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When you grew up with just two arms and two legs, it tended to bias you in favour of using those. Persephone was trying to break the habit.
"Scheisse!" the curse escaped her lips as the coloured balls slipped out of her shadows' grasp and clattered to the floor. She was glad she'd decided not to try for the full Severance experience right away; just coordinating one additional set of 'arms' was proving to require a bit more coordination than her power naturally came with.
The benefits would be worth the frustration, she told herself as she gathered the juggling balls. Sleight of hand, dexterity tricks, coordinating multiple tendrils of shadow at once... the moment she'd started to write down ideas for how she could improve both herself and how far she could take her power with those skills, she'd realized the severe lack of limitations.
Unfortunately, the topic she'd initially wanted to push on was mostly closed. She didn't have even the beginnings of a materials lab here, so she had no way to effectively experiment with the properties of her shadows or how she could shift them.
She would have a materials lab. There were some things money couldn't buy, but for everything else, there was crime. Just, not until later. She hadn't done enough crime yet.
Persephone was startled out of her concentration by an alarm clock ringing in her little nook. Right. She'd promised herself she'd get it done today.
It was time to return to the scene of the crime.
The other crime. The inciting one.
It was weird. She'd been catching the news when she could, at internet cafes and various places a TV was showing the news, and she hadn't seen a single Amber Alert. Was that the word or did that only apply to younger kids?
But like... Yeah this was Brockton Bay, people went missing way more often than the national average. But Persephone was a pretty white girl, and she was under the impression, possibly wrong, that those tended to get highlighted. On top of that, her mother was dead - or missing, if her damn father had hidden the body well enough - which made the whole thing even more likely to draw police and media attention.
And yet, nothing.
That Alex guy, he had an Amber Alert out. So it wasn't like she just couldn't find the damn things. Hers was just… missing.
Persephone would have to see if she could find him. He'd helped her out and if he'd had to go hobo too, he probably needed some assistance of his own. He could be her sidekick. Superheroes and supervillains got to have sidekicks, right? Whichever she was, she was sure she could have a sidekick.
Her home was at very nearly the farthest end of the city from where she was staying now. It was even farther than it sounded from the numbers, because the shortest line between the warehouse and her home went through the bay itself. It took her a couple hours on Brockton Bay's crap public transit, down Lord Street to reach the downtown areas south of the bay, and then a transfer to the farthest-east edge of downtown.
Three-ish hoursish with not much to do but think. None of those thoughts particularly productive. She was heading back to the home she'd grown up in, where her mom had been murdered in front of her eyes. It drew the mind to topics that were pretty nasty. Some that used to be warm and happy, but were utterly ruined now.
Persephone had always had issues with her father. Or… issues with the concept of him. You couldn't really have issues with a man that wasn't part of your life. She saw him every now and then, but even when she did he was distant. Mom had always looked forward to when he got some time to spend with them, but Seph could take it or leave it. Mom had really loved him, and Seph was happy for her whenever her father had showed up, but there'd never really been any joy for herself. She hadn't really resented him for not being there, because she hadn't had a connection with him at all.
When she'd come out to him, he'd just nodded. There was no yelling, no criticism, nothing like that. Just. Nothing at all. Like she'd told him she was going to the mall. Just a piece of information, a 'that's nice, dear' of vague well-wishes, but it wasn't important information, just something to incorporate into his image of the world.
It'd been the same when she'd got into university. Just a fact to take into account. It'd been the last important thing she told him. She remembered being younger, showing him things she'd drawn in kindergarten, made in art class, but she'd stopped doing that pretty quickly. She could read the room, tell when he wasn't interested.
That made it sound like she attached more importance to the lack of a father than she did. Maybe she had, when she was very young. But it was mostly just for comparison. Mom had been all the parent she needed.
When she was excited, Mom was even more excited. When she was scared, Mom comforted her. When she was tired, Mom tucked her into bed. When she was hurt, Mom took care of her. When she was a little brat, Mom taught her better. When she'd come out back in high school, Mom had been delighted, and immediately started trying to help her get with the girl she'd had a crush on back then. When she'd been uncertain where to go in college, Mom had helped her figure out what she wanted to do, and threw a little party just for them when she'd got into the local university's materials engineering program.
