Enjoy!
Terror 3.1
He had been so close!
The endless void warped around his formless mass as he struggled to tear himself away from the Nightmares that kept him trapped. The Nightmares clung to him like a second skin as they struggled to feed on his fear against each other, but the other denizens of the dark were keeping their distance for the time being. Howling masses circled him cautiously like carrion birds as they eyed his weakened form. They were eager to feed, but their knowledge of who and what he had been kept them cautious. They knew not to entice his wrath like the Nightmares, so eager to feed that they turned on him in an instant. The others though, they remembered what he had once been long ago before humanity had ever risen from the bile and muck.
Back when he had been a GOD!
They remembered when civilizations collapsed into anarchy at his mere presence. When he and his legions had ravaged the cosmos like a dark tide, unstoppable and unopposable. He had fed wars, murders, and all sorts of evil that came from the twisted roots of fear. He had dwelled within the hearts of mortals as they looked into the endless dark with only a few fading lights to provide them with the illusion of safety from his wrath.
He had extinguished stars with a wave of his hand and darkened worlds with the passing of his horde. He had been the nightmare that kept them awake at night, the terror that chilled them to their very souls.
He had been the one to end the Golden Age and plunge the universe into the dark.
He had been so close to retaining that, the first step on his path to victory. There wouldn't have been any Guardians to keep him hemmed in on Earth like they had before during the Dark Ages. And as powerful as he was, Lunar Tsar wouldn't have been able to stand against him. Without Nightlight to guard him he would have fallen all the same, and the universe would have trembled at his name once more.
They would have remembered Pitch Black.
They would have remembered the Boogeyman.
He had been so close, victory had all but been within his grasp. The Guardians had been fading, unable to even provide the even smallest amounts of resistance other than empty words. All that had stood in his way had been a group of brats who didn't understand what they were facing. If they had they would have been trembling in their shoes. They should have run and hidden from the dark and the nightmares. Victory should have been his.
But his victory had been snatched up by the jaws of defeat. His army had been scattered, his power destroyed. Everything he had built up had been swept away, all because a group of brats had been too stupid to be afraid. To recognize how hopeless their struggle was.
But they didn't.
And now here he was, trapped in the dark by his own minions. A shadow of a fragment of what he had once been. So weak that even the brats that had bested him didn't see him as they played in the snow and sand. That thought alone made him growl in anger, his entire formless shape shaking in rage. Having fun in his presence. Being happy and fearless while the Boogeyman lurked over their shoulders.
Unacceptable!
His only consolation was that their hope would crumble. Their happiness would fade and their memories darken. Their dreams would become naught by ash once the world was finished with them, and all they would know would be fear in the end. The Guardians would become nothing more than a faded dream as their childhood and belief were ground up into dust by the relentless passage of time.
Such was the way of the world.
But that knowledge was of little comfort to him as he felt his Nightmares feed. He knew all too well what would happen to him, having seen it happen to others over the course of countless eons. He would fade and splinter as all that he was, was taken from him. His existence would fade from the world and the minds of mortals and all he would be in the end was a passing nightmare. He would exist in a deathless, endless torment, unable to die but unable to truly live.
And if he were any other night terror there would be nothing that he would be able to do about it. But he wasn't some upstart like Slenderman or Bauk. They were entities of fear, forged by fear- but he was Fear! To compare them to himself would be like comparing a flickering candle to the sun. And those that disagreed, those who thought they could challenge him and his power? He corrected them of their error and showed them why he was the Boogeyman.
He would not fall here, not so long as fear clung to the hearts and minds of mortals. It was like he told Frost- you can't kill fear.
All he had to do was-
Pain wracked his essence as a Fearling tore at him like a maddened beast. The creature had gone so long without feeding it decided to try and take a bite out of him. He felt a growing dread as the other creatures that inhabited the realm took notice of his weakness and started to drift far closer than he would have liked. He could deal with his Nightmares, but there were some beings here that he would rather not deal with in his weakened state. Those like Lermantoff Serpent might start to get foolish notions about their place in his hierarchy.
