Chapter 1.2
Saturday, April 2nd 2011
"The Butcher can't be a fucking hero!"
I was so glad today was a Saturday.
Being a Noctis cape was a huge boon, too, as I had been up all night dealing with the raging assholes in my brain who were dead-set on making my life miserable. Case in point, I had to push Marauder back down into the dark, joining Fester, Quarrel, and Butcher in their mostly-silenced, obscenity-laden screeching.
"Maybe they should use their time in isolation to improve their rhetorical technique," Damascian said with vicious satisfaction. "We're clearly not changing Taylor's mind."
"Don't pretend that you're not enjoying this, bitch," Ironsides snapped. "The Teeth —"
"Almost went broke when Quarrel stopped selling Tinkertech," Chisel cut in. "Damascian might not have wanted the job, but at least she didn't try to hire Jack Slash."
Sabertooth literally growled at that. "It made sense at the time."
"No it fucking didn't, you moron!" Pyromaniac yelled.
"You're just angry he wouldn't firebomb the PRT headquarters," Stratego replied, "which made even less sense."
Shut the hell up!
To both my and my mental roommates' surprise, most of them actually did shut up, though there was residual grumbling that I chose to ignore. In the several hours since I had come home and snuck back into my room, I had slowly let off of the pressure on the other voices and tried to get a feeling for how they reacted to being stuck in the head of a hero.
Generally, they were pissed.
Extremely pissed.
But the threat of being muted was apparently very real for them, as their entire existence now consisted of watching through the current host's senses and trying to convince them to go along with their own goals. To do that, they needed to be able to talk, and being stuck down in the dark meant that I could mostly ignore anything that they said.
I was already getting rather pissed off at the muffled stream of curses and insults.
In fact, I was pissed off enough that I had started pacing and cracking my knuckles, two habits that I had slipped into so naturally that it wasn't until one of the Butchers made an offhand remark that I realized that I didn't usually do either of those things.
Well… this is my life, now.
In an attempt to stop fidgeting, I had tried to get a handle on Chisel's power by practicing reshaping pencils from my desk. Whenever I activated her power, my mind was filled with details about the materials comprising the object I was changing. The actual reshaping was a bit like playing with putty… just with my mind. In fact, it was almost like moving big swarms of bugs, if they were all stuck together somehow.
The other power I had experimented with was Quarrel's accuracy power, much to the displeasure of its owner. Her power felt stretchy, somehow, which I discovered by flicking beetles at other bugs. Space bent and twisted to ensure the projectiles hit, and attempting to have the bugs fly off the path resulted in them spinning in headache-inducing ways to ensure they reached the end of the 'tube.'
Then I found myself with a knife-shaped pencil, rolling it on the backs of my fingers, and I was once again reminded how my life was about to become vastly more complicated.
A quick glance at my clock revealed that it was nearly nine o'clock in the morning, which meant that Dad was likely to be up soon since he slept in on weekends. I had spent nearly six hours arguing with the previous Butchers, and while my resolve had not wavered (much, holy hell could they be annoying), I had made a few concessions about my heroics for the Butchers' mostly willing help.
Specifically, if I avoided the Teeth, they would use their several decades of experience to help me take down the other gangs.
Under any other circumstances, accepting the help of thirteen crazed supervillains to take down another group of differently-crazed supervillains would have been completely absurd. I wasn't necessarily opposed to using whatever tool was available to me, but I sincerely doubted that the independent hero Weaver had much to offer a group like the Teeth.
"Hey, don't put yourself down, miss biblical plague —" Pyro started, only to be interrupted by Knockout.
"That's all she ever does!" he bellowed. "We'll be stuck here while Taylor loafs around hating herself —"
I punched him back down into the dark with a snarl. Anyone else want to comment on my life?
"Yes," Sabertooth said, so I muted him, too.
"How any of you managed to function as capes is a mystery to me," Damascian said, and I couldn't help but chuckle a bit to myself at the comment.
Still, the others seemed to understand, and so I could turn my full attention to my insects in the basement while the Butchers just complained quietly amongst each other. After so long creating my costume, it was almost second nature to direct my swarm of little workers to clean the blood off the gloves and do minor repair work on the scratches from falling over on the roof.
