P-Zero-Four
New
- Location
- Wherever
Peg Smith
"So that's roughly our picture of Monster. Next is..." Click went the projector, putting Pride's smiling face up while Peg felt herself going grey or maybe green. "... Matchmaker AKA Pride AKA Cherie Vasil, one of Heartbreaker's older daughters, and seemingly his most favored child before his death."
"Excuse me," Peg declared to no one in particular as she jerked to her feet and stumbled out of the chair, making her way to the door. "I have to use the restroom, don't mind me, I'm caught up on this one okay bye!" Peg ignored the mix of confused and sympathetic responses behind her, and just went as fast as she could.
She didn't puke again, but it was a near thing, hovering in a stall, trying real hard to not think about Miss Torture Science, mostly failing, but... eventually she arrived at what a pleasant surprise it was to meet Makeshift, and that... that was a good thought, a calming thought, and a few minutes later she felt ready to go back to the room without expecting it to go horribly.
When she came back to the meeting room, entering much more quietly than she'd exited it, it was to Jason saying, "... is why Miss Mcabee is part of this task force." Which, uh, what?
Fortunately Peg didn't need to embarrass herself by asking what she'd missed or anything, as Menagerie asked, "Do we know if her power works on non-humans?"
Bad Canary looked surprised. "I... never tried?" she said, sounding as if she'd never given the topic any thought at all. Peg was mildly surprised; it seemed like it would've come up in regard to a pet, or birds, or something.
"I'm scheduling a testing session right now," interjected Fiadh, typing furiously with just her thumb at her floppy-eared phone.
Jason looked relieved and a bit embarrassed. "Hopefully Matchmaker can't affect animals, but it would be terrible to think Miss Mcabee could counter such and learn it in the field in the worst possible way." Menagerie murmured something to himself, while Peg felt she understood the gist of it; Bad Canary's power-enhanced singing was here to foil Matchmaker's power, hopefully, and they didn't know whether Matchmaker could or not. Okay, sure. Jason continued with, "Given Miss Mcabee's power is known to work even when transmitted by speaker systems and so on, and her nature as a non-combatant in multiple senses, the current plan is to set up a system where she'll be nearby, in case it turns out to be necessary for her to be closer for some reason, but primarily her singing will be transmitted by speakers on your costumes."
Peg found herself thinking that was actually kind of awesome, like having a Bad Canary concert come to her instead of her going to it. It also put to rest a fear she hadn't even realized was bothering her until it was no longer a concern: she really didn't want to see Bad Canary getting hurt in a cape fight, and especially didn't want to feel responsible for Bad Canary getting injured. Then Jason glanced at his phone and remarked, "We should probably break for lunch."
Peg's stomach shriveled up and died at the thought of food, but... something to drink sounded good. A coffee might settle her stomach; it had worked before, at least.
Everybody aside Makeshift readily agreed, and groups naturally formed as everybody trickled out of the meeting room; Peg found herself walking with Paige and Makeshift, the three of them agreeing they'd rather eat nearby and were in fact all fine quickly grabbing something at the PRT cafeteria, while Poltergeist glommed onto Fiadh and Foundation, and Menagerie and Jason wandered off ahead talking about something. (Peg didn't care enough to try to eavesdrop)
Makeshift, of course, didn't eat food as such, but they plugged a couple of their components into a wall while sitting with Paige and Peg. Peg had already known Makeshift had to get electricity for their devices and this was vaguely analogous to eating, but had not known that Makeshift's field transferred electricity across devices so they didn't need to plug in every individual device unless they were in a hurry to recharge. Peg had to fight the urge to get out her phone and write down another Makeshift Fact, which surprised her: it had been years since she'd last done that, she thought she'd gotten over that obsessive phase.
She successfully distracted herself by engaging Bad Canary in conversation, which was easy since she was pretty hyped to meet the celebrity. "It's so cool of you to volunteer for this, Canary, like I knew you did benefits concerts but-" She stopped because Bad Canary's face had gone through a very complicated series of strange, mostly-upset expressions starting from when Peg had said 'volunteer'. Dammit, had Peg stepped in something again?
Bad Canary awkwardly said, "I- didn't volunteer." Her voice squeaked on 'volunteer'. Peg was just confused; Canary was the 'not-volunteer' Fiadh had mentioned? "I... um... you might've heard..."
Peg stared blankly, having no idea what Canary was getting at. Makeshift smoothly inserted theirself into the conversation, "What Ms Mcabee is getting at is that this was a condition of her plea bargain." Peg blinked. Swung her gaze back and forth between these two people she looked up to. Did not find words. Bad Canary sighed, moodily poking a plastic fork into an unidentifiable bit of cafeteria meat, and still didn't speak up.
Peg cautiously asked, "What happened?"
Bad Canary sighed again, but this time apparently worked up the nerve to explain. "I got in a fight with my boyfriend after a concert, told him to 'go fuck himself', and my power was still somewhat active, so... you can guess what happened. The court decided this was 'assault with a parahuman ability', I think it was. Not great, but I figured I'd get a stint in regular jail at worst, or maybe slapped with a big fine, but somehow things escalated so sentencing me to the Birdcage got floated?" What the fuck? "The Protectorate intervened, though. They were a bit cryptic in the offer, but basically they got my sentence knocked down to community service, and this is my community service."
Peg had a very uncharitable and not at all funny thought wondering if Bad Canary being sentenced to the Birdcage was idiots thinking about what that headline would look like. It was either that or swear a lot very loudly in front of Peg's idols. Peg wiped at her face tiredly. "Okay, can we just pretend I didn't stick my foot directly in my mouth? You're cool either way, I'm jazzed to be working with the Bad Canary even if the reason it's happening is a little crappier than I'd thought-" Peg abruptly remembered she'd been intending to not fangirl at either of her idols. Then she got a look at how Bad Canary was looking taken aback, flustered, pleased, and decided she didn't care enough about her rep; lifting Bad Canary's mood was good. "-so, um. Yeah." You're so good at this, Peg, she thought sarcastically at herself.
Makeshift leaned forward here. "You're a fellow fan of Miss Mcabee's work?" Peg locked up for a moment, because it had never crossed her mind for even a moment that Makeshift might share an interest with her, then stayed locked up for another few moments because she'd never talked with anyone about how great Bad Canary's songs were- "I'm personally quite fond of the themes in Uncaged Self."
"It's my third-favorite of her songs," Peg blurted out, then cringed, then decided she'd rather make it look intentional rather than try to backpedal.
This led to a lunch largely devoted to Peg and Makeshift discussing the themes of Bad Canary's songs (And to a much lesser extent talking about the choreography, among other things), while Bad Canary herself looked pleased-but-awkward and occasionally thoughtfully surprised.
This was all interrupted by Bad Canary getting a message through her Protectorate phone indicating that the power testing lab was ready for her. Makeshift said goodbye, while Peg ended up coming with, partly out of curiosity of what such testing would look like.
... but mostly because she wanted to hear Bad Canary singing.
Peg had been thinking in terms of 'basically a personal concert' and was slightly disappointed with the reality. Turned out that Bad Canary didn't really need to do a proper song to leverage her power. She could kind of hum to 'charge' her power, and she did use her singing voice when delivering instructions, but it wasn't terribly 'song-like' otherwise. No actual need for rhythm or rhyming or syncing her words with music.
Even so, it was interesting. PRT techies brought in a cat, two dogs, three different birds (A pigeon, some kind of parrot, and... a hawk?), and several different kinds of bugs, and asked questions Peg had never thought to ask. (Nor had Bad Canary, apparently) For example, the two dogs were brought in because they were both trained dogs, but one was trained to respond to English commands, while the other had been trained in a language Peg didn't recognize at all, and the techies wanted to see if that mattered. It turned out that it did matter: both dogs responded the same to Bad Canary just humming, including that Bad Canary could in fact pick a specific feeling to try to project and it worked in both cases (Going by a brainwave... thing), but the dog trained in English would sit when told to while the other dog didn't respond to any instruction Bad Canary tried.
The cat and birds extended this trend, where familiarity with English instructions resulted in the ability to give orders that would be followed, whereas the animals lacking such familiarity didn't do as they were told. It also came up in here that Bad Canary's power had some kind of directionality or intentionality component to it, where if she didn't know a subject was present (The techies snuck in a third dog) her power didn't automatically affect them just because they could hear her, and even if she did know someone was around she could choose to not 'hit' them, which explained why Peg wasn't getting the personal concert experience she'd anticipated: Bad Canary was deliberately excluding all the humans during the testing.
The contrast was made very clear when one of the techies figured out that Peg was part of the task force and raised the idea of testing how their powers interacted. Peg diffidently agreed to the extremely cool scenario of having Bad Canary expressly singing at her, and the experience was a night-and-day contrast: suddenly Bad Canary's humming was an incredible aesthetic experience all on its own, and her instruction to walk from one spot in the room to another was a thrill to follow no matter how hesitantly it was said and regardless of how Bad Canary cringed. Peg was a bit surprised to realize how much of her fondness for Bad Canary's concerts was directly caused by the power.
This led into less-cool testing of the range of power-negation from Peg's power, which worked out about how Peg expected. She hadn't specifically paid much attention to the distinction between 'zone at arrival point' vs 'zone at point she teleported from', and was a bit surprised when the techies tentatively concluded that she negated powers in around a 25% larger area at her destination compared to her jumping-off point, and it was jarring to teleport while under Bad Canary's influence, upsetting in ways Peg wasn't sure there were words for, but those details aside she'd already had a pretty good grasp on her range and all.
Makeshift showed up partway through, and testing was done to see if Bad Canary's power worked on Makeshift. Unexpectedly, the answer was 'no, unless Bad Canary's voice was transmitted such that one of Makeshift's devices was playing it'. (Makeshift was very confused initially: apparently, they'd always played Bad Canary's songs directly from one of their devices and so not being affected was not at all what they expected) So that was convenient, indicating Bad Canary could buffer Makeshift against Matchmaker in the event that Matchmaker's power worked on them.
(Nobody suggested testing Peg's power-negation near Makeshift. Peg assumed she was not alone in worrying that it might kill Makeshift)
In turn Menagerie, Foundation, and Poltergeist showed up to get some other tests done real quick before returning to the briefing. They confirmed that Menagerie's animals were affected by Bad Canary's power, that Peg's power temporarily 'shorted out' his tinkertech, Makeshift and Menagerie mentioned in passing that Makeshift could interface with his tech to some extent...
