I woke from a nightmare in which I was cut in half, scrabbling on many limbs, struggling to the surface of the ocean, even while the entirety of my world was destroyed. No longer trapped in dreams my first thought was that the man that had resurrected me couldn't have been a Case 53. Cauldron, it wouldn't be around, not if as much time had passed as the cape had implied. Even if it was still around, the deviance rates wouldn't be so high as to produce someone who looked so strange. He hadn't been a Case 53. He was something else.
Something new.
I was in a crib. Soft fabric was beneath me and I was wearing a cloth diaper. Maybe it was the nightmare, putting me off, but the diaper disturbed me even though the insinuation of the lick lipping hadn't bothered me. The diaper implied that no one was going to use a power on me to age me or if they were they weren't going to do it soon.
The physical worry that I felt at the thought faded. Really, I didn't feel at all like I was used to when waking from a nightmare. I was calming too quickly. I spotted the cause, my eyes adjusted enough to the light to spot the arm. I wasn't alone.
A hand was touching my chest. The hand glowed with a pale green light. My eyes tracked up from the hand to a white arm and then still further up to a blue fabric of a shirt sleeve. Then I finally found her face. A blonde haired woman, maybe twenty. She wore an etched metal plate sewn into a dark blue cloth that was tied around her forehead.
It was pretty obvious that she was a cape. The glowing hand kind of gave it away. However, like the cape I had met earlier she wasn't wearing a costume. Probably, the culture was different now. Time has passed. The world, it would be used to powers. Take them for granted. I could picture the separation between cape life and normal life breaking down. Even during my time, it had been happening. I hadn't had a secret identity and it hadn't been by choice, but the Dallon family had unmasked willing.
It was either that or costumes were normal - which implied they either expected to have my loyalty, were planning on killing me, or the old rules about going after someone outside of costume were still enforced. Each was worrying in a different way.
The woman smiled down at me and I felt my entire body relaxing further. That wasn't because I was comforted. She was doing something to me. Something with her power. The question was, how to stop her? Force wouldn't work. I was too small. Communication? Except I couldn't speak.
I thrashed and tried to make noise, fighting against the urge to be calm and still. The woman's eyes went wide and the intensity of the pale green light grew more pronounced. Ignoring the contentment, I wailed. Then, her hand was above my head. Wind pushed at my skin hard enough I could feel it. Her speed, I hadn't even seen her hand move until it had stopped.
I stopped my wail, eyes on the glowing hand held just above my head. I didn't know what her power could do, beside making me feel calm, and I wasn't eager to find out. Already, I could tell she was a Mover, but judging by her hands she had to be a Striker too. Some sort of touch based muscle relaxation was the best case - the worst would be a Master effect.
I'd went still at her movement and stopped crying out, startled by her speed, but instead of backing off from the implicit threat, she moved her hand down to my head and touched me. I felt tranquil. Anxiety, ripped away from me.
No. I didn't want to let her change how I felt. I fought the feeling of relaxation, tensing intentionally, and she frowned down at me, hand still glowing. Then she looked away from me. Seconds passed. Then I heard footsteps.
"I heard her crying?" The voice was male and it wasn't one that I recognized. I couldn't understand him either.
"Don't worry Aburame-san," the woman said. "She's fine. I think she was frightened by me, even though I used a medical ninjutsu to help keep her calm. It's unusual, but I think maybe… maybe the last time she woke up with a ninja over her…"
"That bastard." The other voice sounded pissed.
"It's only conjecture," the blonde haired girl said. It was frustrating not be able to understand the two of them. I really hoped that the brain of a baby was better at learning a language then the brain of an adult. There was the chance that the reason I couldn't understand them was because of an intentional attempt at information security. Preventing me from knowing their plans. I didn't want to be naive and trust them. If I was their prisoner, that would be a huge mistake. It would give them more time to use the Master power on me. If I waited too long to fight back, I might not even get the chance to fight back. Might find myself going along with something that was entirely against what I believed in.
I'd had training in avoiding that. Every state sponsored superhuman did, from the Wards to the Protectorate.
I almost hoped that would be what I was dealing with. The alternative, being treated like an actual baby, was somehow the worse fate. I wasn't looking forward to months and months of not being able to understand anyone. Of not being able to feed myself or bathe myself or even deal with the bathroom.
Passenger? Can you hear me? Are you even there?
"He said he didn't harm any of the children. But a snake like him? I don't think we can trust him to keep his word." The other voice sighed. "We're lucky really. He told us he was going to kill them if we didn't concede to his demands. If it wasn't for the Fourth…"
"It could have been worse. You're right. I'm going to go check on the other children and make sure they are okay. I'm done here, so you can stop fretting and check on your daughter yourself."
One moment it was just the woman there. The next a man was there too. His hair was brown and spiky and he wore dark goggles over his eyes. Like the woman, he had a dark blue headband with a metal plate on his head. I wasn't sure what the triangular etchings were, but I could tell from the fact that they both wore the same thing that it was some kind of uniform.
The man that was looking down at me now was a Mover too. Another cape. It bothered me that so many of the people I was seeing were high level Movers. First the pale man. Then the woman with the glowing hand. Now this man. Was there someone that worked with them that could grant others powers, like Othala or Teacher could? Or was it different? Were passengers manifesting powers differently now?
I didn't know enough to say for certain.
The blonde woman set a hand on the mans shoulder. "She's alright. I'll be in the other room if you need me."
She walked away and the man looked down at me. "How are you doing Tera?"
