2.2

-- Lt. Col. Tanya von Degurechaff Argent --

I let out a breath of satisfaction, and only then noticed everyone staring at me, aghast. I allowed myself a small smile.

I had underestimated them. Badly. I'd been worrying about landmines and Masters while they were assembling this laser-focused strike right at the biggest fault line in my group. They must have realized right away that a Thinker-based attack would be most foreign to my experience. They'd even hidden it behind another secret to distract Tattletale. And I'd very nearly put my own head in the noose when I'd called Weiss. Actually, had that even been my idea? The implications were frankly terrifying. For that matter, potential Mastering aside, they'd done all that without even technically violating the truce.

But in the end, I'd outplayed them in spite of it all. The general was easy, really. He overplayed his hand. He'd not understood the vital lesson my own experiences had beat into me: that the early twentieth century was a brutal and irrational period, for his nation more than most. What proud Imperial could look on the urbane, peace-loving modern Germany without disgust? Of course, he wasn't a Thinker. Her methods had been far more insidious.

Telling that story had been more than a little embarrassing, but it was plenty worth it to get my leg out of the trap. I'd have some explaining to do to Weiss, but it would be easy enough to come up with something he'd accept. I doubted the Meisters would take him now even if he showed up on their doorstep hat in hand. And judging by the locals' expressions, they had nothing else lined up. Or did they? It would hardly do to underestimate them again so soon.

I looked over at Tattletale to see what she was picking up, but she was just staring at me like the others, eyes wide. I frowned at her. This was no time for daydreaming. I ended up having to jostle her arm to snap her out of it. She shook her head but kept her eyes on me. Stillness broken, Piggot also shook her head and turned her laptop back around.

"This Dr. Schugel…" Lisa probed. "That wasn't the only incident, was it? And he's alive?"

What did that have to do with anything? Was something wrong with her power?

"Dr. Schugel's current status is a military secret. Though if you're really asking whether I murdered my superior officer, obviously not."

"... So he's not only alive, he's still doing military research."

I shrugged. I wasn't responsible for her deductions.

There were another few moments of silence.

"I'm sorry that happened to you," Miss Militia offered tentatively, tone cloying. "That must have been very difficult."

"Oh, fuck you," I spat. She reared back. I'd heard quite enough of that at the time. "I did what I had to do to survive. That wasn't hard. You know what was hard? Reporting back after I had healed to test out the next prototype. But I did it anyway because it was my duty."

That was a matter of survival too, of course. Ever efficient, the Empire had found a use for that most useless of things, the disobedient soldier: executing her as an example to the others. Still, it had been hard. I couldn't afford a single hint of weakness. Not the slightest tremble, not an instant's hesitation. I'd had to literally bite my tongue to keep from asking about the new 'safety' mechanism. I'd snatched the orb without a word and was in the air as soon as I'd gotten my instructions. Everyone there had just thought I was infuriated beyond words, I think. Which, well, hadn't been far from the truth.

"What about the others?" Kid Win blurted. He sounded upset. "You're an impossible badass, fine, but what about his other... subjects?"

I barely kept myself from blinking at him. 'Impossible badass?' That was not how I'd come off from that incident. I suppose I hadn't gotten to the part of the story where I'd finally collapsed on the ground, barely aware of my surroundings, curled up around my arm and bawling my eyes out in front of the entire research team. After a couple days with the doctors, the humiliation had bothered me more than the pain. I'm not sure my reputation as a reliable, sober worker had ever recovered in their eyes. I'd had to fight to get some of the more lurid language taken out of the report or it might have tanked my whole career.

But if that was the impression they'd somehow taken away from the story, I'd hardly correct them. I'd preferred to be underestimated early in the war, but that hadn't really been possible for years. Even the Protectorate's mages, abandoned in Africa as the focus of the war moved to the shores of the Allied Kingdom itself, had recognized me immediately, by sight or magic signature. And of course, killing the Nine had been no way to maintain a low profile on this world.

If I were underestimated, they'd under-commit when they came after me. I'd kill their people, seizing the initiative and leaving them that much weaker when I retaliated, a tidy little defeat in detail. If I couldn't have that, it was best to go the other way. Raise the perceived cost of taking me out to the point that tolerating me looked cheap by comparison.

At least, that's how it should work. However much my reputation grew, I'd never actually run out of mages eager to skewer themselves on my bayonet. You'd think they'd have learned after the first couple hundred, but such is the insanity of war, I guess. Well, until the breakthrough. They'd run then.

I shrugged at Kid Win.

"I haven't kept track. I had other things on my mind."

He looked unsatisfied, but I couldn't tell him what I didn't know.

The fallout hadn't seemed so bad at first. Embarrassing, sure, but no one had rubbed my face in it. I'd received plenty of well-wishers in my medical bed, many seeming genuinely upset over the incident. Dr. Hersche came to me in tears. It had been so uncomfortable I'd found myself apologizing to him to get him to leave. I'll admit I let the unexpected show of solidarity go to my head. I'd started probing for support to oust Dr. Schugel, and the response had been so positive I'd gotten bold.

I'd been such a fool. Me, the sophisticated, modern urbanite, conned by a bunch of primitive rubes! It had all come crashing down when I'd overheard several of my 'allies' -- Dr. Hersche prominent among them -- discussing my unsuitability for my role. 'The military is no place for a little girl,' and so on, a lot of it backed up with my own words taken out of context. A real slap in the face! I'd thought after all my hard work, after maiming myself for the cause, I'd earned some respect. But no, they'd just been giving me enough rope to hang myself!

It'd been an especially harsh lesson in the ruthlessness of Imperial office politics. I'd been accounted a bit of a stickler for professional comportment back in my salaryman days, but I'd never have dreamed of holding an employee to account for making a small scene after receiving a serious injury. Not so long as they pulled themselves together by the end of their physician-recommended leave of absence, anyway. Well, what should I have expected from such a proud and warlike people? I doubt it was even malicious, really. Pouncing on the first insinuation of weakness was practically a reflex, one the Imperial military only honed.

Was it unfair? Of course it was. Easy for them to look down on me when their maiming wasn't on the table. Did they really think they could have maintained an officer's aplomb in that situation? I'll grant the Empire produces some tough bastards, but I didn't see any of them offering to prove it. I'd have been happy to help!

Was it bad policy for engendering a productive work environment? Absolutely. A wise investor doesn't toss an asset after a single disappointing quarter. It's one thing to discipline employees for malfeasance or long-run unproductivity, but for a single moment of weakness in exceptional circumstances? That sort of culture of fear could only incentivize counterproductive ass-covering.

Nonetheless, that's how it was, and it was my responsibility as a citizen to understand and follow the rules of my new society. In time I adapted, learning to give as good as I got.

I hadn't appreciated the nuance at the time, though. I was hurt and angry and in retrospect I admit I overreacted. And it was a bitter pill, having to work alongside Dr. Schugel to quash the conspiracy I had fostered. I hadn't done anything I could be formally censured for, but the atmosphere got pretty tense. Hard to say how things might have developed, had I stuck around. I'd had my second meeting with Being X eight days later, and I was back on the Front by day nine. I didn't leave any friends at that post, that's for sure.

"Well? Any further ambushes?" I prompted Tattletale.

"Ambushes?" Piggot asked, eyebrows raised.

I ignored her denial. A bit shameless, but that's to be expected of a public figure.

"Argent, that wasn't--" She cut herself off and sighed. "No, that's it. You've won."

I frowned at her. I wasn't sure I appreciated that attitude, especially after her slip-up.

I turned back to the director, preparing my thoughts.

"We seem to have drifted off topic. As to the decoys: I'm assured they were beyond saving. Their deaths were tragic, but it was Bonesaw who killed them. A bullet was a mercy, nothing more."

"You didn't know that before you had them shot, though."

"I didn't know they were decoys at all. But neither of those facts matter. We have to take the situation as it is, not as it might have been."

"Panacea could have--"

"Gotten caught in Bonesaw's trap? We didn't even shoot the Bonesaw decoy. She just exploded when the Jack one died, spreading who knows what all over." I continued at her unpleasant expression. "Ah, we irradiated the area on Tattletale's advice. Thoroughly."

She sat back and considered. Gallant interrupted just as she started to nod, though, surprising everyone.

"Wait. Were they really beyond saving?"

What? I started to speak, but he interrupted me.

"Not you. Tattletale. She told you that in the first place, right?"

... Well, shit. I glanced at her as she glanced at me. She did not look entirely confident. What the hell, Lisa? I need to know these things!

"Well, the director's right that Panacea could have helped them. It really would have been risky, though."

Reasonably well done, but it was Gallant that had caught her, not the lie detector.

"And without Panacea?" he pressed.

"... Maybe, maybe not. My psych profile on Bonesaw is mostly built from news reports, it's not perfect."

Piggot had caught onto the evasion now, too.

"Give me a percentage. Your best guess," she instructed.

Lisa bit her lip, eyes darting around. Fuck. Well, as an Imperial myself, what could I do but counterattack?

"You know, there's an American saying I think might be relevant here," I interrupted, drawing attention away from Tattletale. "Something about glass houses?"

I glanced around, but no one wanted to play along. Fine, then. I continued, letting a harsh edge enter my voice.

"How did Shadow Stalker die, again? Was she really beyond saving?"

That pissed them off. Even Miss Militia, despite her determination to play the good cop.

"Yes," Piggot grated at me. "She was inside Echidna. There was no way to get her out."

"Hmm. But there are clones of living capes running around, right? Sounds to me like it was risky, not impossible." Accusation delivered, I made a point of relaxing my posture and tone a bit. "But hey, I get it. Sometimes all your options are bad. Unfortunately, it's not me you're accountable to. Does the public understand the whole sequence of events, there? Her family?"

Now they were truly angry. I let them stew over the threat.

"Blackmail, then?"

I waved the words off without voicing a lie.

"I'm a believer in the rule of law. Your policy on these sorts of incidents is entirely up to you. Consistency is all I ask."

"... I see."

Well, I think they got the message. Time for a bit of conciliation.

"You know, I don't want to be enemies." The director's eyes flicked down to her laptop and she grimaced a little at what she saw there. What? There was no way Notarin had called back in, right? I hadn't said anything that should have activated her power, anyway. Was Piggot checking her email? Whatever. "You did try to have me killed, but that was just a misunderstanding. I don't hold a grudge."

Still ignoring me, she grimaced again at her screen before finally looking up, expression still on her face.

"How very... mature of you."

I shrugged. It was very mature for someone of my apparent age, but I wasn't about to sabotage these negotiations for the sake of verisimilitude. Fortunately, it wasn't hard to come up with an excuse.

"Honestly, I'm used to people trying to kill me." Well, let's not minimize it too much. "Don't mistake me, though: absolutely no one gets used to trying to kill me. Don't push your luck."

"... Right." She sighed. "I am duty bound to enforce the law. If you don't want to be enemies, I advise turning yourself in. Your crimes, while serious, are substantially mitigated by circumstance and could be further mitigated through cooperation. It's not within my power to make promises, but the courts have proven willing to accept very lenient plea bargains in... somewhat similar situations in the past."

"The terms of this deal would involve joining the Wards, right?"

She frowned but didn't seriously try to deny it.

"Most likely, yes."

What a farce! She declares herself an incorruptible agent of the law in one breath, then offers to make it all go away in the next! These were the tactics of a Mafia Don, not legitimate authority. Something tugged at me about that thought, but I couldn't quite grasp it. I obviously had no interest in such an awful offer of employment, but I decided to dig a little.

"And my men?"

She grimaced.

"We can work something out." She hesitated, then dragged out the next words. "It's not like we could hold you if you changed your mind. You don't have much to lose."

What? Of course she could. I wasn't helpless without an orb, but there wasn't much I could do against a concrete cell and a thick steel door. Not quickly, anyway, and they'd have cameras. I carefully hid my confusion. Maybe she meant she couldn't both hold me and make use of me? That was certainly true. And I suppose it was hardly worth going to so much effort for some recruits just to drop them in a cell.

Of course, that assumed the effort actually was to recruit me. She'd been eager enough to ship me off to Germany, where I'd have been useless to her. An asset you can't control is worse than useless, and she was right she couldn't control me. There were a lot of perks that might interest an inexperienced local -- mentorship, civic duty, legal standing, the security provided by being a member of a team -- but she had no reason to believe any of those would tempt me. The frankly insulting compensation package certainly wasn't going to do it.

So maybe it wasn't that simple? If her true goal was to remove me from play, getting me to let my guard--

Lisa rapped her knuckles on the desk. I glanced over. She shook her head.

OK, then. I frowned. If not that, what did they have in mind? If--

"Look, Argent, this isn't some complicated scheme. They've got some idea how out of their depth they are and this is just flailing."

The director glared at Tattletale.

"Excuse me?"

"Oh? Is this offer just a pretense to manufacture an opportunity to murder Argent in her sleep?"

"No, it is not," Miss Militia said harshly.

Tattletale waved her off.

"I know that, obviously." She made a frustrated noise and turned to me. "Look, everyone else in this room put together hasn't killed ten people-- Oh?" She looked at Miss Militia, then at the agent, though I had no clue how she could possibly have read his blank face plate. "Well, maybe a few more. My point is that it's no one's go-to. It's just not how things are done, barring exceptional circumstances."

"And these aren't exceptional circumstances?"

She grimaced.

"Perhaps. But they still haven't decided to try to kill you, and if they did, the attempt would be laughably amateurish, by your standards."

That logic was a little dubious. Catching someone is almost always harder than killing them, after all, and they should have plenty of practice at that. There is something special about lethal combat, though, and newbies do have a tendency to slip up. Did that extend to plots and ambushes? It was hard to say. Who'd put a neophyte in charge of one?

Well, if I wasn't going to trust Tattletale on this sort of thing, why did I bring her? I nodded and turned back to the blank-faced director.

"I decline."

She arched an eyebrow.

"I thought you were a believer in the rule of law?"

"Earth Bet's America hasn't been diplomatically recognized by the Empire nor has it entered into a Status of Forces agreement or any similar treaty. From the perspective of Imperial law, you have no legal authority over me at all."

"But Earth-91's America has been recognized?"

"Earth-91?"

She briefly explained the convention.

"It has been, but that's not relevant. Imperial law lacks any principle of interdimensional equivalence. If you wish to receive recognition, you'll have to get in touch with the Imperial Office of Foreign Affairs."

"And how exactly would I do that?"

Sounded like her problem. I shrugged. She slapped her hand on her desk, suddenly angry.

"Do you actually expect me to indulge this nonsense? America hasn't recognized the Empire, either, and it's not surrendering its sovereign right to enforce its laws on its soil for the sake of an empire that can't even be contacted. You're here now, and there's no way back. Whatever Imperial law says, you are under my jurisdiction."

"You're welcome to your opinion, I suppose. If you attack me, I will defend myself."

She leaned back and grunted.

"So that's it, then?" she asked, bitter. "All those words and in the end it's all about who has the bigger stick?"

"That's been my experience, yes," I grated, surprising myself with my own bitterness.

We regarded each other in silence for long seconds, stretching out to half a minute. Miss Militia looked like she was about to speak up at one point, but she didn't. Tattletale was just staring at me again.

Ultimately, it was the director who broke the tableau, dragging me from increasingly dark thoughts.

"What are your plans going forward, then?"

I briefly considered how much I should tell her, but she'd made that decision easy. If she was determined to be my enemy, I wanted her to know as little as possible.

"None of your business."

She scowled a bit but didn't seem surprised.

"There are concerns about interdimensional disease. We'd like you to meet with Panacea, who will cure--"

"No," I cut her off. Did she think I was an idiot?

"No?" she asked, annoyed. "Panacea is by far--"

"Don't bother with the 'just a healer' B.S.," Tattletale explained condescendingly. "She threatened to give Skitter cancer when she healed her after Leviathan."

Kid Win jerked at that. Lisa's eyes widened.

"Oh. Oh! This is incredible! You're going to have Thinkers poring over every word of this meeting. All I have to do is say the word and they'll dig into all your little secrets! Shadow Stalker constantly--"

"Tattletale!" I barked.

She looked over at me and shut up. I inspected her for a moment. What the fuck was that? What possible advantage could we get from just tossing out all our potential blackmail? Well, now wasn't the time to get into it. I turned back to the director.

"No Panacea. I'm willing to provide a report from an unpowered doctor and that'll have to be good enough."

"... Fine. I believe that's all we need to discuss."

She turned her attention back to her laptop, dismissing me. Not so fast, director.

"What's the timeline on the bounty payout?"

She looked back up, patience running out.

"It will take as long as it takes. Believe it or not, the verification process for a hundred million dollar payout doesn't end with a single interview."

Well, fair enough. But I had plans for that money, and they didn't involve sitting around for... days? weeks? Well, what could I do?

"Over two hundred million, counting the Undersider's cut."

"Oh, it's not even close." She shot me an unpleasant smile, the first I'd seen from her. "We wouldn't want to trouble you with any complicated tax forms, so we handle all that for you."

I frowned.

"You don't know what my expenses are. How could you calculate... Wait, do you mean personal income tax?"

"... Yes? What else would it be?"

"Corporate revenue, obviously. I plan to reinvest virtually all of it." I shook my head. "Startups need all the capital they can get. Taking such an enormous amount out as personal income right now would be counterproductive in the extreme."

"And you're planning to pay appropriate taxes for this... business?"

My frown deepened.

"... Yes? Is there some reason I wouldn't?"

I looked at Tattletale, who rolled her eyes at me.

"Criminal gangs generally don't," the director dryly responded.

... What?

"Who said anything about a criminal gang?"

She stared at me for a moment.

"Well, it doesn't really matter. The deduction is calculated in a manner similar to income tax, but it's in fact distinct. It's written into the law creating the bounty program in lieu of any other taxes. I believe the choice was mainly motivated by identity concerns."

I grimaced. I guess I'd have to scale things back a bit.

"Fine. I suppose that is all, then."

We exchanged stiff nods, Tattletale rose, and we left the office, PRT minder back on our heels.

I stewed as we walked. That had not gone as well as I'd hoped, and not purely due to enemy action. I'd thought Tattletale and I were on the same page, but clearly not. Her power was incredible, and I'd let that distract me from the fact it was attached to an impetuous, undisciplined, inexperienced teenager. And I'd made my share of mistakes, too. High stakes negotiations had once been an important part of my role as an HR manager, but I'd clearly gotten rusty. Well, it certainly could have gone worse. We'd just have to work at it and be ready for the next one.

I didn't allow myself to lose track of my surroundings despite my thoughts, so I was able to avoid the young man coming fast around a corner as I approached. He tossed out an apology as I dodged around him, but he froze when I offered one of my own. I took a closer look. Late teens or early twenties, maybe. Casual clothes. Pretty fit. Bandage poking up over his collar on one side. A little young to be an agent, right? Maybe an intern. When he just kept still and stared at me, I finished maneuvering around him and continued on my way.

A\N: What about Corporal Richter? Tanya just forgot. She'll kick herself about it later, but there was a going on here and he's not really at the forefront of her mind.

Edit: Spelling fix

Last edited: Nov 3, 2022

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TorontoTowers

TorontoTowers

Nov 12, 2022

#1,330

2.C

-- Fortuna Contessa --

I ducked into a doorway just as the man rounded the corner, hearing him call out as he caught a brief glimpse of my back. What had set him off? I carefully wondered without wondering. It was late, but the building was hardly empty, and my clothing shouldn't arouse any suspicion; I'd taken it off someone who was meant to be here. On the other hand, I'd clearly arrived at a stressful moment for these people. Not quite a kicked over anthill but not far from it. Perhaps he was just feeling jumpy. Whatever it was, he picked up his pace as I failed to respond, barging into the dark office.

By all rights he should have noticed me, just standing against the wall to the right of the door. It was the sort of trick a child might pull. But I had done it, so it obviously was the right thing to do, somehow. He stopped a few feet into the room, looking around, then started turning. To his left, though that wouldn't buy me more than a second. Of course, I didn't need a second. He silently jerked as my knife plunged through the back of his head, now angled such that the blood splatter entirely missed me. He went limp and I grabbed him around the waist, dragging his body off to the side before he finished twitching.

Had he been important? He needed to die, obviously, or I wouldn't have killed him. But there could be a lot of reasons for that. Was he actually important, actually culpable for the things I'd see later tonight? If I asked my power, I'd know in an instant. I didn't ask.

I exited the room, locking the door behind me with a key I'd gotten with the uniform. Then why move the body? I entertained myself with increasingly implausible theories as I moved back down the hallway and around the corner, the way the man had come from. The right side was lined with nondescript wooden doors like the one I'd just exited, presumably leading to more offices. The doors on the left were more widely spaced, heavy steel.

I stopped in front of the first one (on the left, of course) and waited long seconds, only raising my knife as the lock clicked. The door opened out, naturally -- wouldn't want to put the hinges on the inside -- so the man was already stepping forward as he opened it, face creasing in confusion as he noticed me. I stabbed him through the side of his head, clearing away his expression just as quickly. Why had he come out now? Had he heard the other man call out? Actually, I suspected these rooms were well sound-proofed.

Regardless, I didn't bother lowering this one down quietly. I pushed him out of my way as I slipped into the cell, tossing my knife into another's eye as he fumbled with his holster. The third and final man watched him slump over with an unreadable expression, which he then turned on me. Not much else he could do, hanging by his wrists from heavy manacles, bare torso colored in startling variety with bruises.

"Batyushka Mishkin?" I asked, already bending to retrieve my knife and collect a key from the corpse of the second man. He nodded, of course. I spoke quickly and passionately as I freed him. What did I say? I had no clue. I didn't actually know... whatever language this was. Something Slavic. I could have known, had I wished, like just about any other question I could imagine. Paths to not knowing, on the other hand, were never so easy. Ignorance had become precious to me over long years of acting out scripts I knew by heart.

He lit up at my words regardless, babbling out an excited reply. He quickly pulled the boots and pants off the second man, spry despite his injuries. Adrenaline, likely. I stopped him before he could start on the jacket, though, offering a clean spare. He didn't think to question why I'd been carrying it around, of course. I grabbed the man's pistol while the former prisoner dressed, discreetly emptying it before I handed it over. He wouldn't leave without a weapon, I figured, but he'd panic and blow our cover if it was functional. I gave him some quick instructions as I led him out.

We had a lot of work to do tonight.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I was alone, so it wasn't some manipulative performance. I guess my power decided I needed a break, and I couldn't disagree. It was mid-morning now. I'd killed three dozen people and freed near as many more, broke us all into a different, even more imposing building, and then got right back to it. All without raising any kind of alarm, somehow.

I'd locked and unlocked doors without rhyme or reason, burned a stack of documents I couldn't read, gave reams of instructions I couldn't understand, tampered with two specific guns in the armory, left all the faucets running in one bathroom, and moved every chair in a big office three inches left. It'd have all taken forty minutes tops if I'd had access to Clairvoyant and Doormaker, but if they could have seen me here, there'd have been no reason to come.

It was nostalgic, almost. Not that I'd been happy, exactly, in those early days. I'd certainly been a lot less tired, for all that every task had taken so many more steps. For that matter, it had been years since I'd last had to stage a proper coup. It was generally more efficient to ensure the wrong people never rose to power in the first place. And then there was the moment that had started the whole chain of events, all my paths shifting in an instant. The emergence of Behemoth. The creation of Doormaker. The Subway Cluster's trigger. A bare handful more over the decades.

And this one hinged on a single window of opportunity that would last seconds mere minutes away. David's fault, naturally. Scrambling to gather the necessary equipment and capes, moving up the most essential actions, scribbling out a couple quick notes... Even with a perfect plan perfectly executed, I'd had to make sacrifices to get everything lined up in time. The others would have to hold things together without me for a while.

But it was worth it. A world Clairvoyant couldn't see? That I couldn't see until the path had opened? How had I not realized the opportunity Noelle Meinhardt had represented? By forcing the creation of endless permutations on powers, she effectively constituted a fuzzing attack on the Entities' restrictions. The Entities and their agents weren't perfect, as I knew better than anyone. But what had they wanted to hide here? I had my suspicions.

Recentered, I strode confidently into the conference room, the gathered... soldiers? agents? breaking off their conversation and watching with some confusion and signs of lasting stress. Not one female face in the crowd. When I reached the head of the table, I abruptly turned and dumped out the sack I'd stolen from the mess hall. Four heads rolled out onto the table, prompting startled exclamations, but I started speaking immediately to head off the uproar. Hard to imagine what words could possibly do that, but I'd found them, of course. They quieted and listened intently as I continued.

