Putting the phone down, Danny checked off another item on his list, nodding in satisfaction. He'd sent the Mayor the document he'd requested around ten that morning, Roy releasing four hundred and fifty thousand dollars into the DWU working account within two hours, and except for the forty minutes he'd taken out at just after three to pick up Taylor and Amy, he'd been contacting various businesses ever since. The current economic slump turned out to be good news from his point of view, as almost all the equipment they required in addition to what they already had was available used in good condition, in some cases for mere cents on the dollar.

A knock on his door made him look over to see Habib peering in, holding a sheaf of papers. "Danny?"

"Yes?" he asked, putting his pen down.

"The supplier of the oxygen for the thermal lances says we can have half of it first thing Friday morning, but that cleans out the local stocks. They're going to have to ship more up from the main depot in Boston which will be here on Monday afternoon."

"That's fine," Danny replied, making some notes. "What about the acetylene?"

"That will be here Monday morning. Both are in fifteen cylinder manifolded pallets, that will give around twelve hours flow at full rate. I've inquired about having a bulk gas supply installed, the cryogenic oxygen tank is available with about a week's notice when we need larger quantities."

"Great. We won't need it for now but I want it as an option later." He made some more notes. "OK, any luck with the extra heavy duty cutting torches we need?"

"Yes, I've tracked down a whole container full of them, including a big pile of thermal lance holders and consumables. It's from a nationwide demolitions company that went under a month ago in New York. The stuff is all sitting in a warehouse down there about to go to auction. There's practically everything we need, including hoses, regulators, protective equipment, you name it. Half of it is still new in boxes from what I can find out, the rest only has about six months use and is described as in excellent condition. Thirty thousand plus another four and a half for shipping and we can have it here before the end of the week." The man looked pleased, as did Danny.

"Fantastic. That will save us at least, hmm, a hundred thousand or so, depending on exactly what's there," Danny smiled, checking a list then making a quick calculation. "Buy it."

"OK. They also have a dozen big plasma cutters they're willing to throw in for another fifteen K, along with a small truckload of consumables."

"We'll take them." He checked another item off the list. "Well done, Habib."

"Thanks, Boss," the man said, grinning as Danny sighed, then leaving the room.

"Tell Zephron to stop getting everyone to call me that!" he yelled after the man, shaking his head with a small smile of his own. Looking at his list again, he ran his finger down it, then picked the phone up and dialed. "Hello, this is Danny Hebert at the DWU in Brockton Bay. May I speak to Richard, please?" A moment later, when the requested person came on the line, he continued, "Hi, Richard. We were discussing some used demolition equipment last week, you remember? Yes, that's right. Well, we'd like to move on purchasing what we talked about, and I have a number of other items I'm looking for..."

Feeling that things were going well, he turned to his computer monitor and began reading from a list on the screen.

Lisa watched the activity at the DWU facility with curiosity, seeing that there were more people moving about with purpose than she could remember ever seeing before. She noticed that the fence that Hookwolf had damaged had been repaired so neatly only the slightly shinier chain link betrayed where the work had been done. Pausing to see what was going on, she allowed her power to suggest causes for the men running around all over the place.

Big project on horizon, nearly guaranteed work. Men very excited and hopeful, grateful to their leader. Loyal to their leader

Stock taking, itemizing repairs required to old equipment, reactivating mothballed equipment

About to start major construction work on Docks

City is funding expansion of Dock facilities

Several warehouses being demolished, new facilities being built on site reclaimed

Rail line being repaired after survey last week

Possibly about to begin salvaging wrecked ships?

'Interesting,'

she mused, raising her eyebrows and looking out at the bay for a moment. 'That's going to change things around here. I wonder what Skidmark is going to do?' She couldn't see the leader of the Merchants just idly sitting by and allowing anyone, even the city itself, to start tearing down what he considered his territory. Between the Merchants and the ABB, there was likely to be some pushback to the DWU plans. 'They may be in for a surprise, though, with Saurial involved,' she grinned, resuming walking. 'Poor old Skids doesn't know what he'll be walking into if he tries anything.'

