Ride On Chapter 2 (original chapter Chapter 139)

The Day After Taylor Triggered

Director's Office, PRT ENE Building

Director Emily Piggot had seen some twisted, horrible shit in her time as both a line grunt and as a desk jockey; being one of only two to survive the Ellisburg Debacle for example, not to mention some of the crap she'd seen in Director's Meetings in the aftermath of one of the Slaughterhouse Nine's little rampages.

Having said that, she had rarely seen so gruesome a sight as two humans who had, from what Armsmaster was saying, been cooked alive.

"They died in how short of a timeframe?" she asked in disbelief.

"In one-point five-six seconds." The Tinker Leader of the ENE Protectorate repeated. "They were essentially cooked alive in that timeframe. I doubt it will make you any less antsy about the situation, but they literally couldn't have felt any pain before dying."

"It doesn't." Piggot ground out. "Who the hell did it? Any clues?"

"There were…scraps of clothing…in the area around the body, all from clothes designed towards girls." Armsmaster said carefully. "After some searching, I have found them to be from cheap, no brand name clothing stores, making tracing them effectively impossible."

"What about DNA matching?" Piggot asked, not liking the implications of the torn clothing but pushing on regardless.

"Now that is where it becomes…interesting." The Tinker replied. "Aside from background bacteria that had landed on the clothing scraps after the incident, there isn't a single piece of identifying DNA on them. No sweat, no blood, no saliva, no skin cast off…nothing. In addition, there is a detail here that Dragon had to point out for me…one of the victims had their trousers down around their ankles."

The implications of that sentence hung in the air for a moment before Emily sucked in a breath sharply.

"You mean that whoever killed those two was raped?" she asked, anger in her voice as her suspicion was confirmed.

"Or just before the act." Armsmaster said carefully. "Any…vaginal or seminal fluid would have been destroyed by whatever killed them, but his presumptive victim Triggering before the deed was done would explain why the boy's…member was…flaccid…before death."

The Director grunted in acknowledgement. A Trigger Event almost guaranteed the mitigation of this incident from murder in either degree down to justifiable homicide in self-defense. The legal definition of a Trigger Event was the worst moment in a person's life, when their entire world came crashing down around them. The Supreme Court had ruled that someone who accidentally ran amok after they had Triggered was, up until a certain point, granted some degree of clemency depending on their actions and what their Trigger event actually was.

In the case of this presumptive girl, the duty to retreat was impossible if she was being held down by the two boys, and as neither boy had been wearing a mask, she doubted that they two 'victims' would have allowed the girl to live after they had finished with her. A competent Cape Lawyer, such as Carol Dallon, would tear any case built against the girl victim to pieces inside of a single hearing. And probably get a not inconsiderable amount of payments for damages out of whoever had brought the suit up in the first place, no doubt.

"So…what manner of power did our real victim use?" She mused. "The injuries suggest Striker, Blaster or Shaker."

"Shaker." Armsmaster replied instantly. "Blaster and Striker powers would logically dictate that one area more than the rest would possess more damage than the rest. That isn't the case with these bodies. They were also facing one another when they died, which would make it almost impossible for a new parahuman to hit or blast them."

"Parahuman powers don't always correspond to logic." Piggot said dryly. "Or even often correspond to logic."

"True, but I also scanned the scene once I discovered the lack of DNA on the clothing scraps." The Tinker replied, tapping his visor. "There's a circle with a radius of about a meter around where the corpses were discovered that has significantly less in the way of organic debris than the surrounding area."

"Very well. So she Triggered, gained a Shaker power and accidentally killed her would-be rapists." There was a hint of satisfaction in Piggot's voice at that. "Is it possible that she is a danger to the public?"

"In the way that Ash Beast is, you mean?" Armsmaster inclined his head. The African S-Class Threat was a walking never-ending explosion, capable of decimating a settlement in minutes. "As there have been no reports of such a thing wandering the streets, we can safely rule out an inability to deactivate her power like Ash Beast presumably has. As to the exact nature of her power…she killed those boys in less than two seconds. Even with her limited range, I would rate her as a Shaker 5, at the very least. Manton Limited specifically to harm humans, or living organic matter at the very least, and highly lethal as well."

"Do you think her power might have a nonlethal setting or could it be stuck on a lethal setting?" Piggot pressed.

"Without power testing, it's impossible to know." Armsmaster shook his head, seeing what she was getting at. "I literally know only the barest of bare bones about her power. Speculating about what she can and can't do with it is pointless."

