Jacqueline is a social thinker, but not a Social Thinker: she automatically approaches problems from a social perspective, and she's gotten quite good at thinking things through in a social sense, but she doesn't have any particular supernatural or parahuman advantage in that regard beyond having more years of carefully-examined experience and devoted study than she is old.
Which, I will admit, is actually pretty big advantage, so maybe she is a Social Thinker after all. But certainly not in the sense anybody in universe would expect.
I've had this tab open for... quite some time, because I really wanted to see how Jaqueline would get out of the situation, but I also really wasn't in the headspace to enjoy a prolonged Coil-being-a-bastard arc.
I am profoundly satisfied, having finally taken the plunge, at seeing the smarmy bastard go down in such a gloriously ignominous fashion.
I rate this takedown 8 out of 10 Icy BMs on the It Gets Worse scale.
I've had this tab open for... quite some time, because I really wanted to see how Jaqueline would get out of the situation, but I also really wasn't in the headspace to enjoy a prolonged Coil-being-a-bastard arc.
I am profoundly satisfied, having finally taken the plunge, at seeing the smarmy bastard go down in such a gloriously ignominous fashion.
I rate this takedown 8 out of 10 Icy BMs on the It Gets Worse scale.
That's quite understandable. Seeing somebody like Coil doing horrible things definitely isn't for everybody, and I set it up with a particularly graphic, if not exceptionally severe, example of him doing just that.
I don't think the story itself could have taken that for very long. It hasn't even really recovered from Bakuda yet. So yeah, Coil had to go down relatively quickly so I could move on, though getting this mess resolved isn't over yet.
I'm glad to hear you liked it, and I must accept your ranking with pride. Considering how much more limited by plausibility Orderly is than the deliberately absurdly improbable It Gets Worse, it's impressive to get that close to it. This hasn't been my only idea for how Coil went down (although it was always going to be ignomious and anticlimactic from at least an in-universe perspective), but I'm glad it went well.
You can not afford to let the full implications of your actions hit you right now.
You can't.
Stick to the plan.
It might not be much of a plan, but it's what you've got.
You can break down later.
Keep it together.
I was in way over my head. Far enough that I couldn't make out the surface as anything more than distant glimmers. I was mostly operating on an intellectual appreciation for the fact that there was a surface, somewhere, and I could, in theory, reach it.
Or, more realistically, get pulled up. What do you do when you've got problems you just can't handle?
Well, I can't speak for you. I don't even know if you've ever been in that situation. But my first instinct is to call for help.
And, wonder of wonders, I just so happened to have recently acquired a cell phone.
"It'll be okay, Sophia, you'll see. I've got a way to contact base."
I honestly don't know if she heard me, but that was alright. I was talking to myself as much as to her anyway, and I could always repeat myself. I was good at repeating myself.
So I did.
"It's going to be okay. I'll call home, and they'll get us out, you'll see."
Then I picked up the phone and got to work.
911 in this town was undermanned and overworked at the best of times, and these were far from the best of times. The city may not have been on fire anymore, metaphorically or otherwise, but it was undoubtedly still smouldering. The non-emergency PRT lines would be no better, if they were even being manned at all. I could easily imagine everybody simply being too busy to deal with them.
As a Ward, I had access to all the emergency lines, including the internal ones. Even as a not formally affiliated but heroically inclined parahuman I'd had a few. I'd been given all the numbers, and the access protocols.
It was all neatly packaged and readily accessible.
On my phone.
I did not have my phone. Vince's was nice enough, I suppose, and it even looked surprisingly similar, but it wasn't Ms. Phoneyface. It did not have a bunch of secret PRT stuff and programming on it. It might have had some of Coil's secret stuff on it, but that didn't help me know who to call, and I didn't know how to access it even if it did exist and would have been helpful.
That left only individual people. Well, there were some other organisations and such I could have called, but none of them were exactly appropriate. This was a little too serious for the non-emergency police line, entirely the wrong sort of problem for Suicide Hotline or Brockton Bay General Hospital, and just downright absurd to bring to a pizza joint, youth club, high school office, or annoyingly prevalently advertised used-car lot.
So that left only individual people.
I didn't actually know all that many individual people by their phone numbers. In this universe it was just Mom, Danny, Taylor, Amy, Alice Stone, and Armsmaster. Most of those were bad ideas.
