Summoner

by codekinguu

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20. Chapter 31-35

Chapter 31

Notes:

this has been SUCH a difficult fucking chapter to write and im not sure why

being sick for half a week prob didn't help

the next chap will likely be even harder to write for me but eh that's not for you to worry about

gib nice comments and/or criticism and ESPECIALLY ideas, i love reading them and I could def use your brain power, and unfortunately i am not yet able to create an international hivemind for my story to brainstorm stuff abt.

enjoy or dont, idk, this chap's a bit dodgy

Chapter Text

Mastering the last three Travellers was… an experience.

She had planned to be very very thorough but it just…

It was hard to convince herself she had to completely and utterly enthrall children, scared desperate children, who were all fairly innocent.

There was just something about whoever and whatever she considered a child that made her protective as hell.

So she'd gone easy on them, despite everything. She didn't work on them like Coil and Bakuda.

It made her question her so-called conviction, to not turn them into puppets.

There she was, prepared to kill them on the mere thought of them being Simurgh bombs.

And then all that emotion had time to cool down, and she was holding Sundancer, Marissa, after seeing her wide eyes and hearing her voice ask 'wait, who are you', hands on her shoulders as she crawled through her mind and feeling like she was being yanked in two directions.

She didn't want to Master them. She felt like she had to, but she didn't want to .

So she inched closer to the color of gray, and did the bare minimum so that they'd listen to her and accept how they felt about her.

Now here she was, flying atop the bay, not knowing if she had been having a bout of paranoia or was less resolved to do whatever it took to kill the monsters than she'd thought.

Both were not comforting to consider.

Guilt was an odd feeling.

And despite all her experience, she wasn't quite certain what it was about them that hit her so hard.

Maybe it was the fact that they were just like her, in a distant way. Torn away from their world, left alone without anyone to help, scared and lost.

Or maybe because she couldn't help but think of them as kids, despite them technically being a year or three older than her.

Or maybe it was Lisa's hesitance.

Whatever it was, she had... a moment of weakness. Frustrating, but perhaps not a bad choice, not yet.

It wouldn't take much to firm up that resolve.

A glance at statistics, a thought of simple numbers. A vision of a brighter future, however distant, like she was an old man planting trees knowing full well she'd never get to relax under their benevolent shade.

But she let herself feel that guilt, feel that pain, because she needed to feel human. To not forget what that was like, to not block it out entirely, but yank it to the forefront.

Would it affect her decisions? It was likely.

The midday sun tried to shine through the cloudy murk, and she idly flew in zig zags, catching all the rays of sunshine peeking through the clouds as she thought, finding an odd serenity come over her, tired and guilty but also accepting of the circumstances.

She could have Teleported back home, but she felt like she needed a moment of rest, some time to breathe after Mastering five people in one day. About to be six, soon.

She had to pace herself a bit.

Eventually, she made it home, sliding under the door and materialising behind the couch and her father as he watched TV, nursing a cup of coffee while he lounged on the couch.

She walked around the couch, and tasted surprise.

"Oh, you're back? How was-"

She grabbed the cup, damn near wrenching it out of his hands to put it on the coffee table, and his emotions shifted to confusion and a dose of concern.

She leaned down, and despite the effort it took him, apparently, he met her eyes, his own wide in confusion.

Gold flashed, and she plunged into his mind.

The Mastering process was easy.

She spent a good while perusing through his connections.

Unsurprisingly, defeatism seemed like a thick coat, covering everything in one form or another.

He was a... weak person. She loved him, but the simple fact of the matter was that he was. His fifteen year old daughter endured so much worse than he, even before she was taken to live a hundred foreign lives. She'd endured a million times worse.

But she bent, and he broke.

She endured enough to break trees in half. She splintered and cracked, but eventually bent to endure.

He simply snapped like a toothpick. A monument to defeat.

Still, she loved him. It was mixed with frustration and anger, but still there.

Regardless, it was time to say goodbye.

She had a good template, from her mother's death.

Loss, acceptance.

If anything, his defeatism made it easier. He only had three friends, and while she genuinely soured and grimaced at the thought of taking him away from them, she had to cut the trail short, she had to give him a blank slate to move on from.

