Heieienej

by Kahlil Johnson

Aka lei

5. Mad mac

Defiant charged Echidna from a flank, driving his spear into her gut and cutting sideways. She didn't react overtly, swatting him away with one of her many limbs, but Defiant stood his ground and swung again, forming an oozing 'x' on her side.

A Dragonsuit swooped down, long and snakelike with four limbs, and it made a strafing run above Echidna, darting her with four purple-glowing rockets that sunk into Echidna's flesh. For a moment, the affected spots grew, as if bubbling, then exploded with baked flesh and roasted muscle and fatty tissue, as well as blood and brown stomach fluid. Rime managed to dig her way out of Echidna's gut, covered in vomit, and then fell to the street, shooting blasts of ice at the monster almost instantly as she backed away.

"Be more careful," Legend chided, "One wrong shot and we're condemning everyone inside to death."

"I calculated that to be safe, but you're right," came Dragon's reply.

Legend soared, then rocketed down to intercept Echidna's path, as he fired flaming rays into her in an attempt to divert her. She ignored the discomfort, trudging through the street. Legend didn't have long before three Purity clones engaged him in blaster combat, seemingly giving him some trouble; at least enough to keep him from shooting at Echidna.

Longinus constructed a large, two-handed sword in his hands. It felt heavy in his grasp, especially when he extended it parallel to the ground, but as he extended his telekinetic field into it, he suddenly found it easier to move it, as if it were lighter. The inertia was smoother, the momentum easier to control.

He swooped down at Echidna and slashed along her side, zipping past her multiple times to hit the same spot, over and over. Before too long, she wheeled around and spat a thick gooey mass of sticky vomit at him, causing him to stick to the ground. Three arms reached for his body, intending to incorporate it into her own.

He released a wave of extreme, gold energy-based heat from his body. The air around him rumbled and vibrated, on the very edge of igniting with actual flames, but the vomit had an ostensibly higher melting point than water. One of the hands caught his left arm in a tight grip.

Longinus fought back against it, using a construct guillotine to cut Echidna's hand off. The cleanly-severed limb fell to the ground, and the two others lunged for him at double speed, as if in shocked reaction to the pain. Noelle herself didn't seem to notice, only peripherally watching him from the corner of her eyes, an amused smirk dancing on her lips, under her sunken eyes.

He shot two lasers at the hands, incinerating them into black, charred logs.

Myrddin hovered in the air, thirty meters above the ground, and raised his staff. He drew out a sigil, kind of like a 'D' shape, but squashed down, and with twin curved lines running through the middle. A gout of red flames shot out of the sigil, washing over Echidna like a stream of hot napalm. She seemed to be screaming, but the roar of the flames scrambled the sound of her pain.

Eidolon hit the ground, the dust of the destroyed city and mud from the waters left behind by Leviathan splattering around and away from him.

He raised a hand and let out a blindingly bright, purple-black bolt of lightning, moving it left to right as it trailed off into the sky. The lightning didn't coil around Echidna, but instead, scythed through her and cleanly severed some of the cap of her body, including the one where Noelle was attached to the green-red mass, at the pelvis. The detached part quickly dried up into a husk, as a new Noelle emerged from the top, slightly altered and more sickly looking than before. She growled at Eidolon, and screamed.

Echidna's body opened up, and she spat out a freakish, ghoulish monster, fifteen feet tall. A mass of cancerous red-brown flesh, with over a dozen screaming skeletal heads wrapped in a thin caul of dry skin at the top. Eighteen arms were placed at different points on the body, alongside an uneven amount of legs. It became smaller with a pop of ash, as one of the incorporated creatures disappeared and became a singular entity, moving to help some clones fight Dauntless.

The Butcher clone screamed in five voices, then proceeded to charge Eidolon. Eidolon tried to move back, but couldn't react in time. He raised both hands, almost getting his fingers crushed before his body and costume transformed into dark bronze steel, with the eye-slits of his mask retaining a green glow.

"Feed him to me," Noelle ordered in a cold voice, surprisingly close to a normal girl's. "I want his power, too."

Longinus emitted a shockwave from his body to throw the sticky vomit off of himself and in the Butcher's direction, zipping away as quickly as his power allowed him to.

The Butcher monster grunted with two of its mouths, which popped into ash. Two separate monsters appeared around Longinus, with explosions of dark smoke and force, managing to sandwich him from two directions. The one behind him wrapped its arms around his torso in a hug, while the other began to punch him in the stomach with enough force to make his eyes bulge out in pain. Surprisingly thuggish - a stray thought told him.

Longinus emitted another shockwave to get the two monsters off of himself, but the Butcher holding him didn't let up, beginning to close its arms even tighter. He felt the pressure on his own arms, enough that if it became just a little stronger, he'd be nursing broken bones. Some nonsensical memory reminded him how difficult that would have been two months ago, and how it was trivial damage today.

He still wasn't eager to experience it.

Longinus used his telekinetic force to put space between himself and the Butcher monster.

"When I kill you, I'm going to have your power," the Butcher in front of him said, placing one hand on his shoulder, and using the other to punch him in the nose. Longinus felt the blow, strong enough to cause a raw feeling in the back of his face, as dulled as it was by his defenses.

In that moment, the Butcher holding him screamed very suddenly, as its arms popped out of its sockets, finally reaching the peak of strain caused by his telekinesis. It kept clutching him with its muscles, though, as hard as it could, but no longer at bone-crushing capacity. The other Butcher reacted quickly, tackling him to the ground and helping its sibling.

Within moments, there was a pop, as another Butcher appeared and threw itself as Longinus. Two more teleported seconds later, and then three more, all of them creating a ball that covered him up. Each one kicked, thrashed, writhed, punched, and even chomped on his various body parts. He started panicking, as he felt their thrashing.

Longinus charged up exactly half of his remaining energy and blasted it outwards in a blazing shockwave that sent every single Butcher flying into the air in different directions. The monsters screamed.

When he was freed, he flinched and saw the Siberian was only six meters away and striding in his direction with a feral grin. He rocketed up and away, in Eidolon's direction. Fucking help me!

Eidolon was engaged in combat with the rest of the Butchers, two Purities, a single Laserdream, a Miss Militia, two Shatterbirds, a Burnscar, and a pseudo-Mannequin; an Alan Gramme that had only managed to put together a crude shell of armor, not even nowhere near as glossy as the original's, and clearly still a baseline human underneath.

Defiant swung his spear and decapitated the Mannequin, before moving in to remove pressure from Eidolon.

Echidna had apparently deigned to ignore Eidolon's power after all. She moved on, slithering across the city in the direction of Captain's Hill, using Vistas and Tricksters to move faster than she'd normally be capable of, while leaving behind a trail of clones to defend herself with.

The Dragonsuit that made the attack on Echidna shifted priorities to making carpet bombings over the city streets, presumably cleaning up the clones that got too far from the main brawl.

Longinus followed after the Dragonsuit, trying to get as close to it as possible, but it was too fast. It crossed the entire city at what must have been just under the speed of sound, dropping high-precision rockets and lasers, before turning around and coming in for another run from a different angle. He was moving at maybe a fifth of its speed if the estimates were to be generous. He didn't really even know why he went after it. To get more orders, when he'd already been told to save the Butcher? And when Defiant and Eidolon were closer?

He followed after Echidna, staying high in the air, firing sharp lasers at her sides, hopefully creating openings for trapped capes to crawl out of.

Several capes from the Atlanta Protectorate, including Cinereal, attacked Echidna from the front. One of the aerokinesis specialists created a whirlwind roadblock, causing Echidna to screech and release three grossly overcooked Trainwrecks, a Regent, two Skitters, two Grues, an undercooked Purity, a Laserdream, and some others, all of whom promptly stood up and began to attack.

He hadn't noticed before, but Echidna was bigger now. At the beginning of the fight, she was at a size where an elephant would be a good comparison, if slightly smaller. Now, she would tower over Leviathan; the top of her body nearly reaching the two-thirds point of most of the suburban buildings' heights.

Grumman landed on a nearby rooftop and rooted his feet in the ground, then raised his hands and hesitated, clearly, unsure at what power to shoot Echidna without killing the people inside. Almost delicately, he fired off a dark-silver blast of roiling, bubbling energy underneath Echidna's side, causing her to stumble half a step, and accidentally preventing her from eating one of the heroes on the ground.

Longinus flew to the rooftop on which Grumman was on. "Graze her sides as closely as you can! You need to open up her belly, so the heroes can get out!" he said hurriedly as soon as he touched down. "I believe in you," he said in a genuine, reassuring tone.

"O-okay," Grumman stammered, then shook his head as if to wash himself down in renewed determination. He began to pellet her side with lighter blasts, mostly singing and punching into them, rather than outright exploding as expected. Not enough.

Narwhal used a forcefield to cut apart Echidna's stomach in a key spot, using Grumman and Longinus' distraction to her advantage. Echidna screamed as a mass of capes emerged from her body. Those alive began to flicker to consciousness, standing up and running as fast as they could, while the dead ones just laid there, for Echidna to reabsorb. She looked briefly miffed, and let out a grumble.

"You did amazing!" Longinus told Grumman, taking off and flying down to aid Narhwal in her task.

Noelle raised her voice, saying, "Kill Narwhal, my Laserdreams," with an almost dreamlike tone to it. Monster villains often said shit like this in the comics, but it was chilling to hear in real life.

Three Laserdreams ascended, trailing red streaks, and began to attack Narwhal who protected herself with ease, even managing to fight back without much effort. Longinus covered Narwhal in construct armor from far away, firing salvos of lasers at the Laserdreams, who created lenses to shield themselves and fire back.

It was in that moment that a rumble went through Echidna's body. A bulge moved from the center of her mass, then down to the bottom, as she shat out a mass of over ten dozen limbs, a bunch of heads, and other interwoven crap. Another one of those monstrous, ghoulish Butcher zombies. Instantly, the Butchers began to teleport out to detach themselves from the main mass, creating undercooked zombies - some of the Butcher ghouls lacked limbs, while others ears or eyes. Ironically, one of them didn't have any teeth.

"I can confirm the Butchers are safely killable," Haunt said over the armbands. "Either that, or my power has some unique interaction with them. Feel free to prove me wrong - I don't think there's a better choice, given the alternative."

Longinus fired a laser through one of the Butchers' heads and prepared for the worst, squinting and tensing up.

Nothing happened, on both accounts. In the sense that the Butcher didn't really die, and his power didn't really seem to react. The Butcher had a large, burning ashtray mark on his… her… its forehead. They didn't really have a gender. They were like sundried skeletons covered in husky, dry flesh and skin. It growled, but ignored him in favor of attacking a nearby hulk-like brute covered in marble.

"I think Echidna is empty, except for the corpses and Butcher," Tattletale said over the radio, "I'd say go for the eyes, but..."

"Press the left button on your armband in the next ten seconds to confirm you're present and alive. If someone doesn't press the button, I will track the armband to see if they're at the same coordinates as Echidna," Dragon informed, with the sound of a keyboard being tapped at in the background.

Longinus immediately pressed the button that Dragon indicated. A short 'verifying' message appeared, before the armband flashed green and the message disappeared, confirming he wasn't eaten.

Eight seconds later, Eidolon landed on a nearby rooftop, and began to gather a swirl of razor-sharp wind in his right hand, as small as a crystal ball, but intense enough the wind currents were visible from the raging dust particles and light refraction within.

Three seconds later, Dragon's voice said, "Confirmed. Everyone except the Butcher is free. Focus on freeing her, then destroy Echidna."

Eidolon lowered his hand, and began to fire scythes of wind at the monster. Criss-crossing wounds appeared on Echidna's body, numbering in the dozens within five seconds. The monster's stomach opened, even as two Vista clones altered the space in front of her to make it easier to scale the nearby hill.

Longinus felt a pang of relief go through his body at the news of everyone being healthy. He approached Eidolon and looked at him. "Can you charge up my environmental shield?" he asked, raising his arm in Echidna's directions.

"Not enough time to cycle through powers," Eidolon answered blankly, then stepped off the rooftop and flew after Echidna, sustaining his assault. Legend was next to join in, covering her in explosive barrages from above. He swung his hand, and during the movement, his fist unleashed six grenade-like blasts onto her. He swung again, doing the same but at twice the intensity, and with twice the amount of projectiles, and then again - doubling with each go, until he stopped when he noticed the insides of her stomach and frowned.

Longinus flew parallel to the Triumvirate capes, firing his own lasers at Echidna, hoping to slash through her and set the Butcher free in some way.

Eidolon got a critical rend on Echidna's stomach, causing it to flap open and release a bunch of bodies. The Butcher instantly stood and teleported away as far as she seemingly could, which was to say maybe fifty meters, while Echidna stopped and turned, picking up her bounty of dead cape templates for new clones.

At that moment, the air wavered, as a black-white figure descended and hovered in front of them. Longinus barely had the time to react when a blast of white light struck him in the chest and sent him eating dust across the city street.

Centurion proceeded to engage in combat with Eidolon and Legend, keeping up with them, and managing to give Echidna enough time to gather her bearings. She spat out a Trickster clone, holding up a dead Trainwreck, and ordered him, "Use your power on this corpse and Eidolon!"

Longinus turned on his Shard Sight to look at Centurion, casting lasers at him simultaneously.

Centurion was too far away to read, but he intercepted the lasers by creating a round construct shield, flickering it for only half a second, before he turned it sideways and - instead of dismissing it - transformed it to have a sharp edge. He moved his hand, and the disk was hurled at Legend at a high enough speed to decapitate a human. Legend turned into a glowing blue version of himself, and transferred back, leaving behind a trail, then moving around and returning to combat with a wide blast of energy. Centurion dialed up his environmental shield to eleven, absorbing the attack with an intake of air, as if smelling a freshly-picked flower.

They began to fight one another, while Eidolon quickly cycled through Blaster powers, using one, dropping it, and then another. He released a crackling blast of gray particles, then something that wasn't quite lightning and wasn't quite fire, and then lobbed a ball of solid-looking plasma, glowing bright enough that it washed almost the entire street in light.

"Bad news!" Exalt declared over the armbands. "Slash and Siberian caught the Butcher again. He's deliberating killing her to take the powers for himself!"

"Stop hi-" Eidolon didn't get a chance to finish, when a construct anvil slammed into him and sent him to the ground, spreading cracks through the tarmac, before it transformed into chains that bound him. Eidolon focused his powers, flickering in and out of existence like a camera shutter before he fluttered out of the chains and quickly rocketed away from them before they could catch his ankles.

"You're rather pathetic for some guys calling themselves the great-" Centurion's body flipped into a dark mist, as Alexandria went through him at supersonic speed, fast enough to crack and rattle windows and force Longinus to close his eyes from the wind pressing into his eyes, "-Triumvirate. I bet Hero would be really proud of you right now."

Longinus shot a volley of lasers, constructs blades and objects at Centurion in a chaotic pattern, virtually unavoidable.

Centurion extended his environmental shield, forming two-layered hulking armor on top of himself, almost like a small mech. He raised a hand, and created several layers of walls between himself and the constructs. There was a detonation, blinding and louder than gunshots, causing the wind to rattle Longinus' body even from this far away. The moment the 'dust' settled, Centurion's walls were destroyed, and his armor was severely damaged, but he was standing - or rather, hovering.

Almost dismissively, he flicked his wrist, gathering up a volleyball-sized orb of silver-black swirling energies. He threw it at Longinus. It trailed behind a long, milky stream of white fire and seemed to move at a curving trajectory, only slightly faster than an arrow fired from a bow.

Longinus dodged to the side of where the orb would impact, but the moment he did, it detonated remotely, five paces to his right. The explosion made his world spin, and his ears ring, sending him through a wall and nearly shattering his spine, and definitely breaking several of his bones. The vague sensations of overwhelming pain scattered on his body would've been unrecognizable two months ago, but he'd already felt them so often that they were becoming familiar.

Seconds later, his regeneration power returned enough vitality to him to begin picking himself up from the rubble. His bones were still fractured and would be in an unusable state for at least an hour, but he could pick himself up and walk using telekinesis. It was excruciating to take his first step forward, painful to follow it up, and then highly uncomfortable with each following step. Everything inside of him was red-hot; his skin under the costume was sweaty, releasing clouds of steam as if he'd just left the shower.

In the post-explosion shock, a confused, stray thought went through Longinus' mind. An unfinished charge is an unrestricted source of power. Putting one into one of his offensive powers would give him an enormous power boost, at the cost of control. The risk was too high.

Longinus hovered out of the hole he had made entering the abandoned basement and assessed the situation.

Eidolon was standing on the ground, almost absent. Centurion paid only tertiary attention to him, glancing in his direction every few seconds - seemingly to keep up the stupor effect - while he used a reinforced baseball bat construct to send Alexandria across the street, and then an orb similar to what he used on Longinus to keep Legend at bay. It exploded halfway between them, scattering the light in Legend's lasers, like a point-defense missile. The remnants of the lasers hit Centurion's environmental shield, mostly refueling him than doing any actual damage. He sent more of these balls into the air, and they stopped moving halfway across like a hovering minefield, forcing Legend to change positions, as Longinus deployed more.

Longinus extended his own stupor-inducing effect on Centurion's mind.

"Tough luck, buddy," Centurion said, across the battlefield, without a target. It was only moments later that, as a chill ran down Longinus' back, he realized Centurion was talking to him. "Jack Slash gave me access to the remaining vials. One of them had anti-Master properties."

Longinus kept his attention on Centurion, to see if he'd do anything. Deep down, though, he moved a sliver of his awareness to that distant thing he had seen in his powerscape.

There, he saw a second, distinct fountain, churning out strands as it assembled charges together. There was a single one, free-floating around it, and a collection of powers, including three that Longinus didn't have.

One of them was some kind of muscle and skeleton-boosting power, strong enough by itself that it'd make anyone using it a Brute 4 or 5. Another was a Tinker power with a very high focus on suits of power armor and power armor accessories, and the last one was a Mover power that allowed the user to teleport to anywhere within sight, within a kilometer, so long as they stood still for at least several seconds - anywhere from three to seven, depending on a number of contextual properties, like the number of enemies near the area of departure and arrival.

Longinus reached out to pull the Mover power into his awareness. He felt a debilitating shock, but the power budged in his fountain's direction.

Outside of the mindscape, Centurion reacted in shock. He immediately blasted Legend with several, curving, furious lasers, then sent balls of white-black energy to distract him. With that, Centurion wheeled around to face Longinus and raised his hand, charging up nebulous hard-light energy into his palm as he moved to land, presumably to exercise his telekinesis and charge up the shot quicker.

Longinus kept pulling on the Mover power but flew out of sight to take cover.

"Two can play that game, asshole," Centurion barked, and Longinus felt and heard five, distinct explosions behind and around him, flinging him down the hallway. His broken bones cried out in pain, his flesh cried red blood as the shattered ribs caused internal bleeding. He lied down, his ears ringing for several seconds.

In that moment, his entire awareness flashed red, and he felt his bones suddenly sink down in excruciating pain. In his mindscape, some kind of force began to cut away the filaments of his phoenix-themed healing power, separating the power into unstable ribbons that deactivated once detached from the central charge. There was a sense of spite to the metaphysical attack.

Longinus stopped pulling on the Mover power in a jolt of panic. His two remaining charges budged, and Centurion managed to perform the act of superpowered theft on just one of them before their extended connection or whatever else allowed Longinus to steal from him was cut.

Longinus popped out of cover, only to be blasted in the chest by a lashing energy whip of white-black force, tossing him into the wall. Centurion crossed the distance between them in a flash, driving the length of his forearm into Longinus' neck. He pinned him to the wall, holding him there.

Longinus felt the excruciating pain of fire in his bone marrow, and his cracked bones singing in agony as he was forced to move.

"You're going to pay for everything you've put me through," Centurion said, with a sadistic, animalistic tincture to it. "I'm the real you. You're some loser, constantly keeping me at bay, preventing me from acting. Do you know how long I've spent, forced to cringe as I watched every single one of your actions ruining our collective life? Too long. This ends today, right now." He raised a fist, wreathed in a black-white roiling aura.

Longinus extended his environmental shield in a sluggish movement. Five strands of golden light came out of the sides of body, circling around them both, and then coming back as golden baselards, trying to aim for the back of Centurion's head. Before they could impact, Centurion transformed into a black wisp and his power forcefully threw him into the opposite wall to defend him.

With a cry of annoyance, Centurion's environmental shield dimmed as he charged up everything in it into a massive wrist-mounted dagger of energy and construct armor on his body. The armor was different from the stuff that Longinus produced - he could see the hints of actual superpowered servos underneath. Using his Tinker power to draw on the inspiration for the constructs - tinkering with only them.

Longinus felt the snippet of an idea in his head. A plate in the brain, to connect with technology… no, he needed to connect with another brain, but the idea was impossible to reconcile with the power's specialty. It was maybe possible, but would require at least hours of research. He could try to do it, but it risked harm and subpar results.

And he was too stunned, the world turning dizzy and hot, as the adrenaline surged through his broken and shattered limbs which did not stop being shattered because Centurion's incursion into Longinus' powerscape ruined his healing power. Longinus threw one charge into one of his broken healing powers with the intent to repair it. Some of the charges extended filaments, but others refused to budge, flashing yellow, orange, and red, or shades in between.

Centurion moved forward, and stabbed the dagger into Longinus's stomach, keeping it there for several seconds, as Longinus tensed up, flexing every muscle in his body in an attempt to keep himself from slumping, kneeling, or collapsing the moment Centurion released. Longinus felt an empty void in his gut. The air of the outside world filled out his stomach with veins of ice, before Centurion withdrew his wrist, and held Longinus in place for several, long, cold seconds. He was savoring the moment, tasting it like a fine wine.

Longinus garnered the last bits of energy all in one piercing blast that was meant to burn his head off. He shot it from his chest, aimed at Centurion's head.

Centurion simply turned into a wisp, letting it pass through, and promptly shook his head as the blast tore away the wall behind him, shattering it and raining down rubble onto the street. "Too weak. Too stupid. You never consider the consequences of your actions, of your tactics. Me, though? I'm Centurion. I'm a military commander. It's supposed to come naturally. You picked the wrong name for yourself, but it fits me just right."

Centurion raised his hand, to swing down again and behead Longinus, but a flash of green and blue interrupted him. Defiant fired a blast of green willpower into the clone's hand, hard enough to make the attack veer off, while Legend used a fat laser to slam him away from Longinus proper.

Centurion tumbled down the street and stood up just as quickly, sliding on his heels until he came to a stop on the far sidewalk. He floated up, then sent an explosive orb their way as a goodbye gift, before he looked away at some distant place not visible from the interior of the building. Defiant used a construct to stop the explosive orb, then watched Centurion warily. In three seconds, he disappeared in a flash of light.

"Are you alright?" Defiant asked, moving up to hold Longinus in place. His voice was blurred out, as if speaking three times, each voice dilated - one higher-pitched, one normal, and one lower-pitched. The cyborg augmentations, probably.

Longinus fell over in Defiant's arms, bleeding from his stomach. He tried to work up the courage and drive to answer but found that he was too tired to even slide his tongue or part his lips. Defiant's light washed over the wounds, and Longinus felt the green light connecting up his individual arteries and halting most of the bleeding. Legend wrapped Longinus' left arm over the back of his neck, while Defiant did the same to the other arm. They led him out of the building like that, silent.

One of the armbands spoke, echoing, "Confirmation that Jack Slash claimed the Butcher's powers. The Nine is leaving the city as we speak, heading southbound."

Who was Jack Slash and Butcher? The blood loss made it hard to recall. He remembered images of a man with a black goatee, smiling at him with a knife. His second mother's corpse, collapsed. Or was it his girlfriend? He remembered a woman in red armor, and teeth and bones. She used a bow; a very large bow.

He couldn't remember them exactly, besides the fact that all of his sentiments about them were negative. Longinus shook his head on an uncontrolled instinct. The movement was exaggerated, as a result, as if he were drunk, causing his entire head and body to sway into Defiant's armor. He felt blood running up his throat alongside vomit. He could try to force it down or pull off his helmet and puke in the middle of the street, in front of Legend and Defiant.

With a mild sense of feedback, he used telekinesis to push the helmet off of his head. It clattered to the ground to the left of Legend's feet, and the man seemed to stiffen in surprise. Longinus didn't say anything to either of the men, puking out a disgusting mixture of food and what looked like coffee grounds, with red blotches. Tears and snot went down his face, and he breathed for the whole amount of eight seconds, before throwing up again, feeling the disgusting stench in his nose and mouth, resting on his tongue, on the top of his throat. Slick, oily, and nasty. He began to cry and whimper, both from the vomit, but also from the pain.

"You're okay," Legend's voice cajoled him. "You're going to be fine."

"I should be dead," Longinus answered over his brokenhearted cries, not in disbelief at being alive, but in sincere disappointment.

"That's not right," Defiant answered him, trying to inject a sense of inspiration into his tone. Trying to inspire him. "You're here with us, son. Just hold on a little bit longer. A healer is on the way. Just half a minute more."

He felt some cold, empty, depleted blob planting itself in his gut, extending roots throughout his nervous system. Or maybe his arteries. It was hard to tell, but the feeling was as cold as the arctic wind. He shuddered. Was this what death felt like? Would he be gone in several seconds? The thought was surprisingly warm, comforting.

Gabriel shook his head instinctively, exaggerated again. He was weeping quietly as red tears – tears that streamed through the blood on his face – went down his cheeks.

Realizing just how strange it would be, if he woke up tomorrow in his bed having never come to Earth Bet. Or if he woke up in the bed in Tattletale's base, or in the Wards HQ, and then recalled tonight. The fight in Coil's base, followed by the Echidna massacre - being held up by the leader of the Protectorate, and his former boss-turned-traitor-turned-friend.

Within moments, a group of capes made their way over the corner, then stopped upon seeing a helmetless Longinus. A vast majority of them politely turned away and went back the way they came - Longinus stifled a 'hah' - but a few of them kept walking. Someone in white armor, someone in a black outfit, someone in a black-white outfit, and someone with large monsters held by chains.

Gabriel looked at them, squinting to recognize them. The blurry triple images crystallized and overlaid to form something semi-coherent. Weaver, Grue, Regent, and Bitch, with several of her dogs, progressively decreasing in size. Gabriel's gaze was stuck on Taylor, trying to trace the lines of her white costume against the dark gray and black background of the city streets, finding it easy enough as a task. He tried to find the lenses of her mask, while he assembled the jumbled mess of thoughts in his mind to try to come up with something to say.

"Crap, the dork got beaten really bad," someone's easygoing voice asserted. Regent. How nice for once to hear his stupid voice. "Hey, you with us, pal?"

"Leave him alone, Regent," Grue said, elbowing Regent lightly in the side of the stomach.

Gabriel's choked up voice left his throat, coming out raspy and breathy. "I'm s-sorry," he muttered.

"No reason to be sorry for," Regent answered, instead of anyone else. "This was actually kind of a victory. You're not going to believe this, but as far as Endbringer attacks and Slaughterhouse Nine purges go? The casualties on both the cape and civilian fronts were mega-low. Like, seriously. We beat some records here today, guys."

"Shut up," Bitch said, with a gruff annoyance to her voice.

Gabriel laughed out loud, and blood came out of both his nose and mouth as he did so. And that didn't stop him from laughing. A laughter of release, more than anything else.

"Aaand like that, he's gone insane," Regent quipped. He looked around with a 'what-can-you-do' kind of shrug. "Well, it was nice knowing you guys."

"Fuck off," Gabriel coughed and barked at the same time, through his laughter, holding onto both Defiant and Legend and sagging down. They steadied him momentarily when he shifted closer to the ground and lost the force to stand on his own independently. Defiant looked at him in what appeared to be concern, for a moment.

"Consider leaving him in peace, Regent," Defiant came in Gabriel's defense. "It's in very poor manners to joke about something like this. It could be considered a violation of the truce."

"You're one to talk," Grue answered, folding his arms in front of his chest.

"I have no idea what you mean by that," Defiant simply answered, denying the unspoken allegations.

Gabriel turned his gaze to Legend. An exasperated, but still smiling expression was on his face. "Have I earned my… my pardon… yet?"

Legend's face was already going blurry, the edges of Gabriel's vision turning black and spinning around with the darkness. He couldn't hear the blotched-out response from the hero, but he did say something in reply. Gabriel blinked, managing to lighten his vision just enough to notice that Legend's expression had gone soft. He wanted to smile back, but found that his mouth couldn't move, beyond his lower lip twitching when he tried to inject any kind of motion into it.

His face went to the right, to look at Defiant. He didn't hear any sound, but he was definitely talking to the Undersiders and Weaver. Saying something to them - chiding them?

The blurriness of the images melded together in his head. The darkness expanded to claim his vision, the sensations, the frosty numbness in his stomach that he'd nearly forgotten about until now intensified with a very sudden, debilitating pulse of icy-cold. He felt his stomach heave one last time.

And then, everything went dark.

Last edited: Dec 21, 2019

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Birdsie

Dec 11, 2019

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Threadmarks Mens Rea 12.x (Interlude: Haunt)

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Birdsie

Birdsie

Sharp Talons Cleave The Worthy

Dec 11, 2019

#4,422

November 1st, 2010

For minutes, he'd been sitting on the curb of the house.

It was a very low rise from the ground, meaning his knees were almost level with his chin. The cold concrete floor was uncomfortable, pressing against his butt. He'd put his hands on his thighs, with no other place to rest them - it made him look somewhat nervous or shocked, with his hood up, his eyes glazed, but he wasn't. He'd never been calmer, more level in his life. He'd never felt this peaceful, with this amount of awareness that his heart was compressing and loosening repeatedly, at a constant 80 BPM, allowing slightly over five liters of blood to flow through his system.

There was nothing else to accompany him, besides the lamp on the porch lighting some of the space ahead of him, casting a long shadow that melded with the darkness, and the sound of crickets stridulating in the tall grasses and bushes around the estate.

"Felix Wilson?" The voice broke him out of his silence, as a second shadow joined his own.

Felix looked up at the police officer. A man in the mid-thirties, white; a beat cop, as salty as they come. He was bald, with a thick orange mustache that joined with a scruffy beard. He had a certain, almost casually bold characteristic to him. He looked confident in himself, like a man built from steel, whose hardiness wouldn't unravel for twice the length of his lifespan. The kind of guy that you could drug, tie-up, kidnap, and then threaten - and he still wouldn't beg for mercy. White motes hovered around his head, clearly visible in the bright light; small bugs or dust from the ceiling.

"Yes," Felix answered, nodding, and not mentioning any of his internal remarks. It just wouldn't do. "That's me."

The police officer frowned at that, perturbed by the unnatural calmness. "Can you repeat what happened here? The coroner and backup are on their way, and my partner and me are in a bit of a doozy."

Felix smiled at the man, simple and plain. He remembered, rather strikingly, one time that he and his two friends had been walking through town.

