Orderly (Worm Semi-SI)

[Obscura]

I didn't get to go home with the Heberts right away. Emily apparently wanted to meet with me and my new guardian for a bit first. She didn't say anything about Taylor either way, but she stayed anyway. That was nice.

It wasn't like she couldn't eavesdrop ridiculously easily, so the only reason to stay was solidarity. Although, come to think of it, I had no idea if she could hear through her bugs or not: I just knew she could see through them. And I didn't think she could read lips. It was a nice gesture of solidarity anyway. I also made a note to learn more about my new foster-sister's power. A mental note, since I didn't have any actual note-taking tools. I guess I had a phone, but that sends a very different message than a notebook.

When you take notes in a notebook, you look studious and attentive, like you're carefully keeping track of everything the other person is saying. Even if your notes are actually about something else entirely. Like a shopping list, or studying for another class, or even composing a report for the nightmarishly powerful interdimensional being that drives nails into your brain if you don't send them enough, as if they hadn't already done way too much to you without so much as a "by-your-leave" and never apologized. No, there is no subtext there whatsoever, stop looking.

If you take notes on a phone, you look like you are deliberately and rudely ignoring the other person, since it's very difficult to tell what you're actually doing on that phone of yours. Maybe you're texting your friends. Maybe you're texting the cops. Maybe you're surfing the internet. Maybe you're reading something horrible, like The Complete History of BOATS. Don't ask what "BOATS'' is.

Seriously, don't. Let me just say there's worse ways to go than in a house fire, and leave it at that. Don't ask how I know that.

Seriously, don't.

When I had money (because I refused to be flat broke forever), I'd buy a notebook. Maybe I'd ask Taylor where she got those very nice journals she kept records of those very ugly months at Winslow in. I made another mental note to buy a notebook. Also, writing utensils, a nice thick walking stick, a first aid kit, general clothing, a jaunty scarf of some sort, undergarments, and, most importantly, earplugs. Preparation is very important.

"Anyways, although Wards usually patrol to justify the expense of outfiting and training them, as the Regional Director I have the authority to approve Jacqueline as a Ward without any such requirements. Frankly, I think we can all agree that Jacqueline is unsuited to the task, both temperamentally and in terms of her powers. She told Lieutenant Castle as much herself."


I nodded at that, I was definitely unsuited for law enforcement, and I had told a PRT Lieutenant, who was apparently named Castle, precisely that. I mean, not in those exact words, but something awfully close. I'm blanking on the exact phrasing I used. Sue me. Oh, wait, you can't. I'm flat broke. Being a formerly homeless orphan doesn't suck nearly as much as being a currently homeless orphan, but it's still not great. At least I had a Taylor, even if she was the "reckless idiot" model of Taylor. And I had Danny. He probably counted for something. He was nice, anyway. That counts for something.

That something being hugs. And some other things, I guess. But mostly hugs.

Hugs are nice.

"I am prepared to offer Jacqueline a position in the Wards without the patrol requirement. Frankly, that requirement rarely comes up anyway, most Wards are raring for as many Patrols as possible. It's caused the PRT no end of problems, especially here, but it's part of the job.

"I can't speak for New Wave, but I don't think you and Brandish would get along. I don't foresee any such problems with the Wards, but you are welcome to meet them before you commit to anything. Taylor, the same goes for you. I'll understand if you don't want to work with us, what happened to you was frankly atrocious, but I think you could do a lot of good in the Wards."

Taylor's response was rather Taylorish: "Um, can I have some time to think about it."

"Of course" was the director's answer.

Danny thought it was a good idea for both of us. I don't think any of us expected anything else, honestly; I certainly didn't. Taylor definitely looked like she'd seen it coming. Go figure. It's almost as if nearly losing his daughter to a gangster-dragon she poked would obviously make him (or any remotely caring parent) in favour of increased supervision for her, but clearly that was impossible, because this was Earth Bet, and good things weren't welcome here.

After that, I was asked to wait outside for a bit, presumably so the Director and Danny could properly ream Taylor out. I wasn't gonna complain, she had quite frankly earned more than a few "please don't be such a reckless dummyhead" lectures. Probably with a strong tone of "we care about you", though I wasn't sure if that'd be overtone or undertone. I was planning on mixing the two themes together for my own efforts, but that's probably just my fondness for dramatics playing up.

For the moment, I entrusted my shopping list to my loyal personal assistant: Ms. Phoneyface. She'd earned a promotion. Rather a rising star in MeCorp, actually. That phone is going places.

Somebody told me that The Land of Make-Believe is nice this time of year. "Not that it's ever not nice, mind you, but roundabout April is one of it's finest times". Personally, I think it's because of the blooming of imagination. It's a remarkably beautiful flower, and the sheer amount of it in the area leaves its characteristic dancing colours on everything. It's either that or the sheer wonderfulness of not being Earth Bet. One of the two.

Still, it was not the time for rest. Promises to keep, miles to go before I sleep. All that jazz.

 

[Obscura]

If I could pull this off, it'd definitely make an impression on Taylor; no ifs, ands or buts. This would also be the perfect symbolic beginning of mending this broken world. And you have no idea what I'm talking about.

I should probably explain. Let me start at the beginning.

So there I was, minding my own business, when "the patron" contacted me. Let me tell you, getting an arrow right between the eyes hurts, even if the arrow has no head and a letter wrapped around it.


Sorry, wrong beginning.

In the beginning there was the Word,

Nope.


It's good to be the Dungeon Master!

That's not it. DMG?


Heard joke once: Man goes to doctor. Says he's depressed. Says life seems harsh and cruel.

I don't think so.


Three logicians walk into a bar. Barkeep turns to the first logician

Oh, that one's hilarious, buuut it's not where I was going with this. Maybe I'll tell you the rest of it sometime. Ah! Here we go:


So there I was, minding my own business, when Taylor came out of the Director's office and told me Danny and Ms. Emily wanted to talk to me. Again. This time without Taylor present. I'm not at all sure we could stop her listening in if she wanted to, but if they asked her not to I'm pretty sure she'd listen. Or not listen, as the case may be.

"I assume they asked you not to listen in?" I whispered. Actual whispering, not stage whispering. I'm not Assault.

I'm not sure who I am, but Assault is nowhere on the list of possibilities. Thank the Ways. Being two people is hard enough, not to mention the problems of having a core identity that biology and society don't want to acknowledge. Being yet another person would just make things worse.

"Yeah", Taylor whispered back. On a side note, she was surprisingly good at whispering, probably a tragic byproduct of what Winslow had put her through. Most people can't get an actual whisper on their first try, being either too loud or so quiet they can't be heard at all. Whispering isn't like tightrope walking, but it does take practice.

"Any idea what they want to talk about?"

"No."

"Okay then."

A quick hug.

Then I walked into the office.

The End.


That's it.


There is nothing more to this story. The adventures of Jacqueline Colere are over and done. No more.


Nothing to see here, move along.
























Yeah, I didn't really expect you to buy that. I was hoping reaching the end would stop the nails, but noooo. Patron just had to be insanely brutal in an entirely consistent manner. Jerk. What kind of loony actually uses nails driving into someone's brain to get what they want? Is anyone actually reading this? I'm getting no feedback here except for the nails driven into my brain when I don't send enough.

Ugh.

So, anyway, I walked into the Director's office, to a "please, sit down". So I, being a veritable paragon of obedience, sat down. What a shock. But please: hold your applause until the end of the presentation.

So, the director actually had a few different things she wanted to talk to me about. First she told me, in a quietly serious tone, that Taylor had done something "rather reckless" last night, and didn't want to be there when I was told about it.

"I know."

"Well, that's a relief, but may I ask how you know?"

"She cribbed the name "Vespiary" from my notes, and I recognized it in the paper."

"Ah. On to the next matter then."

The next matter was about open capes, and the risks and benefits thereof. Emily was willing to let it happen, even in the Wards, but she wanted to be sure I knew how dangerous it could be. I did. And I knew how dangerous not being an open cape could be, since I wasn't any more dangerous or better able to defend myself than my civilian guise looked. Plus all of the many reasons I could get killed in Brockton Bay, like the ones I'd told the Heberts a while back.

(If you don't remember, they all basically boil down to "poor, young, and a member of several minorities". That and Brockton Bay being awful.)

Being an open cape would give me a certain amount of protection under the unwritten rules in my civilian identity. If a Merchant, Bad Boy, or, more likely, an E88 member came after me, their boss would have to either kill them, turn them in, or face the wrath of the entire parahuman world.

There were particularly despised villains and groups who were willing to ignore that, but it was safe to assume that anyone willing to go after a cape in their civilian identity was also willing to seek that civilian identity out. And I wouldn't be able to keep that a secret, not one that couldn't be found if someone was actually looking. Healers tended to be busy, and I wasn't much good at secrets.

Wards in general weren't the "nobody can hurt me" kind of safe, they were the "if anyone so much as looks like they're gonna try to hurt me the entire Protectorate will descend upon them like a tonne of bricks, but less gently" kind of safe. And being an open cape with the Wards would extend that protection to my civilian identity. Technically, that applied to all Wards, but the fact of the matter was that having a bunch of people ready to extact justice for any crime done against you only kept you safe if any would-be criminals actually knew you had those people waiting in the metaphorical wings. Being openly in the Wards was, in my particular case (and by my particular judgement) safer than being hidden.

And since I just automatically assumed I'd be with the Wards, my position on that little issue was perfectly clear to all of us. Including me, for the first time. That surprised me a little. Not nearly as much as basically anything else since this started, but it did. I still decided to meet the existing members first. If any of the others are half as scary as Clockblocker, I might change my mind. There was some talk about that, before everything seemed to be dealt with.

I was also apparently owed some money as an informant, and would have to go to the bank on Thursday with a PRT accountant to sort the money (matter!) out.

After that little tidbit the director opened one of the side drawers on her desk and pulled out what I vaguely recognized as an instrument case. One for something small, nothing like a guitar case or even a violin case.

"Is that?" Danny almost whispered.

"The flute that those girls stole while under Coil's power, yes. We found it in Emma's Barnes' room, apparently as a trophy of some sort. It's not in good condition, I'm afraid. We cleaned it off, but the damage isn't something we know how to fix. I was hoping your power could do it better, Jacqueline"

I hoped so too. I didn't know much about the flute, but I knew it was important to Taylor and that it had been stolen and wrecked, and that fixing it would mean a lot to my new foster-sister. Or however this guardianship thing worked. I accepted the (brand new) case, pulled out the little velvet bag which presumably had the flute inside it, and hung it around my neck. Best to keep it as close to me as possible.

And with the last matter (for the moment) at the PRT building done, it was time to go home. For the first time in months, sort of. It was nice to have a home.

 

[Obscura]

And lo, on the twelfth day of the fourth month of the twelfth year (2000 being the first year) of the first century of the third millennium of the Common Era, Jacqueline Colere, in the company of cunning Danny Hebert and bold Taylor Anne Hebert, descended the steps towards the entryway of the Headquarters of the noble Parahuman Response Team. Stepping through that vaunted gateway, the three left that most redoubtable of fortresses, and came before Danny's seasoned vessel.

Seasoned, in retrospect, might not have been quite the right word for the truck. It was battered, beaten, and functional only by the grace of Danny knowing a lot of mechanics (according to Taylor). And even with all that work it was still one bad day from total failure. "Battered" was a good word for it, or maybe "creaking" or "crumbling". Those were good words. They set the right tone. Insubstantial dramatics, yes, but in case you somehow haven't noticed, I believe in the power of insubstantial dramatics.

Less ideal words, at least in terms of being carefully and precisely picked out, were being shared inside the Hebert's creaking and crumbling old truck. Necessary, yes, but not exactly eloquent. Taylor was, in a word, sorry. She didn't use just one word though. She was sorry for being so reckless, and for trying to patrol alone even though I'd warned her, and for taking on Lung and for not telling me herself, and for taking my ideas without asking, and for risking herself and lots of stuff. Eventually she was just apologizing for everything, including quite a few things that weren't her fault, like me getting beaten up in Winslow's bathroom all the way back on the far-distant time of last Thursday? Somehow it seemed like it had been way longer than a few days since we met. Seriously, it hadn't even been half of a week.

But that wasn't important at the moment. What was important was breaking Taylor out of her downward spiral. Danny was driving, so he probably shouldn't get involved. Road safety is important. Don't drive distracted, kids! Actually, any kids in the readership probably shouldn't be driving at all, but if you do drive pay attention to the road. And be sober. I cannot stress either point enough. Not over whatever-this-is, anyway.

So it fell to me. Now, I could have just slapped Taylor and told her she was being silly, but that only works in the movies. Sort of. It can work, it's just immensely risky and pretty damaging even in the best case. Instead, I did something far more sensible: I latched onto her like a limpet and squeezed tight.

Sensibility is relative, but there was a method to my madness. There is always a method to my madness, even if you can't see it. Sometimes that's all you can manage. You see, the reason that the slapping thing occasionally works is that it's a strong stimulus, but there are ways to get someone's attention without assaulting them. Really. Don't let Hollywood tell you otherwise: they don't know anything.

Sorry, that's not true: they know lots of stuff, they actually just aren't at all interested in conveying accurate information. They have to know a lot of stuff to actually make those movies, but presenting things accurately isn't something they have to do. Not entirely their fault, they make and sell what the public pays for. Documentaries don't sell out theatres. Usually. Playing to reality often makes for a weaker story, so writers cut corners to sell more, because buyers are mostly uninterested in reality. But that's as maybe. The point is that there are non-violent ways to get people's attention, and that it's really hard to ignore a cute little girl latching onto you as tightly as she can, with tears in her eyes, babbling about "you can't go, you can't die, (she) can't lose anyone else. Don't leave me!". And then a lot of bawling. Like, a lot. Whatever you're thinking of, add at least 20 percent.

I may have let go of my iron-clad self control there. I'd already held it longer than was really advisable, and letting go did serve a purpose. Very few things are more distracting, or a better inducement to practice due caution, than a small child who you care about clinging onto you like a limpet, crying, and begging you not to get yourself killed because everyone else she knows has been killed and she can't face any more. Surprising, I know.

The trick to that is in the "who you care about". If your target doesn't care, it just doesn't work, though most people will start caring about a child if they're crying. I wouldn't advise trying it on the likes of the Slaughterhouse Nine though. I can't imagine that going well.

Lo and behold: thusly didst the Taylor turn away from the ruinous path of self-recrimination and turn onto the mildly less destructive path of frantically assuring me that she wasn't going to leave me. And hugging back just as tightly. Significantly tighter, actually, seeing as she was a fair bit stronger than I was. She was older and taller, after all.

Hugs, even frantic reassurance hugs, are nice.

And at least there was no gunfire this time.

Not any nearby gunfire, at any rate. Most likely somebody was shooting something (or someone) somewhere in the city. This was Brockton Bay, after all. Even if there somehow wasn't anything violent going on, people on every side would be preparing for something violent to happen, if they weren't outright preparing to do something violent.

This world is broken, after all.

But we made it home safely. And the Hebert house was home now. Somehow. It was still weird to think about, but not in an uncomfortable way. More like waking up after falling asleep on a chair and finding that somebody put a blanket over you so you wouldn't get cold. And Taylor was pulling herself together.

Maybe, just maybe, things would turn out okay. Hope's a funny thing, isn't it?

 

[Obscura]

"Three logicians walk into a bar.

"The bartender turns to the first logician and, in his best 'customer service' tone, asks 'So, do you all want a drink?'

"And the first logician says 'I don't know.'

"The bartender, now a little confused and a little angry, decides to just roll with it, and turns to the second logician:

"'So, do you all want a drink?'

"And the second logician says 'I don't know.'

"And the bartender, now visibly irritated, and well more than a little bit confused, turns to the third logician, and asks, with a tone implying that the logician had better have an actual answer, 'So, do you all want a drink?'

"And the third logican, blissfully oblivious to the bartender's growing ire, thinks for a moment, glances at the first logician, glances at the second logician, and, after pausing to think for just one moment further, turns to the bartender and says 'Yes.'"


"I don't get it."

"Me either."

