* PRT HQ *
"Shadow Stalker has lost her power. She is currently undergoing an extensive medical exam to try and determine how this happened, if it is temporary or permanent."
Emily Piggot nodded. "Keep me apprised. She's on console duty for now. Investigate that school of hers. Investigate everything, there may be someone she encountered there. There's rumors about Victor of the E88 being able to steal skills. That visiting marksman who suddenly didn't even know how to maintain a rifle with pictures of Victor being in the neighborhood. That time Miss Militia was suddenly unable to operate a motorcycle when responding to an E88 attack, though she eventually regained that ability. It may be something like that."
Armsmaster nodded. "The medical exam is very thorough and may be done sometime late tomorrow. We'll know more then."
* Hebert Household *
As she was currently a little blue blob. Well, maybe a seventy-five pound blob. Taylor Hebert was examining her house from a completely different viewpoint.
Homework was a breeze. She'd kicked that stuff out faster than normal because she could just literally eat a bunch of paper and then spit out finished homework. Boom, put that in the Done column with slime-powers for the win!
She had come up with sixteen plans. She had rejected sixteen plans. Dealing with her father was going to be a LOT more difficult. Maybe do something wild and put him on the back foot to begin with?
She put on an aleph movie. The Incredibles. Huh. What if she...
"Hey, Great Sage, what if I'm in human form and I stretch my arm?"
[Working. Human form would have to be in minimal amount of mimicry and mass limitations would apply.]
"Let's try it out," suggested Taylor. "Go go Elasti-girl powers!"
(whip! grab!)
"Okay, this has possibilities," said Taylor as she reached halfway across the room to the cabinet with the cooking supplies. "I'm going to practice while I make dinner."
[Acknowledged. Research continues.]
* PRT HQ *
"WHAT'S THAT SMELL?!"
"Shadow Stalker has had to drink two gallons of Go-Lytely. Currently she's on the toilet imitating a space shuttle." Clockblocker said through a gas mask.
Vista quickly opened a vent, then shrank the distance between the vent opening and the air at sea three miles away. Once that was done, she could ask the obvious questions. "What is 'go lightly' and why did she have to do that here?"
"I asked myself," admitted Clockblocker through his gas mask. "Go-Lytely is apparently something they call 'bowel prep solution' - it causes everything inside someone's digestive tract to get in a hurry to leave the body. They do it because they're going to do stuff like look up someone's body to see if there's something that shouldn't be in there."
"Again. Why is she doing that here?!" asked Vista.
"Because when she understood what was going to happen she didn't want to go home and inflict this on her family. Apparently we're fair targets," said Clockblocker.
"She wasn't on my Christmas list before, and this certainly isn't going to change that," declared Vista.
A sound, as if a mudslide was occurring in the next room, and fresh wave of smell emanated from the Ward room toilet.
Vista considered. "I can leave. You're on console duty. I'm leaving."
"I got one of the troopers to bring me a gas mask in return for permanent no-prank status," said Clockblocker. "Have fun."
* Hebert Household *
Danny Hebert could tell what was going on before he opened the door. Oregano, bay leaf, and other smells spoke of spaghetti sauce on the stove.
It threatened to bring up old memories and another dip into further depression, so he just went inside and tried to mumble some greeting towards his daughter.
Danny stopped as soon as he saw Taylor reach out to grab a cup out of the cupboard from six feet away. Her arm had thinned and lengthened until she had the cup and then smoothly shrank until it was a more normal size.
"Wha?" managed Danny Hebert.
"Hi Dad. You might want to take a seat. A lot happened today."
Danny Hebert had a feeling that this was understating things quite a lot.
"So... how to put this," said Taylor in a voice that sounded a little off. "Where to start?"
"At the beginning?" tried Danny as he took a seat and found Taylor's arm stretching out to put the cup on the table.
"Well, about 13.4 billion years ago, there was this Big Bang..." Taylor stopped and shrugged a little. "Sorry, humor when dealing with bad situations. Anyway, about a year and a half ago, I came back from camp and Emma had changed."
Danny listened. At one point the cup of tea was replaced with a beer. At another point he was wishing that the whiskey was not locked away or that Taylor would just go ahead and get to the point where she was explaining why she was imitating Stretch Armstrong.
He'd also gone from the fog of depression to the burning rage of denied vengeance to the cold clarity of planning out a vengeance that Hades himself would give him a nod of approval.
His daughter had died at the hands of these three with the tacit approval of the school administration. He had a clear goal before him.
Taylor had taken the opportunity to shift her appearance so that she still looked like Taylor, but as a Taylor that was sculpted entirely of blue crystal.
"So I can go with several possibilities here," said blue Taylor. "Keeping the whole 'I died and reincarnated' thing off the table because that could panic people. Elasti-girl is one, obviously. Stretching and manipulating my shape. I could go with spider powers like that old cartoon from the '60s they run every so often late night. My 360 vision through radar sense, clinging to walls, spider thread would do that. I could even do animal form shifting to be Animal Girl, protector of the planet!"
"Uh huh," said Danny, mostly thinking about torture of several individuals. Maybe the little bit of string and a small fruit method. Hard to go wrong with the classics.
