A?N: Chap 35 review responses are in my forums like normal. Read at your own risk, a lot of folks just really don't like this arc at all. And now, to see what's going on with the other member's of Coven.
Desperation 5.2*
When Lisa opened her eyes, information flooded her brain in such volume her eyebrows hurt and her scalp felt like it was being ironed. Such was the price of overusing her power.
Below she saw the impossible core of Leviathan cracked open, proof that sufficient energy could be imbued even in an insufficient vessel if enough speed were applied. Below that, she saw molten stone and concrete causing the flood waters of Leviathan's attack to billow up in clouds of steam. Evidence of the sheer energy imparted by Mage's last shot.
She felt the roof of the building under their feet lurch precariously. Eidolon shielded them against the immediate shockwave, but could do nothing against the cracked foundations of the eastern section of downtown.
Bedrock cracked. Aquifer seeping into stone. Building collapsing round us.
Mage down. Overused his power. Skitter falling on him with portkey to hospital.
Alexandria nearby, watching. Watching.
Not helping.
Eidolon watching.
Not helping.
Building collapsing, ten seconds before surface too unstable and we fall. Portkey will take us to Brockton Memorial. Alexandria knows where portkeys go.
Mage just killed an Endbringer. A villain. Not under control. Not helping.
"Oh shit." She jumped toward a wide-eyed, terrified Vista. "Get us out of here, now!"
It was a comment on Vista's training as a Ward that she responded without hesitation. Behind them, Flechette screamed as she lost her footing and fell with the rest of the roof. Lisa caught a last glimpse of the New York Ward disappearing as Mage's portkey zipped her to safety.
Then she had to close her eyes as Vista violated physics in a casual fashion. They tumbled into filthy, waist-high water at street level half a mile from the building. Tattletale spun around, her hand still on Vista's shoulders, as the venerable old Brockton Oil tower crumbled to the ground in a cloud of ground cement dust that billowed all around the dead heart of Brockton Bay.
"Something's wrong," Tattletale said urgently. "They're not going to honor the Truce, not with Mage," Lisa said.
Vista glowered. "But why? He killed an Endbringer! He…"
"There's something else, something bigger," Lisa said. "I don't have all the data, but they don't think they can't afford to let him take credit for this. They can't let him be a hero. I don't know why for sure. You need to go back to them and be a Ward."
"But…but!"
Tattletale gripped the younger girl's shoulders. "Vista, listen! Mage adores you, you know that. But he and Skitter have probably been captured by now. We can't protect you! If they think you're still one of them, you'll be safe. And maybe you'll be in a position to help him. Please, go!"
"What about you?"
"Mage lifted the invisibility from the lair before we left so the refugees could find it. Alexandria will be watching it. I can't afford to go there for now. Just go and be safe, please!"
Lisa noted the tears in the other girl's eyes, but also the clenching of her jaw as she decided. The world bent around them, and seconds later Vista was gone.
Lisa ripped off her domino mask and gloves while looking around desperately. She found what she wanted after only a few minutes of looking—Captain's Tower, a high rise condo far enough away from downtown to have survived Leviathan's death. It still boasted some of the most expensive real-estate in Brockton Bay, which would prove perfect for her needs.
The lobby and first two floors were ruined by flood waters, which were quickly receding to reveal the damage within. Lisa waded into the building confident it would have been evacuated. She reached the stairs and started climbing. The lower floors would have been the less expensive, and so she got off on the fourth floor.
Immediately she saw she wasn't alone. The walls were tagged by ABB symbols, and one of the taggers was still in the hall with a can of paint. He saw her immediately and shouted something in Japanese.
Seconds later two more men came out—young, thin and hungry looking. One had a knife. The other carried a bat. In the post economic collapse of the Endbringer era, guns were expensive.
Tattooed. Inducted members of ABB. Have raped, killed or otherwise earned those tattoos.
Women are objects to be used and discarded. If they leave me alive, they will do so only after hurting me badly. No outrunning them—they will pursue.
Her mind calculated her odds even as her body worked on autopilot along the only path that had the best hope for survival. She smiled at them, careful to make her smile more inviting than predatory. Skin color was less important to these boys than tits and a pussy. They wanted sex, they didn't care about the particulars. She sauntered toward them, very pointedly lowering the zipper of her costume to reveal cleavage.
Harry could only wish he were here to see.
The thought made her deeply sad, but she dared not let the feeling reflect on her face. The men made no effort to reach for their weapons as she lowered her zipper all the way down to her navel, revealing a long expanse of creamy skin. Their eyes were locked like targeting systems on the creamy swells of her breasts.
