Staring over the table at his daughter who was involved in cutting a piece of pork chop from the main part of her second one so far, Danny eventually shook his head in bemused wonder.
"Why would you let someone shoot you in the head nine times with a hunting rifle even if you can take it, Taylor?" he finally asked with careful interest. "It seems… hmm, how do I put this without sounding rude… less than optimally sane."
She put the piece of meat in her mouth and chewed, smiling a little at him, then took a drink of water.
"It seemed like a good idea at the time?" she ventured, experimentally.
Danny narrowed his eyes at her. He knew her too well. She looked a little guilty for a moment.
"Anyway, he missed once. And it was only in the head three times, it was in the chest or the back the other five. It stung a little when it missed my armor, but it wasn't much worse than those machine guns the first night I went out."
He kept looking hard at her.
"For a smelly guy nearly as old as you are who was obviously on something he was actually a really good shot," she kept going, glancing at him every now and then as she cut some more pork, apparently trying to judge how he was taking it.
"Old. I see. Thank you dear." He smiled a little, but didn't look away. "Come on, out with it. I know you're both smart and careful and your ancient friend in there with you is all those plus incredibly experienced. There was a reason you didn't stop him earlier. You could have done that at any time over nearly an hour. Why didn't you?"
She chewed thoughtfully, regarding him with an expression he recognized as her talking things over with the Varga. Danny waited, while he resumed eating his own dinner.
Eventually she nodded slightly to herself. "Several reasons. One was because I really was curious to see how many times he could pull it off before he either gave up or missed. I could hear and smell him up there all along, he watched for about ten minutes before he took the first shot, which did actually take me by surprise. I thought he was probably just a merchant scout but I'm sure there's more to it, now."
"OK. Somewhat worrying, but OK. Go on." He added some peas to his plate from the bowl on the table, offering it to her, then putting it down when she shook her head.
"Another reason is that Brandish called just after he took his sixth shot and I had reasons for wanting her and Glory Girl to see it. I'll go into that in a moment. Lady Photon and Laserdream were a bonus."
Danny felt a little startled, then sat back and thought. He was beginning to get a vague idea of where she was going with that comment, but waited.
"Yet another reason, and possibly the more important one, is that I wanted to see if the person who was watching with binoculars from another warehouse a little further away to the side would do anything interesting."
She smirked as he coughed a bit, spraying peas across his plate, then stared.
"Someone was watching?"
"Yep. I'm pretty sure that it was whoever got that idiot to shoot at me in the first place."
Clearing his throat, then drinking some more water to wash half-chewed peas and pork down, he inspected her. "I think you need to explain that, dear."
"When I was exercising, I was keeping an eye out for anything odd, the whole time. To be honest I was more than half expecting some merchants or maybe ABB to turn up sooner or later, I wasn't being quiet and those guys are all over the whole dock area like cockroaches. But it was oddly deserted the whole time. The ABB I can understand, I saw on the news just now that big fight they had with the E88 near the boardwalk this afternoon which probably distracted them, but the merchants were a little strange. Every time I've been through there in the last week or so I've seen half a dozen or so junkies, who are obviously watching and reporting back if anything interesting happens. I think someone scared them off."
"Which means… What?" Danny was worried and confused. He was aware of what she mentioned and she was right, there were almost always at least a couple of dirty and bedraggled homeless drug addicts hanging around the yard, although they seldom caused trouble these days. Über and Leet had left an impression, one that had been reinforced fairly vigorously on a couple of occasions since by some of the boys. They mostly seemed to give the entire facility a respectfully large clearance these days, but it was odd not to see at least one shambling past in the distance, a sign of the times.
"Varga thinks, and I think he's right, that someone was testing what I'd do in the face of provocation," she said slowly, putting her fork down and leaning her chin on her hands, looking at him. "We think they found that guy and paid him to shoot at me, gave him the gun which looked brand new and shiny, scared off the other junkies to keep the rest of the merchants away, then watched from a safe distance to see what happened. I spotted the light reflecting from the lens while I was running around, but I didn't spend any time staring because I didn't want to scare him off."
