Worm A Complete Web Serial
Interlude 1 Last Chapter Next Chapter
"We don't know how long he had been there. Suspended in the air above the Atlantic Ocean. On May twentieth, 1982, an ocean liner was crossing from Plymouth to Boston when a passenger spotted him. He was naked, his arms to his sides, his long hair blowing in the wind as he stood in the sky, nearly a hundred feet above the gently cresting waves. His skin and hair can only be described as a burnished gold. With neither body hair nor clothes to cover him, it is said, he seemed almost artificial.
"After a discussion including passenger and crew, the liner detoured to get closer. It was a sunny day, and passengers crowded to the railings to get a better look. As if sharing their curiosity, the figure drew closer as well. His expression was unchanging, but witnesses at the scene reported that he appeared deeply sad.
"'I thought he was going to crack his facade and cry any moment', said Grace Lands, 'But when I reached out and touched his fingertips, I was the one who burst into tears.'
"'That boat trip was a final journey for me. I had cancer, and I wasn't brave enough to face it. Can't believe I'm admitting this in front of a camera, but I was going back to Boston, where I was born, to end things myself. After I met him, I changed my mind. Didn't matter anyways. I went to a doctor, and he said there was no sign I ever had the disease.'
"'My brother, Andrew Hawke, was the last passenger to make any sort of contact with him, I remember. He climbed up onto the railing, and, almost falling off, he clasped the hand of the golden man. The rest of us had to grab onto him to keep him from falling. Whatever happened left him with a quiet awe. When the man with the golden skin flew away, my brother stayed silent. The rest of the way to Boston, my brother didn't say a word. When we docked, and the spell finally broke, my brother babbled his excitement to reporters like a child.'
"The golden man would reappear several more times in the coming months and years. At some point, he donned clothing. At first, a sheet worn over one shoulder and pinned at either side of the waist, then more conventional clothes. In 1999, he donned the white bodysuit he still wears today. For more than a decade, we have wondered, where did our golden man get these things? Who was he in contact with?
"Periodically at first, then with an increasing frequency, the golden man started to intervene in times of crisis. For events as small as a car accident, as great as natural disasters, he has arrived and used his abilities to save us. A flash of light to freeze water reinforcing a levee stressed by a hurricane. A terrorist act averted. A serial murderer caught. A volcano quelled. Miracles, it was said.
"His pace increased, perhaps because he was still learning what he could do, perhaps because he was getting a greater sense of where he was needed. By the middle of the
1990s, he was traveling from crisis to crisis, flying faster than the speed of sound. In fifteen years, he has not rested.
"He has been known to speak just once in thirty years. After extinguishing widespread fire in Alexandrovsk, he paused to survey the scene and be sure no blazes remained. A reporter spoke to him, and asked, 'Kto vy?' – what are you?
"Shocking the world, caught on camera in a scene replayed innumerable times, he answered in a voice that sounded as though it might never have uttered a sound before. Barely audible, he told her, 'Scion'.
"It became the name we used for him. Ironic, because we took a word that meant descendant, and used it to name the first of many superpowered individuals – parahumans – to appear across Earth.
"Just five years after Scion's first appearance, the superheroes emerged from the cover of rumor and secrecy to show themselves to the public. Though the villains followed soon after, it was the heroes who shattered any illusions of the parahumans being divine figures. In 1989, attempting to quell a riot over a basketball game in Michigan, the superhero known to the public as Vikare stepped in, only to be clubbed over the head. He died not long after of a brain embolism. Later, he would be revealed to be Andrew Hawke.
"The golden age of the parahumans was thus short lived. They were not the deific figures they had appeared to be. Parahumans were, after all, people with powers, and people are flawed at their core. Government agencies took a firmer hand, and state-"
The television flicked off, and the screen went black, cutting the documentary off mid sentence. Danny Hebert sighed and sat down on the bed, only to stand just a moment later and resume pacing.
It was three fifteen in the morning, and his daughter Taylor was not in her bedroom.
