Sleeping for the first time after I was pulled out of the locker was weird. Instead of normal dreams or even nightmares, I was standing in the middle of a white world that gradually filled up with lines leading to and from me. The lines led to floating portraits of people I knew; my Dad, my godparents Kurt and Lacy, Emma, Greg Veder and a few of my other classmates.
Next to the portraits were what looked like thermometers, except that they were all at different levels; Dad, Kurt and Lacy were all about halfway up the top section, while most of my classmates were down in the bottom half where I'd consider the minus temperatures to be.
The two exceptions to that were Emma and Greg; Greg was slightly higher than the middle point, while Emma's gauge was at the very bottom of the lower half of the gauge.
I could feel warmth coming from Dad, Kurt and Lacy's portraits, nothing from Greg's and icy cold coming from the rest. Before I could do anything else, I woke up, in my hospital bed, confused as hell.
What had those lines meant? What did the gauges mean? What did the feelings I got from the portraits mean?
I lay back and puzzled over the situation. Presuming that the odd dream meant that I had Parahuman powers, then what the heck kind of weird ass powers did I have?
Thinking about it logically, the lines were the connections between me and the people that the portraits represented. I knew this as a fact rather than a supposition. The warm feelings I had for three of the portraits were made even more obvious by the fact that the lines between me and the portraits had been glowing golden yellow.
"Miss Herbert?" A nurse scurried in looking at me appraisingly.
"Hebert." I croaked back, my mouth as dry as a desert.
Noticing that, the nurse went and got me a cup of water, which I drank gratefully.
"Hebert…ah. Millicent spelt it wrong." The nurse complained absently as she scribbled the correction onto her chart, "So then, how are you feeling this morning Miss Hebert?"
"I've got a sore head and an empty stomach." I replied with a shrug.
"You would be." The woman said absently, "Feeding you intravenously doesn't do much for hunger. I'll have your breakfast sent up once I've finished giving you a check over."
"Thanks." I said gratefully.
After being poked, prodded and drained of some blood, I was at last allowed to eat, although the hospital food was as bad as rumours made it out to be; bland and tasteless.
My hunger assuaged, I returned to my pondering. The lines between me and my classmates, Greg to one side, had all been a slimy black and looked malicious. They also felt as if they were draining me somehow. That ignored the gauges completely. I honestly didn't know what to make of it all. I'd have to experiment when I got home…whenever that would be.
Two Weeks Later
I stared between the bulkhead and my fist in disbelief. I had just punched it and dented it! And I didn't feel any pain!
I had been practicing since the first night that I had dreamed of the white space and discovered that by closing my eyes, I could go there while awake. The fact that the black lines to my classmates were draining me somehow had concerned me, so I had tried pushing one, connected to the portrait of a girl on the Track Team, away from me. It had resisted me, but I had managed it.
The lines had broken and the portrait had vanished, along with some of the weight that I had felt from the drain. Intrigued by this, I had gone around and pushed away most of my classmates except for Greg and Emma, finding that the drain lessened with each banished portrait. Including my dad and godparents, there had been over a dozen portraits, so the drain hadn't been inconsiderable.
When the only draining portrait left had been Emma's, I had hesitated for a moment. She had been my first and best friend for years before all this and I was loath to remove her from my…mindscape (for lack of a better term). Still, she had betrayed me utterly, stabbing me in the back and had helped put me in The Locker, so she had to go.
Pushing Emma's portrait away had taken a lot of effort, far more than the rest had taken. Still, once she was gone from my mindscape, it felt like a yoke had been lifted from my shoulders. The portraits that were left, aside from Greg's, had blazed with golden light and a strange feeling had come over me as the golden light of the connecting lines had blazed also.
I was being actively empowered by the connections I had with my Dad and godparents. Greg's was an infrequent thin trickle compared to the steady streams I was getting from them, but still.
I had been standing in the hold of a ship in the Boat Graveyard when I did this, and when I opened my eyes, keeping my connections active, I had seen that I was surrounded in a golden glow. So, to test my power and see what it did, I first tapped then punched the nearby bulkhead.