Philistines. The three of us were attempting to reach a state of healthy, functional, normalcy. And it was going pretty well, their poor appreciation for truly excellent jokes aside. We may not have achieved normalcy, but two out three ain't bad. In this context.

Getting two out of three darts onto the board is pretty bad, and getting hit by two of the three darts flying at you is worse. Don't ask how I know that.


In case you need to be told, we (Taylor, Danny, and myself) were getting along pretty well. Taylor and Danny liked some of my other jokes a lot better than the one about the three logicians (philistines!), and they had some of their own as well. I particularly liked Danny's story about the brick. You see, a very long time ago, years and years and years, the Dockworker's Association needed to build a great many things, and so they needed a great many bricks. But one day, due to a clown-based accident at their supplier, they had too many bricks and they couldn't store them all away, because they didn't have enough space. So every member of the Association had to take a brick, and Danny, not knowing what else to do with it, brought his home and tucked it into the guest room bed.

That was the only time the guest room had ever been used, so naturally that meant I was a brick as well. Perhaps that's one of those "you had to be there" moments.

If it seems strange that we were laughing and telling jokes, there is a simple explanation: I deliberately orchestrated it by starting things off (with a much weaker joke than the logicians' adventure at the bar, but that's neither here nor there). There you go, happy?

No?

You want to know why I would do such a thing?

Very well, I'll tell you, even though the pretense that you're asking questions is purely a comedic/dramatic device on my part, seeing as I am getting literally zero feedback on this that isn't "Nails slowly, painfully, driving into my brain" or "No nails slowly, painfully, driving into my brain". Patron is kinda a jerk, you know? But I did have an actual reason for my actions.

You see, humour serves a number of purposes, it is not an end purely of and for itself. Meaning that although it can be an end in and of itself it can also be a means towards other, greater, ends. In this case, its purpose was to give us some metaphorical breathing room, to put a little distance between us and things like awful high school experiences, superhero teams, dead parents, dead spouses, dead cities, the continual possibility of a violent death, nefarious supervillains, authority issues, blows to the head, lingering trauma, moles, spies, interdimensional travel, immensely powerful beings without a good grasp of things like "consent", the violent nature of parahuman society in general, the violent nature of parahuman society in Brockton Bay in particular, bad decisions, recklessness, being two previously distinct people at once, self-blame, arrows hitting right between the eyes, gender identity/biology mismatches, people firing automatic weapons on public streets, betrayal, bullies who weren't actually responsible for their actions, bullies who were responsible for their actions, violent beatings in school bathrooms, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and Taylor's awful taste in pizza. Lots of things, really.


To laugh and joke and be a clown was to leave those things behind, at least for a while, and we desperately needed that. You can't run away from your problems forever, but you can give yourself a little space to work with before you have to confront them, and that's exactly what I intended to arrange for our little ragtag bunch of misfits. By calling us a ragtag bunch of misfits, among other things. Just call me "Pagliacci". Or don't. In hindsight, don't. It won't end well.

But life isn't all fun and games, and eventually reality intruded into the humour, in the form of growing hunger and the need to prepare lunch. Oh well. There are certainly worse ways that a relieving humorous interlude could end. Don't ask how I know that.

Seriously, don't. Yes, I am fully aware that I've been saying that a lot. I know a lot of things that I dearly wish I didn't, alright? I'm probably going to keep saying it, so you'll just have to deal with it. Not like you can stop me.


On an unrelated note, Taylor is really great at making grilled cheese sandwiches, Danny does a very original but entirely pleasant take or tomato soup, and I'm not allowed to use the kitchen yet because they don't know if I actually know how to do so safely. Which is fair. I'm small and unfamiliar, after all, and they want to be sure I'll be safe. You know, somehow, I think things are going to be okay.

I could only hope.

 

[Obscura]

Lisa:

Lisa Wilbourne was not a very happy girl. Both in general and right at that moment. Her situation sucked, again both in general and right at that moment. She was taking steps to alleviate her many problems, once again both in general and the ones of the moment, but that meant taking risks, again both in general and right at that moment. It was a miracle that she hadn't snapped under the pressure weeks ago. But she had to hold strong. Always strong, always in control. Weakness was a luxury she could ill afford. If she slipped up at the wrong moment, she was dead. It really was as simple as that.

After running away from home (for deeply unpleasant but not immediately relevant reasons), and leaving her birth name behind, she'd made her way through a series of crime-ridden municipalities, where she could easily just be another petty thief, maybe cut down a few people verbally. Brockton Bay should have been just another stop, just one more city where she could ply her trade for a bit and then move on. It hadn't been the best life, but it'd been hers, and no one else could control her. She'd needed that.

Then Coil came into the picture. There weren't enough bad words in the world to describe that man, but she'd certainly tried anyway. Lisa didn't give up easily. Coil had his men grab her off the street (metaphorically and literally), put a gun to her head (also metaphorically and literally), and forced her to work for him. And he'd persistently insisted on calling her Sarah. Or "pet", or the ridiculous name he'd given her public persona: "Tattletale". Ugh. Their relationship had only deteriorated since that day. Which shouldn't even have been possible, given the starting point, but Coil was always up for plumbing the deepest depths of being awful.

Now he was demanding she and her team, the "Undersiders", rob a bank. Now Lisa was a smart girl, and even before the advent of Parahumans, bank robbery had been a high-risk low-reward line of criminality. Banks didn't have all that much physical cash, and what they did have was targeted often enough that your average bank was better guarded and alarmed than just about anywhere that wasn't military, government, or the like. The rise of parahumans had only made things worse: supervillains hit banks often enough that they carried even less cash and were even better guarded, and while superheroes couldn't intervene in every crime, or even a substantial portion of crimes, a bank robbery was obvious and high-profile enough that superheroes were basically guaranteed to show up, especially if the robbers were capes. Which Lisa and her team very obviously were. Yeah, that wasn't great. She'd say she was smarter than that, but the fact that she'd be dead if she didn't play along meant that she wasn't.

To make things worse, the Undersiders weren't hitting just any bank, no. They had to hit Brockton Central, the largest, most famous, and best protected bank in the city. And, as if that wasn't bad enough, it was pretty close to Arcadia, where the Wards attended. Which wouldn't be a problem if they could just hit it well away from school hours. Which they couldn't, because the crime had to take place at High Noon. Maybe Coil had seen too many Westerns. Okay, it wasn't High Noon per se, but during the lunch hour anyway. Hitting during lunch was a problem, since there would be a lot more people (hostages could be useful, but having more than you could control was problematic at best, and taking hostages always drew a lot of heat), and the Wards would be more free to respond than any other part of the school day.

Lisa wondered if Coil was trying to get her arrested, but it was a lot more likely that he was just using her as a distraction. Now she had to convince her teammates to follow along with this incredibly bad idea, because Coil would kill her if she didn't. That wasn't any sort of metaphor, he'd murder her and have her body disposed of in such a way that nobody would ever find it. Or use it to frame somebody. Lisa didn't really care what happened after she was dead, but she wasn't about to let herself get killed. Which meant she couldn't afford to be captured. Since Coil would fatally silence her rather than take the slightest risk of her turning on him. Which she'd do in a second if she didn't think it would get her killed.

Maybe he'd part with a bit of money to induce her oblivious teammates to go through with it. It was an absurdly petty way of getting back at him, but petty was the only way she could get back at him without getting killed for it. Besides, it wasn't like the man wasn't absurdly petty himself. Her power told her he was directly responsible for nearly 40% of the vicious rumors about her on the internet (the rest were people he'd set her against, other enemies of hers who were also petty enough to resort to internet gossip for revenge, or the odd bandwagon jumper), and then there were the constant power games he pretty much always won. Because he cheated, naturally.

Lisa Wilbourn didn't think of herself as a violent person. A thief, yes, but she was smart and important enough that a bit of petty thievery was the least the world owed her. And maybe she cut at a few people verbally to prove her superiority, but she was superior. But actual, visceral, violence repulsed her, and not just because she was afraid of it turning on her. Still, if she ever got the chance to beat Coil to death with one of his own limbs, she was pretty sure she'd take it with great enthusiasm and derring-do. Maybe even creativity. He certainly deserved it.

Now she just needed to figure out how, exactly, she was going to pull that off.

 

[Obscura]

How, exactly, did my powers actually work? Or powers in general, for that matter. Frankly, they didn't make sense. Like, at all. Seriously, pretty much everything I thought I knew about how reality worked went right out the window when parahumans were involved.

On an unrelated note, the word of the day is Defenestration.

D is for Defenestration, and it's good enough for Coil. I'm pretty sure he's not a Brute, or at least not one tough enough to survive getting thrown out a window, at least not if I make sure it's above the 20th story or so.

Just because I've been busy with other stuff doesn't mean I don't still have very strong opinions about Coil. It's been less than a day, after all, and I've had exactly zero catharsis. I haven't had the time to do anything about it, but the guy was making me wonder if I could drive a stake through a human ribcage and into the heart. Probably not, but you never know until you try!

And if at first you don't succeed, try, try, again. I didn't want to break the law, but Coil was going exactly the right way to get a Kill Order, which meant that killing him would probably cease to be illegal very quickly.

Kill Orders are one of the more unusual bits of the American legal system, at least here on Earth Bet. Somehow I don't think they had those back home. The rise of parahumanity basically broke the legal system. Badly. Kill Orders were the harshest of the measures taken to ensure some semblance of order could be maintained.

A Kill Order was the answer to the classic Joker problem. Heroes couldn't be allowed to take the law into their own hands, but some villains were just impossible to stop without resorting to lethal force. Kill Orders were the answer to that problem, similar to how the Birdcage was the answer to the problem of villains who could be caught, but couldn't be held long-term. Putting a Kill Order on someone stripped them of all legal protection against violence, and anyone who could was welcome to try and kill the targeted villain. If they succeeded they'd be rewarded, even if they were themselves villains, because a Kill Order was an automatic truce when you came to collect the bounty.

It wasn't something the PRT took lightly, nor should anyone who could actually lay down a Kill Order. Not that any one person could do so, it took at least three PRT directors and a Judge (one who could try capital crimes) to place one, and that was the bare minimum. Nobody had ever actually laid one down without at least twice as many major authorities giving their approval, and even that was an emergency situation and things were already pretty clear. Nobody was going to object to killing Erinyes. Not after what happened to that preschool. Don't ask.

Seriously, don't.


But yeah, Coil was ticking pretty much all the boxes on the Kill Order checklist.

Targeting a minor: Check

Mastering People: Check

Targeting a PRT affiliated Hero: Check

Torture: Check, though by proxy

Random Cruelty: Check

Murder and/or Attempted Murder: Check, though again by proxy


And all that was just from what he did with Emma and Sophia. And the wholeness of his atrocity was a lot greater than the sum of its parts.

He'd literally Mastered two teenage girls, one of them a Ward, into torturing and attempting to kill a classmate. He'd also infiltrated the PRT (maybe only with Sophia), created a private army, armed the aforementioned private army with Tinkertech, and probably lots of other stuff I didn't know about. I'm not omniscient. Or even anywhere close to omniscient. Patron might be, or at least close enough, if they'd actually read the "story" this supposedly was. Which raised all sorts of fascinating philosophical questions that I had no way of answering, or even properly addressing.

The point was, Coil hadn't just crossed the line, he'd set the line on fire, murdered its spouse, and forced their children into an already overcrowded orphanage, which he then also set on fire, using the line's burning corpse, barring the only exit with yet more corpses that he was responsible for making. None of the orphans survived. When and if the whole sordid story came out, the entire city would be after him like he'd forced himself on a Vestal Virgin. The Rubicon was a hundred miles behind him, and getting farther and farther with each passing hour. Him being declared a wolf's head was only a matter of time. You ask me, it couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

And I mean it. A nicer guy wouldn't have gotten into this situation in the first place, by virtue of being nicer and not forcing Taylor's best friend to torture her for over a year. Which Coil did. It can't be that hard to find stakes, right? Maybe I'd visit a camping store. Brockton Bay had to have at least one. It wasn't like the city was nice enough for people to want to stay here all the time. Maybe I'd get the rest of my shopping done while I was at it. Save a bit of time, you know? I could probably get at least the walking stick and the first aid kit at the same place, and shopping districts were a thing. I'd heard things about a "Boardwalk" and a "Lord's Street Market", although I didn't know where or what they were. Mom, may her soul find peace along its path, didn't exactly engage with the culture of Brockton Bay. What there was of it, anyway.

Brockton Bay wasn't exactly Paris even before the entire regional economy went down the drain.

I missed Corner Brook. And the other place I can't tell you about, but which is still dear to my soul.


"Jacqueline, eat your soup before it gets cold."

"Okay, Taylor."

I ate my soup before it got cold. It was good. The cinnamon was a bit unconventional, but it worked surprisingly well.

 

[Obscura]

After lunch, it was time for…

Something.

Look, I had precisely no experience with the kind of situation I now found myself in. They don't exactly cover "so you've just been sort-of adopted by people you meet literally a few days ago but who are still the closest people in the entire world to you because all the others are dead and you don't have anything to do on a Monday afternoon" in school. Even the superior Canadian variety. Nor is there a "For Dummies" book on the subject, a handy-dandy online tutorial, or a Wikipedia article on the subject. Or a Wikipedia, actually. There was a "Free Encyclopedia" online, but it worked more like an actual encyclopedia: with only qualified researchers being allowed to contribute. That meant it was a lot more accurate than Wikipedia, but it was also a lot smaller. None of that helped me know what to do in this situation.

On the upside, my hosts didn't have any more idea what to do than I did.

Wait a minute. That's actually not an upside, is it? Drat. If they knew what to do I could just follow along. Following along seemed nice right about then. I didn't want to take the lead every time. Leadership took a lot of emotional energy. Besides, I was the youngest, sort of. Big people were supposed to take the lead for me, so I didn't have to. That's why they were big.

Yes, I am experienced enough to know better. No, I am not about to let that stop me. Let me have this.

I may not know where you live, and I may not have any remotely feasible way of finding out, but I will find out if you test me on this. Names, addresses, where you sleep at night, that sort of thing. And you will not like what happens after that.

Or maybe I'm just screaming in the metaphorical wind out of sheer stress. Could you blame me?

Well, when in doubt, see what random chance tells you to do. Even if you don't like what you get, that tells you something about what you do like. That's an article of faith on my part, but it's also solid advice given by many of those unfortunate enough not to have embraced the true faith. Or whatever. It's not like our afterlife theology includes the "everybody who doesn't join us suffers forever for not joining us" thingy, so gathering converts really isn't as much of a priority as it is for some other faiths. Plus interfering with the free will of others is a big no-no. You're safe. On that particular matter, anyway. Mess with my ability to be childish and everything I said before still applies. Don't try it.

And I still had no idea what to do. Besides "sit around awkwardly". That's sort of a given. So I decided to consult Ms. Phoneyface.

I searched: "What to do with new family?"

And, according to the health department of a state I'd never heard of, the answer was:



Pause for dramatic purposes.



Extra pausing in case the first pause was insufficient.



Final pausing period.



And it turns out the answer, according to that health department, was to put on a play. With an actual script and stage and costumes and everything. In multiple acts, even.



Yeah, no.

This was already complicated enough. And I don't think that the Hebert's had the money to spare for that sort of thing. Or the time, since it would take a lot of time. Or any interest in that sort of thing. Or any relevant skills. At least not with the acting or scriptwriting parts. None of us were Mara Sorrows, but I was pretty good, though I did rely more on choosing which parts of my genuine self were exposed and which were hidden away rather than actually faking anything. What I didn't know was how to teach others, especially others with no experience. Or time to learn. Or inclination towards the subject. Or any reason to teach them beyond some random health department saying so. Or with me, their theoretical teacher, not actually caring very much.

Sorry, random health department, but you've been overruled. By me. Because I totally have the authority to do that. Yes. Totally have that authority. This is not the unqualified random teenager you are looking for. Move along.

Moving along, there were probably other things to do on a Monday afternoon. Probably. Maybe I should read more than just the first result.

Playing Monopoly : Bad idea.

Playing Diplomacy: Worse idea.