Danny ran his hands through his hair, which was thinned enough at the top to be closer to baldness than not. He liked to be the first to arrive at work, watching everyone arrive, having them know he was there for them. So he usually went to bed early; he'd turn in at ten in the evening, give or take depending on what was on TV. Only tonight, a little past midnight, he'd been disturbed from restless sleep when he had felt rather than heard the shutting of the back door of the house, just below his bedroom. He had checked on his daughter, and he'd found her room empty.
So he had waited for his daughter to return for three hours.
Countless times, he had glanced out the window, hoping to see Taylor coming in.
For the twentieth time, he felt the urge to ask his wife for help, for advice, for support. But her side of the bed was empty and it had been for some time. Daily, it seemed, he was struck by the urge to call her cell phone. He knew it was stupid – she wouldn't pick up – and if he dwelt on that for too long, he became angry at her, which just made him feel worse.
He wondered, even as he knew the answer, why he hadn't gotten Taylor a cell phone. Danny didn't know what his daughter was doing, what would drive her to go out at night. She wasn't the type. He could tell himself that most fathers felt that way about their daughters, but at the same time, he knew. Taylor wasn't social. She didn't go to parties, she wouldn't drink, she wasn't even that interested in champagne when they celebrated the New Year together.
Two ominous possibilities kept nagging at him, both too believable. The first was that Taylor had gone out for fresh air, or even for a run. She wasn't happy, especially at school, he knew, and exercise was her way of working through it. He could see her doing it on a Sunday night, with a fresh week at school looming. He liked that her running made her feel better about herself, that she seemed to be doing it in a reasonable, healthy way. He just hated that she had to do it here, in this neighborhood. Because here, a skinny girl in her mid-teens was an easy target for attack. A mugging or worse – he couldn't even articulate the worst of the possibilities in his own thoughts without feeling physically sick. If she had gone out at eleven in the evening for a run and hadn't come back by three in the morning, then it meant something had happened.
He glanced out the window again, at that corner of the house where the pool of illumination beneath the streetlight would let him see her approaching. Nothing.
The second possibility wasn't much better. He knew Taylor was being bullied. Danny had found that out in January, when his little girl had been pulled out of school and taken to the hospital. Not the emergency room, but the psychiatric ward. She wouldn't say by whom, but under the influence of the drugs they had given her to calm down, she had admitted she was being victimized by bullies, using the plural to give him a clue that it was a they and not a he or a she. She hadn't mentioned it – the incident or the bullying – since. If he pushed, she only tensed up and grew more withdrawn. He had resigned himself to letting her reveal the details in her own time, but months had passed without any hints or clues being offered.
There was precious little Danny could do on the subject, either. He had threatened to sue the school after his daughter had been taken to the hospital, and the school board had responded by settling, paying her hospital bills and promising they would look out for her to prevent such events from occurring in the future. It was a feeble promise made by a chronically overworked staff and it didn't do a thing to ease his worries. His efforts to have her change schools had been stubbornly countered with rules and regulations about the maximum travel times a student was allowed to have between home and a given school. The only other school within a reasonable distance of Taylor's place of residence was Arcadia High, and it was already desperately overcrowded with more than two hundred students on a list requesting admittance.
With all that in mind, when his daughter disappeared until the middle of the night, he couldn't shake the idea that the bullies might have lured her out with blackmail, threats or empty promises. He only knew about the one incident, the one that had landed her in the hospital, but it had been grotesque. It had been implied, but never elaborated on, that more had been going on. He could imagine these boys or girls that were tormenting his daughter, egging one another on as they came up with more creative ways to humiliate or harm her. Taylor
hadn't said as much aloud, but whatever had been going on had been mean, persistent and threatening enough that Emma, Taylor's closest friend for years, had stopped spending time with her. It galled him.
Impotent. Danny was helpless where it counted. There was no action he could take – his one call to the police at two in the morning had only earned him a tired explanation that the police couldn't act or look for her without something more to go on. If his daughter was still gone after twelve hours, he'd been told, he should call them again. All he could do was wait and pray with his heart in his throat that the phone wouldn't ring, a police officer or nurse on the other end ready to tell him what had happened to his daughter.
