Sitting at his desk, Thomas Calvert rubbed his temples with his fingertips while wishing, not for the first time, that he'd picked a different career path.

His head throbbed horribly, he had intermittent double vision, and he was no closer to working out what the fuck was going on!

It was more than irritating.

Sighing heavily, he yanked his mask off having double-checked the door to his office was locked, then filled a glass with water from the carafe on the corner of the desk and washed half a dozen painkillers down with it, before leaning his chair back as far as it would go and putting his arm over his eyes for a few minutes. Moaning a little he waited for the drug to take effect, which it slowly did, although nowhere near as well as he'd have liked. It wasn't a thinker headache, he didn't get those, it was just pure frustration and lack of sleep combined with a level of stress that was worrying.

He went back over the last few weeks in his mind yet again, having totally lost count of how many times he'd done the same thing.

Somewhere in the second week of January, he'd noticed with alarm that certain of his manipulations were either failing totally or giving results other than those they should have. At first it was in a fairly sporadic manner, apparently random. An operation to 'recruit' a couple of Parahumans had failed spectacularly, not once, but over a dozen times until he gave up. Several planned missions to raise funds fell flat, either due to the target apparently being warned ahead of time, or because his entire team of mercenaries was either captured and bound for delivery to BBPD in under three minutes or simply vanished completely depending on how aggressive they were. He'd been forced to cancel every timeline involved very quickly or they always led something right back to him.

It wasn't until some time later that he noticed that all these cases were ones that were either somewhere in the Docks area near the Dock Workers Union facility, in the main commercial district, or a large radius of Arcadia High School.

There was a possibility that it was something to do with the Wards, bearing in mind the Arcadia connection, but the way that everything went to hell was far too bloodthirsty for their normal style.

He'd wasted nearly two weeks probing hundreds of alternative timeline simulations, without coming any closer to working out exactly what the problem was. He was eighty percent sure it was something to do with this new apparent group the Family, specifically Saurial, who he found extremely unnerving, but he wasn't sure how, why, or what to do about it. She was known to be associated with the DWU in some ill-defined manner, as was her much more terrifying sister Raptaur, who really put shivers down his back.

Several attempts to infiltrate the DWU facility had terminated abruptly, and the operation to bring pressure on Mr Danny Hebert, who his research had shown was the person who one could consider most in charge of that bunch of blue-collar weirdos, had provoked something that he was still having nightmares about.

He had no idea what was actually happening. All his power showed was a sudden… void… then the timeline ended. It didn't abruptly stop as it would have if he'd been killed in that alternate, it tailed off into a mass of unknowable nothingness that left him with a distinct impression that there was something that was pissed off at him.

He'd only run that one three times, the last one when he'd lost patience and had his people destroy the Hebert home with both members of that family inside while he was in a car heading out of the city having left him thinking that perhaps it was best to leave that particular land-mine un-jumped-on.

In that particular case the impression of pissed-off-ness had turned into an impression of absolute fury, the void chasing him down in seconds then the timeline evaporating in a manner that still gave him nightmares.

It was pretty obvious that both the DWU and the Heberts were something he should avoid for the time being. He wished he knew why but wasn't prepared to push his luck trying to find out any more about it.

In the midst of all this while he was distracted, he'd not only somehow missed what was almost certainly the triggering of possibly the most powerful precog he'd ever heard of, but somehow also managed to lose track of some extremely incriminating and vital documents detailing various facts around his ownership of a number of companies in the construction industry. He had caught, and then made a very vivid example of, the mercenary who had taken advantage of his lapse of attention to attempt something of a power grab, but the documents were still out there. And the precog was now under the protection of the PRT, in a manner that made her practically untouchable.

He knew, he'd tried, and as in the Hebert case, things always ended… badly.

The times Armsmaster simply arrested him were the good ones. He didn't want to think about the other ones.

In the end he'd managed to trace the missing paperwork to Lung of all people. What the hell that huge rage-beast wanted with it he didn't know, aside from the fact that it would be either expensive, dangerous, or both. He'd dealt with the man once before and found that he was a lot smarter than people gave him credit for and not someone to underestimate despite his personality and occupation.

