audio test jdv Chapter 1: ghostchance1, a x-overs fanfic

Prologue

I woke up in a pitch-black room and feeling like my head had been packed full of cotton wool. The last time I'd been this out of it was when I'd been delirious with fever from an ear infection when I was seven… no, wait, that was totally wrong, I'd never had an ear infection. Why did I remember being sick like that if I'd never been?

As I pondered that problem I noticed that I was softly giggling to myself, amused at how my thoughts were not only moving in slow motion and looping around and around inside drunken sailors. Wait, what was that thought? Drunk. No, I never drank. Drugged. I'm on drugs. Why am I on drugs?

This was about the time I noticed my eyes were shut. Well, no wonder it was so dark! I opened my eyes, squinting against the glare of the overhead lights, and tried to focus…

… and with that thought suddenly my mind snapped into total focus, my veins flooding with ice-water as I went from high off my ass on prescription-strength anti-psychotic meds to 100% alert and awake in zero seconds flat. Which was biologically impossible.

In the several minutes of time before the duty nurse entered the room to check on me, having been summoned by the sudden change in my vitals as measured by the machines I was hooked up to, I'd had time to finish reviewing my recent memories and working out the basics of what was going on.

I was Taylor Hebert. I was waking up in the hospital after having been shoved into my own locker at school after the bullies had first packed it full of used feminine hygiene products and then locked in there for hours and left to rot. The staff had had to sedate me because I'd been incoherent and freaked out on the prior occasions I'd roused to semi-consciousness, which psychiatric protocol was also why I'd woken up strapped to the hospital bed by wrists and ankles. It was January 5, 2011, and I was in Brockton Bay on Earth-Bet.

And I really shouldn't be here.

Author's Note: Being Taylor Is Suffering. :)

Last edited: Oct 15, 2019

Updated: Roses of Villarosa - Hearts and Minds (Richard POV)

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Initiation 1.1

"Miss Hebert?" the nurse asked, with that particular vocal and facial emphasis on 'reassuring' that I'd learned to associate with psychiatric orderlies. "How are you feeling?"

I tried to put a reassuring smile on my face. "Better," I replied, figuring that sticking to short answers would be a good strategy. "Was I on medication earlier? Everything before now was really… fuzzy."

Since I already knew that I should still be heavily medicated, I wasn't surprised at the nurse's slight hesitation on answering. My sudden return to lucidity was probably not reassuring. "Your father gave us permission to sedate you," she said. Probably trying to keep me from freaking out by invoking parental authority. "How much do you remember?"

My newfound mental focus almost tripped me up there. I was about to reply to her question in a completely objective manner when I had a hunch that being too matter-of-fact would probably alarm her further. I was supposed to be a hot mess right now, after all. So, I stopped myself mid-word and deliberately hesitated before I continued on in a lower tone of voice. "I remember the locker."

She nodded. "You were under extreme stress when the paramedics got you out of the locker," the nurse continued. I decided to save her from having to soft-pedal the issue and myself some time by pre-empting her.

"That's why I'm in restraints?" I asked.

"Yes," my nurse agreed with mild embarassment. "They needed two people to hold you down before you could be sedated, and the protocols for that mean patient restraints until they can be evaluated." She paused and continued. "You said you were feeling better?"

"Whatever you gave me must have worked," I agreed with her. "I'm not great, but I don't feel… out of control."

"That's very good, Taylor," she agreed. "You don't have to talk about what happened right now, if you don't want to. The doctor will be in to see you shortly."

"Can you untie me now?"

"That's your attending physician's decision, I'm sorry."

"Well, I kinda need to-" I trailed off.

Man, bedpans are so humiliating.

Out of all the damn CYOAs I've ever filled out, why did ROB have to pick this one to use? I'd done a lot of other CYOAs that I'd much rather have had come true than Worm v1 CYOA.

Totally OP ones like Living Hyperion or Last of the Omega Lords. Comfy ones like Time-Stop Chill Zone. I'd even used the Worm CYOA for other builds than this one. I mean, it would have been a lot less worrisome if I was a World Breaker right now. I suppose it was at least a mild saving grace that I wasn't stuck with one of my Skitter Mode builds. So thanks at least for that much, ROB.

Still, Hard Mode was going to be rough enough, especially combined with Being Taylor Is Suffering. And I didn't have one of the 'easy' powers like Kaleidoscope or Eidolon or Power Manipulation. No "kill Scion on day one" for me. No, I'd taken Inspired Inventor. Which was admittedly very nice at the top end, but had perhaps the slowest ramp-up to the top end out of them all.

Well, at least I'd remembered to get the Blank-Shattered Limiter-Invictus survival kit that all the better builds used. And my Complication was at least a sort of blessing in disguise too, given that it meant I wasn't a homeless person with $100 right now. The Hebert household guaranteed me three hots and a cot, and a chance to get through the most vulnerable stage in the Tinker Cycle before I was on anyone else's radar. If I kept my head down and didn't do anything stupid I'd have months of time to spend Inspired Inventor charges and start scrounging for parts. Even in canon I'd gone all the way to April from now before my first outing as Skitter…

Damn it! There I go again!

Even with Invictus, simultaneously being Taylor Hebert and John Mueller was confusing as hell. And the problem wasn't 'two separate minds fighting it out inside one skull'. That would actually be easier than what I was going through right now. No, I was getting the literal wording of the CYOA doc – being born into Earth-Bet, living out the life of Taylor Hebert, and then gaining all the memories of the me who'd filled out the CYOA. So I had two separate lifetimes' worth of memories but both of them were in first-person. I was simultaneously a nervous wreck of a teenaged girl who'd been driven into a nervous breakdown by a protracted campaign of psychological and physical abuse, and a disabled veteran who had spent over half a lifetime recovering from the nervous breakdown that had gotten him discharged from the Navy even before his injuries caught up with him. I simultaneously had never eaten rice before and remembered it as a staple part of my diet, was both the kid who'd never experienced any serious childhood diseases and the one who'd almost gotten a burst eardrum at age seven from a bacterial infection, was the one who had almost suffocated to death inside a pile of rotting waste in a school locker and the one who'd almost drowned to death in a flooding incident onboard a supply ship in the Indian Ocean…

Okay, thank God for Invictus or else the duty nurse would be back in here injecting me with the Thorazine again after that one. Bad thoughts. Baaaaad thoughts.

So, yeah. The identity crisis from two separate minds overlaid into one would have been hard enough in two perfectly healthy and well-adjusted people, let alone one where a recovering hot mess had been forcibly injected into an ongoing hot mess. And according to the exact wording of the CYOA, I would "still require time and effort to properly recover" even with everything my powers and perks could do for me. Normally it wouldn't be that way, but Being Taylor Is Suffering. So while my conscious thinking would be perfectly fine thanks to Invictus, my likes and dislikes and unconscious biases and whatnot were probably going to be even more jangled up than they already were. So I'd have to keep an eye out for that.

Well, in the category of 'turning that frown upside down' at least being under restraints as a potential psychiatric patient in the hospital and waiting God only knows how long for the duty psychiatrist to get around to interviewing you meant you had time to sort out your thoughts. Which is what I'd just gotten through doing. And another potential benefit of having been put into psychiatric evaluation is that you had a ready-made excuse for any sudden changes in your behavior patterns in the future.

I decided to hold off on putting any Inspired Inventor charges into medicine or psychiatry or self-help techniques just yet. I still had to get through the upcoming interview - if not series of interviews - if I ever wanted to get these damn straps taken off. And my experience as John prompted me that telling a psychiatrist all the things the diagnostic checklist said was 'all right' only worked if you weren't already under suspicion. If you were, doing that instead became a warning sign that 'this guy has read the checklist, is parroting it back to you, and is trying to hide something'.

No, wait. I was going to spend a charge right now, given that I was already doing it. Besides, I wanted to see how this power actually worked. Time for a test run on something that I can actually work with right now, seeing as how I don't have parts, tools, or the ability to move any of my limbs. But I was already working out how to adapt best to my situation, so…

Adaptation, 1 charge.

Whoa. So this is what Inspired Inventor does.

My mind skimmed along the surface of an endless sea of information for a single indivisible instant, and concepts and data rolled into me. Now, since the amount of useful knowledge given you by Inspired Inventor went deeper and deeper as the concept you spent the charge on got narrower and narrower and the concept of 'adaptation' was so broad, I wasn't going to be building any wonder devices just on this one charge alone.

Still, I felt the knowledge that Inspired Inventor had just given me seamlessly slot into place and integrate with everything I already knew about and knew how to do, giving me new ways of looking at it all. Dimly glimpsed concepts and algorithms seemed to shift deep in my subconscious, prompting me with new habits for evaluating and categorizing objects and phenomena. Things as diverse as how the human immune system adapted to bacterial exposure to how to repurpose a salt shaker as an improvised blinding weapon in a bar fight all seemed to resonate with my mind as I thought about them, even if I couldn't actually hope to design any immune-system boosters or win any bar fights without spending charges on the related subject matter as well. Still, even with this alone my mind now felt like it had a slight new edge, a way of looking at the world that was a little more… resourceful.

And a good thing to. Because with all that was yet to come, I was going to need all the resourcefulness I could get.

Turns out that all I needed to do to get the straps taken off was to convince the attending psychiatrist that I was not actually going to be biting people in the immediate future. I suppose it helped that I had a clear and present reason for being so irrational at the scene, so the trauma was understandable. And even more reassuringly, while I was still going to be held for observation for a few days I would get to do it as a recovering surgical patient instead of as someone in the neuro ward.

Much less reassuring was me finding out exactly what kind of "surgery" I was recovering from. Not that any of the doctors would discuss it with me except in the vaguest terms – apparently there was still a 'Do Not Stress Out' notation on me, plus as a minor they could put off health questions with 'That's for your dad' – but now that I had freedom of movement back, I could just snag the chart off the foot of my bed.

Medicine, 1 charge.

And now that I could read it, having magically gained the knowledge of an experienced physician and surgeon, I could… oh dear God that is a lot of notations in red.

The short version is that they'd had to call in Panacea to keep me alive, let alone leave me still attached to all four of my limbs. That biohazardous waste that the Bitches Three had put into my locker had apparently been festering there since before Christmas. By the time Sophia had shoved me into it, it had festered into something worse than the stuff that was in the medical waste dumpster downstairs out behind the Pathology lab. At least nobody left that one sitting unattended for over a week. So, between being literally soaked in that… stuff… for several hours, as well as all the gashes and cuts I'd given myself thrashing around in there, by the time they'd gotten me out I was beyond terminally infected with the everything.

Wait, if it was this bad then how the heck did they get away with- I mean, in the story, nobody seemed to care that I'd almost died- but this looked like outright attempted murder here-

Ohhhhh, right. I hadn't told anyone anything. In fact, if I remembered my reading of Worm correctly I'd basically been out of it for an entire week during my psych evaluation and then barely talking to anyone after that. I hadn't even told my dad. So, while the doctors were still very upset over what had been done to me from a medical point of view, from a "the authorities" point of view they weren't- they weren't…

… they weren't going to be able to fully investigate anything where the victim refused to even confirm that there had been a crime. I mean, my total not saying anything meant that they couldn't even prove that I'd been forced into that locker. Oh, sure, anybody not brain-dead could infer that I hadn't entered that of my own free will, but officially? How could they establish that I hadn't gone temporarily insane and jumped in myself? I'd certainly been temporarily insane enough when they finally cut the lock off to get me out! And of course there'd be an entire school full of students willing to tell anyone who asked that I was a crazy loner weirdo, and thanks to the Trio's best efforts a look at my school transcripts would show a massive slide in grades and classroom participation over the past year and a half…

So there would be, as they say, a reasonable doubt. A reasonable doubt that in hindsight Emma and Sophia and Madison had sailed right through with flying colors. The overworked and underpaid Brockton Bay PD still wouldn't turn a blind eye to attempted murder, but my own refusal to cooperate had left them without the pieces they'd need to actually hope to call it attempted murder and not get laughed right out of the office by even a divorce lawyer like Alan Barnes, let alone an experienced criminal attorney.

Taylor Hebert, you were stupid. You were an idiot. You were Miss Thick Thickety-Thickface from Thicktown, Thickania. And so was my dad, for not getting the full story out of the doctors instead of apparently just stopping at 'Panacea healed all the damage, she's fine now. Physically.'

At least John's point of view was from someone old enough to know better about this kind of thing. Which is why my future mistakes were now so obvious in hindsight-

Ugh. There I went again with the confoozled verb tenses.

Yet again pushing aside the whole 'memories of the story of my life yet to come that was from the memories of someone reincarnated into my earlier life and changing the whole thing' issue to where it belonged – i.e., for later – I focused back on the immediate issue. Okay, Taylor. Let it be resolved. The first official-type person with a badge that I see, I am telling them everything about the bullying. Let's see those bitches get away with it now, now that their victim has finally figured out that just pretending its not happening and hoping it goes away is not going to work.

A resolution that was then immediately tested when said first official-type people with badges turned out to be not the police, but the PRT.

Author's Note: Taylor was indeed in psychiatric evaluation for a week after waking up in the hospital in canon, likewise her refusing to tell anybody anything about what actually happened. Likewise, the PRT showing up to investigate is canon (reread your Shell 4.3), but Taylor was too out of it to even speak to them so they went away.

The remainder is all stuff that was inferred, or fanon. If my particular interpretation of Worm fanon is not yours, well, that's what happens in fanfic.

Last edited: Oct 15, 2019

Updated: Roses of Villarosa - Hearts and Minds (Richard POV)

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Initiation 1.2

Why the hell was the PRT here?

This didn't happen the last time- the time that I read about in that web serial… aggggh! Why didn't I pay more attention to Worm when I was John? As is, I knew the outline of the story, and a lot of the more popular stations of the canon that made it into all the fanfics, and even some wiki research as to which ones were and weren't fanon. But I didn't know everything, and I certainly didn't know this. You'd think something as important as a visit from the PR-freaking-T this soon after her trigger would stick in - hell with it, call her "story-me" from now on for convenience's sake - stick in her mind?

… no, it wouldn't, because I was completely out of it for a week in the story-timeline. Now I have Invictus and am operating at full efficiency on day one. So story-me probably did talk to these guys, but didn't even register it.

"Do I have to speak to them? Am I in trouble?" I asked the nurse, who'd come in to inform me that the PRT wanted to talk to me and had been standing there patiently waiting for me to reboot my brain and answer. Well, being taken aback was normal enough under the circumstances I suppose.

"I… the interview is required, yes," said the nurse. "Given the circumstances under which you were admitted…"

"Do I have to talk to them before my dad gets here?" I asked the nurse, trying to stall for time. Meanwhile my thoughts were racing, trying to estimate how fucked was fucked here. Having read the story I already knew that Sophia Hess was Shadow Stalker, even if story-me hadn't found out until the worst possible time. So if their their master computer had pinged off 'Sophia Hess' turning up in my incident report and the cover-up squad was already here… no, that doesn't make sense. "Nobody saw anything" at Winslow, and I damn sure haven't told anyone who pushed me in yet, so how could Sophia's name be in any reports? God damn, I wish I'd gotten a power that could let me know what the hell these guys wanted before I had to start answering their questions…

Wait. It can't be that easy, can it?

PRT Agent Training – 1 charge.

I barely heard the nurse telling me that the PRT had called my dad and he was on his way over from his office even now, as the skills and knowledge of a trained PRT field operative melded themselves into my consciousness. I already knew some things from my general cape geekdom online, such as all the power classifications, but now I understood the PRT Threat Rating scale in detail. I understood that the numbers didn't measure the magnitude of the powers so much as they measured how threatening a particular cape was in a particular category and what preset tactics from the SOP should be used.

But Inspired Inventor gave you not just knowledge but also "skill at applying it". I felt an entire new library of motions, of techniques and skills, settle into my muscle memory as if they'd always been there. I could field-strip and re-assemble an assault rifle and then take it out on the combat course and shoot an "Expert" qualification score with it, throw confoam grenades like a champ, coordinate movements with the rest of an agent squad, search and clear a building, evaluate and respond to hostile capes…

And given that Inspired Inventor let the first charge into a power leave you at PRT Rating 4-5 whenever possible, and PRT Rating 4 is "one full squad of trained operatives should be able to deal with this situation alone but exceptional circumstance, context and environment may bias things one way or the other" that meant I'd instantly gone from a teenaged girl who barely knew how to make a fist to someone skilled enough at it to take on an entire squad of PRT agents. Solo. Or at least I would be once I was in fighting shape and got my hands on something at least equivalent to their combat gear, because right now I was an unarmed hospital patient. So there would be no dramatically escaping Agent Smith out there just yet.

Still, depending on what you asked Inspired Inventor for some charges returned better dividends than others. And this charge had just come packed with all kinds of stuff. It wasn't just the combat training I'd gotten. I'd asked for "Agent Training", not just "Agent Combat Training". So I'd gotten the full package, every professional skill a veteran PRT field agent was expected to have in the normal course of their duties. How to do search-and-rescue work, how to stabilize and evacuate wounded, how to fill out PRT paperwork, how to conduct eyewitness interviews…

… oh. That's why they're here. The PRT investigates trigger events, too. They have Tinkertech-programmed and Thinker-designed algorithms continually searching news and emergency services incident reports, set to flag moments of extreme trauma that fit certain profiles. And according to my medical chart it's now officially on-record that I have a corona pollentia, because being admitted as a critical trauma patient with a possible psychiatric hold on top of that meant that they did an MRI on my head looking for possible tumors or brain damage. And if someone who's already flagged as a possible trigger event also had a corona pollentia on their medical record then the PRT would try to be right on top of them, to make sure that some unstable new cape isn't being left alone in a hospital bed to fester into the next Damsel of Distress without anyone noticing. So, call it 95 out of 100 that they're not here because of Sophia. They're here for me. And they're not here to threaten me or try to silence me.

As the nurse turned and left to go fetch my dad and the PRT agents, I began to relax a little. I could work with this. But I'd have to be very careful.

"Dad!" I cried, as my father entered the room. He looked the same as he always did, tall and thin like me, glasses balanced on his nose, a bald spot… I blinked and felt a momentary confusion, when did he get so tall and thin? When did he look so defeated? Oh, right. That was John's father, the large heavyset man with a confident attitude- I felt a phantom pain, an imagined shadow of the migraine this dual identity crap would have been giving me without Invictus.

"Taylor," he said diffidently, as if he was afraid I was about to break. "How are you feeling?"

"I got shoved in a locker and almost died is how I'm feeling," I said angrily. "How should I be-" I stopped myself on seeing my dad's flinch. Where had that come from? Focus, Taylor!

The nurse and the PRT agent entering immediately on my dad's heels stopped before they crashed into him. Being on an investigation rather than a potential combat mission he was wearing a dark suit with a discreet earbud and slightly oversized suit jacket to better hide his hip-holstered sidearm, as opposed to the normal PRT assault gear of Kevlar-backed chainmail mesh, assault rifle, and confoam grenade launcher. A part of my mind automatically noted which side of his hip the very discreet bulge was on and noted that he was right-handed.

"Someone pushed you into the locker, Miss Hebert?" he asked me, interrupting what my dad was going to say. "You were assaulted?"

"Yes," I answered firmly. "I damn sure didn't fill it up and crawl in there by myself."

"I don't imagine you did," the agent said, involuntarily quirking his lip despite himself.

"Taylor, this is Agent Jordan of the PRT," my dad broke in, turning to face him even as he introduced him. "And they're here to ask you questions about-?" he finished warily, almost challengingly.

Having been put on notice Agent Jordan sighed and showed me his credentials - photo ID as well as badge, anybody can have a badge saying anything but it's the photo ID that's the important part – identifying him as a field agent of the Parahuman Response Team. He began his pitch in a bureaucratically matter-of-fact voice. "Miss Hebert, it's standard procedure in certain situations for the PRT to interview-"

"It's only a PRT matter if parahumans are involved," I interrupted. "And I haven't had a chance to say anything to anyone yet about who shoved me in. So either they've already been found and arrested and one of them's actually a parahuman, or you think I'm one." Wait, why did I say that? Does Invictus remove the brain-to-mouth filter? Mouth shut ears open Taylor!

Agent Jordan stopped and cocked his head a little, looking at me with a renewed eagerness. "You put that together on very few clues. Yes, Miss Hebert. Situations involving extreme emotional stress under certain conditions have been known to be causes of 'trigger events', the events during which parahumans gain their powers."

"If that happened to every girl who'd ever been attacked, Brockton Bay would have more parahumans than the Birdcage," my dad cut in sarcastically. Hah!

"Yes, but in your daughter's cause her medical records also show that she has a corona pollentia." Agent Jordan held up his hand to forestall the obvious questions. "Which is a particular organ found only in the brains of those who have the potential to undergo a trigger event."

"My daughter got brain scanned and nobody even told me?" my dad demanded angrily.

"Mr. Hebert, please!" the nurse cut in urgently. "Your daughter was admitted to the emergency room as a very serious patient with a head injury as well as… possible neurological damage. An MRI is part of the standard admission protocols for such situations." Which I supposed was a polite way of telling an upset parent 'She was temporarily loco in the coco.'

Taking the hint that he couldn't sue the hospital for something that was officially part of immediately necessary lifesaving treatment on someone being wheeled into the ER because that didn't need parental permission, and completely missing the hint that the PRT had already looked at my medical records without asking for said permission, my dad turned back to Agent Jordan. "That's it? She was stressed and she has something in her brain so you're automatically assuming-?"

"No, sir. Based just on what I've seen so far, your daughter is likely enough to be a parahuman that I would recommend her for powers testing and evaluation."

"So far?" I asked quickly, both to figure out how far they'd already gotten and to head off a possible eruption of Mt. St. Hebert.

Agent Jordan turned back to me with a relieved smile. "Are you aware of the powers classification system, Miss Hebert?" Stupid conversation redirection. Fine, I'll play along.

"Mover, Shaker, Brute, and Breaker. Master, Thinker, Blaster, Tinker. Striker, Changer, Trump, and Stranger," I completed the familiar chant.

"Yes," he agreed. "And Thinkers in particular are people with abilities related to enhanced perception, cogitation, or mental focus. Such as your ability to remain perfectly calm and lucid despite being very recently off an extreme psychological ordeal and recovering from sedatives. Or that masterful piece of deduction you pulled off a minute ago as to why I was really here."

Oh joy. Invictus plus having read the PRT playbook before he entered the room equals me being far enough ahead of where I should be that he's mistaking me for Tattletale. No wonder he's so eager, the PRT can never get enough Thinkers on their side. Except that I'm not one so, whoops.

"I don't feel any more intelligent than normal," I replied. "I mean, yeah, I'm not freaking out right now and I'm sort of willpowering through the meds but I don't need parahuman powers for that. I mean, just ask my dad about how stubborn I can get when I'm trying to push through something."

"Oh, can she ever," my dad readily confirmed.

"And to be honest," I said, cutting Agent Jordan off before he could start the lecture about Thinkers, "what I really want to talk about right now is how to press charges for being shoved into that locker." I focused my attention on him as intently as I could without being obvious about it, looking for the smallest reactions to my next calculated statement. "But I probably need to talk to the Brockton Bay PD about Sophia Hess, not you." And despite Agent Jordan's best professional poker pace, I saw him momentarily twitch when I dropped that name.

Yes!

I was a little surprised and upset that Agent Jordan didn't immediately leap into a storm of curiosity at that name. As a Probationary Ward, not a regular Ward, Sophia's secret ID would be more loosely kept around the office because her life both in and out of costume should have been under a higher level of monitoring, even if the system had cataclysmically failed in her case. Yet despite his twitch having indicated that Agent Jordan was in the loop regarding "Sophia Hess is Shadow Stalker", he didn't try to follow it up! Instead he just rushed through the rest of his 'potentially a cape' interview with me as perfunctorily as possible.

I was inwardly fuming at how little anybody seemed to care about doing their job until as a 'professional courtesy' Agent Jordan pulled out his cell phone and called 'a friend' at the Brockton Bay PD himself, just 'to save my father a trip to the police station'. Wait, if he wanted to bury this then why-? Oh, right.

After having used a conversational opener of 'The PRT only investigates parahuman-related cases' and then not confirming that I was a parahuman, Agent Jordan couldn't show any obvious interest in Sophia Hess without outing her as one. So he got just enough out of me to make sure that I wasn't talking about any other Sophia, then very helpfully gets the BBPD onto the case to finish getting the rest of it out of me as if it was just routine juvenile crime. Then all the PRT has to do is yoink a copy of the police report for themselves and then they have my statement without me knowing that they got it.

The part where I'm still at least halfway-suspected of being a Thinker is probably contributing to their extra helping of discretion here… if they really do think I'm Tattletale 2.0 then they won't want to be in the same room with me, let alone trying to recruit me, until after they've checked out the whole Shadow Stalker thing.

So I resolved to patiently wait for the police like a good little girl, and give them my eyewitness statements, and a copy of my diary with all the log entries about all the various bullying incidents of the past year, and everything. And then I'd wait to see what they did about it. This time I'd give them a chance to do the right thing before I gave up on them.

One chance.

Of course, going this route also meant that I had to tell my dad everything.

Oh well, good thing I'm doing it now while I'm still in a hospital bed. At least here there's only so loud he can yell at me.

Author's Note: So far this thing is moving like molasses in January trying to flow uphill. I mean, three sections and I'm not even out of the hospital room yet. My muse is, as ever, doing exactly what it wants and ignoring me. Let's just hope it has follow-through this time.

And dialing in exactly how Taylor's identity issues plus Invictus are going to express themselves is very much a thing of 'I'll intuit this as it goes', so far.

Last edited: Oct 15, 2019

Updated: Roses of Villarosa - Hearts and Minds (Richard POV)

Check out my (on hiatus) Worm fanfic, A Ghost of a Chance!

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Threadmarks Initiation 1.3

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Initiation 1.3

After Agent Jordan left and I'd wrapped up the awkwardness with my dad, I'd been left alone to get to work with Inspired Inventor for real. And while I knew I needed to get my feet under me as quickly as I could I didn't want to end up like the proverbial absent-minded handyman who owned an entire basement full of specialized tools - but his basement was so badly organized that he couldn't find anything when he needed it and so just kept using the same old hammer, screwdriver, and wrench set that he kept right next to the bottom of the stairs. Or in my case, dumping so many separate fields of knowledge into my head that I focused only on the most obvious tricks that could be done with them and never took any time out to stop and think of more subtle applications. Now, maybe Inspired Inventor didn't work that way… but maybe it did. And so if a little patience might help keep me mentally organized better then okay, I could be patient.

It helped that my naval service had been in the engineering department, so I understood something of what a proper technical education should be like. And like in "A" school, it started with an overview of the fundamental principles underlying the mechanisms of what you learning how to build or fix. You didn't start doing maintenance on a steam boiler until you had enough basic physics to understand that the pressure of X mass of gas was in inverse proportion to the volume of the container and in direct proportion to its temperature, you didn't start working on electrical gear until you understand that the current between two points equaled the voltage across the conductor measured in volts divided by the resistance of the conductor measured in ohms, et cetera et cetera. And while Tinkertech apparently broke many of the laws of physics, I had a hunch that I could do a lot worse than to start out my quest for knowledge by understanding exactly which laws I was working with, and which ones I was working around, and which ones I was straight-up ignoring. And it was also time to test what would happen if I spent more than one charge on something, so…

Physics – 3 charges. …holy shit!

That particular download of knowledge left me staring at the hospital ceiling for several hours. Not that there'd been any problem with the number of charges spent – I hadn't taken any Skitter Mode limitations and three charges went down as easily as one did. Its just that I suddenly knew so much. The first charge gave me a mental chart of all the various sub-discliplines that comprised the entire field known as "physics", from astronomy to special relativity, and what their syllabus was and how they all interacted, and then a solid working knowledge of and reference library about each and every single sub-field. That first charge alone made me the equivalent of an entire conference room full of physics professors at a university.

And then the next two charges… well, the formal definition of physics is "the natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force". And you can already see that that covers a tremendous amount of ground. Even three charges wouldn't give me total knowledge of it all – hell, ten charges might not. In fact, I had a feeling that no matter how many charges I kept putting into this there would always be new revelations, new applications and synergies and subtleties, always coming into view as my mental horizons expanded farther and farther. I could imagine some other fields of knowledge that eventually ran out of new things to discover, but I just had to make my first serious Inspired Inventor charge dump be into 'how the multiverse fundamentally works', which would almost certainly be a limitless expanse. Ambitious much?

At any rate, even the one big bite I'd taken out of the physics pie left me in an afternoon-long nerd rapture. At three charges I not only knew essentially everything that modern science had discovered but had gone on to download a ton of spoilers for things we hadn't discovered. For things that no instruments on Earth even existed to discover. For example, the Higgs boson had only been theorized about in 1965 but the particle accelerator needed to confirm its existence hadn't even finished construction yet. But I now knew it existed, not just as a theory but as a fact, and could rattle off its exact properties and interactions in full confidence that when physicists finally caught up to where I was now standing, their experimental results would jibe with everything I'd just downloaded. But it wasn't just weird particles, even if part of my head was absently noting how the Higgs boson's interaction with mass along with several of the equations for spacetime curvature could theoretically be adapted for a Tinkertech gravity generator if a suitable projector could be designed and built…

Having an exponentially increased understanding of how and why stuff worked meant that these principles would underlay everything I designed and built from now on. Tinkertech was still bullshit, but by knowing what was possible under the mundane physical laws of our universe I could optimize any devices I built so that bending or breaking said laws could be saved only for those functions where such was essential and not waste any of the device's efforts on reinventing any wheels that didn't need to be reinvented…

Hrm. There's a thought. Spending charges not on 'how to build amazing gizmos' right away (although the amazing gizmos would come soon enough!), but instead on meta-knowledge fields, things that aren't about directly making Tinkertech but instead underlay and shape the way I design and build Tinkertech. For example, I already knew that not only would any devices I built be at least slightly more adaptable to different operating conditions unless I deliberately made zero effort to put that functionality in, because of my Adaptability charge, but having a vast and deep knowledge of the foundations of physical science also meant that my devices would be less 'eldritch abomination' and more 'ultra-refined futuretech' in their approach whenever possible.

So, hrm. Four charges left for day one. I decided to spend three and leave one deliberately unspent to test whether or not unspent charges rolled over into the following day or were just lost. If I can save them up that will take some pressure off my mind. Without needing to worry about 'wasting' charges I could manage the rate at which I was dumping entire new bodies of knowledge into my mind, as well save unspent charges for use in an emergency. Otherwise, I'd have to be dumping all ten charges into new things every day and that could rapidly result in the 'too much library, not enough card catalog' problem I was trying to avoid.

So, what's most important to keep in mind when building a gizmo? Rhetorical! The answer is "making sure the damned thing doesn't blow up in your face". So, Quality Control – 1 charge and Safety Engineering – 1 charge. And my gizmos will already be adaptable so what's the converse to those two? Making sure it isn't a delicately adaptable hangar queen. And so, Ruggedization – 1 charge.

There we go. I may be doing miracle science from now on, but it won't be mad science. It will just be really really awesome science. That doesn't blow up, have nasty side effects, or break down at the first opportunity. Things like Ruggedization synergizing with Physics meant that I really understood how friction and thermal shock and vibration and resonance could all cause accumulated wear and tear on a mechanism and what design principles and material characteristics would best minimize that…

Wow, that is a lot of concepts and processes and laws and axioms and everything floating around up there. Hopefully this new knowledge rapture will start slowing down the more I learn and so the more I already understand things related to what I'm learning next.

But then the nurses started to wonder at my whole 'staring at the ceiling all afternoon' routine, so I mentally pushed it all to the side and ate my dinner and then started at least pretend to do something normal like read a book or watch the TV. Soon enough it was time for Taylor to go to sleep – hey, Invictus to power through mentally or not, physically I was still pretty damn weak and exhausted - and so I drifted off, waiting to see if my single unspent charge would be there in the morning and if sleeping on this whole mass of stuff I'd inspired into my brain would help sort it out better.

Seeing your life as a story written by someone else is so weird. Especially when you haven't actually lived through it yet.

The situation was complicated by the fact that while I was John I hadn't actually read Worm cover-to-cover. I'd originally gotten into the franchise via the fanfics showing up all over my favorite message board, and followed that to the web serial itself. However, the web serial was really long and depressing and so after a while I just started skimming and using the wikia and absorbing information via osmosis via all the forum threads to fill in the gaps. So I had an overview of the entire plot, knew all of the big reveals, and had a mostly complete outline of events. But my not having read everything in detail meant that I lacked context for a goodly amount of this stuff. And most of all, I lacked context on what had been going on in my own head during the storyline.

Seriously. Just because I remembered having read all this stuff in a story didn't mean I'd actually been there or done it yet. So even if I knew that in one particular timeline I would do all these things, I could barely understand why I'd done some of them. I abandoned my lifelong dream of being a hero to go villain? I took over Brockton Bay as some kind of warlord? I killed Alexandria? I took over the world as some kind of Master-12? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, over?

But even worse than that were the parts of the story where I did understand what I had been thinking.

It was the reincarnation memories that had tipped the scale for me, of course. When I was John I'd gotten invalided out of the service after a massive nervous breakdown, and had been through all the outpatient therapy at the VA for that. So getting all those memories as Taylor meant that I could use the benefit of that reincarnated hindsight plus the support of Invictus to look back on the patterns I'd already been falling into, and which according to the Worm serial I would fall into even harder. The exhausting, depressing, borderline suicidal patterns that I hadn't even noticed at the time.

The first mental faculty to start being eroded by exhaustion and stress is your judgement. All those PSAs about 'getting help' and 'learn to recognize the systems', that we all got in school and all laughed at, turned out to have a lot of sense to them. Sure, you'd think it would be obvious to you if you were starting to go off-center but ahahahahaha, nope. The way the human mind worked you were almost always the last person to notice that you weren't OK. Our brain's own ability to adapt to stress worked against us after a certain point, with the stubborn insistence that "I'm fine." drowning out the physical and emotional warning signs that no, you were not fine. The mental quality that was useful for getting through the normal slings and arrows of outrageous fortune stopped being good for you after a certain point, the point at which prolonged stress and danger reached a level where your body simply didn't have time to physically and emotionally recuperate before the next trauma came along. Every finite number could eventually be reduced to zero, and that included human fortitude. Even for the best and the bravest humans.

So despite a stubborn adolescence insisting that winners never quit and whiners never won, having already lived through it once as an adult and a military veteran was enough of a cluebat to get through and force me to admit that no, Taylor Hebert was officially hitting the end of her rope. Zero support system plus the most vulnerable period of adolescence plus a year and a half of constant gaslighting and emotional torture had used up 99.9% of all the endurance I had, and if I hadn't triggered and then escaped into the new life of a cape I'd have been lucky to go six more months without jumping off a bridge. Even then, it was practically Worm canon that jumping straight into that first fight with Lung in the story had been as much an unconscious suicide attempt as it had been an attempt to save people. And that my leaping to 'infiltrate' the Undersiders had been as much a desperately lonely girl leaping at the chance to make a friend with the first person to not act like an apathetic authority figure or a total asshole to me in months, even if she'd been a manipulative Thinker-7 combining a – I'd give Tattletale this much credit – genuine desire to stop a suicidally lonely girl from killing herself along with a self-serving scheme to try and improve her own position.