The slightest of vibrations in the house marked the escape of the warm air in the house to the cold outdoors, and there was a muffled whoosh as the kitchen door shut again. Danny Hebert felt a thrill of relief coupled with abject fear. If he went downstairs to find his daughter, would he find her hurting or hurt? Or would his presence make things worse, her own father seeing her at her most vulnerable after humiliation at the hands of bullies? She had told him, in every way except articulating it aloud, that she didn't want that. She had pleaded with him, with body language and averted eye contact, unfinished sentences and things left unsaid, not to ask, not to push, not to see, when it came to the bullying. He couldn't say why, exactly. Home was an escape from that, he'd suspected, and if he recognized the bullying, made it a reality here, maybe she wouldn't have that relief from it. Perhaps it was shame, that his daughter didn't want him to see her like that, didn't want to be that weak in front of him. He really hoped that wasn't the case.
So he ran his fingers through his hair once more and sat down on the corner of the bed, elbows on his knees, hands on his head, and stared at his closed bedroom door. His ears were peeled for the slightest clue. The house was old, and it hadn't been a high quality building when it had been new, so the walls were thin and the structure prone to making noise at every opportunity. There was the faintest sound of a door closing downstairs. The bathroom? It wouldn't be the basement door, with no reason for her to go down there, and he couldn't imagine it was a closet, because after two or three minutes, the same door opened and closed again.
After something banged on the kitchen counter, there was little but the occasional groan of floorboards. Five or ten minutes after she had come in, there was the rhythmic creak of the stairs as she ascended. Danny thought about clearing his throat to let her know he was awake and available should she knock on his door, but decided against it. He was being cowardly, he thought, as if his clearing of his throat would give reality to his fears.
Her door shut carefully, almost inaudibly, with the slightest tap of door on doorframe. Danny stood, abruptly, opening his door, ready to cross the hall and knock on her door. To verify that his daughter was okay.
He was stopped by the smell of jam and toast. She had made a late night snack. It filled him with relief. He couldn't imagine his daughter, after being mugged, tormented or humiliated, coming home to have toast with jam as a snack. Taylor was okay, or at least, okay enough to be left alone.
He let out a shuddering sigh of relief and retreated to his room to sit on the bed.
Relief became anger. He was angry at Taylor, for making him worry, and then not even going out of her way to let him know she was okay. He felt a smouldering resentment towards the city, for having neighborhoods and people he couldn't trust his daughter to. He hated the bullies that preyed on his daughter. Underlying it all was frustration with himself. Danny Hebert was the one person he could control in all of this, and Danny Hebert had failed to do anything that mattered. He hadn't gotten answers, hadn't stopped the bullies, hadn't protected his daughter. Worst of all was the idea that this might have happened before, with him simply sleeping through it rather than laying awake.
He stopped himself from walking into his daughter's room, from shouting at her and demanding answers, even if it was what he wanted, more than anything. Where had she been, what had she been doing? Was she hurt? Who were these people that were tormenting her? He knew that by confronting her and getting angry at her, he would do more harm than good, would threaten to sever any bond of trust they had forged between them.
Danny's father had been a powerful, heavyset man, and Danny hadn't gotten any of those genes. Danny had been a nerd when the term was still young in popular culture, stick thin, awkward, short sighted, glasses, bad fashion sense. What he had inherited was his father's famous temper. It was quick to rise and startling in its intensity. Unlike his father, Danny had only ever hit someone in anger twice, both times when he was much younger. That said, just like his father, he could and would go off on tirades that would leave people shaking. Danny had long viewed the moment he'd started to see himself as a man, an adult, to be the point in time where he had sworn to himself that he wouldn't ever lose his temper with his family. He wouldn't pass that on to his child the way his father had to him.