They had three, maybe four beers in the span of an hour in a private spot of theirs, before a pair of police officers approached them. The trio made a mistake, trying to turn around and go back, only to be asked by one of the officers to come to them. He remembered the distinct fear, anxiety, that his life could be ruined by a single paper that he felt during that conversation. He got away with a warning, while one of his friends got a fine, but it was really scary,

Now? Sitting down, in front of this hardened veteran of justice and law, with almost a dozen corpses in the house behind him? He felt nothing.

No fear, no fleeting anticipation or anxiety that he'd go to brew in a prison full of criminals. No awe, even. Not a gram or iota of fear-derived respect for the officer. Maybe a small glimmer of remorse, at the idea he could've handled his reaction better, but that's where it cut away. He knew he should have been afraid, and knew how a scared person would act, but he couldn't force himself to breathe, shudder, and constantly jump at every moving shadow.

"Sure," Felix said, turning to look forward as he retold the story.

The Day Before...

October 31st, 2010

"That movie sucked," Jolyne quipped, taking a drag of her cigarette.

"Yeah, I thought it was kind of cheap. I mean, the special effects looked ten years old. The acting was borderline 'okay,' in my book, but the goshdarn plot, man. They butchered it," Oscar answered, looking at her as he related his experiences. He and Jolyne were the pseudo-intellectuals in the group. Not as much smart people, as more interested in discussing the technical details of stuff. Felix would've guessed they were introverts, were it not for them coming along to party so often with the rest of the group.

"What did you think, Alan?" Jolyne turned to face the boy. He was the cool guy of the group, head shaved, wearing a leather jacket and black skinny jeans, with matching sneakers. Felix wasn't sure if he dressed in all-black for the occasion, or if it was a part of his get-up; he didn't really talk or see Alan as much as the rest of the group.

"It was good enough." Jolyne looked away with a blank face, clearly trying to keep her expression devoid of getting her opinion rejected. Felix snorted, drawing Oscar and Alan's attention, as the group proceeded. "What? You think otherwise?"

Felix shrugged. He'd been dealing with hallucinations for a large amount of his life, alongside minor schizophrenia-related delusions. The hallucinations themselves were mostly visual; brief flashes of shadowy figures, things undulating and looking different as he walked. He'd been taking medication for a long time, but even with it, the hallucinations still happened. Plot, acting, or bad effects didn't matter - his experiences left him with seeing a life-like quality to the movie. A poor horror film about vampires to the others, but something very close to being real to him.

"It was fine," he hedged, looking around for confirmation, but no one was looking back at him.

"You guys wanna go prank someone, or something?" Steven asked, looking up briefly from his phone. Seeing the others looking at him inquisitively, he pocketed his phone and explained, "Lots of houses around here, and trick or treaters. We could go have some fun, right? Stupid kids would have the time of their life, in a way."

"Nah," Alan waved him off. "We have brewskies to take care of, first."

"Alright. Just putting that out there, into the proverbial pot," Steven said.

Alan smiled at that. "We have plenty of pot to take care of, too."

Everyone laughed, while Felix just looked around nervously, scanning the streets around them. There were a couple of kids in costumes walking on the opposite sidewalk. He thought he noticed some weird shadows bending behind a lamp-post, but it was just a trick of the light. It was Halloween night; probably lots of cops were going to go around. Was talking about this in the middle of the street really safe? He shook the thought off, smiling to himself.

"Hey, Felix. You're being kind of quiet. You doing alright?" Matthew's voice broke him out of the reverie and contemplation.

"Y-yeah, totally," he answered, too fast and suspicious about it. Alan gave him the gimlet-eye, while the rest was content to smirk or ignore him.

"New idea," Steven said, holding up a Google map image on his phone and showing it off to the group. Everyone stopped to take a better look, as he pointed at a single, very lonely house. "See this? It's a haunted house. Legit, abandoned mansion at the edge of town, near the creepy woods. Right by Salem, too. Perfect for the night, don't you think?"

Jolyne snorted. "What, you wanna break in there? Isn't that a little too cliché?"

"I like it," Alan said, taking out his own phone. "How far away?"

"Fifteen to twenty minutes on foot, from here," Steven said, shrugging at him with a little smirk. He pocketed the phone, gesturing with pride at his idea, trying to blow its merits up as much as he could. "If we haul ass, maybe even less. We can take a shortcut through the woods to save ourselves another minute or two. It's nearby, it's isolated, it's perfect."

Alan nodded, looking down at the screen, and beginning to lead the way. "Let's go then. Perfect, like you say."

Some of the group began to cheer, patting the two boys on the back, or on the shoulders. A jovial mood injected the atmosphere as they began to march forward with a slightly hurried amble, Only Felix lingered behind, feeling some cold in his feet at the idea, and lingering behind to keep looking at the shadows as the rest of the group proceeded.

By the time he reached this part of the explanation, another squad car pulled over a dozen meters away from the house. Within moments, a pair of cops joined up with the one that was taking Felix's statement, greeting 'Officer Jeffrey' on their way inside, and informing him the CSI guys would arrive in maybe five minutes from now.

"Right. So that's where the idea to come here was from," Officer Jeffrey said, gesturing a little with his pen. "You didn't raise any objections, despite your... uh... medical condition?"

"I did," Felix clarified, with a wave of the hand, looking down at the ground with tightened lips. His hands clenched a little, in anger that he kept at simmering temperature, carefully concealing all traces of turmoil. "Half-hearted mumblings - they either didn't hear me, or didn't care too much. Possibly half-half, depending on the member of the group. I'm near-certain Steven would ignore it."

With a sense of apprehension, the man nodded. He didn't really seem to believe the story, but couldn't imagine that Felix did it all on his own - the corpses inside the building were ruined in too-varied a way, with too much contrast and disparity. Felix himself couldn't take a group of people, or plan ahead of time to do something like this. If Officer Jeffrey had any suspects, it was probably 'a group did it, maybe the Teeth, maybe should hand this to the PRT.'

"What happened then?" the officer broke the silence that gradually crept in, following Felix's explanation.

"Right." Felix nodded to himself, remembering that he needed to tell the full story. "Next..."

"Wooo! Party! Party, party, party!" Steven raised a dark brown flask high into the air, almost scraping the ancient chandelier as he jumped up and down to the tasteless, showy disco song in the background. His other hand was wrapped around Jolyne's waist, as he reached in to kiss her on the lips; it was a full and passionate embrace, with no holding back. Unrestrained, drunk and wild.

Some of Felix's other friends ran through a hallway, trailing darkness behind them in his vision.

He'd had three beers so far, over the course of maybe an hour or two, and Alan gave him some draws from a weed pipe. To be honest, Felix wasn't feeling so well - he was coming high hard, and not in a good way. The combination of alcohol and weed brewing in his gut seemed to intensify every thought by a magnitude of three. It made the lines of light and shadow much sharper, and gave definition to objects that normal vision didn't have. Was it affecting his medication? His condition wasn't too serious, even without medication, but it did result in some lapses of judgment, in seeing a thing or two that weren't really there.

"You've been awfully quiet," Oscar pointed out, raising a beer in Felix's direction before taking a sip. He'd remarked earlier that the beers tasted like piss, but was downing his sixth one now, if Felix was counting right.

"Yeah." Felix nodded. "Kind of off-put, I guess."

"By what?" The question came unbidden from another side of the room, where Alan stood with a rag, polishing the weed pipe and likely preparing to stuff more of the cannabis into it. He was eyeing them both with curiosity, as he leaned back against the wall and pulled out a small bag of weed, finely diced into small, green-brown clumps.

Felix tried to suppress the feeling of being put on the spot, and the almost tangible sensation of Alan's shadow reaching out for him. He knew it was irrational, but he felt almost like the shadow was purposefully aiming to hurt him. "I don't know," he admitted, lying through his teeth - he did know. "The vibe is good, so's the music. The beer." He raised the half-empty bottle in his grip, shaking it a little.

Alan nodded, and shrugged. Not exactly helpless, as much as indifferent to the issue. After several moments of relative silence, except the music and party noises, he looked up with a knowing look, and remarked, "I know what will make you feel better. Can you get up and run to the kitchen real quick? I think I left my bong there. If you can grab it real quick, we can pull some. Hm?"

There was a sinking feeling Felix's gut. He didn't remember Alan bringing a bong, and didn't really recall anything that could be used to carry one anyhow, with the backpacks already full of bottles and other minor weed accessories - but he might have been wrong.

He stood up, nodding wordlessly, as he walked past Alan and made a steady way through the entryway, across the hallway from it, and to where he remembered the kitchen was. The light was off in the entire house, so he had to enable his flashlight to see anything on the way there.

The house was eerie, which was probably why Steven decided to pick it. Old, rotting planks in the floor, with a green-yellow striped wallpaper that looked like it had been put there no later than the 1920's. The ancient, dusty chandeliers and wall-lamps covered in cobwebs, some of them almost as thick as unevenly-spread cotton candy.

Within moments, Felix reached the kitchen, walking through and scanning the outer countertops with his flashlight, but didn't see anything. "Hey, Alan! Where did you leave it!?" he yelled the question.

"On the counter to the left of the entrance!" came back the reply, vastly muffled by the music, which was at least three or four times as loud, sending minute vibrations through the antiquated wooden building. Small, pulsing 'wub-wub-wubs' that Felix could faintly pick up on through his shoes.

He looked around a little bit, finding nothing. He tried some of the drawers, in case that someone came by earlier and hid it or misplaced it, but he couldn't find a bong anywhere. He'd have probably recognized it by color pattern alone - maybe Felix wasn't much of an extrovert, but he'd been invited to take weed enough times to know what pastel yellow-red-green-purple looked like. And then, the music suddenly stopped, cutting out with a series of bumps and grunts.

Felix wheeled around, flashlight illuminating the kitchen entrance. A glance at his phone's battery told him he had twenty-eight percent left.

"Guys?!" The sound seemed to echo through the wood and stone, with no answer to it, except the dead cold and tone of the estate.

Thoughts, dark and gruesome started to cross his mind. Most idiotic people in this situation would feel a temptation to investigate the sudden interruption of a dozen people partying in an abandoned house. But Felix wanted to get out of the house, feeling a sudden pull to the exit.

He gingerly looked at the corner, down the hallway, and towards the entryway, shining his flashlight to get a glimpse. He saw shadows waiting for him in the edges of the light, before they screeched inaudibly and blinked away into some kind of deeper realm he couldn't comprehend.

Felix shuddered, knowing and trying to convince himself this was his imagination playing tricks on him. Despite that, a growing part of him was convinced this place really was haunted, and they'd upset something great and terrible. He felt a looming presence, pressing down on him with vicious glee. He was alone in a house of spirits, his friends probably taken by the shadows - they'd play with him, and then take him too.

He shook his head. Just the imagination. Just the sickness, the hallucinations. With an ice-cold feeling in his throat and gut, he began a steady, quiet walk across the hallway to the entryway. He was doubly careful to keep his feet on the carpet, and put his pressure in gradients, so the floor wouldn't squeak as much. Giving away his position in a situation like this would be the worst thing he could do.

Or maybe he should have bolted, started running? If he did so right now, he had good chances of rushing outside in five seconds, or less. Could the things react in that much time?

He felt his breathing running down the length of his shirt, fluttering across his chest. Then someone grasped his shoulder, making him jump, scream and run. The moment he crossed the corner, he saw two black demons standing near the entrance in the darkness, smiling at him with white, flashing teeth and red eyes with no pupils or irises.

He screamed again, higher-pitched, and changed direction.

Officer Jeffrey and his partner were looking down at Felix with some odd mixture of concern, apprehension, and a low degree of suspicion. The motes from the ceiling, or the small bugs - whichever you chose to believe was true - that floated around them were much more animated now, as if smelling their emotions and feasting on them.

Felix himself was unperturbed as he told the story. "I went down the other way, to the left," he said, in a perfectly blank tone. "And up the stairs. I thought I could escape through one of the windows. Go into the bedroom, open it up, jump on the porch rooftop, and then down to freedom from up there. I was wrong. They were waiting for me at the top of the stairs, trying to cut me off."

"This... it was all a part of your condition, right? Where were your friends?" Officer Jeffrey asked. Felix had to suppress a smirk when he noticed that his right hand was resting on his belt, near the handgun. His partner was writing now, instead, standing a little off to the side and constantly watching every one of Felix's movements in silence.

"I was getting to that," Felix explained, putting a huff of quiet irritation in his tone, to let them know he wanted to finish the story.

Felix's eyes widened as he saw the black demon on the other side of the hallway, straight from the stairs. Another one stood on the opposite side, and the three from downstairs were walking in his direction slowly. He was being trapped in, from all sides - they'd approach him and take him as well.

He was so afraid. Shadows jumped and swirled around him like a whirlwind of black dust motes, trying to snuff out any given bit of the warmth in his body. They were doing a damn good job of it, too. He felt nothing except coldness in his arms and shoulders, twice as intense as the mark on his shoulder where the demon had gripped him with its slimy tentacled hand, somehow outfitted with sharp nails. Or was he hallucinating?

Fuck, this had to be hallucinations. They had to be.

The beer he didn't finish came back to the forefront of his mind, as he felt the space below his stomach filling up with an uncomfortable, nagging pressure.

Please, no... I don't want to be taken after pissing my pants... no, please... just that bit of dignity... leave me that much.

He shook his head, looking at the demons with a horrified expression. They were approaching him, one step every few seconds, like a pack of wolves calmly proceeding inwards to chomp down on their prey, then feast. They were going to cut him into ribbons, boil him, and consume him.

In that moment, one of the demons walked within five paces, and he saw Alan's face on it, grinning and laughing at him. He pointed down, and Felix noticed he'd voided his bowels, and peed himself. There was a black, soggy stain on his pants, wet against the skin of his groin. He didn't even notice, because of how scared he was.

It was them, all along? His friends were the demons? They got to know him and were going to do this from the very beginning; betraying him and taking him? Why? He was such an idiot. He was still scared of them, scared of the lashing imps in the darkness, of the motes of white death around him, of the blurry poltergeists in his vision. Everything compounded together in his head, promising, with certainty, that he'd be taken in less time than he could take another breath.

He felt the coldness in his arms spreading up to his head, then swallowing up his brain and replacing the last bit of warm-providing fear with itself. Space cracked into bits, the motes crashing through, as he saw something vast and big, and forgot about it almost immediately afterward.

When the process was finished, Felix was on his knees, crying into them in a fetal position, with his friends laughing and recording him with their phones, the flashlights turned up and blinding him.

He looked up anyway, no longer afraid. A different, colder, baser emotion took the fear's place. Anger, irritation. Some sadness, but mostly violent passion at their betrayal.

The motes were still there; tiny slinking shadows, hiding around the different people and keeping unnaturally close to them. He looked at Alan, and almost immediately understood the nature of what he saw inside: the fear of losing control, the fear of being abandoned. Alan wanted to be the coolest guy in the group, and to lose those things was the thing he feared most.

Felix looked at the others and felt his lips curving upwards with each person, even as they kept laughing at him.

They wouldn't be laughing in the time it took them to draw one more breath.

Felix glanced at Alan, and instinctively drew on the motes surrounding him, drawing them into himself. He drew some from Steven and Jolyne; the fear of being separated. A mote from Oscar provided an ambient but suppressed and weak anxiety around sharp objects, mostly needles, and knives.

There was a pop, and the game was afoot.

"So you just... fainted, the moment you, uhm, peed yourself? I'm sorry. Is that normal?" Officer Jeffrey nodded, releasing his hold of the gun. He was looking noticeably less hardened than when the conversation started, the motes around him sparked into life, thrumming with activity. Felix glanced at the motes, and did his best to remember their contents.

"Hey, Jeff, Al, you two might want to see this." Another officer walked out of the entryway, holding a bloodstained phone with a cute, pink casing. The pair walked up to him, to check out the phone.

Felix sighed, standing up and dusting off his knees. The wetness on his crotch dried off some time ago, with a foul scent of ammonia; his posterior smelled even worse, but he'd checked, and it wasn't that bad on that side. He'd have to change his pants and underwear the moment he went home, but he was good for now. He turned around and looked at the cops, all three of them rather invested in watching a recording.

In the video, even from a distance, Felix heard Jolyne's voice. Sobbing, crying, and begging quietly. A repetitive plea, like a prayer.

He remembered it. She decided to run away from him, as far as she could, to the far end of the house. She walked into one of the bedrooms, and hid in the antique closet, hoping that he wouldn't find her. Unluckily, he made sure to check every room twice, while cooing for them to come out. Not that he needed to - the scent of their fear was strong enough that the motes led him straight to them.

Each person in the building died, less than half an hour ago. Each and every one of them succumbed to an end that Felix handcrafted to put them in their own, little, scary definition of hell, right before he finished them. He savored each death, in their own special ways. Both by the virtue of getting to take revenge, and also by the way that he could make the coldness go away by tasting their own fears. A Halloween buffet of death and horrors - he almost laughed at the thought.

In the recording, Jolyne kept crying to herself, begging for him to go away the moment she heard the heavy footsteps. Seconds later, Felix looked up expectantly, counting down mentally. In exactly three seconds - as he predicted - the closet door opened with a creak, and Jolyne let out a high-pitched scream, begging, crying, screaming, and then falling over to the ground. There was a clatter as the phone fell to her side, and then a cute gurgling sound from her slit throat. He remembered how her eyes slid up to the back of her skull in the last second before her body stopped twitching.

The police officers looked up at him, eyes wide as dinner plates. Before any of the three could reach for a handgun, Felix swooped up their motes with a pair of metaphorical arms, consumed them, and turned.

Alan shivered at the ground, using both hands to shield his face from blows, as Felix approached him at a calm pace.

"It's ironic," Felix said, his voice reverberating in the dark void he'd placed Alan into. There was no one around with them, no one to bail Alan out, or admire him. He was on his own, every facade of being cool torn away to reveal the loser that really lived deep down within him. "You know? You said it'd make me feel better. It really did."

Alan shook his head, without speaking. Felix decided to continue, "I read all about these capes on the internet. Trigger Events. When an athlete runs so fast he suddenly gains superspeed, or a weight-lifter breaks his limits and learns to lift cars. Bullshit, all of it, as I just found out. Seems that the media is lying, huh?" He knelt in front of Alan, prompting a shriek and flinching, followed by a bout of panicked shuddering and agitated begging. Felix savored the sounds for five seconds, before speaking again, "I guess I'm like that, anyway."

When Alan didn't say anything any more, not even begging, Felix felt himself scoff without meaning to. "Alright, be that way. You were always a dick to me, Alan. I'll make sure to do this slowly."

"No, please, I-" With a single swipe, Alan's head was detached from his neck by a sharp-bladed tentacle attached to Felix's current form.

Felix slinked back into reality and released his hold of the form: a black, red-eyed shadow demon surrounded by wispy, translucent tentacles, with the ability to form pocket dimensions and induce a fleeing response in people's minds - Felix had an innate awareness of the bodies' functions and an improved awareness of what different bodies could offer him.

He had enough fuel to go for at least thrice as long as he'd been in that body, but it wasn't necessary. He stalked the motes that held the scent of Steven's fear of death, abandonment, and his own existence being meaningless, and began to put together another body from the breadcrumbs.

After his two co-workers experienced the same, Officer Jeffrey fell to the ground, with no visible wound, but eyes widened and glazed. A look of fright was sketched on his face; cheeks, lips, and eyebrows frozen in cold, silent terror forevermore. Felix changed his body back, feeling a pang of regret at the needless deaths of the police officers.

He began to walk away from the scene, as he thought to himself on what to do next.

One of the cops inside the building had no doubt alerted the PRT already. It seemed like Felix had a very narrow window of opportunity to go back home really quickly, grab some pants, money, and then high-tail it. He wasn't afraid of prison, but that didn't mean he was comfortable with it.

June 11th, 2011

Haunt was dropped outside of Myrddin's pocket dimension on the corner of the street away from Echidna. "Never get that close to her again," the hero warned, looking at him with a deep frown. Haunt looked at him, and smiled. The fear of being cloned, the fear of Haunt being cloned, the fear of Haunt himself. The man in front of him was a buffer of fears and insecurities, which only spoke volumes about his courage and ability to fight them down.

He pulled the motes of 'fear of Haunt himself' closer, and took a closer look at them. Nothing definite, and not enough to form concrete traits. He could use it as flavoring, so he took them, and saw Myrddin shuddering.

Before the hero could warn him or complain, Haunt nodded and said, "Okay," before striding past him.

A fringe fear of change was pulled in from Defiant nearby; the fear of becoming a monster, of failing in his duties as a hero. They could add some intensity to the form, but he needed something more... more... He glanced at a distant Miss Militia clone, and emotionlessly jogged in her direction. He slid down on the ground to avoid a bullet, then pulled on her nagging fear at the idea of being shot in the back.

He felt the fears as they crystallized in his head, and felt each one, enjoying their particular fragrances like a well-blended cocktail.

He used what he'd gathered up so far to transform, and his form undulated outwards. A three-dimensional cloud of shadow with red eyes, that could become two-dimensional to travel faster, with a very large speed boost when traveling behind other people. The fear of Haunt and becoming a monster allowed him to enter people's lungs and essentially possess them, though lacking the fine control of a majority of Master powers.

Haunt slid as a translucent, untouchable cloud alongside the ground, then became a fluid gas behind the Miss Militia. He went up, ensnared her, and went in through her nostrils. Within moments, he was looking at the world through her eyes. She put up a very good resistance, giving him barebones control over her body, but he forced her to step forward sluggishly. The cloud of gas floating around him focused and became an assault rifle of some kind. He raised the weapon, aimed it down the road at Jack Slash, then let out an imprecise salvo. The body was cut in the neck not even two seconds later and died almost instantly, his control slipping away.

The fear of 'failing in one's duty' allowed him to keep steering her corpse, with the precision of his control halved in exchange. He raised the assault rifle again, and peppered a Bonesaw spider, destroying it. He focused, and managed to flicker the rifle into an automatic grenade launcher. Five of them hurtled through the sky and exploded, killing a bunch of clones, before the weapon blinked away into nonexistence.

Haunt left the body, and possessed a nearby Laserdream instead. He used the body to fly across the battlefield inconspicuously, stopping on a nearby rooftop. He watched as Eidolon, Centurion, Defiant, and several others struggled to contain the spider-like mass of Butchers.

With almost a sigh, Haunt set up a rig of lenses with Laserdream's power, some of them with multiple layers, to create narrower rays, but ones that could cut better.

He wasn't afraid of the Butcher entering his mind, and didn't really think it'd be too uncomfortable if that did happen. Good luck, driving a parahuman schizophrenic who's quite literally fearless insane.

The lasers lashed out, scything through the Butchers' bodies and making them drop, while they were occupied by the rest of the capes. Eidolon glanced up, noticed him and raised a hand. With a blast of a scythe, red outlined in black, the body's head was cut off and Haunt felt his control go from fifty to three in an instant, then blink down to two, one, and finally zero. Eidolon was already flying away to go after Echidna.

Dick.

Haunt left the body, then exited the Breaker state - he was running out of juice for it anyway - and used his armband. "I can confirm the Butchers are safely killable," he explained casually. "Either that, or my power has some unique interaction with them. Feel free to prove me wrong - I don't think there's a better choice, given the alternative."

A moment later, he looked up into the air and saw as Alexandria tumbled down the street, batted away by a Centurion whose armor was black outlined in silver-white. Haunt focused on the clone. Lots of minor vague insecurities, and a fear of abandonment that the clone hated so much he'd kicked it, stomped on it, and then spat acid on it to get rid of it. A vague, mostly ambient fear of the end of the world, Jack Slash, and Scion - Haunt was seeing some repeating patterns in people's fears tonight - but nothing useful.

He drew on Alexandria's indistinct fear of asphyxiation, then on the ambient fear of the end of the world from the Centurion, to see what he'd get. Some kind of salamander-looking monster, with black oily scales and red serpentine eyes, which casually spread a field of altered reality with itself, which convinced entropy to tip sideways over its own head - accidents, omens of bad luck, and things that a televangelist or a crazy hobo would see as portents of doom. The field came with a black smoke, nowhere as thick or weird as Grue's, but one that could cause an ordinary human to choke from inhaling even invisible amounts; it'd need large amounts to cause unconsciousness or death, though.

He snapped into the form with a jolt of exciting sensations - he could feel the fear he drew on as emotions in his mind - then leaped off the rooftop and rolled alongside the ground. As (bad) luck would have it, a suicidal cat he didn't notice decided to do the same and leaped right on the Centurion clone's face, scratching him.

Haunt took his chance, spitting the black dust at Centurion to give Alexandria an opening. She punched, but Centurion was already moving away as he coughed on the gas. Haunt focused on his fears again, and saw the motes were... too orderly. Abnormally orderly. There was some kind of bonanza going on.

Alexandria tried to punch again, and the aftermath of her blow sent out a shockwave of air that Haunt felt even from the sidewalk he stood on. Centurion tumbled for a moment, then extended his palm and created a large oval shape, black with faint white shimmers rippling through. He turned it sideways and sent it at her, at the speed of an artillery round. Alexandria took the blow and impacted the tarmac, rising from the ground and going after Centurion.

He smirked at her visibly, and teleported away as she went through the spot where he previously hovered.

With a bitter expression, Alexandria went down and looked at Haunt. She gave him a brief nod of thanks, and asked, "Do you have any ability to track him?"

Haunt opened his mouth to speak, but let out only a reptilian trill, deep and throaty, with a faint aftertaste of a snake. Alexandria frowned at him, and Haunt decided to shake his head exaggeratedly to show her what he meant. Alexandria thinned her mouth, then took to the air and used her armband to ask instead, clearly preparing to come down on the clone's ass.

Haunt instead, decided to play with his form for as long as he could.

He bounded across the battlefield, using clouds of smoke and events of ridiculously low likelihood to distract clones, which he then finished off by stomping on them, or chomping them to bits with razor-sharp teeth. He didn't know if real salamanders had teeth like this, but he wasn't complaining.

As Haunt went across the battlefield, with a kill-count of a single Cherish, one pseudo-Mannequin, a Burnscar, and a brief, unfair encounter with Purity, he ran out of juice and decided to hunker down and keep on the watch for good and useful fears.

He hid behind a display in a ruined shop, as the capes on the street fought each other. He left the moment the clones got distracted by Rime's ice blasts. Some of them had useful or curious fears, but he noticed something amiss - a trail of breadcrumbs left behind by someone with very intense fear, who was in the area some time ago.

Haunt focused, looked into the dying, drained motes - useless for his power, besides tracking whoever they came from. A fear of... losing a loved one, fulfilled and somehow still present despite that. A fear of shadow organizations and conspiracies. A fear of having secrets revealed, and of being found.

He grinned, and decided to follow the trail.

Last edited: Dec 30, 2019

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Birdsie

Dec 11, 2019

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Threadmarks Compos Mentis 13.1

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Birdsie

Birdsie

Sharp Talons Cleave The Worthy

Dec 12, 2019

#4,429

Lights, faint, strobing and distant. The darkness zoomed into his eyes, disappearing at the edges, as the blurry lines of lamps came into focus. He could hear his own breathing, make out his own pulse through his chest; the weak, repetitive beats, set apart, one second each. Calm either artificially, or through exhaustion; his heart unable to work any more. Hopefully the former.

He stirred, jerking his arm, and felt crushing swords of delayed pain in the movement. "Ugh," he reacted, keeping still. The rest of his body was kind of… out of tune, with the rest of himself; dull and numb.

"Wakey, wakey," a familiar voice said. Male and jesting. "You with us in the land of the living, pal?"

"I hate and love you at the same time," Longinus spoke with a grin, looking at Regent through squinted eyes. He could only make out a blurred outline of the boy, the black hair contrasting sharply against the white dress shirt.

"So, Legend and that green guy were arguing about taking you in for medical care. Tats argued back, saying we have medics, Legend argued back some more, Tattletale had to do her Thinker stuff on him to make him reconsider. Defiant pushed back. Tattletale objected. Defiant pushed back some more. Tattletale strongly objected," Regent gave him the rundown,

Longinus tried to sit up, only to feel his spine give out the moment one of its segments separated a milimeter away from the bed's soft mattress. "Fuck my life," he hissed.

"And you've basically been in here ever since then," Regent said, ignoring the pained hiss with no reaction, "We've been taking turns keeping tabs on you, and today it was my turn, so here I am. You can get the full lowdown of recent events from sharp-witted, big-titted and blonde."

Longinus shook his head subtly and sighed. "I need to talk with Eidolon," he said, staring up at the ceiling.

"Well, that sucks, because I'm pretty sure he packed his suitcases and left for Houston like a week ago," Regent answered nonchalantly.

"...How long have I been out?" Longinus asked, wide-eyed.

"From the Echidnine fight?" Regent asked, then gave him what appeared to be a genuinely apologetic smile. "Sorry to break the news, but two weeks and three days, right about."

Longinus' heart skipped a beat. "What?!" he exclaimed, feeling panic settle into his mind.

Regent snorted out loud, tilting back in his chair, his stomach bending forward as he let out a stifled laugh. "Just kidding. Three days," he said, through the giggling.

"You're the biggest cunt ever," Longinus exhaled, a pang of relief washing over him.

"Thanks, pal," Regent answered. After a moment of smiling, the smirk washed away from his face, replaced by a look of recollection. "Oh, ah, right, you had a visitor earlier. Some guy called Greg really insisted on meeting you, but I didn't recognize him so I kind of sent him away and told him I'd pass on a message. I've got to admit - I tried my best, but I didn't really listen. Somewhere at the second sentence, he seemed to have totally lost the topic and started talking about Warcraft three. Something-something about your valet losing power? I really don't get it."

"Valet?" Longinus inquired, cocking his head to the side.

"His words." Regent shrugged. Longinus' vision was gradually coming back, as everything went halfway between blurred and sharp.

Longinus' eyes widened in that moment. "Sebastian," he whispered to himself.

"Wait," Regent blanked, then stood up in shocked surprise, the chair sliding behind him. "You have an actual fucking butler? How rich are you, dude?"

"It's a robot I made under the PRT," Longinus clarified, shaking his head.

"...How rich are you, dude?" Regent repeated, in the same exact tone and expression.

"Not at all," Longinus answered. He needed to get out of here and go to Greg, to get Sebastian back.

Regent slumped back down in his chair, mildly disappointed. "Well, not like I can't afford a butler or anything, I guess. I think I should hire one. And maybe some maids to clean up my base. What do you think?"

"If I get Sebastian back, he'll be everyone's personal assistant," Longinus explained. "Give me a second." From there, he closed his eyes, entering the depths of his power.

His fountain seemed to be hampered by some outside influence. He could sense its weakness on instinct, under a near-constant background effect that drained power from it. It was only half as quick as it would have been. Other than that, everything else seemed to be exactly the same, with thirteen charges making an orbit around the fountain.

His Radiant Phoenix power was in shambles, disassembled; less like the filaments were cut away, and more like the strands were pulled, stretched, distorted, cracked, and cut in different places. The power had formed connections into different places, and one of the charges reached out with a filament and was attached to the environmental shield, seemingly exchanging data with one of its dotted elements.

Longinus reached out with three charges, tossing them into the Phoenix power to repair the connections that were torn away by his evil clone.

