At My Fingertips Chapter 4 (Original chapter Chapter 25, Second chapter Chapter 110)

The Next Night

Merchant Storehouse, The Docks Area, Brockton Bay

"Looks like Skidmark's really got his dander up." I muttered aloud. I was looking through the binoculars that I'd bought from a second-hand store earlier in the week. They were just basic bird-watching ones, but I'd 'enhanced' them with Dauntless' power, making them night-vision capable and auto-focusing to boot.

I was down the street from where the storehouse was and on top of a roof. I was no fool and had guessed that even a moron who shot himself full of a hell-brew concoction of who-knows-what would up the defenses of vital places after getting raided twice. And here I was, being proven right.

There were five Merchants on guard outside of the warehouse, all of them armed with handguns of some description, with one clutching a knife, almost a machete, in his other hand.

I had my doubts about if those were the only men on the job; this place held not only a bunch of the Merchant's foul 'product', but a not-inconsiderable amount of cash in unmarked bills. It was a lot more than I could imagine, but for a gang like the Merchants, it was just enough to buy the raw materials for their drugs, not to mention buying processed drugs, for about a fortnight.

If I did this, Skidmark would be forced to dip into any emergency reserves he had in order to avoid him and his gang of crack-heads from going cold turkey. That bothered me not one jot, personally. The only concern was who they might hurt while they had no access to drugs, but if nothing else, it would force the police and heroes to deal with the Merchants more strictly.

With the advantage that my black costume gave me in the dark, plus the fact that all of the Merchant guards were swaying like an elm tree about to fall, I was more than reasonably certain that I could sneak over to the roof of the building opposite the storehouse. Then I'd ambush the bastards.

Tucking my binoculars away into a pouch that I'd enhanced to be slightly bigger on the inside by using Dauntless' power on it three times, I leapt across the rooftops to reach the building overlooking the five idiots who were 'guarding' it. Urgh, they were smoking weed as well. Idiots…

"So what're we lookin' out fer agin?" one asked his neighbor in a slurred tone of voice. I peered over the side to observe, knowing that none of them were going to look up; despite knowing their were flying capes, humans never look higher than themselves.

"You idiot. We're looking for one of those Empire pricks, the one what done blew up our weapons stashes." the other man replied, only slightly more coherent than his fellow. "It'll be Victor or Kreig, probably."

Regardless of the fact that I was the one who put the Merchants onto the back of the Empire, I honestly felt insulted to be compared to those two.

Slipping my hand back into my pouch, I pulled out a flashbang grenade and readied it, but stilled as the two morons continued to talk.

"What if -hic!- What if they get by us?" the first Merchant asked, obviously not all there.

"Then the watcher over on the far end of the street'll call in Mush! Do ya not listen, Jerry?!" the other man said in exasperation, pointing to the opposite side of the street from where I'd come from.

"Ain't that Lance? He'll be snortin' the good stuff." Jerry asked unsteadily.

"Nah, Skids told him if he fucked this up, he'd be target practice for Squealer's next tank-thingie." the other one shook his head. "Even a dead-ender like him'll know better than to snort on the sly tonight."

Hm. That would be problematic. Mush was one of the three Capes that the Merchants had. Of the three, he was the muscle, at least according to PHO. He could make a kind of artificial body around himself made from gathered up trash. That was one power-set I wasn't eager to acquire.

Looking down the street, I saw no signs of any watcher…until I looked at the rooftops. Sitting huddled in a coat underneath a water tower was a man squinting into the darkness of the night. Placed next to him was an old handheld two-way radio, a clunky-looking black one. He wasn't actually looking at the street, but to his left, at something at the back of the building. At what, I couldn't begin to guess, but he had to be taken care of first.

Withdrawing back into the shadows, I moved across the rooftops stealthily, one of the skills I had copied from Sophia. I went three buildings past the watcher's own before using Triumph and Browbeat's powers to leap across to the other side and land as softly as possible. With the usual background noise of a city during the night, I was completely undetected.

It didn't hurt that this guy wasn't exactly being observant; he only had a thin plastic raincoat on, and it was fairly cold, so he was too busy trying to keep himself warm to pay any attention to his surroundings.

Sucks for him.

I cold-cocked him across the back of the head using a pistol butt for a club, making him slump forward like he was asleep. I pulled out some duct tape and made sure he couldn't move or call out to his friends. With him secured, I headed over to the warehouse itself, peered through the skylight and sucked in a breath at what I saw.