Foundation's power was not at all what Peg had been vaguely guessing in the back of her head. Foundation asked the techies which part of the testing area was designated as 'disposable', was pointed to a corner that didn't seem particularly different to Peg, and then had put a finger to one of the sticks in her hair and abruptly turned into a wooden statue version of herself. Only... 'statue' wasn't really accurate, as Foundation retained her full range of motion just as smoothly as if she were still flesh and bone. But she could be completely still, not even breathing, so... statue-like? The effect was a bit eerie, especially in conjunction with watching the ground turn to the same type of wood in a lowly-expanding circle, spreading from where Foundation's feet made contact. Foundation had spent a bit growing things out of the wooden ground, including a little wooden slingshot thing that really did not seem like it should work, but which somehow bent as if it was a thing of wood and rubber rather than wood and more wood, able to launch a plastic bead provided by a techie with surprising speed.
Foundation had explained that her 'territory' could expand without limit so long as she remained in contact with it and she had an awareness of things near it, especially touching it, all of this bound by getting 'killer headaches' if she tried to hold onto too much territory for too long. In turn, they'd tested if Bad Canary's power worked on Foundation when her power was active (It didn't, which Foundation had said she'd expected; she similarly expected to be safe from Matchmaker's power), tested what happened if Peg teleported into or near this 'territory' (Foundation lost control of the affected area temporarily and, oddly, couldn't actually tell anything had happened unless she tried something in the affected area to have it not work) as well as what happened if she teleported while holding one of Foundation's 'more tinkertech-y' contraptions, such as the nonsensical slingshot. (They stopped working; the slingshot became simply a carving in the shape of a slingshot. It stayed 'broken' for the rest of the their time in the test chamber, much longer than Peg's power-negating effect normally lasted) There'd also been a brief test, suggested by Makeshift, of having Foundation touch one of Makeshift's devices to use as the basis of her territory; it didn't have any interesting effects, simply revealing to Peg that Foundation's territory (and her statue form) derived its material from something Foundation was touching at the time she activated her power.
Things got particularly interesting when Poltergeist's turn for test-participation came along.
"I'm legally obligated to forewarn everyone that if they have heart conditions, are pregnant, or otherwise may react really badly to being startled and/or frightened, you should not let me use my power on you outside an actual emergency," she said very seriously.
Still a plastic statue from the test with one of Makeshift's phones, Foundation shrugged and said, "Ah'll be fine. I don't get very emotional like this."
Poltergeist grinned, said, "Awesome, I don't have to hold back," and promptly melted into a cloud of thick black smoke that itself thinned out and vanished in a matter of seconds.
"Uh," Peg commented. "What just happened?"
Over the following minute, Foundation frowned, twitched her gaze about randomly for no clear reason, then bits of things left lying around started hurling themselves about for no reason, one of the dogs abruptly spooked and ran into a corner, ignoring the techie yelling at it to heel, and finally for no obvious reason Foundation yelped, abruptly hovered into the air as if picked up by something invisible, and then was set down gently before black smoke whooshed in next to her and Poltergeist reappeared, one hand around one of Andrea's arms. "Neat. I can be part of a trap!" Poltergeist enthused.
It took an annoyingly long time to extract a meaningful explanation of Poltergeist's power from her, and honestly like half the explanation came from one of the techies pulling her file. The short version was that Poltergeist, upon touching someone, had a window of several minutes in which she could activate her power and become an invisible and intangible shadowy version of herself that rapidly stalked her victim, only visible to said victim (Plus some capes in a kind of random-sounding pattern could see her regardless), having to try to stay mostly hidden from view but able to somewhat mold her appearance and able to move absurdly fast within their view to avoid being spotted. If her victim ever got too clear a view of her, the effect ended and Poltergeist would reappear where they saw her... but if they ever moved their gaze such that she left their view entirely (Including by closing their eyes for too long, though apparently blinking was insufficient to trigger this) then Poltergeist had another window to activate her power and become a Brute-rated shadowy horned figure that was no longer bound by the need to hide but was still invisible and intangible to everyone except her target.
"That sounds terrifying," Bad Canary remarked shakily once the explanation was extracted.
"I know! Isn't it great?!" Poltergeist enthused, then added in an aggravated tone, "I still can't believe Image thinks it would be awful to riff on SCP-173! My power is such a perfect match to it!"
Everybody ignored whatever that was, and testing resumed, but now with people properly informed of the mechanics. Everyone was surprised when Peg's teleport proved able to knock Poltergeist out of her shadow-state (Out of either mode, in fact, and regardless of who Poltergeist was tied to at the time), though she did have to arrive near where Poltergeist was at the time to get that result. (Not, say, the person Poltergeist was 'haunting') It was also surprising (and a little worrying, given Matchmaker) to find out that Bad Canary's power worked on Poltergeist in this state. Lastly, Poltergeist could tag Makeshift, though Poltergeist canceled the effect almost immediately, complaining about 'too many viewpoints'.
Once all this testing was done, Foundation touched the testing area's regular floor and converted the corner she'd been using back to roughly its original state (The techies seemed a bit surprised at this bit of consideration), and then everyone was on their way back to the briefing room.
Peg was aggravated anew when they all got back to the meeting room, running late due to the power testing, and the PRT stooges were somehow not there. She'd been expecting to get chewed out for being late and to be mad at them having a no-win standard of 'you'd be wrong for not finishing testing, and you're wrong for being late because you took a while doing the testing', not for them to be running even more late!
Makeshift and Menagerie murmured some things that sounded like this was weird to them, but shrugged it off and simply went to the papers. Peg followed suit with some trepidation, taking the opportunity to look over Monster's section with the previous conversation in mind.
Five minutes later, Peg hadn't drawn any new conclusions, but Fiadh and Jason both reached the door, focused on their respective phones. At first Peg assumed they were coming in together, but they nearly bumped into each other, glanced in some surprise at each other, then shuffled past and both started talking at the same time. They stopped, made annoyed noises, and then Fiadh made a 'go on' motion at Jason, who shook his head and said, "You first, you're the ranking officer."
Fiadh shrugged, sat down in her spot (With a fresh new mug of cocoa), and casually said, "We've already got a volunteer. She expects to be here tomorrow. Codename of Megaera, ideally we all familiarize ourselves with her 'cheat sheet' before she gets here-"
"Cheat sheet?" Peg and Bad Canary both said, lost.
Fiadh paused. Muttered to herself, "Right," and with a sigh explained, "Protectorate Heroes get two main files: the detailed version, and the abbreviated version with the important highlights. The latter has a more technical name I honestly can't recall. Everybody calls them 'cheat sheets'. Anyway, the important point is she's immune to the Simurgh and her immunity is enough to hedge against the Simurgh's far-reaching manipulations, covering that angle, if imperfectly." After sipping her new cup, Fiadh gestured at Jason. "Your turn."
Jason was frowning for some reason, rubbing at his head a little. After a moment he seemed to notice attention was on him, and said, "Ah... not ideal, but this should work? Okay, so you should all know why we're in Boston-" He stopped, clearly taking in everybody's expressions of confusion, his gaze ending on Fiadh, who gave a shrug. Jason looked incredibly pained. "Nobody told any of you?" Jason closed his eyes and laid his head on the table with a forceful clunk, heaving an enormous sigh, before bouncing back to attention. "Okay, I guess somebody up the chain decided this was need to know, but I am officially declaring in my capacity as the PRT Officer closest to this case that yes, you need to know. So! Two days ago, Monster very unexpectedly went in to claim bounties for several Nine members."
Peg was broadly aware of the bounty system (She actually had a really minor bounty on her, like fifty bucks), but was not at all surprised when Bad Canary expressed confusion at this step. Jason kept talking; Peg wasn't sure he'd noticed Bad Canary's confusion. "Jack Slash's bounty was affirmed, using the video as proof of course, but the office didn't hand over the rest immediately, using the need to confirm supporting evidence as the excuse and encouraging Monster to come back in a few days for those bounties. This was all in the south Boston office -we're in the north one- and the point was to try to pin Monster to this area while this unit got in position and briefed. We'd been hoping she'd take longer to check back in, ideally she'd have taken until at least tomorrow, but bounty collection has a grace period of a couple days after where we're not allowed to jump someone unless they commit a new crime so it's not like we could go after her today anyway. So we can take our time, get Megaera briefed, and be ready to act if she takes further action in the area."
There was a pause, before Fiadh said, "We might as well continue the briefing, then."
"Right," Jason said with mildly grim determination.
The Siberian was covered briefly. Not because she was known to be part of the group, but because her status was unknown and her widely-known invulnerability meant that the default assumption was she was still alive and about somewhere. Peg had been half-expecting to learn the Siberian was some government experiment gone horrifically wrong, or for the Siberian's file to be full of blatantly redacted stuff, as 'what is the Siberian's deal?' was almost as popular a mystery topic as 'what is with the Endbringers?' but she was vaguely disappointed to discover the PRT was basically as ignorant as anyone. Her file was objectively pretty long, but the majority of that length was a terrifying number of sentences saying 'this did nothing to her either'. There was a basic sketch of her personality, but it was 'not Thinker-supported' and was very speculative; nobody had ever heard her speak, or heard of her writing, so her actions were all there was to look to. Said actions were horrific, of course, but not anything new to Peg.
(Bad Canary, notably, very blatantly stopped reading the Siberian's papers fairly quickly, looking ill)
Jason's own discussion of that was pretty much 'if we spot her, we're not engaging her'. He allowed for the possibility that Peg's power-negating teleport might 'pierce' the Siberian's invulnerability, but he emphasized that power-negating powers had yet to be seen to work on her, and further emphasized that testing for it was less important than having the ability to deal with Crawler.
To Peg's surprise, Crawler was a bit less of an enigma.
"Profilers agree Crawler is a masochist, in, um, the... traditional sense," Jason started with, cringing slightly.
Makeshift said, "The sexual, you mean."
Jason cringed harder (As did Peg, though more at Makeshift being so blunt on this type of topic), but made a wavy motion with one hand. "Probably, but the important part to us is that he wants to be hurt, and not just because his power makes him stronger if he gets hurt. Crawler was the only member of the Nine who you could just... get to hold still by saying 'please' and telling him you wanted to hit him with a power. The, um, prior members of this unit got him to stay separated from his teammates for a bit a few times this way."
