It had been a while since I took the time to let my power work its magic on other people, I forgot how fun it could be to have someone that could keep up with me. As it was, even though two of my best friends were captured by a maniac with a torture fetish, I was able to put that far enough in the back of my mind that I was able to have fun jumping across roof tops with Reaper.
I was vaguely aware of my third mind constructing a very detailed 3D model of the city as I ran over it. My range, being about thirty feet in all directions around me, let me know every nonorganic detail down to the cracks in the sidewalk. Thirty feet wasn't anything compared to Skitter's range, but considering a one story building was about fifteen feet tall I was able to get a pretty accurate map going. That is of course, only in most of the city. When you got farther, places the Leviathan's waves didn't even touch, you hit the skyscrapers and taller buildings. I would have headed there first because it had all the warehouses and big empty buildings to hide in. Next to the abandoned places on The Dock, it would have been a perfect place to hide. But I couldn't rule anything out with Tick Tock so I head to the unlikely places first. Which is why Reaper and I were running across people's roof tops at two in the morning.
Reaper suddenly darted past me and did a flying leap to the next house, flipping several times in the process. He landed perfectly, facing me and striking a pose as if to challenge me. Not to be outdone, I smiled and ran forward.
I did about as twice as many flips as him and landed on my hands, following that with several flips across the roof. Each time I landed on my feet I flipped and landed on my hands, pushing off and landing on my feet again. I did this until I reached the end of the roof, pushing off one final time and doing another series of flips onto the next house.
I turned towards Reaper with a silly grin on my face. He held his hands up in surrender for a moment before signing,
"Alright, you win." I laughed a little then a sigh escaped my lips.
"What are we doing?" I said.
"Having a little too much fun," Tenant murmured in the corner of my mind.
'Shut up,' I thought/told him.
"Cheering you up." Reaper signed. "You were extremely angry when you learned about Queen, evident that you literally kicked the woman meant to replace her off the ship. Then you got really depressed when you heard about Troll. So I thought maybe a bit of fun would do you some good." I briefly wondered if his bluntness would be off putting to others, or if bringing up those other things would make a normal person feel down again. I guess it was a good thing I wasn't normal.
"You can say that again." Tenant muttered.
'Shut up Tenant.'
"Well, it's sort of working," I told him. "But we do need to find those two."
"Of course, but you know the chances of finding them and I want something to come out of this trip if nothing else." I nodded and moved on to the next building.
"You know," Tenant said, "That wasn't a normal conversation normal people would have."
'Tenant if I have to explain to you why the term 'normal' doesn't apply to anything we so much as look at were going to have problems.'
"Just making sure you're aware. What's the point of having full access to your mind if I don't make sure you self aware all of the time?" He fell silent after that. I ran for a good ten minutes, letting my second mind race Reaper as my first mind looked over the data I was gathering from my surroundings.
After about an hour we had cleared this section of the city, and now we were on to The Docks. But I couldn't take much more of the micromanaging Tenant and I were doing, it was just too boring. So I set my second mind to the task and brought my first to Reaper.
"So, are you going to tell me why you don't speak?" I asked him idly. Reaper paused a looked at me. He held up his hands and signed,
"I told you, Alexander Blane died a long time ago." I rolled my eyes a little.
"That's not an explanation." Reaper paused again, his mask making it impossible to tell what he may have been thinking or feeling.
"My career was my music, my voice. Then I saw all my friends die and my career go down in flames. Without my career I was nothing, so I stopped speaking because my voice is Alexander Blane. I prefer to be Alex, a Paranorm."
I quirked my lips. "I don't get it."
"It symbolic." He said, his voice slightly muffled by the mask. "Helps me remember that I can't ever go back to that life. So I save my voice for those that truly deserve it." I thought about it for a moment. Then I grinned.
"So I'm 'worthy' of your voice then?"
"Something like that. Come on, let's keep going." I was about to follow him when I felt someone below us enter our power range. I grabbed Reaper by the coat to stop him before he ran off. I pulled him lightly in the direction this person was coming from before letting go. Letting him follow me to the end of the roof to see who it was who showed up.
Miss Militia was waiting patiently on the ground, her arms crossed and a cigarette dangling from her mouth.
"Hey there," I called down to her. Miss Militia gestured for me to come down. I looked at Reaper and shrugged before leaping down to join her on the ground. "Out for a stroll?"
"Looking for you two." She answered. She took her cigarette out and tapped it over the ground to get rid of the ash. "I need your help with something." I raised an eyebrow at her.
"Last I checked we weren't on such good terms with the Protectorate." Miss Militia nodded.
"Alexandria's plan. She and the rest of the Protectorate will only work with you if you if there is some way to lessen your strength or give us some measure of control over the situation."
"And you don't?" I asked suspiciously. I wanted to think she was here on goodwill, but Skitter had sort of ingrained in me a distrust of anything the Protectorate did. I had to take a measure of caution.
