Intrepid

by CeruleanSlane

Once upon a time, three girls bullied a fourth until a tragedy occurred. In the aftermath of that tragedy, all four embark on their own separate paths through the complicated world of capes. Worm AU focusing on the separate viewpoints of Taylor, Emma, Madison, and Sophia. They each have their own stories to tell, their own friends, teams, and enemies. Let's see how they do.

2. Arc 2: Running Into Trouble

Notes – Imageination: Yes, Emma's power is a bud from Sophia's. Taylor is not actually a master though, she's a thinker. More on that in this update. ;)

Luan Mao: You'll see a lot more of how this power works in this update.

HellKing666: Wow, thanks for the extensive thoughts. I'm glad you like the first part of this new story. I will say that it is definitely not a grimdark version of the other one. I don't do grimdark. You'll see how there are chances for certain people as we go along.

That all said, enjoy the new update, guys. I'll shut up now so you can read the actual story.

2-01 – Emma

Thanks to my dad, I've ridden plenty of horses in my life. Being on the back of this wild animal as it tore down the street like a bat out of hell was about as far from that as it was from riding on a plane. It was closer to riding an elephant, which I'd also done thanks to my dad, but that had been at a calm and sedate pace. This was a mad dash down the street, veering back and forth and nearly bowling over people who were unfortunate enough to be in our path. The guy with the crown kept shouting for them to get out of the way, while I mostly just shouted in terror and tried not to fall off.

I would have failed at even that much if the guy in the motorcycle helmet hadn't caught my hands in his during one of the flat stretches. Over the sound of horns honking their disapproval, he directed my fingers down to what I belatedly realized were a series of straps that had been secured to the animal. Gratefully, I grabbed onto the straps and held on for dear life.

It was a good thing that I managed to catch hold of the strap when I did, because the next thing I knew, we were airborne. The guy in the crown had just shouted yet another warning, but apparently the person involved was too slow because the lizard-panther thing leapt all the way up and over them.

Fearing the worst, I glanced back and was relieved to catch the slightest glimpse of whoever we had nearly hit. I couldn't make out much before the animal tore around the corner, but the shape that had been on the ground was moving. Clearly they were all right. Now I just had to make sure I was.

Much to my chagrin, I ended up remembering that my power could get me safely off this animal without any problem at all about two seconds before we came to a stop anyway.

"All good back there?" The guy in black motorcycle gear asked.

"Yeah, you didn't fall off or anything, right?" The second guy added. "Scraping the remains of newbies that don't know how to hold onto the straps off the ground is always a pain in the ass."

"Not helping, Regent." The guy in black muttered before turning his head slightly. "First, don't listen to him, we haven't had any other new members at all, let alone any that fell off. Second, you're gonna have to get down first. We're kinda packed in here and I'd rather not kick you in the face."

Realizing just how close I had been at that point made me lean back reflexively. Turning, I blinked at the sight of another person standing beside the animal. The alley that we had turned down wasn't terribly well lit, but I was able to make out what looked like a plastic dog mask covering their face. Before I could say anything, they spoke with a girl's voice. "Get the fuck off my dog."

My response to that was to blink at her in surprise. "This thing is a dog?"

Okay, yeah, probably not the best choice of words. So I probably shouldn't have been that surprised when the girl in the dog mask abruptly gave a sharp whistle. On cue, the animal we were on jerked upward onto its hind legs. Since I wasn't holding onto the strap, I went flying with a loud yelp. I would have landed hard on the damp ground if I hadn't instinctively leapt into the safety of my power.

Stopping myself in the air as the familiar red glow fell over everything, I righted myself and stared for a second at the massive animal that the other girl had called a dog. There wasn't that much 'dog-like' about it, even while it was frozen like this. Still, arguing the point seemed like a pretty stupid idea.

My attention turned to the two boys who had helped me get away from Oni Lee: Regent and whatever the guy in motorcycle gear was called. Both of them had obviously been taken by surprise as well, and were tumbling off the animal. Unfortunately, there wasn't a lot that I could do about that. I'd get crushed if I tried to catch them (except for the Regent guy possibly, he looked fairly thin), and I couldn't actually move anything while my power was active that hadn't been on me when I activated it. Not that there was an awful lot of options for a soft landing sitting here in the dirty alley to begin with.

I'd been caught mid-yelp and hadn't had a lot of time to suck in air before hitting the pause button, so if I was going to do something, it needed to be quick. To that end, I rushed for the end of the alley where I could see a pile of cardboard boxes that had been broken down and tossed out next to the nearby dumpster. Dropping next to the pile, I psyched myself up for a quick in-and-out. As quickly as I could, I dropped my power and let time resume, grabbed onto as many of the boxes as I could get my arms around, and refroze time while taking a deeper breath this time.

I didn't manage to bring all of the broken down boxes into the freeze with me, but I did manage enough. Hauling up as much of the pile as I could, I dragged them backwards along the ground to where the two boys were. They had fallen closer to the ground in that time, and I knew that one more unfreeze would be too much. So I had to hope that this was enough. On the plus side, it was easy to guess where the two boys were going to hit, since they were so close to the ground.

Carefully, I spread out the cardboard as much as I could, piling it enough to provide at least some small cushion. Once that was done, I let go of my power so that time could resume normal speed.

"-ing hell!" Regent had obviously been caught mid-curse as he landed on his portion of the pile of cardboard. The other guy landed beside him, and both looked at each other before staring down at what they had fallen on, clearly surprised by their at least semi-soft landing. Softer than concrete anyway.

The black motorcycle helmet turned to see me crouched behind them, my hands still on the cardboard. "Wait," he spoke with obvious surprise. "Did you just..."

"Sorry," I straightened and shrugged, feeling self-conscious. "You got me away from Oni Lee, so I didn't think I should really let you hit the ground like that. Sorry I couldn't reach anything softer."

"Did you really just apologize twice for helping us not break our delicate hineys on the ground?" Regent asked. He was already picking himself up, giving me a better look at his costume. In short, he looked like a refugee from one of those renaissance faires that Taylor had always wanted to go to (Our fathers had forbidden it, saying we weren't old enough. And by the time we were, well... yeah). His shirt was ruffled, the white color matching his mask, and he also wore skintight leggings that were tucked into his knee-high boots. The outfit he wore, coupled with his not-exactly-masculine physique meant that the old Emma probably would have used a pretty horrible name to describe him.

Instead, I just blinked at him. "Did you really just say hineys?"

He shrugged while stretching languidly, clearly utterly unconcerned. "I don't know about you, but I consider mine a pretty winning feature. I'd hate for something to get it all bruised."

"Speaking of bruising something," the guy in the motorcycle gear had picked himself up by then, and turned toward the girl whose whistle had started this whole thing. "What the hell, Bitch?"

"Err, are you really sure you should call her names?" I ventured a little hesitantly.

"That is her name," the guy replied without looking back at me. "Or the one she prefers anyway. Public calls her Hellhound to keep things rated PG." He pointed at the girl then. "You know better than to do that shit. You knew we were bringing someone new back with us."

Clearly not bothered by his tone, the girl he called Bitch spoke with a stubborn tone. "I don't like her."

"You don't even know her." From the boy's voice, he was clearly gritting his teeth. "We've been over this, Bitch, we needed the help. We voted, you lost. You're going to have to deal with that."

Okay, I was officially confused. This was starting to sound an awful lot like a long-running argument, which baffled me. How could they have had a history of arguing about me before we even met?

Finally sighing when it was clear that he wasn't going to get anywhere, the guy in black turned to me and extended his hand. "Sorry, on her behalf. Bitch doesn't really know how to get along with others. I'm Grue, and that's Regent. If you want to call him Hiney though, I think we'd all understand."

"Sure would," Regent himself drawled lazily and without a single solitary hint of self-consciousness as he leaned against the nearby wall. "Like I said, winning feature."

Hesitantly shaking Grue's hand while feeling more than a bit lost, I finally found my voice a moment later. "Ummm, uhhh, listen. So, back there when we were running away, he," I gestured toward Regent, "said something about bad guys? In the us being of sort of saying." That particular convoluted phrasing left me feeling about as confused as I was fairly sure the others were, and I sighed. "What I meant to say is that he said you were bad guys. I mean, we were bad guys."

That dark motorcycle helmet tilted with obvious uncertainty. "Yes?" Grue sounded just as uncertain as I was. "Didn't the boss fill you in before he sent you to help us out of that jam?"

I blinked blankly at that. "Didn't the who do what now?"

"She has no idea what you're talking about, Grue." That was a new voice, and I turned to see a figure approaching from down the open end of the alley. She wore a dark colored costume that I picked out as being purple and black once she got closer. Her dark blonde hair was long and fell past her shoulders, and a black domino mask was affixed to her face. She was smiling, but it wasn't so much the 'everyone's happy' sort of smile as it was the 'I know a secret' kind.

"Excuse me?" Grue stared at the newcomer for a moment. "Okay Tattletale, what the hell is that supposed to mean? Yousaid that the boss was sending a new cape as reinforcements. We had a whole argument about it, remember? You might recall Bitch's complaining?"

"Sure," the blonde, Tattletale apparently, nodded. "And he did. But that," she gestured toward me. "was not her. She is a new cape, just not the one you were supposed to be waiting for. Besides, our reinforcement's a tinker, not a teleporter." She gave me a brief look then that I couldn't decipher.

"But she fought Oni Lee," Grue protested. "We thought she was... I mean it looked like... aww fuck." He looked back at me. "You really aren't the reinforcement that our boss was supposed to send?" When I shook my head rapidly, he went on. "And you were fighting Oni Lee. You're a hero, aren't you?"

"Umm..." I took a step back reflexively, hesitating before offering a little weakly, "I'm trying to be? If it helps, I don't think I'm very good at it yet. I wasn't trying to fight Oni Lee. It just sort of happened."

He continued to stare at me for another few seconds while I grew increasingly uncomfortable. I was about to use my power to scram when he finally spoke. "Still, you helped us out. So thanks for that."

Blinking, I asked slowly, "You're not gonna try to fight me or anything?"

"Wasn't planning on it," Grue replied easily. "Unless you really want to?" Belatedly, I realized that he was teasing me. "We could go a couple rounds if you weren't worn out enough by Lee and his goons."

"No, no, that's okay." I held up both hands placatingly. "I'm good. But you guys don't mind me being a hero?" I looked from Grue to Tattletale, then to Regent, and finally to Bitch. Other than the latter, who was glaring at me so hard I thought I might spontaneously combust, none of them looked concerned.

Linking his arms behind his head, Regent spoke nonchalantly. "You did say you were pretty bad at it. We could use some more 'pretty bad' heroes. Maybe you'll drag down their average."

"Wait," Grue said abruptly as he turned toward the blonde girl. "Where is the girl that was supposed to be our reinforcement then, if this one isn't her?"

"Good question," Tattletale admitted before taking a small cell phone from her belt. She flipped it open and hit a button. After waiting a moment for it to be answered, she started, "Hey boss, we—what?" For several long seconds, she just made noises of understanding before finally signing off.

"What's wrong?" Grue had folded his arms across his chest, and I had the distinct impression that he was frowning. Even Regent looked vaguely interested by that point. Bitch was still glaring at me.

"The tinker," Tattletale was wincing. "She's in trouble. After you guys ran off, she tried to extract but she went the other way and ended up right in the middle of some kind of Empire Eighty-Eight incursion into ABB territory. Now she's trapped between a bunch of the Empire capes and ABB thugs."

"Shit," Grue cursed. "That's our fault." He didn't look at me, but I knew what he meant, what they had to be thinking. They'd only accidentally abandoned their new teammate because they thought I was her. "What about Lung?" He added after a brief hesitation.

The blonde girl's head shook. "Lung and a big part of the ABB soldiers are fighting the Protectorate now. But the ones that are fighting off the Empire are holed up and fighting from fortification. They're also shooting at everything that moves, so our girl can't move out of her current position."

Heaving a sigh, Grue nodded. "All right, then we go back for her. It's our fault she's stranded back there anyway. We go in, grab her, and get out again as fast as we can. We are not a part of this battle."

They started to move in, and I stood there awkwardly for several long seconds. I felt so guilty all of a sudden. Sure, whoever this new member of theirs had been, she was a criminal. She was a villain, a cape using her powers for selfish reasons. But that didn't really mean that she needed to die, and being caught in the middle of a gang war between the Empire and the ABB wasn't likely to end any other way. Especially not if she was in costume and likely to be mistaken as a member of the other side by whoever happened to spot her. This was bad, and it was at least partly my fault.

"I'll go with you," I finally blurted before I could talk myself out of it. When Grue turned to look at me, I hurried on. "I mean, just for this rescue mission. It's my fault you guys left her behind, even if I didn't mean for it to happen. So umm, if you don't mind, I'll help you get her out of there."

"A hero helping a bunch of villains?" Regent had adopted a posh tone. "Why, I never."

The girl in the dog mask had already pushed off the wall and was stalking toward me. "Fuck you, you're just trying to get us-"

Grue caught her by the shoulder to stop her forward motion, pulling the girl back. "Back off, Bitch." He focused on me then. "You sure you can do that? Put the whole 'try to bring us to justice' thing on pause for now?"

My head bobbed once. "You didn't attack me when you found out I wasn't one of you. And I owe you for getting me out of there. Plus, like I said, her being trapped is kind of my fault. So yeah, it's put on pause."

"Good enough," he nodded. "In that case, thanks for the help. Now let's go get our new tinker out of trouble."

So, to summarize, I had accidentally intervened in the middle of one fight between two villain teams and been mistaken for a villain in the process. And now I was purposefully helping this villain team save their trapped villain teammate from the middle of another fight between two different villain teams.

Yeah, I was pretty much the worst superhero ever.

2-02 – Taylor

I was in Faultline's head. Or rather, I was seeing things from her point of view. At the moment, that meant that I was seeing myself. Somehow, my body looked even paler and more drawn through another person's eyes than when I was seeing it through my all-encompassing vision. The sight of myself sitting there in the corner of the room, eyes gazing vacantly at nothing was enough to make me wish that I really could take control of this body just so I could close her eyes and stop looking.

Instead, I was trapped here, not yet able to understand my powers enough to control when and where my attention jumped. Which kind of terrified me right then, because if my focus jumped out to some passing person or animal, I would miss what the woman was saying. And I really wanted to hear her.

At the moment, she had gone silent, leaning back to study me for a few seconds. I had no idea what she was thinking, but she was feeling calm and determined. She had stated her intentions of helping me, and had no real doubts about her ability to do so. It was kind of nice, actually. If I let them, her feelings of certainty and self-assurance helped ease my own doubt and fear over what was happening to me.

"I imagine," Faultline's voice spoke then, startling me. "That if you know who I am, you're probably wondering why I'm here, why I agreed to this. After all, the salary of a nurse is hardly going to pay for the time of a single cape mercenary, let alone my team. And you'd be right. We're professionals, and we're very good at what we do. Charity cases are not exactly in our wheelhouse."

I bristled at that, feeling defensive. I was not a charity case. I didn't need her, if she was going to-

"But you're not a charity case."

Oh. I settled slightly, but still wasn't entirely comfortable. She was right, I was wondering why a cape mercenary was paying me a personal visit, apparently on the word of a single nurse that was just guessing about my being a parahuman. He could just as easily be wrong. So why was she here?

"There are two reasons that I'm here, Taylor," Faultline continued in that calm, self-assured tone. "The first reason is the young woman in the corridor right now. She and I only met recently, but I promised her, just like I promised you just now, that I would help her in any way that I could. She's a member of our team, and we take care of each other. She and your nurse are very good friends, and when he mentioned his thoughts on your condition, she promised that she would see if I could help you."

Through the woman's own eyes, I saw her hand come up to gently brush away a bit of my long hair that had drifted down over my eyes before she continued. "The second reason I'm here is because I believe that we can help each other. You see, I have another friend whose ability is so powerful, so amazing that it overwhelms her. It hurts her without meaning to. The doctors thought that the best thing they could do was lock her up. They thought she was broken, but she's not, and neither are you. You're a parahuman, Taylor. Whatever power this is, whatever has you in its grip, it is your power. Yours. That's why I'm going to help you. That's why you and I are going to help each other. Because you are not helpless, Taylor. You are so powerful that your mind can't comprehend it. That's why you have to understand that this is not charity. This is an investment. Because I believe in you."