Idly wondering who would win in a Raptaur vs Lung battle and how much of the Docks would still be standing at the end of it, she headed towards the Boardwalk and a cappuccino with her name on. Things were certainly beginning to change around here somewhat quickly now.

Taylor watched Amy think, the other brunette appearing somewhat stunned and slightly at a loss. She'd covered the bullying, not in detail but with enough description to have made the girl wince in sympathy a few times, ending up with the locker and the voice. Slightly glossing over the actual Varga part of it, she'd explained how she came out the other end of the experience with a number of interesting abilities and a body that wasn't technically entirely human any more, then gone over some of the other things she and her father had learned about what she could do.

So far, she hadn't mentioned the expedition to Canada or Kaiju, or the bay cleanup work, as she wanted to see how the healer dealt with the information she'd been given up to this point before she went any further. Both the Varga and her father had advised caution about telling anyone else everything, although for some reason she felt that the person sitting across from her was one of the few people she could actually open up to.

It was possible that Lisa was another, she thought. But she was still working on that part.

There was even a chance that Leet and his friend would be yet another set that she could be honest with, something she found very funny considering they were technically criminals. But she was almost certain that they'd worked out who she really was and that Saurial and Raptaur were also her, even though she wasn't sure how, and the fact that they'd apparently not told anyone or tried to use the information suggested a certain degree of trustworthiness. She was going to have to talk to them at some point.

"OK. Let me get this straight," Amy finally said, giving her a peculiar look. "You got deliberately locked into a tiny space with some revolting waste, for hours, by your former best friend and two accomplices."

"Yep."

"Just at the point you nearly died, you found yourself somewhere… else…, and ended up talking to something that offered you power."

"Great power, it said. But yes." Taylor grinned a little.

"You can remember that?"

"Sure. Why wouldn't I be able to? It's not the sort of thing you forget in a hurry."

Amy stared at her for a moment, then shook her head. "We'll come back to that part. Anyway, the next thing you know, you're lying on the floor outside your locker in the dark, you can see perfectly, and you then find out that you have the most ridiculously over-powered set of abilities I've ever heard of in one person. Which you think makes you a half-demon or something."

"Pretty much."

"Huh." The Dallon girl was silent for a second. "And having got these powers, including a stupidly powerful Changer ability, some weird-ass Shaker power, and god knows what else, you mainly use it to take out low level criminals and prank the entire planet at the same time by making everyone think that you're several different capes and that there are more of them living in the bay?"

Grinning, Taylor nodded. "Yes."

"I was right. You are crazy."

"Why, just because I didn't immediately go out and challenge Lung to a duel?" she shrugged, still grinning. "What sort of an idiot would do that on their first night out?"

Amy sighed. "And in the process of all of this, somehow your entire biological makeup is upgraded to something that's so different to anything that lives on this world that I'm not entirely certain you're actually alive by normal definitions."

Taylor responded, "So you keep saying. I don't feel much different, to be honest, at least like this. My heart is still beating, I can eat and breathe like normal." Changing her head to Saurial's, which made Amy's eyes widen comically, she added, "Even this seems pretty normal."

"Shit. That's…" Amy didn't seem to know what to say. She repeated faintly, "Shit."

They looked at each other for a while. Amy idly ate some cold popcorn, still inspecting her. "What limits do you actually have on your Changer ability?"

"Dad called me an infinitely variable dinosaur, which is a neat description, and more or less right, leaving aside the fact that I'm not actually a reptile despite appearances. Not quite, anyway." Taylor raised a hand, scratching her chin with a finger that sprouted an inch long talon, then lowered it, the digit returning to normality in the process. "More or less anything that looks sort of reptilian, including feathers and so on, I think. Up to a decent size."

"Where does the extra mass come from?" Her guest looked fascinated now.

"No idea. It just does."

"And what do you call a decent size?"

Taylor hesitated. She wasn't sure admitting to quite how big the Varga could be was a bright move this early on. "Biggish," she prevaricated.

