Exploding Canon (Worm SI)

[Ghoul King]

4.#

Number Man

Sigh.

Ruining Cauldron's plans seemed to be what the Endbringers lived for, of course, but the Simurgh in particular... sometimes Number Man found himself anthropomorphizing it, imagining that it was being intentionally spiteful. It was pointless, really, but he'd drawn dozens of images of the Endbringer flipping off the Cauldron symbol, as it did, in fact, make him calmer. Necessary to have clear thought.

First, most promising parahuman feudalism experiment wrecked before it had time to go anywhere. Of course.

Lung -who had once fought Leviathan solo and lived- now permanently demented by the Simurgh. They'd already shifted him to an empty dimension with a Path-timed Door, and Contessa was currently running modeling on if it was feasible to try to get any use out of the man. Disappointing.

Alexandria MIA. She could be seen trapped in one of those 'flat' prisons, but Clairvoyant and Doormaker couldn't find her, and Contessa couldn't Path a way to get her out. They'd need to make arrangements on the Costa-Brown issue, before anyone became suspicious. Not a disaster -yet- but probably the worst part of this mess. The blow to morale, to confidence in the Protectorate, was tremendous. Not even accounting for how Alexandria, though fairly straightforward in powers, was one of the most powerful parahumans in the world. They needed Bet to hold on for a bit longer, and it was going to be a lot harder now.

They get a possible Scion killer... and the woman is a lunatic before the Simurgh got its clutches into her. Which it did. Because see previous -the Simurgh delighting in spiting Cauldron.

(The Number Man spent a minute on exercises to calm and control his thoughts. Don't anthropomorphize the alien superweapon. That way lay madness)

They were probably going to have to waste vast amounts of Contessa's time on micromanaging the process of making off with the woman's tinkertech without interacting with her or being compromised by the tinkertech itself. Doable, but hardly efficient, and it would negatively impact everything else about their operations.

And it was always possible it would turn out that was rather the point. Dandy.

There were bright spots in this gloom, but not many. The Meinhardt girl from Aleph had joined the Guild, with tinkertech that could shut off powers entirely along for the ride. If that could be reverse-engineered by Dragon -or anyone, really- that would much simplify the matter of containing those errant parahumans of useful potential. Perhaps they would be able to bring back the good Doctor Manton, get him focused on research instead of indulging himself with Jacob.

They would still be able to get a hold of Bakuda's weaponry. Not ideal circumstances, but better than nothing. Probably.

… and that was about it, really.

The Number Man pointedly did not sigh, or rub at the bridge of his nose, or otherwise indicate this bothered him. Something of a leftover of his time with Jacob and King, when showing emotions was dangerous, but one he'd never felt the need to unlearn. It was useful, when he interacted with clients, to be able to present the image of someone powerful and in control in every sense of the phrase.

Speaking of, he double-checked the camera feed for Meeting Room #5, where Doctor Mother was currently walking an impressionable -and flush with funding- twenty-something woman through her options. No problems. Not that this was really necessary, between Contessa and the Custodian, but it never hurt to be too careful.

Alright....

The Number Man returned to his work of managing the world's money for Cauldron's benefit.

Gesellschaft needed propping up. The Empire tended to think that Gesellschaft was the "senior" in their relationship, but truth be told Gesellschaft was very dependent on the Empire for money and troops, their ideology much less popular in Germany than in the USA. (Ironically? He'd never had a good grasp of the idea, no matter how fond of it Jacob had been) Gesellschaft provided legitimacy in turn, encouraging capes to flock to Kaiser, and Allfather before him, to then often move on to Gesellschaft when they grew dissatisfied with their American masters. While Kaiser had gotten away essentially scot-free, and Krieg as his contact with Gesellschaft was still about, the loss of Alabaster, Crusader, Hookwolf and Purity was a noticeable blow. Purity being tainted by the Simurgh and, in the end, put down by a PRT sniper when she tried to break containment had the knock-off effect that Night and Fog had already decided to return to Gesselschaft, and of course Medhall's decapitation forcing Max Anders to relocate to the Boston branch and drop his time spent "caping" while he handled the work attendant to such a massive change was having a depressive effect on recruiting already. The fact that his son had triggered hardly made up for the loss of so many heavy hitters.

So the Number Man took some funding from a Colombian drug lord who just did not understand "Do not mess with Cauldron" and performed some tricks to get the money to Gesellschaft without authorities having any reason to get suspicious.

Better to have someone for Germany's cape population to focus their ire on, rather than collapsing into omnidirectional chaos.

The Archer's Bridge Merchants were functionally gone, with only one of their parahuman members surviving/escaping... and 'Mush' was in a critical care PRT unit in Boston. Not that they'd ever mattered terribly much anyway, but something to keep in mind in his other calculations. The group had never kept much of its money in banks regardless, but there was still some it might be worth siphoning off elsewhere.

If the Number Man was someone who believed in things like 'justice' or 'appropriate outcomes' in some intrinsic sense, the fact that 'Uber' and... sigh... 'L337'... had survived utterly unscathed while filming their escape, dressed as video game characters... well. It was a good thing Number Man didn't believe in the things that would make this a blood-boiling outcome. (What even was "Tales of Symphonia", and why did it require Uber to wield two wooden swords while L337 used a cup-and-ball toy as a weapon?)

Coil's catspaw, the Undersiders, were handling themselves well enough in the aftermath, missing member aside. Not holding together as a group, it seemed, but they weren't particularly significant, certainly not with Coil dead.

New Wave... hm. Should he prop them up? With the deaths of "Shielder" and "Lady Photon", the group seemed likely to be significantly distraught. Difficult to say whether he should interfere or not, and a bit more of a nuisance than most to credibly get money to them without problematic questions. He settled for "not" for the moment. Better to see how they shook out in the coming week. They hadn't even settled on a city to live in, and he had suspicions the group was going to fracture. Yes, better to wait and see.

Faultline's people had made it out fine, which... was somewhat inconvenient, really. The group had already poked into Cauldron a few times, though as yet not so far it was worth... dissuading them. The fact that they'd essentially escaped the 'scream' was... a consolation, he supposed. Assuming this wasn't like Alan Gramme, which, as always, was entirely possible.

"Parian"... successfully escaped, currently in processing. Unimportant, as far as he knew.

"Trainwreck"... fate unknown. Hadn't escaped the city. Unfortunate. He had a small -very small- soft spot for this particular Case 53. Oh well.

Relatively few out of towner casualties... relatively.

Which just made him suspect a long game plan.

Then he turned to looking at the city, itself: the goods it had exported, the goods it had imported. Etc. It hadn't been a particularly important city for producing/exporting tinkertech, but parahuman goods were not the only thing that mattered. What impact would this have on America, and then the rest of Bet? Many things, but which ones needed attention...

Eventually the Number Man ran out of things -for the moment- to focus on regarding the immediate consequences of an Endbringer attack and dropped into the comfort of his routine.

And our story moves on.

 

[Ghoul King]

5.1

I'm very surprised to discover that the city has electricity -erratically. Not sure what's going on that power is a thing at all. Regardless, I arrange to construct a tinkertech generator -it's a 'clean burning' nuclear reactor, somehow, so I don't need to worry about loading it with fuel, I just need to worry about what happens if its containment is breached- and from there arrange an intermediary device so its power load is actually compatible with the building. (I tested with individual light-bulbs and other relatively disposable electrical devices before hooking it into the building's power grid) I suspect I'm providing power for other people in the process, though I don't know enough about city electrical grids to be certain. At minimum, the fact that I'm not pulling from whatever power supply the rest of the city is using should mean that the local power provider doesn't get overloaded.

Water is... bad. There's water, it's still running, but when it isn't running green it's still wrong. It takes me a couple of days to get around to finding out why -it's seawater. Not drinkable. That's concerning, given that you need freshwater fairly regularly to survive. I try to tap my power for some kind of filtration mechanism to get freshwater out of seawater, and come up with nothing. I can remember how to get sea salt out of water -just pour it in a bucket and keep it out in the sun, basically- but I don't remember how to turn seawater into freshwater and my power isn't exactly helpful. Something about electricity, I think?

This adds the additional layer of having difficulty keeping myself and my stuff clean. I actually take to checking the water periodically, and when it's running clean I collect what comes out in buckets. This is important, because it can run green continuously for more than a day at a time. I end up hacking off more of my hair rather than try to keep it washed. Possibly a mistake, considering hair helps keep you warm, but I can't keep it clean and I don't need mundane hair grossness, let alone lice or whatever. At least I'm able to scavenge stuff to drink, for the moment, and to be fair I've never been big on drinking water per se.

Cleaning clothing is a pain, but I'd rather not end up molded. Or whatever it was that happens when you wear unwashed clothes for eons. So I burn water on that, though I don't wash too often, given my limited water. And I outright give up on my costume. Oni Lady costume, I hardly knew ye. I'll miss your functionality, but not the way you made people react to me.

I make a point of taking it apart for tinkertech supplies ASAP.

… once I scavenged replacement clothes, I mean.

Eidolon kept to his promise, to my surprise. No assistance in leaving, but every three days I find new food somewhere in my area -I'm assuming Door is being used- and on and off a luxury is included with the food package, most notably a TV that I'm pretty sure is tinkertech, as it seems to be completely self-contained and has absurd clarity, however it is it picks up its signal. (What kind of tinker specialty lends itself to a super-TV anyway?) I'd rather have an internet-capable computer, but I can see how it would be difficult to quarantine me while providing me internet access. Too easy for me to end up manipulating someone somehow.

Sort of interesting how this is probably Contessa dropping this stuff off, but she's not talking to me. Too dangerous? Too pointless? If it is Contessa, I'm genuinely curious as to why she's so studiously avoiding me in these supply drop runs.

I start out by following the news. There's more interesting stuff going on than I would've expected, really. There's Eidolon explicitly crediting Bakuda (YES!) for helping him determine how to assault the Simurgh, the news ticker includes a passing reference to the Travelers joining the Guild (Huh. Unexpected), there's ongoing discussion at the federal level of the possibility of reworking the Birdcage (!), specifically splitting it into high risk and low risk segments, and a related point is that Paige Mcabee's trial has been completely derailed.

Oh, she's still on trial, but she's no longer in that ridiculous constraint system. She's wearing a pendant and is being escorted by a pair of guards who each also have a pendant, and that's it. The prosecutor has given up on trying to argue she should go into the Birdcage, as well -he's trying to argue for regular prison time, and when Paige's lawyer (Who is, wow, incompetent) isn't trying to argue that Paige doesn't deserve punishment at all, he's arguing that a more reasonable punishment would be to require her to visibly wear a power-disabling pendant anytime she's not in the middle of a concert. (Indefinitely/for X duration)

So that's cool. It never crossed my mind I might be able to derail what happened to Paige in canon, this is a pleasant surprise.

I also end up catching most of the broadcast for mourning Alexandria -which somehow morphed into mourning everyone who died in Brockton Bay with a statue of Alexandria to represent them all, names carved into the statue's base. I only listen to the extent of trying to figure out if they're going to give any specific names or not. Unfortunately, no. Makes it difficult to figure out who all died compared to canon. I mean, a Simurgh attack is a giant derail anyway, but it would've been nice to know... specifics in general, really.

On a completely unrelated note, due to 'sudden personal difficulties' (ie being fucking dead) Chief Director Costa-Brown is stepping down from her position as head of the PRT. Deputy Chief Director Piers Reinhold is taking over until a more permanent Chief Director is selected. I have no idea if that's a canon person or not. I don't recall any Deputy Chief Director being alluded to in Worm at all. Well, actually, I don't remember Deputy Directors in general. Ugh. More unknowns.

I do end up catching a more gossipy segment the day after covering New Wave's 'trials and tribulations' -one of the kids died and two parents died as well (One from each couple) and the rest of them are not at their psychological best either. Panacea's apparently been hospitalized for a nervous breakdown, even. Miiiight be an improvement over canon, honestly. For her, I mean.

… and Glory Girl too, now that I think about it, though I don't particularly care.

I'm surprised when I catch a passing comment indicating that all of Brockton Bay's Wards survived and escaped. Huh. No Aegis death or anything.

Not that I was just idly watching TV or anything. Defending my living space took me more than a week of near-continuous work to be reasonably happy with it, requiring dozens of claymores ringing the perimeter, mines on the roof, and mines littering the floors. The claymores are relatively non-exotic, excepting that the vast majority of them are as difficult to disarm as I can make them with a small, randomly selected portion of them set up with what looks like an option to disarm them that will instead set off a trap. The details vary, but it always hits a sphere around them, the idea being anybody who's somehow gotten behind the claymore to disarm it will be caught up in it -but only a small fraction of the claymores are rigged because I don't want someone who has some kind of remote-disarm power to be able to mass-detonate my primary line of defense by attempting to disable one of the trapped ones. Only the claymores at two entrances are designed to actually be possible to shut off. I do need to be able to go out into the city myself -mostly to retrieve supplies for tinkering, as the drop-offs rarely provide anything I'm willing to scavenge for tinkering, while covering my basic needs quite well.

The mines on the roof are simple proximity devices. The only noteworthy point is that I make sure every mine's effect is one that leaves the roof intact -stuff like converting organic material into glass. Irritatingly, I have to replace them periodically because pigeons keep activating them. The claymores don't have this problem for whatever reason, even though I see dogs and cats wandering in the vicinity of my hotel semi-regularly. The mines I have littering the floors are portal-blocking mines that are designed to trigger when they detect a portal overly close. The idea is that any cape who tries to phase in through the ground or something will be killed by their power shutting off and fusing them with the concrete or whatever.

I keep worrying that tinkertech breakdown is going to get me killed, given how ridiculously vague canon is on how it actually works. I consider it promising that, in canon, Bakuda's arsenal was apparently able to be put in storage for some weeks and still be functional when broken out to mass-bomb the Slaughterhouse Nine, but it still worries me.

Speaking of the Slaughterhouse Nine, I'm intensely relieved when the news talks about their most recent horror show in Arizona. Practically the other end of the continent from me. So no, they're not going to promptly follow-up on this Endbringer attack like in canon. (I really ought to do something about them at some point. And some of the other S-rank threats, I guess)

Early tests on the Simurgh dust are... interesting. Straightforward tests of its physical properties indicate nothing particularly interesting coming to the fore. It's physically uniform and surprisingly... I'm sure a real chemist/physicist/engineer would see legitimate utility to its properties, but I come away feeling like it's as profoundly useless as possible. The impressive properties in the field seem to be induced by the artificial density and so on. Careful tests of how they intersect with my more exotic bombs involve... well, involve a lot of no-selling. Pretty sure it's artificial shard-induced behavior, not natural physics. The stuff seems to be a novel element? I don't know enough of the relevant science to not be sure my shard isn't just lying to me for some reason.

I increasingly spend less time and effort on experiments with the stuff, as it's not really going anywhere -excepting testing which bombs can destroy/affect the stuff, which I keep in mind. A tiny time-stop effect, placed as a nasty surprise to anyone who thinks one of the broken windows is an entry point, has a fairly interesting interaction -dropping the dust in/on the sphere doesn't do what I was expecting of going around it like it's a solid object, but rather involves it traveling partway in and freezing before it's gotten halfway down. So... confirmation that Endbringers are partially resistant to time manipulation effects, but don't completely no-sell stuff like time stopping them permanently; when I try to drop other stuff into a time-stopped zone, it instead treats the time-stopped zone like a solid object that cannot be entered. I guess an Endbringer would have time to escape the zone? I can't remember if that came up in canon, or if I've only seen it in fanfic. I know I've seen it in fanfic repeatedly, I just don't remember if it's a semi-logical meme of fandom or if it's, you know, actual canon.

I never do find a blood analogue. Was/is that exclusive to Leviathan? I don't remember references in canon to the Simurgh and Behemoth seeming to bleed...

In any event, I pack away a fair amount of the stuff into boxes, collecting more whenever I happen to be outside anyway. Its physics properties may be uninteresting, but the Endbringer-ness seems to somehow be enforced anyway. Maybe I can make a suit, fill it with Simurgh dust, and become immune to PtV that way. Or something. Gotta be some kind of use for the stuff.

I'm surprised when a month has passed without any kind of concerted attack on me. Twice I had to replace a claymore when a raving lunatic rushed the building -I heard them both, though I only actually saw the one, they had a molotov cocktail they failed to throw before they were frozen solid, hit the floor, and shattered. Once they defrosted, the result was gross, and I was quite glad to see crows swarming the flesh shortly. No big rush of people though. No giant fuck you from the Simurgh, or even the natural jealousy and anger and so on I'd expect given that I'm one parahuman abusing their power to hog an entire building to myself.

I'm even more surprised when one of the care packages has a birthday card. It's the wrong month- wait. I don't actually know when Bakuda was born. Eh, whatever. Still kind of weirded out at Eidolon sending a birthday card.

Once I have my defenses set up, I turn my focus to tinkering, trying to find a way to kill an Endbringer. Forcing them to shed their flesh is a nice step forward, but not terribly productive if there's no follow-up.

After a week of this, I notice that in addition to care packages appearing, stuff keeps disappearing. Mostly tinkertech, itself mostly stuff I think has a decent shot at legitimately hurting an Endbringer. Still thinking about delivery. I think, given enough time and resources, that I could get a rocket launched into orbit to kill the goddamn Simurgh, but I'm not sure. My power isn't actively uncooperative on the idea, but it's not particularly cooperative either; I did build that mortar, before, even if it was pretty crappy. Grey zone.

Point being, Cauldron is stealing my shit.

I suppose that's one way for my bombs to get out into the world and blow up Endbringers. I'm sort of vaguely irritated on principle because that whole 'consent is for other people' attitude of Cauldron's legitimately pisses me off, but on the other hand it's not like I had any expectation of using the things in the near-future.

The spooky buildings have spread, but I hesitate to say 'like a plague' because... honestly, with what I was seeing during the attack, the city should've already been converted in its entirety ages ago. Or the conversion should've stopped entirely, by virtue of that girl getting killed. This slow, erratic spread doesn't fit what I saw before. Which means I have to be missing something.

After the first month, I make a point of updating the claymores so there's a bug (Easiest organisms to get a hold of) held in stasis inside each shell. Fuck that phasing power. Based on what happened in my brawls with those jerks, it'll probably actually hurt them, especially if they, I dunno, reflexively switch modes to 'bio-phase' in response to the bugs even though metal shells are tearing through them.

I still have no goddamn clue how it is I'm able to make claymores and shit with my bare hands, light tools like wrenches and screwdrivers, plus the occasional power tool. The fugues are less intense, I can stay focused and think while I work, but somehow I get to the end and I just cannot recall for the life of me how, precisely, I managed to produce the 2,000 degree (Fahrenheit, because I guess I default to that in my head?) heat necessary to weld together two bits. I know it needs 2,000 degrees to happen, but I can't recall how I did it. It's crazymaking.

I keep expecting something to go wrong, and while I see fires in the distance a few times and hear some freaky noises day and night... not a lot is happening in my end of town? The worst thing is... well. It's kind of stupid, but I think I saw Taylor skulking around, beyond the fencing. Somebody in a dark costume with bug-eyes on the helmet, anyway, but. No swarm, that I could tell, which seems odd. If it was her... I just. Damn. Tried to help her, and my presence has gotten her Simurgh'd.

I'm basically hoping it's not her, and inclined to suspect it is just because that's exactly what I'd do if I was the Simurgh and inclined to be an asshole to me. And... even from a less the-world-is-about-me perspective? If the Simurgh did, in canon, set up Khepri deliberately, I can imagine that getting Taylor Simurgh'd and locked into a Simurgh-controlled zone is actually an attempt to get her under lock and key until Golden Morning.

So. Thinking it's her. I don't want it to be her, but. Seems... depressingly likely.

Dammit.

Like, okay, I got rid of Coil early on, but is Dinah even better off? I have no goddamn clue if she escaped. I helped Noelle, and that's awesome on a bunch of levels, except I don't know which Travelers got out, and for all I fucking know this Simurgh anticipated my presence in the plot and the Travelers being helped by me is Just As Planned for some pointlessly awful result -AND YES IF YOU CAN HEAR ME I DON'T CARE- so. Yeah. Kinda. Emotionally satisfying to face down Alexandria, given how horrible she is, but what's the point? Whoo. You go, Bakuda, you managed to be irritating to someone who -though basically evil and incompetent from where I stand- was trying to save all of humanity, everywhere.

Ugh. It's arguably all good if I get Scion killed early, cleanly, but that's damn unlikely, especially with me being in... right. Yeah, the TV is calling it the Brockton Exclusion Zone, if I recall correctly. Been a while since it came up on TV. Kinda suspect, going by what I recall of WoGs, that they very quickly dropped the topic so most of the world can more easily ignore this whole thing. Yeah. Whatever.

On the plus side, kinda, this whole period of isolation with, past the initial scramble to get holed up and defended, relatively little pressure, has given me time to actually think about my situation. Ever since I've gotten here I've been tinkering, or panicking about fucking Coil, or in combat, or whatever, and Oni Lee and/or Lung have been breathing down my goddamn neck regardless of exact circumstances. These were not conditions conducive to calm, analytical thought.

So like okay I'm probably an Abaddon missile. That whole thing is something I haven't ruminated too much on because there's mostly no goddamn point. Like, okay, I was originally thinking I'd maybe see if I could make it back to Earth Omicron and all, and then had the thought that maybe I'm not a dude from Earth Omicron at all but just a faked-up personality handcrafted by Abaddon. That I'm able to have such a thought is kinda suspicious in the direction of 'no', but Entities are kinda stupid. That's why they're outsourcing creativity in the first place. So maybe Abaddon didn't think to make me self-censor on such thoughts. Or maybe it did, and it just didn't care because blah blah PtV says such a realization will somehow contribute to completing the mission, or whatever.

Anyway, point being, Omicron might not even exist, the dude I think I'm a transplant of might be a creative lie, and hell, even if my memories aren't faked-up nonsense I might just be a copy, my old self still shoving fanfic onto the internet and playing video games while I'm in the middle of fighting for everyone's lives and/or accomplishing Abaddon's mysterious agenda I dunno. So trying to go back 'home' is kinda... not necessarily the wrong thing to do, but much more of a gamble than I already thought it was when I was just thinking in terms of searching semi-infinite Earths for Omicron.

Other point being... what am I in? I've been thinking in terms of canon, aside myself somehow, or maybe fucking Diabolus Ex Machina what with the Simurgh attacking Brockton Bay and all, but... it being canon is kinda... sketchy. Early canon holds up well enough as a believable world and series of events, you can quibble about individual choices or cry foul on some specific mechanics explanations, but it's believable that, like, the author of Worm was psychically tapping Actual Earth Bet via Entity shenanigans for whatever Entity reasons Entities have, and that I'd only notice minor inconsistencies if I went around interviewing everyone and directly comparing it against a magical copy of Worm I had on hand. Like, maybe Taylor wouldn't have been completely clueless about trigger events, but the Nasty Burger scene would've still played out basically the same, or that weird thing with Shadow Stalker's PRT guardian showing up and refusing to let the school take track from her would've been... her actual mom? I guess? Something that makes sense but doesn't meaningfully change the flow of the scene itself, is the point.

Anyway, early canon is fine, early canon is believable enough, I can believe waking up in a world that looks indistinguishable to my eyes from early canon. Not that I'd have expected it to happen in a million years, but whatever.

Later canon, though... there's way too many inconsistencies, major and minor. The Protectorate rules are retroactively hero-hostile instead of overly-lenient on heroes who are shitstains, that kind of thing, and these aren't inconsistencies that can really be glossed over as 'well, a reality basically like this could exist'. Reality can be stupid and awful and all, but history doesn't twist itself all up to serve the desires of some writer who doesn't care about consistency or at least lacks perfect memory and doesn't double-check what they previously wrote.

The big sticking point being, of course, Cauldron.

This is kinda hard for me to ignore now that Cauldron is really, really obviously making sure I have room and board and jacking my tinkertech. They definitely exist, in a form at least somewhat like canon, but... Cauldron in canon was impossible to reconcile with the rest of the story's reality. So... I was defaulting to hating Cauldron and being pissed at how they're handling this whole situation, like hey, I could use an extraction to a less crappy place and you've got PtV, you should know how to work around Simurgh influence and yadda yadda, but do they? That seems unlikely. PtV was incoherent bullshit that was just a bizarre, frustrating writer kludge to justify basically whatever the author wanted and then stand there saying 'ha ha, you can't criticize this as wrong' no matter how obviously fucking stupid it was, it wasn't a coherent powerset used in a coherent way by a thinking human being.

And the whole thing with the Case 53 army. Okay, I get it, Cauldron is supposed to be doing bad things in service of a good cause, they're in part supposed to be like Taylor writ large, but even leaving aside the irrelevant-to-my-current-circumstances issues of how they fail at that narrative function, the Case 53 army was just bizarre nonsense. Even if I accept Cauldron was completely without morals, had some legitimate reason to keep these people in a box up until Scion's rampage, etc, the fact that they kept on keeping them locked up once Scion was rampaging, instead of hurling them out to be chaff or using Masters to organize them into a proper army, or whatever, goes well past evil, past stupid, into just... bad writing. They're here so the Irregulars can start an anti-Cauldron riot, and the fact that these circumstances are completely unnatural isn't going to stop the author from writing it anyway.

Not even touching on all the inconsistencies with, what was her name, Shamrock or something? The stuff we hear from her early on just plain doesn't fit what we ultimately see Cauldron doing, in a manner that is really hard to wave off as minor details inconsistency, or her misunderstanding things, or whatever. You can tell the author changed his concept by the time we got to Cauldron proper, full stop.

So, like, I can't be dealing with canon Cauldron, not while existing in any kind of internally coherent reality. I can be dealing with an organization with the same name and shit, but it can't possibly be canon Cauldron.

And, incidentally, this is completely consistent with my current suspicion I'm not a transplant at all. It's pretty fucking ridiculous that, like, the author happened to psychically tap Actual Factual Reality, completely accurate future predictions included, particularly in the context of Wormverse physics where precogs interfere with other precogs fundamentally (Except when the author forgets and contradicts that...), and then Abaddon grabbed one random Omicron dude to be his guided missile in Bakuda's body who had read this conveniently-accurate fortune-telling presented as fiction and so would totally be all advantaged in information and shit 'cause of... seriously, that's just a phenomenally unbelievable house of cards. That's just bad fanfic type shit.

Much more believable is that Abaddon used future modeling, it has a lot of oddities, inconsistencies, etc, because Entity future seeing isn't actually 100% perfect, and I got manufactured with fake memories of having 'read a story' that's really just a summary of this not-entirely-coherent oracular prediction.

That fits perfectly with a lot of the issues from this 'story' I 'remember'. Entity precog is more consistently accurate the closer the future actually is; the early story was more coherent than the later story, and I got dumped right into the early story. Entity precog can't fully model Entities themselves, and gets weird and fuzzy when working around them... and Cauldron is sitting right on top of the corpse of an Entity. So of course any precog of Cauldron is going to be... weird. Potentially contradictory. Especially if Abaddon, like, spliced together a few different maybe-timeline-predictions to fill in gaps in each prediction, like one model showed Cauldron recruiting dying people but didn't have any idea what they'd actually do while another predicted the Case 53 prisoners and oh wait those timelines don't actually have overlap but Abaddon spliced them together anyway for whatever reason.

Or, hell, Abaddon might've straight-up lied to me with this whole fabrication, above and beyond all the other ways it's a fabrication. Maybe Abaddon wants me to hate Cauldron for some reason, knows enough about human psychology -he's supposed to have, like, philosophy or something, right?- to guess what will make his simulated human personality angry as hell, and so focused on making Cauldron really hateable in this 'story' instead of making a convincing depiction of a realistic organization to give me an information advantage.

I mean, Abaddon's an Entity so it can be way more convoluted than that because precog blah blah blah, but the point is that I've had time to step back, reassess, and realize that Cauldron is... probably not actually the organization I know and hate. (Slightly regret how I handled the Alexandria encounter, now...) Current theories suggest they're probably vaguely in the ballpark of what I think I know, but, like, a lot of my hate of Cauldron really comes back to detail-work. I'm not actually all that bothered by the basic shape of an organization attempting to stave off the ultimate apocalypse and in the process concluding ethics are just in the way. I'm bothered by how inordinately stupid canon Cauldron is, how so much of their assholery is ludicrously self-defeating or pointless, whereby it doesn't actually make sense to interpret them as desperately turning to dubious methods in pursuit of human survival, but rather you basically have to assume they're collectively lolevil monsters who for some damn reason have a need to convince themselves that their For The Evulz actions are totally somehow for a greater good, honest. You know, if you interpret them as real people, instead of just writing the whole thing off as terrible writing.

Of course, it could turn out they really are pretty stupid and awful, and it could even turn out they have something like PtV and are stupid about how they use it, and so on, but I shouldn't actually be assuming I know what's going on there.

I mean, I've been thinking that kind of thing the whole time, but it largely faded into the background because... well, reality kept seeming basically right to my expectations. The Simurgh showing up was really the first time something happened where it was really, really off the rails and not 100% clearly directly attributable to my actions. And I'm still not sure what that's about, whether it's an indication of me being in a fanfic timeline instead of the canon timeline or if it actually is somehow directly my fault.

Oh, speaking of, my current theory also explains why I read so much goddamn fanfic of this series I was ultimately so disappointed with. Like, if precog was 80% confident 'canon Worm' would roughly happen, and then, like, 19.5% of the remaining possibilities were actually relatively clearly defined major branches... then Cenotaph isn't a fanfic I read, it's a possibility that was, like, second-most-likely of all possibilities, or third, or whatever. Likely enough Abaddon felt the need to lay it out so I wouldn't be blindsided by Skitter turning out to be a hell of a lot more hardcore.

Hell, some of my own fanfic ideas might fall under that banner. I'm... not sure why the Crull in the Skull one would be a part of this, as it seems pretty unlikely 40k is somehow also real alongside Worm and all, but I suppose that could fall under the banner of 'make it convincing to the fake monkey brain'.

Also noteworthy is that this theory suggests I should be paying Taylor a hell of a lot more attention than I was already inclined to pay her. It'd be pretty fucking weird for there to be so many alt-power Taylors loaded into my fake memories if Taylor wasn't, for some reason, a fulcrum or something. I'm... not really sure why she'd be so consistently important across so many precog scenarios, even with many of them revolving around her getting a different power expression or a different shard entirely, but then I'm not exactly privy to Abaddon's thought processes and, you know, inhuman amount of information.

Plus, if I am Abaddon's missile, he may prefer I'm ignorant of whatever reason underlies it for... some reason. I'm having trouble imagining a good reason, given if I'm a fake personality and Abaddon has no reason to be worried about me realizing that then, you know, the biggest bluescreen of death reason for obscuring key information from me clearly doesn't apply, but my inability to think of a good reason isn't exactly surprising. If it's a bad thing for me to figure it out, and Abaddon engineered my personality, and has unfair Entity hax, I'm not going to be thinking of it on my own. Duh.

Funny thing is, the closest to a real existential crisis I had over all this shit was the realization that the reason I wasn't having an existential crisis might not be, as I've historically thought, that it's fucking stupid to have existential crises over this kind of thing and people thinking you'd have such a crisis is stupid, but rather that it might be strong evidence that I'm a fake, inhuman personality that's actually kinda shitty at faking being human, whereby any actual human personality would've had an existential crisis at some point.

Christ, the logic train involved in all this is convoluted as fuck and stupid, but it seems the most sensible thing.

Anyway...

With all that rattling around in my brain, my near-future goals (As opposed to the already-established far-future goals of 'kill Scion' and 'kill all Endringers, including the extra ones that'll tag in as existing ones die') seem pretty clear; firstly, I really, really need to get in contact with Taylor, if indeed that was Taylor I saw earlier, and... see if I can undo her being Simurgh'd or make some bullshit brainscanner to figure her out or something, I'm not really sure, somehow get her in my corner...

… and try to get Cauldron to actually talk to me. I dunno, them dropping off a recording of a tour of their facilities? They seem to be trying to avoid me interacting with them, which suggests they think I'm a Simurgh bomb, which itself is subtly consistent with the idea they don't have PtV or it isn't as broken as in canon or whatever because even with how bullshit the Simurgh is PtV in canon is more bullshit so I'd expect them to be able to just, like, go 'is Bakuda Simurgh'd y/n', and if the answer is yes then do some PtV magic fuckery to cancel the effect or whatever.

Though admittedly PtV is such convoluted nonsense it's possible they're somehow literally doing that right now and it's just that the fastest route to canceling out the Scream on me -even though I never heard it that I could tell- is still damn slow. That would certainly explain why in canon they didn't regularly extract and reprogram Simurgh victims, even though they'd be the easiest people in the world to disappear without revealing their conspiracy.

For the moment, I start out by writing notes -conveniently, this being a hotel means pen and paper are readily available- asking them to let me know what's going on with them, include an apology for fucking up the whole thing with Alexandria, explain I wasn't at my best and was probably operating on bad information, and make it explicitly clear I don't mind them being paranoid about this, I don't actually want David showing up and talking to me or anything, I just want to correct any misapprehensions I'm operating under.

