Damn fucking decoys!
I kicked a building out of frustration and the whole thing collapsed. I could feel my rage and power working together to push for another transformation but it wouldn't do me anything good now. Jack was gone, Bonesaw and Siberian gone with the Dragon suits pursuing them. And to top it all off Skitter betrayed me just before I left the team, as if she wanted to make me as angry as possible.
I slammed my bokken against another building that didn't seem to be in good shape anyway. I was just so goddamn pissed at the moment that I wasn't even thinking about it until Miss Militia came up to me with a rifle pointed at me.
"I'm going to need you to stop." I rolled my eyes, I did not need this right now.
"Whatever, Queen? Take me out of here." Immediately a helicopter swooped down and a hook dangled below it. I grabbed it and out of spite, I flipped Miss Militia off as the helicopter lifted me into the air.
I waited as the helicopter dangled me above a jump jet that hovered next to the helicopter that Queen and Troll were in. I let go of the hook and skipped across the jet before landing gently inside the open door of the helicopter. Queen shut the door as I slid in my seat and immediately the sound of the helicopter blades faded. She had sound proofed the cabin.
"So," Troll said, "Now we go and nip a bit of territory for ourselves right? Get in on a bit of that warlord action?" I shook my head.
"No, they decided they are going to play hardball, so we'll play hardball. Queen?"
"Yeeees Tsundere?" She sang.
"Call in your weapons cache from New York and any free floating ship you have in the area. We're going to take the dock and you can strip all the ships for their material. Then we're going to take that one out of the way place, Trainyard. And that area we're our fight with the Nine destroyed almost everything, The Scar, we're taking that too. Queen, I want you to build something big where The Scar is. A military base or a runway or something. Something just enough to scar them without bringing everyone down on our heads." Queen grinned and threw her arms up in the air.
"Yay! Destruction!" Queen lifted her wrist to bring the wristband she used to communicate with the AI to her mouth. "AI, bring in the North Atlantic fleet and mobilize the New York motorcade. Deploy all Jaws of Vulcan onto the coast of the city." Queen looked extremely happy with herself.
"Jaws of Vulcan?" Troll asked out of mild curiosity. He was playing with a Rubix cube idly in his hands. As she always was when she got to talk about her machines, Queen was excited to the point she was clapping her hands together rapidly.
"Anti rubble machines! Rubble makes it hard for things to drive over a road so I made Jaws of Vulcan!" Troll shrugged, apparently satisfied with that description. I nodded, Queen wasn't the best at describing her machines past what their actual purpose was. It would be easier to wait and see.
"How long until everything gets here?" I asked her. Queen tapped her chin with her long slender fingers.
"Like in two or three hours? Just enough time for me to start sketching new ideas." Queen pressed a button behind her that I hadn't noticed before and a table rose out of the floor. On it was grape juice in a wine bottle, a few champagne glasses, and an old sketchbook that could only belong to a Tinker.
Queen grabbed the book and a black gel pen and began drawing erratically. Troll shrugged and drew a real bottle of wine out of his inventory and poured himself a glass. He held the bottle out to me.
"Want some? To celebrate our new found freedom from tightwads that only held us back?" I shrugged.
"Why the fuck not?" I took it and poured myself a glass. I turned and stared out the tinted windows of the chopper as we moved over the city. I saw the red mist and water clearing up as whatever Panacea made went through killing things and what not. Hero's were still buzzing around while they tried to find Jack and Bonesaw. But Jack had disappeared before I even got to him, not so much as one final confrontation before he fled the city. Skitter would be down there, probably celebrating some victory or cursing herself over some loss after she decided to chase after Bonesaw.
A glanced at Queen. We didn't get Bonesaw nor would we get her anytime soon, yet Queen happily scribbled in her sketch book. I might have thought she was over it or was okay if it weren't for the fact that the device she was sketching she was calling 'The Bonesaw Breaker'.
Oh well, we all deal with things in different ways.
I saw the fleet enter the bay an hour and a half later. Most were battleships larger than The Spire, but those along with the three aircraft carriers that came with it stayed out of The Bay, creating a thin blockade between themselves in the distance. However, in the bay a dozen small warships Queen labelled as Corvettes patrolled the area as Higgins boats delivered the Jaws of Vulcans onto the beaches.
The Jaws of Vulcan was the size of a semi-truck cab and had similar smokestacks billowing thick black smoke as they crawled across the ground at snail's speed. Each of the five Vulcans that were roaming around had four massive clawed arms that grabbed the wrecked ships and tore them apart before scooping them into the gaping 'jaw' of the machine. The jaw would open up to accept the scrap it was being fed and bright red light could be seen radiating out from the white hot core contained inside. Every twenty minutes or after eating a particularly large amount of scrap the Vulcan would stop and a back hatch would open up and deposit three cubes the size of small cars. One made of glass, one made of assorted metal, and one made of any material that wasn't made of the first two. The glass and metal cubes were carted off by other armoured vehicles and loaded onto Higgins boats before they would be transported elsewhere for whatever Queen decided to do with them.
