Snarl 3.1
The building had been part of a factory once. Most of it was dominated by large rooms that had once held the machines of industry, which had since been reduced to irregular bolts and beams protruding from the floor after the machines themselves had been stripped for parts. The other portion was less than a quarter of the building's total size, presumably where the rooms for managing the business side of things once were. If they still held any of their old purpose, it was now for a much different kind of product than whatever the factory had once made.
I was more interested in the larger rooms. The windows that lined the walls, once made to give the workers light, provided excellent positions for my flying eyes to look in. Or my eye-spies, as I'd taken to calling them, though I wouldn't be caught dead admitting it to anyone.
The factory rooms had clearly been taken over. Furniture had been set up in the irregular spaces it could be fit, couches, chairs, and tables arranged in bunches. Some were grouped around TVs or heaters hooked up to portable generators. Brockton Bay had always had mild winters and spring was fast approaching, so I assumed they were running more out of habit than necessity.
Not that it really mattered why. I just cared that it kept my targets grouped up. There were over a dozen people were in the derelict factory that I could see, possibly with more in the business area. They were mostly men, all white, and nearly every one of them had a tattoo of some kind that incorporated a swastika, a triple E, or the acronym of their gang. Seeing even one would have been enough to peg them as members of Empire Eighty-Eight, the most outright shitty gang in the Bay.
I watched them through the windows, or at least my eye-spies were. Most were lounging on stuffed furniture as close to the heaters as they could get without burning themselves, or else watching something on the TV with the kind of invested look that made me think it was showing a sports game or something about one of their capes.
Only two of their number were actually guarding their charge. A pair of trucks sat in what was once the loading dock, parked beside a pile of wooden crates. Inside of those, according to Tattletale's intel and my own inspection, were automatic weapons being ferried through Brockton Bay as part of the E88's arms trade.
One guard leaned against the creates, casting irritated glances over her shoulder to the others relaxing and warm around a TV. The other paced a walkway over the door from the loading dock to the factory room, out of sight from the gangsters in the other room. Both shivered occasionally, the cracked-open door out of the factory letting in a draft of the air outside, while their lack of activity and what I presumed to be their long shift exacerbated the cold.
Or at least that had been the situation fifteen minutes ago. The one on the walkway had been the first to go. His position meant he would have seen if the gangster on the floor was taken down first, so I had no other choice. With an eye-spy slipped through the crack of the door and perched up among the rafters, I'd kept watch on the movements of both gangsters, tracking their sight lines to move a savage in without being noticed. Finding a good opportunity for it to climb up to the walkway and sneak up behind him had been trickier, but one chokehold later and he was down.
The other had been easy by comparison. Another savage slipped in during one of her frequent glances to the other room, closed the distance during the next, and she soon joined her compatriot. The two were just outside the door into the loading bay now, tied back to back and gagged with the elastic cords they'd used to secure the crates together. They were awake and clearly unhappy, but I'd taken the precaution of tying their ankles all together so they couldn't get up and had a savage rifle through their pockets to make sure they didn't have any knives or tools to cut their way out.. They wouldn't be going anywhere.
Two savages now crouched by the door from the loading dock into the factory proper. One held a length of rebar as long as my arm, the other had short lengths of chain wrapped around its fists as improvised brass knuckles. Both weapons had been scavenged from the Trainyard along with a number of others, all for the specific purpose of making sure I could send my savages in armed instead of scavenging on the spot or relying on their fangs and claws. And against the numbers they were looking at, I was glad for it.
I sent them in. With one eye-spy providing an overhead perspective on the factory floor, another serving as overwatch for myself to ensure I wouldn't be caught off guard by a cape that happened to come across my hiding place, and a shifter busy with another duty, they were the entire assault.
The first group was close enough to the door to be caught off guard by the approach. The length of rebar slammed into the gut of the first gangster, doubling him over and leaving him vulnerable as it grabbed the back of his head and slammed his face into the hard concrete floor. The other brought a chain-wrapped fist around in a haymaker to the jaw of another gangster, sending him sprawling over the side of his chair.
The others in the group were reacting, so I stalled their wholesale offense by having the one with the chains grab the TV they'd been watching and hurl it at the two closest together. The cables on the back of the TV caught for a moment before being pulled out by the momentum of the throw, but it stalled it enough that it caught the two around their stomach instead of their chests or heads. They fumbled, caught between not wanting to break the TV by letting it fall and getting it out of their way so they could fight back.
They chose too slow. In their distraction the savage with the rebar had already subdued another gangster and the one with the chains was stepping on the table the TV had been on to lunge at them. It tackled one back onto the couch, lashing out with its legs as it fell to kick the other and knock her down as well. The three were a tangle of limbs, striking out with fists, elbows, knees, foreheads, whatever body part was best positioned to try and hit an opponent. Though that wasn't strictly the case with my savage. It didn't bite or use its claws, as per my orders.
I had enough practice with them by know to know how they acted in a fight, and subsequently I knew how much I had to micromanage them with commands. In a fight like this, against unpowered gangsters, they were competent enough on their own. For the most part my orders were restrictions and conditions places on the basic "attack" command I'd given them as they entered the factory. No biting, no clawing, nothing that might leave someone with serious bleeding, no hits to the spine or throat, nor to the head in a way that might damage the brain. It was the closest thing I could get to ensuring no one would walk away from these fights too injured without robbing them of all ability to act with competence.
As the chain savage wrestled with the two gangsters on the floor, the one with the rebar sent another gangster to the ground curling up in fetal position to shield himself from the blows that rained down on his chest and shoulders. Through my eye-spy I could see the last gangster of the immediate group moving in from behind, a glint of metal in his hand I took to be a knife.
