- Location
- Ural, Russia, Earth
It's alive! I'm so happy!
...I hope they just playing some FPS, not storm Dragonslayers base...
Magical Girl Lyrical Taylor (Worm/Nanoha)
- Thread starter Marsyas
- Start date
...I hope they just playing some FPS, not storm Dragonslayers base...
- Location
- West Michigan
Tangential question:
For all that I've enjoyed this fic and other Nanoha crossovers all the way back to SWTG, I've never bothered to sit down and watch the series. What's the fandom consensus on subs vs dubs?
For all that I've enjoyed this fic and other Nanoha crossovers all the way back to SWTG, I've never bothered to sit down and watch the series. What's the fandom consensus on subs vs dubs?
Mizu
Software Developer
- Location
- Victoria, Australia
I can't say on the dub side, as I've only seen the show subbed. I think they'd be fine, though? Pick whichever you're more comfortable with, I guess.
- Location
- not here any more
I've only ever seen dubs of the original series (ie not of A's, StrikerS, ViVid or ViVid Strike) and I prefer the subs.
Buuuut I'm generally inclined to subs *and* I learn Japanese, so.
6.9 - Administration
Marsyas
Surprisingly Jellicle
- Location
- Undimensioned and Unseen
Note: Originally, 6.8, 6.9 and 6.10 were all supposed to be the same chapter, but they just kept growing. I've been struggling with the writing of this part of the story, and I wasn't sure whether to post this chapter as is or to keep working on it. Sheer frustration plus an ever-increasing gulf of time since the posting of the last chapter proved decisive in charting the former course.
Magical Girl Lyrical Taylor
(Worm/Nanoha)
by P.H. Wise
6.9 - Administration
Disclaimer: The following is a fanfic. Worm belongs to Wildbow. The Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha franchise is owned by various corporate entities. Please support the official release.
Thanks to @Cailin for beta-ing!
-------------
I hadn't been expecting to see Chrono, and there were only a few reasons that came to mind for why he would be here; either he was already involved in the investigation into the murders, or Director Piggot was going to use this meeting to involve him in it. Maybe she was hoping that if I thought the investigation was in good hands, I'd stay out of it? Of the two, I figured the first was more likely than the second.
The room was lit mostly by the sun through the windows. Chrono looked the same as ever, but Director Piggot looked different; her hair was cut shorter, and was brown now instead of blonde, and she regarded me calmly from behind her desk.
She didn't stand up when I walked in; Chrono did.
"Hello, Starfall," Director Piggot said. "Have a seat." She indicated the second chair in front of her desk: the one Chrono hadn't been sitting in.
I did, and Chrono sat down beside me.
"Should I assume you already know why I'm here?" I asked.
"I prefer not to assume," Piggot said. "Why are you here, Starfall?"
"Three girls," I said, "three of my lookalikes from Arcadia, are dead." I gave the words a moment to settle before I added, "They were crucified."
Chrono gave Piggot a look as if to say, 'I told you so,' but Director Piggot herself seemed utterly unmoved. "And?" she asked.
I felt a spike of anger, but I forced it back down, forced myself not to show it. "Why didn't you tell me?" I asked.
"Despite the example set by the Administration Bureau," Piggot said coolly, "the PRT is not in the habit of involving children in murder investigations."
"It isn't the direction I would have chosen if I was investigating this on my own," Chrono said apologetically, "but this is a joint investigation, and the PRT insisted."
[Don't good cop me, Chrono,] I told him telepathically. [I've seen Law and Order.]
Chrono blinked, and a distinct note of confusion came back through the telepathic link as he asked, [What?]
And he had no idea what that was. Maybe it was just as well I hadn't said it out loud. I looked Director Piggot in the eye. "Maybe I would buy that if I weren't so obviously the target. Someone crossed a line, Director. Who was it? Was it the Slaughterhouse Nine?"
"If it was?" Piggot asked.
"Then I'm going to kill them," I said, and I meant it.
Piggot shook her head. "It wasn't them. The Slaughterhouse Nine aren't a factor anymore."
I blinked. Had the Nine been stopped? Killed? Otherwise neutralized? Nothing had been on the news about it, and that was the sort of thing that would definitely make the news. "Who, then?" I asked.
"We're looking at several persons of interest," Chrono said, "but the investigation is still under way."
Inside my strategic planning partition, Lisa spoke the name of the next most likely suspect after the Slaughterhouse Nine, and I echoed her out loud: "The Fallen," I said.
Piggot's eyes narrowed. "I can't comment on that," she said.
[It's them,] Lisa told me. [90% sure.]
Chrono sighed. "We don't know for sure that it's the Fallen, but someone's got you under observation, Taylor."
"Oh?" I asked. The word came out a lot quieter and angrier than I'd meant to say it.
"Even apart from the legal mess of bringing you in on this case, we didn't want you to do anything that would tip them off, whoever they are. We're making every effort to keep you and your family safe; even if the PRT can't use it in court, the Bureau is monitoring the Fallen in the city. If we thought that they were about to move against you, we would intervene regardless of any diplomatic troubles it would cause."
"And in the meantime," I said, "they're free to keep on torturing girls to death as long as those girls aren't me."
Chrono didn't answer. I probably wasn't being fair to him, but right then I didn't care.
"Now that you know, what are you going to do?" Piggot asked.
"I'm going to deal with them."
"And that's exactly why we didn't tell you," Piggot said.
I regarded her coldly. "Three girls are dead for the crime of looking like me. This is my city. Do you really think I can let that slide?"
If my words had been cold, Director Piggot's reply was positively arctic. "This isn't your city, Starfall. No matter what the Administration Bureau might claim, you aren't royalty here. You're a citizen of the United States, of Brockton Bay and an independent hero, not a member of law enforcement and not a parahuman warlord. It isn't your job to bring the perpetrators to justice. It's mine."
"I understand how you feel, Taylor," Chrono interjected, "but these criminals have a long history of kidnapping and brainwashing people like you, and you're too important to us and to this world to risk losing to a mind-controlling parahuman cult that worships broken Lost Logia."
The pattern was easy to see. Piggot was blunt and harsh, Chrono was sympathetic and understanding. Bad cop, good cop. It annoyed me that he was still doing it after I'd told him not to, but I didn't comment on that. Instead I asked, "Why haven't the PRT and the Protectorate taken them down before now?"
"Do you think it's that easy?" Piggot asked. "We've tried. Between the PRT, the Protectorate, the FBI and local law enforcement agencies and independent groups like Haven we've destroyed more than a dozen Fallen cells in the American South in the last five years. They're like cockroaches. You never find them all. They always come back."
"And now they're in Brockton Bay," I said.
"And now they're in Brockton Bay," Piggot agreed.
"So we deal with them," I said.
Director Piggot's eyes all but flashed. "It isn't going to…" she began.
I cut her off. "I'm not asking for your permission, Director Piggot," I said, keeping my voice calm and level. "The Fallen have made me their target, and they've crossed the line. I'm taking them down one way or the other."
She eyed me for a moment. "Then what are you asking for?"
"Your cooperation. Your assistance. You don't want to risk the Fallen getting to me? They'll be a lot less likely to get to me if I have the Bureau, the PRT and the Protectorate on my side."
They gave me their answers.
-------------------
When I left the meeting with Emily Piggot, I allowed my nervousness, my terror, and the knowledge that I had just walked and dictated terms to the Director of the PRT ENE flow back into my mind from where I'd kept it in my other partitions; my heart began to race, cold sweat broke out across my brow, and my hands shook. I had to clench them into fists so hard that it hurt to stop the shaking as I flew away from the PRT building.
Being able to shunt my emotions into my other mental partitions was incredibly useful, but it wasn't healthy, and I was pretty sure that it had made everything a lot harder to deal with when I hadn't been able to do it. I'd gotten used to being able to selectively just not experience my own emotions when they'd proven inconvenient, and now... well, now I needed to get to the point where I didn't need the partitions for that. It was inefficient. Entire me's had been devoted to managing what normal people never seemed to have that much trouble with, dumping the emotional output into minds already experiencing those same emotions, and I'd been fine with all those other myselves being practically paralyzed with fear, or insensate with rage, or so embarrassed that other-me wanted to die as long as it didn't affect my body or what I thought of as my main consciousness.
I couldn't do that to myselves anymore. It wasn't fair to me, we, or us.
