Taking the Stage Chapter 1
17th of January, 2011
Basement, Hebert Residence
Screwing the top of the cane back into place, I had a look of satisfaction on my face as I looked over my equipment...such as it was. I had only been out of the hospital for a couple of days, so I hadn't had much in the way of time to build anything with my newly acquired Tinker power.
Thus far, all I'd made was a pair of dress shoes with selectively frictionless sole surfaces, a remote-controlled drone-top hat, and I'd just finished a very basic self-defense weapon, a cane that had a taser hidden in the bottom tip and had a shield projector mounted inside the fake gem on the topmost part.
How I'd managed to alter the shoes is beyond me; all I'd had access to was some cleaning chemicals and a car battery!
"My specialty is so weird." I muttered with a shake of my head. It was true; rather than armor or whatever, I seemed to more specialize in what I thought of as 'James Bond' tech; weapons and armor hidden in plain sight. It wasn't just stuff like that though; it all had a dramatic and showy flair to it, in both form and function. The shoes glittered like a starry field when the frictionless surfaces on their soles were activated, the top hat was programmed to make 'whooshing' sounds as it flew (when it wasn't in stealth mode) and the shield projected by the cane was a flashy rainbow-colored dome that was about as subtle as a sledgehammer.
I'd seen the phrase 'Tinkertech is such bullshit' on PHO a couple of times, but actually building some had shown me exactly how true that was. I should not be able to power a taser and a shield generator with a pair of D batteries, nor should I have been able to turn parts from an old remote control car into a flying top hat.
At least, not with the tools I had at hand.
Blinking, I looked at the mask I had found on sale in an old shop just yesterday. It was vaguely sinister-looking, bone white with three crimson curved lines that made up a sneering, nose-less face. Something about it had called out to me in spite of its creepy appearance and I'd bought it.
Already, I could feel my mind going over various little additions I could make to it, from flash protection and vision correction lenses in the eyeholes, a coating to improve its durability to greater than steel without making it any heavier, to a powerful air filter that would make it essentially impossible for me to be gassed while wearing it.
First though, I had decided to add a couple of the vision modifications to my glasses, and hopefully no one would notice them. The ones I'd chosen were x-ray vision and a zoom function and with a bit of luck, they would let me find out how the hell Sophia was getting into my locker...
Two Days Later
Taylor's Bedroom, Hebert Residence
FUCK!
I was bust mauling my pillow with punches from one hand and tearing it apart with my grip with my other. I was furious, full of despair and somewhat hysterical to boot.
My plan to upgrade my glasses had worked, perfectly might I add. I'd had to buy some tweezers and wire-cutters, but it had worked. Using my glasses, I could see through walls and zoom in with perfect clarity, all without anyone being any the wiser.
I'd finished them yesterday afternoon, and had worn them today, which had been useful, as I'd been issued a new locker the previous day (as likely as I was to use it after what the Trio had pulled on me) and I'd deliberately made a show of storing my homework inside of it (whilst fighting off a minor panic attack) before heading to class.
People at Winslow, including the teachers, had raised ignoring me to such a fine art that I was used to it and it didn't even hurt (much) anymore. It also gave me a good reason to keep one eye on my locker throughout the day. It wasn't until lunch that I'd hit paydirt.
Fucking Sophia Hess had entered my locker and stolen my homework for my afternoon classes...by turning her arm intangible, reaching through the goddamned door and plucking the homework out of my locker without needing to know my locker combination. Sophia Hess...was a Cape...a fucking PARAHUMAN!
There were only so many Capes in the Bay, and they had pretty distinctive powersets to boot, so deducing which Cape with an intangibility power was also a black teenage girl did not take Sherlock Holmes to deduce. Shadow Stalker, one of the fucking Protectorate Wards, was using her powers in her civilian identity to make my life a living hell.
Shadow Stalker was a former vigilante who had rumors of being forcibly recruited into the Wards mid-year in 2010 due to a body count. Knowing Sophia, I didn't put it past the psycho.
All of my nebulous plans to possibly-maybe join the Wards just went out the window. Fuck them. They had to know what Sophia was like. If they did, and she wasn't being reported, then they were incompetent. If they knew what she was like and was being reported and those reports were being ignored...then it was the higher-ranking people in the PRT and Protectorate that were untrustworthy. No way could I follow the orders of those who I couldn't trust.
How is this fair? Sophia was a fucking hero and she was quite literally almost getting away with murder, while I hadn't broken the law beyond maybe jaywalking and I had been tortured for no reason!
...right, rant over. I was very much disenchanted with the Protectorate and PRT, and I seriously needed to think about what to do next. My first instinct is to grab what little I'd made and go out to prove what Sophia and everyone else said was wrong. My second thought was to smack my first thought down and focus on building up a lair and full equipment loadout...THEN going out and proving that Sophia was wrong about how useless I was.
