Contains body horror, body joy, and Nazi shit
The negotiations go so poorly that the bomb going off is an
improvement.
Lisa sees it first. Not because she's using her power, focused as she is on the Director and Dragon. And even if she did, what would she see? The officer doesn't know what's been slipped into his pack, and Lisa doesn't know enough about his gear to notice any difference in weight distribution or volume. No, it's because of the whispers, or the words, as four letters slam themselves into her vision, block text in the air screaming silently in her face and amplifying her own instinctive scream:
"
BOMB!"
When the Thinker screams and throws herself under a table, you don't tend to second guess her.
Unfortunately for everyone, hitting the deck does them no good. The blast that goes off a full second later isn't a wave of pressure but a weaponization of space itself, an explosion of twisting reality that washes out at something like the speed of light. It takes less than a millisecond for the device to do its infernal work and tear itself apart.
The officer that unknowingly carried the bomb is reduced to twisting pink strands the consistency of taffy, a fine red mist exploding around him as the pressures involved wring his remains dry before they hit the ground.
The entire room warps and twists, the air shaking in subtle ways. But the effect is focused on people. Bones warp and break, muscles fray, nerves snap. The officer nearest him convulses and collapses, her body pulling in a hundred directions that cause a hundred fractures and then a hundred more for good measure. Another seems to explode
inside his armor, flesh flowing out through every crack and joint in a hazy, undefined mass, choking and burbling the only sounds audible from within.
The Director bites straight through her teeth as her body comes apart under the stress, organs stretched to the breaking point and bruising covering her body as blood vessels burst. Above her, the Dragonsuit trying to shield her twists and warps, affected by the bomb through some odd combination of interactions - the mechanical beast sparking and grinding, its insides dragged out, silicon and metal anatomy that bleeds lubricant and fuel.
Across the negotiating table, Carol is a rock, a sphere of invincible light at the speed of thought. But she can still feel the pull of the bomb as it twists the world out from under her, trying to tear those wounds apart that had been so painstakingly shut.
Lisa's mouth tears open, her smile turned slit as blood spills from her jaws. Her eyes threaten to burst out of their sockets, out of her convulsing body, and the words spill out too, strangled croaks that might be screams, the whispers raging around her in an avalanche of speech that even the rest of us can hear, crashing down around her and battering the already ruined terrain.
The wave of twisting space washes over Amy and mangles her bodies beyond recognition. She screams in torture for a second, and then screams a little more before realizing that nothing hurts, even if she's several times the women she was a second ago.
Rachel tries to shield her dogs, despite their panic - to no avail. The blast goes straight through her, after all. The smallest one at least dies instantly from a snapped neck. The rest retch and stumble, their organs twisted like the Director's, yowls of pain muffled by warped lungs.
Neptune barely seems to notice, the water wrapped around her girlfriends and trying to shield them - again, to little effect. Venus screams a brilliant cry, her body twisted at angles too sharp even for her. Jupiter's hands writhe, misshapen and swollen, a million injuries that could only happen to her spread across her countless limbs.
Even Riley grunts as her malleable form warps and twists, bent out of her chosen shape, forcing her to spend precious seconds pulling herself back together.
In some ways, the worst victim is the building itself. The horrible sound of splintering wood echoes, branches screaming as their forms twist. Clay stretches, strains, and snaps. The radio lets out a final electronic wail as it overloads, ears ringing with the sound of the devil herself burning with her children, before it finally falls silent.
Silence, then eruption. Eden is unused to being the literal target of a bombing, so we can forgive the girls of Group West for fucking screaming their heads off (or in Neptune's case mostly cursing and yelling insults at the sky), even as Riley tries to get them on track. Carol is instantly looking for more attackers, grabbing at her phone to make a call, any call. Emily can't speak, and every movement is agony, but she still reaches for her radio to make her own calls, input her own codes. Rachel stares at the twisted form of Lisa, then at her burbling, choking dogs, and ends up grabbing one in each hand, shoving them at the mass of Amy.
"Heal!" she demands, and much to her own surprise, Amy finds that she doesn't disagree with the notion. But there are so many people to heal. Who needs to be treated now, while they still have a chance, and who's destined for the grave no matter how hard she tries? She's familiar with the concept of triage.
She fucking hates it too, and decides then and there that just this once she's going to save everyone.
"Shut up! I'll fucking heal them, okay?!" Amy yells back in triplicate, surprising both Rachel and herself with the ferocity of her voice as she spills across the shattered plaza, surrounding the fallen in desperate embraces as she pours herself and her power - no, they're one and the same now. She pours herself into the dogs. Into Lisa. Into Jupiter, Venus. Rachel. The PRT officers, at the other end of the room. The Director. Even Carol, despite her mother's protests that she's
fine. Which she mostly is, but Amy's not going to have her emotional catharsis taken away from her on the same fucking day she reconciles, so no one can stop her from worrying a little too much.
