"That didn't take long," Taylor said.
It was not even noon on Sunday, less than twelve hours from last night's action, and Danny had gone out on a patrol just to familiarize himself with the area. And he had only been riding for fifteen minutes when he started running across graffiti tags from the Merchants. They had apparently claimed about a quarter of the Docks already, and would doubtless push for more if their challenge wasn't answered.
"Not long at all," Danny said. "They're on the west, if Empire starts sending its people down from the north to start collecting taxes, the gang war is in full swing."
"Okay," Taylor said. "Step one, you gotta get rid of the tags. It's like posting your flag in a new land to colonize it: no flag, no country."
Danny started sending rats up the walls, scraping at the brickwork and concrete to bring down a fine shower of painted dust, etching out the spraypainted graffiti to obliterate or disfigure it. "Working on that. Next, I should answer the challenge, punish them for the imposition?"
"Something like that. You just got pushed, so push back," she said.
It started in one long-vacant townhouse. The gang members that were squatting there were tired from a late night of tagging and partying, and they drowsed on the wadded carpet they had pulled up and rolled up to serve as crude furniture. One of them woke up, still clutching his spoon, and reached for the stash that wasn't there. "The fuck?" he murmured. "Where'd I set it?" He sat up and looked around, but there was no sign of his bag. Or any other. He knew that his friends had brought their own baggies of heroin and molly, but there was none to be seen. He set about waking them up to have them help him look.
Other safehouses and squats were raided the same way. They were stripped of their drugs, their weapons, and their cash. In some cases their shoes were stolen, or the contents of their pockets. When nobody was watching, the doors were taken off their hinges letting the draft in, along with the peering eys of curious neighbors who had been wondering if they should call the police. A wave of defeated Merchants trudged and limped all the way back to their own territory, passing by rows of their own defaced tags. Some of them would report later that rows of rats stared at them, glaring like a jury as the Merchants went back to the area that their supervillains held.
And some of their older tags were missing too, cleared away by the Dock rats. The Merchants had attempted to take this new turf, and had just lost a block of their own for the temerity. They brought word back to their leader, who did not take the news well. Others saw the tags, drew the conclusions. Phone calls were made. Rumors were spread. A squad of skinheads that had been headed south from downtown got a phone call, paused at the border. And after a while, they pulled back, leaving the Docks alone for the time being. Open warfare was averted.
When he got back home, he was ambushed. Taylor was waiting for him with sketches and swatches. "I'm not taking no for an answer. If you're going to be holding the territory against the other gangs, you need to have a presence, you need to have an image. People need to know who you are so they can imagine you, think about you, fear you if they have to. But as long as you're the mysterious unseen figure guiding the rats, people won't react to you, just to the rats."
Danny sighed, and immersed himself in the world of cape costuming. He rejected anything too colorful, and he rejected anything too sinister. Bold blues and reds got vetoed, and anything in a basic black. They negotiated to a brown-and-tan theme, and her sketches began to narrow down to a specific motif. The mask would not represent a rat or mouse, and no logo or symbol worn on the costume. They agreed first on the mask, a simple medium-brown hood that covered him from the collarbone up, with cutouts for his goggles and a built-up mouthpiece like his painter's mask underneath so that it wouldn't tug too much when he spoke, and wouldn't smash his nose flat. That was apparently a major problem with skintight masks.
After that they came back to the olive-drab cargo pants and the olive-drab trenchcoat. Danny was hesitant about that at first, but then Taylor showed him a sketch of it, with his right arm covered in a swarm of rats that ran from his shoulders down to his fingertips, and he had to admit it looked imposing but without the "trying too hard" vibe that he got from a lot of superhero costumes. Full gloves were argued against fingerless gloves, and fingerless won. Tabi slippers were argued against combat boots, and tabi slippers won. Danny went to his bedroom and pulled out a brown UnderArmour shirt from when he thought his workout was going to be a lot more glamorous than it was, and he matched that against the other items and it was fairly cohesive. "I've got some ideas for accessories," Taylor said. "You get started on that mask."
