1.3
To my immense irritation, I discover that Bakuda was also a heels girl.
I think I sort of get the heels. They're so
ridiculously heel-y that they probably add a few inches to her height. I'm not sure whether Bakuda -me, now- is particularly short, but she's Asian and female so the odds are weighted in that direction, and even if she's actually tall unless she's
ridiculously tall it's all too easy to imagine she wants ridiculous high heels so she can tower over other people and/or not have them tower over her. I'm mostly annoyed at how
everything is heels. No flats? Not a one?
I take some comfort in the fact that they're all a somber jet black, nothing pink or worse,
red.
Still, I need to buy something more practical. Even if having Bakuda's body has people disinclined to take me seriously, even if that causes problems down the line, with the ability to produce nonsense like
time stop bombs I'm going to be putting the Fear Of Me into people pretty much no matter what I do, so striving to have an appropriate image in other realms isn't a high priority. I'll be able to lean on my reputation down the line, and in the meanwhile I can just blow people up to make a point. It's not like everything I make
has to be lethal. I can make a point about being able to kill people without killing people.
In other words, I can dress down and still get respect.
For the moment I stick to going barefoot indoors. The concrete is chillier than I might prefer, but I haven't gotten the hiccups yet so it can't be that bad. Maybe I can get Oni Lee to buy me some shoes. Or get a flunky to do it, though I haven't actually
seen any flunkies since I woke up. Worst case scenario I go buy flats in my ridiculous high heels and hope I don't break my neck on the way. I've done worse.
I also finally remember to look for a costume.
I don't have a costume.
I'm not really
surprised that Bakuda doesn't have her canon costume, given that wearing it was the condition Uber and Leet set for being hired by her and it's a part of the Bomberman theme. (I presume) No idea where the gas mask fits into that or whether the distorted voice does at all. I don't remember there being a Bomberman character that wears a gas mask, though to be fair I also don't remember any female Bomberman characters because I've never been a huge fan of the series, so whatever. Regardless, I was honestly expecting a costume.
I feel sort of stupid for expecting a costume, because really Bakuda doesn't have a lot of use for one. She's
known to be the Cornell Bomber or whatever it was, and even if her name and face aren't widespread public knowledge it's not like it would be hard to look up "female Asian student that failed a class at blah university" and pin her down, so her civilian identity is basically blown. Which is probably why she accepted joining the ABB, now that I think about it. Aaaand it also means I can't just walk down the street and buy some flats in my civilian identity.
I did cut my hair, and it's hilarious how often just having a different haircut kills people's ability to recognize you. The Discovery Channel has some great stuff with real-life incidents of that working. So maybe I can get away with it one time.
Not leaving without armaments, mind, because it would be just
stupid to wander around with a known criminal identity and no protection.
Also, I'm possibly a pretty young lady now so maybe I'll have to deal with inappropriate attention of that sort. Hm. Maybe I should build a taser or something. Can I build a taser?
---------------
The short answer: no, I cannot build a taser. I
can build something that induces epileptic convulsions, and I can jury-rig it to
almost behave like an aimed weapon -think a claymore, but spraying electricity or something convincingly similar- but I can't figure out how to rig it with multiple shots without making it unacceptably bulky. Also, I think adding extra "shots" might make it radioactive. I hope not.
Also I built another batch of bombs for the "Lung Rescue Plan ie the Blow The Fuck Out Of Oni Lee Plan". Tinkering is
hard to realize I should, like, stop, when I'm in the middle of it. At least I didn't start cooking more food and then forget about it. I'm starting to think that's going to be really easy to do. Burning down my... home? Workshop or whatever, burning it down=bad. No. Bad shard. Don't make me do that. It doesn't help you see conflict if I kill myself, or end up laid up with burns and bound for prison.
This time I come out of the tinker fugue on my own. This has the disadvantage that I have
zero idea of how many hours have passed, lacking an Oni Lee to conveniently be a clock.
