*Dresden*
There was a mile-wide blob of writhing tumorous flesh slowly spreading across the city, and it wasn't my fault.
Hell, this time, I wasn't even involved. I'd been in New Delhi at the time it happened! Of course, in the middle of that train of thought, Revel ruined it.
"Myrddin… are you somehow responsible for this?" she asked.
I had to admit, I couldn't entirely fault her. After all, most of the time something crazy happened in Chicago, I was at least partially involved. A massive, very slowly expanding mass of twisted flesh certainly counted as crazy.
"I'm pretty sure I'm not," I replied. "I like to think that I would remember something like that."
Revel grunted, signaling that she'd begrudgingly accepted my lack of guilt.
"Then the question remains, what the hell are we looking at here?" she asked no-one in particular.
The airship was silent, except for the soft hum of the tinkertech engines in the background.
"If it weren't for all the organs, I'd say it reminds me of the giant amoeba from Evolution," I said, trying to break the silence.
"Perhaps," Ebeneezar replied. "But it seems more like some sort of overgrown Teratoma. By the way, don't look that up."
Revel looked at him, then at the humongous glob of twisting flesh.
I was pretty sure that Eb didn't know what it was either. If he did, and it was as dangerous as it looked, he would probably break the masquerade (flimsy as it was) in order to take it down.
Dragon's face appeared in the upper corner of the window, which apparently doubled as computer screen, because why wouldn't you get fancy if you were a Tinker as ridiculously powerful as Dragon was?
"Shuffle has informed me that there were several capes present at ground zero. Hookwolf, Skitter, and Glory Girl," she said, making pictures of the three capes appear on screen.
Glory Girl's picture looked, in one word, amazing. It was probably the official one from the old New Wave website, and although it was entirely possible that it was photoshopped to make her look even better, I doubted it. Going by the picture, and the few times I'd met her in passing, I was pretty sure there were a couple thousand perverts on the internet desperately waiting for her to turn eighteen. The Wards at least, never shut up about her.
For Skitter, Dragon had used a picture from her villain days, taken by a journalist that happened to be at a fancy party she and her team had crashed. There were two ways to interpret that. Maybe Dragon wanted to give her a bad impression, or maybe Taylor's magic had made it more difficult to get good pictures of her since. Nevertheless, she actually looked rather cool once you got over the fact that she was covered in wasps and deadly spiders.
Hookwolf had two pictures. One of them in human form, and one in his Changer form. They seemed to be rather recent, as Hookwolf had ditched most of the Nazi imagery, and instead had several vials and containers strapped in a bandoleer across his torso, and a hat that the man probably thought made him look like a rugged cowboy. His metal form was that of a wolf, larger than the Alphas but smaller than a Hexenwolf. It was also, however, a hell of a lot more deadly, what with being made out of metal hooks and chainsaws and everything.
From what I'd heard, he was going through life as a monster hunter now, one that specialized in faeries. Half of me wanted to take him down for being a Nazi, while the other half of me wanted to ask him to deal with my godmother.
"I can't help but notice that all three of them are from Brockton Bay," Topsy, one of the local villain bosses, said.
"You think it's related somehow?" Ebeneezar asked him.
"Those three, just after another Endbringer attack? Sounds fishy to me."
"From what Shuffle said, it seems like Skitter and Glory Girl decided to team up after hearing that Hookwolf was going to be active hunting down a serial killer. Thus, it is highly likely that the two of them are involved because someone from their hometown is involved, not because that is, specifically, Brockton Bay," Dragon clarified.
Revel shifted, and I recognized the change in her mood, she wasn't happy about something.
"Hold on, serial killer?" Eb asked.
"There seems to have been a ritualistic serial killer that used Behemoth's attack in New Delhi as a distraction. Shuffle announced a temporary truce until more was known about the perpetrator."
"Seems to me like that's the person responsible," I said. "But I'm guessing it's not that easy?"
"Not exactly. From Glory Girl's testimony, they were hunting down the serial killer and his minion when this thing appeared. However, it seemed to have been rather disorienting, at least to the people close by, and the testimony of the girls seems to be a bit unreliable, at least from the moment the mass of flesh appeared onwards. Shortly after, Hookwolf caught up with them and managed to help them evacuate."
"And the other people in the vicinity?" Revel asked.
"They were, presumably, outside the range of the debilitating effect, and could safely evacuate before the growth reached them," the Canadian tinker went on. I wasn't sure if I bought the story behind her secret identity. After all, she hadn't ended a single sentence with eh, and neither had she apologized even once in the entire conversation.