Not wanting to risk going through that again, Thomas sent Tattletale and her little group of annoying but talented children after the documents. He was well aware that her loyalties were at best described as tenuous and that she was looking for some way to leave his service. He'd stopped at least a dozen attempts at either slipping away, or recently, simply assassinating him, one of which was truly evil and brilliant, and to be honest was starting to think she was more trouble than she was worth. She'd been keeping information from him and several of their 'sessions' had ended with him becoming quite peeved.

On the verge of either simply ordering her terminated and taking over direct control of the remaining group, or allowing his tame doctor to try the drug regimen he'd come up with recently, he abruptly discovered that this was no longer a good idea.

He didn't know how, or precisely when it had happened, but sometime in the last week to ten days or so Tattletale had ended up becoming yet another trigger for instant and final retribution from whatever was causing all the problems. He knew she'd been researching the Family, as had the PRT, and presumed this was more evidence to suggest all his problems stemmed from the same scaly source.

At that point he'd become even more paranoid than usual and put the base on partial lock-down, venturing out only a few times under discreet but heavy guard and only having checked and rechecked that nothing would go amiss. It was extremely irritating and more than a little frightening.

As was the way that all his possible sources of aid had suddenly dried up. An old acquaintance in Boston had for no obvious reason become downright hostile to him, which he found a little disquieting bearing in mind the nature of that acquaintance, then broken off all communications. His last words were, "I would suggest that you find a new goal, preferably in a different country. Or retire. Please do not contact me again or I will be forced to take steps. Goodbye."

Thomas somehow got the impression that no help would be forthcoming from that direction.

Cauldron was a distant possibility of help, and that distance became infinite when he made tentative overtures and was rebuffed by the simple fact that they hung up on him halfway through his explanation.

It was obvious they weren't any use to him, or apparently he to them. He was on his own.

In the end he'd decided that the Undersiders could be used in an attempt to retrieve his documents. If they succeeded, which was distinctly possible due to their surprisingly high effectiveness, great. Lung would either be looking for them or some unknown group depending on how well Tattletale's ruse worked.

If they didn't succeed, by far the most likely result was that they died and the documents were destroyed. He could live with that, it would achieve his goals and if they couldn't pull this job off they were no use to him anyway. And, as far as he could tell, the cause of instant invisible death would go after Lung instead, which again he was fine with.

What he hadn't expected that the Undersiders would simply disappear.

Or that Oni Lee would end up extremely dead, apparently as a result of something they managed to do. He was impressed, he hadn't thought they were capable of that.

None of his contacts appeared to know where they were, what had happened to them, if they were even still alive, or anything at all useful to him. His best guess was that the PRT had captured them, which probably meant they had been removed from Brockton Bay. Tattletale would be very valuable to them, they were always looking for Thinkers and she was one of the most powerful he'd ever heard of. What she was capable of with sufficient motivation was astounding.

The big problem with that was of course that she had no reason not to tell them everything about him that she knew. Luckily that was a limited amount of information, and she had no idea where his base was or who he really was, but it was worrying. He'd immediately locked down the base completely until he could work out whether he needed to run or not, and the best way to proceed if so. Days later nothing at all had happened, which was starting to make him even more worried. He'd have expected that if she had handed over the information and they'd managed to derive his location from it that they'd have moved immediately on him, but instead things just went on as normal.

Perhaps she and her team had just been quietly eliminated by Lung? One could hope.

The worst case scenario was that he had captured them and taken them into his service, which would actually be worse than if the PRT had them. He had ways to get information out of the PRT, which wasn't the case with Lung's organization. And the man had a very direct and burny way to deal with problems.

Sighing, he removed his arm from his eyes as his headache started to subside, sitting up and reaching for his keyboard. Bringing up reports from his moles in the PRT he checked to see if anything new had come to light. Worryingly, yet another of his agents had failed to check in, which almost certainly meant that Miss Militia had found him. She had been running a comprehensive check of internal security recently and shut down several of his people, including one he was certain they'd known about for some time and were using to feed him bad intel. He always took reports from that agent with a very large pinch of salt and double or triple checked them.

