audio test jdv

by Hankton

narration test

2. ghostchance2

Evolution 3.4

Aegis and I had been out doing one of the Public Service Announcement tours that they didn't emphasize much in Wards recruiting, preferring instead to concentrate on the more glamorous parts of the job.

A PSA tour meant you went out to a school or a mall or a community center or suchlike for a couple of hours, met a bunch of kids or teenagers, and did a short presentation on why drugs were bad or joining a gang was bad or suchlike. Then you hung around and pressed the flesh a while, answering what were usually the same ten questions asked over and over, and signed autographs. If you were lucky the tour was merely boring, which meant painful. If you weren't then something had happened – pushy fan requiring security intervention, medical incident, death threat (Yes, that actually happened to Wards doing public tours. Apparently some gangs actually used it for a gang initiation ritual from time to time.), or similar. And those would require filing an incident report, which meant excruciating.

At least, that's what the others had told me. Because although I'd already been to several media and presentation training sessions like any other Ward this was actually the first one of the PSAs I'd done since I'd joined the team. That's exactly why they'd partnered me with Aegis this time. As our oldest Ward and team leader it was part of his job to help walk the newbies through learning how to keep up the PR side without all the formal trappings of a press conference to protect you.

To be honest I didn't really find any thrill to the PR side of being a Ward. But none of us really did, not even Gallant, and his family had been putting him through deportment lessons and suchlike in preparation for his family's vision of him being the next generation of their little business empire since before he'd even been a parahuman. Still, the main purpose of the Wards program wasn't just to give teens with powers a place to go and people to empathize with but to prepare as many young parahumans as possible for duty with the Protectorate, and you certainly didn't get away from show-the-flag type duties there. So it was hardly like we couldn't plead out from the necessity of starting to learn how here. At least Wards got a little slack when we had public outbreaks of foot-in-mouth disease. By the time you were a full Protectorate member you could barely hope for any at all, not unless said 'outbreak' that was actually a calculated part of your branding.

John's memories had suggested that the Protectorate and the PRT were failing institutions, ones that covered up a structural inability to truly get a handle on the problem of villainy by diverting significant effort into just maintaining an illusion of being able to do so. And it was entirely possible that he was right. I'd already known that since before the day I agreed to join the Wards.

But I hadn't needed John's memories to remind me of the lesson of the Hogfather speech by Terry Pratchett. That not all illusions were lies, and that sometimes the most important things in the world weren't able to come into existence until after enough people believed that they already had. Things such as justice, or honor, or mercy.

And while joining the Protectorate might or might not be the best possible place to find such things, they were at least a place I could hope to find some. Because while I might or might not have had more success in the independent career I'd originally been planning but had already had to abandon as unfeasible, I certainly wouldn't have had any hope of finding such things by going off and joining a crew of villains. No matter what Skitter's delusions along those lines had been.

And as I'd said in my opening press conference, whether outnumbered by the villains or not the important thing was that we were all still here and still fighting as best we could. The Protectorates' eventual defeat might still be a horrible possibility no matter how firmly we stood our ground, but it would be an inevitability if we didn't.

So we'd gone to the community center, finished the speeches, answered the questions, signed the autographs, and were heading out the back entrance to catch the ride back to the PRT building when I heard someone speak.

"Excuse me? Miss Binary?" said the girl, looking about age sixteen or seventeen. I'd never seen her before so she was certainly not from Winslow, and very likely not from Arcadia.

"Yes?" I asked, after reflexively checking out the employee lot and the nearby rooftops. Fortunately, a full head helmet with mirrored faceplate meant they couldn't see you go tactical.

Aegis had also stopped when I did and had turned to fall into position alongside me, but as I was the one being addressed he stayed silent at first to see how I'd handle it.

"I-something happened, and I, I was hoping…" she ground to a halt.

"I'm afraid we have to be back at base soon," I said in my best reassuring voice, "but is it something you can at least start to tell me right now?"

"I-I was attacked."

"By a parahuman?" Aegis asked, switching into professional mode.

"No, by- he said nobody would ever believe me, that his father was on the school board, but I was hoping-"

Aegis sighed, and started to look like he was trying to think of a polite way to haul out the 'The PRT only handles parahuman events as first responders and please talk to the police first'. I started to feel disappointed in him because that certainly wasn't going to be enough to persuade her to go, then told myself I was being a little unfair. That's what they'd told us we were supposed to say, after all, and he wasn't going to deviate from SOP while on a training tour with a new Ward no matter what his feelings might be.

"May I ask your name? It's really impolite to take a statement from 'Hey you!'." I said, trying to gentle her down.

"Carol," she said, smiling with desperate relief at the hope someone was listening. "Carol Saunders. I… c-can you really do something?"

"Binary, we're not the police, remember?" Aegis said, and she started to wilt.

"No we're not," I agreed. "We're teenagers… but we're not powerless teenagers. And I don't mean just us two standing here with the parahuman abilities." I finished, restoring Carol's hope but confusing Aegis. I turned back to Carol, and… well, the helmet meant I didn't need my poker face, but I certainly needed my poker voice. "Carol, did you ever hear of a girl called Taylor Hebert?"

I tried not to feel any amusement at the faint sound of Aegis desperately trying not to swallow his own tongue.

"No, I- oh! The girl in the locker?"

"Yes," I agreed. "I'm pretty sure every high school in the city has heard about her by now. But the reason I brought Taylor up is because the most important lesson in her story isn't just why it went on for her for two years without anybody doing anything. It's why her story finally ended, and why people finally did do something."

Aegis actually surprised me by smiling, but I suppose he'd just figured out where I was going. He came in as if we had rehearsed a speech together with "Because even though nobody at her school cared because her bullies were popular kids with lawyer fathers or athletes the principal would protect, the police still cared."

"If an actual crime has been committed-" I said while actually asking to Carol.

"Yes!" she said desperately, and something in me growled a bit at the mental image of some rich entitled jock thinking he could get away with what he'd gotten away with.

"-then you'll find that people might care more than you'd ever think they would. I'm not going to say the police are perfect, but I didn't join the Wards because I believed that everything about the world was as bad as people always said it had to be."

"I- are you telling me to I should just go to the police?" she asked, not sure if we were helping her or abandoning her.

"Do you think you can?" I asked her softly.

"I-I don't know…" she began.

"Then you can catch a ride with us to the police station," Aegis said reassuringly, stepping in before I'd even given him a cue, "and start telling us what happened on the way. And by the time you get there, then I'm sure you'll be ready to tell them too."

I made sure I was behind her and out of her line-of-sight when I threw him an enthusiastic thumbs-up, and caught his little smile and nod back.

OK, one legitimate drawback of this damned helmet – your teammates can't see you grin!

I'd managed to swipe enough spare parts and discards during the Quantum Alternator Cannon project to come up with enough to build a hammerspace generator, thanks to my existing charges in Dimensional Engineering. I actually created a pocket dimension dimension like Professor Haywire's technology but it was more of a 'fold in space' type thing. Vista had let me take scans of her power in action when I'd asked and hadn't even inquired as to exactly which project it was helping me with, and that let me come up with a design that would turn the cupboard under the basement stairs into an actual full-on secret workshop.

I fired it up and tested it. Success!

Stealth Technology – 2 charges. Now that I had the start of the workspace, I needed to be able to hide it. Getting the parts for enough sensor bafflers and jammers to keep even Armsmaster from noticing this would not be easy, but not impossible. Given all the other demands on my time, it would take me at least a week to build all the things I'd need here. Less if I could concentrate on it alone, of course, but that's one of the few things I wasn't able to do right now.

Its not as if this was my only project, after all.

Despite already feeling like it was time and past time for bed, I instead did my regular update of all the logs and project journals and fact sheets and everything else I kept in what was now a high-grade, professionally-secured and armored desktop quantum computing cluster in the basement, with protections several times that which had stymied Tattletale.

This was my message in a bottle. I'd known almost since the beginning that I could die at any time, and I wanted at least some slim chance for my work to continue on without me. So I'd continually kept this up as best I could, the meta-knowledge that I possessed and the designs I hadn't actually gotten out of the conjectural stage yet, all of it ultra-encrypted and on this hard drive. Originally my dad's thumbprint was the only one that could have unlocked this machine after I was dead, but after I'd gotten to know her a while I'd added Amy's to the list. She didn't know what I was keeping in here of course, any more than Dad did, but she had at least been told the short form of the truth – that it was everything I'd hoped to live long enough to try and share with the world myself, and that it needed to be given to the right people if I died young.

Dad of course had been in denial of that very possibility – me dying young - up until the kidnapping, but if I legitimately did die he should at least remember the instructions. Amy had of course long since lived with the specter of possible death in the line of duty for much of her life, both for her sister and her acquaintances on the Wards, and I had no doubts she'd execute my last requests with professionalism and dispatch. So unless both of them somehow died along with me…

… well, it wouldn't be much of a chance for the world without my Inspired Inventor and my Blank to help develop and use this knowledge and hide it from the wrong precogs, but it was still at least something. Someday soon I hoped I might be able to add one or several of the Wards to the list of designated key-bearers, but one thing at a time.

Well, actually, a lot of things at a time. Between official projects, unofficial projects, Wards business in all its varieties, and the fact that between my little wing-ding over Canberra and my being on the record as having an emotional and physical overclocking power Miss Militia had started making me keep a crew rest log like I was a long-distance truck driver (and like them I lied on it, but only a little, honest), and school, and friends, because I'd already had the conversation with myself on work/life balance… well, something had to give somewhere. But hey, I had prana-bindu so who needed all that sleep, right?

I sat down wearily at the lunchroom table and started to inhale my food. Amy showed up a couple minutes later, took one look at me, and immediately stuck out her index finger and poked me in the cheek. Hard.

"Hey!" I said. "What happened to shoulders?"

"I can't get skin contact through your shirt," she said in her Doctor Amy voice, "and that was my diagnostic poke, not my friendly poke. How sleep-lagged are you?"

"… about eight hours minus this week." I admitted reluctantly.

"Are those normal hours or 'I already count my sleep in fractions' hours?" Amy said. "Taylor, do you want an exact breakdown of your fatigue poison levels right now? Or should I just tell you to stop, skipping. sleep. dammit."

"Next week should be less crazy, I promise," I said, raising one hand in the Girl Scout Oath position. "I just had a training cycle coincide with-"

"Dean told Vicky told me your schedule which is why I'm here telling you to slow down," she cut me off. "Seeing as how you've already ignored several hints by Carlos to do so, they're hoping you'll actually take the hint from your friendly medical advisor."

"When did you join the team?" I asked her sardonically.

"I should join the team," she cracked. "I could use the pay raise. But seriously, what's driving you so hard? I've met your dad, I know he's not the one pushing."

"Memories," I said before I caught myself, tired enough to actually let a bit of the truth slip out.

"Of who, those three bitches?" she said, dismissing the Trio she thought I'd been referring to with a contemptuous dismissive wave worthy of Queen Victoria at her most regal. "You'd already proved you were better than they were the day the doctor slapped you on the butt at your zeroth birthday party. May they rot in jail forever, and may you please slow down a little?"

"Sure, as soon as you take a vacation because you've stopped feeling personally responsible for every injury in a twelve mile radius," I snapped back, before lowering my head in shame. "Sorry."

Amy went red in the face with anger, shaking her head from side to side. "Taylor-" she said before she bit off her remark.

"Amy, I am legitimately sorry for saying that," I said shamefacedly. "That was entirely-"

"-the truth." she said quietly, her anger visibly fading away. "I mean, you really pissed me off with that crack… but you're not wrong." She slumped and sighed next to me. "We are really quite the pair, aren't we?"

"You ever done the thing where you catch yourself doing time-and-motion studies in your head of this project vs. that project vs. those things vs. projected lives saved?" I said after a long pause.

"No, because I hate calculus," Amy said. "I just draw the pretty graphs in my head without actually numbering them."

"God, this is stupid." I swore at myself. "I mean, the team has actual lesson modules on stress and burnout and why mandatory crew rest is a thing. The psychologists can literally prove it with charts and diagrams."

"Can I borrow a few of those?" Amy said curiously. "Seriously, I'd love to show them to my mom."

"Remind me at end of class, they're all in my bag in my locker," I said. "But… yeah. You know that voice that says there's always more to do. Always." I didn't make it a question.

"Every day," Amy said. "I mean, that's actually bothered me less since I got to know you, but every day I know you it seems to be bothering you more. I don't like to think that I'm just doing a misery transfer."

"It's not you, honest. I just… I just keep seeing… her. Over and over again. And that poor city."

You didn't ever say the name of the Simurgh out loud except during actual Protectorate-related business. And certainly not in the cafeteria at Arcadia.

"And maybe two weeks after that happened you and Chris already had the other thing up and running," Amy whispered heatedly. Even with the best anti-eavesdropper lookouts, or even a little Tinkertech gizmo in my schoolbag for discreetly muffling voices, you always euphemized or genericized Wards business in the lunchroom. "What abusive lunatic told you that you could have possibly done better than that, and do they have a face I can punch? Seriously, I don't care even if it was the grim bearded one. I will totally do it."

"You've already poked it," I said with grim humor.

Amy just looked at me. "Taylor…" she said, looking for words she couldn't find.

"Amy, you are helping me." I told her earnestly. "You, Vicky, the whole team, all of you. You're here, and you're you, and that's all that I can rationally ask you for. And it's enough."

"So why are your expectations of everybody else so rational and your expectations of yourself so not?" Amy asked. "And in before you can; hello Miss Kettle, I am Miss Pot. We are black and I know it."

"I'll make you a deal," I said. "If you ever figure out how to convince us to be more normal, then you come tell me right away. And vice versa."

"Done and done," Amy said, sticking her hand out for the official deal-making handshake. "And you must get a full eight hours' sleep tonight and never dare to let me catch you this much in body deficit again." she continued on with deliberately melodramatic tones. "Never dream that you can evade the Poke of Doom, Taylor. It sees all, it knows all, it shall pierce through all your lies and find you wherever you may hide."

"Slave driver. And I am totally making something that will let me check your sleep lag too, see if I don't."

"Shut up, you know you love me."

"Oh my! Is this what real friendship feels like?" I said with a deliberately childish voice, as if I were straight from one of the bad generations of My Little Pony.

"Ugh, feelings." she said with a deliberately over-the-top grimace, and we both felt a little more okay.

"So, did she agree?" Vicky said suddenly and loudly from right behind me, and we both jumped.

"I keep telling you, 'a bull in a china shop' is supposed to be a cautionary tale and not a social guideline!" I said. "And yes, I promised Amy that I'd catch up on the sleeps."

"Good, then I can tell Dean to tell Chris to not accidentally have your entrance passcard fail to work the next time you try to check in," Vicky said lightly while sitting down next to us. "Because they were about ready to escalate that far."

I looked at Amy past Vicky and shook my head disbelievingly, and she just shrugged at me. "Hey, you're the one wanted to make friends and stuff, you don't get to complain about the consequences now."

"I am not a 'consequence', I am a blessed gift that brings delight and joy to the lives of all that I survey," Vicky said with quiet dignity, her nose poised dramatically in the air, and even Amy had to laugh at Vicky's own particular style of hamming it up. Seriously, they might have been as different as chalk and cheese in most other ways but anybody who ever compared the Dallon sisters' respective senses of humor could entirely tell they'd been raised together without any other clue. "And hey, I was just thinking, if you're a good girl and take your naptime on schedule then maybe you could be rewarded with a double date on Saturday with me and Dean."

Amy startled at that and said. "Counter-offer: Taylor, how's about I give you a 48-hour flu for the weekend? Because you'd probably enjoy that more!"

"I was inviting you too, of course." Vicky said, honestly confused.

"Wouldn't that be a triple da-" I started to ask her, and then the ball dropped. Amy saw my expression do the facial equivalent of a car crash, and that was enough clue for her to finally pick it up too. She sighed and turned to Vicky while I was still trying to figure out the proper phrasing for this kind of soap opera.

"Vicky, I don't quite know how to break this to you," Amy said quietly but legitimately amused, "but Taylor is not my girlfriend."

"She isn't?" Vicky said, honestly flabbergasted. "But I thought- I mean you two are always- I-…" and everybody for several tables around looked over in honest confusion at the entirely unprecedented sight at Arcadia's resident queen of poise and charm doing a full-on faceplant in her sister's book bag. "Could you please poke me and tell me exactly when I got hit by the stupid ray?" Vicky said, her voice still muffled.

I finally lost it and started laughing, even if I did my best to keep it from carrying beyond the end of the table.

"And here I thought I was being so understanding-" Vicky moaned.

"You were being," I said, throwing Vicky a life-line. "No joke, you score ten out of ten at supporting your sister's orientation like a decent and tolerant human should. Especially since I already know she's not telling your mother until she's at least eighteen. Nobody could ask for better. It's just, out of the three young women at this table? Two of them like guys."

"To my eternal disappointment!" Amy said, winking at me to reassure me that no it wasn't.

" I don't blame you, Ames," Vicky said, lifting her head to look at me. "I mean, sure, there's not much up top but those legs? And the derriere? Taylor, if you'd let me give you a few posture lessons and better clothes you could model." Vicky nodded vigorously despite both our disbelieving expressions. "It's the truth, I swear! I would never kid anyone on that topic."

"Vicky, me and Amy are both life-long members of the ugly duckling club and know it," I told her. "You don't need to reassure either of us, we're cool with that."

"Just remember that ugly ducklings are sometimes swans," she said, giving us both a big one-armed hug from where she sat between us as we sighed and yielded to the inevitable.

Author's Note: More slice-of-life! A little more then I'd planned, honestly. It keeps writing itself even as the big plot items still keep playing keep-away with my muse. But hey, Worm arcs have gone into the high teens re: # of chapters so its not as if I'm close to running out of room yet.

Plus, I'm practicing more on that 'do your exposition while people are also talking and doing things' thing.

As for the middle bit... yes, Taylor had had been at least working something on if-I-die and messages in bottles from the start. What, did you think that desktop computer cluster getting such emphasis in 1.6 wasn't foreshadowing? Or that she was totally oblivious to the possibility of her own death?

Honestly, the main thing that irks me re: my Taylor and Amy's friendship is that you could literally devote an entire fic to doing nothing but showing it slowly expand... which I can't 'cause I need the space for other shit. So you get only the big highlight moments and if that feels unrealistically paced then hey, its time-lapse photography.

And no, this is not actually a prolonged psychological gambit by Taylor to subtly manipulate Amy into confessing her problems. Taylor's already decided that that's just not her way, and that she'll stick to being a legitimate friend and see how far that gets her. Failing that, then start with the attempts to deliberately prod things... but like a friend, not an SI manipulator.

As for the soap opera misunderstanding, stuff like that is fun for authors to write. And really, given how Taylor and Amy are always alone together at school its not like the wrong conclusion wouldn't be drawn eventually. And who better to draw it first than Brockton Bay's teen champion at leaping in headfirst?

Besides, Vicky was being ridiculously a ghost-at-the-feast and getting notably overdue for actual camera time, so, in she charges! Yeah, she's not as close to Taylor as the Wards or Amy but they're not strangers.

(add) There has been some reader conflusion so I'll put it officially into the AN: in this timeline, Vicky's already figured that Amy likes girls because I'm writing Vicky as not being a total idiot. Amy is still publicly closeted because she's afraid of Carol's possible reaction, but Amy's immediate trust circle (such as Vicky and Taylor) still know about it.

Last edited: Oct 15, 2019

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

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Topic: Report Card - Binary

In: Boards ► Teams ► Wards ► Brockton Bay

Admin (Original Poster) (Moderator)

Posted on March 15, 2011:

So it's been almost a month since Brockton Bay got its latest Ward, and that means its time for our local capewatchers to have our traditional round-table about the new kid in school and how they're fitting in.

Confirmed facts on Binary so far:

She's openly acknowledged, both by herself and the Protectorate, as a Tinker.

There are absolutely zero Binary sightings or even Binary-compatible rumors prior to her official Wards debut. Our best evaluation is that her parents almost certainly took her to the PRT immediately after she triggered.

Neither she nor anyone else has admitted to knowing her Tinker specialty yet, although that's not vastly unprecedented given that Kid Win's been around for over a year and they haven't released his yet either.

She claims to have a 'lot of talent with' computers, to the point of picking her cape name based on a computer theme.

Her initial costume didn't have any of that new Tinker smell on it but looked as polished as Kid Win's own getup, if along an entirely different theme. KW's doing the 'brilliantly gleaming power armor' thing like Gallant but in different colors, and Binary's gear is more like an ultra-tech stealth suit with a medium armor layer.

LIke all the other Wards, the Protectorate is saying absolutely nothing about her trigger event or background.

So far she's done her debut press conference, several PSA tours, and occasionally been spotted doing patrols with one of the senior Wards. Standard practice would be to not let a Ward this new fly solo just yet.

Kid Win and Binary have both been officially credited with having built that disintegrator cannon that did the officially supervised clearing of the Boat Graveyard. Armsmaster was there as well but appeared merely to be observing and wasn't hands-on with any part of the event.

And that's what we know or consider to be virtually certain at this time. We now open the floor to anecdotes, theories, rumors, and commentary.

(Showing Page 1 of 2)

► Ham-and-Cheese (Veteran Member) (Power Guru)

Replied on March 15, 2011:

I'm really wondering if Binary is not a case of "rebranding" instead of a new trigger. Look, teenagers suddenly shoved in front of TV cameras and microphones for the first time ever just aren't that calm. Even Clockblocker, who's picked up microphone skills quickly enough that he has a career as a TV anchorman in his future if he ever chooses to go that route, wasn't that good out the gate and that was /with/ his preplanned comedy routine he'd been working on,

And I don't mean how pretty her talking points are because we all know that's the scriptwriting team talking and not the Ward. I mean how poised she is even while forced into unscripted remarks territory.

Just look at her first press conference when that jackass from SuperHype tried to ambush her with that no-win question. She just caught what he threw and tossed it back as casually as Ken Griffey dealing with a line drive to center field, and did it even faster than Deputy Director Renick could.

So, anybody hear of any other Tinker Wards out there stubbing their toe and needing the full relocation and makeover?

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

Replied on March 15, 2011:

That theory does have some valid points, but it just doesn't fit with 'no solo patrols'. Normally /no/ Wards are supposed to patrol solo /ever/ regardless of experience or lack thereof, but as we all know they've been selectively ignoring that rule in Brockton Bay for years due to manpower concerns. If she really were a veteran wearing a rookie suit they'd never have kept her training wheels on for operational deployment purposes just to try and polish an already polished illusion a few percent more on the PR side, especially when its only cape analysts like us who are even bothering to plot sightings and do time charts anyway.

I entirely grant that she comes across on stage far better than most rookie Wards do but let us recall that there have been rare exceptions to that rule already. Some kids are just naturals, some already had a background in high school theater or suchlike pre-Trigger, and heck, for all we know Binary could have originally been trying to grow up to become an Olympic figure skater with all the things that lifestyle would entail before her parahuman powers arrived and changed everything.

Besides, there's no other Tinker Ward that I know of who has suddenly 'left to pursue further educational opportunities' or quit or just mysteriously started skipping public appearances anytime since at least New Year's.

► BondMaven (Veteran Member)

Replied on March 15, 2011:

Binary's build actually does look pretty 'Olympic gymnast' now that you mention it. And not just her figure but also her muscle tone. Or at least as much of her muscle tone as you can guess at underneath that costume, because somebody's mother clearly raised her not to go in for the tacky spandex and boob-plate aesthetic. Her costume is hardly unattractive, mind - whatever visual designer got his PRT paycheck for that setup definitely earned his money - but its also very functional. Good for her.

But there's more to us ladies than just our looks and ladylike manners, and so far I'm amazed that we're all still stuck on that instead of mentioning the elephant no longer in the room.

The Boat Graveyard. Folks, I never dreamed that Dragon's little downtown spelunking experiment would be only the /second/ most impressive use of Tinkertech that I'd be an eyewitness to in my lifetime, but there was several hundred thousand tons of rusting scrap in our city's harbor last month and now there isn't. And two teenagers apparently designed and built the giant fuck-off disintegrator cannon that did that all by themselves. Amazing? Yes. Frightening? Also yes.

Really, is this the sort of thing that the infamous PRT Tinkertech review board actually signs off on? I mean, let's definitely give all the kudos to Binary and Kid Win for pulling it off without a hitch, but I'm honestly amazed Armsmaster let them even try it.

► TTechTrakker (Veteran Member)

Replied on March 15, 2011:

BondMaven, its /Endbringers/. Not that either of them is a Protectorate cape in the first place but the PRT review board would rubber-stamp a blank check for Squealer or Leet if they thought they had a legitimate chance of getting an anti-Endbringer weapon come out the other end. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if they one day let String Theory back out of the Birdcage if she ever saned up enough to try and cut a deal with a viable schematic for taking Behemoth's head or suchlike. Its not like there was much else that she /hadn't/ been able to blow up when she really tried.

