Runaway

Yeah, it's a bit mindboggling to think that they bought superpowers for those reasons, but you make a good argument, I think...

Not mindboggling at all if you know about the White Mahogany Coffee Table. This is an item of furniture aboard one of those super-yachts. White mahogany does not occur in nature, you have to bleach it. In order for the owner of yacht to have his White Mahogany Coffee Table, he had to commission the invention of a process for bleaching mahogany.

Which he locked down with a bunch of NDAs and exclusivity contracts so only he would have a white mahogany coffee table.

Cost him about half a million dollars. For a coffee table. Aboard a yacht he only uses a few weeks a year. Just so's he can say nobody else has the like of what he's got.

Measured against that, I'm honestly surprised there aren't more rich fucks poncing about in spandex.

...I don't recall whether I've come across this before or not, but what did Calvert get hush money for?

The debacle at Ellisburg. Of course, if the coverers-up had been competent they'd have achieved the cover-up by burying him in the deepest darkest hole in the remotest prison the feds have got and then losing all the paperwork that he ever existed and arranging for him to be shanked in the prison showers. Because he literally committed murder to get out of Ellisburg faster. He shot one of his buddies in the back to get him out of the way. You do not trust someone like that to keep to a cover-up deal for mere money.

Give Piggott this, she was still doing the 'fighting' part of 'fighting retreat' when the goblins got her. And took her payoff in the chance to keep fighting after she should've been medically retired. Whatever her other qualities, she'll stick to something long after she should've quit.

Those cheaper shoes, though, wear out more quickly, so the poor person will have to buy another pair. And again, such that by the time the rich person's shoes wear out, the poor person has actually spent more money than the rich person did to stay shod for the same amount of time -- but because the poor person couldn't afford the up front cost of the good shoes, their only choices were pay more, or pay nothing but go barefoot, unless they could get shoes some other way entirely.

It's Vimes. Sam Vimes. The Vimes's Boots theory has made its way into formal economic discourse. Thus.

Your other option, though... is to try and toe the line. Go after them as much as you can, but not so much you lose the power to do anything. Try to do as much good as you can with power while still keeping power, and hope that you can build up enough force to one day make that single devastating strike after all. But in the mean time... the Empire's still there.
(My understanding is that this is basically the situation your Director Piggot is in.)

Yeah, that's what the greatest expert on fascism who ever lived (Hitler. I'm talking about Hitler. I trust his credentials in the matter are obvious.) meant when he said that the Nazi movement could not have been stopped by ordinary bourgeois means, which were the only means available to the Weimar Republic. He theorised that 'utmost brutality' was in fact the only way they could have been stopped.
 
Yeah, it's a bit mindboggling to think that they bought superpowers for those reasons, but you make a good argument, I think...

Man, some people put gold leaf on their food and eat it. It's wild the shit rich people will do just because they can and you can't, even if it actively worsens their experience.

Huh. Wow.

...Uh. Though, if I were them, that would make me intensely suspicious. So this enormous eldritch alien entity just happens to crash land in exactly the right way to hand a random person both the means and motive to kill her? Which then becomes a extremely useful tool for achieving things, so long as the user is willing to obey its directions on faith? And this enormous alien corpse is so simple to derive superpowers in a bottle from that it costs about seventy-five dollars, including the five hours of untrained labor required? My how incredibly lucky Cauldron has gotten there! Most definitely the Thinker is genuinely dead and this isn't in fact all going according to her actual plan...

I mean, as I understand it, in Worm canon that basically in fact did end up being the case, but... they didn't know that ahead of time. I guess they just kept operating on the basis of "Well, if we're actually all dancing to the Thinker's tune, we're basically all completely f****d no matter what we do, so we might as well assume we're not and try to win that scenario."

Honestly, I assume they are. But just, fundamentally... they're staring down the barrel of extinction as it is, they have potentially unsurpassable threats that they already know about to deal with. They can't afford to worry so much about a threat that might exist when they already have so many that do. They just have to do the best they can and hope enough of the bets they've made pan out that there's still a humanity past Gold Morning.

I'd guess there's presumably also an advertising aspect. Like, perhaps Person A isn't much use to them for favors, either because they're not in a position to give them or because they'd refuse. But Person A can pay cash, and they predict that if Person A buys powers, and they work well, Person B will hear about it. And Person B they couldn't reach directly, because Person B would be suspicious of strange women in fedoras showing up offering them superpowers, but person B, who can give them valuable favors and would do so in lieu of cash if they were buying at all, will trust the word of Person A and get interested enough to start making enquiries.

This is pretty dependent on pathing, but yes, if they wanna get favours owed from B, sometimes the best way to do it is to get a word-of-mouth reference from his good buddy A. Make that the favour he's gotta pay.

(They would prefer not to get a blabbermouth who'd talk to B on his own accord, because they have a secrecy policy, him being a blabbermouth may do one thing they want but it's gonna do a bunch of other things they don't want, so they're gonna have to shut him up once he does what they wanted. Preferably not killing him, it raises a lot of red flags and draws attention, but if giving him a good scare won't do the job it is on the table)

...I don't recall whether I've come across this before or not, but what did Calvert get hush money for?

Ellisburg. They gave him a very generous severance package because it was a horrendous clusterfuck of a paramilitary operation and the PRT really didn't want the details of how badly they'd screwed the pooch to get out.

(Emily Piggot got a similar sweetheart deal, a really big desk job as a PRT branch head - presumably after a training stint. 'cause like, she was a squaddie, otherwise she'd just have been shuffled off as a secretary somewhere. She might still be branch head by now, she's pretty damn competent and she could've worked her way up, but she'd be new)

re the economy of Brockton Bay:
Ah, and thanks there, too. Their propaganda is apparently good enough to even fool those out-of-universe. Might even be convenient for them to point to Leviathan as, oh, you know, we would have helped the shipping industries and the poor people of Brockton Bay out of that little temporary economic slump, but, oh, Endbringers, what can one do?

I mean, I can't blame them for the shipping industry drying up. There's a lot of decision-makers throughout a whole economy that lead to things like this, and honestly the elite of Brockton Bay weren't even on that list - the shipping business was their gravy train, they didn't want to fry it, they just had enough money to eat the loss, moved on, and didn't bother to look at or think about those they left behind.

Oh? You think he might have become an independent hero after his time in the Wards, instead of joining the Protectorate?

Well, not so directly a map as 'totally an independent hero' (he would have to also lose faith in the government for that). But 'rich rando' unmasked face while he uses his money to make the city a better place even if it has to be one family at a time, while also caping for the problems that have to have the shit beaten out of them to be solved.

Of course, in theory, you did put work in, taking on responsibility for upkeep and repairs and the like. The family renting the house doesn't need to worry about any of that; they can just call you, and you'll take care of it!
...Yeeeeah, so... how well is that working about for most renters at the moment, though? Does the modern landlord have a reputation as a stalwart friend of the renter, a comfort to have, someone who specializes in keeping their homes in tip-top shape so they can focus on other things?
Not so much! More someone who buys as cheap as they can, rents for as high as they can, and does the absolute bare minimum upkeep they think they can get away with.

Lol I just had the apartment above me flooding for literally an hour before maintenance arrived and did anything. Literally not a word from management, it dripped down to me badly enough I was having panic attacks, and hit the one below me too. Maintenance guy eventually arrived and I'm still not sure if it was a fourty-minutes-later response to my emails (not like the manager responded to them) or a ten-minutes later response to the lady below me finding the after-hours maintenance number and calling them directly.

Though I will say, there's still the potential matter of different kinds of injustice. It's one thing, for instance, to not notice that you're actually a bad landlord, if you're distant enough from your tenants, but another to ignore how one of your dinner guests sure seems to be saying some very favorable things about Adolf Hitler.

I mean, Adolf Hitler did do one very good thing we all must celebrate: He killed Adolf Hitler :p

But yes there are different kinds that're easier to spot, and that one may care more about.

Something which can also lead to the difficult position of... well, you know you're well-intentioned. You hate the Nazis, you want to help the ordinary people of Brockton Bay regardless of color or creed. But to do that, you have to stay in power. You know that a lot of people who could either support you in power or support you being removed are at best much less opposed to the E88 than you are, and you know how great a risk there is that your replacement, should you be removed, would also be quite a bit less opposed to them. So... do you try and go after the E88 hard and fast, hoping you can take them out and make it a fait accompli before you can be removed? That's a big job, though -- and if you fail, you lose it all. Your other option, though... is to try and toe the line. Go after them as much as you can, but not so much you lose the power to do anything. Try to do as much good as you can with power while still keeping power, and hope that you can build up enough force to one day make that single devastating strike after all. But in the mean time... the Empire's still there.
(My understanding is that this is basically the situation your Director Piggot is in.)

And for Emily, in the end, the system has to remain. You have to do your change, even change for the better, at a pace that doesn't break the system. Because she's seen the system disappear, and it manifested as her best friends getting eaten. She defaults to a conservative approach, a sustainable pace of change, because she's terrified of what happens when society breaks down.

That's my preferred read on her at least. While the distaste for her throughout the fandom is ridiculous and based on nonsense, there is a basis for her to be a much more typical agent of the state, a cop in all its terrible glory. But I prefer to go against that grain, both because I wanted to be able to actually like my protagonist, and because Worm fanfic so often has her be a shithead in the wrong damn ways and makes her a parody of herself, and I don't want to associate myself with those writers or go in a path that even resembles theirs.


She has an interlude during the Leviathan fight. One of the things she thinks on is how Taylor is always observing the situation, assessing, planning, and then moving in with swift and decisive brutality to achieve her desired end. And how that way of being is probably better at using Tattlepower than Lisa herself is. (It's arguable - Taylor doesn't have the charm or the sheer verbal cruelty that lets Tattletale be such an effective social operator - but it's what came into Lisa's mind and there definitely are things Taylor could pull off with Lisa's power that Lisa never could. There are things Lisa could pull off that Taylor never could, so it's basically a question of how many are in each category, and what the overall value of each list reaches)


Though, uh... this is dissonant enough that I hesitate to mention it, but while I was reading that, my brain appears to have taken "That's good of him!", combined it with something from earlier in your post, and returned with "I wonder how Dean looks in a dress?" :D

I will quote Alex's thought from the last chapter they interacted:

Article:
Momentarily, Alex pictured a female Dean. Yeeaaaah his looks were the type that'd transfer well across genders. His personality would probably be twirling in skirts within the second day just to try it out, even if he - she? - decided against.


So... damn fine.

Though I assume, unless I've very much missed something, that that's not a reason Alex has for being leery of him.

Nah that was just me being cutesy about saying 'he's Crusader yo'. Alex's reason for considering him a worse person is A: Claire does set a pretty high bar to beat, and B: he's fucking sus. Like, he doesn't sieg heil in public but you deal with a guy for a while and you start getting an idea of his opinions, especially when there are brown people in the club.

