Monster Chapter 2: Heartless, a worm fanfic

2.1

I don't even make it to lunch. The relentless stream of little torments is worse than usual, more biting, more constant, but the event horizon is when I go for a water bottle from my backpack during gym and it's filled with red liquid with dark bits floating around inside of it. The only reason I don't drink any of it is that I've made a habit of pre-opening my bottles at home (Long story, ugly memories), and the unexpected resistance catches my attention enough to actually see the contents.

Rationally, I'm almost certain this is just juice, probably with pieces of fruit inside of it. Emotionally, I see the locker's contents, and I've hurled it away before I can finish telling myself it's just juice. It clips somebody in the head, and the coach starts yelling at me. I can see Sophia smirking. I have no idea how or when she planted the bottle without me noticing. I don't think I care.

I grab my backpack and go home, shoving my hands into my pockets to hide their shaking.

She'd replaced all my water bottles.

I'd planned to go to school tomorrow as usual.

I'm not so sure now.

Okay, Heartbreaker. Not capable of producing death plagues, but... defended by people who are essentially innocent, not to mention human. That's going to make this hard. There's also the smallest, barest chance he'll decide I'm attractive and turn me into another cultist, in which case I'll have made everything worse by giving him control over a nearly unkillable nightmare monster that doesn't need to sleep. Given everything I've been able to gather about his modus operandi, I'm reasonably certain that it won't happen that way -he doesn't use his power on anyone he doesn't intend to incorporate long-term and for all that he's a monstrous human being I'm not seeing evidence that he's a pedophile- but keeping in mind the worst case scenario is good.

I mean, if he decides to go for it, there's basically nothing I can do, and knowing about the possibility doesn't do much beyond give me a reason to hyperventilate and/or abandon the operation entirely, but... well, there's not actually a but.

I push it out of my mind. First, I need to find him. I already know he tends to operate in the vicinity of Toronto, but information about his location is sketchy beyond that. I'd sort of vaguely assumed he lived in a loghouse out in the woods somewhere and nobody had taken him down because he has a fanatically devoted cult of innocents on his side, but digging around online he doesn't seem to have a stable base of operation. Instead, he tends to live in the house or apartment of one of his recent 'recruits', with the rest of the 'family' either living in the same building or spread out among two or three closely clustered buildings. I'm kind of curious how he manages to move such a large group around under the radar. Are large families, moving as a group, common in Toronto? Does he go ahead with one or two women and then somehow get directions to the rest of the group, and they trickle to the new base in small groups?

Unfortunately, the internet doesn't have anything about that stuff. He's known to have been found in a number of different places, and flushing him out just leads to him going to ground, but that doesn't necessarily mean he doesn't have a primary hidey-hole. The fact that he can vanish so readily is also not actually informative. It's Canada, there's plenty of nothing to vanish into, and he can always Master a woman and hide in her basement or something, with no way for pursuit to know whether any given bystander who 'saw nothing' or 'saw an odd group of people going thataway' is a Mastered woman saying whatever Heartbreaker wants her to say or reporting the truth. He doesn't necessarily need any kind of network in place, ready to hide him... but he also could have such a thing going on. The women he collects don't necessarily have to remain in his immediate vicinity. He may well have a series of safehouses of Mastered women, behaving completely normally for a single Canadian woman until the moment he needs a place to hide.

This is ugly.

I look up more details about Heartbreaker's power, but it's not very helpful. It's unknown if he has an actual range limit, though he seems to operate by line of sight which is something, his effect is not known to wear off over time or be reversible in any way... it's not actually known what his victims experience (Or, it crosses my mind, maybe the Protectorate does know but isn't telling but then I shove that thought into a box and ignore it), but they behave as if they have full continuity and events are completely natural, as far as I can gather.

I decide to look into Master effects in general. In particular, I find myself wondering if killing the Master is a guaranteed way to 'fix' their victims. I have an ugly suspicion it isn't, given nobody has taken a sniper rifle to Nikos Vasil's head, and am unsurprised when the answer is sometimes. My only consolation is that Heartbreaker is similar to known cases of a Master's death freeing their victims: he does not provide specific orders or induce observable physical changes, and the fact that he seems to prefer to keep his 'girls' on hand could be for the obvious reasons, or it could be evidence of a range limitation or a need to refresh the effect with his presence periodically. So... call it 50/50 odds.

I'm already feeling bad for his existing victims. I can't bring myself to not try to kill the man though, given delaying just makes everything worse for everyone.

I spend the remainder of my free time before Dad comes home working out tentative ideas for plans and, after concluding I'm not likely to find anything else useful about Heartbreaker, digging up more information on future targets. (I avoid going off on a picture tangent this time)

Dinner is awkward. I infer Dad was called by the school, but doesn't want to broach the topic himself. I'm brooding, which doesn't help. The one upside is that Dad decided to cook steak tonight, ostensibly to celebrate something going on at work, but really I'm pretty sure it's an attempt to cheer me up.

I do feel better, afterward. A little.

While we're washing dishes, I find myself bringing up Nilbog's death, wondering if Dad heard about it. To my surprise, he hasn't, and his face lights up like Christmas came early this year when I confirm, yes, it was on the news and everything. That makes me feel... not good, but like it was worth doing.

We watch TV for a couple hours after dinner before I "go to bed" AKA lay under the covers as the monster, waiting for Dad to go to sleep.

I'm still feeling restless. I'd originally intended to do more research on Heartbreaker, but the idea of sitting around for a few hours just... doesn't appeal.

I decide instead to do some initial scouting in Canada, around Toronto and some of the other cities he's supposed to be in.

I dress warmer under the blanket than I did for killing Nilbog: a jacket over an old sweater, long pants that haven't been doused in some noxious fluid as yet, mittens I'd forgotten we even had that are uncomfortably tight, and a blue scarf I... haven't worn since mom died. I briefly debate wearing something on my head under the helmet, but ultimately decide it probably won't be necessary. I also skip the backpack this time: I really need to replace the "morning run" idea, and I cannot possibly dress appropriately for Brockton Bay temperatures without freezing in the Canadian winter, so the ruse is pointless in this case anyway. Besides, this is intended to be a scouting run, and Toronto isn't really much farther than Ellisburg was. I have time, since I won't get caught up in a fight and am leaving earlier anyway.

I slip downstairs to boot up the computer long enough to work out a route through to the Toronto region, focusing especially on finding a place no roads go through. I seem to recall reading somewhere that border patrols -Canadian and American alike- are focused on the roads, relying basically on the inclement weather and rough terrain of the wilderness to keep people from crossing the border illegally in areas where there are no roads. I poke around to see if parahumans existing has changed this policy, but what little time I spend scouring the internet turns up nothing in specific... which isn't to say that nothing has happened. Even so, I'm willing to chance it. I'm reasonably sure most parahumans who could cross the border without need of a road would be a bit more visible than the monster -fliers like Glory Girl, for instance- or be nothing a border patrol would be any help against, such as teleporters. So probably they haven't stepped up the security in a way that matters to me, especially since the US/Canada border is a huge stretch of ground to cover. It's just not practical to have the entire thing secured.

It takes longer to wait for the computer to boot up than it does to actually map out a route I can't get lost on once it is online, even with having to find an off-road path across the border that qualifies as not easy to get lost on. Once I'm reasonably confident I have the route memorized -close my eyes, repeat the information, open them, check if I got it right, repeat until I can do it five times in a row- I shut the computer down and head out.

Following the roads is mildly stressful, reminding me of my all-too-recent flight from Ellisburg. I find myself wondering if there's more cars out and about tonight, or if I'm just imagining it. I'm still uneasy about the thing with Dragon. (And the Protectorate, but that goes into the box too and I pretend I never thought it)

Crossing the border turns out to be easy. I'd actually given myself a long way around if the checkpoint near the road turned out to be more serious than I was expecting, but I end up paralleling the road a bit further out than usual for a few minutes, out in the woods, to get past the checkpoint, and then just return to my preferred distance from the road once I'm past it. That's it. I was expecting to at least have to hop a fence or something.

When I hit the Toronto city area, things get more complicated. The place is huge, and doesn't lend itself to roofhopping, not in any way that lets me actually keep a good eye on the ground. I'm blatantly dressed up as a cape, if an amateurish one, which is not conducive to wandering the streets on foot, and that would take forever anyway. Since I didn't bring my backpack, I don't even have any place to hide my helmet, so just taking off the blanket and helmet and pretending I'm nobody of interest isn't a viable option, and could lead to people connecting the monster to Taylor. Or at least connecting 'the girl in the helmet and blanket' to Taylor Hebert, which would still be outing myself as a cape... or humiliate me by having people think I'm a wannabe cape, which would be worse than having people know Taylor is a parahuman.

The worst, most depressing thing, though, is realizing that a big part of my problem is that Toronto is nice.

Oh, I spot what I'm pretty sure are gang toughs at times, and in some of the less trafficked parts of town there's definitely gang tags. There's also at least two other reasonably major supervillains in the area beyond Heartbreaker, the city is close enough they're in Brockton Bay news sometimes, usually speculation that they might move here if they suffer a particularly bad defeat, so it's not some bastion of perfection.

But there's just not the same kind of huge, largely uninhabited/gang-controlled/filled with the homeless sections of town like there is in Brockton Bay. The vast majority of the city is being used for legitimate purposes -or at least for purposes that can pretend to be legitimate- and this makes it hard for me to do anything to narrow my search. To a certain extent, the whole thing just highlights how I didn't have any kind of actual plan -I had vague ideas I'd check the ugly parts of town, the places cops and PRT are less likely to pay attention to- but it's also just the case that, for instance, I see multiple places with attractive, well-dressed women in large numbers. If this were Brockton Bay, I could investigate a handful of places like that, and expect to find Heartbreaker by the end of the week, probably. Here... no, not really. There's just plenty of parties and the like. I'm pretty sure some of the places I'm skimming are sororities, even.

There's also just too many skyscrapers. I'm not capable of combing those efficiently, and it's all too plausible that Heartbreaker is living in a suite in one of the skyscrapers.

I try to tough it out, manually comb the place. It's not like I'm going to go home, build a Heartbreaker-tracking device, and come back tomorrow night. This isn't Protectorate Pals, and I'm not Armsmaster.

Then I'm Taylor for a heart-stopping ten or so seconds, flailing through the air mid-jump, sure I'm going to die.

After I land as the monster, I make my way back to the edge of town -carefully- and then stalk back home to Brockton Bay, done with this.

I don't tell Dad, but I don't go to school today. I stay home and surf the internet instead, in some dim (Yet depressing) hope that I'll find inspiration, or maybe evidence that the Protectorate does know where Heartbreaker is and just doesn't act on it. (Tinfoil conspiracy shut up) An easy answer. Nope.

I double-check where the Slaughterhouse Nine were last heard from. Unfortunately -maybe the wrong word to be thinking- the last time they were placed was two weeks ago and was some town I've never heard of an hour to the east of Los Angeles. They're nowhere near Brockton Bay. Even at their fastest, they've never crossed the country in two weeks, never mind that they theoretically should be able to do so. More likely they're one state over, or still in California, doing horrible things in places nobody cares about except the locals.

Not that I have any idea how I'd kill most of them, but it would be something I could work on, instead of running in circles about how to find Heartbreaker.

I bounce around threads on PHO for a bit, nothing in mind in particular. Eventually I run across a thread that's actually interesting -apparently, a lot of parahumans have weird sensory elements to their powers. Initial conversation is mostly non-parahumans saying, "oh wow that sounds cool," etc while parahumans talk a little bit about what exactly they experience when they use their power, but eventually the conversation shifts more to parahumans talking about weird, unexpected uses for these elements. The thing that particularly sticks with me is Vista chiming in late in the thread: she can't use her power on people -I am distinctly glad to learn she can't actually turn people into pretzels- and she has an awareness at all times of what effect her power is having on the world as well as what it could do. The relevant bit? She has a weird, dim awareness of human presence at all times in an area around her.

She admits she's never gotten any practical use out of it, beyond pranking Clockblocker (Wards prank each other?), but it reminds me of my own power giving me an awareness of people around me. I go back over the thread, reviewing posts I'd previously skimmed where capes are talking about how they discovered these details, and find myself wondering if there's hidden depths to my own sensory weirdness.

I end up spending an hour wandering around outside in my running outfit, intently focused on my 'there's people nearby' sense. By the end of it, I've confirmed anew that, yes, I can tell when the number of people in my radius goes up, and I can tell when that number goes down, and I have some kind of awareness of the overall scale -a couple people feels distinct from two dozen people, though not nearly as strongly as you might expect- but I haven't discovered anything actually new.

I find myself wondering if maybe I can sense parahumans somehow. Maybe parahumans feel different from non-powered people? Or maybe they don't register at all -wait. No, Nilbog pricked my sense, and nothing else did in Ellisburg. Not even Dragon, but that might've been a drone. She's known to use drones. So, not invisible. But maybe different in some way?... it would be fantastic if I could just comb Toronto for parahuman presence.

I head to Arcadia by rooftop, in costume. (Hoodie and pants underneath, no backpack) The only tricky part is timing leaving the house until there's nobody around to see me, but my people-sensing power makes it a little smoother than it would otherwise be. I make sure to be careful, avoiding paths that will involve jumping over heavily trafficked streets, but I also try to just ignore the times I do become Taylor. Well. Not so much ignore as grit my teeth and bull through them. The incident in Toronto scared me, but really that's stupid. I heal instantly from injury, and given how severe what the monster recovered from was, I can probably shrug off similar. Probably. So, I steel myself for the possibility of turning into Taylor mid-jump and try to get used to it happening. I'm not going to land as Taylor when jumping roofs. Even if I do, I just need to break line of sight with whomever is watching me, and I'll become the monster again and be fine.

I turn into Taylor seven times mid-jump on the way to Arcadia, and by the seventh one I no longer flail wildly in a panic. I still have to fight an urge to vomit, but it's less than it was. Once I'm in sight of it, I see a hole in my plan.

Arcadia doesn't have any buildings nearby it. Not close enough to jump to its roof from.

Well. Shit. I'd intended to stealthily crawl around on the rooftop, see if I felt anything weird, anything suggesting parahumans feel different from other humans. Since the Wards go there, that'd be a pretty surefire way of sneaking in a test without having to run down Armsmaster on his motorcycle or something.

I spend a minute debating my course of action, and finally settle for stashing my costume on the roof I'm on -after double-checking that the door to this roof is locked and the lock is not easily rattled open or anything- and then jumping down into the alley behind a dumpster when no one is in a position to have line of sight on the alley. Probably. It takes me a minute to find a sufficiently reflective surface to trigger becoming Taylor, but once I find a reasonably shiny air conditioning unit things go smoothly. Then I jog my way to Arcadia school grounds. After all, I'm just a girl walking if you can see me, and if you can't... well, you can't see me. Perfect!

It's only when I'm halfway across the lawn that I remember Dragon's suit didn't revert me to Taylor.

Too late now. I keep jogging/galloping (Or is it still a jog when you have too many limbs and they all end in blades?) toward the front door, suddenly glad I have my hoodie up, giving my identity a little protection. I'm pleasantly surprised when the front door opens easily to a push. I was half-expecting it to be locked. For that matter, I was half-expecting there to be security guards. I guess rumors about Arcadia are exaggerated a bit.

I have a bit of culture shock when I get inside. Arcadia's halls are cleaner than Winslow's. It takes me a second to realize that Arcadia's halls being cleaner than Winslow's implies that Winslow's halls are dirty. Somehow I'd assumed Winslow was in as good a condition as it could be, just with... less well-paid teachers or something. Fewer teachers? Poorly-trained staff? I dunno. I hadn't realized Winslow was actively filthy. Then I notice that none of the ceiling lights are flickering. Then I realize they're all pure white, where Winslow's are a dull yellow, the kind of color you get out of a lightbulb that needs to be changed.

I spend a minute reeling, assimilating. There's dozens of little details like this. The walls seem strange, and I finally realize it's because they haven't been plastered in gang tags, cleaned of gang tags, re-plastered in gang tags, re-cleaned, ad infinitum. They're just... smooth, like new. The glass is so clean you can almost believe the windows are just open spaces, that's how clear they are. If you told me people eat off this floor, I'd hesitate to call bullshit. There's no knife marks, no cigarette burns, no smell of dru-

Oh. There's somebody staring at me.

Right. Right. I'm here to test my power, not drool all over myself staring at an actually decent school.

I ignore the short girl staring at me like she's never seen a- fuck. I look like a hobo teen in my old, dirty pants and blotchily stained hoody. In Arcadia. Fuck. I didn't think this through.

I ignore the short girl and her weirded-out stare, and stalk through Arcadia's halls.

The girl lets out a strangled yelp when I turn a corner, and I back up, confused. She's wide-eyed, and not looking at anything in particular, seeming focused on something in her head.