It must have been quite a speech. My body language was dynamic. I made eye contact with each member of my audience at just the right time. My tone was furious and longing in turns. At one point I dramatically ripped my holster from my belt and tossed it down, as though to signal I wouldn't fight back, should they reject my judgment.

It went on long enough that I started to notice patterns in my speech. Names. I harshly denounced Pasternak, Dzhugashvili, Nikolaev, and, above all, Loria. The heads? A couple of them had been rather well guarded. I spoke in loving praise of Popov, Gabriel, and Babin, the last of whom, it turned out, was in attendance. He stepped up to stand beside me after a particularly ardent exhortation.

The whole sequence of events was a bit confusing. The men I'd killed had been my audience's comrades -- their leaders, if I didn't miss my guess -- but they certainly didn't seem upset to see them dead. I'd just walked into a meeting and everyone there was on board? Were these people all members of a rebellious faction? Personal enemies of my victims? Had I already killed anyone who should have been here who would have objected? Perhaps they were simply so broadly despised no real selection had been necessary. I suppose it didn't matter. It took some wrangling, but they all ultimately joined in on my coup. Not that any other outcome was possible.

I clapped my hands and, heeding the signal, my small army of former prisoners streamed in from an adjoining room to raucous cheers from their former captors. I sent them off with a final fiery enjoinder.

I grabbed a chair and slumped back into it, finally permitted to truly indulge my exhaustion. No one would disturb me here, not for hours, and when they did, it would be to report 'our' triumph. Not that that would be the end of my work. Nothing ever was. As I drifted off, my final words echoed in my head. I suddenly found I did want to know what I had said, what words had driven these men to treachery and murder. I asked my power.

... What? 'God wills it?'

A\N:

This one is going to take some explanation, I think.

Explicitly dimensional powers are rare, but even among those powers, access is limited to a safe subset of dimensions. Not because the restricted dimensions are threatening to the Entities themselves, necessarily -- there's very little on that level -- but because they might cause a variety of headaches for the cycle, some more serious than others. Obviously this includes Earth 91, because Contessa hasn't already stopped over there to supplement her parahuman 'army' with mages, who are superior in most ways, and neither did Taylor on Gold Morning.

The dimensions Scrub's shard dumps stuff on are restricted, as it happens. It's pretending to provide an annihilation effect, so it can't have anyone stumbling across all the 'annihilated' stuff. Obviously, these are some of the very least interesting restricted dimensions, but they are restricted. Which means Scrub's shard has permission to access restricted dimensions. (At least below a certain 'clearance level.' The dimensions holding Scion's real body, for example, are much more heavily protected.) Not a big deal in general; its effect is purely unidirectional and the worlds it chooses are dead and empty. The stuff might as well be annihilated for all the influence it could possibly have on the cycle.

When it suddenly had to come up with several new variations on Scrub's power, though, it might have overstepped a little bit. But really, how much damage can a few mages do? And, anyway, it's still unidirectional. It's not like it's providing free access to-- Oh, it turns out it is possible to travel the other way with the right Trump powers and Tinker tech? Oops. Well, it was just one cape, and, now that the clone is dead, there's definitely no way back.

Precogs, including Contessa, can't foresee the outcome of trigger events, which I believe should extend to the creation of Echidna clones. So the moment all her paths shifted was the birth of the Scrub clone. As it turned out, she'd have had over a day before the clone died, and she obviously could have saved his life before then. But between the involvement of Eidolon, his clone, and any new clones with unpredictable powers, she had very little ability to foresee events in that fight. She decided not to chance it and took advantage of the very first time the Scrub clone used his power, summoning some poor, confused bastard who Alexandria pulped seconds later.

I had a surprising amount of fun writing this. Contessa is basically the perfect vessel for awful writing. Dumb plans that should never work, only to be saved by impossibly lucky coincidences? Ridiculous and completely unearned skills? Persuading others to act completely out of character with a short conversation? That's literally her power.

And of course she's completely sick of it. She acts exactly as her power directs, reducing her role in her own life to that of audience, effectively, to all that terrible writing. And worse, she already knows exactly how it'll all play out. I think there's some real promise in dropping a young Contessa into, I don't know, a schlocky spy thriller and watching her die inside. Has anyone done something like that?

Sidenote: I reread her interlude before starting on this, and I'm unreasonably annoyed that her power just answers questions like 'What does that mean?'. It's supposed to be Path to Victory, not a general purpose oracle. Of course, PtV could answer questions via circumlocutions like 'path to writing down an accurate translation of that statement' and then looking at the steps to see what she'd write, but she doesn't even have to be that tiny bit clever about it. I get her power doesn't have the normal restrictions, but still.

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Nov 15, 2022

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-- Lt. Col. Tanya von Degurechaff --

"Two per minute at most, Captain Meybert. Are you at all aware of the supply situation? You should be. I've explained it to you often enough. We simply cannot afford to spend our shells recklessly. Two a minute, and make them count."

He stifled a sigh, hand over the mouthpiece, before continuing, defeated.

"Yes, Ma'am."

Well, I had to let him have some fun. He wasn't a bad officer, really. He'd just learned his lessons on the Rhine, where the General Staff had deemed it a vital military priority to turn every hill into a crater. He'd adjust.

"Once we've won the air battle, I'll give you one minute of heavy bombardment in concert with the 203rd. Maximize peak volume of fire to send them running."

"Are you sure, Colonel? I know your boys are good, but it's got to be three to one up there."

I snorted.

"Exactly, Captain. An Imperial mage is worth five communist dogs."

Well, the average Imperial mage certainly wasn't. One and a half, maybe. My pack of killers, though? They'd grumble I'd stopped at five.

"As you say, Colonel."

I passed the handset back to the young Lieutenant I'd snatched it from and took a sip of my coffee. It was still hot, even. Ah, what a civilized way to fight a war! It wasn't quite the cushy General Staff post I wanted, but still. I'd make it through this battle without ever coming closer to violence than harsh language! Well, if I liked my promotion, I should demonstrate my diligence.

"Corporal Roth, what's the situation in the air?"

I'd been pretty happy to get an extra mage company at first. I didn't expect them to perform to my standards, of course, but more is better, right? That had changed once I actually got them in the air. Had they given up on training new recruits altogether? The first time I'd ordered them to shoot a target, they'd actually come to a stop first! Like their fondest wish was to kiss an AA shell! And to think: if I'd tried to stay out of the war, I'd have been conscripted sometime in the next year. And I knew for a fact most commanders didn't cosset useless mages like I did.

Needless to say, it had been a challenge to find productive things for them to do. I'd given Corporal Roth the noble duty of human radio, one of my better ideas. He listened in on the 203rd's communications and coordinated with the Lieutenant on the magic detector to put together a complete picture of the air battle. I should have asked the Lieutenant, properly speaking, but I wanted to give Roth a chance to grow. A bit immature, but he seemed to have a decent head on his shoulders. And he definitely didn't have any future in magic, so it'd be best if he hurried up and found another calling.

"It's going well, Colonel! Fourteen enemy magic signatures flat-lined, twelve confirmed killed."

I nodded, satisfied.

"And ours?" I threw out, perfunctory. I was already considering whether it was time to commit the tanks.

"Just one down, Ma'am!"

I spun back to him, scowling.

"What? Who?"

He froze up.

"Uh... I think it was Third Company... S- something?"

My scowl deepened.

"Sergeant Seidel, you mean?"

Damn! She'd been pretty good, for one of the post-Revolving Door recruits. We'd have to make sure--

"I don't think so, Ma'am."

What? Why had I put this idiot on communications, again? I spun up my own communication formula.

"Salamander Actual to Salamander 03. What's going on up there?"

"Colonel! We--"

"The hell are you doing on comms, Müller? Where's Serebryakov?"

"That's what I'm trying to tell you, Ma'am! Lieutenant Serebryakov is down!"

I stopped, mystified.

"What?"

"Alive, I mean! Downed but alive! Possibly injured! We're looking--"

But I had dropped the formula to focus on my magic senses, already running, coffee spilling behind me.

It occurred to me that I shouldn't start spinning up my flight spell until I was a good ways away from the command tent, so as to not highlight its location to the enemy magic detectors. I did it anyway.

Where was she? There were a lot of magic signatures around, but not hers. Of course, sensing a mage on the ground from the ground isn't always easy. Stuff gets in the way. And if she's grounded, she might be limiting her output to avoid enemy detection. I focused hard on my flight formula, forcing extra manna into the pattern through main will, wasting more than half of it.

I finally lifted off, going for altitude first. I endured long seconds of gradually strengthening flight, getting buffeted by the air while my shell finished spinning up. But my attention was back on my magic senses. I still couldn't feel her. I felt third company, though. And I felt the mages they were fighting. The mages who were disrupting their search. Suddenly enraged, I shot right toward them, unlimbering my SMG and charging an artillery spell.

--

I inspected my A.S. Weapons MKMS forlornly. I remembered how beautiful and new it had been when I'd taken it in trade for my rifle. The bayonet, snapped off in a dead man's ribs, could be replaced. It hadn't come with a lug. That was a custom job, so it fit standard-issue bayonets. Really, I was more annoyed about the state of my uniform. He'd thought I'd back off when my shell broke, so now I was half covered in his blood. Of course, the fight hadn't ended there.

When I'd battered my way through the next man's shell with the barrel, I'd put a distinct bend in it. Could it be bent back? Maybe, but the strength of the metal was already compromised. How the hell was I going to get a replacement barrel for a Waldstätten prototype?

I sighed and dropped the piece of junk. The simple answer was that I wasn't, given the supply situation. I'd had to beg Logistics just to get enough socks.

No clue what got into the enemy today, but they just would not give it up. Those weren't rookies, either. Intelligence was adamant the Federation was sorely lacking in mages, and I had believed them. Despots like Dzhugashvili lived in constant fear of subjects capable of standing up for themselves and communists of course are ever fond of their purges. But half of these had been Albish, including that commander from the Queen of Anjou. Slippery bastard. What sort of man would desert his own homeland on the brink of invasion to help out the communists?

Well, eight more for the tally today. Maybe they'd learned their lesson this time? I wasn't holding my breath.

They'd called the general retreat when the mages broke, fortunately. I wasn't about to order a bombardment, but they didn't know that. We'd seen them off, picking off a couple more, then circled back around for the search. Still not a hint of Visha's magic signature. Well, I suppose they might be willing to bombard the area if they detected her, now that they'd cleared out. Good thinking, as usual. We'd have to--

"Colonel! Over here!"

Müller sounded pretty upset. I shot over towards him. Was it bad? Who had that certification in medical magic, again?

"Engel! Get ov--"

I caught sight of her. I shut up. I touched down much too quickly, like my reflex enhancement had been reversed.

I stared.

You know, I've seen a lot of bodies on the battlefield. Made a lot of them, too. I wouldn't call myself an expert, exactly, but my experience speaks for itself. She wasn't shot or stabbed. Had anyone even tried to kill her? She was trampled. That's all. The sort of thing that happens to old American ladies on Black Friday. Just a fucking accident.

I bent down and detached her orb. How many mages die with an intact orb? A top-of-the-line Type 97, just abandoned in the mud? Like it was worthless? If the leadership ever realized what their soldiers missed here there'd be executions left and right. They'd bring back decimation just for these dumb fucks.

One in ten? Just one in ten? How could that possibly be enough? All of them wouldn't be enough.

I activated the orb, searching through the recordings. There were a lot of them, and she hadn't organized them the way I did. I skimmed--

"Will you shut the fuck up?"

A few meters away, a wounded man just wouldn't stop moaning and groaning. Broken leg and gut wound? He was already dead, and the least he could do was act like it. I barely noticed that sort of thing anymore most of the time, but I was trying to concentrate.

He didn't shut up.

I marched over to him. Really, he should be thanking his lucky stars. He was just lying there, broken leg and all, and somehow he hadn't gotten fucking trampled.

I put my boot through his face, magic augmenting my wholly insufficient weight.

Hadn't gotten fucking trampled yet. I let out a little giggle.

I paused, feeling like I'd forgotten something. Oh. I double checked his uniform. Federation. Obviously he was Federation, or I wouldn't have done that. I turned away and got back to looking through the orb.

It took a while, but I eventually satisfied myself there wasn't anything from today. Well, why would there be? She was running out of space on the orb and she'd never really cared about her score.

So, what had downed her? Any of the mages could have if they'd gotten lucky enough. Well, no. Those jokers? It'd have had to have been several all at once. Even then... Really? I knew that wasn't impossible, but I couldn't believe it. All these years, all these battles, and they'd just ganged up on her? Like no one had ever tried that before?

Actually, there was nothing they hadn't tried before. She was simply better than them. So what the fuck am I looking at? Anti-air? Her shell was great. Better than mine, some days. They'd have had to have gotten lucky. Very lucky. Two-hits-in-a-row lucky. Still a more plausible answer than fucking communist mages, of all things.

I slipped the orb into a pocket. I'd run out of things to think about, so I just stared some more.

"Colonel?"

I blinked, then blinked again. Some of the blood had dribbled down into my eyes, it seemed. Still, I didn't look away.

"Yes, Major?"

"What now, Ma'am?"

I shook my head and turned to Weiss. Right. We'd need to get moving.

"Call the command tent. Tell them to gather the unit commanders. Meeting in ten to plan out the pursuit."

"... Pursuit, Ma'am?" He paused, apparently hoping he wouldn't have to spell it out. I just looked at him. He continued after a couple false starts. "Aren't our orders to hold this area?"

"Your orders are to ready for pursuit."

"Yes, Ma'am."

I prepared to fly back, not looking-- I looked. And saw Müller and Pohl stooping over her.

"And what do you think you're doing?" my voice cracked out.

They froze, then turned slowly to look at me.

"Gathering the Lieutenant's body, Ma'am. So she can be returned to her family for burial."

To her family? To the useless fucks who couldn't keep their teenage daughter out of a world war? And now they wanted her back? How dare they! If she'd died in her second week on the Rhine, maybe then they could have buried her, enjoyed the proceeds of their own failure. If she'd survived these last three years, what did that have to do with them? And if she was dead now… what did that have to do with them, either? Still, I hesitated. The thought of just leaving her here was suddenly intolerable.

"You may gather her body, Corporals, but she will not be buried. We will build Lieutenant Serebryakov a pyre. Something suitably grand, I think."

All of them wouldn't be enough? It'd be a start.

A\N: How could Roth have missed that Visha was down when the 203rd was actively discussing it? He fumbled the connection like ten minutes ago and has been desperately trying to get it working again ever since. He's actually bad at magic, not just bad by Tanya's standards. The Empire is desperate for mages by this point, unfortunately.

So, he just went by what he could see on the detector, trying to remember which signature goes with which mage. (The machine doesn't label them for you, it's WWI tech.) He is very, very lucky Tanya isn't thinking clearly at the moment.

Beta'd by p235711317 and Mecharic!

Last edited: Nov 15, 2022

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Nov 22, 2022

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-- Lisa Wilbourne Tattletale --

"We need to debrief. That meeting did not go as well as it should have." Tanya paused for a moment, then continued begrudgingly. "I recognize that my expectations for you were unrealistic. Still, you can't improve without understanding what you did wrong."

What I did wrong? Your expectations for me? Sure those weren't actually your expectations for someone else, Tanya? You know, I'm coming around to your point of view: that woman must have been a fucking saint to put up with your constant bullshit. But I couldn't actually say that, could I? Talking to Coil never felt like such a fucking minefield. Well, hardly ever.

"Can we do this later? Please? I'm completely tapped."

We'd flown to my hideout, entering through the back. I was more than ready to call it a night, but Tanya had elected to follow me into my bedroom. And she still wasn't leaving.

"Completely? You should try to maintain a reserve, just in case. That meeting wasn't an emergency."

Oh, fuck you.

"And what would you have done if you thought I was holding back?" I hissed, unable to keep the words down.

She frowned at me. Fuck! I shouldn't have said that. I let up on my power a bit, preemptively flinching. My power wouldn't save me, but I couldn't help it.

Confused. Not angry.

I had maybe a quarter second of pure relief before it hit me, the icicle in my brain sprouting fractal spikes. I tried to bite down on a piteous whimper, but it escaped anyway. Not that I couldn't use some pity right now, I just knew my audience.

"Sorry," I mumbled, eyes closed. "I--"

I flinched from a hand on my shoulder, eyes snapping open. Huh. Was that concern in her eyes after all? Getting some mixed messages here, Tanya.

"I would have noted it as something to ask about later. That's all."

That had been an expression of frustration, not an actual question. I had a better idea what was going on in her head than she did, after all, not that that was hard. Still, she was probably right, at least so long as she'd had other people to focus on. I hadn't wanted to bet my life on it.

Of course, she had no clue what I was talking about. She hadn't actually killed me on the basis of a paranoid delusion -- she'd only seriously considered it, deciding my fate while accelerated to the point I could barely read her, let alone respond -- so, really, what did I have to whine about? Oh, and she'd definitely wanted me to know it, too, in case I got any ideas in the future. No big deal, she'd already forgotten all about it.

"It's just a debrief. You don't need to use your power," she offered like she thought she was doing me a favor.

No. Nope. Hell no.

"Too late for that. It hurts even when I don't use it, and it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. More... I was going to say more pain than you've ever felt, but I guess that's not actually true, is it?"

She shrugged.

And that was the thing. Why wouldn't she think that was the right way to treat people when that's how people treated her? Actually, she was being downright considerate in comparison to Dr. Schugel. And possibly the others? She'd been keeping something back, something she didn't want to talk about. Because the part of the story where she burned her hand off wasn't the bad part, apparently.

It would have been one thing if that had been her trigger event. It was... OK, it was bad even for a trigger event, especially considering her age. But it wasn't the worst one I'd ever heard of, or even top five. Maybe some form of pyrokinesis plus the ability to puppet burned flesh, her own included? Eh, that'd be cruel even by power standards. And there should be a Brute aspect given the physical injury. Whatever.

The point was it hadn't been her trigger event, and not just because mages don't trigger. It had been traumatic but not traumatic enough. She hadn't broken. She wasn't even uncomfortable talking about it, really. And what did that say about the rest of her life? It wasn't that I didn't sympathize, it was just... too much. And my oncoming migraine definitely wasn't helping.

Part of me wanted to just tell her that I quit. Coil was dead and we were due over ten million dollars from the bounty payout, so why take the risk? She seemed to think I'd stick around for more money, but I could make money anywhere, and my tastes aren't that extravagant. And, as she was well aware, all the money in the world wouldn't help a corpse.

I'd fear another Coil situation, but I'd learned my lesson. He got me because I hadn't had the resources or muscle to leverage my power, and that wouldn't happen again. I could hire my own mercs, now, and even if the team dissolved, Taylor would stick with me. Well, probably not if I left the city, which would be wise... I'd make it work.

I was even pretty confident she'd let me go if I insisted. Her sense of ethics was... dubious in some areas, and she'd made some compromises on top of that, but this was very clear cut. The ability to break off a business relationship is essential to creating a competitive market, and that's the sort of rule she gets.

She'd feel paranoid about letting me go, but she'd also feel paranoid about enslaving me. She'd have to either give in or kill me and she'd ultimately settle on the former, at least if I played it right. Not that upsetting her like that was smart, but I'd hopefully have made it well away before that became an issue.

Of course, doing that would as much as guarantee there would be an issue. There already would have been if I hadn't been around to manage her. And, while I wasn't overly fond of this city, Taylor wouldn't leave with me. The others too, probably. And, well, I did sympathize with her. That's... not too common. I learn about so much awful shit happening to so many people it's just... hard to care about it all. She managed to stand out.

Well, that was all moot, since everyone knew I worked for Tanya now. Well, technically just the PRT, but I was less than confident they'd manage to keep that tidbit quiet. I'd become the 203rd's obvious weak point. I could fend off people shopping for a pet Thinker, but the sort of groups who'd look for an edge on Tanya? That implied they thought they might beat her, and that implied they were way out of my league. By putting me under her protection, she'd guaranteed I'd need that protection.

If she'd meant to do that, to back me into a corner and leave me no way out, I'd be pissed as hell. But she just... hadn't. The thought still hasn't even occurred to her. She was nearly as upset about the PRT discovering our association as I was, actually. Loyalty was one of her big blind spots, I suspected, despite (or possibly because of?) her capacity to inspire it.

When she considered my possible betrayal earlier, that was the first time she'd really doubted a subordinate's loyalty in years, I think. A lot of her paranoia was about new types of threats she didn't have a good handle on yet, so when she moved on, she just went back to assuming I'd do whatever she wanted without worrying about how to ensure that.

Tanya had been inspecting me while I thought and now she sighed.

"How long will you need?"

Right. My migraine. Well, it was nice not thinking about that while it lasted.

"Through tomorrow afternoon at the earliest. The morning after, at the outside."

She grimaced.

"OK."

"Well, however much you might hate this delay, I promise you I'll hate it more."

"Why would I want you to suffer?" She shot me a brief wry smirk. "We haven't started your training yet."

Oh. Well, that's terrifying. I think on balance I preferred when she frowned at me. Definitely a problem for tomorrow, though.

"Goodnight, Tanya."

"Goodnight." She started to make her way out, then paused, turning back. "Is there anything you need? Anything I can do?"

What? How... thoughtful? Whatever, I'd had my fill and more of trying to untangle Tanya today.

"Quiet and darkness, mostly. Water. Someone to clean if I throw up. A warm bath, when I've recovered enough for it. But I pay people to handle all that. For what you can do? Just please don't bother me until I'm over it. And don't make any big moves until we've talked it over. Or kill anyone. Please." Uh, actually, was it a good idea to leave her unsupervised? "Maybe you should sleep at Taylor's tonight? She can help you with any Bet stuff you need while I'm indisposed."

"Taylor?"

Oh, uh... Shit. Well, she'd probably unmask soon enough, anyway.

"Sorry, Taylor's... one of Skitter's henchmen. Henchwomen, I mean."

She rolled her eyes.

"Fine, though I'll expect you to be more circumspect with secrets that actually matter."

She finally left, and I grabbed my new satellite phone. We'd had Coil's goons fetch some after Tanya got Shatterbird, naturally. I let the team know I'd be out of commission and that the meeting went well -- no one had died, which was the important thing -- and told Taylor she was on babysitting duty. I turned it off before anyone could complain or ask questions. By the time I finished my hands were already shaking, and I'd had to turn the brightness down to minimum halfway through.

This was going to suck.

It actually hadn't been that bad. It should have been -- I know my power, and I knew the consequences when I ran it dry and pushed a little more. There's variance, but not this much. As ever, though, my power refused to explain its mechanics to me. I suppose I couldn't really complain; it was hard to overstate just how much misery this anomaly had saved me. If it ever went the other way, though...

The migraine proper was over in less than two hours, and I'd even managed to get to sleep at a reasonable time. Well, somewhat reasonable. And now I was awake, albeit still lazing in bed, at ten o'clock, which counted as early for a supervillain. Taylor doesn't count, since she's still pretending she's just pretending to be a villain, which... Uh, Coil and Dinah are dead, and they were reasons one and two for maintaining her 'infiltration.' She'd come up with some new excuse, of course, but not all the options were good. Maybe it was time to have a frank conversation about that.

Actually, she'd implied yesterday she'd chosen Tanya as her new project, hadn't she? I'd encouraged her at the time, but now I was feeling... less sanguine about tying our fortunes to hers in the long term. Or, frankly, sharing a city with her. Not that I had a choice anymore, but I was less enthusiastic about it.

Well, maybe the long term wasn't the issue. She'd clearly been much more stable in the past if she'd endured multiple attempted murders without retaliation in kind for the sake of... her career, I guess? Actually, that didn't really make her sound more sane, did it? But definitely less murderous, which was the pressing issue.

So, in theory, she should eventually be able to pull herself together and we'd get all the upsides of Tanya with none of the downsides. Well, fewer of the downsides. We just had to make it past this... little hurdle... of the violent death of her best friend/surrogate sister/social crutch/favorite barista... over whom she'd already killed thousands and wasn't nearly satisfied...

Oh, and a bunch of other things, too, like her paranoia, her violent over-protectiveness, her need to put on a show for her men, her utterly dysfunctional theory of mind, and the simple weight of habit. And I suspected she'd straight up murder the next person who introduced themselves to her as a communist, so we should probably work on that, too, before it came up.

Well, OK, her coping strategies weren't great. We just needed to find her a good therapist. One who specializes in famous paranoid grieving child prodigy orphans with PTSD and bizarre body image issues who are also refugees and child soldiers who fought on the front lines of one of the worst conflicts in human history and are probably autistic or something. Oh, and they'd need to be familiar with the cultural context of another nation from another century on another world. And ideally capes, too.

Fuck.