The empowerment was giving me a Brute rating, making me stronger and the aura seemed to be acting as a forcefield of some kind, protecting me and allowing me to feel no pain.
After I calmed down, I sat down on the deck to think. What did my Dad, Kurt, Lacy and Greg Veder have in common with each other? What could be the source of this power? It was obvious that it had something to do with the connection I shared with them. In the case of everyone who disliked me, their connections had drained my power down to human levels and left me feeling tired and lethargic.
It was…loyalty? Could it be that I gained strength from people I had connections with that were loyal to me and lost strength when I had connections with people who weren't loyal to me? Was that it? Examining it from all sides, it did make sense. Dad, Kurt and Lacy loved me and were loyal to me, while Greg was somewhat indifferent to me, only talking to me because I was just about the only girl in Winslow to not tell him to take a hike when he started on his stupid conspiracy theories.
I decided that that was enough experimenting for one night and headed back home to sleep. Strangely enough, I returned to my dreamscape to see more portraits rising up out of the white floor, most of them connecting black lines to me and draining my power all over again. A few, the nurses who had looked after me in hospital, were similar to Greg, neutral.
Scowling, I counted off the portraits. A baker's dozen, thirteen of them, including the four that had been there before I'd fallen asleep. Gritting my teeth, I started to push away the ones that were draining off my power as fast as I could do so. Unfortunately, as soon as I got rid of one, another popped up in its place. All of them were ones that drained or hobbled my power.
I ended up going through almost every member of Winslow's student body, and a few graduated students, before they finally stopped coming, ending with the last two of the Bitch Trio, Madison Clements and Sophia Hess.
Madison's portrait was actually fairly neutral, the gauge only being slightly below the halfway line, while Sophia's portrait was radiating shadows and darkness, the gauge being all the way at the very bottom, further than Emma even. She really fucking hated me. Why? What the hell had I done to deserve being hated with that kind of passion?!
Pushing Sophia's portrait away was exhausting, far more so than Emma's had been, but I managed it in the end, although I didn't have the energy to push away Madison's. I decided to wait until the next night to do that.
A thought occurred to me when I woke up; Sophia's was the only one who had some sort of effect outside of the connecting lines. Why? What made her different from everyone else at Winslow?
The answer hit me like a tonne of bricks…she was a Parahuman. That had to be the only major difference between her and Emma. The difference on how far down the two gauges indicators were was negligible to the point of irrelevancy, so it had to be something that I didn't know about her. I was betting that Parahumans registered differently to my…whatever the hell you called my weird dreamscape.
Another thought hit me…what would happen if a Parahuman was loyal to me? With mundane humans, I seemed to get a minor increase in my strength and a defensive aura-shield than increased in strength coinciding with both the number of loyal people I was connected to and how high their gauges were. What bonus could a Parahuman grant me?
Two Months Later
I hate my luck.
I was fighting against Lung of all people! Lung!
OK, it was entirely my decision; I couldn't let him kill kids, but seriously!
Fortunately, I was Brute enough to go a few rounds with him. I had reconnected with a few old friends I hadn't spoken to in a while at the Dockworker's Association, so my strength and durability was up fairly high. The aura shield was keeping me from getting burned or anything by his pyrokinesis, but damn was he punching hard!
Lung, in the meanwhile, was getting bigger and stronger, and his metallic scales were getting thick enough over his body that I couldn't count on attacking any of the same spots twice thanks to his adaptive regeneration.
When he roared, I was fed up. Neither of us held the upper hand for the moment, but as Lung was an eight-foot high dragon, the next thing was that he would grow taller and heavier. Best to knock him for six for a while before legging it.
Leaping into the air, I landed an axe-drop kick on Lung's head while he was in mid-roar, which shut him up and stunned him for a minute. As soon as I landed, I knelt, spun around and kicked his feet out from under him before leaping up again and putting all my strength into a powerful punch that sent Lung flying. I blinked as three large things tackled the dragon man. He tried to slash at them, but wound up carving a slice from his own jaw somehow.