So they did not see her unclip and remove the Beretta 9 mm that Harry obtained from the evidence locker room. The men had only seconds to realize their danger before Lisa fired. Her power guided her aim with terrific accuracy, while at the same time forcing her to see and understand the horror she perpetrated on each of the three in horrific detail as they fell back dead of single shot wounds between their eyes.
The shakes and the pounding in her head came immediately after. She holstered her weapon and decided to go up one more floor. She found a long, carpeted hall that had only a few doors on each side, since each floor only had ten apartments, five on each side. She simply walked down trying doors. The first unlocked door obviously belonged to a man; she tried again and found a second that had belonged to a family.
Young couple, techies.
One child in second bedroom, new bassinet, more toys than she will ever play with.
She stripped from her costume without hesitation, shoving it into a laundry basket in the master bedroom closet. The woman's size was taller than her, but only just. She ignored the hanging clothes and looked for boxes or bins.
Pre-baby clothes. Hopes to fit in them again someday. Never will.
The hanging clothes were too large, but the boxed clothes were a better fit. Still loose in some areas and tight in others, but close enough she didn't care. Lisa pulled on a pair of the woman's jeans with a belt to secure the size-too-large pair, but gave up on the woman's Taylor-sized old bras and found a nursing bra that actually fit. Over that she pulled on a sturdy Yankee's sweater. A search through the closet found a pair of hiking boots that were a size too big, but multiple pairs of socks made up for it. With the flooding, it wouldn't matter anyway.
Most importantly, though, she found black hair dye and a pair of scissors.
"It's not like I haven't gone underground before," she said to herself as she started working.
~~Simurgh's Son~~
~~Simurgh's Son~~
Unlike the last time he was captured, Harry had no visitors—Wards or otherwise. Legend never came to check on him or try to guilt him into the Wards program. They fed him, after a fashion, but only if you called having a mechanical arm lower from the ceiling and stick a tube into his mouth 'feeding'. To their credit, it tasted a lot like a slightly gritty milkshake, so he wasn't going to complain too much.
He would have preferred a King Burger, though.
Time blurred and he found himself reliving Potters' memories. War dominated Potter's existence, but those weren't Harry's favorite memories. No, his favorite memories were of the children. Potter had so many, over so many varied lifetimes, that toward the end before the Milky Way died one of his wives estimated that every Mage in the galaxy could trace at least some of the ancestry back to one or another of Potter's various lives.
Children seemed unlikely for Harry Bailey, though. He might have escaped Coil, but it seemed the Universe and God herself were conspiring together to make sure his life sucked ass.
Least he wasn't going to die a virgin.
He never saw anyone or spoke to anyone when the roof over his cell suddenly opened. He couldn't crane his head back to see the sky overhead, but he did feel a rush of cool Spring air with just the hint of rot from the devastated city. He managed a brief glimpse of the city at night—only small clumps retained power—most of the eastern half had no power yet at all.
Then his whole cell was inside another room, which he supposed in a dark mood avoided the problem of having to release him from his constraints. He heard clamps clang shut and felt his stomach dip as the plane or whatever he was in surged into rapid motion.
They aren't even bothering to drive me this time. After two days of captivity he had given up on hope of rescue. Taylor had been with him—chances were they had her too. He hoped Lisa got away, but he couldn't count on that. At least Paige, Jess and Dinah were safe back in the lair.
He hoped.
There was no clock or reference to know how long the flight took. He could feel when the plane banked sharply several times before losing altitude. He half-expected the screech of tires on a runaway, but of course the plane had hover capabilities. Forward momentum came to a complete halt and a second later the craft dropped two feet and came to a halt.
The floor under his cell opened and he was lowered down onto a vast, seemingly endless stretch of cement inside a room so huge he could not see any walls at all. He could see small circles of light from overhead lamps, but nothing else. A giant mechanical claw moved just inside his peripheral vision and gripped the whole portable cell.
The arm lifted him from under what he now saw was an obvious Tinker-made jet. The ceiling rose perhaps thirty feet above, and like the floor seemed to stretch on forever.
Harry could only watch as his cell was carried by the arms toward a huge monitor that hung down from the otherwise featureless ceiling. A CGI face of a woman appeared—a face so utterly ordinary and blank it was almost striking. Speakers to either side of the almost football-stadium-sized monitor blared to life.
She sounded Canadian. Harry kept waiting for her to say 'about'.
"Prisoner 721, codename Mage. PRT powers designation Brute asterisk, Blaster asterisk, Mover asterisk, Shaker asterisk, possible Master asterisk. Individuals reading or viewing this log are directed to see pages four through nine of prisoner's file for particulars on powers. Recommended protocols were properly carried out with containment foam and steel frame, force field containment of hands. Chance of escape following interment in the Baumann Parahuman Containment Center rests at a fairly steady .004601% with some gross deviations for possibly unknown power variations. Within acceptable limits. Hello, Mage."
