Montage 2.2
"Who was it?"
Miss Militia, now in full costume, frowned at me. "You didn't know him. Beyond that, you're not involved. I'd like to keep it that way."
I gave her a level look. "Uh-huh. I, at your insistence, have kept out of hero matters for two years; I've focused on growing up, being a child, being a brother, whatever, but this time the crime came to us. What do you think the odds are that we'll run into problems from this because we didn't have the whole story?"
She sighed. "Higher than I'd like, but not higher than any other person in Brockton Bay. Listen, just-"
"Was it the Slaughterhouse Nine?" I interrupted. They'd returned from their cruise almost as soon as they left, to everyone's great disappointment.
Well, everyone in America had been disappointed. Across the Atlantic, I'm pretty sure they were pointing nukes in that general direction.
"What?" Miss Militia blinked. "Of course not. Last we heard they're still rampaging across Southern Nebraska."
"Then why keep me separate?" I demanded, very deliberately ignoring the skittering black blob moving furtively past her. "What kind of threat is out there that you don't trust me to handle?"
For a moment, she hesitated; then her expression firmed. "It's Protectorate business. It's not the Nine, they aren't coming after you specifically and you didn't know the victim, and that's all you need to know."
I scowled. "Fine. I'll be with Riley; she was pretty upset about the whole dancing thing."
The door swung shut behind me before she could voice her assent. Riley was camping in the lobby, looking exceedingly nervous.
"Did you get it?" I asked her. She glanced from side to side, then beckoned me behind a potted plant.
"Of course!" She pulled out what looked like an RC control unit from behind her back. "I had to run out to the car to get it, but it was pretty easy to smuggle it back in. That Dallon girl was freaking out – she got splatted when the bag fell."
"Splattered," I corrected absently. "And the camspider?"
I wanted to call them nopespiders, but Riley vetoed. Fully spread out, they were about the size of a hubcab, complete with dripping fangs and disturbingly fast movement. It didn't help that their eyes glowed red in complete darkness.
"Already in position," Riley said, grinning. "You make a great distraction by the way. Ha- ah, Miss Militia didn't even turn her head."
I snorted. "I still think it's weird that you brought it. What possible use could you have for a camspider at a ball?"
She shrugged. "You never know when you need to infiltrate a locked room - or when someone's wearing a prettier dress than you are, and you just really want to drop a spider on her head. Still, they were harder to smuggle in than I expected, so I left them behind."
I stared. "You scare me sometimes."
"Thanks!" Riley said, smiling brightly. "I also brought my surprise surgery kit, my experimental reanimation kit and my emergency medical supplies, but I didn't get a chance to use any of those."
"Let's-" I sighed, rubbing my temples. I didn't want to know the difference between the surgery and medical kit."Let's just move on. Are you almost there?"
She nodded, face screwed up in concentration as she fiddled with the controls. The black and white image jumped and shuddered from side to side as the camspider moved. The body was currently in a storage room awaiting transport to PRT headquarters; after they finished processing the VIPs, they'd move it to a secure morgue and we'd be out of luck.
The spider slipped into a vent, dexterous manipulators unscrewing the lid with ease. The next one was harder, but a minute spray of organic acid allowed it to slip through.
"If I find one of those in my room, I'm squashing it," I told her calmly.
"Don't be such a baby," Riley said, eyes glued to the screen. "The acid wouldn't even hurt you."
We were in – well, the spider was in. The body was laid out on a plastic sheet where they'd removed it from the bag. To call it a body wasn't totally accurate – it was several pieces of a body. Arms, legs, torso, head, each piece had been neatly severed and packed inexpertly into a bag before being slung through a glass window.
It was sort of messed up.
I grimaced, glad for my enhanced constitution; Riley just shrugged it off.
"Pan up around the shoulder please," I told her. As it came into view, I frowned. "See how the wounds are completely flat? What does that look like to you?"
"A very, very sharp sword," she said, frowning. "Probably a parahuman effect of some sort."
"Hn," I mused, rubbing my chin. "Go a little lower – on the outside of the upper right arm."