A quick order to the savage had it spin around, swinging the rebar in the same moment to catch the gangster in the hand and sent the knife skittering across the floor before it was even in a position to see him. As he staggered back, clutching his hand, I had the savage step up and knee him in the crotch, essentially taking him out of the fight. Behind it, the chain savage clambered to its feet. The gangsters it had been wrestling with were groaning on the ground, though the savage seemed a bit worse for the wear by the slight stiffness of its movements.
By now, the other gangsters were moving towards the fight. From my eye-spy, I could see they'd split into groups. Two were attempting to flank my savages, while a pair of gangsters hung back. I couldn't hear what was being said, at least not now, but none of the other gangsters seemed upset with them so I assumed they weren't cowards. The more likely possibility was that they had guns.
A less than ideal possibility in a room this large. My savages were tough, but not much tougher than a particularly fit human. And unlike a human they'd vanish entirely if they took too much damage. A few bullets here, in an environment without much cover, would be enough to wipe them out.
I had to keep the pressure up. I directed the chain savage to grab the fallen TV and spin to build up momentum, releasing it to hurl the appliance towards one of the flanking groups. The group scattered to avoid the projectile as it crashed down, sending broken plastic and glass bouncing across the floor.
As soon as the savage had released it I directed the savages to charge the other group while they were distracted and complacent, believing the attacking savages to be directed towards the other group. Through the eye-spy I saw one of the gangsters hanging back raise a handgun, firing at one of the savages. He missed and the savages continued on, giving him no chance to shoot again before they were in the midst of his own allies.
The other group realized they weren't under attack, but after a brief moment of hesitation, they ran towards the loading docks instead of towards the savages. Maybe they were going to get the weapons they were guarding, or intended to flee in the trucks. It didn't matter either way.
That left me with the problem of the remaining gangsters. I'd caught the first group by surprise, but these gangsters were armed and ready. On of them grabbed his baseball bat by either end and got it around the chain savage's throat from behind, pulling back to get it off balance and allowing one of the other gangsters to drive a knife into its stomach.
Whatever sense of pain my savages could feel was overruled by my orders, as it continued to fight on regardless of the injuries it was sustaining. It thrashed around to try and dislodge the gangster holding it in place, driving its elbows backwards and lashing out at the knife wielding gangster whenever he approached. As a result, it hadn't suffered another gut wound but it now sported numerous bleeding gashes along its arms. It was concerning. Durable and incapable of pain they may have been, but I knew from experience that they could be whittled down without a single decisive blow, and it was taking enough wounds that I was concerned it might vanish and leave me missing half my attacking forces.
The other one was doing better. It only faced one gangster armed with a knife, and the superior reach of its rebar allowed it to quickly strike her legs out from under her and batter her down. With her down, I directed the rebar savage to turn towards the knife wielding gangster.
It was too late. By then the gangster had overcome his reluctance to be struck by chain-wrapped firsts and powered forward to drive the knife up into the savage's throat. But as fast as he was to strike, my reaction was faster. I dismissed the chain savage before the knife could penetrate enough to kill it, leaving the two gangsters off balance with the sudden disappearance of their opponent and one of them falling forward into the other in his effort to avoid stabbing his friend in the face.
I was already summoning a new savage almost before I reabsorbed the energy from the one I'd dismissed. I grabbed a crowbar from the duffel bag beside me and handed it to the savage as it formed, ordering it forward immediately with the same orders I'd given the other two. It swung itself over the edge of the roof, grabbing a thin metal column running parallel to the wall of the building and sliding down it like a fireman's pole before running towards the factory a half block away.
In the factory, the rebar savage got to the gangsters just as they stumbled into one another. A quick blow with the metal bar took the knife wielder in the knee and sent him toppling to the ground, with follow-up strike hitting him in the wrist and disarming him. Only the gangster with the baseball bat was left standing in the immediate group they'd been fighting. Simply ordering the savage to take him down as well would have worked as he regained his footing from his friend collapsing onto and then away from him, but that would raise another problem. As soon as he was removed from the equation, the gunmen would have a clear shot at my savage.
It was going to get shot anyways, so I decided on the course of action I figured would surprise them the most. Rather than attack the last gangster, I ordered the savage to shove him to the side and charge the gunmen. It took all the gangsters a moment to realize it had switched targets, enough for my savage to close half the distance between them.
It wasn't quite in range to hit them with its rebar club before they opened fire. Abandoning the hopes of a good melee hit, I directed it to throw its length of rebar. The bullets tore into my savage as the rebar left its hand and it collapsed into nothingness. A second later the rebar hit its target. Spinning end over end, it hit one of the gunmen in the face and shoulder. He staggered back, dropping his gun to clutch at his face.
I summoned another savage and armed it with a monkey wrench before sending it on its way. My only minion at the factory now was the eye-spy watching the factory floor, leaving me blind to the approach of my savages. I sighed quietly. I would have preferred using another eye-spy to monitor them and adjust their orders, but all my summons were currently busy, so I didn't have a lot of options.
I seized on my connections to the two savages and fully embraced them. Immediately I was hit by a barrage of input as I was hooked into my minions' senses. It had taken me two weeks to figure out this trick, then another week and a half to practice with it enough that I could stand to use it for more than a few seconds at a time. So while feeling the full sensory input of a different body just as keenly as I did that of my own had initially sent me into a brief identity crisis, now it was just unsettling.