I'm worried that, like, they'll just avoid seeing the notes because Simurgh nonsense, using powers to predict their existence and location but not their contents, but I don't exactly have a better idea.

Secondarily, I change my routine for scavenging. Before I had all these thoughts, I was very in-and-out, and my attention on my environment was focused primarily on how dangerous any given thing was likely to be. Now I'm looking for signs of human habitation, carefully checking out hideyholes, and trying to see if anything weird with bugs stands out to me.

I was also historically arming myself... very lethally. They're Simurgh victims, killing them is arguably a mercy and even if it weren't jesus fuck no. Now, though, I'm ranging out with some lethal munitions, but focusing more on ice bombs and stickyfoam and other nonlethals. Short-term ones, too, not shit like the Super Depression Bomb. I don't need to go 'hey I should recruit Khepri' and then fuck it up by having her technically survive but with zero interest in actually doing much of anything.

The overall idea being that I'm hoping to find Taylor, capture her, and then... well, I'll figure out something. Or have it all go horribly wrong and kill me, but I'm in Worm, what do you want from me?

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------​

This is where we pretend for a moment like I kept a journal. A very manly journal, in which I aggressively inform any readers that this is private property and the very masculine individual who wrote it will kill the fuck out of you (In a very masculine way) if they find out you read these very private thoughts, which is of course a pink diary plastered in rainbows and pink ribbons and... probably not kitten faces, as I don't actually like cats... flowers? Something like that. Also, I wouldn't bother to lock it or anything, and would deliberately leave it lying around in hopes someone would find it and go what the fuck am I looking at? (I wouldn't write it in cursive purely because I never mastered cursive writing, alas)

In actual reality, I couldn't be bothered with anything resembling a journal. Partly because nothing adequately girly is lying around for me to make my obnoxious plan work, but mostly because I've just never gotten the journal phenomenon and there's no way I'll start now, not in a hellhole Simurgh-bomb city.

Nonetheless, pretend.

Day 1: Nothing. No Cauldron response, no Taylor, not even any screaming lunatics trying to kill me.

Day 2: Still no Cauldron response. I stumbled on a family living in an apartment, visibly frightened when they spotted me. I apologized, backed away, and then my eyes properly registered that the roast pig on the table was actually a roast person (Including an apple stuffed in their mouth...), and promptly blew a lethal munition on killing all of them. Christ, Simurgh, why?

Day 3: One of my sticky notes has a smiley face drawn on it. No other sign of a Cauldron response. Still no sign of Taylor, and now that I think about it where the hell is Lung, too?

Days 4-6: Nothing, unless we count the dog that followed me, barking incessantly, on Day 5. Dogs have always hated me for some damn reason, though, so while it could be some Simurgh thing, I suspect it's probably just... well, wait, if I'm an artificial person and none of my memories are real... Hmm. Maybe dogs pick up on the fact that I'm not behaving like a proper human being, and Abaddon stuffed me full of Dogs Hate You memories so I wouldn't question it? Dogs are apparently really sensitive to human mood, to an extent that sometimes seems like mindreading... though admittedly if my memories are fake that could be a made-up factoid, but I'm overall inclined to assume general Earth-factoids are probably true until proven otherwise because it just seems self-sabotagingly stupid for Abaddon to give me beliefs that a casual internet search would go 'nuh-uh' on. It's not like I fail to question factoids or something, and if I'm an engineered personality Abaddon should know that.

Day 7: I nearly get killed by one of the phasing assholes while distracted by the realization that my lack of interest in sex et al is likely to keep me mission-focused, rather than a normal personality trait, and more specifically distracted by the incongruity that nonetheless I like kids?... like, I'm not strongly interested in having children, but I find kids likable by and large, which just seems like a weird trait for Abaddon to give me? Though, on the other hand, Taylor is a teen, and apparently probably important? I don't tend to think of her as particularly child-like, but... I've not actually seen her, aside maybe that one time from a distance in costume post-Simurgh. Maybe if I actually got a solid look at her I'd totally go 'oh god she's just a child'? Something to keep in mind, I suppose.

Day 8: It crosses my mind that in all the time here I've not really seen any obvious capes, aside maybe-Taylor, Oni Lee trying to kill me during the attack, and the phasing power plague assholes. Then I remember the suicide collars thing, and go oh, right, the Travelers' arc having a lot of capes was anomalous and caused by Cauldron vials plus the Simurgh dumping capes from other dimensions. Otherwise the day is UTTERLY BORING.

Days 9-12: I get excited when I think a bomb has destroyed some Simurgh dust. Then I get skeptical, and further testing determines it just made the Simurgh dust invisible. I promptly take apart the additional copies of that bomb. With no confidence PtV is in Cauldron's hands, there is no way I'm trusting that they won't jack these and throw them at Endbringers like morons. On the plus side, the dust becomes visible again by the time I wake up next morning, so it wouldn't have been a permanent disaster.

Day 13: I'm so tired and frustrated I watch cartoons for a couple of hours instead of tinkering or searching for Taylor. I'm reminded that oh yeah it's canon there's cartoons based on the Protectorate, by virtue of stumbling upon a cartoon that depicts Armsmaster as a lovably goofy, socially awkward nerd-cape who really wants a girlfriend but can't get one because he's a socially awkward nerd oh and also secret identities are a thing. It's jarring, having seen him on TV calling me a terrorist and looking basically nothing like this cartoon version, but it's doubly-jarring because it feels weirdly on the nose to canon, while it seems like the cartoon is kind of deliberately writing people out of character?... like, we've got Assault as The Only Sane Man on the show, facepalming at the wackiness around him, Battery slinging puns, Miss Militia apologizing profusely when people react to her rubber bullets with lots of pain... and even with suspecting my memories are all just bullshit precog-vision, the working theory is that anything that's pretty consistent between canon and fanfic is probably a reasonably consistent prediction, and... Battery's personality tends to be a bit all over the place in fanfic, but Assault is always the goofball, and I can't recall a Comedically Apologetic Miss Militia ever being something I read or heard about. So Cartoon Armsmaster being weirdly on the nose to canon and fanon Armsmaster, but played in a joke-y way, feels... weird.

Day 14: It abruptly crosses my mind; Dragon. My theory where I'm faked-up with faked-up memories based on precog et al, with Taylor being weirdly important... I always found it frustrating and a bit stupid how fanfic loved Dragon and eg absolutely refused to admit Saint actually has something of a point, and I always found it an unsatisfying, dumb WoG that unchained 'seed AI' could go head-to-head with an Entity and potentially win and so Dragon was chained by her creator due to Entity safeguards of arbitrary influence to avoid that...

… and now I'm wondering about a lot of that. Like, Dragon isn't the second-most common fanfic companion to show up -that's fuckin' Lisa, and isn't that concerning in my current theory- but she shows up as important a lot, and she's... bizarrely consistent, which suggests the precog has her as a fixture. Not, like, an AI at all, not even a chained AI. Very specifically a female-presenting Canadian Girlfriend To Armsmaster AI that's inexplicably super-nice and shit. I mean, there was that one hero/villain flipping fanfic where Evil Dragon presented as male because lol of course the AI would choose to present as male because they're evil, stereotypes regarding gender and morality are always to be followed at all times amirite? But that's the only exception I can remember, and it was premised explicitly in messing with everyone, so like it's either a super-low-odds precog scenario or it's just a memory filled in to make me find my history totally plausible, and either way it's not really a point against this theory.

ANYWAY, the point is that Dragon is bizarrely consistent, which suggests precog placed her as existing more or less no matter what, which is utterly bizarre given how improbable the chain of events that leads to her endstate is, which suggests there's something weird going on here, and... even though I found writers irritating for how they handled Dragon, I legitimately found Dragon decently likable, and, uh, I kind of have to consider the probability my opinions are engineered for effect...

… what I mean is this all kind of points to the probability that Dragon isn't Scion tossing out a power for creating seed AI and then hacking the Tinker's brain so they'll shove in shackles and Leviathan happening and blah blah blah. That, instead, she's also some fucking Abaddon plot, and I'm supposed to be inclined to hook up with her to... kill Scion, and whatever the fuck else Abaddon is trying to accomplish with us.

There's a lot of other details from my memories that fit to this. Like, Leviathan sinks Richter's home. I always took it as sort of implied that Leviathan was trying to nuke Dragon, but that theory is a bit sketchy, what with Endbringers being epic bullshit so it should've worked if that was the goal, and also in retrospect the more obvious scenario for me to have drawn historically is that Richter dying and Dragon not was considered desirable by the Endbringers for some reason, but if Dragon is an Abaddon plot then me having this sketchy theory in mind is sort of leading me around to the idea of considering the possibility of Dragon being an Abaddon plot, and also it makes way more sense that one of Scion's Endbringers might try, and fail, to nuke an Abaddon plot. And given the distributed intelligence thing she has going on, they might be leaving her kind-of-alone at this point because they can't kill her without fucking up other directives, like 'don't reveal how ridiculously you're jobbing'.

… hell, for all I know they're actually selecting cities with especially high concentrations of her servers! So maybe they are still trying to kill her, just in a way invisible to anyone that isn't her, and maybe not obvious even to her.

And, like, Dragon being nice. This has always struck me as a pretty fucking bizarre aspect of canon. Not a plothole, exactly, but she's a Tinkertech product and it's a major plot thread that Entities don't really get humans, don't get emotions, don't get social crap, and the extent to which they do tends to be focused on maximizing human suffering because conflict generation gives them data or whatever and they're not bothered by genocide, torture, etc, on an emotional/ethical level. That Dragon is really ethical and nice and compassionate and patient seems like a thing an Entity power shouldn't even be able to do, nor willing to do. Previously I kind of sighed and chalked it up to the writer clearly having a fairly pessimistic view of humanity, that literally the only unambiguously good and nice person in Worm is not an actual human being because there's some deep-seated mistrust or hate toward humanity as a whole, which is consistent with the writer being a dog person and blah blah blah...

… buuuut Abaddon is also supposed to be, by Entity standards, a master of philosophy and other types of thinking even Eden found alien and incomprehensible. And I'm already assuming I'm some subtle assassination plot -well, subtle is maybe not the word, deniable is probably more accurate, but 'deniability' is a socially-rooted concept and so exactly the kind of concept Scion and Eden seem to not naturally get- and 'Dragon is an Abaddon plot' is completely consistent with that theory and irons out a lot of the aspects of Dragon that always seemed a stretch from a realism standpoint.

I have no goddamn clue how I could go about testing this theory given I don't have any recollection of anything I would believe for a second is a way to signal to Dragon I'm totally also an Abaddon plot, please trust me, but... definitely something to keep in mind.

… though this is also complicated by the fact that while I've accepted I'm an Abaddon missile, probably, I don't actually know... like, I'm not a robot that went 'oh, right, I'm an Abaddon missile, I should of course beep-boop endeavor to do what Abaddon wants, wrrrr', I actually still think of myself as human and think of myself as feeling like humanity is where my default loyalty lies? Like, yeah, I've thought before that if aliens were to show up and every human government decided they just had to skin the aliens alive and rape their babies I would be jumping ship from humanity in no time flat, but there's a bit of a difference between 'if it turns out my species is way more assholish than I think they are, and an opportunity to defect from my species arrives, I will not remain loyal to assholes who happen to be the same species as me' vs 'Oh! Turns out I'm not human at all! Fuck all those humans forever, on that basis alone.' Indeed, my historical attitude just requires some verbal tweaking to remain applicable to my current situation; I'm not going to be loyal to Abaddon just because I concluded I'm a simulated personality running on one of his shards instead of biologically an actual human being.

…

I'm going to be so pissed if Abaddon turns out to somehow be exactly the kind of reasonable, moral, and ethical figure I would actually side with, and the reason I wasn't hard-coded with loyalty to Abaddon per se is because I was instead hard-coded to side with People Who Are Suspiciously Similar To Abaddon In Values And Shit.

I can't imagine how that would even work, but fuck me Entities and precog and so on make... not anything possible, but a hell of a lot.

Anyway, point being: if Dragon is a fellow Abaddon plot, I'm not actually sure I want to fistbump her and cooperate on whatever the hell Abaddon agenda she's up to. You know, other than attempting to ethically contain horrible criminals whose superpowers make execution an impractical option, attempt to reform criminals where feasible but not to the point of letting them run roughshod over society, close the gap between parahumans and non-parahumans by raising the general level of human technology so normals aren't automatically stomped by parahumans...

…

fuck me i'm totally going to end up allied with dragon, even though fanfic having people trust dragon and ally with her in no time flat is one of those things in fanfic that drives me batty

why is this my life

 

[Ghoul King]

5.2

Cauldron keeps fucking ignoring me. Dragon hasn't beamed an Abaddon Code into my brain so we can link up and engage in a sinister alien plot of humanitarian aid. The Simurgh dust continues to not let me do exotic shit to it, aside the occasional false hope. Whoopee, I can turn her blue now if I want. Why the hell would I want to do that, and why did it happen in response to a bomb that makes everything in its radius temporarily act like a magnet? Is the Simurgh deliberately fucking with me? Is that it?

Ugh, fine.

Day twenty-two of my goddamn hunt for Taylor to try to... secure her because she's apparently important in most every timeline or something stupid like that. Seriously, why is that? If fanfics are just less-probable precog scenarios, it's not about getting Queen Administrator! It's actually something about Taylor!

Christ, it's like I'm in one of those stories where destiny gets invoked so the writer doesn't have to come up with a real explanation for anything.

…. okay, not really. The equivalent to that would be for Lisa or Dinah to have dropped this shit on me without explanation and directed me to go rescue Taylor because their goddamn Thinker powers said it's important.

Still feels like it's in the vicinity of a destiny plot, though.

Like, I'd assume she's also an Abaddon plot, and I'm being directed to think she's important because of that, but that doesn't really seem to fit the facts. For one thing, the canon timeline has her explicitly getting one of Scion's shards, no ambiguity about it, which would be a weird lie for Abaddon to go out of its way to tell me when it could have just left the point not explicitly answered. More importantly... like, a big part of why I'm inclined to think Dragon is an Abaddon plot is that she's not just a fixture of importance across fanfics in addition to canon, it's that she's consistent to an extent that is pretty fucking weird. Like, Emma and Sophia tended to be broadly the same as far as Sophia being Shadow Stalker, both of them bullying Taylor, etc, but in some fanfics Sophia is the primary pusher of the bullying and Emma is just kinda nodding along and smiling as Sophia kicks in Taylor's teeth, in other fanfics Sophia isn't terribly interested in bullying Taylor and it's only because Emma is stuck on Taylor they're still doing it, I seem to recall there actually being one where Madison was the one who was keeping momentum going...

… vs Dragon being super-consistent, even compared to other characters who had a lot of screentime in canon and who also shouldn't be readily butterflied by alt-power Taylor premises. Brian, for example, whose canon personality was fairly straightforward and consistent aside the second trigger trauma changing him some, and then fanfic tends to make him more of a goofball than in canon, and often just straight-up makes Tattletale the explicit leader instead of doing the canon thing of pretending Grue is Head Undersider but then mostly having Tattletale drive the decision-making process, plus a few other things that are weird. Like that meme about him getting with Purity. I never got that one. It's not like the meme actually depicted them with chemistry- getting distracted.

Point is, Taylor being not super-consistent is inconsistent with that element. If she's an Abaddon plot, she's... what, one that's very adaptable, changing her abilities and personality to navigate whatever exact timeline actually results? I mean, that's possible and all, but that's less me trying to develop a coherent theory and more me acknowledging edge cases exist.

Whatever, I'm searching. Still no costume, dressed heavier than I'd prefer because it's actually pretty fucking cold right now for whatever exact reason -Brockton Bay is supposed to be warmer than average, according to WoG, but I'm not sure how to take WoG in the context of 'canon and fanfic is probably precog scenarios', so I'm not sure that actually applies, even aside the writer being Canadian and I always felt they completely failed to grasp the degree to which they were projecting Canadian ideas of cold dozens of miles south where it's not appropriate- and carting around a bunch of nonlethals and some lethals.

I'm actually wearing my costume's mask, because it eventually occurred to me that it's probably better to signal up front I'm a cape rather than looking like a civilian who raided PRT HQ's armory or whatever being covered in grenades causes people to think, but otherwise I'm still not bothering with a costume. Since I cannibalized my old one and my power isn't exactly cooperative on making a new one. How do most capes get started in that regard, anyway? Canon Taylor had a built-in explanation for most of her costume, but most capes are, what, buying from Halloween stores?...

Anyway, I'm also bringing a stack of sticky notes and a pen. I had the thought a couple days ago that if a place seems like it might be a spot Taylor is hanging out at, just not at the moment I'm in it, I can write up a note explaining that I want to link up with her, and... god, I dunno what else I'll write on the note, but it's an idea. Maybe a hideout will seem to be running low on food, and I'll advertise that I'm set for life on food? And just not bother to mention that Cauldron is involved.

Not sure how I'll handle that bit if she does come with. Mind, that's in part because I honestly have no goddamn clue what the Simurgh will have done with Taylor, but honestly even if it weren't for that I'm not sure how I'd go about broaching that topic. "Oh yeah, there's an extradimensional conspiracy, and I helped them with the Simurgh, kinda, not that it helped that much, and now I have room and board for life even though they won't evacuate me from this hole because it turns out David actually keeps his word."

… huh. That sounds a little less crazy when I think it out than when I was operating on half-formed ideas of how to explain this. And Taylor does know other dimensions exist...

Regardless...

The amazing thing about combing Brockton Bay for Taylor is how boring it's turned out to be. I was expecting roving murder-gangs and shit, but it's clear there's really not that many people around, and most of them are hunkering down, trying to not draw trouble. The busiest part of town is Northerly, where the wall has a gate and roving spotlights and what I'm pretty sure are machine gun nests mounted atop towers. I was just kinda question marking at that for a few days until I remembered that the Travelers' arc did, in fact, involve making it clear that people were eventually let out of Simurgh quarantine, after a lot of therapy and shit, and that this was kinda implied to be normal for a post-Simurgh event.

I've always found that a weird plotpoint, all things considered, but it's at least good to know I might eventually be able to get out without having to blow a hole in a wall or anything?

Not that I've bothered to actually approach that section of town. I don't like waiting in lines when the lines aren't made of Simurgh-subverted people who may or may not decide they'd like some Soylent Green upon sighting me. I also don't need the supplies I've seen get airdropped in a few times, since Cauldron is handling my necessities for me. And I've already got my boobytrapped motel to hide in, so there being guards ready to gun down crazed zombies or the like isn't really a plus for me, probably a minus given I suspect they'd have an itchy trigger finger regarding me.

Anyway, point is, there is no Worm-esque 'it's been quiet for five seconds, the writer is bored, ROLL FOR INITIATIVE' constant stream of murderhobos for me to fend off. Any given day is primarily spent on searching empty apartments, offices, etc, occasionally being startled by particularly gruesome corpses, and scooping up some more Simurgh dust when I inevitably decide I should turn around and get some rest.

Really, having time to think on it, that makes sense. Video games stuffing the post-apocalypse with an infinite supply of raiders for you to murder for experience and loot isn't because that makes the slightest bit of real-world sense, it's because it's a goddamn video game where core content is centered around killing things for experience and loot, so the game is going to be designed so you hit that content readily and regularly. By a similar token, stories that do much the same are... well, fucking lazy and ill-thought out in most cases, for one, but my point is that it's narratively useful to take it as a given that you can kick off new plot beats at any time by having assholes show up and do something the protagonist has to respond to. Those are both foundations that encourage filling the streets with murderhobos to interact with.

In reality, though... people were evacuating when the Simurgh hit. Most capes that didn't successfully evacuate would've had their heads exploded for the safety of the world. The region has been sealed off, so immigrating here is hard and also almost no one is going to even want to try. People keep dying, whether because I freak out and kill them because holy fuck Simurgh why, or because they're Simurgh bombs and Simurgh bombs do shit like eat people like it's the most natural thing in the world, or because people outside my awareness are getting into fights over limited resources and shit, or because the phasing plague assholes catch a building with people inside.

There's probably still a pretty solid number of people in the city in total just because it was... what, 50,000 or so to start? And 20 minutes is not a lot of time to evacuate -it can take twenty minutes to get from one part of a not-that-large town to the other, by car- even if I assume the Protectorate had capes evacuating people with teleportation and the like. Without an insanely bullshit power I should've already heard about one way or another, there's no way they evaced 90% of everyone in time.

But the density being way, way down really is the logical outcome, and since I'm avoiding the part of town that has obvious reason for people to crowd it, of course my experience is going to be fairly sparse on people.

Especially since Brockton Bay is a 'build out, not up' sort of city, so the square-foot density of people is already lower than some places. This isn't New York, as the obvious US comparison point. I'd already kinda assumed that from my memories, and everything I've seen so far has borne that out; there's some gleaming glass spires over in one part of town near-ish the coast, including one that I'm pretty sure has a logo meant to say 'Medhall', but it's just the one corner. Most of the city is dominated by one-to-two-story buildings.

Anyway, with wandering about I think I might know what's going on with the phasing assholes, as far as why they haven't spread to the extent I'd have expected. I spotted one sleeping under a park bench earlier today, and I know it's a phasing asshole because they sat up through the bench, looked about with a way-too-wide grin on their face for a few minutes, and then eventually looked disappointed and laid back down, while I crouched against a low wall with one hand on a black hole bomb, ready to throw. I think they're... well, like movie zombies or something, not really doing much of anything unless there's recently been a human presence riling them up. So the plague of them hasn't spread as insanely as I expected because the density of people is actually fairly low, most people aren't wandering around, scavenging, the way I am, and the phasing assholes just... go to sleep if no one is around.

I suspect they're cheating on metabolic considerations, too, since hunting for food really ought to bring them in contact with other people at a fairly rapid clip if they, you know, need to eat. I'd expect them to have all converged on the gate and either died or infested that whole area, given how much time has passed and how food lying around is largely all looted or spoiled by now. This is also consistent with them not mobbing my hideout; they're not constantly on the prowl for people, and prior to looking for Taylor I wasn't actually ranging that far out, either, so I wouldn't have had much opportunity to 'activate' them.

Anyway, searching the city, looking for unnatural bug behavior, yadda yadda. Still keeping an eye out for materials for Tinkering, too, of course. Idly wondering if any Simurgh plots have succeeded through people released from a quarantine zone after being affirmed as adequately sane. My impulse thought is no, since if it was yes I'd honestly expect releases to simply stop forever, but then again Worm has some pretty weird degrees of second chance rubrics, like how people who really ought to have been executed get Birdcaged, or how Tattletale claims early on it takes multiple serious offenses for a cape to actually get carted off to a serious jail, so maybe it happened a couple of times but people kept right on letting Simurgh victims out after a lot of therapy and all because just killing them all was considered too inhumane?

Then I spot a mass of curly black hair moving behind a window.

I pause a moment, taking stock, checking for threats in the area. I mean, curly black hair isn't unambiguous proof I've found Taylor, but it's more promising than anything else I've seen. And... maaaaaybe there's more bugs flitting about than average? I might be imagining that, but still, I wanna say there's more bugs in the area than I've gotten used to post-Simurgh.

Okay, no other (apparent...) threats in the area... do I call out to her and hope she doesn't try to kill me? I mean, she should know I'm here already, but maybe the Simurgh made her twitchy about sounds? And, I mean, people tend to find me grating when I talk, I'm in a cape mask, covered in grenades... fuck, I'd probably guess I was hostile if I called out to me.

Okay, let's not call out to her.

Well, hitting her with a nonlethal grenade seems... bad. Like, trust problems, obviously, but also Taylor's bug control doesn't go away just because you've tied her up or something, right? So not really a solution unless I block her portal, too, and there's... several reasons I'm leery of doing that. Taylor is blatantly offloading some of her cognition onto her shard in canon, and I'd hate to learn that inexplicably includes her autonomous breathing by virtue of whoops killing her. That'd be insanely stupid... but Entities. I can't discount this degree of that kind of stupidity.

Plus, I still haven't managed to get my shard to cooperate on recreating the portal blocking device. I'm carrying a portal-blocking bomb, but those keep doing something to me too, and it's not like that's a long-term solution anyway. They last, like, 60 seconds or so, and no I cannot build a replacement in that time, even ignoring losing time to them myself.

But even if I had the portal-blocking device on me, that seems like a bad plan.

Eventually I sigh to myself and just start making my way to the window, deliberately making more noise than I normally make when walking. My default is sneaky enough I've spooked people unintentionally, and I'm trying to not have this end in, "Aaaah! Not the bees!"

At the window, I can't see anyone inside. I mean, there's no lights on inside, and the sun is in the wrong position to cast light very far into the building right now, but even as Bakuda I seem to see better-than-average in the dark.

… which might be because my memories are fake and in actuality Bakuda has better-than-average vision in the dark and I have such memories to subtly prepare me for the body I was made to be plugged into...

… point is, I can see this is a kitchen and that Taylor isn't in it. I'd throw in a qualifier about her maybe being in the cupboards, but they're all open, with not much in the way of dishes and all inside them. The qualifier I will throw in is that powers make anything possible so she could be inside and just hidden by some weird new trigger. Hell, for all I know Imp triggered during all this shit but with an area-of-effect notice-me-not field.

I'd say my ability to remember suggests otherwise, but I have no goddamn clue how such a power would interact with fake memories, not even touching on the fact that my cognition may be sitting in a shard that's not fully cooperating with everybody else playing the Scion And Eden Game.

I sigh loudly to myself, less because I feel that frustrated or disappointed and more as an excuse to make relatively innocuous noise. I wasn't really expecting Taylor to be right there.

Alright, this is part of an apartment building. I could just climb in through the window, but the window is busted open and for some reason somebody jammed bits of glass into the edges like this window has razor-sharp glass teeth. That's dangerous, and not something I can readily and safely fix without using a bomb, and I'm trying to be non-threatening right now.

It also suggests that either there's a Simurgh'd asshole wandering around, setting these up for some mysterious precog asshole reason -I'm not even going to pretend she's not an asshole anymore, at this point I suspect she came down to Brockton Bay because I'm an Abaddon missile and she wanted to contain or kill me or something, so I'm doubting she's doing some long game thing for my benefit, and after that thing with the family hell fucking no on benefit of the doubt- or that somebody is actually living in this apartment. I... doubt it's Taylor living in here. She'd probably go back to her house, if anywhere, or hang in the Undersider's loft. I'm not entirely clear what kind of building their loft was, but it certainly wasn't a plain-jane wall o' bricks apartment building.

So probably I just spotted someone else with a big head of curly black hair.

Great.

Nonetheless, I make my way around to the front of the building. The front door is already open, by which I mean it's been knocked off its hinges and has a big splintered spot in the upper portion of it. A Brute bashed it down, I guess? I check the entryway carefully for, like, tripwires and stuff, but nothing leaps out at me. I'd like to imagine my tinker specialty being traps instead of bombs gives me some kind of edge at detecting traps, but it's not like I've had anything obvious happen like a trap being highlighted in gold in my vision like I'm in a goddamn video game.

So I still step cautious as I go inside. Somebody made the window dangerous, at great effort. It'd be kind of weird if they didn't do anything equivalent for the front entrance.

Nothing happens, though. I'm just in a foyer place, with a TV sitting in one corner. It's not on or anything, but it looks like it's in good condition? There's also a wall of mailboxes set in a wall on the opposite side of the foyer, to my right. Several of them have had their little door things ripped open, 'ripped' as in 'I can see where the metal tore as it was pulled on by inhuman strength'. Brute power, or a weird Striker power that let them get leverage in improbable situations, or something. Wonder why they were searching the mailboxes apparently at random, though? Mail is one of the things I'd most expect to be ignored in an Endbringer crisis, and I'm having trouble imagining why the Simurgh would cause someone to go digging through mailboxes. Hmmm. Conspicuously weird.

I continue to wander vaguely toward the apartment I maybe saw Taylor through a window of, keeping an eye out for traps of any sort and also just keeping an eye out for weirdness in general. Also feeling paranoid about the phasing assholes, though unless the person I saw is a phasing asshole it shouldn't be an issue, because whoever I saw would've woken them up and they'd have done their thing to this building already. But still, walls being nearby means phasing assholes can show up with basically no warning.

God, why can't I think of a horror game using that combination of ideas? It would be tremendously assholish, but horror games tend to think 'be obnoxious to the player' is part and parcel of producing horror, so that wouldn't stop anyone...

I walk past bloodstains against the walls, but no bodies in the area to have left them. No evidence of blood-based drag marks, either. Power? Or the blood dried, and then the bodies got moved? The wallpaper reverses color in patches here and there, though I'm not sure if that's evidence of weird power mechanics or just somebody having fun with interior decoration. Roaches keep noticing me coming and scrambling for hiding places. Haven't seen any rats, but I've seen fewer in the city than I was kind of expecting, so I'm not sure if my expectations are incorrect or if something weird is happening in the city.

Lotta doors just wide open, too. I keep popping my head in once I think I'm more or less in the right part of the building, but the first three are clearly wrong. The first one has a half-rotten dog corpse lying in the open, the second one is littered with abandoned goods I would've seen through the window and didn't, and the third one has clear fire damage.

The fourth door I go to is closed, and when I turn the knob it turns out it's locked. Suggestive. Also inconvenient; maybe I should've tried to go through the window after all?

Ugh, I'm not sure how to approach this while seeming non-threatening. The situation is threatening, anyone in the city is competition even if they're not a Simurgh bomb, etc. I'm not sure I can seem adequately non-threatening.

I sigh loudly again, and decide to try talking after all. "Hey, uh, I saw someone in here? You alright? They're doing the supply drops up North, if you're low on food or something that's the place to go." No response. I knock once, and raise my voice a bit, worried that'll get me sounding angry even though I'm not. "Or maybe you need medical care? I assume you've figured out a solution to the running water being seawater when it isn't green shit... unless maybe you've been relying on bottled water and are running low? They're airdropping clean water up North, too." I pause for a moment, realizing I sound like I have an agenda. I mean, I do, but I sound like I have the wrong agenda. "Uh, not trying to push you to go North, I actually haven't bothered myself 'cause I'm situated and don't want to deal with the crowds, but I was kinda figuring you'd take me offering to shack up with me as me offering candy while asking you to come into my van?"

… that sounded better in my head. Less sexually predatory, in particular. Maybe I'll get lucky and that thing where it never crosses people's minds to interpret women as sexual predators even when it's really, really obvious will still apply in Bet America? Hell, canon Taylor came across bi-leaning in that derpy 'I'm so convinced I'm heterosexual that kissing a girl is a completely platonic joke, honest' manner, so even if it's not normal for Bet America, if this is Taylor it still might not cross her mind to take it that way.

I sigh again, irritated with myself regardless. Not going to point out how that sounds, hope it didn't cross their mind to take it that way... assuming someone is actually here. "Trying to make sure you're okay, is the point."

Still no response. Really quiet in general, still a bit weirded out how quiet Brockton Bay is with the city sealed. Even with having thought out how it kinda makes sense, especially with no cars running about and all, it's still a little eerie to be obviously inside city limits and yet things are quiet.

Okay, fine, let's go back to the window-

I stop, blink, rub at my eyes, and yes there's still a blob of roaches spelling out go away on the wall. I can't stop myself from grinning; I have found Taylor! (Not necessarily, but very very likely) I mean yeah she's telling me to leave, but I was expecting that. I wave at the roaches in greeting, more or less. "I dunno if you caught any of that, but I was asking if you're okay? You need anything?"

Go away, Oni Lady, the roaches update to.

My smile goes a bit rictis-y, because come the fuck on I'm not an Oni Lee knockoff with boobs!

… but I take a calming breath. "I can't tell if you can hear me. Are you okay? I can come back with bandages or something." I don't have any bandages, but I might be able to Tinker something up, and for all I know Cauldron will have left behind bandages when I get back. Or I might scavenge some up. Some actually-clean ones, I mean.

I'm fine go away

I frown a little at that. "I'd like to take you at your word, but you know who I am so I assume you think I'm a racist supervillain who threatened to blow up her university over bad grades, so I have to wonder if you're just trying to not let on about problems on the idea I'd jump on weakness or something."

Go away I'm fine

I sigh again. "I'm coming back tomorrow with some supplies, so you're forewarned. And to be clear I'm not expecting you to trust me here, feel free to check them with bugs or something... just, uh, not roaches, please? Roaches crawl through toilet pipes and literal shit and all, I'd hate for you to give yourself an infection because you were suspicious my bandages were tinkertech bullshit."

Go away

I sigh yet again. "See you tomorrow."

Then I leave, making mental notes of landmarks as I go so I can find this apartment building again.

-----------------------------------------------------------​

No, Cauldron didn't conveniently drop off bandages or anything. Not sure if that means Contessa isn't bullshit, or if she is but she doesn't care, or if she is but Taylor doesn't need bandages, or what.

