Obligatory Snippet thread. I might make these into actual stories or they might stay dead and forgotten, dunno yet!
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A Tithe of Pain
Geas
Meat Thing
First semi-abandoned snippet: A Danny-centric tale, with a dark premise - What if Taylor didn't survive the locker?
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I'm still not sure just when exactly I'd gotten my powers. After what happened to Taylor… how she died… and then the PRT taking her body after they took over the investigation into her death…
If it wasn't for Kurt, Lacy and Alan, there might not have even been a funeral. That's how much of a mess I was, once I'd finally gotten her body back from the PRT some five or six days after her death. The bastards had done a second autopsy on her after they'd taken custody of her. Whatever they'd done, Kurt and Alan had refused to let me see her until after the funeral home had worked their magic.
It still hurt, to see her laying there, so pale and still and small. But she almost looked like my little girl afterwards, and less like a modern art homage to Frankenstein's monster, so I was able to choke down some of the rage I felt at her being defiled yet again.
I didn't think anything would hurt as badly as losing my Annette.
As it turned out, I was a fucking idiot and the universe was only too happy to educate me.
I was told that sepsis was what killed her. She… something in the disgusting filth that they'd pulled her out of had scratched Taylor in the two hours she'd been trapped in her locker. Or maybe the infection had set in when she'd ripped off three fingernails clawing at her locker door. I'm told that she was unconscious and barely breathing when the janitor pulled her from her locker.
She went into seizures twice in the ICU and had to be intubated, then died later that night at 10:23 pm, but would have lived if she'd managed to hang on for just another four minutes.
That's roughly how long it would have taken Panacea to get to her next as she was finishing up her previous patient. Just four minutes. Four lousy minutes made all the difference between my Taylor recovering, and her ending up in a casket.
Four.
Goddamn.
Minutes.
And then the PRT butted in, because there was something strange about Taylor's body. As far as I was concerned, the only strange thing was that my little girl was dead because of some little shit's fucked-up idea of a prank. But no, they had to take her and, and butcher her for some goddamn autopsy and didn't even have the fucking decency to apologize for it and-
Just thinking about it sent me surging from the agony of losing her to a red rage that uncomfortably reminded me of my father's temper. I damn near caved Armsmaster's mouth right the fuck in, in right in the middle of that stupid fucking beard, that dense motherfu-
…
So yeah, it took me a while to notice that I had powers. Not until the day after Taylor's funeral, in fact.
I'd tried to numb myself with as much as I could drink despite Kurt's efforts to keep me from drinking myself to death by swiping everything he could find, followed by checking in on me as much as he could along with Lacey, Alan and Zoe. The last of my beer served me well, but not nearly as well as a dusty old bottle of Tequila.
At one point, I remember (in a blurry 'sort of' way) laying on the floor of my living room and staring dumbly up at the ceiling. Then rolled over onto my side to grab the bottle from where I left it, and there it was.
It was the biggest goddamn rat I'd ever seen, and working the docks for as long as I have, I've seen some impressive specimens. Even as drunk as I was, this bastard sitting right in the middle of my living room and looking me in the eye like I owed it something was literally as big as a goddamn dog - easily three or four feet from nose to haunches.
Oh, and it had my tequila, and was pushing it across the floor towards me with its paws, until the glass of the bottle hit my outstretched fingers.
Luckily, despite being literally falling-down-drunk I was already sprawled across the floor, which meant that I didn't fall over when I violently jerked away from the not-so-little bastard. Then I fumbled for something to hit it with, found an empty beer bottle, and prepared to bash the damn thing to death. I froze in mid-swing, because the huge rat calmly pushed my tequila towards me again, until the bottle touched my other hand.
Then it stopped and stared expectantly up at me.
"F-fuck off!" I yelled at it and threateningly jabbed at it with the bottle in my hand. The rat didn't even do much as twitch, it just calmly walked backwards away from me. Just when I wondered if it was going to stop, the damn thing stopped in its tracks.
Not going to lie, it took my alcohol-addled head a moment to process that. On a whim, I randomly pointed around the room with the bottle. The damn rat obediently walked over to the sofa, then the TV, then spun around twice in a circle and rolled over three times. When it was finished, it rose into its haunches, and stared expectantly up at me.
… Huh.
----------
Once I sobered up, it didn't take long for me to begin exploring just what I could do. For starters, I could control a hell of a lot more than one (admittedly enormous) rat. I wasn't exactly sure what the upper limit was, but my range was pretty extensive, easily the entire block my house sat on, and then some.
Have you ever heard the old adage about seeing rats? That if you find one, there's usually at least ten more? As it turned out, in my case that number was definitely an understatement. There were a hell of a lot more than 'ten' in and around my house.
I'm not sure how to describe controlling them. I could sort of give directions and instructions, and my rats (and it was so weird to think that) would follow them as best as they could… which was actually not that bad, as smart as many of them were. I didn't even have to see them to direct them, though I didn't quite see or hear or smell through their senses. Instead, I got mental impressions whenever I focused on a given rat, or when one of them was interested in something.
That was how I found the journals hidden in Taylor's room.
Seeing her neat, carefully precise handwriting damn near broke me into a thousand more pieces, and it was all I could do just to hold myself together. It took nearly as long to work myself up to reading through her journals.
At first, I was confused.
Then alarmed.
Then as I kept reading, grief and confusion and alarm was replaced by a singular emotion.
A deep, all-encompassing, all-consuming hate. A dark, hateful black hate, hate like I'd never felt before. Until then, I'd thought that losing Taylor was as bad as it could ever get.
My hands trembled as I turned page after page after page after goddamn fucking page.
How dare they?! How dare Blackwell, that sanctimonious, scrawny dried-up dusty cunt, lie right to my goddamn face about not having any ideas who might've put my Taylor in that fucking locker?! And how dare Emma?!
I don't know how I didn't crumple the pages or rip something, as badly as my hands shook.
And then I reached Taylor's entry about the flute. Annette's flute.
The hate disappeared.
Then from somewhere inside came then a shock of all-consuming rage, the nova-like intensity of which startled even me. I couldn't breathe, couldn't even think past the desire to wrap my fingers around that little fucking shrew's neck for having the fucking audacity to cry her bullshit crocodile tears at my daughter's funeral and push my thumbs into her FUCKING skin until I GoUged oUT hEr LyiNG fuCKing tHROa-
I saw stars and the things that danced in the spaces between them, and for the second time my mind expanded.
----------
So yeah, this one has been sitting in the ol' Google Docs since... October of last year.
*sweats and avoids eye contact*
----------
I'm still not sure just when exactly I'd gotten my powers. After what happened to Taylor… how she died… and then the PRT taking her body after they took over the investigation into her death…
If it wasn't for Kurt, Lacy and Alan, there might not have even been a funeral. That's how much of a mess I was, once I'd finally gotten her body back from the PRT some five or six days after her death. The bastards had done a second autopsy on her after they'd taken custody of her. Whatever they'd done, Kurt and Alan had refused to let me see her until after the funeral home had worked their magic.
It still hurt, to see her laying there, so pale and still and small. But she almost looked like my little girl afterwards, and less like a modern art homage to Frankenstein's monster, so I was able to choke down some of the rage I felt at her being defiled yet again.
I didn't think anything would hurt as badly as losing my Annette.
As it turned out, I was a fucking idiot and the universe was only too happy to educate me.
I was told that sepsis was what killed her. She… something in the disgusting filth that they'd pulled her out of had scratched Taylor in the two hours she'd been trapped in her locker. Or maybe the infection had set in when she'd ripped off three fingernails clawing at her locker door. I'm told that she was unconscious and barely breathing when the janitor pulled her from her locker.
She went into seizures twice in the ICU and had to be intubated, then died later that night at 10:23 pm, but would have lived if she'd managed to hang on for just another four minutes.
That's roughly how long it would have taken Panacea to get to her next as she was finishing up her previous patient. Just four minutes. Four lousy minutes made all the difference between my Taylor recovering, and her ending up in a casket.
Four.
Goddamn.
Minutes.
And then the PRT butted in, because there was something strange about Taylor's body. As far as I was concerned, the only strange thing was that my little girl was dead because of some little shit's fucked-up idea of a prank. But no, they had to take her and, and butcher her for some goddamn autopsy and didn't even have the fucking decency to apologize for it and-
Just thinking about it sent me surging from the agony of losing her to a red rage that uncomfortably reminded me of my father's temper. I damn near caved Armsmaster's mouth right the fuck in, in right in the middle of that stupid fucking beard, that dense motherfu-
…
So yeah, it took me a while to notice that I had powers. Not until the day after Taylor's funeral, in fact.
I'd tried to numb myself with as much as I could drink despite Kurt's efforts to keep me from drinking myself to death by swiping everything he could find, followed by checking in on me as much as he could along with Lacey, Alan and Zoe. The last of my beer served me well, but not nearly as well as a dusty old bottle of Tequila.
At one point, I remember (in a blurry 'sort of' way) laying on the floor of my living room and staring dumbly up at the ceiling. Then rolled over onto my side to grab the bottle from where I left it, and there it was.
It was the biggest goddamn rat I'd ever seen, and working the docks for as long as I have, I've seen some impressive specimens. Even as drunk as I was, this bastard sitting right in the middle of my living room and looking me in the eye like I owed it something was literally as big as a goddamn dog - easily three or four feet from nose to haunches.
Oh, and it had my tequila, and was pushing it across the floor towards me with its paws, until the glass of the bottle hit my outstretched fingers.
Luckily, despite being literally falling-down-drunk I was already sprawled across the floor, which meant that I didn't fall over when I violently jerked away from the not-so-little bastard. Then I fumbled for something to hit it with, found an empty beer bottle, and prepared to bash the damn thing to death. I froze in mid-swing, because the huge rat calmly pushed my tequila towards me again, until the bottle touched my other hand.
Then it stopped and stared expectantly up at me.
"F-fuck off!" I yelled at it and threateningly jabbed at it with the bottle in my hand. The rat didn't even do much as twitch, it just calmly walked backwards away from me. Just when I wondered if it was going to stop, the damn thing stopped in its tracks.
Not going to lie, it took my alcohol-addled head a moment to process that. On a whim, I randomly pointed around the room with the bottle. The damn rat obediently walked over to the sofa, then the TV, then spun around twice in a circle and rolled over three times. When it was finished, it rose into its haunches, and stared expectantly up at me.
… Huh.
----------
Once I sobered up, it didn't take long for me to begin exploring just what I could do. For starters, I could control a hell of a lot more than one (admittedly enormous) rat. I wasn't exactly sure what the upper limit was, but my range was pretty extensive, easily the entire block my house sat on, and then some.
Have you ever heard the old adage about seeing rats? That if you find one, there's usually at least ten more? As it turned out, in my case that number was definitely an understatement. There were a hell of a lot more than 'ten' in and around my house.
I'm not sure how to describe controlling them. I could sort of give directions and instructions, and my rats (and it was so weird to think that) would follow them as best as they could… which was actually not that bad, as smart as many of them were. I didn't even have to see them to direct them, though I didn't quite see or hear or smell through their senses. Instead, I got mental impressions whenever I focused on a given rat, or when one of them was interested in something.
That was how I found the journals hidden in Taylor's room.
Seeing her neat, carefully precise handwriting damn near broke me into a thousand more pieces, and it was all I could do just to hold myself together. It took nearly as long to work myself up to reading through her journals.
At first, I was confused.
Then alarmed.
Then as I kept reading, grief and confusion and alarm was replaced by a singular emotion.
A deep, all-encompassing, all-consuming hate. A dark, hateful black hate, hate like I'd never felt before. Until then, I'd thought that losing Taylor was as bad as it could ever get.
My hands trembled as I turned page after page after page after goddamn fucking page.
How dare they?! How dare Blackwell, that sanctimonious, scrawny dried-up dusty cunt, lie right to my goddamn face about not having any ideas who might've put my Taylor in that fucking locker?! And how dare Emma?!
I don't know how I didn't crumple the pages or rip something, as badly as my hands shook.
And then I reached Taylor's entry about the flute. Annette's flute.
The hate disappeared.
Then from somewhere inside came then a shock of all-consuming rage, the nova-like intensity of which startled even me. I couldn't breathe, couldn't even think past the desire to wrap my fingers around that little fucking shrew's neck for having the fucking audacity to cry her bullshit crocodile tears at my daughter's funeral and push my thumbs into her FUCKING skin until I GoUged oUT hEr LyiNG fuCKing tHROa-
I saw stars and the things that danced in the spaces between them, and for the second time my mind expanded.
----------
So yeah, this one has been sitting in the ol' Google Docs since... October of last year.
*sweats and avoids eye contact*
Skitters (Worm/Alien anthology)
Geas
Meat Thing
A warning: I did a locker scene for this one, albeit from the perspective of someone who isn't Taylor. I couldn't help but recall how I had Piggot rant about the Parahuman twist on America's Active School Shooter Problem, and I found myself remembering that I wrote this.
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January 6th, 2011
Winslow High School
Julia Peters was one of the many teens gathered in the hall, watching and waiting as the janitor pushed his way through the hall towards Taylor Herbert's locker with a grimace at the smell and a pair of bolt cutters in hand. To be fair he had an easy time getting through the throng of watching high school students. The smell coming out of Herbert's locker had been bad before Sophia Hess had shoved her in, a cloying sickly-sweet stink of rot and filth, but it had somehow become worse. So very much worse.
There wasn't a single person within twenty feet of Taylor's locker. Any closer, and the shockingly pungent and weirdly chemical-ish odor became unbearable.
Even twenty feet away, some of the closer kids had watering eyes and wheezed as they covered their noses and mouths with whatever they could, and Julia could hear one of the Empire kids in their own little cluster in the crowd, tall and wiry with bleach blond hair and gang tattoos peeking out from underneath his sleeves, complain about the smell.
He said something about it as bad as pepper spray or something but Julia was too busy recording the big moment with her phone, because this just might be the biggest and best prank that Emma Barnes, Sophia Hess and Madison Clements had ever pulled on Hebert and it was practically begging to get recorded for posterity. Why, a part of her almost wished that she'd gotten to record the three shoving her inside the mess they'd somehow gotten into her locker. But only almost because Hess was legitimately kinda fucking terrifying and Julia wasn't stupid or crazy enough to get on her bad side for anything.
There was also a tiny voice inside of her that hoped that Hebert was still alive in there, because no one could hear her moving or crying or anything even as the gagging janitor began cutting off the lock and the smell was just so unbelievably horrible, somehow worse than when Hebert had gotten shoved in there and locked inside only an hour ago.
Julia wasn't the only one thinking it, she suspected. As much as she could hear quiet snickers at Hebert's plight, mostly from Barnes and the rest of their cliche but really hers, there was also a lot of nervous muttering, especially from a couple of the gang kids. Barnes looked… eager, in a way that gave Julia the fucking creeps, while Hess seemed almost bored but really she was watching as intently as everyone else. Clements too, but Julia thought that the tiny girl looked oddly nervous, like she too was thinking, like Julia, that maybe they'd gone way too far this time, and-
The locker door suddenly exploded off of its hinges and something dark and way too fast came out screeching and thrashing and people started screaming but none louder than the janitor whose arms were suddenly just gone at the elbow and blood was everywhere and holy shit one of the Empire guys just been killed by the flying locker door it had gone right through him like he was paper and people were getting knocked down, thrown aside like toys and Julia screamed and Clements was screaming next to her and then suddenly Julia couldn't scream anymore and her neck felt slippery wet when her free hand slapped at her throat.
She stumbled towards Clements, who had gone bone white and was clutching at her bleeding belly and what looked like a spike that was poking out of her. Or through her. Then she was gone, getting dragged away down the hallway. Julia didn't know what made her record the sight of Madison and the… the thing that was dragging her by the tail it had impaled the tiny teen with. The thing that had come out of Hebert's locker.
It occurred to Julia that that thing was probably Hebert.
A moment later Julia collapsed as her phone finally fell from her limp fingers as the flow of blood from her cut throat began to slow. Far too late, she tried to apply more pressure to the cut across her neck but her fingers just wouldn't move the way that she wanted them to. She reached for her phone and wanted to swear because the screen had an ugly spider web of cracks across its surface, but she couldn't make a sound.
'Oh,' Julia thought sluggishly as her tunneling vision went dark, even as someone finally began frantically pressing down onto her ruined throat. 'That's not good,' was the final thought that ran through her mind.
Less than a minute later she had bled out.
__________
PRT-ENE Headquarters
The recording pulled from the dead Winslow student's cell phone ran its course, and PRT Director Emily Piggot immediately shifted her gaze to stare hard at the assembled team members of the East-North-East Brockton Bay Protectorate seated around her. Armsmaster's mouth was a hard, thin line that threatened to twist into a pained grimace and occasionally showed a firmly leashed anger, the only emotions he'd shone since they began to unravel this horrifically public trigger event and the cause behind it. It was enough to make Emily humor the notion that he just might be almost as furious as she herself was.
Miss Militia wasn't much better, to judge from how harshly furrowed her brow was, and how the eerie distortion green and black energy flowed around her fidgeting right hand as her power switched restlessly between a variety of knives that she anxiously played with. It had shifted from a pistol holstered at her hip to a balisong knife at the beginning of the recording. Then a karambit, a bowie knife, a dark little tactical blade, a Ka-bar, before towards the end settling on an especially nasty-looking spiraling blade with three cutting edges.
On the opposing end of the spectrum, Dauntless and Velocity seemed horrified and repulsed, and Triumph in particular looked as if he might become ill at any moment. It certainly had an effect on Assault. Like Armsmaster, his face had hardened, but Emily thought him less angry and more focused. Determined. Battery next to him looked nearly as professional with only a frown on her lips, but she was all but crushing Assault's hand in her own grip.
There was a concerted effort being made to control the spread of information concerning the incident. Several PHO threads had been swiftly locked, but there was far more to the internet than a single very popular forum site. At best, the Hebert girl's identity was a paper thin facade in the aftermath of her horrifically public trigger event. If - or more likely when - her identity leaked, she'd hopefully already be in PRT hands.
"Alright, now that you're all familiar with one of the videos that's been circulating across half the damn internet in barely three hours," PRT Director Emily Piggot all but growled out, "what are we looking at in casualties so far?" On the best of days, she wasn't particularly tolerant of the tenuous state of the informal cold war between the PRT and Protectorate, the Empire Eighty-Eight, the Azn Bad Boys and last and certainly least, the Archer's Bridge Merchants. She was less tolerant of things that threatened to elevate said cold war into outright bloodshed, as this mess certainly promised to do, especially when she found out just who was involved.
"We've three confirmed deaths so far," Armsmaster bit out through his clenched teeth, somehow keeping eerily still despite the weight of his power armor. Emily suspected that he'd locked the servos to help him maintain decorum. Clearly, it was all the man could do just to control his voice, and even that was icy with his restrained anger. "Brian Calder, forty-seven, the school janitor was pronounced dead on arrival at Brockton Bay General Hospital due to his injuries, shock and blood loss. Thomas Williams, seventeen, was killed instantly when he was near-completely bisected below the shoulders by the Hebert girl's locker door after it went through Calder's arm. The locker door struck two others before it was embedded in the wall opposite the locker, Eric Simpson, sixteen, and Marcus Clancy, also seventeen; a concussion, a shattered shoulder and nearly-severed left arm for the former while the latter has massive thoracic trauma and is very likely to lose a lung. Both boys are in critical condition, but expected to survive."
Emily heard someone suck in a breath, but she wasn't sure exactly who. Armsmaster continued on.
"Julia Peters, fifteen, was unable to be revived and declared dead at the scene from massive blood loss. Madison Clements, also fifteen, is still missing but presumed to likely be dead by now given how much blood she's presumed to have lost combined with severe thoracic trauma. Of lesser note, there are an additional twenty-seven confirmed injured students, but that can be attributed to mass panic and trampling as they fled the immediate scene. The worst of those injured is Emma Barnes, fifteen, currently being treated for a concussion, a broken left arm, cracked ribs, a jaw fracture, and three broken fingers. When our preliminary investigation revealed her culpability in instigating the incident, she was placed under arrest and is currently under guard by two female BBPD Officers until declared fit for transfer to a cell. She has been charged with conspiracy to commit homicide, attempted homicide, kidnapping, assault, three counts of depraved-indifference murder, false confinement, seven hundred and eighty-one counts of public endangerment, biological terrorism-"
"Biological Terrorism?" Emily cut him off there, because he was oh so clearly enjoying the laundry list of the Barnes' girl's charges perhaps more than he should have, but because the last charge had her more curious than she probably wanted to be.
"Preliminary analysis of Hebert's locker revealed that the interior had been filled with an estimated ten to thirteen kilograms of improperly disposed and partially decomposed biological waste prior to her being forced within it, which when examined showed a very strong possibility of being an immediate health hazard. As the biological waste is part of an active crime scene investigation, the entire school has been ordered closed for the interim on order of the CDC and FBI and all currently hospitalized students are being tested for pathogens, with a strong advisory being announced on all news channels and radio stations, as well as PHO, for all Winslow students who had been in attendance today to be tested for possible infections."
Emily took a breath through her nostrils, counted to five, then slowly released it, but that did nothing to ease the fury churning in her belly.
"And Shadow Stalker?" She was proud that she didn't hiss out the name. As it was, just mentioning the Ward who had helped cause this disaster had seemed to cause the temperature in the room to drop four degrees in the time it took for her to say the idiot girl's name.
"Still missing. From all reports, she pursued Hebert out of the school and into the city sewers."
__________
April 2nd, 2011
Saturday
Dinah Alcott
"Mom, Dad? I love you."
The sudden statement from the back seat of the car threw Dinah's parents off-balance, as she knew it would. Her dad's face twisted into a look that was sort of like he was confused and thought it was funny at the same time; she thought there might be a word for that, and a month or two ago, before she got her powers, she probably would have asked.
"Uh.. Thank you, sweet pea? Also, what did you do?"
"Really, Martin?" her mom said with a roll of her eyes as she glanced back at me.
"It's not what I did, it's what I'm about to do. There's a 97.523% chance that Mom will fully recover in five weeks if you make sure she doesn't try to stand up after the crash, Dad." Then, before her parents could finish parsing just what exactly that they'd just heard, Dinah lunged forward from the back seat, grabbed the emergency brake lever on the center console, and yanked it back as hard as she could, just as her mother drove through the yellow light of a busy intersection.
The crash happened, just as Dinah knew it would, the entire rear of the car abruptly sliding sideways and into the opposite lane. Dinah had already curled up tight into a ball as her parents screamed.
A sudden, gut wrenching impact that made the car spin violently, as if some giant cape had decided to use the mid-day traffic to reenact childhood games with horrific consequences. Dinah bounced hard against the rear passenger door, then the ceiling as the car rolled from the impact. Everything hurt, and she tasted blood. But there had only been a 3.52% chance that she would've walked away from the accident unhurt, counter-balanced by the 82.12% chance that she'd be able to run the three blocks that she needed to before the Snake Man's men that were always following them caught up to her. That was all she needed, really.
Ignoring her parents calling out to her was much harder than she thought as she crawled out of the car through a broken window with the use of only one arm. The other absolutely burned with pain from her shoulder down to her wrist. She'd only glanced at it once as she staggered to her feet, then immediately looked away to keep from throwing up, because her arm wasn't supposed to be bending like that. But it didn't matter. The only thing that was important was the next three blocks.
She took off running, using her left arm to hold her right as firmly to her side as she dared to minimize the pain.
The numbers began changing almost immediately as she heard shouting from behind her. Her head hurt, but that was because she'd cut her head on something and there was blood trickling down her face. A little more pain wouldn't change anything, so she used her power again. A dull spike of pain stabbed at her temple, but it was a pathetic thing compared to how much she was already hurting.
Dinah's good hand flew up as she ran past a horrified-looking older woman who had just seen how hurt the small girl was, and she yanked as hard as she could. Fabric tore and the woman began shrieking indignantly as her arms flew up to frantically cover her exposed and rather large chest; the man chasing Dinah reflexively looked and was distracted just long enough to misstep and stumble into his now-cursing companion.
The numbers changed again as Dinah got to the end of the first block. She made a hard turn on her heels, cutting across the street and through traffic, and was very nearly clipped by a car that only just barely managed to brake to a halt. Unfortunately the men in the SUV that was closely following said car didn't brake in time, and with another deafening crunch, Dinah caused her second car accident of the day.
The Snake Man was making the numbers change faster, but fortunately that only removed five of the plans she'd made for the second block. He hadn't figured it out yet, where she was going and what she was planning.
She dove through an opening door and into a bar, just as someone inside was looking out to peer at the noisy chaos she was leaving in her wake. She could've stopped here, but didn't dare to. The numbers showed too high a chance of ending up in the hands of the Empire 88 rather than the Snake Man, with a frightening likeliness of her cousin Rory ending up dead within three weeks. Even as she limped towards the back door, several bald and muscular men were leaping to their feet and either looking at her or at the pair of suited men who'd come to an abrupt stop. Dinah didn't examine the numbers enough to see what would happen, nor did she care, because a handful of seconds later she was stumbling out of the rear exit of the bar into a filthy alley.
One of her seven target buildings was just in front of her. It wasn't the one she preferred. In fact, her plan was insane and horrific, but the alternative was so much worse for everyone, that horrific future that she'd seen far too many times where Brockton Bay was overrun by hissing serpentine nightmares with gleaming metal teeth.
More men appeared at either side of the alleyway. Dinah ignored them and hurled herself at a grimy glass window that at one point had been covered by a metal grate that had long since been removed. She threw her good arm up over her face just before she hit the glass.
It hurt more than she expected, and she could feel jagged clawing burns on her scalp where glass cut into skin. An instant later she crashed painfully through a shelf and bounced hard off of a dull black pipe before hitting the filthy floor. Everything hurt, it hurt so much, but she found herself smiling viciously all the same because she'd won, even if the Snake Man hadn't realized it yet.
The building was on the edge of the downtown commercial area, and had been empty for a few months now waiting for a new owner. It hadn't been empty quite long enough for squatters or gang members to break in looking for anything valuable, not that that would've made a difference in the end.
Dinah's head spun and her vision doubled and tripled. Above her, she could hear a door being forced open, and dust fell from the ceiling as the Snake Man's men made their way through the building. She forced herself to move, enough though just raising her head made her feel lightheaded. It took everything she had just to sit up and lean against the black pipe she'd bounced off of. But she smiled as wide as she could, because right next to her leg was the reason she'd come to the building, a leathery-looking object nearly as big as her torso.
A moment later four men descended into the basement. Two of them had guns in hand, one spoke quietly and calmly into a radio.
"Sir, subject found, injured but still conscious. Collecting her now," he emotionlessly said as he and his companions picked their way across the filthy basement towards her.
The black pipe Dinah was leaning against rose and rose and rose, letting out a quiet, murderous hiss as lips pulled back to reveal gleaming metal teeth and shining ropes of saliva.
An instant later there was gunfire and screaming, but Dinah's attention was focused entirely on the leather egg and how it bloomed open like a four-petaled flower, revealing wetly writhing flesh. She closed her eyes and let out a soft breath. She heard a squelch, then something wetly slapped across her face and mouth and then the world….
… fell…
…….. away.
__________
I had big plans for this one. But alas, it sat on the back burner for too long and now it's all lumpy and congealed. I might come back to it, might not - I fidn myself dissatisfied with what I've already wrote for this snippet. Also, this one goes back to October of 2019!
... Fucking hell. 😅
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January 6th, 2011
Winslow High School
Julia Peters was one of the many teens gathered in the hall, watching and waiting as the janitor pushed his way through the hall towards Taylor Herbert's locker with a grimace at the smell and a pair of bolt cutters in hand. To be fair he had an easy time getting through the throng of watching high school students. The smell coming out of Herbert's locker had been bad before Sophia Hess had shoved her in, a cloying sickly-sweet stink of rot and filth, but it had somehow become worse. So very much worse.
There wasn't a single person within twenty feet of Taylor's locker. Any closer, and the shockingly pungent and weirdly chemical-ish odor became unbearable.
Even twenty feet away, some of the closer kids had watering eyes and wheezed as they covered their noses and mouths with whatever they could, and Julia could hear one of the Empire kids in their own little cluster in the crowd, tall and wiry with bleach blond hair and gang tattoos peeking out from underneath his sleeves, complain about the smell.
He said something about it as bad as pepper spray or something but Julia was too busy recording the big moment with her phone, because this just might be the biggest and best prank that Emma Barnes, Sophia Hess and Madison Clements had ever pulled on Hebert and it was practically begging to get recorded for posterity. Why, a part of her almost wished that she'd gotten to record the three shoving her inside the mess they'd somehow gotten into her locker. But only almost because Hess was legitimately kinda fucking terrifying and Julia wasn't stupid or crazy enough to get on her bad side for anything.
There was also a tiny voice inside of her that hoped that Hebert was still alive in there, because no one could hear her moving or crying or anything even as the gagging janitor began cutting off the lock and the smell was just so unbelievably horrible, somehow worse than when Hebert had gotten shoved in there and locked inside only an hour ago.
Julia wasn't the only one thinking it, she suspected. As much as she could hear quiet snickers at Hebert's plight, mostly from Barnes and the rest of their cliche but really hers, there was also a lot of nervous muttering, especially from a couple of the gang kids. Barnes looked… eager, in a way that gave Julia the fucking creeps, while Hess seemed almost bored but really she was watching as intently as everyone else. Clements too, but Julia thought that the tiny girl looked oddly nervous, like she too was thinking, like Julia, that maybe they'd gone way too far this time, and-
The locker door suddenly exploded off of its hinges and something dark and way too fast came out screeching and thrashing and people started screaming but none louder than the janitor whose arms were suddenly just gone at the elbow and blood was everywhere and holy shit one of the Empire guys just been killed by the flying locker door it had gone right through him like he was paper and people were getting knocked down, thrown aside like toys and Julia screamed and Clements was screaming next to her and then suddenly Julia couldn't scream anymore and her neck felt slippery wet when her free hand slapped at her throat.
She stumbled towards Clements, who had gone bone white and was clutching at her bleeding belly and what looked like a spike that was poking out of her. Or through her. Then she was gone, getting dragged away down the hallway. Julia didn't know what made her record the sight of Madison and the… the thing that was dragging her by the tail it had impaled the tiny teen with. The thing that had come out of Hebert's locker.
It occurred to Julia that that thing was probably Hebert.
A moment later Julia collapsed as her phone finally fell from her limp fingers as the flow of blood from her cut throat began to slow. Far too late, she tried to apply more pressure to the cut across her neck but her fingers just wouldn't move the way that she wanted them to. She reached for her phone and wanted to swear because the screen had an ugly spider web of cracks across its surface, but she couldn't make a sound.
'Oh,' Julia thought sluggishly as her tunneling vision went dark, even as someone finally began frantically pressing down onto her ruined throat. 'That's not good,' was the final thought that ran through her mind.
Less than a minute later she had bled out.
__________
PRT-ENE Headquarters
The recording pulled from the dead Winslow student's cell phone ran its course, and PRT Director Emily Piggot immediately shifted her gaze to stare hard at the assembled team members of the East-North-East Brockton Bay Protectorate seated around her. Armsmaster's mouth was a hard, thin line that threatened to twist into a pained grimace and occasionally showed a firmly leashed anger, the only emotions he'd shone since they began to unravel this horrifically public trigger event and the cause behind it. It was enough to make Emily humor the notion that he just might be almost as furious as she herself was.
Miss Militia wasn't much better, to judge from how harshly furrowed her brow was, and how the eerie distortion green and black energy flowed around her fidgeting right hand as her power switched restlessly between a variety of knives that she anxiously played with. It had shifted from a pistol holstered at her hip to a balisong knife at the beginning of the recording. Then a karambit, a bowie knife, a dark little tactical blade, a Ka-bar, before towards the end settling on an especially nasty-looking spiraling blade with three cutting edges.
On the opposing end of the spectrum, Dauntless and Velocity seemed horrified and repulsed, and Triumph in particular looked as if he might become ill at any moment. It certainly had an effect on Assault. Like Armsmaster, his face had hardened, but Emily thought him less angry and more focused. Determined. Battery next to him looked nearly as professional with only a frown on her lips, but she was all but crushing Assault's hand in her own grip.
There was a concerted effort being made to control the spread of information concerning the incident. Several PHO threads had been swiftly locked, but there was far more to the internet than a single very popular forum site. At best, the Hebert girl's identity was a paper thin facade in the aftermath of her horrifically public trigger event. If - or more likely when - her identity leaked, she'd hopefully already be in PRT hands.