Double-especially when as previously noted, Dean can't really not see 'this bitch is a Nazi' and even if he can't find a crime to pin on the guy and lock him away forever, he can at least tip off his he-thinks-she's-a-gay-man friend so they don't wander into a dangerous position.

Ah. ...And if he'd lived long enough to realize that he'd probably be a much worse person if they had taken more of a personal interest, without themselves being quite different people, I doubt that would have made him feel much better about it.

Probably not, no. I mean he'd be glad he got to the place he did, but it wouldn't have been a very happy road.

Ahh, thrift stores. Well, I'm thinking of one in particular for me. I visited two in the area, but one of them only once, as that one's a religious one of some variety of Christianity and I got the impression from the visit I did make that being seen as too unusual might be particularly problematic there.

Yeah don't go to the Salvation Army, they fund homophobes and turn away queers. Their shelters are for proselytization. Like, stay away for your own safety and comfort, and stay away because they don't deserve money, every cent spent at Salvation Army is going into the coffers of homophobes, and some of that is being spent on advancing the cause of hate.

If it's not Salvation Army, the case might vary (they're just the big one so it's my initial assumption). But... suspicion is wise when you're queer and dealing with organized and explicitly Christian groups, if you haven't actively looked into them. It's not fair to the ones that're okay, but enough aren't that we need to protect ourselves, and we have the right to do that.

But the other one, that one I've been to multiple times (still nervously, but I think with less reason to be), and for a while it was convenient that, oh, thrift stores, you know, things can get jumbled up, put in the wrong places, and who's to say whether this particular bit of clothing was originally made for women or not? It's fairly androgynous, and it fits, so, you know, even if there might be certain suspicions about it...

You can also just go "It's for my girlfriend, I know her sizes" if called on it. Or if looked at suspiciously.

The ultimate technique is going with a ciswoman, if you've got one in your pocket. Obviously she's the one shopping there and you're just coming along, nobody will question a 'boy' in the women's section if they're accompanied by a woman that passes.

Though I did get bolder at that one later, when there consistently weren't problems or even challenges. It's where, for instance, I got what's still the only dress I own, which was a tremendously lucky find because I was still too timid to try it on in the store and basically just eyeballed it, bought it and hoped... and then when I got it home it did indeed fit, and, oh, hello gender euphoria.

Yesssss, it's just like that. The skirt goes spinny.

The debacle at Ellisburg. Of course, if the coverers-up had been competent they'd have achieved the cover-up by burying him in the deepest darkest hole in the remotest prison the feds have got and then losing all the paperwork that he ever existed and arranging for him to be shanked in the prison showers. Because he literally committed murder to get out of Ellisburg faster. He shot one of his buddies in the back to get him out of the way. You do not trust someone like that to keep to a cover-up deal for mere money.

To be fair, he never did roll over on them. Inadviseable as it might seem it worked out.

I mean he used the hush money to become a Bond villain, conquer a city, and try to declare it an independent microstate. But he didn't blow the whistle about Ellisburg!

(And the former might have been intentional. By Wormtime Cauldron and thus the PRT's bosses did want to see him take it down so they could observe a parahuman warlord in the First World and assess exactly how hard they'd need to ride herd on the parahuman warlords they expected to be ruling more or less everywhere by the end of things. They may have just jumped on an interesting prospect when he started getting there, or they may have pathed it. If it's the latter, they could have fully intended him to get that money, get out quick, and get started all the way back in 2001 when the aftermath of Ellisburg was being sorted out. Maybe even before, when the intervention into Nilbog was first being planned. And if that's the case, it may explain why they put a then-inexperienced Director at the helm of Brockton Bay, one of the more clusterfuck cities in the US - she was set up to fail from the very beginning, and took longer to than they ever could have reasonably expected)

Give Piggott this, she was still doing the 'fighting' part of 'fighting retreat' when the goblins got her. And took her payoff in the chance to keep fighting after she should've been medically retired. Whatever her other qualities, she'll stick to something long after she should've quit.

God, she's such a fun character like that.

Yeah, that's what the greatest expert on fascism who ever lived (Hitler. I'm talking about Hitler. I trust his credentials in the matter are obvious.) meant when he said that the Nazi movement could not have been stopped by ordinary bourgeois means, which were the only means available to the Weimar Republic. He theorised that 'utmost brutality' was in fact the only way they could have been stopped.

Well, he's probably tooting his own horn about how hard he was. But it would've taken a society that didn't have sympathies for him rampant in the halls of power, that didn't let him out of jail two years after an attempted coup d'etat, that was willing to actually just arrest him and his supporters when they murdered people, and that was willing to make the changes and improvements in society that would remove the fundamental bitterness he was appealing to.

Like, the Weimar Republic wasn't able to deal with him, and the Soviet Union would have laughed him off and tossed him in a gulag, the expert and I are agreed on those points. I just don't think it would've taken all that much. All you really need is non-complicity.
 
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Shelter 2.5
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Her father's fingers were digging through her skull.

Persephone couldn't breathe. A red leather glove clasped over her mouth stopped her from screaming as she looked into her father's eyes. They gazed at her dispassionately, his other hand reaching into her brain. Wherever his fingers pried, she could feel shadows sweeping away memories of her mother, snuffing out points of light one by one, until the interior of her skull was empty of anything but writhing darkness.

She woke to the sound of screaming, and realized a bit later, after some panicked hyperventilation, that it was her own echoing back at her. She shuddered and gagged as she rolled over, tears streaming down her face as she tried to catch her breath. She reached, hesitantly, for the back of her head. Perfectly solid, without a hint of dripping cranial fluid.

She knew what cranial fluid looked like now.

She broke down into heaving sobs for a minute. It had felt so real. Or at least, real-esque, since she didn't know what having fingers rooting around in your brain felt like. Her heart was hammering in her ears. Finally, she reached for her alarm clock.

2AM. She'd barely been asleep four hours.

Ugh… that was so goddamn unfair. She'd had a success last night, and she still didn't get relief from the nightmares. Not an unmitigated one - she should have done more testing on how long her constructs lasted, her calling card dissolving before it got received was embarrassing - but still, overall. She'd got in and out easily, without having to fight, with a whole lot of cash in hand. Not as much as she'd wanted but enough to sit on her ass for months. And she still got a night terror after all that hard and successful work.

Thankfully, she was too hyped on adrenaline to fall back asleep and get another round of that. So instead she levered herself out of bed (well, mattress) and stumbled over to her testing area, a wide-open space on the warehouse floor almost indistinguishable from any other.

She'd snagged a gun last night because she really needed to know what her shadow costume could hold up against. Could she rely on it against gunfire, or did she need to dodge bullets entirely? That was a question she'd really rather not have needed to know but Brockton Bay was a disaster of a city and given all the armed guards, even a low-key thief was gonna get shot at. Let alone whatever secret agents of Cauldron she ran into, or whatever that copper-haired woman had been.

Persephone looked around her warehouse, frowning. She needed a backing. She needed to see what the bullet did to the thing behind the shadow. She certainly wasn't going to use herself for it, and the warehouse floor was too hard - just because the bullet didn't pass through her shadow with enough force to damage concrete didn't mean her tender and succulent flesh could eat it. She needed a softer target.

She didn't exactly have a whole lot of stuff lying around, but eventually she just gave up and pulled a bottle of water from her collection. Wrapping a shadow around it, thin and flowing, solidified and strengthened, the way her outfit wrapped around her.

She aimed the gun at it from fairly close - she had nothing approaching marksmanship - and pulled the trigger, to a resounding click. Right, guns had safeties. She wasn't exactly an expert, but it was user-friendly enough that she found the switch after a moment's inspection, flicked it, and took aim again.

This time, it barked in her hand and let loose its payload. It pounded into her palms uncomfortably, and she didn't at all keep it under control, but the bullet hit the water bottle, at least. Her ears were spared - the shadow earplugs she'd stuck in did their job, taking the edge off the sound. If she was gonna get those aimed at her and whipping by, hearing protection was definitely in order.

The actual test… well, the plastic of the water bottle wasn't damaged. Nothing had penetrated the shadow. But the bottlecap had still burst, spilling water all over the warehouse floor. There was no penetration, but it had still delivered enough of a kick to stove in the plastic and force the water out the top. Wouldn't kill her, but it would sure hurt.

And that was pistol rounds. Persephone didn't know that much about guns, but she knew there were bigger bullets and smaller bullets, and handguns were the smallest of them all. She'd need to do separate tests to see if she could hold up against high-powered military-type rounds.

Even for mall cops, she'd need more padding, and more tests. Possibly more water bottles, she might run out at this rate. She'd survive with the thin costume, but she'd like to not take hits hard enough to pop water bottles, so some more was merited.

Testing ate up another couple hours, the ammo in the gun, and most of her adrenaline. And a bit of her faith in humanity, for that matter. She hadn't thought gunshots at 2AM would arouse much attention in the Docks, but it was still depressing to actually do it, empty an entire clip without anyone so much as knocking on the door to check.

Then again, this place where no one paid attention to gunfire was exactly where she'd decided to be.

She was flailing around and it showed. She was turning into a bit more of a criminal than she'd meant to. None of it made her feel guilty - the bank's money was being used to buy thugs and did far better in her pocket, the Enforcers had to be stopped from hurting that redhead, and the fake family had literally been squatting in her house and stealing her identity. But it all looked real bad.

That was pretty much fine if she was going to take care of all of this herself, life of crime and taking vengeance personally. But it was closing off options, and ostensibly law enforcement existed to deal with crime like your father murdering your mother, and now that those options were disappearing and she'd just discovered her father had a whole criminal organization, she was starting to rethink.

Should she have gone to the cops? Persephone was gay in Brockton Bay, she knew better than to trust the cops. They ignored crimes targeting queers as long and shamelessly as they could manage, mostly because they were covering for their fellow cops who had committed said crimes. She'd considered it and dismissed it in the space of a second, originally. She'd heard too much about how domestic abuse calls went to have any faith that they wouldn't just hand her straight over to her father.

But the cops - the Protectorate, PRT, BBPD, the whole array - had a whole lot of tools, resources, people, and firepower. There was a reason the queer community asked for their help with violent crime in the first place, even though it was pulling teeth to get any. What was nightmarishly hard to a collection of random queers was trivial to law enforcement. And now Persephone had a glance at what was backing her father - the fact that this Cauldron could replace people it murdered, get them ready for it long in advance, and mess with records enough to make that replacement viable instead of a joke, that was a terrifying level of power and pull. And she couldn't help wanting someone backing her against that.

Now that that window was closing faster than she'd expected, just as she realized she might want to get back in it, she couldn't help having second thoughts.