Piggot pursed her lips, but let it go. She wanted a suitable justification for getting the girl found and in the Wards ASAP, but Armsmaster wasn't playing ball. It was also a perfectly legitimate point, one that she had accidentally ignored.

"Very well." She sighed. "Canvass the people in the area where the boys died to see if they saw any traumatized girls leaving the area. Given the clothing fragments you say there were at the scene, I can presume that she was naked, or all but naked, after she Triggered."

"I've already detailed Velocity and Dauntless to do that, with Battery lending assistance." Armsmaster replied. "Assault is, surprisingly, not being his usual self about this matter."

"Battery would send him to the couch if he joked about something like this." Piggot snorted. "Besides, even Assault knows when a situation deserves a serious attitude. Dismiss, Armsmaster. I want to find who this girl was, and quickly."

"Ma'am." The Tinker acknowledged and left.

The Director leaned back in her custom-made chair and sighed. The last thing she needed was for something like this incident to happen. Both boys had been the Empire 88's perfect targets for recruitment, Caucasian with blond hair and blue eyes, so it was likely they'd try to find the culprit and use it as a PR coup, for 'doing what the Protectorate couldn't do' or some such stupidity.

'Of course it's going to be hard to do our jobs!' Emily thought bitterly. 'We're underfunded and understaffed! If I ever find who decided to cut our funding and personnel by a third before I was assigned here…!'

Sighing again, Emily Piggot stood up and started heading for the room where her dialysis machine awaited. She needed it now more than ever.

'Fuck you, James Rinke.' She thought with hatred. 'Fuck you, Nilbog.'

The Next Day

Cafeteria, Winslow High School

'Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.' Sophia Hess was not very imaginative with her swearing, but that was mostly because she liked how visceral the word 'fuck' was. Ordinarily, she would relish saying it, but right now , she was too busy confronting a situation that she didn't want to confront.

The black teen was an ex-vigilante, and she had indeed killed at least one person, albeit unintentionally, before she was conscripted by the Protectorate. She was harsh, ruthless and didn't really care who knew it. She frequently beat down people, especially that wimp Hebert, because she wanted to properly establish a totem pole of superiority; her at the top, everyone else at the bottom.

But there was one line that she would never, ever cross, and that was setting people on another girl with the intent of raping her. It was a good thing that those two fuckheads were dead, otherwise she'd have done the deed herself, and she wouldn't have been quick about it.

And that was the whole fucking problem. She'd been briefed on the deaths of two of the boys she'd sent to humiliate Hebert and came to a conclusion that Sophia_Hess-dot-exe couldn't compute.

Hebert had Triggered.

To Sophia, a Parahuman was a survivor, so they were, if not totally worthy of being called predators, then worthy of at least a modicum of respect. But this was that spineless nerd-bitch Hebert. She was pure prey, simple and clean. She was prey; therefore she couldn't be a Parahuman. But the fact that Hebert had been the one those two fuck-ups had chased after and caught meant that, barring a third party interfering, Hebert had Triggered and was a Parahuman and that, following on from that, Sophia had to give her a degree of respect.

Error. Incompatible values set. Sophia-dot-exe cannot compute.

More worrying about the situation was that the other two knew that she had sent them to harass Hebert, and could give anyone asking a point in her direction. Something to take care of later.

Another thing that worried Sophia, in as much as she was able to really worry about anything was Emma Barnes and her potential reaction to this news. The girl had been Hebert's best friend until Sophia rebuilt her after she was attacked by the ABB…or that was how it was supposed to go, anyway. Instead, Emma had become obsessed with proving that Hebert was in fact strong.

'Hebert…strong? Pfft.' Sophia scoffed to herself as she munched on a sandwich. 'Even if she had the strength of Alexandria, she couldn't be strong. She's prey!'

"Hey Sophia." Emma said as she plopped herself down next to her. "How's it going?"

Sophia just grunted.

"That bad, huh?"

Another grunt before the black girl swallowed her mouthful.

"Yeah. Gonna have to scram after school." She said, rolling her eyes. She loathed being in the Wards. Pure bullshit, the whole thing.

"Ah. Shame." The redhead said with a nod. "Still up for tomorrow?"

"Sure." Sophia nodded. She and Emma had planned on hanging together . "Your old man still good with it?"

"Yeah…but he and Mom were pretty weird last night." Emma frowned before shrugging. "Meh. They get like that sometimes."

