Progenitor

by metaldragon868

Annette Hebert wouldn't call herself Marquis' friend, though they were well acquainted. She didn't know that their acquaintance was the healthiest adult relationship he had. Nor, that it would lead to him entrusting his daughter into her care. Taylor Hebert didn't know these things, but she did know that as much as she loved her big sister Amelia, she wish she'd be less...intense.

13. Chapter 10

Progenitor: Chapter 10

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Now, where are you?

I was back at the place where it'd started, Jack's Safehouse. It'd been cleared out by now, leaving nothing but an abandoned garage in its wake. Exactly what I'd been counting on.

I stood in the garage, practically swimming in my dark hoodie and jeans. My face, it's skin shifted into a dark spectrum, practically disappeared into the shadows. My eyes, twisted to align more with a cat's, swept the empty space for even the tiniest detail that would tell me where they went. My nose, filled with enhanced sensors picked up from the best canine breeds and wired into a similarly complex neural net, filtered the air and carefully picked apart every chemical apart down to the thousandth percentile.

I could see where the truck had been parked in here, it's tire tracks making clear marks on the pavement. I could smell the oil, piss, and blood from that night. Faint smears of cocaine, hints of heroine, and distant blip of ammonia. Enlightening if I'd never been here, but nothing that would get me a lead on where to go next.

But then, a familiar scent drifted past my nose.

I smiled.

There we are

I ran out of the abandoned garage and charged deeper into the city.

When I'd initially created the black ooze, I'd made it so that when it inevitably decayed outside my presence, it would break down into a harmless, but distinct, chemical. It was a simple smell, reminiscent of honey. Not particularly strong either, though it would be very distinct from the rest of the chemicals filling the air. To most humans, it would be nothing more than a faintly pleasant scent, but to a nose as refined as mine? It was a trail of breadcrumbs that led me right to the source.

I chased it as it lead me deeper and deeper into Merchant territory. I knew they'd taken some of the black ooze from the stash I'd made and tried to disperse it around, not that it would work out for them. I'd be surprised if the barrels of now completely inert organic matter were stored anywhere important, so that wasn't much of a lead.

The people, on the other hand, were.

The chemical the ooze would break down into would work even inside a human body, effectively marking everyone who'd ever tried using my black ooze. Now all I had to do was find my first lead, then daisy chain them together until I worked my way to the top.

I'd read enough history to know that taking care of the Merchants wouldn't be as simple as "Cut off the head of the snake,", but it would be a good start. I knew a little about their structure, but not enough to truly act on it. I needed more, be it to take them out myself or lead others to finish them off. Either way, I had to be thorough or they would scatter like rats.

So I chased the trail, deeper and deeper into the city. Darting into alleys, behind buildings, and onto rooftops. Then, in the distance, I noticed it. It was impossible not to.

In the gleaming light and vibrant activity of Brockton Bay's nightlife, there was only one section like it, entire blocks blanketed in thick swathes of darkness. When the sun fell, the shadows seemed to wrap around it's hollowed out skeletons and obscure the scar from view, like some great maw rising up from the deep and devouring all light within. Every native knew exactly what it was, the memory of it's birth burned into their memory. None could forget.

The Burnout.

I grimaced as the faint hint of oil and ash that drifted by me.

Of course, I thought, moving towards a more discreet path into the Burnout. They'd be in the home of the Merchants.

I'd been hoping to find more leads before going in there, to get a more solid handle on the Merchant's organizational structure, ideally even find someone important to copy on my way in. If I was one of their big wigs, like some major distributor or lieutenant or something like that, they'd let me in the front door with open arms and tell me all they wanted. If I wasn't…

Well, plan B it is.

I stopped and turned towards a nearby shopping center, trying to look as casual as possible. I didn't truly think anyone was hunting me down, but it didn't hurt to be careful in this city. As one of the largest parahuman hotspots in the world, everyone was on the lookout for anything remotely suspicious. I couldn't get complacent about it, not if there was even a sliver of a chance that it could get Taylor involved.

So I walked into a grocery store as Amelia Hebert with some pocket change, and walked out as an african american man in his late twenties with a bag of chicken.

I was taller now, closer to 6ft 3in, and let the shadow of a beard grow along my chin. My hair, still long, had become dreadlocks pulled into a ponytail. My clothes remained the same, dark jeans pants, boots, a shirt, and a hoodie, though they were a bit more of a tight fit now. Still, I'd been wearing nondescript clothing a couple sizes too large for this very reason.

Another glance around, just to make sure I didn't have anyone paying any special attention, and I started heading back towards the Burnout using the more discrete back alleys.

I walked, careful to take my time and look unhurried. To add to the act, I unwrapped and ate the chicken I'd bought as I moved.

While walking into the Burnout might raise a brow or two, it wasn't exactly unheard of. Though the area may have been without power, water, or even rule of law, people still lived there. For a given value of "lived," that is. Hell, college kids dare each other to go in there every other week. If I just looked and acted like I belonged, or at least wasn't doing anything particularly special, then it'd help reduce the chances of getting noticed.

