Snake 5.2
January 15, 2011, Brockton Bay, 7:21 PM
It'd been more than 24 hours that I'd been tailing Calvert. Disappointingly, apart from a few coded phone calls and some anomalous emotions, he'd not done any un-Calvertlike activities. That was alright though, this was going to be a long stakeout, possibly weeks long.
Taylor and Aveek/I were sitting and chatting in our living room. She was showing me different looks for her Swarm avatar and I was critiquing them based on awesomeness and intimidation factor. She'd found a lot of mannequins in the storeroom of a clothing store a few blocks away and had picked up a lot of different body shapes by mapping them. The one she was currently partial to was a junoesque figure, much more imposing than her slender frame. I noted the difference and suggested she magnify it, push the height to around 7 feet and make everything else proportionally massive.
We were waiting for Lisa who arrived shortly. After Taylor confirmed that the tailing van had passed by and was moving away, Lisa spoke:
"So you guys met Grue's sister."
"Huh?" I didn't have context.
Taylor quirked an eyebrow, "Aisha?" Oh, I see.
Lisa nodded, then turned to me with a mock pout, "How come she got to see the Maker costume before me?"
I chuckled, "Because it's not your time to be rescued yet."
She huffed, "Fine, I better get to see it when it's my turn to play the damsel. By the way, you've managed to both impress and scare Aisha, she knows about the Undersiders, but hasn't yet tried to join up. Anyway, you ready to go?"
Taylor interjected, "Good for her. Now before you lovebirds leave for your date, Lisa, give me some input on my cape persona?" The huge bug clone assembled in front of her, Taylor had peppered it with blue ghost fireflies, making it look ethereal.
Lisa gaped and took a step back, "Whoa! Damn girl! That's ridiculously awesome and scary!" Taylor looked very smug.
Lisa gave it a once over and continued, "Why don't you add some more eyes to keep up with the bug theme? And add a cape, and do the eyes and cape in a different colour, and oh, a dress of..." Well, I did understand very well when a conversation went above my pay grade. I gracefully butted out.
By the time they were finished, the Swarm avatar had taken another level in badass, I observed it:
Queen of Escalation
Swarm
Lvl. 32 Parahuman Projection
STR - 2
VIT - 73
DEX - 27
INT - 59
WIS - 22
CHA - 23
Wow, that was something. Anyway, there were shadier matters afoot, I turned to Lisa, "You guys are so awesome. Alright! Lisa, for my next trick, I implore you close your eyes and turn on your power full blast."
Lisa nodded, took a deep breath and closed her eyes, "Hit me."
I rattled off the key pieces of the puzzle, "Thomas Calvert, Coil, Two Headed Snake, Evil Mastermind, physically baseline human, power is called Corcognition, Paranoid Sociopath, Percieved Threat Level extremely high."
Lisa kept nodding for a while even after I was done. Then she took another shuddering breath and opened her eyes, "That bastard." She was radiating contempt, disgust and realization.
Taylor made a go ahead motion, Lisa continued, "Power lets him experience exactly two timelines of existence, in which different things can happen based on the choices he makes. When he closes one timeline, the events in it never happened, but he has the memory and information gleaned through it. The core of his power is still a precog, but he doesn't know it. Because he experiences things as they happen. He can take any ridiculous risk, and if it backfires he can just close the timeline and it never happened. He uses this to feed his sociopathic urges, to the extent of torturing and killing people just to get information, or even quell his emotions."
She took another deep breath, I was going to ask something but as usual she pre-empted me, "More than 90% confidence in that assessment. However, if you have means to verify before we strike, go for it. Much lower confidence in how exactly it interacts with your power. Also, possibly only one of his timelines is real, the other precog simulated. The threat level thing I believe is mostly due to the huge number of contingencies and deadman switches he's got set up - low confidence on these, best to verify."
I nodded, "I'll make sure I verify as many of these as possible by the time you make the Casino hit. Anything else?"
She shook her head, "Nothing else for now. This clears up a lot of things, but even demystified, his power makes him one slippery asshole. Barring Maker's power interactions, he can and will weasel away from any possible threat and then order a hit from a distance."
Taylor shrugged, "I can think of a few ways to blindside him."
I interjected, "You possibly can, do keep thinking, but we make concrete plans only once we have confirmations on most of these factoids. And the contingencies and deadman switches would need to be found out and dealt with too."
Taylor reluctantly agreed on that, I could tell she was itching for some action. Well, so was I, and I had plans to scratch said itch.