Neptune waves her off. "I'll be fine, just, HRK, let me - " she coughs up what can only be described as a hairball of twisted space, and Amy rolls sixteen eyes and moves on. Riley, for her part, is already pulling and setting Venus's wings back into place with three hands and injecting Satan-knows-what-kind-of healing clay into Jupiter with seven more.
Even with the power of the devil, Amy can't quite save everyone. Miracles can only go so far. But she saves everyone who isn't already dead, and that alone is a miracle and a half.
And not a moment too soon - it's just as the Director wrenches herself from Amy's healing grasp and pulls up her radio for real this time that a star rockets into view and a twisting helix of force and light slams into the roof of the once-mall, sending a huge mass of clay and concrete down into the floor slab, a few pieces nearly splattering the newly healed into so much paste before being caught by Jupiter's still-twitching hands.
"FUCK OFF!" someone screams. Amy blinks, realizes that it's her, and decides that she's better off making every insulting gesture she can think of. Uses several dozen hands.
All she gets for her trouble is Purity firing another beam, and this one is accompanied by the sound of gunfire and a roaring mob, the director's radio crackling while Jupiter shoves blocks and pillars and brick and anything she can think of to try and support the crumbling Eden, weaving her hands past a cascade of terrified dogs as they flee the rooftop garden and race towards their mistress, who struggles to calm them all down.
"The remaining capes of the Empire are all here," Emily says, her voice ringing over the din with an energy born of Amy's 'enthusiastic' healing. "And probably every fascist they could find on short notice."
"YOU MAY DEFILE OUR CHILDREN, BUT YOU WILL NEVER DEFILE OUR SPIRIT! WE WILL CLEANSE THE PREDATORS AND THOSE WHO HOST THEM FROM OUR CITY!"
"SHUT
UP!"
Amy has enough lungs to match a megaphone-enhanced Purity. Neptune gives her a thumbs up, which becomes a double thumbs up when Amy starts throwing bricks and rocks.
Lisa pulls herself to her feet, patting Amy on a shoulder, as her eyes look towards the sky, and damn the blinding radiance of the white supremacist nightlight. "No, this isn't just the Empire," she hisses. "Taking a Bakuda bomb from PRT storage. Managing to slip it into your personal escort. Coil's behind this. I'm sure he'll swoop in somehow after we're all conveniently dead to take care of the fascists and 'restore order'."
"I don't intend on dying today," the Director growls, before barking a series of orders into her radio, too fast and full of jargon to follow. But we catch the words 'use of force authorization' more than once between deployment orders and demands for support from the national Protectorate.
Even Rachel gets the gist, and she can't help but grin. At least in this exhilarating, beautiful and horrible moment, everyone is working together, and the might of the American state is for once going into crushing people who
need to be crushed.
But courts and cops tomorrow won't save us today if the distant screaming mob breaks through. Or if Purity manages to bring down the roof on us. Venus flits into the air, her light shielding our figures from the airborne assault, and light smashes into the glowing wings to little effect. But when Purity brushes off the counter-attack in much the same way, Lisa shakes her head.
"Purity's made of light when her power is active, or close enough to it. The light at the end of the tunnel?" She cocks her head at the whisper, before dismissing it. "Venus! Come down here! You can't hurt her!"
"But I really want to hurt her!" the wings whine.
"At least let someone else have a clear shot, then!"
This turns out to be the right call, as an officer steps up from behind Emily, her helmet shielding her from the worst of the light as she raises her handgun and unloads a magazine (or is it a clip?) towards the shining star, which jitters and jerks, unloading a wave of force a second later and sending them all scrambling for cover again - but something made of metal and plastic falls from her form.
"Hey! You got her stupid megaphone!" Amy cheers (once her ears stop bleeding), and grabs the woman's hand for a highfive, too quickly for her to respond with anything beyond vague bemusement.
"Less fooling around! Night and Fog just killed four of my best people," Emily snaps, looking up from her crackling radio.
"Night's the one who turns into a monster when she isn't being looked at, right?" Venus huffs. "Just point me where to go, and I'll look at her
so hard."
"Mom, let me do it. Amy's got healing covered, and you should be here if everyone needs to fly out," Riley counters, fiddling with a radio plugged into her ears like a stethoscope. "Besides, uhm… they sound kinda like me. Or what I think I sounded like. I want to try and help them, like you helped me."
It's touching, for a moment, before another rain of force, albeit made unsteady by counter-fire, sends everyone diving for fresh cover. Emily curses, and glares at the currently redheaded Tinker girl.
"Go, then. I'll let you do whatever you want with the villains if you can keep my men alive."
