Chapter 9: Power

Lisa stood there, arms crossed over her chest, rather unimpressed with what she was seeing.

"I give you two million dollars, and this is what you have to show for it?" she asked, incredulously, glaring at the Tinker that had built it.

'This' was a patchwork metal door that was connected to thirty seven car batteries. It had literally been cobbled together from metal corrugated roofing, steel siding, and… was that the adhesive paneling of a station wagon? Yes, yes it was.

"Hey," Leet all but whined, "Don't judge a book by it's cover. Ow!" The parahuman gamer glared at his partner.

"What he means to say," Uber said, glaring right back at Leet, "Is that we spent more money than we thought on the internal setting and had to settle for what we could cobble together for the door. It works perfectly."

"And how accurate is it?" The girl asked, obviously still dubious, "How often will I have to replace these batteries?"

"It's one day, one year, just like the show. A full twenty four hours real time equals thirteen, twenty eight day, months chamber time," Leet said, "And you don't actually need to do anything with the batteries. You can get rid of them actually, We needed them to open the door initially, but now it runs off of itself. This thing will still be here when we are long dead and gone."

"Sweet," she said, nodding to herself. She pulled her phone out of a hidden pocket and sent a text. Thirty seconds later, a tall man in black fatigues, combat boots, dark sunglasses, and a black kevlar vest came in. His face was set in a constant scowl. In one hand he held what was obviously a Tinker-tech rifle and in the other was a metal suitcase.

"I asked you to get it done in under two months, and you just barely scraped by with a few days to spare, boys," Lisa said, turning to the two small time villains, "Twenty million, as promised, in untraceable bills. Inside the case is a key to the vault in Las Vegas that holds it all."

"How did you-?" Leet began, but Uber interrupted him.

"Thanks. Here's the instruction manual," the taller of the two parahumans handed the girl a two page document, "Hopefully, see ya never." He grabbed the suitcase, Leet and pulled him into the space ship that they had decided to keep after their ill fated run in with Saiyan. If they were lucky, this would be the last time that they would have to deal with a ridiculously overpowered teenager.

If they were lucky.

Tattletale turned back to the door, then looked to the merc she trusted more than any of the others under her employ.

"Jacobs," she said, "I want thirty of our best guarding this door for the next twenty four hours. If anyone gets in, fire them all and have them sent to Ash Beast's territory in Africa."

"Yes, ma'am," the mercenary nodded, speaking into his radio. In under ten minutes, the required mercs were in the mostly abandoned warehouse.

"Alright, boys and girls," the blonde said with another foxy grin, "Keep this place secure and you've earned yourself a bonus," she didn't say anything more than that before she opened the doors to an artificial dimension with accelerated time.

-9001-`

"What happened?" Alexandria asked, staring through a monitor at the girl sleeping fitfully in one of the provided rooms at the Protectorate HQ in New York. The poor girl was tossing and turning and whimpering. Whatever she was dreaming about was disturbing the teen enough that she was subconsciously activating her Ki.

"We're not sure," Armsmaster said, equally focused on the teen girl. As much as he was… annoyed by her, he didn't want any harm to come to her. "She had hit Behemoth with the javelin, it was almost enough to kill him, then Scion showed up, that's where everything went sideways." The Tinker turned around to face a screen on the wall in the office they were using to monitor Taylor. A screen slid forward out of the panneling, and started playing a video.

For a few moments, it was nothing but blinding white and red light. After a few seconds that faded and they could see the heavily damaged form of Behemoth struggling to move, just before Scion appeared. The moment he did, the miniscule form of Saiyan on the video start screaming and moving spastically until she fell out of the air and started beating her head against the ground. The impacts were so great that the camera was vibrating, even from the obvious distance.

At the same time, Scion finished off Behemoth with barely any effort, thrusting one golden hand into the core of the beast and crushing it into nothing. Afterwards, the strongest hero of them all, and what Alexandria knew to be the true enemy, approached Saiyan. The girl stopped screaming a little bit before he came over to her, looked up at the creature wearing the form of a man, and started the screaming anew.

The video cut off when the girl fled so quickly that it caused a massive sonic boom, destroying everything within four hundred yards of herself.

"She was next seen in the lobby here, blabbering about giant demons that were going to kill us all. She passed out two hours ago," Armsmaster summed up the last eight hours.

The female member of the Triumvirate hummed in thought, watching the video play again. It was barely two minutes long, but so much happened in such a short time. She could only guess at what happened.

Perhaps it was time for a consultation.

"Keep her under observation, if she starts speaking clearly again, alert me immediately," Alexandria told Armsmaster. He nodded to her, turning back to the screen that showed Taylor sleeping.

The Brute-Mover left that room, heading to a secluded office. Once she was absolutely sure she was alone and unobserved she spoke.