Fiadh blandly commented, "Useful," before sipping more cocoa.
Jason continued, "Other than that, he's a bit of a question mark. He probably came from somewhere on the East Coast, according to speech analysts, but we haven't been able to narrow it down to a specific city. Not helping is that he no longer looked particularly human by the time we became aware of him, and we haven't been able to firmly pin down whatever cape-on-cape combats he might've participated in to reach that point. He was a wanderer before he joined the Nine, for one. If he sought revenge or something, it's not clearly distinguishable from his general tendency to get into fights. I- well, frankly, if it turns out he has an agenda more specific than 'get into lots of fights', I'll be surprised."
Jason also did a brief run-through of what was the PRT's best understanding of Crawler's power. Peg's main takeaway was that ideally she'd not get into extended, repeated fights with him, because he might somehow become protected against her power after enough exposure to it. There was also a long list of 'known mutations', but while Peg was still pretty confused as to how Crawler got horrific acid saliva out of his power (The PRT didn't have a clear explanation themselves; they just knew it wasn't something Bonesaw installed: he had it before she joined the Nine), it largely fit to what she'd heard in passing about him.
Click went the projector again, showing a color photo of a young woman with curly brown hair, who Peg would characterize as 'mousy-looking' if it weren't for her eyes being backlit with a hellish glow and her cheeks being marred by around a dozen circular burn marks. "Burnscar, or Miriam Bellamy, we have more information on," Jason noted, sounding relieved to be able to say that. "She triggered in 2007, and was taken from her family as, well, they were the cause." Bad Canary looked confused by this. Had she not heard of abusive families? "She ping-ponged for a bit after that, the kind of drama you sometimes see with people outed as parahumans from the word 'go', exacerbated by her power's effect on her personality, ending up in PAE fourteen months after she triggered once it was decided-"
Okay so apparently he wasn't going to explain that. So Peg leadingly said, "PAE being?..."
Jason blinked, glanced at Peg, Bad Canary, and Foundation, all of whom were looking a bit lost, and he sighed a little. "Right, sorry, um."
When he stalled for a moment, Fiadh inserted herself into the conversation. "Parahuman Asylum East is one of two facilities in the US for the safe containment of non-criminal parahumans who nonetheless have issues with their powers and/or personality such that it's dangerous to them and/or others for them to attempt to live a normal public life." Fiadh sipped at her cocoa. "The nominal goal of these facilities is to help the parahumans to work through their personal issues or attain reliable control over their power such that they don't need specialized containment cells to protect themselves and/or others from their power." Fiadh frowned a little. "I'm surprised to hear that a Slaughterhouse Nine member was ever in one of these facilities."
Bad Canary made a noise of recognition or understanding. "Oooooh." Then she looked disheartened, then morosely thoughtful. Odd.
Makeshift commented, "The Nine did try to hit PAE in 2001."
Jason waved that off. "A different Villain group broke into PAE, about a year ago. Mercenaries of some kind. A number of the patients got set loose by these Villains, apparently to tie up resources on preventing the patients from hurting themselves or others, and some of them got off the grounds entirely. Miriam was one of them. She dropped off our radar until seven months later, when she killed a pimp or something using her powers. PRT troops tried to get her to turn herself in, but she refused, started severe enough fires to gut three different buildings, put a dozen people in the hospital and three people in the morgue, and escaped in the chaos. The next time she surfaced, it was as part of the Nine."
Menagerie asked, "The Nine, or the Hunt?"
Jason nodded. "The Nine. She was part of the Chicago attack." Then he winced. "Which the group change makes things a bit hazy. Nine members all get Kill Orders, and we've never had to deal with 'what if they stop being a part of the Nine?' People only 'quit' the group by dying. PAE has already lobbied for her Kill Order to be repealed, arguing that she 'wasn't in her right mind' for her incriminating actions and that it would be 'unjust' for her to be treated as a criminal rather than a mentally unwell person whose treatment was interrupted, but that decision is way above my paygrade. I've been told we're to prefer capturing her if it proves realistic, but it's very much optional."
Fiadh blandly remarked, "A teleporter who causes massive collateral damage is not a great 'capture alive' target in the best of conditions."
Peg frowned. "I teleport, and short out powers when I do."
Fiadh cocked an eyebrow. "She teleports into fires. Are you fireproof? Would disabling her power also disable her protection from fire?"
Peg frowned harder, but didn't say anything.
Jason looked like he had a dim awareness that something was happening in front of him deeper than the surface conversation, but also like he had no idea what it was and really didn't want to poke it. Instead, he said, "Her psych profile is what has me concerned." Peg frowned even harder, considering adding to Jason's Stooge Counter as well. (She'd already decided to add a second notch to Fiadh's) "By all accounts, by default Miriam is really not the sort of person, well... brave enough to be even an ordinary sort of criminal. But under the influence of her power, she's a very different person, much crueler, much more violent. I think, in theory, if we could manage to just talk to her in calm conditions, we might be able to get her to come in on her own recognizance, but once a fight sorts it's probably impossible. And she has every reason to expect a fight."
Hm. Peg wondered if negating Miriam's power would negate the mental influence? This hadn't come up in her career as Black Bishop... at least, she hadn't noticed it coming up. But then, she hadn't thought of the possibility to keep a metaphorical eye out for it happening. Maybe it had happened and she'd have noticed if only she'd already been aware of the possibility?
Then the projector went click again, this time to one of the more iconic shots of Bonesaw caught on cell phone, the perfect picture of a child's cheerful innocence... if only she wasn't covered in bloodstains and holding a hacksaw that was smeared in gore. Peg's stomach flipped over at the sight. Jason said, "Bonesaw... do I really need to explain?" Jason took in the room, and sighed. "Okay, we're pretty sure she's one Riley Grace Davis, though the Nine killed several families before Bonesaw popped up so it's possible a corpse got misidentified or... it doesn't matter." Jason ran a hand over his face, looking suddenly exhausted. "I'll be honest, Bonesaw is the big sticking point. She's awful. And not just how she's one of the cruelest, most horrible of the Nine, and has been for six years running, with a list of horrific crimes longer than some entire parahuman gangs, but that she's, y'know, a kid. I could go over the twenty different psych profiles we've got, the breakdown of her literally hundreds of vile projects, lay out everything she's done to make the world a worse place for everyone, and I assure you that if someone killed her tomorrow, there'd still be public backlash over 'murdering a literal child', whichever cape took credit would probably forever be remembered not as 'the hero who ended Bonesaw', but as 'the heartless monster who killed a child' and... it would be a nightmare, even if her death went as perfectly smoothly as possible as far as neutralizing her contingencies successfully and so on."
Then Jason waved vaguely at the room. "Hence why this is the team, and not the Triumvirate or... whoever."
There was a moment of silence, before Poltergeist said, "Oh. No wonder Matt was so happy when I accepted this job. Here I thought he'd finally figured out how to pretend to make nice to people you hate." She sounded more thoughtful than angry, which seemed a bit weird to Peg.
Bad Canary added, "So we're... fall guys?" She sounded more upset by this than anything else that had happened so far. (Probably thinking of her career, which... yeah)
Menagerie shrugged. "Probably not so much you, if the radio plan works." Then he added, "I don't mind. Doing good is the important part, right?"
Makeshift turned to Jason and asked. "I take it that Bonesaw's Kill Order is not being rescinded."
Jason winced. "She's personally done enough awful stuff that if Kill Orders could be stacked, I can assure you that she'd have at least three Kill Orders assigned to her. Psych profiles and Thinktank questioning suggest that, however coercive the original context was, she's probably not going to change her ways just because most of the Nine members that were involved are dead. She dies, or she goes to the Birdcage, and Dragon memoed this unit last year that she 'would prefer to not risk the Birdcage's integrity', so really, it's just 'she dies'."
Makeshift shrugged. "I've seen some of her... 'art' firsthand. Biological child or no, I'm not objecting to this Kill Order. I just wanted to check, since you'd brought up the idea in regards to Burnscar."
Fiadh drained her coffee mug and set it aside, before leaning forward and asking the room at large, "Any second thoughts to air or the like, or do we wrap up the review?"
Peg was... honestly mostly glad they weren't, apparently, going to do a blow-by-blow of Bonesaw's Greatest Hits. Peg generally thought of herself as having a strong stomach, this day's events notwithstanding, but every single time she heard anything about Bonesaw's activities, whatever nightmare visions her brain conjured off vague allusion were somehow less horrific than the actual reality proved to be if she went digging. She'd... stopped digging two or three years ago.
Poltergeist spoke up. "You are giving us more on her whole deal power-wise, right? And combat psychology?"
Jason nodded, looking relieved. "Yeah. Yeah, um..." Click went the projector, switching to oh god- click click click click click click -stopping on a less-disturbing image of Bonesaw, several medical tools visible on her person but no visible blood and none of her awful projects on display. (... the fact that she seemed less cheerful in this shot was pretty disturbing itself, mind...) "She's a Tinker, of course, so her arsenal is ever-evolving, but most Tinkers have a gimmick, a specialty, a methodology, and Bonesaw's seems to be about the interface of biology and machinery. She can grow purpose-targeted organisms, but she needs something like electronic machinery to do the job in. She can substantially modify existing organisms through surgery and bypass many common issues with medical implants and organ replacement, where foreign objects are smoothly accepted by the body she's working on, but seems unable to do anything like gene editing for an already-grown animal. She's been known to occasionally make electronic devices that don't interact with biological elements, but it's a rarity, and when samples of such have been passed on to Protectorate Tinkers, they've tended to be reported as poor-quality." Jason grimaced here. "That's the closest thing to a weakness we've noticed."
Jason took a deep breath, clearly steeling himself, and said, "In terms of psychology, Bonesaw is... awful. Objectively awful. Deliberately, intentionally, shooting for awful."
There was another silence. Peg ventured to say, "I'm inclined to believe you," In this case, Peg didn't say, "But that's... unhelpful?"
Jason rubbed at his head again and sighed. "Okay, um... I'm not... really sure what's normal to know about the Nine's operational methodology?"
This prompted a messy sharing of perspectives. Peg was a little surprised when Bad Canary turned out to be, apparently, one of the more knowledgeable in the room about the Nine's norm; Peg was aware Shatterbird had been a particularly memorable member of the group, but hadn't really known that the Nine had a bit of a routine in the past couple of years where Shatterbird 'announced' their presence with her Scream, the group having split up to hit their targets prior to the Scream. (Bad Canary actually described the whole thing as 'theatrical', and made a comparison to a movie that meant nothing to Peg) Menagerie and Makeshift mentioned the Nine keeping the Triumvirate out by being willing to escalate their damage enormously if they showed up, which Peg had this impression she might've heard something like that before?