Huh. Maybe Arcadia isn't so pristine after all, if a girl that young is doing drugs and nobody has caught on. I briefly consider trying to give her a talk about why she shouldn't do drugs, and then decide she's not going to listen to a random hobo teen. Oh well.

Feeling weirdly relieved, I go back to stalking the halls of Arcadia. The way-too-perfect halls.

I'm ultimately disappointed. If my power does differentiate between parahuman and regular human, I can't figure it out.

I'd wonder if maybe the Wards were busy elsewhere, but I spotted Glory Girl -Victoria, I guess- in a classroom, looking really cranky. Even if the Wards aren't here, there's parahumans here, and I never sensed any kind of difference in my power beyond the already-established more, less, vague sense of overall numbers. I can't feel any variation, which is frustrating. 'Parahuman' would've been most convenient, but even discovering my power can differentiate between gender, or age, or something would've been neat. Not what I wanted, but something.

I did confirm that my power is not blocked by intervening objects, the radius completely unaffected by anything except my position as far as I can tell. It has a static, uniform size. I also discovered it seems to be a sphere, or maybe a cube but I don't think it's a cube, anyway the point is that its reach seems to extend equally in every direction, which is part of why I'm thinking it's a sphere, rather than being anything weird like "50 feet out horizontally but only 10 feet up and down". That's useful to know, that I can tell if people are nearby even if there's walls in the way. Makes me harder to ambush, kind of.

I end up leaving the third time a teacher's gaze flicks my way when passing a classroom. Something about the look on their faces makes me uncomfortable, like the walls are closing in on me. Dunno why.

Nothing of interest happens in the time it takes me to get back to the roof I stashed my costume on, and getting it back on is uninterrupted as well. I'm sort of weirded out at how smoothly this is going. If this were cape fiction, I'd have bumped into a Ward without realizing it, been jumped by a supervillain and/or caught on the way out by Velocity, and been called on a cell phone by my dad at the worst possible moment. Not that I have a cell phone...

... the point is, this is going weirdly smoothly-

crying into his hands

-and I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. 'Trip was completely pointless and useless' is bad, but not that bad.

I circle the edge of the rooftop briefly, keeping an eye out for heroes -or villains, for that matter- but spot nothing and make my way home by rooftop, a little less careful to avoid the more heavily trafficked spots. I really want to desensitize myself to the disorientation of becoming Taylor mid-air.

There's a van for Van Dyke Plumbing a block away from my house, cheerful art advertising their, "15 years of quality service".

This catches my eye, because it wasn't all that long ago Dad was talking about poor mister Van Dyke selling what was left of his business and planning to move to Florida and start over. Not letting someone else take over the plumbing business selling. Taking apart and selling the components selling. The van shouldn't be out there. It should've been repainted by now.

I'm watching this from a nearby rooftop, bothered. I really should just ignore it and head back home, but... I'm not sure why I'm caught on this. Yeah, Mr. Van Dyke left... barely a week ago, if I recall correctly?

Why is this bugging me? They're in a yard, set up for-

Their doors are closed. They're in a yard, presumably to do work -that's not Mr. Van Dyke's yard, he lives in an entirely different neighborhood, and he had an actual office anyway- but their doors are closed. All of them. The house's doors are closed. The lights are off.

I'm not quite sure what conclusion I should be drawing, but I have a sudden conviction that this is the other shoe I was expecting to drop at Arcadia.

2.2

The obvious conclusion to draw is that this... whatever it is... is somehow connected to me. It could be the case that this... stakeout? This stakeout could actually be about someone else in the area, but even if that is the case, that doesn't necessarily mean I should ignore it. Whatever it is, it's suspicious.

I very carefully angle to get a better view on the van, more specifically the front, suddenly feeling dumb for not bringing my backpack. If I had, I could find a reasonably private place in walking distance, change out of my costume, and just walk past as Taylor. Instead I'm having to skulk around as the monster in a residential neighborhood, trying to balance several different kinds of stealth. At least no schools have let out yet. There's not actually that many people here right now, just a few housewives, most of whom aren't interested in a view of the street. I'm pretty sure that will change soon, though. It can't be that far off from three o'clock by now.

There's a single guy in the front seat, looking bored. He's dressed right for a plumber, as far as I can tell, but he still doesn't feel right. Watching him scan around every few seconds, otherwise calm and collected, I'm left with the impression of someone who is used to sitting still, one eye out for trouble, not a plumber waiting to start a job or something. I'm put in mind of Miss Militia, and I can't say why exactly. I also can't see into the back part of the truck. In fact -I scramble to the other side of the street- yes, the windows in the back are dark like one-way glass.

That clinches it.

I consider simply rushing the vehicle and attacking it. I discard the idea. Appealing in its simplicity as it is, I'm not actually well equipped for a straight fight, nightmare Brute or no. If the man in front is a cape of some kind -if there's a cape in the back, or people with guns- that could go very wrong very fast. Besides, I haven't actually confirmed that I can tear open a car bare-limbed, regardless of how convinced I am that I can.

What I need is information. Why are they here?

I streak back to the other side of the street, the side the van is on, glad cars have little reason to pass through here. I get up close to a fence, look through a gap. He's looking my way, still seeming bored. A perception power? But no, he's not looking at me, just in my direction. I wait. After a few seconds he looks around again, and I jump the fence and rush to the next one, hide behind it, look through a gap in the fence.

Now he looks like something startled him, and he's looking my direction again. After a moment he puts a hand to his right ear and says something. Some kind of radio? A pause, hand still to his ear, then he says something brief -one or two syllables, going by the way his mouth moves- and his hand drops back to his side.

I wait, but the minute stretches on without his gaze moving away from me. When I start moving to make my way to this house's backyard, he twitches, and now I know he's watching me, his eyes tracking my motion until I stop, his eyes stopping the moment I do. Odd. I'm not Taylor. I already know glass doesn't block the effect, it's not because there's a window between us. If he can see me, why am I the monster?

I push the thought aside. Later. Right now I need to either do something about these people -the guy is not alone if he's talking via radio- or I need reason to believe they're not a problem. At this point I'm almost certain they are a problem, even if I'm not sure what problem they actually are, but it would be a relief if I was wrong and they're actually a... a PRT van staking out some gang thing in the area or something.

Abruptly, I'm Taylor, and after a spasm I whip around, expecting to spot a mom or a little old lady or maybe a kid back from school.

I see nothing.

Meanwhile, behind me, the van bam!s open and people pour out, PRT troopers going by the hands in the air! and do not use any parahuman abilities! and then suddenly I'm being buried in containment foam.

What.

The entire drive to the PRT HQ -in the "plumbing truck", naturally- there's three troopers watching, two of them with containment foam dispensers pointed directly at my face. I want to say the third one is holding a shock baton, but honestly I don't know. I've not read up on the PRT. I basically just know what everyone knows.

I never thought the PRT would ambush me.

They're silent. I'm silent. I couldn't say why they're being quiet. I don't even know what to say. I feel vaguely indignant, but mostly I'm confused. What is going on? Was I just in the wrong place at the wrong time?

I don't get anything resembling answers until I'm unloaded at the PRT HQ and dumped in a cramped room with Armsmaster, Miss Militia, and four more PRT Troopers. Still covered in containment foam of course. (They actually loaded me onto a pallet and carried that)

Miss Militia is the first to speak. I get the distinct impression she's playing 'bad cop'. I have a sinking feeling about how this is going to go down.

"Parahuman identity, powers, reason for being in the area." I blink, not that they can see that. "Um. I... don't actually have a name picked?"

So sue me. I've been a parahuman for less than two weeks.

Armsmaster cuts in, and the bad feeling gets worse, because he's also 'bad cop', sounding impatient and angry. "How did you pick out the van?" I haven't even answered Miss Militia's other two questions.

Suddenly there's an oppressive silence, and I realize I blurted that out. Fuck. Wait, did I blurt that out too? No reaction. Whew. I dec-"This will all go easier on you if you cooperate fully and honestly." Miss Militia again, and I find myself thinking shouldn't you have opened with 'good cop'? and blurt again, "I was just going home and the van bothered me because I know Mr. Van Dyke sold everything and left!"

This time nobody yells at me, and I take a moment to focus. I know they're trying to keep me off-balance, though I don't get why. I haven't done anything!

... I mean, aside from killing Nilbog.

But they don't know I'm the monster, and he has a kill order on him anyway so it's not illegal -actually, should I have tried to claim the bounty on him? Dammit, with that kind of money I could... hire a private tutor or get transferred to Arcadia or something. Fuck. I should've tried to- well. If this is representative of the kind of reception I would've gotten, maybe it's for the best I didn't stick around and try to claim the bounty. Plus, how would Taylor Hebert spend the monster's money withou-

Claim the initiative. Stop getting distracted.

I take a deep breath, notice everyone in the room tensing (right, unknown parahuman, unknown abilities), and breathe out slowly, calmingly. Nobody else relaxes. Ugh. I try to inject calm and measured into my voice, rather than panicking teenage girl. "I'm faster, stronger, and tougher when people can't see me." I pause for a second, taking in the mood for moment. I'm reasonably happy with how calm I sound. Better than how I feel, anyway. "If people are looking at me I'm noth- er." Right, the people-sensing. "Um, I can tell when people are nearby at all times, too. But aside from that I'm just an ordinary girl if you can see me." I frown a little under my helmet, noticing Armsmaster relax fractionally, followed by Miss Militia spontaneously switching from a shotgun to a pair of pistols she promptly holsters without even looking at her hands. Huh. I'm not sure I've ever seen her change weapons on film. I didn't know it turned into some kind of green... stuff... in between.

After a second Armsmaster's lips move just a little bit, saying nothing I can hear, and I feel the last of the tension in the room drain away.

What was all that? Are they just... taking me at my word? I...

... well. I want to be offended at their naiveté, but... I... can't actually recall the last time someone believed me, no need for proof, no having to shoot down idiocy.

Feels good, in a depressing, "how long have I been denied basic civility?" sort of way.

Miss Militia comments, "Interesting powers."

I nod vaguely, not sure how to respond to that. Armsmaster speaks up again, still less-than-warm, but it's different. Reminds me of listening to Dad talking over the phone to people at work. Business-like. "Do you have a preferred temporary designation?"

I blank for a moment. Um. "... Monster?" It comes out like a question, and I cringe at that. This feels less threatening, less like I need to put up a strong front, but I still don't want to be the Nervous Nellie cape.

Armsmaster taps away on one of his bracers like it's a keyboard for a second, not responding verbally, and I fidget a little, notice myself fidgeting, clamp down on it. After another moment he speaks up again, still blandly... professional, I guess. "Not currently in use, under request, or overly similar to an existing name. Acceptable."

... okay I'm impressed. His suit has wireless internet in there? His bracer(s?) doubles as a touchpad or something? I used to be a fan, I never heard of this.

I jolt a little when Miss Militia speaks up again. Ugh. I need to stop with that. "Why were you after the van?" Warmer than Armsmaster, still not warm. I retract some of my previous concerns that they're secretly naïve morons.

"Honestly, I thought it was a... um. Like the Empire Eighty Eight were after me, or maybe someone else in the area." An eyebrow goes up on Miss Militia. I don't see a reaction from Armsmaster, but then all I can see is his mouth, beard included.

Miss Militia asks "You have a reason to think the Empire would pursue you?" I fidget again, suddenly aware of how... paranoid-sounding my thoughts could be seen as.

I admit, "Not specifically no. I just... I knew something wasn't right, and I-" I stop, trying to think of how to say this without admitting I live in that specific area. Might be a bit late for that, after admitting that I was 'going home' earlier, but I'm not comfortable outright saying it. I start over, sort of. "Well, I'm the only thing in the area I know that's of interest. Basically. I guess a Ward could live there, or something? So I... well."

Miss Militia is actually looking a little sympathetic now, but it's Armsmaster who cuts in with, "You thought a gang knew where you lived and were planning on killing you in your sleep." I'm really glad my helmet hides the blush.

"Not anything that concrete? I just knew it was suspicious. I was actually, um, trying to get closer so I could maybe figure out what was going on when-" What did happen there? "-um, when... whatever happened that left me as T-this. Um. Weak." Fuck, almost used my name in my cape identity. Fuck. I need to change how I think of the difference between the monster and Ta-the girl. I can't slip up like that. "And then the PRT Troopers got me." I finish a bit lamely.

Miss Militia fiddles idly with one of her pistols, looking distracted. Armsmaster settles into a chair, claps his hands together in front of himself, leans forward on the table, looks almost friendly... except he's not smiling. "So. Basic self-defense, then?" I hesitate for a moment, wondering if this has suddenly turned into legalese and I-want-my-lawyer and actually am I supposed to have a lawyer now? Can they just grab me, stuff me into a cell, and interrogate me while I'm still encased in a glob of containment foam?

No, not now, later. "I- yeah, I guess? If that applies here?"

Armsmaster waves a trooper over with one hand, tells me rather brusquely, "Hold still." and then makes a couple of odd motions with the hand he waved them over with. The trooper sprays something at the containment foam on me, and it starts... melting and hissing, draining away and I suddenly notice there's a drain in the floor. Huh.

I hesitantly reach one hand over to pop the other hand's wrist -it was in an awkward position and doesn't feel right- but nobody reacts like I'm a wild animal they need to be ready to shoot. I pop the wrist a bit more confidently, and am relieved when nobody so much as flinches at the little crack. Ahhh. Better.

Miss Militia speaks up now -I'm kind of annoyed they're still doing this routine, even if they're no longer pressuring me with it- asking me, "It sounds like you are currently a rogue. Have you considered joining the Protectorate?" Wait, the Protecto- I'm too young for that!

... aren't I?

I respond carefully, feeling like it's important I pick the right words. "I had been under the impression that was not an option open to me." I pause for a moment, trying to think of how to frame this. How about... "My powers don't lend themselves to the classic Protectorate look, and I'm not sure how useful I'd be on patrols anyway." Really, I thought it would be the Wards and no, I don't need superpowered teenage drama in addition to regular high school drama -imagine what Sophia would do to torment me if she had Vista's powers!- and I just... I need to make the world better, and as a Ward I wouldn't get to do that, I'd be babied until I was eighteen, and that's more than two years of the world getting worse, and... and if I'm entirely honest, much as I respect Armsmaster and Miss Militia and Legend and so on, there are times I feel like the Protectorate isn't so much making the world a better place as it is slowing down the rate at which it gets worse. I think Legend coming out as gay was the last time a member of the Protectorate did anything to improve the state of the world?

Though... having said it, I'm realizing I actually mean it. What would I do on a patrol? If I somehow made it big, what kind of action figure could you even get out of 'girl who turns into a monster'?

... Hasbro toys aside, I mean.

Armsmaster interrupts my thought process. "You don't need to rush to decide. If you decide tomorrow you do want be a part of keeping the peace, you can join then. Remaining a rogue isn't a lifetime commitment." Well. I don't see my stated reasons changing. Even if I wouldn't be dealing with teenage drama, I'm still not really Protectorate material. That's always going to be true. Probably. I haven't noticed anything like Crawler's mutations...

I suddenly realize that, reassuring words aside, they're actually waiting for a response. I suppress a weird urge to apologize. "Uh, thanks for the offer? Thanks, but no thanks? Um, not that I'm intending to be a villain or anything, I just don't think becoming a Protectorate hero would work, like, at all."

Armsmaster makes a so-so motion with one hand and says, "Rogue it is, then. For now, at least."

Then his mouth sets into a grim line.

"Now for the paperwork."

The paperwork takes two hours to get through it all, and trying to parse some of the legalese is more stressful than the interrogation was. It's astounding how hard it can be to answer a yes/no question if it's preceded by enough gibberish like, "the party of the first part concedes to the party of the second part that the party of the first part..." I was vaguely surprised, at the end, to realize they never made me unmask. Everything I had to sign was signed as Monster, no attempt to extract my name, date of birth, location of birth, social security number, or anything else that could be used to identify me as Taylor Hebert. I didn't even have to select Caucasian on a form.

In the end I'm driven out to a location of my choosing ("Within reason," which apparently meant basically anywhere within thirty minute's drive of the PRT HQ) in a van (I'm in the back, where the public can't see me in costume) manned by one plainclothes PRT officer, and dropped off by myself, still in costume.

It occurs to me, belatedly, that I would've liked an... I dunno, autograph or something, from Miss Militia and Armsmaster. Or maybe Taylor Hebert would've and Monster is too professional for that?

I'm not sure I like the handle, but I was assured -repeatedly- that it's only for internal PRT paperwork reasons and that my 'real' name will be used when I announce it if I decide I want a different cape name.