She had plans about their supposed disappearance as well.

So she took her time, carefully thinking and pinching, pulling and pushing.

There was something warm in the thought that he loved her and would remember her if she died, that he would be across the country and sometimes think about the daughter he lost, but that was cruel to him. It was perhaps just as cruel to lock his emotions in a way that suited her, and disallow him to move on naturally, but as far as she knew, he never would if she let him handle the 'moving on' part.

He would mope and rot away in a depressive spiral.

So she did the work for him.

She stopped eventually, checking things.

It had to be a bizarre experience, to talk to his daughter one last time while feeling and accepting full well that she might as well be dead, knowing she did it on purpose and not being able to feel discontent or confused about it. As soon as she was out of sight, he'd feel what he felt about her mother's death, without any of the lingering grief of a man unable to move on.

He would know she was alive, but feel like she'd died a long time ago. Acceptance, loss, a dash of melancholy and wistfulness. He could move on now.

At most, there would be a dull ache whenever he thought of his old family. Good enough to masquerade as a genuine reaction, should she come up in his future conversations or such, somehow.

Deciding that she'd twisted him up just enough to essentially be in a state of mind where he was optimistic for the future and sadly thankful for the past that existed, a work of mind-numbingly meticulous prods and shifts, she let go, released him, leaned back, letting Evelynn fade away.

Familiar breathless exhaustion moved through her, and her pulsing headache moved into a constant feeling like there was a knife embedded into her right temple, scraping against the bone of her skull.

Danny took a moment to blink awake, then stared at her, surprised. His brows furrowed, anger about what she did refusing to come, and just turning into confusion.

"Taylor?" He asked, softly, rising up off the couch to meet her eyes with something firmer than she'd seen in years.

She kept her face as earnest as she could keep it.

She probably just looked tired. And by god, she was.

"Tomorrow, you'll leave. Pack up everything you have. You'll go live in Houston. Some people will help you with it. We'll give you new papers and documentation, and you'll have a new job in some manufacturing management position or another. You won't be able to contact anyone you know, and everyone you know will think you are dead. You will keep it that way. Do not contact Kurt, Lacey, or anyone else. Danny Hebert dies tomorrow, and you get a new start. Try to make something of your new life, will you? Not many get that chance." She said, a mildly-intoned request, then licked her lips, swallowed.

He stared, wide eyed and silent.

Her phone rang in her pocket, and she spared only a moment to decline the call, glancing up again as she shoved it back down.

She ignored the ache in her chest as best as she could, and gave him a single nod of acknowledgement. Not respect, not quite.

"You…" She began, tasting the words, slow and pensive. "You were a good father, for a while. You dropped the ball, really hard, around when mom died, but, you're only human. And humans can be selfish, self-centered things when push comes to shove. I'm sure we both wish you did better, but no point crying over spilled milk. At least you left me with a lot of good memories, which is not something everyone gets. Thank you." She said, unsure of how to feel.

It was really moments like this that made it so obvious how disconnected and inhuman she'd become, a red flag waving itself in her face.

She felt more guilt over Mastering the Travellers than she did her own father.

She should be crying.

But all she felt was a numb sense of relief. That this awkward pretension of a functional family was done, she could stop wallowing in its murk, and he could start living again.

"We'll probably never see each other again after tomorrow. Goodbye, dad. Take care of yourself. Move on. I love you."

Deep down under the aged resentment, she really did.

He was silent, his expression getting more subdued and sadly accepting as she went on.

His newfound hope for the future, warring with his understanding that she was true and absolute in her absence.

She turned, and walked upstairs.

She had a shopping list to make.

She grabbed a notebook, a pen, and flopped down on her bed, spent, her migraine sapping her thoughts and willpower. She powered through.

Six hours of nonstop scribbling and sketching later, she realized that calling the mess of a notebook in her hands a shopping list was an understatement.

