Snake 5.3

January 19, 2011, Brockton Bay, 12:21 AM

Taylor's Administration Sensing/Control finally had another upgrade, they were slowing down as the levels were rising. She could sense and control sounds from her thralls, this was big. She could basically hear throughout her range, and her swarm clone could speak in a manner that was only a thousand times creepier than her buzzy phone voice.

We'd also spent some time levelling up Pharmacology and trying different combinations of tranquilizers and paralytics that could be delivered by her wasps. We tried coating/dipping the stingers in certain chemicals, didn't work too well. Fleshcrafting their venom glands to contain (not secrete, biology skill still wasn't that good) those chemicals worked somewhat, it still delivered a miniscule dosage, but then that meant she could measure out her dosage properly.

A number of paralytics, anaesthetics and their derivatives were tried, we studied the effects on mooks in IDs (I still stopped spying whenever Calvert would go into the PRT building). Sadly these special tranq bugs lost their payload after one sting, we still made a few hundred of them and stored them in our inventories. We'd probably get better options if Amy agreed to help us.

For regular takedowns, we discovered that simple pain bugs worked the best. Taylor had found some Tarantula Hawk Wasps, no Bullet Ants yet.

Calvert was still keeping up with his goody two-shoes routine, but I'd already had the chance to confirm one thing, I'd taken a scan of him while he was sleeping. Studying that, he had a superposed/entangled brain in the same mechanism as Taylor's multitasking, but while Taylor had thousands, he had exactly two superpositions. That led much credence to the twin timeline theory.

That night, Taylor had decided to use her swarm avatar for the first time. We were running on rooftops, almost at the end of our patrol route. We'd made sure to keep the visibility of Swarm and maker sufficiently non-correlated and random. Till date her takedowns mostly had been to incapacitate the perps with pain bugs and keeping a swarm around them which actively discouraged running away - which dispersed once the police were nearby. She often used firefly alphabets to communicate with the victims before she got the audio upgrade.

Taylor stopped moving , "Lone female, being followed by three goons." She sent me a location, only a street away. I boosted and jumped to a nearby rooftop when she messaged me that she was taking it. That was an ABB heavy area adjacent to Empire territory. And as expected, the lady was white, quite provocatively dressed, while the goons following her were Asians.

I did my usual observe pass. Huh, guess what? The woman was an Empire plant, probably hoping to stir up trouble so that E88 could start a bid to take over this area. She apparently trusted the Empire a lot. I relayed the message to Taylor. She confirmed that there were another 4 guys hanging about two streets over. She asked me to confirm, I boosted and flew to her marked location, keeping low and out of sight. I spotted the guys, yep, E88 gangers, focused on a phone. These guys were ready to put a match to this powder-keg of a location. I let Taylor know and also added that it was her show now, as my considerable leg-breaking skills were not the right solution for this one.

She sent me a message, 'Time to nip this in the bud. I'm going to give these guys a piece of my mind.' and also sent a live feed of her mental mini-map focused on the woman baiting the ABB. I sat back to watch the show.

The 3 ABB goons were trying their best to surreptitiously flank and surround the bait woman, who was doing her best to pretend to be oblivious. The goons started drawing closer, the woman was clutching her phone inside her pocket nervously. The moment one of the thugs grabbed her shoulder, the fun started.

A number of things happened simultaneously, the woman pretended to startle while pressing a button on her phone. The pretense turned real in a moment as a Swarm Avatar assembled in front of them, while simultaneously assembling in front of the E88 gangers too - whose phone had just started to ring.

The reactions were brilliant:

E88 mook #1 was the first to notice, he gaped and pointed.

E88 mook #2 and #3 looked at the still forming, glowy, blue and green, eight-eyed, swirling, floating, bug-apparition that was the Swarm Avatar, they promptly took off running, screaming their heads off.

E88 mook #4 was too busy checking the phone, he only noticed when he heard the screams. E88 mook #1 had begun moving in the direction #2 and #3, he was elegantly backpedalling though instead of breaking into an outright run, he was also muttering 'Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!' rapidly instead of screaming, very classy.