"Door," she commanded to the empty room, and a glowing, rectangular portal of light opened into the room. She stepped through, and stood at the other end of a desk in a poorly lit office. There was a somewhat aged woman sitting behind the desk, while a dusky woman in a black suit stood next to her.

"We can guess why you've come," the aged woman said, "The girl, Saiyan, she's had a breakdown, yes?"

"Yes, Director Mother," Alexandria agreed, "I want to know, how does this affect our plans?"

"Contessa," the woman, Director Mother said.

The Italian woman nodded, then looked the hero in the eye and said, "She has realized the truth about Zion. Her mind is coping with knowledge that she was never meant to know about him, let alone the rest of existence. However, it is imperative that she patrol Brockton Bay in one week. I am unable to extrapolate why this is important, only that it must happen. If Saiyan does this, Zion will be defeated before the year is out."

Alexandria's jaw dropped. This was huge. Previously, they had nothing, no good way to defeat the true enemy. Everything they did so far was only a stalling method, a hope to extend their time and pray that something would come about that would allow them some small ray of hope.

And now, with Saiyan, apparently that hope had come to fruition. Or it would, if she was capable of patrolling in one week's time.

"I understand," the world's third most powerful woman said solemnly. Another dimensional gateway appeared behind her and she floated through it, already planning on how she was going to get the girl back on the beat.

Hopefully Doctor Yamada would be able to help.

-9001-

Three days later, Taylor sat in a comfortable chair, staring at nothing really as she listened to the woman, one Jessica Yamada, speak to her calmly. The psychologist had been trying to get her to talk about what happened for twenty minutes. Two hours and twenty minutes, if you counted the other two visits they had, in the previous days.

Doctor Yamada, though, was a stubborn woman. And dedicated. She would have you believe that she was a successful practitioner because of said dedication, but really, it was her stubbornness that had won her most of her achievements.

That did not lessen them in any measure, though. She had helped many people, parahuman and normal human alike, overcome some of their worst moment and become productive, but there would always be another case, and she would always give it her best.

So, even though Saiyan, Taylor, was continuing with the mute act, Doctor Yamada stubbornly went on with the session, determined to help this girl overcome whatever horror was plaguing her.

"So, Taylor," the woman began, "Have you ever-"

"Have you ever thought about God?" the teen finally spoke, not looking up.

"Pardon?" the woman asked after a second.

"God," Taylor slowly looked up, staring directly at Jessica, "Have you ever thought about him? What he's like? What his agenda is?"

"I can't say I have given it too much thought," Yamada admitted, "I suppose I think of him like most people do. A distant, omnipotent entity that oversees the universe, looking to give mankind enlightenment."

Taylor nodded, looking away from the woman, "Yeah. I started to hate God. Around the time my mother died, I decided I didn't like him, cause he took my mom from me. Of all the people out there that deserved to die- Jack Slash, the Endbringers, even the Merchants- and he picks my mom," a tear rolled out of the girl's eye that she quickly whisked away, "I almost got over that when Emma turned on me. She started using everything she could to tear me down. Things I told her in confidence. Things I never even told my mom. I'm Bi, by the way. Emma knew before I did. She asked me about it when we were twelve. She'd been using that as the least hurtful weapon against me, before I triggered.

"And then I did trigger," a grin, wide and boisterous, crossed her face, "I triggered with the best power ever, it made me into what I am today. I thought God finally decided to give me a break. I thought it was all looking up, ya know? The last ten, or so, months have been the absolute best of my life," the girl's face went blank again, hollow eyes looking directly at Yamada, "Then I saw him."

"Saw who?" Yamada asked calmly.

"Scion, God," Taylor said, "He's not a kind, omniscient being that wishes the best for us all. He's a monster. He wants to kill us all, slowly, painfully. He wants to take everything we know and love and watch it burn, not for some hatred, or grudge he holds against us for our ruination of his planet. He wants to do this because it is convenient," the girl was obviously haunted by this, "He will do this, he plans on ending it all, at some point. Our powers are his. He gave them to us. He's going to take them back and scorch the Earth clean of all life in the process."

"Why do you believe this?" the doctor asked, having been furiously scribbling in her notebook.

"Because I saw him. I saw the real Scion," Saiyan said, "That golden body he uses isn't even a sliver of his true self. He's massive. Huge in a way I thought only planets could be. It's…" she searched for the right word, "Incomprehensible. The human mind can't truly capture the scope of him. We'll make comparisons, put numbers together to quantify it, to make it smaller, but we can't truly understand it. Even now, it's fading from my mind. I just can't handle the truth of it. One day, I'll just say he was the size of Jupiter, or some other pitiable comparison, and believe it was that simple," the girl sighed, "He's so powerful. There are no words to describe it. No simile to use, no comparison to point to," Taylor looked at her hands, clenching them before her eyes, gathering her thoughts, "The only way to quantify him, to file him, is as God. And God wants us dead for his convenience."