She took a breath and looked at me hard. "I did, but then Tick Tock snagged four of our members right out of HQ. Things have changed." She paused as if considering something. Then she said, "And I thought about what you said about Queen and how we enabled Brigadier to do what he liked. I don't like it. I'm not going to do the same now that Tick Tock has her now." I smiled widely at her and we gazed at each other for a moment. It was a small victory. She isn't going against the Protectorate, but she was acting a little outside the lines they drew. One more ally for us I guess.
"Alright, what do you need?" Miss Militia dropped her cigarette on the ground and crushed it with her boot.
"We have a lead on where Tick Tock might be but no one is moving to investigate until they have all their bases covered."
"And you think it'll be too late before they move in?" She nodded. "Alright, what's the lead?"
"The broadcast Tick Tock is streaming across the city is being sent through a long chain of different routers all over the city. Each router is streaming the broadcast from data it's getting from the last router, which is getting sent from the router before it."
"Creating a never ending chain that has you running in circles." I finished.
"Right," she confirmed with a nod. "But he has been leaving little notes for us at each location. Most of them had just detailed which of his victims were his mental attacks, his physical ones, and both."
"And what was that?" I asked with a frown. Miss Militia glanced at me briefly before answering.
"Glory Girl and Genesis were both physical traumas. Brute has been the only mental victim so far. Panacea, Clockblocker, and Kidwin are all supposed to be both mental and physical."
"Leaving one more victim for both, two more for physical, and three more for just mental."
"Right, but my point was that one of these notes was written on the back of a business card. A card to a play house on the north side of two, ten minutes away from Queen's little military base at Captain's Hill."
"A play house? Like a playground for kids?"
"No, as in a stage and performance. And knowing Tick Tock's proficiency for the dramatic…" She trailed off and I nodded my head. It fits.
"Did you find anything there?"
"Thermal imaging shows two people inside, just standing there and not doing anything. It could be Clockblocker and Kidwin, but there is no way of confirming without going in."
"Which is where we come in." She nodded and turned to us both.
"If that's it, will you help me get to them?"
I smiled. "Of course, lead the way." She paused for a moment and said,
"I don't have a way of transporting you two."
"Not a problem, Reaper?" I looked back at Reaper and snapped my fingers. He nodded and floated off the ground in his ghost form before speeding off and jumping into someone's truck, causing it to rev up as the engine turned on.
"We'll just ride Reaper over there." Miss Militia gave me an odd look that I wasn't exactly sure was for. I decided to ignore it and climbed inside the truck, inviting Miss Militia to join me. After a moment's hesitation, she climbed into the driver's seat and put her hands on the wheel.
"Does he drive or do I?"
"Either or, I don't mind," Reaper said through the speakers of the truck. It didn't sound like his voice, in fact, I think he made it rather feminine on purpose. Miss Militia only answered by putting her hands on the wheel and shifting into gear. And then we were off.
I cut through the ceiling of the play house with a katana and gave a wink to Miss Militia before jumping in head first and doing a flip to land on my feet. Reaper and Miss Militia jumped in after me, having spent a decent about of time in my sphere of influence.
We were in the middle of the auditorium, having landed on a few of the cushioned seats. The place was lit with an orange glow from the lamps all over the room. It was quite and not a person in sight.
"So… Now what?" I asked. Miss Militia looked around, an assault rifle raised in front of her.
"We look for the Clockblocker and Kid Win. But I'm concerned there doesn't appear to be anything here to stop us at all." I frowned. It bothered me a little too.
"If Tick Tock was sure that we wouldn't find where these two were supposed to be until his time limit was up it might make sense he wouldn't put anything here to stop us. Just to rub it in our faces that we made things more difficult than they should have been." Miss Militia frowned deeply.
"Perhaps. But we should-" She was cut off when the lights suddenly went out and spot lights flicked on, lighting up the closed curtain of the stage. Speaker clicked on with a hum before Tick Tock's voice began to come through.
"So good to see you here on time. Seeing how I recorded this in advance, I don't know which of you showed up tonight but I'll take my best guess. Miss Militia wouldn't like sitting this out while she could be helping, but she wouldn't do it alone. And since the Protectorate won't help her, that leaves The Undersiders or The Paranorms. I'm going to guess The Paranorms, and if I know my work as well as I think I do it should be just the remaining three members. Tsundere, Reaper, and the other one." I was intensely aware of Tenant looming in my vision. He knew about Tenant, but I had already known that. What got me was he was being very vague about it, not letting Miss Militia know. Was there some point to that? Some sort of game he wanted to play. Miss Militia cast a sidelong glance at me.
"The other one?" She asked.
"We left Brute back on the ship," I said lamely. No use in telling her what she didn't need to know.
"Well," Tick Tock continued. "I am so glad you came, because I have something really impressive to show you. Now, I must say that I normally always try to incorporate a person's trigger event into my art. With Brute it was his torture done to his loved one. With Panacea, it was releasing her from the burden her power put on her. With Glory Girl, I was making up for the easy trigger she had by putting her in the hardest situation she has ever been in. She won't be playing baseball after that!" Tick Tock's laughter filled the auditorium. It quickly died off and Tick Tock started speaking again.