I discover I have a television. I'm surprised more that it hasn't been dismantled than at the fact of its existence. I spend a bit looking for a remote, until I spot the gutted remains on one of the tables. Oh yeah, I
did strip its wiring for the shadow bomb. (What else do you call a bomb that basically explodes into Grue's power?) Whoops.
I turn on the television manually, and then scroll through channels until I find a news station. I've never been a news-y person, news channels tend to be boring and/or excessively drama-y, but looking for Earth Bet's version of Cartoon Network, however interesting it might be in its own right (Is depicting Endbringers in cartoons considered in poor taste, or cathartic?), is not going to give me context on what's going on in the world I'm now a part of. Well. Not the parts I care most urgently about, anyway.
I grab a Diet Coke -wait, when did that get here? I don't remember having that. In fact... yes, yes the fridge has been shoved into my workshop and a new fridge installed in its place. I... really hope that happened while I was asleep and not while I was tinkering. Not that I'm thrilled at the idea of sleeping through something like that, I'm used to being alert even while asleep, but being that oblivious while tinkering would be a
lot more alarming.
Still, apparently my tinkering is considered important enough that they're working around me, rather than harassing me over doing stupid shit and making me fix it my damn self and/or suffer through my own shard-induced stupidity.
I think I'm getting an idea of why Bakuda had such an inflated opinion of herself in canon, shard shenanigans aside.
I'm wondering... wait... yeah. I
do remember somebody annoying me while I was welding a dust bomb shut. Asking me what I wanted in the fridge? I don't specifically recall. I remember the
annoyance at being interrupted, the dismissive attitude I had, not so much the specifics of the conversation.
Oh, right, TV.
I pour myself a glass of diet coke, notice my trash has also been disposed of, and dig around for snacks in the cabinets. I find ramen. I have no idea if this is because I actually kind of like ramen, or if it's because ABB. Whatever. Diet Coke and a package of ramen, dry. Why not.
I sit down in front of the TV in a lotus position. Or whatever crossing your legs like that is actually called. Drink, chew, drink, chew, watch TV.
In general tone, it's not really that different from what turned me off from news in the first place. The talking heads are different from the ones I vaguely recall on national news, and of course Brockton Bay has local news anchors I have zero familiarity with. Parahumans don't dominate the news. There
is ongoing speculation on what the ABB response is going to be to Lung's capture, they've been surprisingly quiet, yadda yadda, oh, there's a clip of... says it's Velocity. Huh. I was expecting a more Flash-esque look. He puts me more in mind of Superman, or I guess Marvel Man with the lightning-bolt-like imagery, but with realistic musculature instead of comic book muscles, in terms of his body shape and costume design. I guess maybe he works out a lot, because of how his power works? My recollection is that he's basically time-warping rather than super-accelerating and cheating out of friction et al, in terms of experiencing a five-mile run the same as a regular person doing a five-mile run, he'll just finish it before you because he has powers. Not
sure on that. He dies in the Leviathan fight and the only action he sees before then on-screen is at the "embarrass the Protectorate" fight, so he's not really properly explored.
Surprised it's not Armsmaster, given it's Official Protectorate Commentary on the ABB thing. It's pretty generic stuff. Blah blah blah the Protectorate stands ready, constant vigilance (Is Harry Potter not a thing in Earth Bet?), villains always lose in the end, let this be a lesson to those who would use their powers for selfish ends. I idly wonder if they have tinkertech dedicated to making heroes look
~inspiring~ on television, because in spite of being ostensibly a spontaneous semi-interview of catching Velocity on his way to the PRT HQ he's conveniently got a flag waving in the background. I can practically
hear the "fuck yeah America" music swelling in time with his words.
Things get a bit more interesting when the talking heads move on to talking about rumors of the ABB recruiting the Cornell Bomber. Hey, I remembered it right. Specifically? They have a high school photo album picture, all smiles and
~girly charm~ and... braces. Huh. And the civilian name. Alicia? Was that really her name? I don't remember that being her name in canon, and I could've
sworn it came up, given that Tattletale's MO is using people's private life to fuck with them. Then again, I'm
terrible at remembering the civilian names of most capes, bar a few the fandom has used so extensively it's burned into my brain like Armsmaster=Colin and Miss Militia=Hannah. Maybe I just forgot.