"They were out of range, or, they weren't parahumans," Ebeneezar commented, stroking his magnificent beard with one hand, wielding his staff with the other.
"Disorientation that only affects parahumans… Sounds like a trigger event," Revel continued. "But if it was long-lasting, and created this massive lump of flesh…"
"Genoscythe," a man in a black bodysuit I didn't recognize said. "The way the flesh changes, it reminds me of that thing he does with his arms."
"You're saying it's him?" Topsy asked. "Really?"
"It would be rather ironic, no?" a rather attractive woman in a red dress and mask, that was almost certainly a red court vampire, said. "The weakest cape in the city creating this… thing."
"I'm pretty sure that's not irony," I said.
"Actually, Hoss, I think you'll find that, for once, it actually is irony," Eb said.
"Hoss?" Revel asked.
"Myrddin and I go back quite a bit," Ebeneezar said. "I taught him a few tricks here and there."
"You're the one that taught him his magic?" Tecton suddenly spoke up.
"It was really more of a mentoring thing," Ebeneezar responded. "I mean, I couldn't even teach him how to grow a proper beard."
As he said so, Eb started stroking the long white hairs growing out of his chin.
"Trust me, you don't want to see what my body thinks is supposed to be a beard," I replied.
"I know… I mean, Campanile has more growth than you."
"Campanile cheats with his powers," I said, making excuses for myself. One of these days, I'd figure out a spell that would get me a long flowing white beard, just to get Image off my back.
"So, back to the topic at hand," Revel said. "Any suggestions?"
"Burn it?" the Rempire said.
"Something that big? Possibly toxic? In the middle of the city, right next to the lake? That's asking for an ecological disaster," Tecton replied.
"Well, it's too big to teleport it out, and it's hard for most powers to make headway through that much mass," Revel said. "We'll need a strong Shaker power that's not Manton limited."
I looked in the direction of Topsy, a gravity manipulator that could affect a large area. He would be able to turn gravity upside down, making the mass of flesh float into the air, and then crushing it by pushing it down.
"You want me to squish it?" he said, looking me in the eyes. "Even if it manages to kill the thing, we'd have what, a couple million tons of rotting flesh in the harbor?"
"Well, it's too large for me to banish, so that won't work either. Maybe Panacea could help?" I asked.
"Bad idea, that thing down there isn't normal, and we don't want her to get hurt in some sort of bad interaction. She's one of the few parahumans able to heal through the more exotic effects, which means she's far too valuable to risk," Revel said.
"Ahh yes, she's one of yours so you won't take any risks," Topsy said.
"I'm pretty sure some of your people are still being treated by her," the Rempire lady said. "But then again, you're not much of one for strategic use of resources are you? How much of your territory have you lost to Marcone the last two year? Half?"
Topsy promptly shut up, nursing his fragile ego, and I could almost see Revel commit the tidbit to memory. The PRT had good intel, but outside confirmation was always useful.
"So it looks like outright destroying it won't be possible," Ebeneezar said, slowly stroking his beard. "How about containment?"
"Something that big? It'd take a lot of resources, and I don't think any of us want a new Ellisburg in the middle of the city," Revel answered.
"Smaller scale," Eb continued. "I'm sure Tecton will be able to create a water-tight barrier around it, at which point we wouldn't have to worry about disposal, only about killing it."
"Possibly," Tecton said. "But the water interferes with the kind of vibrations I'd need to create to condense the stone like that, and I've never done anything on that scale."
"I've looked at your designs," Dragon interrupted with her lovely Newfoundland accent. "I think I have some spare equipment you could use to make some shortcuts, I can have them here in about five hours."
"And Topsy can shift gravity sideways, keeping the water of the lake away from you," Revel said.
"Which leaves two problems on the table. Killing it, or figuring out how to make it stop growing, and taking down whoever is responsible," the lady vampire said, licking her lips. Maybe it was coincidence, maybe her flesh suit's lips just got dry and she was out of chapstick, or maybe she had a special way of killing it in mind, something that involved her drinking a couple thousand liters of blood.
"Killing it should be easy once we have the area evacuated," Topsy said. "It looks like a crazy version of Genoscythe, and his scythes were still made out of normal flesh. We dump some sort of poison in there, and it'll wither and die."
"We'd need a lot of poison," Ebeneezar said. "If it even has a metabolism. It most certainly isn't eating."
"We'll think of something," Revel said. "If worst comes to worst, I can call in some of the more conceptual powers. Murderbeam should cut straight through this thing."
Finally, the Dragoncraft had reached the PRT's helipad, and with a nearly soundless hiss, the air pressure equalized, and we could leave.