I approach my house cautiously, concerned that it's late enough that Dad is back home, half-hoping that even if it's past the time he would normally be back that today is a late day. Thankfully, there's no car in the driveway -and a quick look around shows nothing like the suspicious PRT van from before- so... apparently he's not home yet.

Whew.

Sneaking back in through my window goes smoothly. I remain the monster all the way through going into our back yard and climbing through the window, so no one saw me. Assuming no cameras anyway, but there shouldn't be anything like that in the area and I can't exactly walk in the front door in costume. After I get my costume off and change into a more comfortable set of clothes, I lurk in my closet.

What I really want to do is crash asleep on my bed, or at least lay down half-asleep and try to work through my thoughts in a vaguely relaxed way. After the adrenaline rush of the last few hours, I just want to relax... intellectually. Physically, the instant I became the monster again I was rested and recovered, with enough nervous energy that I probably couldn't sleep even if I went through the effort of arranging for that to work. A weird downside to being refreshed and recovered anytime I switch: downtime just isn't a thing with me, even if I'd like it. The closest I can come to real relaxation since I first became the monster is holing up in an enclosed dark space, hence curling up in the closet.

I'm not quite sure how to feel about the fact that recreating the locker incident -admittedly minus the disgusting parts- is soothing. Aren't I supposed to be afraid to experience anything like the original trauma after a terrible event like that?

Getting sidetracked.

This whole thing was weird. Suspicious van, suddenly stop being the monster for... no clear reason... getting dragged in and having emotional whiplash from going so fast from, "Talk. Or else," to, "Oh, understandable."

They never did actually tell me why the PRT van was staked out in this neighborhood. I'm a little spooked. I get operational security, but I also really doubt Lung is one of my neighbors when he's not being a supervillain, or whoever. Maybe they didn't inform me because you just don't share information on an ongoing operation. Fair enough.

Maybe they didn't mention it because I'm the target.

If so... why? They shouldn't know I killed Nilbog, and they didn't even ask. They didn't do that whole, "where were you at Y time the night of Z?" to see if I had an alibi, either. They don't seem to suspect me of killing Nilbog, and if it's not that, then... I haven't done anything else. It couldn't even be in reaction to me visiting Arcadia, the van was already there when I got back, they couldn't have tailed me to set up the van in the right place! If it's not any of that, what is it?

I just can't imagine a reason why they'd be after me, and I find it extraordinarily unlikely that they were after someone else and it was an unfortunate coincidence. Which leaves me with... what?

I'm not even completely convinced it's any kind of clue that I didn't see a replacement van in the area on the way back. If they still want to do a stakeout on me for some reason, they'd be more careful, try to make sure I wouldn't notice anything. For that matter, even if they want to do a stakeout on someone else, they might make an effort to hide it from me better, just to avoid a repeat.

I have no explanation for what just happened. Arguably I have less than nothing.

Ugh.

It idly crosses my mind that precognition could explain some of the mystery here, but... I don't think there's any precogs in Brockton Bay, let alone on the Protectorate's payroll.

Besides, that way lies madness. When you laugh at regular causality anything is possible. It's just not useful to posit that precognition might be involved unless you have a specific individual in mind and a specific plan of action. Ideally, one you're pretty sure their precognition won't tip them off to.

I don't actually have a headache from thinking about this. I have more a conviction that I should have a headache from working myself into knots over this than I do an actual headache or anything resembling one. At the same time, I'm still tired, in some sense, of looping through this nonsense.

I unfold myself from the closet, head downstairs, and boot up the computer again. I browse Parahumans Online until Dad gets home. I don't have a specific plan in mind, though I do keep something of an eye out for anything that looks like it might have to do with Heartbreaker.

2.x

Barret Johnson

Being bait sucked.

Not that he'd been told he was bait. What he'd actually been told was that it was his job to handle all aspects of maneuvering the vehicle wherever it might need to go and keeping everyone else informed of anything Miss Militia failed to catch through her scope and that didn't show up on the cameras Armsmaster was very carefully hiding nearby -currently in a civilian disguise with sunglasses (And a fake tan) and loose-yet-comfortable clothing that easily hid the majority of his armor. (No helmet, of course) He was pretending to be the man of the house in a building that was conveniently owned by a PRT employee already. (Johnson didn't know the woman's name. Mary? Milly? Something like that. The rumor mill was that she was perfectly glad to risk her house being trashed in hopes that the it would be trashed so she'd get paid for the damage. She was a secretary? Or maybe she manned the front desk?... Johnson could never remember anybody who wasn't in his squad, a freak, or Director Piggot)

Being bait in a rushed operation sucked worse.

The operation had already been planned to happen, of course, but it was supposed to go down a week later, give or take a few days. (Well. The cameras and directional microphones would've been getting set up even if it weren't being rushed, but it wasn't supposed to be Armsmaster doing it. His time was too valuable to waste on trivialities. Johnson resentfully assumed it would've been his job. Then he found himself wondering what was in the fridge and if he was missing out and decided he resented Armsmaster for getting the job after all) Then one of the mini-freaks had phoned in about suspicious activity at Arcadia and their target had been spotted on camera stalking the halls when they followed up and the bigwigs (ie Piggot) had thrown a shitfit and the whole thing was being rushed and goddammit being bait sucked.

Johnson hated waiting in general, really, but he especially hated waiting as bait for a freak. All he'd been told about the target was that it was, "some kind of Case 53," (So a superfreak) and he shouldn't expect the flashbangs to be effective. Focus on containment foam (Not that Johnson had a tank on him, what with pretending to be a fucking plumber) and try to buy time for Miss Militia to line up her shot. Limit their mobility. Block them with your body if that's all you've got. Maneuver them into a dead-end if you can. Other 'helpful' advice like that.

Johnson knew when the bosses were very carefully not saying, "You're fucked, try not to die."

Bored, scanning the area like a dutiful little soldier (And trying to see if he could identity which skyscraper in the distance Miss Militia was set up on top of with an anti-tank rifle, because that wasn't alarming at all), Johnson saw nothing. He was fine with seeing nothing. Seeing nothing meant the freak wasn't here. Probably. As safe as you could get, really, world being what it was. Not being in clearly imminent danger was the closest thing to safe since the freaks started showing their asshole faces.

's why Johnson had joined the PRT after the Army told him they didn't want him anymore, take a hike. Everybody knew it was the freaks' faults the world sucked so much. Anybody who said different was lying. Really disappointing to learn that he'd be working alongside freaks-

-did something just move?

He squinted hard.

... nothing?

A cat zipped across the street.

Oh. Just a cat. Where was I, again?

Oh, yes. Working alongside freaks. Johnson had been so disappointed to learn that fighting freaks meant fighting with freaks. (Johnson kept a pistol at home, unregistered because it wasn't the government's goddamn business. If he ever became a freak, he was shooting himself in the goddamn head. Fuck that shit) The only good news was he rarely had to talk to or listen to them. Supposedly he outranked them or something, though any idiot knew Armsmaster wasn't going to actually listen if a no-name grunt started talking like they was in charge of the freak, so he didn't know why that was in the rulebooks. Didn't really matter. Piggot did most of the talking to the freaks. Her and whatever sap was manning Console, which Johnson went to great pains to not be assigned to. Ever.

Johnson's head jerked to the side again. He'd definitely seen something, and it wasn't a fucking cat.

A trick he'd learned, useful when he had been in the Service, was to sort of... cross his eyes. Unfocus. He noticed things he didn't notice normally, when he did it. He did that now, and one of the fences caught his eye. A bit of motion, and he realized it wasn't the fence. It was some thing, something huge and blue and tentacle-y and oh jesus fuck this was the freak they were after, wasn't it? God, please let it not be, jesus fuck. Case 53s, they were supposed to be like that metal kid, or the grotesquely ugly kid on the mercenary team. Freaky, but human.

The CGI tinker reconstruction of what this fucking thing looked like had not prepared him for the horrible reality.

Somewhat distantly, he observed himself activating his ear bud and radioing it in, giving directions relative to the truck for double-M to use. Most of his focus was on the freak. Goddamn. It was ugly as sin and just -how had it not drowned itself in horror? Even freaks had shame. Wouldn't wear those stupid costumes if they didn't want to hide their shame from the world.

He kept staring at the horrible freak, sweating a little, waiting for double-M to line up the shot, or for Armsmaster to break out one of his stupid axes and kill the thing, or for Piggot to get on the line and tell them it was a false alarm and they should all go home (Okay, that was pure fantasy. She'd just assign them some other duty, but frankly Console was looking pretty appealing right about now), or hell, for Scion to show up and vaporize the freak. He did that sometimes. Just... flew up, grabbed a freak, and poof! They were dust. Great stuff.

Then the freak disappeared and double-M said, "I have an unknown parahuman in sight. Not the target, I repeat, unknown parahuman, not the target."

What?

Then more alarmingly: "Thinker! They know!" and Piggot got on the line to bark, "Don't let them get away!" and Johnson obligingly hit the button to remotely unlock and open the rear doors and out poured a crew of freak-beaters and then there was a lot of shouting and spraying of containment foam and Johnson was just kind of glad his job was bait and he didn't have to go out and risk facing the horror show freak.

This is where I turn around and it's right behind me, isn't it?

Johnson obligingly turned to look around.

He saw nothing but Armsmaster calmly walking into a civilian car and driving away. Presumably off to get into his freak-clothes at HQ.

Asshole.

Once the (Different?) freak was loaded into the truck, it was of course Johnson's job to drive them to HQ while the freakbeaters handled the job of watching it for any funny moves.

It was boring. After all that fuss and the anti-tank rifle ready to snipe and just... it was boring.

Johnson had been looking forward to seeing their head pop like a water balloon. Wasn't often the PRT broke out appropriate force. If he was the snooty sort, he'd have planned on breaking out the champagne tonight. As was, he'd been planning on opening an extra beer. (So seven cans, rather than six) But no, they'd foamed the freak. Like usual. God. When were they going to put a bullet through?... anybody's head, really. Make all the difference, show them they aren't above the law, aren't above real people.

Johnson stewed the whole drive, bored and annoyed. The freak in the back didn't do anything, just sat there, still like a statue... it didn't help. He didn't like it. Didn't read like defeat.

It read like plotting.

Johnson had been looking forward to the interrogation. Everybody knew what really went on when the PRT interrogated a freak. Beatings, at the least. But no, even though he'd been a part of the operation, he was the only one relieved from duty -but he couldn't go home yet, because of course he couldn't go home yet. There was a debriefing to attend. But not yet, because everybody else in the operation was attending the interrogation.

So fucking unfair.

Instead Johnson poured himself coffee. Last of the coffee in the break room. Considered refilling it. Decided it was too much effort. Somebody else could handle it.

Johnson sipped his coffee, moodily considering how everything was terrible and it was everyone else's faults, the stupid fuck-ups. Moody and irritable... he decided he could use a beer. Just one to reward himself for putting up with such a crappy day, nobody would notice. He was supposed to be heading home after the debriefing anyway, right? It's not like it was actually against regulations to keep beer in the base. Against regulations to drink on duty, yes, but he was relieved from duty. So it was fine. Obviously. Made perfect sense.

He still glanced around before retrieving a can from his hidden stash. Didn't want an unfortunate misunderstanding if someone stumbled upon him at the wrong moment, yeah?

Aaaaah.

Better.

Johnson was just starting to move from mellowed-out drunk to moody drunk when the debriefing was fucking finally started.

Johnson paused briefly after he walked into the meeting room. Piggot was here. That was ominous by itself. Worse, she had that look. The one where she was pretending like she wasn't in a towering fury.

On the plus side, Arms and double-M were also there. Fr- parahumans always got all the attention. Probably Piggot would yell at them and completely ignore the squad. As she should. Probably their fault anyway. Double-M was supposed to shoot the target. (Johnson ignored the niggling part of his brain reminding him that she was only supposed to do that if the target proved hostile. Of course it was hostile! Nothing so awful could possibly be friendly, and that was a fact) So definitely her fault. Definitely.

Piggot skipped the formalities. That was even more ominous. "Did anything in this operation go right?" Yeah, this was the You Stupid Fuckups voice. Johnson slouched a little. Just a little, else she'd notice him slouching and give him hell. Thankfully her eyes didn't move away from the parahumans at all. Good.

Armsmaster -in full costume now- seemed oblivious to Piggot's tone. "We made non-hostile contact with a new parahuman and, in spite of everything, seem to have made a positive first impression." Double-M nodded a little, though she seemed more aware that the question had been rhetorical. Probably. Could never tell with... parahumans.

Piggot was clearly not amused. After a pause in which she seemed to be trying to kill Armsmaster with her mind, she shifted gears. "From the top."

Things moved fast after that, and Johnson had a hard time following it. It wasn't because he was drunk, because obviously he wasn't. One can of beer did not equal drunk. He was tired. That's all. Mostly Piggot asked the parahumans questions and they answered, starting the story from the call from the Ward. (Vista, apparently. Johnson hadn't known that before)

Then Armsmaster was saying something about, "Agent Johnson called in that he saw the target," and suddenly Piggot's attention was on him rather than the parahumans. Johnson sat up slightly straighter, as best as he could without looking like he was and did his best, "Yes ma'am, no ma'am, I understand ma'am."

He slurred, slightly, but he was pretty sure Piggot didn't notice.

Until she started asking if anyone else had actually seen the target.

... they hadn't, not even the cameras ("I was focused on setting up angles on the target house," says Armsmaster) and now everyone's eyes were on Johnson.

"Agent Johnson, have you been drinking on the job?" came out of the icy pits of hell. (ie Piggot's mouth)

"No ma'am," was his swift, completely honest reply.

Armsmaster frowned and made a motion with his hand, and Piggot's expression went sub-arctic. Johnson tried not to frown, himself. He hadn't been drinking before the operation. Or during it. (Just after it, and that didn't count, right?) How dare they act like he was lying? He was just tired. That's why he was slurring. He was only slurring a little anyway.

Piggot made a slow visual sweep of the room and spoke even more slowly, carefully, controlled. "So no one reliable actually saw the target."

Johnson was offended by the implication that he was unreliable. All his friends called him Reliable Barret! (Well, they would, if he had any friends that weren't his three dogs) Nonetheless, he kept quiet. Piggot wasn't paying attention to him. Maybe she'd go back to blaming the freaks again. Their fault. Definitely their fault.

He ignored how double-M's knife turned into a sub-machine gun. Random, total coincidence.

"Armsmaster." Yes! Piggot was ignoring him again! Safe! (Ignore that she's staring right at you, dude. Coincidence. She's not talking to you, so she's not paying attention to you. Duh)

"Yes, Director?" was Armsmaster's schoolboy-perfect reply. Asshole had probably been a teacher's pet, back in the day.

"Which do you think is more likely. That the target is an astonishingly rapid Changer... or that Johnson made a mistake?" Hey!

"Could be both, ma'am." Piggot nodded slightly at that, seeming unbothered by the smartassery. Then Armsmaster continued with, "However, Monster was as completely honest with us as could be expected under the circumstances and, in particular, informed us that her power doesn't activate when someone can see her." Here he paused, and then continued, his words loaded with import. "Such as if Agent Johnson were to have been looking at her." A shorter pause, and Johnson started sweating. Piggot was still staring at him. "If her power were a Changer or Breaker state that was rendered inactive by being seen, I would expect Agent Johnson to have not seen this state at all," was his concluding statement.

Piggot said, "I see." Johnson didn't like how she said it, and he liked even less how Piggot was still staring at him break eye contact or fucking blink come on!

Then Piggot did turn her attention away from him, and the debriefing continued without further attention paid to Johnson.

Johnson did his best to sigh quietly in relief. For a minute there, he'd thought that he was going to be punished. Silly. He'd done nothing wrong, after all.

The ensuing discussion involved Piggot ordering Armsmaster to apologize to the new freak the next time he encountered her ("Because I know you certainly didn't do it while she was here," to which Armsmaster made an acknowledging nod), a tentative conclusion that maybe Monster was the target but more likely she lived in the same area as the target and this was one of those unfortunate coincidences that happen sometimes, and it was decided that monitoring would continue, but it would be restricted to cameras and directional microphones. If Monster was colluding with the target, she would've tipped the target off and having a truck in the area would be too risky. By a similar token, while double-M was to remain especially ready until the target was taken in or taken out, they weren't going to be placing her in a sniper's nest again. Especially since they weren't 100% sure the target actually lived in the area. It was possible the target had stolen into someone's house and used their computer. Unlikely, but possible. (Armsmaster glanced at Johnson as he said this, and Johnson congratulated himself for successfully resisting the urge to flip the bird)

It slowly dawned on Johnson that they really did think he hadn't seen the target. He got mad, and then he got worried. Maybe he hadn't seen it. All he'd seen was glimpses of something between the fence slats, and there were freaks that could alter your senses and it had abruptly disappeared when everyone else had gone out, like... like something out of a supernatural horror movie or something, one of those things where the lead can see the monsters and everybody else thinks they're crazy and sometimes they are and fuck that Johnson wasn't crazy.