So, at a casual pace, I followed the trail. With every step I took, the scent of oil became stronger, the ash grew thicker, the air got colder, and the light grew ever more distant. I shrugged it off, focusing on why I was doing this.

Dad had wanted to take that hunting trip this weekend, but he'd been forced to cancel when something from the docks came up. Something about the government getting spooked about Archon and trying to increase production while beefing up security.

In the end, he'd tried to reschedule it to next week. I was disappointed at first, but I knew how important this all was. Then he told me to go ahead and head out, then report on everything I did. It'd give him a base to build his lesson on.

"Go out and Hunt, Amy" He'd smiled, "It'll give me something to work with"

"Just try not to be such an edgelord."

I huffed, my breath coming out as puffs of mist, and blushed at the memory. Then I remembered who'd called me such a thing in the first place, and a fond smile, graced my face.

I relaxed, and walked into the darkness.

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Well...shit

I'd followed the smell of honey to the first source I could find. In order to get in a larger area, I'd split myself up into my human self, and dozens of rat, cockroach, and even crow selves. They'd all helped me spread out my biosensor network and ensure I was unnoticed, but it'd still taken me about a half hour of walking through outskirts before I found it.

The smell of blood and rot slammed into me like a well.

When I peered into the alley, it was easy to see why. A corpse sat just inside the alley, wasting away. The rats and rot had already dug into their flesh, leaving them unrecognizable. There were no clothes in sight, and from the angle they'd been left, it looked like the body had just been dumped into the alley.

I could smell the bacteria and fungus growing on it, not to mention the myriad of chemicals produced from the rot. It choked the air with it's sick miasma. Still, it was clear to me that this was the source of scent I'd been tracking.

My body worked hard tracking and identifying each and every chemical that hung in every breath I took. Most of it was expected give the conditions. I could clearly see the remnants of my chemical there, meaning whoever this person had been, they'd taken some of my black ooze.

But there was something more to it, something sweet buried underneath the honey and blood and rot, yet so strong and...wrong that it couldn't be confused for anything normal.

It was a cloying sweetness that seemed like seductive whispers of pleasures untold just waiting on the other side. The alluring taste of sweetness mixed with the wheezing rot the coppery blood, and subtle honey, the mix so pungent this close that it would be nearly maddening even to a human's dulled sense.

"Well, well, well. What do we have here?" I muttered, twisting my vocal cords to produce a deeper sound. I sucked down breath after breath, trying to identify that chemical. While part of me broke it down, the rest of me analyzed what was in front of me.

"The rats certainly had a feast with you," I mused looking her over. It was clear they'd been here a couple weeks at least, given the rot and predation. A couple of years ago I probably would have puked, time and the environment hadn't left her a pretty sight.

There wasn't much skin left on their bloody bones. Strings of meat and sinew hung of their carcass while what remained of their guts bulged with the internal buildup of gasses from rampant bacterial growth. Their skull stared straight ahead with empty sockets, a few tendrils of ligaments dangling out of the orbits. Empty needles and discarded brass decorated the surrounding floor, as did a few dead mice, but no clothes. Combined with a certain unmistakable scent, it didn't paint a pretty picture.

"Is this what they wanted to do to you Emma?" I scowled, the thought of someone I knew being subject to such senseless waste and depravity stoking a simmering fire within me. "Is this what your fate would have been? To be used, discarded, and forgotten in some back alley without so much as a grave?"

I huffed angrily, letting that thought fuel me as I crouched down in front of them. Frankly, their state wasn't much of a surprise. The Burnout was abandoned by nearly everyone. The cost to clear all the damage too much to fix up these days, especially after government support dried up.

I'd been mad about it at first, hell I was still mad, but dad had explained it to me. Brockton Bay was, at the end of the day, merely one of the dozens of brushfires the US had to put out. They'd help put out the flames, made sure nothing was going to jump out and kill us all, tried to gather all the spent munitions, and collect what dead they could, but then they needed to move on and keep Archon or worse from trying to fuck us over tomorrow.

Which meant the city was left paying the bill for the most undesirable real estate within 100 miles. It was no New York, and they'd done what they could, cleared and rebuilt what they could. But it was slow going these days, they were barely able to get a building cleared a year.

And no one wanted a dozen blocks of scorched, ruined, and collapsed buildings. The mountains of rubble, the people still missing, the remaining munitions, all of it made it unpleasant to say the least. So no one patrolled it, no one laid claim to it, and no one cleaned it.

No one but the Merchants.

I assumed that others used it for things like executions and stuff, but there wasn't any profit in actually owning it. Not like the various business and residential districts, and certainly nothing like the wealth of center city. It was no wonder they'd laid here for weeks when no one, not the Empire, the ABB, or even the Heroes bothered with anything more than a token effort to patrol it.

So they'd been left here to rot.

All alone...

I paused for a moment, trying to find the words. I felt like I should say something, some kind of prayer. I could remember hundreds of them from Synagogue, but none of them felt quite right to me. Like the wrong tongue speaking hollow words. Maybe this was God's way of giving me a nudge?

But where did I start? What did I say? Did it even matter?

...Well...if I'm going to do it, I need to start somewhere.

