopefully outside the range of her bag of tricks, I tried desperately to think of some way to fight her alone. Plan A was the stun blast, dodged, Plan B was the wide field, ineffective. Plan C was the laser cannon — way too lethal and about as easy to dodge as the stun blast — that's out. Plan D… didn't exist.
"Kid!" yelled Assault, evidently leaving Battery in charge of the Hookwolf problem. I turned my head to face him, just in time to notice and dodge the black canister-grenade he had lobbed at Cricket.
There came Plan D: Hit her with a better area attack.
I pulled a few too many gees flying backwards towards the centre of the street, getting away from soon-to-be-entomed Cricket and towards the fight around Hookwolf. I still kept an eye on her, not quite trusting Assault's timing and aim.
Like a horrible Elephant's Toothpaste demonstration, the grenade exploded into a shower of metal shrapnel (which was all flying directly upwards, clever design) and an expanding glob of containment foam. I realized that I'd lost track of Shadow Stalker, but brushed off the worry. She could phase through foam. Cricket, on the other hand? With non-Mover speed, she was boned.
Hookwolf, meanwhile, was contained but not neutralized by Assault and Battery. He was a vaguely wolf-shaped mess of sharp stuff, fitting neatly into the category of Changer that liked to ham up the transformation thing by growling and making animal sounds as he grew frustrated by the stalemate. Neither hero had hurt him – nor had he hurt them.
Assault turned himself slippery and deftly dodged Hookwolf's strikes in melee range, all the while pushing him back. Battery backed up her partner whenever the fight turned for the worse, bouncing off Assault and using her charged-up superhuman strength to bodily shove him, attacking at different angles each time. Some hits got through, anyway. Battery's suit had accumulated rips past the first one. It seemed that she had stayed too long in the Hook-zone several times, just in time for a well-timed strike to connect at the very start of her cooldown time. One long rip ran along her left side, clearly bleeding.
I didn't have any great plan for taking down the remaining Nazi. If containment foam was a sure bet, Assault would've used it already. My stun gun would probably fail on Changer biology in either mode, and would definitely fail when fired at, effectively, a big chunk of metal. The laser cannon was very, very untested, and Hookwolf was at least slightly reflective. Even if it managed to do something, the possibility of a slightly-charred Battery was enough to dismiss that.
Useless.
I didn't have to wallow in my impotence, though. Hookwolf seemed to come out of his animal rage, backing up a full block out of Assault's reach, and eliciting a pause in the fighting. Seeing his teammates fall to the heroes, he growled a final growl and set off moving.
"Don't chase!" yelled Assault. Battery didn't need the instruction, but she nodded anyway.
"What a rush! But we're not done yet," said Assault, then paused to think. He turned to Battery. "Or did you foam the Tiger?"
"Nope," she said, "He's a couple blocks over. Assault, Shadow Stalker, follow behind. Kid, hover up front. Is he uh, conked out?"
"Ought to be," I said.
She led the way to Stormtiger, who was indeed in a dumpster, face-first, weakly wiggling his legs. Not knocked out completely, but hopefully still dazed. It was a half-sneaky approach: he must have heard footsteps, but we said nothing in his earshot. I hovered above him.
I looked back at Assault for direction. He pointed to Battery, miming opening the dumpster, then at me, shooting finger guns.
I was charged and ready. Battery dashed over and opened the lid, then, pew.
Right in the back. Stormtiger moaned, reverberating through the dumpster. Battery, now fully on top of the dumpster, shook her head at me.
"Missed," I said. Embarassing. I wished my phaser gun had a heavier sound. And auto-aim.
After the requisite 'ding,' I took another shot, lining it up a bit longer this time. Pew.
And nailed him in the dome! The legs stopped wiggling. He sure looked unconscious.
"Woo-hoo!" exclaimed Assault, "Good work, team."
Shadow Stalker glared at our indefatigable leader. "Team," she said.
That elicited no reaction from Assault. He got out a pair of handcuffs and started pacing. "Well," he said, "Fantastic outcome, all considered. Normally, they would've backed off sooner, though." Pressing his finger up to his earbud, he said, "Ashfield, convoy can get back to what they're up to as soon as we finish the arrests. How soon's a PRT unit going to be at our location? Need a pickup with equipment to contain Stormtiger and muffle Cricket, plus cuff maybe fifteen gang members."
"So the patrol's over?" asked Shadow Stalker.
"Nope!" said Assault, "Now we get to escort the convoy."
There goes a fight! Kid doesn't always brood — only when he's not in a fight.
I was on autopilot throughout the rest of the patrol and the debrief after, in a half-conscious state that left me wondering what exactly had happened. I stopped actively listening at the five minute mark, instead drafting a design using my broken visor. The eye-movement controls sucked, but CAD was CAD, and by the midpoint of the meeting the plans were being made into reality at my workshop.
The meeting couldn't have been that important. I'd just feed the bodycam recording into some transcription software later. I came out of my design-trance at the end of the meeting, just as the capes and PRT agents that had gathered were beginning to stand up and grab their effects.
Assault had led the proceedings in a lively fashion. He really seemed to never run out of energy, an advantage in the hero business. A Protectorate cape spent less time in active engagements or on quiet patrols than on doing public outreach, mentoring Wards, and sitting through endless meetings, briefings, and debriefs. Or so I was told – my experience of Protectorate capehood was a lot less varied, as 'extenuating circumstances' cut everything that wasn't strictly necessary from my schedule.
I joined the crowd, naturally parting it. People respected a big suit of power armour, especially one in a hurry. I intended to spend some quality time in the workshop before sleep, and there wasn't anything else scheduled between now and my bedtime.
The conference room was at the corner of two hallways, making for an oddly crowded walk back. The trickle of people coming out of the debrief mixed with a sea of PRT agents in black body armour with rare flecks of primary-colour cape costume. A few steps out of the hall, an agent who had been waiting by the door caught up to me and started walking side-by-side.
She was dressed in combat gear, except for a plain black baseball cap that had replaced her usual composite helmet. "Kid Win?" she asked, holding out a duffel bag in both hands.
Right, my little project. "Thanks," I said, and took the bag. She didn't leave my side, prompting me to stammer through a hasty sentence. "Should I, uh, reimburse you? Paperwork?" I asked.
"No, it's okay. We usually get requests for just a few, but some capes like to keep a stockpile. Anything else?"
"No, thank you," I said. The PRT agent turned to walk back in the direction of the conference room. Had she been waiting for me to dismiss her?
I looked back at her as she passed Assault in the hallway. The team lead was probably the last to leave, taking questions from the people who had stayed behind. He smiled and waved to me as I looked back, catching up to me with a spring in his step. I kept walking ahead.
"Hey, my favourite Tinker! How about that, two villain arrests and you get the credit for at least Stormtiger," he said, grinning, "Now that's a hell of a first day."
"Yeah," I said.
"Not just 'yeah,' hellyeah! And that suit? I'm liking this new Kid Win," he said, spreading his hands out, "Protector of the Skies. Yeah?"
"Yeah. The design's good," I said, turning to look at him.
"Oh yeah, they all are until PR gets to them. You should've seen the stupid crap they tried to make me wear!" he said. For a moment, he paused, just walking along and studying me. "Ah," he said, "I recognize that face. The long patrol face. You just want to get the hell out of costume, don't you?"
"It was a long patrol," I said, parroting his words.
"Well, hang on a bit before you go, rookie," he said. Walking ahead of me, he turned back and gestured for me to follow him. A delay, fine.
Assault led me into another conference room. He hit the light switch, then another switch next to it that tinted the windows a dark gray. He sat down on one of the office chairs and motioned for me to take a seat next to him, taking off his mask.
He turned toward me, pausing for a long moment. I couldn't take off my helmet to join him. All of the armour was connected and a bit of a pain to take off. So I just looked at him, not really sure what to do. I'd heard some advice for maintaining eye contact a long time ago: Look at one eye, don't switch between them. Obvious, but obvious was good for the oblivious. Assault's — I struggled to remember his civilian name — Ethan's eyes were hazel. A bright green with brown spilling out in the middle. Structural colour, not a pigment. Formed by a complex network of blood vessels. The same principle can be found in opal, peacock feathers, diffraction gratings, applied in active camoufla–
"Bud, are you all good?" he asked, pulling me out of the firehose of Tinker thoughts.
Another pause. Should I have said something?
"Hey," he continued, "Mighty Assault has too zoned out in his fair share of meetings, and he isn't too proud to admit it. But you're acting off. Where's the teenage chatterbox?"
"Sorry," I said. Crap. Did I blink, or had I just been staring the whole time? I blinked, but maybe too soon after the previous blink, if I hadn't just been staring. This really shouldn't have been hard, it was just talking.
"Don't apologize, just an observation. I'm not mad, you did good out there! I just gotta know that my team's okay, okay?" He looked down at his lap, then at the ceiling, sighing. "I know they do the psych evals and everything, but that's not enough. We should've had more time as a team before the patrol, but man alive it's a minor miracle that anything is well-organized around this place." After a beat, he laughed. "The damn Rig is in the ocean! And we're arresting Nazis like nothing ever happened."
He looked back at me, but didn't find whatever he was looking for.
"So, uh, yeah. Checking in. Are you doing okay, Chris? Things good with you and Sophia? Have you visited Dennis?"
I froze. It felt like he'd dropped a weight on my head. Thoughts started and stopped before completion. I grew aware of how long it had been since he'd finished talking, then longer, longer. Words didn't come together. I needed to say something, but all I managed was moving my tongue around behind closed lips.
Why was this hard?
Ethan broke the silence. "That's okay," he said, "Uh, just, talk to someone? That's your assignment, go do it before the next patrol. It's okay to, uh," he stumbled, "Things are hard. Be honest in the therapy, alright?"
"Yeah," I said.
• • •
I'd wondered sometimes about who exactly supplied the materials I asked for. Every morning, I'd wake up to a litany of 'request fulfilled' emails, delivering the things I had ordered the day before. The wish fulfillment fairies actually got better after the catastrophe, in sharp contrast to the long list of productive Tinkering days in the Wards that had been stymied by lack of material. I was thankful, but didn't tug on the leash, figuring that orders for exotic materials or just plain unreasonable quantities of regular stuff would be met with resistance.
The workshop was now home to a proper stockpile of computer monitors, stationery, raw materials, and machines. I even had two fume hoods for work with volatile materials and hazardous chemicals. One side of the rectangular room was reserved for storage, while the opposite held manufacturing equipment and half-built projects. Fume hoods for work with volatile chemicals, a laser safety cabinet for weapon prototypes, and the star of the show, a compact CNC manufacturing plant.
I'd envied the one in Armsmaster's workshop and had finally built one for myself, a combination mill/lathe/plasma cutter/metal bender/pick n' place. I could send in a design remotely and come home to the workshop with the boring work already done for me. Heaven, compared to my ad-hoc setup at the Wards HQ.
A pile of more-or-less usable old projects occupied a far corner and bled over into a smaller scrap pile beside it. Searching for my stuff in the wreckage made for a good Sisyphean task – the dull moments encouraged my inner Tinker to come out, and the flying was candy to my thrill-seeking lizard brain. The pile was threatening to spill some of the topmost items on the floor, a consequence of the way most projects found their way onto it: I dumped heavy-duty mesh bags full of Tinkertech in the corner, or just tossed individual pieces on the pile if I didn't find enough to be worth stuffing a bag.
Someone had put a couch next to the door that led out of the workshop, which I didn't order, but wouldn't complain about. Maybe those requisition fairies had installed it, or perhaps the team of Tinkers who were growing the New Rig into a usable Headquarters decided to increase the concentration of furniture throughout the building. I tossed the duffel bag I was carrying on the black leather, where it landed with a satisfying thump.
Next to the couch, a metal framework hugged a section of wall. About three heads taller than me, it was a half-cage with enough space inside to fit a refrigerator or water heater. The machine was all hastily-machined boxy aluminium trusses and loose mismatched cables, not built following a design drafted beforehand. Scuffed robot arms of varying length hung limp in the frame, with either grabber 'fingers' or cylindrical plugs on their ends.
The control panel inside was taken off an old piece of Gallant's power armour, one of the few that I had managed to add to the scrap pile. I didn't know if it was a good memorial that embodied moving on, or just cold and unfeeling pragmatism. He certainly wouldn't have an opinion about it.
I came to a stop inside the cage, putting each armoured boot on the shoeprints stenciled on in red spray paint. One press of the red button on the control panel set the machine into motion.
The armour's forcefields flickered for a moment, then deactivated entirely. I felt that distinct absence-of-noise sensation as my brain adjusted to a world without the soft 80 Hz drone. Motors all around me whirred to life, within the armour and without. The suit set itself into an "A"-pose, while robotic arms on the framework docked with attachment points, downloading information and supplying power. Finally, the back swung open, leaving enough space for me to walk out.
I plopped down on the couch next to the duffel bag, and relaxed my muscles. Good couch. Plenty of give, but not so much that it felt like quicksand. I needed to find whoever had brought it in and give them my thanks.
Catching myself slouching, I straightened out and stretched my limbs. Those rough evasive manouvres had put the hurt on my entire body. The armour was well-fitted, and had masked the pain with gentle pressure, but I was really feeling the soreness outside its embrace.
While the flight computer had let me evade incoming projectiles, there were flaws in its brutish approach to avionics. The system always moved away from projectiles as quickly as possible, without empathy for the person inside it.
So I needed to do more Tinkering on the flight systems, more designing and redesigning. Repairs to the visor. Better force fields around the head and face.
Tinkering is insatiable. Revisions are always needed. The work is never done.
I raked my gaze across the room, stopping at the growing wall of monitors that had sprouted around the briefcase computer. Spread out on one of the desktops were PRT memos, files, reports, videos, all relating to Aegis. Carlos.
If I felt the urge, I could start the world's most comprehensive stalker-diary/fansite/memorial page about him. I had official power testing reports, action logs, bodycam footage hastily annotated with free body diagrams and chicken-scratch equations. Estimated impact force, resistance, tensile strength of his skeleton and musculature.
From almost-imperceptible stretching and squashing of his costume in the video footage, I did my best to look inside his body, modelling and reverse-engineering the anatomy. Moonshot. There probably wasn't enough information to figure out anything good. I didn't know where his remains were buried, and I wouldn't ever exhume them if I did. Still–
Jostling myself out of the grisly daydream, I thought about my other ideas. The suit needed upgrades, not just adjustments and repairs. I had a bit of time before bed, enough to make some progress on another armour module.
I had drawn up the parts I needed during the closing minutes of the debrief, and sent them fabricating at the CNC station in the corner of the workshop. They sat waiting for me, hugged tight by vices: Two halves of a squat, football-shaped missile housing, two fists tall.
I took them from their vices, inspecting the parts. There weren't any obvious cracks, but I needed this to not leak under any circumstances.
Armsmaster had shown me a trick for testing seals. I rifled around the workshop, going through all of the cupboards. A complete lack of labels made the whole thing slower, but eventually I managed to dig out some liquid soap. Over at the fume hood, I turned on the tap and mixed up some soapy water in a beaker. With a hard hit that left my hand stinging, I fit the matching halves into a single assembly and spread the mixture all around the connection. I needed helium to do the next part properly, but in a pinch… I tasted soap, turning the assembly while blowing air into the seam running across it. I couldn't see any bubbles forming on the slick surface: hermetic.
I pulled the halves apart again, getting ready for the main event. The assembly fit together with a gap in the middle. A post stuck out of the bottom piece, and would retract if the top was struck with enough force. The unassuming metal pieces made me uneasy, like the feeling of standing next to a third rail or a woodchipper. It sat in the fume hood, but that didn't help much.
The duffel bag resting on the couch was filled with the PRT's standard issue canister-style containment foam grenades.
The long and short of the idea was this: I wanted foam missiles, and I didn't have the foam in its raw form. Requisition fairies wouldn't save me, because using the foam in gadgets was a tightly-controlled affair. I'd have to wait for weeks to get the approval. That said, Protectorate heroes didn't need any particular dispensation to use the pre-made grenades, like the ones on Assault's toolbelt.
A solution grew out of these constraints. I could just prime a grenade, then quickly seal the foam in a containment vessel.
I really should have put in a piston or a motor or something to clamp the two parts together, but a hammer would do fine if I was going to make just a couple. What's life without a few monumentally stupid inventions?
The grenade fit snugly into the gap between the two halves, upright. All I had to do was prime the grenade and slam the housing shut. Thinking for a moment, I set a timed alarm just in case. If this went poorly, I wouldn't exactly be able to tell anyone.
I put one hand on the spoon and one hand on the pin. I pulled–
The door to the workshop opened with a soft hiss.
"Hey nerd," said Sophia.
Panicking, I took my hand off the spoon, then realized I had three seconds to do the rest. My right hand, still wearing the pin like a ring, found the nearby hammer and started a messy swing, while my left hung to the top half, trying to keep the assembly aligned. I saw the barest hint of the expanding foamball just before the missile shut, hard.
I applied a little too much force, denting the frame. The two halves stuck together with a 'thunk' sound. Moments after the assembly sealed shut, I heard a muffled splat on the inside of the housing. Gingerly lifting the completed missile housing, I double-checked the mating edges for leaks, then released the breath I didn't realize I'd been holding.
"Fuck," I said to nobody in particular. I turned around to face Sophia, who had taken up residence on the couch.
"You came in at the worst possible time," I said, fidgeting with the grenade ring on my index finger.
"Door was unlocked," she replied, "And there's absolutely nothing to do, so I thought I'd come visit." She kept eye contact with me for a few uncomfortable seconds, then looked around the room until she found something, giggling. "Aww, do you miss your boyfriend?" she asked.
I was dumbstruck for a moment, following her gaze to the Aegis collage up on one of my monitors. I felt a mere hint of an embarrassed or angry feeling, but the emotion didn't actually take.
"It's a research project," I said.
"Well," she said, getting up to point at one of the windows on the monitor, "I'm sure looking at his press photos is incredibly enlightening."
I sighed. "You really don't have anything else to do?"
"Nope," she said, "Absolutely nothing. I'm not allowed off the Rig, so I can't go out. I'd go to the gym, but the gym hasn't been built yet." She gestured sharply towards my computer and continued, "I don't even have a fucking laptop, unlike some people. So my only source of entertainment is you, a professional teenage nerd, and get this, a pervert too."
"Read a book. Go to sleep." I thought back to the fight. "Are you just angry at Assault?"
"Who could stay mad at our intrepid leader?" she asked, putting on a voice. "Nope, this is all authentic. What if I just want to talk to my teammate?"
I tilted my head at that. "I've been working in the same room since the Protectorate assigned it to me. You could've chatted my ear off at any point. I find it hard to believe that you just want to talk to me."
It was easier to talk when it was Sophia. Simpler, without any particular stakes. I'd been dealing with her since she'd joined the Wards. Either she stayed silent and mad, or she went and did this, the little talks. There was a game to it, trying to make just enough conversation so that she could work out whatever it was that was stuck in her craw, then leave you alone and get all silent and mad again.
"Ah," she sighed, putting on a wistful gaze and gesturing to the ceiling, "But I want to talk. About. Everything. How we're the last defenders of Shit City. Full-time heroes. Isn't it nice?"
"Full-time, for now. They'll probably reassign us when the crisis is over."
"Who says it's gonna be over? Do you actually, really agree with the idiots who think Brockton is going to bounce back?"
"I don't know," I said. Close to the truth. "But either we make it, and people start moving back in, or we give up and leave. We'll get moved somewhere else – they can't actually keep us in the Protectorate forever, it's horrible PR."
She made a sort of growling exasperated sound. Maybe she would have been an animal-themed cape if PR gave her more control over her costume.
"God. Can I talk to one real person, pretty please? 'PR' and 'the crisis' and 'rebuilding,' and this and that. You're the one other person in the exact mess I'm in, and you don't fucking get it."
I raised an eyebrow. "Get what?"
"It's over. There's no point anymore. Did you see the state of the fucking Brockton Bay Nazis? They brought out two heavy hitters and an iron-caged joke to steal food. Against four capes. I counted how many of their skinhead groupies had pistols. Fucking three of them. What, did they lose them in the wash?
"The city's dead. Anyone who was anyone has either died or left, and the only ones still here are the dregs of the dregs. Not strong enough to move on, not worth fighting or saving. If we stay here and 'rebuild', then we're just a joke. Fucking rats with fucking hard hats and protractors."
She looked at me, expecting a response. I didn't know what to say.
"God," she said, "You don't even bother to fight back. Kid Win, parahuman fucking doormat. You're just like the rest of them."
Sophia got up to leave, the door opening with a hiss. "And take your stupid costume off, sweaty dweeb."
I turned back to the CNC setup, punching in a manufacturing job for another missile housing and pulling fragments of the grenade off of the electromagnets in the jig. I still needed a design for the launcher, propulsion system, targeting, fuze.
The work is never done.
• • • • •
I was up in the clear blue skies again, drawing lazy circles around the New Rig. Tonight's mission was to test the new prototype Zephyr IV – not that I needed to be in the suit to run it through its paces, strictly speaking. I could pilot the armour remotely and review the results from my workshop.
But there was something to be said about the human touch. It was hard to translate numbers into feeling.
The aesthetics had improved with every iteration. Far from mattress-man, I was in a proper set of flying power armour now. The previous iteration had a sort of "soap bubbles put through chicken wire" aesthetic about it, with bubble-shaped forcefields projecting off a no-frills base framework. I left that behind, substituting bubbles for sharp ramps and flat panels as well as incorporating a more aerodynamic, sleek motif into the inner exoskeleton.
The gauntlets still had barrels sticking out of them, but I left the actual firing circuitry and optic fibres behind, rendering them entirely decorative. I had started upgrading the armament, but only got through about half of the work when the new field projectors came out of the CNC plant. Before I knew it, I had finished with the core of the Zephyr IV, and was too hungry for a test to do the rest.
There were several big changes, the first being those field projectors. They came together to form a single forcefield that could completely cover the suit. Underneath that outer layer, the armour was more-or-less the same as the previous model, but less bulky. I could form the field into flight surfaces, which allowed me to reduce the size of the wings to the bare minimum required for a glide, in case the electronics crapped out.
But there were a lot of possibilities besides that. I could allocate more energy to the front, forming a shield that could take more punishment than an evenly distributed field, or shape it into weapons. The projector didn't quite have enough resolution to do hands, but it could project pincers, in a pinch.
The second major change was the flight computer. For the test I was attempting, it was completely in control, just carrying me along for the ride. Thrusters on my back and on my left side pushed me in a gentle loop around the helipad, keeping me pointed towards the makeshift turret in the middle. I could barely see it, but new sensors and software helped out. I set the HUD to display an inset of the target.
It was really just a baseball pitching machine on a swivel mount, plus a couple not-strictly-necessary features. My power seemed to hate leaving a project without adding a built-in power source, computer, and laser rangefinder. It wasn't my best work, but I didn't need anything fancier.
I snapped with my right hand, and the ball came flying out. Slow pitch, like a hypothetical cape had thrown a hypothetical fireball. From this distance, the appropriate evasive action was well within human reaction time.
