Termination 21.4

I might have. . . underestimated, just how big a deal killing an Endbringer was, as the celebrations spiraled completely out of control, people getting smashed and literally dancing in the streets. "So," I commented, glancing over to Taylor, "Assume people are going to be coming in to work late tomorrow?"

"You think they'll be coming at all?" my teammate questioned, lifting an eyebrow.

"That bad?"

"Lee," she informed me kindly. "We killed an Endbringer. That's. . . not a thing. For normal people," she added. "That's like. . ." she trailed off, "Curing cancer."

"But we did that," I pointed out, "And they didn't react like this."

Honestly, it turned out to not even be that hard. Panacea lived up to her name, again, and made it after messing around for a couple weeks. The trick was to not make a pill that did that, the differences in various types and causes of cancers too broad for any one 'cure', but to create a lifeform capable of devising cures based on the patient's individual problems, within certain parameters.

Technically it wasn't one-hundred percent effective, but none of the 'cures' that already existed for other ailments were. There was the issue that it looked like a Lovecraftian bed by way of H.R. Geiger, but with the safer anesthetic Amelia had come up with, one that wouldn't accidentally suppress someone's biological processes to the point of death if you weren't careful like all of the previous ones did, it was easy enough to knock someone out and put them on it, where it'd go to work with its tentacles to move tissue, insectile arms for detail work, proboscises to take samples, stingers to deliver retroviruses, mouths to consume malignant tissue, and so on.

And, unfortunately, there wasn't any way to make it look anything other than completely nightmarish.

But it worked.

"If we could make a pill that cured cancer," the girl corrected. "Something we could mass produce, and something that wimps would use."

The fact that the entire thing ran on an insectile brain, and thus was something that Taylor could control, meant she thought the 'medi-bed' was cute, and while we'd realized her power had tweaked her instinctive responses to arthropods, she's just shrugged upon discovering that fact and was perfectly fine as long as that was all it did.

"Okay, I guess. Just as long as our security staff is still ready. Zilla, make allowances for people not showing up to work, or working at sub-optimal levels for. . ." I trailed off, looking to my teammate.

Taylor thought that over, declaring, "Three days."

"Three days," I ordered, "And working at reduced capacity for the next three. Any response from Æonic?" I checked.

"There have been no communications for you from Æonic," the Virtual Intelligence replied.

"He hasn't sent anything today?" I checked, having tried to reach out to him this morning, after the Simurgh's warning, but I'd had to leave a message.

"Æonic has sent sixty-seven messages to connected systems today," Eclipse's management software informed me, my top-level access, while upsetting to some based on privacy concerns, had caught enough bullshit that I didn't care. "Last message sent was one hour, twenty-seven minutes ago."

So he wasn't sequestered away, he was just being a dick. As usual. I sighed, while Taylor sent me a sympathetic look.

"Was it that important?" she asked, and I appreciated her effort to try and convince me that it wasn't as bad as it was.

"I was gonna talk to him about the fact that Grace was here, but. . . I guess it's nothing unusual," I admitted. "I'll go talk to him myself. How much does he owe us now?"

Strumming a connection to computer-spider, the Arthropod controller winced. "A lot."

"Did he at least pay us back for the material he sourced for his factories?" I checked, getting a flat look in return. "Yeah, that's what I thought. I'm gonna go talk to him."

"Want me to come with?" Taylor asked, obviously not wanting to, but willing to do so for me. I, however, shook my head, knowing how she didn't much like my brother's part of town.

And for good reason.

"No, but I'd not say no to a ride-along sensor-beetle," I replied, the teen nodding and a hidden compartment in my office sliding open, a palm-sized, black-carapaced insect scuttling out, running over to me and climbing up my back as I reset my dimensional shroud into armor, complete with a compartment for it to rest in. Our camera-bugs were good, but, technically we didn't have any eyes in Lotus Row, after my brother had asked us to remove them.