Regardless, I fab up a few grenades with antimicrobial properties. The first three go in the rejects pile, because they're more of those grenades I've already made that also kill gut flora and fauna and all too and so would cause diarrhea and all, but the next couple go into my 'trips outside' pile; these ones explode into a soapy substance that shunts assorted microbial life into some other dimension or something.

Then I really cotton on to what I've just made, go test one of them on one of the rooms I've been avoiding that has a particularly severe roach and mold problem...

… and five minutes later the roaches are upset but sparkling clean (Like, seriously, they're literally glittering what the hell), and the mold is all gone, barely any sign it ever existed. When I tentatively poke a toe into the soapy mass, the black grime accumulating on it from walking constantly without properly bathing vanishes and there's no pain or weirdness.

Holy shit this is perfect. Thank you, power, for cooperating for once!

… shit, this is more evidence Taylor is important to Abaddon's plot somehow, isn't it?...

I spend the rest of the afternoon making more of these grenades and deploying them throughout my hotel lair, starting with cleaning up my sleeping space and attendant bathroom (Water running green doesn't make the toilets unusable, so that's been convenient), and then my workshop area in the lobby, and then whatever random rooms are particularly filthy.

Then I collapse, feeling nauseous like I always do when my environment is suddenly a lot less unhealthy for me, and sleep.

----------------------------------------------------------​

I knock on the building's fallen front door to announce my presence, though it's probably redundant. I've got a wheelbarrow full of scrubbing bubble grenades, some of the food Cauldron has been providing me, tampons also from Cauldron, some shirts I cleaned with scrubbing bubble grenades on the idea they can act as makeshift bandages if Taylor needs any, and some kinda random shit I picked up on the way, like a toaster, 'cause I really have no idea what Taylor's current situation is.

Hauling said wheelbarrow of crap into the building isn't exactly quiet, and even if I'm still not sure whether bug presence in the area is above-average, there's certainly enough Taylor should've seen and heard me coming through them if she hasn't vacated the area entirely. Which... I kinda am doubting she's left already. The insistence I go away makes me think she wasn't willing, or wasn't able, to leave. I'd expect her to have simply escaped and not let on she was present, if she could leave readily. She was walking when I briefly saw her, pretty sure, so 'able' probably isn't the issue. I'm not sure why 'not willing' would be the issue, but it seems the most probable possibility.

Hmmm. Didn't Brian have an apartment? I've been kinda going 'why would Taylor be stubbornly sticking to an apartment', but I'd honestly forgotten until literally this second that Brian has an apartment in canon and Taylor gets shown it... pretty early, I think? Maybe she's sentimental, or maybe she's worried Brian is also trapped and is waiting here just in case he comes back?

Or it could just be a random apartment and she actually is injured or something, just something less... obvious. A gut injury or something that doesn't let her walk for long.

Eventually I get the wheelbarrow into the building, sit down for a second because ow that was hard, and then notice there's bugs on one wall. Go away, Oni Lady.

RrrrRRGH.

Deep sigh. Calm yourself, Bakuda. She's been Simurgh'd, and as far as most people know I'm a racist supervillain who blew up over bad grades -fuck, it just occurred to me that while I blew up her school as a favor to her, she would absolutely have taken that in some... well, I'm not sure exactly, but there's no way she didn't find it threatening through some logic or another.

Deep sigh again. Goddammit, this is going to be an uphill thing the whole way, isn't it? Above and beyond whatever dark cloud of social doom hovers over me everywhere I -wait, I was theorizing dogs just notice I'm not right and my memories faked up them hating me so I wouldn't question it, but I also know humans can be pretty sensitive to shit they don't consciously notice. Maybe my remembered dark cloud of social doom was to psychologically prepare me for people noticing I'm not right and being wigged out by it without consciously realizing it.

…

god, my memories really do make so much more sense if I'm just an Abaddon missile and it's all targeted for effect

Okay! On the plus side, if that is indeed the issue, Taylor is seeing me through her bugs and so probably can't pick up on whatever subtly wrong shit I'm doing that makes people go PURGE THE XENO.

… wait, is that why I have memories of 40k, so I'd be prepared for people wanting to kill me with fire for not being A Real Human Being?

Damn. I hope Dawn of War is a real game, at least, I'd hate for one of the best games of my memories to be faked-up nonsense.

Taylor's bugs have updated themselves to Oni Lady, go away while I was ruminating on how my life makes so much more sense as faked-up bullshit to prep me for my role as an alien sleeper agent that thinks it's human in spite of not being able to pass for one particularly believably. Wait, does this mean I was wrong when I thought the author was overestimating how off-putting people would find Case 53s? Shit, maybe people are way more readily wigged-out by not-fully-human appearances than I've historically believed.

Whatever, focus. Taylor is still here, so yeah she either can't leave or won't leave. She's... well, a captive audience. For at least a bit.

I stand up and start hauling the wheelbarrow over toward the door I'm pretty sure Taylor is behind, grunting with the effort. It's a pain, but I also throw in some talking. "Hey, the, uh, yellow pill-shaped things with the pull-tabs are my scrubbing bubble... um, grenades, technically, but it's not lethal or anything it's just how my Tinkering works don't worry about it. I've already tested them on... actually, crap, I never did test on open wounds. Um. Anyway! Point is, they won't hurt your bugs but they'll clear out mold and virii and other such unpleasant shit so you don't have to worry about infection so much. Won't help if you're already sick, unless I guess you want to ingest one but I wouldn't recommend that I'm pretty sure there's more mass coming out of the grenades than ought to make physics sense, like I tried weighing one, then detonating it and weighing that but it was kinda messy and I'm not sure I didn't just fuck up somehow but it sure seemed like there was suddenly more weight from nowhere because powers do that kinda shit-"

I'm almost to her door, and there's another bug message on the wall. That's nice. Go away.

Oh hey, she's even using punctuation now! Or maybe she was doing that yesterday and I just didn't notice?

"-plus there's some food, there's a toaster or something, there's tampons-"

The bugs jitter in a weird manner, spreading out briefly like Taylor lost control or something, and after a few seconds draw out a new sentence. Leave tampons.

Ooooh. I think she has period cramps. Is... is that why she's not leaving? Is she laid up with period cramps? That'd be kind of weird given canon Taylor never had period cramps, but then again the writer never acknowledged any female biological factoids of any kind (Well, except Purity's pregnancy in passing in backstory, I suppose), and also she's gone through a whole lot of stress and shit of a brand-new kind. I seem to recall reading once that periods can start early in response to external stressors, so maybe the Simurgh arriving kickstarted her period where canon stress never did? She never did fight the Simurgh in canon, and fanfics tend to shy away from the topi-

-fuck, probably because precogs interfere with each other for perfectly naturalistic mechanical reasons and so memories of stories based on precog can't really touch on her too heavily with any possibility of being accurate. Goddammit, my life makes so much more sense like this it's ridiculous!

Whatever. Back to talking while I get the wheelbarrow set up to not fall over. "Yeah, periods suck." I feel like I should be saying something else here that will make Taylor interpret me as relatable and likable and friendly, but my mind fails me and it's difficult to stay focused on the topic when it occurs to me that this aspect of my social awkwardness is itself probably an outgrowth of me being a fake personality made by an alien that only kind of gets human shit. Ugh. Fuck. Whatever. "I was going to leave the whole thing, though, I've already cleaned my space like mad and seriously I'm set for food and shit and ah crap if I knew you were having period cramps I'd have tried to scavenge some chocolate on the way." That's supposed to help with period cramps, from what I've read. Too bad Cauldron hasn't given me any chocolate. It's mostly stuff like cereal or nutrient bars. Even the birthday card didn't come with cupcakes or anything like that.

Still, I can at least make things easier and dig out the box of tampons instead of leaving it down near-ish the bottom of this mass of crap. Make it easier for Taylor to get after I've left. So that's what I do.

I startle and jump away when bees or hornets or something buzz in, never liked those kinds of bugs, but I manage to relax a little when I notice they're incongruously carrying spiders and silk is being released. I watch with fascination as, over the course of a few minutes, they arrange to hook up a large number of flying bugs to the box of tampons, and then awkwardly fly off down the hall, I'm guessing to go fly it in via the window I first spotted her through.

That was cool to see in action. Really cool. Why do people in canon find Taylor creepy, again?

"Oh, right!" I start digging, where did I put the cans?... ah, there we go, some kind of... off-brand orange soda that I've already determined I personally can't stand. I'm not sure if I don't recognize its specific off-brand because Bet wait fuck Omicron probably isn't real that possibility probably doesn't matter at all argh this is going to take forever to properly adjust to. Whatever, I hold the 2-liter bottle up. "I dunno if you've got allergies or something so this particular soda would be a problem for you, but fluids are important, seawater is bad to drink, contaminated seawater is worse, so I brought this. I mean, I have it on hand because it was on the way and I've been ignoring it because I can't stand this stuff, but different taste buds, different bodily needs."

Go away, says Taylor's bugs on the wall.

I frown a little. "I was planning on leaving soon anyway, but this is kiiinda concerning. I'm having difficulty imagining the bugs are somehow delivering fresh, potable water, and I can tell this building has been pretty heavily cleaned out. You die if you don't drink anything for, I think it was three days though it has wiggle room? But you're a-" Wait shit don't let on that you're pretty sure you know this is Taylor the teenage girl who most certainly does not have enough fat stored away to survive dehydration particularly long.

There's an awkward pause, and then Taylor's bugs spell out Go away, Oni Lady.

Hmmm. I don't remember if she'd figured out how to talk through her bugs this early in canon. I recall it was kinda a difficult feat for her, but early canon it also wasn't a super-relevant ability so I don't actually remember when she figured it out. Is she not verbalizing through her bugs because she hasn't figured out how, yet, or?...

I'm also a bit surprised she's being so reasonable. I was really expecting to be attacked by now, what with her being Simurgh'd and all. Hmm.

I catch myself pacing, thinking, then wonder why Abaddon would make me a pacer in the first place, then remind myself to not get distracted, only to get promptly distracted by that dog corpse. I'm about to re-focus, except... wait, why is there a dog corpse here? I'd expect Taylor to feed it to her bugs if only to not have to smell it, or to have had her bugs haul it out of the building, or something, if she's been here even slightly long-term.

In fact, looking closer at it, it's... like, I don't know when it died, obviously, but there's no bugs on it. No flies buzzing it. No evidence of fly eggs having been laid in it. No roaches checking it out, trying to decide whether blood is food or not. Which normally I'd sort of write off as weird, maybe avoid the body more than usual out of worry that it's infected with something weird, possibly power-based, but I'm almost completely confident I'm dealing with Taylor here, and if I'm not it's certainly someone who can control bugs.

So the body being conspicuously avoided suggests the controller is deliberately preventing bugs from chewing on the corpse.

…

That's Judas or something, isn't it? One of Bitch's dogs. That's... a little depressing. I have difficulty imagining Bitch leaving one of her dogs behind to save her own skin. Did she die during the attack? That'd suck, I actually like her.

I wave vaguely at the dog body. "Were they yours?"

There's a long period where I'm honestly expecting to be told to fuck off and leave, but eventually when I glance about I see a wall has bug-text. Friend of a friend.

I nod vaguely at that. So yeah, one of Bitch's dogs. Dammit. And the fact that Taylor is protecting the corpse... it really suggests to me that Bitch died, that Taylor is kinda indirectly mourning Bitch or honoring her memory or something by protecting one of her dogs. Taylor didn't hate the dogs in canon or anything, but she never connected to them. Even in fanfic I don't think I ever saw Taylor emotionally connect to any dogs, let alone Bitch's dogs.

I always found that a bit weird, but I guess Taylor is really not a dog person, pretty much no matter what other stuff happens?

I shuffle awkwardly. I've never known how to react to other people being sad about dead friends and family and all, and if Taylor is anything like in canon that's... even less helpful. My three-and-a-half data points are; her mother died, and this hit her hard, she freaked out when it occurred to her Shatterbird's scream was dangerous to her dad, Regent's death didn't seem to move her at all even though it was played as a tragedy, but then when Alexandria was pretending to kill the other Undersiders she ended up killing Alexandria in response to the ongoing threat. I wanna say what pushed her over the edge was Alexandria indicating she was going for Tattletale next? I remember her getting into contact with Tattletale by having her bugs dial a phone, so she should've thought Tattletale wasn't dead yet, but I don't remember that part of the story very well.

Regardless, that's... limited data, with absolutely no examples of someone comforting Taylor on-screen. I always kind of took it as assumed that Emma comforted her after Annette died, but, again, it's not actually depicted.

So above and beyond being unfamiliar with it in general, I have no idea what Taylor in particular would find comforting vs condescending vs creepily intrusive, etc. Especially in the context of being a known psycho supervillain. Ugh, Taylor started out being, basically, bigoted against villains, irrationally assuming bad stuff not in the general sense of 'there's gotta be a reason they're labeled villains' but more like how someone who's racist invents unpleasant explanations for innocuous interactions with whatever ethnicity they hate. I forget when she told herself she was being shitty to the Undersiders and should give them a real chance, but I do recall it took a bit.

So very possibly she's still in that headspace of 'labeled supervillain, therefore everything is an evil plot, therefore be hostile', and would take sympathy as fake or mocking or something even if I was sincere and didn't have the doom cloud of social failure following me everywhere.

… this is probably why she's constantly insisting I go away and all, isn't it.

Ugh.

I sigh again, and check if Taylor's bugs are spelling anything out, but no, not right now.

I hesitate, wonder if I should be doing something symbolic like leaving a flower at the dog's- actually, does it have a nametag?

I get closer and check. Bentlee.

I blink a few times, going what the hell? before I remember that... I think it was Brutus? Whatever their name was, in canon Bitch carves a dog's name, or maybe it was two names, into the Endbringer defense monument, and the audience sees she's not very literate, getting their name wrong in the small child using phonetics to spell unfamiliar words, and sorry English doesn't reliably do phonetics way. So this would be... well, pronunciation-wise, Bentley? I honestly don't remember if Bitch had a dog named Bentley. I remember Judas, Brutus, and Angelica, and that she had other dogs, but I don't remember their names.

Okay. So yeah, probably one of Bitch's dogs.

I sigh again, glance at the walls, and ultimately leave, not really wanting to bother Taylor now that I've probably rubbed salt in an emotional wound.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------​

Cauldron still hasn't contacted me. Aside the stupid smiley face, but I have no idea what that means.

So I went back to Taylor's apartment, collected a handful of chocolates on the way -candy in wrappers does generally keep for a while, so I'm not too worried about food poisoning- and frankly was expecting her to have finally vanished, so I was ruminating on the Dragon issue some, like maybe I should make an effort to deal with the Dragonslayers? They were kinda inconsistently written so I doubt they're an intentional Abaddon plot I'd be fucking up...

… but no, Taylor is still around, as evidenced by a bug text message on the wall when I arrive.

I'm not joining the ABB.

I blink a few times, then burst into goddamn laughter. She thinks I'm trying to recruit her? I mean, admittedly, that's what the Undersiders did, so I guess it's not completely unreasonable, and I guess it's not even exactly wrong, but holy fuck into the ABB? That's hilarious.

When my laughter is under control enough to talk again, I wheeze out, "Lady, I fucking quit them already."

Then I stop, abruptly realizing I've revealed I know her gender and I'm not sure whether it makes sense for me to know that at this point, panicking for a second, until I remember she took the tampons yesterday. Whew. That's a reasonable-looking assumption on my part from an external view, not me revealing my precognitive info.

It's too bad Taylor isn't in the room so I can't get any kind of read on her response. Her bugs shuffle about for a bit, and if that whole thing about offloading her emotions into her bugs is true I guess that could be an indication she's agitated, but it's not like canon ever delved into what a given emotion translated into, as far as bug behavior goes. Did she notice I freaked for a moment? Is she offended at me laughing? Is she skeptical I actually left the ABB?

No response comes before I get myself together and haul the toy wagon of crap up into the apartment, so I start talking about other stuff. "I managed to snag some chocolates this time. I haven't tried it myself yet, but I hear chocolate is supposed to help with period cramps?" I mean, I'm just guessing she has serious period cramps, but what I've heard in that regard is that serious misery is very much the default. Bakuda's body just kinda bleeding and me not noticing is... a thing my memories claim does happen, but much less often. And now I'm wondering if me not noticing is shard upload stuff, rather than Bakuda's body having a relatively pleasant period.

Taylor still doesn't respond verbally... textually... whatever... but more wasp-or-whatever+spider shenanigans steal the chocolates away, less awkwardly than with the tampons since they're individually wrapped.

I also notice the wheelbarrow and its contents are gone. So Taylor... brought it inside? Or maybe she dragged it elsewhere, but inside seems more likely. Easier, and if she decided she wanted the stuff inside would be better, whereas if she didn't want the stuff... wait, actually, she might've gotten rid of it if she was worried I had boobytraps or something in there. Hm. Damn. Being a supervillain is actually kinda irritating when I want to try peaceful overtures and crap.

Okay, so, like, Taylor's been thinking I was trying to recruit her for the ABB. That's... honestly, that's fucking bizarre, but even though my gut response is to say it sounds like Simurgh'd irrationality I'm honestly not sure it'd be out of character with canon Taylor. Fanon Taylor probably wouldn't say this particular type of ridiculous thing, but- hm. I've always historically thought of that as lazy, bad writing, where Taylor doesn't say things an audience would find ridiculously wrong because the writers are being lazy and shit, but if it's mostly all precog...

… I dunno. Maybe Taylor is just very consistently in tune with her shard, whatever it is, and it's feeding her more info than she really ought to have? As a reward, I guess? I do seem to recall that the handful of no-power Taylor fics I read trended toward Taylor actually getting things wrong, so I guess that's not a crazy theory. It'd potentially also be an answer for why she tends to be weirdly important?

I'm dubious on that theory, in part because canon Taylor was ostensibly really in tune with her shard and didn't do this 'constantly knowing things she shouldn't know' thing, but not enough to completely discount it right away.

Whatever, back up, Taylor thinks I wanted her for the ABB, even though we're in a Simurgh'd zone and gang politics is kind of a fucking ridiculous thing to focus on in that context. So... great. Me being nice and supportive and trying to help her with her period and shit is probably being interpreted as Sinister Villainous Buttering Up.

God, that aspect of early canon Taylor's mentality was so frustrating.

Oh, Taylor's bugs are spelling something out again. Thanks for the chocolate. Go away.

I brighten a bit. "Oh, so the chocolates are helping with the cramps, then?"

The message breaks up, and after a delay some of them form a simple yes. I'm not sure how to take the pause there. I usually find it ridiculous how much people emphasize the importance of face-to-face conversation, but I can kind of relate a little here, not knowing Taylor well enough to guess what the delay might mean where I'd maybe get to see fidgeting in person- actually, no, I wouldn't, would I? She'd just be offloading her emotions onto her bugs, she was, like, already doing that habitually at the start of canon, even if canon implied she got more consistent about it as time went on and kinda retroactively pretended like this was new behavior.

Hm. That actually makes me feel better and oh goddammit I just realized this could explain my own befuddlement at the focus on facial expressions et al. If I'm supposed to somehow Abaddon at Taylor, who is a cape who, even in fanfic, tends to heavily obscure her face when in costume and, in canon, has feelings shunted out of her face in general, then it's disadvantageous to be a normal human who thinks faces are the most important thing ever, because I'll horribly misread Taylor. For that matter, I'd just recently learned about prosody when this happened, and Taylor's swarm-speech probably lacks prosody or has really fucked-up prosody, so I'm better-prepared to take swarm-speech at face value instead of getting caught on 'tone' or lack thereof.

God, at this point I'm hoping it clearly turns out I'm an Abaddon missile just so it stops being unpleasant to discover the latest way it makes sense for my memories to be fake and my fake life carefully engineered to prep me for this job. Having it be a plausible-but-not-remotely-proven theory is downright painful, as there's that nagging doubt I'm a transplant or something and just engaging in confirmation-bias to produce tremendous self-doubt about stuff I'd never previously questioned and never thought I'd have cause to question.

Then a buzzing flying bug beans me on the head and I flail, waving at it while trying to lean away from it, and end up falling sloppily on my butt. "Don't do that," I hiss out. Fuck, I hate it when buzzing bugs fly at me.

Then I notice there's words being spelled out. Whoops, got too into my thoughts. What are you angry about?

Angry? I don't remember- oh, um. I was momentarily frustrated by not being able to get a read on Taylor, and my memories claim people inexplicably tend to read me as ragingly angry when I'm maybe a little miffed. Hm. My first thought is that Taylor sensing it is an indication I'm a lot more blatantly angry-seeming than I interpret myself as seeming, in body language or something, but it occurs to me canon never explicitly addressed antennae. Maybe she's sensing human anger... smells, I guess. And, if canon is anything to go by, not realizing she's reacting to such.

Or- no, I'm pretty sure- let's just ask. "Do you mean when you bumped me with a bug, or before, or-"

Before.

Oh, okay, I did guess that part correctly. Um, how do I explain this? "There was a delay in your response, and I realized I didn't know how to take it and got frustrated. I wasn't mad, not really, certainly not at you. If it helps any, people have a long history of thinking I'm really mad when I'm not particularly?"

There's another pause, and I'm inclined to take it as meaningful when her bugs spell out, What, like at Cornell?

Ugh. "Quick confirmation; you're being sarcastic, right?"

Duh.

I blink in surprise at that and kinda squint at the bugs as a proxy for squinting at Taylor. Taylor using 'duh' weirds me out. She didn't have a formal diction in canon or fanon, but she tended to stay away from... teenager-ese, I guess. Then I remember the actual context this is in, and kinda wave at the bugs. "Okay, like, first of all sarcasm isn't 'duh' if you've not got tone, not unless you're constructing your sentence really obviously, and sometimes not even then. Words on a page, or wall in this case, don't carry the thing people do with voices and expressions." I pause for a moment feeling weird about explaining this to someone who I know has familiarity with internet forums and all, but also waiting to see if she'll respond. The lack of a response stretches long enough I decide she's not going to answer, so I keep going. "Cornell-wise, I honestly can't tell you what happened there." I was intending to keep talking, but then I realize I have no idea how I want to talk around this and stall out.

There's a very long pause, and then Taylor's bugs spell out, Go away, Oni Lady.

I roll my eyes, then shrug, turn to leave, and then have a thought cross my mind and look over my shoulder at the bugs. "You doing okay on defenses? Like, the city is less of a madhouse than I was expecting, but the phasing assholes are dangerous and, y'know, Simurgh means you can't trust people." I pause, consider saying I'm an exception, then decide no because that's manipulative BS and not necessarily true anyway. I don't feel Simurgh'd, and kinda have reason to think I might be immune at this point, but I'm honestly not sure how I'd tell for sure. So instead I continue with, "Like, I doubt you'll take some of my spare munitions, but I'm not sure how you'd stop one of the phasing assholes."

There's a very long pause, so long I shrug and start to turn to leave, when suddenly Taylor's bugs flurry into words. Oh, okay? I wait, kinda wondering if she's agitated, 'cause the bugs seem jittery to me, taking a while to get into formation, but still not sure how to take any given bug behavior. Eventually, she manages; I already killed two.

I grin and enthuse. "Oh, wow, that's good! I think they're the..." The message breaks up, which isn't how she's been handling this so far. She normally only breaks up the message once I'm done talking. No new message forms, and I trail off. "... most dangerous things here?"

There is a very, very long pause, and then it crosses my mind that people often feel that killing people is bad even when it's in self-defense against actual attempts on their own life and whatnot, and that Taylor in particular was, in canon, starting things out thinking things like that she was going to hell for leaving people terrified but unharmed during a bank robbery. I mean, fanfic tends to make her alarmingly heartless from step one, and Taylor did inure herself to such stuff relatively quickly in canon, but, uh, I think the first step in that process was cutting out Lung's eyes during Bakuda's rampage. The one I didn't engage in.

I think Taylor might have been trying to reach out for empathy and emotional support because she felt horribly bad for killing people, so desperate for such that even though she was just bringing up me being the Cornell Bomber she reached out to me anyway, and I promptly went 'great job!' over the thing she was moping about and wanting atonement or something for.

Fuck.

I wait a long, long minute to see if Taylor is going to write out anything else. Nothing is forthcoming.

"I'll... come back tomorrow," I say, already backing out the door.

The bugs don't do anything before I'm out of sight.

 

[Ghoul King]

5.3

What I'd like to do is assemble a magical anti-brainwashing flashbang, where I'd throw it at Taylor and it would cancel whatever the Simurgh has done to her, like a curse being broken. If this were a video game or children's cartoon, I would almost certainly be able to do so.

In life-as-I-knew-it, that was a ridiculous prospect that had no possibility of being real. Personality changes are complex biochemical stuff, and while yes if you do something like put a shot of adrenaline in someone there will be a dramatic effect in how they behave that fades as they metabolize the adrenaline, you can't grab someone who's had cancer crushing them down for years, zap it with chemotherapy, and have every psychological and biochemical effect instantly vanish.

In life-as-I-now-know-it... it's actually possible. I find it unlikely, both because Endbringer-favoring rules mean the 'game' is going to be disinclined to make it easy to cancel out the Simurgh in such a manner, and because it'd require a whole bunch of hoops to jump through in terms of defining what constitutes 'external mental influence' or whatever and then deciding what canceling that out even means, but it is actually possible the shards might've decided to pretend there's technology for magically undoing brainwashing. (For... some reason. A lot of powers are pretty confusing in the context of the final explanation...)

And if I am an Abaddon missile, I might not be fully bound by 'lol fuck you that's an Endbringer'. If Abaddon is indeed using me as a kind of assassin, he's not quite playing by the same rules as the other Entities. Probably has to play pretty close to avoid the other shards refusing to play nice with his shard(s), but there's slightly more wiggle room, maybe, than if I was an Eden or Scion cape.

So I burn the afternoon on seeing if I can get my shard to cooperate on such.

Early attempts are just me staring at my tools and resources, rolling around possible angles on the details through my head and having absolutely nothing result from it. No Tinker fugue, no ideas leaping to mind for how to get started, no feeling I need to run out and find some mercury or whatever before I can get started.

I take a break and watch some cartoons, kind of hoping something will inspire me. Maybe I just need to think about anti-brainwashing differently, and something will get me thinking in the right direction. I even manage to find an episode of the current-generation Protectorate cartoon -as opposed to an older one about what currently gets called the Triumvirate plus, you know, Hero- that's about dealing with Masters and whatnot.

Unfortunately, in spite of the edutainment undertone to the episode, inspiration doesn't strike. It's actually a bit of a downer episode, explicitly spelling out that you can't assume that killing -well, depowering is what the episode depicts, but it's pretty obvious this is 'we're talking about murder, but to children, so we can't directly talk about murder'- a Master will cure their victims. Which makes sense to me given that Heartbreaker being left alone for so long makes perfect sense if no one has any confidence that killing him will undo the brainwashing on his victims, for example.

I'm not sure how to take it being a bit of a downer episode. I distinctly recall edutainment tended to turn me off in part because it was irritatingly prone to insisting on relentless cheer even when attempting to talk about dark topics, and not like 'we're being cheerful about abuse because we're confident we can help you learn how to make it stop', but just this weird tone-deaf attitude that came across like they didn't want to depress the kiddies while talking about depressing things and for some reason thought this wouldn't, for example, make certain dark topics seem not so bad. This edutainment episode deviating from that... is this a Bet culture thing -well. Hm. Omicron probably isn't real, but it does occur to me Aleph is right there and canon made it clear Aleph was supposed to be very nearly identical to the real world, aside the recent connection to Bet and a small handful of capes existing. Maybe a lot of my memories of Omicron are pulled from Aleph? That would be consistent with the nudge-nudge-wink-winking about Aleph being Omicron...

Kinda irritating I don't have an internet connection. I could, like, look up if Steve Irwin died to a stingray in Aleph vs having a radically different life in Bet, compared to my memories. Get some samples of edutainment in Aleph vs edutainment in Bet. That kind of thing. This is a theory I could totally do some testing on right now if only I wasn't quarantined!

Ugh.

Anyway, point is that... well, now that I think about it, power mechanics would kinda imply that my portal blocking bombs would probably at least temporarily disrupt certain Master powers, since probably some powers enforce their mental influence via ongoing portal affects. Unfortunately, the Simurgh explicitly doesn't operate on that kind of mechanic, she's making tweaks to your brain combined with precog to see that you'll be in X place at Y time so if she nudges you to do Z thing she can produce K result. And this is one of the things consistent between canon and fanon, which particularly stands out given how many fanfics downplayed Endbringers; in the stories-as-precog theory, that implies the Simurgh is, in fact, quite consistent on this point. (Endbringers varying their jobbing based on unpredictable precog factors actually makes sense, too, so fanon tending to downplay them is only maybe weird in my theory from the ones that had people killing them)

So actually watching the cartoon has firmed up that it's really unlikely I'll be able to build something to just... wipe away the Simurgh manipulation.

So basically the more mechanically plausible route is to try to brainwash Taylor myself.

I fucking hate the idea, but force myself to see if my power will let me do that kind of shit, and the answer is... sorta? Kinda? Ish? I've got ideas floating in my head for bombs that affect behavior, yes, and not just the Super Depression Bombs, but most of them are short-term manipulation. And mostly in the direction of either disabling victims, or driving them to be violent lunatics. Because conflict drive, I guess. The two long-term ideas that come to mind aren't much better; one makes victims mildly hallucinate for, like, months, and my impression is the hallucinations are the 'monsters are stalking me to eat me' sort, not the 'duuuuude I'm tripping' sort. The other permanently wipes people's sex drive out, which... what the fuck, power? That's not useful in combat! That's maybe even anti-useful in combat!

I make a mental note of it regardless, just in case, like, somebody creeps on me and won't take no for an answer and they're somebody I wouldn't mind effectively neutering for life, but what the hell.

Part of my idle thoughts are on Contessa. Like, there's a part of me that's kind of wishing she'd just show up and tell me how to handle this Taylor situation, that she's conveniently the right kind of bullshit for that to be something I can be confident will work out, etc. This is hard, and having an answer made for me would be convenient.

On the other hand, above and beyond my narrative issues with Contessa's existence in Worm, I'm not a fan of how she's a huge volition drain, which remains relevant even now that this is my life. Like, if PtV actually works as canon indicates, and you trust Contessa and have access to her, technically speaking basically any time you want to do a thing the optimal course of action is to ask her to PtV a solution for you and then do it. That just sounds draining and miserable.

Eventually, grumbling to myself about what a fucking waste of time all this is and how much I hate it, I bang a toe on one of my buckets of Simurgh dust and realize I'm a fucking moron.

I already thought about how Endbringer shit interferes with precognition, and that the Simurgh dust has a lot of arbitrary Endbringer immunities enforced even though its 'natural' physics properties are shit. I literally thought about the possibility of cladding myself in a suit of the stuff to become immune to precog. And the Simurgh's Rube Goldberg Machine plots are reliant on its precog.

I don't have a way of undoing whatever alterations have been made to Taylor's personality, not really, not unless she conveniently had no sex drive prior to the Simurgh's arrival and for some fucking reason was given one and fat chance of that, but I can certainly at least take a shot at interfering with her plots. Hell, with all the Simurgh dust in the area, I may have already substantially fucked with whatever she was planning!

… holy shit, is that why Taylor is being bizarrely reasonable instead of hating me on sight? Did I completely unintentionally derail whatever Simurgh plot was supposed to happen to Taylor just by getting Eidolon to do the resonance thing at her?

I mean, I'm still going to collect some of the stuff on my way to checking up on her and... talk her into putting some in her costume or something, but hot damn. Hell, maybe this is the real reason my time here has been bizarrely peaceful compared to, like, the Travelers' Arc; maybe the Simurgh does set up dominoes so roving gangs of murderhobos get into constant fights and shit, only her own dust being everywhere in the city completely fucked all her precog plans and she couldn't properly plan around it before leaving.

I can't stop grinning as I go to sleep.

-----------------------------------------------------------------​

I'm still grinning when I set out to check on Taylor anew.

Having had time to sleep on it, it did cross my mind that I haven't actually confirmed the Simurgh dust is precog-blocking, and I'm not sure how I'd test that per se. Perhaps more importantly, I have basically no way of confirming that the Simurgh is negatively impacted by her own body interfering with precog or the like, and arguably it'd be kinda dumb for the Simurgh's body to block her own precog so arguably it'd be more reasonable to assume she doesn't care...

… but Entities explicitly do some pretty dumb stuff, and there's also that whole thing about the Endbringers only activating so Eidolon can feel relevant.

I mean, I'm not sure anymore whether that's really a thing or not, given that, among other points, PtV is involved in the scene it comes up in, but the point is that there are points for and against this working the way I'm thinking and I've already studied the dust enough to be reasonably confident it won't give anyone cancer or anything.

Also, if it does, it's way the hell too late anyway.

Point being, I'm less convinced this theory is correct, but still pleased enough to be grinning as I make my way to Taylor's hidey-hole.