My visor lit up, displaying a fluorescent orange overlay that predicted the ball's trajectory and a flashing dodge warning that indicated an upcoming course correction:
YAW +20
SPD ⌄
Tinkering thoughts came to me, critiquing the design. The warning system was passable. Easy enough for me to read at a glance, but there was probably a more effective way of communicating the information. Projectiles wouldn't always come at parabolic trajectories, but the approximation held most of the time and would fade away if the motion didn't match up. Anything moving to hit me that produced sound or showed up on a LIDAR scan could be detected, which covered most attacks. (Though not laser beams from a theoretical invisible Stranger/Blaster, which wasn't a likely scenario, power.)
Another important feature: I could turn the display off at will, and made damn sure it automatically turned off for incoming hails of bullets. I learned my lesson. The trajectory display wouldn't blind me in a pitched firefight like the sonar overlay had in the fight with Cricket.
Now, the second part of the dodging system kicked in. I had to stop myself from instinctively taking control and ruining the test; I had to put my trust in the armour. A half second before the impact, additional thrusters powered up by themselves, slowing my loop around the helipad, then twisting me clockwise. The ball flew past me, inches away from my chest.
Before I had time to reflect, the turret had already shot off another baseball, this time at a pitching speed too fast for me to register the dodge warning. The suit took over and boosted me further in the direction I was already moving, leaving a solid arm's length of clearance between my ball and the back of the armour.
Good so far. Reasonably comfortable dodging, nothing that would induce whiplash.
Two balls in and the boredom-plus-restlessness was already setting in. Human touch be damned, I'd have to do the rest with remote control. I dismissed the inset zoomed-in view of the turret and sent a shutdown command to the device. I wanted to go flying again, properly.
The third major change was to the thrusters. I'd upgraded the powerhouse VTOL thrusters in the suit's calves, and moved them into a jetpack that jutted out of the suit's back. Better than the Hoverboard. More total thrust than in all of the old models put together. A little bit of vectoring is possible, but flight control is mainly–
I tried to evict the thoughts of Tinkering out of my mind, to little effect. There was a constant background rattle of design improvements to the suit, the turret, the visor's heads-up display.
Tinkering could come later. I wanted to go fast.
I made the now-familiar ascent to airliner altitude — save the lack of clouds tonight — completely deactivating the flight computer and taking manual control. I hovered for a moment, and cleared my visor of all widgets and indicators.
I took it in. High above, the devastation wasn't as obvious, but the effect was the same.
Clear skies meant that I could look down from an even higher vantage. I saw a big chunk of the east coast. Many more streetlights were visible further out, in other cities. The grid was still down in Brockton Bay, in a massive outage that didn't have an official planned end date. Most of the lights were in clusters of suburbs on the outskirts, probably powered by homeowners' diesel generators. The city proper was mostly dark, though some of the shorter apartment buildings further away from the crater were lit up in parts.
On a whim, I turned away from the city and flew east, towards the ocean. The voice in the back of my head rattled off more Tinker crap, louder.
The outer field will be well within tolerances as long as I keep my flight subsonic. Need to adjust the profile of the outer field in the transonic range, manual, didn't design one. The computer can handle heavy turbulence. Switch to full-blast flying, rely on the larger back thrusters for power and use the rest for stability. Angle of attack is good, don't stall. Material breakdown starts when the airframe goes into aerodynamic heating, the air is compressed in front of the leading edge–
On and on and on and on and on. I wished it would shut up.
I pushed it. Faster, faster, faster. I had no intuitive sense of the speed. My only measure of acceleration was how bad the jerk was when I throttled up too quickly. (More than 2% per second felt like a punch in the everything.) The ocean below was a blur.
I was well into the Atlantic now. I looked back and realized I was far enough that I couldn't see the lit-up cities in the distance, then I saw the wake of my sonic boom. Funny how it didn't feel like anything. I didn't even hear a thump.
I was past the sound barrier, beholden to a harsher kind of aerodynamics. If I pitched up or down too much, I'd risk breakdown of the force field. Without its protection, the air would rend my suit to shreds, tearing off flight surfaces and just plain breaking my arms, legs, neck.
Now I was in the realm of the amygdala. Running on pure animal instinct, nothing on my mind except the drive not to die and the daredevil rush. The Tinker voice had shut up, finally. All it cost was a pinch of mortal danger.
Sweet nothing for a few minutes. Eventually my ego joined the party, bringing with it my primary stream of consciousness, reflecting on past events. What Sophia had said.
Maybe she was right, and the relief efforts should have stopped by now. Brockton wasn't worth staying in; trash. A thing to be discarded.
I didn't feel anything about it. Most of the time, I sat in a comfortable groove of detachment, a neutral observer in my own body. My 'normal' conversations ran on autopilot. I spaced out often, outside of the workshop. Few things knocked me out of it: fighting, flying, playing with fire. Past the sound barrier, my senses took over; I was here.
For the hell of it, I started a slight roll, then spun faster, faster, testing the limits of the forcefield. I felt like a kid spinning around before playing Marco Polo. The same dizziness came as I jerked myself out of the roll, combined with that thrill of sudden deceleration in my stomach.
Intellectually, I knew that my mental state wasn't normal or good, but I did fine. Never brought it up in assigned remote therapy sessions. If I didn't act like a normal cape to the people on the Rig, they'd make me stop. I'd fall apart.
After a few more minutes of flying, the Tinker voice picked up on the fact that there was no immediate danger, just a background level of catastrophic risk. It resumed chattering, but my conscious mind was still racing, active. I wanted more of this, more flying, stunts, the world. I wanted to actually feel the air, not hide behind a forcefield.
Drive was one of the feelings left untouched by the detachment. I kept to my routine and made myself better. I had to be better. Make a difference, get deep in the fight instead of watching from afar. I could become as strong as Aegis. Stronger. Take hits from Stormtiger like he was shooting Styrofoam.
All I had to do was climb the mountain, one rock at a time.
I couldn't think about the future. Look over the peak of the mountain. Impossible. Try, and I'd see only weathered sandstone. It sounded like static, an ineffable and dull nowhere un-place.
I wouldn't think about the past. Look down. Tempt fate. Release the cool-headed feeling, the only rock I clung to. Fall for a million years through gusting and wuthering air, ripped apart by the impossible distance, impossible facts:
There once was a city called Brockton Bay, and all of my friends and the people I loved lived there.
Leviathan struck, and they let us onto the front lines. Into the meat grinder. Aegis. Browbeat. Gallant. Even thirteen-year-old Vista. The dust settled and the tide fell back. And they put her name on the chunk of rock that marked the end of the city, of my friends, of Kid Win.
I snapped out of the poetic mood, making gaps in each side of the force field and lightly wiggling my fingers, feeling the harsh resistance of the air coming through. A wind that could break my fingers if I was careless.
Leviathan hit, fine. It happened, it's over, that's that, no need to dwell on the details.
At least I had something good after all this. The hot streak with the armour. A flight of ideas, making for effortless Tinkering. They came at every corner, and they made sense, were worth a damn. They fuelled the drive, the need to engineer, improve, become better than I ever was.
A thought crossed my mind, stupid, irrational, animal.
I need better data. More experience.
Stronger opponents.
Essentially, a proposition for self-harm. It was sticky, hard to let go of. I could find a billion ways to steel it, push the thought through any roadblocks founded on reason. The animal self needed battle. The Tinker wanted more data and engineering, less extrapolation and theory. Following through could make old dreams come true, make me a better hero, give me repute and fame — I didn't really care about those things anymore, but people talked about them.
At the bottom of the 'Pros' column was something more powerful than mere argument. Picturing all the opponents I could face gave me chills. I wanted more of that electric daredevil feeling, diving from a 100 foot platform, running across a tightrope without a harness, standing on a speeding motorcycle. Going — I pulled up the speedometer readout on my visor — Going Mach 3 in a suit that couldn't possibly save me if I screwed up.
It made for a good daydream. Enough utility and speed to no-sell Oni Lee. Speed or toughness to dodge or withstand Purity's blasts. Armament to disintegrate anything Rune tried to use as a projectile.
I could dream bigger, beyond the borders of Brockton Bay. Become the strongest cape in the entire northeast. Boston, Philadelphia, New York. Put the Butcher in stasis. Bash through Vex's defenses. Overwhelm Spree. Fumigate Blasto. Find whatever assholes the Elite used as a cudgel and evert them.
Fuck it, take on the Nine. Find Crawler's weak point and accelerate it to escape velocity. Make a freeze ray and render Burnscar impotent, then shatter her frozen corpse. Heat the atmosphere around the Siberian until her invulnerable body decoheres into dust.
Go global. Kill Leviathan.
Now that would be a rush.
A ping on the heads-up display broke me out of the thought spiral. I turned off the visor's 'immersive mode' and brought the on-screen widgets back into view.
A message from Dragon, apparently. She usually left voice recordings, but this one was plain text, with an attachment.
Found your Hoverboard. ﹕)
I pulled up the coordinate ping that was sent along with the message. Hm. I needed better controls than the standard eye movement inputs to put them onto a map, and I couldn't gesture wildly while wrapped tight under the outer forcefield.
With a horrible clunking noise, hydraulic hiss, and booming roar, I engaged the thrust reversers on the main engines. This had to be a top-5 contender for the most dangerous possible test of that system. The rockets strapped to my back weren't happy, but my work was adequate. I was semi-gently pulled back to subsonic speed.
Turning back into a standing hover, I tried to make sense of the coordinates. The location was in Brockton, clearly, but the maps I had didn't outline the new topography, or match up exactly to the coordinate space Dragon had used. I could tell that it was a lot higher than sea level, though – a mystery.
I put down a virtual beacon at the location, which blinked a steady orange on the HUD. Hell with it, I needed something interesting to do. Tinker shop talk with Dragon would make for more engaging conversation than small talk with PRT agents back at the base, or whatever kind of torture my talk with Assault had turned into.
I'd expected the Hoverboard to end up in the water after the fight. Tinker-brain whirred to life at the thought of the old gadget. It was a mistake to take it out into the field without a tracker, it sucked as a flight platform anyway, and the new thrusters had far surpassed it. The only value in getting it back would be sentimental, really.
But there was a lot of sentimental value. I'd bounced ideas off Dean while fitting him for the armour, and we came up with the first sketch. I'd worked on it for ages, sequestering myself even more than usual. Dennis had played pranks on me every time I squirreled myself away in the workshop, while still being genuinely careful around the prototypes. It had taken me flying with Carlos for the first time. I'd even convinced Missy to take to the skies with me, piggyback, while our minders weren't watching.
The memories stung. Maybe getting it back would help, somehow.
I sent a reply, "coming, thx," and shot off again.
I accelerated more aggressively than was strictly safe, putting the engines through their paces. Reaching the coastline quickly, I braked with the thrust reversers and went into a hover near the orange dot.
I could see where the Hoverboard must have landed, a heavily-damaged concrete-and-brick building among the ones nearest the coast. It was right by one of the emergency supply depots that the PRT had set up, whose nighttime lighting painted the ruin's first few floors a dull sodium yellow. Maybe Dragon was helping out with search and rescue, and had happened to find my gadget on one of her excursions.
There were even some lights on in the building, and the ones surrounding it, mostly contained to the first floor. The emergency responders had set up generators, and backfed them into the power grid, lighting up a few blocks of mostly-stable buildings around the big encampment. The one that was host to the orange dot seemed less-than-sound, structurally, but the towers across from it looked okay.
Its foundation had slipped under the pressure of Leviathan's waves, rotating the whole thing ten degrees counter-clockwise. The roof was busted, with the corner closest to the shoreline completely missing. It looked as though the building was made of foam, messily cut with a saw and peppered with divots made by hot sparks.
The orange dot was one story down from the top. At the same height, I saw a single red dot on the sonar – Dragon. Red since I hadn't put her profile into the system. There was always more work to be done.
I flew into the building and saw the sights. Water had made its way inside, some from the tidal waves, but mostly from the busted sprinkler system. The entire city's water supply was quickly exhausted over the course of the accident, as gallons poured out into the streets from damage like this. There was probably a good helping of mold around, as even this exposed upper floor smelled rank and musty. All of the non-load-bearing drywall had sagged and wilted. Some debris had made it in, poking holes in the structure.
I couldn't tell whether it was an office tower, an apartment building, or something else. This top floor was reserved for maintenance, as evidenced by a large and messy hole that led into a deep shaft, where the elevator machine room should have been. I hoped people had already escaped this place by the time Leviathan came, or at least used the fire escape to get to shelter – 'crushed in elevator collapse' seemed like an awful way to go.
The shaft was convenient for me, though. I walked over and took the plunge, catching myself in a hover a half-story down. I revised my assessment – this definitely used to be an apartment building. I stood in a hallway. Both the dot and the blobby representation of Dragon that the sonar had picked up would be just ahead, past the door at the end of the hallway; I shooed the lights, removing them from the visor.
I opened the door. There was my Hoverboard, split fairly neatly in twain, crosswise. Dragon had gone for the dramatic, maybe to cheer me up – it laid in the centre of the room, lit by a lamp hanging from a section of conduit that had come loose. Both halves of the board had chunks missing.
I walked forward, about to greet Dragon, when the hoverboard was yanked out of view. I looked around in confusion. Then, the room filled with red light.
In front of me was a blonde woman with her hair down. She was clearly a cape, wearing a simple domino mask and a dark skintight bodysuit over her pale skin. I couldn't see her in detail, but I'd recognize her anywhere.
I gawked for too long, frozen, not thinking.
She had time to say a quick "Hello, Kid Win!" before I snapped out of it. I was alone, and this was an ambush. It was time to get the hell out.
I set off in a hopping flight down the hall, ignoring the villain behind me.
"I have a bomb!" she yelled. Obvious diversion, but… I stopped in my tracks, and turned to look at her closely.
She was twirling around a matte black prism with a red button on one side. A detonator, similar to the ones that Bakuda had used; similar enough that it might have genuinely come from one of the bomb tinker's projects. Tattletale pointed directly above her, to a fading patch of darkness.
Grue must have come here too, covering up bundles of conventional explosives set on the ceiling with his power. A red light blinked happily in the centre of each bomb. Not the bomb Tinker's motif, but… they certainly looked the part.
"See, now you're listening. Trust me when I say these aren't the only ones I planted. Here's the rules: don't call the white hats, or I blow it; don't run off before I let you, or I blow it. I hope it goes without saying that I can hear silent alarms." she said.
"You're suicidal," I said dryly.
"Mm, wrong. I have contingencies," she said. "You and I can get away from the blast before it all comes crashing down, but did you see the tent megalopolis over there? PRT supplies, PRT people, big old PR-hold-the-T disaster if a kid hero sends a building crashing down on them."
"That's what you want to do? The gloves come off if you kill innocents, the moment they see the bodycam footage," I said, tapping my chestplate. "The Undersiders are small fish now. Kill civilians and you'll end up like the last Brockton Bomber."
"Contingencies, contingencies. Don't get hung up on the details, let's just have a little meeting," she said, gesturing towards the room. "It took a lot of effort to find your gadget, by the way, so I think a thank you is in order. We'll have a little chat, I'll give you back your Hoverboard and you'll come away an informed citizen, nothing bad at all. It's a win-win for Kid Win!"
I had been thinking of ways to circumvent this situation from the word 'bomb.' Only one plan came to me, so I had to try it.
I raised my right gauntlet, pointing the gun barrel at Tattletale's head.
"Can you detonate the bomb if you're unconscious?" I asked.
"Aha," she said. "Bomb threats just aren't your style. You know, a little birdie told me that your suit is a test model – no guns. Try something else."
Admittedly, I had basically expected that outcome.
She led me back into the room – not an apartment, I realized, just an empty windowless room. The hoverboard laid right next to the far wall, where she'd left it, lit dramatically by stage lights covered with red gels. Maybe this used to be a photography studio? Otherwise, this setup seemed like way too much drama for the occasion. With better illumination than my suit's flashlight put out, I could more clearly see the thin strings tied around the hoverboard. Zooming in, I saw it clearly – silk. Skitter was around here, somewhere, though she hadn't shown up on the sonar. Hm.
Tattletale walked jauntily towards the hoverboard, and bent down to pick up something I hadn't quite seen from its spot in a far corner of the room. She stood up and smiled at me, holding up a ruggedized laptop in the hand that wasn't ready to topple the building.
"Why go through all this effort?" I asked. "If you're telling the truth, then this meeting," I said, emphasizing the word she'd used, "Could've been an encrypted email. If you were actually feeling generous, I'm sure you could have just arranged for the Hoverboard to arrive in my workshop."
"Astute," she said, leaning against the wall furthest from the door frame. "The timetable was originally a bit further out for this little rendezvous, but I just saw you flying around in that deathtrap and ah," she paused to mime a chef's kiss, "I just had to move it up."
"You haven't answered my question."
"Nope. No reaction, really? Can you imagine how embarrassing would it be if the forces of good got me with another costume swap? Anyway," she said, flipping around the detonator in her fingers like a butterfly knife, "I take your point, but I couldn't do email. No romance in it, no drama." She gestured toward the lights. "Plus, I need these beans to be spilled without anyone seeing the label on the can."
"Why?"
"It's need-to-know. You don't need the 'why,' you need the 'what,' and that's all I can say."
"Why me?"
"Call it favouritism."
So far, this had sounded suspiciously tame, for a villainous scheme.
"Just deliver a message? And if I don't tell anyone? Or if I tell them about your little plan?"
"Hah. Trust me, you'll tell them – these beans are just that good. But, should you choose to take advantage of my goodwill, you'll get what's coming to you. Ever heard of blackmail?"
"That–"
"That won't work on me," she said, clearly trying to time it so we'd speak in unison. I'd seen this trick, and stopped at the first word, eliciting a little chuckle from her. "You know, I've had a lot of people say that line, and yet I managed to get through to every single one.
"Oh, of course you're a horrible sad sack, a depressed monk without any attachments. The angriest little Ward that could. I can't even pull anything out of your civilian life – and mind you, I would never do that – because your entire life is Kid Win."
I tilted my head, waiting for her to get to the point. I knew her file. Her power would probably get to me, but I didn't want her to see any reaction to the needling.
Tattletale let a few beats pass, waiting for a response. "Tough crowd," she said, "In any case, you do still care about something. Or, should I say, someone."
"You'd be crossing a fucking line," I said a little too quickly. Panic leapt onto my face.
"Shh," she started in a whisper, putting the index finger of her detonator-hand up to her lips, "Quiet, the camp might hear." She laughed for altogether too long at her own 'joke.'
"Listen carefully," she continued, straightening out her posture and speaking in a grave, measured tone, "I'm a cornered rat. And oh, I'll sing and dance and murder to get out of this tight little corner. Little inside baseball for you: I put this miserable little plan together in a day, because events had suddenly conspired to doom our shitty little city. Events right in my backyard!"
She stared at me, intentionally holding a pause. Acting or genuine, it was a good performance. "Either this works, or I meet a worse end than a little rough treatment by the heroes. I don't care about the rules of the game. You don't have to believe me, but I promise you: unless you help me, he will die."
She turned the laptop towards me, revealing a camera feed that filled the entire screen.
My blood began to boil.
Aaand I just realized that a colon followed by a close paren renders as a smiley face on SV. Welp, now my monospace smiley face looks odd, so be it.
It's your favourite Endo, now fortified with Tattletale! I hope you weren't expecting her to be a nice villain.
With many thanks to Fwee, who gave insightful feedback and saved this chapter from being far worse than it currently is. Praise Fwee!
Join the hallowed ranks of the beta readers if you dare, just send me a PM.
This was a chunky chapter, expect future ones to stay in the 4-6k range and to come out on weekends.
I'd normally highlight a mistake that our intrepid protagonist made in this one, but there were so many that I just feel bad for poor Chris. Feel free to list them out for my amusement!
Let's try another character: Would you add dramatic lighting to your bomb threat?
She was a micromanaging little parasite, keeping me company over the radio. I normally didn't mind people talking to me while I did my work, but this had long since crossed a line. I was outside, scavenging parts from the Old Rig's forcefield bridge. I laid on my back underneath a large piece of scrap which had probably been one of the main emitter assemblies.
I was wearing the Zephyr, or at least parts of it. I designed the newest model of the suit to be able to break apart into pieces, allowing me to wear a gauntlet on my left hand and cover my head with the helmet like a makeshift hard hat. The right hand was operating the laptop that laid on my chest, displaying classified Protectorate schematics and my own engineering notes.
"So I've been thinking about them," Tattletale said. Her voice had begun to grate about two 'commissioned projects' ago, and hadn't gotten better since. It was more annoying to not respond, letting her chime in at random intervals, than to keep the conversation going at a predictable pace. So I gave in, dedicating valuable neurons to background chatter.
"What's to think about?" I asked, "Joining?"
"Hilarious," she said. "No. Ever heard of nonsense sentences? 'More people have been to Moscow than I have,' the old chestnut about 'colourless green ideas,' that sort of thing."
A problem in naïve natural language processing and parsing, potential issue for voice contr– "Sounds like Thinker crap," I said, trying to interrupt my internal technical exposition. She was awfully good at feeding the Tinker, who was quicker to jump into thought spirals than normal. That issue had steadily gotten worse over the course of today's back-to-back forced labour sessions. I had hoped that it would be better outside the workshop, but the fresh air hadn't helped at all.
I shook my head clear of the distraction and looked back at the hulk above me. Paint had peeled off it and parts of the metal interior had corroded. The vulnerable insides weren't designed to be exposed to the elements. It was definitely a chunk of the forcefield bridge, but I couldn't figure out exactly what I was looking at, or from what angle.
A car-sized cylinder in the centre looked a bit like the three big emitter coils on the schematics, but could have also been a chunk of the hologram module, or the optical transformer. I put the laptop on the ground to my right, and darkened my helmet. Two blue holographic tendrils extended from the tip of the index finger on my left gauntlet. I reached up and ran them over the surface of the cylinder, really stretching with my shoulder. Red sparks flew off the interface between tendril and metal, bright enough to give me arc-eye if I'd done this without the helmet.
"They're a nonsense sentence for morality. Like the wretch of Omelas, or pure deontology."
Crap, I'd forgotten to interrupt her. "That's a stretch," I said, "You're just trying to sound smart. Pulling out concepts from linguistics and cramming them, kicking and screaming, into ethics. Amorality isn't nonsense morality. Just leave me alone for a few minutes, okay? If I screw this up, I'll end up being the USA's first flat Tinker."
Where was I? The scan. Nothing that indicated residual phoronic matter. Or maybe there was something, but I hadn't paid enough attention while Tattletale was speaking, then… Damn it. I checked again.
"We should be done soon," she said. "And you couldn't do anything like that, trust me. Anyway, the whole situation is just weighing on me. It's like being held at gunpoint by Maxwell's demon."
"Now you're mixing metaphors. Stay out of thermodynamics: that's my turf. Aren't there more important things you could be doing, with the imminent threat and all?"
"It's not imminent," she said. "I just need the prep done quickly. And there's that adage, trust but verify."
"Please," I said, "Tell me that you understand what I'm doing here, that you'd notice if I was turning it into a cannon that kills Thinkers. I dare you."
She had access to the camera feed coming from the helmet. If she was actually watching it, I couldn't tell — she never commented on the proceedings, nor did she ever shut up and let me get on with anything that required concentration.
