"You were gone for hours," Lisa commented, yawning widely. "It's nearly midnight."
She shook her head a little, then rubbed her eyes. She'd been waiting for them for a while, having returned to the BBFO office after Danny went home at around eight. The pair of currently reptilian girls had been gone since just after half past one that afternoon, but looked very pleased with themselves as they came in the rear entrance.
"Sorry, we had to swim a long way to get into deep enough water to properly test things," Taylor replied as she reverted to her normal human form, dropping into a chair. Lisa pushed the chair she was in away from the computer bench and swiveled it around to look at them.
"Where did you go?"
"Out about twenty miles, then due south, it's the shortest direction to the continental shelf, south of Boston," the other girl said. Indicating Amy, who was lying on her back on the floor now, the end of her long tail waving lazily back and forth while she crossed her arms under her head and grinned at the ceiling, she added, "Turns out she can swim at about seventy-five miles an hour. Not bad, for a beginner."
"I could probably manage a little more but the power to speed ratio goes really bad," Amy put in, raising her head to look at Lisa. "That speed seemed about optimal. We worked it out using Taylor's GPS when we reached deep water. I was pretty pleased, it was faster than I expected."
"Not bad at all," Lisa agreed. Turning back to the computer she ran a global mapping program, Taylor coming over and pointing over her shoulder.
"About there, more or less," she said.
"OK. So that's… Hmm, something like seven and a half thousand feet deep. How far down did you get?" She peered over her shoulder at Amy, who looked very pleased with herself.
"All the way to the bottom," the other girl grinned. "I had to stop twice to make some changes, but in the end it turned out to be fairly straightforward. The temperature was simple, the pressure's not too bad. I could easily go deeper, but that would involve a much longer swim. I still want to try at some point even so. This proves I can handle water as deep as anything around here, though."
"I'm very impressed," Lisa replied with her own return grin.
"On the way back we wandered around the city for an hour or so, just to let people see us together," Taylor remarked, sitting down again and putting her feet up on the table. "We had a pretty funny run in with Miss Militia."
"Keep going," Lisa urged when her friend stopped, a wide smile on her face.
"We heard some trouble and went to investigate," the girl began. "Three guys ran and we followed..."
The story, told by both of them, had the blonde almost unable to breath for the laughter. When they finished she kept giggling for over a minute, picturing the expressions on the faces of the unsuspecting heroes. "God, you two are impossible," she finally gasped out.
"Only improbable," Amy said with satisfaction. "With an opening like that, how could I resist? And you know she's going to join in on the spot." The healer waved at Taylor, who was also snickering more than a little.
"I bet PHO is already going crazy," Lisa said, turning back to the keyboard and quickly logging in to her account, then poking around a little in the local forums. It only took her about fifteen seconds to find the thread in question, and links to pictures and video. The other two came over and looked at the screen, all three chuckling at the responses. "Clockblocker is being worried and trolling people at the same time," she pointed out, indicating an entry. "Does that guy ever take anything entirely seriously?"
"No," both the others chorused.
Amy read the last few entries in the thread, which was rapidly growing, then grinned. "Ianthe is going to have to join PHO, I think," she said in a sly voice.
Lisa and Taylor exchanged a glance, then shook their heads with humor.
"Poor PHO," Lisa quipped, even as Amy moved to the next computer and started typing with the tips of her talons, giggling wildly.
Reading the first page of the report she'd just been handed, a summary of the entire thing, Hannah blinked in shock, then lifted her eyes to gaze at the PRT biologist who'd given it to her. He waited politely, looking more than a little confused, something she could sympathize with. "You're certain?" she asked, pointing at one line on the report with an index finger.
The man nodded. "I am… We are, actually. No one can come up with any other ideas, not with so limited an amount of time to analyze the sample. If we could call in some more expert knowledge, we mi…"
Hannah cut him off with a gesture. "No, I'm afraid that for the moment we can't let this information out of the building." A number of checks from Dragon and Colin had left her fairly sure that the research lab computer system was currently clean, and it was now isolated from the rest of the network on the pretext of a firewall upgrade, which was more or less true if misleading. While this had caused a lot of grumbling in the lab, the scientists were currently living with it, even if annoyed.