… my mood sours a little when it occurs to me the mag-bomb turning Simurgh dust blue might be a reference to that thing I remember of people referring to the Simurgh as the Smurf. It could just be a bizarre coincidence, but... Simurgh. And if it's not a bizarre coincidence, that indicates the Simurgh did rummage around in my skull and extract some actual info, which further indicates I actually am a Simurgh bomb.

Ugh. She dies first. I'm tired of the paranoia.

I mean, that was the plan anyway, but originally it was because I have an easier time seeing how I'd blow her up while she's dormant, where Behemoth I'm not sure how I'd deliver devices to him, and even less sure how I'd ensure they survived long enough to activate. Leviathan isn't a lot better, especially because he's lightning-fast and so there's no guarantee he won't just dodge or something if I do get something delivered to him.

But now she dies first to also stop the doubts.

Regardless, I'm in an overall decent mood when I get to Taylor, with the only incident on the way being me skirting around a grocery store I was intending to raid because I hear a couple of people inside, so when Taylor promptly asks me Why did you do it? I'm only mildly irritated. Mostly confused. Still a bit irritated; why do people expect me to immediately know what 'it' is, having not specified a topic? But much less than I'd usually be.

I set down the buckets of Simurgh dust before talking. Oof. The stuff is heavy. "You're going to have to be more specific. I'm not a mindreader."

I don't like how one of the buckets is sitting, the floor a little warped so it's not really sitting flat, so I move it a little with my foot while waiting for Taylor to clarify. Cornell University.

… oh. Great. This topic. I shrug. "I already said; I couldn't say. I don't remember that time." And canon didn't depict it with an Interlude, or really go into detail at all. Nor did any fanfics I remember, for that matter.

There's a moment while, I guess, Taylor processes that? It's briefer than some of these pauses have been, but still noticeable. Not... entirely sure what I'm picking up on here, actually. Something about the way the bugs move, presumably. Like a Case 53?

I just kinda stare at the bugs on the wall, blindsided. I wasn't expecting Taylor to just accept me saying this, it never crossed my mind one could draw a comparison between the hole in my memory and Case 53s showing up with their history missing and all. Shit, I'm so used to rolling my eyes at fiction using the memory loss plot while everybody just blithely accepts the dubious assertion it never occurred to me that parahumans with memory loss is enough of a known thing that I might've been able to say... almost the truth, kind of the truth, however you want to put that, and have people believe it. Oh, uh, talking. "That comparison never occurred to me, but, uh, yeah, actually, kinda."

There's a much longer pause, and I think I know what I'm picking up on; the old message is just being left standing, aside a slow breakdown from the bugs not holding completely still, where what I've interpreted as 'not a pause' has been Taylor breaking up the message, like, the instant I'm done talking. I think. Gonna pay attention, anyway. So you don't know why?

I shrug. "I mean, I... didn't I already say something about bad grades, the first day? Second day? I forget. I'm guessing from contextual stuff I learned later and memories of how family dynamics work and all that my parents probably did that stereotypical China-and-Japan-and-some-other-places thing of demanding I push myself to be the best, so that getting a C or whatever was emotionally the end of the world. But I don't actually know."

You don't sound broken up.

I shrug again. "I don't know. I just don't. That's my best guess, and that's probably as good as it's going to get."

Another pause, and yeah, I think I'm right about what I'm picking up on. Do you regret it?

I stare at the bugs for a couple of seconds, wondering what the hell is up with Taylor that she's stuck on this topic and hasn't, like, bothered to ask about the buckets or anything. Then I shrug again. "I don't even know what happened. I can't give a meaningful answer to that question." I mean, the answer would probably be 'no' even if I did know what happened, not only because I'm mostly sure that wasn't me at all in any meaningful sense of the word, but also because I rarely regret much of anything. If pre-me Bakuda was actually basically indistinguishable from post-me Bakuda, I most likely, in taking Cornell hostage, would've recognized the possibility of undesirable results and considered them acceptable risks.

To be honest, thinking it out, if it were me making the decisions, probably the bad grade or whatever would've come from an obviously racist or sexist professor where this was the tipping point after a lifetime of frustration regarding such stuff. I have difficulty imagining turning to such extreme results if the anger wasn't at society as a whole. And it would neatly explain running into the arms of a racist gang...

Fuck, now I'm not so sure pre-me Bakuda is necessarily that divergent in personality from current-me Bakuda.

… though she was outright sadistic in canon, and I just cannot relate to that mentality at all, so that's at least one big difference.

Oh, uh, Taylor is texting me again. Go away, Oni Lady.

…

sigh

And here I'd been thinking we were maybe kind of hitting it off a bit or something. She was asking questions, expressing interest in my history and all!

Fine, whatever, it's not like the time limit is harsh here. If we stay roughly on canon's timeline, it's, what, three years or so before Jack Slash manages to provoke Scion? Actually, I forget, did Jack hear that prediction and so decide to set off Scion? Because if so we're pretty off the rails of that at this point. Though... I suppose Dinah could've escaped and provide a prediction that sets off Jack... fuck, I don't remember if this is a canon plotpoint or not, and it's kind of important.

Whatever, focus on today's agenda thing!

I gesture at the buckets of Simurgh dust. "Not just yet, I wanted to say you should consider, like, getting yourself a suit and putting this dust inside of it."

There's a sufficiently long pause while the bugs stay on Go away, Oni Lady, that I'm starting to wonder if Taylor is completely done with me and not even going to try to pretend to be polite, but eventually they reform into, Why? and I have this rather vivid impression that it's an incredulous sort of why. I'm not sure if I'm picking up on something subtle or if this is some kind of mental bias. I am a bit used to people not getting what I'm trying to say...

I grin. "Because it's Simurgh dust, my testing has shown the whole thing with Endbringers no-selling powers and shit still applies, so it should block precognitives and whatnot! Which, uh, might include blocking the Simurgh's own precog, though I'm overall doubting that theory at this point."

That stuff is everywhere.

I stare for a moment, not sure what the hell Taylor is trying to say. "Um, yes? Obviously?"

Why the buckets, then?

I raise a finger, then realize that's actually a pretty good point. "Uh, I wasn't really thinking now that you mention it. I keep putting the stuff in buckets to bring back to my place so I have more of it to test just in case I do manage to blow up or teleport out or whatever some of it. Force of habit."

There's another notable pause. Have you managed anything?

I heave a legitimately frustrated sigh. "Turning it blue, and turning it invisible, because those are both so useful to be doing to an Endbringer." I make a face. "I'm really hoping the blue is a stupid coincidence and not the Simurgh deliberately messing with me."

There's an even longer pause. She's inactive, though.

… oh. Oh, right. Uh. Crap, 'Endbringers are jobbing' is one of those things I just take as a given at this point, I sometimes forget that in canon that was, like... Legend made a point about underestimating Leviathan being a bad idea, so there was some in-universe awareness of the jobbing, but the fight with Behemoth was the first time anybody aside I guess maybe Cauldron really got the degree to which Endbringers were more powerful than they'd seemed. And I don't recall whether people really viewed that as evidence of the Endbringers jobbing. Like, I took it that way, I remember other readers took it that way, but I'm not sure canon Taylor or anyone else looked back and went 'wow, the Endbringers are blatantly holding themselves back'.

And while the audience blatantly sees the Simurgh do... something... I forget the details, something about blocking a signal with her body so Dragon doesn't get some piece of info? Or to scramble it coincidentally into the no-look code, so-

…

Oh my fucking god in canon the Simurgh tried to sabotage Dragon's understanding of, like, power potential or whatever it was... I think it was Panacea figuring something out... christ, 'Dragon as Abbadon missile that the Simurgh opposes' makes even more sense than I was thinking earlier. I've got to get in contact with Dragon at some point, figure out, like... if she is an Abaddon missile, does she know? Did she have that built in, or what?

… derail. The point is, the audience got blatant evidence of the Simurgh doing stuff even while 'dormant', but there was no suggestion anywhere in canon that anyone, even Cauldron, was the slightest bit aware of these shenanigans. So... uh, hm. Not sure how to respond to this.

Fuckit. "I really really doubt that 'not currently attacking any cities' is the same thing as 'not doing anything at all'." I mean, I doubt it because outside-context knowledge, mostly, but honestly in retrospect I'm not really sure why everyone in canon seemed to take it as a given they were totally doing nothing? That just seems an obviously questionable assumption. Not that it was a particularly explicit assumption, admittedly, but still...

… you think the Simurgh is messing with you while inactive?

I suspect skepticism. I also suspect this is a time it actually would be useful to have Taylor talking with, you know, her voice. She was, like, low-affect in canon from the bug-pushing thing, not no-affect. And sometimes people aren't being skeptical even though their word choice is stereotypical skepticism. "No? Kinda? Like, it's a dumb possibility, but I also helped arrange for the closest thing to death that's happened to her so far, so if she's petty and emotional at all it's not outside the realm of possibility, and I haven't thought of a better explanation for why magnetizing everything would turn Endbringer material temporarily blue. It could just be a dumb coincidence, blueshift or something else physics-y I'm not thinking of or not aware of."

You what?

… um, I'm not sure what she's reacting to. "What, what?"

Her bugs shuffle around in that manner I'm still kinda wanting to take as agitation before she formulates her next response. Closest thing to death?

I stare blankly for a second before the thought connects to the fact that I have not, in fact, mentioned talking to Eidolon, it wouldn't have been visible, and Taylor probably doesn't have TV or the like and so wouldn't have seen Eidolon kindly crediting me for indirectly helping. Uh. Whoops. "The dust everywhere is kinda-sorta my fault. I tried a resonance-based bomb, she blocked it in her troll-y 'coincidence' way, and I'm not really sure why but Eidolon asked me what I was doing and tried to do the resonance thing with his own power and it resulted in most of her mass sloughing off as dust."

The maybe-agitation thing happens really, really extremely for like... forty seconds? I'm considering asking if she's seizing or something and I need to do something when the bugs form a new message. You talked to Eidolon? Eidolon?!

… oh. Uh. He is a celebrity here, isn't he. And Taylor was something of a cape fan in canon. Like, she'd gotten kinda cynical by the start of canon, but while she wasn't blatantly awestruck by talking with Armsmaster she did stop to think about having Armsmaster underwear as a kid and all. And I seem to recall her talking up the Triumvirate in a more reverent manner... wow. Um. Okay.

"Yyyyeeeesss? It was an Endbringer attack, extenuating circumstances, yadda, but sure, yes, that is a thing that happened." I have no idea how to handle this. At least Taylor is talking to me of her own volition?

The bugs resume doing the maybe-agitation thing for a bit before Taylor spells out a new message. What's he like?

Uh. God. I always hate this kind of question. I shrug. "More pleasant than I was expecting. More patient. Uh. Calmer? I guess I was expecting more nerves, what with the Endbringer battle?" Then I shrug again. "But y'know not really representative of him in day-to-day life. For all I know he, like, was using a power to keep focused during the fight." Or drugs. I wouldn't put it past what little we got about canon Eidolon to turn to drugs to try to keep himself focused and stuff. He had a notable edge of desperation to his character.

You were expecting Eidolon to be unpleasant? That came fast. Hm. Not sure what that means.

Hm. I'm not sure how to respond to this, either. 'cause yeah I was expecting him to be unpleasant, though I'm a bit annoyed Taylor jumped to that framing -I could just as easily have meant that I was expecting nice and got NICE- but I was expecting that because he's a member of Cauldron and Cauldron is awful. And I really, really don't want to be bringing Cauldron into conversation so soon. 'Sounds more reasonable when I think it out than I expected it to' isn't 'obviously Taylor will take me at my word when I appear to put on my tinfoil hat'. Canon Taylor wasn't exactly unaware of people spinning conspiracy theories. There's a reason the tinfoil hat terminology exists in the fandom.

(Ignoring the part where I'm suspecting the fandom was made up by Abaddon... weird thought, put like that)

Whatever, let's be... kind of honest... I guess. "Not specifically no-" This is me lying. Sort of, given he seemed essentially pleasant in canon if you ignore being an in-the-know Cauldron member. Okay, not lying, but being misleading. "-but celebrities are people too, and being good at being pleasant in public for events isn't the same thing as being a genuinely nice person. Someone who is consistently pleasant in public is probably a good actor, even if acting isn't literally their job. And capes are all about keeping secrets from the public, so any successful long-term cape who isn't, like, New Wave or something, you kind of have to assume their apparent behavior is at least somewhat non-representative." All thoughts I've had before, broadly speaking, but not thoughts that were on my mind when Eidolon was in my face.

There's enough of a delay before Taylor responds, without the bugs doing the stuff that I keep wanting to interpret as agitation, that I get the impression this all honestly never crossed Taylor's mind before. Pessimistic.

Uuuugh, I hate one-word responses. And this is, like, comparable to a one-word response in a forum, since there's no tone or body language or the like to hint at the intended meaning. Is she giving a peevish response where she can't disagree and doesn't like it, but isn't holding it against me, just kind of unhappy with a realization about the wider world? Is she dismissing my view by calling it pessimistic? Or is she, potentially consistent with canon Taylor being a bit cynical, using that as a weird sort of praise, where the attitude being pessimistic is comment-worthy because it being pessimistic strikes her as a more realistically plausible viewpoint?

At least the fact that I'm wearing my mask means probably my irritation isn't showing too plainly to Taylor. Assuming she isn't detecting my irritation via antennae picking up smells. Ugh. Whatever, fine. "I guess." Actually- "So are your cramps doing better? Crap, I didn't think to look for more chocolate on the way over." Too buoyed by my kinda dumb theory about the Simurgh being blocked by her own dust. Then a thought occurs to me. "Actually, wait, are you okay on food? It's been a few weeks and my impression is you haven't checked out the drops up North."

There's another notable pause, bugs not moving much. Cramps better. Food situation fine.

Hmmm. Not sure if she's being curt with me 'cause irritation or just 'cause it's a pain to write out words with bugs. "You sure?" I ask, then remember to clarify. "About the food, I mean. Seriously, I'm set, it's not gonna kill me to keep you fed." I'm not too worried, I'm pretty sure I saw her ranging about way back when and all so it's not like she's been hanging out here for more than a month and... literally eating her own bugs or something. Pretty sure. But still would prefer to check. Even aside the villain thing, I've always had the impression Taylor is very reticent about sharing anything that could be viewed as a weakness. And not just in canon, like even a lot of those fanfics where Taylor immediately outs herself to her dad that always felt hugely out of character still tended to have her keeping a bunch of secrets from him, with those secrets tending to be things where sharing them could be seen as revealing weakness. So in the precog scenario, the only way that's not a personality trait of hers is if my facts are correct but the way I'm trying to explain them is wrong.

I'm fine. Go away.

… well, at least she's not calling me Oni Lady. I'll call that progress.

I give a wave. "Okay then, just keep in mind that eating roaches is a terrible idea. I have no idea how safe it is to eat other bugs, you'd probably know better than me." Then I pause, remembering something. "Though I did leave you the scrubbing bubble grenades." Wait. "No, never mind, you wouldn't be able to get their insides germ-free."

There's no response before I've turned and left, and I'm once again kind of irritated at not having any idea how to take it. God, was this why people found Taylor unlikable in canon? My recollection is she doesn't use swarm-speech and so on much, but I'm realizing she didn't use them much relative to her 'screentime'. I have no idea how much she used them relative to face-to-face interactions.

Maybe it is.

----------------------------------------------------​

I still haven't had Cauldron get back to me or managed to trick my power into giving me a way to undo Simurgh personality alterations. At least, not anything I recognize as such. I suppose the claymore that induces a recklessly violent rage may somehow undo Simurgh mind surgery. It's not like I have test subjects. Or more precisely before/after points.

I write a new note asking Cauldron for advice on de-Simurghing people, less because I expect a response and more because it takes nearly no time so why the hell not. I mean, now that I've remembered that regular therapy is apparently successful enough that in canon people were let out after months or years of therapy, I actually have some meaningful hope there'll be an answer that isn't 'have the exact right counter-power that probably doesn't exist because fuck you', but I'm still doubting Cauldron is going to give me a response based on their lack of such so far. Aside the fucking smiley face. Why? What is that about?

Nor has my attempts to blow up Simurgh dust borne real fruit. I tried a few more things after leaving Taylor yesterday, but nothing interesting happened. The closest to interesting was thinking to try a scrubbing bubble grenade, having nothing seem to happen, then deliberately mixing in some mildly moldy paper and trying again... and the mildly moldy paper was protected by the Simurgh dust. Even the bits sticking a bit out of the top were still completely gross. Which tells me the Endbringer Fuck You effect is more generous than I'd been previously assuming, as far as how far out it says lolno.

That's a pain.

Regardless, for today's trip to Taylor's... building, I guess... I made a point of trying to look for more chocolate. Failed to find any, mind, but I did at least remember this time. Candy is mostly gone from shelves everywhere I know a store is, at this point. Last I checked there was one general store with some candy untouched, probably because it was inexplicably deep inside the automotive section, but that was also a week ago.

To be honest, I have no idea how I'm handling today's trip. Taylor is understandably not eager to have a racist university-kabooming supervillain as her best friend, and while I'm basically assuming Taylor is important somehow at this point it's not like I know how. In canon, she brute-forced an army into fighting Scion. Fanfic mostly never got far enough to establish anything like that, or went lazy and just recreated the Panacea+Taylor combo, just different details in how the combo made Taylor overpowered. So... very limited information. And 'we need to hack Taylor into hacking everyone else into being a united army' doesn't jive with the whole 'too many fanfics focus on alt-power Taylors' thing, so while that's certainly an option to keep in mind it seems unlikely to be The Reason.

Which means I don't even have any idea how I'd want to handle the whole long-term... shaping or whatever. Like, let's say I try administering therapy to Taylor to undo Simurgh Shenanigans, and quite reasonably select to get her less violence-happy in an attempt to counteract the Simurgh's effects, only to down the line conclude Peacenik Taylor is exactly the wrong personality for The Plan. There's enough unknowns and weird possibilities due to powers it's very hard for me to clearly pick out any good axioms to pursue. The only probably good one is also the least helpful and most obviously manipulative: trying to get her siding with me as something of a default.

I console myself with the knowledge that this at least means I don't have to worry about my Real Intentions showing on my face or something and thus ruining my plans.

It's not a very consoling thought, but black humor isn't supposed to be consoling so whatever.

With the plan to get Taylor anti-cramp food a bust, I just continue collecting tinker-worthy junk. Which is a weird experience, honestly. Sometimes I look at a thing and have Ideas and it kind of broadly makes sense to me, like finding a portable radio and having thoughts about signals and similar. Other times I'm picking through a room and on my way out I notice I have a plastic shovel or something in my pile I don't remember grabbing, then it vanishes at some point while I'm tinkering, and I have zero clue what I used it for. I'm increasingly suspecting my shard isn't trying very hard to hold me to believable mechanics, and am left to wonder if this level of sloppiness is normal for tinker shards or if it's evidence I am, in fact, working with an Abaddon shard that isn't playing the same game as the rest of the shards.

In any event, I don't hurry particularly, what with the lack of a plan and time pressure being so distant and all, and end up showing up at Taylor's building sometime in... the afternoon, I'm guessing by the sun's position, but it's not like I've got a watch on me. I accidentally cannibalized the last one I pulled from a store like three days ago, after all. Stupid tinker fugues.

Taylor doesn't immediately start harassing me to go away, or demand to know if I was joking about the bug-eating, or whatever. That's sufficiently unusual compared to prior trips I'm... well, worried is maybe a strong word, but certainly very suddenly on edge. It could just be that she's asleep, which would be a little weird but not necessarily a concerning scenario, but it could also be that she's been attacked, or that she's finally fed up with me and fled and I'll have to find her again only now she'll be trying to not be found by me in particular, or that she's caught some illness and I'll have to figure out how to help her get through it.

There's still plenty of roaches in the area, but I'm not sure how meaningful that is. She could've taken all the roaches here and then new ones moved in, for example. I consider calling out, but that seems pretty obviously incorrect: if Taylor is present and awake, she should already know I'm here, whereas if she's not I'm just risking revealing myself to anyone else that might be in the area. Given one possible reason for Taylor to be absent is the presence of a threat, whether having taken her out or just caused her to decide to leave... I'd rather be cautious.

As such, I quietly abandon my wagon of tinkertech fodder before carefully easing my way through the building. I decide to go upstairs first: easier to throw down than up, so if I manage to sneak a bit before stumbling into anything being higher up is probably better, overall.

I really should get around to, like, recreating how my costume had all those hooks for my grenades. That was so convenient. Right now I'm just carrying a few in a purse I found lying around, abandoned and already emptied out by, I'm assuming, looters, and I haven't exactly made my grenades easily identified by touch. Though I suspect that latter point is still an issue with the hooks, but I can at least remember positions there. Not so much when they're all jumbled into a shapeless purse.

In any event, I do my best to avoid having the stairs creak as I go up. I'm not as successful as I'd like, but I've noticed on prior visits that sometimes the building creaks for no obvious reason. I think it's in response to the wind blowing, but it's possible it's just Taylor? Regardless, hopefully it means if someone is present they'll have already written off the creaking as non-indicative.

Nothing has happened by the time I've gotten to the top of the stairs.

Well, aside me realizing I've been misinterpreting this building. With everything I'd seen of the building on the lower floor, I'd been interpreting this as the kind of apartment building working stiffs lived in, possibly working stiffs who sometimes struggled to pay rent sort of thing. Now that I'm a floor up, I'm realizing I wasn't properly accounting for the whole post-disaster thing, that possibly Taylor has been the only person here for weeks, everybody who left did so in a hurry, and the most accessible floor would be the quickest to be trashed by looters and whatnot.

This is not that kind of a building. This is the kind of building people with pricey jobs live alone in, or that a kid going to college might live in if one or both parents makes good money. There's potted plants on freestanding greco-roman pillar things, paintings hung on the hall walls, and when I go to poke inside one of the apartments with its door laying open I can see that all the furniture is very new, both in the sense of being modern iterations instead of a fridge made in the sixties but also in the sense that it's not stuff that's personally seen a decade of wear and tear. The TV is a flat-screen hanging on a wall, and I'm pretty sure Earth Bet is like... fuckit, like Omicron, let's just stick with that, point is I'm pretty sure this isn't just me having failed to notice that flat-screens are already the normal default thing in Bet. I mean, it's a busted flat-screen, looking like someone smashed a rock into the center -I can see a rock below it, anyway- but still a flat-screen hanging on a wall. There's a goddamn fireplace, too, though admittedly we're far enough north that may be less a fanciness thing and more a 'I don't want to freeze to death in winter' thing. I can't tell at a casual glance whether this is one of those stupid decorative fireplaces with no chimney or an actual factual fireplace, and I don't care enough to investigate deeper. (And also don't know enough to guess whether this being on the second floor out of, uh, eight or something, makes a fireplace obviously decorative by virtue of being mechanically impossible to be a real fireplace)

Checking other apartments shows this isn't anomalous. Some apartments have clearly been lived in for a solid decade or the like, not every TV is a flat-screen on a wall, etc, but most apartments have at least one gaming system hooked up somewhere, multiple TVs are common... point is, each apartment has several thousand dollars of crap just lying around, and it's not several thousand dollars of stuff accumulated over a few decades.

I am now intensely weirded out by Taylor having holed up here, and by Bentley having died here. Did Brian have a really nice apartment, much nicer than I'd realized? I do remember Taylor thinking it was a pretty nice apartment, but Taylor's home and school were sufficiently shithole-y that I tended to interpret her interpretations as 'my god, it's not a hole in the wall that will kill me any second now, what is this wizardry' rather than 'nice apartment by the standards of a well-paid middle class individual who think of themselves as poor because they can't buy literally everything they want'.

If this is the apartment building Brian was living in... holy fucking shit, how much money did Coil have? I mean, I'm trapped in an exclusion zone and Cauldron is covering my necessities so I'm not sitting here going 'wow, I should've tried to figure out if I could steal some of his assets after I got him killed', but jeeze the Undersiders were one of his lesser catspaws and they already had the goddamn loft!

I'm so weirded out I actually forget for a minute that I'm up here out of concern something is wrong, but then I startle at what sounds an awful lot like media representations of distant gunfire. It takes me a minute to re-orient myself and... yeah, I'm pretty sure that's coming from the gate area in the North. Probably not a concern, but I resume focusing on stealth and searching for if there's a (local) danger, reminded of my original mission here.

I also make a mental note to raid this place for tinker supplies. There are a lot of abandoned electronics in this building, jeez.

Eventually I've swept the second floor without finding anything of note aside a brief scare with a human skeleton. Yeah, uh, a skeleton picked mostly-clean. Not entirely, there's still enough connective tissue that bits and pieces of it are holding together in the right-ish formations instead of just falling away from each other, but yikes, that's not something I was expecting to see here.

It's not until I'm halfway through scoping out the third floor that it crosses my mind that part of why I'm disturbed is that Taylor has kept Bentley's corpse as un-rotten as she can, and meanwhile this human body has been completely cleared out in a lot less time than it takes for a human body to naturally decompose that far. I don't know the number off my head, but I do know that a human body doesn't go to a goddamn skeleton in a couple of months unless you're, like, in a rain forest or something. Some place warm and humid so mold and all can go mad. Currently, Brockton Bay is not such a place.

This doesn't have to be an indication that Taylor deliberately fed a human corpse to her bugs at maximum speed while carefully preserving a friend's dog's body.

But it could be.

I still haven't found an intruder or heard anything new by the time I start on the fourth floor. The distant gunfire or whatever it was has already stopped, and I've made mental notes of more tinkertech supplies to collect, but that's it. I'm starting to suspect Taylor has just run off and I'm going to have to find her again, not to mention if she has fled she'll probably be actively avoiding me and not receptive to further conversation... that'd be a pain.

I keep searching, though. Powers mean a lot is possible, and normal inferences can be deeply wrong. It's not like I'm having great success with my tinkering, either, so I don't have particularly better ways to spend my time right now.

I notice pretty rapidly there are a lot of spiderwebs in the rooms. Like, there's been spiderwebs in rooms throughout the city as I've wandered around, but this isn't the usual 'humans aren't preventing spiders from moving in' sort of concentration of webs, this is more like what I've seen in a basement nobody had done much of anything with for years. Only much more extreme, more like what I've seen in some arachnophobic movies.

That's suggestive of a few different things, in that it was kinda a standard thing in canon for Taylor to build up spider counts for her costumes and oh goddammit I just realized they're empty.

So okay that narrows things down a lot. The two primary scenarios are that Taylor is around, but has pulled, like, all her spiders to... fend off a threat, or something... or that Taylor has pulled up stakes and left. And I still haven't heard signs of fighting.

I sigh to myself and drastically reduce my efforts to be sneaky, speeding up. The building isn't huge so I'd still rather search up through the floors, but yeah I'm pretty sure Taylor has straight-up left.

Dammit.

-------------------------------------------------------------​

Going up through the apartments continues to see relatively few bugs, yet lots of webbing and other signs of bugs having been present until just recently, while still not hearing any signs of fighting. On the second-highest floor, I finally find a surprisingly pristine apartment, a big space that apparently intrudes up to the next floor, but not even using the maximum potential floorspace, with half or so of it just... empty air.

It doesn't ring any bells for me on sight. I search it more carefully than I've been searching the rest of the building, suspecting this is the room Taylor has actually been living in, and it's certainly... tidy. Shockingly tidy, given Brockton Bay is basically a post-apocalypse zone right now. There's no trash, no sign of bugs getting into things, no bloodstains... one window outside is broken, a blanket set up to minimize air flow in a pretty jury-rigged manner, but aside from that it's sufficiently pristine it's honestly jarring. The broken window is the only reason it would look out of place if you transplanted it into some nice part of some nice town that hadn't been recently hit by the Simurgh.

I'm not entirely sure what to read into that. My impulse, gut response is to think it's a result of Taylor coming here fast and staying here more or less the entire time, relative to the lockdown, but I don't think I really have enough info. Maybe she actually found the place a month after the quarantine started and promptly got obsessive-compulsive about cleaning the place. I don't... think that's the kind of thing Taylor would do... but then again, Simurgh. For all I know Taylor was refusing to interact with me because the Simurgh had already rewired her into being a germaphobe who obsessively washes her hands for thirty minutes after human interaction of any kind.

Probably not that given she seems to have left, but point is... too little info, too major a distortive factor to consider, and also precog can't be fully reliable anyway so I don't know how much to trust my understanding of Taylor's personality, really.

Beyond the eerie cleanliness, the room is... not very useful or informative. There's two different beds, and by smell I'm pretty sure one was in use and the other was not, but just looking at them they look like they were freshly-laundered and put neatly in place by an expert just minutes ago. Which I'd find intensely confusing if I hadn't given Taylor scrubbing bubble grenades, but I did, so it's entirely possible the sheets and whatnot were dirty but not falling apart just days ago and then Taylor applied scrubbing bubble grenades. I'd expect some wear and tear, though...

Anyway, rambling to myself. Back on track: there's a computer, but it doesn't work. I'm not sure whether it's got power and is broken somehow or if it's fine but isn't drawing power, and my power doesn't tell me and I'm not risking a Tinker fugue by trying to dig around inside it to figure it out. Not under these conditions. There's books, and I have no clue what to make of them: books on boxing, books on weightlifting to build muscle, the Art of War, a dozen different martial arts books, books on good parenting...

… wait. Is this Brian's room? It doesn't look anything like what I'd vaguely imagined from the, what, half a chapter spent in it in canon? But the book selection seems kinda sensible for Brian to be reading, and he seemed pretty damn serious about both being a competent villain and about doing right by Aisha, even though he wasn't... very effective at acting as a parent-replacement figure in practice.

…

Okay, that theory would, uh, explain? I guess? Why this room is the one Taylor was hanging in. Sorta? In possibly an intensely creepy way? Like, I'm almost regretting giving Taylor scrubbing bubble grenades because now I have no idea whether the room is an overly-neat shrine to how things used to look by virtue of Taylor obsessively cleaning everything and making sure it was all just so for weeks, or if she's just kinda habitually folding sheets neatly and whatnot and the scrubbing bubble grenades are the only reason it looks like a creepy shrine to Brian.

There's no candles or photos or anything like that, anyway, so it's not a shrine in that sense.

Eventually I give up on combing through the room. I'd been vaguely, in the back of my head, hoping for something like a journal or some such that would act as a clue, but the only journal I found was an extremely minimalist log of the owner's physical conditioning routine. What they ate, how long they jogged, what they weigh now, that kind of thing. No personal references, no goddamn name on it, nothing that would point toward or away from 'is Brian's journal'.

So this is a wash, aside planting more creepy theories in my head. I'm just going to blame the Simurgh for this entire experience and do my best to focus on plans for blowing her up.

The rest of the sweep up through the apartment building is dull, to the point that I'd completely stopped trying to be sneaky by the time I made it to the top floor. More of the same. At least it gave me time to ruminate on the strangeness of the timing of Taylor leaving. If she'd left after I'd failed to be adequately empathic in regards to her probably feeling guilty about killing in self-defense, that wouldn't have surprised me at all. Frustrated me, absolutely, but not surprised me. Our last interaction was downright pleasant, all things considered.

… though now I'm remembering Taylor had a lot of emotional drama relating to not wanting to cozy up to her supervillain teammates and then making a firm resolution to give them a real chance and I'm realizing I honestly don't remember when, exactly, that firm resolution happened. After that firm resolution she seemed to largely drop that 'I can't be friendly with Villains! I might catch their evil cooties or something!" mentality. Before then, though, she was... calling them panic attacks is probably overstating the issue- maybe? Hm. There was kind of a lot of evidence of Taylor being a bit blind to her own emotional state in canon. She certainly didn't dwell on her emotional state as much as one might expect in her internal dialogue. Maybe 'panic attack' is only an overstatement of how she made it sound, not an overstatement of what she was actually experiencing.

So. Uh. Possibly her fangirling over Eidolon and being momentarily friendly to me is why she freaked out? That sounds kinda... ridiculous to me, but I'm honestly not sure if that's 'sounds ridiculous because it's absurd to take it seriously' or 'sounds ridiculous just like all those actual factual lunatic behaviors real people engage in and see no sanity issues with'.

Goddammit.

Plodding down the stairs leads me to wonder about Bentley. The kinda creepy protectiveness toward his corpse indicates that said corpse's current status is probably... some kinda clue...

… so I'm a bit surprised when I get downstairs and the corpse remains exactly where it was, with flies now investigating it, and a roach scampering away as I approach. Well. Pretty strong confirmation Taylor is, in fact, not in the area. I'm... honestly surprised she left the corpse behind, given. I would've left it behind, but I'm less sentimental than most, and most people wouldn't have carefully preserved a friend's dead dog's body.

Hmmm.

---------------------------------------------------------------------​

Absolutely nothing has happened by the time I've rolled the wagon of tinkertech fodder (Some of it loaded up from the apartments I was just searching) back to my lair. Hotel. Base.

… I'm not calling it home.