Further complicating things was that the input wasn't neatly divided by senses, but bundled up into a single ur-sense I had to focus on to divide back up. If they heard a gun fire or saw a knife I'd know it, but I had to focus to tell which sense that information was coming from, and issue that had screwed me over more than once when giving quick commands was a priority. The eye-spies were actually the only ones interpreting the input was easy for, which I chalked up to their always-one sight-sharing giving be a point of reference to decrypt the rest.
In any case it was useful enough now. The first savage I'd sent out was nearly to the factory, with the bound gangsters outside the loading bay doors in sight. The other savage wasn't far behind. That was good, the sooner my savages could attack again, the less time the gangsters would have to prepare themselves. Turning my attention to my eye-spy, the ones in the factory proper were rallying. Of the nine gangsters my savages had downed, two had gotten back up, with the rest still squirming in pain or clutching their injuries on the ground. The five in the factory plus the four in the garage made another nine I'd have to deal with before I could call this in to the police.
The ones in the factory made things easier by not moving to meet up with the other group and instead helping their injured fellows to their feet, trying to rally those who hadn't already risen. It was tighter camaraderie than I'd ever seen with the Merchants I usually attacked, who tended to cut and run when things looked bad for them, abandoning their supposed allies in the process. Whether or not the E88 would be the same in the end remained to be seen.
My second savage caught up with the first, which I'd stopped at the entrance to the loading bay. I directed the first to peek around the door and scope out the room.
The four gangsters were all there, with three opening crates of automatic weapons and the fourth trying to start one of the vans. Both were futile efforts. After taking out the guards in the loading bay, I'd dismissed the savages and sent out a pair of beetleings. I'd had them go through every crate, breaking apart every weapon, so that even if these gangsters got away their cargo would be ruined.
The vans were similarly trashed, though they didn't look it. After trashing a good half a dozen getaway cars, I'd picked up on a pattern. If a vehicle was obviously wrecked, people would just abandon it and flee on foot. But when I made sure to keep the damage hidden so that it seemed from a glance to be perfectly functional, people would waste their time trying to start it up instead of just running away, often up until my savages dragged them out of the car. Ever since, I'd made sure my beetleings didn't leave any outward signs of their sabotage, and tonight it was paying off again.
I sent my savages in, directing them to sneak around to the side to keep the van between themselves and the gangsters. The attempted driver was the first to notice their presence as I had a savage pull him out of the door he'd left open and slam his face into the side of the truck. The other got around the back end and charged the gangsters at the crates.
I tried not to focus too much on what it was doing. It would be disorienting enough pulling back from their senses once this was done, I could afford to let them operate without too much direct influence from me.
As invested as they were in the useless guns, the gangsters wasted precious seconds trying to shoot my savage instead of switching to whatever other weapons they had. It was enough time for my savage to bodily slam one of them into a crate hard enough to crack the wood. They were dropping the guns and pulling out knives by the time my savage had pulled away from their groaning comrade, but my other savage had joined in by then.
The ensuing attack didn't last long, helped along by my subtle encouragement to attack more viciously rather than give the gangsters a chance to attack. One of them still managed to dish out a cut across the arm of the savage with the wrench. Half a block away I winched and clutched my own arm at the phantom pain. The downside to accessing all their senses was that I got everything without any way to filter or dampen it without shutting it out entirely. It was enough of a factor that I made sure I pulled back out of the connection before sending them in to attack the gangsters with the guns.
It was disorienting going from the sensory input of three bodies back to just one, even with the input of my two eye-spies that was still pouring into my mind. The sensation passed quickly and I settled back into watching the factory fight through my eye-spy.
My decision proved to be the right one as one of my savages got shot within a second of emerging into the factory. I created a new one as it died, directing the remaining savage in its attack. It managed to bring down one of the gangsters with a solid blow to the ribs and injure another before the remained gangsters managed to gang up on it, dragging it to the ground to pummel and stab.
I dismissed it and summoned another. The gangsters got less than thirty seconds of respite before the savage I'd made to replace the shot one barreled into the room and clubbed one of them with a baseball bat. That one got shot and killed too, but it bloodied their noses and occupied them long enough for the next savage to arrive, even as I made another.
They might have had a numerical advantage, but I could simply replace my savages each time they were killed. And where the gangsters were growing weary and battered from the successive attacks, each savage I made was in peak condition.
The next savage brought down both the remaining gangsters who fought in melee, leaving only the two gunmen who promptly shot it dead. I held back the next savage as my other replacement approached, watching the gunmen through my eye-spy.
Maybe they were running low on bullets, maybe they were just on edge because they were the only ones left, but they broke. The gunmen backed hurriedly away from the doors leading to the loading bay where my savages had been entering from, keeping their guns trained on it. Tracking their movements from above, I had my savages follow them from outside, one on either side of the building, ducking low so as not to be seen through the windows.
They moved over to one of the large windows lining the room, still watching the door to the loading bay. One turned away long enough to shoot out the window before attempting to climb outside through it.
He noticed the savage too late. Standing to the side of the window outside, I had it grab him and drag him the rest of the way out, slamming him to the ground as it climbed atop him to pin him down with its weight, one clawed hand wrenching his gun arm to the side until he dropped it.
Satisfied that the one gunman was in check, I adjusted the eye-spy to watch the sole remaining gangster. He was backpedaling away from the window, and his expression and the movements of his mouth gave me the impression he was screaming something, though I wasn't willing to tap the savage's senses just to hear what it was. He was also raising the gun to point at the savage, which just wouldn't do. Not only would he free his friend if he shot the savage, he also ran the risk of missing and hitting his friend.