Five infiltrators later, and with no accountability to be found from my brother, we'd started installing spy-flies, the smaller, nearly-impossible to detect versions of the camera-bugs that used minor space-shifting to encircle themselves except for pinhole sensors, but they weren't nearly as good. As a thought-experiment in the other direction, Taylor and Amelia had worked together to make these sensor-beetles, which were effectively wide-spectrum detectors that were insanely sensitive.

I couldn't really make use of them, the flood of sense-data still a bit much, but Taylor had no such problems, swimming through the feelings it gave off with ease, and understanding exactly what they perceived. Even covered with a shell and mesh, sitting safe in my armor, it'd let her see things I couldn't, tapping into any kind of non-encrypted wireless signal, and the standards of what Lady Bug considered to be 'encrypted' were constantly rising, anything below that arbitrary level of complexity 'not really trying'.

Nodding to my teammate, I Strode out, to the edge of where New Brockton Bay ended, and Lotus Row began, a dark mottled blot compared to my shining city, and noted that, despite the merriment, at least the dividing barrier was still manned and monitored.

Honestly, it had a serious 'Berlin Wall' vibe, with an open no-mans-land separating the two, only the restrictions ran in the other direction.

I'd not wanted to build it, having had to section off a good bit of my territory as both the walls and open spaces were areas that I controlled, but my brother had become. . . difficult to work with, to the extent I regretted giving him the extra property, though at least doing so had turned his territory into a solid block, instead of islands in the middle of what I owned. It'd started while I was recovering from Bonesaw's less-than-tender mercies, with him doing construction that didn't follow our planning models at all, though thankfully the model we'd gotten from Accord was specifically designed for that eventuality, but even after I'd come back from my extended leave, he'd refused to play nice, I'd just been too busy with other bullshit before Boston to really notice.

For instnace, he'd let me, through the powers I'd granted Taylor, put up some buildings in his territory to help, free of charge, and then promptly disassembled half of them for raw materials to do what he'd wanted to do all along, wanting to know when I'd come build some more, or maybe just gift him more raw materials and save us both the effort. Oh, and could we increase how much he charged us for using Déjà's precognitive powers, since we were making more money now?

Cooperative policies were suggested, agreed to, and then not fucking followed, the last straw when he'd had Megalith build a fucking Teleportation Gate to Las Vegas, in an attempt to make his territory a sort of add-on to the City of Sin, following my idea of allowing drug use, but then half-assing it into oblivion by not requiring the drugs to be done on-site, which led to. . . so many problems, not the least of which being that he opened up a massive hole in our security systems.

We were able to make security checks coming in and out of New Brockton Bay, which was effectively a fortress-city, quick and easy through advanced tech, screening out gangs, spies, shipments of drugs, bombs, and the like, but all that meant nothing when they could just wander over from Chuckles' territory without so much as a how-do-you-do.

And, when the issue had been brought up, he'd just shrugged and said that wasn't his problem.

So. . . Wall.

And when, despite his statements that the added income he was receiving from his Teleport Gate had nothing to do with us, when the wall and checkpoints had gone up, it'd hit his bottom line hard, and then he'd demanded to speak with me, arguing how my policies were 'unfair' and how I was blocking off 'his' city just because I was jealous.

My response?

The walls were built on my property, having seen this sort of thing coming, and thus, as he'd said, how that affected him wasn't my problem.

So he'd gotten pissy and refused to have Megalith keep up the Tinkertech factories she'd built for us in New Brockton Bay. Well, he'd demanded we pay him for them wholesale, and, when it was pointed out that those had been a gift, in response for all the help we'd offered him, he'd tried to say that he never formally said it was, so it wasn't, which is when I demanded my land back, because it wasn't formally gifted to him, and Lisa had gotten him to shut the fuck up. He'd declared Meg wouldn't maintain them, and stormed out, not knowing that, with Overwatch's powers, any robot he controlled via Technopathy, he could use his Tinker specializations through.