He had never broken that oath with Taylor, and knowing that was what kept him contained in his room, pacing back and forth, red in the face and wanting to punch something. While he'd never gotten angry at her, never screamed at her, he knew Taylor had seen him angry. Once, he had been at work, talking to a mayor's aide. The man had told Danny that the revival projects for the Docks were being cancelled and that, contrary to promises, there were to be layoffs rather than new jobs for the already beleaguered Dockworkers. Taylor had been spending the morning in his office on the promise that they would go out for the afternoon, and had been in a position to see him fly off the handle in the worst way with the man. Four years ago, he had lost his temper with Annette for the first time, breaking his oath to himself. That had been the last time he had seen her. Taylor hadn't been there to see him shouting at her mother, but he was fairly certain she'd heard some of it. It shamed him.
The third and last time that he had lost his temper where Taylor had been in a position to know had been when she had been hospitalized following the incident in January. He'd screamed at the school's principal, who had deserved it, and at Taylor's then-Biology teacher, who probably hadn't. It had been bad enough that a nurse had threatened to call for a police officer, and Danny, barely mollified, had stomped from the hallway to the hospital room to find his daughter more or less conscious and wide eyed in reaction. Danny harbored a deep fear that the reason Taylor hadn't offered any details on the bullying was out of fear he would, in blind rage, do something about it. It made him feel sick, the notion
that he might have contributed something to his daughter's self imposed isolation in how she was dealing with her problems.
It took Danny a long time to calm down, helped by telling himself over and over that Taylor was okay, that she was home, that she was safe. It was something of a blessing that, as the anger faded, he felt drained. He climbed into the left side of the bed, leaving the right side empty out of a habit he'd yet to break, and pulled the covers up around himself.
He would talk to Taylor in the morning. Get an answer of some sort.
He dreamed of the ocean.
Worm A Complete Web Serial
Insinuation 2.1 Last Chapter Next Chapter
I woke to the muffled sound of the radio in the bathroom. Reaching over to my alarm clock, I turned it around. 6:28. Which made today a weekday like any other. My alarm was set for six thirty, but I almost never needed it, because my dad was always in the shower at the same time. Routines defined us.
As a wave of fatigue swept over me, I wondered if I might be sick. It took me a few moments of staring up at the ceiling to remember the events of last night. Small wonder I was tired. I had gotten home, snuck inside and gone to bed at close to three thirty, just three hours ago. With all that had happened, I hadn't slept those full three hours, either.
I forced myself out of bed. As a slave to my routine, it would be wrong to do otherwise. I made myself change into sweats and walk down to the kitchen sink to wash my face, fighting to keep awake. I was sitting at the kitchen table, pulling on my sneakers, when my dad came downstairs in his bathrobe.
My dad is not what you'd call an attractive man. Beanpole thin, weak chin, thinning dark hair that was on the cusp of baldness, big eyes and glasses that magnified those eyes further. As he entered the kitchen, he looked surprised to see me there. That's just the way my dad always looked: constantly bewildered. That, and a little defeated.
"Good morning, kiddo," he said, entering the kitchen and leaning down to kiss the crown of my head.
"Hey, dad."
He was already stepping towards the fridge as I replied. He looked over his shoulder, "A little glum?"
"Hunh?"
"You sound down," he said.
I shook my head, "Tired. I didn't sleep well."
There was the slap of bacon hitting the frying pan. It was sizzling by the time he spoke, "You know, you could go back to bed, sleep in for another hour or so. You don't have to go on your run."
I smiled. It was equal parts annoying and sweet, that my dad hated me running. He worried about my safety, and couldn't turn down a chance to drop hints that I should stop, or be safer, or join a gym. I wasn't sure if he'd worry more or less if I told him about my powers.
"You know I do, dad. If I don't go today, it'll be that much harder to make myself get up and do it tomorrow."
"You've got the, uh…"
"I've got the tube of pepper spray in my pocket," I said. He bobbed his head in acknowledgement. It was only moments later that I realized I didn't have it. The pepper spray was with my costume, in the coal chute in the basement. I felt a pang of guilt at realizing I'd lied to my dad.