Danny Hebert went down to the basement workshop, where the rodents were busy cutting streamers and painting a giant banner for Wilma's baby shower. He swept a massive drift of confetti into a garbage bag, tied it shut and set it aside for the rats to build another pile. Others were working on the painted map, making a comprehensive series of coded markings for each building and a journal of features about each building in his territory. It was a big job, but he tended to do well at those. Some mice pulled out some scrap fabric and needle and thread, and Danny unfolded a deck chair and made himself comfortable with his head right at the level of the worktable. Fabric was measured twice, cut once, while needles were threaded. The pieces were held in place for a perfect fit, the goggles fitted in place, the reinforced painter's mask applied, the edges stitched together. The sewing took surprisingly little time, ten minutes from start to finish with all the paws working together. He waited until they were all clear, then he stood up and walked upstairs.
Taylor turned, and jumped. "Crap, you look different," she exclaimed. "And you.. you actually did a really good job of hiding the seams. I can't even see where you put the zipper."
"I, uh, don't know how to sew a zipper," Danny pointed out. "C'mon, I can't even thread a needle with my own hands, I'm lucky mice are more dexterous than I am."
"Are you seriously sewed into that hood?" Taylor asked with morbid fascination. "Holy cow, that's weirdly awesome."
He didn't answer, he just picked up the athletic shirt and the cargo pants and went to get changed. When he came back, Taylor held out the climbing belt from his rock-climbing set, modified to be a basic utility belt with pouches on it. "Less pouches," he advised, handing it back.
He put on the tabi slippers, and she draped two loops of long silver chain around his body like a bandolier, from his left shoulder to his right hip, clipped to his belt with a carabiner. "You're not always going to have the Protectorate to tie people up for you, and not everyone can be held with zip ties," Taylor insisted. "Besides, it looks badass." He put on the gloves and the jacket, and stepped in front of the full-length mirror to test out the effect. He turned one way then the other, then nodded after a bit. "Better than the wooden armor, " he said. "It's very neutral, very earth tones, but that's about right for a rogue. Not a hero or a villain. A couple black highlights on the shirt and the slippers, but not too much. I think this'll do until we find something better."
"High praise," Taylor rolled her eyes, but she smiled. "Now, cut yourself out of that hood so we can have dinner."
Taylor left to hang out in her room for a bit after dinner, and he checked to make sure she had her phone close at hand and charged up in case he needed dispatch assistance. Then he tucked the trenchcoat, the chain and the cloth pieces of the hood into a backpack with some needles and thread, and rode out again. It was a couple dozen miles to sweep the border of his territory, fortunately he only had to patrol one border because the Docks bordered right on the water for most of its area and the Boardwalk was a neutral ground that covered one side. On the bike he could cover the distance in about an hour and a half, sweeping with his area-effect supersenses to make sure that his neighbors were behaving themselves.
And he was only half an hour in when he ran across something odd. He paused at a safe distance and sent the mice to investigate. There wasn't many reasons he could think of that someone would leave a five-foot-tall mound of cheese with a white flag sticking out of the top of it. The cheeses were all types, from wheels to blocks to processed slices to salad crumbles. It was in an isolated alleyway right at the border of the ABB's old territory, built up in a pyramid to support the wooden dowel rod that the white flag hung from. He swarmed the area, sending rodents up the walls, into sewers, checking out windows and fire escapes and any other opening that could face towards the pile. And on top of an adjoining rooftop, there were a couple of teenage girls and a massive animal that was shaped like Gozer from Ghostbusters but appeared to be made out of bare meat stretched over barbed, hooked bone spurs. He recognized the smell, a ton or so of raw meat, slightly rotten. That smell had been fresh on a rooftop just next to the place he had first fought Lung. One of the girls was petting it, roughing it behind the ears like a dog. The other girl was staring down at the alleyway, leaning her elbows onto the ledge surrounding the rooftop. She offered a casual one-handed salute towards the rats that stared at her.
