6.r
Rune
Rune had
thought she was firmly on the side of Empire Eighty-Eight.
Past tense.
She'd never liked Locust, of course, but she'd been able to be professional about it, back before Locust and Fog had died and it turned out Locust's bugs had been
eating people. That tidbit had made being E88 hard, but she'd have been able to push past it if it had turned out it was a carefully-kept secret, something known only to a few sick fucks. But it hadn't. Rune had fished around quietly, and while the non-capes were hit-or-miss it had become increasingly obvious that pretty much every cape other than herself had known about it, and in fact most of them had helped
supply Locust at one point or another. From the way Stormtiger had talked about it, she gathered it had been a bit of an initiation ritual before a cape could be inducted into some of the more important meetings, that she probably would've been expected to do it sometime in the next year.
The thought made her gorge rise.
It was fucking cannibalism.
Problem was, she'd gotten herself tied to things. She wasn't a new recruit anymore, eased into the life with hiding behind your mask being tolerated so long as you showed up and did the work. They knew what she looked like under the mask, what her name was, where she lived. Even if she were okay with going back to her parents, they wouldn't be able to
do anything about it. She wasn't like Purity, who had drifted apart at some point and nobody had been willing to pressure her because even Alabaster would probably not get back up after one of her beams hit him. She wasn't like Hookwolf, who was strong enough and versatile enough and not
chained to
people enough that if he really wanted he could just wander off and the Empire would probably let him.
Sure, she could pick up a dump truck and crush someone under it, but Rune was still an ordinary squishy human when you got down to things. Slow, fragile, soft-hitting. Too young to readily get a gun by legal means, and too cape-y for the Empire to sneak her one without a damn good reason.
So she'd taken a slow, subtle route, however much she hated it.
Fishing around had eventually gotten Tattletale to approach her when neither of them were under their masks. (Rune had come up with capefiction spy scenarios in her mind, but the reality had ended up being she wandered around aimlessly until a girl with a smile curving just far enough to be unsettling had hailed her one day out of the blue) They'd exchanged assuredly-fake names, and it had become a habit of 'Susan' to have coffee with 'Elizabeth' once or twice a week and talk about the things teenage girls talked about. As a totally unrelated point, the Undersiders would sometimes hit an E88 business of the extralegal kind a few days after one of these discussions.
Spies had been suspected, of course, and information had gotten constricted. Rune had heard less, and probably been fed outright lies, but 'Elizabeth' had assured her they wouldn't trace it back to her regardless. 'Susan' had politely thanked the other girl and then casually remarked she didn't
care. She wanted these people to hurt, and she wanted to get her brother
out, in around that order. She already knew it was too late for herself. Elizabeth's smile had dimmed for a moment, and then they'd continued chatting about Susan's 'friends' as if that exchange had never happened.
You didn't escape from the Empire life as a cape unless you were strong enough to make it happen, and Rune wasn't strong enough. Retirement was a euphemism for being whacked.
Rune really,
really regretted bringing her brother with her to her uncle's home. It had made sense at the time; their parents were assholes half the time, nuts a quarter of the time, and the remaining quarter was a nerves-filled experience that didn't make up for the rest of it. Their uncle had always been supportive, and had all but said he'd take them in if they needed to run away from home. So she'd left, and she'd brought her brother with her, and when her uncle had said things she tended to nod along and agree, since he was much more pleasant than her parents were. At some point she'd become dimly aware they were Empire things being said, but that was only after she'd triggered -thanks, parents, stuffing your own daughter bound and gagged and
blindfolded in the trunk of your car after taking a baseball bat to her head was
great parenting- and by then she was deep enough into the shit that even if she hadn't already had a lot of anger to work through it would've been difficult to back out.
But if she could go back and do it again...
... she might've still run away, but she wouldn't have brought her brother into this.
So that was her ball and chain, the number one reason she couldn't run or defect. The things the Empire did to 'traitors' were ugly and awful, and they tended to believe these things should be handled in a family way. Rune's crimes would be her brother's crimes. It wasn't like she could run away and take care of both of them; she doubted she could take care of
herself. If she stayed, he might disentangle himself down the line and have a decent life. If she tried to leave, it was just dooming him.
