As per my usual rules, when something in my snippets thread hits 5 parts or 20K words, I post it. Given there's three 3-4K chapters and I'm almost done with a nearly 10K interlude... yeah, seems inevitable. Might as well.
The premise for this story is simple. An AU butterfly leads to a slightly different Taylor with an incredibly different power.
Given that it's spoiled here in chapter one, I think I'll leave you all to find out what it is for yourselves.
This story will eventually include relationships with incredibly unbalanced power dynamics. The subject, if (hopefully) not my portrayal thereof, can get kind of squicky. I understand if people want to avoid it, hence the warning.
Taylor gets the power to swap out powers. I can think of at least five girls in canon who would love to at least occasionally not have their powers. (Case 53s notwithstanding, since suddenly not having their powers will kill most of them) I think it's weird that I'm drawing a blank on guys for this particular problem, but I'm just the fanfic guy. Taylor's powerset expounded on in more detail in the footnote AN.
All that said, I hope you enjoy the story. It's been fairly fun to write so far.
"Hello, Taylor." Emma crooned, from her place in the ring of girls waiting for me on my way out of homeroom. I bit back the sigh trying to burble out of my throat. I wished she'd just give up or get bored already. "I'm surprised you came back after yesterday."
"I still have some spare shirts." I said with a shrug. Then I had to reposition the duffel bag Dad had lent me to replace my backpack. Yesterday was art, and they tried to make 'modern art' of me. I had to shower and head home early in my gym clothes, to dispose of the paint-soiled apparel.
She nearly growled in response. "No one wants you here, Taylor!"
"Dad does. Well, not here, but at school." I stated, the words slipping out in a bored near-monotone droll. I'd been mouthing back more often lately, feeling more frustrated, more pressured.
"That lip is going to get you bruised, worm." Sophia said as she stepped forward to loom over me. We were both tall and wiry, but I was slumped over to present a smaller target.
"Yesterday I was a chicken for leaving early, the day before that a frog, and before that a cockroach. You could at least try for some taxonomic consistency." It was harder to keep myself from lashing back, and I was having trouble caring anymore. I was just so tired.
Her fist snapped into my mouth, sure enough splitting my lip and knocking me back. I took a moment to run my tongue over my teeth, testing them. One was loose, but none were chipped. "You wanna say that again?" She hissed.
This time I let the sigh escape. There really was no winning here. They'd never understand anything but violence, and probably wouldn't stop until someone was dead. I backed into the wall and slid to the floor. If I presented a pathetic enough scene the teachers might actually break things up if she kept at it. No one would get in trouble for it, but some buffer was better than none.
"Stay down." Sophia spat- almost literally- and left. The others followed, with Emma trailing behind last. She gave me a victorious smirk and giggled until I lost sight of her.
There really was no point to staying anymore, was there? I'd given it the old college try. I stood and walked straight out the door, uncaring of who saw me. The teachers knew what I dealt with, anyone that reported me could go fuck themselves.
I caught the next bus homeward, connecting to another, and then made my way back. The walk in the chill early December air helped clear my head and soothe the bruises. I passed Dad's beat up truck, habitually stepped over the formerly rotten step, and let myself in.
"Taylor, is that you?" Dad called up from the basement.
"Who else has keys, Dad?" I sniped back, causing him to laugh. I tossed the bag to the side and made my way into the kitchen. "...hey, Mom."
"You're home early." She said, in her usual slow cadence. She turned, the little wires connected to her implants swinging like jewelry as her dull eyes met mine. "What's wrong, Little Owl?"
I winced, having forgotten to smile. Every time I frowned where she could see it, she'd say those same words. 'What's wrong, Little Owl?' in the same exact tone, with the same exact cadence. Maybe a third of the time whenever I just wasn't smiling, but if I was frowning? Every. Single. Time.
It was uncanny, and I hated it. "Just the bullies again." I replied.
"I could still do something about them, if you'd like?" Dad said from behind me, wiping something dark red and somewhat sticky off his hands with a rag. He passed me, stopped to peck Mom on the cheek, and then washed his hands properly at the sink.
No, Dad. I don't want you to sic your Tinker zombies on the school. I very much didn't want to tell him it was Emma doing it, because then either she or Alan- if not both- would wind up dead. He hadn't actually killed anyone yet as far as I could tell, but a lot of moral quandaries fell to the wayside when you were already crafting sins against any god that might actually be out there. "I think I want to transfer out." I replied instead.
Dad slumped, while Mom gave him a soft but victorious smile. "I'm glad, honey." She said, in her usual slow way, with a bit more pause than should be there just for picking an epithet. Some change was inevitable after being dead for something like half a year, even if her brain was being cleaned up and maintained for most of it. Her memory was mostly intact, but her mannerisms were similar yet subtly wrong. Like it was just a computer filtering her memory into an if/then decision chain.
I'd never say it out loud, though. Mom had it rough enough, and Dad was still a bit touchy over having lost her at all.
"We should have done so ages ago." She continued.
I let her have the little victory, Dad cheering up just seeing her smile after a few moments. "So, what's for lunch?" I asked to change the subject.
"Grilled sandwiches." Mom replied after a moment of thought. "I'll make more." She stood again, moving back to assembling food and grabbing a few more ingredients. About seven minutes later she was pulling six grilled Reubens out of the oven.
Two were for me, as a 'growing young woman', while three went to fuel whatever Mom's body did to maintain itself. After lunch Mom and I went upstairs to the computer to double check the process to request a transfer between public schools, while Dad went back to Tinkering in the basement.
About half an hour into our search there was a loud knock on the door. A beat passed as I shared a confused look with Mom. Then another pounding at the door.
We both knew it'd take a while for Dad to get up to the door, so Mom followed as I snuck out to the top of the stairs to listen. My window looked over the backyard, so that wasn't an option. We could have moved into the master room and opened a window there, but also didn't want any chance of someone spotting Mom. A third pounding was followed by, "PRT! Open the door!"
The look we shared after that was concerned. Dad finally made it to the door. "What do you want?" He asked. We couldn't see them from where we were, but knew they couldn't see us either.
"Daniel Hebert?"
"Of all the times to have the name right… again, what do you want? Are you sure you're not after Dan Herbert down the street?"
"Wrong Union, we checked. Can we come in? Less visibility inside."
"...no, I think not. What is this about?"
"You've been indicated as a likely parahuman, which wouldn't be our business if it weren't the police kicking a criminal investigation over to us."
"Criminal? I haven't hurt anyone!"
"Convenient choice of words, sir. They noted odd activity consistent with certain parahuman habits, and a lack of money trail for the acquisition of likely Tinker materials. We don't have to have a problem, mister Hebert. We just need to know what you've been up to and whether we can work around it. We can still make a deal to smooth things over, from what I've seen."
"Why were they watching me?" Dad asked. The guy tried to deny being able to answer, but was cut off. "No, there's a reason, and we're going to have problems if they aren't valid ones." There was audible rage bleeding into Dad's voice now.
I felt Mom moving behind me, and watched her calmly pull several bags from the closets, and fill the last bits of empty space in them with keepsakes we'd prefer not to lose. Mom's flute, the little birth certificate poster with my footprints inked on it, the cufflinks grandpa passed on to Dad when he'd taken over as Spokesman for the Union, their engagement rings, Mom's laptop…
By then I'd stopped watching, silently hoping it was all unnecessary.
"Someone… noted drastic changes to your behavior. They informed the police, because… they thought you were on drugs."
Ah. Yeah. After I'd found out about Mom, Dad demoted himself from Head of Hiring to the part-time 'Assistant' Head of Hiring to have more time to 'appreciate what he'd been taking for granted'. He was still the spokesman, but… after we got Mom back… I can see how his mental 180 from 'driven broken shell of himself' to the 'chipper family man' he'd been after would be alarming. Frankly given that it seemed odd it'd taken this long for them to drop in.
"I see." Dad said, and I could hear the hurt in his voice. He knew as well as I did the only people who cared about us these days were his fellow Dockworkers.
"We need to take you downtown for an interview, and search your home. For what it's worth, I'm sorry, mister Hebert."
"So am I." Dad said immediately before I heard the door slam shut. "Time to go!" He called up to us.
Even locked, ours was not the sturdiest of doors. It took the guy outside two tries to kick it in, just barely enough for Dad to scramble into view.
A piercing shriek sounded out behind me, and I covered my ears in pain, turning to find Mom removing her fingers from her mouth. "Ferdinand, heel!" She yelled.
The black-clad stormtrooper falling upon Dad startled as well, from the sound and the fact that he wasn't alone in the house. And then from the answering squeal of tearing metal from the basement.
"You were…" the goon muttered just loud enough that my ringing ears could catch it. "Back, back!" He called to the others. It turned out there was a whole squad of troopers flooding into the house, now backing to the far side of the living room.
We found ourselves in a standoff, Mom and I coming down the stairs to join him, three large bags slung on Mom's back. There was a whuffing and stampede of footsteps from the basement as Ferdinand made his appearance. A cyborg Mastiff twice my size and at least four times my weight, followed by several much smaller dogs.
He was our guard dog, and the cages were set up such that removing his own door would rip the others free as well. The suddenly outnumbered troopers pulled guns and soaker sprayers, pointing them at Dad and the dogs.
"My god…" one of the two who didn't arm themselves said, voice obviously female. "You're Annette. You're supposed to be dead."
I could hear Mom's smile as the words slowly formed. "Rumors of my untimely demise have been greatly exaggerated."
"And you were supposed to be at school. Fuck." She obviously meant me, but the thought fled my mind as she pulled her helmet off, to show a face hidden by a gray domino mask. "This doesn't have to be a fight. Please, just come quietly." Battery asked.
The man beside her also removed his helmet, his mask red. "We don't have to do this. Think of your family." Assault- the voice I recognized from the door- added.
"I am." Dad stated in cold fury. "I can't lose them again. I can't."
"What happens to Mom?" I asked.
They both winced. "That's complicated…" Assault answered. "We didn't know about her, and… we can't be sure what she actually is."
"We have her death records. She has a grave, she was buried… god…" Battery added unhelpfully.
"What happens to the Tinkertech zombie?" I asked, more forcefully. My answer was a pair of guns shifting from the dogs to point at Mom.
"I swear, we'll do everything we can, but… there's no winning here." Assault said, apologetically. "We have to bring you in."
Mom and Dad glanced at each other, sharing a silent conversation. Mom's eyes grew sad, and Dad's frown grew. His eyebrows knit, and my heart broke. The dogs would buy us a second or two, before the guns made quick work of them. It was unlikely they'd care about shooting Mom, and neither of us would leave without her.
They'd given up. Mom sat back onto the stairs we'd come down, while Dad slowly raised his hands. The PRT were going to arrest Dad, put him in jail for stealing or tax evasion or some other thing they could probably make stick. Maybe they'd have him make things for them, but no one would let him work on people. Even bringing a powerful cape back from the dead, to use on Endbringers or just keep around in problem cities… they'd have to assume he'd make them loyal to himself above the PRT, and that he'd eventually have enough power to break himself out.
I couldn't even see them letting him keep working on Mom. I had no illusions on the fact that she was Tinkertech, and Tinkertech breaks. Every time he came up with something new, something better, or got better materials, she was the first thing he'd work on after a proof of concept. Upgrading, updating, improving. Everything that was still visible were things that couldn't be changed or that didn't matter anymore. The wires and cables crossing her skin? Just redundant backups that don't matter anymore. They were left around because they wouldn't break anything if they tore out, and because they didn't care about the way they looked. It was possible Mom couldn't care about that, even though she still wore nice clothes and a bit of makeup. I was ashamed to admit I liked that she couldn't move about in complete silence because of them. I loved Mom, I did… but still…
I loved them both. I didn't want to lose either of them. Me? I'd probably wind up in foster care. Maybe they'd stick me with a PRT family, like a medieval hostage-princess used to secure an unsteady alliance. There'd be nothing for me then, just a life of being watched and used as a tool to keep my father in line.
There was no pain as I fell to my knees. The world was pulling away, everything distant. My breath hitched, and suddenly I was choking. Tears were welling in my eyes, as darkness crept in at the edges.
This was it. This was the end. My life is over. I might as well be dead.
I woke with a start as gunfire filled the room.
Pushing myself up, I watched as half a dozen men whittled more than a dozen dogs to five in the time it took them to collide. Snarling cyborg dogs met troopers clad in kevlar and chainmail, biting into whatever they could reach. Ferdinand swatted a second aside as he barreled his target to the ground, crushing the man's forearm in his jaws and then biting again, this time crunching down on the helmet and shaking it.
The other men fared better. Two were wrestling with scratching vices attached to their arms, while a third was still pouring rounds into the body of a doberman who didn't need organs to keep itself latched onto his calf. The last of them managed to back through the door, chased by a patch-furred scottie dog that made for a terrible target given its small size.
The dazed trooper with a soaker was getting up, and I scrambled to my feet and kicked him in the side of his head. The angle should jar his brain, and my power let me turn the kinetic energy that would have bled into my foot into extra force. It should be enough to knock him out, or at least keep him down for a few seconds.
His helmet crunched, his neck let out a sickening crack, and he fell limp.
I stared for half a second, eyes glancing over to the screaming men who still had guns. Time for that later.
Also, Powers? Shut up, shut up, shut up-
Hopping over Ferdinand, I tackled the last guy who was upright. My left hand kept his gun away while my right pressed against his faceless helmet, slamming his head into the ground as carefully as I could. It took three tries before the gun was slack enough in his hand that I could take it, and I gave him one more to hopefully keep him down.
Sometime during that, one of the dogs managed to bite into the tank on the other soaker-thing, which started spewing out an off-white foam before it popped like one of those tins of ready-bake biscuits. The cloud puffed out around them, covering that corner of the room, and the other wrestling trooper, along with both of those dogs. I backed away, just barely able to escape before it quickly seemed to firm up and turn more of a beige.
By now Mom, Dad, and Assault were groggily getting up. Why were they down? I'd barely noticed in the adrenaline-fueled chaos, but all of us must have fainted at the same time. Something in the back of my mind whispered that they weren't threats, and I'd ignored them because of it. Why was I up so much faster than them, anyway? Especially the trained heroes?
Questions for later. "Dad!" I tossed him the gun, which bounced off his chest and clattered next to him. He gave it a dumbfounded look. I didn't have time for this. I reached down and grabbed Assault by the back of his tac vest, slamming him into the wall. His hand swung up into the side of my face, which impacted with a dull thud that I redirected into the floor through my feet.
"You… my…" He muttered, then his eyes cleared and he stared down at me from where I was holding him against the wall. "You're a Hatchet Face. Fuck."
I knew I wasn't pretty, but seriously? I rammed my knee up into his groin, which must have hurt like a bitch even though it felt like the codpiece in the armor held up. "Rude."
"Jus-... just don't hurt anyone else, alright?" I saw him glance over my shoulder, where I knew Battery was still on the ground. How did I know that? My eyes narrowed as I stopped to think about it. Battery, Dad, Mom, about five feet behind me and a foot to my right, six feet diagonal right, five feet to my right. I glanced around to confirm it.
I dropped him, walked over to grab the other soaker-thing, full of that foam they use to take down capes. I didn't know they came compact like this, I'd only seen them with those big packs on their backs… I fiddled with it until I found the safety mechanism, an extra button you had to hold down for the trigger to move, and then I glued Assault's legs to the floor, before doing the same to Battery. She was finally waking up, but groggy.
By comparison, Mom had been standing when I checked, and had moved forward to loom over Assault. Dad was standing around, holding the gun like it was, well… a deadly weapon he only superficially knew how to use. Hrm. "Mom, grab the guns?" We might need them, and she was more likely to be comfortable around them. I'd just tossed the one to dad because… …yeah, that was another thing I could unpack later. "Dad, the dogs?"
He jumped, coughed, and called, "heel!" Of them, only Ferdinand could properly obey. The rest tried, their bodies twitching and legs flailing, but they couldn't comply with the order. "We'll… have to leave them." He admitted with a grimace.
"It's not over. We can still fix this." Assault called up to us. I gave him a petulant glare and waved at the two troopers I knew were dead. "It's… that can…"
I squirted a dab of foam into his mouth. Or tried to, anyway. "Shut up." I told him, surprised by how tired I sounded. Yeah, today had been a bit much, hadn't it? I turned to my parents. "Let's just… go."
"Backup lab six, I think." Dad stated.
I bit back a snort at the stupid joke paying off. He'd told me a story once about a frat house letting three pigs loose on campus, labeled one through four, and how they'd kept looking for the missing 'pig 2' for days. I'd never been to any of his labs, but knew he had three of them. 'Three' 'Six' and 'Seven'. From the incredulous look Assault gave him, it was paying off.
Mom had taken the duffel I'd left by the door, dumped out the books, and filled it with all the guns and ammo she could strip off the troopers. Then she moved to start adding books from the shelves in the living room, and I didn't have the heart to tell her to leave them. "Truck?" I asked Dad. He nodded, and I grabbed the bags Mom had dropped by the stairs. They were surprisingly light, which explained how Mom could carry all…
Huh.
Mom had powers. I just knew. I tried not to believe it, but something in my brain insisted. She had powers. I followed the thought, which settled onto where I knew she was. Then back to myself, where I felt… strong. A sense of strength, like I was stronger and tougher than I should be. I tried the same with Assault, and found that instinctual reaction that let me redirect force around me, as well as a sense of… the room, I suppose? I knew what would happen if anything fell, or hit me, or if I hit them, or… my brain started parsing it as math, vectors and trajectories.
From Dad, I got the sense that something was there, but that was it.
All I got from Battery was a garbled mess.
I tried not to think about it too much, and moved to help mom grab books instead. Dad took the excuse to dash downstairs for a couple of tools after telling Ferdinand to 'stay'. A couple minutes later, we were leaving. Assault yelled through his gag, while Battery was muttering like she was concussed. I really hoped they had an ambulance on the way, but I wasn't feeling charitable enough to call one myself.
The scottie was dead in the yard, and the trooper it was chasing in a nondescript van speaking quietly into a radio. When he saw us, he reached out to slam the door shut and ducked lower, but it looked like he was still on the radio. Calling for backup, situation report, debriefing, whatever step he was on by now, we'd given him about three minutes and I wasn't sure what all he could have managed in that time. "We need to go." I told Dad, who nodded.
He tapped the bed on his way past and said "Up!" which was all Ferdinand needed to clamber in. Mom and I tossed our bags in on our way to the passenger door. I dove in while Dad checked the truck, which still started just fine. By the time Mom was in, he seemed satisfied that they hadn't thought to sabotage the old thing.
I couldn't help but look back at the old house while we peeled away. I was going to miss our house. "So… what now?"
Dad drummed his fingers along the steering wheel in thought. "Honey? Call Kurt."