They reached out to the nearest charges available, and sprouted half a dozen filaments each, forming an elegant, fresh web and pumping information into the healing power. It took some time, but he thought he felt the progress of the affected charges incrementally 'straightening' themselves, as though the smashed and ethereal circuitry inside was refreshed.

No longer interested in conversation, Regent pulled out his phone and began to browse websites that offered the services of house servants, mostly cleaners and valets. He furrowed his eyebrow and clicked in the 'butler' category, beginning to browse the pictures and names.

"Oi, can you give me your phone for a moment?" Longinus requested.

"Can you even hold it?" Regent asked, gingerly placing the device in Longinus' fingers. They were cracked, numb, and almost ridiculously cold, but he could move them, with very little feedback from his nerves. Like he was a drone operator, using shafts and levers to move the fingers.

Longinus groaned in frustration. "Look, call this number," he said, and then recited Greg's phone number.

Regent typed in the numbers, one after another, then asked, "Do you want me to put it in loudspeaker?"

"Do whatever. I need to tell you the biggest secret of the decade when we're all gathered, anyway," Longinus shrugged, and regretted it immediately afterwards as a pang of pain stabbed through his shoulder blades. Memories of his early days on Earth Bet came to mind, when he'd been hospitalized so often, with Panacea forced to come and bail him out - there wasn't a Panacea anymore, though.

"Okay." Regent didn't really seem too shocked or bothered by the revelation. He clicked the green dial button, then waited as the dial tone began buzzing rather loudly at them. It took almost ten seconds, but someone finally picked up.

"Hello?" Longinus spoke out loud, so the microphone would pick up his voice. "Anyone there?"

"H-hey?" Greg's voice answered, sounding between scared and doubtful. Regent looked at Longinus with a raised eyebrow.

"Greg! It's me, Gabe!" Longinus called out, a pang of relief wash over him.

"Y-yeah, yeah," Greg replied, lacking his usual excitement. "Hey, can you… no, no you can't, you're injured. God, I'm so fu-cking stu-pid," he berated himself, with the sounds of dull flesh on wood impacts punctuating every syllable.

"Are you okay?" Longinus asked, clearly worried.

"N-ye… no, no, I'm not. Fuck me, right now, it doesn't matter. Your butler is about to die, I'm pretty sure," Greg said, a brief note of panic seeping into his voice in the last sentence. There was a sound of speech in the background, as someone spoke to Greg, and the boy related the message, "He, uhm, he says he's got about… twelve hours, until the software starts experiencing critical failure and the heatsink in his body starts to give out. Oh, and he has a body, now, he says. Don't question it?" The last sentence was a hesitant question.

"I'll send the Undersiders to pick you and Sebastian up, got it?" Longinus instructed, stern and hurried. He gazed at Regent and gave him a shallow nod.

"Wait, whoa, whoa, whoa! The Undersiders?!" Greg reacted in surprise.

"'Sup," Regent greeted jauntily.

"Don't question it?" Longinus said through a cringe. "It's… complicated. I promise I'll explain, alright? Trust me."

"Dude, the Undersiders are villains, just like that creepy motherfucking clone of you!" Greg cried out.

"Greg," Longinus said. "Trust me, please. They will not harm you."

"I trusted you when I opened the door to my house two days ago," Greg answered, with something that wasn't exactly hostility, but sounded defensive. Caution. "It turns out it was your evil cousin, and Jack goddamn Slash was with them."

"What did he do to you?!" Longinus said, clenching his fists.

"C-cut my face open into a smile. I'm fine now, I met Panacea. She healed me, she was here an hour ago," Greg said, with a sound that indicated he was shaking his head.

"Greg, please. I'll send someone to pick you up and bring you here, but you have to trust me."

"F-fuck, fine, do it, goddamnit!" With that, the phone beeped off, as Greg disconnected the call. Regent whistled appreciatively, pocketing the device.

Longinus stared at Regent. "So? What are you waiting for?" he waved him off, hissing in pain as he did so. "Please!"

"Okay," Regent said, standing up and beginning to walk in the direction of the door. "It'd be nice if I knew where I was going, though." Regent strode through the door, calling someone else, and leaving Longinus alone to his devices.

Longinus looked up at the ceiling, closing his eyes briefly. He turned his awareness to his Radiant Phoenix, to keep tabs on its progress.

The three charges he'd connected to the power were maybe a fraction done fixing the ones they were connected to. A total of eighteen charges being repaired, at less than three or four percent completion.

He sighed and turned his awareness to his Enlightened Trump ability. The ability to see powers within eight meters, for now. It rested calmly at twenty-eight charges, and Longinus sensed a depth to its connection. A kind of completeness, or august glory that none of his other abilities had. It was marked by his passenger's favor, in some metaphorical way.

He reached out into the power, 'sticking his hand' inside of it. The charges shuffled around, displaced like gelatin that someone stuck a pen into. They seemed to buzz with crystallized information, up close, the tendrils curving to create a sort of bubble of free space around Longinus' awareness - he was quite sure he was never able to look at powers in this much detail before. A sign of his power improving, or becoming more refined?

Longinus used eight charges for the purpose of being able to sap other passengers of their powers, in some way shape or form. A simpler thought followed it: drain other powers.

Eight charges connected filaments to one another, and created a power that interfered with parahuman abilities within the range of five paces. The scrambled abilities were weakened, if not outright turned off, and the sapped energy could be used to let out a very bland Striker attack, slightly colored by whatever power was sapped, but usually doing nothing except fractionally increasing damage.

Longinus then pushed this new power inside of the Enlightened Trump.

There was a moment of rejection. Both powers spat one another one, or more accurately, Enlightened Trump took a one-second glance at the draining power, decided to scoop it up in its mouth and chew it for taste, then spat it out with total disgust. It buzzed red for a moment, extending one filament like an accusatory socket.

Consume it.

The powers were forcefully smashed together again, and some of their filaments broke away, freeing up the charges to hodge-podge new connections to one another. It was different than his usual method of combining powers, where they both became homogeneous substances. This was clearly two different powers, sewn together using a very rusted stapler by a five-year-old that shouldn't be using office supplies. In practice, he gained the ability to punch… the auras around parahumans, using the energy the draining aura sapped away?

He sighed in frustration and let out a pained, angry groan. "Ugghh! Fuck!"

He carefully tore the powers away from one another. The filaments connecting them flashed a scared red as he did, but the two powers soon floated away like divorced parents, beginning to reform the cracks at their edges, becoming almost seamless within relative seconds. It was almost melancholic to see.

After that, he pushed the newly created power into his environmental shield power, so he'd hopefully gain an exotic effect to his lasers that scrambled powers and absorbed energy for its own use.

The Lance of Longinus. The weapon he'd used as his main power ever since the very beginning. The entirety of it flashed a divine green, as the eight new charges were accepted into the fold and began a smooth process of data acquisition and interpretation. The entirety of Gabriel's mind blinked into nonexistence for a brief second, his brain struggling to comprehend events, as the already information-heavy power gained an additional sack of load. The result was that any time he used one of his constructs to defend from parahuman powers, he'd be able to gain just a little bit more charge from them - same for his environmental shield, and for shooting lasers at active, energy-based parahuman defenses.

This action was followed by a more time-consuming one. Stupor master power into the Tinker power he had made. Something within both powers shifted, as the former, larger power consumed the latter, smaller power into its mass.

Within seconds, he created a sight-based Trump power. It allowed him to grant a single chosen recipient the ability to gain information about people, from observation, or to manipulate people skillfully in order to draw information out of them. The difference seemed very thin, but these were the two settings. It also had side-effects, in that it made it hard to think about anything else except the two main effects of the power. Kind of like Teacher's power, only less about obedience to Teacher, and more like rendering someone halfway braindead.

He felt pretty bummed out, but he didn't want to keep mixing it any more than he needed to. This could maybe come in handy, someday. The last thing he did before exiting the powerscape was send the remaining two charges at the Radiant Phoenix, to make the process faster and improve the power in the meantime. He sighed and opened his eyes, and waited patiently.

Nothing happened. Just he, and the empty medical room, and the beeping of the EKG in the background.

He hummed a gentle tune, waiting. Boredom was quickly catching up to him.

Almost insultingly, the TV remote laid to his right all this time.

"Oh, fuck off–" Longinus cursed under his breath, picking up the remote and turning the TV on.

It flashed onto channel eight, showing a commercial for a restaurant chain that, as far as he knew, was spreading to the northeast from New Mexico and its surrounding states.

Longinus switched channels.

The Wards cartoon played, showing a cartoonish Weld standing proud, one hand on his hip, the other raised in a perfunctory manner, he explained to the children he just saved why it was important to wear safety helmets when walking at a construction site. After that, Butcher and Hemorrhagia snuck up behind him and smashed the back of his head with a girder, which stuck there. Weld turned around, making the kids he was lecturing duck as the girder almost struck them. He wheeled around again, and this time it was the Butcher and Hemorrhagia who were forced to crouch, the latter not managing to do it and falling over, swirls, chirping birds, and little stars dancing around her head.

Longinus snorted, and changed channels again.

A dishwasher commercial, with some kind of energetic dude showing how well they cleaned the plates.

"If you buy one now, you get a mega super-duper Eidolon brand shammie for free! That's right, call 111-955-RIMEWASH, and get a free super-duper Eidolon brand shammie now! Rimewash - it washes better than Leviathan's waves!"

He switched channels, not falling for the Fallen propaganda.

Seven, repeated chords came booming through the television, followed by four notes, played by a violin. A male voice began rapping slowly. It was a trailer for Alexandria: The Triumvirate Musical. "How does a surly, burly superheroine, daughter of a doctor, and a Spaniard, dropped in the middle of the coast in the US, come to be a hero and--"

Longinus changed channels before the verse could finish. What has Lin Manuel Miranda become?

The next channel seemed to be Earth Bet's equivalent of Naruto, except instead of Naruto, it had the Japanese superhero team - Sentai Elite - at the forefront. It was both strangling and somehow funny, just how much reality colored the pop-culture on Earth Bet. And it wasn't really a problem for someone not used to it, given there was always media from Earth Aleph available.

The next channel was the news.

"-scene of disaster. Rhodey, are you there?"

"That's right, Jess," said a white reporter in a suit, leading the cameraman forward as they proceeded down the street and to a PRT cordon. The soldiers stood patrol at the front, and one of them raised his hand as the reporter approached. "Excuse me, gentlemen, do you have any comment on the unwarranted and random evacuation procedure the PRT ENE enacted on the surrounding neighborhoods in recent days?"

"There's been a leak of dangerous gas that we believe may be parahuman in origin," the trooper spouted the line that was clearly fed to him by the PR department. "Our agents are on site, cleaning up the sources of the leak, but we believe there's too much of a risk to live in these areas at the present. If that's everything, I suggest you go back to your van and take care of yourself, sir."

"I have more questions," the reporter-slash-journalist said, raising a notepad in one hand, as he extended the microphone. "Our informants seem to claim that on the night between the tenth of June and eleventh of June, some form of sudden S-class event occured in the city. Is this true, and can the citizens of Brockton Bay feel safe if such things happen right under their noses without the PRT informing them?"

"Sir, let me level with you," the PRT uniform said, stepping forward and leaning his head lower. He was taller than the reporter, and did it to be literally on level with him. "I don't get paid to answer your stupid questions. If you have any to raise, you are welcome to ask our department's information desk. You will find it in the local PRT offices, or you can call directly. Can I ask why you bothered to come all this way just to hassle on-duty PRT agents?"

The reporter's face said 'why, I never,' for the flash of a second, before he moved his hand and waved for the camera-man to follow him. "This is it, folks. They're keeping the truth from us. This was Rhodey Jones, from the Brockton News Network."

"Oof!" Longinus felt the reporter's embarrassment on a spiritual level.

He changed channels again, showing a press conference with Director Piggot answering questions. Flashes of photos being taken were visible against the backdrop of where she stood, and the outline of Dauntless standing next to her could be spotted on the camera from the crackling of his spear.

"-no, this will be the last question I answer," Piggot stated firmly, hands steepled on the table.

"I have one more," a journalist said, raising his hand. Off-handedly, Piggot pointed at him.

"A contact of mine claims that he saw Eidolon teleporting into the city on the night of the aforementioned incident, which is corroborated by several people. This seems to suggest the theory that this is a cover-up of some major attack is correct. Director Piggot, with all due respect, if this was an attack by the Slaughterhouse Nine, I believe all of the viewers deserve to know the full truth," the man said, and Piggot's face gradually turned firmer, rock-solid; but also visibly darker as he went on.

"No comment." Piggot scratched her brow as she stood up, with the journalists instantly moving into a frenzy of asking questions, making pictures at tripled frequency and yelling at her. She motioned for Dauntless to lead her out, and he nodded to her once before walking into the backstage room.

Longinus scoffed and changed channels again.

Another news channel, this one showing Eidolon using a matter reconstruction power of some kind to refill the cracks in the pillars of some kind of courthouse, presumably caused by a superpowered fight. Exalt stood off in the distance, discussing something with a duo of police officers.

"Excuse me, Eidolon!" a reporter called out in the live feed. Eidolon rather pointedly didn't react, instead changing the target to fix another column. "Excuse me, sir! Can I have a moment of your time!? I know you can hear me!"

Eidolon froze for a moment, and raised his left finger without saying anything. He used his off-hand to fix some more cracks, then floated down with a barely-audible sigh. "I'm listening. If this is about the Brockton Bay deployment, I assure you it had nothing to do with the Slaughterhouse Nine, or with the Teeth. The PRT wanted to see if my power could be used to clean up a particularly noxious, allegedly Tinker-caused leak of chemicals and gasses."

"Then what do you have to say about this?" she asked, and the camera shifted to show her raising a photograph of him shooting purple-white laser-lightning at Jack Slash, Siberian, Bonesaw, and the Butcher to no effect. In the background, there were dozens of naked clones and heroes, fighting one another.

The camera turned back to Eidolon. Where a lesser man would have crumbled like a deer in the headlights, he just shrugged and said, "Photoshop. Not particularly good, either; Jack Slash's goatee is nowhere near that short. If you seriously believe we could cover up a… what is this, even? War? War of parahumans?" He laughed thinly, shaking his head. "Then I'm afraid you're mistaken. Now, excuse me, I have work to finish."

Eidolon floated up, raising his hands and continuing the process of fixing the columns.

Longinus turned off the television and sighed deeply. He really could use some company, right about now. Should he call a hooker, just to ask her to tune his piano? God, that sounded dirty, but he meant it literally: teach her to tune a piano, with a construct, so she could have some other skills in life besides blowing cock.

He shook the thought off and began thinking. His thoughts strayed and swayed, swirling in the ethereal scape of the mind.

How the fuck did Armsmaster last like this for weeks? I mean… he had a Tinker power to occupy himself with, and Dragon to talk to, but shit, man; I'd never last in prison because of the sheer boredom.

He groaned and looked to the side. There was a cabinet full of various types of medications, mostly in the form of pills.

Pills. Happy pills?

Signal… he thought, clenching his fists. He still felt so guilty, but… he missed the cheerful girl who drugged him because she didn't know what else to do to help. A silly thought, really, but.. there was more deep down. He related to her so much: on so many levels, they were similar. Kind of the same issues, really, on a purely psychological level. Chevalier's and Hat Lady's words returned to him: perspective.

The door opened within moments, as a woman in a jury-rigged nurse's outfit stepped in, carrying a handbasket and saying, "Someone left this for you. Didn't give a name."

"Huh?" Longinus inquired with a questioning hum, looking over to the nurse. "What's in it?"

She shrugged, and left it at the bedside table. "Look for yourself," she said.

He did, and he saw a red-yellow, square-shaped package of what was probably chocolates, alongside a pair of letters and a single, white rose. The nurse looked at him, gave him a, 'no idea who knew how to leave this here,' and then walked out, muttering something about giving her a call if he needed anything.

Longinus sat up very, very slowly and carefully, reaching out for the basket and putting it on his legs: the only part of his body that wasn't utterly broken. He took one of the letters and opened it. The letter was clearly written on some kind of typewriter, with the signature chicken-scratched in pink ink instead, hand-written.

Hey, what's up homedog

These crazy people rescued me from the Yangban, and one of the doctors told me it was at your 'request.' They told me I can write a letter to you so I am.

It's been a really long, crazy week, honestly. I struggle to recall anything from the few days I'd stayed with the Yangban, except how to say 'yes,' in Chinese.

For reals, though. They made me write this so you know I'm fine. And I am, so, uh, hey! I miss you, kinda. Our relationship wasn't the greatest when I last checked, I mean, beyond the fact that I kind of helped you escape those crazy gunmen I guess. There's not much else I can say, honestly.

A lot of the people are really nice around here. I'm in some kind of medical facility right now, and they're checking me for 'residual brainwashing effects' or whatever. They're not letting me tinker, so I'm kind of pissed, but I guess that's better than tinkering for communist China. Long live Uncle Sam, right?!

Oh, and the hat lady told me to tell you they received your message, and will contact you when the time is right to contact you. Apparently there's some details in the other letter, and they want you to carry it with you.

And what's up with you?

xoxo

Signal / karen

Longinus' expression contorted again, into a smile. A joyful, glad smile. Tears fled his eyes and streamed down his face, as he giggled like an idiot. He was so, so happy to know that she was okay, and alive. But soon after that, thoughts flooded his mind again. Who could've rescued her? Certainly not Accord or Coil, given the fact that Coil had betrayed every cape under his command; which meant Accord wouldn't have a reason to uphold his end of the deal.

He only knew of one organization which was influential enough to pull of something like this, excluding Accord.

Cauldron, most likely.

He shook the thought off, for now, and put the letter with the other one. He picked up the red package and opened it slowly. There were twenty chocolates arranged in neat rows, alongside something that looked like a black flashlight, but with a wide front with purple LEDs.

Longinus smirked and picked up the flashlight, shining it on the letter marked by a 'C.'

We know of your attempt to contact us.

With utmost regret, our organization wishes to inform you that a meeting of any form cannot be safely arranged within the foreseeable future of you receiving this letter.

We are interested in seeing your employment of our products, and hopefully, an agreement can be reached in the future once a meeting can be scheduled. We will contact you at our earliest convenience, to determine your suitability as one of our clients. Until then, we'd like to ask you to stay in bed and not pursue codename Echidna or the Slaughterhouse Nine as you would have done had you not received this letter.

According to our estimates, it would be the best move for you - as one of our clientele - to return to the career of a professional hero within the PRT. Should this prove impossible, we humbly request you to either conceal your activities as a super-villain or to choose a modus operandi that is less likely to sway the public opinion on the matter.

You should use your main power to burn this letter and then hide the UV flashlight provided now, as Tattletale will enter your room to interrogate you in twenty-three seconds of you reading this word.

- Cauldron

Longinus immediately burned away the letter with a flick of his fingers and hid the UV Flashlight underneath the blankets.

As prophesied, the door opened and the blonde villainess entered the room only moments later, with a curious look on her face. "Regent told me you woke up, and immediately sent him and Bitch on some kind of 'grocery run' as he called it? Something about house staff?"

"He went to retrieve my AI butler who apparently has a body now," Longinus explained.

"You know, it'd be kind of nice to know you're a rich kid with robots serving you before we fight an Endbringer together," Tattletale exclaimed sarcastically, closing the door behind herself and striding across the room as she breathed out, clapping her hands against her thighs and each other. "Okay, what else should I know about your family's wealth? Eidolon own a villa in the Sangre de Cristos? Does it have a pool? Can I swim there?"

Longinus snorted and shook his head, amused by the prospect of a villa, owned by none other than his daddy Eidolon. "I'm not rich. I just used the PRT resources, paired with my Tinker and former Thinker power, to create an AI, programmed like a butler."

"Yeah, I figured that out in the first sentence," Tattletale said, waving him off and relaxing in the chair. She glanced at the box of chocolates, then at him. "Anyway. You have a robot butler, and some adoring fans, who are persistent enough they bothered to find where my safehouse is, or proved that my choice of minion messengers is amazingly good, and I chose only trustworthy people. Either way, Regent gave me a call. They'll be back with your robo-butler, microwave, laser cannon, and sidekick in ten minutes, maybe a bit longer."

Longinus snorted and shook his head, shrugging.

"I have no idea how this thing got–" Longinus choked on his own spit at the words 'microwave, laser cannon, and sidekick.'

79

Birdsie

Dec 12, 2019

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Threadmarks Compos Mentis 13.2

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Birdsie

Birdsie

Sharp Talons Cleave The Worthy

Dec 13, 2019

#4,479

After laughing and strutting for a while, Tattletale decided to ask the heavy question that weighed on her mind. "So, once you're healed up, what's the next step?" She looked at him questioningly.

Longinus looked at her for a long, tense moment of silence. "I…" he drew out the first word, to gather his thoughts. "I don't really know. I think I'll stay with you guys; "I'll just pick up a 'socially acceptable' modus operandi, as should the lot of you."

"Really? The thug life?" Tattletale asked, tilting her head. "You really think you can take hostages, rob a bank, and ignore a pair of mutant dogs using a superhero as a chew toy?"

"I mean, it's not like I haven't done my fair share of messed up stuff. Just three days ago I mauled to fine dice an Aegis clone just because he said I'm like Jack Slash." This very thing he had pulled off during the Echidna fight didn't bother him really much: what did bother him was what Aegis said. That Gabriel was just like Jack Slash; that he abandoned them. Who was the one left on the street, to be picked up by the Undersiders? Him.

"So? Those were clones. You're going to be walking the path of a career criminal," Tattletale said, as if unbothered by revealing that. "I'm just trying to make sure you won't back out at the most inconvenient moment."

"I mean… I'm a person who tends to sticks to groups. I feel helpless on my own,"

"Not gonna go back to the PRT?" Tattletale asked. A hint of peculiarity

Conflicting emotions built up within his head. If he wanted to grow more powerful and help more people, he'd need to comply with Cauldron, and go back to being a professional hero. But there was also the fact that in this short timespan, he'd grown closer to the Undersiders as a whole. Especially Brian and Lisa; Grue and Tattletale.

"I don't… know," Longinus uttered with a hint of helpless gravity to his voice. "I want to go back. I know they'd have me back, but… I don't know. Plus, I… I've grown attached to the lot of you."

"In less than a week?" Tattletale asked, eyes bulging out in disbelief.

"Not in the sense that I consider you really close friends, but in the sense that I can call you friends."

"Eeeh, I wouldn't go that far, and I don't think Grue would either. Business partners, maybe," Tattletale said, moving her hand in a comme ci, comme ça gesture, "You have some weird ideas about how attachments work. We haven't hung out even once. I think the one you have the closest bonds with is Imp, and that's only because you gave her a good excuse to stab someone to distract Legend, which is something 'awesome' in her mind." Tattletale made air-quotes at 'awesome.'

Longinus snorted, but then sighed and nodded. "Yeah, it's always been an issue with me. I get… attached too quickly, in general. It tends to get embarrassing or annoying, depending on the person."

She narrowed her eyes, quickly saying, "You don't get along with Director Piggot and Accord. You get attached to people quicker than a puppy lost in a rainstorm."

"I don't... see the connection?" Longinus asked, a little bewildered.

"You're probably one of the most volatile people, emotionally, that I've met - besides Panacea and arguably Skitter." She moved a hand up, explaining, "You don't really use logic, or value it when considering people or events. Grue uses experience, and when forced to step out of his comfort zone, falls back on caution. Skitter always used quick thinking, and wit, while Regent is more relaxed and lazy. You're a ball of emotion, though. It's kind of scary. Are you sure you're not the one who'll end the world, with that clone running out there? At least Scion is coldly efficient, most of the time."

Truth. So much truth spoken in one single soliloquy. He felt read, analyzed thoroughly, like his emotional privacy had just been torn away from his comfortable grasp. His hands fidgeted as Tattletale spoke, and his toes twitched very subtly. The thing that, however, made him feel better, is that she compared him to Taylor: that meant that if she could get better, he could too.

He shrugged and looked down, sighing wearily. "You're not wrong. At all. I was supposed to meet Doctor Yamada, to get my issues sorted, but then… all the Nonagon Funhouse bullshit happened, and I fell off the edge, if you know what I'm saying?"

She didn't answer, looking forward into space and closing her eyes for a moment. There was a moment of peaceful quiet between them. Not really tense, or particularly thought-provoking. At the end of it, Tattletale stood up and said, "Well, I guess if you're staying with the team, you might as well help yourself to Trickster and Ballistic's territories. Coil is going to be making moves soon, and we need to prepare."

"Wait wait, wait," Longinus put his hands forth, gesticulating for her to stop. Then, he bit his lip and looked to the side. Saying this would've hurt a bit. "I'm… not staying. Not for good, at least…" he said, apologetically averting his gaze as he did so.

"Jesus," she exclaimed, with a groan. She moved a hand to rub her nose, where she'd been psychically injured by his statement. "I'm confused now. You're sending some mixed messages. Are you in or out?"

"You are right. I don't have it in me to commit to a criminal career. It's not who I am," Longinus shook his head thoughtfully, crossing his arms to his body. And I need the vials.

Tattletale rolled her eyes. "And like that, the puppy turns around and goes back to its previous owner. Okay." She nodded once, looking squarely at him. "You're welcome to stay for however long medical care for you takes, and, uh, for Regent to get back here with your robot - then, I guess we'll throw a goodbye party."

Longinus snorted and shrugged. "Thank you, for… 'taking care' of me. That's what humans do, right?" he quipped, recalling what she told him not more than a week ago, when she'd found him.

"Humans, aliens, motherfucking Brocktonites. I don't know at this point," she answered, shrugging with her face. "The last week really shook my faith in how the universe works."

"Do you want another truth bomb?" Longinus asked with a fox-like grin.

She placed one hand on the leather-strapped gun at her utility belt. "I will literally unholster my pistol and shoot you in the face if you do that, because I know your shield can take it," she warned.

He giggled and put his hands in the air. "Don't shoot!"

"I'm going to quickdraw, motherfucker," she added, with an upward curvature to her lips. Tattletale let out a brief chuckle, then began to turn, hoping to leave before he had a chance to say anything else.

"But I can do this!" he exclaimed, shooting a very, very weak laser from his forehead into her back. It felt like a pinch, more than anything.

"Asshooole," she said with a hint of good humor, as she opened the door and walked through.

Longinus smiled and let himself fall back on the bed, looking up at the ceiling.

And like that, another segment of his journey had… ended? A chapter closed, an arc completed. Or maybe… it just started? You could write a thirteen-arc story about his shenanigans, and it'd get hundreds of reade–

"Being a superhero is kind of gay," Imp said, popping into existence - no wait, she'd been there for as long as Tattletale now - next to him. She wasn't wearing her mask, and had an almost characteristic impish grin on her face, one hand on her waist, and the other pressing against the same wall his head was closest to. "Join the dark side, we have bacon."

He was snapped out of his train of thought as he turned to look at her. "Oh, didn't see you there," he chuckled, sitting up again with a big of a struggle. "I know, but I am fully heterosexual," he said in a flamboyant tone, as golden petals and sparkles erupted from his environmental shield.

"Press ex to doubt," Imp nonchalantly fired back. She stepped away from the wall, staring at him with a cocked eyebrow for a moment.

Longinus giggled again and sighed. "It'll be kinda sad to leave your side," he remarked with a bit of a apologetic smile. His smile then turned into a smirk. "Can I ask you a question, though? Totally unrelated."

"Sure, but I want to ask a question after that, too. Question for question. You Romans call it squid pro quo, or something like that," she said, making a mistake on purpose to annoy him.

He didn't really mind about the intentional error. "Sure. What's up between you and Alec?" he asked nonchalantly, folding his arms to his chest, cocking his head and raising an eyebrow.

"Hardcore and private," Imp fired back, then sat at the bedside. She grinned at him again, teeth showing. "What, you wanna find out? You can join one of the orgies, if you want. You know, the orgies with hookers, and drugs, and stuff."

"Woah, woah, woah, too many details!" he put his hands forward, stopping her from continuing to speak with a chuckle.

Her smile faded away, to be replaced with stark disappointment and confusion. "Wow. You're really clueless, huh?"

Longinus shook his head, an amused smile appearing on his face. "I am, in fact, not clueless," he added with a humorous tinge to it. "I just keep my 'clues' to me and to my eventual significant ot– fuuuck me," he stopped mid-sentence, feeling a painfully vivid memory of War Crime flash before his eyes.

His face went pale and his hands, now sweaty, gripped the white bedsheets very tightly. He was shaking a little bit, but it was very subtle. Go away, go away, go away… he shouted to his own mind, trying to sweep the vision off his awareness.

"You okay?" Imp asked, looking around herself and clearly not trained or prepared to deal with someone having a PTSD attack. She stood up, lips ramming against each other in borderline-panic. "Fuck, fuck, fuck! What do I… do I call an ambulance, do I... whaa??"

"I'm okay, just… don't leave, calm down," he looked at her with a forced smile, a forced smile that took all of his efforts. "I'll be fine, don't be afraid," he managed to speak in a strained, yet genuinely reassuring tone.

"Dude, I'm not afraid," Imp told him, mildly upset at the use of the word 'afraid,' "I'm just aware that if Tattletale walks back in here and finds you having a panic attack, the only way I can slither out is using my power, and that won't exactly work on goddamn Tattletale."

He felt his body get hotter and hotter. It was hard to breathe, but he pulled through and kept smiling. Gabriel nodded at her and then said, "Y-you can go. Don't worry about me."

"You're kind of insane." Imp was staring, eyes narrowed in suspicion and mental disarray.

He stayed in silence, putting a hand over his mouth to block the sounds of him hyperventilating. Fuck, fuck, fuck, please, make it stop, please...

"Do I call the nurse?" Imp looked behind herself, torn between leaving and staying.

"Y-yeah."

"Alright… you do you, buddy," Imp said, then promptly became less noteworthy than the almost sickly-white ceiling and tiled floor.

As soon as she was out of sight, Gabriel began to shudder. He was breathing louder and harder, his chest heaving up and down as his hands supported his weight on the two metal bars at the side of the hospital bed he was in. Tears streamed down his face helplessly, but he didn't make any other sound that suggested he was crying.

Seconds later, the door opened, but the people walking through were neither nurse nor Imp, but Regent, Bitch, one of her dogs, and… the full suit of Centurion power armor, alongside a microwave skittering on a set of spidery appendages.

The armored person took off his helmet, revealing Greg Veder's frowning face. He lacked the usual pomp and energy, as he greeted Gabriel without fanfare, "Yo." The greeting wasn't just lifeless, but even tinted with a kind of ambient hostility, like it was Greg's default emotion - which definitely didn't sound like Greg.

Gabriel didn't look at him. He was too busy having a panic attack, after all. He tried to stifle his breathing, but to no avail.

"I think he's having a panic attack," Regent remarked calmly, watching things unfold from where he stood.

"I've heard about those," Bitch answered, gruff. She picked up Bastard's tiny form, then carried him over and all but pushed him into Gabriel's broken, shattered arms, prompting a hiss of utter, mind-blanking pain. "Stop crying. You have a dog now."

Gabriel held in a yell of pain at having the baby wolf being put into his grasp. This didn't really help, at all. But as an upside, the puppy was cute.

