"You're shitting me."

Those three words were a sign. A sign that things had changed. Irreversibly. Irrevocably. That nothing would ever be the same again.

"You're shitting me."

A sign that, bad kidneys or not, there was a drink with her name on it in Emily's future. Something expensive that went down smooth. With ice, and a little umbrella in it. A good, last drink before she got put in the ground.

She deserved it for all the shit she had to put up with. She really did.

"I'm sorry to say that I am not, Director. After almost twenty years without a public appearance," Armsmaster replied stiffly, his voice clipped and body tenser then whenever he was forced to attend a PRT mandated social gathering. Knowing him, he'd even locked his suit to prevent himself from pacing. Their current subject of discussion was someone that he had never approved of, for multiple reasons. "Annerose has come out of hiding."

Assault coughed, but otherwise said nothing as he rubbed his swollen jaw and his wife gave him a sullen glare. Battery had earned herself a raise for that. This wasn't the time for jokes. Also, he'd sort of deserved that. No woman liked being compared to Annerose in that way. The woman's bodily proportions were just… No. None of that.

"Are you sure?" Piggot leaned forward in her chair, then placed her elbows on the desk and steepled her fingers. Tossed that last train of thought off a cliff and watched it burn. "Are you sure it isn't a copycat? Or someone that got into one of her battle stashes, got lucky, and decided to moonlight as a..." Piggot grimaced, as did everyone else in the room—Even Assault, if only because he tried to grin with a bump the size of Emily's fist on his face. "Hero?"

Before her disappearance in the late eighties, back before the PRT had become what it was today... Annerose had been one of the first, and most active 'heroes' of the time, a veritable parahuman wild west sheriff. An icon of the free love era that had kept it going far past its expiration date in a manner that had PRT Think Tank Thinkers convinced that she had some minor master abilities. Wherever she went became an orgy of sex—among the citizenry—and horrendously brutal violence—against the local criminal element—that still haunted the PRT to this day.

The more...family friendly face the PRT had tried to show hadn't gone through as smoothly as they'd hoped at the time… These days, they only got a call every once in awhile from a Generation X'er about why their costumes didn't show off more skin.

The complaints had slowed down since then, ending up at three or so a week per branch. It had once been over a hundred every day. Piggot didn't like the thought that those days might be returning. Not at all.

"We're sure. I saw her myself," Miss Militia croaked, head in her hands as she dealt with her sudden and inappropriate feelings of inadequacy and homo-eroticism. Hannah had been straight as an arrow before this mess. A sign of a master at work if there ever was one. "I saw her...from behind." Piggot felt an upwelling of pity rise up within her. "Pictures are the same."

"Damn it," Piggot cursed under her breath as she spun in her chair to face an even more humorless Tinker. At this point, Hannah's memory was more of a curse than a help. She wouldn't be able to focus for days. "What do you have?"

Trust, but verify.

"We've seen what happens whenever a civilian gets into one of her...stashes," Colin said tersely as before he nodded at Velocity, prompting the eerily quiet speedster to dim the lights and start the projector. Piggot couldn't help but wince at the first picture. A set of tits larger than Emily's torso, attached to a screaming woman with a freshly broken spine. Another picture. A panicked-looking man with a tongue so long that he had to wrap it around his arm to keep it from touching the floor, also screaming. "It has never gone well for them."

Emily didn't like that. She didn't like that at all. Admittedly, that had been their own fault. Emily knew this. Once you put a suspicious vial of glowing green mystery fluid to your lips, your fate was in your own hands...but still. She didn't approve of anyone who left things like that lying around.

"Anyone capable of getting around that," The distaste in Armsmaster's voice was palpable, "and her special brand of—DRM like they did is either the luckiest woman in America or Annerose herself."

"That is your professional opinion?"

Armsmaster's frown deepened yet further. Somewhere around 'apocalyptic' and 'Von Neumann swarm'. "Yes." He'd never gotten over that one time he'd looked at one of Annerose's blackboard scribbles. The fact that his power had declared the mess to be impossible before mentally inundating him with phalluses had irked him beyond words. "Yes, it is."