Not one to let an opportunity pass, regardless of how bizarrely it had come to pass, I ran forward and circled around until Lung's head was in striking range and unleashed a powerful series of punches that finally knocked the bastard out. I had been leaving his head alone for the most part, waiting for just this sort of chance.
As Lung shrunk, the dog-things were called back by their controller, a girl wearing a leather jacket and a cheap plastic store-bought mask. I recognised her from descriptions of PHO. Rachel Lindt, otherwise known as either Hellhound or Bitch.
Next to her was a boy dressed in motorcycle leathers and helmet, with a skull-like mask underneath it. On her other side was an androgynous figure wearing a puffy shirt of some kind and a venetian-style mask. He carried a sceptre of some kind lazily in one hand.
The last figure on the left side of the motorcycle guy was a girl wearing a black and purple costume with an eye of Ra symbol on the middle of her chest. She was a blonde with good looks in the girl-next-door kind of way. She was only covered by a domino mask on her face.
My own costume was a bit more cheaply made, consisting of heavily altered military camo pants and a similar jacket, bought from a second-hand store, with a balaclava, a bandana tied around my lower face like Miss Militia and tinted skiing goggles over my eyes.
"Thanks for softening Lung up for us." The biker boy said in an echoing voice, "He was coming after us for robbing his casino. We saw off Oni Lee and were coming to see what we could do about Lung, but you had him well in hand."
"N…Not…really…" I managed as I dropped to my knees, "Imna sleep now…"
Blackness covered me as I collapsed.
Lisa's Perspective
"We have to take her!" I said urgently, "Armsmaster is coming up and he'll arrest her!"
The way the PRT and Protectorate was with unaffiliated Capes disgusted me and I wasn't about ready to let this girl get railroaded by Halbeard for loitering or whatever.
Brian: antsy, undecided, wants to do the right thing, but wants to protect the team first.
Alec: Doesn't care, would go along with grabbing the girl away from Armsmaster just to irritate/anger the heroes.
Rachel: Worried about the girl, worried she might overthrow her place in the Undersiders' 'Pack', yet appreciates someone who can show her strength against a strong opponent like Lung.
I strode forward determinedly and picked the girl up. She wasn't as heavy as she looked.
"We're taking her. End of discussion." I said flatly.
"Fuck it." Grue said with a shake of his head, "Fine, but if this turns Spitfire on us, you lose half your pay."
"Fine." I said, knowing it wouldn't. I had only had a few minutes of using my power on the girl, but I knew she was a good person, having leapt into the fight against Lung to stop him from killing kids, from killing us.
As to her powers…I had a vague idea, but that wasn't important right now. I heaved her on top of Judas after me, while Bitch mounted Angelica and Grue and Regent hopped onto Brutus. As we retreated, we heard the sound of a motorbike in the distance. Armsmaster.
By the time he arrived on the scene, we'd be long gone.
Later
Undersiders HQ
"How is she?" Grue asked in an undertone. I had laid the girl down on the couch and used my power to check for injures. No broken bones, no burns, no injuries at all except from a few bruises. All-in-all, a far better outcome than most people got after going ten rounds with Lung.
"She's exhausted." I answered in the same tone, "At a guess, I'd wager that this is the first time she's really pushed her power to its limits. This is the result."
"Recent Trigger?" Regent asked absently as he made headshot on Call of Duty.
"Could be. Then again, she could be a Cape who's never had to push herself as hard as she did against Lung." I replied, although I knew she was a recent Trigger. She still had the tell-tale signs that I could pick up of someone recovering from a Trigger event.
The girl groaned as she regained consciousness, shifting groggily as she sat up.
"Wha…? Where?" she moaned.
"Easy there, Camo Girl." I said softly, "You've been out for a good hour and a half after you KO'd Lung."
"I had the weirdest dream about mutant dog-rhino things…" she muttered as she sat up.
"No dream. Those were Bitch's dogs." I replied, hiding a smirk. That was a new description for Judas, Angelica and Brutus.
"Ow my head…where am I?" the girl asked.