Playing on the Freeway: Worst idea.

I'm pretty sure WorstLifeAdvice.com wasn't meant to be taken as a serious source of advice, so that explained that, but it wasn't helpful. The fact that it wasn't meant to be helpful didn't help either. Few things are more pettily inconvenient than getting a parody when you desperately need the real thing. I'd have to think of things for myself. It wasn't fun, but needs drive when the devil must. I'm sure that's relevant. Somehow.

Shopping was a nice bonding activity, but I didn't have any money for it. Arcades were also a nice bonding activity, but I also didn't have any money for them. Swimming pools were the same, and I also wouldn't trust any of the ones that remained in post-boat-graveyard Brockton Bay. I'd probably catch something, assuming I still could catch something. My immune system had to be getting a scarily good boost from my aura, assuming my powers didn't make it entirely superfluous. Maybe I even sterilized things of viruses and dangerous bacteria without harming the various necessary microbes of life. I'd have to check that at some point. Waterparks and theme parks were a bit much, and there weren't any nearby in any case.

Wait.

Parks.

Parks are a thing.

Yes.

Definitely a thing.

So I grabbed Taylor and dragged her outside shouting: "C'mon Sis, let's go to the park!"


Impulse control isn't always a good thing.

 

[Obscura]

I don't know whether it was actually liking the idea, desperation for something non-awkward to do, or just humouring me, but Taylor and Danny caved to my idea instantly. If they thought it was weird that I'd just sat there for five minutes before bursting into my childlike scheme they didn't say anything about it. They did look suspiciously amused though.

In hindsight, my plan to drag Taylor to the park and have fun was doomed from the start. Not because Taylor wouldn't play along, or because we couldn't have fun at the park, or even that anyone would try to stop me, but because I had no idea where any nearby parks might be. Stupid reality, ruining all my fun.

Taylor, on the other hand, knew the area. So I was reluctantly forced to stop dragging her, despite how curiously satisfying it was. On a side note, I'm pretty sure she found it fun too, or she wouldn't have let me do it in the first place. And so Taylor took the lead.

Unlike poor, lost, Jacqueline "Doesn't Have A Middle Name" Colere, Taylor Anne Hebert managed to get the three of us (Danny was bemusedly following us) to a park within 5 minutes.

It wasn't a very good park, but it's the thought that counts. Or something like that. My copy of "The Big Book of Cliche Idioms" got left behind when this whole mess started, so I'm not exactly sure on all the details. Sue me. Better yet, sue "Patron". Please sue "Patron". Make them use an actual plan worthy of the name to fix this mess of a world while you're at it.

Ugh.

Now is sadness.










Eventually, we came back from the park. There were highs and lows, but nothing all that extraordinary happened. I can't say that nothing extraordinary happened, because Taylor was controlling an awful lot of bugs and a "Mr. Pinchy", and I was emitting an invisible field of repair, but nothing unusual for us happened. Except Mr. Pinchy, who was apparently awesome. Despite her name, Mr. Pinchy did not pinch us, and was not a Mr. I don't think gender dysphoria happens in arthropods, anyway, and unlike Taylor I knew how to sex a crab. Don't ask.

It doesn't really merit a "Seriously, don't" though. Just mildly embarrassing and not very interesting, not awful and/or horribly traumatizing. It's an important distinction. Trust me on this.

On the off chance you're wondering, I also learned that Taylor isn't all that good at swings, that I'm much better at them, that crabs can go into hiding surprisingly fast, that small children can find them anyway, and that poor maintenance can cause playground equipment to shriek like a banshee if you push it slightly wrong. All from the same incident, incidentally. I'll leave the exact details to your imagination. Danny had wandered off for some of that time, but he was back by the time we were ready to leave. At which point we left. Wonder of wonders.

Walking home (Home!) was a lot like walking to the park, but slightly darker. And more familiar. And less draggy. And by a different route. So not that much like walking to the park at all, except inasmuch they were both walks with the same people of similar length.

I was allowed to try my hand at dinner that night. With a great deal of supervision and "assistance", of course. Still, I managed admirably, if I do say so myself.

And I do.

"Spaghetti sauce" is more complicated than most people think. A great many factors alter both the process and the final result, and tailoring to the exact need takes quite a few different decisions:

What kind of tomatoes are you using? Even if the answer is "canned", there is still a very big difference. Not so much between brands, but between types. Diced tomatoes will create an entirely different result than crushed, and a mix will create something distinct from either. Sliced is similar to diced, but feels different in both stirring and the final result. Etc.

Bacon, sausage, and hamburger meat are the classics, but each will produce an entirely different tinge to the sauce. Large pieces or small pieces? What specific type of bacon, sausage or hamburger? Sausages in particular vary tremendously. Do you even need meat at all? Abstention or substitution can work surprisingly well. I've had good results with apples, but do be cautious to not include too much. Don't even try with "Red Delicious". In sauce, yes, but also with anything else. Just don't.

Spices, spices. So much has been written on the subject that you'd really be better off looking elsewhere, but a few basic decisions are clear. Salt, pepper, garlic, basil, and oregano are the most commonly heard of, for good reason, but I would also recommend considering Thyme, Rosemary and/or MSG. No, I don't care if salt and MSG aren't technically spices, nor about the ridiculous rumours about the latter. Do be judicious in the amount you use it, but only for the same reasons you would be with any spice.

Peppers can supplement things wonderfully, but there is little I can do to assist you in this area. Lack of experience, you see. If you are interested, I must advise you to search elsewhere.

Mushrooms in sauce, on the other hand, are an abomination. Nothing more shall be said on the subject, lest the dark and terrible things in the shadows of reality take notice.

All that, particularly the choice of tomatoes, must compliment the pasta itself. Or the pasta-alternative, such as Gnocchi or even peas in the shell. Whether or not to serve with cheese, and if so which cheese and how it was presented was another matter. Don't be fooled: even cheap "unimpressive" cheeses can be quite pleasant, but that is all I shall say on the matter for the moment.

None of that gets into the intricacies of the actual cooking process, but that's a matter for another time.

Of course, the Heberts didn't get a lot of that, and their selection of ingredients was rather limited. No matter, they would learn in time. On an unrelated note, a young-looking 14 year old being "ridiculously serious" about a subject is apparently "adorable". I have sharp ears.

Dinner wasn't as good as I'd have hoped, but Taylor and Danny were quite impressed. Dinner conversation wasn't as strong as it could have been, but we were all quite frankly out of practice.

After dinner, I learned I was as bad at "Kerplunk" as I was at Jenga. Imagine my surprise. After far more rounds of the marble and complicated plastic device based game than was strictly necessary, it was time for bed.

The (former?) guest room was actually open this time, with the "massive amount of stuff" apparently relocated. Somewhere. I honestly have no idea where they could find the space. I took care of the necessities, removed the brick from my bed, set it on the shelf, changed, and went to bed.

Tomorrow was another day.

 

[Obscura]

Warning: This one starts out a little darker than most of my chapters, though less than some, then suddenly gets way darker than any of my other chapters. If you want, you can read just the only-a-little-bit darker part. There is a very large gap deliberately included between them for that purpose, as well as the only across the page line in the chapter. Or you can skip the chapter entirely, if you really don't want to risk it.



"Li Si:"

The ABB was not exactly one big happy family. It was composed of so many distinct factions, ideologies, cliques, sub-gangs, and enmities that even its members had trouble keeping track of it all sometimes. Scratch that, even its members had trouble keeping track of it all all the time. Nobody knew everything that was going on, since it was just that complicated.

The various Chinese groups resented the Japanese expatriates, especially the Nanjing descendents. The Koreans resented both. Regional groups within all three resented other regional groups within the same nationality, and sometimes regional groups within other nationalities as well. The Mongolians, not that there were many of them in Brockton Bay, had a complicated history with China. Subethnicities with "Asian", "Chinese", "Japanese", "Korean" and many more had various complicated feuds, alliances, agreements, and histories. And all of the above had representatives within the ABB, and those representatives had their own groups, with their own complicated relationships, histories, etc., which only sometimes matched those of their broader groups. All of the above had differing levels of ethics and different rules they followed, and grossly different ideas of what was "acceptable" or "impressive", which meant they were at each other's throats even more often. And that was just the stuff that "Li Si" was involved in: he didn't even try to understand what was going on with the various groups from the rest of Asia. He already had way too much to handle. The only thing that kept the "ABB" even nominally together was fear. Fear of the Empire. Fear of losing the inevitable war if they split apart. And, most of all, fear of Lung.

So it was ironic that Lung was in custody when, for the first time, Li Si saw the various representatives that led the various components of the ABB actually agree on something. It could have been quite nice, since for once he wouldn't have to listen to the constant arguing and talking. Unfortunately, what they were agreeing on was that the "new boss" was a dangerous loose cannon, and they had to get rid of her as fast as possible. Not that Li Si disagreed, but the necessity of it didn't make it any less dangerous.

"Bakuda" was, to be frank, probably even more dangerous than Lung. Nowhere near as invincible, of course, but as a bomb tinker she had a frankly absurd amount of firepower at her disposal. And at least Lung actually needed a reason to kill you. Bakuda would reduce you to your component atoms just to show off, and that wasn't even a hypothetical. She'd already done just that to three different subordinates on three different occasions. Within a week of Lung pressganging her into the ABB. Li Si wasn't sure if the "component atoms" bit was hyperbole, since he wasn't a physicist or a Tinker, but they were just as dead either way. She'd held her entire university hostage over a "B". People said that getting powers could drive a person crazy, and as far as Li Si was concerned, Bakuda was exhibit A.

Already, she was planning to get Lung back. Which wouldn't make her a problem for the ABB's real leaders, at least not in and of itself. They wanted Lung back too. Not because they actually liked their insanely powerful parahuman warlord, but because he was the only one who could keep the ABB (and themselves) safe from the might of the Parahuman Response Team and, worse, the Empire Eighty Eight. Bakuda could only escalate things until their enemies had no choice but to crush them, and under her the only way they wouldn't fall to their enemies would be if she blew them up first. And Bakuda was planning on escalating immensely, ostensibly to free Lung, but mostly to stroke her own massively overinflated ego.

She was building bombs. Which was only to be expected for a bomb tinker, but she was building very powerful bombs in very large quantities. She was planning on building enough to take the entire city hostage, if needed, although that would take her a while. They didn't plan to give her that much time.

Lung would understand.

Various groups were planning out the murder necessary precautionary measure. For once, nobody was arguing about who got the credit, or who would have to pay for it, or whose men would be put at risk, or whether it was really necessary. They all knew exactly how dangerous what they were planning was, and they all were willing to put in their all. Nobody was shirking, nobody was being a glory hog, nobody was refusing to work with some ancestral rival. They were all, for once, acting as a cohesive unit, planning and arranging like they actually liked each other.

And then Bakuda walked in the door.

---

(This is where it gets dark)

Someone must have sold them out.

Bakuda was as bombastic and cruel as always, boasting and gloating even as men cowered. Some tried to fight her, of course. They didn't last long. Bakuda negligently tossed one of her devices at the one closest to her, and suddenly the insides of everybody who tried to fight her were their outsides. None of them survived that. Along with at least six people who hadn't done anything more than cringe in fear. Li Si could see the door guards behind her, or at least what was left of them. It wasn't pretty. Nothing fancy, at least not by Bakuda's standards, but their heads were just gone. Only gore remained. They hadn't made so much as a whisper, so Li Si assumed the lunatic Tinker had managed to make silent bombs. The thought should have been terrifying, but she'd already done worse and she was in the room with him.

There weren't enough swear words in the world, even if Li Si hadn't been too scared to let out so much as a whimper.

And then some men came in, evidently working for the psycho cape. The poorly-done surgical stitching on their foreheads hinted at why. Bakuda was very much not a real surgeon but you didn't really have to be a genius to do surgery, as long as you didn't care about the possibility of killing or permanently damaging the patient.

And the men separated them into ten groups. Bakuda had, in her twisted "mercy", decided to decimate them for the "crime" of trying to stop her madness. Sort of decimate them, anyway, she explained, sounding almost kind. She was killing nine of the ten groups, rather than just one, and she would be doing the deed herself rather than forcing them to do it. She'd still make them watch, though. So each group was separated out to a safe distance, and Bakuda began choosing at random.

Each group would stand there, knowing that to flee was certain death, while if they stayed they might live through it.

The first group died in sourceless agony, hopelessly screaming.

He couldn't bring himself to mourn them too hard. Better them than him, and it improved his own chances.

The second were instantaneously transmuted to glass, never even realizing they'd been chosen.

It improved his own chances.

The third group burned, although their surroundings, even their clothing, remained untouched.

It improved his own chances.

Li Si didn't know what happened to the fourth group, but they and everything around them were still. Impossibly so.

It improved his own chances.

The members of the fifth group found themselves surrounded by ice, doomed to slowly freeze to death.

It improved his own chances.

Sixth group met their end in a normal explosion, albeit one far bigger than the thumb-sized bomb should have produced. At least it was quick.

It improved his own chances.

Seventh group wasn't so lucky. He didn't want to think about them.

It improved his own chances. He had to remember that.

The eighth group was disintegrated. Nothing but dust.

It improved his own chances. He could live through this.

The ninth exploded, then exploded again, then again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, until Li Si lost count.

And then it was over. He'd survived, made it through, if only by sheer luck. He'd lost far too many friends, but for the moment he was just glad to be alive.


And then Bakuda threw another device right at Li Si's feet.


(*!%^%)( !*&)!)(&!)(&^)!(&%)!(!)^_!#&!@)&%)#^&!)(&%@)^!#&!^)_&!#)!^(#&!)!(&^)(!#&%)(*R!&)$#&#%!)%#!(&!)%#_&%!#)(!#^&!#%)(!#&)!$(*&U)&!T)*#&%)!%#(&%!)(!#%U)!#%(*&!#%&)%!#&%#!)(%!#&)!(&!)!%(&%!#)(!%#&%#!)!&%)(U!#)(%


The rest is silence.

 

[Obscura]

I woke up fairly early.

Which, in hindsight, could mean just about anything. Anywhere from the stroke of midnight to about 16 hours after that, depending on who you ask. Though most answers, including mine, would be clustered around the 6 hour period from 4 AM to 10 AM. To be more specific, I woke up in the time period between 6:30 and 7. Since it wasn't a sudden awakening, I really can't get much more specific than that. Deal with it.

Nyeh. (Stuck out tongue)

Anyways, I didn't really have anything to do today. Not anything particularly pressing, at least. Not anything particularly pressing that I had enough money for, I guess I should say. Shopping was fairly pressing, but I had no money. Yah, Boo, Sucks.

I would have money soon enough though. After Thursday, I'd have all the money I could reasonably need. I could be patient.

---

Being patient sucks. How do spiders do it?

I'd have to ask Taylor. It was truly fortuitous that I now lived with the one person on either earth I'd encountered who might actually be able to answer that question. Not like I could just ask a spider.

Or could I? The answer, after mere moments of thought, turned out to be that I could, but it wouldn't accomplish anything because spiders don't understand english. I'd have to rely on Taylor to translate. Or whatever it was that her powers did.

What, you expect me to know? I have no idea how she actually controls bugs, just that she does. Come to think of it, I don't really know how my powers work either. Maybe that was something to do today. The PRT website had a section for booking power-testing appointments, so that was nice. I'd have to ask my new guardian for permission first though. I was determined not to let the habits born of living by myself damage what I had here.

There were already more than enough ways this could go south. No need to add to them. Not yet, anyway. I'd probably have to take more risks eventually. But the keyword in that sentence was "eventually", meaning not now. And it would still be prudent to distinguish between necessary and unnecessary risks, at least as much as I was able to. I was a good deal more sensible than a lot of people, and in particular a lot of parahumans, but I was still only human, and thus I made mistakes. And needed food.