As long as they didn't know he knew they knew, it was still useful to have the agent in play. But it looked like they'd finally run out of patience and nabbed her. Luckily she had no knowledge that could lead them to him.

The one good thing was that they had no way to know about all his backdoors into their computers, something that he'd worked on for years before he retired. It would take someone like Dragon to find them and only if she had both total unfettered access to the system and a reason to look for them specifically. He was confident that neither was the case for a number of reasons.

He poked around inside the PRT system for a while, his head still aching slightly, not really after anything in particular but just seeing if there was anything useful to him. Reading the threat assessments on Saurial and Raptaur made him stare, then shiver. Miss Militia had upped their ratings in several categories since he'd last looked at them and the results were unnerving.

As was watching the videos of them in operation.

He decided yet again that he'd do his best to make sure they never met him. At least it was only those two, but they were bad enough.

Finding the report that Assault and Battery had filed on their encounter with Raptaur and Panacea, he read it with interest, wondering why the New Wave healer had become involved, and how. There was no obvious answer in the report. Finding the attached video files he watched them, snickering at the obvious trolling of the Protectorate capes from both Raptaur and Panacea who were clearly enjoying the effect their words had on the others and the crowd watching.

After a moment, he frowned slightly and replayed part of the file, before thinking hard.

'Sisters, plural. That's… somewhat terrifying,' he thought with disquiet.

Pondering the idea, he finally decided that given the people involved, there was a better than even chance that someone's leg was being pulled, probably by a large scaled hand. After a while, he carefully pulled back from the PRT systems and cut his link to it, having found nothing applicable to his current problem.

Thomas rubbed his forehead again and winced. The headache was diminishing but still unpleasantly present, making him sigh and decide he couldn't face using his powers for a few hours yet. He didn't need any more stress right now.

Luckily, with the base on lock-down, no emergency was likely to happen without a lot of warning, so he could relax and wait the headache out. Glancing at the bottle of tablets on his desk, he considered taking another one, but decided against it since he was already using too many. He pushed himself to his feet and walked across the room to the small built in refrigerator under the huge TV mounted on the wall, turning the latter on then bending down to retrieve a snack from the former.

"May as well see what the masses are doing," he mumbled to himself, popping the top on a can of soda and returning to his desk, which he leaned against the edge of while picking up the remote. Quickly punching in the three digit channel number of the local news channel he raised the can to his mouth and took a mouthful.

Seconds later he was gaping at the screen in horror, soda running out of his nose and down onto the chest of his costume, can and remote forgotten in his hands, still choking a little.

"What, if anything, do we do about that?" Rebecca said with a look of exasperated irritation, waving at the large screen on the wall on which a still frame of Kaiju was displayed, shot from the news helicopter from WCVB in Boston. They had broadcast the entire thing, first from the roof of the City Hall, then from the air when the helicopter arrived some forty minutes later, called by a frantic reporter.

The image was of the impossibly large creature standing up to her waist in water, wearing of all things a Darth Vader helmet and cloak while wielding a sword better than fifty feet long and a good yard-plus wide at the hilt without showing any effort at all. The Cauldron research team had quickly suggested the sword was of a pattern somewhat similar to a Chinese jian sword, although with a number of differences they found fascinating. Presuming it was made of simple steel it would have weighed the best part of eight tons or so, she had quickly calculated, leaving the sheer leverage aside. The strength needed to wave it around like it was made of Styrofoam was enough to make her seriously wonder if the damn thing was actually as strong as she was.

Having watched the video several times, she was certain that the sword was not made of anything as plebeian as steel since it would have folded in half as soon as it was picked up, due to that same leverage. Which somewhat worried her, as did the entire thing. Saurial, then Raptaur, both with that weird matter generation talent, were one thing, but something ten times the size of the latter and most likely exponentially stronger with the same abilities was horrifying to contemplate. The reports that they made some sort of metallic substance that was unbreakable had been something she'd intended to look into at some point but all the other things that Cauldron was invested in, then this whole Jake Petty event, had pushed it to the back of the immediate action queue.