-9001-

Four days later, Taylor was pulling on her mask again. It was a rather large improvement, compared to when she had first come back from India. In just four days, from the time she had actually started participating in the therapy, and she was being encouraged to patrol again. She was told that it would be part of returning to normality.

Normality was good. Normality was freakin awesome. Some normalcy in her life would let her start training again. And she needed to train. Scion was going to decide to end it all one day, and if she wasn't ready when he did, everything would die.

She pulled on her boots, and tied her sash into place, deciding to dress normally instead of using her Clothes Beam for the sake of putting off the patrol for even longer.

As much as she wanted to go on with her life and training, she was actually somewhat worried that she was going to snap at some criminal and just blast him to ashes. She wouldn't be too torn up if it was Hookwolf, or maybe Skidmark, but a normal human mugger? A guy who was forced into thievery because his family was starving? She didn't want to hurt someone like that.

Still, she suited up and prepared to head out, not knowing that twenty three hours and fifteen minutes ago, Tattletale had entered a dimensional pocket with an accelerated rate of time.

"This is your route," Miss Militia handed the young woman a map of Brockton Bay. It had a long blue line that cut a figure eight, with a few detours, all around the residential and business sectors of the seaside city. "Radio in, every fifteen minutes, as usual," the dusky skinned woman said, her gaze softening as she looked at the most powerful, most fragile girl she had ever met, "Will you be okay?"

"Yeah," Taylor nodded, then again, firmer, "Yes. I'm going to be okay. I'll be back to one hundred in no time," she handed back the route, having memorized it, "I'll be back in a few hours." THe young woman moved to the roof of the Protectorate HQ and quickly flew off.

Thirty minutes had passed and it was proving to be a rather boring beat. Honestly, she shouldn't have expected much, even in her home city. At least, not in the residential district. Most of the real criminals operated out of the docks. A few had business down town, but almost no one did anything in the suburbs. It was part of the unwritten rules that you didn't attack anyone in their unmasked life. That was only if you weren't so stupid as to broadcast your identity to the world. Running a parahuman crimewave out of the garage of your home was about as obvious as unmasking yourself and giving out your name and home address on live television.

She was just about to radio in when something hit her.

That was a bit of a deception. Made it sound like someone threw a water balloon at her.

No. Something impacted the side of Saiyan's face and her world spun uncontrollably. Stars swam in her vision. Her ears buzzed with the sound of a continuous bell ringing.

"Hi," the voice of another girl overcame the ringing once Saiyan had finally stabilized her flight.

Floating in the air across from her was a blonde teen, a somewhat manic grin splitting her face in two. She was wearing a familiar purple catsuit, but the body inside it was vastly different from what she had last seen. For one, the blonde hair that had previously come down to just her chin, came down to Tattletale's chin, was halfway to her posterior. Her entire body had an appearance similar to a granite sculpture of a female bodybuilder. Her stomach was tightly defined, her legs corded, her arms not quite bulging, but radiating power none the less. The Thinker had also slipped some new additions into her normal attire. The first was a grey jacket, with a patch over her her left breast that showed a grinning jackal head in silhouette. The second was the black, fingerless gloves she had over her deceptively delicate hands.

"Tattletale," Saiyan said, pulling her Ki up, her body glowing red, her glower visible even through her mask, "That was a mistake."

"Really?" the young woman asked errantly, "A mistake you say? And why is that?" She walked forward. That is to say, even though she was floating in the sky, the girl made the effort to look like she was walking on the air. For what reason, Taylor would never be able to guess.

Saiyan streaked forward, intent on putting Tattletale down in one hit. Her fist slammed into the side of the blonde's jaw and the impact sounded like the thunder crack of a truly monstrous lightning bolt.

"Oh, the pain," the blonde girl mocked, "The pain!" she reached up, faster than Taylor could follow and flicked her on the forehead. It was only her own Thinker ability that allowed her to anticipate the force of the attack and prevent it from taking her head clean off her shoulders.

As it was, the girl was sent flying, several times faster than sound, her head pounding with severe pain. After only a few seconds, she smacked into the side of a mountain. The explosion rocked the natural formation down to its core. The actual impact cleared the entirety of one side of trees and wildlife, leaving nothing but a two hundred meter crater. At its center, buried another ten feet down, Saiyan had to struggle to pull herself out of the mountain. After a few agonizing seconds, she broke free of the rock. Her mask was torn, her upper body burnt and bruised, and her breathing was ragged.

"The fuck was that?" the teen asked.

"That was me."

Taylor nearly screamed, startled as she was. She hadn't even felt it when Tattletale arrived. One moment she was nowhere to be seen, the next, she was sitting in the air, drinking coffee.