Persephone had gotten all she needed. It just all came from Mom, not her father. Honestly that was pretty normal, wasn't it? Emotionally unavailable boomer fathers that earned the paycheck rather than doing the parenting was how it was for most people, as far as she could tell. She'd never felt anything was out of place.
And then it had all been ripped out of alignment, Mom's brains dribbling all down his fingers. All those warm memories now led inevitably to that single terminus. She couldn't think of anything connected to Mom without eventually arriving at what had happened to her.
It had been shocking, but it also… fit? Her father had always been distant. He was just severing a connection that… she wasn't even sure why he'd even entertained it for twenty years, he never seemed all that interested in it. Like brushing water off his jacket. It all just fell into place, like it was the only way things ever could have gone. It had all been building to that moment.
And Persephone Perrine was going to kill her father. That was just as natural, just as proper. Just as inevitable a conclusion. She'd have to work out how, but there were no other outcomes.
She wasn't sure what she'd do if he was still just living here. Killing him would be ideal, but she was pretty sure that was a future thing. She'd learned yesterday that she was not all that good at capefights. Heritage had been handling her without difficulty, Overwatch had oneshot her before Seph had even realized she was there. And Persephone had watched capespotter videos online, in her internet cafe time. She'd seen the difference. Everyone that had a name anyone remembered moved with purpose, not just flopping around like she did. They mostly landed on their feet when they dodged.
The starkest example had been Lace, a local villain-for-hire. Lace used a similar style of lashing tendrils - ribbons in Lace's case. Lace stood imperiously in the center of her battlefield, a queen holding court while her ribbons dealt with problems for her. It wasn't often the woman needed to move - she'd stood still under gunfire while her ribbons blocked bullets. And when she did deign to move, it was with grace, precision, and purpose. She didn't miss a step.
Seeing her goal made it clear to Seph just how far she had to go. It helped point the way there, but if she was that far from what she should look like as a mature cape, there was no way she could take on her father. It wasn't entirely clear to Seph what his powers were, but she was pretty sure he was the real deal. He knew what he was doing with them. She didn't have any evidence of it, really. It was just the feeling she had. And that meant she needed to be better than she was now, and rack up a whole hell of a lot of advantages, before she was able to kill him.
So practically speaking, this was just scouting. See what the police activity around her home looked like, if there was any. Why the death and disappearance hadn't shown up in the news. What her father was doing, if he was there. Hopefully she'd be able to hold back if she saw him.
She'd spent so long swilling in her own brain that it was a bit of a shock when the bus actually arrived.
Persephone stepped out in the bustle of people, pulling her completely-out-of-style rainbow beanie as far down her head as she could without covering her eyes. Honestly her current look made her cringe, but that was the point. She was Goth, with a capital letter somewhere in there. It could be the T, she wasn't picky. Her look was distinctive enough that deviating sharply from it, going full-bore bright flower girl, should at least throw anyone looking for her a little off. She wanted to take off the glasses to alter how she looked even more, but she'd decided against - it wasn't trivial to steal prescription glasses or contacts, and she'd be looking at blurs a foot past her face without their aid. Avoiding notice was good, but she felt safer being able to notice when someone else noticed her.
It was strange walking through the streets. This was all home, the neighbourhood she'd grown up in. It looked the same as ever, all neatly-mowed lawns, tall bushes for privacy, one of the streets blocked off while kids played street hockey, but it felt completely different, now that danger had come here. Angles seemed sharper, and every hidden corner felt like her father was lurking behind it. (She checked all of them as soon as she had the opportunity, none held a lurking murderer)
It wasn't long enough before she got to her house. She crossed the driveway, head down, examining what she could out of the corner of her eye as she passed. Be nonchalant and like she had absolutely nothing to hide. It didn't tell her much, the lawn was big enough there was no real good view inside the windows, but it told her no one was on the lawn, and there were no police lines or anything.
She came to a stop once she'd passed the hedges and was no longer visible from the house. She was going to go into the yard, but a white sedan was passing by. It was moving a bit slowly and uncertainly, so there was a chance it'd spot her. She reached into her pocket, pulling out a slab of shadow in the shape of a phone if she'd had one (she hadn't had it in her pockets when she ran, she hadn't had anything in her pockets, girl clothes didn't get pockets). She consulted it very assiduously, as if that had been the only reason she'd stopped and she had no interest in the house at all.