Bastard let his tongue out as he breathed, looking at Gabriel's face for a moment, then turning his gaze up to look at the wall behind him, as if it were the most interesting thing in the world - typical dog or wolf behavior, probably? After a moment, Bastard withdrew his tongue and closed his snout, lying down snugly in Gabriel's broken ribcage. Bitch, Regent, and Greg watched this situation with gruffness, blank amusement, and hostile blankness respectively.

"A-as much as I lo-love canines, please t-take him away," Gabriel pleaded, holding his hisses of pain in.

Bitch picked up Bastard by the sides of his body. The small wolf made a sound between a whimper and a growl, and his eyes widened in a way that Gabriel associated with dogs being momentarily hostile or upset at a sudden change. He let out a small, high-pitched 'rorf' at Bitch, which she ignored, clutching him closer to her chest and watching Gabriel.

Someone help me, please. He looked down at the microwave, and it only made things worse. Kid?!

"We should probably leave," Greg said, not concealing distaste.

"I guess," Regent spoke back, shrugging. The villain promptly turned, muttering something about the cafeteria and proceeding to walk out. Greg and Bitch stared for a moment, and the former undid the clasps of the power armor, then leaned it against the wall. Bitch watched Greg's every movement with a level of care that implied suspicion, then followed him outside, closing the door behind herself.

"S-Sebastian, please help," Gabriel called out, holding his arm out to the armor.

The armor was mournfully silent. The helmet slid over to look at him with a creak of force and rust, metal grinding on metal. Several sparks went out of loose wiring at the back as it did, but the armor didn't say anything.

"Install yourself in the nearest device, please," he pleaded. He was starting to feel better, probably because some time had passed, and those kind of attacks don't last forever.

The helmet began to creak again, as it slid to look over to the right, taking the entirety of three seconds to cross ninety degrees. After several moments, it slid back left, taking two seconds, then back to the right, taking three seconds again. Some kind of error in the power servos.

"Fuck…" Gabriel breathed out, clenching his fists. He didn't have a Tinker power anymore, so he couldn't fix the armor properly.

The armor's helmet then continued to stare at him, between expectant and mournful, without eyes or words. The microwave decided to move over to the corner where it stood, then withdrew its legs into its body. It almost evoked the image of C-3PO, and R2-D2, only that the former was heavily damaged and unable to speak or walk in any meaningful manner.

Gabriel extended his arm, and extended a tendril of telekinetic force to the armor, grabbing onto the helmet and pulling it towards himself, to put it on. Please, please, please!

The helmet's HUD was disabled when he put it on. His lack of Tinker powers made him struggle to even remember how to enable it, but when he tried the method, it didn't work.

"Fuck!" he exclaimed, releasing a charge of power into the helmet, to charge its batteries up as a last ditch effort.

The lack of any precision, Tinker power, or really any knowledge of what he was doing made it a mistake, which he realized far too late. He felt the helmet heat up to near-choking temperatures almost instantly, and the sound of reverberated crackling, before something on the side panel exploded, spreading a scattershot of yellow-orange sparks, and filling the air with the foul stench of fried wiring.

"Agh!" he groaned out, throwing the helmet off of his head, into the corner where the armor was. The circuitry panel on the right was forced open, revealing black, charred wires, chips, and silicone inserts. He had just killed Sebastian; again.

"I could really use Signal's help, right about now…" he whispered to himself, sighing heavily and laying back down on the bed, staring at the ceiling.

He sighed again and closed his eyes. His body was still sweaty from the panic attack, and he was feeling like a fish trying to climb a tree. Above all, he felt drained, on every level of his being. His body was wounded, aching with every small correction to his position, and sending sharp nails into his body parts when he tried moving or lifting them - he felt as if there was a bulldozer casually resting its tire on top of him, driving him into the bed, even as the most negative thoughts he'd felt swirled in his mind.

What if I just kill myself right now? Who would fucking care?

After lying in bed for ten minutes like the vacuous waste of space he was, a nurse came into the room with a tray of warm food. Some kind of paste gruel, containing bits of chopped broccoli, a side of cut radish, and a steak of some kind of meat so synthetic it might as well have been cooked in a chemistry laboratory - relief rations, post-Leviathan. He'd never really eaten them before, he realized, getting to live in that upper tenth percentile of people who didn't feel the ripples - heh - of Leviathan's attack. There was also a small cup of water, and a mug of dusty, powdery coffee with one spoon of sugar too little for his taste.

Gabriel looked at the nurse with a blank expression and slowly attempted to lift himself up, only to hear and feel the disquieting sound; it went somewhat like, 'cc-cc-ccrack,' in the space around his lower spine, but he didn't feel that much pain. At that, Gabriel decided not to get up too much.

A stray realization, as he remembered he'd managed to stand for a good while, even after Centurion stabbed him. His bones were already broken by that point. Is that really what adrenaline does to the human body? Or was he special? Because holy fuck.

"Do you have some sort of healer on site?" Gabriel inquired, turning his head to the nurse pleadingly.

"Healer?" she asked, blinking. Confused at the cape terminology, probably - and the fact she was a nurse, which kind of qualified as a 'healer rookie' in most people's heads.

"A superpowered person who can heal," Gabriel elucidated.

"Um, no," she said, looking at him with a raised eyebrow. "Aren't they exceptionally rare? I've only ever heard of Panacea, and that one villainous man who works for Accord. Ah, his name slips my mind at the moment..."

Gabriel sighed heavily and shook his head. "How do I eat, while in this state?" he asked helplessly..

"Aren't you telekinetic?" she asked, tilting her head.

He felt stupid, all of a sudden. Was it the medication, or was he just… like that? He'd been told that he was making subpar decisions for the longest time now, and forgetting that you have the ability to handle objects remotely isn't something that'd usually happen to a normal person. "Yeah, yeah, you're right, I am," he said, with a tone of mild disappointment, shaking his head

She cocked an eyebrow, nodded once, and said, "Call me if you need anything. We have some more food, water. If you need a shower, or have to go to the bathroom, we'll help you out. Same goes for if you start noticing any new symptoms. You did receive the diagnosis, yes?" She turned to look at him.

"Not really," Gabriel answered.

She thinned her lips significantly, looking him in the eyes. It was the stare of a woman that had bad news to deliver. She started with a degree of slow caution, "I… don't have the full details. Your skeleton is broken, as I'm sure you have noticed. There's also significant kidney damage, and some scarring on your left lung."

Gabriel's eyes widened subtly, and his expression became filled with mild shock. He felt a numbness spreading through his chest at those news, and then sinking down to his gut with a watery feeling to it. Then, he calmed down, realizing that he was lucky to be alive, so this was probably the best outcome he could hope for. "It's not that much of a surprise… Hey, when I'm done eating, can you sedate me? I don't think there's anything else I can do except sleep. And I can't do it on my own."

"There's… TV? I can bring you some books, if you'd like," she offered, looking kind of surprised and taken aback.

Gabriel considered her proposal, then nodded. "Books will be fine."

"Any preferences?" she asked, unblinking.

"Anything you have. I'll have a lot of time to spend here."

She nodded once, then said, "I'll get you a few, in case one doesn't suit your taste." With that, the nurse walked outside, leaving him alone with the microwave and power armor, which she politely or obviously didn't mention at any point in time.

Gabriel extended an invisible scoop of telekinesis, and used it to cup the food, and carefully brought it to his mouth to eat. He parted his lips, sunk the rice-like artificial gruel within, munched once, then swallowed. It was lukewarm, and the taste was even blander than actual rice. This was the sort of food that movies portraying military boot camp liked to joke about. It wasn't bad, wasn't disgusting. Just bland. Horribly, horribly, flavorless and unfulfilling to eat.

After ten minutes, he was done eating. Out of every ingredient, the cut radish definitely had the most flavor, but even then, it had been so thoroughly cooked and boiled that it had lost a vast majority of the stuff that made radish… radish. Like a packet of iced carrot slices that didn't have any of the nice carrot juices, and was just a stack of soft, dead plant matter the schools forced you to shove into your mouth and chew on 'for your own health.'

He closed his eyes and waited quietly. Several minutes later, the nurse came back in with a stack of seven books in her hands. Two fantasy novels, a single one he recognized from the title alone called 'Charlotte's Web,' an Earth Aleph release of 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,' and three others.

"Thanks," he said, extending an invisible hand to grab the stack of books, floating it to the table next to him.

She nodded once, and left wordlessly, glancing at the microwave on her way out, but not commenting on it. She probably deemed it to be another quirk of living in Brockton Bay, or the fact that her patient was a cape in a domino mask, and that he could use the force of his psyche to lift up matter without using his body.

"Hey, microwave," he called out.

The minute robot's display lit up, showing an eye symbol, the pupil turned vaguely in his direction. It didn't stand up or do anything else, though.

"Do you have a way to communicate with me? In a way I can understand?"

It released a low-pitched screech, not offering anything beyond that. He felt kind of dumb at that.

"Can you show letters on that display?"

Within moments, the eye blinked away. A second later, a very hodge-podge, clearly assembled on the fly, 'YE' appeared on it, cutting off due to a lack of physical LED space.

"And just like that, we can talk," Gabriel said with a satisfied tone, chuckling. "Hop up here, but not on me, please."

The display changed without a sound. 'NO.'

"Why?"

The message went away, but nothing appeared for a long moment. The microwave was content to just lie in its spot, eyeless and without communicating. Almost with a sense of reluctance, after several seconds of not responding, a bar appeared on the display, showing that the microwave had 'two bars out of eight' whatever that meant. The second bar was flashing on and off, in a repetitive pattern, as if to indicate loss or change.

Gabriel realized the microwave was running out of battery. "Go in standby for now," he offered.

'NO,' came the response. The display quickly changed, flashing by a short phrase. 'NO - TB - AT - TE - RY.'

"Then what's the problem?" Gabriel asked, tilting his head to the side in a questioning way.

The microwave screeched at him again, with a higher pitch than before. Almost a trill. The eye appeared on the display, and promptly turned itself to look at the ruined power armor. The microwave stood up, extending its appendages, then swung a single leg in the air in a sort of ceiling-mounted guillotine motion, like it was doing the robot dance with just one limb.

"I don't understand…?" Gabriel was more confused than before.

The microwave screeched in what was clear and undiluted annoyance. It stood up, skittered across the ground, then went back and rammed itself into the power armor at full speed, causing a dull thud to spread through the room.

"Are you… uploading Sebastian to yourself?" Gabriel asked, trying to understand but failing to do so.

The microwave ululated a screech of total and pure irritation, then tapped the leg of the power armor, before doing the guillotine robot dance with its own again.

"Spell it out like you did before!" Gabriel proposed with a hint of annoyance.

The microwave chose to turn away, return to its corner, and sit down. With that, it retracted its appendages back and turned off the display. It wasn't interested in trying to explain it to him anymore.

Gabriel couldn't manage to understand what the robot wanted. Frustration went through his mind and burned in his gut. He sighed deeply and picked up a randomized book from the stack the nurse left him with, hooking his finger on the first page and beginning to read.

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

This planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches. Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.

57

Birdsie

Dec 13, 2019

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Threadmarks Compos Mentis 13.3

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Birdsie

Birdsie

Sharp Talons Cleave The Worthy

Dec 14, 2019

#4,528

"Excuse me," he said, "I'm trying desperately to remember which drug I've just taken, but it must be one of those ones which mean you can't remember."

He shook his head and turned away again, and went up towards the men's room.

"Come on," said Ford. He hurried on downstairs, with Arthur following nervously in his wake. The encounter had shaken him badly and he didn't know why. He didn't like places like this. For all of the dreams of Earth and home he had had for years, he now badly missed his hut on Lamuella with his knives and his sandwiches. He even missed Old Thrashbarg.

The book clasped to a close heavily in Gabriel's hands, as he sighed. It was late evening, now; the darkness outside claiming the streets, with only white city lamps lighting the streets. In the interim between him beginning to read and stopping now, no one came into his room except for the nurse who brought him dinner at one point.

Gabriel turned his awareness to the stack of books and picked up one written by Maggie Holt, beginning to sort through the pages. They went by in a flurry of white, not really catching his attention. With an even more exasperated sigh, he closed this one as well and allowed the back of his head to sink deeper into the pillow. He wasn't feeling tired or exhausted, but the subtle cues his body gave him suggested he'd start to feel that way in minutes or hours.

He closed his eyes and entered his powerscape, to check out the Radiant Phoenix power.

Wouldn't you know it - a full eighteen charges within the power were near-repaired, trying to send dead feedback into the core of the power but failing. Another six were literal minutes away, while another six were twenty to thirty minutes, with another batch of eighteen getting into kick and requiring maybe four to five hours to finish. He wasn't really feeling his bones being fixed, even gradually, which was probably related to the fact that the central charge was still dead, disabled, and cracked.

Gabriel reached out with his awareness to the Radiant Phoenix. He attempted to manifest the same 'circuit board' he had used to create the Enlightened Trump but to no avail. The fountain didn't seem to react, as if the prompt was impossible to realize, or as if it couldn't target the power. He'd have to wait.

After a moment, he saw his fountain suddenly spit out a short half-strand of data, adding it to the charge it was producing. Kind of like a spider that spluttered.

He opened his eyes once more and reached out for the letters that Signal had sent him. He took a nearby pen, with an invisible strand of telekinesis, and began writing on the back.

wadup, homegirl

It's me, Cent Well, I'm Longinus now. Thought you oughta now, eh? It's been so long since we spoke 'face to face,' with that instance not being really face to face.

I had a run in with the Slaughterhouse Nine. They kidnapped me, took away my powers, did some bad shit, ruined my name, then left me on a street.

The Undersiders picked me up, and I momentarily joined forces with them to sort out some of the bigger problems.

Oh, some big-ass Endbringer-lookalike made an evil clone of me who is apparently stronger and better than me, so that just cheers me up, and he shattered every single bone of my body and fucked up my kidneys.

I'm currently laying in a hospital bed, in Tattletale's safehouse, writing this letter with telekinesis. So, yeah, I'm fine!

And, uh, I miss you. Not kinda. I do. Definitely.

xoxo

Longinus / Gabriel

And with that, he closed the letter in the previous envelope, put it next to himself, and closed his eyes to rest for a couple of minutes. Writing while looking up with a bright light in the background was mentally exhausting. When he opened his eyes and looked to the right, the envelope was missing from where he left it.

"Oh, hey Cauldron," he whispered, chuckling in an exhausted way. "Portals, or invisible dudes? I could really use some company, you know. Some decent company."

Nothing responded, except the eerie silence of the lonely room, and the background, the low-volume electrical buzzing of the fluorescent lightbulbs on the ceiling.

"I guess that's what a secret organization would say," Gabriel whispered to himself again, chuckling once more, and finally succumbing to Morpheus.

June 15th, 2011

When he awoke, it was almost exactly nine AM. Shafts of white-yellow sunlight peeked in through the half-curtained windows, illuminating the room and providing some unnatural depth to the broken suit of power armor and the sleeping microwave next to it. The books were taken from his desk at some point, and he noticed that the box of chocolates was missing, a single, torn note pinned by a throwing dart left in its place.

Gabriel reached out for the note, and opened it up.

Stole your chocolate shit

was good

Imp

He snorted and nodded. "I guess that's payback," he spoke to himself with a tone of resignation. I'd do my calisthenics, but… yeah.

A brief glance into his mindscape showed that a not-insignificant amount of his Radiant Phoenix power had been repaired, and some work was actually being done between the networked charges - work, that of course, had no purpose, meaning, or sense, given the fucking core wasn't active, goddamnit!

Gabriel reached out for the TV remote and turned it on, to look at the news.

As expected, the female, pretty-faced reporter on the screen was trumpeting anti-praises to the local PRT department. "-investigation by the Youth Guard indicated heavy abuse of the Ward Centurion, who'd later committed the murder of three men, prior to joining the Slaughterhouse Nine. As of today, the regional PRT directorship committee is going to meet and make a decision regarding the fate of the PRT Department ENE following this scandal. More news on this at noon, and up next - the weather."

He listened to the news quietly. "Shit," he cursed underneath his breath. "Word spread quickly."

"Not that it matters to you, that much," Tattletale exclaimed from the doorway, looking at the screen with folded arms. "This is Coil's move. Dethroning the queen bee from her seat to take it for himself."

"Can you confirm a doubt with your power?" Gabriel asked, looking in her direction.

"A doubt? What kind of doubt?" Her jaw set in place.

He looked her straight in the eyes. "Coil is Thomas Calvert. True or false?"

She narrowed her eyes, moderately confused. "Thomas Calvert? Oh, right, that… you mentioned him. PRT consultant? No idea," she said, shrugging with a twist of the lips that indicated a total lack of knowledge.

Gabriel let out a frustrated sigh and looked at the ceiling. "My healing power is getting better every day. I think I might get better sooner than I anticipated," he said, a bright outlook for his health popping into his mind.

"Speaking of which, it seems Piggot took mercy on you and covered up your ass one last time before her career sunk," Tattletale said, striding across the room and sitting down in the couch under the wall-mounted TV. "She pretty much explained to the public that tall, dark, and edgy with Echidna and the Nine is the actual Centurion. As in, there is only one Centurion, and that's him, and you don't officially exist. Pretty illegal as far as cover-ups go, but she seems not to give a shit at this point. I wouldn't be surprised if she came back strapped to the PRT building the moment a new PRT director gets chosen and blew his brains out for the greater good."

"Rightfully so," Gabriel shrugged, still looking up at the ceiling.

The woman he had hated so much over the past few months, going to such great lengths to cover up for him? Maybe he misjudged her? He shouldn't have been such a whiny bitch.

"Anyway, her career and life are basically over, and since she's essentially a veteran with broken kidneys, no one is going to hire her anywhere," Tattletale explained to him, not really grinning or smiling, or looking content, but taking on that self-satisfied air that she had when using her power to elucidate some fact, "Piggot is well-aware she's losing the game, so there's a - maybe not high, but existent chance she'll decide to go out with a bang. Of course, this will backfire horribly, since Coil has not only his own power, but also Dinah for precognition."

"She's in the Wards, right? I think so, at least," Gabriel inquired, turning his body ever-so-slightly towards her, with a hiss of pain releasing him.

"No official press release about it yet, but the moment Coil seizes powers and a new little girl Ward joins the team - yeah, that's gonna be Dinah," Tattletale said, and then creased her forehead and frowned. "Gallant's resignation is because Coil wanted to get Dinah on the Wards. Threaten or mind-control her, get rid of Gallant so he can't expose that whole thing. It'd be kind of funny if you guys invited him for a casual visit and found a way to occupy Dinah - try it, if you can. With her power and Coil's own, the chances it'll work are mega slim, but it's a no-risk, maybe-reward kind of strategy." Tattletale shrugged at him.

"You're right… anyway, I guess we're… still going to 'collaborate' to fuck Coil over?" Gabriel asked while looking in her direction.

She shrugged. "The Midtowners and us got into some scuffles over the last few days. Both us and them are recruiting more people, now, and it's looking like a gang war in the next few weeks. I'm not actually sure how good our odds are, but yeah, I'm going to have to get tricky to fight Coil."

Gabriel sighed wearily and looked at her. "How have you been holding up, all things considered?"

Tattletale didn't offer an answer for a moment, looking distinctly too somber for herself. "I'm kind of miffed about Trainwreck's death, and the last few days definitely weren't fun, logistically speaking, but I've been worse before. Kind of liberating not to have to work for Coil anymore, too."

Gabriel nodded slowly. "I understand. Fully."

"I'm going to be moving safehouses, though," Tattletale explained, gesturing showily at the room. "He knows about our current places. He donated them to us, so we'll need some new spots out in the city. Are you sure you want to go back to the Wards with Coil as the head honcho, by the way? I mean, it's a safe option, definitely - he won't dare touch you in public if you're a Ward, and he'll probably choose to transfer you as quickly as humanly possible, but I could use the firepower to fuck him over."

"I'm sure, Lisa. I don't think it'd be safe to keep me in the team, anyhow," Gabriel admitted.

"Why not?" She blinked, kind of surprised by that.

"A ball of emotion, volatile, etcetera etcetera."

"Doesn't exactly make it better for the Wards," she shot back with the curvature of smugness gracing her lips.

"They have therapists," Gabriel argued in return with a modest shrug.

"I can buy you therapists. You can buy yourself therapists, once you get in on this; the best in the country, even. I'm raking in tens of thousands from rackets alone," she said, kind of ragged by his answer. "And that's in a post-Leviathan economy. Big zeroes are coming, after things stabilize. And I have some ideas to work ourselves into a kind of symbiosis with the local government, and help people out while getting rich simultaneously. When I say help people out, I mean actually help them out. Not… beat up criminals while wearing spandex." She shook her hand left and right dismissively.

Gabriel sighed wearily and took a moment to think. While one part of him wanted to say 'yes' and stick with them, the other was heavily conflicted. He opted to ask a question, instead of giving a straight answer. Two questions, actually. "How would I fit in your plan?"

"For now, I've been sort of assuming you don't," she answered, and changed the way she sat on the couch, putting one leg over the other. "See, I've been… going easy, on you, I guess. Villains; crime, really, is all about making deals. Equivalent exchange. Sure, illegal exchange, but exchange either way. Could we say, in fairness, that I've done you a few favors so far?" She looked at him inquisitively.

"Yeah."

"Right. Normally, you'd owe me back for that," she said, raising a finger to keep him from speaking, "But I'm doing this pro bono, for several reasons."

"Such as?" Gabriel inquired, with curiosity.

"First of all, you… no offense, but you have the inherent understanding of crime and life of a ten-year-old watching Michael Bay movies, then buying a ticket to America, landing, and being disappointed when nothing explodes in the first thirty seconds," she began, smirking. Tattletale proceeded to shrug, kind of put-off. "So I'd feel… well, yeah, I'm not a good person. I'm a decent human being, in the sense that if there was someone on fire in front of me and I had a bucket of water, I'd douse them, right? But I still have some pride, and I don't feel good with stealing candy from babies - or the crime world equivalent of that, which would be suddenly springing the 'you owe me' spiel on you."

Gabriel raised his eyebrows in surprise. "Well, thank you for that."

"Second of all, I was kind of secretly hoping that being sincerely kind to you would result in some sort of reciprocation, where you'd help me rob banks and assassinate political opponents - as friends do," she joked, her smirk widening into a smile. "But really, I was hoping you'd do that - not permanently, for sure, but a chance was better than nothing."

Tattletale raised a finger, clearing her throat. "Reason numero tres is that I honestly think it's in humanity's collective interest to keep you mentally stable for the future. And I'm telling you this, because - again - I think being honest with you is the best approach here. You're a ball of emotions; a ball that's pretty unstable, and is armed with the superpower equivalent of nukes. So, please, don't cleanse humanity in nuclear fire?" she asked lamely.

"Only Nazis," Gabriel joked, laughing from his belly afterwards.

"Fair," she acquiesced.

"That aside, though…" Gabriel started, then breathed in to gather his thoughts. "Two things. One, I need to… ask something to someone. Second; would you be up for another new member? She used to make these… bomb-ass drugs that make you unconditionally happy, with absolutely no side effects."

"My… interest is piqued?" Tattletale raised an awkward brow, looking to the side momentarily, before returning to him.

"I was having a panic attack, and she slammed a syringe of that shit into my arm to calm me down. Just saying, I had visions of the space whales. And they turned out to be real."

"You know, you're really evolving into a seasoned criminal," she quipped in a moment of realization, "Started out with a triple count of manslaughter, followed it up with sexual assault, and now you want to manufacture and distribute illegal narcotics with the use of a parahuman power."

"Tinker narcotics," Gabriel specified with a grin. "But yes."

"If the PRT ever catches us, we're so fucking done for. Fuck it, I'm in - who's your mystery Heisenberg?" She raised her hands in a 'fuck it' way.

"Signal."

"Didn't Accord sell her out to the Yangban? Sorry to burst your bubble, but I don't think that Coil is too invested in returning her anymore," Tattletale told him.

Gabriel's expression turned off. He looked like he genuinely forgot; which he didn't. "Can you bring me a pen, and a sheet of paper?"

Her eyes widened briefly, then promptly narrowed, then closed as she sighed out. "Nah, I think I've got a pretty good idea of what you're talking about."

"What am I talking about?" Gabriel inquired, not moving that much. He knew she already figured out it was Cauldron: after all, he did talk to her about it in the past.

"It was an eulogy to Trainwreck, obviously," she answered with a scoff. "Who else would do hardcore drugs and bring Signal back to us?"

"Yeah. May he rest in peace, for real," Gabriel said, genuinely mournful.

Tattletale stood up from the couch, with a huff. She stretched her arms over her head, as she began to speak, "Anyway, you've got until you heal to decide where you want to go with this. Plenty of nights to think it through and make a choice, before that happens. The path of a villain, or going to Houston. All the same to me - except not really, I want some nukes too - so I'm just gonna go back to handling business. Give me a call if you need anything, like a therapist appointment." With that, Tattletale proceeded to stride out of the room.

"Wait. I really need the paper, though."

"For what?" she asked, stopping halfway to the exit and looking at him.

"The eulogy, of course."

She looked at him blankly, then withdrew a notepad with a pencil within, tossing it to him. "Knock yourself out, widowed wife."

He caught onto it with a grasp of telekinesis and began writing a quick note.

Can she know? It's essential to our cooperation that she's at least somewhat aware of my involvement with you.

-L

After writing the note, he tore out the page he had written on, folded it four times, and put it where the last note was. He closed his eyes for a couple of seconds.

The note was there, and Tattletale was staring at him with a concerned look. "I'm really thinking we should go for that therapist, you know?" she said, with furrowed eyebrows.

Gabriel chuckled and looked at her. "Just… go. I'll see you later."

"I'll need the notepad back," she said, raising a hand and placing the other at her waist with a moderately unimpressed look. He threw the notepad at her telekinetically, and she caught it one-handed, before turning and striding out. Within moments, the only sound left on the TV were the morning news, currently talking about some kind of unidentified disaster in Haverhill; only several kilometers out of Brockton Bay. Loads of missing people; literal dozens, with no corpses or pointers tracing them back to cults or anything of that kind. All of them disappeared practically overnight.

Echidna. The bitch.

Several minutes later, a nurse delivered his breakfast - a nutritional paste that looked like white goo, with black-brown steak and rubbery carrots cut into finger-long sticks.

He looked at the food in mild disgust, but decided to eat anyway. So this is what it feels like to chew 5 Gum? Amazing. If he was still using his hands to cut the steak, it'd be less of a breakfast and more of a replacement for his morning exercise routine - that bitch was harder, drier, and more cracked than Defiant's sense of humor.

As he ate, the news lady from before came back to regale him with more tales of bureaucratic corruption, discussion, and fuckery, "The regional PRT committee has made a decision just before noon today to fire the PRT ENE Director Emily Piggot, on the grounds that the department couldn't thrive under her leadership, as well as under the suspicion of mistreating workers, corruption, accepting bribes from supervillains, and incompetence. She is believed to have caused the latest incident within the city through negligence and-"

"Bullshit!" Gabriel cried over the voice, slamming the tray with telekinetic force.

"-her fault. She is going to leave her station by Friday of this week, and replaced by a man recommended by the regional committee as a competent and honest worker of the department; former consultant Thomas Calvert. This is all on cape news in the New Hampshire area today. Next up, an interview with the local Protectorate leader, Dauntless."

Gabriel laughed out in a prideful, 'I told you so' manner. "I knew it! I fucking knew it! That Thomas cunt really is Coil!"

The TV skipped on to show an interview with Dauntless, out on the street. As with the videos before, the reporters grilled him for information related to the recent incident, but even when shown a picture of himself fighting a naked Laserdream in low resolution, he said it was fabricated or fake, and didn't offer anything else.

Gabriel switched channels, and kept watching TV. Once he got tired of watching TV, he closed his eyes and entered the powerscape.

Four charges, ideally complete. One of them had just finished being woven by the fountain of light, and joined its brothers in the celestial orbit around their shared source. Across the map of powers, Gabriel found that his healing power was - overall - maybe five to ten percent complete, and would regain enough functionality to begin healing his injuries tomorrow or after tomorrow. Maybe late tonight, of he got very lucky.

He decided to send two charges into an empty space, in which he merged the charges together to create a power that let him recall everything perfectly: infallible memory.

Flashes of neuron alterations went through his brain, filling out the inside of his skull with a warm ambience of bio-electricity. Within moments, he found distant moments and ideas, ones that had been scratched by time and clouded by emotion, and he could see them with more precision, but it wasn't on the level of eidetic memory. And the memories of how he got onto Earth Bet or Triggered were lost, as well.

Content with the result, for now, he put the other two charges into a very basic Thinker power, alike Tattletale's, but with an off switch.

His ability struggled for a moment, then created a new power that would allow him to select one object every several minutes to a half an hour and learn a random fact about it, so long as the fact could be traced back to some data related to the object.

"Good enough," Gabriel shrugged and sighed. He turned his attention to where he had put the note intended for Cauldron. It was still lying there, untouched.

I hope you do your stuff soon, because I really need an answer.

He sighed, and looked up at the ceiling, with puckered lips. There was a brewing pressure in his stomach. His belly ached, almost as if desperately rejecting the hospital food. "I'm gonna… need a nurse for this."

Gabriel reached out for the remote to called the nurse, and pressed the blue button in the middle. A ringing noise echoed through the hallway outside of his room. Within moments, the same nurse that gave him the books walked into the room. "Yeah?"

"Hey, uhm, I need to… go to the bathroom," he said, kind of embarrassed about the request. Never in his life he thought he'd need help to take a shit.

"Oh, let me get the wheelchair," she said, quickly popping out of the room. Moments later, she returned with the full thing, pulling up next to the bed. She looked at him gingerly, reaching out, "Do you need help getting up? I was told you have superpowers, but I don't know exactly what, uh, the… case here is."

"I'll try on my own, if I can't, I'll ask," he replied with a tender smile.

He slowly sat up, aiding himself with telekinesis. As his spine began to grow more and more perpendicular to gravity, he felt the heavy sagging of his shattered bones all across the body, pressing against the flesh - the entire framework of his body, broken like an ancient vase. With ginger care, he picked his legs up and pushed them over the edge in gradual, slow movements, taking twenty seconds just to sit at the side of the bed. It took another half a minute to do a sort of stand-up and sit down in the wheelchair. He sunk into it, with a pained grimace - the experience wasn't excruciating, but it was deep, blunt. Uncomfortable and unavoidable in a way that he'd have never imagined.

His new memory power didn't help, forcing him to recall all those times Miss Militia went with him to a hospital and warned him to be more careful in combat. Back then, he thought it was ridiculous that the Wards had to be kept back from active combat like that – now, he could kind of see the point of those restrictions. Ow, the spine!

The nurse helped him get to the bathroom - a communal bathroom that was a part of Tattletale's warehouse - and then drove him into a stall, and decided to leave the bathroom, telling him to holler if he needed her.

Ironically - he didn't, really. If he wanted to, it was perfectly fine to get back in the wheelchair and use telekinesis to propel it to car-speed. He could literally race around in the damn thing, and no one barring Movers like Chariot, Dauntless, or Assault would be fast enough to stop him.