To distract him, I had my other savage throw a rock through a window. He whirled around, bringing up the gun to point in that direction. That was good, but now I was faced with the issue of how to take him down. If the savage from that side tried to attack, it would be gunned down immediately, and the other would be letting his friend lose if it tried.
He was jumpy enough that a solution presented itself. I had the savage with his friend rise, dragging the gangster upright along with it before grabbing a rock of its own and smashing a window. He spun back with the gun, hesitating this time as he registered the danger of trying to shoot my savage with his friend in the way. It was a good enough distraction for the next order.
I sent my savage on the other side vaulting up through the open window and charging him. By the time he realized something was off and tried to turn, it was upon him. He was tackled to the ground, one arm awkwardly twisted beneath him while his gun arm was splayed out to the side. He struggled, but having my savage knee him hard in the side a few times was enough to make him stop and drop the gun. And just like that, the fight was over.
Cleaning up was comparatively easy. There were plenty of elastic cords from the crates, and all of the gangsters were either unconscious or too beat up to fight back against being restrained. Once that was done, I had one of my savages check their pockets for cell phones. I had one of my own, courtesy of Tattletale, but better to be safe than sorry when it came to being tracked, and using the bad guy's own phones as my burner phones was the best option I had.
It found one pretty quickly, along with assorted wallets, packets of drugs, and other assorted items. I had it leave those, though I did have it take the cash from the wallets. I needed to get money somehow, and getting it at the expense of literal Nazis wasn't going to rob me of any sleep.
I had the savages move the gangsters into the loading dock and bring in the two from outside, slipping my eye-spy inside in the process to watch from the rafters, then had one of the savages leave with the cash and the phone. It brought them to the base of the building I was on and pressed them against the pole my savages had slid down to get to ground level.
The pole curled up and grabbed them before retracting towards the roof. Most of my shifter's mass was up on the roof with me, camouflaged as a mass of cement clinging to the lip of the roof, with an extended tendril disguised as a pole to provide an easy means of reaching the ground.
Tendril retracted, I took the phone and cash. Counting out the bills to be about fifty bucks, I crammed them in my pocket before dialing the police. I had the procedure down by now, listing the situation and location in as few words as I could, hanging up as soon as they registered they understood, and generally giving them as little to work off of about me as possible. Once that was done, I had the shifter return it to the savage, who brought it back to the factory. If that phone turned out to have critical information on it, I didn't want to remove it from the crime scene.
I gave the factory one last once-over. Seventeen tied up E88 thugs, an eye-spy in the rafters to watch them until the cops showed, and a pair of savages perched atop a van like gargoyles to give the gangsters a more prominent reason to not try to escape. I was ready to head out.
I stood and stretched as I commanded my shifter to move along the edge of the roof towards the gap I wanted. My jacket pulled a little tightly during the movement, a testament to my less-than stellar work at stitching it back up after I'd cut it open in a few places to check some lumps I thought might have been trackers. They hadn't been, but I still felt mostly justified. Nothing wrong with a healthy dose of suspicion.
Though despite my suspicion, Tattletale hadn't done anything to break the rules I'd set for our deal. I was always the one to contact her, she always gave me at least three options for targets, and she made sure to warn me about any potential cape conflicts I would want to avoid. If it weren't for our rather off-putting first meeting, I wouldn't really have had a reason to distrust her, even with the persistent knowledge that she was a villain. Dislike, sure, but not distrust.
At the edge of the building, the shifter took a new shape on my command, that of a tall column. As soon as it was formed and solid, I gave it its next order and it tipped over the edge. The top of the column hit the lip of the rooftop on the other edge, forming a precarious bridge. Or at least it was precarious for a second. One it was touching both sides I ordered my shifter to reshape itself. It clamped onto both rooftops and flattened out, forming a bridge. It wasn't very wide, only about a foot, but it was long and solid enough for me to walk across.
I crossed to the next rooftop and it detached from the roof I'd come from, gathering itself up on the roof before moving to the next gap. It moved slower than I did, but I was patient. Given its usefulness to hide me, I was loathe to reveal my shifter to anyone else, so I used it mainly to provide myself paths, bridges, ladders, and other means of passage. It really was a useful creature.
I found myself dwelling on that first meeting with Tattletale as I walked between rooftops. It had been a month ago by now. A month of hitting storehouses and stockpiles, first once or twice a week, then with increasing frequency until this week, where I'd gone out almost every night. Mostly I'd gone after the Merchants, but occasionally a prime target presented itself from the other gangs, a location though hidden enough to neglect guards or separate from the main territory enough to me minimally protected. Tonight was the first time I'd gone after the E88, though I'd hit the ABB twice.
My efforts didn't go unnoticed either. I wasn't as big news as the likes of New Wave or the Wards, but the regional PHO forums definitely seemed interested in me. I'd thought my lack of a name or an in-person appearance on any recording or photo so far would be detrimental to any interest, but it only seemed to boost it. Maybe it was just because I was new and therefore hadn't been discussed to death, but I was being described as some cross between an urban legend and a local cryptid.
'The Bogeyman of Brockton Bay,' they called me. I could understand the reasoning behind it. I made sure to keep my shifters and eye-spies out of sight, and I used my beetleings almost exclusively to sabotage things, which meant not many people saw them. As a result, most of the documented encounters with me were about my savages attacking out of the darkness to beat people into submission, being replaced in minutes or seconds if they were killed, with no signs of any source and no attempts at negotiation. Not the kind of public reputation I'd wanted setting out, but one I'd come to accept I'd be stuck with ever since getting a good look at my savages.
