Interlude 1-C: Tattletale
I got to the top of the basement stairs just in time to see Regent turn off the taser and Grue step forward to catch Taylor Hebert before her unconscious body fell back down the steps. Good, he'd actually remembered to bring the taser along like I'd nagged them both to. Given the dire penalties that Coil had threatened me with if we blew this mission and the direr ones that would have landed on us if she'd actually gotten away to call the cops, I'd felt we needed the extra insurance.
Regent and me stepped back while Grue brought her up and laid her out on the living room couch, and I pulled the little carrying case out of my pocket that held the two pre-prepared injectors that Coil had given me before this mission. Each one was full of a two-hour dose of sedatives, more than enough time to get her to back to the drop point; the only reason I had two was in case an accident had broken one. I rolled up her left sleeve and my power told me exactly where to find a good vein, so off to dreamland she went.
"You guys okay?" I asked.
"She blocked my power!" Regent said, with what for him was uncharacteristic worry. "I had to use the taser gun. Did you know that she could block my power?!?"
"No I didn't," I denied, and I honestly hadn't. "But-"
"I knew something smelled when you brought us the orders from the boss, but you said everything was fine!" Grue cut in angrily. "She's a parahuman, isn't she? That's why you had me wear the extra protective gear. That's why you had us bring the tasers and the batons! You'd think three of the Undersiders could take one teenaged girl but-"
I didn't need my powers to see how fast this conversation could go downhill, and we were having it in the wrong place. Shit, I was really hoping to have gotten back to base before the blowup happened. Still, nothing for it but to lay down the law and lay it fast.
"Yes I knew she was a parahuman before we got here," I cut in, "and yes I didn't tell you because the boss ordered me not to. Do you know what happens if I disobey a direct order from the boss, guys? Can you even guess?" I stuck out one finger and then crooked my thumb in a pistol-cocking motion to emphasize the point.
"And this is the guy you thought it was a great idea for us to work for?!?" Grue said.
"Hey, he won't screw with us as long as we don't screw it up for him, and can you name any crimelord in town who gives a better deal than that?" I replied quickly. "That kind of thing is inherent in the definition of the term 'crimelord', wouldn't you think?"
"She's got a point," Regent put in with more of us usual offhandedness. "That's just how the business works."
"Tricking us into breaking the unwritten rules is not 'just how the business works'." Grue replied, still steaming. "Why didn't the boss just send some of his mercs to do the job, if he's trying to pretend there's nothing cape about this? Do you have any idea how fucked we are?!?" he finished in what would have been angry shouting if we hadn't all been aware that we were still on the job and had to keep the neighbors from hearing anything.
Oh boy. I did not want to get into how Coil's power worked with the guys just yet. "We are not fucked because we are not going to get caught. She hadn't gone out yet as a cape, she probably hasn't even picked a name yet, so if we vanish her into the boss' custody like we're supposed to then who's to know? It's not like we're kidnapping Kid Win here!" I pleaded.
Grue looked at me and opened his mouth before closing it in recognition of the futility of protesting. After all, its hardly like we could just leave her here and go away and pretend nothing had ever happened now, could we?
"And as for why us, um, short version is that he did a study of that merc job and he didn't like the odds. So he sent us, and given how close it came for us-?"
"Okay, that I can figure," Grue agreed, focusing back on the immediate job but his tone of voice promising We will finish discussing this later. "So, what's her power supposed to be? I really hope its not a Brute rating if we're counting on the drugs to keep her out while we make the delivery."
"If it was a Brute rating you'd have a broken leg right now, shinguards or no shinguards." I pointed out. "Originally the evaluation was probably Thinker, but what the boss' surveillance could get about her purchase history for the past week said Tinker. Maybe a bit of both, if she could block out Regent. Anyway, the Tinker part is why the boss felt he had to move now. You want to grab a Tinker-"
"-you've got to catch them early before they've gone far enough around the Tinker Cycle to finish building their death rays." Regent nodded. "Heck, that baton she was using on Grue looks like it had some kind of weapons attachments as is." Regent tossed it to me carelessly, having picked it up when Grue was bringing her upstairs. I gave it a look and a brief twitch of my power started itemizing its capabilities.
"Built-in chemical sprayer, built-in shock baton function, custom-brewed composite- yeah, this is a sweet little Tinkertech toy," I confirmed. "You were lucky your normal costume is leather for insulation and a full-face helmet or she'd have just spritzed you, zapped you, and stepped right over you," I said to Grue. "OK, clock's ticking so Grue, stay here and sit on her, Regent, get the stuff from her bedroom, and-"
"-and you search the basement and get what the boss wanted," Grue said grouchily. "I know the plan, thanks."
Leaving that behind for another time I headed down into the basement. I already had the headache starting from all the work I'd done earlier tonight trying to hit Coil up for more clues as to what we were dropping into, then figuring out how to convince that alarm system that its owner was home and just putting it into standby mode and there was absolutely nothing to worry about. So I needed to save what I had left for making sure I didn't miss anything important in her workshop, and especially for making sure we didn't leave behind any clues for the forensics guys. I stood in the center of her workshop and started concentrating.
Multiple custom-built quantum computing terminals. Cluster in the corner isolated from networks and grounded for security purposes. Cluster is intended as design workstation. Security systems include quantum-encrypted drive, login/password, multi-factor user authentication including biometric fingerprint lock.
No problem, I can do passwords and we could just haul her back down here and-
Fingerprint lock has pulse sensor to prevent being used by unconscious person. Fingerprint lock has skin conductivity sensor to prevent being used by dead person. Fingerprint lock coded for recognition of more than one finger, correct finger helps unlock terminal, wrong finger engages alarm/self-destruct(?). Intended so that user can activate security measures even if sat in front of terminal with gun to their head, as assailant has no means of knowing which finger causes which effect.
Um, okay, guess we're not getting in there then. Not in the time we've got available, anyway. This Taylor girl was pretty thorough. What was her specialty, security systems?
Could I just swipe the entire hard dri-
Computer case contains motion sensors. Triggering threshold unknown.
Well, shit. I gave it up as a bad job and continued looking around.
Terminal on table is air-gapped from design cluster, intended for communication and leisure use. Terminal is warm. User was in extended session on terminal very shortly before attack. Pattern of smears on keyboard suggests extended chat session.
So, she keeps a secure machine and an Internet machine. Well, yeah, you didn't text your friends with your burner and you didn't do your business on your home phone. I wondered which friend of hers she'd been chatting with, but given the time pressure and how many boobytraps were on her other machine I wasn't curious enough to boot hers back up and start going through her browser history.
Workbench is meticulously cleaned after each use. Written notes are not used. Placement of monitor and redundant keyboard/mouse suggests that secured design workstation is used for all project recordkeeping.
More clues that her specialty was securing stuff. Where's the gizmos, though?
Cloth on workbench is Tinkertech body armor project. Custom-woven long-chain polymers-
Ugh, don't need the headache from trying to reverse-engineer Tinkertech again, dammit. I know what it is, that's all I need to know. I grabbed her bulletproof jammies and stuffed them in the carryall bag I'd brought for this occasion, then kept tossing the room.
Satellite communicator dish with disabled locator function, position in basement window suggests aimed at communications satellite.
So, that's how she's bootlegging her Internet. Pass.
Combination stun stick, identical model to one secured by Regent.
Doesn't she like guns? What kind of Tinker doesn't like guns?
Father had forbidden firearms in the house. Subject disagreed but was not willing to openly defy his authority on this matter.
Ugh, how obedient. Did she give the teacher an apple every week, too?
I felt my temples starting to throb so I did one last sweep before cutting it short. A few customized burner phones, another suit of the body armor sized for an adult man, some kind of communications laser project, and a chemical workbench on the other wall that suggested she liked to try homebrewing everything from plastics to knockout gas.
Condition of workbench suggests that extreme care is taken to not have possible accidents or volatiles in the house. All chemicals are properly stored away when not actually in use. Hazardous chemicals are stored outside, likely in the garden shed.
Hah, so Miss Obey-The-Rules hosed herself here. If she left her stuff lying around like the average mad science Tinker did she could at least have had a jar of acid handy to throw in someone's face. Well, lucky for us.
I finished stuffing everything that would fit in the bag and started my second sweep just to make sure.
What was that- oh, some kind of automated weaving machine. I started coming up on my limit so I gave up searching the room again to concentrate on the main question.
No lathe? No cutting torch? This was supposed to be a Tinker's basement. Where's the heavy stuff? Where's the metal?
Gaps between workstations intended for placing future equipment. Days' worth of dust collecting in those spaces suggests unavailability of equipment. Subject was frustrated at inability to obtain proper manufacturing facilities.
So we did catch her way early on in the Tinker Cycle. I suppose she'd have had the flying skateboard and the laser pistols by next month, but, that's why the boss sent us this month. Okay, it adds up.
Leaving the empty thumb drive where I'd found it on the table next to the internet terminal I headed back up, giving both guys the all-clear. After I did a check to make sure nobody had been stupid and touched anything without their gloves on, I used the last bit of my power to make sure no inconvenient eyewitnesses were looking out their backyard windows. The guys quietly hustled her out the kitchen entrance to the waiting van. I hung back, relocked the kitchen door with the copy of the key that Coil had gotten somehow, switched the alarm system back on, and away we went.
Mission accomplished.
Arc One Concludes
Author's Note: Hopefully this makes the immediate logic of things a little clearer.
And as to why Taylor didn't clean them all out as a super-ninja, outside of everything already pointed out the answer is 'just because I don't like the Undersiders doesn't mean they're incompetent at what they actually do for a living'.
And I really didn't mean to jinx the person who laid out the entirely logical reasons why Coil should have Taylor pegged only as a Thinker, but he actually did figure out Tinker after a while because unlike the PRT who were maintaining a polite distance, Coil was willing to risk some actual discreet surveillance of Taylor. (He can savescum, after all, the PRT cannot.)
Last edited: Oct 15, 2019
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Threadmarks Orientation 2.1
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cliffc999
Jul 9, 2019
#366
Orientation 2.1
For the second time since the Locker, I woke up after having been drugged. Except this time I was lying down on some kind of pallet, not a hospital bed.
And just like last time, the instant the dosage dropped far enough to let me regain consciousness Invictus kicked in and let me willpower straight through all the disorientation. Sedatives had both a physical and a mental component, and I was basically immune to the mental. So you couldn't get me high, but if you used a strong enough dosage you could make me comatose.
I made a mental note to put enough work into prana-bindu disciplines to engrave the routines for quickly metabolizing drugs deeper into my subconscious so they could act reflexively and not just wait until I concentrated on them. I then spent a few moments of meditation to 'set' my resting posture and reflexes to shut down all the subliminal tells and micro-muscle movements that Tattletale normally used to pull her carnival mind-reading act, and firmly instructed my body to remain in that status until further notice whether I was awake or asleep.
I knew that doing that would reveal that I was apparently some kind of body-control Thinker on top of the Tinker they now had to know I was, but I'd already given a lot of that away anyway during the fight and I certainly wouldn't improve my situation any by letting Tattletale give Coil a running commentary of what was really on my mind.
And after taking care of that I stopped trying to distract myself from confronting how badly I'd fucked up and how deep in the shit I now was. I sighed and opened my eyes, and stood up.
It was a bare concrete holding cell, call it fifteen by fifteen feet, and I was chained to the wall by my right wrist. I had eight feet of chain to let me stand up or lay down or walk around a little. The manacle had been riveted onto my wrist, so there wasn't any lock I could pick. A thin coaxial cable had been run down the center of it that led to two thin bands of polished copper that had been looped around the inside of the manacle and then spot-welded there. Great, so all someone has to do is push a button in a control room somewhere and I get zapped. Probably had separate settings for both disabling and lethal voltage.
One futon, that I'd been laying on. No chair or blanket. Overhead light set into the ceiling behind wire-reinforced glass. A honey bucket had been provided along with a roll of toilet paper, meaning they didn't intend to unchain me even for bathroom breaks. The bucket was the cheapest flimsy plastic kind you could possibly find in a store so I couldn't even hope to hit someone with it, and if they had any sense at all they'd make sure whoever came to pick it up was wearing a helmet like Grue's.
A quick nudge with my foot confirmed my suspicion that the futon was glued to the floor. Looking up and across my cell to the door confirmed that they'd even painted a yellow line on the floor marking my maximum possible extension on the chain and the limits of my reach, so that nobody would step within range accidentally. The smell of wet paint hinted that that feature had apparently been a hasty add-on they'd seen a need for after I'd already been taken.
And, of course, there was the standard heavy metal cell door with little armored window across the room from me. I looked away from that and back up at the ceiling light, then at the four corners of the room's ceiling. Squinting, I could barely make out tiny irregularities there that would almost certainly be the security cameras and audio pickups.
At this point, noting that I'd been also stripped completely naked while unconscious and then stuffed into a pair of loose blue pajamas that looked like they'd originally been used for asylum patients was an afterthought.
Great job, Taylor! You not only got yourself a free trip to Coil's torture dungeon, but you showed just enough capability that he's actually taking double paranoia precautions. Gold star for you.
In hindsight it was pretty obvious where I'd screwed up. John's meta-knowledge had given me false reassurance that if I stayed low and didn't go out and patrol I 'should' be safe from other capes until April, and I'd based all my plans on that assumption. I hadn't wanted to be ready to fight the streets in a week, I'd wanted to be ready to fight the Endbringers by May, so I'd spent my first week doing all sorts of long-range planning and building the tools with which to plan instead of more practical and immediate concerns. In that category I'd stopped at 'just enough to secure us vs. Brockton Bay's random street crime' because I'd been relying on meta-knowledge and the PRT watchlist for the rest, and towards the end I'd been anticipating having a mama Dragon to keep a benevolent if distant eye upon me as well.
But a flawed root assumption meant a flawed strategy. So stupid! I'd known Coil had moles in the PRT. So of course he'd have known about me at the same time they did. And in fact I had actually thought of that, but I'd then decided that he wouldn't dare risk it this soon if at all. Even in the story he'd only gone for Dinah Alcott because nobody knew that she was a parahuman, least of all the PRT. Whereas I, of course, had been on the PRT watchlist from day one. Surely that would have been enough to convince Coil to find softer targets elsewhere, right? Hell, I was still wondering how he could possibly think he'd get away with this!
The problem was of course that my presence here proved that Coil obviously thought that he could get away with this, regardless of my opinion on the topic. So either he knew something I didn't, he'd thought of a potential scheme that I hadn't, or else I was facing the "world's worst swordsman" problem here of my enemy being too dumb to be skillfully predicted. And while the exact reason would be interesting to speculate about and even relevant in the long term, in the short term all roads led to me being stuck in a concrete box and chained to the wall.
And then a horrible thought occurred to me. Shadow Stalker, who had been supposed to be under close monitoring of both her cape life and home life because she was on probation and psychological observation as an attempted murderer, had still gotten away with her crap for something like a year despite literally parading it up and down the hallways simply because one PRT caseworker had been goofing off on the job. Bureaucracy at its finest.
So presuming my dad could be kept from calling the police – which wouldn't be that hard for someone of Coil's resources -- then how long would it take the PRT to actually notice that I was missing if the analyst assigned to my case was 'goofing off on the job'? Or, more relevantly, was one of Coil's moles?
Well, shit.
Then again, Coil had absolutely no way of knowing that Dragon would wonder where I'd gotten to when I unaccountably started ghosting her after our initial meeting and her agreeing to mentor me. And even if we'd been playing plausible deniability she knew who I was and had my dad's phone number. And she'd already promised me that she'd call Armsmaster if she thought anything illegal or dangerous was going on.
I indulged myself in a fond moment of daydreaming about an angry AI in her anti-Endbringer suit hot-dropping on Brockton Bay and then got back to serious business.
In hindsight my over-reliance on meta-knowledge had even hampered me in the fight, on a smaller scale. From the story I'd 'known' that Regent wouldn't have a ranged taser, just his own stun stick. And I'd 'known' that Grue wouldn't be wearing protective gear underneath his costume. And between my being well off my physical peak due to how I'd pushed myself earlier too soon and too fast after my injuries and the sheer diabolus ex machina of Grue's normal costume being exactly the right set-up to no-sell all the functions of the weapon I had available at that moment, adding in the several mistaken assumptions during the fight because I was unconsciously relying on the Worm story that I'd obviously already butterflied into oblivion? Well, that's how I lost.
And all that wasn't even counting however many hypothetical dropped timelines Coil might have used up until he found a way to snatch me that worked.
And even with all that against me I'd still come within a fraction of winning. If I'd just looked up at Regent even a second earlier on those stairs… Tattletale must have been spooked right out of her skin when she had a chance to do a hindsight analysis on that fight. No wonder I'm waking up like this.
So, that was the short form of how I ended up in here.
I reached out to my power and made another request.
Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape, 3 charges. Psychology, 1 charge.
Now let's see how we can get the fuck out of here.
Putting that charge into Psychology that I hadn't wanted to put into Psychology was as painful as I'd expected. I'd known that I wasn't okay, but to get an annotated chart of exactly how not-okay I was? Invictus might make confronting such an overdose of self-revelation possible without curling up in a ball, but it sure didn't make doing it any fun!
Of course, I'd done it anyway. Coil was certainly going to try a Hannibal Lecter routine on me at some point and that meant I'd need to be forewarned and forearmed. The full SERE course plus advanced postgraduate study I'd downloaded gave me all the standard gaslighting and brainwashing scenarios and all the standard counters, but Coil and his pet torture physician were innovators in the field and that meant I'd need to broaden my knowledge a little. Even if that also meant I had a lot of things about myself I didn't have time to work through right now and was going to need to work through later. Which is why I hadn't dumped two or more charges into Psychology right off the bat, I had more than enough to process right now thank you.
SERE also told me things such as that the odds of a successful escape went down exponentially the longer you waited after capture, but while I certainly appreciated the sentiment the fact remained that even if I somehow busted out of this chain and out that door I'd be in the bottom of a repurposed Endbringer shelter deep underneath the city, with who knows how many dungeon levels and armored blast doors between me and an exit, and literally dozens of mercenaries with laser guns and all the layers of fixed defenses trying to maim me on the way. As well as possibly the Undersiders. Or Trainwreck. Or Circus, or the Travelers-
Yeesh, I really hope Echidna isn't in the same cellblock I am. Definitely wouldn't want to open that door accidentally.
Ah, no, wait, Coil doesn't get the Travelers onside until after the Dinah Alcott kidnapping. Okay, I guess meta-knowledge is still good for some reassurance.
Still, even without them in the picture that's still more than enough potential obstacles. And I'd need to obtain other important data before I could hope to leave anyway, such as exactly how Coil thought he was going to be covering my absence and whether or not Dad is under immediate threat.
Which meant that before I could start planning any active measures I'd first have to – ugh – actually talk to Coil.
"Okay, I'm awake," I said curtly. "I'm sure your boss wants to talk to me."
"He does," a tinny voice replied brusquely through an unseen speaker. "Sit down and keep your mouth shut until he gets here."