Maybe it was a good thing Bonesaw got away since we'd obviously need her skill in creating chimeras to pull this off. That list didn't even cover all her baggage. A lot of it is hard to put labels to. And then we'd have to convince Tanya to open up to this 'person' and not kill them for being around when she was thinking about her loss, which actually sounded way harder than finding/creating them in the first place.

Well, not every plan is a winner. I'd have to talk it over with Taylor, anyway, and she's good at plans. Well, sometimes she's awful at plans, but I thought this wouldn't impinge on her issues too much, at least if we've ruled out institutional solutions.

Though, she wasn't exactly in a good state herself. Her principal obsession just died in a manner arguably reminiscent of her mother's death, and then she helped Koenig murder Bonesaw's innocent victim... I almost rolled over and went back to sleep. How the hell did I end up responsible for this cluster fuck? Weren't there supposed to be professionals to handle this sort of thing? Or adults, at least?

But of course I knew the answer. There were and they were useless. None of our lives would be like this if they weren't.

I sighed and started my morning routine. I'd told Tanya this afternoon at the earliest, though in the best case I'd expected it'd still be pretty bad then. I was basically fully recovered now, mild hangover territory, but I could certainly still use an hour or two of relaxation. Maybe Tanya could call yesterday a vacation, but it had been pretty hard on us mere mortals.

Things would keep. If something big came up, they'd... still not interrupt me, because they thought I was incapacitated by pain. But I'd sent Tanya to Taylor, she'd... Wait, how the hell did I think that was a good idea?

Buoyed by sudden adrenaline, I rushed over to my phone, anxiously tapping the screen as it booted up. A couple questions about the meeting from Brian, an acknowledgment from Taylor last night, and... that was it. That meant everything was going well, right? I called Taylor.

"Hello? Lisa? I thought you were down for the count."

"Wasn't as bad as I'd thought," I hastily got out. "What's up on your end?"

There was a worrying delay. I heard some shouting in the background. I scrambled for my gun just in case, phone still held to my ear.

"Oh, not much. I'm working on cleanup. Some old pickup trucks don't have chips, so you just need to clear out the glass--"

"And Tanya?" I interrupted, pausing my dubious effort to check the magazine with one hand.

"Oh, I gave her a laptop earlier. Seems to have kept her happy. The men are helping out. She wanted to talk to you when you were up, though."

I let out an explosive breath and put down the gun.

"Oh. Good."

I was... almost certain she couldn't hurt anyone but Notarin over the internet, at least.

"... What did you think we'd gotten up to?"

"... Oh, nothing in particular."

"Fine. Should I hand you off to Tanya, then?"

"Er, no. Probably better we speak first. Come to my place?"

"Sure."

"You knew? For how long?"

Taylor shied back towards her side of the couch, suddenly tense. I rolled my eyes and scooted over, wrapping an arm around her waist. I gave her a moment to calm down before continuing softly.

"Immediately. I'm probably the strongest Thinker in the state. You couldn't really have thought I didn't know?"

She had thought that, actually, but I thought it might do her some good to draw her attention to how dumb that was. Because Taylor wasn't dumb and she really needed to confront the reasons she kept doing dumb things. Of course, Taylor hadn't had great experiences with people saying that sort of thing. I'd have to be careful not to push too hard.

"Well, I didn't know how your power worked at first, and afterward you never did anything about it. You do occasionally miss things."

"Not something on this level. I sussed out which of Coil's mercenaries would turn coat right under his nose, with only a minute or two of conversation in most cases."

"... Good point. Why didn't you do anything?"

"You wanted to take out Coil. I was rooting for you the whole way."

"I wanted to take out Coil and the Undersiders."

"Sure, that was the plan at first… Would you have done that?"

She briefly looked conflicted, but she'd already made the choice.

"No, I guess not. You were that confident I'd like you guys? Rachel attacked me the first time we met. I still don't like Alec."

"I don't like Alec. Sell him out if you want, but I suspect you don't actually want to."

She rolled her eyes at me but didn't object.

"You need to be more careful. Can you imagine if you tried that on the Empire? You definitely wouldn't have liked them."

"They don't have you."

"No one else is looking out for that sort of thing here because we have me. I'm certain Coil knew, too. He just didn't care because he was already playing both sides." Actually, he'd been OK with it because I'd promised she wouldn't go through with it, which he'd doubtless confirmed through extensive torture. But no reason to drag down the mood, right? "You'd have gotten caught and Hookwolf would have shredded you."

She sighed, finally relaxing.

"Yeah, you're probably right... So, what now?"

"Nothing. I just wanted to make sure you weren't about to do anything... rash. Tanya can never hear a single whisper about this, you understand? She'd kill you over it just as fast. And if you did give the heroes information on her, what do you think they'd do with it?"

"They'd..." She sighed. "I want to say they'd get her help, but I guess I know better. They'd use it to attack, and, worse, they'd bungle it. It'd be a bloodbath."

I nodded and gave her a little squeeze. Discovering Alexandria and Shadow Stalker's identities had done a number on her faith in the 'good guys.' If it had just been that I'd say she was over-correcting, but there was a lot of other stuff she hadn't been taking into account before. Her predictions were much more accurate now, anyway.

"Besides," I said, "it'd be better if we presented a united front. How embarrassing would it be if we ran into each other in the enemy's camp?"

She'd been looking away, but now her head snapped back towards me.

"What? You just--"

"Not the heroes. A hero."

She paused for a moment to consider.

"Miss Militia. You think she'd be willing to work with us for Tanya's sake. Who is betraying whom here, exactly?"

"Mostly her betraying the Protectorate, I think, though that's not really a productive way to think about it. Both sides will definitely be better off for it, but neither would see it that way if they found out. Call it a diplomatic backchannel."

She nodded. "OK, I'm in." She paused for a moment. "You said Tanya would kill over that sort of thing. Why..."

I gave her a slightly desperate smile. Why am I willing to do something suicidal? Because I know things you don't. Why are you willing to do it, Taylor?

"Why risk it? Because not doing it is also a risk. If they do something to set Tanya off, really set her off, she'll kill the whole department and turn the PRT HQ into rubble. You don't want to know how close we've already come to that. That sort of thing can't go unanswered. They might abandon the city if we're lucky, turn Brockton Bay into a quarantine site like Gary, Indiana or Gallup, New Mexico. They're halfway to condemning it already. Oh, and they'd probably send us a few cruise missiles as a parting gift."

"That's if we're lucky?"

"If we're unlucky they'll send in the big guns to restore order, and they know we're associated. Watchdog to track us down and the Triumvirate to bring us in. Maybe kill orders, maybe just Birdcage sentences. I'm not... completely certain we'd lose, but winning would bring its own complications."

"I said we shouldn't associate with hero killers."

"Yeah... Do you regret it?"

She frowned.

"No. She needs our help. We just need to stop that from happening." She shook her head. "You can ask me again on the Birdcage transport, though."

We sat in comfortable silence for a minute.

"Not certain we'd lose? To the Triumvirate?"

"It's... difficult to bet against Tanya. A lot of people have and all of them are dead. Would you have guessed she'd beat the Nine? Not just beat them, but make them look like a joke? Her world doesn't have anything like the Triumvirate, of course, but no one in our world has anything like her experience. That wouldn't be enough on its own, not in a straight fight, but... I think you're right she's been holding back."

I paused to give Taylor a chance to break in. She stayed quiet.

"Remember that apartment building she thought she could blow through in a single shot? Legend could do that. Maybe Purity too. Not many more names on that list. And that was just the level of power the situation called for. We don't know how much more she might still have been holding in reserve. And magic doesn't follow the same rules as powers. She might have access to some obscure effect that just bypasses power-based defenses, like how Masters can bypass hers."

"If she had that, why--"

"If she's got an effect like that, she hasn't figured it out yet. I imagine investigating that sort of question is going to be one of her priorities in the near future. As for the additional power... there's a cost. No clue what, but she's very reluctant to use it. She took Siberian very seriously as a threat or she wouldn't even have considered it. Still, she'd break it out for the Triumvirate."

"... Who we don't actually want dead, right? We're on the same page on that?"

I rolled my eyes at her.

"Yes, Taylor. Better them than us, but much better neither. They're the backbone of the Endbringer defense and Tanya has absolutely no intention of taking over that role." I continued before Taylor could object. "She sees the fights as pointless. No upside and no possibility of victory. The Simurgh especially, since why would she take a fight she'd lose when she can see the outcome beforehand? You can try to argue with her about it, but I don't think you'll get anywhere. Don't even mention it to her men, no matter what."

Taylor sighed.

"I guess I'll try that, then."

I gave her a moment.

"Well, we know what we want. How do we get it? I had this idea about..."

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TorontoTowers

Dec 1, 2022

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2.4

-- Lisa Wilbourne Tattletale --

I spent a couple minutes trying to work out a way to rescue my plan to slack off for a while but ultimately had to admit defeat. Mainly because I really didn't want to give Taylor the idea she could bother me during a migraine because I might just be malingering. Time to face the music.

Well, not just yet. I grabbed a shower first, carefully not giving Taylor the impression it was because I'd touched her. That'd rather defeat the point of the gesture. It's not like it was anything about her in partic-- OK, that's a lie. I get you have bug powers, Taylor, but that doesn't mean you need to cover yourself in them! But what I meant was that it's hardly just her. My family had never been big on physical affection -- really, on affection in general, but that was a different issue -- and my power had made it a thousand times worse. Even clamping down on it as hard as I could, I knew it well enough that just feeling it chomping at the bit was enough to make me feel dirty.

I dried off and put together a casual outfit. I'd already done that this morning, but I could hardly put the same clothes back on. I did make myself throw them in the hamper, though. You know, I'd read a lot of discussion about superpowers, but all the extra laundry was an underrated downside. Not that I do my own laundry. Almost enough to make me feel bad for the heroes, who have to put up with all the same power side effects without even being rich.

I packed a bag with my costume and gun and called out to Taylor and we made our way out the back. I stopped and groaned.

"Bicycles? Really?"

"What were you expecting? Even if we had new cars brought in, the roads are clogged with all the dead ones."

OK, that was a pretty good point. Still...

"Motorcycles, maybe? It's too hot for exercise. Or Tanya could just come here instead."

"You need the cardio. You can ask Tanya if you want, but I think she'd agree--"

"OK! We'll ride! No need to say anything about this to Tanya, right?"

"Ah, Lisa. You're early."

Tanya was in fact sitting with a laptop, absorbed. I hesitated a little, but my curiosity got the better of me. I made my way behind her as I responded.

"There's variance. I got off especially lightly this time."

She was on a page discussing the pros and cons of incorporating in various states and nations. Huh. Well, I should have guessed she was being literal about that, even without my power. Did she really think they'd let her get away with that? Though they might, honestly. I'd strongly recommend it. There were much less agreeable ways she could be spending her time.

I flicked my eyes across the very full tab bar, letting out a trickle of my power to fill in the gaps. Bunch of PHO tabs: the locals, parahuman healing, Medhall, Marquis, the Birdcage, Dragon, the Guild, the Meisters, Gesellschaft, the Yàngbǎn, the Simurgh, Leviathan, Japan. Er, no, Japan then Leviathan. Interesting. About what I expected, otherwise. Some news articles, mainly on Echidna and Dauntless, though there was one about the Nine's attack. A list of outstanding bounties. A comparison of different language learning programs. FAA rules for fliers. How very Tanya. A few more pages on parahuman healing including some academic papers, which seemed odd until I noticed one was discussing the impossibility of resurrection. Oh. More papers on other topics in parahuman science. Several pages on history, all post Scion.

That made me pause. Well, there was no indication she had specific knowledge about Bet's future and Aleph hadn't had capes until we made contact. Maybe most worlds don't have capes, so the Aleph course of history is more standard, in some sense. But her world isn't standard, either; it had already diverged from shared history of Bet and Aleph and would presumably diverge further as magical science developed. Not sure what to make of that. Was her future knowledge from yet another world, somehow? I let up on my power a bit more.

Likely. Not surprised by existence of other worlds. No indication of ongoing precognition. Dimensional travel known possible; time travel unconfirmed. Magic can replicate some power effects.

Right, it wasn't necessarily future knowledge given that worlds could apparently run on different timescales. It fit.

Well, how would that work? Did she figure out a spell to scry on other dimensions? Somehow transfer knowledge from her dimensional alternate? She clearly wasn't actually from a modern Germany, given the chronic malnutrition. And I thought she'd have left that world had she been able to, at least before getting attached to her people. If--

"Good to hear," she interrupted my thoughts. She'd been willing to let me read over her shoulder for a bit, but I'd apparently been taking too long. "We need to pick up some things. Are you ready?"

Pick up what things, Tanya? No way had the bounties cleared yet. A pit formed in my stomach.

"You don't want to debrief, first?"

"We'll have to handle that later. I've got a busy day planned."

"... I'll need to change into my costume. Don't forget your mask."

She was just lounging in her uniform without it. That's not how you maintain a secret identity, but that wasn't a battle I wanted to pick.

"What?" She glanced back at me, evidently confused. "Why would you need to change into your costume? That'd just attract attention."

Well, looked like this battle was picking me.

"You really can't do cape stuff out of costume. You might get away with it a few times, especially with a subtle power like mine, but sooner or later someone will figure it out. And once you're outed, that never goes away. I don't have any family I care to protect, but I'd like to be able to go shopping without getting harassed."

She was frowning at me.

"... So you do go shopping out of costume, then?"

Yes? Obviously? Why would...

"Oh! Yes. You'll need to change, in that case. Not a lot of girls running around in uniform."

She grimaced but nodded, putting the laptop away and disappearing upstairs. I went looking for Taylor, who hadn't made it far. She was back to helping with cleanup, collecting broken cellphones while pretending to follow a bug arrow.

"Hey, Taylor. Shopping with me and Tanya?"

She stopped and looked over at me.

"Really? Your playbook is kind of limited, isn't it?"

I rolled my eyes.

"Her idea. She does need stuff."

"Well, OK. Give me a minute to finish up. Are you going to invite the others?"

"Better not. Brian might be alright, but it'd take forever to get here from his place, and we're apparently on a schedule. You realize you'll have to... introduce yourself?"

"Already did. Last night."

Called it.

I left her to it and went back inside just as Tanya came downstairs. On the plus side, she'd scrounged up an outfit that fit. Well, kind of. She wouldn't trip over the pant legs, at least. On the minus side, she had her rifle on her back and her knife at her waist.

"Tanya, you can't take all that."

"Why not? Plenty of people are armed around here."

"Around here. We're going to the Boardwalk. People there came off pretty much unscathed and they'll look askance at a girl carrying a rifle taller than she is." Actually, they'd look askance at that here, too. They just knew better than to ask questions. "Unless you want to bring the men? Maybe you can get away with it if it looks like a family thing."

She grimaced and shook her head. Huh. Worth using my power on? Probably not. If I investigated everything Tanya did that didn't make sense, I'd have another migraine by lunch.

She reluctantly set the rifle down and came towards me.

"Knife too. You took it off Jack very publicly."

She paused but ultimately did unfasten and drop the sheath. She even made it most of the way to the door before grinding to a halt. I watched in fascination. She reached into a pocket, presumably reassuring herself that she had her orb. Orbs? Yeah, she'd have taken all three. She took a deep breath and almost started walking again, but she couldn't quite manage it. She glanced over at where she left the rifle.

It was like watching a bug bounce off a window, reorient, and bounce right back off it again. Like the problem was unimaginable. Not surprising, unimaginable. She lacked the conceptual vocabulary to even articulate what was happening to her, let alone explain it. I wondered how long she'd be stuck like this if I left her to it. Well, not too long, probably. This was an especially stark case, but things like this must happen to her all the time. She'd push through on willpower or rationalize doing it another way, and she was only getting stuck now because the logic was very clear and she really didn't want to follow it.

But I really shouldn't wait around. The solution she'd settle on was essentially unpredictable. She'd decide Cherie was controlling her from beyond the grave before she came anywhere near the truth. She'd already decided Cherie had been following her around basically since she arrived, after all. And wasn't that something? Not because it was dumb as hell -- it was, but that wasn't what made it remarkable -- but because it implied that she realizes she has emotions and that they're in turmoil. Well, 'realizes' implies she was correct. Not that she doesn't have emotions, obviously, but I suspect she thinks the word means something else. Payout matrices, maybe? Or were those for multiple people? I really needed to brush up on my Economics.

And it implied not just that she thought she had tumultuous emotions but that she couldn't figure out why. Or maybe she just didn't want to admit that that was compromising her decisions? Right, she's insecure about her men's loyalty and probably believes they'd leave her if they thought she'd lost her touch. Sounds right. A drop of my power agreed.

I walked over to her, rummaging in my bag. Was she breathing too quickly? OK, worse than I'd realized. Fuck. A panic attack was the last thing we needed. How long had it been since she last went out without a weapon? Before the war? Actually, it might have been her time as a 'test pilot.' Her eyes snapped to me as I got close, which was good and bad. Good that she was paying attention to her surroundings at all, bad that I'd actually surprised her. She normally kept close track of exactly where everyone was around her. It'd be creepy, but Taylor did it better. Taylor wasn't also keeping track of all the most efficient ways to murder any or all of those people on an instant's notice, though.

I finally found my pistol and pulled it out, offering her the handle. She snatched it, immediately relaxing. Really? Like you weren't the most dangerous person in the state with just the orb? You can't feel comfortable unless you can efficiently kill at range, too? I sighed. I knew it didn't work that way. Actually, she'd probably be thinking that if she were a smidge more self aware. Shit! Had I spent so long trying to understand how she thinks that it rubbed off on me? Actually, that might explain some things about her men...

"Good thinking," she said. A little late, but her voice was perfectly even. "If there's trouble, I should be able to make better use of this than you."

Yeah, that was just obviously true. Not even going to pretend to be offended.

Though I did notice some clumsiness as she popped the magazine and checked the witness holes. Not actual clumsiness, but I'd never previously seen her handle a weapon with anything less than perfect fluidity. Well, that's just practice, right? She's never held a modern pistol before. She seemed to have a good idea how they worked, though, not that WWI pistols were that different. Satisfied, she reinserted the magazine and checked the chamber.

"Your spare magazine?" she asked, looking down the sights. The barrel was down and her finger was off the trigger.

"I don't have one."

She glanced at me.

"You want to fiddle with loose rounds in a firefight? Get one. Get three."

I didn't carry loose rounds, either, but I doubted she'd appreciate the correction. I nodded instead.

"Got a holster, at least?"

She was trying and failing to fit the gun in a pocket.

"No. You realize that's an illegal weapon, right? Filed serial number, unplugged magazine. You also don't have a carry license and aren't nearly old enough to get one. Keep it concealed unless you need it."

"... Right." She slipped it into her waistband, ensuring her too-big shirt would cover it. "Shouldn't that apply to the rifle, too?"

"It does. And it's one of the reasons that could have been a problem when we got to the part of the city where the law might actually be enforced."

She nodded.

"Well, let's go. I have other things planned for today."

I directed her toward the bike rack. Taylor was already there. Skitter had apparently let everyone go for an early lunch. Fortunate timing, that.

Tanya paused, looking at Taylor.

"You're coming?"

"I was planning on it. Is that an issue?"

"... No, I suppose not."

Taylor looked at me and I shrugged. Clearly not worth using my power.

Taylor and I grabbed bikes at random while Tanya looked through them more carefully. Well, fair enough. She wouldn't be able to reach the pedals on most of these. All of them, actually, except-- I bit my lip. Tanya realized it at the same time. Her expression! I bit my lip harder.

Then her eyes flicked to me and went dead. Her face fell slack. She just looked at me. I'd called her a reptile the day we met, hadn't I? Maybe I'd been too hasty to dismiss that thought. Something cold and predatory and not at all human. I swallowed and felt my palms start to sweat. I tried to cast my eyes down, but I couldn't bring myself to look away. She held me there, pinned by that glassy stare, for a couple long seconds.

Then she got on her sparkly pink bike, tore the tassels off the handlebars, and we set out.

Tanya scowled at the rack of dresses and then turned that scowl on me.

"What would you recommend?

OK, what the fuck was this?

Tanya hates dresses.

Thanks, Power, never could have worked that one out on my own. I glanced at Taylor and she shrugged. That was always going to be a long shot, I guess.

"... What are you going for?"

"You know. Something infantilizing. Cute. Make me seem harmless."

... Did she think a dress could do that? Was this some sort of fucked up loyalty test?

Yes. No.

OK...

"... For what occasion?"

She blinked, scowl faltering.

"Oh, didn't I say? The PRT hasn't made any official statement on us yet. Well, they've spoken on the Dauntless situation, but they didn't identify us. And now they probably won't say anything until they've confirmed the bounties. I thought we might introduce ourselves to the public on our terms."

"You want to fight the PRT on PR?" Taylor asked. "That's... very bold."

"We're in a good position. The first story a person hears about an event always has the biggest impact. And the facts look pretty good on their own; we shouldn't have to spin things too much. And when the PRT is forced to admit we did in fact effectively end the Slaughterhouse Nine, that'll drown out whatever else they decide to say."

"That... might actually work," I admitted. "But why the dress?"

"For the TV interview, of course."

Tanya, feeling humiliated and vulnerable while some media jackass asked probing questions about her past? That was a recipe for murder on live TV, not a PR coup!

"... Capes are expected to give interviews in costume. It would be inappropriate to appear in something else. And you don't want to look entirely harmless if you want to convince the world of your accomplishments."

"Oh." She expelled a breath, trying to hide how relieved she was. "Let's move on, then.

Where did that even come from? She's not exactly fashion-conscious.

Past experience.

...

You know, Tanya might not really believe Imperials are superhumanly brave, but I'm starting to.

Edit: Cleaned up some awkward phrasing and fixed a typo. No substantive changes

Last edited: Dec 3, 2022

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TorontoTowers

Dec 8, 2022

#1,552

2.5

-- Taylor Hebert Skitter --

I'd joked about Lisa recycling material, but this shopping trip really bore little resemblance to our first outing so long-- two months ago. I double checked the dates, disbelieving. Little less, actually. What the hell? The last week had felt like two months. Three, maybe. A week ago, my whole life had revolved around taking Coil down. It had felt impossible, sometimes, though I hadn't let that stop me. Four days ago, I'd thought my moment had arrived, a disaster he'd failed to anticipate arising from his own lair. But I'd missed it! He'd already slipped away by the time we'd arrived, but Echidna hadn't.

That had been a desperate, confused mess. I'm used to chaotic fights. Hell, I prefer chaotic fights. The harder it is to keep track of everything going on, the better, because I don't lose track. Still. A cavalcade of new capes coming in with unknown powers? Their clones, with unpredictable variations? Evil Eidolon? I hadn't felt in control at any point in the whole fight.

I'd killed. Lisa. Brian. Fucking Sophia. Myself. More. Many more. I'd always understood that my power could be dangerous. Even before I started, when I'd hated it, I'd known it could kill. I hadn't really gotten it, though, how fragile a person is, until I'd experienced it for myself. Lisa had said--

"Let's stop for lunch," Tanya instructed. She gestured at a small sushi restaurant. "This place looks good."

Lisa rolled her eyes at Tanya's back as she strode off, then smiled at me.

"Well, I guess we have our orders."

We followed her.

I hadn't even had time to think through everything that had happened in the last week. It hadn't slowed down from there.

But, getting back to the point, the differences were striking. Despite facing right onto the bay, the Boardwalk had been spared the worst of Leviathan's attentions. There were still signs. Most of the rubble had been cleared away, but the gaps were still obvious, valleys carved into an urban mountain range. The storm drain system had been thoroughly wrecked all through the city, dotting the cityscape with stagnant ponds. The people had changed, too. Not so wary nor so heavily armed as in the harder hit sections of the city, but that was the wrong baseline. The change relative to even the worst neighborhoods before Leviathan was unmistakable.

And no part of the city had been spared Shatterbird's attentions. I'd been intimidated, a little, shopping at stores my family could never have afforded. Now, lights shattered and storefront displays transformed into gaping cavities, they more closely resembled dark urban caves. Most of the bodies had been cleared away, but not all. We'd passed a bar -- the sort with shelves and shelves of proudly displayed bottles -- that had evidently been quite popular. I'd thought I was going to throw up, and Lisa hadn't looked much better. Tanya had spared it a single incurious glance.

But Brocktonites are tough. The attack had been awful, but that was yesterday. There was business to do today. Samples had been moved out front into natural light, spilling out onto the boardwalk proper in some cases. Some enterprising individuals had apparently made trips out of the city -- no easy task, from here -- to purchase walkie-talkies, radios, satellite phones, and laptops, and were now reselling them at absurd markups. I didn't doubt they'd sell out, anyway.