Maybe that's why I was distracted when I landed at the site Chrono had mentioned telepathically over Director Piggot's refusal. It was a parking garage near the ruins of the Medhall campus, all concrete and asphalt. The place had been abandoned after Behemoth; it was inside the quarantine zone, and thirty or so homeless people had taken up residence, but I didn't see any of them as I entered the building and walked up a metal stairway to the second floor of the garage.
If I'd been thinking clearly, I'd have scouted the whole place with my sensor spheres before I'd gotten within a mile, but I wasn't.
My first indication that something was wrong came in the form of of a low, distorted growl that echoed weirdly off of concrete walls and abandoned cars.
Movement in my peripheral vision. A flicker of something I couldn't quite make out even with my improved senses, and the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end.
They moved in the shadows with bodies like smoke, visible as pools of deeper darkness where the ambient light didn't or couldn't touch. And though I could see nothing from those pools of deeper darkness to my left and right and behind me, I knew that my gaze had been met.
Something felt like it was writhing underneath the surface of my brain, and I was afraid. I had no choice. But the fear wasn't inside my body, wasn't mine; it was flowing into me from those pools of shadow, growing stronger every second that I held the gaze of I knew not what.
Red glowing eyes opened like magnesium flares in the darkness, and I would have screamed if I could have. I felt my back hit the concrete wall even thought I didn't remember turning, didn't remember moving.
I didn't want to see what was in those shadows, but I raised my hand nonetheless. The equations for a sensor sphere sprang easily into my thoughts through the interface with my new cestus-style Device. I swallowed, and then I forced the terror down as I joined mana and math to my will.
A sensor sphere snapped into existence above the palm of my hand.
Something shimmered in the air, as if it were resisting the power of my sensor sphere, and then the pools of deeper darkness resolved into the forms of enormous spectral hounds. They were black with glowing red eyes, and each was the size of a horse. The effect was invisible to the naked eye, but through my sensor sphere I could see that each was surrounded by a faint ... light was the wrong word, but each spectral form was bordered in and bound by a hint of a green magic aura.
Ghostly claws curled as the hounds noticed what I had done. Their hackles went up, and the one in front of me and the others on either side of me prepared to pounce.
I didn't know what they were exactly, but I wasn't going to let a trio of ghost-dogs beat me.
"Set Up," I said, and my clothes reset to the form of my barrier jacket in a flash of iridescent light.
The legs of the lead hound tensed as it prepared to spring. I had seconds. Less than a second. I could see the coiled tension of spectral muscles, its claws ripping into the pavement as it did so.
And then, in the space between one heartbeat and the next, a man in an immaculate white suit appeared beside the lead hound, his hand on the enormous creature's ghostly hide. "Easy, now," he said in Midchildan. "She's a friend."
The hound froze. And then, ever so slowly, the tension drained from its body, and it whined at the man. The other two hounds followed suit.
"Go watch the approaches," he told them, and after they had given me a long, considering look, as if they were deciding whether it was worth it to attack me after all, the horse-sized ghost-dogs turned and padded silently away.
I stared at the man in white, my pulse still racing, my heart still pounding in my ears. He was shorter than me, like almost everyone from the Bureau. He had long green hair and a delicate -- almost pretty -- face that would have left me unsure of his gender if I hadn't heard him speak.
"Who..." I began. I took a breath, forcing myself to calm down, to release the fear. "Who are you? What are those things?"
He smiled apologetically. "I'm sorry, miss. The hounds of the Unendliche Jagd don't like it here. Something about this world makes them uneasy. Maybe because there aren't many local spirits."
Spirits? I looked in the direction the hounds had gone. "Those things are spirits?" I asked.
He nodded. "I don't normally let them manifest at anything close to their full size, but Earth-Bet is a dangerous place. I apologize if they startled you."
"They didn't," I lied, and I instantly regretted it; he knew I was lying. Spirits? Those were real? I didn't ask the question aloud: I had more pressing business than satisfying my own curiosity. "Are you Chrono's friend?" I asked. "The one I'm supposed to meet?"
"That's me," he said with a smile. "It's an honor to meet you, Ms. Sägebrecht."
"Does Chrono's friend have a name?" I asked, trying not to let my annoyance show, and probably failing.
He laughed, and it transformed him. Laughing, he wasn't just 'almost pretty': he was beautiful. "It's better if he doesn't," he replied amiably. "I wasn't here, after all, and I definitely didn't give you this." He produced a tiny white gem about the size of a bead between his index and middle fingers and offered it to me with an outstretched hand. It vanished as soon as it touched my hand.
My Device gave me a telepathic notification that I had an incoming data packet. I authorized it, and the case files on the investigation into the deaths of my lookalikes downloaded into my Device's data storage.
"Thank you," I said.
"For what?" the man in white asked innocently. Then he turned and walked off after his ghost-hounds of the Unendliche Jagd.
Spirits. Did that make the man a summoner? ... I'd known that spirits existed on a theoretical level, but actually seeing them, interacting with them…
Unendliche Jagd. My Belkan wasn't very good, but I was pretty sure that meant something like 'Endless Hunt.'
Was there a spirit world? Were there ghosts and demons to go along with ghost-hounds? What had been that resistance to my sensor sphere, and that fear aura that had vanished with the resistance?
I'd gotten the information I'd gone to the PRT for, but it looked like I wasn't going to run out of questions any time soon.
----------------
I handed off the data to Lisa and she took it without a word. The next day, we met up for training with the Wolkenritter. All of us showed up again: me, Vicky, Amy, Lisa, Missy. Fate had come to watch, but wasn't participating, and there was an uneasy sort of tension between her and the Wolkenritter. Min was supposed to have been back in time to train with Rein, but she'd told me she was going to be late.
"How late?" I asked.
"Moderately late," she answered.
"Is everything okay?"
Min laughed over the telepathic link. "Everything's fine! Awesome! I'm fine. We're all fine here. How are you?"
Sometimes, I really wished that facial expressions were easier to convey telepathically. Min wasn't there for me to regard dubiously, so I gave the look to a passing bird.
The bird was not impressed.
"Do I need to come up there to help you, Min?" I asked.
"Oh no you don't..." Min hissed. Then there was a sense of pure, radiant joy through the link as she said: "Oh my God, they explode when they die!" A beat passed. "Everything's fine, Taylor. I'm just... bonding with Aunt Dragon."
Uh huh.
I opened a channel to talk to Dragon. "Dragon?" I asked. "Is Min okay?"
Dragon's response was almost instantaneous: "Min's fine, Starfall, but we're busy. Can we call you later?"
"Fine," I said, and that was the end of the conversation.
... they explode when they die?
The training simulator had given us an old, weather-beaten shipping warehouse today, and I was pretty sure Dad had worked here once, before he'd taken the job with the Union. The warehouse had a ponderously high ceiling; exposed girders lined the walls, and towards the back a line of office windows overlooked the main warehouse floor. It was full of boxes and crates of all kinds, and row after row of standard intermodal freight containers surrounded the warehouse on three sides. It smelled like rust and brine and metal, with just a hint of that stale sweat odor lingering in the background, and all of it was fake.
The Bureau's holograms were damned impressive. As long as the mana generator kept the emitters powered, this place was as good as real.
Today's exercise was all about teamwork. The challenges were designed to require us to work together to overcome them. And that was how I was formally introduced to power limiters.
It started just after Lisa and I had been paired up for the exercise. Vita tossed a set of bracelets my way and told me, "Put those on."
I did, and it interfaced with my Device, and I realized something was wrong almost immediately. It felt like I was breathing just as deeply as normal but barely getting a tenth as much air with each breath. But it wasn't about my lungs, and it wasn't oxygen intake that was limited now: it was about respiring Mana. The normal flow of power between my body and my Linker Core was instantly reduced to a flow that seemed barely more than a trickle.
My eyes went wide, and I took the bracelets off; everything went back to normal. I looked up at Vita questioningly.
"They're called Limiters," Vita said. The corner of her lips quirked upwards in a smirk. "Guess what they do."
"Irritate anyone who has to wear them?" Lisa asked brightly. "Cause cancer? Natural male enhancement?"
Vita turned her head and focused her complete and undivided attention on Lisa, and Lisa's answering smile was less smile and more baring of teeth.
I spoke up before Lisa could say anything else that I would regret. "They limit how much Mana I can use," I said.
Vita let it go. She nodded at me. "Wearing those, you're at her level." She gestured to Lisa.
"And you're doing it to make sure I can't just power through the exercises," I surmised.
"Obviously," Lisa said.
I eyed Vita. "I guess they'll let anyone be the Handicapper General these days."