Dozens upon dozens of chemical compounds, thousands of tools, machines, and lab-adjascent paraphernalia, pipes of dozens of sizes and types, valves, chemical equipment that thank fuck shared mostly the same names as in Runeterra, burners and distillers and rotary separation centrifugal stations, crystals of all kinds she could come up with to test if it was possible to make artificial mana crystals in Earth Bet, gigantic shipments of gold and silver and various alloys, good old piles of plywood, a modern forge hammer press, a standard industrial press, bench grinders and clamps and vices and metalworking benches, specialized furniture, sanitation and safety equipment just in case, piles of pure, clean metal, and syringes, and…

And this thing was sixty fucking pages, covered top to bottom.

She stared in dread at the half-consumed notebook.

She was going to have to triple the size of her bunker from a particularly big room to a small factory station, before all this stuff rolled into Coil's- or Lisa's, rather, base.

At this point, she realized that her life would likely be one with a perpetual power-usage headache.

Her "shopping list" done, and with her head feeling like a ball of leather stuffed with needles, she whipped her phone out, let her eyes go half-lidded, and began to read through her people's reports.

There was a lot, but within a few short minutes and some curt replies, she was caught up.

Then she went to Coil's still-ongoing series of texts.

She skipped straight to the Simurgh's case file, and idly got caught in the loop of wondering which fucking timeline this was in, because as far as she knew, he was still in base, but these files were basically copy pastes and he should be smart enough to know not to leave a digital papertrail.

Her best guess was that he had most of the things she asked for in his computer, already. She'd ask Lisa whenever she came back.

Back to the case file, she began to read through the Simurgh's exact abilities, pattern of behaviour, and most worryingly, her 'nudges'.

There was the first incident that truly tipped the Simurgh's hand, which she skipped straight down to, because even she knew about it.

Sphere.

Now, Mannequin.

It was so blindingly, insultingly obvious, that it almost looked like the Simurgh was taunting them. Saying 'this is why I'm here' without saying it.

Mannequin went from a figure of hope to a figure dedicated to killing people who were making the world better, especially Tinkers, hunting them. Sure, the profile could say something about his supposed ego, his supposed psyche, but it was too obvious to give the man- the creature that much benefit of the doubt.

Mannequin wasn't a person either. He was nothing more than an extension of the Simurgh's will and agenda, a puppet. One filled with fluff to give an illusion of fullness, when there was nothing inside at all.

The rest was not insignificant at all, either. She scrolled up, and began from the start.

The Simurgh's case file was the biggest of the three, because of the sheer amount of consequences she left behind, speculated and confirmed. It was nine hundred and sixty four pages long, going from oldest to newest.

The Endbringer directly led to a third of Europe collapsing through her descent into Switzerland, and the thread notes detailed how in horrifying detail. Diplomats being sent home from Switzerland in the dozens each to their respective countries, each of them nudging the dominos to fall into place to make several countries nearly implode.

An example was a diplomat from Greece. He was in Switzerland, a mere stop on the way back home from being in the UK, then left almost as soon as the Simurgh appeared. So did a German politician and a diplomat, on the same day.

In the following two years, this Greek diplomat went to run for Prime Minister. The German politician did the same in his own country a year before him. The Greek politician's main opposition was hospitalised by a tainted cigarette which, surprise surprise, had passed through Switzerland.

He took Prime Minister through sheer force of charisma and the sudden fortune of his main opponent being out of commission for months, then seemed to have a slow mental breakdown demanding absurdities from Germany, reparations in the billions for World War two, and causing diplomatic incidents that soured relations between the two countries until Germany decided to hit Greece with their full economical force and drive them into another economic depression in retaliation.

Considering that the biggest draw of Greece was its tourism industry, it had already been a country on the brink since Leviathan. That nudge just toppled the jenga tower.

But the strikes never stopped coming.

Another hit by the Simurgh, up in what used to be Kazakhstan, strained Greece further with refugees, and Germany locked the refugees with Greece in an act of seeming spite, making the country essentially enter bankruptcy and gut its military to compensate. A strike from Leviathan later, which hit Athens and killed almost everyone in the government, and the country was essentially left in chaos without the money or power to actually enforce order in any capacity, making it prime choice for many criminal elements to move in and hide amongst the ruins, making things worse.

