No Options
The base was built out of the schematics of an Endbringer shelter, with a few tweaks here and there to account for the different purpose it existed for.
There were no countless cots and food reserves, only sharp turns and reinforced concrete where his mercenaries could hold off any siege or attack. The lights were stark white, erasing the blind angles that anybody could use to hide, and cameras were constantly monitoring everything.
Coil was feeling, perhaps for the first time in longer than he cared to admit, cautious. Even in his base, he was feeling like control was slowly but surely slipping out of his fingers.
It wasn't in his strings to be careful about his choices, for he simply spent all of his resources in a timeline that he knew he would discard to gain information to use in the one he choose to keep. With that deluge of information, how much could he truly exert 'wariness' of any kind? His actions were always the precise result of the thoughtful aplication of his power, true, but he wasn't used to find an hard stop in one of the two timelines he could choose from.
Leading around the new parahuman hadn't been particularly difficult, leaving just enough of a trail so that Hood could hammer down on the gangs left Coil with a lot of resources he was able to spend in other, more remunerative avenues.
He checked the reports that he could access only from the terminal in his base (unless he decided to set up another, but that was time-costly), and he started to reply, he heard it.
The crash was thunderous, and immediately alarms and sirens started to blare on his monitor.
"Captain, engage with all forces." he repeated the command that he gave several times before, only to calmly dedicate himself to other matters, already knowing the results of that particular course of action.
Soon enough, the armoured doors that led to his 'office' broke down, letting in a wave of Darkness that spread both like smoke and shadow, both lighter and colder than Grue's trademark inky blackness.
In a random hoodie, a woman that he had learned to know with their past interactions strode in, her gait both declaring her self-assuredness and apparently claiming the very ground upon which she walked on.
"Hood." he greeted her, already trying to set up a conversation that could give him enough leeway to figure out a way to leash this particularly troublesome cape.
"You're the fucker that's been leading me by the nose." the parahuman stated, laughter barely restrained behind this fiction of politeness that both knew could fall apart in a split second, "I've heard you were here, so I've decided to visit."
Coil withheld a grimace under his mask. And how the fuck did you 'hear' that? "Are you dissatisfied with the information I've set up for you to find?" he asked instead, knowing that denying his involvement would only serve to cut this particular conversation short.
"In my experience, those that lead people around are assholes."
"We both want to clean up the city..."
A wild bark of laughter cut him short: "I thought we both wanted the city for ourselves. Case in point, I'm here to evict you."
"Why would..."
The thinker became quiet suddenly, because something had irrevocably changed.
Gone was the casual display of power and generally amicable persona that Hood had been portraying just a second before, and the air had suddenly turned heavy with the promise of violence.
"You're a slimy sort." Hood stated, as if she could tell with just a glance what kind of person rested behind the cover of Coil's costume, "If you actually wanted to 'clean up the city', you would have. I think that you're greedy, and a coward. Your general weakness is just another confirmation."
"Weakness?" what the hell was Hood talking about? She couldn't actually be expecting any cape without her kind of brute rating to simply stroll around and crumple people, could she?
"You don't put your life on the line." she replied flatly, "You lack convintion."
With her last word, Coil felt himself being crushed, his body was fine, it wasn't physical, only... heavy, so heavy...
The timeline collapsed.
Thomas Calvert, who had been working all night from the safe confines of his apartment, sighed in exasperation. Five out of five. He thought bitterly.
For the past week, whenever he choose to wear Coil's costume and directly organize his affairs, Hood had broken in his base, discarding things ike armed resistance, walls so thick that they should have been able to give pause to an Endbringer, and any attempt the Thinker had made to talk circles round the annoying cape.
The cape had been around for a few months, and while the balance of the Bay hadn't been blatantly destroyed, mostly because Hood seemed intent with working alone, the day to day operations were slowing down considerably. Only because Hood seemed to take all the joy in her life from bulldozing through the gangs. The presence of capes only lenghtened the fights, but the result had always remained the same: the violent vigilant won.
To date, there wasn't a single istance in which Hood had been reported wounded. And thus far she had removed Oni Lee, Hookwolf, Krieg and the Merchants.
He needed information, and he needed it yesterday. Hood didn't fuck around, and it was only a matter of time before Coil's operations were disturbed irreparably. Every cape had a weakness, be it a glaring one in their power, be it in their lack of friendships that made them extremely easy to take down with the opportune tools. Every cap had one weakness. And besides a selected few, parahumans shared one glaring weakness: their secret identity.
He had managed until now by either letting Hood do her own thing, or occasionally making sure that one of his moles or mercenaries let a crumbles trail that pointed to yet another gang activity that Coil needed gone. And Hood, apparently knowing that she was being led aruond, always delivered. It appearaed that there wasn't a single night in which she didn't bust some trafficking. She killed some capes, brutalized most gang members, and occasionally scuffled with the Protectorate, which never pushed her too hard, aware that her presence in the Bay was slowly eroding the criminals.