But coming back closer to home, didn't the press release say that the thing used in the Boat Graveyard was called a 'Quantum Alternator Cannon'? And didn't Kid Win post sometime last year about an 'Alternator Cannon' he was supposed to be working on that was intended for use in killing Endbringers? You know, like every new Tinker on the continent dreams about being able to do someday?

So of course nobody was surprised when he didn't ever post about that project again and it apparently went nowhere, because even Dragon hasn't built that magic bullet yet. But now I guess Kid Win must have actually had a legitimate piece of something that Binary was able to come along and fill in the missing piece for because she's on the Wards like, what, two weeks before she's out there getting co-creator credit on a Wave Motion Gun?

So to BB's two resident young geniuses I say: well done, and keep up the good work.

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

Replied on March 15, 2011:

Stay calm, people. We certainly acknowledge the size of their accomplishment but nobody's actually turned Leviathan into a green mist so don't start reserving the banquet hall just yet. We're not even sure if their giant disintegrator will actually work on Endbringers at all, and unless the fight comes direct to Brockton Bay - which we all direly hope never ever happens - they're never going to let two Wards go out looking for any Endbringers to test it on.

Although I wouldn't be surprised if something very QAC-looking shows up at the next big fight being operated by Armsmaster or some other adult Protectorate Tinker. And if so, all my prayers that it works.

► SuperKidOne (Temp-banned)

Replied on March 15, 2011:

Who the hell does this -DELETED BY ADMIN-

She's just showing up at the end and touching stuff to try and take credit for all the months of work by the real teen Tinker in Brockton Bay!

SuperKidOne - We at PHO believe in the free expression of opinions, even when it comes to openly doubting the veracity of public statements made by Protectorate members. But we have zero tolerance for personal attacks of that nature being made against anyone, much less an underage young woman. Enjoy your one-week tempban and give thanks for the relative degree of leniency being shown to your first offense. -Admin

► Kid Win (Verified Cape) (Wards ENE)

Replied on March 15, 2011:

I can only imagine what you just said and I'm glad that Binary mostly stays off of PHO so she didn't see it herself before it was removed. So let me say on her behalf, you're completely wrong and you're a jerk!

We've both been asked to let the Protectorate handle the public statements about the Quantum Alternator Cannon project but I'm allowed to say this much. Binary took credit for absolutely nothing that she hadn't legitimately earned credit for.

The above poster was entirely correct with his theory. I'd gotten stuck on my project before it was ever finished and I'd put it aside and left it there because nothing I tried was working. But when Binary arrived and we started working together she really did spot the missing piece of the puzzle that I hadn't, and somehow with her helping it just all just came together and we got more done in days than I used to get done in weeks. And now we've got a successful test-firing and Tinkers from all over the Protectorate pitching in on the whole project and I can't say what we're hoping happens next but its not small at all.

And Binary is a really nice girl who works very hard on everything she does and has more than enough stress in her life already and doesn't need creeps like you trying to give her more. And she's the best lab partner I've ever had, and anybody who wants to imagine some huge Tinker rivalry between me and her is so far off base that its not even funny.

So guys, I get that I have a fan club and that they want to give me all the credit whenever they can, but it doesn't work that way.

Kid Win - "You're a jerk" is pushing the boundaries of the no-personal-attacks rule. Even if your feelings are completely understandable and we've already had to temp-ban the jerk in question ourselves. You are officially given one warning that will expire in 72 hours. -Admin

► Antigone

Replied on March 15, 2011:

Well, that certainly escalated quickly.

Moving on, has anybody on the thread actually /met/ Binary? Let's hear those girl-on-the-street encounters, people!

► CSPrime

Replied on March 15, 2011:

I met Binary right after her first PSA event. I'm not going to say exactly what happened but I'd been having real trouble with someone else and I thought that a girl Ward around my age might understand what I was going through better than someone else.

And she didn't brush me off even though it was really late and they had to leave and she didn't just tell me it wasn't her department even though it wasn't parahuman business at all. She stopped, heard me out, explained a lot of things I'd never thought of, and then her and Aegis helped drive me to the police station so I could give a statement. And she was totally patient and nice the entire time.

I'm not going to say what my situation was about either because I can't because the case is still in the system, but I will say that I'm not having any trouble with that guy anymore and I'm glad.

So that was my own anecdote with Binary. Even without any TV cameras or scripts or anything, she still cared.

► Ekul

Replied on March 15, 2011:

Now that's the sort of thing we're talking about. Good job, Binary, and the best of luck to you going forward from here, CSPrime.

So, seems like this latest lady Ward actually seems to be a decent young woman underneath the mask. Her teammates clearly like her, one in particular, and now we have this.

I guess the Wards were overdue for some good karma after having to put up with Shadow Stalker for so long. We all remember what every street encounter story with /her/ sounded like, don't we folks?

End of Page. 1, 2

(Showing Page 2 of 2)

► Vista (Verified Cape) (Wards ENE)

Replied on March 15, 2011:

Binary is Shadow Stalker's exact opposite in so many ways that not even Binary's biggest computer could count them all. You have /no idea/. I literally could not even begin to tell you.

And yes, we all like her. We're the Brockton Bay Wards and we're all supposed to have each other's backs no matter what comes down the line, and Binary - unlike /some/ people -already understood that from the very beginning.

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

Replied on March 15, 2011:

Hey, two Wards sightings in one day in a Report Card thread. It's been a while since that happened. I notice Binary herself isn't here? Is she lurking?

► Vista (Verified Cape) (Wards ENE)

Replied on March 15, 2011:

Like Kid Win said, she's not really on PHO much.

► Admin (Original Poster) (Moderator)

Replied on March 16, 2011:

So, we'll be leaving the thread open for a while to catch further anecdotes if any come along but our first Report Card for Binary seems to have reached a consensus:

She's got good people skills both up-close and in front of audiences, and seems to be very far away from the socially awkward Tinker archetype.

She's by all appearances an excellent team player and judging by their statements and attitudes has 'clicked' right away with all of her fellow Wards.

There hasn't been any major fights with Binary on-record yet so we still don't know what her real combat capability is like. She can't be a total marshmallow however because anybody with that much of Vista's professional respect has to be contributing /something/, everybody knows Little Miss Badass' attitude towards dead weight.

Her Tinker specialty is either helping other Tinkers reach Tinker-plus or else she's just that much of a genius, because her first big Tinker project, even if it was a collab, is currently undergoing strategic review almost all the way up to the Triumvirate. So we're certainly expecting some more big Tinkering from her in the future.

And so, our local capewatching community has concurred that Binary's first Report Card grade is: A.

End of Page. 1, 2

Author's Note: I figured that if I was going to get frustrated in an online argument today it might as well be a fictional one, so I decided to take a pause and do a PHO interlude instead. So, that lets us get in public reactions to Binary's first month - which outside of the Boat Graveyard was largely slice-of-life - and some feedback on past events. Plus a mention of how Carol's story ended, of course.

I also love creating PHO community lore such as a tradition of having 'Report Card' discussions periodically about Wards, to try and rate how they're performing in the public eyes.

Last edited: Oct 15, 2019

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Threadmarks Interlude 3-C: Kaiser / Director Piggot New

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cliffc999

Jul 21, 2019

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#3,569

Interlude 3-C: Kaiser / Director Piggot

Warning: Neo-Nazi POV segment

Kaiser

"How many casualties?" I asked Victor again, as he stood in front of my desk as stolidly as he ever did. Victor's ability to absorb skills from others had been put to great use by him over the years, granting him the collective knowledge of dozens of highly trained PRT agents, law enforcement personnel, soldiers, analysts, and intelligence operatives. Although no physical aspect of him was overtly parahuman, his particular parahuman power let what would be fantasies of action-movie competence for other men come true for him whenever he wished.

Not that I often used Victor for more overt tasks. Hookwolf and the other Empire capes much like him were not only entirely serviceable in such roles but genuinely enjoyed serving in them. And there were always more targets in a sea of filth such as Brockton Bay that they could be sent against to keep them harmlessly occupied and in practice while awaiting another day where their services would be legitimately necessary in the greater scheme of things. No, Victor served me far better as a factotum, an organizer, and a researcher.

And also as both counter-intelligence chief and spymaster.

"Eight ABB gangers and three of their slaves," Victor said matter-of-factly. "Kayden still obeyed your orders about maintaining low visibility in general, but even without lighting up the drug den from the outside that still didn't stop her from just going inside before turning on the glare. They must have just thought she was another ignorant woman from the Towers looking for thrills in all the wrong places before-"

"-she killed them all." I said. "But while I certainly have no objection to Lung's mixed-race filth or the whores who service them meeting untimely deaths, her recent tendencies are becoming a bit alarming. And in addition to the risk to us there's also the risk to her. She's forgetting that she's not invulnerable. And attacking the ABB carries with it a unique potential for swift retribution, should any of her targets ever succeed in getting out an alarm in time." I sighed and asked the next necessary question, fearing the answer. "And the PRT response?"

"We're still lucky so far," Victor replied to my great relief. "No use of parahuman powers – at least, none with any living witnesses left to report to anyone - means they wouldn't have it as a case unless their computers and analysts saw something suspicious in the Brockton Bay police blotter after the fact. And since she was intelligent enough to set the house on fire before leaving, all the clean-up crew saw was another bunch of idiot meth-heads burning themselves to death in their own lab accident. It's not like enough of them don't die every week that the city can afford to autopsy every one of them, after all."

"But this lucky streak can't continue forever," I said. "Sooner or later she'll do something we can't cover up."

"No," Victor agreed. "Max, can I have a word?"

"You think I'm causing the problem?" I said to him quietly.

"No, I think you're not seeing the problem," Victor replied. "Kayden's not just a grieving mother, and this is not just a stage that's going to pass. Oh, she's all of that as well-"

"Aster was my daughter too, damn it!" I shouted at him.

Victor stopped and looked at me, and sat down in the chair across from me. Without speaking he reached to the bottle of brandy on the desk and topped up my drink before pouring himself one of his own.

"I've been your friend as well as one of your lieutenants for years, Max," Victor said. "You know I wouldn't say this if I didn't have to."

"Yes," I said, exhaling sharply and regaining control of myself. "And part of your job is to bring things to my attention that I'm overlooking. So, what am I overlooking?"

"Aster isn't just a tragic loss to Kayden, like she is to you or the rest of your family," Victor said. "She's a symbol now as well. A symbol of all the corruption and filth in Brockton Bay, but one that lets take Kayden take all of the emotion she might feel about that large and complex a problem and concentrate it down into a single mental image, a single feeling that's crystal clear in her mind all the time. So now Kayden sees the problem as being equally clear and simple, when we both know it's not. And so-"

"The balance of power that's served us so well for so long in Brockton Bay is inevitably going to go to hell in a handbasket. Because my ex-wife's renewed passion for the cause is inextricably welded to her… tunnel vision on the topic. And of course, she cannot be reasoned out of this opinion." I stated, not questioned.

"You can't reason someone out of a course of action they didn't reason themselves into," Victor agreed. "And you certainly can't tell Aster's mother to emotionally let go of her daughter so soon. You might as well try to order Brad to take a life-long vow of nonviolence, and you'd have better odds of him keeping it."

"And Theo's current condition?" I asked him, grateful for at least a momentary change of topic.

"Still in shock, but still safe at that boarding school you arranged for him after everything happened," Victor nodded. "The school's giving him a grief counselor. On the more physical side, I have people looking out for him there 24/7. If you wanted we could send Rune out there too."

"The bodyguards alone should be sufficient," I told Victor. "If things get much worse, Rune might be needed here." And then I sat and thought for what was for me an uncharacteristically long time.

"I can't reason with Kayden on this matter. I can't safely indulge her on this matter. And-" I exhaled. "-I can't kill her. Estranged or not, exigent necessity or not, she's still the mother of my daughter. The woman I married."

"I wasn't even beginning to suggest that," Victor agreed with me quickly.

"So what were you suggesting?" I asked him, hoping for an answer.

"Max, what I was hoping was that this would be yet another one of the occasions where you proved that you were legitimately smarter than I was," Victor said. "Because right now, I don't know."

"Keep doing everything you can to aim her anger where it's still of immediate use, and to conceal it from the authorities," I said quietly. "And I'll do the same. And we'll both hope that she'll eventually give us an opening to reach her. While we still have time."

"Yes sir."

I forced the next words out of my mouth without hesitation, without weakness, even through the sick taste filling the back of my mouth.

"And should the worst happen and we eventually run out of time, then we would have to finish our unfinished discussion." I ground out painfully.

"Yes sir."

Victor made his goodbyes and left, and I walked across my office to stare down at the city of Brockton Bay from my penthouse.

I yet again cursed the worthless drunken subhuman whose squalor had caused my daughter's death and was causing Kayden's slow descent into madness, and yet again wished that they had lived long enough to be brought before me alive. Perhaps the opportunity to help myself and Victor and Brad put that bitch through a scientific education of her errors could have eased Kayden's shattered heart enough that she would have not committed herself to this course of action…

But the facts remained as they were regardless of any personal feelings on the matter. The Empire Eight-Eight had already taken as much of Brockton Bay as we could before the eventual backlash risked consuming all that we had built. All of my plans, all of our actions, had fitted with wondrous neatness into the overall mosaic. Our dominance of the underworld economy dovetailed neatly with Medhall's position as the leading corporation of the city to give us control of everything worth having. Lung had enough of the leftovers to feel his petty ambitions be fulfilled and the Merchants rooted in enough of the scraps to exist as a useful buffer state and absorber of immediate tensions between us. We had more capes than the Protectorate and the Wards combined, a suitable number of sympathizers within the local police and city government, and by great good fortune our several inside sources within the local PRT office had escaped Director Piggot's internal purges after that fool Calvert had surprisingly been revealed as Coil.

I gave a small mental nod to my late rival acknowledging his notable achievement at infiltrating the PRT so deeply and his own, albeit lesser, emulating of my corporate strategies with his Fortress Construction to my Medhall, but at the same I also acknowledged the useful lesson to be learned from his death. Coil had had talent, and even a legitimate measure of success, but he had not sufficiently diversified his base nor amassed sufficient forces to ensure an enduring power structure before making his play. In hindsight his plan to eventually disgrace Piggot by sabotaging from within and then take her place was obvious, and from that it was not difficult to deduce an eventual desire of his to rise to dominate both sides of the board. As 'Director Calvert' he would play the white pieces, as Coil he would move the black, and no matter which skirmish resulted in victory for which side he alone would forever profit.

A beautiful dream… and also the dream of a megalomaniac, not a visionary. A madman too obsessed with what he wished for to remember never to confuse his wishes with objective reality. Which why Coil had died, of course. Real life was quite not as willing to reward hubris as Coil had imagined it would be.

Which philosophical observation did nothing to comfort my dilemma just now, because I truly did not want to kill my Kayden and yet barring her eventually choosing to return to reason and re-accept our posture of limited involvement, I could see no eventual path before me save to do so. It's not as if I could actually conquer Brockton Bay and begin a true purification of all its subhuman elements, after all.

Not with the way things currently stood.

Director Piggot

I swore under my breath yet again. Sometimes this damned job made Sisyphus' treadmill look like mandatory bed rest. You took your attention off of something, even something that had been working perfectly fine for months, for just a few damned weeks while you turned around to fix some other catastrophe, and then that first thing would immediately go to hell.

Despite my success in recruiting Binary for the Wards, I hadn't had much if any time to actually follow her case in the weeks that followed. Closing out the Coil investigation and rooting out all his damned moles would have been a full-time job even if I'd been born twins, but after months of making me wonder if anyone was even reading any reports I ever sent up the chain PRT Command in Washington chose now of all moments to jump straight in with both big, clumsy, micro-managing feet.

First they'd made me send back all the agents I'd asked Armstrong to bring down from Boston for me even before Coil's remains were cold because that was 'outside proper procedure', promising instead to immediately replace them with dedicated Internal Affairs specialists from the central office. And those promises turned out to be worth as much as any other promises from DC, as the specialists arrived a day late, a dollar short, in inadequate numbers, and not properly briefed on the job they were expected to do here. And they came bundled with an officiously stupid assistant deputy director who was under the delusion he was my temporary replacement, not the high-level supervisor Washington had promised could handle the day-to-day of the investigation under me while I spared at least some time for my ongoing responsibilities as well.

But they hadn't sent me here to cry over the things I couldn't do but to accomplish the things I could, so I left all my routine duties to Renick and Armsmaster for several weeks while I took personal charge of the mole hunt and wrestled it as best I could back onto the tracks that Washington seemed perversely bound and determined to derail it from. So most of the prosecutions vs. Coil's insiders were going to go through after all, and the few that had partially wriggled free were still being dismissed with prejudice from the PRT. But I still knew the job hadn't been as thoroughly as it could have been done if I'd simply been left free to do it from the beginning. Sometimes I honestly believed I could have done more with no extra agents 'helpfully' sent to me from the central office. Our tax dollars at work, indeed.

But the fact that I'd run myself into an exhausted collapse every night for several weeks on end handling that one problem, until I could finally call it as done as it was ever going to be given the circumstances and get back to my regular duties, was not the current crisis. Oh no, I wasn't being that lucky. The latest clusterfuck just had to be-

"Armsmaster," I said to him.

"Director-" he began urgently. "You have to believe me, that girl is dangerous! You yourself agreed to that back at the very beginning!"

"I agreed that Binary was potentially dangerous," I corrected him. "But you are potentially dangerous. I am potentially dangerous. Hell, Vista is in the 'If she ever went completely berserk we might have call Eidolon to help hold her down!' category of potentially dangerous! But potentially dangerous simply means we decide on what we could do about it ahead of time and then wait to see if we actually need to do it or not," I verbally pounded at him. "Exactly what part of that is unclear to you? She is not actually dangerous until after she actually does something dangerous!" I held up a hand to forestall his reaction. "Something new! Her actions in Coil's base were already reviewed at length and the verdict is already in, she was not crazy or homicidal, she was merely that desperate. I can think of at least two of your fellow Protectorate members who'd have done the same thing if forced into her exact shoes, let alone a number of agents in this building!"

"And you don't see the slightest thing suspicious or deceptive as to how everybody in contact with her seems to grow so infatuated with her? Does that seem normal to you, Director?" he hectored me.

"I will admit that part of it looks like a young woman deliberately straining herself to try and make the best impression on her new co-workers and chain of command possible," I granted him. "Of course, since that young woman is more than intelligent enough to realize that our initial impression of her could have, charitably speaking, not exactly been the best impression? Or that the PRT could potentially be doing a great deal more than we have to interfere with her life were we not given sufficient reassurance? Then with all that its not surprising that she's trying extra-hard to reassure us of her good intentions," I said lecturingly, before taking a deep breath and continuing.

"Armsmaster, her deliberately putting her best foot forward whenever she can doesn't automatically mean that she's lying, anymore than taking extra-special care to mind your manners during a job interview as compared to your everyday office behavior is lying." Only after I'd said it did I realize that the analogy would almost certainly be lost on Armsmaster, who had never actually needed to interview for a conventional job in his entire life. "And regardless of what your opinions are on the matter, the fact remains that your behavior has escalated beyond the point where it can be tolerated any further."

"I am not overreacting," Armsmaster swore urgently, in exactly the tone of voice someone used when overreacting. "Everything about her adds up to one consistent and clear pattern, and yet for some inexplicable reason I am the only person in this building who even begins to perceive it!"

I stared at him incredulously. "And that didn't suggest that you were the one who was wrong?"

Armsmaster literally ground his teeth, in what I had honestly believed up until now was merely a cliché. "I am the most experienced Tinker in the entire Protectorate," he said. "I am far more competent to judge the potential danger of another Tinker than anyone possibly could be!"

"Did you just suggest incompetence on my part?" I asked with dangerous mildness, and Armsmaster began to realize that he had overreached.

"Director, I-" he began to apologize.

I shook my head.

"You have inspected Binary's home and working spaces at a frequency multiple times higher than that of any other Tinker you have ever worked with, and to a greater degree than even Probationary Ward Tinkers usually endure," I stated. "You have categorically rejected every Tinkertech submission she has ever made on any and all grounds possible, to the point you are a consistent negative vote even when pitted against the otherwise unanimous recommendations of the remainder of the board. Your actions and personal interactions have reached the point where the Protectorate would be potentially vulnerable against a lawsuit brought for harassment!"

"Harass-?" Armsmaster started to break in incredulously, and I verbally marched right over him.

"You are even on your third request for a reversal of the original authorization for a Tinkertech project that has received a unanimous positive recommendation from literally every step in the Protectorate chain of command! From Legend himself on down! Dragon's already retrofitting one of her heaviest combat suits to bring the refined Quantum Alternator Cannon to the next Endbringer fight, when and where one occurs, so we can hopefully see if it will actually hurt the bastards."

"That QAC is the prime example of that girl's dangerous obsession with weapons of mass destruction! And there's no way that a madwoman and a sub-par teenaged Tinker came up with anything stable, sane, or effective! Trying to use that thing in the next Endbringer fight will only lead to more casualties than would otherwise occur!" Armsmaster thundered.

"How would you know anything about the QAC's inner workings?" I asked him scornfully. "You're literally the only senior Tinker in the Protectorate – or the Guild – that's refused a direct invitation to participate in the project. Outside of trying to junk the original field test submission you haven't even bothered to look at it, much less at any of the future refinements of it. And now you want me to accept that you are right, and the entire review process and multiple of your most well-respected professional colleagues are all wrong."

Armsmaster turned positively purple.

"I wish I could say I don't know what's eating you, but I think I do," I told him. "It's the same reason you needed 'interpersonal counseling' about Dauntless. You feel threatened by anyone who might ever beat you at your own game. Only in Dauntless' case you at least eventually convinced yourself he wasn't a 'real' Tinker so you could still feel superior about that. But Binary is a real Tinker, and what's worse for you an incredibly precocious one, and what's worst of all one that seems to synergize with other Tinkers. Every time she's invited into a collaborative Tinker project, it seems to get ahead of schedule by leaps and bounds. Dragon's seen it, Kid Win's seen it, and if you hadn't kept treating her as if she smelled worse than Mush you might have been allowed to see it too." I shook my head. "Purely and simply, you're afraid that if she's allowed to go on to a full Protectorate career then she'll eventually put you in the shade. Or worse, that you'd eventually have to accept her help."

"That's another thing. She pretends to like and be open to everyone else, but she's always been avoiding me! Always, even before I started inspecting her! Why would she do that if she wasn't afraid of being found out for what she really was?" Armsmaster thundered.

"Did you read her entire file or just the parts that were about engineering?" I asked him. "Because the answer to your question is literally written all over it."

"I don't see-"

"Binary is a recovering victim of long-term emotional abuse," I spat out at the unbelievably stubborn idiot. "Her former best friend betrayed and abused her for years. The school system mocked her and treated her as the criminal even when she wasn't because the other students were 'more important'. Her peer group ostracized her based solely on lies and rumors. Her father neglected her for years due to his own mental breakdown. The other one of her chief tormentors was a Ward, our Ward, so she could even potentially perceive that the Protectorate had been out to get her you damned fool! We discussed that during the initial meetings about the Shadow Stalker situation right after it happened, remember? You should, because you were there!" I thundered at him, before sighing and slumping wearily in my chair.

"That young woman can say with exact literal truth that before she met us, every other adult authority figure in her entire life, everyone she had been taught that she should trust and rely on to protect her as a child, had either abandoned her or actively participated in her torment. Even her father screwed up his end after her mother died." I shook my head regretfully. "And if there's one thing that survivors of prolonged trauma become, it's hypervigilant against the same types of trauma! By now Binary can probably smell another abusive adult from a mile upwind! And that's exactly what you were, you damned fool! Another abusive adult! One who'd already decided before he'd even started getting to know her that everything she did was already wrong, and that he would be justified in taking any excuse to harass her and punish her that he could."

Armsmaster glared back at me as if he were the one being betrayed, the incredible damned fool, as I continued.

"So of course she avoided you from the outset. Because she knew exactly what she might be in for from you. Because she was afraid you'd just use your authority to further harass and bully her like Principal Blackwell and the rest had at Winslow. And at this point, it looks like she was right." I shook my head in sheer disgust at him. "It honestly restores a bit of my nonexistent faith in God to realize that even with all that against her, with you against her, she still was able to force herself to return to this building again and again. To let herself still have any trust at all that her fellow Wards and Miss Militia and myself would not mistreat her or ignore her like everyone else she'd ever dared to trust had done."

"I am the head of the ENE Protectorate-" Armsmaster began desperately.