"Hey, Dragon," he said. "So, what did they convict me of this time?"
"The deaths of three thousand civilians in an Endbringer Shelter that was destroyed when you killed Leviathan."
Harry felt his eyes bulge. "Really? There was a shelter? I passed the plan by Legend and Alexandria and Eidolon both helped. Why didn't they say anything?"
"Alexandria and Eidolon both indicated they were unaware of the lethality of your weapon. Legend, unfortunately, was assassinated by Skitter this morning in a misguided attempt to free you."
Harry wanted very much to puke.
"That's a load of bollocks," he managed to say. "Skitter would never have hurt Legend. He was the only decent person in the entire fucking Protectorate! How could she even kill him? Legend can shoot wide-beam lasers that could knock out every bug she had."
"I'm afraid I don't have answers for you, Mage. Skitter also killed a journalist, two PRT agents and a pair of paramedics during her escape. She threatened the President of the United States, and so a Birdcage order has been issued for her."
"Just like Coil," Harry muttered. "Well, fuck you and your fucking Protectorate. Least Canary's safe, and Genesis and…"
"I'm sorry, Mage, but I processed Canary this morning. If it helps, I placed her in cell block E with Lustrum. It was my hope Lustrum would protect her."
"But…but…" Harry stopped. He just stopped as he realized how completed and thoroughly screwed he was. "You know your own Protectorate killed Legend, right? If Skitter did it, it was because Canary made her. Maybe they tortured Paige into doing it, who knows. But Skitter knew I…I loved Legend. He was the only one who ever cared. She'd never hurt him on her own. I just…."
The worst part about it was that he couldn't shrug or move or anything. He could only blink back tears than ran down his face.
"You know what? I'm sorry I killed Leviathan. The world deserves Endbringers. You all deserve the hell the world has become. I don't care what God wanted when she reincarnated me into this fucking life, you can all just fucking die. Just send me down the chute already."
"I'm sorry, Mage." Worse yet, he believed her. He just didn't care.
The CGI face frowned before going blank. "The Baumann Detention Center is situated inside of a hollowed out mountain, the walls of which are lined with layers of a ceramic of my own design, each such layer separated by volumes of dormant containment foam. If you punched a hole in the outside of the mountain, you'd only wind up with more foam than you knew how to handle.
"That's the mountain. The prison itself is nicknamed the Birdcage because it is suspended in the center of the empty mountain, hanging only by the same network of tubes that supplies prisoners and food to the cell blocks. Both the interior of the tubes and the interior of the mountain itself are vacuums. Even if an individual were to have powers allowing them to navigate the vacuum, I have three thousand antigrav drones in position at any given time, laying dormant in that lightless void, waiting for any signal, motion, energy or air leakage to awaken them. Once awakened, a drone will move to the location of said anomaly and detonate. Many of my drones contain a loadout of containment foam, but others contain payloads designed to counteract various methods one could theoretically use to traverse the vacuum. Some are quite lethal."
"These are not the only measures I have taken, but it wouldn't do to inform you of everything I have done to secure this facility. Know only that even with your teleportation ability your chance of successful escape is negligible, and the chance of you dying or being maimed for attempting it is much higher."
"Understand that while I do retain control over the structure and the ability to observe those within, enabling me to respond to emergencies such as natural disasters, you will not be able to manipulate this to your advantage. I will not, cannot intervene should a hostage be taken, or if an individual should threaten or perform damage to vital or luxury resources. There was no other way to run the prison effectively than to have you police and protect yourselves. I stress: nothing you do can convince me to free you. The elevators to the Baumann Detention Center go one way. Down."
"I will be depositing you in the elevators now with your current cell intact. You will have only the existing oxygen inside the cell. Should you slow or stop the lift, or attempt to scale the interior of the tube, I expect you will likely fall unconscious, suffer brain damage or die for your trouble. A counteragent for the containment foam will be applied as you descend, so that you are free before you reach the bottom."
The mechanical arm moved him to a spot on the cement floor that looked just like the others. The floor suddenly dropped away in four perfectly square leaves that received his cell with an odd slurping sound. His stomach surged up almost into his throat as the cell began to drop.
He could sense odd permutations of space as he went, much like what Vista did. He didn't take much to imagine that the birdcage existed within condensed or expanded space. Tinker powers were as bullshit as his own, really.