Persephone could feel the hairs on the back of her neck rise, like she was being watched. It was oddly nerve-wracking, but the feeling passed before too long, and so did the car. Now that no one was looking in her direction, she dipped into the yard.
Once she was in the yard, she simply sank into the shadow of the hedges, her world of darkness rising all around her. It was clear from the start the lights in the house were on. There were white anti-shadows 'above', in the direction of the house - she worked with shadows, not darkness, and shadows were created by light. She strode towards them. 'From below, looking out through the shadows' wasn't the best view, but it was the one that meant no one could look into her shadows and see her. She didn't know if there was anyone in there right now, but it was best to assume the worst and revise if the truth was more optimistic.
It was an awkward view, looking up from the shadows, but it was pretty clear right from the start that there were people in there. They were talking, but not in English. The pitch was just casual conversation. Three voices, a man, a woman, and a girl. None of them had tones of voice she recognized.
They were bustling around the kitchen. The tone of the conversation was pretty casual, and looking up through the shadows, it seemed like they were preparing dinner.
They shouldn't be there. This house was owned. It already had people living in it. Even if the death had been discovered immediately, it had been two days ago. It was absurd to think it had already been relisted and a new family had already bought it and moved in. And this area was pretty well-off, so it was hard to imagine squatters had moved in. None of the ways for a family to be living here made sense, and yet one was. You didn't bustle around making a family dinner in a house you were robbing, holding a stakeout in, or otherwise doing something illicit.
Persephone moved through her shadow realm, towards the opposite end of the house. She needed to investigate from a better view, which meant actually coming out of her nice safe underworld. While she could probably wrangle the family easily enough, she wasn't sure how dangerous it'd be to get spotted. She'd rather not find out until her other avenues for information ran dry.
She popped out in her bedroom first. Distant from the kitchen. At a glance, it was being redecorated. Seph's knicknacks and wall posters were growing into a pile in the corner, while the shelves and walls were slowly being repopulated with different things. A different person's sense of style.
… huh. She had somewhat expected to see the changes, but she hadn't predicted how it'd make her feel. To see the room she'd grown up in, her childhood, being callously replaced. Piled up to be thrown away.
It was something a lot of people went through as they grew up. Moved out, maybe. They didn't get to keep the places that held their memories. They threw out and gave away old things as they grew out of them. But it wasn't strangers doing it. It wasn't two fucking days after their mom had been brutally murdered.
By the time her thoughts caught up, Ereshkigal was already covered in the shadows of the room. Not a costume, costumes implied organization, patterns, the sort of thing that wasn't in her head in even the slightest. It was just darkness from head to toe, slits for her eyes, not even really solidified. Still lashing and roiling. Walking darkness with green eyes.
There was no ceremony to it. She walked through the house, shadows unconsciously lashing pictures of a happy family that didn't belong here from the surfaces they rested on.
She was making enough noise that the man of the house came out before she reached the kitchen, eyes widening as he saw the thing approaching his family. He was built thick and stout, dark-haired, very pale.
He didn't freeze in fear for longer than a quarter-second, he was already turning to grab something from the kitchen. "Get out of here!" he yelled, throwing a fucking toaster at her.
Ereshkigal simply hardened the shadow wrapped around her, letting the appliance bounce off the thick mass and clatter to the ground. And then the man's shadow reached across from the wall, wrapping around his enterprising limbs and hugging him to itself.
She passed him as he tried to thrash, tried to reach her, entering the kitchen.
The woman and the girl - both blonde, short and broad, built strong - were already ready for her, armed with kitchen knives and standing by the knifeblock. Without a hint of ceremony, the knives started flying.
Ereshkigal's eyes went a bit wide - that was a lot of sharp steel flying right at her and nothing that dangerous had ever been hurled at her before - but she'd already tested that her shadow, when hardened into a millimeters-thin layer of clothing, was more or less stab-proof. With it draped around her so thickly that it obscured her form, she didn't even feel the impacts. The knives simply hit her shadow, sunk in a little bit, and then bounced out as she firmed it up again, clattering to the kitchen tile.