Though my public reputation did still seem to be up in the air. The forums conclusively agreed that I was somewhere between creepy and terrifying, but remained indecisive on everything else. Depending on who you asked, I was a vigilante, an up-and-coming villain, a black-ops Protectorate member, or an advance scout for Nilbog. Likewise, my power was speculated to be anything from a Case 53 with self-duplication powers to a minion-based Tinker to a mutation-granting Trump. I'd even seen one theory that I was multiple people, a Changer that became the monsters and a Master that duplicated the Changer.
The PRT wasn't doing much to quell the rumor mill either. Apart from their initial press statement announcing me as an unaffiliated Master cape, they'd stayed quiet about me save a few non-committal answers to interview questions. It should have put me at ease that they weren't screwing with my attempts to remain behind the scenes to my minions, but it just put me more on edge. I knew Aegis at least had seen me, and I couldn't think of a reason he wouldn't have passed that information on. From that the PRT probably knew the basics of my power and some about me as a person, and the fact they hadn't announced that they knew anything of the sort made me feel like they were holding it over me the same way Emma kept my childhood secrets in reserve to reveal at choice times.
I tried to stamp down the thought as soon as I had it, less because it was unwarranted and more because I loathed connecting my cape and civilian lives in even such an intangible way as a passing thought. It wasn't inaccurate though. Perhaps it was overly cynical to distrust an organization made of superheroes and government officials when they were doing something that benefitted me, but I didn't trust anyone who seemed to be doing something helpful for no reason. Tattletale was at least up front about what she hoped to get out of our deals, and I had front row seats to my own mess of motivations when it came to being a hero, but the Protectorate and PRT were too large for the simple desire to do good to persist as the sole motivating factor. With that many people competing for position, advocating for any number of groups and causes, and generally creating a mass of internal maneuvering and politicking I didn't even have the faintest clue about, as well as the public side of things, they had to be benefitting from their silence. I just wanted to know how.
My best guess was that they were doing what Tattletale had done, doing me a favor to try and butter me up. Hopefully I'd be able to ask them myself soon enough, though I didn't expect to. My encounter with Aegis had put back my plans to join up with the Wards. Initially I'd hoped to prove myself useful enough with a weak power to be more than just the useless rookie, which my accomplishments would have done by now with the bonus of my discoveries about how much more versatile my power was than I'd originally thought.
But meeting and subsequently mauling Aegis moved the goalposts. With the temperament he'd shown me, I had no doubt he'd made sure to spin everything in the worst way for me. Apparently he hadn't done it well enough for them to be willing to declare me a villain, but I'd still be playing catch-up to a month's worth of whatever he chose to tell the PRT, the Protectorate, and the other Wards. It brought to mind quickly repressed thoughts of Winslow rumor mill of bullshit and insults. Aside from the social tiger pit that would be to try and join, I had to prove myself competent enough that when I came to join my accomplishments would make me worth taking on despite anything he may have said about me. On top of that, I was certain he was the type to hold a grudge, so I needed to secure myself enough as someone not to be messed with that he wouldn't try something even once we were ostensibly on the same team.
It didn't help that the past month had also given me plenty of time to second-guess myself and doubt my plans. Aside from my misgivings over a group that would allow someone like Aegis free reign, I still had reservations over putting myself in the hands of a government group whose competence I knew nothing about. I had enough of that with Winslow and chose this path to have the freedom to make up for it, a part of my life untainted by what I went through there. There were few things I could think of that I wouldn't do to avoid making my cape life into the same hellhole of powerlessness and abuse.
I tried to reassure myself that I didn't know what they were actually like, in part because I'd made no really effort to reach out yet. I'd focused on non-powered gangsters for the last month, almost certain wins I could use to experiment with my power and gain experience without too much risk. I'd escalated in frequency and difficulty of my targets, but the fact that I was still avoiding the powered gangsters meant I was dealing with the regular police instead of the PRT.
On that topic, I could see the police pulling up outside the factory through my eye-spy. I dismissed the savages, though I left the eye to watch until the police actually had the gangsters in their custody. At the same time I redirected my shifter. Rather than bridge the gap to the next building it affixed itself to the lip of the roof and extended a column of its body down, simultaneously extending short poles to either side. Within a few moments it took on the appearance of stone, creating a peg ladder I climbed down into an alley. T wouldn't be able to follow me down without just falling off the roof, so I just dismissed it while I thought on my next move.
I could have always tried to find the Protectorate or Wards on one of their patrols, or just sought them out on the one or two occasions I'd spotted them through an eye-spy, but I always avoided them. I picked up enough from Dad's work talk to know that opening negotiations between two groups was always highly dependent on the positions of power each held. If I wanted to reach out, I wanted it to be once I'd built up more reputation and on the heels of a decisive victory for me, one unmarred by the unfortunate level of violence I'd accidentally used with Squealer.
Still, as much as I tried to rationalize things, underneath my pragmatism was fear. Joining the Wards would be a big step. It would mean unmasking to them. It would mean telling dad. It would mean letting someone else control my cape life. It was an irrevocable step. If it turned out to be another Winslow, it wouldn't be one I could get out of without every heroic cape in the city knowing my identity.
The fears were pervasive enough that only my continued desire to be a hero and my desire for greater resources that what I could scrounge from gangsters was enough to keep me focused on the Wards as a goal. But that still left me with the problem of building up a reputation, and the problem there was that I wasn't doing much. Regardless of how some of the more enthusiastic forum members liked to play me up as some terror of the night, the reality was more in line with the skeptics who didn't think one more vigilante could do much.
I'd made a dozen strikes over the past month, to no discernable effect. I begrudgingly had to admit that I couldn't really expect more. A full Protectorate team, Wards team, and PRT division along with a family of independent heroes hadn't wiped out crime over the course of years, and I'd only been active for a few weeks.