He sat on the toilet and, as soon as his exhaust poured out smoke and flames, he began to think.

Gabriel was still conflicted. Broken, split in half between two absolutely opposite sides of different coins.

Sticking to his current path, and kicking it with the Undersiders, thusly becoming an official supervillain, to lead this life of crime and absolute freedom, with people he genuinely grew attached to?

Or go back to the PRT, an institution that will keep him safe and fed with resources, so that he can return to his old path; the path of a hero, yet a violent and ruthless one, who isn't really fit for the job description?

His memory power, or maybe just his brain - the lines seemed blurred, already - made him recall what Jack Slash said about his identity; he wasn't a hero, and would never be. He was a villain, at heart, 'doing the wrong things for the right reasons.' It felt half-mocking, and half-genuine, when he said that: a philosophical serial killer, spouting drivel at him, but trying to be semi-sincere about his conclusions.

He may have been the worst person in the world, but to an extent, he was right. Gabriel wasn't a hero: he hoped he could be, but the professional hero life does not make an actual hero. A hero is someone who helps people, no matter what and no matter how.

A professional hero is simply a celebrity with the authority to make arrests. No more, no less. A villain was something else entirely, covering a wide spectrum: costumed criminals, serial killers, or whatever the Undersiders counted as. Probably the former.

A loud, wet fart came out of his ass.

I'll stay with the Undersiders.

57

Birdsie

Dec 14, 2019

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Threadmarks Compos Mentis 13.4

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Birdsie

Birdsie

Sharp Talons Cleave The Worthy

Dec 14, 2019

#4,547

After returning to his bed, Gabriel decided to spend some time on the internet. More specifically, on PHO. The nurse provided him with a cheap laptop to use to browse the internet, and he was forced to use telekinesis to interact with it.

His Centurion account had been locked, blocked, banned, its 'Wards ENE' stamp removed, and maybe a dozen and a half other things. There were death threats in the locked comments section under the profile. Death threats and critique, about how shit of a hero he was, and how he deserved to get burned on the stake. At least a dozen people listed out things he'd personally done to hurt, maim, or otherwise attack them.

Obviously, he'd need a new account. Or else, he could just do anonymous browsing. He opted for the latter; anonymous browsing never hurt anyone.

There were thirty-eight new threads created in the last twelve hours alone, and a good half of them were speculation and rumors, regarding Eidolon, and the clandestine Protectorate operation carried out overnight in the days ago.

One of the posters cited seeing an 'insane man in white armor, wielding a pair of kitchen knives flex-taped to his wrists,' that looked eerily similar to Mannequin. One of the posters theorized Cherish used her power on a civilian and the Nine tortured him until he thought he was Mannequin himself. He also had a group of drones, going around and building some kind of 'pylon' in the street, until a PRT van drove up, with four troopers all but tackling him to the ground, lifting him by the shoulders, then carrying him into the van and foaming him while he struggled. They took the drones, cordoned off the street, and then took down the pylon, too. There were videos and photos of this.

"I wonder…" Gabriel whispered to himself, suddenly becoming curious on whether he'd find his new identity – Longinus – on PHO. He looked that very name up.

Two related threads came up, one of them announcing a new member of the Undersiders. One of the users posting there posted the video of when Longinus floated down and talked with the national guard, and introduced himself. Several users pointed out he was weirdly similar to Centurion, and this led to wild speculation that they were brothers, cousins, or something, which then spiralled down into epic discussion about what Eidolon's family looked like. The other thread was an image and video dump of related material, with at least eighty-two links and counting; the last one added to the pile two days ago, and showing a brief flash of him carrying Tattletale in the sky, so small against the backdrop of the picture that he looked like a glowing, golden ant, carrying a smaller, golden ant.

He looked into the other links, more and more curious. A bunch of candid pictures snapped from the sides, and videos recorded of him flying by. Nothing revealing, incriminating, or even particularly unique. There were videos of his fight with Legend – or rather, its conclusion – and Imp was visible in a lot of these videos, shown to be stabbing two people to distract Legend. A lot of flak, negative comments and opinions, a lot of 'fuck those motherfuckers' type comments half of which got citations from the mods, and one of the videos showed the person recording calling to Legend and telling him that Imp was responsible. It seemed her power didn't work on cameras.

"Well, crap," Gabriel cursed and sighed, closing the laptop and putting it on his desk. He noticed his body wasn't as sore as it was before; he closed his eyes and entered his powerscape, to check on his Radiant Phoenix.

The healing power was nowhere near the completion of its repairs. Not even near. He sighed wearily and kept his eyes closed. Instead, he began contemplating his last two months of life on Earth Bet. More specifically? His mistakes.

Where did he go wrong?

One of the first things was certainly his lack of creativity in using his power. That's not something easily fixable, but he'd try to work on that as much as possible.

The second was easily his lack of forethought and tactical planning. He constantly made decisions on the spot, without really thinking about what he was doing, and only realizing his mistake after it was done. The fact that he ran headfirst into danger basically most of the time, and retreated only when he was beaten was the main reason he had been hospitalized so often in the past. Armsmaster's classes were useful and did in fact serve their purpose for a good while, but his abrupt nature kept getting in the way.

Coming in third position was his lack of social awareness. Awkward, abrasive and probably socially inept because of many issues tracing back to his childhood, and probably Borderline Disorder. That's something he'd need need to work on with a proper therapist, but there's not many therapists who can properly help a parahuman.

Numero quattro was his emotional volatility. Not something he could control, at all, but it's something that constantly fucked up with his life. He'd whine constantly, get angry over the smallest things and fall into a downward spiral of despair as soon as some downtime came about. And this wasn't considering anxiety, depression and PTSD.

Fifth point was literally the fact that he constantly forgot things. Even yesterday, he forgot he was telekinetic for a couple of seconds. It could easily be attributed to some combination of brain damage and pain medication. But that was easily fixed no more than an hour ago: he made a power that, if properly developed, could lead to a perfect, infallible memory, which in turn meant increased intelligence. Read tens of books on all sorts of subjects, and inherently understand their contents, and thus learn that way? Good idea. He wrote that down in a mind note.

And all these things, combined, made him… a flawed human being. Too flawed. Dangerously flawed. He desperately needed to work on those things. His major fuckups were only that; his own fault. And he hated himself for that; but why not turn that energy, that fire, that burning gasoline into something productive?

He shrugged to himself. He couldn't really do anything right now, but as soon as he was back on track, he'd get to work. Gabriel closed his eyes, to take a quick power-nap.

When he woke up, it was over three hours later – at five PM. The nurse came by to give him food and water and some medication. As he was busy watching TV…

A click, as reality bent within his heart. A pulse of wretched heat spread through his veins like mercury, filling out every nook in his body, and making him shiver at the heat that was paradoxically cold. A quick peer inwards revealed his healing power… was struggling to repair itself, again. The charges he'd put up to the task earlier managed to refurbish a nearly fifteen-percent slice inwards, reaching to the rim of the power's core, before they melded into the power and failed to extend their filaments to the larger network - probably because it was dead - and resulting in something that probably counted as a borderline Case 53 power, but not quite that in itself. It gave him improper feedback on what it could do – beyond the fact that it was healing and fire, he knew basically nothing about it.

Gabriel reopened his eyes and sighed heavily, returning to gazing the television.

The creeping chill of some ghastly, mercury-silver-white liquid-yet-combusting-gas moving through his limbs, reaching their ends, then fading out of existence kept going through him. The feedback was uncomfortable and distracting, but he could probably deal with it for now. Not much worse than the pain he'd already been forced to feel, and as far as pain went, it actually helped a little in that department.

"Fuck me and everything I stand for," he cursed at himself, trying to shake the creeping feeling away, but to no avail.

He thought he saw a flash of something in his vision. A hallucination or trick of the light, passing by so quickly that he didn't really make any physical note of it - which should be rather difficult given his recently-obtained propensity for remembering things in great detail. It was dark silver, with a black background, like a will-o'-wisp in the center of his sight.

Gabriel froze momentarily. His thoughts immediately snapped to his recollections of his cloned counterpart, but it couldn't have been the case. He redirected his gaze to where the note to Cauldron had been put down, and… it was still there, untouched, and covered in a thin layer of shadowy dust that accumulated on furniture and objects that remained stationary for too long.

He picked up the note and re-read it. Maybe they just wrote on it, to answer his question? There was nothing new, except the dust that scattered into the air and subsequently the floor, when he picked up the paper. A sigh escaped his mouth. He put the note back down where it belonged, and closed his eyes to gaze into his powerscape: maybe the hallucination originated from there.

His power was agitated. Not flashing emotions or anything, but agitated. There was movement everywhere. Everything that could vibrate or move was vibrating or moving, or both. Even the one charge he had seemed to be orbiting the fountain with a faster velocity. He noticed the Radiant Phoenix power, and there was a faint scar of the cut that Centurion managed to sneak on it. The scar kept releasing some kind of glowing, silver lightning into the healing power, reaching into the core, and the core sent the silver to the fountain with a thin wire of information.

He saw visions again. A very faint recollection that was his, but wasn't his, where he combined a power he didn't have. Another faint vision, of stabbing Longinus in the stomach. He remembered knocking on Greg Veder's door, but it felt like it had happened dozens of years ago. Like he was two-years-old back then, and he was in his third century right now. The memories were dusty, unfinished, lacking key elements: they felt like surreal hallucinations, rather than actual visions.

The scar kept leaking the silver energy, rather dangerously, filling out the nearest charges in the healing power with its bleak, pale, alabaster radiance. It couldn't even be called radiance. The energy seemed to be sentiently desolate.

Gabriel reached out with his awareness to the scar, inspecting it thoroughly. Through it, he found a vent that led to a realm of pure and endless darkness, with a single, long, tunnel stretching through. He could maybe follow this tunnel, but it carried the obvious risks that he'd be leaving behind his own powerscape. Or at least, it felt that way.

He tried to look forward into the tunnel, without actually entering it.

There was a dim silver light at the end, white and pure, burning away the darkness. But he didn't see anything except that. He shook his head and tried to close the hole itself, but didn't know how to. It was kind of like trying to move the sun, by picking it up with one's fingers and then subsequently realizing that's not how depth perception works.

Gabriel groaned in frustration and turned to his own fountain. Help me? Like you did with the corrupted charge? No response.

"Agh, fuck!" he yelled out in frustration, squeezing his fists and curling up his toes. Everything cracked within them, releasing vibes of pain, which felt almost detached from him. Like he was standing two steps off to the side, and the pain was taking place, but in some remote spot in the Bahamas, while he was in Florida. "Fuck, fuck, fuck! Why is it always like this?!"

He groaned again and let himself lay down in the bed, his chest heaving up and down. He was pissed, because things fucked themselves up even when it wasn't directly his fault. It's like the fucking universe hated him, and it poised itself to specifically make his life a living hell.

Going into the scar would be a bad choice. It probably led to Centurion's powerscape, and he'd certainly notice his intrusion, and possibly fuck with him even more. He didn't want that, and since the scar wasn't doing anything caustic yet, except existing, he left it alone.

Another flash of a memory, or a vision of an event. Him, wielding a roiling black sword outlined in black, stabbing it into something's chest, watching them standing and clutching the length of the energy blade with their hands, causing them to seize and burn, only to slump in death seconds later. He recognized the person in the vision, dimly. From loose associations; the monstrous form reminded him of Haunt.

The person moved back, and reality seemed to alter around them, as Haunt returned to his ordinary, non-Breaker form. clutching a chest wound as he fell to the ground.

He was focusing on the visions, now. Trying to actively channel them, using up nearly the full spectrum of his concentration just to catch bursts of glimpses, images. So life-like, yet distant.

Gabriel decided to intervene. He had to help Haunt, in any way possible. He reached into the scar and threw himself towards the light at the end of the tunnel. After what felt like eons of travel through darkness, he emerged in some kind of vacuous space, only to enter another tunnel within the same system, leading him to a faint hole - a pinprick, really, which allowed him to invade the other host's realm.

He saw a powerscape, almost identical to his own, barring that Centurion never got rid of his Psyche Tinker power. He also had another Tinker power, independent of the Psyche one, that specialized in power armor and power armor accessories. There was a power that allowed him to teleport long distances, with a delay between initiating the teleportation and arrival, as well as a power that altered his muscle and skeleton density, without altering weight significantly; kind of like the Captain America super-soldier serum taken to a peak limit, which included a side effect of killing fatigue toxins and rejuvenating the body - Centurion only needed three, maybe four hours of sleep to be fully rested.

There were also several ongoing constructs, constantly being projected.

A construct plate inside his skull, attached to the brain, based on a design from the Psyche Tinker, which scrambled Thinker powers trying to read his emotions to a minor extent, but mostly specialized in nullifying Master powers; it also had the side-effect of a very minor, overall mental processing boost.

The other construct was his armor, or rather, power armor. Construct servos and mechanisms, to add more strength and durability to someone who could already lift cars with muscles alone, without accounting in telekinesis or the ability to enter an adrenaline rush and get the ligaments of the body to tear in half without consequences, given they'd heal minutes later.

Almost on instinct, Gabriel turned his vision to Centurion's fountain, where twelve charges floated in a lazy pattern. He could feel Centurion's consciousness behind the fountain; he could probably poke it, in some ways. It didn't seem like Centurion had noticed his forced entry yet.

In the background, Haunt used his power to transform into an almost Lovecraftian-looking horror, promptly using a mass of at least fifty tentacles to whip at Centurion's armor effortlessly, as he began to writhe away in the opposite direction.

The first thing Gabriel decided to do was attempt to disrupt the environmental shield power by cutting the connections between the main charge and the border charges. He threw his awareness, imagining a sharp blade cutting through the filaments that made up the web of connections

Something budged within the charges, and in reality, Centurion's forcefield and constructs briefly flickered on and off in surprise, allowing a tentacle to slap him in his face. He was quite literally naked under the constructs, not wearing any sort of clothing or armor. The tentacle had enough force to send him to the ground, where he grasped his head, seemingly in a headache, and did a double-take. He focused, then his constructs and shield went back on, and he flew into the air and redoubled his efforts in killing Haunt; Centurion noticed Jack watching in the background, curiously, but not doing anything to help.

It was kind of funny. For all his smarts, he didn't even realize he was being fucked with yet, or how. Jack probably did, on some subconscious level, with his shard and all.

Gabriel did the same thing to his telekinesis, to disrupt his flight and make him tumble to the ground like a fucking buffoon.

The power flickered on, and several of the thinner filaments were cut away, the nearest charges expressing confusion, before attempting to reconnect. Centurion swayed wildly in the air, then went down and landed, and went inwards.

Gabriel felt his entire consciousness rocking backward as if someone hit his mind with a baseball bat. He retaliated almost instantly, hitting back with double the force. It clearly wasn't effective enough, because another mental slap came half-a-second later, at triple the force, brimming with boiling rage, indignity, anger, and a thousand other subtle emotional cues as an undercurrent, all of them boiling.

He sent a psychic kick at Centurion's mind, trying to take a note out of Centurion's book and filling it with anger and boiling, determined fury. It wasn't effective enough, ostensibly because the emotions were without reason or cause, with no why. Directionless, they stumbled against Centurion and seemed to crash against some mental barrier he'd put up - probably made of concentrated thoughts - doing nothing except annoying him.

He felt Centurion's consciousness leave, moving behind him, and through the crack that connected their powerscapes.

Gabriel followed after him and, within seconds, found himself inside of his own powerscape. Centurion was already there, having widened the cracked scar in the healing power. There was a vague sensation of a scoff, as he noted that Gabriel only had one charge. It was kind of annoying, to instinctively know the reason for it, and shocking to feel the subsequent punch to the single one-third complete charge already in there. The charge tumbled outwards into space, and began to mutate and grow, undulating, expanding, then compressing, like an atom that didn't know whether it should go for fission or for fusion today.

Gabriel tossed the un-made charge back into the fountain, but found himself struggling, as Centurion stubbornly pushed against it to keep it from being stabilized. It felt almost asinine for a moment. Like he was a kindergartener, fighting against another kindergartener because one of them took the other's crayons.

He mentally reached out for the one-third-made charge and lobbed it with violence and anger – the asshole put him in a hospital bed and broke every inch of his body – at Centurion's consciousness.

Centurion's emotions were blank for a perfect second, then went into something aptly described as, 'oh, fuck, that was my powerscape,' and a sensation of him fleeing in shock to catch it before it wormed its way into anything critical.

Gabriel's awareness scoffed. There was a vague sense of a threat in this message, almost as if he was saying 'close the scar, or this won't stop.'

A brief return, as Centurion came back, and defiantly widened the scar. Gabriel felt his healing power ripping at the seams, and tearing into two sides. Gabriel kicked the asshole out with a flashing stab of minor angers and irritations, pushing him back into his powerscape and getting a glance of his powerscape - his power armor ability from the Cauldron vial seemed to have mutated to something utterly vile and only capable of making ten-story junk-mechsuits that were only movable by using rocket attachments. Centurion put a quarantine around it, and started to work the shafts and levers on fixing it.

Gabriel felt a flash of irritation, and then made a firm decision to throw a half-finished charge across every single day, because Centurion fucking deserved it. See how he liked it when someone fucked up his day.

After that, he took something from Centurion's book, again, and created a giant, psychic wall of concentrated thought into the hole made by the scar, to prevent him from entering, or at least making him aware of his intrusion the moment he attempted it. His fountain helped, extending a series of tendrils and using them to make an actual barrier, red-colored, in the spot he outlined. It seemed to be trying to sew the scar shut.

Gabriel instructed the fountain to sap energy from Centurion's fountain; even out the playing field, so they'd both return to their normal output. It adamantly refused, with a flash of red and purple.

He sighed and ordered the fountain to reinforce the barrier as much as it could. It pinged green at him, then extended a braided mass of filaments, more than naked consciousness could comprehend, beginning to layer them onto the scar like some insane construction worker trying to slot in one-thousand concrete blocks into a one-centimeter hole in the locker room the boys made to peep on the girls' locker room. Within moments, the vaguely circular powerscape became a half-circle, as half was occupied by a massive, venerable Chinese wall of defense, the other having powers and the fountain itself.

Curiously, Gabriel realized he'd never been aware the powerscape had… limited space. It was painfully obvious, now. Another thing he noticed was that at least two-thirds of the background were colorful blobs, some of them overlaying. Red, green, blue, yellow, magenta, and cyan colored circles of varying sizes.

As the last order, he informed the fountain to focus on fixing the healing power. It was the utmost priority, as of right now. It seemed momentarily confused, then moved to follow the order, picking up the two halves of the power and trying to stick them together to no effect. A wave of orange ran through the entire powerscape, then another, and two more in quick succession.

Filaments extended from the two halves of the core, forming two separate powers. One of them could make birds that, on a molecular level were made out of combusting oxygen, but on a holistic level acted as actual organisms that required nutrition and care - and were capable of accelerating to the speed of sound to splatter against someone and explode in roaring flames.

The other half of the power was a golden liquid that negated pain, injury, and disease, but couldn't be deployed outside the body. It was also less effective than the original power, and couldn't help with broken bones, but excelled in healing neural damage, brain damage, and nerve damage of all kinds.

The fountain flashed red, as if speaking to itself: 'wrong, wrong, wrong!' It proceeded to tear the filaments in half, before trying again, and again, and again. The stark amount of broken charges didn't seem to help. It also didn't seem to get the fact that the two powers were supposed to be one.

Gabriel stopped the fountain. He gave it a new directive, 'Generate charges to fix the broken ones in the powers, then put them back together. For now, keep the powers separated.'

It seemed briefly confused, not understanding the command. A wave of orange went over his awareness.

Bonesaw was right - they were retarded.

Gabriel sighed deeply, and tried to quarantine the two powers in a stasis field like he'd done before with the one that mutated. Nothing happened, as his shard attempted new combinations of filaments. The powers kept shifting constantly, drawing on elements they'd already had stored - but there was always something broken, some breached element from the cracked charges, that couldn't exactly be repaired.

In that moment, the fountain interrupted itself with a spark of red. Annoyance seemed to seep into the powerscape, as it extended a single, writhing tendril and tore through the crescent of protective walling it had set up only a minute earlier. It snaked between the tiny slits he couldn't perceive, deftly, almost like a spider moving through a web, only to compress everything there and then smash it into the scar, filling it out like a crack in the concrete being filled out with a different, cheaper brand of concrete that didn't dry in even a tenth of the time.

Then it pushed the walling through to the other side, into the dark void, creating an empty space.

What the fuck is it doing?! Gabriel panicked for a moment, looking through the opening to see what was going on on the other side. A great snaking tendril was heading in the way of its powerscape, a twin or cousin to his own. He noticed Centurion's entire awareness going basically 'what the fuck, why' as it left through his own scar and came to go between them. The two lines of data-webbing met in the center, and stuck to each other, tying a knot.

Confusion filled out Gabriel's mind. He was just as confused as Centurion was. Were their powers… communicating, or collaborating? Hell, what the fuck was going on?!

Then, the cords seemed to pull themselves taut, as if trying to force the two powerscapes to merge forcefully. Like two cars, hooking and trying to back up into each other until all of the junk within merged, no matter how colossally broken the result would be.

Gabriel reached out, trying to snap his own tendril in half, to prevent the disastrous result. On the other end, he noticed a panicked Centurion doing much the same, trying to tug on his cord with as much force as possible. It was almost comical - like two dog owners that hated one another trying to prevent their pets from fucking, he realized.

A spark of shocking pain jumped through Gabriel's body, from head to toe. For a moment, his environmental shield flickered to life, but it was silver-black, with white motes within it. He noticed that his chest muscles had briefly swelled to bulky levels, as if pumped full of air and meat, before going back down as someone sucked the gasoline out of them.

Gabriel screamed through the scar an emotion, a feeling of hurry and dread. As much as he hated him, if both of them wanted to come out of this unscathed, Centurion would have to close the scar.

The powerscapes grinded against one another, like two massive crystals. The outer rims holding them together seemed to flake off, spreading crystalline dust throughout the void of nonexistence – of which Gabriel just became dreadfully aware of to a small extent. Amounts of energy comparable to a supernova were being spent to adjust, calculate, and trace an ideal system for merging the powerscapes together – even then, the seed of the trajectory itself was bad, so the result would be catastrophic. All of this effort, just to fix one teensy superpowered ability!? Well, the damn power was trying to help like he asked it to and oh god Gabriel realized these weren't his thoughts.

Gabriel immediately turned to his fountain, and instructed it to stop every single effort to fix the powers.

It didn't listen or react. It was helping.

In that moment, his body bristled with free-flowing energy, as every muscle seemed to tighten into a steel wire. He could calculate the density of every ligament, at roughly six-point-seven-seven the times of a human body's compactness and only a quarter higher in weight.

The cords seemed to stop, as a new solution was noticed!

They both pulled inward into Centurion's powerscape, and yanked his healing power out, before placing it between the two powerscapes in the middle of the void and connecting to it to both of them – kind of like two Siamese twins sharing a single kidney between them, in the spot their bodies were welded together.

Gabriel's muscles sagged, losing the benefit of Centurion's vial-derived brute power, as he felt his bones gradually crackling with dead flames - not even a quarter as effective as his previous healing power, but still working.

Centurion's 'what the fuck' response was literally palpable, and the use of the word 'literally' wasn't an exaggeration in this situation.

His own response to what happened just now was identical to Centurion's, but with an addition. A loud, clear and palpable 'what the fuck, I didn't do it on purpose.'

Centurion's emotions brimmed with anger, as he conveyed a sense of greed and yearning. A sliver of indignity and loss completed the message. 'That's mine, asshole!'

Gabriel defended himself, psychically crossing his arms and trying to project the image of a wound. 'Close the scar, and let's be done with it!

'I can't close it you dumb bitch do I look like a fucking medic I will fucking kill and murder you and everyone you care about you fucking bitch oh god I hate you so fucking much I will kill accord and then I will kill signal and weaver and fucking clockblocker that damn fucking asshole dick goddamn I hate all of you I will burn this whole fucking rotted planet I swear to god I will fucking RUIN YOU YOU LITTLE BITCH oh god I will, I swear right now and here that I WILL FUCKING TEAR YOUR KIDNEYS OUT AND USE THEM AS A MOISTURIZER YOU STUPID. IDIOTIC. FOOL. I WILL DESTROY YOU. YOU HEAR ME? CAN YOU UNDERSTAND THIS MESSAGE? SEND ME BACK A CONFIRMATION YOU FUCKER YOU FUCKING FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK' was the set of words that best described Centurion's emotional reaction.

As it went on, the message became less strangled and more refined, easier to understand. Less emotion, more telepathy. Like a link of consciousness between them, using their shard as the liaison for communication. Emotions were an underlying component; it wasn't speech they were using to communicate, but concepts. Gabriel tried to project an idea, across the link, to get it across. Calmer, unperturbed, and unaffected by turmoil:

'Why don't we fucking collaborate, if we want to get out of this fucking mess?'

'FUCK YOU FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCKING BITCH MOTHERFUCKING BITCH LITTLE HERO-ASS LOOKING BITCHFUCKER BITCHFUCKING COONFUCKER BITCH, I WILL OPEN YOUR EYES JUST LIKE GENOSCYTHE AND THEN NUKE THE WHOLE CITY YOU DUMB, APPALLING CRETINISH APE-MAN. I WILL FUCKING BURN YOU BITCH FUCKING MOTHERFUCKER FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK. IT'S MY HEALING POWER. MY HEALING POWER. MY MY MY MY MY MY HEALING POWER AND NOT YOURS, IT BELONGS TO ME, I WAS BORN WITH IT, AND I HAD IT SINCE MY EXISTENCE BEGAN, AND YOU DIDN'T YOU HAD YOUR OWN GO FUCKING TAKE CARE OF YOUR OWN HEALING POWER YOU DUMB MOTHERFUCKER THAT ONE IS MINE, FUCK, FUCK I EARNED IT, FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU FUCK, IT'S MY POWER, I EARNED IT AND FUCK YOU, I WILL FUCKING MURDER YOU AND TAKE IT ALL BACK AND HAVE ALL THE POWERS AND THEN DESTROY YOU AFTER I'VE KILLED YOU AND EVERYONE YOU LOVE.'

'I would really like to give it back, but I have no idea how.'

'FUCKING BITCH BITCH BITCH FUCK FUCK FUCK I AM SO ANGRY RIGHT NOW, I WILL GO AND KILL SOMEONE BECAUSE OF THIS. I HOPE YOU REALIZE YOU'VE JUST CAUSED AN ENTIRE FAMILY'S DEATH YOU MOTHERFUCKER. NO SCRATCH THAT ELEVEN THOUSAND FAMILIES I WILL KILL ELEVEN THOUSAND FAMILIES IN YOUR NAME BITCH, HOW DOES THAT SOUND? HUH HUH HUH HUH HUUUUH? DO YOU LIKE THE IDEA MOTHERFUCKER? I WILL EVEN WRITE 'TO LONGINUS' ON THEIR FOREHEADS AND GET BONESAW TO DO SOMETHING NEAT WITH THEIR ARMS REPLACE THOSE MOTHERFUCKERS FOR CHAINSAWS AND REPLACE THEIR GODDAMN LEGS WITH SHOTGUNS WHILE I'M AT IT AND THEN I'LL SET THIS ARMY OF ELEVEN THOUSAND MOTHERFUCKING ZOMBIE FAMILIES ON BROCKTON BAY, BESIEGE THE MOTHERFUCKER, AND THEN DESTROY EVERYTHING YOU CARE ABOUT - HOW DO YOU LIKE THAT?'

'What do you want to calm down?'

'five hundred charges and its a deal.' Centurion calmed down instantly. It seems like he was obsessed with trying to improve his power as well.

'I don't have them, Centurion.'

'it's called… I'm sure they have a name for it. you will give me the charges in the future, bitch. like, the opposite of a down-payment.'

'I'd need 125 days of spending no-charges to pay that. You do realize I need to use my power as well, correct?'

'sounds fair to me for not besieging brockton bay with zombies.' A short pause, pregnant. 'OR DO YOU WANT THE ZOMBIES, MOTHERFUCKER? CAUSE I CAN BRING THE ZOMBIES TO YOU. GOD I HATE YOU SO MUCH AND GOD THIS METHOD OF EMOTION BASED COMMUNICATION IS SO FUCKING STUPID IT CAN'T EVEN CAPTURE MY ANGER RIGHT I AM INDIGNANT ABOUT IT AND FUCK YOU FOR MAKING ME INDIGNANT ABOUT IT, THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT. YOU'RE THE FAULT OF EVERYTHING BAD IN MY LIFE, AND I WILL KILL YOU BECAUSE OF IT.'

'I don't want the zombies, but I can't pay that either. What else would you want?'

'GO FUCK YOURSELF.'

'I can do that right now, if you so wish. You'll have to watch the emotions, though.'

'I FUCKING HATE YOU. I WILL KILL WEAVER THE FIRST CHANCE I GET, I HATE HER TOO, TO BE HONEST. FUCK YOU. I HATE EVERYTHING YOU STAND FOR. I EXIST ONLY TO DESTROY YOU.'

'Why do you hate everything I stand for?'

'BECAUSE I FUCKING HATE YOU, BITCH.'

'Why is that?'

'BECAUSE YOU'RE NOT ME, FUCK YOU. YOU DISGUST ME. FUCK OFF. I'M GOING TO GO BURN A FUCKING BUILDING TO BLOW THIS STRESS OFF. DO YOU WANT TO SEE A DEAD BODY, BITCH?'

'I've seen many, to be honest.'

Centurion didn't grace that with a response. Moments later, whatever empathic link joined the two of them seemed to transfer the image of a silver-black sphere being lobbed at a hospital. It went through a window, stopped moving halfway in, and then exploded, tearing out a good chunk of the third floor and destroying it. Down on the street, Noelle was staring in astonishment, with Jack, Bonesaw, Crawler, Siberian, and several clones clad in black-white armor doing the same. Centurion didn't react, raising a hand and firing two more balls through different floors of the hospital, before nodding with grim satisfaction and moving down to join the rest of the Nine.

Longinus couldn't speak, and even if he did, Centurion had already cut the link between them.

51

Birdsie

Dec 14, 2019

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Threadmarks Compos Mentis 13.5

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Birdsie

Birdsie

Sharp Talons Cleave The Worthy

Dec 15, 2019

#4,590

He'd just caused the deaths of several people, by pissing off the chaotic evil version of himself by attempting to give it psychic therapy.

"Fuck me," Gabriel cursed at himself. He turned his awareness to his own powerscape, to see the progress on his healing power, which the fountain was scooping up into a metaphorical bucket like pieces of broken glass, content to use the Siamese kidney for Gabriel's self-regenerative needs.

Gabriel resolved himself that, as soon as he was healed, he'd push the healing power over to Centurion's side so he would stop throwing his damn temper tantrum.

If I was anything like this with Director Piggot, I fully understand why she was so stressed all the time.

