Where's a giant bug zapper when you need one…

Disclaimer: I am by no stretch of the imagination a legal expert and as such the scene in the courtroom shouldn't be construed as a representation of the real life court system. My sisters were the ones who went through mock trial in high school, not me.

Content warning: references to past domestic violence and police corruption. It's not super huge, but it's mentioned.

Lucifra updating a story during the day? It's a Christmas miracle!

Starting with the other perspective this time, because otherwise I'm not a huge fan of the way the timing lines up for the chapter.

I'm summarizing the court case because I'm not confident enough in my ability to write legal matters. Don't worry, that's only part of the chapter. Don't worry, Blaze1992, we're getting to the chaos you mentioned.

"It's good to be working with you again, Flechette," said Clay, arms covered in force field-constructed gauntlets. "We missed you in New York when you got called away to work with Boston."

"Yeah, well," sighed the Ward, shifting her arable style on her back as she walked. "The PRT does what the PRT does and we mortals are left to pick up the pieces afterwards. Speaking of picking up the pieces, how's Jouster doing?"

"About as well as can be expected. He's feeling out some of the indies to fill in the whole 'long range, highly mobile' role you fell into a lot of the time but he hasn't found anyone willing to join up. There's… well, there's rumors going around about the PRT press-ganging unwary kids and making them into soldiers, more than there usually are, and from the way they seem to have originated here in Brockton, I can kind of see it, given what little I've seen of Piggot. But it's still not helping PR in general, and Glenn was hitting up Hero's Tinker-Grade coffee machine like twice a week."

Flechette winced. While "Tinker-Grade" had become something of a meaningless buzzword thrown around to justify high price tags and long lines, Hero's coffeemaker definitely deserved the appellation. She'd tried a cup of the stuff once, and by the time she'd come to March was nearly bald and much warier around her, as were the rest of Lancer Squad. The incident also precipitated her transfer to Boston to get her away from the machine, and it had dissuaded March from following her for a solid three months to boot.

Any reply from the dark-haired girl was preempted by the arrival of a blonde in a white dress with golden designs on it from the sky. "Welcome to Brockton Bay, you two," said Glory Girl, arms folded over her chest. "Let's… chat, shall we?"

"Sure thing," said Flechette, her nonchalance forced to some degree thanks to the evident dissatisfaction in the Alexandria Package's posture. "You want to join us on our patrol?"

"Sure, why not?" The words came from behind them, and Flechette spun around to point her arbalest at the figure before recognizing the designs on their coat.

"Panacea, right? Sorry about that, still kind of jumpy from being in a new place," Flechette said, replacing the weapon on her back.

"No hard feelings, I get how Piggot's… general attitude might be infectious," replied the healer.

"Some hard feelings," Glory Girl snarked.

"I can take care of myself, Vicky," said Panacea, levelly.

"She was still pointing a weapon at you!"

"You say that as if it'd do more than inconvenience me." Panacea turned back to Flechette even as Clay mouthed "inconvenience her" with no small degree of surprise. "But we didn't come to bicker in front of you. No, we're here to talk with you about a more important situation. What has Piggot told you about the state of the situation with Vista and Volur?"

"Not much. We've mostly been told that Volur is to be considered a possible Master who's responsible for coercing Vista out of the Wards and forcing her to work with her and a member of the Teeth named Quarrel."

"So… the Mushroom diet. That tracks." Seeing Flechette's blank look, Panacea rolled her eyes. "Kept in the dark and fed bullshit."

"Well then," said Flechette, more than a little indignantly, "if you know so much about the situation, then by all means, tell us."

"Alrighty then!" chirped Panacea, causing Flechette a moment of whiplash before she realized that it was purposeful. "So, Shadow Stalker's been going rogue since she joined the Wards, and put Volur in the hospital when she caused her Trigger Event. Vista found out and up and fuckin' left once she found out that Piggot just wanted to cover it up instead of actually do something about it, and Quarrel is her cousin."

"Sounds like you're the one spewing bullshit, not Piggot," said Clay.

"Not my fault you can't tell the difference between getting shat on and getting hosed down," Panacea shot back. "Anyways, that's really all we came here to do: to open your eyes to the bullshit you've been being fed. Toodles!"

"We could take you in for M/S screening, you know," said Clay, as much warning as threatening.

"You could," said Panacea. "But there's an Endbringer attack coming soon and you can't afford for me not to go. Besides, while Volur is a Master, her control is over arthropods, not humans."

"Back off with the insinuations," growled Glory Girl before swooping down to scoop her sister up and fly away with a parting "or we boycott your boss!"

"What was that?" asked Flechette, glaring at Clay. "You're normally a lot smoother than that."

"Information gathering, I thought. But… I dunno. Something definitely feels weird right now. Like, I'm coming off the tail end of a concussion or something."