All he had to do was find someplace to rest for a time while he regained his strength. Trying to hide in the mortal realm was out of the question. Lunar Tsar and the Guardians would be keeping a close eye for any of his activity. His lair had all but collapsed with his humiliating defeat, which didn't really leave him with man-
Something was wrong.
Had he been any other being he wouldn't have been able to notice it, but he was as attuned to the Realm of Shadow as Mansnoozie was to the Island of the Sleepy Sands. Though unlike Mansnoozie he hadn't made his realm, he had merely taken it from the mindless inhabitants that now made up his armies. He could feel the currents and patterns of the dark shift and twist as something pushed against the barrier between it and the mortal realm. The ripple traced along the barest edge of his domain like a pebble skimming a pond. Only the outermost parts of his domain were effected, in the space that mixed his realm with the material world, like two links holding a chain together, it was that space that allowed him to travel to and from the physical world.
Under normal circumstances, it wouldn't be that concerning. His domain was quite malleable, and it wasn't uncommon for occasional outside forces to interfere or manipulate the outer edges of the space. He would have just brushed it off as another hedge-wizard who thought they were Merlin, but with his recent defeat at the hands of the Guardians, he couldn't afford to ignore the occurrence. For all he knew they were trying to pierce his realm and drive him even further into the darkness.
They had tried such tactics before during their Dark Ages in an attempt to weed him out of his realm and force a fight, but his power back then had been enough to rebuff such advances. But now attempting to do so would require much more concentration and effort in his weaker state. He could need to interfere now before it got out of hand.
Pitch neared the point of impact cautiously, being careful not to disturb the barrier too much. The edge of his space was flimsy enough that a single tug could break it, another consequence of his defeat. The Realm of Shadows was an extension of his will and a reflection of his health and being. During times like this, the barriers that separated the two worlds would weaken and intermingle like a tide against the shore. At this stage, one wrong move could breach the barrier and send him flying out into the mortal realm. That was the last thing he needed while the Guardians were on high alert.
Another rippled passed through the veil with all the subtly of a brick. It was clear to Pitch that whoever was doing this had no conception of what they were actually interfering with. To his relief that ruled out the Guardians as the interlopers, as anything they did would never be this ham-fisted or chaotic, nor would any spirit who had the barest understanding of their own magic. A small comfort though, since that meant that he didn't know who was messing with the Realm of Shadows. If he were in the state to do so, he would make sure to teach them what happens when you mess with something you don't understand. He couldn't afford to let the rest of the supernatural community think he was so weak that he would allow a mere mortal to mess with his domain.
The fact that he was that weak was entirely beside the point-
Pitch Black jerked as something shattered the barrier.
The interloper had pierced through the veil like a needle, and it was at that moment that he realized something was very wrong. Pitch had spent eons combating magic, even before his time as the Nightmare King. He knew things about magic that no mortal and very few spirits could even begin to understand. Only Lunar Tsar had an even remotely comparable understanding of the mechanics of magic. But what was happening now was so basic even a first-year wizard could understand what was happening.
Magic tended to flow from place to place like water, always rippling and changing, but it most cases magic would always flow to fill in gaps. Places like Stonehenge and Machu Picchu were areas that for whatever reason, experienced a loss of ambient magic power and in an attempt to correct the error, magic would flood into the region. The location would eventually become a hotspot of magical powers and abilities. And right now, that tiny hole might as well have been a bottomless pit.
Pitch had never seen such stagnant or weak magic before. The only thing he could compare it to were the magic null bombs that had been developed to combat him near the fall of the Golden Age and compared this void they might have well been soaked in magic.