It was a freaking trap. There was one of Squealer's abominations of technology down there, main cannon aimed right at the door. No clue what kind of weapon it was, but I didn't want to get hit by it!

The vehicle itself looked like someone had slapped the turret of a tank on top of a garbage truck; in fact, dollars to donuts, that's exactly what Squealer had done. It also had half-a-dozen machine-guns poking out of the main body of the truck and sitting right on top of the cab's roof.

Scattered around the sides of the truck were a couple of Merchants…including Skidmark. The bastard was pretty damn hard to miss, given he was swearing so loud that I could heard bits and pieces of his rant through the window. The general gist of it, removing swear words, was that he wanted the person who had robbed the Merchants and destroyed their property to get killed gruesomely.

I knew about the Unwritten Rules from my usage of my power on both Panacea and on the rest of the Wards and Protectorate that I'd managed to get, but I also knew that all three of the big gangs had broken them in the past. From Miss Militia and Dauntless, I knew that the biggest offenders in this regard were undoubtedly the Merchants; they'd killed at least two Independent Heroes over the years, and drugged at least one to death in his own home, so the fact that they were planning on killing me wasn't that much of a surprise.

I should have searched that lookout's memories after I knocked him out; I would've found out about this in all likelihood. Live and learn. Now, how the hell had the Merchants, of all people, found out that I was going to attack this place tonight?

Slipping back to the knocked out man, I pressed one finger to his hand and scanned back through his memories before pausing. Somehow, another Cape had joined the Merchants, one who called herself 'Shamaness' or something like that; the guy's memories were vague on that. She was a precog, able to see into the future using colored dice and counters as mediums.

With a frown, I withdrew my finger after reading all he knew about her. This was troublesome. A precog, it had been proven, could never be right a hundred-percent of the time, but a half-decent one was right enough of the time to make things irksome.

All things considered, I found it highly suspicious that a Cape who was the perfect defense against an unknown foe would suddenly appear in the Merchants out of nowhere. No one who wasn't a drug-addled fool would ever do that, which meant…what, exactly?

Shaking my head, I put it out of my mind. That wasn't important right now. What was important was that I needed to decide what to do here. It was obvious that this precog had a good idea of where I would target the Merchants, but the scrub that I'd just read, Lance, had overheard that Shamaness' power was defensive only; it only worked when she or a piece of property her was knowledgeable of was under threat.

This was both bad and good; it was bad in that the Merchants now had a way to counter me, but it was good in that the woman couldn't track me down outside of costume.

Sneaking over to the skylight again, I looked around and found Squealer leaning against the wall and shouting at someone on a mobile phone. From what I could hear, she was warning Shamaness 'away from her man' or something along those lines. Why she wanted Skidmark in the first place was beyond me, but there was no accounting for taste, I suppose.

There were three priorities here. First, I had to stop Squealer from getting inside her abomination of a vehicle. Second, I had to take down Skidmark before he could use his power to protect himself. Third, I had to destroy the stupid tank-thing before it could get mobilized. Fortunately, there were more than a few parts of the skylight that were missing panes of glass, so they wouldn't get that little extra bit of warning.

I once more reached into my pouch and pulled out three grenades, two flashbangs and one regular grenade. Grabbing one of the flashbangs, I pulled the pin out and threw it where the guards outside were, before grabbing both the real grenade and the other flashbang, pulling the pins and throwing them into the warehouse below, the flashbang landing on top of the tank thing, while the grenade went right down the turret's open hatch.

"GRENADE!" someone shrieked below, prompting everyone to throw themselves down. I ducked down and scooted back from the skylight just in case.

All three grenades going off at around about the same time made me realize that I'd tapped into Velocity's power on pure instinct. While deafening, it was actually useful. The shrieks as the Merchants down below were blinded by the flashbang and deafened by the exploding tank. The shockwave of the explosion shattered what little glass remained in the skylight, raining glass below.

Drawing a Glock from its holster on my leg, I leapt down through the skylight and into the smoke-filled confusion below. The tank was a smoke-spewing wreck, with at least four regular Merchants down for the count from either the light and sound of a flashbang or from being thrown into a wall from the force of the tank blowing up.

"Fudgepacking sons-of-bitches!" Skidmark shrieked from somewhere in front of me. "Squeals, what the fuck did your shitty car do?!"