Now, though, she had no choice, she needed to find out what the fuck was going on. Brockton Bay was a hotbed of Parahuman activity even on a quiet day, but this was ridiculous.

Her conversation with Emily Piggot had left her certain that the damn woman was, for reasons she was very curious about, much more aware of what was going on than she was letting on. She'd detected the interesting fact, from body language, speech patterns, and various other subconscious cues that her own Thinker ability was very good at interpreting, that her subordinate was worried about the situation but much less worried in some ways than she'd have expected. Considering the other woman's well-known dislike of Parahumans in general with very few exceptions, she had spoken about Raptaur and Saurial with a strange degree of apparently genuine respect.

It was very odd, and she wanted to know what was going on.

David was staring at the screen while gently rubbing one finger over his nose in a thoughtful manner, something she'd seen him do many times when he was pondering an interesting problem. Doctor Mother was also looking at the image, but making notes on a clipboard in her tiny quick handwriting, not looking at the paper. She seemed to be fairly impassive but their long association left Rebecca certain she was fascinated by the conundrum the huge cape presented them.

James Grant, known as the Number Man, was sitting next to Contessa, both of them quietly observing, although she could see that he had a small furrow on his brow that meant he was worried. It was somewhat unusual, he was a person that was normally well on top of any problem, but since he'd come through the portal to call them to watch the TV, he'd looked pensive.

"Do we have to do anything?" David finally asked. "The whole point of the experiment is to see what happens under conditions that seem to in fact be taking place right now, if in a rather different way than we expected." He waved one hand at the screen. "From what we've seen so far, Brockton Bay is now in many ways under the control of a Parahuman group. It might not officially be, but I doubt many people would argue the point if something like that was going to come along and glare at them."

"This new group has certainly derailed Thomas' plans rather conclusively, as far as I can tell," she agreed somewhat reluctantly. "And you have a point, in one way. But in another I'm both very curious and very concerned about this. Where did they come from and what do they want? We have no information about them other than what is public and I can't see how something that size could possibly hide anywhere near the city."

"Underwater," Matt suggested. "That one is definitely aquatic and I suspect the other two are as well, or at least amphibious. They may well have an underwater base."

She considered the idea, then slowly nodded. "That… makes a certain amount of sense. Although it doesn't answer the question of their origins or motivations."

Doctor Mother finished making notes then turned to look at them. "I require a genetic sample from at least one of the Family as soon as possible," she said in even tones. "I can probably tell you their origin from a DNA analysis. Not to mention I am very curious about the Agent that is capable of doing this. It could be very important to our work."

Rebecca was about to answer when her laptop made the sound indicating it had mail for her. She held up a finger, making everyone else in the room pause, then opened it and quickly scanned the inbox. "Director Piggot has finally sent me the interim report," she announced, copying it to all of them. Opening the main document she read it, her eyes moving back and forth rapidly.

After a few seconds they widened slightly. She kept reading, feeling more and more taken aback, opening some of the sub-reports and scanning them as well. Sounds from the others of surprise and shock came to her but she ignored them, to concentrate on her own reading.

Reaching the end of the report body she blinked a couple of times. Then she went on to the threat assessment section, her eyes growing round as she read it.

At the end she read it again, then looked up. Doctor Mother was staring at her own laptop with a certain amount of incredulity in her expression, while David was playing one of the attached video recordings and grinning. She leaned over and saw it was documenting Saurial dealing with some gang members in a way that was frighteningly efficient and rather amusing.

James cleared his throat, making them all look at him. "Whatever else we do, we make sure that James Tagg is kept well away from Brockton Bay under any circumstances," he said soberly. "The numbers if he becomes involved in any aggressive manner, which we know he's likely to do should the need arise, are… very bad."

