Chapter 2

A/N: Hey, everyone! I was really overwhelmed by the positive response the pilot of this story got! Thank you all for giving this a read, and please feel free to give me feedback. Even flames, if you like. I'm not so invested that my world will fall apart over a bad review. And, as a final point before I get to the main chapter: Rogue is a lifestyle, Rouge is a color. That is all.

Before Shepard could realign her sniper rifle with the leader below her, a massive swarm of insects billowed over the rooftop, coalescing into a cloud of ominous buzzing and chittering, and then rushed down onto the gang. Reacting to the new threat and anticipating a Collector's seeker swarm, she spun around, her cloak crackling away, and cast her gaze about for the telltale sets of four orange eyes that betrayed Collectors' positions. Yet the only thing there were the astonished orange lenses of the bug costumed girl on the roof beside her.

Shepard silently cursed herself for losing track of her cloak's charge and rapidly aligned her sniper rifle with the girl's masked head. The girl panicked, realizing just then that she was not as alone on the roof as she had thought. The girl scrambled backwards and raised her hands in surrender.

"Wait! I'm a hero!" she hissed, trying to get her words across without giving away her position to the gang below who were still occupied with the . Shepard had no idea what that meant, but it was obvious at that point that the girl was not threat.

"Stay down," she ordered, pointing at the back edge of the roof. When the girl didn't move, she sighed violently and turned back to the roof's edge, expecting to still see panicking gang members below.

Instead she was slammed backwards by the leader, who was now easily eight feet tall and covered silver scales and wreathed in fire which surrounded him like a biotic halo.

The fuck? Rolling backwards into a crouch she stowed her Black Widow against her back, but before she could finish drawing her shotgun the flaming man was on her again.

"I 'ill 'oo!" he shouted, his elongated snout slurring his words as flames jetted from his outstretched hand and bathed Shepard's armor and shields in fire. It achieved nothing except to knock her onto her back, but this was enough. While Shepard was momentary out of the fight the leader turned to watch the bug girl run for the fire escape, ignoring the clouds of stinging insects that buzzed around his personal inferno.

The girl, realizing she wouldn't have time to climb down before the increasingly large and scaly man reached her, searched desperately around for another avenue of escape but found nothing. Clinging to a feeble hope she pulled a can of pepper spray from the back of her armor and brandished it in front of herself.

The gang leader paused to bark out a low, rumbling laugh at the trembling girl in front of him, but that laugh turned into a bellow of outrage as the girl pressed down on the nozzle, then sprinted to the side to escape. She was out of luck. Even with chemicals burning his eyes the still-growing man was able to reach out and snag the girl by her mane of hair and hoist her screaming into the air.

"'ot 'oo," he rumbled, and his other hand, now fully transformed into a clawed gauntlet, burst into flame. He opened his maw again, presumably to speak, but whatever he was about to say was interrupted by a deafening boom and a spray of steaming viscera from what was left of the leader's head.

As the leader's body slumped to the ground, the girl celebrated her freedom by dropping to her hands and knees and coughing violently, gasping for breath and occasionally interjecting a sob into the mix.

Shepard rose from her crouch, compacting her sniper rifle and trading it out for her pistol, and scanned the area for other hostiles. The other gang members hadn't even tried to make it to the rooftop. As soon as their leader started to throw fire they had fled.

She considered the man's body while the girl pulled herself together. By the end of the fight the man must have been almost nine feet tall, covered in silver scales that she suspected would have deflected the shots from any of her other guns. At first she had thought it was some sort of adaptive hardsuit or tech armor, but now she could see that the man had grown a tail of all things. There was some key bit of information that she was missing, because under the laws of physics as she understood them, people don't turn into dragons.

Shepard reattached her pistol at her hip and strode up to the girl.

"Not the best survival instincts I've ever seen, but not the worst." She offered her hand down to the girl who was still hugging her knees on the floor. "Come on. Let's get you cleaned up." The girl nodded silently and took her hand, allowing Shepard to easily pull her to her feet. She hadn't noticed before while the girl was either crouching or sitting, but she was taller than Shepard by a couple of inches.

Shepard opened her omni-tool, the orange glow illuminating the other girl's mask. It looked even creepier in that light. As she searched through the device for a function that would let her clean the blood off the girl's mask, she heard her let out a tiny gasp. Shepard looked up, saw the girl staring over Shepard's left shoulder, and whirled around, fluidly drawing her shotgun mid-motion. Really? We're not done yet?