Pitch struggled against the vortex like pull that formed in response to the breaching. He could feel Nightmares and Fearlings alike being pulled into the vortex, unable to resist the intense pull as the magic of his realm flowed to into the now much larger hole in an attempt to correct the imbalance. He was just barely able to keep his formless shape out of the event horizon as it pulled on him with a nearly inexhaustible grip.
Then he felt the second breach.
Unlike the first, the source of this tear was far more familiar. It was surgical and precise, as though whoever was making it knew exactly what they were doing. As the burning energy approached his essence, Pitch could recognize the taint on the magic that he knew all too well. How could he not remember the man that he spent an eternity cursing out for assisting with his first imprisonment?
Lunar Tsar!
A wave of pure power slammed into his form and shattered his tenuous grip on the realm. He could feel his essence burning as the Man in the Moon's lunar energy slammed into him like a tidal wave. The brat was trying to force him through the breach and seal him away on some forsaken rock for the rest of eternity!
Pitch snarled as he struggled not only against the black hole-like pull of the breach but against the extremely potent energies of the Man in the Moon. He knew that it was a losing battle at best, the Man in the Moon's strength alone assured that. He hadn't just wanted to turn the boy into his nightmare prince because of his innocence, but because the boy also inherited a tremendous about of magical power and talent from his parents, two of the few people that had actually hurt him in eternities gone by. Without his full power, he couldn't resist both forces at once.
His form shot through the breach like a bullet as he slammed into…something. It was alien and unfamiliar to the entity of fear. But the mere fact that whatever it was wasn't trying to instinctively repulse him with any form of magic told him one of two things. One, this thing had no conception of who he was, or it had no magic to speak of or both. Even humans could instinctively use magic to repel malignant supernatural forces like himself. It had been something that had always vexed him in his weakened state because honestly, did mortals really think a nightlight would be able to keep him away?
But Pitch had no time to contemplate that fact as another wave of Lunar Tsar's power slammed into him, forcing him even deeper into the unfamiliar creature. He could feel the dull flesh being torn apart by his form and his minions as the creature's defenseless form was torn into by some of the darkest forms of magic ever to exist. Pitch could feel the creature's fear and uncertainty of the situation at hand as he was driven into it like a splinter.
Whatever the creature was, it was aware of what was happening to it, or at the very least knew that something was wrong. It lacked a true soul for Pitch to think of it as a living, thinking creature, and the best comparison that he could come up with was that it was more akin to a drone or a particularly clever machine, like that Djinni robot that North had made a few centuries ago.
Not that he would have cared whether it was truly alive or not, but it was much harder to try and mentally fight a creature that possessed the even the merest sliver of a soul rather than an empty machine. But even with this advantage, the creature was vast and he was weakened. It certainly didn't help that Lunar Tsar was trying to push him even further away from the breach. A breach that he could now see was being sewed up by the moon brat's magic. He tried to resist the multiple forces pushing him farther into the being in one last desperate attempt to reach the breach before it closed, but he knew it was a lost cause. Either he could let even more of his power be burned up by Lunar Tsar or he could try and escape.
Realizing he couldn't go up, Pitch chose to go down. He shot down into the belly of the beast like a rocket, the force that had previously conspired against him now working to assist him. And now he could feel something else, something terrified beyond rational thought. He could feel the fear calling out to him, inviting him to feed and grow. Even in this place of stale and static magic, fear was his.
The fear of a child.
An elder child, but a child none the less. He could see the terror now, the terror of death and the inevitable end. A delightful fear in one so young. While the creature's fear had sated him some, it was incapable of feeling true terror. Oh, it could feel fear and concern for its situation, but it was far too organized and restricted to experience terror. But the child's fear, oh that might as well have been the ringing of a dinner gong to him. The creature seemed to be funneling his form towards the girl as if it was somehow connected to her. Pitch obliged the creature as he honed in on his target, eager to regain even the smallest scrap of his power one more.
But once Pitch moved in closer he realized his mistake. In her near death state, the child's spirit had become unanchored to her body and floated on the currents and eddies of magic that surrounded her form.