Mom nodded, dug out her cell, and put it on speaker. While it was ringing, I felt a snap as two of the powers I was holding were returned to their owners. The feeling was unpleasant, but not painful. I suppose this meant I had a range, since I couldn't even feel Assault or Battery anymore. My thoughts were interrupted when Kurt finally picked up.
"Annette? What's wrong? You never call me, and never when we're working."
"Kurt?" Dad called after clearing his throat. "Bad day. We'll need a bunker. Probably ditch the truck, in case it's bugged."
"...fuck. Alright. Where should we meet?"
"You remember that boarded up smoke shop on Thompson?"
Kurt hemmed and hummed. "The one Frankie set on fire that one time?"
Dad chuckled. "Yup."
"Yeah… yeah I can be there in ten."
"Thanks, owe you one."
"Fuck off." Kurt replied in a tone that indicated Dad clearly didn't, and hung up.
"So… what now?" I asked.
Mom bumped my shoulder with hers. "You're not going back to school for a while."
Dad and I broke into fits of startled laughter, not expecting the joke. For all the shit today had been… it helped.
Original plan was to cut out at the trigger, but it wound up well under the wordcount I'd expected for that. I try to have these snippets at least 3K, and it was about 2300 there.
What you didn't see: All the capes dropping, one of the troopers shouting "Trigger!" and them opening up on the dogs. They're trained, and they reacted. It just wasn't quite enough because I kinda' needed Tay and the dogs to kick their asses. XD
Hatchet Face: Why should Taylor know every member of the Slaughterhouse Nine? HF targets capes. He then plays around in the vast, deep shadow of the rest of the nine when he runs out of capes. Which just doesn't happen in the sort of big cities that have survivors. Jack, Shatterbird, Bonesaw, Siberian. Those are the ones she probably knows.
Taylor's cape name is going to be Hotswap. (As designated by the PRT once they figure out her actual power, since we know how Taylor is with names. Danny's getting stuck with Frankenstein, no matter how much the family hates the reference because Victor Frankenstein was an asshole. Annette may or may not get one, I haven't decided yet) Her power allows her to swap the powers of any parahuman within her large (Skitter-ish) range. She can detect parahumans within said range (but can't tell who they are unless she's very familiar with their power, no big neon sign saying what they do) and doesn't need line of sight to swap powers. Every Parahuman can hold one power, and each starts with one power.
Eidolon, the Fairy Queen, grab bags (Goddess, March, Circus, etc), the Butcher… all one power, one slot, according to Taylor's power. The only exception to this rule is Taylor herself, who has three 'blank' slots she can use to swap with others. So she could technically swap for Eidolon, Glaistic Uaine, and Butcher, rocking like thirty powers at once (because their own slots are still part of their one power) without breaking these rules.
Most powers come with a user manual (which she can only access while holding said power), and most of the time swapping powers doesn't actually hurt anyone involved. Vial capes are the exceptions, because reasons. Taylor will not be as good as the original user, simply because she doesn't steal any of their experience with said power. This isn't going to matter too much though, since there really isn't any way to fight her head-on. This Taylor runs on Jack Slash rules; Parahumans cannot win and normal humans aren't much better.
Danny is somewhere between Blasto and Cranial, as a brain tinker with minions. Can't really clone things, needs parts, but better control and smarter drones than Blasto. Annette is just your basic low-to-mid tier Brute who triggered during the crash but died anyway. Triggering can heal some wounds, but it doesn't always do so, and wouldn't work anyway if you're impaled on something and black out from blood loss. For some reason, Triggering didn't save Annette. I don't really care why, story needs her to be a cyborg zombie and her having a simple power Taylor could have instinctively grabbed made escaping the house work from a story and choreography standpoint.
"Taylor, you've gotten so big!" Lacey called when we got out of the truck. She strode over and swept me into a hug. I finally let Mom's power go just to be safe, before I hugged her back. Lacey was a tall broad woman used to physical labor, so she was tougher than most men. I still felt leery squeezing anything I didn't mind breaking while holding a Brute power I didn't know the full measure of. She still grunted when I was done. "Feedin' you well, eh? Not the twig your dad is."
"I can still bench two hundred, you know." Dad muttered childishly.
"Such a baby." Lacey whispered to me. "How you holdin' up, Rose?" She called over my shoulder to Mom.
"I've been better." Mom answered, fully pausing in her task of moving the bags over to their hatchback to do so.
"Ain't that the truth… Look, I'll take Danny's truck over to the DWA, and then I'll stop by tomorrow or something if they don't grab me for bein' in it, yeah?"
Dad nodded and tossed Lacey his keys. "Heel." He called, and Ferdinand hopped down out of the bed. The spot he'd been laying was a large reddish-black puddle of goop that'd leaked from his bullet wounds, but he didn't seem hampered by them. "Sit." He commanded again, pointing into the back of the car. I really hoped the cheap plastic interior was as easy to clean as it looked, for Ferdy gave it no thought at all.
We all piled in, with me in the passenger seat and my parents in the middle row with its tinted windows. They each had a bag on their lap, and a couple between them on the seat and floorboard. "Where to?" Kurt asked, as Lacey drove off. With any luck the Union could still make use of the truck for the couple years it likely had left in it.
"Lab Three." Dad answered. I wasn't sure if he'd changed his mind or was just bluffing with Assault, but I didn't have enough context to question it.
"Righto." And we were off, taking a winding route through the docks until we came to an old machine shop that'd been boarded over. The door was visibly busted, and it was only the blinking security camera that gave any hint someone still cared about the building.
The inside was better than I expected, but those had been pretty low from the exterior. The place was mostly an empty shell, with a few offices taking up the couple floors on one side and a stack of rusting equipment shoved into the far corner opposite those from us. In the corners above the offices were another pair of cameras pointed diagonally across the building. The floor itself was a patchwork of concrete and steel hatches, looking like they might be the sort of wells you'd find car jacks in, in car shops. Each was barred to the floor with a padlock, and while there was grime everywhere, I was surprised at how little dust was around.
Dad wandered through, leaning down to grab the padlock for the middle-left hatch and pull it up, hasp and all. It only looked like it was locked. In the well were a few grease stains, mounting points for what was likely a hydraulic lifter, and a steel door to one side with several heavy-duty locks on it. He fished another set of keys from his pocket and started undoing them.
"Are we going to be safe here?" I asked. "I mean, who owns the building? If it's the Union, won't they check all of those?"
Dad paused, and finished the last of the locks, pulling the door open. The hinges were unexpectedly silent, and beyond the door was a cement staircase. Dad started talking as he led us down. "The DWA is affiliated with over one hundred and sixty buildings in the city, most of them defunct or defaulted without anyone actually taking them off our books for some reason or other. This place was sold to a startup whose check bounced. Technically the bank owns it, but they never came for the keys, and I struck it from our records anyway. So there's no link back to the DWA without scouring the paper records for anything I might've missed." By then we'd reached the bottom, and one last lock let us into what looked like an old bomb shelter. "Which they might do, but it'll take time to search every building. I'm still pretty sure they won't find any link to here, but if they do…" He led us down the hall and to a small room with a few old CRT screens that he booted up. They showed the views from the cameras I'd seen, including one in the stairwell I hadn't noticed. "They might ignore the locks, or might cut them all off. We still have time, then. It's not perfect, but we can try to rush out while the critters keep them occupied."
That sounded okay, but… "Who's going to watch the cameras?"
Dad shrugged. "I'll make a critter for it. Maybe a bird. They see anyone they don't recognize, they sound an alarm." And Dad's zombies didn't get bored. They were more computer than animal, in a lot of ways.
"We can also prep the other two." Kurt cut in. "If you think this one's been made, you know?"
"What're the other two?"
"A smuggling tunnel under a fish cannery, and another bomb shelter like this one. I had plans for a couple more, but never got around to them." He lead us back out to the hallway. "Anyway, here's storage." He waved to the right, the other two doors on the same side as the security room. "This here's the lab." He led us through the only door on the left, into a living-room setup that'd been co-opted for mad science. There were a couple benches, a tool rack, a couple large bathtub-style vats that were currently empty, and six kennel-cages with cyborg animals hibernating within. "Bathroom." He pointed to the left. "Kitchen" Then the right. "And I've got a couple cots I can set up in the other storage room." Which was straight ahead.
"Where do you get all the dogs, anyway?" Kurt mumbled, seeing four more of them in the cages. I got the feeling he'd kept distant from the Cape side of Dad's villainy until now, and I couldn't blame him.
Dad chuckled. "Mostly buy them off the Empire. Why throw them out when you can make a quick buck selling them to someone I'm pretty sure they think works at a Chinese restaurant?"
"Fucking racists." Kurt scoffed.
"I know, right? Dog's way more expensive than pork or beef here in the States." Kurt gave Dad a dirty look, and groaned when his shit-eating grin refused to fade. It was a terrible joke, but… Dads. "Best part is paying them with their own money." Dad continued. "Speaking of…" He pulled a few bundles of dirty bills from one of the bags, and started putting them on a shelf in the closet closest to the door.
Having followed him, I got to see what else was in there. "What the hell…?"
Dad glanced back and followed my gaze. "Aha!" He pulled a stained and threadbare jacket off the rack, holding the stinking article up to himself. "Hobo chic! Best way to wander out to buy supplies. No one looks twice at the homeless here in the docks."
I groaned, not really able to refute it. Mom followed us in, and started unloading the guns onto the other end of the shelf Dad was piling money on. There was already a plastic tub full of money on another shelf, looking like bundles of ones, fives, and twenties. "How much do we have?"
"Here?" Dad asked, giving the piles a once-over. "Maaaaybe fifty thousand? Enough to live on for a while, anyway. Still going to need to steal materials, but that was always the case."
Mom hummed, pausing in her work setting things out. "We could press the gangs harder. Attack, instead of sneak."
"Hey, the racoons have gotten us everything we've needed so far."
"So far." Mom reiterated, colder than usual.
"You know I don't want to paint a target on our backs." Dad tried more softly, repeating arguments I'd heard before.
Mom raised her hands to indicate the bunker we were standing in. "Too late."
"The contingencies-"
"If they can find us, so can the Empire." Mom continued as if he hadn't spoken, turning a sad gaze my way.
Dad followed her eyes. "Yeah… I don't want Taylor to wind up in a Hitler Youth camp, either." He ran his hands through his thinning hair and muttered curses under his breath. "That was going to be another of the PRT's 'sticks' wasn't it?" Mom tilted her head in reply. "Yeah. Shit." His eyes dropped to the guns. "What've we got?"
"Three SMGs, four magazines, three partials. Five pistols, seven magazines, three… need to check. Six tasers, twelve cartridges. Three flashbangs. Two tear gas. No foam… Tinkertech."
"They might have had tracking chips. Good thinking." He looked like he wanted to start pacing or fidgeting. "That's a lot, for the three of us."
"Fuck off." Kurt called from the other room.
"You wanna shoot at Hookwolf or Purity, Kurt?" Silence answered him. He turned back to us. "I don't want to get anyone involved if I don't have to. I don't… I'm not that good in a fight. Scrap a little, but anything more serious than a pub brawl…"
"Mom and I can handle th-"
"NO!" He snapped, causing Mom and I to jump. He winced. "No… I… I don't want you to be in danger, either."
"Dad, we'll have backup from your-" zombies "-critters, right? And my power's really strong as long as there are other capes around."
"What is it, anyway?" He asked, a hint of curiosity working its way back into his voice. I took it as a win.
"I can steal powers. No… that's wrong." It didn't feel quite right, when I said it like that. "I can… borrow them. Swap them around. Actually…" I could feel both of their powers in my mind. Like weights settled on something extending far outside my body. Presences that my attention was drawn to, and always aware of. I knew I could tug on them, and they'd come loose enough for me to grab ahold of. What I didn't know was if I could swap other people's powers.
So I stared, scrunching up my face as I tried to focus on stretching a muscle I wasn't sure existed. Reached out to both of their powers, and instead of pulling them to me… after a moment of intense mental gymnastics, I felt their powers pop free, snapping back into place in new homes.
"Whoa…" Dad muttered, glancing at his flexing hands, and then looking around. He grabbed another bit of the homeless garb, a set of jeans, and strained. A hole ripped itself into a previously whole section of the pants' leg.
Mom was quietly inspecting what she could see of her implants with new eyes.
"That. I can do that." A stray thought came to mind. "Did you know Mom had powers?"
He looked at her, and she slowly glanced up at him. "I… wasn't sure. If it was still there." He admitted. "She's always been a bit trickier to work on, but that could have been nerves."
I suppose that made sense. Mom was 'dead' for about half a year. I had no idea what state her brain had been in, or how powers actually worked. I mean, it seemed like it wasn't a thing each person just had. I was pretty sure I wasn't swapping pieces of brain, so the powers must be coming from somewhere else, right? The things in our brains just… receivers, or something.
That felt right. Like I was just tuning people to a different signal. I briefly considered trying to set Mom and Dad's brain to the same signal, but something stopped me. A bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. It… wasn't something I wanted to try with people I cared about.
"Well, I can swap powers." I said more confidently. "And I can hold more than one. No matter what fight I drop in on, I'll be the strongest person there, because I can just take their power."
Dad considered this. "But… you need powers, then. What about a bunch of normal people?"
"When was the last time you heard about a bunch of normal people going after a cape?" I shot back.
"Well if that's the thing that works…" He pressed.
"So I just make sure I've got capes in my range. It's a pretty big range."
He took a deep breath. "We'll… talk about this later." He glanced at Mom for her input.
She'd been watching placidly as we bounced back and forth. That kind of rapid argument wasn't something she could actually dive in the middle of, anymore. "Later." She agreed.
"So, uhh…" Kurt cut in awkwardly. "I should probably head out. I don't think I'll be missed, but I should still finish off my work for the day."
"Mortgage waits for no man." Dad agreed, pulling his friend into a brief manly hug before sending him on his way and locking up behind him. "So, more tour? I should show you the internet." He led us into the 'bedroom' where he showed off a complicated-looking setup where a pre-paid phone was sitting in a faraday cage with a router, set to act as a mobile wifi hub while cables let them actually do their jobs through the cage. Apparently the one from the phone was set up to run an antenna to the roof for a better signal. Unless someone actually searched the building for the source, it should just look like some hobo with a cell phone squatting in the building. Mom's laptop was plugged into the router, and left powered down for now.
We could probably use it for calls, too. We'd left all our cell phones in the truck, after all. I hadn't thought much of leaving mine at the time, since it was just a cheap flip-phone that'd be easily replaced when someone broke it. It wasn't like I had anyone to call, anyway.
"Now, we've got some canned food, but nothing perishable. So I'm going to swing by a convenience store. Bread, milk, maybe new cell phones… this part of town, hopefully they'll just think it's a Merchant dealer on payday."
I wasn't sure who the Merchants were, but I trusted that Dad knew what he was talking about. He grabbed one of the stacks of small bills and left. I tried to make busy-work looking them up on Mom's laptop, but couldn't focus.
"What's wrong, Little Owl?" Mom asked.
"It's nothing." I lied. Mom just sat down next to me and waited patiently. A few minutes later, I cracked. "It's… the house. What happened."
"Trigger." She stated. When I gave her a confused look she asked, "Powers?"
When I got my powers. "I don't think that's it." I still had my family. We'd lost… basically everything else, but we could always build a new home. We could always get new things.
People couldn't be replaced.
My eyes started to water against my will. "I… I killed someone." Would she hate me? "It was an accident…" If we'd just killed them all, we'd have had time for Dad to fix them, a traitorous part of my mind insisted. I couldn't help the mad giggle as the tears began to fall.
Mom scooted closer, pulling me into a hug. "I love you."
The floodgates opened, and I started sobbing into her chest. "It was an accident… he was just doing his job!"
"I love you, Little Owl." She repeated, rubbing small circles on my back.
My breath hitched, and I started to hiccup. My voice cracked as I kept repeating myself, rubbing tears and snot into her blouse the whole while. Always, she would tell me she loved me.
Mommy still loved me.
Dad returned at some point during all this, but left us alone. He was never the best at dealing with feelings. It was enough that when we finally started collecting ourselves, there was already a kettle of water nearly boiling on a hotplate, and a couple boxes of tea and cocoa from the store.
We made sandwiches for dinner. Afterward, I begged off and tried to get some sleep. After half an hour of tossing and turning, I called out. "Mom?"
"Yes, sweetie?"
"Could you… play your flute?"
With no further prompting, she moved to the bags and dug through one for her flute. I finally drifted off to sleep to a slow, haunting melody.
I snapped instantly to awareness, the room dark around me. Mom and Dad were asleep, and I started searching for what woke me up. There above us, I could feel another weight on the world with my power. Far above us. Whoever it was had to be flying. They quickly cut from one edge of my power to another, a few buildings over and maybe a block upward at the closest point.
For a bit I pondered who it might have been. The most likely were Purity or Glory Girl, but it might have been Dauntless or that Empire witch-girl. Maybe Aegis or one of the Tinkers.
The whole line of thought was ultimately unhelpful, since we hadn't been found. Well, at the very least it was some comfort knowing no capes were going to be sneaking up on us. With some significant effort, I finally managed to get back to sleep.
Affiliated With = Has the keys to. The DWA doesn't own more than a hundred buildings. They might not even have a dozen, these days. But there's loads of places that gave the Union keys back in the day so the guys could just come in and do whatever job, and then later never changed their locks. Danny had access to said keys, and so every one of those buildings is a place he might be hiding out at. That's the sort of sweep that's not worth the expenditure of time or manpower, which is the point. They're still going to search places, it just won't be over a hundred of them. Maybe the top twenty or so candidates after they sort through the ones they can find, which Danny is hoping won't include these three.
Taylor, being a second-gen, didn't have to fall nearly as far to Trigger. She isn't really bothered by it, and doesn't have the same level of Trigger fixation a first-gen usually does. She's never really going to detach "I don't want to lose my family" from "I have trauma related to taking any of my important people away from me" in a way that'll let her examine it properly.
QA used Assault and Battery being there as an excuse to manifest a Trump power, but Taylor could have had anything. Master from her isolation at school and losing her family, Thinker from having a sudden shock upend a long-standing issue, Tinker from having a sudden shock upend a long-standing issue, Striker from having a threat right in front of her, Blaster from having a threat outside touch range in front of her, Shaker from being surrounded while her world crumbled around her, Changer from having society betray her by rejecting her family, Stranger from the unwanted attention this revelation would bring down on them… An argument cold be made for Mover, trying to escape a bad situation. Maybe a group-teleporter or something.
About the only ones that don't work at all are Breaker (Trigger under an altered mental state; Drugs, delirium, psychosis, etc.) and Brute (Trigger due to injury). Even Trump could be argued that it should be Trigger while under the effects of a power, but Jack proves that's not necessary. And QA is a cheating cheater who cheats.
I'm always very deliberate with everything Annette says.
She didn't say it was okay, because it wasn't. She didn't say it was just an accident, because someone was still dead. She didn't say she understood, because while she has experience with violence and death, she really can't know what her daughter is thinking or feeling. No platitudes, no explanations, no philosophizing.