The rats reached up their paws and saluted back. And Danny Hebert, with his hood sewed back in place and the jacket flapping around his legs, stepped out into the open area beneath. His right arm was wreathed in a wriggling layer of furry squirming bodies that ran up and down, sliding over and past each other constantly. Mice and rats swarmed in from the shadows, piling onto the cheese and consuming it ravenously. Cheese wasn't actually that good for rodents, but it was better than nothing. He didn't let any of them really gorge themselves, but they each ate enough to supplement their regular diet and then streamed away to make room for their hungrier brethren. He looked up at them. "You want to talk?" he called up to them.
"Yeah," the girl in lavender with the domino mask called down. "You mind if we come down?"
"I'm a little concerned about that animal with you, but if you were going to attack you would have gone after me last Saturday," he called up.
Apparently that was answer enough, because the two teenagers climbed aboard the giant animal and held on tight. It leaped over the edge of the building, caught itself against the opposite wall, bounded off, checked itself on another wall, using lateral motion to bleed off the momentum of its descent. It rebounded off the walls, each hit lower than the one before, until it was down to street level. Its claws gripped the concrete, and its fetid breath panted with its tongue lolling out like a dog. The girl in lavender had a motif on her costume that showed a staring eye, and the other girl was larger and more muscular, with long uncared-for hair and a plastic Halloween mask of a dog's face held on with elastic cord. "So you must have taken down the ABB," the lavender girl said, sliding off down to the ground.
"And you must be the Undersiders," he said. "How's it going?"
"Cheeky," the girl said back. The other still had not spoken. "Rat powers, that's cool. We came to see you because nobody knows anything about you."
Danny nodded. "And you like to know things before anyone else?"
"I do," she said, nodding. "I'm Tattletale, this is Bitch."
"Pleased," Danny said, stepping forward and offering a hand to shake. "I don't really have a name yet, but let's just call me Wharf Rat until something more official comes up." These girls were about Taylor's age, if he could judge through the masks.
She shook his hand with a shake. "I'll do that. But I assure you, we're nothing like your daughter, so don't start thinking that way. You probably should guard this area well, since she's so close by."
Danny paused, squinting at the girl. Cold reading? Psychic powers? A good spy network? Supersenses? There was no good way to know, so there was no definite way to keep her from doing it again. "So, what do you want?" he asked.
"I said, just to meet you because nobody knows anything-"
"I mean, in general," Danny said. "You guys. Goals, plans, objectives, motivations. What is it you guys want? What makes you guys tick?"
Bitch snorted through her nose. Tattletale paused a second before she answered. "Money, mostly. And fun, and -"
"Money's a means to an end," Danny said. "People want money because they want something else."
Tattletale rallied back with a smile. "Well, we want a little of everything, so we have to get a lot of money. And then-"
"You've already figured out most of what you need to know about me," Danny said. "I have rats. I want to take care of the Docks. I took down Lung and Bakuda and Oni Lee, handed them over to the cops instead of killing them. But I have two questions for you guys, and then we can call it even."
"You don't kill, but you fight villains and get them arrested," Tattletale said. "You think of yourself as a hero. And you want to take care of this area, but you don't think of it as a long-term job. This is a stepping-stone for you, just a temporary arrangement. You've got a plan for these neighborhoods, someone else that will take over. Or you're looking for someone, that's more like it."
"Two questions," he repeated.
But the girl was just getting warmed up. "Hmm, you've been practicing these powers for a while in secret, but there was something particular that made you start using them just recently. The ABB did something that provoked you, so you pushed back. And you pushed back against the Merchants, you don't take well to anyone pushing you around. You've got a nasty temper and it's not controlled as well as you'd like."
"Why didn't you guys join the Wards?" Danny asked.
"Because it's bullshit," Bitch grunted. It was more of a growl than words.
