- Location
- Somewhere, Maybe
That's nearly the same dismissal used by people who like Invisitext. >.<
Taylor is DOOMed
- Thread starter mp3.1415player
- Start date
- Crossover
That's nearly the same dismissal used by people who like Invisitext. >.<
- Location
- Germany
- Pronouns
- He/Him
With colored text you at least know there's something to read. Invisitext is the next step on the 'make the reader jump through hoops because I can' ladder.
- Pronouns
- she/her
And it still assumes everyone's reading on a platform where they can easily select text, and that selecting text will actually make it legible. "Basic mouse usage" doesn't help when you're trying to read invisitext on an iphone - you used to have to painfully select the hidden text, then copy and paste into a second app, notes or something. I'm glad the admins have come up with solutions for it, but people could stand to be a little less dismissive. Not everyone's using a PC.
(posted from my PC)
Ace Dreamer
Verified Reality User
- Location
- Between The Unknown & The Known
I wonder about the people using text-to-speech, because of poor eyesight, or their brain doesn't do reading easily (one friend described it as "jumping, moving text that keeps changing colour")... Then, there's those who turn-off Javascript, so they get more control what their web pages look like, and don't realise 'color' or invisi-text has been used...
What will the web scholars of the future think???
esseresse
R'lyth Power Make-up
- Location
- divorceville, state of depression
- Pronouns
- They/Her
Didn't something like that happen to Jack Slash once in a fic, too evil for heaven, the hell has standards and wouldn't take him?
- Location
- The world inside my head
Pretty sure that was Queen of Blood, yeah.
Yes, and if it was being used as a replacement for invisitext, I'd agree wholeheartedly that it is better since if you download the fic using Omnibuser the invisitext is removed (I can't recall if FanficFare in Calibre does the same). I also know that it is a royal PITA to try to see invisitext on my phone the rare times I'm using it on this site, and that's assuming that I even know it is there since I don't have all the stylesheets and greasemonkey scripts installed on it that I do my computer since I rarely use my phone for reading on the site, but instead use Omnibuser to download ahead of time so I can read when I'm not connected to wifi.
...what?
Seriously, what?
Color, invisitext included, does not depend on JavaScript. Never has. CSS? Perhaps. JavaScript? No.
Regarding seeing invisitext?
There is some between these two lines.
This is invisitext!
Now, if you look in the upper right of the post, you should see an eye icon that can be clicked/tapped to turn it into a spoiler box. One of these. Then you can click/tap on the spoiler box to reveal it (if hover doesn't work).
Dreamlord
Norse Pettifogger
- Location
- Hogwarts
You have changed my life! I did not know this!
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- Location
- Somewhere, Maybe
It's nice to see someone actually explaining how these undocumented features work. THANK YOU! I've been using a plugin to see this since before the 2.0 update!
Ace Dreamer
Verified Reality User
- Location
- Between The Unknown & The Known
Exactly what the controls do on various browsers isn't always clear. I was told that 'Page Style->No Style' turned-off JS, but that 'CSS' means 'Cascading Style Sheets' would probably suggests that was wrong.
Worth knowing... Thanks!
- Location
- The general area. Possibly behind you.
AUTHOR HAS READ COMPLAINTS ABOUT FORMATTING STOP WILL REMOVE EVERYTHING STOP ALL FUTURE CHAPTERS TO BE WRITTEN IN TELEGRAPH-FRIENDLY MODE STOP THANK YOU FOR THE FEEDBACK STOP SMILEY FACE WINK STOP TRANSMISSION ENDS
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EDIT STOP MANY APOLOGIES PREVIOUS TRANSMISSION OMITTED MORSE CODE TRANSLATION STOP ERROR HAS BEEN RECTIFIED STOP THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME STOP PLEASE NEVER STOP TRANSMISSION ENDS
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EDIT STOP MANY APOLOGIES PREVIOUS TRANSMISSION OMITTED MORSE CODE TRANSLATION STOP ERROR HAS BEEN RECTIFIED STOP THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME STOP PLEASE NEVER STOP TRANSMISSION ENDS
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RYRYRYRYRY STOP FINALLY STOP SOMEONE WHO CARES ABOUT READERS WITHOUT ALL THOSE NEWFANGLED FAD WHATSITS STOP NOBODY NEEDS MORE THAN A NICE BAUDOT RTTY SETUP STOP THANK YOU FOR SAVING REAMS OF PAPER STOP FIVE BIT BYTES SHOULD BE ENOUGH FOR ANYONE STOP THOSE DAMN CONTROL THINGIES WITH ALL THEM ARROWS JUST MAKE ME ANGRY BELL BELL BELL BELL KIDS END
- Location
- SoCal
Thanks for this. I didn't have a way to capture SB/SV.
- Location
- The world inside my head
Thanks for this! I don't know if it's my computer or my browser, but I've always found invisitext to be a pain. This will help a lot.
ConfusedPotato
Unverified Verifier
- Location
- Australia
Bah.Telegraph.
Those young ones this days!
In my days we wrote in clay tablets! In Lineal B!
And we could only use one side of the tablet!
Because the other one was always used to protest about Ea-Nasir selling us wheat with sand in the sacks!
Tablets.
What happened to good old, memory and oral tradition?
Darn kids are ruining everything these days.
At least with oral tradition you can't drop the thing and crush your foot in the process.
SanguisAnima
Σ Series Z10/0 Group A 4A-GELU Mk1
- Location
- nowhere important
Yknow, seeing this, reminded me of a certain Maven's interview (seriously, that woman has some anger issues!)
11. DOOMed X: You'll Just Die Tired
- Location
- The general area. Possibly behind you.
"Holy fuck!"
Lisa, Brian, Rachel, and Alec all said the exact same thing at the exact same time, in the exact same tone of total horrified disbelief.
Brian pointed at the TV in the hotel room they were all in, twenty miles from Brockton Bay. Lisa had hooked her laptop to it and they'd tried to figure out what in god's name was happening back in the city, and had just watched the single most disturbing video on PHO any of them had ever seen. "Did you see that?" he demanded in appalled awe. "She took out Victor like it was nothing, along with half the building he was in, then basically slaughtered Hookwolf and made it look easy. He didn't stand a fucking chance."
Lisa nodded, her eyes so wide he was thinking she might need medical help later. Her pupils were expanded like she'd taken something pretty strong although he was certain she hadn't. And from their more than a little angry discussion on the way here she apparently didn't remember anything of the last three days, which was all sorts of worrying.
"I think I know who She is," Alec said in a voice that was faint and horrified.
Rachel, beside him, was cuddling her dogs, all of which seemed upset, but she also nodded like her head was on a spring.
"She's got to be a Tinker, but fuck me she's the scariest Tinker I've ever even heard of," Brian added, looking at the freeze-frame that caught the woman in power armor in mid stride. Lisa had hit the space bar almost in a fugue state as the one who'd just wiped out a wildly dangerous pair of Nazi capes with ease was heading back towards the older guy who was holding a bunch of normal gangers at bay with a massive shotgun-like weapon.
Even that guy worried Brian a lot. The PHO poster going by the name of 'Pieman_Cheeze' who'd uploaded the video about fifteen minutes ago had started videoing just as the E88 group accosted the armored girl and the older guy at their vehicle, so he'd caught the entire exchange. Even though it was shot from far enough away that none of the speech could be made out, what actually happened was easy to see, especially since the car had been parked directly under a streetlight.
The E88 had obviously tried to strong-arm the woman into joining them and had seriously miscalculated the reaction. The older man had taken out two gang members half his age with the certain motions of someone who knew exactly how to deal major damage, and no signs whatsoever of hesitation. Then he'd blown Cricket away with a shotgun without a flicker of emotion, before the girl had apparently literally caught a bullet in mid flight, exploded the shooter who had to have been Victor a second later, and turned on Hookwolf with the sort of firepower you could take out a battleship with.
One shot from some sort of energy weapon had blown the fully transformed E88 Changer about eighty feet, then she'd swapped out the thing for the biggest fucking rotary cannon anyone had ever seen, never mind used handheld, and emptied hundreds of rounds of high caliber ammo into him. Then she'd delivered the coup de grace with the energy gun, completely vaporizing the bastard.
Brian had never even imagined such ferocity and single-minded devotion to dealing that sort of destruction, and was wishing he could forget about it even now even though no one was actually going to miss the bastard. It was absolutely horrifying.
She made Lung look positively cheerful. He could almost feel the rage emanating from her as she did her thing, and wasn't entirely certain that the slight shimmer that had seemed to come from her was actually heat from the gun and not a visible manifestation of an anger more suited to a furious god of destruction than a female Tinker.
He did not want to meet her.
Ever.
He looked at Lisa again and noticed she was shivering, her gaze still fixed on the screen. Reaching out he prodded the space bar and resumed the video. They watched it to the end, where Assault and Dauntless walked over from somewhere off screen, looking somewhat reluctant, and began talking to both of the other people. There was a followup video, he noticed, but he left that for now. There was also a vast number of replies to the thread that was growing very fast, faster than he'd seen for most new Parahumans, and when he scrolled down through the first couple of pages he saw that many of them were expressing a sort of bloodthirsty relief that Hookwolf was finally dead.
A lot of people in Brockton Bay, and many other places, had wanted the murderous Nazi dead for many years. He'd left an impressive trail of bodies behind him and no one could really work out why the PRT hadn't done something permanent about it years ago. Considering there were two separate Birdcage sentences on the guy and he was rumored to be one murder away from a kill order, the authorities really should have gone after him more enthusiastically. That they didn't was generally taken as yet more proof that they were either incompetent and/or corrupt, and possibly in the pay of the Nazis to begin with. Considering the number of villains of that level that were left to roam the countryside without any real repercussions he couldn't entirely disagree with that viewpoint. Between them, the major E88 capes had killed to his certain knowledge at least five hundred people just between them in the last decade and no one really did anything about it. Some of those people had been friends of his, so he wasn't particularly upset about seeing Hookwolf killed.
It was more that what had done that absolutely terrified him…
The PHO comments, of course, seemed to run the gamut from people who were positively gleefully suggesting other targets for bloody death, those who were fantasizing about how many pieces someone like Jack Slash would end up in and how slowly, the usual suggestions of who'd come out on top between this new cape and almost every other possible hero or villain, all the way down to people insisting that she should immediately be prosecuted for the murder of a poor defenseless Nazi. He snorted with black amusement at a couple of those, since it was obvious they were from other E88 members, none of which he sympathized with in any way at all. For obvious reasons. But it was a good example of the sort of thing you got on the internet. The place tended to be full of very strange people in his experience.
And that was coming from him, a teenage super-villain.
Shaking his head, he closed the laptop and gently took it out of Lisa's unresisting hands, placing it to the side. "You OK?" he asked her. She stared at the now-blank TV screen for a good thirty seconds more before turning her head to meet his eyes, blinking a few times, then slowly fell over to the side.
He caught her and sighed. "She's gone again," he complained. Alec looked at the blonde and shrugged, although his face betrayed a slight amount of concern which for him was pretty expressive. Rachel also looked but kept holding her dogs.
"Must be faulty or something," the other boy said. "Stick her on the bed and let her sleep it off." Brian picked Lisa up and took her into the girl's room, putting her on one of the beds and covering her, before returning to the living area with a concerned backwards glance.
"What do we do now?" he wondered out loud. "I'm worried about Aisha, and dad for that matter. They're still in Brockton. With… Her."
"Don't want to go back," Rachel muttered, almost obsessively stroking Angelica, who was whining faintly and visibly shivering.
Brian looked at Alec and saw the same thought in his team-mate's eyes. To be honest, it was much the same feeling he had himself, but he also had family obligations. At least to his sister, and after a moment he sighed and thought that his father also deserved the same. The man wasn't actually a bad person, just not a particularly good father, at least for a teenaged girl.
Their mother on the other hand…
He shook his head. He'd burned his bridges there and wasn't sorry about it.
Alec had commandeered the laptop while he'd taken Lisa to her bed and was now looking through the Brockton Bay section of PHO for anything else of interest. He'd apparently decided he didn't really want to look at the other video of the Tinker of Death. Brian didn't blame him, it was going to take a while before he could get that out of his mind. "Huh," the smaller boy grunted, scanning one thread with raised eyebrows. "Weird."
"What?" Brian looked up from his ruminations, glancing at Alec, then looking at the screen. Alec scrolled back a few pages.
"People are saying that there are strange things wandering around in the docks growling at them," he said, pointing at one line.
"Demonic aliens, alien demons, or just mass hallucinations?" Brian read out loud, before sniggering. "Yeah, let me guess who came up with that."
"Not difficult," Alec grinned. "That guy's a nutcase. But there are several reports of something strange going on in that area. Mostly from people who are probably shitfaced, fair enough, but..." He shrugged. "Brockton Bay, you know?"