I woke much slower the next morning, the first thing in my perception the weights on the world from Mom and Dad, then the rest of my senses trickling to life over the course of a few minutes. Ten minutes later I was finally waking up with a cup of Darjeeling while we had a rudimentary breakfast of toast, eggs, and fried spam.
"So, what are our options going forward?" I asked, still worn out from yesterday.
"What do you mean?" Dad asked back.
"Just… everything. I don't know. Are we just going to hide forever?"
Dad glanced at Mom, who shot him a dry look. "Well, uh. I suppose not."
"So, what are our options?" I pressed.
Dad took the time to fidget and think. "Well, we can't join an existing group in the Bay. Faultline wouldn't appreciate the heat my powers would bring down, Coil is kind of an ass, and the rest of the gangs are a mess of human rights violations."
"Who's Coil?"
"Creepy mastermind type. Tried to recruit me a while back. Started out all… too nice, and kindly. Suspicious. Then got hostile almost overnight and barely talked to me since. I've got no clue what his issue was, but we haven't actually butted heads professionally."
Ugh. Sounded like a drama queen. "So we're on our own."
"Unless we want to move, yeah."
"Where would we go?"
He sighed. "Everywhere has its issues. Any group big enough to support a Tinker has some sticking point or other. Accord in Boston is probably the best bet, but he's a bad fit for a Tinker on staff. We can be… flighty, chaotic… not all there all the time. A perfectionist who'll kill you for tucking your shirt wrong is… not good for that."
"He sounds crazy."
"Most villains are." He said with a chuckle. "No idea how accurate the stories are, but it's not worth the risk."
"So it's just us." The confirmation was a bit disheartening, but I hadn't really expected much else.
"If you want it to be. We could find a smaller group that doesn't have capes yet, or start building something up ourselves. Just hiding is probably enough to keep us safe, but it's not much for a social life."
I scoffed. A social life? Me? Hilarious. "That's fine."
Mom and Dad shared another look. Mom's fairly pointed, and Dad looking like he was losing another argument. "If you want… there's a bus nearby that'll take you to the library or the store, or wherever."
"Why would that matter?" I muttered.
"You'll run out of books here, and you can get things you like. Food, snacks, stuff to brighten the place up, you know. Whatever you want." Dad replied, starting to sound like he was running out of steam.
I gave Mom a dull look. Her response was a soft smile. "Fine." I huffed. I guess I'd try to socialize a little… under protest. I wondered if they'd care about me ignoring other teenagers entirely. I wouldn't put up with another Emma.
Hell, if I ever saw her again… I glanced down at the cheap fork in my hand, and the small bend it'd picked up between my fingers. I hadn't thought I'd pulled Mom's power since yesterday…
I slowly bent it back into shape, doing my best to ignore my previous train of thought. Mom and Dad either didn't notice, or were pretending they hadn't. "Okay, so… either the library or the market later, I suppose."
"And I can…" Dad winced, as I was pretty sure Mom squeezed his leg under the table. "...wait patiently here."
I sighed. "Do you have anything small that can come along?"
"Not here… I'll work on it."
So no pocket chipmunk with a tracking chip or something. I wasn't even sure I wanted something like that, but anything bigger would probably be visible and obviously abnormal. Maybe he could follow along with a flying bird while I was on the bus, but the dogs and raccoons he had here couldn't do that.
I left him to fixing up Ferdinand with Mom, and went to catch the bus with a pocket full of fives, ones, and dollar coins. I'd picked the least offensive clothes, to my senses rather than sensibilities. With my hair in a ponytail and my hood up, I thought I looked like a boy. That was probably enough to hide who I was from casual observers. Maybe I could get a haircut, buy some nice but baggy men's clothes, and make myself a new identity. It'd probably last until I finally started growing boobs, which I was still convinced wouldn't happen unless I had a kid. That wasn't anywhere near on the cards right now, though.
The first stop was picking up some snacks and a phone from a convenience store. The cashier didn't seem to bat an eye at a homeless girl doing so. I hid the fury building inside me until I'd left. That wasn't right. A homeless child deserved more than a glance and a grunt. There wasn't much I could do about it, but that wasn't to say there was nothing I could do. I'm sure some combination of powers could clear the boat graveyard and reopen shipping, improving the economy. I could press the gangs, see if I could push the Nazis and bigots out. This would just invite other gangs, but I could rinse and repeat until I found a set the Bay could live with.
I'm sure a good number of the homeless kids in the Bay were either gay or trans and kicked out for it, orphaned by gang violence, or running from the gangs in some other way. I'd heard horror stories of followers of both big gangs selling their kids, the ABB taking debt payments in the form of daughters for their brothels, and the white supremecist hicks marrying child brides to adults to start them breeding more 'glorious aryans' early.
Ignoring entirely that the actual Aryans were a people from south-west Asia, somewhere around Tibet and just north of India, if I remembered right. I didn't actually care, but it was another reason to scoff and call the Nazis idiots, so I'd take it in a heartbeat.
The point I was trying to reach being that a homeless girl wasn't nearly as rare as it should be, in my city. Helping to mitigate the issue would take time and work, and a lot of planning. The capes I'd need for the Graveyard wouldn't just let me borrow their powers, and fighting the gangs half-cocked was suicide if I wasn't always invincible. I'd bring it up with Mom and Dad later.
The bus ride to the Market seemed to paradoxically take hours and pass in an instant, as I used the trip to scheme up suggestions and arguments for helping the city as a family of villains. After getting off the bus, I noticed the people around were acting odd. Glancing off to the north, huddled up in groups and moving quickly, everyone who wasn't in a building either finding one or trying to move as fast as possible. The weight entering my range and zipping by overhead sinched it, even before I heard the roar and crash in the distance.
There was a cape fight.
I smirked, feeling oddly giddy. I wanted to be there. I needed to be there. I had to be in the thick of it, surrounded by capes. I could tell these weren't my thoughts, but I was having difficulty caring. Another pair of weights entered my range, moving slower than the first. I followed them as long as I could, but one was flying and the other seemed to be in a vehicle. They too left my range, but I felt solace in the fact they couldn't have gotten far.
Another couple blocks, and I was right. Weights started entering my range. First one, a flyer, ducking in and out of it. Then another on the ground, then a pair moving together, then one that seemed to pop from place to place. Finally another half dozen or so almost at once. I lined myself up along one of the streets and finally caught sight of what I was pretty sure I'd find when I got there.
Lung, fighting some big guy in tattered clothes. Glory Girl in the air harassing him. Oni Lee, popping into view for a couple seconds before disappearing. Lung was about the size of my house, and kicking the absolute shit out of what had to be a Brute to have survived this long.
The first thing I did was steal Lung's power. A sense of fire and strength and fear slammed home in my mind. He got stronger in response to danger. I wasn't in danger, so the power did little for me at the moment. I felt maybe as strong as I had with mom's power, but it was hard to gauge.
Lung choked, sagging immediately. He seemed to be having trouble breathing, and his wounds had stopped visibly healing. The lull was enough for those engaging him to regroup, while he was coughing up blood that he'd been ignoring before. Glory Girl rammed into his side, slamming him into the ground and shattering one of his shoulders. Right… they had no reason to think he wasn't still regenerating. If I let them continue, they'd just kill him.
I snatched Glory Girl's power next. She started tumbling out of the air from where she'd been flying back for another pass, so I swapped in the power from the Brute that'd been tangling with Lung. She hit the ground and rolled, scuffed but well enough to jump immediately back to her feet.
Her power was weird. The sense that came most readily from it was pride, which gave no indication of its function. Muted in comparison were a sense of strength and freedom and radiance, which did tell me how it worked. Strength, flight, an invulnerability that was both inviolable and… not? That one was a bit confusing. As was the 'radiance', which gave me the sense that I could… press down on others around me? Well, whatever it did, it was mine for now.
I used my new flight to speed into the air, arcing over the few blocks between myself and the fight. Dauntless was there, fluttering about just above the buildings. I made sure to avoid him as I dropped in, not wanting to kill a hero by accident like I had that trooper. He and his shield were playing bullet sponge while Miss Militia was huddled nearby behind a dumpster, taking shots at a group spread through one of the Bay's dilapidated parks. The park itself was full of trees, long grass, rusting playground equipment, and glowing purple stripes along the ground and partway into the air. A dozen or so homeless-looking men were hiding among the cover of trees and concrete tubes while a dozen more were on the ground, yelling or bleeding out, sometimes both. Half of the ones still up were focused on the Protectorate capes, while the rest including those aware on the ground were focused on the teleporting demon slowly whittling them down.
It was only slowly because he had to dodge an octopus made of garbage whenever he appeared in the group. I could feel the weight from them, the mass of garbage, the teleporting demon, and one of the men on the ground holding pressure on a bleeding shoulder wound. Another couple were hiding in a car on the other side of the park. I could feel Oni Lee's weight shift just before he appeared, an echo slowly fading until the version left behind collapsed into ash. I swapped their powers around, giving the garbage power to Oni Lee, Lee's power to the man on the ground, and that power to the garbage heap.
Then I slammed into the ground between the three groups of combatants, ripped a tree out of the ground, swung it around threateningly while pressing down as hard as I could with Glory Girl's power, and roaring. Most of the men screamed, some soiling themselves, and all of them attempting to flee. The cape on the ground teleported away, then continued to run. The Protectorate capes backed off, while Glory Girl and the Brute shied away, both clearly confused about their new powers or lack thereof.
Lung, as it happens, had already been running away. His body was not taking its sudden lack of powers well at all. This only confused me a little until the trio of powers I'd round-robined snapped back into place without my input, as one of them… faded. I barely noticed Lee appearing behind me and failing to stab my kidney, as I realized the garbage cape was dead.
Ah. Powers that change your body are very bad to suddenly be without, while your body is changed. That made a lot of sense. I could already feel myself growing slightly, from Lung's power. I was in danger now, after all. My eyes snapped over to Lee, and I shoved the power into him before it could do much more than bulk my muscles a little. Lee's power was fleeing. From danger, from safety, from the past, just… fleeing. Something about that felt wrong, but I'd figure it out later.
For now, I grabbed him by the tactical vest while he was confused, and yanked him with me into the air. Then I picked a street and hurled him down it. He was already growing when he left my arms, and Lung was notoriously hard to put down. I was hoping a block's worth of asphalt burn wouldn't kill him.
"Hey!" I heard Glory Girl shout, as she ran over. "Who the fuck are you? What'd you do to my power?" She was trembling slightly, clenched fists shaking as she fought to glare up at me with sweat starting to bead down her face. Was she that angry about her power, or was it something else?
I glanced and confirmed the Brute that'd been fighting Lung was limping away. Really GG, you couldn't have gone after him instead of me? I suppose having your powers swapped would be pretty alarming, and she had very nice powers… She shifted, growing confused as something in the pressure from her own power shifted. I didn't know what changed, just that something had.
"That… is a good question." Dauntless added, keeping a respectable distance in the air.
"You don't know?" I asked back. I mean, I know it'd just been yesterday, but still. I'd been so jumped up about getting into a fight that I hadn't even bothered finding something to hide my face. When he paused as if considering how to answer, instead of confirming he knew who I was, I swapped his power for the Brute one Glory Girl was holding. He yelped and dropped out of the sky, landing very confused but relatively unharmed.
Glory Girl started glowing, and leapt into the air with a fist cocked back to slam into my face. I swapped her for a blank, caught the fist when her momentum carried her into me, and grabbed her around the waist to hold her in the air. "You done?" I asked her.
Dauntless' power was imbuement. A need for an object to be better, and the ability to make it so. It must be pretty potent if it let GG do that, but… I didn't need it right now, and I wasn't sure how it worked. Could Dauntless track things his power was used on? I couldn't take the risk, and wasn't completely sure how it worked. I gave that over to mister Brute, not really caring what he'd do with it at this point, and swiped Miss Militia's power while I was at it, since she was pointing a gun at me. It disappeared with a muted 'pop' as a green light started zipping around me and Glory Girl.
I floated down while Glory Girl tried ineffectually to wrestle her way out of my grip. "Hey! There's a bunch of guys over there that need medical attention! Or handcuffs. You know, either or." I pointed back toward the park. Then I zipped up into the air and angled inland. A few blocks away, the powers all started snapping back to their owners, except Glory Girl's.
"Let go!" She ordered, halfway between a growl and a whine. She seemed to be coming to the logical conclusion that the tables had turned and she had as much chance to budge me as a teenaged girl usually had against her.
"No?" I replied, wondering if she realized how far up we were. Then again, she'd grown used to being able to fly, so…
"What are you even doing?" She asked, sounding resigned. Now that she wasn't wriggling, I was having to spend mental effort intentionally ignoring how nice it felt to have a girl pressed into my side, held there by my arm around her waist.
"Kidnapping? Sort of. You're kind of my getaway ride." She gagged and tried to push away again, and I realized how that might sound. So I pressed on. "I mean, how else was I going to get away? They probably had Velocity on the way, you and Dauntless can fly, they might be able to get a chopper in the air to follow me, and who knows what else. Your power lets me fly fast and keep you in range, so I can get away using your power, and then just give it back when I don't think they'll find me. Easy peasy."
"You think I'll let you go?"
I scoffed. "And how are you gonna stop me, princess?"
"Knock you out when I have my powers back?" She asked as if I was stupid.
"Nah, I'll set you down in a forest or something, fly away, and then wait for you to fly off." I poked the side of my head and grinned. "I can detect parahumans within my range. I'll know if you stick around looking for me, I can swap your power out the second you get close, and if you keep being difficult I'll just kidnap you for real because you gave me no other choice."
She mulled that over for a while. "Why are you doing all this?"
"You mean the fight? Well, you ever see a fight or a villain or something, and think 'Oh yay, I get to punch something!' and jump right in? I guess I'm like that with cape fights. I just really want to try out all the powers, and why not break up a fight while I'm at it?"
"I mean… you're a villain, right? If you were a hero you wouldn't be running away."
I gave a nervous chuckle. "I could just be a rogue who doesn't like my city being on fire?" She gave me a sour look. "Yeah, yeah… where to start?" I took a moment to think while scanning the horizon from the edge of the city. "My mom died two years ago. Dad… triggered? Is that the word?" She gave an uncomfortable nod. I suppose she wasn't expecting the full origin story. Tough beans. "Yeah. So, he digs her back up, starts fixing her, sends me off to summer camp, and like a month after I get back he tells me he's a Tinker and Mom's alive again." She sucked in a sharp breath, but didn't interrupt. "That was over a year ago. Dad's had to steal things, parts, money for parts and food and bills while he's Tinkering instead of working… all to keep Mom alive. So, I've known Dad was a villain for a while… I suppose it's just natural to assume I had to be a villain, too."
"You could be a hero, instead."
I shook my head. "Not after the PRT dropped in at home yesterday. Especially not after I accidentally killed one of them like ten seconds after I triggered. Dad has a bolthole for us to hide out at, and I don't want to lead you straight to it. Because if we get caught, I'd put decent odds on them messing things up with Mom and letting her die again. She might be some weird cyborg zombie, but she's still Mom, you know?"
"I really don't…" She muttered. All the fight had left her at this point. She squeaked when I dove for a patch of marshland the river floods every year, then picked a nice sturdy tree to set her in. She awkwardly straddled a branch, giving me a confused and slightly betrayed look.
"Sorry, best I could do on short notice." I said as I floated back. "Hey, the PRT knows already, so… I'm Taylor."
"Vicky." She replied.
"Nice to meet you, Vicky. Interesting times we live in, huh?" I asked cheerfully, with an awkward laugh. Then I flew back toward the city before things could get more awkward.
Having safely trapped her over a flooded bog like a cat in a tree, I felt safe enough picking one of the apartment buildings in range and diving into one. I waited about half a minute, then swapped Vicky's power back to her. She sped into the air, zooming around the area. When she didn't immediately spot me, she seemed to give up, drifting back into the city, through my entire range, before leaving it.
My mind kept drifting back to the fight, now that I didn't have anything pressing demanding my attention. I killed someone again. I felt them die. Just watched. Just had an accident. My feet drew me into pacing, not wanting to linger on the thoughts, but not having anything to draw my mind away. There weren't any parahumans in my range, I was well on the edge of the city. One of those little suburb towns that technically had its own mayor, but Brockton had grown into and around it until it might as well be a part of it. I couldn't even recall its name, and I doubted I could pick its mayor and functionaries out of a local political lineup.
That tangent lasted a good three minutes, from my incessant phone-clock checking. I was glad no one was around to see me pacing the hallway between tenements. I let my mind drift to imagining the lives of the people here, anything to keep it from snapping back to the lives I'd taken.
It didn't work. I managed to wait barely ten minutes, the bare minimum my brain insisted on to hopefully lose Vicky, then went looking for a bus stop. I made my way back to the lab, where Mom let me in. I spent an hour or so on the computer, looking things up and trying to distract myself. Apparently, garbage-heap was called Mush, and was a villain. That was a load off my mind. I'd still killed someone, but I didn't need to feel as bad about it this time… I tried to insist. I kept looking up other things, but… my mind kept invariably drifting back to Glory Girl. Vicky. It was the best distraction I'd found from the deaths, but I still felt somewhat conflicted about it.
"Hey, Mom?" She hummed from the other room, stopping what she was doing and coming over. "How… do I tell if I'm attracted to girls?"
Her lips pursed like she was trying not to smile, and she made a show of settling into a 'thinking' pose, finger tapping her chin. "Porn?"
I snorted, trying not to laugh. "I guess…?" It wasn't like I'd never looked at porn, it was just very private when I did, because reasons. That and our internet at home had never been the greatest, so I'd prioritized my searching there. "I just don't know what I like, I guess. I suppose it doesn't matter, it's not like I can date anyone…"
Mom scooted closer, sitting beside me and bumping my shoulder with hers. "Just say… you can't bring them to 'your place'?" I thoughtfully waited for her to continue. "When I was a little older than you… I used a fake ID to get into bars. Get drunk. Find someone. Girls were safer… being with girls wasn't." The world still hadn't caught up with the times, and the Bay still had trouble there because of the Empire. Doing 'gay' things still wasn't generally 'okay' even then. One could argue it still wasn't, which was stupid. One more reason to kick the Empire out. "But… could get drunk. Kiss girls. Say it was just being drunk. Sometimes it was… but sometimes… met up later. Went home."
"That's… great." And awkward to hear from my mother. "But I don't have a fake ID." And I wasn't sure I'd use it, if I did.
"Yet." She said with a sly grin. I blushed and wiped at my face, not able to fully accept this was happening. "Kind eyes… Strong hands…" Mom muttered.
"What?" I asked, eager to change the subject.
"Your father. Most of the people I was with. Kind eyes, and strong hands. You wouldn't want to hear what I find sexually attractive…" I started gagging before she was done saying 'sex'. "...but you should find something you like. Maybe sexy, maybe not. Just what you like."