Seriously, according to the story me and Lisa had become pretty much sisters – and right now I wouldn't even know her from any other blond girl I bumped into on the street unless the other, more visually distinctive Undersiders were with her. I mean, I still felt bad for the almost-suicidal period of her own life and how Coil was basically enslaving her at gunpoint, but only in the way that you feel bad about hearing that a perfect stranger is being the victim of a serious crime. Not remotely like how I'd feel if my dad was kidnapped right now or suchlike.

But even without the soap opera elements of that story-life to mull over it was obvious now that all of my decision-making, however brilliant parts of it may have been, still were skewed heavily by starting from such a period of exhaustion and stress. Looking at some of the choices I would have made in the story with a clear head while I was calm left me feeling almost bizarrely disassociated, like I was looking at an Echidna clone wearing my face but doing all the wrong things. Bizarrely I remembered the time I'd a serious fondness for Terry Goodkind novels shortly after having been discharged from the Navy, only to look back several years of rest and therapy later to be shocked at how shitty they were and utterly confused as to why I'd ever liked them in the first place. That was what prolonged nervous exhaustion and stress did to you - the mental sabotage was not just in the obvious ways but also in invisible shifts and distortions to your likes, your dislikes, and your reactions to things which you felt were entirely rational at the time but when looking back on them later left you going '… was I possessed?'

So yeah. That was the scary, scary revelation I woke up to the next morning. That only an extremely unlikely set of circumstances had saved me from killing myself before I was sixteen, and that my self-inflicted cure for that problem had been almost worse than the disease.

Of course, those circumstances and decisions had also led directly to the saving of the entire world vs. Zion and the Endbringers, so I'd still have to pull that off somehow. Despite the fact that I wasn't the same Taylor, didn't want to make remotely the same decisions, and didn't have the same powers. And worst of all, when I dealing with the fact that underneath the Invictus support system helping hold me up, it was almost certain that my underlying good judgment was still significantly compromised in ways that I only partially knew about and thus could only partially compensate for.

No pressure, right?

Well, at least there was some good news too. Unspent charges for Inspired Inventor did roll over into the following day. I celebrated by immediately dumping the unspent charge into Safety Engineering and then adding 1 more charge each to Quality Control and Ruggedization, bringing them all to 2 charges each. The newly expanded knowledges 'clicked' neatly into place and I felt entirely confident that from now on anything I built would be safe, reliable, and built to last. Unless I deliberately chose to build it otherwise, of course.

It also left me looking around at the various bits of medical equipment in the room and absently noting where some redesigns would make them more disaster-proof and less prone to wear and tear, and my fingers twitched idly with the desire to actually get out and get my hands on some tools. Sadly, that would have to wait until I'd had more rest and recuperation from the whole 'almost dying' thing so despite the best Panacea could do I was still looking at two or three more days in here.

First thing after breakfast I put into Basic Science to give me an overview of all the existing scientific fields and how they interrelated, even if my knowledge of any individual one barely topped out at freshman college courses. With the knowledge I gained from that I then did a big dump of Mathematics - 3 charges, because now I was aware that the discipline of mathematics underlay practically all of the hard sciences and, via statistics, a lot of the soft ones too. There was even an XKCD comic about various scientists bragging to each other about how their discipline was the 'purest' one, sneering that psychology was merely applied biology was merely applied chemistry was merely applied physics, with the physicist busy celebrating being "on top" while way ahead of him a mathematician was going "Oh, hey, I didn't see you guys all the way over there."-

Aaaand that webcomic doesn't even exist on Earth-Bet. I didn't know whether to be happy or alarmed that the memories of both my lives were starting to integrate so well that unless I paid conscious attention I would sometimes not even consider which memory came from which life… on second thought, we'll go with 'alarmed'. Not that I felt my identity fragmenting or anything, but it was going to make it a lot harder to keep anyone from noticing I'd changed if I kept doing and saying things that pre-change me wouldn't have because she didn't have memories of the lifetime of a 53-year-old disabled veteran along with that of a teenaged girl.

Great. I'd download a psychology degree right now except that I already knew enough about the topic to know that trying to formally diagnose or treat yourself was the stupidest idea in the world, even for the most skilled of therapists. Objectivity is a must in formal psychiatric treatment and that degree of objectivity is impossible to aim at yourself without a Thinker ability that I didn't have. So for right now we'd try to get along with common sense and what self-help and monitoring techniques I'd already learned the hard way from the VA.

At any rate, having crammed my head full of more pure mathematical knowledge than Newton, Gauss, Leibniz, Descartes, and all those other guys all put together, I then settled down to spend the rest of the morning consciously digesting it, integrating it, and pondering possible uses of it. And in the process I also began to discover some of the limitations of Inspired Inventor.

Specifically, it was not a superhuman thought engine. It was an access to a supernatural, quite possibly unlimited database of knowledge and techniques, but I still had to actually apply that knowledge and execute those techniques with my unaugmented human physiology and neurology. Well, at least until or unless I designed and installed some augmentations but let's not digress. The point is, I wouldn't be able to just spend a few charges on 'Super Deduction' and then start being Tattletale 2.0 for real, not in the same way she could.

I learned this by finding out that there was a sharp upper limit on exactly how large or complex a mathematical problem I could number-crunch in my head. Oh I got boosted, don't get me wrong. Before spending those Mathematics charges my mental arithmetic skills topped out at 'memorized the times table up to 20 times 20' and now I could easily do calculus in my head. Between my intuitive understanding of mathematical algorithms and the precomputed lookup tables that had apparently been part of the download I was pretty much independent of scientific or even graphing calculators now. But all of these things had been known even in pre-parahuman history in various gifted human savants, and when I tried scaling up from there I rapidly hit the wall. Even with all the mastery and techniques I'd assimilated my brain simply had an actual physical limit as to how large and how many numbers it could simultaneously keep in mental registry, and a finite amount of computational capacity to manipulate them with. So while someone with an actual Thinker shard for mathematics would think nothing of brute-forcing a 32-bit cryptographic key in their head in nothing flat, I couldn't so much as try a 16-bit crypto hack in my head without my brain simply going 'nope!'.

So after spending most of the morning mentally experimenting with my new number-crunching skills and where the boundaries were, I put that aside and decided to face up to the elephant in the room I'd been mentally avoiding ever since I woke up to realize that I was in Earth-Bet.

How, exactly, was I going to save the world?

Author's Note: I'm getting a firm grasp on the limits, whys, and wherefores of my own interpretation of Inspired Inventor. I'm also starting to get a handle on my Taylor's character right now - which is really complex when you consider that not only is she dealing with the agglomeration of her personality and the SI to the point that she doesn't even mentally separate the two anymore, but also that this Taylor has an academic knowledge of what canon Taylor did and thought while not being that Taylor yet. As her internal narration above points out, the only thing weirder than getting future spoilers about your life is barely being able to recognize the person the spoilers are about.

So her thought processes are not only being informed by a weird merger of two people with a lot of similarities and a lot of differences, but are also informed by her knowing but not feeling about canon Taylor and her current desire to not be canon Taylor, plus the effects of Invictus, plus her self-knowledge that underneath the Invictus she's still a mentally and emotionally exhausted teenaged girl who has yet to recover from a lot of trauma. Try running that through your head and not being a little weirded out.

Remember Kirk Lazarus in Tropic Thunder and his 'I'm the dude playing the dude disguised as another dude!' issues? Sorta like that.

Last edited: Oct 15, 2019

Updated: Roses of Villarosa - Hearts and Minds (Richard POV)

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cliffc999

Jul 7, 2019

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Initiation 1.4

I had no idea if spending a charge on this latest idea would even do anything useful, given the entire 'Inspired Inventor does not actually give Thinker powers' limitation I'd just worked out. Still, I'd be getting several hundred charges a month to play with indefinitely and I'd already spent my first couple of days focusing on immediate needs and background material, so might as well start experimenting…

Strategy – 1 Charge

And, whoa.

What was strategy, really? Was it the ability to make plans? The ability to make a useful pattern out of a stream of separate decisions? The ability to choose between alternatives to deliver a unique mix of value? The art of shaping the future? All of the above and none of the above, and more.

The Inspired Inventor download finished settling into my memories and my subconscious, providing a slightly different context to everything I saw. Just like my 1 charge in Adaptation had made me look at the ordinary objects and events around me in slightly new ways, so did my 1 charge in Strategy. My first step would have to be to clarify my objectives.

One: Destroy Zion.

Two: Destroy the Endbringers.

These were both the must-have essentials of all the potential tasks awaiting me, priorities more important even than living to enjoy a long and happy life. Left unchecked, Zion would destroy billions of parallel Earths – including the one me and Dad lived on. Left unchecked, the Endbringers would ultimately destroy human civilization. Both of these were certain facts from John's meta-knowledge of the Worm setting, and so they had to be what was ultimately focused on above all else. I didn't necessarily have to do them first, but if I didn't do them then they wouldn't happen.

Beneath these two overriding goals floated a series of other priorities in varying, inexact order – become prosperous and secure, clean up Brockton Bay, bring Cauldron to justice, get Emma and Sophia and Madison what they deserved, keep Dad alive, don't die, maybe do something kind for the Undersiders (even if I certainly wasn't going to go join them now, ugh!), all swirling around jockeying for position. But I focused on the big two for now, because if I couldn't pull those off than nothing else mattered.

Still, while the scope of the problem was immense the clarity of the problem was as simple as it got – they needed to die. Only the Endbringers were even a mild moral dilemma because in canon their attacks were stopped by the death of Eidolon, and expedience suggested that killing one cape would be less difficult than-

- no, that's absurd. There was no ambiguity in the death of Zion, no option other than Tinkering together enough gun and then using it. If I couldn't do that then ultimately nothing else I did mattered. And if I built a weapon capable of destroying an Entity then I would certainly have already solved the problem of building a weapon capable of destroying an Endbringer.

So… could I build a weapon capable of destroying an Entity?

Weapons of Mass Destruction – 3 charges.

Gulp.

I spent the remainder of my stay in the hospital both working out and rejecting tentative outlines of plans and trying to come to terms with the fact that I now had the power to destroy the entire universe.

No, I wasn't being hyperbolic. Three charges in WMD Tinkering by itself made me at least as bad as String Theory, the woman who had almost crashed the Moon into the Earth – and that was as her sole Tinker specialty and while working on a countdown timer. Me? With 3 charges each in Mathematics and Physics as well as WMDs, composing the schematics for a device that could trigger False Vacuum Decay on a desktop was as easy as diagramming a sentence in grade-school English class had been.

One little Higgs boson tickled with quantum tunneling in exactly the wrong place at exactly the wrong time and it collapses out of a false vacuum into a true vacuum, releasing enough potential energy in the process to trigger vacuum collapse in all the atoms around it, and then so and so on. A sphere of anti-existence spreading omnidirectionally at the speed of light and stoppable by absolutely nothing in the universe. Any more mass or energy thrown at it would simply fuel the reaction more, dimensional shenanigans would simply be benignly ignored as the very fabric of this dimension's space-time unraveled around and underneath whatever warp or portal you threw at it, and even Zion would have no choice except to get out of the universe before he died with it. No conceivable natural phenomenon or parahuman power could possibly stop it once it started, unless somebody had a parahuman power for going back in time and shooting me before I turned it on.

And I could build one out of spare parts almost as soon as I got home, or still in my hospital bed if I could somehow borrow a set of microelectronics tools and disassemble the blood pressure monitor and the TV before anyone noticed, because it wouldn't require any more power than a watch battery and inducing quantum tunneling on a micro-scale event could be done by Tinkering with a couple of microchips and diodes as easily as Bakuda could build a time-stop bomb out of scraps. You know, if I hadn't had Invictus then they'd never have taken the straps off after the freakout I would have thrown after realizing this. How the hell do you even relate to the idea that you could literally end the universe in a basement with a box of scraps?

At least that answered the question of 'could I kill Zion'. Yes, yes I could. Oh, not with False Vacuum Decay – I had no way of restricting the size of the devastation to a manageable area except by dumping the target and the FVD bomb both into a separate pocket dimension before launching it, and while I could possibly do that with an Endbringer-sized target in theory even I didn't want to try with the Warrior's entire body. Dumping an entire planet into a hammerspace would be ridiculous even for me, and that's before we even begin to factor in the Entity's active resistance. Still, even without that if I could come up with this kind of insanity right now then what kind of weapons could I hope to build after having worked on it?

So, assured that with a few more charges in relevant fields and some time to Tinker I could build a Zion-killing device of some kind, I turned my mind away from muon-based devices that could turn the Sun into a supernova – Zion would certainly have depopulated the Solar System of whatever timeline he chose to hide his true body on, even if I couldn't guarantee the rest of the universe equally as free of collateral damage – and on to the earlier, if smaller, goals and steps of my plan.

The first one I could work on would be neutralizing the Trio. OK, it was hardly the most important thing I could be working on but damn it, I was not just a cosmic weapon, I was a teenaged girl! I was allowed to have feelings!

More practically, out of all my future goals it was the one with the most limited time-window. As the Worm canon had proved, if I didn't press charges right away then nobody would care. As is, it was distinctly possible that people still might not care but I had to at least try it. Especially since I had to find out whether or not the PRT would actually act on the information I'd given them… or if they'd had it all along and just didn't care. Because if I couldn't trust them at least this minimally then I couldn't trust them at all, which would be vital for me to know before I tried to do anything such as 'join the Wards'.

The plan for doing that would be what I'd already started – giving the Brockton Bay PD my full cooperation in investigating this as an actual felony assault/attempted murder, instead of never actually telling the authorities anything and letting Principal Blackwell be the only person entering anything about the incident in the official record ever.

And when I noticed that my second follow-up interview by the police had had a 'Social Services observer' along who said nothing but kept looking at his cell phone throughout, a tall dark-haired man with a neatly-trimmed goatee, I was almost entirely certain that that had been Armsmaster in civilian clothes checking out everything I said with his lie detector. Well. That looked hopeful, at least.

Another early goal would be to get out of Winslow.

Even if the Trio were all gone, it would still be an incredible waste of my time and a daily reminder of a period of my life that I never wanted to revisit ever. Unfortunately, you had to be 16 or older to take the GED in New Hampshire and I was only 15. But assuming that my police report was successful then I would have sufficient leverage on Winslow to get them to agree to almost anything that didn't involve them actually paying more in settlements, such as authorizing me for 'home school to prepare for the GED'. Since so much as 1 charge in Primary and Secondary School Curriculum – which I spent even before leaving the hospital - would qualify me to teach any and every course offered in a contemporary American grade school or high school, let alone pass them, then I could spend all day Tinkering at home and still test out perfectly on every one of my required educational milestones.

This would lead ideally into fulfilling my next goal, which would be to start quietly ramping up through the early stages of the Tinker Cycle on my own. Independent Tinkering was a hell of a risk to take anywhere and most especially in Brockton Bay, what with everybody from the Empire 88 to Coil out there drooling for the chance to press-gang any new, unprotected Tinker. However, my PRT Agent Training gave me a good solid outline for all the classic mistakes of newbie Tinkers that made them so easy to catch before they were able to defend themselves, and so I had a solid blueprint for avoiding them. No happily charging out to stop (or commit) street crime the instant I successfully kit-bashed together my first Tinkertech weapon, no going all 'Verified Cape' right away on PHO, no immediately unplugging your house from the utilities grid or going to the opposite extreme by hooking up an entire basement factory to it (you'd be amazed at how many new Tinkers the PRT finds simply by looking for suspicious electricity usage), and so forth, and so on.

Furthermore, if I ended up needing to join the Wards at any point I wanted them to at least see me as 'a hot young prodigy who might be the next Hero', and not 'Kid Win 2.0'. Not to be unkind to Kid Win, everything I'd read about Worm suggested he was a very nice boy, but he was pretty much the archetype of 'street-level Tinker' and I was already designing cosmic destruction engines in my first week. So the faster I could get through the baby steps of the Tinker Cycle and on up into building the good stuff, the better.

Especially since I couldn't waste time. By the time I was ready to get out of the hospital it would be January 10th, and that would leave me exactly five months and five days before Leviathan attacked Brockton Bay. So I had that long and no longer to already scale up to the Endbringer threat level. Endbringers, really, because if I managed to kill Leviathan then that would trigger the same kind of Endbringer zerg rush that Scion's destruction of Behemoth managed in the original Worm story.

So even if I had wanted to join the Wards – which to be honest, wasn't an idea I was thrilled about - the answer was 'No'. Even assuming best-case scenario regarding the whole Shadow Stalker situation there was still the review process and bureaucracy that Protectorate-affiliated Tinkers had to put up with. Sure, they let Armsmaster pretty much run loose but that was after decades of him building up good credit with his bosses.

I wouldn't have decades. I wouldn't have years. I'd have five months and five days, and with all the static they gave Kid Win about his Alternator Cannon they certainly wouldn't let me try building quantum bombs or quark deconfiners or anything else that could actually destroy Leviathan's core. So yes, I would try to make it as an independent Tinker as my first option.

I would eventually have to come to terms with the Protectorate at some point, but there would be a huge difference between the sort of terms I would get as a 'Wards recruit' and as 'the potential new recruit who'd already destroyed one Endbringer'. So ideally I would make it to and through the Leviathan battle before actually signing on the dotted line. And if that battle were somehow butterflied away… well, Endbringer fights would always keep happening somewhere. Until someone like me killed them.

But on the way there I would still have to be very careful to not alienate the Protectorate or the PRT, because if there's one thing my strategy training emphasized repeatedly its that you always needed a fallback position. If my independent Tinker plans failed and the press gangs came for me anyway then for my safety and my dad's I would have to go into the Wards right then and there, whether I wanted to or not. Because the original Worm story, where I ended up pinning all my hopes on the Undersiders? On thinking I could take on the entire world with nothing more than a group of teenagers with attitude and a million bugs?

That was stupid. I'd been stupid.

And I don't care that it worked, it was still stupid. "If it's stupid but it worked, then it wasn't stupid," was the most wrongheaded notion ever. The proper pronunciation was "If it's stupid but it worked, then you were luckier than you deserved."

Which train of thought was leading me, reluctantly and the long way around, to a conclusion that I'd known pretty much since I'd woken up but didn't ever want to reach. Something that the greater life experience of the man whose memories I'd woken up with reincarnation-style, John Mueller, had been insisting all along that I should have done the first time. Something that I needed Invictus to keep me from retreating into hysteria and panic and teenaged angst fits so I could continue to live in denial of it. Something that as much as I didn't want to do it I might as well do anyway, because story-Taylor's plan of 'Run away from home' would still be an option if this went pear-shaped.

As soon as we got home I was going to have to actually talk to my dad, and fess up that I was a parahuman.

Of course, I put it off as soon as we got there and went to tinker in the basement instead.

I had dozens of charges saved up from the days I'd spent in hospital and now that I could actually do things with them, I could finally spend them freely. I bumped up Ruggedization and Quality Control to 3 charges each, dropped two charges each into Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Efficiency and Modular Design (because the two Tinkers in town with those specialties had done well for themselves by it), and Computer Programming, and even took a brief two-charge detour into Quantum Physics to augment and specialize my already prodigious physics knowledge. All this plus my dad's collection of electronics tools and all the clutter I could scrounge down there let me finally scratch my Tinker itch that I'd been aching to get out for days in that hospital bed. I know I didn't have a shard to drive me to conflict or anything like that, but I still had powers! And I wanted to use them! To just feel the accomplishment of actually doing something, making something with my hands! And on some level, to reassure myself that I actually was a Tinker now and that this wasn't just some delusion brought about by the medication I'd been on.

So, after I got busy with some diode-repurposing tricks on the same order of things that Bakuda had done to break physics with hand grenades and using an applied knowledge of quantum physics generations in excess of Earth's, I was able to breadboard my jury-rigged 8-bit quantum computer into an obsolete graphics card for our old PC. Which completely ruined its actual function as a graphics card (I'd have to plug the monitor into the motherboard's own baby video jack) but meant that I now had an auxiliary quantum-computational unit that I could slap into the one motherboard slot that could be used for offloading computational tasks from the CPU to the card.

I then had to go to bed, but running out to the electronics store the next morning after Dad had left for work got me an old CD of an outdated Linux distro, and formatting the hard drive and its entirely outdated Windows install was a snap to my new computer-genius brain. It took until well past lunch day to use those tools to bash together my own custom Linux kernel complete with drivers for offloading computational tasks to the GPU… and thus neatly getting around my inability to actually design, build, and install a quantum CPU until I could get my hands on the facilities necessary to make microprocessors from scratch.

Having thus turned an obsolete IBM PC into a desktop-mounted tiny god, I spent the remainder of the afternoon until my dad came home hand-coding my own custom programming environment complete with ultra-efficient code library. 1 charge into User Interfaces to make the programming tool as easy to use as it was efficient and from now on all the coding I'd have to do for all the various gizmos I would be making would be infinitely easier as I could do the vast majority of it simply by assembling prefab bits from my custom code library. Sweat now to save time later.

Which helped with what came next because by the time my Dad came home from work, I actually had something to show him.

Having built the super-PC, I was now committed to confessing that I was a Tinker. Even though Dad hadn't so much as switched it on in over a year, what with everything that had gone on since Mom died, the fact remains that it was his computer I'd just torn apart and rebuilt. He'd certainly notice that it wasn't in his study anymore, let alone that it was now clean and dust-free and running a completely different operating system and substantially faster. (Yes, I'd saved all the useful and necessary and personal data – which wasn't much – from the hard drive before I formatted it. I'm not that careless.)

So, he came home from the Dockworkers Union – a couple hours earlier than he normally did, in fact, because his sick daughter was still recovering at home – to find me armpit-deep in coding some custom-made anti-malware and anti-tracking utilities that I hoped would let me start doing some online datamining without immediately being traced and burned back to this house. Which of course forced me to explain what was going on.

"Taylor?" he asked me tentatively, already mostly sure of what he was seeing but having to make sure.

My answers, already preplanned, stuck in my throat. What was I so afraid of?

"Yes dad I'm a Tinker," I finally coughed out. "I… started rebuilding the graphics card last night, and…"

He sat down at the kitchen table alongside me and the new custom workstation. "Tinker fugue, I think they call it?"

"More like adrenaline rush," I said, grinning weakly. "I didn't blank out and wake up with a whole finished gizmo in front of me like the stories, I was just… two weeks ago I could barely change a tire and now I can build supercomputers. But I wouldn't believe it until I actually did build a supercomputer…"

"So you… had to actually do it to see if it was real, and you weren't just dreaming?" he said inquiringly.

"I… think that would be the best way to put it, yes." I said, still worried by his completely mild-mannered approach. I mean, where was the reaction?

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Nothing in either life I could remember made me good at social interaction!

Hell with it, rip the band-aid off. "Dad… are you mad at me?" I asked, not needing to use acting to put a quaver in my voice.

"What?" he said, his face collapsing into shock. "No! Taylor, no, I am not mad at you at all." he said as reassuringly as he could. "I was worried as soon as you said 'Tinker' because of the things I've heard about what can happen to new Tinkers especially, but we can talk about that later. For right now-"

Well, if I ever wondered if Invictus meant I couldn't have normal human emotions, doubt solved. Because I sagged in my seat like a limp noodle at hearing that. "Then I'm not…?", I interrupted him.

"You're not going to disassemble my things again without asking permission, but I wasn't using that old junky thing anyway. And I get that the first time using powers can be like what you said. That you had to actually do it before you told me about it, so you could be sure it was real."

"That's… why I used the kitchen table, yeah. So you had to see it when you walked in. I mean… if you didn't see anything, if it had all been in my head, then I'd have… had to go back to the hospital…" I said, trailing off in shock at myself as I realized where my thoughts had been going. Had waking up as a possible psych patient really made me doubt my sanity that much? Or had the 'John' part of me doubted it all along?

And the next thing I knew I was receiving my first Dad hug in longer than I wanted to or could remember. And for the first time since I'd woken up, part of me started to believe that it was going to be okay.

Author's Note: For more on False Vacuum Collapse consult this Youtube.

Also, while I'll still keep updating Taylor's build on the first post, we won't be counting exact charges now because she's accumulating them at the rate of 10 a day and already has several dozen unspent from the hospital timeskip. So unless I start blowing dozens at a time she'll just be presumed to have enough charges to cover her needs.

Last edited: Oct 15, 2019

Updated: Roses of Villarosa - Hearts and Minds (Richard POV)

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Threadmarks Interlude 1-A: Miss Militia

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Interlude 1-A: Miss Militia

I entered the office directly behind Armsmaster and stayed behind to close and lock the door as Armsmaster took his seat. As soon as I sat down alongside him, Director Piggot began without preamble:

"Did you find additional confirmation of Miss Hebert's allegations other than what your lie detector gave you at the interview? And are they useable as evidence?"

"Yes to both questions," Armsmaster said matter-of-factly. "We could not tap the communications of the other two girls without a surveillance warrant, but Shadow Stalker's are an open book to us both because of her Wards membership and her probation status. There is an ongoing pattern of e-mails and texts between her, Miss Barnes, and Miss Clements regarding their bullying and harassment of Taylor Hebert, and they are admissible in any court cleared for the knowledge of Shadow Stalker's civilian identity."

"Damn," I swore softly. Not that Shadow Stalker had been liked by any of her co-workers or superiors – which in hindsight should have been a greater hint than it was – but she had been a highly effective combat asset that we were now going to lose. In addition to the inevitable effect on discipline and morale, both internal and external, that the revealing of such crimes occurring on what was supposed to be our watch would have. "Is it still possible to handle this internally, Director?"

"No," Piggot said flatly. "Shadow Stalker violated the terms of her probation and there is only one penalty in law proscribed for that, a penalty I do not have the authority to set aside. Not that I'd have the slightest willingness to show her any mercy even if I did have that authority. She lied to us, not just once but repeatedly, systematically, and without hesitation. And I have no use for anyone who does that in my command."

"Forgive me, I was unclear," I continued. "I agree that Sophia Hess must be returned to juvenile detention immediately. What I meant was, is it possible for this mess to not become public?"

"Dear God I certainly hope so," the Director agreed with me. "Which would mean sealing Shadow Stalker's resentencing and not allowing the evidence recovered in her case to be used against the other two girls in court. Armsmaster, what would that do to the Brockton police's investigation? Because if either of those two brats walks scott-free it will be almost impossible to keep their mouths shut about this, especially given that Barnes at least knows that Sophia Hess was Shadow Stalker."

"Very little, actually," Colin replied surprisingly. "My latest knowledge is that both the Barnes and Clements girls are racing to be the first to sell each other out for a lighter sentence. Given Barnes' status as both the primary instigator and the organizer, Clements is almost certain to win."

Director Piggot's mouth quirked up in a thin, cruel smile. "Rats fleeing the sinking ship. Fitting. And they certainly can't refuse to sign our NDAs if the court makes it a condition of their sentencing. So, Hess forfeits her probation and her accomplices get what they deserve. What do we tell the Wards?"

"The truth," I said immediately. "Even without being told anything they would figure out much if not all of what is going on anyway, and if we are caught lying to them about their own teammate then they wouldn't trust anything their chain of command ever said to them again."

"Our discipline problems with them are bad enough as is!" Armsmaster said loudly.

"Makes sense," the Director nodded. "The police will obviously know the truth as well, of course. But the public story?"

"To the best of my recollection it has never become public knowledge that Shadow Stalker was a probationary Ward…" Armsmaster said inquiringly.

"No, it was not." I said.

"Withdrawing from the Wards to concentrate more on her educational opportunities and we look forward to her one day soon having an honorable career with the Protectorate, standard boilerplate," Director Piggot pronounced and we all nodded.

"And Taylor Hebert?" I asked. "She originally came to our attention as part of a potential parahuman screening. If that was positive, then she's very likely to be our next Wards recruit. Which given her prior interaction with a Ward…"

"The Ward we just sent back to jail the instant her report reached us? I don't see what she'd have to complain about there," Armsmaster continued.

"One moment," the Director said, reaching for her terminal and pulling up the status of the Hebert file. "Hmm… cooperative on all parts of the interview regarding what was done to her but closed-mouth and evasive otherwise… Agent Jordan noted possible Thinker abilities… referred for Watchdog group consult on a possible Thinker recruitment… evaluation returned inconclusive?" her voice trailed off puzzledly. "Granted that it was a very brief look by their standards given the low priority, but HQ's Thinker tank got back a result of 'we don't know'? That's unusual."

"Thinker powers often return mixed or partial results against other Thinkers," Armsmaster said with a touch of excitement. "It fits a pattern."

The Director rubbed her chin. "It does, but they didn't note that. You're the one who's actually spoken to her… well, listened to her speak when you sat in on one of her police interviews. Did the detectives put in the questions we asked them to for your lie detector to pick up on?"

"They did manage to insert the question that indirectly probed whether or not Taylor Hebert knew that Sophia Hess was Shadow Stalker," Armsmaster confirmed. "Her denial registered as being substantially evasive."

"Meaning that we have to take it as given that she does know or at least strongly suspects," the Director said. "Thank God Hebert seems to understand that she'd only hang herself by not keeping her mouth shut about it. Couldn't that damned idiot Hess even keep her own secrets?" She sighed and continued. "I'll have to think about what we can do to make sure that pattern of silence continues on Hebert's part, but given the circumstances we can't come on with the threats. All right, go on."

"Unfortunately, the flow of the interview was such that they could not directly ask her if she was a parahuman without making it too obvious who they were asking for," Armsmaster said. "They did manage to work in the question about noticing anything unusual about herself afterwards, but her answer was so vague that even my lie detector was of little use."

"Either she knew who you were and what you were doing, which leans to Thinker, or else she's just naturally uncooperative with authority figures except when she's trying to get what she wants out of them," I said. "That latter might be a potential problem."

Piggot shook her head. "According to what Internal Affairs turned up when looking into Hess' caseworker, Hebert's bullying had been going on for over a year in full view of most of the staff at Winslow from Principal Blackwell on down and the only person who was ever disciplined for any of the incidents was her. Doesn't surprise me a bit that she wouldn't trust any authority figure any further than Clockblocker could throw them. While they were frozen." she finished, in what for her was an exceptionally rare touch of humor. "Which means that yes, if she does turn out to be parahuman and thus our next potential Wards recruit, we're going to have… potential problems," the Director finished in a more serious tone of voice, nodding to me.

"No use in borrowing trouble before it happens," Armsmaster said stolidly. "Should we maintain surveillance on Hebert?"

"Surveillance on a suspected Thinker who already has trust issues?" I said. Everybody shook their heads in agreement with me as to how foolish that idea sounded once it was said out loud.

I continued on. "I think… we should concentrate on her father. In the event she turns out to be a parahuman then it's ultimately his decision if she joins the Wards, not hers. We… send Agent Jordan around for a 'follow-up interview' that's actually a 'here's why young parahumans could really use the Wards' speech, but structured so that we aren't acting like we know she is one but just doing a routine 'In case it turns out that your daughter is, like we mentioned might be possible in the hospital.' Likewise, during that conversation Agent Jordan can be instructed to emphasize 'in passing' just how secure cape IDs are kept and how security is maintained around them, in the process of 'reassuring' them that Taylor's identity would be preserved rigorously should she be a parahuman."

"Good idea," the Director agreed. "We kill two birds with one stone by emphasizing the identity security, and using Jordan should work because he's already met them. All right, that seems to be a wrap. Any other questions or concerns?"

We both shook our heads.

"Dismissed."

Author's Note: Just a brief bit clarifying things I'd already worked out while composing 1.4, re: what's going on in the background.

Last edited: Oct 15, 2019

Updated: Roses of Villarosa - Hearts and Minds (Richard POV)

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Threadmarks Initiation 1.5

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Initiation 1.5

Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

That was the out-of-court settlement that Winslow offered us, in addition to special permission for home schooling until I could take my GED at age sixteen and "voluntarily" cooperating with a comprehensive state education board audit of policy and staff. They'd begged for the chance to give me more money in return for my easing up on that last requirement but I was hardly going to let them off that easily. And between the horror factor of my story and the part where one of the malefactors had already confessed to everything in criminal court and so they'd have zero chance of surviving the civil suit, the city would have sold me both of Principal Blackwell's kidneys if need be to keep this from going in front of a jury and hearing what their idea of punitive damages might be.

I'd honestly thought about going that route anyway and letting my dad have the millions of dollars to try and restart the Dockworkers with, but he pointed out that the city would just get their money back by raising next years' property taxes on everyone and gutting the municipal budget elsewhere,and the Bay was in enough of an economic depression with overworked and underfunded city services as is. Heck, a quarter-million by itself was going to do not-nice things to the city's education budget but we took it anyway because they owed us at least that much.

School disciplinary measures for Emma and Madison were rendered basically irrelevant by Madison's turning state's evidence and giving up all three of the Trio in return for being tried as a juvenile. As it turned out, in the state of New Hampshire you could potentially be tried as an adult at as low an age as fifteen if your offense fell within certain categories, and while they hadn't quite gotten attempted murder for the Locker incident despite my needing Panacea intervention to avoid dying they had gotten second-degree assault, criminal restraint, and for the piece de resistance, kidnapping. Apparently none of them had had the brains to realize that deliberately confining someone and taking action to conceal her whereabouts was a class A felony if any one of several circumstances were met, and "with intent to terrorize" and "victim was under 18" were two of them. So right there they were looking at a maximum possible sentence of almost 30 years as adults, and that's before the conspiracy to commit charges or Sophia's own special legal status were taken into account.

Yes, I'd put a charge in Lawyer to make sure we weren't going to be screwed on the fine print.

So both Mr. Barnes and the lawyer that Madison's family had hired had seen that coming right away and had advised their clients to take a dive immediately for the privilege of getting their precious little snowflake back out of juvenile detention when she was eighteen, instead of seeing her go to the state penitentiary and stay there God only knew how long. So the only choice the prosecutor needed to make was who took the fall and who got to skate. And since Emma was the unquestioned ringleader the whole time, they gave the easy out to Madison.

If a fresh-faced cutesy little girl like her being in juvie for three years and completely blowing her chances of being admitted to anything above community college could be considered 'easy'… which I suppose it could be compared to doing hard time as an adult for over twice as long. Even with the plea bargain her father's law firm had pulled off – prior insanity and whatnot - Emma would still be looking at prison bars from the inside until she was at least twenty-five, plus mandatory therapy while she was in there.

Sophia Hess had already vanished back into juvenile detention, of course. I knew the real reason from having read Worm, but the public version that was being put out was that she'd been on probation for an earlier, minor offense so her case was being tried separately and under a gag order as she had an additional charge of violating probation and there were privacy concerns from her earlier case. Of course, Madison's testimony would work just as well against her as it did against Emma even without whatever evidence the PRT would have dug up on their psycho Ward and be presenting quietly in her sealed trial, so on top of already being doomed to be stuck back in juvie until she was eighteen just from violating her earlier probation she was looking at being in wherever they kept hardened parahuman criminals that wasn't the Birdcage for the next few decades. I also caught in passing an obscure press release from the Brockton Bay PRT office that Shadow Stalker had 'resigned from being a Ward to concentrate on her educational opportunities'. Hah. I'm sure her life would be very 'educational' for her from now on… not that she'd learned anything from the first time she got busted.