That bit got Jason talking again. "That! That's- it's not just the Triumvirate. That is, the Nine do these... rules a lot. 'Play by our rules, and we'll kill a bunch of people and cause havoc, but if you don't play by our rules we'll make it so much worse'. They always did this, but it really intensified once they recruited Bonesaw, I don't even want to remember how many times a Director or mayor told me this unit couldn't enter their city during an active Nine attack..." Jason shook himself, while Peg had some trouble wrapping her head around the picture Jason was painting.
Fiadh chimed in. "So this is a main part of Bonesaw's methodology?"
Right, right, this was about explaining Bonesaw.
Jason nodded and gestured at the projector's image of Bonesaw. "Exactly. She's scarily attentive to the psychology of people, a lot of her 'art projects' center on figuring out how to be not simply outrageously cruel but do so in an intensely personal way for exactly those victims, and she's the most aggressive member of the group to employ this methodology since King died almost 25 years ago. Even in combat conditions, she prioritizes cruelty and suffering; if she thinks she can make someone suffer more without the attempt seriously risking her losing the fight, she will do it pretty much every time. She prefers capturing people to killing them, probably partly for the pragmatic reason of being a biotinker, but to all appearances mostly because you can't suffer if you're dead."
Peg was not the only person shifting uneasily at this summary. Makeshift quietly said, "I knew she was a problem, but... is she really so terrible? I've always thought the Fallen were more grotesque."
Jason sighed again. "It gets downplayed. When I first got attached to this unit, only about a third of her 'art projects' were made publicly known. That rate went up after I came on board, but mostly because Bonesaw apparently figured out coverups were happening and didn't like it, making an effort to ensure each 'project' was very difficult to hide the existence of. And even then, details get left out of the public records... you know about 'The Loving Family'"? Oh god, Peg's stomach lurched, and everyone else looked unhappy at being reminded of... that. Even Fiadh looked disturbed. "They're somehow fully cognizant in there." Peg lurched back in horror, while Bad Canary's hand went to her mouth in shock.
Poltergeist blurted out, "I thought they were braindead?!"
Jason, looking a bit grey, said, "No. Bonesaw's early projects often ended up dead or braindead in a few days, but as her skills have improved..."
A dozen other 'art projects' Peg had heard about over the years suddenly became much, much more horrifying. Bad Canary fearfully asked, "Does that include 'Together Forever'?" while looking like she might puke.
Jason grimaced. "One of them went braindead a year ago, but the other five? Yeah."
Oh god.
There was a very, very long pause.
Sounding very tired, Jason said, "And this is why I recommend not letting her capture you, and in fact recommend trying to terminate her with extreme prejudice. Don't hesitate just because she can look so innocent."
There were a lot of horrified agreements. Even Bad Canary managed to faintly say something that sounded like, "That makes sense," though Peg could only barely hear her murmuring with everyone else talking.
After a bit, Jason glanced at his phone, and said, "I... think that's everything I need to cover?" Then he glanced toward Fiadh. "Officer Newcombe?" A pause, where Fiadh didn't seem to hear him at all. "... Officer Newcombe?"
Fiadh startled very slightly, left hand clenching into a fist for a moment. "Oh. Yes. Sorry. One moment." Out came her phone, and yes, those were definitely floppy pink rabbit ears attached. It... overall looked like the kind of phone one might buy for, like, a ten-year-old girl. Weird. After a moment of checking whatever on that, Fiadh took a deep breath, stowed the phone, then leaned forward onto the table, deep breath going out, and finally began speaking. "I've been assigned to this task force for two purposes. Firstly, it was pressed heavily upon me by, among others, the head office's Image section, that it is very important The Wild Hunt be positioned as not simply a continuation of the Nine. Officially, this is a new task force with me as head and Officer Henault-" Fiadh nodded to Jason here. "-having been transferred from his old task force, since the Nine officially no longer exist." Jason looked a bit surprised to hear this; had he not been told this beforehand?
Fiadh gestured at the projector image of Bonesaw. "By extension, I am unofficially supposed to prioritize the elimination of Bonesaw, Crawler, and preferably also Burnscar." She paused here, glancing about the room, and apparently Poltergeist stood out to her for some reason, as she pointed at her and asked, "You have something to add, Poltergeist?"
Poltergeist huffed. "Is this one of those 'the unofficial goal is waaaay more important than the official goal' things? Because I will be so pissed if I left Vegas and I really did fall right back into the same ol' same ol' shit."
Fiadh cracked a smile, which... confused Peg. "Pretty brazen of you to say it so openly." Then Fiadh got herself back to a more neutral expression. "The matter was left to my discretion. With being given Officer Henault's context, I personally think Bonesaw's neutralization should be a top priority, but I've always felt it best for the Heroes to not be on a restrictive leash in the field." Here her lips pursed disapprovingly. "Unlike some of my colleagues." Then it smoothed out again. "So if conditions in the field are such that a decision must be made now, as so often happens when dealing with parahumans, and removing Bonesaw from the board is not your top priority? I, at least, will not lead reprimands or an investigation without very strong cause."
Poltergeist cocked an eyebrow. "But your bosses will."
Peg was so lost. Fiadh shrugged, "PRT policy is that responsibility falls to the non-powered oversight by default. If I give you a direct order and you disobey, that's on your head, but if I give you discretion and the head office doesn't like your decisions, that falls on my head."
Poltergeist blinked a few times. "... okay, that's different from Vegas." She was pretty obviously surprised, though it seemed to be a mildly happy sort of surprised.
Menagerie spoke up here, still hugging the chicken. (Which seemed to be getting annoyed by how long it had been held in place, pecking ineffectually at one of his sleeves) "You said you're here for two purposes. What's the other?"
Fiadh's lips turned down in a small yet very noticeable way, not happy. "Director Costa-Brown has mandated that I make sure that removal of Monster from the board is top priority, before the girl quote, 'stirs up another goddamn hornet's nest with her reckless actions', end quote." She sighed here. "This is technically not part of my official orders, but she was very explicit. I'm... of mixed feelings now that I've gotten more context."
Jason blinked. "Uh. Really?"
Peg was pretty confused too. "... why?" Fiadh had seemed particularly stooge-y so far. Peg would've bet money on Fiadh being hardest into 'no second chances to Villains'.
Fiadh looked away, chewing her lip, then faced everyone anew. "Do we have any confirmed kills by Monster of a Hero, or a civilian, or... anybody outside Villains?"
Everybody looked to Jason, who hemmed and hawed for a bit, before admitting, "Not... hard confirmed. We found one of Heartbreaker's, er, 'wives' dead in Brockton Bay, and it looks like Monster's work, but we're not sure. We're also not sure how the woman got there, or why she was there. Most of Heartbreaker's 'family' stayed in Toronto when he died. Most of the exceptions didn't cross the border. It's just this woman and Matchmaker who did. So... there's a theory she got powers and went after Monster, and was killed in self-defense?" Then he shrugged. "Brockton Bay also just has a pile of not-yet-solved murders, plenty after she triggered, and some look plausibly like her work, and plenty of them are definitely civilians."
Fiadh made a vague gesture at the papers in front of her, which... squinting, it looked to Peg like the top paper was the one with Monster's mugshot. "I came here thinking this was clearly some unhinged serial killer with a superpower, and one with a particularly poor survival instinct. Maybe even a Nine fangirl. But in the video, she asks Jack if he wants to repent?" Peg was pretty weirded out by that too, yeah, but wasn't really sure why Fiadh was bringing it up now. "She killed Heartbreaker; I was coming in expecting to be told how she killed a bunch of his 'family', but she didn't, did she?"
Jason rubbed at his head awkwardly again, going, "Uhhh..." Then shrugged. "They weren't present for her attack? But... no, she didn't kill the woman he was, um, 'recruiting'."
Fiadh nodded. "Right. Surgical. Killed Heartbreaker, recruited one of his powered kids, didn't touch anyone else. Killed multiple Nine members, recruited others, but doesn't seem to have done any other damage." Then she frowned. "To be absolutely clear, I definitely think she's a concern, we will bring her in if feasible, but... I'm concerned our info is fucky, pardon my French." Peg blinked a little. The PRT suits had really struck her as being pretty... unfriendly to swearing, and Fiadh had seemed especially rigid so far.
Foundation lit up a bit. "Ah, you mean like the 'mistaken for an adult' thing?"
Fiadh nodded again. "Right. The report here says she 'spoofed' a tinkertech lie detector, presents it as an intentional deception, and so the later report on 'Leet' assumes that was also an intentional deception when she says it was an accident. We've got Armsmaster speculating she might have some nasty Stranger power as why his lie detector didn't go off, but... have you ever met a Tinker who didn't prefer to assume their tech was perfect, often ignoring other possible explanations?" Then she glanced at Menagerie, and added, "No offense intended to those present."
Menagerie laughed here. "It's like you met me in the first couple years of my career!"
Peg had like zero experience with Tinkers. There was the one gang that had been using single-shot laser guns and whatnot recently, but she didn't even know their Tinker's name. She was a little surprised when everybody basically agreed with this presentation; Jason didn't say anything, but gave this tired sigh and nodded a little, like he'd run into that several times already, Poltergeist barked a laugh and told a story about a Tinker she'd known who'd refused to admit it was her gear being faulty once in an op, Foundation murmured speculatively about an indie Tinker she semi-knew...
... Makeshift commented, "I know an exception." After a pause, Makeshift added, "She was very hard on herself in general, though." Which, from a cape of Makeshift's long and varied career, was kind of a polite way of saying 'every other Tinker I knew was as you say, yes'. Saying it without saying it, if you will. Makeshift could be indirect like that. (Peg had been impressed by it as a clever way to avoid being rude without straight-up lying, back when she'd first noticed it)
Fiadh commented, "So... I have doubts." Then she looked a bit green. "Not so much about Bonesaw."
There was collective silent agreement.
Then Fiadh checked the time. "I imagine you all have other things scheduled today-" Ah. Right. Peg was supposed to have another visit with Image today about her rebranding. "-as I certainly do, so see you all tomorrow."