"Unfortunately," Brian sighed. Reaching out he snagged the computer and scrolled down a few posts to read a comment from someone who claimed to be a member of the ABB and was saying he'd been chased by a big red flying ball with horns, enormous teeth, and a bad attitude. Most of the followup comments were basically laughing at him, and telling him that without photos or video he wasn't going to be believed. His response that the flying ball had eaten his phone wasn't particularly plausible…
"That place gets stranger and stranger," Brian finally grumbled, handing the laptop back to Alec, who took it and started reading another thread.
"True," Alec replied, then stopped and stared at the TV. "OK, this one's saying someone nuked a high school!?"
He met Brian's eyes, then both of them looked at Rachel, who shook her head. "Don't wanna know," she replied, settling back with all her dogs draped over her and closing her eyes.
"Fuck." Brian put his hands over his face. He really wasn't having a good time at the moment and hadn't been for the last few days.
"SHE HAS COME!" Lisa's voice said in a highly disturbing way, before a loud snore came back to them as they all jumped violently.
"WE KNOW!" all three of them yelled back as one.
Then they went out to find some food and think about what their next move was, leaving Lisa to her snoring and occasional shout of doom.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Max watched the video with a sense of complete disbelief. When it finished, he raised his eyes to meet those of James 'Krieg' Fliescher, who stared back.
"Jesus Christ," he breathed, not knowing yet whether he should be furious, appalled, or terrified. In all honesty he was pretty much all of those at the same time. "Who the hell is she?"
James shook his head, taking the tablet back and putting it on the desk in front of him. "No one knows. She just turned up out of nowhere, no record of her anywhere before a few hours ago. And she's apparently not only perfectly happy to let people see her face, but also entirely unconcerned with the Rules or anything else."
Sitting back in his chair with a sensation of disbelief, Max keep looking at James. "Brad, Victor, and Melody, all dead in… minutes. Just like that."
"Yeah. Just like that. Melody took two 12 gauge hits to the chest, at practically point blank range. She probably died instantly. Victor..." James shook his head again. "That woman destroyed the top two floors at least with only a couple of rockets, and poor Victor sure wouldn't have made it. I wouldn't be surprised if they don't even find a body after that."
He looked at the tablet for a moment, then went on, "Brad, well, that first shot would probably have killed almost anyone else on the spot. The gatling cannon thing she was using would probably give Leviathan a headache. And those final shots to finish him off… It was the most brutal killing I think I've ever seen." He sighed a little. "Might even have been a mercy, I doubt even Brad would get up after god alone knows how many hundred armor piercing rounds like that. But I don't think she did it to be merciful."
"Making a point," Max said slowly. James nodded.
"Yeah. The point being she didn't give a shit and doesn't take prisoners. And she's perfectly content to not only tell us that but the PRT too."
The pair exchanged looks in silence for a few seconds. "What do you want to do about it?" James finally asked. Max turned his head to look out the window of his penthouse office towards where three of his Parahumans had died, killed by someone who'd made it look almost trivial.
He'd seen the flash of the detonation that killed Victor at the time it happened but hadn't realized what it was. For some reason that made him feel… odd. He didn't really know why.
Who the hell was this woman? Or girl, really, the images he'd initially been shown of her without her helmet on showed someone who was probably around eighteen or nineteen he thought. Older than Rune, but not by much, yet she seemed prepared to simply eliminate anyone who got in her way with what could only be described as massive overkill.
And who was that older guy? For some reason the face looked familiar but he simply couldn't place it. He was sure he'd seen it before. Leaning over the desk he slid the tablet towards him and scrolled back in the video, looking for the clearest shot he could find. Eventually he stopped on a freeze-frame of the guy literally caught in the middle of shooting Cricket, the shotgun shown with an enormous blast of flame coming out the muzzle and underlighting his face in a rather dramatic and, if Max was honest, more than a little troubling manner. There was no sign at all of any real emotion that he could see. The guy looked about as invested in killing someone as most people would be in picking up a carton of milk.
Even to Max, considering some of the things he'd done himself, or seen done, that struck him as a bit strange.
Zooming in as much as he could, he tilted the tablet this way and that while squinting at the pixelated face, trying to decided if he really had seen the bastard before. There was a little voice niggling at the back of his mind that said yes, but he simply couldn't get it to divulge a name, or even under what circumstances. It was very annoying. In the end he slid it across to James, who picked it up and looked at it with an eyebrow up. "Recognize him?"
His subordinate studied the image for a while, then shook his head slowly with a frown. "No, but I get the feeling I should."
"Yeah, me too, but I'm fucked if I can recall why," Max growled.
"That Tinker and this guy are obviously close somehow," James remarked, zooming out a little and studying the image again. "Judging by being in that pizza place, and how they were just wandering around in the street. Husband and wife?"
"Doubt it, he's at least twice her age, and he sort of looks a little like her," Max replied after thinking it over, while inspecting his phone on which the best shot of the girl without her helmet was displayed. "Brother and sister, maybe, or father and daughter. More likely that one."
"Maybe he's a pressure point we could use to get her to talk to us? Assuming you still want her to talk to us." James dropped the tablet once more. "Personally I think we should kill both of them. They've cost us three capes, friends of ours, and at least half a dozen normals."
Max glanced at him before going back to staring out the window into the night. Far off towards the docks he could still see a huge number of flashing lights from PRT and BBPD emergency vehicles, and there were quite a lot of them moving around in the larger area too rather than the original position they'd all gravitated towards. He suspected he knew who had poked the anthill, now. Although he had no idea how.
Based on what had happened to his people, she'd probably blown someone away. It seemed to be a thing with her.
On the whole he didn't have any problems with that approach as long as it was his people being the blow-ers and not the blow-ees. And as long as it was done in a way that couldn't easily be traced back to them, of course. No sense in visibly ignoring the Rules. Conversely, when he was sure that no one would be in a position to know about it, he had never really let something as silly as rules of engagement get between him and a goal. You just had to be smart about it.
This new Tinker didn't seem to realize that. Or, possibly, care. The idea that she didn't even know about the Rules crossed his mind but after a moment's consideration he dismissed it. He was of growing conviction that she wasn't a new Trigger at all, since the weaponry she was carrying was way too powerful to just be something she cobbled together after Triggering. He was well aware of how Tinkers needed to ramp up from the initial designs, which were usually barely functional if often entirely ridiculous inventions that shouldn't have worked in the first place. It was what made them so dangerous if they had time to plan, since they could keep escalating given enough resources.
Of course, it was also what made them so useful to people like him. He had resources. Lots and lots of them. All he lacked was the Tinker…
The problem was that this one was clearly a loose cannon and didn't appear likely to agree to joining them, regardless of her own beliefs. Perhaps she was sympathetic to the Empire cause, and could be persuaded, if the right person approached her. Sending Brad, in retrospect, had probably been a mistake as the man wasn't the most diplomatic of people and tended to be somewhat heavy-handed at best. But it was of course possible that the girl was of an alignment opposed to his own organization and would never agree, or had been poisoned against them by the explosive meeting with Hookwolf.
He mulled over his options. Doing nothing was clearly the least satisfactory one. It broadcast the message that the E88 wouldn't retaliate if their people were killed, which was a dangerous signal to send. It would embolden Lung and his scum, possibly cause the Merchants to get uppity, and even leave them more vulnerable to the PRT actually doing something. Brad had been their heaviest individual hitter by a large margin, Victor's loss was a massive blow due to the enormous number of abilities he brought to the group, and Melody had been one of their best melee fighters. Losing any one of them was a huge problem, losing all three at once was a disaster in many different ways.
Could he make up for it by somehow getting this obviously extremely dangerous Tinker under his control? If he could it would add a lot of firepower to the E88, since he was pretty sure that the three weapons just that video showed were most likely not the limits of her abilities. He briefly wondered what her specialization was. Possibly just destruction. She was certainly good at that.
But if he didn't get her to agree, one way or another, to work for him he was putting whoever he sent to try talking to her at risk of violent retribution and might lose more people. Which was unacceptable. So that was the massive downside to the idea of recruiting her.
If, instead, he arranged to eliminate her, the main risk was as far as he could see failing to manage it. He had little doubt that she'd probably not see the funny side of a near miss. He certainly wouldn't and he got the impression she was at least as ruthless as he was. Probably more so, possibly more so than anyone else he'd met before. For some reason he had a flashback to his own sister and briefly shuddered.
He didn't miss her.
No. Recruiting her was more likely to fail than otherwise, he was certain of that. Perhaps if he'd tried someone a little less obvious in the first place, but in his own defense when Hookwolf was sent to bring in a new Parahuman, he'd normally succeeded, or made sure that no one else could bring them in. Pity the second option hadn't played out this time…
So it was down to either ignoring the insult to his group, which led to some bad outcomes, or dealing with it permanently. And not missing. Which, considering she'd apparently detected and caught an inbound. .50 caliber round with her hand was going to be a challenge.
"Do we still have those Tinker-tech laser guns we retrieved from Coil's mercs last fall?" he finally
asked slowly, still looking out the window and watching the lights move around.
There was a long pause then James said, "Yes. They're in the armory."
"Do they work?"
"They did the last time we tested them, yeah. We were saving them for the right moment. Like if we could frame Coil for something."
"I think this is probably more important," Max replied, turning his chair to face his colleague. "We can't let this stand, but I'm not really interested in seeing if she can react fast enough to shoot back if we give her any warning. A laser beam is much quicker than a rifle bullet. And a lot harder to catch."
"True." James looked thoughtful. "Think they'll handle that power armor?"
"The damn things can blow a hole through two inches of armor plate in about a second, and I doubt her power armor is that thick," Max replied with a shrug. "I sure wouldn't want to be hit by one. Coil is a fucker but he certainly didn't skimp on the hardware."
"We've got four of them. And several RPGs with enough rockets for them to take out a battalion. We could zap the bitch with the lasers then finish her off with the RPGs, I guess..." James sounded a little doubtful, but more because he probably thought it was somewhat excessive rather than not thinking it would work. Which was true enough, but the girl had started it. And with the PRT running around like idiots right now they could utilize the chaos to their benefit and hit her hard then get out before the authorities even knew what was happening. Assuming they could find her, of course.
"It's a major escalation," James added.
"I know, but we don't have much choice," Max growled. "If we let her get away with this, we'll look weak, and you know what will happen then. On the other hand if we come down on her like the hand of god, it will increase our reputation."
"Assuming we actually succeed," the other man muttered.
Max smiled at him. "Don't worry. Yes, she's violent and scary, but then, so are we."
His smile turned into a nasty grin. After a moment, James returned it.
"On the other hand, no sense being stupid about it. Find out where she is now, then pick out some people who are good shots and get them set up with the hardware. Tell them to wear something that doesn't tie them to us. Use ones that don't have tattoos, if you can."
"Just in case?"
"Indeed. Plausible deniability is probably a good idea." Max smirked a little. "Get Rune here. You're going to coordinate the hit from a safe distance, in the air. Find that bitch and kill her. When you succeed, we can discreetly point out to certain people that if you fuck with us, we make you regret it. Briefly."
"And if we don't succeed..."
Max shrugged. "Coil sent some mercs after her. His laser guns, right? He's the only one who uses those things. It's practically a calling card. And if she gets pissed and goes after him, so much the better. Win win, as long as we're smart about it." He fixed the other man with a hard look. "Don't fuck it up, and don't get too close to that crazy Tinker."
"Don't worry, I like living," James replied as he stood. "A good pair of binoculars and about a mile and a half distance should be safe enough." He turned and headed for the door, then stopped with his hand on the knob. "If we don't get her, what next?"
"We can ask certain… acquaintances… to loan us people with the right skill set to do the job," Max replied after a moment. "I'd prefer not to, I don't like owing people favors, especially them, but we can't ignore this situation. It puts everything we've worked for at risk."
"Agreed." James, who Max knew was a true believer, unlike himself, nodded. Moments later he was gone. Standing the leader of the E88 walked over to his drinks cabinet and poured himself a very expensive glass of alcohol, then lifted it in salute towards the direction in which the place his people had died lay, before taking a sip and returning to his desk to make contingency plans.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
When Ethan and Shawn arrived at the car which the purple-armored woman and the older man were standing next to, while both rather wishing they had the option of walking in the opposite direction, they were worried they were about to witness a series of executions. The captured, still living, E88 members clearly felt the same thing based on how tense they were, and how they kept looking at the still figures of the ones that hadn't made it. Including Cricket, who had a pair of holes you could have put a fist into in her back.
A point blank buckshot blast made a pretty nasty mess. Two of them was almost gratuitous. She'd probably been dead before she hit the ground.
The man was holding the weapon that Ethan assumed had done the damage, a pump action shotgun with a pistol stock, and the way he was holding it made it obvious that he not only knew exactly how to use it but had no compunction about doing so if required. The manner in which it was not quite pointing at the pair of them also made it apparent that this requirement wasn't necessarily off the table quite yet in his mind.
Both Ethan and Shawn made very sure to not make any sudden moves.
"We'll take them off your hands, so there's no reason to do anything… unfortunate," Ethan finally said, after several seconds of trying to think of the right words that were least likely to cause a massacre. He was of the opinion that this woman, who somehow radiated a sort of cold fury that was making his teeth itch and causing him to wish he was home in bed, was being totally truthful when she implied she'd just as happily finish the gang members off as let them go. It wasn't a nice feeling. Strangely, at the same time he didn't feel she was actually aiming the anger at him or his companion, and if anything was pretty much neutral towards them.