Lisa's smile widened incrementally; Vita didn't get it. "It's fine," I said. "What do we have to do?"
"Today is team tactics day," Vita said. "We're going to test you at the end. But for now, start your warm-ups."
We did. Warm-ups involved a series of basic magical and physical exercises. We started with stretches and water cutting -- this time without the benefit of actual water to do it with -- and expanded from there.
It wasn't fine. I knew Lisa wasn't weak magically speaking, but operating at her level with the limiter bracelets on my wrists felt like trying to walk with concrete shoes. I couldn't draw power like I normally could: if my normal flow of power was like having a fire hose that I could point at whatever I wanted, this was more like a sad little flow of water coming out of a garden hose at half pressure. My body seemed to get tired more quickly, I could barely fly, and my attack spells left holes in the targets instead of completely destroying them. There was a sense of increasing pressure against the limiters the more I tried to draw in mana, but I didn't push it.
It was frustrating and exhausting, but I took some comfort in the knowledge that I could burn out the limiters if I really wanted to. ... Or turn them off. I could also do that. There was even an icon on my new Device's HUD that would do just that. But burning them out sounded a lot more satisfying.
I realized what Vita and the Wolkenritter were doing pretty quickly.
Chrono must have told them. If they wore me out with the limiters, I wouldn't be able to go after the Fallen until I'd had some time to recover. It wasn't going to stop me in the long term, but it might delay me from acting, depending on how exhausted I got. The fact that it was also good training helped to sell it. Hell, it was probably something they'd planned to introduce anyway, and this just made it doubly useful.
... I think I liked it better when the people standing in my way weren't that clever or resourceful.
But I played into it. I acted more tired than I was, like the level of physical activity being demanded of me exhausted me more than it did. I've never played poker so I don't know what my poker face looks like, but they seemed to buy it. It helped that I was only exaggerating what I really felt. And the whole exercise confirmed something I'd only suspected: my body needed Mana to operate at superhuman levels for any length of time. Deprived of that Mana, it resorted to burning calories for fuel like everyone else's.
It took a lot of calories to power better-than-human muscles and reflexes, and by the time we were done for the day my hunger felt like it was starting to wear a hole in my stomach.
When I removed the limiter, I drew in power, mostly just to reassure myself that I could, and then I released it again.
We ate out, and Fate looked lonely by herself off to the side, so I invited her to come with us to the restaurant, and there we ate and drank our fill as we plotted our next move.
-----------------
Next: 6.10, in which a plan comes together.
Magical Girl Lyrical Taylor
(Worm/Nanoha)
by P.H. Wise
6.9 - Administration
Disclaimer: The following is a fanfic. Worm belongs to Wildbow. The Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha franchise is owned by various corporate entities. Please support the official release.
Thanks to @Cailin for beta-ing!
-------------
I hadn't been expecting to see Chrono, and there were only a few reasons that came to mind for why he would be here; either he was already involved in the investigation into the murders, or Director Piggot was going to use this meeting to involve him in it. Maybe she was hoping that if I thought the investigation was in good hands, I'd stay out of it? Of the two, I figured the first was more likely than the second.
The room was lit mostly by the sun through the windows. Chrono looked the same as ever, but Director Piggot looked different; her hair was cut shorter, and was brown now instead of blonde, and she regarded me calmly from behind her desk.
She didn't stand up when I walked in; Chrono did.
"Hello, Starfall," Director Piggot said. "Have a seat." She indicated the second chair in front of her desk: the one Chrono hadn't been sitting in.
I did, and Chrono sat down beside me.
"Should I assume you already know why I'm here?" I asked.
"I prefer not to assume," Piggot said. "Why are you here, Starfall?"
"Three girls," I said, "three of my lookalikes from Arcadia, are dead." I gave the words a moment to settle before I added, "They were crucified."
Chrono gave Piggot a look as if to say, 'I told you so,' but Director Piggot herself seemed utterly unmoved. "And?" she asked.
I felt a spike of anger, but I forced it back down, forced myself not to show it. "Why didn't you tell me?" I asked.
"Despite the example set by the Administration Bureau," Piggot said coolly, "the PRT is not in the habit of involving children in murder investigations."
"It isn't the direction I would have chosen if I was investigating this on my own," Chrono said apologetically, "but this is a joint investigation, and the PRT insisted."
[Don't good cop me, Chrono,] I told him telepathically. [I've seen Law and Order.]
Chrono blinked, and a distinct note of confusion came back through the telepathic link as he asked, [What?]
And he had no idea what that was. Maybe it was just as well I hadn't said it out loud. I looked Director Piggot in the eye. "Maybe I would buy that if I weren't so obviously the target. Someone crossed a line, Director. Who was it? Was it the Slaughterhouse Nine?"
"If it was?" Piggot asked.
"Then I'm going to kill them," I said, and I meant it.
Piggot shook her head. "It wasn't them. The Slaughterhouse Nine aren't a factor anymore."
I blinked. Had the Nine been stopped? Killed? Otherwise neutralized? Nothing had been on the news about it, and that was the sort of thing that would definitely make the news. "Who, then?" I asked.
"We're looking at several persons of interest," Chrono said, "but the investigation is still under way."
Inside my strategic planning partition, Lisa spoke the name of the next most likely suspect after the Slaughterhouse Nine, and I echoed her out loud: "The Fallen," I said.
Piggot's eyes narrowed. "I can't comment on that," she said.
[It's them,] Lisa told me. [90% sure.]
Chrono sighed. "We don't know for sure that it's the Fallen, but someone's got you under observation, Taylor."
"Oh?" I asked. The word came out a lot quieter and angrier than I'd meant to say it.
"Even apart from the legal mess of bringing you in on this case, we didn't want you to do anything that would tip them off, whoever they are. We're making every effort to keep you and your family safe; even if the PRT can't use it in court, the Bureau is monitoring the Fallen in the city. If we thought that they were about to move against you, we would intervene regardless of any diplomatic troubles it would cause."
"And in the meantime," I said, "they're free to keep on torturing girls to death as long as those girls aren't me."
Chrono didn't answer. I probably wasn't being fair to him, but right then I didn't care.
"Now that you know, what are you going to do?" Piggot asked.
"I'm going to deal with them."
"And that's exactly why we didn't tell you," Piggot said.
I regarded her coldly. "Three girls are dead for the crime of looking like me. This is my city. Do you really think I can let that slide?"
If my words had been cold, Director Piggot's reply was positively arctic. "This isn't your city, Starfall. No matter what the Administration Bureau might claim, you aren't royalty here. You're a citizen of the United States, of Brockton Bay and an independent hero, not a member of law enforcement and not a parahuman warlord. It isn't your job to bring the perpetrators to justice. It's mine."
"I understand how you feel, Taylor," Chrono interjected, "but these criminals have a long history of kidnapping and brainwashing people like you, and you're too important to us and to this world to risk losing to a mind-controlling parahuman cult that worships broken Lost Logia."
The pattern was easy to see. Piggot was blunt and harsh, Chrono was sympathetic and understanding. Bad cop, good cop. It annoyed me that he was still doing it after I'd told him not to, but I didn't comment on that. Instead I asked, "Why haven't the PRT and the Protectorate taken them down before now?"
"Do you think it's that easy?" Piggot asked. "We've tried. Between the PRT, the Protectorate, the FBI and local law enforcement agencies and independent groups like Haven we've destroyed more than a dozen Fallen cells in the American South in the last five years. They're like cockroaches. You never find them all. They always come back."
"And now they're in Brockton Bay," I said.
"And now they're in Brockton Bay," Piggot agreed.
"So we deal with them," I said.
Director Piggot's eyes all but flashed. "It isn't going to…" she began.
I cut her off. "I'm not asking for your permission, Director Piggot," I said, keeping my voice calm and level. "The Fallen have made me their target, and they've crossed the line. I'm taking them down one way or the other."
She eyed me for a moment. "Then what are you asking for?"
"Your cooperation. Your assistance. You don't want to risk the Fallen getting to me? They'll be a lot less likely to get to me if I have the Bureau, the PRT and the Protectorate on my side."
They gave me their answers.
-------------------
When I left the meeting with Emily Piggot, I allowed my nervousness, my terror, and the knowledge that I had just walked and dictated terms to the Director of the PRT ENE flow back into my mind from where I'd kept it in my other partitions; my heart began to race, cold sweat broke out across my brow, and my hands shook. I had to clench them into fists so hard that it hurt to stop the shaking as I flew away from the PRT building.