No cape name. Apparently I haven't been announced as Bakuda yet.
There's an interview with her/my parents. Dad is stolid (And less Asian-looking than I'd expected), looking like he's ready to cry but refusing to give in, confesses he wasn't as close to his daughter as he'd have preferred, takes the blame for not guiding her down her life properly in a sorrowful tone of voice. Mom is, on the face of things, more sorry, making earnest noises about missing her daughter and pleading for her to turn herself in, but the things she
doesn't say stand out to me: in particular, the fact that dad was apparently your standard workaholic father strongly implies it was mom who provided most of the influence over Bakuda's development, and she doesn't do anything to blame
herself like the father is doing.
I have the distinct impression mom was doing the pushing for excellence in all things, including, apparently, being feminine.
Huh.
Well, at least I don't have to worry overly much about not trying to reconnect with Bakuda's family. The dad's not
so bad, but there's probably not an actual relationship there. The mom seems toxic. There's no siblings, the talking heads are explicit about that, and extended family doesn't seem to factor in. I suppose that's a plus side to not showing up as Taylor. Managing a relationship with Danny would've been annoying. I'm conveniently free of filial obligation as Bakuda, not so much if I'd been Taylor.
For that matter, aside from being attached to the ABB I also don't seem to have to care about friends wanting me to reciprocate a relationship they formed with someone not-me. I can fix being attached to the ABB. Distractedly, it occurs to me I should maybe engineer the bombs intended for flunky use to be manually detonatable. Or... hm. If I do that I'm going to be that girl who blew up her university, joined a gang, and then blew up the gang. Not the best tack for trying to convince people that I'm totes not evil, honest.
Wait shit, I never got back to the Taylor thing. I mean, I don't have
any plan whatsoever, but I haven't even been thinking about it.
A bit of digging around finds a laptop with some kind of wireless internet connection, sitting in a forgotten corner of the bedroom area. I load up PHO, navigate to the Brockton Bay>Connections sub-forum, and use the threadsearch function to find threads in the subforum containing "tt". There's a few false positives, but,
unfortunately, there's the canon message to "bug"... dated something like five days ago. So basically I've missed out on any possibility of completely derailing that plot point. Not sure whether I
want to, but it's not even an option.
Uuugh, fucking tinker fugues.
All right, I suppose I
could still try to contact Taylor and try to go
somewhere with that, but, you know, I'm ABB. Connecting with her Skitter persona and pretending I think she's Asian isn't exactly practicable, given she's basically only going to be Skitter around the Undersiders, and finding her in her civilian identity is
all kinds of threatening. With Bakuda's civilian identity a known quantity, I can't just
happen to bump into her on her runs and develop a friendship. Ugh, so many options closed off. Not necessarily
good options, but being Bakuda is limiting.
Actually, you know what? I have an idea for something I
can do for Taylor, with minimal problems.
--------------------
The idea starts with a bang. Specifically, blowing up Winslow High at night to avoid casualties, using one of my exotic bombs. I went with a bomb that removes the electrical charge of atoms in its "blast" radius. In layman's terms: it makes everything vanish completely harmlessly. Or I guess you could consider it a disintegration effect, but people tend to think of painfully turning into dust or something when they hear "disintegration". Nope, just cease to exist.
I sold Oni Lee on the idea of vaporizing Winslow by presenting three points: it frees up our Winslow-attending members for the rescue mission (And doing it at night avoids killing them or cluing people in by virtue of ABB members all not attending on the same day), we'll point to it as an example of the kind of thing that's going to
keep happening if the Protectorate doesn't release Lung, only with real casualties, and it puts the Protectorate on edge, softening them up by getting them tense, tired, etc.
