1.4
As my driver shifted into park and I removed my seatbelt, I took a moment to center myself. I couldn't afford to be Taylor Hebert anymore; I needed to shift mental gears. Lung had no need for some wimpy teenage girl. He didn't force me to join his gang because I was Taylor, he wanted my power and what I could do with it. He wanted an enforcer: someone who could show a confident face to his street thugs while bowing her head to him, someone who could be decisive and give orders to the normal members while being obedient and doing as she was told. Someone who could fight and win as required.
He needed Battousai.
Taking a deep breath and calmly blowing it back out, I pulled my sword up from between my legs and pushed open the car door. Stepping out into the street, I shut the door behind me and took a moment to survey the area.
Lung had chosen an old tenement area in the Docks as this week's base of operations. It wasn't the most decrepit part of the Docks I'd ever seen, but it wasn't far off. Crumbling stone facades and rusted out fire escapes were the backdrop of this setting: multistory barriers of gloomy grays, tans, and browns that loomed high overhead. They seemed to press in on you with a feeling of claustrophobic entrapment, depressing in the self evident truth that most would never escape the squalor to reach greener pastures.
In spite of this, the street between these imprisoning residential walls was alive. Groups of people gathered on stoops and in doorways, filling the space with the buzz of conversation and sudden interruptions of jarring laughter. One group was gathered around a radio while a girl in thick, bright makeup sang along to the upbeat tune with a sort of self mocking enthusiasm. A group of teenage boys, prominently wearing red and green, gathered on one side of the street as they took turns throwing a tennis ball into a group of younger kids on the other side. The kids seemed to be enjoying the game, shrieking excitedly as they tried to dodge the grimy yellow ball and laughing and jeering at their friends who'd gotten hit.
Of course, not everyone was in good spirits. An older group, probably parents of some of the playing children, had gathered together to speak in hushed tones as they watched the kids with a concerned intensity. More than once, a window opened so that a worried mother could call her son back inside. There were also younger groups: teens wearing red and green bandanas and shirts, loosely gathered together in huddles of nervous silence; individuals who fidgeted with a nervous energy and glanced repeatedly at the groups wearing ABB colors, a sort of furtive desire evident in their posture.
Finally, there was a very distinctive group, one that the others went out of their way to avoid so much as looking at, as though doing so would draw their attention. They too were gathered around a stoop, but there was no upbeat conversation or laughter, no sense of friendship or air of playfulness. These men and women held themselves with a steady confidence and a sense of authority. They managed to seem tense and ready, while also being at ease with their surroundings, unconcerned.
It was their mannerisms that Battousai styled herself around, and as I slid my sheathed sword back into the sash around my waist, I imagined myself similarly sliding into my role.
When I moved, it drew their attention and I could see the wave of tension pass through the group, forcing them to focus on me. My posture was confident, my back straight and my head level as I stared unflinchingly ahead. I walked with a sense of grace that I'd never known before receiving my power: each step deliberate but natural, every dip and sway of my hips and shoulders smooth and purposeful. My balance was perfect, my control of my body instinctual, dangerous.
As I stepped out of the street and onto the curb closest to them, their group parted, clearing a path for me to the door of the building they were gathered around. This was the natural order here, the dichotomy between human and parahuman. It didn't matter that I was new to the gang. It didn't matter that I was white, or skinny, or a girl of only fifteen. What mattered was that I had power and that if I used it, they wouldn't be able to stop me.
This was Lung's precedent, his order, his rule. It was the knowledge of power, the promise of its use, and the fear of its direction. He wanted his power to be known, the power of his lieutenants to be known, because knowledge was a better motivator than uncertainty.
Still, I wasn't quite used to my new status in the pecking order. I couldn't help but wonder how much of their consideration for me was actually because of me and not because of Lung. Knowledge of power was only as good as your willingness or ability to use it. I wasn't really sure what would happen if one day I hypothetically found myself forced to discipline someone. Being told to do it by Lung would be one thing, but taking the initiative to do it myself would be another. From what I'd seen, I didn't honestly think Lung himself would disapprove, but that didn't mean that there wouldn't be dissension in the ranks. After all, these people weren't harmless. Most of them had visible guns, a good number of them had probably killed before, and...
And that applied to me now too, didn't it?
I grimaced, and quickly hid it with an acknowledging nod to the group as I started up the short set of stairs that led into the building. I couldn't afford to think like that right now. That was a Taylor thought and at the moment I was Battousai. Unconsciously, my left hand drifted to the hilt of my sword as I forced my expression to smooth out. Recomposed, I pushed open the flimsy feeling front door and stepped into the building.