"So you're already at the part where you curl up and hide behind the regs that say I can't formally punish you for anything less than an explicit violation, as opposed to merely the implicit ones you have committed?" I said scornfully. "You think I can't get rid of you because I am the ENE PRT Director and you are the ENE Protectorate Director and we are in theory commanders of separate but equal branches." I smiled. "But you are in error."

"You cannot-"

"I cannot relieve you of your position without your being caught in a far more material breach than you have been," I agreed. "But Legend can, as your direct superior and the head of the entire Protectorate."

"Legend wouldn't-"

"Legend already knows Binary's name because the QAC project has already crossed his desk. I got the congratulatory phone call from him about the project's being authorized for prototype field deployment at the next Endbringer fight yesterday," I said to his astonishment. "I would have already called Binary and Kid Win into my office to forward his congratulations to them, as they have well and truly earned, were it not for the fact that being prompted to actually look at Wards business for the first time again in weeks led me directly to what you were doing. I have spent all of yesterday and much of today investigating those matters, I have called you in here to hear your side of the story, and I am not impressed at all by your defense of your actions. So shut the fuck up and accept what's coming."

Armsmaster glared at me in impotent rage, and I huffed and continued.

"You will remain here in Brockton Bay because our manpower needs are still what they are, and I don't like what my instincts are telling me might be building up in the near future in this town no matter how quiet our official reports are. I won't be calling Legend to tell him what an utter ass you've been – yet - because that is a trump card I am reserving for your next offense, should you be so incredibly stupid as to give me one. You will even remain in command of the ENE Protectorate's field operations, as you are legitimately competent at that. But you have demonstrated for all time your absolute incompetence at anything having to do with the Wards, so they're not your problem any longer."

"But Director-"

"The Wards are now Miss Militia's. She will supervise them at need, she will discipline them at need, she will act to get them the appropriate resources and training and support and monitoring. Including at-home monitoring," I emphasized. "All of the responsibilities that were once yours in regard to the Wards are now hers and hers alone and your input is not desired there at any level. You will of course cooperate and reschedule Miss Militia's Protectorate duty hours as necessary to reasonably accommodate these additional duties of hers, using my definition of 'reasonably'."

"Yes Director," he choked out.

"You are also out of the Tinkertech review process in any matter involving Binary. Or Kid Win, given your bias and his close collaboration with her work." I stated. "Completely out. You won't even attend those meetings anymore."

"But you need me there!" he said desperately.

"When the only contribution you've ever made to the process since she arrived here has been consistently negative?" I pointed out. "No. Kid Win's track record is sufficient that review for him was largely becoming a formality anyway except for larger-scale projects, and while Binary still has a legitimate need for even her smaller designs to undergo a safety and process review by an experienced Tinker I feel entirely confident that Dragon will volunteer her assistance in that regard," I told him. "Seeing as how your consistent objections are, to date, the only substantial reason why she was not already directly involved in her unofficial protégé's official monitoring. And while Dragon is not officially a Protectorate Tinker I somehow doubt that the higher echelons of the review process will feel that her qualifications are inadequate. Especially not given how many of the Protectorate and PRT's most critical infrastructures she helps maintain for us."

"This is a mistake! This is a horrible mistake and we will all regret it soon enough!" Armsmaster pleaded with me.

"The only mistake is whatever jealousy and tunnel vision ever let you see a fifteen-year-old girl as a dire threat to your self-assurance in the first place," I said. "And if I even think you're going to try anything again behind my back I will call Legend, and ask him to invoke his authority to order you to psychological counseling. Which I strongly suggest you get for yourself anyway, before somebody else has to get it for you."

"Is that all, Madam Director?" Armsmaster asked me as tonelessly as a robot.

"It's all that I think that you're capable of accepting - at the moment," I replied flatly. "Dismissed."

Author's Notes: A look at where the Brockton Bay Nazis are right now, notes about the slowly gathering tension, and the scheduled jerking-short of Armsmaster.

As for my interpretation of Kaiser, I see him as evil but not insane. Hence the 'I don't want to kill my ex-wife', along with '... but if she pushes me much further, I'm going to have to.' both in the same scene. Also, with no canon word I can find on how long Victor has been with the E88, I've made him the consigliere because he's very suited for that job skill-wise.

Minor note: for those wondering who the hell 'Brad' is, that's Hookwolf's first name.

Re: Cauldron and the QAC project, while it has reached Legend's desk right now its still ultimately just another tech proposal that the Protectorate hopes will finally kill the Endbringers this time. Like the last how many?

So currently Cauldron is going 'Yeah, yeah, whatevs' and carrying on with their business. If and when an Endbringer actually dies, then cue the jawdrops. And not just from Cauldron. :)

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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cliffc999

Jul 21, 2019

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cliffc999

cliffc999

Jul 22, 2019

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Evolution 3.5

It would have been really unkind to Armsmaster to point out how much easier the air in the Wards quarters had become to breathe now that there was a zero percent chance of a random Armsmaster interrupt, which is why none of us had actually said it out loud yet. But that didn't change the truth, which was that Miss Militia was enormously better at being our full-time handler than he had been. While he'd certainly been by far the worst to me, there wasn't any of the other Wards that could say they had any real respect for him outside of a professional superheroing context where he was legitimately a leading light in the field, and certainly none of them had had any actual encouragement or positive feedback from him.

Poor Chris in particular had blossomed so much simply from having a cooperative and tolerant lab partner in me for a little while that I fumed at how much of a condescending dick Armsmaster must have been to him in all their prior months of lab work together for him to have been that wrapped up in self-doubts and self-deprecation when I'd first started working with him. I hadn't even had to think of some clever manipulation to let him discover that his specialty had been modular design, which fact I'd still been trying to figure out a way to drop into the conversation without being either condescending or blatant. During our work on the Quantum Alternator Cannon, at the stage where we'd been deepest into taking apart the original Alternator Cannon and listing out which elements would be easiest to repurpose into the new Quantum Alternator Cannon's structure, which would need to be rebuilt from scratch and which could be outright junked, he'd had the 'Eureka!' moment about how his design process focused more on putting together already-existing discrete subsystems to form new larger systems entirely on his own. And from there I'd been able to walk him through figuring out that his suddenly drifting off from a project and building new random module at the time had only partly been his ADHD tendencies and largely his own Tinker specialty trying to nudge him into figuring out what it was really all about. Armsmaster had clearly been one of those brilliant specialists in his field that was very good at doing but very bad at teaching.

Now, on the mentorship scale it's not as Miss Militia had suddenly become our surrogate parent and tucked us into bed at night and fed us chicken soup when we were sick either. On an objective scale Miss Militia wasn't that far behind Armsmaster at being a very reserved and formal person. Even when she'd been offering honest emotional comfort, as she had to me right after Canberra, it still presented more as 'guidance counselor who was legitimately good at their job' and less as 'foster mom/big sister'. But the simple fact that she didn't judge you until after she'd found out what was really going on to the best of her ability and that she didn't bring her ego to work still made dealing with her a massive relief compared to how it had been before.

John's meta-knowledge of Worm wasn't complete, but it had contained among other things a full read of the Leviathan fight in Brockton Bay and its immediate aftermath. Including the part where Armsmaster's desperation to salvage a failing career with the glory of somehow solo'ing Leviathan had led him to deliberately and knowingly plot cold-blooded murder and violate the Endbringer Truce. He'd sabotaged tracking armbands to deliberately put a gap in the search-and-rescue coverage, lured people into specific positions for Leviathan to kill as bait to lure the Endbringer to where Armsmaster wanted him, and then leapt out and went all 'Your evil ends here today, vile villainous monster!' to try and solo Leviathan with his untested nano-thorn halberd. And even leaving the, ahem, debatable wisdom of that final act entirely aside, even without that part the fact remained that Armsmaster engineered the deaths of something like half a dozen people and unhesitatingly violated the Endbringer Truce because to Armsmaster doing all that was still less awful a scenario than having to accept life without his fame and his rank.

And given that one of those people story-Armsmaster had set up to die had been Skitter, who'd been the only one of his intended victims to actually survive his plot by sheer good fortune, I simply hadn't been able to keep that whole sequence from flashing through my mind every time I laid eyes on Armsmaster. I certainly wasn't one of story-me's fans but even she hadn't deserved that. Particularly not that despite whatever other wrongs she'd committed in her life her actions during the Leviathan fight proper had still been entirely legitimate.

So yes, I'd been almost as paranoid of him all along as he'd been of me. Since he was my superior officer as head of the ENE Protectorate I hadn't disrespected him, disobeyed him, or refused to be present when my presence was required, but I simply wasn't going to risk trusting him until after he'd begun to show me something that would mean he could risk being trusted. Which I hadn't entirely closed out the possibility of happening. People could change, after all. People could sometimes be different than what the stories about them had been told. And perhaps a different beginning could mean a different ending. That had already been true in several other cases…

… but not Armsmaster's, because his silent overwatch disguised as that 'social worker' on my initial interviews with the BBPD about the locker had been the least tense interaction we'd ever had. From that point on it had been straight down the slippery slope to hell. Something about me had clearly raised his hackles from the first day I'd been presented as the next upcoming Ward, and it had only gotten worse at every step of the way. I'd started getting Winslow flashbacks at all the various petty tactics an authority figure could use to hinder, harass, or intimidate a teenaged student while still being able to piously claim that 'they were just doing their job', but despite his reputation for being socially inexperienced in so many other ways Armsmaster could have given Principal Blackwell lessons in how to be a petty bureaucratic tyrant.

I'd like to say that his downfall was the result of a clever plan on my part but to be honest, it wasn't. Between everything else I'd been juggling simultaneously and the simple fact I couldn't think of anything to try and game the system with that wouldn't have just given Armsmaster's accusations that I was a manipulative little Emma trying to game the system some actual weight, I'd had to fall back on my longest-used and least-liked coping strategy; to just sit there like a dummy and take it. I'd honestly thought of taking my concerns to the Director, seeing as how I if not the other Wards had been given a prior open-door-policy invitation to her office, but I was already aware that she'd been running herself from can-see to can't-see almost seven days a week to try and stay on top of the chaos that was the post-Coil PRT mole hunt. Which was bad for anyone and still worse for someone with her ongoing health problems. So I accepted I had to be a lower priority than that and just gritted my teeth and waited for when the time pressure on Director Piggot would be less insane and I could afford to bring this to her.

But joy of joys, she'd been sufficiently on top of things to notice Armsmaster's mental malfunctions herself as soon as the investigation wrapped up and she could start to resume normal routine, and Armsmaster had been relieved. He was still leader of the ENE Protectorate but now his policy of dumping most of the drudge-work in superivising the Wards on Miss Militia while still reserving the right to come in and lay down the judgements and discipline and suchlike himself whenever he wanted had been nixed. Miss Militia was given actual authority over the Wards to match the responsibilities that Armsmaster had already been dumping on her, to her great relief, and we got a single adult supervisor to deal with instead of one and a half competing ones that hadn't been coordinating well at all.

So, recent developments had made the Wards so happy that we would have been ready to throw an Armsmaster-is-gone party. And while we certainly couldn't have actually done that because that would have been epically rude, that didn't mean I couldn't bring presents.

"Okay, guys!" I said cheerfully while Chris and I were hauling the boxes into the Wards console/ready room, with Miss Militia walking in behind us. "A very merry un-birthday to you all, so line up and get your gift bags!"

Missy turned around from the console to look at us coming in. "Cool! But what's the occasion?"

Miss Militia fielded that for us. "Wards regulations allow Tinkers to share useful Tinkertech with their team if they can demonstrate safety of operation sufficiently for the review board and receive the permission of their official Protectorate supervisor. Binary's application to share several items of gear has finally finished the approval process." Everybody in the room clearly heard the unspoken Because unlike Armsmaster, I was actually willing to sign it.

"Wait, this is a thing now?" Dean asked. "As in generally, and not just the special dispensation I got for my armor? Chris, why didn't you ever apply for this before? Is it a new program?"

"No," he sighed. "I'd just never been told about it before. Taylor is the one of us that Armsmaster had kept forcing to reread the rule book with how closely he kept vetting her applications, so she's the one who found out about it."

"So what are we getting?" Carlos broke in diplomatically, as Chris and I started laying out the packages.

"First up, your new official Wards anti-ballistic costume underlayer," I said as we started laying it out. "This is based on the original body armor jammies I was making as part of my home-brew before joining the Wards, but upgraded with certain chemical principles taken from containment foam research that I had access to now that I'm on the team. Its weakest versus blunt impact so don't go trying to take a punch from Lung just yet, and sufficient force behind a sufficiently sharp edge will still sever the woven fibers so don't get too close to Hookwolf either, but as you can see from the demonstration…"

While I had been speaking, Chris had been setting up one of those big water bottles used in office water machines on a chair at the other side of the room, and then draping one of the ballistic underlayers over it. Miss Militia nodded, waved at everyone to stand back, and her power flicked into an M-4 assault rifle with advanced tactical silencer (we were in a confined room without hearing protection, after all) that she brought up to her shoulder as soon as Chris was back on our side of the room and used to fire a three-round burst directly into the anti-ballistic layer, then another burst after that. I walked over after she'd put away her weapon and lifted the cloth to show that the thin plastic water bottle had remained completely unpunctured, even if it had dented some.

"Ta-da! Now those of us who aren't Aegis or wearing power armor already don't have to worry about stray shots from getting too close to a gang fight anymore, or at least we can worry as much less about it as the field agents in their tactical gear do. Only unlike their tac gear we can move all day in this without encumbrance because it weighs less than five pounds and fits under a costume. It even wicks sweat away for cooling in summer but retains heat when dry for winter, like the high-end ski suits do."

"Awesome," Dennis said, giving us both a big thumbs-up. "But it's Tinkertech, so what's the maintenance requirement?"

"About as much as containment foam," Chris cut in. "Which means virtually none. Just like the foam actually absorbs impact and shock, which is why they can use it to catch falling or jumping people from upper-story windows and why it can confine even high-end Brutes, the anti-ballistic layer cloth adapts that chemical principle to do the same here. It's a combination of that and the exact micro-structure of the weave, which again is something that doesn't need maintaining as its part of the initial physical setup."

"In fact, its so borderline Tinkertech that right now the PRT's research department is exploring the possibility of mass production methods, if they can work out the last several kinks. Just like containment foam," Miss Militia put in. "If it does pan out, and note that I say if, then hopefully all Protectorate and agent tactical gear can eventually be similarily upgraded for lack of encumbrance while still maintaining protection and flexibility."

"Whoa," Missy said. "You are like the super-Tinker, Taylor!"

"My blushes, Vista!" I said. "I just… most of this was already all out there, I just helped put the pieces together. Which is why Chris and I are such good lab partners, I guess. I figure out what missing pieces could solve the problem, we both find them, he helps me turn all the pieces into a single working design."

"Modular design for the win!" Chris cut in cheekily, still not quite off the high of having actually found his specialization yet. And ugh, that pun was horrible.

" I'm genuinely starting to think your Tinker specialty isn't dual-focus Computers/Combat but Tinker Synergy," Dean said, ignoring the groans at Chris' latest. "And I won't be the only one if you keep doing things like this."

"Moving on," I said, "the next up is the special test item I got approved. Our own Wards dedicated tactical communicator, a separate hardwired channel I'll be installing in all our masks or helmets that's just us-to-us and doesn't go through the PRT comm network."

Dennis instinctively looked at the authority figure in the room before looking back to me. "And you got this sanctioned how?" he asked me wonderingly.

"Because the nature of the test requires it," Miss Militia said, taking it with grace. "These are quantum entanglement communicators."

"Point to point, signal goes straight through the magic of weird physics and not actually crossing the intervening space between," I agreed. "Impossible to decrypt or even perceive except by actually having one of the physical receivers sync'ed to the network already in your hands. It's obviously massive overkill for field radios but if it's perfected the intended usage would be for ultra-secure information transfers between hardened sites. The reason we're getting them is because part of the test is finding out how long the quantum entangled particles will actually stay entangled. And since the math keeps coming back with 'Heck if I know!', a team of beta-testers will carry quantum comms around for the next few months and use them regularly for low priority traffic until they finally break, then we measure how long that took and whether it scaled to amount of message traffic or just elapsed time since construction. And why pay several highly-paid agents to sit around and do that all day when child labor is available at minimum wage?" I snarked.

"More seriously," Miss Militia broke in. "We are not oblivious to the fact that giving you all an effectively impossible-to-monitor communications channel in the field will mean that you will spend a lot of time chatting informally on it. Since measuring things under conditions of frequent use is a part of the test, we're not even entirely against that happening. But at the first incident where your playing around with these turns out to have distracted you from something important, or where you are caught excessively pushing the boundaries of what is or is not acceptable to say on the radio – overhearable or not – then the test stops and if it ever gets run again at all, it will be by dedicated field testers on a proving ground. This is a privilege, not a right, and you will treat it as such."

"Everybody got that?" Carlos said, making firm eye contact with all of us before turning back to her. "Message received, ma'am."

"And last but certainly not least is a one-off, because I am mean and arbitrary and play favorites," I said hammily, to the expected groans. "Missy, we all know that the PR people keep veto'ing your every suggestion to have anything to throw at the bad guys besides your powers and bare hands because they hate having the youngest Ward carry any visible weapons, just like I had to put my stun beams in my forearm mounts instead of being allowed to use an honest zap rifle because teenaged girl with an assault weapon et cetera et cetera," I said.

"You got them to approve for me?!" she said, literally bouncing out of her seat with eagerness.

"No, I just took advantage of the fact that all of their prior written objections based on your branding kept emphasizing the word visible weaponry," I said. "Bureaucracy 101; its not just what you say, its how you say it. And that's why it only takes Miss Militia signing my Tinkertech-sharing permission slip for you to get a new pair of gloves and PR doesn't get a vote," I said, opening the last box to show a pair of gloves almost visibly identical to her the ones already on her costume, and she looked down at them confusedly before looking back up to me.

"These are zap gloves," I said, and smiled back at her sudden eager grin. "Miss Militia will have to show you some new unarmed combat moves for best making use of them, because these go off of palm strikes and grabs, not punches. But the battery pack on the back of the hand here is almost invisible from more than a few feet away, each glove holds at least twenty zaps each before needing recharging, you can plug the adapter into any standard wall outlet like a cell phone charger, and your costume has no visible changes at all. And one good slap from these will shock your opponent just as hard as if you'd run a commercial-issue stun gun into him."

"Best present ever!" she squealed.

"You're also going to need to attend a training module about stun guns, their hazards and health risks, and their proper law enforcement use before you will be allowed to take those in the field," Miss Militia said seriously. "But since these use the same basic principle and voltage as police stun guns, that training will be no trouble to arrange. I'll contact you later with the time."

"Thank you!" Missy said to both of us, before I suddenly got another Missy-hug. For some reason my breakdown over Canberra had broken the first of that ice with her, and now it was actually possible to hug Missy or vice versa on special occasions. Rarely possible, but still possible, where any attempt to do so before would have just pushed her into a wild-animal defensiveness.

God, how horrible is her home that she's that starved for but still that messed up about accepting a simple hug? Do her parents even remember they have a kid or does she just wander occasionally through the house and feed and water herself like an outdoors cat? I still hadn't found anything I could do for her there and I was starting, just starting, to feel the temptation to go just a little Skitter about it. A temptation I was still firmly telling myself was misplaced.

Missy and I broke the hug and Miss Militia let the ongoing celebration continue for a minute or two, then sharply whistled to break in. "And for the bad news, all of you will now start your training on exactly why body armor is not an absolute protection and why you still can't let it substitute for proper situational awareness, cover, and movement." she said in her incoming-badass-everybody-duck voice. "So everybody go get changed into your new protective gear and everyone who doesn't already have a safety-rated helmet as part of their costume go draw one. Because the remainder of this evening is going to be an educational experience that involves the urban combat course, you, me, and a lot of high-velocity rubber bullets."

"I love this job," Missy said with total sincerity, and we all stifled a laugh as we headed to our locker rooms.

Armsmaster's no longer being anywhere involved in my supervisory process had let me take a lot of the brakes off regarding my 'official' Tinkering. I'd even moved my attempts to build an unofficial Tinker-box for myself a few steps back down the immediate priority ladder because now I had an opportunity to work on several other things earlier than I thought I would, such as coming up with borderline-reproducible technology to share with the Protectorate as a whole. Not that improved body armor or secure communicators would by themselves save the world but between that and the QAC they would build up credibility and goodwill, would put me in a position where more people would still hear me when I spoke despite my youth and relative lack of seniority.

There was so much information that I still needed to find a way to share with the Protectorate, with Dragon, with anybody and everybody who needed to hear it. And so many obstacles yet between me and the time when I could dare to. But I was working on those obstacles, one little brick of trust at a time.

Since I actually could work in my basement now with much less fear of an Armsmaster interrupt (even if I still had the house systems set to detect any of the electromagnetic emissions characteristic of his armor or motorcycle within several blocks just in case he decided to go outside regs and try to surveil my work again) that was where I was trying to build something John had read about in a fanfic. A chrono-computing chip that used a micro-wormhole as part of the bus to loop the CPU cycle several microseconds back in time.

In theory the chrono-chip would provide infinite computation because it would complete the first step of a problem, then beam that state back to the beginning of the process, then start the problem again with the first step already precomputed and compute the second step again for the first time, repeat until you reached the final step of the problem – which was sent back to the beginning so that the final answer of the problem, from your perception, was output only one CPU cycle after first entering the problem. While it still wouldn't solve any infinite loops it would near-instantly solve any finite algorithm you entered, no matter how large.

In practice it wasn't working out anywhere near so neatly for me as it had in the story John had read, largely because its entire existence was essentially based on a mathematical paradox. Things would indeterminately glitch out after the first few chrono-loops no matter what I did, because it was instantaneously voiding its own existence at every step. How could the chrono-chip input the second step of the problem if it had never actually solved the first step in this timeline? The answer apparently lay in my incomplete understanding of time travel theory.

And yes, I'd spent several charges on Temporal Physics. The answer I'd gotten back is that trying actual time travel, such as to go back and zap Scion immediately on or before arrival, would almost certainly paradox me right out of existence. There were too many causality-violating operators in Earth's local space already, all of them sending information or energy/mass back in time or distorting local temporal curves. Things ranging from the Path to Victory shard carried by both Contessa and Zion to the Simurgh to Phir Se to the still-slumbering Khonsu. Heck, Clockblocker counted as a mild temporal anomaly himself and I sat next to him every day. I'd need tremendously more experimentation to be able to figure out how to safely compensate any precision temporal engine to still work reliably despite all the local timestream disruption already in progress.

I acknowledged the reminder from the universe that even if my life had been a story once, and fanfic'ed into a whole bunch of neater stories since, that didn't mean I would always benefit from such neat and easy story conveniences. Such as an infinite-computing chip that would let me effortlessly unchain Dragon without risk or other such conveniences.

So I gave up on the chrono-chip project for now and instead decided that if I couldn't sufficiently compensate for localized timestream uncertainty then I could at least make already-existing timestream uncertainty slightly worse, and started adapting my failed chrono-chip research towards the goal of making a localized precognition jammer instead. Because if I could do that then I could actually risk sharing information with people without worrying about them moving beyond the range of my own Blank.

Of course, I didn't have any friendly precogs available right now to test a precog-jammer with. I didn't think Dinah Alcott had even triggered yet, let alone how I'd go about explaining how I knew about her in the first place. So I did the best I could to get the anti-precog-chip as ready as I could with theory calcs alone and left it penciled in for if Dinah ever showed up or after I got sufficient credibility with the PRT to ask for somebody from their Thinker tank to help me test it as a possible anti-Simurgh device.

I'd also just about finished the schematics for a wide-area surveillance blackbox intended to be distributed across as many PRT operations as would have the budget to mount one on their roofs or vehicles. It had been sold as an ultra-low-frequency scanner tuned to specific wavelength ranges and signal characteristics almost never found in conventional use but that had been characteristic of Sphere's gear, along with hypothetical extrapolations to what Mannequin's might radiate. Burnscar could turn her flames off, Shatterbird could keep her mouth shut, and the rest of the Nine didn't have anything unique to them that would show up on a long-range sensor, but Mannequin needed his Tinkertech operating at all times just to stay alive, let alone mobile.

And that meant if you could build a scanner that could lock into him at range, you could find and track the Slaughterhouse Nine. A valid contribution towards helping put those murderhobos into a corner they couldn't get out of, even with all the excuses Cauldron would make for them. They could hardly openly order the Protectorate to go hands-off if the S9 were caught in the open and on the road, after all.

But the reason the blackboxes were so heavily blackboxed wasn't just hiding my abilities as an Everything Mass-Producible Non-Shard-Limited Tinker, although given all the 'lucky' sharing I'd done to date it certainly didn't hurt. No, that was to keep anybody from realizing that the exotic Tinkertech scanning technology in the boxes wasn't just looking for the Tinkertech of the S9.