Being able to shunt my emotions into my other mental partitions was incredibly useful, but it wasn't healthy, and I was pretty sure that it had made everything a lot harder to deal with when I hadn't been able to do it. I'd gotten used to being able to selectively just not experience my own emotions when they'd proven inconvenient, and now... well, now I needed to get to the point where I didn't need the partitions for that. It was inefficient. Entire me's had been devoted to managing what normal people never seemed to have that much trouble with, dumping the emotional output into minds already experiencing those same emotions, and I'd been fine with all those other myselves being practically paralyzed with fear, or insensate with rage, or so embarrassed that other-me wanted to die as long as it didn't affect my body or what I thought of as my main consciousness.
I couldn't do that to myselves anymore. It wasn't fair to me, we, or us.
Maybe that's why I was distracted when I landed at the site Chrono had mentioned telepathically over Director Piggot's refusal. It was a parking garage near the ruins of the Medhall campus, all concrete and asphalt. The place had been abandoned after Behemoth; it was inside the quarantine zone, and thirty or so homeless people had taken up residence, but I didn't see any of them as I entered the building and walked up a metal stairway to the second floor of the garage.
If I'd been thinking clearly, I'd have scouted the whole place with my sensor spheres before I'd gotten within a mile, but I wasn't.
My first indication that something was wrong came in the form of of a low, distorted growl that echoed weirdly off of concrete walls and abandoned cars.
Movement in my peripheral vision. A flicker of something I couldn't quite make out even with my improved senses, and the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end.
They moved in the shadows with bodies like smoke, visible as pools of deeper darkness where the ambient light didn't or couldn't touch. And though I could see nothing from those pools of deeper darkness to my left and right and behind me, I knew that my gaze had been met.
Something felt like it was writhing underneath the surface of my brain, and I was afraid. I had no choice. But the fear wasn't inside my body, wasn't mine; it was flowing into me from those pools of shadow, growing stronger every second that I held the gaze of I knew not what.
Red glowing eyes opened like magnesium flares in the darkness, and I would have screamed if I could have. I felt my back hit the concrete wall even thought I didn't remember turning, didn't remember moving.
I didn't want to see what was in those shadows, but I raised my hand nonetheless. The equations for a sensor sphere sprang easily into my thoughts through the interface with my new cestus-style Device. I swallowed, and then I forced the terror down as I joined mana and math to my will.
A sensor sphere snapped into existence above the palm of my hand.
Something shimmered in the air, as if it were resisting the power of my sensor sphere, and then the pools of deeper darkness resolved into the forms of enormous spectral hounds. They were black with glowing red eyes, and each was the size of a horse. The effect was invisible to the naked eye, but through my sensor sphere I could see that each was surrounded by a faint ... light was the wrong word, but each spectral form was bordered in and bound by a hint of a green magic aura.
Ghostly claws curled as the hounds noticed what I had done. Their hackles went up, and the one in front of me and the others on either side of me prepared to pounce.
I didn't know what they were exactly, but I wasn't going to let a trio of ghost-dogs beat me.
"Set Up," I said, and my clothes reset to the form of my barrier jacket in a flash of iridescent light.
The legs of the lead hound tensed as it prepared to spring. I had seconds. Less than a second. I could see the coiled tension of spectral muscles, its claws ripping into the pavement as it did so.
And then, in the space between one heartbeat and the next, a man in an immaculate white suit appeared beside the lead hound, his hand on the enormous creature's ghostly hide. "Easy, now," he said in Midchildan. "She's a friend."
The hound froze. And then, ever so slowly, the tension drained from its body, and it whined at the man. The other two hounds followed suit.
"Go watch the approaches," he told them, and after they had given me a long, considering look, as if they were deciding whether it was worth it to attack me after all, the horse-sized ghost-dogs turned and padded silently away.
I stared at the man in white, my pulse still racing, my heart still pounding in my ears. He was shorter than me, like almost everyone from the Bureau. He had long green hair and a delicate -- almost pretty -- face that would have left me unsure of his gender if I hadn't heard him speak.
"Who..." I began. I took a breath, forcing myself to calm down, to release the fear. "Who are you? What are those things?"
He smiled apologetically. "I'm sorry, miss. The hounds of the Unendliche Jagd don't like it here. Something about this world makes them uneasy. Maybe because there aren't many local spirits."
Spirits? I looked in the direction the hounds had gone. "Those things are spirits?" I asked.
He nodded. "I don't normally let them manifest at anything close to their full size, but Earth-Bet is a dangerous place. I apologize if they startled you."
"They didn't," I lied, and I instantly regretted it; he knew I was lying. Spirits? Those were real? I didn't ask the question aloud: I had more pressing business than satisfying my own curiosity. "Are you Chrono's friend?" I asked. "The one I'm supposed to meet?"
"That's me," he said with a smile. "It's an honor to meet you, Ms. Sägebrecht."
"Does Chrono's friend have a name?" I asked, trying not to let my annoyance show, and probably failing.
He laughed, and it transformed him. Laughing, he wasn't just 'almost pretty': he was beautiful. "It's better if he doesn't," he replied amiably. "I wasn't here, after all, and I definitely didn't give you this." He produced a tiny white gem about the size of a bead between his index and middle fingers and offered it to me with an outstretched hand. It vanished as soon as it touched my hand.
My Device gave me a telepathic notification that I had an incoming data packet. I authorized it, and the case files on the investigation into the deaths of my lookalikes downloaded into my Device's data storage.
"Thank you," I said.
"For what?" the man in white asked innocently. Then he turned and walked off after his ghost-hounds of the Unendliche Jagd.
Spirits. Did that make the man a summoner? ... I'd known that spirits existed on a theoretical level, but actually seeing them, interacting with them…
Unendliche Jagd. My Belkan wasn't very good, but I was pretty sure that meant something like 'Endless Hunt.'
Was there a spirit world? Were there ghosts and demons to go along with ghost-hounds? What had been that resistance to my sensor sphere, and that fear aura that had vanished with the resistance?
I'd gotten the information I'd gone to the PRT for, but it looked like I wasn't going to run out of questions any time soon.
----------------
I handed off the data to Lisa and she took it without a word. The next day, we met up for training with the Wolkenritter. All of us showed up again: me, Vicky, Amy, Lisa, Missy. Fate had come to watch, but wasn't participating, and there was an uneasy sort of tension between her and the Wolkenritter. Min was supposed to have been back in time to train with Rein, but she'd told me she was going to be late.
"How late?" I asked.
"Moderately late," she answered.
"Is everything okay?"
Min laughed over the telepathic link. "Everything's fine! Awesome! I'm fine. We're all fine here. How are you?"
Sometimes, I really wished that facial expressions were easier to convey telepathically. Min wasn't there for me to regard dubiously, so I gave the look to a passing bird.
The bird was not impressed.
"Do I need to come up there to help you, Min?" I asked.
"Oh no you don't..." Min hissed. Then there was a sense of pure, radiant joy through the link as she said: "Oh my God, they explode when they die!" A beat passed. "Everything's fine, Taylor. I'm just... bonding with Aunt Dragon."
Uh huh.
I opened a channel to talk to Dragon. "Dragon?" I asked. "Is Min okay?"
Dragon's response was almost instantaneous: "Min's fine, Starfall, but we're busy. Can we call you later?"
"Fine," I said, and that was the end of the conversation.
... they explode when they die?
The training simulator had given us an old, weather-beaten shipping warehouse today, and I was pretty sure Dad had worked here once, before he'd taken the job with the Union. The warehouse had a ponderously high ceiling; exposed girders lined the walls, and towards the back a line of office windows overlooked the main warehouse floor. It was full of boxes and crates of all kinds, and row after row of standard intermodal freight containers surrounded the warehouse on three sides. It smelled like rust and brine and metal, with just a hint of that stale sweat odor lingering in the background, and all of it was fake.
The Bureau's holograms were damned impressive. As long as the mana generator kept the emitters powered, this place was as good as real.
Today's exercise was all about teamwork. The challenges were designed to require us to work together to overcome them. And that was how I was formally introduced to power limiters.
It started just after Lisa and I had been paired up for the exercise. Vita tossed a set of bracelets my way and told me, "Put those on."
I did, and it interfaced with my Device, and I realized something was wrong almost immediately. It felt like I was breathing just as deeply as normal but barely getting a tenth as much air with each breath. But it wasn't about my lungs, and it wasn't oxygen intake that was limited now: it was about respiring Mana. The normal flow of power between my body and my Linker Core was instantly reduced to a flow that seemed barely more than a trickle.