Mom was dead. If she could do anything about the situation she didn't need me to call her first, and our home phone probably wasn't in service anymore anyway. I certainly hadn't been paying the bill.
Danny, well, I didn't know the limits of what he was capable of but I doubted it extended into breaking into fortified structures. And even if it somehow did that probably didn't make him qualified to deal with the heavily armed guards. I doubted he was insane enough to try.
Taylor, well, Taylor I could see trying. If she played it smart and got very lucky, she might even have succeeded. But I couldn't count on that.
Alice Stone had been captured with me. Given both normal practice for prisoners by any remotely competent captor and the fact that Miss Phoneyface was missing, I doubted she had her phone. In all likelihood it was either filed away somewhere or one of Coil's minions was poking away at it for classified information.
If it was the former, calling wouldn't get me anywhere. If it was the latter, calling would get me rumpled, and quite possibly shot.
So that wasn't a good idea.
And Amy was undoubtedly very, very, busy, in the field or at a different hospital if Brockton Bay General was done with her. Even if she wasn't, I wasn't sure what she could have done that I couldn't anyway, besides contacting the rest of New Wave, who had no way to find me beyond asking the PRT and their most powerful member down.
Not the worst idea, in all honesty, but not exactly great either. In hindsight she probably had a few PRT emergency lines available to her herself, but I didn't think of that at the time.
And, if I was being honest with myself, I didn't know if I could hear any of those people's voices without breaking down completely. Or the Director's, Vista's, Dr. Maina's, or Sophia's, even if she was the only one of that shorter list I could actually contact. I felt safe around those people, comfortable even. Some more than others, I'lll admit, but even a small amount might be too much. Like most people, I let my guard down around people I trust. It's instinctive to let your feelings out a little more when you feel safe.
Considering the sort of feelings I had at the moment that would not have been a good thing. A necessary thing, eventually, but it could wait. It had to wait.
Keep it together.
That left Armsmaster.
I didn't know Armsmaster, not really. Not as a person. I only had his number because it had been given to me when I'd been issued his Tinkertech, and I'd mostly memorised it because said Tinkertech was inside of me. Beyond that, there was very little of anything between us.
We'd been in the same meetings, and we'd even properly met once, but we'd never spoken about anything but business. I respected him, mind you, but I didn't know him.
We were coworkers. Or, technically speaking, he was my boss. Point is, there was nothing (well, very little) beyond professionalism to our relationship, so I could trust myself to be professional. And, on his end, he was practically a byword for professionalism.
I could handle professional. Someone I knew, someone I trusted on a personal level was a bad idea.
And, well, Armsmaster was a hero. The hero, when it came to Brockton Bay. The head of the Protectorate, and I knew he'd more than earned the position.
This was a little too serious for the non-emergency police line, entirely the wrong sort of problem for Suicide Hotline or Brockton Bay General Hospital, and just downright absurd to bring to a pizza joint, youth club, high school office, or annoyingly prevalently advertised used-car lot.
I am so excited for this. I love when Armsmaster is a hero. Yes I am absolutely biased, but considering my distaste for the grimdark nature of Worm in the first place Armsmaster actually being a hero is something I have no problem hoisting the flag for. Practical guy with no social skills still doing his best, let's go!
I am so excited for this. I love when Armsmaster is a hero. Yes I am absolutely biased, but considering my distaste for the grimdark nature of Worm in the first place Armsmaster actually being a hero is something I have no problem hoisting the flag for. Practical guy with no social skills still doing his best, let's go!
Armsmaster is definitely a flawed individual at the start of both Worm and Orderly, but he is, ultimately, somebody who chose to do right at considerable personal risk and someone who learned from his mistakes and got better as a person after them. That his first impression in the story was terrible and deeply hurt our POV character definitely didn't help his rep with the fandom, and that his stunt with the Endbringers included our sympathetic protagonists instead of just the less justified, much bloodier villains didn't help either, but, ultimately, his major sins are having too high an opinion of his own abilities, not being sympathetic to people are actively hurting people and whose sympathetic reasons he has no way of knowing, and being grating. There's a few lessons he definitely needed to learn, but in both stories I think he's learned them.
Taking on Villains in their lairs was rarely easy. Especially the technically inclined ones. Sure, Coil wasn't a Tinker, but he did have Tinkertech, and that on top of copious amounts of high-end mundane and Tinker-derived technology.
Nothing known that was more exotic or deadly than laser guns and assault rifles, but far too many heroes and troopers had been lost to things they didn't see coming over the years for Colin to trust that.