My mind drifted a bit as I tried to cope with that. This wasn't a charity case. She didn't feel sorry for me, or at least that wasn't her driving motivation. She thought I was powerful. She thought I could help her, that we could help each other. She wasn't trying to baby me, but she did obviously care somewhat. It was like she... trusted me, believed in me... and cared about what I wanted, what I felt.

Slipping out of her eyes, I found myself returning to my wide-view vision and saw both myself and the woman in question. She slipped the glove off of one of her hands to touch mine, and I felt both the clamminess of my skin, and the warmth of hers. "You and I, we're going to play a game, Taylor. We're going to communicate. From now on, if you want to say 'yes', you raise your right arm here." She moved then to touch my other hand. "And if you want to say no, you raise your left arm. Right for yes, left for no. I want you to raise your yes hand if you understand that." Her hand came up to cup my cheek briefly. "And you don't need to feel frustrated or panic when it takes you awhile. I'm not going anywhere. I'm going to sit right there," she pointed to a chair nearby. "And wait for as long as it takes. You focus on what you need to do to get that arm up." Sliding her metal mask back into place, the woman rose and moved to sit in the chair.

From the doorway, Teddy the nurse spoke hesitantly. "It'd be easier if you let her raise just a finger."

"I'm sure it would," Faultline nodded. "But Taylor doesn't need easy. She can do this just fine." Pointing at him then, she added, "Now you and Emily go find something to eat. I will let her know when Taylor and I are finished, but right now, the two of us need privacy."

For the next fifteen minutes, I struggled to force my hand to raise. In spite of the woman's words, I did get frustrated. This was awful. How could I be a powerful parahuman? How could she even think that? It took me a quarter of an hour to lift my hand. And it wasn't like my arm would lift very slowly either. Rather, it took that long before the command to lift my arm made any impression at all. Once it did, my arm lifted just like normal. The problem was the delay between thought and action, and the toll that it took. Just forcing my arm to lift seemed to tire me out the way jogging for fifteen minutes should have.

Finally, however, my right arm rose into the air. It hovered there, as a sense of accomplishment completely out of proportion for the fact that all I'd done is raise my hand filled me.

"Good." Faultline nodded while taking a knee next to me. Her hand held mine briefly. "That's very good, Taylor. But we have to make sure that what you're doing isn't just an automatic response. So I'm going to ask you a few questions. If you answer them all right, we'll assume you are in there and you are coherent. Then we'll go from there." Gently, she pushed my arm back down. "So, first question for you to answer. Rain, dogs, and the planet Neptune are all the same thing, yes or no?"

Once the question was asked, she gave my arm a reassuring squeeze. "Again, I'm right here. I'm sitting down right over there, and I'm not going anywhere until I get an answer. So you tell me, are rain, dogs, and the planet Neptune all the same thing?" After reiterating the question, she returned to her seat.

This time it took me a bit longer. Almost seventeen minutes had passed by the time my left arm finally obeyed, lifting into the air. Through it all, Faultline simply sat and busied herself with something on her phone, occasionally glancing up to check on me before looking down again.

She nodded once my arm was up. Again, the woman slipped away from her chair and came down to the floor in front of me. "Excellent," she praised me, taking my hand and squeezing it briefly before setting it down against my side. "That's very good, Taylor. See, you're more aware than people think. You can do this. Next question then. A tennis ball, a basketball, this building, and the city of Detroit are all the exact same size, yes or no?" After giving me a reassuring pat, she rose and returned to her chair.

Over the forty minutes, we went through two more questions beyond that one before Faultline was finally fully convinced that my arm movements weren't random and that I really was answering. It was hard, both forcing my arms to move, and stopping my attention from drifting. A couple of times I found my point of view shifting to follow a passing orderly, or a patient being wheeled through the floor below mine. But each time, through sheer force of will, I forced my mind back into my own head and focused on lifting the appropriate arm.

It was exhausting work, and more than a few times I felt like quitting out of frustration. Why? Why was it so hard for me to do simple things like lift my arm? How could I possibly be the kind of powerful parahuman that this woman thought I was when I was all but incapable of the simplest actions?

Yet every time I started to think about giving up, I thought about Emma, Sophia, and Madison. The three bitches who had done this to me, who had ruined my life. They had spent so long making me completely miserable. They had tortured, humiliated, and destroyed me. Now they were probably laughing to themselves. They thought they'd won, that I was such a pathetic, incompetent loser that I was completely broken. They thought there wouldn't be any consequences, that the world would just keep catering to their every whim while I lay in this stupid fucking hospital room.

No, I wouldn't give up. I wouldn't let them win. Not this time. Even if it killed me, I was going to force my body to move. No matter how hard or exhausting it was, I was going to learn to control this power. I was going to get back to myself, and once I did, none of those bitches was going to hurt me again.

Faultline was squeezing my hand. "Good, perfect. Now that we know you're aware in there, I have one more question. Whatever's going on with you, it's a power of some kind, isn't it? You might not understand how to use it, or why it's limiting you like this, but you have a power. Something special."

According to the clock on the wall, it was only eight minutes after that question that my right hand lifted into the air. When it did, Faultline's hand returned to squeeze mine. "Good. Good girl. Okay, we'll work out a better communication system. We'll find a way to let you talk to us so that you can explain what you're seeing, what you're feeling, everything that's happening to you. Don't worry, Taylor, we will figure this out. But right now, I think you-"

Whatever she had been about to say was interrupted by the sound of a cacophonous bellow, a roar from outside the hospital that rattled the windows and made one of the nurses who happened to be walking down the nearby hallway that was within my line of sight yelp and drop the coffee she'd been carrying.

The roar was followed almost immediately by the staccato sound of gunfire, sharp and loud against the previous stillness of the night. Multiple bursts from several different guns overlapped one another, adding to the noise. All of it was coming from outside the hospital, but a few of the gunshots were closer. Those, I was pretty sure, were either inside or right at the entrance.

Faultline had stood the instant that the noise started, moving to the window. I focused on her, willing my attention to jump to her eyes, and was rewarded by an almost immediate success. My vision abruptly went from my wide-angle view of the room and surrounding area, to seeing exactly what Faultline could as she approached the window carefully. She kept her body away from the opening itself, using the wall as cover before peeking around to take a quick look.

A beast stood in the lot near the entrance to the hospital, arms raised above his head while fire swirled around him. The figure was clearly at least fifteen feet tall, a monstrous visage with scale-like armor that lined his skin and burgeoning demonic wings rising from the middle of his back. He was accompanied by at least a couple dozen men in what I recognized as ABB colors.

"Lung," Faultline spoke the name under her breath. "It's him and his little gang." She turned to look at me, and I saw myself sitting there, helpless and unmoving. "I wonder what he's doing here..."

"In the middle of a battle with the Protectorate," a new voice answered, and Faultline's eyes moved from me to the doorway where an obese, bald man stood. His skin was pale to the point of translucence, and I could see the dark outline of his skull beneath his face, as well as the bones of his hand when he raised it to point over his shoulder. "Lung himself seems to be more than willing to engage the Protectorate forces in the street, but some of his men have already withdrawn into the hospital, complicating the Protectorate's ability to respond." Finally, he nodded to me politely. "Good evening, Ms. Hebert. I apologize for the interruption, and for the fact that we could not meet under more pleasant circumstances. My name is Gregor."

"Thank you, Gregor." Faultline started to move away from the window, and my vision shifted back from her point of view to the wide angle of the room. "We're not going to fight Lung. We'll head out the back, but we can't leave Taylor here. Not with Lung and his animals so close. So we'll take her with us, for now." She looked to me. "Don't worry, Taylor, we won't let anything happen to you. You're safe."

Yet it wasn't myself that I was thinking about just then. It was the rest of the people in this hospital. Even as the girl in the gasmask, Emily apparently, and Teddy returned to find out what was going on, my mind was reeling. Danger. The people in this hospital were in danger. The ABB could hurt them, could take hostages, could even kill them in the crossfire with the authorities. Even if Lung stayed outside, his thugs could do a lot of damage in the building all by themselves.

Before I realized it, my left hand was in the air. It had only been one minute since I started thinking about the people that were about to be left to fend for themselves, and yet my arm was in the air.

Gregor noticed first and nudged Faultline while she was in the middle of instructing Teddy to bring a wheelchair. She turned at the nudge and looked toward me, pausing at the sight of my arm. The woman was silent for a moment, thinking before she spoke. "No? You're objecting to something? You're responding to what I said about leaving. You don't want to leave? No, that's not it." Her head tilted as she considered me. "You're worried about the patients here, that the ABB might hurt them."

Emily started to say something, but Faultline shushed her without taking her eyes off of me. A few seconds later she repeated her order to the nurse, telling him to get a wheelchair. Still, she kept watching me for a reaction. Through the mask, I could see her calculating eyes taking in everything.

Again, barely a minute after the question was asked, my right hand lifted into the air. As desperate as I had been to communicate before, it was the thought of abandoning the rest of the innocents here in the hospital, of leaving the sick and injured to face the ABB that had been enough to drop the response time of my actions from an average of ten minutes down to barely one.

By that time, Teddy had returned with the wheelchair. Faultline took it from him and pushed it into the room. "Gregor, help me get Taylor into the seat." She nodded when my hand went up. "Good, see, you can communicate. So you don't want us to leave these people in danger."

She paused while Gregor reached down and lifted my pale, sick-looking form to place in the wheelchair, waiting until my body was settled before speaking again. "We're not heroes, Taylor. We do the jobs that we're paid for, and nobody paid us to risk our lives here."

Before I could despair at that, she continued. "But we do favors for each other. We help our friends. So if we do this, if we help these people and protect them from Lung's people, it's not a job. It's a favor for a friend, for a... teammate. Do you understand that? If we do this, it means we're doing a favor for you as a team member. Is that all right with you?"

New teammate. I knew what she was saying, it was the same thing she'd been saying earlier, only more pointed now. She was telling me that I was a part of their team now, if they did this. Whatever happened from here on, whatever power I had and however long it took for me to fully understand it, I was with them. No matter what happened from here on, I would be agreeing to join their team.

This time, it was barely under a minute before my right hand went up.

"Good girl," Faultline seemed to be smiling behind the mask before she turned to Gregor and Emily. "Call Newter. Tell him to bring the van around with Elle.

"Our new teammate would like us to beat up some thugs."

2-03 – Emma

"She is not riding one of my dogs." The dog-masked girl, Bitch, stated unequivocally. And as if that wasn't clear enough, she added an even more succinct, "Fuck off."

"Damn it, Bitch," Grue was clearly frustrated. "Would you rather run headfirst into the middle of a fight between the Empire and the ABB without as much help as we can get?"

Instead of answering that, the girl just raised both shoulders in a shrug. "I don't like her. I don't want her on my dogs, so she's not riding them. I don't fucking care what she does besides that." From the look she sent me then, I didn't think that was particularly true. Even through the plastic mask, it was fairly obvious that Bitch had an idea about a few anatomically impossible things I should do with myself.

Grue started to argue again, but I shook my head. "Forget it, just go. There isn't time for this if you're going to get to your... uh, teammate. I'll catch up my own way."

The other girl, Tattletale, spoke up. "You think you can teleport fast enough to keep up?" There was a certain tone to her voice that made me think there was something else behind her question. For a moment, I wondered what her power was. What kind of a name was Tattletale? It almost sounded like she could tell when people were lying, or force them to tell the truth. Was that it?

Shaking off my confusion, I forced a chipper tone, or at least as much of one as I could manage under the circumstances. "Just tell me where we're going and I might just beat you there."

Bitch's response to that was to give two sharp, short whistles followed by a longer one. Immediately, I heard the galumphing sound of enormous approaching animals.

The sound made me blanch. Right, dogs, plural. So there were more of these things? How many were there, and why did she keep calling them dogs when they didn't look anything like them? Did that mean they actually were dogs that she... I don't know, used some kind of bio-tinker formula to transform like a Jekyll and Hyde situation? Sure, the girl didn't look like any kind of tinker with her plaid skirt, ratty old sleeveless tee-shirt, and army boots. But then again, having an atrocious fashion sense wasn't proof either way. Nor was it an actual crime, I had begun to realize over the past couple of months.

Sure enough, in response to the whistles, two more of the beasts were approaching from down the alley. I tried hard not to think about the size or proximity of them while Tattletale gave me the address that their boss had provided. Then I nodded. "All right, I'll meet you guys there. Be uhh, be careful."

With that little bit of awkwardness, I took a deep breath before activating my power. Everything went red, but I still hesitated there for a moment, staring at the four super villains, minor though they may have been. God, what was I doing? I'd set out to be a hero and on my first night I was helping a group of villains get their fellow villain teammate back. This was a horrible idea, but I had to follow through. Whatever kind of villain this new member of theirs was, she didn't deserve to die.

With that settled, I turned toward the wall to my left and plunged through and into the building beyond. The place was a nasty old motel full of the kind of people that paid by the hour and used that time for the kind of activities that most of the public tried to pretend didn't really happen. I tried to stay focused only on where I was going, a part of me hating myself for the voyeuristic nature of what I was doing, but even then I couldn't avoid seeing a lot of stuff that I never wanted to. The best I could manage was to try to tell myself not to pay any attention to the faces, and to forget them as much as possible.

Through the awful motel I moved, passing people engaged in every kind of vice imaginable while I struggled to focus on absolutely anything else. Inevitably, that meant that I thought about Taylor.

Once upon a time, she and I had been friends. I'd taken it for granted, even back then. When her mom died, it was like a piece of Taylor died too. It was like the Taylor that I had known had disappeared, leaving this... stranger behind. She was never really happy, never really laughed, as if she was afraid that she wasn't allowed to be cheerful anymore. I kept waiting for my Taylor, my friend to come back, but she wouldn't. She was gone, and in her place was this weepy, constantly moping little girl that refused to grow up, refused to accept that her mom was gone and she had to move on. It was like... she wanted things to stay the way they were when her mom was alive, like... if she didn't grow up and act like a teenager instead of a little kid, she wouldn't have to accept that she was going to do that growing up without a mom. So instead of my bright, cheerful, blabbermouth of a friend, I had a girl who didn't want to grow up, and who looked guilty every time she accidentally smiled.

I took it personally, I suppose. To me, in my deluded, stupid, selfish way, it felt as if she had betrayed me. It felt as if my friend didn't want to be my friend anymore, but would rather mope around.

No, that isn't fair. It's not. It's selfish and stupid and completely and totally not fair. I know that now. I understand that now.And this explanation did nothing, absolutely nothing to excuse my choices and my actions. Those can never be excused. What I did was evil, plain and simple. My betrayal of Taylor was so far beyond my subconscious feeling of betrayal from her while she was grieving that there was absolutely no comparison to be made. I was a self-centered bitch who was upset that my best friend was grieving for her dead mother. There would never, ever be an excuse for that.

The truth was, I had been a selfish, vicious cunt. No lies, no obfuscation, no mincing words. I was wrong. I was a traitor, and I had spent years torturing and destroying my best friend for no reason other than popularity, and to impress a psychopath. If anyone in this situation deserved to be the one staring vacantly at a wall, mind broken, it was me. I was the one who deserved to be stuck in that hospital.

And yet it hadn't been the sight of Taylor, broken as she was while being pulled out of that locker, that had destroyed the shell of lies and self-delusion that I had built around myself. It had set the cracks, to be sure, but it hadn't actually shattered the wall. If taken by itself, in the deepest, most shameful parts of my heart, I had to wonder if it would have been enough. It should have been. I desperately wanted to believe that it would have. But then again, seeing Taylor any number of times that we had hurt her, seeing the depths of how horrible we had made her life should have at least nudged my humanity.

So no, the great crumbling of the wall that I had built around what remained of my soul had been seeing the reactions fromother students. As I stood there, watching the catatonic girl who had, at one time, been my best friend be taken away, people... chuckled. Oh sure, most maintained what would be called a 'respectful silence', but a few chuckled, or even clapped once or twice. And as that grew, I heard a couple of jokes being tossed around, whispered so that the teachers wouldn't hear and yet directed toward me. One girl, I remember, made a comment from behind a hand and directed toward my ear about how Taylor's dad might want to bring the locker with him so he had a place to put her when he couldn't pay her hospital bills anymore. When I looked at her, she had seemed proud of herself, pleased with getting a reaction from those around her. But more than that, she had seemed eager for my reaction. She had stood there as if waiting for me to bless her little joke.