"Tell no one outside this room about any of this for now, Doctor Ramirez. It's classified to top secret level five and up, eyes only, you understand?"
He nodded again, looking both puzzled and irritated. "Not really," he grumbled. "But I can follow orders as well as the next guy."
"Thank you. I'm sorry about the inconvenience, but it's important."
"Fine, can you at least tell me where you got that thing?" he said with a frown, pointing at the dart she'd pulled out of the E88 ganger Ianthe had shot, which was sitting in a petri dish on the lab bench next to some extremely expensive DNA sequencing equipment.
"It's part of a new Parahuman encounter I'm working on," she replied.
"Biotinker?"
Hannah looked sharply at him. "Why do you say that?"
Reaching out and picking up the dart in a gloved hand, very carefully avoiding the pointy end which tapered to an extremely fine tip, he held it up. "This was grown. Not machined. It's an amazingly complex metal-loaded organic compound, like nothing I've ever seen before. Far, far stronger than any biologically produced substance on record, but the micro-structure clearly shows a layered construction typical of such things as mollusk shells. The tensile strength is ridiculous, as is the hardness, you could scratch diamonds with it easily. Whoever is responsible for this has something that's worth a hell of a lot of money if it can be mass produced. But the point is that it's produced by a living creature, although not one that was ever evolved on this planet."
Pointing at the tip of the dart, he continued, "The cocktail of drugs used is also entirely unknown to me. There is the soporific, which acts more rapidly than anything I've ever heard of even in minute doses. Time from contact with the bloodstream to unconsciousness is no more than four or five seconds worst case, which is supposedly impossible, but we've tested it. It only works on primates as well, most effectively on humans. Then there's an astoundingly rapid-action local anesthetic better than anything currently used, as well as what looks like some very peculiar form of broad-spectrum antibiotic which also promotes healing based on initial tests."
"Your conclusions being…?"
"It is all the work of an astoundingly gifted Biotinker, or an entire team of extremely good and very experienced biological and chemical engineers that took years to develop it. Without ever publishing anything on any of the drugs in question, or the precursors to them, or the unique techniques used to produce them." He looked at her with his eyebrows up. "Bearing in mind where we are, and the world we live in, my feeling is that the first option is less unlikely."
Hannah sighed gently. He was entirely correct as far as she could see. Neither option made her any happier, the first one being the worst one.
"Add that to the DNA results, or what I think is DNA..." The man put the dart very carefully back into the petri dish and put the lid on it. "The conclusions are somewhat worrying." He turned back to her, studying her for a moment, then spoke again.
"I'm going to go out on a limb here, but I suspect that this involves the Family somehow."
"I can't say any more about it right now, Doctor," she prevaricated, which made him nod once as if he expected the answer.
"Fair enough."
"Can you duplicate any of those drugs?" she asked after a moment's silence.
He looked thoughtfully at the dart. Eventually, he replied, "I am uncertain, it's not really my field. You need a decent pharmacological expert, really. That said, possibly, with considerable time, effort, and investment. Any one them would be something that a good pharma company would spend a couple of billion dollars and a decade of research on, even assuming the background knowledge which is far beyond state of the art. I can be fairly sure that it couldn't be duplicated easily, but I wouldn't like to say it couldn't be duplicated at all. But if you could, just in that dish are the elements of several dozen patents in biotech and tens of billions of dollars of revenue. The structural material alone is ground-breaking, in half a dozen ways I can think of off the top of my head, never mind the drugs."
Looking at her again, he added, "I would very much like to talk to the inventor or inventors of any of them."
With a small hidden smile, she told him, "That may be possible at some point. Thank you for the information and analysis."
"You're welcome, Miss Militia."
"Please remember, this is currently top secret."
The man nodded, then turned and went back to his equipment. Picking up the small transparent container with Ianthe's dart in it, she left the room, thoughts whirling in her head. One of the loudest being that the Director really wasn't going to like the latest development in Brockton Bay Parahuman activity.