Especially on a lair assault.
Even with a Kill Order signed and ready for Coil, the kidnappings too much for whoever had been stalling the Director's efforts, and an increased level of force pre-authorised for his minions, it was still a daunting proposition. And one he absolutely shouldn't have been taking. He should have been dissecting Bakuda's technology, finding a way to disarm the bombs safely, for when they would find more. (And he didn't doubt in the slightest that they would find more, Bakuda didn't seem like the sort to limit herself in any way, and she'd been more than profligate with distributing her creations. It was inevitable that at least some would have slipped out of her control.) He should have been preparing to protect the reconstruction efforts, or working on getting The Rig back to full capacity. He should have been out in public, showing the flag. At worst, he should have been preparing for this exact assault, only with far more time to do it.
Instead, he had a hostage situation. Three of their own had been taken, including two children. Which not only meant Armsmaster had to act fast, he had to do it without giving Coil a chance to take advantage of that potential leverage. Or allowing anything else that could harm the victims.
Which meant gathering up as much force as possible as quickly as possible and gathering as much intelligence on the situation beforehand as he possibly could.
The first part was going well. The Protectorate ENE was responding in full, all the adult members of New Wave were backing them up, and an out-of-town Protectorate member had come to Brockton Bay for this exact purpose, even if Armsmaster hadn't expected to need him for it so soon and had hoped for more.
All were seasoned, experienced heroes with proven track records, (some, admittedly, more than others,) and several had experience in hostage extraction.
Those who did, including Armsmaster himself, all agreed: knowing the situation in general and the layout of the area and location of the hostages in particular was vital.
That part wasn't going well.
Technically speaking, Armsmaster knew exactly where Adjuvant was. She did, after all, have a tracking device, and she'd been wise enough to activate it quickly. It was even one of his tracking devices, so the distance and significant quantities of intervening material involved could not prevent it from reporting its position down to the millimeter, and its admittedly minimal biometrics and self-report systems indicated it had not been removed or tampered with.
The problem, or rather the immediate problem because there were enough problems with this situation that Armsmaster couldn't take the time to properly enumerate them, was that a single coordinate, no matter how precise or trustworthy, told him absolutely nothing about what was around Adjuvant, how to get to Adjuvant, or where to find the other two hostages.
Tattletale was scarcely more help. To her credit, she appeared to be taking the situation seriously, but she simply didn't know very much about Coil's base beyond the broadest details of its location and the very limited portions of it she'd seen for herself, and Coil had been actively hiding as much information as he could from her on those occasions. And while she knew what his mercenaries had carried when they grabbed her, there was no guarantee that Coil hadn't upgraded since then, or hidden additional defences away from what he'd let her see.
Dinah Alcott had pushed past her limit trying to assist. Two questions established near-certain odds that the captives were still alive (and would be fifteen minutes after she asked, nearly ten minutes ago) and 95.87% odds that they still would be alive and not irreparably injured in six hours (less, now, but it had been six when she'd asked) if the base didn't come under assault. Unfortunately, that didn't help with the assault itself in any way, aside from establishing a certain relatively safe amount of time they could delay.
Much shorter than the amount of time it would take before it was safe to ask her questions again, even if she hadn't needed to be sedated before she hurt herself further in her pain.
Dragon wasn't available, and wouldn't be for at least a day. The scheduled unavailability wasn't even much of a hindrance, because even if she had been present, hacking would still have been a dead end. Coil's tech evidently ran on a closed system, and nobody had found a workaround that didn't involve going in. And going in without enough information was contraindicated by the exact reasons he was considering hacking in the first place.
There was information available. But it just wasn't enough.
But it was looking like it was going to have to be, at least for a scouting mission, or he would have to pull a very-much unprepared and most likely deeply emotionally-compromised Vespiary in for a desperate scheme that probably wouldn't even work, when his Armsmaster phone rang.
(Strictly speaking it was a telephone function integrated into several different devices for redundancy, and the alert was "ringing" only in the most colloquial sense of the word, but the distinction was largely unimportant.)
He'd hoped it was additional information. Somebody on the inside trying to reach him, preferably one with more information than Tattletale. A way into the network that didn't involve getting inside the base first. The conditions the captives were being held in, perhaps reported by someone discontented with them. Something.
Later, he would muse that three out of three was actually remarkably good, as much as he didn't like it at the time.