The latter was what dragged me downstairs. Reminds me of something a seasoned old campaigner once told me: "Food, kid, it's the lifeblood of nations. An army marches on its stomach, and so does a city, a town, a village, even a single house. All of this, all you see before you, depends on food. Food is what keeps the engines turning, the antarctic cold from spreading, the french from messing with your spice garden. WAS IT NOT FOOD THAT KEPT NAPOLEON AT BAY?! WAS IT NOT FOOD THAT TURNED ASIDE THE GREAT ZOMBIE VOLCANO THAT DEVOURED THE QUEEN OF BATS?! IS IT NOT FOOD THAT KEEPS THOSE CREEPY LITTLE HORSE THINGS FROM BURSTING INTO OUR REALITY, RAIDING AND REAVING?!" That's when he fell asleep. Otherwise he could have kept going for hours. That's experience talking, and I don't mean his.

It should perhaps be noted that "seasoned" and "wise" are not synonymous, nor does being one guarantee being the other. The man also may not have been at his best at the moment. "Drunk" and "wise" are also not synonymous. You can probably imagine why that's relevant, but the man did give pretty good advice when he was sober. And that first part of the quote makes a surprising amount of sense. Logistics are immensely important, and food is one of the biggest parts of logistics.


More to the point, or at least somewhere a little bit closer to the point, I was hungry, and went downstairs in search of breakfast. Which was already set out. That was convenient. I'd say suspiciously convenient, but I could see Danny cleaning up the cooking process over in the kitchen. That had a lot of explanatory power.

And he was very good at making breakfast, so all my suspicions were assuaged. We humans aren't really as rational as we like to pretend. I'd like to complain about that, but I've been playing on that way too much for that to not be wildly hypocritical. Oh well.


Taylor may or may not have been sleeping in. She was still asleep, but I didn't know when she normally woke up. Winslow started fairly early and I wasn't sure how early she liked to show up, or even how long it normally took her to get ready and actually make the commute. Friday probably wasn't typical.

Taylor or no Taylor (and it was no Taylor), breakfast was a pleasant affair. I ate quite a bit, and I managed to cannily acquire permission to schedule power testing. By asking nicely. "Canny" doesn't necessarily mean overly complicated. If there's a simple and safe way to get what you want, taking it is the canny maneuver. Trust me, overcomplicating things rarely helps. Keep it simple, silly.


Danny had to go to work. He'd taken the day off yesterday, but he couldn't do that too often or the paperwork would conglomerate into a single great mass, which would rapidly achieve sentience and attempt to take over the city. I was about 75% sure he was joking, but there had actually been a brick in my new bed last night.

So I'd have to wait for Taylor to wake up, since I wasn't allowed to go that far away from the house by myself. I booked an appointment for 10AM, and packed two lunches. Not a single time block was taken, so it was safe to say we could stay at it for a while. It wasn't too surprising, since there weren't even a hundred active parahumans in the city, and most of them were criminals. And most of the rest had already tested their powers extensively. So I'd probably be able to test all day if I wanted to. I wasn't sure if I did, but having the option to was nice.

So I covered up the bits of breakfast that needed to be covered up and waited for the Taylor to be upon me. It was inevitable. As long as I didn't do any eviting, anyway.

 

[Obscura]

Webcomics, interestingly, were even stronger on Earth Bet than they'd been back on the other world. There was an entire industry, convoluted and cutthroat, but you really don't want to get into the details of it. It will suffice to say that I had thousands of options, just among the well-established and respected sites. None of them were familiar, seeing as the old Jacqueline hadn't been interested in that sort of thing and Earth Bet and the other world had an entirely different history of web culture, but I quickly found myself engrossed in something.

Engrossed enough that I didn't notice the person I was waiting for come down the stairs, walk over to me, and start reading over my shoulder. It was not until the sisterly teasing started that I realized I had a Taylor on my tail.

I really should work on my situational awareness.


"Should watch your six, sis…"

Taylor was, to be blunt, bad at this. The words were right for what she was trying to achieve, but basically everything else wasn't. She was going for casual teasing, to reinforce a sense of sisterhood and normalcy, although I doubt she would have put it quite that bluntly. She probably didn't even know she was doing it. It was a nice thought.

Unfortunately, she couldn't really pull it off. Managing to sneak up on me, her clothing (pajamas) and her word choice were all good, but she couldn't really take advantage. She was too hesitant, too worried about screwing it up, and she wasn't good enough at hiding it. Her expression, her tone, her body language, all of it showed that she wasn't nearly as confident about what she was doing as her words would imply. But that was hardly her fault, and it had clearly taken a lot of courage for her to try.

So I turned around and hugged her. And said stuff:

"Thanks for trying, Taylor, but you don't need to push past what you're comfortable with. I'm happy with you whatever you want to be"

Things got "sappy" after that. Butt out.

---

Taylor was entirely willing to take me to power testing. We still didn't have to leave until 9:30 or so, so she had plenty of time to eat breakfast and do other stuff. Like changing out of her pajamas into normal outside-clothing. Whatever that means. I really wasn't sure what fashion was like nowadays. In Taylor's case, "normal outside-clothing" meant a dull grey hoodie and similarly unimpressive and unnoticeable pants. Urban camouflage, basically, although it worked by social principles as much as by optical ones. Someone actively looking for every possible enemy wouldn't be fooled. In fact, once you actually noticed her she looked pretty suspicious.

Between that, the fear of people, and being a Winslow student, she was basically ticking off all the irrational and stereotypical "please ignore me, I'm a worthless juvenile delinquent" boxes in peoples' heads, even if none of it was her fault. That was probably a big part of why the staff at Winslow had been so negligent and awful in her case. It's not an excuse, but it's an explanation. Stereotyping and jumping to conclusions are alive and well, and not just in bigotry. Bigotry is merely the densest and most awful expression of a rather unfortunate but very human tendency: the habit of jumping to conclusions based on superficial appearances and categories.

Something both past-me's had known well. The outsider me had had her difficulties with transition, along with some other issues that will remain undisclosed. As for Jacqueline, let me just say there was a reason why she started dressing like the perfect, antiquated, formal, doll-like figure of a teacher's pet. And even more reasons why she kept doing so. A policy I fully intended to carry forward for the foreseeable future. And a policy Taylor could probably benefit from imitating.

Not in every detail, mind you. She wasn't short enough to pull off the "doll-like figure" part, for starters. No, I meant that she could take on a more formal, archaic look. It was just as good for concealing your body while being a lot less suspicious. I wasn't about to try to force Taylor to show off. I could very well guess why she felt like she had to hide. Taylor hadn't said anything about it, but body image was exactly the sort of thing bullies liked to target. And if they'd been petty enough to try that stunt with the juice they were petty enough to strike right at the generic stereotypical weakness of all teenage girls. Granted, it did apply to most teenage girls, but it also applied to most teenage boys, and to most people between the ages of 14 and 30 or so, and a good chunk of even people outside that range. But it was expected in teenage girls, and just about anyone trying to emotionally torture one would hit there. Given how she was hiding, and the way she wasn't hiding in the pictures of her on the walls, it obviously worked.

This quite simply wasn't something that could be fixed overnight, and I would be remiss to try. People just don't work like that. Small steps.

For the moment, small steps meant putting her in something that was less awful, but no less modest. Maybe a big old-fashioned greatcoat. Probably too warm for right now, but it was a start.

"Jacqueline, stop tugging me"

"Taylor, stop dressing like a common hoodlum"

"Common hoodlum?"

"Yeah. It's one thing to hide, but you're hiding in the most suspicious possible way. We're going upstairs, and you're putting on something less hoodlumy."

It was not a question. Taylor wasn't able to argue with me, at least not for very long. Within an hour she was wearing something she would never have thought of, but which concealed her (perfectly ordinary) body and its issues just fine.

I don't know why she had a peacoat, but I wasn't about to complain. And now, unhindered by terrible fashion decisions, we could go and see what bizarre elements Patron had shoved into me. Besides the whole weird situation with being two should-be-different-but-are-not people.

 

[Obscura]

Taylor:

Sometimes Taylor just didn't know why Jacqueline did what she did. This was one of those times. And the fact that it was "those times" after knowing the girl for less than a week was telling. Taylor wouldn't trade her new sister (sort of) for anything (except maybe to get her mother back, whispered a treacherous part of her she didn't like to acknowledge). Nevertheless, she was very confusing.

Some things made perfect sense, mind you. Her stepping in at the juice incident, and her kindness afterwards, had been confusing at the time, but by now it was apparent that Jacqueline was just a nice person. It really was as simple as that.

Going to the PRT had just been the grown-up, sensible decision. It was a bit sad that the 14 year old had to be so grown up, but it definitely made sense. Jacqueline had lost far too much, and that was always going to make an impact. Loss changed you. Taylor knew that all too well, and Jacqueline presumably knew even better. Worse. Whichever. That would certainly explain her breakdown in the PRT lobby, and why she was so scared of losing Taylor. All that Taylor knew was that Jacqueline Colere was a very loving person who'd had too many (far, far too many) people torn away from her. She could figure out that much.


So Jacqueline was great, and she was hurting, which only threw her strange behaviour into stark relief. Like the mime thing. Which was obviously intended to make her (Taylor) feel better, but why that idea in the first place? The jokes didn't really make sense either. Taylor couldn't really say why Jacqueline had been pushing that so hard, even though she (Taylor) had played along.

Now Jacqueline was practically forcing Taylor to dress up, and Taylor had no idea why. At least the girl was respecting her desire to keep her ugly self hidden away. Ugh. And why "hoodlum"? That was a weird word.

It took Taylor a while to work up the courage to ask, and it wasn't about the "hoodlum" comment, but she did ask something. Maybe 40 minutes into Jacqueline pulling out random outfits and checking if they'd work.

"Why do you care so much about what I wear, Jacqy?"

"Jacqy's" response had been uncharacteristically serious, though not in a breakdown kind of way. More of a "this is serious business" sort of way. And it wasn't about the nickname Taylor had unconsciously given her.


"Image is important, Taylor.

"How you see yourself, the impression you carve of yourself, is a core component of who you are. NewU helped me there, but there's far more to the matter than that. We carve ourselves from the harsh, uncaring, stone of reality, and embracing the shape we are in our souls is how we can truly live. And it's how we decide, as best we can, how others see us. Especially the ones who aren't looking all that close.

"And how others see us matters. More than I can really say. It's quite literally a matter of life and death, as well as just about everything else. Being who I am, being what I am, isn't exactly safe, Taylor. Being harmless, being refined, being bright, and, most importantly, being seen to be all those things is a safety mechanism, and the impression you've been giving off to anyone who doesn't take the time to know you isn't exactly one that leads them to care. It's not fair, and it's definitely not right, but you've been making yourself just another meaningless face, and nobody cares about meaningless faces. Not enough to help them. Not enough to save them when the enemy is at the gate. And, in my case, the enemy is always at the gate, or at least close by. You aren't at quite as much risk there, but dressing like just another street rat is a good way to die like just another street rat."


Taylor didn't get a lot of that, but for now she just accepted that Jacqueline was trying to look after her. And that meant dressing her so that people wouldn't dismiss her as a delinquent. She'd think about the rest of it later. And look up this "New-U". Taylor hadn't heard of a cape by that name before, but it definitely sounded like a cape name. Or a charitable organization, or perhaps a public business. Any of those should be easy to find online, if not necessarily get a good read on.

Well if Jacqueline wanted her to look non-delinquential there were some clothes left over from the brief phase where she and Emma had been obsessed with a certain BBC series and decided to mimic all things British. All things English, really, but they hadn't known there was a difference back then. Which included peacoats, which didn't come in child sizes. They'd solemnly agreed to never mention that part of their lives again, a promise Emma had (unwillingly) broken, but Taylor was probably tall enough now to look like a person in her Peacoat, instead of a puppy hiding in a blanket.



"Doesn't that look better, Taylor?"

"It's a fair cop."

"What?"

"Nothing."

The last being just a little too quick. Soon they found other things that went with it all, and Taylor actually looked, not beautiful, but not awful or "hoodlumy" either. She could live with it. She could put what happened at Winslow behind her, even if so much as thinking the name made her angry. She could leave the past behind her. Now it was time to escort Jacqueline to her power testing. There were things she could do there. Maybe do some searching, or engage in power testing of her own.

One short period of preparation later, Taylor stepped out of the house of her father, and into the future.

 

[Obscura]

Skipping over how we got to the PRT building (because it's boring), Taylor and I got to the PRT building. We dropped a code phrase to the receptionist (because just going up to the reception desk and shouting out that you're here for power testing would be just a touch obvious). Anyone who'd been paying attention to PRT operations and was listening in would know it might be a code phrase, but they couldn't be sure, and each phrase was randomly generated for a specific occasion, which made listening for them basically pointless. Unless you already knew them, like the receptionist did. And there were a lot of possible occasions. Basically any appointment might be given a phrase, mostly to obscure the ones that actually needed a code phrase on their own merits. I suspected they had people just come in and give code phrases for no meeting or appointment at all, just to keep people guessing. It's what I would do. Actual Wards and Protectorate members had a different system, so using this to find them was pointless, along with anyone who had reason to keep visiting long term. That system wasn't included in the PRT associate introduction manuals that came preloaded in my phone, so I didn't know how it worked.

Which is why I was mentioning an inflatable baseball bat.

Note to self: make sure Taylor knows about the manuals, and force her to read them if she doesn't want to.

I'd feel bad about that, but it could very well save her life. And I was still a little bit resentful about Lung. I wasn't about to take it out on her unless it was strictly necessary, but I felt this qualified.

Of course she could be entirely eager to read them once she knew, or even already known and done, since she was pretty smart (in most ways) in her own right. Not as smart as me, of course, but then I am the single smartest, most trustworthy individual in the entire multiverse, cruelly brought low by the machinations of a cruel and uncaring mind-screwing, arrow-letter sending maniac, and you should definitely help me in any way you can. Trust me.

On a side note, I'm pretty sure "Patron" isn't reading these, or just doesn't care. Does anybody? Even if somebody is, can they even do anything about this?

Ugh.

I can only hope.

Figuring out my powers would be the job of two labcoated scientists, plus a number of assistants. That number being four. Let's call the scientists Dr. Janice Jones and Dr. Sara Dhar. Because those were their names. In case that wasn't clear. Their assistants were Ms. Lockwood, Ms. Tang, Ms. White, and Ms. White. The last two being unrelated, apparently. They didn't look alike, and one of them was a lot more olive than the other, so it was probably just a coincidence. They did happen. So did weird parahuman nonsense though, and it was hard to tell the difference. I wasn't about to step into it. Whatever "it" was.

No, I didn't somehow fail to notice that everyone involved in my testing was a woman. Maybe it was standard procedure for this sort of thing (at least with female subjects), maybe it was something me-specific. I was a bit more comfortable this way, so their reasons probably had some merit, even if I didn't know what exactly they were.

The plan for today was mostly to figure out what, exactly, my power could fix, and what it considered fixing for certain cases. We knew it could heal me, if slowly, repair bathrooms, fix cell phones, and a few other little things, but we hadn't exactly tested it on a broad variety of things. Oh, and the flute was looking a little bit better. That was what we'd be doing today. With a side effect of testing how long I could maintain my field in active conditions. That might be just as important someday. The most important thing to check was whether I could heal others, and, if so, to prove it. I felt that I could, or rather that my power could, but that wasn't strictly evidence, at least not with something so serious. Parahumans were generally trusted on their instincts about how their powers work, but medicine was too complicated and too sensitive for that. So official healers had to be PRT certified to work on patients. Or possess an equivalent from another country. I didn't. Every known not-absolutely-psychotic healer, even the villainous ones, was certified, and the Endbringer truce extended to that, at least as long as the healer claimed to be getting certified so they could heal at a future attack. Not that "every known ______ healer" meant all that many, since the 3 of us in Brockton Bay meant that the city would soon have one of the largest concentrations of known healers in the entire world.

Meanwhile, New York had more active combat-capable heroes than you could shake a stick at, and at least twice as many villains. No wonder the rise of Parahumanity had led to such a violent society: far more powers were good at tearing things apart (or blasting them to smithereens, or smashing them to bits, etc., etc., etc.) than putting things to right.

