This took
entirely too long, between holidays, being tired and somewhat under the weather, general busyness, and the chapter itself proving to be a pain to write. But here we are, Arc 3: Descent.
3.1
Oni Lee, Lung, and myself have a fairly casual meeting to plot out the Coil thing. It boils down to Lung swinging by the next day out of costume, driving me (Also out of costume) to an abandoned (Crumbling) warehouse, and Oni Lee appearing suddenly inside it once we're inside.
Oni Lee still doesn't look so good, though now I can tell he wasn't missing the
whole arm like I'd originally thought. It was hacked off somewhere behind the elbow, which... well, honestly, the main thing was that he'd lost the hand, anyway. I'm not sure how much difference it makes for him whether it was the whole arm or half the arm or if it could've been just the hand and it would all be the same thing.
I'd puked during the night. Hooray. Too much going on for me to say why. Sickness? The concussion? Bakuda's body having a
really unhealthy period? Some intersection of these things?
In any event, it meant I hadn't slept so well before this. In addition to being concussed still. And possibly being sick, if that's what's going on. I don't
feel like I've caught a bug. No skin crawling or anything. On the other hand, light sensitivity is a concussion consequence
and a consequence of fever. I don't particularly feel like I've been light sensitive, but then I was unusually light sensitive back in Omicron. Maybe Bakuda's body is less light sensitive when concussed and/or running a fever than my old body was when healthy.
sigh
Too hard to pin this stuff down.
Oni Lee is still in costume and armed. I'm starting to wonder if he even
has a civilian life. Lung and I are here out of costume, but not Oni Lee? Suggestive. I notice, and consider asking about, that I can't see the monomolecular knife on him. Did he lose it? Was it destroyed? But I put it off for the moment. Coil. Coil really really needs to die.
Oni Lee is a bit more involved in this discussion. Apparently, even while wounded, he kept up with the ABB's intelligence network. I'm sort of vaguely surprised. I wouldn't have pegged Oni Lee as the spymaster of the ABB, but apparently he is. Anyway, the relevant bit: Calvert was kept on-base for a bit for medical reasons and for his own protection. Also to debrief him. Our mole's information indicates Calvert couldn't point the PRT to my workshop, so that's something. Something I hadn't even
thought about, oh god, that could've been bad.
Unfortunately, they released him yesterday. So he may well be off being Coil right now. Dammit.
I share what I know about Coil's base and methodology and stuff like that. Oni Lee doesn't react, big shock there. I'm more surprised at Lung taking it in quietly. Actually, Oni Lee
does react -he rattles off a list of addresses in the Bay that were made/are being made by Fortress Constructions and aren't obviously incompatible with an underground facility. There's only six of them, which makes sense, since Fortress is about making stuff like anti-Endbringer bunkers, not office buildings. I've always wondered what Coil's base is lairing under, given that.
It's right when we're in the middle of deciding which one to hit that the world goes white, I'm suddenly tackled by two bodies, and the next thing I know the world is a confusing whirlwind of color and noise for about thirty seconds before Oni Lee stops cloneporting Lung and me.
Looking back and seeing three of me all goggling at each other and then collapsing into ash is
weird. Especially since the mes are Bakuda. I'm still not
fully used to seeing myself in mirrors and stuff.
More importantly, I can see Purity leveling the building we were in.
My first thought is a half-thought:
Wait, how did she-
Then I have my second thought.
Oh my fucking god Coil, I fucking hate you.
Because yeah, I can see a shifting mess of metal that's almost certainly Hookwolf off in a different direction. Lung is barking out somethingsomething Japanese and
Cowards! Gutless cowards! and I cut him off and he turns to glare at me but I keep going and say "They're not after us. I think Coil released their civilian identities." And Lung's eyes narrow at me some more, 'cause hey I still haven't bothered to explain that, but Lung orders Oni Lee to get us to the workshop, it's far enough away from here. We ignore the car melting under Purity's DNA death ray. It's not even her target, it's just a little too close to the demolition.
I try not to think too hard about the fact that this seems to be a version of the Wormverse where Oni Lee's cloneporting siphons your initiative or something as we're cloneported along.
----------------
Lung turns on the TV, flips through channels, and catches the tail end of the Night/Fog reporter-murdering bit. Odd timing, but okay. A bit more watching confirms that, yes, the E88 cape identities are all public knowledge now. Also confirmation that two children were "rescued" from Purity -I note they don't mention that she's their mother and make it sound more like she was holding them prisoner- because oh my fucking god what is wrong with the Wormverse, why would you
do that, goddammit.