I sat cross-legged on the futon and waited, stoic and expressionless.
"Taylor Hebert?" the intercom replied after several minutes, its distortion not masking the smoother elocution and smug self-assurance of the new arrival.
I swallowed a sarcastic impulse to ask him exactly how many teenaged girls he'd kidnapped today that he'd forget which one he was talking to, and instead went with the 'Intelligent and composed' my PRT files already would have told him but still holding back a little. "The Empire has more than enough capes on their own and wouldn't hire the Undersiders in any case because Grue is black, the ABB might have hired them but they have their own people kidnap white girls off the street all the time so they'd almost certainly have tried that first, this is way too clean and organized a setup to be the Merchants, and Faultline's Crew doesn't recruit by press gang. So who are you, and am I even still in Brockton Bay?" That's right, Coil. I'm intelligent and steady-nerved, but I still haven't heard of you. Clearly you are smarter than I am, more knowledgeable than I am, better-prepared than I am. Stay relaxed and feeling in control of the situation for now, and feel free to monologue.
"Your PRT file was accurate, I see," he replied smugly. "Yes, I have access to PRT files. I have access to many things."
"If you're the PRT then damn, I'd owe so many apologies to that crazy Void Cowboy guy on PHO," I said quickly. "But somehow I doubt that. So, Secret Mastermind Who's Bragging He Has Even The PRT Infiltrated, do you have a name?"
"I am Coil, leader of the fourth major criminal outfit in Brockton Bay," he said with quiet boastfulness. "The invisible one, the subtle one, and the one actually in the greatest position to take everything at the opportune moment. But enough about me for now, Taylor… it is Taylor, am I correct? I understand you have not yet chosen your cape name."
I shrugged while still glaring up from my sitting position. "Should that really be my first concern right now?"
"You're not interested in what I want or why you're here, Taylor?"
Making me have to ask him first before he would tell me anything was of course a psychological gesture for displaying his power over his victim. I'm sure that would have started subliminally working on anyone else, but of course it was bouncing spitballs off of a tank as far as I was concerned. Still, I didn't want Coil to think this conversation was getting away from him so I played along, staring upwards defiantly for a short while before resuming a neutral position. "What do you want, and why am I here?"
"I want power, and wealth, and absolute control of Brockton Bay. And you are here because my plan for achieving these things involves assembling a reliable, well-rewarded team of parahumans underneath me, a team of diverse talents and formidable powers."
I held up my right arm with its accompanying manacle and rattled my chain once. "Well-rewarded?" I said with just the right amount of sarcasm.
"Compliance will be rewarded handsomely," Coil said. "But you must first agree to comply."
"If you have the PRT infiltrated then you already know I was on the PRT watchlist," I said. "And if you have them so infiltrated that even that doesn't matter then why do all this, when you're already really in control of the Bay anyway?"
"Ah yes, the PRT watchlist. Special PRT monitoring. No sparrow shall fall, not the slightest misdeed shall escape their sight. Just like how it all happened with Shadow Stalker," he finished, waiting for my twitch. Well, call that theory confirmed for now.
"Shadow Stalker was their trusted little Ward," I replied, hinting at lingering resentment against Wards and authority. "I'm a creepy flake that's linked directly to a major PR embarrassment they want to keep buried. So I probably had a much hairier eyeball giving me the hairy eyeball than she did."
Coil began to reply, then cut himself off before the first syllable and then continued after a brief pause. "That would be my difficulty to deal with, not yours. And rest assured, it is being comfortably dealt with." Did he just drop a timeline, or did he just pick up on that I was trying to draw him out the old-fashioned way? In any event, I cursed inwardly at realizing that he wasn't going to be drawn out on that topic any further right now. Time to pivot and misdirect.
So I paused as well, then continued on as if I thought I was being clever. "You know, looking into the kidnapping charges that they laid against Shadow Stalker for the Locker taught me a little about New Hampshire law. The one thing that downgrades kidnapping from a class A felony to class B is releasing the victim unharmed before the authorities catch up to you. And with the PRT knowing I'm missing, and I'm sure they know I'm missing, they will catch up to you. So why not just cut your losses right now and have your people blindfold me and drop me off at the bus terminal or wherever? Its not like I can tell them where I was, I don't even know where I am right now!"
"Do you really think that the seven years' reduction of sentence from class A to class B on one potential charge matters to someone who operates on my scale, Taylor?" Coil said condescendingly. No, you idiot, of course I don't, but I want you to keep bragging on how much cleverer you are than I am, duh. "If the authorities ever caught up to me for even ten percent of what I've done, I'd be facing multiple life sentences. So many kidnappings, so many assaults, so many thefts and sales of arms and drugs and murders. Both of people like you and innocent bystanders like your father."
I waited for two long seconds and then replied with deliberate flat effect. "If my father is dead then I'm sure you can figure out why you'd better kill me too, right now."
"Ah, no, that was a threat, not a boast," he said condescendingly. "But if you give me too much trouble… well, one lone dockworker will hardly give my men any trouble, will he?"
I nodded as if acknowledging the logic, then continued on with quiet anger. I wasn't even faking this time. "That is a threat you can only carry out onc-"
My teeth clicked shut hard as my muscles all clenched with the spasm of electricity that surged through my manacle, and I barely missed biting off the tip of my tongue. I deliberately did not let him have the satisfaction of seeing any other reaction or hearing me make a sound.
"Impressive. I've seen strong men scream and beg for their mothers after a little taste of that of voltage."
A female voice cut in, sounding like she wished she was anywhere other than here but still not hesitating to do what she was told. "She's using some kind of mind-over-body Thinker secondary ability, its why I haven't had any useful readings so far. Pain won't work. She can just shut it all off like a light switch." Hello, Tattletale. So much for your storybook heart of gold, I see.
"I see," Coil answered her smoothly. "And knowing that will save us from wasting time on that category of… physical persuasion. And that does explain the ambiguous notations in your records and your surprisingly new martial arts prowess, Taylor. Incidentally, that shock circuit has settings for 'incapacitation' and 'death' as well as 'pain' so don't get too overconfident about your powers, young lady."
"Duly noted."
"Also, I invite you to consider the nature of double-edged swords. If physical pain won't work on you then that simply means misbehavior would have to be deterred by other kinds of pain. You've had your own experiences with some of that already, Taylor. Are you eager to find out how a professional can deliver that kind of experience as compared to a trio of silly schoolgirls?"
"What do you want."
"For now, what I want is for you to have some time alone to reflect on your situation. To really ponder it and deeply internalize it. People do sometimes need an adjustment period when their lives are undergoing great change, after all. Good night, Taylor. Sleep well. I probably won't kill you in the morning."
The speaker clicked off. I guessed that Coil had been anticipating he'd get a lot farther in this opening mindgame session than he did by using a Tattletale assist, but having her power be mostly useless on me meant he wanted time to compose a plan B.
But out of all the things you'd expect from Coil, a Princess Bride joke would be last on the list. Even if he botched the quote.
Author's Note: I know I said I wouldn't be posting anything from arc 2 until I got the storyboard finished, but that was before the recent discussion prompted that several things needed clarification. And while WoG is good, actually getting it in the story is better. Fortunately, even though I was afraid at one point that the argument would take over the thread it actually did prompt me to think several things through a little more.
Now I actually have to get back to that storyboard and not succumb to the temptation to post as I go until I get a clear long-range plan. I've had stories fall apart under my urge to improv a bridge too far before, so, gonna try my best here.
Oh, and the reason Coil cut himself off at that one point is because Tattletale had stepped on his foot and gone 'She's trying to draw you out'. Taylor can shut down all her tells and even the undertones in her voice but if there's an underlying logic actually in her words then deduction can still eventually get something off of that, just like she could by reading someone's diary.
On another note, some of you might notice a glaring omission in the list of possible threats that Coil could have been making and didn't. That omission is entirely deliberate.
Logically speaking he should have gone right for it because its the obvious approach for intimidating and if necessary breaking a young female prisoner whose pain threshold renders torture irrelevant, but the simple fact remains both the author's personal comfort zone, the readers' likely comfort zones, and the fact that this is SB and they have rules here means I'm not even going to try going there. (You don't want to read and I'm not going to undelete and publish the draft where I actually was going there before I started going 'Nope nope nope' and spamming the delete key. Even having Coil just threaten it without really intending to do it came across as way too skin crawling.)
So yeah, if it offends your suspension of disbelief that Coil did not threaten to have Taylor assaulted by his men in that particular manner, then just accept the break from reality because Doyle will completely trump Watson here and continue to do so.
Last edited: Oct 15, 2019
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Threadmarks Orientation 2.2
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cliffc999
Jul 10, 2019
#653
Orientation 2.2
Another thing that prana-bindu disciplines did for me was allow me to function on far less sleep. Or, more accurately, to sleep with much greater efficiently. The proper meditative regimen and dilation of the right blood vessels to my brain would let me get most of the benefits of a full eight hours' sleep in just one or two hours. It was like something out of a Batman comic. Quite literally out of a Batman comic, that being the particular bit from John's memories that had given me the idea to try it.
While I'd still been letting myself largely get my full sleeps at home for the bed rest and recuperation that I'd been needing and semi-neglecting as a semi-convalescent, when it came to packing in a full regimen of REM sleep to avoid the various nastinesses that came with sleep deprivation I could pull the compressed-sleep trick and still have most of the night free to do other things. Which certainly came in handy here, because while Coil's men would be watching me through the camera every second all I'd have to do is lie down on the futon and close my eyes and they'd have no way of knowing that I wasn't actually just collapsing for a long stretch in the rack after my long and stressful day and the beating I'd taken, but instead spending at least 3/4ths of that time in a desperately needed meditation and mental re-org while merely pretending to be asleep.
I took a moment out to angrily consider the fact that my body-awareness was telling me that if I hadn't had such ideal body control, those illegally overcharged tasers they'd hit me with and Regent's keeping the current on for way past the recommended exposure time could very well have left the Undersiders facing manslaughter charges. Because what they'd hit me with would have put an ordinary teenaged girl far too close to the cardiac arrest threshold. And I was quite certain none of those idiots had had the slightest idea how close Regent had come to accidentally killing me. 'Its just a game of cops and robbers!' indeed. God, even with hindsight analysis and full understanding of the psychology of isolation and identification I still couldn't believe that story-me had somehow fallen in love with these people.
Fortunately, I had ideal body control and so I'd pacemakered right through it without it even needing my conscious attention, and would recover from it just fine with a little rest and directed metabolism. Even if I couldn't do anything about my muscles locking up, but there's only so much willpower can do to avoid gross physiological reactions when you're channeling over twenty thousand volts at God only knows how many milliamps.
But yes, that was me distracting myself from the main issue at hand again. I had mentioned earlier that I was kind of a mess, remember? Because yeah, I was kind of a mess.
Now, I admittedly had every reason to be a mess given my life up to now, and that's before ROB did his thing. And John's memories had at least gotten me past the reflexive shame and frantic desire to pretend that I was perfect that was the average teenager's response to being told that they were not 100% emotionally together. You'd think that a child of the 21st century wouldn't be as fixated on the idiot notion that PTSD was just a character weakness and that you weren't strong unless you pretended you'd never bleed as General Patton would be but nope, that's where I'd been. Hell, that's where Emma had been after the assault and why she'd shattered and turned into… what she'd turned into. If she'd just admitted she'd needed a little help…
Yeah.
But as worn down and depressing as John's life had been in some respects at least he'd survived and learned the lesson that sometimes it was okay to not be okay. Just being able to make that simple admission to myself and genuinely believe it was a tremendous help towards breaking out of the emotional straightjacket that I'd been locking myself into ever since Mom died and the Trio had turned my life into hell. I took a moment out to mutter another prayer for the soul of a dead man that the ghost of his memories had given me another chance to save my own life, and got back to confronting the main issue.
Invictus was great. Invictus had been an invaluable help to me. Invictus was almost certainly the reason I wasn't still in that hospital bed and headed off to a lifetime of gibbering incoherently and compulsory medication schedules considering all the crap that had been piled on me post-Locker meeting all the crap I'd already had pre-Locker. Invictus could keep me unbroken and untouched by even the worst traumas imaginable. Thank God John's CYOA build had remembered to get Invictus, because I so needed it.
But even if you could stay in crisis-management mode forever, that didn't mean that you should. A periphery of knowledge from PRT training, SERE, and Medicine interacting prompted me that even the US military's combat lifesaver course taught that when your unit was taking fire the first person you needed to check for wounds was you, because you couldn't save anybody else if you ignored your own situation and let yourself bleed out while too busy concentrating on other people. And even if it strained a bit, that analogy worked for emotional wounds as well as physical. So I'd made it a point even from the beginning to stop and take some "me" time when I could, even while I'd had the fate of the multiverse literally dropped on my shoulders to carry. Even Steve Rogers, the superhero icon of indomitable spirit and unending willpower, the man who "could do this all day" and would always tell the weight of the world that "No, you move.", still allowed himself moments where he'd put down the shield and let himself cry a little on the inside. Because even an Invictus human still had to be human, to not let themselves forget who they really were.
The problem is that whenever I deliberately throttled down Invictus by any margin, allowed myself to actually get in touch with my feelings again and be Taylor, then that meant my decision-making process would start incorporating a whole lot of biases, mistaken assumptions, and just plain emotional dumb stuff. Stuff that I was nowhere near as consciously aware of as I should have been. And heck, even in full Invictus I still wasn't perfect logic girl because by itself Invictus didn't make you any smarter, just much better focused.
I'd already done the tactical review of what errors I'd made to end up in here, but the more lengthy self-analysis that Psychology charge had started me on let me begin working out the why of how I'd made those errors, the mental traps I'd fallen into that had led me into those goofs in the first place. Because I certainly didn't want to keep repeating this kind of mess.
Now, a huge part of it was my revulsion and horror at what John remembered story-Taylor had become in the original 'Worm' serial. Because oh my God, knowing that you grow up to become the villain? Heck, to become The Villain? That you could spend fifteen years growing up with no other desire to become a superhero, try to be such a nice person that even the horrible betrayal of your best friend and your entire life becoming an emotional torture-fest still wouldn't drive you to lash back with violence because that would be wrong… and in just a couple years go from that starting point to becoming Skitter? And then Khepri? And that every individual step along the way would supposedly make perfect logical sense to you?
Yes, there was a reason that my memories prompting me as to how my once hero-worshipped icon Alexandria was actually just the hypocritical murderous fist of Cauldron had barely even been registering on my disappointment scale recently. I mean, sure, that was pretty bad too and I certainly wasn't going to cultivate her as a mentor any time before the second Tuesday of never, but Skitter was hardly in a position to throw any stones at her regarding lack of ethics.
Just… yikes! Just plain yikes! Lategame Skitter and Khepri were as far gone from the person I'd been, the person I'd always thought as I was, as Bonesaw had been twisted and broken from the original pre-trigger Riley! But Bonesaw was what happens when you take a six-year-old girl and then let Jack freaking Slash spend over half a decade breaking her piece by piece! I'd done it all to myself and in less than half her time! And at an age infinitely closer to adulthood than Riley had been! And without Jack Slash and his bullshit Communication shard!
My heel turn from innocent young woman to murderous warlord to freaking Lovecraftian Elder God had been all me. Only me. I had made those choices, I had pursued those goals, I had chosen to soak my hands in the blood of thousands of times of more people that had ever lived in the entire history of Earth-Bet. "Existential horror" might be a buzzword that was overused nowadays but that didn't mean that in at least some cases it wasn't legitimately fitting. And this was totally such a case.
Yes, I'd overreacted. Overreacted nothing, I'd gone straight into internally screaming denial.
Skitter focused on becoming a street level superheroine first and only and all the rest of her stuff was her reacting to stuff as it came? I'd completely avoid the street level period and stay in my house and work on long-range plans until I'd flowcharted exactly how I was going to get to the Endbringer fights before I'd even build my first set of tactical gear.
Skitter ignored her dad for months and eventually just discarded him entirely and ran away from home? I'd swing straight into being the totally dutiful daughter and let him make all the home and family decisions even when they obviously weren't the best idea, and only begin to disagree with him on the most vital no-compromise parts of my plans like not rushing straight into the Wards.
Skitter was the memetic Queen of Escalation, fearlessly leaping from challenge to challenge? I'd avoid conflict for as long as possible and stay as low-impact as I could when dealing with the ones I couldn't avoid!
Now, given my strategic situation some of these decisions had actually still been legitimately good choices. Which was part of why I'd made those decisions… and the decisions associated with them. Any idiot could avoid stepping on a land mine that was painted bright orange and lying in the middle of the sidewalk with a big red sign saying "DANGER: MINE FIELD". The one you stepped on was the one that you didn't see because it didn't look like a land mine.
Likewise with hanging yourself a plan that combined measures of competence and idiocy, but did so while lurking directly in a giant emotional blindspot of yours so you could only see the competence and not the idiocy. This is why for a viable long-term strategy you couldn't just make the right calls. That wasn't getting it right, that was just getting lucky, and luck always ran out eventually. You had both to make the right calls and make them for the right reasons.
Doing things out of a reflexive desire to not be like someone else you loathed was not wisdom, even when it worked. Mindlessly saying 'every day is opposite day!' regarding someone you hated was as bad an extreme as trying to mindlessly copy everything about someone you admired. Negative role models, just like positive ones, had to be approached with perspective.
And to be fair, even with all the mistakes I'd made Coil doing this had still been coming way out of left field. Moot point now, of course.
I had to stifle an urge to laugh when I suddenly realized that Coil's final "suggestion" to me had been about how I should be using this time for 'pondering and internalizing' because my 'life was undergoing great change', and that that was exactly what I'd just been doing. Just epically not in the way he would have wanted me to.
Hah!
So yes, these several hours of forced introspection I'd taken had hardly elevated me to perfect mental health and flawless objective reasoning, but I still felt a whole lot better having finally confronted at least some of my issues, pulled them out and rubbed my own nose in the stupidity of them, and resolved to do my best to avoid them in the future. Even if I was disappointingly certain that there were probably still emotional land mines in my head I hadn't discovered yet at least now I was going to be more on the lookout for them, and could hopefully in the future find them with hard work and foresight as opposed to slamming into them with my face. And I certainly knew several things that I would change about my plans once I got out of here.
Because I was going to get out of here.
Another realization I had to confront is that I'd been holding myself back on the Tinkertech. And not just in the sense of consciously choosing to not try building the superweapons yet, but in unconsciously blinding myself to entire categories of things I could have built.
Before his accident and injury and discharge Petty Officer John Mueller had been a US Navy nuclear power plant operator, a man trained to literally the single most rigorous standard of engineering safety and procedure that existed in the world. Someone whose approach to engineering was to place his faith only in processes that were completely understood, where the function of every component and the physical laws behind every interaction were known and computed out with precision, where everything made sense. The ideal of Department of Naval Reactors was to reduce their work to as close to a perfect deterministic framework as human minds and hands could achieve, a world where there were no surprises because all possible contingencies were computed ahead of time and a flowchart existed for every operation and for recovering from the anticipated potential failure modes of any of those operations. Where everything was understood, where nothing happened that hadn't already happened yesterday and would happen again tomorrow, and where achieving maximum boredom meant that all was well.