"I'm more or less immortal, I think," said Taylor. "With regeneration and a lack of specific organs, as long as part of me survives I'll eventually regain full mass again."
"That's nice," said Danny. The city had those snowplows, a little modification and nailing someone to the street.
"I... what?" asked Taylor.
"What what?" asked Danny.
"Great Sage has some initial analysis she's sharing," said Taylor. "Apparently the weird tumor was actually two connected tumors. The extradimensional aspect was some kind of high-density transmission kind of like a cable connection elsewhere. Feeder lines running to other sections of the brain. So... Sophia Hess might not have started out as much of a bitch as she was. Weird."
"The Great Sage thing is your Thinker power?" asked Danny, not entirely sure what all these things meant as this HAD been quite an info-drop and it HAD happened when he was tired from a full day of trying to get workers jobs.
"Something like that," said Taylor. "Oh, I need to show you the other forms I can do. Here's Spider!"
(BOMF!)
"That... is pretty horrifying," summed up Danny on seeing a spider the size a coffee table.
(BOMF!) Back to a blue squishy ball. "And here's snake!" (BOMF!)
"That is also pretty horrifying," commented Danny as he was now facing about nine feet of snake with obvious venom fangs.
(BOMF!) "Worked out a bird form." (BOMF!)
"You can fly like that?" asked Danny.
"That will probably require a lot of work," admitted Taylor. "Birds have instincts on how to do it. I don't."
"So, more falling than flying?" asked Danny.
"Yeah, I seem to have some hard limits on apparent mass," summed up Taylor. "I can go for breadbox to giant serpent, trading mass from storage. I'll need more eventually. Maybe eat a few lizards and see if I can go dinosaur."
"Didn't that Horner guy in the papers say they were more related to birds?" asked Danny.
"Yeah, so maybe some different birds," admitted Taylor. "I want to try getting some fish tomorrow. Go slide into the ocean and see what I can eat. Maybe I could do a Loch Ness Monster impression - that'd bring in some tourist money."
"One thing at a time, Taylor. One thing at a time."
* PRT ENE HQ *
"Her Corona Pollentia and Gemma are both gone?" asked Director Piggot. "Nothing else. No other damage. Just gone."
"That's right, biopsy is still ongoing," said Armsmaster. "Whatever happened to her completely removed the growths and all indication of parahuman abilities. Other than that, all results of her physical are showing results within a normal range."
"That's concerning," said Director Piggot. "Someone or something that can remove parahuman abilities, apparently permanently? On the one hand, it could make an alternative to the Birdcage if we could get it."
"There would be riots from various parahumans at the possibility of the PRT being able to remove powers," said Armsmaster.
"You think it might be tinkertech?" asked Director Piggot.
"It is possible," admitted Armsmaster. "If so it would have to be either stationary and disguised or small enough to be hidden. Due to the complexity of such a device, I would think it the former as the more likely."
"We're already investigating Winslow, so we'll alert the search teams for possible tinkertech mechanisms," said Director Piggot. "On that note, they've already uncovered something very worrying about Stalker's activities at school."
* Medhall, 7th Floor Corner Office *
Krieg looked over the blurry photographs they'd gotten of the Docks area. What WAS that thing?
The first thing looked like a blue blob, looking like a deflated blue beach-ball, except it was throwing out a line and then pulling that line into itself rapidly. Tinkertech robot? Bio-tinker stuff? Freaking aliens? No, probably not that last. Maybe a Case 53 of some kind.
Rune had spotted it, apparently one of those times she'd been sunning herself out on a rooftop, and had been curious enough to look but not so incautious as to approach. Then he'd gotten two more badly shot pictures of the thing, also one where the sympathizer had apparently not toggled the camera and gotten a selfie of the top quarter of their face.
The second picture showed the blob had two tentacles, one of which had the familiar line it was reeling in. The third was a woman made of blue goo. Whatever it was, it was trying to imitate a human. Or was human originally and was trying to regain that form.
Still, whether it was a new parahuman Case 53 or a wet tinker's minion or a very weird robot of some kind - it was worth investigating.
Victor would be the best fit for the job, except he had other work that was more important at the moment. Othala could be subtle but she wasn't much on fieldwork. The twins? Nah, getting them away from Max or out in the field for long wasn't happening. Rune? No, hardly any experience and she could be unreliable. Cricket? No, she'd be even worse than Hookwolf. Besides she was busy with the organization on that shipment of non-arms military equipment. Same with Alabaster. The only one not showing up as busy was...
Oh hell. Not him.
On the one hand, Hookwolf could handle intimidation and strongarm tactics. On the other hand, subtle information gathering was completely outside his wheelhouse.
Maybe just have Klauss or Schmidt do the job and Hookwolf just be ready to back the normals up if things got problematic? Klauss looked like a butterball but was a True Believer, and had a vicious streak a mile wide. Schmidt was completely mercenary, the only thing he believed in was a steady paycheck. Klauss was good at intel gathering. Schmidt was good at violence.
Investigation. Possibly eliminating the monster or at least determining what it was.
Of course, it was possible that it WAS a Case 53 and they'd originally started out as the right sort of person but was mutated by whatever made the Case 53s to begin with. Since nobody knew what or who did that sort of thing - actually getting an answer there was unlikely.