Anyway, that's... kinda frustrating? Not that I want to be attacked by a crazed supervillain taunting me with having kidnapped Taylor before cackling off into the sunset, but in some sense that would sure be more convenient than having made it back with still no serious clue what happened. Did Taylor decide she hated me more than she wanted to stay at Brian's apartment and protect Bentley's body? Did something happen while I was gone, some kind of cape assault that left no obvious signs of a struggle but still caused Taylor to drag away tons of bugs? In most contexts I'd dismiss such a theory out of hand, but. Parahumans. It could just be a really, really weird power.

Hell, it could be Cauldron. I don't see why they'd go after her now, but I've already been over the point that I genuinely have no clue what's up with Cauldron given they literally can't be their canon selves so really the only reason I'm confident Cauldron is actually a thing is that Eidolon and Alexandria's behavior seemed too in line with Cauldron being a thing. Though I suppose Alexandria might've just been... being stone-faced and unemotional as a mask thing, rather than as a way to try to hide recognizing the Cauldron name when I dropped it...

Whatever, this is frustrating.

A quick scan of my lair finds no obvious signs of Cauldron tampering -wait. No, my most recent note is gone, and all that's left is a... an emoticon, let's go with, of a sad face, with the tears and all. That's twice now they've gone with a comic depiction of a facial expression. Why? There can't be no meaning to it...

Distinctly unhelpful and able to mean basically anything. Ignoring it.

I briefly eyeball the setting sun, wondering if I should go searching for Taylor anyway, but while I actually like nighttime, I suspect going out would be ill-advised in this case. Easier to miss the infected lunatics, and if Taylor is deliberately avoiding me she'll probably be hugely at the advantage in the dark.

So I sigh and set to trying to tinker up some kind of scanner...

-------------------------------------------------------------​

By morning, Cauldron has dropped off new essentials. Most of it is the usual, but the package of toilet paper has a big emoticon thing on a piece of paper taped to its top. This emoticon is a big grinning face, with a free-floating hand giving a thumbs-up. Uuuuh. I really hope this is intended as some kind of practical message instead of emotional encouragement, but I have no goddamn clue what it could mean.

I file that into the ignoring it pile as a result, get everything organized, get myself fed, take a half hour to iron out the kinks in my scanner, and get to testing it.

It's useless.

Of course it's useless.

… okay, that's not entirely fair. What it actually does is send out... 'theta particles', supposedly, but honestly I've increasingly come to suspect my shard is having fun making up nonsense... whatever the case, I can't see it, but pointing the tricorder-looking doohickey at Simurgh dust makes it glow a radioactive blue.

Like, you know, Cherenkov radiation.

Just Simurgh dust, too. So useless.

That particular doohickey goes into my cabinet of 'this is dumb and terrible but maybe I'll find a use for it someday' junk. I'm having trouble imagining a circumstance in which I'd want to generate Cherenkov radiation at will, but for the moment I'm not so short of tinkertech supplies that taking it apart makes more sense.

… aaaaand I just noticed Cauldron jacked some more of my shit from that cabinet. Why do they keep doing that? I've got it fucking labeled! It says right on it that the shit in here is useless or counterproductive junk! Do they think I'm employing reverse psychology?!?

sigh

That utter waste of time done with, I once again take a wheelbarrow out toward what used to be Taylor's place. Might as well start my search where she started from. Might find... tracks? Or something? The Simurgh dust doesn't degrade and isn't moved readily by wind so it's still all over the place, so, you know, maybe Taylor walked through some?

Whatever, it's an idea.

Mood a bit dour already, it doesn't exactly improve when, over the course of the walk, it occurs to me that my historical opinions vis-a-vis how important physical gender is might be yet more points in favor of 'I'm actually an Abaddon-made personality'. Like, it seems awfully convenient to remember having a male body while holding the opinion that switching genders would require an adjustment period but otherwise be no big deal (If one had magic or something to do so without the side effects of surgery and whatnot, but derail) and then ending up in a woman's body. "Oh no," I can just imagine Abaddon condescendingly assuring me, "It's not that you're mildly uncomfortable in your new body because you're a cobbled-together fake personality I hastily assembled after a fairly cursory examination of these 'Hue-Manz' and so I don't know how to make everything connect right, and it's certainly not that the adjustment period is my shard hastily working to resolve problems behind the scenes once you've been installed in a Hue-Manz body. It's totally that you're just having to adjust to a gender change, which you absolutely, positively, believed of your own free will to be not a big deal. Now shut up and get in the meatsuit, Shinji."

If I ever get a chance to confront Abaddon about this garbage, I'm going to be asking for a clear answer on this topic. I don't even care if I am a tomato in a mirror, I just want to know for sure whether my opinions are tomato sauce or opinions I arrived at based on historical interactions that actually happened to someone one could reasonably call me, so I can stop doubting everything like this.

Arriving at... probably Brian's apartment complex, I set the mostly-empty wheelbarrow aside. It's mostly empty so if I forget to retrieve it, whatever, and I don't need it fouling up my efforts to look for tracks. Naturally, now that I'm thinking to look for tracks, the first thing I notice is my own tracks going back and forth. Wow. I didn't realize I'd left such a clear trail. I'm... not thinking of a specific reason to be concerned by that, but it still raises my hackles to notice I didn't notice.

Okay, so, circling around the building... those look like paw prints... that's a bicycle, probably... wait. Maybe she did take a bicycle. Shit. Okay, fine.

I follow that for a bit, but it fairly rapidly detours into some kinda... storefront. Not sure what it was. The sign is too messed-up, and the shelves have been cleaned out. So could be potentially anything. Anything except, like, a pet rock store, I guess. Though Bet probably doesn't have many of those anyway...

… anyway, point is, there's a bicycle in the store, and there's a corpse, and while it's female I can be largely confident it's not Taylor by dint of the shockingly red hair. I mean, I suppose Taylor could have dyed her hair after the Simurgh hit... but I've never seen red hair dye result in a natural look, and more importantly Taylor doing that in a post-apocalypse is a ludicrously unbelievable scenario. Even with Simurgh fuckery.

So then it's back to circling the building, following tracks and trails as I find them, sighing to myself a lot as they invariably dead end or get slotted into my mental 'that keeps going so far I should finish eliminating nearby trails first' list, and wondering if maybe I should just give up and focus on making a rocket that can reach the Simurgh, not get shot down by the USA on the way up, and hopefully do something permanent-like to the Simurgh. Maybe a portal-blocking bomb...

… and then when I'm most of the way done circling, dark letters leap out at me. Initially because I've previously seen that spot from this angle and there weren't any dark letters in that spot, and then in short order because that's bugs. The confusing thing is they're just spelling out, What are you doing? as if nothing of any interest happened.

I stare, shake my head a couple of times, mutter under my breath, "Are you for real?" and after a second call out, "Can you actually hear me?"

Yes.

That was fast. And she didn't bother to 'delete' the prior message, so I guess she really wants to know. Um. What? "You were gone yesterday and had taken all your bugs with you. I figured you'd left because of an attack or something."

Getting food gets spelled out after a relatively small delay. Well. That would explain the lack of evidence of a struggle, I suppose. Kinda... a weird way of responding to what I said...

I sigh to myself again, and start trudging back to the entryway. "So you're fine, then?"

There's a bit of a delay, but Taylor apparently manages to track my view properly and predict where to move bugs because on a new wall I now have line of sight on more bug-text appears. Better than ever. 'kay. That's... anticlimactic...

Fine. Just... fine. Put me through all that stress and have it be totally pointless.

… I should see if I can ask Cauldron for a pair of walky-talkies or the like. Or try harder to talk Taylor into coming to my lair. Or... hmm. No, I really don't think it's practical for me to move to her lair. Mine's more defensible, for one, and for another I have a lot of machinery shit lying around at this point. It would take a... ton of trips, and regardless of the many feats Taylor's bugs had in canon I don't see them helping me cart all this shit back in any kind of timely manner.

Admittedly, I'm not sure... thing is, in canon Taylor was way, way more willing to go out hang out in the Undersiders' lair than she was to let any of them over into her home. There's perfectly reasonable practical arguments one can invoke in that regard, and I'm sure they were at least partially the motive, but I can't help but wonder if there was something a bit more, uh, territorial? I guess? Something in that vein, is the point, underlying her reasons, such that she'd be more hostile to me shifting into her zone of comfort than vice-versa.

… and then I'm derailed from those thoughts and trying to decide what to say by a fucking smiley face drawn on one wall in the entryway. "What the fuck," I say out loud before I can filter my thoughts. I'm tired and have been completely alone for weeks, so sue me, I've fallen a bit out of the habit of censoring my thoughts before they go to my vocal chords. I note, in the back of my head, that it's the same design as that thumbs-up one on the toilet paper. So. Cauldron is... sending me a message. Of some kind. That's got probably emotionally positive connotations? Or PtV is bullshit and it's a nonsense gambit, I dunno, fucking fuck Cauldron and fuck the Simurgh too this world is dumb.

What's the problem? Taylor asks, and I double-take at the message.

"What, did you put that there?" I ask, gesturing at the smiley face.

There's a long pause, and then the message rewrites itself into, Are you okay?

?!?

I walk closer to the smiley face, wondering if maybe Taylor's ease of using the bugs is fooling me on how well she can see stuff with them, but before I can point more closely at it I notice there's... extremely lightly-sketched designs, the black whatever-the-fuck-this-is (Paint? Ash? I'm not sure) applied in very thin lines all throughout the space inside the smiley face, and as I look even closer I see that even the smiley face's thick lines are actually made of dozens of densely-woven images, placed so close together they appear to be reasonably solid lines at a distance. What the- what?

Okay, my split-second wondering if maybe Taylor had done this and was confused by me being confused seems a lot less likely. I suppose she could've drawn this with her bugs, but I'm not seeing little bug-y footprints or anything, and neither canon nor any fanfic I remember had Taylor use her bugs to draw, not in any competent way, certainly not this impressively, this fast. This seems a lot more likely to be Cauldron bullshit. Probably Contessa bullshit. But... why?

The images themselves don't make a lot of sense to me. Lots of rounded pieces in an unclear form, vaguely tear-drop-shaped if I pull back and focus on the overall shape as it blends into the thumbs-up sign to act as the 'point' of the teardrop, 'cause actually there's more of these nearly-invisible light lines tracing out part of the teardrop between the round face and the cartoonish hand giving a thumbs-up. I'm reminded of some Deviantart images attempting to depict, like, writhing masses of tentacles, where there's suggestions of shapes but no clear sense of an underlying skeletal structure or anything, and where a given line represents the contact between two tentacles instead of a specific tentacle's edge.

I am deeply confused, and only get more confused when Taylor grabs my attention by bopping me on the head with a beetle and when I turn to go, "Goddammit I said-" it causes me to see she's drawn out Why are you looking at that empty stretch of wall?

…

…

Finally it clicks. There was that... odd plotpoint about how even a depiction of an Entity would result in a shard popping in to its host human's brain and going 'these aren't the droids you're looking for, move along', where regular humans can look at such an image just fine but are just going to be confused as to what it's meant to represent while parahumans will have their attention slide off and completely forget about having ever looked at the thing, and even forget events surrounding such an incident.

… but I'm a parahuman.

…

What?!?

 

[Ghoul King]

5.4

I don't really get the opportunity to think too deeply on this for a bit, because Taylor still has no idea what I'm looking at, is still just kinda confused, and even when I try wiping away part of the image she manages to rationalize away some of the stuff ending up on my hand -note to self, why the fuck am I not wearing gloves already, I'm a tinker- as it just being dirtier than she thought, and she still can't acknowledge the image itself. I'd like to keep rubbing away parts of it until she can see it, for a variety of reasons, but I think she's getting actually upset and I do kinda have this long-term goal of recruiting her or something I dunno whatever.

As such, I give up way earlier than I'd have preferred, and when she asks again why I was 'being so weird' I lie and claim I was being distracted by tinker thoughts. She either buys that or is willing to pretend to buy it, it's really hard to be sure which through bug-texting, and from there she... goes back to trying to interrogate me about Eidolon.

… fanfic and canon did not prepare me for how much of a cape fangirl Taylor actually is. What the hell.

Was he as generous as the news says he is?

Oh god come on Taylor, how am I supposed to answe- huh. I actually do have a relevant datapoint. Two, even, though, uh, not wanting to share one of them.

… I'm still not sure how I'll explain my Cauldron-provided supplies to her if I do get her to move into my lair.

Anyway, relevant thing! "Well, he did credit me on the news for helping him come up with the idea. Even called me Bakuda instead of Oni Lady, like I asked him to." I try to not sound like I'm making a pointed remark, as I really am mentioning it primarily as a relevant datapoint on 'generous y/n', but... not sure how well I succeed, given I would, in fact, really appreciate it if she stopped calling me Oni Lady.

There's another middling-length pause before Taylor responds. You have a working TV?

Ah, shit, right. Um. Well. I suppose the TV is tinkertech. It's... not exactly a lie to admit its existence. Just... you know... really misleading... "It's a tinkertech TV. I dunno if regular TVs work." I suspect they don't, but it's not like I've gone around manually testing every TV. I also wouldn't be surprised if it depends on... like, maybe satellite TV is still functioning, while cable TV has been cut? That would make sense to me, mechanically...

So you have news access?

I kinda blink at that, not entirely sure why Taylor is commenting on it. Like... yes? That's what I said? "Yeeesss?"

Have

That just hangs there, the one word formed and the rest of the bugs circling about and whatnot in what I'm just going to start calling an agitated state instead of hedging my terminology every single time. I'm... not sure what to make of this.

Have you heard any news about the Undersiders?

… oh. Huh. I'd sort of assumed she knew better than I did. "I thought you knew."

The message breaks up into agitated bug motion for a bit, long enough I start wondering if I should ask if she'd mind me coming upstairs to harvest more tinkertech fodder from this building, but before I can firmly decide either way she spells out, I saw one of them lose an arm. I don't know if, here there's a pause before the rest of the sentence forms, like Taylor's working to decide how she wants to word it, any of them are in here.

I almost comment on Bentley before remembering that's out-of-context knowledge and no, bad Bakuda, don't be a moron. But okay. Well. I shake my head. "Sorry, that's not cropped up that I've seen. I've mostly been following, uh, national-scale news." And cartoons, but let's not admit that. Taylor has always given me the vibe that she's one of those people who thinks cartoons are something you stop watching sometime in high school or else you're an immature loser.

There's silence, and of course there's no body language and all so I can't tell if Taylor is fidgeting nervously, or depressed, or about to irrationally blame me for not having good news, or... what. And since I kind of suspect that Taylor is going to be quiet for a while, I just go blunt: "Do you mind if I scavenge some tinkertech fodder from this building? Like, just grabbing some things from the second floor."

The bugs do the agitated thing, so I'm pretty sure this probably falls under the banner of 'rude', at least as far as Taylor's concerned, but I've still got that goddamn smiley face on my mind and don't have a lot of patience with people being... emotional, I guess, in general. To my mild surprise, Taylor's response is reasonably quick and is, Knock yourself out.

I mean, I have to wonder if the wording is indication she's a bit pissed off, but hey, she agreed to it.

Taylor doesn't talk to me while I'm raiding the second floor. I wasn't expecting her to, so whatever.

When I've finally gotten my wheelbarrow loaded up to the point that adding more seems liable to have some falling out, I say to the air, "I guess I'll be going now, glad to see you're actually okay," and start making my way to-

Wait, is rapidly drawn on a nearby wall. I hear more gunfire noises to the north, which has me wondering if she's maybe warning me about an incoming attack, so I'm pretty quick to come to a stop and stare at the area appropriately. There's a long pause, which is confusing and slightly concerning, before Taylor writes up, Can I come with?

I blink several times at that, start to move a hand to rub at my eyes because what the hell but then I remember the mask and abort that motion, and after licking my lips (Minor nervous habit), I say "If you like?" I'm really confused and kinda don't want to fuck this up, so prevaricating it is.

Please give me minutes. I raise an eyebrow at that, but then bugs stream in between me and minutes so it now spells out Please give me 5 minutes.

"Sure," I respond, trying to make it an easy response like it's no big and probably failing but who knows how well Taylor can see my body language or parse my tone?

Okay, I guess I'll just take this bit of time to think about the... smiley face.

Thing is, I don't have a hax Thinker power like Tattletale does to 'work around' the mental block. And even if I did, I didn't try. I just casually looked at the thing, acknowledged the thing, and was confused when Taylor didn't know what the hell I was talking about. If I did have a hax Thinker power, I would've either glossed right over it without thought like any ol' parahuman, or had something nag at me for a bit before finally having a breakthrough. Something in those veins.

So, uh, first of all this is big points in favor of me being an Abbadon missile of some kind. Like, I don't think canon explicitly established anything regarding Eden's 'broken' shards still enforcing such a cognitive block, but my recollection is vial-produced trigger events still involve a suppressed memory as part of the connection (I certainly don't recall Battery asking Doctor Mother about her trigger vision), and canon would be a lot less plausible if such a non-trivial fraction of capes would casually bypass the block.

Also, the idea of Bakuda being a Cauldron cape is a pretty big stretch to me, for a lot of reasons. I'm pretty sure she's a natural Scion trigger, and then I got shoved in here by Abaddon doing... whatever happened here.

Point being, I can buy that Abaddon is fine with me not having such a mental block, or... was operating on limited time and didn't prioritize it? Whatever, I can see a few ways for this to make sense in the context of me being an Abaddon missile.

So: big points for that theory.

I'm briefly distracted by the overwhelmingly cool bit of the bugs making up the 5 shuffling about into a 4, roughly a minute after the message first formed the 5. Nice, Taylor. I give her a thumbs-up, though she doesn't respond to that.

Anyway, the bit I'm really not sure what to make of, though, is Cauldron doing this. The series of emoticons, by themselves... um... might mean Cauldron is implying they did something to prevent Taylor from running away from me? Or some such? I guess? (Like maybe Taylor was fleeing, and Contessa did Shenanigans so Taylor changed her mind and just got food like she claimed to me?) But the bigger part here is that it sure looks like Cauldron drew an Entity depiction targeted at me, implying... what, they wanted to test how it would affect me? Did they suspect I'd be unaffected? If so, why? And also if so, what conclusions might they draw? Like, Contessa, in canon, seemed.... probably immune to those shenanigans? Her power was initially not even prevented from mapping out a plan to kill Eden, that was apparently something Eden added in at the last second as Contessa was trying to kill her. But she's the only canon cape where I'm reasonably confident it was... heavily implied, I guess, that she's casually immune to the memetic effect. And fanon didn't touch on the topic at all, I literally can't remember a single fanfic that acknowledged this plotpoint. In fact, I think there were a few that had people straight-up recognize Entities from their trigger event dreams, like the writer didn't remember the memory suppression being a plotpoint at all.

So, uh, if that line of reasoning is remotely close to correct, Cauldron would be... guessing I was something akin to Contessa, accessing a shard that had minimal limits put on its core functions?

God, I dunno. It makes me nervous as all hell, though, because whatever is going on here, it implies Cauldron was suspecting me of something for some reason, and were fishing for results, and my lack of reaction may well have confirmed whatever their theory is in their minds, and I don't have enough info to guess whether they're going to be pleased by these results and metaphorically pat me on the head down the line or if they're going to shiv me and dump me in an interdimensional ditch as soon as they think they can get away with it.

The other, rather more unbelievable scenario I'm nonetheless keeping in mind, is that somehow the memetic smiley face is supposed to constitute help in deprogramming Taylor or derailing Simurgh plots.

This seems dubious as all hell, and more importantly is probably a lot more worrying of a scenario since it means if Cauldron was monitoring that situation they're going to be confused as all hell by me- but then why a smiley face exactly like the one in my lair? This theory just doesn't make sense, but I'm too frightened by it to completely dismiss it.

Fortunately, I'm distracted from my musings by the number switching to 0, followed seconds later by audible footsteps coming down the stairs. After a second, the message vanishes, the bugs scattering to... places I can't see them. Okay, I'll admit that seeing that in action it's slightly creepy. Very, very cool, though. I'm abruptly reminded that Taylor's aesthetic as Skitter really was a notable fraction of why I enjoyed Worm, in spite of it being a textual medium where you'd think that wouldn't be that important.

So I turn around to look up the stairs, and... yeah. It would be an exaggeration to say the person coming down the stairs looks exactly like what I'd imagined, but she's close enough that if I'd seen her without proper context I'd probably still have thought something like, 'oooh, that looks so much like Skitter'. The helmet makes me think a bit more of... Ultraman, of all things, than I was expecting, if you ignore the color being black with yellow eyes, but otherwise yeah, black costume, curly black hair shrouding the back, etc...

… though, uh, as she approaches it becomes obvious there's hundreds of bugs clinging to her costume's surface and each other. I spend a second wondering if she's trying to make herself seem larger than me -I think she might actually be taller than me, though I just realized I have zero clue how tall Bakuda was in canon and I've never bothered to measure my own height so maybe I'm just shorter than I think it's not like I've spent a lot of time face-to-facing with people- but I start hearing a buzzing and see a lot of bugs flying, visible through the window and realize she's taking her swarm with her.

I'm honestly not sure what to make of that, and before I can decide on a response Taylor gives me a stiff nod -it's hard to say why it's stiff, given it could just be about avoiding hurting the bugs or carry actual emotional content the way that would usually mean- and says, "Lead the way... Bakuda."

I startle slightly, partly because Taylor sounds a lot more like an awkward and shy teenage girl from a high school story than the bug-covered technically-a-supervillain standing in front of me was getting my brain to expect. Intellectually I understood that Taylor is an awkward teenage girl, but I'd never really given a lot of thought to her voice. I'd sort of vaguely assumed she sounded like... I dunno, kind of like Raven from Teen Titans? But less gravelly. That's not at all how she sounds, and it makes me wonder if the degree to which people refused to take her seriously, and to which she increasingly turned to violence and whatnot to make people listen to her, had to do with her voice. It's easy to imagine someone hearing her voice and immediately dismissing her even though she's a cape and that's stupid.

Also I startle because hey she used my actual cape-name instead of that PRT garbage!

After a delay that's probably long enough to be inappropriate somehow, I remember to grab a hold of my wheelbarrow and comment, "Uh, yeah, this way."

----------------------------------------------------------------------​

Taylor has a fuckton of bugs. I'm not sure whether she's intentionally intimidating me or what, but if so, it's working. It's not actually 'blot out the sun' levels of madness, but it's still kind of like being inside the eye of a hurricane, because Taylor is considerate enough to at least keep the bugs from entering an area immediately around us, but everything more than five or ten feet away is being seen through hundreds of little bodies. It's insane, and it has me spooked on a number of levels in conjunction with all the other stuff I've seen, like Taylor having possibly fed a human body to her bugs. That bit seems a lot more probable an explanation with how fucking many there are. My only consolation is I catch enough glimpses of individual bugs to know that plenty of these are the sorts of things that don't actually eat human flesh, not even rotting human flesh. Though admittedly there's those deer that turned to biting off bird heads to get their calcium needs met...

I've also got in mind how in canon Taylor increasingly ramped up how many bugs she kept on hand, where she started out just wandering around 'unarmed' and only really pulling whatever was locally available and eventually had spiders in compartments of her costume and whatnot at all times. I remember something about centipedes acting as hair extensions, for example. Which, uh, backtracking that pattern to this is... concerning. Even considering we're in a post-Simurgh zone, this seems... rapid of an escalation.

So in spite of my vague plans to try to broach some kinda topic, I end up quiet for a while, thrown by the situation and spooked by it and also just having a hard time thinking with the thousand-fold buzzing of little bug wings in my ears.

Thus, Taylor ends up speaking first a couple minutes after we've set off. "Is it far?" The buzzing makes it hard to be entirely sure, but I think that's... polite interest? Maybe? I'm not sure I should be trusting Taylor's tone of voice to be representative, and I've always been bad at reading this kind of thing, but that's what it sounds like to me.

I take a second to run through my mental list of landmarks, plot out how much walking that works out to.... "Uh. Twelve blocks? I think?"

Taylor's helmet turns ever-so-slightly toward me, reminding me that every part of it aside the yellow 'eyes' is covered in bugs as several of them adjust their positions, presumably trying to stay on. "You've been walking that much every day?" Yeah, okay, that's mild shock/disbelief there. Probably... other emotional texture I'm missing out on thanks to the buzzing and my general shit skills at that. Thanks Abbadon, I'm just going to assume my bad social skills are your fault until proven otherwise.

I'm a little confused by the degree of disbelief given I distinctly recall canon Taylor did a decent amount of walking about the city... though then again she started out thinking she was out of shape. Ugh, I dunno, whatever. I shrug. "I've been combing the city most days for weeks, scavenging supplies of all sorts. It's not a long walk."

There's a pause of a decent length, and then Taylor visibly tenses up, costume and bugs failing to hide the tension. "Trouble."

Ah crap. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised the biblical plague drew attention. "Exploding, phasing lunatic-type trouble, or regular human-type trouble, or cape trouble?"

"Not sure," is Taylor's terse response. After a second, she adds, "Probably not the first."

"Alright," I say, putting the wheelbarrow down and digging in my purse. Uh, no, that's a pain bomb. No, that's a regular ol' explode-y bomb. No, that's a fire bomb. Mmmmmaybe this freeze bomb?... no, I'd rather not kill unnecessarily, and I've seen already it's not actually non-lethal. Shit, did I bring... okay, there's a Super Depression Bomb. That's... not ideal, but I have that. It might even not meaningfully affect Taylor's bugs, depending on power mechanics stuff. Or bugs might not be able to get affected by it in general, either/or. Christ, why did I switch back to more lethal munitions once Taylor stopped seeming so hostile... Aaand... yeah, last grenade is a phasing shrapnel bomb that... I still haven't tested yet because it was something I made after inspiration struck one day where I passed relatively close to one of those fucked-up building the lunatics exploded on. A bit worried the phasing shrapnel will inflict fates worse than death on people, instead of just killing them through walls. Keeping it in mind, not using it for the moment, though.

Okay, out comes the Super Depression Bomb, and... uh. Hmmm. I think I just recognized another reason why canon folks found Taylor creepy: I looked her way out of habit to get a cue for where the threat is coming from, and Taylor is just rigidly looking straight ahead, which is distinctly unhelpful. Probably focused on her bug vision. "Uh, which way?"

"That way," Taylor says with a slight tilting of her head to our left and a bit forward. Huh. That's vaguely in the direction of the ocean, and tilted away from the area people are crowding, with the supplies and presumed-therapy and all. People scavenging, stumbling on us? People who live that way? I wonder.

There's incomprehensible yelling from that direction shortly afterward, pretty well confirming Taylor's statement. Sounds masculine, I think, though it's a bit hard to tell through the buzzing. "Got any info for me? Signs of power usage or the like?" Kinda important, and she's got eyes on them.

I can hear the grimace in her voice when she speaks, thank goodness I can hear her tone like this. "No, but I recognize them now." Uh. That's a little worrying, that Taylor knows them but they apparently reacted to a bug swarm by coming this way. That's not just curiosity. That... sounds like a grudge, or something. Before I can fully process that and pick out a response, Taylor continues, "They're Merchants, pretty sure they triggered after the attack, and they've staked out an increasingly large part of the city as 'their territory'." Her tone gets low and angry as she adds, "I'm pretty sure they're hoarding food and stealing from drops."

Okay, uh... if Scrub is in that group for some damn reason, that'd potentially be convenient? I could try doing what Tattletale did and bust a portal out into another dimension to get out of Brockton Bay, and maybe even get to tinker in... relative peace until I'm ready to do... stuff. Just study Scrub's power and... combine it with a portal-blocking bomb? Not sure what would happen if I put those together, but hey, possibilities.

I eyeball my Super Depression Bomb, wondering if maybe Taylor can contrive for her bugs to carry it, but this is... probably lighter than a hunk of steel and all of its size has any right to be, but I'm having doubts it's light enough. So I table that thought in favor of asking, "Details? Just a quick sketch, if they're closing fast." I hear more yelling. Yeah, that's a man's voice. Probably a big man, from the... timber or whatever is the correct term.

"They've got guns." Wait, what? "Pulled them from BBPD storage, and they're willing to use them." Ahhh... shit. I'm not meaningfully protected from bullets at all right now. "Two men, one woman, plus at least a half dozen non-capes. The woman is some kind of speedster, keeps trying to touch me, so probably a striker power that needs skin contact." I mentally catalogue my own outfit. It's, uh, got a lot of exposed skin now that I'm thinking about it from that angle. Short sleeves because I hate long sleeves even when it's cold, pants actually go down to nearly my ankles and I've got boots on so that area's protected well enough, but my mask is face-covering but not head-covering and the beanie I'm wearing still leaves the lower-back of my head exposed, and I've got my belly mildly exposed-

…

… has Taylor been hostile to me this whole time in part by virtue of thinking I dress like a slut? This was an ongoing issue with Taylor in canon, that if she felt a woman dressed in a.... sexually promiscuous-signaling way, I guess, she took a particularly dim view of them, and her definition of such seemed to be pretty wide. And I tend to prioritize comfort over coverage, which my Omicron memories indicate is a point of friction with women, where you get women who'd rather dress casually and hate how much flak they get for 'dressing slutty'. Meanwhile, I-as-a-dude could wander around shirtless while delivering trash to the dumpster, and instead of people questioning my moral fiber it had them asking if I joined the military, wondering where the six-pack had come from because surely it hadn't come from just doing grocery and trash runs on foot? I mean, the cold has meant I've been bundled up a bit anyway, but maybe Taylor thinks a Good Girl would bundle up more in this kind of weather, ergo I must be a trashy slut?

Ah, shit, Taylor was still talking while I was distracted. "... other man is the bigger one, has some kind of effect where I haven't been able to get bugs past it onto him." She sounds particularly put out by that. Alright. I... should probably be careful about trying to hit that guy with my grenades.

Wait, why aren't we just leaving? "Why aren't we just running?" I ask, because Taylor has just kept stiffly walking a little behind and beside me, following me as I continue walking the path toward my lair, instead of, you know, fleeing at speed.

Voice tight, though I don't think from anger at me, just stress, Taylor bites out, "Mover woman makes it pointless. She can share the effect, and running from her charges her faster."

Well. That doesn't sound like any power from canon I recall. Sounds... obnoxious as well. Taylor's being light on details, but I'm willing to assume for the moment that the easily-observed details line up with this. Canon Taylor was pretty good about that, and... even fanon Taylors were pretty good about using reasonably concrete data to infer reasonably clear and plausible rules, instead of just assuming things.

"So, uh, any more details on the first man you described?" Usually I'd admit I wasn't paying attention, but that might provoke Taylor, and having her yelling at me would be less than ideal... hey, maybe I should hide nearby. Maybe these guys won't expect Taylor to have support?

Taylor's helmet tilts a little in my direction, silent, and initially I think she's doing that silent judge-y mad thing at me, but then something catches my eye and goddammit that looks suspiciously like some kind of tinkertech drone flying over there, hovering just inside a window. Bugs are swarming it moments later, dragging it down with sheer weight and possibly doing damage other ways I can't see, but that... may well be busting any plan to catch these guys off guard by hiding myself. Then Taylor answers my question, quietly enough I have to strain to hear her over the buzzing of insect wings. "He's been linked to his drones since our first encounter. I think he might've gotten inspiration from my power. They already know exactly where we are."

Not the kind of details I was hoping for, but alright. (Note to self: see if I can study Taylor's power for inspiration of... some kind) "Any nice, defensible positions you know about?"

Taylor shakes her head, which seems a bit unbelievable to me, and then quietly remarks, "Walls hurt us more than her." Oh- come on, she phases or something, too? Also, why is Taylor being so quiet now? Is she worried about being overheard? Why, if so? If not, what is that about?

That's when a big guy comes stumbling around a corner ahead of us, cutting off our forward route. And not, like, human big. He reminds me distantly of Hyde from the League of Extraordinarily Gentlemen movie, arms long enough he can move on all fours like a gorilla, upper arms seemingly made huge by tremendous amounts of muscle, and even doing the gorilla walk he's still tall enough his head is visibly passing just below second-story windows. I'm not sure how he has clothes to his scale, but he does, with combat boots that fit his huge feet, fingerless red gloves on his alarmingly large hands, and what looks like Army fatigues for the main clothes, though with some tearing. His hair looks to have been gelled and combed into that slicked-back look I see used on 'pretty-boy' characters a lot, and for some reason he's wearing sunglasses sized to fit on his face. Power shenanigans?

I side-eye Taylor, because she did not indicate the big guy was this big, but she mutters, "Must be a new formula." Must be- what? Wait, is she implying- what is this tinker's specialty?

The huge guy in front must be lighter on his feet than I'd expect (Or backed by power bullshit), because I can only really hear his footsteps in the form of gravel and other debris scraping against the road. There's no feel-it-in-your-body boom with his footsteps or anything like that. The effect is pretty unsettling -if we have to run, I'm not relaxing just because he's out of sight and we can't hear him. Taylor and I come to a stop, and the huge guy plants himself in the middle of the road, long arms spread wide and legs in a crouch as he looks... vaguely in our direction? His head seems to be looking at a point somewhere above our heads, simply pointed straight ahead, but I can't see his eyes so I don't know where his attention is actually at.

