It was just past midnight, and I was pointing fingers at a tree.
For a while now, it had been lightly snowing — but not enough to gather. The bits of it that landed on the rubber tiles of the playground quickly melted away; and there besides, there wasn't any movement in my field of vision.
Before the tips of my fingers, though, I could feel the heat coming off the sphere of mana I'd gathered — invisibly swirling in place.
Zenjou's trick with the finger gun hadn't looked incredibly difficult, but attempting to pull it off on my own wasn't working out. Nothing salient within the reach of my Reinforcement faintly resembled a Blaster power, and I wasn't certain what I was doing wrong.
"Bang," I said, allowing the energy to dissipate as I bumped my hand upwards in a pretend recoil.
Verification was necessary — not of the abilities Zenjou explicitly intended for me to pick up, but of the things that should logically follow, assuming that her explanations weren't full of shit. 'Gandr' had been sort of a long shot, given that I didn't comprehend the underlying principles; but certainly, there had to be uses for the stuff I'd been taught that I could independently derive away from Zenjou's influence.
If fantasy were real; if the supernatural indeed existed — I should be smart enough to prove it to myself.
From the picnic table at the side of the playground, I retrieved the plastic bag that held my hoodie — rehydrating myself from the bottle of water within. Recapping my drink, I dropped it back inside, and made to depart.
The park wasn't my final destination for the evening. I was headed to Durham Point in the Boat Graveyard, some eleven miles northeast from our neighborhood. With or without active Reinforcement, the total distance there and back was just a little short of a marathon; but though I was in fact looking to burn off the extra calories I'd consumed the past two days, my objective tonight wasn't simply to run.
This was a trial — a proof of concept.
With Zenjou occupying the majority of my daytime hours, the month away from school I'd gotten Dad to agree to turned out not to provide me enough time to properly prepare for my cape debut.
Fortunately, going to bed with active Circuits seemed to drastically cut down the amount of sleep my circadian rhythm demanded in a given day. This bought me a couple more hours of wakefulness to take advantage of — precisely at the time of the night that capes were most commonly active.
Waiting for Dad to fall asleep was a bit of a chore; but being as I'd eventually have to get into the habit of doing so, I resigned myself and hunkered down. Lying in bed fully dressed, I counted the minutes until I was fairly certain he'd zonked out for the night.
As usual, he was in his bed at ten thirty sharp. A little more than fifteen minutes later, I put on my shoes; pulled open the street-facing window in my bedroom and climbed out, using the narrow ledge atop the brick façade of the first floor as a temporary foothold. Shutting the bottom sash, I turned and actively engaged my Reinforcement — silently dropping into our front yard and taking off at a sprint.
Over the years, experts had reached a general consensus that parahuman powers came with a sort of 'instruction manual' — an instinct for their wielding, and an apprehension of their basic applications. Reinforcement wasn't quite so convenient.
Though it did come with its own set of instincts, accurately estimating its performance ahead of actually using it was just about impossible. Consequently, jumping down from the second floor, I hadn't known that I wouldn't injure myself.
But, that was the whole point of this exercise. I wouldn't know if I didn't try.
I needed to establish limits; to get a grip of my exact capabilities in practice. It didn't matter that I might be injured in the process, or that I was potentially exposing myself to harm. This was Brockton Bay — cape capital of the Eastern Seaboard; the staging ground of all the organized crime in New England. Grievous injury was normal — practically a fixture of everyday life. I ran the same sort of risks every time I set foot in Winslow.
There wouldn't be any moving past it if I shied away from the possibility of self-mutilation.
Rather, there wouldn't be any moving at all. I'd be mired in the same dead end that I'd been cornered into for the past few years. I'd lost my mother and father. I'd lost my best friend. My chances of being accepted into a decent university — a well-paying job — were by this point practically nonexistent.
Looking at it another way, there was nothing to hold me back. 'Taylor Hebert' was damaged beyond repair, and one way or another, I'd have to reinvent myself. If my powers were the sole advantage I could levy, I was obligated to master them at any cost. A tool of uncertain utility was no tool at all.
"It's really that simple," I said to myself — noticing the gangbangers at the periphery of my range, and turning down a darkened alley to avoid them.
In an urban environment after dark, a traveling swarm of insects was harder to spot than you might imagine. Still, to avoid undue attention, I'd gone the route of mapping my surroundings mostly from the senses of the insects that entered into range. If the winter were any colder, I'd presumably have a harder time of it; but despite it being early February, a significant insect population was thankfully active.