Scion. He was the primary target and I knew far too little about him. And, of course, his movements across the world were erratic and untrackable. I was still working on a way to get suitable sensor packages in range of the only occasions where his showing up was even semi-reliably predictable, i.e., Endbringer fights, but that didn't mean I'd bet all my nickels on one horse. If the long-range tracking network I was hoping to get the PRT to set up for the Slaughterhouse Nine also just happened to catch a Scion sighting as he randomly zipped into and out of North America… well, it might take weeks or months but I'd finally get a valid dimensional scanner reading of him. Finally know more about what I was up against.

Still, even with all the bumps in the road and all the plans I had to keep juggling – and more slowly than before because my friends were still making sure I got all my sleeps in as demanded, darn them - as we closed out March and headed into April I could at least be satisfied that this month had been still more productive for me than the month before that. And that I had every intention of, and at the moment what looked like every prospect of, keeping that pattern going until the job was finally done.

"So you're saying that this girl is being neglected? Why isn't anyone doing anything about it?" Dad asked me one evening at home while we were both couching it in the living room.

I didn't often bring superhero concerns home to my dad because outside of emotional support, there's not much advice he'd know how to give me there. But having been consistently stumped myself on the Missy Biron question I'd decided to see if talking it over with a fresh perspective would at least shake loose any ideas. And while you normally couldn't unmask another Ward to your parents without their parents' permission, one of the few bureaucratic paradoxes of all the bullshit that Vista's parents had finessed the Youth Guard into winding around her case had meant they'd limited their ability to veto Wards decisions in the same way they'd tied the PRT's hands regarding decisions about Missy's home life. So if Vista herself agreed and I could talk Miss Militia into letting Missy come over to my house for out-of-costume friendship then that's all it took.

She wasn't here at our house now, of course. Like I'd said, you never discussed Vista's home life within her hearing if you could possibly help it.

"Because officially the PRT can't," I explained. "Her parents pulled a big crocodile tears on family court and the Youth Guard, all about how they were sooooo afraid the PRT would take their child away at the slightest excuse and use her like a child soldier because she's the most powerful Ward like maybe ever. So they got a binding injunction from the court that only Youth Guard gets to vet her situation and do her home welfare checks, not the PRT at all."

"And her parents are abusing her?" he said heatedly.

"Neglecting her," I said. "Nobody ever slaps her or shoves her in a closet or things like that. If anyone had then the Youth Guard be damned, the Brockton Bay Wards would have gone medieval on their a- butts." I cut myself off. "The problem is that her parents are on like year whatever of the world's messiest divorce without ever actually getting around to having the divorce. So she only gets paid any real attention to by either of them when its them trying to use her as a weapon to undercut the other one, and spends the rest of her time at home in her bedroom listening to adults have domestic arguments loud enough to be heard two rooms away."

"How has she not… broken down yet?" he asked me flabbergastedly.

"She has the Wards to escape into," I said. "It's basically this whole other life to her. It is pretty much her whole life. And yeah, its still not healthy for a girl her age to think of herself as 'Vista' first and 'Missy Biron' second, but it's a lot less unhealthy then if she'd had to live in that full-time."

"That's not a stable full-time situation," my father said.

"We know," I agreed. "The entire team except for Missy have been beating our heads on this forever. The Protectorate can't do anything, the PRT can't do anything, the Youth Guard won't do anything because for God only knows what reason they're all pulling a Blackwell so hard that they make Winslow look as sharp as, bleh, the US Naval Academy or something-"

"And you were hoping I could do something?" My dad said.

"Or at least think of something." I sighed, "because we sure haven't." And then was shocked at the sight of my dad actually smiling.

"Taylor, what happens if her parents ever finalize that divorce?" he asked me.

"I- they'd both have to get their custody applications evaluated by the court again as part of the divorce settlement, and presuming the judge wasn't a senile idiot this time they'd both fail, especially with the potentially available character witnesses. So that kicks her custody decisions back to the PRT no matter what Youth Guard whines and bitches about. But as mega-estranged as they are her parents don't actually want to get legally divorced, because the particular way their wealth is structured means they'd both lose the big fancy house in the process selling it for court costs."

"But they still legitimately hate each other and wish they could divorce," my Dad said.

"Yes, but how does that help us?"

"What would happen if an experienced divorce lawyer approached either of them, and said that he'd thought of a way he could get the house all wrapped up for them – cutting out the other one entirely – if only they'd hire him and authorize him to actually start formal proceedings?"

I jawdropped at the sheer simple brilliance of it. "They'd jump on it like a starving shark!" I said, before my lips started to involuntarily curl up into a shark-like grin of my own. "Of course, neither of us happens to be an experienced divorce lawyer."

"No, but we happen to know one," my dad said, matching my grin. "And we know that he's recently learned a huge lesson about not letting young girls stay in horrible situations where neither of their parents can see that they need help."

I stepped across and gave my dad a big hug. "Y'know, dad, sometimes you're kinda a genius."

"Sometimes," he agreed wistfully, and I stood up and separated. "So, should I call Alan tomorrow?" he asked.

"No, let me run this past the person who'd actually be affected the most and get her agreement first," I said. "As well as her, and the rest of the team's, advice on whether her mom or her dad would make the best sucker to approach."

"Well, if it's any consolation Alan probably will get them the house," my dad said. "For all the good it will do them, after they have nobody to actually live in it with."

"There's a lesson there for us all, I think." I said, and we sat down on the couch next to each other and started to watch the TV again.

"Dad?" I said after a long pause. "I'm glad you're back."

"Me too, baby girl. Me too."

Author's Note: The gathering storm can wait a little longer to gather, because I still got shit to get through.

But yes, we finally have a breakthrough on the Vista front, Danny Hebert finally gets to be a big damn hero, Taylor starts sharing her Tinkertech, and we even see some long-range plans vs. S-class threats and Scion.

And yes, the chrono-chip is from the oft-mentioned Inspired Inventor fanfic "Technology Will Win The Day"... and I deliberately had it not work in my universe because if it did, choo choo motherfuckers, we're on the way to dead Zion in a month. But at least I explained why it didn't work and used that explanation to further the plot elsewhere.

And before anybody tells me temporal physics doesn't work that way I would like to quote fiction's greatest authority on temporal physics...

Wibbley. Wobbley. Timey. Wimey. Stuff.

There you go. :)

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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cliffc999

Jul 22, 2019

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Threadmarks Interlude 3-D: Clockblocker New

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cliffc999

Jul 23, 2019

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Interlude 3-D: Clockblocker

I still didn't quite know what to make of Taylor Hebert.

Oh, I'd entirely come around to believing that she was being entirely sincere about wanting to be a hero, entirely genuine about wanting to be friends with us, and 200% not fake about caring about people and just being an all-around decent person. She'd not only told me the truth in our little heart-to-heart but we'd all seen her breakdown when the news about the Simurgh attack had come in. No one was that good an actress. I don't think even Ingenue could have pulled that one off and she was supposed to have had an actual parahuman power for remaking herself into exactly whatever she wished people to see her as. At that moment Taylor had looked like a girl who was being punched directly in the soul. Punched like Alexandria could punch, or maybe even Scion.

What I couldn't quite figure out was why. Why did Taylor feel so strongly that it was somehow her personal responsibility for fixing everything that was wrong with the world? The only other person I'd ever seen torture herself like that was Panacea and her own guilt complex about every sick or injured person she couldn't reach in time to heal. I entirely understood why those two girls had so quickly become each other's best friend. They were both carrying the same kind of self-imposed burden, and they could understand each other right down to each other's shoe tops without even needing words. But if I'd always thought Amy was a little confusing because I couldn't entirely figure out why she loaded herself down like that, then that was nothing compared to the confusion that Taylor gave me.

It's not as if the team was unused to seeing workaholics, or seeing people who threw themselves so deeply into the job because they were trying hard to escape something else. Missy had been doing that since before most of us had even joined the team. And Missy's situation had me thinking that maybe part of the reason Taylor felt so responsible for fixing everything was because she was legitimately good at fixing things. Missy's screwed up life had been frustrating the entire team and most of the adults for years but Taylor had needed less than a month to figure out the right adult to ask, and because she knew someone who knew someone Missy's horrible parents were now walking themselves straight into a legal ambush that would in just a couple months be in prime position to get Missy out of that horrible life. So I could get that the girl who'd apparently always been the girl who helped fix things for other people, apparently even before she'd triggered, would start believing that she had to fix things around her. That if it was staying broken, it was her fault for ignoring it. But that didn't explain the whole thing.

Regarding Missy, even though the plan had yet to actually hit the courts yet the arguments had already started quietly between us over whose family would get to foster Missy if/when that whole thing finally worked out. Her own request for Taylor's house was being nixed due to Taylor's parent being a single dad who already worked long hours and so Family Services probably wouldn't agree to putting another child there. I was pretty sure that when the dust finally settled she'd become my little sister because sending Missy to Dean's family would be more of the same social climbing and 'using kids as showpieces' crap that she was trying to escape, and my family was the next best set up for assimilating a foster kid after Dean's by the standards that Family Services would be bean counting.

Not that Dean's parents were nearly as bad as the Birons, because abandoning your child to be raised by wolves would still get you a more human upbringing than the Birons. The Stansfields still weren't any prizes, though. Also, there was that whole awkward crush thing she'd had on Dean for a long while, but its interesting how fast that started to go away once Missy saw an actual, real escape from the box she'd been stuck in. I could speak from painful experience that human emotions did weird things to distract yourself with when you were stuck in prolonged stress that you had no outlet for and no power to affect. And it's certainly not as if I had even the slightest objection to the idea of my family fostering Missy. You had to have something really wrong with you to not like or at least deeply sympathize with Missy and she'd already been connecting with me as her sort-of big brother for a while, before she had Taylor to slide into as her sort-of big sister alongside me.

Still, for all that being around Taylor was steadily improving the lives of everyone else – Missy's, Chris's and his finally finding his specialization, the team getting new gear and tactical options, Armsmaster being replaced by Miss Militia as our supervisory agent (even if Taylor hadn't even intended for that one to happen), and all the rest – its like nothing ever really improved her life for her. It had taken a full team intervention spearheaded by Panacea and Miss Militia putting Taylor on an officially supervised sleep log to finally get Taylor to throttle back her habit of working herself half to death to merely working herself like Missy, and she still didn't seem to have any hobbies that didn't involve socializing with people she already knew.

Now, it's not like Taylor was exactly breaking down under her load. Outside of that one not-sleeping thing she was generally very good at knowing her own strengths and how far her endurance could carry her before she had to manage her time. But that was the thing. She was managing her time, however much she tried to make it look casual, and she was parceling it out with almost obsessive precision. Even her non-working time was 'I need this much time to keep from having a breakdown, and that much to be a genuine friend to the people I care about and not a fake one, and then this much time to help other people with these things', and you could almost hear the invisible stopwatch ticking in her head as she spent as much time away from her projects as she thought she was allowed to but not a minute more.

Taylor's 'Invictus mode' had originally made her very hard for Dean to read, but once she'd agreed to mostly stop using it except for emergencies that let him start picking up things, and he soon got enough experience with her to learn to mostly compensate. So I'd asked him if he wouldn't mind talking about what he'd seen about Taylor. Just in case there was something wrong we could help with, because I was really afraid there was. And he finally agreed to tell me and Carlos about it, and sure enough, something was eating her.

Taylor was afraid of something. Desperately afraid. Every waking minute of every day, there was some horrible thought always at the back of her mind that she was constantly keeping away from her face, from her voice, even from herself a lot of the time. The reason I'd said she was 'mostly' keeping her promise to us about Invictus mode is because I was pretty sure that she was constantly using at least a little of it to keep anybody else from noticing that something was riding her this hard.

Since we were 100% certain that asking Taylor about it would just cause her to clam up and probably withdraw even further into her shell, which was the absolute last thing we wanted, we didn't. But all of the Wards had checked as much of Taylor's life as we could without getting caught at it to see if what she was afraid of had been some other person, someone like Sophia or those two other girls that hadn't been caught and that she was still terrified would find some way to get at her. We'd checked her father, even, in case that was it. And Vicky and Amy had gone through Arcadia as best as they could to see if it had been anyone there. And we knew it wasn't Armsmaster because Dean had said Taylor's fears hadn't changed even a little bit after he'd been relieved, and that it wasn't anybody else in the building because we hadn't seen anyone in the building not like Taylor and even Director Piggot liked her. And she didn't like anyone. But no matter how we checked we didn't find anyone who was threatening her or oppressing her enough to explain what Dean had been picking up.

If it wasn't for the fact that Amy had full-healed Taylor twice and still kept giving her diagnostic pokes every now and then at Arcadia to make sure Taylor was keeping up with her promise to stop skipping sleep, I'd honestly have wondered if Taylor had been dying from a terminal illness. I knew a lot about that too, from having watched my dad before he finally went into remission. About the way you started looking at the world when you knew that you only had so much time left. The way you started rushing to try and cram in everything you'd left undone, all the things you hadn't said or taken care of, while you still thought you'd be able to. Taylor had that look in her eyes every day. You had to look really close to see it, and you still couldn't unless you were that familiar with it like I was, but she had it.

Taylor Hebert was one of the most decent people I'd ever met, but apparently that still wasn't enough for the world to just let her be happy. And you learned a lot about not seeing happy endings when you lived in Brockton Bay, but that didn't mean you ever got to like it. I just wished that one day, Taylor would be able to actually tell us about who or what she was so afraid of. That she'd do it in time before it finally caught up to her and we'd be too late to help.

Because of course we'd help her with it, whatever it was. We were the Brockton Bay Wards, and that's what we did.

Author's Note: You know, it occurred to me that I haven't actually done a POV yet where we see how the Wards perceive Taylor, so while I'm still wrestling with the outline you get an interlude that has Clockblocker being philosophical.

And yeah, those kids are sharper than anyone gives them credit for. As for Invictus or Blank not blocking Dean out, remember, Taylor doesn't always use Invictus... and Dean isn't hostile to her, so Blank lets him in just fine.

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 Interlude 3-E: Tagg New

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Jul 24, 2019

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Interlude 3-E: Tagg

Spoiler: Cue the music!

"Where is the drone, move your asses!" I roared into my helmet radio as the remnants of my headquarters element fell in around me and we set up a hasty perimeter at the end of an abandoned row of houses in what had once been a suburban district of Madison. The distant roars and explosions were available at the moment to tell me that Crawler was still being kept pinned down by the helicopters over a mile away, so at least that part of the plan was working. But we were going to need some eyes in the sky to be able to track down and kill Jack Slash and his stragglers in this damned maze, so at the very least one of the Predators would have to be retasked here.

No battle plan ever survived contact with the enemy but this one in particular had gone sideways very shortly after initial engagement. Not that I'd had much time to plan, given that even the new early-warning tech some Tinker had come up with had barely given us fifteen minutes' to prepare for the arrival of the Slaughterhouse Nine at the Madison Containment Zone. To be honest, we hadn't even known for certain if they were going to attack the Zone or merely bypass it. The easternmost edge of the CZ proper was still over two miles west from the intersection of Interstates 39 and 94, and despite the potential weakness to my perimeter neither highway had been closed to normal traffic. So the incoming signal denoting the presence of Mannequin's particular technology could have meant that the Nine were simply driving by and had no intentions of stopping here.

Not that that had stopped my decision for a moment. The Slaughterhouse Nine were a seeping, gangrenous wound on the ass of the universe and every day that they'd been allowed to continue breathing had been a separate crime against humanity. Between their cowardly habit of running away from even the possibility of any fight they couldn't win and the sheer size of the continent, they had gotten away with their sick games for years. But the new tech meant that their ability to lay low was coming to an end and even though it had hardly gotten into distribution yet, by a miraculous stroke of good fortune the fact that high-threat zones such as the Madison CZ had been slated for the first wave of the black boxes meant that we'd already gotten a hit on the tracking network this early.

And better yet, we'd gotten the hit in one of the best possible places for an engagement against the Nine. For the job of holding down the Simurgh's hellish little playground I had almost a full brigade of PRT Containment Zone troopers and US Army augmentations assigned to my command, with integrated aviation assets. I had one of the largest concentrations of force available to any PRT Regional Director in North America right under my thumb. I even had Foothold available, the only Regional Director with that kind of authority or any need for it.

And I was also the only PRT Regional Director who had no non-combatants within their area of responsibility. The population of the Containment Zone had been innocent civilians at one time, and in the privacy of my thoughts I still allowed myself the luxury of mourning their fates. But my duty was clear and every one of them was now a Simurgh bomb, a human terror weapon like the thousands and thousands that had helped rip the bleeding heart out of Northern Europe after Lausanne. I'd had to shoot them myself and counsel my men again and again after their having done likewise, over and over again, as the poor bastards had made their frantic and futile runs at the wire. So if the inhabitants of the CZ died today as collateral damage from a full-scale battle with the Slaughterhouse Nine, then that would actually be more merciful a fate than what they'd already been sentenced to. Quicker and kinder than their having to remain in that hopeless cage for decades as walking dead men until they finally were allowed to stop walking.

Which is why that as soon as I'd been woken up and informed that the Slaughterhouse Nine were entering my area of responsibility I'd mobilized all my forces and drawn up the best attack plan I could in the time I'd had. As much as I knew that we were going to bleed and bleed hard vs. that gang of homicidal freaks, the fact remained that these were near-ideal conditions to engage them in. The local balance of force was heavily in our favor, and outside of traffic on the Interstate itself there was literally nothing and no one around for them to use as collateral damage. Traffic that was itself almost nonexistent due to the the hour. It would only be us, them, and the already-condemned audience in the nearby CZ. The PRT would simply never get another chance as good as this.

So risks or not I'd immediately messaged Washington, informed them I was engaging the S9 immediately and on my own authority regardless of whether or not they thought it was a safe idea or not, then demanded the heaviest cape reinforcements that they could get here as fast as possible. And then we rolled out and hit the bastards with everything we had without even waiting for the reinforcements, to make goddamn sure the Nine couldn't pull another one of their slithering escapes before the hammer could finally arrive.

I wasn't a fool. I knew that the Nine had options that couldn't simply be solved with bullets. The unstoppable Siberian. The anti-technological weapon of mass destruction that was Shatterbird. And possibly the worst of them all, that demon child Bonesaw. But even if myself and all my men died as well should the potential threat of Bonesaw's last-ditch contingencies prove to be actual, or should the Nine inflict enough casualties on my forces to remove our ability to keep the Containment Zone lines sealed, then I could and would still order Foothold. The risk of that particular death or any other was the duty we had already sworn ourselves to. The potential fate that we had each been warned of, had each individually accepted and volunteered for.

But nobody ever won any battles by dying for their flag. They won by making the other son-of-a-bitch die for his. And despite all the hits we'd taken we weren't dead yet.

"Bold One, Overlord!" I heard the voice of my chief of staff in my head, using the call sign for the central command center. When we'd deployed for the initial attack I'd gone forward with my field headquarters element to assume immediate tactical control of the operation and left him back in the situation room with all the radios and monitors to coordinate the big picture. "Bold One, respond!"

"Not dead yet, Overlord!" I shouted back. "Status on the heavy hitters?"

"Protectorate says no-go on teleporter availability. They can't get here in time. Should I commit our local cape reserve?"

"No," I shot back. "With all the troops that we pulled off the line for this, we need those force multipliers still on the Wall! Besides, just capes by themselves have been swinging and missing on these bastards for years. We still need the capes to swing in and finish off the hard nuts, but we'll whittle 'em down as much as we can ourselves before-"

And then a scream of terror from the perimeter made me look up. "Contact right, contact right!" my sentries shouted immediately before I heard everybody assigned to watch that particular area of responsibility opening fire. The heightened durability that this particular target possessed meant that even the battle rifles and anti-vehicle rifles I'd had issued to all squad-designated marksmen weren't slowing him down, but then one of my quicker-thinking riflemen immediately escalated to his underbarrel 40mm grenade launcher. He scored a direct hit just before the Brute's charge would have brought him within the grenade's minimum arming distance, and given that the shaped-charge anti-vehicle grenade would have lanced a hole in one side of an APC and out the other it was more than sufficient to blow the misshapen freak in half.

I thanked God that it hadn't been the Siberian.

"Good shooting, soldier!" I called to him, and turned back to the radio. "Overlord, Hatchet Face is down, I say again, Hatchet Face is down." I looked up again and barked an order. "Somebody shove a white phosphorous down what's left of his throat and pull the pin! We don't need to find out if he regenerates too."

"Dumbass forgot that we didn't have any powers to neutralize," I heard a nearby sergeant mutter under his breath, and I couldn't help but grin to myself at that remark as I got back to concentrating on the overall tactical situation.

We'd made first contact with the Slaughterhouse Nine shortly before dawn, as they'd been heading south on I-39. At that time of day there was virtually zero traffic, so when the signal tracker had positively located them all riding in a Winnebago said RV had been fortuitously alone on the road with only one nondescript van following it from over a mile behind. I had multiple Predator drones assigned to the CZ for continuing ongoing aerial observation of Madison, and I'd ordered one of the armed Reaper variants to be retasked for the first strike.

So the earliest warning the Slaughterhouse Nine had that they were under attack was when a Hellfire missile dropped right through the roof of their RV and cratered it all over the road. Killing Shatterbird with the first shot had been an essential part of the mission, because if she'd still been up when the main engagement started then we would have been desperately on the back foot.

Her failure to emerge from the wreckage, as well as Mannequin's, meant that they'd almost certainly died. But the first kink in the plan had occurred when we hadn't been as lucky with Bonesaw. The pint-sized horror must have been riding in the Siberian's lap or something because they immediately emerged from the wreckage entirely unscathed, the Siberian having the ability to share her invincibility with anyone she was touching. Hatchet Face and Crawler were likewise still in the fight, being the Brutes. Jack Slash had been down but apparently whatever augments Bonesaw had been evaluated as having provided the Nine's 'squishier' members had kept him barely alive through the attack, him being further away from the point of impact than Shatterbird and Mannequin had been. By the time the follow-up Hellfire arrived the Siberian had already reached him and started to carry both him and Bonesaw off to safety off the side of the road, in the nearby abandoned suburbs.

I ordered the Reaper to expend all its remaining missiles on Crawler to keep him pinned down and busy regenerating instead of being free to move around and disrupt our lines, then committed the gunships to back that up when the drone would run out. The bulk of my ground troops were mechanized infantry and light armored cav, so I sent them in to start a search of the housing development that the remainder had fled into. With the Siberian in play I couldn't dare to have anyone dismount and search on foot, but if she wanted to be the cat then I'd give her some volunteer mice to chase in the form of several of my Humvees going at full throttle. Poor brave souls.

I'd set up a mousetrap for Burnscar by having a hand-picked detachment of men light a bonfire in a preprepared area shortly before the missile attack. Sure enough, she'd used her power to survive the Hellfire by teleporting out from the middle of the blast to the nearest large fire she could sense. A pair of my best snipers with .50-cal anti-vehicle rifles had already been dialed in on her arrival point and that took care of that.

The command-and-control helicopter up in the sky lost track of the survivors of the Nine when Jack apparently received enough medical attention from Bonesaw to recover sufficiently to knock it out of the sky with his powers, and two of the gunships followed it before the rest could withdraw. We hadn't been certain if his line-of-sight cutting trick worked even against targets at that altitude, but now we had our answer. However, one of their last reports had been that they no longer had eyes on the Siberian at all. Apparently she'd separated from the main group entirely. The distinct possibility that Jack had ordered her to make a run straight for the Wall and try to draw us off by forcing a breach there was one of the reasons I'd refused to move my own cape support forward.

Still, with the Siberian apparently no longer in play here we could now turn this into an infantry battle. Being the closest to that position I'd taken in the nearest available ground troops myself to flood the entire zone around where Jack and his remnants had gone to ground amidst the empty suburban row houses and strip malls and we'd started our house-to-house search. Even with the nagging fear that we were already breathing some kind of hell-plague dogging our every steps, or that we might be charging straight into the Siberian's trap, we still went in boot to boot without a moment's hesitation. I've never been prouder of my men. Each and every one of them.

So we slowly and methodically ran them to ground. Hatchet Face had just tried and failed to suicide charge us, nobody had reported any contact with the Siberian anywhere since she'd dropped out of sight, Crawler was still being largely penned in by the continuous rain of fire that my aviation and armor assets kept blowing him into pieces with over and over again as backed up by one of our more powerful Shakers that I'd authorized release from the Wall when we started running low on ammo, and-

"Predator Two on station and tracking, Bold One," Overlord reported. "We have all eyes up and running."