And he was about to hit it.
Under any other circumstances, it wouldn't have mattered. A single spirit would have been utterly inconsequential to him, even in his weakened state. He could have flicked it into a thousand fragments or if he wanted to be vindictive he could have corrupted her into a vengeful ghost. Those were always fun to sic on the mortals.
But the sheer amount of magic that was being channeled towards her spirit was warping it, making it more malleable, just as his form was. Her spirit was absorbing the magic like a sponge in such a massive amount that if she lived he wouldn't have been surprised if she gained some talent in sorcery.
But none of that was his concern as he slammed into her with the force of a meteorite. Pitch would have screamed if he had a physical body. His entire form was burning and twisting as he and the child's spirit melded together like two colors of paint being mixed together.
He thrashed and tore and pulled with all the might he could muster as he tried to free himself from the entanglement that he had found himself in, but it was all for naught. He was trying to resist a literal waterfall of magic that was being poured upon them, crushing their very existences together.
No! He/She/They thought desperately as terror overtook them. If He/She/They pulled, He/She/They might be able to-
Another wave of Lunar Tsar's power blasted into He/She/They, smashing aside whatever pitiful resistance that had been gathered.
LUNAR TSAR!
Boogeyman's eyes shot open in shock as she gasped out of pure reflex more than a need for oxygen. Her eyes darted around the room as her chair groaned under her iron grip. Once she realized that nothing was wrong she allowed herself to settle back down into her seat. She eased up her grip on her chair, ignoring the dents that she had just put into it as she tried to calm herself down.
"Just a nightmare," she muttered under her breath as she rubbed her forehead. She didn't need to sleep, not anymore, but it helped pass time during the day when she couldn't do much and allowed her to take a break once in a while. The nightmares had been constant, but there was something about them that nagged at her. The answer to whatever they meant eluded her, like a stick in a pond the more she tried to reach for it, the farther away it got.
She couldn't help but let out a giggle at the thought of her, someone who literally lived off of fear and nightmares still getting nightmares. Honestly, the best solution to the problem would be to just stop sleeping. It wasn't as if she actually needed to sleep anymore. She allowed herself to do so because it meant she wouldn't have to spend hours staring at a screen, waiting for the sun to go down. It was something she could do to just let her mind relax and shut down for a time.
At any rate, she could see that the sun was starting to set, and such thoughts were cast aside to focus on more important details. The television that she had left on was still spouting more about the Shadow Stalker scandal, something that it had been doing since she had aired the PRT's dirty laundry about a day and a half ago. Boogeyman flicked through the channels in an attempt to find something that might catch her eye.
"-gressman Stein has joined the push for a governmental inquiry into the PRT's activities-"
"…these really the kind of people we want patrolling our streets?"
"Brandish of New Wave is calling this 'a travesty of hero accountability' and…"
"Director Piggot had declined to make a statement…"
Boogeyman turned off the television with a soft click. There was nothing there that she hadn't already seen before. She set the remote down and took in her surroundings with a deep breath. She wasn't sure why, but the previously standard abandoned warehouse had started to…warp for a lack of a better term.
Walls were starting to curve around and turn from the previously structured order to a much more nonsensical design. It had been a slow creeping thing that she hadn't taken notice of at first, but now that the changes had become more pronounced they couldn't help but draw her eyes. Really it wasn't anything major, and the outside of the building still looked exactly the same, but it was something worth noting. An aspect of her power perhaps? Did she have a Shaker power that warped the environment around her?
"Focus," Boogeyman muttered as she tore her contemplative gaze away from the curving walls. She could let her internal interior decorator out later, right now she still had plans to go over and a rendezvous to get to.