"...Sorry," I finally said. I licked my lips and swallowed nervously, completely pointless for me, but it kept me human. "I'm sorry this happened to you."

Now what?

"I...hope you're in a better place now…"

That's weak and you know it I scolded myself as soon as the words left my lips. Do better.

"I...hope you're in heaven now. Or at the very least, that God's given you peace."

God, this is dumb, I thought.

But you'll regret it if you don't do anything. Or worse, you'll stop being you.

I ran a hand through my hair, digging into that anger to push past the oh so human nerves.

"Look...I'm sorry if you had a shit life, you didn't deserve to end up like this. Hopefully, you've found peace with God." I finally said. "In the meantime, I'm going to need something from you to get justice, to help keep this from happening to anyone else again."

"I'm gonna need to eat you."

My body exploded into a mass of tendrils, bursting out of my clothes and wrapping around the corpse. I burrowed through meat and bone, wound myself around their ribs and skull. I dug in, stripping them of flesh and taking in the bone. I slipped through and drunk from their skull. I wormed my way in and partook of their heart. I licked the smallest trace blood and meat from their bones. I infected and absorbed the active bacteria and fungi. I consumed it all, broke it down, and analyzed it. From the smallest protein chain to the largest lump of meat still on them. I took it all in.

When I was done, little was left, and all of it on purpose. I slipped from the handful of bones left, now cleaned down to the first layer of calcium phosphate, and worked my writhing form back into my clothes, before retaking my disguise as a human.

Well, that was enlightening I thought with a hand rubbing the fuzz on my chin.

The cause of the strange sweet scent was some kind of chemical I couldn't make heads or tails of. Not much of it was left at the scene, and even residual marks of it left in the, as I'd discovered, girl's body weren't exactly pristine samples. There was only a little to work with, and even then I wasn't entirely sure what I was dealing with, or if it was even the original substance and not just a byproduct.

As for the girl's brain, it had been pretty badly deteriorated. It had been so long since she'd died that it was mostly just a lump of meat by nothing. I couldn't recover anything but the barest flashes of data from it.

A dark room lit by a red light.

The sound of a horn.

And the smell of blood, sweat, oil, ammonia, and something sweet.

Nothing I could make much work of, unfortunately.

Which led me to the autopsy.

After consuming her whole body, I got a much clearer picture of what I was looking at. I actually had to admit, I wasn't entirely sure my first assumption was on the money. The girl died of an overdose and while she had had sexual intercourse around the time of her death, there weren't any signs of recent physical trauma. Of course, that didn't really mean much either. There were plenty of ways to rape someone without beating them into submission, but it was also entirely possible that she'd just been having normal sex with her lover while they were both dopped out of their minds, she had too much, and they just dumped her naked body in this dump as a cheap grave.

It wasn't a pleasant idea, but I could see it making sense given the context. Still, I didn't really have enough information either way. It also didn't help me find a hard lead.

What did was the chemical running through her rotting veins. It was...possibly a drug. It certainly had mind-altering properties, I just wasn't sure that was the primary purpose. Or, well, the only purpose. It had, well, a lot of confusing, if useful, properties. It could work as a great industrial lubricant and coolant, nice for machines, but it also bonded really well with oxygen to produce an airborne chemical, which was the sweet thing I was smelling.

Again, confusing, don't know why you would want a lubricant that would evaporate into a cloud of sweet narcotics the moment it hit air, but that's what it did. That's not even including how psychoactive it could be if actually ingested or, as her body suggested, ingested. Just touching the barest, most faint traces of the byproduct still in the remains of her body was enough to make me quirk a brow at what it would have done to my nervous system, if I had one.

It was no wonder there were various rats lying around here, dead. No doubt they tried to take a bite, then were hit by the psychedelic trip of the century from just a hint.

Honestly, I wasn't even sure how that worked, even with my powers. I could only gather so much from the faint scraps of biodata I had, most of the trace remains were inorganic chemicals. Other parts of it went way over my head, but I was still working on analyzing them. What was important was that this was pretty rare, really weird, and tasted like space magic.

So it was probably power-related.

Which meant it had limited distribution.

I held up the girl's skull, one of the last remnants of her body I hadn't consumed and looked into her empty sockets. Did it still have a fragment of her soul, or was it just an empty shell of the girl who once existed on this world? Her spirit having gone off elsewhere?

I couldn't rightly say. A question for tomorrow, I supposed.

Still, once tonight was over, I'd do what I could to give her a proper burial. It's the least I could do for her in return for what she gave me.

"All I've got to do is find the source," I muttered to the skull, "And I've already got it's scent."

"How hard could it be?"

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A/n: Oof

This is later than I'd like. Cutting it a bit close. Took a lot longer than I wanted. I had the chapter written up, but there was one correction I wanted to make. Wasn't huge, figured it wouldn't be a big deal.

Took me about four days to do it.

Then on the fifth I scrapped it, and wrote twice that level of content in about two hours. I am quite annoyed. Still, it's out. Hopefully you like where I'm going with this.

Anyways, that's about it, I gotta get back to work making sure all the other chaps I'm working on are up to snuff.

Hopefully, this isn't dogshit.