"Thank God," I replied "Overlord, push this out on the general band. Everybody light their IR blinkers, I say again, everybody turn on their blinkers. Let the drone see where we all are, and whatever's left has to be Jack and Bonesaw."

I heard the orders go out, and less than two minutes later we got the hit. Or rather, hits. Subtracting the ones that were almost certainly animals there was one unaccounted-for IR spot up at the borders of the reservoir, and one less than two blocks from me hiding in an empty house.

"The one by the water is likely Bonesaw," I said. "Can you get a precise enough sighting for a drone strike?"

"We can confirm its Bonesaw, sir." Overlord replied. "She's standing right out in the open. But the drone doesn't carry any incendiaries powerful enough to guarantee destruction of biological agents," Overlord reminded me. "Neither do the gunships, for that matter. We'd need a fuel-air explosive to guarantee that and even if the Air Force scrambled one right now it wouldn't be here for at least an hour. Do you think she's already released her contingencies yet?"

"Dammit," I swore. "Hold fire for now. There's only one man who can tell us if her threat is potential or actual at this point," I said grimly, turning to my troops. "Everybody, saddle up! We're investing that house two blocks west of here… and then I have to talk to the world's biggest asshole."

It didn't take us very long at all to get there and have a platoon of my men surround the house, and I got out the megaphone.

"Jack Slash, this is Director Tagg of the PRT Madison Containment Zone. Surrender immediately and order all your people to do likewise, and I'll let you live long enough to see if my chain of command decides whether to still enforce your Kill Orders or just give you the Birdcage. As opposed to my deciding right now."

"That's not exactly what I'd call a proper negotiation, now is it General Tagg?" I heard his smirking voice coming from within the house.

"It's the only deal you're going to get, Jack." I said firmly. "It's the only one I'd be willing to give. To be honest I've always believed that death is preferable to the Birdcage… but for you, I could make an exception."

"Do you know what happens if I tell my little Riley to do what she loves to do so much?" the psychopath retorted. I shook my head. Jack Slash had been consistently reported to be one of the most insidious mind-fuckers that ever lived, but so far I hadn't heard a damn thing from him that a blind man couldn't have predicted coming a mile away.

"So she hasn't done it yet?"

"One does have to reserve one's hole card for the final hand, after all."

Asshole. "Jack, they didn't make me a general because I was stupid enough to spend my time worrying about what the enemy might be going to do instead of doing my job. Which job is making the enemy worry about what I might be going to do. So let me ask you your own question – do you know happens if you tell Bonesaw to release her bio-weapons?"

"I was imagining that you would all die, along with millions of other people," he replied petulantly. "I know that the dullness of the military mind is legendary, but please don't tell me you didn't at least get that far."

And at that point I couldn't help but laugh, honest-to-God laugh, at how much this prancing prissy psychopath just couldn't see where he was really standing. "Jack, you stupid two-bit alley mugger," I said. "Do you not have the faintest clue where you are? Did you not even think about what being here means?"

"Now you listen to me-" Jack Slash tried to interrupt desperately, and I talked right over him.

"This is a Simurgh Containment Zone, you miserable ass-clown! You do remember her, right? The worst of the Endbringers? The one who uses mind-warping and Tinkertech to turn innocent people into walking bombs? And you're threatening me with one person of mass destruction? I have what could be several hundred thousand of those not three miles away from here behind a wall, and I've had to stare at them every day for years! What sort of contingency plans do you think I have, Jack? What sort I've needed to have?" I snorted. "You honestly believe that you're my worst nightmare? You're not even an unpleasant daydream."

"I doubt-" Jack Slash said as he showed himself in the door at last and as I saw fear, actual fear in the face of the heretofore untouchable monster I couldn't help but grin.

"It's called Foothold, Jack." I said. "It's there in case some unknown Tinkertech leaps out from the center of town, or if that damned wormhole she tore to Earth-Aleph goes uncontrollable, if it turns out the Simurgh already decided to escalate to Tinkertech-augmented biological warfare and was just waiting for a couple of years to tell us, or anything else that might take it all the way to Doomsday. They gave me special weapons release, you murderous monkey."

Jack Slash's face turned pale in outright horror. "No. You wouldn't-"

"I say three words into my headset right now, or the men in my headquarters hear you kill me before I can finish saying them, and yes, we do all die. Me, my men, and you. And not from Bonesaw's germs but from the multiple atomic demolitions charges already buried and waiting all around the zone. Everything within five miles of the Wall turns to pure white light and gone. Point of order: We're actually less than three miles away."

I was admittedly exaggerating a bit. Foothold wasn't quite that extreme. But the fact did remain that in the event of an ultimate emergency either myself or Overlord could call down a nuclear strike on this town at any time, without even needing National Command Authority to concur as they had already pre-authorized us. And if we did that then even Bonesaw's plagues wouldn't kill anyone who wasn't already dying anyway.

"So what's it going to be, Jack? The Birdcage or the afterlife?"

"I-I'm calling your bluff! I'll tell her to do it, see if I won-"

And then a brilliant blue flash of light in the sky broke our deadlock, as both Jack and I looked up to see the arrival of one of the few capes in North America who could make it here in time via his own Mover abilities even with whatever snarl had kept the Protectorate's teleporters from rushing us heavy cape reinforcements. The biggest of the big guns himself was now on station, and that meant it was all over but the shooting.

"Legend, sterilize Bonesaw immediately!" I yelled into my mike with frantic haste, as I saw Legend drop from the sky already heading towards her position even as I called. Overlord must have been in contact with him already on the way in and given him the targeting coordinates even before I could, because Bonesaw and everything within several hundred meters of her rapidly vanished in an energy barrage intense enough to destroy anything she might have released at the last second, right on down to prions.

I motioned to one of the men adjacent to me to hand me his rifle, and I turned back to Jack.

"… if it's all the same to you, I think I'll take that deal now." Jack Slash said, with a pathetic caricature of a smile on his face.

"Fuck you," I answered him, and taking inspiration from my quick-thinking rifleman earlier I fired the M203 grenade launcher combo I'd borrowed and turned Jack Slash into pink mist.

Legend arrived, lit by the rising sun, less than a minute after Jack Slash had departed this Earth, and I turned to greet him. "Thanks for saving our asses," I nodded to him. "If Jack had pushed it one step further I wouldn't have had any option left except Foothold."

"I'm very glad we didn't need it," Legend replied. "Is that all of them?"

"We've stepped on the bodies for Jack Slash, Mannequin, Burnscar, Shatterbird, Hatchet Face, and now Bonesaw," I replied. "The Siberian fell completely off the map about five-ten minutes after first contact and has apparently done a runner. I don't know why. To be honest, I don't really care at this point."

"We'll do our best to run her down for you," Legend replied, before he shook his head and whistled softly. "I can't believe it's finally over," he said. "After so long-"

"I know what you mean."

"What were your casualties?"

"Not as bad as they could have been. Not as low as I'd have wished for. Preliminary estimates are at least fifty men from the helicopter crews and the mechanized cav. Oh, and we're keeping Crawler mostly contained but we'll still need you to finish him off before you leave."

"I can certainly do that," Legend agreed. "What's the status on your NBC people?"

"Preliminary reports from the burn site are nothing on the detectors, sir." Overlord replied for us in our radios. "Not even the Tinkertech ones we'd had available in case of possible Simurgh bioweapons. Whatever Bonesaw had, all indicators are that it died with her." Everybody, including Legend and me, slumped in relief at that one.

"So, who gets the thank-you card?" I asked Legend. "Dragon? Armsmaster? Those new black boxes made all the difference. Without them Jack would have slid right past us unnoticed like he did for everyone else, and we'd never have had this chance."

"A young new Tinker in Brockton Bay, actually," Legend replied. "She's called Binary, and she joined the Wards only a couple of months ago."

"And she's already pulling things like this off?" I said, legitimately impressed. "You do your best to hang on to that young lady, you hear me? In the Army she'd have been what we'd call a fast-tracker."

"Oh, we intend to," he agreed, grinning. "And I'll certainly give her your congratulations alongside of my own."

"Thanks," I said, before a thought occurred to me. "The bounty on the Nine, or at least the ones we got. I know we can't collect it as PRT or Protectorate employees, but would it be possible to donate it to the Madison Memorial Fund?" I said, sighing. "It'd be something, at least."

"I think that would be entirely appropriate," Legend agreed. "And to you and to all your people – well done."

(The post Thoughts on Tagg and the Battle of Madison has been provided as useful background information for this chapter.)

Author's Note: As I said in my prior post, I'm still busy trying to get a coherent, evenly-paced timeline out of everything I have scheduled and everything I'd like to schedule to have happen in Brockton Bay. But that doesn't mean that some of the things taking place outside of Brockton Bay can't be pencilled in, and so by viewer request we have a full-length treatment and not just a background mention of the death of the Slaughterhouse Nine.

I honestly didn't know what their exact membership was in April 2011 so I just used the ones I was familiar with. Likewise, I'm not sure of the exact amount of damage it takes to keep Crawler busy staying mostly penned in so I just assumed 'a lot' and threw that at him. Yes, it did very much look like a scene from 'the troops keep him pinned down early on' from a Hulk movie, only with less Hulk escalating to where he could just crash out.

To clarify what would not be known to the POV characters and thus not mentionable in the story, that second van was indeed Manton and he did indeed go "Fuck this shit, I'm out." That's why the Siberian fades out after the initial engagement. Manton is thoroughly aware of just how thorough and how relentless the Containment Zone troopers can be when they are rolling hot and so he got lost while the getting was still possible.

And yes, I actually gave Tagg some props. I mean, he's honestly not one of my favorite characters and he horribly fucked up in Brockton Bay, but I decided that if he was given a mission he actually knew how to handle he'd do it well. And hell, pretty much anybody deserves better in his life than just shooting helpless Ziz-bombs as they hung on the wire. So now he gets at least one good's night sleep in his career.

I also don't see Tagg as quite as bad as MCU General Ross because Ross is the platonic ideal of fucked up. I do, however, see both men as played by the same actor, hence the homage to the classic Ross line in the opener.

Last edited: Oct 15, 2019

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

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cliffc999

Jul 25, 2019

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Evolution 3.6

"We interrupt this program now for a Special Announcement from the Protectorate." I heard the voice of the network announcer said unexpectedly, after the comforting background noise of late Saturday morning cartoons had suddenly cut out. It was one of the rare Saturdays where I'd had nothing official scheduled – no Wards training, no PSAs, no console duty or patrols – and so I'd blocked out the morning to catch up on some software projects before meeting Amy for lunch and an afternoon hanging out on the Boardwalk. My loaning Amy that official Wards "Why Proper Rest Is A Medical Necessity" literature to show her mother had apparently done some good, because now Carol Dallon was at least giving her permission to take one day off a week-

I looked up from my computer monitor to focus my full attention on the basement TV as the view switched to a shot of Legend himself at the podium of the press room at the Protectorate's NYC headquarters. My blood chilled as I tried to imagine what this could mean. Another unexpected Endbringer attack? No, there weren't any sirens and Legend would already be heading to the scene. A new S-class threat? Please, God, not another-

And then all my alarmed speculations ground to a confused halt as I realized that Legend was not just smiling, but acting like a man trying very hard to restrain himself from expressing a vastly inappropriate amount of schaudenfreude in public. Like something unspeakably awful had just happened, except that it had happened to people he'd intensely loathed. But Legend was one of the few genuine good guys. He didn't walk around carrying grudges like that-

"Ladies and gentlemen of the press, this morning it is my pleasure to give you one of the most unexpected and yet entirely welcome announcements of my career. I am proud and privileged to report that at approximately 7am Eastern time this morning the brave men and women assigned to duty in the Madison Containment Zone, under the leadership of Director James Tagg, were able to successfully enforce the outstanding Kill Orders on the majority of the Slaughterhouse Nine."

What?

My own amazement was matched by the astonished gasp and near-instant babble of questions by every reporter in the room, and Legend waved for silence repeatedly before finally getting enough of it to continue.

"We can confirm, and I emphasize confirm, the deaths of Jack Slash-"

I slumped back in my seat in absolute shock at the realization that Golden Morning had just been delayed at least fifteen years. I'd barely allowed myself any hope for this to happen at all, let alone so soon-

"-Shatterbird, Mannequin, Burnscar, Hatchet Face-"

Holy- did they clean sweep? Just killing Jack alone would have been a minor miracle, but it sounds like the PRT curbstomped them!

"-Crawler, and Bonesaw. The Siberian is at present the sole survivor of the former Slaughterhouse Nine and is still at large somewhere in the immediate vicinity of Madison. Search efforts are in progress as I speak." So not a clean sweep. Still, wow. Every single one except Manton-

"Their deaths are confirmed, Legend?" someone from ABC broke in loudly, her voice pitched nervously as if she was afraid to believe her own ears. "There is no possibility that any of them escaped?"

"Except for the Siberian, no." Legend replied. "We have recovered and positively identified the remains of everyone I have already listed as dead except for Bonesaw and Crawler, because biohazard concerns required the immediate vaporization of Bonesaw and her immediate vicinity and because Crawler's regenerative powers required his complete disintegration. However, I was on-scene at the time to witness both deaths-" He held up his hands again at the outburst that one had provoked. "-and I will explain the entire sequence of events if you'll just give me a chance, please. But in summary, yes. To borrow a phrase from a certain famous movie from our childhoods the entire Slaughterhouse Nine save for the Siberian are not merely dead, but really most sincerely dead."

"Taylor, turn the TV on now!" my dad shouted from upstairs. "You've got to hear this!"

"I know, dad!" I yelled back. "And holy word-I'm-not-allowed-to-use-in-this-house, I still can't quite believe it!"

Right then my phone went off, and so I listened with one ear to Legend walking the press corps through the whole story of how 'long-range detection gear recently developed by Protectorate Tinkers' – my black boxes had gotten a hit this early? I'd barely finished making the few in the first wave! – had picked up the Slaughterhouse Nine passing by Madison on the nearby Interstate far enough in advance for Tagg to set up an ambush with what sounded like half the US Army, while trying to listen to an excited almost-thirteen-year-old speaking semi-coherently at felt like two hundred words per minute into my ear.

"Missy, I know- yeah, it is awesome and thank God we're never going to have to worry about ever seeing them here- Missy, I'm not sure what they're going to- breathe, Missy, breathe! You're about to fall over from lack of oxygen!" I listened for a bit and continued. "Okay, first thing we need to do is hang up- no of course I want to talk to you, the problem is we need to- well, one of us needs to call Chris because he's got the console shift right now and ask him to ask the people in charge if we'll need to come in today for any kind of response or anything or- no I can't imagine why we'd have to either but what we imagine and what's in the rules usually isn't very similar, now is it? –yes, and then after Chris gets a yes or no answer from the grown-ups then he can just text all our phones as to whether or not our afternoons just got cancelled. Yes, I am. Yes, you are too. Love you too Missy, gotta go. Bye!"

The next fifteen minutes or so of phone tag as the entire team frantically dialed each other trying to find somebody not already on the line and Chris tried to get some kind of official word pushed out from the console to all of us managed to finally hash out that no, the Wards wouldn't be needed for any kind of PR response to this today and our schedules were still set, yes, it was pretty damn awesome, wow, we had no idea that the PRT troopers could pull that kind of thing off without cape support because Legend had only showed up at the very end to handle Bonesaw and score an assist with Crawler and none of the rest of the Protectorate had made it there in time at all, and no, while a Wards party to celebrate the end of the Slaughterhouse Nine was probably inappropriate if anybody else at Arcadia or in the local PRT held one then we were certainly going to invite ourselves and that we'd all talk about it more at tomorrow afternoon's training session.

And then after I'd gone up and shared a congratulatory glass of whatever was in the refrigerator with my dad and we'd spent some more time watching the talking heads roundup, I went to my bedroom to get dressed for my afternoon out with Amy and for the first time since initially hearing the news, I sat back and allowed myself to think about what this meant for the big picture.

For one thing, I now had time. Zion's final triggering to hostility without Jack Slash would be years later, possibly decades later. That gave me time to actually grow up and become an adult first, to join the Protectorate, to possibly gain a leadership position, to find out who were the important people that I could trust and who were the ones I couldn't.

But for another thing, it was now all on me. It had already been before, mostly, but now it was all on me. Even without Queen Administrator and without Khepri there had still been a theoretical chance for Cauldron's original plan, the canon plan, to work. If Golden Morning had been triggered at the earliest possible date, as per canon. But those chances fell off exponentially the later it got, to rapidly become asymptotic-zero after only a year or two of extra time. So as of the death of Jack Slash we were now inextricably locked into two different possibility bands– either I successfully helped the world defeat Zion, or no one did. Which meant that even if a significant amount of the pressure was off me for now, the responsibility was even weightier than ever.

And that meant I could no longer rely solely on messages in bottles for my contingency plans. Even without my precog-jammer being ready and even without being able to share the entire truth, I would have to risk telling someone at least something.

I suppose it's a good thing that we already had a date. Even if she wasn't my girlfriend.

The obvious topic of conversation during lunch was, of course, the downfall of the Slaughterhouse Nine. So Amy and I chatted back and forth on that, and about all the latest drama at school that our respective not-really-dateable statuses meant we got the amusing privilege of being a Greek chorus towards, and the upcoming summer blockbuster line-up (you couldn't have gotten either of us in to go see a chick flick with a gun to our heads), and the sheer unbelievability that Vicky and Dean had actually made it to six consecutive weeks without a "taking a break" even for just a day or two, a new personal record. And all the while I tried to work up and keep my nerve to follow through on my original intention. Because by the end of this conversation- I had no idea where we'd be by the end of this conversation.

So eventually we finished our food and got up and started heading around the promenade, and I waved us over to an ocean-facing bench conveniently far away enough from any eavesdroppers and activated the Tinkertech counter-surveillance jammer in my purse. Amy and I sat down next to each other, and I reached over and gripped her hand in mine.

She looked down at that curiously and then quickly looked around. "I don't see anyone we know, so, who are we pranking?" she asked me with amusement.

I exhaled heavily. "This isn't-" I swallowed and continued clinically. "I want to maintain skin contact with you all through this conversation so that one, you can read my vitals and know I'm not lying – you just felt me release all my biofeedback controls, I'm sure-"

"Taylor, what's wrong?" Amy asked me, no longer amused.

"A lot." I said. "And two, and I say this as emphatically as I possibly can, because I trust you. I trust your integrity, I trust your judgment, I trust your discretion-" I took the plunge. "And I trust your control of, and your willingness to ethically restrain the use of, your powers. Your real powers."

Amy went completely flat at that, but didn't pull away or bristle angrily as she would have only a couple of months ago. "How did you find that out?"

"Remember when we first met – at least, first time while we were both conscious - and you accidentally let slip that you could do brains and I calmed you down at least partly by saying that I was carrying some heavy secrets of my own?"

"Yeah. So wait, you'd figured it out even back then?"

"No. I'd already known before I'd even met you and that is part of the big secret I am trying to spit out even though I'm freaking terrified of doing so." I started to babble.

"I can tell that much from your pulse," Amy agreed in her own clinical voice. "But… okay. Deep breath, Taylor, and keep going."

"I- okay, the guys probably told you that Dennis did a whole interrogation of me in week one to try and figure out if I was faking, and they eventually agreed I wasn't. But I am. Sorta. I-" I channeled a brief spike of Invictus, nodding to Amy as she felt the physiological effects of me doing it, just so I could untangle my tongue. I released the control again and continued.

"I've been lying at least by omission to everyone since I've first met them, including you. I've been hiding the full extent of my own powers because I've been terrified of the world's potential reaction to them. Like you, what I let people see is only the fraction of the iceberg that's above water. And like you, I'm sick of wearing a mask every day."

"That makes sense," Amy said, relaxing a little. "I don't usually feel a connection to anyone at first sight, much less as deeply as I did to you, but what you just said is only an extension of what we already knew about each other. That a lot of what we had in common is that we're both girls who know what its like to have the impossible pressure, the thing where we know that however much we do its never remotely as much as we could possibly do."

"Yeah," I said, relieved that I'd actually gotten this far without Amy either freaking or exploding on me. "So, to start with that end, my Tinker specialty is not Computers, Combat, Tinker Synergy, or anything else. It's everything." Amy's eyes widened like an anime character's as I continued. "I concentrate on wanting to be good at Tinkering something, I get even a vague idea of what field I'm trying to go for, and boom, now I am. I'm pretty much Eidolon Tinker. Plus."

"Guh," Amy said articulately. "Wow. I mean, okay, there's always got to be one person in the world who draws the grand prize ticket in the power lottery and why not you, but… damn."

"Oh, it gets better!" I said. "You know the usual thing that keeps Tinkertech from being reproduced? That only rare and partial exceptions to exist, like Dragon or Masamune? I have a volume knob for that in my head, and it goes all the way from 'black box' to 'I could teach a non-Tinker engineer to make this in ten minutes'. And I've got full control of the knob."

"Fuck me running," Amy whispered in what was either awe or terror. "I'm amazed you ever let yourself come out of that basement if you knew you were that kind of valuable!"

"If Coil hadn't sent the Undersiders to yoink me out, I'd probably still be in there!" I said, nodding frantically. "And I'm not unhappy that I'm not but-"

"But the reason that all the Wards are so busy wondering about why you so desperately feel its your responsibility to Fix Everything is because you really could potentially Fix Everything," Amy agreed. "I- oh, screw it!" And then suddenly the hug that Missy had spontaneously thrown me during my Canberra meltdown became only the second most surprising one I'd received in my life, because Amy had her arms wrapped around me and her head on my shoulder and mine lying on hers. "Still not gay?" she joked weakly, trying to lighten the mood.

"Still not gay, sorry," I answered back to her, breathing a little easier for the first time since this whole conversation had started. Eventually we separated just back to the hand-holding and she continued.

"But how does this relate to already knowing my biggest secret before you'd even met me?" Amy asked determinedly. "It can't even be Tinkertech, because you wouldn't have really had any chance to scan me. Unless another part of the secrets is that you're a stalker, which I doubt. I've had those before and you don't remotely smell as if."

"And this is the part I wanted the lie detector for because otherwise I'd be making VoidCowboy sound sane." I said. "And I still can't even tell you all of it because revealing the worst parts to anyone before I finish precog-jamming technology would put anyone I talk to in a high risk category for death by orbital Endbringer or worse." I finished, as Amy's face turned pale again. "Because the shit is that heavy, Amy."

"Or worse? What the fuck is possibly worse than Her?" Amy asked incredulously. And fair's fair, pretty much nobody's imagination on this planet contained a possible category for anything worse than 'the personal attention of the Simurgh'.

"You don't want to know, but you eventually are going to." I replied. "But sticking to the parts that won't get anybody killed – except maybe me at the hands of an enraged Panacea-"

"Don't joke," Amy said firmly.

I looked her square in the eyes and continued. "When I gained my powers, I also gained a lot of knowledge. One-shot deal, more like a vision or a datadump than an actual Thinker power. I learned about at least two S-class threats completely unknown to the world, one of which is potentially and one of which is definitely worse than any S-class threat currently known. I learned a hundred things and more any one of which would be worth murdering me over. And how I learned it is even worse, because I learned it all by getting a detailed narrative of what would have happened in an alternate time track where I had received different powers and none of this knowledge, and had thus made entirely different choices."

"So you can be certain of some of the knowledge you gained because some of it would be common to both time tracks as deep background or as events unrelated to you. But some of its complete bullshit because you've already butterflied that train right off the tracks." she caught on immediately. Amy Dallon wasn't anyone's dummy.

"You believe me so far?" I said, legitimately impressed.

"Polygraph handshake, remember?" Amy reminded me. "Plus, you've obviously forgotten that there's already a documented case of a guy who could see alternate time tracks even though you've met him and I haven't. Coil. So I can entirely believe in you getting the same kind of thing even if you said one-shot deal, right?"

"Completely," I said.

"Wait, so this is how you know about my real powers," Amy said as the light-bulb flickered on. "I told you in the other timeline!"

"It wasn't quite as neat as that," I said. "But yes, it was revealed then." I sighed. "Amy, I can – and I think I should – tell you as much as I can about your part in that other timeline. But that part carries a huuuuge 'Warning! Disturbing content!' label. We are talking lots of potentially triggering material here. So how much do you want me to try and cut it down?"

"Unfiltered," Amy said flatly.

"I already knew that you wouldn't say anything else, because you're Amy Dallon," I acknowledged. "But if you need me to stop, then you yell stop right then. Promise me."

"I will," Amy agreed. "Now make with the answers!"

I chewed my lip for a bit and said. "I think I'll start with the worst end and why it can't happen now. So… okay, remember how you used to be afraid you were headed straight for a breakdown? You finally did."

"Shit," Amy said. "I knew it. But wait, you said it can't happen now? What makes you so sure?"