One day, she stumbled home sloshy with drink foisted on her by Hookwolf ("Call me Brad,"
ew, no) because underage or not Jack Slash's death was reason to celebrate in his opinion, only to find the building empty of both brother and uncle. Being moderately drunk, it took a bit for this to filter through as something noteworthy, and even once her brain caught onto that point she shrugged it off as probably them having heard the good news and decided to go for a night out. Hopefully not to an E88 bar, but Rune wasn't getting her hopes up.
For lack of a better idea what to do, she got an ice pack under the vague idea it would somehow make her less drunk to put it to her forehead, sat at the couch, and began fumbling for the remote... only for her 'work' cell phone to start ringing. She blearily checked for caller ID, got an unknown number, frowned and then shrugged it off with some resignation -it was probably a random gangbanger who'd been assigned to phone her up, this happened all the time- while answering the phone with her 'cape voice' on. (A little deeper, a little older-sounding, a little more refined than she usually allowed herself to sound) "I'm here," she grunted out. Ugh, she was not looking forward to when she was over-age and Hookwolf got
serious about the boozing.
The voice that came through the phone vaguely rang bells in Rune's head. It was female, and somehow alarming even though she couldn't place it. "
Hey, I'm sorry." Rune frowned blearily, too confused to be worried. "
This isn't how the plan was supposed to go, please don't check the downstairs bathroom-" Rune was standing before the word 'bathroom' had been finished. "
-I'm serious you're going to be really unhappy if you do and this was honestly meant to be in your best interests I swear."
Rune ignored the voice, struggling against the alcohol to place it. This should be easy, why did alcohol have to make everything so hard? Why did E88 love its cheap, vaguely German-sounding beer so much? Not that it actually
was German for the most part, Germany might be the 'fatherland' but America was still the home of the brave and Rune couldn't quite remember why she'd been thinking about this in the first place.
Then she pulled open the door to the bathroom, finding her uncle. What was left of him. Rune's eyes traversed across the space vaguely, noticing that this looked an
awful lot like what Hookwolf liked to do to subordinates who'd pissed him off in a big way for the tenth or so time. And lethal. Very lethal.
Rune was no stranger to violence and gore, but between the surprise, the cheap beer rattling around in her veins, and the detail that however much she'd grown to dislike her uncle's part in what she'd become she still overall liked
him, it wasn't terribly surprising when Rune was violently ill into the conveniently-placed toilet. She only had to step through a
little bit of blood and a
handful of entrails, too. (Said thought led to more puking)
"
shitshitshit come on pick up"
Oh. Right.
Rune stumbled vaguely away, noticed her shoes were leaving bloody prints on the floor, and violently tore them away from her feet as fast as she could unlace them. Then she picked the phone up off the carpet just outside the bathroom, and with a ragged but noticeably less drunk voice demanded, "What the
hell is this?"
"
It's a rescue! That... would've gone off without a hitch if Jack Slash's death hadn't screwed with your routine."
Something popped somewhere inside Rune's head, or felt like it did at least, and an intuitive leap made its way to her mouth. "You fucking kidnapped-"
"
Shhhhh shush! Not over the phone! Just... get laced up and I'll walk you through where you go next and this will be only a little bit of a disaster."
Rune's stubborn streak rose to the fore. "Not until you explain
shit to me."
And was promptly deflated. "
Please don't make me take this in the nasty direction. I swear this was supposed to be a good thing, but it does come with strings and you won't like it if the strings get pulled."
Rune cursed to herself, but went to retrieve her at-home stashed costume not to mention a pair of boots that she liked with the costume but was not actually a part of it, trying to ignore how the voice on the other end -who
was it, come on brain- made a sigh of relief. Was Rune bugged? Or, no, cameras, hidden in... corners? Or better, a parahuman-
fuck, that bitch!
'Elizabeth'.
Tattletale. That was why the voice was nagging at her, she was talking differently but it was
her. What the
hell kind of repayment was this for weeks of help?
"
Yes, I know, I'm a bitch, could you hurry up? If you're thinking of grabbing cash it's not worth it, just get started hopscotching to your right and we'll handle the rest. You can even turn off the phone, save ya precious minutes right?"
Hopsco-?