"O.J.?" he asked.
"I'll get it," I said, heading to the fridge for the orange juice. While I was at the fridge, I also grabbed some applesauce. As I returned to the table, my dad slapped some french toast on the frying pan to join the bacon. The room filled with the aroma of the cooking food. I helped myself to the applesauce.
"You know Gerry?" my dad asked.
I shrugged.
"You met him once or twice when you've visited me at work. Big guy, burly, Black Irish?"
Shrugging again, I took a bite of french toast. My dad was part of the Dockworkers Association, as the Union spokesperson and head of hiring. With the state of the Docks being what they were, that meant my dad was pretty much in charge of telling everyone that there were no jobs to be had, day after day.
"Rumor's going around he found work. Guess with who."
"Dunno," I said, around a mouthful of food.
"He's going to be one of Über and Leet's henchmen."
I raised my eyebrows. Über and Leet were local villains with a video game theme. They were pretty much as incompetent as villains could be while staying out of jail. They barely even rated as B-list.
"They going to make him wear a uniform? Bright primary colors, Tron style?"
My dad chuckled, "Probably."
"We're supposed to talk about how the powers thing has influenced our lives in class today. Maybe I'll mention that."
We ate in silence for a minute or two.
"I heard you come in late last night," he said.
I just gave him a small nod and took another bite of french toast, even as my heart rate tripled and my mind searched for excuses.
"Like I said," I finally opened my mouth, looking down at my plate, "I just couldn't sleep. I couldn't get my thoughts to settle down. I got out of bed and tried pacing, but it didn't help, so I stepped outside and walked around the neighborhood." I wasn't totally lying. I'd had nights like that. Last night just hadn't been one of them, and I had gone walking around the neighborhood, even if it was in a different way than I'd implied.
"Christ, Taylor," my father answered, "This isn't the kind of area where you can walk around in the middle of the night."
"I had the pepper spray," I protested, lamely. That wasn't a lie, at least.
"What if you get caught off guard? What if the guy has a knife, or a gun?" my father asked.
Or pyrokinesis and the ability to grow armor plating and claws? I felt a little knot of ugliness in the pit of my stomach at my father's concern for me. It was all the more intense because it was so justified. I had almost died last night.
"What's going on, that has you so anxious you can't sleep?" he questioned me.
"School," I said, swallowing around a lump in my throat, "Friends, the lack thereof."
"It's not better?" he asked, carefully stepping around the elephant in the room, the bullies.
If it was, I wouldn't be having problems, would I? I just gave him a one shoulder shrug and forced myself to take another bite of french toast. My shoulder twinged a little as it made the bruises from last night felt. As much as I didn't feel like eating, I knew my stomach would be growling at me before lunch if I didn't. That was even without accounting for the energy I burned running, let alone the escapades of last night.
When my dad realized I didn't have an answer for him, he resumed eating. He only had one bite before he put his fork down again with a clink on the plate.
"No more going out in the middle of the night," he said, "Or I'm putting a bell on the doors."
He would, too. I just nodded and promised myself I would be more careful. When I had come in, I had been so tired and sore that I hadn't given any thought to the click of the door, the rattle of the lock or the creaks of floorboards that were older than me.
"Okay," I said, adding, "I'm sorry." Even with that, I felt a twinge of guilt. My apology was sincere in feeling, but I was making it with the knowledge that I would probably do the same thing again. It felt wrong.
He gave me a smile that seemed almost like an unspoken 'I'm sorry too'.
I finished off my plate and stood up to put it in the sink and run water over it.
"Going on your run?"
"Yeah," I said, put my dishes in the beaten up old dishwasher and bent down to give my dad a hug on my way to the door.
"Taylor, have you been smoking?"
I shook my head.
"Your hair is, uh, burnt. At the ends, there."
I thought back to the previous night. Getting hit in the back by one of Lung's blasts of flame.
Shrugging, I suggested, "Stove, maybe?"
"Be safe," my dad said, emphasizing each word. I took that as my cue to go, heading out the side door and breaking into an all out run the moment I was past the chain link gate at the side of the house.