She caught the shadow of a flying knife, rounded it off into a sphere, and sent it flying at the younger of the two women, smashing into her cheek. The older turned to her in a moment of concern. It paused the barrage of hurled knives long enough that the shadows of the women on the counter could grab their arms, pin them to their sides, and the shadows on the floor could take their ankles.
Teeth gritted, Ereshkigal looked around at her prisoners, shadow hauling the man into the kitchen to join them. She was still furious, but she couldn't think of any way to vent it that didn't involve just sadistically hurting them. "... Who the fuck are you?!" she eventually screamed.
"... Richard Duensing," the man eventually said. The three of them were smart, they didn't scream. If they'd screamed, she'd have to do something about it, and she wasn't entirely sure how controlled she'd be about it.
A tendril of shadow reached up, flattened, and slapped him in the face. "No you fucking aren't." He didn't even look like her father. "Who are you really?" She thinned the edges of the tendril even further, hardening them. Sharpening them. "Next one is sharp."
"... Reinhild," the younger woman said, glaring up at her, struggling against the shadow in a clear attempt to reach the knifeblock. "Reinhild Linse."
The adults suddenly broke out speaking to Reinhild in a language Ereshkigal couldn't quite make out. It sounded like German, but not quite. Ereshkigal knew German, but not well enough to understand a fast-paced, talking-over-each-other conversation in a language that wasn't quite right.
She could read tone, catch words here and there. It was definitely an argument. Keywords that came up frequently were 'ferräden' (which sounded a little similar to 'verraten', meaning 'betray'), and a word that sounded like 'benefactor'. Someone had set them up here - her father?
Eventually, the girl continued in English. "They gave us a home, that's all. We had to change our names but we could live in this place. We're thankful, but not so thankful we'd give our lives. The gift was our lives in the first place."
Ereshkigal's eyes narrowed. "Who's 'they'?" Her father had friends, huh.
"They called themselves 'Cauldron'," Reinhild said, shrugging as best she could while bound by shadow. "They told us little. Assigned us these names, this house. Taught us the language, how to live here without notice. They finally moved us in two days ago."
"'Finally'?" This hadn't been spur of the moment. This had been planned, they'd literally been training replacements. Whoever 'they' were.
The girl opened her mouth to speak, but then there was a tremendous boom, a shattering of glass, and a cracking sound passing between them.
She hadn't heard gunfire before. It took her a bit to identify it, between the unfamiliarity and the sheer shock of being shot at.
If she was honest with herself, Ereshkigal didn't figure it out until she turned to the source of the explosion, catching sight of a copper-haired woman loping across the lawn towards the house. The woman held a sleek black-and-stainless-steel gun in her hands, and was yelling into an earpiece. "Shots fired, moving to check it out!"
You fired them! Ereshkigal wanted to protest, not even sure why the woman was going through the trouble.
Was this an agent of this 'Cauldron'? There was definitely backup on the way, she wasn't sure how long… Could she take on a woman with a gun? Her hardened shadows were proven to be knifeproof, but were they bulletproof, even when this dense? She didn't know and she would prefer to test that out while she wasn't wearing them.
But she could just pin the woman before she fired, so she grabbed hold of the woman's shadow and sent it wrapping around her ank…les.
What the fuck? The woman must have been watching her shadow, she was already sidestepping even as it started to move, and the tendrils of shadow wrapped around empty space just a foot to the side of her ankles.
Dammit. Once she materialized shadow, it didn't follow the body automatically anymore. In that momentary gap between materialization and being grabbed, the woman had moved. Was this what fighting professionals was going to be like?
The woman continued to dance around the shadow as it continued to lash out for her, and the barrel of her gun settled, very deliberately, very pointedly, between Ereshkigal's eyes. Then shifted a degree or two to the side, and sent another bullet whipcracking past her ear.
The sound was so loud and concentrated that Ereshkigal flinched away, clutching her ear, though she could hear the woman yelling "Stand down and you will not be harmed!" A very, very clear warning shot.
… right, no, whether Ereshkigal could take this or not, she was no longer interested in finding out. This woman was proving to be way more trouble than she'd expected, backup was on the way and it would be more trouble on top. Whatever further information she could get here, it was better to run away, and fight another day, when she was better at it.
Ereshkigal simply dropped into her shadow. She wasn't exactly sure where she was going to come out, but she'd find a decent place nowhere near here.
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