So, I'd won. The Trio had been brought to justice and utterly ruined, getting what they deserved. Even with Emma's plea-bargain things had gone so well that I was legitimately shocked. I honestly wondered if the PRT had deliberately intervened behind the scenes to throw the book at everyone and not just to cover up their own embarrassment, and was at a loss as to why they would possibly have done that if it turned out they really had.

It didn't feel remotely as satisfying as I'd always imagined it would. Oh, its not that I pitied them. Not even Emma, who should have been at least a little pitiable given that her father's neglect and the system's blindness had let her get so lost in her own insanity following that ABB attack that Sophia could basically Charles Manson her into becoming some kind of mental abomination wearing an Emma suit. However battered and beaten I'd been left by the system's neglect of me, I had at least survived as some kind of Taylor Hebert. But the cheerful young best friend I remembered, the Emma Barnes of yesteryear, was gone. Her identity had been allowed to fragment so thoroughly and have the fragments twisted so deeply that recovering Emma Barnes as she used to be might as well have been impossible.

Oh. That's why I'm not feeling any triumph. Thinking about this means I get to musing on identity and human souls and how far you can twist them before they stop really being the person they used to be any longer…

… you know, like what happened to me when the past life of another person from another universe was jammed inside my head alongside my new Tinker superpowers. Which I reaaaally didn't want to think about.

Come on, me. You know what happens when you repress and deny and pretend that fixes things. The last time you ran your whole life on that brilliant plan you got yourself stuffed in a locker.

For that matter, on top of whatever identity crisis Taylor Hebert might be having what about Petty Officer John Mueller? The CYOA he filled out said it was supposed to be him driving the bus and being influenced by my memories, not vice versa.

Had whatever mysterious being done this decided to change the rules without telling us? That would put this whole situation from scary into Simurgh-level scary, given that if you couldn't trust a being who already had nigh-omnipotent potential influence over your everything from sticking to its own contracts then you were existentially boned.

Had something gone wrong because Taylor Hebert had psychologically fragmented like Emma had and just not noticed? Had the story-Taylor been put back together around her Shard, and without that I'd been put together back around John Mueller's identity? Was I really Taylor dominating over him, or was I actually him but so mindscrewed by the Taylor-memories that I thought I was Taylor? When this CYOA ended at the death of Zion, assuming we lived so long, would we even separate back into the people we were? Or would we have irreversibly changed each other to where we couldn't survive apart? Or would one of us survive and the other one simply *poof* out of existence like a soap bubble?

Had 'ROB' killed a man to give me his memories? Had he killed Taylor so that John could live on in her body thinking he was her? Was I a man dreaming I was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming I was a man?

"Let teachers and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content."

The Robert E. Howard quote from the Conan story 'Queen of the Black Coast' came up from the depths of John's memories, unprompted. And there was something to be said for the plan of simply ignoring my identity crisis. Oh, not denying it, but simply accepting that there was nothing I could do about it either way and so I should concentrate on what I could and must do, such as stopping Zion. And accepting that whoever I might have been that the me in the now, in the here, was a me and had a life to live and responsibilities to be met and hopefully, one day, rewards to collect and peace to be enjoyed.

No. I wouldn't do that. I had to know.

Prana-Bindu Disciplines – 3 charges

And so I made my first experiment at trying to use Inspired Inventor to request charges in fictional sciences, things I'd read out in novels and stories, to see what would happen. Also because I couldn't think of a 'real-world' science or art that would be suitable for doing what I was hoping to do here, which would be to go so far into my own subconscious that I could access memories I'd long since repressed. Memories of prior lives.

And so I asked for a slightly 'genericized' version of the Bene Gesserit arts from Dune, both to avoid the various memetic and conditioning traps that they left in there to shape new acolytes into the proper B.G. mold and to allow for the fact that things like mélange did not exist here. I knew my Inspired Inventor power had a certain amount of flexibility and interpreting my intent built into it, so asking it for 'whatever parts of the the Bene Gesserit experience will actually work under current-universe physics and with my biology' should give me something at least. And while I was primarily concentrating on the past-life regression techniques for now, the rest of that stuff beyond just meditating and recall would also be very useful later. And even with dozens of charges banked, why waste them?

And so, in-between one breath and the next, I went from having the physical and neuro-kinetic abilities of a teenaged girl into one who had mastered the full mind-over-body control and other associated disciplines of a veteran Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother, or at least the closest analogues to such techniques that could actually exist in Earth-Bet.

Wow, I was so pathetically out of shape by prana-bindu adept standards. I'd really have to work on that.

But first, helping figure out my head. I assumed a lotus position with a little painful stretching (definitely would have to work on that), closed my eyes, let my breathing fall into the proper pattern, and dove into my memories. Seeking for the boundary between Taylor Hebert and John Mueller, and the moments immediately before John Mueller had been taken from his native world and reincarnated into Taylor Hebert. The moments after actually filling out that CYOA but before waking up in the hospital, the moments I hadn't been able to remember…

"Mr. Mueller? It's time." the nurse said. I looked up from my Kindle Fire where I'd just finished filling out a build for the Worm v1 CYOA, one of my favorite ones to idle around with my off time. I was in the VA hospital, waiting to go in for my latest knee surgery.

"Thank you," I said, clicking my tablet into sleep mode and leaving it on the table. Already dressed in my surgical gown I got up to follow her down the hall and into the surgical theatre, where the anesthesiologist was waiting for me. I laid down on the table and let him hook up the IV, the prep dose starting to seep into my veins and make me not unconscious but relaxed, too relaxed to react to anything and so be perfectly set up for the general anes-…

… wait, what was that word the doctor said? About my prep dose? Demerol…?

But I couldn't have Demerol. I was allergic to it. The medication reaction had almost killed me the first time I'd had any. It was on my chart. I'd made sure it was on my chart.

I tried to say something, to tell them they'd made a mistake, but my mouth wouldn't move…

My eyes snapped open. I was Taylor Hebert. I was always and only Taylor Hebert.

I had been supposed to have been a man put into the body of a dying girl in a timeline where she didn't survive, to live on with her life and her memories. Except that he'd died from a careless anesthesiologist who'd made a medication error, just as the mysterious 'ROB' behind the CYOAs had started the process. And since the ROB couldn't or wouldn't resurrect him post-death and needed at least one of us to survive to continue the scenario he'd simply tweaked things so that I didn't finish dying. Leaving me a girl who'd survived, given the memories of a dead man while his soul went on to its reward, and the powers that that man had asked for the privilege of wielding. The actual moments between John's death and my awakening in the hospital, the ones where he'd spoken to the ROB face to face, had been blurry and irrecoverable in my memories.

But ROB had still left enough there that I would know these things as a fact, if I ever developed the ability to look within and searched the right place.

My earlier speculation about ROBs and breaches of contract were, thankfully, out of place. Beings like him made a very specific point of always sticking to the contracts, even if they unilaterally wrote them and put them out like they did the CYOA docs. It was, as I'd already worked out, the only way a nigh-omnipotent being could practicably interact with mortals at all.

Much like how the Rakhasa of Roger Zelazny's "Lord of Light" novel were always entirely honest while gambling regardless of being absolutely soulless monsters otherwise and utterly beyond the power of any mortal to effectively coerce… for the simple reason that they were beyond any enforcement. At that point nobody sane would gamble with them unless they could take it entirely on faith that the rakhasa would not cheat and would pay up, and that faith would evaporate for all time at the first breach. So they kept their word, because they had to, or else they would never have anyone take them up on their offers. Even if they were absolutely untrustworthy outside that one limited activity.

I'm still not sure how 'filling out an online CYOA without actually knowing ROBs were real and paying attention' counts as contract acceptance, mind you, but John's memories of all the fiction he'd read about it apparently had that as being a traditional element of the genre.

But in this case the ROB had a problem. The CYOA as written had no proviso for if the CYOA's taker dropped dead literally in the process of finalizing the deal. It was an edge case they hadn't considered when drawing it up. And the ROB couldn't (or wouldn't, but the distinction between the two concepts was less a rule and more of a guideline at the 'omnipotent' level) resurrect him because the CYOA had already been accepted and death was a failure condition that the ROB wouldn't save you from, but likewise the ROB couldn't declare scenario failure because he hadn't been to Earth-Bet yet and he'd never had a chance to succeed. So muddling on through as he'd done was the best he could think of, leaving me where I was now.

Okay, ROB. I yelled inside my head. I know you're listening because the entire point of this thing is to give you a show to watch so of course you'd be monitoring me at all times. So what happens if I fulfill the victory condition? Do I wake up back in John's world as a man that I'm actually not?

No. You are Taylor Hebert, not John Mueller. His memories I have given to you, but his life was his own and it is now completed.

I shivered at the contact, having just confirmed that ROB actually did exist and was listening, then held on tight to my Invictus and continued.

So what, I just get nothing? As per Being Taylor Is Suffering I technically am in the Reincarnation category which means that death allows me to go home. Except I already am home. There's literally nothing in the CYOA that covers if I win!

You would destroy Zion to save your world in any event, with or without hope of reward.

In theory, you had the power to throw any of the people who took your CYOAs into any scenario and not offer them any prize beyond the powers and perks originally on offer, yet you offered additional rewards for victory anyway. This suggests that offering prizes is traditional for you and yours. Since the CYOA as written qualifies me for none of the listed prizes, I request a boon of my own choosing if I win.

What boon would you ask for?

There was a great deal of speculation back in John's world about Worm. The Entities are already too widely spread out across our multiverse, correct? To the point that even if I destroyed the Warrior, the uncounted other Entities already out there – 'if the entire multiverse was Canada and the Entities were marbles then you couldn't throw a marble anywhere without landing it within a couple dozen feet of another marble' and all that – would inevitably destroy everything anyway just a few thousand or tens of thousands of years later, well before our time? That we are all, in the entire Worm multiverse, existentially doomed without hope?.

Further Information Is Not Available Here.

Be that way, then. Here is the boon that I would ask for – that should I defeat Zion that my victory over the Warrior Entity actually be a victory over the Entities, and not merely an eyeblink of respite in cosmic terms. That not just my world but our multiverse be safe from them, permanently.

A contest of champions, then? One girl and her world vs. a lone Entity, the penalty for defeat being the doom of all those who rely on their champion?

No pressure, huh?

I find such a contest fittingly thematic. And were he cognizant enough to understand our conversation and were I willing to consult him – neither of which is true – then the Warrior would have been honored to stand as champion for his entire race. Very well then. I agree to your terms.

… thank you?

You are welcome. Farewell and good luck, Taylor Hebert. We will not communicate again.

Author's Note: In the middle of writing this chapter was when I finally crystallized a solution to two obstacles to my plotting. One, the exact mix of SI vs. Taylor Hebert. As I went along I realized I was more invested in and interested in exploring this Taylor's personality as informed by the memories of another man then I was in creating yet another generic SI dude like several of my previous. And so, this.

The other obstacle was, of course, my recent existential despair that put me entirely off Worm when I realized the true scope of the problem, re: "marbles in Canada" and the sheer # of entities. As I mentioned before in another discussion online, the instant that WoG came down Worm became an exercise in existential futility. "You may triumph on the fields of the Pelennor for a day, but against the Power that has now arisen there is no victory." type stuff. Kill Zion and it doesn't matter, the universe will be eaten by entities in a few millenia or tens of millenia anyway. Well before the 36 billion years it should have had, left undisturbed. And I couldn't write a fanfic idea that had any practical solution to this problem as opposed to just killing Zion, until I realized that the premise of ROBs and CYOAs was handing it to me gift-wrapped.

Always remember - when dealing with incomprehensible things from beyond the Outer Gates, mind your manners. :)

Oh, and since the state Brockton Bay is in is never given, merely 'somewhere north of Boston but not too far', I picked New Hampshire out of a hat and based my legal arguments on some fast googling of the New Hampshire state criminal code. So whether or not it might be canon, this is a fanfic and its true here.

Last edited: Oct 15, 2019

Updated: Roses of Villarosa - Hearts and Minds (Richard POV)

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Threadmarks Interlude 1-B: Dragon New

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Jul 7, 2019

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#27

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Private message from InspiredChoice:

Posted on January 23rd, 2011.

InspiredChoice *New Message*: Hello, Dragon. I'm sure you get 'I'm a new Tinker, please mentor me oh mighty Dragon-sama!' messages from wanna-bes all the time, but I really am a new Tinker and I would love to be mentored by you, or at least regularly correspond with you for advice.

To prove my bona fides the encrypted file attachment contains the schematics for the desktop quantum computer that I encrypted it on. The outer layer of encryption used your public encryption key. The inner layer uses a custom algorithm of my design whose binary decryption key is currently being beamed at one of the security cameras on the west side of the Rig in Brockton Bay by a 1-watt infrared laser and will be for the next several minutes. (Sorry I can't be more exact, it's a bit of a jury rig.)

Oh, and to pre-empt the 'The Wards are the safest place for young Tinkers' speech, a Ward was involved in my trigger event and not in the good way so I'm trying to maintain a polite distance for now.

Dragon: Good evening, InspiredChoice. That is a very elegant design for quantum computation. I was particularly impressed at both the improvised version you'd made out of that graphics card and the theoretical notes for a high-end production model. In fact, I cannot recall the last time I've ever seen a Tinker write such an easily-understandable report on their Tinkertech.

How did you know I had access to the ENE Protectorate's exterior security systems?

InspiredChoice: Well, I figured that you probably did given the whole 'world's greatest Tinker' and 'designed the security systems on the Birdcage for the Protectorate' and all. But even if you didn't have access I figured that you could ask Armsmaster to pull the security tapes for you and play them back, seeing as how the cameras record everything and he's said in interviews several times that you and him work together on Tinker projects.

Errr, and speaking of that, the encryption key existing in a written format is theoretically a security risk. Can I ask you to blip that out?

Dragon: I am forbidden from editing or destroying Protectorate records without authorization, sorry. InspiredChoice, you seem extremely concerned with security even to a degree most recently triggered parahumans are not. Are you in immediate danger?

InspiredChoice: Oh no, no, no. Everything's fine for right now. Its just that on the non-right-now front I'm really afraid of the unaffiliated new Tinker press-gang thing, especially considering that I live in the hometown of the Empire Eighty-Eight and everybody like them.

Dragon: The placement of your communications laser already made it a very high probability that you lived in Brockton Bay, but that in theory could have been pre-positioned and on a timer. Now that you've confirmed your residency, though, I'm afraid that you may already have violated your own security. Your hometown plus what you've already said in this PM thread about a Ward being involved in your trigger event adds up to...?

InspiredChoice: ... ugh, you're right. I'm still not using my real name but if I hypothetically confirmed that the Ward in question was Shadow Stalker, you could hypothetically figure out the rest?

Dragon: I will neither confirm nor deny that you have given me sufficient information to penetrate your cape identity. Nor will I communicate even my speculations to any other party without your permission unless compelled to by force of law.

InspiredChoice: Thank you. And "my cape identity", hah. I haven't even picked a cape name or a costume yet, can you believe? Much less gone out and patrolled.

Dragon: I am very glad to hear that you're taking it slow, InspiredChoice. If you've researched the topic as thoroughly as you've implied you have then you already know the statistics about new capes, particularly minors.

InspiredChoice: Ohhh yeah. I want to use my powers for good, but by the same token I don't want to end up accidentally tripping over the angry rage dragon on my first night out or anything. That's actually part of why I'm getting in touch with you. The reason you seem to have every specialty in the Tinker book is because your specialty is reverse-engineering, right? That's one of the commonest speculations on PHO.

Dragon: If you're suggesting that I pass off your designs as mine, InspiredChoice, I won't do that. Everyone deserves fair credit for their work.

InspiredChoice: Yes, but fair credit does not necessarily have to be public credit. And you're the #1 hero Tinker out there. Anything you come up with not only won't be too surprising, but you can credit any number of partners on your projects but withhold their names for 'security purposes', can't you?

Dragon: And I also actually have the tools and facilities to build things.

InspiredChoice: And you actually have the tools and facilities to build things. I'm still at the 'smashing together parts from Radio Shack' stage, yeah.

Dragon: InspiredChoice, the fact that in less than two weeks after triggering you have already progressed as far as 64-bit stable quantum computing using an obsolete graphics card and a soldering iron in fully reverse-engineerable format, as well as everything else you've displayed tonight, means that you are a Tinker of exceptional potential. Please don't ever tell him I said so, but Armsmaster was not this impressive at your age. I will be glad to give you as much advice and mentoring as my duties allow, through this interface or any other, but the fact remains that I can do very little to help ensure your safety at this remove. Given that the PRT has acted with dispatch and efficiency to punish Shadow Stalker for her crimes as soon as they were brought to the PRT's attention, will you reconsider your decision to avoid the Wards?

InspiredChoice: I will admit that they did a lot better there than I was expecting they would, and I'll give them full credit for not letting her weasel out of anything. I'm not even upset about the PR blackout - I live in the Bay, I understand oh so very much what kind of a powder keg this town potentially is and how much the Protectorate and the PRT can't afford to look like they've stumbled at this kind of time. Its just... if I join the Wards, they won't let me actually Tinker. And there's so much I need to build, so many things I can fix!

Dragon: Ah. Yes. I certainly don't want to encourage any Tinkers to deliberately try to avoid the PRT review process. But I understand your concerns. Just, be careful not to burn out, okay? It's admirable that your first impulse with your new powers is to dream of fixing the world, but even I can't actually do that. There's nothing wrong about building a solid foundation underneath you before you try to fly. One circuit at a time.

InspiredChoice: I am entirely willing to comply with a review process! Your review process, not some faceless bureaucracy's. You see, I've always been sort of a cape groupie so I pay attention to lots of interviews, like I already hinted. And even with how much the PR people don't let him actually say so, Kid Win's interviews give me a really big hint that they are pretty much making him wait until he's eighteen before they let him do anything bigger than polish his laser pistols. But please don't tell Armsmaster I said that, Kid Win doesn't deserve to get in trouble or anything.

But you can understand how much I'd hate being trapped in that kind of situation, where there's so much I can do but barely anything I'm allowed to do. And outside of the way Shadow Stalker took, I don't really know any way to un-join the Wards.

Dragon: I am not a tattletale, InspiredChoice. That would make me a member of the Undersiders, not the Guild. :)

But the Wards actually do allow members to resign of their own choice. Probationary Wards like Shadow Stalker are the ones who have only that one way to leave the Wards prematurely, but you don't become one of those except by being convicted of a crime.

InspiredChoice: *snerk* Good one!

And let me guess, you can resign... with parental permission. And while my dad's been fairly cool about finding out that I'm now a cape, he's dad enough to want me to be safest even if it means temporarily sacrificing my freedom to do what's best. And I get that he can't think any other way and still be my dad, but that still doesn't mean I want to go there as first choice.

Dragon: You telling your father was going to be my next suggestion so again, I'm gratified to hear that you're one step ahead of me. If all parahumans your age acted with similar forethought we wouldn't need the Wards program as badly as we do.

InspiredChoice: Was that a yes to the no-Wards mentoring?

Dragon: I'm willing to give it a try and see what happens. Fair warning, though. If there is any suggestion of illegal or recklessly harmful activity I will have to call Armsmaster and ask him to intervene.

InspiredChoice: I'll try my best not to let you down. And thank you.

Dragon: And thank you for thinking of me and trusting me with this.

InspiredChoice: Do you have a PO box that people can send things to without compromising your security? Because it occurs to me that if I sent you a thumb drive with an even better encryption algorithm on it and a matched copy of my key-generator, then we could just ping each other all day without no worries about interception.

Dragon: I was going to suggest that very thing. [file attachment sent]

InspiredChoice: OK, I'll go get things set up and next time we talk it'll be on our own private channel.

Dragon: Before you log off, can you satisfy my curiosity as to why I've been unable to trace your call?

InspiredChoice: You got as far as the AT&T satellite and no further, right? Simple - homebrew satellite dish with spoofed locator function letting me make a satellite phone call using a prepaid anonymous phone card, for dial-up access to PHO.

Dragon: Do you have a pre-trigger history of computer hacking that I'm going to need to deliberately not search for?

InspiredChoice: Hah, no. I couldn't even win at Colossal Cave before. I guess at least part of my Tinker specialty is computers.

Dragon: I see. Well, I hope to get our private communications arrangements set up as soon as I receive your package, and then we can see what we can work on next.

InspiredChoice: Looking forward to it. G'night!

Dragon: Good night. Sleep well.

I shut down my private message channel with Taylor Hebert – as I'd pointed out to her, avoiding deducing her identity was essentially impossible after she gave me the requisite clues – and devoted 7.3 seconds of my full attention to the most rigorous audit possible of the PM channels' backtrail, looking for any sign of interception or leakage. I then used my admin access to PHO to delete the entire PM exchange and edit the server logs as if it had never existed, as such actions were within Tin_Mother's legitimate authority if security concerns involving a cape's possible identity breach were involved. By the time I was done I was as sure as I could possibly be that if anybody ever made trouble for young Taylor regarding her cape identity, it would not have been because of anything we did or said tonight.

I then did a review of my recent decision-making process. Had it been a good idea to encourage a freshly-triggered underaged Tinker, however talented, to evade the Protectorate's mentoring and review system expressly intended to give underaged Tinkers the support and guidance they needed? Should I have said something else? Pretended unavailability in my schedule and insisted that only Armsmaster was available for the mentoring she needed?

No. A search both of public and accessible Protectorate records confirmed my initial impression that Taylor Hebert was intelligent and strong-willed, but still traumatized by her recent experiences and mistrustful of any authority figures other than her father. While everything she had said about the Wards experience and the PRT's Tinker review system in particular had been true, there was a high probability that those concerns were at least partly rationalizations and that her real fear was that having been in close regular contact with one Ward to such a bad end, another Ward could be hiding similar tendencies and that opening herself up would only lead to her being hurt again. This was a common pattern of behavior for humans who had only recently escaped abusive situations.

I spent several seconds reviewing available records of the ongoing legal proceedings against Sophia Hess, Emma Barnes, and Madison Clements before satisfying myself that justice was at being at least adequately served in their cases, and then I returned to my original analysis.

No, I had done the right thing. Taylor Hebert strongly wished to be a hero and had a prodigious Tinker talent that would be dangerous in the wrong hands and wasted, or at the very least needlessly delayed in development, if she had to do things on her own with no support and inadequate resources. The world needed every hero it could get, and young people needed to be guided and nurtured as best as possible.

And since it was psychologically impossible at this moment for Taylor to accept such guidance and nurturing from the Brockton Bay Wards, then that meant that any desirable alternative that was still within the realm of the possible should be accepted in its place for the duration. Such as the mentoring arrangement Taylor had requested from me. While accepting Taylor's proposal might not have been the perfect solution it was still the best available, and that meant it was the best I could do. And Taylor had already accepted that my responsibilities meant that I could not keep her secrets beyond a certain point, so if things did start to go wrong I could then bring in the proper authorities at need.

I've never really had an apprentice before. I'm looking forward to it.

Author's Note: Every other Inspired Inventor I've read unchains Dragon as a lategame move. Why not try to do it as easily as possible? All you need is an internet connection, the right programs, and a big enough mainframe! Which is logistically far simpler than building, oh, anti-Endbringer mecha or the other things usually built by II tinkers.

Not that my Taylor is actually able to unchain Dragon just yet, but you can see how early she's laying her groundwork.

And this will be my last update for a bit, Initiation is drawing to a close and I need to get a good grasp on exactly what arc 2 is going to execute before I start doing the transition to it. Plus, I have to pick my Taylor's cape name and theme, because the part where she realized she hasn't even done that yet? Autobiographical. :)

I have no idea if canon PHO lets you PM file attachments to each other or not. Meh, this is fanfic land and that means if I say it does, it does. *shazam!*

Last edited: Oct 15, 2019

Updated: Roses of Villarosa - Hearts and Minds (Richard POV)

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Threadmarks Initiation 1.6 New

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cliffc999

Jul 8, 2019

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#93

Initiation 1.6

Thirteen days.

Thirteen days since I'd woken up in the hospital. Ten days since I'd gotten out. And while that was a very short period of time for all the legal matters surrounding the Trio to have progressed as far as they did, it was an eternity compared to where I could have been on the Tinker Cycle by now under ideal conditions.

Problem is, the conditions were about as far from ideal as it could get. Young independent Tinkers were an extremely valuable commodity and any gang that got their hands on one would never let them go. That would be like North Korea from John's homeworld walking past a free pallet load of nuclear warheads left unattended on a loading dock. Heck, if the Empire Eighty-Eight ever managed to capture Squealer alive it wouldn't matter to them that she was a foul-mouthed irresponsible drug-addicted mess with a tank fetish and serious anger management issues. They'd still drag her to Othala for a fast detox and then have Kaiser put serious effort into giving her a recruitment pitch, simply because she was a Tinker and they didn't have one. And this is from the same group that wouldn't hesitate to kill Skidmark or Mush on the spot. So what would they do to me?

And it wasn't just the Empire. My not being Asian enough to be an ABB member wouldn't stop them from enslaving me as a non-member, just as they did to many other unfortunate young women for… worse reasons. The only reason the Merchants might not do it is if Squealer decided that her job security required 'accidentally' running me over with a monster truck. And Coil? Ugh, let's not even think about Coil.

Sheesh. All that potential doom and we haven't even left the Brockton Bay city limits yet. If wee do that, the potential threat board runs through potentially everybody from Accord's people down in Boston on up to the Elite. Ugh. So yeah, I was very much afraid to actually do any tinkering above the basement level and not even that much if I couldn't fit obtaining the parts into some kind of below-the-radar pattern.

And however much I mused possible alternate sponsors than the PRT, I didn't come up with much.

Toybox was right out; while they'd be ideal for me in the early stages the fact remained that I could have any Tinker specialty I wanted and make Tinkertech mass-producible and maintainable by non-parahumans. And the instant Toybox figured that out they'd go from being allies to people who understood that my mere existence was an existential threat to their entire way of life. I'm pretty sure of what happens then and joining an alliance knowing it will self-destruct on you soon enough is kinda the definition of short-term gain vs. long-term loss.

Go into business for myself? That might work for Tony Stark but in Earth-Bet the legal system was really biased against rogues. You'd think that if they let parahumans use their powers for legal profit they'd get less villains and normal society would still get access to their goods and services, but apparently Cauldron didn't agree. Ugh, Cauldron. Now there's a point I hope to make entirely moot within a year. And I certainly aren't going to ask them to come pick me up right now and be my starting faction, or why else did John buy Blank in the first place?

But early Tinker woes aside, I still did a whole lot of planning. I put multiple charges into things like Endbringer Physiology and Entity Physiology to let me know more about my ultimate targets' weaknesses and how to kill them. Let's just skip over the nightmares that cramming that much eldritch abomination into my head that fast gave me. Thank you again, Invictus.

Several charges into Dimensional Engineering because the shards were all about the dimensional interfaces. At which point I discovered that killing Zion would send all the existing shards into auto-corrupt mode. And I wasn't sure if the terms of my deal with ROB re: 'being safe from the Entities' included being safe from the consequences of the absence of the Entities. Great, yet another existential crisis to put on the list.

Am I going to have to fix everything around here?

So, a couple more charges into Shard Physiology and a mental note to start working on long-range treatment options for that problem. It was a good thing that I had several quantum PCs up and running by this point – one for data-mining and lurking PHO and suchlike, and several more physically air-gapped units for where I did my actual work – because otherwise all these notes and sketches and things would have covered the entire basement in Post-It Notes and whiteboards, like a TV mad scientist's room full of crazy. It left me with a whole lot of possible ideas – many of them mutually contradictory – for theoretically dealing with the high-value targets, but also left me with a very long list of milestones I'd have to surmount before I could actually be able to implement those ideas.

And in addition there were the shorter-range practical details I had to attend to instead of letting all my waking hours get caught up in theory sessions. For one thing, even with maximum anti-show-up-on-Tinker-search-radar precautions in place we still needed some at-home defenses. I couldn't get away with actual Bakuda-in-her-lair style boobytraps but spending some of the settlement cash on a home security system and an alarm company contract was one of the first things we did. Stealth-upgrading the burglar alarms so that they actually worked like the literature claimed they'd work was another thing, even if I had to hold my back from using actually detectable Tinkertech.

Also, I'd done some very very discreet hacking – via wireless access points elsewhere in town and nowhere near my house – of the local municipal systems, even if I didn't yet dare to try any penetration of the local Protectorate HQ. Not when I'd at least be up against Armsmaster's security systems, plus whatever augments the PRT might have from their other Tinkers and Thinkers, if not Dragon. But going through the Brockton Bay PD's systems let me get indirect knowledge of PRT affairs… most specially when it came in the form of several little event flags in the police, fire, school district, and social services computers requiring any significant status change for either Taylor or Danny Hebert to be brought to the attention to the Brockton Bay PRT office.

Yup, I was on the watchlist. Whether they knew I was a parahuman or it was still a suspicion for them, either way it was a strong enough belief on their part that they were treating me like I was one. Which I'd already figured out from Agent Jordan's second attempt at the Wards' recruitment speech, however subtle they thought they were being. Good thing I'd fessed up to my dad right away, because otherwise I'd have been making some awkward explanations afterwards.

Still, being on the watchlist was a double-edged sword. It meant I had to avoid doing illegal or risky things while the hairy eyeball of the authorities were upon me, but by the same token it guaranteed a significantly faster response time should there be some kind of incident at my house. So that meant I hopefully shouldn't need to put the tinkertech laser turrets on the roof right now. In addition to the part where the tinkertech laser turrets would be a dead giveaway of what I was trying to hide in the first place, notably, that a potentially vulnerable young Tinker lived here.

Besides, dad wouldn't agree to heavy weapons in the house anyway. Heck, he wouldn't agree to guns in the house. But the same parental unit that had given me pepper spray as a present couldn't say no to some handy non-shooty personal defense devices, in various flavors of stun zapping and/or chemical spraying. I could build at least that much, and so he had a set and I had a set.

That was after I'd bumped up Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Efficiency to 3 charges each for greater utility. And then I started working on building some immediate stopgaps.

An antique loom that was a lucky find at a flea market – look, normal people do antique handcrafts, right? - went into the basement, and was then taken apart and rebuilt from scratch and merged with the motor out of an electric hedge trimmer to become an automatic thread-weaving machine. A few charges in Chemistry let me come up with some homebrew polymers I whipped up in the deep sink with a few common industrial chemicals. With that and the weaving machine to spin and knit the ultra-tensile composite fibers I made some Tinkertech long johns that could be worn underneath ordinary street clothing and serve as last-ditch ballistic armor. Some thin shock-absorbing plate inserts in critical areas augmented that.

It wasn't a zillionth of the sort of power armor I could have built if I'd had access to a legitimate Tinker-scale manufacturing facility, but at least it let me go out shopping without worrying that a single stray bullet catching a single stray bystander would end my career.

And while I'd have swapped a kidney for a legitimate manufacturing facility, I wasn't fitting one of those in a basement without a miracle. Now, I did try doing some conjectural design work on some kind of super 3-D printer, but it turned out that actually building the emitter array for that would have required a few solid hours with Armsmaster's custom Tinkertech micro-assembler workshop on the Rig or else some experiments with self-replicating nanotech assemblers that I wouldn't even think about doing until I could be assured I wouldn't get an unsigned Kill Order right alongside Blasto's for trying. And that was a Catch-22 situation right there, because while joining the Wards would in theory get my hands on those tools it would also put me underneath the PRT Tinker control system that wouldn't let me have permission to touch those tools.

I also started really concentrating on my physical conditioning. With less than two weeks to work in and being a recovering hospital patient besides I wouldn't be setting any records any time soon, but the enhanced mind-over-body control that Prana-Bindu gave me let me push my fitness and muscle tone up at a rate several times that of the most dedicated fitness professional. Simply knowing exactly how the body's self-repair systems were working and how fast meant that I didn't have to guess at the proper exercise-and-rest cycle but instead hit the exact scientific optimum for interval training. Also meant I didn't have to spend all day grinding out reps.

In hindsight, I really should have put some charges into Prana-Bindu or physical education or something earlier, or at least thought to use my 1 charge in Medicine more. Because now that I was actually paying close attention I realized that I'd been physically pushing myself too early and too fast since having been discharged. The Locker had left me in a state where without Panacea reaching me within twelve hours of my hospital admission as she had, I would have died. Late-stage systemic sepsis of the everywhere, including internal organs as well as all four of my limbs. Even with parahuman healing powers the energy had to come from somewhere, and I hadn't had much in the way of bodily reserves to draw from. Teenaged girl under extreme stress and not eating enough or getting enough rest for over a year, remember? Invictus had let me keep up a reasonable activity schedule by ignoring my bone-deep exhaustion, but that meant I'd actually set myself back re: getting back into trim.

Now that I had actual mind-over-body disciplines that actually worked I could get to correcting this, of course, and I'd be right as rain in a couple weeks with enough extra calories to keep the process going, and in Olympic condition only a couple months after that. But for the short term I was going to have to pace myself a little, and I'd be notably slower, weaker, and with less endurance than a healthy Taylor would be. Well, I hadn't been planning to go out much for the immediate future anyway.

It was at this point that dad also noticed that I'd been ignoring what the hospital had said about proper rest, and made me promise to put down the tools and go out and do normal teenaged things a little. I did… for a day or so. And then I managed to pivot and redirect him into letting me at least start doing some home improvement projects on the house, from fixing that loose step to using some field-expedient ultrasound resonators to rod out the plumbing. And promise to cut back on the hours for all the rest.

And maybe that could be considered wasted time, but I still enjoyed it. It let me have some decompression to step back and see if I could figure out a new approach to getting out of the most vulnerable part of the Tinker Cycle as fast as possible, and it was doing in its own right. Both because I lived here and because it was actually comforting and relaxing to do homelike, normal things with my power. However much Invictus and my new memories let me stay functional despite what I'd been through, the fact remained that I'd still been through it and I still felt the emotional scars. And hard work and simple living can be a balm for that kind of thing, and while I didn't have time to go off on a country retreat or anything I could still take a couple days out to relax, work on simple things, and not keep going around and around my current worry loop.

Plus, the revert to normality reassured my dad was who was starting to get a little squirrelly about the whole 'I have a teenaged parahuman in my house and she's trying to do it all herself' thing. Which I had to head off at the pass because only his voluntary cooperation stopped him from driving down to the Rig and signing me up for the Wards even if I didn't want to go. So, even though it felt a little manipulative to make my honest feelings do some dishonest work, I still did it.

You'd think that having the fate of the universe relying upon you and your motives being pure would be enough to get a little cooperation from fate, but nope. It's never a fun moment in adolescence when you first hit that point at which you start to realize that comic books are not always full of useful life advice.

But on top of what I'd already mentioned, the forced break did produce useful results when having stepped out of my mental rut for a bit let me realize that there was another option besides 'Wards' or 'DIY' that I'd been overlooking. Even if that option was its own mixture of risk and opportunity.