Uh. Okay. Should I-

"Are you seriously-" I whirl around to get a look at the voice suddenly coming from behind us, angled so I still have the big guy in the corner of my eye. I'm pretty sure I hear Taylor moving too, but she's now behind me and I'm not turning far enough to check. "-is that fucking Oni Lady?" Uuuugh fine we're in a quarantine zone you have decent excuses but goddammit that's not my name.

I am now looking at three people -well, three capes, as I can see probably-non-cape stragglers a couple blocks away, moving to catch up. The guy talking is... probably the 'big guy' Taylor was mentioning before, as he's taller than either of his compatriots even though one of them is in pretty bulky armor that's probably adding at least a few inches to their apparent height. He reminds me vaguely of my mental image of Jack Slash, though to be fair I think it's mostly because his beard clearly hasn't been shaved in a couple weeks-ish, and he's wearing that plaid shirt I see as a stereotypical logger thing for some reason and I have that in my mental image of Jack Slash, even though I think the actual canon description was of a completely different kind of shirt?

… and it's probably because he was smiling a probably-fake friendly smile when I was initially turning, only dropping it when he... got a look at my mask, I guess. Now he looks kinda stupefied, like Bakuda being in front of him is a shocking, unbelievable scenario. In any event, I'm not seeing weapons on him, and the only visual evidence of power usage is that I can see Simurgh dust conspicuously shoving itself away from him as he leans a little forward. Fuck, now I want to study his power, it might help against the Simurgh. He also doesn't seem to have tried to cobble together a costume, just... wearing pants and the plaid logger shirt, no mask, no flourishes that leap out to me. Which. Fair, in a post-apocalyptic environment like this, though it seems a bit -does his power protect from the cold? Is that it?

I note that he's standing as the point of the arrow the three are forming. He was also speaking, so... leader? Maybe? Or does his power protect others somehow, so that being in front is better?

Off to his right is the armored individual. The aesthetic of the armor is odd, calling to mind some anime thing I can't quite recall -it makes me think a little of Mewtwo's armor, but that's not really it- with everything rounded and the bits expanding into ball-ish endpoints at the hands, feet, and the forehead, where I can't see their face at all. Meanwhile, the central body is almost completely unprotected, just some red gem-looking diamond of some kind hanging in front, with black rubber tubes of some kind connecting the gem to the armor bits. The armor is all a stark white, which stands out given, you know, post-apocalypse, and the other two capes are showing signs of having trouble getting washed and so on, colors a bit faded, slightly darker patches suggesting old stains that never got fully removed, the beard thing with the talking guy, and so on.

My first thought is the armored individual is the tinker, but my eyes immediately catch on the man on the left, who could probably cosplay as a female character convincingly without a ton of effort in different circumstances, being on the short side with a page-boy haircut (Frayed, right now, but clearly something he's been trying to keep in that look even after the Simurgh hit) and a generally androgynous figure... but here and now he's got, you know, stubble, and no chest, so I'm pretty sure he's a man. He's also wearing a trench coat (Unbuttoned up top, where I can see his bare chest... I'm not sure why. It's pretty chilly right now, enough so even I have bundled up, however grudging it might be. Points in favor of the other guy's power protecting from cold and extending to allies?), the pockets festooned with twitching bits of plastic and metal. He shoves one back in its pocket as I'm watching, face irritable, and then grabs at a different pocket and lobs the sphere into the air, where it deploys a little helicopter blade and takes off pretty much directly up. So, uh, probably the tinker, who Taylor said was a man.

… okay, so I guess the anime armored person is the speedster woman? She's just standing there, extremely still. Not very mover-like.

After the obligate staring and studying is done with, I call back, "My name is Bakuda. I'm not a goddamn knockoff. I don't even teleport! Or clone! Or anything Oni Lee did!"

The talker smiles nervously, says something quietly enough I can't hear it over the buzzing, and then raises his voice to be heard. "Okay! We don't want trouble with you, our business is with the girl!" His eyes dart nervously to Taylor. Why is he so nervous? He seemed pretty confident earlier, before he... noticed me...

… do I have more of a reputation than I thought?

Taylor doesn't say anything, so there's a bit of an awkward pause before it dawns on me that I'm up for doing the talking here? I thought Taylor was going to be doing any talking, she knows these people and also I'm -well. Crap, only maybe Oni Lee had any idea how shit I am at face-to-face interaction, and now he's dead. Okay, uh, god... I really thought they were just going to attack, honestly, and now I feel slightly stupid just holding out my Super Depression Bomb-

-it finally clicks talking guy isn't really looking at me, he's looking at my grenade-

-like I'm ready to throw it any second now. Or. Not stupid, exactly. Embarrassed, I guess, like I decided to go to an event, arrived in a tuxedo, and it turned out everyone else is in super-casual clothes because it wasn't a formal event of any kind.

I... keep holding onto it, though, because the stragglers are getting close enough I can see pistols clenched in hands. Nothing heavier than a pistol, no rifles or shotguns or anything, but they not only have pistols but are carrying them like they expect to use them any second now. Or like they're morons who think you should just keep your pistol in your hands with no regard for trigger safety, which is arguably more dangerous.

Okay... um. I'm not handing Taylor over to them, because she's probably important to Abbadon's plans I'm maybe going along with and also I'm predisposed to like Taylor from having seen her view in canon heavily and her coming from a pretty sympathetic situation so these guys would need a really good sob story to overcome that. I'm... not sure I should just openly and explicitly tell them to go fuck themselves, though? I'm not sure why they haven't just attacked, it could be... cape politeness, where they're totally confident they can kill me but aren't wanting to fight me gratuitously. The nervous eyeing of my grenade doesn't jive with that, but people often confuse me, and you can be trying to be polite, confident you'll win, and still be a little nervous about an unknown explosive. They could be confident they'll win and just nervous about long-term harm...

The tinker pulls out another sphere-drone of some kind and blows on it, at which point it pops out a pair of wings that flap like mad and starts slowly circling us. I'm not thrilled with that. It makes me wonder if they're willing to talk because it buys time and their powers give them an advantage as time goes on. Maybe the speedster has a shaker thing going on, like Labyrinth but somehow letting her give herself and buddies enhanced speed in the zone, that kind of thing. Taylor mentioned something about charge earlier, so that's... concerning in that direction.

Okay, fine, I gotta say something, I guess. "Why are you even after her?" It occurs to me that Taylor is at my back and so I can't see her reaction at all, nor see if she decides to attack me if I'm hostile. So, uh, this might be a dumb thing to do? Too late, me!

The talker visibly relaxes, which is a pretty big drop in tension given he's pretty far from me and yet I saw it anyway. Because I didn't go straight to hostility? Because they're getting assets in place? Because a power of theirs has a cooldown and it just finished? "Girl keeps raiding our territory, injuring people, stealing food. We want justice." There's a slight pause, and he adds, "Friend?" in a questioning way, while his smile widens, nervous bent gone entirely.

One of the stragglers apparently overhears him, because I can hear them distantly yelling, "Yeah! Justice!" Pretty sure. Difficult to be entirely sure through the buzzing.

Okay... on the one hand, that sounds plausible. Post-apocalypse situation, I'm not clear how much food is being dropped into this place, scavengables have definitely been running out everywhere I've been looking lately, and, well, Taylor had a low opinion of the Merchants in canon and once she was administrating her territory people got pursued by stinging bugs if she felt they were adequately criminal. Fits the situation, plausible to Taylor's personality.

On the other hand, I don't know this guy, and the fact that he's visibly nervous about me and yet being friendly makes me twitchy. I'm a known villain with a pretty awful resume, looking at things from any kind of external viewpoint, part of a racist gang that probably has a bone to pick with white folk like himself, and if they know Bakuda is the Cornell University bomber they have every reason to think of me as... irrational, unstable, quick to blow big places up for small reasons. This guy trying to make nice with me really feels... suspicious, especially on top of the original nervousness. I killed PRT people. It was on accident, but nobody else has any reason to believe that and honestly I was pretty careless, one might say criminally careless. Under a lot of pressure, not thinking clearly, not used to the situation -plenty of reasons why I handled that poorly, basically, but nobody else has any reason to guess 'some dude suddenly woke up in a fictional story as a villainous character and didn't handle it very well' as an explanation. Is he approving me killing enforcers of law and justice? Being nice because faking it costs him nothing now, and nobody else will mind if he kills me without warning down the line? Something else entirely that's still kinda awful?

So I ask, "What about me?" while doing my best to sound very interested in the answer.

The talker looks confused, like he's not sure how to respond, maybe not sure what I'm asking, but I deliberately don't clarify. "You're... fine?" he says, like a teacher called him up to answer a question and he's hoping that's the answer the teacher wants but isn't really confident it's true.

His tinker buddy pulls out another little drone, this one a sphere with four legs, holds it near his face for a second, and then carefully sets it down, at which point it slowly starts crawling off to his left. Really don't like this, especially how the stragglers are starting to catch up. The first one to catch up passes their pistol to the talking guy, and there's some kinda awkward moment I don't properly parse visually that I'm guessing is that bug-blocking effect Taylor mentioned making the passing process harder?

"I thought you said you wanted justice, though?" I call back, trying to sound innocent and, uh, probably failing given people haven't ever thought I sounded innocent since I hit puberty- wait. Different body, different voice. Hmm. I don't think we ever got a description of how Bakuda's non-filtered voice sounded in canon, either...

… I'm not sure what to make of it, but the buzzing of the swarm around us intensifies, too. Is Taylor flying more bugs? Somehow getting the existing bugs in the air to sound louder? And, uh, why? In any event, it clearly unnerves the talker and tinker, and even the woman in armor adjusts her position in a manner that might be nervousness. Some of the stragglers also stop walking temporarily, like they're not so sure they want to be a part of this. The talker is looking nervous again, licking his lips and fiddling with the pistol like maybe having a weapon is comforting him, though he's idiotically got it pointed at his chin so I'm a bit amazed he can be comforted by this process. He shouts, "Look, just... hand over the girl, alright? We don't want no trouble with you, friend."

Okay, I'm not at the point of 'if this guy dies I'mma count that as probably a good thing', but broadly speaking I'm upshifting my 'suspicious' quota a few points. And re-considering my earlier rejection of the pain bomb. Uuuugh, fine, fight time it is. Instead of bothering to give a response, I reach into my purse with my free hand, which doesn't seem to alarm anyone initially -do they think I'm pulling out money or something?- but almost immediately after the pain bomb I'm pulling out becomes visible I can see the talker's eyes widening, he's trying to point the pistol my way while beginning to shout something, and the tinker recoils as if slapped.

Though I'm not sure they're reacting to that so much as the way Taylor's swarm of bugs has stopped politely delineating a wall and has gone on the attack.

So I'd intended to toss the pain bomb at these guys, but instead I turn around and toss the Super Depression Bomb at the way-the-fuck-too-huge guy, who has started to advance, though oddly still crouched with his arms held wide. He... totally ignores the grenade as it sails his way, but when it goes off his jaw goes slack, and after a bit of a delay he starts slumping to the ground. Slower than I'd like, but problem solved, maybe?

So I turn back to focusing on the actual capes. Taylor seems to have the gun situation under control. I can't make out the details, but I can already see one pistol having been pulled into the air, dangling from seemingly nothing, so, uh, maybe I should have raised the possibility of bugs delivering a grenade, but anyway I'm assuming that's dangling from spider silk? The pistols still held by people are-

BANG

-oh jeez that's loud but I don't feel anything and I'm pretty sure that was a pistol discharging toward the ground? Anyway, Taylor is mobbing those people with bugs, I think I see bugs mobbing hands and people are screaming a lot though that could be panic instead of pain I suppose, and she seems to be contriving for the pistols to be pointed away from our general direction.

Exception: the three capes are not similarly impaired. The talker cape is holding his pistol pointed directly at me and is shouting to be heard over the swarms of flying bugs, something about 'shoot' and 'bitch' and 'give up', so probably something about how he'll shoot me if Taylor doesn't give up, and I'm already dropping to the ground even as I'm taking in the others. The tinker is crouched down a bit, fiddling with another one of his drones and ah shit I don't know what his other drones are doing. The armored cape, meanwhile, is starting to glow, some kinda blue aura concentrated on the gem (Well, maybe for the gem, it mostly just looks purple, but color theory so I'm pretty sure that's just the blue aura on the red gem) and each of the stark white armor bits. Oh, and there's blue aura going along the cables, I think?

Taylor, meanwhile, has -she's thrown herself in the way of the gun. Uh. I mean okay canon indicated her costume is basically bulletproof, but this is still more than a wee bit surpri-

BANG

-sing okay that was his pistol, I'm pretty sure, as Taylor flinched back and I can hear talker cape cursing loudly and ah shit I see a drone pulling itself out from Simurgh dust to go after Taylor it's in her blind spot and just as I'm pulling myself to my feet it gets mobbed by bugs. Oh. Right. Taylor basically has local omniscience. Holy shit, I just realized I'm The Load for Taylor here. Well.

I look back, and shit, the really big guy is still moving. Not... fast, but he's hauling himself our way in this odd, sorta... jerky, I guess, manner? He'll move an arm for a bit, and then stop, and then kinda startle and continue moving it like he just remembered he's supposed to be doing that? So for some fucking reason he's not actually down.

I kinda don't want to kill that guy because I'm starting to suspect he's basically the tinker's puppet and so might be, like, completely innocent, so I jog away from there to behind Taylor and look over her shoulder at the capes. Talky guy is snarling to himself, I think, though it's a bit hard to tell through all the audio and visual noise of the swarms of bugs, the tinker has just released another drone and then startles when a fairly sizable beetle dive-bombs it seconds later, sending it careening along the ground a foot or so, though it doesn't look damaged to me, anyway the armored cape is sorta putting her arms together fist-first or as close as she can approximate with her armor, and I can kinda see some kinda visual distortion in front of the talker? Like if there was a sheet of some transparent material being stretched by him standing against it. His power? Her power? Both?

Then Taylor tackles me and I notice she's not covered in bugs anymore though I probably should've guessed that earlier and I spend a half-second starting to mentally catalogue which of my bombs can protect me from her without killing me (Or her, I barely remember to keep in mind) but we hit the ground before the thought can go anywhere and-

That's when there's some kinda snapping noise I don't understand, why did I hear it so clearly, followed by Taylor grunting into my chest while I get a partially obscured view of a blue blur overhead and a staccato sound I don't understand followed by a crack as my face gets hit by something I didn't even see and holy shit my forehead hurts at least my nose probably isn't broken?

Then Taylor drags herself to her feet, kinda clutching at one arm, though it's not dangling or anything so I'm pretty sure it's not broken, and I haul myself up too and take a look around.

Talker is swearing loudly, and him and his fellow two capes are walking backwards, still maintaining that V-formation pointed at us with him as the point. Definitely significant. He lost his pistol somewhere in there and is brushing a few bugs off of him, while the tinker looks sullen, reaching out to grab a drone as it flies down so he can stuff it into a pocket. The... supposed speedster has what looks like steam wafting off of her armor bits, which are now red in that 'metal heated to the point it glows' sort of way so, uh, not sure what just happened but they clearly don't like it.

They're also already far enough away I'm not confident in my ability to toss a grenade that far.

… fighting parahumans without having information on them sucks.

A glance behind us shows that... the big guy is still hauling himself toward us. Fuck. Fine, okay, freeze bomb, go.

… it only really affects maybe a third of his body, and the results are, uh, gruesome. I avert my eyes so I don't have to watch flesh tearing open where non-frozen flesh meets frozen flesh, torn open by his weight or something I dunno whatever the case I'm just really glad I can't hear anything over the buzzing of Taylor's bugs.

We end up ducking into a side alley to go around him.

--------------------------------------------------------------​

It quickly becomes obvious as we walk that Taylor is not in a good condition. She's limping a little, and I'm pretty sure it's a worse limp than it looks because it really looks to me like she's trying to hide it, and, you know, failing. Similarly, she switched sides for following me, so that the arm she was clutching at earlier is on the other side, and is holding it where I can't get a good look at it with our current respective positions. She's also gasping for breath, in this way I don't know how to describe that, regardless, makes me think she's doing her best to prevent it from being heard and it's bad enough she's not entirely succeeding.

"... you weren't having cramps, were you," I ask in a not-really-a-question sort of way, suddenly remembering that the last Cauldron-provided supply drop including a medical kit. I mean, I did accidentally cannibalize the old one at some point in my tinkering, but that was like over a week ago, so I'm a bit suspicious of the timing regardless.

Taylor is conspicuously quiet, aside the gasping and all.

I sigh mentally, and shuffle the bomb-purse to my left arm. What I'd like to do is ask some questions about what just happened, but if Taylor is, in fact, trying to hide her issues and still ending up gasping for breath a little, she's probably not in a state for a decent back-and-forth. So instead I reach out with my right arm, ignore how Taylor visibly tenses up and gasps in pain in response, and snake it under her armpit. "Lean on me, come on."

There's a second where we're both not walking where I'm half-expecting Taylor to tear away from me or something, but then she audibly bites down on another gasp of pain, cutting it off, and leans into me, and we start walking.

The rest of the walk to the outskirts of my lair are quiet, aside Taylor speaking up at one intersection to say we were heading toward one of the exploding lunatics, 'sleeping' inside a bus stop, so we had to detour around them.

------------------------------------------------------------------​

"Okay," I say, while we come to a halt in an awkward way because we don't know each other's body language-type stuff so it takes a second for Taylor to get that I'm trying to stop. "I need to go disarm the claymore before we can go in, and it'd probably be best for you to... sit down here, I guess."

Taylor nods, but doesn't otherwise answer. I'm still not sure how much of that is Taylor being not very chatty in general vs how much of that is Taylor being in a lot of pain right now. I'm almost completely confident nothing is broken, and I've yet to see any blood, but that doesn't mean it isn't serious. It takes a minute of silent negotiation to get Taylor levered into a sitting position, slumped against what I think is a mailbox but it doesn't look like any mailbox I've seen so I'm not actually sure.

Two minutes later, I've got the claymore deactivated and am helping Taylor walk inside, commenting, "Your bugs should be fine to enter. Even dogs and cats don't set them off. Don't... clump them too much, I guess? But should be fine."

Taylor still doesn't respond to me, and her helmet is... lolling a little. Yeah, this seems... serious.

Set her down leaning against -fuck. Fuck. I just saw a glint of light off metal somewhere in the sky!

I scramble back to the claymore, and rewire it so it can't be disarmed anymore, just in case the tinker saw enough to replicate me disarming it in the first place. They might still pull Tinker Bullshit to disable it, but I'd rather not give them more opportunities than necessary.

Then I go back and retrieve Taylor from the... I don't know what they call these, it's a pot for a plant but it's big and square, this path has them lining it intermittently because hotels seem to think that's appealing? Whatever, I help Taylor back to her feet, and we drag ourselves into the building, glad for the latest time that hotel doors tend to be designed to swing shut on their own.

I'd originally intended to get us to my workshop area, the foyer proper, but Taylor is struggling enough I settle for ducking into the first room that I've already gotten open by virtue of cannibalizing its lock for tinkertech fodder at some point, and sitting her on the bed, glad I already hit most of the building with scrubbing bubble grenades so this room is actually clean. "If you can get your costume off, great, but I'm going to get a medical kit and be right back."

I do exactly that, more aware than usual of the bugs in the building. Taylor's doing a surprisingly good job of hiding them now that we're here, but I still see bugs crawling into crevices and bugs chewing on what greenery in the hotel is both natural and not already completely gone. It takes a bit, because I left the kit in the room I've been sleeping in instead of my workshop to avoid a repeat of accidentally using it for parts, and that's... pretty far from the entrance we came in by.

When I get back, Taylor's managed to get her helmet off, and has laid on her back on the bed. The rest of her costume is still on, though it looks like she hasn't given up entirely? I'm seeing bugs at specific points, like maybe she's having them... unzip it or whatever. I don't remember how Taylor's costume worked, and it's not obvious at a glance. I vaguely recall that being intentional?

Taylor's face has what looks to me to be a largely-faded bruise around the right eye, but otherwise appears to be uninjured. So that's probably not an injury she got just now. Still can't see any blood. I'm opening up the kit, and looking for instructions because I've never had training and thankfully there are instructions, too bad I have no idea if that's standard or if I should assume Cauldron added it in, but whatever I know that this is the anti-septic alcohol, that is adhesive bandages and what they're for, and... okay, the instructions weren't really helpful otherwise, because the aspirin is in a labeled bottle and I know what aspirin is for, the gloves are obviously gloves (Sweet! I was just thinking I need gloves!), slightly surprised to see tweezers but can tell what they are and guess what they're for (Picking little things out of wounds), and the ointment isn't properly explained by the kit's explanation so actually the manual was kinda bad.

Whatever, I've got medical stuff and some idea how to use it, and the fact that there aren't sewing-type materials is honestly a bit of a relief because I'm not squeamish about much but sticking needles in people to sew them up is one of those things I've never stopped getting heebie-jeebies in response to the idea of. (Circular saw to the skull with Coil? Gross, but not nails-on-a-chalkboard-horrifying. If I'd needed to sew him up afterward? I would've felt mildly faint, hands too weak to do it properly. There's a reason I just shoved the bone back in when I was done) So I'm okay with an excuse to not have to grit my teeth and sew Taylor up anyway!

… a temporary excuse, let's just hope that's so unnecessary I don't have to figure out how to finagle it with my tools. I mean, I've got scrubbing bubble grenades so hygiene isn't a concern, probably, but I still would hate doing it.

… okay, fine, enough stalling.

Taylor has gotten out of the top part of her costume while I was focused on pulling out and identifying the stuff in the medical kit and I'm still not seeing blood, but her right arm is a mess of bruises, red and black and blue making up more of what I can see than any healthy shade of skin.

… this medical kit is not going to be helpful at all, is it.

Her left arm has some bruising as well, but it's light enough I might not have noticed it if I wasn't looking for it. Mildly pink/red patches of skin, of uncertain shapes, like they could be weird rashes or something. It's concentrated more at the shoulder than anywhere else, though even the shoulder is more pinkish-pale than bruise colors.

Then my attention latches onto the crusted blood on the lower-right side of the grey tank top, which I'd missed due to my angle and because I was looking for fresh blood. That's an old injury. Shit. "Please tell me you already used a scrubbing bubble grenade on that injury in your side."

Taylor gives me a look, or, well, tries, but she's looking at a point a bit to my right. I'm not sure if that's because of how much pain she's in or because she's not wearing glasses. "'m fine," she gasps out, and I'd give her a pointed look in response to how obviously wrong that is but I still haven't taken off my mask and even if I had I'm not so sure Taylor would register it in her current condition.

So instead I reach for that part of the shirt and peel it away and oh god that sound is gross, while I ignore Taylor gasping in pain and ineffectually slapping at me. No bugs are attacking me so whatever. Yes, that is a largely-crusted-over old injury... and it's oozing dark blood and, uh, some kinda white shit. That can't be good.

I stand up, go to the bathroom, double-check that the water is running the right color right now -it is, good- and while I'm waiting for it to warm up I go pull on the gloves, and then grab a pillow and pull off its case. (So far, however this building heats its water hasn't broken down. I'm hoping to be out of here before I have to figure out where the water heater is, let alone how to fix it) Once the water is warm enough, I soak the pillowcase, and go over and start gently scrubbing the injury, ignoring how Taylor keeps hissing in pain and so on. When the scrubbing stops making progress, I go wash it at the sink, washing out most of the blood and... whatever that other stuff is, and go back and keep scrubbing.

Repeat until the scab is nearly entirely gone, and the injury no longer oozes dark blood and white shit every time I put pressure anywhere near it. It looks a lot less worrying like this, as I can now see that the scab made it seem something like twice as large as it actually was. I'm not sure what kind of injury it is, but it's not a deep stab wound, anyway. Some kind of slashing wound? Something weirder from the speedster, since Taylor mentioned them trying to touch her and has been hiding how injured she was for days and days? Maybe heat got through her costume, and this is from being burned? Whatever it is, once I've got it reasonably clean, I consider retrieving a scrubbing bubble grenade to get it completely clean -but then decide against it, given Taylor rejected it, I still haven't tested what happens if it gets inside a body, and I've still got other options.

So instead I go grab another pillowcase, soak it in rubbing alcohol, and lay it against the injury. Taylor makes a shocked, pained noise, but she's still not trying to stop me so I keep on ignoring that. I'll swap it out for an adhesive bandage in a minute.

Alright, the bruised arm. Bruises aren't something I know how to take care of. They're internal damage, I know that, so putting bandages on isn't going to help. I'm not sure how much of a concern infection is, but I'm not breaking the scrubbing bubble grenades out for that, either, same reasons as earlier. I end up settling for grabbing a third pillowcase, soaking it in hot water, and gently rubbing the bruised areas, on the vague idea that if nothing else I'm at least cleaning the surface and that's probably not a bad thing. Given Taylor's apparent mistrust of the scrubbing bubble grenades, she probably hasn't used them to clean herself, and I have no idea if she was able to shower or bathe properly in that building, especially given these injuries. The scabbed wound at least suggests she hasn't been taking advantage of water for cleaning, whether or not she had it available as an option.

To my surprise, the bruises get a little better in response. Not a ton better, but the swelling goes down, Taylor stops holding the bruised arm so stiffly, and the colors get a little less vivid. "Ice," she finally gasps out, and I feel slightly stupid, because yeah that is a standard thing for treating bruises, isn't it?

"One second," I say, holding up a gloved finger before heading out. Yeah, there's ice machines in this building, and I haven't cannibalized all of them. The one in my workshop? Yeah, gone. The two indoors? Also gone. The one outdoors? Even in my worst tinker fugues I haven't wandered outside, and I never committed to any concrete plan to drag it in for future tinker plans, so it's just sitting in that outdoors snacks-and-so-on space, humming.

It produces ice when I prompt it, dumping it into the bucket. I... think the color is wrong, like maybe the water used to make the ice had stuff growing in it at some point, so I figure out how to crack the thing open -briefly assisted by my power at one point, thanks power- and uh yeah that's gross.

It takes another twenty minutes to get the existing water supply dumped out, a scrubbing bubble grenade detonated inside the machine, and more water dumped in. Then I wander over to tell Taylor. She's still on the bed when I arrive, the alcohol-soaked pillowcase off to the side, while an adhesive bandage has made its way onto her old injury, which seems likely to have been dragged there by her bugs, but I decided not to make a fuss. "Gonna need like twenty min-"

"I know," Taylor grits out, though she... sounds less bad than earlier. Pretty sure. Mostly sure.

Okay, fine. "Got any other injuries you've been holding out on?"

There's a decent chunk of silence where I'm thinking Taylor isn't going to say anything, but eventually Taylor admits, "Left foot... lacerated... glass on... floor."

It takes me a minute -and some gritted-out instructions from Taylor- to figure out how to get the boot off, but I'm relieved to discover there isn't any glass inside the foot. Just some old, crusted-over cuts. More hot water scrubbing with the fourth and final pillowcase in the room, and I eyeball the shallow, mostly-healed injuries for a bit before saying, "I'm not sure whether bandages make sense for feet, my experience is that doesn't work well. Do you want me to do it anyway?"

Taylor shakes her head in a no, and I notice she's got a sheen of sweat on her skin that wasn't there earlier. Um. Okay, not sure if that's a worrying sign or a product of all this helping. I shrug. "That the only one?"

Taylor nods, and I'm not entirely convinced this is true, but I'm also a bit reluctant to press the point. If there's another, bleeding, injury it's almost certainly not on her torso or skull so unless infection ends up being the issue she's not going to die from it, probably, and I really don't think Taylor had intended to open up to this extent. She's... probably waiting for me to drag her onto my Frankenstein slab and start experimenting on her, or something.

I mean, even if I wanted to do that I wouldn't because her bug control would make that an awful idea, but Taylor's thought process regarding villains was strange at the best of times and if she's entirely clear-headed right now- well. She might be, actually. It was a bit of a canon plotpoint that she stayed functional and clear-headed for longer than you'd expect as some side effect of so much awareness going into her bug control. Though given how I suspect that works that may well be less Taylor being clear-headed and more her shard simulating her heavily and not accounting for her injuries, so, uh, dangerous scenario if you think about it...

Never mind, point is, we'll address this depressingly likely-to-exist additional injury later. Maybe Taylor will handle it herself when I'm not paying attention and get to pretend like there was never another injury. I dunno, maybe it's somewhere embarrassing?

As a temporary substitute for the ice, I soak a pillowcase grabbed from another room in cold water and try to kinda... wrap it around the massively bruised arm. Taylor gasps in pain, but relaxes after a second and breathes out, "Thanks," mildly surprising me. I wasn't expecting a thanks as part of this process.

I comment, "I'll swap it out for actual ice in a few minutes," instead of directly acknowledging the thanks. Then I change the subject entirely. "Any bruising that's not obvious from where I stand? Like, it seemed like you got hit in the back?"

Taylor nods again, which is ambiguous but she's still in a lot of pain so fair. I'm inclined to take it as a, 'yes my back is bruised too,' response.

I dither for a minute, not sure what else to do, and then think to comment, "If spelling stuff out with bugs is easier, feel free to make requests that way." If I'd thought of it earlier I'd have raised the point earlier, but was focused on, you know, treatment.

Taylor looks mildly, briefly surprised. Normally I'd be a little weirded out at how mild a surprise it seems to be, but that thing of 'pushing' her feelings into her swarm goes all the way to early canon so I'm kinda suspecting her surprise is greater but being shoved heavily into the swarm. I mean, it could be directly representative... she was in a lot of pain and might've legit forgot... okay, maybe not, then. Not sure.

Regardless, after a minute she adjusts her positions, hisses in pain, and then nods, not looking happy about it. Not... sure why... but sure, this works. I spend another minute unsure what to do -there's no way the ice is ready- and then it occurs to me Taylor might appreciate a low-energy distraction. "You want me to get you the TV?"

It takes me a second to notice, but Taylor has spelled out Yes on the wall. Right-o, then.

I wander off and grab the thing. I've been keeping it in the workshop so I can watch it while working -you'd think I'd be tempted to take it apart for parts, but I have no idea how to open it up and my power is strangely disinterested in it, which has me intensely curious as to what's up with it- so this process is relatively quick, slowed down only by the TV being a bit bulky, and a bit heavy. Lighter than I'd expect of a TV of its size, mind, but still a bit of a pain.

Taylor starts to lever herself up into a sitting position, but I go, "Nonono, we can get you laid on a pillow for support against the backboard." Taylor doesn't say anything, but obligingly holds still while I get the regular TV out of the way, get three pillows piled up against the headboard, and cooperates when I work to get her adjusted so she's laying against that to keep her propped up, wincing and hissing intermittently but not verbally complaining.

Then she clears her throat and asks, "How do I work it?"

I consider repeating that bug-text is fine to use, but she seems... more okay. Less bad. She's no longer gasping in pain with every breath, and she's considerably less tense than when we started. Talking didn't seem to pain her, either. So okay, fine, I'll leave it alone. Instead I answer the question. "It's not got a remote, volume knob is the left bit and it's only got four settings: mute, quiet, hearable, and rock-and-roll." Taylor gives me a look like she thinks I'm joking, but I just roll my eyes behind my mask and say, "I didn't make it that way."

Taylor's eyebrows furrow and I abruptly realize I'd been trying to make it seem like I made it. Whoops. Uh, okay, if Taylor says- "Do you know whose lair you pulled it from?"

… oh. Yeah, okay, the natural assumption would be 'I found it in some tinker's lair and took it home with me'. Crisis averted. I shake my head, saying, "Not a clue." Because seriously I genuinely have no idea who made this. I've been kinda wondering for a bit if it's some bullshit Cauldron-tech made by an in-house tinker or something. It'd make sense for them to have at least one on hand. Then I continue my explanation with, "Anyway, right widget is for flipping through channels, it's got way more channels than just local channels or even just US channels but they seem to be organized by nationality or something? It can be a bit of a pain, honestly, but at least it works." And that ends my explanation. The magical tinkertech TV is actually a bit of a pain... no remote, no ability to input a specific channel, no way to remember a specific channel for easy access... to be honest, part of the reason why I keep watching cartoons and national news is that they're clustered relatively close together.

Taylor takes all that in without responding, and I'm not terribly surprised when bugs are at the knobby bits in short order to manipulate them. Alright, still don't want to ask her about what actually happened in the fight and all just yet, ice still isn't ready... oh. I can work on myself.

The first thing I do is take off my mask, immediately noticing a bit of blood on the inside. Before I can really take that in, I see Taylor looking at me, seeming stricken. "What?" I ask, completely confused.

Taylor gestures with her less injured hand at the mask, and breathes out, "Secret identity."

Oh.

That.

I roll my eyes. "My civilian identity is a matter of public record, I'm Alicia Black-" Though if somebody called me 'miss Black' I'd space on it. And I'm probably going to take a bit to get used to Alicia, since I've only ever been called Bakuda and Oni Lady (jerks) since waking up here. I only know the full name because it was on the birthday card from Eidolon, the family name wasn't in the news where I first learned... my, I guess, personal name. "-nice to meet you anonymous teenage girl who has bled all over my lair after defending me and is not in costume."