It was then, in that moment as I saw the face of the girl who would say such a vile, horrible thing that it truly struck me for the first time: this was the environment that I had helped to create. Regardless of who Taylor was to me, regardless of what our relationship had been, this was what the students around me thought I would like. I was brought face to face with the sick, evil environment that I had helped create over the past couple of years. A girl was taken to the hospital and might never recover, and their reaction was to not only make a joke about her father being too poor to take care of her, but also that he was so poor that he might be forced to put her back in the thing that had traumatized her. And she said it specifically to impress me. Because that was the environment that I had created.

It was that realization, after seeing Taylor taken away and then seeing how people reacted to her being taken away, that finally, finally shattered the wall of delusion I had built around myself. Because once I allowed myself to think that it was wrong for one person to make a joke about Taylor's condition, once that tiny nugget of conscience appeared, it caused a domino effect that systematically broke down everything else. If it wasn't okay for that person to make a joke about Taylor's condition, then Taylor's condition wasn't right. And if Taylor's condition wasn't right, then she didn't deserve it. And if she didn't deserve it, then what we had been doing was wrong. One by one, the carefully constructed lies that I had used to hide myself from acknowledging what we were doing were brought down. Everything we had done to Taylor over the past two school years came rushing back to me, seen through a different lens, through different eyes. I saw them, for the first time, through her eyes. I saw what we had done, what we had turned the school into and how sick it all was. Betrayal after betrayal, I saw how it had affected both Taylor and the other people, the people who were now so desensitized to bad things happening to her that even this couldn't shock them out of it.

When I woke up some time after passing out, I'd had the power to stop time for as long as I could hold my breath, the ability to stretch brief moments out. I'd had the ability to think, plan, and consider my actions. Every action I took, my power gave me the time to think them through.

And right now, it was a power that would let me travel much further than I should have been able to in such a short time. I plunged through the last wall of the motel, dropped onto the sidewalk between a prostitute and a man that was on his way to her, and let time resume.

To the pair of not-so-righteous citizens, I appeared to pop up out of thin air. Both yelped, and the man pivoted on his heel before running back to his car while yelling over his shoulder that he was so sorry, he was going back to his wife and would I please not take him to the PRT.

The prostitute, meanwhile, proceeded to start screeching and cursing at me for driving away her client. Apparently he tipped well enough that she was ready and willing to kick my ass for scaring him off.

Thankfully, before she could claw for my eyes, I finished my brief break and took another deep breath before stopping time again. Now in the open, I oriented myself toward the place I needed to go and ran.

In this state I didn't really get tired other than the toll it took to use my power in quick succession, so I could run full out every time I was in it without being exhausted once time kicked in again. I used that to my advantage by racing across the street, through people, objects, and even more buildings. I didn't have to pay attention to roads or obstacles, I just picked the straight line toward my destination and hoofed it. I could have floated, of course, but that was honestly so slow that running was actually faster. It was useful for getting higher than jumping would allow, but definitely wasn't meant for speed.

So, I ran, popping in and out of the time stop here and there whenever I had to. Occasionally I took a brief breather so that I wouldn't have completely exhausted my power by the time I got there. Once I even took a few seconds at a nearby drinking fountain. But generally I just ran as fast as I could.

I heard the gunfire before seeing anything. The street where the villain girl was supposed to be was actually a dead-end, which I was really, really hoping wasn't as bad of a sign as it seemed.

Checking the time on the throwaway phone in my pocket, I saw that I'd arrived only a few minutes after I'd set out. I'd probably been running for about twenty or so, but only three or four had actually passed, even with the breaks that I'd had to take. Hopefully Bitch and the... the umm... crap what did they call themselves anyway? I felt like I should probably know that by now.

Then again, I still had no idea what I was going to call myself, let alone other people. I was starting to have a few suspicions that I hadn't really been ready when I set out tonight.

Still, I was here now and someone needed help. Even if she was a villain. So as soon as I heard the fighting in the distance, I pushed myself to go faster toward rather than away from it. That took some doing, considering my instincts were still screaming to get the hell away from the gunfire.

Coming out of the wall surrounding a public storage lot, I found myself at the deepest end of the dead-end street in question. Straight ahead of me were two old factory buildings with tires piled high in the back lot, visible through the well-worn fence. In the windows of the buildings I could see gun barrels and the occasional head or hand as the ABB members inside the building glanced out to check their targets. Those targets, meanwhile, were a couple dozen Empire soldiers who were liberally spraying gunfire at the buildings.

That was the situation I had walked into. The ABB defenders were using their cover and high ground to pick their shots against the far more numerous yet exposed Empire thugs. As I stared, open mouthed while asking myself what the hell I thought I was going to do here, I saw a strange spectral-sort of light pass behind one of the windows. Then one of the ABB men was thrown out of the window by a ghost-like knight who disappeared a moment later.

Right, Crusader. Which obviously meant there were other Empire capes in the area as well. This just went from stupid scary to pants-pissingly terrifying. After my encounter with Oni Lee, the last thing I wanted tonight was to face off with some other cape that was going to kick my ass up and down the street.

Before I could worry too much about that, my eyes fell on a figure crouched in the darkness near the base of the factory fence, partially obscured by the overgrown vines and bushes.

As soon as I spotted the figure, I stopped time once again. No way was I going to risk crossing this street out in the open. Instead, as soon as the red shift fell over my view, I ran down the street and toward the semi-hidden figure.

I could see her a little bit better from up close, enough to tell that she didn't look like any tinker I'd ever heard of. There was no armor, no giant rifle or killer robot perched in front of her, and there wasn't some souped up hot rod car with guns popping out of it parked nearby as far as I could tell.

Letting time start, I spoke up in a whisper. "Hey, I'm here to-"

Stupid. The girl spun on me, some kind of small stick object pointed my way. I remembered, tinker, and hit the ground with a yelp, terrified that a nuclear powered pen laser was about to blow a hole in my chest.

Yes, I ducked rather than simply jump back into my frozen time state. I panicked. At the same time, I managed to yelp out, "I'm trying to help!"

Holding her fire with... whatever it was, I saw the girl frown. "Help?" When it became clear that she wasn't going to shoot me, I hesitantly straightened and gave her another look now that my power wasn't tinting everything red.

Judging from her height and build, I thought she was about my age. She wore a long sleeved purple silk shirt that was partially covered by a black vest with violet lining, as well as what looked like simple dress slacks and shiny black shoes. Over her shoulders there was a cape, an actual cape, that was black on the outside and light purple on the inside. She also wore a black top hat with a purple band over it, and a silver half mask with what looked like amethysts where her eyes were covered her face down to her mouth. The skin that I could see was white.

"You're a umm... a tinker, right?" I asked slowly, uncertainly. Was she? "The tinker that was supposed to show up to help... uhh, Tattletale and her team." At her nod, I breathed in relief. "They're coming. It's sort of a long story, but I wanted to help get you out of danger."

The girl's voice voice was gravelly and deep as she responded. "I can't leave." She stood straight, the darkness of the nearby bushes all-but enveloping her while the cape that she wore served to obscure even more of her form. She kept speaking in that guttural, gravel-gargling voice. "I swore a vow when my parents were murdered before me that I would not stand idly by and allow violence to take my city. Those who seek to harm others will learn to fear me. If I fall in my duty, so be it. My blood is in the freedom of this city, my death will serve its future."

I blinked a couple of times. "What, seriously?"

Collapsing forward, the girl let out a long, wheezing laugh, coughing a few times to recover from the voice she had adopted. This time when she spoke, her tone was normal. "Fuuuuuuuck no, dude. I do what I do because it's fun as hell and my powers are god damn amazing. As am I, for the record. Fun as hell, and god damn amazing. You should've seen your uhh... okay I can't see your face through that mask, but I bet it was great. Now how do we get out of here? Lemme guess, going by that red burst that showed up just before you did, you teleport or something?"

"Uhh, red burst?" Having no idea what she was talking about, I just blinked blankly for a second before shaking off the confusion to add, "I mean, something like that." I hesitated. "Only I can't actually take anyone with me." Flinching, I shrugged helplessly. "Sorry, sorry, I didn't really think this out, I guess." I sighed then. "There's a lot I didn't think out."

If the girl was annoyed by that fact, however, she didn't show it. "No big, dude. If I had a nickel for every time I did something without thinking it through, I wouldn't have to be a criminal anymore, I'll tell you that much."

Even as I started to that, a male voice from nearby demanded, "Hands up, bitches! Get your fucking hands-"

The girl turned in a single motion, the stick in her hand lifting to point at the man while she spoke a single word. A burst of light shot from the... I couldn't believe I was going to even think it, but... wand and into the man's eyes. He jerked backward with a cry about not being able to see, dropping his gun in the process.

Before he could recover from that (and before I could recover from my surprise), the girl held her sleeve out as though to demonstrate that there was nothing in it. As she did so, a long string of colorful handkerchiefs that had been knotted together into a rope shot out of from within her sleeve, far too long to have been stored within it. The makeshift rope wrapped itself around the still recovering man, binding him from his ankles to mouth, leaving just enough of his nose uncovered that he could keep breathing. He let out a muffled yell of protest before tipping over.

"You... you do... magic?" I stared at the girl.

In mid-bow, the girl lifted a finger in admonishment. "Ah, tricks. I do tricks, not magic. Remember, I'm a tinker, not one of those capes that thinks their powers are real magic."

"A tinker... you're a tinker and you make... magic tricks."

She grinned, full force so that I could see her teeth. "Now you're getting it, dude! But uhhh," the girl nodded past me. "I can't tie all those guys up."

Turning, I saw another half dozen men coming our way and paled. I hadn't even kept hold of the bat that I'd used against Oni Lee and his men, what was I going to do now?

In the next second, however, black smoke enveloped the rushing men, blocking them from our sight. Immediately afterwards, one of Bitch's 'dogs' landed hard on the ground in front of us with Tattletale perched on it. "You girls need a lift?"

"Sweet!" The magician-girl immediately clambered onto the beast, laughing with delight before offering her glove covered hand to me. "C'mon, dude, imetay to amscray."

In the days and even weeks that followed, I would have no idea what possessed me to take her offered hand and let her pull me onto that animal. It was stupid in so many different ways. I wasn't a part of this team, I wasn't even on their side. They obviously didn't need me to ride with them, and besides that, the girl these things belonged to had made it clear that she didn't want me on them.

Still, I let myself be pulled up and onto the beast. While the flashes of gunfire continued in the background, Tattletale gave me what felt like a long look deep enough to see all the way through me. Finally, she turned her attention front and called for the dog to go. In another instant, there was a whistle from some distance away and the dog leapt away from the ongoing battle. Flashes of light accompanied our departure, staccato bursts alongside the sound of guns themselves as the war continued without us.

That decision, made in the spur of the moment and without conscious thought, affect far more than just how I got away from that particular situation. It set the course for everything else that would happen to me from then on. Not that I had any inkling of that fact at the time.

Because honestly, how was I supposed to know that some of those flashes weren't from gunfire, but from the camera whose contents were already being uploaded to the most popular and populated parahuman message board in the world?

2-04 – Taylor

In the months that had passed since I was trapped inside my filth-filled locker, I had often thought that there was no further depth of loathing that I could sink to than the sensation of helplessness that ruled every facet of my life. Unable to enact any but the tiniest measure of free will upon my own body, and even that taking far too long to be of any use, I had thought that it was as bad as things could get. There couldn't possibly be any feeling worse than seeing my father kneel beside my bed and beg for me to give him some sign that I could hear him and then be utterly incapable of giving him what he wanted. Not even the locker itself had been as bad as feeling his tears against my skin as he kissed my cheek, yet being unable to do anything about it. He was right there, I could see and hear him as he clung to me, his body shaking from the force of his tears in spite of his every attempt to hold himself together. And yet I could do nothing for him. That was the single worst experience of my life.

Yet this, being rolled along the corridor in a wheelchair by people I barely knew on the way to certain violence was a fairly close second. I was just as much a prisoner as I had ever been, but now people were going to be fighting, possibly dying, because of my choice. From this point on, if Faultline or any of her people were hurt, it was my fault. I had asked her to help. It was my responsibility.

It was the right choice, I was confident of that much. Lung's thugs would have free reign over as many hostages as they wanted if someone didn't stop them, and Faultline's Crew were the only real candidates here. It was them or these sick and injured civilians. No contest there, even if Faultline was nice to me. Pragmatically speaking, her people could stop a lot more deaths and injuries from happening.

But that didn't help my mounting frustration with myself. Yes, it was my choice that had brought Faultline and her people to this, but I didn't want to lay here and be helpless. What kind of cape, what kind of parahuman became less capable after they gained their powers? What sense did that even make? If I was a cape, I had to be the worst, most pathetic one in existence.

I was so frustrated and full of loathing, in fact, that I couldn't stop my power from switching my vision. I felt it coming on, but before I could focus on trying to hold it back, my view had suddenly jumped.

Now instead of seeing a wide angle view of myself being rolled hurriedly down the corridor by Nurse Teddy as he followed Faultline, Gregor, and Emily, I was staring down the targeting scope of a rifle.

Calm. I breathed in and then out smoothly, letting the rifle scope dance across parking lot below the roof where I was perched. The crosshairs passed over the rampaging Lung as Assault and Armsmaster worked to hem him in as much as they could, but didn't dwell long. I felt a rush of anger and frustration as the crosshairs centered on the gang leader, as temptation to pull the trigger itched at me. But I forced the feeling away and moved the sights onward to another target. There was no point to shooting the monstrous figure, not when he was amped up this much. Instead, I brought the head of one of the ABB soldiers that I could see through the hospital entrance. He was waving a gun and shouting at somebody. A single squeeze of the trigger sent a shot through the glass that put him down.

The shock in that moment of actually seeing a man, even one of the ABB, shot to death knocked me out of the sniper's point of view and back into my all-around vision. Disoriented as I was, it took a moment for me to realize that Faultline was crouched down in front of my chair, talking to me.

"-down the stairs to meet them." Her voice was terse, clearly accustomed to giving commands that would then be obeyed. Unfortunately, I had tuned out so I had no idea what she had been saying or what had happened in that time. Damn it, why was I so useless!? There had to be something I was missing, something I could do so that I could actually affect things.

Before I could lament my condition any longer, Gregor replaced Faultline in front of me. I simultaneously watched his face and the back of his head with my strange wrap-around vision while the man carefully lifted me out of the chair. "Apologies, Miss Hebert. Were it but possible for your noble steed to be more stallion and less... jellyfish, we would gladly provide." His voice was careful and precise, with a bit of an accent that I couldn't place. There was also a slight pause while he spoke, the man obviously taking the time to choose each word carefully that showed that he wasn't completely comfortable with the language. In spite of the unfamiliarity, however, there was a certain disarming kindness and politeness to his voice. That, as well as his gentle touch as he settled my slight figure into his arms were at odds with his outward appearance. Most people looking at the bald, obese man with shell-like scabs randomly dotting nearly transparent skin probably would have dismissed him as a thug at best.

The younger woman, Emily, went to the nearby door first. It was the stairs, which explained why they had taken me out of the chair. Behind Gregor, Teddy was gripping the handles of the chair tightly, his face lined with worry as he kept glancing from me to the windows where the fighting was still audible.

With Emily and Faultline leading the way, and Teddy bringing up the rear with the wheelchair, Gregor carried me down the stairs. They moved quickly and quietly from the fifth floor to the fourth, then toward the third. As they neared that landing, however, my wide-angle view showed one of the ABB members approaching with his shotgun held high, checking each room on his way through. Patients he left alone, but any nurse, doctor, or orderly he encountered was ordered at gunpoint to go down the hall in the other direction. Clearly they were being rounded up for some reason.

Realizing that the man was going to reach the stairwell right after we passed it, thereby putting an armed gunman right at our backs, I struggled to lift my hand to warn them. Just under a minute was my absolute best time, and that was still way too long. I needed to help! I needed to warn them before the man with the gun reached the entrance to the stairs and ended up coming out right behind us.