This meant my Vizier could maintain the detection devices he'd created, as well as make more, but it'd also meant his Repair specialization could be utilized en masse, meaning he could easily maintain pretty much every Tinkertech device in the city with a minimum of fuss, as long as he was plugged into our intranet. We still kept our contracts with the rest of our Tinkers for service and repairs, as it was a good source of pseudo-'passive' income for them, and kept them from getting too nuts, but it also meant we weren't dependent on them either, something that, surprisingly, no one else before my brother had tried to leverage.

Likely because I could easily rip out their spine through their spleen, but either way they'd been fairly nice about it.

It'd taken my brother a solid two weeks before he realized Overwatch could just repair things, and that Chuckles had just killed a fairly hefty income stream for his people, at which point he demanded we restart the maintenance agreement we'd had with Megalith, and I told him that we were fine. He'd then declared that we wouldn't have access to Déjà at all until we renewed the contract, and at a higher rate too, for causing so many problems.

So we'd closed the border, and shut off his utilities. It was harsh, but, even though he was family, he was severely pissing me off. We'd also snuck Herb in to copy Déjà's power to do our own checks on a number of ongoing projects, which is also when we found out that her power marked the people she used it on, instead of being tracked by the power itself, as Break couldn't give someone a precognitive vision, wait for the power to fade, re-copy it, and give the person a second go.

That'd lasted all of a week, his base's capabilities not able to keep his entire territory running, and while Megalith could build some of the key components of the needed infrastructure, she couldn't do the entire thing, and their systems had been built to piggyback off our systems. And abuse them, as, while our buildings were all fairly high efficiency when it came to water and power draws, his Tinkertech went through it like a sorority at their first kegger.

So he'd finally given in, but refused to do the negotiations himself, pawning it off on his lieutenants rather than even come to the meeting like I had, claiming he had 'other things he needed to do'. Lisa had tried to cheat, using her own power, along with Déjà's, but Herb had just swung by Cauldron HQ, Pathed one agreement, and threatened to do so for every one after that if they didn't cut the shit.

Things got hammered out, utilities were restored, and everything was settled without coming to blows, the fact that they apparently had in one of Déjà's timeline, along with them getting their shit wrecked without Blindspots present, Charlie to help their fight but more without me to reign in my people, was what had brought them to the negotiating table in the first place.

And the fact that dealing with my brother had gotten that bad. . .

I wasn't mad.

Just disappointed.

So we negotiated a deal that was, despite our overwhelmingly superior position, still fair. Early access to new developments, at lower rates than anyone else. Custom orders given priority for a fraction of the fees we charged everyone else. The fact that, despite using his people against us, I still helped his people tweak their powers to negate downsides for relatively cheap, even after I found out that he'd started selling the service that was specifically supposed to just be for his people to others, and that he hadn't kept my ability to do so a secret like I'd asked. His rationale? Because we'd negotiated for me to do so for up to three people a week, to him, he had 'open slots'.

And he kept shorting us.

Because, ultimately, we were profitable enough that his acting like a parasite wasn't enough to be worth the hassle of dealing with directly, and the fact that his actions gave me a steady supply of new Shards to copy, map, and generally poke.

And he was family.

Nodding to the guards on duty, I flew across the border, no matching wall on his side, though I wasn't trying to be subtle, and, by crossing at our checkpoint, I'd show up on what little surveillance his people had.

Floating across the rooftops, his place was a giant mishmash of building styles, design choices, and 'organic' growth, which pretty much meant it was a disorganized mess whose traffic flow-lines were closer to a flow-knot. They were celebrating too, but the celebrations here had a. . . darker feeling to them, Acoustokinesis and Aerokinesis carrying cries not just of joy, relief, and merriment, as they had in New Brockton Bay, but the crying of children, the moans of public sex, and. . . yep, that was someone begging for mercy.

A retasked spy-fly found it was coming from one of his low-effort housing projects, which were pretty much tenement slums from practically their inception. Meg could mass-produce modular frames, which they'd stacked and connected into base setups, and then they'd promptly given zero shits about them as long as there wasn't a large enough problem.

And. . . yep, that was a meth-head being the shit out of his girlfriend. Joy. A loop of hardened air caught him around the neck, yanking him back, while the woman, curled around her child, and sobbed.