... but maybe, just maybe. Maaaaybe he drank a little too much? Just a little. Drinking could lead to hallucinations, couldn't it? And he did have a stressful job, didn't he?

Johnson decided to stop thinking about that. Existential crises (Not that he actually knew the phrase) were not anything he wanted to give himself nightmares with.

The debriefing ending, and Johnson walked away feeling like he'd gotten away with something.

Then his captain took him aside and said, "Johnson, we need to have a talk about your... habits," and Johnson realized with a sinking feeling that he hadn't gotten away at all.

Johnson blamed the freak whose fault this obviously all was.

The fucker.

2.3

After the thing with the PRT/Protectorate, to my surprise I don't see any further sign of monitoring or anything else concerning.

I spend the first night half-expecting a PRT squad to come crashing in through a window, and can't bring myself to actually leave the house. I end up spending pretty much the whole night searching the internet for a shortcut to finding Heartbreaker. I'm depressed, but not surprised, to find nothing so convenient.

I do some thinking about how convenient certain capes' powers would be at shortening this. The problem is that I'd either switch from 'find Heartbreaker' to 'find the villain Proboscis' and also then tack on 'convince the villain Proboscis to help me find Heartbreaker' as an additional difficulty, or they're a Protectorate cape -or a Ward, in a couple of cases- in a far-off city which... well, contacting them probably wouldn't be that hard, but convincing them to help me... I just find myself thinking if it were really that easy, that hero would've already done it. Maybe their powers are blocked by Heartbreaker's power, or maybe the Protectorate just doesn't work that way, or something. I don't know. I kind of don't care. It's a dead end, is the point. I'm certainly not in a position to hire one of the rogues selling tracking services, not at the rates they charge.

So I give up and for the next six nights I manually comb Toronto. It's slow, tedious, it has me half-tempted to give up and chase down some other horrible monster... but most of the others in the world are more mobile, way harder to kill, both, or just too far away for me to realistically reach. Some of them I'm not even sure it's appropriate to kill them. Moord Nag sounds really really horrible, but Africa as a whole is so bad I have to wonder how much of that is 'Moord Nag is a monster' and how much is 'Africa is so bad if you're not a monster you're dead'.

I resign myself to combing the city for the next few months and keeping an eye on PHO for rumors during the day where possible. Not really what I want to do, not really what I itch to do, but whatever. I actually try for a grid search pattern initially, but give it up almost immediately because I can't keep street names straight, can't correctly anticipate how long any given chunk of the city will take to search, and on the second night it crossed my mind I could all too easily search an area, tell myself done, and then Heartbreaker moves into that area while I waste time searching the rest of the city. After I have that thought I just wander at random, with a vague attempt made to not retrace my footsteps too consistently.

I go back to school, and things are quiet the first day, with nothing more than three shoves, two incidents of talking about me 'behind my back', and once Emma loudly implying I was too stupid to answer a question on the blackboard. I knew it wouldn't last, but it let me get through the day. The rest of the week is variations on the usual, spiked by enough surprises I can never quite block it all out, also as usual, but I'm at least relieved the quiet period doesn't continue: they're not building up to something worse. In a way, the dull tedium of searching Toronto at night is a relief. In another way it's just one more layer of torment, but self-inflicted.

On the seventh night I get lucky.

I'm surprised. I'd vaguely assumed Heartbreaker was an achingly beautiful prettyboy, the kind of guy other girls swoon over while I'm thinking I thought you girls were into men? With a name like Heartbreaker and the way he uses his powers... well. It seemed the obvious inference.

He's... kind of ugly, actually. His arms are hairy enough to make a bear envious, his face has this squashed quality that has me legitimately wondering if whoever delivered him as a baby put too much pressure on his head, and he has an odd scar running down the right side of his face. It's not an attractive/cool scar, either, just an ugly line that creates the illusion of having an overly large, unsettlingly shaped cheek, as if his cheek has or is a cancerous growth. He's also obviously out of shape. He's not fat exactly, but he has the kind of flabbiness you see on people who don't exercise enough, like their skin is just a little too large for their body.

If you look past all that, yeah, he's got the foundations of a nice look, with a lantern jaw, pretty eyes, the most amazing hair I've ever seen outside of a movie, and the suggestion he used to be very fit... but in a way it just exaggerates the ugly parts, making them seem hideous in contrast. On a more average man, they wouldn't stand out so sharply. On him, it's like finding diarrhea staining your five-star hotel room's silken bed.

The ugliness is what makes me certain it's him. He's got two attractive, shallow-seeming young women with him, one hanging on him like he's the most important thing in the world (While she's got perfect makeup, a fashionista dress that can't possibly be keeping her warm enough for Canadian winter, and hair only marginally less amazing than his) while the other maintains a running chatter walking just behind him. Even though he looks like the kind of guy that girls who dress like that usually openly laugh at, he swaggers like this is just the way the world works, nothing unusual about it... but he doesn't carry himself like he's moneyed. Frankly, his clothing is... not the worst thing I've ever seen, but it's hillbilly chic, not rich man casual. He could be a rich hillbilly I guess, but the group isn't acting like he's rich. For one thing, they're not even glancing at the storefronts they pass by.

Maybe I'd have passed right over him if I wasn't specifically looking for Heartbreaker. I'm not sure. Here and now, though, the whole thing rings false, easier to explain with parahuman abilities than by imagining the women aren't shallow or assuming the man brings something unseen to the table, like a winning personality. Plus... his gaze keeps lingering overly long on other women, quite blatantly, yet the woman draping herself over him isn't reacting at all. I think the girl behind him rolls her eyes sometimes, but I'm not completely sure. I don't have a good angle.

I want to get close enough to listen to them, to get confirmation that yes, this is Heartbreaker, and I'm not sure how. I'm lucky in the first place that we're in a part of the city where the buildings are short enough I can make out individual faces while stalking around on the roofs, but I'm still too far away to hear people as more than the noise of crowds, and there's no way I'm going down in costume. I'm also not going to stash my costume and go on foot. The cold is horrible when I revert to Taylor mid-jump, and that's with the costume over winter clothing. (I honestly can't believe drape-girl isn't freezing to death) Besides, I'd risk losing them in the process... and risk being unable to find my costume (Such as it is) afterward, to boot. I've only been combing the city for a week, I'm not that familiar with it.

So I stalk them by rooftop, frustrated. After a couple of blocks I realize they're heading toward downtown, which is... well. Shit. I might lose them outright, unable to follow them by rooftop. Too much risk of killing myself if I try to clamber along the windowsills and other ledges, and there are parts of downtown where it's all smooth glass, like they're asking for Shatterbird to ruin their city.

I'm relieved when, at the next corner, the girl behind him gets his attention, they stop and talk for a minute, and then they turn right, toward suburbs and apartment complexes.

Over the course of three long, slow blocks the buildings get shorter, but they also move away from the road, transitioning into commercial zones with parking between the buildings and the sidewalk. Thankfully, traffic is less dense too, both car traffic and foot traffic, and I start catching bits and pieces of the trailing girl's chatter. Nothing useful, though I notice with a chill that she sounds very... teenager-y, with phrases like ohmygawd and like, yeah. I double-check for a cell phone, half-hoping she's his daughter being dragged along, chattering on a cell phone rather than one of his victims, not to mention half-hoping this isn't Heartbreaker at all. I don't see a cell phone.

Fucking Heartbreaker.

Her monologue falters for a moment, and then picks up louder than ever. She has a smile like the proverbial cat that ate the canary, suddenly. She was smiling earlier, yes, but it was different, in some way I can't fully quantify. Odd. I take a risk and leap soundlessly into one of the bigger trees a bit ahead of them. Thankfully, none of them seem to have noticed, possibly-Heartbreaker not looking like he's paying attention to anything, drape-girl paying attention to nothing but him, and chatterbox apparently too absorbed in her one-sided conversation.

"... two, maybe three relationships close enough that they might miss her, and they read long-distance to me, probably parents she talks with on the phone or maybe by email or Skype, I can't find reciprocal people in the city. I don't think she's close enough to any of them that they'll find a sudden change alarming if they even notice it at all, though there was the incident with the stalker a couple years back so you shouldn't assume anything, and her coworkers find her a combination of boring and creepy. She's got self-esteem issues like crazy, convinced she's not that attractive, but guys and some girls disagree fairly frequently, she probably dresses ugly and hasn't even noticed it, she doesn't feel to me like she's in poor health, anyway. She's not a spender, too conservative, probably has some money saved up from her job even though her job doesn't pay well."

If I had a human face, I'd be frowning. What am I hearing here? She's talking like this is someone she knows personally and extensively, like she knows this girl -this woman?- better than they know their self, but... if she did, she'd know whether they dress ugly or not, wouldn't she?

"So daddy, she joining the 'harem' or not?" She says harem with air quotes -as in she literally does the air quotes thing with her fingers- and with a light tone like someone joking. Well. Glad to hear she's not one of his girls.

He grunts, mumbles something I can't really make out, and then says a bit more loudly, "I've told you before, don't talk about it like that outside." They're passing under the tree. I'm pretty sure that's the only reason I heard him at all, he's a lot quieter than the chatterbox. Also: holy shit. His voice is like someone bottled... I dunno, something sexy. And then concentrated it. And then concentrated that. And this what he sounds like when he's annoyed, holy shit, I would buy tapes of him just nattering on about anything, why is this guy not doing porn or even on the radio or something, holy shit. I try to imagine what he'd sound like if he were trying to ooze sex appeal, and my brain blows a fuse.

Suddenly I have an idea of why drape-girl's head is laying on his shoulder, ear almost touching his jaw, awkward pose be damned.

Looking contrite in a very fake looking way -wait, shit, they've gotten to the other side, I can't see their faces anymore, they're going to be out of my hearing soon- the chatterbox apologetically says, "Sorry daddy, I forget sometimes it's supposed to be a secret, the way we live."

He grunts again, which thankfully doesn't provoke that absurd response from me, and then grumbles out something I can't make out but sounds like it might be, "Don't do it again." Gooodddd I am tempted to follow him just to hear him grumble moodily some more.

Oh wait, I'm following him anyway. Right. Okay. Awesome. I have a good excuse! Reason.

That.

I wait until there's a decent gap in the foot traffic (It's not a long wait -not many people are interested in braving the chill past sundown, I've noticed, not on foot anyway) and then return to the rooftops to resume stalking him. If I'm a little less careful about staying out of sight... well, he's probably Heartbreaker. I can't risk losing track of him.

Eventually probably-Heartbreaker goes to a second-story apartment and knocks on the door. I'm watching from a roof on the other side of the street, and the street is a little too loud for me to hear the exact words, but a woman answers the door, rubbing sleep out of her eyes, and then shock and joy explodes across her face and she kisses him and urges him in, acting like he's an old friend she hasn't seen in ages. I want to say she's a little glassy eyed, reminding me somehow of drape-girl, but at this distance it's hard to say.

I also notice, wishing it would produce a cold knot in my stomach, that she essentially ignores drape-girl and chatterbox. The latter? Sure, makes sense. Chatterbox waves goodbye, talking about going home, and wanders off, humming to herself with obnoxious cheer. Her smile takes on a different character when the door closes, though, and I start to wonder if maybe she's not got such a good relationship to dear old dad. But drape-girl comes in with probably-Heartbreaker and draws zero commentary. For that matter, she doesn't react to the other woman being kissed.

Found you.

My first impulse is to leap to the street, break down the door, and charge in to kill him, but I rein it in. I'd rather sneak up on and assassinate the man rather than risking him noticing me and Mastering me. For that matter, being seen by him is a problem, even if he doesn't do anything to me. The monster can kill Heartbreaker. Taylor -the girl, don't make that mistake- the girl can't kill Heartbreaker. Hm. Maybe I should correct that. A knife? A gun? No, getting distracted. What I need to do is find a way into the apartment, ideally a window that's open. It doesn't even need to be wide open, I'm surprisingly thin as the monster: no part other than the head is much thicker around than the girl's arms.

Hey, I actually remembered to not think of it as Taylor.

Wait, getting distracted. Focus.

I jump across the street, wince at how I briefly turn into Ta- the girl at the apex of my flight, and land on the apartment's roof. Carefully, as the roof is sloped and tiled so if I turn back abruptly this could go bad places fast, crawling as low as I can in part to try to avoid being seen and turned into the girl again, I check the windows I'm pretty sure are attached to the apartment I saw Heartbreaker enter. They're both closed and locked. I make my way to the front door, find myself the girl again, try to turn the knob. Locked. Damn. I'd hoped they'd forgotten. Then I'm the monster again. I back up, check under the welcome mat covered in snow. No, there's not an extra key under it. I look around, spy some potted plants. Potted plants in Canadian winter? Who does that? They're obviously dead, anyway. None of them is hiding a key, not under the pot, not under the dirt.

I leap back onto the roof before anybody spots me again. I don't need people calling up the local PRT office -and there is one in Toronto- and derailing this assassination.

I have a sudden brainwave when I notice one of those raised-up little window things you see on roofs sometimes. I didn't pay attention to it earlier, but maybe...

The window opens easily, not locked or otherwise proofed from being opened from the outside. Yes. I slip into the attic, pink insulation material lining it.

I've always wondered why the stuff is pink.

Anyway.

I stalk around, trying to be quiet. This has always been easy as the monster, more so than I'd expect for how large it is, but I don't want to produce any sound. I'm inordinately grateful that my night vision is so good as the monster, as it makes it drastically easier to spot and avoid loose foil, weak-looking planks of wood, or anything else that might produce noise when stepped on. Even so, I tip-toe, never taking more than one limb off the ground at a time so I never have more weight than necessary on my limbs. After a fair amount of searching, I spot a door in the floor, one of those staircase things that's weighted so it goes up and down smoothly, I never understood the mechanics of it. I creep my way toward it, tamping down my excitement. I need to remain quiet. A single mistake could net me a fate worse than death... or at least fail me this operation and get Heartbreaker to put his guard up. This is my best chance.

I very cautiously push down on one end, slowly increasing the pressure until I finally feel it moving. It takes rather more pressure than I'd expected. Nonetheless, it does go. This would be where I'd breathe a sigh of relief as T- the girl. I'd worried this would be another dead end. After all, attic doors don't have to be designed to accessed from inside the attic. Certainly not designed so the monster can open them. After a long, slow, torturous minute, I have the staircase down to its fully unfolded position.

Now I can hear them.

Great.

That's... great.

I take the staircase down to the hallway, taking in everything. Out toward the front, where I can still hear them ugh, there's a living room or something. On one side of this hallway, there's a bathroom, toilet facing the door. The other side looks to be a bedroom, currently dark and unused. The end of the hallway is... I'm guessing a closet? I make my way toward it, slowly, quietly, and slowly open it, glad that it's already open a crack.

Yes, it's a closet.

I slowly push the closet door back into its just-barely-cracked-open position. I sneak, very slowly out toward the main area. I poke my head out, just barely, out around the corner toward the noises, as close to the ground as I can get.

I conclude that there is no way I'm sneaking up on the three of them. Also, ew. Ew ew ew. Really? Why would you- how- that can't possibly be enjoyable! For either of them!

... can it?

No, never mind. Focus. The important part: I'm not sneaking up on them as the monster. That's... unfortunate, though I'll admit the thought of killing Heartbreaker in the middle of... that... leaves me feeling kind of scummy, so I'm not entirely unhappy with having a reason to not do so.

I need a different plan. I don't want to wait until he leaves. For all I know he'll do something like call one of his women to pick him up. For whatever reason he's only got two women with him, neither of whom are armed or anything -I was pretty sure earlier just because drape-girl wasn't dressed to hide a knife or a gun or anything, but I'm completely certain now- and... probably neither of them is a parahuman? I think he doesn't grab parahumans?

Shit, I forget. I might be mixing him up with one of the other targets. Shit.

No, never mind, they haven't noticed me, I just need to... isolate him. Even if they have powers, that's all I need.

... I find myself glancing at the bathroom.

I think I have a plan.

Way the hell too much time later, I've gotten the attic door closed back up, quietly, except it thumped at the end and I'd have winced but none of them reacted so it's fine, and I crept into the bedroom, unlatched the window and slid it open a little just in case, and tilted the bedroom door mostly closed. Thankfully, it didn't creak. Now I'm positioned to peek through the gap as invisibly as possible.

And then I wait.

And wait.