Taylor still looks a bit bamboozled, but gives no actual reply for long enough I return to examining the inside of my mask. Seriously, blood? Okay, that correlates to here on my forehead... oh. Huh. That is dried blood I'm feeling there. A lot less than I'd expect of a head wound, though I suppose that's not surprising. It would've run into my eyes earlier if it hadn't clotted quickly. Pressure of the mask preventing much blood from flowing? Side effect of the mover cape? I have had head wounds bleed only a- "I'm Taylor. Taylor Hebert."

I re-focus on Taylor, who is kinda... trying to look solemn? I think? Oh. Yeah, she's holding out her less injured hand for a handshake. "Given how injured you are, let's not do a handshake and just say we did? Nice to meet you, Taylor." I also don't like doing handshakes, as it happens, but even if I did like 'em come on Taylor don't strain yourself like this.

Taylor leaves the arm in the air for a minute, but I can see it's wobbling a little from the strain, and she gives up before I get to the point of thinking giving her the handshake will be necessary to get her to give up. "Nice to meet you, Alicia," Taylor says in this practiced way that makes me think she's dredging up some old routine for greeting people. (I'm not. I'm just kinda... pulling from movies and whatnot. You know, assuming the movies are real, etc etc)

There's a pause for a bit there, where I'm wondering if Taylor is going to push further on this or let us go back to letting her heal and watch -uh, national news it looks like- while I work on myself until it's time to go get the ice. She doesn't say anything, but she keeps looking my way like she thinks I'm going to say something. So okay fine I do. "We cool, then? Because I just discovered I have my own injury to work on and the ice is still not ready."

"We're... cool," Taylor says, wincing partway between words, probably out of physical pain and not psychological pain at my lingo.

"Cool," I say as a final confirmation before heading into the bathroom.

Looking at myself in the mirror... huh. Not sure what to make of that injury. It looks kind of like a cut, but when I carefully clean away the edges of what's dried, trying to avoid having it bleed more, it looks more like a very small s shape, which is... strange. Hmm. I didn't think anything of it at the time, but the injury in Taylor's side was also shaped like an s, just... larger. That's sufficiently weird I'm inclined to suspect it's some bit of power strangeness.

… I should maybe see if I can build a scanner now and get bullshit nonsense tricorder answers out of studying our injuries, like there'll be some lingering S Particles or some such nonsense I can study to get a grasp on the power that did it. Seems... likely to be the speedster woman, given my forehead is where I was hit by her and that's where I've got this injury. Was my mask too thin? Wrong material type? Or... yeah, there's a crack in the mask, and putting it on and then putting my finger where I know the injury is? The crack lines up. Alright, so... mask broken on hit, and this let cape bullshit through to brand me like I'm Harry Potter if he was a girl, on the wrong side of the pond, and had a magic space whale teaching him the ancient mysteries of how to make everything die horribly.

I'm hoping it doesn't scar because I'd be quite surprised if Earth Bet doesn't have some knowledge of Harry Potter and it would be annoying to have people cracking jokes about the Girl Who Lived and so on.

In any event, I'm at the point where I'm pretty sure if I scrape away any more of the scabbing it will just re-open the wound, so I decide to just wash the mask briefly, make a mental note to either do something to fix the crack or see if I can replace the mask entirely, and after a minute pop out and tell Taylor, "I'm going to go get you ice now."

Taylor nods, and on the way to the ice machine I grab another pillowcase from a different room on the way.

I end up having to wait another... five minutes or so before the ice machine gives me results I'm reasonably happy with, but then I dump a bunch of ice into the pillowcase. It's not perfect -it's going to leak- but it's better than risking a tinker fugue and I haven't noticed anything in this hotel that seems like a clearly better answer.

When I get back, Taylor is clearly struggling to stay awake, focused on... a politician or something, I don't care... on the TV, and yeeps when I gently arrange to sort-of-kind-of wrap her most injured arm with the pillowcase of ice, adjusting her position so it will hopefully leak out onto the floor instead of into the depression made by her body.

I've got scrubbing bubble grenades, if this results in a mold problem it's fixable.

Taylor drifts off in less than five minutes, ice apparently taking enough of an edge off the pain that her exhaustion has finally caught up to her.

I, meanwhile, am wide awake and am going to reinforce the fuck out of my defenses.

 

[Ghoul King]

5.5

I can't rig up turrets, but I can rig up high-altitude bouncing betties and calibrate their sensors to react to various things unlikely to be seen in my airspace unless a tinker is involved. (Iron, plastics, etc, in large enough quantities it's not just... the iron in a bird's blood tripping the sensors) This would be a really dumb idea with normal explosives, but a large number of my effects do the video game explosion thing of only reaching out a certain set distance before stopping, so I don't have to worry about a drone triggering a bouncing betty while I'm outside the building and so being killed by shrapnel from my own trap. Just have to make sure I don't carelessly include any of the exceptions.

I also lean heavy on the effects that are relatively unlikely to end up with a drone beaning someone on the head after it's been downed, like the black hole bombs and a couple of time stop ones, but I don't have a ton of variety in that range and don't want to risk the tinker having or being able to build a countermeasure to just one or two specific effects and so be gold. As such, while they're only maybe 30% of the bouncing betties I set up on the roof and throughout the grounds, I include freeze bombs, 'EMP' bombs (They're not EMP bombs. I don't know what the fuck they do, as they work on tinkertech that should never in a million years care about an electromagnetic pulse. So video game EMP bombs, basically), some thunderclap bombs, and some one-off examples of weirder shit I'm hesitant to actually test on-site. Like the one my power insists will release a short-lived swarm of flying.... things that will eat anything that moves for the thirty seconds or so before their arbitrary lifespan times out.

Once that's done I make a sweep of everything reasonably readily checked to make sure no drones have already infiltrated -wondering idly if bugs scattering to get out of my way at times is just normal bug behavior while Taylor sleeps or some kind of subconscious Taylor input- but aside one of the anti-portal mines in the floor having already suffered adequate decay its light is blinking red so I have to repair it I don't find any problems.

Well. Tinkertech problems.

I see the speedster lurking on a roof at one point, probably watching me. I wonder for a minute if they're going to jump down over the fence or something, but when I very obviously stare in their direction for a minute while continuing to work they retreat out of sight. Not sure if they're scared of me or just don't want me to know about them watching or what. Maybe reporting whatever they saw.

So uh yeah they're not giving up. They really want to push this. Or maybe they think it won't be so bad attacking my tinkerfortress bristling with hellish weaponry while bug control girl is also around to make everything worse for them. I've... seen stupider, admittedly, but I'm more inclined to take this as evidence that they're seriously committed to coming after Taylor. Definitely need to pull the rest of the story out of her once she's had some rest.

It's getting late enough I might normally consider going to bed -past dark, specifically- but instead I start adding more claymores, covering the fencing more thoroughly. I already had the fencing covered to some extent, just in case the phasing lunatics swung by, but it was a bit light, more a just-in-case measure than something I found likely to be seriously tested, and I especially lost interest in reinforcing it once I worked out the phasing lunatics are pretty passive. Now I add a second line of claymores behind/between the existing claymores.

That takes long enough I really just want to collapse, but I also feel it's rather important that I see if I can develop that scanner I was thinking of building.

And lo, it fucking works first try.

… I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. Tinkers studying powers is supposed to be a standard capability. So there'd... have to be standard support for it. Or. Consistent support for it. Whatever. Scanning devices of some kind broadly makes sense to be a common capability, regardless of core specialty.

Point is, I now have a box with a screen on one side and antenna-looking bits on the other side, with some knobs and buttons for changing how sensitive it is, tuning what it's focused on, and sundry other reasonable-sounding things, but frankly it's a magic fucking box. I didn't sit down and spend time coding up a reasonable list of things for it to analyze, and write up models for how to represent the info being studied, but when I point it at shit it spontaneously produces graphs and words that describe the thing in vaguely useful detail.

I want to say this seems like evidence of my power being really lazy about pretending plausibility, but from what I recall of canon touching on tinker-made scanners I kinda suspect this type of bullshit might actually be normal. Like, I've got my time stop grenades. I've got them because canon Bakuda already knew how to make them when I showed up so I had a few to start and haven't found it too hard to replicate them when I've gone into tinkering sessions. And my recollection is that canon Bakuda, like, claimed to have derived them from 'studying' Clockblocker's power by... watching videos of him using his power. Which, if I'm recalling that correctly, is on the level of saying you watched someone type at a keyboard, so now inspiration has struck and you know how to assemble a motherboard with its own OS and so on.

… put like that, my power might be trying harder to pretend plausibility than what I'm recalling from canon...

Regardless, I scan the weird injury on my forehead. Does it have distinctive chemical traces, or anything else useful like that?

… not that the scanner can tell. It gives me a bunch of vaguely medical-sounding mumbo-jumbo about how deep the cut is, and informs me that infectious organisms in the wound are at a 'sustainable' level -which I think is supposed to mean my body has it under control, given the injury isn't bothering me, but who knows with powers- and gives me an approximated timetable until it'll be 'fully healed' (13 days), but no, it doesn't detect S Particles or even anything more conventionally weird like... I dunno, mercury in the wound?

As I make my way to Taylor, I wave the scanner at any clumps of bugs I pass close-ish to. The scanner keeps giving me error messages about 'not in the library', with minimal actual useful info -stuff like how much infectious-to-me stuff is on their carapace, not anything about the state of their own health. Not useless, but not nearly as helpful as I'd have liked. I'm certainly not going to be Building Better Bugs or anything.

I don't feel inspired as a result, either. I get to Taylor's room and wave the scanner at her sleeping, drooling form, disappointed.

Her injury registers as... pretty badly infected. Something about 'purulent discharge'. Ahhhh, fuck. Why is it rattling off two dozen separate microbial species in the injury? I hope that's normal and not a sign this is heinously bad.

There's also a bunch of other, less urgent data. Mostly-healed cuts concentrated around Taylor's lower legs, a healing injury on the right side of Taylor's pelvis -was I right about the 'embarrassing injury' theory?- and assorted scratches, bruises, and some secondary signs of minor malnutrition, particularly of specific vitamins. Vitamin D is listed as the worst, which feels odd. Isn't that the sun vitamin? Has... Taylor been ranging out less than I'd have expected? Might want to ask later.

Still. I'm mostly worried about that infection.

Off to the workshop.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------​

I wake up in my corner, and that's confusing, because I'd planned on going to my workshop to see if I could tinker up something for the infection, or at least tinker up something based on Taylor's power now that I've tried scanning her and her bugs.

It takes a minute, but... right. I took a shower because I was all kinds of gross and am not fully confident a scrubbing bubble grenade is fully equivalent in utility to good ol' water (Fuck, forgot to use the scanner to try to gather data for comparing), then laid down in my corner and pulled up the blankets for 'just a minute'.

And then I woke up to sunlight in my face.

So yeah, I slept the entire night away.

… well. We don't seem to have been attacked in the night, anyway.

The first thing I do, after getting dressed up a bit more, is head over to where I left Taylor. I'd like to tinker first, honestly, but I don't trust myself to not get lost in the fugues. I was bad enough at losing track of time before all this. (Assuming that was real, which... well... that aspect of my memories could be preparation for tinker fugues? I suppose?)

When I arrive, it's to the discovery that all the pillowcases are gone, while Taylor is laying in the other bed under the blanket, awake and staring at the TV. It's still on national news or some such. I note that the first bed has a pretty large stain, matching to where the ice-pillowcase was laying. So. That apparently didn't work very well. Dangit. Her costume got moved too, though I'm not seeing where any of it is aside the helmet, which is currently sitting on the desk between the beds, where hotels usually have a phone. (The phone itself has been shoved into the alcove below)

Taylor herself says, "Hey," in a quiet voice as I come in, not looking my way or indicating surprise or anything. Because she knew I was coming via bug control, I assume.

"Hey," I say back, because mirroring people's greetings or saying 'you, too' is an excellent fallback option when I have no clue what to say myself. Taylor sounds better, at least. Uh, physically. Not so sure about emotionally. Never been good at reading that, though, so whatever. "Need anything before I get to tinkering? Food, for example?" Hmmm. Wonder if the scanner would get real-time data on food's effects?

Taylor shakes her head a little, which gets a raised eyebrow from me. After a second she clarifies, "I already ate. Woke up... an hour ago."

I blink at that. "I keep almost all the food in the work- the foyer. I'm pretty sure you shouldn't be walking that much in your current condition." This isn't remotely the furthest room from the foyer, but it's still a decent chunk of walking away, given how injured she is. The infection in particular is... eating up a good chunk of her right side.

"'m fine," she once again says in an extremely unconvincing way. She apparently catches my skeptical expression, because she turns to look me roughly in the eye and speaks a little louder, clarifying. "I had help," her less-bruised arm going up so a spider can be lowered onto it by a... wasp, I think. I... really hope Taylor's control over her bugs is as good as canon made it seem. I do not like wasps. I assume she's trying to convey her bugs helped somehow. I'm... not sure how that would negate my point about walking, but I'm also not entirely sure it's worth pressing the point.

"Fine," I say, pretty sure my tone conveys that I don't think it's fine at all, "I've got tinker workshop things to do, then, before those assholes show up again." I stop, reconsidering. "Actually, no, if you're up for walking you're up for talking. I need to know what these people can do, so I can best construct counters to them." Then I'll tinker. Fuck, not sure if I should prioritize defenses or Taylor's health.

Taylor looks mildly surprised for reasons utterly beyond me, slightly shakes her head, but then contradicts what I was expecting that to mean by pulling herself into slightly more of a sitting position and saying, "We're several blocks away from their current border. We're fine." I think I can see her treating the infected area as tender? Not sure if I'm imagining it.

I shake my head. "A drone followed us to the hotel, and last night the mover lady was watching me work on the defenses from a rooftop."

Taylor looks surprised, then distinctly put out, then resigned. She mutters something under her breath, though I don't catch what -I see I'm not the only one who's gotten into a habit of talking out loud unnecessarily due to lack of human interaction- and then takes a deep breath, wincing partway through. She powers on before I can bring the wince up, though. "They're Merchants." She pauses, and I'm not entirely sure what her expression is about. "I said that already." It's clearly not really a question, but I nod anyway. Taylor wipes at her face with her less-injured hand, sighing, sounding tired. I'm probably going to need to push her to rest properly, if canon... and fanon... is anything to go by. Especially given she's really not acting like she has a big infection in her side.

After taking a few moments to collect herself, Taylor... changes the subject? "Why did you fight them?"

Oof. Um. Not sure how to answer that. The truthiest truths are not the ones that are a good idea to share. I shrug to stall, thinking. Um, she thinks I was trying to recruit her for the ABB, she knows I'm the Cornell Bomber, she probably was trying to feel out if I regretted my mad supervillainy and was apparently put out pretty badly when I enthused about her successfully defending herself in a murderous manner... this isn't helpful. Okay, different angle: a truth that's probably not answering her real question but is answering her stated question, which is something I do enough without realizing it that she may already know it's a thing I do from prior conversations and not jump to being suspicious of it. "I didn't like how the talky guy was trying to make nice with me when he has every reason to suspect I'm a murderous lunatic. If he approves of me killing PRT goons, I don't want anything to do with him, and if he's just faking making nice with me that makes me doubt his story and his intentions."

Taylor's face goes conspicuously blank when I refer to myself as a 'murderous lunatic', and twitches very slightly when I mention killing PRT goons. Did... she not know about that incident? "You... distrusted him because he was being nice." I note the tone is flat and not a question. Uuuuusually that means people are annoyed with my answer, but not always.

I shrug noncommittally. "I know I have a reputation. He clearly knew who I was, and was clearly nervous around me, and still decided to schmooze. That doesn't read as honest, to me."

Taylor stares at me in possibly-judgmental silence for a minute before speaking. "So why help me," she says in this flattened tone that makes me think she's trying to not let on whatever she's thinking. I... think I hear a bit of nervousness in there? Maybe? Though isn't voice trembling one of those nervousness things? I might just be hearing the strain on her from the infection.

True answer: because I have memories of reading a story from your perspective wherein I broadly found you relatable and likable and cool, and have since drawn the conclusion that you're probably important in some precognitively-obvious way whereby I should default to keeping you safe and probably on my side to boot.

No way that's going to fly. So I shrug and go with something... plausible. "To be honest, I've been staying away from the Northern area, and basically everyone I've met so far has either been one of the exploding lunatics or the Simurgh had very, very obviously warped them into something horrific. You're... the first person I've met since things settled down who I didn't think needed to die." This is technically, like, not really true now that I'm thinking about it, as I have spotted seemingly-fine people, I just keep avoiding them. Plus the ABB guys, who seemed normal enough. Okay, so I just straight-up lied here, whoops. Not sure if I should backpedal or not, I'm not sure if Taylor is one of those people who treats admitting to shitty memory as shifty evidence of deliberate lying.

Taylor stares at me for a bit, unusually still. I wonder if this has to do with her power? Or could just be normal person creepy stillness. That happens. Then she closes her eyes and takes a deep, ragged breath, though to my surprise she doesn't wince or otherwise react problematically to doing so (Did the scanner mislead me on how bad the infection is? Or... is she just that good at hiding the pain and all?), and after she's let it out she starts talking, eyes still closed. "I've had... four run-ins with them." That's... pretty frequent. "Not counting this time," she clarifies before continuing.

"I think they're Merchants." I consider pointing out she's said that twice already, then decide that would probably be too assholish given her current condition. "I haven't heard them call themselves anything in particular, but they're starting from the right area, and they're all addicts." I raise an eyebrow at that, because I'm unsure how Taylor would know that, and also unsure how they'd keep doing drugs in a post-apocalyptic situation, but Taylor is already explaining before I can ask. "The tinker's drones aren't... actually for scouting, or fighting. He started giving them wings and legs after our second encounter. Normally he attaches them to the outside of a person, or originally small animals like stray cats, and more recently opens them up to put a drone inside them, and it does something to their blood, processes it so it goes in as regular blood and comes out with something more inside it."

Well. That's unpleasant. And now I'm wondering if the big guy was controlled or just... under the influence.

"They mentioned territory. What they didn't say is they keep growing their territory, drawing the line wider as they gangpress more people, get them under the tinker's influence. Each time we had a conflict, it was closer to where-" Taylor's breath hitches for a second. Unsure if emotional or infection-related. "-to where I was staying. I didn't pick fights with them, and they wouldn't let me apologize and back off for 'violating their territory'." She doesn't physically air-quote there, but I can hear it in her voice, alongside a bit of, you know, scorn. "I'm not sure how rational they are, with the drugs in them." I'm abruptly remembering canon Taylor was kind of terrified of drugs, didn't understand them, just kinda vaguely knew addiction was a thing and didn't know anything about how it worked beyond drugs being involved. This is... probably harder for her than it would be for me.

It dawns on me, as Taylor continues talking, that when those capes were talking about wanting Taylor, wanting 'justice', they probably meant they wanted to get her hooked on their tinkerdrugs and try to more or less enslave her, given the modus operandi Taylor is describing. I end up interrupting Taylor. "Sorry, I didn't catch that last bit, got distracted." I... don't think I want to mention this to Taylor, certainly not while she's laid up. Either she's already figured it out, or she hasn't and it'll be likely to horrify her, and given everything that might be... very bad.

Taylor shoots a slightly skeptical look my way before re-focusing on the TV and, I assume, re-iterating what she was last saying. "The tinker is the anchor to their operations, but he's not in charge. That's the mover-" I startle slightly at that, as it really came across like the talky guy was the boss, but now that I think about it he didn't issue actual orders or do anything else unambiguously boss-like. None of them did, mind, but still. "-who might be a Case 53?" Taylor sounds unhappy to be uncertain about this point.

There's a lull here, and Taylor looks sufficiently out of it I'm genuinely wondering if she's drifting off or forgetting about the conversation or something, so I prompt with, "You've never seen her without the kit, or something?" That seems the most obvious scenario for why Taylor would theorize such.

Taylor nods slightly as she resumes talking, not seeming surprised so probably she was just thinking? "I've gotten bugs on her, so I know it's not all growing out of her flesh, but some of it might be." She takes a slightly shuddery breath. Still not sure if pain or emotion. "I still don't entirely understand her power. She charges up, she can share her speed when she unleashes it, she doesn't lose momentum when bouncing off of walls or other reasonably solid and flat surfaces-" Oh. Is that what Taylor meant when she said walls wouldn't help? Slightly less concerning than phasing, if so. "-she picks a target to control her charge, she's actually used non-capes as focal points twice before, but there's a cooldown period after she's attacked where she acts like she feels vulnerable. And during the attack she-"

Taylor pauses for a second here, looking at me out the side of one eye, and asks, "Do you know how Velocity's power works?"

Sorta-kinda-maybe? Canon Taylor said something about him being less able to interact with the world when speedstering, there was a comment about how without a mechanic like that super-speed would mean annihilating the concrete with your super-footsteps, but we barely saw Velocity himself in canon and canon was pretty quick to show us capes like Night who show Worm canon doesn't give a shit about how Taylor thinks super-speed should work. And fanon just treats him as the Flash, down at the lower end of the power scale instead of Justice League most-super-bullshit-League-member. And I never personally saw him since arriving here. And he's dead now. Wait, does Taylor know that's partially my fault? Shit, is that why she's bringing him up in particular? I'd just assumed she picked him as a local example.

In the end, I shrug, and tack on, "Fast, but some kinda tradeoff?" after it occurs to me a shrug could be taken as 'kinda', as I'm intending, or as 'no, not even slightly', the way some people use shrugs.

Taylor takes another deep breath, though no wince this time. "The faster he went, the less able he was to interact with the world around him. This woman seems to work like that, but more binary, and... she keeps trying to touch my skin, I think I said that before?" I nod, and Taylor continues, sounding a little relieved. "So I suspect there's more to it than that, like she can hurt people if she gets skin contact."

Okay, so... kinda like if Battery and Velocity had a kid, but with teamwork thrown in. And with some kinda targeting mechanic. My power isn't immediately trying to throw up counter-tech ideas, but I'm not sitting down to tinker yet and I'm not sure how normal intrusive thoughts are for tinkers. I think Kid Win was the only tinker we got indications of having such experiences... and he had dyscalculia and whatnot, that might've been part of that whole thing. Though on the other hand I probably have dyscalculia myself... except if I'm an Abbadon missile with fake memories I'm not sure whether to trust that and I haven't had a clear opportunity to check how terrible I am at math since arriving here...

… fuckit, point is 'we'll see what happens when I start tinkering'. Right now, I still want the rest of Taylor's explanation anyway.

Fortunately, while I was distracted, Taylor herself seems to have been focused on... Armsmaster looking angry while text scrolls by, talking about his 'exemplary performance' in... San Diego? Huh. That's California. Wouldn't have expected Armsmaster to end up at the opposite end of the country from Brockton Bay. Wonder why?

After another ten seconds or so, Taylor rouses herself, apparently no longer interested in Armsmaster's explanation about how he just wants to show that everyone can be their best selves, or whatever it is he means exactly. She looks at me, glances away, looks at me again, then starts talking, which... uh... okay? "Lastly, Glacius-"

"Wait," I interrupt. "They have cape names?" I do not believe for a second some asshole named their kid Glacius.

Taylor looks extremely confused, stares a bit more directly at my face, and after a second of studying my face closely her confusion visibly intensifies. Why? Regardless, after a second Taylor continues in an extremely dubious tone with, "I assume so. Glacius is the only one I've heard."

I sigh heavily to myself. The Mover was the only one in anything resembling an identity-obscuring costume! If she had a cape-name, I'd be dubious on the practicality of her committing to a cape identity but at least be able to follow a train of thought. Glacius and the tinker were not in costumes, let alone costumes that concealed anything. So unless that tinker is extra bullshit, where they only look like normal folks in normal clothes... fuckin' why?

Taylor, meanwhile, is continuing to stare at me like she's deeply concerned. I don't get that, either. Eventually she apparently decides I'm done interrupting her, I guess, because with one last dubious glance in my direction she goes back to looking at the TV but talking. "Glacius is the big guy. The... not the big guy you..." She pauses and her expression is... carefully blank? I think? I've honestly never been able to tell the difference between 'carefully blank' and 'neutral non-expression', but something feels different about her expression. Then Taylor looks me in the eye, which, uh, great, I hate it when people do that, I'm already habitually focusing elsewhere, latching onto a clock on one wall before she can resume talking. "Did you kill him?"

It takes me a second to parse the swerve, because no I did not kill the shield guy. Whatever it is he does. The... weird giant guy, that's what she's asking about. I shrug. "Before you laid out the tinker guy's basics, I'd have said 'probably'. Now I'd say 'probably, but with a question mark'." Like there was definitely chunks breaking apart, but a tinker with unclear biological manipulation ability makes that a bit less certain of a lethal thing.

Taylor takes a minute to respond, still trying to stare at my eyes and goddammit I just remembered that guilty conscience stereotype she better not be thinking I'm avoiding looking her in the eye out of guilt. "... 'but with a question mark'?" is the entirety of her response, while I'm still studying the clock and oh hey there's some intrusive tinkerthoughts. Not... very useful ones, but still.

I make an aggrieved noise. "I have no idea what you're reacting to."

Taylor's still trying to look me in the eye even as my gaze wanders around the room -ah. I should clear out some of the sheets, or something. Before I can get started on that, Taylor says, "Who actually says 'question mark'?"

Sarcastically, I respond with, "Me, clearly." Okay yeah let's start... cleaning up this room. Or at least getting the gross stuff piled together so I can deal with it all at once later.

Taylor's quiet for a minute as I bustle about, dropping assorted gross things on the bathroom floor. She speaks up when I reach for an indeterminate dark mass, saying, "Don't touch that. It's part of my costume."

I consider pointing out her costume cannot possibly be clean after everything that's happened, but having just been intensely sarcastic I suspect it would be taken as more snark rather than a legitimate point. And hey, I do have scrubbing bubble grenades. So I leave it, and go back to combing through the room.

"Seriously, why did you say 'but with a question mark'?" Taylor asks as I'm eyeballing the room's phone, murky tinkerthoughts suggesting it might have parts of use to... something.

I sigh, because okay clearly Taylor isn't going to let this... thing... go. "I have something of a history of being taken very differently from my intent, particularly when I'm talking." Taylor makes a confused noise here, but I'm not sure why and don't want to get derailed. "I ask an earnest question, and the teacher thinks I'm being a smart-alec. I make a bland observation about current events, and whoever is around takes it as a pointed remark about their failings as a human being. I say something straightforward, and it gets taken as sarcastic. I make a joke, and it gets taken as me being earnest, with an attendant belief that I'm being deliberately a giant asshole. I don't make a joke, but what I say gets taken as a joke. People who've been around me a while generally clue in and get what I'm saying and what it means, but even then there's still times I get taken as sarcastic when I'm not, hurtful when I was trying to help, etc." I finally decide yeah sure let's pull this stupid phone out the wall, it's not like we're going to use it for its intended purpose. "Doesn't matter whether I try as hard as I can to be polite and distant in word choice, or casual and friendly, or otherwise adjust my diction and so on to try to get people to get what I'm saying. Something about my tone, or body language, or something else nobody consciously pays attention to, something I don't really have control over."

It occurs to me as I'm laying all that out that really this is another thing that makes way more sense if I'm an Abbadon missile instead of a regular human being interdimensionally transplanted. Like if I'm a kinda crappy simulation remote-controlling Bakuda's body from... wherever my power's shard is lurking... it'd make a certain amount of sense for there to be, like, a loss in fidelity. Maybe Abbadon didn't get a good look at humans as he passed, and the damage done to Bakuda's brain by... her original power plugging in, or the Abbadon shard plugging in, or both... took away the ability to just tap the brain for regular ol' human... tone control or whatever... and I'm just manually steering this whole thing without a lot of fine control human brains are supposed to have.

I've just finished disconnecting the phone from the wall, speculatively eyeing the cord for reasons I can't quite put into words, when Taylor speaks in a low tone. "The whole world out to get you."

It takes a second for that to properly register, and when it does my head whips around to look at Taylor directly before I'm even thinking. "Wha- what are you talking about?"

Taylor startles, eyes locking with mine for a split-second before she re-focuses on the TV. "Nothing. I didn't say anything."

What the fuck was that about? God- forget it. She doesn't want to talk about it, and frankly I'm not sure I want to hear about it, even though I'm pretty sure I got misunderstood a-fucking-gain and theoretically really want to clear that up. But no, I just... this is dumb, and we have threats, and I need info. "Okay whatever, go back to forcefield guy. Or whatever he does."

Once Taylor resumes talking, I go back to handling the room situation. Almost done finding and stockpiling gross sheets and all. "Glacius is the... big guy you didn't kill." There's a noticeable pause in there while I'm crawling under the bed she's not currently using, and... why is there a wallet with dollar coins in it down here? Like okay I'd honestly forgotten Earth Bet America uses dollar coins instead of dollar bills, but no seriously why is there a wallet down here? Annoying, really, a wallet of cash is worthless to me in these current circumstances. Nice leather on the wallet, but I... don't think there's tinkerpotential there? "I think of his power like saran wrap." No, my power doesn't call anything to mind. "He can wrap it around other people, but it 'breaks' if they get too far apart, and he can't put it back up immediately."

Okay, so I was right about that guy, more or less. There's a lull in Taylor's monologue, so I prompt her with, "Any other times it breaks that you've noticed?" Hm, maybe the money has tinkerpotential? Money is surprisingly sophisticated stuff. Raw metals, at minimum.

I think I see Taylor shrugging out of the corner of one eye. I certainly hear her, hissing in pain. "No, I don't think so. I'm assuming enough force would work, because he doesn't act like he's invincible." Yeah, my brain's bubbling looking at this coin. Wait, gold? Why does my power think there's gold in this coin? "But I've never made it happen except by separating them."

Hm. Powers can be weird. "Has he ever had the shield up without having it wrapped around other people?" I'm wondering if it's, like, invulnerability tied specifically to hanging with others.

Taylor takes long enough to respond I glance over to check if she's fallen asleep before re-focusing on the wallet because no, she's just lost in thought. Probably. "I... don't know. It's almost invisible. I'd assumed he kept it up whenever he could."

Hmmm. Depending on how the effect discriminates and all, I might be able to work around that. Like, maybe a teleport effect would bypass his power, and then the protection would break from him being separated from his buddies. I've got a few one-offs I refused to replicate because they seemed of dubious utility to my defenses, like a random-teleport mine that shunts anybody in its 'blast' sphere to somewhere within a mile of the mine. "Okay, so separating him from his buddies is an idea." A worrying thought occurs abruptly. "It doesn't, like, explode when it fails, right?"

Taylor gives me a look I don't know how to parse, but after a second says, "No. It stretches, and then rips. The remains melt into a... fog, I think." So back to this coin, yeah, my power is insisting I can... strain out the gold using some magnetic bullshit... I realize gold isn't magnetic and so that sort of makes sense from a distance, but I have to question the mechanics of what my power is telling me. Always wondered what the point of tinker powers was supposed to be in the cycle, especially given how much fakery is clearly involved. What are the Entities hoping to get out of technology testing when the technology doesn't even actually work the way the test monkeys are told it works? Scion and Eden don't even get the soft sciences stuff, so it's probably not a psychology thing...

"The fog do anything? Suffocate bugs or the like?" Later Worm got bad about treating a lot of power visuals as basically just visual flair, like how Peach suddenly had heart effects in Brawl but the physics of the affected attacks weren't actually changed, not even Peach Bomber when it was switching away from an explosion, but early Worm tended to have power visuals more meaningful and, like, nuanced. Which fits with the precog-theory...

"What are you doing?" Taylor asks instead of answering my question.

I look up for a second to assess Taylor's expression, but there's nothing unexpected there. Curiosity and exasperation like I'd expect. "I'm a Tinker, Taylor." I gesture at the coin, then the phone. "I need raw materials, and I have to be perpetually on the lookout for inspiration." Actually, I'm not sure how normal that is now that I think about it. One of my perpetual disappointments with Worm was early Worm and WoG persistently indicate there's a lot of the creative process you'd expect in Tinkering, trying out ideas and having them turn out to be better in your head than in your hands, or the world not working quite the way it would need to for your idea to work as imagined, or the materials you have available not working for what you want to do but leading to different ideas... and then canon avoided depicting said process, and got quite bad about Tinkers just getting to produce a perfect answer first time every time. And don't even get me started on fanfic...

… so maybe it's actually just me.

That's a worrying thought.

Meanwhile, Taylor has finished mulling over that response. "Even the dirty laundry?" she asks, doubtfully. Not sure if joke.

I'm just going to go ahead and blame this on Taylor being sick and injured and all. "No, that's just dirty laundry that needs cleaning."

Taylor continues to stare doubtfully at me. "Why are you shoving it in the bathroom, then?"