Goddammit.
God
dammit Coil.
I guess this Coil at least has the excuse that he's probably not thinking clearly, thanks to me. Canon Coil was just being a stupid asshole for, as far as canon indicated, no reason.
Well. I can take some comfort in the fact that it's
highly improbable that the original events that got the Undersiders being attacked will play out again. Of course... that means the Undersiders are unlikely to help Purity get her kids back, which was what cut the demolition short... fuck.
Lung speaks up. "This is good."
The hell you say.
He continues. "A good cover for our own attack." A grunt. "Get into costume, Bakuda." And then he turns away and starts stuffing bombs into a sack. I. Uh. Shit. Um. Fuckit, fine.
Some minutes later I'm in costume with bombs clipped to it as well as the signaling device, and we're cloneporting to the first potential site, skirting the worst of the E88 rampage. I also grabbed my new portal-blocking prototype. This one has an actual readout for me to use, giving me sensor feedback on portal shenanigans. I kludged it together by sacrificing an XBoy -no, seriously- that one of my guards was playing on when I was tinkering, loudly enough to A: piss me off and B: catch my attention while in Spark mode. My power
really hates giving me anything that provides information, so it was a colossal pain to figure out how to feed sensor inputs into the screen such that they did what I want, and I still don't like the way the UI is constructed. I incidentally confirmed the portals capes have are
inside their brain, using the sensor.
Lung asks me, on the way over (Oh god please don't let this be killing my mind) whether I can do Tinker bullshit to scan the underground or anything. I answer no. I make bombs. And traps. I don't make sensors. I've
tried. He raises an eyebrow at this, but does not dispute it.
Then I slap myself in the face -er, mask- and say "I
can scan for capes, though." A pause. "Uh, though I'm not sure how long the range on the sensor actually is. Haven't tested that yet." Lung grunts again, distractedly. We're in front of a finished building. I wanna say in canon Coil's base was underneath an under-construction one, but I'm not 100% on that so I didn't specifically say that when we were talking in the warehouse prior to Death Ray Interrupt. I break out my sensor thing, ignoring the expanding circle of "Civilians refuse to enter this space because oh god villains". I say "Well, it detects us, but not anything else, but, you know, range."
So we walk into the building and completely ignore the security guards pulling pistols. Well, Lung and I completely ignore them. Oni Lee is suddenly behind one, knife to the guy's throat and cutting. I wince a little. Repeat three more times before any of them can actually fire a shot. God
damn. Hopefully this is Coil's base.
Short version: no. Long version: more dead security guards, and hell no.
Dammit.
Cue cloneporting to site possibility #2. This one is an
abandoned Fortress Construction project, and so was my highest hope. That's the obvious place to put a secret base, right? No parahumans detected, but I tried paying attention to the device as we were cloneporting (That is, watching its data on our prior selves) and its range is a lot less than I'd have liked. All we find are some homeless people. Merchants, going by the bangles. They literally piss themselves and run. We ignore them and dig around for entrances and find nothing.
Cloneporting (errrrgh) to site possibility #3, a non-abandoned ongoing construction project, meant to be an Endbringer bunker when completed. I mused to myself at some point in all this that, with Velocity dead, we're unlikely to be intercepted. This is dumb of me. This is very dumb of me.
It's Glory Girl, back for round 2. By Glory Girl, I mean the entire family.
Both of the entire families. Except Panacea. Probably off at the hospital, treating victims of the E88 rampage. Lung starts ramping up immediately, steps away from Oni Lee, and charges the big guy (Um, Manpower, I think?) while Oni Lee starts cloneporting me around. My prior selves get it before I do, and pull and toss grenades before they can collapse into ash. Some of them are non-lethal bombs being tossed at the Dallons and the... the... um... the other family. New Wave, is the point. Others are hilariously destructive bombs being tossed at likely entry points to a hypothetical base. Basically depended on what was closer to them.
I, meanwhile, find myself shortly standing on a roof, hidden away, with Oni Lee telling me to
stay here and wait while he returns to the fight. I decide to pass the time fiddling with the portal blocker. I'm disappointed to find that each and every cape registers as a portal to different personal dimensions. (ie one dimension per cape) Man, what? Buds! That's not how buds work! I call bullshit!
Dammit.