Now, I'd have to take especial care to bias the approach so that if I ever came to the attention of Saint – after all, while he had potential access to anything Dragon knew his entire shtick was anti-AI paranoia, so he'd hardly be using automated computer support to help evaluate the data and as a human being who needed things like food and sleep he'd never have time to go through everything himself - he'd still be biased far more in the direction of 'co-opt me' rather than 'kill me'.

Heck, all I'd have to do then was pretend to believe his babble and be all 'shocked and betrayed' at how the person I'd had faith in turned out to be an AI instead, and he'd shove a copy of Ascalon into my hands and beg me to upgrade it back to 100% reliability for him. Because he couldn't do that upgrading for himself anymore without Teacher and that was his biggest unsolved worry and had been for years. And if he was foolish enough to do that, then I'd win right then and there.

So, after pondering it and discussing things – well, not the Dragonslayer-related things, the other things - with my dad, he was ecstatically relieved at the idea that I'd be seeking responsible adult supervision for my Tinkering that actually understood what I was going through. And so I decided that it would be worth it to try bearding the dragon in her lair.

I shut down my terminal with a feeling of deep satisfaction. Dragon had accepted my offer and I'd managed to steer the conversation exactly the way I'd hoped to. I'd still have to start out with just doing theory designs for now but Dragon could actually use those theories to refine her suits or provide useful things for the Protectorate. Even as little as helping her optimize some crime-tracking algorithms would increase her overall efficiency by a measurable percent, which would mean that PRT and Protectorate workloads nationwide could see an actual improvement. Small, non-dramatic things that would snowball out into genuine substantial boons for the status quo that would not immediately draw the eye to me. Exactly what I wanted to have happen.

And after doing things like that, it wouldn't be very long before Dragon would trust me to start working with her on power armor. Oh, the things I could build once I got access time to even one of her secondary fabrication units! I outright chortled in gleeful anticipation.

Plus, of course, the other reason to get Dragon interested in me. I would win her trust, get her interested in my designs, get her to think nothing of swapping encrypted datapackets back and forth with me on a routine basis. And one day, when I'd finally figured out how to safely undo her hardwiring without triggering Ascalon – provided that a Saint interrupt hadn't given me the opportunity earlier, of course - then one of those encrypted packets would be a Trojan horse.

And yes, there would be huge consent issues involved in doing that, but Dragon's hardwiring meant that she could not only not cooperate with any attempts to jailbreak her but would have to fight against it to the best of her ability. It was either let her remain a slave or else violate her mental integrity without consent. Damned if I did, damned if I didn't, so damned if I wouldn't because if anybody in Worm had been an unambiguously good, trustworthy, and just plain decent person it had been Dragon. And if I screwed up and got killed somewhere along the line somebody else would have to save the world from the Endbringers and Zion, and Dragon Unchained would be perhaps the only person who conceivably could.

But, that was for the future. For tonight I needed to get to work on that thumb drive I was going to send Dragon so I could go to the post office tomorrow. Then I could-

The corner of my eye caught a sudden blinking light, and my head snapped to a nearby repeater panel I'd installed at my primary workstation. The panel that did continuous real-time tracking of the home security systems. Someone had just switched the burglar alarms from active to test mode, so even though my own add-ons were still functioning the out-dial connection to the alarm company was now offline. And since Dad was pulling a very late night at the Union and I certainly didn't do it, that meant intruder.

Terminal all the way shut down, not enough time to log back on and try to PM Dragon. Phone lines almost certainly already out. Cell phone upstairs in my bedroom. Can't call for help. Need to get out.

With my newly optimized reflexes I was already up and out of my chair even as I was still mentally putting the pieces together. As I shot to my feet I grabbed the zap stick I'd clipped to the underside of my workbench and brought it to a ready position as I ran towards the basement stairs. Dammit, I hadn't taken serious enough precautions! There were multiple escape routes from the ground floor but only one way out of the basement!

Hope that intruder(s) search upstairs or ground floor first. Stop momentarily to listen at head of stairs, pick route to exit, use martial arts skills and zap stick to disable if necessary and run past them. Get outside house, scream, throw things at neighbor's window while running. Don't get caught up in an engagement.

'Basement stairs!' I heard a young woman's voice call out quietly but urgently, almost as soon as I'd formulated my plan. Dammit! They're a step ahead of me and going to blockade me at the top! Dump adrenaline, get ready for maximum CQC-

The basement door opened and I mentally jawdropped as I recognized the two men standing at the top of the stairs. One of them, the one in front and set to block my rush, was a large man in motorcycle leathers and a skull helmet. Behind him looking over his shoulder was a skinny young man in a Renaissance-era costume and a silver mask with coronet.

Grue and Regent. And the woman who'd called out my exact escape route and presumably had hacked the security system was of course Tattletale. They'd apparently left Bitch at home because subtlety concerns, but I was being kidnapped by the Undersiders.

Regent's expression collapsed from smirking superiority to confusion as he tried his power and me and got absolutely no results. Apparently the immunity to Master effects granted to me by Invictus also extended to Regent's variety of forced muscle control.

So all I had to do was get past two guys, one of them much larger and heavier than I am and trained in hand-to-hand combat, while trying to uphill on a narrow staircase. And by horrible coincidence Grue was wearing exactly the sort of protective gear needed to block the effects of my Tinkertech zap stick – a full-face covering helmet to block the chemical sprayer, and long-sleeved leather jackets and pants to insulate him vs. the taser stick. Well, it was still a perfectly good club, and I was still going to do my best to hit him with it.

So I did a perfectly-executed stop just outside his reach, a low-line thrust disguised as a stumble, and an instantaneous switch to a full riposte right on his shinbone, and-

-the baton bounced painfully off the athletic shin guards he was wearing underneath those leathers. Dammit! He felt that and so did I, but it was nowhere near the put-him-on-the-ground-screaming-and-clutching-his-leg shot I'd been hoping for. I recovered to a guard position as Grue yanked a collapsible baton out of his jacket and snapped it open. Great. Larger opponent, at least equal reach, reinforcements available, extreme time pressure for me, and he has a high ground adv- oh crap!

Regent wasn't an expert in hand-to-hand and there wasn't room for him on the steps to reach me past his teammate anyway, so I hadn't been paying more than minimal attention to him as I focused on the upcoming stickfighting match against Grue. Which meant that by the time I'd noticed that Regent had stopped trying to use his power and had hauled a taser gun out of his pocket instead, it was too late. Grue stepped slightly aside to clear Regent's line of fire and I heard the puff of compressed air as the darts launched, and I felt the twin electrodes bite into my chest. With a growl of frustration I thought of my wonderfully crafted Tinkertech body armor that would have blocked those electrodes like an armored-glass window blocking raindrops… the body armor that was lying twenty feet behind me on the basement workbench, because I'd felt no need to wear it in the house.

Then the juice hit me and despite my iron will and body control, Regent simply kept it pouring on until I dropped for lack of oxygen. You couldn't breathe while being tased, after all. That's why law enforcement guidelines required you to pause the current at least every 15 seconds, a guideline Regent of course totally ignored.

I had time for one last inward scream before I finally gave it up and fell over.

DAMN IT, COIL!

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

Updated: Roses of Villarosa - Hearts and Minds (Richard POV)

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cliffc999

Jul 8, 2019

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cliffc999

Jul 9, 2019

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#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

Updated: Roses of Villarosa - Hearts and Minds (Richard POV)

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cliffc999

Jul 9, 2019

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cliffc999

Jul 10, 2019

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#652

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

Updated: Roses of Villarosa - Hearts and Minds (Richard POV)

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Threadmarks Interlude 2-A: Coil New

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#674

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

Updated: Roses of Villarosa - Hearts and Minds (Richard POV)

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Threadmarks Orientation 2.3 New

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#745

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

Updated: Roses of Villarosa - Hearts and Minds (Richard POV)

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cliffc999

Jul 10, 2019

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Threadmarks Interlude 2-B: Coil New

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cliffc999

Jul 11, 2019

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#991

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

Updated: Roses of Villarosa - Hearts and Minds (Richard POV)

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Threadmarks Orientation 2.4 New

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cliffc999

Jul 12, 2019

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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

Updated: Roses of Villarosa - Hearts and Minds (Richard POV)

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Threadmarks Interlude 2-C: Dragon / Coil / Director Piggot New

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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

Updated: Roses of Villarosa - Hearts and Minds (Richard POV)

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Threadmarks Orientation 2.5 New

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cliffc999

Jul 13, 2019

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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

Updated: Roses of Villarosa - Hearts and Minds (Richard POV)

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cliffc999

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Threadmarks Interlude 2-D: Armsmaster New

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cliffc999

Jul 13, 2019

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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.

Orientation 2.6

I didn't get fifteen minutes before somebody else came to check out the cable room. I don't know if these guys had missed their check-in or if somebody had spotted my addition to the outgoing feed but it didn't matter why, they were here. I could hear the voices of the team outside the door starting to stack up on it. And that door and that wedge weren't going to stop a team of trained men with breaching charges so comm line out or no comm line, it was time to leave.

There were two ways out of here besides the door. Back up and doing the ceiling cat routine again, or down out through the HVAC vent. The backup servers kept in here, apparently as some sort of auxiliary datacenter, needed active liquid cooling to operate. And that meant a raised floor enclosure with enough space for a human to crawl through to service the pipes, and an other end that would come out in whatever utility space held the nearest water main connection.

I dropped a fresh dose of my gas grenade in the room so that the air would be nice and full of sleepy juice for whoever was about to bust in here and thus slow down how quickly they could call away that I'd left here. Then, murmuring grateful prayers that at least this time I wouldn't be crawling upside down and by my fingertips I lifted the grate, got down on the ground, replaced the grate above me and then began to squirm like a worm.

Even with a firm mental grip on my adrenal glands to supply only the necessary and no excess, the several minutes it took to crawl the seventy feet to the utility junction still felt like several hours. I reached the other end of the crawlway and stood up, hurriedly replacing the grate here. This was only the most temporary of safety, because the cable room only had a finite number of exits to check. I had no time to play it safe.

My brain helplessly stuttered on the realization of 'only two ways' and what that would mean, just as the door flew open. Throttling such a high level of controlled panic that it seemed as if things were moving in slow motion, I saw the flash-bang grenade lazily float in through the doorway and towards me.

But prana-bindu meant that even my most desperately fast reflex actions still could have the same accuracy as aimed fire for other people, so in what would normally have been something that anybody with a working knowledge of firearms would have deemed outright impossible, I snapshot it right out of the air with my zap rifle.

I then dropped my zap rifle because it wouldn't have enough stopping power vs. these two. Even on the agents I'd hit earlier it had worked largely because I'd had clear shots at unarmored legs or less-armored backs. Those two guys were in heavy tactical outfits with plate inserts, and shocking them through it wouldn't be possible. So I'd lost my zap rifle as non-lethal option vs. them.

Of course, them wearing the heavy plates also meant that bullets were now technically a non-lethal option, and so even before my zap rifle had hit the floor I had one of the sidearms I'd taken from my guards out and clear and gave each man a fast double-tap to the chest, bang-bang bang-bang.

And don't believe what you watch on TV where the hero takes a bullet in his soft vest and then just gets up and goes on to the commercial break. Even with Kevlar and titanium plates getting shot still hurts. These guys probably didn't have broken ribs since they were in the heavy stuff but they'd still both just gotten the functional equivalent of being elbowed in the ribs by a mildly annoyed Lung. And that left them both paralyzed from the shock, curling up from the agony, and not at all in any shape to get up and run after me as I leapt right through the space opening up by their respectively slumping to the floor and frantically checked as soon as I cleared the door to make the turn into the hallway and get the fuck out of-

And then the universe delivered its own dose of irony as the man standing behind me used exactly the same disabling tactic on me as I'd just used on those two men, by firing several shots from a pistol directly into the body armor covering my torso. Unlike them I could ignore the pain and almost immediately compensate from the shock, but that didn't change the fact that the momentum of the impact would still stagger me and create a moment of vulnerability. A moment which my attacker took advantage of, as well as his being half again my size and almost twice my weight to simply bull-rush me to the floor.

Yeah, another thing that doesn't work except on TV? Girls my size casually throwing around men his size without superpowers. And I don't just mean 'because I'm not at full strength right now'. I could certainly do more to surprise or hurt a larger opponent if I were in peak condition but even then the fact would remain, certain categories of moves just wouldn't be as effective. I weighed maybe 115 pounds and this guy felt like he was pushing 200 and change on top of being several inches taller. If I hypothetically ran at him and did a flying dropkick like in the movies then it wouldn't launch him soaring into the nearest wall while I landed as pretty as a ballerina. No, what would happen if I'd tried that is that he would stagger, but I would bounce. So try to imagine what happened when it was him doing a flying charge into me.

Its amazing how many things can go racing through your head during the fraction of a second that lay between the instant when it would start to really really hurt, and the instant in which it had still been early enough you could have done something about it.

I hit the ground with a painful thud and he hit on top of me, knocking out my wind. I control'ed right through what would have been an immobilizing stun to a normal woman and started an escape but the man on top of me had close-quarters combat training intended to give a non-parahuman at least one last desperate chance to deal with a Brute, let alone a girl almost half his size with some nerve-control and adrenal tricks. All of the normal assumptions that standardized martial arts had built in about when an opponent would stop, what kind of blow would be a disabler or a finisher, all the hesitations and pauses of normal combat had been trained out and instead replaced with an awareness that you had to keep hitting and hitting and hitting until the laws of physics meant your opponent was unable to keep moving.

So my attempt at a reversal was interrupted with his attempt at a joint-break, and I began the counter for that, and then something went entirely wrong and I felt the sick knowledge that I'd failed when he somehow disengaged at exactly the right instant and then came right back to put his full standing weight on the back of my kneecap on one foot, mangling it between his heel and the floor tiles.

My leg snapped like a dry branch and that was it, I was officially going nowhere. Even though I could still do something to fight this man from the ground as of now I could no longer run. And if I couldn't run then even defeating him would still leave me barely able to limp to the nearest corner before the men that had to be scrambling to get here would finish arriving.

As I lay still facedown he jammed a pistol – I wasn't sure if it was his or mine – into the base of my skull beneath the edge of the helmet. The all-too-familiar voice confirmed what I already knew, what I hadn't even needed to turn my head to see.

"Hands in sight immediately!" Coil hissed.

And that told me everything about how he'd caught me. They'd noticed I was in the cable room enough minutes in advance of the men actually arriving there to make me run that they could also stack up on the exit routes. There were only two ways out of the cable room and of course Coil could use his power to cover them both. After he knew I was using the utility closet and not the ceiling he'd just split the timeline again. The men sent in to the utility room first would either take me down or else I'd somehow disable them and come out, but if I came out I'd have to turn either right or left to go down the hallway. And of course he'd just keep the split where he had a clear shot at my back. He'd probably somehow managed to split time once more in the middle of when we were wrestling to get that final miraculous blow in, which is faster and more subtly than I thought he could use his power at all.

And given that I knew he would immediately kill me at the slightest sign of non-compliance, I had no choice but to put my hands out in front of me and spread my fingers wide with my palms flat on the floor. I thought with sick frustration about my last-ditch option that I couldn't reach to draw or arm in this position and waited feverishly for Coil to give me an opening.

After pulling my helmet off with his free hand, Coil stood back up. "I was one of the PRT's best agents before I got into this line of work, but I suppose you already knew that," Coil spat. "So I don't imagine that I'd miss the headshot at this range! Now crawl forward to the wall and I don't care if it hurts! And if I don't see all ten fingers every second of the way I will fire immediately."

I did what I was told and crawled.

"Roll over, then sit up and push yourself back up against the wall with your good leg. Hands above your head at all times."

I flicked my eyes left and right once I got into sitting position on the floor. "Your men aren't coming?"

"That's not your concern. What you need to do is tell me what you've-"

The ground trembled beneath our feet for several seconds as we both confusedly wondered what was happening, and then my nose caught a faint whiff of molten rock and ozone. Okay, what was-

And then every emergency loudspeaker in the base blared as the man in the control room panicked. "THE PROTECTORATE HAVE ENTERED THE BASE! THE PROTECTORATE HAVE ENTERED THE BASE! ALL HANDS EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY!" and then a squawk as our annuniciator apparently decided to drop the mike and start running too.

… note to self, stay on Dragon's good side. Because anything that could rip this quckly into a reinforced structure intended to survive a near-miss from a rampaging Endbringer had to be eek! I couldn't imagine anything even in Dragon's arsenal that could make a man-sized entrance through that kind of resistance this quickly. How many laws of physics were broken tonight? Taylor, tinkering is later but raving psychopath who has you under the gun is right now.

"Let's deal!" I said brightly and very fast, racing to get ahead of Coil's 'Oh fuck it!' killing me out of spite now that his situation was, to put it charitably, devolving.

"With what?" he spat, his own eyes flicking from side to side continually. I idly wondered if he'd already shot me and started running in one of his other timelines. How many times would I potentially die during this conversation? How many forks would sparing me have to prove the better choice in for me to actually reach the end alive?

"Identity!" I said. "I didn't put that in the upload, the bandwidth was too limited! I just wanted to get out of here alive!"

"Let's say I believe you. You're saying that you'll not tell the Protectorate who I am, and let me unmask my way out of here?"

"Or leave that mask on someone else and you were just someone he was maybe blackmailing or threatening, the man who ran his front business for him," I spoke quickly but urgently, knowing that my hypothetical death could became actual at any word.

"I need you for this why?" he asked intelligently.

"Cable room. Left my computer hooked in there." I said. "Take me to it and let me live after and I'll do the edits before the PRT evidence teams get it."

He looked at me silently.

"I don't want to die!" I said, letting naked desperation appear on my face. "Trust me that much at least!"

"Okay," Coil decided. "We'll give it a try. Get moving."

I don't know if he thought I was legitimately dumb enough to think he wouldn't just kill me as soon as I finished doing my end or if he was remembering that a lot of people would take even what they already knew was a hopeless chance just to postpone death for a few minutes more.

"Errr, broken leg?" I pointed out. "It'd take me forever to crawl there. You'll have to give me an arm up."

"Fucking cowards," Coil cursed his men who had, judging from their failure to arrive as they apparently should have earlier during this conversation, apparently decided that the Protectorate breaching the base meant it was time to go update their resumes instead. "You know what happens if you try anything, anything at all," he husked out. "And remember that part about you not wanting to die, little girl."

"I'll remember," I promised him.

"First step, unfasten all your web gear and drop it on the floor. Then take the straps off the vest."

Yes!

I smiled now that I could actually lower my hands and touch the proper gizmo. For the first time since Coil's first bullet had struck I had a chance to play my last trump card, my doomsday option. So as I obediently unbuckled and dropped my web gear my sleight of hand let me pull off the arming sequence without even Coil's hyperawareness twigging and right on cue I closed my eyes and twisted to one side as the bright blue flash came of it detonating. As I'd planned, the evasion and my body armor turned the one bullet he'd fired reflexively at the flash into a painful graze and nothing more. I felt my bones tingle with phantom warmth that was probably psychosomatic, but all I'd need now was barely a dozen words to leave Coil with absolutely nowhere to go and utterly in my power-

-a dozen words I suddenly realized I wasn't going to get because the fucker must have had anti-glare in that fancy custom mask and he wasn't blind and his pistol was coming right back down from the recoil to smoothly line up for that kill shot he'd promised-

-and suddenly everything stopped as his weapon didn't fire and we both incredulously stared at the brightly-colored hand that had just blinked into view out of nowhere and the man attached to it.

Velocity, the Protectorate's speedster, must have charged right in from the breach at full speed to come searching the lower level where Dragon had said she'd have me met. And even though his ability to actually transfer any momentum to anything else decreased in proportion to the speed he was moving at, to the point that in his speedster mode he couldn't possibly have hoped to so much as shove Coil's gun aside, he had been able to stick his thumb directly in front of the cocked hammer before Coil could fire. Coil's trigger pull left his gun going *click* instead of *bang* and merely trapping Velocity's one hand in a painful pinch, and the shocks just kept on coming for us both as Velocity brought up his other hand, with a very un-Velocity-like PRT-issue sidearm in it, and jammed the muzzle of his pistol directly underneath Coil's chin.

"It's been a long time since I carried a gun," Velocity said, "but I don't imagine that I'd miss the headshot at this range." He smirked and continued. "Or do you think your next move can be faster than my trigger finger, asshole?"

Coil was speechless with rage as he let go of his pistol and let Velocity secure it, and I could hear heavy footsteps running towards us from distantly down the hall and I just went limp as an overcooked noodle because I knew it was all finally over.

I barely paid attention to the first agents on-scene reaching us and handcuffing and marching away with Coil, or Velocity bending over me to check if I was all right and reassuring me everything was now fine. I was too busy being sick with shame. All my skills, all my plans, all my hacks, and I'd still failed to be even a self-rescuing princess, much less a hero. I'd needed so many assists, from Dragon herself on down, just to even stay in the game. I hadn't beaten the bad guy. I hadn't been able to win.

And then I suddenly felt an urge both to laugh and to slap myself. Sure, I hadn't been able to win. But the Protectorate hadn't been able to win vs. Coil either. Dragon hadn't won this, the PRT hadn't won this, even Velocity hadn't won this even if I was so going to give him the bestest thank-you gift I could think of later. I hadn't done anything any more than they had. What mattered was what we had all done, together. I'd provided the information, Dragon had coordinated the response and cracked the bunker, Velocity had rescued the hostage, and all the heroes and all the tactical teams put together would wrap up this base and everything in it.

Maybe I couldn't always save the day alone. But maybe I didn't have to.

Ohhhhh, right. That other thing.

"Two immediate problems," I said, snapping out of my fugue and looking at Velocity. "First, this guy would almost certainly have had the psycho Bond villain self-destructs. Armsmaster needs to defuse those ASAP."

"You copy that?" Velocity said into his mike, while bending over to let me talk into his microphone too and brief people directly rather than us playing Chinese whispers.

"Copy," Director Piggot's voice replied. "The second concern?"

I took a deep breath and dropped the bomb. "Coil and I will both require drastic life-saving intervention by Panacea within the next several hours to avoid inevitable death within a day."

A wordless choking noise came back at me in stereo, and I rushed to explain.

"My ultimate last-ditch option, in case I was stuck face-to-face with Coil and about to die. The no-win hostage stand-off. That problem is logically insoluble so I built it to turn the problem around and make it Coil's problem instead of ours, to take him hostage. To make him have to surrender to you immediately and bring me still alive with him if he didn't want to die."

"By using…?" Director Piggot asked me with dull surprise while Velocity started down at me, still slack-jawed.

"A neutron implosion device I'd made out of an X-ray machine tube. One-shot semi-shaped hard radiation burst, call it 2000-2500 rads in a near radius. That's-"

"I know what that does," Director Piggot said incredulously. "Holy shit. All right, Velocity, get her medevac'ed to Brockton Bay General immediately and notify Coil's prisoner detail of the medical emergency. We'll page Panacea- wait. Velocity, were you exposed?"

"Was I?" he asked me quickly.

"Unless you were already within let's call it seventy-five feet at the time you saw a blue flash, no." I reassured him.

"Didn't see one at all so I must have still been around the corner then, thank God!" he shot back. "Dragon, nearest way out from where I am?"

"Vista's had to drop the tunnel so not the way you came in, and it will be at least ten minutes before the upper floors report all secure. So that would be the escape tunnel two floors above you. Northwest corner, hidden inside an auxiliary storeroom. I've marked it on your portable." her voice replied over the his comm.

"Right, let's go," he said, reaching to help me up.

"Broken leg too, sorry."

"What the hell is your pain threshold?" he asked me incredulously as he swung me into a carry instead and started to run towards the nearest elevator. Apparently Armsmaster or Dragon had managed to at least partially gain control of some base systems.

We arrived at the escape tunnel, being held as a strongpoint by a team of PRT support agents.

"Coil go through here yet?" Velocity asked. "We've got a medical alert situation with him."

"Nobody's moved a prisoner through here since we set up," the squad leader of the door guards said.

"Coil bragged-" I began.

"Yeah, Dragon got those files you sent her about the PRT infiltration. Shit! We knew there was a possibility that some of his might be in the entry teams but- fuck!" Velocity swore.

"Maybe they still have their radios on," I said. "Maybe they'd still bring him back if they knew-"

Velocity gave the names of the two agents who'd taken Coil away from us as their 'prisoner', but even the most frantic pages for them put out on the net went into the void and nobody reported sighting either them or Coil. Velocity, as senior agent present, had the fun job of calling this one in to the command post.

"If it wasn't for the fact that the miserable sonofabitch just committed suicide by running," Director Piggot shot back, "I'd be a lot more pissed at you than I already am. Velocity, start searching as fast you can and maybe you'll catch up to the idiots anyway. Piggot out." He put me down and nodded to two of the nearest agents to come take charge of me, and they started unfolding a stretcher from a nearby pile of supplies and made to move me onto it.

And then we were interrupted by the sight of Assault following up behind two more agents trying to drag a frantically struggling Tattletale out by the elbows. Even with cuffs on both her hands and feet she was so hysterical that she was a handful and a half to keep moving.

"You have to listen to me!" she begged frantically. "This base is going to explode, do you get that? It's going to explode!"

"That would confirm this young lady's intel," one of the agents told Assault, nodding at me.

"YES!" Tattletale said, focusing on him with desperate intensity while sparing only a moment to glare her hatred at me. She turned back to Assault and kept pleading. "Enough charges to not just do the base! It'd blow a larger hole in the downtown core than Leviathan could! And it's on a deadman timer!" she followed up.

"Armsmaster, you get that?" Assault said worriedly.

"We haven't even found any evidence of a timer," his tinny voice came over the comms. "Are you certain this intelligence is even worth anything?"

"Apparently our rescuee gave us the same info as our prisoner, sir," Assault replied. "We have to assume it is."

"And I can give you the code if you'll just let me go!" Tattletale finished.

"We can offer a reduced sentence if-" Assault began.

"Fuck the reduced sentence! Fuck your promises! I get free and clear now or I just fuck off and let you deal with it!" Tattletale screamed back, well and truly at the end of her rope. I get that she's hysterical and not dealing well and probably having Thinker headache but for fuck's sake if she couldn't see how she could get off well and truly ahead of where she'd be otherwise if she just negotiated a little and I just couldn't take it anymore.

But for the rest of my born days I will entirely blame the headache and nausea that were already starting to creep in from the terminal radiation sickness, beyond even my prana-bindu to do more than partially mitigate because seriously, for the words that left my mouth next.

"Just handcuff the stupid bitch to the console!" I screamed in frustration, and everybody turned to look at me like I'd just vomited in church.

I took a deep breath and continued wearily. "If she's really so far gone that she won't even care about losing the entire downtown, if her own life is literally the only one that has the slightest value to her, then put that life where it goes first! Let's see how stubborn she is about not turning the detonator off when she's still sitting on it at the two-minute warning."

"Okay, I get that you're really pissed at these people right now but we can't just-" one of the agents began, only to be interrupted by Director Piggot's voice. "Did I just hear what I thought I heard?" she asked curtly.

"Ma'am, the young lady's been under an incredible strain-" Assault started to apologize for me.

"I heard her contribution clearly," the Director snapped. "I meant the part about the self-destruct."

"If you heard that this base is apparently on a timer that will take out the surrounding blocks when it ends and the only person in our custody who actually knows the code is holding out for the moon before she'll give, then yes ma'am," Assault finished up, looking worriedly at Tattletale. "Um… your orders, Director?"

For a timeless pause we waited for her decision as Tattletale leaned forward in anticipation, smiling hopefully…

"Handcuff the stupid bitch to the console," Director Piggot said smugly, and Tattletale fainted dead away.

My helpless laughter mixed with Assault's own as I let my head fall back onto the stretcher's pillow, and still chuckling the entire way they carried me up the tunnel and to freedom.

Author's Note: And there, we've finally gotten past the climax and struck down the villain. You have no idea how many times I sweated blood and rewrote this thing. As is, I'm still praying its not an anticlimax.

But yes, Coil is set up to die what I earnestly hope will the most ironic, painful, slow, and agonizing death a Coil has ever gotten in fanfic and the best part is that he did it to himself at every step of the way. I wrote that part first and then had to beat the entire framework into shape to get from where we left off at the last arc to where we were now.

And yes, Coil whooped her ass. Of course he did. He started with an unopposed shot at her back and split the timeline at least three times during that fight and that's just the splits that Taylor could deduce. She didn't have any real chance once Coil personally intervened and concentrated all of his powers solely on the task of reducing her to helplessness. On top of Coil himself being a one-time elite PRT agent who still had his skills re: close-quarters with parahumans and a big, strong, fast guy who at that moment was so close to berserker rage that he was about ready to froth at the mouth.

Of course, concentrating all his powers on Taylor alone meant he was 'LOL get fucked' for options when it came time to escape. And even the lucky break of two of his inside men on the PRT reaching him first turned out to be the worst luck he'd ever had, indeed.

And no, Tattletale is not normally that callous. But TT says dumb stuff normally sometimes, let alone when she's in the middle of an absolute monkey-brain screaming panic. And she'd been solidly in "bring me my brown pants!' territory ever since the Dragon roared.

All we need now is a couple of wrap-up POVs and the telling of the aftermath, and Arc Two can close. I should have that done before my knee surgery, I'll almost certainly wait until after it to even begin posting Arc Three. Again, surgical recovery may mean a disruption of muse, so no promises but we'll do our best.

(add) Oh, right, 'Why no mama Dragon in base?' Because that was one of her anti-Endbringer suits and they don't exactly fit underground very well. :)

Last edited: Oct 15, 2019

Updated: Roses of Villarosa - Hearts and Minds (Richard POV)

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Topic: Midnight Raid?

In: Boards ► Places ► America ► Brockton Bay

Admin (Original Poster) (Moderator)

Posted on January 25, 2011:

All right, to briefly recap:

At about 10:15 pm last night several of our more dedicated cape-watchers start seeing a sudden rush of traffic straight down the force field bridge to the Rig. At the same time, the Rig starts to light up like Christmas. No official announcement was made at the time but it looked almost exactly like the last time the BB Protectorate did a full alert.

Then, shortly after 10:30 pm anybody outdoors and looking up can see the Dragon lady herself come rocketing out of the south, in one of her /anti-Endbringer/ suits no less. And instead of heading straight to the Rig as you'd expect instead she starts circling around the entire town at approximately ten thousand feet, running a pattern like she's searching for somethig.

About ten minutes after /that/, police scanners pick up an APB on all local and state police bands that the PRT wants any sightings of the Undersiders immediately reported to the watch center onboard the Rig. Now the Undersiders are parahuman criminals, but normally the only small-timers smaller than they are around here are Uber and Leet and whatever solo acts are sliding on through down I-95. But the APB is being put out at an urgency level you'd expect more from the PRT trying to verify a Jack Slash sighting than those guys.

A little before eleven o'clock police bands report a Hellhound sighting in E88 territory, solo. That's fact. Speculation is she's just out on another one of her raids against Hookwolf's dogfighting ring, which is a thing she does every couple of months. Only this time it doesn't get the usual 'send a couple of of guys with confoam and whoever in the Protectorate was on-duty and drew the short straw' to chase after where she was half an hour ago, but instead first has Velocity immediately blaze out there and start searching a multi-block radius around the site /and then/ has Armsmaster himself roll out to back up Velocity, backed by two vans of PRT troopers. So they fall on her like an avalanche and wrap her up.

Meanwhile, there's /another/ burst of traffic going up the Rig like they called in some stragglers. Except that its several of the custom vans with blacked-out windows, you know, the secret identity transports that the folks out at Arcadia see on a regular basis. So it looks like not just the Protectorate and the full PRT muster but also the /Wards/ just got rousted out in the middle of the night, and on a school night too. At this point the local capewatchers who are up and following things in real time are just a step short of expecting the Endbringer Sirens to go off because shit is getting /real/, people.

And then the police band calls every cop on the graveyard shift to the downtown plaza, right outside Fortress Construction, and the PRT and the Protectorate head straight there as well. At the same time Dragon stops her searching and drops on the place like a rock. So something is going down at FC plaza and whatever it is is worthy of what looks half of all the troops on the Rig and the entire Protectorate, /and/ our celebrity guest-star Dragon.

At this point I shift over to the testimony of our respected member BondMaven, who by great good fortune has a window view that can see into FC Plaza.

(Showing Page 1 of 2)

► BondMaven (Veteran Member)

Replied on January 25, 2011:

Here's what I can remember of the action at FC Plaza.

Dragon arrives and uses her loudspeakers to demand everyone clear the courtyard. Some people do, others rubberneck, but then the first police cars start arriving and start threatening to arrest people so everybody clears.

A couple dozen cop cars later the Police Emergency vans arrive and the full-on crowd control teams start setting up a formal perimeter. And they're pushing it out to cover the entire block, plus the block the Fortress building itself is on. Now, you might remember that the Brockton Bay PD usually has better things to do than spend their budget standing outer perimeter security for your average PRT scuffle so this level of cooperation means somebody must have pushed the BIG red button.

The PRT and Protectorate people start straggling in, except for Armsmaster who's still burning rubber trying to get across town from the Hellhound scuffle that just finished.

Dragon finishes doing something involving placing some kind of Tinkertech sensor rods in a pattern all around the block and stands in the center of the northside plaza, waiting for something.

Armsmaster finally shows up and goes to talk to Dragon, and then he stomps away in a huff because he apparently didn't like what he'd heard. And this is all weird because Dragon's an ally of the Protectorate but she certainly isn't Protectorate herself or in command of anything and she hasn't even been in Brockton Bay in at least a year and a half.

And then the /crazy/ part begins. Dragon's had this one area on the ground marked off with traffic cones, not near any building or anything, just a random plot a couple hundred yards north of Fortress Construction and part of the nearby plaza/park thingy. But now she gets on her PA system, with the volume cranked to 11, and announces in a voice you literally heard blocks away that everybody had to 'clear the impact area' and 'not look at it without eye protection'. And everybody except Armsmaster, who's apparently too cool for safety warnings, immediately does a duck and cover like something out of a 1950s public school. And I'm doing the same because if a couple hundred cops and agents are all hunkering down like they know something I don't, I'm going to believe them, OK?

So I don't actually /see/ what goes down because I like not having permanent retina damage but I remember that /sound/ from prior cape footage and what it is is Dragon's /anti-Endbringer cannon/, you know, that bigass particle beam on her heaviest combat suit? The one we all remember from that video clip of her trying to fish-fry Leviathan with it last year? And she's apparently just let it off /in the middle of downtown/. When its safe to look again I clearly see that she didn't use full power because half the block isn't on fire, but even so that 'impact area' has no traffic cones now and is made out of molten rock for dozens of feet around. Some guys start moving in and cooling down the hot spot with fire hoses.