"Alright, now that you're all familiar with one of the videos that's been circulating across half the damn internet in barely three hours," PRT Director Emily Piggot all but growled out, "what are we looking at in casualties so far?" On the best of days, she wasn't particularly tolerant of the tenuous state of the informal cold war between the PRT and Protectorate, the Empire Eighty-Eight, the Azn Bad Boys and last and certainly least, the Archer's Bridge Merchants. She was less tolerant of things that threatened to elevate said cold war into outright bloodshed, as this mess certainly promised to do, especially when she found out just who was involved.
"We've three confirmed deaths so far," Armsmaster bit out through his clenched teeth, somehow keeping eerily still despite the weight of his power armor. Emily suspected that he'd locked the servos to help him maintain decorum. Clearly, it was all the man could do just to control his voice, and even that was icy with his restrained anger. "Brian Calder, forty-seven, the school janitor was pronounced dead on arrival at Brockton Bay General Hospital due to his injuries, shock and blood loss. Thomas Williams, seventeen, was killed instantly when he was near-completely bisected below the shoulders by the Hebert girl's locker door after it went through Calder's arm. The locker door struck two others before it was embedded in the wall opposite the locker, Eric Simpson, sixteen, and Marcus Clancy, also seventeen; a concussion, a shattered shoulder and nearly-severed left arm for the former while the latter has massive thoracic trauma and is very likely to lose a lung. Both boys are in critical condition, but expected to survive."
Emily heard someone suck in a breath, but she wasn't sure exactly who. Armsmaster continued on.
"Julia Peters, fifteen, was unable to be revived and declared dead at the scene from massive blood loss. Madison Clements, also fifteen, is still missing but presumed to likely be dead by now given how much blood she's presumed to have lost combined with severe thoracic trauma. Of lesser note, there are an additional twenty-seven confirmed injured students, but that can be attributed to mass panic and trampling as they fled the immediate scene. The worst of those injured is Emma Barnes, fifteen, currently being treated for a concussion, a broken left arm, cracked ribs, a jaw fracture, and three broken fingers. When our preliminary investigation revealed her culpability in instigating the incident, she was placed under arrest and is currently under guard by two female BBPD Officers until declared fit for transfer to a cell. She has been charged with conspiracy to commit homicide, attempted homicide, kidnapping, assault, three counts of depraved-indifference murder, false confinement, seven hundred and eighty-one counts of public endangerment, biological terrorism-"
"Biological Terrorism?" Emily cut him off there, because he was oh so clearly enjoying the laundry list of the Barnes' girl's charges perhaps more than he should have, but because the last charge had her more curious than she probably wanted to be.
"Preliminary analysis of Hebert's locker revealed that the interior had been filled with an estimated ten to thirteen kilograms of improperly disposed and partially decomposed biological waste prior to her being forced within it, which when examined showed a very strong possibility of being an immediate health hazard. As the biological waste is part of an active crime scene investigation, the entire school has been ordered closed for the interim on order of the CDC and FBI and all currently hospitalized students are being tested for pathogens, with a strong advisory being announced on all news channels and radio stations, as well as PHO, for all Winslow students who had been in attendance today to be tested for possible infections."
Emily took a breath through her nostrils, counted to five, then slowly released it, but that did nothing to ease the fury churning in her belly.
"And Shadow Stalker?" She was proud that she didn't hiss out the name. As it was, just mentioning the Ward who had helped cause this disaster had seemed to cause the temperature in the room to drop four degrees in the time it took for her to say the idiot girl's name.
"Still missing. From all reports, she pursued Hebert out of the school and into the city sewers."
__________
April 2nd, 2011
Saturday
Dinah Alcott
"Mom, Dad? I love you."
The sudden statement from the back seat of the car threw Dinah's parents off-balance, as she knew it would. Her dad's face twisted into a look that was sort of like he was confused and thought it was funny at the same time; she thought there might be a word for that, and a month or two ago, before she got her powers, she probably would have asked.
"Uh.. Thank you, sweet pea? Also, what did you do?"
"Really, Martin?" her mom said with a roll of her eyes as she glanced back at me.
"It's not what I did, it's what I'm about to do. There's a 97.523% chance that Mom will fully recover in five weeks if you make sure she doesn't try to stand up after the crash, Dad." Then, before her parents could finish parsing just what exactly that they'd just heard, Dinah lunged forward from the back seat, grabbed the emergency brake lever on the center console, and yanked it back as hard as she could, just as her mother drove through the yellow light of a busy intersection.
The crash happened, just as Dinah knew it would, the entire rear of the car abruptly sliding sideways and into the opposite lane. Dinah had already curled up tight into a ball as her parents screamed.
A sudden, gut wrenching impact that made the car spin violently, as if some giant cape had decided to use the mid-day traffic to reenact childhood games with horrific consequences. Dinah bounced hard against the rear passenger door, then the ceiling as the car rolled from the impact. Everything hurt, and she tasted blood. But there had only been a 3.52% chance that she would've walked away from the accident unhurt, counter-balanced by the 82.12% chance that she'd be able to run the three blocks that she needed to before the Snake Man's men that were always following them caught up to her. That was all she needed, really.
Ignoring her parents calling out to her was much harder than she thought as she crawled out of the car through a broken window with the use of only one arm. The other absolutely burned with pain from her shoulder down to her wrist. She'd only glanced at it once as she staggered to her feet, then immediately looked away to keep from throwing up, because her arm wasn't supposed to be bending like that. But it didn't matter. The only thing that was important was the next three blocks.
She took off running, using her left arm to hold her right as firmly to her side as she dared to minimize the pain.
The numbers began changing almost immediately as she heard shouting from behind her. Her head hurt, but that was because she'd cut her head on something and there was blood trickling down her face. A little more pain wouldn't change anything, so she used her power again. A dull spike of pain stabbed at her temple, but it was a pathetic thing compared to how much she was already hurting.
Dinah's good hand flew up as she ran past a horrified-looking older woman who had just seen how hurt the small girl was, and she yanked as hard as she could. Fabric tore and the woman began shrieking indignantly as her arms flew up to frantically cover her exposed and rather large chest; the man chasing Dinah reflexively looked and was distracted just long enough to misstep and stumble into his now-cursing companion.
The numbers changed again as Dinah got to the end of the first block. She made a hard turn on her heels, cutting across the street and through traffic, and was very nearly clipped by a car that only just barely managed to brake to a halt. Unfortunately the men in the SUV that was closely following said car didn't brake in time, and with another deafening crunch, Dinah caused her second car accident of the day.
The Snake Man was making the numbers change faster, but fortunately that only removed five of the plans she'd made for the second block. He hadn't figured it out yet, where she was going and what she was planning.
She dove through an opening door and into a bar, just as someone inside was looking out to peer at the noisy chaos she was leaving in her wake. She could've stopped here, but didn't dare to. The numbers showed too high a chance of ending up in the hands of the Empire 88 rather than the Snake Man, with a frightening likeliness of her cousin Rory ending up dead within three weeks. Even as she limped towards the back door, several bald and muscular men were leaping to their feet and either looking at her or at the pair of suited men who'd come to an abrupt stop. Dinah didn't examine the numbers enough to see what would happen, nor did she care, because a handful of seconds later she was stumbling out of the rear exit of the bar into a filthy alley.
One of her seven target buildings was just in front of her. It wasn't the one she preferred. In fact, her plan was insane and horrific, but the alternative was so much worse for everyone, that horrific future that she'd seen far too many times where Brockton Bay was overrun by hissing serpentine nightmares with gleaming metal teeth.
More men appeared at either side of the alleyway. Dinah ignored them and hurled herself at a grimy glass window that at one point had been covered by a metal grate that had long since been removed. She threw her good arm up over her face just before she hit the glass.
It hurt more than she expected, and she could feel jagged clawing burns on her scalp where glass cut into skin. An instant later she crashed painfully through a shelf and bounced hard off of a dull black pipe before hitting the filthy floor. Everything hurt, it hurt so much, but she found herself smiling viciously all the same because she'd won, even if the Snake Man hadn't realized it yet.
The building was on the edge of the downtown commercial area, and had been empty for a few months now waiting for a new owner. It hadn't been empty quite long enough for squatters or gang members to break in looking for anything valuable, not that that would've made a difference in the end.
Dinah's head spun and her vision doubled and tripled. Above her, she could hear a door being forced open, and dust fell from the ceiling as the Snake Man's men made their way through the building. She forced herself to move, enough though just raising her head made her feel lightheaded. It took everything she had just to sit up and lean against the black pipe she'd bounced off of. But she smiled as wide as she could, because right next to her leg was the reason she'd come to the building, a leathery-looking object nearly as big as her torso.
A moment later four men descended into the basement. Two of them had guns in hand, one spoke quietly and calmly into a radio.
"Sir, subject found, injured but still conscious. Collecting her now," he emotionlessly said as he and his companions picked their way across the filthy basement towards her.
The black pipe Dinah was leaning against rose and rose and rose, letting out a quiet, murderous hiss as lips pulled back to reveal gleaming metal teeth and shining ropes of saliva.
An instant later there was gunfire and screaming, but Dinah's attention was focused entirely on the leather egg and how it bloomed open like a four-petaled flower, revealing wetly writhing flesh. She closed her eyes and let out a soft breath. She heard a squelch, then something wetly slapped across her face and mouth and then the world….
… fell…
…….. away.
__________
I had big plans for this one. But alas, it sat on the back burner for too long and now it's all lumpy and congealed. I might come back to it, might not - I fidn myself dissatisfied with what I've already wrote for this snippet. Also, this one goes back to October of 2019!
... Fucking hell. 😅
Queen Of Monsters Pt 1
Geas
Meat Thing
This one miiiiiiight end up getting its own thread pretty soon because I've got some ideas. I kinda feel like this chapter still needs work but I also currently don't feel like chipping away at it nonstop.
Enjoy.
January 4th, 2011 - Monday
1:31 am
Brockton Bay
Eastern Massachusetts General Hospital
Room 217B
__________
"She's intubated!" the man in scrubs called out semi-frantically from where he stood at the head of the bed.
"Someone hold her goddamn arm so I can get the IV back in!" another shouted as those crowded around the bed worked with a unity that almost appeared semi-chaotic. The slight form laying in the bed should've been easy enough to handle, but the way she violently shook and spasmed and thrashed changed things. Helping a patient in the middle of a generalized tonic-clonic seizure - what used to be called a 'grand mal' seizure in years past - was never easy.
But this was no ordinary seizure.
It took four just to hold the girl still long enough to strap her to the bed as her violently-spasming body writhed and twisted, for all that she might have been a hundred pounds soaking wet. She'd already slammed her right forearm against the railing of her bed hard enough to fracture her radius and ulna, and it was all the team could do just to keep her from hurting herself even worse until her seizure passed. Even then, she was still shaking hard enough that it seemed like her bed might start twitching its way across the floor… and she'd been seizing for fifteen minutes.
An instant later the patient suddenly went bonelessly limp as a shrill tone began shrieking from the EKG device that was tethered to the girl, and everyone moved at once.
One of the team, an almost tiny Hispanic woman, literally vaulted onto the bed to straddle the girl's belly and began frantically giving her chest compressions, keeping count via a frantic muttering underneath her breath as the code cart was all but dragged over to the bed.
"Defibrillator ready!" someone shouted, and the tiny woman allowed someone to pull her off of their patient while another stepped forward to rip the gown from the girl's chest, modesty be damned, and liberally squirted a dollop of gel onto her upper chest and side.
"Clear!" another shouted as defibrillator paddles were pressed to the girl's chest. Not even a second later a spasm ran through the girl's body, and when the EKG continued to whine, someone stepped forward to give her chest compressions again while the defibrillator recharged.
After several frantic minutes of trying to revive her, they gave up and covered Taylor Hebert's body to give the dead girl back her modesty, and called the time of death.
__________
Same Day
11:42 am
__________
Olivia Moore never did like having to perform autopsies on kids, especially ones that died to violence. Unfortunately, when you're a medical examiner living and working in a city - especially one like Brockton Bay - you don't have much choice in the matter, and Olivia prided herself on being better at leaving a body in a respectable condition than most others while still being as thorough as she needed to be for a police investigation.
Oh, and despite being a petite white woman that just so happened to possess blonde hair so pair that it verges on white, she wasn't in the pocket of any of the gangs (specifically the Empire 88), so she was usually the one called in to examine the 'suspicious' bodies to minimize any chances of someone tampering with evidence.
Olivia at first had been looking for evidence of any infectious disease that could have caused the seizure that had killed the girl, and there'd been enough of those that she was certain that wherever Taylor had been before she'd been thrown into an ambulance was due for a very thorough investigation. She'd found evidence of early-onset septicemia in the scratches on the girl's bruised hands - a serious infection that could easily have killed the poor girl, if the seizure hadn't done her in first.
However, there had been suspicious things that she'd found while examining the corpse of fifteen-year-old Taylor Hebert, once she'd begun to look past the failed efforts to resuscitate the kid. Numerous old bruises that were - had been - in various stages of healing before her death, some of which had the telltale signs of being defensive wounds. Hairline fractures in certain places had given further evidence that the girl had been violently beaten more than once. There had been no signs of sexual abuse - thank God - but the corpse was the corpse of an abuse victim all the same.
Olivia tried to take consolation in the fact that at least now, no one could hurt the girl ever again.
The girl's brain had been… odd, however. Olivia at first thought it'd be a case of SUDEP; Sudden Unexplained Death in Epilepsy. That theory had been quite firmly squashed when she'd opened up Taylor's skull and found… she still wasn't sure just what she'd found, even after spending almost five mentally-exhausting hours on Taylor's body. It was as if the girl had suffered multiple fatal aneurysms within her brain simultaneously, the damage was so extensive and widespread. However, despite the damage, her brain was also strangely wrong… and the medical examiner couldn't help but recall how Parahuman brains were structurally different from those of baseline humans, possessing an anomalous mass of tissue that was believed to be responsible for them having or using their powers.
The ruin that was the deceased Taylor Hebert's brain had three such masses.
Olivia frowned, pausing in the middle of the report that she'd been working on ever since she'd placed the Hebert girl back into one of her drawers. It'd be weeks before the toxicology tests on the blood and tissue samples that she'd taken from Hebert's body were completed, but Olivia was already intending to forward her initial findings to the relevant authorities and hoped that if the PRT did take over the investigation - as she suspected that they might - that they'd actually solve this one. It was just a hunch, but the medical examiner suspected that, either accidentally or deliberately, someone had killed Taylor Hebert.
Olivia never noticed how the fluorescent lights flickered behind her, or that within the morgue storage cooler that Taylor Hebert's corpse had been placed to preserve the girl's remains, said corpse had begun to twitch.
__________
1:59 pm
__________
Strange as it was to say, police were in fact not as common a sight at Winslow High School as most would expect, despite the school's reputation. The reason for this was quite simple in retrospect; the often-derided Brockton Bay Police Department's Gang Intelligence Unit was very efficient when it came to keeping an eye on known affiliates of the Bay's major gangs. Despite issues of funding and personnel, the GIU's officers were exceedingly talented at both sniffing out any officers that were on the take or who might have questionable loyalties and surviving skirmishes with the gangs, which made them a menace to the rank and file of the Empire Eighty-Eight and the AZN Bad Boyz. This meant that teenage recruits and prospects were encouraged to keep their heads down to minimize drawing GIU notice.
This was less due to the intelligence and cunning of the officers, and more simple necessity. Cops got killed in Brockton Bay, as surely as water was wet and mountains were high. A smart cop was a cop elsewhere. A greedy or cowardly cop - not always the same thing - learned to keep their head down when necessary and tried to balm their conscience however they could.
The crazy ones - and you had to be crazy to be an honest cop in Brockton Bay - got clever and sneaky, and learned to make do with what they had.
The crooked officers were bypassed when need be and tolerated at other times, and occasionally very quietly dealt with, because when you couldn't quite trust Internal Affairs anymore (and no honest cop in the Bay had trusted IA in the last ten years) you did what you had to do to get the job done and not instead end up with a toe tag and a twenty-one gun salute. And when it came to your cases, you had to haul ass and get shit done if it looked like the PRT might take even a hint of interest.
Few understood this better than Detective Sergeant Leon McNichol, a veteran BBPD officer for ten years now. Being Irish made it complicated when it came to dealing with the Bay's gangs, and by 'gangs' it obviously was just one certain gang in particular. His partner Detective Anna Hamill had it both simpler and worse, being a black and openly bisexual woman. Working as partners was a simple choice; each considered the other to be a trustworthy and decent cop, which made the two of them worth their weight in gold. A partner you could trust not to stab you in the back, not just metaphorically, was what kept them alive and working together. That they also got along amazingly well despite Hamill's eight-month-long relationship with McNichol's ex-wife helped.
They made for quite the pair as they exited Hamill's car. McNichol was tall and broad-shouldered, brown hair buzzed short and with a leather coat over a baseball shirt and jeans that did a fairly decent job of hiding his shoulder harness and pistol. The top of Hamill's cornrow-laden head only just came up to his shoulder, with a much-heavier coat shrouding a stocky form clad in a blouse and khakis. Both openly had their badges hanging from cords around their necks. Most of the other officers parking and leaving their vehicles needed no such adornment. If the flashing police lights on their vehicles wasn't enough of a hint, the combinations of black uniforms, protective vests and tactical rigs that many of the officers securing the building wore would have clued in even the most thick-headed idiot.
Winslow High was the same miserable shithole that had been the last time McNichol had investigated a stabbing in school grounds, some… three months back? No, it had been almost five months, right at the beginning of the school year. A brawl that had ended up with a kid getting stabbed and four kids getting shipped off to juvie.
Fun times at Winslow as always, McNichol thought sardonically as he and his partner Hamill exited their police cruiser within the high school's increasingly-crowded parking lot. Crowded, because it was a small parking lot and the school day technically hadn't ended yet so that meant the teaching staff's personal vehicles, school buses, and whatever rides certain students had were all taking up room. Fortunately, McNichol didn't consider that to be a problem.
Neither did any of his fellow officers preparing to flood into Winslow.
"Why do I always forget how stupid kids are?" Hamill said with an exasperated sigh as one scraggly teen who was obviously cutting class to take a smoke break bolted the moment he realized just how many cops were suddenly descending on Winslow, which suggested that he was probably carrying. He didn't get very far of course. There were squad cars positioned around the property as an outer cordon before they had rolled in.
Before McNichol had even shut his door, he was already hearing over his radio that the kid had been pounced on, the little idiot.
"Fifty says the worst he has on him is his mom's prescription meds," McNichol commented as they began striding towards the school's entrance, taking the time to glance at the vehicle parked in the Principal's reserved space and confirm that she was on school property.
"... Partner, you're terrible, you know that?" Hamill rolled her eyes as she fell into step next to him. "Seventy-five says he's carrying Molly."
"Heh. Deal."
__________
It took until McNichol and Hamill had very nearly reached the Principal's office before the woman finally came out to meet them. Larissa Blackwell was the same as always - rail thin, and dirty blonde hair in a bowl cut that was not flattering given her sharp bone structure. The moment her eyes fell on the two officers her bony Visage twisted into a pinched expression which, in McNichol's very respectful opinion, gave her a face like a hen's ass.
"Detective McNichol. Detective Hamill," she stiffly greeted them as she met them barely twenty meters from her office's door. "Which student are you looking for this time?"
"Oh Larissa, it's always such a pleasure," Hamill said, all faux-syrupy-sweetness, perky cheer and insincere charm. "How are you? How's your dad doing these days?"
The cold stare that Blackwell gave Hamill in response could have frozen molten rock. McNichol couldn't help but chuckle.
"Now ladies, play nice. We're all role models here, remember?" He chuckled again when Blackwell's unamused gaze swung in his direction. "And actually Larissa, we're not here to arrest any of your kids today. Not yet anyways. No, we've got a few questions we have to ask you and probably a few other teachers while CSI does their thing."
Blackwell began blinking.
"Wait, wha-" she began to say, but Hamill smoothly cut her off.
"Not to worry Larissa, this is to get some detes from you and your staff about one of your students, who's the subject of our current investigation. Who they talk to, who they're seen around, their grades and disciplinary records, that sort of thing."
"I've told you both before," Blackwell irritably retorted, "what gang affiliations a student might have is your job, not mine."
"Eh, it's a little more complicated than if this kid's in one of the gangs," McNichol said apologetically. "Can't rule it out though, and this one we gotta at least get that 'A for Effort.' You know how it is." He shrugged and sighed, and Blackwell rolled her eyes and huffed irritably.
"Then in the interest of saving us all some time and minimizing the disruption that you're inflicting on my school, again I'm asking which student is this about?"
"Oh, we didn't tell you?" Hamill blushed - and how a black woman could blush so vividly or on command was something McNichol still couldn't wrap his head around - and with an embarrassed laugh rubbed the back of her neck. "Shit, where is my head today? Sorry Larissa. Long nights, ya know? Honestly dunno how I get anything done."
Blackwell's irritation visibly skyrocketed, and just as she opened her mouth to snap at Hamill…
"We're here about Taylor Hebert," McNichol said with a tiny smile, and just like that Blackwell paused and blinked.
A heartbeat passed.
"Ah. Her," Blackwell said with thinly-veiled distaste. "Somehow I am not surprised. That girl has been a problem almost from her first day."
"Oh? Sounds like she's been a pain in the ass for you," McNichol commented as he finally gestured towards the Principal's office. Absentmindedly Blackwell nodded and pivoted smartly on her low heels, and the two detectives fell in on either side of her.
"Her constant allegations and poor attempts at gaslighting her fellow students have been giving me more than a few headaches. I'm assuming that what happened yesterday has something to do with it?"
"You assume correctly, Larissa," Hamill replied. Blackwell clicked her tongue.
"I don't know what you can expect to find," she said as she led them through the door. Blackwell's secretary glanced up and seemed to pause at the sight of the two detectives, then the other woman's lips twisted into a frown. "I had to contract a cleaning crew to thoroughly sanitize not only Hebert's locker but the neighboring ones. It took them several hours before they were finally able to get rid of the smell - they had to work overnight, which was not cheap." Hamill nodded sympathetically.
"Eugh. Sounds as bad as that thing Gladly and his jackass friends did our senior year," the dark-skinned woman commented.
"It was worse," Blackwell said with a pained grimace. Hamill raised an eyebrow.
"... Fucking hell, Larissa," she very eloquently replied.
"We're also going to need to speak to the cleaning crew that you contracted," McNichol said, causing Blackwell pause in the middle of pulling open her office door.
"That seems excessive for investigating a school prank."
"Well, an assault actually," Hamill glibly corrected with a roll of her eyes.
"Technically partner, I think that this was supposed to be an investigation into kidnapping, illegal confinement, illegal disposal of biohazardous materials, and attempted murder," McNichol playfully corrected, and watched out of the corner of his eye as Blackwell began blinking rapidly.
"I don't-" The principal began to say.
"No, no, wait a second," Hamill playfully interrupted, then smacking her forehead, she exclaimed, "I am so dumb. The girl's dead, so this is definitely a murder investigation now." As Hamill spoke, the amusement and good humor drained away from her face and tone, and by the time that the last word left her lips, her cold expression could have frozen molten rock.
Larissa Blackwell looked as if the floor had suddenly been yanked out from underneath her.
"... I beg your pardon but this is not funny," she quietly said.
"No Blackwell, the murder of a teenage girl really isn't," McNichol said as that tiny smile returned to his lips. "Not even in Brockton Bay. Hey, do me a favor and keep your ass in that chair, okay?" He pointed without looking at the secretary, who had risen in a half-crouch. She obediently lowered herself back behind her desk.
"Now, Miss Blackwell," McNichol said as he turned his attention back to the principal, showing more teeth in his smile than he'd been moments earlier. "We're gonna sit down and have a talk about Taylor Hebert. It's up to you whether that talk happens here or in an interrogation room. And in addition to any and all documentation concerning one Taylor Hebert, and I mean everything, we're gonna need the security footage all the way back to… eh, let's call it the beginning of winter break for now and play it from there."
__________
January 5th, 2011 - Tuesday
7:06 am
Brockton Bay
Eastern Massachusetts General Hospital
__________
Amongst the varied cape communities within the United States, there was an informal code of conduct, sometimes called the truce or the game or referred to as the unwritten rules, depending on who you asked. Respect the secret identities of other Parahumans. No attacking the civilian family members of Parahumans. No lethal force, which went hand-in-hand with no guns. No violence or powers during a meeting. No terror attacks on civilians. No enslaving people, which led directly to no sexual assaults or rape attempts.
These rules were, more or less, respected amongst most Parahumans but truth be told were more considered what one would call guidelines. Only a precious few completely disregarded these sad attempts at civility… the Fallen or the Slaughterhouse Nine, as an example.
There was one more unspoken rule however that was rarely thought of but was, by most with a shred of sanity, considered nigh-sacrosanct: don't start shit at a hospital.
After Eidolon literally disintegrated three members of a gang of villains for endangering a maternity ward in Texas, and on another occasion Alexandria had turned a villain with a Kill Order into a gruesome smear spread across two miles of highway 405 for having the audacity to threaten a hospital that was rumored to be hosting the newborn child of another hero, it became quietly yet widely accepted that doing so was almost certainly a shortcut to a death sentence, especially when other villains across the country began coming down similarly hard on offenders that did anything that endangered a hospital or its patients. When the infamous Marquis later crucified two members of the Slaughterhouse Nine during their attack on Brockton Bay when their rampage threatened a free clinic giving treatment to Shatterbird's victims, it had been ingrained as an addition to the Unwritten Rules that most capes honored or at the very least paid made sure to give the appearance of respecting.
If you were a Cape and you threatened a hospital, or tried to hurt or kill those within, your lifespan was in danger of being drastically shortened by the rest of the Cape community.
As such, any and all Parahuman incidents at or near a hospital tended to get a rapid PRT and Protectorate response. This was especially the case within Brockton Bay given that Panacea regularly made rounds at hospitals throughout the city, as thanks to her existence, medical tourism brought a not-inconsequential amount of money to the otherwise struggling city.
Two squads of PRT officers in full gear made their way into the lower levels of the EMGH, led by Armsmaster and Velocity of the Protectorate. Just outside of the hospital morgue was the young medical examiner that had called them in, still so shaken that her face was even paler than her pale blonde hair. Given that her hair was so pale that it verged on white despite her youth…
Armsmaster concluded that for the time being, he needn't worry about Doctor Moore just yet. Her colleagues were adequately capable of attending to her if she succumbed to shock. He did however use the heads-up display built into his helmet and added an annotation to have a PRT officer follow up with the woman later that day, in the event that she recalled a crucial detail that might become important later.
More immediately critical was that power was out across the entire floor… but as the veteran hero neared the doors to the morgue, even the emergency lights were out. Out of caution he slowed his own approach, but when his equipment showed no signs of power loss, he quickened his pace once more.
"Think it was an EMP?" Velocity mused.
"If it was, it was an extremely localized one," Armsmaster replied, "or something very similar. Not an impossibility when it comes to powers. Ready to breach?"
"On your signal, boss."
Armsmaster brandished his iconic halberd while Velocity almost lazily rolled his neck and shoulders. A gesture had two of the PRT officers moving to either side of the door while the rest of the squad readied their weapons; non-lethal firearms and containment foam sprayers, though two were carrying carbines loaded with lethal munitions just in case.
Armsmaster had his suspicions on just what they would find within the morgue. Doctor Moore had reported some sort of violent electrical discharge that had erupted from the morgue coolers when she'd tried to open a drawer containing the deceased subject of a recent murder investigation, leading him to theorize that this was an attempt to destroy the deceased's remains with tinkertech. It wouldn't be the first time that a villain attempted such, either by their own means or with tinkertech devices purchased or stolen from others. He had already made a note to recommend that the PRT-ENE be prepared to take over that investigation and to question Shadow Stalker on how much she knew about the deceased, given that the subject had been a Winslow student. Shadow Stalker wasn't exactly a model Ward, but he concluded that she may have some knowledge or insight into the case.
"Go," Armsmaster commanded, and the PRT officers shouldered the doors open and raised their weapons; before the doors were even halfway open Velocity vanished from sight, and less than a second later numerous glow sticks were liberally scattered across the morgue, bathing the room in vibrantly bright chemical light that was ever so faintly tinted green.
It was more than enough light that Armsmaster very nearly paused when he saw the state of the coolers that lined one of the walls of the expansive room.
"... What in the actual flip-fucking piss?" Velocity quietly muttered as he stared slack-jawed, having reappeared from his high-speed state at Armsmaster's side. Another time, Armsmaster might have chastised the other hero for letting his tongue get the better of him when caught by surprise.
In this instance, Armsmaster rather understood the once-soldier's vulgarity, even if he wasn't one to express himself in a similar fashion.
In the light of Velocity's numerous glow sticks they could see how something had ripped apart several of the morgue drawers. It was as if the metal had all been pulled in a single direction, twisted and warped and sheared apart to be molded into an ugly, lumping-looking mass that was still attached to the remnants of the morgue cooler by seemingly fragile and badly damaged struts of metal that somehow were just strong enough to keep the mass supported in mid-air. For a brief moment the smell of ozone was suddenly heavy in the air, followed by a loud crackling and popping as sparks danced across the ruined metal.
Fortunately, whatever created the effect left the corpses laying neighboring units undefiled, but that was still another reason to resolve the situation quickly so the other bodies could be moved elsewhere as quickly as possible. The Protectorate leader flicked his eyes in a certain pattern, cycling through various sensors built into his helmet, then grimaced a few seconds later as the results were displayed across his helmet's visor.
"Velocity," he said without taking his gaze off of the mass, "Get the power turned off for the morgue. The mass is consuming electricity directly from the hospital's power grid - possibly due to having compromised the morgue cooler's electrical systems." as he spoke there was another crackling surge of electricity that danced across the mass of metal.
"On it, Boss," the speedster responded, vanishing almost before the last word reached Armsmaster's ears. Less than a minute later there was an odd groaning, not from the mass but from the twisted spokes of metal that suddenly seemed less capable of supporting it, as the lump of metal noticeably sagged a foot closer to the floor. The PRT officers armed with containment foam sprayers kept their weapons levels on the mass as electricity popped and crackled across it again, then a second and third time in rapid succession along with a high-pitched buzzing or humming that was more easily felt than heard.
"Hose it down with foam, at least a two inch coating on all sides, and be careful not to touch it directly. Its surface is giving off roughly point oh seven five nine nine six sieverts of microwave radiation - if you're lucky, you'll only get second degree internal and external burns," Armsmaster ordered, and the PRT squad around him immediately yet cautiously acted. The PRT and Protectorate alike were filled with all manner of horror stories involving capes, usually due to tinkertech behaving in unexpected and dangerous ways or strange power interactions between Parahumans. Yet there were also plenty of incidents where an unknown (or known) cape's powers had unforeseen consequences. It was unexpected surprises which led to good people becoming casualties.
As the mass was entombed within a cocoon of containment foam, Armsmaster activated the plasma cutter built into his halberd and began to cut.
Cutting through the first strut went well. On the second, he had to begin carefully modulating the energy output to his plasma torch to adjust for the mass's attempt to leach energy from his iconic weapon. On the third strut, he was forced to stop and reconfigure the energy fields containing and regulating the plasma blade. Concerningly, by the time he'd had the mass completely carved free of the ruined morgue cooler, it had dropped his halberd's power reserves by thirty-six percent.
Also concerning was how the mass floated a good two feet off of the floor all on its own, gently bobbing up and down as if it were floating in water instead of in midair.
Fortunately, the fact that it floated on its own made it simple enough to move the mass, especially with a thick coating of containment foam to minimize possible injuries from maneuvering it. All the same, bolts were drilled into the foam coating the mass to serve as anchors for pull ropes to drag it from the hospital by, because there was no sense in taking pointless risk. The entire time, Armsmaster continued to assail the strange mass with every option in his power armors extensive sensor suite.
"Armsmaster to console," he spoke when the mass was finally hauled out from the hospital's interior towards a waiting transport vehicle.
"Console copies, Protectorate Lead," the PRT officer manning the console promptly replied.
"The Unknown Parahuman Object successfully extracted from the EMGH morgue and is now being loaded for transport to containment and examination site Lincoln-Six-Echo. Be advised that the UPO is being considered extremely hazardous and potentially unstable due to energy absorption properties, and is emitting dangerous levels of microwave radiation."
"Site Lincoln-Six-Echo; acknowledged, Protectorate-Lead," the officer confirmed. "Traffic control on standby to expedite delivery to examination site and minimize civilian and gang exposure to UPO."
It took less than ten minutes to guide the mass out of EMGH, largely due to the need to ensure that it didn't come anywhere near any of the civilians within the hospital, be they patients, staff or visitors. Somewhat more difficult was safely getting the object into the back of a transport without endangering any law enforcement personnel, a problem solved by Armsmaster applying Archimedes' ancient adage of a fulcrum and a long-enough lever. One of his devices built into the outer surface of his left vambrace that he'd constructed specifically as an all-purpose emergency jack for collapsing buildings, moving and lifting vehicles - and in one very memorable case used to launch Hookwolf through a burning truck and three hundred meters into the bay - served well enough to push the foam-encased mass into the vehicle.