"Hmm." Amy studied her closely. "As big, perhaps, as a two hundred foot long swimming thing with a mouth that could swallow this house?"

Staring, Taylor wondered how the hell the girl knew that. "Why do you ask?" she replied after a moment. The Varga was listening intently as well, very interested in the answer.

Finishing the popcorn, Amy took a drink of her apple juice, watching her with a small smile. Eventually she spoke.

"Interesting story. On Sunday morning, I got an emergency call from a doctor I know at the PRT who needed my abilities to fix a patient that had just keeled over with a series of massive heart attacks." Taylor looked at her, feeling puzzled, which must have come out in her expression. "It was Director Piggot."

"OK," Taylor replied slowly.

"Well, I got there pretty quickly, Vicky and I were just down the road anyway, and got taken up to the conference room where she and most of the local Protectorate were having a meeting. She was in bad shape, but I sorted her out easily enough. In the process I saw that there was a picture of this absolutely huge lizard-eel thing on one of their monitors, with a lot of data on another one that seemed to be saying it was about two hundred feet or so long. I think Dragon had provided the information."

'Oh, shit. I ate Dragon's little robot submarine!' Taylor briefly panicked. 'She's the most famous Tinker in the world! She won't be pleased about it.'

"They were hunting us, Brain, not the other way around. We merely pointed out in a direct fashion we didn't appreciate being waylaid in international waters," her demonic companion replied calmly. "I doubt that there is any real problem here. The loss of a no doubt easily replaced machine is fairly trivial in the grand scheme of things to one such as this Dragon, I suspect."

Her worry subsiding, she thought about it and decided he was right.

"Dragon, you say?" she asked mildly after the very short internal conversation. "How interesting."

Amy studied her closely. "Hmm. Yes, it is. Anyway, Armsmaster seemed awfully jumpy about the whole thing, he turned the screens off as soon as he noticed I was looking at them."

"I imagine that they talk about all sorts of secret PRT business in their meetings," Taylor commented, opening another bag of potato chips and dropping a few into her mouth, still having her Saurial head on.

"I suppose so," Amy allowed after a second or two. "But… I couldn't help noticing that this rather substantial creature, which by the way is wildly larger than anything that's ever been seen before from what I could find out, even as a fossil, had very familiar looking eyes."

Taylor blinked.

"Very familiar eyes," Amy repeated slowly. "Distinctive, too. Weirdly enough, they're so distinctive that I could swear I'm looking at something that's identical except for size right now..."

They stared at each other for a few seconds.

"Strange coincidence," Taylor commented.

"Isn't it?" Looking at the bowl next to her, Amy added casually, "You mentioned more popcorn?"

"Sure."

Both of them went into the kitchen, where Taylor put another bag in the microwave. She leaned on the counter watching her guest who was half-sitting on the kitchen table with a small dark smile on her face.

Another long pause was broken only by the sound of the humming microwave and popping corn.

Eventually, Amy asked after a deep sigh, "Is there a particular reason you were swimming around somewhere as a two fucking hundred foot long sea serpent?"

"Language, Amy," Taylor grinned, reverting her head to normal then opening the microwave, taking the bag out and pouring the contents into the bowl the other girl held out to her. "I was coming home."

"From where?"

"Quebec."

Amy gaped. "Quebec? What the hell were you doing in Quebec?"

"Mainly poking around having fun," she laughed. "I wanted to see how fast I could swim, test myself, that sort of thing, and I needed somewhere deserted. That's where I ended up."

Eating some of the popcorn, Amy asked curiously, "How fast can you swim like that?"

"About three hundred miles an hour or so," she replied. Then she had to hastily thump her new friend on the back when she choked. "Don't inhale it, you can't breathe popcorn."

"I know that, you idiot," Amy gasped, then coughed. "Water!"

Filling a glass from the tap Taylor handed it over then watched as the other girl drank half the contents, coughed violently for a moment, then finished it. "Three hundred miles an hour?!" she squeaked.

"More or less," Taylor nodded. "I was still speeding up as I practiced. It's pretty cool."