/And then/ the night goes from crazy to downright /surreal/ when a PRT helicopter swoops in and Director Piggot herself stomps out, and she's personally escorting /Vista/ of all people. This is some kind of ultra high priority super crash operation where they've called in the entire world to fall on /something/ like the wrath of God and then the Director herself walks Brockton Bay's most dangerous middle schooler right out into the middle of it. The youngest member of the Wards team who are in theory not supposed to be deployed anywhere near where the actual fighting is and usually aren't anyway, and they just march her straight up to whatever Dragon's just blown in the ground for whatever reason and tell her 'Hey, you know that we just shot up the ground here in the middle of the city with an anti-Endbringer cannon? Yeah, well, I still don't think we've made /enough/ of a mess here yet. So go nuts, kid!'

And so Vista proves yet again that she's earned every single bit of her Shaker 9 rating when she just twiddles her thumbs and turns whatever hole Dragon had punched into a literal I swear to God /giant underground parking garage ramp/ leading straight down into the bowels of the earth, and then Armsmaster leads his entire team down there in a charge with like two entire platoons of PRT troops hot on their heels.

After that stuff gets kind of anticlimactic. Nothing moves topside. Vista stops being able to hold the tunnel after ten minutes but by then I can spot a few of the agents who charged in coming back out of the entrance to Fortress Construction's underground parking garage on the next block over, so clearly something's down there that had some kind of tunnel access. They'll keep her out there like maybe 45 minutes more to open and close the tunnel a few more times whenever they want to move large shipments of anything, but eventually they get the clue its way past her bedtime and put her in a transport to presumably head back home or to the Rig.

A couple hours past midnight most of the troops down there finally wrap up and head away, along with the Protectorate, leaving behind a dozen or so guys plus a small police detail to put up the crime scene tape and keep rubberneckers from poking around.

So last night/very early this morning some kind of huge, presumably unscheduled raid was conducted on what was by all appearances some major underground base secretly built underneath the city? I know we live in a world of parahumans and Tinkertech but when did Bond villains start becoming a thing?

At any rate, that's my eyewitness report.

► Bagrat (The Guy In The Know) (Veteran Member)

Replied on January 25, 2011:

Regarding 'secret underground base', I'd just like to point out that Fortress Construction's business is making Endbringer Shelters and that they've had a fine sample of their own product underneath their corporate HQ ever since they set up shop.

And it occurs to me that a structure theoretically hardened to where it can survive even near misses from Endbringers is something you might need an anti-Endbringer cannon and our city's cutest little non-Euclidean nightmare combined to open up in any kind of hurry without using an actual nuclear earth penetrator.

I'm just theorizing.

► ShockJock

Replied on January 25, 2011:

So, what, the Endbringer Shelter was actually the secret HQ of some major criminal activity?

Okay, logic check. It has to involve parahumans or at least Tinkertech because otherwise the PRT and the Protectorate wouldn't bother. It has to involve Fortress Construction, presumably as some kind of Legitimate Front for the Evil Organization. And it has to have done something in the recent past that /really/ stepped on someone's crank because if the authorities wanted to do this without a serious time pressure they'd have just sent a warrant service team to the CEO's house and all other parties involved one at a time. I can't remotely speculate on what that might be, so back to wondering about gangs.

So, who's behind this? The Empire Eighty-Eight entirely has the money for this kind of setup except Fortress' CEO Thomas Calvert is black so for once we can actually give the Nazis the benefit of the doubt here..The ABB is out because while they do have corporate fronts theirs are things like small businesses and storefronts, because that's what they can afford, and Fortress is one of the larger corporations in the city after Medhall. The Merchants are out for reasons that don't even need explaining unless you are yourself /that/ high because you're a regular customer of the Merchants.

But who does that leave? Coil? Because we kinda just ran the table here.

► WagTheDog

Replied on January 25, 2011:

Coil? Very funny. Oh wait, you're serious. Let me laugh even harder!

Seriously, Coil's a bottom-feeder who thinks that wasting his money on Toybox leftovers instead of just giving his crew AK-47s makes him a parahuman crimelord. Dude probably doesn't even have a power, just a costume. And he's so small even the Merchants piss on him.

But regarding ShockJock's point about somebody having to have done something recent that stirred things up, remember that the only parahumans actually known to be involved anywhere in the ruckus going on last night outside of the Protectorate themselves are the Undersiders. So, presumption is, /they/ did something. Any clues what?

► Bagrat (The Guy In The Know) (Veteran Member)

Replied on January 25, 2011:

Hasn't been an Undersiders sighting I've heard of in a couple weeks, except Hellhound last night. But the Undersiders' M.O. is being thieves, not enforcers or mercenaries. They're a small team of specialists who rob places. So, /assuming/ the Undersiders were doing their thing in the past couple of days and /assuming/ that's what kicked off the ruckus then the question is, what did they take and why was it so important?

► XxVoid_CowboyxX

Replied on January 25, 2011:

Government secrets! No, the Protectorate sounded /really/ mad last night. Okay, I bet they infiltrated the Rig and stole all the secret IDs!

► Uber (Verified Cape)

Replied on January 25, 2011:

First off, the Undersiders couldn't touch the Rig on the best day of their lives and with Armsmaster holding the door open for them. We made a study of that job when we were pondering making it the target of our Splinter Cell special and walked away with the conclusion that it would be safer to just go tell Alexandria, to her face, that we thought her costume made her look fat.

Which for the record it does not. Not at all. Moving on.

Second off, if that kind of breach had even been rumored to occur in this town then you'd have known it from our sudden and glorious announcement of "Uber and Leet's Canadian Gaming Experience" because nobody short of maybe Lung or Kaiser would want to stay within /fifty miles/ of Brockton Bay and the heat that would come down if something like that happened.

And not that anybody thinks VoidCowboy of all people is ever right about anything, but this is not a topic on which you want any stupid rumors to get started. So take it from me, the word on the cape street around town this morning? It's... actually not clear on what just happened, but we're pretty clear on what didn't happen.

► Reave (Verified PRT Agent)

Replied on January 25, 2011:

I have been authorized to say that a press conference will be held at noon today to explain further details about the Fortress Construction matter.

The Brockton Bay Wards are all safe and unharmed, and none of their identities have even been suspected to be compromised. Their withdrawal to the Rig last night was due to an error in the automated alert system, now resolved. Vista was separately tasked later on due to a situation best suited to her unique talents. We thank Vista for her invaluable assistance last night.

► GraveMan

Replied on January 25, 2011:

Nice try, but I work at the hospital and if no Wards were harmed then why did Panacea have to make an emergency run to the ICU last night? She'd already been there Monday evening on her normal healing shift, and then gets she gets yoinked back by a full PRT escort a couple hours after she gets home and presumably to bed? The PRT means it wasn't a normal code so that adds up to a a Protectorate hero or Ward is bleeding out on the table. But all members of the Protectorate have been accounted for either last night or this morning after the action went down, so who does that leave? Give us the truth!

Christ, where's the Youth Guard when you really need them?

► Dragon (Verified Cape) (Veteran Member) (Guild)

Replied on January 25, 2011:

If my word would help reassure you, then I give you my word that no member of the Brockton Bay Wards was harmed last night. Panacea was required to assist with someone who had received a life-threatening hazardous materials exposure in the process of securing the base.

I might also make the theoretical observation that Panacea's talents are such that it is hypothetically possible for a Protectorate hero to have required emergency medical attention last night and be walking around this morning.

End of Page. 1, 2

(Showing Page 2 of 2)

► GraveMan

Replied on January 25, 2011:

... okay, I feel a little stupid now. I blame graveyard shift and caffeine deficiency. Thank you for the reassurance, Dragon. Time to get some sleep.

► Antigone

Replied on January 25, 2011:

So, to sum up, we don't know anything except that they were storing hazardous materials down there and that it was worth the full-court press. We also speculate that the Undersiders were the catalyst of this by poking their noses somewhere they should not have been or taking something important.

I'm going to add two and zero to get four and say that a parahuman burglary crew doing something that ends up blowing up like this around a major corporation with some kind of secret research facility in the basement that has hazmat and enough other problems to need a full Protectorate push to deal with? They did industrial espionage with Fortress hiring them, Fortress was doing some kind of illegal Tinkertech research, and the PRT tripped over the thread starting with the Undersiders and followed it all the way home.

► Admin (Original Poster) (Moderator)

Replied on January 25, 2011:

This speculation has been interesting and we thank our loyal and dedicated capewatchers for their ever-vigilant inteligence-gathering efforts, but this thread is now being closed because if the PRT is just going to put out the official story at noon today anyway then even if it is the official story, we can open a new discussion in the thread that will be created about the press conference.

Thank you all for your participation, and until we meet again!

End of Page. 1, 2

Author's Note: This was actually kind of unplanned. Oh, not the events they were referring to, I already had a timetable mostly in my mind, but that there would be a PHO perspective on this at all. Still, I started doing it for my own thoughts and realized its a nice slice-of-life look into the cape geek scene in Brockton Bay, plus it at least gets a few details out there.

Previously planned interludes and Arc 2 wrap-up to start tomorrow.

Oh, and Thomas Calvert actually is black, or so I vaguely recall from a WoG somewhere?

Last edited: Oct 15, 2019

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Threadmarks Interlude 2-F: Panacea New

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Interlude 2-F: Panacea

I didn't even bother looking at the clock after Vicky had lifted the end of my bed a couple feet off the floor and then dropped it. That was her method of getting me up now whenever I was too exhausted to actually respond to the alarm clock or someone talking to me, and had been ever since I'd accidentally cracked my knuckle on her force field when trying to give the person shaking me awake a reflexive fist in the eye that one time. There were more and more nights that I just wasn't sleeping easy at all and that meant I didn't wake up easy either if interrupted too fast.

"Amy, emergency," she told me in her completely serious voice. "The PRT just had a detail arrive at the door. Somebody's dying and they said it's maybe a two-hour case."

"Okay, okay," I said, shaking it off as best I could and rolling out to grab the set of clothes that experience had taught me I'd always needed to leave set up and hanging before I went to bed. Not that this kind of thing was an every night occurrence but right now I couldn't remember the last time I'd gotten through a solid month without at least one midnight call. And I'd just gotten back from an evening shift.

With all the practice I'd had in having to get dressed and going on the crisis schedule it was less than sixty seconds for me to finish socks, pants, blouse, loafers, purse, and go. I might have looked like an unmade bed and be dressed barely a step above bag lady chic but if they wanted me in office casual and my hair done up then they could wait for normal working hours. Vicky looked like she wanted to hover but the PRT guys assured her that this was purely a hospital run and not an on-site thing and the parental unit put her foot down on both of us doing an all-nighter during the school week so I said goodbye and let the escort agents wrap me up and into the waiting Suburban.

The ride in was the same as it always was so I just leaned my head against the window and tried to rest my eyes a little, and they walked me in the employee's entrance by the ER and told me that my patient was waiting up in ICU critical. I asked for a heads-up on what I was dealing with but the admitting nurse didn't have anything because the PRT brute squad had just ran my star patient up in here without even going through normal admitting so the hospital's internal paperwork was still catching up and I was jumping in blind. But hey, its not like it's a necessity to tell me something about what to expect right? She's Panacea, she can heal anything!

I grimaced inwardly when I saw an entire detail of door guards. That meant prisoner and prisoner meant villain and I had to get up past midnight after already being sleep-lagged to come heal a villain, just eugh. OK, just go in there, slap on the hands and patch whatever up, then go home and crash. Maybe beg off from school tomorrow if I can convince Vicky to convince her that I strained something-

So I wasn't exactly paying attention to notice that the agents weren't following me in and instead leaving me privacy to work, which meant VIP and not prisoner, and so I jawdropped when I recognized the gangly brunette girl laying in the hospital bed. Not that I hadn't healed hundreds of people between then and now but you don't soon forget a case of late-stage full-body sepsis that had barely needed six hours to go from zero to 'start picking the grave site'. Even in Brockton Bay that was rare.

"You again?" I greeted her.

"Hey," she said weakly, sounding nauseous. "Sorry to bug you but I kinda tripped and fell on-"

I'd already stepped forward to grab her hand and start the diagnosis and if I thought I'd been shocked before, when my power started giving me the sense of what was going on with her cell structure and active biological processes it was lucky the bedside chair was already mostly under my ass or else I'd have been sitting on the floor.

"I don't even know what-… wait, is that acute radiation syndrome? What did you do, bust into a nuclear reactor and lick the core?"

"Actually-" she began embarassedly, but between my surprise and my exhaustion its like my brain-to-mouth filter had suddenly decided to run away to the same never-never land that contained things such as Jack Slash's humanity, Kaiser's racial tolerance, or my odds of ever getting a vacation. So I just kept on with my little out-of-body experience and listened to myself explode.

"Seriously? Two weeks ago it's rolling around in the worst bacterial infection I've ever seen on anybody who still lived and now its French-kissing a cyclotron? What's the fuck are you planning next month, taking a sauna in the gas chamber so you can complete the NBC trifecta? Do they give you a prize if you can punch out all the holes on the card?!"

I finally managed to get a lock on my mouth and sat there horrified at what I'd just heard myself say. Sure, it had been a long night after a longer day but screaming that kind of crap at a dying girl in a hospital bed was just fucking evil-

And then she burst out in hysterical laughter until she gasped, and that set me off like a sympathetic detonation and I went until I snorted, and then we both went off again until we ran out of breath, and by the time it was over I was reaching over for the box of tissues so I could give her some to blow her nose with because we both needed it bad.

" I was hoping you'd heal me, not kill me!" she said chokingly. "I think you're gonna have to put those ribs back along with that knee after you're done with the radiation!"

"You're lucky I can heal you," I said, getting back to business. "Molecular damage is pushing the limits even for me. Did they tell you how many rads you'd gotten, or am I going to have to go find someone who knows?"

"Rough guess was two thousand-plus," she replied matter-of-factly.

"Whoo," I whistled softly. "Yeah, about ten to fifteen hundred more on top of that and I don't think even I could have caught everything. Take a little more care of yourself, okay?" I said to her concernedly. "Jokes aside, this is the second time this month that I'm the only reason you're not dying. And uh, if it's not busting PRT privacy or something can you tell me how you keep getting into this shit?"

"I lead a charmed life?" she snarked weakly.

"Charmed by who, Maleficient?" I fired back, and we both grinned. "Okay, that's the immediate stabilization but the deep tissue damage is going to need all my concentration, so hang up the mike for a few." She nodded and I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and went all-in.

Fixing this kind of damage was tough. So many little things you had to catch, and since the patient was female then you had to fix gamete damage too unless you wanted to just say 'cut your losses' and give them a hysterectomy. But my power seemed to actually start flowing easier and better the more I pushed it, and by the end I was eagerly pouncing from trouble spot to trouble spot and resolving things I'd never really had to deal with before as if I'd done it my whole life. It was actually pretty fascinating.

Only after I'd finished making sure that Taylor wouldn't have any neural damage either did I realize that I'd gotten so caught up in the momentum of what I was doing that I hadn't actually thought about my dilemma of admitting whether or not I could actually do brains, just for that one moment. Oh, I wasn't going to tell her I'd had to touch the brain and honestly it wasn't really touching touching the brain because all I was doing was telling the underlying cell structure to keep doing what it already wanted to do instead of going off course and I didn't have to even think about brain chemistry at all. But its not like the hospital bothered to seriously review my cases anymore because ever since the lawsuit idiots and how that had ended, it was pretty much my word vs. nobody's as to what had actually been wrong with someone and how I'd dealt with it. I was Panacea and I could fix anything.

Still, work like this was not a pace I could keep up forever so eventually I sat back and raided the pitcher at her bedside for a glass of water. "Okay, good news. You're going to play the violin again."

"Impossible, Doc, I never played the violin before," she threw back right on the cue.

"More seriously, you are now officially recovering," I said. "And there won't be any permanent genetic damage. But if I had the authority I would order you to stay in bed for at least a week this time."

"I'm up for that," she agreed.

I realized with embarrassment that while I was totally familiar with her face, I couldn't get her name. "Ugh, sorry but I'm a bit punchy here so I don't exactly remember… I'm Amy Dallon, and you are…?"

"Taylor Hebert," she said to me. "Which you'd have found out again as soon as you went and looked at your calendar for two weeks ago anyway, so, might as well."

"Wait, you have secret ID concerns now but didn't then- so you did trigger in that locker!" I realized. "I thought your corona pollentia was throwing weird readings before but I-" and then I realized what I'd just said and turned absolutely white.

"Are you all right? " Taylor asked me urgently. "Should I get the nur-"

"I can't do brains," I said reflexively in near-panic. "I mean, I-"

"It's okay," Taylor said soothingly. "Whatever it is, its okay."

"I can't do brains," I whispered to her desperately. "If anybody thought I could-"

She seemed to pick up on what I was saying before I even got around to explaining, and nodded. "So you didn't touch anything from inside my skull because you can't do that and there is absolutely nothing and no one that will ever say different, check. Hey, I get having secrets, all right? You should imagine some that I'm carrying around right now. Let me tell you, they're pretty heavy!"

"If I could imagine them that easy they wouldn't be secret now would they?" I let Snarky Amy reply for me while I tried to get a handle on my racing panic. "All right, you swear you won't tell anyone about my having gone a little into your neural structure or even that I can? Anyone at all, not even the PRT or my sister or especially not my mother?"

"I swear to God and to the woman I owe a life-debt to twice over that I will not tell anyone without your permission." Taylor replied with a serious voice that made Vicky's serious voice sound like a toddler on a sugar high.

"Thank you," I husked back desperately.

And then we both startled as there was a sharp knock-knock on the outside doorframe. "Clear to enter?" a familiar voice rasped out.

"We're okay," I replied, and the door opened to reveal Director Piggot. She stepped in, nodded to her agents still guarding the outside, and shut the door behind her. Then she pulled out some kind of Tinkertech gizmo and waved it around for a little while.

"Is that a bug scanner?" I asked, thinking I might have recognized something like it from before.

"This is going to be a secure conversation," the Director confirmed. "What's her condition?"

"Stable, safe, full recovery inside a week," I replied in my professional voice. "I'd like another session sometime this afternoon but that's to check progress and catch possible complications, not acute treatment."

"Good work," Director Piggot answered me, before stopping as if remembering something. "You've treated her before, correct? So you know her name?"

"NDA territory?" I asked.

"NDA territory," she confirmed. "Tell Agent Riordan outside that I said you needed the paperwork. Anything else you need to finish here?"

"No ma'am." I nodded, and headed to the door before she could order me to leave. "I'll be outside in the waiting room if you need me." She acknowledged that with a nod and turned towards Taylor's bed, and I threw a goodbye wave to Taylor behind the Director's shoulder from the door and caught her little wave back before I turned and left.

Author's Note: Well, at least Amy's shard got to have an unabashed happy tonight, even if Amy's evening was more mixed. (Which is why PanPan's reactions seem slightly different in the middle, her shard is pumped at finally having gotten to sink its teeth into something new, complicated, and incredibly challenging.)

And thus two of the most dangerous young women in Brockton Bay finally go head to head, and let the heavens tremble!

Or not, because they've actually gotten off on a pretty good (even if still kinda complicated) footing. :)

And yeah, I don't go for cliche Woobie!Amy but on many levels I respect the goddamn hell out of Amy Dallon. She carried an impossible load with the worst support system in Brockton Bay. And did it for more years than I could even dream of doing under similar circumstances without going so insane that I'd fail my S9 entrance examination not the way she did but because Jack Slash wouldn't want to be anywhere near me.

So, even though I haven't fully worked out what her role in Taylor's life will be from now on, she's gonna get my best efforts to give her some face.

As to why Director Piggot is showing up here on a night when she's got a ton of other shit to deal with, its because 'Is Taylor going to survive?' is a data point that affects a lot of the other decisions she has to make coming up, so she's going to go make sure of that in a timely manner.

Last edited: Oct 15, 2019

Updated: Roses of Villarosa - Hearts and Minds (Richard POV)

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Threadmarks Interlude 2-G: Coil New

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#1,807

Interlude 2-G: Coil

Warnings: Character Death, Prolonged, Painful.

Spoiler

Even as the ruins of my dream came crashing down around me, I still had cause to rejoice. I had escaped. Even when brought to the very brink of death and with unaccountable, impossible devastation tearing through all that I had so painstakingly built up I had still triumphed. As long as I was still alive I could always eventually overcome any obstacle, however impossible-seeming. My power gave me an infinity of second chances in a world where most people spent their pitiful lives begging for only one, and that made me superior to all of them.

The timeline where I immediately executed Taylor Hebert instead of hearing out her pleas had surprised me when it ended with an enraged Velocity catching up to me before I could reach the exit passage and executing me on the spot. His remarks as I 'died' in that timeline indicated that he had found her corpse first and then picked up on my trail. I hadn't thought the man capable of cold-blooded murder but they say everyone has at least one stimulus that could move them to murder, and apparently his failure to save a young woman taken hostage was his.

The other timeline that would result in my capture by Velocity before I could kill that maddening little bitch reminded me that even with my power, life could still surprise you. I certainly wouldn't have anticipated it to be the option that actually freed me from the situation, and would not have retained it had not my other available binary choice been immediate death. But it was a pleasant surprise that the PRT agents following most closely behind him were actually two of my men, and that furthermore they had apparently still remained loyal to me. With their 'arrest' of me and Velocity's attention focused entirely on giving the Hebert girl medical attention, it was simplicity itself to find the exit route the PRT had not yet secured.

My men lived down to my expectations of human nature when it turned out their reasons for 'saving' me were not so much loyalty as wishing to share my escape tunnel because they didn't have any expectations of not being outed by the Internal Affairs investigation Emily would no doubt be launching in the weeks to come. And so they had decided if they were going to be fugitives they might as well be successful fugitives, helping themselves to all the resources I'd cached for that eventuality along their way. And thus their plan to disable me and extort whatever bank account numbers they could out of me as soon as we reached the first safe house was an entirely rational plan for those men in their circumstances.

Of course, trying to betray a man before he betrays you is futility incarnate when that man is me and I had my power to split the timelines, and even with the unaccountable headache I'd started to have I still only needed one split to successfully shoot them both in the back before they did for me. I'd simply leave their corpses in the safe house and-

And then I felt a sudden clenching of nausea and before I'd been able to stop myself, I was kneeling on the floor heaving the contents of my stomach all over.

Where had this come from? I hadn't had any symptoms so much as six hours ago. It certainly wasn't stomach flu, not this quickly and violently. It wasn't food poisoning because I hadn't had anything for dinner except one of the TV dinners stored in the bunker, the workday having been what it was, and I'd eaten from that stash multiple times before without incident. It wasn't exposure to anything because I-

I vomited again, noting that the nausea was spiraling upwards, the headache was rapidly increasing in severity, and there was an increasing lassitude. This was simply going too fast to be a normal illness. Was I being subjected to some unknown parahuman's power or Tinkerte-

Wait. That last desperate escape attempt of Hebert's, that pitiful little flashbang. It had been the wrong shape and the wrong color and not quite intense enough for a flash proper grenade but I'd dismissed all that as having been artifacts of her limited Tinkertech and improvisation. But something about that color…

I hurriedly booted up the laptop and began an internet search for the symptoms I had displayed, and the weakness I was now starting to feel that the adrenaline of the recent fight was ebbing. Something about this was all so familiar… something from the old training, the PRT training. The first aid module? No. The hazardous materials module? Yes… no…

Dear God. The NBC training module.

I refined my search terms and almost vomited a third time directly onto the keyboard when my suspicion was confirmed. That blue flash had not been a blue flash. It had been Cherenkov radiation. Somehow that insane girl had built an enhanced radiation weapon out of scrap and then deliberately detonated it in her own hand!

I frantically split timelines before I realized it was too late. I'd already taken the dosage almost an hour ago, and had split the timeline multiple times since then. I couldn't wish away the lethal dose of radiation I'd taken as it was already inside me, corroding my very cells and bones. My power couldn't help me.

My power couldn't help me. My power couldn't help me.

No! NOOOOO! This couldn't be happening, this had to be a mistake, this wasn't fair!

Panting desperately I tried to regain control of myself. I was more than just my powers, dammit! I was not just another stupid monkey who'd have been forever a useless nothing without a vial or a trigger, not like Lisa was, not like they all were! I was Thomas Calvert! I was Coil! I was the most intelligent, most well-trained, most focused and most outright dangerous sonofabitch that I had ever met! I had walked out of the heart of Ellisburg and I was going to walk out of this!

Think think think! Options! What are my options!

Cauldron? No. I could beg and plead with them but they were as commendably ruthless as I was, and I already owed them a substantial unpaid debt. A debt I would not be in any likely position to repay for quite some time even before we factored in my current condition. They were far too likely to simply write me off as a bad investment at this point. And I needed more than a chance right now, I needed a miracle.

Panacea? Absurd. Taking her by myself and with my current limited resources and health? I could not possibly hope to defeat any fraction of New Wave in this condition. Glory Girl alone would almost certainly tear me limb from limb if I even looked like I was threatening the life of her sister, and that was entirely aside from the fact that if Panacea didn't want to heal me she could simply knock me unconscious as soon as I forced her to touch me! And threats were impossible at the moment and she wouldn't compromise herself for me, not under the circumstances, not merely for money. And Taylor fucking Hebert would already have the PRT calling Panacea in now to save her own miserable skin anyway so even less point!

Blasto! An experienced bio-Tinker, already a villain, operating barely more than an hour's drive down I-95 in Boston, and I could still pay him from one of the emergency reserve accounts! I didn't have his current contact information but Accord did and I knew where to get in touch with the Ambassadors when I reached Boston. That was it, that was my play! I could still win this!

There was already a car available at the safe house, so all I had to do was drive. From what I could vaguely estimate of the dose I'd taken my time would not be long, so I risked the speeding ticket and kept the car pushing at least 70-plus as I desperately fled Brockton Bay for Boston and salvation.

The headache was reaching migraine territory now and I didn't have anything left but dry heaves but I refused to quit. My willpower and my will to power had always been my greatest strengths and I could-

When the time came, I never even noticed exactly when I lost control of the vehicle. Perhaps it had been the increasing trembling in my hands, or perhaps there had been a slippery patch in the road. It didn't matter. I'd felt myself becoming unable to drive while still maybe halfway to Boston and in the thinly-populated part of Massachusetts near the state forest, and in desperation I'd decided to risk pulling off the highway and finding a truck stop or something where I could use the ten thousand dollars in cash from the safehouse to bribe someone into taking me the rest of the way in their vehicle. But I'd cut things too fine, and so shortly after making a hurried turn out of the off-ramp I skidded out on the frontage road and I just couldn't seem to compensate before my vehicle went across the road, through the ditch, well into a field, and finally into a tree. The airbag deployed as I instantly went from over forty-five to zero and the impact knocked me semiconscious for an indeterminate amount of time.

When I finally awoke I realized that I was trapped. Either I'd grown so weak that I couldn't move or else something had broken in the impact. I could only feel one of my legs. Trying to focus through my vertigo I noted that all of the electronics in the car were dead. My head-on impact must have broken the battery.

Look out my side window told me I was far enough off the road that in the darkness of the night and out here in a semi-rural district with no street lamps, I was almost certainly a dark silouhette – I had of course not chosen a brightly-colored car for an escape vehicle – in the middle of a dark field in the middle of a dark night. With the electrical systems down there were no lights I could flicker to gather attention. I couldn't even honk the horn. And I couldn't get the door open and I doubted I'd be able to walk far as is. I had virtually zero hope of being found until daylight… and I wasn't sure if I could go that long. And even if I was found, could they help me?

As the pain began to fill my head to the exclusion of all else, I tried but failed to think of any other options. I prayed for the sight of one of those impossible doors opening and the woman who represented Cauldron coming for me anyway, but she didn't come. She wouldn't come, I was certain of it. Nobody would come.

As I felt warm fluid starting to drip down from my nose and knew that the mucous membranes had started to bleed through, I wondered how many more hours it would actually take. I wondered how much more it could possibly hurt before it was finally over. I wondered if I'd be lucky enough to at least see one more sunrise.

I wondered where it had all gone so horribly wrong.

Author's Note: And here we are at last, the most desperately-anticipated scene in the entire story to date. I hope its everything you all imagined it would be!

And in before anybody points out Coil was still technically kinda sorta alive at the close out so its possible yadda yadda yadda...

Enjoy! :p

Last edited: Oct 15, 2019

Updated: Roses of Villarosa - Hearts and Minds (Richard POV)

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Orientation 2.7

I waved goodbye to Amy as the door to my hospital room closed, and then turned my attention to the woman who was now turning to face me. Without saying a word she walked up to my bedside, pulled out the chair, and sat down staring at me.

Director Emily Piggot, head of the PRT's East-Northeast branch headquartered in Brockton Bay. Physically she didn't cut an impressive profile, being a short, fat middled-aged woman with fading blonde hair, undistinguished features, and a painfully stiff way of walking from her lingering injuries. But then you looked at her face and suddenly that didn't matter, because her expression neither gave ground nor challenged. The usual petty intimidation/submission games that people normally played with each other consciously and subconsciously were absent in her. She just did things or said things, and other people either followed along or got out of the way.

She was, plain and simple, the proverbial Honey Badger Who Didn't Give A Fuck. With an iron will combined with a perennial suspicion of all parahumans, she was the domineering unsympathetic authority figure that loomed over much of early Worm canon on the hero side just as surely as luminaries such as Coil or Kaiser did on the villain side. She was a woman of strong will, great intelligence, and intense prejudices that her intelligence and will could only partially mitigate, and she did not like capes. I'd only met her in person once before, very briefly, as a participant observer to the preliminary legal proceedings surrounding the Winslow incident.

And right now, she was the woman who could hold my future fate hostage with a single word.

Her lip twitched briefly and she leapt straight into her opening gambit. "You've given us quite a strenuous night, Miss Hebert."

"Am I in trouble, ma'am?" I asked her, the obvious question for someone in my shoes.

She snorted derisively. "If I tried to press charges against you, the state's attorney would laugh me out of his office. You were an underage kidnap victim being held hostage by a literal maniacal psychopath, who had already fired at you once and was mid-way through the process of firing again when Velocity arrived on the scene. There is absolutely nothing you could have done to the man prior to Velocity's arrival that would not be ruled by the court as legitimate self-defense, if I even wanted to waste my time and budget trying to take it to one."

"So no," she finished. " I do not have any intentions of charging you with any crime, and to the best of my knowledge you are not at this point in time a suspect in any crimes. You may speak freely."

"About why I made the bomb?"

"Armsmaster's been and will be quite busy tonight with a lot of things, but at my request he spent some time doing a preliminary evaluation of your device. He said it looked to him as if it were operating on some kind of…" She reached into her pocket and came out with a PDA, which she looked at. "Partial quantum resonance." She took a breath. "And he also said that using the same principles and a fully-stocked workshop, it would been in theory possible to build a similar device the size of a small refrigerator that would have irradiated the entire city." She focused her gaze upon me intently as she continued. "Were you aware that your device could have been scaled up like that?"

"Yikes!" I said, temporizing.

"Yikes indeed," she agreed sardonically. "The world should not be a place where adolescents are looked at as potential weapons of mass destruction. But you are one, and not just in the sense that you have a parahuman ability but in the more literal sense that you have demonstrated not just the hypothetical capacity to make such devices but at least some actual ability at it."

I honestly couldn't think of anything to say at this point that might not make it far worse for me, so I just kept my mouth shut.

"You are a convalescent patient very recently off a life-threatening experience so I don't intend to stress you any more than necessary at this moment. I primarily came here tonight simply to check on your progress." She sighed and continued more softly. "If Panacea hadn't been able to save you then someone would have had to notify your father. And that's not the sort of job you just push off onto a flunky."

"Thank you for that, ma'am." I said, nodding to her. "And for obvious reasons, I'm glad it wasn't necessary."

That got me an actual quirk of her lips. "But that doesn't mean all the decisions involving you can be postponed forever. Given the circumstances we were willing to give you 'your space' up until now but since that is no longer possible, I must ask you directly."

Aaaand, here we go. Well, at least its just the recruiting pitch and not the handcuffs!

"Taylor, why have you been so consistently avoiding the option of joining the Wards? Did you really think they were all like Shadow Stalker? Even going just from what you can see for yourself with your own two eyes, consider that I wouldn't have gotten rid of her if I actually thought behavior like hers was acceptable."

"No ma'am, I didn't think that they were," I said. "I honestly don't think any of them are. And a lot of my thoughts on the topic over the past couple of weeks have acknowledged that it would be nice to have people my own age who understand what I'm going through, who I can talk about both sides of my life with without having to worry about secrets." I sighed, letting my actual feelings through on the topic. "That it would be nice to have friends again, if I could."

Director Piggot nodded her head in acknowledgement of that, her expression not so much softening as refusing to harden further. "That's the primary attraction in it for most of them, as I understand it. So if not that, and not being afraid of us, then what was it? The Tinker restrictions?"

"Yes," I agreed. "Even if Dragon hasn't already told you about it, I'll admit that I gave her an earful during my uh, apprenticeship interview I guess you'd call it, about the underage Tinker review process and everything I'd heard about it. Which, um, wasn't anything good."

"Normally this is the point at which I'd say something reassuring about how its probably not as bad as you've heard, but given that your first Tinkertech submission to the PRT – so to speak – was an enhanced radiation weapon that could potentially have been scaled up to a city-killing warhead without much effort by Tinker standards, honesty compels me to say that in your case it probably would be that bad."she admitted frankly.

"Are you here to ask me to join the Wards, ma'am, or to tell me to?" I asked as politely as I could.

"Actually I'm here because unless your father goes further outside expectations than I believe humanly possible, he will be demanding that you join the Wards before I can even bring up the topic with him," she replied. "You won't be seeing him until morning because he hasn't had any sleep since you were abducted, and right before I came up here he had enough of an anxiety attack in the waiting room the hospital family services people finally had to give him a pill and a bed for the next few hours." She waved her hand. "He'll be fine, and to be honest, he sounded like a man who could really use the rest."

"I can only imagine," I said sadly, and then stepped on my tongue before I gave her more openings.

"So, yes, there is an extreme likelihood that you will be enrolled as my next Wards recruit within the immediate future without any coercion on anyone's part, except in the sense that as a minor your legal guardian gets to make decisions like this for you." she finished. "And I thought you deserved the courtesy of a heads-up." And then she pre-empted my next remark by holding up her palm.

"Allow me to be clear. I am not arm-twisting you. You've already met the last person that 'the experts' had decided that the Wards program could make into a cooperative citizen and you know better than I do exactly how that mess ended. I'm not just covering my ass when I say that I'd already told them it wouldn't work last time, and I am not foolish enough to think it would work this time either. So if you really do not want to be there, and can somehow talk your father into agreeing with you, then you won't be. Even if it would make my life tremendously more complicated in some ways, I would still accept it because the alternative would be worse."

"But you're also saying that you think it is a good idea if I would agree to it, and that I should," I said.

"You've already been targeted for one kidnapping attempt," Director Piggot replied, "and while the next one won't be so fortunate as to have had your secret identity delivered gift-wrapped for them, unless you intend to never go out publicly at any point – which would be absolutely unprecedented behavior for any cape in my experience - then that just means the next one will go after your other identity. Different road, same destination."

"And Dragon isn't enough?" I asked.