She did not like the gangers, though.
"You sure?" she asked, producing a very, very disturbingly large knife that was closer to a sword from wherever she kept her weapons, then waving it meaningfully at the gangers. The three that were looking back over their shoulders, apparently braver than their compatriots, went stark white under the streetlights and sweated even more heavily when they saw it.
"Yes," he hastily said. "We're sure. I can call for backup to remove them and clean up. And maybe then we could just… talk… for a while?"
She turned her helmet to him for a second or two, then looked at the man next to her, who shrugged while not letting his gun drop at all. It had been sort of nearly pointing at the gangers while somehow also sort of nearly pointing at them. Ethan wasn't sure how that trick was done and didn't much like it. "Your choice," the guy said.
"Fine," she replied. The sword-knife vanished, taking an aura of imminent death with it. The aura of nearly imminent death she was producing all by herself had remained. "I just need to have a word with them." Walking closer to the half-dozen shaven-headed and terrified E88 men she studied them, then pointed at one. "You. You're the leader of this lot, right?"
The Neo-Nazi, who was at least six feet tall and built like a linebacker, with shaven head festooned in swastika tattoos, swallowed hard. For an instant Ethan actually felt sorry for the fucker, then felt disgusted with himself for doing so. The man stared at the armored woman over his shoulder as she moved closer. She was even taller than he was, and had to bend over a little to put her head next to his. He tried to move away but didn't have a lot of luck, pressed against the wall as he was.
She said something else in a low voice, too quietly for either Ethan or Shawn to make out. The Nazi then shook his head quickly. The woman repeated her comment, putting a hand on the guy's shoulder in the process. There was a faint crunch and the man squeaked like a kitten being stepped on, going almost green. He started talking, very very quickly. She nodded encouragingly when he slowed down, while her hand tightened a little more.
Within a couple of minutes she seemed satisfied, releasing the man who dropped to his knees and vomited. "Thank you," she said, returning to her companion, then turning to Ethan and his colleague. "All yours." Glancing at the man she'd added, "We can talk to these guys then go see Kaiser."
"Sure," the other guy replied with a sort of grim smile. "Want some help?"
She laughed a little, in a way that nearly made Ethan piss himself, but didn't reply.
Not certain what the fuck was going on, but as worried as he'd ever been, Ethan left Shawn to stare nervously at the woman whose name they still didn't know, moved a short distance away, then made a brief report to Director Piggot.
"We'll send backup," the director said when he finished telling her what has happened. "Do not push her. I want her out of here, not running around vaporizing Nazis." She then muttered something that sounded as if she was regretting having to say that, before continuing more loudly, "Leave your comms open. We need to hear what she says. And Assault?"
"Yeah?"
"Be careful. Losing you and Dauntless would be… unfortunate."
He almost smiled. "Thanks. We love you too."
"Idiot."
That time he did smirk a little, the annoyance in her voice was palpable, but he seldom got to say things like that right to her face and didn't regret it. And he was fairly sure she genuinely was concerned which was oddly morale-boosting, despite her well known dislike of Parahumans in general.
Perhaps he was finally wearing her down?
Taking a deep breath, he turned back to the scene by the car, then returned to his partner. "The PRT is sending people to take these guys and clean up the scene."
"All right," she replied, glancing at him, then going back to watching the prisoners who were sweating hard and looking like they regretted their life choices in a very significant way. Ethan was pretty sure that as and when they got out of jail they were going straight. And as far away from Brockton Bay as could be managed.
"Um..." He cleared his throat and twitched when she looked back at him. "Can we ask what exactly happened? If you don't mind?"
For some reason he really didn't want to give her the slightest idea they were a threat. He'd seen how she dealt with those.
The woman shrugged a little. "I got home a little while ago after a very annoying trip and just wanted to have a pizza with my dad. These assholes and Stabbypuppy basically turned up and told me Kaiser wanted to see me. I told them to fuck off. They didn't, and got pushy." Turning her head towards the shortened building which was still occasionally disgorging debris as it settled, then glancing at Cricket's body, before finally looking down the street to the small glassy crater, she finally turned back to him and Shawn. "I don't take threats well."
'That much I think we worked out for ourselves,' he carefully didn't say, but by god he thought it very hard indeed. Meeting Shawn's eyes he could see similar thoughts were going through his colleague's head.
"Was it necessary to do… that?" the other man said, waving at the building, then the other signs of destruction. Assault winced slightly as it wasn't really the ideal thing to say at that precise moment in his view. Luckily she didn't seem to take offense.
"They started it," she replied almost mildly. "I finished it. Here, anyway. I still need to clean up some loose ends."
Ethan was slightly distracted by Director Piggot's voice. She'd cut off a vicious obscenity half-way at the point that the woman had said 'her dad' and then gone so quiet he could almost hear it. After several seconds there had been some faint mumbling which sounded horrified. Now, after another short silence, the woman was apparently saying something almost inaudible to someone else in the room, probably with her hand over the microphone. He wondered exactly what that little bit of information leakage had revealed, other than that this woman wasn't even slightly concerned about people working out her identity.
As he was about to ask another question, the distinctive sound of the PRT sirens that had been going on constantly in the background became louder, then a pair of vehicles came around the corner a couple of blocks away and headed in their direction. One was a prisoner transport truck, the other one an incident control vehicle. As they approached, another transport appeared behind them. All three parked fairly close, troopers piling out and stopping dead when they took in the scene, before the sergeant in charge walked over, his hand on his weapon and looking somewhat worried.
Even as he opened his mouth, Ethan cut him off. "Get these guys processed, clean up the site, and take photos," he said. "We'll handle the rest."
Closing his mouth, the man saluted. "Sir," he said crisply. Glancing at the two other people who were watching without moving, he looked mildly concerned, but didn't ask. Instead he went back to the group of PRT people and started directing them as they got to work.
"Maybe we should take this somewhere quieter," the man with the shotgun said. The woman looked at him and nodded. He'd slung the weapon over his shoulder and scooped a handful of shells off the roof of the car, putting them in his pocket, and now he locked the vehicle again.
"You guys like pizza?" the girl asked, turning back to them.
Shawn exchanged a glance with Assault. "Ah… yes?"
"Great. I could probably handle another one. Come on, we can talk in there." She pointed back down the road towards the only business that seemed open, a pizzeria that Assault had never been in. "Sergio won't mind."
"You are hungry," the man chuckled. "You've had three already."
She had a grin in her voice as she replied, "Killing Nazis is fun but it builds an appetite."
"Fair enough. I could do with another coffee myself." Both of them walked off, Ethan watching as they went with a sensation of unreality and incipient dread in his gut. He looked at Dauntless, who looked back and shook his head.
Sighing, and wishing he was somewhere else, he followed with his companion. Tonight was definitely not a normal night even for these parts and he had a horrible feeling it was only going to get stranger.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Krieg knelt on the large piece of road Rune had ripped from the ground with her telekinesis, peering through a huge pair of binoculars mounted on a tripod. "Hold it there," he instructed the robed girl, who slightly rolled her eyes behind his back, but otherwise didn't respond. She wasn't fond of the man, but like a good little E88 member she knew how to follow orders.
Why they were floating here like this no one had bothered to tell her, but that wasn't unusual. The entire city was going strange at the moment anyway, starting when that fuck-huge explosion hours ago had lit the entire room she was in and nearly given her a heart attack. No one seemed to know what had caused it, and Kaiser had called everyone in an hour or so later so she hadn't even really had a chance to poke around on PHO to see if she could find out. All she got to do was sit around waiting to be told to do something, which as usual was providing air support for other people. It was annoying, she hadn't had a proper fight in weeks and was bored out of her skull.
"Up about ten feet," Krieg ordered. She sighed inaudibly and did as requested, floating the chunk of street up to the desired altitude, then sitting down on it. Looking up at the stars she waited for something interesting to happen. Krieg spoke quietly into his headset, apparently telling someone on the ground to move to another position, but she didn't bother trying to make it out. The breeze a hundred feet up was strong enough to blow his words away unless he raised his voice, she was getting cold, and she wasn't really enjoying the entire experience.
After a couple more minutes she lay flat on her back, folded her arms across her chest, and just grumbled to herself. Holding the platform up was trivial and didn't take much concentration, so she was free to think how irritating this all was. Which was very.
Hearing PRT sirens heading somewhere different over the background sound of them around the city, she sat up and peered off in that direction. A few sets of lights were visible intermittently as the vehicles headed away from the large group of them over by Winslow to the east a few miles, apparently going more or less towards the bay, somewhat closer to them. After a moment, she shrugged and lay down again. They were still a long way off and not apparently heading right at them, so what the PRT did was no interest of hers.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Staring at the blurry video she'd pulled from PHO, Emily tried to work out what the hell was going on. "That's the Hebert man," she finally said, pointing at the screen. "I'm sure of it." She looked at Renick. "Get one of the people out there to get a better image of him to confirm it." Her second in command nodded, turning away for a moment to issue a quiet command through the comms system. Only a few seconds later they had an uplink from the squad sergeant's helmet camera of the two people who had apparently wrecked an E88 snatch squad and killed three of their Parahumans. The much higher quality video showed Assault and Dauntless talking to a tall skinny man holding a shotgun and an equally tall figure in matte purple power armor of a design she'd recently become all to familiar with.
"Fuck. It is Hebert. And that girl called him dad, which means that is Taylor Hebert. The missing girl from Winslow."
"In other words, someone who had an ax to grind with that place," Renick corrected, his voice disturbed, as he watched the two people head off down the street with their own Parahumans following after a glance at each other. "That's the link we were missing, I think. She was last seen in Winslow and her father claimed she was the subject of bullying to a degree that is sickening." He looked at Emily, eyes suddenly widening. "By one of our own Wards."
Emily nodded slowly, her mind whirling. "Where did she go? How did she come back? And how the fuck did she end up with all that equipment and the training to use it, in only two weeks? If she Triggered, how did she find all the resources to build that stuff in so little time, and where did she do it? And why did she hop around all over the damn planet taking out S class threats before she turned up here?" Those were only a few of the many, many questions she had. Renick shook his head, not knowing the answers any more than she did.
"There's one big problem that immediately comes to mind, if that really is the Hebert girl. This is her home town. Your approach of wanting that person to go somewhere else may be dead in the water..."
"Shit." Emily rubbed her forehead, thinking hard. This situation was getting worse and worse. Not only did they have someone who was capable of removing with prejudice a large chunk of the city and had done so, but now it looked like that person had fairly good reasons not to be happy with the PRT. Assuming she knew that Sophia Hess was Shadow Stalker, and they had to assume that either she did already or shortly would since her father knew, and wasn't even remotely pleased about it.
"We can't do anything about this without more information," she finally said. "All we can do for now is hope Assault and Dauntless can get that for us, without starting world war three in the process."
Renick sighed. "Yeah. This doesn't make me feel any happier."
"Nor me." Emily shook her head. "And there's still no word from the Chief Director, the Protectorate, or anyone at the top. If those bastards dump all this on my head and claim it's my problem I'm not going to be happy about it."
He nearly chuckled but clearly rethought that in light of the glare she gave him. "I'm sure they won't do that, Emily," he replied after a moment.
"Yeah, right." She looked back at the screen. "I just hope the E88 doesn't do something stupid because of this. We have no idea about way too many things surrounding this case and them getting involved would only cause total chaos."
A couple of seconds passed, then they slowly met each other's eyes. "Oh, hell," she groaned.
Renick was already ordering more PRT personnel onto the street, and telling them to look for E88 people as a matter of priority. Emily slumped in her chair with a sensation that the boot she could almost feel dropping towards her was still gathering speed.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Assault watched as the girl nodded to the guy behind the counter as she headed for a table. No one else was in the place at the moment. The proprietor didn't seem all that surprised to see them, and not particularly worried either. He merely nodded back. "Still hungry?" he asked, smiling a little.
"Yeah, built up an appetite again," she said, laughing. "Sorry about the noise."
"No problem. It was in a good cause," he replied, making Ethan glance at Dauntless, who was staring at the man.
Both of them stared at the woman when she sat down and casually removed the helmet of her power armor, revealing the face of a girl that seemed perhaps eighteen, possibly nineteen, with long almost black curly hair that somehow fitted inside the thing. She bore a distinct family resemblance to the older man, who'd sat down next to her and waved to the counter guy, who nodded and disappeared into the kitchen. Looking between them, Ethan decided it had to be father and daughter. Neither one of which appeared concerned about keeping her identity secret. He wasn't comforted about that. It implied either ignorance, which seemed unlikely, or a confidence that it didn't matter if anyone knew who she was. The latter was deeply worrying, because it in turn implied that she considered herself able to deal with any likely threat to either of them.
Thinking back a short while, he was fairly sure she was right.