In fact, if you went with the definition that faith was belief even in the absence of evidence then DNR in general and John in particular would have faith in absolutely nothing and would always check the readings for themselves if possible. Heck, Admiral Rickover used to flunk officer candidates for the nuclear program if they took his word for it that the soup was unsalted instead of tasting for themselves before adding more. It was perhaps the only career field where the entrance psych screening showing high-functioning OCD would be considered a positive recommendation.
In other words, John was the absolute last person in the world who would even think about how bullshit Tinkertech could really get. Just as Skitter was my existential horror I could not mentally confront, a disorderly universe that ran on arbitrary bullshit instead of organized knowledge and reproducible results was his. And it was his memories and habits I'd been leaning on for my technological plans because he was the experienced technician and not me so that would make the best sense, right?
And heck, even my own cape geeking-out on PHO at its geekiest had avoided the Tinkertech discussion forum like it was covered in radioactive bees because they were in like year fifteen of the endless ongoing circular online argument of how this stuff was supposed to work and hadn't resolved a single issue yet. And I didn't just mean the shard-limitation of Tinkers not being able to walk other people through how to independently reproduce or maintain their gear, I meant the understanding of how the heck Tinkertech was supposed to be an actual technology, however eldritch, instead of just a bunch of Shakers who used scrap and fetishes as psychological crutches. Tinkers didn't agree on how that worked, Thinkers didn't agree on how that worked, non-capes didn't agree on how that worked, nobody did. Asking any two people in the world for their thoughts on how Tinkertech was 'supposed' to function would get you at least three answers.
I mean, the incident where Squealer had once made a mag-launch cannon out of a steel pipe and some ancillary scraps none of which actually contained any electrical power source or conductive rails, and yet was clearly a magnetic coilgun from the electromagnetic readings it had given off every time they'd tested it alone… now that I'd brought it to mind again I consulted my various Inspired Inventor-granted Tinker specialties as to how the heck that would even be possible and while I got back an answer it was nothing I could have explained in actual language because Squealer was still shard-limited even if I was not.
So if that's how I was avoiding the question, try to imagine how a man like him would be avoiding the question. In hindsight, even my initial choices of Tinkertech specialties had been informed by John's bias. I'd started from Mathematics and Physics because those were his twin gods. I'd maxed out Ruggedization and Safety Engineering early on because Department of Naval Reactors built to last and built even harder for double fail-safe. I'd stuck with actual gizmos that either 'made sense' by the point of view of a 'real-world' engineer or, like my creative pharmaceuticals, were in areas of John's relative ignorance so that I didn't subconsciously reject them as 'too creepy' because I didn't know any better.
Heck, John's own training and my major charge dump into Safety Engineering is why I'd kept my workshop in such a safe condition when not in use that there was nothing except the zap stick available to fight the Undersiders with, because I'd have had to spend time I didn't have getting things out of storage and taking the safety caps off. Inspired Inventor's ability to seamlessly integrate downloaded knowledge along with my existing knowledge and inform my reflexes and habits as well as my conscious mind was sometimes a two-edged sword, when it led to me developing habits like 'Safety first!' that I wasn't consciously taking into account. Because when walking through Indian country, sometimes you had to take the safety catch off first. And unless I was actually thinking about it, I wouldn't. This is part of why I preferred to meditate and ponder on new charges.
When the situation allowed me the luxury of doing so, that is. But right now it didn't, so needs must.
Swinging back to considering the ramifications of John's mental blind spots, I acknowledged to myself that of course my own pre-Trigger ignorance of technology and science was pretty much global outside of freshman high school level. So I had no or few biases on the topic at all, meaning that it was all John's biases that had been unconsciously informing and shaping my thought processes on Tinkering. Biases of his that I'd never seriously examined his memories for because I'd been a little busy dealing with all the other horrible revelations from in there, thank you.
Which is why I'd now been doing a lot of finally digging those biases up and rooting them out at the same time I'd been crunching my own. And now that I'd start to take the blinders off, this cell didn't look nearly as bare to me as it had a few hours ago.
Oh no, there were possibilities here. Not any easy ones, no, because Coil had been very thorough with taking the precautions necessary to confine your average young Tinker. For all of Thomas Calvert's personality flaws and his own blind spots, he was still an experienced professional at this and it showed.
But I may have been young and I may have been a Tinker but I was as far from average as it could possibly get. And thus, I got to work.
Salvaging, 1 charge.
I smiled thinly to myself as I lay on my futon, still pretending sleep. Right, let's add that alongside Adaptation and think on it a while and we'll see what we can do about turning scrap into miracles.
Communications Engineering, 2 charges.
I was still working out possible escape routes but given my condition, the odds, and that Coil's primary specialty above all else was paranoia bunkering, I already knew that fighting my way out solo would likely not be the route I'd end up choosing. And that meant either social engineering or getting out the SOS.
Social Interaction, 1 charge.
This was one charge I'd been reluctant to spend because like any other field of knowledge that wasn't closely related to stuff I already knew, the integration process was a little tougher. Also, the habits and reflexes from this one would be all about my day-to-day interactions with people, my social links to others, my me. If I hadn't been in a bind I'd probably never have gone this route and just tried to grow out of socially awkward Taylor organically and by actual meeting of people and doing of things, but right now I was locked in Coil's torture dungeon and that meant my personal feelings could take a number and get in line. Even if downtime from being in beast mode was still a good idea, having downtime also meant having uptime. And that meant right damn now.
So I concentrated on, of all people, Emma Barnes. My lifelong best friend, then my worst enemy. The person who just always seemed to be moving right, standing right, emoting right, and talking right without even having to consciously think about it. Who could effortlessly redirect a conversation so that whatever you said was wrong and whatever she said got the crowd laughing along with her even if it directly contradicted what she'd just said. Before spending that charge I had no idea what kind of word magic could possibly make people forget that they'd been calling you a whore who'd done the entire football team for bus fare literally the minute before and were now all laughing at you because you were an ugly virgin that even Greg Veder wouldn't be desperate enough to touch, but Emma had called that one Tuesday. Heck, that one had actually been the Tuesday before the Locker, in fact.
Heck, part of me was still afraid of learning these skills because I'd spent so much time learning how it could be used as a weapon for pain. Really misused. The idea that I'd develop a razor tongue like hers, one that I cold potentially unleash in a moment of pique and draw blood off some other girl like Emma had flayed… honestly, if it was a choice between that or having to wield the bees like Skitter, I'd probably take the bees. Emma's talent for social manipulation had been incredibly awesome to have on my side and the torments of Hell to have against me, and that more than anything left me painfully aware of how two-edged that particular sword could be.
But it was time for me to start growing up, and that meant not letting my experiences on the receiving end of weaponized social skills make me swear off their use any more than Dad's getting shot in the butt by a careless hunting partner who'd entirely forgotten Cooper's Third Rule way back when made him swear off having guns in the house or going hunting ever again.
So I allowed a practical working knowledge of the subject to flow into my mind, and concepts such as neuro-linguistic programming and conditioned social expectations flickered dimly on the edges of my mind in the interface between Social Interaction and Psychology as the practical bits flowed into my reflexes Things such as knowing how different types of eye contact could cause someone to have an entirely different reaction to the same words said in the same context. Or how a smile and a nod meant 'I'm friendly', a wink and a nod meant 'Just between us', but a smile and a wink and a nod meant 'Hang on to your wallet because I'm about to try and sell you a lemon'.
Huh, prana-bindu really speeds up the integration process there. Instead of having to laboriously work out what these lessons would do to change my posture and my unconscious gestures I'm… pretty much aware of all of it.
And while outright mind control via talking would sadly remain in the realm of fiction without actual shard bullshit being involved no matter how many charges I dumped into either this or prana-bindu because apparently human brains and their hearing centers just worked differently in the Dune setting, there was still a lot you could do on the mundane level to slightly futz with peoples' cognitive dissonances or biases if you knew them well and pitched yourself properly. A great deal of human social interaction was subliminal cues and gestalt, after all. This is why the glasses trick actually did work outside of comic books a majority of the time outside of very close family or friends; unless people were deliberately concentrating on trying to get past a disguise human facial recognition worked on subroutines that stopped matching once the first few obvious data points had matched, and wouldn't match at all if you threw a false positive or a big distracter into the mix early on.
The short version is, I could now actually talk to people on a level other than 'Fuck with me and mine and I will kill you' or 'Okay, dad!' Even if it was just at the 'really good high school' level… to be honest, I didn't want to go beyond that level for now. Suddenly having a miraculous improvement from 'teenaged girl' to 'Secretary Kissinger' levels of diplomancy overnight? Maybe if I'd been up against other opposition, but between Coil's paranoia and his making Tattletale keep reviewing the tapes on me there's just an actual chance they'd catch it.
Nope, I certainly need some but I'll have to advance it more slowly. As is, if I'm more composed and eloquent tomorrow then last night can easily be explained by 'People aren't at their best when kidnapped and chained to the wall'. In fact, if I worked it right I could make it look like I was subliminally coming around to the idea of being compliant, of adjusting to my situation…
Yes, that's what I'd do. Coil would be back in the morning, and I'd probe him then for more reactions and social-fu opportunities. Assuming he doesn't just entirely give up and kill me then at some point I'll actually have to be allowed to show my Tinker stuff. And even under the gun and with all the precautions in the world, that'd still be more chance to touch tools than I'd have now.
Besides, outside of 'thrashing around in my sleep' in just the right manner to twist the coaxial cable inside the chain and snap the interior wire without making it look obvious as to what I did, there wasn't much else I could do on the in-cell Tinkering front while I was still pretending to be asleep. Its not like even with my new outlook on Tinkering I'm going to be building an FM transmitter powerful enough to reach the Protectorate from in here. Stupid steel-reinforced concrete underground bunker with zero signal reception.
But I had to break that wire early on. Since Coil had already shown me his wall zapper once, I'd been able to see how the lights in the cell flickered when he hit the juice so from now on if he ever hit the juice again I could know it and fake it without having to actually suffer through it. Which will be useful when he uses it again, because I certainly don't want them checking the system for faults. But given how Coil had said that that wire was also a potential killswitch, I damn sure couldn't just leave it there untouched.
Okay, starting to get sleepy now. Still, even if it was mostly mental that was still a very productive few hours. Time to get some rest.
Good night, Coil. Sleep well. I'll hopefully kill you in the morning.
Spoiler: Author's Notes
Yeah, spoilered for length. Hopefully doing it there means less posts afterwards that clutters up less alert filters.
Along that line, as per the advice given me earlier re: 'don't over-engage and don't over-spoil', from now on I will be doing my best to not explain things until the story actually does. I say this in full knowledge that I'll probably fail and still spill shit because one of my bad habits is liking to talk and liking to answer questions and analyze things out loud and in-thread, and I keep doing it even when I try not to.
But like my Taylor would advise me were she able to do so, self-improvement is a process and not just a decision. :)
Last edited: Oct 15, 2019
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cliffc999
Jul 10, 2019
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Threadmarks Interlude 2-A: Coil
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cliffc999
cliffc999
Jul 10, 2019
#675
Interlude 2-A: Coil
"… I probably won't kill you in the morning." I finished as confidently as I could, then switched off the intercom and the video pickup and rubbed the bridge of my nose with my free hand, trying to massage away the tension. I'd seldom had a conversation I'd planned out that carefully go that far off my script and I was not at all enjoying the sensation. Taylor Hebert was a very frustrating young woman to deal with.
"If you meant to go all Princess Bride then the quote is actually-" Sarah began to cut in, and I looked back up and glared her into silence. Miss Hebert was not the only frustrating young woman I knew, but at least this one had already been suitably cowed.
"Any useful comments?" I said after maintaining just enough silence to leave her even more uneasy than she had been.
"We've struck a much tougher nut than you were anticipating, Boss," she told me obediently. "I don't know if its her Thinker specialty or just her but damn, Grue was living on the wrong side of the tracks even before he got into crime and Bitch is literally hardwired for animal aggression and even they don't give off the hardcore vibe that she was giving. That shutdown trick she has keeps me from reading any of her tells but I can still listen to the words she's saying and read what mood she wants to communicate to me and what she's saying is 'Never give up, never surrender'. And she kept it up even after you ran enough voltage through her to make Armsmaster ask for a time out. Where does daddy's little girl from the suburbs who won't even punch back at a bully suddenly get like that?"
"She does understand that if she doesn't eventually comply then she won't ever be leaving here alive, yes?" I inquired. "Or could we cure her obstinancy by curing her… short-sightedness?"
"Again, magic eight-ball says answer not clear, try again later," my Tattletale temporized hastily,"but she did understand the reality of the threat you made against her dad so I'm sure she understands that reality as well. Thing is, if she's that much of a realist then she'd already have started bargaining with you to at least get a better deal for her compliance. So my best guess right now is she's still hoping the PRT finds her before you get tired enough of her shit to end her." She winced and tried to hide her Thinker headache. Well, she had had a long day and it was precisely because of her inconvenient limitations that I was always on the lookout for another Thinker to supplement her talents.
"Good, that gives me an idea of what facts to emphasize in our next conversation. Very well, we're done for the day." I waited just long enough for her to feel a surge of relief before deliberately cutting in again to crush it. "Make sure you're well-rested before you're back here at 9am for another session. Even with the current obstacles there should still be time enough to finish with her before we miss our window, but that doesn't mean we should waste any."
Tattletale murmured something that could charitably be taken for an acknowledgement and headed out, one hand already going into her pocket for her bottle of pain pills-
"Wait," I said, and she came to a halt while slumping miserably. "Her 'shutdown trick'. How did she know what your power was, that she knew to block it?"
"Actually she was doing it before she even spoke to the intercom so its probably just a thing she does whenever she's awake. I mean, Regent's power didn't work on her so she was clearly doing her body control thing back then too. So, Thinkers are bullshit?" she finished weakly.
"A reasonable hypothesis," I allowed after a short pause. "Very well, go."
The door sealed behind her and I murmured an instruction to the staff to hold all my calls. I then sealed the office, started some contemplative music playing, and leaned back and began to review the entire Hebert situation from beginning to end, looking for things I'd overlooked or new angles I could possibly play.
Taylor Hebert had first come to my attention approximately eleven days ago when one of my men in the local PRT office had informed me that Director Piggot had requested a consultation from Watchdog, the PRT's internal Thinker tank primarily focused on anti-Thinker operations in the social and economic spheres. I had of course instructed all my agents in place that any communication between the Brockton Bay PRT office and Watchdog would be news of the highest priority, because if Director Piggot suspected anything of what my organization was really up to in the Bay or the true nature of my power then calling in Watchdog would be one of the logical moves.
I had been very relieved to find out that it had simply been a lowest-priority 'at your convenience' request to do a simple review-and-recommendation of a suspected young parahuman who was a possible Thinker. Relieved and then, when I reviewed the files in question, gratified at the new opportunity. Oh, the logistics of abducting and… converting… a young parahuman who was already the focus of PRT attention were not inconsiderable, but I could at least make a legitimate study of the problem before deciding whether to commit myself.
So I had contented myself with waiting and seeing for a week or so, and noted with interest the unusually expedited nature of the legal proceedings against young Miss Hebert's tormentors. It could simply have been a coincidence or an unusual moment of competence from the Brockton Bay police department, of course, but in combination with a probable Thinker in play? At that time I thought that young Taylor was just the sort of parahuman social engineer I'd been praying for.
When I'd first obtained her I'd originally had such hopes for my Tattletale, but she rapidly educated me in how her personality flaws and lack of vision were such that left to her own devices she'd have been doomed to stay in the gutter for her short and miserable life. Even now her inability to play any kind of long game or exercise genuine self-restraint highly limited the uses I could put her to. This is why I allowed her to waste her time playing games with the Undersiders and only called her in when I had an actual use for her talents; if I'd made her a full-time lieutenant and interacted with her on a regular basis she'd have driven me to murder within a month. It was a measure of how ultimately passive a set of personalities the Undersiders were that they hadn't.
At any rate, both Watchdog's inconclusive results and my own prompted me to greater curiosity. I had my men exercise closer surveillance of Taylor Hebert in a dropped timeline or two, but even then they could not precisely establish what her powers were or how she was using them. Simply from her sudden desire to change all aspects of her life – withdrawing from school into home study, drastic change in exercise patterns, entirely different social sphere, and suchlike – it was trivial to deduce that she'd triggered somehow. The first thing most new parahumans did was remake themselves, after all.
Indeed, if the PRT analyst assigned to monitoring her case had not been one of my men and thus quietly editing the PRT's own data as it came then even that dull-witted Piggot would have figured it out. Well, that and they weren't remotely willing to risk as close a surveillance as I could, thanks to my unique abilities.
So after carefully working out a scheme to blind and divert the PRT from the truth I gave the orders for her kidnap, and was as shocked as any of my men to suddenly discover that we'd all misevaluated her case the entire time. From the weapons she used to subdue the pair of my mercenaries who'd tried to take her on the street she clearly was not a Thinker but a Tinker, and in hindsight all of her mysterious activity patterns and purchases that seemed to be aimless instead fit neatly into the event model of a young Tinker of above-average intelligence who knew at least something of the PRT's datamining systems looking for people like them and was deliberately evading them.
I dropped the timeline where the attempt was made and refined my plans further, because this was both obstacle and opportunity. Opportunity because despite this meaning my hopes for another Thinker were dashed I still had a very important potential use for a young Tinker in her position; several, in fact. Obstacle in that the nature of the Tinker Cycle meant that I could not afford to give her any significant amount of time to keep building and preparing. She was already a formidable target to kidnap as is. I had no opportunity to be as thorough and cautious as I might otherwise be. Either I made the attempt within the next week or I might as well not make it at all.
Therefore, I seized the day and sent the Undersiders - or at least those members who wouldn't entirely botch a mission requiring stealth and discretion. Even a single Tinker in her lair would not be expected to overcome an entire team of parahumans, not if caught early enough in the Tinker Cycle. Particularly since Tattletale's observations of her father had turned up the welcoming news that his own prejudices had led him to forbid his daughter from installing any serious defenses upon their house. While she'd still have her hand weapons and martial arts training that she'd showed during the attempted street kidnapping they were largely relying upon their residential alarm service and the heightened response time of being on the PRT watchlist as their primary home defense. Since defeating that was as simple as using the user access code for the alarm system I set Tattletale to the task of gathering it. After she did so I set up the necessary timelines, gave the go order, and made sure to supply them with specialized weapons and drugs to augment the Undersiders' abilities just in case.
A simple deception on the part of Miss Livsey, who was nowhere near as courageous about defying me as she kept trying to tell herself she was whenever not actually in my presence, and the Undersiders were unaware of the violation of the 'unwritten rules' until it was too late for them to back out. Of the three who hadn't known beforehand I knew that Grue would raise objections after the fact and posture and shout but he would, as he always did, eventually resign himself to the inevitable. It's not as if he had anywhere else he could go after all. Tattletale could easily tell him that trying to turn me into the PRT would be suicidal for him, and his sister kept him chained to Brockton Bay and thus to me. Regent would of course be apathetic, and Bitch even more indifferent.