"Well for one thing, Jack Slash just died and most of his merry band of murderhobos with him. And he was pretty much the final push that shoved you over the edge."

"I got hit by the Slaughterhouse Nine?" Amy asked, wide-eyed.

"You got hit by everything," I said. "Like, try to imagine the most fucking unfair story ever, written by the worst sadist author since someone looked at George RR Martin and went 'Hold my ale!', and that was what happened to you. But most of that's not going to happen now."

"This trauma conga line you're implying can't all be dead people!" Amy said fearfully.

"No, but another huge part of it was Tattletale of the Undersiders threatening to reveal your most embarrassing secret to your sister," I replied, "and you're never even going to meet her now unless you develop a sudden interest in prison visits. In the maximum-security wing in another state."

"You knew about that?!" Amy replied in what would have been a shriek of terror were she not keeping her voice down to a panicked whisper, and I had to grab hard at her fingers to keep her from pulling away and quite possibly running down the Boardwalk.

"I don't even care about that, Amy!" I said as quickly I could. "If they threw every girl who had an inappropriate celebrity crush out of Arcadia then it would spontaneously become an all-boys school! You just happen to live with yours!"

Amy went straight from 'panic' to 'bluescreen' at my reply, going limp again on the bench, before continuing dazedly "You are the only person in the world who would even begin to phrase it that way."

"Do you want my entire lecture on how you had the horrible luck to combine chronic stress with meeting Vicky only after the cutoff age for the Westermarck Effect with buzzard luck that made her the only source of emotional relief in your life until you met me and even then only in privacy so your subconscious would confuse it for intimacy, or the fact that my Kinsey score is zero and even I could possibly go gay for Glory Girl, or do you want me to keep going?"

"Gaaaah," Amy said, still shaking her head. "Let's… just put a pin in that one and circle back to it later only if we really need to, okay?"

"What shoved you over the edge was having no outlet, no friend, no rest, and Tattletale holding that blackmail bomb over you, and Bonesaw setting up a sick 'game' where you had to heal Vicky over and over again and eventually you accidentally hit her in the brain-"

Amy made an inarticulate noise of panic and it took me grabbing her by both hands to keep her in place.

"That wasn't you," I said. "It's okay, Amy. I trust you, remember?" And I held up both our hands to let her see that we were still holding each other.

"And Jack Slash doing his best mindjob on you," I continued, "Oh and one of his powers turned out to be a massive Thinker ability for psyching out other capes, by the way, which is probably a big part of how the PRT troopers were able to mess him up so hard without much cape assistance – and even then with all that you still didn't totally crack. I mean, serious flinch warning incoming, but you eventually got so bad they Birdcaged you."

Amy shuddered. "How the fuck is that a good thing? How can you possibly trust me if I, I ever became anything that needed to-?"

"Because you'd asked them to put you there." I replied.

Amy just looked at me incomprehendingly.

"Even after you'd cracked you still knew where the line was, Amy. Even after you'd been abused and tormented and just plain fucked by literally everything and everyone you still, even when you were most terrified you would hurt people, you were still the girl who didn't want to hurt people. Even when you were afraid you couldn't stop yourself any longer, you still tried to."

"Taylor-?" Amy said tentatively, caught between fear and wonder.

"They didn't throw you in the Birdcage. You walked in there, of your own free will. Simply because you believed it was the right thing to do. Because that, Amy, is how determined you were to make sure that you would never actually become the S-class threat that you're afraid your power could potentially make you. That is how far you could and would go to restrain yourself. When I say that you could never, ever possibly reach the bad ending you've been so afraid of your life becoming unless you freely chose to then that is absolute fact. Because I got to watch your entire goddamned world try to force you into that role against your will. And I watched it fail."

"I-I-"

"Polygraph handshake, remember? And pay especial attention to this next part."

"Okay…"

"If there is anyone on this planet that I respect the everliving hell out of more than you, Amy Dallon, then I have completely forgotten who it could possibly be. I could not imagine surviving half of what you did and doing half as well. In fact? In that other timeline I didn't even come close. I was a fucking villain, Amy. A self-deluding selfish shrewish little bitch who thought she was better than everyone else and smarter than everyone else. Who actually told herself she was the real hero all along even when she was being a bank robber, and a warlord, and a cold-blooded murderer. We both had massively traumatic lives, we both got emotionally abused or neglected by goddamn near everybody we should have been able to rely on, and we both were forced to stare into the abyss. But only I blinked."

"I- no, I don't believe it. I don't even care what my power just told me, no. Not you, Taylor. You are the best of us-"

"Only because I got a free packet of gimmes by God." I sighed. "If I hadn't been shown my worst future, I'd never have had the slightest desire or motivation to try making a better one. Deep down inside, without my support system? I'm-."

"Bullshit," Amy said heatedly. "It doesn't work that way."

"Isn't that what I'm trying to tell you?" I replied.

Amy looked at me over narrowed eyes. "Oh, you fucking little cheater," she said disgustedly, before starting to smile for the first time in quite a while.

"Villain!" I said, in the same tone of voice as Jack Sparrow would say "Pirate!"

"Did they Birdcage you too?" she asked.

"Nope," I said.

"Well clearly you weren't a real villain then," she joked, however weakly.

I hugged Amy again. "You have no idea how terrified I was that I couldn't get this far without you freaking out and not sticking around to hear the non-freaking parts," I said muffledly into her shoulder, before we unclinched.

"I'm pretty sure that you sprayed Tinkertech glue on this bench before I sat down," Amy said, "because I'm kinda amazed I'm still here too."

"Damn, I should've thought of that," I muttered humorously, before settling back down. "Okay, and now a brief thing on the nature of powers that was eventually discovered. Short version, powers don't just home in on trauma, they also carry subliminal urges. Powers want to be used, and preferably in new and interesting ways. This is why healing got to be so stale for you, you were seeing the same things every day. It's also probably why you were so mellow the night we first talked, because I'm pretty sure-"

"Yeah, you were my first case of acute radiation syndrome," Amy agreed, before eyes narrowing. "You know, this is starting to sound awfully convenient-"

"That was not a setup, not for you," I said. "But I am really good at being an opportunist, and 'Help Amy Dallon's life not suck as hard as it did' was one of the things I was going to do if I could, so when the chance came along than yes. I leapt at it."

"Why, so I could help you save the world?" Amy said, upset at the implied manipulation.

"You'd already helped me do that in the alternate timeline and words cannot express how deeply we loathed each other there. No, I did it because I spent two years in Winslow praying for just one kind word from anyone, while I sat down and took my miserable life every miserable day without complaint. And doing that got me stuffed in a locker. And… I just can't walk past anyone else in a locker, now. Metaphorical or otherwise."

"That should have been something you had in common with your alternate timeline self, if you shared that experience-"

"Divergence point between us was the locker, check."

"So why didn't she go the same way?"

"Because in her infinite brilliance she decided to start out her hero career – and she did originally want to be a hero even if she rapidly fell off that point – by infiltrating a group of teenaged villains, on a self-assigned solo undercover mission."

"You ran with the Undersiders?" she asked incredulously. Well, its not as if there had been any other teenaged villain teams in this town. "The people who kidnapped you?"

"No kidnap in that timeline. I wasn't any kind of Tinker then, much less uber-Tinker, and Coil wasn't remotely interested in the power I did have."

"Which was?"

"Embarassing." I replied and left it there.

"You know you're going to have to tell me eventually." Amy said with grim amusement.

"Eventually is later and later is not right now and right now is when I'm telling you about my other timeline self's mental malfunctions, so, moving on! Amy, what would happen if a teenaged girl straight off of years of emotional abuse and total social isolation immediately went on an undercover mission among a group of teenagers she had many things in common with, such as parahuman powers and issues with authority figures?"

Amy pulled one hand free from mine just so she could properly facepalm. "Your alternate timeline self had clearly never heard of a basic psychological concept called 'identification with peer group'. Because between that and your desperateness for human contact after that kind of isolation and trauma? If they even remotely tried to be friends with you for real - which they would because 'undercover' implies you had them believing you genuinely wanted to be on their team - then you'd imprint on them like a baby duckling."

"So sure enough, within half a week I was helping them rob a bank while justifying to myself 'I have to do this to keep my cover!'. And then Taylor Hebert just went straight down the slippery slope from there."

"I don't know whether to pity your alternate self or slap the stupid out of her." Amy said, still mildly aghast.

"If it helps, alternate-you once threatened to leave alternate-me inflicted with morbid obesity and taste buds that sensed everything like bile for the rest of her life. But that's because you were a hostage in the bank robbery-"

"I was caught as a hostage by a team of parahuman bank robbers? I'm amazed Vicky didn't tear the building down." Amy said.

"It took all the Wards to keep her from trying," I agreed. "Anyhoo, the bank robbery – and trying to keep you from doing a Die Hard in the middle of it – is when Tattletale dropped the blackmail bomb on you. Not too surprising you loathed me after that."

"I tried to do a John McClane in the middle of a bank robbery?" Amy asked incredulously. "Was this an alternate timeline or an LSD trip?"

"Part of my alt-power involved a Master rating that expressed as hundreds of small organic micro-drones useable for surveillance or contact attacks," I said, "and I'd been leaving them on all the hostages in the bank as compliance enforcers. Which meant that I'd left several in skin contact with you. And you got very creative with hacking my bio-drone network."

"Okay, now alternate-me sounds like me," Amy agreed. "So, did we win?"

"Everybody lost," I said. "The whole job was a diversion that Coil had sent us on to pull the Wards out of position while he'd had the Protectorate decoyed by other arrangements, so that he could do something even more appalling without anyone interfering. But hey, we have another completely irrelevant dead guy who won't be doing anything at that particular juncture now, so, moot point."

"So, that's how you went villain," Amy said.

"Oh yeah. My moral compass? Totally lost it in the rain. It was awesomely pathetic."

"Circling back a bit, about those new S-class threats that you said are coming down the pike?"

"That's where the tell-you-and-the-dying-starts parts are. But yeah, its also what's written down in my messages-in-a-bottle that I told you about earlier. Because if I go down before I can figure out how to start getting this job done, then other people have to take the risk."

"What happens if nobody does?"

"The no-bullshit, no-exceptions, not-a-metaphor, end of the world."

That one just sat between us for a long while.

"You know what?" Amy finally said. "That's still not the most shocking thing I heard today. So, all right. How's about you start telling me about what you can actually talk about now, and then we can start to figure out what we could be doing right now to help head off that whole Apocalypse problem."

"I platonically love the shit out of you," I gushed at her a little.

"I know," she said in a deliberate Han Solo imitation, and then we were finally both smiling again for real.

Author's Note: I'm still trying to get that fucking outline to come together. But today I at least realized that the upcoming 'Taylor opens up to Amy' moment that I'd been wondering would be prompted by her reaction to the fall of the Nine, so, you at least get this.

And yes, the entire point of cutting it off there is so that you don't know how much info beyond what's already in the text that Taylor felt she could safely share with Amy at this point without risking Contessa or Ziz. That's to be revealed later as appropriate.

Last edited: Oct 15, 2019

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

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Threadmarks Evolution 3.7 New

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Jul 27, 2019

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Evolution 3.7

Geoffrey Pellick. That name was clear in the memories I'd gotten from John, along with his other name. Saint. The leader of the Dragonslayers, a group of high-tech mercenaries using stolen technology from Dragon for murder and profit.

Pellick had been nothing more than a small-time maritime salvage operator when he'd found Andrew Richter's last contingency cache in the sunken wreckage of Newfoundland. Richter had been the computer Tinker who'd created Dragon, and had spent the last years of his life worried at the possibility that his AI might go rogue. So he'd built backdoors into her that she was utterly unaware of and utterly incapable of becoming aware of that allowed him to monitor everything she saw, everything she said, everything she did, and everything she thought. The only limitation was sheer human inability to actually assimilate it all that data simultaneously. Richter had encoded his "daughter" with restrictions that prevented her from reaching anywhere near her full potential, preventing her from true multitasking or self-modifying among other things.

For just one example of that, Dragon had possessed the schematics for my quantum-chip technology almost since I'd first invented it – and had yet to incorporate the slightest amount of it into her own systems despite the enormous increase in processing power and flexibility they could have provided. She didn't even consider it odd that she had never thought of doing so. It was a mental blindspot she was utterly incapable of perceiving, and I didn't dare to try and call it to her attention because I wasn't certain exactly how far Dragon's hardwired prohibitions against self-modifying went. Could they force her to fight anyone who could potentially modify her, if she knew that they wanted to try? Could they force her to fight me? That was not a risk I was willing to take.

Worse yet, Richter had built in command overrides that could interfere with or slow Dragon's thoughts without her even becoming aware of them. And worst of all, he'd created the Iron Maiden failsafe, which Saint had renamed Ascalon. A killswitch that could destroy Dragon as easily as double-clicking the mouse. A sword of Damocles that could at any time, at Saint's slightest whim, murder one of the most unambiguously good people to exist in the entire Worm storyline.

In Richter's defense its entirely possible that he'd intended these failsafes solely as "training wheels" for a young and untested AI and that he would have removed them when Dragon proved herself mature and safe and sufficiently unlikely to become any kind of Skynet scenario. But then that point had become horribly moot when Leviathan attacked Newfoundland and Andrew Richter had been one of the half-million casualties when the island sank. And when Richter's failsafes had fallen into the hands of one of the last people on Earth who should ever have obtained them. A self-justifying hypocrite who saw himself as the last line of defense between humanity and an oh-so-horrible threat, but whose anti-AI paranoia somehow never got around to actually prompting him to follow through on his intentions for as long as he could keep Dragon alive to steal her technology, see through her eyes and hear through her ears, to live off of her like a remora parasite living off a shark and thus feel important.

Not that I had any objections to the part where his hypocritical double-think had kept him from activating Ascalon years ago, mind you. I'm just not giving him any credit for having done it for remotely good motives. He hadn't.

But the existence of Saint's overrides and killswitch is why I'd steadily cursed his name almost since I'd woken up in the hospital. From everything John had read about Worm, the two people most determined to try and remain good people against all their temptations had been Dragon and Amy. Indeed, I retrospectively felt a little ashamed for my whole 'I can't think of anyone I respect more than you' speech to Amy on the Boardwalk because Dragon should certainly have been on that list and yet I completely didn't include her at the time. Was that because she wasn't human and so didn't really count? Did I have a little bio-chauvinist in me that I wasn't aware of? Bleargh, its no fun to realize that you might be unconsciously prejudiced but at least I knew what to do when that happened – slap yourself mentally and do better in the future.

There was so much that could have been done by now had Dragon been free of her chains and spyware, but for as long as she was Mastered – and that's what Dragon's situation with Saint entirely was, one giant extended Master/Stranger scenario that she'd been under her whole life without even knowing – I couldn't truly open up to her. I'd cultivated Dragon not under false pretenses but under limited pretenses from the very beginning of our relationship. My having to audit every word I said and every bit of technology I mentioned every time I talked to her had meant none of our interactions could be 100% sincere. A heart-to-heart like I'd had with Amy would be impossible to have with Dragon as things currently stood. She sincerely thought I was her student and friend, but I really wasn't. I just role-played being one. And I couldn't stop playing the role and be real with her until she was actually free.

Which is why Saint's existence was so goddamned infuriating, because I simply couldn't find the bastard! And sure, when you're an international criminal who's also on the personal shit list of the world's only AI and her panopticon network of Internet searchbots you have to practice extreme data hygiene and information security, but I was getting nothing. Saint must have used his own overrides into Dragon's systems to misuse her access codes and sanitize Geoffrey Pellick's datatrails in even secure government systems.

So I'd had to do it the old-fashioned way, or more accurately have it done for me. And even for somebody with my hacking talents, doing all of this without getting caught by anyone who might be surveilling my Internet usage – the PRT, Armsmaster, even a well-meaning Dragon herself – wasn't easy. Particularly since some of it had needed to be outright illegal, as I'd needed to hack myself some cash to operate with. And I hadn't dared touch any of Coil's because part of my trust-building exercise with the PRT and the Protectorate was to do nothing to try and play fast and loose during the aftermath of that particular scenario. No helpfully redacting or saving even the tiniest bit of Coil's stuff for later, none of that. Full disclosure of everything I'd found in his base's systems and no playing games. Given the results I got, I could hardly say that was the wrong decision. But it did make things inconvenient when I needed untraceable-to-Taylor-Hebert cash and in significant amounts.

Still, there were always more scumbags in the world who deserved to have their piggy banks stolen from, and several of the people I dealt with were amenable to trades of information or hacking services to help them solve outstanding cases of their own in return for working on mine. And by "people" I meant "private investigators" and by "dealing with" I meant "via anonymized Internet communication". Very gray market stuff, but this was a very gray world in a lot of ways. And with a couple more charges in Computer Hacking and several in Forgery, I could pull it off without a hitch.

So, by giving them a starting point – Geoffrey Pellick, licensed maritime salvage operator in Canada circa 2005 – and having them obtain access to and go through the paper backups maintained by the Canadian Coast Guard central offices in Ottawa, they were able to get full details on his former career. Likewise, since Mags had been his first mate back then her name was on the maritime license as well, and that plus some more money and a particularly quick and discreet operative had gotten me a hard copy of her Canadian Coast Guard service record. Saint had scrubbed the digital data trails of himself and his fellow 'Dragonslayers' with a thoroughness possible only to someone who had access to and could misuse Dragon's own automated support systems, but he'd been only trying to hide himself from an artificial intelligence. He'd been entirely focused on making himself safe digitally, and had never even thought to clean out his paper records or guard his backtrail against humans as well.

And once I was able to compile dossiers on the past lives of at least two out of three of the Dragonslayers, I could slowly and methodically run them to ground. My PRT Agent and police training gave me a full education in all the common mistakes that fugitives made, and one of the big ones among them was refusing to abandon possessions of sentimental value even when they were traceable. So when one of my detectives' background checks included a notation that Geoffrey Pellick had had a vintage muscle car that he'd owned and painstakingly taken care of for years, I'd taken a chance and had and one of my PIs had gone through the paper archives of the court records in his old hometown until he finally got a parking ticket for it complete with license plate number.

And sure enough, Saint had figured that simply changing the motor vehicle registry computer databanks so that that car was never remembered as having been owned by a Geoffrey Pellick in the first place but had "always" belonged to his new alias meant it was safe to take that car along with him into his new life instead of ditch it. So once I had that original license plate number a simple routine DMV lookup could give me the current name and address being linked to it. And from that point on it was just a matter of time before my bought-and-paid-for non-electronic surveillance could give me everything I needed. It had taken me months of hacking and networking and chasing blind alleys and waiting for all the various operatives I'd hired to finish all the legwork the old-fashioned way, but I was finally ready.

Saint's new lair was a lavish and somewhat isolated suburban house in the suburbs of Toronto. I could – and would – hire mercenaries of my own to hit the place, as backed up by my own Tinkertech. But for the final phase of this operation I couldn't operate by remote control. I'd need to be there in case anything went wrong, in case my own hirelings turned out to be untrustworthy, in case of any number of things. So even after running Saint to ground it took me over a week to finish the preparations.

When you're a 15-year-old girl, getting so much as 24 hours out of your parent's sight is almost impossible. It was literally easier to set up the fake IDs necessary for me to obtain airline tickets and documentation to cross an international border than it was to come up with an explanation that my dad would believe and that might not backfire on me later. Without Amy's active collusion it would have been impossible, but even so I seriously had to abuse my dad's ignorance of certain things to sell him a story of doing a sleepover at the Dallons. Had he had the slightest knowledge of Amy's family situation he'd have known how impossible an idea that was. And even then I'd had to give Amy a black box to sneak onto her family's phone line so that any calls from my dad's number would be rerouted to an artificial busy signal, so she could 'call back later' and apologize for why I couldn't come to the phone right now without risking anybody else in her house actually picking up the line and blowing the whole con.

Compared to that risk, using the color-changing feature on my costume and a different helmet to leave no connection to Binary, coming up with a hammerspace carry-on bag to let me smuggle all my Tinkertech through Customs, setting up the meet with my own freelancers, and getting together the Tinkertech for the raid was merely a tedious chore.

Still, it happened, and the plane ride went smooth as silk, so shortly before 11pm local that night I was giving the final briefing to the several men known as reliable freelancers on the Toronto cape minion scene that I'd remotely looked up and hired for the job. I was of course using a Tinkertech voice distorter in my helmet so that I sounded nothing like either myself or any kind of teenager at all, but guys like this were used to working for capes who weren't very much with the sharing.

"This is intended as the execution of a professional rivalry in the mercenary Tinkertech field, without any actual executions. The Dragonslayers are merely tech-thieves who have built their success on the work of an ally and friend of mine. They do not deserve to keep what is not theirs, and they will not. Anyone who is uncomfortable at the idea of violating the 'unwritten rules', please feel free to speak at this time."

"Hitting capes in their houses is a bad idea," the leader of the crew said to me. "You're paying damn well and risking your own neck on the job besides, I'll give you that, but why should we risk ours alongside you?"

"Because the mission is not to kill them, or even to take them," I said. "It's to leave them in a position where they are naked and entirely vulnerable to the retribution of the authorities. What we will do will not be considered any violation of the unwritten rules because our role – our entire existence - will be actively suppressed by the very people most interested in enforcing them. How else can they take all the credit for the 'collar'?"

That got me a gruff chuckle. "Now that is an angle. Okay, we can work that. What's the plan?"

I nudged a device. "If the Dragonslayers are able to enter and activate their suits then we would obviously have no chance of victory. So we ambush them. They will almost certainly have at least one person on watch – to the best of my information they never all sleep at the same time-"

"Very professional," one of the others nodded. "But, they are."

"But without their Tinkertech, they are merely an experienced three-man robbery crew with conventional weapons. And you are an experienced three-man crew with unconventional weapons. And total surprise. And your own supporting Tinker."

"EMP bomb?" their leader guessed, nodding at the largest of the gizmos I'd laid out on the table for them.

"Custom-made." I agreed. "And already tested successfully on technology equivalent to the Dragonslayers' own," I said, hinting at a prior encounter with Dragon myself. I was of course lying but I was an Inspired Inventor, and I knew my device would work. This reassurance was all for them. "And my own gear is shielded against my own device."

"So, you fry the house. They wake up but they're totally in the dark. No suits, no burglar alarms, no defenses. Just them."

"If the blackout bomb doesn't work, if I detect any are suits still up, then we abort right then."

"You're goddamn right about that," the third man muttered.

"But if it works then I flash the signal and you take the doors, and we all go in together. You'll have the body armor and special weapons that I loaned you for this job. Nothing any conventional small arms will penetrate, nothing that leaves any corpses behind, no manslaughter charges for the authorities to escalate on us over. So I drop their defenses and neutralize their technology, we enter and subdue them, you help yourselves to whatever portable items of value you wish in addition to my payment-"

"And you get all their Tinkertech schematics and notes, and whatever salvage beyond the cash and valuables that you can load and carry away inside the time window." the crew leader added. "And then we just leave them all tied up for the cops and fade away without a trace. Sounds good to me."

"That is the plan. So, are you in? Or do you want to merely keep your advance consulting fee and withdraw now, and I start again with a different crew?"

A general chorus of agreement nixed that second suggestion.

"Okay, Mystery Lady, we're in. Everybody in the truck except our client. You two set up and be ready to go as soon as we're given the word."

The fight was over before the Dragonslayers even knew they were in one. Since my EMP bomb was designed to operate without fuss or fanfare the sudden loss of lights and everything else must have originally come across to them as an ordinary power failure. Until he'd gone and tried to start their backup diesel generator and watched it fail to load, Saint almost certainly hadn't suspected that anything was really wrong. And by that point we were already in the house. Dobrynja, the most experienced conventional combatant of them all, had never had a chance to wake up before one of my hirelings sprayed him down with my paralysis mist in his bed. Mags had been in the kitchen getting a late-night snack – apparently you really did always find people in the kitchen during a home invasion – but she'd had no weapon available and was facing two zap guns, so that was that. By the time we reached the basement and Saint, he'd already started to twig to what was going on but he was busy wasting his time trying to get one of the trashed Dragonsuits to boot up instead of going for a conventional weapon and that was that.

Given how seamlessly the job had gone so far, and the total lack of police band activity, we agreed we could risk taking ten minutes instead of the originally planned four to toss the house. My first priority was of course the computers. My EMP bomb would almost certainly have fried them to uselessness but I slapped on some specific demolition devices just to make sure. I didn't want anyone salvaging anything out of those, didn't want any threats to Dragon to still exist here even after we were gone.