I seriously considered trying to remote-detonate the bomb to vaporize Oni Lee. Unfortunately, I find it a little too easy to imagine something like: watch Oni Lee (Having
somehow convinced him to let me come along and watch, which is not a guaranteed thing), see him cloneport into the school, detonate the bomb the instant his prior body turns to ash, and whoops he's already cloneported back out to near me and now I'm scattered neutrons. Given how I want the bomb's blast radius able to remove 99-100% of Winslow from existence, that's a
really plausible scenario. Also I'm not 100% certain Oni Lee will do it personally anyway, and asking questions is probably dangerous. Accidentally killing a flunky is A: not my goal and B: risking letting Oni Lee know I am trying to kill him. I explained to him
why it would be awesome if he did it, because he can cloneport and have the body left behind detonate and voila we still have the bomb, and tinkertech stuff has more of a constricted production pipeline than just buying more grenades, but that doesn't mean he'll
do it.
The real goal is, of course, to give Taylor a completely legitimate excuse to not deal with Winslow High for the foreseeable future. It'd be nice if I could somehow leverage this to get some trust from her, but eh, whatever. Mostly? Winslow High is a hellhole and making it cease to exist cannot possibly be anything but an improvement.
There's probably also a tiny bit of catharsis to it, admittedly. I never went to high school, but my brief period of time in middle school was
hell and I fantasized about vaporizing the school and everyone in it with Siege Tanks. Revenge is a dish best served in a completely different reality by converting an unrelated building to neutrally charged particles. Also, the innocent grass and dirt and earthworms and so on in the area, but eh. Catharsis!
Since the radius is, of course, a sphere (Well, not
quite a sphere, it's a little flattened by gravity), it'll even leave a nicely intimidating crater.
I don't remember
exactly what the timeline looks like in canon, but I'm pretty sure the Undersiders haven't hit the bank and... hm. If they haven't, I really ought to do something to make the Dinah thing not happen. Squeamish moral considerations aside, canon events pretty strongly indicate Coil is one of those people who should be killed on principle and denied resources on principle.
Also, maybe I should figure out if I can somehow explode Noelle into being fixed and/or return the Travelers to Earth Aleph. Via explosions. I'm pretty sure I can achieve the latter somehow, a
lot of my bombs involve portal shenanigans of some kind, but I'm iffier on the first point. Wormverse doesn't really do "life energy" or whatever, for all that "healing effects" like Othala's exist, so I have doubts I can engineer some kind of cure bomb, especially since Noelle's issues aren't necessarily anything that would qualify as an injury/infection/whatever. For all I know a "cure bomb" would just accelerate her transformation.
Also, Simurgh, if you're listening to this, please don't fuck it up, I already
know you manipulate events to fuck over Scion for whatever reason you have, I'm already going to try to do that, I don't need you fucking this up and frankly if you want Cauldron outed for some reason I can probably pull it off, Contessa or no. So please? Don't fuck over the Travelers like in canon, or I guess don't fuck over my attempts to un-fuck them. Please and thank you.
Naturally, I have
another tinker fugue, making a series of bombs that do... eeeh. Sort-of-nice things. Like one of them, I was intending it to cauterize wounds, but really it's just a small, tightly controlled burst of intense heat from a pill-sized bomb, so you could totally use it to kill people, or destroy their eyes, or whatever. Another bursts into an anti-bacterial agent. It, uh, has
acceptable impact on human flesh, but it does lead to explosive diarrhea and/or vomiting if you're caught in the radius. I do kind of wonder if maybe it could be useful for curing people with serious, long-term infections that are slowly killing them (eg MRSA), but it's not exactly a good way to address the common cold.
When I come out of it, I'm vaguely grateful I don't have to deal with facial hair. It's been... going by prior fugues it's probably been a week-ish since I "arrived". I hate shaving my face, so that's nice. Really, I have less hair in general now. Plus it's not razor wire hair. If I shave my legs or something it's not going to be half as torturous as it once was. Awesome.
Unfortunately, this means I've missed Plan: Vaporize Winslow entirely, probably.
Damn.