... great. Off to Image for Peg.
Super.
"So that's roughly our picture of Monster. Next is..." Click went the projector, putting Pride's smiling face up while Peg felt herself going grey or maybe green. "... Matchmaker AKA Pride AKA Cherie Vasil, one of Heartbreaker's older daughters, and seemingly his most favored child before his death."
"Excuse me," Peg declared to no one in particular as she jerked to her feet and stumbled out of the chair, making her way to the door. "I have to use the restroom, don't mind me, I'm caught up on this one okay bye!" Peg ignored the mix of confused and sympathetic responses behind her, and just went as fast as she could.
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She didn't puke again, but it was a near thing, hovering in a stall, trying real hard to not think about Miss Torture Science, mostly failing, but... eventually she arrived at what a pleasant surprise it was to meet Makeshift, and that... that was a good thought, a calming thought, and a few minutes later she felt ready to go back to the room without expecting it to go horribly.
When she came back to the meeting room, entering much more quietly than she'd exited it, it was to Jason saying, "... is why Miss Mcabee is part of this task force." Which, uh, what?
Fortunately Peg didn't need to embarrass herself by asking what she'd missed or anything, as Menagerie asked, "Do we know if her power works on non-humans?"
Bad Canary looked surprised. "I... never tried?" she said, sounding as if she'd never given the topic any thought at all. Peg was mildly surprised; it seemed like it would've come up in regard to a pet, or birds, or something.
"I'm scheduling a testing session right now," interjected Fiadh, typing furiously with just her thumb at her floppy-eared phone.
Jason looked relieved and a bit embarrassed. "Hopefully Matchmaker can't affect animals, but it would be terrible to think Miss Mcabee could counter such and learn it in the field in the worst possible way." Menagerie murmured something to himself, while Peg felt she understood the gist of it; Bad Canary's power-enhanced singing was here to foil Matchmaker's power, hopefully, and they didn't know whether Matchmaker could or not. Okay, sure. Jason continued with, "Given Miss Mcabee's power is known to work even when transmitted by speaker systems and so on, and her nature as a non-combatant in multiple senses, the current plan is to set up a system where she'll be nearby, in case it turns out to be necessary for her to be closer for some reason, but primarily her singing will be transmitted by speakers on your costumes."
Peg found herself thinking that was actually kind of awesome, like having a Bad Canary concert come to her instead of her going to it. It also put to rest a fear she hadn't even realized was bothering her until it was no longer a concern: she really didn't want to see Bad Canary getting hurt in a cape fight, and especially didn't want to feel responsible for Bad Canary getting injured. Then Jason glanced at his phone and remarked, "We should probably break for lunch."
Peg's stomach shriveled up and died at the thought of food, but... something to drink sounded good. A coffee might settle her stomach; it had worked before, at least.
Everybody aside Makeshift readily agreed, and groups naturally formed as everybody trickled out of the meeting room; Peg found herself walking with Paige and Makeshift, the three of them agreeing they'd rather eat nearby and were in fact all fine quickly grabbing something at the PRT cafeteria, while Poltergeist glommed onto Fiadh and Foundation, and Menagerie and Jason wandered off ahead talking about something. (Peg didn't care enough to try to eavesdrop)
Makeshift, of course, didn't eat food as such, but they plugged a couple of their components into a wall while sitting with Paige and Peg. Peg had already known Makeshift had to get electricity for their devices and this was vaguely analogous to eating, but had not known that Makeshift's field transferred electricity across devices so they didn't need to plug in every individual device unless they were in a hurry to recharge. Peg had to fight the urge to get out her phone and write down another Makeshift Fact, which surprised her: it had been years since she'd last done that, she thought she'd gotten over that obsessive phase.
She successfully distracted herself by engaging Bad Canary in conversation, which was easy since she was pretty hyped to meet the celebrity. "It's so cool of you to volunteer for this, Canary, like I knew you did benefits concerts but-" She stopped because Bad Canary's face had gone through a very complicated series of strange, mostly-upset expressions starting from when Peg had said 'volunteer'. Dammit, had Peg stepped in something again?
Bad Canary awkwardly said, "I- didn't volunteer." Her voice squeaked on 'volunteer'. Peg was just confused; Canary was the 'not-volunteer' Fiadh had mentioned? "I... um... you might've heard..."
Peg stared blankly, having no idea what Canary was getting at. Makeshift smoothly inserted theirself into the conversation, "What Ms Mcabee is getting at is that this was a condition of her plea bargain." Peg blinked. Swung her gaze back and forth between these two people she looked up to. Did not find words. Bad Canary sighed, moodily poking a plastic fork into an unidentifiable bit of cafeteria meat, and still didn't speak up.
Peg cautiously asked, "What happened?"
Bad Canary sighed again, but this time apparently worked up the nerve to explain. "I got in a fight with my boyfriend after a concert, told him to 'go fuck himself', and my power was still somewhat active, so... you can guess what happened. The court decided this was 'assault with a parahuman ability', I think it was. Not great, but I figured I'd get a stint in regular jail at worst, or maybe slapped with a big fine, but somehow things escalated so sentencing me to the Birdcage got floated?" What the fuck? "The Protectorate intervened, though. They were a bit cryptic in the offer, but basically they got my sentence knocked down to community service, and this is my community service."
Peg had a very uncharitable and not at all funny thought wondering if Bad Canary being sentenced to the Birdcage was idiots thinking about what that headline would look like. It was either that or swear a lot very loudly in front of Peg's idols. Peg wiped at her face tiredly. "Okay, can we just pretend I didn't stick my foot directly in my mouth? You're cool either way, I'm jazzed to be working with the Bad Canary even if the reason it's happening is a little crappier than I'd thought-" Peg abruptly remembered she'd been intending to not fangirl at either of her idols. Then she got a look at how Bad Canary was looking taken aback, flustered, pleased, and decided she didn't care enough about her rep; lifting Bad Canary's mood was good. "-so, um. Yeah." You're so good at this, Peg, she thought sarcastically at herself.
Makeshift leaned forward here. "You're a fellow fan of Miss Mcabee's work?" Peg locked up for a moment, because it had never crossed her mind for even a moment that Makeshift might share an interest with her, then stayed locked up for another few moments because she'd never talked with anyone about how great Bad Canary's songs were- "I'm personally quite fond of the themes in Uncaged Self."
"It's my third-favorite of her songs," Peg blurted out, then cringed, then decided she'd rather make it look intentional rather than try to backpedal.
This led to a lunch largely devoted to Peg and Makeshift discussing the themes of Bad Canary's songs (And to a much lesser extent talking about the choreography, among other things), while Bad Canary herself looked pleased-but-awkward and occasionally thoughtfully surprised.
This was all interrupted by Bad Canary getting a message through her Protectorate phone indicating that the power testing lab was ready for her. Makeshift said goodbye, while Peg ended up coming with, partly out of curiosity of what such testing would look like.
... but mostly because she wanted to hear Bad Canary singing.
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Peg had been thinking in terms of 'basically a personal concert' and was slightly disappointed with the reality. Turned out that Bad Canary didn't really need to do a proper song to leverage her power. She could kind of hum to 'charge' her power, and she did use her singing voice when delivering instructions, but it wasn't terribly 'song-like' otherwise. No actual need for rhythm or rhyming or syncing her words with music.
Even so, it was interesting. PRT techies brought in a cat, two dogs, three different birds (A pigeon, some kind of parrot, and... a hawk?), and several different kinds of bugs, and asked questions Peg had never thought to ask. (Nor had Bad Canary, apparently) For example, the two dogs were brought in because they were both trained dogs, but one was trained to respond to English commands, while the other had been trained in a language Peg didn't recognize at all, and the techies wanted to see if that mattered. It turned out that it did matter: both dogs responded the same to Bad Canary just humming, including that Bad Canary could in fact pick a specific feeling to try to project and it worked in both cases (Going by a brainwave... thing), but the dog trained in English would sit when told to while the other dog didn't respond to any instruction Bad Canary tried.
The cat and birds extended this trend, where familiarity with English instructions resulted in the ability to give orders that would be followed, whereas the animals lacking such familiarity didn't do as they were told. It also came up in here that Bad Canary's power had some kind of directionality or intentionality component to it, where if she didn't know a subject was present (The techies snuck in a third dog) her power didn't automatically affect them just because they could hear her, and even if she did know someone was around she could choose to not 'hit' them, which explained why Peg wasn't getting the personal concert experience she'd anticipated: Bad Canary was deliberately excluding all the humans during the testing.
The contrast was made very clear when one of the techies figured out that Peg was part of the task force and raised the idea of testing how their powers interacted. Peg diffidently agreed to the extremely cool scenario of having Bad Canary expressly singing at her, and the experience was a night-and-day contrast: suddenly Bad Canary's humming was an incredible aesthetic experience all on its own, and her instruction to walk from one spot in the room to another was a thrill to follow no matter how hesitantly it was said and regardless of how Bad Canary cringed. Peg was a bit surprised to realize how much of her fondness for Bad Canary's concerts was directly caused by the power.
This led into less-cool testing of the range of power-negation from Peg's power, which worked out about how Peg expected. She hadn't specifically paid much attention to the distinction between 'zone at arrival point' vs 'zone at point she teleported from', and was a bit surprised when the techies tentatively concluded that she negated powers in around a 25% larger area at her destination compared to her jumping-off point, and it was jarring to teleport while under Bad Canary's influence, upsetting in ways Peg wasn't sure there were words for, but those details aside she'd already had a pretty good grasp on her range and all.
Makeshift showed up partway through, and testing was done to see if Bad Canary's power worked on Makeshift. Unexpectedly, the answer was 'no, unless Bad Canary's voice was transmitted such that one of Makeshift's devices was playing it'. (Makeshift was very confused initially: apparently, they'd always played Bad Canary's songs directly from one of their devices and so not being affected was not at all what they expected) So that was convenient, indicating Bad Canary could buffer Makeshift against Matchmaker in the event that Matchmaker's power worked on them.
(Nobody suggested testing Peg's power-negation near Makeshift. Peg assumed she was not alone in worrying that it might kill Makeshift)
In turn Menagerie, Foundation, and Poltergeist showed up to get some other tests done real quick before returning to the briefing. They confirmed that Menagerie's animals were affected by Bad Canary's power, that Peg's power temporarily 'shorted out' his tinkertech, Makeshift and Menagerie mentioned in passing that Makeshift could interface with his tech to some extent...