"I'm not stupid enough to do that. I deal with people, thoughts, intentions. In short: you. Can't tell a clamp from a micrometer, but I sure as hell know what you're thinking. And you're not the only plate I'm spinning. Misery loves company."
"Well, can you call me back? Six hours in your fucking virtual sharashka and I need a break. My sparring session is up in half an hour, anyway, and I can't exactly fight with a villain in my ear. Even if I could, this isn't going anywhere. I'll come back tomorrow with better tools."
There was a pause, and I could make out the soft clacking of a keyboard in the background. "Fine. Call me when you get into your workshop tomorrow," she said.
• • •
There was a gym on the New Rig now. I had a feeling that any amount of amenities wouldn't please Sophia, but at least she couldn't complain about that defect anymore.
I was nearly done putting on my gear, checking the fit on the bright red gloves. I walked out of the changing room, and was greeted by my practice partner.
"Ready?" Jamie asked.
"Sure. I need to work on my, uh. A lot of things. What did we do last time?"
"Stance and awareness, then you wore yourself out with bad technique."
I did this style of training with the Wards, but Jamie — Battery, but we sparred out of costume — took it to another level. Ethan's philosophy was that everyone needed to be able to hold their own in an unpowered brawl. I figured I was the worst of the four-person patrol group, judging by the length and frequency of my spars with her.
She didn't need protective gear, opting for plain grey gym clothes. I followed as she jumped onto the blue practice mat, designed to make falling safe. Or at least not hurt as much as getting smashed into concrete.
"Right," I said, shuffling to adjust to the springy surface. "Interval warmups again?"
"You bet. Defend, roll with the punches."
She adjusted her footing, and I tried to do the same, shuffling a little more.
"Number 1, let's go."
She powered up and stepped toward me, turning the motion into a punch. I knew she wasn't going to go full-blast, but there was still that lurch in my stomach. She would have hit me square in the chest, but I met her strike and tried to turn her motion into a throw. She didn't commit, and her arm flew out of my grasp. We reset.
Then, another step, quicker than the last. Her fist aimed for the same target, the right side of my chest. I reacted quicker, ready, stepping into her and trying to use my knee to direct her motion into the ground–
"Stop!" she said, back in position and unpowered. Her disappearance put me off balance, and I fell onto the floor without any grace.
"What are you doing?" she asked. "Head in the game, Chris. We're doing backsteps and stance. Cut the judo crap."
"Sorry," I said.
"Come on. Get ready, then I'll start the second on your mark."
I got up, and tried to clear my head. Stances. Feet in place, I did a couple of deep breaths. "Go!" I called out.
She was on me again, punching with the other hand. Ready to hit the left side of my ribcage, not vulnerable if she keeps to the same level of force. Underneath, lungs, heart, pumping below capacity. Needs cardiovascular exercise to maximize efficiency, reduce resting heart rate. Continuous-flow replacements have had success but need to compensate for the loss of the usual pulsatile–
She hit me. I hit the floor.
"Again," Jamie said.
Take three. On 'go,' she came at me, with a low kick this time. It felt like time slowed down as I watched her foot, covered in a layer of fine blue lightning.
Pulling my shin out of the way felt like navigating molasses. I stood in place, realizing too late that I'd just been staring at her, frozen. Her strike hadn't connected.
"Chris," she said.
"Sorry–"
"No. I don't know what's going on with you, but you're not getting anything out of this. Can I get you to snap out of it with some exercise?"
I hesitated too long, and she interrupted my silence.
"Okay," she said, "Then I'm glad we caught it in the warmup. I won't spar if you're not ready, and right now, you're not ready. Let me know if this happens again so we don't just sit around looking at each other."
She hopped off the mat. "Show up in the morning, and get a few virtuals in beforehand. We're done here."
Putting on a simple mask that she had been carrying in her pocket, she walked toward the door and left the gym.
I went in the other direction, back to the changing room. I sat down at my locker and began to change. Didn't need a shower, since I hadn't even worked up a sweat.
What a shitshow. Working for Tattletale had probably wound up the Tinker too much, or just plain tired me out. I wasn't eager to go back to the workshop, and instead decided to go to bed early.
Nobody came up to me as I made my way back to the dormitory section. This Rig was quiet at times. There was probably less commotion here than in the original. Fewer people, fewer missions. It felt like everything was winding down, even the old villains had turned to leave. There wasn't any trace of Hookwolf after the fight with his Chosen, and Purity's group had stayed for only a couple of days before seeking greener pastures in Boston.
I figured that maybe a week or two from now, the Protectorate would finally call it quits. Pull out of Brockton and put a cordon around the ruins. I was sure there'd be some way to get the New Rig out of the city and install it somewhere else. Maybe they had already installed thrusters on the pontoons and I just hadn't seen them yet.
As for the remaining heroes, it wouldn't be unprecedented to distribute them throughout the surrounding major cities.
The accommodations at the base were hotelish, complete with keycard doors and 'Do Not Disturb' signs that fit around the door handles. I slid my card through the reader on the faceplate and entered my bedroom, making a beeline for the bed.
I plopped down on it face-first, careful not to hit my head against the wall. I wasn't sure who my next-door neighbour was, but he had a bassy voice and didn't hesitate to let me know that he hated my accidental kicks and headbutts. More of a problem in the settling-in days, when I hadn't given up on the fight for easy sleep.
At first, I couldn't get myself to stop thinking. My body would be as tired as it was possible to be, basically unable to move, and yet my mind wouldn't stop chasing stray thoughts. Tinker thoughts, anxiety, memories, snippets of past conversation, my friends' faces, they all kept me up and wouldn't let me go. I would stay up all night and shamble around uselessly all day.
On night three, I searched for solutions in my belongings. My spark pistol was broken. The power source was completely busted. Using choice bits of stationery and the one screwdriver I could get my hands on, I broke apart light fixtures for their LED drivers and cracked into the marrow of my dorm's electric heater. In half an hour, I had managed to turn the pistol into a plug-in appliance.
Laying on my stomach, I felt around with my right hand for the familiar handle, wrapped in electrical tape. I put the barrel against my head and squeezed the trigger.
• • • • •
Battery returned from her run around the surrounding blocks and skidded to a stop next to me.
"Still something on your gadget?" she asked.
I'd been looking at the device intently, close to crushing it with the power armour's motorized gauntlets. I built it to the specification provided, and it turned out horrible: handheld, not integrated into the Zephyr; flaky and prone to false positives; also just plain ugly. It was a boxy miniature LCD display mounted on a handle that resembled a toy car remote, made of literally the first parts I could think of and not iterated upon further than that. The readout resembled my armour's sonar display, but operated on different principles, tuned to detect human lifesigns. Theoretically, exactly the thing I needed.
"Yep," I replied. "I'll just call it a bug and move on. Search and rescue resuming in sector B9."
HQ had shrunk the patrol groups, finally. Battery was a perfect fit for the special mission that I had requested, so it was just her and me making our way all around the city, this time going from the outskirts in toward the coast. To the Protectorate, it would look like a show of initiative by a new member. Really, it was a service ordered by the same 'client' who had commissioned the lifesign scanner.
The task felt, if not pointless, then low on point. Time was measured in hours in respect to successful rescue attempts, not weeks. Anybody who got injured and stuck, but not immediately killed at the time Leviathan struck was already either dead or in hospital. The people we'd be searching for were those who had gotten injured in the events following the disaster. The 'rats,' as Shadow Stalker had put it, who didn't manage to get out, lacking the ability or the willingness to leave.
"Stop here," I said, "I think there's two in the green house."
The suburbs weren't hit that hard, mostly, but there was a little oceanside gated community that had taken on a lot of water. The house before us was half-collapsed, Mansard roof blending into carport blending into driveway. Bits of green vinyl siding littered the ground.
The radar showed someone inside the house, and another in the detached garage. I heard the crack of Battery breaking glass, followed by a yelp.
"Found 'em," said Battery, then in a softer voice, "Hey, bud, it's gonna be alright, just don't move."
"Need me?" I asked.
"I can take one of them, just unconscious. I think I'll need you to keep this guy's leg in place. He's in the main room."
I had brought all of my new gear to this mission, including the new Hoverboard. Hoverpad, maybe: A hexagonal hovering platform that was currently carrying a bunch of poles.
I made my way around the house, trying to find a better way in than Battery's window. I settled on the door. It was completely busted, unable to turn even if I'd had the key: It was hanging on only by the lower hinge, tilting down in such a way that it dug into the floor, stuck in an indent.
I took out one of the hexagonal boxes from the bracket along my thigh and threw it on the ground. It hovered an inch above the floor, not quite touching anything. With a gesture, I drew out its forcefield into a cross shape, just touching the edges of the door frame.
I spread my suit's outer forcefield into an 'umbrella' dome, meant to protect my head and upper body from falling bits of house. All prepared, I applied pressure with the cross to push apart the door frame, making a horrible creaking sound come from all around the house. I pulled up on the door handle, pushing the entire door out of its resting divot, and pushed hard. Nothing.
With a frustrated grunt, I slid my right finger into a hole in the suit's right hip, attaching a cutting head. The suit's helmet darkened as I sheared through the deadbolt with a stream of plasma.
Finally, I kicked the door open.
I was inside a ruined McMansion, in front of a young man who looked to be about the same age I was. He wore a black oversize backpack, and black jeans. The denim was stained with blood at the point where his right leg met a gaudy chandelier which had fallen on him.
His left hand was gripping a black bunch of fabric, maybe a hat, hard. His right was holding on to Battery with equal force, as she spoke to him in a low voice.
"Alright, see, here's my partner. We're gonna get you to safety, but I have to leave now and carry someone else, okay?"
She gave me a quick nod, then set off in the direction of the carport.
"Okay," I said. I should be reassuring, right?
He didn't say anything back, entirely focused on holding back sobs, but some slipped through, anyway. His face was scrunched in a pained expression, eyes screwed shut. I could see the traces of since-dried tears on him. A bit of water still covered his chin, contributing drips to a wet stain on his Triumvirate T-shirt.
Behind him was a young girl. A long piece of metal, maybe an inch across, ran from the high ceiling of the room to the floor, right through her chest. A bracket that had once held some lights, or a piece of the roof, maybe.
I looked back at the boy, trying to form a plan. It was good that I'd gotten the door open, hopefully that door frame would hold for long enough. Without it, there weren't any other ways out of the house that could fit me and a passenger. I could definitely lift him out and carry him to an infirmary, but I wasn't sure that it would be that simple. Would lifting the chandelier make him bleed out?
I tried to get into a problem-solving mindset. Looked at the calf, clearly bent wrong, then at the chandelier. Wiggled the edges of my forcefield idly. How bad was the break, anyway?
Not an open fracture, but complicated with avulsion. Ideal biology would seal leaks, reset fracture. Risk of fatal hemorrhage high. Solutions, cautery–
I looked at my fingertip-mounted plasma cutter for a half second, then docked it back to my hip. No.
–medical adhesive, pressure on the wound–
No. All bad. I wasn't a doctor, and the prospect of killing someone with my Tinker power was a non-starter. I turned away from the boy.
"Battery, I can't do this. How far is the medical team?"
"The helicopter is five minutes out."
"Okay. I don't think he'll bleed out. I'm coming to meet them."
Just as I took my first steps towards the door, the frame of the house began to creak, big time. I heard it all around me, a warning call. The noise was joined by wood-splitting cracks and loud impacts. The structural members began to fall.
I managed to catch a ceiling beam directly overhead, about three heads away from making impact. I had barely enough time to react, and didn't prevent anything else from hitting the ground. There was a sickening crunch of lumber on flesh that came from behind the injured boy. I forced myself not to look at it.
Before I had time to regret it, I pulled out another force-box, set to hover near him, and pulled a tight forcefield blanket around the boy, trying to exert the same amount of pressure on his calf bone that the fallen chandelier had.
He yelled, muffled by the pale orange field that now covered him completely. I yelled too, throwing the chandelier off him and picking him up, hoping that the protective blanket would prevent me from wounding him further.
I broke into a run out of the collapsing house, hopping over debris. The force-box whirred behind us, barely keeping pace. The field buzzed and flickered as it came in and out of range, but didn't go out entirely.
I held my moaning charge in a bridal carry, stopping a good ten strides away from the collapsing house. The box finally caught up to me. I kicked it up so that it landed on my chest, pinched between my helmeted chin and the passenger. Projector secure, I took to the skies, trying not to drop my passenger or snap his neck with excessive force.
"The house collapsed. I've got him now. Battery, where's the helicopter?"
"C12," Battery said. I had only asked out of stress — a simple spin around would have told me the direction I needed to go. The medical team hadn't caught up to us yet, flying in from the search and rescue base on the coast. I called the Hoverpad to me, then realized that it was still laden with gadgets.
Damn it. I kicked the rods sitting atop the platform, sending them flying to the ground. I watched them go down, wincing at each landfall. I tried to shake my head free of regret, and turned my attention to the matter at hand. I set the kid down on top of the Hoverpad, and carefully attached the field-projecting box to one of the receptacles on its side. That would be better than carrying him in my arms.
I made it to the helicopter quickly with the hovering platform following behind. I left the kid hovering in place once I got near enough to the helicopter to feel the wind coming down from the rotor. It was hard to maintain level flight under the downwash, but I managed.
The people inside couldn't hear me at all, all I could do was wave and point at the hovering platform behind me. I hoped that Battery or whoever was on Console had let them know what was going on. I made for the nearest rooftop.
They got the hint, landing 30 seconds after the boy and me. I got him off the platform and onto solid ground, field still powered on.
I couldn't avoid looking at the wound any longer. Despite my best intentions, he had bled. The forcefield covering his body followed the shape of his leg, now concave and pointing down instead of straight in the knee-to-heel section. There was a bend in the field directly below his wound, and blood collected there in a red puddle. I hoped it wasn't too much blood loss.
The doctors ran to us, kits at the ready, and I started to explain the situation. Before I could say a word, they started shaking their heads and motioned for me to turn off the forcefield. Right after I did, they went to work.
I watched for a few seconds, then jumped off the rooftop, catching myself with the thrusters before I started falling. I flew back in the direction of the neighbourhood we had been checking out.
"Resuming search," I said.
• • •
We searched through more collapsed and collapsing houses, but came upon no other people. Outside the suburbs, bursts of lifesigns surrounding Endbringer shelters were the only break we saw in the sea of nothing. I was glad for the two rescues from earlier. They had helped make this feel like less of a joke.
We were nearing another shelter, the second of the night. This was the nearest to the coast that I'd seen anyone. I passed through a gentle wave of commotion — the sound of an enormous crowd averaged out and dulled into an indistinct murmur. The noise sharpened as I neared, until I could make out individual voices. A mother calling after her two children. Somebody using a wheelchair, trying to part the crowd in the parking lot. Children and babies crying in the backs of PRT trucks; their reverberating voices were a distinct sour garnish that completed the commotion. There weren't any old people in the crowd.
I landed in a puddle, adding to the layer of crust on the bottom half of my armour. The weather was horrible. Most of the assembled survivors weren't dressed for it, wearing whatever they had on before the disaster. The scope of a city-wide evacuation wasn't obvious. Plans that started and ended at 'Get to a shelter!' didn't account for the weeks of waiting for a ride out of the city, having only what you brought with you, subsisting on rations and whatever could be scavenged from the ruins. Choosing between lean days and starving children.
I saw Strider at the Leviathan fight. Blue suit, few words. Didn't remember whether he was an American cape, or came from abroad. He didn't join the fight, instead transporting people, feet stuck to the designated teleport platforms. I only saw glimpses of him, most mid-teleport. Always working. He could've gotten these people out of Brockton in no time, spread them around to cities that could take the influx of refugees.
In his absence, they had to make do with trucks. The roads that wound around here were more rubble than asphalt, pummeled by the fighting, eroded by Leviathan's wake. There were potholes I could stick my head into, heaps of disassembled building taller than the trucks, and a messy line where the road had been melted by one of the capes that had defended the shelter. I saw a truck coming into the camp sink into a patch of road that had looked solid on the surface, but gave way to a grey-brown gravelly slurry that now coated the tires.
There was one usable path, winding its way out of the parking lot. It stayed on a safe patch of street for a car-length, crossing it and bending into a 'tunnel' that had been carved through the remains of a hotel.
The building looked as though it had been struck by a great axe during the disaster. Its middle third now spilled out toward the parking lot and beyond the end of the path, rubble displaced by whatever had struck it. The new way through was just a widening of that initial rift, now big enough to fit four cars through.
A swarm of volunteers in white hard hats (and rarely green ones) had descended on the rubble. They were operating bulldozers, picking away at the edges of the makeshift road with jackhammers, and tossing chunks of building into big bins that were then taken away to a spoil pile by loading vehicles. A few red plastic crates marked with the symbol for hazardous explosive substances were scattered about, upturned and empty.
Trucks came at regular intervals, momentarily stopping the road work. There was no hope of going through the ruins from this far out; they'd be going toward the coast, where a patchwork assembly of prefab bridges led onto a pier. Ferries ran every hour, emptying the city.
"Kid," Battery said, gesturing for me to come to her. She was talking to a man who was a good head taller than me and proportionally bigger in the other dimensions. He was wearing a black combat vest, fatigues, and an assault rifle strapped across his chest. On top of the dark stuff, he wore an additional set of clothing: a hi-vis vest, a fluorescent pink hard hat, and a lanyard that read 'SUPERVISOR.' He had a salt-and-pepper beard, wrinkling face, and slight underbite. He held a pencil and a heavy-duty metal contractor's clipboard in his hands.
In just the military outfit, he would have passed for a grizzled drill sergeant; In just the construction safety gear, an experienced foreman. Both just looked comical.
"That him?" he asked.
"Yes. He needs a tour of the place, I think," Battery said.
He quirked his brow. "What d'you need, exactly?"
"A talk with your engineer, or failing that, a tour of the site," I said, "The stabilizers work best when they're near the weakest structural members. If you have a generator, I can hook into that and make the power cells last longer."
He scratched his beard. "Can't let you at the generators. And we've no engineer. Can't spare the guys to get you a tour guide, neither. But you can make a lap 'round the works, long as you don't bother or distract anyone. Even then… falling concrete to the brain's a hazard all 'round the demo. Keep your distance. You know site safety, smart guy?"
I nodded.
"Right, fine. Stay away from the works, just walk 'round the edge. And ask before you do anything that might kill someone, yeah?"
"Got it," I said. The man huffed in response. He looked back at Battery, and walked away from us, rapping his pencil against the edge of his clipboard.
I sighed. The other shelter was about as well-staffed, so this wasn't exactly a surprise. I called the Hoverpad over. It carried a bundle of twelve telescoping rods, recovered from where I'd kicked them off. Two had broken in the fall. I winced at the memory — If I had thought faster, I could have saved them. Deployed another box and caught them in a force field, or just grabbed them in the crook of my knee. I'd done the right thing: the boy was more important. It still hurt.
This shelter wasn't actually a great choice for the stabilizers. The actual building was fine, and they would hinder the demolition crew working on the building. I still needed to put up four around this site to meet my quota.
I flew in a low hover, making my way from the parking lot to the 'axed' building, Hoverpad following me closely. I untied the knotted-up yellow caution tape that was holding the bundle of gadgets together (the only thing the crew at the previous shelter had to spare) and set down one of the stabilizers next to one of the corners of the ruin. Each stabilizer was a telescoping metal rod, painted white. Their bottoms ended in a wide tripod, and they were topped with shiny smooth spheres. A melon-sized bulge marked their middle with a little control panel on one side and a barely-visible square indentation opposite.
I tapped in a round of eyeballed settings into the control panel, then put my finger on the slider labelled 'Field Strength.' As I slid it toward full power, I watched the top of the device. The sphere topping the rod thrummed with energy. Air near the device turned slightly hazy. It was almost possible to see the slight blue tint around that computer modelling had predicted, though it was faint enough that I wasn't sure it was my imagination. I knelt down and picked up a rock to test the field with.
I whipped it into the air in a suit-assisted throw impossible for a human pitcher. It shot through the air and stopped dead a few moments after hitting the field. It hung in the air for a second, then started falling down, maintaining a constant speed and spitting in the face of gravity.
That done, I walked behind the device, looking around for people. Nobody was nearby. I reached behind the control panel and pressed into a nondescript patch of metal. The hatch gave way and sprung outwards. Inside were blocky plain-aluminium Tinkertech parts, half of a prototype. They would snap together into a single large assembly once reunited with their compatriots. None looked broken on cursory inspection.
I closed the hatch, watching the surface come flush with the rest of the metal. I walked away at a brisk pace and took off again, flying to the other side of the building to set up a second stabilizer.
Train, work, fly, sleep, repeat. Nothing really changed, except that I got this pit-in-the-stomach feeling that came whenever I thought about what all of my tech was going to be used for.
With many thanks to Cantrip (whose SB username I do not know, and who may indeed just not be on SB) for their round of feedback, and to Partisanenpasta for their own quick look. "One quality chapter a week" turns into "one mediocre chapter a week" without their help; If you want to help me step up my game, shoot me a message on the forums, on the SB Discord server, or on the Cauldron Discord server. 'Quality' is of course relative. I'm sure at least a couple of people have bounced off this fic because the writing just isn't up to snuff.
And look, I figured out non-gradient horizontal lines. I think. Still gonna stick with the triple/quintuple middots for scene breaks, though.
Here's the chapter! I feel quite nervous, because there are 99 watchers subscribed to this thread at time of writing, and yet more anonymous guests popping in from time to time. I've gotten more engagement from posting short stories elsewhere… but this feels special. Reading Worm fics on SpaceBattles has been what I do to wind down for a long while, and I guess the years of suffering horrible writing drove me to throw my own mangle of words into the ring. Now I've actually committed to this thing, and have a plan for finishing it unlike my previous threads in CrW/Worm. I hope you're enjoying the fic.
We've crossed my 20,000 word goal, set in the first Informational post. If you know any high-repute artisans, please do direct me their way. For now, this is all I have for you:
Finally: Would you put dead drops into your Tinkertech?
Two days, and no news from Tattletale, no news from Brockton General, nothing at all to think about except my actual job.
The Protectorate gave me plenty of other things to worry about. With the Empire gone, there were no more active villains roaming the streets, so all efforts were focussed on the evacuation. As of yesterday, the last boat carrying survivors from the Endbringer shelters had left the city, but that was only part of the problem.
Leviathan had, for all intents and purposes, killed Brockton Bay. Bureaucracy was holding up the funeral.
I got briefing documents every morning, from which I was putting together a picture of the decision makers. At first, the priority was on keeping order in the streets, and rescue workers seemed to have the situation in hand: So heroes went on patrol. Soon after, it became clear that cold, hunger, and building collapse were bigger issues than crime: So heroes did search and rescue. Then, division in the ranks: Search where? Rescue whom? Evacuees in the suburbs, of course, since the Endbringer attack was on a Sunday and analysis of population movement patterns predicted a high density of people in the bedroom communities outside the Brockton core– Except, no, wait, the projections didn't account for the dockworkers– But another report concludes that… On and on it went.
I was at fault, too, sat inside my workshop engineering forcefield-emitting armour and making gadgets to order for literal supervillains instead of spending more time in the field or manufacturing search and rescue devices.