I entered into a sort of dim and grimy foyer. Most of the space was taken up by a bare wooden staircase that disappeared up into the deeper gloom of the floor above. Its handrail was missing most of the little wooden struts meant to support it and just by looking at the footworn steps I could already hear it creaking in my imagination. At the base of the stairwell, a man with a rather prominent scar across the left side of his face sat in a dinky little folding chair with a shotgun laid across his lap. Chest puffed out with his arms crossed imperiously, he did his best to look imposing, but the effect was spoiled when he quickly looked down and turned away when I met his eyes.
Sparing him a bit of pride, I quickly turned my attention to my right where a cardboard box sat on the floor, loosely filled with cheap one-time-use cell phones. Behind it, a dry erase board sat propped up against the wall. A grid had been drawn in permanent marker on it and each box was labeled with a letter of the alphabet and a phone number. Some of them were also filled with names, messily scrawled in any combination of the English alphabet, the Korean alphabet, and well, the others that all seemed similar enough to Chinese that it was still next to impossible for me to tell the difference.
I stepped up to the box and stooped down next to it, careful so that my knees wouldn't actually touch the filthy floor and soak up who-knows-what. Reaching into it, I plucked out one of the random phones, slid the plastic back off, and popped out the battery. Underneath, an uppercase G was scrawled onto the inside of the phone in thick marker. The designation of my burner phone confirmed, I snapped the battery back inside, closed the phone up, and powered it on before scooping the whiteboard up from its resting place. A dry erase marker dangled from a string taped to the side of it and I used it to carefully pen Battousai into the G box.
Lung, Oni Lee, and Bakuda each had the number to my personal cell just in case they needed to demand my service at a moment's notice, but I figured it was a good idea to take one of the throw away phones too for more general communications.
Phone collected, I slid it into the back of my sash next to my personal phone and rose back to my feet. Turning, I caught the front door sentinel watching me out of the corner of his eye an instant before he looked away. I stared back at him silently for a moment before purposefully clearing my throat. He answered me in thickly accented English, resolutely staring at a spot on the floor somewhere to his right.
"Third floor." And with that, our brief interaction came to an end.
I did my best to hurry up the groaning steps without making too much noise: a nearly impossible task made easier by my inhuman agility, and quickly reached the landing of the third floor. Here, two men leaned against the wall on either side of a white door stained cigarette-smoke-yellow, beyond which I could hear the sound of conversation. They glanced at me briefly as I approached but otherwise did their best not to acknowledge my existence. I walked straight past them and opened the door without stopping to knock, stepping into the gloomy little apartment as confidently as I could and closing the door behind me.
"...and we will see how interested she is in playing word games after a week with nothing new to look at but the coming of her meals and the shape of her shits." Lung's deep, rumbling voice transitioned from what I thought might have been Japanese into an accented but clear English so smoothly that I almost missed the change. The one woman and four men that he was speaking to, however, certainly didn't. All five of them turned to glance over at me by the front door before quickly snapping their attention back to Lung.
On most occasions that Lung was speaking to a group, he often switched between a few different languages, depending on who he was speaking to and what they were proficient with. That seemed to have changed a bit though, starting from around the time he'd ordered me to start showing my face at more meetings. Whenever I was around, Lung tried to speak primarily in English (barring, of course, with those few people who couldn't speak English at all yet,) even when the people he was talking to spoke back to him in another language. When I'd first noticed it, I thought that he was doing it for my benefit, so that I'd be aware of what was going on with the ABB and its territory. Now, I had something of a different impression.
He wasn't doing it for my benefit, at least, not exactly. Lung wasn't the type of person who'd make such a big concession for one person, if for anyone at all. If there was something I absolutely needed to know, he'd just tell me that directly. No, what he was doing was forcing the rest of his subordinates to acknowledge my presence, my existence.
He must have noticed the way they were acting around me: pretending that I wasn't there, purposely speaking in a language that I didn't understand whenever I was around, even though they'd been talking naturally in English moments before I'd arrived. He'd noticed it, noticed a problem and was now addressing it.
Again, I didn't think that he was doing it for my benefit. I imagined that if I started having problems in my performance because of their behavior, Lung would expect me to find some way to address it myself. He would never step in to solve my issues for me. What he was doing was addressing a problem in his organization. Lung had announced that I would be joining as one of his parahuman lieutenants and that should have been the end of it. He expected his word to be all that was necessary to put people in line. That it wasn't was not alright, and Lung was delivering a warning.
When he switched to English, even as others continued to speak in Chinese, or Japanese, or Korean, he was saying: 'Yes, I have noticed what you're doing and it will change.' Lung only gave warnings on a given topic once before there were consequences. Frankly, I found myself hoping they got the message sooner rather than later, if not for the good of my conscience, then for the sake of convenience.