She nodded, maneuvering the spider.
"See that?" I pointed at the screen. "Can you roll the arm?"
"Maybe?" She hazarded. Long, hairy legs entered the viewpoint, pushing against the arm. It rolled easily, being fairly thin. "Looks like a tattoo? No, wait, that's a brand – looks like fangs?"
Blood splattered haphazardly on walls, already starting to dry. Bodies everywhere, some torn to pieces. Flashing red and blue lights.
"I know it," I told her quietly, hands clenching into fists. "Take a picture, then you can retreat with the spider."
She nodded. "So, a gang tattoo? E88? Haven't heard much out of them since Gesellschaft-"
"No, not E88," I told her grimly. "The Teeth. I guess New York got boring."
...
11 PM, July 2nd, 2007
Riley's Lab
"You can't keep doing this," Riley told me the moment she saw me.
It had been three days since I'd discovered the Teeth were in town. Miss Militia was out more often than not, so it was fairly easy to avoid detection when I returned from my late night (and entirely unauthorized) patrols.
Easy to avoid detection from her, anyways - Riley was an entirely different kettle of biologically modified fish. I expected her to be in bed, but clearly she was experimenting with stimulants again.
I shrugged, stepping inside the barn. Riley's workshop was out here; I'd vetoed the 'basement laboratory' idea on the basis of safety and strange olfactory emissions. "I told Hannah I was going to be training my liquid control. I have an excuse already embedded."
"That's not the point!" Riley said, leveling a finger. "You promised you weren't going to do any heroing!"
"I only have eight days until my birthday, and then I'm joining the Wards," I told her irritably. "Besides, I'm not letting the Teeth wander around my town without trying to stop them."
"You haven't gone after the E88," Riley said slowly. "What makes the Teeth so special?"
I grimaced, running my hand through my hair. No one gets under your skin like family. "You wouldn't-" No, she would understand – probably better than anyone else. "I don't want to talk about it. Now, that problem I asked you about earlier. . .?"
She scowled. "Changing the subject isn't going to help, and I'm still working on it – unless you changed your mind about the basic surgical option. . .?"
"No thanks," I told her dryly. "People would probably notice if I grew a foot overnight. It has to be something that speeds the process up while my ability is off."
"Hn," she wrinkled her nose, suddenly deep in thought. "I've been exploring hormonal and metabolic methods, but I haven't quite nailed down the side effects yet. If you could get me monkeys instead of mice. . .?"
"Yeah, like that wouldn't look weird if anyone found out. This isn't incredibly urgent, but it would solve a problem." Not appearing to grow older would make me very obviously a Cape of some type. I wasn't worried about myself being outed, but Riley or Hannah could be targeted by association.
She gave me a sly look. "It'd be a lot easier if we had someone capable of biological manipulation around."
I grimaced. "I'm working on it, but if she's healing people she's being very discrete, and hospital records aren't easy to access in the first place."
"She's probably not working out of a hospital if she's trying to be discrete," Riley pointed out.
"In that case, there aren't any records to find. There are no rumors of a new Marquis, no random plagues, and I seriously doubt she's joined a gang without anything being aired over the news. If she's even triggered at all, she has to be a rogue."
"More time travel references," she said, eyeing me.
"Can't explain," I told her tolerantly. Riley had been wheedling me for information ever since I'd first told her the first few pieces of meta knowledge and sicced her on the vials. "It would totally shatter your worldview. I'm not going to lie, but I can definitely say you're better off not knowing."
"Tch," she threw her hands up into the air dramatically. "Why do I even put up with you?"
I grinned and applied my knuckles to the top of her head,ruffling her hair in every direction. "Because you lurv me. Because I'm thebestest brotherever. Because-"
"Ack!" She wiggled desperately, pulling away. "Off, lunatic!"
"Ah, what a cruel fate, having such a bratty sister," I bemoaned, mockingly falling to my knees in despair.