And she was even more worried about that Alex guy now. He was a witness. He would have been next on the list to deal with, there was a mysterious and terrifying organization backing her father, and he'd said her father knew where he lived. Went ducking in to get supplies before Richard Duensing caught up. There were so many red flags to his fate, and Persephone had just let him go and do it. She'd kept herself safe, splitting up from him, refusing to go where her father might follow, and she'd never even thought to stop him, to keep him out of that dangerous place he'd been going into.

She should have stopped him. He'd saved her, and she hadn't thought to save him.

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Persephone... poor girl...

At least she's aware that her current trajectory is more than a little dicey. Hopefully once she gets some rest and does a little more self-reflection she'll figure out a better path.
 
Today's escort was Lieutenant Claire Otsoa, a pretty woman with long copper-blonde hair she knew from HEMA classes.
Hang on a minute...
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'?
The copper-haired woman spoke into a cellphone as she checked their pulses with a slim and elegant finger resting lightly next to their throats. Ring on the little finger of that hand, the left, made of facet-cut steel. She seemed… very observant. She was dressed in what Reinhild was fairly sure was casual clothing for this world, a blouse and skirt, but there was nothing else casual about her. Her movements were those of someone familiar with violence and very ready for it. Her diction was clipped and precise, and she showed no fear at having faced an empowered monster.

Worse - there was the hint of a grin on her lips and a light in her eyes, exultation and excitement from the encounter. She was one of the really crazy ones. Dangerous in every direction. And here for a purpose that likely wasn't to their benefit. Reinhild made a mental note to speak to her as little as possible. There was no telling what information the woman was after, or what she'd do once she had it.
Normally Lieutenant Otsoa would be here too, as the initial investigator into that first appearance, but as one of Emily's few absolutely trusted personnel, she had a higher-priority duty at the moment and would have to review the footage on her own later.
...have they set the fox to guard the henhouse?
 
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Hang on a minute...



...have they set the fox to guard the henhouse?

Either that, or Claire was spying on the family for Emily. She probably wouldn't have been able to justify charging into a family home if she'd been 'passively observing' but if she were actively snooping and saw something she could create the justification for stopping Ereshkigal... well. 'Shots Fired.' Was never able to confirm where those came from.

That actually makes more sense than her being a Cauldron agent, in my mind.
 
There's also 2.3.

"We were running a stakeout on the Duensing house, to watch the fakes. An unknown parahuman attacked them just a few minutes ago. Shortly before, Persephone was seen in front of the house. The agent didn't recognize them at the time, but after a review of the footage, the girl in question very much resembles the sketch. We'll want you to check the footage."

The PRT was monitoring the Duensing house - Claire was there on Emily's behalf, and her appearance in Reinhild's interlude was her nosing around and trying to pry out their secrets (and Reinhild and her family are Cauldron plants). If she were there as a Cauldron agent, they don't exactly have any secrets of interest.

Persephone just doesn't know there's an investigation, so her only guess for why an armed agent is around the house was as Cauldron security.

Of course this isn't to say she or one of Emily's handpicked team aren't Cauldron agents. But there hasn't been evidence of that yet, just Persephone misidentifying her opponent because she didn't even know the PRT was in the game.
 
@ConsiderableHat re the White Mahogany Coffee Table:
...Wow. You know, and one point, I did some fantasy design for a private railcar I might commission if I won a large enough lottery, but I was skeptical I'd actually do it even in that highly unlikely scenario, since I didn't think I'd use it enough and even allowing other people to charter it might not get enough use out of it to justify the cost. But compared to behavior like that...

And yeah, looked at that way, buying superpowers just for the exclusivity does indeed seem less mindboggling.

ConsiderableHat said:
The debacle at Ellisburg.
Huh. I didn't realize that that had been hushed up.

re Piggot vs. Calvert:
Yeah, when you want to pay off the two survivors of a debacle to hush it up, one of them was quite willing to murder his comrades and asks for lots of money and few questions about how he's spending it, and the other was fighting pretty much to the last and just asks to not be given a cushy medical discharge and instead keep doing a hard but valuable job for you, maaaaybe the former person should not be given quite as much trust as the latter.

re the Vimes's Boots theory:
...Well, I'm embarrassed for forgetting it was Vimes himself. Thanks!
(I also don't think I knew it had gotten into formal discourse; neat, and thanks.)

Yeah, that's what the greatest expert on fascism who ever lived (Hitler. I'm talking about Hitler. I trust his credentials in the matter are obvious.) meant when he said that the Nazi movement could not have been stopped by ordinary bourgeois means, which were the only means available to the Weimar Republic. He theorised that 'utmost brutality' was in fact the only way they could have been stopped.
Ah, I don't know if I'd heard that; thanks.

Though I'm not sure I would credit Hitler as the greatest-ever expert on fascism; after all, his attempt to put it into practice certainly didn't work out very well for him. Franco, on the other hand, for instance ([checks Wikipedia for details]), managed to rule for over three decades and die peacefully in bed at the age of eighty-two.

Pale Wolf said:
some people put gold leaf on their food and eat it
Ah. Right. I think I had heard of that, now that you mention it.

It's wild the shit rich people will do just because they can and you can't, even if it actively worsens their experience.
It does seem so, aye.

Honestly, I assume they are. But just, fundamentally... they're staring down the barrel of extinction as it is, they have potentially unsurpassable threats that they already know about to deal with. They can't afford to worry so much about a threat that might exist when they already have so many that do. They just have to do the best they can and hope enough of the bets they've made pan out that there's still a humanity past Gold Morning.
Right.

This is pretty dependent on pathing, but yes, if they wanna get favours owed from B, sometimes the best way to do it is to get a word-of-mouth reference from his good buddy A. Make that the favour he's gotta pay.
Makes sense.

They would prefer not to get a blabbermouth who'd talk to B on his own accord, because they have a secrecy policy, him being a blabbermouth may do one thing they want but it's gonna do a bunch of other things they don't want, so they're gonna have to shut him up once he does what they wanted. Preferably not killing him, it raises a lot of red flags and draws attention, but if giving him a good scare won't do the job it is on the table
I wasn't so much thinking of a general blabbermouth, for that sort of reason, yeah.

re the hush money deal:
ConsiderableHat already answered this, but thanks for the additional information.

I mean, I can't blame them for the shipping industry drying up. There's a lot of decision-makers throughout a whole economy that lead to things like this, and honestly the elite of Brockton Bay weren't even on that list - the shipping business was their gravy train, they didn't want to fry it, they just had enough money to eat the loss, moved on, and didn't bother to look at or think about those they left behind.
Ah, thanks; makes sense.

re future!Dean's cape career:
Ah, thanks.

Lol I just had the apartment above me flooding for literally an hour before maintenance arrived and did anything.
Yeeeeeeeep.
Sorry about you having such a proximate and personal example to share, though.

it dripped down to me badly enough I was having panic attacks
Oh, sorry!

I remember one time when I was living in an on-campus student apartment, and one day I woke up to the sound of running water and lots of it from my bathroom. Since I was the only one living in the apartment, this was rather concerning, and indeed I discovered that there appeared to be a small waterfall coming out of the bathroom ceiling. Fortunately, IIRC, it happened to only fall on water resistant or proof things and I was able to erect dams of paper towels to stop it spreading off the tile, and it was furthermore because of something that went wrong in plumbing work already ongoing, thus no wait for people to arrive to fix it -- but still, not really the nicest thing to wake up to. And I recall hearing it was worse on the other side of the building, too.

I mean, Adolf Hitler did do one very good thing we all must celebrate: He killed Adolf Hitler
Indeed. :D

And for Emily, in the end, the system has to remain. You have to do your change, even change for the better, at a pace that doesn't break the system. Because she's seen the system disappear, and it manifested as her best friends getting eaten. She defaults to a conservative approach, a sustainable pace of change, because she's terrified of what happens when society breaks down.
Ahh, yes, that makes sense, though I'd not thought of it; thanks!

Of course, it could be viewed as increasing the risk of an actually Ellisburg-type situation, someone with a particular sort of power deciding that the system'd completely failed them and so they'd replace it entirely with their own system, and anyone in the way was an acceptable loss -- but statistically, Ellisburg-type situations are quite rare, so the increased risk is still a small risk. Less extreme but still highly destructive breakdowns are much more likely, and she probably is significantly decreasing the risk of one of those.

While the distaste for her throughout the fandom is ridiculous and based on nonsense
There's particular distaste for her in the fandom? My impression is that she's generally portrayed as pretty reasonable, intelligent, and dedicated, even when she's an antagonist.

and because Worm fanfic so often has her be a shithead
...Huh.

re Lisa speculating on Tattlepower!Taylor:
Ah, thanks.

re Dean in a dress:
:D

Nah that was just me being cutesy about saying 'he's Crusader yo'.
Thought so, but thanks. :)

re the in-character reasons for being wary of Justin:
Makes sense; thanks.

Probably not, no. I mean he'd be glad he got to the place he did, but it wouldn't have been a very happy road.
Right.

Yeah don't go to the Salvation Army, they fund homophobes and turn away queers. Their shelters are for proselytization. Like, stay away for your own safety and comfort, and stay away because they don't deserve money, every cent spent at Salvation Army is going into the coffers of homophobes, and some of that is being spent on advancing the cause of hate.

If it's not Salvation Army, the case might vary (they're just the big one so it's my initial assumption).
...Ah. Well, this was a local one, not as far as I know affiliated with a non-local organization, but I have in passing dropped some change in the red kettles before, and I think I did buy some things at one of their stores years ago (though admittedly that wasn't a store I chose but one my dad took me to when helping me move). I guess I won't make that mistake again. I didn't realize they were that bad, just, oh, the Salvation Army, they go around and do... some sort of charity, not entirely sure what, but this kettle's closer than a change machine anyway. Sigh; sorry.

But... suspicion is wise when you're queer and dealing with organized and explicitly Christian groups, if you haven't actively looked into them. It's not fair to the ones that're okay, but enough aren't that we need to protect ourselves, and we have the right to do that.
Yeah. And IIRC, I did look into this one somewhat before going, didn't find anything that looked too negative... but I'm not entirely sure, even less so now given how much I apparently didn't know about the Salvation Army, and add to that that I got a bit personally uncomfortable there and didn't even at least on that trip find all that much I was interested in, I don't think I'll be going back.

You can also just go "It's for my girlfriend, I know her sizes" if called on it. Or if looked at suspiciously.
Hah, well, I'd prefer not to lie about it and would more prefer to not be questioned in the first place (and being looked at suspiciously seems like it'd be better countered by just acting as if This Is Perfectly Normal, so as not to look suspiciously defensive), but yeah, I think I have gone in with some just-in-case deflections in mind.
(I will say, it really helped me along when a friend was holding an explicitly fancy dress wedding, and IIRC their suggestion on the invitation was what got me looking into local thrift stores in the first place. And were I to be there and challenged, well, why, this is for a fancy dress occasion, and surely that context makes it completely above any suspicion, yes?)