Today's file: bad. All medical facilities had been over capacity since the start of the attack and were only getting better in proportion to how many people had managed to leave Brockton. There were five digits in the estimate for "excess deaths" due to our inability to evacuate people in precarious situations. And the roster of heroes who travelled to help the relief effort was "experiencing severe attrition."
It was hard to blame the ones who left for their decision. At a certain point, every ruined house in the suburbs, sunken building in the downtown core, and converted storage container blends into a composite heap of human suffering. The mangled people, sick people, hungry people, and the corpses are all remembered as one. The travelling heroes who had stuck with us this far had suffered all that, just to help people they didn't know in a place they had no relation to.
The report said we were nearing the end, anyway. Maybe they just thought they'd done enough.
That was my morning, pacing around the workshop while skimming through the briefing documents on my visor. It was distressingly clean in here. Work on gadgets was slow between all the long days of flying around Brockton. The last project I managed to finish was turning Tattletale's bulky radar-gadget design into a module for the Zephyr's vision system.
There was a knock at the door.
"Come in," I said.
Assault was at the threshold, fully-suited, with a neat manila folder in hand. Lately it seemed as though he didn't even take it off to sleep. He put his free hand to his mouth to suppress a yawn. "Holy hell," he said, "I thought the directory was lying, but no, our wunderkind really is awake at 6AM."
"The customary greeting is 'good morning.' And yeah, I was hoping to get some time to myself, work on things." I gestured vaguely at the lightly-cluttered workbenches.
"Good, uh, good. Do you have time to talk?"
"Sure. What's the matter?"
"Well, I was just looking over our schedules, you know, squad leader stuff."
"Right," I said. Had he noticed my unscheduled leave on the day of the bomb threat?
"And I noticed, you don't have any personal time on yours. At all."
I breathed out. No, it was just Assault. "Actually, I put down flying as personal time. For fun, you know."
"Yeah, for fun and to test your tech. I mean, spend some time living like you're not a superhero. Talk to someone. I mean, I told you that already, but, seriously, talk to someone. Unwind."
"Okay, fine: When I fly, I test my suit. Two birds, one stone, so sue me. I'm just busy, Assault. Gadgets to make, people to save."
"Whole squad's busy. Whole Rig's busy. It's a relief effort, there are always people to save. But you have to put your oxygen mask on, before helping others."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"It means: Put on a DVD and turn your brain off. Read a book with characters in it, and a twist or two. Think about things other than making gadgets and saving lives."
"We need all the manpower we can get–"
"And that manpower is no good to us if it's running at full tilt all the time. You're going to run out of steam. Badly. There's a reason most capes lead double lives, and it ain't the allure of secrecy. You need normal."
"Okay," I said.
"Okay?"
"Yes. Okay. I'll add more personal time, no flying. Two hours good? Three?"
Assault raised an eyebrow at me. "Seriously?"
I offered no response, waiting for him to continue.
"Geez. I don't care, Kid. I'm not your dad. The hours don't matter, I just think you're doing too much and running on empty. That's all."
He took a look around the lab, and turned to leave.
I looked at the ceiling, screwed my eyes shut in a grimace, clenched my fists, and took a deep breath. I imagined watching this moment play out from the outside, through my visor. I could picture bright red text appearing just as Assault would have turned to leave — "SOCIAL INTERACTION FAILED."
"Fuck me."
"You called?" asked Tattletale. I bolted upright and scrambled to look for the source of the noise. My laptop.
"God, please not now."
"Normally I'd needle you and let you know exactly how much of that I heard, but there's no time for that now. Coordinates, fly there, we'll be outside. And quickly."
• • •
I flew, from afar probably looking like I was holding the stereotypical "Alexandria pose," arms outstretched. Really, I was miming strangling motions, with a few vigorous shakes thrown in.
The destination was a factory building in the Docks. Its sloping roof was crowned by a sign that said "Redmond Welding," bent a bit out of its original rectangular shape. At the front, there were two massive metal sliding doors, and beside those a human-sized door. Tattletale stood in front of it, waving.
I landed without fanfare.
"Welcome to Casa 'Siders," she said, opening the door, "Be our guest."
I paused for a moment, looking around the building. Then, I turned the suit's tac-radar on and looked around again. Tattletale was covered by a blob of transluscent red "life sign vision," and in the distance I could make out three other person-sized blobs, all at ground level inside the building, and three bulky bear-shaped things next to them. Above us was another bear-thing. Hellhound's dogs.
"What's the trick?" I asked.
"There is no trick," she said, "And if there was, you'd have to play along anyway. So play along."
"None of Grue's darkness to hide your numbers?"
"No. There is no trick. Come inside, I insist."
Deep breaths. I walked into the building. Dark, but naturally so. Rusted hulks of machinery littered the factory floor.
"That way," Tattletale said from behind, pointing out a spiral staircase.
The rest of the Undersiders were sitting on the floor in an empty corner, seemingly bored, two dogs at their side. Hellhound and Grue turned to look at me, but Skitter sat absolutely still. I absentmindedly checked myself for bugs, forgetting that I couldn't have felt any through the armour.
"Yep," said Tattletale, "There we are, you see us, big whoop. You could see them through walls anyway. No tricks. Keep going."
Up the stairs I went, until I stood facing… a living room, essentially. In the centre of the space, there were two couches set at a right angle, facing an honest-to-God home theatre setup. TV, speakers, game consoles. In the distance there was an eating area with tables and chairs. Shelves with books. Rugs. All illuminated by transluscently-dusty windows near the ceiling.
Only one thing detracted from all the normality on display: The Hellhound-dog I'd seen through the walls, sitting upright on the floor beside one of the couches.
Coming from behind, Tattletale gently nudged my suit. I stepped to the side, letting her walk to the further of the two couches and sit down. Hellhound's monster was sitting upright on the floor, right beside her. Tattletale fished around in the couch cushions until she found a laptop that had fallen through. She set it on her lap but did not open it.
"Join me, please," she said, indicating the other couch with her hand, "Don't worry about the dog. He's tame."
"Great," I said, taking a seat, "My alarm bells are ringing. Loudly. What are you up to?"
"This is where we sleep at night. Casa 'Siders. I'm serious. So, what I'm up to, is inviting you into our home."
"That might have been a grand gesture before, but now? During an evacuation? When we're all leaving town? This isn't even a token attempt to build trust. It's just weird."
"Yep. But we won't need this place anymore, and this fit the schedule better than meeting somewhere else. I want to ask you something: What's our plan?"
I stared at her. "Seriously? Can't you just get to the point instead of asking rhetorical questions? You're supposed to be the mastermind."
"Yeah, I know. The question isn't rhetorical. You're not an idiot. You've probably put some things together. Had some questions. So, what's our plan, best as you can surmise?"
I rolled my eyes, and thought for a moment.
"You said that I had to 'deliver a message,' which I still don't know anything about. What you actually did was commission a bunch of gadgets and annoy me."
"Warmer. Come on, be a Thinker for a second. What's not adding up?"
I tilted my head at her. "Fine, I'll play along. Only you've been talking to me, not the rest of your team. Maybe they don't like me. Or your plan. Also, you're missing an Undersider. I don't think I saw Regent at the bomb threat, and he's not here now, either. Did Leviathan get him?"
"Perceptive! Now, be a Tinker again. What are we doing with your tech? You must be curious."
Of course, she ignored my question.
"I don't understand how it fits together. You asked for a device that detects lifesigns from afar, a massive forcefield projector that slows sudden motion, and the compression ring thing. I haven't seen you use any of the gadgets, you may as well just be fencing them."
"So you don't have any ideas?" she asked.
"No. I don't know. You're not planning on killing Leviathan, right? I can't do that. Those won't do that. Maybe you could stop some of the waves, but the power source won't hold against a tsunami. The ring might hurt it, or more likely just bounce off the skin. So he'd take a swipe at your gang and turn your team into a kind of chunky supervillain chili. And I guess you'd need the lifesign scanner after that massacre, to see where the still-warm bits of dog and human viscera would fly to. There, that a good guess?"
"Colder. Much colder. We don't have a deathwish, despite all appearances. Okay, another question: What's my endgame?"
"How the fuck should I know?"
"Just narrow it down, Sherlock, eliminate the impossible. How does this end?"
"Fine. You haven't left the city, for some reason. Probably because your missing team member is keeping you here. Evac is going to be over within the week, including hospital patients. You need to be here, and there's just four of you, so you can't keep eyes on Clockblocker when he gets moved outside Brockton.
"No hostage, no leverage. You don't have me for long, meaning either you already have what you need, or we're having this conversation so you can string me along some more. So, you took me here to build trust, which, I cannot stress enough, did not actually work and is just weird."
"A good enough answer. Now, look at this." Tattletale turned the laptop in her hands around, screen facing me.
The dusty screen displayed a graph, orange circles arranged on a black background. On the X-axis, time in days, on the Y-axis, "seismic events."
"Bubbles show quantity and magnitude, how high they are doesn't matter. Big bubble on the left is Leviathan landing, plus the aftershocks. Then it's quiet. Then…"
A line of little earthquakes, or maybe a continuous little earthquake. Higher than the background noise.
"So, you're predicting the second end of Brockton Bay?"
"It's as ended as it can get, so, no. Look: Seven days of quake, stop for three, then seven more days of quieter quakes. Someone dug for something, found it, and left the same way they came."
Looking at graphs. Peak Thinker shit.
"So? You're extrapolating."
"Yeah, I am. Kid, Leviathan didn't get Regent. He disappeared the same day the quakes stopped. Skitter couldn't find him with bugs, he isn't dead because we had contingencies for that, and, fucking– We don't know where he is. The– The seismographs don't give precise enough readings to figure out the location. And we're the last idiots still in the city, us, and the refugees, and…"
"And the relief effort. Holy shit, you don't have anyone else you can reach out to. Wow. A villain's life is sad."
"Yeah."
"So, this is a sob story. This is you saying: Sorry Kid Win, we had to blackmail you and make a little bomb threat, and hold your friend hostage, because we're just the poorest little villains who couldn't. And the kicker is, now that your grip is slipping on the leash, you want me to help you more. Fuck you. You lost someone you care about in the wreckage: My condolences, get in the fucking line. Ask for help through the official channels, like everyone else."
"You don't get it: There aren't official channels for us. And there isn't a leash."
She took off her domino mask, revealing a sprinkling of freckles under her eyes. A smirk hadn't come across her face for the last minute, at least. The acting skills were really out in full force. Thinkers.
"Yeah, we're asking you for help. We're sick bastard villains, on equal standing with seagulls and rats for the Protectorate's empathy. We squeezed you for all the advantages we could get, because, as you said, we don't have anyone else. They all either died, fled, or betrayed us, just like everyone else in Brockton.
"No big names came to help evacuate, right?" she continued, "No Tinkers, either? Not even their charity-shop gadgets? All the heroes would rather play-fight with villains in New York or Chicago, because there's nothing here for them, just death and crumbling concrete.
"And the fight, what a joke. Your erstwhile mentor, recovering in the 'hospital?' Yeah, he wanted to test his mettle against the Endbringer more than he cared about preventing casualties. All while they let kid heroes fight Leviathan. Vista! Fucking Vista died."
"You," I said, "are on thin fucking ice."
"And you are in the Protectorate, an organization that can't get enough of its shit together to stop people from dying in this festering wound of a city. Seriously, how many heroes do they have on their roster? Where the fuck are they?
"So, here's your message: Regent is somewhere under the collapsed Shelter 12, and we're going to go get him tonight. Under the shelter there's one giant lifesign, hard to miss. The thing has him. Even if you think I'm bullshitting, you're obligated to report this. Got it?"
I tapped my chestplate. "It's all on camera, asshole."
"And we don't have Clockblocker hostage. We never did, I just bluffed. Sorry. You're free to go — you can even try and arrest us if you want, though I don't like your chances."
I tried to bore holes into her skull through her eyeballs. She had just let her hostage go, effectively. Where was the trap?
She put her mask back on, and stood up. The monster-dog beside her adjusted its posture to let her climb atop it. I saw Grue's darkness seeping up from the first floor, and even reaching around the outside of the building to cover the windows.
I stood up and stomped on the ground.
"Fuck you. Fuck you. That doesn't even begin to cover it. Die. All of you. Go down there, try to save your only living friend, if he's not fucking dead already. Step into the trap, whatever it is, and die an interesting fucking death!" I was shouting, fully hoarse-throat shouting.
"Sorry, Kid," she said, fully sat atop the dog now. The darkness was creeping up to my knees now.
She'd gotten to me. Fine, I was easy to get to. I was done being passive. I leaned forward and willed my suit to lift off in a tackle at the dog, high speed–
–And was arrested in midair. I hung, almost in-place, moving forward an inch at a time.
Grue, downstairs. They must have been setting up a stabilizer while we talked, and I couldn't hear it powering on through the darkness. Thus rendering two out of three of my weapons ineffective. Containment foam grenades would, at best, make a sphere the size of a bowling ball before hardening completely. Lasers would work, but killing and maiming is against Protectorate policy. And there was enough "novel physics" involved in shooting off a stun phaser round here to dissuade me from the notion. If it blew up, I could lose an arm.
Oh, and I couldn't aim any of that at her if I wanted to, because I had chosen the worst plan of attack possible.
My vision was fine, but the thoughts — I thought red. Invective, images of thumbs-on-trachea violence against clever little Thinkers, just plain swearing. Going back over every word she'd ever said to me and wondering how I could be so fucking stupid.
Tattletale just looked at me.
I spooled the thrusters up to full power. Predictably, I went no faster.
"I'm sorry," she said again. She rode the dog down the stairs into the darkness. Soon, it crept up to my helmet, and found its way to my face through an air vent. I could hear nothing, do nothing, see nothing. I hadn't even made a distress call while I'd had the chance to. God, I was a shit superhero.
Fuck.
Hi, Tattletale haters! Following a philosophy I like to call "I will finish at least one goddamn fanfic in my lifetime, so help me Satan," I wrote a shorter chapter to break the… Half-year drought/hiatus. Whoops. Life got in the way, and then I never got life out of the way– That is, until now. I make no promises of consistency, but this will be finished. Even if it ends up being the worst Tinker fic on this website or whatever, I will write words until this stupid story has a stupid ending.
This chapter received almost no editing and is probably full of silly mistakes. I will come back and update the post after a few passes. (This text should be struck-through if I did this.) Also, #@!% this chapter, I tried to write it two other times and only now have something halfway-workable. Anyway, it's here, like it or not. Hopefully I haven't forgotten how to write and it's structurally okay. I gotta stop writing this endnote, the chapter is fine. I'm fine. We're fine. Kid isn't, but, hey, at least he got a Hoverboard out of this whole debacle.
Finally: Would you… man, I don't even know. Write in with your own "Would you…?" question. I feel bad for everyone in this chapter.
Grue's darkness would last 30 minutes or so, from what I remembered of his dossier. My gadget… I wasn't sure, the math kept getting jumbled up in my head. It would probably keep me locked in place for less than an hour, but more than 10 minutes. Or a lot less than 10 minutes.
The Tinker, unusually restrained this morning, was letting loose. Grue's power blocks light, probably most EM, sound, but lets through motion-effect fields and their carrier particles — Redesigned Zephyr should include SCUBA mode to render wearer invulnerable to respiratory hazards — Does 'darkness' affect internal organs? Who can corroborate this? —
I forced myself to take deep breaths. A lot of deep breaths. The supernatural fog muffled everything, so much so that I couldn't hear myself breathing, but I tried to stay the course, anyway. There was no point being agitated.
But it was bad. It was so bad. Don't get me wrong; I'd considered what I would do if the jig ever came soft-side-up, but this wasn't what I'd pictured. The plan for telling the Protectorate about my part-time arms-dealership and simmering hostage situation was pretty much "send an email and hope," and didn't involve this much hesitation.
And yet… I would certainly be put on some kind of probation for all this. Checked out for Master/Stranger stuff. Probably would have access to the computer networks revoked. It seemed unlikely they'd let me keep flying around right after I revealed that I'd become an unwilling asset to a supervillain team.
I didn't like that reality.
Assuming nobody had noticed my absence, there would still be some time to think. Look around the Endbringer Shelter that Tattletale had mentioned and check just how much smoke she was blowing up my ass. List all the ways that my tech had failed me.
Find the best way to phrase the sentence "I got drawn in by the most obvious Tinker-lure in the history of luring Tinkers, and so, just so you know, untold thousands of dollars in equipment and probably Protectorate secrets are in the hands of villains now." Or the best way to deliver Tattletale's message: "Hey there my fellow heroes, there's a big thing underground in the city centre, and it has a villain. No, I don't know why. Nor do I know that that's actually true, for sure. Oh, good question, thank you: this is our problem despite the almost-full evacuation of the area because… Because a known liar said so."
It was naked manipulation, literal mask-off manipulation. Hard to forget her stupid freckled "my intentions are pure at heart" face.
Despite that massive, massive little detail… I still wanted to take a look. She wouldn't lie about something she'd know I'd check, that's just Lying 101. There probably was something rotten under that building and finding out what felt a lot easier than confessing to being the worst superhero on the Brockton Bay roster by a country mile.
I was expecting the fall, but dropping to the ground in the darkness, without any warning, still gave me a spook. The field finally let me go, or I passed through the area of effect.
Very slowly, I took step after step until I was touching a wall. The staircase down would be on my left.
Screw walking. Decidedly out of range of the stabilizer now, I flew up and through where I figured there would be a window, tearing out a couple of bricks on my way out. The cloud of darkness outside was only a few feet thick and easily gave way to the usual sights of urban decay amid a blue sky. After a few seconds, the last dregs of Grue's supernatural fog cleared out of my suit entirely, I could see out of my visor again.
The Undersiders were gone, long gone, but I looked around for them anyway. Monster-dogs left behind some evidence of their dash through the streets, but after about three blocks any hope of tracking them was done for.
I was stalling, delaying the inevitable. And it was time to delay some more.
The flight over didn't take long. Within a minute of escaping the field, I could see the wreck.
Shelter 12 stood in ruin; canted over, cracked in half, and visibly unfit for human habitation. Assuming someone repaved the streets, it would take a good 5 minute walk from the edge of the Crater, inwards, to get there. (In reality, rather a lot more mantling and trudging would be involved than in a typical downtown stroll.) When that hypothetical pedestrian got there, they would see no obvious way in or out.
The building was a one-story concrete thing, in contrast to the modern skyscrapers surrounding it. The vibe was "pillbox." Heavily eroded asphalt beaten-up enough that sections of it would turn to slush under a boot- led into a parking garage: caved-in, blocked by chunks of car and concrete. The side of the building that had sunk into the ground showed no signs of permeability. Its aboveground counterpart was a little better, but getting to any actual doors would require clearing a path through a mangle of streetlamps, fenders, and wire fencing.
I saw red on my visor. Lifesigns, just like what Tattletale had described. A readout to the side told me it was 40 metres below ground, subway level, and 10 metres across at its widest — about as long as a bus. It got more defined as I flew closer to the ground, until I could finally make out a central mass and a thing jutting out of it that moved from side to side. Two blobs, hard to tell.
But those weren't the only things underground. Stretching out toward the centre of the crater, in the direction of the coast — 20, 30, 31 little blobs. Human-sized blobs, all completely still. Tattletale hadn't mentioned that part.
I hovered for a while, deliberating, letting the occasional gust of wind push me around. The weather was calm.
With a few flicks of my eyes, I called home.
"Assault?"
"You got me, Kid. Need anything before the morning's orders?"
He greeted me in my workshop, wearing a smile and carrying two coffees. It took a little while to properly doff my armour, so he had to stand and wait as I left the protective shell. Soon enough, we were both sitting, Assault on the couch, me on the office chair. He tried to make small talk — must have, he was Assault. I guess he got the message about the tone of this meeting when I didn't really respond.
I fretted with my fingers and licked my lips, way too much, way more than humans usually do. I looked up, down, everywhere but at him. I keenly felt my quickening heartbeat.
It should have poured out of me. I should have talked and kept talking. But we only had a half hour until the team meeting, and I was being myself.
"We missed rescues. 30 people under Shelter 12, city core, and some kind of monster. Cape or biological tinkertech." Easy.
But I didn't say that. What I said instead was: "I'm taking the day off. Sorry, I know you needed me doing search and rescue."
Assault just nodded. He sat calmly opposite me, waiting for more words to fall out. I took a sip of my coffee. Very sugary, very creamy, sickly sweet.
"Okay. Really short notice, but it's okay. The squad can handle it. Didja give that life-radar to Battery?"
"Yeah," I said.
"Great, it's good tech. Take it easy, Kid. Read over the morning brief, though, okay?"
He clapped me on the back, twice, and left the lab.
I felt myself tense, involuntarily, and gripped the underside of my chair. I stared into space, and thought: about the people underground, about the tech, about the trap, and not seeing it coming. The Tinker in my head was quick to join the fun, running through every daily briefing I'd read, everything Tattletale had said, all trying to make sense of what the hell had happened to me earlier this morning.
My hands hunted for something to do while my mind raced, settling on dismantling the Hoverpad. I placed it on the workbench surface and took out my tools.
It made no sense — it made absolutely no sense. If Tattletale wanted the PRT to respond, she would have led with the "30 trapped civilians." But…
She wanted a PRT response, but didn't give a concrete deadline. "Tonight," not "2100 hours." And she didn't use her 'in' with the computer systems to fake it. Did it mean anything?
My old Wards-issued smartphone joined the Hoverpad on the operating table. It was going to be a donor in a tracking module transplant surgery.
Then, the meeting at their headquarters. If that even was "Casa 'Siders." And the unmasked heart-to-heart. The sob story. Something about her version of events had been bothering me, ever since I'd heard it.
I dropped the tools over my patient's heart, leaving the Pad with the mechanical equivalent of a sponge in its chest cavity.
I mashed keys on my laptop until it woke up and clicked my way into the web browser. I had a 100-link-strong folder of bookmarks, labelled "Leviathan," and I didn't even have to scroll past the first screenful to get to what I needed: The full transcript of my armband's activity.
I searched for Regent, and there he was: "H22, Regent deceased." But the Undersiders were convinced he'd lived. The location lined up, at least. The villain's last ping very well could have come from Shelter 12.
I wandered back to the Hoverpad, mulling things over as I fished the loose tools out of its frame and resumed the surgery. It was clear I was being messed with, but how? I both needed to talk to Tattletale and kick her shit in. That was her whole deal, so great.
There was another thought, a worse thought: Maybe Tattletale didn't lie.
I closed up the chassis, done with the transplant. Now with the Hoverpad set to autonomous flight, I could play hooky with impunity. I'd just call for help if I needed it.
One thing at a time: Get into the armour. Take the Hoverpad. I could walk and chew gum — up the stairs, and edit the schedule. "Personal time, flying."
The last item on my pre-flight checklist: I called 'Dragon.' No response, as expected. The suit would keep calling until it got a bite.
I jumped off and engaged thrust, going into an irresponsibly steep dive. The L-shaped flight path took me within 20 feet of the surface of the water. For a moment I had no thoughts in my head, just adrenaline, but I was both too preoccupied with other thoughts and too used to flying to really ride that high. I followed the winding coastline until the Rig was well out of sight. At the Docks, behind a pier, I released the Hoverpad, its course set to fly in an arc pointing toward the Atlantic, then coming back to the New Rig.