Yet, to my surprise, Emily didn't pass the landing and keep going. She stopped and cocked her head as though listening. Then she stepped past the door to put herself on the opposite side of it, holding a hand up for the others to wait while she continued to listen carefully. A second later she held up a single finger before using two fingers to simulate someone walking and nodded to the door.

Nodding once, Faultline moved to the opposite side of the door. The two of them waited there silently for another handful of seconds before the door began to swing open.

The poor Chinese man stepping into view with his shotgun held lazily to one side never saw it coming. Faultline's hand lashed out to brush over the gun and there was some kind of flash of red and blue energy before the weapon fell apart into several pieces which proceeded to clatter to the floor.

As he turned toward Faultline, Emily stepped up behind the man and put one hand on each of his shoulders while kicking the door shut once more.

"Do you know who I am?" Faultline asked the man point blank. When he focused and had a good look at her, he paled a little before nodding quickly. Once he did, the woman continued. "Good. Then you know I'm not lying when I tell you that the person standing behind you is capable of spitting liquid fire straight into the back of your skull if you don't do exactly as you're told."

The man stiffened at the threat but eventually gave a reluctant nod, after which Faultline went on. "You have anything to bind yourself with? Handcuffs, zipties, whatever?"

"Fuck you, bitch." The man spat the words impulsively. "Lung will rip you all apart." I thought there was something weird about the movement of the man's mouth, but couldn't figure it out.

"What'd he say?" Emily asked while keeping her hands on the man's shoulders.

Faultline shrugged one shoulder. "About what you'd expect. He says that Lung is going to kill us."

I was confused. Why did Emily need the other woman to tell her what the man had said when she was standing right there? She could hear just fine, as evidenced by her noticing the man approaching the stairway to begin with.

"Lung is not here to protect you," Faultline informed the man. "Only we are. Would you like to die now, or do what you're told and live to fight another day? It's your choice, but we are in a hurry."

The man's shoulders slumped somewhat at that and he muttered, "Left front pocket."

"Good boy," Faultline praised him before focusing on the other woman. "Left front pocket, he should have some kind of bindings."

What was going on? Why did she have to repeat what the man had said? Why was Emily acting like she couldn't hear? Focused as I was, it took me a second to realize the truth. It wasn't that Emily couldn't hear, it was that she couldn'tunderstand. The man had been speaking another language, Japanese probably. Faultline as well has been speaking that other language when she replied to him. Yet I had heard it in English. Or my head had translated it immediately. That's why I'd thought there was something odd about the man's mouth when he spoke. His lips weren't matching up with what I was hearing. Somehow, my power was giving me an instant translation of his words.

I would have preferred the amazing super power of being able to stand up and walk around.

Emily found the ties in the man's pocket and bound his wrists behind his back. Once that was done, Faultline reached out to take off the radio that was clipped to his belt and held it to his mouth. "Tell them that the second floor is clear." She looked to Emily then. "If he says anything else, flame him."

The button was pressed, and the man hesitated for only a second before dutifully reporting that the second floor had been cleared. An impatient voice demanded that he check the windows to make sure none of the PRT agents or cops were climbing up to get in that way, and to watch for snipers because Sasumu was already down. Faultline left the radio on long enough for their prisoner to acknowledge, then stuck it onto her own belt before nodding. "Second floor, go."

With Emily's hands steady on the man's shoulders to make sure he knew she was right behind him, they let him lead the way down to the second floor. I could already see that the area around the door was empty, but they still took the time to make sure by sending the bound goon through first.

I wondered why we were going to the second floor, a question I'm sure I'd have known the answer to if I hadn't been tuned to sniper-vision while Faultline was explaining it. My frustration with myself and the situation was growing worse by the second. Which wasn't helped when there was a sudden shout from the end of the hall, beyond the range of my vision.

Gregor sat me back down in the wheelchair that Teddy had been carrying, just as three ABB thugs came running into range of my vision. The first brought up a pistol and aimed at Gregor, but a sudden spray of liquid fire from Emily's mouth shot toward him and the man flailed backwards with a scream.

The second man was struck by a stream of liquid that Gregor shot from his extended hand which knocked the thug into the wall before hardening almost immediately, leaving him stuck there by an off-white shell that nearly covered his entire body.

The third man, meanwhile, stood back out of the way with his gun raised, shouting for them to get down. Before any of them had to deal with him, however, an orange blur flew in out of nowhere before slamming into the man. The blow knocked him to the ground, and then I saw what had hit him: a young man maybe a little bit older than me with orange skin, dark red hair that looked like he had just stepped out of the shower, and a long tail. That last part of the boy's anatomy flicked upward and over his own arm briefly, and I saw the glistening sweat that it wiped away. Then the tail went down to brush over the face of the fallen man while he was grabbing for the gun that he had dropped when he was hit from behind. As soon as the sweat-soaked tail made contact, the man's eyes rolled back and he stopped trying for the gun while a goofy smile crossed his face. He was clearly out of it.

"Newter," Faultline greeted the orange figure. "Any trouble getting Labyrinth inside?"

"Nah," he replied casually while looking over his shoulder. "We're good, right?"

Another figure entered the range of my vision, this one a female in a dark green robe that had a maze drawn on it, and a simple mask. The girl didn't seem to be paying attention to the people talking. Rather, her focus was on the wall beyond them. She stepped that way, hand outstretched toward it as though reaching for something that no one else could see.

Faultline's voice was kind, like it had been when she spoke to me. "I know we promised you the night off and it wasn't fair to go back on that. So are you okay, Labyrinth?" She waited a moment before repeating the question. Only when the distracted girl nodded did she move on.

Then Newter focused on where my body was sitting, taking a step toward the wheelchair. As he moved, that tail of his swept up to brush the face of the bound prisoner. "Heya," he waved with his hand and his tail simultaneously while the ABB goon dropped to the floor. "So you're the Hebert girl, huh?"

"Newter, this is Taylor." Faultline intoned while waving back and forth. "Taylor, this is Newter."

Some distracted, overwhelmed part of my brain noticed that, in spite of his orange skin, the boy was rather attractive. I might've blushed at his attention, if I'd been physically capable of it.

"Hey look," Newter pointed. "She's blushing."

Oh sure, that my body was actually capable of doing on command. Traitor.

Thankfully, I was distracted from my embarrassment by Faultline. "Okay, you," she looked toward Teddy, "will stay here with Taylor while the rest of us clear out the lobby." To me, she added, "I promised that we'd stop the ABB from taking over the hospital. Will you be okay waiting here while we do that?" She waited the fifty-four seconds before my right hand raised and then nodded. "Good, you should be safe here, but if anything happens..." She pressed what looked like a small cell phone into Teddy's hand. "Press the call button if there's trouble."

Pale-faced, Teddy gave a quick nod. "B-be careful, Ems."

Emily promised that she would be, and then they moved back to the stairs. By that time, my view area had widened enough that I could see a decent amount of the floor below us if I shifted my focus a little that way. Doing so revealed the entrance lobby where a handful of the ABB thugs were tipping over chairs and benches and piling them up a short distance from the doors to act as cover that they could fire from if the building was breached. The nearly headless body of the one who had been taken by the sniper explained why they were all staying well away from the windows and doors.

I could also see the hostages gathered in the middle of the waiting area. There were dozens of patients and hospital staff, with more arriving by the second.

I really hoped that Faultline and her people could do this without letting anyone else get hurt.

Sudden and utterly unexpected pain in my side snapped my attention back upward to where my body was now laying on its side. The wheelchair had been knocked out from under me and was sitting a few feet away, while Teddy scrambled backwards on the floor, his eyes on the three ABB thugs who were standing over us. He'd dropped the phone somehow, and was reaching for it.

Unfortunately, a fourth goon stepped into view from the other side and kicked the phone further away. "You trying to call someone, son of a bitch?" Some distant part of my brain acknowledged that he hadn't actually said the words 'son of a bitch', but some other language that meant the same thing.

Another of the ABB soldiers was crouched in front of my body, waving a hand in front of my face before flicking my cheek with his fingers. "Hey, Ji-hoon, I think we found a vegetable." He laughed obnoxiously and flicked my cheeks again.

"Leave her alone!" Teddy abandoned his reach for the phone and started to lunge that way, but a backhanded blow from Ji-hoon, the one who had kicked the phone away, put him back on the floor.

"You do this?" The thug gestured to the two gang members that were still lost in the effects of Newter's sweat. "You drug our friends, huh?" He slid a wicked looking knife from its sheath on his belt. "Maybe I cut out your eyes, see if you think it's funny then."

"You watch, carrot girl." The thug who had been flicking my cheek held my chin and turned my head toward the spot where one of the other ABB members had grabbed Teddy and was holding him steady as Ji-hoon advanced with his knife.

Fuck! No! I couldn't just fucking sit here and let this happen. Not this, not now! I was supposed to have powers? I was supposed to be a parahuman, a cape? What the fuck kind of cape was so fucking helpless she couldn't even try to stop something like this? What was the point of having powers if I couldn't help anybody?

Okay, body, you made me sit here while dad cried and begged for some kind of sign that I could hear him. You made me suffer through that. But not this time. Not this time. You are not going to sit here and let the friendly nurse who actually talkedto you like a normal person, who went out of his way to get you to people who could actually help and might have risked his job in the process, get maimed by these monsters.

You're a parahuman, Taylor, prove it. Move.

Move.

MOVE!

Something in my brain... clicked. My frame of view abruptly widened. I could suddenly see all the way up and down the hallway, into every room, and onto the floor both above and below us.

It was more than that though. It wasn't just that I could see everything, the information flowing into my head in that second was obscenely detailed. Not only did I somehow know everything from the air pressure, to the temperature, to precise amounts of gases that made up the air around us, but that was only the tip of the iceberg. Numbers filled my head, whichsomehow sorted through all of them. I could see exactly how each person's movement disrupted the air, slightly changing the pressure with each twitch. I could see exactly how one man's arm was going to move even before it did, just from the slightest change in pressure, and my brain somehow extrapolated that out to precise angles.

I could look at one of the men and suddenly be awash in information. I knew how old they were, everything they were carrying, what their clothes were made out of, even that one of the men had broken his arm badly a few years earlier and it had never quite healed right.

And most importantly of all... my hand was closed around the wrist of the man who had been flicking my cheek.

"Hey, yo, she ain't-" The man started to call out.

I saw the angle and the exact pressure that was needed, and my free hand lashed out to smack hard into the man's throat. His words were choked off as he stumbled, eyes wide.

A simple thought brought my body to its feet. I was standing up. My field of vision still wasn't inside my own eyes, but I wasstanding. That in itself was an act that should have made me sob from joy. Yet I was angry. I was livid and for once, foronce, I wasn't just going to sit back and take it. Not this time. Not now.

The other men had noticed what was going on. One of them, the nearest, yanked a pistol from the back of his pants. He aimed, but it was sloppy. From my all-encompassing view, I saw the exact path the bullet would take. Not only that, but as wide as that vision was, I could even tell that it wouldn't hit any bystanders. In that single split-second, my brain somehow processed where the gun was pointed and calculated the trajectory of the bullet. I saw and understood where it would hit the first time, where it would ricochet to, and then where it would embed itself.

I didn't even flinch as the man pulled the trigger. He aimed again. This time he would have hit me, but I saw where the bullet would go and instinctively knew the precise movement that I needed to make to avoid it. Just before the trigger was pulled the second time, my body jerked sideways, twisting just enough to let the trajectory of the bullet pass between my raised arm and left side.

Again he fired, and again I avoided it simply by knowing exactly where the bullet was going to go.

"Settle down, cunt!" The guy with the knife was pressing it closer to Teddy. "Or he gets-"

I took two quick steps sideways, bringing the angle of the man's gun onto the trajectory that I wanted. I could see where the bullet was going to go, and I manipulated his aim until it lined up correctly. He fired again, and again he missed. This time, however, the bullet didn't bounce away harmlessly. Instead, it ricocheted off of the wall and went straight through Ji-hoon's wrist. He howled and dropped the knife.

Finally, the thug with the gun got tired of shooting and came straight at me, swinging the gun like a club with a wild yell. Again, I saw everything I needed to. The angle of his approach, his speed, information that would have overwhelmed most people filled my head. I saw and simultaneously understood everything I needed to do to disarm him.

First, I instructed my body to sidestep his lunge. A quick smack of my hand against his wrist at a precisely calculated angle and force knocked the gun from his grasp and into my own waiting hand. My body spun around, letting the man pass me by while a nudge from my foot to his ankle sent him sprawling headfirst into the wall where he lay and whimpered, cradling his wrist.

I continued turning, gun outstretched until the next angles lined up correctly. I pulled the trigger twice in short succession. The first bullet hit the knife on the ground and sent it skittering away from Ji-hoon, who had been reaching for it with his uninjured hand. The second shot, meanwhile, rebounded off the floor, hit the wall, rebounded off of that and then struck the third goon who had been rushing up from behind my body. It hit him in the shoulder, making him fall with a howl of pain.

The man that I had struck in the throat was running away, trying to escape down the hall. My powers judged his speed and then I lifted my leg and gave the wheelchair a kick. The chair rolled down the hall at an angle that sent it into the fleeing man's path just in time for him to plow right into it. He went down in a heap and groaned, but didn't get up again.

Ji-hoon by then was cursing rapidly. "What the fuck are you?" He demanded while holding his injured, bleeding hand.

His answer came not from me, but from Teddy as the nurse clubbed him over the head with one of the fallen guns. The goon collapsed, leaving the hallway clear of threats.

"Taylor!" Teddy was staring at me with wide eyes. "You're... you're okay! You can move. You can—Taylor?"

His voice was fading away, and I felt my hands go numb once more. The gun fell from my limp grasp, and then my body collapsed as my field of view shrank back to what it had been before, all of the extra information fading back to background noise. Whatever had clicked in my head was gone now that the threat was dealt with. I heard Teddy calling my name as he sprang to catch my falling body, but my vision was already fading out.

I was suddenly tired... so very... very tired.

2-05 – Sophia

Why were people so fucking useless? Twenty minutes after I call in for the police to come play taxi for the wannabe muggers or whatever they thought they were, and I was still sitting here playing babysitter. Christ, how hard was it to send a god damn squad car, toss them in the back, and drive them to jail. I already did all the actual work for the fat, lazy fucks. The least they could do was stop double fisting hoagies long enough to take these jackasses off my hands so I could get back to it.

Not long ago, I would've just made sure the thugs couldn't get away and booked it. Waiting around was boring and stupid. Even now, I didn't exactly know why I was staying. I grew more annoyed with each passing minute, both at the cops' continued failure to show up, and my own inability to understand why I didn't just fucking tell the girl I'd saved to let the cops know what happened and leave. It wouldn't have been the first time that the police had to track me down later to get my statement. Yet I stayed, even as my annoyance at that fact continued to grow.

At least Little Miss Would-Be Victim had gotten the message and stopped trying to talk to me after the third time that I responded to her babbling with a grunt. She was sitting nearby, talking excitedly on her phone with her mother about meeting up with her at the police station after she gave her statement.

I was sorely tempted to tell her to have her mother turn on the news and find out if every cop in the city spontaneously came down with an even more severe case of sucksattheirjobitus than usual.

The wait was made worse by the fact that I stupidly checked my phone messages. Or rather, the lack thereof. Most of the messages on the conversation screen were from me to Emma, trying to set a time for us do something, with the latest being a short update on my route for the evening in case she wanted to meet up later and get something to eat. She'd responded a couple times, but always to say she was busy, or her parents wouldn't let her go out, or she had work.

Switching school sucked ass. When I first heard they were splitting us up and moving me to Arcadia, I'd known it would be bad, but not like this. Madison never talked to me, which is why I was still convinced that she had been the one who ratted us out. And even though Emma still at least talked to me, she was busy or grounded so often she might as well live in a different state.

"Shadow Stalker, this is Armsmaster. Give me your current location."

Jumping slightly as the sudden voice cut into my brooding thoughts, I scowled before hitting the button that would make my communicator work. "Same place I've been for the past twenty minutes. Waiting for someone with a car to come pick up these lowlifes." I kicked one of the slumbering men in the side.