And, as I was experiencing, there were even a few open restaurants. It felt more than a little extravagant while large portions of the city scrabbled over shipments of rice and beans, but here they were nonetheless. How were they getting ingredients? Well, Brockton Bay's fishing industry, on its last legs before Leviathan, had seen something of a resurgence as other foods had gotten harder to come by. No clue if the native fish are appropriate for sushi, but it seemed more plausible than getting it shipped in.

Tanya had secured us a table with some difficulty. The waitress, and there was only one, didn't seem to speak much English, and she kept glancing at Lisa and me as though expecting us to take the lead. But there were only so many reasons for a gaggle of teenagers to enter a restaurant and Tanya ultimately got the point across.

Tanya and her struggles to be taken seriously had been a bit of a theme today. It was one thing in costume, with her tailored uniform, worn rifle, stained bayonet, and casual power use. She might not look like an adult, but she certainly looked dangerous. Dressed casually? Cute kid. Bit skinny. Striking eyes. Not remotely scary. And she knew it full well. Didn't stop her frustration from slowly mounting each time she was ignored or talked over.

Ironically, it was Lisa who didn't seem to get it. The first time a shop assistant had asked her what clothes to get Tanya, she'd just stared back in disbelief, like she couldn't accept that such an idiot could exist. I was starting to worry about her. The things she said about Tanya and the way she acted around her were drifting further away from 'traumatized child' and closer toward 'Nyarlathotep in a skin suit.' And while I couldn't be certain she was wrong -- hard to second guess her when she'd apparently had me figured out in less than a minute -- it was concerning that she was losing track of how things looked to everyone else.

"She doesn't speak English?" Tanya asked, settling down and flicking her eyes over the menu. "The city has a sizable Japanese population, but I don't see any reason to limit the customer base like that."

Lisa answered, "You might be surprised by some places in former ABB territory. But on the Boardwalk? Most likely the normal server just isn't available for one reason or another."

"Hmm. We're OK to speak freely, then?"

"Should be. Maybe avoid any recognizable names."

"Normal people do gossip about capes," I pointed out.

"Fair," Lisa shrugged. "Uh, can we talk about the meeting later? In private?"

Tanya didn't even glance up.

"Of course. I hadn't expected otherwise."

Lisa shot me an apologetic look, mouthing 'later.'

I had to admit that stoked my curiosity. I could be wrong, but it sure seemed like she'd gone to that meeting wary of Tanya and left terrified. But I'd trust Lisa's judgment. For now, at least.

The waitress came over and Tanya immediately pointed at her menu. When she nodded and started to move on, Tanya pointed to something else, then a third. Did she even know what the portions would be like?

"Hungry?" I questioned, pointing out my own order.

She grunted.

"The Empire is a great nation, but its maritime tradition leaves something to be desired. Seafood was hard to come by even before the war."

Fair enough.

"Are we done shopping?" I asked. "I think we've gotten you all the necessities."

"Just about. We'll stop by a bike shop before heading back."

Ah, of course.

There was a part of me -- the part where half-understood fragments of Mom's philosophy had best taken root -- that was uncomfortable with Tanya's disdain for the trappings of femininity. Then again, Mom had had some things to say about getting taken seriously as a woman in the workplace, too. In the nineties, not the twenties. In academia, not the military. And she had actually been an adult. If Tanya had wanted respect in that environment and all the people she saw did get respect were conspicuously masculine, it was easy to see what conclusion she'd draw.

More perniciously, she might interpret invitations to express her femininity as attempts at sabotage; Lisa had mumbled something about paranoia compensating for an inability to gauge others' intentions. (It was one source of paranoia among many, apparently.) Probably best I leave it, then, at least until I've earned some trust.

The server came over with our food. Tanya had ordered three types of nigiri, apparently.

"Careful," I warned. "They sometimes put wasabi between the fish and the rice. It can be pretty spicy."

She snorted.

"The rations on the Rhine were known to kill the weak of constitution. I had a man get a medical discharge for food poisoning. An A-rank mage, brought low by our own cooks! I can handle a little spice."

She picked up a piece with her hand rather than embarrass herself with the chopsticks. She dipped it in the soy sauce -- upside down, for some reason -- and popped it in her mouth. Her eyes did widen briefly, but, true to her word, she quickly adapted to--

"There's a spell for handling spicy food?" Lisa blurted, exasperated.

Oh.

Tanya swallowed, not rushing. She gave Lisa a level look.

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

A solid eight out of ten. Nine, if not for the slightest hint of red in her cheeks. A valiant effort but clearly futile, given her audience. It was best just to let Lisa get her digs in in these sorts of situations. She really couldn't help herself -- she needed to win these games -- but she wouldn't get mean about it if you let her have it. We all have our--

"Right," Lisa muttered, subdued.

She looked down and started eating without another word. Fuck! I stared at her in disbelief. Glory Girl, who could tear her limb from limb? Panacea, who could start a plague at will? Hookwolf, the human blender? Alexandria, who no one in the world could have stopped had she chosen to do anything at all to her, or all of us, or the entire city? Lisa had mouthed off to all of them. She hadn't hesitated and she hadn't regretted it. I had no doubt she'd have talked back to Leviathan if he'd said anything to talk back to.

I looked at Tanya, searching for clues. She'd already forgotten the exchange, as far as I could tell. Had she even been angry? Now she was concentrating on her food, visibly pleased. What the hell was going on? I nearly demanded an explanation, but... I did trust Lisa. If she felt this was the right move -- and she obviously did feel very strongly -- I didn't want to get in her way. I would be getting my explanation, though, when we next had some time alone.

Noting with a start how far behind I was falling -- Tanya eats fast -- I grabbed my own chopsticks. Then I put them right back down, stomach rebelling, as a breeze brought in a truly horrific stench. I'd noticed the men on body collection as soon as they'd entered my range, given all the bugs they'd brought with them, but I'd been pretty successfully ignoring them until now. It wasn't as bad as the bar, but I hadn't been trying to eat then. Lisa had stopped, too.

"I think I'm done," she said.

"What?" Tanya asked, only then slowing in her attempt to inhale her meal.

Her eyes flicked between Lisa and me, confused for a couple moments before finally noticing.

"Oh, don't be such a baby. They've barely started to stink. Eat when you get the chance, or you'll regret it later."

Suiting action to words, she got right back to it.

"They were people," I pointed out, trying not to sound angry.

"Yeah?" she half asked, apparently a little baffled why I'd felt the need to point that out. "Only human corpses smell like that."

... She wasn't joking.

I almost corrected her, but that... wouldn't help. If she had misunderstood, it wasn't because she was dumb and needed it spelled out. That someone might get upset about a stranger's life ending for its own sake just wasn't a serious possibility in her mind. Who the hell raises a child like that? Well, that was an easy question to answer: the Imperial military.

Making her understand something like that wouldn't be easy. If I tried, I'd probably accomplish nothing but burning my credibility in her eyes. Which... actually made total sense. I could explain things like that to Rachel now, but a couple days after we'd met? When I hadn't really understood her? Hadn't built trust? With... everything else that had been on my mind, I'd lost the plot. She really was much better at hiding her issues, to be fair.

Well, understanding came first. Fortunately, it shouldn't be too hard to get her talking.

"How do you handle it? The way you talk, it must have been even worse on the Front."

She shrugged.

"You get used to it. You get hungry. Maybe you miss a meal or two and lose another, but starving yourself isn't easy. I'd hope anyone with the willpower to manage that would be smart enough not to try, though I suppose I should know better. Regardless, I've never seen it happen. Of course, while a few missed meals won't kill you outright, the enemy might if you're not at your best. Eat."

What enemy, exactly? It was like she just forgot sometimes that the war was worlds away. But I was understanding, not explaining. I took a bite. The smell had mostly dissipated, anyway.

"Come on, that's it? I wanted a war story."

She raised her eyebrows.

"You sure about that? Wouldn't want to put you off your lunch."

"Actually, I'd like to hear about that too," Lisa offered. "If you don't mind."

I nodded in agreement.

She leaned back and regarded us.

"Very well. Let me tell you about the Rhine."

She paused to collect her thoughts, eyes going distant.

"You'll come in by train. The Empire is surrounded by jealous neighbors and our defensive doctrine, the internal lines strategy, demands excellent rail infrastructure from one border to the other. War is expensive, understand. Ruinously so. Earlier generations were spared war on this scale because they simply couldn't afford it. So the trains run around the clock, stuffed to the brim with ammunition, guns, rations, uniforms, lumber, shovels, canteens, and a hundred other things, all just to replace what got used up. Oh, and they've each got some passenger cars, too, to replace the men that got used up."

She gave me a smile like she was sharing a joke.

"Much emptier on the way back, of course. All that payment and the purchases wouldn't fill a single train car. But you're not going back. Ever, probably, though maybe you haven't realized that yet."

"The first thing you'll notice is the smell. You wouldn't believe how it travels. Slaughterhouses are normally banned within city limits, but the Rhine Front is a slaughterhouse on the scale of a nation encompassing dozens of cities. And all the meat just left out to rot. But really, the smell's not so bad. It's foul, but it's one note, at least a distance, and you'll stop noticing it before too long."

"Next is the artillery. Just the big guns at first, a muted rumble. You might even think it's thunder, except that it never stops, and that it only gets louder as you approach. Once you're in the thick of it you'll realize there's nothing like it, nothing at all. But let's not get ahead of ourselves."

"Soon enough you'll start passing trenches. You might think you're close, now, but you're not. Defense in depth. Line after line, each kilometers long. And if you're smart you'll realize there'll be as many on the other side, where their logistics is easy and ours is hard, and you'll start to understand what victory would cost. I wonder if you can still see the scars on this world, so long after your Great War? I doubt it. The rearmost lines are well constructed and tidy. That impression won't last."

"You'll probably see your first body while you're still a ways away. Or a part of one, anyway. Artillery can scatter a person over a remarkable distance. They'll get more common as you close in. There are huge sections of the Front where there's no direction you can look without seeing the pieces of a couple dozen men littering the ground. Though of course you shouldn't look. Sticking your head up over the trench lip is a good way to join them."

I was spellbound. Not by the description itself -- I'd seen my share of bodies myself -- but by the way she spoke about it. There wasn't any harshness in her voice, but it wasn't dead either. She wasn't trying to intimidate me -- she hardly seemed to realize I was there. She was reminiscing. Telling me about a part of her childhood like I might talk about a rare trip to Boston with Mom. I'd probably sound more upset about that, to be honest.

"Other places they're so thick you'll struggle to walk without stepping on someone, though you'll give up trying before long. All sorts of people, corpses of every age from minutes to months, all mixed together and around without a care. A hand sticking up out of the mud like the rest of the person might be just under the surface, reaching up for help. A tuft of dirt-caked hair fuzzing a trench wall, where it had been repaired with whatever was on hand. Artillery craters turned into stagnant little ponds full of bobbing bodies. And let me tell you, you'll notice the smell again when you get near those."

"It'll affect you, at first. You'll wonder about them, who they were, what they could have done differently. I found half a torso with a Naval wound medal my second day. Never worked out how the poor bastard managed to die hundreds of kilometers from any ship. But you'll have bigger concerns. The artillery is a constant irregular pounding. Sometimes slow, sometimes fast, but it never stops. And even the idiots in your cohort will have seen the bodies and realized what it means by now. It wears on you."

"I don't know if it's better or worse for mages, because a mage can stop an artillery shell... if you're ready for it when it comes, which could be any moment of the day or night. And if you're willing to draw ten times the fire to your position while you fly away. There's very little they could hit that's worth more than a mage, but the people you leave behind might disagree. And all that? It's just backdrop. You'll have your own responsibilities. All those corpses don't make themselves. There's only so much you can focus on."

"What I'm getting at is this: if you ask a man on his third day on the Rhine what he hates most about it, he might say the lack of respect paid to the dead. He might say the ever present threat of random and meaningless death. He might even say the enemy. Rookies spout all sorts of nonsense."

She shook her head with a small smile and met my eyes, returned to the present.

"Ask him again on day thirty, if he makes it, and he'll tell you it's the mud. Guaranteed."

We ruminated on that for a bit, quietly finishing up.

"Do you... miss it?" Lisa asked.

That startled out a huff of laughter. She started to respond but paused. She frowned, humor draining away.

"Say one thing for the Rhine: it's not the Eastern Front."

And that was the end of that.

"Lisa said you had a full day planned? If we're done shopping, what's next on the agenda?"

"I'll have to leave by seven to make the interview, so--"

"What?" Lisa yelped. "You've already set it up? Today?"

"Yes? You weren't available this morning, so I spoke to some of Coil's people. It took some work, but we secured a nine o'clock spot on CBS at their New York studio."

Lisa had visibly paled by the time she finished, hands clenched on the table so they wouldn't tremble.

"I said not to make any big moves until we talked it over."

"We are talking it over."

"Just setting it up was a big move!" She took a deep breath, struggling to get a handle on her tone. "We need to call this off. Right now. Maybe the PRT hasn't heard about it yet."

"... How would the PRT hear about it? CBS is a private company, and they obviously wouldn't want to ruin their own interview."

"You don't get how important PR is to the PRT. They have people at CBS. And CBS would rather ruin your interview than every hero interview until the end of time."

"... Really? What happened to a free and independent press?"

"The last thirty years!" She worked to calm herself again with more success. "Look, I wouldn't have expected you to know about that. It's not public knowledge. That's why we need to talk things over. And it's not just that. We need time to prepare. And you can't go to New York. Legend is in New York."

Tanya tapped her fingers on the table, displeased.

"I have set an hour aside for preparation. And why does it matter where Legend is when he can get anywhere in seconds?"

"He can, but he doesn't. The Triumvirate only comes out when things get really bad. It's part of how they maintain the balance of power, incentivize not making things really bad. But that doesn't help if you go to him. And an hour? We need days. We need to go over everything." She shook her head. "No, we need a list of questions in advance. We need editorial control."

"I'm not a novice at this, you know. I've participated in propaganda shoots. I've presented research papers. I've addressed the general staff. I've stood for court martial twice. We need to get this done before the PRT get their act together and put out their own statement, and we need to scrupulously adhere to journalistic ethics to deny them easy avenues of attack."

"You're not getting anything you want if this turns into a cape fight at the studio! You need..."

They went back and forth for another ten minutes before settling on a course of action. I didn't know the first thing about any of it, so I kept my mouth shut, even as things got a bit heated. Dad had once told me a good compromise left no one happy, so this one must have been great.

Tanya canceled the CBS spot in favor of a small local station tomorrow. Their equipment would be wrecked, so we'd 'generously' let them use stuff we'd prepared. Hopefully, they'd discuss their plans for the interview in range of a backdoored mic, so we'd get the question list without having to ask. Even then, we'd spend four hours tomorrow morning prepping for any curve balls.

The interview would be broadcast 'live,' which apparently meant 'on a short delay' even in the normal course of events. (How the hell did Tanya know that?) That should enhance our credibility without much risk, as the local news hadn't had great viewership before Shatterbird destroyed every TV in the city. If it went well, it'd be syndicated later. If not, the equipment would mysteriously 'malfunction' and delete the footage.

It all sounded pretty good to me, for what that was worth.

"Fine, then," Tanya acceded. "That shifts the schedule around somewhat, but I think the next item is still good. Coil's people have figured out where the Chosen are holing up, and..."

Last edited: Dec 8, 2022

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TorontoTowers

Jan 8, 2023

#1,618

2.6

-- Lt. Col. Tanya von Degurechaff Argent --

"Argent, to see Mr. Meadows. I don't have an appointment, but I expect he'll want to see me anyway."

If he didn't at first, I'd be happy to provide incentives.

The 'doorman,' a tattooed thug with a rusty shotgun, gaped. I'd come down on the lair at full speed, stopping on a dime before the entrance less than a second after plunging through my camouflage formula at two hundred meters. I'd half expected to invite some panicked fire, but none had come. Oh well. I'd naturally been ready with an active barrier, and staring the fools down while their best efforts amounted to nothing might have helped set the right tone for this meeting. Well, maybe not -- didn't want to intimidate them too much, just yet -- but it would have been satisfying. Good discipline or awful discipline? The gormless staring certainly hinted at an answer. His finger was off the trigger, at least.

"... I'll pass that along," he finally got out, disappearing into the suborned Endbringer shelter.

I waited 'patiently,' affecting a studied disinterest in the milling toughs who had been hanging about the entrance. The men were watching for anything truly threatening. Realistically, there wasn't much in that category that could be safely deployed in a crowd, but I wasn't willing to discount stupidity from Nazis.

(Enemy mages in among the troops can be nightmarishly difficult to deal with, even given doctrine's cold-blooded sanction of moderate collateral damage in such instances. Low to the ground, moving fast, and exploiting defilade, targeting with either anti-air guns or machine gun emplacements is impractical, and mages are effectively immune to infantry armament, given realistic limits on coordination of fire in such scenarios.

Short of widespread bombardment of one's own position, the only practical counter is to deploy one's own mages, which could get messy to say the least. The textbook answer is actually to not counter them -- combat mages near the ground can't actually do as much damage as they can from altitude, and, more to the point, can't defend their artillery spotters, who are every commanders' top priority. Still, it was the right move on occasion, like our raid on the Dacian's HQ.

Of course, the Chosen did not have mage parity. Their only flier, Rune, wouldn't last a quarter second in a straight fight. This wouldn't go well for them should the situation devolve into open violence.)

Unfortunately, the cape that ultimately emerged was not Brad Meadows alias 'Hookwolf,' the leader of 'Fenrir's Chosen.' It was Victor, whose name I hadn't bothered to learn, the Thinker and skill thief. After my recent experiences with the PRT, I had less than no desire to deal with either of those things. Fortunately, the theft took upwards of a minute to spin up, and the Thinker power would just let him know I'm serious.

"Victor." I gave him a polite nod. "If I still see your face in ten seconds, I'll cave it in. Go back and get your boss."

He stared at me for a couple seconds. I didn't mind. It was his time to spend as he saw fit.

"The truce--"

"Four seconds," I reminded.

He retreated into the bunker, though I couldn't be sure how far he really went. Tattletale was confident his power required line of sight, but the fact I couldn't see him didn't necessarily mean he couldn't see me. She hadn't thought there was much risk. The fact that Miss Militia, for example, retained her proficiency in marksmanship implied he was substantially more limited than her conservative guesses indicated. I couldn't sense any magic from him, but I hadn't sensed any from Cherie, either.

I briefly regretted not finding a way to bring Skitter -- she'd wanted to come and I was already missing her tracking abilities -- but on balance I'd determined her capabilities didn't justify sacrificing so much mobility and firepower. Of course, she could have worked from the ground -- not everyone within three hundred meters of the lair was Chosen-affiliated, and I hadn't needed anything overt from her -- but the taboo against doing 'cape stuff' out of costume was strong.

I didn't necessarily dislike the custom. It's laudable to maintain separation between one's personal and work lives, and the last thing I wanted was to discourage this single glimmer of professionalism in my new employees. And there's something to be said for keeping to good habits even when they don't seem important. But doing the job comes first, right? And super villainy is not a field that rewards coasting or clock-watching. You need to move fast and break things if you want to establish yourself. Of course, you'd ultimately want to carve out a stable niche where--

I paused, reviewing that thought. What the fuck? Am I actually starting to take this nonsense seriously? Taylor refused to help because she couldn't do it dressed like a bug. And it's one thing for kids to play dress-up, but I'm here to meet a thirty-something man who insisted people call him Hookwolf. This world is insane, and I can't let myself forget that.

I let a bit of that contempt show on my face as the clown finally emerged from his hole. His full face wolf mask hid his expression, but he didn't seem intimidated. Just as well. Fenja, Menja, and Stormtiger filed out behind him. I started casting.

"Argent," he growled. "Threatening my people under truce--"

"The truce is over. The Nine are dead or fled."

He paused, but not for long. He nodded to himself.

"I'd like to hear that story. You want to talk? Come in."

...What? I'd been told he was prideful and crude, unstable and violent. This was practically friendly! Did he have a trap set up in the lair? Well, I wasn't about to enter it.

"I think we can talk right here, actually."

"Oh, don't be like that. This isn't the sort of conversation you want to have in public. Not that my people aren't loyal, you understand, but it doesn't pay to take stupid risks. Victor can sit it out if you're feeling untrusting."

"... What sort of conversation do you imagine we're having?"

That stopped him. A frisson of tension passed through the group. Fenja and Menja spread out, presumably so they'd have room to grow.

"I'd assumed you'd want to negotiate an alliance against the Pure and the rest of the filth," he said, voice harder but still calm. "You didn't seem too fond of Krieg at the meeting."

I grit my teeth. The fucking nerve. I smoothed my tone with some effort.

"An alliance? With you?"

If he heard the disgust I struggled to hide, he didn't show it.

"Who else? The Merchants? Vultures and rats, cowards who feed on misery. The heroes? They're ineffectual and corrupt, and you've already made your opinion clear on them. Faultline only cares about money and the Undersiders are irrelevant. And trust me, the snake is not your friend. My Chosen are the cream of the crop. Disciplined, experienced warriors ready to fight for the cause. In your time we would have sought glory on the battlefield, but in this debased age it's all we can do to keep up with internal enemies."

... What a fucking moron.

"'Sought glory on the battlefield?'" I repeated, bemused. Who can truly take offense to the words of a lunatic? "Someone has to be first over the trench lip, I suppose. And there are always pillboxes that need filling."

He glanced at Stormtiger, trying to hide his confusion.

"... Look, I can see how some of our imagery might seem tasteless to you." He'd apparently guessed that hadn't been a compliment and was now aiming for appeasement. "And Krieg took it too far, he has no right to wear that uniform. But believe me, it's meant with respect. Keeping the flame alive in spite of all opposition, as the Fuehrer himself did after Versailles."

Ah, and there the anger was again. I didn't even really like the Empire, but implying that the Nazi regime was a continuation of the Kaiserreich rather than its repudiation? I didn't think I owed my second homeland much on balance, but I surely owed it better than to let that pass. Fortunate I'd already been planning to kill him, I guess. I'd need to play this up.

"Keeping the flame alive? Through drug pushing and sex trafficking and random violence? I'd sooner see the dream of empire dead and forgotten than continued in your person! Fortunate, then, that you so clearly don't understand it! You confuse the primitive impulse to ethnic tribalism with nationalism, the kinship found in dedication to a shared ideal. Not Frankish or Saxon or Frisian, but German! Not German or Austrian or Croatian, but Imperial! My Empire grew by finding common cause with the Pole and the Czech while your 'fuehrer' resorted to suppression and purges, the vile tactics of the communist. You want to talk about debasement? Look in the mirror!"

I subtly glanced around as the impact of my words was felt. The rank and file were muttering and glaring, hands on weapons. The masked capes were hard to read, but odd bulges moved beneath Hookwolf's skin and the twins had grown a good twenty centimeters. Well, it was fine if they didn't appreciate my rhetoric. They weren't the target audience.

"What do you want, then?" Hookwolf snarled.

Not going to try to argue? Perhaps he realized his grasp on history wouldn't hold up under scrutiny, or maybe he'd prefer to make his point to his people after getting rid of me. Just as well.

"To deliver this ultimatum: leave the city or die. Abandon your holdings, harm no one, and never show your faces in Brockton Bay again. I'll give you till sundown."

It was a very generous offer, not that I expected them to appreciate that. Taylor had wanted me to insist they turn themselves in. Earning some credit with the PRT might have been nice, but then I'd have been obligated to chase down anyone who managed to run away, which would have been a major pain. And I didn't actually want them in custody, at least in this city. Gesellschaft would probably send a team to free them, which I was certain would become my problem one way or another.

My first instinct, on the other hand, was to open with bombardment of the surface targets then flood the bunker with carbon monoxide. It would have been quick and easy and posed virtually no risk given their capabilities. As a battle plan, it was near perfect. But, as Lisa had pointed out, it left something to be desired as a marketing ploy.

"This is our city. You think you can drive us out with words?" Stormtiger demanded.

I shrugged.

"No. I expect you to do something stupid and give me an excuse to kill you. Honestly, my preference was to simply have the lot of you executed as looters and bandits. Questions of jurisdiction aside, you certainly deserve it and your victims certainly deserve justice. But while you might be born warriors, I am a fundamentally peaceful person driven to violence by necessity. I'm offering you a chance to prove me wrong."