Then it struck me. Sophia/Shadow Stalker used her powers to make my civilian life a living hell. An appropriate amount of revenge would be to use my powers to make her Cape life a living hell. That had a nice, ironic twist to it that was also just. Unlike Sophia, I knew when to stop pushing, and as I had no expectations that the bitch would ever be brought to task for what she has done to me, I'll have to step up and take the law into my own hands.
By definition, this meant that I was gonna be a villain. While the feeling of dismay and repulsion I'd expected was present, it wasn't nearly as pronounced or as virulent as I'd guessed it to be. Also, I had a sense of...anticipation, almost, at the thought of matching myself against Shadow Stalker and, as a consequence, the PRT and Protectorate.
First though, I had to get myself out of Winslow. No way was I gonna put up with being in the same building as Sophia any longer than it took Dad to withdraw me. Fortunately, I also had some ammo that would make him do it. The school had been supposed to make sure more bullying against me didn't happen, and they hadn't succeeded past an hour of me setting foot back in the place. Dad would NOT take that well.
Once that was taken care of, I had to look for a place to set up as my base and workshop. While a lot of my Tinkertech inventions were meant to be worn or held, a fair few were perfect for the kind of defenses needed to drive away people who discovered my base.
Baby steps, Taylor. Baby steps...
One Week Later
Taylor's Workshop
It was so gratifying to have been pulled from High School. It had only taken a single conversation and showing Dad some recent bruises to get him raging mad and make him withdraw me from Winslow. Now I was working towards my GED on my own time and, with no one sabotaging or stealing my work, I was fairly confident about sitting the exams for it by July or August. September at the very outside.
Dad was pleased; he'd said that I was taking after mom with my studiousness, which made me blush. Mom had been one of the most popular English Lit professors at BBU, and she was something I held up as a goal to reach. I wasn't anywhere close to matching her yet, but a goal was what one strove to achieve and surpass after all.
Anyway, I'd decided to take up jogging to get fitter. It also let me scout the neighborhood for a possible place to set up a workshop. I could only work out of my basement for so long before Dad grew suspicious, after all.
Fortunately for me, what with the economic slump that Brockton Bay had been going through thanks to Leviathan, and the actions of the three big gangs of the Bay, I was almost spoiled for choice when it came to buildings I could use, even inside of a block around my house. I did decide to cast the net wider though; too close, and it would be too obvious who the base belonged to, while too far would be impractical to get to.
In the end, an old clothier's shop was my base of choice. The windows were, for the most part, boarded up, the doors locked and it looked like no one had set foot in it for a decade at least. Given the faded paint of the Star of David on a couple of the boards, it was an easy enough guess that this shop was formerly owned and run by a Jewish family who had fled the Bay in fear of the Empire 88.
Setting up the most basic of bases inside was fairly easy. I was the one in charge of housework since mom died, so it wasn't as if I hadn't had practice at it. The place was full of dust and stuff, but that was fairly easy to get rid of. I'd also found a bunch of tools that were in half-decent condition that were pretty helpful in disassembling the furniture and remaining electronics in the store and upstairs flat for materials.
I'd found some money, about a hundred and fifty bucks, hidden in the sofa, which was good luck for me, and back luck for whoever had hidden it there. I went around to some hardware stores and bought some necessary items to aid in my Tinkering. I made sure to only buy one or two items from each store, and to go to stores that were pretty far apart. It did not take a genius to figure out that the PRT and the gangs were on the lookout for Tinkers, as Tinkertech was all kinds of bullshit.
Tinkers and Thinkers, from what I've gathered from PHO, are force multipliers in an organization. They enhance what is already there. Squealer, from the Archer's Bridge Merchants, was a vehicle Tinker. She usually cobbled together cars, vans and tanks from scrapped pieces of junk that usually let the vastly weaker Merchants hold their own against the Empire and ABB. That's why the the Merchants hadn't been squished by either of the stronger gangs yet.
Taking that into account, I had to make sure that nobody could find my base. That was why one of the first things I made with my new tools and materials were a bunch of small hologram projectors that I placed at every window that wasn't boarded up. They made the interior, to anyone looking in, look exactly as it had been before I'd cleaned up. I'd also built something similar to a white noise generator, except it was more a 'sounds that belong in an empty and abandoned house' generator. This would ensure nobody heard anything coming out of my workshop that they weren't supposed to.
With secrecy taken care of, I turned to security. It used up the last of my spare parts, but I threw together a couple of hard light hologram projectors. Unlike the soft light ones used for the windows, the images projected by these ones were able to interact with material objects and beings. That's why the images they threw up were of large muscled men wearing masks. Their job was to punch the daylights out of anyone other than me who entered my base. I put one in the shop itself and one in the back entrance, just to be safe.