The situation in the city was relatively stable. At the very least the gangs weren't outright fighting on the streets. The tension was still there, though. The pressure between the gangs and Protectorate had been building for something and while she had added some fuel to the fire, all she had really was bring the tension back into focus to the public. There was going to be a gang war eventually, with or without her inference, she just wanted to make sure that the civilians were out of the line of fire and that the gangs would get what was coming to them.
And with how the Protectorate was scrambling for a response to the revelation of Shadow Stalker's activates, it would end up falling on her shoulders to fix the mess they had left to rot and grow. Perhaps if she started to show them up enough they might actually get off their asses and do their jobs for once.
Boogeyman snorted. The thought of the local Protectorate actually doing something constructive was laughable. At best, they would schedule half a dozen more publicity stunts to try and dig themselves out of the hole they had created.
Because that was more important than actually doing their jobs.
Though in all honestly, she had been somewhat taken back by the enormity of the backlash the local PRT and Protectorate had gotten from the Shadow Stalker fiasco. She had known that such a scandal would have huge repercussions, but while it was easy to mentally envision that, it was a quite different to see people as powerful as state senators and congressmen getting involved. Powerful people were calling for an investigation of not only the local Protectorate, but they wanted to but nationwide Ward teams under scrutiny as well. Boogeyman wasn't sure if the motions would actually get anywhere, but the more people talked about the scandal, the less they would trust in the rose tinted image the Protectorate provided them. The local team's approval rating was at an all-time low if a few informal polls were to be believed.
The PRT was desperately trying to throw the blame off themselves and onto Winslow, but for all they could try, they couldn't break the narrative that had grown like a malignant cancer. Their attempts to deny that they had known about Shadow Stalker's activities was only making people believe that they were informed of her activities even more- the Streisand effect.
The parents of Winslow were in total uproar towards the PRT and the school administration. The fact that their children had been going to school with a sadistic Ward had incensed more than a few individuals. Not only that but as more of Winslow's failings as a school were being brought to light, more people were starting to question the reliability of the place as an institution of learning.
Though Boogeyman was certain that the media was playing up the level of control the gangs had over the school. When she had gone to Winslow as Taylor she had never really seen any overt gang activity aside from a show of colors or the occasional scuffle, but it wasn't like she had gone out and looked for the gangs at the time either. At any rate, it almost irrelevant what was true or not, the parents wanted blood and they weren't taking no for an answer. Even more than a few of the Arcadia and Immaculata parents were baying for the incompetents that let the situation get this out of hand.
Winslow had been closed down for the time being while their staff and administration were being put through a thorough investigation. They were still looking through files from what the news said, but they had already brought the principal up on charges. A smile had been brought to her lips at the sight of Blackwell being arrested on charges of negligence, embezzlement, and as an accomplice to murder along with a slew of other charges. And given the public's opinion on the matter, it wasn't likely that she was going to be able to wiggle her way out of this one. Really, it was amusing how quickly the PRT was to turn if given the option of getting bad PR. While nothing official had been released by the local Director, it was clear that some of the more PRT friendly news stations were trying to load as much as the blame onto the school as they could. It wouldn't help them in the end, but it was still fun to watch everyone struggle against each other in an attempt to get out of the pit they had dug themselves into.
Lack of evidence isn't going to save you this time, Janice, Boogeyman thought with no small amount of glee. Perhaps she should give her former principal a visit before this was all over. It would be more than a little amusing to see the former educator on the back foot for once. To see her smug and self-assured face crumble into despair as she realized the full implications of what was happening to her. It was highly unlikely that the PRT would let their scapegoat get off easily, she would likely to be shipped off the prison.
But such indulgences would have to wait for when she wasn't so busy. The city was a powder keg of violence and resentment that was threatening to blow at any moment. The Empire had released an "official statement" that the attack on the Hess family had not been a sanctioned hate crime as if being sanctioned would make a hate crime any better. They had even gone as far to leave the man who had let the Nazis she had dispatched know the identity of the Hess family gift wrapped on the PRT's doorstep.