Tattletale could probably help with that. She'd given the impression that she knew which targets would most effectively disrupt the gangs, but I didn't want to rely on her to that extent just yet. I wanted to try and stand on my own without too much outside help, however tempting it may be. Though it seemed the time would soon come to swallow my pride. Reputation would be nice, but I had to remind myself that the priority was getting rid of the gangs.
Besides, if reputation was what I wanted, I would have gone to the Endbringer fight two days ago. It had been a terrifying moment to hear the announcement of an Endbringer attack and realize that for the first time in my life I was included in the request for all parahumans to go and help. And then I didn't. I had plenty of excuses for why. The attack was in Australia, it was the Simurgh, my minions would have been useless. It still didn't make me feel any less guilty.
But that was in the past. I needed to concern myself with the present and future, and for the future to go well I needed to do more in the present. The best option I could see was to go after another of the Merchant's capes. Or I could capture Trainwreck again.
That was a point of irritation every time I thought about it. Squealer was still in custody, but Trainwreck had been in custody for less than two weeks before breaking out again. After all the frustration he'd put me through, and the effort I'd put into taking him down, it annoyed me that the PRT had let him get away so easily. I'd considered tracking him down again as soon as I found out he'd escaped, but I'd seen the news after he was taken into custody. My sense of victory for taking him down had been significantly soured at the realization that I'd basically been destroying a man's prosthetic limbs.
So a Merchant cape it would be. I checked my energy and found my pool just a little under half full. Even if it wasn't enough to take down any cape I managed to find, it would be enough to at least bloody their nose.
I pulled out the phone Tattletale had given me and dialed her. It was the first time I'd called her twice in a night, and it rang enough that I got worried that she might not pick up.
After enough time that I nearly gave up, she answered the phone. "Bogeyman! How's it going? Everything go alright?"
"I'm fine. Went well, shipment got cleared out." I focused on what I was seeing through the eye-spy for a moment. "The police are loading up the last of them right now."
"Cool, cool." Her tone was as friendly as it ever was. Initially it had annoyed me, but after enough conversations with her I'd come to realize that it actually meant to be friendly. I didn't know when over the past year and a half I'd started assuming that sort of tone was automatically concealing mockery, but I knew it was a bitter thought that the Trio had tainted my ability to even perceive friendship. If nothing else, at least my deal and the ensuing conversations with Tattletale had helped me realize it was a problem.
"I was just wondering since you usually only call once a night." She continued. "I got worried that tis was going to be one of those calls from the movies where someone gets shot and calls someone for help as they bleed out in an alley. I'd hate to have something happen to my favorite vigilante."
"Aren't I the only vigilante in the city?" My reply was halfway between casual and inquisitive. Even I wasn't certain if it was meant to be banter or a genuine probe for information. I hoped it was the latter. It would be a bit awkward, but better than becoming overly familiar with a villain.
She apparently took it as the former, because she laughed. "True, but I don't think it would be that hard to find another tall, dark, and brooding cape somewhere out there. They probably wouldn't come with their own entourage, though."
I smiled at the joke. It would have been easy to just let her banter at me for a while, but it would also have been dangerous. I didn't like turning the conversation back towards business, and I didn't like how I didn't like that. Against my initial judgement, Tattletale was growing on me. Not in the sense of being a friend, or even someone I could really trust, but as someone who was at least reliable.
She's a villain, I had to remind myself, I can't trust her. It was a mantra I'd been telling myself more and more over the last week as I talked to her more often. But she was also the first person besides Dad that I'd regularly talked to on amicable terms since my short-lived fair-weather friend last fall. And as much as I hated that and tried to consciously resist it, that still counted for something.
Fuck, I needed to talk to more people. I ran through my mental list of every cape in the city close to my age, and just like all the other times, couldn't pick out any of them as being good option to reach out to. I really needed to move along my plan to join the Wards, which meant tonight was even more important.
"I'm calling for business." I said. "I want to know where I can find a Merchant cape. Not Skidmark though, and preferably one who's not with a big group."
I heard her hum in thought, switching over to business mode. "Just a second." I heard the faint rustling of papers, followed by the clack of a keyboard. "And just to be clear, since one of your rules is that I can't push for you to go out more often than you want to or to go after capes, this is your plan? Not something you're going to twist around and blame on me later?"
"Yes, I'm sure."
"Alright then. It'll take me a minute to find what you want." There was a moment of silence before she spoke up again. "So, you're looking to step up your game. I'm curious, did one of those gangbangers do something that got to you? Or is this just the next step for you?"
I didn't really want to answer the question, but I considered it anyways. It did seem to be the next step, escalating from gangsters to the powered members of the gang. Not the E88 or ABB, but still powers and still criminals. A more difficult step, but one I'd have to take sooner or later.
"I think-" I said before stopping myself. I hadn't meant to speak, but I didn't want to leave the sentence unfinished. "I think it's just the natural progression. I won't get anywhere if I just pick off the lowest members of a gang. I need to move up eventually."
"Mmm." She replied. "Move up where? In terms of breaking down the gang, in terms of reputation?"
I made sure to keep my mouth shut this time.
She kept talking anyways as keys continued to clack in the background. "Well, if it's reputation, you know my group?"
"Yes." I said curtly. The first thing I'd done as soon as I got to a computer the day after meeting Tattletale was to look her up. Her page on the wiki was disappointingly empty, so I'd made sure to check it almost daily ever since, in the hopes that someone would update it with more about her. It hadn't yielded much, but about two weeks ago someone had changed her association block to mark her as a member of the Undersiders.