After a moment Rune figured out it was a reference to her power. Even though she'd never compared it to hopscotch anywhere but in her own head, and only once half a year ago.
The fuck?
Nonetheless, after a brief glare at her phone she went along. Tattletale was threatening her
brother. (And had apparently killed her uncle? The timing made no sense for it to have
actually been Hookwolf, she'd been
with him...) Until she could figure out how to take that threat away, she'd go along. And if worst came to worst... she'd make Tattletale pay in blood.
Out a window, climb up toward the roof, find the junkpile of a car she'd stashed up here one night just in case, apply power, wait for it to
stick, and... hop in, strap the seatbelt on, pointlessly put her hands on the steering wheel because she was still looking forward to her driver's licence, and
go.
She wasn't sure which direction Tattletale had meant by 'your right', so Rune arbitrarily turned right in midair before picking up speed. She didn't even bother going a full 90 degrees. She wasn't sure it had even
meant anything. Elizabeth would sometimes say things for how 'Susan' reacted to them, and for no other reason.
Some part of Rune was urging her to call this in, let the Empire know her brother had been kidnapped and that the Undersiders had done it, but she mentally cringed at the idea of her brother being
rescued by the Empire, ingratiated to them, made to see them as heroes. Even if she could gloss over
how she knew it was the Undersiders, which was a
big if, no no no a thousand million times
no. She wanted him to live, but she wanted him to live
better than her. Though she hated to admit it to herself, if the choice was between a live E88 brother or a dead brother with his hands clean, she'd take the latter in a heartbeat and resign herself to a deeper level of Hell. Better that than bringing him down there with her.
Then, abruptly, a forbidden thought pushed its way into her mind:
what about the Protectorate?
They wouldn't mind that she'd been selling out the Empire. It might even make them look on her with more sympathy, even if she'd been selling them out to the Undersiders rather than the government. It was their
job to protect people from parahumans, and this certainly qualified. And if she
did end up in jail... so long as her brother made it out okay...
Her personal cell phone was launched out of her hands when
something thudded against the side of the car. She was pretty sure she heard one of the wheels -not the tire, the entire damn
wheel- impact below, but she was
kind of distracted by someone in dark colors looming over her. "Sorry," the girl said apologetically while Rune's brain connected the dots and once again came up
Tattletale, "I gotta make this look good. No hard feelings!"
And then Tattletale broke her nose.
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Eventually Rune's eyes cracked open, her head pounding and her nose pounding and actually now that she was thinking about it
everything hurt.
Especially her upper right arm. Where she'd been
bit by one of Bitch's evil zombie dogs.
But pretty much everything else, too.
She pushed herself up regardless, pushing through the pain. 'Manfully', Hookwolf might've said and then just kept smiling if someone else said that wasn't really correct when you were talking about a teenage girl. She took in her cell, because that's what it most certainly
was. One cot. A toilet offering zero privacy. Not much else. A proper door rather than bars, at least, though the door had a little window with bars in
it. No windows into the room. A closer look at the cot showed it was bolted to the floor, and the bolting looked recent, so it was probably done so she couldn't use her power on it.
Fucking
hell, what kind of repayment was this? You help a girl for a solid two months and she breaks your nose and has her friends rough you up and puts you in a fucking
cell? What had Tattletale done, handed her over to the PRT?
Fuck, that probably was it, wasn't it?
Then Tattletale's costumed face popped up behind the door's little window. Rune did her best to glare, wondering whether the swelling over her right eye made her look like an idiot or adequately thuggish. Whether it was a failure to be threatening or Tattletale being Tattletale, the other girl grinned her creepy curved grin, and cheerfully announced, "You'll be happy to know that aside that hiccup you personally experienced, everything went off without a hitch!"
And then she opened the cell door, no sound of a lock being turned at all, and stepped in, leaving Rune to goggle. Tattletale made a show of looking behind her, and then seemed to catch herself and focus on Rune, making an effort to look more serious. "Okay, I already said I'm sorry but let's reiterate:
I'm really sorry this wasn't how this was supposed to happen. Except the ways it was, but, okay, can you just, I dunno, sit there and glare angrily at me while I talk? That okay?"