The ultimate technique is going with a ciswoman, if you've got one in your pocket.
I don't, as far as I'm thinking of, unfortunately. I did meet one (well, as far as I know she's cis, at least) who joined my RPG group not all that long before I realized I was trans and came out to said group, at which point she was very supportive, buuuut this was also just before she moved to another city for work. She's still in the RPG group since we play over the internet (which has come in handy before for people moving, or temporarily for them being sick but not feeling too bad to play, and of course it came in very handy during the pandemic), but her current residence isn't "casually go shopping together at a thrift store with an unpredictable enough stock that any given visit might result in finding nothing of interest" close. Though I suppose there are also non-thrift stores... also not an option at the moment, though. Eh, I only have so much room to store clothes, anyway.

(Though you've gotten me thinking a bit now, and while I've gotten more, if not perfectly, comfortable with that thrift store now, the shoe store I've been thinking of visiting is an unknown... and, well, I could truthfully say "Oh, I have an invitation to a fancy dress wedding" without mentioning that the wedding did in fact already take place in 2019...)

Yesssss, it's just like that. The skirt goes spinny.
:D

Though I've not been all that successful at spinning the skirt yet; there's not really enough clear space in my room for it, and the one time I wore it in a hotel room I was low on time. I do wonder if there's a trick to it I'm not aware of, and/or more nimble shoes would help.

she was set up to fail from the very beginning, and took longer to than they ever could have reasonably expected
Though wouldn't that imply that they didn't path that part out?
 
Though I'm not sure I would credit Hitler as the greatest-ever expert on fascism; after all, his attempt to put it into practice certainly didn't work out very well for him.
Well, fascism as a government (as distinct from the rallying ideal of a lot of malcontents) doesn't so much have failure modes as consist of them. Hitler, Mussolini, et. al. were basically trying to nail wet turds to the ceiling.

Franco, for his part, wasn't actually a fascist: he was a monarchist and a conservative and Spain's first dictator after a nasty civil war, as part of which last thing he did most of the things in the Standard Fascist Playbook on the social, law enforcement, and civic government side, and almost none of the economic nonsense and absolutely none of the warmongering.

Following which his policies built the foundations of what we now know as modern Spain, which is a standard-issue european liberal democracy.

Complicated character, Franco. Which is to say: absolutely an arsehole, just an arsehole with more nuance than your garden-variety fash.
 
They may not have thought it necessary- Contessa's time is a finite resource after all. Considering all the things she has to keep track of, it's not surprising that a few parts that SHOULD have been "pathed out" weren't.
 
Not mindboggling at all if you know about the White Mahogany Coffee Table. This is an item of furniture aboard one of those super-yachts. White mahogany does not occur in nature, you have to bleach it. In order for the owner of yacht to have his White Mahogany Coffee Table, he had to commission the invention of a process for bleaching mahogany.

Which he locked down with a bunch of NDAs and exclusivity contracts so only he would have a white mahogany coffee table.

Cost him about half a million dollars. For a coffee table. Aboard a yacht he only uses a few weeks a year. Just so's he can say nobody else has the like of what he's got.
Do you remember where you heard this story? White mahogany does exist in nature, so if it's real I suspect some details have been mixed up over time, but if not apocryphal it sounds very interesting.
 
Do you remember where you heard this story? White mahogany does exist in nature, so if it's real I suspect some details have been mixed up over time, but if not apocryphal it sounds very interesting.

White mahogany is a species of eucalyptus and yes, it's commercially-available timber that is basically wood-coloured. Fairly light shade, but wood coloured. This story is about someone who wanted his mahogany actually white. Buggered if I can remember the exact source, though. Or whether he knew enough to actually insist on actual swietana trees or could be fobbed off with sapele or something I don't know.

Apparently a gold shitter isn't enough for some people. That is documented in several places.
 
Ahh, yes, that makes sense, though I'd not thought of it; thanks!

Of course, it could be viewed as increasing the risk of an actually Ellisburg-type situation, someone with a particular sort of power deciding that the system'd completely failed them and so they'd replace it entirely with their own system, and anyone in the way was an acceptable loss -- but statistically, Ellisburg-type situations are quite rare, so the increased risk is still a small risk. Less extreme but still highly destructive breakdowns are much more likely, and she probably is significantly decreasing the risk of one of those.

Honestly, Emily doesn't get to touch the risk factors. She doesn't hold much political power and she's not likely to. What she can do is stop the breakdowns and replacement attempts, keep the system working and doing the things for people that it advertises to minimize those risk factors (ie "the government isn't doing anything about X crime so I guess I've gotta go out onto the streets and kill the ethnicity doing it"), and buy time for the people that actually do rule the world to pull their heads out of their asses and fix it.

There's particular distaste for her in the fandom? My impression is that she's generally portrayed as pretty reasonable, intelligent, and dedicated, even when she's an antagonist.

You've found the better parts of the fandom, congratulations.

...Ah. Well, this was a local one, not as far as I know affiliated with a non-local organization, but I have in passing dropped some change in the red kettles before, and I think I did buy some things at one of their stores years ago (though admittedly that wasn't a store I chose but one my dad took me to when helping me move). I guess I won't make that mistake again. I didn't realize they were that bad, just, oh, the Salvation Army, they go around and do... some sort of charity, not entirely sure what, but this kettle's closer than a change machine anyway. Sigh; sorry.

No need to apologize, you didn't know and they go to a point of having good press. Now you do.

Though wouldn't that imply that they didn't path that part out?

They didn't bother. The whole point of needing an assessment/experiment in the first place when they have godlike foresight is that there are gonna be more than enough blind spots and butterflies to throw off anything you might see to begin with, and as Southern Cross notes, Contessa-time is their only finite resource, so why blow it on something you already need to run a live case study on 'cause you don't know exactly how things are gonna pan out? They just wanna see what and how Coil will do. Exactly how much tyranny he descends to, exactly how much Cauldron can just leave to the new world to sort out itself in the wake of Scion.

I mean hell, if PRT ENE manages to remain free and standing even in the absence of outside support, even in the conditions of the post-apocalypse, that's the ideal end result. You don't even have to assess how parahuman dictators are gonna pan out if continuity of civilian government is maintained. If the answer is 'parahuman dictator doesn't happen' that's the best possible result.

Though depending on how much they've already discounted that possibility, they could be stacking the deck to get to the expected endpoint sooner so they can observe it. Alexandria has seemed fairly partial to Coil re that experiment so they aren't exactly approaching this with scientific detachment.

Following which his policies built the foundations of what we now know as modern Spain, which is a standard-issue european liberal democracy.

Complicated character, Franco. Which is to say: absolutely an arsehole, just an arsehole with more nuance than your garden-variety fash.

Eh. No, Franco actively and aggressively did not mean to build the foundations of a standard-issue European liberal democracy, and in fact the foundations his time laid out are the fracture points in that standard-issue European liberal democracy.

Franco had a successor all laid out. It was not the restoration of the monarchy and passing rule on to Juan Carlos. It was his Prime Minister, Luis Carrero Blanco. He was forced to restore the monarchy and pass that rule on because Basque terrorists murdered the fuck out of Carrero Blanco five years before, while he was a doddering old man who couldn't possibly cultivate another successor.

Modern-day Spain reached its current point by outright memory-holing the Franco dictatorship and pretending it never happened. There are huge problems still extant, including fash and fash-sympathizers still in power. A transgirl who published tweets making jokes about that assassination - of, again, a major fascist political figure, whose death created the opening for that liberal democracy, and was fourty-four years ago - was sentenced to prison and had her life path completely ruined by a further addendum to it. The sentence was revoked after her prison stay but the fact that it happened at all is deeply concerning. And her court-appointed lawyer outright told her that he was an admirer of Blanco (again, key figure in the dictatorship) and wanted to base her defence on a claim of insanity based on her being trans.

Franco was absolutely a fascist in every meaningful sense, he ruined Spain for generations, and none of his nuance or complexity is in a direction away from fascism or away from condemnation.

Antifascism was born in the Spanish Civil War, and the Republicans knew exactly what they were fighting against.
 
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@ConsiderableHat re whether Franco was a fascist:
Well, I'm aware that an exactly classification of what does and does not count as fascism can be difficult to pin down, but my understanding was that Franco was at least generally understood to be one? Sure, not exactly the same type as Hitler or Mussolini, but they weren't exactly the same as each other, either, and Imperial Japan was different from all three.

Southern Cross said:
They may not have thought it necessary- Contessa's time is a finite resource after all. Considering all the things she has to keep track of, it's not surprising that a few parts that SHOULD have been "pathed out" weren't.
Oh, yeah, but I was saying that specifically because of the context:
Pale Wolf said:
They may have just jumped on an interesting prospect when he started getting there, or they may have pathed it. If it's the latter, they could have fully intended him to get that money, get out quick, and get started all the way back in 2001 when the aftermath of Ellisburg was being sorted out. Maybe even before, when the intervention into Nilbog was first being planned. And if that's the case, it may explain why they put a then-inexperienced Director at the helm of Brockton Bay, one of the more clusterfuck cities in the US - she was set up to fail from the very beginning, and took longer to than they ever could have reasonably expected)
That is, the situation where they expected Director Piggot to fail sooner was, in that discussion, one in which they were applying Contessa time to at least part of the situation. As I read it, at least.

@Pale Wolf re Emily's capabilities:
Ah, good point, and thanks. Yeah, she doesn't, for example, have access to the resources she'd need to actually eliminate the E88, with how large, well-armed, and dug-in they are, at the very least not without a lot of collateral damage and who knows what in the aftermath, but she can still push back against them and try to stop their power growing.

You've found the better parts of the fandom, congratulations.
Huh. Well, good, but I wonder how that happened? I mean, at the very least, if I have read more negative portrayals of Director Piggot, they haven't stuck in my head the way the more positive ones have. At worst, I think I recall her being sometimes portrayed as unfairly prejudiced against parahumans, but still quite willing and able to work with them to try and help people?

(I mean, I do remember stronger in-universe criticism of her, but most strongly from people like Sophia Hess who... do not seem especially reliable sources on the matter.)

No need to apologize, you didn't know and they go to a point of having good press. Now you do.
Thanks. Still annoying, though.

Well, at least I don't think I need to worry about finding out the Rail Passengers Association (which I've more actively supported) is quietly anti-LGBT, given one of their top-level people is nonbinary. (As far as I've been able to gather, at least, from the news bulletins, where they joined presenting as female (though I don't know if that's what they thought or they just weren't out yet), then some time later were suddenly referred to with they/them pronouns and started doing what looked to me like some name experimentation. It was rather nice, seeing it just happen as so normal it didn't even need commenting on, though then again for all I know it was more explicit on some social media I wasn't on.)