"Twenty-one words, and not one of them was an answer to my question." The uptight tinker's voice was hard. It was always hard lately. He and fat old Piggyfuck were always pissed off at me lately. I had thought that it was bad back when I was first forced into the Wards, but that had been a picnic compared to the microscope that those two had stuck me under for the past couple months. They wanted an accounting of everything I did during every minute of my day. Literally, I was supposed to write down my activities with time notes into a journal and turn it in at the end of each week. And they were checking up on me in other ways, I was sure.

Not that there was any reason for me to lie anyway. I wasn't really doing anything outside of this and all the extra work Piggyfuck had me doing at the PRT HQ. The fat bitch got off on ordering me around, making me do fucking janitorial work, mostly involving cleaning up the bathrooms and offices to her specifications. She even made me wear one of their ugly brown jumpsuits while doing it. Sure, I got to keep my mask on, but all that did was make it crystal clear that Shadow Stalkerwas the one scrubbing that toilet. I would've preferred the anonymity of being some random teenager on work detail. But Piggyfuck knew that, so she made sure that I had to do the work with the mask in place. Everyone in the building knew I was in trouble, that I had been on the razor's edge of ending up in Juvie.

Not that all the extra work mattered. At least it was something to do besides sit at home or go to school. Outside of cape stuff, those were pretty much my only options. My mom hadn't spoken more than a dozen words to me in private since everything went down, and about half of those had been 'don't you blame Steven for your problems.'

Shaking off those dwelling thoughts, I forced myself to respond as simply as I could manage. "Fine, I'm on Dalben and Twenty-First, across the street from the mattress store. Do you-"

Before I could finish asking if he wanted directions, Armsmaster interrupted with a blunt, "Hold." Then the line went dead for a few seconds before his voice came back. "We have a Lung situation. We're working to contain him, but it's escalating and some of his men have taken hostages."

"Lung?" I pushed off the wall, ignoring the wide-eyed look that the name brought to the civilian girl's face as she stared at me. "Why didn't you say so before? I'm on my way."

That flat voice returned. "Believe it or not, we're not quite so far down our list of contingency plans that we've reached 'chuck a fifteen-year old girl with a crossbow and delusions of grandeur at him and see what happens.' If you see us reach the plan where we're trying to use Battery in a princess dress to lure him out of the city after he's gone full dragon, that's when you can consider yourself on deck."

Jeeze, someone was in a snarky mood. I opened my mouth to snap out a retort, but something made me stop myself and take a breath first. Swearing at the guy in charge of the local Protectorate probably wasn't going to help anything, as cathartic as it might have felt for a second. Somehow, I made myself stick to a simple, "Then what do you want me to do?" And I managed it with minimal teeth grinding.

There was a brief pause, and I shifted anxiously from foot to foot before Armsmaster's voice came back. "There's also an Empire situation that we can't deal with right now. They're attacking a building in ABB territory, and there are civilians in the way. The rest of your team is already heading there. Meet up with them and get the civilians out of harms way. That's the priority, Shadow Stalker, not fighting. Aegis is in charge. You listen to him, got it? Any problems and I swear you'll have console duty for a month."

"Yeah, yeah." I was just happy to leave the thugs behind. "I'm on my way, just give me the location."

Before I could take off after getting the address, the girl spoke up. "Hey, you're not really going to fight Lung are you?" Her eyes were still wide as she stared at me.

I hesitated, inwardly kicking myself for it before shaking my head. "No, just another situation."

"Oh." She paused for a moment as if considering that before giving me a thumbs up. "Well, good luck! And thanks again for... this." Her hands gestured around at the unconscious men.

For a second, I said nothing. Then I reached under the cloak of my costume and came out with a few of my tranquilizer bolts. "Here," Dropping them into her hand, I pointed to the nearest of the men. "Any of them start to move, stick one of those in them. It should last until the cops show up."

Before she could say anything else, I turned and entered my shadow state while leaping up, going in and out of it to bounce off the nearby walls in order to get higher so I could travel faster.

The Empire, huh? Good. No one gave a fuck if I kicked the shit out of them. And maybe, just maybe, I'd lose myself in the fight long enough to stop picturing Taylor Hebert's broken, traumatized and empty face for more than five minutes for one time since she was pulled out of that fucking locker.

Scion knew that hadn't happened so far.

---

It wasn't hard to find the buildings that the Empire was attacking. All I had to do was follow the sound of all the gunshots. By the time I arrived, the rest of the Wards were already on the outskirts of the back lot behind the factory, and I took a second to watch them. Triumph's recent graduation to the Protectorate had left pseudo-Brute Aegis in charge as the oldest, though he'd only be the leader for a short time before he too moved on.

Gathered around Aegis were Vista, Gallant, Clockblocker, and Chronicler. The last was the other major team shake-up beyond Triumph's graduation, a recent transfer that was supposed to make up for Kid Win's family moving out of town a month earlier. All of them glanced up as I arrived before looking away. While Armsmaster and and Piggot were doing what they could to work me to the bone, my supposed teammates had spent the last couple of months giving me the cold shoulder. They didn't speak to me any more than they had to outside of training or in the field. Chronicler was the only one who didn't know much about the situation, but even he rarely said much to me.

I'd tried to lie to myself and say that they were afraid of me, but it never worked.

"Okay," Aegis spoke up a little louder, a concession to my presence. "We've got three streets to evacuate." Pointing to a small makeshift diagram he'd drawn into the dirt with his toe, he went on. "The two factories are here. Then there's this street to the west, and these two streets to the east and north-east. We need to get the civilians clear of those areas before this gets even worse than it already is."

He pointed to Clockblocker and Gallant. "You two take the west street. Any Empire soldiers get in your way, use Gallant to corral them so that Clockblocker can put them in time out."

I stood there, a few yards away from the rest of the others, and watched silently as we were divided into teams. Vista and Chronicler went to the first street to the east, while Aegis partnered me with himself.

"Priority is the civilians, guys." The emphasis in his words was unmistakable. As was the fact that he was looking in my direction. "We get them out of danger. Any questions?"

"Nope," I couldn't resist. "Save civilians. It's kind of what we do, right? We're heroes."

For a long moment after I spoke, none of them said a damn word. Then Vista spoke, her quiet voice breaking the suddenly even more uncomfortable silence. "Not all of us." The kid actually stared straight at me while she said it, unflinching and uncompromising. Then she turned on her heel and started away without another word. Chronicler joined her belatedly as a flick of Vista's hand shrank the space in front of her. Two steps later and they were gone.

No one corrected her. No one reprimanded her. No one said a single word about it save for Gallant, who started to speak after looking at me silently for a couple of seconds. "I think-"

Before he could continue, I shook myself and started to move. "What the fuck are we still standing here for? You trying to play 'evacuate civilians' on hard mode or something?" Without waiting for a response, I started to dash across the field, using my shadow state to go faster with each leaping bound.

What the hell did Vista know, anyway? I was a hero. I put my life on the line every fucking time I went out here. Yeah, I went over the line with Hebert. But it's not like I meant for her to get that hurt. I wasn't some cackling villain. I still did the job, I still risked my neck, same as her. What right did she have to act all morally superior? We were both out here, doing the same job, weren't we? What was the difference between what she did and what I did? And why did that last question seem so important?

The three boys exchanged quiet words briefly before Aegis caught up with me. He said nothing aside from telling me to go solid. When I did, he caught me under the arms and carried me off the ground. It was faster than my shadow-state running, and we reached the street in question within a few seconds.

As soon as we came within sight of the street, a handful of Empire goons became visible. They were crossing the street toward the factory parking lot, laying down heavy suppressive fire toward the windows of the factory itself. At the same time, the ABB people within were shooting back. Bullets were flying in every direction. The whole street was a god damn war zone.

And these houses were occupied. There were people in these homes that were providing the backdrop to this battle. I could hear babies crying inside several of the houses, and several people kept poking their heads through curtains or above windowsills. These motherfuckers were going to end up getting a hell of a lot of people killed at this rate.

My first instinct was to jump to my shadow state and simply drop without saying a word to Aegis. Why the hell did I need a babysitter anyway? But I didn't. Instead, I stopped myself and spoke. "I've got this, drop me on them." He started to object, and I pressed on. "Look, you can lead those people out the back and tank anything you might run into. If I try to lead them out and run into anything, the best I can do is go insubstantial at them, which won't help any fucking civilians that are with me. I go down there now, I put down those guys and maybe the ones in the factory turn their attention somewhere else. That gives you time to get the civilians here out of the way."

Still, he hesitated as if trying to either figure out why I was explaining things that way, or to find the flaw in what I was suggesting. Maybe he was trying to figure out if I was lying to him.

"Fine," Aegis finally replied tersely. "But be careful, got it?" I had a feeling he wasn't telling me just to keep myself safe, but also (and probably more importantly) to make sure no one else got hurt. "Put them down, make sure the coast is clear, then meet back up."

"Yeah, yeah." Rather than wait for him to release me, I jumped to my shadow state and let myself fall.

I plummeted toward the nearest group, pulling both crossbows from their holsters and shot at two of the men. The first missed, but the second man went down a second before my boots smacked into the shoulders of the third. He was knocked sprawling to the ground with me on top of him. I shot a bolt into his back just to be sure before rolling off and onto the pavement.

One of the men tried to smack the crossbow out of my left hand, but I went insubstantial again for a brief second before sweeping around into a kick that knocked his leg out from under him. At the same time, I pointed the crossbow in my right hand backwards and triggered a shot that hit the man that I'd missed the first time, while I was falling. That one hit and he went down.

Smirking to myself, I was just turning to check on what the gunmen in the factory were doing when excruciating pain abruptly exploded into my right leg. A cry of surprise escaped me and the crossbows fell from my hands. I hit the ground, looking back in disbelief to see a long, wickedly curved knife shoved through the muscle of my thigh. It was held by the hand of the man that I'd landed on, the man that I had deliberately shot with a tranquilizer bolt. There was no way he should be moving this soon.

The knife twisted again, and I cried out, instinctively jumping into my shadow state. Which helped, but I still couldn't stand. The pain in my leg was too great.

The man holding the knife where my leg was looked up, and I finally got a decent look at him. He wore a jacket and a baseball cap, but beneath those was a man in a costume that I recognized.

Alabaster. Fuck. That explained why the tranquilizer hadn't kept him down. His body reverted back to its pristine state every few seconds or something. I wasn't sure about the specifics, and the pain in my leg was making it hard to think too much about it.

"My apologies," he spoke politely, the tone at odds with the viciousness that he had stabbed me with. "This just wasn't your fight."

"Yeah? Well it's not over yet." I growled the words. "In case you missed it, you can't stab a fucking shadow." I ignored the pain and gestured to my leg where the knife still was, not that it was accomplishing anything.

Alabaster inclined his head. "Your disagreement is noted and your enthusiasm admirable," his polite, careful tone was the same as before. "But I believe it is." His thumb moved over the hilt of the knife, and I saw it brush a button.

Wait, button? On a knife? Just as that thought struck me, the clearly tinker-designed knife was enveloped with electricity. The pain of that coupled with that of the stab wound drove all conscious thought from my mind.

Distantly, I heard someone screaming, realizing only belatedly that it was me. I was back in my solid form, lying half-conscious on my side. Something jabbed into my arm, and I recognized one of my own tranquilizer bolts. My vision swam then while Alabaster strode easily away from me and toward the factory, dropping my crossbow on his way.

And yet, the last view that I had as I lay there on my side wasn't of the man who had stabbed, electrocuted, and then shot me with my own tranquilizer bolt. Instead, I saw one of the Undersider's massive dogs running away from the scene. I couldn't see that son of a bitch Grue, but his partner in crime Tattletale was there alongside two other capes that I didn't recognize. One was dressed up like some kind of stage magician, while the other wore some red and black outfit.

"Fuck me..." My vision was already drifting in and out as the tranquilizer took hold. "There's more of them."

2-06 – Madison

It didn't take very long after I picked myself up from the ground before I realized who that group had to have been. The Undersiders weren't exactly major players, but they were the only people I could think of who matched the whole 'riding around on giant animals' thing. I had thought that those were suppose to be dogs though, and the thing that had nearly run me down hadn't looked the slightest bit like a dog.

The notion of going after them entertained itself in my head for about four seconds before I dismissed it. I had no way of catching up with them since my powers hadn't come complete with a jetpack. Jogging was pretty much my first and last method of transportation at this point.

Before I could decide what to do, and whether or not I should bother trying to call the authorities about seeing the Undersiders in the area, the sound of running feet drew my attention the other way. Something made me take couple steps back into the shelter of the nearby alley that I had nearly gotten creamed coming out of the first time. I pressed my back to the wall of the building and listened.

The footsteps, at least three or four sets of them, drew closer before stopping right on the other side of alley opening. I could hear the men panting and cursing under their breath, some in English and others in what sounded like Chinese or Japanese. So either this was a bunch of lost tourists out on an evening run, or the ABB had been chasing the Undersiders. Considering the condition of the Brockton Bay tourism department, I was going to go with the latter.

Keeping the words I was hearing in mind, I focused on my power and imagined the Japanese to English dictionary and phrase book that I had absorbed a few days earlier, just in case. The first few words didn't translate at all, and I was considering switching over to one of the other Asian language books that I'd brought along. But then I heard the shrill ring of a cell phone before one of the other men shouted a word that immediately translated as 'Wait.' The ringing phone was answered, and a short conversation ensued. I could only hear one side of it, and kept having to translate what I was hearing, but as far as I could tell the guy speaking was receiving orders from someone important.

He disconnected the call a minute later and spoke a long string of words that my connection to the Japanese book belatedly translated as something fairly close to 'Others chase other girl near factory. Oni Lee say to help trap girl to catch other children.'

They set off, back the way they'd come, while I frowned. There was some other girl that they'd been chasing, maybe one of the Undersider, and they had her near some factory? And now these reinforcements were heading back to help trap the girl so they could use her as bait or something.

Okay, so the girl was probably another villain. But did that really matter? After all, Sophia was technically one of the Wards, who were the so-called 'good guys', so I was pretty sure that what team someone was on didn't preclude them from being good or bad. And even if she was bad, she definitely didn't deserve whatever the ABB had in mind. I doubted that their idea of kidnapping and using her as bait would involve locking her in a room with a television and orders to entertain herself.

On the other hand, it was the ABB, what could I actually do? I couldn't keep my protective absorb field up indefinitely, because after the first few seconds, it became exponentially harder to maintain. The longest I'd managed to keep it up before collapsing had been about fifteen consecutive seconds, and that had been completely exhausting. I needed breaks in between uses, and from the sound of things there were going to be a lot of ABB soldiers at this factory. The idea of going there, of actually facing not just one bitter old drunk with a baseball bat, but a small army of thugs that would definitely be armed with things a hell of a lot deadlier, was terrifying. Who the hell did I think I was to consider it?

A bully. A bitch. A monster. That's who I was. That's who I'd been. That was the kind of person that I had let myself become, and in doing so I'd help to destroy an innocent girl's life. Taylor was broken, her mind shattered because of what I helped do. So who cared if this was dangerous? Who cared how scared I was? How scared had Taylor been of me? How much thought had I put into how she felt?

So no, I couldn't walk away from this, no matter how scared I was. I had to force down my fear and help this random girl, if I could. Whatever team she was on, she didn't deserve to be put through whatever torment the ABB had in mind. And if I died? Well, at least I would have done my best.

Though it felt like my inner turmoil and fear had lasted for hours, a quick peek around the wall showed that the departing thugs had barely reached the end of the block. Taking a breath, I produced the mask and jacket, hurriedly pulling them on before giving the running men another glance.

Okay, time to follow them and see where this factory was so I could help this girl they were after. And if I was lucky, I'd manage to do so without letting my fear get any worse than it already was.

Because 'was shot to death by the gang members she was following after they were alerted to her presence by the sound of the idiot peeing herself' would probably be the worst ending to the shortest vigilante career in the history of ever.

---

It wasn't hard to trail the ABB thugs back to the factory that they'd been talking about. Focused as they were on getting there, they weren't exactly paying a lot of attention for anyone that might have been following them. Still, I didn't want to push my luck too far so I stayed a decent distance back.

