It's actually so easy now I'm just going to do it again. A dozen chapters fifteen minutes lets goooooo!
Interlude - Sarah
Lisa stood on the sidelines and watched.
Seemed to be her fate lately.
Whoever screwed Taylor Hebert over taught her well. Newtype really knew how to twist the knife once it was in. Each time she said 'Ask the PRT' she emphasized that stuff like Hartford was their responsibility, that they'd taken up that mantle, and that they were sucking at it.
She couldn't throw them under the bus harder, and they made the bus schedule.
Case-66 would break now. Cauldron too probably, if Arbiter's resignation was a sign. Lisa doubted that the PRT could hold off investigations for long now. Circumstance simply didn't make it feasible to do anything but delay.
It was ironic.
Count mentioned Cauldron planning several social experiments right before Scion died. They were concerned about how to keep society going and stable in a world where random teenagers could shoot lasers from their eyes. One proposal Alexandria came up with was dubbed parahuman feudalism, a cynical—though practical—concept where parahumans would rule territory and enforce some semblance of control.
Savors control above all else.
That just made it more ironic. The city was different. One parahuman built a suit, started kicking the others out except for those she could tolerate or sympathize with, and now stood atop the city as queen in all but title. Brockton Bay was lucky she didn't trust herself to rule over others and had no desire to.
Cauldron got their feudalism, installed by sheer will at the hands of a girl with every reason to hate them.
They probably couldn't evict her either. The city would riot. Though if Lisa had to guess, Cauldron would settle on ignoring her. They had their own problems now and Newtype was too far down the list to warrant significant attention.
Calvert made that mistake too.
Newtype might not hate, but she could seethe. Cauldron infuriated her. She wasn't playing nice anymore. Wasn't even pretending to. She'd worry about the 53s and the Wards, and at some point she'd stopped ragging on Armsmaster and started liking him. She didn't want to add corpses to the pile.
As soon as she got the chance and cleared her conscience, she'd bury Cauldron herself. Assuming they managed to survive everything else until then.
"She reminds me of Rebecca," Count mused. "Before the weight of it all crushed her, turned her cold."
Worried Newtype would become the same. Now relieved.
Good for her.
"What now?" Lisa asked.
"You didn't have to do that, Sarah."
"Do what?"
"Take her rage for me."
Oh, that. Lisa rubbed at her cheek and shrugged. "I did promise her a punch once."
Count smiled. "You're more generous than you think you are."
"Leave the psychoanalyzing to professionals." Lisa was starting to sympathize with Faultline. Thinkers sucked. "I owed her a punch. She collected. Done is done."
"If you say so, Sarah."
She did and that wasn't her name anymore.
Lisa thought the news gaggle was weird when Newtype threw the PRT under the bus. It got weirder when she called Bakuda out. One of the watching reporters called her a villain.
Taylor Hebert's answer?
"According to who?"
The boy beside her—Pencil McStabbins—gave an interesting reaction to that. So did several reporters who seemed on Newtype's side.
She'd always been hard on villains. It was her persona. Then again, it was easy to be hard on villains when they were drug peddlers, sex slavers, and racist shits. Harder when they were orphan children cast aside in the storm, and the parahuman who stuck her neck out to try and protect them.
Count and Teacher weren't entirely wrong, when it came down to it.
There was no going back. The old order couldn't survive the existence of people like Bakuda, Newtype, and Dragon. A new order needed to come about, and Lisa would prefer one that still had shopping and stock markets. Most people would, even the damned doomsday preppers who wouldn't last five minutes in a real crisis.
"They tried to strong-arm her after her trigger event," Newtype railed to the camera, "and she turned villain. They should have known better!"
Damn the girl was not pulling punches.
She wasn't entirely wrong either, though Lisa doubted the law would agree. A trigger event was a psychological break by default. Most courts would count that as extenuating circumstances.
Cauldron pushes legal extremes to maintain control.
Sounded about right.