"Mmm, coffee," the villainess almost moaned, "Do you realize how long it's been since I had a decent cup of joe? No? I'm not surprised. You're probably trying to figure out why I'm sooo much stronger right now. I don't blame you, I'd be wracking my brain over it too." Suddenly she was in Taylor's face, her grin as wide as ever, "Boop!"

She finger flicked the hero again, sending her through the mountain. She didn't get too far, because Tattletale intercepted her and kicked her skywards. Saiyan couldn't breathe, she was hit so hard. Her body started to go into panic mode, until she forced it to calm back down.

By the time that had happened, Tattletale was there again, pulling back for another, horribly telegraphed, punch.

Boosting herself to the max, Saiyan flowed around the punch, rocketing a machinegun series of kicks into the villain's upper body. She hit her thousands of times, tens of thousands.

Just like before, there was more thunder, a crack for each kick.

Tattletale was rocked back with each blow, but Taylor didn't let up for a second.

"YaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!" the teen hero shouted her fury to the heavens as she continued the attack, going ever faster. She had to beat her, she had to win, she had to-

Her thought train was broken when Tattletale caught her foot in one hand. The other girl was even straining to hold it there while Saiyan was shaking with the effort of trying to free herself.

"Bored now," the blonde said, "My turn," the sinister hiss in her tone made the hero feel fear. Fear like she felt when she realized what Scion was.

Tattletale started pulling forth all of her Ki, everyone ounce of it. The edges of her body started becoming outlined in the purple light of her own power, the Chi she could call forth becoming so thick that Saiyan was having trouble staying in the air.

Seconds passed and the pressure that the villainess was putting out showed no signs of slowing down, It only grew, and grew, and grew!

And Taylor could see it all. She could see, and understand, and know exactly how powerful the other girl was.

The villain was so high above her that it was worse than hopeless. This was even worse than Scion.

And yet, even Tattletale, as she was now, would still not be enough to kill the true body of the deity that was the golden man.

If anything, that only brought Saiyan deeper into her despair. It only furthered her regretful understanding of just how impossible it was going to be to even to try to stop Scion from destroying everything.

Taylor had been on the cusp of madness just after she saw Scion. This pushed her over that edge.

Tears leaking out of her eyes, mixing with the blood coming from her nose and busted lip, she flung herself at the villain. She knew it was useless. In the very depths of her soul, she knew there was absolutely nothing she could do to Tattletale. That cursed shard of the evil god in her brain gave her an absolute understanding of the assisted suicide she was committing.

But that was just it. She wanted to die. She wanted it to end. There was nothing she could do to stop the coming apocalypse. She couldn't even stop a small time villain on her own turf.

Her scream rocked the world in a way that would have made Behemoth jealous when she threw herself at Tattletale. The air itself was colored with her insane rage.

The villainess was actually shocked out of her immense display, taking the coming attacks with shock. They still didn't hurt, but what she was seeing, what her own intuitive Thinker ability was showing her, brought back a pain from her past that she only wished she was over.

Saiyan wanted to die.

"Come on!" the hero roared at her, powering up Chi blasts and firing them rampantly, "Come on!" she streaked in, slamming titanic attack after titanic attack into every part of the blonde that she could, "Do it! End it! KILL ME!" She kept attacking. Hitting and punching and blasting and screaming. She kept going until her knuckles bled and her voice was hoarse and pushed herself further still. She pushed and pushed, going on and on.

After minutes, her power began to give out. She had long since lost her voice, but still kept trying to scream and rage against the villain. She pounded the butts of her fists weakly against the shorter girl, her body being wracked with the sobs she could no longer vocalize.

When her legs finally gave out, and she could no longer stand, she hid her face in her bloody hands, still crying and shaking.

Lisa would admit that, when she first got out of the Hyperbolic Chamber, she was not in her right mind. A year of solitude had driven her a little batty. Getting out, showing off her power. It was supposed to be fun. It was supposed to be the spur that drove Saiyan into getting her own chamber, or something, to match her growth.

But now, the girl genuinely wanted to die. She was giving up, and her beating at the hands of Tattletale was the final straw that drove her to it.

If someone didn't step in now, didn't do something to give back her hope for a better future, the girl would implode and commit suicide.

Letting go of her Ki and her Chi, Tattletale- no, Lisa- approached Saiyan. She didn't even hesitate to pull the younger girl into an embrace, rubbing her back and cooing gentle sounds into her ear.

She would shamelessly admit to using her power, pushing it to its limit, trying to find ways to soothe the girl, to bring her back from that edge. If this was all she had to do, she'd do it thousands of times over.

"Shhhhh," she whispered to the other girl, her own eyes a little glassy with the weight of the emotions that were pouring out into the air, "It's gonna be okay. It will all be okay."

-9001-

There were a lot of Italics in this chapter.

Power Levels!

Taylor/Saiyan- 6826

Lisa/Tattletale- 930/9,413,444