"The seafood pizza here is great," she said, picking up a menu, then waving to the seats on the other side of the table. With a certain amount of trepidation and confusion over the entire situation Ethan walked over and sat down, Shawn following and doing likewise. The pizza man returned, putting a large coffee in front of the man and a large coke in front of the girl, who smiled at him. "Thanks, Sergio."
"My pleasure, Taylor." He glanced at the two heroes. "Anything for you guys?"
"Ah… A coffee, thanks. Black with one sugar," Ethan replied. Dauntless shook his head and didn't say anything. The girl ordered a small seafood pizza, Sergio quickly wrote it down, then brought Ethan his coffee, before vanishing again.
Picking up her coke the girl, apparently called Taylor, sipped it while eyeing them. Assault got the impression she was darkly amused by their puzzlement, and he was certain the mostly silent man who was watching them carefully as he drank his own coffee was. "What else do you want to know?" she finally said, putting the glass down again.
"Well, what happened outside would be a good place to start," Ethan replied after a sip of his own coffee to calm his nerves and give him time to think. "In more detail, maybe?"
She studied him, then nodded. "Sure. Like I said, I got back after a very annoying trip, and a really long day, met Dad, had some really good pizza, and we were heading home when those idiots turned up..." It only took her about five minutes to explain the sequence of events although Ethan couldn't help thinking that there were a lot of things missing as far as her own background went. He was aware that Director Piggot was listening, but the woman, aside from a couple of faint comments, didn't interrupt.
When she finished, a voice in his ear said, "Ask her if she really is Taylor Hebert, please. Politely."
"Excuse me, but… Are you Taylor Hebert?" he asked. The last name was somewhat familiar, he'd heard that a girl of that name had gone missing a couple of weeks ago, from Winslow…
His thoughts ground to a halt as he started putting a few things together.
But that girl had been about fifteen, hadn't she? This one was definitely older, he was sure of that. So what the hell happened?
"Yeah, that's me. Why?" She tilted her head enquiringly.
"Taylor Hebert, the girl who went missing from Winslow High School?" Dauntless asked, leaning forward and glancing at Ethan. He'd clearly heard of the case too, which had been being investigated by the BBPD as far as either of them knew. There had been a couple of small articles in the paper about it, and her father Danny Hebert, who was something to do with the Dock Worker's Union. And presumably the man sitting next to her.
"That fucking place," she spat. "Yes. First place I visited when I got back here." Her smile was truly vicious. "It's much better now."
"It's entirely gone now," Shawn muttered.
"Which makes it better," she grinned. The grin abruptly vanished. "It'll be even better than that when I get rid of the remaining problems. But Kaiser is the more urgent problem."
"Um… About that." Ethan swallowed as her eyes fixed on his. "You can't just kill him."
"Oh, I can, don't worry. It's easy," she replied with a toothy and terrifying smirk. "I'm really good at killing things."
"What things?" Shawn asked after a few seconds.
"What have you got?" she said, leaning back as Sergio turned up with her pizza, putting it in front of her. "Thanks."
He nodded and left again.
Ethan tried to suppress the urge he'd suddenly had to get up and leave hastily. "What my friend here means is that ideally we don't go around killing people," he said.
"It solves a lot of problems," she commented, picking up one slice and taking a bite out of it. "If more of those fuckers were killed this place wouldn't be such a shithole to start with."
Both heroes exchanged a look.
"There are… well, laws against that sort of thing."
"Doesn't stop them doing it, does it?" she asked, eating some more pizza. "Seems to me that those laws mostly work to stop people preventing the villains doing whatever they want."
"But without laws, it would be even worse, believe me," Shawn told her.
"I'm not sure how, at times," Danny remarked, causing them to look at him."All the gangs between kill literally hundreds of people a year, and have done for at least the last twenty years or more. Ironically it was actually safer when Marquis was around. He at least only went after people who threatened him. Kaiser and his people kill minorities for fun, and anyone else who gets in the way. Or sometimes is only walking past. I've seen at least a dozen reports this week about deaths attributed to the E88 alone, most of them to Hookwolf. That asshole should have been in the Birdcage for years but it takes my daughter to finally put him down. You guys certainly didn't stop him."
"It's not quite that easy, Mr Hebert," Shawn said, sounding concerned.
"Yeah, it kinda was that easy," Taylor chuckled. "He was reasonably tough but compared to some of the things I've killed over the last few years..."
They stared at her, then at each other.
"Years?" Ethan echoed.
"Yeah. Probably… something like about five years personal timeline? Around that. It's hard to be absolutely accurate." She looked thoughtful, while her father watched her with a look of pride and sympathy. "After you've died the first couple of hundred times, you sort of lose track of it. Stops being all that important really."
She picked up another slice of pizza as Ethan gaped at her, trying to work out what the fuck she was talking about.
Eventually he had to ask, and he was sure she was waiting for that based on the tiny smirk she was wearing.
"Any chance you can explain that?" he said a little helplessly. This was far outside his comfort zone and his normal sense of humor seemed to be having a very hard time coping.
"I still don't have all the details myself," she replied, after finishing the slice. "But it started when I woke up the first time in a pile of bloody crap in a storage room on Mars in 2236."
She laughed at the expression he must have had on his face, while in his ear Piggot made a very strange sound. Then she proceeded to relate a story that terrified him worse than anything he'd ever heard or seen, mostly because he was certain it was totally true.
It got much worse when she produced a small device that turned out to be some sort of holographic projector and started showing them videos of what she'd experienced, apparently recorded by her armor.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Listening to the story the Hebert girl was telling, at first Emily scoffed, but after a while she started to get a horrible sensation in the pit of her stomach. That got steadily worse as the story unfolded. While she was sure a lot was being left out, there was far too much detail in it to be entirely fictional, and it was backed up by certain evidence. And her finely honed bullshit detector which was screaming at her that the damn girl was both entirely truthful and the single most dangerous and angriest person she'd ever heard of.
If she found Sophia, that idiotic girl was dead. That much was abundantly clear.
Emily had a brief thought that perhaps if she threw Sophia to the entirely absent mercies of the Hebert girl that it might save the city.
She and Renick listened as the girl talked, getting more and more concerned. And deeply scared.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
By the time the Hebert girl stopped talking, Shawn was literally shivering. The undercurrent of raw rage that had come into her voice a few times left him nearly shitting himself, despite all the things he'd seen in his time as a hero. She was not someone he'd want aiming that at him or anything he cared about, since it was blatantly obvious that she would have zero compunctions about dealing with problems permanently.
Hookwolf had discovered that to his cost. And it seemed likely that Kaiser would as well unless they could persuade her to let them handle it. He wasn't at all certain that was even possible not to mention likely. She seemed like the sort of person who didn't leave a job unfinished.
How and why she'd ended up where she did was a total mystery, and a lot of the story seemed to be missing since she obviously wasn't telling them everything, but considering that, if she was right, she'd experienced close to five years of essentially constant combat in the two weeks of real time she'd been gone, that was entirely understandable. And it explained how she'd become so fucking dangerous, too. Five years of never-ending combat in an environment that almost literally sounded like hell was far, far more than any soldier would have. Even in a war you normally had some down time, and you didn't have these 'plasma imps' shooting fireballs at you.
And if you died, you certainly didn't restart at the beginning and have to do it all over again.
The fact that she was more or less sane, if extremely annoyed by the entire experience, was almost unbelievable. He wondered what else she'd learned during that other than how to kill things really efficiently.
Both he and Ethan simply sat there and looked at her as she fell silent, his colleague holding a cold and half-finished cup of coffee in one hand, which was shaking slightly. The girl picked up the little projector thing that had shown them scenes that would feature in his nightmares for years to come, turned it off, and put it away somewhere. "So that's pretty much it. Now I'm home. Got a few last things to deal with and then I can sit down and work out what I'm going to do next. Obviously going to school isn't on the list. I doubt there's anything I could learn there any more."
She shrugged. "I can probably figure out some way to make some cash. I learned a few neat tricks."
Standing, she looked down at them as she put her helmet back on, while her father who had remained mostly quiet during the story also got up. "Now if you'll excuse me I have some more Nazis to find. I need to explain a few things to them."
They watched as she headed for the exit, her father stopping at the counter to hand Sergio some cash, then waving and following her. Both men exchanged a look, blinked, and jumped up. "Oh, fuck," Dauntless mumbled. He was certain she wasn't joking.
They went after her, finding her standing outside looking off to the left, away from where the PRT had finished cleaning up the scene before they went away. He followed her eyes to see a dozen men dressed in dark clothes and carrying weapons coming around the corner near where Hookwolf had died.
His eyes widened, but he didn't even have time to react before things got very complicated very suddenly indeed.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Tammi sat up again as she heard Krieg's voice become more urgent. He was still looking through those ridiculously large binoculars at something in the distance. She squinted to try to make out what he was so interested in, while wishing that people would tell her what was going on. Through the gaps in the taller buildings, she could make out some sort of illuminated window at ground level, some sort of shop or something, on a street at least a mile away. There were some people outside it, silhouetted against the light, but the figures were so small at this distance all she could tell was that they were there. The street ran at an angle from their position, going off at about forty five degrees until it vanished behind the buildings.
Krieg said something that sounded like "Shoot the bitch," into his headset.
Tammi's head snapped around to stare at him, then she looked back in time to see a number of purple flickers of light.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Taylor watched the men, obviously E88 gangers, as they stopped a couple of hundred meters away. She'd felt them coming for the last twenty seconds or so. Her armor's systems instantly highlighted the weapons they were all carrying, assessing them and assigning a threat level, which was low. She stepped in front of her father, hearing him chamber a round in the shotgun he'd acquired from that first E88 fuckwit.
Before she could say anything, the men opened fire. She heard Dauntless make a sound of shock but didn't bother looking around.
Half a dozen bright purple energy beams hit her, two more missing and going past, one on either side. Her armor registered the hits and showed a small momentary drop in integrity before it compensated. Her eyes narrowed as she pulled out her plasma rifle.
The first RPG round screamed past some two meters to the right, the rocket flare briefly illuminating the entire street with a yellow flash. She didn't move a muscle, hearing it explode somewhere in the distance behind her. The next two were fired simultaneously, both of them tracking towards her this time.
She lifted the plasma gun and shot both of them out of the air before they'd got halfway to her.
Her anger, which had been simmering under the surface as it always was, rose.
Taylor aimed, held the trigger down, and moved the energy weapon sideways in a quick motion. Then she turned away from the bisected gangers even as they were falling to the ground, put the gun away, equipped the rail gun, and aimed at a much more distant target.
She fired.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Rune's eyes widened as the distant scene went from four people standing next to a window to total chaos in a second, then they widened even more as a violently brilliant blue-white ball of something headed towards them, growing from a pinprick to a basketball-sized sphere of death almost too fast to track. Without even thinking about it she dived off the platform her powers were holding in the air, feeling a massive wave of heat pass over her back before a huge force slammed her sideways. She lost consciousness as she bounced off the first building.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Ethan had just barely managed to avoid the purple laser beam or whatever it was that went between the Hebert girl and himself. Several more directly hit her, apparently to no effect, while the last one skimmed over Shawn's shoulder and removed a chunk of armor and flesh with a sound like someone slapping a metal table with a steak. His companion yelled in pain as he dropped, but Ethan didn't spare him a glance since he was much more invested in the fucking RPG rounds that these new idiots had just fired at them.
The first one went past at some distance, exploding on a building behind them, while the next two didn't even make it more than halfway as Hebert moved so fast he couldn't make out the motion. A blue ball of energy hit each rocket near enough at the same time, fractions of a second after they were fired, and before the explosions died away she'd also cut down all the attackers in one shot.
Then she whipped around, the weapon changing to something even larger, and a much bigger blue-white discharge roared off into the distance, causing him and Dauntless to duck while staring. The noise was incredible. Far in the distance a moment later there was a large explosion over the rooftops of the buildings, the whitish flash illuminating the scene.
"Christ," he said, bewildered at how quickly everything had happened. He was used to fast moving battles but this was ridiculous and had come completely out of the blue. Not to mention the sheer efficiency and brutality of her actions, which were clearly aimed at eliminating the danger permanently and immediately.
He wondered a little hysterically if she even understood the concept of 'non-lethal takedown.'
Or 'overkill.'
Director Piggot was yammering in his ear, but he ignored her as he watched the horribly lethal young woman put her enormous weapon away, while wondering how many other weapons she actually had on her. And where she kept the fucking things.
"Right. Enough is enough. Kaiser's beginning to piss me the hell off," the armored girl said in a hard voice. "Time to point out how that ends."
Walking over to Shawn who was moaning in pain, a large cauterized and blackened wound on his right shoulder where his costume had been vaporized, she shook her head. "For god's sake, it's only a small third degree burn," she said, sounding slightly annoyed, although she was almost visibly radiating rage again. Ethan was profoundly grateful that it wasn't aimed at them. "Man up, will you?" She produced a small device like an auto-injector and bent over him, stabbing it into his exposed skin. "Here, this will fix it. Stings a bit, but you get used to it in the end."
She walked off with her father next to her as Shawn screamed in agony. Ethan watched, amazed and a little sickened, as the blackened flesh quickly repaired itself. By the time his friend was only groaning a little and apparently entirely healthy, he looked up to see both Heberts had disappeared.