"How do you mean?" she asked curiously. Tagg wasn't stupid by a long shot but he had a direct manner that rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. And a tendency to immediately reach for a big stick and make threats if he wanted something. He wasn't, in her opinion, a particularly diplomatic person, although for certain types of problem he was a good fit and very effective.

Not to mention that he and Emily Piggot got along like sodium and water, never having liked each other for a number of reasons.

"I mean, my calculations show that he would extremely rapidly escalate to a level where the Family retaliated. He wouldn't be able to help it, they would flatly refuse to do what he demanded and he would be unable to tolerate that. If he took the sort of action that his personality demands the consequences would be disastrous."

She shared a glance with David. Looking back to the other man, she asked, "What would happen?"

"I don't know."

Everyone looked at him, most of them in shock. "You don't know?" she echoed. He shook his head.

"I can't predict them. I can predict people around them, and get an approximation of what might happen, but every time I directly try to work the probabilities on any of the Family, I get nonsense. Almost an error message, in fact, is the closest way I can put it. My power can't read them or predict them and I don't know why."

"An anti-Thinker effect..." Doctor Mother looked fascinated. "That is… rare. I wonder how complete it is." They exchanged a glance, then everyone turned to look at Contessa, who looked back. She gazed at them evenly.

"Have you tried?" Rebecca asked.

The other woman shook her head slightly. "Not as such. When Saurial first came on the scene I experimented with Path to Victory on her." She seemed uncomfortable. "It was… less than entirely successful."

"Why didn't you mention it before?" David asked curiously.

"I have been wondering that myself," the brunette woman mused. "I can't answer you."

Once again they all looked at each other. This was more than a little worrying.

"Can you try again, please?" Rebecca asked. The other woman gazed at her for several seconds, then nodded with a slight look of worry.

"All right."

Glancing at the screen for a moment, as if to refresh her memory, she closed her eyes, something that she rarely did except when she was trying a particularly complex use of her powers, took a deep breath, and relaxed. Everyone watched her.

"Path to learning about the Family," she said, letting them know what she was trying her power on. Her expression went blank, then puzzled. "Subject not found."

"What?"

Contessa opened her eyes, looking at Rebecca, who was feeling startled. "That's basically what my abilities said, translated into something you can understand."

Rebecca watched while the woman closed her eyes again and appeared to concentrate. "Path to learning about Kaiju." There was another pause, then she repeated "Subject not found." Shaking her head, she frowned. "Path to defeating Kaiju."

"Subject not found."

"What the hell is going on?" David asked quietly. Rebecca shrugged, while Doctor Mother was studying Contessa as if she'd never seen her before.

"No idea."

"Path to bringing the Family to work with Cauldron."

"Subject not found."

Pausing to think, the woman tried a different tack. "Path to controlling the Dock Workers Union."

She paled abruptly. "No, that's not a good idea," she whispered, looking shocked.

The others exchanged a glance. When they looked back, Contessa was staring at them. There was a trickle of blood running out of one nostril, which she absently wiped away.

"Whatever you do, don't threaten a friend of the Family," she said in a shaken voice. "That path leads nowhere good in a very small number of steps. You don't want to know what the last one is." Rebecca was stunned, she'd never seen her companion look like that in all the years she'd known her.

"Why not?" she asked.

"It would be… very bad indeed."

"In what way?"

"I can't give you details, but I can say that we would have a lot of trouble as a result. We don't want to go down that route."

James nodded a little, showing he agreed. "I concur. I don't know exactly what would happen either but the end result would not be favorable to us. If you go there, which I know you will, be very cautious." He looked at David. "I mean that particularly for you. Don't look for a fight or I think you'll get one you don't want."

David stared at him, then around at the others. Contessa seemed to be thinking hard, one hand holding a tissue to her nose. Doctor Mother looked fascinated again.

"Well, that's not worrying at all," Rebecca sighed. "What the hell are these people? We've never had anything like this happen before."

"I don't know but I'm very curious to find out," David said quietly. "We need to discreetly check if the same thing happens with other Thinkers and precogs."