By the time E88 mook #4 did notice, the Swarm avatar had raised her hand in an accusatory manner at him, her 8 eyes arranged in a clearly angry glare, while fireflies of her cape and hair were moving in a flame like aura (I'd shown Taylor clips of Super Saiyans and Aleph Disney's Hades' hair to explain the effect to her. She'd made it work with fireflies pretty accurately). Mook #4 wanted to backpedal, but stumbled and fell on his arse. He opened his mouth to say something, but Swarm interrupted him in her buzzy creepy voice, "You! Never try this again." The mook started trying to shake his head and nod simultaneously, then yelped as if stung by a bee, because he was, I guessed.

By now, mooks #1, #2 and #3 had all fallen down and rolling on the ground, still screaming, but this time presumably due to being stung. Taylor was using common harmless wasps, she was being nice.

Meanwhile, two roads away, the ABB guys' reaction to their Swarm Avatar was far more unanimous, ABB Mook #1 was a native English speaker, he just gave the forming mass of bugs one look, said "OhShiiii..." and ran, the other two joined him, shouting "他媽的! 跑!跑!" and "妖怪!" respectively. While the bait lady just kept shrieking at an unholy pitch.

Taylor repeated her finger pointing glare and speech for the bait woman when she paused her shriek to take a breath. She gave the mooks and the woman a few cursory wasp stings and just let them all run away afterwards. I got a somewhat disappointed 'Let's go' message with a mental sigh from Taylor, she probably had more to say to them. I messaged her back, 'Yeah, you might want to turn down the intimidation a notch or twenty if you wanted to give a longer speech...' I didn't mention that if I were in their place, I'd probably have shat my pants just watching that display.


January 19, 2011, Brockton Bay, 2:54 PM

Calvert still hadn't put on his costume or visited his lair yet. He sure was one paranoid SOB. He had a changing password that he called his lieutenant/s with twice daily, I was sure it was some kind of failsafe. I was also sure if I gave Lisa the 9 passwords I'd collected, she'd figure out the pattern and intervals in a jiffy. Other than that there were also two generic anonymous portals where he'd go and input a code, every day for one and the other one I figured once a week - more failsafes and deadman switches. They were shady, heavily rerouted and nigh unhackable, but none of these were yet directly linked to his villain id.

I had checked his home PC earlier only to find nothing incriminating, I suspected his setup was either in his base or, more probably, online - I was proven right. That afternoon was the first I caught him logging on to his Coil accounts from his home PC. His whole setup was in the cloud, tinkertech secure server. Well, if I had one, I certainly couldn't blame him for having one.

His authentication into the server was a 3 step process, a hardware dongle plugged into whichever machine he was accessing the server from, a regular password, and a one-time security code that he got as a text in his cellphone. I'd already scanned his cellphone. I'd scan the dongle later that night. The password Lisa had already told me. But my mana construct resolution was still at around 100nm, I'd need to grind it more before I could duplicate the dongle.

I kept spying on him, trying to glean whatever I could from his screen. He was planning on going to Boston for a couple of days, his excuse was a meeting with the Boston PRT director for some consulting. I found out from his villain account screen that he'd set up a meeting with Accord, another cape I somewhat respected (sans his legendary OCD). Honestly, if Coil wasn't such a teenager kidnapping scumbag, I'd actually have liked him quite much.

Aveek/I was at the Hebert's, Danny had just driven us back from the GED testing centre. We answered the tests such that we'd get impressive, but not stupendous results, for obvious reasons. We were sitting at their living room, Taylor brought out 3 steaming cups of Chrysanthemum Tea from her inventory. I just finished explaining Coil's security protocols.

Taylor came up with the solution within moments, "well, it's not paranoia when we're really after him. Duplicate his dongle as soon as you can, meanwhile, I'll be writing a backdoor app for his phone for you to install. Duplicating it would just create a network conflict and alert him. Send me his phone's specs, firmware and antivirus details." She'd been really enthusiastic about coding apps after making the voice masking one.

I nodded, "I'll have it sent to you by tonight, let me check if I can also give a copy of his phone's flash memory to you." I still hadn't tried reading or copying electronic data from scans into machines, time for some more research. "I think I would lay off patrols tonight. Research."

Taylor shrugged, "More for me. Not like I can't program while patrolling. I already have an IDE in my phone. It'd be fun, never coded a proper rootkit before. I've been experimenting with some basic hacks and viruses, it's interesting how..."

Danny interjected with a sigh, "I don't know whether to be proud of how smart my daughter is or to be worried that she's so enthusiastic about computer viruses."