It certainly changed some of their theories in a rather unexpected way.
"Another one just turned up," Dennis commented, peering at the laptop on his knee.
"Another one of what?" Chris asked as he looked up from fiddling with the innards of one of his laser pistols, the device half-disassembled all over the common room table.
"Another Family member," his friend and colleague replied. "Big sort of blue-purple one calling herself Ianthe. PHO says it's Greek, meaning 'Violet Flower'. Which is a very pretty name for something that could probably unscrew Lung's head and eat it."
Getting up, the Tinker went and hung over the back of the sofa so he could see the screen of the other boy's laptop. "Hey, is that Saurial next to her?" he asked, somewhat surprised.
"Yep. They were wandering around down on the Boardwalk for an hour or so around ten this evening," Dennis replied, scrolling down the page to another image. "She's easily a foot taller than Saurial, so she'd be about seven and a half feet maybe? Looks quite similar although much more solidly built, she must weight three or four times as much at least."
"Green eyes, not that weird yellow-orange that Saurial and her sisters have," Chris noted, pointing at the screen.
"Apparently she's a cousin, this guy 'MZenny' is saying. They came into his shop, he's the one Saurial buys eggs from, and she introduced Ianthe. Left with two dozen eggs." Dennis grinned, shaking his head in wonder. "How did we get to the point that huge reptiles casually wandering in off the street and buying groceries is seen as normal? Hardly any capes at all do that in costume, but these guys just walk around like it was nothing special."
Snickering, Chris shrugged. "Around here it isn't. This is Brockton Bay, home of the fucking weird. Although I'd agree it's gotten a lot weirder in the last couple of months."
"I wonder how many more of them there are?" his friend mused.
"No idea. This is the first time anyone has ever seen more than one at the same time, though, isn't it?"
Dennis thought for a moment, then nodded a little. "Except for Amy, I think so. She's apparently met Saurial and Raptaur at the same time, and she met Kaiju before probably about anyone other than the Mayor and that Hebert guy from the DWU."
"The girl has some very worrying friends."
"The girl is a very worrying friend," Dennis snickered. He kept reading the thread, adding a few comments which made Chris laugh, just to push things along. Indicating one screen name, he grinned. "You know who that is?"
Leaning closer, Chris read the name. "IguanaGirl? Who?"
"That Chinese girl Lucy, who sits at the same table that Amy does these days at lunch," he replied. "She's apparently mad on lizards, has a pet iguana or something, and she's the one that Amy beat up a mugger for with Saurial. The girl posted photos of them together to practically every place on the planet, she was so pleased about it."
"Oh, right, I remember. But her face was blacked out, right?"
"I heard them talking about it and I'm sure it's her. Not to mention, she's damn good looking even with her face covered," Dennis smirked. "I never forget a good looking girl."
"I'm sure you don't," Chris sighed, amused. Pushing himself back to his feet he returned to servicing his weapon. "Well, at least things are going to get even more interesting around here."
"One way to put it," Dennis mumbled, typing quickly, then grinning evilly at the almost immediate responses. "Hey, guess what?"
"What?"
"Ianthe has joined the thread." The boy read some more, his eyebrows going up, then nearly died laughing. "And she has a really weird sense of humor."
Glancing at his friend, who was snickering almost constantly as he read, Chris downed tools once again and went to see what was going on now.
By the time Carlos and Missy got back from patrol, both of them could hardly speak.
Opening the door, Emily looked at Hannah, then waved her in without a word, locking it behind the other woman then following her into the living room. Hannah was already sweeping it for bugs with her detector. Leaving her to it, she went into the kitchen and got a couple of mugs, then put the kettle on and dumped instant coffee into each mug, knowing they were going to need caffeine based on the woman's expression.
When she came out a couple of minutes later with a steaming mug in each hand, Hannah was sitting in a chair holding a folder, waiting for her. She handed the visitor one mug then also sat. "Now what?" she asked after a couple of sips.