My eyes went wide, and I took the bracelets off; everything went back to normal. I looked up at Vita questioningly.
"They're called Limiters," Vita said. The corner of her lips quirked upwards in a smirk. "Guess what they do."
"Irritate anyone who has to wear them?" Lisa asked brightly. "Cause cancer? Natural male enhancement?"
Vita turned her head and focused her complete and undivided attention on Lisa, and Lisa's answering smile was less smile and more baring of teeth.
I spoke up before Lisa could say anything else that I would regret. "They limit how much Mana I can use," I said.
Vita let it go. She nodded at me. "Wearing those, you're at her level." She gestured to Lisa.
"And you're doing it to make sure I can't just power through the exercises," I surmised.
"Obviously," Lisa said.
I eyed Vita. "I guess they'll let anyone be the Handicapper General these days."
Lisa's smile widened incrementally; Vita didn't get it. "It's fine," I said. "What do we have to do?"
"Today is team tactics day," Vita said. "We're going to test you at the end. But for now, start your warm-ups."
We did. Warm-ups involved a series of basic magical and physical exercises. We started with stretches and water cutting -- this time without the benefit of actual water to do it with -- and expanded from there.
It wasn't fine. I knew Lisa wasn't weak magically speaking, but operating at her level with the limiter bracelets on my wrists felt like trying to walk with concrete shoes. I couldn't draw power like I normally could: if my normal flow of power was like having a fire hose that I could point at whatever I wanted, this was more like a sad little flow of water coming out of a garden hose at half pressure. My body seemed to get tired more quickly, I could barely fly, and my attack spells left holes in the targets instead of completely destroying them. There was a sense of increasing pressure against the limiters the more I tried to draw in mana, but I didn't push it.
It was frustrating and exhausting, but I took some comfort in the knowledge that I could burn out the limiters if I really wanted to. ... Or turn them off. I could also do that. There was even an icon on my new Device's HUD that would do just that. But burning them out sounded a lot more satisfying.
I realized what Vita and the Wolkenritter were doing pretty quickly.
Chrono must have told them. If they wore me out with the limiters, I wouldn't be able to go after the Fallen until I'd had some time to recover. It wasn't going to stop me in the long term, but it might delay me from acting, depending on how exhausted I got. The fact that it was also good training helped to sell it. Hell, it was probably something they'd planned to introduce anyway, and this just made it doubly useful.
... I think I liked it better when the people standing in my way weren't that clever or resourceful.
But I played into it. I acted more tired than I was, like the level of physical activity being demanded of me exhausted me more than it did. I've never played poker so I don't know what my poker face looks like, but they seemed to buy it. It helped that I was only exaggerating what I really felt. And the whole exercise confirmed something I'd only suspected: my body needed Mana to operate at superhuman levels for any length of time. Deprived of that Mana, it resorted to burning calories for fuel like everyone else's.
It took a lot of calories to power better-than-human muscles and reflexes, and by the time we were done for the day my hunger felt like it was starting to wear a hole in my stomach.
When I removed the limiter, I drew in power, mostly just to reassure myself that I could, and then I released it again.
We ate out, and Fate looked lonely by herself off to the side, so I invited her to come with us to the restaurant, and there we ate and drank our fill as we plotted our next move.
-----------------
Next: 6.10, in which a plan comes together.
Last edited:
Did the Jack Slash / Min omake become canon ? D:
6.10 - Administration
Marsyas
Surprisingly Jellicle
- Location
- Undimensioned and Unseen
Magical Girl Lyrical Taylor
(Worm/Nanoha)
by P.H. Wise
6.10 - Administration
Disclaimer: The following is a fanfic. Worm belongs to Wildbow. The Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha franchise is owned by various corporate entities. Please support the official release.
Thanks to @Cailin for beta-ing!
-------------
At the restaurant, I told them everything, and Missy shifted in her seat as I did so. I could have brought up the fact that I now knew she had been part of the patrol that had found the dead girls, but I didn't see that it mattered anymore. I mean, yes, it bothered me that she hadn't told me, but she'd also been ordered not to, and forcing a confrontation now would probably only alienate someone that I liked and whose help I wanted, so I didn't.
We sat there in silence, communicating telepathically as we ate and drank, and the waitress kept giving us weird looks.
[I need to find them,] I told the others. [I could call up a whole bunch of Sensor spheres to search the city until I found the Fallen, but if I did that, they would figure out what I was doing pretty quick.]
[Does that matter?] Vicky asked.
[It matters if it gives them time to pull a surprise on us,] Missy answered, [or if they react badly and innocent people get hurt as a result.]
[We'll call mass sensor spheres plan B] I said. [I need plan A. I want to know where the Fallen are and what they're doing, and I don't want them to know that I know. Any ideas?]
Yuuno looked up from where he sat on the table with a rice ball clutched in his tiny ferret hands, occasionally nibbling on it. [If we can get the Bureau's permission,] he said, [we could maybe use the Arthra's sensors to isolate areas in the city with large concentrations of parahumans.]
Amy blinked. [Are the ship sensors that accurate?]
Yuuno shrugged. [Maybe? Taylor's sensor spheres could do it, but that's at much closer range. I don't know what kind of fidelity the ship sensors have.]
[It's worth trying] Lisa said, and brought up her index finger to scratch Yuuno between his ears.
Vicky noticed, and Lisa's smile widened just a little.
[Any other ideas?] I asked.
[Depends on the time frame,] Lisa said. [Give me a day to put things together and I'll figure it out.]
I really didn't want to wait a day, and it showed on my face, but maybe it was better than giving the Fallen any idea that we were looking for them. Maybe.
[I can find them,] Fate said.
Lisa regarded the other blonde skeptically. [How?]
The waitress was giving us weird looks again.
[I've got a team that takes care of information gathering for me. They'll either get the information we want or they put me in touch with someone else who can.]
[Can you get it tonight?] I asked.
Fate nodded. [They can do a rush job] she said.
Lisa looked like she'd swallowed a lemon. [Can we not go with the plan where we get help from Faultline?] she asked.
[Damn,] Vicky said. [You've got enough money to hire them?] She sounded impressed. [I'd heard they didn't take jobs in Brockton Bay.]
[They don't,] Lisa confirmed.
[Of course not,] Fate agreed. [That would be against their stated policy.]
Vicky looked like she was pretty sure she was missing something. [And you're going to hire them for a job inside Brockton Bay,] she said.
Lisa glanced sidelong at Vicky.
Fate nodded. [Yes.]
Vicky got it. She didn't look like she liked it, but she got it. [I see.]
That didn't sound good. How much did it even cost to hire mercenaries to do information gathering for you? I had no idea, but it was probably a lot. [I don't know if I'm comfortable with you spending that much money for this…] I began.
[I'll take care of it,] Fate said again. She didn't raise her telepathic voice, but behind the soft-spoken girl's thought came an iron ring of determination; she would do it, and that was that.
[What do you have against Faultline?] Amy asked.
[Besides her being a heinous smug bitch?] Lisa asked back.
Neither Amy nor Vicky could quite hide their smirks, but I spoke up before either of them did, hoping to forestall the quip.
[Okay,] I said. [Do it. Yuuno, you and Lisa work the sensors angle. The rest of us will act like everything's normal so we don't give anything away before we're ready to move. Any questions?]
There were none. We finished our meal, paid the bill, and went our separate ways.
--------
Faultline's Crew came through. A few minutes before midnight, I was looking at photos of the converted warehouse where the Fallen had holed up, official city schematics, pictures of entrances and exits, and an estimate of the number of parahumans they had on site.
They had even included a shot of Valefor in full costume seemingly taken through the skylight, and that made us all wince. Valefor was a notorious member of the Fallen with a Master power that allowed him to control people he saw with his eyes. I didn't know exactly how that worked, but I didn't intend to give him the chance to Master any of us.
The Bureau wasn't willing to give us time on their sensors, which would make things harder, but Fate came through yet again, and I found myself seriously considering inviting her to join the team. The final planning ate up the the midnight hour, and we were ready to move by 1:00 AM. The turn from 12:59 to 1:00 found us all floating just above the cloud layer directly above the warehouse, and the moon cast the clouds in silver splendour.
"Everyone ready?" I asked.
"Ready," Yuuno said; he was in his human form in full Mage regalia, a determined set to his face.