Africa 2.0, warlords and the law of the land ruling masses of innocents.

Turkey went to capitalise and sent a "stabilising force" that swept away whatever was left, and at that point, it wasn't even considered an invasion despite the chronic enmity between the two nations, simply due to how bad things had gotten for Greece.

Then Turkey got hit by Behemoth, making the occupying force pull out and leaving Greece to stand on its own wobbling legs.

Too weak to enforce law, but too numerous to abandon, with four million residents living solitary lives in the forests or congregated in plains and valleys ruled by warlords.

An attack on some country she hadn't even known existed which locked down the entire subcontinent in a dick measuring contest for three years as every country chopped at the bits to be the first to 'help' the shattered nation by subsuming its territory, none willing to go to war but none willing to let go either, and that dick measuring contest led to a nuclear reactor exploding through an insane series of events that took six pages to summarise, which ended up killing a dozen thousand people and making half of Georgia lose power which broke the camel's back with general discontent the people had, which ignited country-wide riots about gas and electricity prices and corruption, which only got worse when the state of Georgia escalated into violence which escalated in a loop with arms dealing from surprise surprise, Greece, arming the rebels, eventually making the government collapse and fracture into three different factions.

All of which soon collapsed as well and marked the end of Georgia and that then rolled into several European nations having crippling social and economical issues with the massive influx of refugees from the countries collapsing all around them, which led to massively increased crime of all kinds, which led to Gesellschaft exploding from a small group to a massive powerblock with thousands and thousands of members as the natives of Germany and France and surrounding countries reacted to this huge influx of foreigners, which led to… it just-

It just…

That was just one example among hundreds of how the Simurgh destroyed every strand she touched.

Some attacks set up dominos that wouldn't fall for years, until another attack set up the perfect conditions for them to.

A man who had a power that might affect the Simurgh was killed in a plane crash directly caused by the flight network going haywire due to the Simurgh using a piece of radio-sonar-adjascent Tinkertech during an attack on a neighbouring country and making the plane fly straight into a mountain in the clouds. Thousands and thousands of miles away.

A seemingly random piece of debris used to defend against a Legend laser scattered, and its biggest chunk seemed to fly perfectly to kill an evacuating wonder child who had an IQ of one hundred and sixty six at the age of merely eight years old, back when Denmark still existed.

Denying the world of yet one more unforeseen genius before he could make anything better.

It never fucking ended. Every rock, every blink of the fucking Simurgh did something, and ruined a dozen things more.

Dominos, thousands, from seemingly small actions.

One attack built on another, then intersected with one of her brothers', then another intersected with her second recorded one ever and then her fifth with her seventh, and four threadmarks of the seventh attack caused immense damage to threadmarks noted by the third attack which led to another series of catastrophic disasters. Reading this made her feel so endlessly helpless.

The file's speculation section was even more bleak.

All those actions and dominos in Europe might have been nothing but a side objective of the Simurgh to create an unending conflict zone to separate Russia, Europe and Asia and heavily strain economies and land trade.

Without considering the theory that the other two Endbringers had gotten suspiciously more effective in their attacks since the Simurgh dropped from the sky, insinuating some kind of guidance or control.

It was so obvious that the Simurgh wasn't just a threat, she was THE threat.

There was nothing that even compared.

She had precognition on the scale of genuine, complete, omniscience.

The more she read, the more she felt that knot in her chest tighten.

She couldn't take the chance. Tomorrow, if Noelle wasn't immune to her Mastering, the Travellers would have to go, regardless of how much it hurt.

She would make sure it was instant and painless, if it came to that.

But, the Simurgh paradox left her indecisive, again. What if some bizarre power interaction could break her Mastering? What if her time cage broke and then the Mastering faded? Would she not have created the exact circumstances needed for Noelle to destroy everything she was trying to build?

The Simurgh paradox again. No matter what decision she neared, it felt like she was heading straight to what the Simurgh wanted her to do.

She was walking down endless spirals.

Maybe it would be best to destroy all of them, objectively but not emotionally. Kill them all, Noelle included, and wash her hands of the entire situation.