And it was a marketing ploy, of course. I meant to clear out all the other villains in the city sooner or later -- if nothing else, I had a strong interest in Brockton property values given all the real estate I'd taken from Coil -- but the main reason to prioritize the Chosen was the potential for brand confusion. Brocktonites had heard their whole lives about an 'Empire' with vague German stylings led by a 'Kaiser,' and inheriting those associations was the last thing I needed. And even past that, I couldn't expect sufficient historical nuance from the general public to distinguish between the Germany of the first and second world wars.

Destroying the remnants of E88 -- something the authorities hadn't managed in over a decade, somehow -- should provide a clear, costly signal of my opposition to Nazism. Something to set the record incontrovertibly straight in my interview tomorrow. But why just destroy them when I could make a spectacle of it? Confront them face-to-face, denounce their poisonous ideology, offer them a generous deal, and only kill them after they reject my mercy, all on 'camera?' Well, it was probably an order of magnitude riskier. Against a serious opponent that'd obviously be disqualifying, but I had these clowns so thoroughly outclassed it made sense to trade some advantage for a PR boost that could help me avoid more dangerous confrontations down the line.

Doing it this way should be more impressive to the public, who'd been conditioned to expect spectacle from their 'heroes,' and my apparent willingness to talk should signal reasonableness to the capes. And if they tried to kill me first, the 'rules' permitted me to respond in kind. Or at least it would be a smaller violation? I didn't really understand all the nuance there and hadn't been convinced I should care, Lisa's best efforts aside. Taylor had clearly been upset about the planned killings, but she'd managed to hold her tongue. Progress.

"Fuck that," Hookwolf barked. "A 'fundamentally peaceful person?' I think you're just a coward. Let's settle this, you and me."

Well, that was easy. I nodded.

"Acceptable. Fair warning: I don't go in for play-acting. If we fight, one of us dies."

I didn't bother fishing for guarantees they'd leave peacefully after I won because I'd actually rather they didn't. I wanted to lead off by killing their leader to maximize the chance they'd lash out and minimize the chance they'd do so effectively. It was fine if a couple escaped, but a dead enemy is a joy forever.

"Fine. No one interferes. No flying away."

I nodded again, dropping to the ground. I didn't release my flight spell, though.

He spent a couple seconds sizing me up. I rested my hands comfortably on my rifle but didn't bother pointing it. Finally, he moved, metal bursting from his skin. I released the spell I'd been charging since he came out. He spasmed, grating metal substituting for the screams he could no longer voice.

The modern mage shell is a marvel of engineering. Through an elaborate system of thresholds and filters managed by a powerful, highly-customizable daemon, it can protect against practically anything, so long as your magic holds out. But it's not some inexplicable parahuman power, appearing fully formed in a moment of need. It was designed to protect against practically anything, at the cost of some pretty serious trade-offs and an enormous number of research hours. The daemon alone is so complex and so fast it consumes nearly a third of the entire manna throughput of the spell. Why was it designed that way? Because it is the product of a decades-long arms race.

The first versions were little more than a knight's shield, a plane held out in front of a mage capable of stopping moving objects like bullets. Enter the artillery spell, which produces a blast wave capable of killing around that barrier. Once that was solved, a variant was designed to shove manna through the shell before producing the blast. It was much less efficient, but bypassing the shell more than made up for that. So a shell variant capable of blocking foreign manna was created. And so on.

Sonic attack spells? That's why the modern shell automatically dampens loud sounds. Spells that produce poison gas? An airtight shell has aerodynamic benefits, anyway. Optical formulae may have killed more mages than any other type of spell, given how difficult it proved to design a counter to a speed-of-light attack. (The trick, of course, is not to try to react to it but to embed the necessary optical properties in the shell at all times. Admittedly, I never quite understood how that could work without distorting the view through it.)

We're presently in a shell-dominant phase of magical combat, where there's no better long range anti-mage spell than the artillery formula, which is just the maximally efficient conversion of magic to energy. (For which I'm very grateful, as non-shell-dominant phases tend to have much lower skill ceilings.)

Optical formulae still have niche uses -- it's a lot easier to score hits, which may outweigh the inefficiency if you're incompetent, and they're nice for avoiding collateral damage, in the rare instances where that matters -- and mage blades go right through shells, with the caveat that you have to be close enough to push it through. Otherwise, most of the enormous variety of known attack spells are simply left to languish, strictly inferior to those options in modern magical combat, only still installed on our orbs in case the enemy tries to cut corners on their shells.

Of course, parahumans don't have shells.

One particularly vicious variant, arguably the first of the 'poison gas' class, simply dumps all its energy into superheating the bullet on impact, producing a cloud of extremely hot copper and lead vapor in the victim's face. Even with magical healing, the complications could be nasty. Nowadays it's mainly used for reheating coffee, but all the magical machinery for its use as a high-power attack spell is still there. And while a rifle bullet can only hold so much manna, the hundred kilograms plus of metal under Hookwolf's skin could hold as much as I could pour into it over the course of our three minute conversation.

I didn't make it quick. I certainly could have. I can fully charge an artillery spell in three seconds. Admittedly, throughput wasn't the bottleneck in this case; I'd have completely exhausted myself in thirty seconds if I'd pushed as hard as I could, and I'd obviously wanted to maintain a reserve. Drawing it out just let me be more efficient. Still, there was approximately thirty artillery spells' worth of manna in this spell, enough to kill any mage in the world ten times over.

But killing him in an instant would have been a waste of an opportunity. Instead, I stared, faking intense concentration as he thrashed, metal body taking on a cherry red glow. He'd actually produced more metal out of nowhere when he'd assumed his Changer form -- something magical theory judged to be utterly impossible, for what that was worth -- which did somewhat ameliorate my attack. Metal is a good conductor of heat, unfortunately, and I could simply scale up the output of my spell as necessary.

A minute later, I lazily dodged another vicious if poorly aimed swipe. As Tattletale had said, his Changer form retained his human eyes, and they'd long since been destroyed by the heat. I was getting a bit impatient. Surely the others should have realized by now he had no chance? Why hadn't anyone tried to interfere? Well, Koenig would cut them down the instant they tried it, but I'd been hoping they wouldn't realize that, or at least that their loyalty would win out over their cowardice.

Hookwolf didn't have much fight left in him, not unless I wanted to make it completely obvious I was drawing things out deliberately. I gave up on the ruse and glanced around, only to find a sea of horrified faces, hardly any anger to be found. I briefly held a bit more hope for the capes, whose masks hid their expressions, but Stormtiger actually flinched from my stare.

I sighed and finished Hookwolf off with a twist of thought, outright melting most of his body. Well, this was a street gang, not an army. I suppose it was unreasonable to expect any real discipline or bravery. Still, it couldn't hurt to fish for another kill or two. The more I got out of the way here and now, the fewer I'd have to worry about later when they found their spines.

"I know we agreed that fight would settle things, but if someone else wants a go, that's fine by me."

I waited for a couple moments, receiving only silent stares.

"Maybe that was just a good match-up for me. None of the rest of you are made of metal, right?"

...

"Hey, you heard your boss. I'm a coward. And a race traitor and a little girl. Don't tell me I've scared you all off, just like that? Where's your pride?"

...

I scowled, getting frustrated.

"You know, maybe you could have saved him if you acted faster. That chance is gone now and it always will be. Every day you're going to have to confront the fact that you could have done something and you didn't even try. Even now you do nothing! How dare you! You call yourself warriors? Violent thugs, more like. But that makes it worse! You fight for pride, for territory, for stuff, for fun, for your fucking brain-dead ideology, but where was that warrior spirit when he needed you?"

I stopped, breathing heavily. As the echoes returned I realized I'd been shouting. Still, no one said anything. I stared around the group, blinking away tears. If anything, they looked even more scared. Not a single one looked ready to fight. And this scum dared call anyone else subhuman? Well, I wasn't going to give them a choice. If they wouldn't fight for revenge, they'd fight for their lives.

"Kill them all. No one gets away."

And we did.

--

"Oh, it didn't work out. They wouldn't take the bait. Fallback plan went off without a hitch, though," I informed Lisa.

"Tea, please?" I asked the henchwoman, sending her scurrying off.

"Fallback plan?" Taylor asked, dodging Lisa's kick.

"You know." I waved vaguely. "Killing them without all the rigmarole. Really, that plan was too complicated to ever work. We shouldn't have bothered." I turned to Lisa. "We'll have to switch back to the old script for the E88 question. It's not as polished as I'd like, given that we thought we wouldn't need it, so..."

Edit: Clarified Tanya's emotional state at the end

Last edited: Jan 9, 2023

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TorontoTowers

Feb 13, 2023

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2.7

-- Lisa Wilbourne Tattletale --

"Look,"-- I licked my lips, nervous. --"maybe we can salvage some of the footage? If--"

Tanya looked up from the laptop, fixing me with a cool stare.

"I don't think it's usable," she commented mildly.

I dropped my eyes, struggling not to visibly shiver. This really wasn't getting any easier, was it?

Responses intensifying. Signs of developing phob–

Shut up, Power. That was rhetorical and you know it. Maybe other powers can pretend not to understand their users' intentions, but you've aptly demonstrated you understand me as well as anyone else.

I took a deep breath, the familiar argument with the voice in my head grounding me. I glanced back up, noting with relief that Tanya had looked away. She was in a good mood -- no prizes for guessing why -- but not good enough to let me know what had actually happened. Not that I needed to know or anything. Spinning this cluster fuck would be hard enough without worrying about the truth. Still, I really did need some details.

"How many dead?"

Her eyes went distant, presumably checking the recording I wasn't allowed to see.

"Sixty one."

I carefully didn't wince. More than I'd expected, not that the difference between thirty and sixty murders would really matter to anyone. Well, maybe it'd matter to the Chosen. Sixty one wasn't ten percent of the gang -- hell, with the complete breakdown of order in most of the city post-Leviathan, it might not be two percent -- but they'd have been some of the best, most devoted 'soldiers' they'd had. Not exactly efficient, but Hookwolf had never cared about that. Between wreaking havoc on the organizational structure and making the leadership look weak, the gang wasn't likely to recover from this. Even if a couple capes hadn't been there.

And wasn't that something? Leviathan had already fractured the Empire, but if anything, the fact that each half of the gang was independently viable just showed how powerful and entrenched they'd been. Hookwolf himself had been the city's premier boogeyman for over a decade. Perhaps Lung and Purity were capable of more destruction, but they'd shown at least a modicum of restraint while Hookwolf... hadn't. This was a big fucking deal for Brockton Bay, probably even more immediately impactful than killing Siberian.

Which was not to say the response would be positive... The gang might be done as an enterprise, but the rest of them wouldn't just vanish. Neither would their friends and families, nor the sympathizers who weren't formally affiliated. Even the people who hadn't liked them but lived in their territory and depended on them for protection from the Merchants might feel some resentment depending on how things played out. Their victims would celebrate, of course, and there were more of them than the rest of those groups put together. But celebrating the death of the Chosen wasn't the same thing as celebrating their murderer.

"Do we have to worry about anyone else having a recording?"

"Doubtful," she said, not looking up. "No living witnesses, either."

... Not getting the impression that was an accident. Now I really wanted to know, not that I could afford to indulge my curiosity for its own sake. Was understanding what had driven Tanya to mass murder worth becoming a living witness? I honestly doubted it had taken all that much, but that just made understanding exactly where the line lay even more important. Well, the men were witnesses, and she hadn't killed them. A thought to pursue later, maybe. For now...

"Do you have to take credit, then? Denounce the Chosen and let their 'mysterious' deaths speak for themselves."

She looked at me again, brow furrowed. That was fine; it was when she made a point of controlling her expression that you needed to start worrying.

"Why? Taking credit was the whole point."

I took a deep breath. She was in a good mood, right? She wasn't incapable of taking criticism per se, so long as it was in private. (Taylor was off sulking somewhere, Sierra was smart enough to realize she wanted no part of this conversation, and the men were playing poker or something downstairs.) And I understood her a hell of a lot better now. Better than anyone ever had, I'd bet every dollar I'd ever seen. And... if I didn't push back now, when would I?

It'd be one thing if I was still making good progress with passive observation, but that well was drying up. I wasn't getting much new information without pushing my power, and when I did, half the time it gave me nonsense like 'surprised that she's surprised by the taste of sushi.' If I wanted to really understand her -- that is, as well as I could understand literally anyone else with two minutes' work -- I'd need to experiment. As in, literally subject her to stimuli for which my various models predicted different responses to see which she'd give. Like a proper fucking scientist pioneering the fast-growing field of Tanya von Degurechaff.

Hell, that's probably literally true. Killing Siberian and Mannequin and Shatterbird is the kind of thing that makes all sorts of people sit up and take notice. So is interdimensional travel from weird dimensions. So are clearly atypical power expressions. Never mind the Thinkers, there are going to be actual academic papers written about her. And little do they know, her psychology is far weirder than any of that.

The digression served its purpose, dousing enough of my anxiety to let me deliver the necessary lines with the necessary tone. Time to get started.

"I told you when we planned this it was risky. Even if everything went off perfectly, you'd have won detractors. Heroes don't kill. Now--"

"Nonsense," she briskly interrupted. "The heroes killed Crawler just yesterday. They killed Echidna and several of her associates and victims just a few days before. And everyone's killed plenty of clones."

"That was all the PRT, not the Protectorate. That makes a difference. Normals killing capes is punching up, even when that doesn't really make sense. Not that the heroes wouldn't have tried to kill the Nine... Look, it's complicated, but outright massacre is way over the line. We've built up a whole set of customs surrounding this stuff over decades and you're trampling all over them."

She sighed. I could practically see her preoccupation with rule-following warring with her disgust for these particular rules. I still didn't really get how she'd ended up valuing conformity as an end in itself -- I could certainly think of instrumental reasons for the wolf to don sheep's clothing, but it genuinely wasn't instrumental. Useful, however it had happened.

"... And the clones? That wasn't all the PRT."

I hesitated.

"Clones don't count. They're power creations, not people."

She raised an eyebrow.

"If Panacea assembled a perfect copy of a person from raw materials, would they not be a person?"

"I don't know if she can actually do that. She--"

"Assume she can."

"... Not legally."

"That's not what I asked."

I inspected her face. She wasn't just going to let this go. I gave up.

"Yes, they would be. And yes, the clones are too. Most of them aren't biologically viable long term and all of them have been Mastered into a permanent omnicidal frenzy, but sure, they're people. That's not how the public sees it, though, so it's not relevant. Can we please stop talking about this?"

She looked at me for another second, expression unreadable. Probably mentally placing me into the category of people who inexplicably found being a killer upsetting. She finally nodded and relaxed into her seat.

"Fine, let's get back to the point. Killing the Chosen was always the plan. I get some nice soundbites could have punched things up, but what's really changed?"

I rubbed my temples.

"Fifty odd extra murders, maybe? The plan was to kill the capes, not..." I trailed off, filled with a sudden suspicion. "Wait, were you always planning on killing the normals? Did you think that just wasn't worth mentioning?"

I watched her face. Yes, that was exactly what had happened. Fuck, honestly that was on me. I'd slipped up and treated her like a sane person for two minutes. Miss 'I mostly kill people for wearing the wrong color clothes' wasn't going to shy away from a few dozen extra deaths.

Naturally, she was now looking at me like I was the crazy person.

"Of course. They're just as complicit in the gang's activities as the capes. I'm not about to comb the city for the rest of them, but when the opportunity presents itself?" She shrugged casually. "I didn't bring it up because I don't need advice on handling regular people with guns. And, anyway, didn't you say the taboo was just on killing capes?"

OK, I knew how to handle this. I just needed to remind her that's not how civilians think and cognitive dissonance with her ridiculous self image would do the rest. I'd watched Taylor do it by accident. Easy. Except the last time I'd tugged that thread, she'd nearly killed me at the lunch table. I thought I understood what I'd done wrong there -- I was a little too obvious, but most of it was just that I'd scared her with stories of the Simurgh and then reminded her I was a powerful Thinker -- but... 'Do that again and I will kill you. No more chances.' Hell, I'd thought she was just the normal kind of traumatized, unstable mess back then; it was a lot scarier in retrospect. It was enough to have me gripping the edge of my seat under the table, knuckles white. But if not now, when?

"No, Tanya," I groaned, all exasperated teenager. "Killing anyone is taboo. Puppies and kittens and bunny rabbits, too, if you're going to assume it's OK to kill any living thing I haven't specifically told you not to."

She processed that while I pretended I wasn't frantically scanning her face... Good. Not exactly as I'd predicted, but close enough. Still, best not give her too long to think about it.

"The Unwritten Rules only forbid killing capes, but the public doesn't care about that. Most of them don't even know about it. 'Capes killing normals' is punching down, even if they deserve it. Certainly never heroic." Well, I could imagine exceptions, but I knew better than to give her an inch.

"Well, I'm not a hero, am I?"

No, Tanya, you most certainly are not. Actually, it was pretty interesting how easily she'd slipped into the role of villain. Like it was unfair and mildly degrading but definitely not a surprise. I mean, it shouldn't be a surprise -- even her own side is terrified of her, if Richter is any guide, and rightly so -- but I thought she genuinely had no clue about that. Despite appearing to deliberately evoke and exploit that fear... Maybe it was a method she'd discovered worked without ever realizing why, or maybe it was deliberate and she thought it was normal or no big deal, or maybe she just dramatically underestimated the net effect. Or maybe she understood exactly what she was doing on some level and just pretended very hard not to...

Fuck, why is nothing ever simple with her? I'll just chalk the villain thing up to learned helplessness and move on, I guess. That's probably what it is, one way or another.

So, definitely not a hero. But the whole point of PR is... She doesn't really get what a hero is, does she? I thought back over our previous conversations. Yep, she'd rounded the whole concept off to 'cop with powers.' Which, well, was how I'd originally explained it to her. Granted, I'd been trying to get a hell of a lot across in a few sentences. That was the root of the problem, really. Well, this one problem. She picked things up fast -- that wasn't entirely a lie I'd made up to cover for her secret future knowledge -- but a few days just wasn't enough time.

This would be so much easier if she'd take a couple weeks to actually learn how things work here before violently changing them. But that just wasn't feasible. Never mind that violence was her only reliable method of emotional self-regulation, the city itself wouldn't wait. This was a critical period in the history of Brockton Bay, the moment where the course of the coming years and decades would be determined. Hell, I've barely gone two weeks without a fight since the Ruby Dreams fiasco. This was a step up in pace but honestly not that much of one. Not that we couldn't afford to slow down a little; there are benefits to being top dog. And that really would be nice because my power was not keeping up. Not when I had to manage Tanya on top of the usual shit.

Of course, her ignorance wasn't all bad. It gave me an opportunity to shape her perspective, and, in particular, how certain facts fit into her bizarre worldview. That was always the goal, here, and preconceived notions might have made things more difficult. Which wasn't to say this would be easy. She was used to having to work to make things make sense, so just feeding her the answers might arouse suspicion. Well, maybe if I just described it in the right terms while pretending not to be familiar with the academic concept...

"If you want effectual PR, you need to fit into an existing archetype. Like it or not, presenting yourself as a soldier is just going to come off as theming, not a distinct identity. Capes are heroes or they're villains. And--"

"Or rogues, right?" she interjected.

Huh. Maybe I'd spoken too soon on the villain question. Was that what she was going for? She was, uh, not doing a very good job.

"Rogues barely exist. In this whole city of three hundred thousand, there's only Parian. And she's protecting territory now, so even she's not really a proper rogue anymore. Anyway, they're almost always noncombatants. Technically mercenaries can qualify if they exclusively work with heroes, but there's no real money in that."

She grimaced and shook her head.

"No mercenary work. Not without very careful vetting, at least. Mercenaries have to be predictable, at least to their employers. Too easy to set up a trap."

Huh. I actually wasn't sure whether that was paranoia or a reasonable concern. No one was going to that much effort for Faultline, but Tanya was on a different level. Anyway...

"Isn't that what you're paying me for?"

She shrugged.

"You're not perfect. Simple OPSEC would get them eighty percent of the way there: just make sure you never speak to anyone who knows the true plan. You have limits, and with the way you show off I'm sure anyone who cares knows what they are."

I glared at her.

"What's that supposed to mean? My wiki page is a stub."

She scoffed.

"Your power is invisible. Hiding it from random civilians isn't an achievement, and they're not who we care about. No, I'm talking about how you insisted on explaining Notarin's power over my objection."

"You're the one who wanted to know what her power was."

She gave me an unimpressed look.

"And she offered to explain it. You could have just waited and told me if she was lying. There was no reason to provide further evidence on your capabilities or to draw attention to yourself like that."

"You know, Tanya, I don't think I drew most of the attention in that meeting."

"Yes. That was the idea," she impatiently explained. "We want our enemies paying attention to me. I can take it. You can't. Impressing them with your power doesn't make you look like a less vulnerable target, just a higher value one."

I hesitated, retort dying on my lips. That was a pretty good point. PRT policy is to prioritize Thinkers regardless, but that's far from a hard and fast rule, especially when the non-Thinker has much higher ratings, which... Actually, I didn't think any of her powers would warrant a seven on their own. The system kind of breaks down for someone with eight or ten moderately good powers with strong synergy, because capes like that don't exist. Well, it's not like they don't fudge things. They'd call her a Configuration-type Trump or something to put that big scary nine at the top of her sheet.

So, fine, there was a case for sandbagging so they'd go after her first. Or, rather, there might have been, if everyone didn't already understand more or less what I can do. That was more down to Leviathan than 'showing off,' but whatever. I somehow doubted Tanya would have been willing to let herself look weak if that's where the logic had pointed instead, but no sane person would treat her as a standard for reasonableness. I was pretty sure they actually didn't know the specific mechanisms my power used, though; I had made an effort to sow doubt there.

... Which might mean there's something to be said for not giving out examples of what my power can do.

"Fine, fine, I should have waited. Not that you have any room to talk. They thought your orbs were gaudy jewelry until you just told them otherwise."

That got her attention.

"... What? Are you telling me they didn't interrogate their mages?" She stood up, adjusting her rifle. "Haven't interrogated their mages?"

Shit!

"No! No, they definitely have." She paused in her sudden rush to kill/recruit the other mages before they could divulge her secrets. "They just lied about the orbs, I think. Piggot and Militia weren't surprised about the rest, though I suspect they didn't really believe the story until they met you at the truce meeting."

I could see her hesitate. There was a moment of suspicion in her eyes and my breath caught, but she kept thinking at normal speed. Well, normal for her, which was still something like thirty percent faster than us muggles. After a long moment, she sat back down and I tried not to look too relieved.

"Why? If they didn't trust the PRT enough to tell them about the orbs, why tell them about the rest? Why didn't the PRT believe them?"

I hesitated.

"I'm pretty sure they were the Master victims Gallant mentioned. They were summoned before you, possibly while the Echidna fight was still going on. Lot of different capes and clones who might have grabbed them. The PRT probably thought they were delusional when they took them in, but they'd have recorded their M/S interviews. The mages were confused and probably traumatized by the Mastering. Maybe they were grateful for the rescue, but not grateful enough to tell the PRT how to take away their powers."

She frowned but I thought it was considering rather than suspicious.

"So, the PRT assumed they were some random capes who came in for the Echidna fight and got Mastered? Their equipment should have corroborated their story."

I shrugged.

"I'm basically guessing at this point, but I think Velocity brought them in. He'd have been first on the scene and his military background might have helped him talk them around. He was pretty much constantly busy between then and his death, so maybe their equipment got stuffed in a locker somewhere and forgotten about. Except the orbs, which they convinced him held sentimental value or something."

"... Really?"

"I told you, it's just a guess."

She waved that off.

"I mean, they're incompetent enough for that story to seem reasonable to you?"

"Pretty much, yeah. Have you seen this city?" I shrugged. "To be fair, they've lost a lot of people in the last month while their workload has only grown."

"A properly structured chain of command could have ameliorated a lot of those issues." She grimaced. "But I suppose that's too much to expect from civilians. I've certainly seen military units screw it up."

We sat in silence for a moment.

"So, we're way off track," I said. "Want to go over the rest of the meeting now? Get it out of the way?"

"Sure," she assented. "Moving the interview to tomorrow freed up several hours, and we should debrief while the details are still fresh."

She considered for a moment.

"When I threatened to walk out if they didn't identify their Thinker, you undermined me. You had a valid point that I'd missed, but my mistake benefited us. You understand the issue?"

"Yeah..." I grimaced. "I figured that out right after I told you."

She nodded.

"Try to think before you speak in the future." Bitch. "I don't understand why you thought it was a good idea to just give up all the blackmail material you've gathered," she started right back in. Hey, hold up, we were taking turns! Or did she really think that was the only mistake she'd made? "Can you explain your reasoning?"