Riley tried to glare as she patted her hair back down, but couldn't help but crack a grin. "Maybe you shouldn't be a hero; you could have areal careeras a circus clown."
I snorted. "I doubt I'd have much peace living like that; the Protectorate would be after me day in and day out."
It was probably the wrong thing to say. The atmosphere, for a moment light and jovial, went back to being tense. Riley bit her lip, looking away.
"Don't worry," I told her, smiling crookedly. "You'll be fine, no matter what happens."
"I'm worried aboutyou,blockhead," she huffed, picking up a beaker as if intending to throw it. After a moment, she set it back down. "We have a couple of experiments running; would you like to help me collect the data?"
I nodded, accepting the olive branch, and we got to work.
Working with a Tinker was different than I would have expected. At first, I was just a perfectly steady hand – sort of a living, breathing robotic assistant that she used when she really needed a new perspective. After a while, my duties spread to statistics and documentation, using my mental abilities to speed the banalities of recording the conclusions of the experiment.
Now, I was doing my best to perfectly mimic her procedures.
The first time I tried to make her blood oxygenation chemical, she scoffed. The temperature requirements during 'cooking' were surprisingly finicky, and the chemical proportions – and additive times – were also irritatingly precise.
The expression on her face when I finished was worth every hour I spent. I've never seen her that shocked, not even when I told her I'd seen the future.
It answered a question of mine – if someone with a perfect memory, exact muscle control and extreme reflexes duplicated a Tinker's movements exactly, could they duplicate the product?
The answer was yes – for simpler things. Still, even a simple success was enough to give me a minor Tinker rating, so I continued studying her experiments. I was actually very helpful, according to Riley; I'd helped design and program the electrical implants of the camspiders.
I still didn't know what I was doing most of the time. We didn't mention it to Miss Militia - she would be obligated to report it to the PRT, and it would inevitably cause problems.
Speaking of which-
"I thought I'd find you in here," Hannah spoke from the doorway. "Helping your sister with her projects?"
"Yup," I told her cheerfully. "The man eating rodent army is nearing completion. Soon, no villain will be safe."
From her expression, Hannah took the comment at face value for a couple of seconds. The way we started laughing was probably what tipped her off that we weren'tquite serious.
"Funny," she said dryly, rubbing her face with one hand. Suddenly, I felt kind of bad about it; she looked exhausted. "I have some good news and bad news for you."
"Lay it on me," I said, carefully putting my soldering iron down.
"Good news, we've got the final version of your costume approved. It's on its way, and it will be here before you join the Wards. Bad news-" Hannah grimaced. "Bad news, we also finished polling the PR department's focus group. We have a list of names, and they wanted me to pick the ones you would like best. You're going to have to come in tomorrow."
I shrugged. "It's Summer vacation – I have nothing but time."
...
I underestimated the PR department.
I regret this.
The list wasn't long, per say, but considering every permutation and connotation was tiring in a very spiritual way.
"Let's go over the list once more, this time out loud." Madame Gertrude Bones had been working for the Pr department since 1993, and if I had to describe her in one word, it would be stubborn.
"Beginning with the verynumerousA names," I said, straining to cover my irritation. "Achilles has negative connotations that do not quite fit the image I'm going for. Archimedes doesn't roll off the tongue, despite its similarities to Alexandria; Ajax makes me sound like a cleaning solution, like some sort of cape janitor; Anu is a god name – why is that even in here? - and Adamant. . . isn't terrible."
I skipped over Aegis; he may not have triggered yet, but I would always associate it with his Bet-A counterpart.
"The words 'damning with faint praise' come to mind," Bones said mildly. "Go on."
"Indomitable and Summit are probably the least bland, but if I had to pick another I'd go for Adamant," I admitted. "Typhon is a powerful name, but it's too villainous – much like Titan, only more so, and being called Titan while I'm this short would make me a joke. Prometheus and Rig are more suitable for a Tinker than a Brute and - did you filter these at all?"
"We tried, but Miss Militia convinced us to give you the full list – something about getting you in the right mindset. Bear in mind, if you suggest something terrible Iwill call you out on it. You may also change your pseudonym once you fully join the Protectorate - Ward names can be temporary depending on the strength of your power and reputation."