Now, back to the Undersiders' place. It was nearby, in the less-distressed section of the Docks.
I landed softly, just outside the door Tattletale had led me through. Nothing and no one. No — there were bugs. Scattered all about the place, but so small they were invisible to the tac-radar. Moths, ants, spiders. Thinly spread across the façade of the building and no doubt inside. The door hung open, and, sure enough, a thin spiderweb was stretched across the threshold.
I walked through, unfazed.
They hadn't bothered to take the stabilizer with them. It still stood in the centre of the room, turned on. The readout on its control panel shone yellow, indicating an overstrained power cell. Maybe I could have broken out of it with enough thrust… Whatever. No time to dwell on mistakes. I turned it off, just in case.
'Dragon' wasn't just ignoring the calls. She kept declining them, hanging up. My suit kept calling.
I turned off the field, and checked the device over. Nothing was placed in the secret compartment.
Over by where Grue, Skitter, and Hellhound had sat, was a discarded olive-green tarp, about the right size to hide a stabilizer pylon.
Nothing else stuck out at me. I went up the stairs, breaking a few more spiderwebs.
The apartment upstairs was exactly the same. Two couches, home theatre, lived-in atmosphere. I checked out the other rooms. Kitchen, dining area with tables. Six doors. One labelled 'washroom' with a pictogram-style sign, two with small graffiti emblems, the rest unadorned. The bedrooms had been cleared out, and in a hurry, all the linens in disarray and the drawers pulled out of the nightstands.
Actually, the whole space looked like it had been cleaned. No trash, papers, bits of costume, only the surface-level signs of habitation.
"You missed something: There are people under the shelter."
"You… oh, you terminally-socially-anxious little idiot. You didn't call it in."
"And you answered my call. Thinkers and intel, you're like moths to a flame. You can drop the act, I know Skitter's got her bugs on me."
"No. Skitter is out of range. But thanks for letting us know you came back for another look. And scouted the shelter. Anything interesting?"
"300 casualties estimated at Shelter 12, but 31 people are still alive underground, plus whatever your big lifesign is. You didn't mention the people, why? You saw them. Wait, wait–"
The gadget. —Handheld tac-radar prototype displays the 3D point cloud as a top-down approximation. Major distortion artefacts, 'blobby' output. Resolution is low due to inadequate spacing between the sensors, improved in Zephyr-integrated model—
"–You just trusted my tac-radar prototype. That far underground, it just merged everything into one lifesign. That's all you had to go off of, because Skitter's bugs couldn't get in. Either that, or you're the worst planner of all time and didn't even try to scout the area. What the hell are we dealing with here?"
"This is a tonal change, Kid Win. 'We,' deductive reasoning, engaging with the puzzle I gave you. Last time we talked, you wanted us all to, I quote–"
"You win! You did it. I got the message."
"So call your bosses. Tell them about the shelter. Lifesigns. Your camera recording. That's the message."
"You. Are. Smarter. Than. Me. Is that what you want to hear? Need your ego stroked? Is the tonal change not enough for you? You wanted my help. You got it. Let me work the problem, and tell me: How the fuck do you know he's alive?"
"You're going right where I want you, little Ward."
"Fine. Shut up and give me directions."
It was a street not too far from the Endbringer shelter, maybe six blocks out. As usual, I really didn't know what Tattletale was playing at. Pulling a superhero-landing in the middle of the throng of villains seemed crass, so I picked out a less-ruined intersection a block away and walked from there.
Loose particles of aggregate and bitumen crunched underfoot. I still felt safe inside my suit, despite the many flaws. Maybe that wasn't such a good thing.
Tattletale waved at me as I turned the corner. The Undersiders, in broad daylight, looked surprisingly okay. Maybe their suits just hid the wear-and-tear better than the Nazis' had. Grue's motorcycle-leathers getup was the most tattered-looking of the lot, having accumulated a tidy collection of light grey scuff marks that spoiled the edgy villain schtick.
They were arrayed around an alley that separated two incredibly drab buildings. I never went to this part of Brockton out of costume, and it was too far north of the usual patrol routes for me to have gotten to know it that way. So far, this was mysterious as all hell.
The villains were hard to read. Skitter stayed completely still, but a swarm of bugs drew out shapes from chaos theory textbooks by her feet. Hellhound kept her gaze fixed on one of the three dogs that loomed in the background, making two-handed window washing motions that must have passed for petting the monster. Tattletale bounced from one foot to another. Grue carried a large black duffel bag over his shoulder, and another identical bag in his right hand. A business-end of one of my stabilizers peeked out of a bulging zipper.
A cloud of Grue's darkness obscured whatever was inside the alley. The Undersiders, it seemed, were sticking to their new theatrical bent.
Within earshot of the villains, now, I caught a bit of their conversation, only now realizing that Grue had been talking.
Grue spoke in an exasperated tone. "This is your third improvisation, T. Hope it's worth it."
"Shush," said Tattletale, "and don't keep count if you don't intend to hold a grudge."
"Am I interrupting?" I asked.
"No," said Grue, "You're the guest of fucking honour."
At that, Hellhound turned her attention away from her dog and stared daggers at me. Her usual cheap mask was off, revealing a brusque face.
"Can we keep it cool in front of the meal ticket, please?" asked Tattletale, turning towards her team and gesturing for peace with both hands.
Receiving no response, she turned her attention to me. "Meal ticket, say the line."
"You just never let up, do you?"
"It's her coping mechanism," supplied Skitter. "But she should be less insufferable with us around."
Tattletale snapped her fingers. "I guess we're all abandoning any semblance of opsec anyway, but come on, guys, sometimes your words really hurt me. Now, meal ticket? Didn't you want information?"
"Regent is alive. Who else? How do you know?"
"Perfect. I'll tell you everything, but one little tiny stipulation. No arrests, no bad blood, no funny business, shake on it." She extended her hand.
"You used me."
"Yes, and I'm very sorry about that. If you want to go into the spooky underground dragon's lair alone, or with your PRT friends, you know where it is. But you want something from us, and we want something from you, so let's sing kumbaya for a little bit. Please." She took a step forward, arm still outstretched.
I weighed my options. This was probably my last chance to do the thing heroes are supposed to do in this situation. Meaning, shoot all my containment foam missiles, make a call to Console, and bounce. Get debriefed, get benched, and lose what little hope Tattletale had given me.
"I hate myself, and I hate you," I said, and shook her hand.
"Hell of a grip," she said, extracting her digits. I guess I needed to calibrate the gauntlets for fine motions, hardware interlocks to avoid crushing delicate obj— "Good to have you on board. Now, your questions: Regent, alive for sure. Others—Well, some poor suckers probably went the same way he did, but it's hard to give any upper or lower bound. As for how, I assume you won't just take 'trust us' for an answer."
"Nope."
"Great, then opsec is fully out of the window. I present, Imp!"
Tattletale sauntered over to the cloud of darkness and gave it a poke. Out of the alley came a cape, wearing an oni mask and black leathers, not unlike Grue's outfit. She shoved past an affronted Tattletale and flipped her a middle finger.
"She's got a bone to pick with you, the amazing wallhacking camera-laden wunderkind. Tinkers, what a pain in the ass to hide things from your prying eyes. Point is, we were missing two Undersiders last we met, not just one."
I looked at her, tilting my head and hoping that body language would work through the suit. "So you're… what, another Thinker?"
"No, jackass," said Imp.
"What her deal is, is need-to-know. Regent put the charms on her—"
Grue exhaled, hard.
"—and she's been in his spooky embrace ever since. True love. Minus a break between his vanishing trick and the day the drilling stopped."
I made a confused noise. "Regent's power gives people charley horses. Twitches."
"Would be what we'd have you believe," said Tattletale, "but, now that opsec is well and truly done away with, you can hear the sordid truth: Regent can twitch you so hard and so deep that you become his to command, i.e: spooky embrace." She emphasized "his to command," putting on the sort of voice used for telling ghost stories at night, face lit with a flashlight.
"His hands are still on the strings, but he hasn't been pulling," said Imp. "So he hasn't kicked it, yet."
I blinked in disbelief. "Seriously, that's all you have?"
Tattletale stepped closer to me, arms akimbo. "Pretty much. That and the pains we've been taking to mount this rescue. We just straight-up gave the PRT two trade secrets, and that pill really burned going down. So, yeah, it's all we have, and we hope it's enough for you."
"Remind me why we're going along with the sudden change of heart, please?" asked Grue.
"Good question," said Imp.
The villains shared a sequence of significant looks, then turned to face Tattletale expectantly.
"I got a hunch," she said. "And if you want better than that— Kid! Why are you going along with us?"
"H22. Six cape deaths in H22, all at the same time. A wave got past the barriers. Six, including Regent, and including Vista and Aegis. No offense, I don't think your friend is special. If his power is still working… They might all be alive. We never found the bodies. Also, in case you forgot, I saw 31 people trapped underground."
"In short, he's a bleeding heart with a thin veneer of deniability," said Tattletale. "Begged to come here, didn't phone home, and him calling the white hats now probably won't make this situation any worse than it already is. And we shook on it, so, scout's honour."
"Thanks," I said. "Really convincing me that I shouldn't call this in right now."
"Yeah, because the PRT is well-known for their nuanced, surgical approach to delicate situations when working with incomplete information."
I sighed. "Now, why are we here, specifically?"
"It's a good place to go for a walk," said Grue. "We should get going, now that the pleasantries are over and done with."
Grue stomped off into the cloud of darkness, followed by Skitter and Imp. Tattletale went next, gesturing for me to walk behind her. That meant Hellhound and her dogs would be bringing up our rear, though I didn't know how she planned to squeeze the monsters through the rather tight inter-building space.
The feeling of walking through the blind-and-deafening cloud was still weird, probably the kind of cape effect you could never quite get used to. There was only about a foot of darkness, leading to a staircase, leading to a door. It passed for a weird, forgotten entrance to a parking garage. Grue fished a key out of a pocket and opened the way. Skitter produced a flashlight and lit the musty concrete basement.
The door led into a small room, whose only notable features were another, sturdier door, and a booth in one corner where a bored security guard might have once sat. The booth was all concrete, moulded into the walls. A plexiglass window with holes for airflow, like in a prison visitation centre, would have separated the guard from the hoi polloi. With everyone in attendance, it felt a little crowded, and the weird parking garage fug began its fight with an invading mutant-dog-smell for dominance.
Tattletale pointed at the bulky door ahead. "Electric lock," she said. "Power is, obviously, off. Care to help out?"
All signs pointed to the door being a one-way kind of thing. There was no knob or knocker on its face, just steel and rivets. A hinge ran along its left side.
"Great. So where am I breaking into, exactly?" I asked.
"Former employer's digs. We still have our keycards, but he's a little indisposed at the moment. There's a path to the shelter, and it's easier to come from below."
"The path through this entrance was the only one without any cave-ins," said Skitter. "And Bitch doesn't like ramming stuff with her dogs."
I walked up to the door, and looked at it, then stepped a few paces back and looked some more. I flexed my fingers in the gauntlets.
"What're you waiting for?" asked Imp.
"I've never actually tested this kind of thing," I answered, a little more timidly than intended.
Grue tilted his head and touched his free hand to his forehead. "You've got a shiny supersuit and you've never hit anything with it?"
"Not, like, solid steel!"
"What kind of teenage superhero are you?"
I huffed, breathed in and out, and allocated more power to the forcefields and actuators. I now glowed a dim but noticeable blue, even competing with Skitter's flashlight. I wound up for a punch…
…And knocked a dent into the door. I had aimed for where the knob would be on a normal door, and the impact took a chunk out of the surrounding concrete as well as bending the metal.
Grue broke his brooding-moody character and laughed at my efforts. "Maybe kick it, next time."
"I think you've killed the lock, so, pull," Tattletale suggested.
There was enough space between the door and wall now to grab it. With some effort and the horrible sound of metal scraping on concrete, I pried it open and got a look inside. Yet more of the parking-garage-catacomb, lit blue by my forcefields. Through the door was a hallway leading left and right.
"Now for the walking," said Grue, budging past me and heading down the right path.
Skitter sent her bugs ahead, and we continued in the same formation as when we'd entered the vestibule. Grue at the front, Hellhound in the back.
"It's a good thing you came," said Tattletale. "Even with the gadgets, it would have taken us all day to get through the tunnels. Skitter, got any fruit snacks left?"
"Catch," said Skitter, tossing her a colourful plastic bag.
Gracefully tearing into the gummies, Tattletale talked as she chewed. "Anyway. Human glowstick, here's your briefing. Told you already about the big dig, so, that's our best theory for what happened. The where: best we figure, our old boss had a big underground vault, and now it's got an extra hole in it."
"Right under the Endbringer Shelter. Weird place to put a vault."
"He had ties to a construction company, and the municipal government is a good client. I guess the accounting worked out."
"What's inside?"
"Currently, something big and organic. Before then… I don't know."
"And who do you think broke in?"
"Tinkers. Can't tell you more without speculation. Maybe a curious Toyboxer got a lead, maybe some other unscrupulous assholes. For all I know, they're still in there and we can ask them straight-up."
"You know, you're not giving me much at all. Didn't you say this was dooming our city?"
"You've never seen Bitch angry, it's really doom-like. I lied, man, it's what I do. You're right, it's not my best work: Horrible plan, unknown odds, shitty numbers, and there's no guarantee Regent is even down there. Or any of your friends, for that matter, but here we all are anyway, grasping at straws."
We walked in silence, six footsteps echoing through the hallway at a time, off-rhythm. The monster dog smell had, improbably, won out, along with a hint of body odour.
That these tunnels weren't filled with floodwater was a miracle. The contractor must have had prior expertise in supervillain lair drainage. As we walked, I counted 20 doors, all closed and only labelled things like "BD24" or "BC16," never descriptively. It was strange to think that an underground complex like this existed without most people knowing about it. We walked on, until the only way forward was to turn left, and then walked some more, until the only way forward led to a staircase. Grue took it down. The sound of the dogs stampeding down behind me made me think of a chair being thrown out of a moving car onto pavement.
The next point of interest was another door, this one with a knob and a keypad, the digital kind with a touchscreen. The electronics were dead. As was the custom here, the "DG20" on the label told me nothing about the purpose of the room beyond. Tattletale gestured at me, then at the door.
I walked up to the threshold and took a step back, lining up a few kicks without any follow-through for practice.
"So I'm just a lockpick, now?"
"Yep. I think you can cut through this one, though, champ."
I bit back an insult and got on with it, sliding the cutting attachment on my hip onto the suit's right index finger.
"Look away if you like your eyes," I said, and gave the villains a few seconds to save their vision before I started drawing a neat vertical line between the door and its frame.
With the deadbolt and latch bifurcated, it only took a bit of mechanical elbow grease to force the door open. The door's wound glowed from blackbody radiation.
Inside… shelves. The room was a spacious closet filled with shelving units and plastic containers, all emptied out.
"And that's it. Grue, set her up."
The villain – once again – budged past me and walked up to the far wall of the storage room. He set down the bag in his hand and unzipped it, exposing a tightly-packed collection of my structural stabilizers. "Genius, how many do we need here?" he asked.
I looked at him and tried to get across "what the hell are you talking about" in powersuit body language.
"To break down the wall," Grue said, in the manner one would use to talk to a particularly thick child.
"Three should do it," said Tattletale, throwing her empty bag of candy to the ground, and using her now-free hands to point. "One in each corner, one in the centre. Remember to run them in reverse."
"You want to… locally speed up motion?"
"No," she said, "I want to break down that wall. We're almost through to the vault. Come on, X-ray vision, get with the program."
I turned on the tac-radar module. We had descended to the right depth, and were only a little ways out from the lifesigns. They hadn't changed in shape, though approaching from the side made the rhythmic motion of the big blob's central appendage seem a lot more ominous. In profile, it looked like a weirdly-tapered grub.
I focused on real-vision and looked back at Grue. He had asked Skitter for help, and now both were setting up stabilizers in the corners of the far wall. The Tinker, whose input I had been ignoring for the duration of the walk to DG20, was starved for attention. My head buzzed with incoherent mumblings about field strength and designs for non-spherical emitters.
Imp, quiet throughout the descent, got my attention by snapping her fingers. I'd missed some of the conversation. "Hey, brainy, wanna use your kickin' feet?"
This smelled like a terrible idea, but I'd gone this far. The first kick seemed to do hardly anything, kicking up a little bit of dust and breaking away a handful of concrete. The noise agitated the dogs, one of whom barked at the commotion. ("Lucy!" was the first word I heard Hellhound say.) Unsure of myself, I looked back at Tattletale, who flashed me a double-thumbs-up.
I kicked again, and again, and again, focussing on one spot in the centre of the back wall. The gouge got deeper, I kicked up more dust, and cracks started to fan out from the spot.
"Let me try something," I said. "You should step back."
The Undersiders stepped out of the room and gave me space to do something tremendously dumb. I stood at the threshold of the door, and powered up the suit's thrusters. The loud noise in the echoey underground space set Lucy off again, but I only heard the dog for a split second. I barreled down, right foot extended, and delivered a horrible flying kick to the concrete wall. There was a bang, as the force of the impact shattered the man-made stone into dust and chunks.
I barely saw it — one moment, there was a wall in front of me, the next, dust. The forcefields around the Zephyr flared a bright blue, then began shrieking horribly. Their death rattle sounded at first like a dying clowder of Tamagotchi kittens, then finished with a 'pop' — the forcefields were no more.
I stumbled, understandably, having just used approximately way too much kinetic energy to turn a reinforced wall into a pile of concrete-and-rebar smithereens. I windmilled my arms and tried to use thrusters for balance, but the effort ended with me fallen to the ground, in ignominy.
On the floor, I wiggled my fingers and toes, trying to convince my body that it was safe to move. I heard the rustle of boots and paws on concrete chips — the Undersiders — and waited for a quip about my blunt approach to demolition, but none came. I willed myself back to fighting form, stood up, and turned to face my allies of convenience, who were looking at me. Or, actually, it was hard to tell with some of their masks — they were looking past me.
I followed their gaze, and didn't like what I saw.
Aww, Chris. Don't worry, you're not even close to the worst superhero in Brockton Bay.
Thanks to Fwee for beta-reading! Praise Fwee.
If you're interested in reading chapters early and have a knack for constructive criticism, give me a PM and become a beta reader for Endo! Also, consider joining the Cauldron Discord server if you're a wormfic writer or a wormfic enjoyer. The people there are nice and crave fresh blood.
Forenote & Content Warning 'Endo-' is a prefix, from the Greek 'endon' meaning 'inside' or 'within.' The next bit may gross you out if you're not wholly comfortable with that concept. Here lay a little bit of body horror. Expect more beyond this point. If you made it through Worm, you should be fine.
The thing in front of me looked like a blob of red marmalade in the shape of a jelly bean with polycephaly. Skitter's flashlight filled the blob with beams of slightly-blue light, which shone through it, up to a point. The material was only clear for the initial few feet, turning more cloudy the deeper you looked. The uniform red gel was broken up with chunks of darker material like a 70s Jell-O meal, hazy outlines that ranged in shape and size from 'short person' to 'refrigerator.' It wasn't all one pancake, but a half-starfish shape. It reminded me of those extra-large messed up mutant-tomatoes and -strawberries.
The centre of the thing was covered up by 'arms' — like starfish arms — extending out. Rings of sinew-coloured fleshstuff ran on top of the gel-stuff and divided it into segments, each segment an armspan across, adding a dash of "maggot" into the overall form.
The red stuff took up a full third of the room's vertical space, a full storey of creature. We had a good half soccer field's worth of space from the perimeter, which spoke both to the size of the vault and its inhabitant. If it were ground up and turned into organic homogenate, it would fill at least six tanker trucks of goop.
That was the main chunk of the creature, though not its full extent. There were… structures? Features? Anatomical processes, extending out of the central wriggling thing and stretching all over the room. I turned on my high-beams to see better: Sinuous pillars that looked like nothing so much as scaled-up human spines stretched out from the centre of the shape, reaching up to the ceiling and stabbing through it. They had also punctured some spots high on the wall to our right. Those pillars had burst out of the main form violently enough to leave distinct exit-wound marks in the otherwise smooth surface of the jelly creature. Some of those wounds were even starting to scab over.
All the vault's surfaces — the walls, the floor, the ceiling — looked off, slightly too shiny and with a winding bulbous texture, as though covered in thick, transparent snot. More of that red-marmalade-stuff formed winding shapes like speed humps that covered the floor. It reminded me of slime mould, or mycelial networks. There were enormous cracks in the concrete above us, and the whole roof had a slight dip to it in the centre. It looked like the only things keeping the roof from collapsing were hard organic growths emanating from those bone tentacles. They had reached up to the cracks and filled them with bone-glue.
I heard a sound behind me — coughing, Hellhound was coughing, and then everyone else was too — and took it as my cue to stand up. The ground beneath me, covered in debris, squelched and I realized that the strange sheen I'd seen on the walls was biological fouling. I released a breath I hadn't remembered holding, and regretted it on the next inhale when the stench hit me. Cadaverine, sulfur, whatever corpse-smell was worse than cadaverine. The lifesigns on the tac-radar had been so much smaller than the organic hellscape inside the chamber, because the rest of the thing was dead and putrefying, turning clear as it decayed.
In fact, parts of the red jellybean were also clear. It was laid out like a half-starfish, crowned with an opaque and dark shape on top. Arms reached out of its lower half. We could see three: The enormous wriggling-arm that I'd seen from above and through the walls, and two deflating and rotting protrusions that flanked it. Opposite the three arms was a flat plane of jelly-flesh that I could only make out by looking through the creature.
A thick black cable was embedded into the centre of the flat part, which was moving very slowly into the creature by means of peristalsis. It pulled the rope inside itself millimetre-by-millimetre, squelching with each little motion.
"Fuck me," said Grue. The rest of us were too busy hacking our lungs out and trying to adjust to the smell to say anything in reply. I was just glad that the thing didn't seem to be angry with us — it had arrested our progress with pure putrescence without even really meaning to. Still, everyone kept their eyes fixed on the abomination for a horribly long moment, just in case it started shooting acid, gristle, or bone at us.
"We keep going?" asked Grue.
"We keep going," answered the rest of the Undersiders, except for Hellhound who was still breathing pained, wheezing breaths.
Tattletale stumbled over to Skitter between coughs, and shook the zip-bag from which her teammate had produced a flashlight and fruit-snacks earlier. Skitter batted her hand away at first, but let up once Tattletale insistently grasped her wrist.
"Fine," said Skitter. She unzipped the bag and gave her an amber pill bottle, losing some grace to a coughing fit.
"Addict," said Grue, fighting the stench with a hand over his face.
"Fuck off," said Tattletale, and dry-swallowed one of the pills. "And thanks. Already overdoing it, and now this hits us. —" she coughed, as though to emphasize her point. "So I need 'em."