Inside his mind, he felt ancient thoughts stirring his own, merging as they sometimes did. Since his vision after Leviathan died, he accepted that he and Harry Potter weren't necessarily one and the same, though he was kind of thankful he didn't have to go through all the bonding shit. It was kind of fun getting to know a girl the old fashioned way instead of insta-magic pow super-sex. Not to say he was against super-sex, it just felt like cheating.
But what he was now realizing was that he was just seconds going to find himself in an unescapable prison filled with the most violent, most powerful supervillains in the world. He was still sixteen. He was going to have to be ruthless to survive the brutal, primitive jungle.
He barely had time to close his eyes and hold his breath when the spray began dissolving the containment foam. He felt the metal ribs that held him against the board unclip and retreat into the back of the holding chair. And then he stopped moving.
Cautious and confused, Harry pushed himself forward until he emerged in a small room with curved, smooth white walls. He was just in time to see a cheap cardboard box shunted from a space above his head onto the floor.
A quick search found three sets of identical orange jumpsuits, a carton of cigarettes (really?) plus a generic tube of toothpaste, soap and shampoo.
"Everything a growing boy needs," Harry muttered.
There was only one entrance or exit from the room, and movement from that opening drew his eye to see a man half a head taller than Harry wearing bright orange pants, but otherwise who was barefoot and bare-chested. Dragon-themed tattooes covered almost every inch of that exposed chest.
Lung? All Harry could think of was: "What the hell are you doing here?"
Lung rolled his shoulders, flexing muscles Harry knew for a fact he didn't have. "You are Mage. The Bug Girl is your minion."
"Not sure she'd agree with the 'minion' part, but we were in the same gang."
"The television says you killed Leviathan," Lung continued, as if Harry did not speak. "You and the bug girl. Already those here view you as powerful."
Harry stood stock still, his mind trying to catch up from the transition of losing everything he cared about to having a conversation with a psychopathic man-dragon. "I suppose."
"This is not the first prison I have seen. There are four ways one can survive a place such as this. First is to join one of the gangs or groups in charge. Before, I could not do this because I was known to be half Japanese, half Chinese, and there was no gang willing to include such a person in my first prison."
"Er, sorry to hear that…"
"Nor is it possible now, for I am too used to being in charge to bow and scrape for any length of time without losing my patience. The second option is to be somebody's bitch. They give you their protection in exchange for the most base of services. This has never been an option for me."
"I can see that, sure."
Lung stared hungrily at Harry. "The remaining option is to find the strongest man in the prison and kill him for no reason.. In such cases, one demonstrates he is too dangerous or unpredictable to be fucked with. Of course, I do have reason—you are friends with one who harmed and insulted me. For this alone I would kill you. But this way, everyone knows that Lung killed the cape which killed Leviathan."
"Sure," Harry said. "Why the fuck not? Killed an Endbringer, saved a city, then got arrested and thrown in the Birdcage for it. So, why not have a fucking duel to the death with some shit-head wannabe Nobunaga. Wanna lay down here, or do you need room to display your awesomeness to all the little-brained peons you think you need to impress?"
Lung snorted. "Big words for a little man. I…"
Harry blasted him out of the room, pumping as much magic into the blasting charm as he could. Lung flew backward, a surprised look on his tattooed face. Harry followed, feigning disinterest despite his rapidly beating heart, to inter a large hemispherical area that rose up four floors from where he stood. Each floor was lined in rails, and leaning on those rails were hundreds of prisons who appeared to have gathered for the show.
Behind him, he saw a giant tube that rose up past the ceiling, bisected by a wall. That was what he'd come down, he gathered. He placed his box on the ground and turned to see Lung ramping up already, cloaked in flame and eight feet tall.
With his runes, Harry knew Lung couldn't kill him. As strong as the villain was, he had only muscle and fire. Granted, it was a lot of muscle, and a ridiculous amount of fire. However, Sundancer had far more firepower.
That said, Harry was limited on what he could do to actually beat Lung either. He could kill him—he'd never tried a killing curse, but he knew it existed and had no reason to think it wouldn't work. However, he also knew hundreds of far nastier curses as well. He knew curses that would turn Lung's blood to ice, his bones to glass or force him to regurgitate his own intestines.
He definitely wanted to get the fight over with, before Lung got to big.
"Avada Kedavra!" Sick-green magic flashed from Harry's hand and struck Lung in the center of his chest.
For a brief moment, his fire went out and the cape staggered back, an expression of agony on his face. Harry waited for him to fall dead. Instead, Lung roared and exploded into flame and scale, suddenly shooting up to twenty feet in height, bristling with scales, flame and even fucking wings.
Harry stared, genuinely confused. "Huh, that's new. Wonder if I did it wrong?"
*Parts of this are from Worm, Interlude 6.x, by Wildbow.