She nods ever so slightly, all humor gone from her face.
"You know, you're really aiming high for your first date!" Neptune teases, and then Riley throws an empty syringe at her and leaps up through the crumbling ceiling, pushing herself off of a stray hand and quickly vanishing over the side of the roof.
"Brandish."
"Ma'am."
"Support the officers by the main entrance. Keep back the mob."
"Yes, ma'am!"
"I'll go too!" Neptune cheers. "I've always wanted to scream at a hate mob!"
The ocean washes towards the entrance before Emily can say anything to stop her, and honestly she doesn't even try. Even with her momentarily taking charge of us kids, she seems to recognize that Neptune is one girl she can't hope to control. Carol follows in her wake, weary but determined.
Emily turns to Rachel, Amy and Lisa, the only parahumans not already scrambling. Rachel meets her eyes, and a chorus of every empowered dog growls gently behind her. None of us except
maybe Lisa can see the bone-deep exhaustion that growing so many dogs so fast draws out of her, despite Amy's best efforts to keep Rachel topped up (complicated by the fact that she's also scrambling to keep the dogs that
aren't being empowered under control in their terror).
Once again, hostile action saves us, in the form of a green ghost hacking his way through the wall, then another, then another.
"Crusader!" Lisa shouts, despite wondering why the ghostly figures are stabbing and tearing their way through walls they should just be passing through - ah, of course. The roots. They don't pass through
living things, after all.
Jupiter's hands are occupied trying to hold up and repair their cover, and she's obviously strained. Venus just flitted off into the air, trying to draw attention and fire away from her faltering girlfriend. But there's still one very clear set of massive,
living attack beasts ready to go…
The Director reaches the same conclusion, and gestures towards the encroaching wave of hazy forms. "Bitch," she says, managing the uncouth cape name without a stumble. "Can your dogs take them out?"
"No fucking shit they can. Don't let anyone hurt the rest of my dogs, or my Lisa," Rachel growls, shoving the latter into Amy and ignoring both of their S-class blushes as she turns back to Crusader's approaching minions, stalking forward and whipping her head from side to side. Her finger sweeps from ghost to ghost, an angry, angry grin plastering itself onto her face.
"KILL!"
Howls echo throughout the night, as the pack descends on the ghosts. It takes a bit for them to get used to how the ghosts pass through walls, but fortunately they don't pass through the ground, at least not too far. And biting still works.
With the dogs holding off Crusader, and Venus holding off Purity, Jupiter has a second to rest, but only a second, before she starts frantically kneading and melding clay back into place, a hackjob to repair the tree of life, to restore its calming aura and its fruit of peace. Amy helps the clay flow, and throws in a few chunks of extra flesh, but neither of them can do anything for the radios, though Amy can at least patch up the delicate organs and tissues that Riley designed.
Emily pulls Lisa to her side, and promises that if Lisa doesn't reveal any state secrets, she won't be shot for knowing state secrets. If Lisa
finds any state secrets, well, she doesn't say them, and the Thinker takes the offer for what it is, throwing together words and string as she listens to Emily's radio, occasionally adding her insights as to who might be a spy and who can be trusted.
Swimming through the air and fighting through Purity's blasts while occasionally throwing out her own, Venus can see everything. The mob struggling to break through waves of containment foam and batons (and one invincible sphere of light) there, while just a block over, fascists with pistols trade live rounds with PRT officers. Neptune is in both places, pushing back the crowd with waves of thick liquid, draining the exhaustion from faltering paracops and pushing them back onto their feet where she can, and of course cackling and bantering the whole way, loud enough to be heard even from up here.
(It's nice to have something to drown out Purity's increasingly unhinged rantings. Otherwise she might have to
listen. Purity accidentally gendering her correctly and then furiously trying to 'correct' herself was funny once, but after about seven times or so, it's getting pretty old.)
There's Miss Militia, arriving on the scene only to trade shots with an Empire cape she doesn't recognize - some lady in a cowboy hat - with Armsmaster's distinctive blue bike not far behind. And there's Riley, hand to hand with Night and Fog, surrounded by winged eyes matching the ones growing all over the Tinker's body, and scattered urns leaking thin blue mist - the former obviously to counter Night, while the latter must be somehow neutralizing Fog. Riley seems to be holding her own against the duo, but she isn't able to get the upper hand - one of them throws a flashbang or smoke grenade whenever they're in danger, giving Night a window to transform and tear into Riley, forcing her to back off and regenerate.
It looks like this is going to be a long, exhausting siege.
Then Venus spots something. A form concealed by baggy clothes, walking towards one of the few parts of the PRT perimeter not actively being encircled. They pull their hood off. A white boy with a chubby face and neat blonde hair, raising his hands as guns lift to point at his feet. Still swirling around Purity's attacks, Venus nonetheless strains to see and hear the odd encounter.