"Myrddin, Glory Girl and Skitter should still be near the disaster site. Take the ship and bring Tecton and Topsy, and whoever else thinks he or she can help there. I'll be hunting down our serial killer in the meantime," Revel said before leaving.
Revel leaving, and me being left behind, meant one and only one thing. I was actually in charge.
Problem was, of course, that this meant I'd be having responsibilities. So no goofing off, no making silly jokes, no yelling pop culture references at supervillains.
"So Gandalf, any idea what that thing is?" I whispered, as Ebeneezar suddenly stood beside me.
"Nothing that matches it entirely. It looks a bit like a Shoggoth, but it's not actually one of those."
"How do you know?" I asked.
"Because there's still people around," he answered. "Now, if you don't mind me, I'm off to help catch a serial killer. I've been waiting for one ever since I saw Psycho."
The old man, who was much more agile than you'd think from his apparent age, ran after Revel to offer his help. The Red Court vampire also left, walking down the ramp of the airship in her heels. She'd actually been wearing heels to an Endbringer fight…
She'd probably report straight back to Bianca, if it wasn't her under that mask. I wasn't quite certain as to how much influence Red Court Vampires had over their flesh suits. Plus, there was the mask and everything.
"Dragon, you mind bringing us to the site?" I spoke to the air, feeling a bit silly.
"Sure thing Myrddin," she replied, her face appearing on the glass window, semi-translucent.
"You're awfully chipper all of a sudden," I said, trying to look at her face instead of the city behind her. At least I wouldn't have to worry about wandering eyes. In the reflection, I could see Tecton and Topsy standing somewhere behind me, young Everett keeping an eye on the supervillain.
"Well, they finally decided on what do to with Behemoth's head, and I'm getting the eyeball!" she said like a toddler getting ice-cream.
"You think you'll be able to use it for something?" I asked. I wasn't sure how her tinkering worked, but with some luck she'd be able to create eye-lasers or something in the future.
"First things first, I'm going to figure out if it actually uses the thing to see, because it didn't exactly run around like a headless chicken," Dragon said, a more somber expression spreading over her simulated face. I wondered how the hell that worked. Was it directly linked to her own facial expression? Her hormone levels? Or did she just press a button that said melancholic on it?
"What about the rest of the head?" Topsy asked, trying to act important.
"A guy called the Erlking claimed a few of the biggest horns, and a group of self-proclaimed Arcanysts, led by a guy calling himself Merlin, has most of what goes for blood in that thing. The Yangban claimed some parts in the name of the Jade Emperor, and the remaining parts were divided between local players. I presume most of them wanted it as a wall-hanger, instead of to perform research.
"You have to admit, it'd make a pretty cool mantelpiece," I replied.
"Now I wish Flechette cut off his legs instead," Tecton said. "I could've done some amazing things with those. How is she anyway?"
"You know her?" Dragon asked.
"We met during one of the practice events, a couple of months ago. She seemed nice," Tecton replied.
"Well, I'll tell you because this will be all over the news tomorrow, but she decided to use her moment of fame to leave the Wards," Dragon said. "Probably because New York kept moving her around."
"You know where she's going?" Tecton asked.
"Last I saw, she was with a white-haired cape calling herself Aurora," Dragon said. "I'm not sure on whether that's an actual name or a cape name. Anyway, we're almost there."
I looked out of the window, and saw that we were quickly approaching a small cleared out parking lot, where Dragon's transport landed, and opened its main exit. This time, there was no hiss of air, the short trip meaning there wasn't much of a pressure differential, and Dragon's mechanisms didn't create sound the way I'd come to expect from trains and subways.
"Let's get going," I said, as a teenager and a supervillain followed me.
From up close, the large heap of flesh was much more intimidating. Sure, it was expanding very, very slowly, but it was still covered in organs and scythes, both of which twitched every now and then.
Around it was a big piece of red and white tape, courtesy of the Chicago PD, and two parahumans.
One of them had transformed himself into a twisting mass of steel death, roughly the shape of a large wolf. The other had cleared the parking lot we'd landed on of cars, and was currently using those very cars to try and tear through the massive blob of flesh.
Looking around, I spotted the reason they were using their abilities right here. The parking lot belonged to a nursing home, and a few people were clearing out the inhabitants. Due to the slow growth of the flesh-heap, most people had been able to evacuate quite easily, but Hookwolf and Mockshow were buying some extra time for the elderly.