It was clear that Kaiser was trying to find a way out of the corner that his idiotic foot soldiers had backed him into, but it was a futile effort. The simple fact was that Kaiser was too tangled up in his gang's unifying narrative to convince the public that this wasn't in part his fault. And even if it actually was an unsanctioned hate crime, all it proved was that the man couldn't control his gang. The Empire was bleeding, and the sharks could smell the blood in the water.
It was the beginning of the end for the Empire, even if they didn't want to admit it. Oh, they still had life in them, but they were going to die. It would be a slow insidious thing that crept up on them inch by inch. Everything they built would slowly crumble around them as their shining white empire was snatched into the darkness. And by the time they realized what was happening it would be too late.
Boogeyman blamed her mother for her poetic side.
But while the attempt on the Hess family's lives had certainly forced the Empire on the backfoot, it had also forced Boogeyman to reevaluate her strategy. Her original plan had been to focus her efforts on sabotaging the Empire's operations as they tried to expand and capitalize on the propaganda that the Shadow Stalker situation provided them. She would have pushed them back and deny them any opportunity to expand or grow in response to the event. She would sow the seeds of doubt into their follower's minds about their conviction that the Empire could "protect" them. And once their fear sprouted and spread there would have been little, if anything, that the Empire could do to stop it.
That certainly was still a cornerstone of her plan, but the fact was that the Empire was keeping most of their actives close to their chests and were avoiding making any waves that might bring more attention to them.
She could try to make a push against them, but pushing them into an even tighter corner might make them do something foolish. When she did make her more against them it would have to sufficiently weaken them so that any retaliation they made wouldn't result in entire city blocks being demolished.
For the time being, it served her purposes to let the Empire stew for a bit longer. Every hour they did nothing was another hour of their followers losing faith in their leader's promises. Kaiser had always promised to protect the decent whites from the "sub-human filth", and now it was coming to bite him in the ass. Promises that couldn't be fulfilled weren't conducive to garnering public support.
Boogeyman doubted that the truly loyal members of the Empire would leave, they were far too ingrained with the idea of racial superiority to even consider that they might be wrong. But having the general populace lose their faith in the Empire's protection would go a long way to vilifying them. People would be far less likely to protest to her brutal methods if they recognized how monstrous the Empire actually was. All she had to do was strip away their belief and faith and show them the reality of the world.
Boogeyman cast that line of thought aside as she stood up from her seat. There was no point in wasting more time contemplating the Empire's destruction. She would simply have to be patient. She turned towards a section of the wall where she had placed a rather large map of the city. She had pinned the map up with a few pushpins to hold it in place against the wood. Bands of string had been placed up outlining the territory of the various gangs. Despite her victory against the Merchants she still held a very small portion of the city, only a few blocks of the worst developed districts of the city.
But it was a start and that was what was important. As the old saying went, Rome wasn't built in a day. She could name independent and Protectorate heroes who had been working as long as she had been alive, if not longer, who had done less to the villains and criminals. The rate at which villains escaped custody was a disturbing number and one that the Protectorate made sure to keep well away from the public eye.
In the last twenty years, the only major villains from the Bay who had been successfully incarcerated were a few rank and file of the Teeth after the Slaughterhouse had finished with them and Marquis, who had been captured by New Wave, or the Brockton Bay Brigade as they had been known back then. A few minor independents had been captured, mostly from the scattered Asian gangs prior to Lung's arrival, but it was still a distressingly small amount. The number didn't even reach the double digits, a fact that was never really brought up when the Protectorate talked about all their hard work at keeping the city safe.
"Fools," Boogeyman muttered under her breath as she turned her attention back to the map. The Empire controlled much of the city, far too much if you asked her. They had an iron grip around the Commercial District and the Downtown Coast with a few tendrils digging into the Docks South. The Azn Bad Boyz were the undisputed rulers of the Docks and the Trainyards, a rather impressive amount of territory considering they only had three capes on their roster. From what she could tell, Coil didn't really hold territory like any of the other villains, but he apparently had a very strong presence in the Downtown districts of the city, brushing right up against the areas that the PRT and Protectorate actually cared about. After all, Downtown was where most of the city's money was made and where Arcadia and their precious Wards were located.