Foundation's power was not at all what Peg had been vaguely guessing in the back of her head. Foundation asked the techies which part of the testing area was designated as 'disposable', was pointed to a corner that didn't seem particularly different to Peg, and then had put a finger to one of the sticks in her hair and abruptly turned into a wooden statue version of herself. Only... 'statue' wasn't really accurate, as Foundation retained her full range of motion just as smoothly as if she were still flesh and bone. But she could be completely still, not even breathing, so... statue-like? The effect was a bit eerie, especially in conjunction with watching the ground turn to the same type of wood in a lowly-expanding circle, spreading from where Foundation's feet made contact. Foundation had spent a bit growing things out of the wooden ground, including a little wooden slingshot thing that really did not seem like it should work, but which somehow bent as if it was a thing of wood and rubber rather than wood and more wood, able to launch a plastic bead provided by a techie with surprising speed.
Foundation had explained that her 'territory' could expand without limit so long as she remained in contact with it and she had an awareness of things near it, especially touching it, all of this bound by getting 'killer headaches' if she tried to hold onto too much territory for too long. In turn, they'd tested if Bad Canary's power worked on Foundation when her power was active (It didn't, which Foundation had said she'd expected; she similarly expected to be safe from Matchmaker's power), tested what happened if Peg teleported into or near this 'territory' (Foundation lost control of the affected area temporarily and, oddly, couldn't actually tell anything had happened unless she tried something in the affected area to have it not work) as well as what happened if she teleported while holding one of Foundation's 'more tinkertech-y' contraptions, such as the nonsensical slingshot. (They stopped working; the slingshot became simply a carving in the shape of a slingshot. It stayed 'broken' for the rest of the their time in the test chamber, much longer than Peg's power-negating effect normally lasted) There'd also been a brief test, suggested by Makeshift, of having Foundation touch one of Makeshift's devices to use as the basis of her territory; it didn't have any interesting effects, simply revealing to Peg that Foundation's territory (and her statue form) derived its material from something Foundation was touching at the time she activated her power.
Things got particularly interesting when Poltergeist's turn for test-participation came along.
"I'm legally obligated to forewarn everyone that if they have heart conditions, are pregnant, or otherwise may react really badly to being startled and/or frightened, you should not let me use my power on you outside an actual emergency," she said very seriously.
Still a plastic statue from the test with one of Makeshift's phones, Foundation shrugged and said, "Ah'll be fine. I don't get very emotional like this."
Poltergeist grinned, said, "Awesome, I don't have to hold back," and promptly melted into a cloud of thick black smoke that itself thinned out and vanished in a matter of seconds.
"Uh," Peg commented. "What just happened?"
Over the following minute, Foundation frowned, twitched her gaze about randomly for no clear reason, then bits of things left lying around started hurling themselves about for no reason, one of the dogs abruptly spooked and ran into a corner, ignoring the techie yelling at it to heel, and finally for no obvious reason Foundation yelped, abruptly hovered into the air as if picked up by something invisible, and then was set down gently before black smoke whooshed in next to her and Poltergeist reappeared, one hand around one of Andrea's arms. "Neat. I can be part of a trap!" Poltergeist enthused.
It took an annoyingly long time to extract a meaningful explanation of Poltergeist's power from her, and honestly like half the explanation came from one of the techies pulling her file. The short version was that Poltergeist, upon touching someone, had a window of several minutes in which she could activate her power and become an invisible and intangible shadowy version of herself that rapidly stalked her victim, only visible to said victim (Plus some capes in a kind of random-sounding pattern could see her regardless), having to try to stay mostly hidden from view but able to somewhat mold her appearance and able to move absurdly fast within their view to avoid being spotted. If her victim ever got too clear a view of her, the effect ended and Poltergeist would reappear where they saw her... but if they ever moved their gaze such that she left their view entirely (Including by closing their eyes for too long, though apparently blinking was insufficient to trigger this) then Poltergeist had another window to activate her power and become a Brute-rated shadowy horned figure that was no longer bound by the need to hide but was still invisible and intangible to everyone except her target.
"That sounds terrifying," Bad Canary remarked shakily once the explanation was extracted.
"I know! Isn't it great?!" Poltergeist enthused, then added in an aggravated tone, "I still can't believe Image thinks it would be awful to riff on SCP-173! My power is such a perfect match to it!"
Everybody ignored whatever that was, and testing resumed, but now with people properly informed of the mechanics. Everyone was surprised when Peg's teleport proved able to knock Poltergeist out of her shadow-state (Out of either mode, in fact, and regardless of who Poltergeist was tied to at the time), though she did have to arrive near where Poltergeist was at the time to get that result. (Not, say, the person Poltergeist was 'haunting') It was also surprising (and a little worrying, given Matchmaker) to find out that Bad Canary's power worked on Poltergeist in this state. Lastly, Poltergeist could tag Makeshift, though Poltergeist canceled the effect almost immediately, complaining about 'too many viewpoints'.
Once all this testing was done, Foundation touched the testing area's regular floor and converted the corner she'd been using back to roughly its original state (The techies seemed a bit surprised at this bit of consideration), and then everyone was on their way back to the briefing room.
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Peg was aggravated anew when they all got back to the meeting room, running late due to the power testing, and the PRT stooges were somehow not there. She'd been expecting to get chewed out for being late and to be mad at them having a no-win standard of 'you'd be wrong for not finishing testing, and you're wrong for being late because you took a while doing the testing', not for them to be running even more late!
Makeshift and Menagerie murmured some things that sounded like this was weird to them, but shrugged it off and simply went to the papers. Peg followed suit with some trepidation, taking the opportunity to look over Monster's section with the previous conversation in mind.
Five minutes later, Peg hadn't drawn any new conclusions, but Fiadh and Jason both reached the door, focused on their respective phones. At first Peg assumed they were coming in together, but they nearly bumped into each other, glanced in some surprise at each other, then shuffled past and both started talking at the same time. They stopped, made annoyed noises, and then Fiadh made a 'go on' motion at Jason, who shook his head and said, "You first, you're the ranking officer."
Fiadh shrugged, sat down in her spot (With a fresh new mug of cocoa), and casually said, "We've already got a volunteer. She expects to be here tomorrow. Codename of Megaera, ideally we all familiarize ourselves with her 'cheat sheet' before she gets here-"
"Cheat sheet?" Peg and Bad Canary both said, lost.
Fiadh paused. Muttered to herself, "Right," and with a sigh explained, "Protectorate Heroes get two main files: the detailed version, and the abbreviated version with the important highlights. The latter has a more technical name I honestly can't recall. Everybody calls them 'cheat sheets'. Anyway, the important point is she's immune to the Simurgh and her immunity is enough to hedge against the Simurgh's far-reaching manipulations, covering that angle, if imperfectly." After sipping her new cup, Fiadh gestured at Jason. "Your turn."
Jason was frowning for some reason, rubbing at his head a little. After a moment he seemed to notice attention was on him, and said, "Ah... not ideal, but this should work? Okay, so you should all know why we're in Boston-" He stopped, clearly taking in everybody's expressions of confusion, his gaze ending on Fiadh, who gave a shrug. Jason looked incredibly pained. "Nobody told any of you?" Jason closed his eyes and laid his head on the table with a forceful clunk, heaving an enormous sigh, before bouncing back to attention. "Okay, I guess somebody up the chain decided this was need to know, but I am officially declaring in my capacity as the PRT Officer closest to this case that yes, you need to know. So! Two days ago, Monster very unexpectedly went in to claim bounties for several Nine members."
Peg was broadly aware of the bounty system (She actually had a really minor bounty on her, like fifty bucks), but was not at all surprised when Bad Canary expressed confusion at this step. Jason kept talking; Peg wasn't sure he'd noticed Bad Canary's confusion. "Jack Slash's bounty was affirmed, using the video as proof of course, but the office didn't hand over the rest immediately, using the need to confirm supporting evidence as the excuse and encouraging Monster to come back in a few days for those bounties. This was all in the south Boston office -we're in the north one- and the point was to try to pin Monster to this area while this unit got in position and briefed. We'd been hoping she'd take longer to check back in, ideally she'd have taken until at least tomorrow, but bounty collection has a grace period of a couple days after where we're not allowed to jump someone unless they commit a new crime so it's not like we could go after her today anyway. So we can take our time, get Megaera briefed, and be ready to act if she takes further action in the area."
There was a pause, before Fiadh said, "We might as well continue the briefing, then."
"Right," Jason said with mildly grim determination.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Siberian was covered briefly. Not because she was known to be part of the group, but because her status was unknown and her widely-known invulnerability meant that the default assumption was she was still alive and about somewhere. Peg had been half-expecting to learn the Siberian was some government experiment gone horrifically wrong, or for the Siberian's file to be full of blatantly redacted stuff, as 'what is the Siberian's deal?' was almost as popular a mystery topic as 'what is with the Endbringers?' but she was vaguely disappointed to discover the PRT was basically as ignorant as anyone. Her file was objectively pretty long, but the majority of that length was a terrifying number of sentences saying 'this did nothing to her either'. There was a basic sketch of her personality, but it was 'not Thinker-supported' and was very speculative; nobody had ever heard her speak, or heard of her writing, so her actions were all there was to look to. Said actions were horrific, of course, but not anything new to Peg.
(Bad Canary, notably, very blatantly stopped reading the Siberian's papers fairly quickly, looking ill)
Jason's own discussion of that was pretty much 'if we spot her, we're not engaging her'. He allowed for the possibility that Peg's power-negating teleport might 'pierce' the Siberian's invulnerability, but he emphasized that power-negating powers had yet to be seen to work on her, and further emphasized that testing for it was less important than having the ability to deal with Crawler.
To Peg's surprise, Crawler was a bit less of an enigma.
"Profilers agree Crawler is a masochist, in, um, the... traditional sense," Jason started with, cringing slightly.
Makeshift said, "The sexual, you mean."
Jason cringed harder (As did Peg, though more at Makeshift being so blunt on this type of topic), but made a wavy motion with one hand. "Probably, but the important part to us is that he wants to be hurt, and not just because his power makes him stronger if he gets hurt. Crawler was the only member of the Nine who you could just... get to hold still by saying 'please' and telling him you wanted to hit him with a power. The, um, prior members of this unit got him to stay separated from his teammates for a bit a few times this way."
Fiadh blandly commented, "Useful," before sipping more cocoa.