Stop right there! This is a restricted area!
I know, sir. But I need to speak with Purity. Sir.
Speak with - who the hell are you?
I'm her stepson, sir. Theo Anders. I believe that I can talk her down, sir.
… what the hell. You got an ID, kid?
Yes sir.
Show it to Corporal Shields, here.
Venus flutters closer, pulling on her portable radio and listening close to the crystal diode. She can just about make out the boy's soul in the waveform, and he seems pretty genuine, more than most anyone around her -
A helix of force smashes into her from behind, tearing through wings and eyes with contemptuous ease in stark contrast to how she had so easily absorbed Purity's light before. Venus shrieks in pain, thrown downwards as her body bleeds and sizzles - sent into a tailspin and spiraling to Earth like Lucifer falling from heaven.
She crashes directly on top of the PRT's blockade, sprawling across an armored car with an undignified squawk.
Purity hovers in the air, gathering force to finish the job even as guns train themselves skyward - and then, she catches the eyes of one Theo Anders, stepping between her and her victims.
If she has any doubt as to the boy standing in her way, it disappears when he shouts upwards to her, a wavering but grimly determined voice.
"Kayden!"
The monster that happens to be a human being becomes a human being that happens to be a monster in real time. She drops, not quite to street level but close enough that he can look up at her without straining his neck. The light this close is blinding, but he stares at her anyways.
"Theo," she murmurs, so soft that Venus can barely hear it.
"Kayden. Stop. Please," he insists. His eyes squeeze shut. He looks utterly terrified.
"You know that I can't stop. That I'm doing this for Aster."
"Stop, or… or y-you'll never see her again."
Purity falls to the street like a puppet with her strings cut. The light goes out, revealing a face - painfully ordinary above the white bodysuit. She's not even blonde.
"What? I don't… w-what? She…. y-you…" She stammers for a moment, before regaining her composure, and a hint of her killing intent. "You're lying! You couldn't, you
wouldn't…"
"I did it as… as soon as you left. I had to." His face creases, brows furrowed, and then his voice raises. Theo builds up energy, glaring right at her with all of his might, however meager and human. "I should have done it sooner, Kayden!"
"Theo! Theo?! What on earth are you saying, Theo? This is a lie, this is a trick, this has to be…"
"Kayden." He closes his eyes again, breathes in hard. "You said you were going to be a hero. For a while, I at least thought you were trying. Then - when our identities were leaked. How many people did you kill just to keep Aster?"
His eyes open.
"They were taking her away, yes. Away from Kaiser, from capes, from violence. Away from monsters like
you. And don't tell me she wouldn't have been safe. She's not safe
here, because
you kept her here."
Purity just stares, tears clouding her eyes. Theo keeps talking, his own face going through a million warring emotions.
The troopers surround them, but don't shoot. It's quite polite of them.
"If you really cared about her, maybe you'd be willing to become a better person for her, Kayden. But you haven't. You've gotten
worse! Running right back to Kaiser. Working with the Empire. And now this ridiculous war of yours. This is who you want her mother to be? This is how you want her to grow up? Do you really care about her at all, Kayden?"
"You don't believe that," Purity insists. One wonders who she's trying to convince.
"I do. You've had so many chances to change, and you've taken none of them. So… surrender, please. You and Aster are the only family I have left. Surrender and… and I'll try to help you, Kayden, for whatever that's worth."
Purity stares into the silence, her lips working silently. Theo stares back, resignation and sadness on his face, but still managing to keep eye contact with her.
"...okay," she finally breathes out, a tiny, defeated voice.
Theo gingerly approaches her, and offers her his hand. She takes it, and instantly bursts out sobbing.
The officers surround them.
Venus watches the family drama from the side of the car that had been her crash point. A trooper - not a full combat medic, but Venus insists she doesn't need one - is listening if not watching, his gaze more focused on delicately wrapping bleeding wings and eyes with gauze, glowing clots welling up behind the fabric.
"He seems like a good kid," he murmurs.
She nods. The officer doesn't realize half of what those two words mean to her, but Venus appreciates the gesture for what it is.
And you know what? Theo does seem like a good kid, for better and for worse. Not much like any of the good kids she's known, but then, none of the good kids she's known have been the heirs to a fascist street gang. She would have noticed.
With its figurehead gone, the mob loses steam. A gaggle of green ghosts try to take Purity back, but Venus manages to stare them into submission; Crusader flees into the city moments later. Neptune casually knocks huge swathes of the crowd off their feet with roaring waves, leaving them easy pickings for the PRT officers; others peel away in small groups or as individuals. Venus flutters back into the air, and sees Riley with Night and Fog… having tea? It's an absurd sight, made terrifying by the sheer number of guns pointed at the three of them, and the fact that Night has a flashbang in her palm, Fog is barely solid enough to hold a teacup, and Riley currently has enough spikes on her to look more porcupine than girl. But somehow, whatever she's doing works well enough that none of the guns go off.