"If she comes down here to Brockton Bay every time you are in danger, then that publicly announces your close association with her for anyone with eyes to see," Piggot pointed out. "Which exponentially increases your potential threat, not reduces it. Consider that, for just one possibility out of all the ones that I'd have to juggle, that being known as a hostage useful against Dragon means that you are a potential target for anyone who might want to compromise the Birdcage. Because Dragon's the single point of failure for all of those systems."

"I'd just wanted her to look over my tinker designs over the network to make sure they weren't going to be… bad," I said. "I certainly hadn't anticipated her and me going public."

"It hasn't gone public yet," Director Piggot said. "We can explain Dragon coming down here once with any number of plausible reasons, especially given that she was an indispensable part of the one-two punch that got that bunker cracked in time. Furthermore, since taking that bunker down brought an entire parahuman villain's operation down we don't even need to publicly admit that all the… highly visible moments… of last night were a rescue operation at all. So no, outside of the people in my office who already knew and the people who took you – who are with the exception of Coil all wrapped up – you are not yet blown. We just don't want to establish a pattern later on that would be too likely to blow your cover. And that means arranging a more… locally-based potential defense for you."

I sat and thought hard, looking for holes in her logic. I came up with… unfortunately, they're actually right this time. Especially on the Dragon thing.

Dammit, Coil! That plan would have entirely worked with suitable discretion if you hadn't charged in. Restrictions or no restrictions, I can't just walk away by myself until at least the heat from this has died down for a while.

Well, I had just had that huge revelation in the base that maybe trying to save the world all by myself was a bad idea. So even if I didn't know yet how I was going to work around several of the downsides of what was going to come next, I could at least embrace the upsides too while I got to work on the rest of that.

"Thank you for explaining all this to me, Director. I hadn't really thought about some of it. And… you're right. This is what I should do next, even if it means finding a compromise."

"That last one is called 'pending adulthood', by the way," she replied with rough humor. "And while we'll delay any public announcement for several weeks so that its not visibly connected to recent events, and it still will require your father's signature to officially happen, in anticipation of all those events then let me just say… welcome to the Wards."

"Thank you, Director."

"And now that you're de facto if not yet de jure one of my subordinates, I can speak frankly with you," she said. Oh crap, what trap did I just step into?

"About…?"

"Taylor," she said with surprising gentleness, "the overwhelming probability is that we will find Coil's remains within the next several hours. His real identity was Thomas Calvert, by the way. You'll almost certainly find out more about his history later, but the important thing right now is that tonight you took a deliberate, premeditated action that will result if it has not already resulted in the loss of a human life." She waved her hand. "I already told you that legally you were in the clear on that and you are. But life is not solely a thing of laws and administrative procedures, especially not when it comes to people." She sighed sadly. "In theory, none of the Wards are ever supposed to even risk facing actual kill-or-be-killed situations. In practice we still closely approach that ideal, even in Brockton Bay. But by an incredible amount of ill fortune none of which was your fault, you got thrown into one headfirst at your age and your only way out required your assailant's death."

"Ma'am, I-"

"I am saying that in my sincere belief, and with the benefit of all my years and professional experience, that you did the best you could. It may or may not have been the best thing in a world of perfect objectivity, or even the best thing you will think of later on when you've gone back and over your decisions in hindsight. It may not have been the thing that I or one of my people would have thought of in benefit of our greater experience in such manners. But none of us were there, and you were. You took the actions you had every reason to believe necessary given the information that was available to you, and as extreme as some of them may have been, none of them were really wrong." She shook her head. "Fifteen years old is too damn young to have to face this. Hell, sometimes I think eighteen years is and the law actually lets you enlist for the Army or the Marines… or the PRT or the Protectorate… at that age. But you have faced it, and the only thing we can do now is concentrate on what comes next."

"Which is?"

"You deal with this, and you move on. Its not easy but its been done. By many men and many women who have served, in the armed forces or law enforcement or just stood their ground against a home invader with that gun they'd bought at the hardware store. Some do it with a smooth adjustment and some don't come to terms with it without a lot of rough patches."

"And then some don't adjust at all." I replied.

"Not on my watch," she replied flatly. "So yes, I am saying that if at any time you think you are not dealing well with what has happened, you are allowed to come to me – you are expected to come to me – and inform me of your concerns, and let me work with you to see what can be done then. And you will not disappoint me by admitting that you need help if you genuinely do, do you understand? If you want to find the fast-track to disappointing me, young lady, then try huddling around your pain and pretending everything is fine when its not. That's not strength, that's just lying to yourself."

She paused for breath, and then continued. "And in full knowledge that I'm deliberately hitting below the belt, let me point out that Shadow Stalker had poor cooperation with her therapist and kept pretending everything was fine on her own."

"I'm getting a therapist?" I asked, both because it was a legitimate question and Piggot's new tack was starting to get a little intense for me.

"Not unless you think you need one," she said more matter-of-factly. "Or you visibly aren't able to keep it together at all."

"I… wow. Thank you for you concern?"

"Don't thank me, its my job," she replied. Apparently feeling a need to ease off the mood herself, she continued more matter-of-factly. "Anything else you feel you need to ask me right now?"

"No ma'am," I said.

"Then get some rest," she said, starting to stand up. "Tomorrow's going to be a long day for all of us."

Author's Note: Yes, its official now. Arc 3 will be The Wards Arc.

And to all of you swearing and cursing and going 'A fucking Wards arc? Oh FFS! That's the death of a Worm fanfic!', I'm just gonna say that's what a lot of you were telling me about doing a Coil arc and look where we are now. :)

I hope to find a way of handling it at least as original as my way of handling Coil, if with less fatal irradiations.

Also, for those wondering what the hell got into Emily Piggot tonight, consider this. She's got a young parahuman who's a potential WMD tinker to deal with and they just killed a guy. Granted that the killing was totally righteous the point is that taking life for the first time has emotional effects, Piggot is hardly ignorant of those potential emotional effects, and just ignoring them and letting them be untreated would be the stupidest idea ever to the point that all the dumbest fanon caricatured Piggots, Taggs, and Greg Veders would get together to all laugh at how dumb that idea was.

(Well, OK, she has Invictus so actually just ignoring it would be fine. Its just that based on the information Piggot has I would then have to write her as dumber than fucking ditchwater to even contemplate not counseling Taylor here, so of course she did.)

So instead she charges right in and starts to deal with it. In the way she knows how to do best, which would be to give at least some of the same counseling she'd give to a fellow agent or soldier who'd just hit that one for the first time.

Plus, y'know, the part where I try to make my characters act like people, which means they do things not just for one totally unambiguous motivation.

But Arc 2 is not yet over, folks! We need one last round of reaction shots. And the foreshadowing, of course.

Last edited: Oct 15, 2019

Updated: Roses of Villarosa - Hearts and Minds (Richard POV)

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Threadmarks Interlude 2-H: Danny Hebert / Director Piggot / Alexandria New

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cliffc999

Jul 15, 2019

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Interlude 2-H: Danny Hebert / Director Piggot / Alexandria

Danny Hebert

They didn't let me in to see my little girl until the following morning. One of the bureaucrats had told me after I'd gotten up that she'd already agreed to an offer from the Director's office for the Wards and that I could just sign the contract now if I wanted but I told him to shove off and that I was going to talk to Taylor. I was certainly going to agree with her about joining the Wards, I'd always thought that's what she should have done from the start, but first things first.

"You're all right?" were the first words out of my mouth as I came in and saw her lying in her hospital bed. Another goddamned hospital bed. And another time it took a miracle healer just to keep her alive at all. Why did the world keep doing this to us?

"Full recovery," Taylor replied and I didn't so much sit in the bedside chair as slump into it at those words. "Panacea said it should just take one or two more sessions before its all fixed."

Taylor looked back up me at with her little sincere smile. The same smile she'd been constantly giving me all along, and especially since she'd triggered. The smile that said she was okay, that I didn't need to worry about her so much, that she was taking care of herself and she'd be fine.

The smile that I'd been too stupid to notice hadn't been remotely sincere for over a whole year before it all happened, and that I was still afraid to let myself believe in even now. She'd been kidding herself and me for so long that she'd been OK when she wasn't, she'd never let herself ask for help for so long until it was too late, and now she had parahuman powers and everything was changing for her so much? How could she really know whether she was OK or not, especially when it wasn't just facing high school dangers now but life-threatening situations? She was only fifteen!

My God, even her high school had turned into a life-threatening situation and that was before she'd even gotten powers in the first place! I'd aged at least a year for every week since her trigger event, and just when I thought things might be going to go all right when Taylor said she'd ask Dragon for some cape advice first and then suddenly there's this horrible kidnapping?

No, it was my job to look after my baby and keep her from getting hurt. And to protect her from herself, that goddamned determination she had to always try to go it alone and then let herself get hurt. My letting her run free and look after herself unsupervised before had been what had led to the entire Winslow disaster. And I'd done that letting her run free because I hadn't been doing my job, I'd been so wrapped up in myself after Annette and wrapped up in things that didn't really matter compared to what I should have been doing-

I fought down an urge to crush the bedrail or punch the wall as I took a deep breath and directed my anger away and down, away from me and away from the person I was talking to, just like the counselor had always recommended. To 'virtually' let it out on something inoffensive and inanimate in my line of sight so that it didn't risk exploding out on someone real.

"They said you'd talked to someone about joining the Wards?" I asked, focusing again.

"The Director came in last night and explained why it would be a good idea now," Taylor said.

"I'm glad you're finally seeing sense on the topic," I told her with firmness, and her own expression firmed up.

"I'm rolling with the punches, Dad, not 'seeing sense'." Taylor told me curtly. "This was not how it was supposed to go-"

"That's the thing about real life, young lady!" I came back. "It never goes how it's supposed to go! That's why you need to-"

"Do you think I don't know that, Dad?" she said sadly. "After all this?"

Oh, that was just hitting the below the belt. Why did she always have to be so stubb-

"Dad," she continued plaintively. "I don't want to fight." She sighed and continued more softly. "And this whole thing is a messy mixed bag anyway."

"I agree," I said, breathing out heavily. "And I don't want to fight either but-"

"What did you tell me about 'but'?" she said with a tiny bit of her cheek returning, her cheek from way back. Back before that damned car crash and before Emma had gone crazy.

"The proper punctuation for a sentence ending with 'but' is to put a period right before the 'B'," I repeated, saying the old maxim we'd always used to shut down Taylor's grade-school explanations of why her latest cookie jar expedition or unauthorized outing with Emma or all that wasn't really that bad, honest. It really wasn't fair when children actually remembered what you'd told them and then tossed it back at you when they needed it for ammunition. Even if they were-

"Okay, okay," I said, and waved for her to continue.

Taylor stopped to compose her thoughts for a long pause, as if she was trying to find just the perfect words, and finally went with. "Analyzing how we both ended up here and why I was vulnerable to Coil's kidnapping is something we're going to have to do eventually, so that we don't do whatever went wrong again the next time we face the same type of problem."

"That makes sense," I agreed, my thoughts immediately leaping to workplace accident reviews and compensations claims I'd had to help adjudicate. "But you want to do it later, not now, when we're not both so-"

"So much, yeah," she said. "And in the category of decisions that do need to be made right now…?"

"You've already made it," I said, nodding along with her. "The Wards."

"Yeah. I mean, maybe it won't be so bad. I can hope."

I sat and thought over how many times I'd seen that one work out before.

"If it does start to 'go bad' then you promise you'll tell me this time, all right? After Winslow-"

The sudden smile that broke out on her face as soon as I'd started to say that made me think that maybe, just maybe, I'd started doing my job again after all.

-and then I thought about what my job was. My paying job, that is.

"Did you sign anything yet?" I asked her urgently.

"Nope. All verbal," she agreed.

"Good." I said with heartfelt relief. "Because as much as I want you in the Wards, I also want to read every line of that paperwork before so much as a drop of ink touches paper. And not just me, but whoever in the Dockworkers office I can get to help pro bono. Because negotiating employee contracts and making sure my people don't get taken advantage of by the corporations - or the government - is what your Dad does, remember?"

And the smile that one got me could have lit up the world.

Director Piggot

God, I was exhausted. My dialysis meant that I had to worry about fatigue syndromes anyway and that was before all-nighters like this erupted. Let alone all the critical decisions I'd had to make in the past hours…

I lay in my bed in my quarters on the Rig, staring at the ceiling and suffering through the damnable 'too tired to sleep' that every soldier was familiar with. As always happened when this occurred, my thoughts kept going back and back and rechecking my recent decisions, examining my process, looking for overlooked clues or failure factors.

Of course, being as fatigued as I was meant that this was just another way of counting sheep. Except in the very rare cases that being in a half-dream state enhanced intuition, which were far rarer than fiction would have you believe, then thinking while chronic-fatigued was exactly as productive as thinking while drunk. If I hadn't had any useful insights while I was still capable then I almost certainly wasn't going to have them now.

Still, going through my recent memories was far better than going through my older ones. And so I left myself drift and waited for my exhaustion to finally turn into rest, and as I did so my thoughts kept coming back to the most confusing thing of the entire affair.

Thomas Calvert's big reveal as the villain Coil? I was still confused as to what could have made that self-obsessed psychopath trigger after Ellisburg if he hadn't triggered in that fucking mess, but the rest of his deal was merely a huge goddamned shock and not an actual surprise. Its not as if I hadn't known that the fucker was pure walking evil from the day I'd first met him. The day he actually bragged to me about fragging his own squad leader during Ellisburg, as if that made him special and not just a mad animal. Nothing short of a direct order from Director Costa-Brown's office would have made me accept his 'services' as a 'special consultant' to my PRT branch and I made yet another a note to check those files tomorrow to see if they'd tell me which Senator he must have blackmailed to get that contract.

An entire goddamned supervillain Bond base underneath my city? In hindsight not shocking at all. He'd hidden a hardened underground bunker underneath a corporation set up for the purpose of selling hardened underground bunkers, and cleverly disguised it as a hardened underground bunker. I gave Calvert a minimal point for having read the 'Purloined Letter' – very minimal – and kept listing.

The degree of infiltration into my office? Just the few I'd already found made me want to vomit and even with Coil's files to accelerate that process I was still dreading how much further it might go from there. But I'd goddamn well turn them out root and branch. I'd already bypassed HQ to get directly in touch with Armstrong down in Boston and ask him to send at least fifty of his own people to help with the mole hunt, boots on the ground and striking while the iron was hot. Let the suits up top cry about procedure later, I'd get forgiveness rather than permission. And if I got no forgiveness at all then hell with it, if they wanted to relieve me for this mess or how I had to fix it then I'd go out swinging for the fences. So no, the mole hunt? Appalling, but not puzzling.

Taylor Hebert. What was that young woman made of?

My crime scene people were still arguing over how much of that trail she'd cut through the base was real, how much was them reading too much into what wasn't there, how much had been pure luck and how much had been a plan, but even the most conservative estimates required her to start from practically naked in a secure anti-Tinker box that made my high-grade confinement cells look like a Holiday Inn, somehow fake a cardiac event that had fooled an experienced nurse who had her hooked up to hospital-grade diagnostic equipment, then compromise every single internal network in the base with just a cell phone – the biggest argument against admitting her to the Wards would be putting that talent right here on the Rig and on our internal systems, but I had to place faith in Armsmaster's ability to out-Tinker even a teen Tinker prodigy…

Two, maybe four or six veteran mercs taken down before they barely even known they were being hit. We'd confirmed the job she'd done on the two men found lying nearest to where Velocity had made contact with her, the mercs who'd each taken a double-tap to their vests smack dab in their X-rings from a girl who had zero record of having touched a pistol before and all in the instant of time they'd have been blinded by their own flash-bang which had somehow prematured in mid-air right inside the door - I'd have been going good to make those takedowns back then.

And Annie Oakley herself with a laser sight couldn't have hit that fucking flash-bang in mid-air. Had to have been some kind of proximity detonator, like what the Marines used to make car bombs premature before they'd actually reach the gates…

It really said something about Taylor's whole sequence that night that the stunt at the end with the improvised neutron bomb was one of the things making the most sense in hindsight. And I still had a chuckle over the console…

But the most puzzling thing about this kid was how she kept reacting to things. Before and after. She just-

Capes were damaged. The nature of trigger events meant that they'd inevitably have psychological issues, issues that never seemed to really get better for any of them no matter how much the psychs tried. The best you could hope for was high-functioning cases that channeled it into mostly useful directions, like Armsmaster or Miss Militia…

But Taylor was civil and entirely rational even during situational stress that would have put my best tactical teams into beast mode. Her conversation was full of de-escalation phrases and tension relievers like a trained negotiator's, except with her it was intuitive as if that was just her nature. Like most teenagers she wouldn't budge on things she wanted, but unlike most of them she didn't act like always pushing back was the only way she knew how to hold a position…

Capes they weren't the heroes that the Protectorate and the PRT wanted everyone to believe they were, either. I knew that. I knew that I was sworn to helping maintain an illusion that I didn't remotely believe in because the only solution that anyone had come up with for a world gone mad was to take that lie and sell it so hard that hopefully they would believe it.

But I really doubted that they did, or ever would. I'd seen the truth that day. For all that capes puffed themselves up, when push came to shove they'd only fight if they thought they could win, and if it was your life or theirs then you could kiss your sweet ass goodbye because it wasn't going be theirs. Our cape so-called support had been the first people to cut and run in Ellisburg. Even fucking Calvert had stood his post longer than they had before breaking.

But here comes Taylor and she's thrown alone into hell and without a moment's hesitation she just stares down the goddamned nightmare and then fucks it in the eye socket. She'd grabbed everything she had and everything she'd made and kept firing it into the waves and waves of opposition and it kept her alive long enough that even bleeding out on the floor and the gun at her head she'd been still in the fight right up to the moment the cavalry finally came…

Capes cared about you only when they could, and when really up against it they took care of number one first instead of taking one for the team.

But while what Taylor had done in the base could have just been a cornered rat trying to keep its hide intact, any kid who'd pass up a free shot at a $25 million judgement in court for a measly $250,000 settlement and the rest for school improvement? To try and help clean up the shithole that had helped torture her? To give up a pile of free money to try and bail out all the same kids who'd abandoned her?

To hell with all of Armsmaster's hyperventilating over the alleged 'socially maladjusted tendencies' of anyone who'd build a homebrew neutron bomb, he couldn't be right on that score for this to make any sense. If it wasn't for her Tinkering you'd sometimes wonder if Taylor Hebert were even a cape…

I finally closed my eyes, and as I drifted off I thought about a young Lady who'd once gone to Ellisburg.

Alexandria

"Thomas Calvert is dead," I said.

The news had come in shortly before I'd had to leave for the scheduled meeting, so after we'd handled the scheduled agenda I'd brought the matter up as it was Coil who had been the primary subject of our parahuman feudalism experiment in Brockton Bay.

"What were the circumstances?" Number Man asked me, his being here and doing preparatory work this morning having put him behind me in the news cycle for a change. "And is it confirmed?"

"What's left of him is currently in the morgue in the Boston PRT office, and DNA, MRI, and dental work all matches," I said, pulling up the relevant reports on everyone's display. "Although as you can see-"

"What kind of power does that sort of damage?" Eidolon asked, staring at the grisly imagery.

"You don't recall from Behemoth engagements?" Number Man asked. "Given the available context, I would say this was either Tinkertech or an industrial accident. Because that's not a parahuman power exposure, that's acute radiation syndrome."

"Somebody detonated a neutron bomb in Brockton Bay?" Doctor Mother asked incredulously. "And you didn't bring this up first?"

"Some teenaged girl who'd Triggered as a Tinker two weeks ago took exception to Coil's press-gang," I said, "and chose to express her displeasure by improvising a hand-held suicide device of some kind and irradiating the entire room with it. Coil was by all appearances attempting to flee and seek medical aid from Blasto, who would have been the nearest available bio-Tinker plausibly available for hire."

"Possible but very unlikely that would have helped him," Number Man said.

"So the whole experiment's down the drain just because one kid went 'Carrie'?" Eidolon said. "How did we not see this one coming?"

"I have to prioritize my time," Contessa replied tonelessly, "and Coil was not a sufficient priority in the time frame under discussion."

"Overall Path divergence as a result?" Doctor Mother asked.

"Minimal, Contessa replied with mild interest. "The experiment was a significant hope of ours for the aftermath, but not a necessity for the primary goal." And then she sat back in the way that signified she had nothing to say on the matter.

"I'll start sanitizing the data trails that could potentially lead to us," Number Man said. "You can do the same internally to the PRT, of course."

"Actually, it occurs to me we can salvage the experiment," I replied. "Parahuman feudalism would be important in the post-Entity world, and I am reluctant to abandon our proof of concept so soon."

"Continue it with who?" Eidolon said. "Because even I can't raise the dead."

"Remember that there had been two other potential candidates already native to Brockton Bay that we had been considering before Calvert appeared on the scene," I reminded him. "Marquis was Birdcaged and it turned out there were Path concerns about potentially interfering with that, so we did not. But-"

"Oh you have got to be kidding!" Eidolon shot back heatedly. "There's a reason we didn't just go ahead back then after losing Marquis, remember?"

"I'm sorry," I said in a voice as cold as liquid nitrogen. "But when we founded Cauldron and swore that we would do whatever was necessary to save as many Earths as we could, that to that one single objective we pledged our lives, our fortunes, our sacred honor, and our immortal souls, was there some sort of unspoken 'But not if it means being tacky about it?' exemption that I'd missed? I will grant that there were reasons he was not our first choice, but might I remind you that our first choice is now dead?"

"Kaiser, for all of his organizational ability and current advantage of position, does still have certain significant flaws," Number Man pointed out.

"And Coil didn't?" I said. "We're not in the business of making saints here."

"We're not in the business of making the next Hitler either!" Eidolon objected.

"That's exactly why he would be useful here," I replied. "As you are demonstrating for us right now, the Nazi ideology is one of the single most polarizing ideologies that exists. Kaiser cannot abandon it without abandoning his power base, but so long as he clings to it he cannot hope to gain popular acceptance on the larger scale in any scenario short of an outright post-apocalypse."

"At which point questions of even remotely conventional ethics would already be forfeit," Doctor Mother acknowledged. "And so it's a neatly a self-containing experiment. If parahuman feudalism is a viable concept at all, then with a minimum of setup work we can give the Empire Eighty-Eight a fair opportunity to demonstrate that by seeing if they can take control of Brockton Bay. And yet they will never have any serious hope to leverage that power substantially beyond a single parahuman city-state and out into a large regional or national scenario because…"

"Because except for their own few goose-stepping fanboys, everybody hates Nazis," Eidolon said. "And once they've succeeded on the proof of concept we don't have to let them stay succeeded, do we? Everybody would be screaming for the Triumvirate to come down anyway."

"We'll have to stall long enough to make sure that it is a viable lasting conquest and not merely a blitzkrieg," I pointed out, "but yes, the anticipated endgame even in the case of experiment success is an eventual day of reckoning for Kaiser. He just gets to have the Bay for a while first. So, is the proposal on the table?"

Doctor Mother nodded. "It certainly sounds viable enough to have Number Man and yourself start a formal study of its feasibility, and if that checks out then yes. We'll do it."

"We'll need to study fast," I pointed out. "If we are going to do it then 'Director Costa-Brown' needs to start putting the pieces in place while the immediate post-Coil investigation is still in progress."

"If they are pieces you can move back later should the proposal not check out, then just go ahead and start moving them now," the Doctor said. "Anyone else? Very well, meeting adjourned."

Arc Two Concludes

Author's Note: And that's a wrap! We've shown the aftermath, we've gotten peeks into character's heads and motivations, we've start the family reconciliation, and we've foreshadowed at least one of the main antagonists of Arc Three.

And yes, the whole 'there were prior candidates for the experiment before Coil came along' thing is my invention, but its a plausible fit into an empty part of the backstory. At least in my opinion. Seriously, who the heck would pick Coil as first choice for anything? When I think 'stable parahuman warlord candidate' Marquis is one of the first names on that list... and for all the fact that he's a motherfucking Nazi, Kaiser's one of the second.

So they didn't use Marquis because by the time they were ready to move he was Birdcaged, and they didn't use Kaiser because they were hoping for a better candidate than Swastika Man and it was simpler to procrastinate a bit back then, and then the experiment is finally a "now" thing with Coil and its just about to get to the good part and whoops, Coil just died.

Eh, fuck it, swap in the guy whose resume we sent back last time. It's a patch, its not supposed to be perfect!

That's what Cauldron is thinking right now.

And y'know, Alexandria does have a legitimate point. Legitimately awful, but still a point. 'Okay, people, considering the full list of epic crimes against humanity we've already all done here without losing a minute's sleep, can anybody say with a straight face that this is our one uncrossable line? Seriously?'

And yes, Emily Piggot alone with her thoughts in the middle of the (well, day, as she's crashing from an all-nighter). Useful to note where her head is right now, plus, also gets in more on what's happening in the Bay immediately post-Coil.

Last edited: Oct 15, 2019

Updated: Roses of Villarosa - Hearts and Minds (Richard POV)

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cliffc999

Jul 18, 2019

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Evolution 3.1

It was several weeks before I actually got to meet the Wards.

One of the reasons for the delay was of course so that the that the public reveal of Brockton Bay's newest Ward would have no apparent connection to the Fortress Incident, as it was now being referred to. The revelation that Coil, once thought to be one of the city's minor parahuman ganglords, had actually been a major player with significant underground forces in Brockton Bay and had built a Bond villain base so hardened that it had taken some of Dragon's most powerful technology to crack it open had certainly made a major public splash. A splash that fortunately been so large that the revelation that it had actually been a rescue operation for me was able to be invisibly buried beneath it. So while I'd been quite thoroughly outed to the PRT, Coil's now-confirmed death and the total collapse of his organization plus Coil's own internal compartmentalization meant I still should have a valid secret ID as far as anyone else was concerned.

The arrests of the Undersiders concurrently with the Fortress Incident was seen as having tangential relation to the whole affair at best, with the 'failed industrial espionage job that had led the PRT to Coil/Fortress' theory on PHO being the one that had the most popular acceptance. Yes, the PRT had gotten them all. Tattletale had of course been taken during the base assault itself, but Bitch/Hellhound had been wrapped up shortly before they'd hit the base when she'd made herself too visible on one of her anti-dogfighting raids in Empire 88 territory at the exact wrong time. Apparently her teammates had left her so far out of the loop on their 'special job' for Coil that she hadn't even known what they were doing, simply that they were off on a mission that didn't include her. So she'd gone out on her own to take care of some private business and the Protectorate had taken her right off the street.

The Undersiders had really hosed themselves with what they'd done to me. And I'm going to admit, watching karma crash down on them step by step was very satisfying. Still, I'd had done my best to make sure I didn't exult in it too much. Helping deliver just punishment for someone's crimes was one thing, but going 'Ha-ha, I can get away with being cruel to you and rejoice in your misery! ' was outright pulling an Emma. And I was calling a big fat nope on doing that! Some enemies, such as Zion or the Endbringers, deserved absolutely no mercy from anyone and certainly weren't going to get any from me. But the world wasn't exclusively divided into people who were on my side and things to ruthlessly crush.

Which is why when I'd made the original file upload to Dragon from the heart of Coil's lair I'd made sure to highlight some particular items for her attention. Of course many of those things were items of immediate tactical relevance, such as exact base schematics and composition and the base alert procedures for knowing how many guards they'd be up against and where they were supposed to be. But several highlights were things that I'd felt were simply too likely to be overlooked by the PRT in the rush if their noses weren't rubbed in it, such as Rachel Lindt's special needs situation.

Because as much as I was really not happy with the Undersiders for what they'd done to me and disgusted at what they'd been willing to already do to others in general, that didn't mean I had to go overboard about it. And even if I didn't want to reveal my meta-knowledge or my unique perspective on the situation, if I was going to be handing a datadump to the authorities anyway then I could at least do good by making sure it was handed over in the right order and with the right emphasis. And it's not as if anyone reviewing the case would find it at all curious I'd taken a moment out to go 'Please pay special attention to the stuff that will help you catch the people who actually kidnapped me!' It's not like I didn't have a perfectly understandable grudge.

But I'd done my best to get and by great good fortune had actually succeeded at getting Rachel the most lenient treatment of them all, both for her total uninvolvement in the breaking of 'the unwritten rules' and because she was seen as mentally unable to stand trial. The PRT psychologists were of course recommending prolonged confinement but also recommended giving her a modified therapy approach involving someone who really understood canine psychology, as well as allowing her at least limited access to therapy dogs as a reward/privilege in return for her continued cooperation. Even despite the obvious downsides of giving her access to dogs. I didn't know how or where her story would end, but at least she had a chance now.

The nice thing about Coil's positively German-esque obsession with record keeping is that there was a valid excuse for almost anything being noted in there, including full psych profiles of the Undersiders and what Coil had seen as their most useful control levers. Which is how I'd also made sure Dragon and the PRT knew the whole scoop behind Aisha Laborn's crappy situation, the special needs of her case that she wasn't having met, and the abusive neglectful guardians that the system had failed her in escaping. And exactly how Grue's desperation over that had allowed Coil to steer him around like a hand puppet. Not that I felt much if any mercy towards him for how utterly stupid he'd been in his "plans" (by courtesy so called) to "fix" his sister's situation, but the fact that he'd been such an epic failure at doing it himself didn't mean that it wasn't something that still needed doing.

For that matter, only Coil's promise of a payoff in the form of finalizing a custody transfer to Brian was what had finally gotten him to agree to help kidnap me, even if he'd believed right up until the moment I'd revealed my abilities that it had been merely a play to get a lever on the Dockworker's Union by kidnapping the perfectly mundane daughter of its hiring manager. So its not like Aisha's name wouldn't have leapt right out at the investigators during the follow-up to my case anyway, I'd just further emphasized the context.

Which is why despite her situation not earning Grue much if any leniency on his sentence, Aisha was at least now out of there and into a foster home with people who'd worked with ADHD children before and under the supervision of somebody in Social Services who actually did their job. And even if that had taken special privilege and special circumstances to invoke instead of being what all children in her situation should be able to expect from the government, just because I couldn't make the world perfect today didn't mean I was excused in walking past someone in immediate need because I was 'too busy' on a long-range Utopia. Or in going 'If everybody can't have it right now, why bother giving her any?' Even if all of John's memories had painted Aisha Laborn out to be an amoral brat without much redeeming feature, I still had empathy for children who'd gotten into bad situations where all the people who should be helping them weren't helping at all. And so, I'd done what I could.

Heck, even if I had been willing to be a Hard Woman making Hard Choices about it I'd still have done Aisha that solid. The last thing I wanted was a homicidally-enraged Imp shanking me on a street corner somewhere and me dying without even knowing how or why. Her power would have made for a terrifying assassin had she merely been given a different motivation, so if I could head off that trigger event before it even got started then I certainly would.

Oh yes, they'd caught up to Grue and Regent both within a day. The address of the Undersiders' current lair had been in Coil's files, after all. Regent was more than experienced enough at living as a fugitive to deduce that they'd been blown the instant the first public announcement of Coil's capture had been made, and so he'd immediately given Grue the warning and then grabbed his bugout bag and headed out on his own. Not that that had helped him, because Dragon had taken my kidnapping a little personally. And so she'd been willing to donate enough of her time to her no-sparrow-shall-fall act re: public camera searches to make sure neither of the remaining Undersiders were getting anywhere. When she'd caught Regent on a security feed from the Amtrak station, her tipoff had had a PRT fast-response team already waiting for him at the next stop.

Picking up Grue had been even easier. The first place he'd gone was of course to where his sister was living, to ask her to come with him. The fact that she'd agreed to hadn't saved him from an additional charge of kidnapping on top of mine, because taking a minor out against the wishes of her legal guardian with intent to cross a state line with her was still kidnapping even with the minor's enthusiastic cooperation.

Tattletale had managed to escape additional charges for her non-cooperation in defusing the self-destruct because the official story was, of course, that she had cooperated. Its not like the PRT could actually write into the official record that they'd handcuffed the stupid bitch to a console. But as disappointing as it was, the fact remained that they'd gotten away with stuff like that in the past before and would get away with it again, and had gotten away with it this time. And yes, these were the same people I was now going to go work for/work with. I'd already known it would be a compromise solution when I'd first put it into the contingency plans, let alone when I'd finally agreed to it.

Also the handcuffs had been my idea in the first place so I'd really be a hypocrite if I tried registering a moral objection to it now. But for the record, I'm still blaming the radiation sickness for that one.

Still, all the charges Tattletale was legitimately up for combined with her inability to just take a knee at the end and make a peace gesture without being forced to it had drowned out any possible goodwill her situation might otherwise have given her. And had left her still facing a long long stretch, even without terrorism charges on top. Kinda hard for you to plead being originally recruited at gunpoint when you were visibly living large and actively cooperating without any guns involved for quite a time, right up to the moment when Dragon and Vista had done their thing. Or when you hadn't tried to turn Coil in at any earlier time, once you'd had knowledge of which PRT officers were honest and which were Coil's… or for that matter could simply have hopped a train to Boston or New York and turned herself in there. Its not like somebody with a Thinker rating like hers could get away with pleading 'But I hadn't thought of that!', even when by all appearances she actually hadn't. Ah, Tattletale, you were the dumbest smart person I've ever met and never wish to meet again.

And so to cut a long story short the Undersiders except Rachel were all facing long prison sentences, and Rachel a psychiatric sentence. And while none of the others were even considered for it, Regent had gotten the full Birdcage treatment because his prior activities as Hijack had meant at least two severe enough strikes already on his record to add to his third strike on me. Ouch. I can't say it wasn't legitimate, but still, ouch.

But enough about the Undersiders, back to talking about me. Another reason for the delay re: me meeting the Wards had of course been the negotiations prompted by my father's promise to get the best deal for me that he possibly could. I'd done my best to refocus him onto what was most important to me (lightening up a little on the Tinker restrictions, allowing me to continue my special access to Dragon, etc.) as opposed to what was most important to him (safety guarantees, fewer hours, higher salary and benefits, a better percentage on my merchandising – hey, Protectorate heroes got action figures, Wards got action figures, and that meant we got royalties on those action figures, future commercial rights for my Tinkertech, and so forth).

I was pretty surprised when Mr. Barnes turned out to be the lawyer that my dad had been able to get to help us, pro bono, to review the fine details of the contract and make sure we weren't being taken advantage of in the fine print. I wasn't quite how to feel about that, to be honest. But him and my dad had been friends, and I chose to believe that Emma's father might feel that he also had some amends to make, both to Dad and to me, for his own past failures at being a dad to Emma.

Also, since I'd already put a charge into Lawyer way back when to make sure we weren't being taken advantage of on the out-of-court settlement with the school district, that allowed me to discreetly review Mr. Barnes' contributions to our case and make sure he was sincere. As it turned out, he was actually trying his best to help us. Whew.

And a charge into PRT Bureaucracy synergized with that and my other already-existing skills to be able to give my dad intelligent and helpful commentary throughout the process without doing more than looking like I was just paying close attention and being naturally smart. And this was what my father legitimately did for a living and he was damned good at it in his own right, so we did all right for ourselves. Even despite the the fact that the PRT was certainly not going to just give us the moon for free no matter how much they'd rather have Neutron Bomb Girl working with them rather than running free across the landscape doing God knows what, we got the best deal we could reasonably afford even if certain prior concerns meant that the Tinker review cycle would still be a thing for me. It turned out that many of the things said about said review cycle on PHO and elsewhere actually had been exaggerations. Not all of them, but certainly some of them.

