"So…your power is survival?" Grue asked in disbelief.
The Undersiders had taken me from the scene ASAP when Armsmaster approached on his motorbike. I hadn't wanted to deal with him. We were inside their warehouse-turned-base now. Bitch had given me a wide berth and was sitting as far from me as she could and still be in the room. Must be feral instinct.
Tattletale was wary of me as well, but that likely came from her Thinker power. Regent was lazing around like he didn't give a shit. Grue…was leaning idly against the wall.
"Pretty much, yeah." I replied with a grimace, "I enter a kind of 'survival mode' when I sense danger, which came in handy on Yamatai…"
"Holy shit!" Regent interrupted me, "Your one of the survivors from the Endurance! Only, what, five of you survived?"
I flinched. "Yeah…it was…a cluster fuck of epic proportions."
"What happened?" Tattletale asked gently, "All we know was that there was an S-Rank Parahuman on the island…"
"Himiko, the Sun Queen." I said with a shiver, "She was a victim of the Simurgh from one of its early attacks back in 2005. She got sent back in time, but not before she Triggered twice."
"Fucking shitty bastards!" Regent cursed eloquently.
"But…how far back did she go?" Tattletale wondered.
"She was the first person to be called the Sun Queen during the Yayoi Period of Japan, so about 300 BCE." I answered, "That's over two-thousand years. Me and a couple of the others found her journals."
"How was she still alive then?" Grue asked, "It makes no sense."
I grimaced and sipped my tea. "It does if you take into account her powers. She had two really powerful abilities. The first was the ability to control the weather within her reach…which was most of the Philippine Sea. She could make it sunny, stormy, rainy or whatever she wanted without even breaking a sweat. She could even control it well enough to swat a seaplane out of the air or forcefully crash the Endurance onto the rocks."
"Shit! That's….that has to be one of the most powerful Parahuman abilities on the planet!" Grue cursed.
"Uh huh. So was her second power." I said grimly, "She could transfer her mind from one body to another, retaining her memories and powers as well."
All of the Undersiders blanched at that.
"It continued throughout the years, birthing the legend of the Sun Queen Himiko as she possessed the bodies of one High Priestess after another." I told them, "Then, in the Kamakura period…that's 1185 to 1333 CE to you guys, the High Priestess refused to become her vessel and killed herself, trapping Himiko in her dead body and making the settlers flee the island. In her rage, she shrouded the island of Yamatai and the entire Dragon's Triangle in deadly storms to prevent anyone from leaving."
"Fuck." Tattletale whispered.
"Wind things on nine hundred years and the Endurance comes along." I smiled bitterly, "We get wrecked on the island, about eighty percent of the crew dies either in the wreck itself or in getting to the beach and Lara Croft and I get grabbed by this…insane man and strung up by our feet in a cave. I think he was planning to either sacrifice us or eat us, I don't know which."
"God…!" Tattletale whispered, her power letting her see a thousand details I didn't mention.
"It's such a cluster fuck after that." I continued, "We weren't the only people on the island; there was a group calling themselves the Solarii Brotherhood, made up of men who had survived the wrecks. There were over two hundred of the bastards and they were all inhuman monsters who worshipped Himiko. Lara and I had to fight our way through them practically every step of the way. Lara triggered when some Russian bastard almost raped her and she had to kill him to survive and I Triggered when the leader of the Solarii, Father bloody Matthias, killed Conrad Roth, an old friend of my mother's family and Lara's last link to her parents."
"And you couldn't leave because of Himiko." Tattletale whispered, "And nobody would believe you or Lara that Himiko was behind it."
"You are shitting me!" Grue said in shock.
I shook my head. "Reyes refused to believe that a Parahuman outside of the Triumvirate could be so powerful. Jonah was being the peacemaker. Alex was trying to impress Lara and Whitman…that craven bastard was working with Matthias! He took Sam to him!"
"Who?" Regent asked.
"Samantha Nishimura…a lineal descendent of Himiko the Sun Queen." I said, "You see, Himiko could only use her transference power on individuals who either called Yamatai their home or a descendant of someone who did, so she wanted Sam. Lara was her best friend, so she was very much against it, as was I."
"Too right! Imagine what would happen if an insane millennia old Parahuman Simurgh victim got let loose on the world!" Regent said, face as pale as snow.