It's not like the other parts of the city had anything of value, Boogeyman thought with a snort. Still, putting aside the PRT and Protectorate's ineffectiveness, something about Coil just irked her.
Compared to the other gangs he was a virtual unknown in terms of parahuman powers. Some speculated that he didn't even have powers and was just wealthy enough to buy professional mercenaries and Tinker tech weapons. He was considered more of an irritant that an actual player to the local law enforcement and the gangs and yet…
Boogeyman couldn't quite put her finger on what it was about the masked villain that bothered her so. Maybe it was just because of her experience with the Merchants had taught her the value of intelligence as she had simply taken those lessons to heart. But one didn't hire professional mercenaries without some long-term plan and some serious money to back it up. Boogeyman didn't know what hiring mercenaries cost, but she had learned from her father through osmosis that hiring a professional could get expensive. Having at least two or three dozen well-trained men on hand had to amount to a rather large price tag.
So where was he getting his money?
Looking at the map Boogeyman realized something that had slipped her notice at first. Coil didn't have any forms of income that she could see knew of. The Empire and the ABB made their money off of drugs, prostitution, weapon smuggling and a variety of other sources of illegal income. But Coil didn't seem to partake in any of those illegal activities in any considerable degree, and certainly not enough to sustain a criminal empire for any length of time.
Kaiser, Lung and even now deceased Skidmark made sense to her. They wanted to gather power and wealth and were willing to do anything to get it, even if it meant stooping to the lowest of the low and then grabbing a shovel and digging even deeper. One didn't allow themselves to become a Nazi if they were concerned about things like morality.
So as disgusting as their practices were, Boogeyman at the very least understood what they were trying to accomplish and how they went about doing so. But Coil, Coil was a mystery. He was a virtual unknown that had managed to survive in Brockton Bay, a city that had more capes per capita than most places in the United States. Boogeyman didn't understand what Coil was doing and she didn't like that.
She was going to have to rectify that.
Easier said than done, Boogeyman thought with a grumble as she walked back over to her chair, twisting the piece of furniture around until it was facing the map. She plopped herself down and stared at the map with a contemplative expression, chin resting against the palm of her hand. She was going to have to find and…question one of Coil's mercenaries but trying to find one of them was going to be difficult. They weren't like Empire or ABB members who walked down the street with their gang colors emblazoned for the world to see. These were professionals who only stayed as long as they needed to before slinking back off into the shadows.
They hide in our domain.
Boogeyman felt her fist curl at the stray thought. If Coil thought that he could hide by slithering in the shadows, then she would just have to show him the error of his ways. Because no matter how deep he dug, there would be no place that the shadows touched that he would be able to hide from her.
But she was going to have to put that on hold for another day, she had a rendezvous to make and a hero to meet.
"Stay here," Boogeyman ordered to her assembled Nightmares as she rose from her seat. She didn't bother waiting for their agreement before she dove into a shadow.
Hopefully, this would go better than her conversation with Miss Militia.
She was still somewhat shaken by whatever had happened to her in that apartment building. It had left her as quickly as it had come, but she couldn't stop remembering the tightening of her chest as something twisted inside of her. If she didn't know any better she would have thought that it was because she couldn't breathe, but she knew that she didn't have to do that anymore.
Whatever it had been it had reminded her that she wasn't immortal and that she could still be hurt. Even if a bullet to the head couldn't put her down that didn't mean whatever that had been couldn't.
Boogeyman tried to push such thoughts away she moved towards where she would meet her target. If this worked she would have a parahuman to add to her ranks of Nightmares. If not, well…
There were always other options.
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