That was very basic security, and I would expand on it at a later date, but for now, I had to build a full lineup of tools and clothes for my debut against Shadow Stalker. Luckily for me, it was amazing what people left behind in their houses when they left Brockton Bay behind; toasters, TV's, DVD players, VCR's, ovens, refrigerators, freezers...the list went on. I even found an old PlayStation and XBOX in a couple of houses.
Not bad for a week's worth of B&E and Tinkering. Actually, is it even breaking and entering if the house is abandoned?
Whatever. Point was, I now had the materials to build some basic machines to help me make my Tinkertech-fused clothing. Kinda like a loom on steroids. I would have to build the Tinkertech to be fused with the clothing beforehand, but it would mean I wouldn't have to clomp around in power armor like Armsmaster or Dragon. It was always better to have freedom of movement than armor in combat if you asked me.
Now, where's that soldering iron...?
Two Weeks Later
Taylor's Base and the Broadwalk, Brockton Bay
It had taken a couple of false starts, and one rather humorous (now that I look back on it) incident with minor self-electrocution, but I had finally built myself a full outfit, fully rigged with a lot of Tinkertech surprises. The outfit was...well, a magician's outfit, to be blunt. Shirt, bow tie and black tuxedo jacket, black formal pants, fancy shoes, as well as a black top hat, white gloves and my upgraded mask. Also a black high-collar cape almost completed the outfit.
The last piece of gear that I have made to complete the outfit is a special belt that basically gives me hammerspace, a small pocket dimension to store things in. in that, I had my cane, as well as half a dozen other little tools and tricks for all sorts of situations. Proper preparation prevents problems.
Who knew that some of the stuff I learned at Summer Camp would come in handy? Go figure.
I was almost fully dressed in my outfit now. My trousers were on, shirt and tie on, tuxedo jacket on and cape over my shoulders. I was winding my hair into a braid, which I would then wrap into a bun before putting on a wig of black hair. No point giving Sophia any clues about who I was, after all.
Finishing the braid, I reached for the wig before pausing. Did I really want to do this? I was going to fight against the Protectorate if I did this. I would be a villain. There would be no going back from it.
Then again, was there really any choice for me? On the legal side of things, I could do nothing against Sophia. I'd looked over everything I had and it was far too circumstantial, even if Sophia only had a Public Defender for a lawyer. Add in the legal teams of the PRT, and I had a better chance of surviving Behemoth while naked than of getting any kind of satisfaction against the bitch.
Was I about to let my tormentor off scot-free? Without extracting any kind of satisfaction from her? Hell no. No fucking way was that bitch getting away with what she had done to me!
Snarling with anger and determination, I finished suiting up, pulling the wig on and securing it, followed by my mask and finishing off with placing my top hat on my head at a jaunty angle.
Looking into the dressmaker's mirror that I had found in the shop proper and relocated to my workshop, I nodded. I was almost ready to go out and kick ass. All I needed now was something very important...a name for my Cape persona.
After a moment of thought, I smiled beneath my mask before turning and leaving the room with a dramatic billow of my cape. Yes...that would do nicely.
Exiting out of the back door, I activated the main function of the cape I wore and started to levitate off the ground before shooting up through the sky. I barely restrained the urge to yell like an idiot as I flew across the skies. This was something I'd always wanted as a child, to fly. Granted, I'd wanted to be an Alexandria-type as well, but hey, I'd take what I could get.
"Where are you, Sophia?" I muttered as I scanned the Broadwalk minutes later. The Wards had several patrols a week, all in 'soft' locations in Brockton Bay, areas where the worst crime to be expected was a mugger or perhaps at worst a bit of low-level gang violence. The Broadwalk was one of the more accepted areas for the so-called publicity patrols that the Wards undertook, and some dedicated Cape Watchers regularly uploaded those patrols onto PHO. According to the most recent, Shadow Stalker was supposed to be here today.
My eyes narrowed as I caught sight of her supposed partner on patrol, Clockblocker, but there was no surly black costumed figure slouching along nearby. Where was she?!
Lessee, knowing Sophia...she's gone off on a solo patrol. The bitch thought she was better than everyone else, and she was a former vigilante, so pussyfooting around in a publicity patrol with someone she didn't like/respect would make her slip her leash and go beat people up, like the bully and psychopath that she was. Typical.
Sending myself higher into the sky, I started scanning the streets and rooftops beneath me before I finally caught sight of her leaping across the space between rooftops. I clenched my teeth and my vision went red for a moment. The bitch who had corrupted and twisted my best friend, who had made the last fifteen months or so of my life a living hell, was right in front of me. And here I was ready to stat a little payback.