"Oh, none of it is that great. Mainly stuff about Shadow Stalker and Armsmaster -- be glad you missed them -- and they died too recently and too heroically for scandals to really make waves. Actually, the bit about Panacea was probably the stand-out, and even that's likely going to fizzle. I wanted them distracted with ass-covering rather than focused on us. Probably all that info's worth."

"Hmm." She considered. "OK, that's a better answer than I was expecting." Bitch. "Still, I think we can find a better moment. Just bringing it up might have gotten us most of the benefit, anyway, since they'll have to investigate Stalker just in case what you were going to say would have been truly damaging. The circumstances surrounding her death are a pretty minor secret and they ended up being useful. I'll want to review everything you have later. Now, about that: why did you lie to me about the decoys? It'd only function as plausible deniability if you didn't come to the meeting, so you should have told me when we decided you would come at the latest."

"I didn't lie to you." I sighed. "I told Taylor what she needed to hear and you overheard me. I didn't think the PRT would call us out on that and I didn't think you'd care one way or the other."

"Ah. Really, I should have figured that out for myself. The point of the decoys was to trick a hero into killing them, right? She'd have made sure they could have been saved specifically to cause this sort of legal trouble."

Huh, that was completely correct right up until the last part. Let's not think about the fact the person she's come closest to actually understanding during our acquaintance is Bonesaw. I nodded.

"Well, I think that's everything I have. On the whole I'd say your performance was acceptable given your inexperience. So long as you take these lessons to heart, I see no reason you couldn't be very successful in this role."

Oh my god she has to be doing this on purpose. Not even Tanya can be this condescending by accident, right? Power?

Wrong.

... Was this all part of some bizarre capitalist fantasy? Because that was the sense I was getting. Little penniless orphan Tanya watching the businessmen walk to work in their nice suits, dreaming big of an idyllic life of corporate sociopathy. And now she was using me to live out one small part of it, giving a promising if inexperienced young employee a mediocre performance review to motivate her.

...

I had to encourage this, didn't I? No, it was not a question. I actually had to. My life depended on this lunatic finding non-violent ways to express herself and this was the best lead I had.

Now, uh, how did I do that? I was a multi-millionaire, a high school dropout, and a supervillain. I hadn't spent a lot of time contemplating how to behave during a performance review. Well, I didn't think she expected me to be happy about this. Maybe just accept it and move on?

I nodded silently and she looked satisfied.

"Now, what were you saying about cape archetypes?"

Oh no you don't, Tanya. Now it's your turn!

"Actually, I had a couple more notes about the meeting." She raised her eyebrows questioningly. "Hiroo Onoda. You're not supposed to know who that is."

Hiroo had been a Japanese soldier in WWII, a commando tasked with sabotaging Allied operations in the Philippines. And that was just what he did, and kept doing, for thirty years after the war ended, unable to accept Japan's defeat. They'd had to dig up his old commanding officer to get him to finally stand down. Notarin had mentioned him and Tanya had definitely recognized the name.

Her expression went blank. Come on, you already knew I knew!

"Maybe Gallant missed it," I blurted. "They've been working him to the bone."

She relaxed a bit. Wait, did she think I was asking her about it? I'm not suicidal!

"Oh, I doubt Gallant got much from me. I'm a pretty reserved person."

...Or not. She was just being delusional, nothing new there. Was it worth trying to explain that wasn't how it worked? Maybe I could chip at the edges...

"I wouldn't count on that. His power can be pretty subtle." He was actually thoroughly mediocre as empaths went. "I've mentioned how my power works on micro-expressions? He can see tiny bursts of emotion, reactions so small even you might not notice them." I didn't wholly succeed in keeping a sarcastic lilt out of that last clause, but she didn't seem to notice. "But, like I said, he wasn't at his best."

She drummed her fingers, face still blank.

"Perhaps I've made a point to research cases similar to my own? I imagine that's how Notarin learned about him."

I shrugged.

"Perhaps. Not much we can do now regardless. Just something to watch for going forward."

She nodded.

"You did pretty well with the lie detector," I continued. "But not perfectly. You--"

She waved it off.

"Right, my discussion with General Keller. An acceptable sacrifice."

No, it was not. Well, letting them know she wasn't actually a fanatical nationalist wasn't a sacrifice at all. Probably the only good thing that 'discussion' accomplished. Explaining that was... delicate, but I thought the return was worthwhile. Attempts to poach the men were going to happen, and not all the perpetrators would be sitting safe a continent away. In terms of reducing the odds of pointless massacres, reassuring her of their loyalty was probably the best single thing I could do right now. I just couldn't let it look like I was trying to butt into that relationship. That would be... bad.

"You know, you could afford to turn down the nationalism a bit. It's really not making you any friends here and the men don't need to be reminded of their duty."

Which she presumably believed continued to include following her around and doing whatever she said, permanent exile from the war and their world notwithstanding. Hell, maybe it did. What did I know about Imperial military law? Point was, I wasn't about to convince her they were personally loyal to her -- she literally didn't understand what those words meant -- but she already believed they were dutiful. Emphasizing that was easy enough.

"I'll take it under advisement," she replied, frowning.

Probably the best I was going to get.

"Anyway, that's not what I was going to say. I meant when you told them you didn't want to be enemies."

"What, really? That's a hell of a time for a malfunction."

Sure, 'malfunction,' let's go with that. Actually, does she consciously realize she's lying? I have no clue how the lie detector actually works, or the fact it triggered on that might tell me something interesting. It could be agonizingly difficult to disentangle the things she was genuinely confused about from the things she was lying to herself about.

"Well, it happened. I think it registered as 'partial truth' rather than an outright lie. And again when you said you didn't hold a grudge for the Dauntless thing."

That one was easier to figure out. She really didn't hold a grudge for trying to kill her, but they'd come pretty damn close to getting Granz.

She sighed and rubbed her temples. Oh, am I causing you a headache, Tanya? I'm so, so sorry about that. Hopefully I can make it a little bit worse.

"And you forgot about Corporal Richter."

She sent me an annoyed glance.

"Bounty meetings are under truce. It wasn't the right time to address the kidnapping of an Imperial soldier."

Liar, you forgot about him. And let's cool it with the inflammatory language, please.

"Look, Tanya, they're going to be asking their mages a lot of questions about you. Already have been, I'll bet. What are the non-Imperial mages going to say?"

She snorted.

"A whole lot of nonsense."

"Unflattering nonsense?"

"Very much so."

"And what is Corporal Richter going to tell them?"

She considered.

"You want to leave him there? As what, a liaison? A spy?"

I shrugged.

"Whatever works. Mostly, I'm warning you we're on very thin ice with the PRT and taking him is going to piss them off. And come on, do you really want him? You were patting yourself on the back for remembering his name."

She chewed on that for a bit.

"I do in fact have a duty to see to his well being."

"So do the PRT. They'll ensure he's safe and taken care of, educated, given a career."

"Remind me what the death rate for Wards in this city has been this month?"

"Remind me what the death rate for mages on the front has been?"

She grunted an acknowledgment but didn't concede the point.

"If it's about firepower, do--"

She shook her head.

"No, nothing like that. The 188th is nothing impressive. I'd probably need a month just to get him up to the point he wouldn't slow us down. For one mage? I've got better ways to spend my time. No, the important bit is them having him -- the three of them -- rather than us not having them. I've quite appreciated not having to worry about magic detectors the last few days." She thought deeply for another couple seconds, then seemed to come to some realization. "Actually, I think you're right."

Uh, OK. Not going to question success.

"That's everything on the meeting, then?" she asked.

Not hardly. There was her complete misread on Miss Militia, her conviction that a friendly recruitment offer -- it was hard to imagine a friendlier one, really -- was a Thinker-crafted 'ambush,' leading to the part where she tortured Notarin for literally no reason, and I could go on. But there wasn't really any point in talking about any of that, at least not until she'd believe me when I told her how profoundly wrong she was about everything.

I nodded.

Er, where were we? Right, right, I was trying to connect not murdering scores of criminals to signaling theory while pretending I didn't know what that was, which... Actually, things had been going rather well, hadn't they? She'd contradicted and insulted me but hadn't thought once about killing me. Even when she thought I was lying to her. Was it really just a matter of sating her blood lust? That felt too easy. Or, well, certainly not easy, but incomplete. Anyway, best take advantage of it while it lasted.

"Alright: broadly speaking, you're either going to be seen as a hero or as a villain. That's how the public sees capes. Trying for a third option just means letting someone else make the choice for you. And it's not like you're not planning to fight villains, anyway. You just need -- sorry, needed -- to act like a hero. And I get the rules for that seem restrictive and pointless, but... OK, this is going to sound dumb, but the fact that they're restrictive and pointless is what makes following them meaningful. If there was no cost to acting heroic, it wouldn't demonstrate any commitment to pro-social behavior."

OK, she definitely got the message. Did I overdo it? If--

"Why didn't you say that before?" she frowned.

Fuck, did I miss a moment of acceleration? Moving straight from revelation to blaming me was... Well, not out of character, but I'd expected to be able to interject before she got there. Nothing to do but double down... She does realize she has communication problems, right? On some level? She has to have noticed the constant failures? Right?

"I've been trying! I've been saying the same things to you over and over again and I have no idea why you're only getting it now!" I lied.

Huh, she actually looked chastened. I was expecting some irritation at herself redirected into irritation at my incompetence -- not good, but a dramatic improvement over some of the theories she might have come up with. This was... probably good? Well, the reminder that I was still constantly getting blindsided by her responses was terrifying, but I needed all the leverage I could get.

"Ah. I apologize for misunderstanding. My English is maybe a little rusty. Perhaps I should have asked more questions."

You little shit, we both know your English is obnoxiously perfect. Somehow. Well, maybe she actually doesn't know? Whatever, I'd let her have it. She hated feeling like a failure and she hated looking like one even more, so getting an apology felt pretty nice. Even if it was for not asking more questions and not for, oh, I don't know, the mass murder? Or for ignoring my advice? How about the death threats? Being insufferably incomprehensible? All those times she visualized the precise steps involved in killing me or the others or, actually, literally everyone else she'd spent any time around for as long as I'd known her? Well, except the men.

Never mind, once put into its proper context it actually felt pretty shitty. I'd almost rather she didn't have a conscience at all if this was all it was going to do. It'd make her easier to figure out, at least. Still, leverage. I closed my eyes and sighed, letting a bit of my exhaustion show through.

"I understand we've got a limited window of opportunity here. We need to move fast, and that means you can't afford to take the time to really get your bearings. But that wouldn't be nearly so much of a problem if you'd just listen to my advice. Like you said you would when you recruited me."

Securing her obedience wouldn't be optimal -- I could admit I wasn't her equal on tactics, at least, not even close -- but it would certainly be a net improvement. Not that I had any chance of actually accomplishing that. In terms of the marginal shifts I could push for here, it seemed like the best option. Definitely better than convincing her to let me take a day off, unfortunately.

"I have listened to your advice," she responded a little petulantly. She noticed her tone and sighed. "... But perhaps I could afford it somewhat more weight. In your judgment, is the situation irrecoverable?"

There was no change in her tone. I was so busy reveling in my (pathetically minor) victory I almost missed the most dangerous question I'd ever been asked. (Hmm. There was the time Coil pressed a gun to my forehead and asked whether I understood him, and then there was the time Alexandria and Legend had shouted over each other to ask me where Leviathan had gone... Nope, this was definitely the most dangerous one.)

Oh, it'd feel pretty great to tell her she really fucked up... for a tenth of a second, which was about how long it would take her to give up on these half measures and start planning an all-out war.

I slowly shook my head, trying to look like I was carefully thinking it over.

"I don't think so. Not so long as it remains a one-off," I said with, in my opinion, an impressively artless tone.

She looked at me weirdly. Fuck you too, Tanya. You know, the way you jerk my feelings around sure reminds me of someone. Then I remembered the way Cherie had leered at me and shuddered. You know what? Never mind. Actually, she would have come after us with or without Tanya, wouldn't she? The Nine didn't travel too fast, so they'd have had to already have been on their way. And Cherie had had a thing about Alec. Or, well, they'd had a thing about each other.

But the point was that if we'd have had to deal with her either way, it was really, really nice to have Tanya 'I feel nothing when I kill' Degurechaff around to handle her. And the rest of the Nine, can't forget them... Fuck, we'd probably be dead or worse right now if not for her. 'Better than the Slaughterhouse Nine' was damning with the very faintest praise, but that might literally have been the choice we'd had. Maybe I was being a little hard on her... Which just made it that much more important to handle this properly.

"We're trying to walk a narrow line," I explained. "And this definitely doesn't help. But it's not like anyone important likes the Chosen." Hell, maybe the public wouldn't celebrate the Chosen's murderer, but the PRT genuinely might have if Koenig hadn't killed three of their own. The rank and file at least, who wouldn't consider the larger implications. "They'll know it was us, no avoiding that. But if we don't take credit they'll be able to pretend they don't know. Provided they want to."

Would they? Honestly, I had no clue. I had no illusions this decision was crossing Piggot's desk and I didn't know the first thing about the newly appointed Chief Director West. But that was not the right thing to say right now.

"And addressing this situation is a lose-lose for them. They can't not condemn this sort of slaughter, but condemning you for solving the Nazi problem they let fester is a bad look. And, frankly, they'll probably hope that if they give you some space you'll clear out a few more gangs before they have to do anything. Which we should not, to be clear, because then they would have to do something."

"They'll consult with external Thinkers, and even Appraiser and Eleventh Hour will be able to tell them they actually really don't want you in the Wards."

What they'd have to say about leaving her free, on the other hand... Well, I guess that was my job to manage. Fuck me.

"This isn't kill order level, not even close. Hookwolf probably killed three hundred people, a lot of them civilians, and he didn't get a kill order. That was over the course of his whole career, granted, but it'd be very hard to argue you're worse. They're not going to take a big PR hit and spend the resources necessary to beat you just for the privilege of sending you to the Birdcage for something they'll secretly be thrilled you did. And that's only if they win the trial. We could make that pretty difficult and very embarrassing."

Pretty well done, if I did say so myself. Hell, I was almost convinced. But it was equally important -- OK, substantially less important, but important nonetheless -- to not let her think she could keep getting away with this sort of thing.

"Still, this damages our position substantially. If we're not taking credit, we can't spell out how we're doing the PRT's job for them,"-- which, actually, had always been a terrible idea, but Tanya had been insistent on it --"and it reopens the E88 question, as you noted. Not an enormous deal: there are going to be rumors you killed them, and that sort of rumor travels faster than an outright admission."

"But that's just the PR side. You've probably earned Piggot another couple transfers, and they'll be selected to be maximally annoying to us. The PRT's internal assessments of you are going to get a lot less flattering. They're going to get less cooperative. There are going to be analysts arguing that you're too unstable and dangerous to be left to your own devices, and this is going to give them a lot of ammunition. Other villains are going to be a lot less likely to hold back against us, which--"

"Wait, wait." She'd been listening more or less patiently -- she did just say she would -- but I'd clearly lost her. "If you want me to believe all this absurdity secretly makes sense, you're going to have to do a better job explaining that one. These are actual fights we're talking about, right? You don't all have a contract with a TV network or something?"

... If you were that badly confused, maybe you really should have apologized for not asking more questions. Started with it, anyway. Well, I suspected she was just confirming her understanding, which I hardly wanted to discourage. She could really stand to do more of that.

"Well, I've heard some things about certain cities out west. But no, these are real fights."

"OK... And when you've won one of these 'real' fights, what do you do with the losers? I imagine the heroes arrest them, but I take it that Coil's little prison complex isn't normal for villains?"

"Definitely not. It's pretty rare to win conclusively like that. Normally you get a couple good hits in, maybe injure someone badly enough to take them out of the fight. They withdraw and you let them. If you put enough pressure on a group, they'll normally decide to leave for greener pastures rather than risk a decisive loss. But when it does happen, there are a few options. Steal their stuff, ruin their rep, wrap them up as a present for the heroes, things like that."

"I suppose that's reasonable enough. The normals do carry real guns, though. I've seen that for myself."

... They got a shot off?

I shrugged.

"The rules are different for normals, like I said. If normals with guns are a serious threat to your team, you don't really have any business getting into that sort of fight. We focused on hit-and-runs until we got Taylor."

She nodded.

"She can effectively incapacitate any number of normals at will, and with decent range. Well, at least relative to the short sight lines available in a city. The average street criminal probably can't reliably hit a person at four hundred meters, anyway."

"... She normally just sabotages the guns. But sure, same idea. And I see where you're going with this: no, you can't just order the normals to execute your captives. No one's going to care if you technically didn't violate the letter of the Rules. They're unwritten."

She grimaced.

"Let's leave that topic alone for now. Actually, forget about capes for a moment. When regular gang members fight they shoot each other, right? And they shoot at regular cops, who shoot back?"

"OK, maybe I don't see where you're going with this. But sure."

"Well, it's simple enough. Why? Why do you hold back?"

"... Because I don't want to die?"

"No, that's why you want them to hold back. I bet you don't want to get robbed either, but that doesn't stop you from robbing others. The defining trait of the criminal is defection from the social contract, yet you all cooperate on this shitty knockoff? If this is a real equilibrium, why haven't the normals arrived at it? And don't give me any bullshit about the heroes. If they could enforce these rules, they could enforce the actual law."

... 'Confirming her understanding?' Fucking debate club Socratic Method bullshit! I decide to go easy on you and conserve my power for five fucking minutes and you pull this shit? And with that insufferable little smirk! Well, I can certainly fix that. But what exactly to say? Not that I didn't already have ideas, but... I let up on my power. Not entirely, not nearly. I wouldn't need much for this.

Planned course of action inadvisable.

... Then it stopped. What the fuck? Seriously, you're refusing to enable my self-destructive tendencies? That's the whole basis of our relationship!

The shock gave me a chance to get a hold of myself and realize what I'd tried to do. Fuck. Well, given that I'm alive, I suppose I've never tried to do anything quite so self-destructive before. Are you... concerned for my safety, Power? That's sweet and all, but have you considered not torturing me for asking you questions? And maybe you'd like to explain why you insist on constantly reminding me about--

Tanya mumbled something. No, that wasn't right, her voice was drowned out by... something...

"Are you feeling alright?" Tanya asked again, frowning. "You've been a bit pale and distractible all day. And I've seen you shivering even though it must be twenty seven degrees in here."

I stared at her.

Concerned for your well being.

Thanks, Power. Good to see you're already back to being your old useless se-- No, wait, really? She's not just performing a mysterious human ritual because that's what real humans do? When did I start warranting actual empathy?

First observed yesterday evening, after–

Right, I remember that. I didn't pursue it then because you were repeatedly stabbing me in the brain at the time. The question I meant to ask is why?

Unconsciously identifying you with dead–

...

"Actually, you're looking very pale right now. Why don't you lie down?"

I nodded after a moment.

"You know, maybe I will. I need to check on Taylor, too."

She frowned.

"Right, that. You have things handled, I trust?"

Well, if nothing else, this meant I could push harder.

"Taylor's stubborn. I'm trying, but it'd really help if you'd kill fewer people."

Her frown deepened.

"I don't mean to disparage your friend -- she seems like a lovely young woman for a career criminal -- but maybe she's not cut out for this sort of work? I imagine she'd do well in agriculture."

I couldn't help it. I burst into laughter.

"I'll-- I'll suggest that."

She had no idea what was funny about her words, obviously. I laughed harder. She was staring at me like I was having a psychotic break. Which was hilarious because I obviously wasn't. Shut up, Power.

"Let me walk you up."

It took about twenty minutes for me to get my shit together and think things through. This was...

Well, practically, it didn't change much. It meant I couldn't leave without setting off a massive shitstorm, but I'd already come to that conclusion. It meant her expectations for me were way too high, but I wasn't going to meet them regardless. It meant she'd protect me, but she'd already promised to do that. Though instead of looking for ways to wriggle out of an inconvenient promise, she'd be looking for excuses to prove to herself she could protect me. That wasn't good, but it didn't make too much difference on the margin when she was already doing that for the men. The biggest dangers were still overreaction and escalation attracting the attention of people she couldn't beat.

No, the real implications were smaller scale. If she'd started seeing me as a protege in truth -- rather than a risky investment with an uncertain return -- I could afford to be a lot bolder. She wasn't going to kill me for a simple comment or question, whatever she'd said a couple days ago. Well, not unless it was a really dumb thing to say. And while she wouldn't kill me, she'd have no compunctions about taking her feelings out on others... OK, I could afford to be a little bolder.

And then there was the flip side. How would she react if she figured out what she was doing? I didn't know. And though she was clearly capable of misunderstanding her own feelings for years, that might be changing. She'd recently discovered that emotional pain wasn't some weird metaphorical turn of phrase, for one, and who knew where that would lead? Hell, my own plans depended on raising her emotional intelligence to age-appropriate levels, and it'd be pretty embarrassing if that's what got me killed. Normally I'd also worry about an enemy Thinker figuring it out -- that's the sort of thing I like to poke at in a fight -- but, well, if they can figure Tanya out that thoroughly from a distance, they probably weren't beatable anyway.

(How had I missed it for so long? Well, I'd figured out pretty fast that thinking about her loss directly led to thinking about murder, so I'd done my best to prevent it altogether and had other concerns when it happened despite my efforts. Who's to say how long my power knew before I asked the right questions, though.)

But really, she might just brush it off. It depended too much on the precise circumstances. Maybe I could even engineer things for a favorable result. No, the real problem was what would happen if she decided I was doing it on purpose, for which I had a much clearer, bloodier prediction.

I'd mulled that over for a while and eventually came up with the perfect solution: get her to latch onto Taylor instead. Which, well, maybe felt a little like throwing my friend under the bus to save myself, but she was genuinely better situated for this. She might actually be capable of living up to Tanya's expectations, for one. Scary thought, but that's a problem for later. And Taylor's idea of subtle social maneuvering was negotiating from a position of strength; no one was going to confuse her for a master manipulator. Well, maybe it wasn't a great idea to depend on Tanya's capability as a judge of character, but she already thought I was a master manipulator. Substantially better than I actually was, really. It didn't hurt that if Tanya trusted her more that might reduce my workload somewhat.

But the big reason was that Taylor had already latched onto Tanya for basically the same reason. Meanwhile, Tanya was considering sending Taylor off to work the farms -- which had not actually become any less funny after my rest -- and this was pretty much the only way I could think of to get Tanya to care about her at all in any reasonable amount of time. Not exactly a healthy foundation for a friendship (or whatever the fuck you'd call it), but we'd probably have months before that blew up, and they'd hopefully both be much more stable by then.

And Taylor would definitely agree if I explained it to her -- well before I finished, probably -- for whatever that's worth.

So, first off, I just had to help them past this fight. I got up and started looking for Taylor. It shouldn't be too hard; Tanya seemed at least somewhat amenable to compromise and Taylor was desperate. A couple hornets found me before I could get very far, leading me to her room. Which, well, was the first place I was going to check, but thanks anyway.

I hesitated for a moment just outside the door, something feeling off about the whole experience. One of the hornets buzzed threateningly by my ear and I jumped. What the hell, Taylor? I opened the door after a second's thought. If I was having misgivings about this conversation, I was having more about trying to avoid it.

"Hey, Taylor. What's up?"

"Tattletale," she responded flatly. Unnaturally flatly. And 'Tattletale,' not 'Lisa.' Not a good sign.

What are you mad at me for, Taylor? Well, conserving power or not, I do actually need to know. Power?

Overheard conversation with Tanya.

Oh.

Edit: Fixed a typo and some tense issues

Last edited: Feb 14, 2023

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TorontoTowers

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TorontoTowers

TorontoTowers

Mar 16, 2023

#1,801

2.8

-- Lisa Wilbourne Tattletale --

I stepped into the room and closed the door. It wasn't likely that Tanya would come looking for me at the worst possible moment, but that was just how my luck was going. So I turned around and closed the door. I turned back and studied Taylor while she stared back at me.

She sat on her bed, back straight, hands in her lap. She was wearing her knife, but I thought she just hadn't taken it off. Her expression was completely slack and I noticed no tension in her hands or arms, which would have been pretty reassuring if I didn't know she could just opt out of having body language at will. I glanced around the room and didn't see any bugs -- not that they weren't there, obviously -- except my two 'escorts,' who didn't slow in their agitated buzzing. I eyed one with evident anxiety, though not too much.

"Are you going to hurt me?" I asked neutrally.

She hesitated for a second but only one.

"I haven't decided yet. You should explain yourself before I do."

Ouch. I'd expected her to pretend she hadn't meant to threaten me. Making her commit to that would have helped move things in a less adversarial direction. But she was more pissed than I'd thought, apparently. At least she was letting me explain.