"Thi-is is Ad-adjuvant re-requesting assistance."
Colin didn't need his voice recognition program to confirm that the speaker was indeed Jacqueline Colere, Especially not with the distinctive sound of her powers running in the background. Nor did he need it to tell him she was in a great deal of distress and trying to keep it out of her voice.
"You'll get it. Talk to me, Adjuvant."
She would. He was determined on that much, at least. He just needed to figure out how…
Armsmaster is, at the end of the day, very good at being a superhero. He can get caught flat-footed against something he isn't prepared for or overlooked, (an especial weakness of both Tinkers in general and him in particular, and something the canon Undersiders were very good at) and he has some definite weaknesses dealing with things that aren't in the core "being a superhero" job description (some of which are admittedly part of his job description as the leader of a superhero team), but when his expectations aren't being blown out of the water he is talented, dedicated, and extremely experienced at his core competencies, which this falls well within.
Despite everything, it was a relief to hear those words. They were crisp, assured, efficient, and, most of all, professional.
I could handle professional.
Or at least I could handle it better than I could anything else.
I think he got that. I can't really prove it, but, looking back, I get the feeling he understood. Either way, it made things easier. More distant. I could pretend it all happened to somebody else, some stranger, instead of to me.
I couldn't believe that some stranger suffered it, of course, and frankly it would have been more than a little upsetting even if it had happened to a stranger, but the pretending still helped a bit. Gave me space to breathe, if only metaphorically.
It did absolutely nothing for the stench, physically speaking, but talking at least involved a lot of breathing through the mouth.
I didn't actually know how to give a proper field report, or even an after-action one. A Ward is supposed to be taught the bare bones of the skill before they're fielded for the first time, (and to have got it more-or-less down to an art by the time they've graduated,) but my first fielding wasn't exactly planned.
Even by the enemy, I should note. In all likelihood I wouldn't have survived Browbeat's ruined debut if Barracuda had known to target me. But that's a different nightmare.
My point is, I didn't exactly have the full repertoire of skills I should have had before I so much as stopped a pickpocket as a superhero, and that included rapid information conveyance.
But I did have a sharp memory, strong motivation to pay close attention to the events in question, and a more-experienced senior in the field to gently guide me to the important stuff.
Gently enough that I only noticed in hindsight, actually. Although that might have been more about me than him.
Either way, it worked. The tale I told my boss was rather more prosaic than what I've shared with you, but it hit all the major beats. The story of the text, Reed, the van, (by licence plate number, even,) and getting knocked out by the gas grenade (and what it smelt like, in considerable detail, upon not-quite-request) didn't take very long. I'm not sure how much of it was new information, it wasn't like the hospital didn't have cameras, but the beginning was as good a place to start as any.
Far better than most, actually. Chronological order is an easy habit to fall into as a human, and it's even easier to just keep going down the existing rut once you're there. There's a momentum to it that really helps where you have to tell a story, especially an unpleasant one.
Even so, it got harder when the story got to waking up with Vince's gun in my face. My voice was shaking as I shared my observations on my guards, most pertinently their fear of their employer, though Armsmaster made no comment on it.
He sucked his teeth in when I mentioned 'fortunately" being still in the same clothes, but I pretended I didn't hear him. Though I don't think I did a very good job of pretending. He didn't show any more signs of distress after that, not that I could hear. If anything, he became even more professional and clipped, to the degree of monotone, almost like a text-to-speech machine.
… actually, in hindsight I think it was a text-to-speech machine, or at least some sort of machine generated or prerecorded audio. Or maybe just a really nice voice modulator. Tinkertech or something. He's Armsmaster, he can do that sort of thing.
Whatever it was, I appreciated the effort.
Coil himself was even harder to talk about than his minions. Still is, even now, although I guess you've probably noticed that. But I managed it. No doubt I wasn't pleasant to hear, but I painted a clear picture of what Coil had done, both to me and Sophia, though I had to backtrack and explain about the tablet after the latter.
At the time, I didn't think much of him asking "do you still have it?", but I answered in the affirmative nonetheless. Then I finished the story.
I didn't let him talk after confessing to Coil's death. I didn't know what he was going to say, though he was saying something before I rudely interrupted, but I knew that if I heard it I would not be able to take it. So I told him about breaking out, and Vince's interruption. What I said to the masked mercenary. The alphanumeric identifier on the door, what I had on hand, that the door was locked from my side now. How Sophia looked (not good), and how I was feeling (not much better), and whatever other little details I could scrape out that might be important.