Checking out that page, which had been made the same day, had revealed them to be a small-time gang of thieves. Apparently they counted Grue as a member, as well as Hellhound, a nomadic independent villain who'd been bouncing between nearby cities for the past year before moving to Brockton Bay. Besides them and Tattletale, they had one other member helpfully listed as 'Unnamed Villain.' All in all, fairly minor players in the scheme of Brockton Bay, and exactly what Tattletale had claimed to be on that first night. What I didn't know was why she was bringing them up in the context of my plans for the future.
"One of my teammates, Grue, he thinks in sort of the same way." Tattletale said. "Reputation's big for him, so there's a lot of focus on balancing security and reputation, what puts us on the map versus what puts us at risk."
I relaxed a little bit. She was just gossiping about her team. She was doing it in a vaguely uncomfortable way that felt like it was drawing comparisons between me and a B list villain for hire, but it was harmless. Interesting too, in a way. Everything I knew about villains I learned from the forums, their wiki pages, news articles, or, in very few cases, fighting them. It was odd hearing a villain casually discuss her teammate like this.
"Speaking of which, I was talking to him about you." That put me on guard again. We might have had an agreement, but hearing Tattletale casually mention talking about me with her villain teammates set of warning lights. Even if it was with the same air she'd just talked to me about Grue, it wasn't something I was comfortable with.
"You want to escalate what you're doing, right?" She continued. "Well, he and I were thinking that, if you were willing, you could come along on-"
"No!" I cut her off. "No no, no! We agreed on rules, Tattletale, and the very first one is that I do not work for you! The addendum to that is that if you try and recruit me, our agreement is over, do you remember that?"
The question might have carried more weight at the beginning of the month. I'd grown used to our agreement, come to appreciate the convenience of skipping the process of tracking down gang stockpiles and hideouts to get right to taking them down. One night I'd called and Tattletale didn't answer, which I'd found out later was because she and the Undersiders were robbing a tech firm at the time. I'd gone out on my own anyways, but I'd ended up just wandering the streets for a few hours, finding only a single wandering gangster nearly drugged out of his mind for my trouble. He'd barely been worth the effort, and I'd been embarrassed to call it in to the police after a string of successes with bringing down crowds of gangsters and finding weapons and drugs.
Could I cut ties with Tattletale and start from scratch? Yes. It would be hard, enough that I'd probably lose the progress I'd made against the Merchants over the past month well before I was anywhere near as effective as I was with Tattletale's aid. Would I cut ties? If it came down to it, yes. But I hoped it wouldn't come to that. She'd reached out to me for a reason, and I hoped she'd see reason and take it back.
I started pacing in the alley. I was more than a little angry that she was breaking the rules like this. My other eye-spy was only watching an empty loading bay by now, so I called it back to me just to distract myself by watching the overhead view of the city as it flew. At the same time, I had the strange experience of watching myself pace back and forth from the bird's-eye view of my other eye-spy.
"I know, I know." Tattletale said. Her voice remained calm in spite of my anger, and I was quickly reevaluating her tone on the scale between friendly and faux friendly. "If you don't want to hear it, I won't give you the pitch. I'll drop it and move right on to telling you what you want to know. But before you choose whether or not to hear it, let me just say that I'm ninety-five percent sure that if you do hear it you'll agree."
I silently fumed. My anger abated a bit at her willingness to drop it, but the fact that she'd brought it up in the first place and her assertation that I'd be interested still rubbed me the wrong way. I was half tempted to just hang up on her and call it a night, and a part of me wanted to just break off our deal right then and there. But a part of me was curious about what she could possibly have planned that she thought would convince me to go along with whatever she had planned. There was no harm in hearing her out before denying her, right?
"What is it?" I said, my voice still tight with surpassed anger.
Tattletale had clearly been waiting for me to agree, because she started talking with the air of someone who'd planned everything they were going to say ahead of time. "Well first off, it's not a recruitment. It's just an offer for you to come along on one job, one time. Our standard practice as thieves involves avoiding witnesses and shutting off security systems, so you shouldn't have to worry about anything that happens on the job getting linked back to you, and we've never had to deal with any heroes so far."
I didn't bother to reply. From the sound of it, she was just trying to preemptively counter any arguments I would throw at her proposal.
"As for the job itself, since you'd be coming on it, you would get to have a say every step of the way. You'd get to come to the planning meeting, speak up for or against any plans, basically all the perks of membership for a limited time. The job itself shouldn't take more than a couple of hours, about the same as one of your nightly outings. And upon the completion of the job you'd get a full fifth of the earnings, probably coming out to at least five thousand dollars."
The amount of money she'd so casually mentioned caught my attention. Dad was still trying to pry payment out of the school for my hospital stay, that much money could at least ease that burden somewhat. But it wasn't nearly enough to come close to persuading me.
I shook my head. "No, I'm still not-"
"But!" Tattletale interrupted, "That's just what everyone on the team gets, and you'd be putting your neck out there as an outside hire. So to sweeten the pot, your payment would also come with three bonuses."
I narrowed my eyes in suspicion, thought she couldn't see it. Presumably this was the part of the deal she thought would sway me. I considered cutting her off so she couldn't finish the pitch. I couldn't think of anything she could off that would change my mind, but what if she was right? Wouldn't it be better if I avoided the temptation entirely by keeping myself ignorant.
But I was still curious and prepared to be insulted by what she thought my determination to be a hero was worth. I let her keep talking.
"Bonus one, my time. For half an hour, at no price, I will help you figure out how your power works."