"Log it when we get back to base, I guess."

Flechette turned back to the route just slow enough to miss the flash of red darting into an alley in a display of missed timing that would have never caught her Clustermate.

Taylor wasn't quite sure what she was expecting Judge Myra to look like, but a white-bearded old man who looked like he'd be a fantastic shopping mall Santa wasn't it.

The other people in the courtroom were a rather diverse bunch, too: Blackwell had come in all her horse-faced, harsh glory, and Alan Barnes stood next to her as her lawyer, red-faced and red-haired. Also present was PRT Director Emily Piggot, looking like someone had dropped a can of biscuit dough into a suit, Armsmaster, looking like he'd rather be anywhere else, and the PRT's lawyer, a whip-thin man who looked like the human equivalent of a chihuahua.

A lot of the arguments had gone over her head, even with Odin whispering in her ear about what, say, a duty of care was, because as much as Taylor had always been a voracious reader she was also in way over her head, being thrown headfirst into the pit of school liability.

Still, she had managed to piece together a general picture of the situation at hand between denials and Myra's threats of "contempt of court".

As it turned out, Sophia was on some sort of probation with the PRT which let her work with the PRT as a member of the Wards while under some strict conditions. She… technically hadn't breached her probation, since through some complicated legal mumbo jumbo it was Shadow Stalker and not Sophia Hess on probation, which didn't exactly fill Taylor with confidence in the judiciary in Brockton Bay despite Judge Myra's seeming outrage at Piggot.

According to the PRT's lawyer (a thoroughly unpleasant man named Steven Leeze), Sophia's complicated legal status as a member of the Wards meant that she couldn't be held responsible for her actions in her civilian identity, including the actions she'd taken against Taylor, thanks to "compelling domestic and national security reasons".

Mr. Truth tore that to shreds, using precedent where a police officer had been taken down for domestic abuse that he was covering up thanks to his friends always being the ones to respond to domestic violence in that area of the city.

Judge Myra accepted that reasoning and then grilled Piggot and her lawyer on why, exactly, they had shielded their Ward, who they were legally supposed to prepare for life as a hero and also keep within the law, based on her parahuman status.

Once he decided to leave the lawyers to stew in his own thoughts, he turned his focus to Blackwell and Alan Barnes, asking some pointed questions about, for one, the incredible biohazard that Taylor was stuffed into that somehow disappeared between Taylor was retrieved from her locker and the (admittedly much delayed, since for some reason they hadn't investigated until after Taylor had woken up) arrival of the police to investigate the incident.

When Blackwell said that it was as a result of a PRT team cleaning up the site the day of Taylor's hospitalization, Judge Myra turned his focus back to Piggot.

"And what," said Judge Myra, his bald head flushing red with rage, "possessed you to perform such an utterly idiotic act of obs-"

He was cut off by a loud, blaring siren, which sounded in three sharp blats before cutting off.

Armsmaster paled before turning to the door and all but sprinting out of the courtroom just moments before Judge Myra slammed his gavel down on the bench. "Dismissed. I will issue a summons to a second session within the week and you will all come."

With that, the man stood and strode out of the courtroom, leaving everyone behind to talk amongst themselves.

Danny blinked, paling, then turned to Taylor. "You can't be thinking of going."

Taylor looked back. "I have to go, to heal if nothing else. If I can bring at least one extra person home…"

Danny sighed, then stood. "I'll drive you at least a little bit of the way to the PRT building."

Mr. Truth patted Taylor on her shoulder twice, a feeling like a static shock accompanying the first pat. "Godspeed, Taylor. Come back alive."

"Will do, sir." Taylor walked out of the courtroom with Odin and Danny flanking her, brain working overtime to try and put together some sort of rune-carved pattern to try and extend her stamina reserves on the fly.

As expected, fifteen minutes of frantic theorizing wasn't enough time to put together even an ad hoc battery for magic energy, and given some of the runes she was eyeing, Taylor thought it would have taken longer than that to charge anyways.

Fortunately, she had enough of an understanding of the energy she used to cast the runes to start drawing it into herself even as she tried to put together a working magic battery, milky-white eye gradually starting to glow under her eyepatch as the energy accumulated, not that it was visible under both patch and helmet once the latter went on

Before too long, she had arrived at the PRT building and had joined Panacea and Glory Girl in waiting for the teleporter to arrive, armband cinched over her armor on her right arm. Two people that Taylor vaguely recognized from an announcement about a PRT department reshuffle seemed to be paying inordinate amounts of attention to her, but after a moment of her having turned her helmet in their direction they looked away.

"So, you're planning to heal too?" asked Panacea, fiddling with the sleeves of her robes.