Oh, and most Parahumans jumped to violence at the drop of a hat, and that was only usually a hyperbolic metaphor. Accord, over in Boston, had apparently murdered one of his servants for dropping one of his hats, and he wasn't the worst. At least he needed a reason. He had clear (albeit draconian) standards and wouldn't resort to horrible murder unless you violated them or went against him, which was more than could be said of the likes of Hookwolf. Or, heavens forbid, the Slaughterhouse Nine. They were the last thing anyone or anywhere needed, except for an Endbringer. And it said a lot that the monstrously-behaving but otherwise "merely" parahuman group could be mentioned in the same group as the latter.

So I was brought to a room with a very comfortable chair, sat down, and told to activate my aura and various things would be brought in and out of it. By machine at first, in case my aura affected or was affected by the examiners, which would compromise experimental integrity. So I sat back and thought of a better world. Results will be in the next report, since I can get away with just this for right now. Neener-neener.

Stupid nails in my brain.

 

[Obscura]

Power testing went pretty well. It was boring, since I mostly just sat there while my aura did stuff, but we learned a lot. Well, Doctors Dhar and Jones learned a lot, and shared quite a bit of that with me. Not all of it, because there were limits to what they expected a 14 year old with no training in the field to be able to understand, but a lot of it. I was a bright kid, after all.

My power apparently worked mostly by statistical means: all the actual work (as opposed to the theatrics like the ticking, brass skin, clock-face eyes, etc.) was done by little random things that weren't actually impossible, just relatively unlikely under normal circumstances. Normally the second law of thermodynamics means that things get more energetic and less ordered, but within my field it was the reverse. Which meant that my power made things colder, but not by all that much. I couldn't feel it, and neither could they, but it was enough for their high-end thermometers to detect. I do mean really high end thermometers. One of them was actually Tinkertech, courtesy of Armsmaster, and could not only measure temperature more precisely than any commercially-available thermometer (disregarding the black market illegal Tinkertech of Toybox), but it could also measure the heat of dozens of different points at the same time, and fit inside a box I could have completely covered with one hand. If they had let me touch the incredibly expensive Tinkertech, that is.

Neat.


That meant that it worked on literally everything they tried it on, and a few things that just had to be exposed to get the testing items in place, like the drones they used, or the chair I was sitting on. Which started out nice and was now the second-best chair I'd ever encountered.

I still missed my perfect chair. The one I (sort of "I", anyway) was sitting on when the shift happened. This chair was pretty comfortable, but the colour and styling wasn't nearly as nice. That chair was perfect, and this one, nice as it might be, just couldn't live up to its legacy.

Looking back, there's a lot wrong with just about everything about this situation. But I'm sure you knew that already. I certainly haven't been trying to hide it. Frankly, nothing about this leads me to believe that "Patron" is even remotely qualified to possess any of the abilities they evidently do, in fact, possess. That doesn't exactly fill me with confidence about the state of multiversal governance and society, but feel free to prove me and my induced cynicism wrong.


I'm waiting.


Still waiting.


Guess it's not happening. Too bad.


Shoot.


Anyways, we also learned a lot of little stuff, like that my eyes did show the current time, but did not respect daylight savings time. Or time zones. Just the current solar time for Brockton Bay. That threw the good doctors off for a little bit, but apparently you don't get to be a power analyst for the PRT without being good at spotting and coming up with theories about odd little things like that. Someone was bound to spot the thread eventually, and indeed they did.

Similarly, my skin didn't actually change to brass, it just acquired the same optical profile as polished brass, and the phantom cogwheels are just a trick of the light. Fortunately, since one of the Ms. Whites (the tall, pale, one) piloted a drone through several of them. I am honestly not sure if that was an accident or a purposeful, if reckless, test. It really could go either way.


Lunchtime came and went, and my box lunch went to waste as I was given another meal chit/ticket. The main feature of Tuesday lunch at the PRT cafeteria, at least in my eyes, was the roast beef au jus. Or however you say it. Regardless of languages I don't really remember, it was a truly excellent sandwich. One which the PRT, unlike some people, didn't ruin by adding onions. Or any other extra weirdness.

Like an entire clove of raw garlic. Or swedish fish. Or peanut butter. Or bacon. Sadly, none of those examples are hypothetical. Or stories that I can share, given the circumstances. But the PRT's version was uncontaminated by such depravity, and it was good.


After lunch they started testing organic stuff. Living humans would have to wait until they had someone qualified to check over my work on hand, but that wouldn't take as long as it would in other cities. Apparently they'd already contacted Panacea and her sister would fly her over to do an assessment as soon as they were out of school. And there were always people in need of healing, so finding some wouldn't be hard. Between that and the protocols the PRT had in place to maximize the availability of healers, including agreements with every hospital in town except the research hospital in Medhall, getting people would be quick. And easy, at least on my part.

There was probably a lot of paperwork involved, but I didn't have to do any of it. Praise the sun!

Gooood sun. Good sun. Who's a good massive ball of hydrogen and fusion byproducts? Who's a good massive ball of hydrogen and fusion byproducts?

You is! Yes you is! Yes you is!


Ahem.

You heard nothing.


So they started with plants. A sick houseplant, a couple hundred seeds that died from the cold, a couple hundred more seeds that they'd put in an oven and baked for a while, a flower in water, and a shrubbery. Yes, a shrubbery. There didn't appear to be anything wrong with it, so they were probably just testing what happened if there wasn't anything for the aura to fix.

Long story short, it worked just fine. The seeds were apparently returned to vitality after an hour and a half's worth of exposure, and the houseplant slowly got better, although it wasn't entirely healthy by the time they decided to move on to the next test. They just left it there. The shrubbery remained a shrubbery.

The next test was with small animals. Lab mice, to be specific. The distinction between lab mice and lab rats is apparently important, although I have no idea why. Animal testing laws were apparently fairly open when it comes to parahumans, since most of the mice had been wounded, maimed, poisoned, etc. to see if my aura could help them. The answer was a resounding "kinda?"

Resounding and clear are not synonymous.


My power, it seemed, didn't do anything for missing parts, although it did clear over cuts admirably. There wasn't even any scarring. Well, sort of. The wounds scarred over, but the scars themselves faded to nothing eventually. Wounds went from "life-threatening" to not bleeding relatively quickly, but healing all the way took longer, and for the scars to disappear took longer than the entire healing process, which was already pretty long, and the larger the wound was the longer it took. Though there was apparently zero infection, although they'd be checking that more thoroughly afterwards.

The poisoned mice were all fine as long as they were in the aura, but what happened after they left differed. My aura apparently didn't remove some poisons, or rather did so at such a slow pace that less than a tenth of a tenth of the dose was removed in the entire period of testing. Specifically the ones that were hard to remove were those with really simple molecular structures. Various venoms were broken down easily, but stuff like mercury or arsenic would not disappear so easily. I could treat the symptoms of mercury poisoning, but couldn't remove most of the actual mercury, so it'd start poisoning them again as soon as they were out of the aura. That was sad, but it boded well for my ability to treat infections. One mouse had a tumour, and that was still there, so I don't know about cancer.

I really shouldn't be too greedy about powers, but I was pretty disappointed that I didn't get magical anti-tumour abilities. Then the lab phone rang, was answered, and apparently Panacea would be there in 5 minutes, and the experimental patients were already set up. Time to get ready.

There is no possible way this could go wrong.

Keep telling yourself that, me.

Keep telling yourself that.

 

[Obscura]

Panacea didn't look like much at a first glance, but looks can be deceiving. I should know, given how much effort I put into making sure my appearance gives the right impression. Looks are especially deceiving in the parahuman world, where what power somebody gets is not at all based on their physical appearance, and only rarely changes their appearance to match it, at least when not in active use. Case 53s aside. They really operate on an entirely different set of rules, what with the inhuman appearance, memory loss, and weird markings. I have no idea what's up with that, nobody else does either (including the 53s themselves), and nobody's made any progress in finding out.

Anyway, lots of capes don't look like you'd expect based on their powersets. Not that you'd know in most cases, since who capes were outside of their deliberately designed costumes tends to be carefully hidden.


Panacea looked like a teenage girl. Which she was, but she was also the most powerful and versatile healer on the planet. Only brains, death, and insufficient biomass to work with were outside of her power, literally anything else could be fixed by her hand. Literally, since she was a skin-contact based Striker. "Healing hands" has never been so apt.

Making the right impression here was important. Not only was she the one assessing me, she was probably the best person available to teach me about the life of a parahuman healer. Seeing as she was the only other parahuman healer within a hundred miles who wasn't a nazi. Personally, I'd rather work with Panacea. Can you blame me?

To that end, several factors combined. Firstly, my mode of dress. It was exactly the same outfit I'd been wearing every day since the merger, but it was clean, classy, and distinctly old-fashioned. And it would be new to Panacea. Thanks to the cleaning power of my aura, it didn't even stink. I could have just washed it every night, as the old Jacqueline had, but this was a lot easier. And a lot less wrinkle-prone. It was hardly the height of fashion, but it would give off a nicely unthreatening and adorable impression.

Secondly was my own appearance. Freaking adorable. That was handled.

Thirdly was my advocates and apparent allies. The PRT was about as good as I could reasonably get, so that's that.

Fourthly, finally, and probably most importantly, would be my own demeanour. I'd have to decide that. I didn't know that much about Panacea as a person, but I did know she was incredibly famous and valuable, and that meant a lot of fawning, admiration, etc. went her way. To grossly oversimplify, there were two basic responses to that.

The first was to revel in it. She didn't do any such thing openly, but it could just be concealed. If that was the case, then the best response would be to fawn over her like everybody else.

The second was to be sick, tired, and/or resentful of it. That was always a possibility, especially since she hadn't sought fame out, but rather had it given to her because of her power. Resentment would be a perfectly reasonable response to that. And she'd hardly be the first valuable parahuman to dislike the pressure their power put on them. If that was the case, the best response would be direct and businesslike, ignoring her fame. Fawning would only create exactly the wrong sort of feelings. Similarly, taking the direct and businesslike approach would only make things worse if she was the reveling type.

The catch, of course, was that I had no way of knowing which scenario was the case. So I couldn't very well take either potentially optimal route. As an aside, that's actually a very common problem in strategy. Knowing what to do in every scenario only helps if you know which scenario you're facing, so guessing and outguessing is a very large part of the game. And my biggest weakpoint, unfortunately.

So I adopted a "Maximin" approach, one that had the best results for its worst outcome. Read up on game theory sometime. It's pretty interesting. In this case, my approach was to play to my strengths: adorablity and precociousness.

I did have other strengths, such as cooking and tactical planning, but the former wasn't really applicable here (because I didn't have time or an excuse to be cooking, not because it was inapplicable to the subject of making first impressions in general) and incorporating being good at planning into a plan was more than a bit complicated. And probably also not really applicable here.

So cute and pleasantly bright and cheery it was. There are worse acts.

It was also pretty close to my natural personality. I just needed to suppress the bitterness, overwhelming grief and the all-consuming pain. Plus most of the snarkiness. And some of the hugginess. And my constant need to be reassured that I wasn't alone. Maybe some other stuff too. Okay, that was a lot of things to suppress, but it wasn't like I wasn't used to it. The weird, at least, could stay.

Thank goodness.

I honestly don't know what I'd do without it at this point. Probably be serious until I cracked like an egg dropped from orbit and needed to be institutionalized for my own safety. Contrary to popular opinion, most mentally ill people, even the serious cases, aren't a danger to others. Indeed, the "sane" people commit far more crimes, especially violent ones, against the seriously mentally ill than the reverse, and the same group commits far fewer crimes per capita.

Generally, people are committed to a mental hospital because they aren't safe on the outside. It's far more to protect them from the outside world than protecting the outside world from them. Or at least it should be, ignorance was a very real problem. Especially on Earth-Bet, because Parahumans were a strong exception to the rule about the mentally ill not being dangerous to others, seeing as they had powers that couldn't be taken away and no real way of controlling them. The inherent Parahuman bloodthirstiness didn't go away in mentally ill capes, either. So that wasn't great.

But for the moment, it was time to deal with Panacea, and make an inroad into the medical community. I put on my best big bright smile, and walked out with the good doctors and their assistants.

What could possibly go wrong?

 

[Obscura]

Vicky:

Vicky (she refused to be called Victoria by anyone, except when her mother was mad enough) (Or by Amy when she was mad enough) (Or Dean, who was very formal)(Or by her teachers, who she didn't have the authority to overrule, on pain of her mother calling her Victoria) (Come to think of it, quite a few people could call her Victoria, but this narrative is not about to risk it) was not stupid. Like many Brutes, and indeed many pretty young women (especially blond ones for some reason), people often assumed she was, but that assumption had little grounding in reality. Although her recklessness and poor impulse control didn't really help her avoid conveying the impression of stupidity, come to think of it. But she was a rather intelligent young woman, and she had done a lot of studying on the topic of her chosen profession. That being superheroics.

And an important part of superheroics, albeit one that was frequently understressed, was psychology, particularly parahuman psychology. Understanding the people you were dealing with, allies and enemies alike, was vital to not screwing something up. She did have a bit of trouble actually applying that knowledge, especially when her personal feelings got involved, but she knew more than enough to know that the "I'm so bright and cheery" act the apparent new healer was putting on was an act. Just like how the way she wasn't fawning over Vicky had to be an act. The kid was well within aura range, but she was clearly suppressing her feelings.

Not that Vicky could really blame the kid. New triggers did all sorts of weird stuff. It came with the massive amount of trauma they'd just went through. But she did tip off her sister. Parahumans tended to have all sorts of problems, and the wrong stressor could easily cause things to go very wrong.

Vicky was very glad that she didn't have to worry about that with her family. That would get weird quickly. Happily, she had no such worries, since there were no such issues in her family.


Taylor:

She'd meant to do power testing, she really had. Then she'd stumbled across a whole world of concepts, ways of being, and types of discriminiation that she'd never considered before because she hadn't even been aware the discriminated-against group existed, let alone that her new sister was one of them. It had been an interesting morning.

NewU's website was very informative. And extremely well designed. Apparently the man (and he was entirely firm that he was a man, regardless of what his birth certificate had to say about the matter. Taylor was willing to take his word about it.) was not only highly dedicated to the cause of trans rights and welfare, he was also a pretty powerful Tinker with a lot of money.

Being a Tinker didn't necessarily make you qualified to design a website, but having a lot of money did mean you could hire somebody to do it for you. And it seemed that he'd chosen wisely, even if Taylor had never heard of the firm listed as the designers. Frankly, that was the least of the new ideas she was encountering, so she didn't pay it much mind. Taylor had much bigger things to consider, especially since she'd figured it out rather than Jacqueline telling her willingly. Even if the girl was really bad at secrets, stumbling across them was still awkward, and this was one that could apparently get her (Jacqueline, not Taylor) killed, so it was a sensitive subject.

So Taylor decided to get as much information and understanding as she could before she said anything to anybody. Her sabotaged grades might not show it, but studying was something Taylor was very good at. She was going to play to her strengths on this, and not risk hurting Jacqueline with insufficient information.

She definitely wasn't just scared of frightening off one of the few people she felt like she could trust, no. Definitely not. That would be silly.

No. She was just gathering information to make the best possible decision, that was all.

Definitely.


Danny:

Danny, at the moment, was doing his best to deal with the ridiculous amount of work that had piled up in his absence. He'd only missed two and a half business days, but that was more than he could really afford to miss. The Association was barely on its feet, and every little bit of employment he could scrape up counted. He hated leaving the girls at home without him, but had to, and Taylor could take care of at least the day-to-day stuff. He was determined not to let her, or Jacqueline for that matter, be forced to bear their problems alone, and he wouldn't, but he couldn't leave the DWA to die either, and he needed his paycheck. The director had, surprisingly, offered him a supplement for Jacqueline, and he'd reluctantly accepted, but it wouldn't cover all, or even most, of the household's expenses. It was designed to pay for one child after all, and that was about what it would do. It had hurt a bit to accept even that much. He didn't like charity, at least not when it was aimed at him. The irony that he'd dedicated his life to helping out his boys did not escape him, but that was at least nominally at a job they paid him for, even if he could get a lot wealthier in a different job.