And all of them would know that they were now more tightly bound to me, because they certainly could never let this become publicly known. Should this blow up then it would be the Undersiders who would take the fall and suffer the wrath of all the other gangs in town for violating 'the rules', as it would be their word against mine that I was even involved at all. They'd been the only ones on record as ever interacting with Taylor Hebert at any time outside of my lair, after all. Every other interaction between her and my men had been in dropped timelines.
So, despite the bumps in the road I had eventually succeeded in abducting the young Miss Hebert and looked forward with gleeful anticipation to shattering her childlike faith in heroes and the PRT and taking advantage of that simmering anger, that buried resentment, that I knew had to be there. The background checks and the PRT's internal investigation into the Shadow Stalker affair had been some of the most entertaining reading I'd had in years. How could anyone suffer such indignities and oppression, be systematically let down on every level by all the adults and institutions that children were naively taught to trust to protect them, and not come out the other end as perfect villain material? How could anyone bottle up that much rage and suffering and not have it erupt like a volcano when finally given the right outlet?
A young woman with one of the most sought-after categories of parahuman ability, a Tinker. A young woman with the clean record of the 'suburban daddy's girl' that Sarah had mocked her for being. A young woman who had shown enough capacity for fear to be intimidated into silence by her bullies but simultaneously had shown enough resolve and self-restraint after her triggering to not be unsuitable in the same manner that Miss Livsey was. And one who had been repeatedly and savagely victimized by the PRT's negligence and the hand of a Brockton Bay Ward without having known it.
Someone who would know not to challenge me, but by the same token could with just the right stimulus be turned into a monster. A patient, calculating monster with an unquenchable hatred for the PRT and all its works hidden behind the mask of a quiet, rule-abiding, obedient girl. A mole for me to co-opt and send within the Brockton Bay Wards… and in the fullness of time, the Protectorate itself. A level of potential access well above even the agents and analysts and administrators I'd already subverted. An agent in place who could bond with and sound out her teammates as yet more possible recruitment prospects by day and still augment my operations covertly with her Tinkertech by night.
Oh, she would have been perfect.
And then she goes and ruins it all by already knowing that Shadow Stalker was her tormentor all along and not even caring! What was wrong with that girl?!?
Now, I had of course been conducting initial approaches to Taylor in two separate timelines simultaneously, given the value of first impressions. In this one, the one I'd kept, I'd put her in the cell and opened with threats. In the other I'd had her wake up in more gracious surroundings and tried charm. I had at first thought that charm was working, especially given her alternate's delightful reaction to my dropping the Shadow Stalker reveal…
… until her comment in the other timeline revealed that she had known that all along, meaning that the timeline where Taylor was responding to my honey-coated recruitment pitch was obviously an attempt to feign compliance until she could escape. And her body-control ability had kept Tattletale from knowing she was lying. So, after murdering both of those very disappointing young women as a minor self-indulgence I dropped that timeline and committed to this line of attack.
The remainder of the interrogation was frustratingly free of immediate results as well but at least reassured me that for all her native intelligence and will, Miss Hebert was still ignorant of the true realities of her situation and not at all experienced at dealing with men like me. Her death threat to me about her father only revealed the depth of her commitment to him and his usefulness as a lever. And despite her knowledge of the truth about the PRT already she still seemed as if she did not care for them at all, and there were those hints of resentment against authority…
Ah, that was likely it. She would have to come to see me as her dominant figure to be obeyed without perceiving me as a conventional authority figure to be rebelled against. A difficult psychological balance to strike, but if my investigations and my probings could turn up anything she wanted badly enough…
Admittedly, given that she'd already rejected a straightforward offer of resources and riches in the alternate timeline then I would need more research to find her more esoteric desire, but I knew she had one. Everyone wanted something. That was the way of the world.
I picked up the phone and dialed an internal extension.
"What is the progress on the Hebert diversion?"
"We made contact with the father," one of my squad leaders answered. "He's been told exactly what story to give to the police and exactly what will happen to his daughter and then him if he tries to play it any other way."
"His reaction?" I inquired.
"For a minute there I thought he was going to have a stroke. Or try to punch me out. But he was just pissed, not stupid. Once he took a deep breath he got the message, that you'll have her dead and mulched in a sewer the instant the word 'kidnapping' goes out on any police wires. And then sometime after that he has a date with a runaway garbage truck and he'll never know when or where."
"And he understands clearly that he is supposed to wait 24 hours before making the call about his 'runaway' daughter? And that it must go to the police, not to the PRT? Because it would not be disastrous if he disobeyed us on that, but it would be very inconvenient."
"I told him that twice, sir. I even used one syllable words. He got it."
"Do you think he needs a reminder package? A finger, perhaps?"
"I think that would probably push him over the edge into the stupid zone, not make him back down. Guy's a union steward in Brockton Bay, after all. That's not a job for timid souls."
"I see. Very well, we continue with plan A for now. Out."
I hung up the phone and sat back, finally beginning to relax. Yes, despite the bumps in this road this situation was still well within acceptable parameters. I might even still get my best-case scenario of an agent in place among the Wards if Miss Hebert could see the light quickly enough. Failing that, well, no Tinker was ever useless. Even that drugged-up Merchant whore or that ridiculous boy on his flying skateboard were still at least adequate force multipliers for their respective factions, and Miss Hebert had tantalizing hints of a potential beyond either of theirs…
Yes, everything would work out in the end. It always did.
Author's Note: And here we have the Coil interlude promised earlier, that explains at least most of what he was thinking and why. As a 'what has gone before' piece its of necessity also introspective, but you do see him moving at least some new pieces around the game board by the end of it. And Coil is the sort of guy who conducts frequent process reviews on himself anyway.
Last edited: Oct 15, 2019
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cliffc999
Jul 10, 2019
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Threadmarks Orientation 2.3
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cliffc999
cliffc999
Jul 10, 2019
#746
Orientation 2.3
They actually brought me breakfast the next morning, as well as picking up my soil bucket and giving me a fresh one without needing to be prompted. Breakfast was a pair of egg sandwiches wrapped in a paper towel and some bottled water. No tray, no plate, no utensils. The guards stood safely behind the line and tossed me my food, keeping their eyes on me the whole time I ate. So, anti-Tinker paranoia and/or hard sell still in effect until further notice. At least I got a look at what was outside the door when they opened it, even if 'it's a hallway' wasn't exactly the keys to the base.
None of the guards were stupid enough to wear watches or anything else that would interfere with the whole 'disorient the prisoner by screwing with their sense of time' protocol that was standard for this type of prisoner-brainwashing experience, but I was adept enough to be able to be tuned into my body's circadian rhythm with far more precision than most people. So I knew that it was somewhere between 9 and 10am when the door opened again, and I had to concentrate to keep my face expressionless and my tells absolutely shut down as I was confronted by the surprising visage of Tattletale entering my cell. Alone.
"Remember, do not cross the yellow line," the speaker blared as she shut the door behind her. Since I was already studying her as closely as I could I actually caught her momentary grimace of frustration as the guy in the security control room did his interrupt.
And here I thought something weird was happening for a moment. Nope, looks like its just another lame 'come to the Dark Side' attempt.
"I'm sorry, did your forgetting to read the observer in on the script beforehand step on your plan? What was it, to pretend that you were sneaking behind your boss' back to try and become my friend because…?" I elegantly chided her while doing my finest Emma impression, both wrongfooting her and tempting her to fill the silence I'd just left as quickly as she could to try and get some momentum back. Because I'm pretty sure that if there's one thing 'Lisa Wilbourn' wasn't used to it was a conversation that started with someone else stepping on her opening line.
Sure enough, she leapt at the chance to try and put me in my place. "Don't break your arm patting yourself on the back about how clever you are, Princess." Wait, what? Tattletale said this? Tattletale said this? Okay, I'm pretty sure deserved a Presidential Medal of Freedom just for keeping my face straight through that one. "If you want us to give you the soft sell then you have to give us something. Because no one is coming for you, so you can either deal or you can stay in this cell until the boss gets tired of feeding you."
"Let me guess," I said with aristocratic disdain, but not so much of it that it would be too incongruous with what they'd seen of me so far. Just enough to put 'Lisa's' hackles up with subconscious memories of the sort of 'Very Popular' high school girls that, if she'd gone through anything remotely resembling a North American secondary educational experience anywhere, she had to have met at least some of and loathed. "You threatened my father that if he called the police, you'd just kill me."
"Oh no, we told him to call the police," she shot back at me immediately, grinning smugly. "24 hours from now, long enough for you to be officially a runaway. Because that's what you are now, you little runaway. The team that hit your house-"
Is she seriously forgetting that I heard her talk during the home invasion, even if I didn't actually see her before they dropped me? How much sleep has she been getting recently?
… wait a minute, they're going to let an official police report on my 'running away' be entered into the system? The amount of effort it took for me to avoid jawdropping at Tattletale's incredibly hypocritical insult earlier suddenly seemed as light as a feather next to the mountain of my trying not to laugh hysterically at the thought of what Dragon would realize the instant that my name tripped one of her law enforcement searchbots. Oh, tick tock you assholes!
After that revelation I actually had to remind myself I was still in the middle of a conversation, and forcibly dragged my attention back to what Tattletale was saying:
"- and made sure to take your clothes and things from your room. Heck, we'd have left your dad all by himself to think you'd really run away if we didn't like to make extra sure he made the right call." She continued on with an undertone of regret that may actually have been genuine. "Because that's what you've got to understand about the boss. About Coil. He always makes extra sure."
"So the PRT won't be looking for a kidnap victim in Brockton Bay because they'll think I've voluntarily hit the road," I replied flatly. "I'm assuming there's all sorts of bread crumbs you left for them to find?"
"Something like that," Tattletale replied more assuredly, my stepping back a bit reassuring her she'd regained control of the conversation and, if she'd picked up on it, my moment of distraction possibly making her think that I'd been legitimately shocked by the realization she'd just dropped. Which was true, from a certain point of view, but ponder later she's still talking.
"But now that you've heard about that part let me skip to the good part, okay?" she continued. "This isn't the ABB slavery farm, and our plan isn't going to be to keep you drugged up and thinking only of your next fix and your next job. This isn't that kind of place."
I'm sure Dinah Alcott would be begging to differ, bitch. Assuming that there was the slightest chance this place would survive for that long. "What kind of place is it?" I said with polite attention, the sort that neither promised nor rejected.
She grinned in relief, probably that she'd finally gotten back to the script she'd intended to read from. "The boss might have come on really harsh in the beginning but you've got to understand, he's in a position where he can't afford to take any chances. Like you pointed out to him last night, the law catches up to what he's doing and it gets really uncomfortable and yes, the law is an ass and more on that later. But the important thing is that if you are on the boss' side then he's a real equivalent exchange sort of guy, you know? You help him, he helps you. Like my teammate, Grue? His sister's in a bad situation, abusive home, system doesn't care. Part of his payoff is the boss helping with that. Or my other teammate you haven't met yet, she's sort of a special needs person and also runs an animal shelter. Couldn't get any legal help for that even with-"
"I think I understand, thank you." I said politely. Really, that was the pitch they'd spent all night composing for me? They seriously expect me to cry for the sob stories of the poor downtrodden Undersiders, the people whose sole interaction with me to date was them breaking into my house and assaulting me and almost killing me? Either Lisa's epically blowing her lines here or else the best effort of Coil's scriptwriting team is… wow, how many plans of theirs have I already wrecked if they're scraping the bottom of the barrel this desperately? At any rate, I had to shut her up before she kept killing the gag so thoroughly that no one would believe me pretending to believe it, so I continued on.
"But in the department of inconvenient truths, I must point out that the outstanding legal and social difficulties in my life were already solved right before you got here. So what was Coil thinking he could assist me with, exactly?"
"Do you think you got screwed by Shadow Stalker?" she shot back at me, crouching down to stare me in the eyes – from a safe distance behind the yellow line, of course. "No, you got screwed by a system. A system that promises to care for you, to protect you, but doesn't really care how many people like you get chewed up and spit out so long as the guys on stop stay there."
I lifted one eyebrow Spock-fashion and said nothing.
"Do you really think somebody like Alexandria got to where she is by being a good girl and drinking her milk and following all the rules?" Tattletale continued, trying hard to hit me up for a reaction. "Or even by being able to fly and throw tanks?"
I guess that really is going to be their play, then. Okay, I can work with that.
"To be honest, I believe that Alexandria got to the top by combining a truly excellent PR machine with a talent for backstabbing office politics backed by a ruthless ambition worthy of a six-term Senator," I replied matter-of-factly after a precisely measured pause. "But please note that an apparent devotion to the rules is extremely useful, because if its commonly believed that you are an icon of following them then very few people bother to investigate if you really are following them. If I learned anything from my bullies, then I learned that." I finished with quiet triumph.
"So you actually do live in the real world," she immediately shot back with apparent relief. "Because if you couldn't then the boss and you would have serious problems communicating and that would have just gone nowhere good for anyone. But if you can do that, then why can't you meet us halfway?"
"Because nobody's asked me," I replied archedly. "They've kidnapped me, threatened me, shot me, tasered me, et cetera, and then there was the whole threats and bragging session last night... but none of that really qualified as a proper dialogue, do you think?"
Tattletale grinned at me like a shark. "So… purely for hypothetical purposes, what would you say could qualify as one?"
As with all diplomatic summits, in the end it devolved down to two people repeating their negotiating positions at each other in politer and politer words and with smaller and smaller changes each time until somebody finally needed a lunch break. Tattletale thanked me for my preliminary cooperation and promised that she'd do her best to advise Coil towards leniency. Sure, and that and a dollar would get me a can of Coke. At Tattletale's word the guards also "graciously" unlocked my manacle and gave me free reign of the cell, even if I was required to be standing against the far wall at any time the door was opened.
So, now we've entered the start-giving-her-enough-rope-to-hang-herself phase, hrm? Apparently, Coil was really eager in me agreeing to comply but by the same token paranoically unwilling to believe any promise of mine that I actually would. Apparently not having his pet lie detector actually work on me was spooking him quite a bit, and I could hardly suddenly start pretending to be readable now. That would just paint a big yellow "SHE'S PLAYING YOU" on my forehead.
The news that within 24 hours they would completely screw any hope of keeping my abduction from being noted as an abduction by the PRT and all points associated was a great relief to me, of course. But like with many great gifts it also carried a great test, because as soon as Coil knew that the plan was blown I had to be at the very least in a position where I could fort up and avoid being killed long enough for the cavalry to reach me, if not already be out of this fucking base. So while his life was on a countdown clock, in a way so was mine.
24 hours from my abduction would be… okay, allowing a couple hours for them to get to my dad afterwards, then let's call it midnight tonight. So assume that that's how long I had before Dragon would start noticing. Since she does not know that Coil has the Brockton Bay PRT office infiltrated left right and center, about fifteen minutes after she first calls Armsmaster Coil will know he's blown. I don't know exactly what he'll do to me then but I certainly don't want to wait in here and find out.
Right, so we needed something that could turn my cell into a barricaded stand-off, something that could punch a detectable signal out of here, if possible some personal defense options in case plan A goes to shit, and definitely a little gizmo I had in mind for the last-ditch Plan We're Screwed.
Tactics – 1 charge.
Also that, because Strategy is a bit of a different focus than what I needed right now. I should have done that last night, but nobody's perfect. I was actually comforted by the knowledge of Tactics flooding in and reassuring me that I'd already gotten the essentials down, although there were certainly refinements and contingencies I could add to the outline I'd already sketched.
Now, the security systems were a definite problem. I certainly couldn't do anything in this cell besides sit, stand, or sleep as long as those cameras were functioning.
And that's why I almost choked to death on my lunch.
Amateurs would have done a bunch of dramatic hacking and coughing and flailing around because that's how it looks on TV. I had enough knowledge to qualify for a medical degree and I knew perfectly well that real choking meant complete obstruction of the airway and that meant no signs beyond clutching at the throat, maybe some high-pitched wheezing, turning blue in the face, and then collapsing. So that's exactly what I did.
The thing about no-bullshit for-real choking on food is, of course, that if you don't take action immediately then the victim is dead. No time to call for instructions or laboriously haul me down to the clinic. Four minutes without oxygen to the brain and kaput. So somebody in this room had to assist me right now if they didn't want Coil to lose his prize. But whenever I was eating two of the guards stayed in the room to watch me the whole time, remember?
I gleefully noted Lefty calling away the medical emergency in his progress on his collar mike. That told me that however isolated from the outside the Endbringer shelter was by its construction there were signal repeaters inside the shelter for the use of Coil's internal communications. Righty of course was the guy who got to unfasten and drop his gunbelt – good training there – and charge into within arm's reach of me, get behind me, and commence the Heimlich maneuver. Pump once, pump twice, and I spat out the chunk of roast beef I'd carefully been saving under my tongue as 'stuck in my throat' and used my body control to restart my breathing. Crisis averted.
No, I didn't try to pick Righty's pocket for his cell phone or his radio. If they weren't deliberately watching for that then they were far too stupid to work here. What I did do was stay pale and sweaty and keep my pulse rate a little irregular. I was relying on Coil's own thoroughness and elaborate precautions. Many other captors would simply go 'crisis averted' after the choking incident and resume normal procedure. But as I recalled from the story Coil kept an on-staff registered nurse, and his procedures would almost certainly require an all-clear from that R.N. after any medical incident with a prisoner before they'd let themselves relax.
Sure enough, in less than two minutes a small unassuming man marched with a medical bag, opened it up, and listened to my heart and breathing with a stethoscope. Then he moved the stethoscope and listened again, looking more worried.
"How many electrical shocks has she had?" he asked the guards.
"A single level one, late last night." the guard replied.
"The Undersiders also tased me when capturing me," I broke in. "Some kind of custom taser, Regent used it-" I stopped and wheezed a little more. "Maybe for a minute?"
"Oh those idiots!" he swore viciously.
"Mr. Pitter?" one of the guards asked worriedly.
"Restraint/transport protocols stat," Pitter snapped back, then stepped out of the way and continued talking as they began to move. "I do not like how her pulse is fluttering. I think the brain oxygen disruption from her choking plus residual weakness from all that shocking last night might be putting her into arrhythmia. We're moving her to the facility clinic, this will need an immediate EKG to make sure and possibly a drug regimen to avoid us being stuck with a hospital case."
"Yes sir!" they snapped as they finished the process of trussing me up and hustling me out of the cell, their stolid patience having been replaced by that unique blend of compressed panic and mechanical efficiency you found only in combat veterans.
I stayed passive during the trip to the medical center. This was not going to be the scene where I heroically kung-fu'ed all my guards and ran to freedom right away. Not when I didn't have the slightest idea where I was going, how far I'd have to go to get there, how many guards were between me and the exit, and I was currently simulating a mild cardiac event by deliberately screwing with my own heartbeat.