But wouldn't the Simurgh want her to get rid of Noelle?

She wanted to fucking scream.

Fuck.

Seeing that her anger wasn't serving her migraine any good, she tuned out of the Simurgh's absurdly long file, and moved onto simpler things, like reading up on the local cape scene, present and past.

But eventually, she found herself back in that file.

Reading every tragedy, every domino, every significant name that was directly or indirectly executed by the Simurgh, feeling that molten chain coil around her crystal heart, tighten around her lungs like an elastic band.

She wasn't sure when, but eventually, the bed dipped, and with a sigh that washed over her right cheek, an arm wrapped around her, bringing warmth back into her chilled limbs as Lisa shuffled into place behind her.

She wasn't sure when she curled up into a ball facing the wall, but now she realized it, just one hand clutching the phone extended in front of her.

She quickly found where she last left off, and kept reading.

Lisa shuffled, laying her head on Taylor's, reading with her. The pressure helped her migraine, a tiny bit.

Five minutes passed.

Ten.

"You're scared." Lisa softly said.

"Yeah. Overwhelmed in general, because today has been a fucking day, but also scared." She murmured. "You can read what I'm reading. I can see why this is classified. It makes it all feel so fucking pointless. Like resisting her is so futile it's not even morbidly amusing. I hate this fucking apathy everyone feels, but just reading this makes me feel like I might as well lie down and die. And that just makes me angrier. I'm… I'm not trying to kill an Endbringer, I'm trying to kill a god. An omniscient god that knows everything. And my only hope of not having this backfire horrifically and kill us, is the vague hope that my power fucks with hers. And I have six of her fucking pets in our base. Largely innocent children. I'll do what I have to, but… but I don't know what the fuck that is." She growled, her fingers going white around the shaking screen-

A hand extended past her, and grabbed her wrist.

The screen stopped shaking, even as her fingers continued.

"Taylor. Simurgh paradox, even though the word paradox doesn't really make sense but whatever-"

"I know, Lisa. But-

"No." Lisa said, voice soft and firm, forcing her wrist downwards until her phone was screen down on the bed.

She gave a token struggle to turn it over, before slumping.

"Taylor, listen. I know this is particularly fucking with you because of your paranoia, so you need a second opinion, if not a third and fourth. There is no need to worry about what you cannot change."

She got that sense of deja vu pretty often, but this was a particularly strong case. She felt like if someone simply made the walls wooden, she'd been in this exact situation before. She couldn't even remember from which Legend that errant memory was.

But it made her pause and listen more than she might have otherwise, because it was one thing to know that and another to hear it.

"If the Simurgh can predict you and is targeting you, then we're all already fucking dead and there's nothing you will ever do that will prevent it. But if she's not capable of predicting what I think are a hundred-something capes, which we see inside you in huge rotating clusters, in another world, independent times of death in another fucking timeline, all that, simultaneously, then whatever you do, she's fucking blind. You have either lost already, or you have nothing but victory ahead. Your power doesn't work like any other power I've ever heard of. Even the PRT's power section makes it sound like what you have is either immensely unique or downright impossible. Agonising over this will just make you miserable. So act like she can't predict you, because if she can, then no matter what you do, we're both fucked and done for so you might as well just give up on saving the world."

She took a moment to do some meditative breathing, in and out, clearing her mind with ease and well-practised effort.

A minute of silence later, she nodded, slightly.

"Yeah. You're right. I've either lost already, or I've won. The outcome is not something I can actually change if I've lost. So, let's act like I won. Like the Simurgh can't predict me. In that case… I suppose nothing's changed. I'm still going to the ABB meeting tomorrow until I get Lung, then I work my way to the Empire, and eventually take the Merchants." She murmured, more of a recap to soothe herself than something that needed to be said.

Lisa rolled back around her with a sigh.

"Good. We need to get you an emotional support cat you can evilly stroke while you sit on your throne made of spikes."

The joke didn't fall flat, but it wasn't funny enough for her to laugh in her current state. She simply huffed in amusement, and clicked the phone off as they settled into bed.

"Did you do it?" Lisa asked as she used her hair and neck as a pillow.