Rune had never been one of the chatterbox villains who whittled foes down with cutting words, or distracted, or otherwise was good with words. Her thing was getting people to fuck off because they didn't want two tons of concrete to land on their face. Usually, she was fine with that. Here and now, she wanted a cutting retort to rise to her lips and make Tattletale feel exactly as awful as she deserved to feel.
No words obligingly unfurled from her tongue, and after a moment Tattletale clapped her hands together and declared, "Great! Super! Perfect." Then she leaned against one wall, obnoxiously casual and calm, like they were two friends in a normal girl's normal room. "Okay, the skinny is me and someone who shall not be named worked out that the Empire was starting to suspect you weren't all that
committed to, uh, 'the cause', and there were plans rattling around to fix that. Iiiii left it alone for a while because hey, your life, but then one bright bulb known as your uncle got it in his head that they'd get your
bro in on things to hook you in deeper and, well..."
There was ash in Rune's mouth. That was what she'd been trying to
avoid, or at
least delay.
Tattletale smiled sympathetically. "Yeah, my thoughts exactly." Then she went back to her creepy overly-curved smile. "Sooo I coordinated with someone, we came up with a plan, and, well, the plan ended up being making it look like the Empire made an example out of your uncle while we kidnapped your bro. The original idea was that we'd make it look like we kidnapped you
too, but the Jack thing meant we had to
improvise, so now the story is that you found your uncle dead and went looking for revenge and ran into us and it turned into a fight and you lost. Simple!"
Rune stared at Tattletale, trying to figure out what could be going on behind those idiotic eyes. Eventually, she cracked her mouth open and in a frustratingly shaky voice asked, "Where am I, where's my brother, and how is any of this supposed to make things
better?"
Tattletale's smile dimmed a bit again before returning to the megawatt range of radiance. "I can't say, he's right around the corner but he's asleep and I figured you'd want to let him rest, and the
idea is that you'll be gallantly rescued by the PRT and taken into protective custody and probably rebranded and Susan will remain friends with Elizabeth since neither of them have anything to do with this sordid business."
Rune scowled. "I coulda done that myself, and anyway they'll just send Donny to our
parents."
This time the smile fell
completely off of Tattletale's face, which was so bizarre for the girl Rune's adrenaline started pounding while she hauled herself to her feet -and then Tattletale gently shoved her back into the cot, a point she wasn't able to resist well thanks to
how fucking much everything hurt. "Shush sshhhh it's not- I'm not sure what you're thinking but it's not that and I swear to god I can't even take credit for this but your parents are dead."
Rune blinked.
Tattletale's eyebrows climbed under her mask.
Rune blinked again.
Then Tattletale grimaced. "Oookaaay. Look, it was the Teeth, it happened four days ago or so the police are still trying to make sense of
that mess and it would take some serious arm-twisting to get
me out to Boston right now, so, uh, congrats? The PRT would have to find some other relatives to foist you off on, aaaaaand I take it from your reaction they're probably not going to find anyone."
Rune allowed herself to collapse more properly into the cot, and began rubbing at her eyes. "Fuck."
Tattletale's voice was sympathetic when she said, "Yeah."
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Nobody paid much attention when Seattle gained a new Ward. Some of the tinfoil hats on Parahumans Online pointed out similarities to a known villain from Brockton Bay, but they were shouted down by the more reasonable portion of the site's denizens, the ones who got tired of pointing out how many capes had broadly similar powers that differed in
details.
Tattletale paid attention, of course, and was more pleased than she'd been expecting the first time her Lisa Wilbourn phone got a ring from her new friend on the West Coast. She was tickled pink when the other girl introduced herself as
Elizabeth.
On an unrelated note, Thomas Calvert was pleased that his 'insight' had proved key to extracting the girl and her brother from what had turned out to be an ABB attempt to strike back at the Empire with the Undersiders as unwitting cats-paws. Atypical of Lung, but PRT intelligence indicated a new parahuman had been recruited, so change was unsurprising, really.
Perfect.
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Riley
It took a couple of days to get a few minutes alone with Taylor. It also took about that long for Bonesaw to stop expecting the other Nine to swoop in and retrieve her, as well as get a handle on what Taylor expected of her.