"Ready," Missy said. She looked tired, and her hair was frizzing a little after her trip through the clouds, but I wasn't going to send her away unless she asked me to, and I was pretty sure she would never ask.
"Ready," Vicky and Amy both said at once, and they were followed up a moment later with Lisa's, "Ready."
I began to call up sensor spheres. I was too tired from the day's exercise to do what I wanted, which was to blast the site from orbit until nothing was left. Honestly, I was too tired for what we were actually attempting, and even if I hadn't been, I didn't have enough processing power without Min's help, but that was where everyone else came in.
One by one, I passed the sensor spheres off to the others, letting Fate link them into the Garden of Time's mainframe so it could take up the computational burden even as the others took over fueling the Mana requirements; Vicky and Missy could each only support one sphere, but between the rest of us the thirty others weren't a problem. Once our senses were well and truly linked to the shared, networked Wide Area Search, we were ready to begin.
"Final confirmation?" I asked as I called up an almost painfully small spell swarm consisting of a few thousand Divine Stinger micro-bolts, and the cloud bank below us rippled with iridescent light.
Fate put a hand to her ear and answered after a few seconds had passed. "All known Fallen in the city are on site."
"Yuuno," I said.
He stepped forward in midair and brought his foot down onto a green Midchildan spell circle. He shaped the Mana as it gathered in a rippling wave of light between his cupped hands, the spell matrix quickly taking shape. Then he cast a new variation on one of his bounded field spells: one that drew inspiration from a spell that the Wolkenritter had demonstrated during our training. "Bands of light," he chanted, "become the cage that separates foe from victim. Space-Time Prison!"
The magic flared between his hands, expanded, and rippled out in a sphere that swept across the warehouse below us, diffusing as it expanded, shifting from green to blue to a shimmering purple haze; every non-mage and non-parahuman it touched was swept away; every parahuman and mage was left trapped within a Bounded Field designed to act as a prison to those within for as long as You could hold it.
Lisa cast her spell next, reaching out through her Device to prevent any signals from escaping. "Static field is up," she announced.
"Ladies," I said. "Let's knock on the door."
Vicky, Amy, Missy and I opened fire. Granted, all Vicky and Missy could throw down was a single concussive magical bolt each, but I wasn't going to tell them not to join in. Amy's maroon beam went down alongside my minimum-power Divine Buster, and the dockside warehouse's front wall evaporated.
The sensor spheres went next, then the Stinger Swarm, and then our forward attackers.
There were eight parahumans inside our cage. They came into view all at once as the sensor spheres caught sight of them; a few were in states of partial undress, but they were all up, and they weren't panicking. One was an effeminate looking teen boy dressed in a flowing white gown bedecked with white and silver feathers; his lips were black, full, and sensuous, and he wore a delicate-looking mask which showed a woman's upper face. Another wore a costume that was meant to invoke Behemoth; still others had appearances closer to traditional demons. None of them saw us coming.
My stinger swarm lit the interior of the warehouse with thousands of iridescent explosions, and the Fallen howled. Missy dropped out of my arms and swung her hammer on the way down, and a distortion of the space between her and her target saw the hammer stretch impossibly across the intervening distance to strike the Behemoth-cape center of mass, and the blow blew him off his feet. Vicky body-checked Valefor into a huge mass of iridescent explosions, and Amy whipped a beam of light across three others that took down two of them and sent the third -- a walking mountain of muscle with ram's horns and cloven hooves -- into a screaming rage.
Ram demon boy charged, and I Divine Bustered him through the back wall and out into the water. He skipped three times before he struck the far wall of Yuuno's prison spell. There was a sound like the tolling of an iron bell, and ripples spread across the wall in concentric rings from the point of impact.
It wasn't just a matter of total surprise and overwhelming firepower: we knew this place, and it clicked as I raised a barrier to deflect a torrent of magma vomited up by a brute/changer who looked like she was made of obsidian shot through with molten veins.
This dockside warehouse with the smell of brine and rust, while cosmetically different, had exactly the same layout as the place we had spent all day training in with the Wolkenritter.
My barrier held; magma splattered heavily off of it like the liquid rock that it was, not splashing when it hit the floor so much as splattering a little. I ducked behind a row of crates that I knew would be there even without the data from the sensor spheres to avoid a spray of corrosive bubbles that came from a man with a Leviathan-themed costume off to the right; then I flew a spiralling loop up and over the crates, twisted my body to avoid hitting an exposed pipe on the ceiling, and fired off another low powered Divine Buster at the molten girl.
When the light faded, she collapsed unconscious at the center of the twenty foot crater I'd left her in.
Then it was over; the Fallen had fallen, and I looked literally every direction at once through our sensor sphere network in hope of catching the other shoe before it dropped.
Silence fell on the warehouse, punctuated only by the sound of our breathing and the beating of my heart. Any moment now the Fallen would reveal their counterstroke, things would go pear-shaped, and we'd all have to frantically improvise our way through the rest of the battle.
… any moment now…
Amy went to each of the unconscious Fallen in turn and made sure they were out and would stay that way, and about the time she reached the last one, I began to frown.
"Huh," I said.
"Is that it?" Vicky asked. A few seconds went by. "That can't be it."
"That's it," Lisa said with a grin.
We sent our respective sensor spheres combing through the warehouse in search of some other threat.
Nothing.
"I told you," Lisa said.
I eyed Lisa. [Did you plan this with Hayate ahead of time?] I asked suspiciously.
Lisa looked as innocent as she could while still smiling like the cat that ate the canary, and she didn't answer me.
Fate landed next to me. "Well done," she said.
Vicky frowned, tapping at one of the unconscious parahumans with her foot. "Is anyone else getting the sense that this team is hilariously overpowered for ordinary crime fighting?"
That broke the tension. Amy rolled her eyes and Missy laughed.
Fate blinked. "Are you upset that you won?" she asked.
"No, of course not," Vicky said. Then she frowned. "And kind of."
Fate arched a blonde eyebrow.
"We're not upset," Amy explained, "it just feels too easy."
Fate looked at me. "You had a good plan. You executed it. You took your enemy by surprise and dispatched then before they could react. How is that too easy?"
Nobody answered for a score of moments. Then Lisa said, "We could pick a fight with the Triumvirate if you want."
Group laugh. Freeze frame. Roll credits. I managed not to share aloud my inner monologue's snark only by supreme effort of will.
When it was all over, Yuuno's prison released, the Fallen arrested and taken away and the explanations given to the PRT and Protectorate teams, I went home and slept.
The next morning, I went to confront Hayate. I met her at the same boardwalk cafe we had used the first time we had met. I came in expecting an argument; she ordered tea for both of us, and it smelled heavenly.
We sipped in silence for a handful of minutes, and eventually I said, "You and Lisa planned that whole thing."
Hayate nodded. "We did," she confirmed. "She came to me shortly after you gave her the information you got from Chrono's friend."
"Why?" I asked. "I thought you didn't want us going after the Fallen. That was why you had the Wolkenritter try to exhaust me during training yesterday, wasn't it?"
She smiled. "Just because you seek one particular outcome doesn't mean you shouldn't hedge your bets in case things go differently."
I thought through the entire chain of events, and things fell into place. "You wanted us to stay out of it, but you took measures to ensure that we would succeed if we did intervene."
"That's right," she said.
"But…" I began. I halted, not sure what to follow that word with.
"Taylor," she said, "You can't always avoid an all-or-nothing gamble, but why take one when you don't have to? Set up the situation so you can profit from it no matter the outcome and you'll come out ahead even if you don't get exactly what you wanted."
It made sense. It made a lot of sense, in fact, and I regarded the woman with new respect. "What if it had gone badly?" I asked.
"Signum and the others were nearby," she answered, "ready to intervene the moment they decided it was necessary."
I didn't have a response to that.
Hayate finished her tea and then rose smoothly to her feet with a smile. "Good morning, Taylor," she said, and made her exit from the cafe.
I was still thinking about her words when Min returned to Brockton Bay. She came to me, transporting herself across space through the link we shared. She shimmered into existence beside the table, looked at me, and grinned.
"I'm back!" Min said. "What did I miss?"
(Worm/Nanoha)
by P.H. Wise
6.10 - Administration
Disclaimer: The following is a fanfic. Worm belongs to Wildbow. The Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha franchise is owned by various corporate entities. Please support the official release.
Thanks to @Cailin for beta-ing!