"Your power is absurd," Chisel mused, following the work herself. "Maybe you should have called yourself Queen, what with your army of bugs."
"I'm glad I can't feel nauseous because this is disgusting," Ironsides complained. "Did we have to do this before breakfast?"
"I could go for breakfast," I agreed, then froze — I had been trying not to respond to the voices out loud, for obvious reasons.
"Omelette?"
"Bacon sandwich!"
"Reheat pizza!"
"Don't call that shit 'pizza!'"
I wasn't expecting that level of enthusiasm from the others. You guys really like food, huh?
"YES!" came a chorus of agreement.
After some consideration — mostly to avoid cooking — I pulled out a few slices of pepperoni pizza and threw them into the microwave. Knockout and Alkaline started a surprisingly vitriol-laden argument when they saw the pizza in question, as the former was from Brooklyn and the latter loved deep-dish despite growing up in Boston. Out of pure, twisted curiosity, I let them rant and rave in my head, along with the others who tossed in the occasional comment or insult.
"… disgusting pizza soup! How am I supposed to hold the stuff in a fistfight?" Knockout bellowed.
"It's a ranged weapon! Get sauce in their eyes!" Alkaline retorted.
Stratego, of course, asked the natural question. "Why are you fighting in a pizza shop?"
"Clearly you've never been to New York," Damascian grumbled.
"Why not just eat the pizza first?"
"What was that, Taylor?"
The pizza argument was immediately forgotten in a howl of jeers and laughter as I spun around in my seat, finding my Dad standing in the door to the kitchen. He looked like he hadn't slept very much at all, with dark circles under his eyes and droopy, exhausted posture. Still, his expression perked up when I turned to face him, morphing into something strange and unreadable a moment later.
"Just, uh, thinking about breakfast," I said, stuffing one of the slices into my mouth before I accidentally spoke out loud again.
"See, you can use pizza to deflect things!" Alkaline laughed.
I had to turn away from Dad to avoid smiling too obviously while eating, which he luckily took as a sign to stop staring and shuffle into the kitchen. "So, Taylor," he said awkwardly, "you seem rather awake. Did you, uh, make coffee already?"
Right, being a Noctis cape meant that I was unnaturally alert in the morning. "Nope. I just slept well, I guess?"
Dad gave me a look that I couldn't quite figure out, then moved to the coffee pot. "Well, that's… good. Have any plans for today?"
"Feeling bad for your—" was as far as Fester got before I punched her into the void.
"If you want to go 'hero' tonight, at least practice with your new powers," Chisel advised.
"Not really?" I lied. "I want to drop by the library for some school stuff, then I might go for a walk."
"Just make sure you stay safe, Taylor," he said, brandishing this morning's newspaper alongside his coffee mug. I missed whatever he said next when I saw the headline:
Quarrel, Lung Killed in Cape Fight; ABB Leaderless, New Butcher in Town?
What?
I had killed Lung!?
The Butchers roared in approval in my head, offering congratulations that I barely heard despite their volume. Even Quarrel got in on the celebration, because no matter what happened afterwards, Lung had died to the Butcher. Lung, who had apparently fought an Endbringer?
"No joke," Stratego rumbled. "I met a cape who saw the battle."
I would have been just as thrilled had the Butcher in question not been me.
"Taylor?" Dad asked, jerking me out of my own mind. "Is everything okay?"
"Yeah. Just… surprised. Lung was a force of nature, you know?"
"As opposed to a biblical plague," Pyro snickered.
I winced slightly at the description of my powers, turning it into a grimace while standing up. "School on Monday will be interesting, I guess." Before Dad could ask any more awkward questions, I rushed up to my room.
I did actually spend two hours in the library, as I told Dad, but I spent it on the PHO wiki instead of homework. The Butchers had fought damn near everyone who could put up a fight at one point or another, but I wanted to refresh our collective knowledge of the local cape scene before I went back out.
One thing that all fifteen of us agreed on: I had been crazy lucky to survive last night. My total lack of preparedness should have been my undoing, and it was only Quarrel's single-minded bloodlust when it came to Lung that had kept me alive.