Oh no, he had a bad fall, I mused, as the domestic abuser caught his balance, a wider ring of air forming around his chest, while a smaller one gripped his head, and forced him backwards, just so, slamming into the corner of a nightstand, a bit of Acoustokinesis enhancing the hit enough to make it fatal.

Part of me wanted to whisper to the woman to go to the checkpoint to get help, but we'd quickly learned that Charlie would offload the medical needs of his populace onto us, going so far as to use it as a selling point of moving there, just because we cared. Talking with the boy, he'd seen no issue with his actions, even after an hour of trying to explain why that wasn't acceptable or fair, as, since we wanted to 'help people', he was just 'helping us help people'.

And charging them for the privilege, while expecting us to do it for free.

For a moment, I'd remembered Brandish's ultimate fate, but he wasn't that bad.

There was also the issue that he'd, at first, been fine with our people doing the occasional patrol, until he'd tried to set up an informal caste system where we were supposed to work against randos but his people, even out of uniform, had 'diplomatic immunity' and had to be left untouched, no matter what they did, but no, he wouldn't hand us his personnel records, we were just supposed to ask everyone and anyone that claimed to be his was to be let go, promising that he'd take care of the people that made such claims in error, as well as punish his own employees.

But he didn't.

At which point we'd told him to police his own territory.

Which he didn't.

Flying towards his mansion, a palace built on top of his base, the church long since torn down despite its historic status and worth as a PR symbol, I paid half a mind to what was going on, not hesitating to kill the rapists, getting less subtle after the fifth, the celebrations making things even worse than normal, reminding myself why Taylor and I generally didn't pay attention to what happened here, and warned everyone in New Brockton Bay that Lotus Row was to be considered its own country, because, functionally it was.

However, we didn't ignore the fact that the government gave us a rash of shit for every new expansion or development, while they didn't give two shits about Charlie's territory, at least after discovering, when they threatened to take action against it, we told them they were free to, as long as they didn't enter NBB to do so, and their attacks didn't cross into our territory.

I was sure Charlie would survive such an intervention, and it might teach him some well-needed humility, as well as being a wake-up call for the level of power we were dealing with, but, as Earth Bet seemed to constantly do, I was disappointed as they let that shit lie, my brother's people just good enough to avoid their wrath, as, despite what was publicly stated, several cities were worse.

No, when it was no longer a piece to be used against us, suddenly those with moral concerns couldn't be arsed to do their job, which is why I gave them about as much attention as they deserved.

Restricting myself to not burning down any of his buildings, as, while this was bad, it wasn't ABB bad, I set down on the large entryway, four members of Bell Tolls on guard looking at me warily. One of the idiots lifted his gun, and I raised an eyebrow, using Metal Creation to fill in the rifle's barrel. The Shard did need to be used a little, to properly settle in before I could gift it and its brother to another person, creating another Dryad set to make sure Taylor was not a single point of failure.

Feeling something happening to his gun, the mental midget decided to shoot, which caused the device to explode in his hand, a smidgen of air control enough to guide the shrapnel away from his vitals as he went down, screaming and bleeding.

"I'm here to see Æonic," I told the least stupid looking one.

The man put a finger to his ear, the actual person in charge likely already watching what was going on, the guard informing me, "Mr. Æonic isn't seeing anyone right now."

"You misunderstand," I replied, smiling. "I am going to see him. I'm giving you three minutes to warn him and give him time to. . ." I extended my senses, glad I'd gone ahead and not installed spy-flies, as, yes, that was my brother making sex-grunts as he railed. . . Megalith, by the moans. He slept with all of his lieutenants, Tattletale included, but from what we could tell Meg was the only one that actually gave a damn about him. "put on some pants. Or I can go now. Your choice."

"Uh. . ." the guard said, unsure, and, tracking the sounds and the spies we did have, his second security chief, the one he hadn't fucked yet, was contacting him, telling him, and, yep, he was telling them to tell me to wait and come back in an hour.