"We were possibly wrong, but also right," Hannah sighed heavily, putting the folder on the coffee table between them and pushing it across to her, then taking a sip of her own coffee. "There's another Family member running around tonight. Apparently a cousin."
Emily raised her eyebrows, but said nothing.
"She's probably a Biotinker."
The PRT director nearly choked on her drink. "WHAT!?" she yelped, quickly putting the mug down, then wiping her chin free of coffee with her sleeve without thinking about it. "I mean, what the fuck? How… Is that even possible? If they're the result of a Biotinker, can one make another one?"
Hannah shrugged, sighing heavily. "I have no damn idea at all right now. Everything about the Family breaks all the rules we thought we knew. But there's more." Putting her mug down she dug into her pocket, removing a plastic bag containing a small transparent sample dish, which had something rattling around in it. She handed it over to the other woman, who accepted it, then examined it carefully.
"What's this?" she asked, still inspecting the contents of the sample container. Tipping it from side to side she looked at the small very sharp dart, made of some dark substance she didn't recognize.
"Ianthe, the new one, used those to deliver first a paralytic agent, then a knockout one, to three E88 members I was pursuing tonight after a robbery at Brockton Bay Arms and Ammunition, on Bay Drive. About eight of them broke in and were cleaning the place out when Robin and I stumbled across them. We took down five, the other three ran. They didn't get far."
Emily listened to the report of the encounter with the new cape and Saurial. Hannah showed her video from her own camera that she carried these days, which caught most of the frankly rather disturbing dialog between both reptiles. She shivered a little. Ianthe sounded cheerfully bloodthirsty and really not at all human, much less so in some ways than Saurial or even Raptaur.
"Fuck me, this is getting ridiculous," she said after handing the tablet back. "But Biotinker?"
"The dart is biologically produced according to the lab. The drugs used are entirely unknown to us. As far as I can tell, and the lab agrees, she fired them from some form of gas-operated launcher in her arms. Traces of chemicals on the rear of the dart suggest a highly energetic exothermic chemical reaction as the propulsive force. Based on the chemical mix, the lab scientists say that they can probably be fired at extremely high velocity if necessary, possibly a couple of thousand feet per second. Which makes it a very dangerous weapon."
Emily was steadily paling listening to the dry facts delivered in a toneless voice, she could feel it.
"I didn't tell them much about the Parahuman in question, but Doctor Ramirez immediately guessed a Biotinker. Either that or a whole R&D team. Based on what Ianthe said a couple of times, I'd go for the first choice. Assuming that's the case, I hate to think what else could be used as a payload other than an obviously carefully non-lethal takedown system. Nerve agents, perhaps? Possibly other things even worse. So she's immediately into a fairly high Blaster category as well as Biotinker. Not to mention Brute like all of them." Hannah shrugged. "I have no idea if she shares their other abilities yet. But she's very strong, very fast, and very weird."
"Shit."
"You want to know the best bit?"
Emily wasn't at all sure she did, but she slowly nodded. Hannah retrieved the folder and opened it, removing a sheaf of papers with the PRT R&D division logo on the top sheet, then flipped to the next page.
Clearing her throat, she read from the summary, "DNA analysis via standard rapid polymerase sequencing failed with errors resulting from lack of standard amino acids in sample presented. A number of more esoteric techniques were attempted, ultimately resolving that the sample contained a DNA analog of unprecedented complexity based on a quadruplex helix unlike any known organism. While DNA quadruplex structures are known to exist in nature, and indeed in the human body, the associated fact that the structure uses eight rather than four amino acids as the basis of the nucleotides that encode information, three of which are entirely novel molecules, casts significant doubt that the organism which produced the sample is related to any known life form. Information density of the DNA analog is a minimum of an order of magnitude greater than normal double-helix terrestrial DNA. The data currently available suggest an origin elsewhere. More definite conclusions will require considerable levels of further research and larger sample sizes."
She closed the report and put it back into the folder, which she placed on the table. Picking up her mug again she leaned back and sipped it, while Emily stared at her in shock.
Eventually, she cleared her throat. "Excuse me?" she asked very carefully. "Did all that end up saying in a roundabout way that the Family are aliens?"