"...thanks, Mom." I said, still embarrassed, but honestly appreciative of the advice. Then I took a deep breath. "Hey, so… I was thinking… about a makeover…"
Mom's lips slowly split into a wide grin, and I started to wonder if this was a good idea. Oh well, it had to be better than dwelling on things, right?
I barely slept that night.
Coil did try to recruit Danny. I wonder why that didn't work out for him. :3
For those who haven't caught it yet, Taylor is hovering around Brute 2 as a baseline from a ping off Annette's power. This being PRT for "A group of civilians can probably handle it." You don't actually get to 'The situation can't be resolved unless we show up' until a threat rating of 4 in any category. A cape response doesn't become mandatory until 6.
QA is very loud, and wants Taylor to live in interesting times.
This fight is actually something that happened in AT, where Lung killed the Merchants' Brute, 'Brick'. (The more PR friendly half of 'Brick Shithouse'. Naturally, the Merchants knew him simply as Shithouse.) Will this matter at all? Not really. Just showing that the Merchants were a revolving door in their capes as well as normal members. The Merchants simply pose zero threat to this Taylor. Their best bet is to come at her with one of Squealer's tanks, and all Taylor needs to do there is pull Sherrel's power while she's driving, removing the innate Tinker ability to utilize their own tech (and Squealer's reported Thinker subrating letting her drive like a pro) and causing her to crash.
So, I went into this thinking "I want her to fuck over Lung by swiping his power, not fuck herself over by keeping it for very long, and wind up riding GG into the sunset as unsuggestively as possible. How do I do that?" and I think it turned out well. Short but chaotic, and I hope fairly interesting.
The talk with VIcky was originally slated for Amy. Whoops. Oh well, it'll give me more to work with for the interlude.
The talk with Annette was supposed to be the start of the next chapter, but then I decided I wanted to timeskip between proper chapters, and over the course of the interlude. Whoops again.
So you get that now, instead of later. Yay supportive parents! Annette wants Taylor to have fun, and Danny can do his best to keep her safe while his little girl steps into an exciting new phase of her life. He doesn't have a shotgun for if she does bring someone home, but I'm sure he'll make do.
Taylor, canonically, liked Brian's smile. She's not terribly attracted to buff guys, didn't really care that he was taller, thought his protective streak was nice, but… she liked his smile. And it's not just guys who can have cute smiles.
Okay, so the Open Beta didn't point out any significant issues. Nobody commented on the thing my brain was hanging up on, so it must be fine.
Before I forget again, I have a Discord server where I drop occasional updates and can be readily contacted, and Patrons get access to the spoiler section where I'm willing to answer just about any story-related question, and where I post the links to google docs for previews and Closed Beta purposes. (It also helps me manage my Starving Artist Syndrome) So if you want the chance to comment on things as they're written and sway how the scenes go, that's how to do it.
Three hours after the fight
Vicky stampeded through the front door, slamming it behind her and landing unceremoniously on the couch in the living room. It'd happened often enough that Amy could run through a step-by-step action replay of it from her place in the kitchen, failing to decide on something to eat for dinner while Carol was at the office. Mark had his low-effort microwave freezer meals, but Amy didn't want to touch those. Nor anything else as simple as 'pop it in the microwave'. That was just lazy, or admitting she didn't have the energy to fend for herself, neither of which she could accept.
So instead she wandered into the living room to see if Vicky had broken up with Dean again. "The hell crawled up your skirt? Wasn't it just a debriefing you had?"
Vicky groaned into the pillows. "I don't want to talk about it."
"Right." Amy nodded along, sitting in one of the couches and counting down in her head.
Three… Two…
"It's that villain!" Vicky snapped. This was the opposite of 'not talking about it' but Amy was an old hand at politely ignoring hypocrisy. "She's just so… ugh!"
"Big girl words, Vicky." That earned her a pillow to the face. Amy slung it right back, but it bounced off her sister and past her, onto the floor. Vicky had already gone back to sulking. "What's wrong?"
"A lot. I dunno. Everything? It's… I don't even know where to start."
"At the start?" Amy leaned down to give her a light shove. Her palm brushed her sister's arm near the end of her short sleeves. A couple small scrapes, an aggravated muscle group, and some partially-healed evidence of fun time with- she pulled back as if burned, fighting the snarl on her face down to a grimace. "What even happened?"
Vicky didn't notice anything but her words. "Well first Dean canceled our date, so I was already in a bad mood. I got my costume and went out to fly. I didn't expect to find anything, but I just wanted to punch someone." The normally stiff pillow clutched in her arms squished and contorted. "When I heard a fight, I jumped right in. Even if it was Lung, I was happy just to have a target." She paused, chewing her lip in thought. "He'd chased some Merchants into a bunch more. They were trying to get in just enough licks to run, but it wasn't working." She heaved a deep breath. "And then she showed up."
"Who?"
"Ta- eh- uh- hmm." Vicky stopped and started for a couple seconds, before taking another moment to stop and think. "It was a new girl. Didn't even have a cape name. Just… showed up."
Like you did? Amy carefully didn't ask. "Then what?"
"She…" Vicky sighed, falling limp atop the couch. "She kicked ass. Swapped powers around. Somehow got Lung to run-"
"Wait, hold up. Swapped powers?" Amy cut in.
Vicky flinched. "Yeah. She… kinda… took my powers."
I can never meet this girl, Amy vowed. Anyone with her powers was a nightmare waiting to happen. Absolutely anyone. "Then what?" She asked, after swallowing back the bile rising in her throat.
Vicky took several seconds to think on her words before answering. "She… used my aura. Scared everyone. I… I nearly pissed myself. It was terrifying. I… ugh. I managed to push through it, knew it was just my powers, but… then it got weird." She took another few seconds to chew her lip. "Like… I don't think she stopped thinking I was an enemy, but my power… flipped? All of a sudden it was like I was talking to my best friend, or Dean, or you. Like everything was fine, and great, and would be great as long as I…" She dug the heels of her hand into her eyes, scrubbing with them and taking several deep breaths. "I figured I'd be immune, if someone ever copied my powers, or stole them, or any of the other horror-cape scenarios you hear about sometimes. Immune." She gave Amy a wan smile. "Y'know, like you."
Yes. Immune. Definitely. Absolutely. "That is pretty weird, yeah." Ignore the comment about horror-capes, she wasn't talking about you.
Vicky collapsed back into the couch. "It was like… like I couldn't stay mad at her. She was a villain, but it didn't matter. She started talking about her family, and… it all just sounded so reasonable. It still does!"
Amy scoffed. "How?"
"I don't know!" Vicky shouted, hands reaching up as if to grab the idea of it and strangle it, only to flail about in the air when nothing was there. Her hands landed back on her head, where she dragged some of her blonde hair between her fingers, and started audibly bapping her forehead between her palms. "It's just…" She settled down again, taking a deep breath and letting her hands drop, without making any effort to fix her hair. "Her dad triggered when her mom died. Dug her up, brought her back to life, and this girl… 'why are you a villain' I ask, and she just…" A long few moments hung in the air, Vicky's lips parting, jaw working, voice failing. "...'Because I love my mom.' she says." Amy stared for a moment, wondering why that mattered, but was interrupted when Vicky's hands slapped back over her eyes and she started shrieking. Amy was startled out of her seat, and was scrambling up to check on her sister, when Vicky muttered, defeated. "How am I supposed to stay mad at that?"
"Because she's a villain." Amy stated firmly.
Vicky pinned her down with a sad, almost pitying look. "If Mom died, wouldn't you want her back? Even if…" Vicky stopped, curling in on herself.
No. No, she wouldn't. And that made Amy a terrible person, didn't it? Just another horrible thing about her. "Yeah…" She muttered instead.
It took a couple minutes before Vicky spoke again. "What am I supposed to think about her?"
Hate her. Amy couldn't help the fury bubbling up in her stomach. How dare this little bitch make her sister feel this badly about anything? Villains were villains. They'd made their choice, and needed to face the consequences. Amy forced her hands and jaw to unclench. Pressing hadn't worked, so… "You should give it more thought. More time. You don't need to decide anything now." Especially since it seemed like she was siding with-
Amy bit her cheek and dug her nails back into her palms. Vicky would make the right choice, once her head was clear. "You need to think about something else for a while."
"I…" Vicky started, voice cracking as she failed to speak. "Do I really… whammy people like that?"
God fucking dammit, Vicky. "I'll put on some TV." She said instead, picking up the remote and finding one of her sister's stupid shows. She passed up the first two soaps Vicky listened to while doing homework sometimes, and the documentary about capes. She couldn't just let her sister vegetate there, or she'd wallow for days. She settled on one of the dumb game shows Vicky loved knowing all the answers to. With any luck her competitive streak would force her to pay attention and focus on something else for a while.
Amy slumped back into her seat, grumbling to herself. She couldn't let Vicky lose some mind-game to a villain. Her sister was harmle- Vicky's aura was harmless. She was a Shaker, not a Master. Her power went away as soon as it was turned off, or out of range. Completely safe, and hardly worth agonizing over. When Vicky's eyes settled on the TV, Amy slipped out of her seat to head back to the kitchen. She still needed food, and now Vicky did too. Amy could manage something nice, if it was for Vicky.
Ohh, that bitch was going to suffer whenever Amy got her hands on them. How dare she make Vicky sad? Make Vicky question herself? Take Vicky's attention away? Wait, no. She… trying to sabotage New Wave. Yeah. As soon as that bitch got herself hurt, they'd come crawling and-
"Wait. Shit. Fuck." And she couldn't do anything, because of those stupid powers. Amy couldn't let herself anywhere near a power-stealer. She let out a low, impotent growl.
Amy'd find some way to get back at her. Somehow. Eventually.
Three hours after the fight
"Really." He read the last lines of the report again. They remained unchanged. "Really."
A palm dragged itself down the thin material of his face mask, fingers splaying to let him stare through them, index prodding almost painfully against the edge of his eye socket. He leaned back, taking a deep breath and releasing it. "Fine."
So the Heberts were on the run, let loose in the city. They'd go to ground, build resources and materiel, and come back an even more annoying thistle in the finely managed tapestry of his city. This was fine.
He split time, picking up the expensive monitor on his desk and hurling it into the wall with a throat-splitting roar of fury.
Except he didn't, as that timeline immediately ceased to exist. This was fine. He would make it fine. He pulled the half-empty bottle of Glenfiddich from a drawer and chugged six fingers worth before replacing it. Then he split time again, one of him standing to access the safe with his personal libations. It was always handy to have something on hand to offer the commanders, even to occasionally toast a successful operation with, but he wasn't going to spend half a million dollars on the barest shred of loyalty it'd earn him.
One of the simplest pleasures afforded his power was the ability to spend an evening with the most extravagant spirits in the world, safe in the knowledge the bottle would be whole and hale the next morning. He'd even resold several of them; gaudy things not worth the diamonds inlaid into the bottles. The one he selected tonight had cost him a paltry hundred-and-thirty thousand. That version settled in on one of the comfortable seats in his private room, to imagine grievous violence inflicted on marionettes too inconsiderate to follow their strings when tugged.
The version he'd be keeping, unless something phenomenally unlikely destroyed his office while leaving his room untouched, dug through more reports to confirm no additional nuggets of information could be gleaned. Hebert approached, the daughter triggering, and all three running. Hebert's truck turning up at the DWA, with no one having seen him all day, nor any indication of how it'd appeared. No witnesses, no prints from the cab, no functional cameras at the entrance or in the lot, and nothing substantial from initial analysis of the ichor still hardening in the bed. Battery's condition was alarming, but changed nothing given his prior certainty that nothing positive could come from personally involving himself.
It was a bit odd that his timelines had seen no issues over the course of the day, however. He had to assume the girl triggering was the key to the anomaly of the timelines that simply ended whenever he committed to ordering his men to kill Hebert. It didn't happen every time, and was less likely when he ordered the daughter targeted first. Almost a certainty when Hebert himself was the priority.
The trick, it seemed, was to kill all three simultaneously. Difficult given the Brute, but not impossible. Hebert and the girl were simple to arrange, due to their schedules. One had an office job, and the other attended public school. The doll almost never left the house. It should have been one of the easier hits to plan, even accounting for multiple targets.
Yet despite having both followed regularly, neither had led him to a proper Tinker lab, and neither of the two minor sites they'd found had any indication of the locations of any larger sites. It was uncanny, which indicated powers. Hebert specialized in minions, several of which displayed intelligence far above the animals they were made from. It wasn't out of the question that this was the norm. Intelligence rivaling human, possibly exceeding it within a narrow specialty. It's the only way to explain such targeted and accurate retaliation during his attempts. It took hours at most for something to come looking for Coil whenever a Hebert died.
With a shudder, he recalled the last time he'd attempted to deal with Hebert. It had finally worked. All three Heberts dead, without any hitch in his timelines. He'd returned to his office after confirming the cadavers with his own eyes, only to find one of Hebert's raccoons arming the base self-destruct.
As a man, he could respect it. Scorched Earth; From hell's heart, I stab at thee.
As a mastermind, he found it infuriating. That timeline was a wash. If it could be done once, the feat could be repeated until they ran out of racoons, and there was no telling how many of the things were still active. The only way to solve The Hebert Problem permanently without risking his hard-fought infrastructure was to make sure all of the caches of Tinkertech were also dealt with at the same time as the creator and his family.
He'd shelved the project after pointing his Tattletale at the Tinker labs. A task that provided dividends almost immediately in the form of a young and easily bought Tinker, and later with the Case 53. She claimed to not be confident regarding any of the illusive 'animal Tinker' labs he'd intended her to find, however. There was no point in moving forward without that information, and no gains to be had in spending time and energy on Hebert while the man kept his head relatively down.
The man must have had some sort of surveillance network alerting him whenever he was followed, and enough presence on the internet to slice into intranet databases like his and the PRT's indiscriminately enough to actually find him. Virtual intelligence, housed in a tiny mobile platform. He hesitated to call it true AI, the same way he refused to believe an Endbringer might take an interest in Brockton Bay. Some scenarios had so few possible 'win' conditions that it was a waste of effort to try.
Coil wasn't out of the game yet, however. He still had pieces to play, and angles to pursue. He picked up a phone, and dialed a number. "Ugh… what?" The young voice on the other side grumbled.
"Sarah." He stated sharply, shutting her up. This was not a day for games, jockeying for superiority and reminding his Tattletale of her place. Today was deathly serious business. "You will find the Hebert family. You will report any information you find as soon as you can confirm it. I'm sending you PRT reports, photos, and mental profiles, as they become available. I don't care what you have to do. Stalk and befriend the daughter if you have to. Just find them."
"Wha- the hell-" He hung up, not caring what she thought. Her power would fill in the gaps, especially once she had more data. She'd realize within the hour that Hebert was the Tinker she'd been tasked to look for, that something about the family was dangerous to Thinker powers, and eventually that there was more to Hebert's power than animals. There was no need to spend breath on it.
It burned, risking an asset like this. Time had come to be of essence, however. He could always re-acquire her if she went rogue. He rather trusted that she would, all things considered. She would see an opportunity and jump headfirst, believing his difficulty finding the family and using his power to neutralize them would keep her safe. It would make her sloppy, when he could easily follow the same breadcrumbs, so long as they were located. He still had enough trackers, both physical and digital, that he'd know almost everything she did when she cut herself loose.
But it was likely he'd lose her anyway, in the inevitable clash with Hebert. It was likely he'd lose a significant portion of his resources and material. His base would be compromised, his mercenaries cut down or captured without the infrastructure to hide and house them, and his investments in the city would come to waste. It was possible his identity would be in danger.
Was it truly a gamble then, to expend resources that would burn either way? No, better to have an excitable dog flee after their prey than the unhappy tracker at his back, waiting knife in hand. His tattletale was far easier to find and track than the Heberts had proven to be. She could be re-acquired. The rest of his resources were intact, and he could contract Accord to optimize his plans and contingencies. He could acquire additional tools and manpower to throw at the problem. And now that the girl had triggered, it was possible the effect blocking his powers would be gone, or at least greatly reduced.
Even if his power didn't work this time, he was still Coil.
If it did? He couldn't lose.
Three hours after the fight
With Glory Girl's report, it only took half an hour to compile a briefing summary, and schedule the meeting. The hour he gave everyone to arrive was more than enough to flesh it out into a presentation. He juggled a few more reports and notifications while he was at it, eventually settling in to wait with the other early arrivals.
First came the ever-punctual Miss Militia, who took several moments to realize he was already in the room. He bade her sit, and watched her carefully while she did. Her motions were still slower than normal, unusually hesitant. His half-finished predictive software agreed. She'd been shaken by the altercation, and he couldn't figure out why. Naturally, he brought up her full unredacted file, to skim while they waited.
Ah. An early interview from her time with the Wards, indicating she believed her power was quite literally a gift from her god, intended to save her life and make the world a better place. If she still held to those beliefs despite the pressure from PR to not externalize religious ideation and the years since, then it made a bit of sense. Facing a power nullifier was one thing, but having one's 'divine right to survive' co-opted by an enemy would be incredibly demoralizing.
She'd need a few days off, to get her head back in the game. He made a note to schedule her a few mental health days, possibly send her off to Philadelphia to talk things over with old friends somewhere less chaotic. One of the other first Wards should work for a sounding board to her issues.
The Wards started filing in, next. First Triumph and Aegis, the leaders. The press release to transfer Triumph to the Protectorate had been pushed back a few times, but was currently slated for next Thursday. Aegis had already taken over more than ninety percent of the duties in preparation for the change. They only updated the age of Protectorate and Ward capes on official sites on January first for privacy reasons, and even then the information was sometimes intentionally inaccurate. This made December an oddly appropriate time of year for age-out promotions.
Vista and Clockblocker came next, and were expected to be the last of the Wards. Vista spent as much time as possible either on the job or on the base, due to her home situation. Legal was still quietly feuding with CPS and the Youth Guard over her guardianship, neither willing to cede ground due to precedent helping Vista would set for the rest of the program. No matter how legal tried to frame it, all the other two saw was more excuses to pull children from their homes so the PRT could spend more time 'forcing' them to train or work. Clockblocker had his own reasons for not wanting to be home, but wasn't as adamant about staying away as Vista. Today, he'd just come in early for a patrol with Aegis in a couple hours and happened to hear about the briefing.
Gallant was at a family gathering, Shadow Stalker preferred to stay away as much as possible, and Kid Win tended to ignore optional briefings in favor of Tinkering.
Assault stormed in next, flipping a chair around near the wall to brood away from the group. In all honesty, Colin had expected him to have skulked off to hunt down the Heberts himself by now, only interrupted by Battery waking from her coma barely more than two hours ago. He was still an irreverent manchild most of the time, and Colin still hated how he'd essentially harassed Battery into dating him, but he had to admit the man had grown rather devoted since then. It didn't make up for his faults, but there was little Armsmaster could do to Assault, so long as he kept to the deal with Legend and maintained an exemplary field record.