-------------
At the restaurant, I told them everything, and Missy shifted in her seat as I did so. I could have brought up the fact that I now knew she had been part of the patrol that had found the dead girls, but I didn't see that it mattered anymore. I mean, yes, it bothered me that she hadn't told me, but she'd also been ordered not to, and forcing a confrontation now would probably only alienate someone that I liked and whose help I wanted, so I didn't.
We sat there in silence, communicating telepathically as we ate and drank, and the waitress kept giving us weird looks.
[I need to find them,] I told the others. [I could call up a whole bunch of Sensor spheres to search the city until I found the Fallen, but if I did that, they would figure out what I was doing pretty quick.]
[Does that matter?] Vicky asked.
[It matters if it gives them time to pull a surprise on us,] Missy answered, [or if they react badly and innocent people get hurt as a result.]
[We'll call mass sensor spheres plan B] I said. [I need plan A. I want to know where the Fallen are and what they're doing, and I don't want them to know that I know. Any ideas?]
Yuuno looked up from where he sat on the table with a rice ball clutched in his tiny ferret hands, occasionally nibbling on it. [If we can get the Bureau's permission,] he said, [we could maybe use the Arthra's sensors to isolate areas in the city with large concentrations of parahumans.]
Amy blinked. [Are the ship sensors that accurate?]
Yuuno shrugged. [Maybe? Taylor's sensor spheres could do it, but that's at much closer range. I don't know what kind of fidelity the ship sensors have.]
[It's worth trying] Lisa said, and brought up her index finger to scratch Yuuno between his ears.
Vicky noticed, and Lisa's smile widened just a little.
[Any other ideas?] I asked.
[Depends on the time frame,] Lisa said. [Give me a day to put things together and I'll figure it out.]
I really didn't want to wait a day, and it showed on my face, but maybe it was better than giving the Fallen any idea that we were looking for them. Maybe.
[I can find them,] Fate said.
Lisa regarded the other blonde skeptically. [How?]
The waitress was giving us weird looks again.
[I've got a team that takes care of information gathering for me. They'll either get the information we want or they put me in touch with someone else who can.]
[Can you get it tonight?] I asked.
Fate nodded. [They can do a rush job] she said.
Lisa looked like she'd swallowed a lemon. [Can we not go with the plan where we get help from Faultline?] she asked.
[Damn,] Vicky said. [You've got enough money to hire them?] She sounded impressed. [I'd heard they didn't take jobs in Brockton Bay.]
[They don't,] Lisa confirmed.
[Of course not,] Fate agreed. [That would be against their stated policy.]
Vicky looked like she was pretty sure she was missing something. [And you're going to hire them for a job inside Brockton Bay,] she said.
Lisa glanced sidelong at Vicky.
Fate nodded. [Yes.]
Vicky got it. She didn't look like she liked it, but she got it. [I see.]
That didn't sound good. How much did it even cost to hire mercenaries to do information gathering for you? I had no idea, but it was probably a lot. [I don't know if I'm comfortable with you spending that much money for this…] I began.
[I'll take care of it,] Fate said again. She didn't raise her telepathic voice, but behind the soft-spoken girl's thought came an iron ring of determination; she would do it, and that was that.
[What do you have against Faultline?] Amy asked.
[Besides her being a heinous smug bitch?] Lisa asked back.
Neither Amy nor Vicky could quite hide their smirks, but I spoke up before either of them did, hoping to forestall the quip.
[Okay,] I said. [Do it. Yuuno, you and Lisa work the sensors angle. The rest of us will act like everything's normal so we don't give anything away before we're ready to move. Any questions?]
There were none. We finished our meal, paid the bill, and went our separate ways.
--------
Faultline's Crew came through. A few minutes before midnight, I was looking at photos of the converted warehouse where the Fallen had holed up, official city schematics, pictures of entrances and exits, and an estimate of the number of parahumans they had on site.
They had even included a shot of Valefor in full costume seemingly taken through the skylight, and that made us all wince. Valefor was a notorious member of the Fallen with a Master power that allowed him to control people he saw with his eyes. I didn't know exactly how that worked, but I didn't intend to give him the chance to Master any of us.
The Bureau wasn't willing to give us time on their sensors, which would make things harder, but Fate came through yet again, and I found myself seriously considering inviting her to join the team. The final planning ate up the the midnight hour, and we were ready to move by 1:00 AM. The turn from 12:59 to 1:00 found us all floating just above the cloud layer directly above the warehouse, and the moon cast the clouds in silver splendour.
"Everyone ready?" I asked.
"Ready," Yuuno said; he was in his human form in full Mage regalia, a determined set to his face.
"Ready," Missy said. She looked tired, and her hair was frizzing a little after her trip through the clouds, but I wasn't going to send her away unless she asked me to, and I was pretty sure she would never ask.
"Ready," Vicky and Amy both said at once, and they were followed up a moment later with Lisa's, "Ready."
I began to call up sensor spheres. I was too tired from the day's exercise to do what I wanted, which was to blast the site from orbit until nothing was left. Honestly, I was too tired for what we were actually attempting, and even if I hadn't been, I didn't have enough processing power without Min's help, but that was where everyone else came in.
One by one, I passed the sensor spheres off to the others, letting Fate link them into the Garden of Time's mainframe so it could take up the computational burden even as the others took over fueling the Mana requirements; Vicky and Missy could each only support one sphere, but between the rest of us the thirty others weren't a problem. Once our senses were well and truly linked to the shared, networked Wide Area Search, we were ready to begin.
"Final confirmation?" I asked as I called up an almost painfully small spell swarm consisting of a few thousand Divine Stinger micro-bolts, and the cloud bank below us rippled with iridescent light.
Fate put a hand to her ear and answered after a few seconds had passed. "All known Fallen in the city are on site."
"Yuuno," I said.
He stepped forward in midair and brought his foot down onto a green Midchildan spell circle. He shaped the Mana as it gathered in a rippling wave of light between his cupped hands, the spell matrix quickly taking shape. Then he cast a new variation on one of his bounded field spells: one that drew inspiration from a spell that the Wolkenritter had demonstrated during our training. "Bands of light," he chanted, "become the cage that separates foe from victim. Space-Time Prison!"
The magic flared between his hands, expanded, and rippled out in a sphere that swept across the warehouse below us, diffusing as it expanded, shifting from green to blue to a shimmering purple haze; every non-mage and non-parahuman it touched was swept away; every parahuman and mage was left trapped within a Bounded Field designed to act as a prison to those within for as long as You could hold it.
Lisa cast her spell next, reaching out through her Device to prevent any signals from escaping. "Static field is up," she announced.
"Ladies," I said. "Let's knock on the door."
Vicky, Amy, Missy and I opened fire. Granted, all Vicky and Missy could throw down was a single concussive magical bolt each, but I wasn't going to tell them not to join in. Amy's maroon beam went down alongside my minimum-power Divine Buster, and the dockside warehouse's front wall evaporated.
The sensor spheres went next, then the Stinger Swarm, and then our forward attackers.
There were eight parahumans inside our cage. They came into view all at once as the sensor spheres caught sight of them; a few were in states of partial undress, but they were all up, and they weren't panicking. One was an effeminate looking teen boy dressed in a flowing white gown bedecked with white and silver feathers; his lips were black, full, and sensuous, and he wore a delicate-looking mask which showed a woman's upper face. Another wore a costume that was meant to invoke Behemoth; still others had appearances closer to traditional demons. None of them saw us coming.
My stinger swarm lit the interior of the warehouse with thousands of iridescent explosions, and the Fallen howled. Missy dropped out of my arms and swung her hammer on the way down, and a distortion of the space between her and her target saw the hammer stretch impossibly across the intervening distance to strike the Behemoth-cape center of mass, and the blow blew him off his feet. Vicky body-checked Valefor into a huge mass of iridescent explosions, and Amy whipped a beam of light across three others that took down two of them and sent the third -- a walking mountain of muscle with ram's horns and cloven hooves -- into a screaming rage.
Ram demon boy charged, and I Divine Bustered him through the back wall and out into the water. He skipped three times before he struck the far wall of Yuuno's prison spell. There was a sound like the tolling of an iron bell, and ripples spread across the wall in concentric rings from the point of impact.
It wasn't just a matter of total surprise and overwhelming firepower: we knew this place, and it clicked as I raised a barrier to deflect a torrent of magma vomited up by a brute/changer who looked like she was made of obsidian shot through with molten veins.
This dockside warehouse with the smell of brine and rust, while cosmetically different, had exactly the same layout as the place we had spent all day training in with the Wolkenritter.