He massaged his temples, trying to push away the stress. Meanwhile, he took notice of his body, and how it was gradually improving. He wasn't healed; not even near, but he could make out the fractures in his bones with near-crystal clearness, due to the powered feedback from the flame sitting within them. Despite that, it'd take a good while before even his internal hemorrhaging and bruises were healed. Maybe a day or two, until he was healed.

His power deposited the cracked healing power above the fountain, then connected a thin membrane, suppositionally over the charges. Some kind of repair caul or station, or his power's equivalent of those ideas. It stopped producing charges, redirecting its energy towards scrapping and replacing ruined data with new information that wasn't corrupted.

That was literally what he'd asked it to do originally. The whole 'shared super-organ' thing was unnecessary! Fuck the damn power. Fuck shards. What the fuck? He was so fucking frustrated; angry beyond imagination, at what happened and at what that motherfucking prick did to that hospital. Fuck, fuck, fuck!

Fuck! Fuck him, and everything he stands for!

Now he was stuck with one charge, until his power repaired the regeneration ability.

I could really use Cauldron's help, right about now. God, how I could use their help.

Assuming that Cauldron had actual telepaths capable of reading thoughts, they seemed to be ignoring his pleas because no case of handy dead alien vials appeared near his hospital bed in that moment.

Welcome to Earth Bet. With every major victory, comes a bigger fuck-up. Would you like fries or a coca-cola deluxe with that? God, talking to mys– not really weird, since I did just that for the last fifteen minutes.

He shifted position in the bed, feeling the bones crackle with embers nested in the fracture lines, and the joints popping at every movement as he set himself on his side. He sighed with enormous relief as finally his body rested in a different position, almost a whole week of physical stress and tension leaving his torso, shoulders, and limbs within seconds and filling him out with what seemed to be a white cloud of warm yet inexplicably cool comfort.

Too bad several people had to die for this. Fuck, fuck I hate myself. I hate Centurion and myself.

He cried himself to sleep that night.

June 16th, 2011

Starting at eight AM, Regent and Imp had come by to harass him, or as they worded it, 'visit' him. "Heeey, buddy, Tits told us to check on you," Regent said by the way of greeting, as he extended a white-red striped packet full of creamy specks. "Popcorn?"

"Oh, no thanks," Gabriel responded, sitting up slowly, helping himself with his arms. Out of the blue, he realized this motion came easier, and with less pain. God, how he missed having his regenerative power. Too bad he'd have to abandon it forever, to calm Centurion's nerves.

"It's got butter," Imp said, grabbing a fistful and eating with her mask raised slightly. She crunched on the mass of popped corns, as she added, "And salt."

"I don't like popcorn," Gabriel responded with a shrug

"Lame," Regent said, sitting down in a chair.

"I prefer feminist tears," Gabriel responded, reaching for a cup of water, from which he took a sip. He tipped the cup in Alec's direction jubilantly.

"That's even saltier," Regent answered with a smirk. He tossed three popcorns in his mouth and chewed on them for a moment. "I hope you're feeling better today, because Tits said we're moving bases. Calvert is Coil, and Calvert is gonna fuck us over pretty fast with his precognition. We're gonna be fighting the losing game until we can pop him, and we apparently are." As he said 'pop' him, Regent took a single popcorn and demonstratively squeezed it into a mush, before throwing the result into his mouth.

"I am feeling good enough to move comfortably, but I can't fight," Gabriel responded, frowning slightly. He desperately begged for the healing power to fix itself more quickly, so that he could be in a state to fight.

"So you're staying with us on the team?" Aisha said, but made it sound like a question. She reclined next to Alec, reaching into the popcorn pack and withdrawing a fistful which she chummed on as she waited for Gabriel's reply.

Gabriel turned towards her and nodded slowly. "Yeah, I am. Heroes are gay, after all, right?"

"Damn it," Alec cussed, giving the popcorn to Imp, then reaching into his pockets and pulling out a fat wad of dollars that had to be at least 1000, if not more. He handed it over to the gleeful Imp, with a bitter, "Here."

"Did you two have a fucking bet?!" Gabriel asked in disbelief and shock.

Aisha grinned impishly. "Yeah. Only thing is, I'm cute enough that Tattletale would tell me her guess. That's how you win, biiitch!" She smacked Alec on the side of the arm, and he looked pissed for a moment, then grinned back at her and took the popcorn, raising it high enough she couldn't reach it. "Hey!"

Ah, the sexual tension. Just go in a room and smash already. You're roughly the same age, anyway.

"We're here for security," Aisha said, looking at Gabriel with her face, but staring at the popcorn with her eyes and a sense of challenge. "In case the PRT decides to raid this safehouse, so we can get you out before one of Calvert's fuckers shoots–you!" Mid-statement, she leaped and tried to take the popcorn, but failed as Alec made her left ankle twist at the right moment, causing her to trip on the floor with a grunt. He laughed at her.

Gabriel grinned and telekinetically slapped the popcorn out of Alec's hand, making it fall right in Imp's grasp. "Victory is ours."

"Hey, dickwad! I bought that!" Alec accused.

"It's mine now." Aisha took a handful out, still lying on the floor, then tossed the popcorns in her mouth and pressed her teeth, releasing a crunchy sound that wilted Alec's soul within seconds. She grinned brightly, showing off the bits and pieces on her teeth with a teasing quality.

Popping and cracking noises echoed through the room, as Gabriel's healing power adjusted his joints and vertebrae, sending waves of pleasure and warm relief throughout his body. "Aaah…"

Alec was sulking in his seat, one arm holding up his chin, expression unreadable but not pleased, as he watched the process occur with not even faint amusement. That was rather unnatural for someone with his personality. He was probably imagining himself using his power to trip Gabriel over and over down a set of stairs.

Gabriel chuckled and shook his head. "You guys wanna… do anything?" he asked, breaking the awkward silence. Meanwhile, he gazed at the place where he had put the note to Cauldron the day prior, and which was still there, covered in dust and with a single, mocking spider-web between three folds of the paper..

"What, like, eat popcorn together?" Alec asked, relaxing his body and glancing at Imp. She was on the floor, stuffing herself to annoy him even more. The pleasure she derived from making him sullen was even greater than the pleasure of popcorn, it seemed.

"Idea! Back when I was with the PRT and training under Armsmaster, he gave me an exercise. Think about a cape you know, and think about how you could de–"

"Laaame," Alec and Imp cried both at the same time, in that typical, obnoxious manner that only American teenagers could manage. Soon after, Alec added, "You're a nerd, my guy."

"Then what? Call hookers here? Wait, no, don't listen to me, I was joking," Gabriel responded, realizing mid-sentence that Regent would actually do that.

"Holy shit," Imp said, sitting up and looking at him, then at Alec. "Let's call hookers to Tattletale's safehouse, and tell them to give blowjobs to the homeless people."

"Fuck. We're calling so many hookers right now," Alec said, grinning and reaching for his phone.

"Don't!" Gabriel extended a telekinetic tendril towards the phone, but he was too slow.

"Alec, pass me the phone!" Aisha said, getting up quickly and running backwards. Alec epically yote the phone across the room, straight into her grabbing hands. Imp's power instantly kicked in, and she was… s-somewhere. Longinus' power told him she was in sight, but not where.

Gabriel extended a hand, and thrust forward a golden wall on the door, preventing her from getting out.

"Now, we're getting somewhere," Alec said, with a jeering grin, as he looked over at Longinus. "I bet you she's already doing it. Calling a whole bordello up in here."

"Shit. I hope one of them takes pity of me, at least," Gabriel said. He disintegrated the wall, reabsorbing its energy into his environmental shield. His stranger detection flared briefly, before winking out as Imp moved out of sight.

"Is she really..." Alec trailed off, looking at the exit. He blanked, then burst out laughing. "Oh. Hahaha! Tits will totally kill all of us when the pimp rolls up!"

"Please don't…" Gabriel whispered, shuddering. He didn't want to see Tattletale angry, again. Not when surrounded by hookers, strippers, and women of the night, at least. It'd just make it really uncomfortable, and he definitely would not be able to look at her in the right way when all those hot women were around, considering Lisa part of them.

"We're changing safehouses anyway," Alec blew him off casually. The boy proceeded to shrug, waving his hand around. "What's the worst that could happen? A prostitute will give you a blowjob? Eh. Overrated, if I'm to speak from experience. A lot of virgins on the internet might disagree, but that's them."

Alec's mention of blowjobs being overrated sparked some curiosity. "What's better than a blowjob, aside from sex? Honest question."

Alec was unblinking, as he looked over at Gabriel. "Drugs?"

"Right," Gabriel deadpanned.

"I mean. Obviously, I never took," Alec said, sitting down on the couch and putting one leg over the other as he picked up the popcorn packet and grimaced, when he found it empty, tossing the thing in the bin. He looked up at Gabriel, explaining, "Dad discouraged it heavily. If you wanted drugs, you had to mind-control someone and then get them drugged up, to feel the high through your power. Thing is, only some of us had powers that allowed that kind of thing. I tried it a few times, it wasn't too bad. I don't think it's the same experience, though."

Gabriel sighed and let himself lay down on the bed again, staring up at the ceiling. All this talk of drugs made him vividly recall when Signal jammed a syringe into his shoulder, to calm him down. That felt good. A kind of happy memory, given that he knew Signal was safe and healthy. But he missed her, so yeah, that was that.

"Ooh. Got stories?" Alec asked, leaning forward with interest. "That looks has 'memories' written all over it."

"Uhm, yeah. I was in the Wards, and… this girl – a really good Tinker, she could make pretty much anything with no evident restrictions of specialty – saw me while I was having this panic attack. She panicked herself, and used Tinker-made drugs to calm me down. That was the best metaphysical experience of my life, and I got to see the space whales."

Alec laughed out loud, low and impressed. "Holy shit, if you use the word 'metaphysical' to describe it then it had to be good," Alec mumbled, with a disbelieving, albeit amused expression.

"Shit, I miss that girl…" Gabriel mumbled again, more talking to himself. I'm going to hug her so tight as soon as I see her.

Alec tilted his head. "And the drugs?"

"Nnnnot really, no. At the time, I was against it. I was mad, like, really mad. But then I realized that, even though they were very powerful drugs, they had no withdrawal effects, or anything. They could be sold as legit antidepressants on the market. Do you realize the potential?"

"I don't really think they could, if they made you see space whales," Alec said.

"Just tone down the potency, and you're good to go," Gabriel pointed out.

"Fair enough." Alec nodded, then cited his reasoning, "A lot of normal medicine's got the kind of chemicals that can basically be either used as drugs or as the… what's the word? Precursors? To drugs?"

"Yeah, I think so. Also, I highly doubt the space whales were a hallucination…" Gabriel mumbled, recalling what his shard had shown him.

Alec raised his eyebrows up, while squinting. "No? The drugs caused your brain to go so high it released a psychic wave out into the cosmos and called actual space whales into the Wards HQ?" He sounded extremely skeptical.

"I mean, no, not like that. Can you… read memories with your power? Or… something similar?" Gabriel asked, cocking his head.

"Not really, no," Alec answered, shaking his head with a degree of disappointment. He smiled apologetically, explaining, "I can use other people's powers and get some fine control if I have like, a few hours to study their body, but usually I can only make them trip or stuff like that."

"Ah. I see, alright," Gabriel shrugged, sighing. "Shame I can't show you what I saw."

"Anyway, I was gonna say – cough medicine has everything a druggie needs, really, so long as you can get them to sell it to you," Alec exposited. "Drink enough cough syrup, and you'll get calm and sleepy. Pop enough cough tablets and you'll get energetic, high, weird, and probably have hallucinations too. Common medicine, right?" He grinned, straightening up with a kind of 'what a society, no?' shrug.

"Well, fuck. But think about the side-effects, though," Gabriel remarked.

"Like what? Not coughing?" Alec asked with a dose of sarcasm, raising an eyebrow.

"I mean… too much of anything can kill you. Even water."

"How much is too much?" Alec asked, his grin expanding.

"Six liters of water can kill you, one-hundred and eighteen coffees can kill you, thirteen shots can kill you."

"I wasn't asking literally," Alec slumped, sitting back and his grin dropping into a bored expression almost instantly.

"Then how were you asking?" Gabriel tilted his head in confusion.

"I enjoy your 'drug' paranoia, not your… water, coffee, and alcohol paranoia." Alec waved one hand in gesticulation. "I mean, what kind of side-effects are we talking about? In my experience, people only buy drugs because they have a shitty life, and need to run from that. If you don't have a shitty life, no reason to take drugs. If you stop having a shitty life, then no rehab's really required since you won't have an irrational need to mess with your own emotions constantly."

"Organ failure, psychological damage, that kind of side effects, you know?"

Alec shrugged. "Organ failure is mostly what I'm looking out for, but it doesn't really happen unless you've got allergies, or overdose, or underdose. Body can get used to receiving specific doses of some chemicals. You have to be picky about what you take or it can fuck you up reaaal good. Psychological damage? Not really." He shrugged again, pursing his lips and looking distinctly flat. "People leading shitty lives take drugs. People who don't have shit lives don't have reasons to take drugs, except amusement - but if they don't have shit lives, not much reason to amuse themselves."

Seeing the weird look he was getting, Alec blinked and clarified, "Uuh, I guess what I'm trying to say is: drugs aren't addictive, unless you let them. In the same way that video games aren't addictive, or hobbies aren't addictive. Also, I can't believe you manage to get me this philosophical in a conversation about drugs."

Gabriel nodded. "You're right," he agreed, still staring at the ceiling. Then, he changed topic. "So.. what's it like with Imp? I mean, you two are pretty close."

"Yeah. Casual sex on weekends. Hardcore sex on weekdays," Alec said with blatant nonchalance, to cover up whether he was being genuine or facetious.

"You make the same jokes too," Gabriel chuckled, shrugging in the bed. His bones weren't even causing any soreness at this point, and it felt like his bruises had gotten the once-over. He could probably walk now, if given a crutch or some telekinetic weight support.

"Yeah, we're… soulmates is the word, I think," Alec said, with a hint of distinctly not caring about Gabriel's opinion on having relationships on the team.

"You do you," Gabriel smirked and chuckled. "I'm glad you two… found each other? I mean, it's good that you enjoy each other's presence."

"You say that as if you didn't." Imp came into the room, tossing Alec's phone to him with a jaunty grin.

"You sometimes give me headaches, but I have fun too," Gabriel shot back, laughing briefly.

"So, how many hookers did you call?" Alec questioned Imp, looking into his call history and whistling appreciatively. "Naughty."

"Yeah. One of them is twins. Redheads, with tits out to heeere," Imp said, and gestured to her chest, making a 'pulling to the sides' motion until her hands were almost twice as far from her chest as the width of her entire torso. "Neat, right?" She looked at them, and Alec burst out in uncontrolled laughter at that, soon joined by her.

"Too big." Gabriel shivered in slight disgust.

"People like big tits," Imp said, and pointedly didn't mention her own meager charms.

"I like big tits too. Just… not such gahoonka lonkas," Gabriel said. Alec snorted, and it was probably for the best that he wasn't drinking anything in that moment because he might've snorted into it. Imp just burst out in laughter again, uncontrolled and running wild as she kicked at the floor with both feet, her stomach heaving up and down with each laugh. Seeing her react like that, Alec started laughing – tamely at first – but quickly matching her in sheer ferocity, almost doubling over and crumpling from the chest contortions and tears streaming down his face. He clutches his midriff, trying anything that might stop the endless guffaw.

Gabriel joined in their laughs, holding his belly, trying to ignore the sheer pain that shot through him every time he bent his back.

They laughed like that for the entirety of twenty seconds, until the door opened with a snap hard enough it almost cracked the concrete wall. "Who the fuck called hookers in here?!" Tattletale demanded.

Imp and Regent instantly stopped laughing, then pointed at Gabriel accusingly.

"What the fuck?!" Gabriel stopped laughing immediately, staring at them in disbelief. They were throwing him under the bus. "I don't even have a phone!"

Imp walked back to him, using sleight-of-hand as she reached under his covers and pulled out Alec's phone from them. "What's this, then?"

"Wow, really?" Tattletale blinked. "You thought I'd fall for that?"

"Hey, that's my phone!" Alec exclaimed.

Tattletale sighed, pressing a pair of fingers to her temples, and connecting them to her brain as she tried to massage the space alien nested within into something resembling calmness and tranquility. "My god."

Gabriel turned on his Shard Sight, to see if Tattletale's space alien was actually mad. It wasn't, or at least not that he could see. He turned it off, and sighed. "Can I talk to you about something serious, later?" he asked, looking at Lisa.

"Turning Imp and Regent over to the authorities for being annoying pricks?" she snapped, looking at the two perpetrators, both of whom grinned at her seedily, only adding to her anger as she stammered out in sheer disbelief, "W-why you! Longinus, shoot laser beams at them! You have my express permission to shoot lasers!"

In that moment, Imp disappeared and then disappeared from his Stranger Detection a moment later. Regent raised a finger, calmly saying, "I object this course of action strongly, as your teammate and friend."

Gabriel grinned at Regent. He put a hand forward, and constructed a massive, beaded dildo in it. "It's this, or lasers."

Regent's lips pursed together, as he was faced with his choices. He didn't say anything for several seconds, then began to nod slowly, as if in blank acceptance. With that, he turned around and bent over. "Please, be gentle."

"I was fucking kidding, get the fuck out!" Gabriel threw the dildo at Regent, who side-stepped it like a tittering gazelle, and proceeded to run out of the room with a bark of mocking laughter. "God, these two."

"They actually called hookers," Tattletale said, sitting down on a chair in disbelief and breathing out. "What did you want to talk about? Joining the team officially, or…?" She gave him an inquisitive look.

"Yeah. I'm joining, but that wasn't actually what I wanted to talk about. It's kind of a… side effect of it?" Gabriel said, tilting his head and looking to the side, almost preparing himself to ask the question.

"Side effect? Did you and Regent have a conversation about drugs? That's the only reason your brain would choose that word," Tattletale exposed.

"Well, not really. How do I run a gang, or a territory, at that? I'll have Trickster's and Ballistic's, so I guess I need to know the ropes," Gabriel asked, crossing his arms.

"It's not that hard. I can teach you. Hopefully," she said, confident at first, then dropping all pretenses at the last word and smiling apologetically.

"Don't worry, I used a power to give myself infallible memory. Not eidetic, but still very good."

"Well, the first thing you'll have to take care of first is claiming the territory," Tattletale explained, waving her hand. "But we'll get to that later, once you're all healed up and I've moved bases elsewhere Downtown. Coil is prrrobably going to make his first moves tomorrow night, or the day after that, but I doubt he'd perform any major operations on the night of his inauguration. It'd be kind of suspicious if the new PRT Director knew on the very day of his promotion just where to find all the major crime hot-spots. A bit easier if a precognitive Ward joins first, one who'd already worked under the dead crime boss, and probably got to see some of the backstage stuff herself."

"Right. Dinah," Gabriel cussed, hissing too.

"Anyway, the plan for today is to prepare for moving tomorrow. We won't really be changing or moving territories, as much as moving our bases of operations within territories," Tattletale explained calmly, then looked outside the window. The sun wasn't visible over the bay, having already moved to the other side of the building, shining down and covering the Downtown streets in shadows. "So I guess I'll give you the 'employee instruction guide' either tomorrow, or after tomorrow. Maybe we'll fight the Midtowners and PRT before that, or maybe not. We'll see how things go. A major aspect, though, that you should know about organized crime?" She looked squarely at him.

"Go on?" Gabriel prompted her to speak further.

"Don't go flying out into the fucking city in broad daylight and talking with the national guard. And if you do, maybe consider running before they call the Triumvirate on you?" she proposed, in a 'putting that out there' voice, more than anything else.

He responded to that with a chuckle and nodded. "Alright, I'll make sure of that."

With that, Tattletale stood up with a huff, and strode out of the room, muttering how she'd have her revenge for the redheaded hooker twins at her doorstep.

And with that, he was left alone again, with his thoughts and power. Far too often, in recent days, but that seemed to be the main trait of being hospitalized.

The conversation with Regent – about the drugs, and their merits and demerits – made him recall Signal. And she hasn't left his thoughts ever since he mentioned the happy space whale accident. However, as soon as these thoughts began to spontaneously generate dopamine in his brain, the memories of Laserdream hit him like a speeding truck.

It almost felt like she was there, looking at him in disgust, saying, "You moved on so fast."

He cringed, internally and externally, disgusted at himself alongside her. The thing was: he didn't really move on. It still hurt, too much for his own good, to the point where he had to cover it all up. He had to push these thoughts and memories away if he wanted to live even a single hour without breaking down in tears.

However, thinking about something positive, like a friend with whom he shared something, helped a lot in keeping his sanity. And that happened to be Signal. In some weird way, he felt really close to her, almost in the same way he was close to his best friend back on Earth Ayin. He hadn't seen either of them in so long. Was that why his desire to get Signal back was so salient? Because he could actually do it with Signal – with Karen – where he couldn't with Hope?

Gabriel shook his head, and decided to construct a pair of crutches, to walk around the building and stretch his legs. He didn't use telekinesis, because he wanted to see what'd happen if he walked around like a disabled person. Would people offer to open doors for him? Let's find out!

56

Birdsie

Dec 15, 2019

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Threadmarks Compos Mentis 13.6

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Birdsie

Birdsie

Sharp Talons Cleave The Worthy

Dec 16, 2019

#4,603

Early morning.

After putting on his mask and the rest of his suit – he was only wearing an underlayer in the bed – he decided to take them back off, and take a proper, hot shower, with things, like soap, and shampoo, and he really hoped Imp wasn't watching him, because that'd be rude on many levels, given he counted as a disabled Endbringer fight veteran – he fought in two Endbringer battles. How many did she fight in? Zero? One? Laughable.

And if she was watching him anyway, she'd get a laser in the face. Stranger detector for the win.

After he was done with the shower, he walked out with a towel wrapped around his waist. He looked in the mirror, and briefly admired his Greek god sculpture of a body, awash with fun things, like battle scars that were literally glowing orange as the small imperfections were burned away. There was a significant tear in his stomach, between two of his pecs, where Centurion's blade had penetrated the gut. From the sheer angle at which the stab occurred, it seemed like it went up, through the intestines, and scraped his upper organs – the area of the actual stomach, kidneys, liver, and all that stuff – though the energy dagger didn't seem to be long enough to touch the lungs or heart.

Even this scar was glowing, filled with dead and weak embers. A literal dying flame, compared to the roaring phoenix his power used to be. And it was borrowed.

For some reason, the taxi fedora girl appeared in his mind. All this constant thinking about Cauldron was probably the cause; he was anxious about getting into contact with them, or rather, when they decided to grace him with their goddamn presence and sell him dead alien flasks for a change – instead of being all mysterious and silent – like shadow organizations tended to be.

She just appeared suddenly one time, talked to him about something she had no right knowing about, and then disappeared just as suddenly. She was either parahuman, or a Tinker robot wearing a funny outfit.

Because parahumans wore funny outfits by default.

He sighed again, and went back to his room to dress up. A brief thought crossed his mind – would it be wise to inform Tattletale that he and his evil clone had a psychic battle just minutes before he went to sleep yesterday? It had certain pros and cons, like not getting blindsided by the Slaughterhouse Nine making a wild U-turn on their vacation ride to Boston just to give Brockton Bay one last kick in the nuts.

Gabriel nodded and, as soon as he was clothed, walked to Tattletale's 'office' only to promptly be told she wasn't there by one of the guards. She was eating breakfast in a room reserved for the Undersiders, so he asked for directions, and he received them.

Regent poured a packet of McDonalds ketchup onto his plate.

"You save that stuff? It's pretty disgusting," Imp said, biting into her Big Mac.

"I had a psychic battle with my evil clone just yesterday night," Longinus dropped the bomb as soon as he entered the room, closing it behind himself and sitting down with the rest of them.

"Cool," Regent said, mouth full of fries and cola, spraying bits of both as he spoke. He quickly swallowed, with a mumbled, 'excuse me,' and said, "And I had this, like, utterly badass sword fight with Cherish today at like two AM? Like, it turns out she was working as a double agent for Heartbreaker all this time, so she showed up to recruit me, and I was like, 'no, I'm cutting tiesss,' and I attacked her with my katana, and she attacked me with her own, and we both threw mind-controlled soldiers at each other, and it was totally badass and cool." Imp clapped her hands, faux impressed.

"It means I know where the Nine are at all times. Thing is, the connection works both ways," Gabriel continued to explain, ignoring Regent's incoherent and stupid blabbering.

Tattletale took a sip of her coca cola, with three cubes of ice, instead of two. She glanced at Longinus and asked, "What? I was listening to Regent's ridiculous and made-up story."

Brief exasperation filled out Longinus' body, but he decided that this wasn't a good time to get irritated, and proceeded to explain again - slower, no longer forced to speak over someone, "Me and Evil-Me share a connection granted to us by our power. Through this connection, we can share emotions and images. It means that, if I focus hard enough, I can see through his eyes. Same goes for him, though."

"So in short, we have to blindfold you permanently," Regent said, slipping a stack of fries into his mouth and squeezing the mushy potato insides out of the hard, fried membrane with his teeth, tearing the fries into two, then beginning to chew properly. Within moments of doing so, he swallowed with a sigh of satisfaction.

"It takes effort, and it makes both of us extremely dizzy and stunned. I doubt it'd be reliable in battle." Longinus shrugged.

"So in short, we don't have to blindfold you permanently, but we have to put you on seizure watch. Got it," Regent concluded with an affirmative nod.

Gabriel snorted and flipped him the bird amusedly, then turned to Tattletale. "What's your take on this?"

"You're going to be unreliable in combat," she answered, cautiously. Regent and Imp looked at each other, and Tattletale proceeded to explain for everyone's benefit, "If he's as scornful as he seems, he's probably sitting in some alleyway right now, rubbing his hands together to create friction, as he waits for a good moment to fuck you over."

Longinus pursed his lips in thought. "He's in Boston with the rest of the Nine. I doubt they have time to care about me."

"Ah, so he's going to kill Accord," Tattletale said with firm realization, suddenly smiling blankly, showing her teeth, as she stood up and then away from the table. "I should probably put a stop to that."

"Yeah, you should."

Tattletale took out her phone as she walked out, calling someone up. Imp stole several of Regent's fries when he was staring at Tattletale's ass, dipped them in cream sauce, then stuffed them in her mouth. Then, to cover up her blatant act of theft, she took a bite of her Big Mac and grinned when Regent noticed several of his fries missing.

Getting hungry, Longinus extended his reach to grab a Grand Crispy McBacon, biting into it gleefully, feeling the juices dribble in his mouth. "Mmm…"

"Yo," Regent interrupted the feeding with an expression that had 'not cool' written all over it, "You didn't order no shit, and didn't pitch in. Those are my munchies." As he said this, he was either completely blind or willingly allowing of Imp taking another fry from literally right under his nose, dipping it in ketchup and then munching on it.

"Oh, sorry. How much was this?" Longinus asked, chewing.

"I'll sell it to you for two kay," Regent proposed smugly, biting into his McCheese with the mien of a cat.

"Ten dollars," Longinus shot back, staring into his eyes challengingly.

Regent turned to Imp, muttering, 'watch this,' before he looked at Longinus.

"One kay, otherwise it's just not a good deal to me," he said, waving his fingers back and forth, and proceeded to argue further, "You won't be able to order anything here on time, since we're moving really soon, and I doubt going out to order for yourself is a good idea given the state of the city, and the fact that Coil wants your balls on a pike in his trophy room." He turned to Imp, muttering something about, 'this is how you do business.'

"Well, what about an up-payment? I'll pay you five hundred when I have the money," Longinus proposed, chewing slowly and almost mockingly.

"Nope," Regent popped the 'p.' He bit into his fast-food product, chewing lightly - either unbothered or trying to match Longinus' obnoxious activity. Regent swallowed, then continued, "Not gonna go below eight-hundred, and even then, if you pay later, I'm going to be asking extra for giving you a favor so you don't starve."

Their gazes locked. The two teenagers stared at each other, Longinus as intense as a red-black sky of apocalypse, and Regent casually disinterested and slurping off loose mustard from his pinky finger.

"You can have this back," Longinus stated, putting down the burger in the box, sliding it over to him with a degree of spite. "Oh, this too. It's yours, after all," he added, opening his mouth and making the chewed up piece of burger float into the box with a single clamp of invisible telekinesis, where it sagged into a mush of inert, brown-white-yellow biomatter pulp.

"Yeah, this is why you won't be a super-villain. The moment you puke out a grenade you didn't pay for during an arms deal is the moment that the capes decide to geek you," Regent blankly stated, biting into his burger with a large chomp, then gesticulating at Longinus disapprovingly with it, as he continued – mouth full – "Ith badh fuhr bidhness; too bee a dihk laik dat."

"You're a special case," Longinus jeered, chuckling. "This doesn't change the fact that I'm hungry."

"You have some kind of hate-boner for me," Regent stated, eyebrows dropping slightly. "Kinky, but I'm not into it."

"You two need to have gay sex, then realize you're not into it and regret it for the rest of your lives," Imp remarked off-handedly, holding up a nugget of amber chicken glazed in sweet-spicy sauce, before biting it in half and relishing the taste of full, unhealthy meat and the flavor of the sauce. She chewed, licking over it with her tongue before she pushed the rest of the meaty treat into her mouth.

Longinus constructed a small, golden dildo in his hand. It flopped down as he pointed it in Regent's direction and asked, "Wanna go now?"

"Hate-boner," Regent said, coughing between the words as if to punctuate that his assumption was correct. He continued at a calm, disinterested pace, "Also, I'm not really bothered or interested by it, but whipping out your ding-dong during breakfast is a strong indicator of poor table manners. Control yourself, man."

Longinus laughed and disintegrated the construct into thin air. Gold sparkles ousted from it and quickly dimmed to the point of disappearance. "I will."

"I have some good news and some bad news," Tattletale announced, stepping into the room with a frown – if not even a full-out scowl.

"Shoot," Longinus prompted her to speak, turning sharply in her direction.

"The remnants of the Teeth either joined the Nine, or got gobbled up by Noelle, so now the Nine has extra ammo variety," Tattletale began, "And also, there is no good news, inasmuch as there is worse news, those being that the Fallen are approaching our fair city with the intent of moving in after Leviathan's attack, and possibly scoping out the likelihood of Noelle being a new god for their religion."

"Catholics. You gotta hate 'em," Regent quipped, picking out a loose pickle and then dropping it onto the tray, before finishing his burger by chomping it once, then pushing the remnant into his mouth with one finger, and chewing on the mass of meat, bread, sauce, and other ingredients.

"Fuck," Longinus cussed, crossing his arms in thought as he stared down at the white table.

The Fallen; a villainous group that worshipped the Endbringers, the very beings that brought about untold amounts of death, destruction and misery to the human race. He figured they must've been absolutely not sane to worship those monsters.

"Yeah, so we're probably going to be dealing with those, as well as Coil, and whatever independent groups decide to show up in the gang war that's going to break loose soon," Tattletale elucidated, then sat down and picked up her meal where she left it. She took a brief glance at the chewed mass of saliva-covered mush that Longinus pulled out of his mouth a minute ago, and looked briefly green around the gills, looking away and trying to ignore the sight as she continued her meal with furrowed, upset eyebrows.