"Why would someone set something like that up?" None of the ideas he had were ones he was happy about.
She shrugged. "I don't know yet. I've got a couple of vague ideas and he's got more, but we don't have any proof of anything. Not even this for the most part. Although I do know for a fact that someone was watching, then left just after the New Wave ladies turned up. I checked where he was hiding on the way home and it was a man, probably white, not too old."
"How on earth do you know all that?" he wondered.
She tapped her nose with a finger, smiling. "This thing is pretty remarkable when I'm Saurial. Male or female, that's obvious, rough idea of race is not too hard, age is more difficult but I'm learning."
Nodding a little, he studied her, then smiled. "Pretty good, Taylor. Anything else?"
"I'll know him again if I smell him, definitely. I was half tempted to track him and see where he went but I wanted to get home and think about it. I can go back later, the scent will last for a couple of days. Unless it rains really hard, I think, which it's not supposed to do for a while." She resumed eating. "The guy with the gun was hysterical when I grabbed him, I think the last two or three shots were getting a little desperate which is why he missed that time, or maybe seeing half of New Wave turn up threw him, but he did have about two thousand dollars and a big bottle of Ritalin in his pocket. I think he was on that, and probably something else, but I don't know about drugs. I could smell it on his breath, though." She wrinkled her nose, making him grin.
"From about two hundred yards away. He was horrible, although in good condition physically from what I saw. He looked like someone who used to be pretty fit and went downhill. But he definitely had practice with guns, he knew how to use that thing." She glanced at him while sticking her fork into a roast potato. "Two hundred and fifty yards is a good long shot for a rifle, isn't it?"
"What sort of gun?" he asked curiously.
"It said Remington 750 on the side. Some sort of expensive looking hunting rifle with a telescopic sight. Brandish unloaded it and it had about five pretty big bullets in it, he'd just reloaded it when I came through the window and he screamed and threw it at me." She cocked her head, a mannerism he'd noticed with amusement that seemed to come from her reptilian side. "I wonder why people keep doing that when I turn up?"
"You know exactly why, dear," he chuckled, "don't try to make me think you've changed that much. You may not find it odd yourself anymore but you know full well the effect you have on people." She smirked and he laughed.
"Maybe. They overreact a lot of the time, but I guess I can see why. Saurial's not too bad, is she? We tried to make her look as safe as we could." Taylor seemed mildly worried for a moment, making him smile tenderly at her.
"She's… an acquired taste. But not bad, no. Just a shock the first time."
"OK." His daughter looked pleased.
"But yes, you're right, that range to hit a more or less man sized target seven or eight times in a row and only miss once is pretty decent work from what I remember. Not incredible, but considerably better than average even with some practice. And a telescopic sight."
"He was lying down on a pile of old pallets with a blanket over them, inside the room, bracing the gun on a broken chair," she added. "Just like in the movies. Maybe he was trained in the army or something?"
"Not impossible," he mused. "There are a lot of ex soldiers around these days, parahumans and the changes they brought to the world had a big effect on the military world-wide. I've heard a lot of them have fallen on hard times and tend towards drug abuse in some places, poor bastards. We've got a few that managed to avoid that in the DWU, they're good people. Disciplined and alert."
She nodded, looking thoughtful still. "He only took a shot when I was standing still for more than a minute or so, which was useful, I could more or less pick when he'd fire after I worked it out. Three shots in a row with New Wave there was a difference, he'd always waited about eight or nine minutes between shots up to that point."
"So why did you want New Wave, or as I suspect, specifically Glory Girl, to see you tanking a shot like that without flinching?"
"Reputation."
Her response was immediate, but he got the impression it was the result of some considerable thought.
"Explain, dear," he replied, resuming eating slowly and listening.
"I've been thinking about how to stop people coming after me, or through you to get to me," she sighed after a moment, leaning on one elbow and picking at the remains of her dinner. "I want to stop that before it starts. One way is the way Lung does it for example. Incredible violence, then the threat of more incredible violence, that keeps people from attacking him, pretty much. But he's killed a lot of people to get to the point he's basically safe from most capes. I don't want to do that."