My barrier held; magma splattered heavily off of it like the liquid rock that it was, not splashing when it hit the floor so much as splattering a little. I ducked behind a row of crates that I knew would be there even without the data from the sensor spheres to avoid a spray of corrosive bubbles that came from a man with a Leviathan-themed costume off to the right; then I flew a spiralling loop up and over the crates, twisted my body to avoid hitting an exposed pipe on the ceiling, and fired off another low powered Divine Buster at the molten girl.
When the light faded, she collapsed unconscious at the center of the twenty foot crater I'd left her in.
Then it was over; the Fallen had fallen, and I looked literally every direction at once through our sensor sphere network in hope of catching the other shoe before it dropped.
Silence fell on the warehouse, punctuated only by the sound of our breathing and the beating of my heart. Any moment now the Fallen would reveal their counterstroke, things would go pear-shaped, and we'd all have to frantically improvise our way through the rest of the battle.
… any moment now…
Amy went to each of the unconscious Fallen in turn and made sure they were out and would stay that way, and about the time she reached the last one, I began to frown.
"Huh," I said.
"Is that it?" Vicky asked. A few seconds went by. "That can't be it."
"That's it," Lisa said with a grin.
We sent our respective sensor spheres combing through the warehouse in search of some other threat.
Nothing.
"I told you," Lisa said.
I eyed Lisa. [Did you plan this with Hayate ahead of time?] I asked suspiciously.
Lisa looked as innocent as she could while still smiling like the cat that ate the canary, and she didn't answer me.
Fate landed next to me. "Well done," she said.
Vicky frowned, tapping at one of the unconscious parahumans with her foot. "Is anyone else getting the sense that this team is hilariously overpowered for ordinary crime fighting?"
That broke the tension. Amy rolled her eyes and Missy laughed.
Fate blinked. "Are you upset that you won?" she asked.
"No, of course not," Vicky said. Then she frowned. "And kind of."
Fate arched a blonde eyebrow.
"We're not upset," Amy explained, "it just feels too easy."
Fate looked at me. "You had a good plan. You executed it. You took your enemy by surprise and dispatched then before they could react. How is that too easy?"
Nobody answered for a score of moments. Then Lisa said, "We could pick a fight with the Triumvirate if you want."
Group laugh. Freeze frame. Roll credits. I managed not to share aloud my inner monologue's snark only by supreme effort of will.
When it was all over, Yuuno's prison released, the Fallen arrested and taken away and the explanations given to the PRT and Protectorate teams, I went home and slept.
The next morning, I went to confront Hayate. I met her at the same boardwalk cafe we had used the first time we had met. I came in expecting an argument; she ordered tea for both of us, and it smelled heavenly.
We sipped in silence for a handful of minutes, and eventually I said, "You and Lisa planned that whole thing."
Hayate nodded. "We did," she confirmed. "She came to me shortly after you gave her the information you got from Chrono's friend."
"Why?" I asked. "I thought you didn't want us going after the Fallen. That was why you had the Wolkenritter try to exhaust me during training yesterday, wasn't it?"
She smiled. "Just because you seek one particular outcome doesn't mean you shouldn't hedge your bets in case things go differently."
I thought through the entire chain of events, and things fell into place. "You wanted us to stay out of it, but you took measures to ensure that we would succeed if we did intervene."
"That's right," she said.
"But…" I began. I halted, not sure what to follow that word with.
"Taylor," she said, "You can't always avoid an all-or-nothing gamble, but why take one when you don't have to? Set up the situation so you can profit from it no matter the outcome and you'll come out ahead even if you don't get exactly what you wanted."
It made sense. It made a lot of sense, in fact, and I regarded the woman with new respect. "What if it had gone badly?" I asked.
"Signum and the others were nearby," she answered, "ready to intervene the moment they decided it was necessary."
I didn't have a response to that.
Hayate finished her tea and then rose smoothly to her feet with a smile. "Good morning, Taylor," she said, and made her exit from the cafe.
I was still thinking about her words when Min returned to Brockton Bay. She came to me, transporting herself across space through the link we shared. She shimmered into existence beside the table, looked at me, and grinned.
"I'm back!" Min said. "What did I miss?"
GiftOfLove
From the Heart
I'm sure Taylor is just loving the reminder that all of her friends hold loyalties to other groups besides her own.
That's a very important lesson to remember when she enters the political arena. EVERYONE who claims to be her ally, even when sincere, will still have obligations on other fronts and if she does not account for that, she will either be cut loose or become a pawn.
Always Late
Lacking in coffee, sleep, and brains
- Location
- Ohio
That can't have been it. The Fallen are the fourth-largest group in North America and finally have a single unified individual all of the cells and families can all agree needs to die. Eight capes cannot remotely be the end of it.
Trying to move ALL of their capes at once would result in a convoy the PRT couldn't help but notice and have the Triumvirate land on(in Alexandria's case literally. Maybe Eidolon too if he's in a theatric mood) With Valefor on site, this is probably their A-Team. The guys they think have the best shot at taking out the bitch who killed their "gods." Now that they've failed in the most humiliating fashion possible, more teams might trickle in haphazardly, but none of them will be anywhere near as capable as the one the Rainbow Knights just smashed.
- Location
- Hug the Moebot; Save the world
The last we knew Eidolon was reduced to a living severed head. I imagine he wont be doing much for awhile.
The Fallen don't know that
Mizu
Software Developer
- Location
- Victoria, Australia
dispatched them before
Where did you muck in the timeline?
Marsyas
Surprisingly Jellicle
- Location
- Undimensioned and Unseen
Order of events. A few things surrounding Lisa approaching Hayate. Generally caused by me switching the order of scenes for better flow within a chapter while neglecting the actual timeline of necessary causes and effects. Stupid chains of causation.
mdkcde
"Emotions are prohibited"
- Location
- Nani Sore?
If this were an anime I would have edited the " trust noone, even yourself" meme by now.
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Always Late
Lacking in coffee, sleep, and brains
- Location
- Ohio
The Fallen are the Iraq Insurgency if it was run by the Westborrogh Baptist Church. They don't move like a modern military unit. They have a massive number of cells due to how decentralized they are, and Valefor's mother is explicitly anti-Thinker to the extent the PRT does not look in certain areas anymore:
Like I said: This cannot be the end.
That's terrible. Have a funny.
Interesting. I wonder how her power would react to magic based scanning, which is, one, not dependent on a Thinker Shard playing by the rules and two, always involve a degree of separation between the caster and the target in the form of a device or computer system.
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Marsyas
Surprisingly Jellicle
- Location
- Undimensioned and Unseen
The effect Valefor's mom would have on magical scanning is the same as the effect she would have on bog standard human detective work. Which is to say, nil.
Related: the law enforcement agency generally responsible for investigating the Fallen is neither the Protectorate not the PRT: it is the FBI. They generally have to do it without Thinker support, and that's fine. Not ideal, but fine. Humans can successfully solve crimes and investigate and prosecute domestic terrorism without being Thinkers. They call in the PRT and Protectorate when they actually need to make arrests.
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Always Late
Lacking in coffee, sleep, and brains
- Location
- Ohio
Just to clarify for folks, this is quest canon, which is perfectly fine. Wildbow's keeping Momma Mathers in his back pocket after all.
On the one hand, I can get behind this. While the PRT tackles capes, the fact that The Fallen have a good number of unpowered goons in their decentralized insurgency spread across the southern US means that the FBI would be the main investigative body tracking them across state lines.
On the other, there's the whole 'decentralized insurgency' issue combined with Masters, the second-gen bud kids Momma Mathers mixed throughout the three branches, and powers in general. That makes conventional investigation very difficult and in many ways dangerous.
Marsyas
Surprisingly Jellicle
- Location
- Undimensioned and Unseen
Powers aren't the be all end all. Yes, Masters and Strangers are a thing. Yes, they are a bloody nightmare. Yes, if they have to, law enforcement personnel will shoot to kill. If the Fallen were going around actively Mastering and murdering law enforcement agents, law enforcement agencies are unlikely to make any effort to bring them in alive. Furthermore, other criminal groups are probably not going to want to have anything to do a bunch of cop-killers and mind-rapists who worship the Endbringers. ... which, if we follow the Westboro Baptist connection, makes sense.
I wouldn't be surprised if local villain groups decide to cooperate with law enforcement to get rid of the Fallen when they come to town. ... sort of like what happened in canon, but with less "oh shit, oh shit!" *runs* *explosions* *BEES*
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