The motorcade had appeared at roughly the same time, only I first saw them as the crossed over the crest of Captain's Hill and entered the Scar before immediately deploying two of their own Jaws of Vulcan. The motorcade didn't have any tanks, as Queen had said, but they had plenty of mounted artillery. Or at least, what I thought was artillery as the Tinker weapons made it hard to tell.
Apparently, Alexandria and Eidolon had come to Brockton Bay in response, but they had done anything yet. They're probably still trying to assess the situation and get they Protectorate's thinkers to decide how much a threat Queen was. But that was the third thing that made Queen terrifying to everyone.
One, Queen was incredibly efficient with an unparalleled amount of free time. She completed millions of dollars and year-long projects with approximately a few thousand dollars worth of effort and in just weeks.
Two, Queen was insane. You touch her ships and it's an act of war, and something she is more than willing to respond to. You do anything to her, say the wrong thing, threaten her, insult her, anything at all and you risked sending her on a rampage or something like it. There weren't a lot of people who knew Queen as well as I did now, so all they saw was The Mad Tinker who could crush entire cities if she wanted to.
But the final nail in the coffin, the third things that absolutely terrified every villain, hero, and otherwise was that somehow she was immune to almost all thinker powers and her tech doesn't make any sense to other Tinkers. We got a little insight to that with Dinah, she described Queen being like a cloud of fog that wrapped things near her into fog as well. She said that Troll and I had become hazy ever since we started working closer together, something Skitter was banking on it helping them fight Coil. Not to mention she might also have some effect on Coil's power, whatever it was considering no one bothered telling me.
But one thing was for sure, there was no way they were condemning Brockton Bay now. I had heard the idea getting tossed back and forth and Tattletale talking about plans around it. The Slaughterhouse Nine brought a new bout of destruction to the city, granted that was mostly our fault. Troll running around certainly didn't help the case. If I didn't know Coil better I would have said that before we made this move, the city was as good as condemned.
But there was no sane person on this planet that would hand Queen the city now that she had started applying the pressure. Not even me if I was in that position.
About forty minutes in the Vulcan's had cleared an area about the size of a parking lot, with blocks made of the more useless rubble stacked like a wall off to the side of the beginning of the territory.
After I had vented a little I calmed down and called off the takeover of Trainyard. I know Ballistic had his eyes set on it and there was the doll girl there too, Parian I think. Instead, I decided we should secure the area encircling the land surrounding the crater lake. That put Grue's territory to our North, Imp to our south, and Tattletale to our West. Strategically, it put in a bad spot since we're technically fighting now. But with Queen holding the coast and Captain's Hill it was more like they were sandwiched in between us. And if they try to take out central location it would be easy to move and counter-attack from another part of the territory.
It probably screwed them over a bit but I wasn't exactly in the mood to care.
Queen brought the helicopter down over our new territory around the crater. Several jump jets were hovering in a v-pattern around us to help stage our entrance. I notice The Spire was looming on the water nearby.
The three of us stepped out onto a building top above the crowd we had gathered. In the crowd, I could make out Assault and Battery, Glory Girl, and the Wards. A little more hero presence than I was anticipating, but I could roll with it. I shouldered a bokken and strode right up to the edge with Queen and Troll right behind me.
"Goooooood evening Brockton Bay!" I shouted over the crowd, my power making my voice carrying further. "I'm sure you're getting tired of hearing it, but we are claiming this area!" I grinned and raised my arms into the air. I suddenly noticed Eidolon hovering alone far above us and suddenly everything was put into perspective. One slip up here and it might be us vs Eidolon, and as much faith I had in my power I think there was only one outcome to that fight.
"We are a bit old fashioned if you care to call it that," I continued. "For now on you follow our rules and such. Past that you're free to do as you wish, we'll have a protection fee though. Like, ten bucks a month? Troll? Anything to add?" Troll stepped forward and said,
"If you are selling drugs, you better share." I nodded.
"Yeah, we'll put a tax on that. Ten percent of all illegal sales or activity go to us. Now, if any of you want some work, a warm place to sleep, good food and all that jazz, you may talk to Troll." Troll saluted comically before I pushed him over the edge of the building.
Troll fell from too high up.
"He'll be back in a minute," I said. "Now, for clarification. No one, unless they are working for us may enter the parts of Captain's Hill that Queen is annexing. The coast is free for anyone, but don't interfere with Queen's machines. We're not like Skitter, we won't be giving you food or anything of the sort unless you work for us. You have to handle all that by yourself, all your get from us is a sense of security. If you're lucky." I grinned as wide as I could manage.
"Now, just to confuse you, I asked Queen of the Castle here to do this." I signalled to her and she gave a cute little laugh before pressing a button. Suddenly The Spire disappeared from view as it's cloaking measures kicked in. I knew that a few dozen of her armour cars and half of the ships disappeared as well. Enough to know they were there, but also too many invisible to let them rest easy.
"And with that, I'll bid you adieu." I gave a mock salute with my free hand and spun my bokken around in my hand. I turned to climb back into the helicopter when I paused and looked back and said,
"By the way, call us the Paranorms."