Drawn to Win

Tattletale choked as Lung lifted her up, scaly hand around her neck. She scrabbled at it, trying futilely to loosen his grip on her. It was hopeless though.

'Fucking Coil!' she shrieked in her head, 'He's not helping! Whatever the fuck his power is, he's not using it to help us!'

The Thinker knew that the snake-themed villain only cared about himself and his goals, but when she had spoken to him just a few hours ago, she had gotten the impression that she and the Undersiders were a necessary cog in order to bring those plans to fruition. What had changed?

"Tats!" Grue shouted in alarm. He and the others were barely able to stand thanks to Lung's single-minded pursuit of them across most of the Docks area, burning and clawing at them all the while.

"You robbed my casino." Lung growled, still human enough not to have his words distorted by his transformation, "For that, your lives are forfeit."

Before he could make good on his threat, in Tattletale's case at least, a voice shouted from the side.

"Inscribed in the Book of Thoth, I call out your name and summon you to the world to do my bidding!" the voice (female, teenager, desperate, Tattletale's power chimed in helpfully) shouted, "Come forth, Guardian of the Gates of Hades, Cerberus!"

In a flash, a three-headed dog the size of the trailer of an eighteen wheeler appeared from nowhere. The three heads locked onto Lung and it roared a challenge at the Dragon of Kyushu.

"What. The. Fuck?" Regent gasped.

Lung dropped Tattletale and turned to face the new foe. He roared a challenge back at the Gate Guardian of the Underworld and charged at it. The three-headed dog roared and counter-charged the Dragon and bit into his scaly hide with two heads, while the third bit deep into his left arm.

"Get over here!" the voice that summoned Cerberus hissed at a dazed tattletale, "I can only maintain him for five minutes! Come with me if you want to live!"

Put like that, the Thinker supposed, she had no choice.

She crawled over to the location that the voice had come from and was pulled up. She looked up into a pair of worried green eyes that looked out at her from a mask made to resemble a bird with a long, thin beak...an ibis.

'Ibis…sacred animal associated with the Egyptian god Thoth.' Her power chimed in helpfully, 'Thoth, or Jehuty, was credited with the creation of every branch of knowledge by the Ancient Egyptians and Ancient Greeks. Created writing, the Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs. Parahuman possesses the ability to manifest and animate anything she draws.'

Her rescuer wore, aside from the black and green ibis mask, a leopard-patterned costume with moon disks and ankhs decorating it. Around her waist, she had a heavily modified workman's tool belt that had several pockets with drawing pads, pens and pencils, erasers and, oddly enough, a spray can in them. Clutched in one hand was a drawing pad with an empty page…that was slowly turning black.

'Beasts can only be manifested for a certain period of time.' Her power deduced, 'Once manifested, they exist until the page turns black. Time determined by skill of artist, quality of paper and tools used to draw and detail of drawing.'

"Hey! You OK?" Tattletale was snapped out of it by her rescuer lightly slapping her cheek.

"I-" she started before coughing, her abused throat objecting to being used, "I'm…well, not alright, but I'm getting there."

"Good. Can you and your friends get away from here while Cerberus hold off Lung?" the bird-masked girl asked.

Hit by sudden inspiration, Tattletale asked, "I don't want to be a villain anymore. Can you take me to your base? Please!"

Blinking, the girl nodded.

The sound of Lung and the Cerberus drawing fighting became louder, as Lung forced Cerberus back. Decision made, the girl grabbed a smaller drawing pad from her belt.

"Inscribed in the Book of Thoth, I call out your name and summon you to the world to do my bidding." The girl chanted as she opened the pad to a page depicting a superbly detailed black horse, "Come forth, Steed of the Night, Hrímfaxi!"

In a flash, the horse leapt off of the page and then grew to full size, rearing back and neighing before settling down. The girl leapt up on top of the horse…Hrímfaxi…before reaching down to give Tattletale a hand up.

"My name's Tattletale!" the Thinker said as she wrapped her arms around her rescuer's waist, "Who're you?"

"Call me Seshat." The girl replied, "Now hold on tight!"

'Seshat. Egyptian Goddess of Writing, Knowledge and Wisdom. Associated with Thoth alternatively as his consort, his female counterpart and as his daughter. Name chosen to emphasise that she is female.' Tattletale's knowledge and power informed her.

With a kick, Hrímfaxi reared up again and leapt into the sky, hooves seeming to gain traction on the air as if it were the ground. Out of the corner of her eye, Tattletale noted that her erstwhile teammates were retreating on Bitch's dogs. She withdrew an arm and rifled through her pockets until she found the phone that connected her to Coil. With a laugh, she threw it into the fight between Lung and Cerberus, which was back at a draw.