"It's fucking impossible is what it is," Amy retorted, looking annoyed. "No biological organism can produce that amount of power for that long."

"I can," she shrugged. "It's not hard."

The other brunette stared at her for a few seconds, then sighed heavily. "I get the very definite impression that there's a lot more you haven't told me."

"There is," she confirmed. "I wanted to see how you'd take it first. You're not going to run off and tell the PRT, or New Wave, are you?"

"No, I damn well am not," the girl snapped. "One, I made you a promise, and I keep my word. Two, you scare the crap out of me when you get like you did in that closet. I have absolutely no wish to go through that again, or worse, which I'm certain would happen if I caused you problems. And three, I'm not sure they'd believe me anyway, and if they did all hell would break out, trust me. Which takes us right back to point two. So I'm more than interested but it's not going to go any further."

Studying her, Taylor thought for a while. 'What do you think?'

"She seems sincere, and desperately curious. I suspect that telling her is safe enough and it shows a level of trust that I believe she is seeking in someone. The girl needs a friend as you have already pointed out." The Varga sounded a little sad. "She reminds me of you in many ways but she doesn't have anything like me backing her up. I think… I think that we should try to be that for her."

'I'm more or less thinking the same thing,' she admitted, with a small internal sigh. Amy was watching her with a look mixing interest, hope, worry, and several other more difficult to decode emotions, while her scent was even more complex. Eventually Taylor shrugged.

"OK. I'm going to trust you with something only one other human knows. Please don't let me down."

"I won't," Amy replied, then appeared very confused. "One other human?"

"Dad knows all of it." Taylor grinned. "Come back in the living room and I'll tell you the rest." Trailing behind her host as she headed across the hall again, Amy sat once more, cuddling the popcorn bowl, while Taylor stood in the middle of the room. She checked that the curtains were pulled on the windows still, something she'd done when they entered a while ago, then faced her guest.

"I left out some things. The voice, it was from somewhere a long way away. Another world. Probably another universe, in fact, not like Aleph, but something very different."

Amy listened, seeming fascinated and somewhat puzzled.

"When it offered me power, as it put it, what it actually did was give me the opportunity to merge with a demon. The Varga. We're basically one being now, one being with two minds. He provides the abilities, I provide the direction."

Slightly gaping, Amy stared, then closed her mouth with a snap. "You know, you're not actually helping your case for not being crazy," she commented somewhat sarcastically.

Grinning, Taylor shrugged. "I know, and it's actually really difficult to prove beyond doubt. I know it's true, and Dad is convinced, but I guess you could if you wanted decide I just have some weird multiple personality thing going on. But I swear, it's true." She waited as Amy thought for a moment, then motioned for her to continue.

"On his original world, the Varga was a great demon, one of twelve, who were defeated and captured in a battle between forces I have no understanding of at all. When you know what he's capable of, it means that the greater powers were so far beyond that, it's horrifying. I mean, his kind were worshiped as gods more than once and in many ways that seems a fairly reasonable definition. So what the greater powers can do kind of makes you wonder..." She explained some of the things her constant companion had told her over the weeks since they merged, the history of his linkage to the bargain made with Luna's ancestors, and a number of other essential parts of background information. Amy listened with great interest.

"That's a damn good story if nothing else," she said when Taylor finished. "Can you actually prove it? I mean, magic?! That's nuts."

"And normal parahuman powers aren't?" she retorted. "You can apparently touch any living thing and rewrite its DNA. Clockblocker can make things freeze in time. Vista can make one end of the street the same as the other end and step between them. Miss Militia can produce any hand held weapon you can come up with just with a thought. Those are near enough to magic as to make no real difference, aren't they?"

"That's… not an entirely bad point," Amy said after a few seconds. "But, is your ability really that different?"

"I don't know for sure. But I can turn into more or less anything I can think of that's even vaguely reptilian, up to a very large scale, I can make things out of thin air with no apparent mass limit and out of materials that I'm reliably informed can't possibly exist, I'm supposedly damn close to indestructible, I don't get sick, I can in theory heal from almost anything..." Taylor shrugged. "Sure, there are capes out there with a lot of the same powers from what I've read, to one level or another, but I don't know of any that have all of them in one person, or to quite this level. It sort of terrifies me when I list it like that."