"Basically, because it's bullshit," Tattletale reinforced her teammate's message. "Too many rules, oversight, questions, restrictions, people watching over your shoulder, all of them convinced they know better than we do just because that's what people do. So, you like recruiting people, you've done it a lot, as a job, but also as a passion. Poltiical campaigns, grass-roots activism, getting people to do what's good for themselves by joining together to do the right thing together."
"Second question," Danny cut in. "Is it just you kids, or is there an adult mixed up in this too? Like that guy in Oliver Twist that teaches the kids to steal for him, setting them up to take all the risks while he takes the largest share of the rewards?"
Bitch reacted before Tattletale had time to formulate her answer. The larger girl turned to her teammate. "Fuck this," she snarled, then turned towards the Wharf Rat, "fuck you," she snarled at him before she spun on her heel to stomp towards the giant slavering animal. "And fuck him!" she yelled, swinging herself up onto the beast's back, using bony knobs to step up like a ladder to take the monster's back. Tattletale hung back as the giant creature wheeled in place, following its rider like a well-trained horse, and leaped up onto a wall and then bounded away, crashing into one wall after another as it gained some height and took to the rooftops. Tattletale stared after her.
"Sorry about that, was she your ride?" Danny asked.
"She does that kind of thing," Tattletale said, shrugging.
"She seems like she's pretty hurt," Danny said. "She needs something she's not getting, or someone."
Tattletale glanced at him. "You a shrink? No, you're not a shrink. Quit being a shrink. I can get another ride. You just enjoy the cheese, okay? Oh, and take this," she said, pulling a phone out of a pocket and handing it to him. "It's easier to give you a call than to set out giant piles of cheese."
"Actually, cheese isn't that good for them," he said. "Bread, meat, fruits, those are all good, but dairy isn't something they should eat a lot of."
She glanced back at the flag, laying on its side. "Could've fooled me, they ate it fast enough."
"It was a peace offering with a flag of truce," he said. "I'm not going to snub that just because it was a shitty peace offering. I'm heading out, you should catch up with your friend. If you need me, give a call," he said, and tucked the phone into his pocket. He walked away, keeping an eye on her with the rats to make sure that she didn't follow him. When he was far enough away, he took the phone out of his pocket and pulled out the battery and the sim card, then tucked them into an evidence bag in his pocket. He had the rats on his arm swarm up to cut through the stitches holding the hood together, then tucked it into his pocket while the rats climbed down his body and dispersed. The jacket was taken off, bundled up, tucked under his arm, and the chains were tucked away inside the bundle. When he got to the backpack and the bicycle he stuffed his costume into it, then climbed up on the bike and pedaled along. He kept Tattletale in his range, watching her from corners and cracks and crannies, dark tight spaces that she could not see into.
She walked like she knew he was still watching her, alternating between open streets so she could see his spies, and then ducking into the maze of alleys so she could lose pursuit. A couple times she actually threw him off, but she underestimated the rats' sense of smell and he picked up her trail again. She made some calls on her cell phone, and he was able to hear her talking insistently to one of her teammates, getting increasingly irritated with someone called "Regent" until he promised to make Bitch come back and pick her up. Then Tattletale climbed a fire escape and pulled herself up onto the rooft, waiting there for her teammate to come retrieve her again.
Danny didn't need to wait for Bitch to come back with her pet monster, he knew he could track them during the week. Now he knew how they traveled, and what the creatures smelled like. He had smelled that scent on rooftops before, but so spread out that he had to work hard be able to connect their path at all. But having seen the animals in motion, he could see how it bounded off walls as well as roofs. He hadn't thought to have his rats smell the sides of buildings for traces of raw rotting meat. He rode away to finish out his route, and added that to the list of things for him to follow up on later.