The answer seemed to be 'nearly nothing', which was sufficiently upsetting Bonesaw had shoved it to the back of her mind and focused on other things.
Finally, though, Miss Vasil had taken Burnscar outside one night they were holed up in a crappy motel (
Really crappy, Bonesaw had an abundance of roaches to work with, it was convenient really), informing Taylor and Bonesaw that they'd be coming back in an hour or so. ("And remember:
Pride is always watching," delivered with a cheery grin that, bizarrely, wasn't forced)
Taylor had stared at the closed door for a good thirty seconds, and then spun around and focused on the tinkertech computer.
(Which Bonesaw had yet to be allowed to touch. That was fine, as she could tell it barely constituted tinkertech at all. She'd get more out of raiding a Best Buy than out of cracking this thing open, she was sure. Even the hard plastic screen wasn't that interesting; she could make stronger
and more flexible with some ordinary office supplies and a bamboo seed. Well, preferably a
few since they were difficult to get to germinate)
Bonesaw resisted the temptation to see if Cuddle Bugs was on. Television had been a rare treat with the Nine, and given the previous two nights had involved camping in the woods Bonesaw suspected that until she got away from these people it'd be much the same. And given she had a Kill Order on her, it would probably always be true. She'd thought up a plan to leave the country once, but the thought filled her with such sick dread, one more thing the Nine (
Jack) would've taken away from her... no.
This was, of course, Bonesaw procrastinating on actually talking to Taylor. She wasn't
scared of the girl, not in any way that mattered given how long she'd been with the Nine, but... so far, she'd been essentially hauled around and given the occasional order, such as non-invasively determining if Miss Vasil's head injury was serious. (It hadn't been) Bonesaw had never really had the option of
not being complicit with the Nine. She'd never sat on one side of a gap, looked at how wide it was, and made herself jump anyway. This was a new experience, strangely enough.
(This was, of course, even more procrastination)
Finally, she managed to ask, "So what kind of parameters are we talking, here?"
Taylor continued poking at the computer for nine seconds, and then tilted her head in a manner Bonesaw was leaning toward being possible due to her changer power. Bonesaw
had worked on someone who could do it naturally, but power was more likely. "Parameters?"
Bonesaw nodded simply. She still didn't have a good handle on how Taylor would react to different emotions. With the Nine, if she was anything other than relentlessly cheerful...
Anyway. "For what constitutes a 'fix'. I can't say what kind of
specific solutions I'll be able to come up with until we get me situated in a lab, and there's no way I'm letting you blame
me for not telling me what you really
want."
Taylor stared at her in silence for just a little too long, and then finally said, "That makes sense."
And then fell into silence and stared
through Bonesaw.
Bonesaw had spent months with Mannequin, though. She was used to a blank face staring at nothing in complete immobility, even if normally the face was blank because it was his not-quite-ceramic outer layer with no adornment rather than because of... whatever was going on with Taylor. Bonesaw was strongly confident it had to do with the second trigger, but her attempts to obliquely question Taylor had so far gone nowhere in particular. Not that she'd
made many in the brief time they'd been together, but Bonesaw had gotten
pretty good at getting answers out of people quickly. Though usually this involved mortal terror...
"Speed is essential. The sooner the plague is resolved, the better." Bonesaw snapped out of her daydreaming, re-focusing on Taylor. Taylor was still staring blankly at nothing, but there was a bit of a tremor in her voice. In anyone else, Bonesaw would assume she was on the verge of tears, but Taylor had already proven fairly abnormal. "The second-most important thing is that people
survive. Preferably with their minds intact, but if you quickly ensure their survival and the end of the plague's spreading and then later return them to their senses, that would be preferred to a slower solution that keeps everyone recognizable." One of Taylor's eyes
twitched in that odd way that Bonesaw was already confident meant Taylor had partially transformed in a near-invisible way and then undone it. She still wasn't sure if it was a nervous tic or the passenger interfering and Taylor pushing it back. "Third most important is making it easier for them to reintegrate into regular human society. I would
prefer that everyone affected simply return to the lives they had before the plague infected them, but I don't believe I will get what I want. I will also accept everyone surviving, having a human mind, and then dealing with the social fallout of looking like monsters by
explaining the situation." Explanation apparently done, Taylor relaxed, stared at Bonesaw for a few more seconds, and then returned to the computer.