"It seemed the thing to do," replied Taylor, tapping her thumb against her thigh. "Like, we've got all kinds of people to fight her, but the more we can keep alive for next time, the better, you get me?"

Panacea nodded, then opened her mouth to say something, but before she could, a man wearing aviator's goggles and a cap appeared in a flash of light, bringing with him a small group of huddled capes, with the exception of Narwhal, who stood head and shoulders above the group.

"Everybody get close! We're jumping to Miami and then straight to Canberra!" the man shouted, and the assembled capes scurried in to obey.

Two flashes of what Taylor saw as an odd non-space later, the assembled group of capes were abruptly buffeted by the wind of Alexandria's passage as the iconic flying brick was hurled through the air a mere six feet to the left of their group.

"Sorry for the hot drop," said the man in the goggles. "I'll be right back with the rest of New York and Boston, so clear the landing zone!" With that, he vanished in a burst of light.

"Come on," said Panacea, already jogging off towards a tent with the telltale red cross of a medical station. After a moment, Taylor and a woman in a red bodysuit and an eyepatch followed.

When they arrived, it was to a harried-looking woman in a seafoam blue bodysuit vaguely suggestive of a doctor's scrubs. "Panacea, Volur, to triage, follow Horizon's lead on what to prioritize. Othala, find Scapegoat and keep him going as long as you can, and work on recovery in between that."

Panacea nodded, dragging a confused Taylor along with her. "Hippocrates is a Thinker/Trump," she said, anticipating the other cape's question, "primarily focused on the way that powers interact with the body. Some sort of postcognition and extrapolation, as well as an inherent awareness of the way that human bodies work, so it's limited in what can be done with new Triggers, but she's good for running a bunch of medical capes together."

"Ah, okay. That tracks."

The duo arrived at an open area to the side of the tent where a woman in a blue and brown bodysuit with a jagged line separating the two halves stood amidst a clump of tables, which were about half filled.

"Good," she said, relaxing infinitesimally. "Start with these two," she gestured at two incredibly pale individuals, bleeding from crushed legs and likely only still alive thanks to a pair of noncape medical assistants running blood bags into their veins.

Panacea reached out and touched one of them, at which point the bleeding from the legs slowed to a stop. Taylor turned to the other one and flicked out a gebo rune, burning in the air for a moment before vanishing in a flash of light, taking a small portion of the energy she'd not stopped building up with it.

The individual abruptly shifted, ruined legs and bloodstained bodysuit flickering once before they recovered, leaving an unstained gray bodysuit over a well-muscled male body, the IV dangling from its pole nearby.

He blinked his eyes open, then turned to the other man (taller, paler, and somewhat less muscular). As he watched Panacea reconstruct his partner, Taylor moved onto the next cape Horizon indicated, reattaching the arms that had been torn off the dark-skinned woman lying there, and then moving on to the wholly bisected cape she vaguely recognized from a press release from Houston and putting him back together, even cleaning his white uniform.

"Holy shit," said Horizon, stunned, as Taylor cleared out the triage area with help from Panacea.

"I'm gonna need… probably like five minutes before I can do that again," said Taylor, breathing somewhat heavily.

"I don't expect you'll need to. It's an unfortunate reality of the Simurgh fights that we don't get too much traffic in the medical tent because of the scream and the precautions we have to take because of it. I just wish they didn't always leave my ears buzzing…" said Horizon.

Taylor winced as some kind of sensory feedback swept through her bugs even as a number of them were squished. "There's something inco-"

The roof of the tent was pulled off the metal supports, held frozen in a telekinetic grasp as the pale face of the Simurgh glared down at Taylor.

"Fuck," she said, as the Endbringer swept a wing down to crush her.

In the Birdcage, a young-looking blonde woman's eyes abruptly shot open, glowing white with a complicated knot pattern in the center for a moment before they resolved into empty white expanses.

"The time approaches," she rasped with four voices, three of which would have been recognized only by a very limited number of people and the fourth of which would have struck terror into any person alive. "The Warrior's foe rises, guided by Polydectes and Vakr to avenge her predecessors."

Then, she blinked, green irises and dark pupils appearing in the space between her eyes closing and opening. "Interesting. I believe my time here is coming to a close."

The one woman attending Glaistig Uaine went pale with fear, but the world's second-deadliest Trump paid her no mind, eyes no longer focused on her physical location. After all, a godling was faced with a being almost perfectly suited to killing gods, and that spectacle wasn't one to be missed if one had the chance.

And that's that!

The original intent of this chapter was to have the cliffhanger at the end of the court scene with everyone freezing but not saying what it was, then with the Flechette patrol ending with the sirens going off with a "oh shit" moment, but that didn't last since I didn't actually write out the stuff in the court scene.

That's about it, so read, review, enjoy, and have a nice day!