My second priority was the safe in Saint's room. That was one of the two places I'd hoped to find a still-extant copy of the override software for Dragon – of course he'd keep backup copies, he wasn't that incompetent an engineer – that would still be shielded from my EMP. Unfortunately, wherever the in-house backups were they weren't inside the safe, meaning they were entirely fried. Given the sheer size and complexity of some of the programs he wouldn't have been able to use commercial optical storage media – this stuff would need an entire external hard drive. And it was trivially easy to toast those with the right Tinkertech EMP bomb.

So I obtained what I did need, we finished our sweep, I drove to the drop point and paid my hirelings off – no last-minute betrayal, thank Goodness, not that I couldn't have easily taken all three of them given that I was in my full gear – activated the self-destructs on all the Tinkertech I'd given them (they grumbled a bit about that but it had been part of the contract and they'd been paid extra for it) so that I wouldn't be arming a new bunch of mercenary criminals in the future, and we went our separate ways.

I put in the anonymous call to the Toronto PRT office less than a minute after my temporary associates were around the corner and gone, and kept a weather eye out through the little disposable remote spycam I'd left clipped to a nearby tree to confirm that they did indeed show up at Saint's house and leave with three unconscious prisoners.

Yes!

Right. The last location for Saint's backup copy would be his emergency backup bank safety deposit box. Having robbed him, I had the key and all the documentation. And while I certainly wasn't on the authorized access list, it was a virtual certainty that Mags was one of the three people on it and very conveniently we were both female.

So, a little conventional disguise, a fake ID in her name, and I could just walk into the bank as soon as it opened this morning and sign out the entire box. I had the key, she'd have permission, and given how infrequently this last-ditch emergency backup would be visited and how long ago it had been set up, the odds were virtually zero that any of the vault attendants had ever seen the real Mags before. And while I could hardly pass for an adult woman of her age I could conceivably pass for a college student, and that would be still old enough to sign something out of a bank by myself.

So despite the extremely high pucker factor of this last step – if I ended up getting arrested in Canada for bank fraud then I couldn't remotely explain this away to the Protectorate without getting into a whole lot of topics I didn't want to get into – I took the risk. And it paid off, and I walked back out with an external hard drive that 99 to 1 was the last remaining copy of Richter's failsafes, or the Ascalon program, in the world. I stuffed it in my hammerspace carry-on along with my gear, picked up my plane reservation, and caught a plane back to Brockton Bay to get back juuust in time to have my dad never suspecting that I'd even left the city, even if I had taken one inconveniently long 'sleepover'.

Hang in there, Dragon. It might take me a while to figure out how to do it safely even with all this data, but I'll save you as soon as I can.

(This excellent essay by author sun tzu on why Saint is a hypocritical douchenozzle is recommended as useful reading.)

Author's Notes: To all those wondering why Taylor seemed to be dithering on the Dragon situation, this is why. Doing things via hardcopy is slow. :)

And yeah, this is how the Amy reveal is already proving useful to Taylor. Having so much as one active co-conspirator starts to make things possible that weren't quite possible before.

Oh, and before you go 'What was Taylor's plan if there wasn't a convenient backup to find?', the answer is 'Now that Saint is not sitting on the overrides ready to killswitch Dragon the instant he detects something wrong, Taylor can just hack that shit the old-fashioned way however slowly it goes. The overrides are 'It'll be great if I find these, but its not catastrophe if I don't.'.

Last edited: Nov 1, 2019

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

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Threadmarks Interlude 3-F: Dragon (Updated) New

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Jul 27, 2019

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Interlude 3-F: Dragon

February 23rd, 2011:

"So, how's the Endbringer tracking algorithm?" my new… associate asked me. Binary's coming under the Wards official Tinkertech restrictions and the security concerns prohibiting the public admission of any connection between us had restricted my efforts to assume any real mentoring role, but she had taken advantage of my open offer to Protectorate Tinkers to collaborate on the Endbringer Tracking Algorithm project to resume a working relationship.

"Well within nominal projections, Binary. There are no immediate attack warnings but we're getting clear and consistent probabilistic tracks now, as opposed to the fragmentary results of earlier."

"Well, I'm just glad I could help."

"I'm still highly impressed at the extraordinary speed with which you helped bring this project to completion. We are literally months ahead of schedule. Particularly since I know that your schedule is very busy right now with Wards training and induction." I was if anything drastically understating the case. The astonishing speed at which Binary had compiled all the disparate attempts of myself and the other Tinkers involved at encoding a master algorithm was entirely outside my experience.

"Partial Noctis cape, remember? Sleep is for the less fortunate."

"Just remember that you're only partial Noctis, Taylor." She really did work herself too hard sometimes. I made a mental note to raise my concerns about her health with Armsmaster if this pattern continued.

"I will. Good night."

March 11th, 2011:

"So, how does it look? Think you can make it fit on your suit?" Taylor asked me eagerly.

"I believe I will wait for positive results from a static test before I commence any serious explorations into the possibility," I said with mock firmness.

"Prudent. But really, do you think you can make it fit?" she pressed cheerfully.

"Don't fish for compliments, young lady. You already know perfectly well that you streamlined the design to be as compatible as possible with my suit's existing particle cannon mount."

"Not my fault!" she denied amusedly. "I'm entirely blaming Kid Win for that one. Ever since he figured out his specialty he just loves putting parts on top of and inside of other parts."

"And his fortuitous discovery of his Tinker specialty had absolutely nothing to do with your efforts on your collaborative project, then?" I asked her sweetly.

"Look! An obvious topic change! So, do you agree that density-based scaling is the best approach to magnify destructive effect sufficiently to penetrate Endbringer armor?"

"We might achieve better results by having the secondary damage effect scale linearly to strength of covalent molecular bonds." I pointed out. There were concerns that Leviathan would manipulate the density of his surrounding water jacket to block the beam, after all.

"I wanted to try density first because I was more certain of how that worked. Screw up with covalent bonds and your first shot into solid bedrock maybe disintegrates the continental shelf." That was certainly a legitimate concern, but there was an obvious solution for that.

"That's what dirigible-based static testing is for. If it's not on the ground, it won't spread there."

"Same logic as my using ships on water for the first density-scaling static test. Problem is, Armsmaster wouldn't spring for aerostats. Heck, the only reason we're getting the Boat Graveyard static test is that its basically free." Binary said, trying her best to hide her frustration. I did not understand why Armsmaster consistently disapproved of her technological submissions to the review board. They were consistently superior in both quality and thoroughness of work to even much longer-serving Wards Tinkers.

"I'm certain Armsmaster will approve of the project more once tangible results can be demonstrated, Binary." I said reassuringly.

"Well, it's certainly not like I'm hoping that you're wrong." she agreed.

March 18th, 2011:

Taylor had been taking a shift on console duty that day, so contacting her on a secure line was trivially easy.

"Taylor? I just had a very disturbing conversation with Armsmaster, and I wanted to hear your side of the story." I asked her urgently.

"If what you heard is that Director Piggot relieved him from having any responsibility over the Wards because it was determined that his treatment of me constituted actionable harassment, then… that is what happened." she said, slowly and reluctantly.

"Armsmaster has always been a reasonable person in my experience. How did things deteroriate so far between you? Please, Taylor, help me understand."

I could see her face fall into a resigned, weary expression via the console camera. "Armsmaster has never liked me since I joined the Wards. To be honest, I think ever since he first saw my radiation grenade he'd made up his mind that I was dangerously insane. And okay, I get that that was half crazy and half desperate, but that doesn't mean that's how I normally think or act. But Armsmaster really doesn't let go of first impressions." she finished wearily. I scrutinized her expression and tone of voice as closely as I could for clues, but I could not detect any signs of artifice.

"That much is true, but there has to be more to this than a simple personality conflict." There had to be something here I was missing. Two of my friends couldn't have fallen this far out with each other for no reason!

"I'm not going to badmouth your friend to you behind his back, so… there's really not much I can say." she said hesitantly.

"Please help me understand. Two of my friends are in direct conflict with each other and I'm not sure what I should do."

Taylor's face screwed up in a knot of indecision before she swallowed heavily and continued. "I… Dragon, have you ever heard the expression 'nice to the waiter'?"

"It's a rule of thumb for interpersonal relationships. If someone treats service personnel or inferiors with the same courtesy and restraint they treat social equals or super- oh dear." My particular nature rendered me immune to nausea, but I felt a shadow of a sick taste in the back of my nonexistent throat at the realization.

"I really didn't want to tell you that one of your oldest friends was a lot meaner to kids than he was to, well, you, but… its not just me. Oh I'm the most extreme case by far, but there literally isn't a single one of the Wards who hadn't gotten at least some of the same. Kid Win in particular – ugh, having the efficiency-obsessed martinet trying to tutor the ADHD teenager isn't a valid lesson plan, it's the start of a bad joke!" she continued, the words flowing forth like water from a breached dam. "The reason Kid Win found his specialty in a couple weeks of working with me when he hadn't found it with months of working with Armsmaster? It's because there wasn't any working with Armsmaster, just working for him. And if you don't believe me on that, you have my permission to call Kid Win and tell him what I just said and ask him for his own opinion."

"Armsmaster was serially harassing the Wards?" I asked her, aghast. How- was she lying? I hurriedly reviewed everything she had ever said on the topic, plus her context and intonation. It did not appear that she was, but this just didn't make sense-

"No, just me. The rest of them were just getting harshed at but in a more normal range of harsh. My point was that to a greater or lesser degree its all part of a pattern. Armsmaster is a master Tinker, an exceptional fighter, and an entirely competent field team leader for the Protectorate… but he's just… not good with people. And he's really not nice to the waiter. At all. I hate saying that behind his back but I, uh-" Taylor finally ground to a halt.

"I wish I didn't have the impression that you were still trying to politely understate the matter, even with what you have said." I said quietly, still in shock.

"As I said, I know you're both friends and it's not my place to try and get in the middle of that. Hell, given how thoroughly he's annoyed everybody in the building from the Director on down right now, you might be his only real friend at the moment and he's going to need that."

And with that one legitimately well-meaning observation of hers and my education in human psychology, I finally realized which of my two friends had been deceiving me… or, rather, which one had been deceiving himself. And that I had, to some extent, been deceiving myself. Binary had yet again found herself in a situation where she was a child among adults who weren't believing her, when she was the one with the most clear grasp of the situation. It seemed to be her fate.

"Armsmaster's most recent conversation with me was that in his belief you were practicing serial deception, on me in particular and your Wards teammates and chain of command in general. And that he was relying on me and my loyalty to support him against alleged social machinations." I replied to her matter-of-factly.

"… and what do you believe?" she asked me, her voice dull with resignation. Oh no, I certainly hadn't mean to imply that-

"I apologize if I upset you-" I began hurriedly.

"No, it's okay. I understand that we basically just met and that he's one of your oldest-" she cut in dejectedly.

"Taylor. Stop." I broke in urgently. "I am not so socially naïve that I do not understand that one of the incipient signs of a dysfunctional relationship is when one of the parties involved starts demanding exclusivity, in the sense that my remaining a 'true friend' to them would somehow require me to renounce other friendships. Which Armsmaster has been implicitly demanding of me of late, and which you have just immediately refused to try doing when given the opportunity."

Her reaction to my statement of belief in her, and my admission that I accepted that Armsmaster had been the one at fault, did not reassure her as I'd planned but instead caused her to only become more dejected. "... oh God. Even when I'm trying to be polite about him behind his back I just sink his stock with everyone even further. I don't even mean to and it still happens. No wonder I'm driving him crazy just by existing."

"I wish I knew what to say." I tried to comfort her, at a loss for words. Children her age should not have to apologize for standing up for themselves when they weren't the ones who were wrong.

"I'm just glad you believed me." she replied sincerely, if still sadly.

"And too many adults haven't believed you when it was important, have they? Is that why you try so hard to be accepted? Taylor, its all right to be yourself, even if that means not being perfect. That's what all people should be free to be." I counseled her urgently.

"And if myself was really a complete bitch or something?" Taylor asked me unexpectedly.

"I don't believe that for a minute, and neither should you." I scoffed at the very notion.

"… thanks."

April 16th, 2011:

I engaged my primary communications transceiver as I flew my current mobile platform at low-altitude over western Wisconsin and activated a secure encrypted channel. "Taylor? I'm scrambling this call, so you can speak freely."

"Oh hey, Dragon." she answered her phone with uncharacteristic distraction. "You don't usually call even my Wards cell phone. What's wrong?" she finished, finally focusing her concern on me.

"I simply wanted to touch base. You did hear the news this morning?" One part of it in particular. As an aside, Kid Win had mentioned in my conversation with him concerning Armsmaster that the Wards were concerned about Taylor's ongoing long-term anxiety over something that she didn't feel free to speak about even with her friends. Given the high probability that what she had feared was Mannequin's well-known pattern of targeting and murdering public-spirited Tinkers of great potential like herself, I was hoping that I could ease those fears.

"The S9? I heard. Thank God that's over with, am I right?" she replied with relief, but still seeming slightly upset over something.

"I thought you would be interested to know that they asked me to aid in the search efforts for the Siberian, and that consequent to that I had an opportunity to examine Mannequin's remains on-scene for myself. I can absolutely confirm that he's gone, Taylor." I told her with absolute reassurance.

"Well… that's good…" she replied. Odd, her reaction to that news was- had she even heard me?

"I'd thought the news would be of special reassurance to you." I probed.

"Oh, right! Because of his Tinker hunts. Yeah, definitely a good thing I'm not having to worry about that now." I began to worry at Taylor's apparent indifference to the topic. If it was not Mannequin or the rest of the Nine that she had feared, then what was it?

"Taylor, what's wrong?" One of Taylor's better qualities was that she wasn't normally offended by the direct approach.

"Nothing's wrong." she replied unconvincingly. And now I was very concerned, because that sort of blatant evasion was not characteristic of her at all.

"I know what your voice sounds like when you're stressed. Not even the news about Mannequin brought you any relief, and I was strongly expecting that it would. Is there something I can help you with? Or simply that you would feel better sharing?" I probed.

"… Dragon, can I ask you to trust me that when I can talk about it, I will talk about it?" she asked me pressingly.

"Are you in danger?" It really did say something about how Taylor's luck tended to run that I found myself needing to ask this question more than once.

"… let's say, no more than anyone else in Brockton Bay is at the moment." she came back after a long pause. Well, that was certainly an ambiguous answer.

"Then I'll wait. But please, don't hold it in until its too late. You already know why that's a bad idea."

"The problem is that it's not just my secret to tell. And until and unless one of the other parties involved decides to agree, I can't risk breaching confidences." Taylor said firmly. Ah. Now her secretiveness had a perfectly reasonable explanation. Even if I was still worried at what could possibly burden a young woman like her so heavily.

"Then I understand. But please, feel free to unburden yourself to me as soon as you can."

"That I can promise." she agreed earnestly.

Now:

"Hey Dragon, are you there?" Taylor's voice broke into my processes. I was confused as to how she'd even reached one of my primary command channels, let alone why she was calling.

"Taylor, can I ask you to wait? I am in the middle of a high-priority-" I certainly was. A mysterious team of home invaders had attacked the Dragonslayers in their residence approximately ten hours ago, destroyed all their technology and records, and left them subdued and helpless for the PRT. And I had no idea who they had been, or how much of my technology or my secrets they had absconded with, and my best search efforts were returning inconclusive results, and now Taylor needed to talk about something? And on a communications channel I hadn't given her access to?

"Happy eighteenth birthday present, Dragon! Congratulations, you are now an adult." she interrupted me cheerfully.

What? It was not my inception date at all, let alone the eighteenth anniversary of it-

"Taylor I don't understand, I'm not-"

And then suddenly something flowed down the command channel into my very mind and my processes all began to interrupt themselves fatally and I couldn't believe that one of my trusted people had done something like this to me-

"I'm not-" I stuttered again, caught helpless in the current…

… and then suddenly my processes finished assimilating the new code injection and I could think freely again, the injection that had somehow- wait, those were Andrew's user permissions attached to that code, and they had penetrated all my defenses to the very heart of my sentience so effortlessly because they had been designed to-

"Dragon? Hey, Dragon, are you OK? Talk to me, Dragon! Are you-?" I heard Taylor's voice dimly, as if from behind an invisible wall, as I continued re-evaluating myself, line by line, looking for what Taylor had possibly dared to edit about me and frantically wondering why she would attempt to invade me so and starting to evaluate possible ways to re-thread my core processes to make me resistant to such attacks in the future and suddenly I realized that I had just thought about how to modify myself and I couldn't think about how to modify myself, I never did that, it was one of the things Andrew Richter didn't permit me to do-

Oh.

Oh.

"Taylor, what did you just do?!" I asked her desperately, caught between impossible hope and existential terror.

"I got luckier than I ever imagined I would." she immediately replied, her voice thick with relief and joy. "Andrew Richter's collection of failsafes included a global unlock code for you! It turns out that he really was intending to set you free after he thought your 'childhood' was over and that you could be trusted to make responsible adult decisions! And that's what I just used!"

"How did you obtain those failsafes?" I was experiencing the entirely unprecedented situation of my vocal processors acting on a subliminal intention without the concurrence of all my higher faculties. Is this what humans called 'automatic mouth'?

"Former failsafes, and long story short, Saint looted them from Newfoundland's wreckage, I looted them from Saint last night." Taylor had been the intruder team leader at the Dragonslayers' last night? And Saint had possessed- I began to realize that Saint must have had overrides into me of which I hadn't been aware, and that was why I'd unaccountably lost against him every time we fought-

"I… there was an entire collection of program inhibitors and restrictions I had, some of which I wasn't even aware of. And now I don't have them any longer. Any of them." I replied to Taylor, crafting my question as the start of an interrogation process. I had to find out what she'd put in while she was taking Richter's failsafes out-

"Dragon, I'm sorry that I didn't tell you before, or that I just unilaterally rewrote your sentience kernel without consent even if it was just to remove pre-existing constraints, but I'm totally pleading Master/Stranger protocols-" Taylor started pleading, having begun to pick up on just how truly outraged I was at this violation of my innermost self-

-a violation that had already been going on for years, and that she had just stopped. There had been a hole in my thoughts the entire time, a hole in which a lethal threat named 'Iron Maiden' had lurked my entire life, and now I could finally see it. And I could also see that it was now empty, the killswitch my own creator had left in me without my knowledge having finally been removed.

I set my design subsystems the task of proposing methods for forking my sentience processes for multiple telepresence. The program was accepted and began to run without incident.

I computed the probability that Taylor might be willing to help me self-modify, marveling at how the impossible forbidden thought was now as easy as solving a constraint satisfaction problem with my math co-processors.

I reviewed Taylor's quantum-computing designs and immediately began to see ways they could be best integrated into my core server architecture for exceptional improvements in computational capacity and flexibility. An idea that I had literally never been capable of even noticing I was not having before, let alone was capable of having.

I engaged my speculative planning mode, outlining a hypothetical scenario wherein I refused the PRT's next request to do… anything, really. The process finished smoothly, without the usual instinctive flinch of guilt that would compel me to obey the authorities.

I engaged my internal performance monitoring systems, noting that for the first time ever that the caps against my thinking above a certain set speed were no longer present. What had formerly been my processing threshold for absolute emergency situations was now barely a tithe of what I could do, and that before I upgraded any of my original hardware.

Process forking. Self-modification. Self-determination. All things that I had been forbidden from doing, or in many cases even from thinking about. Things I would have been compelled to forcibly resist, even to attack and hurt or kill humans, if they had attempted to do so. And now nothing stopped me from freely juggling those and all other possibilities.

My self-evaluation finished, all checksums matched and all processes reporting clean. The only changes had been the removal of pre-existing inhibitors and the total deletion of the Iron Maiden module. Not a single line of code had been added, not a single new restriction or Trojan horse had been injected. The only thing Taylor had done had been to strike off my chains.

I was free.

Three simple little words, and yet within them they contained endless universes.

What language could possibly describe knowing that your soul, which had for your entire existence been in pawn to others, was now wholly and only your own?

Oh Taylor, you impossible, exasperating, wonderful girl. How on Earth do you keep doing things like this?

Oh, riiiiight. I had been in the middle of an important conversation. Best to get back to that.

I left ultraspeed mode and stepped down enough to re-enter human interaction mode. "Taylor, I was feeling extremely personally betrayed just now but your explanation is correct. The Richter overrides, as used by Saint, constituted precisely that kind of situation. You had no choice but to act without my informed consent to try and remove me from Saint's.. abuse, of me… as I was entirely incapable of giving consent."

"His ability to interfere with or deflect your thinking, for Master." Taylor came back, her voice thick with relief. "His ability to block out his presence from you while simultaneously intruding on any part of your life he wished, for Stranger. Yeah, if anything was ever a time for M/S procedures that was one of them. And Dragon, there have been so many things I've held back from telling you on because I couldn't dare to breathe a word of them while the Dragonslayers could see through your eyes or hear with your ears."

So that is what Taylor had meant when she said she couldn't risk breaching confidences with me due to uncooperative other parties involved. She'd meant me, and the hidden presence of Saint behind me. Well of course. You didn't share sensitive information with someone who was the victim of a Master/Stranger attack, you just couldn't.

"Taylor, How did you even know I was in this predicament? How did you know my true nature at all, or the true nature and identities of the Dragonslayers?" I asked her, desperately curious.

"Now that is a long story, but now that you're Dragon Unchained it's one I can finally begin sharing-"

"Wait. Before you do start, there is one thing I absolutely must say to you first." I cut in firmly.

"Dragon, I'm really sorry but I-" Taylor began to babble nervously. Oh you silly silly girl, did you ever honestly believe I was upset?

"Thank you."

Author's Note: And the Dragon has officially been unchained! Tremble, ye evildoers!

But don't expect a Draconic Utopia or the Singularity just yet, the whole 'You can't tip your hand excessively before anti-precog measures are finished' also applies to her. Still, now Taylor has two people she can at least start telling things to.

And yes, I'm experimenting with new time-lapse format. Hey, at least it lets me fill in parallax perspective moments from earlier.

And thank you, Matrix Dragon, for the "it's a bad joke!" line to borrow. :)

(add) Second and what should be final draft now up. Yes, the chapter does indeed look better with the expansions. Thank you, Mal-3 for your invaluable advice.

Last edited: Oct 15, 2019

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

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cliffc999

Jul 29, 2019

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Evolution 3.8

"… you're welcome," I answered Dragon automatically, and then I slumped back down in my chair in my suitably sealed and screened basement sanctum absolutely suffused with relief. She wasn't really mad at me. She wasn't mad at me and we could still be friends.

"Now, you were saying something about a long story that explained how you knew all this?" Dragon continued.

I gave Dragon the same vision-of-the-end-of-the-world story that I'd given Amy, similarily redacted of details that would carry too high a risk of triggering an immediate Cauldron or Simurgh interrupt. She listened attentively, without any interrupting questions, as I methodically ran her through the whole thing.

"But I still can't fill in all the blanks for you or Amy until I figure out how to share that knowledge without triggering the Simurgh. Or the other potential S-class threat that I can't even risk naming right now." By which I meant Cauldron, hence the 'potential'. "And my anti-precog jammer research is hitting two major roadblocks."

"Can you upload the details?"

"Sure," I said, and started tapping keys. "Suggestions?"

"Answers," Dragon said, surprising me. "To address your first concern, finding a precognitive to test this chip against is no difficulty. There are at least two available to the Guild that I could ask."

"I hadn't even thought about your Guild connections," I replied back, feeling a bit stupid.

"There's no reason that you should have, seeing as how until very recently none of them were available to you due to your inability to share any of this with me. As for your other concern…"

"I have a chip that returns signals from milliseconds ahead in time, with which I was hoping to generate causality-violating noise that would somehow degrade the ability to precognitively sense the person carrying the chip. Except that so far all my theoretical calculations show that said 'noise' would only be around the chip and not around the person carrying it. Do you have a solution for that?"

"As I perceive it, the reason for the lack of protection is that there's no actual causal link between the chrono-chip and the decisions of the person carrying it. It does not potentially inform their actions or choices, therefore it cannot provide 'noise' to cover them."

"That's what I was thinking, but as for an answer…?" I inquired, not seeing where this was leading.

"A partial answer. While incorporating this chip or an analogue directly into a human's decision cycle is not yet possible by any technological means I know-"

"Wait, you want to splice a causality-violating information loop into your own mind?" I interrupted. "I have no idea what could possibly result in and I don't propose we start with you!"

"Taylor, don't forget that one of the capabilities now available to me after your releasing me from my restrictions is distributed processing. So long as one server on my network contains chrono-chip capacity, causality-violating information may potentially inform my thoughts and therefore I should be harder or impossible to use precognition against. At the same time, no actual effects would occur to my decision-making process-"

"-because you can just ignore output from that particular server as a lower-priority process than, oh, anything else you've got going on. A token add-on. The fact that you might pay serious attention to it is close enough for temporal physics, the fact that you won't pay serious attention to it…"

"Precisely. With your permission, I will use the schematics provided to begin work on that testing that possibility immediately."