"It got blown the fuck up, Skids!" Squealer retorted. "I told ya I shoulda been in there! If I had, the fucking hatch woulda been closed!"

Before Skidmark got a chance to reply, I clubbed him unconscious with a chop from my hand and then knelt down, briefly touching him, very reluctantly, to copy his power.

"Skids? Skids, this ain't fucking funny!" Squealer called out. I ghosted around and let the woman, wearing her 'costume' of barely-anything-there clothes and a pair of goggles, walk past me looking for her boyfriend and leader before clubbing the idiot woman unconscious.

I holstered my pistol, knelt down and touched Squealer…and was hit by a thumping headache. What the hell?!

Moving away from her and staggering to my feet, I let out a sigh of relief as the headache subsided. Looks as if I can't copy Tinkers, or maybe it depends on their specializations? More time to think on that later, I have to worry about securing these morons first.

Duct tape to the fore…I was never leaving the house without a roll of duct tape ever again.

I'd just finished taping up Skidmark's face when the bangs from outside started. Looks like those five idiots out there had finally gotten their shit together and realized that something was up inside. Fortunately for me, there was only one door, aside from the large one that was for vehicles, so there wasn't any other way for the five of them to get in. That being said though, if they came in and started randomly firing bullets all over the place, they could start another explosion or skill someone.

Shaking my head at the thought of saving the life of these parasites, I still leapt up onto the roof again before peering down over the lip of the roof. One person, the one who had been swaying the most, was out cold, while the other four were clumsily banging on the door.

I had, unfortunately, run out of flashbangs in my pouch so that left direct confrontation. Fortunately, I would be attacking with surprise on my side, and from behind, to boot.

Dropping down silently to the ground, I used Browbeat and Triumph's powers to become super strong before charging at the four grouped idiots. Just before I struck them, one heard something and started to turn around, but I barreled into them and knocked them through the door. Good thing it was a piece of crap weak plywood door.

The four idiots, plus the door and the guns they'd let go of when I hit them, flew into the warehouse and landed on the ground, sprawled out and struggling. I strode in and cracked my knuckles and smiling grimly under my mask. Out of all the gangs in the city, the Merchants were the worst of the lot. Any kind of payback for what they'd done to my home was good in my book.

As they struggled to stand up, I darted around and kicked their weapons away from them, mostly into the still smoking interior of Squealer's tank-thing. Now the only weapons they had were their BO, their own bodies and one knife that I couldn't see.

"You son of a bitch…!" one growled as he managed to get to his feet. "Don't underestimate the Merchants!"

I assumed a defensive stance and waited. I didn't have to for long, as the guy came at me with a very obvious and very clumsy right hook that put him off balance when I dodged. I responded with a throw that send him crashing into a nearby crate, smashing it open.

The next two to get up charged me as one, but I caught their hands in my palms, gripped them and pulled, throwing them off balance and letting me leap over them to kick one down. The other recovered himself and came at me again, so I simply delivered a strong punch to his solar plexus, driving the wind from his lungs and making him collapse to his knees, cradling his abused stomach.

The other grabbed a length of metal that had come off the tinkertech abomination behind me and came at me, swinging it like a baseball bat. This one I dropped with a kick to the balls after he swung it through my head, which I'd turned insubstantial with Sophia's power.

The last had the knife, and he actually seemed competent with it. I frowned as he advanced on me and invoked Battery's power. Raising my hand and making a theatrical grasping gesture, I ripped the knife from his hand and caught it.

"Give up." I said flatly. My voice came out as a gender-less rasp.

"Fuck you!" the idiot shouted.

"There's no helping a fool." I sighed. Tossing the knife away so it clattered into the cab of the truck-thing, I assume a stance and waited. He came in swinging, all of which I dodged. Thank goodness I'd kept up my fitness program with the help of Panacea's bio-monitoring power. I tripped him up and sent him crashing to the ground before knocking him out.

After that, I bound and dragged out every single one of the Merchants, including Squealer and Skidmark, and piled them up on the street outside before looting the place. I obviously ignored the drugs, which made up a full three-quarters of the stock in the warehouse, and focused on stuffing both my backpack and my pouch with cash. There were literal piles of cash in one room in particular, and I managed to get about half of it in the two containers I'd brought with me.