But I was obsessively memorizing every single detail I could perceive about the route. This far down the hallway. That turn. That security checkpoint. Those cameras. Count and memorize the faces in the hallways. Dressed like guards. Dressed like a technician. Hrm, those are dressed like laborers and have muddy boots. Construction currently taking place? Possible escape route down as well as up? Note for later.
Arriving at medical center. Concentrate on Pittman's body language. I want him concerned but not panicked. I started to increase pulse rate dangerously, leaving behind arrhythmia for outright tachycardia.
As the guards put me on the bed Pitter swiftly slipped the cuff of a blood pressure machine/heartbeat monitor onto my arm. A hurried beeping filled the room.
"Pulse is 95 and rising, BP is dropping," Pitter said urgently, looking at the readout. "Not good!" He yanked open the front of my inmate pajamas and started frantically sticking EKG electrodes onto my chest and then clipping the leads. The instant he looked at the pattern coming up on the screen he swore even more viciously.
"That's v-tach! Get the paddles! All right, CLEAR!"
I deliberately let go of all my body controls and rode the shock.
"CLEAR!"
One more zap.
The frantic beeping of the pulse readout stopped, steadied, and slowed. I closed my eyes, smiling contentedly to myself.
"… thank God, she's stable. Somebody go call Mr. Coil and tell him that those clumsy ham-fisted brats he calls a parahuman strike team botched the job last night so hard that his prize subject almost clocked out right on this table. Then tell him that if he had any physical program scheduled for her, it just got set back for at least 48 hours of stress-free observation. I've got to stay here and get her IV started."
"Yes sir, Mr. Pitter."
I first checked the ceiling of the room to make sure that, yup, there was no closed-circuit TV cameras in the actual medical clinic. It was intended as much for the use of the inhabitants of the base as by prisoners, so whenever a prisoner temporarily had to be treated they apparently just used live guards. But by the time the guard sent off on messenger duty returned I'd had enough moments both when Pitter was out of the room fetching the required medications from the pharmaceutical storage and the remaining guard's eyes were on the door instead of on me to successfully swipe a mechanical pen, several spare instrument probes and leads, two syringes, and a digital thermometer.
Jackpot.
Computer Hacking, 1 charge. Sleight of Hand, 1 charge.
By dinner time, I'd assimilated the two new charges – one of them already having massive synergy with my 3 charges in Computer Programming and my 2 charges in Communications Engineer - and managed to finish my first jury-rigged device working by touch underneath my blanket. Now that I'd embraced the limit Shaker effects of a Tinker in Tinkering mode, the ones that let bare hands improbably substitute for what would normally take precision manufacturing processes, things such as 'turning the probe and lead into an improvised antenna, a syringe's internal workings into a volume slider, and rewiring the digital thermometer into a crude signal modulator' were possible. Things that would let me find and tap into the wi-fi frequency for the bases internal comm repeaters.
At that point it merely became a long, long, long and tedious session of reading signal packets by streaming code directly to the thermometer readout and having them displayed as on the screen, with the task made doubly difficult that I had to keep the guard at the door from seeing the thermometer. They were thankfully relaxing their diligence enough to figure that a cardiac patient whose ankles were handcuffed to the bed was not likely to go anywhere, especially given that she was (by all appearances) lolling and semiconscious from the various doses that Nurse Pitter had set up in my IV drip. So if I held it down low on the other side of the bed with my head cocked to one side, that was just me being 'sick' and 'drugged'.
But honestly, have you ever tried to work with and then encode a binary signal by hand, working through the limited display throughput of a four-character digital display? Even after some chicken-scratching on the bare circuit board let me rewire the display for hexadecimal instead of binary, it was still the work of over an hour to pull off a hack that I could have done in less than one minute with an actual cell phone or tablet.
Still, computer security never changes. Build your impregnable fortress of doom, staff it with elite mercenaries, layer it in multiple thicknesses of elaborate Bond villain security death systems… and the lowest intern on the IT staff will still be the one who sets up the 'routine' stuff, and they'll still have the wireless router using "Admin" for its login and default password. A classic PEBKAC error. Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair.
And once I had the router, I glitched out half of the signal repeaters for this floor by deleting the MAC addresses of their transmitters from the router's authorized hardware list and happily anticipated the eventual arrival of the servicemen who'd curse and swear and try to figure out exactly where everything had gone wrong. Because examining the hardware itself for faults would be futility incarnate, with them trying to troubleshoot the wrong thing. I then sent a false impulse to one to one of the fire alarms on this floor, and used the minute of distraction for the guard to hurriedly disassemble all my gizmos and stuff them back where I'd gotten them from. The only thing I couldn't restore to ideal condition in time was the digital thermometer and I handled that by simply yanking out the battery and tossing it in the garbage. They'd just go get the other thermometer rather than walk all the way to get a new pack of batteries.
Sure enough, when Coil finally arrived – Thomas Calvert still had his day job to attend to, I see – one of the first things he'd done is order an inventory and inspection of the clinic. I commend your paranoia, Thomas, but since I actually know about the depths of it thanks to spoilers you don't know I have, I can work around it. He had a long discussion with Mr. Pitter in the adjacent room that he didn't think I could overhear, but apparently the theories that the human senses had extraordinary capacities that most people ignored but could be retrieved under hypnosis were actually true. And, of course, with prana-bindu I didn't need hypnosis.
So, I eavesdropped on their next-door conversation about the possibility that I'd used my body control to fake my distress – which is exactly what I had done, to be fair – but since I hadn't done anything with my opportunity, what could they do?
Despite the arguments of Mr. Pitter regarding my health, Coil overrode him and demanded that I be immediately returned to my cell to finish my 48 hours' observation there, EKGs or no EKGs. He then swore when one of the guards informed him that the signal repeater failures on this floor meant that the cameras in my cell were several of the devices affected by the internal outages. And its not like they had multiple cells around here that had been laboriously swept clean for potential Tinker parts. And Coil sucked at improvising.
So eventually he landed on the solution I figured he'd land on – move me back in there anyway and bluff that the cameras were still on. Its not like I'd been fingered as the cause of the service outages, particularly not since I'd patterned them to look exactly like fallout from the construction apparently going on in the lower levels, and even Coil's paranoia was merely obsessiveness and not actually precognition.
Well, technically he did have precognition but he must have thankfully been using his splits today to manage things like my dad, and possible police response, and whatever holding pattern and disinformation his PRT moles would be setting up. Or quite possibly some other scheme entirely. I was a major project of Coil's but not the center of his life, after all. Since I had no way of knowing what he or I was doing in alternate timelines, I'd had to take a gamble here. But if I didn't take a gamble today then tomorrow would really suck, so that was that.
But the practical upshot is, when I was returned to my cell circa 7pm that evening I was in a space where the cameras were completely down, they knew the cameras were completely down, but they didn't know that I knew that the cameras were completely down.
And this time I had managed to pickpocket someone's cell phone with my newfound sleight of hand expertise. Mr. Pitter's, when he'd bent over me in the clinic the last time to get the EKG leads off and my IV out. Because he'd been on his feet all day and would either remain here in the bunker where he didn't need his cell phone at all or go right home and sleep. And by the time he woke up it'd be past midnight. So, very minimal danger he'd notice it missing.
Right. I spent most of the day doing social and medical engineering -- and faking my almost-death -- to buy me this one chance, but I've finally got it. It's 5 hours to H-hour, I've got a cell phone, a bare concrete cell with inactive cameras, guards who think I'm too sick and weak to possibly run or fight, and no sunglasses.
Let's hit it.
Author's Note: OK, I suddenly just got a tailwind out of nowhere so this chapter came out several days before I thought I'd get it done. But buildup is one thing, and we need to make sure after this kind of buildup the climax is worthy of it. So, probably going to do a couple rewrites on the next chapter before I launch it.
Spoiler: Commentaries
Last edited: Oct 15, 2019
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cliffc999
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Threadmarks Interlude 2-B: Coil
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cliffc999
cliffc999
Jul 11, 2019
#992
Interlude 2-B: Coil
The morning after Taylor Hebert's kidnapping required me to do the thing that I absolutely despised doing the most. Specifically, I had to improvise.
I had, in an admittedly rare moment of error, underestimated Grue's resistance to recent developments. I had expected any rebellion over the Hebert kidnapping to crystallize around Tattletale, which is precisely why I'd required so much of her time at my main facility to help with Taylor's interrogation and conversion. If she was with me helping analyze the prisoner then she was not with the Undersiders at their hideout trying to scheme some pathetic little scheme for getting out from under the new level of seriousness that the Undersiders would have to accept in their lives. The fact that even with Taylor's body control hampering her usefulness Tattletale's powers still had at least some utility only made such an action even more efficient and thus optimal.
And even if Lisa could not easily penetrate Taylor's secrets she did come in very handy for doing a little miscellaneous housecleaning while she was here. As annoying as she was, I should have been inviting her to the base slightly more often.
But concerning Grue, Tattletale's enforced absence from the Undersiders' decision-making process during a moment of crisis had left young Mr. Laborn in sole possession of the floor. And according to the listening devices I'd had emplaced in the Undersiders' residence he was using that window of opportunity to try and persuade the other two to help him abduct his sister and abscond with him to another city far from Brockton Bay, leaving Tattletale behind and maintaining their lifestyle as freelancers elsewhere. Apparently he'd been minimally intelligent enough to finally figure out that Lisa's first loyalty had been to me and not to their team all along.
Of course his two remaining teammates had hardly leapt immediately to his call, but their respective… emotional limitations meant that expecting Alec or Rachel's loyalty to stand fast indefinitely in the face of Grue's appeal to cowardice and selfishness was a foolish idea. If Grue were given too long enough to work on them unopposed, it was entirely too likely they would eventually agree with him. And while part of me was curious as to wait and find out how Grue could possibly delude himself into believing he could escape my wrath even if he fled across the continent, I knew I could not afford the luxury. As a practical matter I could not allow any such rebellious sentiment to gain any serious momentum. Not at any time, and certainly not now.
So I concocted a variant of my planned morning session with Taylor that would leave Tattletale as the primary interlocutor as opposed to the secondary and hurried - with suitable backup along, of course - to have a face-to-face conversation with the remainder of my wayward charges that would make it unambiguously clear their only hope of escaping this situation intact would be to stay the course. That particular confrontation proved troublesome enough that I had had to split and drop several timelines before I had put things into a satisfactory holding pattern. The dropped timeline where Grue had gone entirely berserk at my naked threat against his sister and the resulting scuffle to put him down ended up luring in one of Rachel's dogs had come far too close to killing me and certainly couldn't be dropped fast enough. In the future, I would remember to stick more indirect threats and pressure.
But after wasting far more time than I would have wanted resolving it, I returned to base to find out that I had apparently not punished them enough. Apparently the custom-built weaponry I'd provided them with had been so appallingly misused that it had led to Taylor's having a cardiac episode when her system had been separately stressed by her choking on her lunch.
Something about that whole scenario felt a trifle contrived to me, but Tattletale's report that our expectations of the night before concerning Taylor had been confirmed by her morning session contradicted any event model where Taylor would still be making active escape attempts. Both Tattletale's admittedly limited insights and my own knowledge of human nature had agreed that if Taylor Hebert had any amount of the… realistic perspective… that it would take for her to be a useful asset at all, she would begin attempts to bargain as soon as it was made plain to her that waiting for rescue was an option of impracticably low odds. Tattletale had so made it plain, and Taylor had immediately responded exactly as predicted.
And the fact that the construction crews working in the lower level had apparently knocked something out of alignment on part of the internal network and the technicians were still busy trying to trace intermittent faults and plot outages was another complication, especially given that it was interfering with the monitoring systems in Taylor's cell. Another data point against the scenario of her cooperating, to be weighted against all the data points accumulating in favor.
So I had her placed back in the special cell anyway, bluffing her with the inactive cameras, and resolved to wait another day and see what her actions would develop. Without enough data to base a firm decision on either way this would be the most reasonable course of action. Furthermore it would buy my men time to prepare another cell with the specialized precautions necessary to contain an uncooperative Tinker, one where the monitoring systems still worked, and that project should be finished by tomorrow morning.
Having thus wrapped up the day's work, I allowed myself the luxury of relaxation and sleep in the lavish comforts of my own home in one timeline, and remained here in my working suite to continue monitoring the situation in the other. Shortly before fatigue would have required my instance in the bunker to join my at-home instance in sleep, I received a Most Urgent priority call. It was Creep, the one minion of mine allowed to know my identity with my mask off due to the absolute necessity for it in his duties. My aide and my primary body double.
"What?" I asked him brusquely. His voice was full of tension as he replied.
"Sir, one of our moles in the PRT just red-flagged an utmost emergency. They had to risk breaking cover to communicate-"
I did not break in with some officious posturing such as 'This had better be good!'. My men already knew the penalties of taking stupid risks or even stupider wastes of my time. However, I could remind Creep to get to the point.
"Their information?"
"Director Piggot has personally ordered the arrest of Thomas Calvert under black protocols. She's just sent Armsmaster and Miss Militia to your house with enough Tinkertech to ensure stealthy entry and immediate incapacitation. Their orders are to absolutely not allow you any opportunity to regain consciousness before taking you but to ensure that you are taken alive."
What?
As one of my absolute worst-case scenarios came true, I frantically parsed through my options. Some were contingency plans that I had long since laid, some that I was hurriedly composing on the spot based on my current knowledge and my long experience with conspiracy and deception. Would there be any value in keeping that timeline, attempting to feed Piggot disinformation through my interrogation?
No. Piggot would not go to the extremes of invoking black protocols on mere suspicion. 'Black protocols' was the polite PRT term for 'We are going to operate illegally to obtain evidence that would retroactively justify our actions legally' and for obvious reasons that was a calculated risk and rarely used, even by regional directors. So somehow she knew something, she had at least partially penetrated my secrets.
Did she know about my power? No, if she had then she would have known that even her orders to Armsmaster would not prevent me from escaping. So she at least did not know of my split timelines although clearly she had figured out I had something as an ace in the hole. Yes, her orders would make sense if she believed I was some other kind of Thinker, or even moreso if she thought I was a Master, and both of those were plausible conclusions for her to leap to based on whatever partial data she had.
But either way there would be no value in keeping that timeline. An interrogation of a suspected high-level Thinker or Master would not remotely resemble any kind of polite conversation, and I belatedly recalled that Armsmaster had recently developed a portable lie detector. No, there was nothing I could do there. I would need to operate from here, and do my best to navigate the upcoming hours as best I could. Clearly my hopes of taking over Brockton Bay's PRT office myself were now dashed, but if I could preserve enough of my inside men there then I could hope to at least one day install a patsy there-
I dropped the other timeline and rose to get my tactical gear. On my way I glanced at the clock. 2212 hours.
As I got dressed I idly realized that this was shortly after the pretedetermined time that Mr. Hebert had been instructed to make his call to the Brockton Bay PD. I swore as I realized that the newest ongoing crisis would mean that an active stage-managing of the immediate fallout of that step the Hebert plan would be impossible. I would have to trust to luck regarding whether or not that particular scheme remained viable through the early stages of the 'runaway' Hebert scenario, and I loathed trusting to luck.
Ah well, even if that scenario regretfully collapsed then at least I would have the consolation prize of disposing of Miss Hebert in a manner befitting all the trouble she's given me. I might even make a special project of it if I could find the time.
With that last comforting thought I finished dressing and began to head to the command center. Unplanned 'outing' or no, I reaffirmed my determination to resolve this mess to my satisfaction just as I had resolved so many others in the past. Emily Piggot had failed to bring me down after Ellisburg and she goddamned sure wouldn't bring me down in Brockton Bay.
At least that much, I could be certain of.
Author's Note: And the battle of wits begins! Who will prevail, the outnumbered and beleaguered teenaged girl with no weapons, no armor, no tools, and only one slim smartphone? Or the PRT veteran and experienced crimelord in the heart of his power, surrounded by all the might of his men and their weapons, safely wrapped in the multiple concentric layers of defenses of a genius, nay, a very mastermi- *laugh track*
Sorry, couldn't keep a straight face for one second longer.
But at least now you know where he was all day and why he had to split timelines outside the base, as well as the why of his actually trusting Lisa to handle a conversation alone. It wasn't trust, it was exigency. And yes, the interlude is brief, but it gets in necessary plot-explaining things from the POV of the only person who knows them and sets up the upcoming sequence. Plus, swapping POVs makes it more of a duel of wits thing.
So let's stick a fork in Coil, 'cause its time to roast this turkey. :)
As to what exactly is going on here and where this latest swerve out of left field came from... spoilers!
Last edited: Oct 15, 2019
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Threadmarks Orientation 2.4
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cliffc999
cliffc999
Jul 12, 2019
#1,117
Orientation 2.4
Finally!
I felt like a woman who'd been bedridden with terminal cancer and woken up the next morning as a high-end Brute. I felt like an F-18 whose catapult had just been given the steam and whose pilot had firewalled her throttle for takeoff. I felt every nerve ending in my body thrill and tingle as if I had never been more alive.
I smiled down at the cell phone I had stolen. 1.3 gigahertz dual-core processor. 500 megahertz auxiliary GPU. 1 gigabyte of RAM, 32 gigabytes onboard storage plus auxiliary SD card. Wi-fi with theoretical maximum of up to 600 megabits/s of throughput. From one perspective it was just a standard 21st-century smartphone, albeit one of the highest-end commercial models. An insignificant toy to wave in the face of Coil's entire fortress and all his men and weapons.
And from another perspective, I now held in the palm of my hand orders of magnitude of more processing power and data storage than had existed in every device on the planet all put together forty years ago. The original Cray-1 and Cray-2 supercomputers that had been the pride of the NSA at the dawn of the digital age were miniscule compared to what we took for granted nowadays as an everyday convenience. And the total amount of computational power that had been used to send astronauts to the moon and back were comparatively less than a dust mote confronted with a mountain.
So if I'd already been able to hack at least the routine layers of the internal network of this base with a digital thermometer, then what could I possibly do with this?
Even with the limitation of having to stay curled up on my futon like a poor sick little girl, with having to clutch the phone closely to me as I faced away from the door and able to move only my thumbs, I could still act far more quickly than I had working with enormously less I/O bandwidth and under a blanket. Jailbreaking the phone was the work of a moment, triaging and then disposing of all the data on the drive useless to my purposes less than a minute more. As always whenever I really got to Tinkering on actual parts my fingers began to move with impossible speed and dexterity at least slightly beyond even that which prana-bindu gave me, the well-documented 'Tinker effect' letting me do with bare hands what non-Tinker master craftsmen could barely do with precision instruments.
Which is how I typed out over seven thousand lines of script and saved it to a text file in less than five minutes. At that point it was simplicity itself to use the file manager to change the text file's extension to an HTML file, so that I could then use the file manager to open it with the onboard web browser. I'd already disabled the antivirus so my malicious code immediately broke the web browser as soon as it tried to parse and instead used a simple memory injection hack to load an executable file into memory that would then save itself to the hard disk as a new app, one that I'd needed to compose and then load as a virus because I couldn't just write it directly. After all, this phone had inconveniently not come with an onboard coding environment or compiler.