And wonder if I can turn off my sense of hearing as the monster, because uuuuugh, but no, I can't, or at least I can't find the metaphorical off switch. It does get me wondering about my other senses -do I even have taste as the monster? I don't have smell, can I turn that on? Can I turn off my vision?- which provides a few minutes of distraction, but is otherwise not terribly productive. Alas. About the only positive thought I have is at least the monster can hold still well. This would be so much worse if I had to actively fight against fidgeting. I find myself idly thinking how it's sort of interesting, in a fucked-up way, how a man who, going by his looks, probably struggled with getting women to talk to him at all got a power that let him skip the wooing process entirely.

The noises stop. Again. Not the first time they've paused, I'm barely paying attention, trying to hum a rhyme to myself, which is difficult without vocal chords. I snap out of it when I hear Heartbreaker say something in that ridiculous voice of his, followed by footsteps coming my way. When he enters my line of sight yes he's going into the bathroom! Also, he's naked. I'm not surprised exactly, but I was kind of hoping he wouldn't be. I imagine there are teenage girls who wish they got to see him from this view. Wait, distracted, stop it. Only question is...

... yes! He's not sitting down or even bothering to close the door!

Hooray for men being lazy, inconsiderate jerks everywhere!

I slowly push the door open until it's open enough I can walk out smoothly. Then I jolt forward and stab into Heartbreaker's head and chest a dozen times before he can even cry out in pain.

I wait a minute, eyeing the corpse, half-expecting him to laugh it off. Nobody's ever backed Heartbreaker into a corner before. Maybe he's got regeneration or something. When he slides a little I jolt in surprise and stab him another two dozen times... and then realize all that happened was the corpse was settling. I think some blood got under it somewhere and it slipped?

At this point the body looks like an animal savaged it, which is... not exactly wrong, I guess. The monster certainly isn't human.

I did it? I drift for a minute. Killing Nilbog was hard and I nearly died and I keep expecting Heartbreaker to have a surprise, I keep waiting for things to go wrong like they did with Nilbog. It can't be this easy. But I guess it is? Nilbog did have an entire city of creatures at his beck and call, while Heartbreaker was... I guess he really was just a man when you ignore his Master ability.

I feel weird, like I'm elated but in a very dry, analytical way. I feel good, but not heady.

Well.

Mission accomplished.

Now I just have to hope his effect breaks with his death.

(I very carefully do not think about the possibility that I just killed an innocent man rather than Heartbreaker)

2.4

Lingering over Heartbreaker's body, a voice comes up behind me unexpectedly, a silky voice promising something. I turn, suddenly remembering the two women, but the silky voice turns into a shriek and then another scream joins it and-

vast many ancient powerful

Destination. Agreement.

closing in on a continent, the northern part, cold, snow, local structure, target, female

-wha

buh

Somebody is beating my head against the ground repeatedly. Lift, smash, lift, smash. I can't think. My vision is swimming. Everything is dark. I remember, disjointedly, that I have a helmet, that it's why everything is dark. The smashing continues. The person, it's a woman, screaming unendingly I can't even tell when she stops to breathe is she stopping to breathe she must be why is she naked oh, oh right, it's Heartbreaker's girl, the new one, the one that lives here. I like her hair. It's dark and curly and long. I want hair like that.

Wait. I have hair like that. I like it. It's my best feature. Why does someone have my hair?

I'm angry, suddenly, my thoughts all over the place, and I bring my right arm up in a clumsy motion intended to be a punch. It ends up being something more like popping her in the chin with my open palm. I have difficulty believing it hurts her, but she pulls her hands off of my neck -oh, oh right, I was having trouble breathing, I didn't even notice- and one hand goes to where I hit her while the other rears back, forms a fist, and smacks the front of my helmet, which bounces my skull off the ground. It still hurts a little less what she was doing earlier.

I notice I can taste blood. Everything tastes like vomit. I don't feel any vomit. I don't smell any vomit. Everything still tastes like vomit, and blood, and metal and it's like the locker all over again and I shriek and headbutt the woman so hard everything goes black for a few seconds and there's a crack and I'm worried it's my helmet, but I can hear her muffled, distorted crying and some clinical part of my brain declares broke her nose and that's fine, that's good, that means my helmet is safe, my identity is safe, I'm good.

Once I can see again, I punch her in an eye. I notice I'm shaking. I remember, all of a sudden, that she's a victim and I shouldn't be attacking her. It's not her fault. It's Heartbreaker's fault. I should kill him.

Wait.

I already did that.

So it's not his fault.

I rise to my feet and absently kick her in the ribs, stumble into a wall. Then I remember something. It's important. I should be the monster. I double-check: she is covering her face and her eyes are closed.

I should be the monster. Why am I not the monster. Why am I hurting and bleeding and I need to kill Heartbreaker and no wait I already did that and I kick the woman again and she says something in probably French and cries and curls up into a ball and I decide that's that but I'm still not the monster. The world tilts crazily, and that clinical part of my brain from earlier decides to be a smartass and tell the rest of my brain that this is obviously a concussion. I retort and how would you know what a concussion feels like and then it's smug and I have a moment of almost-lucidity that I am arguing with my own brain, that parts of my brain are arguing with other parts and not in a normal way where I'm being indecisive but like they are talking and emoting and I have a concussion and I need to become the monster so I can fix that.

I turn toward the door, intending to leave, become the monster, make everything better, and there is a thing there, it's my locker, it has eyes and teeth and faces, it speaks in Emma's voice with Sophia's angry growl just behind it and even Madison's chirpy smirky faux-innocent attitude somewhere in there and somehow the faceless, voiceless mass of all the students and all the teachers and the principle and the police and everyone else that has never cared is in there and it's bleeding, no it's not bleeding it's menstruating, but it's all dry and old and crusty and molded and there are things and it wants to hug me and I recoil from the thing and I trip over the woman and crack my skull on the floor again and a loopy part of me cheerfully comments now my concussion has a concussion, that'll take it out of commission! and a violent urge to vomit takes over and I vomit into my helmet and everything is the locker, I can't escape, I'm trapped, no one is coming for me and I'm going to die and I need to get out scrabbling against the door it clicks it never clicked it slides it opens I'm free

and then I'm falling and everything is cold and I hit snow with a muffled crunch and I can't feel my left arm no wait it is made of pain everything about it is pain, but I need to escape the locker is here, the locker is after me and I lurch to my feet, ignoring the shouts of alarm around me, and glance, on impulse, up and the locker is in the window above me, watching me, preparing to chase me and I run and I run until

finally

finally I am the monster in an alleyway.

I lurch to the nearest rooftop, orient myself using downtown's spires as my reference point, and then run toward Brockton Bay.

I don't stop running until I'm home.

After I've climbed in through my window, I grab my hand mirror, head into the bathroom, lock the door, start the shower, and stand under the running water for I-don't-know-how-long, trying to tell myself that, whatever I saw, it wasn't real, the locker is at school, I wasn't in school, I was in another city in another country, lockers don't stalk people. I idly examine myself in the mirror, half-distracting myself half just... I'm looking at myself, I need to be to be Taylor, the girl, whatever, and if I'm looking at myself of course I'm going to notice things. Half-that.

The helmet is cracked, the visor has big chunks missing from it, the remaining plastic is razor-sharp and some of it is probably in a position to end up taking a bite out of my face if things flop around, which of course they will with my acrobatic tendencies. I resign myself to the idea that the helmet is a wash, which I'm not happy about because I don't have the money to buy a new one, even if it's also used, and I really don't want my identity on display, so I need to replace it. Maybe I'll replace it with one of my scarves. That works for Miss Militia. Of course, she's approachable, and friendly, and heroic.

Maybe not a scarf.

It takes distressingly long for it to dawn on me that there's almost no blood staining the helmet and blanket. There's some on the forehead of the helmet, and a few spots on the blanket, which I set to work scrubbing as furiously as I can with one hand while the other holds the hand mirror, but I distinctly recall things being a lot worse. Well. Distinctly is... not the word to use. Everything was a blur when it was actually happening. My memory of it isn't going to be something better than a blur.

Didn't I vomit? I can't find any vomit stains. Did I imagine that too?

What actually happened?

Dad knocks on the door and asks me if I'm all right, startling me. I hope he didn't hear the blanket shifting. Or pay any attention to the sound of plastic hitting the floor as the visor loses a couple more pieces. I take off the helmet, carefully, to avoid him hearing my voice being distorted by it, and call out, "Nightmares." Which... is maybe even true, in a way. (It's not real) Silence for a minute, except for running water, and then I can hear him walking off.

I breathe a sigh of relief.

Then I giggle, struck by the thought that I wanted to sigh in relief several times over the night and physically couldn't.

When the giggling doesn't stop after thirty seconds I start panicking, try to stop giggling, giggle harder, panic harder.

Finally I drop the hand mirror, I'm not even sure how intentional it was, I want to think it was but I don't know, and I'd wince when I hear glass cracking and falling out of the mirror but I'm the monster, I'm calm, I'm not giggling, I'm not feeling like I should be giggling and only not giggling because I'm the monster, I'm calm, the monster doesn't have anything to wince with.

I guess I could cringe. I could cringe.

Should I cringe? Is that, like, a thing I should be training myself to do, or- no, no one can see the monster, cringing for their benefit doesn't make sense. I mean, I guess if I'm being filmed...

It crosses my mind that I'm not actually entirely stable, monstrous healing or no. Is the monster concussed, somehow?

Did the monster become concussed when I was shot in Ellisburg?

Wait, no, I healed aft-

"Taylor! Are you all right?!" I suddenly realize Dad is calling me. Has been calling me. He heard the mirror drop hard and crack loudly, came running, he knocked on the door, and I was ruminating on the monster's body language, or really its lack, and- I really should answer him.

I'm fine Dad, nothing important, I'm not cut or anything.

... it takes me longer than I care to admit to notice that I didn't actually say anything. It takes still longer, Dad still asking me if I'm alright, to remember that I'm the monster, and have no vocal chords, and I need to correct that if I want to say anything. I lean toward one of the larger pieces of glass, idly noticing smaller ones going down the drain and wondering if that will be a problem, and the instant I can see my reflection I grab it, ignore how one edge bites into my hand -it will heal, everything heals- and call out, "I just dropped a-" wait shit a what, what did I drop, I wouldn't have a hand mirror in the shower, "-a-" shit there's nothing glass in here wait I know

I drop my glasses to the floor and then step on them. crunch

There's a moment where I'm anticipating pain, trying to figure out why I'm anticipating pain, and then I realize I don't wear boots into the shower normally and I'm still in my costume. I feel stupid. I didn't actually realize my boots would protect me, I forgot I was wearing them, I just got lucky.

"-uh, my glasses and they got broken".

Then I realize I've just destroyed one of my two pairs of glasses.

Why did I do this to myself.

Dad asks me if I'm alright and I assure him I'm fine, I haven't been cut and I'll clean it up myself, I have another pair, and anyway we'll need to replace them soon anyway, the prescription is getting out of date, which is reasonably true. We probably would've waited two or three months to replace them, but they are getting a little blurry.

I resent, just a little, that my miracle healing doesn't fix my eyes.

I scoop up the glass and the rest of the hand mirror, taking care more because I don't want to accidentally become the monster than because I'm concerned about cutting myself on the glass. I'm only half-paying attention to Dad, I can tell he's not really reassured, but he's not willing to press me on the topic and he really does need to get to sleep, since he has work in the morning, so functionally this conversation is over. I'm relieved. Now I won't have to figure out how to hide the costume.

Well. I don't need to sneak it past Dad, anyway.

It's six in the morning by the time I've hidden the ruined helmet in the basement, gotten the blanket through the washer and into the dryer, and put the boots away... and thrown all the glass and glass-related stuff into a trash can. Except for one shard, large-ish and not overly sharp. I keep that, hide it where the monster can pull it out readily enough in my bedroom, as a temporary solution.

So. Now I need a new hand mirror, a new something for covering my head, and I need to be more careful with my glasses. In fact, maybe I should stop taking my glasses out with me in costume? I'm... well, I'm painfully blind without them, but I spend most of my time as the monster. It's not necessarily unacceptably problematic for me to have bad vision as the girl, is it?

... if I'm completely honest with myself, it really is unacceptable. My vision is dangerously bad without glasses. ugh

I unwind in front of the computer, absently surfing PHO for... anything, really. I'm still jittery. If I could sleep, I would, just to get some distance, mentally, emotionally, whatever, from this night. I have a moment where I'm considering looking up if Heartbreaker's fate has been announced or anything, but I the walls closing in feel sick at the thought of reminding myself of what happened.

I decide to read lighter stuff, like parahumans talking about cool/funny uses of their powers, non-combat uses. Somehow this transitions into me watching videos of stuff exploding, stuff not exploding that you'd expect to explode, and testing the seaworthiness of a boat made of duct tape. It sinks, but not as quickly as I expect.

I find myself wondering if the monster can swim. Does it float? It doesn't seem to breathe... I should test that.

I'm taken out of distracting myself by Dad waking up, the day starting up. I decide to start breakfast. Then I realize I don't have my hand mirror, and I don't want Dad walking in on me holding a chunk of broken glass while cooking. I... don't know what he'd think was going on, but I can't imagine it would be good.

When I hear the shower start up, I head off to start breakfast, relieved I have a few minutes.

I end up using a particularly reflective pan, until I hear Dad coming down. I also set his plate down at the kitchen table such that he'll be facing the stove when he sits down. Once Dad makes his way down the stairs, I put the pan away, quietly, and a bit awkwardly given I'm trying to not just drop it by turning into the monster in the process, and then I have to close the cabinet door without slamming it or cutting it. You'd think there'd be more reflective objects in a kitchen.

Breakfast is awkward. Dad asks about the nightmare waking me up. I'm vague, because I'm not talking about the locker. Dad gets the memo, backs off, and makes a face like a kicked puppy.

I hate that face.

At least the pancakes were good.

I go to school, but only by bargaining with myself. I tell myself I will treat myself to ice cream if I make it the whole day. (Never mind that I'm already concerned about my funds) If I don't make it to 12 o'clock, I will punish myself: I will watch Uber and Leet's videos all night, instead of doing something useful, productive, or enjoyable with the time.

It doesn't go the way I want.

I'm twitchy, and Emma picks up on it. Her usual ploys are replaced with deliberately making sudden sounds behind me, or sudden motion at the corner of my vision.

I flinch and whirl toward the sound or jerk my head toward the motion every time. In short order all of my tormentors are following in Emma's footsteps.

It doesn't take long for even the students that normally ignore me to be laughing in response to me twitching, jerking, whirling.

Teachers shush the class when too much of the class erupts into laughter at the same time, but they don't tell people to stop messing with me. They don't even tell me to stop being a disruption. (This has happened. I have fantasized about killing the teachers, and then locked those thoughts away) They just ignore the whole thing.

By 10:40 I'm glancing at the clock constantly, desperately wanting the momentary relief lunch would bring. Naturally, Sophia picks up on the fact that I care about the time, and seems to somehow infer that I specifically care about 12 o'clock, and the pressure ramps up, and keeps ramping up. To my surprise, it's not physical: she doesn't push me, kick me, trip me, or 'accidentally' bump into me. Instead she does things like abruptly call out to a friend from right behind me when I was sure there was no one there. On an abstract, unemotional level, I'm kind of impressed at how skilled she is at this. I'd sort of assumed Sophia was a jerk jock sort of person, getting by more on athletic ability than intelligence, but she is by far the most effective of my tormentors at finding the exact right moment to freak me out, finding my blind spot, knowing exactly where the very edge of my vision is and having something flash suddenly right at that edge, like I just saw light glinting off of a knife, but it's always a metal pen or the rings of a notebook or something else innocent when I twitch to look, and she maintains this constantly, with a very faint smirk, not even looking my way.

At 11:46 I'm glancing at the clock when something goes BANG! right behind me.

I burst into tears and run home without even checking what actually happened.

Halfway home I realize I left my backpack underneath my desk. I dully resign myself to getting it and everything in it back... in ruins.

2.5

The afternoon is me brooding and Dad pretending he didn't get a call from school about me missing the latter portion of my day. I know he got that call, because the answering machine took it before he got home and I didn't delete it.

The night is spent on my self-punishment. Training doesn't work if you aren't consistent, even if the thing you're training is yourself.

To my surprise, watching Uber and Leet is cathartic. Behavior I'd condemned with disgust before makes me feel better, somehow, makes life seem a little less awful. Even kidnapping Miss Militia as 'Princess Daisy' doesn't provoke my ire. (Puzzlement at how they didn't get shot, maybe, but not anger or disgust) I laugh, even if I have no idea who 'Princess Daisy' is.

(A quick search shows that it's an obscure Nintendo character, supposedly somewhat less obscure on Earth Aleph, whom is basically the better-known Princess Peach with a different color scheme, including brown skin)

A thought nags at me as I watch.

Why aren't they in prison?

The thought is initially an absent curiosity, something sitting in the back of my head as I watch Armsmaster ignore the pair making off with bags filled with candy to instead grab one of Leet's inventions. It's not even an urgently threatening device -just an anti-gravity badge Uber lost in the scuffle.