And the local thrift shop I prefer is as far as I know a charity shop for a local normal non-religious hospital.

re Cauldron not pathing out Director Piggot:
Ah, thanks.

is that there are gonna be more than enough blind spots and butterflies to throw off anything you might see to begin with
Right. It's not all that useful if Contessa tells them that parahuman feudalism will work well if they do X, providing nothing on sizable list Y, most items on which they can little to no control over, happens to interfere, in which case who knows.

re the experiment potentially ending with Director Piggot still in charge and the implications of that:
Good point!

Though depending on how much they've already discounted that possibility, they could be stacking the deck to get to the expected endpoint sooner so they can observe it. Alexandria has seemed fairly partial to Coil re that experiment so they aren't exactly approaching this with scientific detachment.
Hm, maybe, but if they want to test how Director Piggot and her team would do in the postapocalypse, that could also be correcting for her not actually being in the postapocalypse, and presented with more outside threats than outside support, yet.

re Franco:
Ah, thanks; that's more in line with what I'd thought.
Though, yikes, re the current lingering issues in Spain. I'd remembered from a blog post by a Spanish person that the fact Spanish fascism was never really exactly defeated was still causing issues, but I don't think I'd realized things were as bad as the case you mention seems to indicate.
 
@ConsiderableHat re whether Franco was a fascist:
Well, I'm aware that an exactly classification of what does and does not count as fascism can be difficult to pin down, but my understanding was that Franco was at least generally understood to be one? Sure, not exactly the same type as Hitler or Mussolini, but they weren't exactly the same as each other, either, and Imperial Japan was different from all three.

The social, law enforcement, and civic government are the defining factors of fascism. Warmongering isn't really part of the playbook, except insofar as the nation they want, in terms of social fabric and often in terms of territory held, is absurd and making anyone sit down and take it often requires a war to assert that will. Franco didn't warmonger after the fact because he had his war, he won his war.

And fascism doesn't have an economic playbook. It's not an ideology really. It's rule by gutfeel, it doesn't have an implicit economic plan. So any individual country's fascism basically comes up with an economic playbook to suit that country's circumstances, with a minimal impact on the national elite.

Franco is neither a monarchist nor a conservative. Because conservatives don't launch a reactionary coup d'etat (he did not rise to power after a destructive civil war, he started the civil war to seize power). Monarchists don't appoint themselves dictator for life, supplant the actual monarchy, and plan to appoint whoever the fuck they feel like as the new monarch 'when he considers it convenient' (direct quote from Carrero Blanco talking to the actual legitimate heir to the throne btw).

Franco led a coalition including conservatives and monarchists, but he himself came from Falange, an explicitly fascist political party. The ruling party ostensibly merged with the Carlists but retained basically nothing of their ideology, the official ideology was a direct copypaste of Falange's.

@Pale Wolf re Emily's capabilities:
Ah, good point, and thanks. Yeah, she doesn't, for example, have access to the resources she'd need to actually eliminate the E88, with how large, well-armed, and dug-in they are, at the very least not without a lot of collateral damage and who knows what in the aftermath, but she can still push back against them and try to stop their power growing.

Nah, the E88 doesn't matter. The E88 is a symptom. What Emily would need to fix the problem presented by the E88 is a fix to the economy, where half the city is in fact no longer rotting in despair and left with no hope of escaping crushing poverty other than radicalism or crime.

More guns only solves the symptoms, it can't fix the fundamental problem and risk factors. And, as you note, she doesn't even have the more guns.

Huh. Well, good, but I wonder how that happened? I mean, at the very least, if I have read more negative portrayals of Director Piggot, they haven't stuck in my head the way the more positive ones have. At worst, I think I recall her being sometimes portrayed as unfairly prejudiced against parahumans, but still quite willing and able to work with them to try and help people?

Protagonist-centered morality. She was opposition to Taylor in canon, so a lot of readers decided that made her a bad person and the point was exaggerated and decayed over a decade of fanfiction that grows ever more disconnected from people who actually read the original text.

(I mean, I do remember stronger in-universe criticism of her, but most strongly from people like Sophia Hess who... do not seem especially reliable sources on the matter.)

Sophia never criticized her, Sophia was kinda a fan. (Which, granted, you can take as something to criticize :p ) The worst criticism came from Tattletale, whose moral condemnations have the weight of helium considering this is literally a violent warlord criticizing the person trying to stop their violent warlordism, and was explicitly trying to rattle Emily to make secrets shake loose as part of an interrogation. (Said criticism was mostly bullying over her weight tbh, and Emily was still winning that conversation so they gagged her. Which lends even less credence to when Tattletale describes her as an anti-parahuman bigot - because we know Tattletale gets bitchy about women that're smarter than she is)

re Franco:
Ah, thanks; that's more in line with what I'd thought.
Though, yikes, re the current lingering issues in Spain. I'd remembered from a blog post by a Spanish person that the fact Spanish fascism was never really exactly defeated was still causing issues, but I don't think I'd realized things were as bad as the case you mention seems to indicate.

To be clear it's not all the time. The sentence was overturned. But even once is bad mojo. Thaaat's what happens when you just kinda forget about your fascist dictatorship instead of pursuing a reckoning with it.

Not that I don't understand. That reckoning would've been messy, and wouldn't necessarily have succeeded. That fascist dictatorship was the apparatus of government, and it had already won a war over the matter.
 
I didn't realize they were that bad, just, oh, the Salvation Army, they go around and do... some sort of charity, not entirely sure what, but this kettle's closer than a change machine anyway.
Oh, the anti-LGBTQ stuff is the least of what they've done.

View: https://youtu.be/HUpvVksZ7GQ

There's also a memorial in Philadelphia for people who died when a Salvation Army thrift shop collapsed. TBF, it had a brick wall dropped on it, but 1) the organization knew the building next door was being demolished and didn't close the store down for the duration and 2) if the building had been properly maintained, it might have held up under the masonry that fell on it long enough for an evacuation. I mean, it would have collapsed anyway but it might've taken longer.
 
@Pale Wolf re fascism and Franco:
Ah, thanks for the information.

re the E88:
Weeeell, on the one hand, yes, the E88 is a symptom, and to really fix things, the underlying issues would also need to be addressed. Take the E88 out without doing that, and it'll likely just be replaced with one or more other groups trying to take some degree of power for their own goals.

However, I wouldn't go so far as to say that, because of that, the E88 doesn't matter; a symptom can still be dangerous, and it can still be important to treat or at least manage it even if that by itself isn't going to cure the symptom's cause.

Protagonist-centered morality. She was opposition to Taylor in canon, so a lot of readers decided that made her a bad person and the point was exaggerated and decayed over a decade of fanfiction that grows ever more disconnected from people who actually read the original text.
I was actually more wondering about how I happened to unknowingly select less anti-Piggot works, but still thanks for the information.

Sophia never criticized her, Sophia was kinda a fan.
...Huh. Yeah, I'm not remembering coming across that. Wow.

The worst criticism came from Tattletale
Huh.

Said criticism was mostly bullying over her weight tbh
...And that was supposed to work? A schoolyard taunt against a woman who is well aware of her physical issues, which she got fighting in Ellisburg, which she was good enough at to be one of only two non-parahuman survivors of and without murdering any of her comrades? And who remained such a dedicated believer in her work that, even after that, when she was offered a large bribe as hush money and presumably the start of a very cushy retirement, she instead chose a promotion and more responsibility even if it meant being stuck in one of the worse director postings the PRT has? Really?

and Emily was still winning that conversation
Oh my. What a tremendous shock. However did that happen.

Which lends even less credence to when Tattletale describes her as an anti-parahuman bigot - because we know Tattletale gets bitchy about women that're smarter than she is
Ah, thanks.

To be clear it's not all the time. The sentence was overturned.
Well, that's good, at least.

Not that I don't understand. That reckoning would've been messy, and wouldn't necessarily have succeeded. That fascist dictatorship was the apparatus of government, and it had already won a war over the matter.
Right. I'd imagine the choice was seen as something like:
Option One, you smoothly transition to a democracy, at the cost of just kind of... leaving all the enthusiastic fascists just kind of around with no consequences or the like, so that they mostly just grumble about the changes they don't like but don't mind quite enough to try really hard to stop you.
Option Two, you try and do something about the fascists... who have had decades in power to entrench themselves and consider how to stay in power. And maybe this ends in purging the fascists from power, but it also quite possibly ends in either the Second Spanish Civil War or just the fascists turning out to have enough support for their status quo that they don't even need to fight another war to end up back on top.

@tortiecat:
...Ooooookay, well! That, uh. Yikes. Can't say I'm particularly happy to have that information, but better to be informed on it than not, I think, given the strength of their PR machine, so thanks for it.
 
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You know I really wonder what would have happened if Persephone had gone with Alex at the start of the story. I may be compelled to write fanfiction of fanfiction.
 
Shelter 2.6
==========

Alex had finished in time, though barely. Basically got the last plates in place before the Wards' evening patrol. She wasn't going on official patrols, of course - had to have a debut first, before making public appearances.

None of the fancy materials Armsmaster had mentioned. She wasn't going to have a dedicated tinker budget until way later in her initiation, because right now she was basically a ghost in the system, getting fully entered would mean anyone who could see the PRT's files (like, say, the secret conspiracy that had edited public records to erase the real Rosemary and Persphone Duensing from existence) would know she was there. She'd used the PRT workshop and military-grade materials instead.

Dirt-simple power armour. Renaissance-style white plate of hardened steel over a spectra/kevlar mix, no frills, stark and gleaming. She preferred Gothic-style fluting or colour patterns like Greenwich armour, but art took time and she was trying to get something she could just get out there with. She hadn't even had time to temper the steel, so it was super-hard but very brittle, if it took hits it was going to shatter like a ceramic plate. No frills, no features, no electronics other than the pressure sensor body glove used to control it and a PRT helmet radio built-in. It barely even qualified as tinkertech.

It was embarrassing to put it next to Armsmaster's halberd, but with something on that size scale, it was the most she could finish in time to start searching today. She could put in more shop time as she searched.

Claire looked much more respectable as a cape next to the blank armour. Black bandana over her upper face, she'd picked up a bright red beret somewhere, and had somehow dug up a flamenco dress in rich purple, over which she wore a yellow-dyed bulletproof plate carrier and a red shawl. With a different kind of pistol holstered at each hip, along with a combat knife and a fixed-length baton.

… honestly Alex would not put it beyond Claire to just have a flamenco dress lying around. It was an eclectic look but it did look like an actual cape costume, despite Alex being the cape here.

Alex's escort had to fake being a cape as well, more or less. Alex needed to not be a Ward while she was out searching. She was undebuted, and any indications that she might be a Ward drew attention to that ghost in the system. So her escort couldn't go out in PRT battle rattle. But they still had to conceal their identity. Claire had just gone above and beyond.