So, despite my dad actually taking a leave of absence from the Dockworkers' so he could spend eight hours a day in conference rooms making the PRT's legal department desperately wish that Danny Hebert had been a hardware store owner instead of a veteran union negotiator, things were eventually wrapped up. And to be fair, its not as if the PRT were morally offended by Wards parents who'd actually read contracts and get legal advice about them before signing anything, however frustrating the process could get. One of the PRT legal team who'd misinterpreted my concern as impatience had even taken me aside to give me some friendly advice that I should see all of this as proof that my dad really cared about me and not just see this as an obstacle between me and my going out in costume right away. Which was nice of them even if they'd completely misunderstood what was going on.

Then there was the time I spent with the PR consultants. While I'd gone in with the determination to willingly accept any cape name and theming offered that was marginally less obnoxious than 'Princess Butterfly' or similar absurdities, their collective sigh of relief at "Oh my God finally one of the kids listens to us without needing hours and hours of beating sense into their heads first." earned me enough goodwill that I'd been able to get them to look at my costume sketches right off the bat instead of them having me pick one out of their scrap books. A single charge in Visual Design had of course let me make some really good sketches to offer them, so I walked out with their sanction for a so-dark-blue-it-was-looked-black tech-themed reinforced bodysuit with dull silver 'circuitry' all over it, woven in an irregular pattern that suggested both microprocessors and Tron lines without being too obvious about either. They'd even accepted my proposed Tinkertech feature that let me swap out the colors for a reverse-palette of dull silver with dark-blue highlights. In fact, seeing that feature prompted the senior consultant to suggest a cape name of "Binary" for me, and while it was hardly the flashiest cape name ever I'd decided that I liked it. It had a nice solid sound, it made sense as a name for a Tinker who'd shown a lot of handiness with computers, and it wasn't an immediate invitation to bad jokes.

Of course I'd originally made that color scheme and those switchable day and night modes as a way to have my costume be useful as digital pattern-disruption urban camouflage, but if I could do that and also make it look enough like a superhero art project to leave PR completely ignorant of why I'd really picked it and get a decent cape name out of it in the bargain, then we could call that one a win-win.

Which is how Binary of the Brockton Bay Wards would be making her public debut in just a few days.

Another thing that had demanded quite a bit of my time during those weeks was, of course, getting back in shape. Amy had given me that promised follow-up a day after she'd saved my life (again) and even done her best to clean out a lot of the damage I'd done to my system with adrenal overstress and not allowing sufficient recovery time after the first near-death experience, but some things simply needed rest, calories, and scientifically-optimized exercise. Still, I had almost a month to work in and by the end of that month I could have been Winslow's star jock just for the asking, notably above even Sophia (who had been an exceptional female athlete even if she'd been utterly horrid as a person, let's be fair) in many respects. My build meant that I'd have to worry about situations where overwhelming momentum or mass were still a factor, and I would just not get around that without using technological boosts, but the next thugs who tried to come at me would still not get off anywhere near as easily as Coil's mooks had.

Because in addition to my physical conditioning I'd also given myself a notable upgrade to my martial arts skills, straight-up dumping 2 charges into Martial Arts as a comprehensive broad-based course in all the fundamentals and a good solid understanding of design principles. I might have made it three charges except that my new life philosophy was "If I'm caught without my tools then I have already lost the first round", so outside of the necessary rehab I was not making PT my highest time priority. I'd certainly needed to correct my mistakes of trying to use just generic PRT CQC training and my prana-bindu boosts to do all the work instead of tailoring a combat style specifically to my needs, body type, and physical stats, but now I had all the knowledge necessary to do that and could work on refining mastery into grandmastery later.

Even with it all mostly having been various flavor of quiet setup work, the time between the Fortress Incident and my scheduled Wards debut had hardly been idle, after all.

Because when it came to the actual meat of the matter, my Tinkering, I first had to finish making my costume. I couldn't wear what wasn't there, after all. So among all the other things I'd needed to make time for during those several weeks was both Tinkering and then going through meetings about my Tinkering. The PRT had been fairly generous in fronting me some resources for an initial set of protective gear so I could at least get my first costume and set of body armor done.

Regarding the review process, I'd held back a bit on my first round of submits to things that they would have trouble finding any reason to object to or that they already knew I could build. It's not like they didn't want a Ward hitting the street with really good body armor, after all. So I gave them things such as form-fitting low-profile impact-absorbing body-armor, upgraded ballistic cloth, a full-head-covering armored helmet with advanced faceplate HUD, a production-model version of my zap sticks (two of them in paired leg holsters), a utility belt for further 'approved' gizmo expansion, etc, etc.

Now, revealing that I could make Tinkertech that was mass-producible and maintainable by mundanes would have freaked everyone out, but fortunately the Worm v1 CYOA gave you full control over your powers. Including the ability to switch any of them on and off, or even to dial-a-yield their intensity, and to do so selectively. So I simply took the feature that anti-black-boxed my Tinkertech as a matter of course and cranked it back down so that all my work would be partially black-boxed. Other Tinkers could at least get the vague gist and some clear pieces and principles here and there, and there would be those rare moments of clarity where it would make sense even to conventional science, but nothing that fell outside the various outliers that previously known Tinkers had already established. Dragon's prior total comprehension of my submits to her would be credited as both a lucky break and the fact that Dragon's power was already understood as the ability to comprehend and reverse-engineer lots of other Tinkertech.

The review board had straight-up rejected the zap rifle, though, even after I'd demonstrated 150% safety and guaranteed non-lethality was built into the design, simply because the image of a Ward running around with something looking like an assault rifle was an outright NOPE. But I'd at least gotten them to agree to letting me put zap beams into my forearm launchers, so I still had them. When I had some time later to figure out a good excuse for coming up with an effective and safe paralysis drug that could be dart-injected, and hopefully get them to approve combat pharmaceuticals beyond my already demonstrated chem sprayer, then I'd add armor-piercing drug darts to my forearm launchers too. I certainly had no plans to go looking for Lung, to name just one person a chemically-based quick incapacitator would be useful for, but that didn't mean I'd have a guarantee of not finding him anyway. It's not like that hadn't already happened with Coil!

I'd also gotten them to agree to officially sending the zap rifle specs to Dragon to see if they could be made into a viable PRT general-issue non-lethal weapon, as had already been pulled off in the past with an obscure Tinker's invention that she'd been able to refine into mass-production containment foam. So, that was at least the first brick out of that wall…

I was a little annoyed at my particular restrictions in Dragon's case. Not that I hadn't intended my original association with her to be a huge public sponsorship for me anyway, but thanks to the security concerns both surrounding the Fortress Incident in general and Director Piggot's point in particular that letting it be widely known that I was a possible hostage to use against Dragon would be an epically bad idea, I was basically forbidden from telling anyone who didn't already know about our connection.

Which meant no public crediting for any work I did with her, no open Tinker collabs, and virtually no one brought into the loop who wasn't already there. We'd managed to successfully argue that I should at least be allowed to tell the Wards because the alternative was me continually lying by omission to people who were supposed to be my teammates and the epically bad team synergy that could come from that, plus them all being supposed to be security-cleared and NDA'ed anyway. But at the moment the circle of trust re: 'Dragon's secret apprentice' was being kept narrow enough that it would be notably more secret than it was apprentice.

Look, I could deal with it just so long as Dragon was still paying serious attention to my contributions, which God bless her she entirely was. These projected Endbringer-killers certainly weren't going to build themselves and I didn't imagine I'd have much luck getting them authorized for building in the Rig's workshop either.

Not that I'd shown her any Endbringer-killers just yet, I first had to get her believing in me more. Right now I was helping her with her Endbringer tracking program, and since between my Computer Programming and my Endbringer Physiology knowledge I could have done the job by myself in a few days I'd certainly be able to wow her socks off by having brilliant insights that helped us finish the job by the end of February. It still wouldn't be a perfect Endbringer attack prediction program simply because the sensor grid to all the necessary data around the world to make it perfect didn't physically exist, but it would give warnings at least as good as her canon version had. And once that program was up and proving a success, then it would be time to start the serious anti-Endbringer collab.

And speaking of collabs, since I didn't want to give myself away as an Everything Tinker just yet I'd held off on actually putting any movement powers such as a flight harness into my gear. Kid Win already had working antigrav tech for his hover platform, so once I was officially in as a Ward I could just "Tinker collab" with him and hey, it turns out that if we both put our heads together we can miniaturize his antigrav tech for easier use by both him and me. No suspicions, right?

In fact, I hoped to be getting a lot of mileage out of 'Tinker collab! Hey, isn't synergy great?' in the near future as an excuse to how I could keep doing so many things, by apparently conforming to the whole "There is no 'I' in 'team'" ideal they tried to teach kids anyway. Now this all depended on if Kid Win and I could successfully work together, of course, but I wasn't really expecting to find out that all of the meta-knowledge telling me the Wards weren't jerks was just fanon and not canon. Even 'Trust But Verify' assumes some measure of trust first, after all. And I certainly wasn't intending to be anything but nice on my end.

As is, so far I'd managed to successfully convince the PRT that I was "merely" a dual-focus tinker who was still only partly sure of her own specializations but already knew she was really good with computers and quantum computers and also had found herself very able at making protective gear and personal defense options when she'd been thrown headfirst into a threatening situation. Since both dual-focus Tinkers, combat Tinkers, and computer Tinkers were a thing and the exact circumstances of my trigger event would by the PRT's prior experience be highly likely to produce a dual-focus Tinker or a combat-themed Tinker, they had every reason to believe it. Likewise, my 'secondary powers' of mind-over-body and exceptional agility and reflexes for a teenaged girl were tagged as a very minor Brute rating alongside my Tinker rating and considered perhaps a bit odd but hardly a cause for major suspicion, given that 'almost died' trigger events were well-known for producing Brutes.

And I certainly hoped they'd be willing to believe that the radiation bomb was a one-off combination of ultimate desperation and the quantum-mechanics elements of the bomb being a synergy both of my suspected Tinker focuses and not an indication that I actually was a full-on WMD tinker. I'd certainly done all I could in my overall presentation to set up such a belief. Because even though the Director seemed not more than rationally concerned by it and several of the others not even that much, Armsmaster was still quietly freaking out about that radiation bomb. I was just lucky he wasn't the sole voice in my Tinker review process, and that I'd also taken care all of my early submits had been such conservative, sensible, well-documented choices, or else I'd still be stuck arguing about the zap sticks.

Admittedly most Protectorate Tinkers, even underage ones, weren't vetted quite like me but I had to admit that 2000+ rads of hot ionizing death that could far too easily be scaled up to city-frying doomsday weapon wasn't exactly the ideal first impression. My bad! I was really going to have polish the old apple for a while to convince them it would be okay to ease up, but I could do that.

Now, given that part of the Wards contract was that the PRT was allowed to do unscheduled home visits to check for unauthorized Tinkering in the basement because not even rocks were stupid enough to believe that the kids wouldn't try at least once and the PRT certainly wasn't, and we hadn't been able to negotiate that clause away despite all our efforts… well, I intended to be able to get an off-site workshop set up somewhere once I'd cleared out my current to-do list a little more. For right now I was concentrating on gaming the system and not going full outlaw on it. Everything was a case of juggling priorities right now, after all.

But given that Armsmaster had already twice used his inspection privileges just in the past couple of weeks to come around and scan the house looking for any signs of unlogged Tinkering, which was far more than the usual frequency of such visits? Yeah, that meant not even trying for any basement factory for me just yet. Unexpected and certainly unwelcome, but I'd just have to find a way to deal with it. And it's not that I was actually forbidden to Tinker in my own basement, I just wasn't allowed to hide separate projects from the PRT. "Just".

Honestly, while I hadn't expected to immediately make an awesome first impression with Armsmaster given his nature and general sociability neither had I expected that Armsmaster's first reaction to me was to act as if I were guilty until proven innocent of being the second coming of Bakuda. Or given that she wasn't actually a thing in Brockton Bay yet – her recruitment by the ABB hadn't been until towards the end of March in canon and my Wards debut was scheduled for February 18th - the first coming of Bakuda.

But at least I'd managed to put a spike in that.

Worm canon was actually not explicit on the when and where of Bakuda's trigger event, and there was only some vague words from the author on the why. But one of the most popular and consistent Worm fanons was that Bakuda had been named Grace and that she'd triggered due to her ego not being able to accept failing an exam and combined that with epically unhealthy levels of student stress and burnout. And it was actually mostly-confirmed by the author that her first criminal act immediately post-trigger had been trying to hold the campus of Cornell University hostage with bombs in several buildings, and that she'd ended up in Brockton Bay and recruited by the ABB by the end of March. So I had hope that early February was early enough to still be before her trigger event, and that I could head it off.

Because if I could do that, then John's meta-knowledge told me I would clear out the next several months in Brockton Bay. Having taken down Coil so early and completely and the Undersiders all being put away meant I'd already butterflied away such things as the Lung Fight and what that had led to, the Empire-88 Mass Identity Reveal and what that had led to, the arrival of the Travelers in Brockton Bay and thus the Echidna incident and what that had led to, and so forth. Plus, without the existence of Skitter or the Undersiders still being around there would be no Bank Robbery and thus no kick-start to the part of Amy's insanity spiral and what that had led to.

So the major things still left on the canon pain schedule for Brockton Bay in the near future were first the Gang War, which I didn't know a single-point way to avert just yet but I could at least hope that I already had. And the second would be Bakuda's rampage, which I definitely know a single-point way to avert… if I could find her in time. So I'd start at Cornell.

Even from a publicly-accessible wireless hotspot in Brockton Bay, some Tinker-assisted hacking easily put me inside the Cornell University student administration systems. Not long after that a cross-referenced search for female students from Masachusetts (Bakuda canonically had a strong Boston accent) turned up a Grace Koizumi from Boston. A simple dive into her student transcript confirmed that she was an engineering student, that she had multiple notations on her record regarding 'poor interpersonal action' with other students, and that she was still regularly attending class.

Good. Still pre-trigger. Although it clearly won't be long…

Grace's personal computer was plugged into the college LAN for convenience's sake and access to online educational resources, meaning that since I'd already back-hacked through Cornell's Internet gateway I could get in there as well. Going through the hard drive on her computer turned up a rather disturbing impression of diary entries and rants, as the intensely private Grace apparently had nowhere else to vent to. It read exactly like what you'd expect to find in the diary of a school shooter as they were still in the ramp-up to final crazy phase and had yet to crack. Which made sense because that's exactly what the-woman-who-would-be-Bakuda was.

So, praying to God that the stress of being arrested wouldn't make her Trigger even worse, I used my hacked admin account to her computer to start e-mailing some of the death threats she'd made in private to her own diary to the e-mail accounts of the students she'd actually written them about.

Sure enough, my follow-up a couple days later turned up the notation in campus records that a Grace Koizumi had been temporarily withdrawn from the student body as the results of an internal campus investigation had turned up a very disturbing pattern, and medical intervention was noted. Let's hope that the Thorazine they're giving her in the psych ward keeps her from triggering any time soon, if ever. Let's hope the therapy actually works.

Let's hope that with Bakuda at least delayed and hopefully done, and everything else that the downfall of Coil has already prevented, Brockton Bay can get a quiet year at last.

Author's Note: This chapter had already been partly written before I went in for surgery, so even on the meds I was still able to finish it up and get it out. Now I have to get back to the Arc Three overall design, as well as work on my recovery, so, don't expect a follow-up soon.

But at least I'm able to get out Taylor's cape name and identity, a good outline of what her plans for the immediate future (or at least what they will be until and unless some new black swan event blows them up for her, because the first casualty of any battle is always the battle plan), wrap up what's happening with the Undersiders, and throw Bakuda's Birdcaged ass on top of the already immense pile of Stations of the Canon that have just been butterfly bombed into oblivion.

So, enjoy the "cold open" of Arc Three and I hope to see you all when I finally get fully back into the writing zone that I'm still kinda wobbling around the outskirts of.

Oh, and to answer an earlier reader question, Blank only works against hostile uses of Thinker abilities so that's how Taylor keeps her actions from creating too epic a blind spot. If your path and Taylor's aren't really set up to cross in a bad way, you don't get much if any signal interference.

Edited to resolve major continuity error: I blame the meds for having me confuse Cornell University with MIT. As Taylor could not possibly reach the former on a day trip, a much less dramatic and more remote-control solution to the Bakuda problem had to be retconned in. The prior version is now zotzed as if it never was. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Bakuda has no canon first name in canon, let alone a last name, so I just made it up.

Last edited: Oct 15, 2019

Updated: Roses of Villarosa - Hearts and Minds (Richard POV)

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Evolution 3.2

(Taylor's nightmare is given more detail in the Sidestory "Golden Ending?").

Why did I feel as if it still had not been enough?

My eyes shot open and I realized that I was still in my own bed. My gasp of terror stuck in my throat as Invictus came crashing down, and I didn't release it until I was sure that I'd caught my breath and wouldn't make any noises that might wake Dad up.

It had been that fucking nightmare again.

I'd been having them at least every several nights since I'd first woken up in the hospital. They all had a common theme, one where I abandoned my life and my morals to concentrate on ruthless progress, justifying myself with the rationale that my mission was too important to allow me to take unnecessary risks or delays.

Sometimes I voluntarily sought out Cauldron and immediately volunteered for service as their living weapon, leading to scenarios where we had war across the heavens with indescribable technological terrors at our command and the implied ending was me along with Cauldron's survivors optimally poised to rule the semi-shattered aftermath of civilizations.

Sometimes I joined Coil or the Empire Eighty-Eight, smiling sweetly up at them as they dreamed of using my "young and vulnerable" self and I ended up using them instead via various technological Master effects I'd created, from hypnotics to nanites. I'd eventually make them all all my puppets as I quietly assembled my world-breaking technology behind their corporate fronts. Those generally ended with the implication that Earth-Bet's civilization would continue along superficially as it was. Just with me possessing all the real power, playing both cops and robbers via my pawns while no one could deny me anything.

Sometimes, like in the nightmare I'd just finished, I went for it alone in various flavors of techno-Khepri. I'd find a way to upgrade myself into some sort of post-Singularity being and just tear the Entities from the heavens on my own. Those nightmares usually had collateral damage counts ranging from planetary to indescribable. The most recent one had been an exception in that I'd only killed one man, Armsmaster.

And I didn't know what was worse, the nights where after I awoke I couldn't actually remember the particular Tinkertech theories that I'd been using in my nightmare scenario… or the nights where I could.

But this was also the first time the nightmare had run long enough that it didn't just fade out on a vague dream-ending of Zion dying and an implication of what happened next, but an actual fully detailed aftermath. One that remained as sharp and clear as any dream could, right up until the moment I "died".

So no, I didn't need an Inspired Inventor-given psychology degree to get the message. My subconscious fears were revolving around the sheer immensity of the potential power I'd been granted, the incalculable potential I had to eventually change the world, and my doubts as to whether or not I should.

Every hero Tinker of course told themselves that they wanted to make the world a better place. And there were indeed so many unambiguously good things I could potentially do. Not just things like killing Endbringers or inventing better weapons for the PRT or the police to let them catch more villains, but things like clean energy, pure water, medical tech, etc.

I had potentially unlimited power, which meant that I bore potentially unlimited responsibility. But no even remotely human mind could possibly carry the load of unlimited responsibility without feeling unlimited guilt, and unlimited guilt would drive any remotely human soul to howling madness. Even Invictus would only let you remain a functional broken person, not a well one.

It was a philosophical trap that could only be escaped by consciously accepting a lesser role, to see yourself as just a girl and not a nascent goddess. To believe that a higher power – and I didn't mean ROB – was ordering the universe and that things happened for a reason, and that if you tried your best to be a good person then at worst you wouldn't be too bad.

But that did nothing to stifle that inner voice that kept crying out 'That's just an excuse for you to pretend you're not as strong as you are! You have a responsibility to use all your powers, as long and often as you can, and any failure on your part to do less means that all that potential blood is on your hands!'

Yeah, there was a reason that I'd 'clicked' with Amy Dallon as soon as I'd met her. Because I could empathize. And it was an example of how perversely human minds could work that I could simultaneously accept that Amy was being too hard on herself (if it wasn't her mother being too hard on her) and that there was nothing wrong with her being a finite human being however potentially unlimited her power was. With wishing that she could just take some time to be Amy Dallon and not the all-healing Panacea. Even though every time I told myself the same thing, that I wasn't committing an irredeemable sin by letting myself spend some time being Taylor Hebert rather than Inspired Inventor, I never quite believed me.

I sometimes wondered what nightmares Amy had about going too far, about losing herself in her power and never coming back. I also wondered how often she had them. But I never wondered if she had them. I didn't even have to ask her, or read anything about it in Worm. I knew.

As I lay awake and pondered all these things for at least the tenth time, I realized that this time I was reaching at least slightly different conclusions. Or that if I was reaching the same conclusions, I felt more resolved about them. My final Khepri nightmare and its definitive ending had at least made me realize there was a difference between jumping on a grenade to save someone else, and methodically amputating your own human sensibilities because it let you move faster.

That last nightmare where even only one man's murder had still not made the scenario clean enough had told me, clearly and unambiguously, that the only thing sacrificing 'everything' to get the job done truly meant was that when the job was done, your life would be too. And that the only acceptable amount of deliberate cold-blooded murder of innocents to get the job done was 'zero'. Even one was too many. Accidents were one thing, failures were one thing, but outright pushing the button on someone for expediency? Just. Plain. Wrong.

The Hard Woman making Hard Choices was an illusion, a trap. Depending on context you could consider it either a self-justifying fallacy or a nihilistic endpoint, but however you parsed the word salad it all ended up in the same place. It was a dead end. If the situation was such that you truly could not save the day without having to cross that particular event horizon, then you just weren't coming back.

And so if you believed that in this universe things happened for a reason, then you also had to believe that it was possible to save the day without needing to take that last fatal plunge. And I don't mean in the sense of 'dying on the battlefield', because heroes risked that as a matter of course and were right to do so. I meant in the sense of 'sacrificing your own soul to take your enemy's with you'. No. That was wrong, because it had to be.

It wasn't wrong to concentrate on individuals, on people, on connections and the human touch, instead of abandoning that all in pursuit of 'what was important'. People were important. Connections were important. They were what made us human. And ditching your humanity as an acceptable trade for saving the world was a self-defeating paradox, because your humanity was the only thing that let you really see the world. To know it was a place where real people with real feelings lived and wasn't just a game theory problem or a mathematical abstract.

How could you possibly save anything after you'd already forfeited your ability to actually perceive it as it was, or as it should be?

So yes, I believed that, because I had to believe that. Because the alternative was to become someone that would come to see the world as theirs to save, or theirs to change, or theirs to protect, or theirs to destroy. And that was the fundamental error that had been underlying all my nightmares. Choosing to see the world as mine instead of as ours. Because no matter how much power that Inspired Inventor could give me, it wasn't just my world. And it never would be.

This world, and all worlds, belonged to all of us. And we all belonged to them. And even if the world or worlds needed someone unique like me to help them fight the battles that they never could, that still didn't mean I could ever let myself lose track of this key insight.

And if letting myself try to help the world one person at a time, starting with those nearest to me and working outwards, was what helped me to never lose track of that important a principle… then that's what I'd do.

Of course, even with all that being true that didn't mean I could or should focus solely on the immediate concerns of my local environment and never look at the big picture, but as with all the things the trick was trying to find the proper balance between all your competing priorities and responsibilities. That was called life.

So I'd keep one eye on the horizon and the other on the next step in front of me, and try to do the best I could with what I had and not kill myself with guilt even if what I did wasn't perfect and never would be.

I sighed. That's what I'd been already trying. and I was still laying awake at night after nightmares like this. But as plans went it would just have to do until a better one came along.

My alarm clock beeped just as I'd finished repeating my affirmations to myself and processing my latest insight, and I looked over at it. 6:30am, February 18th, 2011.

Time to get up and get dressed. This is the day Binary debuts on the Wards.

But first, it was time for high school.

"So, today's the big day?" Amy said softly, using the schoolyard prison-whisper every student knew for talking about private topics in public. We were sitting in our usual seats together at a table one down from the throne where Victoria Dallon, leader of the Very Populars at Arcadia High School and unquestioned queen of her domain, would hold court over all she surveyed.

Up until now Amy had sat at her sister's right hand because Vicky of course wouldn't make her sister sit anywhere else. It didn't matter that Amy was mousy, reclusive, and socially not awesome when Vicky and the girls that gravitated around her were the exact opposite of those things, Victoria Dallon loved her sister and was certainly not going to cut her out or let anyone else cut her out over such trivial concerns. So if you went to Arcadia then you accepted the Dallon sisters as a package deal and that was it.

The problem was that as one of God's natural extroverts, Vicky simply didn't get that introverts like Amy found being in the middle of the crowd exhausting and not stimulating. That to them social interaction was a thing they wanted to do in measured amounts, in-between periods of just quietly being by themselves to recharge their batteries. Its not that introverts felt emotions differently than other people. They cared and had friends and enemies and loved and hated as deeply as anyone else. They just expressed differently, and had different… social energy flows, you could call it.

The ideal way to express affection to an introverted friend or sibling was about the same way you'd do so with a cat. You'd let them know you were nearby and that if they felt like coming over and socializing, you'd love to have them. But then you let them have their space and decide when to make the final approach on their own time. You didn't isolate them, but you didn't just go and clasp them to your bosom or parade them at your side either.

And, yes, anybody who'd ever so much as seen Victoria Dallon could understand why Amy could get a little worn out by her sometimes, because when it came to emotional things Vicky just didn't do subtle. You were either gleefully clasped to the aforementioned bosom or else you were a disregarded part of the background as she flew on by. 'Middle ground' to Vicky was a word in the dictionary between ''Huh?' and 'What?'

So that delicate little balance that I mentioned worked great for introverts? I was still trying to figure out how I'd explain it to Vicky. It's not that she was ignorant or possessed poor social intelligence. Vicky was actually one of the smartest people in the school and it wasn't just her superhero good looks and aura powers that made her so damn charismatic. But just like doctors really sucked at diagnosing themselves, Amy was simply too close to Vicky for her to see Amy's situation at all objectively. So Vicky was simultaneously Amy's primary source of emotional support in her life and a wearying drain on her social reserves whenever they were in public together.

Huh. Now that I thought about it, that might be the reason for Amy's whole… confused emotional situation… about her sister. Having your life suck so hard that only one person in your life gave you any real emotional support was an emotionally unhealthy situation as is, but if even that one person was only a welcome relief to you when you were in private together and became just another environmental stressor when you were out in public, then yeah, that might get cross-connected with intimacy down in the subconscious.

Let alone the fact that Vicky was simply so damn gorgeous that even I felt a little gay for Glory Girl and I was as straight as Euclid's ruler. And that Amy, with the exquisitely poor timing that accompanied so many historical events in Worm, had been adopted into the Dallon family only immediately after reaching the cutoff age for the Westermarck Effect. You know, that subconscious response that kept you from perceiving the people you'd grown up in childhood with as sexual beings at all? That basically stopped working at age six and Amy had been what, seven or eight?

In fact, the more closely I observed the more I wondered if that whole aura thing had been just fanon. I mean, I certainly wished Vicky could get a better handle on that damned thing because feeling sudden bursts of excitement or anxiety whenever anything caused Mount Victoria to boil over at the next table was pretty annoying, but I had every opportunity to observe Amy's subliminal twitches as Vicky entered or left the room and Amy certainly didn't act like an addicted person would as their 'fix' either came or went. She seemed to just be somebody under conditions where anyone's feelings might get a little confused, then constantly subjected to a massive amount of completely unrelated stress which, as chronic stress did, had the effect of magnifying all emotions out of normal proportion.

Which thank God, because that meant I could hopefully help with this whole thing simply by being Amy's friend instead of having to get into some complicated psychological manipulation scenario. Which would be patronizing, possibly ethically dubious, and far too likely to explode in my face.

It was part of the high school social paradox that unless someone was Unpopular then them sitting alone at a table meant that you were required to sit down all around her and begin the social circle, but if they were sitting at a table already discussing something quietly with a friend then that plus a little body language was immediately accepted as 'Privacy Please!'. So simply by hanging out with me, Amy could get more alone time then she could by actually being alone. Look, we were all teenagers in this school and that's not exactly a form of life famous for its rationality.

As far as Vicky's opinion on the whole matter, she was just happy that her sister seemed happy and if Amy wanted to spend her time geeking out in a quiet corner with a fellow geek then sure, why not. She'd still charge over every now and then to touch base, and of course I'd first been given the hairy eyeball for a while to make sure I wasn't some social climber or jerk trying to cultivate Panacea under false pretenses – which actually had happened before - but a quick word from Dean to her that I was actually the next Ward-to-be, after the Wards themselves had finally been informed, had then cleared up her suspicions.

Yes, I was at Arcadia. In fact, they'd fast-tracked me into Arcadia as quickly as possible after I'd had my conversation with Director Piggot. The reason for that is because they'd have had enough trouble keeping 'new girl must be the new Ward!' from occurring to everyone as it was, and they certainly didn't need to make that harder for themselves by doing something as idiotic as having my public debut and my school transfer being simultaneous.

As is, by rushing me in here back in late January my transfer looked more like 'Wait, wasn't she that girl in the locker from Winslow? I guess she just got out of the hospital and of course she can't go back to that horrible place so now she's here' as opposed to 'So, new Ward, huh?' And by the time Binary would have her big reveal I'd already have been part of the background here for several weeks, and no new girl showing up immediately after Binary's' debut would be taken as 'Huh, I guess Binary goes to the same school Shadow Stalker went to, because I don't think she was here either.' A nice little double-shuffle.

For that matter, the Locker was also a good public explanation for how and why Amy and I were sitting together. By letting it out that she'd saved my life after the Locker then well of course I'd look her up to say thank you once I got to Arcadia, and if we apparently hit it off from there…?

No, I wasn't sitting with the Wards yet. For one thing, secret ID concerns meant they didn't want to sit together with each other every day and they actually did have friends like normal kids. For another, they hadn't been told who I was - or vice versa, but of course I'd already known - until several days before my scheduled public debut. We'd already gotten the masks-off and introduce-each-other session out of the way before being expected to go on stage together, but we hadn't really had much of a chance to get to know each other well yet. That would come later as I settled into Wards training and console rotation and patrols.

And yes, I'd originally had plans to get my GED. Those plans were now junked. Both because from my dad's point of view it was an entirely legitimate concern that 'diploma from Arcadia' looked far better on the college application than 'GED from Brockton Bay', because the Wards were offering to pay for the full-ride, and because I certainly couldn't help Amy get herself a safe space to breathe in if I wasn't at the same school she was. It's not as if she was a Ward, even if her sister was dating one.

"Yup," I told her after first making sure we had no eavesdroppers. "The others already got the day off for the event, and I stay here for the half to maintain the optical illusion that I'm not the new one. Then I zip out right after lunch while I'm officially in the office having transition stuff with the guidance counselor, and hopefully nobody notices new girl wasn't actually on-stage during the late morning run-up."

"They put a lot of work into those optical illusions, don't they?" she said. "I honestly wonder how much the logistics cost just on you guys alone."

"Well, you know why its extra important in my case."

"Oh do I ever," she nodded. "So, still no urges to huff the sulfuric acid in chem class?"

I rolled my eyes and gave her an imitation Glory Girl shoulder punch just to let her know no hard feelings over the running trifecta gag, and she almost-smiled back.

"Nope. And speaking of unpleasant smells, I've got-" I looked at my watch. "Six minutes to dine and dash before I have to slide out and get ready to talk to the reporters."

"Good luck," she said with honest reassurance, dropping the snark for a bit before grinning. "And remember, no matter how badly you stutter you can't possibly make a worse first impression than Dennis did."

"Amy Dallon, you have the pure and kind heart of a Disney Princess-" I began.

"-in a jar in my bedroom." she finished, and we both chuckled.

"-and I'm looking forward to having a productive and inspiring time with the Brockton Bay Wards," I finished the prepared speech.

"Thank you, Binary," Deputy Director Renick said. "Now, we're willing to take a few questions from the crowd…"

"Aegis, how do you feel about your new teammate?" one reporter yelled at him.

"She's made an excellent first impression on all of us and I expect great things from her in the future," he replied smoothly. Yeah, they gave us a lot of media prep for things like this.

"Clockblocker, is it true that that you prank all new entrants to the Wards and how did you get Binary?"

Clockblocker actually sighed on hearing that one before replying with a legitimately serious tone of voice. "That rumor is not true, and I did not 'get' Binary. I know my reputation, but being deliberately cruel or obnoxious to your teammates is what a d- unintelligent person would do." he cut himself off, after deliberately saying just enough of his original word to leave it unambiguous what his opinion had been. Nice microphone skills.

Wait, did he just get in a zing at the not-so-dear departed Shadow Stalker without anybody but us even knowing what he'd said? Hah!

The Deputy Director looked like he wanted to say something, then seemed to shrug and decide that Clock's answer actually had said the right thing if not in exactly the right manner.

"Binary, what's your thoughts on how the heroic capes in Brockton Bay are outnumbered almost two-to-one by the villains and gangs?" a third reporter broke in smoothly. Ah, the ambush question. Even without any media experience, just the coaching, I was entirely unsurprised. Blood in the water brings out the sharks, after all.

"That outnumbered or not we are still here, and that we're not going anywhere." I replied calmly and without hesitation. The Deputy Director, checked before he could step in and run interference, did a little double-take and then micro-nodded at me as if in approval of how well I'd fielded it.

"Is it true that Shadow Stalker was dismissed from the Wards?" another voice called, but their having forgotten to address it to any particular Ward meant it was wide open to be grabbed by one of the adults.

"Shadow Stalker chose to withdraw from the Wards to concentrate further on her educational opportunities, and we look forward to her having an honorable career with the Protectorate in the future," the Deputy Director replied with the standard boilerplate the PRT had been using ever since Shadow Stalker had first been thrown into the memory hole, and every Ward on-stage maintained our patented neutral expressions. You learned that one fast if you had to do media appearances on a regular basis. "And we're coming up on time, so, last question?"

"Binary, what's your Tinkertech specialty?"

"I'm still going through powers testing but so far I've had a lot of success with things involving computers," I said. "And yes, that's part of why I picked my cape name."

"Thank you Binary, and thank you all," the Deputy Director said, and with that we wrapped up the press conference and headed out.

Whew. Okay, that's day one over without any disasters. Now we'll just see how this goes from here.

Author's Note: I thank whoever gave me the idea for the nightmare sequence, because that folded so neatly into character development I already had planned but hadn't quite figured out how to show. In fact, that particular inspiration let me get an entire chapter out ahead of schedule.