Lung was ready to pounce, Kaiser kept trying to organize his ambushes, the Merchants were gone... and Coil was running out of the little patience he had managed to hold onto.
Gritting his teeth because of yet another confirmation of the current difficulties embodied by Hood, Coil fished a particular phone out of a drawer, dialing the first number on quick call.
After a single ring, the familiar voice of one of his assets answered: "Yeah Boss?"
"You'll find a package at the 34th of Fritz Boulevard." he informed her, "Dress up, wear the earpiece, and wait for furhter instructions."
"Oh shit, is it that serious?" Tattletale replied, "Okay, okay, I'm moving."
He had tried to reach out to Hood in other timelines during the neverending nightmare week in which the cape decided to bust in his base anytime he was in it. Both with body-doubles, mercenaries, or himself, he had seeked an encounter with Hood. Each time, he had terminated that timeline. The annoying cape didn't talk with underlings, her words not his, and seemed to have an instinctive dislike for Coil that brought her to kill him anytime they met.
He gave orders to his mercenaries, setting them up both as snipers and middlepoint to communicate his orders to Tattletale, and waited.
You lack convintion. Hood's words seemed to echo in his head, as if they meant something. Those were words that he had heard each time he meet Hood in one of his timelines, delivered with the same seriousness and solemnity that he had grown to associate with the impending doom that Hood represented.
She had been useful, destabilizing the gangs and allowing Coil to realize his preparations faster than he would have believed possible. But she had to go. She had some way to realize whenever Coil set foot in his base, and had no qualms about acting upon that info. She only appeared when he actually was there, and never when he directed his body-double.
He had ran several of these scenarios before, using Tattletale as a prop to discover things about Hood that he could use to, if not to leash her, at least to direct her. Hood never killed Tattletale. Not once. It was the only constant, the only weakness. Tonight was going to bring things to an end, one way or another.
And given his peculiar power, Coil was reasonalbly confident about his chances.
Once he received the needed confirmations, he enacted a plan that had been in the making for the previous two days. If using Tattletale was the only way to lower Hood's guard, he would. Coil didn't like losing pieces, but sacrificing a knight to remove a brutality-happy parahuman that would eventually tear him a new asshole was only sensible.
For the first time since Ellisburg, Coil found himself with the choice between losing, and losing less.
In one timeline, he detonated the building over which Hood was talking with Tattletale, in the other, he tried to direct the conversation without speaking out loud, for fear that his opponent could hear him or memorize his voice, scrambled or not.
In the first timeline, after the explosion, he had to wait exactly 13 minutes before he heard it: a familiar, thunderous crash, followed by cold and oppressive darkness climbing up the walls of his building. There, he knew that he was dead.
With a sigh, he picked the second timeline, clamped down on his rage, and closed the connection with the soon to be dead mercenaries.
AN
It's not that easy to write Coil, no. Scratch that, it's pure shit.
His power lets him split the timeline and chose one of two outcomes. Period. He cannot chose to discard both and repeat the simulation, otherwise he truly would be invincible, wouldn't he?
For example, he has three roads in front of him: he can simulate two, but one of the two is reality (the one he chooses). The point I'm trying to make, is that if Coil wants to simulate the third road, he has to first simulate the first two, drop one, then simulate the actions of turning back to examine the third road, and only then he can actually choose the best option among the three (if he wants the second one now, he has to choose to walk away from the first and walk the second).
Following the previous example, once he has simulated the third road, he ends up either in that simulation, or he remains in whateer other choice he made instead of inspecting the third road.
Alternatively, he can simulate three times, each time, in one timeline he remains still, in the other he picks one of the three roads, choosing to 'remain still' until he has all of the necessary info to make a decision. Having said that, in this example, he spends the time of the simulation remaining still.
This power is bullshit only when not applied in time sensitive situations. In his Operations, he always chooses to hold back, or do something. Then he discards the 'do something' reality until he has enough info to use in yet another simulation, and once it turns out successful, he 'makes it real' by choosing it.
The use of Dinah considerably makes him more dangerous, because he doesn't have to actually simulate any scenario, he only has to simulate one in which he interrogates the precog, and one in which he doesn't, chosing the latter in the end so that he has infinite questions. This cuts down considerably the time necessary to apply his power.
But the point I'm trying to make is that time ticks forward in both of his simulations: he spends the time that in a fake timeline he would invest interrogating the precog doing somthing else, but he spends it anyway.
As an addendum, it's unclear just which kind of choices rapresent a significative enough nexus for Coil's to split the timeline. Think about it: he chooses to go to his base, or to remain home. But in both the first and the second reality, there are a moltitude of choices he makes to follow through his objective. From driving his car (which implies choices about braking and steering), to reading reports and whatever.
The only way I've found to make sense out of this, is that a 'timeline' goes in automatic (without Calvert needing to split again his power) until he decides to make a simulation that branches from one of the two realities he has going on.
And yeah, some of you may say 'it's obvious', but it's fucking not.
As for Taylor... yeah, Haki is bullshit.
Ideas, opinions?