Increasingly I feel like I'm missing something, watching Velocity prioritize getting the mayor to safety over running the pair down, Miss Militia breaking out a bazooka that... launches a net, which Leet proceeds to cut his way out of with an oversized sword. (What is with his hair in this video?) I don't even know what to make of the one where Uber, Leet, and a mob of hires are all in white masks and mostly in red robes, Uber in a white outfit issuing orders from a "tank" mounting a giant lightbulb that seems to hurl lightning... really ineffectual lightning. It stuns people briefly, but it doesn't seem to cause any real harm, just immobilizing them for a few seconds.

I don't get it. Uber and Leet are villains... they're jokes... they're alone in Brockton Bay, aside from occasionally hiring other people to play secondary roles in a skit. They don't have muscle. They're not subtle, their escapes usually leave an obvious trail.

I feel like I do when I have a word on the tip of my tongue, only it's that I can't complete a thought.

I stop at 5 in the morning, only three or four videos behind their latest escapade, and head outside, intending to do... I'm not sure what, exactly.

I promptly have a heart attack as the monster when a cat meows behind me.

School is not happening today. I console myself with the thought that this is Thursday night/Friday morning. I'll have a couple of days to calm down where I won't be missing school.

Things will be better by Monday.

They have to be.

The morning is awkward again. I claim that I didn't get enough sleep, that I might be coming down with something. Dad leans forward, looking at me over his glasses, and agrees, in a mild tone of voice, that I look like crap. He calls the school to let them know I'll be staying home sick for the day.

I assume he's colluding with me until I get a look at myself in the bathroom mirror after he's left and see the dark circles under my eyes.

Becoming the monster for a minute doesn't make them go away. I actually try to lay down and sleep on the couch, relying on the TV's reflective screen to keep me from becoming the monster, but I don't feel tired and I don't fall asleep. In fact, I have trouble holding still, and have to fight against an urge to turn around, knowing I'd become the monster if I face away from the TV.

I give up in frustration after an hour, going by the clock.

So. I look tired, or maybe sick, but I can't sleep. I also don't actually feel tired or sick.

Great.

I get back on the computer and pull up my targets document.

Making the world a better place

By Taylor Hebert

Assignment premise: if you could make ten changes to make the world a better place, what would they be? Explain your reasoning.

2: Kill the Three Blasphemies.

3: Kill the Slaughterhouse Nine. (How?)

4: Kill Heartbreaker. Sniper? How does his power work, exactly? Range?

5: Kill the Sleeper? (Risking provoking him?)

6: Kill Ashbeast? (Too human?)

7: Kill Lung. (Killable?)

8: Kill Kaiser/break E88. (Is there a hideout?)

10:

I notice I haven't removed Heartbreaker. I absentmindedly do so and save the document. Then I stare for ten minutes at the screen, trying to think of research I could be doing or similar. When I catch myself following the way a stray hair curlicues, reflected in the monitor, I decide this isn't going anywhere and close the document. I hop online, and start digging around for... I dunno. Stuff.

Eventually I realize I'm trying to follow up on why aren't Uber and Leet in prison? On impulse, I type exactly that into the search engine. I'm not really surprised to not find an official answer, but I am surprised to find unofficial answers. I'm not the only one asking this question. There's a lot of different ask/answer cases online, most of the answers unhelpful/opinionated stuff like, "The Protectorate doesn't do their jobs," or, "Uber and L33t are too awesome to be caught!" but there's a also a number of answers claiming that they're protected by an invisible code or a gentleman's agreement or... the framing differs, but the idea keeps cropping up that there's the regular laws, and then there's another set of rules when it comes to capes, a set not in any books.

One of these answers points to the Endbringer Truce as an example of 'cape rules'.

I go digging into the Endbringer Truce. I've heard of it, but never paid much attention to it. The gist of what I turn up is: the Endbringer Truce started out as an informal, unspoken policy among parahumans when Endbringers attacked, with Behemoth's first attack provoking local capes to close ranks against him as it became obvious he wasn't something any one of them could take, and afterward local heroes were unwilling to pursue villains that had participated in the defensive action. Conversely, villains who had taken advantage of the chaos to advance their own agendas were met with retribution -there's rumors Lightspoke and Rain of Pain actually teamed up to deal with offenders, but no concrete proof exists, and I get the impression nobody is all that interested in finding such proof. It became official-unofficial PRT policy, and then at Director Costa-Brown's urging it became official-official PRT policy, with details hammered out like what the grace period was, what constituted taking advantage of an Endbringer attack, etc, and eventually a modified version of Costa-Brown's basic proposal actually became international policy, signed by every member of the UN and pretty much every other country that isn't a technicality, a warzone with no stable leadership, or North Korea. The international version is more focused on the behavior of countries than with parahumans, setting a grace period in which it is forbidden to attack or declare war on a country sufficiently devastated by an Endbringer attack, penalties for not suspending an ongoing war directly affected by an Endbringer attack, rules requiring all signing nations to have a standing army ready to move to punish violations of the Truce at all times, but there are rules more specific to capes and dealing with capes.

A good third of the document is caveats, errata, and extra rules that apply specifically to Simurgh attacks and not to attacks by Behemoth, Leviathan, or any hypothetical future Endbringers. It's kind of depressing seeing in writing how scared people are of the Simurgh, a grim reminder of just how much she warps everything by existing. A lot of rules relevant to the Simurgh have also been retracted, revised, or replaced with entirely different rules, thanks to stuff like the failure of the tattoos.

I've always known about the Endbringer Truce, of course, but I'd always heard of it as a cape geek thing. I hadn't realized that it applied to international politics.

The thing that really sticks with me, though, is that it started as an unspoken agreement. That lines up with the recurring claim that Uber and Leet are protected by some kind of invisible honor code among capes.

Hmm.

I look up if they've participated in Endbringer conflicts. They don't film themselves doing so, I'd just sort of assumed...

Yes, they've participated. Three attacks to date, specifically.

Huh. Are they being given leniency because they fight when Endbringers attack?

... is Lung being left alone because he fought at Kyushu?

I find myself wondering if there are other unspoken rules. Customs?

I comb through the tinfoil hat threads. It seems the obvious choice. If there are such rules, and I've never heard of them before... the people most likely to be saying them aloud are going to be the people nobody takes seriously.

It does have the flaw that tinfoil hats can be fucking crazy.

I ignore the threads about parahumans having beauty standards. I'm not even entirely sure what that means, but I'm sure it's something stupid. I discount a dozen other obviously ridiculous ideas... but I keep in mind some of the more questionable ones. Questionable doesn't mean it isn't real. Unlikely to be true, certainly, but not definitively false.

I pay the closest attention to things that... fit, in odd ways. The PRT doesn't unmask villains they capture is one -I find myself objecting, "Yes they do," because seriously, they do, but then I think on it more and find myself thinking of all the villains they've captured whose civilian self remains yet unknown. I mentally mark that down as tentatively true.

Supposedly capes don't attack each other in their homes. My mind goes to New Wave, whom was attacked not long after they switched from being the BBB... but hasn't been attacked since. More importantly, I draw a complete blank on cases where a cape was attacked in what turned out to be their home outside of New Wave. Doing some digging online shows that there are cases beyond New Wave, but... I notice trends, even there. Particularly psychotic villains being the perpetrators (Or, in one case, a particularly psychotic hero, Vaccine) or the perpetrator screaming ugly accusations during the assault -accusations of power-assisted rape, for example.

This leads to me paying closer attention to the threads claiming that those who stray too far from these rules cease to benefit from the protections offered. Attack a cape in their home, out their civilian identity, abuse the Endbringer Truce -you don't get those protections yourself. (This jives with the official Endbringer Truce documentation -violating the Truce means the Truce no longer protects you)

Eventually I notice there's a plethora of locked threads, specifically when one thread is bandying about the idea that the moderators suppress the truth by locking threads, linking to various threads as examples of locked 'truth threads'. My initial impulse is to think that's just standard tinfoil hat crazy talk, same as, "mind control rays from satellites using our fillings for their reception," but I'm disturbed to notice in skimming the locked threads that they include very few of the most obviously ridiculous theories being pushed. It's mostly the more plausible-sounding stuff that's locked. The really ridiculous stuff is allowed to rot naturally.

The thread complaining about threads getting locked to 'suppress the truth' gets locked sometime while I'm looking over the list of locked threads.

I take a break from the tinfoil hat threads for a bit, feeling my paranoia mounting.

I focus on collating the ideas into a coherent whole and comparing it against real life and considering the implications.

For instance: this either suggests the PRT was not there for me when they dogpiled onto me, as everything I'm reading indicates the PRT has marked overlap with cape culture (Which seems intuitively logical, too), or they were breaking a big taboo in coming after me in my own neighborhood.

The latter is an unnerving possibility. It also doesn't fit with the rest of what I'm reading, as Nilbog would most certainly constitute a parahuman who has forfeit all the protections of cape culture. There'd be no reason to come after me for that, except maybe to congratulate me and give me the Kill Order bounty money.

I conclude with some relief that it really was a coincidence.

After I've had a few minutes to clear my head of Feeling Crazy, I dive back in. This could be important. Trying to kill off some of the worst local scum might be a mistake. If there are rules, I need to know them.

Eventually I get derailed. I haven't been following local news in any meaningful capacity, not really, and one of the threads I'm digging through refers to something significant.

Assault and Triumph are dead.

I'm surprised, particularly by Assault's death. He's not exactly easy to kill. The tinfoil hat thread I find this statement in links to another thread, and clicking into it shows that thread is, "honoring the sacrifice of those heroes that fell in the Final Ellisburg Incident."

The list is... not as long as it would be if it were a thread for honoring those that fell in an Endbringer attack, but I'm still upset to see two dozen dead, including Shepherd, Chevalier, and Torrent -capes who were particularly positive presences, going above and beyond the call of duty.

When I originally read the news, I'd been under the impression that nobody died. They didn't even say there'd been low casualties -which this thread makes a point of saying- just that Ellisburg was dealt with, New York state was safe to live in. That kind of thing. All positive. No... no negative.

I go and dig up the relevant news articles, wanting to know -did I just overlook the bad news, or did they leave it out?

The answer is: they left it out. I can't find a news article covering Nilbog's death that refers to any casualties. It's all just praise for Dragon and Panacea and, "All the other Protectorate heroes that helped save the day." The closest I find is the personal blog of a cape spouse whom mentions that their spouse's best friend died in the Ellsburg fight, making what would otherwise be wonderful news something of a downer.

More digging around shows that there are local news reports for the individual deaths, such as Philadelphia newspapers covering Chevalier's death, and they do consistently mention that the given hero died during the fighting with Nilbog, but there's no overarching picture in the news, no easy way for the public to collate exactly how bad Ellisburg actually was. A couple of the heroes that died are actually from the West Coast, I assume they got teleported or something. I'm not familiar with either of them, and their names aren't very informative -what kind of names are Pinion and Alert anyway? Maybe a flight power for the first?...

I return my focus to the thread. It's... not actually a complete casualty listing, not necessarily. They've got six different capes listed as maybe, as they haven't been seen by the public since around the Ellisburg incident but they're not confirmed dead. Sometimes heroes take breaks, for one. For another, sometimes they get captured by villains. There's people in the thread who comment that, though it's not common, the Protectorate has been known to misrepresent deaths -that casualties from Ellisburg may have been attributed to other sources for any number of reasons. They get called tinfoil hats by most, but I'm not so sure. I haven't found a reference to the monster's presence and influence at all, not in any of the press releases or news reports that I've looked at, and that seems... an odd omission. Even if I didn't have this stupid conspiracy theory about Dragon sitting in my head... still an odd omission.

I find myself getting bored of reading through the thread, notice that I'm getting bored, and get upset. Shouldn't I still be upset? I got a bunch of people killed. I mean, I'm pretty sure I prevented worse by doing this -I find it unbelievable that Nilbog would've just quietly died and his creations then all stayed in the city and gone extinct- but I still got a bunch of people killed. I didn't ask them if they were ready to die, I just made it happen. Shouldn't I feel responsible? Because I don't. I'm... more upset at the fact that it didn't play out the way I'd intended, than I am by their actual deaths. That bothers me.

Somewhat uneasily, I find myself wondering if there will be similar consequences for killing Heartbreaker.

I push the thought aside. Crying over spilled milk isn't useful. I should learn from these mistakes and adjust my plans going forward. Maybe target people whose deaths won't leave dangling threads like these two did before I go after other threats that will leave dangling threads. Speaking of, I update my targets document again, then a third time when I remember the Butcher is an ongoing problem in Boston, and probably a much worse person than Lung or Kaiser are, all things considered. Not sure how I'll deal with the Butcher... but that goes for a lot of my list.

Making the world a better place

By Taylor Hebert

Assignment premise: if you could make ten changes to make the world a better place, what would they be? Explain your reasoning.

1: Kill the Butcher. For real. (How?)

2: Kill the Three Blasphemies. (How do I get to Europe? Ride a plane on the outside?)

3: Kill the Slaughterhouse Nine. (How?)

4: Kill the Sleeper? (Risking provoking him?)

5: Kill Ashbeast? (Too human?)

6: Kill Lung. (Killable? Wait until later?) (Protected?)

7: Kill Kaiser/break E88. (Is there a hideout?) (Protected?)

8: Kill Leviathan.

9: Kill Behemoth.

10: Kill the Simurgh.

I don't really think it's all that likely I can assassinate an Endbringer...

... you know, I wonder...

Thirty minutes later I'm at the beach, just ordinary Taylor in a swimsuit (Minus glasses), swimming toward the horizon, trying to not look conspicuous. I suspect my hair makes that harder than it should be, with the way it spreads out around me in the water, but whatever. Once I'm far enough out that I feel reasonably alone, I glance back to see if anybody's paying attention to me (Hair in the way, hair in the way, agh!) and decide no, nobody is watching me specifically, their attention on other things.

Out of habit, I take a deep breath and close my eyes before I dive.

A second later, I'm the monster, touching ground. I'm surprised at how clearly I can see. I can't see very far, I don't think, but it's actually kind of unsettling how much it looks like I'm standing in open air. I glance up, confirm that the top of the water looks weird and distorted like it should, and feel a little calmer. Experimentally, I try walking, out deeper into the ocean. I can feel resistance, it's slower than in the air, but it's nothing like the slow-motion sort of experience you normally get when you put someone underwater. I go faster, wondering if I can get to anything like my land top speed. I still don't really feel like there's all that much resistance. I go screw it and throw caution to the wind, going as fast as possible.

It's only after I've been running for a minute or two that it occurs to me that I have no frame of reference available. I got an idea of how fast I was on land by comparing myself to cars on the highway, and I was easily topping 60 mph in a straight line with no obstacles, going by that. Here, all I've got is how fast the ground underneath me travels, and how quickly fish swim away from me. I don't even know how fast most fish can swim. That sparks a thought, and I pick out a fish and chase it, trying to impale it. It flickers, shimmering, and I miss it three times, but it can't outrun me... though once it swims high enough I can't jump high enough to reach it, either. Which reminds me: swimming. Can the monster do it?

Short version: no.

Long version: hell no.

Still, I feel... comfortable down here, weirdly enough. And... wait. What's that smell? Those smells.

Why do I suddenly have a sense of smell?

I pick one out, the strongest smell, and follow it and... I'm pretty sure it takes me to underneath the fish I was trying to catch/kill earlier. Interesting. I can smell things underwater? Why can't I smell things above the water? Maybe... maybe it's not really smelling things? Just some weird, monster-y sense I'm interpreting as smell because my other senses are in use? Ugh, I don't know. I can track underwater, that's the important part. So maybe I can track down Leviathan somewhere in the ocean.

Wow. I... I didn't really think this would do anything other than test how the monster performs in water.

Speaking of, I should test breathing. I haven't noticed myself breathing as the monster, I don't seem to suffocate, but I'd rather be confident I can hold my breath (Or whatever) for at least an hour or two before I commit myself to going deep underwater, unable to swim to the surface for air. That would be horrifying and a completely stupid way to die. So, I fight down the temptation to just go wandering out into the ocean, looking for Leviathan. Instead, I wander around, staying away from the beach, experimenting with swimming and the general mechanics of wandering around underwater as the monster while I wait for some evidence that I've needed to breathe the whole time and never noticed it.

The sun is painting the sky red by the time I decide that I probably don't need to breathe as the monster. If I'm just holding my breath, doing so for hours is still pretty impressive. I think sperm whales can only hold their breath for three or four hours? I've been down here at least that long, and I'm pretty sure the monster could comfortably sit inside a sperm whale's lung, so there's no way I have a sperm whale's storage capacity for air on regular physics. Parahuman abilities don't exactly have a lot of respect for ordinary physics, but overall I think it's more likely that I don't need to breathe than it is that I need to breathe once every ten hours, or whatever.