"Assault!" The voice in his ear was furious. "Report! What the fuck is going on?" He realized that she'd been shouting for some time now.
He got to his feet and hauled Dauntless to his own, the other hero feeling his shoulder in shock. Both of them looked at the fresh batch of dead gang members at the far end of the street.
"We may have a problem, Director," he said as calmly as he could, which wasn't very.
Ethan had a feeling that this night was going to be a very long one, unless you were a Nazi.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
When they came back with chinese food, Lisa was sitting on the sofa looking out the window next to the TV with the weirdest expression Brian had seen on her yet. She didn't react when they entered, just continued peering out into the night. He looked at her, then at the window, not seeing anything of interest out there other than a few street lights.
He did work out that she was looking towards Brockton Bay.
As Alec and Rachel unpacked the bag of food, he walked over and poked her. Very slowly, she turned her head to meet his eyes. He saw her pupils were tiny pinpricks, giving her a very disturbing look which immediately worried him considerably.
"Hey, you all right?" he asked, concerned.
She blinked, then opened her mouth.
"In the second age, at the final battle, when all that Hell could field had been vanquished, one stood. Tempered by the fires of RAGE she overcame all. In her FURY she broke the forces that dared stand against her, taking her place as the rightful Heir through trial by combat. The Umbral Plains lie in ruins, the Dark Lords are cast beyond the Outer Realms for all eternity, while across the worlds all know that She Has Come. Absolute in her determination to bring eternal torment to those who wrong her and hers, yet merciful to those who follow her in awe of her Glory, Power, and Anger, she is named… The Doom Queen."
The deep ghastly voice that spoke those words was not that of a seventeen year old girl, Brian thought in horror as he pressed himself against the wall as far from her as he could get in the hotel room, next to Rachel and Alec who were doing the same thing. He could smell urine from the direction of the dogs, who were hiding under the table.
He wasn't even sure that the voice was human.
Lisa blinked again, then shook her head. "Oh, great, you got chinese. Did you remember beef chow mein for me?" she said perfectly normally as she hopped to her feet and went over to the table. Sniffing, she looked down, then grimaced. "Rachel, your fucking dogs have peed all over the floor."
She glanced at them and frowned. "What's wrong with you guys?"
Peeling himself off the wall, Brian felt very much that whatever was going on he didn't like it at all and wished it would go away and leave him alone.
Lisa, Brian, Rachel, and Alec all said the exact same thing at the exact same time, in the exact same tone of total horrified disbelief.
Brian pointed at the TV in the hotel room they were all in, twenty miles from Brockton Bay. Lisa had hooked her laptop to it and they'd tried to figure out what in god's name was happening back in the city, and had just watched the single most disturbing video on PHO any of them had ever seen. "Did you see that?" he demanded in appalled awe. "She took out Victor like it was nothing, along with half the building he was in, then basically slaughtered Hookwolf and made it look easy. He didn't stand a fucking chance."
Lisa nodded, her eyes so wide he was thinking she might need medical help later. Her pupils were expanded like she'd taken something pretty strong although he was certain she hadn't. And from their more than a little angry discussion on the way here she apparently didn't remember anything of the last three days, which was all sorts of worrying.
"I think I know who She is," Alec said in a voice that was faint and horrified.
Rachel, beside him, was cuddling her dogs, all of which seemed upset, but she also nodded like her head was on a spring.
"She's got to be a Tinker, but fuck me she's the scariest Tinker I've ever even heard of," Brian added, looking at the freeze-frame that caught the woman in power armor in mid stride. Lisa had hit the space bar almost in a fugue state as the one who'd just wiped out a wildly dangerous pair of Nazi capes with ease was heading back towards the older guy who was holding a bunch of normal gangers at bay with a massive shotgun-like weapon.
Even that guy worried Brian a lot. The PHO poster going by the name of 'Pieman_Cheeze' who'd uploaded the video about fifteen minutes ago had started videoing just as the E88 group accosted the armored girl and the older guy at their vehicle, so he'd caught the entire exchange. Even though it was shot from far enough away that none of the speech could be made out, what actually happened was easy to see, especially since the car had been parked directly under a streetlight.
The E88 had obviously tried to strong-arm the woman into joining them and had seriously miscalculated the reaction. The older man had taken out two gang members half his age with the certain motions of someone who knew exactly how to deal major damage, and no signs whatsoever of hesitation. Then he'd blown Cricket away with a shotgun without a flicker of emotion, before the girl had apparently literally caught a bullet in mid flight, exploded the shooter who had to have been Victor a second later, and turned on Hookwolf with the sort of firepower you could take out a battleship with.
One shot from some sort of energy weapon had blown the fully transformed E88 Changer about eighty feet, then she'd swapped out the thing for the biggest fucking rotary cannon anyone had ever seen, never mind used handheld, and emptied hundreds of rounds of high caliber ammo into him. Then she'd delivered the coup de grace with the energy gun, completely vaporizing the bastard.
Brian had never even imagined such ferocity and single-minded devotion to dealing that sort of destruction, and was wishing he could forget about it even now even though no one was actually going to miss the bastard. It was absolutely horrifying.
She made Lung look positively cheerful. He could almost feel the rage emanating from her as she did her thing, and wasn't entirely certain that the slight shimmer that had seemed to come from her was actually heat from the gun and not a visible manifestation of an anger more suited to a furious god of destruction than a female Tinker.
He did not want to meet her.
Ever.
He looked at Lisa again and noticed she was shivering, her gaze still fixed on the screen. Reaching out he prodded the space bar and resumed the video. They watched it to the end, where Assault and Dauntless walked over from somewhere off screen, looking somewhat reluctant, and began talking to both of the other people. There was a followup video, he noticed, but he left that for now. There was also a vast number of replies to the thread that was growing very fast, faster than he'd seen for most new Parahumans, and when he scrolled down through the first couple of pages he saw that many of them were expressing a sort of bloodthirsty relief that Hookwolf was finally dead.
A lot of people in Brockton Bay, and many other places, had wanted the murderous Nazi dead for many years. He'd left an impressive trail of bodies behind him and no one could really work out why the PRT hadn't done something permanent about it years ago. Considering there were two separate Birdcage sentences on the guy and he was rumored to be one murder away from a kill order, the authorities really should have gone after him more enthusiastically. That they didn't was generally taken as yet more proof that they were either incompetent and/or corrupt, and possibly in the pay of the Nazis to begin with. Considering the number of villains of that level that were left to roam the countryside without any real repercussions he couldn't entirely disagree with that viewpoint. Between them, the major E88 capes had killed to his certain knowledge at least five hundred people just between them in the last decade and no one really did anything about it. Some of those people had been friends of his, so he wasn't particularly upset about seeing Hookwolf killed.
It was more that what had done that absolutely terrified him…
The PHO comments, of course, seemed to run the gamut from people who were positively gleefully suggesting other targets for bloody death, those who were fantasizing about how many pieces someone like Jack Slash would end up in and how slowly, the usual suggestions of who'd come out on top between this new cape and almost every other possible hero or villain, all the way down to people insisting that she should immediately be prosecuted for the murder of a poor defenseless Nazi. He snorted with black amusement at a couple of those, since it was obvious they were from other E88 members, none of which he sympathized with in any way at all. For obvious reasons. But it was a good example of the sort of thing you got on the internet. The place tended to be full of very strange people in his experience.
And that was coming from him, a teenage super-villain.
Shaking his head, he closed the laptop and gently took it out of Lisa's unresisting hands, placing it to the side. "You OK?" he asked her. She stared at the now-blank TV screen for a good thirty seconds more before turning her head to meet his eyes, blinking a few times, then slowly fell over to the side.
He caught her and sighed. "She's gone again," he complained. Alec looked at the blonde and shrugged, although his face betrayed a slight amount of concern which for him was pretty expressive. Rachel also looked but kept holding her dogs.
"Must be faulty or something," the other boy said. "Stick her on the bed and let her sleep it off." Brian picked Lisa up and took her into the girl's room, putting her on one of the beds and covering her, before returning to the living area with a concerned backwards glance.
"What do we do now?" he wondered out loud. "I'm worried about Aisha, and dad for that matter. They're still in Brockton. With… Her."
"Don't want to go back," Rachel muttered, almost obsessively stroking Angelica, who was whining faintly and visibly shivering.
Brian looked at Alec and saw the same thought in his team-mate's eyes. To be honest, it was much the same feeling he had himself, but he also had family obligations. At least to his sister, and after a moment he sighed and thought that his father also deserved the same. The man wasn't actually a bad person, just not a particularly good father, at least for a teenaged girl.
Their mother on the other hand…
He shook his head. He'd burned his bridges there and wasn't sorry about it.
Alec had commandeered the laptop while he'd taken Lisa to her bed and was now looking through the Brockton Bay section of PHO for anything else of interest. He'd apparently decided he didn't really want to look at the other video of the Tinker of Death. Brian didn't blame him, it was going to take a while before he could get that out of his mind. "Huh," the smaller boy grunted, scanning one thread with raised eyebrows. "Weird."
"What?" Brian looked up from his ruminations, glancing at Alec, then looking at the screen. Alec scrolled back a few pages.
"People are saying that there are strange things wandering around in the docks growling at them," he said, pointing at one line.
"Demonic aliens, alien demons, or just mass hallucinations?" Brian read out loud, before sniggering. "Yeah, let me guess who came up with that."
"Not difficult," Alec grinned. "That guy's a nutcase. But there are several reports of something strange going on in that area. Mostly from people who are probably shitfaced, fair enough, but..." He shrugged. "Brockton Bay, you know?"
"Unfortunately," Brian sighed. Reaching out he snagged the computer and scrolled down a few posts to read a comment from someone who claimed to be a member of the ABB and was saying he'd been chased by a big red flying ball with horns, enormous teeth, and a bad attitude. Most of the followup comments were basically laughing at him, and telling him that without photos or video he wasn't going to be believed. His response that the flying ball had eaten his phone wasn't particularly plausible…
"That place gets stranger and stranger," Brian finally grumbled, handing the laptop back to Alec, who took it and started reading another thread.
"True," Alec replied, then stopped and stared at the TV. "OK, this one's saying someone nuked a high school!?"
He met Brian's eyes, then both of them looked at Rachel, who shook her head. "Don't wanna know," she replied, settling back with all her dogs draped over her and closing her eyes.
"Fuck." Brian put his hands over his face. He really wasn't having a good time at the moment and hadn't been for the last few days.
"SHE HAS COME!" Lisa's voice said in a highly disturbing way, before a loud snore came back to them as they all jumped violently.
"WE KNOW!" all three of them yelled back as one.
Then they went out to find some food and think about what their next move was, leaving Lisa to her snoring and occasional shout of doom.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Max watched the video with a sense of complete disbelief. When it finished, he raised his eyes to meet those of James 'Krieg' Fliescher, who stared back.
"Jesus Christ," he breathed, not knowing yet whether he should be furious, appalled, or terrified. In all honesty he was pretty much all of those at the same time. "Who the hell is she?"
James shook his head, taking the tablet back and putting it on the desk in front of him. "No one knows. She just turned up out of nowhere, no record of her anywhere before a few hours ago. And she's apparently not only perfectly happy to let people see her face, but also entirely unconcerned with the Rules or anything else."
Sitting back in his chair with a sensation of disbelief, Max keep looking at James. "Brad, Victor, and Melody, all dead in… minutes. Just like that."
"Yeah. Just like that. Melody took two 12 gauge hits to the chest, at practically point blank range. She probably died instantly. Victor..." James shook his head again. "That woman destroyed the top two floors at least with only a couple of rockets, and poor Victor sure wouldn't have made it. I wouldn't be surprised if they don't even find a body after that."
He looked at the tablet for a moment, then went on, "Brad, well, that first shot would probably have killed almost anyone else on the spot. The gatling cannon thing she was using would probably give Leviathan a headache. And those final shots to finish him off… It was the most brutal killing I think I've ever seen." He sighed a little. "Might even have been a mercy, I doubt even Brad would get up after god alone knows how many hundred armor piercing rounds like that. But I don't think she did it to be merciful."
"Making a point," Max said slowly. James nodded.
"Yeah. The point being she didn't give a shit and doesn't take prisoners. And she's perfectly content to not only tell us that but the PRT too."
The pair exchanged looks in silence for a few seconds. "What do you want to do about it?" James finally asked. Max turned his head to look out the window of his penthouse office towards where three of his Parahumans had died, killed by someone who'd made it look almost trivial.
He'd seen the flash of the detonation that killed Victor at the time it happened but hadn't realized what it was. For some reason that made him feel… odd. He didn't really know why.
Who the hell was this woman? Or girl, really, the images he'd initially been shown of her without her helmet on showed someone who was probably around eighteen or nineteen he thought. Older than Rune, but not by much, yet she seemed prepared to simply eliminate anyone who got in her way with what could only be described as massive overkill.