"How are you supposed to even fight in that dress?" Alex had to ask.

Claire grinned distractingly-red lips. She'd gone full-bore on makeup too, it was ridiculous. "Have you seen the kind of dances people do in these dresses? I have so much freedom of motion." She demonstrated by swinging a shapely, uncovered leg straight up in the air, holding it over her head for a moment before dropping it in her next step.

Alex just nodded her visored head in acknowledgement, averting her eyes a bit from the display with a faint blush. It was way harder to ignore things like that ever since she'd changed. Her eyes had focused in a way they didn't used to. Claire either hadn't noticed, or had been merciful. "So what should I call you? You know my nickname for the moment."

"My callsign's Needlepoint, so go for that," Claire said, as put the finishing touches on her nail polish - an electric blue that quite stood out.

Alex just looked at her askance as they walked. Claire generally came to the salle in full makeup, but Alex had assumed she was just usually glammed up. It was quite another thing to see her literally doing herself up as she headed out for an actual mission.

"Hmn?" Claire slipped the nail polish away.

Alex just gestured. "Is this a hot date or something? Why all the makeup?"

Claire licked her lips, and smiled. It was a smile full of terror and promise. "Do you want it to be?"

Thankfully her helmet covered her entire head, so the blush that completely covered Alex's face wasn't visible as she whipped her eyes away. "N-no!"

Claire's laughter rang out. "Good, I'm a bit too old for you." The young woman - she was about twenty-four - looped a companionable arm around Alex's neck. "So, for the actual answer, you know the most important thing in martial arts is confidence, eh? Especially in ours."

Alex nodded, her blush cooling a bit now that the moment of teasing had passed. "Yeah, obviously." There was an attitude you needed to embrace to succeed in armizare. A complete and utter disregard for your opponent. You moved through them without any concern for their space or interest in their well-being. Confidence was crucial in anything that required bold and decisive action on a hair trigger, but in HEMA, you needed the confidence of a nobleman who knew the chaff in front of them was nothing to concern themselves with. The techniques wouldn't even work without that body language. They'd been made by people for whom that was natural.

Claire grinned. "The neat thing is, it's all kinda cross-applicable. The confidence that comes from being the hottest thing there is is confidence you can apply to a fight."

"Huh." Alex wasn't entirely sure about it, but Claire had been using her actual teaching tone of voice. Claire was happy to mess with people (a little too happy) but she never taught them wrong. Not like Alex would be putting it into action. She'd never been super-happy with her looks. She definitely had a better aesthetic appeal as a girl, but she wasn't going to be working it to anything like the degree Claire did. That was not at all appropriate for a guy to do, girl body or no.

The two walked the Docks, and they were absolutely drawing eyes. There was no way someone in power armour wasn't going to draw notice, so it wasn't like Claire's flamenco dress made it any worse. But it was unlikely to spread. People up here in the Docks didn't call the cops, and they weren't going to call the ABB unless there was an actual problem. Frankly the ABB didn't give a shit about randos walking their territory, even if a member spotted them and called it in, it wasn't gonna go farther than conversation. They had actual incursions and attacks to respond to.

It'd been a challenge finding a patrol to go alongside. Persephone was definitely in the Docks, that was where you went to find an empty building you could squat in. But the Protectorate did not densely patrol the Docks. The Wards almost never came any farther than the Lord Street Market, and Protectorate Docks patrols were quick motorbike runs that covered a lot of territory fast and not in-depth. The substantial majority of Protectorate patrols were downtown. There just weren't that many patrols in the area they needed to search.

Looking at the patrol schedules definitely explained a few things Alex hadn't thought to wonder until just then. The minor scandal last year when the head of the Wards, Necromance, had refused to graduate into the Protectorate and instead debuted as the independent hero Santa Muerte. The fact that the Protectorate was 6/7 white and the Wards 5/7 (counting Shadow Stalker, who was on probation and had never volunteered to be there) in a city that was only 44% white.

The Protectorate and Wards barely serviced the poorer, browner areas of the city at all. Alex had known people up here didn't call the authorities, and that was just good sense when it came to the police, but she hadn't realized the sheer degree to which even non-abusive law enforcement like the PRT had just abandoned these areas.

Not that Alex had any room to talk. She was just as white and came from the kind of nice background that got to attend Arcadia without it being any kind of big deal. She'd only even thought to look at the numbers because of her history of juvenile delinquency and wandering the browner areas of the city.

She wasn't really sure what to think of it, but… she'd have to do that thinking, probably. Alex didn't have any options but the Wards - she sure as shit wasn't capable of investigating and calling to account a secret conspiracy, she needed the PRT to deal with Cauldron and her father. But it would have been nice if that had been an unalloyed good, instead of just the best of a bunch of imperfect options. It felt like it really tarnished the shine of working with Armsmaster.

But that thinking was for later. Right now, they were searching for Persephone, and since those patrols were so limited, Alex had to make full use of the ones she could side-along with. Claire had a digital recorder held up to her lips, speaking into it when they found something worth note.

Brockton Bay was a lot of city, but there was actually only a pretty narrow slice of it that Persephone might be in. If she hadn't gone to a friend or made a new one that let her in, she was squatting in an abandoned building in the Docks. That building was going to be within easy walking distance of Lord Street - Persephone would have been crossing from the farthest possible point of the city, so she'd have taken the direct route up to the Docks, and she'd have made that trip in a state of considerable psychological distress, so she'd have taken the first available building rather than pushing her search area too far.

It would be secured with a padlock. There hadn't been time to get a locksmith in even assuming Persephone had the resources - which she certainly might, if she was a cape now. And if it was unsecured this far north, she'd have been kidnapped by the ABB for ransom. No demands had come through, so that didn't seem to be the case. And if she'd gone to a friend, the other investigation routes should turn her up.

So Alex's search pattern was basically just a fat line around Lord Street, north to south, with a pretty specific profile for the kind of building meriting closer investigation. Working with a professional investigator like Claire made a very wide possibility space narrow incredibly fast. It was amazing.

The first building that matched the criteria was a warehouse off the intersection of Lord Street and Wilson. Old, decommissioned, rusting where there was metal, vines crawling up the walls and grass breaking through cracks in the pavement. But the padlock on the doors was new.

Claire spoke the address into her recorder, voice crisp and precise, as she circled around the building, away from Alex. They didn't have time to stake out every location that turned up, so they had to check them as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Which meant one knocked on the door, the other circled around to look for a break-in point. Ideally the resident opened the door and they could check if it was Persephone, second-best-case scenario there was a way in without breaking a window or a lock. Worst-case, they'd move on with the location registered, and come back later. Unfortunately, neither of them knew how to pick locks, and while Alex was having ideas on how to solve that problem now that it came up, she hadn't had time to build any kind of tinkertech lockpicker yet. They could break in easily, Alex's armour and halberd would have no trouble at all against a padlock or window, but it'd compromise the place's security - it could endanger the inhabitants. And aside from being a dick move, if this was Persephone's place and they broke the security, she might not be present, she might come back home to a much less safe place.

Alex knocked, closing her eyes so she could focus on her hearing, listen to what was happening behind the door. Someone was there. Or… something. An extremely fast, high-pitched whirring.

Claire came over her radio a moment later. "There's a broken window along the side. Looks like a rock went through. Security's already compromised, so we can break in safely."

Alex stepped back a bit from the door so her response was less likely to be heard from within. "Something going on inside. Sounds like someone's running a blender? Or an electric drill, screwdriver. Electric rotational motor, anyway."

"Can you hear if they're coming to the door, or ignoring you? Kinda rude to break in if they're gonna answer."

Alex stepped closer again, listening carefully. "... no footsteps, just the motor."

"... Then they're either not here, or not opening the door," Claire decided. "Come around counterclockwise, we'll use your grappling hook to get up to the window and break in."

Alex nodded, slowly moving around to the right. She kept her eyes on the door, but it hadn't opened by the time she had to round the corner. Claire was towards the front of the building, and gestured up to the second floor (such as it was on a warehouse). Sure enough, the window up there was broken. Something had gone through the glass in the upper-right corner, and the cracks had propagated through the whole pane, leaving only jagged edges across the lower and left sides.

With one arm, Alex raised Armsmaster's halberd, converting the head into a grappling hook and launching it up to the window. The other arm, she wrapped around Claire's waist as the older-but-no-larger woman latched onto her side.

Trying not to reflect on how much more awkward this would be if she could feel anything through her armour (she knew from vision and grappling that Claire was very curvy, feeling all of that nestled up against her would be hazardous to her sanity, with the way her new body was making all of that harder to ignore), Alex tapped another control switch, reeling the halberd back in to its hook, and hauling the two of them up alongside. The motor didn't have any real trouble with it - it was built to handle the much bigger Armsmaster and his much bigger armour, Alex and her armour were lighter and Claire didn't really add all that much weight. Her arms didn't have trouble either, the strength enhancement was more than up to the task of carrying the weight of both on the one arm.

While Alex hung from the windowsill, Claire scrambled up her armoured body and the halberd without any difficulty, crouching atop Alex's shoulders and aiming a pistol into the other side. "Clear!" she barked, reholstering the pistol and slipping in, avoiding the broken glass.

It only took a moment for Alex to pull herself through the window and climb in. They were in a second-floor section, so they didn't have to fall all the way back down to ground level - the window led into a breakroom, a wide space with a table in the middle, a counter with a sink and a microwave, and a fridge in the corner. There was a hall that went down the front end of the building - places like this, that usually hosted bathrooms and offices - and to the right there was a landing and metal stairs down into the main warehouse floor.

And beneath Alex's boots, there was the crunch of glass. She crouched down, frowning behind her helmet, to examine it. "... this break was recent. No one's cleaned up the glass yet."

"Yeah." Claire had one of her pistols drawn again, watching both ways out of the room. "And it wasn't a rock." She nodded to the far wall of the breakroom. There were holes in the plaster. Alex had seen bullets embedded in a wall before, she didn't need to get right up there and examine it. (Not that they'd been fired at her or anything but when you lived in Brockton Bay and made a habit of wandering around the whole of it rather than the nicer areas, well. You were gonna find places where bullets had been fired and hadn't been cleaned up)

"... fuck." Bullets embedded in a wall in the Docks wasn't all that rare, but the angle was wrong. This was the second floor and they had come in pretty level, not from a sharply-below angle. And looking back out the window, there didn't look like any windows or openings at this altitude that could have been a firing position, or a stray shot from another building. The rounds had been fired from about the height of this window, directly into this window.

"Yeah. Someone beat us to it." Claire nodded to the stairs. "Cover me."

Alex wanted to hit herself for not realizing Cauldron would be looking for Persephone. Maybe someone else, but… well, Occam's Razor, the older girl was on the bad side of one organization willing to resort to violence, that was probably what was responsible for violent entry into a place she might be living in. Hopefully it was only might and this wasn't her place at all. Hopefully she wasn't home. Hopefully they weren't too late. But that sound of whirring motors took on a much more ominous tone now.