Dauntless wandered in, just barely in time for the meeting. He slumped into a seat, still fiddling with the tiara left behind by Glory Girl. According to Dauntless, it felt as if she'd somehow managed to dump a dozen charges of his power into it at once. This left him conflicted, since he already had empowered headwear granting him enhanced senses. He'd used more than a month's worth of charges building it up, but it didn't have nearly the breadth of the tiara, which seemed to fairly accurately mimic a much weaker version of Glory Girl's powerset.
Colin carefully kept his face neutral, to not betray the dark amusement welling up. The biggest hurdles were the fact that it was a girl's tiara and clashed horribly with Dauntless' motif, and the fact that altering the helmet enough to fit the tiara under it might damage it to the point it'd lose all its charges of power. A proper Tinker wouldn't have those issues.
Velocity zipped in the door just as the meeting was scheduled to start, while Directors Piggot and Renick arrived almost a full minute late. It was difficult to judge whether there had been a last minute complication to deal with; if Piggot had misjudged her steadily degrading travel speed again, or if it was intentional disrespect. From her attitude, it always seemed intentional. She couldn't afford to show weakness in general, but abhorred doing so around parahumans due to prior trauma. She was not a bad commander, but her hang-ups meshed poorly with a position in the PRT. None of his attempts to have her transferred to a police or military posting, or promoted to a regional position where she'd rarely interact directly with capes, had gone anywhere. More likely she'd be medically retired, which also had yet to gain traction for reasons he couldn't fathom.
Some days it felt like he'd been set up to fail, but he had yet to find a reason why that could be. He'd been one of the Protectorate's ten most popular east-coast capes for years, and had just broken back into the top twenty nationwide. Neither the PRT nor Protectorate could afford to sabotage him.
And yet… and yet…
He swallowed the sigh and instead drew a deep breath through his nose. "Thank you all for coming. This situation is potentially volatile, and requires the ability to respond immediately, hence the briefing. I've sent copies of the report to Triumph and Aegis, as well as Directors Piggot and Renick, for further dissemination." He'd handle catching Battery up himself, when she was more lucid. "A few hours ago there was an altercation between Lung and Oni Lee and the Archer's Bridge Merchants. Reports from informants and the captured Merchants indicate Lung was 'pissed' about something the Merchants did, but the actual reason is unclear. The Merchants don't hold territory the same way the major gangs do, preferring to operate within areas claimed by other gangs. Either this has changed, or something about their operations offended him. One rumor claimed the Merchants had mugged one of the ABB's dealers."
Colin raised a hand, haptic controls in his gauntlet clicking the presentation to its first slide. "That is not why we're here." The screen showed a years-old family photo, with another third of the screen taken up with an ID photo of the man, a yearbook photo of the girl, and a helmet cam picture of the woman. "Yesterday we approached Daniel Hebert on suspicion of being a criminal Tinker. He was to be arrested, interrogated, and given options to join the Protectorate in the event investigations agreed his most heinous charge was theft." The picture of the woman lit up. "His wife, Annette Rose Gardner," someone, almost certainly Clockblocker, snickered. "Died two years ago. Her body has been confirmed missing from her grave, likely exhumed to be utilized as the subject of Tinkertech enhancement." The snickering, and all sound besides, had vanished. "Her status as a living being is in question, but cannot be ruled out. She was recorded conversing and showed signs of personal initiative, but is also clearly a Tinkertech entity. Until her capabilities have been confirmed, assume a 'three' in every power category."
The pictures of the girl lit up next. "This is Taylor Anne Hebert. Analysts have rated a ninety-seven percent chance that confronting her father caused her to trigger. Assault, Battery, and all three Heberts fainted, after which she showed Brute capability, and Assault reported the loss of his power. Battery never regained full consciousness, and brain scans indicated she'd fallen into a comatose state shortly after the Heberts fled. She's currently awake and expected to make a full recovery." He waited for a few noises of shock and concern before continuing, mostly from the Wards. Another much blurrier photo of something brown in the air popped up. "We believe she is the cape that appeared at the ABB/Merchant confrontation, stealing or swapping the powers of present capes." This time an info page appeared, with names next to photos.
"I have tentatively registered her designation as 'Hotswap'. A fairly neutral name which describes her power well, in the event she can be recruited for the Wards."
"Didn't she kill someone?" Vista cautiously asked. Once again it seemed rumors were spreading faster than official reports, as she shouldn't have been informed yet.
Colin clicked his tongue. "Two people. We believe there was a poor reaction between Mush and Hotswap's powers, resulting in his death. This was likely an accident, and thus criminal manslaughter rather than murder. We've had worse over the years." He stated, with a pointed look to Assault. The man scoffed, having never agreed with the accessory murder charges he'd racked up breaking worse villains out of prison transports. Few of them stayed clean once back to their gangs, and they almost universally cared less for their guards' lives than Madcap had. Colin then turned back to Vista. "The first case immediately followed her Trigger. Given her age, the fact that Trigger Events have been successfully argued as moments of temporary insanity in previous criminal cases, that she likely believed herself acting in self-defense while 'insane', and may not have understood her powers at the time… there is very little chance of significant repercussion for the death of Trooper Henric Jenkins."
"You mean Stalker, right?" Clockblocker asked after a moment of silence. "Look, I love the T&A, but it's hard to get past how much of a bi-... loose cannon she is. And not in the fun movie cop way. Are we sure we want another one?"
Not what he meant at all, but he couldn't correct the misconception without outing Madcap. Colin cleared his throat, pointing back up at the slideshow. "Her father, also a confirmed criminal, has been designated 'Frankenstein'. In the event we turn Hotswap without catching her father, she would be moved to another department by default to avoid any conflict of interest. Her closest non-villain relation is a grandmother in New York, which would neatly make her Legend's problem." Or whoever was in charge of the city said grandmother lived, since it was not part of the NYC area. Given that she was both widowed and retired, it seemed likely the PRT would pay for her to move there, given Hotswap's powers and history. "If we flipped both… technically Frankenstein now presents the lesser charges. He would be encouraged to move to a department better equipped for research and development, or simply one with the spare manpower to watch over a formerly villainous biotinker."
From his posture, this seemed to mollify Clockblocker.
"Elaborate. Now." Piggot however, was now glaring his way.
This was to be expected, however. The next slides were all about Frankenstein. "From what we've found, he has methods of restoring functionality to damaged tissues, replacing anything that can't be repaired. The dogs we recovered from the house have enhanced musculature, with most of the brain and nervous system replaced with mechanical equivalents. Testing is ongoing, but we have yet to find anything that looks like a disease vector. They actually appear nearly sterile; we're still trying to figure out some of the antimicrobial properties added to their… 'blood'." It was closer to some unholy conglomerate of preservative, fuel, hydraulic fluid, coolant, antifreeze, and wastewater sluice than anything a biologist would recognise as blood. "If nothing else, we might see half a dozen new antibiotics in a few years just from studying these samples. We're dealing with cyborgs, not zombies. Before you can ask, it appears no effort was made to repair their reproductive systems."
"That's a relief." Deputy Renick muttered, then spoke up. "What about the wife?"
"Unknown." Colin stated slowly. "There was no sign of a second child at the house, or when they fled. Aside from due diligence, I've been trying not to think about it." It took a few moments for the implications of the question to filter through the room. A wave of frowns, grimacing, and several Wards turning green followed, Vista going so far as to 'eww' audibly.
"So, wait. What do we think his specialty is?" Clockblocker asked, seemingly the first of the Wards to recover.
"Corpse restoration, or making drones with biological parts. Current rules of engagement are for a versatile minion Master."
"Then… the Halloween flash mob might not have been Uber and Leet?"
The follow-up caught Armsmaster off-guard. He hadn't considered that. Three dozen skeletons performing Michael Jackson's 'Thriller' on the Boardwalk had been attributed to the duo, especially with the event being covered by one of their streams and the Tinkertech melting down immediately afterward. However… "That seems… less and less likely, yes."
"He's been active that long?" Triumph asked.
"Since the wife's death, yes?" Piggot cut in before he could answer.
"Yes." Colin confirmed. "The string of thefts the police believe might be attributed to Hebert span approximately two years. The serial numbers on electronics recovered from the house corroborate at least two of them, with the investigation ongoing."
"Just, uh…" Aegis spoke up. Colin had a feeling he just wanted to be included in the conversation, given his upcoming promotion. "Just thefts?"
"Until the incident, yes." He answered, pulling a slide up out of sequence listing off possible targets compared to successful thefts tentatively attributed to Hebert. "The bottleneck for his tech appears to be processing units. CPUs, GPUs, and some higher-end motherboards with their own minor inbuilt logic processing. The dogs' brains each contained at least one modified processor. Based on the data we have, extrapolations from the thefts and the dogs, we can cautiously expect between forty and two-hundred-thirty minions."
"That's quite the range." Triumph muttered.
Colin shifted gears to elaborate. "The dogs show a gradual progression of improvement, and we can't know whether they were made at the beginning, middle, or end of the standard Tinker progression arc. If the minions are left with minimal intelligence, and the parts are able to be split up due to improvements in efficiency, we get the higher number. Assuming a lack of efficiency, or building more advanced units as we presume Mrs. Hebert was, the number could be as low as twenty or thirty, though we consider this highly unlikely." He cleared his throat, skipping back to where he'd left off previously. This one showed a pie chart breakdown of the common animal species in the greater Brockton Bay area. "We can expect animal-form minions. Dogs and cats, especially if he can source from animal containment centers forced to euthanize their captures due to overcrowding. Rats and racoons are also fairly common, though rats may be too small to house the brain processors. If he can minimize his tech to that degree, it's possible he can work with smaller birds such as corvids or pigeons. Even if not, we might see seabirds such as gulls and ospreys. If he can source from outside the city, he might have opossum, foxes, hares, squirrels, and other small game. Low but possible odds of deer, wolves, and coyotes. Second-worst-case scenario, he's gotten his hands on a black bear or moose."
"The hell could be worse than a moose?" Dauntless muttered loud enough to draw everyone's attention. He coughed and wavered under it for a moment, before pressing on. "Those things are horrifying up close without being cyborgs."
"From a tactical and ethical standpoint? Humans." Armsmaster replied, his dark tone silencing the room again. "I've checked, and there are three former troopers besides Jenkins who might still be sufficiently preserved that they could provide a data leak or allow access to our facilities. Until further notice, we're raising Stranger precautions from level two to level three. I strongly advise the PRT to follow suit."
"Done." Piggot replied immediately, waving to Renick, who dug his phone out to issue the order.
"What about water things?" Vista asked, raising a hand. "Don't we have beavers?"
"Technically yes." Colin replied. "However, I don't believe they provide enough tactical advantage to convert, when the only population nearby is situated in a protected park. He's more likely to spend the effort on more easily acquired canines. Otters, fish, crabs, and other aquatic life were dismissed for similar reasons. He's not going to make a cyborg shark when no-one but civilians have any reason to be out in the bay, given our force-field bridge."
"Everything goes out the window if he hits a zoo…" Clockblocker muttered.
The Brockton Bay Zoo didn't have anything as extravagant as an elephant, rhinoceros, or hippopotamus, but it did have several species of large cats and great apes. "For the moment we're hoping to prevent escalation to that point. Additional guards should be assigned there regardless." Armsmaster agreed. Renick, who'd been about to put his phone away, instead started on another set of orders.
"Next up is Hotswap. We don't know the particulars of her power; her range, maximum number of stolen powers, or ability to manifest all aspects of the powers she steals. We have reason to believe all of these have some form of limitation. Our primary source is Glory Girl, who engaged in conversation with Hotswap while abducted. Hotswap cited a range, but did not disclose what that is. Hopefully she did so because the range is relatively short, and because this is a tactical liability. She did not simply steal every power, which a new cape would do to overwhelm a fight if they could. Nor did we see any indication of using Lung or Dauntless' power, and she chose Glory Girl over Oni Lee or Skidmark for her escape." He'd been flipping through pages as he went, and did so again. Rather than any images, this one was a summarized medical report.
"There have been two known cases of complications due to Hotswap utilizing her powers. Mush showed signs of being crushed under his trash-golem, but it's possible his non-standard anatomy at the time would have been fatal regardless. For this reason I'm ordering that Aegis is never to be deployed in an area where she is suspected to be present." The Ward himself paled under his helmet, though no one could see it. The shift in his posture showed his shock and horror well enough. "It's unlikely his day-to-day anatomy shifting is different enough to be a serious health risk, but a combat situation is different. Changes made to survive might fail when the power is swapped out, and anyone the power is swapped to might wind up with permanent alterations for any number of reasons. I'm eighty-percent confident Panacea could revert any changes, but it's not worth the risk." Armsmaster stopped, stepping forward and addressing Aegis directly. He lowered his volume, speaking with a more concerned tone. "Your safety, as well as that of your fellow Wards, are our highest priority. If you hear anything about her, retreat. If you notice your powers have changed or might be missing, notify someone immediately. Understood?"
Aegis nodded. "Understood, sir."
Colin stepped back, clearing his throat before projecting his voice again. "Likewise, all other capes are to notify others immediately if they spot changes in their powers." He then addressed Director Piggot. "We have yet to see her swap a power to someone who didn't already have them, but we cannot discount the possibility."
"I'll add it to the memo." She stated, nearly managing to growl despite speaking in a fairly normal near-monotone.
"The other case…" Colin lead, page flipping to another medical report. "...is Battery. We do not know why she reacted so negatively, but presume it to be a power interaction. Again, she is expected to make a full recovery, but was confirmed comatose for approximately half a day, possibly more. Until we figure out why she reacted so poorly, we have to assume others may as well. Possibly including those who've already had their powers swapped around. What we do know is that sending Protectorate capes after her is a bad idea. In theory, so long as she doesn't have powers nearby to take, we've seen nothing that couldn't be explained by her utilizing present powers. It stands to reason then, that our best tactics for taking her down is to deploy a non-parahuman squad trained to handle chaotic Trumps, while we can be reasonably sure she has no other parahumans nearby. Do you concur?" He asked Director Piggot.
She made a show of staring him down for a moment, before nodding. "The data seems to agree, for now."
"Then we should begin running squads through scenario training for someone randomly gaining a power from various local capes. I've listed her as Trump five-asterisk to reflect this." Ignoring optimal engagements, the girl was a ten. Disengage until special units and tactics can be levied, do not seek engagements without the aforementioned tactical advantage. "In the event she… sneaks up on you, or seeks a dialogue, it may be better to attempt talking to her than visibly fleeing. Her profile indicates a lonely, socially awkward girl. Bullied; we don't know yet if she's the type to become the bully, or target those she views as bullies, as is common for those with such history who suddenly find themselves with powers."
The 'profiling' had come primarily from the journal found in the girl's room when they searched the house. It was written in a simple cipher that hadn't taken his suit more than half a minute to translate, but still seemed like too much effort for a teenager to bother with for a red herring. It included her thoughts on her mother's condition, her father's growing mania, and some detail regarding the bullying campaign she was enduring at school… including naming perpetrators.
Sophia Hess. This would bear investigating further. There was nothing he'd found to justify a breach of her probation as Shadow Stalker, but there was enough to audit her handler, and might be enough to go public with a probation officer for her civilian identity as well. Juggling secret identities could be so tedious.
"What about her bullies?" Vista asked hesitantly, likely asking out of duty while not entirely disagreeing with Hotswap's motivation.
"Unlikely to be in significant danger, unless they live near a cape," or are a cape, but they could post additional security for the Hess' home until further notice. That this could double as keeping an eye on Sophia was simply a bonus. "They will be notified of some danger, however I don't believe it likely that an attack will happen to line up in Hotswap's favor, and they've already had over a year without Frankenstein taking his daughter's frustration out on them on her behalf. We have reason to believe," from her journal, "that this hasn't been a matter of his own temperance. They should be relatively safe with a police detail."
This would also keep several of their own agents freed up to deal with the gangs. "I'll add it to the docket." Piggot muttered, and Renick made a note. "What do you think we should do regarding information control?" She asked in a tone that indicated she'd already decided but was willing to let him guess and say it first.
"High clearance only, disseminate as little as possible, inform those with clearance of a media blackout." Colin answered immediately.
Piggot nodded. "It's going to get out, but we can hold it off as long as possible. The last thing we need is some Master trying to control Hotswap, or the Teeth or Nine showing up to light the powder keg." The room collectively shuddered at the thought, some doing a better job hiding it than others. "Frankenstein makes drones, not people. Any indication otherwise is going to bring every gang on the east coast to our city, and a few from the rest of the continent besides. The only reason I limit things there is because by the time anyone else hears about it, he'll either be dead or someone else's problem. There is to be no confirmation of him working on humans at all, including not informing the rank and file why we're tightening Stranger protocols. The wife is just a cape with unknown ratings until further notice. Any questions?"
Her tone brooked no argument, and everyone else had enough experience working with Piggot to know not to question orders. "If asked about the Stranger protocols," Renick slowly began, picking up steam when his superior allowed him to continue, "what reasoning should we give them? People are likely to dig or assume, otherwise."
Piggot chewed on it for a few moments. "Blame the Masters." She finally said with a shrug. "Tell them we have reason to believe a human Master is in the area, possibly from the Fallen. Maybe the rumor mill will drag Haven off their asses camping around the bible belt to send some backup." Colin knew she didn't like Haven. As far as Piggot was concerned, they were a step off being another Christian cape cult like the Fallen, only given leeway to call themselves heroes because they spent ninety percent of their energy targeting the Fallen. Everyone hated the Endbringer worshippers, who called the city-killing monsters harbingers of their god's displeasure with the world as it was. Whether they were still worshipping the Christian 'God' was up for debate. If Haven's convenient target disappeared… well, they'd deal with the fallout when it came.
Tomorrow's enemy could still be made use of today. Colin quietly approved of the ruse, and picked up from there. "New Wave should be informed, especially considering they're already involved. I don't believe reaching out to the smaller independents is worth the potential information leak, however. The redacted information on the general notice boards will be sufficient." There were more cape sites than just PHO, and the PRT maintained a low-security bulletin for semi-official dissemination. "Glory Girl has already agreed to a standard pre-press blackout, and the rest of New Wave shouldn't have any arguments in avoiding a mad scramble for the Bay. Best case, we can avoid publicly revealing anything about Frankenstein for now."
Knowing their history, the last thing they wanted was to be caught up in another Boston Games situation. It wasn't quite the same, since the local gangs would likely help to buffer the influx to some degree, not wanting competition to set up permanently. It was close enough though, and they'd see it once the situation was outlined for them.
That was a problem for later, however. "Any further questions?"
"Do we really want to call him 'Frankenstein' in that case?" Clockblocker asked. "It kind of implies the people thing."
"As previously noted, the name is a placeholder and we're hoping information about him remains sparse. I'm open to workshopping the name if you have any suggestions?"