And who was that older guy? For some reason the face looked familiar but he simply couldn't place it. He was sure he'd seen it before. Leaning over the desk he slid the tablet towards him and scrolled back in the video, looking for the clearest shot he could find. Eventually he stopped on a freeze-frame of the guy literally caught in the middle of shooting Cricket, the shotgun shown with an enormous blast of flame coming out the muzzle and underlighting his face in a rather dramatic and, if Max was honest, more than a little troubling manner. There was no sign at all of any real emotion that he could see. The guy looked about as invested in killing someone as most people would be in picking up a carton of milk.
Even to Max, considering some of the things he'd done himself, or seen done, that struck him as a bit strange.
Zooming in as much as he could, he tilted the tablet this way and that while squinting at the pixelated face, trying to decided if he really had seen the bastard before. There was a little voice niggling at the back of his mind that said yes, but he simply couldn't get it to divulge a name, or even under what circumstances. It was very annoying. In the end he slid it across to James, who picked it up and looked at it with an eyebrow up. "Recognize him?"
His subordinate studied the image for a while, then shook his head slowly with a frown. "No, but I get the feeling I should."
"Yeah, me too, but I'm fucked if I can recall why," Max growled.
"That Tinker and this guy are obviously close somehow," James remarked, zooming out a little and studying the image again. "Judging by being in that pizza place, and how they were just wandering around in the street. Husband and wife?"
"Doubt it, he's at least twice her age, and he sort of looks a little like her," Max replied after thinking it over, while inspecting his phone on which the best shot of the girl without her helmet was displayed. "Brother and sister, maybe, or father and daughter. More likely that one."
"Maybe he's a pressure point we could use to get her to talk to us? Assuming you still want her to talk to us." James dropped the tablet once more. "Personally I think we should kill both of them. They've cost us three capes, friends of ours, and at least half a dozen normals."
Max glanced at him before going back to staring out the window into the night. Far off towards the docks he could still see a huge number of flashing lights from PRT and BBPD emergency vehicles, and there were quite a lot of them moving around in the larger area too rather than the original position they'd all gravitated towards. He suspected he knew who had poked the anthill, now. Although he had no idea how.
Based on what had happened to his people, she'd probably blown someone away. It seemed to be a thing with her.
On the whole he didn't have any problems with that approach as long as it was his people being the blow-ers and not the blow-ees. And as long as it was done in a way that couldn't easily be traced back to them, of course. No sense in visibly ignoring the Rules. Conversely, when he was sure that no one would be in a position to know about it, he had never really let something as silly as rules of engagement get between him and a goal. You just had to be smart about it.
This new Tinker didn't seem to realize that. Or, possibly, care. The idea that she didn't even know about the Rules crossed his mind but after a moment's consideration he dismissed it. He was of growing conviction that she wasn't a new Trigger at all, since the weaponry she was carrying was way too powerful to just be something she cobbled together after Triggering. He was well aware of how Tinkers needed to ramp up from the initial designs, which were usually barely functional if often entirely ridiculous inventions that shouldn't have worked in the first place. It was what made them so dangerous if they had time to plan, since they could keep escalating given enough resources.
Of course, it was also what made them so useful to people like him. He had resources. Lots and lots of them. All he lacked was the Tinker…
The problem was that this one was clearly a loose cannon and didn't appear likely to agree to joining them, regardless of her own beliefs. Perhaps she was sympathetic to the Empire cause, and could be persuaded, if the right person approached her. Sending Brad, in retrospect, had probably been a mistake as the man wasn't the most diplomatic of people and tended to be somewhat heavy-handed at best. But it was of course possible that the girl was of an alignment opposed to his own organization and would never agree, or had been poisoned against them by the explosive meeting with Hookwolf.
He mulled over his options. Doing nothing was clearly the least satisfactory one. It broadcast the message that the E88 wouldn't retaliate if their people were killed, which was a dangerous signal to send. It would embolden Lung and his scum, possibly cause the Merchants to get uppity, and even leave them more vulnerable to the PRT actually doing something. Brad had been their heaviest individual hitter by a large margin, Victor's loss was a massive blow due to the enormous number of abilities he brought to the group, and Melody had been one of their best melee fighters. Losing any one of them was a huge problem, losing all three at once was a disaster in many different ways.
Could he make up for it by somehow getting this obviously extremely dangerous Tinker under his control? If he could it would add a lot of firepower to the E88, since he was pretty sure that the three weapons just that video showed were most likely not the limits of her abilities. He briefly wondered what her specialization was. Possibly just destruction. She was certainly good at that.
But if he didn't get her to agree, one way or another, to work for him he was putting whoever he sent to try talking to her at risk of violent retribution and might lose more people. Which was unacceptable. So that was the massive downside to the idea of recruiting her.
If, instead, he arranged to eliminate her, the main risk was as far as he could see failing to manage it. He had little doubt that she'd probably not see the funny side of a near miss. He certainly wouldn't and he got the impression she was at least as ruthless as he was. Probably more so, possibly more so than anyone else he'd met before. For some reason he had a flashback to his own sister and briefly shuddered.
He didn't miss her.
No. Recruiting her was more likely to fail than otherwise, he was certain of that. Perhaps if he'd tried someone a little less obvious in the first place, but in his own defense when Hookwolf was sent to bring in a new Parahuman, he'd normally succeeded, or made sure that no one else could bring them in. Pity the second option hadn't played out this time…
So it was down to either ignoring the insult to his group, which led to some bad outcomes, or dealing with it permanently. And not missing. Which, considering she'd apparently detected and caught an inbound. .50 caliber round with her hand was going to be a challenge.
"Do we still have those Tinker-tech laser guns we retrieved from Coil's mercs last fall?" he finally
asked slowly, still looking out the window and watching the lights move around.
There was a long pause then James said, "Yes. They're in the armory."
"Do they work?"
"They did the last time we tested them, yeah. We were saving them for the right moment. Like if we could frame Coil for something."
"I think this is probably more important," Max replied, turning his chair to face his colleague. "We can't let this stand, but I'm not really interested in seeing if she can react fast enough to shoot back if we give her any warning. A laser beam is much quicker than a rifle bullet. And a lot harder to catch."
"True." James looked thoughtful. "Think they'll handle that power armor?"
"The damn things can blow a hole through two inches of armor plate in about a second, and I doubt her power armor is that thick," Max replied with a shrug. "I sure wouldn't want to be hit by one. Coil is a fucker but he certainly didn't skimp on the hardware."
"We've got four of them. And several RPGs with enough rockets for them to take out a battalion. We could zap the bitch with the lasers then finish her off with the RPGs, I guess..." James sounded a little doubtful, but more because he probably thought it was somewhat excessive rather than not thinking it would work. Which was true enough, but the girl had started it. And with the PRT running around like idiots right now they could utilize the chaos to their benefit and hit her hard then get out before the authorities even knew what was happening. Assuming they could find her, of course.
"It's a major escalation," James added.
"I know, but we don't have much choice," Max growled. "If we let her get away with this, we'll look weak, and you know what will happen then. On the other hand if we come down on her like the hand of god, it will increase our reputation."
"Assuming we actually succeed," the other man muttered.
Max smiled at him. "Don't worry. Yes, she's violent and scary, but then, so are we."
His smile turned into a nasty grin. After a moment, James returned it.
"On the other hand, no sense being stupid about it. Find out where she is now, then pick out some people who are good shots and get them set up with the hardware. Tell them to wear something that doesn't tie them to us. Use ones that don't have tattoos, if you can."
"Just in case?"
"Indeed. Plausible deniability is probably a good idea." Max smirked a little. "Get Rune here. You're going to coordinate the hit from a safe distance, in the air. Find that bitch and kill her. When you succeed, we can discreetly point out to certain people that if you fuck with us, we make you regret it. Briefly."
"And if we don't succeed..."
Max shrugged. "Coil sent some mercs after her. His laser guns, right? He's the only one who uses those things. It's practically a calling card. And if she gets pissed and goes after him, so much the better. Win win, as long as we're smart about it." He fixed the other man with a hard look. "Don't fuck it up, and don't get too close to that crazy Tinker."
"Don't worry, I like living," James replied as he stood. "A good pair of binoculars and about a mile and a half distance should be safe enough." He turned and headed for the door, then stopped with his hand on the knob. "If we don't get her, what next?"
"We can ask certain… acquaintances… to loan us people with the right skill set to do the job," Max replied after a moment. "I'd prefer not to, I don't like owing people favors, especially them, but we can't ignore this situation. It puts everything we've worked for at risk."
"Agreed." James, who Max knew was a true believer, unlike himself, nodded. Moments later he was gone. Standing the leader of the E88 walked over to his drinks cabinet and poured himself a very expensive glass of alcohol, then lifted it in salute towards the direction in which the place his people had died lay, before taking a sip and returning to his desk to make contingency plans.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
When Ethan and Shawn arrived at the car which the purple-armored woman and the older man were standing next to, while both rather wishing they had the option of walking in the opposite direction, they were worried they were about to witness a series of executions. The captured, still living, E88 members clearly felt the same thing based on how tense they were, and how they kept looking at the still figures of the ones that hadn't made it. Including Cricket, who had a pair of holes you could have put a fist into in her back.
A point blank buckshot blast made a pretty nasty mess. Two of them was almost gratuitous. She'd probably been dead before she hit the ground.
The man was holding the weapon that Ethan assumed had done the damage, a pump action shotgun with a pistol stock, and the way he was holding it made it obvious that he not only knew exactly how to use it but had no compunction about doing so if required. The manner in which it was not quite pointing at the pair of them also made it apparent that this requirement wasn't necessarily off the table quite yet in his mind.
Both Ethan and Shawn made very sure to not make any sudden moves.
"We'll take them off your hands, so there's no reason to do anything… unfortunate," Ethan finally said, after several seconds of trying to think of the right words that were least likely to cause a massacre. He was of the opinion that this woman, who somehow radiated a sort of cold fury that was making his teeth itch and causing him to wish he was home in bed, was being totally truthful when she implied she'd just as happily finish the gang members off as let them go. It wasn't a nice feeling. Strangely, at the same time he didn't feel she was actually aiming the anger at him or his companion, and if anything was pretty much neutral towards them.
She did not like the gangers, though.
"You sure?" she asked, producing a very, very disturbingly large knife that was closer to a sword from wherever she kept her weapons, then waving it meaningfully at the gangers. The three that were looking back over their shoulders, apparently braver than their compatriots, went stark white under the streetlights and sweated even more heavily when they saw it.
"Yes," he hastily said. "We're sure. I can call for backup to remove them and clean up. And maybe then we could just… talk… for a while?"
She turned her helmet to him for a second or two, then looked at the man next to her, who shrugged while not letting his gun drop at all. It had been sort of nearly pointing at the gangers while somehow also sort of nearly pointing at them. Ethan wasn't sure how that trick was done and didn't much like it. "Your choice," the guy said.
"Fine," she replied. The sword-knife vanished, taking an aura of imminent death with it. The aura of nearly imminent death she was producing all by herself had remained. "I just need to have a word with them." Walking closer to the half-dozen shaven-headed and terrified E88 men she studied them, then pointed at one. "You. You're the leader of this lot, right?"
The Neo-Nazi, who was at least six feet tall and built like a linebacker, with shaven head festooned in swastika tattoos, swallowed hard. For an instant Ethan actually felt sorry for the fucker, then felt disgusted with himself for doing so. The man stared at the armored woman over his shoulder as she moved closer. She was even taller than he was, and had to bend over a little to put her head next to his. He tried to move away but didn't have a lot of luck, pressed against the wall as he was.
She said something else in a low voice, too quietly for either Ethan or Shawn to make out. The Nazi then shook his head quickly. The woman repeated her comment, putting a hand on the guy's shoulder in the process. There was a faint crunch and the man squeaked like a kitten being stepped on, going almost green. He started talking, very very quickly. She nodded encouragingly when he slowed down, while her hand tightened a little more.
Within a couple of minutes she seemed satisfied, releasing the man who dropped to his knees and vomited. "Thank you," she said, returning to her companion, then turning to Ethan and his colleague. "All yours." Glancing at the man she'd added, "We can talk to these guys then go see Kaiser."
"Sure," the other guy replied with a sort of grim smile. "Want some help?"
She laughed a little, in a way that nearly made Ethan piss himself, but didn't reply.
Not certain what the fuck was going on, but as worried as he'd ever been, Ethan left Shawn to stare nervously at the woman whose name they still didn't know, moved a short distance away, then made a brief report to Director Piggot.
"We'll send backup," the director said when he finished telling her what has happened. "Do not push her. I want her out of here, not running around vaporizing Nazis." She then muttered something that sounded as if she was regretting having to say that, before continuing more loudly, "Leave your comms open. We need to hear what she says. And Assault?"
"Yeah?"
"Be careful. Losing you and Dauntless would be… unfortunate."
He almost smiled. "Thanks. We love you too."
"Idiot."
That time he did smirk a little, the annoyance in her voice was palpable, but he seldom got to say things like that right to her face and didn't regret it. And he was fairly sure she genuinely was concerned which was oddly morale-boosting, despite her well known dislike of Parahumans in general.