Monday morning he woke up early to check his territory again, and found a group of Merchants that were trying to move back into the area he had taken from them as compensation for their attempted takeover. After they had made their big land grab he had moved his borders a block to the west, and now some of the scruffy, unwashed junkies that hung onto the Merchants were moving back into those shacks and squats and putting up their crude graffiti tags again. The Wharf Rat stole their drugs and destroyed them in the sewers, stole their cash and weapons, ripped up their shoddy clothes, chased them out into the street, and even chewed through the support beams and destroyed the condemned houses they had ben crashing in. And then he moved a block to the west, expanding his territory one more time, chasing the Merchants deeper back into their own territory, destroying the Merchants' logo wherever it was posted.
He was not interested in giving them one inch just to see if they would take a mile. He was going to train the Merchants to respect the Docks and the sanctity of his territory the same way he would train a puppy not to mess the rug: consistency and immediacy. Punish every infraction immediately, consistently. Every instance must be responded to or they would get mixed signals, but if they learned that every single infraction led to a discipline action, every time, they would stop misbehaving.
Then he rode to work and changed clothes, and buckled in for another day of negotiations. He spent the majority of the morning juggling emails between the owners of some of the local factories, the local Councilwoman for the area of the harbor, the tax assessor's office, and a local bank. He was trying to broker a four-way deal that would let the industry captains to defer some of their taxes until they had seen profits above a specific margin, giving them the option to defer costs if the plan didn't work out. There was a lot of resistance from each side, nobody wanted to be the first to concede anything at all, so he had to wrangle and winkle out small gains from each side and use those to lever the others for a small concession, a small promise, a carefully-worded counteroffer.
It was easy for things like this to get bogged down, but the fact that he could lock his office door and set five rats on the keyboard of the desktop computer, the laptop computer, texting from his phone, and making calls on his desk phone at the same time, really helped keep the momentum going and gave each of the parties the impression that this plan was moving fast and that they could work to keep up or they could fall behind. He honestly regretted that he had to step away from his office shortly before noon. He shuffled all the rats out, and locked the grates to make sure they stayed away while he was gone. Then he put on his tie and jacket and took the bus north to City Hall, to meet the mayor at his office.
He stayed on his phone as he rode, texting and emailing with one hand while he held the overhead strap for balance. And as he sat on the benches outside of the mayor's office he barely looked up at all. He was half-certain that the benches were so uncomfortable just so that visitors would be reminded how little they mattered and how important the mayor was. Finally his receptionist looked up, and called his name.
"I've got ten minutes, my meeting was running late," the mayor said without greeting as he stood and went to his coatrack. He took down his jacket and swung it over his shoulders and arms, tugging it into place. He was a tall man with a leonine manner, a coif of wavy full gray hair and a long, stern chin. "I was told this important enough to jump the docket and interrupt my day."
The meeting had been scheduled a week ago, Danny knew, and the man was not actually giving him any sort of priority, he was just saying that to make it seem like Danny was imposing on his time and put him on the defensive so he'd have to justify his ten minutes with the mayor. Instead of going defensive, he leaned in. "I was hoping you could tell me where that one-point-nine million dollars went," he said.
The mayor froze, his eyes tracking left to settle on Danny, seeing him for the first time.
"June, three years ago, remember? Your bank records it as being a real-estate deal, but there was no exchange and no deeds. No property changed hands, no contracts were signed or notarized. Just shy of two million dollars went away without a trace, and you never filed for a refund or stop payment or anything."
The mayor unfroze, lurched back into motion. "I'm a real-estate developer by trade, like my parents, I've done hundreds of land deals in the past three years. Dozens or hundreds of documents for each of those and-"
"And I've read through all of them," Danny said. "I was able to connect each and every thing, except for one sum of one-point-nine million dollars that disappeared in June two-thousand-eight. That money could have put the ferry into operation, could have connected the north and south sides of the city, could have brought ten times that much money into the city."
"You checked every?..." the mayor repeated weakly, running down like a clock again.
"Every single page. cross-referenced and double-checked. Tell me something, was it worth it? Whatever you spent that money on, was it worth it?"
The mayor deflated, his lionlike confidence sagging over his bones. "I won't answer any questions about that."