Another irony too, given that Newtype craved control. Suppose she deserved credit for being self-critical enough not to pursue it like an idiot or at the expense of others. Good for her. A hero who actually acted like one.
"What did she mean by war?" Lisa asked. "And I don't mean the one you know about."
"The world has been at war since the Thinker and the Warrior arrived," Count replied, "whether people realized it or not."
Reading her was hard. Her power was bullshit. She wore a mask all the time to hide the pain she felt, and between the mask and the pain underneath it hardly anything else came through. Briefly though, without the mask in place, she seemed confused. Her initial reaction was disbelief, but that faded in less than a second.
She knew something, and as with many other times she wasn't sharing.
"You should ask Newtype about it," Count suggested.
"We're not friends."
"Why not?"
Multitudes of reasons, chiefly among them that Lisa reminded Newtype far too much of whoever hurt her and Lisa wasn't interested in indulging her martyrdom complex.
"You complement one another."
Lisa scoffed. "Yeah. We're peanut butter and jelly."
Thinking of that night was weird, mostly because she didn't remember much. Less and less as time went on, she realized. Lisa kicked herself for deciding to leave it all be then. Figuring out exactly what she missed now was going to be a pain in the ass. Newtype didn't want to share information with them because she didn't trust them. Labyrinth was too close to the PRT. Aisha was with Newtype now, but…
Well, you miss one hundred percent of the shots you don't take.
There were too many blind spots in this mess as it was.
"Be careful," Count offered.
Lisa really hated that someone else could do that.
But what the hell. Add some more shit to the day. She was already back in Brockton Bay.
And fuck she could delude herself as well as anyone but that just felt false. She knew it. For some baffling reason, Brockton Bay felt more like the place Lisa belonged than anywhere. She didn't do well alone. Even after leaving home and having nowhere to live, she stuck close to people.
They were just strangers.
Nothing like the Undersiders. For all the suck that was Count, Calvert, Coil, and Teacher, she fit in there. A merry little band of misfits, perfectly made for her. A bit bitchy to treat them like her own little adoptive family, but they really were. She didn't appreciate it until it ended. Typical 'learn a life lesson' bullshit.
Mostly, Lisa worried about Rachel. The asylum was better than prison, but psychologists weren't equipped to deal with parahumans, not with both hands tied behind their backs. The influence of her power would never let Rachel lead a normal life. At best, she could fit in a bit better but Lisa suspected the world would be better off adapting to Bitch than trying to make Bitch adapt to the world.
Some people didn't fit in, and why should they be made to? Maybe if everyone adapted a bit better to Rex, maybe he wouldn't have…
Lisa pulled the brim of her hat down and kept walking.
World feeds you shit like that.
No point complaining about it.
Aisha was with Newtype, Taylor Hebert. Probably living with her. She'd feel responsible for the younger girl's wellbeing with Grue away. Probably making her do her homework and frustrating her constantly. Aisha would ditch that shit, frequently.
Now, where would Lisa be if she were a rebellious black teenage girl with super pow—
Lisa froze.
It sat at the end of the block at the corner, staring at her. The fucking Green one.
Fucking figured. She knew this would go south! Why did she let Count talk her into coming back? Why did she listen?
Lisa turned on her heel quickly and started back toward the hospital.
Not coincidence. Here for you.
She turned back around.
The Green one in front of her. The Red one behind her.
One on the roof across the street.
They wanted her to head down the alleyway to her left. Like hell.
With only a cursory look, Lisa stepped right into traffic. A horn blared and tires squealed as the oncoming car came to a sudden stop. She offered the driver an apologetic smile and calmly crossed the street. The Purple one above leaned over the roof's edge. Lisa stepped to the right to avoid being right under her and started back up the street.
Like hell she was going to let the little devils corner her.
Ahead, a shadow lurked around the corner. She didn't need her power to recognize it.
As she approached the corner, Lisa pulled off her hat. "Sorry about this!"