She looked somewhat depressed. "If nothing else that's because I could make his body count look stupid without even trying. I could probably make Leviathan's body count look like he wasn't putting a lot of effort in." She looked up at Danny seriously. "But, I might be able to get the same effect without killing anyone, or even threatening to kill anyone, by looking so dangerous no one wants to find out what I can really do because they're already worried about what they know I can do. Looking just a little nuts helps."
Taylor grinned for a moment. "Plus, it's sort of fun, seeing the color people go when I do something unexpected." Her face became thoughtful while Danny tried not to laugh. "Although sometimes they go weird colors at odd moments anyway, which is a bit strange." After a couple of seconds, she shrugged. "It's probably nothing to worry about. I'm glad Glory Girl apologized, even though I didn't mind. It was nice of her. Her mother looked embarrassed about the whole thing."
"From what I've heard about Carol Dallon, and New Wave, I can see why they would be," he smiled. "That video didn't show the young woman in a very good light after all and I imagine it could have had fairly bad repercussions if it was on, for example, the evening news."
She nodded, picking up a piece of cooked carrot with her fingers and putting it in her mouth. Finally finished, his daughter got up, then started moving around the table clearing everything away, while he smiled his thanks, grabbed the last roast potato out of the bowl with his fork, then let her continue.
"No, having Glory Girl going red and shouting wouldn't help them. I didn't want to do that to them, they're good people, even though it was pretty funny to watch. At the time it was just peculiar, though." She giggled slightly, piling dishes in the sink. "That's what got me thinking about reputation, though. It's something that seems to be pretty important in the cape world."
"It's important everywhere, Taylor, like in business, or in the union work I do, or anything else, really," he acknowledged. "It goes with respect. Or fear. Lung has both, for example. People fear him, but to a certain level they also respect him, because while he's incredibly dangerous and violent, he holds back a lot of the time. Not that it makes him a nice person, because he isn't, but he could be a damn sight worse. Just look at the S9. Or any other one of several parahumans or groups of them I could point at."
As she put the plug in the sink and turned on the water, adding a squirt of soap, she nodded slightly. "That's kind of my point. I could go full Varga and wreck cities without any effort at all. I could probably literally pick the Rig up and carry it off, assuming it was strong enough not to fall apart. Even the combat form in a fairly small size is probably the sort of thing that would make people think there is a fourth Endbringer in town. But I don't want to do any of that! All I really want is a fairly quiet life with my Dad, one where I can help out around the place and use the abilities I was given for good, preferably having fun doing it. Killing people and making them terrified of me because of that isn't something I want. At all."
By the end of her rather impassioned speech she was looking at him almost with tears in her eyes. He studied her for a couple of seconds ago, then got up and held her.
"I understand, dear, and I agree. What I know you can do right now is impressive to a level that's somewhat worrying and I still haven't seen you more than forty feet high. Which now that I say it out loud is just silly." He grinned down from the four or so inches difference in height between them as she looked into his eyes.
When he let her go she appeared less upset, turning back to the sink and speaking over her shoulder. "I was reading PHO and there was a thread about this sort of thing. Someone called AllSeeingEye, who seems smart and has a lot of information about capes somehow, was arguing that reputation is the most important thing a cape can have. More so for villains than heroes in some ways but it's important in both cases. He, or she, was talking about small groups starting up having to pull off spectacular things, both to get people to take them seriously, and to leave them alone. They gave some examples and it seemed to make sense in a way."
He moved to stand beside her, drying the dishes as she washed them, still listening.
"I talked it over with Varga and he agreed. We decided that we didn't want to get a reputation as someone who was violent, but more someone who no one wanted see become violent. Both of what everyone knew they could do, and because of what they didn't. Fear of the unknown is pretty effective, after all. That's the whole point behind horror movies."
She grinned for a moment, her teeth lengthening into razor sharp points and her eyes glowing yellow. "Which I seem to remind people of for some reason. I can't see it myself, though."