There was a pause, when I ran out. I could tell he was thinking, and that he probably wanted to say something emotional, but he didn't. Instead, he asked me to pick up the tablet, and do some things with it and the phone. Technical stuff, that largely went over my head, but the gist of it was that it would connect the two to each other and to Armsmaster's own devices.
It was hard, harder than it should have been given the amount of guidance I had, but I scraped through. He was happy with it, whatever "it" was. I'd done good, and he told me so, in precisely so many words.
Somehow, I didn't think it was just about the tech stuff. Probably the way his voice was suddenly all too human again.
It stayed that way as he told me to hang tight, the heroes were on their way. To keep my aura down, in case it gave something away, but it was going to be fine. That it was going to be okay.
I didn't believe him, nothing was ever going to be okay ever again.
Such a good chapter. It's amazing how these perspectives tilt things. Armsmaster is probably thinking he's not doing great, and yet Jacqueline is feeling so glad for the help and support. Different people need different things
And suddenly, Armsmaster was the perfect choice of contact. Not only because he can pretend to listen unjudgementally while doing something else, but because that tablet has a connection to the base's network. He will probably be in the thick of the fighting, too, but a tinker in the security system would make all the difference.
Any bets on whether she recovers from this trauma before the next one?
Such a good chapter. It's amazing how these perspectives tilt things. Armsmaster is probably thinking he's not doing great, and yet Jacqueline is feeling so glad for the help and support. Different people need different things
Yeah. I do think Armsmaster is probably aware of what Jacqueline wants right now, but he's a lot more aware of any mistakes he makes than Jacqueline is, at the moment.
And suddenly, Armsmaster was the perfect choice of contact. Not only because he can pretend to listen unjudgementally while doing something else, but because that tablet has a connection to the base's network. He will probably be in the thick of the fighting, too, but a tinker in the security system would make all the difference.
He really is the best choice, under the circumstances. He's very good at professional, which is what Jacqueline needs right now, and now he has his way in. And some other stuff this chapter did hint at, but I'll leave you to speculate on what that might be.
Julius Quentin "Jules" Brown, the man known to one Jacqueline Colere as "Vince", considered himself a pretty sensible guy, all told.
Sure, he was technically involved in the whole cape scene, but he didn't want to be.
Nobody sane wanted to be involved in the cape scene.
Unfortunately, he didn't have a lot of other options, employment wise. Not too many people were looking to hire a skillset like his, and the more legitimate ones tended to look down on things like dishonourable discharges and assault charges, even if the latter had never been proven beyond reasonable doubt.
Those [bears] had it coming anyway, in his opinion.
But his superiors hadn't seen it that way, for once, and he'd had no choice but to turn to crime. And, within crime, very few outfits paid as much or equipped their hirees as well as Coil's.
(In a post-Parahuman world, more than a few provided as many opportunities for a bit of "fun", or even more, but Coil provided the best. And the most discreet. Jules would, in fact, pretend that wasn't a factor, but he knew, deep down, that he was, in fact, pretending.)
So Coil it was. The snake was a cape, yes, and thus more dangerous than Jules really wanted to get mixed up with. And undeniably a monster.
Every cape was, and Coil in particular was creepier than a blanket made of baby-skin.
But his contracts were good, and the jobs were better.
Even if he had no doubt the unnatural terror could kill him in seconds without blinking an eye about it, every job he'd been given was a cakewalk, and he was making good progress on his retirement fund.
Jules had always wanted a ranch. A nice big one, deep in the country, no-one around for miles and plenty of room to roam.
And do other things. (And, in fact, other other things.)
So he stayed on. He wasn't entirely happy with it, and he couldn't look his employer in the eye without worrying if his heart was about to be ripped from his chest, but he was determined to stick it out. Finally get his life back on track.
Life wasn't exactly good, but it was bearable. He could live with the fear.
Really he was better off, his new boss wasn't nearly as restrictive about things like a bit of booze and a little blow, and there was a lot more of the fun action to be had, working for a big, bad, monster.
Until one day, Coil crossed a bigger, badder, more vicious monster, even if the little nightmare was technically physically diminutive. He knew full well that that didn't make a lick of difference, not with capes.