The boy gave her a surprised and then appreciative look. Then a surprised look again when the hat hit him in the face. He stumbled and Lisa grabbed his arm and pulled. The Orange one scrambled back, and Lisa used the boy to swing herself around and step over it.
Breaking into a run, Lisa sprinted away from the trap.
Only to run right into the Navy one waiting for her.
Of course it was waiting for her. The fucking robots were damned magic! She couldn't go right into traffic with a semi-truck roaring down the road. She'd get run over. Left was where they wanted her to go, again. Did they know she'd choose to cross the street before?
Expected you to run.
Lisa stepped up onto a parked car, running over the hood and jumping from one roof to the next. A driver yelled at her and she shouted an apology back. She really was sorry. She just didn't feel like having another gallon of strawberry jam dumped on her hair.
Leaping back onto the street and running, she turned at the next block and then went straight across the street.
The Purple one flew over her head, rotors extending from inside its body. Great. Newtype gave them upgrades! Just what they needed.
The robot flew into her path and Lisa grabbed a newspaper from a man's hands and swiped at it. Knocking the machine aside she kept running, trying to think of somewhere to go. Somewhere with lots of people would be best. The robots couldn't harass her so easily in front of a crowd.
"Not so fast, not so fast!"
In pursuit.
Well duh. So much for being sorry—
Her power didn't work well on StarGazer. Well, why would it? AI was completely new as far as possibilities went and Lisa had no real way to gauge her behavior beyond what was obvious. Dedicated to Newtype, loyal to its creator, and by all accounts not particularly deceptive. She didn't control the Haros exactly, but she was always aware of them. Whatever happened before, she'd knowingly allowed it to happen.
Really, saying the Haros were sorry was notable because she never said she was sorry.
With only a moment to choose, Lisa stepped left into the alley to her right.
The Orange one rolled forward, joining her in the alley.
Lisa's skin crawled with the memory of every mean-spirited prank they threw at her.
Could she be a bitch? Yes, yes she could. She didn't stalk Newtype every waking moment of the day to make her suffer for some petty slights.
"Alright, what do you want?"
The Orange robot's 'ears' flapped and its eyes flashed. "Sorry, sorry."
"I got that already."
She checked over her shoulder passively. Her power always led her to think the worst thing possible. That fostered conflict. Drove her to not make things worse, exactly, but to feed her power what it wanted on the other side. It was subtle, incredibly so. It played to her cynicism and bias.
Wonderful way to second guess herself.
Were her parents as heartless as her power told her? Was Cherie really so hopeless? Was Newtype really such a heartless egotist? How much had she gotten wrong because her power wanted to be a cast-iron bitch…that just liked messing with people.
Fuck.
"Delivery, delivery," the Navy robot replied. It came over from the right and pointed.
Turning around, Lisa looked deeper into the alley. The Pink robot peeked around the corner. It watched her for a moment, then held up the leashes in its hand.
Lisa's jaw dropped.
The robot walked toward her, leading Brutus and Angelica along behind it. Both dogs perked up as they got closer and barked at Lisa. They escaped the small machine's hold quickly and Lisa found herself tackled to the ground by Brutus while Angelica circled her and yipped.
They had Bitch's dogs.
Brutus licked at her cheek, which surprised her. Rachel hated her guts. She hated anyone who talked too much. Not much Lisa could do with that because any conversation was talking too much for Rachel. She would think Bitch's dogs would hate her.
Her hand scrambled under the puppy kissing assault, and despite Angelica's playful nibbling at her hand, she found the leashes when the Pink robot handed them to her.
The Orange robot pointed at Brutus. "Long walks, long walks."
Why did they have Bitch's dogs? Was that part of their apology for fucking with—
She was wrong. Terribly, terribly wrong. They'd found a whole new way to fuck with her.
They were being nice.
"I fucking hate you all," Lisa declared. "Hate you so much."
"Have fun, have fun."