Now, I wasn't about to let the money remaining be reclaimed by the Merchants, so I scoured around out the back to find, as I expected, a small truck full of fuel barrels, presumably for the tinkertech one. I brought all of them into the money room, using some of one to douse the drugs, before grabbing another couple of regular grenades and standing atop the tinkertech truck. I pulled the pins out of both of them and tossed them right at their targets, one at the drugs and one into the room with the remaining money, before leaping out of the warehouse and started leaping across the roof tops to get clear.

The warehouse collapsed in on itself as the grenades exploded, setting off the possibly tinkertech fuel. All the king's horses and all the king's men ain't putting that warehouse together again. Not to mention the money and drugs that they lost.

Well, that wasn't any of my business now.

Some people might have wondered why I hadn't called the police or Protectorate to arrest Skidmark and Squealer, but there were two reasons. First, if anyone in either organization was stupid enough to ignore such a large explosion, even in Brockton Bay, then they deserved to get booted to the curb faster than you could say knife. Second, from all of the Protectorate and Wards members I'd touched, I'd gotten a sense for how fragile the peace in the Bay really was.

Everything here hung by a thread, with the balance liable to snap if so much as a single factor was overly weakened. As pathetic as they were, the Merchants acted as a buffer between the ABB and Empire, preventing a gang war that would engulf the city. As much as I wanted the Merchants gone completely, until I, or more likely the authorities, could sweep up the gangs in one fell swoop, they were an unfortunately necessary evil.

I glanced back at the flames engulfing the warehouse behind me. For the moment, the Merchants were not an issue; I'd weakened the to the point that they'd be scrambling to keep ahold of their current territory, especially if the authorities arrived and arrested Skidmark and Squealer before someone woke up and worked their way out of the duct tape that I used to bind them.

Grinning to myself, I decided that the Empire might make significantly satisfying targets, and they were so big that it would take quite a bit of effort to weaken them to the same extent as the Merchants had been.

Later

Meeting Room, Cauldron Base

"Skidmark and Squealer were defeated by our mysterious Trump in Brockton Bay." Contessa remarked as she leaned against the wall and ran one finger along the lip of her fedora's rim.

"Hardly surprising; the Archer's Bridge Merchants are only still a gang due to the lack of funds, Capes and personnel that the Protectorate and PRT ENE requires." Doctor Mother said with an irked flap of one hand. "Had you not Pathed a way to turn whoever the Trump is to work for us, I would never have lowered myself to allow a Thinker/Precog vial to 'go missing' and end up sold to those low-level fools."

"It isn't quite as simple as that." Contessa countered mildly. "As you are well aware, Trumps are some of the hardest Parahumans for any level of Thinker, especially precogs, to deal with. My [Path to Victory] is usually an exception, but whoever this Trump is, their presence is acting like…echoes, to my power. Every time I Path something that even tangentially involves them, I see multiple Paths, which isn't unusual, but these ones…they obscure and distort the Path I want to see, for some reason. It's as if I'm trying to Path a collective of people, similar to the Butcher."

The infamous possession Cape, the Butcher, was the leader of the gang known as the Teeth. Once natives to Brockton Bay, the entire gang had fled when the Slaughterhouse Nine had invaded the city. The powers of the Butcher could possess any other Cape within a certain radius and drive them insane, becoming the newest Butcher in the line once the current wielder was slain.

"So we used a precious vial on a gamble?" the leader of Cauldron looked at her most trusted agent censoriously. "This is not what I expect from you, Contessa."

"It is a gamble." the Thinker acknowledged. "Not acting, on the other hand, would have led to Calvert revealing Cauldron to the Trump in the worst possible manner when he tries and fails to recruit them by force. By adding Shamaness to the Merchants, we have effectively ensured that they will remain intact for the foreseeable future, and that this Trump is now firmly focused on attacking the other two gangs instead of obsessively grinding the Merchants into dust as they had been before. Overall survivors in my modeling of the end battle have also increased by one percent."

This made Doctor Mother's eyebrows shoot up. "Really?! In what way?"

"I can only see overall results, not the causes." Contessa shook her head. "But it has been a while since the results of the battle with Zion have improved by an entire percentage point. The last time that happened, it was before the Simurgh descended on London."

"Well…I stand corrected. Even a vial as potentially useful as Diviner was pales in comparison to more people surviving the destruction of most Earths." Doctor Mother said after a moment. "Should this Trump help us in a significant way, we will have to devote more resources to them. What name are they going under?"