What she saw was another thing she couldn't explain. Actually, three of them. Leaping onto the other end of the rooftop were three monstrous animals being ridden by four other teenagers in costume. The animals were almost the size of a Kodiak shuttle and were covered in grey bony plates and spikes reminiscent of a less-tech-filled Reaper Brute. At a whistle from one of the figures the dogs halted and the kids hopped off.

Their costumes ranged from barely functional to ridiculous. One girl, whose figure made her look more like a man, wore street clothes with a cheap plastic dog mask. The other girl wore skin-tight purple spandex and a domino mask, her blonde hair and green eyes standing out as she took in the scene around them. The largest of the group was male, but he was entirely covered with a leather jacket, gloves, and a biker's helmet with a skull decal covering any exposed skin. The last was the least understandable. A kid with curly black hair and a frilly white shirt leaned languidly against the side of one of the beasts, twirling a small scepter in his hand. He wore a small crown on his head and, contrary to his lazy stance, was staring intently at Shepard.

The man in black stepped forward, indicating he was either the leader or the spokesperson of the group, and began to speak. "You guys really saved us a lot of trouble. When we got word Lung was aiming to come after us tonight, we were pretty freaked. We were arguing strategy for the better part of the day. We eventually decided, fuck it, we'd meet him halfway. Wing it. Not my usual way of doing things, but yeah." He looked warily over at the gang leader's, Lung's corpse. "It looks like you have things in hand though. Is he really dead?"

Shepard cocked a hip out to the side and said in a deadpan. "What, kid, never seen a dead body before? It doesn't get much deader than that."

The blonde in purple snapped her head toward Shepard and they locked eyes. Suddenly the girl's green eyes shot wide and she gasped. "Oh, fuck! Grue, we should go. Like, now."

"No rush, Tattletale. We're just introducing ourselves, then we'll head out." Grue? Tattletale? Either naming conventions were extraordinarily strange in this city or there were teenagers using codenames. Neither was a good sign.

"Nope! Thanksforthehelpgottagobye!" The girl grabbed the much larger boy by the elbow of his jacket and tried, ineffectually, to drag him back to their mounts. Gure shook her off and gave her an annoyed glare from behind his helmet.

"If you're not going to explain, we're going to talk to them." He turned back to Shepard and the bug girl. "Anyways, we're the Undersiders. That's Tattletale. I'm Grue. The girl with the dogs - We call her Bitch, her preference, but in the interests of being P.G., the good guys and media decided to call her Hellhound instead. Last and certainly least, we have Regent." he finished, pointing at the kid with the scepter who was still staring eerily at Shepard. "You girls have names?"

Shepard looked over at the bug girl. The girl hadn't said a word the entire time, and even now seemed to be shrinking away from a conversation. Shepard rode in to her rescue.

"No."

Grue straightened in surprise. "You – I thought. Okay, I guessed with costumes like that you would already have names."

Tattletale interrupted him again. "Grue, no joke. We have to go. Armsmaster in sixty seconds."

Grue looked back to the rest of his team, then nodded. He turned back to Shepard and the bug girl. "You two need a ride?"

Shepard shook her head, and after a moment the other girl mirrored it. "I can get around on my own, thanks." Grue nodded, and the four teenagers mounted their beasts and leapt over the side of the roof, their beasts bounding off into the darkness below.

As soon as they were gone, Shepard whirled on the other girl. "What the hell is going on? Costumes? Codenames? The "good guys and the media"? What is this, Blasto cosplay week?"

As soon as Shepard had started talking, the girl had only squeaked and shrunk down to the floor of the roof, cowering away from the frustrated soldier above her. Shepard sighed, relaxing her stance and extending a hand to the girl curled up at her feet. She hadn't meant to be so intense to a traumatized girl. It was easy to forget she wasn't surrounded by soldiers anymore.

"Sorry, I'm just frustrated. I'm not going to hurt you. On your feet, kid." The girl hesitantly took Shepard's hand, and the soldier easily lifted her to her feet. "I'm just looking for some answers. What is with all of this costume stuff? And the bugs. Where did those come from?"

The girl still shied away from Shepard, but she answered. "Um. You're a cape right? How can you not know about this stuff?"

"A cape? I don't –" At that moment she heard a dull roaring sound, which quickly transformed into the roar of a motorcycle as a man in full power armor swerved around the side of the building and slowed to a stop right underneath them. Shepard sighed and looked pleadingly at the girl, then walked to the roof's edge and looked down at the man below her.