She shook herself, and followed after the older woman, halberd raised.

Claire moved around the doorframe, more than anything else. It was almost like the left side of the doorframe was a hinge around which she orbited, moving in an arc and sidestepping through the door, before an immediate step forward took her out of the doorway and out onto the catwalk landing.

Alex followed once Claire had made the room, her gaze tracking around the warehouse. There was a lot of warehouse, so it was a bit disconcerting, not immediately having a complete sense of it. Not normally disconcerting, but when you were entering a place someone with a gun had preceded you into, it suddenly became much higher priority to immediately know every inch of it, and she wasn't as good at moving tactically as Claire was, controlling her exposure and maintaining situational awareness. Alex wasn't completely unfamiliar with it, but her experience was shooting sports - airsoft, paintball, laser tag - not formal training and live-fire practice.

The threat was below. Right next to the entrance, watching it. A small quadcopter drone, four long spars hosting whirring rotors, and an oblong main body beneath. The whole thing was flat, wide, it looked about the size to fit into a pizza box. It was turning to face them.

Even as Alex spotted it, a single shot rang out from Claire's pistol, shattering something in the main body's housing. The high-pitched whirring instantly halted, and the drone crashed to the floor.

"... would've been better if I could examine it intact." Not that it was really a complaint. It might have been armed, low risks were better. Alex didn't need to fear much in the way of bullets, but Claire's bulletproof vest only covered her torso.

"Don't let me stop you on the next one. There wasn't a window this time. It was ten degrees off from facing us when I fired." Yeah, fair. Alex would have to be quicker on the draw to capture one intact safely.

The quadcopter was the only threat or activity of any kind. The warehouse was empty, old and dusty. With the racks empty of any kind of goods, they could see clear from one end of it to the other. The only sign of anything was basically a camp - a mass of blankets and pillows, clothes and sundries scattered around - in the far corner. Someone was living here, and not very well, but they weren't here right now.

Alex walked to the end of the catwalk, leaned over the railing, and pointed the halberd at the quadcopter. It took a few tries to grab it with the grappling hook and reel it back up, but it was still way faster than walking down to get it.

Yeah, Claire had been right to shoot it, there was a gun slung under the main body, and a camera lens at the front. The design was fully integrated - this wasn't a store-bought quadcopter and gun strapped to each other, the whole thing had been built in one piece. Maybe not tinkertech, but if it wasn't, the maker was professional-level and had a workshop to match.

Alex pointed the camera down at the catwalk - hard to tell if it was still active, best not to let it see anything interesting - and backed into the breakroom. "Needlepoint, cover me. I'm gonna take a look at this thing."

"Roger," Claire replied, backing up with her gun still at ready.

Alex took up a position in the corner of the breakroom in front of the counter, out of sight of both the doors to the stairway and the hallway, pulled her armoured gauntlets off and down to the body glove, and reached for the plastic-cased toolset at her hip.

Once she pulled apart the main housing, Alex had to grin. The radio was still intact, Claire's bullet had torn into the battery. She'd have liked to examine the battery back in the workshop along with the rest of it - if this was tinkertech there was so much she could learn from it - but the radio was the part she wanted to tinker with now. She could hook it into one of the halberd's power cells to make her little toy work.

"I should have led the way in," Alex said as she fiddled with the radio. "I've got the armour, I can take more than you can." It was a bit surreal watching the fingers of her gauntlets still moving, echoing the commands they were receiving from the body glove. Maybe she should've had a shutoff for when they detached from the rest of the system.

"I've got the training," Claire said, not turning to face Alex - she stood in front of her, gun ready, watching the viable angles of approach to Alex's little corner. "I'm less likely to take it. And I've got the responsibility. You're a brave kid, Ripple, but you're a kid. It's the responsibility of us adults to keep you safe." She paused. "Well, as safe as can be managed in the circumstances."

Did you still get to be a kid when your father was a murderer? Revelations like that seemed kind of childhood-ending. The loss of innocence, the weight of responsibility to do something about it, none of it smacked of childhood.

Apparently sensing her dissatisfied air, Claire grinned back over her shoulder. "I'm your teacher, and you're my student, Ripple. It's your duty to surpass me. And it's mine to see you to that point. That means I keep your risks dow-"

She stopped talking as the sound of whirring filled the air. "Incoming. Get your gear on."

Alex tugged her gauntlets back on, locking them in place. She was all but done, so with her less-deft armour-plated fingers, she finished attaching what she'd made of the drone's radio to the halberd's haft, and flicked it on. A rapid set of clicking noises ensued as she pointed the halberd towards the broken window, and back down the hall and its occasional windows. With a thumb, she carefully rotated the dial until the noises stopped. Lowering the gain until only the important signal would be registered. She could flick it back up if she needed to detect drones. But their controller was way more interesting.

There were short, sharp cracks of gunfire from down the hall. Individual single shots, breaking windows open so the quadcopters could enter. And ahead, four of the little drones hovered into view out the breakroom's windows, two of them at the front-side window and firing to break their way in.

Claire and Alex didn't wait, a bullet shattered one drone, while Alex fired the halberd's grappling hook at another. The drone whipped aside lightning-fast.

Take too long to reel the hook in and fire it again. Instead, Alex triggered one of this halberd's special features, a spatial compressor. It might've looked real weird from another angle, but down the haft of the halberd, the drone suddenly grew far closer, and with a hard thrust of the now-blunt end where the head should socket into place, Alex shattered the target drone, and pulled the grappling hook back. In the time it took for that, Claire had shot down another drone.

As if in response, the remaining quadcopter zipped up above the window and out of view. The whirring motors from down the hall proved they weren't pulling back fully. Just preparing for a concerted approach now that they knew where the targets were.

Then, surprisingly, a voice came from outside the window - the radio on the surviving drone. "To the one in armour. Are you Alex Masaryk?" The voice was feminine, and familiar, but Alex couldn't place it just yet.

It was almost shocking to have herself mentioned. She'd been so focused on Persephone, she'd forgotten they might be looking for her too. "... who wants to know?" Granted, she'd basically just answered the question with a no, there. Her voice was way too soft and feminine to pass for her old one.

"You may refer to me as Spiral. If you are not Alex Masaryk, what is your purpose here?"

"Give me a reason to tell you anything," Alex muttered, slowly turning the halberd in a three hundred and sixty degree circle.

"Without an answer, I will have to assume your purpose is hostile to my own," Spiral said. "That would make it unwise to leave either of you alive."

Ahah. There. The former radio started clicking. Alex grinned. Gotcha.

Since Alex was distracted, Claire continued the conversation. "Why don't you tell us your purpose here? We can trade."

"Confidentiality best suits my purpose."

"What a coincidence, ours too."

Alex tugged on Claire's wrist, pointing down the hall and whispering so as to hopefully not be heard by the radio. "I've got a bead on her location. Hundred metersish in that direction." She pointed with the halberd, northwestish. It was all 'ish', she hadn't exactly had the electronics on hand to rig up her detector with any way to read its signals other than a sounding rod.

Claire looked at her, surprised. "... how the fuck did you do that?" She shook her head. "Nevermind, tell me later. We'll make a break to that point."

Alex nodded. "Ready when you are." She hooked the captured drone to her utility belt.

"Out the north window. Destroy drones on the way. Take your hook down, run as far as it stretches. I'll hold the rear, once you have a good angle I'll zipline down the cable. Then we make our way there."

"Got it." She wanted to protest leaving Claire behind, but Alex was the one with the grappling hook. And ziplining down would be faster than climbing. Less time spent off her feet and unable to protect herself.

"Go!"

Alex ran down the hall, across the front of the building. There were a good dozen drones ahead, flitting out from the offices and the far window, guns aiming at her.

She ran through the hail of gunfire, the brittle plates of her armour cracking under the impacts, but she herself barely even felt the hits, lashing out with the halberd. It was a bit unwieldy - taller than Armsmaster, the weapon was very long, a bit hard for Alex's much smaller frame to handle efficiently. But it didn't hold her back from cleaving through two drones and shoulder-charging the rest, getting as many of them out of the air as she could before the less-protected Claire came through behind her.

Claire's gunfire and swinging baton took a few down as well, and then they were through the cloud.

Alex could hear gunfire from behind, but she had to trust Claire to keep herself safe back there. If she slowed down, Claire'd be in there longer. Turning to help would do the opposite. Alex just had to bear through the contradiction of hearing her friend getting shot at behind her and knowing the best thing she could do for Claire was keep her eyes forward on her own job.

She was at the window at the hall's end. The flick of a switch converted the halberd head to its grappling hook configuration (really it was more of a claw like one of those crane games). Alex hooked it on the windowsill and vaulted through what remained of the glass, playing out the cable to let herself down fast, without breaking anything.

There was gunfire above. She couldn't tell which end of it Claire was on, but… there weren't any screams yet. That'd have to be enough, Alex still had work to get done before Claire could get out.

Clenching her fists around the halberd's haft, Alex ran down the street to the north. The sky held more of the little quadcopters - it wasn't a super-dense cloud, but more and more were vectoring towards the warehouse from around the neighbourhood. The human denizens of the neighbourhood were either out of view or behind cover by now. They had no idea what was going on, but they didn't want any of it.

Finally, Alex felt a weight in the grappling hook's line, and looked back over her shoulder to see Claire, purple dress billowing around her shapely legs and coppery hair flowing in the wind, baton held between her hands across the cable, sliding down it like a zipline. Once she was low enough to the ground, she let go, continuing into a forward run past Alex to vent her forward momentum.

She was laughing wildly, a grin slashed across her face. "Ahahahah whooooo, that was bracing!" Acted the exact same after a good spar with Colin, so she didn't seem to be hurt in a way she didn't like.

Alex resumed running alongside her, quickly looking her up and down. No worse than scuff marks on her limbs, but there were bullets embedded into the yellow of her vest. She'd taken hits, but… it looked like nowhere unprotected. "Starting to see why you took this job," she drawled, the fear and nervousness draining out of her.

"I make no secrets, I love this shit!" Claire set about reloading her pistol as they ran. "Okay, so how's your dowsing rod work? How do you know we're heading to her?" She took aim up into the drones in the sky, firing. Single rounds at a time, every single one shattered a drone. No wonder the squaddies called her Needlepoint, she could probably thread a needle with bullets.

Alex dialled up the spatial compressor, cutting into the drones with the halberd blade. Small cuts, and a lot missed, the drones flitting aside with infuriating sprightliness, but it was a melee weapon right up in their face that just needed to flick to strike, followups were instantaneous and none lasted long. "It's a drone radio! It already detects signals on Spiral's command frequency, so I set it to ping when it detects them! Click like a metal detector, faster pinging the closer the source is!"