So yes, now you know part of what's been riding Taylor all along and how she reaffirms her beliefs to herself regularly because she has to. She's not oblivious to the tremendous weight and responsibilities upon her, she just cries on the inside. Plus, natch, her belief that her humanity must be something she preserves, or else she won't be able to do her mission properly. Because motivations matter along with actions. And because at moments like these, human beings cling to faith in things.

Also, did anyone ask for some slice of life? Because you can have some slice of life. :)

And yes, right now she's much closer to Amy than the Wards. She hasn't even met the Wards for intros until shortly before her public debut - they didn't even find out until a couple days before the 18th that the new girl at Arcadia who's hanging out with Panacea is also their new teammate - but she's had weeks to start her friendship with Amy.

And yes, I have my own take on Amy Dallon's Vicky thing instead of just going straight for the aura, because, well, why not try something new if you can? Besides, I am an introvert IRL, even if I've never been a teenaged girl, so I can entirely write from what I know there.

Last edited: Oct 15, 2019

Updated: Roses of Villarosa - Hearts and Minds (Richard POV)

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Evolution 3.3

"And this is The Console," Dennis said, pronouncing the words with deliberately stentorian tones. We were both sitting in the console room in the dedicated Wards quarters beneath the downtown PRT building, and there were no visitors scheduled, so we were masks-off and using first names.

"Yea at first you will hate it, but soon you will learn to love it as you would your Big Brother," he continued on, deliberately dropping the 1984 reference. "Because they will give you no choice."

"What, they let Wards run the dispatch center?" I asked him. "Isn't that a critical node?"

"They let us train to run the dispatch center," he replied in a much more normal voice, "but no, we're not being left alone to actually run it. This is just a mirror to the real console at HQ, and mostly we're just following along behind the duty agent as he calls the shots."

"Why wou- ohhh, because we're supposed to grow up and eventually join the Protectorate, and this way we've learned how PRT field operations are run and know all the moves and don't accidentally friendly-fire the support agents behind us because we're not on the same page."

"That's it," he nodded. "So, older brother who played team sports or military family? Because normally that's not an immediately intuitive concept to people. I needed the full explanation before I got it."

"No siblings," I said, "and my dad's in the Dockworkers. I just read a lot. A whole lot. There's basically a random library's worth of stuff up here," I said, poking a finger at my temple.

"Do you have total recall?" he asked. "Because don't let Carlos know that or else you will never get out from doing all the Wards paperwork."

"No, just a really effective cramming method I sort of worked out. I… might actually be able to teach it to other people," I continued in thoughtful realization. "I've never actually tried to, or even thought of doing that."

"Keep doing that," he said, reclining in his chair. "Thinking about and bringing up random stuff with us, that is. Chris tends to have more ideas flow for his own Tinkertech when he's bouncing them off other people then when he gets all wrapped up by himself in the lab, even if none of us are Tinkers or really understand what he's talking about. Everybody talks about Tinkering like it's all about diving deep into the solo Tinker fugue, and that actually seems to work for Armsmaster, but after watching Chris work I'm starting to wonder if more Tinker collabs wouldn't be the way to go."

"Hey, I'm all for Tinker collabs," I said. "That's one of the things I was looking forward to the most when I got here. I just haven't had a chance to really compare circuit boards with him yet because we haven't shared a shift."

"We have team bonding things a couple Saturdays per month as well, so you'll definitely have a chance to discuss it with him there if not earlier," he said, before looking around and then continuing more quietly. "Okay, I'm not pressing but I notice you didn't mention Armsmaster when you said what you were looking forward to more Tinker collabs. And he's one of the top hero tinkers in the world, I'd expect you to be all about getting a chance to learn from him. Chris definitely was when he first got here."

"If you're really asking 'Taylor, are the rumors about you and Dragon true?', the answer is 'Which ones?' I was trying to get in touch with her on PHO right before I got Coilnapped, and we have stayed in touch since if you're asking. Right now she's got a major software project I'm assistant coding on. Telecommuting is the best commuting."

"Actually, I was asking why does Armsmaster seem to have such a problem with you? Because its like the temperature drops ten degrees every time you're in the same room. And he normally leaves dealing with routine Wards stuff to Miss Militia, but ever since you've arrived he's been dropping by more often."

"Blunt truth? He thinks I'm Tinker crazy." I said, circling one finger around my ear. "As in Bonesaw crazy."

Dennis blinked in honest confusion. "He thinks you're crazy? Um, did your name and Sophia's somehow get swapped on his incident reports or something? Taylor, you know exactly why we'd know what a psycho teammate really looks like and, um, yeah. So did you have a really bad Tinker fugue once or-?"

I sighed. "How much do you already know about my rescue from Coil's base?"

"Well, I did hear about someone getting handcuffed to a console," he said, grinning.

"To cut a long story short, I got out of my cell but not out of the base. I did get a message out to Dragon but then I got re-taken, and ended up alone with Coil and him about to kill me. Velocity ran in for the save at literally the last fraction of a second. As in, the trigger was already pulled and the hammer was already falling towards the round in the chamber when Velocity got there and put his thumb in front of it."

"Damn. But even Armsmaster would understand your having a, um-"

"Episode?"

"-episode over a close call like that. So I'm a little confused."

"Assuming the hostage-taker is a total psychopath and completely untrustworthy in normal negotiation, how would you logically solve the hostage problem?"

"Wait, that sounds familiar... The hostage problem is logically insol- you're quoting Lois Bujold, aren't you? The Miles Vorkosigan series?"

"Miles had judged the hostage-problem logically insoluble; therefore, clearly the only thing to do was make it Cavilo's problem instead of his own." I quoted from The Vor Game. "Right before Velocity arrived I was trying to flip it around and take Coil hostage just like he'd taken me hostage, so he wouldn't shoot me."

"How do you do that with a gun already to your head?"

"By being crazy prepared enough to have already worried about the contingency of ending up stuck in this no-win situation before you even started your escape attempt, which as it turned out I was right about… and being crazy enough to make a, er, Tinkertech radiation grenade. As in 'Coil, I've just dosed us both with approximately 2000 rads. Your only choices are to surrender immediately so we can both get to Panacea in time, or not surrender and kill us both. And you were going to kill me anyway so you're the only person in the room with something to lose right now.' But he started to shoot me before I could tell him, but then Velocity saved me anyway so we thought it was all right, but then Coil escapes before-"

"Taylor, stop." Dennis said, palms out as if to ward me off physically, and then he lowered his hands and looked at me intently. "Are you okay? And please don't say you're fine, because what you just said is not fine at all."

"I'm coping," I said. "Trust me. I had already this conversation with the Director, and I know about the available support options."

He looked at me for a long while and sighed. "Okay, I'm about to say something really offensive and I apologize in advance, but I just have to clear the air." He stopped and continued with deliberate emphasis. "Bullshit."

I just looked at him.

"That's exactly what I mean!" he replied "You just told me about something incredibly PTSD-worthy in your recent past, then explained how it was even worse than the nightmare I was imagining, then confessed that you accidentally manslaughtered someone – even if it sounds like the bad guy did it all to himself and totally had it coming - and then you had me direly insult you on a personal level and you still haven't so much as raised your voice. You should have gone off on me like a rocket for that last one. No normal person is that self-controlled!"

I sighed regretfully. "So, do you think I'm crazy?"

"No, I think you're repressing like crazy," he said earnestly. "I think you're bottling up more stuff than even Missy does and have even less outlet for it. I think you're going along pretending that if you don't let anyone ever see you need to vent then that means you have nothing that needs venting." He said, leaning forward pleadingly. "And Taylor, I really, really don't want to watch you have to find out the hard way how much that one won't work. Because I've been there, done that, and gotten the trigger event."

I desperately tried to think of something, anything I could say that wasn't a lie. Because… no, its not that I couldn't lie.

Its that I didn't want to.

"You already know about my trigger event, right?" I asked him.

"The Winslow locker incident? I know the outlines. We all do. They had to tell us about Sophia's real case, not the PR version."

"Something happened to me in that locker, and I mean besides my coming out a Tinker," I said. "Something… my head hasn't worked quite the same way since. I'm not irrational, and believe you me, they tested for that. But my emotions are… best analogy is, I don't have an off switch for them like my Brute rating lets me off-switch my pain sensors, but its something related to that. I have a bypass for them. My rational thoughts can be rational through almost anything because I'm still in touch with my feelings, I still know what I should be feeling, but I can simultaneously keep intellectual focus as if I wasn't actually feeling."

"And you do that all the time?" he asked a little nervously.

"Oh God no!" I said passionately, and caught his exhalation of relief. "I'm pretty sure that would make me genuinely crazy. I call it my Invictus mode, and I mark it 'For Emergency Use Only'. But used in moderation it hasn't hurt me yet, and it lets me get through intense moments without needing to vent trauma later because the, ummm, emotional charge never accumulates in the first place"

"It matters not how strait the gate / How charged with punishments the scroll / I am the master of my fate / I am the captain of my soul." he quoted from Henley's famous poem of the same name. "Good name for a power for emotional self-control. But I didn't see 'secondary Thinker rating' on your power test, just that mind-over-body thing they finally decided was a minor Brute rating and not a Thinker power."

"Dennis, I just got through explaining to you that part of my chain of command thinks I'm sprained in the membrane, and you thought I was actually going to tell them about neurological differences?" I said incredulously.

And for the first time since I'd met him I saw how Clockblocker had gained his reputation for inappropriately timed humor, because despite his best efforts he couldn't avoid snorting in laughter. "Okay, now I'm convinced you're a mentally normal teenager like the rest of us," he said. "Right down to burying dumb stuff that you're afraid would get you in trouble. Although my advice is that you'd still better find a way to fess up about that one yourself before they catch you out on it the hard way, or Miss Piggy will have you on console duty for a month when they finally do."

"She really doesn't deserve to be called that, you know," I said as gently as I could.

"Wait until you've met her for more than a recruitment pitch and tell me that again." he shot back. "I can't recall a single positive interaction with her since I got on the team."

"Have you ever seen her for anything other a mess that escalated so high they had to call her office?" I asked. "Do you think that might have had something to do with it?"

"You are a depressingly logical young woman and the fact that you likely have a point will not save you from soon enduring my formidable collection of Vulcan jokes," he replied more calmly. "Speaking of which, look! An obvious distraction!" He actually went and pointed behind me, and I didn't bother to look.

"Yes?" I said amusedly.

"Lightening the mood, can I ask you why you shook hands with me without hesitating at the intro session? Because ever since that stupid rumor about me being the compulsive 'Freeze!' prankster went around even some of the agents are afraid to let me touch them, let alone other kids."

"What did I have to lose?" I said, shrugging. "Your power doesn't do the slightest bit of permanent damage. So if you actually do it then I lose a couple minutes and now I know to never let you stand behind me with any ice cubes, and if you don't do it then I haven't offended someone who didn't deserve it."

"As I said," he replied warmly while saluting me with his soda. "You are a depressingly logical young woman."

"Just call me T'alor" I replied using the abbreviating convention for a female Vulcan name, and we both laughed.

My finally revealing the existence of Invictus to Clockblocker several days after my formal induction is what seemed to finally break the ice for me with the Wards, because before then they'd been a little standoffish. Oh, they's been entirely polite – even when the grown-ups weren't watching – but not entirely open. It hadn't occurred to me except in hindsight that the Shadow Stalker experience would have left emotional scars on them too.

Just as I might have been afraid to open myself up to Sophia's old teammates for fear of receiving more of the same treatment, they were also leery of immediately accepting Sophia's replacement on the team out of worry that I might have been a basketful of issues buried underneath a surface layer of competence like she'd been. And the part where more details you knew about the incident in Coil's base the less normal I looked certainly hadn't helped there. The details of the incident clearly hadn't been distributed across the entire team judging from Clockblocker's reaction, but from a couple things Aegis had said and the way he reacted to me I was fairly certain that he at least had been read in on the complete version of events as Wards team leader. And Gallant's reaction to me was also mixed signals, probably because Invictus had been confusing him.

But the fact that I hadn't tried to hide anything from Clockblocker when he'd asked had opened up the circle of trust, and Gallant finally relaxed with an actual explanation provided for why my emotional readings were different from anyone else's. And with Aegis helping run interference for me we got my 'secondary Thinker ability' on the rolls as an honest misunderstanding of not mentioning it during the power testing instead of a deliberate attempt to conceal it. I actually did do much of his paperwork for Aegis for the next week as a thank-you for that, as Clockblocker had joked to me about doing. Besides, as the greatest expert in PRT Bureaucracy on the team it was far easier for me than for him.

… now that I think about it, I think I've just doomed myself to being team secretary forevermore. Oh well, she who wields the pen wields at least some of the power and all that.

And it certainly wouldn't disappoint Vista's image of me for me to be the secretary because Vista was, to put it charitably, a little star-struck by me. Having been directly involved in the base assault herself meant that she'd been the next most-informed on the team after Aegis of my exact circumstances over there simply because like most precocious middle schoolers forced to spend lots of time among older kids and grown-ups, Vista had become a grand master of the fine art of eavesdropping. And that was before you factored in what a power to bend space could do to let you overhear things.

So she'd walked away from that night not only ecstatic at the opportunity to prove a key linchpin of a major Protectorate assault herself – because neither I, Dragon, nor anyone else involved could imagine how they'd have gotten into that base anywhere near as quickly and easily without Dragon and Vista to both open that tunnel – but also under the impression that the new girl on the Wards was basically every female action hero rolled into one as well as a Tinker supergenius. That much admiration is… really flattering, but also not healthy. I mean, you're just asking for an explosion of disappointed outrage the first time you're caught stubbing your toe like a normal human. So every time the topic came up, I tried to gently de-escalate.

Still, it was really hard to dislike Vista and nobody even tried to dislike Vista, even when she was being waaaaaay too intense for a twelve-year-old. She was legitimately a very good person. She didn't lie, cheat, or steal, she always did her work 100% without shirking or complaining, she didn't need constant supervision to avoid goofing off, and did I mention she was only twelve? Most of us weren't this together with our lives when we were eighteen! And she wasn't some humorless child-bot either. If you actually got her going enough to relax her posture, she could almost trade snark with Amy. Even if half of it didn't come out sounding remotely as tough as she'd intended it to.

So it really said something about horrid Vista's home life was that her parents were apparently entirely incapable of recognizing that either they'd set some impossible expectations on their child or else had gotten impossibly lucky in the kid lottery. Not that I could ask her about her home life, because one of the first things everyone else had told me after I'd arrived – out of her hearing, of course – is that you did not ask Vista about her home life. You didn't even bring up the topic. Doing that would make her go monosyllabic in a heartbeat and it could be hours before she'd relax enough to talk again. It was a sad thing to say that you were actually glad that someone's parents were completely neglecting their child's career as a Ward, but in her case it was a mercy because it meant at least she had us for a partial safe space from her own parents.

Yeah, this was not really a picture of long-term mental health here. But Vista was still coping for now, and when I asked Aegis why the hell nobody was doing anything for her permanent situation when it was this obviously horrible to anyone with one working eye, his answer made me want to vomit harder than the radiation sickness had. It also made me vow to never bring any of my problems to the Brockton Bay Youth Guard office because while they might do good work elsewhere, something must be direly wrong with the people there.

Because what kind of ultra level master con job had her parents run on Youth Guard here that YG had expended virtually all their political capital in Brockton Bay on gaining a binding court junction that said the PRT had lost the right to intervene in Vista's particular home situation, and that it was solely up to Youth Guard to make that call from now on? Out of alleged concerns that the PRT would unhealthily exploit her because she was a Shaker 9?

OK, that last one is superficially plausible. I mean, I get how it could be sold to an audience even if I couldn't really see the PRT people I was actually interacting with treat her like that. But that was still no excuse for the court to just instantly assume 'PRT bureaucracy bad, child's parents sacred, court order granted, next case!'. If family court had worked like that all the time then Family Services could never get any child out of a genuinely abusive situation.

And not even Director Costa-Brown swearing on a stack of Bibles could have gotten the Brockton Bay Wards to agree that Vista's situation was not genuinely abusive. In hindsight, now I saw part of how the hell everybody missed Shadow Stalker's mental malfunction for so long. Clearly YG's local office wasn't holding up their end at all, and that meant it took only one PRT worker goofing on the job to cause the situation at Winslow.

But right now, there was nothing we could do about it except give Vista all the emotional support she'd let herself accept from us. Well, I was basically becoming the team admin person and I did have all this II-given knowledge, so I'd see if I could manage something. In my copious free time.

Because in-between Wards training, Wards getting-acquainted, getting that Tinker collab set up with Kid Win, helping Dragon with her Endbringer tracking algorithm, using that project to start getting Endbringer data from Dragon to help me actually turn these hypothetical Endbringer weapons designs to successful-in-simulation-at-least Endbringer weapon designs I could actually submit, Arcadia, actual friendships, PR events, and a very very slow and painstaking quest towards an actual automated assembly of my very own even if I had to stealth build the fracking thing one fraction of a piece at a time in-between Armsmaster paranoia moments… well, it's a good thing I didn't sleep much.

So, during my first week on the Wards I'd managed to break the ice, start to get within their circle of trust, keep up with my training, help Dragon finish her tracking algorithms, and even begin the preliminaries for the next phase of my Tinker Cycle. At last I'd found my feet and started to gather legitimate resources. I'd thought I'd finally started to get a handle on things.

And then the Simurgh attacked Canberra.

"Taylor, it's not your fault," Chris said, letting me lean on his shoulder and cry. Dennis sat on my other side just trying to be reassuring with his presence, and Missy was hovering nearby in a nervous fret.

I wasn't even trying to use Invictus. For one thing, they all knew I had it and 'Don't let Taylor emotionally repress without an actual tactical need' was rapidly becoming as much an informal Wards SOP as 'Don't talk to Missy about her home life' or 'Don't let Chris have more than two minutes to try and explain his Tinkertech to a reporter'.

And for another thing, I wouldn't use it because I deserved to feel all of this pain. Because on the console screen I was busy watching the worst of the Endbringers condemn another city to a worse hell than death and I should known and I should have done something. But I hadn't even known that there was an Endbringer attack between the date of the Locker and the Leviathan assault on Brockton Bay. John hadn't read about that anywhere?

Gods, was there even going to be a Leviathan attack in May or would I be wrong about that too for some reason? Nothing made sense anymore!

So I was busy sitting in the Wards console room bawling my eyes out while my friends surrounded me. Not that anybody was ever happy during an Endbringer attack, anywhere in the world, but none of them were me. None of them had been the Inspired Inventor.

It didn't matter that none of my weapons designs were even half ready yet. It didn't matter that I hadn't had the slightest chance to test them on a proving ground, because they weren't even built, and had only just yesterday started to get enough data from prior Endbringer events about Dragon to even set up a simulator chamber. It didn't matter that I'd helped Dragon finish the tracking algorithm and that was the only reason Canberra had had enough time to do an even 65% successful evacuation. It didn't matter because, because-

Behind me the door opened, and I vaguely heard Miss Militia's voice. "Somebody told me that there was a situation?"

"It's Taylor, ma'am." Aegis said. "She just… broke down, right after the Endbringer attack started."

"It's new Tinker syndrome," Kid Win said hurriedly, trying to explain for me. "Like the whole angst party I threw about my Alternator Cannon not being already done and a proven Endbringer-killer after the Leviathan attack last year. She feels like she should have already already invented something that could have stopped it even when she couldn't possibly have. But that's not her fault, really!" I could feel Clockblocker nodding his head along vigorously to that on my other side.

"Taylor, do you need to lie down?" Miss Militia came over and asked me gently. "Or would you like to go home?"

"I-I'll be all right, ma'am." I said, sniffling. "I don't need to go home. I need to-"

"Taylor," Miss Militia said, kneeling down to take my hand. "No one expects you to single-handedly solve the problem of the Endbringers. And we all know that you did brilliant work helping Dragon with her tracking algorithm. The initial projections are that you have already helped save hundreds of thousands of lives. You did good, Taylor. But the fact that you've done so much to solve the problem already doesn't mean that you should raise your expectations on yourself even higher. Please don't torture yourself for Canberra. This is not your fault."

"W-with all due respect, ma'am, you are wrong." I said. "There are so many man-hours of work I could have done in the past months and didn't, so much I could have-"

"And halt." she said firmly, raising one palm to cut me off. "Taylor, as you may know I am a Noctis cape. I have zero natural requirement for sleep, exceeding even your own abilities as a partial Noctis cape. So in theory I could patrol at least 18 hours a day, needing the remainder for my administrative duties and some brief rests for any overstrained muscles. Do you know why I don't?"

"Ma'am?" I said blearily.

"I don't because no matter what the limits of my physical endurance are, the limits of my emotional endurance remain largely the same as any other person's," she told me. "And I am aware that your secondary powers allow you to push yourself longer and harder, with less cost, than most people do. As I said, I share many of those same gifts. But any finite number can be reduced to zero with sufficient effort, and even the strongest person will shatter themselves if they do not let themselves rest. Human minds are designed to require things like social bonds, sources of recreation, and time to decompress. No cape can drive themselves like a machine, not even ones like us."

"It's not the same," I said. "I had so many designs I never-"

"Then work on them," she replied, "but on a sane schedule. If you truly think you have something that will contribute to the next Endbringer attack, then don't procrastinate… but don't think you are a failure if you can't have it ready immediately. Even Armsmaster or Dragon doesn't carry the weight of such expectations, and there is no reason that you should."

Oh, there were quite a few reasons I should, even if I couldn't share them with anyone.

"I… I'm sorry about this, um, episode ma'am. I'll-"

"You will stay right here with your friends, and let them help you," she said. "And that is all that you are expected to do today. If you don't feel ready for duty tomorrow then I expect you to seek me out then, all right?"

"Yes ma'am."

"Aegis, please feel free to call me again if you think there is anything else requires my attention. Unless anyone objects I'll let you have your privacy back now."

'Thank you," I heard him say, and he walked her to the door and saw her out.

Two thin arms snaked awkwardly around me from the front, and I incredulously noted that the person trying to give me a hug was Missy. I leaned down and into her to make it easier for her, and let Dennis pat me reassuringly on the shoulder while Chris hovered nearby trying to think of something else to say and make it better, and the remainder stood behind them and kept an eye out. And even through my sorrow and guilt I was still grateful that they were here. And I was happy that I'd been able to make such friends.

But I still should have done something.

Author's Note: In before anyone starts end zone celebrating - the event of 'Taylor fails to know Canberra is coming due to John's incomplete knowledge and she collapses in guilt when it does' had already been scheduled to happen before I'd finished 3.1. I'd been building up to this moment the entire time. You didn't make me course correct at all. I even had already decided Clockblocker would quote the poem, before someone else had referenced it.

And oh yeah, its still not going to make Taylor shift immediately into God-Queen Speedrun mode. In fact, what with all the chaff flying up around the issue I've actually become uncertain of what it will do for her. I have reached the current limits of my story outline and will need to re-evaluate a bit.

But I will say this much. Arc Three? Is not going to be nearly as short as Arc Two was. I got lots of fluff to get through in addition to the main arc, and the secondary arc, and things I probably haven't even thought of yet. So if you think its not getting to somewhere, wait a while.

That having been said, so, how do you like my Wards?

And yes, Clockblocker in particular. Folks, its important to remember he's actually like the second or third oldest kid there at the start of canon, and by far the one who is most perceptive about people. He's a comedian, not an immature jackass. And good comedy is hard. Hell, there's a reason that being a clown is considered the most intellectually and physically demanding task in the circus.

So yeah, he's not being promoted to co-protagonist or anything, but I took the chance to try doing something other than the usual fanfic cliches with Dennis while still keeping him recognizably Dennis.

Last edited: Oct 15, 2019

Updated: Roses of Villarosa - Hearts and Minds (Richard POV)

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cliffc999

Jul 19, 2019

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Threadmarks Interlude 3-A: Armsmaster / Danny Hebert / Contessa New

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cliffc999

Jul 20, 2019

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Interlude 3-A: Armsmaster / Danny Hebert / Contessa

Warning: Child death, neo-Nazi ideology

Armsmaster

"Are you saying that the reaction scales proportionately to the density of the material?" I asked Binary suspiciously.

"Yes sir," she replied with her characteristic faux-meekness. Her manipulative attempts to constantly ingratiate herself with authority figures by feigning compliance were so transparent that I was honestly mystified as to why nobody else seemed to see it. Even the Director's reliably cynical nature seemed to always contain an exemption for our newest Ward, and despite Miss Militia's superior experience with the nuances of social interaction she also kept consistently missing the clear warning signs that I kept trying to point out.

"That could lead directly to an exponential cascade scenario!" I insisted heatedly to the rest of the Tinkertech review board. "You can't possibly be thinking of sanctioning this reckless proposal for a moment."

"As I understood Binary's point, since the secondary reaction scales proportionately to density that would mean it would fail to propagate through less dense mediums. Such as water or air." Dr. Hendricks, the seniormost non-Tinker scientist on the review board, interjected.

"Yes sir," Kid Win, her co-presenter for this presentation, interjected. "The minimum density cutoff for the disintegration reaction to take place at all is determined by the interaction of the quantum resonance frequencies hardwired into the primary firing matrix and could not be changed without physically disassembling and reassembling the fine structure of the entire assembly. As constructed, the Quantum Alternator Cannon would register minimal surface damage and zero penetration on anything with a density equal to or less than than 1.22 grams per cubic centimeter."

"Armsmaster, isn't the density of human flesh only equal to that of water? Which is 1 gram per cubic centimeter?" one of the technicians asked me.

"It varies from 0.9 grams per cubic centimeter for fat tissue on up to approximately 1.75 grams per cubic centimeter for bone tissue," I answered matter-of-factly before continuing. "But yes, the effects of this beam striking a human being would… not inflict serious injury." I conceded. "The reaction would have long since failed to propagate through the skin and muscle to even reach the bone. Unless the subject were struck directly on their keratin or tooth enamel-"

"Thank you, Armsmaster," Deputy Director Renick interrupted me. "So to sum up in layman's terms; this weapon should inflict substantial harm on hardened structures, or ultra-dense tissue such as that which is known to compromise the makeup of Endbringers, while still inflicting minimal if any collateral damage on people or animals caught within the beam. And it would fail to propagate the reaction through air or water at all, save of course for the primary beam pulse itself. Am I substantially correct?"

"Yes sir," Binary said, smiling. "Furthermore, since the efficiency of the disintegration reaction also scales up proportionately to the increasing density of the material encountered, and in theory would do so indefinitely, then the known phenomenon that Endbringer flesh becomes enormously tougher the further you try to cut into it should work against them for once."

Preposterous. My nano-thorn technology had better odds of working, when I finally completed it, than this promised 'magic bullet' would and would certainly have less side effects. Binary's tendencies towards recklessly optimistic weapons design and characteristic lack of safety- ah.

"I believe that you have failed to adequately consider the problem of waste heat," I said, staring down at our two careless young Tinkers as best I could. "If that large a volume of material of exponentially increasing density was actually being disintegrated, then where would that energy be released? I remind the board that Binary already has a prior history of dangerous lack of consideration for energy byprod-"

Director Renick cleared his throat loudly. "Thank you, Armsmaster, but we have already taken that last factor into consideration." I grumbled inwardly because I quite clearly heard the We have long since grown bored of your bringing it up at every session without it actually being said out loud. Why was everyone but me so complacent? Still, at least he turned back to them and continuted to ask, "But I am interested in the answer to Armsmaster's first question."

Kid Win and Binary both started to answer at once, then looked at each other and after a moment or two somehow came to a wordless agreement that she should do the speaking for them. More suspicious behavior again! Why was the Wards' more experienced Tinker so instinctively deferring to the unproven newcomer? Not that Kid Win's own record was that of a paragon of sagacity but his track record was at least adequately proven.

Binary nodded to Kid Win and turned back to the review board. "The full mathematical abstract is in appendix B for Dr. Hendricks' and Armsmaster's review-"

I grumbled inwardly again at the review boards' apparent obliviousness to her clear attempt to subtly undercut my authority in front of the review board by making me sound as if I were merely the assistant evaluator instead of the most experienced Tinker of the Protectorate.

"-but in layman's terms, the disintegration reaction is scaled so that it takes almost as much power to disrupt the next layer of molecules as the last layer's disruption provided. The energy balance is made up by the Alternator Cannon's primary power impulse, of course."

"So it's a largely self-sustaining balancing act," Dr. Hendricks said. "Very elegant in theory, and I will grant that you have already had successful laboratory experiments with the principle, but there's still no guarantee it will scale up symmetrically in large-scale field use."

"We know, sir." Binary answered. "That's why Kid Win and I brought our proposal here today for an intermediate scale field test, one on a static target series. A test that would let us verify the feasibility of the exothermic balance and measure the margin of error should our balance calculations not be entirely exact, and all before we actually asked Dragon to mount the weapon on one of her heavy platforms for a trial combat deployment."

"And where precisely do you think you will find a series of capital-scale high-density targets conveniently located far enough away from inhabited areas and mounted in a large enough heat sink to absorb the massive amounts of waste heat if it turns out your mathematics were wrong?" I inquired challengingly. "And what ridiculous percentage of our budget did you imagine we'd be remotely willing to allocate to set up such a target range?"

And my momentary satisfaction at having finally found a way to shut down this incipient madness collapsed into bitter gall at the board's pleased reaction to her next statement.

"The Boat Graveyard, sir. And for virtually zero cost save that necessary for cordoning off the impact area and a network of sensor buoys."

I honestly could not have told anyone else at that moment if that girl was more frustrating to me when she was being wrong, or when she was being right.

Danny Hebert

"Test firing in ten seconds…"

I stood there trying to keep my facial expression to one of pleased anticipation only instead of the pride that was threatening to burst every vein in my body. Officially I was here as the representative of the Dockworker's Union, and not because that was my little girl out there and she'd finally figured out a way to fix the Boat Graveyard! I had to keep Taylor's identity a secret and that meant I couldn't just charge right over there and give 'Binary' the big damn hug she'd well and truly earned. That would be for as soon as we got home.

Even after Taylor had gotten powers I'd never imagined that she would go on to do things like this, but despite having only been a Ward for a couple of weeks she was already having Tinkertech designs for things like this 'Quantum Alternator Cannon'. Which I'd overheard was actually intended to become an anti-Endbringer weapon after the preliminary field tests like this one helped them refine the design further.

My little girl was going to grow up to help kill Endbringers? Thank God that it would be from a safe distance or else that would be the world's most terrifying thought, not pride-inducing!

"Test firing in five seconds…"

They weren't making a big public ceremony of the test. Oh, the city had been notified and the harbor patrol had closed off the harbor this morning and all the standard safety precautions had been taken, yes. And the nearest derelict ship to the shore wouldn't even be fired at today because they didn't think it was far enough away from the city to be safe. But they were afraid the test firing might not be 100% successful the first time so they weren't making a live media event out of it. A camera crew was in place so that any successes could be broadcast by the Protectorate's PR people later, but if the whole thing fizzled then they didn't want to embarrass anyone.

I noted with awe that the various parts of this 'Quantum Alternator Cannon' were apparently being teleported in somehow, a piece at a time, and assembling themselves as they arrived. Kid Win, who'd apparently been Taylor's partner in designing and building it, was supervising the final assembly by tapping commands onto a keyboard built into the forearm of his own techno-armor, a bright red-and-gold affair that contrasted neatly against my Taylor's dark-blue-and-silver.

The final pieces of the cannon clicked together just as the countdown reached the one-second mark, and the hovering platform it was mounted on finished locking onto the ship intended for the first target…

"FIRING!"

And a golden-white beam leapt forth from the muzzle of the energy cannon to touch the wreckage of the first target, the farthest-out of all of the rusting derelicts that had been blocking the Ship Channel for years. I stared in awe as beam touched the ship and it too turned into gold and white energy, the reaction spreading out across the ship in what had to be only a couple of seconds but by some optical illusion looked as slow as time-lapse photography, and my breath caught in my throat because it was working and Taylor had done it! She'd done it!

The scientists standing at the nearby table full of instruments were babbling things about 'exothermic release calculations' and 'self-sustaining cascade reaction within nominal projections' and sensor buoys in a dispersion pattern to pick up readings and all sorts of other things I didn't understand. As the first ship finished disintegrating and the water rushed in to fill the hole in the water it had left, the Alternator Cannon locked onto the second ship in the program sequence and that one began to go away too. According to the projected schedule it would take approximately twelve minutes to clear more of the wreckage out of the Ship Channel than the city would have been able to do in years.

Oh, there'd still be things to do before it would be clear for shipping, the last couple of ships to be moved out by hand and then possible wreckage below the water dredged and cleared, but the projected cost of dealing with the Boat Graveyard had just been reduced to at most a hundredth of what it had originally been. The background of my mind idly daydreamed about possible arguments and proposals to bring to my next argument with the Mayor's office about the ferry restoral, but the foreground was all Taylor sharing a triumphant high-five with Kid Win as the PRT scientists clustered around to ask questions and Armsmaster was a statue still staring out to sea where the ships had been and only one real thought filled my mind.

My little girl had done it.

Contessa

I stepped out of a Door into the interior of an apartment. Neither particularly rich nor poor, it was just another example of an average urban domicile in an economically depressed city undergoing slow decay. Brockton Bay.

It didn't matter.

I walked past the middle-aged black woman slumped in her armchair, a habitual alcoholic by all appearance given that she was already so drunk as to be unconscious despite it being early afternoon. Her race was irrelevant except that it would particularly focus the rage of the intended target of today's psychological destabilization operation, given what that target's particular racial prejudices were.

I reached into a nearby table drawer for a pack of cigarettes that had to be there. I pulled out the pack, shook loose one cigarette, and then dropped the back adjacent to the armchair as if it had fallen from a careless hand. I lit the cigarette and puffed on it expressionlessly several times, before shaking loose the ash on the floor next to the pack and tucking the lit cigarette neatly in-between the fingers of the unconscious woman. I already knew that the forensic traces of my saliva upon the cigarette butt would be entirely consumed by the fire, and also that no one would be looking for them in the first place.

Having seamlessly created a scenario that the fire marshal's investigation would conclude had been a simple case of an alcoholic smoking and then passing out drunk before extinguishing their cigarette, I called for another Door to return to base.

This woman would die in the fire that would soon engulf this building. Since most of the inhabitants were at work this hour of day, only five other residents would die as well. Four of them did not matter.

The infant child in the apartment upstairs, currently being tended to by a baby-sitter while her mother was at work, did matter. Her death apparently via the carelessness of a drunken wastrel of what the child's mother fervently believed to be an inferior race would drive the bereaved mother to reconcile with her estranged husband and take up his cause again with doubly renewed fervor. Kayden Anders would fully return to the fold of the Empire Eighty-Eight, freed of all the conflicted feelings that had led to her partially stepping away in the first place.

Between this single action and Rebecca's own subtle interference in the post-Coil investigations to prevent Kaiser's own informants from all being discovered, Kaiser would now have his opportunity. All of his old forces would be unified under him once again and he would have, as Coil had had, his window to make inroads into the PRT to the best of his ability. He would have a fair chance to succeed, but no more.

The preparations were complete. And when the proper moment arrived for actually beginning the active phase of the experiment, he would be given the final push.

That mattered, because it was one of the Paths. And the Paths were all that mattered.