Even though his armor looked relatively advanced, it was no tech Shepard had ever seen. The armor was midnight blue with silver highlights, but where Shepard's armor was segmented and reinforced with ballistic weave and ablative plating, this man's looked to almost be one single piece. He also had no guns, which was what disturbed Shepard the most. Instead of a ranged weapon of any kind, this man seemed to think a halberd would be effective. Granted, it was probably the most high-tech halberd the world had ever seen, but still. Put Shepard at thirty yards out or further and this guy couldn't hope to touch her.

While Shepard was criticizing the man's choice of armament in her head, the halberd man fired a grappling hook from the end of his weapon and flew up to the rooftop. Huh. Maybe fifty yards. He assessed the bug girl first, then spent far longer looking at Shepard. She was pretty sure it was her armor she was checking out, but the visor really made it look like he was undressing her with his eyes.

"Eyes up here, soldier." When his head snapped up she smirked. "Now I know –"

The man interrupted her with a sharp bark of a question. "Are you going to fight me?"

"We're good guys!" The bug girl paused after her unexpected outburst and looked at Shepard "Or at least, I'm a good guy."

Shepard glanced over at her, somewhat offended. It was the other girl who was covered in blood and brain matter. But she supposed the accusation wasn't unwarranted. She did blow off a guy's head right in front of her. She turned her attention back to the halberd man, whose hands had strayed to the haft of his weapon. "Nah, I'm a good guy too. Just a bit more violent than I think she expected." Shepard got only a blank stare from the armored man until he took a closer look at the giant, scaled man lying on the roof behind them.

"You killed him." He said it as a statement more than a question, which Shepard appreciated. It was nice not having to explain the obvious.

"Yep. Pretty easy shot actually. I've never fought a guy who gets bigger as you go, though. It was fun, but short." The man's hand was back on the weapon across his back, and he nodded sharply at the two girls.

"Explain."

The bug girl took a breath and started her story. "Well, tonight's my first night out and I was going out to patrol, so when I ran into Lung and his gang I thought I'd head somewhere else."

"It would have been a good idea," the armored man stated, "but you're still here."

"Yeah. I heard them talking about killing kids so I couldn't just let that happen, so I stayed. I only realized after I attacked Lung that she was here too."

"You two don't know each other?"

This time it was Shepard who replied. "No. We don't."

"Then why are you here?"

"I followed a gang member here after he mentioned some kind of attack. Once I got here I set up on this roof. I waited a few hours, the bug girl here showed up, attacked the big guy –Lung, you said? – and then I killed him."

"Just like that?"

"Just like that. Anti-material rifle"

The armored man thought about that for a moment, then nodded as if to himself and refocused on the bug girl. "You know you could have been seriously hurt or killed tonight."

"Y-" Her voice broke as she was reminded of her near brush with death. "Yes. I know."

"This is why we have the Wards program. To help new powered kids like you learn to use their powers in a safe environment. You really should think about signing up."

The girl had no response to this, and the armored man seemed to accept that. He turned to Shepard. You claim you were merely investigating and defending this girl, but you did kill a man. Justified or not we still need you to come in and answer some questions."

While this could be the opening Shepard was looking for to speak with the authorities and get her questions answered, she was hesitant. This man had very conveniently shown up not five minutes after she had killed Lung and was expecting her to just follow him to an undisclosed location with no proof of his authority or of who he was.

She voiced her concern aloud. "Let's slow down for just a second. Who are you, and why do you have the authority to do the police's job? Why should I follow you anywhere?"

"I am Armsmaster of the Protectorate East-Northeast." His annoyance started to slip through into his tone. "The responsibility of dealing with dangerous and potentially hostile capes falls to us because the normal police can't handle powered criminals, and you should come with me because if you don't I will be forced to bring you in by force."

None of this information actually helped Shepard to know who this "Armsmaster" was or where they were, and the "by force" part of his spiel sounded a lot like something Cerberus would do. In fact, she wouldn't be surprised if Cerberus were behind this whole scenario, planting a technologically backwards city on some planet and then setting themselves up as semi-benevolent overlords.

Shepard really didn't want to have to deal with conspiracies this late at night, so she readied her trump card. "Look, 'Armsmaster.' It's late and I really don't want to have to deal with this, so you're going to head one way and I'll head the other, and maybe I'll see you around sometime."

Armsmaster's hand was back on the haft of his halberd. "I can't let you do that. You need to come in to speak with my superiors."

Shepard smirked under her helmet. "Spectre immunity, Armsmaster. My authority overrules yours and your superiors'." She turned to the bug girl, who had been looking back and forth between the two armored people as they spoke. "Well, kid, I wish you luck. Try not to get killed by any more dragon men. I should go."

And with that, Shepard activated her tactical cloak and left behind two bewildered capes by themselves on the roof.