The ones that randomly connected to me weren't how I'd known about the gangbangers, though. As I'd mentioned to Zenjou, outside of a tactile perception, the senses of insects were unreliable; difficult to interpret, unless I was present in person to acquire context. This was the reason I'd felt it necessary to put together a costume in the first place.
The Reinforcement of insects opened up a whole new world of possibilities.
To be accurate, even when Reinforced, a single insect was nothing impressive. On average, capabilities as an offensive agent weren't much improved, and about the only enhancement notable enough to be mentioned was the consistency at which my power could grasp the non-tactile senses; the fidelity of the sensory data conveyed. Fully enhanced — as far as I could manage at my current level of skill — the hearing of a common housefly was pretty decent; but the compound structure of its eyes guaranteed a clear visual range of a couple of meters at most. Nothing to write home about.
Clarity, however, was cumulative. If a single fly couldn't provide a visual grasp of an ongoing crime, how about ten? Or a hundred? Setting aside monsters the size of Zenjou's blood worms, it was trivial to encompass a normal insect with motes of mana — sustaining it like an extension of myself until it completely exhausted its sugars.
Ergo, the insects that entered into range of my body only provided 'most' of my mental mapping of the urban terrain. A sparse, barely-discernible swarm supplemented that with hearing and passable vision — following along as I traversed the streets and alleys. Maybe because I was going so fast, the rate of turnover was higher than expected, and I kept having to replenish the numbers lost from the supply of bugs I'd been gathering beneath my clothes. Nevertheless, it was on their account that I was able to distinguish between obvious members of the ABB and the pedestrians I wouldn't have an issue running past.
If I could be caught on camera or otherwise observed, though, I slowed the hell down. The minor Mover rating afforded to me by Reinforcement was nothing I wanted to advertise outside a proper costume. No sense in getting myself gang-pressed a second time — potentially by somebody with a personality worse than Zenjou's, and none of her redeeming bits.
More constructively, what sort of powers did I actually want to advertise?
My situation with Zenjou was an object lesson in just how critical knowledge of an opponent's capabilities were in any kind of hostile interaction. Seen in a certain light, the PHO Parahumans Wiki was far more dangerous than it had any right to be — irrelevant that it was driven by the collective enthusiasm of tens of thousands of cape groupies. This was probably the reason the profiles on the Wards and the Protectorate tended to be edit-protected.
Insect Reinforcement made it so that I could call in ongoing crimes without exposing myself to danger — making viable Zenjou's suggestion that I don't assume an explicit cape identity. For all that Zenjou's style of instruction was superficially hands-off and sink-or-swim, in my mind, there wasn't a doubt that her intention in having me learn to Reinforce the blood worms was to arrange that I'd 'discover on my own' the path she'd previously outlined.
Given that she hadn't put up much of a complaint toward my plans overall, I wasn't certain what her hang-up was against my assuming a cape identity. Was it because she valued me as a maidservant or something? A dress-up doll, seeing as she'd again complained about my wardrobe?
Regardless, I wouldn't be going along with that. I'd meant what I said about the authorities in Brockton Bay being overworked and underpaid. Somebody had to pick up the slack, if the Protectorate wasn't having enough of an impact.
That said, from the standpoint of information warfare, 'simply reporting crimes' was a bad idea in the long run. A noticeable uptick in the number of crimes reported would definitely be noticed by interested parties, even if I were to somehow disguise my voice. Pretty soon, they'd take it as the work of a Thinker — and in general, cape gangs tended to prioritize Thinkers for recruitment or elimination.
What with Nilbog being a thing, being known as an insect Master wasn't much better — especially if it came out that my swarm could be used for spying. Irrelevant of whether I established myself as an independent hero, this was the sort of thing that would get me on the Protectorate's bad side pretty quickly. Worse yet, anyone familiar enough with my powers would have countermeasures ready almost instantaneously.
It made a lot of sense to keep the insect control and the potential for spying on the down-low — strictly for use in reconnaissance, or to acquire a situational awareness in combat. Problem was, that left me in a bit of a bind regarding the powers I could display. As things stood, I wasn't confident that Reinforcement alone would get me by if I were forced into a fight with somebody armed with a handgun.