Reaching out with Acoustokinesis, I told my brother directly, "You have one-hundred and eighty seconds, Chuckles. Your power means you don't get blue balls, so quit your bitching and meet me in your sitting room, or I'll go after you and drag you out."

"Fuck you," the naked boy snarled, and I formed a blade of black flame an inch away from his head, the movement of air enough to pin down his exact location, the voids in Aerokinesis such that I didn't hit anything, not that I could use that power to make a blade in something, though I could grow it into a target. The sudden appearance of the weapon, something my status as a Blindspot meant he couldn't see coming, caused him to stumble backwards, freezing time around himself for a moment, before he realized it wasn't dangerous and he released it, going for his pants. Making shapes with Pyrokinetic Weaponry was difficult, but I could do decorations, so I spun the blade, and formed numbers on the flat of it, counting down.

Nodding to his guard, I walked in through the front door, already knowing the layout of his 'house', and took a seat, his servants watching me worriedly. "Don't worry, I'm just here to talk," I told them, the women, and they were all women, quickly getting out of my way.

Back in my office in New Brockton Bay, Taylor, watching me through the Insect Network, made some coffee, setting it down on the Marked plate I'd left on my desk. This kind of specificity was still something that took me a bit to concentrate on, but with the teleportation Mark to serve as targeting parameters, I Strode the drink miles away to my open hand. I'd like to be able to move it so I could simply curl my fingers around the handle as it appeared, but turning things with that power still escaped me, despite my best efforts.

Tracking my brother through the hallways, making my sword follow him, he moved to his office, and took a seat behind his admittedly impressive looking desk, and he ordering his people to have me meet him there, which. . . no.

When the timer hit zero, I reached out and Strode him to me, the boy flinching as he went from throne-like chair to couch, freezing time again as he silently swore, the sound not moving through the frozen air but still present to my senses, my own anti-time power flaring and encompassing me, as I took a sip of my coffee and gave him a droll look.

He glared, and I took another sip, replicating and exaggerating the sound, shifting his own heartbeat into it so he could hear it clearly despite us both sitting in time-locked silence. He'd put his helmet on, so I couldn't read his expression, but his head moved to the side, like he was talking with someone, though without a noise, and time resumed.

"What?" he demanded mulishly.

I took another sip.

"Didn't see you at the Endbringer fight," I commented, having wanted to tell him the good news of Grace being here but damn if he didn't get on my nerves.

"You didn't need me," he shot back dismissively.

"I didn't need me to be their either, but I still went," I pointed out.

"Is that why you're here?" he questioned disdainfully. "Who cares?"

And this is why he lets Lisa handle PR, I noted internally. "Ignoring the soft benefits, you said you'd be there," I pointed out.

"And then you said you had a plan to kill Behemoth that didn't need me. And ya did. So ya didn't need me," he repeated, like I was a particularly dim child.

"Grace is here," I remarked. "Not here here, Canada, but on Earth Bet."

"Grace?" he echoed, confused, "Whose Grace?"

I wanted to be annoyed, but this was. . . not out of character. "Grace. Your cousin. Second cousin, technically?" I prompted, but he didn't respond, likely wearing an expression I couldn't read because he was wearing a helmet. "Cousin Jessica's kid? A year older than you? Tan, frizzy hair, really short."

"Oh, her. She's here?" he asked, disinterested.

"With a powerset on par with ours," I agreed. "Who you would have met if you'd come to the Endbringer fight."

Throwing his hands up, my brother declared, "Fine! Fine! I'm sorry I didn't come, okay?"

Which, as far as him committing to actually do something next time, meant. . . squat diddly. He hadn't said he'd come to the next one, though even if he did that didn't mean he wouldn't find some reason to not come in the intervening time, deem it good enough, and not say a word to me unless he was specifically asked about the thing I couldn't know about, while claiming he wasn't hiding, lying, or otherwise deceiving anyone.

But. . . he was family. And he was seventeen. And, yeah, I hadn't been like this then, but. . . well, our parents were kinda assholes.