Plus, even if the men did get out of sight, there was always the sound of gunfire to show me the way. I'd been hearing it for several blocks, a mixture of automatic weapon fire and short, precise shots that echoed through the night. It sounded like some kind of war was going on. Was this really all over the ABB trying to catch one girl? That was insane. Plus it sounded like some of that gunfire was being directed back and forth at one another. This couldn't be as simple as chasing down one girl. Not with the amount of firepower that I could hear. So what the hell was going on?

Abandoning my pursuit of the men at the sound of even more gunfire, I decided to cut through a nearby yard. I needed to get a view of what was going on, and following this group was probably just going to lead me to an even larger one before they spread out to search. I needed to get closer.

The lights were off in the house that I came around the corner of, but I could hear people moving around inside. A baby cried, and then a woman hushed it frantically. Then, as if to punctuate the need for quiet, three quick shots rang out. They didn't seem to be directed anywhere near the place, but the sound was enough to set the baby within sobbing once again, and this time they were joined by a couple others from nearby houses.

Edging my way around to the front of the house, I peeked out to the street and stopped at the sight of several more gang members the road ahead of me. Except these guys weren't wearing ABB colors. Instead, they were dressed as members of Empire Eighty-Eight.

The Empire was here? Okay, well that explained where all the shooting was coming from. But wait, were they looking for the same girl that the ABB had been hunting down? Just how special was she?

Before I could even start to come to terms with any of that, a new sight caught my eye from above the running men. Two shapes were flying overhead. Or rather, one shape was carrying the other.

It wasn't until the flying one released the other that I was able to pick out who they were. The flying one was Aegis, from the local Wards team. The other was also a member of the Wards, but one that made a cold, empty feeling settle into my stomach: Shadow Stalker. Sophia was here.

She was also dropping straight toward the unprepared Empire thugs. For a couple of seconds, all I could do was stand there and watch in awe as she picked them apart. Even knowing what I did about who she was and the kind of person she happened to be, I couldn't help but be amazed by how fluid her movements were. She was the kind of badass that I could only dream of someday being.

The thought made me feel even more sick inside, and I started to turn away rather than risk a confrontation when one of the men who should have been down abruptly reached up and stabbed her in the leg. The suddenness of the attack left me in as much surprise as the sound of Sophia's cry of pain did. She was hurt. She was in actual pain.

Still, I stood frozen in indecision for a second too long. The man on the ground and the girl exchanged words before there was a spark of electricity. This time, Sophia actually screamed, a dark and ugly sound that didn't bring me any kind of satisfaction the way I'd thought Sophia being hurt might have. In reality, the sound of the other girl, my former friend, being in pain just made me sick.

Pushing myself away from the house, I started that way at a run. But I had a long distance to cover and the man who had stabbed Sophia had already taken one of her crossbows and shot her with a bolt.

The man tossed the crossbow aside and continued on across the street. I ignored him and ran straight for where the dark-clad girl lay sprawled on her side. Sophia was a bitch, but I couldn't just leave her lying there before at least making sure that she wasn't going to bleed out or anything.

As I drew near, I heard her mumble a curse. I was dropping to my knees behind her to check out how bad things were when Sophia mumbled again, "There's more of them."

More? Eyes wide, I lifted my head and looked around. But there were no more Empire goons nearby. Instead, all I could see, from all the way down the street, was a now-familiar massive shape. The Undersiders and their big 'dog' mount. They were down here too? Did that mean they had come to rescue their other member from this clusterfuck? I caught only a brief glimpse of the animal with three riders before it took off in a different direction.

But I didn't have time to think about that. My focus was on Sophia, who was clearly unconscious by that point. Pulling the bolt from her arm, I cast it aside and then looked at her leg. There was blood everywhere, and for a couple of seconds I panicked. What was I supposed to do now?

First Aid. I had a first aid kit as part of my collection. Summoning it with a thought, I opened the kit and then leaned closer to her wounded leg. Grimacing at the nasty sight, I started to lift the leg to elevate it while groping for the disinfectant in the kit.

Unfortunately, before I could do anything else, a sound much louder than the repeated gunshots tore through the air. It sounded almost like a bomb going off. With a yelp, I dropped Sophia's leg and the disinfectant, turning toward the factory where the sound had come from.

It wasn't a bomb after all. Instead, I could see the shattered remains of the factory wall and roof where a gigantic figure now towered over the field. I was staring at a beautiful blonde woman wearing some kind of valkyrie get-up who happened to be almost thirty feet tall. In one hand she carried a long spear, while the other hand held a struggling, shouting, cursing figure wearing some kind of gas mask.

Fenja, from the Empire. Or Menja. I always forgot which was which. And the girl clutched in her hand, was that the Undersider that everyone was so intent on finding? But if it was, why had the rest of the Undersiders already taken off?

I was pretty sure there was something important that I didn't understand about what was going on that would have explained everything really easily, but at the moment I was still completely confused.

And, more importantly, I was apparently sitting right in the middle of the giant woman's path. She started running with the struggling figure still clutched tightly in one hand, every step causing a minor earth quake as she came charging straight toward me.

My eyes widened in what probably would have been a comical fashion if I hadn't been so terrified. Without thinking, I hooked my arms under Sophia's and hauled her up to drag out of the way. For everything that my former friend deserved, being pancaked beneath a giant warrior amazon's foot wasn't one of them. Not for the first time, I wished that I could stick biological matter inside my invisible storage field. Instead, I had to do this the hard way, hurriedly dragging the limp figure while staring at the rapidly approaching giant.

I wasn't going to make it, and even if Fenja (or Menja) had cared enough to step over us, she wasn't paying any attention to where she was going. She was too focused on keeping her hold on the struggling figure in her hand while she sprinted to get away from the factory.

What could I do? What should I do? My mind raced in a nearly blind panic as those heavy, thudding steps drew closer by the second. We were still directly in her path.

It meant nothing. It was stupid and would have accomplished pathetically little. But before the sprinting valkyrie giant could reach us, I dropped Sophia and threw myself over her, covering the other girl's limp, unconscious and bleeding figure with my own body. Stupid, that foot would crush both of us together just as easily as it would crush one of us by ourselves. But covering Sophia's injured form was the only thing I could think of in that panicked second.

Boom. Thud. The next footstep was close enough to knock my teeth together. I braced myself, all-but openly crying as I clung to Sophia's limp body and told myself how stupid I was.

Then... a glowing blue energy shell abruptly appeared around us, and I heard the giant woman curse as she stumbled, the field having caught her descending foot.

Her foot came down on the other side of the field, and I looked up in shock in time to see her change course and run another way down the street. A second later, the blue field faded away.

"What the..." I managed before a new voice spoke up.

"You okay?"

Startled into yelping, I turned that way quickly, and found myself staring at the person who had rescued both me and Sophia from certain squishy demise. Shielder, a member of the local hero group called the Brockton Bay Brigade, stood there looking down at me. His blue hair matched the color of the visor and emblem on his otherwise white bodysuit.

Beside him there was a woman with black hair who wore an outfit that was similar enough to Shielders to mark them as being a part of the same team. Hers was white with wavy black lines. Her own visor was obsidian black to match the lines that adorned her uniform, but her mouth was set in a concerned frown.

"I... umm... thanks..." I managed to say.

"No problem," Shielder replied. "You a new Ward?"

"Uhh, no." I shook my head, feeling the shock of nearly dying settling in on me. "Not really. I umm... Oh I'm gonna be sick."

Fleur knelt beside me, quickly putting a hand on my side. "Take it easy, you're okay. You're all right. What happened to Shadow Stalker?"

Forcing the bile back down, I looked toward Sophia. "Stabbed in the leg... and tasered or something, I think. And he shot her with one of her tranquilizer darts."

"Shit, someone wanted her to stay down." Shielder was already kneeling there to check on her. "She needs some help, but I think she'll be okay."

"What's your name?" Fleur asked me, her calm voice steady enough to keep me from freaking out too much.

"Umm, uhh, M-" I started before catching myself. "Archive. I've been calling myself Archive."

"Archive," Fleur nodded. "That's good. You were very brave, Archive. We saw what you did, what you were willing to do. If we hadn't noticed you dragging Shadow Stalker, we never would have seen her laying there. You saved her life. " Her hand squeezed my arm. "Are you sure you're okay?"

"I Ummm... I think so." I settled back and started to breathe a little more easily. "What about Fenja?"

"That was Menja," Fleur corrected gently. "Don't worry, Laserdream and Lady Photon are on it. You just sit and breathe. Take it easy. We've got it from here."

It was true. The gunfire had stopped, and I could see the other members of the Brigade scattered around the factory area, helping more members of the Wards settle things down. Lightstar and Manpower were both visible, herding a group of disarmed ABB troops into a circle.

In the background, I could hear Shielder calling for Panacea to come help Shadow Stalker. Which meant that she would be awake soon. Pushing myself up onto shaking feet, I rose.

"Hey, take it easy," Fleur cautioned. "Are you sure you can stand?"

"I'm not hurt," I promised. "I'll be okay. I just..." Needed to get away, needed to get out of there before they woke up Sophia. I couldn't be around her, couldn't risk it. "I've gotta go."

"Okay, well... be careful." Fleur reached out to squeeze my arm. "I meant what I said, you were very brave to throw yourself on top of her like that."

After swallowing thickly, I nodded before backing away. After staring at the fallen Sophia for a few more seconds I turned and ran the other way.

I hoped that the Brigade could figure out what the hell had been going on tonight, because I still had absolutely no clue. Nor had I really accomplished much by being there.

But hey, at least I didn't throw up.

2-07 – Emma

To say that Bitch was upset to see me riding one of her dogs again would be an understatement. I'd barely slipped off the animal once it came to a stop some distance away from the factory where all the fighting was happening before the sound of rushing footsteps made me spin around in time to see the dog-masked girl coming right up behind me. Before I could say anything, she extended her arms and shoved me hard. I went stumbling back and tripped, landing hard on my backside with a yelp.

"Told you, stay-" The girl made a motion to lunge at my prone form even as her name was shouted. Not willing to just let her land on me, I jumped into my time-freeze. Bitch was frozen in mid-leap, her fist cocked back to punch me the second she landed.

Rolling out of the way and coming back to my feet, I took in a breath while letting time go back to normal. The angry girl landed hard on the ground where I had been, punching down with a fist that hit concrete while continuing her shout. "-off my dog!"

I held my hands up placatingly. "Look, I'm sorry. I just..." Trailing off at the sound of growling, I blinked over to see twoactual dogs, a Rottweiler and a German Shepherd stalking closer to me.

Before they could get any closer, however, a heavy black cloud settled in over them, and Grue put himself between me and the other girl. "Bitch, get a grip." He ordered her. "She didn't hurt Angelica." Once Bitch was focused on him, he dismissed the darkness around the dogs, leaving them looking a bit lost and uncertain for a second before they ran to join their mistress.

"Seriously, dude, chill." The girl in the magician's outfit appeared then, extending a hand down toward Bitch to help her up. "We're all on the same side here, remember?" The half-mask left her mouth uncovered, so her easy smile was visible. "One for all and all for kicking ass and making bank."

Glaring at the hand being offered to her briefly, Bitch shook her head and climbed to her feet without the assistance. "No, she's not. She's one of them." Her voice was accusing as she stood there flanked by her two ordinary sized dogs, with the big one, Angelica apparently, standing behind her.

"What, a hero?" The magician turned to give me a considering look for a second before nodding. "Yeah, I guess I should've known that. You do have that dazzling 'rescuing damsels' look."

"It, umm..." I hesitated uncertainly for a second. "That doesn't bother you?"

She shrugged. "Nah. I mean, you could try arresting me if you want, but I have a habit of liking that sort of thing. Besides, fair's fair, so when I get out of it, it'll be my turn to tie you up. And I know some really interesting knots." Somehow, even with her eyes covered, I knew that she had winked at me.

Even as my face grew red to match the color of the lenses that covered my eyes, Grue started to talk. "The point is-" He stopped as the magician's words sank in and gave her a brief double-take before clearing his throat to continue. "Err, the point is, she helped us. She didn't have to, but she did. So calm down, we couldn't just leave her behind back there after she ran right in to help save one of us."

Bitch looked like she wanted to object to the 'one of us' remark, but remained silent. After glaring at me for another moment, she turned away and moved to Angelica. The other two dogs trailed after her.

"Sorry about that," Grue turned to face me. "You didn't deserve that. Thanks for your help, uhh..." He trailed off for a moment before asking, "What do you call yourself, anyway? We never found out."

I blinked a couple times at the question, shifting uncertainly. "Oh, I umm, I never really decided."

It was Regent who spoke next, the renaissance-dressed boy emerging from around the corner of the nearby building. "Didn't decide on a name before running out to play hero? Isn't the name supposed to be pretty important? I mean, how else are they going to know what to name your cereal after?"

He'd lost me with that, and I shook my head. "Cereal?"

His hand waved vaguely. "Yeah, you know, Sugar Frosted MegaHerO's or whatever, the breakfast of champions. The whole reason to be on the other side, all that tasty corporate sponsorship. Can't really get that if you're a villain. Don't get me wrong, no judging. I considered it myself. But I just like my precious Froot Loops too much to risk competing against them." He let out a lamenting sigh. "Oh the hero I could have been if I never listened to that Toucan."

"But," I protested, "I didn't choose to be a hero just to get cereal named after me."

"No?" Regent looked at me for a moment before shrugging. "Well, now I'm baffled."

"We'll explain it when you're older." Grue informed him before focusing on me. "No name, huh?"

I shrugged again, a little helplessly. "I'm not very good at coming up with that sort of thing, I guess. Every name I thought of is already taken."

"Oh jeeze, tell me about it." The magician girl sighed while shaking her head. "I go through all the trouble of coming up with the name that perfectly describes how ridiculously amazing I am, and it turns out someone already took it. I mean, the nerve of some people, you know?"

Curious in spite of myself, I asked, "What name did you try to take?"

Her grin was incorrigible. "Legend."

After recovering from a brief choking fit, I stared at her. "What—umm, what name did you go with?"

"Nimue," she replied while tipping her top hat to me. "Just call me Nimue. As in N, I, Mmmm, oooh, aaaayyye." For the last three letters she simply made noises of approval while giving me a thumbs up.

"Nimue," I repeated with a nod. "I'll remember. And uhh, Grue, Regent, Tattletale, and... Bitch." Boy did using that name make me flinch considering how little the other girl clearly thought of me. She gave no reaction however, focused as she was on her animals.

"You really should give yourself a name," Tattletale advised. "Otherwise the Protectorate might just start using another name for you, and good luck changing people's minds about what you want to be called once one thing gets around. Trust me, it's screwed over more than one person."

"Right, I'll umm, keep that in mind," I promised before shifting on my feet. "I guess I should umm, go now?" Shrugging vaguely, I added, "I suppose... next time we might be on opposite sides."

"Don't you worry, teleport-lass," Regent assured me. "We'll take it easy on you, for old time's sake."

I made a face at the name. "Teleport-Lass? Ew. No. You're right, I need to choose a name." Still feeling awkward about just walking away, I stood there uncertainly for another couple of seconds before nodding. "Anyway, thanks for umm, for getting me away from Oni Lee, even if it was a mistake. Good luck with the whole... ummm... villain thing, I guess."

Leaning closer to Grue, Regent stage-whispered. "She really is bad at being a hero."

Flushing at that, I froze time and let the red haze settle over everything. I took another moment to look at the group gathered there before turning on my heel to sprint away.

This was not how I'd expected my first night out as a hero to go.

---

The next morning was a school day. Actually, it was later the same morning, considering how late it had been when I finally got home. Which was a semantic point that my body made sure to remind me of repeatedly when my alarm went off. I managed to hit snooze twice before Mom came in to flip the lights on, open my blinds, and switch on the stereo that sat on the desk on the other side of the room. Her response to my groan of protest was to pat my bed with a cheerful, "Just think, only two more months of this before you can start sleeping in." Then she stole my pillow on the way out of the room.