"You can't even tell me if it was important? Maybe you spent the money on hookers and blow, maybe you spent the money on ransoming some helpless child away from terrorist kidnappers. Tell me if the money went to something worthwile," Danny demanded.
"I won't answer any question," the mayor said. His bluster was gone, but when he deflated from the loss of leonine strength, all that was left was a skeleton of ironlike resolve and stubbornness.
Danny tried again. "There has to be some-"
"I will resign my position before I answer any questions," the mayor said. He sounded sad as he said it, but he continued. "I will go to prison before I answer questions. Take my money, beat me senseless, whatever you have to do, I won't talk about it." He sighed, and stood, and straightened, and swelled with the return of his countenance. "Whatever you think you've got, Mister Hebert, it's not what you think. Just stop there, leave it alone." He shot his cuffs, checked his collar, and walked out to meet his car to take him to his lunch appointment. Danny stared after him, his mouth open.
"Okay, that's really weird," Barry said, sitting back in his chair. "He wouldn't even make up a lie to protect himself?"
"No," Danny said, shaking his head. He leaned against the doorframe of his friend's office. "I mean, he probably figured that if he lied I'd just research it like I researched the rest of it, and would come back and call him on his lie. But as soon as I called him out, he just locked right up. Whatever's going on, it's something big. More important to him than anything else."
"Family," Barry said. "I follow local politics as much as you do. And I know that the only thing our mayor likes more than shady land deals that technically aren't illegal on the flimsiest of pretexts, is his family. If he is willing to lose his job, his money, go to prison and get shanked by Big Blue the Bowling Ball Bag Bludgeoner, then it's because he's protecting his family."
Danny slumped in place. "Well shit. I'm not going to go after the man's family. That's just... low."
Barry made a face. "Seriously? You busted your ass on this, and it's kind of a big deal. It could affect the city, we don't even know what this is or what it means, but the mayor's office is a big deal and his secrets are a big deal."
"It's important, yeah, but so is having some basic humanity," Danny said. "I want answers, and that's important, but his family is important to him. I can understand that."
The big accountant sighed, and nodded. "Okay, yeah. I get why you wouldn't want to push that issue. Just hold onto your research, think about it, give yourself a window to come back to this if things change, all right?"
Danny nodded, his face somber. "Yeah, yeah I'll do that Barry. Thanks, you're a pal."
"So, how about that tax deal you're brokering for the factories on the east side? Any traction there?" Barry asked.
A smile cracked across Danny's face. "Yeah, actually. The factory owners have called in an impartial lawyer to draw up a preliminary contract for their cooperation, the councilwoman's office is ready to sign off if the tax assessor gives the okay, the tax assessor's office is digging through records to confirm the legality of this maneuver, and the bank's officer has bumped this matter up to the branch director for approval. I might have this thing."
Barry leaned back, his eyes wide. "This will be jobs, Danny. Hundreds of jobs. For a few months, at least, maybe it will catch on and snowball."
"I don't want to get ahead of myself," Danny said, but he couldn't keep the grin off his face, he was almost giddy with excitement. "The hard part is going to be keeping this from Taylor, I don't to get her hopes up for something that hasn't panned out yet."
He walked back to his office, while the rats continued doing his job from across the building. He was taking steady steps towards this deal every hour, and he had a great feelling about it. And he also knew that without his powers, it would have taken literally weeks to get to this point, maybe months, or never at all. Small delays compounding, small delays allowing others to drag their feet, hesitation leading to stagnation. But with the ability to work ceaselessly on four fronts at once, he could shove it through in just a few days. And in those weeks that it would have taken, anything could have happened that would distract him, dissuade him, discourage him.
In another reality where Danny Hebert did not have powers, he would be struggling with the early stages of this deal still, while Bakuda started bombing runs on the city. And when Taylor ran away, it completely shut down this arrangement entirely. But in the reality where Danny had powers and Taylor did not, things were going well for this brokered arrangement.