I can't correlate a given portal to a given person, either. Most of the portals keep zipping out of my detection/suppression range, and I decide to ignore homing in on those ones. I pick one of the two portals that's actually sticking stably in my range and fiddle with the settings until it
should be-
-aaaand that's the sound of someone screaming. A quick peek over the roof's edge shows, uh, I think it's Manpower, pretty sure, down on the ground on fire and screaming. And with his guts torn open. Lung is looking at his blood-soaked hand. I think he looks surprised. Hard to tell when he's already considerably larger and the scales are starting to form. And he's wearing a mask. But the body language looks like "surprised" to me, I'm pretty sure. I duck back down and go back to fiddling with the portal blocker, get it away from blocking that portal. Once that's done, I peek back over. Manpower is not screaming anymore.
I'm pretty sure he stopped screaming because he's dead.
Well. Shit.
Two of the fliers are carrying off his corpse though, so maybe not. Maybe he's not a corpse yet. Lung lets them escape, and lets the rest of the group retreat. Except Glory Girl, because she doesn't fucking retreat, she charges Lung headfirst (Well, arms out front and fists clenched, but whatever), slams into him so hard he actually falls over, and starts punching him in the head repeatedly, so hard that I can see
concrete cracking underneath his head, right up until Oni Lee appears on top of her and, after a second's delay, detonates a grenade that sprays... oh, that's the napalm one. (Well. It's not technically napalm, but it's close enough)
That gets Glory Girl to go zooming off, screaming in rage and probably pain, though I note that the stuff seems to be running off her slowly even though the not-napalm is
really sticky. I guess her forcefield is partially protecting her, and it can't cling properly to the force field? Might be clinging more to
itself, surface tension or something...
Well. That's New Wave driven off.
Lung wastes no time in taking advantage of his partially ramped up state -I notice he has claws- to start digging his way into one of the points that got blown open by one of the prior mes.
End result: No, not Coil's lair either. Fffff. Also, Lung is no longer ramped up by the time we're done here.
Oni Lee collects us and cloneports (ffff) us to Site #4. It's a bank Fortress Constructions made for Sun Trust. It's supposed to be impregnable to 99% of parahumans and safe in an Endbringer attack barring them actually deciding to target the bank itself, per se. It's also uncomfortably close to where Rune (Going by "Figure crouching on top of a big floating chunk of stuff while more stuff floats around") is causing havoc, but we ignore her and she ignores us, to my surprise. I briefly wonder if Coil outed us.
No wait, that's stupid. I don't have a civilian identity, and at this point I don't think Lung
or Oni Lee do, either.
We go to the back of the bank (It's an entire floor lower than the main of the bank) and blow our way into an area designed for armored trucks to swing by and do their armored truck thing. We then blow our way through another metal shutter off to one side with a big sign saying -well. I don't actually catch it before we blow it up. Somethingsomething caution something Endbringer something.
To my very great surprise, it hides a corridor quite obviously going down and left. Lung rumbles.
I get the distinct impression he thinks we've found it.
----------------------
An obnoxious amount of walking down in a spiral later, we're in front of a Totally Under Construction Do Not Enter Bunker. None of us believe it for a second. I've been watching my portal suppressor the whole time, and it's detecting two portals on the other side. I mention that aloud. Just two portals I can see. "I'm guessing there's guards just on the other side of that door. They should be equipped with tinkertech laser guns. Well. Regular guns with tinkertech laser attachments, anyway." I always wondered who
made those attachments in canon.
Lung rumbles out "Not for long." I notice that he's ramping up. Hm. I'd always sort of thought he needed an active threat in his area to ramp up. Maybe he only needs to be
anticipating combat?... I dunno. He tells Oni Lee and I to "stay here", drops the bag of bombs, and goes jogging toward the (Big, round, metal) door, throwing fire ahead of him. It's hot enough that even back here I'm starting to feel uncomfortably warm. Yikes, and he's barely even started ramping up. I grab the bag and back up a few feet. Oni Lee follows, walking backward, eyes always on the door.
I decide to tune the portal blocker into one of the capes behind the door while Lung's busy tearing at the door. I
think I can hear voices yell- actually, wait, a PA thing just crackled on. Can't quite make it out, between the electronic distortion and the racket Lung is making in tearing at the door. Somethingsomething leave something be shot somethingsomething warning something and then it crackles back off. Whatever. I focus on tuning the portal blocker.
It takes longer than I'd prefer for Lung to finally tear his way through the door. I wince at how metal is
melting around him. Gonna need to be careful, following him. Regardless, I got the portal blocker tuned. I'm puzzled at how the portal isn't moving at all. No reaction at all? Hm. You know, I
really need to do a more scientific test of this thing... anyway. The first hole lights up purple. I think purple was the color of Coil's tinkertech lasers? Lung's left shoulder is suddenly gore (I note that I can see part of the shoulder blade sticking out, and I can't see any damage to it), and there's a gouged out chunk of ceiling, melting, behind him. The damage is
visibly healing already.