(Fuck, why did I tell her I couldn't read her when she did her statue impression? Oh, right, I was worried about other Thinkers and hadn't thought I'd need the advantage. Silly me, ever thinking for a second I'd had things under control.)

So, this was... pretty bad. She wouldn't actually follow through, of course. Not because of her morality or our friendship or because Tanya would fucking obliterate her or anything silly like that -- there was very little she wasn't capable of in service of her goals -- but because it wouldn't promote her goals. On the contrary, she couldn't afford to piss me off. She'd said Tanya listens to us yesterday, but if she'd been eavesdropping she should be keenly aware that in fact Tanya only listens to me. And however angry or hurt she felt, Taylor could be counted on to keep her eyes on the prize.

Didn't mean she wasn't angry at me. Didn't mean I hadn't hurt her.

Should I go to her? No, not yet. If she was focused on the weakness of her position, she'd read that as me rubbing it in. Better to act guilty and a little intimidated. Which, well, wouldn't take all that much acting.

"I just... needed to do something to help. You know I worry about you, right? If I could have made it right, I'd have done that instead."

Taylor's capacity for empathy could be spotty -- her rigid morality actually derived from her personal victimhood narrative, the anger and indignation it produced, and, more and more, self-disgust -- but feelings of worthlessness and the need to be useful? She'd get that. Good thing I was confident on that, or her complete non-reaction might have flustered me.

"So you lied to me?"

I let out an exhausted sigh.

"I can't tell you how often I wish my power would lie to me. Sometimes the truth is critical, sometimes it just hurts. I had to bear this but you didn't. I'm sorry."

I didn't really like taking this tack. Even if she bought it -- which she probably wouldn't, for all that I was being as candid with her as I'd ever been -- it'd hardly restore her trust in me. I'd have preferred to convince her that I'd lied to Tanya about lying to her, and I might have managed that... right up until she worked out I'd refused to testify under lie detector to the version of events I'd given her.

Sure enough, she'd raised an unimpressed eyebrow.

"Are you sorry for doing it or for getting caught?"

Aww, that's cute. She'd set a trap where the obvious 'correct' answer contradicted what I'd just said. That might even have worked on me... when I was seven. Maybe eight. I'd never argue she'd had an easy life, but it had certainly been simple. I wanted to ruffle her hair with a 'Keep at it, Sport!' but I was supposed to be apologizing. So I looked down instead, shamefaced.

"You realize this whole thing is on me, right? How were you supposed to figure out they were decoys?" I looked her in the eyes. "I fucked up and I'm sorry."

She stared at me for several seconds, motionless. I mean, I didn't really expect a 'No, Lisa, this isn't your fault! You did the best you could!' but it might have been nice to hear. The total lack of feedback was actually starting to get to me. Which was the point, obviously.

Taking responsibility for the whole debacle might seem counterintuitive, but I reminded myself there was no real risk. It wasn't like she hadn't already formed an opinion on my culpability. Better not to be seen attempting to minimize it. And she wouldn't let me take all the guilt. That'd leave none for her.

"And the clones? They're not 'mindless power creations' after all?"

Probably time to show a little backbone. There was inducing empathy and then there was becoming a target for her own self-loathing, and too much weakness might push me over the line. Or maybe I wasn't even close. I'm good, but manipulation via dead reckoning isn't easy.

"You knew that was a lie when I said it. Hell, Aisha knew." I stumbled over to the bed, caught myself on a post, and sat down beside her. I still kept some distance but standing while she sat sent the wrong message. "What does making me say it accomplish? They still need to die."

She turned to look at me, still utterly emotionless.

"When exactly did you and Tanya discuss this 'fallback plan?'"

I groaned.

"Never. She made it up. Or maybe in her mind killing everyone is just understood to be the default fallback. You were there, when could we have discussed it?" I glared at her. "By the way, you really need to listen to me when I tell you to shut up around her. Now, are you ready to cut the interrogation bullshit and have an actual conversation about this?"

She paused for a few seconds. I noticed a faint buzzing from outside and jerked.

"Did you know about Dinah before the bank?"

... Fuck. I'd miscalculated. It'd been something like half an hour since I'd admitted to lying to Taylor, and she'd spent that whole time thinking about all the other times I might have lied. New obsession or not, if she decided I was ultimately responsible for Dinah's kidnapping and everything that followed I really might be in danger. Not as much as she was in -- because, again, Tanya would turn her into a bloody smear if she attacked me -- but that was hardly reassuring. And 'I had no choice' really wasn't going to cut it, here. She'd have died for Dinah and right now she'd hold me to the same standard. All I could do was reiterate the old story and hope she'd accept it. For both our sakes.

I turned to face her squarely and made firm eye contact.

"I did not. I've lied to spare your feelings when the truth didn't matter, I admit it. On something that important? Just so you wouldn't be angry with me? Never." Good execution but hardly an airtight argument. Time for a distraction? "You know Coil had that stuff prepared for me, right? Tested it all on me in dropped timelines. Made sure I knew what was waiting for me if I disappointed him. All he really had to hide from me was the plan to use it on someone else."

He hadn't, of course. Acquiring the precog had been too important to him to leave me out of the planning process, albeit with heavy supervision. Not that I couldn't have subtly sabotaged things anyway, but he'd made it very clear just how disappointed he'd be if anything at all went wrong. And what then? I certainly hadn't been happy about it -- still wasn't -- but when it came down to it, I'd had a reasonable shot at taking Coil down and Dinah hadn't. Hell, he'd have captured her anyway sooner or later.

That was not how Taylor would see it, though.

Fortunately, it seemed I'd convinced her. The buzzing hadn't quieted, but she nodded and broke eye contact.

"Sorry," she said, voice still flat.

I relaxed. That had been a hell of a--

"This can't happen again. I need to be able to trust you," she abruptly asserted. "Don't use your power on me outside--"

"Fuck that," I snarled, shoving her shoulder. "Like you don't-- Actually, no, I'm not having this conversation with a fucking mannequin. Stop that."

I glared right into her dead eyes, arms crossed, for a couple moments before life returned to her face. Oh, she was still offloading most of her reactions -- and maybe that was for the best -- but to me, it was the difference between bare ground and a cross section of archaeological strata. Confusion layered over anger and betrayal and pain on top of guilt, desperation, fear, and more anger. I felt a knot loosen in my chest at finally getting a look at what I was working with. Didn't do much to quench my own anger.

"You use your power to keep track of me from the moment I enter your range to the moment I leave it. You keep it up in your fucking sleep! Did you think I didn't notice?"

She hesitated for a moment, face twisting with reluctance. Well, a few specific muscles tightened to a nearly imperceptible degree, but it stood out clearly against the literal nothing she'd been showing before.

"I... suppose that's fair. I'll stop--"

"I don't want you to stop! We're teammates, I depend on you. What if I really need you and you're ignoring me for the sake of privacy of all things? How are you going to feel about this idea then?"

A mulish glint entered her eyes.

"That's hardly the same--"

"Hey, I've got an idea!" I brightly interrupted. "Wouldn't your power be more effective if no one could get to you? What if we hide you away in, I don't know, a small metal box?" I dropped the false cheer. "Get it? I'm not doing it!"

I watched impatiently as anger melted into realization and shame. She looked down.

"Sorry. I shouldn't have asked."

My crossed arms tightened over my chest.

"No, you shouldn't have." I sighed, trying to let it go. "Christ, Taylor... You want to know why I lied? Because I couldn't stand to see what you'd do to yourself. Are doing to yourself. This shit hurts everyone who cares about you too."

I clamped down on my power as I said the words. I knew what they'd do to her and I didn't need to hear it. She wouldn't know how to respond. Or, more accurately, she wouldn't be able to figure out how to phrase 'I know but I'm not going to stop' in a way that let her maintain the moral high ground. There was a reason I'd talked around it before: making her feel even more guilty wasn't productive. But she had to understand I wasn't going to sit back and let her hurt herself no matter how much she thought she deserved--

"You didn't sound so concerned about me earlier."

What?

She was still letting some of her reactions bleed through, so when I let up on my power I could tell the faint resentment in her tone was genuine -- substantially understated, actually -- but, uh, about what? She'd barely come up in that conversation and I didn't see what would have bothered her in what I did say. I considered pushing my power further, but I really didn't have much to spare if I wanted to be functional tomorrow morning. And if she'd misunderstood something it was probably better to appear confused, unpleasant though that was.

"If this is about laughing when--"

"This is about drawing attention to my civilian identity just to distract the PRT."

Huh. I needed a couple moments to work out what she was even talking about, mainly because she was pretending the problem was the threat to her secret identity.

"Oh, the blackmail on Stalker? No, I was just going to tell them about the 'extra' patrols and the lethal bolts. Like I said, nothing too serious." I paused, considering the implications of her misunderstanding. "Fuck, Taylor, you really think I'd do that to you?"

That hurt. It was one thing for her to think me a liar -- I was, no getting around it -- but to think I'd betray her trust like that? Reduce the worst day of her life to a simple distraction? And she had thought I'd do that, clearly. And -- I watched her expression with growing horror -- she still did, didn't she? I almost wanted to protest the unfairness of it. Out of all the lies I'd told her, it was this simple truth she disbelieved? I guess I hadn't thought I'd needed to be that convincing. It was just a stupid misunderstanding... Fuck.

I wrapped her in a hug. My skin crawled but I sucked it up. She didn't push me away but she certainly didn't hug me back. She looked away.

"Hey, don't pretend this isn't a big deal. I know it is. You shared a confidence with me and I've never -- would never -- use that without talking it over with you. I phrased it that way earlier because I wasn't going to tell Tanya, either."

I almost went on, explaining why doing that wouldn't even make sense, but I stopped myself. She wasn't upset because it would have been a tactical blunder, whatever she'd said, and convincing her I understood the tactics wouldn't fix anything. She'd caught me in a lie and felt betrayed, and part and parcel of betrayal in her mind was using her secrets against her.

(Never mind her 'origin story' really hadn't been a secret when she'd blurted it out three whole days after we met. Back then she couldn't forget it for a moment. Her circumstances had barely changed and what she had needed from us was the validation everyone else had denied her. But now she'd escaped, now she'd built up a dangerous, confident persona who no one would dare treat that way. Except someone had. The story had become a threat to her new life and she feared that even as she'd told herself she'd grown past it.

Pretty bog-standard parahuman psychology. Which just made tripping over it all the more embarrassing.)

Still, it wasn't like there was nothing more I could do.

"I've shared things with you I wouldn't want spread around either, you know."

That hadn't been easy -- understanding parahuman psychology didn't make me immune to it, obviously -- but I'd... Shit. I'd actually been about to think 'I'd made myself vulnerable to her as a form of precommitment to our friendship.' I really needed to spend less time around Tanya. As soon as that wouldn't be suicide, anyway. So I'd just have to deal with it for the foreseeable future, I guess. Whatever, the point was telling her that had meant something, and she knew that.

And after a long moment she nodded, relaxing slightly.

"Right."

And that was it.

I sighed and released her. She did believe me. Mostly.

We each took a few moments to collect our thoughts. That had been a hell of a lot. Actually, I'm surprised she gave me a chance to... She'd wanted to be convinced, hadn't she? Like, what could she have done if she decided I had betrayed her? None of the options I could come up with were good. She was better than me at that sort of thing but sometimes there was no winning move. And if she were serious about this, she knew better than to let me speak. She'd known she needed my help with Tanya and she'd feared losing me as a friend. So she'd decided her suspicion was the problem, justified or not, and set this all up to let me work my magic.

Hell, Taylor, only you could fool me into reading a cry for help as a hostile interrogation.

... And I'd still bungled it. Fuck. Oh, I had excuses. I was exhausted both mentally and emotionally, and so was my power. She'd taken time to prepare and given me none. I'm a Thinker, not a Master. And this was a real fucking dumb way to approach the problem. (Though, again, very characteristically Taylor.)

But when it came down to it, if she'd wanted me to restore her faith in me, I'd failed. It certainly could have gone worse. I'd done an OK patch job, considering, but the fault lines were still there. I could fix it, really fix it, with enough time and power... Which, practically, was the same thing as not being able to fix it. Well, at least it was over.

"So, how'd you pull this off? You didn't really bug your own hideout, did you?"

She raised an eyebrow and I rolled my eyes.

"You know what I mean. Hidden microphones."

She relented.

"The other meaning was closer, actually."

I blinked.

"Damn, you got that working with your power? Since when?"

She shrugged.

"Intelligence and coordination are now my primary roles on the team, right? I've been practicing... a lot and I'm still not very good. I need a lot of different types of bugs pretty close to understand speech, and sight is still unusable."

Oh. She'd described trying to use her bugs' senses as extremely disorienting and painful, hadn't she? She'd hit on an arguably productive way to hurt herself and jumped right in. Well, maybe that wasn't giving her enough credit. Hearing through her bugs really might have let her figure out the decoy trick. Which, uh, I should be very careful not to point out just in case she hadn't realized.

"Hey, that's useful." And terrifying. She'd gotten that far in a day? How long until she was listening in on every conversation in a quarter mile radius? July? Well, I can't really call anyone else out for Big Sister tendencies. "Maybe it's even useful enough to spare you from banishment to the apiary."

She gave me a flat look. Flatter.

"Come on, you have to admit that was funny."

"I don't think I do, actually."

I hesitated. Were her feelings really hurt? She could handle some ribbing these days. I'd made a point of it as a form of exposure therapy -- so had Alec, though he was just an asshole -- but in the context of everything else... Well, I really couldn't afford to spend power on this but explaining cost nothing.

"I think she was genuinely trying to be nice, you know. She's just bad at it."

"She called me 'a lovely young woman for a career criminal.'"

"She really did, didn't she?" I couldn't suppress a little chuckle. Taylor glared. "Look, it's funny because she actually meant it. As for suggesting a career change, it's an opportunity she would have liked to have had. Or she's convinced herself she would have, anyway."

"She could certainly retire to the country now. Somehow I don't think that's the plan."

"God no," I laughed. "She knows that's not an option for her -- well, I say 'know' but I doubt the explanation she's settled on has any overlap with the real reasons -- but she thinks you can still get out."

She was wrong, of course. Taylor's combat experience might not amount to a percent of a percent of Tanya's, but she was just as psychologically dependent on it. Well, no, not nearly, but still dependent enough there was no chance she'd voluntarily give it up anytime soon.

"She also thinks you're dangerously naive and it's going to get you killed. Maybe her too if she's foolish enough to rely on you," I continued. Taylor wanted me to be forthright with her, right? She needed to understand this even if she didn't. "I know you're trying to meet her in the middle, but she's not going to see any reason to move at all if you don't put things in the right terms."

"Like you did?" she asked archly.

This at least was an issue I'd anticipated, if not quite so soon. Taylor could be as ruthlessly pragmatic as anyone, but she sometimes needed coaching to get there. Coaching that would at best annoy and confuse Tanya, who instead of needing moral excuses for pragmatism needed pragmatic excuses for morality.

It wasn't that big a problem: if Taylor really objected to properly framing a message for its intended audience, she couldn't have managed a tenth of what she had with Rachel. Even without any preparatory work on my part, she'd realized what I was doing. It was probably a bit of a shock to hear me indulge Tanya's casual sociopathy, but that would have been easy enough to smooth over on its own. In the context of the rest, though? The reminder of my skill in that area probably didn't make me seem more trustworthy.

But that damage was done. All I could do now was address the object level concern.

"Yes, like I did! I'm making progress. Do you want this to work or not?" I took a breath. "Look, I'm not saying your way won't work"-- it wouldn't, but I wasn't saying that --"but how long will it take? Weeks? How much of the city will be left by then, you think?"

"I have a plan for that, actually." Uh-oh. "They need the orbs to do anything, right? And they're potentially extremely valuable if there are more mages on Bet. It should be easy to stage a theft; there probably will be attempts to steal them. Harder to stage a recovery once we can trust them to behave responsibly, but we'll have time to figure that out."

... Thanks, Taylor. At this point I just wouldn't know what to do with myself if I went five minutes without experiencing mortal terror. Well, at least she was talking to me and not just doing it.

"Not that I don't see the appeal of putting Tanya in timeout, but would you prefer to hand the city to the Merchants? Lost Garden? The Teeth? Because that's what you're proposing. We made this power vacuum. If we just walk away, we're responsible for what follows."

Of course, the much bigger problem was the possibility we'd bungle the theft and die. They were at least as aware of the threat as we were and vastly more capable. But starting with practical concerns would implicitly concede it was a good idea if we could manage it, which it wasn't.

"We -- the Undersiders -- can defend the city. That was the plan before they showed up, right?"

"Sure, that was Coil's plan. Do I need to remind you he was a moron? He insisted we take separate territories despite building our whole team comp around synergy. Anyway, we were supposed to have the Travelers for that. We don't have the muscle on our own to claim the whole city." I spoke over Taylor as she tried to respond. "And even if we did, we certainly don't look like we do. We'd have to fight it out, and that comes with collateral damage."

That gave her some pause.

"I'm not sure it would be enough, anyway," I continued. "The orb is an aide, not the source of their powers. Don't know what that means in practical terms, but I wouldn't want to count on it. And if they remain active, they'll be much less willing to hold back if they don't comfortably outclass everyone."

She drummed her fingers on her knee, considering.

"If it came to it, do you think we could beat them without their powers?"

Why, Taylor? Why are you so determined to get us killed?

She interrupted while I tried to formulate a response.

"Stop. You're seriously going to try to convince me we can't take three guys and a scrawny child?" she accused. "Fuck, Lisa, what's gotten into you?"

I glared at her. What was this trick question bullshit?

"It's about the fallout, not the fight. If it comes to that, we're never going to rebuild trust." Also, I had no confidence we could take them. I'd believe Tanya wasn't dangerous when she was dead and buried and not a moment before. Maybe wait a week just to be certain. "And this whole idea is counterproductive. Getting robbed in the night doesn't make you less paranoid."

She shrugged.

"It'd take longer, but we'd have the time. No more massacres."

And we'd finally gotten to the issue I'd thought I was here to address.

"Look, I'm with you on this. This can't happen again. But overreacting makes it more likely, not less."

"Overreacting?" she demanded, strident. "To sixty one dead?"

"Sixty one Chosen. Not desperate opportunists looking for food and security, either. Committed officers of the old Empire, the ones who didn't think Purity was violent enough."

"They deserved to go to prison, sure. That's not what happened."

"That was never on the table. How would we have gotten them to the police station? Not that they have the capacity to hold or feed that many."

"So killing them is just fine?"

"So letting them continue robbing, hurting, and killing innocent civilians is just fine?" She hesitated and I pressed. "Why don't you ask Brian how he feels about this?"

"Yeah, seriously, Tay?" I jumped and so did Taylor. "You're getting this bent out of shape over Hookwolf and his buddies? I can't decide whether I want to point her towards Skidmark or Purity next."

Aisha leaned casually against the wall by the door. Really? What next, Fog hiding in the walls?

...

Is Fog hiding in the walls?

No.

Right, of course not. That'd be dumb.

I restrained myself from double checking and gave the bag of chips in Aisha's hand a pointed look.

"No popcorn?"

She smirked.

"I looked. You need to restock, Taylor."

"This is a private conversation," Taylor said stiffly. Bad move.

Aisha recoiled, face contorted in... I think that's supposed to be guilt?

"Fuck, I'm so sorry. I had no idea. Well, maybe I suspected when Lisa closed the door the second time... I'm just overcome with shame." Her face relaxed back into the smirk. "Well, now that I've apologized to you, don't we both need to apologize to Tanya?"

She was making a joke of it -- because of course she was -- but if she'd quietly waited and watched both conversations, this wasn't some lark. I thought over what had been said. Well, she hadn't been entirely passive, but she hadn't screwed with us enough to really disrupt things. Had Brian put her up to this? Probably not. Alec? She could have just been curious herself. Not worth using power.

"I know this is a bit, but please don't admit anything to Tanya. How would I explain your death to Brian?"

She rolled her eyes.

"Come on, she wouldn't really do that." She paused. "Right?"

I pretended to think about it.

"Probably not?"

That got to her, at least a bit.

"Not going to tell me not to listen in?"

"I would if I thought you'd listen." I grimaced. "I'll have to talk to her about her plans for Stranger countermeasures. If she senses a Stranger and can't remember you, she'll pretend nothing's wrong and flood the room with invisible, odorless poison gas."

There it was. Aisha could be difficult to manage but she wasn't actually trying to get herself killed.

"I wouldn't need to if you weren't keeping secrets." She stood up straight, crossing her arms. "This should be a team meeting."

"This isn't team business," I responded. "Tanya's replaced Coil, not Brian. Your orders from the boss are to sit back and enjoy your absurd salary, and everyone else is happy with that."

"It's team business if Taylor is volunteering us to fight every villain on the East Coast instead of letting Tanya handle them."

Huh. We both turned to Taylor.

"Actually, that's a good point," I said. "Even if the team can do it, you and I certainly can't. They deserve a say."

"Not like you're pulling off this dumbass plan without me, anyway," Aisha added.

Taylor hesitated but ultimately folded under the combined assault.

"Fine. Nothing drastic without a team vote." Which she knew full well she'd lose. "Was there something else you wanted, Aisha?"

"Nah, feel free to get back to it. Pretend I'm not even here."

She leaned back and ate a chip. She didn't use her power.

Taylor sighed and looked at me.

"Can't you make her go away?"

"Not really," I said. Not without crossing lines, anyway. "If I start detailing Brian's fetishes you're more likely to flee than she is." Aisha laughed and Taylor blushed, proving my point. "Best I can do is bore her until she activates..."

"I'm not saying they were good people," Taylor said after a long pause. "Maybe the city's better off with them dead. But this didn't just happen. We killed them. Sixty one people who'd still be alive if not for us. Doesn't that bother you at all?"

I blinked. Wow, she was working hard to make excuses for Tanya. Not surprising, exactly, but this was a bit blatant even for her.

"I don't know about you, but I was doing my best to save them. Tanya decided to kill them against our advice."

Her expression hardened.

"Were you trying your best? You managed to convince her it was a mistake pretty fast after she did it."

I really hadn't pushed that distrust down very far, had I? Though, uh, she wasn't completely wrong. I hadn't pushed as hard as I could have, cautious about getting caught. Overcautious, given later revelations. But with my understanding at the time, I'd maintain it was the right decision for minimizing long term issues. If she'd killed me for manipulating her, we'd definitely all be in a much worse position now. And of course killing everyone there wasn't actually the plan and I still didn't know why she'd changed her mind.

Still, the implication certainly wasn't true. Pretty insulting, too. I dwelled on that for a moment to get mad enough to respond properly.

"You think this is easy? Fuck you. Why did that tack work and not any of the others? I don't know! Is that what you want to hear? Tanya is ridiculously, impossibly confusing and I challenge you to find anyone in the world who could have done a better job."

Taylor raised an eyebrow.

"Didn't you just remind me how great your power is at this sort of thing? How you can figure a person out in moments? Sure, she's had an eventful life, but you've had days to figure out how to help her."

"My power tells me how to hurt people," I growled, genuinely angry now. "That's what it does, that's what it's for. You get it? If I want to help someone, I have to put the pieces together myself. And--"

I stopped at the look in Taylor's eyes. I looked away. Fuck, why did I say that? And not ten minutes after I'd admitted to compulsively using my power on people I care about. Even Taylor's not enough of an idiot about this sort of thing to fail to connect two dots.

"Lisa..." she started, unsure of how to continue. I felt her hand on my back and shuddered at the unexpected contact. She pulled away.

"Why do you think you have bug powers, Taylor?" I asked after a long moment. "They're cruel jokes at our expense, every one of them."

I looked at her, at her dawning horror. She'd suspected, of course, but she'd gotten good at not thinking about it. Saying that was over the line but the pity was intolerable. I rubbed her back, as much to prove I could make myself do it as to comfort her, but it still seemed to help. I didn't tell her it would be alright because she'd insisted on honesty even when it hurt.

We sat in silence for a minute, not looking at each other. Finally, she started back in as though nothing had happened.

"Tanya is a kid who's had the most profoundly fucked up childhood I've ever heard of. She doesn't know any better. We do."

I startled and double checked the door. It was still closed. Tanya wouldn't stoop to pressing her ear to the door, but if she was going to show up at the worst possible moment, this was it. I hoped it was, anyway.

"You really can't say things like that. She does not appreciate people discounting her agency."

She stared at me for a moment.

"She's still down the hall, Lisa. The men are downstairs. Seriously, what happened? You're never this twitchy, not even when you should be."

Nothing happened, Taylor. You just lack the self-preservation instincts God gave a sea cucumber. But whatever, no harm in going over the bounty meeting at this point.