Armsmaster and Miss Militia finally close in on the cowboy hat lady, only for said lady to point her revolver at her own head, scream "You'll never take me alive!" and fire before anyone can stop her. But instead of blowing her brains out, she simply disappears, with the gun itself clattering to the ground in her wake. A moment later, Venus spots a figure in a familiar cowboy hat, falling out of the sky a good few miles away.
How absolutely bizarre.
We meet up again, this time in one of Eden's side rooms colonized by the PRT and Emily's orders into a temporary command center. It's much less roomy than the main plaza, but now that we're not all about to start throwing powers at each other, it does just fine. Besides, it has intact chairs and tables.
Not that it's any less chaotic when Venus returns there. Lisa is in the center of the room, scrawling on anything she can get her hands on, drawing a conspiracy board of glass and wire with the help of a few stray hands. Who can be trusted, and who's under the influence of the serpent? The whispers roll over her ears and spill across her eyes, letters dancing in her vision. If she lets herself go, she might become one of them, a specter of screaming secrets. Secrets to hurt and secrets to kill.
Amy has healed everyone she can heal, and doesn't feel like turning them into monsters of meat and mayhem, or creating monsters of meat and mayhem. Not even if they'd asked, which they don't. But after that attack? She's worked up a great desire to hit someone. To
fight. Throwing insults and rocks at Purity just wasn't enough, especially when she couldn't
hit her with any of them.
Victoria takes down criminals all the time and
she seems to have her shit together.
Amy wants some of that. This Coil guy tried to kill the damn PRT director, that means he's fair game, right? She's familiar with the unwritten rules and how much they're worth, of course, and right now it seems like they're worth very very little, for better and for worse. Someone tried to kill her, her family, the strange devils that had turned her life upside down, even the Undersiders of all people. Tattletale - Lisa - can probably find that someone, point Amy like a gun, let her angry desire take care of the rest. And for once, she doesn't want to hold back. To focus her anger, maybe, to deliver it precisely. But to stop it? Absolutely not.
So Amy pulls on her fuzzy awareness of her own bodies, sculpts herself for war. She'd probably ask Riley for advice, but miss golem bio-Tinker is still occupied with her little pet project Nazis, forcibly talking them through a tea party which she refuses to allow to end. If
that monster can rehabilitate
those monsters, more power to her, but Amy's not touching that with a fifteen-foot pole. Instead she experiments on her own. The human clay of the renovated mall yields to her touch, and she twists it alongside her own skin and muscle and fat, trying different combinations of development pathways, heat and pressure and epigenetic impulses.
Venus, for her part, ends up drawn into a conversation across the room. Armsmaster - Colin, though we don't know that - stares at a pile of broken robot parts, and occasionally glances at the bothersome Neptune next to him playing with a hairball of broken space. The Tinker was definitely charismatic before, but right now he seems to emit a baseline level of sullenness. Which is understandable, given what happened during the battle with Leviathan and the consequences he received, though only the PRT and maybe the Undersiders know the details. Right now, though, a mix of worry and fascination has swept him up and out of his funk.
"-you're sure the bomb didn't have a conventional component that did this?"
"Clear as crystal, halberd guy!"
"I felt the transmission," Venus offers, flitting over as she stares at Armsmaster's complex armor and the remains of Dragon's mecha all in one wingbeat. "The… signal of the bomb, if you could call it that. It was tuned for living things, or the space they were in. It wasn't… it wasn't tuned for
meat, I don't think. This machine wasn't meat, but it was definitely alive, you know? Which… would mean that we are looking at a corpse."
He frowns at the thought. Colin's not sure how much of her analysis he believes - he's already gotten a sense of how much the devils talk in metaphor and abstraction - but the implications are still troubling.
The central display of the control center, however, has to be Emily herself, arguing animatedly with Rachel. Well, Rachel is certainly animated, as is Jupiter, representing the devils in this. Miss Militia - Hannah, though again we don't know that - is there as well, her weapon a knife by her side, her eyes alert above the flag-patterned scarf, but she says little, not wanting to contradict her boss. Emily, by contrast, doesn't seem to quite fit into her newly healed body, her movements and face a bit too stiff for a frame that's clearly built for physical exertion.
"He hurt my team. He dies," Rachel growls, staring the Director dead in the eye. "Don't make it more complicated than it has to be."
Director Piggot's answering glare betrays little. "You need supervision. You need rules of engagement. You need a
plan. You want to, what, take on a powerful Thinker in his own base, with access to a solid team of parahumans - suspected to be related to forty disappearances in New York, let's not forget that - along with dozens of trained mercenaries with Tinkertech armaments and an unknown number of independents?"