I decide to back further away, get the curve of the tunnel between me and potential death lasers. Oni Lee instead suddenly appears to one side of the door, followed by the one next to me collapsing into ash.
Jesus christ dude. It's got to be
blazing that close to Lung. I guess it
does get him out of the line of fire, but still.
I can't see what's going on, but I
can hear the screams, yells, the sound of gunfire -
loud- and I also hear... something brief. I'm not sure what, exactly, and I don't get any time to analyze it because it stops almost instantly, while
both of the portals I'm reading -the two that aren't Lung and Oni Lee, I mean- vanish at the same time.
I stare, gobsmacked. The hell? Trickster can't mass teleport. There should've been a delay of
at least a split-second. What the hell happened?
I fiddle with the thing for a few more minutes, waiting for the noises of combat to stop. Explosions start up, I occasionally catch flickers of purple cutting through the ceiling nearby -missed shots, I presume- and I assume Oni Lee has joined the fray. Fiddling with the settings on my portal blocker doesn't clarify anything about the two portals. The PA starts back up somewhere in here. I
think it's a general call to arms. I still can't make it out that well.
Eventually everything goes quiet (Well, the noises are distant enough that I'm pretty sure I'm safe, either way), and I hesitantly make my way to getting line of sight on the area, leaving the bag behind for the moment.
It's a
mess. I make my way gingerly closer, very aware of how
hot the air coming from this area is. I can't see Lung or Oni Lee either. I guess they went on ahead without me? Great. When I get close enough, I can see... a lot of scorched and torn open/apart corpses. The odd thing is, one of them looks like it was costumed, rather than kitted out with military gear, but
just the one probably-costumed corpse is in the area. It's at the center of a loosely spherical area of molten concrete and steel, and it and a half-dozen militarily-dressed corpses around it are the only ones that don't look to have been clawed at.
I take a minute to digest that.
Did... Sundancer kill one of her teammates? Wait, there were two portals, they winked out at the same time. So... she killed two teammates?
Why? And where's the other body? Actually, if one of them was Genesis, I think her projections are supposed to vanish entirely on "death"... Still. This doesn't make sense... I'm missing something. Dammit. Never thought I'd wish for bug control. I'd have more information, at least. Probably.
I edge a bit closer, get slapped in the face with a sudden rush of even hotter air, and promptly have to turn to one side, pull my mask up, and vomit tremendously. The
smell carried with the hot air is fucking
awful... and I already vomited last night, so I'm not exactly in a position to weather it.
I give serious consideration to trying to make the mess go away with one of my more exotically destructive bombs. I reject it after a minute of thought and move on to: ice bomb?
… mmmmaaybe. It's... well, it
does cool things off, but the main thing it does is pull arctic ice from another dimension and dump it here. It's more
solid water than it is
cold water. In fact, thinking on it further, making everything
wet is... not a good way to improve the smell. Eugh.
Back to being half-tempted to break out a black hole bomb to clean up. Still... that wouldn't cool things off, which I need to get through the door safely. Parts of it are
still visibly red-hot, and a handful of spots look to me like they might still be
soft. Not safe for an unaltered human body to go through.
I waffle like that for a few minutes, half-listening to the battle raging elsewhere in the complex, keeping an eye on my portal blocker the whole time. Early warning system for capes approaching, basically. Finally I decide fuckit, I'll break out an ice bomb to speed along the cooling. Arm the bombs, toss a bomb, wince at how the pillar of ice that bursts into existence completely blocks off the door... I pass time by clipping other bombs to my costume.
It doesn't take very long for the ice pillar to melt, though. There's a
lot of steam produced, too, though I'm relieved to find it's not
scalding steam, at least not by the time it gets to me. Still. Now I'm in a hot, muggy tunnel with hampered vision, on edge because I keep expecting some of Coil's men to come try to secure the front door. I guess they're a bit busy with the rage dragon and Oni Lee.
Once the last of the ice is melted I approach cautiously. The steam gets hotter closer to the door, but not problematically so. I also note no metal seem to be red-hot. I slowly put a foot out and set it down gingerly on a spot that looks relatively unaffected, and then just leave it there when I'm not immediately burned. It's warm, but not uncomfortably so. Maybe if I was barefoot it would be a problem, but I'm not, so it's fine.