Speed first, casualty reduction second, human minds third, aesthetics last.
Bonesaw very deliberately kept the pleased smile off of her face as she went to turn the TV to Cuddle Bugs, tinker thoughts bubbling in the background.
Maybe this'll be good after all.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Later
Having had
that conversation go well, Bonesaw was now confident enough to attempt
small talk with Taylor, at least in theory.
The only issue was she'd yet to see Taylor express an interest in anything that wasn't immediately and obviously practical or centered around one of her major goals. Bonesaw had initially thought Taylor might be a bit of a cape geek, based on how she kept reading parahuman news, but listening to Miss Vasil and Taylor talk had made it clear that 'fixing' the plague was a break from routine: Taylor's default was to do what she'd done to the Nine, identifying 'bad' parahumans who the Protectorate had failed to capture or kill for a very long time and dealing with them.
So Bonesaw took a gamble.
"So what do you think your changer form was
originally?"
Taylor took nearly a full minute to respond, at last twisting away from the computer and looking Bonesaw dead in the eye. (Something about this bothered Bonesaw, but aside making a note of it she'd pretended there was nothing worth paying attention to about it) "Clarify."
Bonesaw decided to take that as a good sign. Miss Vasil had intimated that Taylor was quick to violence, and that made perfect sense to Bonesaw. A one-word demand, however blunt and abrupt and
toneless it might be, was still well ahead of the responses Bonesaw had
expected. Especially since she knew that Taylor knew that Bonesaw could survive some fairly serious damage. So she shrugged in an overly-casual manner and let a note of only-slightly-faked excitement slip into her voice. "Well, it didn't just come from
nowhere, did it? And it doesn't really look like anything from the Earth or mythology or pop culture, so I think it's some kind of alien you're turning into."
Taylor sat very still, even for her, and then put one hand to her chin in what was either a habitual thoughtful pose or a deliberate attempt to look like she was thinking hard. Bonesaw
strongly suspected a lot of Taylor's body language was artificial, but she didn't have enough history to be sure. "I suppose that's a possibility." No inflection. No sound of interest. No
engagement.
Nonetheless, Bonesaw noted that Taylor had not returned to the computer. So she pushed onward. "I'm thinking it must've been a prey animal in a
really vicious ecosystem, probably living off of sunlight, or in a symbiotic relationship with fungus, or filter-feeding off of fluids."
Taylor's gaze
sharpened all of a sudden, and it was only thanks to all her time with the Nine that Bonesaw gave no reaction to that at all. "And why do you think that?"
Still not giving her own opinion, but she seems pretty hostile to mine. Bonesaw gestured toward her own face. "No mouth.'
Taylor sat very still, strangely sharp gaze still centered on Bonesaw, and then her eyes un-focused quite obviously. She was still looking in Bonesaw's direction, but not
at Bonesaw. "Multi-cellular organisms got by without mouths for ages. The earliest mouths weren't even designed to
move. Lamprey mouths, little more than an opening surrounded by teeth, the whole body having to contort itself to cut up prey."
Bonesaw had already read
that biology textbook, so this wasn't news to her, but it was the first time she'd seen evidence of Taylor having a hobby. She doubted an interest in biology, or animals, or whatever was behind this, had been related to hunting down 'bad' capes. Of course, there was a pretty big flaw in Taylor's point, so much so Bonesaw wasn't entirely sure why she was
saying this. "Your changer form doesn't have a mouth at all, though."
Taylor tilted her head ever-so-slightly, an acknowledging nod so barely existent that if Bonesaw had blinked she might've missed it entirely. "It does, however, have a coating of fluid that retains blood and flesh."
Hmmmm. "So you're suggesting the coating is some kind of digestive fluid, the results absorbed directly through the skin? The immune system problems would be a nightmare, though."
Taylor shrugged. "Or the fluid is meant to contain a symbiotic population that handles digestion. The immune system problems might not have been relevant at the time, either. Who knows how alien life would've evolved?"
Bonesaw objected to that without thinking. "It would've started from the bottom up, of course, so there'd be a rich ecosystem of single-celled organisms ready to attack and infect at that level."