So while the Teeth had a pretty good idea about the local cape scene since showing up last summer, I didn't want to walk into my next fight as ignorant as before. At the Butchers' prompting, I had also studied the other heroes, since I would hopefully end up working with them. I pointedly ignored the taunts about fighting the heroes, instead.
"Thank whatever gods constantly shit on Bet that Vista is a Ward," Knockout muttered while I was looking over the Wards.
Why does that matter?
Alkaline snorted. "Wards versus the Butcher? How bad does that look?"
"Taylor here didn't get the memo!" Fester sneered, but I only gave her a halfhearted shove. The irritating woman cackled, but I was rapidly becoming bored of her awful commentary. She was like Emma, except that I could actually do something to her. Well, I could do something to Emma, a lot of things actually. Especially now…
We looked over the rest of the Wards team, and apart from Clockblocker, there wasn't anyone we were particularly worried about. Browbeat and Aegis were meatheads; Kid Win could be dangerous but inexplicably wasn't. Shadow Stalker was annoying, but the Butchers had her number — the Ward was weak to electricity. Finally, there was Meteor, who set herself on fire and then mirrored damage onto her attacker as burns. She would also be annoying.
As I closed the computer up and left the library for the Docks, the Butchers' advice rattled around in my head. As a general rule of thumb, Masters and Thinkers were high priority targets in cape combat, and the others had decided that I counted as both.
To demonstrate the point, they were having me tag everyone in my range with bugs, which in turn fed into Stratego's battle analysis power. It was surprisingly easy to use, as I had discovered last night — the flood of information about ambush points, retreat routes, attack patterns, and everything else slotted right into my head with the positions of all of my bugs.
"How? Seriously, how? You're processing everything simultaneously! There's more than a million bugs in your swarm!" the Thinker himself complained.
"You could fight blindfolded!" Knockout cheered. "I want to see the looks on their faces!"
Alkaline rolled her eyes. "How can you see with the blindfold?"
"Fuck you!" he bellowed back, but I was too caught up in wrapping my mind around Stratego's power to care about the ensuing argument. By the time I found a sufficiently empty warehouse in the heart of the Docks that was unlikely to be discovered randomly by any passerbys, almost all of the voices were shouting and yelling like I had just inherited.
Quiet! I snapped, and wonders of wonders, they did. Mostly.
"We don't —" Butcher tried, and I put my foot down before he could get anything else out.
"So, power testing. What first?"
The resulting silence was deafening.
"Knockout's super strength is due to his force fields," Damascian offered.
"You bitch!" the brawler in question yelled, and I punched him back down into the dark.
"Explain."
Over the next few hours, I started to get a handle on some of the less immediately destructive among my new powers. Knockout possessed a fairly versatile close-range force field, which usually wrapped his body (and thus increased his strength) but could be formed into dinner plate-sized discs to block projectiles. The super strength part was… dangerously hard to feel, actually — it was like noticing my clothes. The shields, on the other hand, manifested around me with a spatial sense similar to knowing something was nearby because my hair brushed it. Except the hairs were a foot long and stood straight out from my body.
Fester's power, on the other hand, felt like slime oozing from my hands. There was none of the feedback of Chisel's power, thankfully; things just broke down into black smoke and drifted away. It was telling that the power didn't feel any different to use on people or objects, according to the more helpful Butchers.
Alkaline's power, surprisingly, had a lot more control than I had originally determined. Pooling blood in my hand was as simple as willing it out of the hammerspace. Adjusting the flow rate and shaping the output into a spray were considerably more difficult, and it felt like I was grasping one of the invisible ends of Quarrel's space-warped tubes. With my mind.
I played with Sabertooth's animal-morphing power a bit, but it had weakened significantly when Pyromaniac took over. Worse, I had to use the collective's memories to actually use it, as I needed to know exactly what I wanted to change and I didn't know very much about animals. Pointed predator's teeth and big cat claws ended up being easy, eagle eyes harder, and actual wings nearly impossible.
All the while, the collective made snide remarks on my ability to use their powers. Their commentary, however, only strengthened my resolve to use all of these powers for good.
My second night out in costume was, at least so far, dramatically better than my first. Given that Lung was dead, it was impossible for tonight to be worse, but the Butchers had (somewhat begrudgingly) helped me put together a plan that went beyond 'send in the bugs and pray.' Specifically, I was going to hit a loaded ABB safehouse in a boarded-up grocery store that I had scouted out with my bugs earlier in the day, and if I did things correctly, I wouldn't even be in danger.