"So, since you're here," he said, shifting the topic, "When are ya gonna come do your power thing again? I've got a couple that need it."

"Recruitment going that well?" I questioned, pretending he was still keeping to the letter of our agreement, Overwatch having already hacked his systems to find that, for his records, he was temporarily letting people join Bell Tolls, so he technically wasn't lying, which was all the excuse he needed to hide behind in his mind, paper-thin as it was.

And the sad thing was, when I'd first come here, I'd probably have bought it, as it was technically correct, and I'd believe that it would have been on me for not specifying.

Now. . .

I was just tired.

"Yeah," he nodded, without a hint of shame in his voice. "We lost some people, so it evens out. Not here, but other places are kinda dangerous."

And 'Lost' here means 'they left' not 'they died', while your second sentence is made up of two unrelated statements put together so technically you're not lying, I mentally dissected, feeling, like I often did with my family, like I was having a conversation with the Fae.

At least my mother didn't come here, I mused, nodding, pretending I bought his lie. "Then you've paid for the last set?" I questioned.

~He hasn't,~ Taylor informed me, even as my brother told me, "Yeah, yesterday."

~The payment we got yesterday was for raw materials. And no, the amount wouldn't've covered your work. It was even less,~ my teammate informed me, expecting my next question.

"Then you should look into your people's actions, because it seems like someone's been embezzling," I noted neutrally, pulling my anger back, insulted that he thought I wouldn't check. "And please label your payments, Charlie. We're running a dozen different deals, and doing so helps avoid miscommunications. Give me the rest, and I'll look at your new recruits."

"Come on, can't you do it now?" the boy whined. "It just takes a couple hours."

I merely shrugged, "I wish you'd responded to my emails earlier, as I had time this afternoon."

"I didn't see-" he started to lie, then changed course, "didn't set aside time to do that."

"You had the time when I arrived," I observed, and, while I couldn't see his face, the sharp exhalation was undoubtedly anger. "Business before pleasure is a truism for a reason."

"Yeah, I know," he shot back, which, no he clearly didn't, "How 'bout tomorrow?"

"I'd set aside some time, but I won't be available for the rest of the week," I informed him, to his obvious displeasure from how he balled up his hands into fists, but this let me address the last thing I needed to talk to my brother about and leave. "With the Endbringer dead, things are. . . iffy, and until dad sends us a warning, we won't see the next one coming. And because of how things happened, I'm not sure if it'll be the same one as the original timeline. Behemoth's target was certainly different."

My brother was a fucking sieve when it came to intel that he didn't think would hurt him, and the only judgement he respected when it came to that was his own, as we'd discovered. As such, he had no idea that Ziz occasionally visited, let alone the intel-sharing agreement I had with the Psychic Endbringer. "That means we'll be possibly going in blind, if it's not one of the ones I know. If it's coming here, or to one of my other cities, obviously we're gonna need to fight," I stated, pausing for a second, noting the lack of any response from my brother, "but if it's somewhere else-"

"I'm not going," Charlie declared challengingly, which, yes, was actually going to be what I was going to ask him to do, but the way he put, he obviously expected me to disagree.

"What?" I questioned, wondering where he was going with this.

"I'm not going," he repeated mulishly, as if that was all that needed to be said.

Pinching the bridge of my nose, I Strode my now-empty cup back to the office, which clattered a little as it fell on the prepared blanket, not shattering like the first dozen or so had when I'd tried that. "Why?" I questioned tiredly.

"They're not my people, and you said you don't know what it is. What if it's something dangerous?" he argued.

Then you have a powerset that makes you very, very hard to kill, and your Tinkertech cybernetics, which your power have only been improving, will pay off, I noted mentally. Again, hacking his computers using Herb's copy of Déjà's power, we'd gotten a list of what he'd gotten installed, and the boy had had extensive work done, to the point that he could probably fight on the level Herb had, pre-Slaughterhouse Nine, or I could, pre-Leviathan, and survive far more, his enhanced capabilities making those five-seconds of perfect precog a true panoply of options, along with possessing a built-in teleporter in case he needed to nope the fuck out, which his Peak Condition was further upgrading without any input from him whatsoever.