Perhaps he was finally wearing her down?
Taking a deep breath, he turned back to the scene by the car, then returned to his partner. "The PRT is sending people to take these guys and clean up the scene."
"All right," she replied, glancing at him, then going back to watching the prisoners who were sweating hard and looking like they regretted their life choices in a very significant way. Ethan was pretty sure that as and when they got out of jail they were going straight. And as far away from Brockton Bay as could be managed.
"Um..." He cleared his throat and twitched when she looked back at him. "Can we ask what exactly happened? If you don't mind?"
For some reason he really didn't want to give her the slightest idea they were a threat. He'd seen how she dealt with those.
The woman shrugged a little. "I got home a little while ago after a very annoying trip and just wanted to have a pizza with my dad. These assholes and Stabbypuppy basically turned up and told me Kaiser wanted to see me. I told them to fuck off. They didn't, and got pushy." Turning her head towards the shortened building which was still occasionally disgorging debris as it settled, then glancing at Cricket's body, before finally looking down the street to the small glassy crater, she finally turned back to him and Shawn. "I don't take threats well."
'That much I think we worked out for ourselves,' he carefully didn't say, but by god he thought it very hard indeed. Meeting Shawn's eyes he could see similar thoughts were going through his colleague's head.
"Was it necessary to do… that?" the other man said, waving at the building, then the other signs of destruction. Assault winced slightly as it wasn't really the ideal thing to say at that precise moment in his view. Luckily she didn't seem to take offense.
"They started it," she replied almost mildly. "I finished it. Here, anyway. I still need to clean up some loose ends."
Ethan was slightly distracted by Director Piggot's voice. She'd cut off a vicious obscenity half-way at the point that the woman had said 'her dad' and then gone so quiet he could almost hear it. After several seconds there had been some faint mumbling which sounded horrified. Now, after another short silence, the woman was apparently saying something almost inaudible to someone else in the room, probably with her hand over the microphone. He wondered exactly what that little bit of information leakage had revealed, other than that this woman wasn't even slightly concerned about people working out her identity.
As he was about to ask another question, the distinctive sound of the PRT sirens that had been going on constantly in the background became louder, then a pair of vehicles came around the corner a couple of blocks away and headed in their direction. One was a prisoner transport truck, the other one an incident control vehicle. As they approached, another transport appeared behind them. All three parked fairly close, troopers piling out and stopping dead when they took in the scene, before the sergeant in charge walked over, his hand on his weapon and looking somewhat worried.
Even as he opened his mouth, Ethan cut him off. "Get these guys processed, clean up the site, and take photos," he said. "We'll handle the rest."
Closing his mouth, the man saluted. "Sir," he said crisply. Glancing at the two other people who were watching without moving, he looked mildly concerned, but didn't ask. Instead he went back to the group of PRT people and started directing them as they got to work.
"Maybe we should take this somewhere quieter," the man with the shotgun said. The woman looked at him and nodded. He'd slung the weapon over his shoulder and scooped a handful of shells off the roof of the car, putting them in his pocket, and now he locked the vehicle again.
"You guys like pizza?" the girl asked, turning back to them.
Shawn exchanged a glance with Assault. "Ah… yes?"
"Great. I could probably handle another one. Come on, we can talk in there." She pointed back down the road towards the only business that seemed open, a pizzeria that Assault had never been in. "Sergio won't mind."
"You are hungry," the man chuckled. "You've had three already."
She had a grin in her voice as she replied, "Killing Nazis is fun but it builds an appetite."
"Fair enough. I could do with another coffee myself." Both of them walked off, Ethan watching as they went with a sensation of unreality and incipient dread in his gut. He looked at Dauntless, who looked back and shook his head.
Sighing, and wishing he was somewhere else, he followed with his companion. Tonight was definitely not a normal night even for these parts and he had a horrible feeling it was only going to get stranger.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Krieg knelt on the large piece of road Rune had ripped from the ground with her telekinesis, peering through a huge pair of binoculars mounted on a tripod. "Hold it there," he instructed the robed girl, who slightly rolled her eyes behind his back, but otherwise didn't respond. She wasn't fond of the man, but like a good little E88 member she knew how to follow orders.
Why they were floating here like this no one had bothered to tell her, but that wasn't unusual. The entire city was going strange at the moment anyway, starting when that fuck-huge explosion hours ago had lit the entire room she was in and nearly given her a heart attack. No one seemed to know what had caused it, and Kaiser had called everyone in an hour or so later so she hadn't even really had a chance to poke around on PHO to see if she could find out. All she got to do was sit around waiting to be told to do something, which as usual was providing air support for other people. It was annoying, she hadn't had a proper fight in weeks and was bored out of her skull.
"Up about ten feet," Krieg ordered. She sighed inaudibly and did as requested, floating the chunk of street up to the desired altitude, then sitting down on it. Looking up at the stars she waited for something interesting to happen. Krieg spoke quietly into his headset, apparently telling someone on the ground to move to another position, but she didn't bother trying to make it out. The breeze a hundred feet up was strong enough to blow his words away unless he raised his voice, she was getting cold, and she wasn't really enjoying the entire experience.
After a couple more minutes she lay flat on her back, folded her arms across her chest, and just grumbled to herself. Holding the platform up was trivial and didn't take much concentration, so she was free to think how irritating this all was. Which was very.
Hearing PRT sirens heading somewhere different over the background sound of them around the city, she sat up and peered off in that direction. A few sets of lights were visible intermittently as the vehicles headed away from the large group of them over by Winslow to the east a few miles, apparently going more or less towards the bay, somewhat closer to them. After a moment, she shrugged and lay down again. They were still a long way off and not apparently heading right at them, so what the PRT did was no interest of hers.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Staring at the blurry video she'd pulled from PHO, Emily tried to work out what the hell was going on. "That's the Hebert man," she finally said, pointing at the screen. "I'm sure of it." She looked at Renick. "Get one of the people out there to get a better image of him to confirm it." Her second in command nodded, turning away for a moment to issue a quiet command through the comms system. Only a few seconds later they had an uplink from the squad sergeant's helmet camera of the two people who had apparently wrecked an E88 snatch squad and killed three of their Parahumans. The much higher quality video showed Assault and Dauntless talking to a tall skinny man holding a shotgun and an equally tall figure in matte purple power armor of a design she'd recently become all to familiar with.
"Fuck. It is Hebert. And that girl called him dad, which means that is Taylor Hebert. The missing girl from Winslow."
"In other words, someone who had an ax to grind with that place," Renick corrected, his voice disturbed, as he watched the two people head off down the street with their own Parahumans following after a glance at each other. "That's the link we were missing, I think. She was last seen in Winslow and her father claimed she was the subject of bullying to a degree that is sickening." He looked at Emily, eyes suddenly widening. "By one of our own Wards."
Emily nodded slowly, her mind whirling. "Where did she go? How did she come back? And how the fuck did she end up with all that equipment and the training to use it, in only two weeks? If she Triggered, how did she find all the resources to build that stuff in so little time, and where did she do it? And why did she hop around all over the damn planet taking out S class threats before she turned up here?" Those were only a few of the many, many questions she had. Renick shook his head, not knowing the answers any more than she did.
"There's one big problem that immediately comes to mind, if that really is the Hebert girl. This is her home town. Your approach of wanting that person to go somewhere else may be dead in the water..."
"Shit." Emily rubbed her forehead, thinking hard. This situation was getting worse and worse. Not only did they have someone who was capable of removing with prejudice a large chunk of the city and had done so, but now it looked like that person had fairly good reasons not to be happy with the PRT. Assuming she knew that Sophia Hess was Shadow Stalker, and they had to assume that either she did already or shortly would since her father knew, and wasn't even remotely pleased about it.
"We can't do anything about this without more information," she finally said. "All we can do for now is hope Assault and Dauntless can get that for us, without starting world war three in the process."
Renick sighed. "Yeah. This doesn't make me feel any happier."
"Nor me." Emily shook her head. "And there's still no word from the Chief Director, the Protectorate, or anyone at the top. If those bastards dump all this on my head and claim it's my problem I'm not going to be happy about it."
He nearly chuckled but clearly rethought that in light of the glare she gave him. "I'm sure they won't do that, Emily," he replied after a moment.
"Yeah, right." She looked back at the screen. "I just hope the E88 doesn't do something stupid because of this. We have no idea about way too many things surrounding this case and them getting involved would only cause total chaos."
A couple of seconds passed, then they slowly met each other's eyes. "Oh, hell," she groaned.
Renick was already ordering more PRT personnel onto the street, and telling them to look for E88 people as a matter of priority. Emily slumped in her chair with a sensation that the boot she could almost feel dropping towards her was still gathering speed.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Assault watched as the girl nodded to the guy behind the counter as she headed for a table. No one else was in the place at the moment. The proprietor didn't seem all that surprised to see them, and not particularly worried either. He merely nodded back. "Still hungry?" he asked, smiling a little.
"Yeah, built up an appetite again," she said, laughing. "Sorry about the noise."
"No problem. It was in a good cause," he replied, making Ethan glance at Dauntless, who was staring at the man.
Both of them stared at the woman when she sat down and casually removed the helmet of her power armor, revealing the face of a girl that seemed perhaps eighteen, possibly nineteen, with long almost black curly hair that somehow fitted inside the thing. She bore a distinct family resemblance to the older man, who'd sat down next to her and waved to the counter guy, who nodded and disappeared into the kitchen. Looking between them, Ethan decided it had to be father and daughter. Neither one of which appeared concerned about keeping her identity secret. He wasn't comforted about that. It implied either ignorance, which seemed unlikely, or a confidence that it didn't matter if anyone knew who she was. The latter was deeply worrying, because it in turn implied that she considered herself able to deal with any likely threat to either of them.
Thinking back a short while, he was fairly sure she was right.
"The seafood pizza here is great," she said, picking up a menu, then waving to the seats on the other side of the table. With a certain amount of trepidation and confusion over the entire situation Ethan walked over and sat down, Shawn following and doing likewise. The pizza man returned, putting a large coffee in front of the man and a large coke in front of the girl, who smiled at him. "Thanks, Sergio."
"My pleasure, Taylor." He glanced at the two heroes. "Anything for you guys?"
"Ah… A coffee, thanks. Black with one sugar," Ethan replied. Dauntless shook his head and didn't say anything. The girl ordered a small seafood pizza, Sergio quickly wrote it down, then brought Ethan his coffee, before vanishing again.
Picking up her coke the girl, apparently called Taylor, sipped it while eyeing them. Assault got the impression she was darkly amused by their puzzlement, and he was certain the mostly silent man who was watching them carefully as he drank his own coffee was. "What else do you want to know?" she finally said, putting the glass down again.
"Well, what happened outside would be a good place to start," Ethan replied after a sip of his own coffee to calm his nerves and give him time to think. "In more detail, maybe?"
She studied him, then nodded. "Sure. Like I said, I got back after a very annoying trip, and a really long day, met Dad, had some really good pizza, and we were heading home when those idiots turned up..." It only took her about five minutes to explain the sequence of events although Ethan couldn't help thinking that there were a lot of things missing as far as her own background went. He was aware that Director Piggot was listening, but the woman, aside from a couple of faint comments, didn't interrupt.
When she finished, a voice in his ear said, "Ask her if she really is Taylor Hebert, please. Politely."
"Excuse me, but… Are you Taylor Hebert?" he asked. The last name was somewhat familiar, he'd heard that a girl of that name had gone missing a couple of weeks ago, from Winslow…
His thoughts ground to a halt as he started putting a few things together.
But that girl had been about fifteen, hadn't she? This one was definitely older, he was sure of that. So what the hell happened?
"Yeah, that's me. Why?" She tilted her head enquiringly.
"Taylor Hebert, the girl who went missing from Winslow High School?" Dauntless asked, leaning forward and glancing at Ethan. He'd clearly heard of the case too, which had been being investigated by the BBPD as far as either of them knew. There had been a couple of small articles in the paper about it, and her father Danny Hebert, who was something to do with the Dock Worker's Union. And presumably the man sitting next to her.
"That fucking place," she spat. "Yes. First place I visited when I got back here." Her smile was truly vicious. "It's much better now."
"It's entirely gone now," Shawn muttered.
"Which makes it better," she grinned. The grin abruptly vanished. "It'll be even better than that when I get rid of the remaining problems. But Kaiser is the more urgent problem."
"Um… About that." Ethan swallowed as her eyes fixed on his. "You can't just kill him."
"Oh, I can, don't worry. It's easy," she replied with a toothy and terrifying smirk. "I'm really good at killing things."
"What things?" Shawn asked after a few seconds.
"What have you got?" she said, leaning back as Sergio turned up with her pizza, putting it in front of her. "Thanks."
He nodded and left again.
Ethan tried to suppress the urge he'd suddenly had to get up and leave hastily. "What my friend here means is that ideally we don't go around killing people," he said.
"It solves a lot of problems," she commented, picking up one slice and taking a bite out of it. "If more of those fuckers were killed this place wouldn't be such a shithole to start with."
Both heroes exchanged a look.