He shrugged. "Dunno… something about Pet Sematary, maybe?"
Colin frowned, somewhat frustrated he hadn't thought of it first. "We'll swing back to that later. We have very little information on him, and still need to debrief on the conflict earlier today. To that end; Militia, Dauntless, you were on site. As much as you can in your own words, please."
The pair proceeded to go over what happened at the park, most of it overlapping with the written reports. A few questions prompted new information, which was why Armsmaster preferred holding these sorts of briefings in a group. He might be above average intelligence, but he wasn't the sort of genius who could catch everything. Delegation was an important skill, even better when you could manage it without letting on that that's what was happening. Less credit to share around, in those cases.
He added in information from Glory Girl's interview when applicable, but otherwise left the team to their work while observing. The meeting continued on into what little they knew of Danny Hebert as a cape, the warrants they'd used to search the building and what they'd found there in the basement, and speculation on more labs that might be elsewhere in the city. They went over things to look for on patrols to try and narrow the search for the Tinker, and what to look for to hopefully spot Hotswap.
After the meeting, he spent another half hour discussing the situation with Piggot. Then he sent a report on Hotswap up the chain, and happily went back to catching up on tech maintenance.
Twenty-five hours after the fight
The dragon pondered his latest challenger. Some slip of a girl, barely more than a child, who could somehow steal the powers of those nearby. His senses were excellent while he was a man, but the dragon's senses were more. He could hear the conflict behind him, pick out her hair color and body shape from a glance over his shoulder. It might be enough to identify her if she entered his presence again, but not enough to send his minions on a search.
'Curly brown haired white girl' was the sort of thing that'd have his men harassing Jew girls and giving Kaiser an excuse to crow about how their differences might not be as irreconcilable as they appeared. The bastard had a way with words, a charisma to woo and sway the masses. It complicated dealing with the Empire, a hive of wasps that gleefully attracted attention to themselves, even from far afield.
Lung was not stupid. He knew the moment something drew a Protectorate or Guild taskforce to the city, or the attention of chaotic monsters like the Nine, that his time as king would end. The trick was ensuring the rest of the city agreed with him, and the problem was convincing zealots they were wrong. Of all Kaiser's faults, the worst was his insistence on associating with zealots. He convinced himself that he could manage them, while amassing a powderkeg for a throne.
Lung needed only fear to inspire loyalty, which let him deal with such elements and only enhance his image for doing so. Sometimes the simple solution was common because it worked.
He drummed his fingers along his seat's armrest. A fine mahogany, well carved and beautifully lacquered, it would burn if he failed to restrain himself. He'd had it for three years now. It helped, having a place to ponder problems, far from the bustle of the city and his gang.
The problem now was this new piece on the board. How would the Protectorate react? Recruitment, with honey or vinegar. Easy to plan around. If that power came to be wielded by his foes there was no point challenging it, which was why it would be so appealing. If they couldn't befriend the girl, they'd alienate her. Make a potent enemy who might not care for the game of weights and stones. A child that may upend the board, and call down the very forces Lung had carefully avoided drawing the attention of.
Kaiser would hopefully see the issue just as clearly. For all that his Empire had connections beyond the city, calling upon them would also draw the ire of his allies' enemies. The Protectorate would follow the Clans east, and if the European capes didn't follow the Germans, the Guild certainly would.
His Empire was more difficult to predict, as segmented by ideology as it was. Hookwolf would ignore anything but a direct challenge unless ordered otherwise. Krieg would see her eliminated or sent overseas to the Germans, neither of which could be accomplished quietly. Purity would snap and die at the first challenge, her own power and bigotry turned against her. Victor would assume his power infallible and push to recruit the girl, if only he could work his skills on her. Fool Thinker, unable to accept that Kaiser would always be better with words.
The question then became which of them would slip the leash first. Kaiser would of course approach the situation just as the Protectorate, honeyed words and knives in the dark. …Krieg, he decided after a moment. The man was too ambitious for his own good and would have her tracked down and chained, which would spark violence.
What then, should He do? Lung owed the girl a small boon, just as he owed her a violent end. Lung was forced to flee, his own body rebelling against him. But Lee had stayed. Lee had fought. Lee had grown.
For the first time in years, his right hand was answering questions with sentences instead of single words or confused grunts. He was able to report on what he'd seen and experienced, which was how Lung had come to fully understand what had transpired.
It was Lung's power. The only thing that made sense was if the regeneration had repaired some of the damage done by Lee's own power. It didn't fix everything; Lee was hardly the belligerent, disobedient delinquent Lung'd had to break when he arrived in the city. Lee wasn't the same man he was then, and had to relearn a surprising amount of his vocabulary, but he was far and away superior to the doll who could barely hold a handful of short orders in his mind at once.
But this ran contrary to the fact that she'd humiliated him. Forced him to flee, and abandon his goal. That the goal had been accomplished by the girl was irrelevant. Even if the Merchants had lost a cape, it wasn't by his hand. The message had not been sent. Do not fuck with Lung's things.
So the girl needed to die. Perhaps he need not ensure she suffer, in repayment for the aid to Lee, but die she must. His fingers drummed again. If she could remove powers entirely, his would not have been returned. If she could keep them forever, why return the greatest power in the city? If she had no limits, why ever grant a power to someone else? No, the girl had a maximum number, and could only borrow power. How does one kill something like that?
Simply give it no powers to steal. Kill her with something that won't care what powers she has. Yes, overwhelming unexpected force. He'd have to find something that could manage it. If not, he could always pay a Tinker to build a weapon to do the job. Just because he'd never had reason to before now in no way meant he couldn't, and sufficiently loyal middle-men would prevent any loss of face from outsourcing a solution.
If the problem didn't resolve itself, he could step in before anything threatened his kingdom. Now he just had to find the girl.
Thirty-eight hours after the fight
Jen blinked at the ID in surprise. It wasn't too odd to get calls at this time of day, but this was an external unregistered number. Someone actually managed to navigate the labyrinthine call menu to make it through to her. She steeled herself for whatever situation might be on the other end, and clicked her headset to accept the call. "Philadelphia Parahuman Asylum, how may I direct your call?"
"Oh! Hello. I actually just had some questions about mental health resources for parahumans, if that's okay." The man on the other end replied.
"I'll… do my best to help, sir."
"Thank you! My daughter triggered recently, and she's started showing post-traumatic stress symptoms. Mood swings, depression, anxiety, night terrors… Anyway, I can't find any reputable listings for parahuman therapists, and I was hoping a facility connected into that network might have more resources."
"Well, if you'd like we'd be happy to help. We have several specialists on staff here, an-"
"Nono, no. I don't believe any of your staff would be willing to make tele-health appointments to another state, correct?"
"Er, not really, no. What's the problem? Our facilities are first-rate, with top specialists and intensive care, why couldn't we help her here?"
"Your facility is known to have had several patients removed by outside agents, and my daughter's powers are…rather exactly the sort that'd prompt idiots to try assaulting your facility. I don't think it'd work, for the self-same powers, but we're not willing to put your staff and other patients at risk that way." He paused for a moment while she digested that. When she failed to reply, he continued. "Plus, we… might technically be considered villains. There's a chance the PRT would try to have her transferred to their custody, or try to pressure your facility to bring us out of hiding, which… could end very badly. We just want to be left alone, and for our daughter to be happy."
Jen had been wincing periodically throughout. It was rather difficult to stop a parahuman with a goal, except with another parahuman ready for them. They had security, but it hadn't stood up to the challengers that came knocking. Each defeat left them with fewer capes willing to sign on, especially when one of those was the Slaughterhouse Nine. She hadn't been on staff then, and it'd given her pause when applying, even when she'd never be expected anywhere near any of the parahumans, or in the line of fire in the event of another break-in.
"I'll have to make some calls." She acceded after a few tense and silent seconds. "Your request is… odd, and we might not have an answer you'll be happy with."
"So long as an effort is made, I'll be happy. We're already planning on setting her up with a normal therapist if this falls through. We'll be able to work something out, but it wouldn't be the best possible option, you know?"
"Of course, sir. Now, how should I get back to you?" A few moments jotting down sparse contact information, with him explicitly denying any current mailing address due to safety concerns, and she had everything she needed. "Thank you, sir. I'll try to call you back today, but it might be a couple of days." He bid her a good day, and she returned the sentiment.
Then she had a brief chuckle at the absurdity of it, before clapping her hands over her cheeks a couple times and dialing an internal number. It picked up after a few rings. "Jessica, you're never going to guess what just happened…"
AMY
(This segment brought to you by Heroes and Villains by Poets of the Fall)
Taylor: "Your therapist will remember my name."
Amy "HA! Joke's on you, I don't have one of those!"
Just setting some things up in Yan- Tsundere-land. Don't mind me…
[idly skims the Rivals-To-Lovers trope page]
It's very hard to internalize someone else's experiences. Language isn't sufficient, and we cannot know another's fears, wants, loves, pains… In some ways it's very easy to assume no one else can hurt, because you can't know they're hurting. Not in the same way a cut obviously and viscerally hurts you. Not in the way a breakup makes you sad. Not in the way losing a loved one can devastate you. Life is ultimately a solitary journey. We are all born alone, we all live alone, and we all die alone.
Except kind of not, though? That's a reasonable, if incredibly shitty way to view the human condition. It's possible to empathize with others. We even call it a mental illness when someone can't. But it's also impossible to truly understand.
My point being, Vicky just got slapped in the face with someone else's experience in a very real way, and now it's real in a way it couldn't be before. She knew, she empathized, but she couldn't understand. Now she does. Now she knows what she does to people.
And she is freaking the fuck out about it, now that she's had hours to stew on it somewhere she couldn't afford to be seen breaking down. The PRT cleaned up the scene, prioritized MM and Dauntless while they were already kind of focused on A&B from the Hebert Incident, and wound up taking an hour or so to get to Vicky's debriefing, which took a lot longer because they can't just expect the written report later, like with the other heroes involved. Vicky then spent half an hour or so flying around, trying not to freak out, failing, and then deciding to go home.
Anyway-
Amy canonically is not immune to Vicky's aura, just so used to it she can't really tell when it's affecting her. Which isn't to say aura theory is correct (even though it makes perfect sense and the science checks out), we don't need that argument locking any threads, just that no one's actually immune. Even Dean is just resistant because it's his own power trying to work on him, not actually immune as far as I'm aware.
Amy: "Tsun tsun tsun tsun tsun tsuntsuntsuntsuntsunTSUNTSUN-"
Vicky: "What's wrong?"
Amy: "Fuck m- I mean y- I me-... [inarticulate rage]"
COIL
Coil's shard being all "You want me to simulate a trigger. Not just that, but Queen Administrator triggering? No. Hell no. Do you have any idea how many options that bitch has? How much energy that'd take to calculate? I'm not digging through every one of them. Knowing you, several times? Have a headache, idiot."
Add in that QA is a cheating cheater who cheats, and Coil is having a bad time.
This particular racoon's name is Jeremy. He is a very good boy, who occasionally stops to wash the money he steals from the gangs in clear puddles when sent on missions. This behavior is not part of his programming, and is why he was pulled from the electronics heist team. Danny thought it was too cute to remove, so they found a compromise.
Why burn Lisa? Coil is smart enough to feel desperate, given previous Hebertnanigans. As repeated in the snippet, Tommy boy is confident he can track Tats to Taylor and them. Then he sends in his dozens of trained non-capes to murder the fuck out of Taylor. Also her mom and dad, because reasons.
This segment was originally planned to come after the Armsmaster one, but then I swapped chronology around, deciding the breadcrumbs I could drop in this bit would make the next one hit harder due to anticipation.
ARMSY
So. Very frustrating. I thought I found an error and needed to make the briefing happen the next day after the fight, because I needed Battery to be out overnight. …except I forgot that I'd already had it be overnight. So. Yeah. I rewrote it, realized the fix had become the error and needed to take a break. Here is the fix, because I'm not just deleting work entirely.
Three hours after the fight
With Glory Girl's debriefing, Colin was confident he could throw together a briefing on the new capes. Militia and Dauntless had given their reports, and he had all the information he needed. However… they weren't in any state to actually attend the briefing in question. They'd powered through the cleanup at the park, but even during their oral reports they were visibly shutting down. It was an unusual reaction from hardened heroes, and prompted him to take a closer look at the situation.
Dauntless was easy enough to figure out. The man had a delicate constitution in the best of situations, being a sentimental man with a history of mental health issues even before his trigger. Glory Girl managed to show him up without trying, which had shaken his resolve. Being overwhelmed by the fight itself and the confusion of the power-swapping explained everything, as far as Armsmaster cared to look.
Miss Militia was given more thought. Armsmaster skimmed back over her unredacted file, first recent events, then skipping back to the start when nothing in the past few years prompted him to remember something. That's where he found it; an early interview from her time with the Wards, indicating she believed her power was quite literally a gift from her god, intended to save her life and make the world a better place. If she still held to those beliefs despite the pressure from PR to not externalize religious ideation and the years since, then it made a bit of sense. Facing a power nullifier was one thing, but having one's 'divine right to survive' co-opted by an enemy would be incredibly demoralizing. He might need to arrange for her to have some time off, once the current investigation was resolved.
He emailed both, telling them to ignore their schedules for the next twelve hours to recover, but that he expected them to attend a late morning debriefing. Then he spent the rest of the night collating data from the investigation teams between work on Tinker projects and other paperwork.
Seventeen hours after the fight
Waiting the night to hold the briefing had proven more fortuitous than expected. It let them perform autopsies on several of the dogs, search the house and start cataloging Tinkertech and building materials, and find the truck dumped near the Dockworker's Association building. A cursory search of the Union's records had already given them a handful of promising locations to search, while they kept up sparse patrols in the area in case the Heberts had camped out in one of the buildings nearby.
Of particular interest was the journal found in the daughter's room. It was written in a basic cipher that took his suit's software about half a minute to crack and superimpose a translated version onto his HUD in its place. Between the thoughts on her mother's condition, her father's growing mania, and the sparse details of a bullying campaign at school, it was a goldmine.
Sophia Hess. This would bear investigating further. He might need to audit her handler. There was nothing he'd found to justify a breach of her probation as Shadow Stalker, but there might be enough to go public with a probation officer for her civilian identity as well.
He'd mostly caught up on paperwork put off by the investigation when Miss Militia drudged into the room, looking much like a non-noctis cape who hadn't slept last night. He was loath to pull her from duty while they still had decent odds of finding a Tinker workshop they'd need to raid, but it might be necessary to expedite that time off. At the very least she was still feeling well enough to be early as usual.
Minor tweaks to fix things after that, but they're not worth pointing out.
ANYWAY-
According to the wiki, Renick is one n, not two. I still default to two because Rennick looks right, but I'm working on remembering the correct spelling. At least I'm not habitually forgetting the space in Glory Girl, or spelling 'laser' with a Z for Laserdream. Crystal's canon PHO handle is GlitzGlam, but there's no Z in her cape name.
Browbeat: Not a Ward until 2011 (I'm pretty sure it's some time in March), and this interlude is still set in early December 2010. I did not forget to mention him when talking about where all the Wards are.
I keep seeing Armsmaster referenced as one of the top ten Protectorate capes, but haven't dug around to see if there's any canon backing to it. It sounds fanon-y. You'd expect a political backwater like Brockton Bay to pull his reputation down. Brockton's about half the size of Boston, and just barely off the top fifty US cities by population, which means it'd probably be somewhere in the 40s a decade ago. You'd expect him to be high in popularity, but nationwide? Top ten feels off, when I'm not sure he'd be known much at all outside the New England area.
Prism is probably higher, as Legend's second. Possibly some other New York cape would have better publicity than Armsmaster too, but maybe not. Rime, as Alexandria's second in Los Angeles. Seattle, Portland, Vegas, other large cities in California like San Francisco, San Diego, or Sacramento probably have popular leaders, too. I can keep going down the list of cities way bigger and more prominent in the media than Brockton would be, but I think I've made my point.
TL;DR: I can see a dedicated media campaign on his part putting Armsmaster in the top twenty, but not the top ten. So he gets to be one of the top ten East Coast capes. Still very impressive.
It wasn't having her power swapped out that put Battery in a coma (though that also hit her a lot harder than it would a natural cape), it was having her power put back when she left Taylor's range. As far as Assault and the agents with him were concerned, she never actually woke up.
"But" I hear you say, "If people get off charges for triggers, why is Rachel still on the run?" Because this has only been a thing for the past few years, and Rachel triggered almost a decade ago. If she got caught now, a lawyer (assuming they cared to) probably could get the murder of her foster mother dropped. But the PRT and court wouldn't care because of her other crimes, all 'you're still a villain, you didn't turn yourself over to the PRT, you chose to continue doing crimes. We're charging you for those, and you can't argue your way out of them.' So it wouldn't really matter.
Trump 5* - Five and nine are the highest ratings that can involve zero Protectorate parahumans. Five being 'a team of specially trained and/or equipped PRT troopers can handle this cape' and nine being 'shoot it with ICBMs'. Taylor might warrant a nine tactically, but she currently does not warrant a nine ethically.
Vista is a nine because no, there is no amount of training or equipment that will let normal humans beat her in a fight. Imp was a five because theoretically, a team of normals could be directed to catch her by someone outside her range running overwatch through body-cams. Lisa should have been a five, because a hardened soldier isn't going to care what you say to them while they're getting the job done (which is why Coil's mercs could catch her). Her rating was jacked up by Tagg so that they could get away with (over)killing her should the opportunity present itself. A trooper killing a five is doing his job wrong. A trooper killing a seven he shouldn't have stood a chance fighting is a hero.
But what about the Ruuuules? Fuck the rules. The PRT doesn't actually care about the rules, and certainly not to the degree fanon says they do. The Rules dictate the Empire should have been safe even when their identities were unmasked. The Protectorate, being other capes, were not allowed to target their civilian identities. Piggot had zero problem unmasking capes once they were caught, so that they could catch them again easier if they escaped. Tagg ran roughshod over rules that aren't codified anywhere and thus do not actually matter. The only people who really have to worry about them are small teams like the Undersiders, who can get stomped out by bigger groups that can ignore the rules, like Lung and the Empire. I mean, even when they were unmasked, the Empire was still going strong until they lost Kaiser to Leviathan.
TL;DR: The Protectorate cares about the Unwritten Rules. The PRT does not. Once your identity is known, you're just a criminal who happens to have powers.
Endbringer Truce =/= Unwritten Rules. Stop confusing the two.
Pet Sematary: Remember how I said Danny would be stuck with Frankenstein? This statement is now incorrect. I remembered it was a thing as I was writing the 'do we really want to call him that' question. I like to pretend I'm more cultured and well read than I am, especially considering how booky Taylor should be. (And this one is worse. It's kind of an AU point that Taylor didn't feel as bad reading through her mom's library in this timeline, and thus has opinions on quite a few things)
I'm still incredibly unhappy with the ending here. That's the part I figured people would hate, but no one mentioned it. It's the worst of the lot, and doesn't feel up to standard.