"You're not the only one," Amy muttered, looking at her wide-eyed. "Fuck me. You really are the grab bag to end all grab bags, aren't you?"

"So it seems. You can understand why I don't want the PRT finding out all at once, they'd freak the fuck out and try to blow up the city or something to stop me doing whatever it is they'd think I was going to do." Taylor sat down, sighing a little. "But all I actually want to do is help Dad out, help the DWU as well and the city too, and have some fun. While stopping crimes when I see them. I've been deliberately staying out of cape fights for several reasons. Hookwolf was because he came after me, not the other way around, and he needed to be persuaded to go away and not come back."

"From what I saw on PHO you managed that pretty well," Amy smirked. Taylor snickered.

"He seemed impressed, yes. Or was it scared shitless? I sometimes get those mixed up."

They shared an amused look. "But you see the problem. Most capes seem to want to go out and break things, fight each other, that sort of thing. I don't. Oh, I'll do it if I have to and I think I'm pretty good at it, I learned a hell of a lot from Princess Luna's memories and abilities, but I'm not going around looking for a fight. That appears to be an unusual attitude for parahumans."

"It certainly seems a little out of the ordinary, yes," Amy replied after a moment. "I'd have to agree that a lot of capes seem to find themselves fighting each other more than is likely by random chance, for some weird reason."

They both pondered the oddity of that fact for a little while, then the other girl shrugged. "We're not going to work out why just sitting here. OK, I have some of the background, as weird as it is. What else?"

After some more discussion with the Varga, Taylor decided she might as well be honest considering how much Amy seemed to have worked out for herself. Going back to the beginning, she filled in most of the holes. By the time she finished an hour later Amy was gaping again.

"That is the most bullshit pile of bullshit I've ever heard," she grumbled when she finally closed her mouth. "You ate Dragon's probe?"

"They kept shoving it in my face! What else was I supposed to do?" Taylor protested. The girl stared, then shook her head slowly.

"Why do I think that you think that statement actually made sense?" she sighed.

Grinning, Taylor spread her hands a little. "If it's any consolation, it didn't taste very good."

"How big was it?"

"About six feet long, maybe?"

"And you just swallowed a six foot long metal and plastic machine with no ill effects?" Amy seemed somewhat incredulous.

"More or less. I spat out all the little bits, but most of it went down. I had to digest it for a while but that happened on the way back." Taylor looked amused. "Maybe I should sent Dragon an anonymous email and apologize, and also suggest that she puts a little container of Tabasco sauce in the next one to give it some flavor?"

With a smirk, Amy asked, "You'd actually do that, wouldn't you?"

"Possibly. It would be good for a laugh. Which is a good reason to do some things. Life without humor is boring."

"You've never met Armsmaster, clearly," her guest replied in a dead-pan voice.

Grinning at the comment, Taylor shook her head. Amy studied her for some time. "Anything else?" she finally asked.

"Oh, all sorts of things. I'm still learning from the Varga, and coming to grips with all the things I sort of inherited from the previous brains. Mostly Luna, but there are things in here from the other two as well." She tapped her head with a finger. "Oh, and this."

Removing the cloaking effect, she waved the end of her tail at Amy, whose eyes widened somewhat. "This is permanent. It marks the Brain, it's part of the bargain apparently. I'm stuck with it for the rest of my life." Laying it across her knees she stroked the scaled appendage for a moment, smiling a little. "It was a hell of a shock when I saw it for the first time, not to mention how worried I was about people seeing it. But to be honest now I'd miss it if wasn't there."

"You have a tail," Amy spluttered.

"Yes, I know. I just showed it to you."

"How… Why couldn't I see it? Or did you just grow it with your Changer power?"

Amused, Taylor thought for a moment, then pointed at the doorway, her own eyes suddenly widening. "Shit, what's that?!" she gasped. Amy whirled around, staring for a few seconds.