"Welcome to the secret headquarters of the Undersiders." I replied. As expected, she tensed up at that before wincing and massaging her temples through her balaclava.
"Great. I've been captured by villains and my power's down for the count. Just perfect." She grumbled.
"You aren't captured." Grue told her, "I don't know how much you remember from before you konked out, but you helped take down Lung, on our behalf. That earns you a solid from us."
"Lung…was after you? Jeez, I thought he was going to kill kids, actual kids! That's why I jumped in. Ow, my head…if you aren't going to keep me prisoner, do you have any aspirin or something?"
"You have a Thinker headache." I informed her with a grin, "Stop trying to use your power and it'll go away after about ten minutes."
"I'm not trying to use my power; it's always active and I have no idea how to deactivate it." The girl retorted.
That made me wince. Yeah, my own Thinker power was like that; always on and only able to be deactivated or muffled for a short period of time. With this girl's own power, I could tell that she couldn't even do that much.
"What is your power anyway?" I had to ask, "I can see it gives you a Brute rating for your strength and a forcefield around your body to protect it, but those are because of the power, not your power in and of itself."
The girl looked between me and Grue warily before shrugging.
Resigned to the fact that she was in an unusual situation. Curious why villains are being honourable. Unaware of the Unwritten Rules. Assigning us temporary trust based on Grue's words and my friendliness. Misses having a female friend she can trust.
"Basically put, my power gives me strength based on loyalty." The girl said uncomfortably, "The more people who have some form of loyalty to me and I form a connection to, the stronger my Brute power becomes. It isn't necessarily subordinate to superior loyalty either; it can be father to daughter, friend to friend or even acquaintance to acquaintance. Any kind of loyalty activates my power. On the other hand, dislike of me drains my power. I have to actively cut off any negative connections, otherwise I'm weakened. I just cut off Lung's connection while I was asleep, actually. Now I know that Parahumans register differently to my power."
"What do you mean?" Grue asked, but my mind was racing as my power gave me clues. Trigger caused after extensive bullying. Caused by former best friend. Caused by insignificant groupie. Caused by star track team athlete.
"The person I hold mainly responsible for the incident where I got my powers is a Parahuman." The girl said angrily, "She showed up in my mindscape…look, in my mind, I can see connections between me and portraits of people. Gold connections if they're loyal, black connections if they're negative. The one I blame the most for this had her portrait surrounded in shadows and darkness."
Parahuman with power over shadows or darkness in Brockton Bay limited to Grue and Shadow Stalker. Trigger caused by female. Culprit is Shadow Stalker.
"Don't say her name." I told her firmly, "The Unwritten Rules are clear on this. OK, basically, one of the primary rules is to not unmask other Capes. If you suspect the identity of a Cape, keep it to yourself. To make it easier for you, there are only two people in Brockton Bay who can control shadows and darkness. Grue here is one of them. The other one is Shadow Stalker."
"She…that…that sadist is a fucking Ward?!" the girl snarled angrily.
Feels betrayed by her school for covering up the activities of a Ward. Is intelligent, understanding how a lot of incidents that occurred over the time she has been bullied…a year and a half…that Shadow Stalker's power could have been used for.
"Yeah, we aren't exactly fans of her either." Regent commented as he looked over at her from his paused game, "She almost killed Grue there a couple of months back with a live arrow to the gut."
"Crossbow quarrel." I corrected absently.
"Fuck off. He almost bled to death on the last couch we had and we had to get a new one." The renaissance faire reject continued unabated, "I loved that couch."
"Regent, it was white." Grue said patiently, "It was almost asking to get made dirty."
"Still liked it."
"Wait…Grue?" the girl peered up at him in confusion, "As in the Zork monster?"
Grue threw up his arms in exasperation. "Does everyone get that aside from me?"
I snickered when I read the confusion in the girl's body language. "I came up with his name," I explained, "and Grue here never played any games or the like growing up, so he had no clue what it was."
That made her chuckle.
"Curious here…what happens if a Parahuman is loyal to you?" I asked then. The girl shrugged.