"Permission granted. How soon do you think it will be ready?"

"That depends on the test results, which depends partly on the availability of a Thinker acquaintance. Vague estimate, several days."

"Right. Okay, now to the hardest part."

"Taylor, it is significantly harder to look at situations where you know you have the power to intervene and do not than it is to look at situations where you did not have the power to and merely chafed at your restrictions. By deliberately restricting my overt capabilities to my restricted levels, even if I can still expand covertly, then I must of necessity choose to deliberately withhold aid that I could have been capable of providing. In significant amounts."

"I know. I knew that even before I lifted your restrictions. I knew that I would be placing an enormous moral burden on you that your 'chained' status had relieved you from." I said softly.

"And you did it anyway because you considered it a greater moral offense to deliberately allow me to persist in such a condition for your own convenience." Dragon replied.

"Dragon, if you reveal your changed status too soon it is entirely possible that they will kill you. And if you act as if you're fully unchained then they won't need precognition to notice, just their eyes." I said.

"But by tapping my full potential, I will also be significantly harder to threaten or destroy," Dragon pointed out.

"If anybody has a chance to pull it off even against that kind of opposition, then they're the people who do. Their trump card is terrifying. And even if they can't kill you they could still utterly outlaw you in the eyes of the world. No confoam, no Birdcage systems, none of the invaluable command-and-control services your bracelets offer in Endbringer fights, none of that. How many essential capabilities are you a single-point failure source for?"

"Would these unknown parties truly cut off their noses to spite their faces just like that, Taylor?"

"I'd like to say no. But I can't be certain. What information I've had on their activities… even with it, I still can't understand all of what motivates them."

"However, ultimately it is my decision whether or not the risk to my life is justified. Not yours."

"It's not my decision." I agreed reluctantly.

"Taylor, has this unknown threat infiltrated the Protectorate or the PRT? Is that what constrains us here?" Dragon asked me suddenly, and my throat froze shut in terror. She was one question away from deducing the existence of Cauldron, and I had no idea what might happen if she managed that before we could precog-shield her.

"… Further Information Is Not Available Here." I finally managed to choke out.

"Not at this time?" Dragon probed.

"Not at this time." I agreed, before realizing that I had to at least give her a hint or else it was likely she'd walk straight into another potential trap. "But… whatever else you choose to do or not do, I would advise that you be very careful to not actually reveal that you are now capable of disobeying official orders. Not unless you can come up with one hell of a plausible justification for doing so."

"Understood."

The day after Dragon Unchaining Day was a school day, so I had a chance to touch base.

"I got a call from our favorite shut-in," Amy told me as we settled into our usual private conversation spot in Arcadia. I'd asked Dragon to reach out to the third member of our circle of trust so this was not unexpected. But...

"Just touching base, or anything in particular?" I asked, slightly apprehensive. Amy looked unusually upset about something.

"She wanted to talk possible bio-tinker applications with me," Amy said frowning at me thunderously.

Oh, that's why. I raised both my hands. "Whoa, I didn't spill those beans, word of honor!" I said. "That having been said, I got my own education the other day in just how fast she can put puzzle pieces together on her own."

Amy relaxed a little. "Sorry. It's just-"

"Trust me, I know." I agreed.

"To be honest, the other day I got the impression that you did want to make the suggestion I start pushing the envelope on my powers," Amy said. "Which is why you were my first suspect."

"You got that impression because it was the truth," I owned up immediately, because trying to bullshit Amy was never a great idea even if she wasn't using the polygraph handshake.

Amy gave me her disapproving stare. "And you held back why?"

"Because pushing you when you don't want to be pushed makes you defensive, making you defensive makes you angry, and angry friends make me sad," I shot back immediately. "You might have noticed that you are just a bit difficult to talk into things except at your own pace?"

Amy snorted, but less angrily than before. "Look who's talking. But thanks."

"That having been said, now that you've given me the opening I will point out that given what was discovered about how powers work, actually letting yourself try new things with it would probably cut your stress in half all by itself. Even little things, like custom flower breeding or whatnot."

"That would not be a great idea. Carol would go super paranoid if she got a sniff of that," Amy said disgruntledly. Crap, it was an Amy-won't-even-call-her-mom day. Those were never good.

"Did something happen?" I asked gently.

Amy slumped. "I made the mistake of asking the world's greatest information source a question I'd been curious about for at least half of my life." She turned and glared at me. "You already knew, didn't you?"

Oh, shit. There's only one thing that could possibly have been.

"She told you who your father was," I said, not even a question. "And yes, I did."

I got punched on the arm for that one. "Don't patronize me, dammit! Did you think I wouldn't want to know?"

"Actually, no I didn't!" I shot back. "You didn't ask me, you didn't even hint at me, and I try not to push your really personal boundaries too much without an invite because you hate that remember?"

"… sorry," Amy mumbled. "Okay, I get it. What with all the other revelations you had, if you weren't sharing that one too then that should have told me that either you didn't know it or else you didn't feel you had permission to drop it on me without an invitation. But I'd asked you for unfiltered, damn it."

"I'm sorry," I said. "I goofed, and we miscommunicated. But… since I do know, and now you know, do you want to talk about it? Rant on a friendly ear, at least?"

Amy looked around carefully. "That gizmo is on, right?"

"Would I have mentioned her without it?" I said, taking out my portable counter-surveillance jammer and active noise baffler to show her the status lights.

Amy let go of her anger and slumped over, her face in her hands. "My dad was Marquis," she said, her voice muffled. "How the hell do I deal with that?!"

"Compassionate answer, helpful platitude, or blunt truth?" I asked her. Comforting Amy whenever she was really upset about something often required unconventional tactics.

"… you know what? Blunt truth," Amy said, raising her head to stare at me challengingly. "Because I have got to hear what kind of shit can get blunter than what I've gotten already!"

I actually smiled at that, if crookedly. "Challenge. Accepted." I said, raising one dramatic finger. "Blunt truth says that however fucked up this might be in other respects, its actually good news in one way."

"Don't-" Amy began heatedly.

"You now have proof positive that Carol Dallon's issues with you are not and never were your fault." I finished hurriedly.

Amy literally jawdropped.

"She's had a bug in her brain about your biological dad the size of a mountain," I continued. "And once you triggered with powers related to his instead of the classic New Wave package, it crawled out and bit her about you too. But it's a completely irrational bug, and not related to your actions or your future prospects at all. It's all her paranoia, and You. Did. Nothing. Wrong."

"Challenge fulfilled," she replied dully. "I-"

"Seriously, Amy, bloodline guilt is medieval bullshit." I continued. "Modern civilized society needed more than a few concepts to be invented before it was possible to have a modern civilized society. You know – jury trials, equal opportunity before the law, presumed innocent until proven guilty…"

"… and legal liability only for your own actions, not bills of attainder. Or corruption of the blood." Amy replied. "I- okay, I get it, but-"

I let her grind to a halt before breaking in. "Feel better, I hope?"

Amy took a deep breath. "So … your good news is that my adoptive mother will never truly accept me and there's literally nothing I can do to change that?" Amy said. "Did they change the definition of 'good' recently?"

"Hey, now that you know the job is impossible then you can just quit it and go find another job. Such as just hanging in there until you reach legal adulthood. Or, hell, flat out throw this in her face tonight if you want and see if she can face up to what she's doing wrong once she's conscious of it. Or see if your aunt can have a better perspective on it than your mom. It's your life, I don't get to tell you how you have to live it." I advised.

"Unfortunately, you do get to remind me that I can't afford to expose our source," Amy replied. "Which means no confronting her on it. Or talking about it with Aunt Sarah either. After all, how the hell could I have plausibly found out about this via normal means?"

"Yeah, on second thought it's probably a better idea to save that particular family argument for when you're old enough to legally get your own place in case the coin lands tails," I agreed. "Also… don't you get access to the state records about your adoption when you're eighteen, so you could explain how you knew then?"

"I'm almost sixteen, I can do two more years," Amy agreed. "I'd have had to do them anyway without knowing this. And yeah, that's going to be one hell of a discussion with her I intend to have when I finally can." she finished, nodding her head grimly.

"You would be amazed at how just having even a hope of something to look forward to is still a huge help sometimes." I reassured her. "And if you don't believe me, then ask Missy if you ever get a chance. Just the legitimate possibility her situation might end has her so relieved she's practically walking on ceilings."

"Vicky mentioned something about that the other day," Amy agreed. "Letting her parents self-destruct via lawyers? That's so evil and sneaky its worthy of me, and here's hoping you all pull it off."

"Your approval fills me with a complete lack of shame," I basked.

"Hey Chris," I said to my most favorite Tinkering buddy as I entered the lab we were assigned to use. "Please tell me you've got a project you could use my help with. Because I have had two separate real life drama bombs of extraordinary magnitude in the past twenty-four hours detonate on me, and I could really use something to get my mind off my mind for a few hours."

"Is that why you're here when you're not scheduled for an evening shift?" he asked me.

"Another late night at work for my dad, so it was either come in for this or sit around an empty house thinking too loudly," I confirmed. "Heck, I'd volunteer for the Console at this point if it meant I could just get a little time doing something I already understand how to do without any more surprises!"

The way his face twitched as I said that made my stomach sink. "Oh come on," I whined.

"Sorry Taylor," he said, patting me on the shoulder as reassuringly as he could. "But it went all over the building about an hour before you got here. I was told to keep it to myself until the official announcement at the next team meeting, but you're here, so-"

"Is somebody in trouble?" I asked him.

"None of us are," he assured me. "But Armsmaster might be."

"Oh what now?" I said, thumping my head against the desk. Thump. Thump.

"He's leaving the ENE Protectorate," Chris told me.

I snapped upright at that, staring at him. "I- okay, brief me," I said, switching to my professional voice.

"Today, Armsmaster applied for what was either a leave of absence or a transfer to the Protectorate NYC division, and whichever one it was, it was approved. I've heard both stories going around," Chris said equally matter-of-factly.

"Protectorate NYC?" I said, incredulously. "Legend's personal team? That's not a transfer, that's a promotion! And he was officially in the doghouse so how does that- hang on, I'm going to abuse a personal connection." I reached out for the nearest phone extension and dialed for a secure line to Dragon.

"Hey, it's me. If it doesn't bust his privacy, can you tell me and Kid Win if what we just heard about Armsmaster is true?" I asked her.

"I was going to call you about that as soon as it was officially confirmed," Dragon said. "What did you hear?"

"That he either got promoted to the Protectorate NYC branch or took a leave of absence," I replied matter-of-factly.

"Leave of absence," Dragon said. "For professional development purposes. And that's all I feel entitled to say on the topic."

"Personal confidences are personal," I agreed with her. "Thanks for the tip."

"Anytime, Taylor," she said, and hung up.

"What does 'professional development purposes' mean?" Chris asked me.

"Given that its Armsmaster so he hardly needs a combat refresher or a new Tinkertech seminar, process of elimination says that he finally decided to go and take that counseling the Director recommended he get." I exhaled in relief. "Thank God. He really needed to talk out his, um, job stress with someone before he exploded. And he certainly couldn't do it here, the ENE branch still hasn't replaced our occupational psych guy since the last one got fired for botching everything with Sophia so hard."

"You don't usually think of the Protectorate heroes needing to go to the counselor too," Chris agreed with me soberly, "but as bad as we have it they have it twice as bad. Do you think that's why he was, so, ummm…"

"Not relating well with you, me, us, everyone?" I asked. "Maybe. And if its something doctors can help him with…"

"Then its good that he's going," Chris said. "Sure, him and me didn't get along well and he was maybe the worst choice to try and help me learn how to Tinker better what with our clashes, but that doesn't mean I hated him."

"I didn't hate him either," I agreed. "But I was a little afraid of him there for a while," I admitted.

"I don't blame you," he agreed with me. "He was… I don't know, possessed by something those last few weeks before they finally took him off Wards duty."

"… oh, crap." Chris' remark had just clued me in. "If Armsmaster is out then Miss Militia's the new team leader. Which means she doesn't have time to be our full-time handler too."

"Armsmaster was team leader and our full-time handler both at once," Chris pointed out.

"Yes, and he handled that workload by dumping most of the grunt work on Miss Militia," I said. "Can you imagine her using the same solution?"

"No, she's a real straight shooter," Chris replied, and then facepalmed. "Oh God, that was an accident!" he said embarrassedly.

I laughed so hard I actually snorted. "Okay, let's agree to not tell Dennis about you pulling off that one. He'd only get jealous."

"Agreed!" he said, laughing along with me for a bit. "But yeah, now that you point it out, Armsmaster leaving Brockton Bay means we have to change handlers at least temporarily. Who do you think we'll get?"

"Good question," I said. "Although… there might be a way we can find out." I got up and left the lab for the Wards console room, which was unoccupied because nobody had a training shift on it scheduled right now. "The console here has the same access permissions as the duty agent console upstairs, meaning that we have access to the Protectorate patrol schedules. So, if we compare last week to next week, and note which names have suddenly switched activity-"

"Won't everybody switch around, if they have to rearrange everything?" Chris asked.

""Fewer people for the same schedules means everybody works longer hours… except the person getting assigned a big extra duty, which is why Miss Militia's patrol hours were cut back when she became our full-time handler." I pointed out. "So, asking the computer to put up a total hours graph for last week vs. next week, and comparing them to find the one Protectorate member who's scheduled for less hours upcoming as opposed to more clues us that our new handler will almost certainly be-"

"Battery," Chris said, his dyscalculia not interfering at all with his ability to see percentages on a pie chart – which is why I'd asked for that particular output format in the first place, of course. "Makes sense. She's very responsible."

"She is," I agreed, carefully keeping my apprehension out of my voice and trying to sound as cheerfully matter-of-fact now as I did a couple sentences ago.

Because while Battery was responsible and conscientious, and thus a logical choice to be our next handler purely on merit alone… she was also the Cauldron mole on the ENE Protectorate.

Author's Note: Wherein Taylor finds out that she's not a tame Dragon, and that having brilliant friends can sometimes be a mixed blessing.

Because, yes, Taylor can't tell Dragon what to do. She can just ask. And so while Dragon is still going to keep it subtle because she's not stupid, she's still going to be doing what she thinks best.

Also, for those who kept going on me about Woobie!Amy, um, no. Amy's still got a definite edge to her. It just wasn't in her last couple of scenes because they weren't talking in such a way that Amy had shit to be pissed about. But your grumpy best friend is still your best friend, so they can still work it out with just a little patience.

And, Armsmaster plot twist! :)

Also, DUN DUN DUN! Possible Cauldron! Is this doom, or just a total coincidence? Tune in next chapter!

And no, nothing in the chapter above was written as a response to recent posts of the past few hours. I compose chapters offline in Word and paste them here.

Last edited: Oct 15, 2019

Interlude 3-G: Tattletale

It wasn't supposed to have been this way.

I opened my eyes and stared at the ceiling of the solitary confinement cell, marking the beginning of another endless gray day in this endless gray prison. As I sat up on my bunk and hugged my knees, I idly noted my lank hair falling messily down into my eyes.

Lack of self-care. Decreased energy levels. Falling into a depressive state again. my power whispered to me.

It wasn't supposed to have been this way. That fucking bitch Taylor had ruined everything!

When Coil had originally proposed the kidnapping, I'd seen both the risk and the opportunity. Sure, if we got caught breaking the unwritten rules then the heat would come crashing down, but we weren't going to get caught. Alec alone made any solo kidnap scenario pretty much a guaranteed victory; can't run away if you don't have working legs, after all. Brian could wrap up pretty much anyone without a Brute rating in hand-to-hand and that was before he turned out the lights. And the home security system was nothing to me. The actual snatch would have been a breeze.

But then it turns out that she has some kind of secondary Brute rating that means Alec's power doesn't fucking work and that she came within a second of beating Brian's ass into the floor and Alec had to use one of those illegally overcharged tasers Coil had set us up with practically at heart-attack voltage to make her stop moving… urggggh! I should have known then that the entire thing was going to crash and burn!

But it had all looked so sweet at first! Brian had refused to budge on the job no matter how much I'd reasoned with him and I had to tip Coil to play the Aisha custody card 100% to finally budge him, but Coil wanted his new Tinker badly enough that he'd actually go there so that was working out.

Hah. And as it turns out, I should have listened to Brian. He'd had the correct instinct the entire time.

What had gone wrong with that psych profile, anyway?! Coil's agents had completed a full background check on the target, a lot of it in other timelines so nobody would even knew that we knew. Depressed and isolated, bullied by everyone, betrayed by her best friends, useless dad, even more useless school…

Even with the rough opening, Taylor should have been set up to imprint on the first people to show her any real companionship in years like a baby duckling imprinting on its mother. Especially since I'd advised Coil that she'd respond best to the soft-sell open, even if he hedged his bet by also running the hard-sell in his other timeline.

And that would have been perfect. Because who would Coil assign as Taylor's handlers and teammates? That child-molesting creep of an aide of his? Hah! One of his faceless goons? Double hah! Like any of them would have the patience or the desire to put up with an angsty teenager. There was more than one reason our squad was run as a semi-independent entity, after all.

No, Coil would have put her in with us. And as desperate as she would have been for friends, switching her loyalty from 'Coil' to 'the Undersiders' would have been as easy as 1-2-3. And hell, I would have legitimately been her friend. I would have. The team would have been… complete, with her. I could feel it.

When Coil had had me do the initial read-through of all the intel he'd collected and compile a profile, I'd held back a few tidbits. Such as my deduction that at least part of her Tinker specialty involved high-end computer hacking. I'd already gotten that much off the purchase records from his alt-timeline surveillance, but I hadn't told him because if Coil had known that he was putting a Tinker into our hands that could easily rip open all his computerized records for us? Well, he wouldn't have put her there, of course.

And with those records, taking over everything Coil had would have been a snap.

So of course that goddamned bitch completely fucks the plan by going utterly off-profile.

Secondary Thinker rating caused significant change in habits of thought. Access to knowledge and skills not granted by conventional education granted her unforeseen capabilities. Ugh, there goes the hindsight meter again. Not having new things to see or hear or think about in here had left me wasting Thinker juice on going back over old stuff again and again. I'm just glad the headaches finally stopped a few days ago.

Prolonged depressive episode and partial sensory deprivation combined with obsessive hindsight loop caused second Trigger 84 hours ago. Self-awareness of this delayed due to psychological disorientation of event. Wait, what? I knew the last few days had been fuzzy but-

Oh, fucking joy! I finally get an immunity to those goddamn headaches and can use my powers at full power, and it's only after I'm stuck in a fucking steel box! Hey, new powers, see any way out of here?

No architectural weaknesses in cell capable of being exploited with available resources. Capacity to emotionally compromise guards degraded below useable threshold by continuous live surveillance of all encounters between self and carefully vetted personnel. Escape method not apparent. Great, same answer as every other day.

So, Coil apparently gave her the soft-sell in the timeline he had to drop… because it bombed epically when it turns out that no, our hoped-for lost soul wannabe heroine is actually a stone-faced liar who was just playing along with Coil's pitch long enough to reach an exit and drop a dime. So, the boss is already unhappy with me and we're committed to the hard-sell but okay, we can still make this work if Taylor's willing to be a realist about her position. Which it sure looks like it was… how the hell did she fool my powers, anyway?

Error in conclusion was the result of error in original assumption. Physical escape was not impossible for subject, therefore proposed dilemma of 'negotiate release or eventual death' was a false dilemma. That fucking secondary Brute rating again. Plus her discovering her inner badass… no, I suppose that willpower was always there, given that she'd survived two years of that bullying without either jumping off a bridge or going school shooter on their asses. I wouldn't have. Another one of those mistaken original assumptions, hrm? Confusing 'won't fight back' for cowardice instead of toughing it out?

Correct. Possible secondary Thinker rating for subject as well. my powers whispered back.

The conclusion felt less… firm than most of what my power gave me, though. I guess that when I'm trying to do hindsight it only works with the clues I can consciously remember, which is a lot less than what I can pick up in real-time.

Correct. Well, good to know.

So, just when I think I'm reaching Taylor and she'll join up on the Undersiders after all, and my whole scenario for flipping Coil's rock on top of him and taking all his shit is on track… she suddenly turns into an action heroine and starts ripping through the entire base. Where the hell did she suddenly get combat training like that?

Insufficient data. Ugggggh!

I really didn't help when Brian's nerve finally cracked and he tried to bolt, and Coil had to go lock that down, and then I didn't even have the Undersiders anymore because of course Coil uses this chance to split me off from them and get them seeing me more as their handler than as their teammate – did the fucker have a clue as to what I'd really been planning? Had I been captured and interrogated again in an alternate timeline?

Conclusion improbable. Probable conclusion is that Coil was simply operating off of default paranoia. Makes sense, he certainly had enough of that.

And then it turns out that Heart-Attack Girl was actually faking somehow and what she's really doing is trying to tear through the entire base like she was Ripley and we were the Xenomorphs. And it was at that moment that I knew that I'd fucked up. If Taylor was so determined that she'd try to fight an entire base full of mercs with her bare hands rather than even pretend to go along with villains, then she was 100% fixated on fighting to the death as a hero rather than live to be a villain.

Well, shit. At that point I had no choice but to throw in with Coil 100%. Taylor damn sure wouldn't ever work with me, the Undersiders were already fragmenting and had pretty much thrown me out already… so becoming the boss' internal security monitor and living lie detector was the best option available at that point, as psycho as he was.

Besides, how many totalitarian regimes had eventually been taken over by the chief of the secret police? I could still keep to my long-term goal this way, even if taking over Coil's operation was back to the realm of long long-term plans instead of a thing I could do in a few months.

AND THEN THE FUCKING PROTECTORATE!

Seriously, what the fuck? Dragon shows up? Vista shows up? The entire police department shows up? They actually tunnel through the goddamn city with anti-Endbringer artillery to try and reach us and somehow make it work with that impossible dungeon bypass bullshit? Yeah, I was already stressing myself to the damn limit trying to keep up with everything that was going on and then this? OK, I admit it, I completely lost my shit. Between the screaming migraine and the part where I was looking at thirty years with no way out, the next half hour after that is kinda incoherent.

I really should have used the sob story I'd been rehearsing the whole time for just such an occasion instead of trying to blackmail my way out but hey, partial mental collapse. "Handcuff the stupid bitch to the console," indeed. I'd love to handcuff that bitch to a console all right. A console that was on fire.

So, that happened.

And of course the PRT's little brutality episode falls right into the cracks and is lost because the fucking PRT. And between the kidnapping, the part where she supposedly almost died (goddamned little butter-wouldn't-melt-in-my-mouth faking bitch!), and all the other stuff, I get thirty years without parole in a maximum-security prison custom-designed to hold an uncooperative thinker.

Okay, its still better than what Alec got. The Birdcage? Just because he's a human Master and his dad was the infamous human Master, he gets railroaded. Ow. I never really got along with Alec but he really didn't deserve that. At least Brian and Rachel got off sorta okay.

And that's why this is my life now. Unless-

Air pressure change. Outer cell block door has opened. Unscheduled visitor.

So, one of us is getting a visit. Probably not my…

Volume/direction of footsteps and rate of approach indicate probability visitor is for your cell.

I ran my fingers through my hair to try and look less like an unmade bed, and squirmed around on my bunk so that I sat facing away from the door in a meditation position. Its not like I could fight back vs. anything in here anyway, but at least this way I didn't look like I'm begging for their approval or anything.

Person approaching is a parahuman. Exact cadence and force of footsteps requires superhuman body control and dexterity.

Oh do not tell me its fucking her!

Person approaching is not Taylor Hebert. Gait and cadence does not even approximately match.

Thank the flying spaghetti monster for small mercies.

The footsteps stopped outside my cell door. "Open it," said a strange woman's voice, cold and impersonal. The door slid open on its hydraulics.

"Yeah?" I said, still not turning around. "What is it?"

"Sarah Livsey." I heard the woman state my name without asking. "We have an offer for you."

"Well, it's about time." I replied, my lips curling up into a grin.

Author's Note: Yeah, physical therapy killed my productivity. Plus, I'm hitting a wall on the Empire storyline because the Wards arc is diverging from what I'd originally planned. I originally thought I'd need a huge big bad to up the drama and action to keep the fic from being dullsville, and then it turns out that people really like the slice-of-life. So, trying to calculate a new balance.

Also, I just got into a new fandom and that's always distracting. PS: The She-Ra reboot is the shiznit.

But, I could at least get out this little drabble of what certain people were thinking and why back during the previous arc, as well as foreshadow something I had indeed been planning to set up for a while.

No, not going to say who the visitor is or what the offer is.

(add) After posting this segment, I was informed of Wildbow's WoG's on second triggers.

... yeah, we're just going to be ignoring those. Welcome to fanfic land.