"Console to Protectorate Lead," the communicator in his helmet suddenly chirped as the PRT transport and its escort detail began moving, "Director Piggot is-"
Before the message could be fully given to him, the sensor suite Armsmaster had left active to track the fluctuations of energy that the UPO emanated began screaming warnings at him, despite that the vehicle carrying it was over a hundred meters away and nearly at the intersection. He whirled in place just in time to see a crackling discharge of energy dance over the vehicle. Without hesitation he closed the communication line with the console and opened the emergency channels.
"Armsmaster to UPO transport!" he roared out. "Get clear of the vehi-"
The explosion that consumed the transport from within and literally tore the vehicle apart came with a concussive blast wave that blew out every window within three hundred meters and violently threw the PRT vehicles escorting the transport as if they were die-cast toy cars hurled by an angry toddler. One van tumbled and bounced end over end, a burning mass of crumpling metal that eventually skidded to a top after several seconds. The other vehicle ended up embedded upside down within the side of a nearby building. Of the PRT officers escorting the UPO, only a pitiful few survived the explosion.
Other nearby vehicles fared little better from the explosion, though mercifully the civilian casualties were lower than what they could have been due to both the PRT cordon and the rerouting of traffic; a little less than two dozen deaths, but with over fifty seriously injured and three times that exposed to a dangerous radiation spike normally attributed to being exposed to runaway nuclear reactions without sufficient protection.
Armsmaster was aware of none of this, having been hurled through two walls when the blast sent him hurtling back inside Eastern Massachusetts General Hospital.
__________
Enjoy.
January 4th, 2011 - Monday
1:31 am
Brockton Bay
Eastern Massachusetts General Hospital
Room 217B
__________
"She's intubated!" the man in scrubs called out semi-frantically from where he stood at the head of the bed.
"Someone hold her goddamn arm so I can get the IV back in!" another shouted as those crowded around the bed worked with a unity that almost appeared semi-chaotic. The slight form laying in the bed should've been easy enough to handle, but the way she violently shook and spasmed and thrashed changed things. Helping a patient in the middle of a generalized tonic-clonic seizure - what used to be called a 'grand mal' seizure in years past - was never easy.
But this was no ordinary seizure.
It took four just to hold the girl still long enough to strap her to the bed as her violently-spasming body writhed and twisted, for all that she might have been a hundred pounds soaking wet. She'd already slammed her right forearm against the railing of her bed hard enough to fracture her radius and ulna, and it was all the team could do just to keep her from hurting herself even worse until her seizure passed. Even then, she was still shaking hard enough that it seemed like her bed might start twitching its way across the floor… and she'd been seizing for fifteen minutes.
An instant later the patient suddenly went bonelessly limp as a shrill tone began shrieking from the EKG device that was tethered to the girl, and everyone moved at once.
One of the team, an almost tiny Hispanic woman, literally vaulted onto the bed to straddle the girl's belly and began frantically giving her chest compressions, keeping count via a frantic muttering underneath her breath as the code cart was all but dragged over to the bed.
"Defibrillator ready!" someone shouted, and the tiny woman allowed someone to pull her off of their patient while another stepped forward to rip the gown from the girl's chest, modesty be damned, and liberally squirted a dollop of gel onto her upper chest and side.
"Clear!" another shouted as defibrillator paddles were pressed to the girl's chest. Not even a second later a spasm ran through the girl's body, and when the EKG continued to whine, someone stepped forward to give her chest compressions again while the defibrillator recharged.
After several frantic minutes of trying to revive her, they gave up and covered Taylor Hebert's body to give the dead girl back her modesty, and called the time of death.
__________
Same Day
11:42 am
__________
Olivia Moore never did like having to perform autopsies on kids, especially ones that died to violence. Unfortunately, when you're a medical examiner living and working in a city - especially one like Brockton Bay - you don't have much choice in the matter, and Olivia prided herself on being better at leaving a body in a respectable condition than most others while still being as thorough as she needed to be for a police investigation.
Oh, and despite being a petite white woman that just so happened to possess blonde hair so pair that it verges on white, she wasn't in the pocket of any of the gangs (specifically the Empire 88), so she was usually the one called in to examine the 'suspicious' bodies to minimize any chances of someone tampering with evidence.
Olivia at first had been looking for evidence of any infectious disease that could have caused the seizure that had killed the girl, and there'd been enough of those that she was certain that wherever Taylor had been before she'd been thrown into an ambulance was due for a very thorough investigation. She'd found evidence of early-onset septicemia in the scratches on the girl's bruised hands - a serious infection that could easily have killed the poor girl, if the seizure hadn't done her in first.
However, there had been suspicious things that she'd found while examining the corpse of fifteen-year-old Taylor Hebert, once she'd begun to look past the failed efforts to resuscitate the kid. Numerous old bruises that were - had been - in various stages of healing before her death, some of which had the telltale signs of being defensive wounds. Hairline fractures in certain places had given further evidence that the girl had been violently beaten more than once. There had been no signs of sexual abuse - thank God - but the corpse was the corpse of an abuse victim all the same.
Olivia tried to take consolation in the fact that at least now, no one could hurt the girl ever again.
The girl's brain had been… odd, however. Olivia at first thought it'd be a case of SUDEP; Sudden Unexplained Death in Epilepsy. That theory had been quite firmly squashed when she'd opened up Taylor's skull and found… she still wasn't sure just what she'd found, even after spending almost five mentally-exhausting hours on Taylor's body. It was as if the girl had suffered multiple fatal aneurysms within her brain simultaneously, the damage was so extensive and widespread. However, despite the damage, her brain was also strangely wrong… and the medical examiner couldn't help but recall how Parahuman brains were structurally different from those of baseline humans, possessing an anomalous mass of tissue that was believed to be responsible for them having or using their powers.
The ruin that was the deceased Taylor Hebert's brain had three such masses.
Olivia frowned, pausing in the middle of the report that she'd been working on ever since she'd placed the Hebert girl back into one of her drawers. It'd be weeks before the toxicology tests on the blood and tissue samples that she'd taken from Hebert's body were completed, but Olivia was already intending to forward her initial findings to the relevant authorities and hoped that if the PRT did take over the investigation - as she suspected that they might - that they'd actually solve this one. It was just a hunch, but the medical examiner suspected that, either accidentally or deliberately, someone had killed Taylor Hebert.
Olivia never noticed how the fluorescent lights flickered behind her, or that within the morgue storage cooler that Taylor Hebert's corpse had been placed to preserve the girl's remains, said corpse had begun to twitch.
__________
1:59 pm
__________
Strange as it was to say, police were in fact not as common a sight at Winslow High School as most would expect, despite the school's reputation. The reason for this was quite simple in retrospect; the often-derided Brockton Bay Police Department's Gang Intelligence Unit was very efficient when it came to keeping an eye on known affiliates of the Bay's major gangs. Despite issues of funding and personnel, the GIU's officers were exceedingly talented at both sniffing out any officers that were on the take or who might have questionable loyalties and surviving skirmishes with the gangs, which made them a menace to the rank and file of the Empire Eighty-Eight and the AZN Bad Boyz. This meant that teenage recruits and prospects were encouraged to keep their heads down to minimize drawing GIU notice.
This was less due to the intelligence and cunning of the officers, and more simple necessity. Cops got killed in Brockton Bay, as surely as water was wet and mountains were high. A smart cop was a cop elsewhere. A greedy or cowardly cop - not always the same thing - learned to keep their head down when necessary and tried to balm their conscience however they could.
The crazy ones - and you had to be crazy to be an honest cop in Brockton Bay - got clever and sneaky, and learned to make do with what they had.
The crooked officers were bypassed when need be and tolerated at other times, and occasionally very quietly dealt with, because when you couldn't quite trust Internal Affairs anymore (and no honest cop in the Bay had trusted IA in the last ten years) you did what you had to do to get the job done and not instead end up with a toe tag and a twenty-one gun salute. And when it came to your cases, you had to haul ass and get shit done if it looked like the PRT might take even a hint of interest.
Few understood this better than Detective Sergeant Leon McNichol, a veteran BBPD officer for ten years now. Being Irish made it complicated when it came to dealing with the Bay's gangs, and by 'gangs' it obviously was just one certain gang in particular. His partner Detective Anna Hamill had it both simpler and worse, being a black and openly bisexual woman. Working as partners was a simple choice; each considered the other to be a trustworthy and decent cop, which made the two of them worth their weight in gold. A partner you could trust not to stab you in the back, not just metaphorically, was what kept them alive and working together. That they also got along amazingly well despite Hamill's eight-month-long relationship with McNichol's ex-wife helped.
They made for quite the pair as they exited Hamill's car. McNichol was tall and broad-shouldered, brown hair buzzed short and with a leather coat over a baseball shirt and jeans that did a fairly decent job of hiding his shoulder harness and pistol. The top of Hamill's cornrow-laden head only just came up to his shoulder, with a much-heavier coat shrouding a stocky form clad in a blouse and khakis. Both openly had their badges hanging from cords around their necks. Most of the other officers parking and leaving their vehicles needed no such adornment. If the flashing police lights on their vehicles wasn't enough of a hint, the combinations of black uniforms, protective vests and tactical rigs that many of the officers securing the building wore would have clued in even the most thick-headed idiot.
Winslow High was the same miserable shithole that had been the last time McNichol had investigated a stabbing in school grounds, some… three months back? No, it had been almost five months, right at the beginning of the school year. A brawl that had ended up with a kid getting stabbed and four kids getting shipped off to juvie.
Fun times at Winslow as always, McNichol thought sardonically as he and his partner Hamill exited their police cruiser within the high school's increasingly-crowded parking lot. Crowded, because it was a small parking lot and the school day technically hadn't ended yet so that meant the teaching staff's personal vehicles, school buses, and whatever rides certain students had were all taking up room. Fortunately, McNichol didn't consider that to be a problem.
Neither did any of his fellow officers preparing to flood into Winslow.
"Why do I always forget how stupid kids are?" Hamill said with an exasperated sigh as one scraggly teen who was obviously cutting class to take a smoke break bolted the moment he realized just how many cops were suddenly descending on Winslow, which suggested that he was probably carrying. He didn't get very far of course. There were squad cars positioned around the property as an outer cordon before they had rolled in.
Before McNichol had even shut his door, he was already hearing over his radio that the kid had been pounced on, the little idiot.
"Fifty says the worst he has on him is his mom's prescription meds," McNichol commented as they began striding towards the school's entrance, taking the time to glance at the vehicle parked in the Principal's reserved space and confirm that she was on school property.
"... Partner, you're terrible, you know that?" Hamill rolled her eyes as she fell into step next to him. "Seventy-five says he's carrying Molly."
"Heh. Deal."
__________
It took until McNichol and Hamill had very nearly reached the Principal's office before the woman finally came out to meet them. Larissa Blackwell was the same as always - rail thin, and dirty blonde hair in a bowl cut that was not flattering given her sharp bone structure. The moment her eyes fell on the two officers her bony Visage twisted into a pinched expression which, in McNichol's very respectful opinion, gave her a face like a hen's ass.
"Detective McNichol. Detective Hamill," she stiffly greeted them as she met them barely twenty meters from her office's door. "Which student are you looking for this time?"
"Oh Larissa, it's always such a pleasure," Hamill said, all faux-syrupy-sweetness, perky cheer and insincere charm. "How are you? How's your dad doing these days?"
The cold stare that Blackwell gave Hamill in response could have frozen molten rock. McNichol couldn't help but chuckle.
"Now ladies, play nice. We're all role models here, remember?" He chuckled again when Blackwell's unamused gaze swung in his direction. "And actually Larissa, we're not here to arrest any of your kids today. Not yet anyways. No, we've got a few questions we have to ask you and probably a few other teachers while CSI does their thing."
Blackwell began blinking.
"Wait, wha-" she began to say, but Hamill smoothly cut her off.
"Not to worry Larissa, this is to get some detes from you and your staff about one of your students, who's the subject of our current investigation. Who they talk to, who they're seen around, their grades and disciplinary records, that sort of thing."
"I've told you both before," Blackwell irritably retorted, "what gang affiliations a student might have is your job, not mine."
"Eh, it's a little more complicated than if this kid's in one of the gangs," McNichol said apologetically. "Can't rule it out though, and this one we gotta at least get that 'A for Effort.' You know how it is." He shrugged and sighed, and Blackwell rolled her eyes and huffed irritably.
"Then in the interest of saving us all some time and minimizing the disruption that you're inflicting on my school, again I'm asking which student is this about?"
"Oh, we didn't tell you?" Hamill blushed - and how a black woman could blush so vividly or on command was something McNichol still couldn't wrap his head around - and with an embarrassed laugh rubbed the back of her neck. "Shit, where is my head today? Sorry Larissa. Long nights, ya know? Honestly dunno how I get anything done."
Blackwell's irritation visibly skyrocketed, and just as she opened her mouth to snap at Hamill…
"We're here about Taylor Hebert," McNichol said with a tiny smile, and just like that Blackwell paused and blinked.
A heartbeat passed.
"Ah. Her," Blackwell said with thinly-veiled distaste. "Somehow I am not surprised. That girl has been a problem almost from her first day."
"Oh? Sounds like she's been a pain in the ass for you," McNichol commented as he finally gestured towards the Principal's office. Absentmindedly Blackwell nodded and pivoted smartly on her low heels, and the two detectives fell in on either side of her.
"Her constant allegations and poor attempts at gaslighting her fellow students have been giving me more than a few headaches. I'm assuming that what happened yesterday has something to do with it?"
"You assume correctly, Larissa," Hamill replied. Blackwell clicked her tongue.
"I don't know what you can expect to find," she said as she led them through the door. Blackwell's secretary glanced up and seemed to pause at the sight of the two detectives, then the other woman's lips twisted into a frown. "I had to contract a cleaning crew to thoroughly sanitize not only Hebert's locker but the neighboring ones. It took them several hours before they were finally able to get rid of the smell - they had to work overnight, which was not cheap." Hamill nodded sympathetically.
"Eugh. Sounds as bad as that thing Gladly and his jackass friends did our senior year," the dark-skinned woman commented.
"It was worse," Blackwell said with a pained grimace. Hamill raised an eyebrow.
"... Fucking hell, Larissa," she very eloquently replied.
"We're also going to need to speak to the cleaning crew that you contracted," McNichol said, causing Blackwell pause in the middle of pulling open her office door.
"That seems excessive for investigating a school prank."
"Well, an assault actually," Hamill glibly corrected with a roll of her eyes.
"Technically partner, I think that this was supposed to be an investigation into kidnapping, illegal confinement, illegal disposal of biohazardous materials, and attempted murder," McNichol playfully corrected, and watched out of the corner of his eye as Blackwell began blinking rapidly.
"I don't-" The principal began to say.
"No, no, wait a second," Hamill playfully interrupted, then smacking her forehead, she exclaimed, "I am so dumb. The girl's dead, so this is definitely a murder investigation now." As Hamill spoke, the amusement and good humor drained away from her face and tone, and by the time that the last word left her lips, her cold expression could have frozen molten rock.
Larissa Blackwell looked as if the floor had suddenly been yanked out from underneath her.
"... I beg your pardon but this is not funny," she quietly said.
"No Blackwell, the murder of a teenage girl really isn't," McNichol said as that tiny smile returned to his lips. "Not even in Brockton Bay. Hey, do me a favor and keep your ass in that chair, okay?" He pointed without looking at the secretary, who had risen in a half-crouch. She obediently lowered herself back behind her desk.
"Now, Miss Blackwell," McNichol said as he turned his attention back to the principal, showing more teeth in his smile than he'd been moments earlier. "We're gonna sit down and have a talk about Taylor Hebert. It's up to you whether that talk happens here or in an interrogation room. And in addition to any and all documentation concerning one Taylor Hebert, and I mean everything, we're gonna need the security footage all the way back to… eh, let's call it the beginning of winter break for now and play it from there."
__________
January 5th, 2011 - Tuesday
7:06 am
Brockton Bay
Eastern Massachusetts General Hospital
__________
Amongst the varied cape communities within the United States, there was an informal code of conduct, sometimes called the truce or the game or referred to as the unwritten rules, depending on who you asked. Respect the secret identities of other Parahumans. No attacking the civilian family members of Parahumans. No lethal force, which went hand-in-hand with no guns. No violence or powers during a meeting. No terror attacks on civilians. No enslaving people, which led directly to no sexual assaults or rape attempts.
These rules were, more or less, respected amongst most Parahumans but truth be told were more considered what one would call guidelines. Only a precious few completely disregarded these sad attempts at civility… the Fallen or the Slaughterhouse Nine, as an example.
There was one more unspoken rule however that was rarely thought of but was, by most with a shred of sanity, considered nigh-sacrosanct: don't start shit at a hospital.
After Eidolon literally disintegrated three members of a gang of villains for endangering a maternity ward in Texas, and on another occasion Alexandria had turned a villain with a Kill Order into a gruesome smear spread across two miles of highway 405 for having the audacity to threaten a hospital that was rumored to be hosting the newborn child of another hero, it became quietly yet widely accepted that doing so was almost certainly a shortcut to a death sentence, especially when other villains across the country began coming down similarly hard on offenders that did anything that endangered a hospital or its patients. When the infamous Marquis later crucified two members of the Slaughterhouse Nine during their attack on Brockton Bay when their rampage threatened a free clinic giving treatment to Shatterbird's victims, it had been ingrained as an addition to the Unwritten Rules that most capes honored or at the very least paid made sure to give the appearance of respecting.
If you were a Cape and you threatened a hospital, or tried to hurt or kill those within, your lifespan was in danger of being drastically shortened by the rest of the Cape community.
As such, any and all Parahuman incidents at or near a hospital tended to get a rapid PRT and Protectorate response. This was especially the case within Brockton Bay given that Panacea regularly made rounds at hospitals throughout the city, as thanks to her existence, medical tourism brought a not-inconsequential amount of money to the otherwise struggling city.
Two squads of PRT officers in full gear made their way into the lower levels of the EMGH, led by Armsmaster and Velocity of the Protectorate. Just outside of the hospital morgue was the young medical examiner that had called them in, still so shaken that her face was even paler than her pale blonde hair. Given that her hair was so pale that it verged on white despite her youth…
Armsmaster concluded that for the time being, he needn't worry about Doctor Moore just yet. Her colleagues were adequately capable of attending to her if she succumbed to shock. He did however use the heads-up display built into his helmet and added an annotation to have a PRT officer follow up with the woman later that day, in the event that she recalled a crucial detail that might become important later.
More immediately critical was that power was out across the entire floor… but as the veteran hero neared the doors to the morgue, even the emergency lights were out. Out of caution he slowed his own approach, but when his equipment showed no signs of power loss, he quickened his pace once more.
"Think it was an EMP?" Velocity mused.
"If it was, it was an extremely localized one," Armsmaster replied, "or something very similar. Not an impossibility when it comes to powers. Ready to breach?"
"On your signal, boss."
Armsmaster brandished his iconic halberd while Velocity almost lazily rolled his neck and shoulders. A gesture had two of the PRT officers moving to either side of the door while the rest of the squad readied their weapons; non-lethal firearms and containment foam sprayers, though two were carrying carbines loaded with lethal munitions just in case.
Armsmaster had his suspicions on just what they would find within the morgue. Doctor Moore had reported some sort of violent electrical discharge that had erupted from the morgue coolers when she'd tried to open a drawer containing the deceased subject of a recent murder investigation, leading him to theorize that this was an attempt to destroy the deceased's remains with tinkertech. It wouldn't be the first time that a villain attempted such, either by their own means or with tinkertech devices purchased or stolen from others. He had already made a note to recommend that the PRT-ENE be prepared to take over that investigation and to question Shadow Stalker on how much she knew about the deceased, given that the subject had been a Winslow student. Shadow Stalker wasn't exactly a model Ward, but he concluded that she may have some knowledge or insight into the case.
"Go," Armsmaster commanded, and the PRT officers shouldered the doors open and raised their weapons; before the doors were even halfway open Velocity vanished from sight, and less than a second later numerous glow sticks were liberally scattered across the morgue, bathing the room in vibrantly bright chemical light that was ever so faintly tinted green.
It was more than enough light that Armsmaster very nearly paused when he saw the state of the coolers that lined one of the walls of the expansive room.
"... What in the actual flip-fucking piss?" Velocity quietly muttered as he stared slack-jawed, having reappeared from his high-speed state at Armsmaster's side. Another time, Armsmaster might have chastised the other hero for letting his tongue get the better of him when caught by surprise.
In this instance, Armsmaster rather understood the once-soldier's vulgarity, even if he wasn't one to express himself in a similar fashion.
In the light of Velocity's numerous glow sticks they could see how something had ripped apart several of the morgue drawers. It was as if the metal had all been pulled in a single direction, twisted and warped and sheared apart to be molded into an ugly, lumping-looking mass that was still attached to the remnants of the morgue cooler by seemingly fragile and badly damaged struts of metal that somehow were just strong enough to keep the mass supported in mid-air. For a brief moment the smell of ozone was suddenly heavy in the air, followed by a loud crackling and popping as sparks danced across the ruined metal.
Fortunately, whatever created the effect left the corpses laying neighboring units undefiled, but that was still another reason to resolve the situation quickly so the other bodies could be moved elsewhere as quickly as possible. The Protectorate leader flicked his eyes in a certain pattern, cycling through various sensors built into his helmet, then grimaced a few seconds later as the results were displayed across his helmet's visor.
"Velocity," he said without taking his gaze off of the mass, "Get the power turned off for the morgue. The mass is consuming electricity directly from the hospital's power grid - possibly due to having compromised the morgue cooler's electrical systems." as he spoke there was another crackling surge of electricity that danced across the mass of metal.
"On it, Boss," the speedster responded, vanishing almost before the last word reached Armsmaster's ears. Less than a minute later there was an odd groaning, not from the mass but from the twisted spokes of metal that suddenly seemed less capable of supporting it, as the lump of metal noticeably sagged a foot closer to the floor. The PRT officers armed with containment foam sprayers kept their weapons levels on the mass as electricity popped and crackled across it again, then a second and third time in rapid succession along with a high-pitched buzzing or humming that was more easily felt than heard.
"Hose it down with foam, at least a two inch coating on all sides, and be careful not to touch it directly. Its surface is giving off roughly point oh seven five nine nine six sieverts of microwave radiation - if you're lucky, you'll only get second degree internal and external burns," Armsmaster ordered, and the PRT squad around him immediately yet cautiously acted. The PRT and Protectorate alike were filled with all manner of horror stories involving capes, usually due to tinkertech behaving in unexpected and dangerous ways or strange power interactions between Parahumans. Yet there were also plenty of incidents where an unknown (or known) cape's powers had unforeseen consequences. It was unexpected surprises which led to good people becoming casualties.
As the mass was entombed within a cocoon of containment foam, Armsmaster activated the plasma cutter built into his halberd and began to cut.
Cutting through the first strut went well. On the second, he had to begin carefully modulating the energy output to his plasma torch to adjust for the mass's attempt to leach energy from his iconic weapon. On the third strut, he was forced to stop and reconfigure the energy fields containing and regulating the plasma blade. Concerningly, by the time he'd had the mass completely carved free of the ruined morgue cooler, it had dropped his halberd's power reserves by thirty-six percent.
Also concerning was how the mass floated a good two feet off of the floor all on its own, gently bobbing up and down as if it were floating in water instead of in midair.
Fortunately, the fact that it floated on its own made it simple enough to move the mass, especially with a thick coating of containment foam to minimize possible injuries from maneuvering it. All the same, bolts were drilled into the foam coating the mass to serve as anchors for pull ropes to drag it from the hospital by, because there was no sense in taking pointless risk. The entire time, Armsmaster continued to assail the strange mass with every option in his power armors extensive sensor suite.
"Armsmaster to console," he spoke when the mass was finally hauled out from the hospital's interior towards a waiting transport vehicle.
"Console copies, Protectorate Lead," the PRT officer manning the console promptly replied.
"The Unknown Parahuman Object successfully extracted from the EMGH morgue and is now being loaded for transport to containment and examination site Lincoln-Six-Echo. Be advised that the UPO is being considered extremely hazardous and potentially unstable due to energy absorption properties, and is emitting dangerous levels of microwave radiation."
"Site Lincoln-Six-Echo; acknowledged, Protectorate-Lead," the officer confirmed. "Traffic control on standby to expedite delivery to examination site and minimize civilian and gang exposure to UPO."
It took less than ten minutes to guide the mass out of EMGH, largely due to the need to ensure that it didn't come anywhere near any of the civilians within the hospital, be they patients, staff or visitors. Somewhat more difficult was safely getting the object into the back of a transport without endangering any law enforcement personnel, a problem solved by Armsmaster applying Archimedes' ancient adage of a fulcrum and a long-enough lever. One of his devices built into the outer surface of his left vambrace that he'd constructed specifically as an all-purpose emergency jack for collapsing buildings, moving and lifting vehicles - and in one very memorable case used to launch Hookwolf through a burning truck and three hundred meters into the bay - served well enough to push the foam-encased mass into the vehicle.
"Console to Protectorate Lead," the communicator in his helmet suddenly chirped as the PRT transport and its escort detail began moving, "Director Piggot is-"
Before the message could be fully given to him, the sensor suite Armsmaster had left active to track the fluctuations of energy that the UPO emanated began screaming warnings at him, despite that the vehicle carrying it was over a hundred meters away and nearly at the intersection. He whirled in place just in time to see a crackling discharge of energy dance over the vehicle. Without hesitation he closed the communication line with the console and opened the emergency channels.
"Armsmaster to UPO transport!" he roared out. "Get clear of the vehi-"
The explosion that consumed the transport from within and literally tore the vehicle apart came with a concussive blast wave that blew out every window within three hundred meters and violently threw the PRT vehicles escorting the transport as if they were die-cast toy cars hurled by an angry toddler. One van tumbled and bounced end over end, a burning mass of crumpling metal that eventually skidded to a top after several seconds. The other vehicle ended up embedded upside down within the side of a nearby building. Of the PRT officers escorting the UPO, only a pitiful few survived the explosion.
Other nearby vehicles fared little better from the explosion, though mercifully the civilian casualties were lower than what they could have been due to both the PRT cordon and the rerouting of traffic; a little less than two dozen deaths, but with over fifty seriously injured and three times that exposed to a dangerous radiation spike normally attributed to being exposed to runaway nuclear reactions without sufficient protection.
Armsmaster was aware of none of this, having been hurled through two walls when the blast sent him hurtling back inside Eastern Massachusetts General Hospital.
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Worms, Spiders and Octopi
Geas
Meat Thing
This one originated as a joke - I pointed out that a certain character from a certain movie from a certain franchise shared a lot of common physical features with another certain character from a certain fandom that a lot of people seem to enjoy reading and writing fanfiction about. The individuals that I told this joke to went a little bit nuts with the concept, and then my muse just ran with the idea and I ended up cranking this out in under five hours during a time when I should have technically been more focused on work (or at the very least, focused on the next chapter for Callsign: Owl). It's a little short, but this was the sort of thing that really didn't need to be any longer, and there's a non-zero chance that I will succumb to peer-pressure and write more of this one.
And no, I'm not talking about Armin from Attack On Titan and Hozumi from Prince Of Stride.
__________
Annette continued to sit in the coffee shop, but she stared after the one-armed girl until long after she was out of sight. The contents of her paper cup weren't quite steaming by the time she finally raised a hand to pluck off her glasses and wipe them clean with a tissue, but Annette no longer had any desire to finish the beverage. She wasn't sure just what she had expected, but meeting that girl… It had hurt in ways that she hadn't expected, and despite how short the meeting had been, it had been honestly far more difficult than she had expected it to be.
With a quiet sigh, she left some money on the table along with a substantial tip before riding to her feet. Before she'd set foot outside of the coffee shop, she had already known and decided on what she was going to do next, and it was not what she'd originally planned when she first learned that a private detective was observing her.
"So much for my so-called 'lunch,'" she muttered to herself with a faint, wry smile.
A brief glance confirmed that Taylor was still making her way to the mall's exit. Annette made it a point to not actually follow the girl. She had a strong hunch that the young lady would be quick to notice if someone was tailing her. So instead, Annette made her way to the nearest lady's room. It took her less than a minute to change into her 'working' clothes and even less time than that to exit the restroom, not through the door but through an HVAC vent shaft in the ceiling. Not for the first time was she grateful that she was such a petite woman, though her height made quickly moving through the mall's ventilation shafts such a chore.
She didn't even want to think about what might be getting in her hair.
Logically, Annette really should have let others deal with the situation. Things were already… tenuous with her employer, and the man had security operatives for a reason. How, the vast majority of them were tragically blunt tools, as unimaginative as they were imbecilic cretins. Plus, Annette lived and breathed an old adage: never send a man to do a woman's job.
Annette made it through the HVAC vents to the roof of the mall just in time to catch sight of Taylor and… him.
For a moment, Annette forgot how to breathe as she watched him hug Taylor before the two climbed into a rental car. She had believed the girl earlier during their brief meeting, but seeing him… That made it more viscerally real in a way that hurt. It was an old pain, that hurt, and one that she'd thought she'd long gotten over some eleven years ago.
However, as Annette had very recently learned, when it came to alternate parallel worlds, they could come with unpleasant surprises. Until now, she had been convinced that the most unpleasant surprise she ever would have was being hit by a truck that had slipped through a temporary tear between realities. But seeing still-living versions of her daughter and husband - the only man she had ever liked and loved enough to marry and make a life with - that she had buried after a fatal car accident was a special kind of hurt.
Annette's equipment wasn't exactly designed to make traversing rooftops an easy affair - unlike some individuals she could name - but it was simple enough that she could do so, keep an eye on the Hebert's rental, and let her mind wander. Something in her belly twisted when she considered how much she had just lied to the young woman with anecdotes about a family that had never existed, or how close she'd come to murdering her before she realized that the girl was actually a version of her Taylor, and not in fact a soon-to-be-horrifically-deceased law enforcement officer or intelligence operative playing games.
The Taylor Hebert that she had just met was not her Taylor. Her Taylor had never looked at her with such regret behind her eyes. Her Taylor had never made oblique references to numerous crimes. Her Taylor had never suffered the awkwardness of trying to adapt to missing an entire arm from the elbow down, and hadn't had two puckered bullet wounds in her forehead that had only been partly hidden by a knit cap.
Something crunched.
Annette took a deep, calming breath, and deliberately paid no attention to the shattered brickwork that she left in her wake. Inwardly, she couldn't help but note the irony. Her employer had funded her work into extra-dimensional technology in the hope that it would allow him to be reunited with his deceased wife and child. Annette had never dared to even imagine torturing herself with that possibility. She'd told herself that after eleven years, she'd mourned her husband and daughter and had moved on, that the hurt was a gentle ache now, easily dismissed.
And yet it was an inter-dimensional incident - some kind of massive conflict or even outright war of some kind - that had returned a maimed and haunted specter of her daughter to her along with a mockery of her husband who even at a distance looked far older and worn down than he should have.
Annette was afraid of this new Taylor and her father. She could admit that much, even to herself. Logically, she knew that she should keep the young woman and her widowed father at a distance. It'd be safer for both them and herself, given that her employer was currently languishing in jail after the destruction of the device she'd built for him.
That the device had been inherently flawed… Annette could admit that to herself now, even if it irked to do so. It hadn't nearly been ready for the use that it had been put through at the end. And okay, maybe it did seriously endanger, if not come perilously close to outright destroying, a not-insignificant percentage of New York City. Technically, that hadn't been Annette's fault per se, but rather her employer's, but she could see how some might lay some amount of the blame at her feet. That was something she could deal with.
What Annette wasn't sure she could deal with was this new Taylor learning about her hand in that mess and rejecting her outright. Maybe, just maybe, this Taylor would have understood, given those haunted and regretful eyes of hers and the obvious signs on her body of a life of violence… but Annette wasn't ready to take that risk. That wasn't logical of course, that was being ridiculously and stupidly emotional and Annette knew it.
And yet here she was, crouched on the roof of a hotel as she watched two interdimensional refugees park their car and make their way inside. And to make it worse, she was still indecisive. Should she do everything it took to push the girl and her father away? Or should she take a risk, indulge Taylor's poorly-hidden desire for some kind of relationship, and see what happened?
With a sigh, Doctor Annette Olivia-Rose Octavius ran her gloved fingers through her hair as she stood on the side of a billboard some twenty-seven stories above the street below, held securely in place by the four mechanical arms that were an integral part of her costume, and let her mind continuously spin in circles on just what to do about the dilemma that had dropped itself on her lap.