Jason continued, "Other than that, he's a bit of a question mark. He probably came from somewhere on the East Coast, according to speech analysts, but we haven't been able to narrow it down to a specific city. Not helping is that he no longer looked particularly human by the time we became aware of him, and we haven't been able to firmly pin down whatever cape-on-cape combats he might've participated in to reach that point. He was a wanderer before he joined the Nine, for one. If he sought revenge or something, it's not clearly distinguishable from his general tendency to get into fights. I- well, frankly, if it turns out he has an agenda more specific than 'get into lots of fights', I'll be surprised."
Jason also did a brief run-through of what was the PRT's best understanding of Crawler's power. Peg's main takeaway was that ideally she'd not get into extended, repeated fights with him, because he might somehow become protected against her power after enough exposure to it. There was also a long list of 'known mutations', but while Peg was still pretty confused as to how Crawler got horrific acid saliva out of his power (The PRT didn't have a clear explanation themselves; they just knew it wasn't something Bonesaw installed: he had it before she joined the Nine), it largely fit to what she'd heard in passing about him.
Click went the projector again, showing a color photo of a young woman with curly brown hair, who Peg would characterize as 'mousy-looking' if it weren't for her eyes being backlit with a hellish glow and her cheeks being marred by around a dozen circular burn marks. "Burnscar, or Miriam Bellamy, we have more information on," Jason noted, sounding relieved to be able to say that. "She triggered in 2007, and was taken from her family as, well, they were the cause." Bad Canary looked confused by this. Had she not heard of abusive families? "She ping-ponged for a bit after that, the kind of drama you sometimes see with people outed as parahumans from the word 'go', exacerbated by her power's effect on her personality, ending up in PAE fourteen months after she triggered once it was decided-"
Okay so apparently he wasn't going to explain that. So Peg leadingly said, "PAE being?..."
Jason blinked, glanced at Peg, Bad Canary, and Foundation, all of whom were looking a bit lost, and he sighed a little. "Right, sorry, um."
When he stalled for a moment, Fiadh inserted herself into the conversation. "Parahuman Asylum East is one of two facilities in the US for the safe containment of non-criminal parahumans who nonetheless have issues with their powers and/or personality such that it's dangerous to them and/or others for them to attempt to live a normal public life." Fiadh sipped at her cocoa. "The nominal goal of these facilities is to help the parahumans to work through their personal issues or attain reliable control over their power such that they don't need specialized containment cells to protect themselves and/or others from their power." Fiadh frowned a little. "I'm surprised to hear that a Slaughterhouse Nine member was ever in one of these facilities."
Bad Canary made a noise of recognition or understanding. "Oooooh." Then she looked disheartened, then morosely thoughtful. Odd.
Makeshift commented, "The Nine did try to hit PAE in 2001."
Jason waved that off. "A different Villain group broke into PAE, about a year ago. Mercenaries of some kind. A number of the patients got set loose by these Villains, apparently to tie up resources on preventing the patients from hurting themselves or others, and some of them got off the grounds entirely. Miriam was one of them. She dropped off our radar until seven months later, when she killed a pimp or something using her powers. PRT troops tried to get her to turn herself in, but she refused, started severe enough fires to gut three different buildings, put a dozen people in the hospital and three people in the morgue, and escaped in the chaos. The next time she surfaced, it was as part of the Nine."
Menagerie asked, "The Nine, or the Hunt?"
Jason nodded. "The Nine. She was part of the Chicago attack." Then he winced. "Which the group change makes things a bit hazy. Nine members all get Kill Orders, and we've never had to deal with 'what if they stop being a part of the Nine?' People only 'quit' the group by dying. PAE has already lobbied for her Kill Order to be repealed, arguing that she 'wasn't in her right mind' for her incriminating actions and that it would be 'unjust' for her to be treated as a criminal rather than a mentally unwell person whose treatment was interrupted, but that decision is way above my paygrade. I've been told we're to prefer capturing her if it proves realistic, but it's very much optional."
Fiadh blandly remarked, "A teleporter who causes massive collateral damage is not a great 'capture alive' target in the best of conditions."
Peg frowned. "I teleport, and short out powers when I do."
Fiadh cocked an eyebrow. "She teleports into fires. Are you fireproof? Would disabling her power also disable her protection from fire?"
Peg frowned harder, but didn't say anything.
Jason looked like he had a dim awareness that something was happening in front of him deeper than the surface conversation, but also like he had no idea what it was and really didn't want to poke it. Instead, he said, "Her psych profile is what has me concerned." Peg frowned even harder, considering adding to Jason's Stooge Counter as well. (She'd already decided to add a second notch to Fiadh's) "By all accounts, by default Miriam is really not the sort of person, well... brave enough to be even an ordinary sort of criminal. But under the influence of her power, she's a very different person, much crueler, much more violent. I think, in theory, if we could manage to just talk to her in calm conditions, we might be able to get her to come in on her own recognizance, but once a fight sorts it's probably impossible. And she has every reason to expect a fight."
Hm. Peg wondered if negating Miriam's power would negate the mental influence? This hadn't come up in her career as Black Bishop... at least, she hadn't noticed it coming up. But then, she hadn't thought of the possibility to keep a metaphorical eye out for it happening. Maybe it had happened and she'd have noticed if only she'd already been aware of the possibility?
Then the projector went click again, this time to one of the more iconic shots of Bonesaw caught on cell phone, the perfect picture of a child's cheerful innocence... if only she wasn't covered in bloodstains and holding a hacksaw that was smeared in gore. Peg's stomach flipped over at the sight. Jason said, "Bonesaw... do I really need to explain?" Jason took in the room, and sighed. "Okay, we're pretty sure she's one Riley Grace Davis, though the Nine killed several families before Bonesaw popped up so it's possible a corpse got misidentified or... it doesn't matter." Jason ran a hand over his face, looking suddenly exhausted. "I'll be honest, Bonesaw is the big sticking point. She's awful. And not just how she's one of the cruelest, most horrible of the Nine, and has been for six years running, with a list of horrific crimes longer than some entire parahuman gangs, but that she's, y'know, a kid. I could go over the twenty different psych profiles we've got, the breakdown of her literally hundreds of vile projects, lay out everything she's done to make the world a worse place for everyone, and I assure you that if someone killed her tomorrow, there'd still be public backlash over 'murdering a literal child', whichever cape took credit would probably forever be remembered not as 'the hero who ended Bonesaw', but as 'the heartless monster who killed a child' and... it would be a nightmare, even if her death went as perfectly smoothly as possible as far as neutralizing her contingencies successfully and so on."
Then Jason waved vaguely at the room. "Hence why this is the team, and not the Triumvirate or... whoever."
There was a moment of silence, before Poltergeist said, "Oh. No wonder Matt was so happy when I accepted this job. Here I thought he'd finally figured out how to pretend to make nice to people you hate." She sounded more thoughtful than angry, which seemed a bit weird to Peg.
Bad Canary added, "So we're... fall guys?" She sounded more upset by this than anything else that had happened so far. (Probably thinking of her career, which... yeah)
Menagerie shrugged. "Probably not so much you, if the radio plan works." Then he added, "I don't mind. Doing good is the important part, right?"
Makeshift turned to Jason and asked. "I take it that Bonesaw's Kill Order is not being rescinded."
Jason winced. "She's personally done enough awful stuff that if Kill Orders could be stacked, I can assure you that she'd have at least three Kill Orders assigned to her. Psych profiles and Thinktank questioning suggest that, however coercive the original context was, she's probably not going to change her ways just because most of the Nine members that were involved are dead. She dies, or she goes to the Birdcage, and Dragon memoed this unit last year that she 'would prefer to not risk the Birdcage's integrity', so really, it's just 'she dies'."
Makeshift shrugged. "I've seen some of her... 'art' firsthand. Biological child or no, I'm not objecting to this Kill Order. I just wanted to check, since you'd brought up the idea in regards to Burnscar."
Fiadh drained her coffee mug and set it aside, before leaning forward and asking the room at large, "Any second thoughts to air or the like, or do we wrap up the review?"
Peg was... honestly mostly glad they weren't, apparently, going to do a blow-by-blow of Bonesaw's Greatest Hits. Peg generally thought of herself as having a strong stomach, this day's events notwithstanding, but every single time she heard anything about Bonesaw's activities, whatever nightmare visions her brain conjured off vague allusion were somehow less horrific than the actual reality proved to be if she went digging. She'd... stopped digging two or three years ago.
Poltergeist spoke up. "You are giving us more on her whole deal power-wise, right? And combat psychology?"
Jason nodded, looking relieved. "Yeah. Yeah, um..." Click went the projector, switching to oh god- click click click click click click -stopping on a less-disturbing image of Bonesaw, several medical tools visible on her person but no visible blood and none of her awful projects on display. (... the fact that she seemed less cheerful in this shot was pretty disturbing itself, mind...) "She's a Tinker, of course, so her arsenal is ever-evolving, but most Tinkers have a gimmick, a specialty, a methodology, and Bonesaw's seems to be about the interface of biology and machinery. She can grow purpose-targeted organisms, but she needs something like electronic machinery to do the job in. She can substantially modify existing organisms through surgery and bypass many common issues with medical implants and organ replacement, where foreign objects are smoothly accepted by the body she's working on, but seems unable to do anything like gene editing for an already-grown animal. She's been known to occasionally make electronic devices that don't interact with biological elements, but it's a rarity, and when samples of such have been passed on to Protectorate Tinkers, they've tended to be reported as poor-quality." Jason grimaced here. "That's the closest thing to a weakness we've noticed."
Jason took a deep breath, clearly steeling himself, and said, "In terms of psychology, Bonesaw is... awful. Objectively awful. Deliberately, intentionally, shooting for awful."
There was another silence. Peg ventured to say, "I'm inclined to believe you," In this case, Peg didn't say, "But that's... unhelpful?"
Jason rubbed at his head again and sighed. "Okay, um... I'm not... really sure what's normal to know about the Nine's operational methodology?"
This prompted a messy sharing of perspectives. Peg was a little surprised when Bad Canary turned out to be, apparently, one of the more knowledgeable in the room about the Nine's norm; Peg was aware Shatterbird had been a particularly memorable member of the group, but hadn't really known that the Nine had a bit of a routine in the past couple of years where Shatterbird 'announced' their presence with her Scream, the group having split up to hit their targets prior to the Scream. (Bad Canary actually described the whole thing as 'theatrical', and made a comparison to a movie that meant nothing to Peg) Menagerie and Makeshift mentioned the Nine keeping the Triumvirate out by being willing to escalate their damage enormously if they showed up, which Peg had this impression she might've heard something like that before?