"Afternoon officer. What's the situation on the ground?" I asked one of the cops standing around the corded-off area. He looked to be just a bit older than me, and his short hair was matched by a magnificent hipster beard that didn't make me feel jealous. From the tired look on his face, he'd been setting out a larger and larger area for hours now, trying to keep ahead of the disaster area.
"Ah Myrddin, good to see that you're back safely," said the officer, an older man that vaguely reminded me of Murphy. Maybe he was family? "We've been setting off the area, helping people evacuate. There's cops all around this thing, and we've been getting help from people we'd normally be arresting. Like Hookwolf over there."
He pointed at the metal cape, whose shapeshifted form somehow looked giddy about all the blood and flesh he was tearing through. In comparison, Mockshow was rather hesitant, and was trying to avert her eyes from the carnage. I had to admit that despite my dislike of her -she had completely wrecked my car, and only the intervention of a parahuman mechanic had been able to save the blue beetle- I felt some sympathy.
"And the girls?" I asked.
"They're about a block that way," the cop replied. "They seemed rather shaken, like they'd seen something they shouldn't have, but Carmichael's the one dealing with that situation." He pointed at a short, overweight cop without hair that looked like he needed another donut.
"Okay," I said, trying to put on what I thought looked like a command face. "Tecton, I'm guessing you'll need to take some readings in the area in order to do what you need to do? If so, do them, officer Beard here can help you with that. Topsy, try not do to anything stupid. I'm going to get you guys a boat, and figure out of our witnesses can tell me anything else."
Leave it up to me to forget someone's name in the middle of an awesome command speech.
I turned around, and started walking towards the officer that Beardsley had pointed out to me, when I turned around to take a look at Hookwolf. I'd have to figure out what he'd been doing as well, but that could wait. For now, he was launching his tail at one of the massive eyes visible in the surface of the blob.
I looked at the eye, the eye looked at me, and I felt the pull of a soulgaze, which was disconcerting in all sorts of ways, the least of them being that this thing apparently had a soul.
The vision was strange and disconcerting. It reminded me of nothing so much as those hypercube drawings that mathematicians insisted were just the shadow of a real hypercube. It did, however, help me figure out the identity of the thing.
Perspectives switching in and out, I saw Genoscythe, a D-list parahuman hoodlum with delusions of grandeur, swirling through an extradimensional crystalline mass of flesh, merging and melding with it. It was massive, it was powerful, it was drained and weary. But that was just one part of the vision.
Unlike with Taylor, where I'd just seen her parasite in the background, I actually got a feel for the thing here, and I felt something close to what Ebeneezar must have felt when he looked Jack Slash in the eyes. The emotions, the motivations coming at me through the soulgaze were strange, inhuman and powerful.
Fear, fear of failure, of not being good enough. Conflicting interests. The thing in front of me served a greater goal, but it knew that it could not be part of that greater goal, that it wasn't good enough, that it would be discarded for the greater good. That greater good, the final goal, was just there in the background, almost forgotten. I couldn't see what it was, but I almost felt like I would agree with the goal, if not with the costs of the goal.
Besides that, more inside of it, there was what could best be described as love, an intimate bond between two people, making them one, but twisted and strange. It reminded me of a fucked-up version of marriage, but it seemed like this parasite actually loved its host, loved Genoscythe. Not for his skills or his looks, those things were almost irrelevant to the inhuman intelligence. No, instead, the parasite loved Genoscythe's resilience. His ability to always stand up, to keep up a positive outlook. It had been their shared journey, their similarities, that had made them become close to each other, and the parasite's weakness had come through its love for its host.
I suddenly found myself back on the street, still looking at the twisting mass of flesh, at Genoscythe. It was strange, but I could almost feel pity for the thing, unable to control itself, lashing out in all directions while it was dying. It was dying, I knew that now. It wouldn't last a day like this, and it was expending all its energy by expanding its mass, bleeding itself dry, unable to stop the process.
It was strange, that bond between Genoscythe and his parasite. They had been so close to each other… I thought of Lisa, Tattletale. Of the way she seemed to be dealing with her brain-parasite. Of the way it had brought her back, even after she'd died.
Eb and the council had taught me that powers were dangerous and unnatural, that they completely disregarded the Third law of magic, and that I shouldn't give the thing that had lodged itself in my brain an inch, because it would take a mile.
If I compared that to Tattletale and Genoscythe though, I wasn't entirely sure how true that was. Not that I would suddenly go crazy and claim that I saw through the lies of the Wizards, but I was pretty sure there was more to it than they'd told me.
I turned my mind back to the mission, and tried not to think about parasites in brains, Merlins, Behemoth heads, or the fact that Eb and Revel were on a mission together.