LUNG
I like writing smart Lung. It's kind of fun, and also an interesting challenge due to how much of an asshole he is.
This segment was not part of the original plan, and came about because I figured it would be a good place to warn the readers about SuperLee. I expected it to be like two moderately sized paragraphs.
Instead it's something like a thousand words. What the hell, brain.
It also wound up a good way to also poke at worldbuilding the Empire. Always nice when that can avoid actual Nazi PoV. Racist rapist Asian caricature gang lord thug? Still preferable to Nazis. I think it has something to do with me being white, which makes white supremacists feel even more wrong.
It's just part of human nature to hate things similar to you how are doing it wrong than people with more glaring differences. Catholics VS Protestants, Christian VS Muslim, Everyone VS the Jewish… it's all the same god. That's why they're the Abrahamic religions. They all worship 'the god of Abraham'. The 'other' are just worshipping him wrong, which is more offensive than, say, Hindi or Shinto or whatever the various shamanistic and totemic beliefs were called. Heretics as opposed to Heathens. It must offend god to be worshipped wrong, yes?
Absolutely ridiculous to someone as agnostic as I am. Seems like people just looking for excuses to abuse and kill each other. Bluhhh… that's not what this thread is about, though. Again, let's not lock the thread, please. Just me rambling far too much trying to explain a point.
I look at white supremacists and see how that could have been me on some level, which is revolting. That's the point I was trying to make. (And might help explain why so much of the fandom finds the E88 so much worse than the ABB, since I've seen it asked repeatedly. The majority of the fandom is white, and a significant chunk of it are LGBT and have dealt with people like the Empire finding that offensive enough to wish harm on them. They'd dislike me as a mostly-straight white male who happens to be poly, but they'd want my partner (who is trans) suuuper dead.)
And yes, Lung is a rapist. Part of the 'kidnapping for brothels' fanon comes from a WoG stating that Lung keeps sex slaves. Implied as for himself, but the fandom reads 'his gang does that'. Which isn't a huge jump to make given support from the Emma Alley scene and nothing in the text actually refuting it.
JEN
This was the last segment added, to help explain the state of Taylor after the timeskip (which will be something like six weeks, either mid or late January, I haven't decided yet).
Taylor will, ironically, wind up with better mental health support than most Wards.
There have been minor edits to the start of chapter one clarifying Taylor's behavior at Winslow shifting to be more confrontational as a recent development. If you want to go back and skim those, it should take you half a minute at most. All of the edits are before Taylor gets home.
To those wondering where I've been, mostly dealing with issues. Mental health, physical health, family, appointments, lawyers… My biggest issues these days are with anxiety, especially when there's some significant appointment I need to be keeping. I've been okay, but just not in any mood to write most of the time.
AT49 is about 4.4K words, and I'm past the big chunk of writer's block that had me unable to touch it at all for half a year. Hopefully that will be coming out soon. A significant chunk of my 'writing' time, since I didn't feel up to typing, was planning out a reboot for Refractions (one of the significant changes being that it has a name, now), more data on that possibly soon. You can always ask on the Discord if you're interested.
Oh right, plugs. Uhh, your Patronage would be appreciated… and I should really figure out some other support platforms at some point. I never remember to look into them at a time when I'm mentally stable enough to not wind up feeling anxious about it. Nothing new, really. I'm incapable of remembering to make appointments with any sort of office before like 8PM when everything is closed. Even writing notes and setting alarms usually doesn't help…
Bah, you're not here for that. Onward to post-timeskip!
It took a moment for my brain to register what I was seeing out the window. Covered in snow, I barely recognized the park where I'd broken up that cape fight just over a month ago. I stared as it passed by, then leaned my head back against the window. I didn't know where this bus went, just that it passed Lord's Market on the other side from Lord's Street, and generally wound north between the Trainyard and the Boat Graveyard. I'd never ridden past the Market before.
This was a thing I've been doing, lately. Every few days I'd feel the urge to buy a day pass in the morning, and just see where it took me. I'd get off at random connecting stops and hop on the next bus to come by. I'd seen more of the city in the past month than I remembered seeing in the past decade, watching out through the windows. People, traffic, the weather, the city… there was a lot to see just sitting around and letting someone else drive, if you didn't feel like spending the time on anything else.
One of my therapists called it melancholy, and the other said it was mild depression. One being a chronic condition, while the other could pass if I had more things to be happy about. Both of them encouraged me to go outside and meet people, find hobbies, and have fun. I wasn't sure I cared to, but that was probably my particularly bad mood today talking.
I'd just met with my trauma specialist yesterday, a nice middle-aged Latina woman named Penny, who usually worked with troubled teens in Manhattan. She was the first therapist we'd reached out to who was interested enough in my case to accept doing video calls. It helped that we'd only called places we thought wouldn't have gang ties, and that she almost certainly had no ties to any of the Brockton gangs.
We'd talked about Winslow and Emma yesterday, which probably explained my mood today. The first three meetings that first week were to establish that I wasn't murderous or suicidal, and to talk though the deaths on my conscience. It hadn't helped as much as I'd hoped, but it set some groundwork for dwelling on it less, even if I still had problems sleeping. I refused to stoop to sleeping pills, or anything I could wind up addicted to, but we'd already gone through too much melatonin and calming tea for my liking. I hated talking about anything in my life, but I hated not sleeping more.
So we talked about Emma. Everything she did, everything she'd had the other girls do, the few things their posse had gotten a few of the boys to do… There was a lot of skimming and summarizing involved. I still didn't want to think about it, let alone talk about it, but this just how therapy was supposed to work, right?
It helped that she treated my situation seriously. I'd gotten a few generalized stories without names from her, of the sort of things she usually dealt with. Rape victims, abusive families, suicidal depression, overstressed teen parents… sometimes combinations of them. Abuse was still abuse, she'd said. Different pain is still valid pain, and she helped people deal with the marks left behind, regardless of what caused them. I still felt conflicted, like there must be someone else who needs the time more than me, but I couldn't deny it was helping.
It wasn't quite the same with my other therapist. Her name was Jasmine, and she insisted I call her Jazz. She wasn't much older than me, somewhere in her early twenties, and very notably was not currently a licensed therapist. Technically she was still a student, but they couldn't find a full cape therapist with enough free time to take on a new client. So, when they asked if I was fine seeing a student, I hadn't objected to it. I get to see someone studying parahuman psychology, and she gets client hours with a cape, a win-win for the most part. I'd looked it up, and it wasn't that unusual for lower-risk patients to be handed off to what amounted to an apprentice working with the same practice, someone trying to become fully licensed but needed more study or time working with clients.
Jazz seemed very knowledgeable, but could be almost painfully cheery sometimes. Very much an optimist, who tried to reframe things as positively as possible. It clashed hard with my own pessimistic internal narrative, but for all the frustration it was probably a good thing, both of us skidding against the other like a set of brakes and evening each other out a bit more with each appointment.
Her supervisor was a woman named Jessica, whom I'd briefly met a couple times through the video calls. She helped with intake, and then tried to assure me that I could request a new therapist at any time if we turned out to be a poor fit. I didn't feel like taking her up on it, yet.
It was nice to have someone plugged into the literature on hand. They still didn't understand much about capes, but what I'd heard so far made sense. What I'd gone through was either a Trigger Event or a Crisis Point, depending on if you were asking the few laypeople who knew about them, the people studying capes, or the people trained to look out for them. A few of the established rules were a bit fuzzy around a second-generation cape, but there wasn't enough research to find patterns of which and by how much, just that we should expect the unexpected more often than usual with capes.
We spent a lot of our time talking about my relationship with Dad, who did fit several of the models better. Obsessive tendencies weren't rare, especially among Tinkers. Most of it was focused on Mom, but I'd been experiencing more of the overprotective streak since we'd left the house. Case in point, my little followers.
They were hard to spot from the bus, which was part of the point. As if it sensed I was thinking about it, the little sparrow that often took the role of my 'handler' dove into view. It was the least deformed of the set of birds Dad put together as monitoring drones, and thus the best option for signaling me if they spotted something I needed to know about. It didn't have a name. None of them did. Dad usually named his critters as a way to better tell them apart and remember which was which, but these were supposed to be mine, so he'd left their names to me.
I'd tried once or twice to think up lists of names to pick from, but it always felt wrong. Not just the names themselves, but the act of naming them. There was something off about them, and it made everything weird. Dad said it was nothing, but I think his power just didn't let him notice how some of them worked together better than they should, or did things before they'd be ordered to, or tweaked orders based on previous ones. I'd seen what went into them, and Dad had no issues rambling about what the things he was making could do, and they shouldn't be able to do that.
The bus stopped, and I found myself looking right where the sparrow had landed on a sign just outside the window. It looked almost normal, if not for the glint of a lens for one eye, slightly bigger than the other. It stared at me, and I stared back.
There was something in the back of my mind, quietly whimpering that looking too closely was dangerous. It didn't feel like me, reminding me of the sensation I'd felt when I was drawn to the cape fight. I just couldn't tell if my power was scared, or if it wanted me to be afraid.
Best not look too deeply, either way. Lovecraft might have been a racist bastard, but I'd read enough of his and similar work to understand that some things beyond knowing should stay that way. I broke eye contact first, and the bus trundled on.
I hadn't noticed any capes today. It was a much smaller part of why I kept wandering the bus lines like this, but after the first time I'd stumbled across one while riding, part of me wanted to know where they all were. A small and probably-powers-adjacent part of my brain. It begged the question of whether anyone else had powers as loud as mine, but I hadn't heard anything like it. Maybe no one wanted to sound crazy, so every cape unanimously decided to keep it to themselves. Maybe I was the crazy one. Maybe it was my powers in particular. Jazz had no data to point to, but was inordinately chuffed to have the slim chance of being the first person to psycho-analyze a power.
The bus hit a dilapidated, half-abandoned looking neighborhood, and turned around the block, stopping by one of the few places in the Trainyard still operating, before looping back and heading south again.
I continued to sit there and think, run through mindfulness exercises, and watch out the window. We passed a pair of weights in my power sense on our way past Lord's Market again. They must have just gotten there, and they were almost on top of each other. A couple out on a date? It was hard to tell from the bus, but I think they were moving around at a walking pace. It wasn't Mom and Dad, both because Mom was hard to hide conspicuously in a crowd, and that they were still the only ones with powers I knew well enough to pick out by feel.
That's the sort of thing that made it odd to not find any capes. In the end, they were people too, who had lives and maybe jobs outside of being a hero or villain. Sometimes I'd spot a Ward or Protectorate cape on patrol, or some random face on the street. More often they were inside or behind buildings. It was hard to imagine Lung or Hookwolf holding down a desk job, but Kaiser seemed like he could be someone important. Maybe he commuted to or from being Governor Mitchell, or maybe he was secretly Mayor Christner, or some other oily-feeling politician Dad had nothing but ill words for.
As far as I knew though, everyone besides the gang capes and Protectorate would have to worry about school or work, which meant they could be anywhere.
What I didn't see much of was fighting. The truth was, big cape fights just didn't happen all that often. Not ones big enough to be spotted from outside my range, anyway. I hadn't even seen small scuffles between unpowered gangers like I'd expected. Just the once that the bus was called to divert around a couple blocks, for reasons that only might have been gang related. It seemed most of it was small, or over quick enough it was hard to spot.
I got off the bus, hopping on the one I'd often used to take back to the house out of habit. The route didn't pass right by it, but what I could see a couple blocks away looked completely normal. No extra cops or vans, and no capes I could sense staking out the area. We passed right by the stop I used to disembark from nearly every day. The bus continued roughly south-southwest to the commercial sector, which was the best-off part of town aside from the Boardwalk and maybe downtown. Both of those had the benefit of not being gang territory, effectively held by the PRT and Protectorate and Enforcers depending on the day. The commercial zone, including the Towers, Mall, Medhall, and a bunch of other housing and office complexes, was the heart of Empire territory. Oddly enough it didn't feel like there was a gang presence as such, it wasn't like minorities were being lynched for going to the mall, but there might be issues I wasn't aware of if they tried to live there. The whole area was relatively clean, free of gang signs and with only the occasional homeless person.
Of course, I wasn't plugged into the seedy underbelly of the city. I probably just didn't know what to look for or where to go to find the issues. I was always just passing through, seeing exactly what the Empire wanted me to; a clean comparative utopia, if only the rest of the city would agree with them on anything. At least I think that was the message, which I would continue to steadfastly ignore. Better a wreck of a city we could actually fix than a Nazi city we'd need to tear down first.
This bus only came to three blocks from the edge of the mall at the closest, and I walked the rest of the way while keeping an eye out just in case. There were a few parahumans at the mall when it came into my range. None of them seemed to be traveling together, so probably not a PR event. I hadn't actually met any of the capes I sensed, when they were out of costume. Hopefully that trend would continue, in case things got awkward. I'd hate to find out someone like Julia was Rune and not be able to do anything with it, but more likely I'd never figure out who they were, just that they had powers.
I avoided the capes I saw around town who were in costume, being exclusively heroes who might recognize me despite changing my look. Mom and I fiddled with a few things, and Dad sent his animals to raid clothing and makeup shops on the off chance I'd be recognized if I did it. A part of me wondered if he just wanted to impress how useful having loyal and sneaky minions was, and another couldn't help but remember that he'd always been a penny-pincher, and it was hard to get cheaper than free. Mom wouldn't have let him just go around stealing from innocent local businesses though, so there was probably more going on that I wasn't seeing.
The biggest change to my looks was my hair. We cut it boyishly short, since I doubted there was a single picture of me without at least shoulder-length hair. It gave me the option to look more like a girlish guy if I wanted, or just layer on more changes to make myself unrecognizable. Today we'd gone for goth chic; black on black clothes with thick dark mascara, and the contradictory reputation as loner attention-seekers to help eyes roll off of me even if I caught them. The makeup magnified my resting bitch face to more of a constant glare at anything I was looking at, and most people I'd looked at in this getup had trouble meeting my eyes. Black also had the benefit of being especially toasty in the sun with it still being winter. All I really needed were jeans and a hoodie as long as I was back indoors before dark.
I was also wearing contact lenses, which took a while to get used to. I could see better than ever with us using my newer prescription for them, while my glasses were a couple years old. Surprising what you could get without questions if you knew your numbers and paid in cash around here. I could still see well enough with the old frames, and the exams were cheaper and more mandatory than updating the glasses. I was kind of surprised they'd survived Winslow, but I never took them off without keeping an eye on them, and no one ever aimed higher than my mouth on the rare occasions they targeted my face at all, accidental bloodying of my nose notwithstanding. I think there was more of a stigma around glasses, where the faculty might have to pay closer attention if those were broken, while they got away with ignoring trashed clothes, bags, and books.
This was all to say we gave fairly low odds even someone who knew me fairly well could recognize me unless I started talking to them, and about half of those were in on it. It let me do things like this, running around the mall just to wallflower my way through the minimum amount of human contact needed to stay relatively sane. Mom and Dad met up with Kurt and Lacey now and then, though I didn't care to know how or when, just that it was almost never at the bunker since we moved in. They can't lead people to a place they never go, after all.
I wandered around the first floor, mostly window shopping. I stopped in at a bath and body shop, meandering through their product stands until I came to hair care. I took my time looking before picking up more hair oil, which went right into my pocket after buying it. I didn't really want to lug any bags around, and this had little intention of buying much.
The next shop I went in catered to the 'edgy' scene crowd I was currently masquerading as a part of. Dark clothes all around, a wall of band tees, hoodies galore, and even small leather and lingerie sections. I spent the time there alternatively boggling or trying not to laugh at the thought of whoever might be keeping this shop open. It certainly wasn't anyone from Winslow.
Then I went upstairs and started wandering towards the food court, figuring I might as well eat while I was here. I passed a shoe store where I only slowed to look into the windows, a clothing store, a phone shop, a pretzel stand, and a different clothing chain, before I stopped in at a candy shop. I didn't buy anything, but had fun looking around for a few minutes. Maybe I'd grab something on my way out, if I still had a snack itch after eating.
After that came a knicknack shop for any tourists that weren't sticking to the Boardwalk for some reason, then another clothing shop, a movies-and-games store I ignored, and then a large emporium store that specialized in- you guessed it- clothes and shoes. I cast a longing glance back behind me, where I spied a small book shop on the other side of the building. I'd need to go around the building to get to it though, since we were on the second floor and the center of the building was open from the first floor. The little catwalk across the middle was about as far as just going around would be. Another place to stop on my way out, I supposed.
I looked around, scanning the crowd at the food court. One of the weights in my power sense had made it there before me. I didn't want to figure out who they were, but I wanted to actually run into them even less, which meant I needed to find them. All I could tell through the middling crowd was that it should be somewhere in a gaggle of girls standing near the food stalls.
As I got closer, I started to recognize some of them, and a squirming feeling began crawling up my stomach. Girls I vaguely knew from Winslow, which meant… sure enough, there was Emma. Sophia loitered next to her, present but not really part of the group the same way Emma was. I didn't see Madison, but she might be in the bathroom, and was small enough to be hidden by one or two of the others if not.
I bit back a groan and shifted to the side so no one would run into me while my thoughts were running like a train headed downhill. I was honestly surprised that it took this long to run into them. It just seemed like my luck that they'd pop up the first time I walked through the boardwalk or any of the shopping centers. But no, this had to be my third time through the mall this month without any hint of them until now.
They moved, and the weight moved with them. Peering along the mini restaurant fronts circling the food court, I stared incredulously as the dot firmly refused to shift away from them. One of them had powers. There was no other explanation. The group began splintering as it appeared no one could agree on what food to get, and the weight stayed with Emma and Sophia. It couldn't be Emma, could it? She was too much of an attention whore to keep her head down as an independent, or not try to stand out in whatever group she joined. But even as I thought that, the train stumbled on which cape I knew of she could be. She couldn't be Rune, and no one else matched even half as well as Sabrina the Teenaged Nazi as far as gender, body type, behavior, and skin color.
The pair split up a few moments later, and the weight followed Sophia to some sandwich place. Sophia was a cape. She had to be, but which one? Her I could see managing to avoid the spotlight. Was she in one of the gangs? Was she using her powers to threaten the principal into letting them get away with everything? It couldn't have gone much further than Blackwell, or I would have heard rumors. Gladly for one couldn't keep a secret to save a life, and I had serious doubts about the rest of the faculty as well.
It was just like her. Lording over everyone, pushing down anyone that stood out or annoyed her, strutting about like a thug. I took her power before the thought crossed my mind, the sick burbling fury lashing out while I was unable to care about stopping myself. Her power instantly struck me as odd. I felt safe. Like I could be untouchable and free, the second I flicked the new toggle in my brain. It just pissed me off more, that she got to go through life with what amounted to a security blanket, constantly comforting her. Making her feel powerful and invincible, while I had to suffer on my own.