Sophia:

Okay, she could handle this. Definitely. She was just going to be introduced to the Wards, a bunch of professional superheroes who were all much cooler and more experienced than her. Oh, and they thought they'd known her, but had actually known Shadow Stalker. Who was not exactly nice, so they'd expect Sophia to not be nice either. And both those statements were gross understatements. Shadow Stalker was just awful.


Okay, maybe she couldn't handle this.

Unfortunately, not doing it wasn't really an option. Not if she wanted to actually use her powers for good. She definitely couldn't survive going independent, even if it wouldn't draw way too much attention. So she'd have to work this out. Somehow. At least she wouldn't be alone. Miss Militia was in there right now explaining things, at least to the extent of "your teammate was Mastered the entire time you knew her and isn't actually a horrible excuse for a human being." Hopefully with a "Please be nice to her, she's very confused and absolutely should not be held responsible for anything Shadow Stalker did". And a "Do not call her by the name of her impostor." That was important.

If someone called her by that name she'd fall apart in seconds. And that would be bad. They'd see, and they'd think she was weird, and they'd reject her, and she wouldn't be able to stay here where it was safe, and she'd be thrown out on the streets and have to...

Breathe. That's what Miss Militia told her to do, and Sophia certainly wasn't about to go against the woman. Breathe.

In.

Out.

In.

Out.

In.

Calm.

She could handle this. Definitely.

Definitely.

Definitely?


Emily:

The massive amount of paperwork and decisions she just had to make slowed down for nothing, not even horrible atrocities. In fact, horrible atrocities generally meant a lot more paperwork and way too many decisions. But Emily Piggot didn't trust anybody else to do the job, so she stuck at it.

But it was good to hear that the new Sophia Hess was recovering as well as could be expected. And that she was apparently a lot more controllable than the old one. That was for the better, as was "Adjuvant" coming in for power testing. The name was actually pretty good too, although Emily didn't really like the whole cape name system. It'd do. Frankly, Emily needed all the good news she could get. The Coil situation wasn't getting any better, and that was on top of all the usual awfulness.


Panacea:

Amy honestly wasn't all that invested in the whole situation. A new healer was neat, but it wouldn't change her workload all that much. They'd just bring in more people. The bodies never stopped. She was more interested in Vicky. She was so close, so tempting, so untouchable and majestic, and Amy wanted her so much, even though she knew it was wrong.

And then she got close to the cute little clock-girl, with the brass skin and the clockface-eyes and the ticking and the weird gears around her, and she was distracted. Vicky was, for once, not on her mind. Fore or back. The task at hand was, and Vicky wasn't. She wouldn't realize that for some time.

It wouldn't be until she got home that she realized that Vicky was, for once, just Vicky. Reckless, aggravating, stupid Vicky. It didn't last very long, but she did notice. She wondered what it meant.

That wouldn't be for a while, though. As she went into the PRT building, she was thinking only about the strange girl's power. Just like she was supposed to be.

 

[Obscura]

Annoyingly, not that I'd cop to that to anybody in this universe, Panacea didn't even seem to notice me as a person. Or basically anyone else, for that matter. Except her sister, but family does tend to be easier to empathize with. Knowing them for years, living in the same house, expectations of mutual support and all that. Siblings did that. I assume.

But she didn't really engage with anyone else on a human level. At all. Even when I was being (pretending to be) ridiculously cheerful. Nothing. Zip. Nada. Naught. Zilch. Nihility. Crumb-Diddly. Zero. 0. Squat. Other funny-sounding synonyms for no response.

What?

I needed to do something with all the emotional energy that was bouncing right off the world's most powerful healer. Engaging conversation certainly wasn't on the table. And I wasn't about to be rude about it.

But yeah, either she was about as empathetic as a particularly unempathetic tree or she had way too much on her mind. Which was just great. Everything was fine.

It wasn't like I already had way too many problems to actually deal with all of them. Not at all.



Except for the part where I totally did.

Naturally, I had no idea how to deal with this. Ugh.

Another thing to note down and try to figure out later. For now, I'd bide my time and gather more information.

I think it's best if I move on to happier things, like the 5-year girl who'd been hit on the head by an E88 mugger and was left slowly dying because of the resultant brain damage.

---

Okay, I will admit that that part isn't so happy, but the part where my aura successfully reversed the damage is. Take that. They stuck me in a room full of patients for a few hours, my aura stretching across the entire room (and quite a bit of the surrounding hallways, closets, etc.), and things turned out quite nicely. That little girl was okay (and very huggy, as were her parents). Five stroke patients, two car accident victims, several other people with severe head injuries, three PRT troopers and a guy who was suffering from serious drug withdrawal were all cured. Mostly, anyways. The guy said he wasn't craving another dose, but I have my doubts.

But people were better, and that was what was important.

That little girl (I should probably learn her name at some point, huh?) would live to adulthood. Probably live to adulthood, anyway, this was Earth Bet with all the awfulness that implied. The PRT troopers would go on to serve and protect, to stand against the rising tide of superpower-related violence and crime, and presumably do whatever it was they did when they weren't on the clock. Probably having happy families that would miss them and all that jazz. I am not really all that familiar with jazz, but I pretty much envy them for their hypothetical all that jazz anyway. I should probably look into whether Ward benefits include therapy. And maybe whether doctor-patient confidentiality covers concealing the fact that the patient is actually a shoved together patchwork mess from a unknown, but presumably extremely powerful, being forcibly merging two previously distinct people. Not that I expect to find a lot of precedent on the matter.

The car accident victims would be spared months of slow, agonizing, recovery. And they'd be able to go back to work again right away, which was very important. They shouldn't have to go to work right away, but listening to their conversation it was very important that they did, since they had no savings and no other source of income. And they lived in an apartment, which meant rent. If they'd had to heal the normal way, they would have been homeless pretty soon, not to mention unable to feed themselves. Hospital bills would not have helped in the slightest. And the streets of Brockton Bay were not kind, especially not to those nursing injuries. Odds were they'd be dead within six months. Whether or not someone dragged (or drugged) them into a gang (the Merchants did that a lot, especially with the homeless), poor conditions and their existing damage would lead into a downward spiral, culminating in fading out, broken and alone, in a worn and battered warehouse, both alike in being slowly destroyed by the neglect of a harsh and uncaring reality.

Okay, that last part is pure speculation on my part, but it wasn't all that unlikely. Warehouses like that were quite common in Brockton Bay, especially around the docks, most of them were poorly secured at best, and they were one of the most common places to seek shelter. If the old Jacqueline Colere hadn't decided living in her school was the way to go, that was probably where she would have ended up. She probably wouldn't have survived that. She was young and healthy, but she was also naive and weak, unable to defend herself against the many predators that harassed and sometimes devoured the homeless of Brockton Bay.

Money. It all comes down to money. Power, really, but money is one of the most direct and universally applicable forms of power. But there wasn't much I could do about it now. Bite my tongue, bide my time.

For now, the people I'd healed today would have to be enough.

Panacea checked my work with admirable (eerie) professionalism. She could have done quite a lot of it quite a bit faster, but this was designed to check my abilities. There were exactly zero complications or mistakes, which was a relief. Looks like it was safe to let my aura go on autopilot when it came to fixing things, which was very good since I didn't even know if I could take it off autopilot. A lot of parahumans couldn't exert fine control over what their powers did, and Patron did not exactly strike me as being great with those sort of fiddly bits. They hadn't even considered that I might not be honoured and appreciative of their "agreement", so I wasn't all that confident in their ability to design a user interface for whatever was behind my aura.

Also, my aura did do something against cancer after all: it was, technically speaking, a total cure for it. Any cell exposed to my aura for long enough, according to Panacea, stopped being cancerous. It just didn't do anything about the tumours and misshapen growths that had already formed. Which was incredible, really, since the growths that already existed weren't going to kill you, and if they didn't get any worse and no new ones would form the problem was generally easily handled by modern medicine. Compared to tumours that were still growing and would regrow if you missed even the tiniest bit, anyway. It just didn't look all that impressive next to someone who could completely cure cancer on a whim, existing tumours and all. But just about every healer on the planet paled next to Panacea. Except maybe Eidolon, and he was the most powerful of the Protectorate by a very wide margin. Nobody knew exactly how his power worked, unless they were cleared for the specifics by the PRT, but it seemed like he just got whatever three powers he wanted.

My aura, despite its source, had done well today. And holding on to my grudge against "Patron", regardless of how justified it was, wasn't helping. Time to go home, rest, and hopefully figure out something about what I should be doing.

What, exactly, was something I'd have to figure out.

 

[Obscura]

Wednesday started out, to be blunt, not very interesting. At least not to read about. I mean, I liked it, but I wouldn't be all that keen to read about it from an outside perspective. Let's be honest here, do you really want to read five pages about how I spent most of the morning sleeping? I can do it if you really want, but really it might be best to just skip right to the kidnapping.


So there I was, minding Taylor's own business, when a guy with a pistol walks up to me and tells me I'm going with him or else.

---

Apparently I need a bit more context than that. Stupid conscience. If it is my conscience and not something Patron programmed into the new me. I really don't have any way of knowing whether the jerkiest jerk that ever jerked put in some more subtle stuff along with the brute force mind whammies. It doesn't really seem to fit with what I know about them, but maybe that's just what they want me to think. The rub is that I just have no way of doing anything about it, aside from hoping someone reads these reports and takes umbrage with the grossly unethical behaviour. Hint hint.


But yeah, I should probably explain.

Let me start at an arbitrary point in time that, since I picked it out, is now the beginning.

Sleeping in was pretty nice. I still woke up really early, that's not a habit that breaks that quickly, but I just went back to sleep. That's all I'm saying on the subject.

Breakfast wasn't Danny-made, but it was still pretty good. Taylor wasn't as good at it as Danny was, but she was better than I was. Her take on the concept was also a lot healthier than Danny's. I don't know what that says about them. Maybe Taylor's mom was the one with the health concerns. And, regardless of the veracity of that theory, I should probably learn her name. It wasn't really my fault that I didn't know anything about her, since both of my hosts seemed to avoid mentioning her, but it wasn't ideal.

I'm pretty sure she's dead, and that neither of them are really over it. Either that or she ran away leaving behind a jilted husband and an abandoned daughter, sparking a great deal of resentment. Or they just never really knew each other.

I should probably just look in the public record, instead of possibly dragging up old demons by asking. At least that way I'd know what I was facing before I had to face it. I couldn't leave that kind of psychic wound unaddressed in the people I'd somehow become family with. Yes, I'm admitting it happened. Yes, what I said about it being very risky was still entirely true. It happened anyway. I am honestly not entirely sure when it happened, but it did. I'd just have to deal with the consequences.

Of course it was entirely possible that I'd be destroyed by those consequences, but I couldn't very well escape the possibility now, except by working on the relationship like a reasonable and sensible person. And they were hardly the only thing that could destroy me, even discounting the universal risks of the human condition. Most of the other risks were more physical than emotional though.

On the plus side, it turns out that the standard Wards package does include therapy, although only the annual psych evaluation is mandatory. Something to take advantage of. I, and probably every single parahuman on the planet, definitely needed it.

I also asked Taylor about how spiders managed to be so patient. The answer is apparently that they aren't wired to need constant stimulation, so they don't get bored. They aren't even capable of boredom. Kinda obvious in hindsight.

Not very helpful, but obvious.


But yeah, after that Taylor and I went to the Lord's Street market to update her looks. Both in and out of costume, though in the former case this trip was more for getting ideas and scouting out places for later than actually buying stuff. Taylor was going because yesterday had opened her eyes to the possibilities (according to her) and I was going because she had all the fashion sense of a brutalist architect. Personally, I suspected she was doing this for sisterly bonding purposes. Not that I minded, mind you. Some non-emergency-based familiarity was exactly what we needed. That and hugs. Hugs are good.


"Awww" purred the Taylor, as she was hugged. Then we went to the market.

There's a song about that at the tip of my tongue, but I can't remember how it goes. Or what it's called, and I'm not sure I ever knew where it came from. Eh, it's not important.

The market was pretty good. A lot of the stalls were overpriced or just plain bad, but there was a lot of valuable ore amidst the dross. Or however mining works. I am not an expert on the subject. Taylor was willing to buy some things for me though, which was nice. I acquired a nice pink scarf, some cheap earplugs, and a new (to me) skirt. All of which were very nice. Taylor got several things, mostly clothes, which looked pretty alright. Mostly. They weren't as bad as her Winslow outfits, anyway. That was the important thing. That and the kidnapping.

So I was looking over a selection of coats when it happened. Taylor's peacoat was pretty great, but it would soon be too hot to wear. My situational awareness apparently wasn't great, so the guy managed to get right behind me pretty well. Then shoved the pistol in my back and told me I'm going with him or else. Didn't see what he looked like, seeing as he was behind me and I wasn't about to risk looking, but the voice was pretty distinctly masculine. Yes, I realize that assumption was a bit hypocritical, but the guy was taking me hostage so I wasn't exactly inclined to be generous.

But I was pretty sure my power wouldn't help me if I got shot, at least not if they unloaded a clip into me, so I went along with what I was told to do. Which was to hand over my phone, then slowly and inconspicuously leave the market by the nearest exit. The grab was swift and mostly successful, but I knew one thing that my captor didn't. There, sitting patiently on my back since before Taylor and I left the house, was a wasp. Plus there were several other wasps on me, in different locations, as a backup. One of whom was actually pretty nice and pettable. And I'm pretty sure there were quite a few other bugs keeping an eye on me. Point was, a girl whose sister controls bugs is never really alone. Unless she demands privacy, in which case her sister had better deliver it. I wasn't about to do that in the middle of a kidnapping. I may be fairly eccentric, and I may be writing a letter to a horrible interdimensional overbeing of some sort because the probably-not-literal nails in my head demand it, but I'm not stupid.

 

[Obscura]

Taylor:

Taylor had been keeping a careful metaphorical eye on her sister, even as her own literal eyes were looking over clothes. The girl, through no fault of her own, seemed to attract trouble like vinegar attracted flies. (Contrary to the popular expression, flies actually preferred vinegar to honey. The expression was only valid in its metaphor, not as a literal "fact".) Ever since they'd met, Jacqueline had stumbled into various things.

As opposed to Taylor's deliberately getting into various things. Maybe it was hypocritical, but Taylor wasn't about to leave Jacqueline unsupervised if she could help it.

So Taylor had put some flies to watch the smaller girl ever since they'd started living in the same house, at least while Jacqueline was in range. Plus some other bugs. Except when she was in her room, or sleeping, or in the bathroom or places like that. Jacqueline suggesting Taylor put some wasps on her made things easier, even if the wasps were just to reassure the smaller girl, since Taylor actually had much smaller, less conspicuous bugs to play with. Having permission for her spying made it feel less like, well, spying. Paying attention to her shopping and paying that kind of attention to a young child would be difficult for most people, but Taylor was very good at multitasking, if not at picking out clothes.

Because of that, when Jacqueline started quietly leaving the market, Taylor's proprioception tipped her off. And the man behind her sister was following awfully closely, and that was a gun. "GUN!" her mind screamed at her, fortunately not reaching her mouth. Much. Nothing audible, anyway. Screaming that in a public market would probably cause a panic. Somebody might get hurt. Somebody innocent, that was, somebody who wasn't kidnapping Jacqueline. The one who was, on the other hand


[Bunnies. Lots of Happy, Playful Bunnies. No swear words whatsoever. Definitely.]


So now Taylor was dealing with a kidnapping. Her first instinct was to just bury the guy in bugs, but that would scare people. Probably including the kidnapper, and then he might shoot by reflex, and that couldn't be allowed to happen. So she decided to borrow one of Jacqueline's oh-so-successful stratagems, and wait.

It wasn't terribly glamorous or superheroic, but lives, especially Jacqueline's life, were more important than that. She would still swarm the guy under the instant her sister was safe and nobody could see it though. Some things you just couldn't let go.

Calling the (super) cops and not killing the guy would have to be heroic enough.




Regent:

"Alec", which was not his real name, was bored. Not just at the moment, but in general. It was his default state of being, really. Thanks to his "upbringing", which really didn't deserve the name, boredom was one of the very few emotions he could properly feel. So when he spotted some random girl petting a wasp, he decided to investigate. He didn't really have anything better to do.