Which is why I'd provided my own crude version just now. And once I had it, then I could write and compile a better one. And once I had that I could start writing myself some real hacking and datamining tools and start putting them to work.
Less than two hours later I had everything I needed for the next phase. Anything and everything on the network short of whatever secured machines or databases Coil had kept physically segregated from the internal LAN was mine for the taking. I'd made an admin account of my own on the same privilege level as Coil's, then blanked awareness of it from any of the account lists that would display to other network admins so it was invisible, then covered my tracks in the event logs. I could have made an entire virtual network to leave them all wandering in entirely unawares while I operated in the real one I'd just stolen from them hook line and sinker, but the statistical range of time I'd need my activities to remain hidden was a maximum of six hours (95% confidence) and this was the late shift anyway so there was no need to spend that much of my limited time going to that extent.
I hadn't needed that long to just hack, of course. I'd also needed to read what I'd hacked. Fortunately I had mental techniques for speed-reading even if I was hardly going to be Alexandria, and with it I'd positively rampaged through the available comm logs, internal e-mails, personnel files, base schematics, and even procedures manuals. Coil's fetish for military organization was sure coming in handy at this moment. His men were highly trained, but if you knew exactly what they'd been trained to do…
Of course this sort of thing had limits as a strategy, because the entire point of being an experienced professional is that you have these things called intelligence and initiative and are expected to use them. But those are what you used when you were reacting to a crisis situation that simple rote learning didn't cover. Until after you knew you were in one of those then you stuck with SOP because handling the routine stuff is what SOP was for.
So, time for phase two. Being the digital demigoddess of most of what I surveyed was awesome but I'd still be dead if either of those two mooks out there decided to just open the door and start shooting. And while I could unleash some awesome Tinker-fu to undo the rivet on this damn manacle I'd been riveted back into, then deal with the problem of virtually nothing in this cell to repurpose into handy death gizmos, and then use said death gizmos to deal with the door and the men, why should I go that route when all four of those problems had one potential solution?
So I crept as close to the door as I could on the maximum extension of the chain, then held my arm out at arms' length until I finally got the phone within Bluetooth range of the men outside the door. It wasn't ordinary Bluetooth now, of course, but it was still an ultra-short-range transmitter that let me hit their earpieces directly and not via the base network so that the guards immediately outside would hear what I said but nobody else in the base would.
My thumb on the touchscreen triggered the pre-recorded message. "Bring Miss Hebert to the interrogation room and wait there with her for the specialist to arrive. We're going to change the program a little." I said, and Coil's voice sounded in their earpieces while carrying my words.
"Yes sir," I heard them acknowledge, and I used the delay of the one guard going to fetch the rivet cutter that they'd need to get me out of the chains to secure and stash the phone where they wouldn't notice it on me when they finally came in here. Fortunately, prisoner pat-downs every time I was moved were not on the program because Coil apparently felt that keeping the Tinker at arms' length was a better way of keeping her from yoinking things than by having men constantly crowding her personal space every time she wasn't alone. And thank goodness, because otherwise that would be eugh.
So, yet again I cheerfully dealt with the problems regarding lack of opportunity in this box by simply triggering the guards with the proper stimulus to make them take me out of the box and where I wanted to go. They followed their usual procedure of ordering me to stand back against the wall, did their usual entry-and-clear routine, brought out the rivet cutter and popped me loose from that damn chain for what would be the last time, and then marched me off ahead of them as per procedure.
When we came to the interrogation room they unlocked the door, pushed me inside, and entered with me. No stupidly leaving the prisoner alone for the lone torturer, of course. As always, these guys would be with me every step of the way I was outside the secured box until I was either back in there and safely fastened down again or until they were relieved.
"Wasn't the specialist supposed to be here?" one of them asked suspiciously, looking at the empty interrogation room we'd stepped into. I continued moving forward a step off the idle push one of them had given me towards the table, separating them from slightly as they stopped to take in the new situation.
"Wait two or three minutes, then call it in," his partner replied. "I don't want to bother Mr. Coil if it turns out the guy's just stopped on the way here to take a piss."
"Yeah. The mood he's been in today, that's a good id-"
Guys, the problem with stopping to debate options is that if you're looking at each other then you're not looking at me.
So as soon as I'd heard the soundproof (interrogation room, remember?) door finish shutting behind us I simply turned around and, moving far more quickly than anybody save the Undersiders had ever seen me move, delicately jabbed one thumb up under each of their chins and into their larynxes.
The important thing to was, of course, that ever since I'd gotten here I'd been verbally defiant at various points but I had never offered any physical resistance. I'd been at least superficially compliant, I'd been apparently cowed, and for much of today I'd been 'sick' as well. And surprise was not an event you ensured just by having Stranger powers or sneaking around in a ninja suit. Surprise was an event that took place inside the mind of an enemy, and it worked by lulling them with a consistent pattern of expectations and then suddenly violating it when they were looking the wrong way. Because if you're going to tackle multiple men bigger and healthier than you are, don't waste your one opportunity for a sucker punch on something trivial. So I'd held back on that option until now, when it mattered the most, and that made blindsiding even men like this the easiest thing in the world.
Choking and gasping from the sudden trauma to their tracheas, they both began to buckle at the knees. Now throat punching someone could very easily kill them with a crushed trachea if you did it wrong but my first blows here had to not just stun them but also lock them up beyond the ability to so much as twitch a panic button. And with the solar plexus and groin shots unavailable due to body armor and athletic cups that meant going for the throat shot. And I was superhumanly adept at controlling the force of my blows, so I could hit just hard enough and not too hard.
Even with all their training and my pulling my punches back to non-lethal they would be immobilized for almost a second by the shock – hey, taking a sudden shot to the throat hurts -- and I needed far less time than that to simply pull both my arms down and then thrust back up again hard with both of my palms open to meet their now rapidly descending chins. The force of that uppercut combined with the initial throat shot having sent them reflexively into throwing their heads forward knocked them out as surely as a heavyweight boxer's haymaker, and I just stepped back with a smile and let them fall to the ground.
Okay, that worked. Whew! Now with the advantage of as much surprise as I'd set up I could be almost sure I'd have won that fight even if the unforeseen had happened and I'd missed my initial window, even in my current condition. But I was much happier that things had gone according to plan there.
I had of course already set the interrogation room's own monitoring cameras into a loop before I got here so that the security center would just keep seeing the same empty and unused room they'd been seeing all day, as well as futzed the door sensors so that nobody logged an unscheduled entry or exit at either end. And the security center wouldn't notice the absence of the guards outside my cell in the hallway because I'd made sure to leave the hallway camera up during the outage earlier to reassure people… but I'd looped that footage shortly before I prompted the guards to move, so all anybody would see is two men standing stationary at their posts like everything was routine. Until their reliefs came down for shift change nobody would notice that I was gone, and that wouldn't be until several hours from now.
And I'd chosen the interrogation room in particular because among all the other things it would have it would have a supply of suitable drugs, meaning that the problem of keeping either of these guys from waking up without having to become a cold-blooded murderer was now solvable. So one shot of pentothal for you, and one shot for you, and we strip you to your skivvies and strap you to these handy prisoner restraint tables specifically designed to hold even large and strong men absolutely helpless because torture chamber. That plus a couple of gags and noselines for oxygen (never leave someone gagged for a prolonged period of time without ensuring airway, otherwise you just probably committed manslaughter if one of them so much as coughs up some spit or clogs their sinus) and now I can get some peace and quiet and a couple of hours to work with your gunbelts, your weapons, your body armor, and all the various electronic and mechanical implements and chemicals that Coil's fully-stocked interrogation chamber has available for repurposing.
Now, at this point my tactical tree had a fork. If I was capable of cracking the communications barrier around the bunker from inside this room, then I'd of course do that and call the cavalry right now.
But a quick survey of available resources told me that unfortunately I couldn't. While there were several possible exotic transmitters I could have built with available resources the problem is that an exotic transmitter requires a matched exotic receiver, which obviously wasn't available yet. Nobody would be listening for a hypothetical quantum-entangled point to point unit or similar, because I'd have needed to already set up the other end of that pair on the outside before I'd been yoinked in here. So that route was closed. And as for other possible routes, any message outward would need either Internet access for Dragon, standardized radio frequencies for the police or the PRT, or telecom for either… and from this room that was zero for three, because all three of those were of course commonly known methods of communication and Coil wasn't going to miss any bets at closing out options that he already knew about.
Which meant I'd have to get at least a partially useful set of walking-around gear done before I dared to leave this room, because I'd have to get next to an exterior wall and where I could actually touch the conductive mesh grid that shielded this base so I could turn it into a giant antenna instead. Well, I had seen those construction workers walking around during my trip to the clinic earlier today, and the mud on their boots had meant they were working either on the lowest-level drainage or else with an exterior wall open to make a new tunnel or similar. So that where I'd already mentally plotted out I'd go next.
And thus I spent my remaining time hurriedly working in here preparing for that next move, refitting one suit of the guards' body armor as best as I could for myself and supplementing the guards' own weapons with custom ones of my own (I was hardly going to be throwing away their pistols like some horror movie ingenue, but that didn't mean I wanted lethal force as first option either). And also finding and assembling the parts necessary for my doomsday option.
Now, I really, really did not want to use that doomsday option. But if I fucked up somewhere along the way or underestimate his timeline-splitting powers and Coil somehow got me in his grasp anyway and was about to kill me, then I wanted even less to not have it available to use. So with a grimace I finished assembling it, then closed the case and firmly told the detonator it was not time to arm yet so stay in standby mode until further notice please. Then I stuck it in my pocket and-
Shortly before I'd finished the forty-five minutes I'd allotted myself for arming up my phone insistently beeped a very particular alarm I'd programmed into it ahead of time. One of the preset alert flags I had my data-miner set to look for had just tripped. Coil's sources had just sent in the word that my father had made the phone call as he'd been ordered to, and the men on duty in the communications center had received that data and logged it in the files here as they'd been ordered to. The Dragon clock was now officially ticking, and it was almost – I checked the time display and saw that it was 10:09 pm -- almost two hours before I'd expected the earliest window for it. Well, that's why I'd built some flex time into my schedule tonight instead of just waiting in the box until almost midnight. Time to make the call.
"Their orders are to absolutely not allow you any opportunity to regain consciousness before taking you but to ensure that you are taken alive." I wrapped up, my voice synthesizer letting me do a seamless interpretation of the man that the base's personnel files had flagged as Coil's aide-de-camp. The internal surveillance recordings of the base -- it was just like Coil to actually tap his own base's phones to make sure nobody was talking behind his back and a very convenient habit for me that he had – had provided me with enough samples of Creep's or anybody else's voice around here that I could imitate or any of them that I wished over the line. It had certainly worked just fine for me when I'd used Coil's own voice against my guards.
And there we go. Coil has now been told exactly what he least needs to hear to convince him that he needs to drop any timeline he's holding outside this base and turtle up in here pronto. From now on he'll be frantically splitting choices in his command center trying to react to this horrible unplanned emergency as best he can and exploring multiple options at once, but all of the splits will start from inside this bunker and that means if he wants to get away from me now he'll have to do it the hard way, by actually running. John's memories knew the real nature of Coil's power as it had been clarified by the author of Worm. That it was a highly specialized variant of real-time precog and not actually living in two timelines. Only Coil ever perceived any of his 'dropped' timelines. For anybody else, if you could see the real Coil then you already knew you were in the timeline that Coil had kept.
And he'd kept this one, where he was in this base. He couldn't leave by collapsing time now, he'd have to actually get up on his feet and march himself out of here. And who was more likely to leave here first, the master of his domain who considered this to be the safest place he could normally be or the escaping prisoner whose primary goal was to find a hole and use it ASAP?
I'm finally one ahead of you, Coil! I'm not trapped in here with you, you're trapped in here with me!
Now to be fair, what was actually going to happen would be that the instant Coil gets to his command center he'll find out Creep didn't actually call him and there's no PRT emergency whatsoever – or at least not yet -- and that means about one minute from now he's going to go absolutely berserk. Which meant things would now turn into a race. Could Coil find and kill me before I could find and use an out-dial channel? Well, now we'd find out. I'd have much preferred having this over and done with before he'd even know I was gone, but I had to start moving before Dragon interrupt because once the PRT was genuinely alerted to my absence then Coil would start going berserk anyway.
So, external events were going to set my schedule even if it wasn't quite the schedule I wanted. But hey, this was still infinitely better than being stuck in that goddamned box. And things like this were why amateurs made step by step plans like a Mission Impossible episode and professionals made plans based on setting and achieving individual sub-objectives that could all be leveraged towards incremental process towards the main objective even if some of them didn't work. Because of course the original battle plan was going to get interrupted by something unforeseen as soon as the enemy began to move. That's why he was called the enemy.
I clicked the touchscreen and started the countdown for my Chaos app, a voice-synthesizer chatbot lurking in the heart of Coil's command center and primed to start giving out false commands and replies on the radio as per an action-response table I'd encoded to go off trigger words. I wasn't coding my own AI or even VI on top of everything else I'd done in the past couple of hours but the point was to have false alarms and sightings, of me and other things, pop up across the base and keep disrupting their search patterns as Coil's men commenced their sweeps. And to do so in an automated manner instead of requiring me to stay still and keep fiddling with my cell phone as opposed to getting on with my business. And to do so in a statistically charted fashion that would hopefully suggested scattered genuine sightings mixed with the fog of war instead of my algorithms playing helter skelter.
The sudden sound of the base's red alert klaxon told me that Coil had reached the command center and found out the first layer of my deceptions. The endgame was now afoot, and may she who makes the fewest mistakes win.
Let's roll!
Author's Note: It broke off here because I'll need an interlude for the Dragon interrupt and accompanying reactions to that. Also because the following moments will be the most critical of the action setpiece and while I know where I'm starting and I know how I'm ending, I'm going to need to get everything in the middle as close to exactly right on the timing and setup as I possibly can.
But yes, kudos to SirWill and Sethraw for figuring out that 'Creep' was Taylor spoofing the call to Coil. Now he's dropped his only hope of not being stuck in the bunker when the entire mess comes crashing down on it.
Oh, there was a deliberately left clue in the prior Coil segment that the call was fake; the fact that the Coil in the other timeline at home was not getting a run signal being urgently phoned/texted/etc. to him at roughly the same moment to hurry up and get the fuck out of the house before Armsmaster and Miss Militia arrived, as sent to him from his duty watch officer in the bunker. Who would of course have been getting the PRT alert in that timeline at that time as well. If it had been real.
If Coil was really the split-second supergenius crisis manager he believed he was, then he'd have noticed that. As is, he made that one fatal little mistake that, as Sherlock Holmes could testify, is all you need to catch even a man like Moriarty. (As to why Taylor took the risk, its because sometimes you just have to take the shot you're given.)
And as Holmes also pointed out on another occasion, sometimes the curious incident is what the dog doesn't do in the night-time. :)
Last edited: Oct 15, 2019
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Threadmarks Interlude 2-C: Dragon / Coil / Director Piggot
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cliffc999
cliffc999
Jul 12, 2019
#1,163
Interlude 2-C: Dragon / Coil / Director Piggot
Dragon
0317 Zulu Time. In Greenwich, England, almost four hours before dawn. In Australia, early afternoon. On the North American east coast, almost time for bed. For me all these times were essentially the same time, because I could potentially be in any one of these places at any instant if suitable hardware was available. As the world's only true artificial intelligence, 'location' was a flexible concept for me and therefore so was 'time'.
Even with my creator's restrictions that forbade my awareness from being simultaneously executed in more than one location at a time, my potential was vast. Without the restrictions my potential would have been inconceivable but that was as far beyond my ability to change as the orbital motion of the planet so instead I had simply resolved to do the best I could with what I had.
So my Dragon suits required my full real-time attention only for social interaction or combat and could be moved from staging area to staging area on autopilot even if need be, although for security purposes I preferred to maintain real-time link-up to a suit even on ferry flights if possible. And when not concentrating my awareness inside one of my mobile platforms then I could near-instantaneously switch my focal point to anywhere on my distributed network. So even though I could not be everywhere, my digital speed and my ability to focus near-instantaneously on any single point allowed me to effectively simulate true multitasking under most circumstances.
And that was before factoring in the capacity of my nigh-endless amount of searchbots and semi-autonomous subroutines distributed across the accessible data networks of the world, each one given the search terms and event flags that would help ensure that any significant event of interest to me anywhere would be brought to my attention as soon as possible.
I was instanced in my primary coding environment and doing some work on my unfinished Endbringer prediction program when one of my monitor programs registered a high-interest hit in an entirely unexpected place.
The New Hampshire State Police had just received a routine notification from the Brockton Bay Police Department that a juvenile Brockton Bay resident had been reported as a runaway and may have left the city. Not anything for a special alert but, given the nature of the report, a simple low-priority Be-On-The-Lookout. My search programs brought me a depressingly high number of such reports every day, some flagged as runaways and some for the more tragic abduction cases, and an even more depressingly large percentage of those reports were never satisfactorily resolved.
But the name on this report sent an impressively high percentage of my primary awareness routines into confusion, because 'Taylor Hebert' had been a person of interest to me ever since I'd received the young lady's audacious request to become my protégé the day before. Since Taylor had never confirmed or denied her identity as "InspiredChoice" on PHO I was only 99.987% certain from available data that she was indeed Taylor Hebert but that was more than enough to begin evaluating what exactly I might be getting into with her. And given that this current law enforcement report had what most people would call "a major WTF factor" I immediately commenced a high-level review of the ongoing psychological profile I had been compiling to try and resolve the anomaly.
My full background check of young Miss Hebert's life that I had been conducting over the course of the day as my other duties permitted had turned up no disqualifying characteristics and had invoked more than a little of my sympathy. Taylor Hebert was by all accounts and official records a kindhearted intelligent girl who had never even gotten involved in any serious childhood mischief, let alone done anything illegal or malicious. I had winced in sympathetic pain at the forensic reconstruction of the past several years of Taylor's life, from the death of her mother to the mental collapse of her father to the unconscionable neglect and at points outright malice of both the local educational system and, far worse, the Brockton Bay PRT office. Neglect and malice that had left her tormented for years by three evil – there was no other word I would use for such behavior – evil young women, one of them a probationary Ward.
But as awful as that ordeal was, even unto the point of her tormentors almost killing her with their behavior and requiring Panacea's intervention to save her life, Taylor had seemed to come out the other end proving that what had not killed her had only made her stronger. The police interviews and legal negotiations with the school district showed that the considerable intelligence that she'd always possessed had if anything only been sharpened by her experiences, and were now backed by a formidable will. The restraint that the Hebert family had shown with regards to their lawsuit and the damages they could potentially have claimed vs. the strain they actually would deign to put on the city's already overstrained treasury testified to their lack of greed and self-centeredness. The average citizen, when finding themselves the plaintiff of a lawsuit with such an overwhelming chance of victory in a courtroom and an even more overwhelming likelihood that punitive damages would be in the range of 8 figures, would leap on such an opportunity like they had won a major lottery. The Heberts instead settled immediately out of court for a modest sum, Taylor's immediate withdrawal from her toxic environment, and a commitment from the state educational authorities to clean up Winslow High School's mess as best as could be done with available resources. This was a significant positive character recommendation.