"Obviously," he laughed. They shared a silence for a while, finishing the dishes and putting them away, while he pondered her words.
When they were sitting down in the living room some minutes later, he asked slowly, "So the entire thing with the sniper, and if I know you at all, putting on a show for New Wave when they turned up as if you didn't know they were there, that's to make them worried?"
Taylor nodded, sighing slightly as she relaxed on the sofa on her back. "More or less. I don't want to terrify or threaten them, but acting all casual when someone's shooting me in the head, then laughing about it, seemed to work at least as well. They were already looking worried after they saw me running around with the hammers. I'll show you the recordings in a moment. It was a lot of fun and very helpful, I seem to have all the knowledge for all sorts of martial techniques in here somewhere but I need to practice them before I can use them properly."
She smiled a little. "It's like the difference between memorizing a book on doing something, and learning the hard way. Once I've done it for a while it kind of comes back to me like I always knew how, but I make mistakes before that. Lots of them in some cases."
"And you assume that Glory Girl will tell her cape friends what happened, the New Wave adults will do the same, and people will decide not to push you just in case your good humor wears off?" Danny watched her nod.
"That's the idea."
"There's always the possibility that the PRT or someone else might decide you're potentially too dangerous. Or just want to try themselves against you anyway. Some of the capes are very aggressive."
The young woman sighed, the end of her tail slowly waving back and forth as she gazed at it. "I know. It's a calculated risk. I'll have to deal with that when it happens. But according to the statistics I read, new capes tend to get… recruited, I guess… whether they like it or not, mostly by villains, but sometimes by the PRT. That seems to be what happened to Shadow Stalker when they caught her. Hopefully I can look dangerous enough to make people think better about it, but not so dangerous they think they need to stop me."
"A fine line, I suspect."
"Hopefully not too fine." She rolled her head to the side to look at him. "I plan on sticking to dealing with low level idiots and helping with other problems like that, rather than being stupid and going after the big name capes. If they come after me I'll stop them, but I remember what you said about gang politics. Varga has helped me see how bad it could get, compared to how bad it is right now." She shivered a little. "I don't want to be the cause of a gang war."
"That would not be good, certainly," he agreed. "Please try not to do that if you can."
After a moment, he added more slowly and carefully, "I can't say I entirely disagree with your methods, as worrying to others as they might seem. Just be careful. On that note, though, I do have a criticism." She raised an eyebrow, waiting. "You potentially put several members of New Wave at risk from a sniper, dear. Did you think about that?"
Her face fell. "Yes. Afterward. I was only really expecting Glory Girl and Brandish, and Glory Girl is bulletproof anyway, everyone knows that. And I was ninety percent certain he was going after me specifically as well. But I should have thought harder about her mother, the other two as well. They can make force fields that would have stopped him but that only matters if they knew he was shooting in the first place. Varga pointed it out as well. I'm sorry, I'll think it through better next time."
"I'd still prefer there not to be a next time, Taylor. If someone starts shooting at you in future do your old Dad a favor and stop him, not just grin at him while the bullets bounce off your face? Please? Especially if there are other people in the area who aren't as ridiculously durable as you seem to be."
With downcast eyes she nodded, her face red. "I'll be smarter about it next time, Dad, promise."
"Varga, make sure she is," Danny added firmly.
She snickered at the internal response from her companion, but replied mildly, "He said he'll try, Dad."
"Good. Now, let's have a look at that video of yours. Is there any of my DWU still standing?"
"Dad! I was very careful." She smiled, then looked slightly ashamed again. "After the first time I punched a hole in the concrete with a dummy. We fixed it."
Shaking his head in amusement he waited as she got her laptop and downloaded the camera footage then watched with a mix of impressed awe, horrified awe, and amused awe, what she'd gotten up to that afternoon. The general theme was definitely awe, though.
"Have you thought about some form of ranged weapon?" he asked as he watched from the viewpoint of his daughter as her scaled arms wielded an enormous sword, cleaving wood, stone, and metal with equal ease. "I know you're fast enough to chase most people down on foot but perhaps something other than hand held weapons would be useful eventually."