January 16, 2011, Brockton Bay, 1:02 AM
The date had gone well, I'd borrowed dada's bike. The bugged car was too restricting to talk freely. We still had a tail throughout, but less intrusive than the first time.
Once I'd dropped Lisa off, I'd gone home, and played chess with Taylor - my chessmen were mana constructs and hers were made of bugs. Once Maker/I had confirmed that Calvert had gone to bed for the night, I swapped primaries and avatars with the spying body, Taylor equipped her costume, and we were ready for our first night to get some real XP.
We couldn't use an ID to move out, because one was still active for the spying body (it didn't cost to maintain, just create and collapse). So I just unequipped the glowy construct parts of my armor, we went out of the backdoor once Taylor confirmed there were no eyes on us. We parkoured, sticking mostly to rooftops till we were a good few kilometres from home and at the starting point of our patrol route.
Given Taylor's already massive range, we'd devised a grid pattern which swept her range over most of the unclaimed zones in the docks area, and did a double layer coverage of the known gang hotspots - information gained from dada.
The first thing we encountered was a domestic violence scenario, a man was beating up a barely teen girl, possibly his daughter - in a house in the unclaimed zone. Taylor bugged the man with bees and wasps till he took cover in a different room while herding the girl with butterflies and moths to go out of the house and wait at the gate. All of these while calling the police.
I'd already gleaned enough information from scanning my glasses and phone, combined with my tech and programming skills, to be able to make mostly untraceable calls by hacking a burner phone's firmware. We'd both equipped ourselves with hacked burners and had spares in our inventories. She'd also modified an open source app which masked our voices, hers sounding buzzy and mine sounding deeper and hollower over the phone, it was good work. We waited till Taylor confirmed that the police were on their way and moved on. Just out of that we got the same XP that we'd get subduing 3 high level construct-mooks.
The next one was in one of the gang hotspots, Empire controlled area to be precise. 5 Empire thugs had rounded up on two black guys and just started beating them up. They were about 800 metres away, I took it up, went full boost and arrived in about 15 seconds. I'd lately gotten the hang of boosting part of the contact surface while running/parkouring, or else boosted runs left a nasty trail of broken concrete and twisted metal.
We'd already discussed the response to these incidents, no nice taser takedowns for them. I sent off the police call while running. The moment I was in line of sight I shot off observes, the victims were brothers, recently moved in, they didn't really know this was an Empire hotspot. And the thugs were just mid level goons with knives, only one had a gun.
Oh well, I arrived at the scene, the next 5 seconds went like clockwork - disarm thug, scan thug, break his legs (clean breaks of the tibia, would heal with moderate medical care but they'll not be walking before a few months at least), disarm the next one, scan, break his legs, disengage thug from victim, scan, break, disarm, scan, break, disengage, scan, break.
I produced zipties from the inventory, lined up the thugs with sitting their backs to the wall and tied them up. I kicked the dropped weapons into a rough pile, then turned to the victims - Noah and Jordan Smith, decent guys.
"Do note that this is an Empire hotspot. Please avoid walking through this area in the near future."
They were still in shock, gaping at what just happened, Noah got his composure back first, "We... We didn't know. We're new here. Y-You're from the protectorate?"
I nodded, "No, I'm Maker, independent tinker. You guys seem a bit beaten up, I have some tech that can heal it. Would you like me to?"
The younger brother, Jordan, blankly nodded, "yeah, okay, if you can."
I extruded a gadgety looking construct from my palm, "touch this, please", he did. I hit him with Scan, Heal, Cleanse, and Refresh in that order. Heal had gotten a lot of levelups with my recent study of the session with the Dallons, he was healed up fully, even a nascent tumour was healed. He was left gaping for a few seconds again, "Whoaaaa! I feel like I've just woken up and had a strong espresso shot! Thanks man!"
I nodded, the older brother held out his hand too. I applied the same set of skills on him, he also had Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, blue collar job I presumed. I let him know, "You'd want to check your computer usage posture, had an aching wrist lately?" He nodded again, "This does feel great, yes, and the wrist pain is gone, how'd you know?"
His brother interrupted, "Healing tech man, of course he'll know what's wrong with you."
I nodded again, Taylor had already messaged me, a BPPD patrol car had just veered towards us a few blocks away. The thugs were too delirious with pain to do anything other than moan. I asked them to wait for the police who're on their way. Then jumped to a nearby roof and left.