Lisa takes that moment to barge into the frame. "Don't forget Dinah Alcott! Wait, did I forget to tell you about Dinah Alcott? Kidnapped parahuman, sees future as percentages, drugged and coerced to use her power for Coil?" Her grin slips off her face for a moment as she glances to the side, listening to the whispers about a young eye, a prize - a prize put there by who? - and the thought starts to pound in her head -
"Lisa!" Rachel snaps, and it sounds almost like she's about to say 'Heel!', but Lisa snaps back to her, grins again (a bit more shakily) and carries on before Rachel can say anything too mortifying.
"So! So the longer we wait, the more likely it is that he'll see us coming. He might not even know his attack failed yet, for all we know. Unless any of you can block precognition?"
Armsmaster is sure he could figure something out, given time. Venus, in particular, is extra sure she could figure something out.
But they don't get a word in. Jupiter speaks up, crushing bricks into dust as her hands writhe with fury at the thought.
"We've never needed a plan before. Emotions and intimacy, they got us through Jack freakin' Slash, didn't they?"
"I prefer helping people myself, but we're pretty good at murder too when there's a need for it," Venus adds.
A lot of people stare.
Venus stares back, her eyes lifting in a brightening smile, daring anyone to call her out. Neptune whistles approvingly.
The Director resists the urge to palm her face, but barely.
"You're not lying to me. You're lying to
yourselves, which is worse."
"We've got plenty of information and strong powers," Tattletale insists. "You have a leaky organization, an anti-parahuman complex, and way too much red tape to do this at the speed it needs in order to catch Coil off guard."
Emily smiles at that, catching Lisa off guard. "That is where you're wrong. I can send Miss Militia or Armsmaster there at any time. All I need to wait on is an actual plan. Which, I would note, you have still not offered."
There's no room to speak the exact plan on screen anyways - that would doom it to failure. But Lisa finally relents enough to actually do the planning. Coil has not so much one base as a sprawling complex of bases, bunkers disguised as canceled Endbringer shelters, tunnels connecting to various points within and between artificial caverns, safehouses branching off from Brockton's sewer system. A lot of that collapsed after Leviathan - but Lisa is pretty sure she knows where Dinah is being kept, along with the Travelers and his other key assets, centralized in a single secure location. There's a self-destruct, of course, but he won't use it if he can't escape the effects. Sure, he can try it in one timeline and discard it if he can't get out, but that ties up his power.
The point is, his base is surprisingly OSHA compliant, at least as far as means of egress are concerned. They have enough overwhelming force that they can probably take anything he throws in a straight fight - the concern is not that they can't take him, but that they can't stop him from fleeing, or from unveiling some complication.
So, they need to split up, surround the entrances. Lisa proposes pairing off, but the devils refuse any group smaller than three, on philosophical grounds. Two is a bad number for the devil, you see. It doesn't take too much convincing to go to three, though.
First, they'll pick up the rest of the Undersiders. Rachel is confident they'll assist, or she'll make them assist. Besides, they need to assure Taylor's safety. They're pretty sure that Brian, Aisha and Alex are at the hospital with Taylor right now. Neptune happens to know how to get there fast, so she'll just bring the other devils and Amy there, put up some kind of temporary protection, and take off towards the designated entrance points.
Also, Amy is involved, we forgot to mention. And cheerfully talking about how she can put Taylor into a chrysalis, a cocoon, to keep her protected until Riley or Amy have a chance to give her the attention she needs. Fitting for Skitter the bug girl, and she's
pretty sure she can make it safe from anything short of another Bakuda bomb and who has those just lying around, anyway?
Carol stares blankly at her daughter. "Are you… sure?"
"Never surer! I don't want to mess with her head anyways. She went down as a hero," Amy rumbles.
And it is absolutely a rumble, because Amy has changed herself for war. The mass of humanity has gathered, compressed on itself, bulked up. The sprawling garden of flesh is contained within a shell of hard ceramic, an immense snail - bigger than an SUV but smaller than a box truck. Rather than a slithering foot below, however, the shell has wrapped around the bottom, giving the impression of a round-keeled sailing vessel, a ship of the line of porcelain armor, with a cute little fleshy tail sticking out the back for a rudder. Gunports on the side pop open occasionally, lifted by grasping hands to reveal the squirming mass of Amy at the warform's core, little portholes pushed apart to let through tentacles. Some of the hatches are meant for people to climb inside and be healed. Two pairs near the top let out two sets of long, fleshy wings, stretched skin like a bat, painted black so as not to appear quite as gruesome. Though the wings are mostly cosmetic, as Amy floats on her own desire with the wings folded upright into dark sails for the moment. Not all of her is biology anymore, after all, and she's quickly learning to make the most of it.