Case in point, that psycho kid that paraded around with the Slaughterhouse Nine. Banesaw, he thought the name was, or at least that was the one that had lasted the longest. The one Coil (and, unfortunately for him, Jules) had just crossed certainly seemed to fit that mold.
This particular little horror had seemed perfectly harmless at first. Just some stupid kid about to get exposed to the reality of the world. The nurse outfit was… weird, but it was just a stupid halloween thing. It still had the store's label on it. Maybe she'd been grabbed from a costume party or something, or maybe the boss just liked it. Wasn't his business. He was just gonna spook it, make it clear who held the power.
It was funny, at first. The look on the thing's face. He remembered laughing at it.
Worst mistake of his life.
He barely remembered why he came back. Some sort of message about an ABB stash of some sort, and he was the low man on the totem pole, so he'd had to carry it. He didn't remember what it said, and he didn't think he'd ever known why it was important enough to risk interrupting Coil.
What he remembered was a monster in the shape of a child standing over what was left of his monstrous employer. He knew how much force it took to pulp a human head in a blow, let alone a cape's, and he wanted nowhere near it. The smashed chair arm only proved it.
And the thing's eyes, it's skin, the way the world around it shifted and gleamed, it was all nightmarish in a way Coil could never have equaled.
It didn't even blink at the blood and other things that coated its limbs.
It let him go, that was the worst thing. Like a cat playing with a mouse. Waiting for its victim to try to escape, just so it could snatch that hope away. Just like he was doing, though he wasn't stupid enough to turn himself in like it said.
That would just put him right back into its power. It wouldn't have so much as mentioned the possibility, otherwise. It was one of the "heroes", then, as if there was anything heroic about all consuming clockwork soaked in gore.
No, he was going to run, and run, and never look back. Hopefully it couldn't follow, didn't know who he was. Couldn't find him. He was going to take what he had, and find some deep, dark, hole to hide in.
He had just left the general vicinity of the base when he tried to pull out his phone, looking to access his account. It was only then that he remembered that the brazen nightmare had his cell phone, and, with it, everything it needed to dissect every aspect of his life.
Julius Quentin "Jules" Brown, the man known to one Jacqueline Colere as "Vince", was never going to sleep again.
... He really should have taken Jacqueline up on her offer. Alas, he correctly deduced the existence of a trap, but was sadly mistaken as to the nature of it. He thought that surrendering was the false option; when, in fact, it was running which turned him into a target.
... He really should have taken Jacqueline up on her offer. Alas, he correctly deduced the existence of a trap, but was sadly mistaken as to the nature of it. He thought that surrendering was the false option; when, in fact, it was running which turned him into a target.
Vince is just a little too clever (and paranoid) for his own good. A certain amount of wariness about people with superpowers makes sense, but he's taking it a bit too far, combined with a frankly unhealthy level of cynicism.
Vince is just a little too clever (and paranoid) for his own good. A certain amount of wariness about people with superpowers makes sense, but he's taking it a bit too far, combined with a frankly unhealthy level of cynicism.
I'm going to be honest with you: what followed was, in all likelihood, a make-work project. Or at least something very much in that nature. Sure, I was talking to an actual PRT analyst, as far as I know, and to some extent it probably was important to go over the stuff I'd stolen requisitioned, but there were bigger things going on and I wasn't exactly qualified for the task.
Odds were Analyst Jones would have been more productive in that regard just doing the job himself: the phone was rather thoroughly compromised by Armsmaster, after all, and it was by far the most information-dense element of my ill-gotten gains righteously confiscated materiel.
The real goal was to keep me talking, distracted, and not panicking. In that regard, it worked pretty well. Particularly when I looked and saw just what background Vince had on his home screen:
Ponies.
Not the colourful, animated kind, but the real world sort that carry heavy packs and presumably do other useful livestock things. Though, like those other ponies, these ones were mostly being extremely cute.
They even had little hats. Fancy hats.
"When a felon's not engaged in his employment" indeed. Although I guess he actually was engaged in his employment, even if the felonious little plans he was maturing weren't exactly his own.
And I didn't feel all that bad about my attempt at depriving him of his liberty. After all, it could just as easily have been "I just shot Jacqueline in the face".
But I do find those little equines legitimately humourous.
The look on the brown one's face.
Things were going to be okay. Or at least I could pretend they were.
The rest of it, well, that was the highlight, humour-wise. Nothing matched up to the ponies. I honestly doubt anything could have, not with the ponies having come first.
Intelligence wise, pickings were better.