"Anyway," I said, deliberately showing irritation towards Regent, "The Solarii had fortified the entire island and had tamed the native wolves…if by 'tamed' you call beating, starving and torturing them until they attacked anyone but the Solarii 'tamed,' anyway."
"Bastards!" Bitch growled.
"Too right." I agreed, "So it was Lara and me armed with WWII era guns and a few other items against the entire Solarii Brotherhood…they didn't stand a chance. Then there were the Oni, the immortal members of Himiko's Stormguard Samurai legion. Those bastards took a lot to kill them.
"It all came to a head at the ritual altar, where Lara avenged Roth by killing Matthias and Sam Triggered as she resisted Himiko's possession attempt. Lara and I killed her together. Lara stabbed her through the heart and I stabbed her through the eye. Then we got out of there as Himiko finally died."
There was silence as I finished my story.
"So is the reason why Bitch is giving you space because she's sensing someone higher up on the food chain than she is?" Alec asked after a moment, earning him a snarl from Bitch.
"She can likely sense my willingness to kill her dogs if she sets them on me." I replied with a shrug, "When my survival mode activates, in ingrains actions necessary for my survival into my conscious psyche, so after a few instances of it being necessary, I can perform them without conscious thought. I wouldn't like having to do it, but if she did set them on me, my body would react as if they were trying to kill me."
"Can I ask about Lady Croft's powers?" Tattletale asked.
"Sure…she told me she's not bothered about people finding out.2 I replied with a snort, "She told Alexandria herself to 'piss off and not bother trying to recruit me, her or Sam,' so it can't hurt."
"She…she said that to Alexandria?!" Regent gaped.
"Lara's powers and mine are fairly similar. We both have a 'Survival Mode' where we do everything we can to survive, but hers is more powerful." I said musingly, "With mine, I just have my eyes to see with, but she says she can see things necessary or useful to her survival light up in her eyes. She also says she can see destinations light up with a pillar of light.
"I also have a 'path to victory' as I call it. I can see the next step of actions in a series to complete the objective of me and as many people as I can surviving. Lara's is more limited, but also more powerful there as well. She can see several steps ahead, but only for herself and Sam."
"Useful." Grue said with a nod.
"We also have a kind of Changer ability." I continued, "As well as hammerspace."
"Huh?" Regent said, and then jumped as a pile of weaponry appeared in front of me. Shotgun, Assault Rifle, Pistol, knife, longbow, ice pick…
"You have all of that?" Grue asked in amazement, "And the PRT didn't confiscate it?"
"Oh they did…I just took it back." I replied with a small smile, "Anything we put in our hammerspace is ours and we can retrieve it from as far away as two kilometres. Then comes the Changer thing."
"What do you Change into?" Grue asked.
I waved my hand and everything but the pistol vanished. Picking it up I said, "Our weapons."
"Like Miss Militia?" Tattletale asked.
"Nope; she makes energy that can transform into various firearms." I replied, "Lara and I need physical weapons to start off with, but we enforce changes on them. In different ways, of course."
"Different how?"
"Well…Lara started off on Yamatai with no weapons or anything. She quickly got her hands on a crude bow and a crude hand pickaxe. Once she Triggered, those weapons started to evolve, adding little bits and pieces to improve her chances of survival. Once she used the bow to take out about thirty Solarii, the bow evolved from a crude bow to a hunting longbow, with all the previous improvements still added. Her axe became a proper ice axe, her pistol became a better one, her WWII machine gun became a modern rifle and so on." I explained.
"Wow…so she's caught up with current modern technology…big wow." Regent drawled.
"When last I saw her, Lara's bow had a mass driver on it, sending an arrow through several sheets of solid steel." I replied simply, "The rifle now fires plasma rounds, same for the shotgun. The ice axe now has a monomolecular blade and point and the pistol has unlimited ammo."
"Holy shit!" Regent hissed.
"Sam's power is defensive in nature." I continue, "She has the ability to defend against any mental-based Parahuman power and redirect any physical ones away from her or anyone within a few meters of herself."
"And...you?" Tattletale asked.