She glanced up at him, then looked thoughtful. "Varga has mentioned the idea a couple times, yes, but I was concentrating on the close range stuff to start with. What do you think I should try?"
"Maybe some sort of thrown net or something? That Vargastuff as you call it seems basically unbreakable. The sheer weight of it might be a problem, you'd have to be careful not to crush someone, but if you made it it thin enough and flexible enough it would be fairly safe." He thought for a moment, as she nodded with an expression of interest, then got up and poked around on the bookcase. Eventually finding what he was looking for he pulled the dusty book from its place where it had probably rested since the death of Annette and flicked through it, finally smiling.
Handing it to her he pointed at the page. "Look, this is the sort of thing. The Romans used nets, tridents, javelins, things like that. Nice and simple, no moving parts, which you said was easier. Less to worry about than a gun and you can scale them up and down easily."
Taking the book from him Taylor looked at the page while he went back to watching the video, looking over occasionally as she turned pages and mumbled to herself, or her demonic partner. By the time the file had ended she was sitting up with an expression of concentration on her face.
"Any good?"
"He thinks so, yes," she replied slowly. "He's familiar with a lot of these in slightly different ways, the people of his old world had very similar things." She held out a hand in which a thing that looked not entirely unlike a lawn dart appeared. "They threw something like this with a catapult. Sometimes lots of them bundled together. I think I could throw it pretty accurately by hand with some practice."
Staring at the glinting needle-sharp point of the gray metal dart, Danny swallowed a little dryly. Perhaps this hadn't been the best idea to mention?
"It looks… extremely lethal," he commented carefully.
"Not as lethal as this is," she smirked, hopping to her feet and making the dart go away, to be replaced by a seven foot long javelin like something out of the Olympics
The metal throwing spear tapered gently to a fine point at both ends, with the central few inches recessed below the remainder of it and a different color where it was wrapped with something grippy. He remembered how slippery the strange metallic substance was and knew this was so it could actually be used, while wondering how heavy it was, aside from 'very'. "That's fairly horrific, dear. How far could you throw it?"
"Like this probably a few hundred yards at least," she smiled. "Saurial could do a lot better, and the combat form could most likely toss it well over the horizon if it was big enough." Hefting the thing, she looked at it thoughtfully. "I'll have to practice a lot, I don't have much in the way of premade skills with this. Princess Luna never used one although she'd seen them used."
"Please do it somewhere a long way from anything breakable," he smiled. "A very long way."
"I will. Maybe the ship graveyard?"
"Go up to the far north end, everything up there is completely wrecked," he advised. "It won't matter if you punch holes in things or something like that. Capes are always testing themselves there, as I understand it."
Taylor nodded, going back to reading the book on historical weapons, intermittently snickering to herself. Now just the tiniest bit worried, Danny left her to it to go back into his office, intending on starting a preliminary list of questions to ask the various people he had in mind who might be helpful with her plan for the bay.
"Think she'd be up for a commission or two?" Randall looked over at his friend, who was watching a video on PHO, which was currently playing something with a techno version of the Jaws music attached to it. He went over and watched as Clockblocker was scared witless, chuckling at the results. The new cape was impressively good at sneaking up on people.
"What do you mean?" he asked. "And have you forgotten she's a hero?"
Leet shrugged. "No, but I have a couple of ideas based on that old Turok game series and we could use a dinosaur. She's the nearest thing to one I've ever seen. She looks a hell of a lot like some sort of Velociraptor that decided to get an opposable thumb, put clothes on, and run around the place terrifying idiots."
Mulling the idea over, Über laughed again. "I can see it, yes, but… still a hero."
They exchanged a grin then went back to what they'd been doing.
A few minutes later, they looked at each other, the same thought hitting them at the same time.
"Long tail, wasn't it?" Kevin mused in a considering voice.
"Yep."
They both thought more about this little fact as they resumed their activities, more slowly this time.
"What do you think?" the figure behind the large expensive desk said, after pondering the words of his subordinate.
