How to Beat Fried Worms
Disclaimer: Worm is owned by Wildbow, and he can keep it.
-----
Chapter 56: Insidious
-----
Alec quietly sighed as he sat in a cheap, plastic chair in the Brockton Bay General Hospital. Across from him, sitting in an equally cheap chair that was literally bowing under his weight, sat an eleven or twelve year old boy covered in an honestly grotesque amount of muscles.
The man had offered to drop Chort off wherever the boy wanted to go but... the kid had wanted to see things through. The boy had felt responsible for what they found inside Mama Mathers off-grid cabin and Alec hadn't been able to convince him that it wasn't his fault, that he hadn't had a choice in what had gone on inside of that den of filth.
The man's eyes slid to the side as he heard someone's shoes squawking down the polished tiles and saw a teenaged girl wearing a set of white robes hurrying by whilst a blond girl literally hovered nervously at her shoulder.
Panacea and Glory Girl. Called in response to Alec and the people he'd brought to the hospital.
Alec closed his eyes and inhaled slowly as the duo hurried past, appreciating the scent of sterile antiseptic in comparison to the musk, anxiety, pain and fear that had filled the Mathers hideaway.
It had taken him more than twelve hours to drive from Las Vegas, Nevada to Kansas City, Missouri, even as he'd been speeding and passing other cars. Then he'd spent the better part of a day, watching and observing the little cabin in the woods. The redneck bastards didn't have plumbing in their cabin, it seemed, because there had been an outhouse out behind it that had seen pretty frequent use. An outhouse that now housed Mama Mathers headless body.
Alec was still on the fence as to whether or not he would be destroying that Shard. He didn't necessarily blame the chunk of alien flesh for what its power had been used to do, very few of Eden's Shards were even 'awake' after all.
But...
Alec exhaled slowly, drawing Chort's gaze.
He could worry about that later, if at all. He'd brought Chort and the four girls that were... prisoners inside the Mathers house to the Brockton Bay General Hospital for a reason. A combination of reasons. They needed medical help, absolutely.
Being chained to a bed could cause a whole host of medical issues, necessitating things like antibiotics, muscular redevelopment or abortions.
And... the girls were definitely at risk of... well...
Alec had brought them to Brockton Bay because of Gallant. The boy with the Cauldron Vial power to see and manipulate emotions.
"You think them whores are gonna be okay?" Chort asked.
Alec, in the process of rubbing his temples, froze for a moment before he resumed doing so.
"Chort?" he asked. "What's your actual name?"
"Mama said I wasn't supposed ta use the name I had before she came an' got me."
"Mama's gone and I plan on making sure she doesn't come back," Alec told the boy, ignoring the other people in the hallway. "So, what's your name?"
"...Billie," Chort admitted after a moment. "Billie Baker."
"Alright, Billie. Can you tell me why you're calling those girls 'whores'?"
"'Cuz that's what Mama said we was," the boy explained, as though it were plain and obvious. "She said we're all gonna be whores for the family."
Alec was tempted to bring Mama Mathers back to life, just for the sake of putting her back down. But that would be a waste of energy and would only further traumatize people that thought she was dead. It wouldn't be a worthwhile expenditure of time.
"Billie, she was saying that to insult people and make them feel bad. To make herself feel better." Alec sighed and opened his eyes, carefully ignoring the angry girl hovering nearby. "It was name calling, like calling people stupid or dumb or retarded. It's not something that nice people do."
It was a lot more complicated than that, actually, but Billie was, like, eleven or twelve and sounded like he'd been pulled out of school pretty early. A simple explanation that got the point across without making the poor kid feel stupid for asking was more important than being specifically accurate.
"...Mama wasn't a nice person," Billy agreed in a whisper, as though afraid of drawing the dead woman's wrath.
"Who are you two talking about?" Glory Girl, Victoria Dallon asked. The teenager had gone from looking furious to confused, starting about the time that Billie had used the word 'Whores'.