Dragging myself out of bed, I yawned while staring at my bedraggled self in the mirror that was attached to my door. Jeeze, I looked like hell. My newly shortened red hair was sticking out in every direction, and there were visible bags under my eyes. Not so long ago, even the sight of myself this way would have freaked me out. That would have been the worst part of my day, on par with a national emergency. God, I'd been such a shallow bitch.

Running my hand back through my hair with a sigh at that thought, I grabbed my clothes for the day and headed out to the bathroom to take a long, hot shower. Hopefully that would be enough to wake me up so I didn't fall asleep in class.

After taking care of everything that I needed to in the bathroom and making myself look somewhat presentable, I headed downstairs to fix myself something to eat. I still wasn't feeling bright and chipper, but the shower had helped. As did the sound of the cereal filling the bowl.

"Froot Loops?" Anne asked curiously from where she was sitting at the other side of the table. "Since when do you have those? I thought you were supposed to be a die-hard blueberry bagel girl."

Looking down at the bowl, I flushed a little at the realization of why they had been on my mind before turning to take the milk out of the fridge. "I just had a weird craving, I guess."

Turning her attention back to her computer tablet, Anne shrugged and took a bite of her own toast. "Heard of weirder things, I guess. Like that thing last night, did you hear about it yet?"

Taking my seat at the table, I took a spoonful of cereal while shaking my head absently. "No, what?"

"There was a huge brawl last night," she went on eagerly. "Seriously, like, all the major teams were involved. The Protectorate was fighting Lung while some of the ABB got trounced by Faultline's Crew. Then the rest of the ABB were in some big fight with the Empire until the Wards and the Brigade jumped in on both of them. Even the Undersiders got involved. God knows what they thought they were doing."

"The who?" I blinked up at that uncertainly, even as a thought ticked at my brain. "Wait, you mean..."

"You know, those new guys with the big monster dog things," Anne explained. "Well, the PRT says they're dogs anyway. They're the ones that robbed the Ruby Dreams Casino a few weeks ago."

"That's their name!" I exclaimed suddenly, and probably too loudly. I'd been trying to remember what the group was called all last night and it had continually escaped me. Seeing the weird look that Anne gave me after that, I flushed and slumped a little before taking a bite of my cereal. "Err, I was talking to someone at school about the capes around town and we couldn't remember those guys."

Anne gave me a curious look for a second before shrugging. "Whatever. From the sound of things, you won't be forgetting their name for long. First there was that casino thing, and now they're going head to head with the Empire and ABB? Especially if they keep adding new capes."

"They weren't actually fighting them-" Near the end of my sentence I caught myself and pitched my tone to make it sound more like a question. "Were they? That just uhh, seems stupid for such a small group." Belatedly, I caught the last thing she'd said. "Wait, adding new capes?"

Shrugging once more, Anne turned the tablet around. "I dunno about fighting, but they were there. And yeah, turns out they already got two new recruits. See?"

She held the tablet up for me to look at the online article that she'd been reading, and I found myself staring at a perfectly clear photograph of myself in costume. I was front and center on the page seated on Angelica's back alongside Tattletale and Nimue. It had clearly been taken just after I let myself be pulled up onto the dog. Under the picture was the title of the article: Rookie Villains Join Undersiders.

Yelping, I grabbed the tablet out of her hand, my eyes wide as I blurted, "What?!" My eyes scanned the article quickly. Unknown cape, some kind of teleporter who created a red starburst pattern wherever she appeared or disappeared, new member of the Undersiders alongside some kind of magician cape.

"Uhh, are you okay?" Anne frowned at me. "You look kinda pale, Woody."

"Pale?" Mom entered the kitchen and reached out to put a hand on my forehead. "You do feel a little warm. I thought you just stayed up too late. Do you feel sick?"

"I... I..." Yes, I wanted to say. I felt sick because my attempt to be a super hero had failed so spectacularly that now everyone thought I was a villain, that I was actually a member of the Undersiders. Who had taken the picture? Just how good of a camera had they used? That photograph was so good we might as well have posed for it.

Finally, I shook my head. "I'll be okay." There was no way that I could stay home today. If I did, I'd end up being babied by my mother all day, and I'd never be able to take care of this. If there was any way to take care of it. What was I supposed to do, contact the Protectorate and say, 'Actually, I'm not a villain'?

Mom still sounded doubtful. "All right, but if you start feeling worse, I want you to let the office know, okay? I'll come pick you up. Actually, speaking of which." She looked toward my sister.

"I'll take her to school." Anne rolled her eyes and straightened. "Hurry up and finish your Froot Loops, Fruit Loop."

I'd lost my appetite, but I ate mechanically while scanning the article, feeling the food drop into my uneasily rolling stomach. My mind was reeling. Member of the Undersiders. The article linked to a topic on PHO, where I could see the forum members debating what my name was and what the limits of my power were. There was already several pages of discussion about whether I could take other people with me when I teleported, what the red starburst pattern that showed up when I used my power was, and how far I could teleport. A few people claimed to have seen me appear for brief seconds at various points along the route that I had taken to reach Nimue, and one person even had a much lower quality picture that had been taken of me stopping to get a drink out of the water fountain, clearly taken hurriedly from a cell phone.

Villain. They thought I was a villain. And why shouldn't they? After all, I had been running around with the Undersiders all night without even trying to stop them.

My personal lamentations faded however, as I noticed something else that was mentioned through the topic. "Wait, the Protectorate fought Lung at Saint Augustine's Hospital?"

Anne nodded. "Yeah, the ABB took over the hospital for awhile before Faultline's Crew got rid of them."

"Saint Augustine's?" Mom turned away from the sink at that. "Isn't that the hospital that Taylor's staying at?"

I nodded mutely. Suddenly I didn't care at all about my own problems. "Never mind about the ride, Anne. I can walk, I need the fresh air."

"Err, you're turning down a ride?" Anne frowned at that. "Are you sure you're all right?"

"I'll be fine," I grabbed my bowl and went to rinse it out. "Like I said, need the fresh air to wake up."

Mom hesitated, looking like she wanted to object but wasn't sure how to tell me not to get some exercise. "Okay, but like I said..."

"If I feel any worse, I'll tell the nurse." I dutifully promised before heading upstairs to grab my backpack. Instead of my books, however, I shoved the costume inside. I had no intention of going to school. My destination was the hospital.

I had to find out if Taylor was okay, and what exactly had happened there last night. Everything else could wait.

Interlude 2A – Prism

The squeak of a chair against linoleum startled Samantha Rowen out of her uneasy and uncomfortable sleep. The blonde girl jolted awake before immediately flinching at the pain in her neck that had grown from sleeping upright in the cheap medical wing waiting room chair.

Wincing when he saw that the squeak of the chair had woken her, Nolan Kelleher, better known to the world at large as Dauntless, winced. "Sorry about that," he apologized while settling his body into the seat with a groan. "Just had to get off my feet." His voice, as always, was a casual drawl that was at odds with the serious look in his tired gaze that was visible through the slits in his Spartan style helmet.

"It's okay." Samantha slowly pushed herself up and out of her own seat, grimacing first at the soreness and cramps in her muscles, then at the smell of the sweat-soaked costume that she wore as Prism. After everything that had happened the night before, she had come to the medical wing of the Brockton Bay Protectorate Headquarters, their floating fortress on the water, without showering or changing. Stupid, in retrospect, but she couldn't stand to go anywhere while they had injured members of the team.

With that in mind, while cracking her neck, she asked, "What time is it, anyway?" After yawning, she added, "And how are Armsmaster and Assault doing?"

"About half past six," Nolan answered while nodding toward the early morning light coming in through the window at the end of the hall. "Assault's still sleeping off the surgery. As for Armsmaster... eh, you know the big guy," Dauntless replied. "He's just pissed off that he's been sidelined. Doctor's orders have him locked in bed for now. Most they'll let him do is design with a sketch pad. He wants them to bring in Panacea and get him back on his feet."

"I take it she doesn't have any more ambrosia ready yet?" Samantha winced while thinking of just how irritated and short-tempered Armsmaster could get if he wasn't allowed to leave his hospital bed.

"Nah," Dauntless shook his head while plucking the helmet off and setting it in his lap. This deep in the medical wing of their headquarters, there wasn't anyone around who didn't have enough clearance to see their faces. It was kind of a necessity if they were going to be treated. "Apparently Lady Photon and Laserdream got hit pretty hard when Menja was making her escape with the ABB Tinker. Plus Clockblocker got nailed by Crusader. Those injuries plus the hit that Shadow Stalker took, and a few civilians that got shot in their own homes pretty much drained the kid's entire supply. They said it'll take her time to recover."

Samantha nodded in understanding. The Brigade and the Protectorate worked together fairly often, enough that she knew a good bit about the girl's power. It allowed her to dissolve any nonliving matter that she could hold in her hands into a sort of pudding-like substance. The denser the object, the more resulting material she received. The new substance itself was a blank slate that would accomplish nothing other than tasting pretty good. But if the girl touched and focused on it, she could 'attune' the stuff to heal a variety of injuries or illnesses. The downside was that the blank slate stuff went bad within a few days of being created. Worse, once the stuff was attuned to a specific injury or illness, that time dropped to only a few minutes. So it was impossible to stock up on or ship the stuff anywhere.

"Sorry, I shouldn't have fallen asleep and left you to deal with this stuff." It was her job, as Armsmaster's second in command, to handle all of this fallout.

Shaking his head once more, Nolan gave her an easy smile. "Don't stress. It was a long night for everybody. I got to the fight last, so I was still mobile."

"I take it Sam's in with Ethan?" She asked while starting to pace, her mind working through the various problems that they had to deal with. Now that she was awake, she was going to have to get to work.

The jokes about herself and Battery each having the same first name had been run through the gauntlet so many times by that point that Nolan didn't even bother to take a swing. He just nodded. "Yeah, docs said he'll be fine. They had to do some surgery to deal with the burns, but he was awake for a few minutes before the drugs knocked him out and seemed okay enough. He asked them if they could only heal half his face until Halloween comes so he can go as some old Batman villain."

That sounded like Ethan, and Samantha smiled briefly. "What about Rory?"

"He was heading out to get some real food last I knew." Nolan grimaced while rubbing his leg where he'd been gouged heavily by one of Lung's claws. "Made him promise to bring me back a cheeseburger. That was awhile ago, he should be getting back pretty soon."

"Right," Samantha rubbed a hand against the exposed part of her face before recoiling again at the smell. People repeatedly said that she was one of the few that completely pulled off the skintight costume look. At the moment, she was really wishing that she could have been one of the capes whose uniform consisted of looser clothing. At least sweating in that wasn't quite as bad. "I think I'm going to hit the showers and change while I have the chance. Let me know if anything else happens?"

"Will do," Nolan nodded before adding a little slyly, "And don't worry, I won't let Armsy know that you took a shower instead of coming up with a way to bust him out of medical house arrest."

"Hey, if he asks, I'll just point out that I do my best thinking in the shower." Samantha patted Nolan on the shoulder before heading out to get cleaned up. She'd take her time and enjoy it, because judging from the pounding they had taken the night before, she wasn't likely to enjoy much else today.

---

"So, do... any of you have anything to say for yourself as far as far as last night's utter fiasco goes?" PRT Director Emily Piggot's hard glare was directed at the conscious and relatively uninjured members of the local Protectorate two hours later. Without Armsmaster and Assault, that meant they were down to Prism, Dauntless, Battery, and Triumph standing in the woman's office at PRT headquarters. Battery hadn't wanted to leave her husband, but Ethan had apparently woken up enough to assure her that he would be fine. So she was here, but if Samantha was reading the other woman's body language right, she was also about a hair's breadth away from physically choking the PRT director. Especially considering the fact that they had left the Protectorate building where Ethan and Colin were specifically to cater to Director Piggot's dislike of actually going out to the floating base.

Rather than risk that kind of situation, Prism chose to get the director's attention on her instead. "Yes, there are some things that we should discuss about it. But before we do, I think something needs to be said." She waited until the woman's eyes were focused on her before continuing. "We are not here to be dressed down by you. We are not your team of Wards, not even Triumph. If you want to discuss things like adults and figure out what we can do to improve things the next time Lung goes on a rampage, then by all means, let's discuss it. But if all you're interested in doing is playing the blame game and talking at us like we're children, then we have other work to do."

For a long moment, Director Piggot glared at her. Samantha knew the woman didn't like her. Piggot hated the fact that someone she saw as a spoiled brat who wasn't yet twenty-one years old was second in command of the city's Protectorate team. But Armsmaster had chosen her, and the PRT had no say over those decisions. Prism herself had been uncertain about even moving to this city after she had graduated from the New York Wards a little over two years earlier. But Legend, her sponsor and mentor through the Wards experience, had asked her to do it as a favor for him so that he wouldn't feel quite as bad asking their local hero, Miss Militia, to transfer over to New York as his own second in command.

She was glad she'd done it, now. Brockton Bay, for all its faults, had become home quickly enough. Even in situations like this, where their efforts against the local criminal capes didn't go so well.

Finally, after a long stare that neither woman backed away from, Director Piggot made a dismissive noise. She tapped at three keys on the keyboard before using one hand to turn the monitor around so that they could see it. "All right then, 'like adults', explain to me why every local new source this morning is opening with articles like this."

Glancing to the screen, Samantha winced inwardly first at the picture of herself kneeling over an injured Armsmaster to check on his condition, then again at the bolded caption beneath that which read, 'Protectorate lose brawl with Lung at hospital.'

"We didn't lose," Triumph pointed out. "Lung retreated before anyone could finish the fight."

"He didn't retreat," Piggot snapped. "He found out that the Empire was stealing his tinker and took off to save her. We're just lucky he didn't reach them before his power ran out, or we'd be picking up even more pieces of the city than we already are. Do you have the slightest idea how much money it's going to cost to put that hospital back into working order? Hell, there's still patients missing. Some of them got scared and ran away or wandered off while they were trying to evacuate. One of which was supposed to be physically incapable of moving on her own! If all of them aren't brought back safe and sound, do you know what kind of liability that opens the PRT up to?"

Dauntless shook his head. "We didn't exactly choose where the fight went."

"Your job," Piggot informed him with a jab of her finger, "was to move the fight away from that hospital before it got that bad. Your job was to contain Lung's people and stop them from spreading out too much. Do you know why we don't have a whole pile of corpses to deal with? Faultline and her group. God only knows what the hell they were doing at that hospital in the first place. But if they hadn't been there, those headlines wouldn't be talking about you losing a brawl. They'd be talking about how you let dozens, if not hundreds of people die because you were too busy losing said brawl to keep those gang members out of that hospital."

Before any of them could respond to that, the woman continued. "And lest we forget, the other major story of what happened last night while the Protectorate was busy losing to a single parahuman: the mayor's niece was kidnapped. Would any of you like to be the next one to field one of his phone calls on that particular subject?"

"Oh would you just shut up already?" Battery finally snapped before Prism could respond to that. "Were you out there fighting Lung and his bullshit power? Were you out with the PRT and police squads that were taking back the hospital? Then shut up about it. Lung went toe to toe with Leviathan and survived. There were only six of us, two of whom are still in the hospital. You want that son of a bitch contained next time he ramps up? Then you figure out how to contain him."

Spinning on her heel, Battery stalked through the office door, slamming it behind her with enough force to rattle the pictures and awards on the walls.

Piggot shook her head and sighed after that. "The thing she needs to learn is-"

"No." Samantha pointed a finger at the woman. "What you need to learn is that you may be the big chief head honcho in charge of the PRT around here, but you don't put on a costume. You don't go out there and risk your life. You don't have a husband in the severe burn ward because he went out to risk his life. And here's the thing. If push comes to shove, who do you think the higher ups are going to move out of a city if you can't get along with the capes here, all the people with powers that you've pissed off because you can't get over your fucking issues, or you?"

Turning on her own heel then, she strode to the door with a gesture toward Triumph and Dauntless. "Come on, we've got more important things to take care of."

---

"I take it you're feeling better now?" A short time later, Samantha poked her head into Armsmaster's hospital room to find the man standing and adjusting the parts of his costume that hadn't been too badly damaged.

He gave the halberd a practice swing before nodding with satisfaction. "Yeah, Panacea made it by with some of her ambrosia finally. About time, I was starting to think that kid was taking the week off."