I make my way home, hoping Dad didn't get back before me.

He did, but he goes from concerned to pleasantly surprised when he learns that I spent the day at the beach. Apparently I'm looking a lot better than I did this morning, and he's inclined to think I didn't skip school to go to the beach but instead went to the beach to try to work on my health, having legitimately missed school due to being under the weather.

I don't bust this interpretation.

Instead I hang out on the computer trying to gather information. The first thing I do is try to get an idea of how big the Atlantic ocean is, because last I heard Leviathan was somewhere in the Atlantic ocean. I think he was supposed to be in the Mariana Trench?... no, the internet tells me the Mariana Trench is in the western part of the Pacific Ocean, not anywhere in the Atlantic. A quick double-check confirms that, yes, the last official statement on Leviathan's location was somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean. I decide to look up how big the Atlantic Ocean is.

From Maine to Portugal, in a straight line, is more than 3000 miles. That's... Maine to California isn't much more than 2500 miles. It took me all night to go to Ellisburg, kill Nilbog, and come back to Brockton Bay, which is, what, a couple hundred miles? Three hundred? I couldn't cover that in one night if all I did was run from Maine to Portugal in a straight line! I couldn't do that over an entire weekend! Going from the Arctic Circle to Antarctica is something like ten thousand miles. Call that something like 3000 times 10,000 and... ugh. That's... 300,000 square miles? Ignoring that Leviathan isn't stuck at the bottom of the ocean, while I am, barring maybe hitching rides on whales or something?

Damn. Unless my tracking ability has really impressive performance this is... just not realistic.

Ugh.

Fine, whatever, I don't really want to do another... okay, yeah, I really do, I can't lie to myself. I want to deal with the big threats, the world-shaping ones, and my past failure with patrols isn't helping me build enthusiasm for focusing on the small-time problems. Still. Leviathan is... probably beyond my ability to reach right now, which is frustrating because Behemoth is supposedly swimming around in the Earth's core and the Simurgh is in orbit, and while I suspect at this point that the monster could survive in space that doesn't mean I could get there as the monster, let alone avoid being thrown out to die in the void of space or go crashing back to Earth and die in the atmosphere, let alone the worst-case scenario of surviving all that, making it back to Earth safely... while having been sung into a weapon.

I have zero delusions about the possibility of successfully traveling to and survive the pressures at the center of the Earth. If I have any shot at killing Behemoth, I'm just going to have to wait for it to surface. Frankly, even if I can kill an Endbringer, I don't see killing Behemoth happening, with how many people respond to Endbringer attacks. I'd have no chance of getting at Behemoth as the monster at all.

... I guess maybe I should comb Brockton Bay for the small fry, try to interrogate them, find Kaiser or Lung, bust them?

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's what I'll be doing tonight and... well, for the foreseeable future, I guess.

First, I need a replacement for my helmet.

2.y

Cordelia Vasil

It takes Cordelia a bit to realize that people are running and screaming from her.

She'd been trying to follow Nikky's killer, initially, and assumed people were panicking because Nikky's killer was in the area. She'd found footprints (which turned, rather abruptly, into... knifeprints?...) in the snow and followed them as far as she could, and from there she'd followed the screaming. But no, she realized after two blocks of this that she was the cause, not Nikky's killer. She wasn't following a trail at all anymore.

She'd been depressed. Nikky's murderer had gotten away. Then she'd realized she was covered in blood, and she thought something like oh yeah, I did clutch at his body and sob, I guess that makes sense and had headed back to the New Girl's apartment. (She'd never caught their name. Names weren't necessary with Nikky, not most of the time) There, she'd washed up, ignoring the New Girl's pained moans just behind her, and borrowed some clothing -warmer clothing than what she'd been wearing, and more importantly not soaked in blood. She was sure New Girl would understand. (Also, she didn't really care. Cordelia knew she was Nikky's favorite, that someday soon... that... if he were still alive... then someday soon he would've realized and kicked all these girls to the curb. They weren't special like Cordelia was)

Freshened up and ready to face the world, she'd promptly found people were still running in mortal terror from her.

That was puzzling. Then it occurred to her -shouldn't that be upsetting? A mental 'poking' of how she felt about it was... no, it was puzzling, and it was... satisfying? Pleasing? That didn't sound quite right. Cordelia turned to word association.

Fear terror nourish

... nourish? Confused, Cordelia pouted. That was a bizarre association.

Before she could delve further into this exciting vista -Cordelia never knew that having people running in terror from her would be appealing, it was a very interesting insight into her own character she'd never have anticipated- PRT and Protectorate agents turned a corner, startling her. They didn't flee in terror, which seemed natural enough. She found the heroes in particular interesting -the PRT agents were dressed the way they always dressed, but the heroes all had clunky helmets covering their entire head that she knew were not a normal part of their costumes. She'd never been any kind of cape geek -ew, no thanks- but it was hard not to have seen Radiance on the news. He was kind of hunky. Nothing compared to Nikky, of course, but still nice to look at.

Not so much with the garish helmet hiding his glorious chin.

Oh well.

She waved and called out, "Excuse me!" intending to ask if they'd seen a parahuman in all black, motorcycle helmet with childish fangs drawn all along the jawline, anything like that?

They ignored her.

Cordelia huffed, annoyed. You don't ignore Cordelia! Nobody ignores Cordelia!

She pushed back the annoyance. They weren't ignoring her, it was just those big stupid helmets made it hard to hear. They had radio or something in them, didn't they? Maybe they couldn't hear her over their boss talking or something. Totally understandable, not ignoring Cordelia, nothing to get mad over stop being mad Cordelia.

Deep breath.

Calm.

With a bright smile she got closer and almost directly in front of... uuuuh... Freakcake? God, whatever the woman's name was. Planted herself firmly in front of the woman and waved and called out, "Excuse me!" again and they were still totally ignoring her the jerks!

So she slapped Flakecup or whatever her name was right in her stupid helmeted face and ow ow that stung ow.

It took her a moment (Too busy clutching at her poor hand and ohmygod she'd chipped a nail god fucking fuck!) to notice that the entire contingent of jerks had fallen into a huddle facing outward, scanning everything. She could just barely hear their voices through their helmets, juuuuust enough to tell they were freaked out a bit. Felt good, actually. Felt powerful.

Hmmmm.

She circled around a bit, trying to decide how to approach this. Someone turned a corner, spotted her, then went screaming the other way. Interestingly, the goon squad reacted to that, jerking and tightening their huddle. Cordelia took a deep breath, and gave a great big scream.

No response from the squad.

A few people came along around corners or opened their window to look out onto the street, upset or confused, but they all freaked and fled or hid once they could see Cordelia.

The PRT squad, again, reacted to that where they hadn't reacted to Cordelia's own scream.

HMMMM.

She grabbed a discarded bottle of alcohol, and waved it around. No response. She tossed it at a car, it broke on the car, they reacted to that. One of them sprayed containment foam at the car! It was just blind luck that Cordelia hadn't been in the line of fire, honestly, she hadn't actually thought about the possibility they'd shoot at the bottle. Need to be more careful.

She decided to back off and watch them. Did the PRT carry real guns? She couldn't remember, and didn't know how to check if the rifles they were carrying were pew-pew-you-die guns or, like... rubber bullet guns? Tinker guns? Oh whatever. Better to not find out by getting shot. Then she decided to back further out of sight once another late-night walker went screaming away -where were the people in cars, anyway, shouldn't there be cars?- because every time that happened the squad had a minor freakout but didn't do anything and she really wanted to see if they'd start moving and maybe find out what they were up to. Maybe they were after Nikky's murderer! So she holed up in a little corner, rubbing her arms for warmth because okay her borrowed clothes were warmer but they weren't really all that warm.

After a few minutes of watching the squad -she eventually noticed they were using hand signals- a helicopter flew overhead, shining a spotlight down around the squad. Cordelia squinted, trying to see if she could figure out what kind of helicopter it was -PRT? Police? News?- but the spotlight was killing her night vision and it was dark and ugh. She stepped out to try to get a different angle, the spotlight jerked her way, and then there was a strangled scream and a man came falling out of the sky and hit the ground with a heavy thud. He didn't move. Dressed in black, looks like body armor or something? So police or PRT. Probably.

The helicopter flew away, and Cordelia got the distinct impression they were totally running. Neat.

The squad, meanwhile, had tightened their huddle and sprayed a line of containment foam all around themselves, making a barrier Cordelia couldn't walk over. Or jump over. She could still throw stuff at them, but whatever. Bored now.

... oh right. Darn it. She'd wanted to follow them in hopes they were after Nikky's killer. She pouted. Hate to admit it, but I totally botched this. Now they were just going to huddle there for... way too long, probably.

She decided to head back to New Girl's apartment. Maybe she'd notice a clue she hadn't last time -she had gotten derailed by thinking the screaming was in response to Nikky's killer. Maybe she could follow the trail properly this time.

After a bit of a hike, she was in the right area. The ambulance and two police cars were new, though. Distressingly, they'd driven right over the trail left by Nikky's killer, totally obliterating the footprints in the snow. The inconsiderate jerks. She hurried over to see if she could find the trail anyway, and after a bit of fretting she found what she was reasonably confident were the killer's footprints. But the footprints again vanished in favor of what seriously and for true looked like someone had been walking on swords or... something. Really really weird. They were a cape though. Maybe?... um... well, maybe it was still them somehow. Because cape?

They vanished after not too long, too. That seemed... even stranger. If they could... teleport? Fly? Phase through walls?... well anyway, she'd have expected them to do it earlier. Weird. A glance around showed... marks on the alley wall. Hmmm. Her gaze trailing up along the wall, taking it all in, there was a distinct trail up the wall, meandering a bit before it hit the roof. Well. That explained where they'd gone, but Cordelia wasn't sure how she'd follow them. Or. Wait. Aren't I a parahuman now?

That would totally explain the running and the screaming and... well. She wasn't sure why the PRT squad couldn't see her when everyone else apparently could (And was terrified for some reason, what was up with that? She'd seen herself in the mirror after she cleaned up and she looked mighty fine if she did say so and she did say so) but okay whatever, Cordelia was a cape now. Or a parahuman, really, she couldn't really see herself wearing tights or any of the other disasters capes seemed to think looked good on them. Ew. So: parahuman. Not cape.

But hey, maybe she had a power to... climb walls?

Ow ow ow ow.

No, not to climb walls. She'd complain her outfit was ruined by falling into the dirty snow, but eh, she'd pulled it from New Girl's wardrobe anyway. Not Cordelia's proble- oh goddammit she'd chipped another fucking nail.

No, the first one had not regenerated, either. Because that would be too convenient. Ugh.

Cordelia tried sniffing the air. Maybe she had super-senses!

Oh god that was a mistake did some hobo vomit back here why does it smell so bad jesus.

... she was pretty sure she didn't have enhanced smell. Or sight, now that she thought about it. She hadn't had any interesting experiences trying to squint at the helicopter earlier or anything of the sort. Hearing? Didn't seem that way, but she wasn't sure how she'd test that anyway. Was she maybe tougher?... the nails chipping wasn't a positive sign, but she decided to claw at one arm anyway.

It bled.

Dammit.

Oh wait, maybe she had, like, super-strength that was overcoming her own super-durability!

Ow owowowwoowow

Punching the wall=bad plan. At least she hadn't chipped another nail.

So no, no super-strength, no super-toughness.

Could she fly?

Cordelia's face screwed up in a look of intense concentration, successfully blocking out the sound of another person fleeing in terror (Somewhat less successful in blocking out the sound of them dropping their bags in the process) and... felt... something? Like, a warmth in her chest, near her heart. Seemed new. Never felt anything like that when doing yoga. Didn't hurt, either, so probably not heartburn. Hmm. What was it?

She tried imagining it, like... getting hotter.

It got hotter, feeling like intense warmth going out all the way to her extremities, so hot it felt like it should burn, but somehow not burning her.

Ooooh.

How about cooler?

It got cooler, back down to how hot it started, then cooler than that as she kept up the... whatever she was doing. She stopped when it felt like a matchstick. She didn't want to put it out. Maybe she'd never be able to start it back up!

Okay, but what is it?

She was pretty sure it wasn't a literal heat, because her breath had been the same fog cloud in the air either way and she hadn't, like, melted snow where she stepped or anything even though she'd felt so hot, even though it had felt like even her fingertips were hot. So. Symbolic? Symbolic of... what? She hadn't started floating, so it wasn't some weird flight power. She hadn't felt her thoughts feel any different at any point her -or. Had she? She'd done that word association thing earlier, gotten... what was it again?

fear terror nourish

Right, that. Hmm. And people ran screaming from her... and she liked it...

Hm.

Cordelia walked out of the alleyway and headed toward New Girl's apartment, 'flame' still damped down to a matchstick. The EMTs were loading New Girl into the ambulance. Police seemed to still be inside. One of the EMTs glanced at Cordelia, frowned for whatever reason, continued with his work. Rude.

... waaaait a second.

He didn't panic!

In fact, Cordelia realized she hadn't had anyone react to her particularly since she'd damped down the 'flame'. Neat! More than neat, really -now that she thought about it, she wasn't sure how she'd have had a normal life if everyone ran screaming in terror the instant they saw her. Lucky to have found out how to control it before she'd realized how problematic it would be. So... ramping it up... made people more scared of her? Was that it?

She decided to test it, sauntering her way over toward the EMTs, who had just closed the door. With some mental effort -a bit less than earlier, maybe practice would one day bring it down to a casual action?- she upshifted the warmth to what it had been earlier. Campfire, she decided to call it. She called out, "Excuse me!" with nothing in particular in mind beyond catching their attention. The one who'd ignored her earlier ignored her again -Rude!- but the one who'd glanced at her glanced again, double-taked, and she could juuust barely hear him mumble, "No. Impossible."

Hm. Not running screaming. Weird. She pushed the heat up until she felt it in the tips of her fingers and watched the man jolt, visibly panic, and turn to run. He retained some sense, though, throwing open the ambulance's door and scrambling in and yelling at his partner -who had still not looked at her!- to, "Just drive!" She didn't hear the partner's response, but the ambulance pulled away. She thought, but wasn't entirely sure, that the man who had freaked out had been watching her in the side mirror.

So there was some nuance here she wasn't getting. Did the warmth have more settings than degree?

... a bit of experimentation turned up nothing. Trying to imagine it as, say, a block of ice of varying size did nothing, not even making her feel cooler. Trying to imagine it heating up a part of her body also did nothing. More or less, bigger or smaller. Nothing else she could find to do with it.

She pouted, and made her way in to see if the cops had turned up anything. That was what cops did, right? Track down criminals? Surely they had a lead on Nikky's killer.

Entering the apartment she could already hear snippets. They weren't promising -things like, "Looks like an animal attack to me," and, "Who the hell was this guy? I'm not sure we can get dental records off this skull." It sounded like... four different voices? She decided to wait just inside the doorway-

-a cop turned a corner, sipping (coffee? Hot chocolate?) saw her, fumbled for her gun while falling on her butt and splattering the styrofoam cup's contents all over herself. Drat. Cordelia decided to ramp up the heat -the cop had yet to make any progress on pulling the gun, she felt she had time- and see what happened. Take it as far as she could go.

It turned out 'as far as it could go' was 'causing the cop to curl into the fetal position, body wracked with silent sobs' while Cordelia felt radiant, like she had to be glowing. (She wasn't, but it felt like she should be) Had the woman failed to run because she was a cop? Something about the training, or the psychology? No, that didn't seem quite right. The helicopter had been fleeing, Cordelia was almost certain of that, and she was fairly confident it had been a cop copter or a PRT copter.

Another cop called out, "Hoskins, what'd I tell you about-" turned the corner, had his eyes roll into the back of his head, and hit the ground in a dead faint.

Coooool.

"Jesus Christ!" and, "Nom de Dieu!" came from the bathroom -he'd come from it, apparently two people in there had seen him faint. Then she heard a radio click on, and she decided she didn't like the sound of that. She'd thought they'd come to her, it'd be fun. Instead, for the second time tonight she found herself standing in the door to the bathroom while someone -well, two someones this time- scrambled up against the wall. They weren't talking to the radio. The radio was demanding things like, "What's your situation? Answer me!" but they were too busy sobbing against the wall, clutching at each other and wailing for forgiveness in two languages. It sounded like... the one in English seemed to be begging for forgiveness from his dead son, while the French-wailing cop was apologizing for shooting an innocent gangster (Was that a thing? Weren't gangsters not innocents, by default?) and pleading for forgiveness.