Free. She was free of Coil. Now all she had to do was keep it that way.

Later

Coil's Office, Coil's Secret Base

Thomas Calvert was not a happy man. Rather, his supervillain true-self Coil was not a happy man. He considered Coil to be who he truly was, rather than boring-old Thomas Calvert.

The reason why he was unhappy was that, once again, his pet Thinker, Tattletale, had attempted to slip her leash. This wasn't unusual, as she had done so at least twice before. What made this attempt more than noteworthy was that she had succeeded, in no small part due to the intervention of a Parahuman who he apparently couldn't account for using his Parachronal Cognition power.

He could split the timeline and in one, send the Undersiders to rob a casino, while in the other; he had them sit at their home base doing nothing. It was, in fact, what he had done earlier that day. The robbery had succeeded, so he had dropped the 'safety-net' timeline. He had then used his power in order to play the stock markets for a while. Even a massive company like Fortress Construction didn't have limitless funds, so he did this every so often.

When, in both timelines, he received a distress call from tattletale, he had dropped the least profitable one and immediately split the timeline once again. In one, he had simply hung up, while he had ordered them to retreat in the other.

According to what the timelines showed, in both cases the Undersiders were either slaughtered or crippled beyond further use, so he had simply dropped the retreat timeline.

What had actually happened was that a Parahuman had swept in, summoned some sort of giant three-headed dog projection to fight Lung, swept Tattletale into his arms and then summoned a flying wingless horse projection before cantering into the night, Thinker in hand, while the rest of the Undersiders had retreated on Rachel Lindt's monstrous dogs.

It was, he was forced to admit, a better end than either of his timelines had anticipated. The Undersiders were not dead or crippled and could still be of use further down the line. What it actually was, though, was something of a disaster for his plans. Some Thinker powers synergised very well with his Parachronal Cognition, with Tattletale's being one of them. He had made plans to 'acquire' a precog that had Triggered a short time ago as well.

With is ability to split timelines backed up by a powerful precog and Tattletale's Photographic Deduction power, he would have had a far easier time of taking over Brockton Bay that he would have with just his own power. Now he had a Thinker on the loose who, while not fully in the know about his plans, still knew enough to be dangerous. Plus, she was in the company of someone whose actions could not be seen by his power.

A deadly combination.

'I had always felt superior to Contessa.' He thought glumly, 'Even although her thrice-accursed Path to Victory is far more powerful than my own power, she still has blind spots; Scion, Eidolon and the Endbringers. I didn't have any…not until now, anyway.'

Coil steepled his fingers as he thought. He had the Undersiders, the Travellers and over fifty mercenaries armed with Tinkertech lasers in his direct employ, not to mention the resources of the PRT in his unmasked persona. With all of that, it should be relatively easy to have whoever it was that threw a wrench in his plans labelled as a villain or at least an extreme vigilante.

That was for later, though. For now, he had to contact Cauldron and secure a vial of a Thinker power for someone. He had no doubt that they would charge him an arm and a leg for it, but he had to replace Tattletale, at least in the short term. In the long term, having three other Thinkers to synergise with would be beneficial in the extreme.

'Whoever you are, you will pay for getting in my way!' he vowed as he reached for his phone.

The Next Day

Seshat's Base

Lisa Wilbourn looked around the room she was in. It had been a kitchen in one life, and still was. It was, however, now full of old-fashioned kitchen items that she vaguely recognised from the Victorian or Edwardian periods!

"How, the hell, can you summon flying horsed and hellhounds and not modern stoves?" she demanded of her host, who manged to look sheepish while dressed up in a bird's mask.

"I can't summon anything from a drawing that is in mass production." Seshat admitted, "I also can't draw someone who is currently alive, so no summoning Alexandria to fight for me. I've experimented and the limitation for people is that they had to have been dead before I was born. With inanimate objects, the limit seems to be that how many are being made in the world right now and how many already exist in the world right now limits me. Apparently, there's also enough left of cooking appliances from the last hundred years or so that summoning them is impossible."

"Huh. Guess that means no tanks too." Lisa mused. Shame. She would have loved to have broken into Coils base in one. Blowing him up with a cannon or running him over with one sounded like fun.

"Depends." Seshat shrugged, "I could summon a Mark 1 British Tank fairly easily, as most of them have been destroyed, aside from some museum pieces."