The former vigilante hid a frown. If Hebert had told her old man about what had happened, he would've flipped his lid and gone to the police. As that hadn't happened, she was willing to bet that Hebert had kept quiet about it. Actually…

"Hey, where is Hebert?" she asked abruptly, realizing that she hadn't seen their prey all day.

"She took the day off, apparently." Emma shrugged faux-unconcernedly, but Sophia could see the worry in her eyes for the fucking prey.

'Seriously, why is she so determined to prove that Hebert is anything but a walking waste of oxygen?!' she screamed to herself. 'I should have convinced her that Hebert was a shit on her shoe by now! Seriously, what the fuck?!'

That did it. Something had to be done about Hebert, soon. No way was she ever going to show any kind of respect for that lowly stick-thin tramp!

'That said, if she is a Cape now, it makes thing tricky.' Sophia thought darkly as the bell rang and she plodded along to class. 'She took care of those two chumps in seconds with whatever the hell her power is; a lethal power at that. Tch, someone like Hebert having a strong power should be an oxymoron.'

Resolving to investigate the little bitch the next time she arrived in school, Sophia continued on her way.

Same Time

Living Room, Barnes Residence

"Zoë, I-!" Alan tried to speak before his wife shut him down.

"No, Alan." She said firmly. "Now that you finally told me what happened to Emma that day, and who Sophia Hess really is, I'm ashamed and shocked at you. How dare you keep this from me? Her own mother?"

"What was the point of traumatizing you as well?" the divorce lawyer asked wearily, slumping on his seat. "Emma practically had a mental breakdown and I wasn't much better. I just…wanted to move on."

"From what Danny said and showed us, there's no 'practically' about it!" Zoë snapped. "Alan, she mocked Taylor for crying for a week after Annette died! Does that sound anything like the daughter that we raised? She shut Taylor out after that Hess girl showed up, so I'm willing to bet that she had something to do with it."

"We owe her a debt, dear." Alan replied with narrowed eyes at his wife. "If it wasn't for her intervention, then Emma and I could be dead!"

"Intervening in her parole hearing was more than enough payback, Alan!" Zoë was becoming angry now. "Or do I have to remind you that unlike in an average divorce hearing, there were dead bodies involved in this one! She has killed at least one person!"

"Accidentally." Alan pointed out.

"Irrelevant. She has twisted our daughter against her childhood playmate, and done unspeakably awful things to Taylor." The Barnes Matriarch said firmly.

"Nothing in that diary he showed us would hold water in a court of law." Alan said stubbornly.

CRACK!

Alan blinked as he was suddenly looking to one side and his cheek was stinging. Had…had his wife just slapped him?!

Turning to look at Zoë, the lawyer subtly gulped. She wasn't just mad at him; she was positively apoplectic.

"I do not CARE if you don't think it could hold water on the bench, Alan!" she snarled. "What reason could Taylor and Danny have for lying and fabricating all of this against Emma, hmm? No reason at all! Taylor wouldn't say that Emma had done something like this unless Emma had actually done it!"

"I'm Emma's father! I'm supposed to protect her!" Alan protested.

"Not from the repercussions of her own mistakes, Alan." Zoë said softly. "And you are supposed to protect her from bad influences, which you have failed to do. I don't want to see Sophia Hess inside this house ever again, and Emma isn't allowed out until she blocks Sophia's number on her phone, blocks her on PHO and other social networking sites and swears up and down to never consort with her again. And you aren't to enable her, or I shall become very angry with you. As it is, you are sleeping on the couch for the next two days."

After Christmas

Taylor's Base

Cleaning up a garage was not easy. Especially when aforementioned garage had been abandoned for god alone knew how long. The carpet was moldy, the walls full of rot and cockroaches (in the office area at least) and don't even get me started on the garage area.

Still, it had taken time, effort and some finagling, but I had managed to clear out the dross and drek from my base, dumping it in bins across Brockton Bay to prevent people from getting a real suspicion as to where it came from. I had salvaged anything electronic to start building my lab, along with raiding the junk yards for materials on the side, and spent the time I had that wasn't spent cooking, cleaning, studying and doing everything I could to earn my GED ASAP turning my garage into as much of a fortress as I could.