The wasp-petting girl getting kidnapped was pretty interesting, though he felt he was missing a lot of context. Ah, well. He'd just keep watching. Maybe even intervene if he felt like it. Being the hero for once could be funny.

He'd totally rub that in Lisa's face. The sublime amusement of her being caught flat-footed for once was another of the feelings he could genuinely possess, and he treasured it.




Coil:

This was a little sooner than he'd been expecting, but he could work with it. When he'd had his agent leak Colere's info to the Merchants, he'd expected it would probably take a while for the information to reach one of the relatively forward-thinking members, but he'd gotten lucky and gotten one of the more active degenerates. The team he had surveilling the girl had caught the whole thing on video. He couldn't see the weapon, if there was one, but he could see enough.

The man was bold, but not very bright. Still, his plan to kidnap the girl and forcibly addict her to drugs probably would have worked on a normal teenager. Assuming Coil was willing to let him do it. He wasn't morally opposed to it, but it might have been inconvenient.

Jacqueline Colere, on the other hand, was a parahuman, and even if the Merchant didn't realize that every parahuman was dangerous, Coil did. Not that he would be upset if the Merchant was captured, or even if he died horribly.

He was actively hoping that the idiot's kidnapping attempt would force the girl to show her hand, but with Vespiary so close it wasn't likely. More likely it would just force more PRT attention on them, which was all for the good, since it would make the robbery tomorrow into an even better distraction for the PRT. And he had a plan to get Vespiary out of the way of the robbery already under way.

And if the Merchants got taken out in retaliation for this, he'd probably be able to swoop in and grab their few valuable assets. He had more than enough forces to do so now, but it would draw too much PRT attention. The Merchants were definitely the weakest of the three big gangs, by a wide margin, but they had a reputation big enough that easily overtaking them would draw a lot of attention.

He didn't believe for a moment that the kidnapping/recruitment attempt might succeed.

He wasn't stupid.

Jacqueline Colere was far too dangerous for that to work.




Regent:

Eh, what the [h-e-double hockey sticks]. The kidnapper-kidnapee duo entered a deserted building (there were plenty of those in the fair city of Brockton Bay), and Alec followed at a respectably non-dangerous distance. Brockton Bay was never entirely safe, and nowhere at all was entirely safe for him, but it was an acceptable level of danger. If he worried about and/or responded to everything that could endanger him he'd never get any peace.

When the guy pulled out a greasy syringe, that was enough to draw what passed for Alec's ire. He knew what the Merchants did to young girls, and it was just similar enough to what dear old dad did to irritate him. A bit. Not very much, but enough for him to decide to intervene. In the laziest, safest, possible way. And so, with a lazy wave of a parahuman hand, the man found his gun hand pointing in the wrong direction.

Then, shockingly quickly, the man was covered in more insects than Alec was willing to shake a stick at. Or even be around, at least when they were acting in concert. And so, job well done, the bold (not actually bold), courageous (not actually courageous) and very definitely heroic (very definitely not actually heroic) young (actually young) parahuman returned home (to his "team's" base, which wasn't actually all that much like a home, but which was still probably the place the most like an actual home he'd ever lived in.)

He was definitely going to rub this in Lisa's face. There was no way she could see that coming, and the look on her face would be funny.

That obviously insect-controlling kid was pretty scary though. That was one power he'd rather not have to fight against. He made careful note of the girl's features.

 

[Obscura]

Warning: If you are entomophobiac (scared of bugs), this chapter may be disturbing. Honestly, this entire fandom is probably disturbing to entomophobes, but this chapter in particular might be bad. Not nearly as bad as some of the stuff in canon though, I think.


Have you ever seen a cockroach force its way up a man's nostril? I have. It is not a pretty sight. You think of cockroaches as creeping, scuttling creatures on the ground, but they have wings for a reason. I didn't know the little bugs could fly before I saw them doing so, but apparently they can do that. And some of them are small enough to fit inside a nostril, or at least a stretched-out nostril on an already large nose. I am usually quite fond of learning, but that was one piece of information I could have done without.

Similarly, I did not wish to dwell on such facts as cloth being a poor barrier to a determined mass of insects, who could just slip past it with ease, spiders being able to withstand being smashed against a wall by moving to where the holes in it were, or the human body being able to remain standing while literally covered head to toe in insects.


Seriously, I couldn't even see the guy. Except for his nose, with its one non-filled-with-cockroach nostril, which was left uncovered. Presumably so he could breathe. And he was breathing, thank the ways.

I really didn't want to have to deal with murder charges. For me or for Taylor. No reasonable court of law would convict me, but Taylor was another story, and there were lots of unreasonable courts in the land, especially the prejudiced ones, which was most of them. And even if we weren't found guilty it would still take months of hard work and immense stress.

All of that was purely hypothetical, of course. I very definitely didn't think the guy was dead for even a moment. Nope. Didn't even consider that my new sister might have gone crazy and killed somebody, even if he pretty much had it coming. Child-drugging jerk as he was, Taylor still wouldn't kill him, or anybody else, ever. Definitely.


Okay, fine. I had my doubts, and I'm trying to convince myself more than you. Taylor was a good person, but good people have been driven to do bad things before. Especially when bad men with firearms are trying to drug their little sisters, probably for pedophiliac reasons.

To make a not very long but really unpleasant story short, my kidnapper had me walk into the nearest deserted building. I think. It was a few blocks away, since this was one of the few parts of the fair city of Brockton Bay that could pass for healthy. The building was a rotting, unhealthy place, but it's depravity paled compared to that of my kidnapper as he drew a filthy syringe from one of his many pockets and slowly advanced towards me. Then his arm twitched.


And then he was covered in bugs.


Yeah, not a pretty sight.


At all.


Seriously.

I don't think he'd even been bit or stung, but it could not have been pleasant. At all. Especially with the insertion of insects into orifices.

I'm sure the child-drugging kidnapper will be fine. Eventually. Physically, at least. Even if one were to make the incredibly dubious assumption that a man willing and able to kidnap a little girl from a very busy public market at gunpoint, direct her towards an abandoned building that was still surrounded by occupied buildings, and attempt to stab her with a syringe that was presumably full of some sort of sedative in full view of the totally unrestrained victim was entirely mentally sound, he certainly wasn't after he was left covered in bugs for a bit more than five-and-ten minutes.

The strangest thing about the whole situation, and wasn't that a field rife with competition, was the twitch, right before he got covered, when his firing arm jerked about 60 degrees off me. Maybe it was a muscle spasm or something of the sort? I do not really have any better theories about what happened, so it was a muscle spasm until proven otherwise.


I felt like I was forgetting something, but I'm really not sure what. I guess if I could remember what exactly I was forgetting it wouldn't really be forgotten, now would it? That's the nature of memory.

I assume. There's really no way of knowing how memory works for other people, since the whole thing is really subjective. Under better circumstances I might have been inclined to look at that a little deeper, but I really didn't have the time or mental energy to spare. I had a broken world, a new family, an even more broken city, and a guy covered with bugs. Head to toe, with the only skin showing being the presumably deliberately uncovered nose. I mentioned that before, but I feel it's worth mentioning again.

Seriously, it was disturbing. I hadn't really realized just how powerful Taylor was before. Yeah, she'd gotten into a fight with Lung, who was generally recognized as the most powerful cape in the city, and won, but that had been mostly Armsmaster, according to both her account and that of the news. So just how terrifying she could be when she was angry wasn't something I'd really thought about before.


I'd studied the villains of Brockton Bay extensively, and carefully considered how each could be a threat to me and/or her, but I hadn't really looked at her own abilities all that much. Apparently, they were extensive. Suddenly it occurred to me that I had no idea how far she could be from a bug (or crab) under her control, how she got control, or how many she could have under her power at once. Beyond "enough to completely cover a man to several layers" anyway. That was definitely enough to be scary. Very definitely enough to be very scary.

I wasn't about to stop pestering her though. She liked me, and it was sort of my responsibility to make sure she did things like dress properly and socialize, even if she didn't want to. Especially if she could be this scary. Already, plans were being drawn up to make her be more considerate of how things looked.

I was rather leaning towards the occasional casual mention of just how terrifying she could be, plus a few slips about how disturbing that was. She'd do the rest herself. Once I had gotten over being terrified and stunned by the whole ordeal, that is. For the moment, I was panicking, mostly internally. Mostly.

Not entirely.

Not really as much as I probably should have been, to be honest. Probably hadn't really sunk in yet. Oh well.

 

[Obscura]

Help was not long in arriving. Taylor was there first, naturally. She was closest, and she knew exactly where she was going. A great deal of panicked concern and reassurances followed that development, before the PRT troops arrived.

"Troops" was the right word. The PRT has a rather difficult mandate, and PRT troopers had (and have) to do it without powers of any sort. Normal police training, equipment and tactics just wouldn't cut it against most parahumans, which was why there even was a specific Parahuman Response Team in the first place. So the PRT was trained to a higher standard of combat.

After the Cold War, the military forces of the US eventually shifted into an elitist approach, emphasizing small numbers, shock and awe tactics, and truly impressive training, standards, and equipment. The PRT wasn't as individually impressive, nor as well equipped, but they were a match training wise for a more conventional military, or at least the ordinary rank-and-file thereof.

Their grenades might be filled with containment foam instead of something lethal, but their guns and body armour, not to mention their training, were military-grade.

Of course that had serious downsides when it came to acting as a police force, especially when martial law was not in effect. There was a reason why they didn't do normal police work, and it mostly boiled down to being overequipped for the job and trained for combat rather than the social aspects, investigation, and sense of trustworthy authority that were 90% of good, right-headed, policework.


Of course a lot of the actual police weren't good at that either, but that's another story. And they were at least marginally better at it in most cases. At least they didn't carry assault rifles. Not on this earth, anyway. The militarization of normal police departments had been rendered pretty much superfluous by the PRT and actual superheroes. The me that was grabbed from an outside universe didn't know much about the subject, and it hadn't really taken off here, so there isn't all that much I can tell you.

But yeah, troops was very much the right word for the PRT's enforcement arm. It wasn't the entirety of the organization, of course, but there simply weren't enough parahumans on the side of the law to maintain order against the parahumans who weren't on the side of the law. And even if there were, entrusting the entire duty of guardianship to people who were selected basically at random and who all had an innate desire to fight wasn't a great idea. The PRT was far from an ideal solution, mind you, but it was what we had and there really wasn't a way to do without it. Not without a lot more resources than the government had to spare, anyway. Or calling in the actual military, which was a bad idea for all sorts of reasons.

The PRT troopers secured the kidnapper and left, leaving behind a PRT agent. Trust me, there's a difference. If PRT troops are like the military's troops, then PRT agents are like FBI agents: Investigators and questioners rather than fighters. Or at least a lot more than they were fighters. So the agent, whose name I did not actually think to ask about, took our respective statements.

---

Panic and fear, as it turns out, are not great for making a coherent statement. Neither is protective rage. Who could possibly have guessed? Aside from anybody with a basic grip on how humans work, that is.

So we asked to come in later. Probably after I did whatever it was I was supposed to do at the bank. Sit there and nod at the right moments, probably. Maybe sign a few things they didn't think I'd read, or realize that I understood if I did.

That's one of the big upsides/downsides of being apparently 14. Underestimation is rife. In my case, I was pretty glad for that, and for people's protective instincts towards me, but I bet it would seriously annoy the average parahuman. In my case, not being taken seriously as a threat/combatant was mostly for the better, but if I was an impulsive young superheroine eager to kick butt and take names I'd be rather irked by it.

I wonder if Vista has this problem? If you didn't know, seeing as I have no idea what you know, Vista was the youngest of our local Wards, at somewhere between 12 and 14 (details about most capes were kept deliberately sparse) and someone who might be frustrated by underestimation. She probably was. She was one of the more powerful capes in the city powers-wise, rather experienced (she'd been in the Wards for longer than most members ever were), and still often treated like a toddler by the internet. That's gotta be annoying if you weren't counting on it for survival.

And, given that she was an active-combat superheroine, or at least an active policework superheroine, who was on a team that was explicitly volunteer-only (they did sometimes offer it as an alternative to punishment, but I doubted that was the case in Vista's joining. It's hard to press charges against somebody under the age of 9.), avoiding danger didn't seem to be her top priority.

To be fair, it wasn't mine either. I could understand wanting to fight the evils of this world regardless of the risks, I just wasn't convinced that that was the best way I could actually help. I could hardly expect everybody to agree with me on that, and it was certainly a lot better than actual villainy, or even standing aside and doing nothing. I'm not at all convinced of the argument that every parahuman has to be a warrior, or even entirely sure that having power obligated you to use it for good rather than merely refraining from doing harm with it (purposefully or otherwise), but I did rather admire genuine efforts to make things better.

In most cases, anyways. When they didn't get ridiculously wrong-headed about it. Or allow bigotry to exclude people from the ones they were trying to help. Or sacrificing some for the benefit of others when it could reasonably be avoided. I guess both of the latter fall under the first, but I feel they are worth mentioning separately. I'm sure at least some of the nazis here actually believed in their "cause", even if most of them were probably in it for the money, excuses for violence, safety, or power. I'd say it was cynical of me to assume most of them only paid lip service to their "cause", but I'm not actually sure that playing along with it was worse than being a true believer in this case. Kinda like having to decide between jumping off a burning 30 story building's roof or staying and choking to death on the smoke. They're different, but both are pretty darn awful.

 

[Obscura]

Unfortunately, I cannot whistle. I've tried, you know? I'm told it is a simple matter of muscle memory, that once you hit upon the right method it becomes as easy as just doing it, but I have never quite got it right. And you have to get it right, at least once, even by accident, before it can start getting easier. Some people do it before their memories form, and never realize how hard it is to get it the first time, but I was not so fortunate.

So only Taylor was whistling "innocently" when we returned home. Probably for the best, actually, since the whole schema is rather obviously not innocent. Not in the slightest. It's not being caught holding the murder weapon while it's still inside the victim, but it's pretty darn suspicious.

Danny didn't catch on though, because he wasn't home. He was still at work. If he had been here he'd have had to be pretty impressively oblivious to not notice. Although he had somehow failed to notice what was going on with Sophia, Emma, and Malady at Winslow. That's probably not that last girl's real name, but I'm not putting in the effort to look it up. Sophia and Emma may not have had a choice in the matter, so I would try not to hold it against either of them, but Malevolence has no such excuse. Point is, he hadn't known about it, so either he'd been really oblivious and was making up for it now or Taylor had been a lot better at keeping her feelings hidden. Or she was just bad at hiding guilt in particular.



Oh, and Winslow is a terrible excuse for an institute of education, Principal Blackheart is a horrible excuse for a school principal, the teaching staff range from mediocre at the very best to downright terrible at worst, school discipline is a joke, and the cafeteria, resting space and showers leave a lot to be desired. That last may not seem as serious as the others, but do remember that the old Jacqueline Colere lived there for months, and those are rather serious issues under those circumstances. It's serious business.

The Hebert home was practically Shangri-La by comparison. Way better, seriously. And although "way better" is a relative term (phrase?) (idiom?), relative differences are important. Seriously. I slept in an actual bed here, instead of curled up on a rather terrible chair. With blankets, instead of scavenged bits of clothing from what people lost. Not the lost and found, mind you, since Winslow had given up on having one of those after the tenth time somebody stole the whole thing. That was before I was born, for the record. Either me. Only reason I knew was that somebody had complained about it, and the administration actually issued a response for once. It was only an excuse, mind you, but it was a lot more than most student complaints got. The shower actually had a consistent flow, and water heated beyond "lukewarm". And "lukewarm" was being generous to Winslow. "Just wildly varying every few minutes. From freezing to just warm enough to feel unpleasantly biological to every point in between and back to freezing and so on and so forth" would be a better description. Not my description, but a better one. Taylor's shower was not anything special as household showers go, but by not being utterly awful it was a massive improvement. The food was actually consistently recognizable as such, in appearance, flavour and texture. Winslow regularly failed at each of those, and sometimes at all three at the same time. Don't even think about trying the mystery meat. Personally, I suspect that it's old military surplus rations, possibly from the first world war, but drywall is the prevailing theory amongst the student body.