Oh boy, was I ever looking forward to this.
With a gesture, I pulled a gun out of my hammerspace. It wasn't a conventional gun; it fired something other than bullets, after all.
Steeling myself with one final deep breath, I exhaled and swooped int to the attack, aiming my gun at Shadow stalker.
With Sophia
The first hint that Shadow Stalker had that something was awry was on her way back from beating the shit out of a bunch of Empire thugs. She had just landed on a roof when a noise made her look up, to see some fucking weirdo in a cape and top hat swooping down at her with a gun of some kind in their hand!
Instinctively rolling to the side, she was nonetheless smacked in the ankle by one of the projectiles that the gun fired...and it didn't hurt, oddly enough. Looking down quickly, the Shadow Breaker saw a fucking playing card, of all things, slapped across her boot. What the shit?
"You don't have to kneel in my presence, Shadow Stalker, but the gesture is appreciated." a computer generated voice informed her drolly as her attacker floated to hover over the gap between this building and the next, the gun clasped in one gloved hand.
"Who the fuck are you?!" she snarled, ignoring another one of Clockblocker's unenthusiastic attempts to get her back on patrol with him. Fucking pussy.
"I? You may refer to me as Phantom Renegade, Shadow Stalker." the wierdo mockingly tipped their hat to her. Stalker couldn't tell if the bastard was male or female, but whichever they were, they were in for a world of pain. "Consider this first meeting simply a sort of polite introduction. Our next meeting will be far less cordial, I can assure you, oh murderess."
Snarling at the reference to the skinhead she had crucified to a building and left to bleed out, Stalker brought up her crossbow (equipped with a live bolt that she had forgotten to remove before heading back) and fired at the bastard...or at least tried to. The instant that she brought her crossbow up, the card on her leg exploded into some kind of foam that trapped her where she knelt on the roof, much to her fury. There was far more foam present than the card could have possibly contained.
Fucking Tinker!
"Now, now." Phantom Renegade mockingly scolded her. "Dangerous toys are all very fun, but it's rude to try to use them when other people are talking, you're liable to get hurt."
"Fucking...bastard!" Stalker shouted, struggling in her bonds to no avail. It was more effective than containment foam! And she could literally feel the electricity running through it, which meant that she daren't use her Shadow State for fear of being electrocuted!
"How rude. Also uncouth." the condescending, soon-to-be-dead, bastard chided her. "I think that as a greeting, this has gone very well. I look forward to seeing you again at a later date, Shadow Stalker. For your crimes, I shall make your life as a Cape a hell from which you shall not awaken from. Have a pleasant day."
With that, the fucking bastardized son of a bitch simply turned in midair and flew off without a second glance back! As id she were beneath his notice!
It took ten minutes of swearing and screaming before the whatever the fuck it was dissolved into nothing, leaving no evidence behind that she had been attacked. This, quite naturally pissed off Shadow Stalker quite profoundly and she spent three minutes muttering curses before she stashed the bolt and headed to meet up with Clockblocker, debating about reporting this shit.
'Fuck it. If she comes after me again, I'll shoot her for real this time.' she decided. 'Fuck Piggy and Halbeard.'
She would come to regret that decision.
OK, so...this wasn't what I expected to write when I sat down. I was hoping to have chapter 3 of Force Your Way ready for you. Instead...this showed up. I guess I really needed to get this plot bunny out of my head, huh?
Taylor here has two or three linked powersets here. First, and most obvious, is her Tinker power. Second is a Striker power that she isn't entirely aware of yet that allows her to 'mark' her gear. Third is a modestly useful Thinker power, which allows her to track the marks that she makes regardless of distance, as well as gives her insight into a problem that she turns her mind to, pointing out weaknesses in an argument or plan. It's something of a cut-cost version of Lisa's power, except no Thinker headaches and Taylor doesn't have the power-induced asexuality due to her needing to focus pretty hard to use it.
Major downside here is that she's pretty much focused entirely on punishing Sophia Hess for her Trigger event. Can't have everything, I guess.
The powers here are partly inspired by the magician Mandrake from the old Defenders of the Earth cartoon, as well as the Phantom Renegade from Medabots, Kaito Kid from Magic Kaito1412, as well as a fair few James Bond films. Live on, Q.
Tinker: 4 [Specialty: Magician-themed personal gear and clothing, concealed weapons, armor and accessories]
Striker: 1 (Is able to 'mark' many pieces of her equipment to a symbol that she can track regardless of the distance between them.)
Thinker: 5 (Is able to be granted insight into arguments and plans. Has slightly higher intelligence. Is able to track items marked by her Striker power. Range is worldwide.)