"My dad?" She asked, and Lisa snickered.

"Could have worded that better on your end, but yea."

She made a face.

"Yeah. He's… ready to move on. Update on SS?"

"Coil said he'll use both timelines, he should have her here by tomorrow morning. Mind explaining that plan to me oh Miss Cryptic?"

Mid day. The ABB meeting was in the afternoon, and her power testing was… actually around that timeframe as well. She'd only have a few hours in between to schedule for.

"Tell you tomorrow morning. The two people I asked for?"

"The scumbags you wanted for whatever reason?"

"Hm." She hummed affirmatively.

"They'll have them in base by morning."

"Okay. Our new apartment?"

"No fucking clue. Can't decide. Need your opinion. Also gotta stop wearing your clothes, they don't fit me and they're not my style. I'm going shopping tomorrow after you tell me of your plan. Then imma go out looking for Spitfire the entire day I think. I'm getting closer. She's somewhere around Merchant territory."

"Hm, alright. Feel free to move fifty grand into your account for shopping or whatever else. Goodnight." She said numbly, exhausted in every way possible, physically, emotionally and mentally.

Lisa shuffled, wiggling around her, trying to find a decent spot, then sighed.

"...Wanna swap?"

Wordlessly, she wriggled around as Lisa did the same.

This is much more comfortable, she thought as her arms closed around Lisa.

"I should make you shorter again." She mumbled, rubbing her cheek on black hair. "That extra inch I gave you is ruining the logistics-"

"Shut the fuck up, Taylor." Lisa grumbled sleepily.

Sleep did not come nor pass easily, but at least she was comfortable and warm during the following night.

After an exhausting workout session which ended with a run, a shoddy but quick breakfast, and a couple hours more till sunrise, she was ready to put the plan to motion.

During those early hours however, she was thinking.

Thinking of the simple fact that she could read people really well. That she could see through them, to some extent. It was nothing but experience, but endless, mind-breaking perspective.

And she hadn't been utilising that skill too much, if at all, because it required empathy, or at least sympathy.

So, despite her actions not changing, she deigned to feel that empathy, if only to be able to read people more than skin-deep.

So it was with less excitement and more weary resignation that she woke up a bleary-eyed Lisa and began to explain.

Who gave her a sleepy, confused look, while Taylor herself simply wiggled into fresh clothes after her shower.

"I mean, the plan is good, I guess, but why Shadow Stalker? I just don't see the connection. Seems random. Which, great misdirection and a heap of confusion, I suppose, but all it's going to do is put a target on Coil's back, and by consequence, ours."

She tugged the shirt down, and tilted her head at her… little sister.

"What do you… wait." She paused, half-turned squinting. "Did I not tell you?"

Lisa gave her a deadpan look.

"If you have to ask, yes."

She hummed, nodded.

"I… thought I did. You know that I triggered at my school right?" She asked, and before Lisa could ask, she bulled through.

"Well, the short gist of it is that I had three girls at my school, trying to bully me to suicide for no apparent reason. They'd gotten scarily close to succeeding a couple times. My trigger event was getting shoved and locked into a locker filled with months worth of fermenting and festating rot and garbage, including used period pads, what I'm pretty sure was spoiled food, and something plastic that had filled the locker with fumes that made me high. By Sophia Hess. One of the three main players in the game called 'ruin Taylor's life'. The PRT found out about her activities soon after, because after such a public shitshow, they interrogated everyone. And people's lips walk the talk real quick when parahuman bullshit is involved."

Lisa blinked up at her, rising up on her elbows, eyes wide in horror.

"I… yeah that- that would do it. Holy shit T, do you need a hug?" Lisa asked, curious and concerned.

She snorted, waving her off.

"I definitely wouldn't mind, but I don't need one. Been through much worse in the lives of my capes. The locker itself barely registers anymore. Regardless, that's why we're using Hess for this."

Lisa licked her lips, and nodded.

"Well, uh, I feel like I shouldn't let you be so casual about definitely traumatic experiences but I don't know what to say to that. Moving on?" Lisa offered, and she let a smile form on her face.

"Yeah, lets."