Taylor cocked an eyebrow, eyeing Bonesaw with skepticism, more genuine emotional content contained in that one expression than Bonesaw had seen from her since they'd left Chicago. "Imagine a world choked by deadly rain, a relentless scrubbing of the surface that single-celled organisms are rent asunder by. Imagine there are caves, pockets of safety where the deadly rains don't reach, in which simple life evolves. Underneath the surface, life evolves in a manner more or less familiar to Earth, aside that something takes the place of sunlight, but when larger organisms evolve some of them stumble into a coating that keeps out the deadly rainfall of the outside. Some of them range out routinely, evolution does its thing, and before you know it the surface is populated by a mixture of animals that duck in and out of the caves freely, with somewhat weak immune systems propped up by the cleansing death of the outside, and animals that avoid the caves because they've abandoned a functioning immune system entirely, relying solely on the cleansing death to protect them from microbial life. A world where large, multi-celled animals have evolved with nearly no influence from infection and sundry other effects of single-celled life for ages."
That sounds an awful lot like passenger bleedthrough to me. Makes sense, she's a changer, she second-triggered, and I'm pretty sure her passenger did something to her mind in particular during the second trigger. So her passenger either took this pattern from its own world or from some other world, and provided it to Taylor? Why offer this animal as a power? I've taken apart a couple dozen 'monster' capes, and they mostly weren't functional as independent animals, when they were even particularly animal-like. They relied on constant jury-rigging from their passenger just to survive on a daily basis, sometimes even hourly. There was the guy with no lungs where oxygen was just being forcibly injected into his blood every thirty-two seconds, and when I went poking around in his brain it just stopped at one point and he only survived because I'd hooked him up to pump oxygen into his blood directly myself beforehand. And even then I forgot to set up a way to dispose of the carbon dioxide so he didn't live very long.
Of course, I haven't dissected Taylor, either. Maybe her changer form wouldn't function at all, either. But would that even mean anything? If her changer form doesn't have an immune system... even considering that Earth's microbes aren't going to be adapted to target that body right away, there should still be infection. A virus might not be able to hook into her cells' machinery but there's any number of microbes that ought to be brute-force eating at her flesh if the animal she becomes really evolved with no protections from microbial assault. So maybe if I'd dissected her before I'd heard this story I'd find she shouldn't function either, and not think about the possibility that she could've functioned in an alien environment.
I wonder if any of the more inhuman parahumans I've studied were effectively aliens stranded on a distant planet and held together by the passenger version of spit and duct tape?
"... ley. Riley. Are we done, or is something wrong?"
Bonesaw snapped out of her thoughts, having forgotten Taylor was even in the room, and reflexively moved to deflect attention, smiling sunnily. "Oh no, nothing wrong, I was just impressed by how smart you are."
Taylor stared at her in a manner that reminded Bonesaw
vividly of a time Shatterbird had looked just before slapping the taste out of Bonesaw's mouth-
-and then turned back to the computer, apparently content to end things that way.
Bonesaw stared at Taylor's back for a minute or so, wishing for a moment that she had the power to
understand people by just thinking really hard (Instead of by cutting them open and seeing what made them
tick), and then gasped in horror when she noticed she'd missed the first
half of the Love Bug Song!
Taylor briefly glanced her way in response, but then Bonesaw started singing along and Taylor returned to looking at gory images and European headlines.
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Another day
"... so can you answer my question now?" Bonesaw asked while putting on her best Innocent Child Guilelessly Begging A Favor They Believe Is Minor While The Adults Think It's Major But The Child Doesn't Know That face.
Miss Vasil didn't call her on it. Bonesaw noted that in her internal digital notepad, wondering
why. She knew she was faking, and Miss Vasil seemed to enjoy calling her out on faking. Not every time, but a lot of the time, especially when it
mattered to Bonesaw, and this mattered to Bonesaw.
With finely-honed skills at reading the atmosphere of deranged killers who might hurt, maim, or even kill because you happened to remind them of their abusive teacher by speaking in
juuust the wrong way, Bonesaw took in what was around her.
Taylor looked calm, but that didn't mean anything with her. The fact that her fingers kept merging together into three points and then unmerging was much more telling, an odd habit of Taylor's that Bonesaw was
pretty sure was a stress response.