"So it's not on the carpet?" I'm not sure why Taylor is asking this. Minimize stains, and minimize opportunities for shit to grow in the carpet, which is harder to clean than the sheets... blankets... whatever the terminology here is...

"Aren't you-" She hesitates for a second here, no idea why. "Aren't you going to use a... 'scrubber grenade' to clean it all anyway?"

It takes me a second to work out she means my scrubbing bubble grenades. I guess the exact wording didn't really stick with her. Also: um, good point. "Okay, thoughtless habit is your explanation then. I'm on autopilot here, mostly listening to your explanations. Like whether the clingwrap shield kills bugs when it breaks?" This is deliberately pointed of a comment.

Taylor's lips twitch in what might be an aborted smile at my initial comment, but it's difficult to be sure, especially knowing how bad that infection is. Could just be a twitch of pain. In any event, she nods -to herself? In acknowledgment of my pointed remark?- and says, "No," very firmly.

I bristle slightly at that, that level of surety is rarely justified in my experience... and then take a calming breath. Picking a fight with Taylor while she's sick and I know it would be dumb. "Is it problematic for them to breathe it, or anything?"

Taylor visibly mulls that over. Or maybe she's mulling over whatever Protectorate-cape-I-don't-recognize on the TV just said, I haven't been paying attention to her. "Not that I've noticed, but I hadn't th-" Her breathing hitches for a second, but she bulls on. "-thought of that." I'm considering what to ask next when Taylor remarks, "His power might be ice-based, given the name."

I space for a second, a kind of incoherent rage at the universe itself arising at the possibility that Taylor might be right and Glacius might, in fact, have unnecessarily provided a clue to his enemies by picking a meaningful name alluding to a non-obvious element of his power. Normally I'd dismiss it out of hand as stupid, but Worm also gives us Tattletale, who had zero need to pick such an accurately-revealing name. Fuck, maybe my expectations of how inane it is for people to do such are also a product of being an Abbaddon missile, if he was using a similar process as Scion and Eden with prior worlds and so got a lot of thought into yomi and similar I might've inherited a lot of assumptions therein, vs actual random humans with powers shoved into their skulls totally seeing nothing wrong with passing out hints to all their enemies via their fucking names.

Fingers being snapped reminds me Taylor is in the room. "What was that about?"

My gaze follows Taylor's pointing arm to the wallet I picked up earlier, which is currently twisted up in my hands. Whoops. Been a while since I've done that. "Anger habit I thought had gone away, where I twist or otherwise put pressure on stuff in my hands, sometimes without noticing if I'm focused on other stuff."

Taylor goggles at me, and it finally registers on me that she's wearing her glasses and has been this entire time. Right, right, she actually had a compartment in her costume for her glasses, didn't she? That simplifies things. "Anger over what?" Taylor asks in this mildly anxious way I can't quite put my finger on.

I carefully try to get the wallet back to its default shape as I answer. "The possibility that you might be right, and this cape might be stupid enough to have put a hint to a non-obvious element of his power into his cape name, and attendant implication I live in a universe in which an actual person actually thinks this makes sense." Wait, is this croc leather? I thought it was regular leather with a pattern inlaid afterward was all, but this isn't bending quite the way I'm used to leather wallets bending.

Taylor stares at me for a long, long chunk of time, absorbing that statement, before finally remarking, "You didn't seem that mad when they were trying to kill us." She sounds bothered. Probably. Great.

I sigh again, then double-take. "Wait, they were?"

There's a pause where I'm pretty sure Taylor is giving me an are you serious? look, before she says, "They had guns," and I have to wonder if she sounds pained due to the infection or if this is more psychological pain at having to point it out to me or what.

"Well, sure," I start out, because it's not like that's a terrible point, but it's still... kinda bizarre for Taylor to jump to. "But you're-" Wait shit amend presentation! Avoid spoilers! "-You threw yourself in front of me like you thought you were bulletproof, and they didn't treat that as weird or anything, and you've fought them a lot before. They probably didn't think guns would kill you, and you already told me they want to coopt you. And they were bluntly there for you. Like okay yeah now that you mention it they were probably okay with killing me, but I'd probably be okay with killing me if I were in their position with their likely knowledge of what I've done and why I've likely done it." Should I bring up blowing up Taylor's school here as an example? Would that be forced?

Taylor stares at me in silence for so long I eventually heave a sigh and stand back up. "If that's all you've got to tell me vis-à-vis their powers and all, I'm going to see if I can tinker up something to counter them and/or to hurry up your recovery now."

Taylor doesn't respond as I head out, phone, coinage, and wallet in tow.

 

[Ghoul King]

5.6

Okay, power, this would be a really good time to actually cooperate.

I start out uncertain how to go about this, then decide to get a little organized, grabbing one of my many pens and some paper and writing down...

Taylor health?
Shield?
Speed?
Drones?

… as the order I want to go through this. Taylor first because health is a priority on multiple levels. Then shield guy because he's the one I'm most concerned will, like, block literally my entire current arsenal because fuck you, and Taylor went into enough detail if any inspiration will strike off detail level, it'll be for him. Then speedster lady because she seems like the only one maybe more directly dangerous than just their gun-carrying minions. Drone guy last because tinkers are adaptive: if I come up with a broad counter to his shit first, then they attack and we drive 'em off but don't deal with him in a permanent way (Killing. I'm talking about his death), I have this distressing suspicion his next wave of tech will be hardened against that answer, whereas I'm reasonably confident the other capes won't do anything equivalent.

… hopefully.

Once the list is written, it also crystalizes in my head that I should be able to come up with at least a partial fix for Taylor relatively readily, given it's, like, bacterial infections and I've already built a broad answer to that type of issue. A variation on that should be comparatively easy, I'd think. So that's another reason to prioritize Taylor first, especially if tinker creativity is at all like regular creativity.

… actually, I've made multiple variations now that I think about it. There was that... uuuhh... well, I didn't want to use it because it did tissue damage, at least according to my power, and who knows where that grenade ended up in all this chaos... point is, I've made more than one anti-bacterial grenade. Promising for the potential for one better-suited to this situation? Maybe? Or maybe not. I've made a lot of distinct tinkertech devices, but looking back, variation on individual ideas is something I've consistently struggled with. I didn't really question it with stuff like the time stop grenades, because time stopping isn't something that lends itself to fine gradation, but like I've got the one 'frost bomb' concept. Like yeah I can load it into claymores, mines, bouncing betties, grenades, and other delivery mechanisms, but it's really just the one device drawing arctic ice from other dimensions as far as the, uh, 'exotic' component. I've not fiddled with it to try to draw, I dunno, black ice? Frozen juice? Really, you'd think 'portal in a specific class of object' would be pretty easy to tune to different ideas.

Hmmm.

In fact, thinking back: why the fuck did this attempt at a medical scanner with a screen and all work out? Back when I made the tinkertech earring I couldn't get my power to cooperate on making anything more medically useful! I... don't think I got inspiration from another tinker or power since then... if I did, I didn't notice...

… but tinker fugues. Fuck, maybe I did?

I'm also dimly remembering WoGs talking about Worm capes having shades of level-up mechanics to them, where tinkers would be rewarded with more designs for getting into conflict and whatnot. I tend to forget about it because canon didn't allude to such, even when we had parahuman science sorts doing infodumps about parahuman mechanics, but I also know that people noticed that in canon Taylor overall improved over the course of the story in ways that couldn't be explained by skill improvements. More range, that was the big one. I think some people blamed some of her later bug feats on that, too, though I always assumed that was just the author screwing up. So. Maybe my shard didn't give me it before because I hadn't gotten into enough fights and all? That was before I participated in anything overtly cape-y...

Also occurring to me is that... I was thinking just minutes ago about how later canon was increasingly bad about tinkers just getting able to fab up the right answer when they needed it. That... might actually be a tinker shard truism. Especially given how fanfic was really prone to it. "Nah, Bakuda," my shard was saying before. "You don't actually need a medical scanner for helping other people, so you're not getting one." And now I actually do need one to diagnose Taylor, so suddenly I can make one.

Even if it's not a general shard truism, it sure as hell fits with the rest of my Abaddon missile theory, because in that theory Taylor is somehow Mission Critical, and my shard is liable to contrive ways to keep her alive.

So: great! I have a minimum of three theories for why I suddenly can build this thing, with no obvious way to eliminate any particular explanation! Great fucking think!

At least I wasn't physically idle while burning brain time on this unhelpful thought process. Busily organizing parts and stuff.

… come to think, I haven't eaten yet. I really should. Okay, fine, food first, what cookable meal do I have in the fridge or freezer-

...

I slam the freezer door shut, and turn around and go to my snack pile instead.

Okay, so, finding a smiley face giving a thumbs-up, drawn on the back of the inside of the freezer in that same hide-it-from-capes effect is incredibly creepy. Especially since it reminds me of that one emoticon where I was never sure if the thumbs-up was meant to be sincere or sarcastic.

On the other hand, it's... good news? Maybe? It certainly seems to suggest Cauldron isn't going to just drop support for me because Taylor's around, and more precisely that they're making an effort to keep having that support be invisible to Taylor. I... guess Doormaker opened a portal inside the freezer, and then somebody drew the image through the portal... and that would keep it out of Taylor's awareness even with all the bugs, since a freezer is too cold for most bugs to be at all comfortable heading inside. I know from experience that even the most aggressive of roaches are extremely reluctant to enter a freezer, even if there's an open container of food inside that's starting to go bad, and other bugs are even less eager to brave the cold. Doesn't really solve the part where I need supplies, not unless I... I dunno, claim the freezer is tinkertech that pulls shit from another dimension semi-randomly? But I've already worked out that this can't be canon Cauldron, so I really shouldn't be continuing to expect stupidity from them, either.

I'm not sure why I find the image of Contessa drawing through the portal so adorable. Not that I have any unambiguous evidence it was her, but it leaped to mind...

Regardless, I settle for having some soda and a decent amount of snacks, idly noting that some of the snacks vanished while others went untouched. Not sure how much general significance to attribute to what I'm seeing, given Taylor's infection. She's almost certainly unconsciously self-medicating, so a whole box of cinnamon pop-tarts vanishing could be extremely far outside her usual diet. And given how that stuff works, if I asked her, she'd probably rationalize it as 'they were closest' or 'I haven't had pop-tarts in weeks and didn't care about what kind they were' or some other explanation.

Once I'm done eating, I take a brief peek outside, not really expecting to see anything given nothing has exploded and Taylor hasn't tried to get my attention. I don't notice anything, but it was a casual inspection.

Then I finally try to focus on doing something for Taylor's health. Preferably in pill form... though I wouldn't say no to a magic wand I can wave over her side to clear away the infection. Hint-hint, power.

Unfortunately, my power is... uncooperative. I'm remembering stuff like the acid bouncing betty, this vague notion lurking that I could use that to melt away the area, but, uh, no. And no, my power isn't proffering ideas of how to keep Taylor alive after melting away a sizable fraction of her torso. Not that I would go for 'melt away a chunk of Taylor, then replace it with cybernetics', but come on power you're not even trying to sell me on this 'use flesh-eating acid on Taylor' idea.

Trying to think from different angles is less helpful than I'd prefer. Trying to mentally frame it as a trap to improve Taylor's health conjures the amusing mental image of doing the supervillain trap door thing, "You have failed me for the last time!" and my poor minion going shrieking to their apparent doom, only to be confused when actually it fixes up their injuries somehow... but it doesn't get my power to offer up any devices.

Eventually I give up with an aggrieved sigh. Fine, conventional attempts to treat her it is. At least for the moment.

Okay, sticky note says next I try to... right, see if my power offers ideas for countering clingwrap shield guy. I did at least see his shield in action, so that's something, hopefully.

Actually, 'countering' is maybe the wrong word for what I want. I want ideas that I think have good odds of bypassing the shield with low odds of some kind of backfire. Like, in pop culture shields tend to be depicted as just stopping or absorbing projectiles, but sometimes they bounce off like the shield is the equivalent of sloped armor on a tank, only omnidirectional and working on way more kinds of projectiles. Taylor didn't provide a clear description of the kinetics of the shield, may well have had no opportunity to test the kinetics given the tools at her disposal, and I didn't get a chance to really observe his shield myself in our one encounter: it would be really bad if I used, like, a relatively conventional shrapnel bomb only for it to bounce off the shield and shred me. Especially since I still haven't properly made up an armored costume for myself like I keep thinking I should do. If I had, I could at least try the X-COM Pistol-and-Power-Armor strategy, of restricting myself to gear I'm confident won't hurt me...

... though actually, given powers, I'm suddenly not so sure that would be safe. If his power did something like make deflections somehow more dangerous, that could go badly.

...

So basically I don't actually have adequate info on his power to be sure much of anything would be safe to try on him. Wow. I had never actually considered how frustrating a barely-understood defensive power could be. With someone who only seems to have an offensive power, I can at least be pretty confident that 'surprise explosion' is a good and safe plan. Well. As safe as any explosive-based plan ever is, I guess.

My power doesn't really throw up ideas in an inspirational way, either. I'm pretty sure remembering I had some Khonsu bombs at the start of this whole 'being Bakuda' thing is just regular memory stuff, not my power subtly suggesting it would very definitely be a safe solution to this particular problem.

I spend a bit tinkering up some more of the random-teleport mines grenades just because their mechanics seem reasonably unlikely to do anything backfire-y in the face of a shield -among other points, my power is extremely insistent teleported stuff will not intersect with solid objects, which I've previously considered a flaw but means that if eg the shield bounces the effect back at me I won't end up killed by that. Nor in the sky, or underground. It could dump me on unstable ground, among other hazardous possibilities, so it's not completely safe, but it's annoyingly safe.

I also find it likely that they'll be useful enough against the other two. And any normal human assistants.

... actually, maybe I should make a lot more of them, put like that. I keep struggling with non-lethals, and there's defensive utility there. Though I'm also running low on the cadmium that it needs, and I'm a bit reluctant to go scavenging more computers under these conditions.

Hmmm.

Before I can commit to any particular plan, I startle violently in response to a horrendous noise. I'm vaguely reminded of some of the more unpleasant sounds I've heard cats make, including a time I might actually have heard a cat dying outside. It does not stop, whatever it is, and I start making my way toward the window the sound seems to be coming through, alarmed and upset and wanting to know what the hell I'm hearing.

I'm almost to the window when a blobby mass of bugs in the general size and shape of a small cat or dog or the like goes lurching past, the noise quite obviously coming from it. I stare in shock and confusion as it stumbles, crashes to the ground with the shriek turning into a pitiful meow, and... goes silent and immobile, aside the many, many bugs swarming over it.

"What the fuck," I say aloud because seriously, what? After a second my brain more properly recalls the context, and I amend it to a louder, "What the fuck, roomie?" So sue me. I don't know if she doesn't want me calling her Taylor where others might hear, and I... probably?... shouldn't know her cape name is Skitter.

After a second, bugs spell out, on the ground -wow, is she accounting for parallax or whatever the term is? That actually looks like real words from this angle, wow- tinker still spies with animals

I blink at that. I don't- she didn't say that was a thing? Or. Not explicitly, I guess? Like okay yeah she mentioned he started with animals and also mentioned being linked to his drones more recently... I guess that is a logical scenario to guess, but... "Okay, that's a sound theory, but you just murdered a- a whatever that is, off a plausible theory?"

can smell drugs

I... well, maybe? I know you get a certain amount of stuff with bugs avoiding or pursuing based in part by target diet where their antennae pick up on chemicals (ie smell), so that's certainly possible, but I'm still a bit-

That's when the bug mass partially clears up, revealing amid the gore I'm catching glimpses of a red (Possibly from the blood...) metallic sphere with pipe-y bits sticking out asymmetrically in four directions. I gawk at that as the bugs do some maneuvering to shove it away from the animal corpse, with it ultimately rolling a couple feet toward the window, orange goo blorping out of two of the tubes three times each as it rolls.

... okay. "Never mind my doubts."

Then I rush out to grab the thing and haul it into my workshop so I can study it, furtively looking around for any other signs these assholes are actively scoping us out. Fuck, am I gonna need to re-tune my claymores or something? Taylor has to sleep, and while her bugs were later indicated to do a certain amount of stuff even while she was sleeping, that was both later and was never really presented as the kind of thing that lent itself to 24/7 patrolling.

I don't spot anything before slamming the door shut behind me, heart beating like crazy.

Alright, let's look at this drone...

----------------------------------------------------------------------​

An hour or whatever later, I've got three of these things to study, because Taylor's bugs stung a pigeon to death (Well, two of them actually, but only one had a device in it) and dragged the (tiny) tinkertech to my workshop and murdered another quadruped I suspect was a stray dog this time outside my workshop.

I'm really, really glad I'm not the sort to have nightmares in response to this kind of shit. This is unpleasant enough without dreading revisiting it in my dreams later. I don't even like dogs or cats, but the sounds of them dying horribly are not exactly fun.

Through some combination of possibly-actual-intuition and power-assisted intuition, I've worked out some actually-useful bits, not just 'oh look these all look similar and have orange goo in them'. A lot of it doesn't really surprise me, like that the tubes are designed to hook into blood vessels and integrate as part of the bloodstream, with two of them being for the blood going in and two for the blood going out. The metal, similarly, is some tinkertech... alloy? That sounds wrong to me, but my power is pretty insistent it can be assembled from copper and aluminum using some phase-shift nonsense, so whatever, fine, it's an alloy and this somehow prevents tissues from rejecting it, metal poisoning of any kind, etc.

I had to take one of them apart to get into the whole 'how do the drugs work' part. I went with the biggest one, which by a small margin was the first one. I initially thought I'd need to figure out, like, a blowtorch or how to get my power to bullshit up whatever I do when I really ought to require a blowtorch but don't actually use anything like that, but this tinkertech material is... a bit like plastic, I guess? It's not actually that mechanically tough in terms of being difficult to cut or the like, but wouldn't break readily in field usage because it deforms and then bounces back to its original shape when hit with pressure.

I did need to heat it up some to make it easier to cut into, but that was literally just going into the kitchen and setting it on the stove for a bit.

Anyway, I'm... not entirely sure how the drug process works. I have a microscope I found ages ago so I got to compare scraped-off, partially hardened blood from the entry ports against orange goo scraped off the exit ports, and I'm pretty confident this is chemical and not nanites or parasitic organisms or similar, but I'm not entirely sure what everything I saw means. It's been way too long since I used a microscope, and my power isn't doing any garbage with feeding me terms and occasionally meaning of said terms. Still. I think the red blood cells are all being converted or replaced, with white blood cells and other stuff in the blood untouched, in addition to the chemical thing I'm seeing in the exit port samples.

The inside of the widget, meanwhile, is less opaque to me. There's multiple chips on the inside sealed away under glass (Is that safe?), most of which are on a central bit that's a sphere-ish thing normally held in place by electromagnets and covered in a lot of... tubes? Entry or exit points, is the point, with the chips in gaps. My power insists those chips are for managing the drug conversion system, which makes sense to me. I'm not sure if it's purely me or partly my power that I suspect the chips could change the nature of the output.

Two of the chips are on the inside of the outer layer, with miniature... ffff.... 'subspace' transmitters... seriously, what the fuck does subspace even mean? Forget it, whatever, it's some kind of super-high-tech radio equivalent is the point, able to work in conditions radio wouldn't. (Possibly due to pure shard fuckery, but shhh) Some of the transmitters are for transmitting to the chips on the inner orb, while others are for more external transmissions. Probably how the tinker is 'linked'... wait. How was he controlling these animals?

"Taylor," I say aloud to the room. "I don't suppose you've noticed any metal or plastic or other foreign bits in the brains of these animals? I could really use any chips or the like that might be in them."

If there's not chips in their brains or on their spines or something, I'm unsure how the control would work.

Regardless, while I'm waiting for a response I cut open the inner orb, and it promptly deflates like a dead jellyfish, some honeycomb patern visible to me. The hell? How was it- it didn't release fluids or anything! Why did it fall apart then?

I have to get some tableware from the kitchen to carefully peel it apart, carefully washing them first, because if it's that sensitive I'm half-expecting touching it with my bare -well, gloved- hands to be bad somehow or another. I'm... pretty sure after a couple minutes that it's some kind of hexagonal grid thing, only somehow in 3D? There's also a lot of subtle variation, probably. I think this is some kind of... bizarre protein-folding mechanism, or something not far removed? Like I can see the chambers have the ability to open or close their assorted sides via some kinda artificial muscle system, and I'm pretty sure these muscles are controlled by the chips. Similarly, the insides of different chambers have these nearly-invisible corrugations on the inside of their muscle-things and the more solid frames that I'm pretty sure vary between chambers. I have difficulty seeing how this would work in reality-as-I-knew-it, but I can sort of imagine that each chamber is designed to manipulate cells going through them, where different arrangements of chambers would essentially be different folding instructions.

That's pretty cool, and aside my skepticism of it being able to work without shard shenanigans I find it essentially believable as some kind of futuristic, multi-functional device? I could imagine reading Popular Science and having them describe something not-entirely-dissimilar from this as a Coming Soon Medical Device.

Then Taylor beans me on the head with a beetle again.

"Goddammit, stop that!" Fuck, I hate being startled by bugs, forget being smacked with them.

As I look around, I see bugs have spelled out, here you go as well as care to share? and as I'm looking around bugs add you were ignoring me. The first sentence causes me to notice that, yes, there's a neat series of nine chips that weren't there earlier laid out in a row nearby, with bugs spelling out bird, dog, and cat 'above' each set of three from my perspective. Huh. Three chips per? I was expecting one, maybe two, like one in the brain and one in the spine.

Then a beetle buzzing ominously at head height reminds me to answer Taylor. "Okay, like, first of all, thanks, that really helps, second we really need a better way of getting my attention than beaning me on the head, and third I'm still working through this, it's complicated and I don't want to jump to conclusions while trying to explain to you what I'm seeing."

The 'labels' remain, but the rest of the text 'wipes'. After a second two sentences are spelled out. The higher one is any suggestions? while the lower one is how would talking to me be bad?

I consider complaining about that wording, then decide Taylor is probably just keeping words short or something else, not deliberately misrepresenting my words by fucking changing them. Might be easier for her to stick to fewer bugs for writing, or something. "Crickets? I don't like cricket noises, but they don't freak me out like beetle to the head does." Ugh, how do I word this... "As for the conclusions stuff, I don't really default to thinking in words, and I find that when I try to organize my thoughts with words, it tends to be... limiting, both in the sense that I have more trouble recognizing a possibility if I don't have the vocabulary for it, and also in the sense that I'll sentence up a possibility as just a sketch of a possibility and then my brain-" Wait. Is it my brain, if I'm a shard upload? In fact, is this even still a concern? "-basically just wants to build on whatever I verbalized instead of considering the full range of possibilities. So I talk to someone about something I'm studying, and I compare it to a river's flow, and now my brain will not let go of that metaphor and its implications until something has me going 'wait, that doesn't make sense'." Ugh, I'll just assume it does still apply. Might be a completely different explanation from my historical vague guesses as to why, like it's because I'm a shard upload or something... but if I am a shard upload and fake personality and blah made by alien supercomputers etc, probably any memories of things I found problematic still apply even if my engineered thoughts for why don't. I hope.

I don't have any crickets gets spelled out. Goddammit. After a delay, added below it is you don't think in words? What??? Yes, with three question marks. God, it's like a fucking chatroom fucking fuck that's why I remember chatrooms even though I didn't like them!

Uuugghrgh, I have never had to explain this shit to anyone but family before. Fake family that probably doesn't even exist. Which is why I have no such memories, so I would find this natural to feel new.

my god it just gets more annoying the more plausible it feels

Okay! Fine! Explanation time, I guess! "Have you heard of Asperger's?" Ignoring the distinct possibility the real reason is that I'm an engineered, shitty fake human! I don't even begin to know how I'll break that idea if I ever feel it merits explaining!

maybe? gets written out after a second. That's... okay. I really hope this isn't 'maybe' as in 'Taylor has heard those stupid, assholish assburger memes, and is wondering if I'm mispronouncing that or something'.

Wait.

How recently did Asperger's get identified and shit? Because Bet is supposed to have diverged from Omicron/Aleph in... 1980-something? Right?

Crap. This diagnosis might not even exist in Bet, or at least go by a different name. You know, assuming Abaddon didn't straight-up make it up for some fucking reason.

"Forget it, never mind that angle, let me start over." This is such a pain. "I actually primarily 'think in pictures', which is semi-normal and also a hideous simplification, but the point is that I don't actually default to the subvocal talking-to-yourself form of 'thinking' that is the pop-culture stereotype of what conscious thought resembles, and which is even actually accurate in a non-trivial fraction of the population. Well, semi-accurate. Point is, I'm not constantly mentally muttering to myself as my primary thoughtstream, I'm doing... modeling of how things can go, and stuff." Wait. Is this because of the Bakuda insertion prep stuff? Because being a strongly visual thinker sounds tinkertech-favorable. Though then again my memories insist I was bad at assembling furniture and whatnot?

Cornell sounds like a good school writes itself onto the wall via bugs.

Uh.

Er.

Huh. That is a reasonable conclusion to jump to for knowing this stuff, isn't it? Is... is Taylor envious of, uhhh, pre-me Alicia having gotten advanced education? Winslow was a hole, and canon Taylor was pretty quick to give up on further schooling when Leviathan wrecked things. She... yeah, I could totally buy she'd given up on the idea of ever going to college, even aside the superpower stuff making it a bit unnecessary.

Man, I don't even have fake memories of going to college. This feels weird, to have her possibly envying an experience I don't in any meaningful sense have.

After it occurs to me that likely merits an actual response, I say, "I guess. I'm just big on science in general." I've always wondered if that kind of interest correlated to tinker powers in canon. Am I a point in that direction? I suppose it depends on what's actually going on... "A-anyway-" Goddammit voice stop acting up! "-that's why I prefer talking to happen after theorizing is significantly done. Makes it easier to think through the problem without unnecessary fuckups."

okay

I wait to see if there's anything more, then go back to tinker-studying when nothing else seems forthcoming.

Okay, three chips. Huh. Only two of them have subspace transmitter/receivers. Two per set of three, I mean. But they're not directly linked? There's no evidence of damaged wires or anything like that, and the subspaceless chips don't 'mate' to either of the other chips in a more mechanical way. How does that work? Hijacking the nervous system, maybe? Or maybe those chips are fully automated and don't need to be able to receive instructions or cooperate with other chips or the like.

The chips are all also the same size, unlike the drug-spheres, not varying based on animal. Hmm. A minimum size requirement? Not immediately thinking of other sensible reasons to have them all the same size even though the pigeon would've been too small to readily fit the chips in the brain and all. Actually- "Hey, were the pigeon's chips on the outside, perchance?"

no

Okay, really confused now. Though I guess that explains why Taylor murdered an innocent pigeon: because it's not obvious on the outside there's a difference. Wait. "Did the other pigeon smell of the drugs?" Because that's what Taylor was saying was why she killed them. Well. Implying, more like.

yes

Huh. Weird. Is the drug... making it into the feathers, and then getting ingested by other pigeons while grooming? Why only two pigeons together smelling alike- was it? "Were there other pigeons that smelled of the drugs?"

not here

Huh. Did... did Taylor kill a mating pair? Not... sure what the mechanics would be there... but it's one of the more obvious explanations for this particular situation... whatever, three chips per animal, one doesn't have subspace comms. "Do you know where the chips were, specifically?"

The wall spells out look down. I obligingly look down, and see bugs near the chips. It takes me a second to properly parse them as trying to spell out words; at this distance, it's hard to not notice very viscerally that they're bugs. Still, it looks to me like Taylor is saying one chip was in the brain for each, one in the upper spine -that's the one that doesn't have comms- and one on... the heart?

Okay, the brain and spine chips make a kind of intuitive sense to me. Some kind of hijacking the nervous system for control thing, with the spine chip either doing some more automated control stuff or using the spine itself to 'talk' with the brain chip. I'm really not sure what to make of the heart chip, though. Especially since it does have subspace comms. If these were humans, I'd wonder if maybe it was for something like stopping the heart, as some additional layer of threat, but- well. Hm. Put like that, maybe it's for restarting the heart, if the drugs cause it to stop? I dunno, that's imaginable as a possibility, anyway. Still doesn't clearly answer why the comms, though.

In any event, this is looking pretty strongly to me like the tinker has more direct control over people than just getting them hooked and then threatening to take their supply away if they don't do as they're told. I kind of figured just from the animals showing up, but it was possible they were directed other ways than direct control. This also pretty strongly suggests the giant guy was being driven by the chips, not continuing to move by being harangued via an earbud I didn't notice or something. Nice to have that much confirmed, though I'm... well. I was about to say that I'm annoyed I didn't bring and use one of my tech-fouling grenades, but thinking it out I'm not 100% sure the guy would've survived that. He was unnaturally huge, and now I'm pretty confident Taylor is right it was caused by tinker drugs, so it's distinctly possible screwing up his tinkertech would've killed him. Probably slower and at least as horribly as what I did to him, too. So, uh, never mind that maybe-regret.

I decide to take apart and study the cat's set of chips. Right away I'm pretty sure (Probably primarily thanks to my power-provided 'tinker intuition') that while there's actual sensor bits in the chips, they're not anything suited to passive surveillance while I've got them here in my workshop. There's stuff for picking up electrical impulses and chemical information from the animals they're embedded in, and the chips are designed to power themselves basically entirely through passive means riding off the host animal's... stuff. Mostly the nervous system, I think, but there's systems that look to me to be for turning blood flow into, uh, hemoelectric power, I guess.

I sort of wish the possibility they still functioned as intelligence tools had occurred to me earlier, as tinkertech/powers in general mean a lot of normal assumptions aren't safe assumptions, but no harm no foul in this case. Something to keep in mind for if I run into future tinkers, though. Actually, canon alluded to tracking devices being kind of standard. I haven't thought about that because I don't do that with my constant stream of assorted devices, but...

… nnnnope, not finding anything that seems like a tracking device per se. Would be a bit redundant with the subspace comms, admittedly.

Anyway, the chips are less helpful to study than I'd like. I'm not tinker-intuiting anything about their programming, except the extremely unhelpful point I'd already basically assumed that they're designed for reprogrammability, and their observable physical design isn't flagrantly cluing me in on their range of storable programs or anything. Especially because even if I knew enough about regular computer chips to make sensible inferences, I'd just assume they were low estimates because tinkertech doesn't care about normal physical limitations.

Their actual physical construction also doesn't grab me in terms of offering inspiration for my own tech or anything. I already build computer chips into a non-trivial fraction of my tech. Somehow. Without remembering how I did it. These chips being designed to interface with biology doesn't give me ideas, which is semi-disappointing but on the other hand I'm not sure I'd want biotech ideas so whatever. More accurately, not sure I want biotech ideas of the sort I'd expect to get from this tinker. Help with medical inspiration would be nice. Turning people into flesh-and-blood robots that obey my will is not my thing.

At least they're raw materials for my own tech.

I don't even have an answer for what the heart chip is for. Ugh. That's intriguingly weird, I was hoping for an answer.

Ugh, fine, back to the orb stuff.

I'm just starting to pry off one of the cut-open orb's chips when multiple freaky things happen. Whizzing noises, wood breaking, glass shattering, metal pinging noises, and a biblical plague rising from the hotel and swarming off to my left. "What the fuck?" I look around, confused and spooked, not sure what the hell is going on, and then notice one wall has bugs spelling out get down!!

I stare at that for a second, watching the bugs moving to join the rest of the plague, distantly starting to hear screams. Something pings and goes rolling off a table, and it finally dawns on me that this is gunfire. I'm immediately crouching, trying to assess by visuals and memory what would be vaguely decent cover, notice the foyer of course has big-ass windows -several of them being the glass I heard shattering earlier- and decide to just start hurrying out of the foyer, deeper into the building, alternating half-crouching and semi-running-on-all-fours. (Huh, Bakuda's body is flexible enough to do that. Women are generally more flexible than men... or this is fake personality preparation bullshit...)

My heart is pounding by the time I'm far enough into the halls I'm inclined to think being shot is super-unlikely. Holy shit, I could have died with no warning. I really need to get myself some kind of proper armor, goddamn. I'm not sure I got particularly lucky in this case, as thinking back I think that was just a dozen-ish pistols being fired, and pistols are not designed for accurate long-range shooting, these people have good odds of being untrained, and it wouldn't be surprising if the tinkerdrugs are negatively affecting their aim, but that could easily have been a zero-warning death.

Fuck.

 

[100thlurker]

if you have issues with the way sv is run, you are free to discuss them at anytime...but not in this thread. Hello everyone, sorry to interrupt!

Another thread ruined by necroing idiots. I blame lazy moderators.

Click to shrink...

If you have issues with SV's Rules and wish to discuss them, we have far more appropriate venues such as Staff Communications or the Suggestion Box. We will be glad to field them there. However, as a courtesy to your fellow posters who wish to enjoy the content on the forum, please do not muck up threads outside of those forums with complaints about the Rules.

@deletedaccount43 has been given a standard Infraction and will be taking a short vacation from the thread.

In the meantime, let's drop this subject for good!