She twisted the cap back on and tossed the bottle back to Skitter. It made a sound like a pill-maraca landing in her hands. Grue said nothing further. This argument smelled like the ones I'd heard Assault and Battery have. Perennial exchanges about who should go in to a building first, whether there was really enough time to dash in without running out of juice, kvetching about the last time one or the other of them had gotten hit because they'd strayed too far from the main group— always simmering, never boiling over. If the general rule held, Tattletale and Grue would have words after all this was over. After all, they'd been in the middle of having words when I arrived.
I didn't have a sure footing, exactly, but I managed to find my balance on the weird, squelchy floor. The putrefaction-nausea now faded into a background sense of gastric unease, and I felt well enough to keep moving. The others were in varying states of recovery, but by now all of us except Hellhound had stopped wheezing.
"What's the plan?" I asked.
"Thinking," replied Tattletale. "The air is foul, but it isn't toxic. That or we'll drop dead in a couple of days. Skitter, bugs?"
The other girl gave her a nod. Insects poured like water, coming in from behind the villains in tidy streams that spread out into expanding spheres.
"Anything interesting?" asked Tattletale.
"Ow! Crap," said Skitter, and pressed her right hand against her temple. "Something happened when they flew into…"
"Jellybean?" I said.
"Sure, Jellybean. Fuck, ow."
"Like, dead-something?" asked Imp. "If that thing kills on contact, then where's Al— Regent?"
Skitter grit her teeth, breathed through her mouth, huffed, and emitted sounds of muted pain. I wondered if she counted as an animal-themed cape. "No," she started, "Not dead, weird, like Panacea at the bank. Worse. T, I want your Vicodin."
"No, you don't."
"No, I don't. Fuck, though—"
"That's right. We've established a budget of one addict," said Tattletale. "What do you feel?"
Skitter sank down to her knees. When even that proved too much, she just sat on the floor, both hands now touching her head. It took more awful seconds of grunt-struggling for her to answer the question. "Flies and mosquitoes for scouting; they sat on the surface okay, then they sank into it. Now I feel… it's like they're all one bug, but its senses and motion is all messed up. I think the clear stuff on the floor is safe— Gah! I hope they die in there, I don't know if I can walk out of range like this."
"Try to focus on the other bugs," said Tattletale. "What's through the hole?" she asked, pointing to the leftmost wall.
Indeed, there was a hole, though it was mostly occluded by one of the spine-pillars from where we were standing. I leaned left and right to get a better look, making the ground beneath me emit loud squelching sounds. It reminded me of middle schoolers making fart noises by squeezing their hands.
The distant opening was about one and a half times as big as an ordinary subway tunnel, and its edges were considerably rougher. Much like my own entrance into the vault, the tunnelers had turned the reinforced wall into an enormous spread of concrete rubble. Unlike the ground beneath me, the order of the layers there was reversed: biofilm-atop-rubble, not rubble-atop-biofilm. Beyond the opening lay a rough-hewn rock wall — that was all I could see.
The cable I had seen extending out from Jellybean's flat side reached into the mouth of the tunnel, terminating at some point beyond it that we couldn't see. The rope was interrupted every six feet or so by a roughly-formed sphere, four feet across, of what looked like black mother-of-pearl. The surfaces of the spheres were iridescent and gnarled, with a texture like distorted tree bark. Inside those balls, I detected life-signs — the 31 roughly person-sized things I saw from aboveground, only their shapes in profile were a lot less convincingly humanlike. Ten of them were within the chamber, the remainder beyond the tunnel.
"The hole," started Skitter, "Not much in it. Tunnel goes far, further than my range… More balls… No more rope after the last ball, then nothing."
"No tech left behind?" asked Tattletale.
"Don't know," said Skitter, "Full sweep is hard. Maybe some tiny stuff but nothing obvious."
"Thanks, Bugs. Okay, people," Tattletale said, clapping her hands, "Don't touch the Jellybean, watch for traps. I don't think the person who did this intended for us to find their handiwork." In a lower tone, she said, "Jesus, poor girl."
Imp stared at her teammate, hands spread wide. "That thing is human?!"
"Yeah, look up there." Tattletale pointed at the top of the Jellybean, at the small opaque shape atop the main mass, right in the middle of all the protruding 'starfish arms.' I hadn't looked all that closely at first, but it was clear now — the top half of a young woman, in the nude. We saw her from the side. She was laying on the red jelly that made up the rest of her body, face toward the ceiling, sunken a little into it like she was lounging in a beanbag chair. Her left hand, the one closest to us, was clearly stuck inside the red jelly. She was holding onto a piece of scrap paper, like a receipt.
I reconsidered the geometry of the situation. The tunnel — and her flat side, pulling in all the peopleballs – would be directly in front of her, if she were standing up and looking straight ahead. The writhing tentacle originated from her back side. We came in from her left.
Her hair was all messed up — parts draped across her face, some of the brown locks embedded in her main body. Most of it was hidden by a device she wore on her head, a metal helmet in the shape of a colander. The first recognizably-technological sign of Tinkering here were the wires attached to it, trailing off to something that we couldn't quite see behind her.
It felt creepy to stare, especially with the zoom afforded by my visor. The human part of her wasn't moving at all. I hoped she wasn't in pain.
I also didn't want to look for too long because of The Tinker. I could feel it raising a million questions in the background, fighting hard to pull me away from the reality in which I was traversing dangerous terrain with the Undersiders. That we had faced no resistance — so far — only worsened the feeling. No fighting meant nothing to distract myself with, nothing important enough to shut him up with. I really didn't want to find out what that thing's architects had been thinking when they built it, no matter how much my superpower pleaded.
"Let's stick together and walk the perimeter, see what we can see," said Grue.
Tattletale gave an 'mm-hm' in reply. "Just avoid the thrashing part," she said, gesturing at the wriggling arm-thing to our right.
We formed up and moved counter-clockwise, staying a safe distance from Jellybean-girl, all of us except Skitter and Hellhound, who were left sitting next to each other in the storage room we had entered from. Hellhound had muttered something I didn't catch to Tattletale, then retreated out of the foul-smelling vault. Skitter ran after her, or did the closest thing to running that she could manage. Tattletale conferred with the pair briefly and emerged with a little Tupperware-style container.
"I've got a jar o' bugs!" she sang, to no fanfare.
"What's with them?" I asked, pointing at where Skitter and Hellhound had gone.
"They're no good to us in this state," she said. "Skitter will be in touch if she manages to fight off the headache. If the red stuff works the same way as Jelly's body, the dogs would just get hurt." Tattletale pointed at a nearby thicker patch of 'mycelium,' a pulsing red speed-hump winding through the ground.
So we plodded along, all of us that could. Not in silence, but an eerie soundscape. The squelching, Jellybean-sounds, and crackle of boots-on-debris were the only noises around. At some points, Tattletale would stop us to warn about another prominent tendril of red-stuff, directing the throng to avoid stepping into the jelly. It would not do to get absorbed like Skitter's bugs.
All of us except Tattletale snuck nervous glances at the pulsating, wriggling Jellybean-girl. We had elicited no reaction from her so far, but she was, in real terms, probably the second-biggest living thing I'd ever seen up close, right after Leviathan.
It didn't take long for us to come up to the string of man-sized beads that stretched from the Jellybean's front-side. There was a change in odour: I smelled blood, maybe, or something awfully like it. It felt like my mouth was full of pennies. An armspan away from the spheres-on-a-string, Tattletale gestured for us to stop. She opened up her bug container and gingerly took out a millipede, pinching one of its ends between her thumb and forefinger, then tossed it at the bead closest to us. It just bounced off and landed on the floor, legs wriggling in self-righting instinct.
I stepped back — carefully, checking for ground-tendrils — and looked at the bead critically. "Organics, obviously. Lifesigns. I can't make out fine detail, but it's the right volume to be a curled-up person."
"Or a neurotoxin-producing mutant," said Grue. "Even with his help, the plan stinks, T. We're here, it sucks, and there's a good chance we're gonna die figuring out what all this even is."
"I'm just looking," said Tattletale. "Regent's gotta be here somewhere. But I don't think we're looking at a string of cape-balls, here."
"What makes you so certain?" asked Grue.
"Numbers, and timeline. Almost nobody bothered to recover bodies from the site, sure, but 31 unaccounted-for capes from this one area seem unlikely. If those balls have got people in them, they're probably evacuees from Shelter 12. As for timeline, the girl would have fought off the people drilling in. They would have had to knock her out first, before they could cram the Shelter survivors into Pokéballs and make them into her… uh. I was going to say something, but it's insensitive."
"What's Pokéballs?" asked Imp. "Did you just make a sex joke?"
Tattletale sighed deeply. "None for two on the Aleph references today," she muttered.
She gestured for me to go further, past the wire and the balls. I tiptoed through the floor-squick and over the waist-high wire with a little thruster assistance, landing with a splat.
Past the balls, the atmosphere was much the same, though the floor was thicker with those red, active tendrils. There was the barest hint of a track in the muck-covered floor. I could barely distinguish it from the rest of the ground cover, but it was there, an indent in the slime mould floor. It led from the tunnel to a spot near the monstrous girl's right side, where we were headed.
I was trying hard not to look at Jellybean, at that point, and Tattletale must have noticed. She sidled up next to me and poked the Zephyr — and me in the Zephyr — in the shoulder, ignoring the fact that it was a metal suit of power armour.
"What?" I asked.
"Get cold feet around girls?" she asked.
"What?" I repeated.
"Well, it's just that we're walking around a very large girl, and you're taking pains to keep your eyes away from her. And we came here to examine this girl. And you're, you know. Not."
I searched for a deflection. "So?"
"Well," she said, chewing on her words, "Some people would take that as a kind of suspicious behaviour, but I'm above all that."
"Great news, then. Can we save the banter for after we've had a look at this thing? You sending half your team away feels like suspicious behaviour to me, too, but I haven't said shit about it."
"Hey." Tattletale stopped for a moment. The villain turned to me and set one hand over her heart, the other spread out in an open gesture. "We've got to trust each other, and, Thinker-to-Tinker, we gotta talk. Hell of a lot of things aren't right with this tableau. As for Skitter and Bitch, one's got the headache of a lifetime and the other could make a convincing spokesperson for PETA. No dogs, no Bitch. That leaves us three as the only ones willing and able to walk around the Mausoleum of Fun."
"Thanks for sharing," I said. "Let's look around the other side and through the hole. Talk once we get back to the entrance."
"Fine, I won't press it," she said. Tatteltale returned to her place, walking a few steps ahead of me.
Jellybean's other side was markedly different. Once we made our way past the flat part that the beads were being drawn into, (which, on closer inspection, looked like a Cubist painting of a mouth that had been airbrushed over), we were greeted by a new kind of Jelly-flesh. The sinewy bands that split the 'starfish-arms' into segments branched off at odd angles and did not constrict the jelly on this side. We could see vast expanses of reddish blob matter, interspersed with dense tangles of white sinew. Directly ahead of us, past the mouth, two of those new-style arms waved. The motion was slow and we were in no real danger of touching them, but we kept our distance anyway as we moved past.
Beyond those arms, I saw blinking lights like those on a server rack — it was a server rack, propped right up against Jellybean's main body. It had been positioned in a gap between the starfish-arms. The track in the ground terminated right around that spot.
This would be the other side of the device connected to the girl's head. I followed wires upward and saw where the machine interfaced with the bone. We were closer to the human part of this human-gelatin hybrid now, and the sight was a hell of a lot more ghastly this close up. Her skull had been broken and constricted. The bone that made up her forehead was shattered and in pieces — I could see that, because those pieces were stabbing up and through her skin. The effect was something like a crown of thorns. Reddish and pus-coloured brain-stuff was exposed to the elements.
The 'colander' had looked a lot more benign from the other side. The girl's hair had covered the extended blades and thick snaking probes that crept in through the messy forehead-wound. The helmet connected to a thick cable that arced down and through Jellybean's main body, terminating at the unassuming server rack on the ground. The face of the girl wearing it was set in an expression halfway between a smile and a silent scream. Whichever one of her muscles was responsible for pulling her lips into a grin was stuck, madly twitching.
Below the girl, beside the server rack, right in the crook of the two Jelly-arms, there was the final piece. It was an inert bunch of sinew, an indent in the Jelly-flesh. About as tall as the Zephyr, about as wide as a human being in an 'A-pose' — because it used to hold a human being in an 'A-pose.' A man-shaped mould was set into the creature before us. It held no occupant.
I looked back at all three of my compatriots: Grue and Tattletale. They seemed just as bewildered as I was. If they had any sympathy for the girl, they didn't show it. Tattletale chanced a 'woo-ow' whistle, to no response from Jelly.
Beyond the machine and the mould were another set of Jelly arms: one wriggling, one peacefully rotting, and nothing else of note. We came back to the spot just in front of the server rack, and looked to be heading all the way back round the creature before Tattletale stopped us again.
"Kid? You're boring holes in the floor."
I looked up at Tattletale. "Can we just talk once we're back with the rest of your group?"
"You've barely looked at what we've got here, and you gotta see this." She walked up to me and tugged against my left gauntlet, the one closest to Jelly. Invisible to her, I opened and closed my mouth, working out frustration with jaw exercises. I let her lead me closer to the creature, preparing myself for a mental Tinker-tirade once I got there.
The two arms that splayed out from the middle-part were wiggling very slightly, basically set still. Tattletale directed me to look into the right arm, with my helmet's high beams still shining bright. I looked closer at those chunks in the smooth surface of the creature, the proverbial broccoli in the gelatin, flies in the ointment. I saw them–
Vista. Right there in the horrible red Jell-O. Missy. Preserved in amber, hair suspended mid-super-slow-mo-tousle, mask peeling away and suit still clinging on. She looked at a point beyond me, eyes wide open. Beyond her, harder to see in the red stuff — Carlos, curled up in the fetal position, upside-down. My face felt hot. She was only inches from the surface.
I reached out to touch her; she was so close, right there. Tattletale's gloved hand snapped out in front of my gauntlet faster than I could reach the surface. "Hey! Striker power. Sober up before you hurt yourself, dumbass."
I tried to shake myself back into reality, putting my arms at attention and moving back a half-step. We stood there for some time in awkward silence, looking at our loved ones, embedded in headcheese. They found Regent a little later, though the atmosphere didn't turn celebratory after that. He was in the arm opposite Vista and Aegis'. This felt like a place that shouldn't exist — the smell of blood and rot, the girl twitching in what was probably agony — but not attacking us — the improbable proportions of the underground chamber, the fact we'd been able to break through at all and see them. Them: Ghosts, revenants.
I went to their funeral. All their funerals. A very short function at the Rig, five days after the disaster, just another point in the PRT's regimented schedule. 30 minutes for a ceremony and mourning, right before evening debrief and bedtime. They dragged a priest out from somewhere, and he said some words before listing out most of the names that would be carved into the cenotaph later. We stood silently. I wanted to cry, didn't even care whether people saw through the visor. It was okay to cry. My eyes refused the order. That night was when I started shooting myself in the head with the spark pistol.
Much the same now — shouldn't I be crying sad tears? Tears of joy? Shouldn't the awful smell be helping? No, nothing. I was just red in the face. Here were the nightmares I'd been avoiding, and the dreams. And here I stood: broken as always.
That list of names came to me now, in fits and starts. Who was the big one behind Browbeat, whose casket would look like a refrigerator box? Or the skinny stretched-out noodle person in the distance, hazy through the layers of Jelly, who was she? Was Gallant in there, somewhere, ready to tear me a new one for treating his tech as a source of scrap? They floated in place like insects frozen in amber, moving only slightly. Vista didn't react to my standing in front of her — through it all, through however many days of this, her face had remained fixed in an open-mouthed expression.
One way or another, Tattletale and Grue got me to look away and trudge back to the entrance. They needed Hellhound and Skitter's input. My thoughts were all TV static, blending in with the horrible sounds of boots stomping on the organic mush underfoot. My mind was taking a walk, somewhere far away from my senses.
By the time I came back to reality, we'd retraced our footsteps, and settled down in the storage room. The bio-layer covering the floor was slowly creeping up and around the debris near our entrance. It seemed that she would keep growing outwards, even as parts of her sloughed off and rotted away.
Each of us sat on chunks of concrete like we were kids in the forest, butts on rocks. We'd coaxed the remainder of the Undersiders out of the storage room: Hellhound held her nose, pinching it closed and panting (animal capes) while Skitter twitched at odd intervals and arranged her bugs into geometric shapes on the ground. (Animal capes.)
Tattletale was talking. "I still want to look past the tunnel, but we should get started on the rescue right away. I'm 90% sure we can fashion a tractor beam out of what you gave us, right, Kid?"
I nodded, mostly by default. Tractor beams were the last thing on my mind. I was listening, but still far away. A vivid picture of the embedded capes swam in the corner of my vision. It had been on my mind since I had first seen it.
"Right. Then there's the matter of the gurney. I half-expected you to bring along the handy-dandy Hoverboard–"
"–Pad."
"The handy-dandy Pad, yes, but you've sent it off flying somewhere. So, great job."
"You've been tracking me?"
"You're surprised? Anyway. No gurney, which is going to suck for Regent's convalescence, but we can carry him out on one of the dogs if we're careful. Worst case scenario, one of us lugs him around in a fireman carry."
Imagining that brought me back to reality. "No, that's idiotic. We've got the wrong tool for the job. We should just get Panacea down here."
The Undersiders all turned to look at me.
"Yeah, and get our insides turned into outsides?" said Skitter, setting her head slightly askew. Her voice was strained. "She threatened me with cancer, last time we spoke."
"Did you see what I just saw? This is some deep shit. It's not just your friend, it's a lot of people, good people. I know you got into a tiff with her—"
"Understatement of the century."
"—But when she sees this, everting you will be the last thing on her mind. She healed all comers after the disaster. I'll vouch for you, mend fences, but I don't think that will even be necessary. Given that the thing– the girl, is alive, and not hurting anyone, this could be a quiet emergency. Save heroes and civilians, save the torture victim at the centre of the machine."
"And join the hivemind-gestalt," said Tattletale.
"What?"
"Striker power meets Striker power. She touches that thing, who knows which one wins. They're all still alive in there, Skitter's bugs and our friends. All alive together. And don't think you got that good people dig in unnoticed, Tin Man."
"I didn't mean it like that!"
Skitter raised her hand, preparing to say something. She was a lot more relaxed than the last time I saw her, though her body language made it hard to tell. She wasn't twitching in pain but I could still spy winces through her mask. She was flexing her jaw and cheeks enough to move the hard shell that covered her face back and forth. All the while, Skitter ran her hand back and forth over her arm and idly played with her bugs. "Tattletale worked it out while you were staring. At first I thought my bugs were growing larger, or fusing into one another, but no — I just feel them more, now. I can't control anything, and focusing on them for too long gives me a headache. It's a device for… something."
Tattletale finished her thought: "Someone converted a very unfortunate young woman into a bioreactor, of the sort that integrates people. And bugs, partially– Well, I hope it's partial. And then they left her to die once she'd finished reacting, absconding with the product."
"Great, okay," I said. "Evil plot. That doesn't change anything! We can find a way to let Panacea at the patient without, uh, the bad stuff happening, and fix everything. What if taking the people out of the main body kills them? And what are we going to do about the ball-things?"
"First of all, remember our agreement. You shook my hand on this. No PRT, no Panacea, no getting turbo-cancer — 'No thanks' to all that shit. I've seen what she can do to people. Second, no, they won't die once we pull them out. Hunch, before the rest of you get ideas about asking how I know."
Grue made a 'keh' sound at that. Echoes of another bygone argument.
"Third—"
Tattletale's spiel was interrupted by a sound coming from Jelly's direction. It took me a long half-second to work out that a human being had made it. It was straddling the boundary between 'scream' and 'rasp,' and sounded like how I imagined someone would caterwaul after being flayed and set on fire. Soon after, Skitter started screaming, too, though in a more human register. She fell to the ground and curled up into a ball, clutching at her head.
As soon as she heard it, Tattletale got off her concrete seat and jumped into action. She looked at the source of the noise, then at me. She yelled "Fuck! Kid! Check your camera feed!" and I had no time to work out why she was asking me that, nor why she was walking directly at the nebulous source of the screaming.
I scrubbed through the last 10 minutes of bodycam footage. Jelly, the balls, the living-floor, the machine, the brain mid-surgery, the baroque painting of my friends in stasis. Something weird, too, a dark silhouetted shape following us. I only caught glimpses of it, covered in black, before I finally got to the present moment in the video. It was there and wasn't there. I saw nothing through my visor, but through the camera overlay—
Unnaturally black, long, slender limbs bent at odd angles. Textured like Grue's suit — had it learned to imitate us? Did we fall right into a trap? It was walking toward us on its knees, pulling itself forward only with the motions of its right thigh, moving as though an alien had just been thrust into a human body and was learning to walk for the first time. The head was bent back to look at the ceiling, and to fill the air around us with that awful immolated scream.
"What the fuck is that?!" I yelled, stepping back from it.
"Peace!" shouted Tattletale. "Peace, peace, she touched the Jelly. Is she making any signs at us? Fuck, what a pain in the ass."
"What is that thing?!" I repeated. I zoomed in on the camera feed and found that indeed, its lower half was dripping with that familiar reddish bio-fouling.
"It's Stranger Training 101, for you," said Tattletale. "And the first rescue of the lot, for all of us."
New readers:The next 3 chapters are found in the "Apocrypha" section of the Threadmarks. See the various informational posts for an explanation of sorts. Just keep reading the Threadmarks in order! The chapters in the Apocrypha section are all the tail end of Arc 1 and beginning of Arc 2, before I embarked on the Arc 1 Rewrite.
I feel like I overhyped the body horror with the little warning in the forenote. Let me know what you think, though.
As several posters have guessed, it's Echidna! Although there's really no reason to call her that in this reality. Jelly is much more like a Weirdchidna, anyway. I wonder what happened to her.
Cut Tattletale lines:
"You think it stank this bad inside Jonah's whale?"
"Addiction is good, actually: I'm one lame leg away from penning bizarre case studies with a crack team of medical residents."
"Yeah, the coast looks clear to the bugs, but we aren't bugs. We're bug-eyed losers. Stay frosty."
Cred Hunt: I am way behind on the challenge, now, but I'm in it for the fun, not the glory. Sorry this chapter took a while, though. I don't know how ReavingBishop does it, there's like 100k logged on their spreadsheet.
Thank you to Dessert, Fwee, and another mystery reader for helping this chapter grow to its full potential. Praise Dessert! Praise Fwee! Praise the anonymous mystery reader who only left comments on the manuscript and did not leave a message! Without them, this chapter would contain at least 50% more hallucinated fanon. If you would like to join their hallowed ranks, please shoot me a PM or join the Cauldron Discord server.
And yes, I meant everted and not inverted. Editors advised me to cut that bit, but I wanted to show off my vocabulary. In case you couldn't tell by polycephaly or the anatomical processes line: I like to use ten-dollar words from the medical dictionary.
And I'll just say right now that I might rewrite a bit of the description in this chapter, and this text will be struck-through if I did that. Last time I made this gambit, I ended up being too lazy to fix anything. Maybe this time…
I figured I'd be done this chapter by Sunday, but knocked out the draft today and fixed it working off some very thorough and fast crit by the end of the night. So, hurrah! You get a chapter, I get to feel better about my writing speed. This endnote is way too long, so:
Finally: Would you reach out to touch the dead-friend-холодец?
