- Location
- That place over there.
- Pronouns
- He/Them
Amazing, and I hope Taylor was watching or something so she could see how much like her mom she is.
Night_stalker
Slava Ukraini!
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Oh yeah, def getting interested in thhis more and more.
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.
verycoolname
Not actually cool
…Right, I need the chapter with Reed Richards in court/jail ASAP.
Evilreadermaximu
Unimpressed Asgard
So if I remember the agent's of shield timeline right that means that Daisy's goine AWOL and Whats-his-name has taken over as director.
You can practically hear the click of that landmine arming.
....I'm really hoping that goes public, Richards really needs a 8 course meal of humble pie.
- Location
- San Diego
Ohhh. And Doom will gladly foot that bill for the sheer privilege, just to have a laugh as Richards gets hoisted by his own arrogance.
- Location
- Indiana, US
So if somebody outside this Earth attempts to open a portal into it, will Richard's portal just stop it, or will it cause an explosion? And if so, on which end of the portal or will it be both ends?
- Location
- USA
I feel like this isn't a one time thing. It has been over a decade since I watched a F4 series, but Reed almost destroyed the city/state/country/planet seems very familiar.
Night_stalker
Slava Ukraini!
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Turns out when you think you're thhe smartest man alive, you should probably have someone around to double check the maths/make sure it's something you need to do.
- Location
- Indiana, US
So Reed was the original "move fast and break
Night_stalker
Slava Ukraini!
- Pronouns
- He/Him
"Eh, we don't need fancy rad shhieldign, space is famously lacking in radiation of any kinds!"
Reed before his spaceship journey into a cosmic ray area.
Geas
Meat Thing
This isn't the same Marvel Earth that the MCU and in particular 'Agents of Shield' is set in. That's Earth-199999. However, this Earth can be considered adjacent to that Earth as well as Earth-1610B - the official designation of 'Into the Spider-Verse' Earth. So in tried and true 'hack' writer style, I will shamelessly cherry pick things to flesh out the Earth that this fic uses. Also I always liked Coulson, but I'm not going to transplant his entire MCU story because that won't work for the purposes of this fic. Parts of it though? Oh yeah.
Just let me know if you spot any places where the paint is peeling off of the flex tape that I'm holding everything together with.
Why, whatever do you mean?
The effects of Richards' portal interdiction device (or whatever name I settle in for it) will be expanded on and explained soon in my very best fake science manner.
Evilreadermaximu
Unimpressed Asgard
Other than coulsons subdued non-verbal "Oh crap" reaction? Very well done by the way, very in character.
Also, where the heck is that picture from? I've seen you use it before but I don't recognize it.
Geas
Meat Thing
It's from my very favorite graphic novel franchise Gunnm - also known as Battle Angel Alita - by Yukito Kishiro. Doctor Desty Nova, eccentric, brilliant, absolutely amoral and absolutely terrifying, is the character I constantly use pictures of and one of the major antagonists throughout the series. The manga is separated into three series: Battle Angel Alita, Battle Angel Alita: Last Order, and finally Battle Angel Alita: Mars Chronicle.
"Portals go in, portals go out -- can't explain that!"
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:
- Location
- Tatum, Tx
By the Hoary Hosts of Hoggoth!
The implications are actually there! Reed never closed the portal to the Negative Zone...at least not successfully. And yes, that would result in interference on a quantum level...that could easily result in negative effects on traveller's and portal devices.
The implications are actually there! Reed never closed the portal to the Negative Zone...at least not successfully. And yes, that would result in interference on a quantum level...that could easily result in negative effects on traveller's and portal devices.
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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Night_stalker
Slava Ukraini!
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Oh yes, this is seeing the light of day. It's a truly good read.
- Location
- Tatum, Tx
I never thought that this combination of words would be typed, but here it is: Poor Shadow Stalker
Rachel being the star of AU like this is awesome. Keep up the great work!
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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