Rolling her eyes, Samantha pointed out mildly, "You were only confined to your bed for a couple hours, you know."

"Too long," he insisted before starting for the door. "Tell me where we stand."

"Well," she considered for a moment. "Piggot might be organizing a lynch mob for me personally, but other than that..." Samantha sighed. "Not much better. We still don't have any idea what set everything off last night. We don't even know who took the mayor's niece, just that whoever it was smacked the girl's father hard enough to knock him out for hours, and her mother never heard a thing."

"So we really have no idea where she is, who took her, or why?" Armsmaster didn't sound happy.

"Nope," Samantha admitted before sighing once more. "Nor do we know much about the new capes that showed up last night."

"What details do we have?" Colin asked while stopping at the main desk to scrawl his signature on an offered pad accepting his responsibility for dismissing himself from their care.

Holding up the computer pad that she had ready, Samantha showed him the picture taken of the girls on the back of one of Hellhound's mutated animals. "Two new villains. We have no idea what the one in the magician outfit can do. According to some eyewitnesses, she used a wand to blind someone and then ahhh, opened her sleeve and a bunch of scarves flew out to tie him up. There's a couple other similar reports from the last week or so. According to them, the girl said her name is Nimue."

"The Lady of the Lake," Colin murmured thoughtfully before nodding to the picture. "What about the other girl?" After asking, he started to walk down the hall once more, heading for his lab.

Samantha shrugged at that. "No idea what name she's going by. Seems to be a teleporter. We think she's limited to a relatively short distance, considering the fact that she kept popping up around town on a course that we plotted as being straight toward the factory where she met up with this Nimue girl and Tattletale. As far as we can tell, it's not that long of a distance, only a few blocks at most, but definitely not limited by line of sight. And she can cover a lot of ground quickly by teleporting one time after another. She can't, however, teleport with anyone else. At least we're pretty sure she can't. That's the only way Tattletale showing up with Hellhound's dog makes sense."

Nodding slowly as he stared at the picture, Colin finally spoke. "All right, we'll keep an eye on them. The Undersiders are small-time thugs. The Wards should be able to handle anything they do while we focus on Dinah Alcott." He looked up then. "What about the third new cape?"

"According to Shielder and Fleur, she goes by Archive. Powers are completely unknown. Apparently she left a first aid kit behind, but they said they'd give it back to her when they see her again."

"One on our side, then?" He sounded hopeful.

She nodded. "The way they tell it, she threw herself over Shadow Stalker when it looked like Menja was going to step on them."

Stopping briefly to glance at her as if that surprised even him, Colin considered. "Okay, make sure everyone knows to extend an invitation to the Wards to this Archive whenever she pops up again. If the Brigade doesn't grab her first, that is."

"Got it." Samantha nodded before hesitating. "You know Lung's gonna escalate again, and soon. The Empire stole his bomb tinker. He's gonna be out for blood."

Nodding, Colin stopped outside his lab. "Yeah. I have a few ideas about that, but I need time. Can you handle things for a few hours while I get busy?"

She smiled slightly at that. "Sure, what else are subordinates for? I'll keep a lid on things while you do your tinkering."

"Thank you," he grunted the words absently before stepping through the door into his domain. "With any luck, the next time Lung shows up, we'll have a way of dealing with him."

"I hope so," Samantha said quietly. "Because whatever her other faults, Piggot was right about one thing. We got our asses kicked last night."

"Next time," Armsmaster assured her with the confidence of a man who already had many ideas of how to make his statement factual, "things are going to be different."

Interlude 2B – Othala

"How did you lose your eye?"

The voice, coming after a long silence, startled Vanessa out of half-asleep state. She took a moment to adjust herself in the comfortable armchair before self-consciously raising a hand to the patch that she wore on the left side of her face. In the field, she let her hair cover the patch so that it wasn't quite as obvious. But she had pulled the hair back after they'd come in from retrieving the girl from her home.

She'd gotten a little sleep in the hours that had passed since they had abducted the child. But Kaiser wanted her or Rune to take as many of the shifts as possible, and the other girl had school to attend.

"You know most people would consider asking that to be rude," she pointed out while sitting straighter.

Across the room, Dinah Alcott lay half-buried under the blankets, watching her with a curious expression. Rather than look abashed at the remark, she simply replied, "Most people think kidnapping is pretty rude too. I thought we were already past social norms."

Biting her lip, Vanessa went quiet for a moment before standing up. "You heard what Kaiser said. He needs your help to fix this city. Drastic times call for drastic measures."

"I heard." the twelve-year old confirmed with a simple nod before sitting up in bed. She crawled to the end and hopped off, moving to open the mini fridge before pulling out the carton of juice that was inside. After carefully pouring some into one of the plastic cups that were provided, she looked back toward Vanessa and lifted the bottle questioningly. "You want some?"

"Did your power tell you I would?" Vanessa was only half-kidding. Honestly, the idea of precogs freaked her out a bit. What did that say about free will and all that?

"No," Dinah replied quietly while holding the bottle. "I don't like to use my power. It hurts too much."

Vanessa nodded. "Thinker headache." A moment later she added, "And sure, I'd like some juice."

After pouring the second glass, Dinah crossed the room and offered the cup to the other girl. Once it was taken, she took a gulp from her own juice before pointing out, "You never answered the question."

"It's still rude." Vanessa carefully sipped from the cup while watching the younger girl.

Dinah shrugged absently and returned to put the juice in the fridge. "I'm still kidnapped." She rooted around inside briefly before coming out with a pair of plastic wrapped danishes. Holding one up toward the older girl until Vanessa nodded, she tossed it that way, then sat down on the bed to open her own.

Catching the tossed danish, Vanessa carefully unwrapped it while remaining silent. Finally, she cleared her throat. "It has to do with how I got my own powers. Most people consider that to be a very personal subject, so I guess I'm not used to people actually asking about it." When this was met with a blank stare, she conceded, "You have a point though, we did kidnap you. So I guess we can talk about it."

Taking a bite of her danish, Dinah smiled before tucking her legs beneath herself on the bed. "You give super powers to other people, right? Can you use them on yourself?"

Vanessa shook her head. "No, just other people that I can touch. And only one power to each person."

"That must be really useful," Dinah mused briefly before taking a sip of her juice. "Kinda sucks that you can't use it on yourself though. Doesn't that make you pretty vulnerable?"

"It can," Vanessa agreed after nibbling the end of her danish. "But Victor takes care of me."

"He's your boyfriend?" Dinah asked curiously before balling the wrapper of her finished danish up and tossing it into the nearby trashcan. She took a couple of napkins from the table to wipe her hands off.

"No," Vanessa took another nibble of her pastry. "He's my husband."

"Husband?" Dinah looked surprised at that. "How ummm, how old are you then?"

Smiling faintly, Vanessa replied, "I'm eighteen. I married Victor a year and a half ago."

Frowning, Dinah balled the sticky napkins up in her hands. "But I thought you couldn't get married before you were eighteen. You married him when you were sixteen?"

"You can get married that young if you have your parents' permission." Vanessa explained quietly.

Dinah absently tore the napkins into little scraps. "Your parents were okay with you marrying him when you were still in school?"

Shaking her head at that, Vanessa replied, "I dropped out of school. Took my GED. And they were okay with it because it was their idea. Or," she corrected, "It was Kaiser's idea, and they accepted it."

"It was Kaiser's idea that you get married?" Dinah sounded confused.

"Well," Vanessa adjusted herself in the chair and hesitated briefly. "Really, Victor was supposed to marry my cousin. That was what our yacht trip was about."

"Yacht trip?" Dinah's head tilted curiously before she took the last gulp of her orange juice.

Nodding, Vanessa smiled. "Yeah, it was supposed to be just Lauren and Preston at first."

"Preston?" If anything, Dinah looked even more confused. "I thought his name was Victor."

Wincing inwardly at her blunder, Vanessa coughed. Surely it wasn't that big of a deal. After all, Kaiser had allowed the girl to see his face. "That's his codename now. I knew him as Preston first. Anyway, the two of them were basically betrothed. Preston did something that really impressed Kaiser, so he was allowed to marry into the family. The yacht thing was supposed to be a chance for them to get to know each other. It was a three week trip."

"But they didn't go by themselves?" Dinah was watching her intently, as if hanging on her words.

"No, Lauren wanted me to go with them. She uhh, she wasn't sure how she felt about Preston. She barely knew him, and she wasn't sure about being alone with him for three weeks."

Dinah coughed then. "Wait, how old were you? What were you gonna do about it?"

"Fourteen," Vanessa admitted with a shrug. "She wanted company in case things didn't work out. It wasn't about protecting her, it was about if they didn't get along, she wanted someone to talk to. We were friends ever since she used to babysit me. So I went. The three of us were alone on the ocean for almost a month. It was one of the most fun times I've ever had. And Preston did fall in love with her."

"Did she fall in love with him?" Dinah asked. When Vanessa nodded, she hesitated before adding, "Was she the only one on the boat that fell in love with him?"

Flushing at that, Vanessa looked down for a moment before answering quietly. "No. I was younger, and I wasn't the one that was promised to him, but I still... I still liked him. During that trip, he was just so..." She trailed off briefly, searching for the right word. "So heroic. So daring. And he made me feel special, even though I wasn't supposed to be there. Maybe he was doing it just to impress Lauren, I don't know. Either way, he made me feel really good about myself."

"What happened then?" Dinah was laying on her stomach across the bed by that point, watching her.

Instead of answering at first, Vanessa looked away for a few seconds to collect herself. When she finally spoke, her voice was quieter. "There was a gathering of the families, a party to celebrate Lauren and Preston's engagement. Everyone was happy and there was so much food." She swallowed uneasily. "But then a bunch of niggers attacked us. They were part of an old gang, one that doesn't exist anymore since Kaiser and Purity wiped them out. They umm... they found out that some of the most important members of the clans were there, so they came to kill them and anyone else they could."

Dinah's voice was hushed. "Is that what happened to your eye?"

Vanessa gave a little jerk of a nod. "Yes. There were powers going off everywhere. Guns, fire, lasers, blood... I saw one of my friends get punched by someone with super strength. His fist went through her skull. When he took it out, he had some of her... her..." Shaking slightly, she swallowed. "Sorry, I shouldn't say that with you. You're just a kid. I mean, the point is, there was a lot going on. And one guy, he was a big nigger, he hit me really hard. He knocked me down when I was trying to hide, and he threatened to..." Catching herself, she shook her head once more and carried on, skipping details. "Preston was looking for Lauren, but he couldn't find her in all the confusion. He found me though, and he attacked the guy that was trying to hurt me. He tried to save me, but the guy... he hurt Preston. He hurt him and he held him down while he used his knife to... to cut my eye. He told me Preston wasn't strong enough to save me, that he was going to carve both of them out while Preston watched."

Swallowing hard, Vanessa felt the ghostly memory of the pain from that moment. "That's when I got my power, my power to make other people stronger. He told me that Preston wasn't strong enough, so I got the power to fix that. And Preston killed him."

"He saved you, but only after you gave him the power to do it." Dinah observed.

Vanessa nodded. "Yeah, but it was too late for Lauren. One of the others, they killed her. Burned her body so bad she wasn't even recognizable. So, that was it for their marriage."

The younger girl was quiet for a few seconds before speaking up carefully, "But he still had to have his 'in' with the family, and you were already in love with him."

"It's not as bad as it sounds," Vanessa claimed. "We waited a year before even talking about it. I had to learn about my power. And Preston got his in the meantime. Then Kaiser brought it up again and... well, there was no reason not to. My parents approved it as soon as I was sixteen. So I dropped out of school and got married. Now we're partners. We do almost everything together. We're good at working with each other. My powers compliment his really well. We're both flexible."

There was silence from the other girl for so long that Vanessa looked up to make sure she hadn't fallen asleep. But Dinah was just laying there watching her with a rather intense expression. Feeling unnerved by that, she asked, "What?"

Slowly, the younger girl pushed herself off of the bed, walking over to her before extending a hand to squeeze Vanessa's. "I'm sorry," she said quietly. "I thought I had it bad, being kidnapped by monsters. But I was only kidnapped a few hours ago. You've grown up with them. They're your family, your friends, everyone you know. And how can you recognize the monsters when they're the ones that make you food, that teach you how to read, that drive you to school, that tuck you in when you're a kid?"

Staring at the younger girl for a moment, Vanessa yanked her hand back. She opened her mouth to retort as a flush of embarrassment crossed her face. Before she could say anything, the door opened.

"And how are we doing this morning?" Kaiser asked. He was immaculately dressed, as usual.

Quickly, Vanessa replied, "Fine. We're just talking." She had no idea why she suddenly felt as though Kaiser knowing what Dinah had been saying would be a bad thing.

"Good, good." Smiling generously, the man crossed the room before sitting at the chair in front of Dinah's bed, looking toward where the girl was still standing near Vanessa. "I'm going to have pizza brought in this afternoon, and when she gets here Rune will help you study. She'll be a good tutor for you. Until then, you can watch cartoons or whatever you like. There's just one thing we need to take care of first."

Dinah stared at the man before slowly walking over to sit down on her bed, watching him carefully. "You want to ask me a question. You want me to use my power. But it's gonna hurt." Her voice went up plaintively at the end. "It really hurts when I use it."

"You'll get better at it, I promise." The man assured her. "Thinker powers, especially ones that are as strong as I believe yours are, always come with drawbacks. Exercise it enough and you'll be able to use your gift more without getting those headaches as much. But in any case, right now we have a shortcut. That's why Othala is here, after all. Well, one reason. Her company is another."

"Othala?" Dinah glanced toward Vanessa before looking back at the man. "You mean you think one of her powers could help?"

The man's smile broadened. "See, I knew you were a smart girl, Dinah. Very smart. Yes, I believe that if Othala grants you her healing ability, it will help ease the headaches somewhat. We'll try two questions first, all right? Just two, and then let Othala use her power to give you some healing."

Still trembling a little, Dinah nodded hesitantly, but didn't speak. It looked as if she realized that she didn't really have a choice.

"Good girl," Kaiser smiled patiently before leaning back. "Now, we spoke a little bit last night about how you believe your power works. So, for the first question, I just want to ask... Presuming that the same countermeasures we discussed last night continue, what are the odds that Lung will find out where Bakuda is being kept within the next three days?"

The girl's eyes screwed shut briefly and she fidgeted on the bed uncomfortably for a moment before answering. "Thirteen percent if you don't change anything about what you're doing with her." As soon as she finished speaking, Dinah gave a soft gasp of discomfort.

"Good, that gives us time to work with." Kaiser nodded approvingly. "Thank you. One more question then. This is a drug that my people have been developing." He took a small vial from his pocket and held it up. "What are the odds that its contents will work to knock Lung out when he's powered up?"

Cringing in pain, Dinah took a moment to answer. "Twenty-six percent if he's at the power he usually fights at."

"I assume the earlier it's used, the better the chances are." Kaiser mused. When the younger girl whimpered, he held a hand up to her. "Don't worry, that wasn't a question." Nodding to Vanessa then, he said, "Othala, if you wouldn't mind?"

Obediently, Vanessa slid off her chair and moved to sit next to Dinah. She lifted a hand and set it on the other girl's arm, providing her with the healing part of her gift.

Immediately, Dinah let out a long sigh of relief. "That's... that's better." She sounded surprised.

"Excellent." Kaiser's smile grew. "I'll have some more questions for you later, Dinah. But you take care of yourself for now. And mind Rune when she comes to give you your lessons." He rose from the chair, tucking the vial away before starting for the door without another word, his mind already elsewhere.

Once he was gone, Dinah spoke again, her voice a soft whisper. "Thank you for healing me."

"It's what I do," Vanessa replied, feeling uncomfortable.

After another few seconds of silence, the girl whispered again. "I asked another question."

"What?" Vanessa looked at her, squinting. "What do you mean you asked another question?"

"I asked another question, before he asked me the second one." Dinah explained. "One for myself."

Frowning, Vanessa hesitated before speaking again. "What question?"

"I asked what the odds were that he'll ever let me go home." Dinah informed her, her voice very quiet.

She didn't explain what answer she'd gotten, and Vanessa didn't ask. She didn't need to. Kaiser had shown the girl his face.

She would never be allowed to go home again.