A couple of slow, careful minutes later I'm on the other side of the door. Hooray!
I'm also standing amid a charnel house, but I'm still calling that a victory.
… then I turn around, grab the sack of bombs and get
it through the door.
I'm much less cautious after that, though I make an effort to be quiet, which is a pain in the butt with the bag of bombs and the fact that the bombs attached to my costume rattle and shake and the fact that I'm in boots walking on metal grating when I'm not walking on concrete and oi. I take heart in the fact that I can
still hear the sounds of gunfire and explosions and what I suspect is Lung roaring, and so probably I'm not that audible to anyone else.
When the path splits three ways it's very obvious which direction Lung went. I suspect Oni Lee followed, too, though he's the assassin so he may well have been sneakily going some other way.
Huge goddamn corridors for an underground complex, though. For Noelle, I guess. Or for truck deliveries? Both?
I go left, which is an almost-normal-sized corridor. I suspect the forward path is the main route. I'd rather go exploring off to the sides, see what I can find. I take it slowly and carefully. I
highly doubt my mask is any protection from bullets, even if the main of the costume
does seem to be armor.
… dammit, I only just realized that my awesome tinkertech helmet was damaged and I never thought to fix it or replace it. I have no idea what they did with it, either.
Fffff.
Regardless, I find... offices. Like, Dilbert-would-live-here offices. Excuse me, work here.
I consider digging around in the files for information, but honestly I'm not sure what I'd be looking for. How is this organized? What even
is here? Probably most of it is the mind-numbing paperwork bureaucracies tend to generate by being bureaucracies, and not of much
use to an outsider. Or an insider, for that matter. At least not without being, like, a spy trained in pulling together the big picture from dozens of reports, or something.
It's also a dead end. No corpses though. A space not in use yet? Or were there people here, and they rallied?...
I head back to the branching area and go down the right path this time. (ie walk in a straight line from my current area)
I almost immediately note that I can smell blood. Oddly, just blood. No gunpowder or anything. A few more minutes of walking shows me why -it's a barracks (Or group quarters?), and Oni Lee clearly got here first and managed to slit throats with surprisingly little resistance. To be fair, there's only five corpses, one of whom is literally in their underwear. Just past the barracks is an armory. I know so because it's labeled "armory" in giant red-painted letters above the door. The door itself hasn't been opened. Odd. Did Oni Lee teleport
past the first fight and go straight to this area, while Lung fought the initial group alone? I'm having trouble imagining a reason why these people wouldn't have been battle-ready by the time Oni Lee showed up, as even that theory seems a stretch.
I waffle for a second: do I want to
loot the armory or deny access to it?
After a minute I decide that carrying a gun sends entirely the wrong impression, even if people think of me as a maniac murderer already. A shift in tone from
cape to
conventional combatant backed by parahuman powers. Seems dangerous to go that route.
I break out a welder bomb, set it on the door, twist the detonator, and then walk away and press the remote detonation button on my transmitter once I'm out of sight. Fuck yeah, remote control bombs.
Back to the main corridor and down the last route. This time, the next branching area is
complicated, with a staircase downward to one side -the door has been torn off its hinges but there's no evidence of Lung traveling
down the stairs- and series of individual doors past it, some torn open (A couple marked with redhot handprints) and others not, ending in a door marked prominently with "Receiving". Receiving what? It doesn't look like a giant vault door like I'd expect for Noelle's room... my recollection is Coil's personal safe room is set deep inside the base...
Regardless. I focus on checking out the rooms. A cafeteria (Filled with dead people), multiple small rooms that I suspect are quarters, a medical room, a room labeled "Therapy" (Huh?), an exercise room, an abbreviated firing range, a room with multiple
motorcycles for some reason (Rapid response for the troops?), a torn open door into another tunnel, and a number of rooms that mean nothing to me. Probably some are storage rooms, though. Not sure about others, though.
I also notice cameras, primarily because they're clearly
tracking me.
Fuck that.
A couple tense minutes of digging through my bag later, I have what
amounts to an EMP grenade in my hand. (It's more complicated than that, and I'm pretty sure it won't effect most tinkertech -definitely not my bombs, portal blocker/scanner, or transmitter anyway- but it
will ignore "hardening") I arm it, set it down, and while it times down head off toward the stairs down.
Then everything is plunged into darkness when it goes off.
… I didn't think this through very well.
I wait another couple of minutes, until I remember my not-EMP-grenade actually burns out circuitry and power lines. If there's a backup generator or something, it won't help.
Great.