Now that was interesting. Cordelia had been starting to think it was basically just a... generic? Sure, generic. Generic terror, or maybe that everyone was seeing her as a scary monster or something. These two cops seemed to be thinking she was a vengeful ghost here to punish them -and they each thought she was a different ghost, unless the English-sobbing cop's dead son happened to be the 'innocent' gangster the other cop had shot. Seemed a bit unlikely, though something to keep in mind with further testing.

Cordelia made her way back to the female cop, and yeah, they were still curled into a ball. So was her power operating on anyone in an area? No, wait, that was obviously wrong -the PRT squad hadn't even known she was there. (What was with that?) In fact... people had consistently only panicked when they saw her. The two EMTs, for instance: the one who saw her, he freaked, the one who didn't, didn't. So... people saw her, but they didn't see her, not when her 'flame' was up, they saw... ghosts they felt guilty about, maybe? Seemed a bit unlikely -not everyone had a death on their conscience- but it seemed a good enough working theory to start with. Some kind of personalized horror, anyway.

Her thoughts were interrupted again by a spotlight hitting her full in the face while some asshole on a megaphone was calling out, "This is the PRT! Parahuman, you are a danger to others and possibly yourself. Please, turn yourself in." Oh heck no. She'd promised Nikky she'd never ever ever ever let the PRT get their grubby mitts on her. Not that she kept her promises usually, but Nikky was special, and really, it had been his last request. (Well, his last request had been sexy funtimes, but really that was just quibbling over semantics) She owed it to him to keep to that promise.

So she tried pushing the heat past 'radiant'.

Mmmm. No-go.

"Parahuman, this is your last chance. If you do not turn yourself in, we will use whatever force is necessary to bring you in."

Annoyed, Cordelia stalked her way to the open door and called out, "Go fuck yourselves!" out into the glare of the spotlight.

Weirdly, there was no reaction. Again.

What is with that seriously?

She backed up, trying to think of a plan. All she had was some kind of fear-inducing powe- actually.

She leaned down toward the woman cop (Horkit or something?) and said, "Walk yourself out the front door or else," in her best menacing tone. (She admitted it wasn't very good, but she figured her power would make anything she said terrifying)

Lady cop curled into a tighter ball. Cordelia pouted.

Darn it. She'd hoped she could leverage the fear to, like, control people. Would make things so much simpler. She could've even continued Nikky's legacy! In honor of him of course, not at all because she liked the idea of dozens of men subject to her every whim. Oh no, not at all.

So okay, the option of sending the cop out so they think she is the parahuman they're looking for was out, and there was no way Cordelia was going to (wo)manhandle the cop out there. Lady was way too muscled for that to be a practical option. PRT probably wouldn't buy it anyway, not even well enough to give her a few extra minutes.

"You've forced our hand, parahuman," came from the loudspeaker jackass and there was the sound of a whole lotta feet tromping on concrete and through snow and up the stairs and Cordelia decided to get behind the couch and she could hear them spraying foam everywhere the instant they got through the door. Didn't get her yet, though some of it expanded uncomfortably close to her spot. She popped her head up to look over the couch and ooooh crap one of them is looking directly at me.

But then their helmet shifted away and nobody else reacted.

Cordelia blinked. All right. So... she scared most folks, but she was invisible to the PRT -oh, and the Protectorate heroes. Odd.

... was it something to do with the helmets, maybe? Cordelia chewed on her lip thoughtfully, noticing that, again, she could just barely hear the troopers talking within their helmets. Good soundproofing apparently. Really good, because honestly she was only hearing them when she was pretty sure they were being loud. Not yelling, exactly, but definitely loud. She inferred she wasn't hearing them at all when they were speaking at a more conversational level.

A trooper sprayed something new at some of the containment foam, and the foam melted away, giving them a path toward the rest of the apartment. They moved with caution, leaving a pair of troopers behind while the rest advanced slowly. Cordelia watched the fluid that was melting the containment foam inch its way toward her spot. In a minute, she'd be able to... hop the containment foam. Probably. She didn't like how fast the fluid was fading. The melty containment foam looked a lot like soapy water, really. She found herself wondering if it would be a bitch for New Girl to get out of the carpeting, and whether the PRT would reimburse New Girl for the damage if so. She also found herself wondering if the lady cop was going to survive being buried in containment foam. Didn't seem like the kind of thing you could breathe in, but the troopers were being pretty cavalier with the stuff. They were supposed to protect people, right?

Then the fluid had all faded away, disappointing Cordelia by leaving a rather larger patch of containment foam between her and freedom than she'd have liked. She eyeballed the stretch she'd have to jump with much dubiousness. She didn't want to just sit here forever... or, well, for a few hours, really. She might still be able to track down Nikky's killer if she hurried! In fact, maybe she could use this fear power to interrogate someone? The cop lady hadn't taken instructions, but that didn't mean she couldn't ask questions and get answers. Surely someone else had seen Nikky's murderer, at least long enough to give her a general direction to look.

After some hesitation, she decided to take the risk and, with a tiny bit of a running start, hopped the containment foam.

When she thumped on the other side, the two goons standing guard both glanced her way. She froze, heart pounding. She didn't seem to have a power to defend herself from people who weren't scared of her. Had she broken the invisibility somehow?

But then they turned away, not paying attention to her.

She walked slowly toward the front door, half-expecting one of them to shout, "Ha ha you fell for it!" and foam her, or something similarly mean. Nope, no response. She was making an effort to not make noise as she walked, but she wasn't really succeed- oh right, the helmets were soundproofed. Probably they really couldn't hear her regular footsteps. Lucky.

Out she went, smooooothly. There weren't even any civilians to go running screaming. Squinting through the multiple spotlights, Cordelia thought she saw the start of a cordon. Wow, they were taking Nikky's death really seriously! Maybe she wouldn't have to hunt down the bastard who killed him and make them suffer before they died. Though she wasn't sure the PRT would properly punish them, so maybe she shouldn't trust them to handle it?...

Hmmm. Maybe she should get help. One of Nikky's kids. Daddy's worth avenging just because he's your dad, right? She'd never really paid a lot of attention to their powers before, but she was sure there was at least one who had some kind of tracking ability.

She carefully slipped her way past the developing cordon, got some distance, and once she was reasonably confident she was out of sight of the PRT she tamped the warmth back down to 'matchstick'. She wasn't sure having the warmth high was why she seemed to be invisible to the PRT goobers, but better to be safe and wrong than risky and wrong. Ya know? But now she needed to not be freaking out everyone else.

From there she made her way back to... what had been Nikky's latest place. But now he was dead.

The sun was rising by the time she'd managed to find the place -she'd never concerned herself overly much with memorizing directions to their current place, it wasn't really necessary and they almost never stayed more than two weeks in a place anyway- so it had taken her a while.

On her way over she'd noticed she wasn't tired. She hadn't noticed earlier, with all the reasons to have her adrenaline pumping and her focus away from her own condition and all, but it was really really obvious once she'd been wandering around after dark for hours and still wasn't tired at all. Also? At one point one of Tube Lord's goobers had tried to mug her -she'd thought it was a regular mugging until she'd seen the little red LED lights blinking under his hair- and she'd ramped up the heat all the way until the man was left sobbing on the ground (Sounded like he was imagining her as an angry Tube Lord, which, ew. But informative!) and then ramped back down and realized she felt physically better after she'd reduced the goober to a sobbing wreck.

So apparently her weird word association of fear=terror=nourish was because she totally ate people's fear or something.

Neat.

But now she was knocking on the door to Nikky's latest place (A house in the suburbs, owned by his second-latest toy) and oh god it was that bitch Connie why. Why couldn't it have been someone who didn't hate Cordelia for no reason who answered the door.

Connie opened her mouth to say something cutting and cruel because, come on, it was Connie, and Cordelia decided she didn't have to put up with that anymore, not with her power and with Nikky being dead and all and she just ramped the heat up and watched Connie pale, stumble backwards, and then avert her eyes and clutch at her cross necklace and start muttering prayers to The Lord to protect her. Huh. And here Cordelia had always thought Connie just liked the necklace because it was a pretty shade of silver and went well with basically all her outfits.

Cordelia advanced toward Connie, taking glee in how the bitch stumbled backward some more until she was up against a wall, eyes still averted (Not closed, interestingly) and seriously considered kicking her, see if she could get screams out of her and-

-aaaaand the rugrats started screaming. And the other girls. A lot of them began running.

Whoops.

Cordelia brought the heat back down, buuuut it didn't really help. Everyone who'd already seen her and turned to flee kept fleeing. Connie jerked and asked, "Cordelia, is that you?" but she was kind of the exception. Other people came in to investigate, some of them shouted to ask what was going on, and anyone who responded gave them some story about some terrible thing having come for them (Lizzie said it was Nikos and he was angry, Tam said it was Jack Slash here to play, one of the rugrats was crying about the Simurgh...) so most of them were also panicking and running away and Cordelia's attempts to shout and tell people nothing is wrong, everything is fine, CALM THE FUCK DOWN! didn't really work. (Maybe in part because she was lying: Nikky was dead, ergo things were not fine. She knew one of the rugrats was definitely some kind of truthseer or something like that, couldn't remember which one. Cordelia wasn't an experienced liar anyway. Maybe they'd all picked up on it)

In less than ten minutes Cordelia was left almost alone in the house. Connie was staring at her, muttering about Satan and souls and other stuff Cordelia would never have pegged her as believing in. At least Bigfoot wasn't in the muttering. Yet. There were also a half dozen of the smallest rugrats, abandoned and too small to do more than cry and/or scream while failing, and three adult women who'd fainted or... something. Hadn't, uh, Ga-something had a weak heart? Miiiight've died of a heart attack. Whoops.

Unless Connie had powers, this wasn't helpful.

Speaking of: "Connie, do you have powers?"

Connie gave Cordelia a look. The look that said you were so stupid she didn't want to talk to you for fear she might catch your stupidity. Bitch.

Cordelia pushed the flame up a bit and loomed over Connie, ceasing to heat up right when Connie's stare turned rigid and horrified and she muttered something about the devil and possession.

"One more time Connie. Do you have powers? Yes or no."

"N-n-no." A pause. Then Connie blurted out, "It didn't count I didn't mean to you can't have my soul!" and then slapped her hands over her mouth and just stared in horror.

So Connie was useless then. And also had done something at some point that made her think Satan could totally have her soul but wanted to pretend it didn't count. That was kind of interesting, though not nearly as interesting as Cordelia finally finding a way to use her power other than 'hide from the PRT' and 'terrify everybody else into incoherent panic'. Maybe if she'd modulated her power more carefully she could've made the policewoman go outside earlier?

Soooo. Since Connie was useless to her for finding Nikky's murderer... and she still needed to explore the details of her power...

She only realized she was grinning when Connie moaned in horror.

She determined a number of interesting things with Connie's help.

She confirmed -especially when one of the other women woke up and apparently saw Cordelia as her abusive ex-boyfriend- that the horror other people saw was personalized, and could change based on how high she pushed the 'flame'. When she kept the flame low to mid-range, Connie saw her first as Cordelia, than as Cordelia possessed by the devil. Pushing it higher caused Connie to interpret her as a substantially modified Cordelia -Connie had been staring rather blatantly at empty space in front of Cordelia's forehead at one point, and questioning her had revealed she saw enormous curling goat horns growing out of Cordelia's head- and pushing it as far as it went led Connie to think that Satan was standing there in the room, though Connie was vague as to whether she thought Satan had replaced Cordelia or if Cordelia had just vanished as a coincidental thing or what. The other woman replaced seeing the abusive ex-boyfriend with... Cordelia wasn't sure exactly what the woman saw at higher heat, but it didn't sound like anything human. Parahuman, maybe, but not a regular human.

She also confirmed that, even though sight seemed to be the primary trigger for her power, it was considerably more complete a sensory experience than that. Connie smelled 'brimstone', felt fur, and claimed, when questioned, that 'Satan's' voice had an unearthly echo to it. The other woman similarly alluded to smelling cigarette smoke when she perceived Cordelia as her ex-boyfriend.

Interestingly, the two both knew the other was present and they would talk freely to each other, but their differing perceptions were sort of... glossed over. Connie talking about Satan right over there didn't leave the other woman baffled. Cordelia wasn't entirely sure what was going on inside their respective heads. Just assuming the other woman was crazy and/or stupid? Somehow filtering their statements to be consistent with their own perceptions, such that Connie perceived the other woman as talking about Satan anytime she talked about her own vision of Cordelia?

It had also become clear that Cordelia's inference that she was sustained by fear was a bit more true than she'd originally thought. She'd bitten into an apple partway through her tests... and spat out what she'd bitten off. It tasted like ash from an ashtray, so much so that she'd expected what she spat out to be ash. Nope, it was partially-chewed apple, still wet (Where her tongue had reported it as dry as a desert) and nothing apparently wrong with it. Meanwhile, she felt... refreshed by bathing in the terror of Connie and the other woman. That was sufficiently weird she'd decided to ignore it for now.

She'd also experimented some with trying to motivate Connie and what's-her-face into doing what she wanted via fear. Interrogations worked okay, sort of, but she'd not been able to figure out a consistent way to issue a command they'd follow. Informing them they'd be punished if they didn't obey mostly just provoked moaning, sobbing, or other undignified shows of terror. Not action. Even if it was really very reasonable requests, like, "Hold up two fingers on your left hand." Modulating the exact level of terror wasn't very helpful. It was frustrating, because she felt sure she could get the results she wanted somehow, but... nothing she'd tried had worked yet, not even a little, outside of demanding answers.

By far the most interesting tidbit had been when Cordelia had decided to test her power's effect when played through a recording -ramp to max, record herself saying something via one of the teen's cameras, ramp down, play the recording at Connie (And the other woman, why not) and see if her power transmitted itself through recordings.

The answer was: she didn't show up in the recording at all! The camera recorded, but somehow she wasn't in it, not even her voice. She was like a vampire or something. Gave her a possibility for why the PRT goons hadn't reacted to her, too: if they were seeing and hearing the world through cameras and microphones... she'd be completely outside their awareness. Interesting.

She wasn't sure when she was interrupted in all this testing, but it wasn't any later than noon, going by the position of the sun in the sky.

In retrospect, she was surprised at how long it had taken the police to be called, what with all the screaming.

She tamped the flame down and sauntered out to meet the police, quite confident she could scare her way out if things went bad. They were just cops, after all. She called out, "What seems to be the problem, officers?"

There were two cars, four cops. Two a car. They were taking this a little more seriously than the bare minimum, but they weren't here in force. The fat one (Of course there was a fat cop) closed the car door behind him and didn't bother to raise his voice in response. "Reports of domestic disturbance, ma'am." He raised one giant eyebrow and asked in a mild tone, "You wouldn't happen to know anything, ma'am?"

Oh. They were here over the kids screaming. Here she'd thought maybe this was some kind of half-assed response to everyone else running away at dawn, screaming incoherent nonsense. (Where'd they all gone, anyway? Cordelia was pretty sure there wasn't an agreed-upon home to meet at, not yet. Had they really just... panicked and fled every which way?) With a dismissive sniff she ramped up the heat and- well. She'd originally planned to grab a cop car and drive that out of here, but the more she thought about it the more that seemed like a bad idea.

And now it was too late to see if she could go online on one of the laptops in the house to look for a cape whose costume matched Nikky's killer. She could hear the dispatcher directing reinforcements because one of the jerk cops had managed to call for help before curling into a fetal ball, and at some point this was going to get the PRT on her case and Cordelia wasn't actually willing to bet they'd never find a way around her combination of 'invisible to cameras' and 'terrifying to people'.

Darn it.

Uuuugggggh. Finding Nikky's murderer was going to take forever like this, even if she was done getting distracted by her shiny new power. (Which she was honest enough with herself to admit was unlikely. It was a very shiny power) She'd screwed up and scared off all the teens who might've been able to track the cape for her, and she'd still found no evidence her own power offered anything of the sort. Nikky was dead, so making puppy-dog eyes to get him to use his power on someone was out, and her own power, cool as it was, had so far proven iffy at getting cooperation from strangers.

Okay, first thing she needed to do was determine where Nikky's murderer was.

Second thing she needed to do was get to where they were at.

Third thing was kill them.

Well, no. Third thing was make them suffer so much they regretted being born and begged for death.

Fourth thing was kill them.

She wondered for a moment what she'd do after that, and then decided it didn't matter.

Revenge first, a life of luxury and handsome men later.

Cordelia frowned and rubbed her chin, ignoring the cops moaning and sobbing in the background. Maybe she could find a netcafe? Look up capes, see if one matched what she'd seen? Yeah, that sounded good. She'd need to ask someone for directions...

... she glanced at one of the cops...

... but first she should get some distance, ramp her power down, and then start asking people for directions to the nearest netcafe.

Sounded like a plan!

She began walking, humming an uplifting tune to herself.

Today is the first day of the rest of my life!