"What?" she asked. "I can't see..." Turning back, she gaped, then looked carefully around the room. "What the hell…?"

As soon as the healer's eyes were off her, Taylor had used the cloaking technique, jumping to her feet and carefully running around to the other side of the sofa. Amy kept looking around, then got up and went to the chair, feeling it cautiously, before staring around again. "Oh, ha fucking ha. What did you do, Taylor?"

When there was no answer she even went so far as to look under the chair, then behind the sofa, before going into the hall and checking the kitchen, only to come back in and sit down again in a huff. "Very funny. Where are you?" Reaching for a handful of popcorn she froze when she felt another hand in the bowl, slowly turning her head to see Taylor grinning at her from a foot away, her head Saurial's again.

"GAHHH!" she screeched, jerking backwards and slipping to the floor, where she lay while giving Taylor a shocked look. The latter flipped some popcorn into her mouth and laughed.

"What are you doing lying on the floor, Amy? The sofa is much more comfortable."

"You bitch," Amy snarled, getting up and glaring. "That scared the shit out of me. What the hell did you do?"

"Assassin's Cloak. A very useful magic spell."

"Magic spell. Sure it is."

"Honest! What else could it be?"

Amy gave her a long-suffering look. "A Stranger ability on top of everything else. Christ. You're impossible."

"No, just fairly improbable," Taylor smirked.

Sighing, the other girl shook her head in despair. "I can see dealing with you is going to be complicated."

"Probably worth it, though," she grinned.

The brunette gave her an answering grin in return. "Probably." After a moment, she added, "So this… 'spell'… can hide your tail?"

"Basically, yes," Taylor replied, "It was Varga's idea. We tested it, it seems to work against cameras, and thermal sensors as well. So far no one has seen through it as far as I know. It's really useful, like I said. I use it every day, like for going to and from school." She explained how she usually traveled, making Amy look impressed. "It's also pretty funny using it to sneak up on criminals. Between than and turning the lights out they tend to be sort of surprised."

"Now that I can well understand," Amy sighed. "I'm surprised no one has died from a heart attack yet."

"Not that I'm aware," Taylor smiled. After a moment, she thought of something that made the smile fade. "Oh. Shit. Director Piggot… Do you think that was my fault?"

Amy looked sympathetically at her as she paled a little. "Yes, and no, I think. Yes, I suspect it was the stress of that meeting that provoked it, but no, it wasn't your fault. Not really. Trust me, the woman was very ill, she had a lot of things wrong with her and a heart attack was totally inevitable sooner or later. As far as I can work out I can practically guarantee that within six months at the outside she'd have keeled over from something, or just in general. If anything, you may have helped save her life, because if I hadn't been so close and called in so quickly she wouldn't have made it. If it had happened at home no one would have known until the smell got too bad."

Taylor winced, while Amy got the familiar somewhat deadpan smile. "Nice."

"Sorry, I call it like I see it. And I've seen way to much of it."

"Still, I didn't actually intend to scare her into a heart attack."

"I don't think you did, quite. She just got so worked up she had a problem that she'd have had eventually anyway, with or without your help."

They sat in silence for a while, then Taylor sighed slightly. "Way to bring my good mood down, Amy."

"Is it going to stop you doing what you're doing?"

She thought, then shrugged with a small smile of her own. "No, I don't think so."

"No harm done, then," the other girl chuckled. They considered each other for a few seconds, until she appeared to come to a decision. "Look, it's not that I don't believe this insane origin story of yours, but I need to check something. Can I touch you?"

"On a first date?" Taylor smirked. Amy rolled her eyes, a scent that mixed amusement with sudden worry puzzling her for a moment, although after a few seconds she worked out a possible reason, deciding that the time for that particular can of worms wasn't just yet. But it needed to be addressed eventually.

"Very funny," Amy sighed. "I just want to check something and I need to touch you, my power only works through skin contact."

Studying her, Taylor and the Varga discussed the request, quickly coming to a decision.