A massive woman emerges from the front of the shell, a single huge Amy who'd easily stand ten feet tall if she wasn't all snailing ship below the waist. Porcelain plates whorl around her head in a massive, ornate helmet, and more of the plates roll over her flesh, overlapping scales of protection on a… shall we say, generous body. She grins beneath the bony protection, two smaller, modest arms crossed over her midsection or what passes for it while her massive main arms flex, showing off the vicious talons at the end, claws of bone and ceramic.
Victoria would love the helmet, Amy thinks, imagining herself with an immense sword, the picture of some monstrous knight. It's a surprisingly nice thought, considering the context. It makes her feel less like an unattainable paragon to desperately desire and more like a person. A friend, a family member, just someone who she can appreciate in her life. Thinking about her in the context of complaining about how 'chainmail' is a totally ahistoric and made up term - and don't get her started on 'scale mail' or 'plate mail'! - feels grounding, in a sense. Amy really needs that.
Besides, if she wants carnal pleasure, she's just found someone who definitely wants to fuck her, or at least kiss her. Sure, Rachel is a villain, but the sheer blandness with which she brought it up makes that feel almost irrelevant. Transactional, but in a good way - no attachments, no
mess.
All that said, the image guides Amy a bit, and as Carol looks her over, Amy thickens the fibers between the plates, shores up the vulnerable points with soft armor. She still doesn't make a sword - she wouldn't know how to use it! - but she does make something else knightly. Vines grow off her body and twist into ropes and cords before unraveling into fibers, winding back together into cloth and fabric. A white tabard rolls over her armor of plate and scale and shell and muscle, neatly belted in place and adorned with a familiar red cross.
She never did like it that much, did she? Amy thinks on it for a moment, then focuses, drawing out the pigments. The simple cross becomes asymmetric, with the three top points flowering outwards while the bottom point draws downwards, pulled into a long, sharp point. It could easily be a sword with an ornate crossguard and pommel, or perhaps just a more ornate cross you might find on a piece of heraldry. Besides being slightly kinder to the Geneva convention, it feels right. More martial.
Carol watches this all in silence, and then finally speaks. "That's not what I'm worried about, Amy. Healing is one thing, but going out to fight?"
The healer-turned crusader pauses, midway through unfurling flags over her shell (not unlike the ones Riley had unfurled over her spider, come to think of it).
She bites her lip, but then nods firmly.
Though she knows what she wants, she's not sure how to actually
say it for a good long moment.
"...A hot girl offered to have sex with me and I can't let her get herself killed before I can take her up on that," Amy finally manages. The nuclear blush appears for a moment, but she grins stupidly all the same. "I'll figure it out one way or another."
Rachel glares in affront, but doesn't tell Amy off. Carol laughs, awkwardly but not unkindly. A few others offer little smiles.
But back to our plan. Take care of Taylor, pick up the other three Undersiders, then converge on Coil's complex, in four groups. Rachel, Lisa, Amy. Jupiter, Venus, Neptune. Brian, Aisha, Alex. And ideally, Riley, Armsmaster, and Miss Militia.
(Incidentally, Riley has freed herself from her tea party, clearly by drugging the two Nazis somehow given they're passed out cold. This seems pretty reasonable, given that they are Nazis.
Riley's suggestion to resurrect the 'corpse' of Dragon's mech sounds much less reasonable, even though she could probably do it. The philosophical implications of such an action would be a headache unto themselves. We have enough headaches already.)
The Director can provide others as backup if needed, but none of the girls are eager for more minders.
Four groups, four directions of attack. An encirclement. But they need to be able to communicate, to respond rapidly - if Coil draws his forces together, three won't be enough to stop a breakout. PRT comms are almost certainly compromised. Venus offers a solution - not the girl's old radios, but a new set, twelve personal communication devices. Entangled, bound together by a shared origin - the bones of a saint.
What?
She gestures to the remains of Dragon.
Oh. Fair enough.
Venus extracts twelve pieces of metal and circuitry as delicately as if she really were handling the body of a saint. Armsmaster helps, but makes the mistake of commenting that it all seems a bit like magic.
She smiles, a little too smug for comfort. "Aren't you just using a different kind of magic? Your powers hardly follow the laws of physics either."
"It could be sufficiently advanced technology!" Riley pipes up. "But like, even if it is, knowing how a gun works doesn't tell you how to fight a war, right? Though that's not a good metaphor, passengers are more like soldiers than guns, they've got their own agency and clearly can change what power they give to fit the situation-"
Riley's theories about powers as living things are, admittedly, interesting, but they'd still imply a certain science, rules about biology or sociology or psychology rather than physics. When Venus talks about pieces of Dragon's mech as 'the bones of a saint', it's hard to see that as anything but mysticism.