~~{}~~ ~~{}~~ ~~{}~~ ~~{}~~ ~~{}~~
And no, I'm not talking about Armin from Attack On Titan and Hozumi from Prince Of Stride.
__________
Annette continued to sit in the coffee shop, but she stared after the one-armed girl until long after she was out of sight. The contents of her paper cup weren't quite steaming by the time she finally raised a hand to pluck off her glasses and wipe them clean with a tissue, but Annette no longer had any desire to finish the beverage. She wasn't sure just what she had expected, but meeting that girl… It had hurt in ways that she hadn't expected, and despite how short the meeting had been, it had been honestly far more difficult than she had expected it to be.
With a quiet sigh, she left some money on the table along with a substantial tip before riding to her feet. Before she'd set foot outside of the coffee shop, she had already known and decided on what she was going to do next, and it was not what she'd originally planned when she first learned that a private detective was observing her.
"So much for my so-called 'lunch,'" she muttered to herself with a faint, wry smile.
A brief glance confirmed that Taylor was still making her way to the mall's exit. Annette made it a point to not actually follow the girl. She had a strong hunch that the young lady would be quick to notice if someone was tailing her. So instead, Annette made her way to the nearest lady's room. It took her less than a minute to change into her 'working' clothes and even less time than that to exit the restroom, not through the door but through an HVAC vent shaft in the ceiling. Not for the first time was she grateful that she was such a petite woman, though her height made quickly moving through the mall's ventilation shafts such a chore.
She didn't even want to think about what might be getting in her hair.
Logically, Annette really should have let others deal with the situation. Things were already… tenuous with her employer, and the man had security operatives for a reason. How, the vast majority of them were tragically blunt tools, as unimaginative as they were imbecilic cretins. Plus, Annette lived and breathed an old adage: never send a man to do a woman's job.
Annette made it through the HVAC vents to the roof of the mall just in time to catch sight of Taylor and… him.
For a moment, Annette forgot how to breathe as she watched him hug Taylor before the two climbed into a rental car. She had believed the girl earlier during their brief meeting, but seeing him… That made it more viscerally real in a way that hurt. It was an old pain, that hurt, and one that she'd thought she'd long gotten over some eleven years ago.
However, as Annette had very recently learned, when it came to alternate parallel worlds, they could come with unpleasant surprises. Until now, she had been convinced that the most unpleasant surprise she ever would have was being hit by a truck that had slipped through a temporary tear between realities. But seeing still-living versions of her daughter and husband - the only man she had ever liked and loved enough to marry and make a life with - that she had buried after a fatal car accident was a special kind of hurt.
Annette's equipment wasn't exactly designed to make traversing rooftops an easy affair - unlike some individuals she could name - but it was simple enough that she could do so, keep an eye on the Hebert's rental, and let her mind wander. Something in her belly twisted when she considered how much she had just lied to the young woman with anecdotes about a family that had never existed, or how close she'd come to murdering her before she realized that the girl was actually a version of her Taylor, and not in fact a soon-to-be-horrifically-deceased law enforcement officer or intelligence operative playing games.
The Taylor Hebert that she had just met was not her Taylor. Her Taylor had never looked at her with such regret behind her eyes. Her Taylor had never made oblique references to numerous crimes. Her Taylor had never suffered the awkwardness of trying to adapt to missing an entire arm from the elbow down, and hadn't had two puckered bullet wounds in her forehead that had only been partly hidden by a knit cap.
Something crunched.
Annette took a deep, calming breath, and deliberately paid no attention to the shattered brickwork that she left in her wake. Inwardly, she couldn't help but note the irony. Her employer had funded her work into extra-dimensional technology in the hope that it would allow him to be reunited with his deceased wife and child. Annette had never dared to even imagine torturing herself with that possibility. She'd told herself that after eleven years, she'd mourned her husband and daughter and had moved on, that the hurt was a gentle ache now, easily dismissed.
And yet it was an inter-dimensional incident - some kind of massive conflict or even outright war of some kind - that had returned a maimed and haunted specter of her daughter to her along with a mockery of her husband who even at a distance looked far older and worn down than he should have.
Annette was afraid of this new Taylor and her father. She could admit that much, even to herself. Logically, she knew that she should keep the young woman and her widowed father at a distance. It'd be safer for both them and herself, given that her employer was currently languishing in jail after the destruction of the device she'd built for him.
That the device had been inherently flawed… Annette could admit that to herself now, even if it irked to do so. It hadn't nearly been ready for the use that it had been put through at the end. And okay, maybe it did seriously endanger, if not come perilously close to outright destroying, a not-insignificant percentage of New York City. Technically, that hadn't been Annette's fault per se, but rather her employer's, but she could see how some might lay some amount of the blame at her feet. That was something she could deal with.
What Annette wasn't sure she could deal with was this new Taylor learning about her hand in that mess and rejecting her outright. Maybe, just maybe, this Taylor would have understood, given those haunted and regretful eyes of hers and the obvious signs on her body of a life of violence… but Annette wasn't ready to take that risk. That wasn't logical of course, that was being ridiculously and stupidly emotional and Annette knew it.
And yet here she was, crouched on the roof of a hotel as she watched two interdimensional refugees park their car and make their way inside. And to make it worse, she was still indecisive. Should she do everything it took to push the girl and her father away? Or should she take a risk, indulge Taylor's poorly-hidden desire for some kind of relationship, and see what happened?
With a sigh, Doctor Annette Olivia-Rose Octavius ran her gloved fingers through her hair as she stood on the side of a billboard some twenty-seven stories above the street below, held securely in place by the four mechanical arms that were an integral part of her costume, and let her mind continuously spin in circles on just what to do about the dilemma that had dropped itself on her lap.
~~{}~~ ~~{}~~ ~~{}~~ ~~{}~~ ~~{}~~
Worms, Spiders and Octopi 2
Geas
Meat Thing
Part 2
__________
Not for the first time (and probably not for the last either) did Dr Annette Olivia-Rose Octavius find herself thinking three very significant words.
Fuck.
Reed.
Richards.
As a general rule, was not a woman prone to vulgarity, which was perhaps ironic given that in recent years she found herself loosely associating with all manner of self-professed villains due to her connections to one Wilson Fisk. She'd even given a number of said individuals semi-legitimate employment as security specialists for Alchemax using her authority as CEO and Director of Research and Development. Many of said individuals could be especially coarse with their vocabularies, but most of them were smart enough to control their tongues when in her presence.
Annette enjoyed a very respectable degree of personal wealth on top of generous funding from Fisk. She had multiple hard-earned doctorates in physics as well as in engineering, an intelligence quota of 254, and was often invited to be a guest lecturer at MIT, the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, and even Nanyang Technological University despite her less-than-stellar grasp of Mandarin. Single-handedly, she had tranformed Alchemax from a failing company to one of the leading laboratories in the world when it came to theoretical physics and dimensional research. She was widely and rightfully regarded as one of the most intelligent women on the planet.
Also in her own humble opinion, despite spending so much time in a lab these days, even at forty-five she still looked pretty damn good in a bikini (and just as good outside of one as well).
Yet Reed Richards - scientist, adventurer and so-called 'super hero' - had eighteen doctorates, earned from attending no less than four prestigious universities across the United States. The fifty-four year old man was so intelligent that no one had yet to determine a method to accurately estimate just how intelligent he was; allegedly, he was able to read newspapers and write fully coherent sentences by the time he was two years old, and it was well-known that he had graduated Harvard at fourteen years old, before he was old enough to drive a car. As a scientist, the sheer amount of resources and funding at the man's disposal theoretically rivaled the economy of the United Goddamn Kingdoms.
Richards wasn't just the US president's scientific advisor. When the man spoke, the entire scientific community sat up like suddenly attentive dogs eager for a treat. Every discovery that he announced and every article that he published made shockwaves, causing their peers to endlessly debate, argue, and hypothesize just attempting to comprehend whatever the man had deigned to share with the world.
Reed Richards was a genius amongst geniuses.
Worse, the too-smart bastard knew it.
Despite Annette's considerable expertise, dozens upon dozens of published papers and articles, and years of research, Richards was considered the premiere authority on interdimensional phenomena, research and technology. When golden light shattered the sky six months ago and refugees from other worlds were suddenly everywhere, it was Richards that came up with the means to seal the breaches after the vast majority of said refugees were either sent back to whatever world they came from (if said worlds still existed) or to whichever world would accept them. Two months ago, it was Richards who was called in to study her work, leading to the remnants of her device quickly being disassembled and taken by the other scientist.
Officially, no one knew who built the device that Wilson Fisk killed the original Spider-Man over, and had nearly destroyed New York City with due to his desperation to find a version of his wife and son that still lived.
Unofficially, Reed Fucking Richards had had the fucking audacity to chastise Annette for 'allowing Fisk to manipulate her into building the device and letting him activating the portal before it had actually been ready to use.'
As if she were just a naive, simpering weakling of a girl, unaware of just what kind of man Fisk was and blinded by the funding and resources he had given her!
That arrogant, patronizing, self-absorbed, patriarchal, elitist, sexist, cradle-robbing, ephebophilic piece of shi-
'Breathe, Annette,' she told herself before she broke something important. Again. 'Breathe.'
Even two months (and many healed bruises and a couple rib fractures and a mild concussion) later, Annette still seethed from the man's unthinking condescension whenever she thought about it. In a large part, it was because Richards had recently just 'decided' that, after the Golden Sky and Fisk's usage of her technology, research into interdimensional technologies should be restricted. He argued that for the safety of all, only authorized individuals and facilities should be allowed to continue such research, and had given a preliminary list of those that he believed should be permitted to continue any existing research along those lines.
Neither Doctor Annette Olivia-Rose Octavius or Alchemax Corporation were on his list.
Almost immediately Alchemax's stock had taken a severe hit from the announcement, and it didn't help that a painfully substantial amount of funding was still coming from Fisk's pockets despite the man's incarceration and upcoming trial. That particular account hadn't been frozen yet, but Annette knew that it was only a matter of time before her research company's situation became dangerously critical. Very soon she'd either have to secure a new source of funding for her research, or risk Alchemax being bought out, plundered for research and materials, then shut down.
Almost as infuriating and in many ways more attention-grabbing was the mystery surrounding Taylor and Danny Hebert.
Namely, that they (and the few Golden Sky refugees still on her Earth) weren't suffering the effects of the peculiar Universal Displacement Syndrome that had very nearly killed the other Spider-Man and the other displaced Spider-heroes that had banded together to bring down Fisk. The displaced Spiders had all suffered symptoms within days of being displaced across universes, but for those like Taylor and Danny, it had been approximately six months and neither of the two showed symptoms.
It was fascinating… and concerning.
Within her office, Annette dwelled on the dilemma, pacing back and forth as much on her organic legs as she did the mechanical arms affixed to her upper back. To one side her was all the data she had at her disposal: operational data from the Super Collider that she'd built for Fisk, the meager data that she'd collected in the unfortunately brief time she'd had to study the displaced (and embarrassingly pudgy) Peter Parker, and what she'd observed from the other Spiders before they had returned to their native Earths. On the other side was all the data that she'd been able to obtain from the Golden Sky refugees… what little there was thanks to Richards. Most of it had been obtained from discreetly observing Taylor, and from 'creatively acquiring' copies of the young woman's medical records from the hospital that she'd ended up in when she'd arrived.
What little that Annette had been able to acquire from that route had very nearly drawn SHIELD's attention to her; a complication that she could ill afford these days. It also did not help that fucking Richards had the most data on the phenomenon that had brought Taylor to Annette, and of course the arrogant prick considered said data to be too dangerous to share, even to those who specialized in such research. Most galling of all was that he had the audacity to consider Annette to be lacking in the necessary intelligence and wisdom to work with data concerning a field that she was one of the widely-acknowledged leaders in.
And to think, people continued to wonder why Victoire von Doom hated the man so passionately that it had become a thing of urban legend.
Scowling, Annette forcibly dismissed the man from her thoughts to focus on the problem at hand, and once again asked herself why wereher daughter and husband Taylor and Danny still perfectly fine? Presumably it could be due to how they crossed between universes. The flawed super-collider that she had built for Fisk - in retrospect not the best name, or even that accurate - had functioned by analyzing the DNA of a subject, then searching nearby coterminous alternate dimensions; if it found a match, then the individual could be pulled from one world to another. Unfortunately the process by which it had done so had, due to the lack of sufficient shielding to contain the effect combined with lingering residual effects from previous tests, unforeseen deleterious effects.
Also it probably would have been inevitably fatal to the Richard and Vanessa Fisk that had been briefly pulled across worlds.
As a side effect of the earlier test runs, an alternate version of the late Peter Parker - otherwise known as Spider-Man - had also been dragged across worlds; brunette instead of blond, perhaps as much as a decade older, and at least twenty pounds heavier, but still recognizably a Peter Parker. But what precisely had caused the living cells of his body to undergo such drastic and violent decay? Was it a form of radiation imbued into his tissues by the process that dragged him across words? Possible yet unlikely, and didn't - couldn't - explain the fascinating visual 'glitching' that he and the other Spiders had suffered from.
Unfortunately, the samples that Annette had obtained from Parker in the tragically brief time she had him as her… guest… had disintegrated mere days after the loss of the super-collider.
Wait.
Wait.
Annette frowned hard enough to make her brow crease, and considered that it might not have been her machine which had caused the glitching. Two of her mechanical arms stretched across the room to tap at a keyboard with four-fingered manipulators. A moment later several screens descended from the ceiling of her office, and displayed the few images that she had of the other Spiders.
The older Peter Parker. Another that looked like he'd walked straight out of an old pulp noir radio serial from the 40s. The boy in the predominantly black costume. Unless she was mistaken - and she very much doubted that given how skintight that costume was - a lithe teenage girl or young woman as the fourth. Fifth was a second girl, a tiny Asian, who piloted an absolutely fascinating suit of powered armor that Annette would have loved the opportunity to study. The last was a diminutive humanoid porcine creature that inexplicably seemed to interact with reality in a manner reminiscent of cartoon physics.
Six Spiders from six different universes. Very different universes, considering the porcine Spider. Was that the issue? Being inserted into a universe with some undetermined degree of divergence from your own being invariably and inevitably fatal to the traveler? Or was the issue one with her reali-
Annette's train of thought was suddenly interrupted by the shrill chirping of an alarm from her wrist. Scowling, she raised her arm - her actual, flesh and blood arm, and pulled up her sleeve. A moment later her eyes widened behind her googles at the screen of her smartwatch, and she immediately realized that further research would - for once - have to wait for later.
More important things demanded her attention.
She was going to be late for lunch. With Taylor.
That was absolutely unacceptable.
Not for the first time was Annette grateful for coming up with the design for her mechanical arms and the neural interface that she used to control them like extensions of her own body. They made it trivial to zip herself back into her dress, track down her shoes in record time, and get them on her feet without having to hop in place like an idiot - these days Annette honestly had no idea how she'd ever managed and often entertained the notion that every woman should have her own set of highly prehensile pneumatic secondary arms.
'I'd probably make a fortune just from selling to mothers at cost,' Annette mused with a grin.
Then her smartwatch beeped again and with a curse, Annette deflated and retracted the arms underneath her clothing as she pulled on her scarf and coat, tugged her hair down, and slipped on her glasses before hurrying out of her office.
~~{}~~ ~~{}~~ ~~{}~~ ~~{}~~ ~~{}~~
Annette would never admit to a single living soul that it took her a good five minutes before she was able to work up the nerve to approach the little table that Taylor sat at. A part of it was simply to state and take in the young woman's features, as well as to choke down the resulting heartbreak as she inevitably wondered if her Taylor would have grown that tall, or what Taylor's hair would've looked like had it not been cut so short, or if she was eating properly which as absolutely stupid because she wasn't a child and more importantly she wasn't Annette's child. Most of all, she did not want to risk getting even a glimpse of Danny Hebert for fear of making a fool of herself.
He was not her husband.
And if Annette told herself that enough times, she'd eventually begin to believe it.
It was as she finally approached - carefully stepping around a short, mousey-seeming brown-haired woman walking with an adorably tiny little girl that was giggling as she clutched her mother's hand and worked her chubby little legs to keep up with the woman's carefully short stride - that Annette took the time to really look at the young woman that took so much effort to track her down. Taylor was dressed much like she'd been during their first meeting: a knit cap over her cropped-short hair, a scarf around her neck, and a heavy coat that cleverly disguised how her right sleeve was empty from casual observers. Taylor hadn't noticed her approach just yet, which let Annette glimpse her face in an unguarded moment.
For just a moment, Annette slowed and nearly stopped as she saw the haunted expression on Taylor's face as the younger woman stared off into the distance at something only she was able to see.
Taylor's sweaty face was drawn tight and eerily bloodless as pained gasps tore their way from between her lips. Her left hand had dropped the book that she'd been reading and her twitching fingers were curled as if she were holding something, with her index finger visibly extended. A moment later she violently shivered, then raised her hand to rub her face.
Taylor was still breathing hard like she'd just run a foot race when Annette finally reached her table.
"Taylor?" Annette carefully called out as she stood just outside of arms reach, wanting to go right to the young woman's side but not daring to because damnit, Taylor was not her daughter. The one-armed woman shuddered again.
"They're gone," she gasped out, as if she were suffocating.
"... Taylor?" Annette suddenly felt cold.
"They're gone," she repeated as she almost drunkenly lurched to her feet and nearly tripping over the backpack that she'd left on the floor, which immediately drew concerned glances and confused stares from more than just Annette. She took two steps, almost running, then stumbled and fell to her knees and one hand. In that same moment Annette's heart jumped up to her throat and she moved, knocking over a chair in her haste to get to Taylor's side. The moment she touched the younger woman's good shoulder, Taylor violently flinched away from her.
"THEY'RE GONE, THEY'RE GONE, THEY'RE GONE!!!" Taylor suddenly screamed, and just like that, the mall around then went quiet. Then just before Annete reached up, Taylor's head rose.
"Aster's dead," she quietly said to someone who wasn't there, with an eerie lack of emotion in her suddenly hoarse voice. "I'm sorry."
Annette's blood turned to ice in her veins. Then steeled herself, then knelt down to pull Taylor to her feet. Taylor didn't react, instead continuing to stare off into space, though her frantic hyperventilating was mercifully beginning to calm.
"Ma'am?"
Annette froze, then glanced at the tall African-American NYPD officer who was approaching with obvious concern in the eyes behind his glasses.
"Officer Davis, PDNY," he calmly said. "Is everything okay, ladies?" His eyes very obviously flickered over Annette and Taylor then lingered, taking in the younger woman's vacant expression, her trembling and pausing on the empty sleeve where her right arm should have been.
Annette opened her mouth… but for one of the very few moments of her life, she had no idea what to say. She wasn't sure what to do either. She felt helpless.
She hated feeling helpless.
"You should take her somewhere a little less crowded, or maybe just head on home before something triggers her again," the police officer gently said. "Veterans have it bad enough at times. If she's having trouble managing, you should try getting her to talk to Curt Hoyle over at the VA office on the upper west side. He's a good man. Former Navy, pretty sure he was special forces of some kind. He tries his best to make sure every Vet that comes his way gets what they need to make it, especially those that don't come back whole."
Annette blinked as the officer handed her a business card, and tried to reconcile the mental image of a Taylor who might've been on the wrong side of the law with one that might've been a soldier… and didn't care for how easily those two views of the same young woman meshed despite Taylor being too young to have been a soldier. She nodded all the same, then slid an arm around Taylor's shoulders. Someone was nice enough to hand her Taylor's backpack, then she carefully guided the young woman that wasn't her daughter elsewhere.
She tried to ignore the officer's concerned gaze as he watched them leave, as well as the stares of the dark-skinned woman and teenage boy that approached the man even as she led Taylor away.
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Taylor was trembling and eerily quiet by the time Annette got the young woman into the passenger seat of her car, seemingly back in the present but unwilling to look anywhere near Annette's face. Instead she was tense and skittish, and looked as if she wanted to be anywhere but where she was.
There was an unpleasant, gnawing silence after Annette climbed behind the driver's seat, and as she buckled herself in and started the engine that's when Annette instinctively just knew. This moment would be key in defining just what sort of relationship she and Taylor might have. If she let Taylor run now… well… that would be that. Taylor would work to make sure that there was a distance between the two of them. A nice, friendly, safe distance, and Taylor would keep that wall between them once she decided that she was done dwelling on the loss of her real mother. Likewise, Annette would no longer have to deal with being haunted by a scarred and traumatized doppelganger of the daughter that she once had.
All Annette had to do was say nothing.
"I lied to you, when we first met."
'God fucking damnit, Annette Olivia-Rose Octavius you are such a sappy sentimental bitch,' she inwardly swore at herself as Taylor immediately tensed in the passenger seat. Palms suddenly clammy, Annette wet her lips as she tightly gripped the steering wheel. "I still wear the ring, but I'm not married. Widowed, actually. I never had sons, but I wouldn't have minded it if my daughter had had a little brother or two. Instead…"
Annette squeezed her eyes shut and very slowly exhaled. There was the old wound, still surprisingly tender after more than a decade. She could feel Taylor's gaze burning like the heat of the sun.
"Instead," Annette forced herself to continue, "both my daughter and my husband died back in 2005, a few days before her tenth birthday. Car accident. Drunk driver. I don't blame your father not wanting to see me. I get it. I'm not too sure about how well I'd be able to control myself if I saw him either, even though he's not my Danny. It's already difficult because every time I look at you, I can't help but wonder how much my Taylor might've been like y-"
The sound of the car door opening had her blinking, then frantically turning but Taylor was already climbing out of the car.
"Taylor!" Annette yelled but the girl was already slamming the car door behind her. She fought with her seat belt until it released her, then threw open the driver's side door. By then it was already too late, but the older woman still futilely climbed out of her car and frantically looked around.
"Taylor!" Annette yelled again, but the young woman was already gone.
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I think I need a better title for these Worm/Spiderverse snippets. 🤔
__________
Not for the first time (and probably not for the last either) did Dr Annette Olivia-Rose Octavius find herself thinking three very significant words.
Fuck.
Reed.
Richards.
As a general rule, was not a woman prone to vulgarity, which was perhaps ironic given that in recent years she found herself loosely associating with all manner of self-professed villains due to her connections to one Wilson Fisk. She'd even given a number of said individuals semi-legitimate employment as security specialists for Alchemax using her authority as CEO and Director of Research and Development. Many of said individuals could be especially coarse with their vocabularies, but most of them were smart enough to control their tongues when in her presence.
Annette enjoyed a very respectable degree of personal wealth on top of generous funding from Fisk. She had multiple hard-earned doctorates in physics as well as in engineering, an intelligence quota of 254, and was often invited to be a guest lecturer at MIT, the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, and even Nanyang Technological University despite her less-than-stellar grasp of Mandarin. Single-handedly, she had tranformed Alchemax from a failing company to one of the leading laboratories in the world when it came to theoretical physics and dimensional research. She was widely and rightfully regarded as one of the most intelligent women on the planet.
Also in her own humble opinion, despite spending so much time in a lab these days, even at forty-five she still looked pretty damn good in a bikini (and just as good outside of one as well).
Yet Reed Richards - scientist, adventurer and so-called 'super hero' - had eighteen doctorates, earned from attending no less than four prestigious universities across the United States. The fifty-four year old man was so intelligent that no one had yet to determine a method to accurately estimate just how intelligent he was; allegedly, he was able to read newspapers and write fully coherent sentences by the time he was two years old, and it was well-known that he had graduated Harvard at fourteen years old, before he was old enough to drive a car. As a scientist, the sheer amount of resources and funding at the man's disposal theoretically rivaled the economy of the United Goddamn Kingdoms.
Richards wasn't just the US president's scientific advisor. When the man spoke, the entire scientific community sat up like suddenly attentive dogs eager for a treat. Every discovery that he announced and every article that he published made shockwaves, causing their peers to endlessly debate, argue, and hypothesize just attempting to comprehend whatever the man had deigned to share with the world.
Reed Richards was a genius amongst geniuses.
Worse, the too-smart bastard knew it.
Despite Annette's considerable expertise, dozens upon dozens of published papers and articles, and years of research, Richards was considered the premiere authority on interdimensional phenomena, research and technology. When golden light shattered the sky six months ago and refugees from other worlds were suddenly everywhere, it was Richards that came up with the means to seal the breaches after the vast majority of said refugees were either sent back to whatever world they came from (if said worlds still existed) or to whichever world would accept them. Two months ago, it was Richards who was called in to study her work, leading to the remnants of her device quickly being disassembled and taken by the other scientist.
Officially, no one knew who built the device that Wilson Fisk killed the original Spider-Man over, and had nearly destroyed New York City with due to his desperation to find a version of his wife and son that still lived.
Unofficially, Reed Fucking Richards had had the fucking audacity to chastise Annette for 'allowing Fisk to manipulate her into building the device and letting him activating the portal before it had actually been ready to use.'
As if she were just a naive, simpering weakling of a girl, unaware of just what kind of man Fisk was and blinded by the funding and resources he had given her!
That arrogant, patronizing, self-absorbed, patriarchal, elitist, sexist, cradle-robbing, ephebophilic piece of shi-
'Breathe, Annette,' she told herself before she broke something important. Again. 'Breathe.'
Even two months (and many healed bruises and a couple rib fractures and a mild concussion) later, Annette still seethed from the man's unthinking condescension whenever she thought about it. In a large part, it was because Richards had recently just 'decided' that, after the Golden Sky and Fisk's usage of her technology, research into interdimensional technologies should be restricted. He argued that for the safety of all, only authorized individuals and facilities should be allowed to continue such research, and had given a preliminary list of those that he believed should be permitted to continue any existing research along those lines.
Neither Doctor Annette Olivia-Rose Octavius or Alchemax Corporation were on his list.
Almost immediately Alchemax's stock had taken a severe hit from the announcement, and it didn't help that a painfully substantial amount of funding was still coming from Fisk's pockets despite the man's incarceration and upcoming trial. That particular account hadn't been frozen yet, but Annette knew that it was only a matter of time before her research company's situation became dangerously critical. Very soon she'd either have to secure a new source of funding for her research, or risk Alchemax being bought out, plundered for research and materials, then shut down.
Almost as infuriating and in many ways more attention-grabbing was the mystery surrounding Taylor and Danny Hebert.
Namely, that they (and the few Golden Sky refugees still on her Earth) weren't suffering the effects of the peculiar Universal Displacement Syndrome that had very nearly killed the other Spider-Man and the other displaced Spider-heroes that had banded together to bring down Fisk. The displaced Spiders had all suffered symptoms within days of being displaced across universes, but for those like Taylor and Danny, it had been approximately six months and neither of the two showed symptoms.
It was fascinating… and concerning.
Within her office, Annette dwelled on the dilemma, pacing back and forth as much on her organic legs as she did the mechanical arms affixed to her upper back. To one side her was all the data she had at her disposal: operational data from the Super Collider that she'd built for Fisk, the meager data that she'd collected in the unfortunately brief time she'd had to study the displaced (and embarrassingly pudgy) Peter Parker, and what she'd observed from the other Spiders before they had returned to their native Earths. On the other side was all the data that she'd been able to obtain from the Golden Sky refugees… what little there was thanks to Richards. Most of it had been obtained from discreetly observing Taylor, and from 'creatively acquiring' copies of the young woman's medical records from the hospital that she'd ended up in when she'd arrived.
What little that Annette had been able to acquire from that route had very nearly drawn SHIELD's attention to her; a complication that she could ill afford these days. It also did not help that fucking Richards had the most data on the phenomenon that had brought Taylor to Annette, and of course the arrogant prick considered said data to be too dangerous to share, even to those who specialized in such research. Most galling of all was that he had the audacity to consider Annette to be lacking in the necessary intelligence and wisdom to work with data concerning a field that she was one of the widely-acknowledged leaders in.
And to think, people continued to wonder why Victoire von Doom hated the man so passionately that it had become a thing of urban legend.
Scowling, Annette forcibly dismissed the man from her thoughts to focus on the problem at hand, and once again asked herself why were
Also it probably would have been inevitably fatal to the Richard and Vanessa Fisk that had been briefly pulled across worlds.
As a side effect of the earlier test runs, an alternate version of the late Peter Parker - otherwise known as Spider-Man - had also been dragged across worlds; brunette instead of blond, perhaps as much as a decade older, and at least twenty pounds heavier, but still recognizably a Peter Parker. But what precisely had caused the living cells of his body to undergo such drastic and violent decay? Was it a form of radiation imbued into his tissues by the process that dragged him across words? Possible yet unlikely, and didn't - couldn't - explain the fascinating visual 'glitching' that he and the other Spiders had suffered from.
Unfortunately, the samples that Annette had obtained from Parker in the tragically brief time she had him as her… guest… had disintegrated mere days after the loss of the super-collider.
Wait.
Wait.
Annette frowned hard enough to make her brow crease, and considered that it might not have been her machine which had caused the glitching. Two of her mechanical arms stretched across the room to tap at a keyboard with four-fingered manipulators. A moment later several screens descended from the ceiling of her office, and displayed the few images that she had of the other Spiders.
The older Peter Parker. Another that looked like he'd walked straight out of an old pulp noir radio serial from the 40s. The boy in the predominantly black costume. Unless she was mistaken - and she very much doubted that given how skintight that costume was - a lithe teenage girl or young woman as the fourth. Fifth was a second girl, a tiny Asian, who piloted an absolutely fascinating suit of powered armor that Annette would have loved the opportunity to study. The last was a diminutive humanoid porcine creature that inexplicably seemed to interact with reality in a manner reminiscent of cartoon physics.
Six Spiders from six different universes. Very different universes, considering the porcine Spider. Was that the issue? Being inserted into a universe with some undetermined degree of divergence from your own being invariably and inevitably fatal to the traveler? Or was the issue one with her reali-
Annette's train of thought was suddenly interrupted by the shrill chirping of an alarm from her wrist. Scowling, she raised her arm - her actual, flesh and blood arm, and pulled up her sleeve. A moment later her eyes widened behind her googles at the screen of her smartwatch, and she immediately realized that further research would - for once - have to wait for later.
More important things demanded her attention.
She was going to be late for lunch. With Taylor.
That was absolutely unacceptable.
Not for the first time was Annette grateful for coming up with the design for her mechanical arms and the neural interface that she used to control them like extensions of her own body. They made it trivial to zip herself back into her dress, track down her shoes in record time, and get them on her feet without having to hop in place like an idiot - these days Annette honestly had no idea how she'd ever managed and often entertained the notion that every woman should have her own set of highly prehensile pneumatic secondary arms.
'I'd probably make a fortune just from selling to mothers at cost,' Annette mused with a grin.
Then her smartwatch beeped again and with a curse, Annette deflated and retracted the arms underneath her clothing as she pulled on her scarf and coat, tugged her hair down, and slipped on her glasses before hurrying out of her office.
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Annette would never admit to a single living soul that it took her a good five minutes before she was able to work up the nerve to approach the little table that Taylor sat at. A part of it was simply to state and take in the young woman's features, as well as to choke down the resulting heartbreak as she inevitably wondered if her Taylor would have grown that tall, or what Taylor's hair would've looked like had it not been cut so short, or if she was eating properly which as absolutely stupid because she wasn't a child and more importantly she wasn't Annette's child. Most of all, she did not want to risk getting even a glimpse of Danny Hebert for fear of making a fool of herself.
He was not her husband.
And if Annette told herself that enough times, she'd eventually begin to believe it.
It was as she finally approached - carefully stepping around a short, mousey-seeming brown-haired woman walking with an adorably tiny little girl that was giggling as she clutched her mother's hand and worked her chubby little legs to keep up with the woman's carefully short stride - that Annette took the time to really look at the young woman that took so much effort to track her down. Taylor was dressed much like she'd been during their first meeting: a knit cap over her cropped-short hair, a scarf around her neck, and a heavy coat that cleverly disguised how her right sleeve was empty from casual observers. Taylor hadn't noticed her approach just yet, which let Annette glimpse her face in an unguarded moment.
For just a moment, Annette slowed and nearly stopped as she saw the haunted expression on Taylor's face as the younger woman stared off into the distance at something only she was able to see.
Taylor's sweaty face was drawn tight and eerily bloodless as pained gasps tore their way from between her lips. Her left hand had dropped the book that she'd been reading and her twitching fingers were curled as if she were holding something, with her index finger visibly extended. A moment later she violently shivered, then raised her hand to rub her face.
Taylor was still breathing hard like she'd just run a foot race when Annette finally reached her table.
"Taylor?" Annette carefully called out as she stood just outside of arms reach, wanting to go right to the young woman's side but not daring to because damnit, Taylor was not her daughter. The one-armed woman shuddered again.