"Another gang war. That's just great. I'll take happiness in the fact that I didn't cause this," Longinus sighed, letting his head fall back to look at the ceiling. He closed his eyes momentarily, to look at his healing power and its status while he kept listening. It was at almost fifty percent done, although slowing down drastically as it got nearer towards the core, picking up the 'denser' data packets.

"What about Accord?" Imp questioned, raising a hand like a school-girl.

"Alive, but that's not exactly good news, given he's working with Coil. Honestly, not even sure if we should be siding with him, or with the Nine. It's kind of a free-for-all right now, and we're not in a good position," Tattletale said, then quickly took a handful of fries, swallowed them up like pills, followed them up with several gulps of her coke, and picked up her burger to finish it off on the fly. "I'm gonna call Grue and Bitch, let them know. Then we can plan our movements, the general strategy for dealing with Coil, and I guess help Longinus claim territory." Everyone nodded, as she stood up and walked away.

Longinus clicked his tongue and turned to Regent, looking serious. "Real talk here. Are you good at being convincing?"

"I'm the best actor since the Earth Aleph Samuel L. Jackson was born," Regent answered, his face crossing into the 'deadly serious' territory.

"Teach me. Really, teach me," Longinus requested, putting his hands on the table.

"Teach you what?" Regent asked, slurping up a fry.

"That."

Regent blinked once, looking down at the table, then looking up at Longinus again. "Eating?"

"Acting. I want to be able to lie while looking truthful, and things like that."

"That's not really hard," Imp said, seeming amused by the request. Almost like Longinus was a cute little boy, learning his multiplication tables when the rest of the family was a bloodline of savants that could perform trigonometry at age five. She looked at Regent, and said, "Hey, Regent."

"Yeah?" He quirked an eyebrow, but didn't look away from his food.

"I love you," Imp replied, trying to make it sound straight.

"Oof," Regent accepted the hit. "You're good at convincing lies. And double-speak. I'm going to take revenge for that." He lightly punched her shoulder, then took a drink from his Eidolon-commercial Sprite can.

"Yeah," Imp said, almost blank, then looked at Longinus with a kind of 'see?' appeal. "You can't even tell if I was lying or telling the truth. The fact is, love is kind of gay, so probably lying, but lying in an affectionate kind of way. Either way, the whole thing gets confusing as fuck, and you can't tell who's loving who anymore, and it distracts you for just long enough for the boys to nab your wallet while you're not looking."

"You're getting pretty gay there, Aisha," Regent chided amusedly.

She shrugged it off. "Yeah, but, what I'm saying is, you gotta make it sound like it's the truth; no matter if it is or if it isn't. Like, if you know the truth is pretty unbelievable, you might be better off telling a lie that sounds more believable, or painting stuff to fit it into someone's worldview. Make it sound and look that way. Just put yourself in that mindset and play pretend, I guess."

"Gayness doesn't apply when it's girl on boy," Longinus deadpanned, looking at Imp. She waved him off with a shrug.

"This whole situation is gay enough that Legend could make a laser out of it," Regent said, wrapping up his food papers into a paper clump and tossing it into the bin. Roaring, thunderous laughter erupted from Longinus, who almost fell backward from his bench and onto the ground from how much he was laughing. It lasted for the entirety of ten seconds, with Imp and Regent staring blankly at his outburst.

"You broke him," Imp said.

Regent shrugged and smiled at the sight of Longinus having a roaring guffaw-apoplexy. Guffaplexy. "I have my moments."

After twenty seconds, Longinus' laughter slowly turned to controlled giggling. Constant, like the heartbeat display of an electrocardiogram, but not as intense or rumbling as before. "Sheesh… that was good."

"Yeah, anyway, I'm gonna go play video games on Tits' computer," Regent said, standing up and stretching. He straightened, tapping a finger on his chin as he began to walk away, "Hm. Swords and Sandals, or Meteor Run…?"

With Regent taking his leave, Imp was left alone to be Longinus' tutor in the fine art of deception and connivance.

Longinus shifted his gaze to Imp and put one arm on the table. "So?" he prompted her to continue the explanation with his other hand, waving it.

"So what?" she asked, tilting her head.

"How do I deceive people?"

"I guess, you just… do? I'm pretty sure most kids learn to do it on the playground, or when they tell their parents they're not feeling too well and fake a cough to get away from school," Imp explained, shrugging helplessly at his request. "Uh. I don't know. Let's do scenarios?"

Imp stood up, ripping off the McDonalds logo from a nuggets box and using it as a fake badge, by placing it into a spot on her costume's chest where there was a small incline she could safely place it in. "Okay, okay: here, I'm, uh… let's say I'm a cop on the street, outside a convenience store. My car's down the street, a few meters from me, and… no partner, at least not that you can see. How do you get me away from the convenience store?"

"Fake report. Or, if applicable, ask my men to make a ruckus that'd warrant the police's attention," Longinus proposed, raising his eyebrows.

"Yeah, but, how do you do it?" Imp asked, looking at him demandingly and folding her arms. "Play it out. Come on. I'm a white man in his late thirties, gruff-looking, beat city cop. Go on."

Longinus stood up and his expression shifted subtly, almost unnoticeably. From one of relaxation, to one of mild worry. "Sir? While coming here, I saw a couple of young guys in yellow bandanas throwing bottles at a small store and generally making a ruckus. It's just down the street."

"Which store?" the Impficcer asked, gruff-sounding and lacking a fake mustache to complete the image. She/he folded her/his arms over her/his chest for effect.

He crossed his arms meekly, looking over his own shoulder, his fingers fidgeting with his sleeve. "It's the Seven-Eleven three blocks from here, sir…"

The Impficcer grunted in thought, then said, "Fine. I'll finish off my donut and check it out." With that, Imp returned to her usual demeanor and waved her hand. "See, you're good at it! Good enough to fool a retarded cop, at least. It'd be better to get some actual practice on actual targets. Say. How do you feel about a little prank on the city law enforcement, to show you the ropes? Nothing big, nothing major. Won't even require powers, if we play it right."

"I'm not sure that pranking the police while the Fallen are coming to the town is wise," Longinus admitted, cocking his head to the side with a small cringe forming on his face.

"Ooh, please, what's the worst that could happen? We find out the Fallen have a mole in the police department? Stop being a big baby with a vagina, Longinus, and come prank some coppers with me!" she near-demanded, standing akimbo.

He frowned. "Thing is, the PRT knows my face and face-concealing domino masks are easily recognizable."

"How much problem would it be to get a flesh-sculpting power to just alter your face?" she asked, more curious about his power than actually trying to get him into pranking the police at this point.

Oh, that would be more problematic than she thought. At least for the time being. "I mean, that would be a pretty minor type of biokinesis. Just alter the shape of already-present biomatter. The thing is, my charge production is at a stand-still; my power is fixing the healing power to fix my bones."

"All I hear is an excuse to not prank the police force," Imp chided, disappointed in him. She clicked her tongue and shook her head, raising a finger to his mouth to stop him from speaking further. "As your teacher and master, I disapprove and eagerly encourage you to do better in the future."

"Why not prank some bank into sending us untold amounts of money?" Longinus offered, shrugging helplessly.

"How?" Imp asked, looking at him sideways.

"Deception," he quipped back.

"...How do you deceive a whole bank into something like that?" Imp asked. Suddenly, her leg began to skip up and down. "Can you actually do that? That would be fucking awesome. The best heist in goddamn history. Can you imagine Tattletale's face when she finds out that a bank just handed over cash to us? Like, pro bono, or whatever?"

"It'd require your power, to work," he said, then began to enlighten her on his master plan: "I pretend to be a… security inspector, or whatever. I ask them to see their vault. You come in with a bag, and as I check out everything, I hand the money to you, then you walk away with it."

Imp seemed to stiffen a little, as she scratched her cheek inelegantly at the simplicity of the plan. "Yeah, the problem with that is that my power doesn't work through cameras. The moment the fat security guard sees me wandering around, he'll press the alarm button and send the PRT down on our ass like fireworks on the fourth of July. Unless we can put him to sleep first."

"Obviously, the camera guy would have to be put to sleep," he scoffed. "After that, it's as easy as walking in, and walking out."

"I like the way your brain works, new guy," Imp acquiesced nodding along to his logic. She seemed more bubbly and energetic now, speaking almost hushedly as she asked, "Which bank do you want to hit?" She didn't seem concerned by notions like, 'we should alert the team first, or plan this in more detail.'

"Not yet. We'll ask the team first. But it doesn't necessarily have to be a bank. Could be a jeweler's, which would be much easier to hit, I think, and would let us have more profit from selling all of the gems. Hell, even a museum would be kind of good," Longinus proposed, shrugging again.

"Come ooon!" Imp moaned, raising both of her arms into the air as she extended herself. "Grue will never agree to it, citing 'poor pay-out' and 'high risks,' or some other cowardly-sounding statistic as his reason."

Longinus' mouth set itself into a firm grimace. "He wouldn't be wrong, though."

Imp folded her arms and looked away, but didn't say anything. Rather pointedly. She looked almost like a petulant child, trying to guilt him into her way of thinking. That was good, but not good enough for him. He'd already been forced to deal with Vista and Signal on a casual basis for some time, so he picked up some experience in dealing with little girls with mean tempers; not that Signal was a little girl - though, there was definitely some overlap there, given her attitude.

"Sorry. The idea can be used in all kinds of contexts; corporate espionage, robberies, and stuff like that," Longinus offered, putting a hand on her shoulder.

"Meh," Imp said, trying to guilt-trip him again by showing clear disappointment.

"It won't really work otherwise, Aisha," he informed her that her childish tactic wouldn't work.

She didn't say anything again, and sat down with a sigh. One hand placed against the side of her head, she looked off into the distance, sulking visibly.

"I'm sure Tattletale will agree with us that it's a good idea," Longinus tried to comfort her, sitting down on the other side.

"I think she'll be a stuck-up bitch about it, and give a better plan, or call us stupid for even trying or something," Imp complained, hand still pressing against her cheek. She pulled it away, looking at him and kicking at the floor with both of her feet. "I mean, seriously! It's always Grue and Tattletale doing the planning; the rest of us never get to say anything!"

"Do you want me to… do something about it?" Longinus offered, genuinely willing to be helpful.

"You're a part of the bourgeoisie, here, Longinus," Imp accused, with the barest hint of a scoff. She folded her arms at him demandingly. "You're also overriding my ideas, and it's not cool. Come on, let's go scam a cop or a bank, or something. You know you want to." As she went on, her voice went from 'guilt-tripping' to 'tempting' him.

Longinus considered the idea for a moment, massaging his chin with one hand. "I'm… not sure. It'd be neat, but I'm not healed yet, and I'm kind of scared to go out while my powers are not yet fully functional."

"Come on," she egged him on. Imp slammed both hands into the table like a petulant child about to throw a hissy fit. "What's the worst that could happen? You can fly, I can hide. We both kick ass!"

"Your death, my death, our arrest, our delivery to the Birdcage?" Longinus listed out.

"Pfft. Bitch, please. You? Maybe? Me? I'm an innocent thirteen-year-old and a victim of my poor, formative environment, so obviously I'm going to juvie at worst, assuming they don't go even lighter on me," she elucidated, beginning to sound less and less like herself, and more like there was a criminal mastermind and part-sociopath lurking in her subconscious all this time. "And obviously, with my power, that's not gonna last," she added, with an impish grin.

"Oh, fuck you," Longinus chuckled, waving her off dismissively. "I wish I had your po– hehe."

"No, fuck you," Imp bitched, standing up defiantly. "My power is mine! It's copyrighted, dude! It's not cool to take people's powers."

"I'm joking, I'm joking!" Longinus defended himself, putting his hands forward. But in that moment, he got an idea. "Wait a moment. Hm, turn 'invisible' and stand where you are," he requested, turning on his Shard Sight as he spoke.

"I don't turn invisible, jack-ass," she grumbled, before he immediately forgot who he was talking to. He didn't see or feel anything from the general vicinity, generally confused as to why Regent and Tattletale left him alone in here. Within moments, Imp was back in front of him, and his brain went, 'oh, right, this whole thing,' as it remembered that Imp existed.

"You're also invisible to my power-sight," Longinus spoke to himself.

"Not invisible, jack-ass!" she repeated herself, slightly more annoyed than last time.

"Unnoticeable, unimportant, whatever it is. The effect is invisibility, but ten times better."

Imp walked around the table, saying, "You're no fun. I'm gonna go play games with Regent on Tits' computers, or whatever." Within moments, he was left alone and couldn't quite grasp why he'd been sitting here without purpose, before painstakingly remembering that Imp was with them at some point, and his brain connected the dim dots of recollection until he realized once again that he was having a conversation with her, before she left abruptly.

Longinus sighed and stood up, heading towards his hospital room; the one he had been staying in for the last couple of days. The note was still there, lying, and covered in a thin layer of ceiling dust and dead skin tissue that flaked off of the nearby people over the last of hours or days. Disgusting to think about.

With nothing better to do, he decided to do some exercise. Starting with a regimen of stretches that Armsmaster's rigorous training routine had gotten him used to, he soon transitioned into making up for his daily quota of one-hundred push-ups, squats, and sit-ups; though, he wasn't sure if the ten-mile run was a good idea, given that Coil and the Fallen were basically hunters, and it was open season for the Undersiders' ass. His cracked, but healing bones kept releasing clicks with the more strenuous movements, reminding him of the brittleness of his current body with jolts of pain, that he pushed through.

Within twenty minutes, he was lying down on the floor. Gabriel barely broke a sweat from the exercise, but still decided to rest and not exhaust his organism too much when it was still regenerating from a run-in with his sociopath brother.

After a quick shower to rinse off the stench of stringent calisthenics, Gabriel picked up a Maggie Holt book, titled 'Pact,' which apparently delved into supernatural themes – he'd been interested in this kind of stuff for a while. A friend in his previous life inspired him to write something that brushed similar topics – which he decided to post on an internet forum for whatever reason – so he decided he might as well indulge himself for once.

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Birdsie

Dec 16, 2019

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Birdsie

Birdsie

Sharp Talons Cleave The Worthy

Dec 17, 2019

#4,622

By the time Gabriel finished reading 'Pact,' after several hours, he felt the link with his Phoenix Healing swell in size, as the repairs swam their way across the entirety of the power, charging the motes of data with fresh, uncorrupted information. It'd be done repairing in only an hour, although it felt changed, from how it used to be.

"Sheesh, and I wanted to write something similar to this," he muttered to himself, putting the book down and heading to the bathroom.

He took care of his toilet business, feeling a pang of relief and satisfaction as he did so – colored mostly by his previous inability to move around independently without the help of a nurse – and then went out of the hospital ward to go look for Tattletale.

Unfortunately, she didn't appear to be in her office, as Regent and Imp appropriated her work computer to play a co-op online video-game about a girl that's water, a boy that's fire, and a temple full of traps where the players have to cooperate and use their respective elements to escape.

"Oh, whaddup?" Regent greeted morosely without looking up. He was at the arrow-key position, while Imp sat to his left and joyously commandeered the use of WSAD.

"Oh, I'm looking for Tats," Longinus stated, leaning on the doorway. "Do you know where she is?"

"Tits? Went downstairs a few hours ago," he answered, pulsing with a sudden heartbeat of anger as his character died with a game sound. Imp immediately pressed a button to reset the level, and they tried again.

"Alright, thanks," and with that, he left to go downstairs.

The entire safehouse appeared to be agitated, with movement in every hallway, corner, and room. Tattletale's minions - not really recognizable from normal people past the fact they were working - were lugging around heavy boxes of supplies, some marked, others unmarked, while armed mercenaries stood guard and directed the efforts, with Tattletale standing among three of her workers; two women, one doctor of some kind, and showing around at clusters of supplies to direct them.

Longinus walked up to Tattletale, waving at her as he approached. "Yo, anybody needs some help?"

The group of faithful minions and their leader looked at him. Tattletale glanced at the boxes, and pointed to a grouping of eleven heavy, man-sized crates, that'd ordinarily require a forklift to move anywhere. "You see those? Load them into that truck over there - I'll be with you in a minute," she said, giving him quick directions.

"Aye aye, cap'n," Longinus said. After approaching the boxes, he raised both hands and ejected golden streams that condensed into four identical platforms. He slid each platform under the boxes, like peeling off an omelette from the frying pain. Two for each platform, with two being lifted by him, one per each arm, as he had the platform cords change their attachment point to his shield to be closer to the back of the waist. It didn't really hurt to support their weight now, given the fact that he was heavily aided by telekinesis. And like that, in one go, he cleared all but one box, then didn't really bother with the last one as the forklift operator was already lifting it up on his own.

Tattletale was already wrapping up her conversation, and approaching Longinus with a look of curiosity on her face. "What's up?"

"Nothing very urgent. Actually two things, one of them is more important. I'll start with the latter," Longinus started, putting his hands behind his back. "I was talking with Imp, a couple of hours ago, and… she said that the team feels left out from the decisions that mostly you and Grue make."

Tattletale raised an eyebrow. "First of all, we let everyone come to a vote before making any big, team-affecting decisions. Everyone gets their say in accepting or not accepting a job. Everyone gets to vote for new members, or provide reasons why they do or don't want someone on the team, as was the case with you. Second of all, she's thirteen, with the mind of a ten-year-old on… I want to say 'drugs,' but I feel that'd be disrespectful. Her mother took drugs while in pregnancy, so Imp hates that, but she's… hyper, as you noticed. If I gave the role of 'head strategist' to her, we'd be in jail on the first mission we carried out."

Longinus nodded along, then continued onto the second point, "I know what you mean, yeah. Thanks for clearing that up. Now, onto the, uh, second thing. Imp is still involved, but I had an idea for a possible heist, or robbery, or whatever that involves a quick in-and-out."

"Wwweee don't really do that anymore, with Coil gone - most of the income comes from the rackets, and stuff like that," she said, then quirked an eyebrow, "But do tell. Kind of curious what you came up with."

"Let's take a really big bank for example, with lots of money inside. Someone pretends to be a security inspector, with some kind of fake document to prove it," Gabriel started, constructing in his hand a sheet of paper that said 'fake head honcho' on it. "But, and here's the catch, you bring Imp with you. You ask them to show you the vault, you go in with Imp. Since she's unnoticeable, she can grab as much stuff as she wants, and then walk out with six, seven duffel bags full of money.

"And you might say, 'But Longinus, Imp's power doesn't work on cameras!' Well, I thought about that as well. Put to sleep the camera guy, or apply a loop that lasts as long as you need to the camera CCTV. And this can be applied to everything; corporate espionage, theft of information, scams, and so on," Gabriel finished his explanation, crossing his arms confidently. He felt accomplished by this idea, and realized that his brain was wired more for illicit operations, rather than heroics.

"It might work once or twice, then they'll realize there's parahumans in the woodworks, then the PRT will investigate, realize how we did this, and subsequently everyone smart and worth stealing from in the city will up their security," Tattletale said, in a voice that didn't insinuate she was discrediting or saying the idea is entirely stupid or without merit. "Not bad, though. As far as scams go."

Longinus chuckled and put a hand on his chin. "Alright. Do you need anything else, while I'm still here? My healing power is almost done, and I'm pretty sure I'll undergo another.. 'evolution' when it wraps up."

She raised an eyebrow at the term, but didn't otherwise deign to mention it. "Alright. For now, not really, no. I guess you could help moving crates, but you'd have to do it with only constructs, not by lifting them. Or you can summon construct minions or something, I don't know. Just don't use your hands."

"Why not my hands?" Longinus asked, cocking his head to the side in confusion.

"Because, Longinus, minions use hands to lift stuff. Evil overlords don't lift stuff. They have minions or superpowers for lifting stuff," she said, with a smirk. Tattletale put one hand on her waist, and used the other to motion to the rest of the room, where droves of people were carrying bags and boxes for her.

Longinus concealed a gulp and nodded. I'm kind of sub, and she has evil villain confidence. That's low-key attractive, won't lie.

"Alright," he said, nodding. He extended a hand, and closed his eyes, to try and project a small golem which would carry out very simple tasks, like 'lift that,' or 'attack this.'

He created a man-sized effigy of golden crystal. Two legs and arms, and a shapeless head with no features, but it was insufficient. The entire structure was rigid: one object, with no joints or mechanisms for movement. He'd need to work around that somehow. He looked at it, focusing on its intended purpose, but all he managed to do was hammer in more of his energy to reinforce the tiny flaws and holes in the construct, to make it a fraction tougher.

From across the room, some of the less-busy workers were politely staring at the casual expression of superpowered will, but no one spoke or approached, and no one carrying supplies stopped carrying them.

Longinus sighed and disintegrated the small effigy, reabsorbing its golden energy into himself. He shook his head and put a hand on his waist. "Ugh, I'd need to manually control it if I wanted it to work, on top of other things" he said, turning to Tattletale with an annoyed frown on his face.

"Don't lift supplies then," she said, with a shrug that suggested she didn't care. Without changing her tone or stance, she added, "Though, it'd be a good technique to fake having intelligent minions."

"I'll try to work on that, yeah." Longinus nodded, then turned around to leave the room. "See you around," he said, walking out of the door. He headed towards his room, as it was almost time for the power to set itself back into working order, and he'd need to focus for this.

In his awareness, yet another broken charge was converted into a repaired one by the venerable circuitry of the fountain manually working it over. It was slotted into place, pumped with a modest amount of data to work with, and then promptly activated, as it reached out with filaments and began to transfer data with its brethren. The healing power was nearing ninety-five-percent completion.

Longinus sat down on the bed, entering the powerscape to give more instructions on how exactly the fountain was supposed to fix the last remaining bits. He wanted some small adjustments; make self-regeneration faster, scrap the fiery bird thing, and let outward-healing be possible only through touch. That way, he'd have an excuse to French kiss people when they needed healing. Scrap some bits off the edges, to get more on other parts. He hoped that this change would grant him a bigger supply of his healing flames or, if possible, even make them unlimited – which was unlikely.

His fountain kept doing changes with no indication of whatever, or of the fact that his dim thinking even registered as a message.

He sighed and turned his gaze to the note he'd written for Cauldron; which was still fucking there. He picked it up, and opened it, only to see that absolutely nothing changed. He groaned in frustration and burned it in his fist, with a flash-release of golden flame.

Then, he laid his head on the bed and took a power-nap, so he'd wake up with his power fixed. His eyes opened only minutes later.

The outcome of the repair was basically a whole different power: natural healing processes became over thrice as fast, and he could enter a Breaker state in which his body turned into a flaming avatar which sped up the regeneration even more, depending on how many energy sources were around, such as fire, explosions, and parahuman powers. It also leeched kinetic energy and molecular vibrations but to a slightly lesser degree. While in this Breaker state, though, he was much more vulnerable: he could be put out with enough water or even a fire extinguisher, and his heart became a blue, red and golden target to hit for extra points. On top of that, he couldn't move or use his powers very well.

Longinus sighed and entered his Breaker state to finish up the healing process.

Almost instantly, his field of vision narrowed slightly and his environmental shield flickered off, as his costume was consumed and hidden in some far-off dimension for later access, revealing a roaring body of almost sickly, white-yellow fire. It'd have been nauseating and blinding to look at, were his eyes themselves not fire also. He could sense his heartbeat within his chest, as the core of his form pumped the superhot gasoline through extradimensional arteries, to fill out the entirety of his being.

Without being guided, invisible tendrils popped out from his skin and reached out across the room. In less than a second but slightly more than an eyeblink, the waves filled out the entire room. They leaked out of the keyhole and hinged, open windows to a degree.

The sunlight dimmed, the surfaces became colder, with the glass pane windows frosting over. Some of the medical equipment flickered on and off, including the lights. It was almost like that effect you saw in paranormal stories, where a ghost shows up and immediately the entire world – especially the ambient temperature and technology – seem to go haywire.

The bed he was lying on was also on fire, so that was kind of shit. He observed as the blanket became crispy, then began to deliver low flames that were lowered yet again by his constant sapping of energy. The body took just enough to accelerate the healing process without putting the fire out; letting it spread and proliferate across the bed, without losing the source of food. Like a patient fisher or hunter, waiting for his game to breed, instead of driving it into extinction.

Longinus snapped out of his Breaker state. He immediately noticed that none of his bones were broken, not a spot on his body was bruised and sore, and he also noticed the searing heat from the bed he was on. He jumped off the bed like a graceless gazelle, rolling on the floor and looking around as the cold, frosty effects and electrical interference of his power almost immediately straightened themselves out – like someone let go of a rubber band which caused strange shit when pulled.

He thrust his hand forward and condensed energy around the bed in a bubble, constructing a perfect golden sphere, to make the fire suffocate. The feedback from the meager but ever-present flames suggested they'd keep burning for a few seconds, but there was no reason to rush.

Within moments, the flames turned into lone tongues of fire, and the tongues became crisped embers of red ash; before even they succumbed to entropy and became black char and gray ash, with the foul smell of a typical household fireplace. He sighed in relief and disintegrated the sphere, shaking his head.

"I wonder if this power scrambles Tinkertech as well…" he thought out loud, stretching his newly healed body.

Moments later, his burner phone – god, that name caused him to cringe right now – rang.

He took it out and picked up. "Hello?" he answered.

Grue was on the other end, almost immediately saying, "Longinus, you got a minute right now?"

"Yeah, I just got done healing. What's up?" Longinus asked, heading for the changing room to put on his costume – he missed wearing it.

"We're preparing for a major operation; sort of sudden, but needs to be done. Suit up, go meet with Regent, Imp, and Tattletale, and get the details from them," Grue spoke, then hung up without anything else.

Within roughly thirty seconds, Longinus was back in his costume. It was repaired by one of Tattletale's minions after the Echidna fiasco; her on-call guy for sewing up the costume. He didn't ask any questions and did good work, so she took the liberty of sending Longinus' costume to him while Gabriel was unconscious after the fight.

He walked out and hurried to Tattletale's office. Regent, Imp, and Tattletale were already there, in costumes and masks, with the former two waiting for Tattletale to put on her utility belt, and equip herself with everything she'd apparently need: a modest-sized medkit, a handgun of the same brand her mercenaries used, and some other stuff; which included at least two phones, and a single item that looked suspiciously close to a bomb detonator.

"Are we ready?" Tattletale asked, turning to the rest of the group.

"What exactly are we doing?" Longinus asked, crossing his arms in curiosity.

"Midtowners are stepping in on Sundancer's former turf; mostly Avalanche and Uber from what we know," Tattletale clarified. "We'll be driving them out, and then running away. It'll have to be a hit-and-run defense. We need to drive in the point as quickly as possible and get out just as quickly, because there's lots of PRT and military people in the area cleaning up leftover clones, and Calvert is going to send help to the Midtowners as soon as possible."

"Let's go! Whoop-whoop! Fightin' time!" Imp pumped both of her fists into the air, as she ran out of the office and made a mercenary stumble, followed by stumbling mentally in non-memory at why he stumbled physically. Tattletale sighed, and walked out, followed by Regent and Longinus.

Outside the safehouse, in one of the back alleys with the supply vans, Grue and Bitch were already waiting with a pack of Bitch's dogs grown to horse-plus size, with sharp fangs and claws, and enough meat on them to qualify as 'fleshy dumpsters.' The Undersiders began to mount dogs, while Grue said, "I've got word that Gargoyle's with them, but Venus is apparently either busy or holding back. They also got their minions, and are making rounds around the stores; making sure people know who's in charge in the area now."

Tattletale nodded once to Grue, then nodded to Bitch, who looked at Longinus blankly. "Are you not getting on?"

Longinus shook his head and lifted off the ground. A couple of seconds later, he projected some rudimentary armor on both of Bitch's dogs, earning him an exaggerated nod from her: the kind of nod given by a person who had absolutely no idea just how far up and down you should move your head while nodding. After a brief chuckle, Longinus covered himself in three extra layers of armor, constricting his movement somewhat near the arms and legs – not that he'd need all of that, being a laser-user and flier both.

With that, the Undersiders set off, and Longinus watched at the city scenery on his way there.

Things barely changed over the days of his rest. Some of the streets were still partially flooded, with cracked roads or sidewalks. At least a fifth of the shops and stores they went by had cracked windows, using boards and nails to go around the issue of replacing the glass, and they'd passed by at least two stunned crews of workers trying to get power or water running again in some of the city districts. Regent put both fingers to his forehead and jauntily saluted a shocked police officer, who didn't even say anything or move when he saw the pack of wild, minivan-sized dogs running wildly by him.

"Any idea where they're at?" Tattletale asked, looking to Grue.

He shook his head helplessly. "All I got is word they're in the area."

"Then we'll spread out and look for them. Three to four minutes. Call if you get anything," she proposed. Bitch whistled, and the dogs split off to the left and right, going down two sides of a lengthy street and stopping at the ends, before their passengers got off and began to patrol; Longinus was left with Bitch and Bastard in the middle.

She whistled once and directed Bastard to sniff around in the general vicinity, without looking up or talking to Longinus.

Longinus stuck to the dog and followed it, careful as to not disturb its trail-following.

Bastard proceeded into one of the alleyways, then nudged a trash can with his nose and made it tip over, spilling out its greasy contents. He extended a barbed tongue and proceeded to lick the trash, only for Bitch to growl and kick him in the side of the snout, causing him to snort and sneeze in that way dogs often did, before he looked up and proceeded through the alleyway at an accelerated pace, on his tiptoes.

The flying villain chuckled and kept following, looking at Bitch off-handedly from time to time.

In several moments, they emerged on another street: some kind of former commercial zone, now mostly turned into a shantytown ghetto with homeless people and drug dealers. Looking around, Bitch noticed a group of black people in hoodies walking down the street. She rocked her body back, and Bastard moved to hide within the alleyway, as she got off and looked at them, around the corner. Longinus flew up on a rooftop, to a vantage point, to look at them from above.

The hoodie-wearing pricks walked into a hardware shop, and Longinus spotted one of them retrieving a handgun from his hoodie as he stepped in. The ten-to-twenty other people on the street were too far away to see, or too occupied by their own business to really care.

Longinus turned to Bitch and looked at her questioningly, but without saying any other word. She was too busy staring at the shop and contemplating something with her face to look three stories up and step away from the wall to allow her to even notice he was there, so there wasn't really an option of communicating anything, there.

He stepped off the roof and gently lowered himself to the ground. By the time he was halfway down, Bitch already made up her mind, and mounted Bastard in the most comfortable spot on his back – which still looked rather uncomfortable – and promptly rode down the street in a stampede, heading for the store the hoodie-wearing gangsters were in.

"Fuck it, let's go," Longinus' environmental shield roared with golden flames, as he flew down the street, following Bastard. When he was close enough, he touched down on the asphalt and approached the door of the hardware store, with a menacing tone in his step.

The thugs' lookout widened his eyes in fear, then yelled something on the inside of the store. Everyone in there seemed to react in sudden alarm, scrambling to take cover behind the counters and shelves, raising up their weapons.

Longinus spread his arms, and his step turned from a menacing stride to a calm, collected stroll. Behind him, Bastard skidded to a stop, and raised himself to give Bitch a modicum of cover.