Then again, if they've gotten this far with mysticism, it clearly works for them. Maybe he should try it himself sometime?
While the Tinkers tinker, and the planners plan, Neptune works on her own magic, her own ritual. Though it's a lot less
mystical than Venus's work. No double bubble toil and trouble for all that her handle is
RestingWitchFace, no bones of steel and circuitry. There's still symbolism, of course, but most of it is emotional, wrapped up in her mind and body. The feeling of movement, the weight of rushing water. A current, carrying things from
here to
there. A whirlpool gathers below her as she closes her eyes, focuses. Bearing burdens and poisons is something that comes easily to her, taking the slings and arrows of the world. Bearing herself from place to place, even splitting, everywhere like the all-consuming ocean? Very doable. Bearing
people, now that's trickier. She's done it like a dozen times, but usually under duress. Calling it on command, it takes focus. Concentration.
Dancing in circles and chanting helps too, but that's more a mnemonic than anything. Neptune stays still and focuses on her interiority.
A painful hour passes, maybe two. Rachel argues with everyone about where her dogs will go. Director Piggot needs to be escorted somewhere safe. Riley can drop the dogs that aren't fighting off at a shelter on the way, or maybe hide them within Labby until the mission is done. As for the Director, the PRT HQ is hardly safe, but it has the Wards in it, or what's left of them, and Carol can bring the remainder of New Wave there for the occasion. (Emily doesn't tell them about Shadow Stalker ignoring her calls. Lisa notices the absence, but has bigger things to worry about for once.)
Venus passes out nine sacred ribs, pendants hanging tight around the neck with a curling earpiece on one side and a long, coiling antenna on another. They won't last forever, but they'll be good enough for this fight. She wants to return them to Dragon whenever the hero calls back in, anyway.
Neptune builds her tunnel of water until it feels like holding back a tidal wave, and reflects that she may have overdone it.
But at least, they break. At last, five of them gather around the whirlpool.
Rachel, her grin one of anger and promised violence, stroking and soothing a dog beside her. Her chance to kill the bastard who hurt her dogs, who hurt her
friends. She wouldn't miss it for the world.
Lisa, vibrating with energy, listening to whispers and her power, worried, scared, but putting on a brave face. For so long she's been under the serpent's boot. Is this a chance to finally be free?
Amy, pulsating with desire, a heady mixture of anxiety and excitement and rage and hope that leaves her head spinning and her heart pounding - only the need to help contain the pent up violence in almost a dozen dogs brimming with Rachel's power in potential beneath the skin keeps her grounded. She's looking forward to hitting something.
Venus, nervous excitement, fiddling with the holy bones of steel. A fidget, more than a Tinkering. The depths of an underground base don't suit her at all, but she trusts her loved ones to make it safe for her, or at least bearable.
Jupiter, clenching and unclenching, her hands imagining all the things that this Coil has done to Dinah Alcott and to Lisa, all the things he would do to them and their friends. She's not much of a killer, but against this monster? She's starting to see the appeal.
And of course in the middle is Neptune, wiping off a smear of ink as she stands atop the maelstrom, a conductor and a magician at once bowing before her audience.
"Neptune Limited Lines, at your service! Six passengers (plus many dogs) to Brockton General Hospital, in comfort and quality, faster than you can blink!"
Venus smiles. "You're totally lying. Right?"
"Too late now!" she cackles. "Down we go, ladies!"
Venus and Jupiter descend into the swirling pool without a second thought. Lisa is ready to go, but she looks to Rachel for confirmation - and really seeing it, Rachel suddenly has second thoughts. Bad memories.
"I'm not gonna fuckin' drown my dogs in there. We can walk."
"This is the fastest way to get to Taylor," Lisa quietly murmurs.
"... I can take care of them?" Amy offers quietly. "Put them inside my shell, keep them warm and dry. It won't be that different from when you use your power on them."
Rachel glares at Lisa, but quickly turns her eyes to Amy, instead. Amy, to her credit, holds her gaze.
"...Fine. Do it. Don't make me regret it."
Amy does as ordered, ever so gently leading the dogs into the shell with scratches and pets and little happy noises, marveling at the simple joy of their brains, before sealing them up in a cocoon of what might best be described as snuggling flesh. Deep breaths to pressurize and oxygenate the cocoon, plates and skin to seal it against the waves which might be gentle or might crush them.
Then she sails on into the storm, without hesitation. Rachel glances at Lisa, grabs her, and dives in after.
Neptune laughs, and pours herself through the whirlpool a moment later.
A/N: Good heavens, look at the time! So, uh. Have a chapter. I promise we're in the home stretch, and my plan is to have the story finished by the new year.