"I'll deal with that after the meeting," she assured him.

Doctor Mother made some notes and nodded thoughtfully. "Please ensure you retrieve a DNA sample. I am even more intrigued now."

Rebecca nodded. David turned to her after staring at the image on the screen for a little longer, his eyebrows raised a little.

"What do we tell Paul about our involvement?"

"Nothing, for now. He's already involved himself, based on what Piggot said and this report, but until we have a better idea what the situation is I don't think we need to let him known any more than he's found out for himself."

"Are you sure that's wise?"

"It's worked up until now," she pointed out. "The man is an idealist. We need people like him, and he needs people like us. But he doesn't need to know that."

Her colleague sighed faintly and nodded. "All right. I'll go along with that for now. I just hope it doesn't come back to bite us."

"What's the worst that could happen?" she asked lightly, then stopped as everyone in the room fixed their eyes on her. Looking up at the still frame of Kaiju again, she added with a faint sigh, "Sorry. Forget I said that."

After a moment's hesitation, she carried on. "Leaving that aside for the time being, let's go over the press release on the Petty incident. I'd like to get that out before I go to Brockton Bay since I don't want to be distracted."

They were soon discussing the exact wording of the press release, none of them looking at the screen on the wall, aside from Contessa who was still holding a tissue against her face, a small furrow between her eyes as she thought.

Having finally ended up with a draft of the whole report set that she was happy with, depending on your definition of 'happy', Emily sent it to the Chief Director over the most secure method Armsmaster and Dragon could come up with, bypassing the local PRT network entirely in favor of a Guild link through one of her communications satellites. They were almost certain that Calvert would have no way to intercept it. That done, she glanced at Legend who was watching her with interest, then Hannah, who seemed worried.

Turning to both Tinkers who were also watching her, Dragon somehow emitting an air of curious anticipation, she cleared her throat.

"I need to tell you both something, but I need your word that you won't pass it on, either to the PRT or the Guild, at least for the moment. You'll understand why when I explain but for now let's just say that it's speculative, worrying, and potentially extremely public-relations-unfriendly. There's no immediate threat, but there is the possibility of a very serious one. I don't want it getting out into the public domain, and bearing in mind the security issues we've uncovered recently, that could well happen if we don't keep things quiet until we both work out the full ramifications and also catch Coil and shut the bastard down for good."

Dragon and Colin shared a glance.

"Are you aware of this, sir?" Colin asked Legend respectfully. The other man nodded slowly.

"I am, Emily and Hannah filled me in earlier. At the moment I agree we should probably do as she asks."

"I see." Tapping his index finger on the table, the Tinker looked at his friend, who shrugged very slightly and nodded once. "Agreed. I am slightly uncomfortable with this, but bearing in mind some recent events that Dragon and I have been involved in, I can hardly be a hypocrite about it."

Wondering what exactly that statement meant, Emily nodded thankfully. "Good. All right, this is currently only a hypothesis with no real proof behind it, but a lot of fairly convincing evidence from a number of sources. A few weeks ago, Hannah came to me at home..."

"A nuclear shotgun?!"

Colin winced. The Director's voice had gone shrill, Hannah was staring at him with disbelief, and even Legend looked shocked. He glanced at Dragon who seemed mildly amused as best he could tell. Perhaps the new openness their small group had developed wasn't quite as open as he'd thought?

"Allow me to explain, Director," he began. "A couple of weeks ago, I got an email from Leet..."

"Thanks, Dad. It was fun," Taylor smiled, hugging her father after he'd closed the door and hung up his coat. She'd been waiting for him to get back, having arrived there herself half an hour earlier.

"It was," he smiled down at her. "And thanks to both of you. Without you, it would never have happened. The city and the union owe you a lot."

"No, they don't," she laughed as she released him. "We're helping each other. That's what friends do. Come on, I made you some coffee, I want to show you the video of my talk to Legend. It's hysterical, his expression is amazing!"

Grinning, he allowed her to tow him into the living room.