"... and that was the truth?"

"Notarin's power wouldn't have worked otherwise."

"Fuck, that's horrible."

"That was what Militia said, more or less. Tanya immediately decided it was a trick and told her to fuck off. I'm not certain if she straight up doesn't realize sympathy exists, doesn't believe it could ever apply to her, or if it's something about that incident in particular. Either way, don't make that mistake."

Taylor reluctantly nodded.

I'd saved Tanya's little flight test anecdote for last in hopes of distracting Taylor from the rest. So far so good. Time to take the initiative back.

"Look, I know this isn't good, but take a step back and consider how this all would have gone without us. Imagine Tanya in her 'infantilizing' dress proudly explaining to half the world how she gassed sixty people hiding in an Endbringer shelter. We are helping, even if it's not as easy as we'd like."

Taylor grimaced.

"Right, she wanted to seem harmless. How the hell did we get here from there?"

I dropped my head into my hands.

"Fuck if I know. I thought this was such an easy win. How do you lose the moral high ground to Nazis?"

She didn't have an answer for that.

"So... what now?" she asked.

Getting with the program, Taylor? Fucking finally. Though honestly the last thing I wanted to do at this point was dive into an involved planning session.

"Fact finding. Despite all this talking about it, I still don't know what actually happened. I think I can get the men to cough up some details."

She nodded and I started to get up. No, you know what? I didn't need to just let Taylor get away with this bullshit. I sat back down and glared.

"And you need to decide whether you're really committed to this project or not. I need a partner, not another draw on my attention and power."

Harsh? Definitely. Unfair? For sure. I knew she was hurting. And, hell, I'd deserved... some of that. But Taylor handled pain by channeling it into obsessive dedication, and I -- we -- needed that working for me and not against me. She couldn't run from her problems forever but I was a lot more concerned about the next two weeks.

She looked away. After a moment, she nodded. I squeezed her shoulder and prepared for the next conversation. At least it couldn't be as intense as this one, right?

I took a moment to observe the table before I approached. The men were still playing their card game, exchanging jabs in German. They'd found beer somewhere -- I was sure Taylor didn't keep any -- but none of them seemed drunk. Weiss was technically their commander, wasn't he? They all looked comfortable including him as one of the guys. Perhaps that made sense. The battalion was Tanya's much longer than it was his and he was in charge now because she said so. It'd be natural to just coast on the respect they had for her.

I really didn't understand their dynamic as well as I'd like. Focusing on Tanya had made sense: they did what she said, not the other way around. And ignoring them made it somewhat less likely Tanya would decide I was trying to suborn them when I annoyed her and she started looking for reasons to distrust me. (Not that she wouldn't concoct elaborate conspiracies out of whole cloth, but you do what you can.) But maybe it was time for that to change.

I hadn't taken Tanya's implication I'd be a full-fledged member of her team all that seriously when she'd made it. Maybe she thought her word mattered more than the years of combat and camaraderie the four of them had shared but I didn't. But if that was how she was starting to view me in truth, I should have some leeway to interact with them. And while understanding them might not be as useful as understanding Tanya, it should be much easier.

Of course, I didn't actually have any power to spare for that at the moment. Fortunately, this shouldn't be too complicated. I walked up to the table.

"Hey guys. I'm trying to work out how much info postcogs and other Thinkers will be able to get from the aftermath of the Chosen fight, but the whole thing is pretty confusing from Tanya's perspective." That was a safe bet. If she'd tried to talk at all she'd have been right in the middle of them when the fight started. "Mind showing me your recordings? Of the whole encounter, ideally."

They all stopped their game and looked at me. Koenig turned his chair and stared. I shivered.

Each of them had taken on some of Tanya's characteristics. Or, less euphemistically, Tanya had hammered them into forms she found more pleasing. Weiss was meticulous and polite. Granz was clever and unpredictable. And Koenig? Tanya turned to him when she wanted someone shot. They were all dangerous, to be sure, but only he looked at people the way she did. Like you were an object, a fancy stimulus-response machine, a puzzle to figure out what input will produce the desired output. If you were lucky. An obstacle to remove if you were not.

Like he was looking at me now.

"Piss off."

I pissed--

"Wait," Weiss called.

I turned back, a few steps further away. It didn't feel like enough, but the other side of the room wouldn't either. They were ignoring me for the moment, involved in a quiet argument in German. They'd known I was lying, clearly. About having seen Tanya's copy? Probably. What happened there to leave them so certain?

My power could translate -- it was pretty cheap, even, provided I'd flicked through some grammar and vocabulary references at some point -- but I ultimately decided against it, and not just because I was running low. Koenig had been willing to let me walk away and Weiss hadn't sounded too angry, so I wasn't in immediate danger. The longer they thought they could hide information from me this way the better, and the easiest way to pretend I couldn't understand was to in fact not understand. I could always ask my power for the translation later.

Weiss won the argument, of course. Well, maybe it wasn't a foregone conclusion if I was reading the situation right. His authority derived from Tanya. Would it apply when he acted against her wishes? Which, uh, was a pretty big step. She allowed her favorites a pretty long leash, but there was a limit. What the hell happened?

They'd all gone back to staring at me, but it was clear the others were waiting on Weiss, eyes calculating.

"Why do you want to see it?" he asked after a few uncomfortable moments. "The truth."

I dropped my eyes in shame. Well, do or die time. What's going on here, Power?

Worried, Defensive. New internal tensions and defiance of authority indicate concerns over leadership. Likely--

Huh. Only now realizing that Tanya was batshit insane? Unlikely. Doubt they were having moral qualms over a few dozen murders, either. They'd done worse. Add in their certainty Tanya hadn't shown me the recording? That implied... a bigger problem than I'd been thinking. Well, the right approach was clear at least.

"I can't help if I don't know what happened."

"That's why, then? Helpfulness?" He didn't sound convinced.

"You were listening in on the meeting, right? We're publicly associated now. Your success is my success. Your failure, likewise."

He nodded after a moment.

"No more lies."

To him, presumably. I doubted he wanted me to share this conversation with Tanya. But the fact that every last person in the world is a hypocrite isn't news to me. I nodded.

"Is there really no way back to our world?"

I blinked.

"Nothing's impossible, but it's an extremely rare effect. I wouldn't even know where to start looking. Dodge from Toybox, maybe? Though--"

"You won't find one."

"Probably not, no."

"Not probably. You will not find one."

Oh. Bold of him to put conditions on receiving my help. But if he thought I was desperate enough to-- she wouldn't expect me to come, would she? Fuck, who am I kidding? She absolutely would.

"Got it."

He nodded and pulled out a chair for me.

I double checked the fly on my sleeve -- Taylor would have it buzz if Tanya started moving this way -- and sat down.

...

"--debasement? Look in the mirror!"

Tanya's voice emerged from the air. Weiss's view wasn't great -- the magic telescope thing made up for the altitude, but I couldn't really make out anyone's expression from above and the constant irregular motion certainly didn't help -- but the audio was clear. Piped in from Tanya's orb, presumably.

She really was quite the orator. Not the best I'd ever seen or anything -- probably not even as good as Kaiser had been, and he'd only really been good for a cape -- but far better than she had any right to be. Well, I could see how it might have happened. Before she learned magic persuasion would have been her only real means to exercise control over her life, which I was confident had always been a top priority for her. She'd set out to master it in blissful ignorance of just how poorly suited she was to it, and the result was... this.

She had the technical aspects down, naturally. Logos and ethos, too, though of course the latter owed less to her oratory than to her kill count. Pathos, though?

"--give you till sundown."

Well, there was definitely pathos. It was... Well, it was like a kid with a gun. Any other kid. Powerful, maybe, but she barely had a clue what she was doing with it. She made a strong impression, for sure. Just not always the one she had in mind.

"--expect you to do something stupid and give me an excuse to kill you. Honestly, my preference was to simply have the lot of you executed as looters and bandits. Questions--"

I winced. Maybe this wasn't usable, even before the killing started.

"--I am a fundamentally peaceful person driven to violence by necessity. I'm--"

Now, that was interesting. Not because it was insane, obviously, that was old news. Was that what she told herself? Had told herself? It was a surprisingly normal defense mechanism, really, but here it sounded more like habit than a strongly held belief. In the time I'd known her, she'd sometimes pretended to want to avoid violence and sometimes... not. I'd vaguely theorized that the inconsistency came down to some obscure principle that only made sense to her, but if it was a more recent development...

Yeah, I could see it. Major Degurechaff, commander of the vaunted 203rd, could pretend (to herself) to hate violence to her heart's content because she really didn't have much of a choice, at least so long as she also insisted on pretending (to everyone else) to be the perfect little jingoist soldier. Lieutenant Colonel Degurechaff, on the other hand, had a whole Kampfgruppe to command and could easily justify leading from the rear. Hell, maybe that was why she pursued the promotion in the first place, working hard to get something she didn't even want. Maybe she got a bit restless and twitchy without her fix, but she was comparatively stable then and her inhuman willpower was well established.

Then Visha bit it while she was playing officer.

A few more details clicked into place. The occasional bursts of overconfidence standing out against her normal paranoia. The way her moments of insecurity focused on everything but fighting. Her absolute insistence on always putting herself in the most dangerous positions. It all stood out because it was new. Something I'd probably have realized sooner if I'd paid more attention to the men, but oh well. How many of the contradictions in her character had propped up the Tanya-of-two-weeks-ago and how many were symptoms of its collapse?

Then came the duel, wherein Tanya decided the best way to persuade the Chosen attacking her was a good idea was torturing a Brute 7 to death by staring at him. I sighed.

"You're not Manton limited?" I asked as the scene dragged on. At Weiss's blank look, I continued. "The Manton Effect refers to the tendency of powers to include protections from their effects. The most common one is limiting the application to exclusively living things or the reverse, so a telekinetic has to throw things at you instead of just pinching your arteries. Not ringing any bells?"

He shook his head, frowning. I suppose I hadn't really expected the normal rules to apply to magic, but that raised some questions.

"But your power works on both people and objects?" he asked before I could start.

I shook my head.

"My power works on information. It doesn't do anything directly to anyone but me. Which is another common limit, by the way: powers that work on people tend to only work on the user or on everyone but the user."

"Ah." He nodded in recognition. "Mental spells can only be cast on oneself."

Huh. The possibility of getting in on that mental acceleration hadn't even occurred to me. Oh well. Though, damn, that also meant no analgesic formula... Probably wouldn't have worked, anyway. Nothing else does.

But, by implication, physical effects aren't limited. You could boil your own blood as easily as anyone else's? Well, I suppose that's why they train mages. It's something, anyway.

"Not everyone is Manton limited, just to be clear. Narwhal can split you in half from fifty feet with no warning. If you're not Manton limited, why don't you do things like that?"

He shrugged.

"Moving manna on its own is slow. With a few minutes to work a mage can do that"-- he nodded to the illusion --"but it only takes a few seconds to attach a spell to a bullet and fire it. And mage shells block manna."

That was... well, he had a point. There weren't a ton of people they could kill with this method they couldn't kill faster, easier, and from a longer range with an artillery spell. Tanya only bothered with it because she didn't want to tear the crowd apart with shrapnel, I think. Though given how it turned out that might have saved her some time. Still...

"If this gets out, it's going to be a big deal. Non-Manton limited capes are scary and it's not obvious from this recording that there are other limits in play." I paused, considering. "Well, maybe not that big a deal. Not far up to go from demolishing the Nine."

He gave me a level look.

"I don't see how it would get out."

I shrugged.

"Just saying."

I glanced back at the illusion. Tanya was starting to get annoyed no one else had volunteered for roasting but she wouldn't give up for a while yet.

"What happens if you try to use a mental spell on another person?"

He shrugged.

"How would you? There's no way to reach another's mind."

What?

"You can affect the rest of the body but not the brain? Why?"

He frowned.

"Not the brain, the mind." He glanced at Koenig. "Am I using the right word?" They shared a brief exchange in German. "Ah, the better word in Albish might be 'soul.'"

What.

Observing my expression, he shrugged.

"If you want to understand the theory you'll have to talk to the Colonel." Not only did he not look the slightest bit embarrassed about admitting a kid half his age knew more about his job than he did, he didn't even seem to realize he should. The effects of long term exposure to Tanya, I guess.

"When you do, don't say 'soul.'" Koenig hastily advised.

Weiss turned to him, perplexed. That turned to irritation as he got the context in German. Koenig shrugged, nonchalant, and Weiss turned back to me.

"Excuse the Lieutenant, the word I was looking for definitely was not 'soul.' The Colonel... disapproves of superstition."

Huh. I mean, no way was she genuinely religious, but I'd have guessed she'd have pretended. Though maybe religion meant something different on their world. What did it have to do with magic? If--

"--know we agreed that fight would settle things, but--"

I looked back to the illusion.

"--that warrior spirit when he needed you?"

Oh. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, I'd still kind of expected she'd just wanted to cover up an embarrassing mispronunciation or something. This was... Well, it certainly could have been worse. Words can't express how fucked we'd have been if this had happened at the truce meeting. Or maybe not? I probably could have diverted her if I'd been there; I'd certainly have figured out where she was going long before she did. Actually, I had distracted her when her thoughts drifted that way at the meeting. Maybe I'd already--

Illusory Tanya barked out some German and the killing started.

I'd thought it would be over in an instant, a quick sequence of explosions turning the crowd into paste. But that wasn't what happened. Maybe they were worried about hitting Tanya? A single anemic explosion blew apart Fenja's torso while Tanya split Menja's skull with her bayonet. Weiss carved Stormtiger in half with a laser as he shot down to join Tanya in cutting down the normals. It got hard to follow after that.

Maybe if I'd seen a little less I could cling to a sense of unreality, treat it like some over-the-top grindhouse flick. But I'd killed eight clones in the past few days and watched maybe a hundred more die and I knew this was real. The whole thing was over in less than ten seconds and I could already tell they'd be replaying in my head for a good while. Weiss let the illusion fade and I took a couple moments to pull myself together.

"And the rest?" I asked. "That's the important part, but the more I know, the better."

"The rest?"

"When you..." Uh, there'd been about sixty people there, hadn't there? "You forgot to clear out the shelter." Noting his expression, I revised. "No, Tanya forgot to clear out the shelter. And you didn't remind her."

He shuffled a bit.

"I'm sure she had her reasons."

I raised an eyebrow. Really?

His expression firmed.

"After Operation Revolving Door broke the Republican Rhine Army Group we all thought the war was over. Millions captured in the greatest encirclement ever attempted. Imperial troops marching through Parisii. We performed the decapitation strike ourselves, turning a great army into so many milling thugs. We all thought the war was over... except the Colonel. She ordered a strike on the Republic Navy at Brest the day before the cease-fire went into effect. When the General Staff shot her down, she was inconsolable."

He paused, staring a hole through my head. Very dramatic, not that it was hard to figure out how the story ended. The war was still going on, so obviously it hadn't been over. Still, I decided to let him have his moment.

"Rumors spread. They said Rusted Silver loved battle more than the Fatherland, that she'd rather burn the whole world than face peace. They laughed at the little girl's flight of fancy. They whispered that the Front had broken her, like so many others. I'm ashamed to admit I had my own doubts."

"She was right, of course. That very day that snake de Lugo fled with the remaining Republican forces from Brest to establish a government in exile in Africa and continue the war from there. And it was only with that support that the Commonwealth dared enter the war, and only with those two fronts sapping our strength that the Federation felt secure in invading."

"And it was no general, not Zettour nor Rudersdorf nor Hans nor Romel who saw it. It was then Major Degurechaff. The Colonel simply sees further than you or me and you'd do well to remember that."

That's an impressive story and all, but do you really think that's what this is, Weiss? There was no point in asking; he wouldn't have brought me in if he didn't have doubts. I could work with that.

edit: fixed a couple typos

Last edited: Mar 16, 2023

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TorontoTowers

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TorontoTowers

Jun 10, 2023

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-- Lt. Col. Tanya von Degurechaff --

We were halfway back to the encampment by the time I realized I was doing things out of order. My Kampfgruppe is a fearsome weapon but even the best weapons require maintenance. Drop your rifle into the mud of the trenches and it won't fire without cleaning, and confusion and doubt are no less fatal to the function of an army. I needed to ensure my mages understood the necessary course of action so I could use them as a... cleaning rod to break through any obstructions among the unit commanders.

I came to a stop and called, "Gather up!"

The battalion quickly assembled by company in a semicircle in front of me. The unit commander meeting I'd scheduled was fast approaching, but this shouldn't take long. I took in the faces before me. There was fear there, and grief, but there was anger too. Reigning in the battle maniacs was Sisyphean toil, but giving them their head? It wouldn't take half a sentence. Well, I'd give them a bit more than that; anything worth doing is worth doing properly.

I let the silence stretch for a few long moments, considering my approach as tension built.

"Debt, gentlemen. All civilization is built on debt. The farmer borrows against Fall's harvest to plant in Spring. The inventor seeks investors to gather the capital necessary to complete the invention. Even the Kaiser takes out loans to fund this war and must, I assume, expect some unimaginably vast return commensurate to that outlay. When it comes down to it a debt is just a promise, and there's no shame in that."

I took a moment to look over the battalion. Some of the newer members were thrown but my veterans had an idea where this was going. I met Koenig's flinty stare.

"To renege on a debt, though? Well, that's no good, is it? If all civilization is built on debt, a deadbeat is nothing but a barbarian. Koenig, what would you call such a man?"

He knew what I wanted. His jaw set and his hands tightened on his rifle.

"I wouldn't call him a man at all," he rumbled.

I nodded.

I'd grown rather fond of this call-response speech pattern early on in my officer career. As a major I could hardly develop a personal relationship with every mage under my command, and of course my appearance didn't inspire confidence.

"We are owed, gentlemen. Vish--" I cleared my suddenly tight throat. "The Lieutenant was taken from us. From me! We are owed, and don't doubt we will have our recompense. Granz, do you think the communists will pay us what we're owed?"

He knew what I wanted. He raised his eyes to meet mine, unashamed of his tears.

"Not without a fight."

I nodded.

The men knew their company commanders, though, so I involved them in the speech and they made their support clear. And that had only become more important now that I was responsible for a whole Kampfgruppe and couldn't spare the 203rd the attention they deserved.

"Of course not. To the communist, debt is oppression. Left to its own devices the Federation would collapse under the weight of its barbaric ideology, but how much damage would they do in the meantime? Too fucking much. And we'll do our part to stop them. We'll take what we're owed, eye for an eye. Though of course it's not that simple. You have to consider relative value. What do you think, Weiss? How many communists is S-- the Lieutenant worth?"

There was only one answer I would accept and he knew it.

"There..." he started, too softly. He swallowed and spoke up. "There aren't enough in the world."

I nodded.

But the ritual wasn't done, was it? There were four companies and I'd only addressed three company commanders.

"You're right, of course. But forget what we're owed! It's vulgar to focus on that when we haven't yet discharged our own obligations. And make no mistake, gentlemen, we are in debt. We owe the Fatherland, of course, who was robbed of his finest daughter on our-- But you know what? Screw the Empire! It's the Lieutenant we owe! We failed to teach them they should have laid down and died before laying a finger on her; the least we can do is make them regret their inattention!"

I took a breath, reigning in my increasingly shrill tone.

"But hey, maybe I'm being unreasonable? Matters of debt demand a sober, considered approach. I'd hate to go too far." I looked to Third Company and steeled myself. "Serebryakov, what mercies would you say are due your former countrymen?"

...

I nodded.

They understood, most of them. And the rest understood I would not be swayed, that there was no way out but through.

"Nothing less than the life of every man who took the field against us today will satisfy our obligation. Every one of them, I swear it! Swear it to me!"

And they, hard-faced and resolute, did swear it.

Weiss and I touched down a little ways outside the encampment in the hope of hiding its position. Likely futile after my takeoff earlier, but we'd be breaking camp soon enough anyway. We started towards the command tent.

"You understand what I need from you, Major?"

He looked at me for a few long moments.

"Of course, Ma'am. Only..."

He faltered under my regard. Had I glared at him? I didn't think so. He'd had an unfortunate penchant for timidity when he'd joined the 203rd, but I'd thought he'd grown out of it. Well, perhaps I could forgive some weakness today. So long as he did what was required of him.

"Only?" I asked.

He swallowed.

"They've still got more than a hundred twenty mages, twice our artillery at least, and ten times the men. It's one thing to fend them off while we're dug in, but... Colonel, what's the plan?"

... Plan?

I almost hesitated, almost admitted I had nothing, but hard won experience wouldn't allow me to show doubt to a subordinate. Not even Weiss.

"Let me worry about the how, Major. Focus on the meeting. When have I led you wrong?"

I closed my mouth, cutting off the rambling before I could say anything even more dumb. Today! I'd led him wrong less than an hour ago!

But he decided to have mercy on me. I couldn't imagine why.

"Yes, Ma'am."

I nodded and started to consider how I was going to kill a division. Hundred twenty mages or not, I thought we still had the edge in the air. After all, the only real advantage mages have on the defense is better anti-air coverage, an unreliable asset at best. With me at their head, the 203rd could crush their combat mages and kill their spotters, reversing the artillery advantage via much more accurate fire... which still left an infantry division facing down my battalion. And it wasn't enough to beat them. They couldn't be allowed to flee or surrend--

"Ah, Colonel?"

Weiss had stopped and I joined him. We hadn't arrived at the command tent yet, but... Ah, this was probably the last chance we'd have to talk privately before the meeting.

"Major?"

But he didn't speak. He took out a handkerchief and paused inquisitively. Oh, right, the blood. But since when did Weiss handle-- Well, everyone should be well acquainted with the realities of a soldier's profession at this point; a little blood is just the sign of a job well done. But that was no excuse to appear slovenly. I nodded and he started dabbing at my face, my cheeks, my nose. He'd never get it all out of my hair or uniform, but the effort should count for something.

He did what he could and put the handkerchief away. We continued on our way without another word.

"--seize the rail yard. It's not like there's a bridge they can blow; we shouldn't have much trouble fixing any sabotage," I finished. "Meybert, Ahrens, you're confident your vehicles are up on their maintenance? We're scuttling anything that can't keep up."

Ahrens nodded and Meybert said, "Yes, Ma'a--"

"Forget logistics," Captain Thon interrupted. "Why are we pursuing a superior force? Our orders are to defend the separatists while--"

"You're confusing defense for guard duty," I snapped. "Proactively destroying threats to the separatists is well within our remit. Regardless, the Kampfgruppe's orders are my concern. Concern yourself with my orders."

He stared at me for a moment, then shook his head.

"No, this is insane. We can't win this fight and there's no reason to try." He took a step towards the radio. "I'll--"

His drivel trailed off into wet gurgling -- a substantial improvement in my opinion, the man had a profoundly annoying voice -- but... Ah. He had a bayonet in his throat. My bayonet, as it happened. Oh. I heard a scuffle to my left, but I was confident Weiss had it under control. I shoved Thon over onto his back so he could finish dying in relative comfort.

"What a fucking disgrace," I grated, mouth forming the necessary noises without my conscious involvement. "It's one thing to find cowardice and insubordination in a conscripted farm boy, but in an Imperial captain?"

I shook my head and caught sight of Captain Meybert, hand on his pistol grip and Weiss's hand latched around his wrist ensuring he couldn't draw it.

"Something you'd like to contribute, Meybert?"

He hesitated, eyes sliding from Thon drowning in his own blood to Weiss to me. I quirked an eyebrow.

"... No Ma'am. I was just... startled."

Now I hesitated. I glanced at Weiss who gave me a nearly imperceptible nod.

"Very well," I allowed and Weiss released him. "I suppose congratulations are in order, Acting Captain Tospan. I'll fill out the paperwork when time permits. I trust the rot extends no further into the Fallschirmjäger battalion?"

He gaped wordlessly. I frowned.

"And we'll need to keep your vice commander appraised, of course. Someone fetch... Lieutenant Nemec, I believe?"

At least three staffers scattered to track him down, but Tospan remained silent. Was something wrong with him? I took a step towards him and he suddenly found his voice.

"Yes Ma'am, thank you Ma'am, no problem Ma'am!"

I shook my head, displeased.

"Get it together, man. You're acting like you've never seen a corpse before."

He nodded -- too fast, but whatever -- and I prepared to get things back on track.

"Now--"

Everything froze. Time stopped. Captain Thon, who'd finished dying a few seconds before, sat up and wheezed. He shoved three fingers into the hole in his neck and tried again, managing comprehensible speech with a slight whine.

"My child, you're making a mistake. Remember: there will be no second reincarnation."

313

TorontoTowers

Jun 10, 2023

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