Lisa cleared her throat, "Yeah, with that added bit of context, the plan is really good."

She shrugged in genuine humility.

It really wasn't a good plan. It was simple, quick and effective enough, but it wasn't what she could consider good.

"Eh, it's… passable. Now, get something comfy from our luggage, 'cause our transports are coming. I'll go wake up dad."

Lisa groaned, but began to roll to the edge of the bed like a slug.

"I got you coffee and donuts, so hurry before they're cold!" She added as she closed the door shut behind her.

"Thank you!" Lisa yelled through the door, and Taylor felt her lips twitch into a brief smile before that dropped as she knocked on her dad's door.

Her two scumbags were quickly brought to the house through the back yard in breathable army boxes with some help from one of her men as Lisa and her father rode off in different vehicles. One to the closest airport, the other straight to their base until they could apartment hunt.

As safe as the base itself was, it was too depressing to live in. Cold concrete walls and military cots surrounded with ammo boxes were not good for mental health.

Lisa wanted light and sound and presence around.

Taylor wouldn't mind that either.

Her father would be better off. A bit of Lulu's work made him more handsome and as hale as Lisa, almost, as well as giving him a face to match his new papers and not tag any face-recognition algorithms in case Dragon got on her case.

The woman was brought to Taylor's room, the man to her father's.

Despite the fate she was planning to inflict on these two people, she took a moment to read the summary report of why Coil chose them. She wasn't sure why.

The first had raped his girlfriend's child. Eleven years old. Released a week ago after a five-

She read that again, brows raising in complete and utter fucking bafflement.

A five year sentence? Just FIVE years?! For-

She took a deep breath, and got back on track.

Man, Coil sure knew how to pick them, huh?

The woman's file simply said that she was a nutjob obsessed with joining the S9 despite being a normal human, and had been a semi-notorious serial killer down in New York before she had to flee here to escape the hunt. Coil had been keeping an eye on her in case she could be used, and she seemed content with murdering and abusing animals in Brockton until he called on her.

Well, goodbye guilt. You weren't here for long, and you left even quicker.

She opened her phone, and checked her and her dad's files, one last time.

No dental records, because no criminal history. No fingerprints either, because neither of them had ever been arrested or put into that system. No DNA, because of the same reason. The PRT would have collected her DNA after power testing for their researchers to check, but that hadn't gone through.

Blood types matched with medical records, should they dig deep enough.

Perfect.

She turned into Lulu the Fay Enchantress again, and made the woman into a perfect copy of herself, then crossed the hall to turn the man into her father, keeping out of sight of the only other person in her house, then picking Evelynn again.

She did bother to learn her driver's name. James. Built enough to carry a heavy man in a military-camoed bodybag like a suitcase.

Her preferred driver stood at the bottom of her stairs, having been told to be very careful about bootprints, a crossbow on his leg as he idly looked around.

She didn't have too much time before the drugs began to wear off, but she had some, so she quickly turned back into herself then to Evelynn, holding her phone.

Calling would get her an answer much faster.

"Yes?" Lisa asked, the rumble of an engine barely audible in the back.

She would have called Coil directly, but apparently calling and talking to him directly over the phone was damn impossible while he was using his power. Even a phonecall was enough to trigger that ridiculous reaction he described. There had to be a pretty thick filter between them for his power to not send him into an overstimulated seisure.

Having to talk to him through at least one liaison would get annoying fast, she could tell.

"Is SS at base?"

A pause, a shuffle, a muted murmur from afar.

"She will be soon. Thirty minutes."

Eh, a believable timeframe.

She closed the phone, and took a deep breath.

"James."

She doesn't need to say more.

He instantly took a brisk walk up the stairs, and walked with her into her room.

She grabbed a t-shirt out of her closet, forced it into the limp hand of a body that looked like hers but wasn't, and there's probably something profound and symbolical in what she is about to do, but as James holds the limp woman up next to the closet, one arm around her waist and the other holding her head steady, every inch of him covered, she doesn't think about it; she has a job to do.

She has an awkward, earnest teenager with great potential and a good future as a Hero to kill.

The Precision Rune locked in.