Ideally, I'd manage to make a bit of headway with Gandr, and debut as a minor Brute with a Blaster power for nonlethal takedowns. Capes like that were a dime a dozen — not particularly threatening or of interest to the gangs. There'd still be attempts at blackmail or gang-pressing, presumably, but not at the priority a Thinker would attract.
"If only things could go so smoothly," I muttered — chuckling humorlessly as I stopped at a pedestrian crossing on Lord Street.
Market was just up ahead, a couple of blocks away from Chinatown and the shopping arcade at Little Tokyo — the heart of the territory held by the ABB. Surprisingly, there weren't any hoodlums in my path, though I spotted a couple on the side-streets. Along the grime-covered sidewalks of Lord Street itself, my only company were the hobos huddled up against the graffitied storefronts; and the scores of working girls, loitering about despite the cold in various states of undress.
Counter to the stereotype, the majority were conventionally attractive — slender, curvaceous; occasionally pierced or tattooed in ways that seemed to excessively emphasize their sexuality. If they cleaned themselves up, it was hard to imagine that they couldn't find better-paying employment in a normal job somewhere — which made me wonder if they weren't being forced or blackmailed; maybe victims of human trafficking. By appearances alone, some of them had to be underage.
Women shouldn't have to live like this — selling their bodies to men who would treat them literally like pieces of meat.
I averted my gaze as I jogged past. As much as it galled me, beyond investigating over the weekend to see if they weren't acting under duress, there wasn't much I could do for them at present. If it happened that poverty alone had put them on the streets, nothing I could do would matter.
In a perfect world, the girls here wouldn't have to debase their bodies just to get by. The economy would be in a better place, and they'd have lives that were going somewhere; dreams that could be realized —
— a way out of the dead end that was Brockton Bay.
I ran — past Market; past the shopping arcade; crossing beyond the inhabited part of the Docks. Here on out, there were only derelict buildings — boarded up; burned down; reduced to rubble. In Dad's words, this was 'the shame of the Dockworkers Association' — the Boat Graveyard. Rusted husks of ships lined the shore.
A lot of people seemed to think that Brockton Bay was the way it was because Leviathan had ruined international trade. Truth was, the shipping industry was perfectly fine — outside the state of New Hampshire. It was merely the case that New England wasn't big enough for two major ports, and Brockton Bay was less than sixty miles from Boston Harbor.
Back in the 80's, when the textile factories in Manchester moved overseas, the big companies decided it'd be cheaper to centralize all their operations to Massachusetts. With its comparatively older infrastructure, the port at Lord's Bay was considered redundant; and the last nail in the coffin was hammered in when the Stevedores Union rioted against the resulting layoffs — torching the entirety of the Docks North.
The Boat Graveyard was a memorial to a dying city — a reminder that Brockton Bay was damaged goods.
Tonight, it served my ends that nobody wanted to be here.
The docks at Durham Point were famously the site of the SS Laleham — a cargo ship the size of a skyscraper, sunk within the harbor by the members of the Stevedores Union. I hadn't any particular interest in the wreckage, though.
Running along the side of the wharf, I slowed down as I approached the end — panting lightly as I stared across the water at the Dover shoreline.
"Eleven or so miles should be far enough," I said, reaching to the collar of my T-shirt.
From beneath, I pulled out the silver pendant I'd been given today — set with the ruby I'd been playing around with at the dance school. 'For emergencies only,' Zenjou had lent it to me as a quick source of mana that I could access in the unlikely event that Reinforcement somehow drained me dry. Probably, she'd intended it as a tracking device.
Touching the surface of the jewel, I extended a tendril of energy within. Not to charge it, as permanently storing mana without the body apparently required something special that Zenjou couldn't readily teach me. Rather, I just wanted to conduct an experiment.
In the kaleidoscopic depths, a familiar presence brushed against my mana — etching into visible form.
"Salamander," I said, addressing the tiny faerie.
Within the confines of the ruby, she glanced about the harbor in interest — quickly fixating upon the hull of the Laleham.
Eleven miles away from Zenjou, I wanted to think that I was without the range of her powers — that I wasn't being Mastered. Of course, there was no way to confirm, but I wanted desperately to believe. I wanted to know for certain that Salamander was as alive as she seemed.
I needed for Fantasy to objectively exist, because the alternative was far too cruel.
"Tell me," I said to the ruby. "Are you real?"