"They're gone," she gasped out, as if she were suffocating.
"... Taylor?" Annette suddenly felt cold.
"They're gone," she repeated as she almost drunkenly lurched to her feet and nearly tripping over the backpack that she'd left on the floor, which immediately drew concerned glances and confused stares from more than just Annette. She took two steps, almost running, then stumbled and fell to her knees and one hand. In that same moment Annette's heart jumped up to her throat and she moved, knocking over a chair in her haste to get to Taylor's side. The moment she touched the younger woman's good shoulder, Taylor violently flinched away from her.
"THEY'RE GONE, THEY'RE GONE, THEY'RE GONE!!!" Taylor suddenly screamed, and just like that, the mall around then went quiet. Then just before Annete reached up, Taylor's head rose.
"Aster's dead," she quietly said to someone who wasn't there, with an eerie lack of emotion in her suddenly hoarse voice. "I'm sorry."
Annette's blood turned to ice in her veins. Then steeled herself, then knelt down to pull Taylor to her feet. Taylor didn't react, instead continuing to stare off into space, though her frantic hyperventilating was mercifully beginning to calm.
"Ma'am?"
Annette froze, then glanced at the tall African-American NYPD officer who was approaching with obvious concern in the eyes behind his glasses.
"Officer Davis, PDNY," he calmly said. "Is everything okay, ladies?" His eyes very obviously flickered over Annette and Taylor then lingered, taking in the younger woman's vacant expression, her trembling and pausing on the empty sleeve where her right arm should have been.
Annette opened her mouth… but for one of the very few moments of her life, she had no idea what to say. She wasn't sure what to do either. She felt helpless.
She hated feeling helpless.
"You should take her somewhere a little less crowded, or maybe just head on home before something triggers her again," the police officer gently said. "Veterans have it bad enough at times. If she's having trouble managing, you should try getting her to talk to Curt Hoyle over at the VA office on the upper west side. He's a good man. Former Navy, pretty sure he was special forces of some kind. He tries his best to make sure every Vet that comes his way gets what they need to make it, especially those that don't come back whole."
Annette blinked as the officer handed her a business card, and tried to reconcile the mental image of a Taylor who might've been on the wrong side of the law with one that might've been a soldier… and didn't care for how easily those two views of the same young woman meshed despite Taylor being too young to have been a soldier. She nodded all the same, then slid an arm around Taylor's shoulders. Someone was nice enough to hand her Taylor's backpack, then she carefully guided the young woman that wasn't her daughter elsewhere.
She tried to ignore the officer's concerned gaze as he watched them leave, as well as the stares of the dark-skinned woman and teenage boy that approached the man even as she led Taylor away.
~~{}~~ ~~{}~~ ~~{}~~ ~~{}~~ ~~{}~~
Taylor was trembling and eerily quiet by the time Annette got the young woman into the passenger seat of her car, seemingly back in the present but unwilling to look anywhere near Annette's face. Instead she was tense and skittish, and looked as if she wanted to be anywhere but where she was.
There was an unpleasant, gnawing silence after Annette climbed behind the driver's seat, and as she buckled herself in and started the engine that's when Annette instinctively just knew. This moment would be key in defining just what sort of relationship she and Taylor might have. If she let Taylor run now… well… that would be that. Taylor would work to make sure that there was a distance between the two of them. A nice, friendly, safe distance, and Taylor would keep that wall between them once she decided that she was done dwelling on the loss of her real mother. Likewise, Annette would no longer have to deal with being haunted by a scarred and traumatized doppelganger of the daughter that she once had.
All Annette had to do was say nothing.
"I lied to you, when we first met."
'God fucking damnit, Annette Olivia-Rose Octavius you are such a sappy sentimental bitch,' she inwardly swore at herself as Taylor immediately tensed in the passenger seat. Palms suddenly clammy, Annette wet her lips as she tightly gripped the steering wheel. "I still wear the ring, but I'm not married. Widowed, actually. I never had sons, but I wouldn't have minded it if my daughter had had a little brother or two. Instead…"
Annette squeezed her eyes shut and very slowly exhaled. There was the old wound, still surprisingly tender after more than a decade. She could feel Taylor's gaze burning like the heat of the sun.
"Instead," Annette forced herself to continue, "both my daughter and my husband died back in 2005, a few days before her tenth birthday. Car accident. Drunk driver. I don't blame your father not wanting to see me. I get it. I'm not too sure about how well I'd be able to control myself if I saw him either, even though he's not my Danny. It's already difficult because every time I look at you, I can't help but wonder how much my Taylor might've been like y-"
The sound of the car door opening had her blinking, then frantically turning but Taylor was already climbing out of the car.
"Taylor!" Annette yelled but the girl was already slamming the car door behind her. She fought with her seat belt until it released her, then threw open the driver's side door. By then it was already too late, but the older woman still futilely climbed out of her car and frantically looked around.
"Taylor!" Annette yelled again, but the young woman was already gone.
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I think I need a better title for these Worm/Spiderverse snippets. 🤔
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Worms, Spiders and Octopi 3
Geas
Meat Thing
This is getting out of hand, now there's three of them!
Also I think I may need a better goddamn name for this snippets than Worms, Spiders and Octopi.
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Numbness of a physical variety was something that Annette had by necessity become accustomed to. Emotional numbness however was something that never failed to cause her thoughts to hitch and stutter, like an old and poorly-maintained car with a failing engine. Taylor running away… Annette probably should have been hurt, or angry at herself (never at Taylor), or miserably sad.
Anything but the cold numbness that crawled around underneath her skin.
Mechanically, she slid back into the steering wheel of her car. It took her four times to turn the ignition because her hand kept shaking which was stupid because she was numb and didn't feel anything yet clearly her stupid hand disagreed. She finally paused and forced herself to take a deep, slow breath. Then a second and third, until the trembling of her fingers had finally eased.
Except now Annette's eyes burned. It made driving so annoying that she almost gave into the impulse to inflate her tentacles and let them handle steering and watching the road. That would have been stupid, because she took considerable care in distancing 'Doctor Annette Olivia-Rose Octavius' from the urban legend that was 'Doc Ock' the few times circumstances had forced her hand. People seeing the former with the latter's extremely distinctive four mechanical tentacles, consisting of ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene and carbon fiber fabric over a unique hydraulic-pneumatic tube system and terminating in titanium-niobium steel alloy claws, would have been counterproductive to put it delicately, and would have put both her career and her company at risk.
Taylor rejected her.
The thought made her hands tighten on the steering wheel until the blood drained from her knuckles.
'Deep breaths,' Annette, she told herself. 'Breathe. This is probably for the best that she took the decision out of your hands. This way, you can focus on salvaging your reputation before Richards can ruin it further with his patriarchal bullshit, sever your connections to Fisk, and save your company from going under. Taylor's a big girl. She'll be fine. And she's not your daughter.' Annette took another calming breath.
She then bit her lower lip hard enough to draw blood.
The pain did precious little to clear her head.
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Annette had nearly reached Alchemax and in fact had just turned onto the forest road leading to her research facility before it occurred to her that maybe she should have driven herself home instead. For a moment she considered turning around, but only for a moment. It wasn't as if she had anyone to go home to at the moment, and it wouldn't be the first time that she spent the night in either her office or lab. The latter in particular felt a safer choice than an empty apartment on the edge of New York City.
Of course, it was at that moment that Annette remembered that tomorrow was garbage pick-up and knowing her elderly neighbor, he was going to take her garbage bins to the curb along with his own in the wee hours of the early morning if she wasn't there to stop him. It didn't matter that he was well into his 90s, or that she had told him countless times that he didn't have to make such an effort because she wasn't home enough to build up much garbage anyways. He'd just smile and chuckle and agree with a wink from behind those enormous old Cartier Vendome sunglasses that he always wore. Then he'd take out her bins anyways.
It wasn't quite sunset yet, though the sun was clearly beginning to dip below the horizon when she parked her car. At a glance it appeared that most of her employees had already headed out for the day. Fortunately, that meant that she likely wouldn't have to address the concerns of her employees just yet about how Alchemax was going to survive the next few months.
Unfortunately, that meant that she also would have to deal with one of the 'security specialists' that she'd hired at Fisk's insistence, because one of them was very obviously waiting for her and wasn't bothering to hide it.
"Evening, Doc," the towering albino mockingly hissed out in a sibilant whisper around the toothpick clenched between his teeth. The giant of a man leisurely strolled forward with all of the casual arrogance of a large predator that wasn't particularly hungry and his black suit, despite its flattering and expensive cut - failed to adequately disguise a physique that was entirely capable of very literally breaking most men and women in half.
Alonzo Lincoln, more commonly known as Tombstone in certain circles, had built up his reputation as a mobster doing just that to a number of people.
Annette let her expression relax into carefully bland calm as she met the man's gaze.
"Mister Lincoln," she replied in a neutral and deliberately bored tone in greeting as she calmly strode for the front doors of Alchemax Labs, though in reality she gave the mobster her undivided attention. Lincoln was far too dangerous to be dismissive of. A dim thug he may be, but he was a superpowered and more importantly dangerously cunning creature all the same. That he managed to avoid capture and arrest when Fisk and Gargan ended up in police custody only emphasized that. "I expected you to be fully preoccupied in whatever task our currently-incarcerated benefactor requires of you, rather than reporting in for a late shift."
The albino African-American's lips peeled away from his teeth in a humorless grin that would have done a crocodile proud. Annette felt the hair in the back of her neck prickle as the large man smoothly fell into step beside her, and was uncomfortably reminded of the fact that Fisk's current right hand man was easily four times her mass in muscle alone. Annette was not a short woman either, yet he effortlessly loomed over her by at least a head without even trying.
"Well Doc, you know how it goes," he said with a leisurely roll of his broad shoulders. "Someone's gotta make evidence go missin'. Encourage witnesses to clam up, or change their minds about what they thought they saw… or just plain ol' disappear. Maybe even a prosecutor or a judge or a witness for a case finds some pictures in the mail of their daughter, and the mall that the girl likes to go to. The tea she likes to drink, the book she's currently reading. Who she eats lunch with. Her cute lil' boyish haircut and that silly little knit cap. The goofy bald dad with the weak chin and the cheap rental car. Things like that."
Annette felt her stomach turn to ice, and though she tried to control her reactions, her eyes widened all the same. Lincoln's whispery chuckle made it all too obvious that he noticed how what he said had struck a nerve.
Annette came to a sudden stop mere meters away from the glass doors of Alchemax's main entrance, and pivoted to stare up at the smirking mobster looming over her with that crocodilian grin still on his lips. Annette felt a twitch begin just above her right eye.
"Now, now, Doc," the mobster said with playfully false reassurance. "The Boss is a real understandin' guy about a lot of things, ya know? It's a real crazy world we live in, these days, and all sorts of crazy and sometimes unfortunate things happen. Dangerous things, Doc. Especially to such a twig of a girl who's clearly had some bad stuff happen already. Ya know, 'cause of that empty sleeve? Had to have been a bad injury, that. Personally, I'm kinda impressed she survived it."
Lincoln's smile grew just a little wider as he stared mercilessly down into Annette's eyes, even as her heart thudded painfully against her ribs.
"The Boss also understands that sometimes, even a really smart person is sometimes tempted, just a lil' bit, to make certain choices to make certain things a little easier for themselves. But see, the Boss also understands that that's just temptation messin' with such a smart person. A smart person would know not to run their mouths about certain things if their situation starts lookin' a little uncertain, or if certain people start asking hard questions about certain pieces of equi-"
Lincoln suddenly stopped talking, and instead his eyes began to bulge out as his toothpick abruptly fell from his lips.
At first, Annette couldn't understand why the mobster had suddenly stopped making thinly veiled and genuinely terrifying threats abouther daughter's Taylor's safety and well-being, on top of revealing that Fisk had definitely been having her watched without her realizing it. Then she wondered why she was suddenly able to look Lincoln in the eyes without having to strain her neck.
"Oh," she found herself saying when she finally noticed the semi-transparent tentacle of polyethylene and carbon fiber fabric and pneumatic tubing coiled dangerously tight around the giant man's thick tree trunk of a neck. She hadn't even felt her tentacles inflate and expand, yet when she glanced down she realized that two of them were supporting her weight until she was the one looking over him. A third tentacle was doing it's very best to crush the mobster's trachea and clamp down on the carotid arteries in his neck, and had also coiled around his legs and had crushed his arms against his chest even as he frantically tried his hardest to pull her tentacle from his neck before he lost consciousness.
"Oh," Annette quietly repeated. Then she closed her eyes and took a deep, calming breath.
Then she very carefully and deliberately put her hair up.
"Mister Lincoln. Alonzo. Tombstone," Doctor Octopus said in a quietly dangerous tone as she glared hard into the big man's eyes. He hoarsely squeaked in response and his eyes began to flutter and roll back in their sockets. An instant later he sucked in a wheezing breath as the tentacle coiled around his neck relaxed a fraction of a centimeter. He coughed and his lips pulled back in a snarl as he tried to thrash his way free only to freeze when four metal claws firmly gripped his head and face, mere centimeters away from gouging his eyes out.
"Tombstone," Doctor Octopus repeated with an eerie lack of emotion to her voice. Lincoln tried to say something, only to choke when she briefly tightened the tentacle around his neck again. "From your observed feats of strength - throwing an SUV half a block for example - I estimate that you can lift approximately six tons without strain. You have impressive physical durability as well, able to endure fantastically extreme heat as well as significant cold. Most impressive is your skin, which has the tensile strength of diamond, allegedly, while still possessing human elasticity. So very, very elastic. But what about the tissues underneath your fascinating epidermis? The fascia that connects your impressive skin to the muscle underneath?"
As pale as Tombstone was, somehow he grew even paler while looking into the enraged scientist's eyes as she said, "I theorize that with sufficient external force, force that my tentacles should be easily capable of applying by the way, I could peel that incredible skin from your body. Like a banana. For best effect, I'd have to start at your mouth. That way, I'd maximize my chances of peeling your skin off without tearing it. I'm sure that I can find impressive uses for six feet and seven inches of leather with the tensile strength of diamond.
"H-hey, look Doc, th-this is just busine-"
"Shhhh," she pressed a slender finger to his lips. "As physically durable as you are, Mister Lincoln, there's a good possibility that even you might die from such an experience, but don't worry." Her smile grew wider, and she let her finger slide almost sensually down from the big man's thin lips, and began unbuttoning his shirt." I'll do my best to draw it out, just for you. None of my doctorates are in medicine - not yet - but I am a very rapid learner with an extraordinarily high intelligence quota. Vivisecting a human that just so happens to be superpowered will no doubt be a very educational experience."
"It's the B-Boss, not me!" Lincoln frantically rasped out. "He's been havin' you watched ever since before the Spider-Brat trussed him up for the cops!"
Doctor Octopus's fingers froze at the third button of his dress shirt. As the dark humor faded from her face and her hard and angry green eyes rose to meet his pale red paze, one of her tentacles firmly grabbed his jaw.
"I'm waiting, Mister Lincoln," she coldly said as she arched an eyebrow.
"The Boss found out about her when she came outta wherever hidin' place you had her and started meeting!" Lincoln swiftly replied. "He knows that she's your kid, and that that means you must've gotten your fancy machine workin' proper at least once an' used it to bring her here!"
Annette blinked twice, momentarily but absolutely dumbfounded for just the barest of moments, because that was absolutely not how Taylor and Danny had made it to her Earth. She almost corrected the superpowered mobster, but found herself holding her tongue before the first word left her lips.
As far as most of the world knew, all the refugees from the "Golden Sky Disaster" had deported either back to their home worlds - if said alternate Earths were still habitable or even still existed - or to whatever other Earth they could be sent to thanks to Richards. Taylor was one of the very rare few that managed to avoid that fate, entirely because the hospital that she'd ended up in had - for once - refused to discharge a critically injured but uninsured patient before she was medically fit to leave.
By the time Taylor had been ready for discharge, it had no longer been possible for her to be sent to another Earth. Danny managed to stay presumably because he was Taylor's only family.
The thought that Fisk had come to believe that Annette had been either deliberately holding back on him or worse had outright deceived him by using his dangerous plan to find a version of her own family was concerning. She had - with some reluctance - accepted funding from the crime boss because he was genuinely brilliant in his own way. Originally, taking his money was simple. He needed it laundered and Alchemax was a useful link in a chain that obscured just where said money came from and went to, with a respectable amount going to properly fund Alchemax's various research projects.
Then Fisk had learned of Annette's super-collider project.
Fisk was a coldly logical and pragmatic man… save where his dead wife and son were concerned. The wife and son that he had personally murdered the original Spider Man to regain. That, from a certain point of view, he had lost twice. He had even murdered one of his own 'security contractors' over that goal just for slightly being in the way.
Tombstone being sent to warn Annette about not talking to the authorities was as much a polite warning as it was a very serious threat, one that made it abundantly clear that Fisk could very easily become a threat to her. Or worse, to…
"Mister Lincoln," Annette began with a calm that she didn't truly feel as she set the massive man very carefully back down onto his dress shoes, "I believe that it is safe to say that your services here at Alchemax will no longer be required. A shame, as you've a gift for ensuring that Alchemax security operated with a very respectable degree of efficiency. But in recognition of your excellent service, I'll see to it that you're issued two months of severance pay, and will pen a letter of recommendation to any future employers interested in your unique services."
Annette looked up at Tombstone with a wintery smile as she slid her hands across his chest, making the giant man visibly shiver. But all she did was pluck the ID badge from his breast pocket. The moment her tentacles uncoiled from around him, Lincoln hastily backpedaled and rubbed at his throat, all the while watching her with far more wary caution in his eyes than he used to have.
"Uh… right," he warily replied, clearly half expecting some manner of last-minute violence from her the moment he dropped his guard. It made Annette think that the man truly had been a mobster for far too long… On the other hand, she'd been seriously considering killing him in an especially horrific manner mere moments ago, so perhaps he wasn't wrong. "... Thanks, Doc."
"Don't mention it. And Mister Lincoln?"
"Yeah, Doc?"
"Do keep in mind that if our benefactor does have any designs on a certain young woman…" Doctor Octopus smiled a very unpleasant smile, "a human brain can survive for approximately four minutes without fresh oxygenated blood before permanent brain damage begins. With your impressively enhanced stamina, I fully expect that to extend to at least an hour, if you're foolish enough to irritate me. So keep my daughter's name out of your fucking mouth. I hope that I'm being sufficiently clear."
"C-crystal, Doc."
It was only after the massive man turned to flee, that Annette inwardly cursed at acknowledging Taylor as her daughter. The only relief was that the few employees still on site didn't seem to notice her… 'unorthodox termination' of Alonzo Lincoln. She also would have to make sure to check the security cameras and remove any imagery of the confrontation.
Sighing and rubbing her forehead, Annette let her hair back down then belatedly fully collapsed and retracted her tentacles before making her way inside the building. Never mind trying to distract herself from her disaster of a meeting with Taylor; dealing with Lincoln and learning that Fisk had her, Taylor and Danny in his sights was problematic, and if she were being honest with herself, somewhat distressing. She was going to have to go over Alchemax's security very thoroughly and try to locate any surprises that either Tombstone or the Kingpin may have already put into place; that included possibly removing any security personnel that might have also been hired after Lincoln went onto Alchemax's payroll at Fisk's 'suggestion.'
This was already calling for a glass of the Moscato that Annette kept in her private office slash lab for special occasions. Fortunately the day could not possibly get any worse, she concluded as she strode into her office.
Then she froze and blinked because somehow, someone was in her locked and secured office waiting for her. Two someones actually.
"Ah, there you are, Doctor Octavius," one of her research assistants nervously apologized, shoulders hunched and not-quite-hiding behind a tablet PC as if it were a shield. "I'm really really really sorry but he insisted but he said he wasn't here to arrest anyone even though he somehow bypassed the entire building's security without setting off the alarms and just came right up to me while I was on my break and I wasn't sure what I should do but I didn't think you, I m-mean we, we're doing anything wrong-" It only took a glance to recognize her as Adrianne Phillips, one of the few biologists and biochemists in Alchemax's employ. Intelligent, hard working, a bit mousey, and if Annette were honest with herself, more than a little cute at times but Annette very firmly believed that an employer should not have relations with employees.
No matter how delightfully shapely they were.
"It's quite alright, Miss Phillips," Annette said reassuringly without taking her eyes off of the man. That only prompted Phillips to immediately dart away from him and all but hide behind Annette. "I'm sure our uninvited guest has a reason for intruding."
The remarkably plain-looking man gave a congenial and a smile that could only be called 'politely apologetic,' and his bland expression and receding hairline gave him an air of easy forgettability, especially given the well-tailored suit that all but screamed 'government paper pusher.'
"My apologies, Doctor Octavius," he said as he stepped closer and offered a handshake. "I'd have introduced myself sooner, but you appeared to be rather preoccupied with relieving Mister Alonzo Lincoln of his employment with your company."
Annette froze just as she began to reach for the man's hand.
"I'm Phil Coulson, with the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division. If you have a moment, I really do need to talk with you about a few things."
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This distracted me from the next update for Callsign: Owl. But now I'm free, free, free! Free to pay attention to my other projects! Of which I have too damn many now. If my muse comes at me with another new idea, it's getting tazed and thrown into the trunk of my car.
Also I think I may need a better goddamn name for this snippets than Worms, Spiders and Octopi.
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Numbness of a physical variety was something that Annette had by necessity become accustomed to. Emotional numbness however was something that never failed to cause her thoughts to hitch and stutter, like an old and poorly-maintained car with a failing engine. Taylor running away… Annette probably should have been hurt, or angry at herself (never at Taylor), or miserably sad.
Anything but the cold numbness that crawled around underneath her skin.
Mechanically, she slid back into the steering wheel of her car. It took her four times to turn the ignition because her hand kept shaking which was stupid because she was numb and didn't feel anything yet clearly her stupid hand disagreed. She finally paused and forced herself to take a deep, slow breath. Then a second and third, until the trembling of her fingers had finally eased.
Except now Annette's eyes burned. It made driving so annoying that she almost gave into the impulse to inflate her tentacles and let them handle steering and watching the road. That would have been stupid, because she took considerable care in distancing 'Doctor Annette Olivia-Rose Octavius' from the urban legend that was 'Doc Ock' the few times circumstances had forced her hand. People seeing the former with the latter's extremely distinctive four mechanical tentacles, consisting of ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene and carbon fiber fabric over a unique hydraulic-pneumatic tube system and terminating in titanium-niobium steel alloy claws, would have been counterproductive to put it delicately, and would have put both her career and her company at risk.
Taylor rejected her.
The thought made her hands tighten on the steering wheel until the blood drained from her knuckles.
'Deep breaths,' Annette, she told herself. 'Breathe. This is probably for the best that she took the decision out of your hands. This way, you can focus on salvaging your reputation before Richards can ruin it further with his patriarchal bullshit, sever your connections to Fisk, and save your company from going under. Taylor's a big girl. She'll be fine. And she's not your daughter.' Annette took another calming breath.
She then bit her lower lip hard enough to draw blood.
The pain did precious little to clear her head.
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Annette had nearly reached Alchemax and in fact had just turned onto the forest road leading to her research facility before it occurred to her that maybe she should have driven herself home instead. For a moment she considered turning around, but only for a moment. It wasn't as if she had anyone to go home to at the moment, and it wouldn't be the first time that she spent the night in either her office or lab. The latter in particular felt a safer choice than an empty apartment on the edge of New York City.
Of course, it was at that moment that Annette remembered that tomorrow was garbage pick-up and knowing her elderly neighbor, he was going to take her garbage bins to the curb along with his own in the wee hours of the early morning if she wasn't there to stop him. It didn't matter that he was well into his 90s, or that she had told him countless times that he didn't have to make such an effort because she wasn't home enough to build up much garbage anyways. He'd just smile and chuckle and agree with a wink from behind those enormous old Cartier Vendome sunglasses that he always wore. Then he'd take out her bins anyways.
It wasn't quite sunset yet, though the sun was clearly beginning to dip below the horizon when she parked her car. At a glance it appeared that most of her employees had already headed out for the day. Fortunately, that meant that she likely wouldn't have to address the concerns of her employees just yet about how Alchemax was going to survive the next few months.
Unfortunately, that meant that she also would have to deal with one of the 'security specialists' that she'd hired at Fisk's insistence, because one of them was very obviously waiting for her and wasn't bothering to hide it.
"Evening, Doc," the towering albino mockingly hissed out in a sibilant whisper around the toothpick clenched between his teeth. The giant of a man leisurely strolled forward with all of the casual arrogance of a large predator that wasn't particularly hungry and his black suit, despite its flattering and expensive cut - failed to adequately disguise a physique that was entirely capable of very literally breaking most men and women in half.
Alonzo Lincoln, more commonly known as Tombstone in certain circles, had built up his reputation as a mobster doing just that to a number of people.
Annette let her expression relax into carefully bland calm as she met the man's gaze.
"Mister Lincoln," she replied in a neutral and deliberately bored tone in greeting as she calmly strode for the front doors of Alchemax Labs, though in reality she gave the mobster her undivided attention. Lincoln was far too dangerous to be dismissive of. A dim thug he may be, but he was a superpowered and more importantly dangerously cunning creature all the same. That he managed to avoid capture and arrest when Fisk and Gargan ended up in police custody only emphasized that. "I expected you to be fully preoccupied in whatever task our currently-incarcerated benefactor requires of you, rather than reporting in for a late shift."
The albino African-American's lips peeled away from his teeth in a humorless grin that would have done a crocodile proud. Annette felt the hair in the back of her neck prickle as the large man smoothly fell into step beside her, and was uncomfortably reminded of the fact that Fisk's current right hand man was easily four times her mass in muscle alone. Annette was not a short woman either, yet he effortlessly loomed over her by at least a head without even trying.
"Well Doc, you know how it goes," he said with a leisurely roll of his broad shoulders. "Someone's gotta make evidence go missin'. Encourage witnesses to clam up, or change their minds about what they thought they saw… or just plain ol' disappear. Maybe even a prosecutor or a judge or a witness for a case finds some pictures in the mail of their daughter, and the mall that the girl likes to go to. The tea she likes to drink, the book she's currently reading. Who she eats lunch with. Her cute lil' boyish haircut and that silly little knit cap. The goofy bald dad with the weak chin and the cheap rental car. Things like that."
Annette felt her stomach turn to ice, and though she tried to control her reactions, her eyes widened all the same. Lincoln's whispery chuckle made it all too obvious that he noticed how what he said had struck a nerve.
Annette came to a sudden stop mere meters away from the glass doors of Alchemax's main entrance, and pivoted to stare up at the smirking mobster looming over her with that crocodilian grin still on his lips. Annette felt a twitch begin just above her right eye.
"Now, now, Doc," the mobster said with playfully false reassurance. "The Boss is a real understandin' guy about a lot of things, ya know? It's a real crazy world we live in, these days, and all sorts of crazy and sometimes unfortunate things happen. Dangerous things, Doc. Especially to such a twig of a girl who's clearly had some bad stuff happen already. Ya know, 'cause of that empty sleeve? Had to have been a bad injury, that. Personally, I'm kinda impressed she survived it."
Lincoln's smile grew just a little wider as he stared mercilessly down into Annette's eyes, even as her heart thudded painfully against her ribs.
"The Boss also understands that sometimes, even a really smart person is sometimes tempted, just a lil' bit, to make certain choices to make certain things a little easier for themselves. But see, the Boss also understands that that's just temptation messin' with such a smart person. A smart person would know not to run their mouths about certain things if their situation starts lookin' a little uncertain, or if certain people start asking hard questions about certain pieces of equi-"
Lincoln suddenly stopped talking, and instead his eyes began to bulge out as his toothpick abruptly fell from his lips.
At first, Annette couldn't understand why the mobster had suddenly stopped making thinly veiled and genuinely terrifying threats about
"Oh," she found herself saying when she finally noticed the semi-transparent tentacle of polyethylene and carbon fiber fabric and pneumatic tubing coiled dangerously tight around the giant man's thick tree trunk of a neck. She hadn't even felt her tentacles inflate and expand, yet when she glanced down she realized that two of them were supporting her weight until she was the one looking over him. A third tentacle was doing it's very best to crush the mobster's trachea and clamp down on the carotid arteries in his neck, and had also coiled around his legs and had crushed his arms against his chest even as he frantically tried his hardest to pull her tentacle from his neck before he lost consciousness.
"Oh," Annette quietly repeated. Then she closed her eyes and took a deep, calming breath.
Then she very carefully and deliberately put her hair up.
"Mister Lincoln. Alonzo. Tombstone," Doctor Octopus said in a quietly dangerous tone as she glared hard into the big man's eyes. He hoarsely squeaked in response and his eyes began to flutter and roll back in their sockets. An instant later he sucked in a wheezing breath as the tentacle coiled around his neck relaxed a fraction of a centimeter. He coughed and his lips pulled back in a snarl as he tried to thrash his way free only to freeze when four metal claws firmly gripped his head and face, mere centimeters away from gouging his eyes out.
"Tombstone," Doctor Octopus repeated with an eerie lack of emotion to her voice. Lincoln tried to say something, only to choke when she briefly tightened the tentacle around his neck again. "From your observed feats of strength - throwing an SUV half a block for example - I estimate that you can lift approximately six tons without strain. You have impressive physical durability as well, able to endure fantastically extreme heat as well as significant cold. Most impressive is your skin, which has the tensile strength of diamond, allegedly, while still possessing human elasticity. So very, very elastic. But what about the tissues underneath your fascinating epidermis? The fascia that connects your impressive skin to the muscle underneath?"
As pale as Tombstone was, somehow he grew even paler while looking into the enraged scientist's eyes as she said, "I theorize that with sufficient external force, force that my tentacles should be easily capable of applying by the way, I could peel that incredible skin from your body. Like a banana. For best effect, I'd have to start at your mouth. That way, I'd maximize my chances of peeling your skin off without tearing it. I'm sure that I can find impressive uses for six feet and seven inches of leather with the tensile strength of diamond.
"H-hey, look Doc, th-this is just busine-"
"Shhhh," she pressed a slender finger to his lips. "As physically durable as you are, Mister Lincoln, there's a good possibility that even you might die from such an experience, but don't worry." Her smile grew wider, and she let her finger slide almost sensually down from the big man's thin lips, and began unbuttoning his shirt." I'll do my best to draw it out, just for you. None of my doctorates are in medicine - not yet - but I am a very rapid learner with an extraordinarily high intelligence quota. Vivisecting a human that just so happens to be superpowered will no doubt be a very educational experience."
"It's the B-Boss, not me!" Lincoln frantically rasped out. "He's been havin' you watched ever since before the Spider-Brat trussed him up for the cops!"
Doctor Octopus's fingers froze at the third button of his dress shirt. As the dark humor faded from her face and her hard and angry green eyes rose to meet his pale red paze, one of her tentacles firmly grabbed his jaw.
"I'm waiting, Mister Lincoln," she coldly said as she arched an eyebrow.
"The Boss found out about her when she came outta wherever hidin' place you had her and started meeting!" Lincoln swiftly replied. "He knows that she's your kid, and that that means you must've gotten your fancy machine workin' proper at least once an' used it to bring her here!"
Annette blinked twice, momentarily but absolutely dumbfounded for just the barest of moments, because that was absolutely not how Taylor and Danny had made it to her Earth. She almost corrected the superpowered mobster, but found herself holding her tongue before the first word left her lips.
As far as most of the world knew, all the refugees from the "Golden Sky Disaster" had deported either back to their home worlds - if said alternate Earths were still habitable or even still existed - or to whatever other Earth they could be sent to thanks to Richards. Taylor was one of the very rare few that managed to avoid that fate, entirely because the hospital that she'd ended up in had - for once - refused to discharge a critically injured but uninsured patient before she was medically fit to leave.
By the time Taylor had been ready for discharge, it had no longer been possible for her to be sent to another Earth. Danny managed to stay presumably because he was Taylor's only family.
The thought that Fisk had come to believe that Annette had been either deliberately holding back on him or worse had outright deceived him by using his dangerous plan to find a version of her own family was concerning. She had - with some reluctance - accepted funding from the crime boss because he was genuinely brilliant in his own way. Originally, taking his money was simple. He needed it laundered and Alchemax was a useful link in a chain that obscured just where said money came from and went to, with a respectable amount going to properly fund Alchemax's various research projects.
Then Fisk had learned of Annette's super-collider project.
Fisk was a coldly logical and pragmatic man… save where his dead wife and son were concerned. The wife and son that he had personally murdered the original Spider Man to regain. That, from a certain point of view, he had lost twice. He had even murdered one of his own 'security contractors' over that goal just for slightly being in the way.