"Isn't that the very first kind of tank to have ever existed?" the former Undersider raised an eyebrow, "You know, the ones that required a crew of half-a-dozen or so in order to work?"

"I said I could summon it, not that we could do much with it." The bird-masked Cape retorted, "Now, I think you said something about being a villain last night?"

"I was forced to become a villain at gunpoint by another villain, Coil." Lisa informed her, "I tried to run several times, but he always caught me and…punished me. This is the first time I've gotten away from him since I came to the Bay."

Even although Seshat wore a mask, Lisa, who had revealed her identity to her last night, could tell she was frowning. "You couldn't get away? With your power, I'd have figured you would've been able to break free rather quickly."

"Coil claims that his power is to make everything turn out as he wanted. I watched him flip a coin and call heads every time. Ten heads in a row." Lisa answered.

"Probability manipulation of some sort?" Seshat mused, "Reality warping? Figuring Thinker powers out is a tremendous pain. So how did I manage to rescue you then?"

"I have no idea." Lisa admitted ruefully. She hated not knowing things. "At a guess, you interfere somehow with whatever power he possesses, making him unable to use it or blank him to seeing what's going on. That means that I'd like to stick near you as much as possible, at least until Coil is neutralised. As long as he's around, I'm not safe on my own."

"…he really scares you, doesn't he?" Seshat said softly.

"He scares the living crap out of me." The blond girl confirmed, "He's also a threat to the city. He has my former gang, the Undersiders, in his payroll, along with the Travellers, a nomadic band of villains, and fifty or so mercs with Tinkertech laser rifles at his command. He also has contacts and moles in the PRT and the police. The instant I go to them, I'm as good as dead, as I'll be back in Coil's hands before you can say 'knife' and be punished again. He has threatened in the past to get me addicted to drugs in order to keep me docile and obedient."

Her ability to read Seshat was pretty good, even without her power. Seshat, or rather the person beneath the mask actually liked Brockton Bay for whatever reason. By telling Seshat about Coil and his ambitions, Lisa was setting them on a headlong confrontation with one another. Nothing she was saying was a lie, nor was it exaggerated. It was the deadliest weapon for a Thinker: the unadulterated truth.

Did this make her feel guilty? Yes, but she also didn't want to become a drug-addled pet on a leash for Coil. Lisa would apologise to the girl after Coil was six feet under.

"So he's a danger to Brockton bay?" Seshat asked sharply, "OK, start talking. I want to know everything you know about this character."

With a nod, Lisa started to lay down everything she knew about Coil and his operation, starting from his goals.

OK, so this is a little something I had cooking in the back of my mind for a while. Care to guess where it came from?

I will take this chance to answer a question that someone pointed out for the first chapter of [Time and Time Again], whereby someone wondered how Paradox/Taylor could feel Coil using his power. The simple answer is that Parachronal Cognition is still a temporal power; therefore Paradox/Taylor was able to sense it being used. My guess about Coil is that he split the timeline just before the Undersiders arrived at the bank and ordered them to abort the operation in one timeline whilst keeping the one where they carried out the bank robbery in the other.

The reason why Coil's power doesn't work on Seshat/Taylor is because of the influence Thoth has on her powerset. Thoth wasn't a god of good or evil. He was seen as a god of mediation. This translates into Parahuman Thinkers who are decidedly good or evil (by Seshat/Taylor's definition) being unable to see her or affect her using their powers. Lisa isn't good or evil; she simply is trying to survive, which is why her power still works on Seshat/Taylor.

Master: 8 (Is able to summon forth creatures, objects and people that she has drawn. Cannot summon anyone still alive or was alive when she was born. Cannot summon objects currently in mass production or that exist in great numbers. Requires a chant in order to summon anything. The summoned creatures' strength and length of time that they can be summoned for is determined by Taylor's skill at drawing, the quality of the paper used, the quality of the materials she uses to draw and the amount of detail in the drawing itself. Once summoned, the page that the drawing was on will be consumed by darkness, with the drawing returning to the page once darkness fully eclipses the page or at the order of Seshat/Taylor. Is able to summon up to three creatures at once. No limit on objects. One person at a time.)

Thinker: 6 (Has the ability to be unable to be seen or affected by Thinker powers coming from people she would consider either 'good' or 'evil' in moral alignment. Is unaware of this aspect of her powers, but that has no effect on its effectiveness. Those Thinkers who are neither good nor evil can affect and see Seshat/Taylor with their powers. Has the ability to learn how to draw very quickly, with current skill worthy of a professional artist. Can reach the realms of Michelangelo and da Vinci with enough time and effort.)