Worm A Complete Web Serial
Insinuation 2.2 Last Chapter Next Chapter
The run had helped to wake me up, as did the hot shower and a cup of the coffee my dad had left in the pot. Even so, the fatigue didn't help the feeling of disorientation over just how normal the day seemed as I made my way to school. Just a matter of hours ago, I had been in a life and death fight, I had even met Armsmaster. Now it was a day like any other.
I felt a bit nervous as I got to homeroom. Having basically skipped two classes the previous Friday, failing to turn in a major assignment, I figured that Mrs. Knott probably knew already. I didn't feel relieved when Mrs. Knott glanced up at me and gave a tight smile before turning her attention back to her computer. That just meant the humiliation would be redoubled if and when class was interrupted by someone coming down from the office. A part of me just wanted to miss this class too, just to avoid the potential humiliation and avoid drawing attention.
All in all, I felt anxious as I made my way to my computer, which kind of sucked because Computer class was one of the few parts of the school day I didn't usually dread. For one thing, it was the one class in which I was doing well. More to the point, neither Madison, Sophia nor Emma were in this class, though some of their friends were. Those girls didn't usually feel the need to harass me without the trio around, and I was further removed from them because I was in the advanced stream of the class. A good three quarters of the people in the room were computer illiterate, being from families that didn't have the money for computers or families that didn't have much interest in the things, so they practiced typing without looking at the keyboard and had lessons in using search engines. By contrast, I was in the group that was learning some basic programming and spreadsheets. It didn't do a lot for my already geeky reputation, but I could deal.
Mrs. Knott was an alright teacher, if not the most hands on; she was usually content to give us advanced students an in-class assignment and then focus on the more rambunctious majority for the rest of the class. This suited me just fine – I usually wrapped up the assignment in a half hour, leaving me an hour to use as I saw fit. I had been recalling and going over the events of the previous night during my morning run, and the first thing that I did when the ancient desktop finished its agonizing load process was to start digging for information.
The go-to place for news and discussion on capes was Parahumans Online. The front page had constant updates on recent, international news featuring capes. From there, I could go to the wiki, where there was information on individual capes, groups and events, or to the message boards, which broke down into nearly a hundred sub-boards, for specific cities and capes. I opened the wiki in one tab, then found and opened the message board for Brockton Bay in another.
I had the sense that either Tattletale or Grue were the leader of the group I had run into. Turning my attention to Tattletale, I searched the wiki. The result I got was disappointingly short, starting with a header reading "This article is a stub. Be a hero and help us expand it." There was a one sentence blurb on how she was a alleged villain active in Brockton Bay, with a single blurry picture. The only new information for me was that her costume was lavender. A search of the message boards turned up absolutely nothing. There wasn't even a hint as to what her power was.
I looked up Grue. There was actually information about him, but nothing detailed or definitive. The wiki stated he had been active for nearly three years, dealing in petty crimes such as robbing small stores and doing some work as an enforcer for those who wanted a little superpowered muscle along for a job. Recently, he had turned to higher scale crime, including corporate theft and robbing a casino, together with his new team. His power was
listed as darkness generation in the sidebar under his picture. The picture seemed crisp enough, but the focus of it, Grue, was just a blurry black silhouette in the center.
I searched for Bitch, next. No results. I did another search for her more official title, Hellhound, and got a wealth of information. Rachel Lindt had never made any real attempt to hide her identity. She had apparently been homeless through most of her criminal career, just living on the streets and moving on whenever police or a cape came after her. The sightings and encounters with the homeless girl ended around a year ago – I figured that was when she joined forces with Grue, Tattletale and Regent. The picture in the sidebar was taken from surveillance camera footage – an unmasked, dark haired girl who I wouldn't have called pretty. She had a squarish, blunt-featured face with thick eyebrows. She was riding atop one of her monstrous 'dogs' like a jockey rides a horse, down the middle lane of a street.