Tombstone being sent to warn Annette about not talking to the authorities was as much a polite warning as it was a very serious threat, one that made it abundantly clear that Fisk could very easily become a threat to her. Or worse, to…
"Mister Lincoln," Annette began with a calm that she didn't truly feel as she set the massive man very carefully back down onto his dress shoes, "I believe that it is safe to say that your services here at Alchemax will no longer be required. A shame, as you've a gift for ensuring that Alchemax security operated with a very respectable degree of efficiency. But in recognition of your excellent service, I'll see to it that you're issued two months of severance pay, and will pen a letter of recommendation to any future employers interested in your unique services."
Annette looked up at Tombstone with a wintery smile as she slid her hands across his chest, making the giant man visibly shiver. But all she did was pluck the ID badge from his breast pocket. The moment her tentacles uncoiled from around him, Lincoln hastily backpedaled and rubbed at his throat, all the while watching her with far more wary caution in his eyes than he used to have.
"Uh… right," he warily replied, clearly half expecting some manner of last-minute violence from her the moment he dropped his guard. It made Annette think that the man truly had been a mobster for far too long… On the other hand, she'd been seriously considering killing him in an especially horrific manner mere moments ago, so perhaps he wasn't wrong. "... Thanks, Doc."
"Don't mention it. And Mister Lincoln?"
"Yeah, Doc?"
"Do keep in mind that if our benefactor does have any designs on a certain young woman…" Doctor Octopus smiled a very unpleasant smile, "a human brain can survive for approximately four minutes without fresh oxygenated blood before permanent brain damage begins. With your impressively enhanced stamina, I fully expect that to extend to at least an hour, if you're foolish enough to irritate me. So keep my daughter's name out of your fucking mouth. I hope that I'm being sufficiently clear."
"C-crystal, Doc."
It was only after the massive man turned to flee, that Annette inwardly cursed at acknowledging Taylor as her daughter. The only relief was that the few employees still on site didn't seem to notice her… 'unorthodox termination' of Alonzo Lincoln. She also would have to make sure to check the security cameras and remove any imagery of the confrontation.
Sighing and rubbing her forehead, Annette let her hair back down then belatedly fully collapsed and retracted her tentacles before making her way inside the building. Never mind trying to distract herself from her disaster of a meeting with Taylor; dealing with Lincoln and learning that Fisk had her, Taylor and Danny in his sights was problematic, and if she were being honest with herself, somewhat distressing. She was going to have to go over Alchemax's security very thoroughly and try to locate any surprises that either Tombstone or the Kingpin may have already put into place; that included possibly removing any security personnel that might have also been hired after Lincoln went onto Alchemax's payroll at Fisk's 'suggestion.'
This was already calling for a glass of the Moscato that Annette kept in her private office slash lab for special occasions. Fortunately the day could not possibly get any worse, she concluded as she strode into her office.
Then she froze and blinked because somehow, someone was in her locked and secured office waiting for her. Two someones actually.
"Ah, there you are, Doctor Octavius," one of her research assistants nervously apologized, shoulders hunched and not-quite-hiding behind a tablet PC as if it were a shield. "I'm really really really sorry but he insisted but he said he wasn't here to arrest anyone even though he somehow bypassed the entire building's security without setting off the alarms and just came right up to me while I was on my break and I wasn't sure what I should do but I didn't think you, I m-mean we, we're doing anything wrong-" It only took a glance to recognize her as Adrianne Phillips, one of the few biologists and biochemists in Alchemax's employ. Intelligent, hard working, a bit mousey, and if Annette were honest with herself, more than a little cute at times but Annette very firmly believed that an employer should not have relations with employees.
No matter how delightfully shapely they were.
"It's quite alright, Miss Phillips," Annette said reassuringly without taking her eyes off of the man. That only prompted Phillips to immediately dart away from him and all but hide behind Annette. "I'm sure our uninvited guest has a reason for intruding."
The remarkably plain-looking man gave a congenial and a smile that could only be called 'politely apologetic,' and his bland expression and receding hairline gave him an air of easy forgettability, especially given the well-tailored suit that all but screamed 'government paper pusher.'
"My apologies, Doctor Octavius," he said as he stepped closer and offered a handshake. "I'd have introduced myself sooner, but you appeared to be rather preoccupied with relieving Mister Alonzo Lincoln of his employment with your company."
Annette froze just as she began to reach for the man's hand.
"I'm Phil Coulson, with the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division. If you have a moment, I really do need to talk with you about a few things."
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This distracted me from the next update for Callsign: Owl. But now I'm free, free, free! Free to pay attention to my other projects! Of which I have too damn many now. If my muse comes at me with another new idea, it's getting tazed and thrown into the trunk of my car.
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Worms, Spiders and Octopi 4
Geas
Meat Thing
(One more update and I'm just gonna make a thread because this thing has a mind of its own now.)
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For just a moment, Annette was paralyzed with indecisiveness. This intruder into her life and personal space was a SHIELD agent. How long had they been watching her, and how much did they know? If the man knew that she'd just been dealing with Tombstone, then he almost certainly knew about her dealings with Fisk.
Was this a threat, some kind of mind game or distraction? Why was it only this Coulson? How many other agents were there? Should she deflect, and deny any accusations that he might make while protesting her own innocence, perhaps even choke down her pride and claim that hadn't been aware of how far Fisk had been willing to go to get his family back?
Or should she try to run? Abandon everything that she'd worked so hard to build and possibly forever damn her reputation in the scientific community and worse of all, prove Richards right about her just for the sake of her own freedom?
Or should she try to kill him?
…
Could she kill him? Could she take that damning step, become a genuine murderer and be forever labeled as just another dangerous villain rather than the brilliant scientist she truly was? Would she take being perceived as being every bit as violently dangerous as people like Fisk and Lincoln? Be forever thought of only as Doctor Octopus?
The moment passed, and Annette found herself cautiously and reluctantly shaking Coulson's hand.
"... I suppose it's fortunate that I don't have any pressing engagements for the moment then, Mister Coulson. Miss Phillips? This conversation may very well affect the future of Alchemax, so you may as well stay for it. But would you be so kind as to fetch the Moscato from the mini fridge underneath my desk and pour me a glass?"
"Oh, uh, yes ma'am." Phillips stepped out from behind Annette, and shyly stepped well around the remarkably unimposing SHIELD agent, who gave her a very polite nod and was nice enough to not make any sudden movements given how skittish Phillips was.
"So…" Annette began carefully, "you are apparently well aware of my removing Alonzo Lincoln from Alchemax's employment roster, despite my only coming to that decision only five minutes ago, if that."
The corners of Coulson's mouth didn't even so much as twitch out of the polite expression he effortlessly held.
"The tentacles were an… interesting touch, Doctor. As was the disturbingly graphic threat of just how you were intending to flay alive a man with theoretically impenetrable skin, before you changed your mind." At that, the corners of Coulson's mouth twitched into a brief smile, as if they were merely discussing the weather. At the same time a chill crawled down Annette's spine. Once again, she wondered if she would be finally killing someone for the first time today.
A dark little part of herself reminded her that she had stood by when Fisk killed Spider-Man and had been entirely willing to watch another Spider-Man die, just to study why reality seemed to reject his presence.
Annette felt her jaw tighten, and did her best to ignore that little voice inside.
"Am I under arrest, Agent Coulson?"
A soft, brief chuckle was her response.
"Doctor, if SHIELD arrested every Enhanced individual of interest just for making threats, then we'd need to build three more Rafts just to hold all of you," Coulson calmly retorted. "And before you ask, your dealings with Fisk and his cronies are only tangentially related to why I'm here."
Despite the man's calm demeanor and deliberately unthreatening nature, Annette still tensed as his left hand reached inside his suit. Then she tensed and blinked, and stared not at the neatly folded flexible screen with visible inlaid circuitry at its edges that he pulled from his pocket. Instead…
"That is fascinating," Annette breathed out as she reached forward.
"Oh, this?" A genuine smile briefly appeared on the man's lips as he prepared to show off. "Heh, this is actually a neat little piece of gear we call a Flex Scr-"
Annette ignored both him and the Flex Screen and instead firmly took hold of Coulson's left hand with both of hers. It didn't just look real, it felt real. Most people would never have noticed, but Annette had earned her engineering doctorate at an age when most girls were preoccupied with prom dresses and boy bands.
"Ahh… Doctor, I'm awfully flattered but I usually require dinner and a movie before this sort of thing," Coulson dryly commented.
"This is absolutely exquisite craftsmanship!" Annette exclaimed as she forced Coulson to raise his arm higher, the better to examine his left hand underneath the fluorescent lighting. "I don't think I've ever seen such detail on synthetic skin before!" She tickled his palm with the tip of an index finger and grinned at the way his fingers twitched before beginning to experimentally squeeze his hands in a number of places. "Excellent fidelity and reflexes. I'm guessing you incorporated some of Transia's work? No one else comes close to their cutting edge work in synthetic nerve conduction and nerve interfaces. Do you use ultrasonic or capacitive sensors to simulate touch feedback? I can tell from the sensation that you also make creative use of small-scale artificial muscle actuators. Interesting choice. Not as much power as going pneumatic but definitely the better choice for fine dexterity at such sizes. I'm guessing the power source is in the forearm, probably just beh-"
Coulson very pointedly yanked his incredibly realistic prosthetic hand out of Annette's grasp and tugged his sleeve back down from where Annette had begun to roll it up. Then he raised an eyebrow and commented, "Dinner and a movie first, is what I believe I said."
Annette very deliberately did not dignify that with a response, and by sheer force of will refused to allow herself to feel embarrassed enough to blush, not even when she heard a muffled giggle from Phillips.
The mood however quickly grew serious once again when Coulson unfolded the transparent plastic screen in his hands. Now that she was actually paying attention to it, Annette quickly surmised that it had to be something like an organic electroluminescent device, though just how SHIELD managed to create a foldable and transparent OLED screen was something that she very much wanted to know and was already giving her ideas for later.
"I'm fairly certain that I don't need to tell you of all people just who this is, Doctor." A moment later her musings on intermingling SHIELD tech with her own came to an abrupt stop when she found herself staring at an image ofher Taylor.
Worse, it was an image of Taylor as hinted in the meager hospital records that Annette had acquired. Too still, tubes in her mouth and nose, the visible portions of her face very obviously one massive mottled bruise with blood-stained dressings all but mummifying her shaved head, with an even larger and bloodier dressing wrapped around what was left of her right arm. Too small for the bed she was laying in, and so still, so pale that were it not for the medical sensors glued to her neck and chest, she could have easily been assumed to have just died.
For a moment, Annette could only see a much younger Taylor.
A little ruined and broken body, arm shorn off completely at the shoulder, rather than in part; one of the very rare instances where a seat belt had done far more harm than good. A crushed chest, a ruined little skull, horribly deformed by severe blunt-force trauma. Breathing only because the life support hadn't been turned off yet. The stink of antiseptic and piss, and a tiny bloodless hand that didn't even so much as twitch no matter how desperately Annette squeezed, or how many times.
It was an old pain, that particular hurt, and one that she'd thought she'd long gotten over some eleven years ago.
Even as her office suddenly spun around her Annette swiftly turned away, stumbling until one of her tentacles tore itself out from underneath her clothes to steady her, then strode away until her desk was in front of her, cool and heavy and real and present.
She focused on the feel of pressed and painted wood underneath her fingertips. Cool. Comforting. Easily breakable but even as the thought slid into her thoughts she choked it back.
Willed herself to stop trembling.
Inhale.
Exhale.
A coppery taste on her tongue; Annette was biting her lip again. She forced her jaw to unclench, but that didn't stop the trickle of blood from her lower lip. As quickly as she could, she pulled herself back together, and shoved those agonizing memories back into the dark where they belonged.
Phillips, bless her heart, passed Annette a tissue to clean her face up with. Annette plucked it from the other woman's grasp and dabbed at her face and especially her bleeding lower lip and straightened herself out. She very deliberately ignored the way Coulson watched her and how despite the fact that he hadn't drawn a weapon, he suddenly no longer seemed quite so calmly placid as he deliberately stepped into her field of view while staying just outside of easy reach of her tentacles. Yet at the same time, she felt bizarrely more comfortable with him now that he'd dropped the paper pusher façade.
"My apologies, Mister Coulson," Annette stiffly said after taking a calming breath. "You picked a poor picture to use. It reminded me of something that I wasn't prepared to recall today."
Coulson arched an eyebrow and he gave her a look that was so dry, it could have cured meat.
"Must have been a pretty bad memory, to hit you like that."
"You have no idea," Annette breathed out. She dabbed at her lip again, then frowned when she noticed how she'd raggedly torn her dress very nearly to her left hip when she'd reflexively steadied herself with her tentacles. The leggings of her bodysuit were on full display, but fortunately SHIELD clearly already knew about her alter ego.
"What is she to you, and how do you know her? For that matter, what do you know about her?" Coulson asked. "Fisk and Lincoln seem to be of the opinion that she's your daughter. The way that you handled Lincoln is only going to emphasize that."
Annette was well aware of that already, but hearing it said so starkly still cut. Sighing, she dabbed at her lip again, and discovered that fortunately the bleeding had finally stopped.
"Doctor?" Phillips spoke up, and Annette turned to see the younger woman's wide-eyed expression as she asked, "You have a daughter?"
"I'd say that it's more complicated than that, but that just seems so embarrassingly trite." Annette tried not to grimace, in part to keep her lip from deciding to bleed again.
"Doctor, I'm going to need you to uncomplicate it then," Coulson asked. Somehow, without even moving, he seemed to stand up just a little straighter as he unflinchingly met Annette's eyes, and very deliberately stepped within arm's reach of her.
"Not disregarding whatever hold or threat Fisk has on you, right now Miss Hebert is a person of serious interest to SHIELD, being currently the only known witness and likely also a participant to what was by all accounts an interdimensional war involving multiple Earths. A war that our world knows almost nothing about beyond the fact that it had estimated casualties numbering in the billions in just four days, and SHIELD only knows that much from interviewing refugees before most if not all were deported and Richard did whatever he did to block travel to our world. We don't know who began it or how it ended, or even if it ended."
Coulson paused, which gave Annette a moment to try and wrap her head around what she'd just been told. She'd been aware that Taylor had been through something terrible and had done terrible things in turn. The young woman had readily implied that much. Hell, even a police officer had had Taylor pegged as a badly traumatized war veteran before Annette had even begun to consider the possibility. She wanted to believe that Taylor was just too young to have been any kind of soldier.
But Annette felt a chill when she abruptly came to the conclusion that just because the use of child soldiers was both illegal and frowned upon in many civilized countries… that reasoning only applied to her Earth. She knew effectively nothing of what Taylor's Earth-Bet was like.
She just knew that whatever Taylor had gone through, she would never have allowed it to happen had she been able to prevent it, no matter what she would have needed to do.
Unbidden, she recalled how dangerously close she'd come to killing someone already.
"We at SHIELD don't like that state of affairs," Coulson said, causing her attention to reflexively snap back to him. "If this war flares up again, we need to know if our Earth is going to be in the crosshairs. Taylor Hebert is the only one we can access that might be able to answer those questions, and you, doctor, just so happen to be the only person that she's tried to talk to."
A bark of hysterical laughter escaped from Annette's lips before she could contain it.
"Me?" she asked in disbelief as she turned to Phillips, who stood watching with the stunned expression of someone realizing that they really should not be hearing the things that they were hearing but didn't dare draw attention to themselves to point that out. She still held Annette's bottle of Moscato and a glass that she had yet to fill in her hands. Annette took both from her unresisting fingers. "Mister Coulson, she ran from me the moment I tried to open up to her. She… She had some kind of horrific PTSD flashback, and when I tried to do something, anything…"
Annette didn't quite shiver as she filled her glass nearly to the brim before smoothly gulping down its contents in three massive swallows, almost before the taste had registered on her tongue. Only then did she push the Moscato back into Phillip's hands. Fortunately the younger woman didn't spill any as she briefly fumbled with the bottle.
"Okay, not good," Coulson replied, and Annette had to resist the urge to snort because that was easily the understatement of the year, "but she still tried to connect with you. That clearly makes you probably as important to her as she is to you. Is she the reason why you built that device for Fisk?"
That time, Annette did snort, and fortunately before she took a sip of her wine.
"Mister Coulson, I'm not Fisk." She felt her lips twitch into an unpleasant smile. "Fisk had his eyes on getting his wife and son back, no matter what. I on the other hand have had years to come to terms with the deaths of my husband and daughter. No, I built my machine because I wanted to prove that my research wasn't… How did Richards put it? Ah, yes. 'A foolishly fallacious endeavor based on a flawed understanding of quantum physics and the underpinning upon which our reality exists, and more importantly a waste of time, effort and funding that could be better spent elsewhere.' Hmph. Prick."
Annette turned back to Coulson and was about to say more, only to pause at the odd looks that he and Phillips were both giving her.
"... You're a widow and a vilomah?" Coulson asked, as if he wasn't quite sure he had heard Annette correctly. A small part of Annette was impressed; most people didn't know that there was a word for a parent that lost a child. The rest of her felt a spike of irritation. Did the man not bother studying whatever file SHIELD undoubtedly had on her?
"And you know how to open and read a dictionary," she snapped at him. A moment later she sighed and closed her eyes. "My apologies. Even though it's been eleven years since the car accident that took my family and shattered my spine, I'm recently realizing that it's still an unpleasantly tender wound, and Taylor Hebert being a living version of my daughter from another world is… I'm still finding myself processing that Taylor is what my daughter might have looked like had she survived."
For a moment, Coulson continued to give her that oddly surprised look, as if he was struggling to comprehend just what Annette was saying. Just as it began to make her uncomfortable his expression suddenly smoothed into bland calm.
"Doctor, consider this," he said. "Finding out what Miss Hebert knows about this war is important enough that SHIELD is willing to overlook a number of things if you share whatever you learn with us or convince her to agree to an interview… provided of course you manage to avoid any further exuberant discretions with any former or current associates of yours. Otherwise, the next time we talk is going to be a very different conversation. Also," Coulson's lips curled into that tiny smile again, "it hasn't escaped SHIELD's notice that despite Richards' blocking interdimensional travel, the machine you built for Fisk still managed to gain access to other worlds."
Annette blinked and stared, absolutely dumbfounded and not enjoying a single moment of it, even as Coulson handed her a business card before striding for the door.
"Wait," Annette called out. "What… what is this supposed to even mean? Is this some kind of backroom deal pardon?"
Coulson looked back at her with that tiny smile.
"I think, Doctor Octavius, that you'll soon discover that you will have less issues severing Alchemax from Fisk's financial influence than you think. I'll be in touch."
A moment later, the door shut behind Coulson with an oddly final-seeming click, leaving Annette with far more questions than she cared to have about a number of things. Again she asked herself just how long had SHIELD been watching her. On top of that, she began to wonder just how Richards had sealed those dimensional breaches six months ago, and why Coulson - or rather SHIELD - seemed to think that that should have significantly impacted the function of her super-collider.
This inevitably led Annette to consider the possibility that the way her machine had malfunctioned might not have in fact been due to any flaws in the device after all. Or rather, no flaws in her device.
For a moment her head spun, and her brain wanted to go in a thousand different directions at once. She hadn't even considered the possibility of a source of artificial interference impeding the functionality of her super-collider, not once. If she had, she would've tried to identify and account for it, but it wasn't as if Richards had explained whatever the hell it was that he'd done; he'd merely said that he'd solved the portal problem. She had never imagined what whatever method he used would still be in effect; to not just remove the portals but block them as Coulson implied, he must have built a device of his own, one that was still activ-
'Oh my God,' Annette suddenly thought, 'my machine might not have been malfunctioning, it might have been Richards' doing all along.' For a moment, she couldn't help but feel a surge of vindictive exhilaration. Her super-collider's side effects could easily have been due to interference from whatever device Richards built. If it hadn't been for Reed fucking Richards, New York might never have been nearly destroyed, and Spider-Man - the original one - likely would not have been killed by Fisk.
Annette suddenly had complicated feelings about that particular revelation, given her past history with the vigilante.
It was nearly as unsettling as the revelation that if her theory was true, then Richards' habit of unilaterally making decisions with potentially world-wide effects without explaining himself or his methods had almost killed, at minimum, eight million people.
"... Oh my God, Reed Richards nearly killed us all, and no one has any idea," Annette heard herself quietly say.
Ice suddenly forming in her gut, she turned to Phillips, only to find the suddenly-pale younger woman hastily gulping down a glass of her employer's Moscato. Annette quickly realized that Phillips had a very good idea, especially taking into consideration the meeting that they'd just had with Agent Coulson, and pointedly drained her own glass of wine before holding it out to get refilled.
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Fortunately, I already have a few titles in consideration because 'Worms, Spiders and Octopi' was a straight-up asspull on my part.
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For just a moment, Annette was paralyzed with indecisiveness. This intruder into her life and personal space was a SHIELD agent. How long had they been watching her, and how much did they know? If the man knew that she'd just been dealing with Tombstone, then he almost certainly knew about her dealings with Fisk.
Was this a threat, some kind of mind game or distraction? Why was it only this Coulson? How many other agents were there? Should she deflect, and deny any accusations that he might make while protesting her own innocence, perhaps even choke down her pride and claim that hadn't been aware of how far Fisk had been willing to go to get his family back?
Or should she try to run? Abandon everything that she'd worked so hard to build and possibly forever damn her reputation in the scientific community and worse of all, prove Richards right about her just for the sake of her own freedom?
Or should she try to kill him?
…
Could she kill him? Could she take that damning step, become a genuine murderer and be forever labeled as just another dangerous villain rather than the brilliant scientist she truly was? Would she take being perceived as being every bit as violently dangerous as people like Fisk and Lincoln? Be forever thought of only as Doctor Octopus?
The moment passed, and Annette found herself cautiously and reluctantly shaking Coulson's hand.
"... I suppose it's fortunate that I don't have any pressing engagements for the moment then, Mister Coulson. Miss Phillips? This conversation may very well affect the future of Alchemax, so you may as well stay for it. But would you be so kind as to fetch the Moscato from the mini fridge underneath my desk and pour me a glass?"
"Oh, uh, yes ma'am." Phillips stepped out from behind Annette, and shyly stepped well around the remarkably unimposing SHIELD agent, who gave her a very polite nod and was nice enough to not make any sudden movements given how skittish Phillips was.
"So…" Annette began carefully, "you are apparently well aware of my removing Alonzo Lincoln from Alchemax's employment roster, despite my only coming to that decision only five minutes ago, if that."
The corners of Coulson's mouth didn't even so much as twitch out of the polite expression he effortlessly held.
"The tentacles were an… interesting touch, Doctor. As was the disturbingly graphic threat of just how you were intending to flay alive a man with theoretically impenetrable skin, before you changed your mind." At that, the corners of Coulson's mouth twitched into a brief smile, as if they were merely discussing the weather. At the same time a chill crawled down Annette's spine. Once again, she wondered if she would be finally killing someone for the first time today.
A dark little part of herself reminded her that she had stood by when Fisk killed Spider-Man and had been entirely willing to watch another Spider-Man die, just to study why reality seemed to reject his presence.
Annette felt her jaw tighten, and did her best to ignore that little voice inside.
"Am I under arrest, Agent Coulson?"
A soft, brief chuckle was her response.
"Doctor, if SHIELD arrested every Enhanced individual of interest just for making threats, then we'd need to build three more Rafts just to hold all of you," Coulson calmly retorted. "And before you ask, your dealings with Fisk and his cronies are only tangentially related to why I'm here."
Despite the man's calm demeanor and deliberately unthreatening nature, Annette still tensed as his left hand reached inside his suit. Then she tensed and blinked, and stared not at the neatly folded flexible screen with visible inlaid circuitry at its edges that he pulled from his pocket. Instead…
"That is fascinating," Annette breathed out as she reached forward.
"Oh, this?" A genuine smile briefly appeared on the man's lips as he prepared to show off. "Heh, this is actually a neat little piece of gear we call a Flex Scr-"
Annette ignored both him and the Flex Screen and instead firmly took hold of Coulson's left hand with both of hers. It didn't just look real, it felt real. Most people would never have noticed, but Annette had earned her engineering doctorate at an age when most girls were preoccupied with prom dresses and boy bands.
"Ahh… Doctor, I'm awfully flattered but I usually require dinner and a movie before this sort of thing," Coulson dryly commented.
"This is absolutely exquisite craftsmanship!" Annette exclaimed as she forced Coulson to raise his arm higher, the better to examine his left hand underneath the fluorescent lighting. "I don't think I've ever seen such detail on synthetic skin before!" She tickled his palm with the tip of an index finger and grinned at the way his fingers twitched before beginning to experimentally squeeze his hands in a number of places. "Excellent fidelity and reflexes. I'm guessing you incorporated some of Transia's work? No one else comes close to their cutting edge work in synthetic nerve conduction and nerve interfaces. Do you use ultrasonic or capacitive sensors to simulate touch feedback? I can tell from the sensation that you also make creative use of small-scale artificial muscle actuators. Interesting choice. Not as much power as going pneumatic but definitely the better choice for fine dexterity at such sizes. I'm guessing the power source is in the forearm, probably just beh-"
Coulson very pointedly yanked his incredibly realistic prosthetic hand out of Annette's grasp and tugged his sleeve back down from where Annette had begun to roll it up. Then he raised an eyebrow and commented, "Dinner and a movie first, is what I believe I said."
Annette very deliberately did not dignify that with a response, and by sheer force of will refused to allow herself to feel embarrassed enough to blush, not even when she heard a muffled giggle from Phillips.
The mood however quickly grew serious once again when Coulson unfolded the transparent plastic screen in his hands. Now that she was actually paying attention to it, Annette quickly surmised that it had to be something like an organic electroluminescent device, though just how SHIELD managed to create a foldable and transparent OLED screen was something that she very much wanted to know and was already giving her ideas for later.
"I'm fairly certain that I don't need to tell you of all people just who this is, Doctor." A moment later her musings on intermingling SHIELD tech with her own came to an abrupt stop when she found herself staring at an image of
Worse, it was an image of Taylor as hinted in the meager hospital records that Annette had acquired. Too still, tubes in her mouth and nose, the visible portions of her face very obviously one massive mottled bruise with blood-stained dressings all but mummifying her shaved head, with an even larger and bloodier dressing wrapped around what was left of her right arm. Too small for the bed she was laying in, and so still, so pale that were it not for the medical sensors glued to her neck and chest, she could have easily been assumed to have just died.
For a moment, Annette could only see a much younger Taylor.
A little ruined and broken body, arm shorn off completely at the shoulder, rather than in part; one of the very rare instances where a seat belt had done far more harm than good. A crushed chest, a ruined little skull, horribly deformed by severe blunt-force trauma. Breathing only because the life support hadn't been turned off yet. The stink of antiseptic and piss, and a tiny bloodless hand that didn't even so much as twitch no matter how desperately Annette squeezed, or how many times.
It was an old pain, that particular hurt, and one that she'd thought she'd long gotten over some eleven years ago.
Even as her office suddenly spun around her Annette swiftly turned away, stumbling until one of her tentacles tore itself out from underneath her clothes to steady her, then strode away until her desk was in front of her, cool and heavy and real and present.
She focused on the feel of pressed and painted wood underneath her fingertips. Cool. Comforting. Easily breakable but even as the thought slid into her thoughts she choked it back.
Willed herself to stop trembling.
Inhale.
Exhale.
A coppery taste on her tongue; Annette was biting her lip again. She forced her jaw to unclench, but that didn't stop the trickle of blood from her lower lip. As quickly as she could, she pulled herself back together, and shoved those agonizing memories back into the dark where they belonged.
Phillips, bless her heart, passed Annette a tissue to clean her face up with. Annette plucked it from the other woman's grasp and dabbed at her face and especially her bleeding lower lip and straightened herself out. She very deliberately ignored the way Coulson watched her and how despite the fact that he hadn't drawn a weapon, he suddenly no longer seemed quite so calmly placid as he deliberately stepped into her field of view while staying just outside of easy reach of her tentacles. Yet at the same time, she felt bizarrely more comfortable with him now that he'd dropped the paper pusher façade.
"My apologies, Mister Coulson," Annette stiffly said after taking a calming breath. "You picked a poor picture to use. It reminded me of something that I wasn't prepared to recall today."
Coulson arched an eyebrow and he gave her a look that was so dry, it could have cured meat.
"Must have been a pretty bad memory, to hit you like that."
"You have no idea," Annette breathed out. She dabbed at her lip again, then frowned when she noticed how she'd raggedly torn her dress very nearly to her left hip when she'd reflexively steadied herself with her tentacles. The leggings of her bodysuit were on full display, but fortunately SHIELD clearly already knew about her alter ego.
"What is she to you, and how do you know her? For that matter, what do you know about her?" Coulson asked. "Fisk and Lincoln seem to be of the opinion that she's your daughter. The way that you handled Lincoln is only going to emphasize that."
Annette was well aware of that already, but hearing it said so starkly still cut. Sighing, she dabbed at her lip again, and discovered that fortunately the bleeding had finally stopped.
"Doctor?" Phillips spoke up, and Annette turned to see the younger woman's wide-eyed expression as she asked, "You have a daughter?"
"I'd say that it's more complicated than that, but that just seems so embarrassingly trite." Annette tried not to grimace, in part to keep her lip from deciding to bleed again.
"Doctor, I'm going to need you to uncomplicate it then," Coulson asked. Somehow, without even moving, he seemed to stand up just a little straighter as he unflinchingly met Annette's eyes, and very deliberately stepped within arm's reach of her.
"Not disregarding whatever hold or threat Fisk has on you, right now Miss Hebert is a person of serious interest to SHIELD, being currently the only known witness and likely also a participant to what was by all accounts an interdimensional war involving multiple Earths. A war that our world knows almost nothing about beyond the fact that it had estimated casualties numbering in the billions in just four days, and SHIELD only knows that much from interviewing refugees before most if not all were deported and Richard did whatever he did to block travel to our world. We don't know who began it or how it ended, or even if it ended."
Coulson paused, which gave Annette a moment to try and wrap her head around what she'd just been told. She'd been aware that Taylor had been through something terrible and had done terrible things in turn. The young woman had readily implied that much. Hell, even a police officer had had Taylor pegged as a badly traumatized war veteran before Annette had even begun to consider the possibility. She wanted to believe that Taylor was just too young to have been any kind of soldier.
But Annette felt a chill when she abruptly came to the conclusion that just because the use of child soldiers was both illegal and frowned upon in many civilized countries… that reasoning only applied to her Earth. She knew effectively nothing of what Taylor's Earth-Bet was like.
She just knew that whatever Taylor had gone through, she would never have allowed it to happen had she been able to prevent it, no matter what she would have needed to do.
Unbidden, she recalled how dangerously close she'd come to killing someone already.
"We at SHIELD don't like that state of affairs," Coulson said, causing her attention to reflexively snap back to him. "If this war flares up again, we need to know if our Earth is going to be in the crosshairs. Taylor Hebert is the only one we can access that might be able to answer those questions, and you, doctor, just so happen to be the only person that she's tried to talk to."
A bark of hysterical laughter escaped from Annette's lips before she could contain it.
"Me?" she asked in disbelief as she turned to Phillips, who stood watching with the stunned expression of someone realizing that they really should not be hearing the things that they were hearing but didn't dare draw attention to themselves to point that out. She still held Annette's bottle of Moscato and a glass that she had yet to fill in her hands. Annette took both from her unresisting fingers. "Mister Coulson, she ran from me the moment I tried to open up to her. She… She had some kind of horrific PTSD flashback, and when I tried to do something, anything…"
Annette didn't quite shiver as she filled her glass nearly to the brim before smoothly gulping down its contents in three massive swallows, almost before the taste had registered on her tongue. Only then did she push the Moscato back into Phillip's hands. Fortunately the younger woman didn't spill any as she briefly fumbled with the bottle.
"Okay, not good," Coulson replied, and Annette had to resist the urge to snort because that was easily the understatement of the year, "but she still tried to connect with you. That clearly makes you probably as important to her as she is to you. Is she the reason why you built that device for Fisk?"
That time, Annette did snort, and fortunately before she took a sip of her wine.
"Mister Coulson, I'm not Fisk." She felt her lips twitch into an unpleasant smile. "Fisk had his eyes on getting his wife and son back, no matter what. I on the other hand have had years to come to terms with the deaths of my husband and daughter. No, I built my machine because I wanted to prove that my research wasn't… How did Richards put it? Ah, yes. 'A foolishly fallacious endeavor based on a flawed understanding of quantum physics and the underpinning upon which our reality exists, and more importantly a waste of time, effort and funding that could be better spent elsewhere.' Hmph. Prick."
Annette turned back to Coulson and was about to say more, only to pause at the odd looks that he and Phillips were both giving her.