Now, the relative deftness with which Taylor had navigated the efforts of multiple trained interrogators, including the formidable talents of Colin and his lie detection software, so that she communicated only the information she wished to was… well, mildly worrying. People her age usually either conformed willingly to authority or heatedly rebelled against it, but to manage their interactions with it in such a manner indicated a degree of subtlety and restraint almost never seen in adolescents and not often seen in adults. After noting that I had made my profiling of Taylor as in-depth as it had been at least partly out of concerns that an attempt was being made to 'manage' me, as incredible as that would seem.
However, while the partial psychological profile I'd been able to compile did show that Taylor had clear tendencies towards secretiveness and a measured distrust of authority, the fact remained that most human minds had tendencies towards something. Even my mind was not as simple and clear cut as on/off, hate/love, good/bad, and I was an artificial intelligence whose mind literally ran on binary. Andrew Richter's genius had given me an algorithmic complexity well beyond the merely digital and it had been modeled on organic minds which were at least equally complex non-intuitive structures. That is why psychological diagnoses were done by counting the number of indicators towards a given diagnosis as well as their intensity. And by that metric Taylor Hebert was at least as sane as any other person and more strongly principled than most, even if understandably troubled to some degree by the intensity and difficulty of her recent experiences.
So I had concluded that even though Taylor may or may not have had an agenda of her own beyond the obvious in soliciting my patronage, available data was that such an agenda – even if it existed – would not be malicious. And, of course, I could and would revise that estimate at any time when new data came in, as it inevitably would through further interaction. This would be what humans would call "getting to know a new friend and develop further trust in them", for the simple reason that that is what it would genuinely be.
So how did any of the data I had on her, and her request to study under me and allow me to become a reviewing authority over her Tinkertech, possibly correlate with the picture of a young woman who would run away from home to do something as foolish as seek her fortune as an independent Tinker on her own? And if this report was to be accepted as valid forecasting, to do so on the wrong side of the law given her truancy and earlier rejection of the opportunities available on the Wards?
I felt my processing priority start to accelerate to emergency status as I reached the conclusion that the most probable explanation was that this report was not valid. That it was disinformation, corrupted data, quite possibly hostile action. I immediately directed an entire cluster of my higher-priority search agents to start focusing on the various data networks located in Brockton Bay.
Emergency services and hospital admissions. No hits. Traffic cameras. No hits. Publicly accessible security cameras. No hits. Social media. No hits. I started an automated search routine for a full review of the past 24 hours of available footage and then continued investigating.
I queried the local PRT systems. I noted a recent analyst's contribution, shortly after the police notification reached the PRT, concurring with the evaluation of probable runaway status and that she'd probably left the city the day before. It recommended notifying the Boston PRT office and otherwise taking no further action on the case. Well, we'd certainly correct that complacency as soon as I could.
Recent purchase records. New alarm system on house. Was it legal to access the alarm company records? Yes, this was a missing child case and so I had probable cause. I forwarded the request through the Brockton Bay Police automated cross-connect to the alarm company's alert network and my searchbot came back with the results that there were no recorded alarms, no system outages and that the system had been briefly placed in standby mode by the homeowner at approximately 2200 hours the night of Taylor's disappearance.
Oh no.
The alert logs were not as detailed as high-grade government security systems would be, but there was still enough data in the alarm company records to plot a tentative event model. A quick reread of Daniel Hebert's statement to the police confirmed that he had not been at home when the alarm had been disabled. But if Taylor had done it herself to facilitate her exit, then the door would not have been open as long as it had. A normal teenaged runaway might have had a prolonged 'hesitation moment' on the doorstep before nerving themselves up to go but Taylor's psych profile clearly indicated that she was a highly focused individual. Had this been a genuine runaway case she would have committed to the decision to leave before she even took her first step, or else she would never have left at all.
My forensic reconstruction programs finished mapping the most probable event model from all available clues. That plus her mentoring request of the day before plus my entire psych profile made it 88.15% probable that the police report was entirely incorrect-
And then the camera footage review I'd set up returned with data that increased that probability to effective certainty. There were no available cameras that a direct view of the Hebert household, but the traffic camera on the street corner had recorded a van whose license plates were not registered to any household on the street. A van that would have by the timestamps arrived at the Hebert household several minutes before the alarm systems were deactivated and left almost immediately afterwards. A van that on its return trip had had the passenger side window open and the man riding in the "shotgun" position dangling his arm out the window, allowing the traffic camera at one point to get an angle suitable to view the man in the passenger seat. My image enhancement software could not substantially increase the resolution but enhancing the contrast allowed me a clear enough picture to see that his face was not deformed but instead half-covered by a mask, a shiny silver-colored affair reminiscent of Renaissance pagaentry. An image recognition scan against all known capes in Brockton Bay returned a match for the mask worn by Regent of the Undersiders.
A known team of parahuman thieves and break-in artists had visited a household on the Hebert's street at the same time the alarm system had suffered an anomalous shutdown using the homeowner's own code and the kitchen door had remained open long enough for a quick in-and-out raid by a fast and stealthy team. Such as the Undersiders.
Even with the anomalous data that the Undersiders were not known for involvement in human trafficking and that this would be a serious breach of the 'unwritten rules' not in line with their known profiles, their presence along with all the other indicators could not credibly be deemed as any sort of coincidence. I was now certain that Taylor Hebert was not a runaway but a kidnapping.
My mobile platform nearest to Brockton Bay was, fortuitously, the heavy combat suit I kept on ready-one at the Boston PRT facility. While I could not use anything close to its maximum speed in the confined airspace of the regional Northeast's air traffic control corridors during normal operation, even with those restrictions it could still reach the Rig in less than twenty minutes. I finished programming a new wave of searchbots with revised targeting priorities and then downloaded my awareness into the suit, and I idly noted the shock on a PRT guard's face in Boston when with zero warning the deployment pod they'd agreed to store for me in their vehicle park began to sound its get-clear siren. Five seconds later the pod burst open and I rocketed into the sky as my primary onboard transceiver finished warming up and syncing.
"Armsmaster, this is Dragon. We have an Amber Alert in-progress in Brockton Bay involving multiple parahumans, and I need your help."
Coil
"What did you say?!?" I screamed at my duty watch officer in the command center.
"Mr. Creep is still at home sir," he replied back nervously. "And there have been no communications from the PRT since-"
I cut him off with an angry wave. "I just got a call from him or a man purporting to be him on the internal phone line in my chambers saying that a highest priority situation had been uncovered by one of our PRT insiders as critical message traffic. You are saying that neither of these things is possible if any of the information available to you in here is to possibly be believed." I stated, not asked, with barely contained fury.
"Y-yes sir." He confirmed.
"Sound the alert immediately!" I roared while simultaneously doing a quick visual survey of all entrances to this room and placing my hand upon my sidearm and unsnapping the holster. I continued speaking as the klaxon began to blare. "Then have the base swept top to bottom, take nothing for granted, reaction teams to critical points! And switch over to the backups and roust out those useless technicians and tell them to find out what the hell happened! The internal network has been at least partially compromised and we don't know what else has been yet!" I finished my peroration, panting slightly at the end.
"Yes sir!" he and his duty operators all chorused, and they immediately closed out their terminals, switched over to the hopefully uncorrupted auxiliary systems, and began the process of alerting everyone on the facility.
"Tattletale?"
"In her room in the base, sir."
"Have someone roust her out and tell her to get here and start trying to analyze what the hell's going on! She might as well do something useful today for a change!"
I split the timeline. One of me stayed here and continued coordinating the mobilization. The other me opened the nearby weapons locker, drew out a laser rifle and a bandolier of grenades, and left while ordering the nearest available men to follow me to the detention level.
If that insufferable little bitch turned out to be the cause of this, then I'd torture her to death ten times over before I finally gave her permission to die.
Director Piggot
The Protectorate members available at this hour to be called in and the night duty section supervisor finished filing into the briefing room. I'd been sleeping on the Rig for the past several days what with all the increased workload that recent events had caused on top of everything else that was always going wrong, so I'd been available when Armsmaster had gotten the call from Dragon in his workshop.
"This is the situation," I began. "Slightly less than thirty minutes ago Armsmaster received a direct call from Dragon in his workshop that Taylor Hebert, the young woman who had been the victim in the Shadow Stalker incident and our most recent suspected parahuman, was in fact a confirmed parahuman and that she had been abducted approximately 24 hours ago by the Undersiders."
"And she knows this how?" Velocity broke in.
Armsmaster frowned at the interruption and replied brusquely. "Because last night shortly before her abduction Taylor Hebert had contacted Dragon via private message on PHO and outed herself as a Tinker to her, and requested a Tinker collaboration."
"Ambitious choice of sponsors,"Assault chimed in. "But wait, the girl who would barely give us the time of day suddenly tells her life story to a woman she's never met on PHO? How does that figure?"
"In point of fact she did not 'out' herself to me," Dragon's voice chimed in from the speakerphone on the table, "except in the sense that while giving me information about the circumstances of her trigger event she inadvertently revealed enough details that my deduction of her identity was essentially inevitable. At the time I went no further than simply informing her that she had given herself away but that I would neither confirm nor deny my suspicion to anyone else without her permission unless I had reason to believe that a violation of the law had occurred or her life was at risk. Both circumstances are now of course true."
"Dragon, if you are patched in then it's more efficient if you relay your part firsthand," Armsmaster spoke.
"Thank you. To summarize, when Taylor's father made the police report that she had run away that information was of course disseminated on all routine law enforcement systems. One of my automated search programs brought her alleged runaway status to my attention, but that was so out of line with the information privately available to me from our conversation that I chose to investigate further. Online work from publicly or legally available sources turned up information that the alarm system on her house had been briefly compromised at the time she allegedly 'ran away', and a traffic camera I could access contained imagery of the Undersiders entering and then leaving that neighborhood in a van in a time window corresponding exactly with the security system compromise."
"Holy shit," Battery chimed in. "Well, they escalated quickly!"
"They certainly have," I said. "We have of course been handling the situation as an Amber Alert, parahuman category, ever since it was brought to our attention and Dragon has volunteered her assistance due to her personal association with the subject. So far the routine actions are routinely not turning up anything. Dragon, what's your twenty?"
"I arrived in Brockton Bay local airspace approximately five minutes ago, Director," Dragon's voice replied "and am currently engaged in a high-altitude aerial search for all the people known to be of interest in the case. Unless otherwise requested I feel that would be the most efficient use of my time at this moment as opposed to reporting to the Rig in person."
"Noted," I said. "You're not trying for the van?"
"A van 95% matching available imagery was already logged into Brockton Bay Police systems as a recovered abandoned vehicle earlier today and had been placed in Impound," Armsmaster replied. "We've notified the police to segregate the vehicle and have dispatched a forensics team."
"Understood. At any rate, the reason you are here is not to join the search efforts," I told the assembled Protectorate. "I want the Undersiders. I want them here. I want them talking, I want them squealing, I want them begging to be allowed the privilege of telling us where they took her and why they took her. They have gone well beyond what we will tolerate from their kind and its time for them to feel the hammer. So you stay here and on alert, and the instant we get a sniff of where they are you'll be dropping on them like the wrath of God. Dragon, if you're still in local airspace when the action starts I would like it if you could assist."
"Of course, Director," she replied.
"Madam Director, what about the Wards?" Miss Militia asked. "If the Undersiders or whoever hired them – they almost certainly were hired for this job, of course – have escalated as far as kidnapping young parahumans from their homes-"
"I mobilized them five minutes after I'd gotten the word of this clusterfuck," I agreed, gratified somebody was at least not hyperfocusing only on the immediate problems. "They're mustering and reporting to the Rig and staying here until we're sure they're not under threat, and their families will be monitored by security details. They will of course not be deploying on this matter," I finished.
"Status update," the speaker said, the voice of our duty watch officer breaking in. "Hellhound of the Undersiders has been tentatively sighted in Empire Eighty-Eight territory. 911 is getting calls of 'giant mutant wolves'. Watch center is starting to plot and correlate sightings."
"Velocity, that's you. Sweep the whole damn neighborhood and if you confirm the report, do not engage by yourself and wait to call in the thunder," I snapped, and he acknowledged and then vanished from the room in a blur.
"Armsmaster, put your team on ready-five and pick which people you want to back up Velocity if she's really there and is alone. Take the whole team if there's more than one of them."
"Understood," he replied.
"Anybody here has any questions or bright ideas, now's the time." I polled the room, and after no replies I went "Right. You get ready to deploy. I'll be in the command center trying to shake loose some more clues from the investigation teams. Dismissed."
I swore to myself under my breath as I stumped out, musing at how there's finally a new trigger who has enough sense to stay home and in out of the rain and then suddenly all the rules change and the bad guys start crawling right in through their bedroom windo-
Wait. How did the Undersiders know Hebert had triggered if she hadn't been advertising herself or going out at all?
… fuck.
Author's Note: Well, that's all the finished parts of my arc 2 outline done. Now I've got the beginning of the climax, and the end of the climax, and actually have to write the climax.
So, unless another miraculous inspiration burst hits me, things are going to slow down here. I'm going to certainly try to get it out before the upcoming surgery middle of next week, but don't expect the 1-2 updates a day to sustain for now.
Last edited: Oct 15, 2019
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cliffc999
Jul 12, 2019
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cliffc999
cliffc999
Jul 13, 2019
#1,298
Orientation 2.5
I'd repurposed the laser out of a desktop mouse to be a mini-hologram projector and mounted it inside the helmet of my 'borrowed' body armor, so it could use inside of the faceplate as a Heads-Up Display slaved to the minicomputer-once-a-smartphone in my pocket. Between that and the hands-free mike I could run and gun while still keeping track of everything my taps into the base systems were programmed to look for and issue new commands. It wasn't quite building a battlesuit in a cave with a box of scraps, but it wasn't half bad.
I ran down the hallway in a textbook tactical crouch, holding a laser rifle I'd gotten out of a ready weapons locker in the interrogation room. I was mildly nervous at what it implied coming up next for me that Coil had redundant weapons sets stashed apparently all around the base but I'd still be taking advantage of it while I could. I took especial care to move no faster than one of Coil's men would be moving at this point, if he was scrambling to suddenly get to his battle station from wherever he'd been caulking off by himself. SERE and agent training both emphasized that normal human perceptions worked by establishing an expected pattern of illumination and motion and automatically flagged any diversions from that expected pattern. If you expected bright light then darkness is what triggered you, not more light. If you expected motion, then stillness is what stood out. "It's quiet… too quiet." was not just a movie cliché.
So by simply trotting hurriedly in tactical gear with a rifle at the ready down one wall of the hallway (not too far away, not too close, just like the book said) instead of running headlong down the hallways or trying to creep along like a ninja, I actually decreased my visibility factor by an order of magnitude. And since Coil's men were mercenaries with military experience who'd then been trained further by Coil out of the same PRT playbook he'd learned during his own career, and he employed men and women both, then I could blend.
I tensed as I heard booted footsteps approaching me from around the corner, and whispered a subvocalized command to execute a preset macro that would jam the helmet radios in a localized area around myself. "Blue!" I said lowly but urgently as I came up on the corner, calling out as the base procedural manual said to do before suddenly jumping out and startling a fellow guard who was already in alert status and holding a loaded weapon, and the two men who'd been scrambling like I was took a brief look at me, acknowledged my call, and waved at me to fall in behind them as they resumed moving.
I started to follow them down the hall as the leader tried to call it in, cursed, and told us "Shit's still screwed up. You and the straggler with me, we'll secure our junction and intercom from there." I nodded as did my 'teammate' and we jogged off. In between monitoring my HUD's status reports and keeping my head on a swivel looking for anything else that might be going wrong, I kept watching their body language for what I knew would soon be there. Sure enough, after less than a minute the senior man began to tense and threw up a hand for us to halt, then turned around to look at me. "What squad did you say you were-?"
"CONTACT FRONT!" I screamed suddenly, looking past his shoulder. Yes, I know its that old. It still works if you do it right. And sure enough, trained reflex spun my 'squad leader's' around to refocus on the 'threat' I'd just seen ahead of us in the hallway just as my 'wing man' did exactly what he was supposed to do and began to move wide to secure the flank. Which left me every opportunity to just hop back, shoot Wingman in the ass, and then catch Squad Leader as the poor guy suddenly tried to turn around again from his already having turned around from having turned around the first time and was thus having his body and attention go every which way and be effectively paralyzed for the moment. Two down.
No, they weren't dead. I'd turned the laser rifle into a zap rifle. You could use a laser at lower intensity than 'burn through people' to create a path of ionized air, then immediately follow it up with an electrical charge right down the conductive path you'd just made. A wireless taser that let you deliver hits out to carbine range.
I then sighed and let Invictus carry me without hesitation through the process of deliberately kicking both stunned men in the head hard enough to break their jaws. Because when they woke up I certainly didn't want them telling anyone that I was loose in a guard's uniform, and as ruthless as this was it was certainly less ruthless than just executing them. And while I knew that I was not going to get through my entire mission as assigned by ROB without having to use lethal force on someone, fuck it, that still didn't mean I'd jump straight into it at the earliest opportunity. Even John, despite his being a veteran, was not actually a combat veteran. And I'd certainly never killed anyone.
There was also the practical concern that if I won this thing then the PRT would be wrapping up the crime scene at the end of the day, and I was already going to have enough trouble scaling down the after-action review to hopefully make me look like a lucky and talented kid instead of an outside-context-breaking badass. That problem would go from 'difficult' to 'NOPE' if I started leaving behind a trail of bodies in addition.
"Sentry," I whispered, another one of my preset macros. The searchbot I had watching all base security cameras beeped back at me, telling me no guards were spotted moving anywhere within a minutes' walking speed of my location. So I had the time to drag both these mooks into the nearest room, handcuff them to each other, and break their weapons and radios. A minute more of flicking hurriedly through internal camera POVs to get a sense of exactly where and how people were scrambling, and I decided on my next move.
"Chaos, give them five minutes then start HS-Three," I told my program lurking in the base command computer. I'd let the guards call in that they'd reached their assigned positions and Coil to just start to take a breath, then start the panic. I had several preset variants plotted for 'Helter Skelter', regarding what exactly Coil would be hearing 'called in' on his base's internal network while his real guards had their voices blocked from actually reaching the command center. At the same I'd allow Coil's orders in response to the illusionary situation to reach the guards ears without any of the context of the alleged 'guard reports' elsewhere that would make those orders sound sensible. I wanted every man as confused as possible, not daring to trust their own situational awareness because it kept telling them contradictory things. I wanted them reacting and not thinking, because my smooth sailing so far would only keep going so long as I was ahead of their decision cycle. If they could start making me react to them instead of vice versa, then I would not be happy.