"That would appear to be the conclusion the scientists came to, yes," Hannah replied quietly. "Doctor Ramirez didn't put it in exactly those words, of course, and I could tell he really didn't want to believe it, but he's a good scientist, he goes where the data lead him, not where he wants to go. There's always the possibility they're wrong, but added to all the other weird shit we've learned, it would explain a few things." She sipped her coffee again. "Adds a whole hell of a lot of totally unexplained things as well, of course. Like how they got here in the first place, how long they've been here, and why. I'd like to say it's impossible, but..." She looked at Emily, who looked back, not sure what to think.
Eventually she transferred her gaze to the little dart in the container, which she'd put on the table between them. "Aliens. Jesus."
"Now what?"
"I have absolutely no idea," she sighed, then got up to retrieve a bottle of brandy. Her coffee needed something extra, and she was pretty sure Hannah's did too.
Popping another egg into her mouth, Taylor crunched it up absently as she poked around on the internet, looking at interesting videos. She was currently absorbed in one which showed several people using some water-jet machines to lift completely out of the water and do stunts, which was sparking some interesting ideas.
"That is very strange to watch," Lisa said from behind her.
"It's cool, though, right? Just water being enough to make someone fly."
The blonde girl sighed gently, but in a good humored way. "I was referring to you eating eggs raw while your head is something from a nightmare but the rest of you is normal," she replied.
Looking over her shoulder, Taylor grinned. She currently had a scaled down version of Raptaur's head on her shoulders. Picking up the half-empty carton of eggs she offered it to her friend. "Help yourself," she said.
"No, thank you, I like my hen fruit fried or scrambled, as was intended by the hen," Lisa laughed.
Amy reached over and carefully picked one out of the box, dropping it into her mouth and chewing. Lisa looked at her, as did Taylor, for different reasons. "Hey, you had your own eggs, these are mine," Taylor said, pulling the box out of reach.
"I ate them all," Amy smiled. "Weirdly, you were right, like this they're a nice snack."
"You're both very peculiar," Lisa chuckled. Two reptilian heads exchanged a glance. Taylor ate the second to last egg, flipping the final one to her friend, who snapped it neatly out of the air.
"Don't see it myself," Taylor commented. She spun her chair around, looking at the other two. "Well, all things considered I think today worked out pretty well. And the tests of the new cousin were perfect."
Amy nodded happily. "I'd have to agree, this worked way better than I expected it to. I've got a massive mental list of improvements and modifications to make, some of which will have to wait for version two, because they need structural changes." She looked thoughtful. "That said, I can probably rebuild this one. Anyway, lots of ideas. I've implemented quite a few already, this isn't the Ianthe that left the building earlier. I guess it's time to get out, though. I'll have to go home at some point and Mom might find this even harder to accept than my tail."
Taylor grinned while Lisa laughed a little. "I can imagine she might have some awkward questions," the blonde said dryly.
"Just a few. Then she'd blame the Family for corrupting me."
"Us corrupting you?" Taylor put an incredulous tone in her voice, which got a look filled with humor in return.
"Implausible, I know, but that's the way she thinks." Amy stood up from where she'd been sitting on her tail, then moved to the middle of the room. "OK. Let's see how well this works." Lying down on her side, she closed her glowing eyes. The 'Ianthe' body went still, then a few seconds later the life support pouch access slit appeared. A hand came through the skin, which Taylor moved to hold open. Amy in her real body slipped out of the biological exosuit, slightly damp with some sort of fluid that evaporated almost instantly.
Helping her to her feet, Lisa steadied her as she swayed a little, her eyes closed, then opened them slowly. Blinking furiously, she raised a hand and rubbed them. "Whoa. That's a hell of a change," she muttered. "And a let down in a way." After a moment, Lisa let go, the other girl stretching widely with a crack from her spine. "But aside from the senses I feel great. Really rested."
"Is it my imagination, or do you look slightly different?" Lisa asked suspiciously, stepping back and studying the brunette with an expression both Amy and Taylor knew meant her power was at work. Her eyes widened. "You cheater."