At the end of the day, he took his clothes in a tight bundle and put them in his small athletic backpack, along with the collapsed cooler from his lunch. And also a single rat and his cell phone. As he rode, he continued to read and send emails, right until the close of business and all his contacts cut off for the night. And then he rode a circuit around the Docks, an hour and a half to make sure that the other factions of supervillains were not encroaching on the power vacuum, instigating a gang war. The Merchants were staying right where they were. But now that things were quiet on that front, he had to worry about Empire Eighty-Eight to the north.
The Merchants were a gang of junkies and malcontents and street people and crazies, but Empire was a group of white supremacists that incorporated white-trash skinheads and prison-tatted peckerwoods but also a cool businesslike savvy and a team of eight supervillains at the top of their organization. It had been over a dozen before their group split up some time ago, and a dozen supervillains on one team was a problem for everyone, that was as much as the Protectorate and the New Wave team put together.
He pulled over when he was near the middle of the Docks, a few miles from home, and he took out the phone that Tattletale had given him. He fit in the sim card and the battery, and checked it for messages or texts. A few hours ago, shortly before he spoke to the mayor, a voice mail had been left on the phone.
"This message is for the man who introduced himself as the Wharf Rat," the message said. It was Tattletale's voice. "I wanted to arrange an exchange of information. For example, maybe you would want to know when and where the Merchants are going to make their big move and try to take you out. In return, the Undersiders want you to not track them to their headquarters, and don't ask how we know, and in general just don't look for information on us. This offer has a deadline, either you take us up on it or the Merchants take you out and it's a moot point. Ta!"
He dialed the number the call had come from.
"Tattletale here, Mister Rat."
"Don't bother tracing this call."
"I won't, you're just at the geographic center of your claimed territory, not actually near your own home," she said cheerfully. "So, you're ready to make the trade?"
"You just want my word that I won't snoop around your business? A promise is good enough for you?"
"Your promise is," she told him. "Do I have your word that you won't interfere with us?"
"If the information is good, then you've got a deal," he said.
"Swell. Tomorrow night, Skidmark and Squealer are going to take her new wheels for a joyride through the Docks. They roll out of their garage at four pm to catch the most rush-hour traffic. Expect chemical weapons, conventional weapons, ramming attacks, and a lot of mayhem designed to do nothing but mess the place up and drive people out."
Danny considered that. "Okay, thanks for the heads-up. I don't know what you did or paid for that information, but I hope that you feel it was worth it just to have me stop sniffing around. I for one feel I got the better end of the deal, but ideally you feel the same way yourself."
"Count on it, Mister Rat. Big picture I came out way ahead here."
"Good to hear it, Miss Tattletale. But, one more question if I may?"
"Whatcha got?"
"The other night I asked you what you want. What I should have asked is: are you getting what you want?"
"You're talking nonsense, Mister Rat."
"I just want to know whether you are getting what you want. You don't have to tell me what you want, or tell me what you're doing to get it. But the place you're in, and the path you're on, is it giving you the results you want?"
There was a long pause before Tattletale replied. "Why are you asking?"
"Because everyone should ask that, and everyone should answer that question. Because I think that supervillainy is like a lot of bad habits, that you get stuck in it after it has stopped serving its purpose. Because I think that four kids on their own should have someone, somewhere, watch over them just a little bit. Look, don't answer me right away, it's not a small question. Just roll it around a bit and see what you think."
"I'm starting to think Bitch was right about you. Fuck you, Mister Rat." Her tone was lighter than her words, flippant and not hateful.
"Whatever. I'll be in touch. Thanks for the heads-up."
He hung up, and started making preparations.
Author's Notes: This version of the story is going to move a bit faster than the original, both as plot and as narrative. The plot moves faster because of Danny's specific powerset lets him set his own timetable, he can take the fight to his opponents in a way few heroes can. And my depiction will be faster and more intensive, since at this point it is assumed that the reader already knows the Worm canon material. That means that I can skip a lot of description, since everyone here already knows who the characters are, what they look like, what the locations are, et cetera.