Looking around the office section now, I had to smile. It was neat and tidy, with a desk next to a whiteboard, both crammed with ideas courtesy of my Tinker power. I had somehow managed to throw together a power generator that could run on energy siphoned off from my deadly golden Shaker power. I had refurbished some car batteries and turned them into power storage cells for it. If my calculations were correct, unless I seriously overloaded them, then I should have enough power to not need to change the batteries for about a year.

Huzzah, Tinker Bullshit!

Sauntering into my workshop, I smirked as I looked it over. All of the useless crap was gone, leaving plenty of room for my various projects. Some of the tools left over from when the previous owners of the place had abandoned it had actually been in reasonably good condition. I had used them to build new tools and then scrapped them to make other tools. Circle of life for tools.

My eyes fell on several half-completed insect transforming devices that I had half completed and I grimaced. I couldn't make any more until I could understand why I was limited to a transformation time of fifteen minutes, at least in Masked Rider [The First's] form.

I turned my attention to the motorbike that I had found here. This was a lot more successful than my attempts to make a more powerful transforming device were. Mainly because it was simply a matter of finding the right parts to swap out with the old busted ones. The frame was completely solid, and I'd only needed to replace a couple of parts of the engine. I'd worked slowly to replace the various parts, mostly because I'd taken to scrounging around the junkyard using my [The First] armor, which is how I'd discovered that irritating limitation in the first place.

All that was left to do was replace the gauges and the bike would be good as new. Then I'd see exactly what this 'Hurricane Cycle' looked like. That could wait though.

Walking over to a desk that was covered in paper, which in turn was covered in scrawls of high-level math, I buckled in and started crunching numbers. It was enough to give me a migraine, but fortunately, I was good at this kind of thing, so I persevered. About an hour passed before I sat back and stretched.

"Well shit." I said mildly. If my math was correct, then the reason that my Masked Rider [The First] armor shut down after fifteen minutes…was because of a safety limiter. Evidently, due to the fact my little power field was too damned powerful, and the fact that [The First] was supposed to run on Wind energy as opposed to the apparent Solar energy that my Shaker field generated, the limiter activated after fifteen minutes to prevent my armor from blowing up.

Exactly why I had built something that's functionally incompatible with my power is beyond me, but it is the first thing I built, so maybe there was some sort of bug (ha, ha, ha) with it?

According to the numbers, my Solar energy was incredibly dense and not very easy for [The First] to convert it into Wind energy on the go. Solar energy, at least the type I emitted from my field, was about five times denser than the Wind energy that the suit ran on. Altering the power source wasn't possible now that the suit had been initialized, so I simply had to find a way to more efficiently convert Solar to Wind externally…hmm…

A few hours later, I'd finished putting together my prototype Solar-Wind converter. Placing a hand on it I opened my field for an instant, filling it to max capacity immediately. Closing my field, I set it to convert all of the Solar energy it had into Wind energy before heading home. I was bushed.

The Next Day

"I'm sorry, what?" I asked my Dad flatly. "I must need my hearing checked, because I could've sworn that you just said that Emma wants to talk to me."

"I did." Dad nodded patiently.

"Why should I talk to her?" I asked flatly. After all of the things that Emma had done to me, I was wary of whatever the hell she was planning now.

"Because Zoë has been working on weaning her off of Sophia Hess." Dad said firmly. "She's been forbidden to talk to her at school, Hess isn't allowed in the Barnes home anymore and all of her social media has had Hess blocked on it. Just recently, Zoë finally managed to make a breakthrough with Emma and she feels that Emma wants to come clean with you."

My skepticism must have shown on my face as he added, "Zoë and I will be sitting in on it, so you won't be alone. Alan…is in denial about the whole thing. He still wants to protect Emma from everything, so he's been told to work overtime today."

My respect for Mrs. Barnes, or Aunt Zoë as I usually called her, went up a notch, while my disfavor against Alan went up as well.

"OK." I nodded reluctantly. If she did something, I swear I'd punch her lights out though.

The car ride over to the Barnes home was quiet and I was reliving the last time I'd been to Emma's house, only to leave in tears. It had been just after I'd gotten back from summer camp and Emma had turned me away…with SOPHIA standing there. Oh, Hess just made me so damned mad.

Dammit. Looks like I still miss having Emma as my friend. Stupid childhood memories.

The Barnes home's interior hadn't changed much since I'd last been in the place over fourteen months ago. Something that shocked me was when Mrs. Barnes swept me into a hug as soon as I walked in.

"Oh Taylor. It's good to see you again." She said as she hugged me very firmly.