"I see."

"Not yet. With the help of a supercomputer and Dragon..." With a wave at Velocity that had the other man sighing, the projector jumped past another ten transgressions against God and nature... And onto one of the only—clear—pictures of Annerose that was publically available and not worth a couple million dollars on the market. A full back shot, leg/arm warmers with accompanying leotard and all. The next—clear—picture that came up beside the first was more recent, no leg/arm warmers and a leotard somehow even more scandalous than the original. A sign of the times. "We were able to determine that this is actually the same person."

And then came the math, centered around the woman's buttocks. Curvatures and radii. Emily groaned, Ethan snickered and his wife, Janine, ground her teeth hard enough to hear. Of course that's what they went for as proof of identity.

"She, from what I can tell, is mathematically perfect. The best example of biological symmetry Dragon and I have ever seen," Colin said. Emily felt slightly better when the math spread out to encompass the rest of the woman's body. Slightly. "The proportions between the two are one-for-one. A perfect, impossible match. Something as perfect as this just can not naturally occur in nature...and then we have the MO."

Another click, and everyone but Hannah—too busy keeping her face in her hands to look—frowned.

"That is blood," Colin spat, "and bits of teeth and bone. Enough for five different people."

And that was why there was a PRT. Why their oversight was necessary.

"It's on the ceiling," Robin said, stunned. "The walls are covered in it. The blood on the floor looks like it would come up to my ankles… Where did it all come from? Is that a burned out basement?"

A good question. One that people had been wondering since Annerose's debut.

"That's what I wonder as well, and yes. That is a burned out basement," Colin admitted. "Even with five people, there isn't nearly enough blood in a human body to do...this. I have no idea how Annerose is capable of doing this as casually as she does."

"Victims?"

"Just one." A photo of a seemingly normal and mercifully unconscious, blood covered valkyrie came up on the screen. "During an E-88 show of might while Menja was separated from her sister, she was drop-kicked into a condemned building, given a compounded concussion, and then brutalized to within an inch of her life with a fire extinguisher...then had her wallet stolen. Classic Annerose."

No doubt Menja was heavily traumatized at this point. The testimony they'd gotten from her before they'd put her in a cell had pointed at such. Another classic Annerose gambit.

"It's just like '85," Emily said grimly, "but unlike '85, the PRT is now a full-fledged organization. An organization devoted to curbing the excesses of parahumans like Annerose. We can't allow this to continue."

And suddenly, Ethan stopped smiling. "Does that mean we're classifying her as a villain? Because, if we are, I reserve the right to tell you that this is a bad idea."

"No." Emily shook her head, getting a roomful of relieved sighs from everyone but Colin in return. Any hero as old and—Emily hated to say it—powerful as Annerose wasn't someone anyone wanted to tangle with. "She is a vigilante. One with problems with excessive force, but still technically a hero since she hasn't killed anyone in over thirty years."

"Oh, thank god. I get to keep my teeth for another day."

"Just meet up with her, and be polite." Emily started rubbing her temples. "Get her into the Protectorate by any means necessary, so that we can clean this mess up. Keep the pressure on while the PR department gets to work. Give her a rebranding."

"At least she'd be more polite than Shadow Stalker…" Hannah mumbled.

"That's right. Keep looking on the bright side, Hannah." Emily, with a bit of a struggle, sat up from her seat. "Now I don't know about you, but I have a dialysis machine waiting for me. Dismissed." Everyone but Colin started to file out of the room. "And good luck explaining this to the Wards." In response, Hannah pushed herself to the front of the line and started power walking down the hall.

Emily didn't envy her.

It didn't take much longer for the door to close, leaving Colin and her alone while she looked through her paperwork to decide which to take home. Nice and quiet, until Colin decided to add his two cents. "I noticed that you didn't tell them that Menja was perfectly healthy when we found her."

Emily kept pointedly silent.