"There are… well, laws against that sort of thing."
"Doesn't stop them doing it, does it?" she asked, eating some more pizza. "Seems to me that those laws mostly work to stop people preventing the villains doing whatever they want."
"But without laws, it would be even worse, believe me," Shawn told her.
"I'm not sure how, at times," Danny remarked, causing them to look at him."All the gangs between kill literally hundreds of people a year, and have done for at least the last twenty years or more. Ironically it was actually safer when Marquis was around. He at least only went after people who threatened him. Kaiser and his people kill minorities for fun, and anyone else who gets in the way. Or sometimes is only walking past. I've seen at least a dozen reports this week about deaths attributed to the E88 alone, most of them to Hookwolf. That asshole should have been in the Birdcage for years but it takes my daughter to finally put him down. You guys certainly didn't stop him."
"It's not quite that easy, Mr Hebert," Shawn said, sounding concerned.
"Yeah, it kinda was that easy," Taylor chuckled. "He was reasonably tough but compared to some of the things I've killed over the last few years..."
They stared at her, then at each other.
"Years?" Ethan echoed.
"Yeah. Probably… something like about five years personal timeline? Around that. It's hard to be absolutely accurate." She looked thoughtful, while her father watched her with a look of pride and sympathy. "After you've died the first couple of hundred times, you sort of lose track of it. Stops being all that important really."
She picked up another slice of pizza as Ethan gaped at her, trying to work out what the fuck she was talking about.
Eventually he had to ask, and he was sure she was waiting for that based on the tiny smirk she was wearing.
"Any chance you can explain that?" he said a little helplessly. This was far outside his comfort zone and his normal sense of humor seemed to be having a very hard time coping.
"I still don't have all the details myself," she replied, after finishing the slice. "But it started when I woke up the first time in a pile of bloody crap in a storage room on Mars in 2236."
She laughed at the expression he must have had on his face, while in his ear Piggot made a very strange sound. Then she proceeded to relate a story that terrified him worse than anything he'd ever heard or seen, mostly because he was certain it was totally true.
It got much worse when she produced a small device that turned out to be some sort of holographic projector and started showing them videos of what she'd experienced, apparently recorded by her armor.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Listening to the story the Hebert girl was telling, at first Emily scoffed, but after a while she started to get a horrible sensation in the pit of her stomach. That got steadily worse as the story unfolded. While she was sure a lot was being left out, there was far too much detail in it to be entirely fictional, and it was backed up by certain evidence. And her finely honed bullshit detector which was screaming at her that the damn girl was both entirely truthful and the single most dangerous and angriest person she'd ever heard of.
If she found Sophia, that idiotic girl was dead. That much was abundantly clear.
Emily had a brief thought that perhaps if she threw Sophia to the entirely absent mercies of the Hebert girl that it might save the city.
She and Renick listened as the girl talked, getting more and more concerned. And deeply scared.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
By the time the Hebert girl stopped talking, Shawn was literally shivering. The undercurrent of raw rage that had come into her voice a few times left him nearly shitting himself, despite all the things he'd seen in his time as a hero. She was not someone he'd want aiming that at him or anything he cared about, since it was blatantly obvious that she would have zero compunctions about dealing with problems permanently.
Hookwolf had discovered that to his cost. And it seemed likely that Kaiser would as well unless they could persuade her to let them handle it. He wasn't at all certain that was even possible not to mention likely. She seemed like the sort of person who didn't leave a job unfinished.
How and why she'd ended up where she did was a total mystery, and a lot of the story seemed to be missing since she obviously wasn't telling them everything, but considering that, if she was right, she'd experienced close to five years of essentially constant combat in the two weeks of real time she'd been gone, that was entirely understandable. And it explained how she'd become so fucking dangerous, too. Five years of never-ending combat in an environment that almost literally sounded like hell was far, far more than any soldier would have. Even in a war you normally had some down time, and you didn't have these 'plasma imps' shooting fireballs at you.
And if you died, you certainly didn't restart at the beginning and have to do it all over again.
The fact that she was more or less sane, if extremely annoyed by the entire experience, was almost unbelievable. He wondered what else she'd learned during that other than how to kill things really efficiently.
Both he and Ethan simply sat there and looked at her as she fell silent, his colleague holding a cold and half-finished cup of coffee in one hand, which was shaking slightly. The girl picked up the little projector thing that had shown them scenes that would feature in his nightmares for years to come, turned it off, and put it away somewhere. "So that's pretty much it. Now I'm home. Got a few last things to deal with and then I can sit down and work out what I'm going to do next. Obviously going to school isn't on the list. I doubt there's anything I could learn there any more."
She shrugged. "I can probably figure out some way to make some cash. I learned a few neat tricks."
Standing, she looked down at them as she put her helmet back on, while her father who had remained mostly quiet during the story also got up. "Now if you'll excuse me I have some more Nazis to find. I need to explain a few things to them."
They watched as she headed for the exit, her father stopping at the counter to hand Sergio some cash, then waving and following her. Both men exchanged a look, blinked, and jumped up. "Oh, fuck," Dauntless mumbled. He was certain she wasn't joking.
They went after her, finding her standing outside looking off to the left, away from where the PRT had finished cleaning up the scene before they went away. He followed her eyes to see a dozen men dressed in dark clothes and carrying weapons coming around the corner near where Hookwolf had died.
His eyes widened, but he didn't even have time to react before things got very complicated very suddenly indeed.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Tammi sat up again as she heard Krieg's voice become more urgent. He was still looking through those ridiculously large binoculars at something in the distance. She squinted to try to make out what he was so interested in, while wishing that people would tell her what was going on. Through the gaps in the taller buildings, she could make out some sort of illuminated window at ground level, some sort of shop or something, on a street at least a mile away. There were some people outside it, silhouetted against the light, but the figures were so small at this distance all she could tell was that they were there. The street ran at an angle from their position, going off at about forty five degrees until it vanished behind the buildings.
Krieg said something that sounded like "Shoot the bitch," into his headset.
Tammi's head snapped around to stare at him, then she looked back in time to see a number of purple flickers of light.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Taylor watched the men, obviously E88 gangers, as they stopped a couple of hundred meters away. She'd felt them coming for the last twenty seconds or so. Her armor's systems instantly highlighted the weapons they were all carrying, assessing them and assigning a threat level, which was low. She stepped in front of her father, hearing him chamber a round in the shotgun he'd acquired from that first E88 fuckwit.
Before she could say anything, the men opened fire. She heard Dauntless make a sound of shock but didn't bother looking around.
Half a dozen bright purple energy beams hit her, two more missing and going past, one on either side. Her armor registered the hits and showed a small momentary drop in integrity before it compensated. Her eyes narrowed as she pulled out her plasma rifle.
The first RPG round screamed past some two meters to the right, the rocket flare briefly illuminating the entire street with a yellow flash. She didn't move a muscle, hearing it explode somewhere in the distance behind her. The next two were fired simultaneously, both of them tracking towards her this time.
She lifted the plasma gun and shot both of them out of the air before they'd got halfway to her.
Her anger, which had been simmering under the surface as it always was, rose.
Taylor aimed, held the trigger down, and moved the energy weapon sideways in a quick motion. Then she turned away from the bisected gangers even as they were falling to the ground, put the gun away, equipped the rail gun, and aimed at a much more distant target.
She fired.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Rune's eyes widened as the distant scene went from four people standing next to a window to total chaos in a second, then they widened even more as a violently brilliant blue-white ball of something headed towards them, growing from a pinprick to a basketball-sized sphere of death almost too fast to track. Without even thinking about it she dived off the platform her powers were holding in the air, feeling a massive wave of heat pass over her back before a huge force slammed her sideways. She lost consciousness as she bounced off the first building.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Ethan had just barely managed to avoid the purple laser beam or whatever it was that went between the Hebert girl and himself. Several more directly hit her, apparently to no effect, while the last one skimmed over Shawn's shoulder and removed a chunk of armor and flesh with a sound like someone slapping a metal table with a steak. His companion yelled in pain as he dropped, but Ethan didn't spare him a glance since he was much more invested in the fucking RPG rounds that these new idiots had just fired at them.
The first one went past at some distance, exploding on a building behind them, while the next two didn't even make it more than halfway as Hebert moved so fast he couldn't make out the motion. A blue ball of energy hit each rocket near enough at the same time, fractions of a second after they were fired, and before the explosions died away she'd also cut down all the attackers in one shot.
Then she whipped around, the weapon changing to something even larger, and a much bigger blue-white discharge roared off into the distance, causing him and Dauntless to duck while staring. The noise was incredible. Far in the distance a moment later there was a large explosion over the rooftops of the buildings, the whitish flash illuminating the scene.
"Christ," he said, bewildered at how quickly everything had happened. He was used to fast moving battles but this was ridiculous and had come completely out of the blue. Not to mention the sheer efficiency and brutality of her actions, which were clearly aimed at eliminating the danger permanently and immediately.
He wondered a little hysterically if she even understood the concept of 'non-lethal takedown.'
Or 'overkill.'
Director Piggot was yammering in his ear, but he ignored her as he watched the horribly lethal young woman put her enormous weapon away, while wondering how many other weapons she actually had on her. And where she kept the fucking things.
"Right. Enough is enough. Kaiser's beginning to piss me the hell off," the armored girl said in a hard voice. "Time to point out how that ends."
Walking over to Shawn who was moaning in pain, a large cauterized and blackened wound on his right shoulder where his costume had been vaporized, she shook her head. "For god's sake, it's only a small third degree burn," she said, sounding slightly annoyed, although she was almost visibly radiating rage again. Ethan was profoundly grateful that it wasn't aimed at them. "Man up, will you?" She produced a small device like an auto-injector and bent over him, stabbing it into his exposed skin. "Here, this will fix it. Stings a bit, but you get used to it in the end."
She walked off with her father next to her as Shawn screamed in agony. Ethan watched, amazed and a little sickened, as the blackened flesh quickly repaired itself. By the time his friend was only groaning a little and apparently entirely healthy, he looked up to see both Heberts had disappeared.
"Assault!" The voice in his ear was furious. "Report! What the fuck is going on?" He realized that she'd been shouting for some time now.
He got to his feet and hauled Dauntless to his own, the other hero feeling his shoulder in shock. Both of them looked at the fresh batch of dead gang members at the far end of the street.
"We may have a problem, Director," he said as calmly as he could, which wasn't very.
Ethan had a feeling that this night was going to be a very long one, unless you were a Nazi.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
When they came back with chinese food, Lisa was sitting on the sofa looking out the window next to the TV with the weirdest expression Brian had seen on her yet. She didn't react when they entered, just continued peering out into the night. He looked at her, then at the window, not seeing anything of interest out there other than a few street lights.
He did work out that she was looking towards Brockton Bay.
As Alec and Rachel unpacked the bag of food, he walked over and poked her. Very slowly, she turned her head to meet his eyes. He saw her pupils were tiny pinpricks, giving her a very disturbing look which immediately worried him considerably.
"Hey, you all right?" he asked, concerned.
She blinked, then opened her mouth.
"In the second age, at the final battle, when all that Hell could field had been vanquished, one stood. Tempered by the fires of RAGE she overcame all. In her FURY she broke the forces that dared stand against her, taking her place as the rightful Heir through trial by combat. The Umbral Plains lie in ruins, the Dark Lords are cast beyond the Outer Realms for all eternity, while across the worlds all know that She Has Come. Absolute in her determination to bring eternal torment to those who wrong her and hers, yet merciful to those who follow her in awe of her Glory, Power, and Anger, she is named… The Doom Queen."
The deep ghastly voice that spoke those words was not that of a seventeen year old girl, Brian thought in horror as he pressed himself against the wall as far from her as he could get in the hotel room, next to Rachel and Alec who were doing the same thing. He could smell urine from the direction of the dogs, who were hiding under the table.
He wasn't even sure that the voice was human.
Lisa blinked again, then shook her head. "Oh, great, you got chinese. Did you remember beef chow mein for me?" she said perfectly normally as she hopped to her feet and went over to the table. Sniffing, she looked down, then grimaced. "Rachel, your fucking dogs have peed all over the floor."
She glanced at them and frowned. "What's wrong with you guys?"
Peeling himself off the wall, Brian felt very much that whatever was going on he didn't like it at all and wished it would go away and leave him alone.
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in which the PRT realizes exactly who they're dealing with, and what happened on Taylors "little trip".
Kaiser ignores the sense of approaching DOOM, instead opting to poke it with a stick. again. the results are expected.
Kaiser won't be missed, in either sense of the phrase.
reaching Lisa's last proclamation (the first Queen's Testament?), comparisons to the Slayers Testaments in DOOM confirm that Taylor, nay the DOOM QUEEN, finished what the Slayer started.
Kaiser ignores the sense of approaching DOOM, instead opting to poke it with a stick. again. the results are expected.
Kaiser won't be missed, in either sense of the phrase.
reaching Lisa's last proclamation (the first Queen's Testament?), comparisons to the Slayers Testaments in DOOM confirm that Taylor, nay the DOOM QUEEN, finished what the Slayer started.