"I think I don't want to get anywhere within at least a hundred yards of that thing," the other man replied. "We knew she was tough, but she literally acted like being shot in the head with a 30-06 hollow-point round was funny. That's… not encouraging."
"I'm more interested in its reactions overall. No signs of anger, or wanting to hurt the sniper?"
"No. It was weird. She seemed surprised by the first shot, but worked out his pattern quickly and after that was basically playing with him, treating it like some extra training. I have a sneaking suspicion she detected him before he even fired although I don't know how. She certainly looked in that direction several times, even waved once, after he started shooting, but just kept on with what she was doing like it was nothing to worry about."
He thought for a moment, then shrugged. "Like I said, weird. Most capes would at least have got angry about it and done something sooner. Lung is at least as tough for example but he'd have killed the bastard after the first shot on general principles."
"Lung is an uncultured animal," the first man replied with disdain. "This one… Still an animal, but possibly trainable. With some care."
"I'd advise against any action towards her until we have more idea of what she's capable of. What I saw today was… disturbing."
"Why, specifically?" his superior queried, looking at him with calm interest.
"Generally, in my experience, most Brutes, which she definitely is, are brawlers. Lung is, he has no class or skill in fighting, he just keeps hitting and burning things until his opponent either escapes or dies. That's a common approach. When you're that strong and tough, and in his case regenerate that fast, you can just wade in without much thought. Not that he has any ability to think beyond a certain low cunning, you know his kind."
The other man nodded, this was so obvious as to not be worth mentioning.
"Capes with less physical powers usually either die quickly or manage to leverage that power to some extent, but still seldom branch out into other methods of fighting. It happens but it's rare. They're basically individual fighters, or in some cases, like our people, they learn to work together in small groups, their powers complementing each other."
"I understand," the first man said with a touch of impatience. "But I fail to see the point."
"The point is that what I saw today was someone who has significant skill in battlefield tactics and skills, not a brawler who simply hits things until they fall over. She was practicing attacking an army, not a gang. And she was winning. Admittedly her opponents were training dummies but she'd go through a normal human squad no matter how well armored like a threshing machine I suspect. The really disturbing thing is that she was doing it as if she had years of practice, not what's most likely only weeks at best."
Tapping his fingertips together, his superior thought for a while, during which he waited patiently. "I see. Very interesting. I wish you had thought to take a camera."
"So do I."
"Pity. Still, it can't be helped. Perhaps we can arrange that at some future date."
He thought some more, then nodded decisively. "We will watch for now, but not interfere. Perhaps some more interactions can be arranged with someone disposable to gauge its capabilities more precisely. We'd need some form of leverage, as well, I doubt it would comply easily. But it could be exactly what we need."
He stood, walking to the window and looking out over Brockton Bay, lights glimmering into the distance, with large sections partly dimmed where gang activities were causing damage. "We could finally take over, clean this city up, and make it safe once more for the right kind of people."
"Our kind."
"Well, obviously," the man smirked. Turning to his agent, he asked, "You're sure it had no idea you were watching?"
"As much as I can be, yes. I cleared up very carefully and left when I saw New Wave arrive for whatever reason they had, there was no point taking chances. But the sniper was clean, there's no way to trace him to us. The gun was recently stolen from a dealer in Chicago with no paper trail leading anywhere in particular either, as was the ammunition. As far as the man knows, he was just paid in drugs and cash to use his old marine training to shoot a troublesome cape, by a concerned citizen who was worried about a dangerous barely human animal beating up young men. The junkies were easily scared off as well so there should have been no witnesses. That idiot Skidmark had no idea anything was going on."
"Very good. Very good indeed. Well done."
Returning to his seat the man made a couple of cryptic notes, then pushed the paper to one side. "Now, onto other business..."
Taylor inspected the building with a certain amount of introspective interest. She'd had trouble sleeping, pondering the mystery of the sniper, so had decided at about one AM to go back and follow the scent of the mystery observer. It had led right to the employee entrance of this rather large facility halfway across the city.
"Intriguing," the Varga commented slowly.
She nodded without replying, then turned around and silently headed home, thinking about it and what it might mean.