I rubbed the back of my neck, mulling it over. Finally, I sighed; I would just have to grow into whatever name they picked. "Top three remain unchanged – Indomitable, Adamant or Summit."
Bones nodded. "I would recommend Zenith; the others are rather generic brute names, and that's a bad thing with trademarking."
Zenith. Great. Maybe I could get a holographic projector hooked up to the back of my suit, or maybe I could convince Sundancer to provide a backdrop.
"I suppose Alexander is out of the question?" I asked whimsically.
She gave me a Look. "Yes."
"Worth a shot." I sighed.
"I will forward your preferences to the Director," Bone's said, gathering her materials.
One week till I was a Ward. Presumably, things would get easier; now, I just had the entrance interview to worry about.
...
Hannah had a surprise for me when I got home.
"Josh!" The surprise latched her arms around me the moment I stepped in the door.
"Hey Taylor," I choked out. My indestructibility was currently off, or I'd have tried to whirl her around like Riley. "How's your summer been?"
"Great!" She exclaimed, letting me go and dragging a redheaded girl over. "Dad was busy with Mr. Barnes, so Mr. Barnes brought Emma! Then Hannah called, and Mom said we could come over!"
"Emma, huh?" I eyed her for a moment before extending my hand. "I'm Joshua. It's nice to meet you."
Taylor's possible-future-betrayer shook my hand, nervousness betrayed by a slight tremor. She opened her mouth, perhaps to say something polite, but Riley chose that moment to burst into the room. I wasn't sure where she had been watching from; Hannah had forbidden any tinker tech inside the house.
"Hey!" She yelled, pointing accusingly. "Hands off my brother! That means you too redhead!"
I suppose it was fate that they wouldn't get along, I mused.
"He's not your brother!" Taylor retorted, mimicking Riley's pose. "You're adopted!"
Judging from Riley's expression, she was a hairs breadth from reaching for her surprise surgery kit. Riley hated Taylor's carefree attitude and pushy nature; Taylor hated Riley's occasional condescension and how she was instantly recognized as a genius at school.
I hope this doesn't end in acid spiders, a trigger incident and me buying a new house.
"Girls!" Hannah called from the living room. Everyone present, myself included, flinched. "Play nice!"
We were silent for a moment. Emma fidgeted, while Taylor and Riley settled for giving each other hostile looks.
"So," Taylor said eventually, voice even. "What are we going to do?"
Riley smiled, showing small but sharp teeth. "How about a board game?"
...
Scrabble was never meant to be this vicious, I thought numbly.
It may have been the look Riley gave me before we started, or it may have been my own desire to stay out of the fight, but somehow I was doing only slightly better than Emma.
"Excise," Riley hissed. "Double word score, thirty points."
Unwilling to lose, Taylor looked stubbornly over her letters. She was just barely trailing behind Riley, hanging on to her position through tenacity and luck despite Riley's greater vocabulary. Finally, her eyes lit up.
"Exited!" she said triumphantly, playing off Riley's word - to Riley's immense displeasure. "Double letter, double word! 30 points!"
This was getting ridiculous. My acid spider sense was once more tingling, and I didn't have to be Spiderman to realize that was a bad thing.
I carefully put down a single tile, making 'Excised', and stood. "I'm going to grab a snack."
Emma gave me a panicked look at being left alone, but I was unmoved; when Riley had that expression on her face, it was every man for himself.
Taylor's mother was in the kitchen. I carefully stepped past her, grabbing a yogurt out of the fridge.
"Hello Joshua," she said, giving me a warm smile. Immediately, I sensed I was being patronized. "I wanted to thank you for your gift – Hannah said it was your idea?"
Hearing the unspoken question, I shrugged. "Earpieces are much better for driving. Um, do you play Scrabble?"
She nodded, raising her eyebrows.
I let out a relieved breath. "Think you could take my place?"
Sic 'em, English lit professor.