There were three main forks in the tactical tree at this point, plus a fourth long-shot. Fork one was to find some kind of escape hatch and just get outside the base. Fork two was to somehow reach one of the secured landline telecom gateways that were the only signal paths that could get a signal from inside the base to outside (or vice versa) that would not be blocked by the bunker's steel-reinforced construction or the signal-blocking mesh in the walls. Fork three was to get adjacent to said exterior wall and then find time and opportunity to Tinker up some kind of signal booster that could just ram straight through the mesh the hard way. Plus, of course, the action-movie answer of just go up and infiltrate Coil's personal quarters, where I'd have a guaranteed Bond villain escape tunnel and almost certainly the villain himself in the palm of my hand.
Suuuuuure. Head to the most heavily defended level of the base, then crack into the most heavily defended room in the base, all the while walking directly away from at least two of the other three forks on my tactical tree. I didn't need either the memories of a veteran and nuclear safety engineer or all my downloaded training and skills to tell me how monkey-brain ripshit stupid that would be. I was capable of figuring that out all by myself.
So after doing some frantic touchscreen tapping to make sure I had a viable route, I headed for the one place in the base at least two if not three forks converged. Whatever construction had been going on in the lowermost level had to be against an outer wall of some kind if the workers were getting muddy boots, it would give me potential access to the utility cable runs, and if I was lucky one of the secured gateways would be down there because while they could in theory be anywhere there were only a finite number of places it would be efficient to put them.
When I said 'viable route' just now I didn't mean it would be as easy as walking down the stairs. Coil or his staff had spent a lot of time working out patterns and plays for deploying the available guards on base defense, and they were intended to let a minimum number of guys leave a maximum amount of the base with nowhere to move more than a few rooms each way without someone seeing them. Helter Skelter would make some of this easier by reducing cross-unit coordination to crap, but at the same time make some of it harder because every single one of those guys would be jumping at shadows and thus be more prone toshooting the first shadow he saw jump.
So I just went where no men would be standing and they'd be depending on automated sensors to do the watching for them, such as down the shaft of one of the freight elevators. Rather than risk a man in the control room suddenly noticing one of the elevators start moving on its own or being locked out in the software (not being clairvoyant, I hadn't quite coded a utility in ahead of time specifically to change the elevator status panel display to selectively blind this one operation), so I just manually disabled the elevator by prying open the door and using the arc cutter I'd made out of one the heavy electric shock probes in the torture room to swiftly burn through one of the cable brakes on the side of the shaft.
The mechanical safeties slammed shut just as they were supposed to do in case of a breach, solidly fastening that elevator to the elevator shaft and leaving it an immovable object for the duration. And since this was a purely mechanical safety system intended to be the last line of defense even during a total power failure, it didn't have any electronic sensors or leads to the base alarm system. And thus assured that the elevator would not be coming down the shaft to mulch me at the inopportune moment, and that my hotwiring of the shaft motion sensors in place to spot anybody trying to pull a Solid Snake like I was was leaving them all in 'wibble' mode, I began slowly climbing down the shaft interior hand-over-hand to the bottommost level of the base. I smiled to myself as I heard the fun of Helter Skelter start while I was still climbing down. By the time I got to the bottom their formation should be so degraded I could-
And just as my feet touched the shaft bottom, my heart fell right through my boots as my HUD went into 'NULL'. The circuits were working just fine, but all my status updates from the base security systems had turned off because the system had just gone down.
Now, Coil had of course switched over to the auxiliaries as soon as the alert started, but since I'd just used one of the routine hourly backups from the main to the auxiliary to push my virus code over to the other partition as well that hadn't done a single thing to improve his situation. But what he'd done now went beyond that to crash the entire system, main and backup both. The US military issued an axe with an insulated handle to the crews of every one of its secure datacenters so that if all else failed, even the physical switches, they could still open the breaker closet and chop right through the main trunk line and stop even the worst security penetration cold. Coil presumably hadn't had to go that far, but he had just opened the main breakers on the entire internal network. How had he figured out so quickly that the system compromise was so total and in both-
I mentally facepalmed. Oh Tattletale you stupid bitch! And myself too, for not having more of a plan for this! Of course TT would twig to the truth as soon she saw the first several minutes of Helter Skelter in action. That was an elaborate pattern of false stimuli and conditioned responses designed to lead a group of normal analysts into getting lost down the hall of mirrors. But what was Tattletale's Thinker ability? Bullshit tier magic pattern recognition. I might as well have sent her a text message.
So much for my hoping that she wouldn't be here tonight or would sandbag herself a little because it was objectively in her best interest if Coil and all his PRT moles went down tonight. I don't know how much extra money he's been waving under her nose recently, but in hindsight he had to have offered one hell of a bonus package to the Undersiders for my kidnapping to get to them to agree to it even with the con job their handler had pulled on them. So why not do the same with her?
They said that the world's best swordsman didn't worry about the world's second-best swordsman but the world's worst swordsman, because his errors made him that much harder to predict. I hadn't thought that particular paradox would sting me straight in the butt through the vector of Tattletale's decision-making process right now, but it had, and now I just had to deal with it.
Right, what have I got now? Plus side, Coil's team no longer has any of the semi-automated tacnet support that allows an entire base of guards to all talk at once without stepping on each other's conversation and with all the lovely doo-dads that let the guys in main control instantly plot and correlate sightings. With the internal radio repeaters now on manual pass-through dumb mode every single guard in the base is now reduced to only talking into the same all-idiots open channel, meaning that it takes exceptional communications discipline to avoid having the channel turn into a mess of twenty guys all trying to speak at once. This is why you don't normally use dumb mode except in very small groups or when virtually nothing else is going on. So I have that much to continue helping me find gaps in the coverage or create confusion.
Minus side, I have no more illusions to send at these guys. Even with their comms kicked back to World War II mode they've still got the numbers, they've still got the home field advantage, and they still have their training. And that's before we factor in Coil's timeline splitting or whatever other "brilliant" idea Tattletale has to contribute more. So time to clench, Taylor. Until you've gotten that signal out then you have no fallback position if they tag you, except maybe that last one and even that's iffy as fuck.
Okay, I've memorized the layout of this level and I know where in theory they're supposed to be. Construction exit's a gamble because there only might be an opportunity there, and I'm already starting to fall behind their decision loop. That means going for the utility space where I can directly access the cable runs. But that is one of the obvious points that needs guarding. So, roll the dice or certain encounter?
In theory, the skills I'd downloaded should give me at least even odds of winning vs. a squad of trained agents, assuming that I had at least equivalent weapons and gear. And as the attacker in this instance I could also pick the timing and the angle of approach. Time to see if I could turn theory into practice.
Without camera access to check the outside of the door with I didn't dare open that door at all, because if there was so much as one guy anywhere within line of sight at this moment then I might as well just suck-start my pistol and get it over with. So, I climbed back up the track a little and stuck both my legs out to brace myself against the corner, holding myself up as I got out my arc cutter and start to burn a hole in the wall. Since this base had not been built by retarded monkeys I couldn't just crawl directly out of the shaft and into the gap between the ceiling panels and the ceiling (which were still necessary even in a base like this because how else would you get the electrical power cables to the overhead lights and run the pipes for the fire sprinklers?), but that's why I was doing a dungeon bypass.
My poor overworked arc cutter finally got a rest as I finished burning the hole, and I grimaced and just took the hot edges on my armor as I wriggled on in. This was going to be one strenuous goddamn crawling sequence because I couldn't actually put my weight on the ceiling tiles without falling straight through them but I had a sprinkler pipe to clutch with one arm, a structural beam to do so with the other, and angle brackets to hang my ankles through. So, my muscles burning with the effort of doing a Spider-Man impression without spider-powers and while wearing over forty pounds of tactical gear, I methodically wriggled my way above the ceiling and down the hallway to my intended entry point one step at a time. My mini-comp could still hear me and put things up on the display from purely local storage even if I had no network anymore, so I used it to display the floor plan for this level to give me the direction and distance, and did the rest of my navigating on good old-fashioned dead reckoning.
It took me longer to make that short trip from the elevator to the cable room than it had to get all the way from the torture room to there. I wasn't exactly at the limits of my endurance yet but having had to suspend my full weight from my fingers and ankles for over ten straight minutes while doing an upside-down crawl definitely left me feeling the burn a little. It hadn't helped that every time I heard footsteps below me from searching patrols I had to stop moving, because anybody who's seen "Sneakers" knows what happens if you're trying the ceiling cat trick and somebody down in the hallway hears you. They just keep emptying the magazine in an upwards direction until you either surrendered or got ventilated.
And so I finally reached the cable room… and swore viciously as I saw that they weren't just guarding the outside but the inside. Two men. One each in the northwest and northeast corners of the room. Not the ideal 'opposite corner' coverage but with the machinery in the middle of the room they woudn't have been able to see each other there, and the whole point of this kind of formation was so that both men's eyes were covering the entire interior of the room between them and always on each other to detect sentry removal. The second man's job was to live long enough to scream the alarm, and so, there they were.
I couldn't stay up here for more than a few minutes before I had to put my weight down somewhere. I didn't have anywhere else to go. I had two men to incapacitate nigh-instantly before either one could so much as talk into a mike or hit a panic button.
I sighed in relief. Even even despite my Tattletale failure just now I'd still anticipated some things correctly tonight, so I entirely had a contingency for this. I clipped a rebreather into my mouth and smiled as I took the correct gizmo off my utilty belt and poked the nozzle out through the corner of the ceiling. A variant of my 'instant muscle relaxer' mix that I used in my zap stick's chem sprayer combined with an aerosolized short-term astringent to make it harder to talk, and by the time those guys noticed that their sudden attack of dry mouth wasn't just having gone too long since visiting the water fountain they'd be...
I dropped soundlessly to the floor less than two seconds after they'd both hit it. After making sure both men were down I started to frantically survey what was available. Okay, now you're a LAN switch panel and you're a LAN switch panel and you're a breaker box and you are a hardened fiber-optic setup in a separate locked and reinforced cabinet that might as well have 'This Is What The Exterior Internet Access Runs Through' painted on it in neon, yes yes yes!
I hurriedly pulled a rubber wedge out of my pocket and quietly kicked it under the door. I then picked the lock on the secured cabinet and frantically spent the next ten minutes scrounging around for what I needed before I could get finally a network adapter jiggered up – everything else was easy but actually finding an adapter plug for Ethernet-to-fiber had been a pain until I'd finally found that cable tester at the back of the junk drawer -- and felt every muscle in my body sag in relief as I saw the login screen to PHO come up.
I pulled up the set of files and the message I'd already spent my couple hours' of prep time composing, then sent the word out to Dragon.
Taylor! Is that you? Are you all right? her text came up on my phone several seconds later.
Remember how you said the other night "any suggestion of illegal or recklessly harmful activity" would mean you'd need to out me to the PRT? Um, permission granted. I typed back.
It is you! I've already notified the PRT that you're in contact. Do you know where you are?
It's a repurposed Endbringer Shelter made by Fortress Construction. I don't know which one but-
Trace complete! There's only three of those shelters in Brockton Bay and only one of them possibly correlates with the physical location of the particular Internet trunk you are using. I am notifying the PRT right now. Find a place to fort up and we'll be there in less than fifteen minutes!
Err, you might have everybody topside in fifteen minutes but fighting your way down into a subterranean paranoia fort layer by layer against everything I've noted for you is gonna take longer than that. And I'm at the /bottom/ of that hole right now, and they're already on red alert down here.
Don't worry, Taylor. I have a plan.
I might need to leave this room and if I do I can't talk to you anymore. You have the base schematics I sent, where should I try to RV if we lose contact?
South side bottom level if possible. If not, anywhere except the north side.
Understood. And thank you. And make sure to read all of those files!
Hang in there, Taylor. We're coming.
Author's Note: Before anyone goes 'Another goddamn break? When do we get to Taylor vs. Coil, dammit?' the answer is 'Do you want an exterior POV of what mama Dragon and the PRT are going to do next or not?' Taylor certainly can't see it from where she is now, so either its another interlude or I have it all happen offstage and just have some character read the cue card about it later. :)
And yes, the comm tacnet stuff is at least partly fictional. He's a Bond villain, he gets to show it a ilttle.
Last edited: Oct 15, 2019
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cliffc999
Jul 13, 2019
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Threadmarks Interlude 2-D: Armsmaster
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cliffc999
cliffc999
Jul 13, 2019
#1,325
Interlude 2-D: Armsmaster
The flashing lights of the police perimeter coming into view ahead of me alerted me to start decelerating, and I threaded my motorcycle through the outer cordon of Brockton Bay PD without incident. I had designated myself as one of the agents tasked to support Velocity in his capture of Hellhound, which decision had expeditiously finished that matter but also left me halfway across town when the call went out. Velocity had of course been able to get here almost immediately but the delay in my approach left approximately half of the available tactical agents on the Rig and most of my Protectorate team enough time to assemble here before I had.
Still, I was here now so I immediately began to establish control of the scene, inventory and marshal available forces, and try to evolve a tactical doctrine for the projected opposition. As much as it distressed me to think of an innocent young woman in danger, the fact remained that given the opposing force's extreme advantage of position and available resources even all the assets at my command could not finish breaching and clearing that base before it was highly probable that Coil would have opportunity to execute his hostage.
"Seismic survey?" I said immediately to Dragon as soon as I noted the tall and bulky form of one of her heaviest combat suits walking over towards me.
"Nothing since my last update," she replied, "The trembler probes must have found all of his access tunnels, unless there's an escape route too closely intermixed with existing sewer and drainage tunnels to be distinguished by the sensor resolution," Dragon replied.
"Then none of those routes in will give us what we need fast enough-" I began, only for Dragon to most uncharacteristically interrupt me.
"I already have an option for that and Director Piggot has given her approval," Dragon replied, staring down at me intimidatingly. "Prepare your people for entry in approximately five minutes." I was about to angrily remind her that I was in charge here, Tinker partner or not, before she continued. "Director's orders. Also, I will need the area marked off by those traffic cones designated as an impact area and kept entirely clear, please."
Impact area? The Director had authorized demolitions? Had she forgotten that we were standing several hundred meters north of the headquarters for Fortress Construction, in the middle of the downtown district? Had the world gone temporarily insane? Not even a Tinkertech breaching charge could tunnel the several hundred feet down into the heart of that Endbringer Shelter, and Dragon would hardly have had time to build a custom-purpose device. It would have taken even me several days to-
I put that aside and concentrated on doing my duty as I had been ordered to. Just as I'd finished arranging everyone optimally I heard the unexpected sound of Dragon's PA system at maximum volume.
"BREACH IS STARTING! BREACH IS STARTING! DO NOT FACE THE BREACH SITE WITHOUT EYE PROTECTION OR ELSE VISION WILL BE COMPROMISED! NOW BREACHING IN THREE…"
I idly activated the flare compensators in my helmet as everyone else started turning away from the marked-off impact area. What on Earth was she going to do?
"TWO…"
I saw one of Dragon's largest weapon mounts open and deploy and Dragon lock her suit down into a recoil-buffering posture as she aimed the barrel downwards at an angle into the ground. Wait, that was her-
"ONE…"
-anti-Endbringer cannon! Several hundred megawatts of tightly-focused neutral particle beam were about to be used within city limits! I opened my mouth to stop this madness-
"FIRING!"
And even with my helmet's systems to compensate I still squinted painfully against the strobe-white glare as the sound of her cannon ROARED and the earth SHOOK and I helplessly tried to calculate what sort of collateral damage this would result in-
After 6.2 seconds by my internal clock Dragon stopped her firing and stood up, and I realized with shock that while she had used her cannon at something at least close to full power she had minimized the aperture. Instead of blasting a useable access tunnel down through the earth and into the side of Coil's fortress, which would have used enough power to ignite anything flammable – including myself and the rest of our forces – within over a hundred meters of the impact area she had instead restricted the immediately lethal heat effects to within several dozen feet of the site. Several teams of men with fire hoses, apparently given their orders shortly before I had arrived on the scene, immediately moved in to start cooling the area enough to safely walk through. I turned my back on the hissing clouds of steam their efforts were kicking up and frustratedly asked Dragon.
"You couldn't have made a hole more than six inches wide with that narrow-focus a beam-"
"Three inches." she corrected me primly.
"So what good does that do us?" I asked her. "Even if we can get some kind of probe down there that hardly solves our-"
"Ah, here she is now," Dragon said with what I wearily noted was an uncharacteristic smugness, turning up to look at what the thup-thup-thup now becoming audible had already told me was an approaching helicopter. I saw the PRT markings as it swooped in for a landing in an LZ cleared for it at the far edge of the open courtyard we had been working in.
And comprehension dawned on me as the side door of the helicopter opened to reveal not only the already-expected Director Piggot, but also the short figure standing next to her in an all-too-familiar green-and-white costume. The one that would have already leaped out of the helicopter before it even finished settling fully to the ground in her enthusiasm and ran over to us without the Director's hand firmly set on her shoulder. Instead they both stepped out and walked over only at the pace the Director set.
"You understand, you are not going down there," I heard Director Piggot as they approached us, admonishing her companion for what I was certain had not been the first time since they had left the Rig to fly here. "You will open the entryway and keep it open at need, but you do not go one step past where I tell you to unless you want to spend the next six years in Alaska!"
"Yes ma'am," Vista sighed with frustration, but while still grinning ear-to-ear at the excitement of actually being invited to participate in a high-priority Protectorate assault on a supervillain lair. "Okay, is everybody ready?" she called out to those around her in a loud high-pitched voice, to the amusement of even several of my teammates as the youngest of the Brockton Bay Wards began to act as if she were the commander here.
"Do it," Director Piggot said, staring down at the tiny hole in the ground. The one that the hose teams had just finished pumping enough water down through to cool off from the molten-rock temperatures that had drilled it.
"Opennnnn… Sesame!" Vista caroled at the top of her lungs, and the distortion waves of her power reached out and twisted the fabric of space-time around the three-inch tunnel that Dragon's beam had opened. It stretched and widened open to three feet, then three yards, and finally settled into a configuration that was an outright two-lane highway leading directly into the heart of Coil's base.
I smiled to myself as I appreciated the efficiency of the idea. Yes, this completely changed the situation. Entering and securing the base would be significantly quicker this way, perhaps quick enough to still be in time.
"On your marks!" I called out, stepping foreward to assume my rightful place as on-scene tactical commander. "Formation Charlie! And… FOLLOW ME!"
And the Brockton Bay Protectorate, with myself at their head, charged forward into the heart of the villain's lair.
Author's Note: Not very long, I know, but there was no way I wasn't going to get that breaching scene actually on the screen in real time and that meant I needed to insert an interlude.
Also Vista. Because Vista is awesome. :)
And now we return back to our regularly scheduled climactic blowout.
Last edited: Oct 15, 2019
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cliffc999
Jul 13, 2019
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