The door looked as if it opened itself, when Longinus used a telekinetic cord to pull on the handle. Almost immediately, he heard someone yell, "Stop fucking moving and go the fuck away or I'll blow this guy's brains out! I know who the fuck you are, and we already called our boss!"

"And you also know that I fought Legend, and got out unscathed, mh?" Longinus spoke, stopping his movement to look at the situation.

"Bitch, please! You were about to get tagged like a common motherfucker when your shitty teammate saved your ass!" one of them jeered, only to be smacked by another with a degree of 'what the fuck are you doing.'

He could see at least four thugs, barely. Mostly their hands and bits of their heads poking out from behind the countertop to the right of the entrance, or the store shelves to the left. That said, when they were entering, he saw at least eight thugs entering. Most of them appeared to have shit-basic pistols, but it wasn't impossible that one or more of them had assault rifles.

Bitch growled, clearly contemplating ordering Bastard to just go through the front of the store and fucking them up.

Longinus turned briefly towards Bitch, raising a hand towards her as to tell her to wait. She didn't seem to read the movement in any way shape or form, still growling and staring at the shop. "May I come in, so we can properly negotiate, like civilized people?" he inquired, cocking his head to the side.

The ring-leader of the perpetrators called out, "Our negotiations end at, 'you go away, we stay.' Unless you want to negotiate with our bosses, or the PRT, if they decide so. In which case, you're welcome to stay as long as you like! Outside!"

Longinus turned his entire body towards Bitch. "Go ahead," he said apathetically, gracefully floating off the ground and out of Bastard's way.

She whistled once. "Attack!"

Bastard growled, then sprang up and leaped forward. In what looked to be a single movement, he crossed half the street between him and the store. There was a loud tearing sound, as brickwork; stone and mortar, as well as glass collapsed under his bulk, in much the same way a hole in a wall might appear after a gunshot. The only difference here was that the hole was giant-dog-sized. Screams, gunshots, and wilting exclamations of pain came from the inside of the store in short order, alongside brief, half-second growls of aggression as Bastard did his stuff.

In less than ten seconds, Bitch whistled again, and the wolf strolled out of the store, whipping behind himself with his tail. He looked back at the thugs for a moment, as if hesitating leaving his food inside, but Bitch whistled once again, harder, and he made up his mind, walking over to her.

Longinus touched down once more and calmly made his way inside of the store. He stepped over some moaning thugs, and knelt in front of the ring-leader, lying against the counter and clutching his stomach. "Tell your boss that this seat is taken," he stated almost joyfully.

The ring-leader coughed, then looked up at him with a glimmer of defiance and spat a dense wad of blood and saliva at Longinus' chest. He was aiming for the helmet, but couldn't quite angle his head up to do it..

"Pathetic," Longinus jeered, standing up on his feet and turning to the shell-shocked store owner. "Are you alright?" he asked, not approaching at first.

The man shook his head, both hands clasped over his ears, his eyes just barely open. The gunshots and muzzle flashes must have done something mean to his perception.

"Come with us, we'll bring you to a doctor," Longinus offered, approaching him with the intent to pick him up in a construct bubble.

In that moment, Bastard growled and subsequently whimpered as a massive, jagged rock caught him in the side and lacerated a spot where armor was thin. He promptly took off with bloodthirsty anger, and Bitch stepped back, content to observe. Moments later, two more of her dogs prowled past the storefront with open, foaming mouths in the direction of where the rock came from.

Longinus promptly took off the ground and shot past the broken glass of the store, to hover in the air, on alert for any incoming attacks, and observe the situation.

Down the street, a ramped-up Gargoyle, at least ten-feet-tall and sporting mean-looking, glinting claws of sharpened rock was fighting back a biting, gnawing, clawing Bastard, while the other two dogs were trying to catch Uber, Avalanche, and someone that Longinus didn't recognize, but wore mismatched red-gray clothing with a balaclava mask and appeared to be capable of teleportation. It took five seconds for it to click, somehow - a Trickster clone.

Taking aim and firing off a piercing laser, Longinus caught the Trickster clone in the side of the arm, and caused him to look over in his direction. Smoothly, Longinus' vision of the world swapped for one on ground level, as he heard an angry scream from up above. All of the dogs stopped what they were doing and looked up in alarm.

Longinus looked up, and saw Bitch, who was maybe two or three seconds away from splattering against the ground like a watermelon tossed from the top floor. He fluttered up and flew in her direction, constructing a cushion-like platform for her to land on. Bitch grunted as she sank into the soft gold structure, but Longinus was forced to scowl when a massive, sharpened piece of obsidian-black rock impacted the construct and made it rock down, with cracks spreading through the solid parts.

Looking in the direction of the shot, he noticed Avalanche handing another piece of sharp rock to Uber, with Uber taking aim with the slingshot in his hands, pulling up the expanding stone, then quickly releasing. Longinus instinctively lowered himself, with the car-sized projectile whizzing just centimeters above his head and hitting some building far behind him.

He attacked the Trickster clone; a burst of piercing lasers aimed at his center of mass, to maximize damage.

The clone seemed to react with smugness, as it disappeared, replaced by a guy with a phone, who'd been clearly recording the whole thing. The man stiffened in sudden shock, as several of the lasers porked him in the torso, across the arms, and one of them catching his foot and making him stumble back and fall over, the phone clattering to the ground where one of Bitch's dogs stepped on it while backing up to avoid an artillery projectile from the Uber-Avalanche howitzer wombo-combo.

Longinus reached into his power supply, and loaded up a kinetic missile to toss at Uber and Avalanche. It smashed against the rooftop they were on, exploding with enough force to throw them both off the rooftop. They fell three stories down and then hit the concrete with a pair of grunts, while loose debris rained down on them from above.

It was in that moment that the Trickster clone decided it was about time to stop helping and run away, and decided to get the fuck away from the general area, replacing himself for a mailbox, then once again for what looked to be a white mannequin from a broken clothes store display case, and then once again for some kind of crate, as he disappeared out of sight.

Gargoyle was shocked, but instead of continuing his fight, he refitted his body to contain wings and be smaller, and more aerodynamic. He stepped away from Bastard, who managed to bite into his arm and keep him in place.

Gargoyle growled, then moved away and tore his arm away, causing a pile of rocks to be left in Bastard's mouth. With that, the villain leaped away, dashing for Uber and Avalanche – presumably trying to get them before the dogs could.

Longinus rammed into Gargoyle's side with his full might. He managed to angle the attack enough to pin the enemy villain against a brick wall between a small repair and clothes store. Gargoyle clearly wasn't stunned enough, because instead of the expected inaction, he swung his taloned fist and caught Longinus in the head, throwing him down into the ground with not quite enough force to crack concrete, but almost.

He groaned in frustration and picked himself off from the ground. Gargoyle had already leaped over his body, returning to his mad dash race. Bitch whistled, and the dogs moved for Gargoyle, who scooped up his unconscious-and-probably-dead-or-dying teammates into both of his arms, before flapping his wings and taking off at a snail's pace.

Longinus turned to Bitch, questioningly. "Do we chase after them or let them go?!" he exclaimed inquisitively.

Instead of an answer, he received the sound of screaming, as Bitch's dogs dug their jaws into both of Gargoyle's ankles and began to pull him down. He redoubled his wing-flapping, hoping to get away, while Bastard approached with a bloodthirsty expression.

There was a weak point, in the thin strands of rock-flesh that connected the wings to Gargoyle's back. Longinus gathered energy into his hand, thinning it into a flat disk, then splitting it off into two identical ones. He cast his hand forward, and thin scythes emerged at bullet-speed – gold bound within white outlines – before they both cut off Gargoyle's wings and caused him to drop to the ground with a grunt. Bitch's dogs began to drag him, as he was forced to leave Uber and Avalanche lying alone.

Bitch whistled. "Stand!" Bastard triumphantly put down one of his paws on Gargoyle's back, keeping him in place with at least a solid ton of meat-weight.

Longinus flew down to Uber and Avalanche, and surrounded them with a three-layered construct bubble, which he lifted off the ground. "Take Gargoyle and let's scram!" he shouted at Bitch, as he flew up in the air with the two of them.

Just then, Longinus noticed his phone was ringing, and probably had been for a while – unnoticed over the sounds and high emotions of combat.

He picked up immediately. "G, yellow."

"L, green," Grue answered over the other side. He was mildly surprised. "Tattletale filled you in on the codes?"

"We got Gargoyle, Avalanche and Uber captured and constricted, with the latter two being unconscious and probably in critical condition. Also no, Regent did," Longinus answered.

"Huh, alright," Grue said, moderately curious, "Meet us down the main lane, then we're getting the fuck out of dodge." Click.

And with that, Longinus flew away to the intended destination with the construct bubble containing the two unconscious villains. He looked back, and saw that Gargoyle was trying to use his claws to keep himself in place against the concrete – which just so happened to be useless as Bastard and another dog used their prehensile tails to drag him after them, though it did manage to ruin the road by leaving behind two sets of five, pencil-thin furrows in the tarmac.

52

Birdsie

Dec 17, 2019

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Birdsie

Birdsie

Sharp Talons Cleave The Worthy

Dec 18, 2019

#4,643

People – or rather, the local community of vagrants, hobos, vagabonds, former Empire mooks-turned-minor-thugs, junkies, and drug dealers – stared in emotional reactions varying from fascination to mild concern as a stampede of minibus-sized monsters dragged a literal, screaming gargoyle down the street, with him trying to keep himself in place using sharp claws to no avail, leaving behind torn lines in the asphalt; and soon followed by a flying supervillain carrying a bubble with two costumed people seemingly sleeping within.

One of the locals snapped a photo of the event with his smartphone, his jaw hanging ajar in moderate shock. A laser burned through the phone, leaving a clean hole in it. The man flinched, then yelled an expletive.

Longinus came around from his sailing position to a vertical one, then gracefully touched down with both feet as the dogs and wolf slowed down to a trot, then full stop, in front of Regent and Grue, Tattletale slightly off to the side and calling someone on the phone smugly.

"Apparently, Tats' main idea is to call Calvert directly, mock him, and then give him the location of the Midtowners so he can make the arrest. Also, giving the info to the emergency line to make sure he didn't just ignore it," Regent explained the situation, while looking at the bubble of unconscious-or-maybe-dead capes.

"In exchange for leaving us the fuck alone, I hope?" Longinus asked, dropping the bubble on the ground but not letting Avalanche and Uber free of their entrapment.

"They're on his payroll, remember?" Grue asked, washing Avalanche and Uber in a good-sized cloud of his black fog, probably to further deter them from trying shit. In the background, Tattletale let out a bark of laughter that was more said than laughed; a near-aristocratic 'ha-ha-ha-ha!'

"Riiiight," Longinus sighed, crossing his arms. As he waited, he exerted the full strength of his telekinetic force to completely replenish his energy supplies.

"Right, right. Say hi to your mom, schnuckums," Tattletale said in the way of goodbye, hanging up on whoever she was talking to. With an expression of pure satisfaction, she turned to the team, saying, "Alrrright. Let's get the hell out of dodge, before Grumman and Dauntless drop on our ass. We have two to three minutes to gee-tee-eff-oh. Longinus; tie Gargoyle down to the asphalt and make sure he's secure."

"What about Avalanche and Uber?" Longinus asked, releasing the telekinetic pressure off of himself as he made his way towards Gargoyle to tie him down with at least fifty lengths of construct chain.

She shrugged. "Are they dead? That could be a problem." Tattletale looked at Bitch, who didn't offer anything beyond a grunt that didn't really convey any useful information.

"Fuck y–" Gargoyle managed, before Grue's fog muffled him out, then covered his entire body.

Longinus reached inside of the construct bubble with his awareness, to hear if they were breathing or not. He'd never tested if he could use constructs as hearing aides, but if it were possible, he wasn't hearing anything, and the only feedback was from the gravity pulling Uber and Avalanche down in its direction constantly.

Grue dropped the fog on Avalanche and Uber, while Longinus shook his head and approached the bubble, sticking his face inside by letting the spot he'd come in through become intangible. "Oi, fuckers, are you alive?"

Uber let out a keening noise that was somewhere between the sound that Death made when it was moving in your direction on horseback intending to swing its scythe about drunkenly, and the wail of a Dementor on hardcore, top-quality, choice methamphetamine. It may have been an allegory for Uber's crushed lungs, but it might as well have been a random noise he decided to make.

"Do you want us to take you prisoner so you get medical attention?" Longinus asked offhandedly. Geneva Convention for the win, baby.

Avalanche released a sound – or to be more precise, a brief series of sounds and high-pitched, throaty noises – which made Uber's previous noise sound like an elegant Mozart concert by comparison.

Longinus took his face out of the bubble. "You said the disabled chap and the Spartan guy would be here in three minutes?" he asked, turning to Tattletale.

"Two, now," Tattletale answered, looking moderately uncomfortable with the timer ticking down over their heads/

"Alright, let's get the fuck out of here, they'll be fine," he said, floating off the ground. "The bubble will drop as soon as we're far enough away."

Uber let out a sound that, if watered, given warmth and sunlight, and planted in the richest soil available, might have – in twenty-eight years – grown into a proper 'fuck you!' Right now it was just the gurgle of a throat filled with blood and struggling to let oxygen through a jammed windpipe.

The Undersiders mounted the dogs, then quickly took off down the street, with Grue dropping his power from Gargoyle. The stone Changer promptly yelled, "Hey, fuck you! All of you! You're fucking dead!" before his voice trailed off into the distance as he left.

"Tell that to your kicked ass and cut wings!" Longinus yelled back mockingly, laughing out in pride. The pure, unrestrained adrenaline and dopamine that came with properly kicking ass, finally.

Being a Ward? Needing restraint and caring about PR ratings? That was in the past. Longinus was a villain now, a fully groomed, proper villain. It brought much more satisfaction, to be able to kick ass without the fear of someone reprimanding you for breaking a bone you shouldn't have broken. This was faster, more efficient and more fun. The sheer excitement that came with it was something Longinus didn't feel in a long time; if the right person was around, he'd probably kiss the shit out of said person because of the sheer quantity of DRA in his veins.

With a sense of jubilancy at defeating their main contesters in the gang business – and really, the only ones except the Fallen who were still setting up camp, and the PRT who didn't count as a proper gang – the team returned into the vicinity of Tattletale's territory, before pulling the dogs over into an area that Longinus didn't recognize. It was in the better, more affluent part of Downtown, and yet also one of the more desolate streets. Bitch directed the pack into an underground parking garage attached to what looked to be a former police station, but was clearly defunct for at least months, if not entire years, and the team began to get off the dogs.

"Nice place," Regent commented, as the parking garage door closed behind them.

"Picked it out myself," Tattletale spoke back, hopping off of one of the dogs – Bentley, he was called, Longinus thought.

"Fuck yes!" Longinus exclaimed, hopping excitedly – exactly twice, to make the sheer emotion leave his body from his feet, into the ground. Then, he regained his composure, clearing his throat. "Yeah, nice crib."

"Eeey, he's learning the vernacular! It's so adorable," Imp said, as she climbed down from Bentley in careful movements. "Too bad we didn't get to fight anyone. You guys hogged all the fun to yourselves and didn't even call for back-up."

"They caught us by surprise. Calling for backup would've been… not wasted time, but…" he didn't want to say that it would've actually been wasted time, to not sound rude.

"Heat of the moment, yeah, we get it," Regent said, jauntily placing his taser-staff on his shoulders, and wrapping his arms around either and, making himself look kind of like a smooth 'w' with a lid on top. He looked around the garage, making note of three unmarked transport vans in one of the corners, and whistling appreciatively. "I want a secret base like this."

Longinus crossed his arms and looked around, in the same appreciative manner that the others did. "Honestly, I wish I could have a base like this too. I low-key hope that my future men will be at least a quarter as good as Coil's men were."

"Get real, guys," Tattletale mocked, stepping past them like a bird strutting its feathers out. "The top quality comes from contacts. And when we were in Coil's base, I just so happened to appropriate a pendrive with all his shit."

"Oh, yeah, you mentioned that earlier," Imp muttered, "What's on it?"

"I have numbers to Faultline's Crew, about two dozen separate PMCs, several groups of independent mercenaries, three contacts labelled 'serial killers willing to do dirty work for cheap,' Toybox, and a lot of specialists. Forgers, clean-up workers, demolition specialists – you name it."

"You think we could hire Faultline to help us out with our Coil problem?" Grue asked, as the Undersiders all began to walk in the direction of the building's doors, leaving behind Bitch who began to interact with her dogs and make them shrink.

"Nah. Whatever we pay her, she'll go for the highest bidder, and that's Calvert," Tattletale said, pursing her lips in mild frustration. "Even if he couldn't pay twice as much as we can, he's got the local PRT department in his pinky finger, so..."

Longinus nodded along, pursing his lips as well. "We need to off him."

"Exactly," Tattletale said, smiling without turning her head around to them. "Except that's going to be hard, for two reasons: one, he can live in two timelines and choose the one he likes, and two, he has a precognitive that gives him percentile odds of something happening. It's as easy as asking her, 'will there be a problem before lunchtime?' and when she says, 'ninety-nine percent,' he just asks, 'what are the odds the Undersiders will try to off me before lunchtime,' and then he's got us all figured out. Ideas beyond the obvious would be pretty swell."

"Tell the Fallen that Calvert is a blasphemous heretic, and let them deal with it," Longinus jokingly offered, shrugging, then chuckling.

"Dealing with the Fallen is pretty much semi-equivalent to dealing with the devil," Grue chided from the side, "I really would rather not, if we can avoid it, but there's something to that suggestion. We can't do it on our lonesome. Really can't."

"Working with Endbringer worshippers has got to be a new whole level of low for us," Imp remarked.

Longinus nodded, then sighed helplessly. "Not as low as three meters underground."

Regent snorted. His tone had the slightest touch of derision, but he was mostly serious, as he said, "Yeah. Honestly? I'd rather crack open a cold one with Valefor and sing praises to Behemoth, sooner than I'd smell daisies upside-down. But that's just me."

Soon after, Bitch caught up with the rest of the group, dogs and wolf in tow on leashes – she seemed to be following the conversation only peripherally, but heard them as they walked ahead.

"Put it to a… vote? Who would consider getting in contact with the Endbringer Cult?" Longinus asked, crossing his arms inquisitively.

Tattletale looked around, and saw as both Imp and Regent raised their hands into the air. The group stopped walking, glancing at each other. Slowly, gradually, in slow movements, Bitch hesitantly raised her hand, glancing at the rest of the group.

If Bitch agrees, it's the right thing to do. Animal instinct never lies when staying alive is on the line.

Longinus raised a hesitant hand, leaving Tattletale and Grue on the 'against' side, although a moment later, Tattletale shrugged and raised her hand with a 'fuck it' expression. Grue let out a loud groan, and said, "Fine! But we're going to be extra careful when dealing with them. No half-measures."

"Obviously," Longinus nodded in agreement, glancing at Grue briefly, only to then look at the rest of the team. "So, it's decided? After I claim territory and settle down, we go talk with the worshipers of the Unholy Trinity of Death?"

"It seems like it," Grue said. He sounded upset at the fact they had to take outside help, but more upset that it had to be the Fallen they'd be asking.

"That just leaves the question of how much time we give Longinus to set up. The longer he takes, the more open we are to attack by Calvert, and the harder it'll be to attack," Tattletale explained, before promptly saying - in a shade more serious voice than before, "Coil isn't going to be sitting by idly while we take territory that he considers his. He's either going to offer us our old jobs back – which isn't happening, or he's going to cut us out. Like Grue said: no half-measures from now on."

With a chipper tone and jaunty salute, Regent agreed, "Sir, yes, sir!"

Longinus sighed and shook his head, looking at Tattletale as she spoke. "You're right. But… how exactly do I claim territory? Do I just… go there, and… look menacing?"

"We'll get to that. Come with me," Tattletale said, waving for him to follow, while the rest of the Undersiders stood aside and then eventually dispersed to attend their own business.

He followed after her, with a curious stride to his step.

"Alright. Basically, gangs and organized crime, obviously work on a different level than governments. It's a hard balance: you need to make just the right amount of noise for people to hear you and understand you, without making enough noise to draw the attentions of the El Policia on your ass," she promptly explained, and turned her head to look at him as she said, "The base for it all? Reputation."

Longinus nodded along, feeling himself grow slightly more confident as she said the word 'reputation.' He already had a good amount of it.

"The reason the ABB was so indomitable? That no one dared touch the dragon's hoard? That's because Lung was a scary motherfucker, and he had scary motherfuckers on his call." She moved her eyes around, as she explained, "Oni Lee was fairly above-average as far as Movers went, but Bakuda took his danger rating through the roof, and then through the stratosphere. And she herself was almost as scary as Lung. You know she put bombs into people's heads to keep them in line, right?"

"Yeah, I know that well," Longinus nodded along, remembering the effects of her bombs.

"Yeah, so basically, no one messed with them, until they made so much fucking noise that not only were they fucking up their own business, but they were fucking up everybody else's business too. Bakuda was the problem there; instead of seeing it as business, she saw it as a pissing match," Tattletale explained to him, as they made their way past a pair of guards and up the stairs.

He felt a pang of satisfaction. "And she's in the Birdcage."

"Right. The key here is to be a scary motherfucker, like Lung, or at least a smart one, like me. Be scary, big, benevolent – whatever you want, but make a name for yourself, and make sure that name doesn't call down the wrath of Heaven on you," she finalized the first part of the 'claiming territory 101' course.

"But how do I… build a 'gang?' That's what concerns me the most," Longinus said, tapping his foot anxiously on the ground.

"I'll get to that in a second," she said, raising and waving a hand down as if to calm him down. They walked around the corner, to what looked to be her new office. "Okay, so claiming territory is pretty easy once you have reputation. You go onto the territory itself, and then delineate it as yours. Literally like a dog pissing over a fire hydrant to let all the other dogs know it's his. Do what it takes - get your minions to rough up the motherfuckers in the other gang's color, or make tags and claims on the walls, like 'Longinus Rulez,' or 'The Legion of Many' or shit like that. Go around, make some noise. Drop a dumpster or two onto the middle of the street, stand up on them, and yell to everyone that's looking; tell them: 'This is my turf. Any of you want it for yourselves? You gotta fuck with me, first! Do you want to fuck with me?' and when they shake their heads, you finish with a scoff: 'Ha! That's what I thought.'" She chuckled to herself.

"Who isn't against me, is with me, and things like that?" Longinus asked, leaning on the wall of the office.

"Yeah. The key here is to make the people understand they live in your domain, now. The families and typical salarymen need to walk down the street, and they need to understand 'Longinus operates in this general area.'" Tattletale sat down in her office chair, swiveling around to face him with steepled hands. "Sometimes, but not always, someone will come to contest your claim. Another cape from a rival gang – obviously not a problem for us, since everyone else is long gone. At worst, the Fallen might show up, and then you just have to tell them you were actually looking for them."

"Yeah, yeah," Longinus nodded along, sitting down on the chair in front of her. "What do you suggest I do, to start?"

"I'm not finished. You asked me about recruitment, I was about to get to that. Recruitment, business. I'm giving you the lowdown of being a crime boss, here," she said, rather miffed that he was trying to hurry her up. Longinus chuckled and waved at her, to prompt her to continue.

"Another thing you can do is taunt someone. Go up on their turf, paint some tags, turn over their favorite car, or break down their door and fuck up their kitchen, then run. That's near-sure to start a gang war between the two of you, and whoever comes out on top has a better hold over the area," she said, as she kicked the 'power on' button on her computer and got it starting up.

"Right," Longinus said, cringing slightly underneath his helmet. The idea of a gang war didn't really please him. "Isn't a gang war something to be avoided, unless you know the other party won't win?"

"A gang war is generally bad for business, yeah. But sometimes you need the territory, or you feel confident you can win. Brockton Bay, before Lung went down, was pretty much in an eternal stalemate between the Merchants, ABB, and Empire for what must have been several years," she mused, and he recalled that period – it was when he started out. The few gangsters he'd seen always seemed pretty confident about their operations. "They chipped away each other's territories; nibbled singular streets over the course of months, but it never really changed. Then Lung was taken down, and there was a sudden power vacuum, and all of the other winds tried to even out the pressure by rolling in. Get what I'm saying?"

He nodded, rather uncomfortable with the idea of gang wars, but following alongside her reasoning. "Yeah, I get what you mean."

"Alright, cool," she said, then briefly turned to her computer, and started looking around the desktop as if to confirm something. She clicked on some icon, took a brief look at a window that popped up, then turned back to Longinus, stretching her back. "Anyway. What else, uh… recruiting, right. What do you know about that? Probably nothing?"

"I know that people need to know that they can get either protection, shelter or money to be convinced," Longinus started, leaning an arm on the desk.

"Yeah. Some gangs, like the former Empire, had the benefit of something called 'an ideology.' A bunch of people are losers who blame society for their shitty life, and since they have no positive traits, they ascribe them to belonging to a group, which apparently raises them above other groups. Like being white, instead of black," she explained, waving her hand around, "If I was to give you a close-accuracy demographic of the Empire's membership? A quarter would be bloodthirsty psychos who joined on their own, a quarter would be actual racial supremacists who 'believed in the cause,' another quarter would be forcibly recruited and way underpaid, and the last quarter would be the gangsters who were in it for the money - either because they were greedy, or because it was their only option."

"Riiiight. What can I offer?" There wasn't really much in the way of resources that he could give to any potential 'psychopaths for hire' willing to consider working for him. Actually, maybe hiring psychopaths wasn't a good idea? "As of right now, I'm just the guy who fucked with Legend and came out unscathed."

"Money, protection, or stuff like that. A lot of people would pay to have a guy with flight and lasers fuck up any looters that went through their house, no matter who that guy is," she said, then clicked something on the internet and began scrolling through. An article on the PRT ENE, it seemed.

Longinus recalled what the mafia did, back on his previous Earth. Some of the families would offer protection from unorganized crime, in exchange for money, loyalty, and silence. 'Il Bacio di Andreotti,' was a good example. It was a historical event, in which the at-the-time Prime Minister of Italy shared a greeting kiss - one kiss for each cheek - with a Mafia boss. An infamous "kiss of honor," meant to signify that Andreotti was somehow linked, or in the cahoots, with the mafia.

When he didn't say anything else, she took it upon herself to continue, "You have two main types of gang members, with various flavors and 'tiers' for both types."

He nodded and folded his arms. "Elucidate."

"The first is something most people call 'useless fuckheads.' You go visit a shady area of town, put the word out: looking to hire someone. No questions asked, no background check, no experience required. The problem is, this sort of process gets the sort of person that probably deserves some questions, a background check, and who has a reason they don't have any prior work experience. Teenagers from a sketchy area who don't have anything going for them, addicts, idiots, drunks, or something in that vein. Hence, 'useless fuckheads.'"

"I'll teach them. Clean them up. Make them useful fuckheads," Longinus put out, shrugging. He'd try, at least.

"I doubt it," Tattletale responded, shaking her head with an amused smirk dancing on her lips. "They haven't risen into the 'second type' of minions for a reason. And that being your underlings. The actual minions who aren't cheap cannon fodder for moving boxes or shaking down meth dealers."

"Right. And how do I get those?" Longinus asked, crossing his arms. This was fun and placed him in a constant state of needing to know more.

"Underlings come in tiers," she elucidated with a drawl. "You have the basic ones; minions – sort of like useless fuckheads, except they aren't disappointments to their own mothers. Whatever addictions they have, they don't let them affect their work life. They have an ethic, and might be willing to work for something else than drugs or money.

"Next tier is your 'seasoned, experienced criminal,' which is kind of like the crime world equivalent of a military sergeant that's done with his Vietnam tour. They're experienced, often slightly specialized, but without professional training. Pimps, drug distributors, professional burglars - that kind of stuff. They're not quite your lieutenants, per se, but they are what makes the backbone of a crime empire.

"Then you have specialists. Not exactly small-time criminals; even if, like the previous category, they grew up and stirred in crime, they have something that sets them apart. You ever seen Earth Aleph's Breaking Bad? Or some kind of Earth Ayin equivalent?" she asked, turning her head a little inquisitively.

"Oh, I watched the shit out of that," Longinus stated with a chuckle.

"Right. Mike Ehrmantraut is what I mean when I say 'specialist.' It's someone with a professional background. Demolitions experts, drug dealers with decades of experience and their own mooks helping as muscle or to smooth running things, trained hitmen, you name it. Usually, they won't be working for you directly, but rather, you'll be hiring them on a case-by-case basis, as required, but for large sums of money," she explained, clicking on another internet article that displayed Aegis taking some kind of trophy on a podium next to the rest of his team and Director Calvert.

"What if I manage to get them to want to work for me?" Longinus asked, stepping up to the desk. He leaned over with both hands on the top, looking at the article she was reading. Something about saving the mayor from a hitman? Weird.

"Good for you, but that usually doesn't happen. This kind of people are way too careful to get themselves wrapped up directly, on average," she said, without glancing away from the screen for even a moment. With that, Tattletale looked up at him and said, "Anyway. The last category is your lieutenants. The right-hand men and women, who run shit in your absence, or help make the plan to break you out if you get caught, or carry on messages for you. That kind of stuff. Usually, you'd just pick a seasoned criminal you've worked with for a while, or who you have a reason to trust."

His mind immediately went to Signal. He didn't know if she'd even want in any of this, but he hoped she'd stick by his side.

Tattletale put one leg over the other, then drew closer to her desk and started clicking away at what appeared to be financial reports. "Anyway, that's about it for recruitment. You know-how, you know the categories - you'll be fine. There's other stuff to go over; business, bribery, subtlety. You'll need to pick some rackets to do in your territory, and see if you can get into a 'friendly relationship' with the local PD. And figure out a work model that keeps things smooth. Marquis had a tendency to kill those of his men that went out of line."

"Right," Longinus answered blankly. It had some sense to it, going by the logic that fear equaled control. He didn't want his people to step out of line, and killing the personalities that went out of line could be a viable option for keeping the order within his organization, but mostly as a last resort.

"So, what do you think is 'crime that you'd be comfortable with?' I've heard you mention that Tinker friend who can make drugs, so I guess that's in. A signature product is good to have; a signature Tinker product is going to net you big bucks, assuming the people in your area can even afford it," Tattletale said with a slight smirk on her face, as she wrote down an e-mail to someone.

"A mutual acquaintance is currently keeping her safe. I don't… even know if she'll come back in the near future," Longinus sighed wearily, throwing his head back to look at the ceiling.

"Well, you'll have to pick something else. Not dogfighting rings, by the way – Bitch will literally murder you if you try," Tattletale warned, mostly as a joke.

Longinus nodded and chuckled. "Of course. Chicken fighting?" he offered, as a joke.

She shrugged, saying, "Hey, whatever works. Regent's basically running a secret strip club on his turf."

He nodded and got up. "I'll get started as soon as possible. Thank you," he said with a smile underneath his helmet.

"Remember: make noise, but not too much," she called out, as he made his way out.

53

Birdsie

Dec 18, 2019

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