Amy grinned, while Taylor looked her up and down as well. Her friend definitely looked slightly more toned and muscular, although not in a way that anyone would really notice without a before and after comparison. They both had the advantage of having seen her only hours before to measure against. "What did you do?" Taylor asked curiously.
"I may have added certain abilities to the construct based on the healing symbiote, only a lot better," Amy snickered. "And it's not impossible that I used that to make some small improvements to myself."
"Two hundred percent upgrade in muscle fiber strength isn't a 'small improvement' in my view," Lisa pointed out, walking around Amy and inspecting her closely. "Not to mention a whole series of neural modifications, tendon and ligament upgrades, and..." She stopped, then sighed, shaking her head in wonder. "You just couldn't resist, could you?" she asked rhetorically.
Amy pasted a smug grin easily the equal of any the blonde could produce on her face, holding up her right hand, in which a familiar dark gray blade grew. "Nope."
"Oh for gods sake," Lisa sighed.
"The hardest part was making sure it doesn't show," the healer laughed. Transferring the organic knife to her other hand, she held up the one that had produced it, which Lisa and Taylor both looked closely at. "But I managed."
"That's both seriously impressive and really freaky," Lisa smiled.
"I didn't want to go back to being just normal Amy," the brunette shrugged. "So I fixed a few things."
"Normal Amy is hardly 'normal' by most people's standards," Taylor smiled. "But I can understand the urge. How much stronger are you now?"
"Let's find out. Can you make some weights, please?" Amy reabsorbed the knife she was still holding. Taylor quickly made a series of blocks of steel in sizes that she'd worked out corresponded to hundred pound increments, starting at four hundred pounds and going up to two tons. They already knew that the previous symbiote had boosted the girl's strength to the point that she could manage the lowest weight block quite handily.
Amy picked that one up with one hand, nearly falling over at the off-balance weight, but catching herself in time. "That's a lot easier," she grinned, looking very pleased. Putting it back down she moved down the row of steadily larger gleaming blocks, grabbing the handles on each and lifting. She topped out at just over a ton.
"Fuck, that's amazing," Lisa muttered. "You'll have to be careful you don't snap someone in half, though, with that sort of strength."
"I can turn it down for normal life," Amy explained. "It uses a lot of energy so there's no point in being that strong when I don't need to be. Same for the speed boost. Taylor uses Varga bullshit to get around it, but I can't do the same thing." She snapped her hand out so quickly it blurred to normal vision, although Taylor could follow it without trouble. Lisa blinked in shock. "That needs strength, toughness, and high speed neural signals all in one," the healer explained. "Otherwise just the inertia of my arm would break it when I stopped. I've made some changes to the bones as well, using a non-metallic version of the knife-blade material. It's not as strong although it's still a lot stronger than normal bones, but it won't show up on a metal detector."
"You've been busy," Taylor remarked, very impressed.
"It's a start towards the real mods I want to make and about all I can get away with safely at the moment," Amy nodded. "But it should be enough to keep me going if something bad happens, and give my symbiote time to heal me properly. I'm testing some of the new ideas I have for the series two symbiotes." Looking at her arm, she flexed it. "I was tempted to add a scaled down version of the dart launcher system, but that needs some pretty major structural mods to a human skeleton and I decided it wasn't the right time yet. But I can also produce the same drugs I can use as Ianthe, so I can always throw a knife at someone. Or a bigger dart."
"Can you throw a knife?" Taylor asked curiously. Amy raised a hand, opened her mouth, then stopped, before sagging a little.
"No." She sighed when both her friends laughed. "Can you teach me?"
"Sure, no problem," Taylor snickered. "Like I said, I need to teach you the Family style anyway, and it's pretty damn flexible." She looked at Lisa, rubbing her chin in thought. "Actually, I should teach both of you. Varga and I have been working on a version suitable for people without tails that I want to teach Dad's security people. And Brian, I think he'd be very good at it. Über too, he'd pick it up in no time."
"Even without the tail moves, it's a very distinctive style," Lisa pointed out. "Anyone with serious martial arts experience will notice that instantly. It'll be pretty obvious who's teaching her."