The feeling seemed to get stronger, making me imagine my own power was trying to give me a hug. No, I don't hate you, I just wish I hadn't been forced to feel weak and helpless for almost two years, trapped between suffering and letting something terrible happen if I told Dad to cut loose.
The brief moment passed, leaving me with a now tempered fury. I wasn't alone. My power had my back, and my parents would support me no matter what I chose to do. Buoyed by the thought, I began stalking forward. If Sophia was with one of the gangs, she wasn't going to stop just because her favorite target was gone. She'd just shift that violent energy to someone equally undeserving of the treatment. She was a thug, and the only languages they understood were money and violence. Being unwilling to try paying the bully to play nice, it left a single option for trying to communicate.
Sophia was just starting to look around in confusion when I reared my hand back. I wasn't sure if she'd heard me or if she'd finally noticed her powers were gone, but it didn't matter. She still caught me in the corner of her eye quick enough to turn my knockout haymaker into a glancing blow by trying to duck away from it. I switched targets from the back of her head to her face, but only managed to snap her nose instead of catching her in the cheek or jaw as intended.
She yelled, catching the attention of Emma and the rest of the crowd. Then she brought her arms up to block the backhand swing I launched from my overextended fist. I dropped a little lower, changing the angle of the attack to knock her arms up so I could pop her in the slightly crooked nose with a quick left jab from my other hand. This knocked her off balance and stunned her into dropping her food. It didn't take much more leaning forward to barrel into her stomach, pushing her at least a meter back before slamming her into the ground.
I had to hand it to her, even with the air knocked out of her, she put up more fight than expected. I was sitting on her thighs, slapping her hands away as quickly as I could, and I was still only hitting her with every third punch I'd intended to do damage with through her broken guard.
Emma screamed a few seconds into me pounding Sophia on the ground, and a quick glance caught her tossing a food tray aside and charging in to help. She didn't seem to know what she was doing, though. The angle was all wrong, and it was pretty easy to lean over and hunker down so that she just bounced off my shoulder instead of tackling me off her friend. With her stunned on the floor for a bit, I went back to pounding Sophia's face until she stopped fighting back.
This was it. I'd won. I'd finally beaten her at her own damn game, and… sitting here, huffing and staring down at her as she looked up at me with fear in her one good eye… it felt hollow. Wasn't there supposed to be some catharsis kicking in? It might not've been a fair fight, but I wasn't sure I'd win a fair fight without using whatever her power was. Sophia had done a lot over the past year and a half. She'd kicked me down, shoved and tripped and bruised me, bloodied and nearly broken my nose twice, and nearly knocked a tooth from my mouth on several occasions. She deserved this. She'd earned it. I raised my fist one final time…
My body sagged as I let it drop to my side. "I don't get you." I said. "Why is this fun for you?" Cape fights I could understand, those were exciting by default. Fighting someone who could fight back was a challenge, and I could understand that. Beating up normal people? Picking on nerds and lonely girls who didn't want to fight back? Why?
Her fearful eye turned defiant, and she spat a huge glob of blood and spit into my face. I brought an arm up to wipe it away from my eyes, which gave her time to punch me in my side. It hurt a lot, and I think she was aiming for my kidney, but it wasn't enough to knock me off of her even when she tried to kick me off of her legs. I grabbed her shoulders, reared back, and slammed my forehead into her jaw. I could feel her head bounce off the floor, and she stopped fighting again.
I swayed somewhat unsteadily to my feet, wiping at my eyes again. "You fucking bitch!" Emma called, warning me she was back up.
Her fist was coming at me, and I took a moment to watch it. It was an overhead strike, aimed to come down on me despite me being taller. Maybe because I was still hunched over? I stood up straighter, figured out where her hand was going, and caught her wrist and forearm in my hands. I'd only seen this in movies, but if I really was a bit stronger than I should be…
I ducked down, pulling her wrist and shoving my other hand into her gut. Then I heaved my shoulders up against her chest and threw her as hard as I could. I was disappointed when she didn't fly across the room, but she did land on a nearby table hard enough to break the top off its bolted-down stand. She landed in a groaning crumpled heap on the floor.
That was it, I supposed. The whole Winslow chapter of my life, capped off in one shitty, confusing, unsatisfying food court brawl. I was starting to get angry again, just from how cheated I felt. I was supposed to feel better, less sad, satisfied, vindicated, or something, but all I felt now was angry that I'd gotten into a stupid fight for dumb reasons and had nothing to show for it besides bruises forming on my knuckles and my side.
"STOP!" I stopped swaying and glanced to the side, to find an unremarkable overweight mall cop advancing on me, hands empty and held wide in front of him. I wasn't impressed. He was big, but not really a threat. "Okay, we're all calm here. We need to get medical attention for everyone before the situation gets any worse, and-" He lunged, and I flicked the new toggle in my brain. I was just too done with today to care enough to do anything else. He fell right through me, landing in a confused heap after tripping over Sophia. I'd known the power would keep me safe, but I hadn't known how.
I looked down and saw my hands looked like shadowy clouds in the brief moment before the power flickered off. Where had I seen these powers before? I was sure now that they were familiar, but…
Mutters in the crowd caused everything to snap into place. Shadow Stalker. Sophia was Shadow Stalker. Sophia was a Ward. Well… shit. I guess I was in more trouble than I thought.
The mall cop was crab-walking backward away from me, terrified of the cape he'd just tried to take down. A glance at the crowd showed they were backing off as well as they could with more rubberneckers behind them blocking their escape. Quite a few of them had phones out, and a couple were still pointed my way. Fuck.
I used the power to drop through the floor, and started jogging to the nearest ground-floor exit. My hood was still up, and I had to hope that was enough to hide my face. Stupid, stupid. There were enough people that I couldn't really run without knocking into someone, and people seemed happy to hop out of my way at the speed I was going. I pushed through the doors and started down the sidewalk at a brisk pace that I hoped didn't look like I was fleeing the scene.
Movement in the corner of my eye pulled my head to the side, and I stopped. The glass display window full of mannequins promoting one of the stores inside provided just enough reflection that I could see something was wrong with my face. I jogged over to the nearest parked car and stuck my head next to the door mirror.
My face was covered in blood. No wonder people were jumping out of my way, I looked like a serial killer. I pulled my hoodie up and started wiping it away. My skin looked a lot better, and the black barely showed the blood soaking into the cloth. Now I just had to get out of here… It was probably too much to ask for the bus to arrive before a search party found me, but I didn't have a better idea. I still had Sophia's power, and I could phase into a car… but while I knew how to hotwire a car, I didn't know how to hotwire a car. It'd take me several times longer to figure out which wires I needed than it would for the bus to show up. I couldn't trust running around checking cars for spare keys. I might be able to steal a bike… but motorcycles had the same issue, and I didn't see any bicycles to try and phase away from their locks. I vaguely recalled a bike shop in the area, but running around looking for that wasn't any better than the other options.
I was still powerwalking toward the bus stop when I felt a weight quickly coming up behind me. It was soon joined by the sound of a car engine growing closer. I adamantly refused to turn and look. Had to act cool. Pretend to just be a normal shopper. Just the average pedestrian, nothing to see here, nope. Certainly not a violent goth girl, face smeared with blood and black makeup, with a red wet spot on the front of her hoodie, no… not at all. I was panicking. I knew I was panicking. The car pulled up, squealing very briefly as it stopped. I couldn't help looking.
"Get in." Said the honey-blonde girl in the driver's seat. Her window was rolled down, she was thumbing over to the passenger seat, and she was glaring at me. Naturally, I immediately swapped her power for a blank before she could threaten me, or Master me, or whatever it was her power did. I also instantly regretted it.
Frustrated. Angry. Afraid. Afraid of you. Afraid of someone else. Afraid for her life. Feels unsafe. Feels threatened. Was threatened. Is threatened. Threat to her life. Threat related to you. Threatened by you. Afraid of you. Afraid for her life. Needed to find you, to avoid threat to her life. Threatened by someone looking for you. Threatened by a villain looking for you. Is a villain. Is a villain looking for you. Is working for a villain that is looking for you. Wanted to find you. Is afraid of you. Doesn't want to hurt you. Doesn't think she can hurt you. Is afraid of you. Is trying to help you. Thinks she needs to help you to stay safe from her boss who is threatening her. Is-
"Fuck!" I spat, shoving the power back into the girl's head. I started rubbing at my temple, where a needle was starting to grind its way into my brain.
The girl winced. "Don't do that." She hissed, also rubbing at her head. "Get in, or wait for the bus. Pick one, already."
I glared at her, and now that she wasn't glaring back, my first thought was that she was actually pretty cute. Bright green eyes, a little button nose, freckles for days, and her hair tied back into a fancy french braid. What I could see of her figure from the door was pretty appealing as well, hidden as it was by a thick sweater.
She glanced back at me, then rolled her eyes. "Or stand there ogling me, I'm sure we both have all day."
I blushed, marched around the car, and got in. She started driving at a relatively sedate pace, idly reaching across me to open the glove compartment without looking. Within was a gun, which she again reached past to grab the bottle of aspirin next to it. In a deft show of dexterity or a great deal of experience with pain management, she opened the bottle one-handed, poured three pills into her palm, re-closed the bottle, stuck it back where it was and closed the compartment, and then swallowed the pills dry. Her left hand never left the wheel. Maybe twenty seconds later, she seemed to remember that she had a cup of coffee sitting in the cupholders between us, and took a swig.
"Sooo…" I muttered, about when Sophia's power snapped back to her without my input.
"Fuck you." She spat half-heartedly. "Do you have any idea how long I've been looking for you? And the very first thing you do is give me a migraine."
I took a moment to collect my thoughts before I replied. "You were way too convenient."
"Coming out of nowhere, here to save you, knight in shining cadillac, and my reward is an ice pick. I get it. Really, I do." She gave me a venomous side-eyed glare for a moment, before wincing and sagging a bit. "At least I didn't put a gun to your head first."
The rueful way she said it made me think there was some history there. Maybe that boss of hers? "Who are you working for?"
"Coil." She spat, then a few moments later added, "Fuck that guy."
I thought back to what Dad' said about him. "Yeah, fuck that guy."
We drove in silence for a few minutes while I ruminated and she focused on controlling her headache. "Lisa." She stated into the silence. "So you can stop pronoun-gaming about me."
Lisa, then. "What is your power, anyway?"
"Sherlock Holmes on crack."
"Cocaine, actually." I prodded with a small smirk.
"Go fuck yourself." She jabbed back. "It connects dots. Sometimes the dots are wrong. Usually they're right, even when they have no business connecting from what I can see. I get a few hours a day out of it if I keep a handle on it. Or I could firehouse facts for a few minutes, which I learned not to do pretty damn quick." The last she hissed angrily, and I gave her a small apologetic smile. That was as close to saying sorry as I'd get, and I had a feeling she knew it. I had no way to know her power would do that, and had good reason to feel threatened by a cape rolling up and all but abducting me given my options at the time.
Quite frankly, if her own power hadn't stabbed my brain with the fact that she wanted to help me, and hated the boss that told her to look for me, I would be treating this as an abduction, just waiting for the first chance I could get to either run away from my captor or take her down somehow. "So, what now?"
She grimaced, not answering immediately. If I had to guess she was debating how much to lie to me, given the fact that I could- at any time- swipe her power back and spend a second or two sussing out if and to what degree she was lying. "I… need to choose. Between you and my boss. I need to know if you can take him down, and how much collateral damage I'll have to deal with if we do."
"If he's a cape, it should be as easy as finding him, unless he has an army of goons or something."
"The army of goons is going to be problematic, yes. I haven't managed to suborn nearly enough of them. He seems to notice half the time when I do, and shuffle employment around with other merc-using villains. His power shouldn't let him do that."
I opened my mouth, thought about it for a second, closed it, and finally clicked my tongue in thought to buy myself another moment to put thought to words. "Well, that sucks. What even is his power?"
"Some precog bullshit even he doesn't understand. Thinks he's the center of the universe, so of course his power creates and destroys universes." She scoffed. "I'm about eighty percent sure he just picks two choices, his power shows him both, and somehow that translates into him picking the one he likes and making it happen, all in a way that to him looks like he's living two lives and playing god with them."
"That doesn't sound so bad, but I'm sure there's context I'm missing for why that's terrible."
"Generally, if you target him at home, he'll actually be at his base playing Bond villain. If you assault his base, he'll be busy at work playing nice with the PRT. I don't know who he is, but I know he's got connections there. Makes the most sense if his connection is himself."
"If I didn't already have reasons to not like the PRT…"
"I know, right?" Lisa turned down a street that'd lead us closer to my bunker than the one we'd been on. Then she seemed to notice my apprehension about it. "So, where are we going?"
"We're far enough away now, I can get out whenever and be fine."
"Fair enough." She pulled over near another bus stop. "We should trade numbers, meet somewhere else once you've cleaned up." I hesitated again, not knowing if her boss had the tech or connections to track a phone just from its number. "Or at least take my number, and contact me an hour or so before you want to meet. I might be busy with my boss, but otherwise I can drop everything to be there. You can throw the burner out after you call- before we meet even- if you want."
I didn't have a good argument against that suggestion, and so I relented. Paranoid enough now to worry about Tinkertech trackers somehow working with pre-prepared ink or paper, I used a fingernail to scratch the number into the back of one of the receipts in my pocket. She just smiled condescendingly while watching me do so, since I knew if they were willing to go that far, they could probably leave a tracking fluid soaked into the seat cushion or something, and I was already fucked if so. Still, it made me feel a little better, and she didn't actually say anything about it.
We said our goodbyes, hers including a saucy wink that almost had me swapping her power back in to see if she was trying to play honeypot now that she knew I thought she was cute. I decided it wasn't worth the headache when I could just watch out for it either way, which just had her smirking wider.
She drove off, and I scrubbed at my face some more with a different part of my hoodie. Then I walked a few blocks to a different bus route, and continued riding near-randomly for another two hours, just in case I was being followed. By then my hunger was starting to get the better of me, and my skin still feeling grungy wasn't helping with that. So, I took a circuitous path back to the bunker to check in with my parents.
Tried to make the timeskip feel like time was skipped. Very much not the same Taylor we left off, she got worse over the next couple days, hit miserable rock bottom about the story thus far, and the parental units decided to do something about it. This is Taylor after about a month of recovery.
For those who got it, yeah. Jasmine Fenton. I needed a spare-apist, and the version of her from Queen Phantasm (Worm/Danny Phantom) came instantly to mind. It's still in very rough planning stages, despite the fact that I started planning it about two years before I started AT. It's likely still a close second for amount of planning behind it, after AT. I just wish I had a story arc planned for it, to make it feel worth writing. Incredibly pleased with the setting fusion, I just wish I had somewhere I wanted it to go past chapter three or so.
Oh well, plans for the future.
On Taylor's hair: she kept it long in canon as an homage to her mother. Short hair would have absolutely been easier to clean, take care of, and been less of an issue for potential physical bullying. This Taylor is still interested in connections with her mother, but it isn't the ironclad edict that was held to in fanon, not that I know how much of one it actually was canonically.
This Taylor, with her mother's support, is okay with cutting her hair. A lot of this story is just exploring what changes if Annette isn't some monolithic ideal the family holds on to out of grief.
Attention-seeking Goths: I've always considered myself a goth. I like dark shirts, dark shoes, dark pants, and being alone (most of the time). Usually I'm just wearing blue jeans and a black jacket, or a long-sleeved black button-up left open like a jacket over whatever shirt, if it's too hot for thick layers. Usually blue, gray, green, or occasionally red shirts under that. A splash of color to make the rest more ignorable. Because I liked dark clothes, but didn't want attention.
The people wearing designer blacks or lace or leathers, though? The ones in the dark makeup, screaming with their clothes and attitudes how different and sad and misunderstood they are? Nope. Those are the Goth Chic crowd. They want attention, usually so they can make a show of ignoring it. I have never understood those people. Busy being depressed and overstimulated by crowds over here.
Like, I tried it briefly in high school, thinking that was a way I could actually get chicks that wasn't too far out of my wheelhouse, but it never worked. I gave it up as too much effort pretty quick, and never really grokked the appeal.
For those worried about the depression, I am currently about as mentally healthy as I've ever been. Therapy, pills that seem to be working, physical therapy to try and get a leg up on starting exercise, trying (and not really succeeding) to eat better, hobbies other than reading fanfiction and vegetating to videos when I'm too melancholic to read…
I still need to be in a mood to write, which is why this has taken so long, but honestly I've been doing surprisingly well this year. Just need to steer myself back into writing more (which I hope has happened since writing this part of the AN, if I'm posting it.)
I added a bit of filler between arriving at the mall and getting to the food court, for pacing purposes. This tweaked the reveal just a little, and I already wasn't terribly happy with it.
Taylor needed to be angry enough to throw fists, but I didn't want it to feel like a berserk button. Might have been too long between mentioning the Winslow therapy talks and the rationalization to violence, but I don't think swapping things around would make those bits better.
The confrontation here was probably affected by me bungling the one in AT, writing myself into a corner and then, not being sure what to do with it, decided they just ran and left town rather than get bogged down trying to figure out something new for it that wouldn't mess up something else. So we get kung-fu 'beating the shit out of Sophia' action. Also further use of Taylor's weak Thinker powers, thinking faster when not moving and intrinsically understanding angles and trajectories. A pair of Thinker 1-2 powers that mesh into a solid 2-plus-ish when applicable.
Now, Emma and Sophia should be able to beat a Thinker 2. Sophia is a combatant trained to fight capes who has some manner of backup, that's solid best-a-3 territory, especially if Sophia used her power. However, not only were they ambushed, but the phasing got yoinked. Add in the Brute 1-2 rating, and Sophia stood very little chance even if she could start getting hits in.
(Rating of 1: lucky untrained civilians can probably handle this. Rating of 2: A large group of untrained civilians or a trained civilian can probably handle this. Rating of 3: a group of trained civilians (cops) or someone trained to fight capes can probably handle this. Rating of 4: a group of trained cape fighters (PRT) is required. Rating of 5: A group of specially trained and geared PRT troopers can handle this. 6+: some flavor of 'requires cape support')
Lisa was always going to show up soon, but original plans had her finding Taylor here and then tracking her for a few days now that she knows to check bus lines, cornering her in a less emotionally charged setting.
Then I decided that was pussyfooting and wordcount padding, and so here she is. Pacing for this story was always supposed to be pretty quick, it's partly an experiment to see if I can keep something to just novel length, and there are still a bunch of plot beats to hit along the way.
But I DO intend for there to be a bunch of these longer introspective segments to hopefully keep things from feeling too rushed.
I stuck this up for open beta in the discord for a couple days before posting it, but I'm not sure anyone actually looked at it. No feedback… must be good feedback? I dunno.
Patrons had access to it before anyone else, and if you want to nudge things while they're in progress that's the way to do it.