"Mama Mathers, the Master behind the Fallen," Alec explained to the girl as he leaned back in his seat and looked up. "She's dead, now, so things are going to start getting interesting."
"The leader of the Fallen is dead?!" the excitable blond asked, her voice carrying down the halls. "When did this happen- Why haven't I heard about it?!"
"-A- leader of the Fallen is dead," Alec clarified as he activated his system and opened the Abilities menu. He had five points to spend and he had an idea for one. "Mama Mathers ran the Ziz branch, though I'm pretty sure she functionally ran the others, too. She was a high-end Thinker slash Master who infected everyone through the same senses that came in contact with her. Hear her name and she became aware of you. See her and she could see through your eyes, impose images over your own vision. If you heard her voice, she could hear through your ears and speak to you from anywhere in the world. Touch and taste and smell were in there, too, but you get the point."
Alec sighed as he ran through the options with his eyes before selecting 'Vehicle Tinker' as what he wanted to spend a point on.
"It's part of how the Fallen managed to stay organized between branches, I think, even though they barely touched technology. The leader of the Behemoths could say something out loud and Mama Mathers could relay it to the Leviathans. I'd wager that she probably made sure that most of the police and public officials of Kansas City had seen her at some point, then she'd know whatever it was that they were doing, she'd know if they were ever coming after her." It was impressive, Alec certainly couldn't argue that. But the mental strain would've been immense, especially with an improperly programmed Shard being the source of the power.
If Mama Mathers hadn't been crazy to start with, Alec doubted it took too long to settle in.
"Anyway, Mama Mathers has been dead for something like... three hours?" Alec looked up to Billie, who shrugged his massive shoulder. "I was more focused on bringing her victims here than I was in parading about her corpse."
"Hah, that's... funny," Vicky laughed, once, and it was clearly faked. "You're talking as though you're the one that killed her."
"That's because I am, in fact, the person that killed her, Miss Pelham." A fact that Alec did not regret. In the slightest.
"My name is Dal...!" Vicky started to say before she caught herself. Alec turned his gaze to look at the girl, locking one yellow eye on her as she froze mid-sentence. "...It's you!"
"Is it?" Alec asked, a grin tugging at his lips as Billie, the poor boy, just looked confused.
"You're Apollyon!" Vicky shouted, her aura flaring ineffectually against him as she pointed one finger directly at his face.
"I suppose I am," Alec agreed, his voice mellow. "How have you been, Miss Pelham?"
"My parents have been fighting non-stop because of you!" the girl shouted, drawing a significant number of disapproving stares from numerous nurses and doctors. The girl ducked her head, chastised but undeterred. "What do you think you're doing here?!"
Alec glared as he met the girl's eyes in disapproval... until the man tiredly sighed and sank into his seat.
He was not going to get into a pissing match with a teenager.
"The victims at the Mathers compound needed help, Victoria," Alec explained. "That's what I'm doing here. No more. No less."
Looking past the girl as one of the doors opened, Alec watched Panacea go to the other room where two of the other girls had been admitted. The healer looked... well, like she'd eaten something that didn't want to stay down, really.
"Though... If Amelia would like to know the name of her father, to learn the reason Carol distrusts her? I would be willing to explain it to her."
"You stay away from my sister!" Vicky hissed, venom dripping from her words.
She was her mother's daughter, after all.
Alec simply shrugged and tilted his head back against the wall. He'd made the offer. Whether or not it was followed up on was in Vicky and, hopefully, Amelia's hands.
The sound of clanking metal drew everyone's attention away from the little spectacle of Vicky threatening Alec and over to some new arrivals. A man in a red and very form fitting jumpsuit, a woman wearing a military style outfit with a camouflage bandana over her mouth and, at the center of the attention, a man wearing an armored suit with eye-catching blue lines running along the seams that implied 'power!'
Velocity, Miss Militia and Armsmaster.
This was going to be great, Alec could feel it.
Good?
Well, good and great really weren't the same thing, were they?
Yay! More crafting feats!