Forenote:
This chapter marks the start of the Arc 1 Redraft, slotting in right after 1.7.
New readers: nothing to worry about, the threadmarks should be organized properly. You can find the old chapters 1.8, 1.9 and 2.1 in the Apocrypha threadmark category on the SB release. See the voting post there for details on why this rewrite happened.
The properly-new part of this chapter starts after the section break.
The flayed-and-burning screaming was winding down, only coming in fits and starts now. Tattletale stood four steps away from the screaming thing, hands raised. She spoke to the half-invisible thing, but not so loudly that I could make out any of the words.
Grue and Hellhound, behind me, had stood up and brandished their weapons — a crowbar and a piece of rebar, just things that had been close to hand — and were only now calming down. Skitter convulsed and sobbed on the floor. Her whimpers came out sounding as though she was forcing her mouth closed, making noise despite herself.
Hellhound dropped the rebar and got in close to the pained supervillain. She hesitated for a moment before bodily righting her, which elicited another round of screaming. Hellhound put her hand on Skitter's shoulder and kept it there. The body language on display felt intensely awkward, as though she was trying to console a distant acquaintance after they had gotten covered in fresh piss.
"What the fuck?" asked Grue, lowering his crowbar.
Tattletale did not respond immediately. She took the time to say a few more sentences to her conversation partner and gesticulate peaceably with open palms before turning away to talk to Grue.
"Stranger Training 101 for you, too. Everyone, no need to panic. I don't know what's going on with Skitter, but I'm 90% sure that the person behind me is a friend."
"Who? This another one of your 'just trust me' moments?"
Tattletale's 'friend' screamed again, setting everyone on edge.
"Hey," said Tattletale, "Let's not hash this out right now. Listen, listen." She paused, screwing her eyes shut and gesturing with one arm, as though pulling a thought out of thin air. "Okay, Grue: How many people were there when we met up with Kid?"
"Seriously?"
"Just answer, come on."
"It was you, me, Bitch, and Skitter."
"So how many?"
"Five."
"Who else?"
"No one else, T."
"Then why'd you put up the darkness?"
"We were waiting for kid hero over there," he said, pointing at me. "Hiding a thing. Your idea. Wait…"
"A thing. You don't remember. See?"
"No, I do not see."
Another scream interrupted their exchange. I kept my eyes fixed on the black and dripping thing through the camera overlay. It was folding itself upward, now, tensing and twitching with every move. It only stopped screaming once it entered an upright stance, though set askew. Its right leg remained sunken into the goop on the floor.
Tattletale held up her index finger to her mouth, and slowly turned back around. All of us went quiet, and even Skitter's sobs grew more muted. This time, I could hear her pleas to the monster.
"You know us. Focus, focus on your power. Talk to me, Stranger."
It flashed before my eyes. It was like that trick middle schoolers taught each other, closing one eye, staring ahead, and moving your thumb across your field of view until your thumbnail got caught in the blindspot. In the camera overlay, the shape remained as it ever was, but my actual eyes both saw and didn't see it.
"T, what the—" began Grue. Tattletale stopped him with another raised-finger gesture, still trying to talk to the creature.
"May, day," it said. I could barely make the words out; its throat was hoarse from shouting. Finally, its form settled on something recognizable — her form. She was the extra Undersider. Her elbows were bent backwards at a slight angle, past their joints' normal limit. We heard her breaths, too: hoarse and heavy, louder than her speaking volume. The devil mask had stayed on, as had the rest of her costume.
There was a long pause.
"No, no, no," said Grue. He walked over to Imp, stepping around Skitter on the ground and ending up beside Tattletale.
"No touching," said Tattletale.
"Fuck you!" he yelled, turning to face her. Next to them, Imp flinched and gurgled in response. "What the hell, T? This is my limit."
"There's no time for this right now, and—"
"Fuck. You." Grue pressed his index finger into Tattletale. "You fucked up."
"We voted. We're getting him out."
"Yeah. We get him out of there, we fix Skitter, and we turn my sister normal. And then I am leaving."
Hellhound grunted behind us. "Me too," she said.
Imp broke the silence between them. "Mayday."
Grue turned towards her and spoke in a much gentler tone. "Aish? What are you talking about?"
"French," said Tattletale. "M'aidez — Help me."
"Bullshit. Where'd she learn French?"
"Might not be her," said Tattletale.
Grue turned to stare at Tattletale. "Fucking what," he said.
Tattletale stepped back, spreading her hands out. "Can we apportion the blame after we're out of here?"
"Oh, fuck," I said. "How do we fix this? Can we just lift her out of the muck?"
"Not sure. Striker effect might reach through her body."
"I'm wearing armour."
"She was wearing a bodysuit. Got caught anyway — everything leaks."
I patted down my thighs, finding the force-projectors still attached to the armour. I fiddled with the bracket holding them on, and took one in my hand. I threw the hexagonal puck on the ground, a few feet away from Imp. With a flick of my eye and a "raise up" hand gesture, I instructed the projector to put up a box-shaped forcefield.
"Would this work?" I asked.
Tattletale tilted her head at the gadget, looking it over. "Maybe. You really could've mentioned that gadget when we were talking about gurneys, by the way." ("Can't believe I missed those," she muttered.)
"Okay," I said, "Step away from her, just in case."
They moved back, keeping their eyes fixed on Imp. Grue and Hellhound helped Skitter up from the ground and lifted her, one supporting each arm. She protested, but was in no state to wrest herself out of the carry.
I formed the force-box into a U-shape, and commanded it to lift up and around Imp. She had been quiet since her last utterance, only breaking the silence with heaves and rasps. The moment that the forcefield touched her, she screamed, and I found myself unsure of what I was doing. A forcefield? Why was I making a forcefield?
There was another scream ahead of me — who was screaming? — and my right hand and eye twitched, hard, like a really bad cramp. Together, the motions made up the gesture that meant "Dismiss forcefield," the opposite of the first motion I had made. The puck on the ground grew inert with a gentle fizzling-out sound.
Tattletale ran to my side.
"Camera, again! Point me at her!"
I looked around in a panic, finding that the picture-in-picture camera overlay was already active on the visor. Through it, I saw something weird ahead of us, again. Again?
"There!"
I pointed at the shape I saw through the display, only a few feet from where I had dropped the projector puck. Tattletale approached the spot and crouched low nearby. She hesitated as she chose her footing, careful to stand on the slightly-slimy concrete and not deep in the layer of slime on the ground.
Imp was there again, an arm's length away from Tattletale.
"Mayday! Mayday!" She actually yelled it out this time, though that was all she could do before she had to choke, rasp, and gasp for air again. From the storage room behind us, I could hear Skitter yelling, too, though no recognizable words came out.
"Okay, okay," Tattletale said. "Moving her does not work. Why did you take down the forcefield?"
"I flinched," I said. I rubbed my right arm instinctively, still sore from the cramp, but quickly realized that I was just scraping one metal gauntlet against another.
Tattletale let out a low groan and rubbed her temples. "Oh, motherfucker."
I milled around Imp for a while, watching Tattletale attempt to communicate with a person that only said one word. Grue watched beside her, for a while, before punting a fouled chunk of concrete like a soccer ball and stomping off to the storage room.
After a few minutes of trying to get through to her teammate, Tattletale gave up on diplomacy and decided to leave Bitch in charge of watching over her fallen teammates — Skitter joined the Stranger girl, Imp, in not being able to do much. She and Grue had a short conversation in the storage room, out of even my enhanced earshot, then emerged to have a talk with me.
Before I could say anything, Tattletale tossed me the duffel bag that Grue had carried on his back, the one with the remaining Tinkertech.
"Walk and talk, cowboy," she said. "First stop, let's take another look at that tunnel."
They walked quickly, expecting me to catch up.
"We're seriously splitting up?" I asked.
Tattletale gave me a look. "Yes."
"Man, I'd hate to be your teammate," I said.
"Bitch and Skitter can handle themselves. And we don't exactly have a choice when it comes to Imp."
Grue grunted, though I wasn't sure if he actually agreed.
We kept walking. It was odd, being so close to Jellybean. I could feel her body heat, even through my power armour. The wet noises that her body made sliding on the fouled floor soon faded into the background. The smell wasn't that bad, now that we'd stood in it for a while. And even the primal fear — that feeling I'd get standing next to an elephant, a creature I knew for a fact could kill me if it wanted to — that also faded to nothing.
Tattletale stopped us at the entrance to the tunnel, turning to face me.
"Now we split up. Grue's scouting, we're setting up your thing."
"Just one great idea after another," I said. "I can do it myself, give you an extra body to watch over your teammate. Better yet, let the guy with the wings scout."
"I'm the team leader," said Tattletale. "We're in a time crunch. Extract, then escape."
"Team leader my ass," said Grue, and walked off into the mouth of the tunnel. Dust particles were suspended in the distance, spread so thick that it only took twenty paces for him to completely disappear from view. I could only make out his silhouette through thermal vision.
Tattletale sighed.
"What's this about a time crunch?" I asked.
Tattletale put one hand up to her temple, and motioned for me to follow her. "Walk and talk. I'm going to need so much Vicodin. 31 balls coming from the tunnel, right? They're separate from the main mass, organic matter, on a tether. She's drawing them in, slowly, has been for weeks. Even with that stable food source, her body is mostly dead tissue now.
"So the million dollar question: What happens when she fully dies? — I don't know, but it won't be good for the people inside."
"How long do we have?" I asked.
"Again, I don't know. Half a day, two days, something like that. Assume the worst. The more pressing concern is your friends from the Protectorate. Stupid move to send your tracker away, but I get the logic. Your suit can't be tracked directly, right?"
I hesitated. "Uh—"
"Great. Just great. That means we have an hour, tops, until they figure out your dumb ruse."
"You're more concerned about the heroes than the… than her?"
"I'm concerned about her rotting, and taking Regent with her. Jellybean herself hasn't so much as lifted a goopy finger at us. What the deal with Imp is… We'll work that out once we're ready to leave. As long as we don't touch the XL Striker, we'll be fine. The forces of good, on the other hand, are nothing but trouble."
"Why don't you just tell the Protectorate what's going on? You could probably work out a deal. We're not monsters."
"Machine Army. Ellisburg. Madison. If the good guys don't like it, and they can put a lid on it, they will. We're small-time villains, without any actual pull at the negotiating table. They come knocking, it's not hard to see what happens. Everyone is arrested, of course, which effectively ends our careers. Putting that aside, you, extorted-kid-hero, are either put on probation, exonorated, or arrested, take your pick. Then they hesitate too long consulting their tank of Thinkers, and in the end pull everybody out, half-digested."
"Bullshit. Vista's in there, best Shaker on the East Coast."
"Doesn't matter. Alexandria could be in there and they'd fumble just the same. If they aren't being actively threatened and schemed against, they fuck it up. Look at the city — they can afford to let it fall to ruin, so they do. The crises in Massachussets and New York are more pressing, so they get more Thinker time. The Nine are on the run, but nobody ever seems to go after them proactively. The Protectorate can be very clever with the right motivation, they've just got blinders on by default. Anyway, we're here."
Her far side was as we'd left it: the central sinewy man-indent, beneath her human part; the jarringly normal computer equipment on the ground; my best friends in the whole wide world, embedded in the gelatinous matter on the right; Regent and more capes I couldn't recognize, embedded in the left.
I set down a 'tarp' before landing, using another projector to conjure up a thin force-box that covered the floor. The two arms on either side of the man-dent were only pulsing slightly, and didn't raise a fuss when the expanding forcefield made a slight indent in the mutated flesh.
I carefully set the bag down on the pale orange forcefield, unzipped it, and took out both pieces of the "compression ring" within.
I had been harbouring some suspicions about the purpose of Tattletale's "commissions" since she started ordering me around, though I hadn't told her when she asked at their base. I thought that the serial robbers who were holding my friend hostage had been ordering gadgets to assist in another upcoming series of robberies. Motion-slowing stabilizer fields to deflect containment foam and bullets, lifesign-detectors to make cleaner getaways, and finally, this: A drilless drill, a portable hole; a machine that said "Open, Sesame."
"You said this was supposed to let you travel through a solid surface. Didn't say anything about walls of flesh."
"I didn't want to limit your vision," Tattletale said. "Will it work?"
I set down the ring on its edge and pulled on the upper section. I stretched it until it came into its full size. The mechanism unfolded into a metal ring, its aperture two heads taller than the Zephyr. It looked like an oversize picture frame, drawing a thick circle around Vista's floating body.
"Maybe. You don't know shit about Tinker gadgets. Why did you follow me here?"
She was silent for a few seconds. I turned away from the ring to look at her.
"Because the cavalry is coming, and I need to make sure you're not going to turn on us."
"Bad luck you dropped your leverage, then."
"You're not stupid. We can take most hero teams that they'd send to investigate, if they aren't expecting anyone besides you. Skitter and Bitch alone take care of most of the heavy hitters that are still in Brockton, and they wouldn't send Shadow Stalker. I'm expecting Miss Militia or Assault, maybe another cape to support."
"Sounds like you don't need me."
"That's just the thing. I'm not a Tinker, but it doesn't take one to set up a prebuilt device. Your armour has holes in it, and we've got Skitter and Grue. I'm pretty sure a well-placed gunshot would disable you, too, I watched you work on the schematics. Ever tested your forcefields against point-blank small arms fire?"
I looked her up and down. Her arms were crossed, and she wasn't reaching for a weapon. Her tone was level, even-keeled. The rest of her team was minutes away.
"I'm not making threats. I don't want to fight you. I'm just making the choice obvious. If you have to take our side in a fight, you can always say it was under duress. Wipe the bodycam feed and come crawling back to the white hats. But you're not going to destroy the device, fight us, or call the Protectorate, not unless you want your friends to die."
"If you were as confident as you say, you wouldn't be wasting time talking to me. Better to make it a surprise."
"We can take you, and we can take a two-man team of heroes, but we can't take both. If you're on our side, you get your friends out. Fight on their side… well, you'd be putting her life in the hands of Watchdog."
"You've got nerve."
"Occupational hazard. I'm not walking out of here with my hands clean, Kid. Better to be honest about at least some of it. Try to work fast, and pick the right side when the time comes."
She turned and walked away.
There were a billion things about this situation that bothered me. Most pressing was Jelly-girl's behaviour. Tattletale wasn't concerned about her, but that was scarcely a source of comfort. Jelly was enormous, and clearly powerful enough to engulf at least a half-dozen capes (that I could see; maybe there were more), yet she had barely reacted to our presence. We hadn't seen how she had gotten to Imp, but all signs pointed to an accident rather than an outright attack. If she was in constant pain, pulling chunks out of her could make it worse. I didn't want to see her angry.
Then there was the abandoned machinery. Brain surgery? A parahuman-based bioreactor the size of a house? This had been hidden under Brockton Bay since just a few days after Leviathan attacked. Without Tattletale's spotting it, it would have gone completely unnoticed. Most villainous Tinkers would have made something like this the centerpiece of a major public move, but it seemed as though this whole thing was just a precursor to a larger scheme. I got the feeling that we were looking at things that nobody was supposed to know about. I wasn't about to touch the machine, with or without Tattletale's say-so.
I heard footsteps in the distance, which in this place were slapping, squelching, organic noises. Soon enough, I came face-to-face with two more Undersiders.
"You're walking again?" I asked.
Skitter was walking, though with a tired gait, like she was limping with both legs. When the group came to a stop in front of me, she took the opportunity to pant and catch her breath.
"Pain's better," she said. "And I wanted to see him."
Regent was embedded in the Jelly-arm opposite the ring, suspended in a rather calm pose. His mask had stayed on, covering any expression, though he'd lost his grip on his trademark scepter. I was glad that he wouldn't be armed when we'd pull him out — last we met, he used the taser-cane to shock me hard enough that it left a nasty burn mark on my side.
"All this effort to rescue that dick," I said.
"He's our dick. We don't leave our people behind," said Skitter.
"Half your team isn't exactly on the same page. Looks like the Undersiders are imploding."
"You're one to talk," said Tattletale. "Where's your team?"
I pointed at the centre of the ring.
"That's another thing," said Grue. "We're gonna get his friends out first?"
"Buzz off," I said, "I just set it up where it was most convenient, and I'm not even done yet."
"Oh, like I'm supposed to believe—"
"Gentlemen!" Tattletale shouted, interrupting her teammate, "If it comes down to it, we can flip a coin. The whole point here is to work together."
"Fat load of work you've had us do," sniped Grue. "Scouting report, by the way: It goes on for miles, and there isn't jack shit down there."
"Come on, man," said Skitter. She was just a few feet away from Regent, looking him over but not reaching out like I'd done with Vista.
"Anyway, I agree with you," I said. All of the Undersiders looked a little taken aback. "Get him out first. There's no telling if they're even alive in there, the life sign readings aren't very accurate with the giant anomaly in the way. And if they are alive, pulling them out might kill them. Tattletale said it integrates its victims, maybe they're too far gone now." — And the unsaid part, between me and Tattletale: If I were smart, I'd save your guy for last, but here we are.
We stood around in an uncomfortable silence.
"T?" asked Grue, "What do you think?"
"He's probably still kicking. And if he isn't, or pulling him out kills him, then there was nothing we could have done, anyway."
"And Imp?"
"Jelly's power is almost certainly a Striker thing. We'll just have to hope it wears off once Imp is out of range. Ask Kid for a forcefield with a dead man's switch, or something. Cut off the tentacle."
"Those are tentacles?" I asked. I looked through the 'tarp' at my feet to stare at the bio-guck.
"Yeah, covered in a thick layer of goop. They grab you if you step on one, I think. Irrelevant — just don't touch the red stuff. This is absolute hell for me, my power is chasing down too many tangents. Not enough independent sources."
"So lay off the damn painkillers," said Grue.
"Hey," I said, trying to nip their bickering in the bud before it began in earnest. "If you're not here to help me set this up, please just stare in silence."
"You're nearly done," said Tattletale, "Am I wrong?"
"Yeah, but there's still stuff left to do. Wouldn't want anyone to come out of this thing puréed." I set my mind back to the task at hand. "Right. I actually need an assistant, so it's good that you came." I pointed at a panel on the right side of the ring. Its lid hung open on a hinge, revealing a nest of wires.
"You need us to do what, exactly?" asked Skitter. "You're the Tinker."
"I just need one of you to rewire some things. The density compensator is set too strong and I can't change it in software. I thought this was meant for pulling things out of concrete… anyway. These gauntlets—" I flexed my fingers to demonstrate, "—aren't built for twisting wires together and flipping dip switches."
"Just take off the suit, man," said Tattletale. "I've seen the schematics. You can pull off the arm piece for a minute instead of relying on the skills of one of us incompetents with a crash course in technobabble. Uh, no offense, team."
"No," I said.
"Man, whatever the PRT pays its therapists is not enough."
Skitter stepped closer to the ring and shined her flashlight into the wire-filled compartment. "It's fine," she said. "I'll do it."
"Okay," I said. "Ever wired up a light fixture? Same idea, just more wires to twist together. And don't lose the plastic caps, they're a pain to fish out."
"Sure," said Skitter. "What do I do?"
"Disconnect the green, yellow, and black wires."
"Got it." She rooted around in the compartment for a few seconds. "Now what?"
"Black should go to green. Yellow to black. Leave the rest loose but try to keep the copper ends far away from each other. Don't have any electrical tape, so that's the best I can do."
"Real 20th century tech," said Tattletale.
"First prototype, and the client was a bitch," I sniped back.
"All done," said Skitter.
"Good. Now, look for a green circuit board, 'DXP.' It should have a big black rectangle component soldered on with white plastic parts, those are the switches."
"Right, I see it."
"The side furthest from the edge of the board is 'on,' and each switch has a label. Flip switches 6 and 8 to 'on,' please."
"Got it. What next?"
"The test run. We're done."
I looked over Skitter's work — fine, at a glance — and shut the compartment. I carefully lifted the contraption and set it down facing Regent's prison, earning a nod from Grue. Taking a few steps back, I was now ready to begin.
The thrum of the forcefield projectors beneath us was joined by the harmonious notes of the field generators inside the ring. The aperture of the device filled with a barely-perceptible, clear membrane. It looked like a soap bubble popping in extreme slow-motion, played in reverse.
"So what are we putting in for the first go?" I asked. "Bugs would probably work as a test, but that would just hurt your teammate."
"No tests," said Tattletale, "We don't have much time, and there's four more people to pull out. I trust your tech. Put a platform down so we can carry him and go for it."
"Really?"
"Just do it, please."
I raised a bed-sized section of the forcefield-floor behind me. Breathed in, breathed out. I pushed the membrane into the gently-writhing arm, and felt no resistance. The bubble stretched to accommodate my extended arm, letting it pass through as if there were no Jelly at all.
Regent wasn't quite within arm's reach, though. His right leg was closest to us, outstretched as though he had been engulfed mid-kick. Even so, the toe of his shoe was a good five feet inside the flesh-jelly prison. I took a step through the opening, screwing my eyes shut despite myself. If this failed… It didn't bear thinking about. I appeared to be fully inside the jelly-arm now, surrounded on all sides by red gel. The space around me felt just like normal air. The device was working.
A half-step more, and the iridescent membrane came to intersect Regent's foot. The boundary of the 'bubble' wavered there for a moment, before shooting forwards, all at once, travelling up his leg and further. Now it held him completely, stopping just an inch behind his back.
I took another step forward and grabbed him by the shoulders, relieved that they felt solid. The tech worked. I took a breath to concentrate, then firmly yanked him, using my back foot for leverage.
The sudden movement left the bubble with a bunch of empty space inside its boundary, which it promptly closed, racing to become as taut as possible. I wasn't expecting it to smack Regent in the back, and then me — he landed face-first on the force-platform with a 'crack!' that I hoped came from his mask and not his skull. I managed to remain upright, stumbling for a few steps as I was forced out of the rubble.
Skitter and Tattletale were at his side immediately. He came out dry. The membrane was set not to let the muck through. He must have looked safe enough to touch for Skitter to risk it: She turned him onto his side and took off his mask. Beneath it, he was a decently handsome teenager, about my age. She clapped him on his back a few times.
"Is he breathing?" asked Grue.
After one more clap, Regent finally moved, hacking up the biggest gob of phlegm I'd ever seen. He breathed in deeply and coughed again, and again, and again. He involved his voice, too, hoarsely moaning at times.
Tattletale drew out a long sigh. "We did it," she said.
Another sound joined Regent's pained noises, like bending, straining metal. It filled the air all around, growing in volume, until the shrill sound became the loudest thing in the room — and then stopped.
"What is that?" asked Skitter. "Is she waking up?"
"Fuck, they came earlier than I thought," said Tattletale. "No, the sound is coming from above. The white hats are breaking in."
A loud, muffled boom interrupted her. The vibration travelled down through the floor and I could feel it in my knees. A chunk of bone cleaved off one of the spine-things on the ceiling and hit the ground with a loud follow-up crash. Then another boom. Another. The bone-stuff plugging up the cracks in the ceiling was crumbling in volleys. Concrete dust filled the air. It smelled like a construction site.