"But every now and then I see someone who is just so boring! Neither an interesting trigger nor any struggles with their powers as Panacea had. These poor soulless people with nothing interesting in their life don't make for good art. But I do my best, as I did for Clockblocker and Kid Win. Friendship rivalries are about the only thing interesting happening in their life. But this time, I was really hard pressed.
"You see, Assault and Battery are very uninteresting. Sure, how they became a couple was somewhat neat to see. But Battery is a liar that didn't have a trigger event and Assult watched his father get the snot beat out of him in an alley behind some bar. Not good material to work with. But then I found this tidbit from his childhood. Assault used to be really into puppet shows. So I thought, why the hell not? Let's run with it, and then this beauty was born."
I heard the stage curtain pulling open and turned around to see it. Miss Militia had been scanning the room for trouble and had to turn too. When the curtain opened completely I felt a little sick to my stomach.
Assault and Battery were dangling from the ceiling on puppet strings. Stakes were shoved through their wrists and feet, dried blood showing how it bleed out of them. The lower half of their jaws had been removed and replaced with crude metal ones that were also attached to strings.
And then the strings began to move.
"Hello there," Tick Tock said, doing his best impression of Assault as his metal jaw moved back and forth. "My name is Assault and I'm here to tell you how much I screamed when papa Tick Tock dislocated my shoulders and elbows for this. I would also like to point out how much distress I was in when he made me watch him cut off Battery's jaw while she was still awake for it."
"Hey," Tick Tock's Battery voice said as the strings made her pull up her hand in a fake friendly wave. "I stayed awake dangling here for a good hour, praying someone would come and help us. Would you like to know what I screamed? What I cried for? I cried for Assault and I screamed for every name of every hero I could remember. None of them heard me. Where were you Miss Militia? You were supposed to lead us. You were supposed to help us." He started laughing in his mock voice of Battery, but as he grew louder he switched to his own voice. When his laughing was at its peak he suddenly stopped and started talking again.
"You know what? I'm in a generous mood, so I'll give you a hint as to where my next little project is going to be set up at. It should be finished by the time you figure it out. Assault and Battery here wrap up my solely physical victims, though I'm sure some mental damage is to be entailed with it. Ah, what can you do? Anyway, my next victim is Imp and she is going to be a bit of both. And to find her, simply ask: Where was she running from, and where was she running to. That'll be all, see you later." He said the last bit with a deep, sinister tone.
"You should go after her." Miss Militia said quietly. She lowered her weapon and stared up at the two of them on the stage. Every now and then their limbs would move and their jaws would open and close silently.
"I'll help you get them down," I said, taking a step forward.
"No, every second counts against him." Miss Militia said curtly, not leaving any room for disagreement. "And he was right, these two were my responsibility." I almost spoke again before I stopped myself. Tenant walking into my vision, his cane making a tapping sound even though the floor was carpet.
"Would you like to know what you're thinking?" He asked. I didn't answer him. I stared silently at him. He read my mind nevertheless. "You're thinking that after this, finding Imp might give you another clue towards finding Queen and Troll. And thus, you want to abandon Miss Militia and these others and go look for her. Not for her sake, but for yours."
'Piss off Tenant.' I thought at him before turning back towards Miss Militia.
"Reaper, stay here and help Miss Militia cut those two down." I order him. "Help her any way you can."
"Tsundere-" Miss Militia began before I cut her off.
"No, I'm not asking. Let Reaper help you, I'm going after Imp." Before she could utter a response, I turned and jumped back up through the hole in the ceiling.
I was about to run straight for the ship The Undersiders were on, tell them what happened and see if we could figure it out together. But then I realized that's what Tick Tock wanted, to delay me a little more. Get more people involved, complicate and slow things down. I needed to do something else.
Trigger events, he made his 'art' with trigger events in mind. What was Aisha's trigger event?
"Tenant?"
"You don't know, you were never told," Tenant answered me. I swore under my breath. "But there is a bit here where Skitter explained to you a bit about Aisha and Brian's history."
"What's it say?"
"That she ran away a lot from her mother and then later her father. Often times looking to Brian for help and otherwise."
"She is running from her mother to Brian," I stated. But she couldn't run on water to a ship, unless Tick Tock had done something to fix that. Maybe he put her at her mother's house and strapped a bomb to her and told her to run to Brian before the timer ran out. There were a hundred different variables to this I didn't know that Brian and Taylor might. But there is only one place in this city she could run to that meant Brian. Grue's lair.
I whipped out my phone and sent a text to Skitter and Tattletale. The only one I had the number of.
'Tick Tock is having Imp run from her mother's to Grue. Don't know the details, I going to Grue's lair to see if there is something there. Go to her mother's and see if you can find her at some place in between.' As soon as I sent it I turned toward the area of town Grue's lair was and I pushed off the roof. The moment I did I felt a transformation kick into place. I understood it the moment it was accessible to me, a speedster. As usual, my power always gave me what I needed.