And all of that was still way better than what the average street rat in Brockton Bay could expect. Even without my growing fondness for both Heberts, I'd be rather reluctant to leave. Small wonder. And I very much doubt that whatever the guy who got covered in bugs had in mind for me was any sort of pleasant. For me, at least.

I'd come way closer to losing everything than I was comfortable with, even if Taylor had the entire situation under control the whole time. Which I doubted, since if that was the case the gun wouldn't have mattered. I needed to take some more precautions. I bet the PRT has tracking devices. I can probably get somebody to implant one in me.

Better safe than sorry.


I really don't want to fall into the clutches of some of the nasty people out there. Wardliness should help, and so should being a publicly known healer, but there was no point in taking chances. At least not chances that could legally and safely be avoided without causing worse risks. I wasn't about to start carrying a gun, for instance, because even if I could do so legally (laws on parahumans carrying weapons were really lax, partially because your average parahuman was not really hindered in their ability to kill somebody easily by something so simple as not having a weapon), I had no idea how to use one properly, or even safely, and would be far more likely to shoot somebody I didn't mean to by accident than I would be to successfully defend myself with one.

Incidentally, and statistically, the person I was most likely to shoot was myself. That wouldn't be great.

A heavy stick, on the other hand, was something I knew how to use and was way less likely to hurt myself or others with. Accidentally, that is. I was probably way more likely to hurt somebody with a stick on purpose than I was with a gun, because a stick, unlike a gun, can fairly reliably be non-lethal. Just don't try knocking people out with a "tap on the head". Either it won't work or you'll cause serious, if not fatal brain damage. There's very little middle ground, and what there is varies not only from person to person but from angle to angle, stick shape to stick shape, and circumstance to circumstance. Even then, "middle ground" is more being painful and disorienting enough to enable escape without doing anything that they won't recover from. Or causing serious brain damage without incapacitating them. If somebody's been knocked out by a blow to the head, get them to the hospital. I cannot stress that enough.

That's when I realized I'd been staring blankly into space for Taylor-knows-how-long, and that Taylor was desperately trying to comfort me. I decided I should probably pay attention to her.


Taylor is pretty neat.

 

[Obscura]

Sophia:

Sophia was okay. Not great, but as well as could reasonably be expected under the circumstances. Which were pretty bad, but not anywhere near as bad as they could have been. Or anywhere near as bad as they had been a week ago. Relatively speaking, she was walking on rainbows.

It had been almost exactly a week since Shadow Stalker had met Jacqueline Colere. Sophia still hadn't met the girl. Almost exactly a week had passed since Sophia's body and brain had met the smaller girl's aura. A bit less than a week had passed since Sophia had started being Sophia again.

Honestly, she never would have expected that she'd be so grateful to someone for causing her to break down screaming, but she was. Now the real (definitely) Sophia Hess was back and ready to take on the world.

---

Okay, she was definitely not ready to take on the world, but she could, hypothetically, be ready for that someday. As opposed to before, where she basically didn't exist. She was alive and real again, and that meant more than she could really express.

The last week had been hard, but the PRT and Miss Militia had had her back the entire time. Sophia had spoken with her mother, sort of, but it hadn't gone all that well. Sophia had admired her mother before Shadow Stalker took over her (Sophia's) life, but she resented how the person who was supposed to protect her hadn't noticed that anything was amiss. So she hadn't had a lot to say, and her mother apparently didn't either. She didn't know what her brother was thinking, since she still hadn't talked to him. Her little sister understood pretty much nothing, not that Sophia could blame her. She was just too young to understand.

So things with her family weren't great. Still beat not existing.

And things with her team weren't great. They weren't awful, but they weren't great. Of her newfound teammates, only Gallant really seemed to understand. And he was both an empath and much more informed about the situation than any of the non-Gallant Wards. Things were awkward with the others.

Vista and Shadow Stalker apparently very much did not get along, which was apparently almost entirely Shadow Stalker's fault. She was mad about that and thus mad at Sophia, and even though she knew intellectually that her feelings weren't right, that didn't make them go away. Sophia had tried to reach out, but didn't really know how, and Vista had mostly just sulked and scowled. Sophia could understand that, but that didn't make it pleasant.


"Uh, hi?"


...

---

"I'm Sophia, what's your name?"

...

---

Clockblocker was apparently one massive ball of hormones and bad jokes. Sophia could understand why Jacqueline didn't seem to like him, but her over the top terror made Sophia suspect something else was up there. She'd looked and hadn't found anything, but she would be the first to admit she wasn't a very good investigator.

"If I had the power to rearrange the alphabet…"

"Ewww..."


It was kind of weird that way, since he was sort of way older than her, but their bodies were about the same age. She didn't like to think about that. How old was she, really? There wasn't an easy answer to that question.


Browbeat was pretty neat. His power was cool, and he'd never met Shadow Stalker so he was judging her on her own merits. He was also pretty attractive, even if Sophia was 100% sure that it wasn't natural. Perfect control of her own body would be ridiculously awesome. Sophia was definitely envious. He hadn't been announced to the world yet, but Sophia was sure he'd be a great hero.

"So that's a really cool power"

"It comes in handy"


If that sounds entirely straight laced and serious, you should be informed that his hands noticeably increased in size when he said that. It was kinda funny. Kinda.


Aegis, the team's leader, was all business. Which was fine, she guessed.

"Good to have you."


And Kid Win, her last teammate, and the team's Tinker, was either avoiding her or was entirely focused on his tinkering. Maybe both.

"Hey, where's Kid Win?"

"In his lab. Don't try going in there unannounced, it's full of electric things and an easily startled Tinker."


Miss Militia told Sophia that things would get better with time and familiarity, during the same little talk where she'd explained what was going on with Vista. Sophia hoped so.

For the moment, she was moving forward. And that meant all sorts of things, but right now it meant figuring out a superhero persona. She wasn't about to use Shadow Stalker's, for obvious reasons, and she couldn't really fill the same role anyway. Shadow Stalker was a highly skilled and dangerous combatant, at least by the standards of the Wards. Part of that was Sophia's stolen power, but a lot of it was raw skill and ferocity.


The real Sophia Hess, on the other hand, had some basic self defense training and that was about it. She was nowhere near field ready, let alone on Shadow Stalker's level. So she'd have to find some other way to contribute, preferably one that worked with a new name and costume. And train a lot, but that was a gimme. She probably couldn't get to Stalker's level. Not any time soon, at any rate.

She was probably going to go with Miss Militia's idea. Her powerset was perfect for scouting and reconnaissance, and that was something she felt a lot more comfortable doing compared to busting heads. The skillset involved would even fit into search and rescue quite neatly. That sounded a lot nicer than just being a skull-cracking maniac like the not-her that had stolen her life.

That neatly explained why she was in a room full of random junk, trying to figure out how to turn into a ghost. She didn't really want to call her breaker state a "shadow". Bad non-memories. Ghost sounded much nicer.

To her, at least, and that was what was really important. She'd managed it a few times, but she couldn't do it at will yet. But she was continually reassured that she'd get there, and that she didn't have to be great right away. Miss Militia really was just the best mentor.

She didn't have a new name or costume, and she definitely wasn't ready for the rough-and-tumble world of superheroics, but Sophia Hess was determined to get there.

She had to justify her broken existence to herself somehow.

 

[Obscura]

[REDACTED] :

Taylor was whistling when she returned home, in a poorly thought-out effort to seem calm and nonchalant, and not at all like she'd just had a horribly traumatic experience while saving her little sister from an even more horribly traumatic experience.

It wasn't very convincing, and she was really only trying to fool herself, since Jacqueline didn't seem to be listening. Or looking. Or paying attention in general. She hadn't actually said anything since the guy grabbed her. She'd nodded at the appropriate times, at least with the investigator from the PRT, but beyond that she seemed dead to the world around her. Taylor really had no idea what she was thinking, but hopefully she wasn't dwelling on the ordeal.

Taylor was doing exactly that, but she hoped Jacqueline wasn't. Maybe that was a bit hypocritical, but obsessing over what had happened wasn't helping Taylor, and she certainly didn't want to. She just couldn't help it.

It should perhaps be said that Taylor Anne Hebert, whatever you think of her as a person, didn't exactly have the best skills for dealing with trauma and other such unpleasantness. That's not to say she wasn't strong, mind you. If she hadn't been an immensely strong person, she would have snapped under the pressure of her high school experience like a candy cane dropped off the Empire State Building. Rather, her ability to find healthy forms of catharsis was rather poor, and her ability to actually address and deal with the roots of her problems was, if anything, worse. Strength could only do so much to deal with that.

Jacqueline Colere, clever little minx that she was, had managed to force Taylor to actually address her school troubles, and the experience of doing so had helped Taylor to an immeasurable degree. But problems that are rooted so very deeply simply do not go away overnight. Taylor, to put it simply, needed help. So did Jacqueline, even if she hadn't quite put that together yet. Unfortunately for them, neither was in a mental position to seek out that same help.


Jacqueline was not one to turn away from needed help, but she didn't yet know that she needed it. She should have, mind you. She knew enough that, if she was looking at things objectively, or even with the limited objectivity she usually managed, she would have figured it out pretty much immediately. But she couldn't manage that right then. And she was latching on to any passing thought in order to avoid thinking about what happened, which wasn't really helping. It was all too easy for the girl to lose herself in her own mind. It didn't really help that she simply didn't have the raw mental resilience Taylor had.

Taylor knew she needed help, but couldn't trust anyone enough to seek it out: her past experiences had left her ill-suited to it. Winslow had taught her to mistrust authority, and her father, for all that he'd been better this past week, had been ignorant and unhelpful for too long. She almost reached out to him nonetheless, but couldn't quite bring herself to do it.

Jacqueline, given her past actions, might have been an alternative. The bonds there were not so old nor so tightly wound to the entirety of Taylor's life, but nor were they tainted or rusted. But Taylor was not only untrusting, she was caring. Which meant she couldn't ask Jacqueline for help, because Jacqueline already had too much on her shoulders and Taylor wasn't willing to add to that.


Thus, neither could ask for help.


Truly, it was fortuitous that neither needed to ask.


Once they were home and the pressing need to get home had subsided, Taylor moved to Jacqueline's assistance with alacrity. And panic. Lots of panic. Picking up a scared child in a massive hug and patting her on the back more than a little bit too hard is not recommended by any country or sub-national government's health department. Except Moord Nag's "administration", and Moord Nag did not come to power by being good at administration or picking out people who were actually qualified to deal with trauma. She came to power by being a powerful Master with a projection that ate people and got stronger by doing so. Might is sometimes said to make right, but it certainly does not make for good governance. But Jacqueline appreciated Taylor's effort anyway, because sometimes just knowing someone is trying to help helps in and of itself.

Danny, too, appreciated Taylor's efforts, but he wasn't about to let it stand like that. With a little too much delay, the PRT agent had called Danny and let him know what happened. I wouldn't be too harsh on the PRT agent, since they were just making absolutely sure they had everything and that their superiors did as well before calling in the official guardian.


Danny eventually managed to get the whole story. Much like his daughter, he wasn't particularly good at this sort of thing, but persistence won out in the end. Or it could have been the hugging and various other sorts of comforting moves he performed.

And so, the three of them started, once again, to move past their myriad issues. Hopefully, it'd stick.


And if you're wondering just who I am, or how I know all of this:


[Don't worry about it]

 

[Obscura]

Okay, yesterday/Wednesday was pretty bad. Okay, not just "pretty bad". Yesterday/Wednesday was awful. Seriously awful. It wasn't the worst I'd ever had, or even in the top ten, but that says a lot more about my lives so far than about yesterday. In a saner world, having somebody kidnap you and try to inject you with a filthy syringe would be among the top three worst days of any child who had it happen to them. Top five at the very worst. Or it just wouldn't happen at all. That would be just fine in my book. Seriously, just fine. No objections whatsoever.

I'm moving past it. Or trying to move past it, at least. That really takes time and talking. Lots of talking. Preferably with a professional. On a related note, Taylor and I would be joining the Wards officially once Danny got off work. Yeah, that requires the permission of a parent or guardian. Except under certain very specific circumstances that didn't apply here, mostly having to do with abusive and/or otherwisely criminal parents/guardians. It's all basic common sense when it comes to government employment for minors. As much as common sense applies to the matter of giving minors government jobs in the field of law enforcement, anyway.

There's perfectly sound reasons behind the Wards program's existence, but it sounds completely insane does it not? Just letting children and teenagers, mostly teenagers, go out and enforce the law? Getting into fights with criminals and such? Please tell me I'm not the only person on Earth Bet who realizes that's the sort of scheme that merits careful watching.

There are, in point of fact, a lot of protective measures tied into the Wards program. Constant communication, high-end training and equipment, no working alone, staying away from the worst of everything, and so forth. Not to mention the colossal amount of anger the PRT and Protectorate brought down on anybody who hurt them, and their advertisement of the fact. But it's still something rather unfortunate that wouldn't exist in a less awful universe. At least not as active law enforcement. Something like the scouts could be nice. If they cut out the homophobia and transphobia, and whatever sundry other forms of bigotry the scouts organization encourages. And without the poorly supervised authority position of Scout leader. Hopefully with less pedophilia and no bankruptcy from payouts to victims. Something like the functional parts of the Scouts could be nice. I'm sure there are some. I just can't think of any. You know what, maybe this hypothetical organization should have a different role model.

Maybe the Navy League? I don't know that much about it, but you don't hear nearly as much bad stuff about them as you do the scouts, and it's Canadian so it's automatically and intrinsically better organized and more sensible than its American counterpart.


I kid, I kid. About that last thing, anyway. Just being Canadian doesn't automatically make something more sensible. We Canadians put a lot of hard work into sensibility, and we still have a lot of major screwups, mistakes, and crimes against humanity. Look up the residential school system sometime. We really only look polite and nonoffensive by comparison. Really, no country is entirely innocent. Human history has a lot of awful stuff. But this has really gone off on a tangent. Several tangents, really, with most of them branching off previous ones. Like some sort of tangent maze. And that's another tangent.

I should really get that under control.

I'm not going to, but I should.


But yeah, we were totally signing up with the Wards for the mental health benefits. It's not really as selfish and stupid as joining a superhero team for the benefits package might seem. You see, we all really needed professional help, as would anybody else who'd been through what we'd been put through, and Danny couldn't afford it. Especially not in this city. Supply and demand. There was a lot of need for psychiatric help around here, thanks to the gangs and the crippled economy, and not a whole lot of people who were qualified to give it, thanks to the gangs and the crippled economy. And the Merchants take a dislike to them for some reason. Some sort of targeted anti-intellectualism, not that the average Merchant would recognize the word. Maybe they just resent the occasional effort that is made to get them off drugs. And Danny's job at the association didn't pay very well. And Taylor and I didn't have jobs, or any reasonable way of getting them other than the Wards. Well, we didn't have any other reasonable way of getting non-illegal jobs.

The gangs were always looking for parahumans to press-gang. Or whatever the term is for when somebody forces somebody else into an organization that's purely land based and criminal instead of maritime and military. Is it just press-gang? That doesn't seem like it should be for some reason, but it does sound right. I'm just going to keep using it. I don't really have the time to look.

I'm also going to take full advantage of being able to get actual treatment for my many, many, issues. These mandatory reports, while annoying, have sometimes been helpful for this, but writing to you, whoever you are, isn't great for anything more than catharsis. Don't get me wrong, it's entirely possible that you're an awesome person/ a bunch of awesome people, but my complete inability to get any sort of communication back from you makes it somewhat difficult. Being a good listener is an absolutely essential skill for psychological help, mind you, but while it's a necessary condition it's not a sufficient condition for being good at helping people.

That I genuinely have no idea who's going to read this, if anybody, makes things worse. And my complete lack of choice in the matter doesn't help at all. At all.


But I was taking steps to help myself, with the help of people who care about me, and I was sure that Thursday, April the 14th, 2011 would be better than the day before it. Sun and stars, it couldn't be much worse.