The impacts stopped. A fragile silence came over us. Everyone looked shocked, scrambling to get even footing on the shaking ground — even Tattletale dropped her cool demeanor for a moment.
Soon enough, she was back to normal. "Good, their intel is shit. If they don't know about the way we came through, they won't know about the tunnel, either."
"This is good?" I asked.
"Yes, it's good. They haven't broken through immediately, so that rules out Miss Militia and Shadow Stalker. Same plan, we just have to hurry, double time. Pull out your people, carry them into the tunnel, that's our escape route. Fold up the ring after we're done, we need it to get out of the tunnel. We're taking Regent."
Surprise! I actually just remembered that I had this written up. Also working on 2.2, in the background.
The changes are slight, but the rewrite begins here.
Lastly: Would you stay calm in the face of incoming white hats?
Tattletale and Grue left, heading toward the tunnel. The big guy took Regent in a fireman's carry, and made his way through the muck, soon disappearing behind Jelly. Tattletale followed close behind.
There wasn't much noise. A background squelching sound emanated from around Jelly, probably her tentacles rubbing against the ground, but the impacts from above had stopped for now. If Tattletale was right, that wouldn't last long.
I lifted the gadget and slid it to face Vista. She was unmoving, permanently staring ahead. I hoped she wasn't conscious in there.
My hands moved to push buttons and adjust the feet that held the frame of the thing to the ground. "Portable Hole" seemed fanciful and inaccurate with the adjustments I'd made for pulling people out of the monster. Perhaps I'd call it the "Extraction Ring" instead— Irrelevant thoughts. I was in a time crunch.
Satisfied with its position, I powered up the ring and set another force-projector 'gurney' on the ground nearby.
"I can help," said Skitter, reminding me that she existed. I'd lost track of her in the recent chaos — she hadn't gone to the tunnel with the others.
"Don't need help," I said. "Or is this another veiled threat?"
"Two people is better. I can get them stable while you pull them out."
"Fuck off."
I walked forward through the ring, gently stepping around Vista. Again, the ring projected a bubble of "normal air" in front of me, making it possible to walk through Jelly. It reminded me of playing "Parachute" in elementary school, going in circles underneath a big tarp.
There she was. Vista, hanging mid-air, an inch away. I could touch her. I was so close… But I pushed ahead. The field could expand for a while yet, and it would be faster to pull everyone out at once. Ahead of me was Aegis, and further in, I could see even more. Browbeat to my left, Gallant to my right. Others who I couldn't recognize. Many had their costumes torn open, at least partially — they were frozen in time, captured moments away from the fight with Leviathan.
Just as I passed Gallant, I heard a shuffling behind me. I spun on my heels and looked at the interloper. Skitter had followed me inside and was preparing to carry Vista to the gurney.
"Hey!" I yelled. "Get out—"
BOOM!
Another tremor from above. The Tinker in my head had time to ask, —Did I build in vibration resistance— and then immediately receive the answer. In a split second, the bubble that surrounded me 'popped.' I felt an intense jerk, like being hit by a wall of water, as Jelly's gelatinous body crept in through the holes in my suit. Then the red stuff started pouring into the holes in my body, but I didn't have the time to start choking before I blacked out.
I couldn't tell what I was feeling for a long time. Eventually, I put a name to it: It felt like a dream. Unfamiliar because I'd been avoiding them for the better part of a month.
A dream that wasn't about anything, not yet. I had no senses, no body, no scene in mind. In my stomach, I had a strange, familiar dread. It was the urgent feeling of something important. I'd felt it in school about homework, or sitting on a creaky chair in the PRT building and smacking my shoes against the sticky linoleum floor while I waited for Director Piggot to call me into her office.
There was an even stronger feeling that nothing really mattered. That was all — I was free to think about anything.
Sitting still in this soup of dread and nihilism made my bones itch. Screw this, I thought, I want my friends.
No, the dream said back, though not really in words, you don't want friends. You are lesser, but you could be greater. You are confined, but you could be free.
You are an ant, but you could be more, so much more.
I didn't understand, and besides, my dreams didn't talk to me. Usually, they showed me all the things I hated about myself. All the regrets I had, all the friends I lost — that's why I wanted my friends.
I didn't say this to the dream — and again, my dreams didn't talk to me — but the dream spoke back, anyway.
I make you more. You will be more.
At first, the dream was blackness, primordial nothing interspersed with those strange dream-thoughts that presumed they knew what I wanted. Now, it was turning into something else. A lesson. Not in a classroom, but a mental slideshow, the kind of dream that flitted rapidly from scene to scene.
I was at the first link in the chain, staring at molecules. Up close in some warmwater tidal pool, like I'd taken a ride on the Magic School Bus. RNA world, the proverbial 'primordial soup.' Replication. Respiration. Hydrothermal vents. I looked with an oneiric microscope at a form of life that was only a few steps removed from pure biochemistry.
I asked the dream, What does this have to do with anything? and the dream stubbornly refused to respond.
I was shunted to the next link, considerably more complex. Deeper in the open ocean. Cells, cell networks. Modern-day jellyfish and Portuguese men 'o war. Starfish. Octopus.
Then, the next link — I was on the shore. I saw the first vertebrates, outside the pages of a biology textbook. I forcefully projected my thoughts at the dream, What the fuck! There's something important and this isn't helping me out of it.
This time, the dream did speak back. This is more important, it said, Nothing is more urgent than your betterment. You must learn of the tyranny of the spine.
I was bewildered, but the dream shut me up. I couldn't express anything, not while it was telling the story.
I saw images of vertebrates. The spinal cord. Organisms that turned from reacting to the world immediately, relying on simple chemistry for complex behaviours and hints of memory, to constructing a perception of the world through the spine. Prehistoric raptors and crocodilians hunting for prey. Rodents digging burrows. Monkeys gathering fruit, grooming each other, fighting monkey battles and monkey wars over the best foraging grounds.
They turned inward, constructing brains that could look forward in time, simulate an internal world, construct models of reality. Direct perception wasn't possible anymore. Bias crept in. Imperfections spiralled out into world-changing flaws.
Gathering behaviour. Social behaviour. The dawn of man, people who were almost recognizable as modern-day humans. Finally, technology — a biological catastrophe.
What the fuck are you talking about?! I managed, and broke free from the lesson. Back into the blackness. A calm nothing.
This is the why, it said, now comes the what.
Nothing happened for a while. Then, I heard faint voices. It sounded like a crowd of people, all babbling. I could make out familiar voices. Friends, I thought. I thought it again, harder — Friends! — Hoping that I could be with them. See them again.
Something sliced through the background, filling the darkness with light. I saw… something. I wanted to label it 'outside,' a concrete room with a missing ceiling. In it, in the centre, stood a giant nude man.
His form shifted — sometimes a him, sometimes a her, or maybe it wasn't right to call them a 'man' at all. A dream person, outside the parameters of normal human anatomy. It was about five times as large as a human being, for one, and its limbs weren't always attached at the same joints. The skin shifted and morphed into faces.
A hundred Missies' faces, popping up all over the giant, replaced by Deans, replaced by Browbeats, then a dozen people in sequence who I didn't recognize but whose names I knew. Billie Lewis, Frank Charm, Alexa Denzel. Skitter's face. My face. Carlos' face. I cried, or wanted to cry.
Why?! I asked.
What. Who. said the dream, This is us. This is you.
I was pushed into the giant. My vision faded to blackness again, and heard the crowd, this time more clearly. I couldn't understand the thoughts, but they were their thoughts, Missie's thoughts, Frank Charm's thoughts, Dean's thoughts. Only in snatches did I get what they were thinking about. A little bit of fear, pain, loneliness. Hunger. Mostly, the feeling of being at peace, of being content. They didn't know I was there.
And snatches of another stream of thoughts. Strange ones, not that I could tell why they felt strange, but it seemed like a harsher, more complicated signal. Again, that phantom knowledge told me whose, with certainty — Skitter's thoughts.
The dream said, again, This is you—
I woke up, laid out on the forcefield gurney that I'd set out for Vista and the others. Face-down, just like Regent had landed. Immediately, I felt like I was going to hurl. I reached around for the back of my suit and found the quick-release, then all but tore my helmet off. It clattered to the floor. I tried not to barf all over it.
"We don't have time to waste on this shit!" Grue's voice.
Someone clapped me on the back, not that I needed the help. I hadn't entirely avoided the helmet on the ground, despite my best efforts. I turned around and tried to reach with my other arm, but found that it was tied up somehow.
"Your girlfriend would be dead if we hadn't come back!" That was Tattletale.
"That's not what I mean and you know it," said Grue. "Let's get out of here."
I tried to sit up, dangling my feet off the holo-gurney. I saw the Extraction Ring, powered off.
Instinctively, a Tinker thought started its racing path across my mind, something about how the device broke, but— pain.
It sent me reeling. I shouted. I yelled. I flinched and shook my arm, shook my head as though that would make it better. It didn't. All my nerves burned, and then my skin burned too, and my bone, and I felt as though I was a cigarette soaked in Everclear and thrown into an open hearth. My eyes didn't agree, but then my eyes burned too. Everything was too warm; Tears ran down my face; I couldn't think of anything for more than a second before another reminder would come — "Hey, jackass! Your arms are on fire! Your brain is on fire! YOU'RE ON FIRE!"
A hand clapped my back. I stopped the noise in my throat, and tried to bear the pain without screaming. (Though at this point what was coming out of my mouth wasn't really a scream, more the breathy intermittent thing you get when you yowl in pain for too long but just have to keep going.)
I realized then that I couldn't hear anything. A terrible ringing noise, a pure sine wave oscillating at some precisely-most-annoying frequency had replaced all other sound.
Another clap on my back, and I felt like I should say something, despite the ringing. I stumbled upwards, barely falling into a standing pose. Through tears I saw something I recognized. I don't know what. Finally, I did say something. I said:
""
There was silence all around, though of course it did nothing to quell the pain. People were looking at me. I didn't know why. I didn't know what I had said.
The ringing noise faded. I screamed, and this time I could hear what I was saying.
"Fuck! What the fuck?!"
I held my head in my hands, straining against the headache. I tried to stand up and find my footing, again feeling that my left arm was stuck in place somehow. Thin, white strands were wrapped around it.
"What the hell did you do to me?"
"Pulled you out of there," said Tattletale, "In what's looking less and less like one piece. Your accent's horrible."
I didn't look at her, or anyone. I was too preoccupied with looking at the floor to try and avoid another flash of pain.
"Grue, just go," she said. "We'll be right behind you."
"No," said Grue. "You. Alone. Will be right behind me. I'm taking Skitter, you can work this mess out by yourself."
"Auughe," said Skitter.
"You realize… Fuck, forget it. Go," said Tattletale.
They must have walked away. Tattletale must have started talking to me. I couldn't hear anything over another wave of ringing in my ears. I ripped off the strands of silk binding the fingers of my left arm together. The pain was fading. I blinked away more tears.
"—so, pretty please, get moving or tell me if you can't."
"They're still in there," I said. "I saw her, through the ring. You didn't pull them out."
I stared at her. Flecks of rock and bits of grey dust had settled on her mask and beyond it. The heroes had given Tattletale concrete eyeshadow.
"Look to your left, please. It won't hurt."
"You didn't pull them out."
Tattletale walked up to me, within spitting distance. I stayed still, looking at her.
"I'd kill for that bastard to be alive right now so he could give you a chiropractic adjustment, but if you'd look to your left, you'd see he's fucking gone!"
She punched me in the chest. It probably hurt her hand, like punching a car.
"They're all gone. Not dead, but they may as well be. No response to anything, babbling, that's it. We're dead too, if the Protectorate keeps banging on the roof. Even with your armour, you won't survive the collapse unless you go with us down the tunnel. We need to set up your forcefields, for you to do something — otherwise we're toast. We don't have much time."
I looked to the left.
Aegis — Carlos, laying on his side, hands in front of him, balled into white-knuckled fists. His eyes were wide open. He was mumbling something under his breath. Every once in a while, his arms would twitch and he'd almost hit himself on the forehead.
"I'm sorry. Skitter made a rope… We only pulled him out because you wouldn't let go. Don't die for nothing, Kid. They would have wanted you to live."
I fell to my knees and stepped forward, inching closer. I reached to put my hands on his shoulders, against his face, only to realize that my gauntlets were still on. Cursing, I undid the little overcomplicated clasps that held them on and threw them to the ground. Tattletale made to gather the loose parts. I didn't care.
Carlos. Living and breathing Carlos, terrified and curled-up Carlos. Still in his costume, torn in places. An enormous gash stretched in a spiral from his left hip to his right shoulder blade, cutting across his chest — had Leviathan done that? Did he rip him apart with curving water?
My hands hovered an inch from his shoulders, from his face. I didn't know what to say. I cried.
I wasn't sure what he was mumbling. It didn't sound like English.
Tears blurred my vision — I blinked them away, then wiped them away. His suit had even bigger rips along the limbs. The sleeves had come off entirely. I could see that one of his forearms had a developing bruise. I ran my finger down, starting at his wrist and ending at the point of his elbow, going around the injury.
I squeezed with the muscles of my face, trying to banish the tears. I squeezed with my hand, too, and managed to squeeze… too far. Something felt wrong. I stared at my right hand, firm around Carlos' elbow.
I was still in the nightmare, that could be the only explanation, because—
I saw my hand, melded into his elbow. My fingers intersected his arm, up to the knuckles. I felt a pull, and my body didn't move but flowed into his, like I was being squeezed out of a tube of toothpaste.
I had no time to be surprised. My vision went dark. All I had was touch, and touch was telling me that I was, impossibly, crawling, flowing out of my body and into Aegis'. My fingers and my arm and my shoulder and my entire trunk poured down through his elbow and into his body. I felt it in more sensory dimensions than the standard set — his extra hearts and distributed brain and reinforced bones, they didn't just rub up against me, they became me.
I wasn't anywhere, for a good few moments, and then I exploded.
Not that I knew that at first: I took my first breath since the blackout and found it a little harder than I expected. Laid across my chest was what I took for a minifridge and then realized was my Zephyr. I managed to roll it off myself and sit up a little, wiping what I thought was sweat off my brow. I took another deep breath in. Something smelled weird. Pennies. I looked back at my hand.
I was covered in blood.
"What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck—"
"Shut up!" yelled Tattletale.
I looked up at her. I had taken a lot more breaths in the meantime. I kept breathing, fast. I felt lightheaded.
She was wearing the gauntlets I'd left behind on the floor, and had used them to put up a bubble-shaped forcefield around us. Falling debris struck the barrier every couple of seconds, mostly small pebbles with the occasional volley of football-sized hunks. I must have been out for longer than it felt like. Her suit was shinier than normal. Blood. I felt nauseous.
"We had five minutes and now we have less. You don't have time to process this, so I'll process it for you. Whatever the hell this is, you can't be Kid Win anymore. You probably can't be a hero anymore, that's— that is Breed levels of fucked-up. So whatever the hell you do, you have to avoid the idiots upstairs unless you have a watertight plan to explain… this. Which you don't.
"That's the easy part. The other thing is we're all gonna die unless you go into the tunnel with us and get us an escape route."
The same way that people don't have tails, and can't feel their tails, I couldn't feel any feelings. 'Numb' would be generous, like a local anaesthetic removing fine sensation while keeping the feeling of pressure — no, this was just nothing. I looked on completely impassively.
Tattletale was done talking. She used my gadgets with surprising deftness, punching in commands I'd never taught her to move the forcefield around us. The wall slammed into me, straight up; for herself, she'd shaped a bar to hold onto. It was nice of her to put in a floor. The bloodied parts of the Zephyr that Tattletale wasn't wearing were just ballast to her — she made holes in the field and they shot out the back, left in our trail.
We were careening towards the mouth of the tunnel. Tattletale took us on a long arc to avoid any possible encounters with the aggravated and flailing Jelly.
Vista, Browbeat, and Gallant were still in there. Somehow, that wasn't the worst fate that could befall someone imprisoned inside.
Tears rolled down my face, or maybe blood. I blinked away the liquid all the same. Something was building in my throat and threatened to come out, but I managed to keep it down despite the bumpy ride along the perimeter of the vault.
We slid to a stop at the tunnel's mouth. Grue, Bitch, and Skitter were inside, maybe 20 feet past the entrance. Skitter sat propped up against one of the smooth walls of the tunnel, kind of like how I was propped up against the inside of the forcefield. Regent, next to Skitter, laying in the same position as Aegis. Grue and Bitch were standing up, in the middle of a quiet conversation.
The dogs were absent. So was Imp.
Both standing villains turned and stared at us.
Tattletale deactivated the field. I fell to the ground — well inside the tunnel, it really was solid concrete ground, not Jelly-biofilm. My head rang. I looked straight ahead.
"Striker power, don't touch him," said Tattletale.
"I'm going out. We need to get Imp!" Grue shouted.
"We have less than a minute. No time for rescues. Imp's as good as dead."
"You're taking him over her?"
"Not now! I have one plan and it's a long shot."
"Aefhgh haaagh?" asked Skitter.
"Very bad. Even odds we make it out without injuries. Quiet please, I need to time this."
I started coughing. That thing inside my throat was coming out. I struggled to stand up so I wouldn't choke in it. Phlegm and sputum, and then — something more solid. The stuff pooled in my lap. The solid thing looked at me.
An eyeball. Brown.
Tattletale was busy reconfiguring the forcefield. She was closest of any of us to the mouth of the tunnel — the collected capes stood watching what she did. Inputting more gestural commands, she used my field projector to form a flat disk that spanned the tunnel with a rectangular notch cut into its top side.
She finished right on time.
The demolition orchestra was reaching a crescendo. Concrete fell in larger and larger pieces, joined sometimes by spears of rebar. The loud 'BOOM's were now accompanied by piercing shrieks. The awful high-pitched noises came from the bone supports that stretched up to support the ceiling. It was some acoustic artefact of splintering osteo-stuff, delayed by a few seconds after the primary impact.
We didn't have long to really take in the dissonant tones as just a few 'BOOM's after the supports started shrieking, they fell down.
The one on my left started falling first. It came down slowly. Two seconds later, the one on the right fell, a second more and the one furthest back detached, a half-second more and the spine-support nearest to us started to come yet nearer.
Tattletale had been staring ahead this whole time, watching. It was only now that she performed the "Oh, shit!" command, pumping her fist twice to tell the emitter to sacrifice power draw for protection. Optimizing further, the device closed the slot at the top, forming a complete seal.
Immediately, the shield was struck by a wave of debris. Warped disks of bone, splinters, concrete, and rebar flew at us, but none were let through. The emitter's high-power setting made a horrible buzzing sound, not a constant note but a wavering, flagging waveform, modulated by each of the heavy strikes that the crumbling ceiling landed on the forcefield. It was worse than the sound my suit made when I crashed into this concrete-and-flesh hell, and just a hair better than Cricket's wailing.
We survived, I thought. The forcefield cycled through different colours in patches, like a stained glass mosaic designed in real time. The panel fitted flush with the entrance of the tunnel, and its component hexagonal sections flitted between green, blue, orange, magenta, all at random. Looking through the rainbow-noise tiles, I saw nothing but a cloud of dust, and beyond it, tall, dark shapes.
Those shapes must have been shadows, silhouettes of the remaining spine-pillars, which meant there was light coming through from somewhere — the ceiling! — which meant that the people on the surface had finally broken through.
I felt very, very small.
Tattletale raised her right arm, pointing the barrel of my laser cannon up toward the top of the tunnel's entrance. The field morphed again, no longer completely solid. The slot she had cut into it reappeared. I saw the laser beam — not that it was really a laser beam, there wasn't enough dust in the air to actually see collimated light. It was a cartoon laser beam, what I once thought it should have looked like. A thick red line, cutting across space and melting the place it hit. It worked off some different and exotic physical principle. I was missing the part of my brain that might have told me more.
She cut downward, starting from a spot on the tunnel ceiling and moving through the slot in the forcefield to some invisible point beyond. Where the laser intersected with the dust cloud outside, it sparked in a magnesium-bright flash of light.
I had, charitably, two seconds to take in the view. Then, time was up. The dust cloud turned into a fireball. It burned bright for several seconds, and then was snuffed out completely by the biggest rockfall yet. The entrance of the tunnel was corked up, blocked by tonnes of rock. Since they hadn't seen the layout of the room without a giant cloud of dust in the way, it would probably take the heroes a while to figure out where we had gone.
There was commotion and shouting behind me. Another argument broke out between Grue and Tattletale. Hellhound kept quiet. I wondered where her dogs had gone. I wondered who the heroes were that came to save me — Assault and Battery could probably survive this kind of thing. Miss Militia, though… She would probably come in with a plan for 'immediate explosion,' so, her too.
There was a slight breeze flowing through the tunnel, which had turned into a brief gust during the explosion. Now the air was calm. I felt sticky, wet, and cold.
"Let's go," said Tattletale.
I sat still, looking through the pile of rubble, exactly as I had been for the past minute.
"Let's go," she repeated.
I tried to speak and false-started. I had to clear my throat of the phlegm and blood, then I could talk. I didn't turn to look at Tattletale.
"Why?" I asked.
"No, no, none of this aquoiboniste crap. Sit on the forcefield."
"Why me?"
"Sit down on the forcefield! All we can do now is find the bastard who did this, so let's get the hell out of here."
I stood up, finally. Tattletale wasn't looking very well-composed. Her hair had gotten messed up from something, then coated in concrete dust, then showered with gore. She had tried to wipe off the layer of blood off her face with a sleeve, but hadn't bothered to get it very clean, just enough to be able to see without stuff getting in her eyes. The front of her suit was similarly coated, dripping with blood and sparsely sprinkled with unidentifiable meaty chunks. Maybe those were bits of fat or muscle.
"Did you plan it all? Did you want this?"
"Did I want my friends to die? What the hell do you think?"
"I could kill you!" I yelled. She tried not to show it, but I must have rattled her. She took a deep breath in and broke eye contact for a second.
I continued. "I could kill you in a second, so you can't fuck with me anymore! You ruined my life! I killed him! All I wanted was to help my friends and now they're dead!"
There was a pause.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm really, really sorry. You will never forgive me, I know. But you're not a killer. Kid, please get down and don't do anything rash."
Get down? — Oh. I was floating a foot above the ground.
Two foreign-language song references in this one:
ДДТ said:
Что такое осень? Это камни
Верность над чернеющей невою
Осень, вновь напомнила душе о самом главном
Осень, я опять лишен покоя.
Endo returns, I return, honestly I didn't do much editing to this chapter and it's pretty much as it was on the Google Doc. I am once again moving house but I should be settled in by Oct 1st, expect maybe another chapter by the end of October. Thank you for reading!
Would you reach out to touch your best friend's arm?
Edit October 10th:
Have been trying to remember where I stole a bit of imagery from since I wrote it, finally got it. Chris coughing up an eyeball in this chapter is imagery I nabbed from an episode of short-lived Canadian sci-fi show Travelers. Pretty good show, I hate that it got killed by the swirl of TV networks airing it. Will have to put it in my recs thread at some point.
For SV Readers:
With this chapter, we're finally caught up with the AO3/SB releases. I'll try to remember to keep everything in sync from now on.