That bit got Jason talking again. "That! That's- it's not just the Triumvirate. That is, the Nine do these... rules a lot. 'Play by our rules, and we'll kill a bunch of people and cause havoc, but if you don't play by our rules we'll make it so much worse'. They always did this, but it really intensified once they recruited Bonesaw, I don't even want to remember how many times a Director or mayor told me this unit couldn't enter their city during an active Nine attack..." Jason shook himself, while Peg had some trouble wrapping her head around the picture Jason was painting.
Fiadh chimed in. "So this is a main part of Bonesaw's methodology?"
Right, right, this was about explaining Bonesaw.
Jason nodded and gestured at the projector's image of Bonesaw. "Exactly. She's scarily attentive to the psychology of people, a lot of her 'art projects' center on figuring out how to be not simply outrageously cruel but do so in an intensely personal way for exactly those victims, and she's the most aggressive member of the group to employ this methodology since King died almost 25 years ago. Even in combat conditions, she prioritizes cruelty and suffering; if she thinks she can make someone suffer more without the attempt seriously risking her losing the fight, she will do it pretty much every time. She prefers capturing people to killing them, probably partly for the pragmatic reason of being a biotinker, but to all appearances mostly because you can't suffer if you're dead."
Peg was not the only person shifting uneasily at this summary. Makeshift quietly said, "I knew she was a problem, but... is she really so terrible? I've always thought the Fallen were more grotesque."
Jason sighed again. "It gets downplayed. When I first got attached to this unit, only about a third of her 'art projects' were made publicly known. That rate went up after I came on board, but mostly because Bonesaw apparently figured out coverups were happening and didn't like it, making an effort to ensure each 'project' was very difficult to hide the existence of. And even then, details get left out of the public records... you know about 'The Loving Family'"? Oh god, Peg's stomach lurched, and everyone else looked unhappy at being reminded of... that. Even Fiadh looked disturbed. "They're somehow fully cognizant in there." Peg lurched back in horror, while Bad Canary's hand went to her mouth in shock.
Poltergeist blurted out, "I thought they were braindead?!"
Jason, looking a bit grey, said, "No. Bonesaw's early projects often ended up dead or braindead in a few days, but as her skills have improved..."
A dozen other 'art projects' Peg had heard about over the years suddenly became much, much more horrifying. Bad Canary fearfully asked, "Does that include 'Together Forever'?" while looking like she might puke.
Jason grimaced. "One of them went braindead a year ago, but the other five? Yeah."
Oh god.
There was a very, very long pause.
Sounding very tired, Jason said, "And this is why I recommend not letting her capture you, and in fact recommend trying to terminate her with extreme prejudice. Don't hesitate just because she can look so innocent."
There were a lot of horrified agreements. Even Bad Canary managed to faintly say something that sounded like, "That makes sense," though Peg could only barely hear her murmuring with everyone else talking.
After a bit, Jason glanced at his phone, and said, "I... think that's everything I need to cover?" Then he glanced toward Fiadh. "Officer Newcombe?" A pause, where Fiadh didn't seem to hear him at all. "... Officer Newcombe?"
Fiadh startled very slightly, left hand clenching into a fist for a moment. "Oh. Yes. Sorry. One moment." Out came her phone, and yes, those were definitely floppy pink rabbit ears attached. It... overall looked like the kind of phone one might buy for, like, a ten-year-old girl. Weird. After a moment of checking whatever on that, Fiadh took a deep breath, stowed the phone, then leaned forward onto the table, deep breath going out, and finally began speaking. "I've been assigned to this task force for two purposes. Firstly, it was pressed heavily upon me by, among others, the head office's Image section, that it is very important The Wild Hunt be positioned as not simply a continuation of the Nine. Officially, this is a new task force with me as head and Officer Henault-" Fiadh nodded to Jason here. "-having been transferred from his old task force, since the Nine officially no longer exist." Jason looked a bit surprised to hear this; had he not been told this beforehand?
Fiadh gestured at the projector image of Bonesaw. "By extension, I am unofficially supposed to prioritize the elimination of Bonesaw, Crawler, and preferably also Burnscar." She paused here, glancing about the room, and apparently Poltergeist stood out to her for some reason, as she pointed at her and asked, "You have something to add, Poltergeist?"
Poltergeist huffed. "Is this one of those 'the unofficial goal is waaaay more important than the official goal' things? Because I will be so pissed if I left Vegas and I really did fall right back into the same ol' same ol' shit."
Fiadh cracked a smile, which... confused Peg. "Pretty brazen of you to say it so openly." Then Fiadh got herself back to a more neutral expression. "The matter was left to my discretion. With being given Officer Henault's context, I personally think Bonesaw's neutralization should be a top priority, but I've always felt it best for the Heroes to not be on a restrictive leash in the field." Here her lips pursed disapprovingly. "Unlike some of my colleagues." Then it smoothed out again. "So if conditions in the field are such that a decision must be made now, as so often happens when dealing with parahumans, and removing Bonesaw from the board is not your top priority? I, at least, will not lead reprimands or an investigation without very strong cause."
Poltergeist cocked an eyebrow. "But your bosses will."
Peg was so lost. Fiadh shrugged, "PRT policy is that responsibility falls to the non-powered oversight by default. If I give you a direct order and you disobey, that's on your head, but if I give you discretion and the head office doesn't like your decisions, that falls on my head."
Poltergeist blinked a few times. "... okay, that's different from Vegas." She was pretty obviously surprised, though it seemed to be a mildly happy sort of surprised.
Menagerie spoke up here, still hugging the chicken. (Which seemed to be getting annoyed by how long it had been held in place, pecking ineffectually at one of his sleeves) "You said you're here for two purposes. What's the other?"
Fiadh's lips turned down in a small yet very noticeable way, not happy. "Director Costa-Brown has mandated that I make sure that removal of Monster from the board is top priority, before the girl quote, 'stirs up another goddamn hornet's nest with her reckless actions', end quote." She sighed here. "This is technically not part of my official orders, but she was very explicit. I'm... of mixed feelings now that I've gotten more context."
Jason blinked. "Uh. Really?"
Peg was pretty confused too. "... why?" Fiadh had seemed particularly stooge-y so far. Peg would've bet money on Fiadh being hardest into 'no second chances to Villains'.
Fiadh looked away, chewing her lip, then faced everyone anew. "Do we have any confirmed kills by Monster of a Hero, or a civilian, or... anybody outside Villains?"
Everybody looked to Jason, who hemmed and hawed for a bit, before admitting, "Not... hard confirmed. We found one of Heartbreaker's, er, 'wives' dead in Brockton Bay, and it looks like Monster's work, but we're not sure. We're also not sure how the woman got there, or why she was there. Most of Heartbreaker's 'family' stayed in Toronto when he died. Most of the exceptions didn't cross the border. It's just this woman and Matchmaker who did. So... there's a theory she got powers and went after Monster, and was killed in self-defense?" Then he shrugged. "Brockton Bay also just has a pile of not-yet-solved murders, plenty after she triggered, and some look plausibly like her work, and plenty of them are definitely civilians."
Fiadh made a vague gesture at the papers in front of her, which... squinting, it looked to Peg like the top paper was the one with Monster's mugshot. "I came here thinking this was clearly some unhinged serial killer with a superpower, and one with a particularly poor survival instinct. Maybe even a Nine fangirl. But in the video, she asks Jack if he wants to repent?" Peg was pretty weirded out by that too, yeah, but wasn't really sure why Fiadh was bringing it up now. "She killed Heartbreaker; I was coming in expecting to be told how she killed a bunch of his 'family', but she didn't, did she?"
Jason rubbed at his head awkwardly again, going, "Uhhh..." Then shrugged. "They weren't present for her attack? But... no, she didn't kill the woman he was, um, 'recruiting'."
Fiadh nodded. "Right. Surgical. Killed Heartbreaker, recruited one of his powered kids, didn't touch anyone else. Killed multiple Nine members, recruited others, but doesn't seem to have done any other damage." Then she frowned. "To be absolutely clear, I definitely think she's a concern, we will bring her in if feasible, but... I'm concerned our info is fucky, pardon my French." Peg blinked a little. The PRT suits had really struck her as being pretty... unfriendly to swearing, and Fiadh had seemed especially rigid so far.
Foundation lit up a bit. "Ah, you mean like the 'mistaken for an adult' thing?"
Fiadh nodded again. "Right. The report here says she 'spoofed' a tinkertech lie detector, presents it as an intentional deception, and so the later report on 'Leet' assumes that was also an intentional deception when she says it was an accident. We've got Armsmaster speculating she might have some nasty Stranger power as why his lie detector didn't go off, but... have you ever met a Tinker who didn't prefer to assume their tech was perfect, often ignoring other possible explanations?" Then she glanced at Menagerie, and added, "No offense intended to those present."
Menagerie laughed here. "It's like you met me in the first couple years of my career!"
Peg had like zero experience with Tinkers. There was the one gang that had been using single-shot laser guns and whatnot recently, but she didn't even know their Tinker's name. She was a little surprised when everybody basically agreed with this presentation; Jason didn't say anything, but gave this tired sigh and nodded a little, like he'd run into that several times already, Poltergeist barked a laugh and told a story about a Tinker she'd known who'd refused to admit it was her gear being faulty once in an op, Foundation murmured speculatively about an indie Tinker she semi-knew...
... Makeshift commented, "I know an exception." After a pause, Makeshift added, "She was very hard on herself in general, though." Which, from a cape of Makeshift's long and varied career, was kind of a polite way of saying 'every other Tinker I knew was as you say, yes'. Saying it without saying it, if you will. Makeshift could be indirect like that. (Peg had been impressed by it as a clever way to avoid being rude without straight-up lying, back when she'd first noticed it)
Fiadh commented, "So... I have doubts." Then she looked a bit green. "Not so much about Bonesaw."
There was collective silent agreement.
Then Fiadh checked the time. "I imagine you all have other things scheduled today-" Ah. Right. Peg was supposed to have another visit with Image today about her rebranding. "-as I certainly do, so see you all tomorrow."
... great. Off to Image for Peg.
Super.