Unfortunately, as I had discovered last night the teleport did not lend itself to stealth. Thus, I had to climb up to the roof of the store across the street from my target under my own power. Of course, with the super strength, durability, endurance, and regeneration, I barely noticed the strain. It was almost a slap in the face that all of my morning runs had amounted to nothing, but I was happy to grasp any silver-lined straws that I could get my hands on.
"I hate this stealthy shit," Pyro complained, as she had been doing all night. "Just set it all on fire and be done with it!"
Instead of offering a retort, I focused on creeping across the roof, crouched down so that I wouldn't inadvertently give away my position. In reality, I didn't need to be this close — my range was almost four blocks — but I didn't want to teleport in blind if the raid went sideways. More importantly, while the Butchers howled for blood in my head, they were my powers now and I was going to do things the way I wanted.
"You all underestimate good strategy," Stratego said with a sagely tone. "You won't be disappointed once the last domino falls."
"So you keep saying," Knockout whined. "It's getting old, some of us want to jump into the action already!"
"If you punch one of them, maybe he'll shut up," Chisel added. I rolled my eyes and pushed them all aside so I could focus on my plan.
I knew from the beginning that getting the Butchers' help with my heroic activities was going to include a great deal of dismissing less-than-heroic suggestions. The only way that this was going to work was if I could rein all of those impulses in, demonstrating that I had restraint and strategy to go with the powers instead of violence, shows of force, and more violence.
I could do this, collective metaphorical eye-rolling in my head or no.
In the store, my bugs were providing me with an excellent real-time mental image of the layout, the thugs, and where the goods were located. They were listening, too, giving me information on who was talking or the general noise level even if I couldn't make out individual words.
Stratego's giggles were an ominous rumble in my head.
Another advantage I had was that the Protectorate hadn't announced how Lung and Quarrel died, just that they did. I was sure their higher level reports contained a full dossier on me by this point, but the ground level grunts probably didn't know about my bugs yet.
"Could just grab one of the dumbasses and work them over a bit if you really want to find out what they know," Fester suggested with unrestrained glee. "Nothing makes a man sing quite like having his dick rot o—"
I slammed her back into the dark even as she cackled the whole way, but the memories she had shoved to the front of my mind lingered like the smell of rotting garbage. Several of the Butchers seemed to find particular enjoyment with dredging up their most depraved moments and showing me, though I had discovered that the worst memories were not always the insane violence.
No, the worst was knowing that my mother would have — and had — bought Fester a beer while they had both worked for Lustrum. My cursed inheritance had even stuck its slimy tentacles into my memories of Mom, who had apparently been bi and rather adventurous in her youth. Even though I desperately wanted to hear her voice, it wasn't worth… everything else.
"We actually tried to talk Fester into tracking Annette down after she inherited," Sanguine said in a horribly fake seductive tone, so I slammed him down alongside her.
Next one to suggest anything involving my mother gets to spend a week in the dark!
Miracles of miracles, they all dropped the subject.
"Can we just get this over with already?" Marauder complained, and while I was loath to let him order me around, he had a point.
So, I reached out to the swarm I had been collecting in the walls of the old building and had it descend on the people inside. Shouts of alarm turned into screams of pain and horror almost immediately, despite the fact that I was being very careful to keep my bugs from actually injecting their venom when they bit the gangsters. The bites and stings were certainly painful enough that I felt no need to risk another Quarrel situation when I only had three epipens on me.
Of the twenty six men and three women working in the now un-safehouse, ten of them simply collapsed to the ground and tried to shield themselves from the swarm. The rest panicked, followed by most of them running into the silk triplines I had set up in the hallway and doors. Eight of the gangsters managed to escape by trampling their friends that had discovered those triplines, and my swarm gave a half-hearted attempt to follow them.
I watched from my rooftop as black bands of bugs chased the men before dispersing back into the environment. Those gangsters that remained of the formerly mobile were curled into the fetal position, so I covered them with my swarm to remind them I was there even as my spiders began to bind them up.