"... You're a widow and a vilomah?" Coulson asked, as if he wasn't quite sure he had heard Annette correctly. A small part of Annette was impressed; most people didn't know that there was a word for a parent that lost a child. The rest of her felt a spike of irritation. Did the man not bother studying whatever file SHIELD undoubtedly had on her?
"And you know how to open and read a dictionary," she snapped at him. A moment later she sighed and closed her eyes. "My apologies. Even though it's been eleven years since the car accident that took my family and shattered my spine, I'm recently realizing that it's still an unpleasantly tender wound, and Taylor Hebert being a living version of my daughter from another world is… I'm still finding myself processing that Taylor is what my daughter might have looked like had she survived."
For a moment, Coulson continued to give her that oddly surprised look, as if he was struggling to comprehend just what Annette was saying. Just as it began to make her uncomfortable his expression suddenly smoothed into bland calm.
"Doctor, consider this," he said. "Finding out what Miss Hebert knows about this war is important enough that SHIELD is willing to overlook a number of things if you share whatever you learn with us or convince her to agree to an interview… provided of course you manage to avoid any further exuberant discretions with any former or current associates of yours. Otherwise, the next time we talk is going to be a very different conversation. Also," Coulson's lips curled into that tiny smile again, "it hasn't escaped SHIELD's notice that despite Richards' blocking interdimensional travel, the machine you built for Fisk still managed to gain access to other worlds."
Annette blinked and stared, absolutely dumbfounded and not enjoying a single moment of it, even as Coulson handed her a business card before striding for the door.
"Wait," Annette called out. "What… what is this supposed to even mean? Is this some kind of backroom deal pardon?"
Coulson looked back at her with that tiny smile.
"I think, Doctor Octavius, that you'll soon discover that you will have less issues severing Alchemax from Fisk's financial influence than you think. I'll be in touch."
A moment later, the door shut behind Coulson with an oddly final-seeming click, leaving Annette with far more questions than she cared to have about a number of things. Again she asked herself just how long had SHIELD been watching her. On top of that, she began to wonder just how Richards had sealed those dimensional breaches six months ago, and why Coulson - or rather SHIELD - seemed to think that that should have significantly impacted the function of her super-collider.
This inevitably led Annette to consider the possibility that the way her machine had malfunctioned might not have in fact been due to any flaws in the device after all. Or rather, no flaws in her device.
For a moment her head spun, and her brain wanted to go in a thousand different directions at once. She hadn't even considered the possibility of a source of artificial interference impeding the functionality of her super-collider, not once. If she had, she would've tried to identify and account for it, but it wasn't as if Richards had explained whatever the hell it was that he'd done; he'd merely said that he'd solved the portal problem. She had never imagined what whatever method he used would still be in effect; to not just remove the portals but block them as Coulson implied, he must have built a device of his own, one that was still activ-
'Oh my God,' Annette suddenly thought, 'my machine might not have been malfunctioning, it might have been Richards' doing all along.' For a moment, she couldn't help but feel a surge of vindictive exhilaration. Her super-collider's side effects could easily have been due to interference from whatever device Richards built. If it hadn't been for Reed fucking Richards, New York might never have been nearly destroyed, and Spider-Man - the original one - likely would not have been killed by Fisk.
Annette suddenly had complicated feelings about that particular revelation, given her past history with the vigilante.
It was nearly as unsettling as the revelation that if her theory was true, then Richards' habit of unilaterally making decisions with potentially world-wide effects without explaining himself or his methods had almost killed, at minimum, eight million people.
"... Oh my God, Reed Richards nearly killed us all, and no one has any idea," Annette heard herself quietly say.
Ice suddenly forming in her gut, she turned to Phillips, only to find the suddenly-pale younger woman hastily gulping down a glass of her employer's Moscato. Annette quickly realized that Phillips had a very good idea, especially taking into consideration the meeting that they'd just had with Agent Coulson, and pointedly drained her own glass of wine before holding it out to get refilled.
~~{}~~ ~~{}~~ ~~{}~~ ~~{}~~ ~~{}~~
Fortunately, I already have a few titles in consideration because 'Worms, Spiders and Octopi' was a straight-up asspull on my part.
Update
Geas
Meat Thing
Worms, Spiders and Octopi finally has its own thread, along with an update.
Link to the latest chapter below.
(Yes, I was an idiot and accidentally posted it here first)
Dawn-Cast Erudition: a Tale of Octopi, Worms & Spiders Crossover - Superhero
Link to the latest chapter below.
(Yes, I was an idiot and accidentally posted it here first)
Dawn-Cast Erudition: a Tale of Octopi, Worms & Spiders Crossover - Superhero
Last edited:
Dog Days
Geas
Meat Thing
This idea I had... not sure how long ago. Been letting it percolate for a while, then over the past two days, ended up cranking this out. Might expand it, might not. Hopefully not, I'm juggling too damn many stories already. Either way, it could use more polish but I felt like posting something today, so... cheers!
"Aegis," Cerberus snarled out in a reverberating growl not unlike one of her dogs as she stalked forward, her pale blue eyes like chips of ice as she glared at Hookwolf with undisguised malice. "Med Evac Vista. Gallant, go with him and take Colonel with you. I'll take care of this." Vista's blood dripped steadily from the razor sharp spikes of metal that still protruded from the burly villain's right fist and forearm, though it was questionable as to whether or not he had even noticed Vista when he knocked the smallest Ward out of his way with a blow to the chest that had effortlessly cut through the girl's breast plate.
The tone in his fellow Ward's voice put a chill down Gallant's spine. He'd seen Cerberus angry plenty of times; when one of their fellow Wards made a mistake, or were disrespectful about Director Piggot when she was in earshot, and God help anyone that said anything mean about a dog in her presence. Despite her incredible discipline, the fifteen-year-old Ward had a temper that despite all of her training had never been fully curbed. As such, since joining the Wards, Gallant had gotten used to seeing anger simmering in the girl's Aura from time to time.
All of that paled in comparison to the seething, murderous, ice-packed hatred that he saw in her at that very moment, even as she gently but insistently pushed Vista into Aegis's arms. Blood dripped steadily from the gash that Hookwolf had just inflicted on the youngest member of the Ward's team.
"I'm f-f-fuh-fine!" Vista defiantly protested despite the pained grimace on her face, but she only put up a token resistance as Aegis wrapped her in his arms and took to the air; despite the thick wad of gauze pressed to her sternum, there was still a distressing amount of blood oozing out from between the young girl's gloved fingers. Hookwolf had barely grazed her chest when he backhanded her out of his way, but he'd still cut her deep. Colonel, the pony-sized German Shepherd that had tried to block Hookwolf and paid for it with a horrific gash across his face to show for it, let out an anxious whine and limped badly as he continued to put himself between the Wards and the E88 enforcer.
"Cerbe-" Gallant tried.
"I. Said. Go," she hissed out as her blood-splattered gloved hands clenched into fists.
"Cerberus, this is Armsmaster," the radio in her helmet suddenly announced. "You are to disengage, fall back immediately and make sure that Aegis and Gallant get Vista to safety! Protectorate inbound in two minutes, get out of there now!"
Cerberus ignored him.
"You got balls, girl," Hookwolf said as he hooked his thumbs into the waistband of his ragged jeans, "but I'm done playing with you kids. Fuck off, or I'll-"
"Thor, smash!" Cerberus roared out and the thing at her side that used to be eighty-one pounds of golden brindle American Pitbull but was now over a ton of scales and muscle and barely-contained violence silently responded. Paws the size of car tires cracked the street as muscles like steel cable tightened underneath the saurian monster's thick hide, then in an eye blink Thor pounced.
With a contemptuous bark of laughter Hookwolf threw himself to the side as metal poured out of the villain's bare chest, covering him in a roiling layer of sharpened metal. Thor's massive paws shattered the street where Hookwolf had been standing barely an instant later. The Empire cape was already twisting even as Thor's massive maw yawned open to take a bite.
"Goddamnit, Cerberus!" Armsmaster yelled over his helmet. "I told you to-" This time, the Ward switched off the radio in her helmet.
"Loki, flank!" Cerberus snapped out, and an instant later, a cherry red pickup truck was hurled into the air as the transformed dog that had somehow been hiding underneath the truck's bed suddenly grew even larger as he lunged for Hookwolf's legs. Normally, Loki was a rather adorable little Boston Terrier, if prone to mischief.
The lean and vaguely serpentine thing that Loki had become was far from adorable.
"You bitch!!!" Hookwolf snarled as Loki's head - shaped vaguely like a snapping turtle's - stretched forward and snapped shut around his left leg, despite the layer of churning razors and hooks that suddenly protected the limb. Blood flowed out from between Loki's bony and beak-like jaws as Hookwolf caught Thor's massive maw before the first dog could bite into him, then with a roar, he slammed the first dog into the second, dislodging Loki just long enough to fully transform into the lupine monster that was his trademark.
"Vali go go go!" Cerberus commanded just as Hookwolf twisted and lunged at her.
Normally, Vali was a remarkably jovial (and ever so slightly overweight) old Rottweiler, and one of the most popular of Cerberus's dogs. He was derpy and absolutely loved small children, and despite all the time Cerberus had put into him over the last year after taking him in when his previous elderly owner died, he still shamelessly begged for treats whenever he thought that he could get away with it.
That dog's farts from eating things that he damn well shouldn't have had already become a thing of legend amongst both PRT and Wards alike.
The Vali that was charging Hookwolf at that very moment was less a Rottweiler and more a canid version of a rhinoceros, only far more heavily-armored; the tinkertech collar that Armsmaster had built for Vali in particular had transformed the monster dog's hide into the kind of heavy sloping armor that was usually reserved for infantry fighting vehicles. Vali leapt past Cerberus, his huge horned head already lowered, and slammed right into Hookwolf with all the unstoppable mass of a runaway train, just before the cape could begin to rip the Ward apart.
Hookwolf wheezed from the impact as he was thrown into a parked car, hard enough that the vehicle crumpled around him even as it flipped over almost completely from the impact. The villain recovered remarkably fast though, not so much climbing as flowing back to his four feet by rearranging the mass of blades that his body had become. That was when Thor and Loki hit him again, the former getting his massive mouth around Hookwolf's neck while the latter bit and tore at the Changer's hind legs. Cursing, Hookwolf broke away, shedding an entire layer of his horse-sized body and a captured leg, and with a whirl, raised a paw that whirred like a chainsaw from hell.
Just before the enforcer could claw Thor's eyes out with a paw swipe, Vali slammed into him again, nearly breaking him in half before Hookwolf was sent tumbling and rolling from the impact.
"Freya. Hurt," Cerberus commanded as she stepped back to give the fourth and final dog that she'd brought with her more room to go on the offensive.
That was when Hookwolf tried to run, but the Alaskan Husky - now the size of a Polar Bear - finally moved to engage, cutting off the enforcer's path of retreat as she went for his throat. Thor and Loki attacked again even as the villain tried to pull away. That was when Hookwolf finally abandoned his lupine form completely, twisting into a serpentine monstrosity of writhing blades. That let him narrowly evade the full force of another of Vali's brutal charges by the slimmest margin, instead taking a glancing blow that sent a spray of metal shrapnel flying from the core that held his vulnerable human form.
But in the process, Hookwolf had taken his attention off of Cerberus to focus fully on the four monstrous dogs trying their damndest to rip him apart, which was when the Ward raced forward. A flick of her wrist caused a collapsible baton to slide out of her arm guard and into her waiting hand, and as she slammed it into his exposed core, a loud crackling pop was hard followed by Hookwolf's screams as his inhuman form spasmed and rippled, followed by his convulsing human form hitting the ground as the voltage set his muscles spasming.
He was still twitching and gasping when Thor's jaws closed around his skull and began violently shaking him as if he were a squeaky toy and not an adult male weighing roughly two hundred pounds.
Hookwolf's neck snapped just as Armsmaster's bike noisily screeched to a stop.
PRT-ENE Director Emily Piggot knew exactly when Cerberus was just outside of her office door. While the girl could be remarkably light-footed when she wanted to be, the same could not be said of all of her dogs. In particular, she could hear the nervous whining of one of the girl's dogs; Thor, judging from the pitch and tone. Though Cerberus herself rarely showed it, that particular dog always picked up easily on when the girl was nervous or upset in the way that only a perceptive and attentive pet could.
Given that Cerberus and her dog were being escorted to Piggot's office by Armsmaster and three PRT troopers, it only made sense that the girl was nervous. Though her costume hid a lot of her tells, she clearly grew more nervous the moment she laid eyes upon the Director.
Being nervous was only sensible when Piggot was so very and obviously absolutely furious.
That didn't keep Cerberus from immediately marching straight up to Piggot's desk alongside Armsmaster and standing at rigid attention. Thor, head hanging low and fur still damp from the quasi-Tinkertech cleaning solution formulated to clean the leftovers from his meatsuit off of his fur, whined as he slunk behind Cerberus and tried to hide behind her legs. Cerberus on the other hand, still had Vista's blood splattered across the gloves and armguards of her costume.
Unlike the vast majority of Wards, Cerberus's costume very deliberately closely resembled that of a PRT trooper. A casual observer wouldn't notice that her uniform lacked a sidearm holster and the majority of the ammunition and grenade pouches, or that the mirrored faceplate of her helmet was covered in a subtle etching of a Doberman Pinscher's distinct visage, an image that was also engraved on the teen's pauldrons. It was a departure from the costume that PR had originally put the Ward in at the tender age of six, when she became the darling of PRT Troopers everywhere in the aftermath of the utter shitshow that had been Ellisburg.
"Thor, quiet," Piggot snapped out and the big dog obediently quieted down, and when Piggot snapped her fingers and pointed at the floor to the immediate right of her desk, he promptly trotted over and laid down. Piggot resisted the urge to lean over and give the pitbull a reassuring scratch behind the ears. That would come later, when she wasn't quite so furious at the Ward in front of her.
"One," Piggot began in a frosty tone, "rather than follow regulations specifically written to maximize the safety of Wards when confronting a dangerous Parahuman, rather than retreat and ensure that Vista received immediate medical attention, you instead chose to stand your ground. Two, you willfully disobeyed direct orders from Armsmaster to disengage from fighting Hookwolf, risking not only your own life but those of four PRT K-9s. Three, you switched off your radio in a flagrant disregard for the chain of command and safety regulations. Four, you killed Hookwolf."
Piggot's nostrils flared as she angrily exhaled, all the while glaring at Cerberus with such intensity that it was a wonder that the girl didn't spontaneously combust.
"Is there anything that you have to say for yourself, Cerberus?"
"Nineteen, Ma'am," Cerberus quietly replied. "That's how many people Hookwolf has murdered since he came to Brockton Bay. Seven of them-"
"Law enforcement officers. I am well aware of that, girl," Piggot all but growled out. "Five were Brockton Bay PD and three were PRT Troopers; Daniels died from his injuries thirty-two minutes ago, making it eight law enforcement officers that he's killed here in just the Bay. The rest of his victims here were civilians or gang members. That does not give you the duty or the right to execute someone!"
"He nearly tore Vista in half, just for being in his wa-" Cerberus began to yell, only to be cut off when Piggot's hands abruptly slammed down onto the surface of her desk.
"Do you have any idea of the shit that you've just stepped in, you stupid girl?!" Piggot roared as she rose from her chair. Her powerful shoulders strained her suit as she angrily stomped out from behind her desk, not hindered in the slightest by the prosthetic that replaced her lower right leg from just below the knee. "Or the damage that you've just done to your own reputation?! Were you anyone else, you'd be in handcuffs and on your way to a holding cell!"
The Director of the PRT-ENE marched right up to the fifteen year old Ward, and though her helmet's mirrored face plate hid the girl's face, an observer wouldn't have thought that the case given how Piggot glared exactly where the girl's eyes were.
"This is just the kind of mess that would not only get you three months in Alexandria's remedial discipline camp but also have you marked as a Probationary Ward until you turn eighteen, and that's if you're lucky! That's not even considering how the Empire is going to react to Hookwolf's death, given your feud with him!"
"He hurt Vista," was Cerberus's quiet yet passionate retort, and the girl's shoulders visibly shook as her gloved hands briefly clenched into fists. "She's so small and she was just trying to get Colonel away from him and, and he just hit her, like she was a grown man and-"
Cerberus fell silent the instant that Armsmaster's gauntleted hand fell onto her trembling shoulder.
"Though Cerberus did flagrantly disregard both orders and procedures," Armsmaster grunted out, "given Hookwolf's history of violence and actions today, it would be difficult to say for certain whether or not he would have stopped at maiming one of our Wards."
The glare that Piggot gave him in response to that would have seared the blue and silver paint right off of his power armor and the beard from his jaw, had she been Parahuman.
"Troopers, clear the room," Piggot ordered. The PRT Troopers that had escorted Cerberus didn't even hesitate to turn and march from the room, and it was only after they were gone did Piggot's expression shift from anger to unmistakable disappointment… which was arguably even worse.
"You've messed up badly, Rachel," Piggot quietly said, and Cerberus quietly nodded in agreement as she hesitantly raised her hands to remove her helmet. Her short auburn hair was matted to her forehead with sweat, and despite the stubborn set of the teen's jaw, her pale blue eyes were bloodshot and watery.
"I know, Ma'am," Rachel Piggot said with a quaver in her voice as she forced herself to meet her adoptive mother's unyielding gaze.
"I have never been more disappointed in you than I am right now. Not for killing Hookwolf - Brad Meadows deserved death twice over - but because you thought that facing him was more important than Vista's safety."
Rachel flinched like she'd just been stabbed in the heart.
"... I'm sorry," she all but whispered. Her head began to fall, but Piggot's hand gently but firmly caught the girl's chin, forcing her to maintain eye contact.
"Effective immediately, I am hereby stripping you of your position as Captain of the ENE Wards and giving it to Triumph," Piggot quietly said. "You will be undergoing retraining and recertification in the usage of appropriate force in the field, procedures for facing dangerous villains, and emergency medical treatment. Vista was badly wounded, and you scored the highest on emergency first aid than any other Ward in the past five years. She could have died today, and it would have been your fault, Rachel."
"... I'm s-sorry, Momma," Rachel hoarsely whispered.
"'Sorry' would have been a piss-poor consolation to Vista's parents if she had bled out."
Rachel all but crumpled, and the sound that came out of Piggot's adopted daughter was painful to hear. That didn't dissuade Piggot, however. Some lessons needed to be unpleasant.
It still stung to watch the fat tears begin rolling down Rachel's cheeks. Armsmaster very wisely paid no attention to the delicate moment between the two. He turned away just so, facing away to give the two the illusion of privacy. Knowing him, he was using the time to either file the necessary reports concerning Hookwolf's death or was remotely working on something that was in one of his labs; possibly both.
Piggot let Rachel silently cry for almost a full minute.
Then…
"Rachel."
The girl jerked, then with a sniffle, almost reluctantly raised her head to meet Emily's eyes again.
"Y-yes, Momma?"
"You have until Triumph turns eighteen and begins transitioning to the Protectorate to earn your place as Wards Captain back," she told the distraught teen. "To that end, I am assigning you to train a new Parahuman that will be joining the Wards in a week's time. She chose to become a Probationary Ward rather than going to juvenile detention and risk serving additional time; Dauntless and Velocity apprehended her shortly after she nearly killed a man with a crossbow bolt. I don't trust her as far as I can throw her; she's disrespectful, ill-tempered, violent even for a vigilante, and egotistical, but I'm legally and morally obligated to give her an opportunity to prove that she's not a piece of shit that only deserves a prison cell. You, Rachel, will be taking point in getting her acclimated as a Ward, and ensure that she learns and follows all necessary rules and regulations and becomes a satisfactory member of the Wards ENE. Do an excellent job, and when the time comes, I'll consider granting you your position as Wards Captain back instead of passing it onto Aegis."
Rachel sniffled and firmly rubbed at her face and cheeks with the back of a gloved hand, which perhaps was the only reason she didn't smear drying blood onto herself. As she did, she visibly pulled herself together, standing up straighter and squaring her shoulders.
"Yes, Ma'am," Rachel replied with only the faintest hint of the quaver that had been in her voice. "I'll get her into shape, whether she likes it or not."
"This will not be easy, Cerberus," Armsmaster said as he turned his attention back to the two. "Shadow Stalker isn't just willful and defiant, she's a violent thug with delusions of being a hero. She's someone that we've had our eyes on for at least a year and a half now, given her habit of using broadhead crossbow bolts on people; there's been a lot of bloodshed in the areas she's lurked around. No fatalities to her name yet, that we know of. And somehow, she managed to acquire a lawyer to act on her behalf when we arrested her despite her background and attitude."
Almost immediately Rachel's thick brows furrowed and her eyes narrowed.
"Is she a gang plant?" the Ward all but growled out.
"Not to our knowledge," the Director answered with a scowl. "Her lawyer passed the screenings and background check. Still, I want her watched carefully. If she slips up, steps a single toe out of line, or even so much as walks across the street outside of a crosswalk or uses an aerosol can in a manner other than directed, I expect to hear about it ten minutes later from either her Probation Officer, Armsmaster, or you, Rachel. Am I understood?"
"Absolutely, Ma'am," Rachel swore.
"Good girl. You and Thor are dismissed; go get him and yourself cleaned up." At his name, the pitbull perked up, and when Piggot beckoned him with a twitch of her fingers, he immediately rose and trotted to her side to press his large head into her hip until she relented and began scratching brisky behind his ears just firmly enough that his tail began excitedly whipping back and forth. "And Rachel?"
"Yes, Momma?"
"If she is a problem, then you have my permission to break her if you have to, until she stops being a problem."
Rachel didn't smile; she bared her teeth.
"Aegis," Cerberus snarled out in a reverberating growl not unlike one of her dogs as she stalked forward, her pale blue eyes like chips of ice as she glared at Hookwolf with undisguised malice. "Med Evac Vista. Gallant, go with him and take Colonel with you. I'll take care of this." Vista's blood dripped steadily from the razor sharp spikes of metal that still protruded from the burly villain's right fist and forearm, though it was questionable as to whether or not he had even noticed Vista when he knocked the smallest Ward out of his way with a blow to the chest that had effortlessly cut through the girl's breast plate.
The tone in his fellow Ward's voice put a chill down Gallant's spine. He'd seen Cerberus angry plenty of times; when one of their fellow Wards made a mistake, or were disrespectful about Director Piggot when she was in earshot, and God help anyone that said anything mean about a dog in her presence. Despite her incredible discipline, the fifteen-year-old Ward had a temper that despite all of her training had never been fully curbed. As such, since joining the Wards, Gallant had gotten used to seeing anger simmering in the girl's Aura from time to time.
All of that paled in comparison to the seething, murderous, ice-packed hatred that he saw in her at that very moment, even as she gently but insistently pushed Vista into Aegis's arms. Blood dripped steadily from the gash that Hookwolf had just inflicted on the youngest member of the Ward's team.
"I'm f-f-fuh-fine!" Vista defiantly protested despite the pained grimace on her face, but she only put up a token resistance as Aegis wrapped her in his arms and took to the air; despite the thick wad of gauze pressed to her sternum, there was still a distressing amount of blood oozing out from between the young girl's gloved fingers. Hookwolf had barely grazed her chest when he backhanded her out of his way, but he'd still cut her deep. Colonel, the pony-sized German Shepherd that had tried to block Hookwolf and paid for it with a horrific gash across his face to show for it, let out an anxious whine and limped badly as he continued to put himself between the Wards and the E88 enforcer.
"Cerbe-" Gallant tried.
"I. Said. Go," she hissed out as her blood-splattered gloved hands clenched into fists.
"Cerberus, this is Armsmaster," the radio in her helmet suddenly announced. "You are to disengage, fall back immediately and make sure that Aegis and Gallant get Vista to safety! Protectorate inbound in two minutes, get out of there now!"
Cerberus ignored him.
"You got balls, girl," Hookwolf said as he hooked his thumbs into the waistband of his ragged jeans, "but I'm done playing with you kids. Fuck off, or I'll-"
"Thor, smash!" Cerberus roared out and the thing at her side that used to be eighty-one pounds of golden brindle American Pitbull but was now over a ton of scales and muscle and barely-contained violence silently responded. Paws the size of car tires cracked the street as muscles like steel cable tightened underneath the saurian monster's thick hide, then in an eye blink Thor pounced.
With a contemptuous bark of laughter Hookwolf threw himself to the side as metal poured out of the villain's bare chest, covering him in a roiling layer of sharpened metal. Thor's massive paws shattered the street where Hookwolf had been standing barely an instant later. The Empire cape was already twisting even as Thor's massive maw yawned open to take a bite.
"Goddamnit, Cerberus!" Armsmaster yelled over his helmet. "I told you to-" This time, the Ward switched off the radio in her helmet.
"Loki, flank!" Cerberus snapped out, and an instant later, a cherry red pickup truck was hurled into the air as the transformed dog that had somehow been hiding underneath the truck's bed suddenly grew even larger as he lunged for Hookwolf's legs. Normally, Loki was a rather adorable little Boston Terrier, if prone to mischief.
The lean and vaguely serpentine thing that Loki had become was far from adorable.
"You bitch!!!" Hookwolf snarled as Loki's head - shaped vaguely like a snapping turtle's - stretched forward and snapped shut around his left leg, despite the layer of churning razors and hooks that suddenly protected the limb. Blood flowed out from between Loki's bony and beak-like jaws as Hookwolf caught Thor's massive maw before the first dog could bite into him, then with a roar, he slammed the first dog into the second, dislodging Loki just long enough to fully transform into the lupine monster that was his trademark.
"Vali go go go!" Cerberus commanded just as Hookwolf twisted and lunged at her.
Normally, Vali was a remarkably jovial (and ever so slightly overweight) old Rottweiler, and one of the most popular of Cerberus's dogs. He was derpy and absolutely loved small children, and despite all the time Cerberus had put into him over the last year after taking him in when his previous elderly owner died, he still shamelessly begged for treats whenever he thought that he could get away with it.
That dog's farts from eating things that he damn well shouldn't have had already become a thing of legend amongst both PRT and Wards alike.
The Vali that was charging Hookwolf at that very moment was less a Rottweiler and more a canid version of a rhinoceros, only far more heavily-armored; the tinkertech collar that Armsmaster had built for Vali in particular had transformed the monster dog's hide into the kind of heavy sloping armor that was usually reserved for infantry fighting vehicles. Vali leapt past Cerberus, his huge horned head already lowered, and slammed right into Hookwolf with all the unstoppable mass of a runaway train, just before the cape could begin to rip the Ward apart.
Hookwolf wheezed from the impact as he was thrown into a parked car, hard enough that the vehicle crumpled around him even as it flipped over almost completely from the impact. The villain recovered remarkably fast though, not so much climbing as flowing back to his four feet by rearranging the mass of blades that his body had become. That was when Thor and Loki hit him again, the former getting his massive mouth around Hookwolf's neck while the latter bit and tore at the Changer's hind legs. Cursing, Hookwolf broke away, shedding an entire layer of his horse-sized body and a captured leg, and with a whirl, raised a paw that whirred like a chainsaw from hell.
Just before the enforcer could claw Thor's eyes out with a paw swipe, Vali slammed into him again, nearly breaking him in half before Hookwolf was sent tumbling and rolling from the impact.
"Freya. Hurt," Cerberus commanded as she stepped back to give the fourth and final dog that she'd brought with her more room to go on the offensive.
That was when Hookwolf tried to run, but the Alaskan Husky - now the size of a Polar Bear - finally moved to engage, cutting off the enforcer's path of retreat as she went for his throat. Thor and Loki attacked again even as the villain tried to pull away. That was when Hookwolf finally abandoned his lupine form completely, twisting into a serpentine monstrosity of writhing blades. That let him narrowly evade the full force of another of Vali's brutal charges by the slimmest margin, instead taking a glancing blow that sent a spray of metal shrapnel flying from the core that held his vulnerable human form.
But in the process, Hookwolf had taken his attention off of Cerberus to focus fully on the four monstrous dogs trying their damndest to rip him apart, which was when the Ward raced forward. A flick of her wrist caused a collapsible baton to slide out of her arm guard and into her waiting hand, and as she slammed it into his exposed core, a loud crackling pop was hard followed by Hookwolf's screams as his inhuman form spasmed and rippled, followed by his convulsing human form hitting the ground as the voltage set his muscles spasming.
He was still twitching and gasping when Thor's jaws closed around his skull and began violently shaking him as if he were a squeaky toy and not an adult male weighing roughly two hundred pounds.
Hookwolf's neck snapped just as Armsmaster's bike noisily screeched to a stop.
PRT-ENE Director Emily Piggot knew exactly when Cerberus was just outside of her office door. While the girl could be remarkably light-footed when she wanted to be, the same could not be said of all of her dogs. In particular, she could hear the nervous whining of one of the girl's dogs; Thor, judging from the pitch and tone. Though Cerberus herself rarely showed it, that particular dog always picked up easily on when the girl was nervous or upset in the way that only a perceptive and attentive pet could.
Given that Cerberus and her dog were being escorted to Piggot's office by Armsmaster and three PRT troopers, it only made sense that the girl was nervous. Though her costume hid a lot of her tells, she clearly grew more nervous the moment she laid eyes upon the Director.
Being nervous was only sensible when Piggot was so very and obviously absolutely furious.
That didn't keep Cerberus from immediately marching straight up to Piggot's desk alongside Armsmaster and standing at rigid attention. Thor, head hanging low and fur still damp from the quasi-Tinkertech cleaning solution formulated to clean the leftovers from his meatsuit off of his fur, whined as he slunk behind Cerberus and tried to hide behind her legs. Cerberus on the other hand, still had Vista's blood splattered across the gloves and armguards of her costume.
Unlike the vast majority of Wards, Cerberus's costume very deliberately closely resembled that of a PRT trooper. A casual observer wouldn't notice that her uniform lacked a sidearm holster and the majority of the ammunition and grenade pouches, or that the mirrored faceplate of her helmet was covered in a subtle etching of a Doberman Pinscher's distinct visage, an image that was also engraved on the teen's pauldrons. It was a departure from the costume that PR had originally put the Ward in at the tender age of six, when she became the darling of PRT Troopers everywhere in the aftermath of the utter shitshow that had been Ellisburg.
"Thor, quiet," Piggot snapped out and the big dog obediently quieted down, and when Piggot snapped her fingers and pointed at the floor to the immediate right of her desk, he promptly trotted over and laid down. Piggot resisted the urge to lean over and give the pitbull a reassuring scratch behind the ears. That would come later, when she wasn't quite so furious at the Ward in front of her.
"One," Piggot began in a frosty tone, "rather than follow regulations specifically written to maximize the safety of Wards when confronting a dangerous Parahuman, rather than retreat and ensure that Vista received immediate medical attention, you instead chose to stand your ground. Two, you willfully disobeyed direct orders from Armsmaster to disengage from fighting Hookwolf, risking not only your own life but those of four PRT K-9s. Three, you switched off your radio in a flagrant disregard for the chain of command and safety regulations. Four, you killed Hookwolf."
Piggot's nostrils flared as she angrily exhaled, all the while glaring at Cerberus with such intensity that it was a wonder that the girl didn't spontaneously combust.
"Is there anything that you have to say for yourself, Cerberus?"
"Nineteen, Ma'am," Cerberus quietly replied. "That's how many people Hookwolf has murdered since he came to Brockton Bay. Seven of them-"
"Law enforcement officers. I am well aware of that, girl," Piggot all but growled out. "Five were Brockton Bay PD and three were PRT Troopers; Daniels died from his injuries thirty-two minutes ago, making it eight law enforcement officers that he's killed here in just the Bay. The rest of his victims here were civilians or gang members. That does not give you the duty or the right to execute someone!"
"He nearly tore Vista in half, just for being in his wa-" Cerberus began to yell, only to be cut off when Piggot's hands abruptly slammed down onto the surface of her desk.
"Do you have any idea of the shit that you've just stepped in, you stupid girl?!" Piggot roared as she rose from her chair. Her powerful shoulders strained her suit as she angrily stomped out from behind her desk, not hindered in the slightest by the prosthetic that replaced her lower right leg from just below the knee. "Or the damage that you've just done to your own reputation?! Were you anyone else, you'd be in handcuffs and on your way to a holding cell!"
The Director of the PRT-ENE marched right up to the fifteen year old Ward, and though her helmet's mirrored face plate hid the girl's face, an observer wouldn't have thought that the case given how Piggot glared exactly where the girl's eyes were.
"This is just the kind of mess that would not only get you three months in Alexandria's remedial discipline camp but also have you marked as a Probationary Ward until you turn eighteen, and that's if you're lucky! That's not even considering how the Empire is going to react to Hookwolf's death, given your feud with him!"