"I call it 'Optimisation.'" I replied, "I can fully change my weapons forms and abilities depending upon the enemy I face. For example, the gun I used to knock Lung out…"
Concentrating for a moment, a blue light shined around my pistol and when it faded, a completely different weapon remained.
It was still vaguely pistol shaped, but the barrel was very much longer, like a Magnum. The slide was missing and had a pair of flashing lights on either side. It was also crimson red.
"This gun has the ability to fire a shot that forces a powerful regenerator to feel every cell dying as if it were a limb set alight with plasma…all at once. It is very, very painful and as you saw, made even Lung with his enormous pain threshold black out." I said.
"You made that on the spot especially for Lung." Tattletale stated.
"Yup. I'm going to delete it though." I replied, "I can only keep ten 'blueprints' for each weapon and regenerators aren't common enough to need this gun kept on hand in case they appear."
"What are your plans now?" Grue asked, "Are you going to join the Wards or New Wave? Your identity is hardly a secret."
This made me laugh bitterly again. "No, I just want to be left alone. Sadly, the ABB hasn't been cooperating with me. They put my dad, the Head of the Dockworker's Union, in hospital for refusing to bow to them. Oni Lee was the one who did it. I was actually looking for him, but ended up fighting Lung instead. He seemed kinda steamed that I wanted his underling rather than him."
"Lung has an ego the size of Leviathan." Tattletale put in dryly, "So what now? Are you planning on hunting Oni Lee yourself? That's not a good idea. His teleport/duplicate trick is very much not something to face alone."
"I think that if she took down someone on the same level as the Slaughterhouse Nine and Nilbog, she can handle Oni Lee, Tats." Regent remarked.
The blond Cape threw him a hard look, making him subside somewhat.
"Who is looking after you with your father in the hospital?" Tattletale asked.
"I'm looking after myself. The ABB trashed my house and it's a crime scene, but I make do sleeping in Dad's office in the Dockworker's Union building." I shrugged, "I'm home-schooled now, ever since I broke some girl's nose for trying to be smart with me…Sophia Hess, I think her name was called. It's all very easy for me without having to consciously hold my survival mode down when in a large crowd of people."
"I know the feeling. My powers need to be consciously restrained as well." The purple and black clad Cape said with feeling. I shared a look of understanding with her.
"You can stay here if you want." Grue offered, "We seriously owe you a solid for taking Lung down before he could kill us."
"NO!" Bitch yowled, "She'll kill my dogs! No! I'm pack, my dogs are pack! Not her!"
"Bitch, look at me." I said softly. The canine Cape reluctantly met my gaze.
"I will not so much as touch your dogs if you do not want me to." I informed her gently, "The only way they would die is if you ordered them to attack me. It would be involuntary on my part as my Survival Mode activated, but that is the only way you would have me attacking your dogs."
After a moment, the dog mistress snorted and looked away. "Fine. Leave my dogs alone and I'll leave you alone."
"Deal." I said and made the pistol vanish back into my hammerspace.
"So then, now that the drama is over…what's for dinner?" Regent asked lazily.
So yeah…this isn't one of my better efforts. I realise that Tomb Raider!Lara has been done before, at least twice to my knowledge, but I wanted to try my hand at it. Haven't thought of a name for her other than the generic 'Survivor.'
Thinker: 9 (Can enter a 'Survival Mode' whereby the overwhelming priority is the preservation of herself and those she cares about. Enough repletion against specific foes will ingrain combat habits that her body will follow through on instinctively. Can see a 'path to victory', detailing what she must do to survive up to half an hour in advance. Has exceptional special awareness.)
Brute: 2 (Able to tank blows that ought to deal serious damage to her. Stronger than a fully grown man. Is immune to pain while Survival Mode is active.)
Mover: 2 (Athletic on the level of an Olympic athlete and can move silently enough to stalk deer without startling it.)
Changer: 5 (Able to freely change any weapon that she is familiar with to adapt to the situation at hand. The act is automatic, although she can influence it to be non-lethal. A maximum of ten changes per weapon can be stored for immediate deployment. New changes can be made but must be either erased or replace an existing blueprint within a day of creation.)
Shaker: 3 (Able to store an unknown number and size of weaponry and other objects in a pocket dimension only accessible to Taylor. She is able to retrieve them from a maximum range of two kilometres, but it leaves her exhausted to do so.)