"Was… was it really that easy?" Butcher, of all the voices, asked. "Christ kid, you just took out an entire safehouse in seconds, without even lifting a fucking finger!"
"Holy fuck…" Marauder muttered. "That was fucking beautiful."
I ignored the chatter in my head about how terrifying and beautiful my power was as I set the rest of my swarm to work. My spiders were using silk to bind the individual bills while my fliers worked together to ferry the money outside. My bugs deposited the cash into the duffel bag next to me, and I was astounded how quickly it was adding up. I was glad I listened when the chorus said I'd need that second bag.
Five minutes later I'd emptied the building of any cash I could find and decided it was time to get down there and clean up. My first move was to carve myself an entrance using Chisel's power on the locked door, then I gathered up the bound gang members and left them in a pile on the front steps. I did another pass through the building to make sure everything was clear before preparing to destroy the drug stash.
"Hey wait a second, I know how you feel about this stuff, but that's a lot of money to toss away," Sanguine tried.
I don't care. You aren't going to talk me into reselling this shit, and I'm not using it either.
Pyromaniac's explosive teleport wasn't hot enough to set most stuff on fire, but using it point-blank next to a stack of powder wrapped in plastic was enough to set the stash ablaze. Of course, the flaw in my plan was made evident when the fires started to spread almost instantly.
"HAHAHAHA! YES! BURN!" Pyromaniac cackled.
My first instinct was to call the fire department, which garnered annoyed grumbling from the Butchers. They never cared about collateral damage, but I had to be better than them. An almost subconscious search of my costume yielded no cell phone with which to call the authorities, a fact that was made all the more obvious by the Butchers laughing at me.
"Seriously, what kid doesn't have a cell phone these days?" Marauder sneered.
"Your former adversaries will likely possess one," Damascian pointed out. "And it will give you the chance to save them from imminent immolation."
A convenient bug let me teleport into the middle of the street, only to discover that the webbed-up ABB goons were in the process of being freed by reinforcements, all of whom had knives and looked like they would rather be anywhere else. My swarm was mostly depleted — note to self, bring more offensive bugs in the future — so I switched to one of my much less flashy and more pedestrian ways to stop crime.
That is to say, I punched them.
Following instincts that I definitely had never developed, I practically launched myself towards the cluster of gang members. My right hook caught the first target directly in the ribs, and I nearly tripped in horror when he was sent flying.
"Kay! Ohh!" Knockout bellowed.
"More like FATALITY!" Marauder answered.
Right, I had a half dozen Brute packages mixed in with the rest of my powers. I could probably kill a man with a well placed flick of my pinky finger if I really wanted to; a memory of Knockout doing just that quietly slipped into mind. Suddenly I felt sick — I'd almost certainly just killed someone by accident because of this damn inheritance.
"Oh boo hoo, not like it would be the first time for you," Quarrel mocked. "Won't be the last time you kill someone either. Grow up, you snivelling baby."
"Just throw the corpse into the fire. They'll never know!" Pyromaniac said with a wink.
Their jeers were bad, but it was Chisel's calm commentary that sent chills down my spine. "Taylor, you won't be able to keep this charade going for much longer, not if you keep making mistakes like that. The heroes will never forgive you."
I pushed them all aside as I tried to focus on the fight and being nonlethal. I delivered a weak kick to a leg, hoping that would be enough to put them down without grievous injury, but the sound of snapping bones told me that wasn't happening. Turning to the three remaining men, I let out a sigh and hit them with Butcher's pain projection. They screamed in agony, but such a limited burst shouldn't cause any long term damage. At least I hoped it didn't.
Looking at the aftermath of my efforts, I let out a weary sigh and hurried over to the man I'd first punched. He was still alive, but in bad shape. Sanguine's power practically leapt to my fingers when I touched his bloody form, revealing just how much damage I had caused with my negligence.
He was, politely, fucked up pretty bad.
However, he would probably survive if the paramedics got here soon, so I quickly rifled through the pockets of the pain-blasted goons and found a cell phone. I called 911 and let them know about the burning building and injured gang members — which reminded me to move the stack of goons away from said burning building — before teleporting back up to the roof where I had stashed the money.
As I hoisted the duffle bags of cash, it occurred to me that tonight was still arguably better than my first night out.