According to the wiki entry, her powers manifested when she was fourteen, followed almost immediately by her demolishing the foster home she had been living in, injuring her foster mother and two other foster children in the process. This was followed by a two year series of skirmishes and retreats across Maine as various heroes and teams tried to apprehend her, and she either defeated them or successfully evaded capture. She had no powers that would have made her any stronger or faster than the average Jane, but she was apparently able to turn ordinary dogs into the creatures I had seen on the rooftop. Monsters the size of a car, all muscle, bone, fang and claw. A red box near the bottom of the page read, "Rachel Lindt has a public identity, but is known to be particularly hostile, antisocial and violent. If recognized, do not approach or provoke. Leave the area and notify authorities as to her last known location." At the very bottom of the page was a list of links that were related to her: two fansites and a news article relating to her early activities. A search of the message boards turned up too many results, leaving me unable to sift through the crap, the arguments, the speculation and the villain worship to find any genuine morsels of information. If nothing else, she was notorious. I sighed and moved on, making a mental note to do more investigation when I had the time.
The last member of the group was Regent. Given what Armsmaster had said about the guy being low profile, I didn't expect to find much. I was surprised to find less than that. Nothing. My search on the wiki turned up only a default response, "There are no results matching this query. 32 unique IP addresses have searched the Wiki for 'Regent' in 2011. Would you like to create the page?" The message board didn't turn up anything else. I even did a search for alternate spellings of his name, such as Regence and Recant, in case I had heard it wrong. Nothing turned up.
If my mood had been on the sour side as I got to homeroom, the dead ends only made it worse. I turned my attention to the in-class assignment, making a working calculator in Visual Basic, but it was too trivial to distract me. The work from Thursday and Friday had already given us the tools to do the job, so it was really just busywork. I didn't mind learning stuff, but work for the sake of doing work was annoying. I did the bare minimum, checked it for any bugs, moved the file to the 'completed work' folder and returned to surfing the web. All in all, the work barely took fifteen minutes.
I looked up Lung on the wiki, which I had done often enough before, as part of my research and preparation for being a superhero. I'd wanted to be sure I knew who prominent local villains were and what they could do. The search for 'Lung' redirected to a catch-all page on his gang, the ABB, with quite a bit of detailed information. The information on Lung's powers was pretty in line with my own experience, though there was no mention of the super-hearing or him being fireproof. I debated adding it, but decided against it. There were security concerns with my submission being tracked back to Winslow High, and then to me. I figured it would probably be deleted as unsupported speculation, anyways.
The section beneath the description of Lung and his powers covered his subordinates. He was estimated to have forty or fifty thugs working for him across Brockton Bay, largely drawn from the ranks of Asian youth. It was pretty unconventional for a gang to include members of the variety of nationalities that the ABB did, but Lung had made it a mission to conquer and absorb every gang with Asian members and many without. Once he had the manpower he needed, the non-Asian gangs were cannibalized for assets, their members discarded. Even though there were no more major gangs in the east end of town to absorb, he was still recruiting zealously. His method, now, was to go after anyone older than twelve and younger than sixty. It didn't matter if you were a gang member or not. If you were Asian and you lived in Brockton Bay, Lung and his people expected you to either join or to pay tribute one way or another. There had been local news reports on it, newspaper articles, and I could remember seeing signs in the guidance counselor's office detailing where people who were targeted in this way could go for help.
Lung's lieutenants were listed as Oni Lee and Bakuda. I already had some general knowledge about Oni Lee, but I was intrigued to see there were recent updates to his wiki entry. There were specific details on his powers: He could teleport, but when he did so, he didn't disappear. As he teleported, his original self, for lack of a better term, would stay where it was and remain active for five to ten seconds before disintegrating into a cloud of carbon ash. Essentially, he could create another version of himself anywhere nearby, while the old version could stick around long enough to distract or attack you. If that wasn't scary enough, there was an report of him holding a grenade in his hand as he repeatedly duplicated himself, with his short lived duplicates acting as suicide bombers. Topping it all off, Oni Lee's wiki page had a similar red warning box to the one that Bitch/Hellhound had on hers, minus the bit about his public identity. From what they knew about him, authorities had seen fit to note him a sociopath. The warning covered the same essential elements: exceedingly violent, dangerous to approach, should not be provoked, and so on. I glanced at his picture. His costume consisted of a black bodysuit with a black bandoleer and belt for his knives, guns and grenades. The only color on him was an ornate Japanese-style demon mask, crimson with two green stripes down either side. Except for the mask, his costume gave off the distinct impression of a ninja, which just added weight to the notion that this was a guy who could and would slide a knife between your ribs.