"He hurt Vista," was Cerberus's quiet yet passionate retort, and the girl's shoulders visibly shook as her gloved hands briefly clenched into fists. "She's so small and she was just trying to get Colonel away from him and, and he just hit her, like she was a grown man and-"
Cerberus fell silent the instant that Armsmaster's gauntleted hand fell onto her trembling shoulder.
"Though Cerberus did flagrantly disregard both orders and procedures," Armsmaster grunted out, "given Hookwolf's history of violence and actions today, it would be difficult to say for certain whether or not he would have stopped at maiming one of our Wards."
The glare that Piggot gave him in response to that would have seared the blue and silver paint right off of his power armor and the beard from his jaw, had she been Parahuman.
"Troopers, clear the room," Piggot ordered. The PRT Troopers that had escorted Cerberus didn't even hesitate to turn and march from the room, and it was only after they were gone did Piggot's expression shift from anger to unmistakable disappointment… which was arguably even worse.
"You've messed up badly, Rachel," Piggot quietly said, and Cerberus quietly nodded in agreement as she hesitantly raised her hands to remove her helmet. Her short auburn hair was matted to her forehead with sweat, and despite the stubborn set of the teen's jaw, her pale blue eyes were bloodshot and watery.
"I know, Ma'am," Rachel Piggot said with a quaver in her voice as she forced herself to meet her adoptive mother's unyielding gaze.
"I have never been more disappointed in you than I am right now. Not for killing Hookwolf - Brad Meadows deserved death twice over - but because you thought that facing him was more important than Vista's safety."
Rachel flinched like she'd just been stabbed in the heart.
"... I'm sorry," she all but whispered. Her head began to fall, but Piggot's hand gently but firmly caught the girl's chin, forcing her to maintain eye contact.
"Effective immediately, I am hereby stripping you of your position as Captain of the ENE Wards and giving it to Triumph," Piggot quietly said. "You will be undergoing retraining and recertification in the usage of appropriate force in the field, procedures for facing dangerous villains, and emergency medical treatment. Vista was badly wounded, and you scored the highest on emergency first aid than any other Ward in the past five years. She could have died today, and it would have been your fault, Rachel."
"... I'm s-sorry, Momma," Rachel hoarsely whispered.
"'Sorry' would have been a piss-poor consolation to Vista's parents if she had bled out."
Rachel all but crumpled, and the sound that came out of Piggot's adopted daughter was painful to hear. That didn't dissuade Piggot, however. Some lessons needed to be unpleasant.
It still stung to watch the fat tears begin rolling down Rachel's cheeks. Armsmaster very wisely paid no attention to the delicate moment between the two. He turned away just so, facing away to give the two the illusion of privacy. Knowing him, he was using the time to either file the necessary reports concerning Hookwolf's death or was remotely working on something that was in one of his labs; possibly both.
Piggot let Rachel silently cry for almost a full minute.
Then…
"Rachel."
The girl jerked, then with a sniffle, almost reluctantly raised her head to meet Emily's eyes again.
"Y-yes, Momma?"
"You have until Triumph turns eighteen and begins transitioning to the Protectorate to earn your place as Wards Captain back," she told the distraught teen. "To that end, I am assigning you to train a new Parahuman that will be joining the Wards in a week's time. She chose to become a Probationary Ward rather than going to juvenile detention and risk serving additional time; Dauntless and Velocity apprehended her shortly after she nearly killed a man with a crossbow bolt. I don't trust her as far as I can throw her; she's disrespectful, ill-tempered, violent even for a vigilante, and egotistical, but I'm legally and morally obligated to give her an opportunity to prove that she's not a piece of shit that only deserves a prison cell. You, Rachel, will be taking point in getting her acclimated as a Ward, and ensure that she learns and follows all necessary rules and regulations and becomes a satisfactory member of the Wards ENE. Do an excellent job, and when the time comes, I'll consider granting you your position as Wards Captain back instead of passing it onto Aegis."
Rachel sniffled and firmly rubbed at her face and cheeks with the back of a gloved hand, which perhaps was the only reason she didn't smear drying blood onto herself. As she did, she visibly pulled herself together, standing up straighter and squaring her shoulders.
"Yes, Ma'am," Rachel replied with only the faintest hint of the quaver that had been in her voice. "I'll get her into shape, whether she likes it or not."
"This will not be easy, Cerberus," Armsmaster said as he turned his attention back to the two. "Shadow Stalker isn't just willful and defiant, she's a violent thug with delusions of being a hero. She's someone that we've had our eyes on for at least a year and a half now, given her habit of using broadhead crossbow bolts on people; there's been a lot of bloodshed in the areas she's lurked around. No fatalities to her name yet, that we know of. And somehow, she managed to acquire a lawyer to act on her behalf when we arrested her despite her background and attitude."
Almost immediately Rachel's thick brows furrowed and her eyes narrowed.
"Is she a gang plant?" the Ward all but growled out.
"Not to our knowledge," the Director answered with a scowl. "Her lawyer passed the screenings and background check. Still, I want her watched carefully. If she slips up, steps a single toe out of line, or even so much as walks across the street outside of a crosswalk or uses an aerosol can in a manner other than directed, I expect to hear about it ten minutes later from either her Probation Officer, Armsmaster, or you, Rachel. Am I understood?"
"Absolutely, Ma'am," Rachel swore.
"Good girl. You and Thor are dismissed; go get him and yourself cleaned up." At his name, the pitbull perked up, and when Piggot beckoned him with a twitch of her fingers, he immediately rose and trotted to her side to press his large head into her hip until she relented and began scratching brisky behind his ears just firmly enough that his tail began excitedly whipping back and forth. "And Rachel?"
"Yes, Momma?"
"If she is a problem, then you have my permission to break her if you have to, until she stops being a problem."
Rachel didn't smile; she bared her teeth.
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Queen Of Monsters Pt 2
Geas
Meat Thing
January 5th, 2011 - Tuesday
7:27 am
Brockton Bay
__________
It took less than sixty-nine seconds for Armsmaster to regain consciousness to the insistent chimes of his power armor's various alarms, followed by another one hundred and twelve seconds for him to climb to his feet and assess himself for injuries. Blood trickled steadily from his nostrils as he spat out even more of it, but despite the fierce pain along the left side of his chest, he was fortunate that only four of his ribs were mildly fractured despite feeling like he'd just been punted the length of a city block by Fenja or Menja. On the other hand, he could tell from experience that a few of his bruises went all the way down to his internal organs in some places.
More immediately concerning were the radiation warnings that his helmet's HUD screened at him. His armor's radiation shielding was holding - for the moment - but he closed the mouthplate of his helmet all the same to improve its efficiency, then almost as an afterthought he activated his armor's emergency medkit. He didn't hear the quiet hiss of the jet injector, but he felt its sting multiple times at his upper arm as his armor injected him with a combination anti-inflammatory and painkiller as well as a stimulant; within moments, he found it easier to breathe.
He still tasted blood on his tongue, but he could move and still had most of his full range of motion. Despite the pain, he strode out of the damaged room that he'd awakened in and swiftly made his way back out into the street via the holes he'd unwillingly made in two of EMGH's walls after being caught in the explosion.
"This is-" he began to announce over the local PRT communication channels, only to pause at the brief spike of pain in his chest. "Nnngh… This is Armsmaster. I need a casualty report and a status update." Despite the drugs flowing through his veins it still hurt to talk.
"Lieutenant Piet here," a male voice swiftly responded. "Squad One including myself are at eighty percent effectiveness, minor injuries to three, four dead. Squad Two is below half effectiveness with sixty percent casualties; six dead, eight injured to various degrees. Called for reinforcements, setting up a one-block cordon and escorting surviving civilians into the hospital."
"Pass onto hospital and EMT personnel that all civilians and first responders should be checked and treated for radiation poisoning," Armsmaster ordered with a grimace as he finally made it back out onto the street. It took more of his self control than he wanted to acknowledge to not gawk at the destruction that he found waiting for him.
The wreckage of the UPO's transport - what little he was even able to visually identify at a distance - reminded him of old photos dating back from World War 2. Specifically, a particular series of photos of a Panzer IV tank that had been struck by one of a battleship's heavy guns. That particular tank had been reduced to so much scattered wreckage that the only way it had been identifiable as having once been a tank was due to a still-intact portion of one of its continuous tracks.
The crater in the middle of the street that he was approaching could have easily swallowed two of those old WW2 era tanks whole. The only recognizable debris from the vehicle were fragments that might have come from the vehicle's light bar, half of the front bumper, and a warped and ragged chunk of the dashboard that had somehow ended up embedded halfway through a street post.
The crater yawned in the middle of the street like a puckered wound. For a good meter, there was so much residual heat that asphalt had partially melted. Undaunted, Armsmaster continued to stride forward, trusting in his armor's hazmat protective systems to safeguard him from both the fumes and the heat.
"Boss?" Velocity's voice crackled over his radio. "Please do me a solid and don't fall down into the huge, smoldering, irradiated hole in the middle of the street? I'm not ready to start calling Miss Militia 'Boss' and I definitely don't want her job. Plus, your girlfriend would probably blame me for it."
"Velocity, save the chatter for the sitrep when we're done," Armsmaster replied. "... Also, Dragon and I are not in a relationship."
"Keep telling yourself that, Boss."
"You've been spending too much off-duty time with Assault."
"... Ouch, Boss. Ouch."
Despite himself and the situation, Armsmaster felt his lips quirk into a very faint grin.
Said grin just as quickly vanished when he finally made it to the very edge of the crater, and looked down… and down… and down. Down past molten bitumen, down past destroyed pipes and cable junctions, down past a yawning storm drain that was big enough to ride his bike through.
With a few blinks he activated a laser rangefinder and pointed it down into the smoking hole. When that didn't give him an answer, he carefully took aim with his halberd. A soft hiss heralded a tracking dart being fired into the yawning abyss.
Please stop falling, Armsmaster found himself desperately thinking, yet within seconds he felt his mouth twist into a pained scowl.
"Armsmaster to Console, we have a serious problem."
January 5th, 6:59 am (before the explosion)
Brockton Bay Police Department - Precinct 1
__________
Danny Hebert looked dead inside and out. Oh, he was still breathing and his heart was still beating, steadily pumping blood through his veins. That didn't change the simple fact that the man looked like someone was trying to pass off a corpse as a still-living person.
It wasn't just the rough stubble across his jaw, or the wrinkled clothes that looked (and smelled) as if he hadn't changed or even bathed since he'd been told of his daughter's death barely two days ago. It wasn't even because of the steady stream of steaming coffee that dripped across his rough-looking knuckles where it was slowly but steadily spilling over the rim of the cheap styrofoam cup that he was carelessly holding.
The man wasn't even flinching, despite how painfully hot the coffee leaking across his hand must be.
Trite as it was to say it, it was his bloodshot green eyes that said the most about Danny Hebert's state of mind. Half-lidded and unfocused, they stared at nothing in particular and his glasses only emphasized the dark circles around them. Those sunken eyes were as dull and empty as a doll's… or perhaps instead a dead fish, one freshly gutted on a butcher's cutting board. One look into those lifeless eyes was enough to make a person believe that the man was already as dead as his wife and newly-deceased daughter, but his body hadn't yet received the memo.
As such, Detective Hamill made an immediate mental note to officially recommend putting the man on a suicide screening the moment she finished interviewing him, even before she finished sitting down across from him.
"... Are you alright, Mr Hebert? " she asked in a carefully neutral tone. For long seconds the broken man didn't respond, and Hamill was about to repeat the question when a feeble flicker of life filled the man's vacant eyes and his gaze finally rose from a corner of the table to her face.
Very concerningly, he still had yet to notice the slightly reddening skin where he'd spilled his coffee across his fingers.
"Oh. Uhhh…" he trailed off and his eyes blinked with glacial slowness, not quite fully focused on her, and he absentmindedly sat down his forgotten coffee cup. "I-I'm sorry, what did you just say?"
It took Hamill effort to keep that carefully neutral expression and she mentally ticked up the priority of assessing Hebert's mental health by several ticks as an icy chill crawled up her spine.
"I asked if you're okay, Mr Hebert," she said as she drew several tissues from a box placed at the center of the table and very carefully and deliberately pressed them into Hebert's other hand. "You burned your hand with your coffee."
For eerie seconds, he stared at her, dull and bewildered, and a part of Hamill perversely hoped that he was either badly hungover or high on something. Anything other than this living corpse that sat across from her. It only got worse when he finally looked down and took notice of his scalded hand.
There was no flinch, no hiss of pain, not even a tension in his jaw as he mechanically dabbed at his injured hand with the tissues she'd given him.
"Oh. Sorry," he woodenly responded.
"Mr Hebert… Do… you know where you are, right now?"
"I… Uh…" Hebert blinked sluggishly again, then his brow furrowed. A spasm ran through the fingers of his uninjured hand as his fingernails suddenly and noisily scratched across the table's surface, then his entire hand shook before he suddenly clenched it into a trembling.
"Taylor," he softly said. "She died." His eyes grew distant again, staring off at something only he could see as his pupils swelled.
"My condolences, Mr Herbert," the detective said in a softened tone. "I cannot begin to imagine how difficult this must be for you, but I have some questions that might help us figure out who hurt your daughter."
At first, Hebert didn't react.
Then just like that, it was like a switch had flipped in the man, and those dead eyes were suddenly focused on her in a way that had her reflexively suppressing the urge to put her hand on her gun because all of a sudden his eyes weren't quite so dead anymore. Hamill wasn't one to scare easily, but despite how placidly composed his face became, his eyes…
Hamill was suddenly reminded of a school trip to the zoo when she was just a twig of a brat with braces. She had gotten the opportunity to enter the veterinary care area along with several others, something about getting to see one of the cuter animals - a baby goat her from the petting zoo her memory insisted - getting a checkup after falling ill. Mere moments after she and the other kids had entered, a tiger in a cage had also been brought into the area, still so drowsy from anesthesia that it hadn't even raised its head from where it was laying against the bars… not until the kids, Hamill included, had rushed over in excitement to see the animal. The moment ten year old little Anna had gotten within maybe three feet of the cage, the tiger had suddenly raised its head and its intense yellow eyes had fixated on hers in a way that had made the little girl forget how to even breathe despite the reassuring steel bars separating them.
Hebert's eyes, in that moment, were an uncomfortable reminder of that tiger.
"... To move this along," Hamill said with a calm that she didn't entirely feel, "though we have yet to finish looking entirely through your daughter's three journals, it swiftly became apparent that Taylor was the subject of an extensive harassment and bullying campaign led and propagated by three individuals in her age group, beginning her freshman year at Winslow-"
"Over a year," Hebert suddenly interrupted. "This… Winslow allowed this to go on for over an entire school year?" He sounded absolutely bewildered, and Hamill had a feeling that bewilderment was genuine. Yet as carefully level and calm as his tone was, a vein began to throb in the side of the man's neck.
"Indeed, Mr Hebert," Hamill confirmed. "We're still questioning several teachers, but it appears that the administration had a policy of giving favorable treatment to two of the girls we're looking at as suspects. One is the star of Winslow's track team, and you know how young athletes always bring the money in for schools - you couldn't count just how many schools try to cover up what their athletes do just to keep the money coming in. The other has a moderately wealthy and successful lawyer for a parent and as such apparently has delusions of wealth and influence."
"And the names of these girls would be?"
Hamill very pointedly gave Hebert a stern look.
"Mr Hebert, if you want any kind of justice for your daughter…" she said warningly, but he swiftly raised his unburned hand.
"I just would like to know who I'm going to be seeing in court over a wrongful death lawsuit," he softly responded. "My daughter was taken from me, Detective. If the courts fail me too, then I'll have to bleed these girls' and their families of every dime I can get from them, along with Winslow. I'm a close friend of a fairly good lawyer."
"Keep in mind Mr Hebert, that our three primary suspects are only suspects, for now," Hamill insisted. "We don't actually know for certain the degree of their involvement with Taylor's death, if at all. Yet."
"Yet?"
Hamill allowed herself a tiny smile and a nod.
"Fortunately, warrants are a very easy thing to obtain given the list of criminal charges involved. One of the suspects is already in the system as a juvenile offender on probation, but has a sealed record; we've already left a message for her parole officer that we're sending a unit to bring her in for questioning and making moves to talk to the other two before the day is over, if possible. That being said, it's entirely possible that the names of one or all of these three girls might be familiar to you. Gimme just a moment here." Hamill made a show of flipping through her documents, though she'd already memorized the names of all three girls. "Ah, here we go. Sophia Hess, Madison Clements and Emma Barnes."
Hebert didn't react until the final name.
Then both of his hands clenched into fists tight enough that his whitening knuckles popped, even as his pupils shrank into pinpricks and his nostrils flared. Hamill had no doubt that if the man hadn't been within the depths of a police station, Hebert would have exploded. Instead he struggled to choke back the rage that made the veins in his neck and temples throb and his face redden.
"Sh-she… Emma…" he hissed out between Jaws that were so tightly clenched, it was a wonder that one of his teeth hadn't cracked. Underneath the anger, it was nearly as easy to see the telltale sting of disbelief and betrayal. Even in Brockton Bay, a surprising number of assaults and murders were still committed by those close to the victim or their family.
It was also as sure a sign as any that, at the very least, Emma Barnes was very well known to Hebert's father.
There were any number of questions that Hamill could have asked in that moment; any number of things that she could have done. She could have firmly emphasized to Hebert that the Barnes girl was at the moment only a suspect until proven otherwise; at the very least she possibly might be able to identify who the guilty party actually was. She could have had him held until he was calmer and rational, which wasn't exactly uncommon when there was a possibility that a victim's family member, lover or friend might jeopardize an investigation.
But Detective Anna Hamill never got to make that decision. Just before she could speak, two things happened. The first was that the lights within the interview room flickered and cut out for a few alarming seconds. The second was the the way the entire police station suddenly shook around them, as if the entire building was a massive gong that had suddenly been struck. The steaming contents of Hebert's coffee cup splashed across the table as it rocked and toppled over, but Hamill was too busy reflexively grabbing the table between them to notice. Of more immediate notice was the dust and flecks of paint and plaster that suddenly fell from the ceiling and the way a crack suddenly along one wall, stretching from the floor nearly all the way to the ceiling.
The shaking stopped just as suddenly as it had begun, leaving Hamill and Hebert staring at each other in alarmed confusion while shouts and screams began traveling throughout the building. Less than ten seconds later, the emergency alert siren began to sound, a shrill screeching consisting of three short tones, followed by three longer tones, then three short again; the old Morse code distress signal. In modern cities like Brockton Bay, it was used to indicate that a major incident had just occurred somewhere in the city and it was all hands on deck, ASAP. Police, fire department, emergency medical services, PRT, the heroes, everyone.
For just a brief second, Hamill and Hebert stared at one another in stunned surprise.
"I need a phone to make sure that the DWA-," Hebert began to say an instant later as both rose at nearly the same time, but Hamill didn't bother letting him finish; most of the city knew by now that more than a few members of the Dockworkers Union worked at various volunteer fire departments across the city. "Front desk, if the pay phones are down ask one of the operators on duty!" Hamill all but yelled. Less than a minute later, all thoughts of the interrupted interview were gone from the woman's conscious mind as the BBPD began mobilizing.
It wouldn't be until much later that anyone would notice that Hebert's spilled coffee had somehow frozen solid.
Or the strange burns that had been left on his chair.
7:27 am
Brockton Bay
__________
It took less than sixty-nine seconds for Armsmaster to regain consciousness to the insistent chimes of his power armor's various alarms, followed by another one hundred and twelve seconds for him to climb to his feet and assess himself for injuries. Blood trickled steadily from his nostrils as he spat out even more of it, but despite the fierce pain along the left side of his chest, he was fortunate that only four of his ribs were mildly fractured despite feeling like he'd just been punted the length of a city block by Fenja or Menja. On the other hand, he could tell from experience that a few of his bruises went all the way down to his internal organs in some places.
More immediately concerning were the radiation warnings that his helmet's HUD screened at him. His armor's radiation shielding was holding - for the moment - but he closed the mouthplate of his helmet all the same to improve its efficiency, then almost as an afterthought he activated his armor's emergency medkit. He didn't hear the quiet hiss of the jet injector, but he felt its sting multiple times at his upper arm as his armor injected him with a combination anti-inflammatory and painkiller as well as a stimulant; within moments, he found it easier to breathe.
He still tasted blood on his tongue, but he could move and still had most of his full range of motion. Despite the pain, he strode out of the damaged room that he'd awakened in and swiftly made his way back out into the street via the holes he'd unwillingly made in two of EMGH's walls after being caught in the explosion.
"This is-" he began to announce over the local PRT communication channels, only to pause at the brief spike of pain in his chest. "Nnngh… This is Armsmaster. I need a casualty report and a status update." Despite the drugs flowing through his veins it still hurt to talk.
"Lieutenant Piet here," a male voice swiftly responded. "Squad One including myself are at eighty percent effectiveness, minor injuries to three, four dead. Squad Two is below half effectiveness with sixty percent casualties; six dead, eight injured to various degrees. Called for reinforcements, setting up a one-block cordon and escorting surviving civilians into the hospital."
"Pass onto hospital and EMT personnel that all civilians and first responders should be checked and treated for radiation poisoning," Armsmaster ordered with a grimace as he finally made it back out onto the street. It took more of his self control than he wanted to acknowledge to not gawk at the destruction that he found waiting for him.
The wreckage of the UPO's transport - what little he was even able to visually identify at a distance - reminded him of old photos dating back from World War 2. Specifically, a particular series of photos of a Panzer IV tank that had been struck by one of a battleship's heavy guns. That particular tank had been reduced to so much scattered wreckage that the only way it had been identifiable as having once been a tank was due to a still-intact portion of one of its continuous tracks.
The crater in the middle of the street that he was approaching could have easily swallowed two of those old WW2 era tanks whole. The only recognizable debris from the vehicle were fragments that might have come from the vehicle's light bar, half of the front bumper, and a warped and ragged chunk of the dashboard that had somehow ended up embedded halfway through a street post.
The crater yawned in the middle of the street like a puckered wound. For a good meter, there was so much residual heat that asphalt had partially melted. Undaunted, Armsmaster continued to stride forward, trusting in his armor's hazmat protective systems to safeguard him from both the fumes and the heat.
"Boss?" Velocity's voice crackled over his radio. "Please do me a solid and don't fall down into the huge, smoldering, irradiated hole in the middle of the street? I'm not ready to start calling Miss Militia 'Boss' and I definitely don't want her job. Plus, your girlfriend would probably blame me for it."
"Velocity, save the chatter for the sitrep when we're done," Armsmaster replied. "... Also, Dragon and I are not in a relationship."
"Keep telling yourself that, Boss."
"You've been spending too much off-duty time with Assault."
"... Ouch, Boss. Ouch."
Despite himself and the situation, Armsmaster felt his lips quirk into a very faint grin.
Said grin just as quickly vanished when he finally made it to the very edge of the crater, and looked down… and down… and down. Down past molten bitumen, down past destroyed pipes and cable junctions, down past a yawning storm drain that was big enough to ride his bike through.
With a few blinks he activated a laser rangefinder and pointed it down into the smoking hole. When that didn't give him an answer, he carefully took aim with his halberd. A soft hiss heralded a tracking dart being fired into the yawning abyss.
Please stop falling, Armsmaster found himself desperately thinking, yet within seconds he felt his mouth twist into a pained scowl.
"Armsmaster to Console, we have a serious problem."
January 5th, 6:59 am (before the explosion)
Brockton Bay Police Department - Precinct 1
__________
Danny Hebert looked dead inside and out. Oh, he was still breathing and his heart was still beating, steadily pumping blood through his veins. That didn't change the simple fact that the man looked like someone was trying to pass off a corpse as a still-living person.
It wasn't just the rough stubble across his jaw, or the wrinkled clothes that looked (and smelled) as if he hadn't changed or even bathed since he'd been told of his daughter's death barely two days ago. It wasn't even because of the steady stream of steaming coffee that dripped across his rough-looking knuckles where it was slowly but steadily spilling over the rim of the cheap styrofoam cup that he was carelessly holding.
The man wasn't even flinching, despite how painfully hot the coffee leaking across his hand must be.
Trite as it was to say it, it was his bloodshot green eyes that said the most about Danny Hebert's state of mind. Half-lidded and unfocused, they stared at nothing in particular and his glasses only emphasized the dark circles around them. Those sunken eyes were as dull and empty as a doll's… or perhaps instead a dead fish, one freshly gutted on a butcher's cutting board. One look into those lifeless eyes was enough to make a person believe that the man was already as dead as his wife and newly-deceased daughter, but his body hadn't yet received the memo.
As such, Detective Hamill made an immediate mental note to officially recommend putting the man on a suicide screening the moment she finished interviewing him, even before she finished sitting down across from him.
"... Are you alright, Mr Hebert? " she asked in a carefully neutral tone. For long seconds the broken man didn't respond, and Hamill was about to repeat the question when a feeble flicker of life filled the man's vacant eyes and his gaze finally rose from a corner of the table to her face.
Very concerningly, he still had yet to notice the slightly reddening skin where he'd spilled his coffee across his fingers.
"Oh. Uhhh…" he trailed off and his eyes blinked with glacial slowness, not quite fully focused on her, and he absentmindedly sat down his forgotten coffee cup. "I-I'm sorry, what did you just say?"
It took Hamill effort to keep that carefully neutral expression and she mentally ticked up the priority of assessing Hebert's mental health by several ticks as an icy chill crawled up her spine.
"I asked if you're okay, Mr Hebert," she said as she drew several tissues from a box placed at the center of the table and very carefully and deliberately pressed them into Hebert's other hand. "You burned your hand with your coffee."
For eerie seconds, he stared at her, dull and bewildered, and a part of Hamill perversely hoped that he was either badly hungover or high on something. Anything other than this living corpse that sat across from her. It only got worse when he finally looked down and took notice of his scalded hand.
There was no flinch, no hiss of pain, not even a tension in his jaw as he mechanically dabbed at his injured hand with the tissues she'd given him.
"Oh. Sorry," he woodenly responded.
"Mr Hebert… Do… you know where you are, right now?"
"I… Uh…" Hebert blinked sluggishly again, then his brow furrowed. A spasm ran through the fingers of his uninjured hand as his fingernails suddenly and noisily scratched across the table's surface, then his entire hand shook before he suddenly clenched it into a trembling.
"Taylor," he softly said. "She died." His eyes grew distant again, staring off at something only he could see as his pupils swelled.
"My condolences, Mr Herbert," the detective said in a softened tone. "I cannot begin to imagine how difficult this must be for you, but I have some questions that might help us figure out who hurt your daughter."
At first, Hebert didn't react.
Then just like that, it was like a switch had flipped in the man, and those dead eyes were suddenly focused on her in a way that had her reflexively suppressing the urge to put her hand on her gun because all of a sudden his eyes weren't quite so dead anymore. Hamill wasn't one to scare easily, but despite how placidly composed his face became, his eyes…
Hamill was suddenly reminded of a school trip to the zoo when she was just a twig of a brat with braces. She had gotten the opportunity to enter the veterinary care area along with several others, something about getting to see one of the cuter animals - a baby goat her from the petting zoo her memory insisted - getting a checkup after falling ill. Mere moments after she and the other kids had entered, a tiger in a cage had also been brought into the area, still so drowsy from anesthesia that it hadn't even raised its head from where it was laying against the bars… not until the kids, Hamill included, had rushed over in excitement to see the animal. The moment ten year old little Anna had gotten within maybe three feet of the cage, the tiger had suddenly raised its head and its intense yellow eyes had fixated on hers in a way that had made the little girl forget how to even breathe despite the reassuring steel bars separating them.
Hebert's eyes, in that moment, were an uncomfortable reminder of that tiger.
"... To move this along," Hamill said with a calm that she didn't entirely feel, "though we have yet to finish looking entirely through your daughter's three journals, it swiftly became apparent that Taylor was the subject of an extensive harassment and bullying campaign led and propagated by three individuals in her age group, beginning her freshman year at Winslow-"
"Over a year," Hebert suddenly interrupted. "This… Winslow allowed this to go on for over an entire school year?" He sounded absolutely bewildered, and Hamill had a feeling that bewilderment was genuine. Yet as carefully level and calm as his tone was, a vein began to throb in the side of the man's neck.
"Indeed, Mr Hebert," Hamill confirmed. "We're still questioning several teachers, but it appears that the administration had a policy of giving favorable treatment to two of the girls we're looking at as suspects. One is the star of Winslow's track team, and you know how young athletes always bring the money in for schools - you couldn't count just how many schools try to cover up what their athletes do just to keep the money coming in. The other has a moderately wealthy and successful lawyer for a parent and as such apparently has delusions of wealth and influence."
"And the names of these girls would be?"
Hamill very pointedly gave Hebert a stern look.
"Mr Hebert, if you want any kind of justice for your daughter…" she said warningly, but he swiftly raised his unburned hand.
"I just would like to know who I'm going to be seeing in court over a wrongful death lawsuit," he softly responded. "My daughter was taken from me, Detective. If the courts fail me too, then I'll have to bleed these girls' and their families of every dime I can get from them, along with Winslow. I'm a close friend of a fairly good lawyer."
"Keep in mind Mr Hebert, that our three primary suspects are only suspects, for now," Hamill insisted. "We don't actually know for certain the degree of their involvement with Taylor's death, if at all. Yet."
"Yet?"
Hamill allowed herself a tiny smile and a nod.
"Fortunately, warrants are a very easy thing to obtain given the list of criminal charges involved. One of the suspects is already in the system as a juvenile offender on probation, but has a sealed record; we've already left a message for her parole officer that we're sending a unit to bring her in for questioning and making moves to talk to the other two before the day is over, if possible. That being said, it's entirely possible that the names of one or all of these three girls might be familiar to you. Gimme just a moment here." Hamill made a show of flipping through her documents, though she'd already memorized the names of all three girls. "Ah, here we go. Sophia Hess, Madison Clements and Emma Barnes."
Hebert didn't react until the final name.
Then both of his hands clenched into fists tight enough that his whitening knuckles popped, even as his pupils shrank into pinpricks and his nostrils flared. Hamill had no doubt that if the man hadn't been within the depths of a police station, Hebert would have exploded. Instead he struggled to choke back the rage that made the veins in his neck and temples throb and his face redden.
"Sh-she… Emma…" he hissed out between Jaws that were so tightly clenched, it was a wonder that one of his teeth hadn't cracked. Underneath the anger, it was nearly as easy to see the telltale sting of disbelief and betrayal. Even in Brockton Bay, a surprising number of assaults and murders were still committed by those close to the victim or their family.
It was also as sure a sign as any that, at the very least, Emma Barnes was very well known to Hebert's father.
There were any number of questions that Hamill could have asked in that moment; any number of things that she could have done. She could have firmly emphasized to Hebert that the Barnes girl was at the moment only a suspect until proven otherwise; at the very least she possibly might be able to identify who the guilty party actually was. She could have had him held until he was calmer and rational, which wasn't exactly uncommon when there was a possibility that a victim's family member, lover or friend might jeopardize an investigation.
But Detective Anna Hamill never got to make that decision. Just before she could speak, two things happened. The first was that the lights within the interview room flickered and cut out for a few alarming seconds. The second was the the way the entire police station suddenly shook around them, as if the entire building was a massive gong that had suddenly been struck. The steaming contents of Hebert's coffee cup splashed across the table as it rocked and toppled over, but Hamill was too busy reflexively grabbing the table between them to notice. Of more immediate notice was the dust and flecks of paint and plaster that suddenly fell from the ceiling and the way a crack suddenly along one wall, stretching from the floor nearly all the way to the ceiling.
The shaking stopped just as suddenly as it had begun, leaving Hamill and Hebert staring at each other in alarmed confusion while shouts and screams began traveling throughout the building. Less than ten seconds later, the emergency alert siren began to sound, a shrill screeching consisting of three short tones, followed by three longer tones, then three short again; the old Morse code distress signal. In modern cities like Brockton Bay, it was used to indicate that a major incident had just occurred somewhere in the city and it was all hands on deck, ASAP. Police, fire department, emergency medical services, PRT, the heroes, everyone.
For just a brief second, Hamill and Hebert stared at one another in stunned surprise.
"I need a phone to make sure that the DWA-," Hebert began to say an instant later as both rose at nearly the same time, but Hamill didn't bother letting him finish; most of the city knew by now that more than a few members of the Dockworkers Union worked at various volunteer fire departments across the city. "Front desk, if the pay phones are down ask one of the operators on duty!" Hamill all but yelled. Less than a minute later, all thoughts of the interrupted interview were gone from the woman's conscious mind as the BBPD began mobilizing.
It wouldn't be until much later that anyone would notice that Hebert's spilled coffee had somehow frozen solid.
Or the strange burns that had been left on his chair.
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