I stared at him, uncomprehending and the man's lips went from creased to flat. No more smiling. He was sad. Disappointed. I wasn't responding the way he wanted me to respond. Who was he? What was he expecting from me?
"What did he to you little bug?" The man's words sounded pained. "Don't you remember your daddy?"
I blinked up at him. What sort of things did a baby do? What was he expecting? Obviously he didn't want me to cry, right? Didn't he work with the guy who resurrected me?
He reached for me, invading my personal space, and I couldn't get away. I tried to make picking me up difficult for him by squirming. That earned a frown, which was a success in my book, but it wasn't enough. He didn't drop me. Didn't take the hint. I was a baby and I was being treated like one. He didn't seem to realize. It was like he hadn't been told.
Like he thought I was his own kid. I shoved aside the idea that I might be, because it would imply that I had once been his kid and now I wasn't. It was a can of worms I didn't want to get into, something horrible enough that I didn't even want to consider it.
I looked for another explanation, anything. Then, I saw it. When he moved me closer to himself, I noticed something that I had missed before. He had holes in his neck and small beetles were moving in and out of those holes as if he was some sort of human hive. Horrible images flashed through my mind. Images of my time with Bonesaw, the Tinker who had promised to turn me into a living hive. I could remember a wall covered in human skin and the moment when I had realized that it was Brian and that somehow he was still alive. Me being paralyzed. A young girl gleefully explaining to me what she had done to my friend and what she planned to do to me.
No control over my powers. Turned into a living hive. Another explanation, something other than him thinking I was his daughter, clicked into place.
In that moment, all pretense that the situation was under control vanished. Bonesaw's experiments. They had me. She had been practicing at turning people into hives in preparation for the work she was going to do on me.
I'd been cut in half before. I'd been face down in shallow water with my back broken fully expecting that I would drown. I'd been trapped in a burning building. At none of those points had I ever come close to feeling the sheer terror I felt as I realized that Bonesaw had me and there was nothing I could do to escape. Last time I was in Bonesaw's power, I'd tried to kill myself. I felt the same way now as I did then. I didn't have my power. I was trapped in the body of a baby. There was no way I would be able to escape. I flailed and screamed anyway. Tried to slip loose from the grasping hands. Tried to find some way to fall towards the floor.
"Shh... sshh..." The Bonesaw experiment was rocking me against himself. Trying to comfort me as I tried to squirm and hopefully fall out of his hands to land head first on the floor. "It's okay. I'm here. It's okay."
I flailed harder, but I couldn't slip his grip. Then I realized I was going about it all wrong. I went still and acted like he had succeeded at comforting me.
He pulled me a bit away from himself, holding me a bit more loosely now, and smiled. I twisted and squirmed. Slipped from his hands. I fell maybe an inch before he adjusted, catching me.
Damn.
"Slippery girl, aren't you Tera?"
He was holding me more securely now and on-guard for another attempt at suicide. What other options did I have? He would need to feed me eventually. I could try to choke myself. That was a danger with babies, that they would eat something too big for them. The terror had faded a little.
Even with the terror not acute? It was completely rational for me to want to end my life. Bonesaw's Tinker specialty might as well have been fates worse than death. She'd arranged for Cherish to live trapped within a contraption made by Sphere for thousands of years and tuned the girl's power so that she would constantly feel the negative emotion of everyone within the city. I was smart enough to understand that it would be better to die than to let her get hold of me. Death might not even be enough to save me.
No. No death hadn't been enough to save me. I had been dead. Maybe I was being irrational, but the situation didn't make sense. I had been insane, before the fight. Now, I was a baby.
It wasn't a conscious decision on my part, but I started crying again. It felt natural and right and I think a lot of the reason I was doing it was because of instinct rather than intent. The spiky haired Bonesaw experiment grimaced. His nose flared, twice. "You didn't go potty. You didn't want me to pick you up, but that didn't make you cry. So what is it? Are you hungry?"
I kept crying as he babbled at me. The way he was acting, the concern? It didn't strike me as particularly meaningful. Bonesaw had tended to act like an excited and innocent young girl. It was only when juxtaposed with what she was talking about that she seemed like a monster. It could be the same here. He could be whispering to me about how wonderful it would be when they turned me into a sack of regenerating flesh that would be constantly be eaten alive for the next thousand years by enraged bullet ants.
I could have tried to stop crying, but didn't. The man carried me out of the room into a hall. The floors looked wooden, but the walls were all some sort of off-white canvas material.
There were other people in the hall. Unlike before, I knew to be watching for small black specks moving around the people. So I was able to pick up on the fact that the guy holding me wasn't the only Bonesaw experiment. Apparently, she had gotten to the entire family.
Except that didn't make sense. The scale of it. That there would be so many people with such a similar power to my own. Not just that, but having other powers.
The woman the man brought me too looked tired. She didn't have holes in her body, but there were insects on her. The man looked at her, happy. She looked at me, her face lighting up like she had seen her first born daughter returned to her.
"Does she need breast feeding?" The woman was looking at the man, but her hand was going to her chest. The innocence of her, the relief in the room. There were some quality to it that didn't fit with the theory I had been operating under before, that the man who had resurrected me had told them what he had done to me. Not unless this was even weirder than I was imagining and some sort of insect cult had grown up around the idea of me.
No. These people. They thought I was her daughter. What did that mean for me? What was the cape that had resurrected me playing at? Worse, what if they realized I wasn't who they seemed to think I was?
Can't let that happen. I thought.