"Aren't all the drones broadcasting on that frequency?"

"Yeah, but they're tiny! Small transmitters, weaker signal! I tuned the gain down until the drones were invisible and there was only one source!" Alex paused. "I mean, it could be a relay rather than the main transmitter, but if we take that down the swarm loses command signal anyway!"

"Nice work!" Claire paused to shoot down another three drones, dumping her magazine and slapping a new one in. "Point of interest, for your specialty? I have never seen Armsmaster do that! I don't even know if he can, not as fast and light on working materials as this!"

Huh. Definitely something to consider. In-depth, thoughtfully, and later. As bullets ricocheted off her armour, Alex pointed the halberd at a drone, tuned the spatial compressor up until it was point-blank range, and snatched it out of the air with the halberd head in grappling claw form.

Dialling the compressor back down, shortening the halberd and bringing the drone within arm's length, Alex grabbed it, hooking it onto her utility belt next to its more damaged compatriot. Something to rip apart in the workshop later, now that she was done discussing trade secrets.

It tried to escape, obviously. The motors whirred madly. But there really wasn't much something that size could do against even a human's strength, let alone Alex's enhanced power armour. All it could do was shoot into the back of her legs, and she was just ignoring it as it did that. The kind of gun you could fit onto a drone that didn't weigh much more than a kilogram was enough to kill someone unprotected, but even the soft layer of her armour could eat it for days.

Which was good, because the hard layer was fracturing badly, riddled with cracks from the gunfire, and some patches had lost their little bit of plate - it was attached to the layer below with an adhesive, so it didn't just fall off, but once it was cracked away from the rest, a bullet's impact was enough to overcome the adhesive and knock it to the street below. She was going to need to completely replace it, this time with tempered steel instead of just hardened. At least she had time for that before next run, with an entire day for the whole thing to cool.

Claire wasn't as protected, but it was hard to hit fast-moving limbs and Alex was using her body as cover against the worst of the swarm, so she hadn't taken one to anything unarmoured yet. The drones didn't exactly have a lot of time to aim with her pistol fire tearing into them.

Eventually, they reached the target building. An old parking garage, cracked and beaten up, but surprisingly full of cars. Even as the building came into sight, the drones in the sky peeled off, swirling low and around the buildings of the area. Before too long, the only drones in sight were scattered wreckage, and the valiantly-struggling one at Alex's waist. And even it had either stopped trying to shoot her, or run out of ammo.

"Spiral is either withdrawing or massing them to make a final stand once we get to her point," Claire said, reloading her pistol, holstering it, and drawing the other pistol - it was much more recognizable than yet another steel-framed 9mm, a revolver chamber without a visible hammer and the barrel at the low end of the chamber instead of the top meant it could only be one of Emilio Ghisoni's designs, and the size meant it was a Mateba Autorevolver rather than a Chiappa Rhino. A gun with a much more robust firing system, capable of handling the biggest rounds on the market. Rather than upgunning her main weapon, Claire had a completely separate Brute Gun and one for literally everything else. "If it's the latter, she's going to have close-combat capability, which probably includes power armour if this is a tinker. So get ready, this is going to be a party."

Alex nodded, a flick of a switch converting the halberd head into grappling claw form and closing the claw into a pseudo-ball. Blunt object to hit people with. One configuration was as good as the next for blowing the drones, and the ball was better for capturing people alive. She could upgrade to the blade or the plasma injectors if the armour proved too resilient. "What do you mean if? Isn't this obviously a tinker?"

Alex led the way into the parking garage. There were ABB toughs guarding the entrance, rough-looking Asian men (boys, really, none even reached the mid-twenties) in red and green, but none of them seemed all that eager to bar the entrance of two determined capes (well, one determined cape and one determined fake), hanging back around the edges. One was on cellphone, so they were probably calling their bosses and it might be advisable to be not in ABB territory with reasonable alacrity.

"These aren't off-the-shelf, but they're within technological norms. They may be tinkertech, they're super high-performance, but that'll take you reverse-engineering them to tell. Evidence at hand still allows for these to not be tinkertech, and that'd mean Spiral has an entirely different power, or even no power."

Huh. Fair point. That was another thing that made Claire a professional investigator, she was good at keeping her leaps of intuition from getting too far ahead of the evidence.

A quick sweep of Alex's halberd proved the signal source was on the ground floor, and they made their way, carefully and quickly, through the ranks of cars, the occasional bystander ducking and hiding behind their vehicle.

The target was a big beefy panel van in blue paint, with an armoured figure standing in front of it. The figure was about Alex's size - a bit bigger, but that owed more to the armour's thickness than the person within being any larger. The armour was a completed tinkersuit unlike Alex's - it ran light on stylization and decoration, but it wasn't completely devoid of personal touches, just restrained. Not meant to express any identity, but there'd been enough time and care put into the design for hints of one to leak through. Little touches that weren't impractical, but hadn't been done for the purpose of practicality, like the shaping of the armour and especially the helmet, sleek and pointed.

It was a more conventional suit design, which was to say, something of a brick. All straight angles, and the sharp angles presented a degree of sloped armour, but the lack of curves proved the tinker had been working clean-sheet, without reference to preexisting medieval designs. (Armsmaster's suit was also not medieval in styling and had a grievous lack of curves, but that was because it was modular - each piece was equipped with an internal teleportation device that allowed him to swap out his entire suit for one back at the workshop, allowing him to instantly replace damaged parts, or fine-tune his array for the challenge at hand. The segmented design prevented the fully-integrated curves of medieval gear)

The hands were effectively mittens, the fingers other than the thumb all held in the one section rather than having the independent articulation of Alex, Armsmaster, and Dean's suits. Not a martial artist - not to say that the fingers were wiggling all over the place for them, but small shifts in hand and finger position allowed or assisted particular techniques, and Spiral clearly hadn't seen a need for that level of dexterity.

There were long blocks alongside each of the forearms - integrated weapons? - and a heavy lance/drill in Spiral's armour-mitted hands. "Don't think you're getting out alive," she said. With a cluck of her tongue, the space around them filled with drones, dropping from the upper levels of the building, flowing out from the back of the van, whirring so loudly it was hard to hear over.

So Alex had to yell. "Honoka?!" She'd finally placed that voice, now that she heard it directly rather than over a very small speaker.

Spiral went still. "... who are you?"

Alex looked around carefully, both to make sure there were no witnesses and to make sure the drones weren't going to shoot her, and pulled off her helmet. "... Alex."

The drill in Spiral's hands hit the pavement with a loud crash. "A-Alex?! What happened to you?!" She pulled off her own helmet, revealing the face of Honoka Inoue - Japanese, early thirties, dark hair in a short and sensible cut, a face that was always a little tired but never lacking in determination. A coworker of her father, she'd been around the house with some frequency.

The woman's infatuation with Richard Masaryk had been obvious to Alex's eyes. She'd always hoped to get them together. Tried more than one or two shipping shenanigans. Alex had had a mom, and she didn't need or want a new one, but she'd always hoped that if there was someone else at home, if it was whole again, that Dad might spend his time there. She'd take a new mom if it got her a father again.

It was all too obvious where Honoka and Richard worked together. It could have been a day job, a legal cover Richard worked at when doing things that weren't hideously immoral, but with tinkertech, power armour, and guns, there was no way Honoka wasn't a Cauldron agent.

"... you already know what happened," Alex said, voice hollow as another little hope died a small, strangled death. "I saw what Dad did for a living. I ran. I took the vials. Drank one. 'Deviated', I think your shop term is."

Honoka shook her head. "This is what we were afraid of, I… thank god it wasn't as bad as it could have been, but…" She swallowed, meeting Alex's eyes. "Come back to us. We can take care of all of this."

Alex snorted. "Like Dad 'took care' of Rosemary Duensing?"

Honoka flinched. "That's… it's more complicated than you think. She had to die. For everyone's sake."

"You're going to have to explain that one to me. Why everyone needed her to die," Alex spat. "Use small words, I'm having a hard time keeping up."

Honoka glanced at Claire. "... this is very confidential, we can explain it, but… it's better if we do it in private. Come back with me, I promise your father will explain. Or… if you're not ready to talk to him, I can…?" There was a faint, weak note of hope in her voice.

Alex just glared at her. "You can explain now. I'm not going anywhere with killers and monsters."

Honoka bit her lip for a long moment, so hard there was a trickle of blood, still looking at Claire, before finally turning back to meet Alex's glare. "... the world is in danger from the rise of capes. Social order is breaking down everywhere, entire countries have given way to warlordism and parahuman feudalism, and it's even worse than you know. It needs to be saved. It… it doesn't look pretty. We're riding the edge of extinction and we can't afford to hold back, to fight clean. There are things we need, things we need to know, things we can't get or find out in an ethical manner. Duensing… None of us liked it, but it had to happen."

So, an evil conspiracy to save the world. That was what Cauldron was, huh?

Alex sighed heavily. "... you know something my mom taught me?" She took a deep breath. "'If you have to live as a monster, it's better to die'. You've already thrown away your humanity, so I don't even know what the fuck you're saving at this point. But it isn't anything I value." She put her helmet back on. "Needlepoint, we grab her." And brought her halberd back up as she charged.

Honoka backed away, teary-eyed, catching the first blow on her armoured forearm, flinching as Claire's first bullet, heavy and hard, sparked off her breastplate. With a speed greater than Alex could muster, she shoved Alex back with an open palm, sliding her own helmet back on once she'd made herself the space. "Alex, please! Be reasonable about this!"

"I'm the only one here that is," Alex snarled, a heavy blow of the 'ball' at the end of the halberd smashing into Honoka's shoulder, struggling to drive her to the floor. She could finish this if she could get Honoka against a solid backing. Otherwise the blade was out and she wasn't sure if enough of a beating from the pseudo-mace would get through the armour to actually register on her.

"Rude!" Claire chirped, another shot lodging into one of Spiral's joints, a softer point in the armour.

"You're batshit and proud of it, Needlepoint!" Alex shot back. Honestly the snark improved her mood a bit. Open question how much of that was intentional vs just how Claire was.

"True things can be rude!"

Backing away, Spiral vaulted over the low wall of the parking garage, and never hit the ground. As soon as she was outside, an array of rotors sprung out from panels on the back of her armour, rapidly spinning up and pulling her away, up into the sky.

Alex launched the grappling hook to catch her, but a drone zipped in the way to sacrifice itself to the claw. Claire fired carefully, trying to hit the rotors, but there was no angle, the entire array had folded back up to hide behind Spiral's armoured body.

The drones filled the sky in Spiral's wake, sheltering her as she quickly pulled away, hiding around a far building, and trailing after her.

Alex stomped the ground, blowing a dent into the pavement. "Motherfucker!"

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I STILL don't know why she had to die! Was she a fake, replaced by a Stranger, worming her way into Cauldron?
 
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