Bakuda was a new entry, added to the ABB wiki page just ten days ago. The picture only showed her from the shoulders up, a girl with straight black hair, large opaque goggles over her eyes and a metal mask with a gas mask styled filter covering the lower half of her face. A braided cord of black, yellow and green wires looped over one of her shoulders. I couldn't pinpoint her ethnicity with the mask and goggles, and her age wasn't any easier to figure out.
The wiki had a lot of the same details Armsmaster had mentioned to me. Bakuda had essentially held a university ransom and she did it with her superhuman ability to design and fabricate high tech bombs. There was a link to a video titled 'Bomb Threat @ Cornell', but I didn't think it wise to play it in school, especially without headphones. I made a mental note to check it out when I got home.
The next thing that caught my eye was the section heading titled 'Defeats and Captures'. I scrolled down to read it. According to the wiki, Lung had apparently suffered a number of minor defeats at the hands of various teams, ranging from the Guild to the local teams of New Wave, the Wards and the Protectorate, but consistently managed to evade capture until last night. A blurb read, ' Armsmaster successfully ambushed and defeated the leader of the ABB, who was weakened from a recent encounter with a rival gang. Lung was taken to the PHQ for holding until the villain's trial by teleconference. Given Lung's extensive and well documented criminal history, it is expected he will face imprisonment in the Birdcage should he be found guilty at trial.'
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. I wasn't sure what to think. By all rights, I should have been angry that Armsmaster took the credit for the fight that could have cost me my life. Instead, I felt a building excitement. I felt like shaking the shoulder of the guy sitting next to me and point to the screen, saying, "Me, I made that possible! Me!"
With a renewed enthusiasm, I switched tabs to the message board and began looking to see what people were saying about it. A post by a fan or minion of Lung threatened violence against Armsmaster. There was a request by someone asking for more information on the fight. I was given pause by one post that asked whether Bakuda could or would use a large scale bomb and the threat of potentially thousands or hundreds of thousands dead, to ransom Lung back.
I tried to put that out of my mind. If it happened, it would be the responsibility of heroes better and more experienced than I.
It struck me that there was one person I hadn't looked for. Myself. I opened up the advanced search page for the message board and did a search for multiple terms. I included insect, spider, swarm, bug, plague, and a mess of other terms that had struck me when I had been trying to brainstorm a good hero name. I narrowed the timeframe of posts to search for posts made within the past 12 hours and hit Search.
My efforts turned up two posts. One referred to a villain called Pestilence, active in the UK. Apparently Pestilence was one of the people who could use 'magic'. That is, he was if you believed magic was real, and not just some convoluted or deluded interpretation of a given set of powers.
The second post was in the 'Connections' section of the message board, where rescued damsels left their contact information for their dashing heroes, where conventions and fan gatherings were organized and where people posted job offers for capes and the cape-obsessed. Most were cryptic or vague, referring to stuff only the people in question would know.
The message was titled, simply, "Bug"
I clicked it and waited impatiently for the outdated system and overloaded school modem to load up the page. What I got was brief.
Subject: Bug
Owe you one. Would like to repay the favor. Meet?
Send a message,
Tt.
The post was followed by two pages of people commenting. Three people suggested it was something important, while a half dozen more people decried them as tinfoil hats, 's term for conspiracy theorists.
It was meaningful, though. I couldn't interpret it any other way; Tattletale had found a way to get in contact with me.