"Not got a clue. Parahumans don't tend to advertise themselves unless they're New Wave and both of the ones I've encountered before now have disliked me, to put it mildly."
"Yeah. Psycho Stalker and Rage Dragon." Regent snorted, "Try Tattletale there. She's more up your street."
I blinked at that. Yes, I was friendly, but to the point of experimenting to see what happened if little miss loyalty here got friendly with me?
"Actually, first things first; what's your Cape name?" I asked, trying to delay things.
"Best I could come up with was Fidelis." The girl shrugged, "As in Semper Fidelis."
"Loyal." I translated for a confused Bitch, who had remained silent, "OK then. Well you saved us the bother of having to really fight Lung, which makes you a friend in my book."
"Thanks." Fidelis nodded, "Remind me not to do that again."
That earned her a chuckle from Grue and Regent. Then, a golden glow surrounded her and abruptly, my Thinker power stopped working on Fidelis.
"What the…?!" I said, wide eyed. I'd never come against anything that could block my Thinker power before. Stall it, yes. Confuse it for a moment, yes. But point-blank no-sell it? Never.
"Two seconds." The Cape said and went silent for a moment before coming back out, "Right, so my friendship with Tattletale here earns me a Thinker power, a fairly weak one actually. It blocks Thinkers from scanning me for about ten minutes once I activate it, before shutting down for two hours. That's what I'm seeing here anyway."
Fidelis. Loyalty-based power acquisition. Loyalty from mundane humans grants her a Brute rating. Loyalty from Parahumans earns her weak powers of the same type as the Parahuman. Power is never the same as the original Parahuman's own due to differences in thinking and experience. As friendship and loyalty with the Parahuman increases, so too does the power she receives. Never reaches strength of original power.
"Thankfully, it only stops direct scanning of you by Thinkers." I huffed, "It looks like you get weak powers from Parahumans who have some sort of loyalty to you. They can grow, but never reach the full potential of the original power."
"So wait…she's basically a more reliable Eidolon, is what you're saying here?" Grue asked intently.
"Pretty much." I confirmed, "Fidelis here, as far as I can tell, needs people to be loyal to her in order to have any sort of power whatsoever, and losing people's loyalty loses her power or even drains her, as she stated. As long as she has a person's loyalty though, she's able to use her powers as she pleases, although she has to play the power lottery with the powers she gets; she had as little control over what she gets as Eidolon has with his own power. Once she has them though, she keeps them. The only problem other than those I've already stated is that once again, they are not strong powers and they never reach the same strength as the original power."
Regent whistled. "Damn. So if she buddies up with Grue and me, she gets a Shaker/Stranger power and a master power from us, though she has no control over what that power is? Sign her up; I wanna see what she gets."
I walked over and smacked him on the head lightly. "She wants to be a hero, Regent." I reminded him.
"Maybe not so much after the PRT and Protectorate screwed things up with fucking Shadow Stalker." Fidelis replied, sounding rebellious. "What's the pay like?"
"Two grand a month." I replied, "Plus income from our jobs. How's your power by the way? The Brute one?"
Fidelis stood up and clenched her hands. A duller, but more consistent golden glow covered her body.
"Back in action." She replied.
"Bitch, are you going to do your usual?" I asked.
Rachel blinked back at me before huffing. "No. She kicked Lung's ass. She can join. I'm higher in the pack anyway."
Once again, confusion came from Fidelis. I got that by using my normal ability to read people, as I still couldn't read her with my Thinker power.
"Normally Bitch picks a fight with new recruits to try and drive them away." I explain to her, "The fact that you kicked Lung's ass seems to have neutralised the need for that though."
"Yay me." Fidelis deadpanned, "Is the offer to join up genuine?"
"It is." Grue confirmed, "We've needed a heavy hitter for a while. A Tinker too, but we'll take a heavy hitter if we can get one. You in?"
The camo-costumed cape thought for a moment before shrugging. "What the hell. I'm in."
As Tattletale did an admirable job of explaining Taylor's power in this chapter, I will forgo my usual explanation and merely leave it as her being rate as a Trump/Thinker 8. Anyone with further questions, review!