"Eek! Aunt Zoë?" I managed to get out, as my idiot Dad stood by and smirked at me. He has such a twisted sense of humour!

Once I saw Emma again, sitting on the sofa, dressed not in her usual impeccable fashionable clothing but in a pair of sweats and a loose t-shirt. Her hair had actually grown out slightly from the short bob that it had been in since Hess had stolen her from me and she had more than a few bags under her eyes.

"Taylor." She said softly.

"Emma." I said neutrally, but with a frosty-cold air to my words, making everyone else wince.

That frostiness didn't last as we sat down and Emma started to tell me and Dad her story…of how a group of ABB had cornered Emma and her father, threatened to mutilate her. I knew that had Sophia, Shadow Stalker, not intervened, Emma would be either a mutilated girl turning tricks in an ABB brothel or dead right now.

"So that explains why you let Sophia into your life." I said, fighting to keep my neutral at the revelations. "But why did you let her turn you against me? What did I ever do to deserve that, Emma?"

"She tried to…but you were too big a part of my life." Emma said with a swallow. "One of the things that ran through my head when that knife was in front of my face was that I wanted to see you again. I…I guess…I wanted to prove to Sophia that you were strong, that you were worthy of her respect. I don't get why she hasn't said you're strong yet though…"

"It's because Sophia Hess is basically a thug, Emma." Dad growled. "She sees enduring the shit she and you put Taylor through as a sign of weakness as opposed to strength, as you see it. Damn it…"

"Dad…!" I said warningly. "No charging off to shout at the Protectorate."

Yeah, that would not end well. Knowing them, they'd go into total cover-their-ass mode and deny, deny, deny whilst slapping us with NDA's as fast as they could. Nope, keeping quiet about it is the best way to go. The revelation of Sophia's alter ego was a shock to me as well, and I dearly wanted to punch her, but I'd settle for never seeing her again.

Things got a bit sentimental when Emma pulled out a completely untouched flute…Mom's flute. She had secretly substituted it with a cheap pewter flute before Sophia had…befouled it.

"Do you really think I'd let Sophia do something to Auntie Annette's flute?" Emma asked with a watery smile.

I held it with trembling hands…I never thought I'd hold it again. OK, for this, if nothing else, Emma's getting a hug.

After I hugged her, she looked shocked and a little grateful. I sat back down and looked at her steadily. She had been a total bitch to me for over a year, but a part of her had…I don't know, resisted or subverted Sophia's twisted indoctrination. She hadn't thrown anything I'd given her away and she'd even saved Mom's flute.

"What you did to me, Emma, has broken our childhood friendship." I said to her, and watched as her face fell. Ignoring the twinge that my heart felt, I carried on, "However…while we may never be as close again as we were before this, I can try to trust you as a friend again, Emma. Betray me like that again though and you will never be forgiven. Understood?"

Tears fell from Emma's eye as she silently nodded to me in gratitude. Zoë Barnes gave her daughter a one-armed hug and Dad ruffled my hair proudly.

"Daaad!" I complained mock-irritably. "Serious moment here!"

That made him laugh and I huffed, a smile creeping in. This…had turned out much better than I had anticipated. I was a Cape, I had my friend back and things were progressing smoothly. I was…cautiously optimistic here.

And you all know that that means, right? ^_^

So, several slight modifications to canon here, mostly to do with Emma herself. For a kick off, she was slightly stronger willed than her canon self, so she didn't completely go to pieces after the ABB attacked her. Second, she mentally grabbed on to Taylor during that breakdown, making her someone she couldn't abandon or throw away. That leads to the third change, which is Emma set out to prove Taylor's strength to Sophia. The dissonance between Emma and Sophia's value of 'strong' made that somewhat hard to do though.

Fourth, Emma mitigated a few of the more serious pranks that Taylor suffered, as she was still her friend (in her head). Plus, Emma here loved Annette Hebert like a second mother, so she obviously wouldn't let Sophia befoul the antique flute that she had left to Taylor.

Now, I AM aware that a lot of you hate 'Emma Redemption' fics, and for good reason. I agree, to a point, but for me, that's if it happens post-Locker. Before that, I think that it is possible for Emma and Taylor to rebuild their friendship. After that moral event horizon though…unlikely.

Anyway, if you could all have a look at my profile, you'll see a poll there that will determine how I write ficlets from here on out. If you haven't voted already, please do so now! It closes at roughly 12:00 on the 1st of July, GMT.