While not able to fight at the fuck-you levels that Herb or I could, and that Grace could in an Endbringer-level confrontation, he would still be an incredibly valuable asset.

Assuming he'd get off his ass-et.

Seriously, at least Boojack did what you paid him to do.

But. . . family.

"You know what, fine," I told him, as if that wasn't the plan all along. "I'll call you up when we get the warning if it's one of our territories-"

"If it's here," he interrupted.

". . . what."

"I'll fight if it's here, but if it's one of your other places, that's on you," my brother informed me smugly, like. . . what? Because I agreed with him on one point he was now on a roll and had momentum?

"You know what, fine," I repeated, knowing it wouldn't be. "Side note, have you heard from Dad? Because I haven't."

The teenager snorted, "You're the only one that's met him. He hasn't said shit to me since I got here."

. . . Of course he hasn't. "Okay. You want me to call you when Grace comes here?"

My brother shook his head. "Nah. We don't get along. That's you and her." He paused, then chuckled, "Actually, do it. I want to see her face when she finds out I've got a harem."

"Yeah, I'll tell the feminist you're living the Persian dream," I rolled my eyes. "And knowing you, you'd convince them to fake being pregnant, while not wearing shoes, just to make the point."

Sitting up straighter, my brother excitedly said, "Hey, I hadn't thought of that! That'll be awesome!"

"I'll tell her you said hi, but are busy," I informed him, standing. "I'll be in touch, and try to respond next time. Something simple as, 'Busy, talk to you tomorrow,' takes fifteen seconds and means I can either tell you it's an emergency, or know when it's appropriate to arrive."

My brother shrugged, offering a, "Yeah, sure," which really meant, 'Yeah, I sure hear you', and it was my fault for not reading his mind, implications be damned. Because you couldn't be held to what you implied, despite him doing that very thing to me all the damn time.

But. . . family.

Striding back to my office, I sighed, and Taylor lifted an eyebrow. "Why do you put up with him?"

"Because he could be worse," I replied. "And, to be honest, I've got more pressing matters. Grace isn't nearly as bad."

My teammate gave me a long look, finally asking, "That why you were so happy to see her?"

Nodding, I dropped into my chair. "Yeah. She can be a bit prickly, but she cares. A lot. Charlie meanwhile. . . well he is a Villain, just as much as my father is a Rogue."

Part of me wondered if the roles we'd chosen had changed us, molded us, such capabilities well within the limits of a sufficiently advanced Master power.

But, at the end of the day. . . it was like my father to act as he had, to disappear for long stretches of time because he was busy, getting annoyed when he was disturbed, and, now that we weren't living in the same house, we couldn't run into each other. He was moral, when he thought about it, but left to his own devices he had a milder version of my brother's 'how is this my problem'-ness, and it was hard not to leave him to his own devices when I couldn't contact the motherfucker.

And my brother. . . I wished he was better, but. . . it tracked.

Meanwhile, Herbert was actively subverting Cauldron, despite being a 'Conspirator', and, well, if I'd been shaped more into being a Hero instead of being me, maybe it would've been easier to deal with the shit that kept coming my way.

But things were getting better, and my tendency to focus on the negative was blinding me to the progress we'd made, Chuckles little slice of slum notwithstanding.

"Want to go get dinner?" Taylor questioned. "I checked, and Mr. Ikeda's place is still open. How's ramen sound?"

Smiling, I nodded, getting back up. The instant stuff might be the college-student's staple, but the good stuff was the closest I'd gotten to Japanese Soul Food, and I could use some of that right now. "Sounds like a plan," I told her, offering her a hand, which she took, and I Strode us to the street outside his shop.

Smelling the rich scents of the broth, I felt a bit better, and looked forward to when Grace would visit.

Because if Charlie was a Villain, and my father a Rogue, that girl was definitely a Hero.