"So?" Taylor shrugged. "Everyone knows that Panacea is a friend of the Family. Teaching her our style is perfectly reasonable. We just need to make sure she doesn't use the tail moves when she's not Ianthe. It'll take some practice, and the cloaking technique will cover most of that sort of thing anyway, but I can't see much of a downside." She looked back to Amy who had sat in one of the chairs. "Although, it might also be a good idea to learn a more normal martial art as well. Dad says Zephron is really good at Karate, so maybe he'd teach you. Some of the other people here know other ones as well."
"Brian knows a fair amount about at least three styles," Lisa commented. "Along with being pretty decent at boxing. I can ask him if he'd show you some things."
"I think that would be a good idea," Amy replied thoughtfully. "I also want to learn more about the baton usage, like Danny mentioned a while ago."
"Mark's the man for that," Taylor told her.
Considering the dormant Ianthe body lying on the floor, Amy nodded slowly. "That will let me test some other things I designed in," she said, the other two following her eyes. "In theory, the secondary brain should have something not too far off Über's ability to rapidly learn things, especially muscle memory things. It seems to be working so far, I was able to pick up all the new skills I needed to run around in that without too much trouble, and a lot of it will even eventually transfer into my real brain, since the linkage is so deep. It should allow me to learn these martial arts abilities much faster than it would normally take, days rather than months. But I'm not sure quite how well it will work until we try."
"You are such a cheater," Lisa snickered. "It's just build a power with you, isn't it? You're nearly as bad as she is." The blonde waved at Taylor, who waved back.
"There are worse people to be compared to," Amy said with satisfaction.
Taylor bowed, grinning at her friend. "Thank you, cousin," she giggled, making them both smile.
Lisa was now looking at the immobile form of the new cousin, a thoughtful expression on her face. Taylor and Amy exchanged a glance. "Something wrong, Lisa?" Amy asked.
"No, not really. I was just thinking that there could be some slightly awkward issues about the new Family member, the Biotinker cousin. It's a little too convenient in some ways, everyone knows Panacea is friends with Raptaur and the others, as Taylor just said, and now there's a Family member who can also heal? Among all sorts of other terrifying abilities." She looked troubled. "A sufficiently paranoid person might come to exactly the wrong conclusion, for example, the right one. It's not a wildly high probability but I can't honestly say it's not something that would happen. The PRT is very paranoid, so are a lot of other people."
Amy and Taylor both looked at her for several seconds, then each other, then the sleeping bioconstruct.
"She's right," Amy said. "Damn."
"What we need," the Varga spoke through Taylor, sounding thoughtful as well, "is a diversionary technique. It is doubtful if anyone would realistically suspect Amy Dallon of being Ianthe the Family Biomanipulator if both of them were seen in the same place at the same time, especially if this was by impeccable witnesses. Witnesses such as, for instance, Dragon and Armsmaster..." He trailed off, the three girls exchanging glances.
Amy nodded very slowly, meeting Taylor's eyes. "He's got a very good point," she remarked.
Both Taylor and Amy turned to regard Lisa with an evaluating expression. "Taylor?"
"Yes, Amy?"
"It's time for more mad science. Set up the table."
"Yeth, Mathter," Taylor lisped, dragging a faked damaged leg across to a vacant spot on the floor with great flailing of her arms. "Have you the pathient?"
"I do indeed, Igor," Amy smiled darkly. Lisa was looking worried. Pointing, the brunette said firmly, "Clothes off, on the table, face down. Trust me, I know what I'm doing."
"Oh, hell," Lisa sighed, but went to do as instructed. Behind her, the healer laughed in a dark manner, making her shake her head sadly. "Power, it goes right to the head in some people," she muttered, making the foreboding guffaw turn into a giggle.
"At least get dressed first, this is too weird," she said plaintively over her shoulder, loosening her belt and taking her jeans off.
"You haven't seen anything yet," Amy grinned, cracking her knuckles.
She did at least go and retrieve her clothes before she started doing the unnatural once again.