His name was Julius Quentin Brown, nicknamed "Jules" by at least one of his contacts, though he'd removed his middle name from almost everywhere. Fortunately I had his drivers licence.
Said licence also gave me his birthday, which was the Seventh of August, Nineteen Ninety. He really didn't strike me as a Leo, and while Snake seemed appropriate to a western perspective the actual birthsign has very different connotations. Frankly, those were even more grossly unfitting than the lion. Just goes to show what astrology's worth.
Diligent, responsive, compassionate and kind hearted my laser pointed-at glabella.
Vince apparently lived in an apartment downtown, on a street I recognised as not quite running smack dab through the middle of Coil's territory. A bit of consultation with Jones indicated that the listed address was, in fact, located well within the serpent's coils.
Hardly surprising.
From his licence photo, Vince was tanned and had a strong face. I guessed he was probably what would be considered good-looking but not exceptionally so by those who were interested in that sort of thing, assuming they liked buzzcuts. He could have fit right in at an E88 rally.
Or, like, in the military. Where Coil was supposed to do most if not all of his recruiting from.
He was six feet and two inches tall, and apparently weighed one hundred and eighty nine pounds. He was not marked as a blood donor, which was not surprising in the slightest, nor as a veteran, which was more so given his obvious level of training, even if he had equally obviously gotten sloppy since then. According to Jones that probably meant a dishonourable discharge.
Which made sense, or at least felt like it. I don't know if that was actual analysis or if Jones was just looking at his military record. I mean, I'd relayed the number on the driver's licence to him, so even if Armsmaster had neglected to share the phone access with the analyst for whatever reason Jones should have been able to look it up in the records.
I'm just gonna file that as further evidence for my "make-work" theory.
Moving on from the licence, I had his credit card, from Navy Federal. Presumably issued before Vince got kicked out of the military, although I can't say I actually know how they work. I'm not even sure if they're actually a federal service or not, though given US attitudes towards government involvement in business in general I'm guessing not.
Still, given that he would have been nineteen when it was issued, I don't think he would have been special-forces enough for Coil's bunch to recruit if he'd been discharged before then.
That was, in fact, something that should have been easy to just look up, but I didn't. And if Jones did, I wasn't told about it. Either way, it would apparently be simple enough to track.
Despite the temptation, I did not, in fact, end up using Vince's credit card to buy "Gun Safety for Dummies" for him like I planned/briefly considered. But it would have been hilarious.
And, well, involved deliberately provoking him, which even if it was safe I probably couldn't have brought myself to do. But it would have been hilarious.
Phone-wise, he'd left himself logged into a lot of stuff, which in turn let my curious fingers in. His browser history was mostly age-inappropriate, irrelevant, or both, but I did manage to find his bank account. I didn't look too closely into it: I didn't want to know just how lucrative doing Coil's dirty work was.
I suppose it wouldn't have been too hard to get a warrant to access Vince's financial records if it proved necessary, but Jones not asking me to dig further was further evidence that my feelings were more important to him, or at least to his superiors, than actually getting information.
I do appreciate that. I really do. Sure it makes sense even just from a pragmatic cost-benefit point of view, since capes are expensive and valuable and hard to get ahold of and the information in question wasn't, but they didn't have to have been as cautious about my wellbeing as they were. From an information gathering perspective, the best thing they could have done would probably have been to grill me on events again, over and over. Or they could have left me alone, and not occupied a valuable unit of manpower during a crisis. They even could have tried to comfort me more directly, and slammed me straight into a level of thinking-about-it I simply could not have handled.
I couldn't have handled any of those, really.
But they didn't do any of those things. They kept me busy, gathering all the above information and a bunch more that's even more irrelevant. They kept me distracted and filled with purpose, if not exactly happy or well.
And they did a good job of it. Or Jones did, rather.
Thanks, Jones.
I probably should have tried to learn your full name at some point, huh? Maybe it's not the biggest deal in the grand scheme of things, but I do regret not asking. You were there for me, and I owe you at least a bit more than to have never even tried to learn your name.
I am sorry about that. I'll try and fix that, if I get the chance.
My sincerest apologies, but I think you'll find that those are Jacqueline's heartstrings now. Don't worry, she'll make sure they get plenty of exercise.
My sincerest apologies, but I think you'll find that those are Jacqueline's heartstrings now. Don't worry, she'll make sure they get plenty of exercise.