This group seemed to understand and they continued their discussion in English: reporting to Lung on various areas they managed and the sorts of problems they'd encountered.
I only gave it half an ear as I moved to join them; it wasn't immediately relevant to me and I wasn't here so that I could participate in the conversation. Instead, I stood at attention off to the side, half way between Lung's position on a couch to my left and the people he was speaking to on my right. It was the same general position he'd put me in the first time I'd shown up to one of these meetings, and I'd made a conscious effort to replicate it every time thereafter.
I'd decided that it was probably another sort of power play, this one directed more towards the people who came to speak with him than at me. I was a parahuman, a dangerous combatant, muscle. I wasn't standing directly at his side so I didn't give the impression of being highly trusted and invaluable like Oni Lee when he was around. I was just a silent, present sentinel to the interaction. I stood between Lung and his audience, somewhat intrusively on the edge of their peripheral vision. It was another reminder that I was here and ready to be used when I was needed.
Of course, I could just have been over thinking things, but it seemed to make enough sense to be plausible.
The meeting carried on rather uneventfully for awhile. Ten minutes or so after I arrived, a few more participants showed up and took their place to my right. Once or twice, someone was dismissed to get back to other duties they needed to attend to. Eventually, Lung himself lapsed back into his usual habit of switching languages as the mood took him and I fully lost track of the flow of the discussion, spacing out on my own. It wasn't until something very new happened to me that I was snapped back to reality.
My cell phone rang.
Luckily, I'd remembered to turn off the sound so it didn't obnoxiously intrude into the conversation. Instead, I managed to do that myself when I almost violently flinched when it started vibrating against my tailbone.
"Shit." I swore quietly to myself, fumbling with the back of my sash as just about every head in the room turned to look at me. I probably should have been more worried about interrupting them, but I'd already fully shifted mental gears back from Battousai to Taylor and all I could think in my panic was 'something must have happened to dad.'
Finally getting the phone free from the folded cloth, I whipped it out in front of myself and checked the caller ID. I was brought up short when instead of 'Home,' the display read 'Contact 03.' That was the name I'd entered Bakuda's information under, not wanting to use her actual cape name in case someone unaffiliated with the ABB got a hold of my phone. Flabbergasted, I turned stupidly to Lung and found him staring at me, a question obvious in the set of his brow.
"Uh, it's Bakuda." I said, shining paragon of the spoken tongue that I was. Lung continued staring at me for a moment before replying.
"Answer it." I winced at his nearly dumbfounded tone.
"Ah, right." Hitting the call button, I brought the phone to my ear. "Hello?"
"Give the phone to Lung." Bakuda demanded without preamble. "I know you're there paying face time." I turned to Lung and pulled the phone away from my head. Before I could speak, he gestured me over. Awkwardly, I crossed the room in three quick steps and placed the phone in his waiting hand. He brought it to his ear and turned to stare at his still assembled audience, silencing the whispers that had started.
"What?" He questioned in a demanding tone.
"Did you torch a circle jerk of Nazis?" Even without my enhanced senses, I probably could have easily made out Bakuda's shrill voice in the now silent room. Unperturbed, or at least forcing himself to look that way, Lung replied.
"No."
"Well, if you didn't, then someone is going through an awful lot of trouble to make it look like you did." Now Lung reacted, eyebrows drawing together into a suspicious glower.
"Explain."
"My guy in the BBPD just heard about a report coming in from Bay Memorial Hospital 'bout a veritable truckload of skinheads coming in covered in burns, skin melting off and shit. Four dead, three in no shape to talk about what happened. Apparently, there was some sort of fire in the old Burns steel mill, ironic, but it wasn't just fire. One of the outside walls got smashed down, metal siding torn up, machinery melted down to slag. I mean, it's not your MO to trash a single building and disappear, but do you think the Retarded Reich is gonna give a shit about that?"
There was a pause as Lung seemed to consider before responding.
"Where are you?"
"Lexington workshop, why?"
"Take what supplies you need and establish a new workshop in the train yard. You found a suitable location there, yes?"
"I mean, yeah, but it's trashed with industrial sized problems. I need more guys."
"You have what you need."
"Fuck off with that! How do you expect me to keep moving my operation when you leave me with your whiny sloppy seconds!?"
"Improvise." Lung growled before promptly ending the call.
Standing and turning to me, he held out my phone. I reached to take it, but when I tried to pull it away he maintained his grip. I glanced up at him and met his eyes. He held my gaze for several seconds before speaking.
"Battousai, you're going out tonight."
With those five words, I felt 'Taylor' slip away, back into the background of my mind. My left hand drifted down to grip the top of my scabbard and I pulled my phone away from Lung, slipping it back into my sash. Resolutely meeting his eyes, Battousai answered.
"Where do I go?"