"Mnemosyne, after the Titan-Goddess of Memory." Contessa replied. "I'm almost ninety percent certain that this Trump is female."

"Hm, well, keep an eye on this 'Mnemosyne' for the foreseeable future." the black woman said firmly. "Results such as what you have described require investigation if it's more than a flash-in-the-pan incident."

"Three steps ahead of you, Doctor." Contessa reassured her with her usual enigmatic smile. "Very literally three steps ahead of you."

Three Days Later

Mnemosyne's Base

Smirking as I played with my new power, freshly acquired from Skidmark, the royal blue field glowing as it rippled across my costume.

Skidmark's power was criminally wasted on the man. It was a forcefield that repelled anything that touched it. With my version, only a single usage of it meant the strength was about the same as a light gust of wind. I could 'layer' the field several times over to increase how powerful it was, but I could only apply it to my body, my clothes or something I was touching. Another pretty useful effect was that anything passing through the field was accelerated with a force equal to the repelling aspect. Something that I'd found useful was to layer it several times over a gun I was holding, rapidly accelerating the bullet to quite a bit faster than average once it left the barrel. Unfortunately, such a cool power had its downsides; with Skidmark's version, he couldn't move from where he was standing once he'd applied even one layer of his power. In my case I could move, but only at a slow walk.

By using Velocity's power as well, though, that weakness was negated somewhat, but still only something useful when I'd had time to build it up and when I didn't need to move quickly, or at all.

Still, it was my first actual defensive power, so I was taking it as a win.

I'd stashed my stolen cash in my base, and gone around buying things in places that I knew Dad didn't go to, which meant they were rather pricey as a result. A portable stove, several gas canisters, some torches and lamps, a couple of sleeping bags, some preserved food…I'd bought most of them sparingly over the last couple of days, and I still hadn't made anything close to a dent in the cash I'd 'requisitioned' from the Merchants.

Next on the list was a mini-fridge, as well as a portable power station. I was almost certain that the power in this place was cut, but I'd see what I could do about that.

As for my new targets…the Empire was seriously bad news. Racist Neo-Nazis, drunk on power, with the largest number of Capes in the entire city, enough to offset Lung to a certain degree. They also had the largest amount of unpowered muscle among the three big gangs. Normally, this gave them a serious advantage due to their numbers, but against me, someone who could trace back through their memories to find places of interest, as well as copy any useful skills, they may as well decorate them with neon signs saying 'Information for sale, please access when ready'.

After a while, the Empire would wise up and figure out that I was somehow getting information from their muscle, and then compartmentalize information about it, even more so if they did it already, but until then they were wide open.

Dismissing the shield with a flash of light, I went over to my homemade weapon rack. I was already dressed in my costume, now all I had to do was get armed and ready. A pair of Glock pistols, in holsters on each of my legs, was a good start. I didn't need to worry about knives thanks to Miss Militia's power, so I had to decide what else to take.

After throwing a couple of magazines of ammo for my pistols in, I decided to add some P90 ammo and my P90 itself to my bag. It was high time that I got myself some experience in using it. I'd absorbed the experiences of someone else using it, so I knew how to clean, disassemble, maintain, reassemble and shoot with it, but there's using absorbed memories, and then there's personal experience.

I'd also enhanced it several times with Dauntless' power. It had three abilities. First, every time you emptied a clip, the magazine would slowly refill with bullets over the course of about twelve hours. Second, the bullets it fired were slightly faster than average. And third, the bullets it shot had more kinetic force than a regular bullet, yet weren't any more penetrative.

Fortunately, it came with its own sling so I could carry it on my back in addition to my backpack. I didn't want to use it unless I needed to, and carrying it in my hands was begging someone to take me way more seriously than I wanted.

After adding more flashbangs and a couple of real grenades to my pouch, I was ready. I walked towards the window, opened it up and then used Vista's power to compress the boards covering the window down so I could get out.

Beneath my mask, I smiled grimly. Mnemosyne was on the hunt again tonight.

And that's it for this chapter.

I am glad that people like this series of ficlets. It's quite nice to see all of the reviews. All I would ask is that, before you review, that you check the actual reviews already present for the chapter. If someone's already reviewed about something that you want to point out to me, there's no point flogging a dead horse. I read every single review that I get, even the guest ones, so I only need to be told something once for me to get the point.

Next chapter, I'll be doing a short list of Mnemosyne's gathered powers and Trumped equipment. Look forward to that.