That did pique my interest. Her wiki page didn't list a power, but by now I was certain that it was either some form of Thinker power or a Trump power that let her understand the power of others as either a primary or secondary function. In either case, her telling me about my power would mean trusting her to know that same information, if not more if she chose to withhold something. My trust for her didn't run that deep, especially since my concerns over her power were the main reason I insisted we communicate only over the phone.
"I don't need you help with my power." I said.
I could practically hear the shrug she made. "That's fine. Though you make different monsters, don't you? Someday you might want some help figuring out how one of them works. Or you might want my help on something else. It's your favor, your choice how to use it."
Tattletale waited a second until it was clear I wasn't going to respond, then kept talking. "Bonus two, we get you a costume. High quality, untraceable, and you get to design it."
I looked down at the dyed jacket and jeans I was wearing. A costume didn't really seem so important now that I'd locked down my tactics of avoiding the front lines. If I was doing things right, no one would even see me. Still, unnecessary as it would be, the idea of a real costume felt enticing, like the first step towards being an officially recognized cape.
"And I'd get it…" I asked against my better judgement.
"Before the job." Tattletale replied. "You could wear it on the job, or only start using it afterwards if you want, give your current outfit one last hurrah."
I made a noncommittal grunt. The things she was offering were nice, certainly things that I would have eagerly accepted if not for the strings attached. But none of them felt worth going along on a criminal mission. I could get by without that money, I was dong fine with what I currently knew about my power, I was comfortable with my current costume.
That left just the last bonus. With what I knew of her, Tattletale was probably saving the 'best' for last as a grand finale. If there was anything she was offering that she thought would convince me, it would be that last bonus.
"And the third?" I asked, hoping to rob it of some of its impact by interrupting her presentation.
"Oh, that's easy." She said in the tone I knew meant she was grinning on the other end of the phone. "Betray us."
I stopped pacing. Over the course of the conversation I'd been annoyed, offended, and amused, but this was the first time I was really confused.
"Excuse me?" I asked.
"Betray us." She repeated. "Sell us out to the Protectorate, call the cops to anticipate our robbery, whatever you can think of to put us in the hands of Johnny Law."
I was at a loss for words for a moment. All my conversations with Tattletale had been focused on business, and they'd all given me the impression that she was smart. Arrogant and a bit too fond of screwing over the people she gave me directions too, but smart. The idea that she was offering me a deal that deliberately involved betraying her to the Protectorate was baffling.
"Why?" I asked eventually.
"You've read out wiki pages, right? Heroes usually have their pages restricted, stops the bad guys from knowing all their strengths and weaknesses, but the pages for the bad guys are always filled with as much detail as possible. So since there's not much on the Undersiders, you know they don't have much on us at all. Just telling the PRT about our powers and tactics would probably get you in good with them, much less if you actually managed to bring us down. We're a new group, but Grue and Bitch already have some name recognition. You'd score yourself some major points."
"No," I interrupted, "Why are you offering for me to betray you? Why would you ask me along on a job where that's a key factor in my participation?"
"Oh, honey." Tattletale said. I could still hear the grin, but the friendly tone was a little less friendly now. Not quite mocking, but more self-assured. "You're smart and you have a pretty good power. However you choose to go about betraying us, I'm sure you'll do it well. But when it comes to betrayal and counter-betrayal, I'm confident I'll be a step ahead of you the whole way."
I considered the offer, genuinely considered it for the first time. I hated that she had been right. This third bonus was far more enticing than anything else she'd offered. One way or another, if I took it I'd be losing Tattletale's support. But if I did it right, I wouldn't need it. Every article and forum pot I'd seen about the Undersiders said they were elusive and talked about how little was known about them. Of the two who were known before the group, one was a mercenary moderately well known in the area and the other wandered enough to be recognized across states. Taking them down would give me all the pull I needed to join the Wards on my own terms.
"Well?" Tattletale asked. "You come along on one job as a mercenary consultant, with plenty of steps to make sure your work with us won't get linked to your hero identity, and in return you get help with your powers, a new costume, several thousand dollars in cash, and potentially all the reputation of taking down a villain group."
I didn't answer at first. The idea seemed tempting… But she was offering it for a reason, she'd even spelled out that she was confident she could outwit any attempt at betrayal. On top of that, I didn't know enough about the ins and outs of cape dynamics to know for certain what would happen if I did this. Would I get flagged as a villain anyways? Would they send me to juvie instead of the Wards?
"Let me get back to you on that." I said hesitantly. "I need to think it over first."
"Sure, no rush." Tattletale said. "We'll always have jobs, you can get back with your answer whenever."
I nodded, still a little bit out of it as my thoughts whirled. "Right. In the meantime, my request?"
"Of course! First, Mush was recently spotted at the border of the Docks and the Trainyard…"
I listened with half an ear before picking a target and hanging up. I was distracted by the warring ideas in my head of risks and benefits, weighing possibilities against certainties. I'd need more time than just tonight to think, and I'd need to research. I pulled out my notebook and pen as I walked, using an eye-spy to keep an eye on my path. I sketched out a two-column chart to lay out the pros and cons of Tattletale's proposal with the intent to fill it out while my minions duked it out with Mush.
It was an hour and a half later before I collapsed into bed. Mush hadn't been there, but a dozen Merchants were. By now they'd be in police lockup along with the E88 thugs from earlier tonight. The chart in my notebook was still as empty as when I'd sketched it.
The problem, I thought to myself as I drifted to sleep, was that I needed more information. Not only on the job, but on the cape politics surrounding it. I needed to know, if everything went wrong, what my options would be and what it meant for me. And for that, I needed to ask a professional.