Miss Vasil had turned to look at Bonesaw and goggle in horror before Taylor had snapped at her to pay attention to the road. Even focused on the road, she was tilted so Bonesaw was in the corner of one eye, and her hands were reflexively clutching at the wheel. She also had one foot tapping nervously against the floor.
Burnscar (Trailblazer was a
loser name) was starting to hyperventilate, at least until Miss Vasil started murmuring something soothing to her -and probably using her power, but if Taylor wasn't going to notice and get mad about that then Bonesaw wasn't going to call her attention to it. It's not like Bonesaw was all that fond of Burnscar. She was pretty boring.
Bonesaw drew the obvious conclusion: passengers were not nearly as well-known as she'd assumed they were (They were
obvious, you didn't need to be a tinker to see this!), and Miss Vasil and Burnscar at the least had
not been ready to learn they had aliens plugged into their brains whose goals were unclear but who most certainly
had goals, and one of those goals was keeping their rides unaware of the fact that the aliens existed and had goals for their rides.
Fiddlesticks.
(She'd stopped
saying child-swears around Miss Vasil, as the other girl would
not let up about it, but Bonesaw really didn't
like using adult swears)
Taylor was the first to speak. "So my power...
deliberately removed my guilt." She sounded deeply unhappy, which was the first Bonesaw had noticed Taylor evincing that particular range of feeling. Anger seemed more normal for her so far, when she wasn't carefully blank-faced. Bonesaw was coming to suspect Taylor habitually hid her real feelings long before the second trigger, possibly long before the first. (Long experience with the Nine had trained Bonesaw to not ask about trigger events, or lives before them, unless she had total power over the person she was speaking to. Too dangerous, otherwise)
Bonesaw frowned at Taylor's words. "That's a possibility, but I wouldn't want to assume it. I've got a lot of evidence the passengers don't understand us that well, and while powers are practically magic that doesn't mean the passengers fully understand what they're doing there, either." Bonesaw had plenty of experience with the accidents that could result when digging around in a person's insides, and she wasn't an alien at all!
Taylor seemed to be ignoring Bonesaw, focused on one hand that was partway to the tentacled state. Not far enough for the sheath of blue/grey-ish mostly-clear fluid to have appeared, but enough so she had only three fingers, all lined with sharp edges. "Take away the guilt so death does not dissuade her." Taylor sounded peevish, not quite
angry but certainly unhappy. Then Taylor glanced at Burnscar. "Remove ambiguity so she doesn't reconsider." This statement was calmer, though still unhappy. The corner of her vision turned to Miss Vasil. "Give great power to someone who won't
have qualms about using it." She sounded almost amused, reminding Bonesaw vividly of her mother rebuking her for painting the walls, a memory Bonesaw ruthlessly crushed out of long habit. And then finally she focused on Bonesaw. "I wonder what your power did to
you, beyond surrounding you with the Nine?"
Bonesaw blinked at that, reflexive disagreement rising from her throat. Her power hadn't changed the way she
thought-
except for the intrusive tinker thoughts, seeing how she could peel away someone's skin and put armor underneath, seeing a flower and thinking of what its petals contained and what she could synthesize out of it
-or
felt-
except she'd been a normal little girl, hadn't she? Would Riley have been able to look upon a bloated body with delight? Would she have been horrified when a patient succumbed unexpectedly?
-or....
Bonesaw stayed quiet and told her uncooperative nervous system to
shut the fudge up.
Miss Vasil, however,
grinned after a minute. "Don't be a bunch of negative nellies. We already knew powers did shit to you, it's just now we have some
context. Hell, maybe you guys can find your 'passengers' and punch them in the face until they patch your software the way you like it. Wouldn't even need to bother with 'consequences' lessons, Mimi. Knowledge is goddamn
good. It's
power."
Taylor spoke up. "Bonesaw." She turned to look Taylor in the face, keeping her own carefully blank, idly noting Taylor's hands were back to being fully human. She didn't say anything though, waiting for Taylor to continue. "What would it take to convince you to stay on board after the plague is
fixed, and help us further investigate these... 'passengers'?"
Riley gave the question serious thought before she answered.