She gave herself Sophia's fingerprints, adjusted, or rather, fondled, the bolt, took aim, and fired.

A tiny drop of blood splattered on her lip as the crossbow bolt sank deep into her body double's head, and before she ccould second guess the impulse, she licked it off.

Then she grimaced, because that would have tasted much better if she was Rengar, and that's where she cut that line of thinking off and focused on the moment.

She jerked her head to the other room as she tossed the crossbow to him, reflecting on the slight power boost she felt from killing the woman and stacking her Rune's effects, for perspective. It was a small boost, but workable.

James let the woman drop to the ground in what looked like a natural way, one armed, carefully checking his steps, then reloaded as he followed behind her.

They walked into her father's room, and she did her best not to even look at the man who wears her father's face as she and James carefully shove him under the blankets, like he's just sleeping.

She took the crossbow, touched the bolt all over again, and then made the mistake of looking at his face.

Her chest tightened, and anger rose to meet that unfamiliar feeling.

She couldn't be weak. She couldn't afford to.

So she didn't give the crossbow to James as she should. She simply took far too long steadying the shot, fixating on her father's face.

She's not sure why she tortured herself like this, staring right at that face instead of just pulling the trigger and leaving, instead of telling James to do it, but something inside her demanded it.

Maybe she was trying to force herself to face the truth, that as far she's concerned, she really has killed her father, cut him out of her life in a way not so dissimilar to simply losing him in another way. Or maybe she was just trying to satisfy that vague sense of background guilt via self-punishment.

Regardless, eventually, in the respectful silence of her current preferred subordinate, a sharp twang sounded out with another meaty impact.

The man in the bed jerked once, a crossbow bolt going through one ear and out the other, stabbing into the bed.

Her stomach clenched painfully as she steadied her breath.

She handed the crossbow to James, who mutely took it.

"Bring me the gas and leave."

James did as she asked, walking downstairs. She walked out the room, closed both doors in the hall. She felt James' soul walk around the back, to his motorcycle.

The sun was about to rise over the horizon any minute now.

He walked back to the house, inching across the rocky path instead of the grass or mud, avoiding leaving footprints, came up to the back yard's door, then skirted around to his bike, and drove off.

She floated downstairs, opened the door, and grabbed the gas can.

Any more than one wouldn't be terribly realistic, after all.

She didn't know if it would work, but she turned on the gas too, then went upstairs, trailing a line of gasoline from her bed, to her father's, then down the stairs, where she stopped being meticulous and just swung the damn thing around, a strange emotion like relief and grief bubbling into her.

There were no pictures left of mom.

Dad took everything of mom she hadn't taken.

Beyond some memories so distant they might as well be prehistoric myths in her mind, there was nothing left here.

Even so, something about this ached.

She soaked the edges of the carpets, made sure to splash a bit of gas on everything flammable to make sure the fire caught.

Then she tossed the gas can aside.

She flashed back to herself to pocket the phone she had been holding onto while using Evelynn as a cover, then dug out a match, and swapped back to Evelynn, shifting into her gangly self like a snapshot.

She flicked the match, and stared at it, the scent of gasoline filling her mind.

It burns out in her hand, crumbling to ashes. For a moment, her mind is blank as she gently rubs the ashes between two far-too-smooth fingers. A flex of will gives her a different set of fingerprints, something that isn't Sophia's. She doesn't try to think about why.

She took out another match, struck it against the matchbox, and dropped it on the floor.

She stood straight and looked on serenely as the flames burst to life around her, crawling and flashing across the liquid, sometimes flashing up with thwoom sounds and other times just flickering into life.

She took a deep breath, not particularly bothered by the flames licking at her shoes.

It smelled like burning memories and freedom from a past that doesn't feel like it's truly hers anymore. Threads severed. Chains to the past, cast into a forge and broken.

Or maybe she was simply being overly sentimental over a setup and a cover up that doesn't need to be that way.

She licked her lips, needlessly.

"I know you wouldn't have been particularly proud of me, mom. But I also know that souls have nowhere to go here. There is no afterlife in Earth Bet. No Spirit Realm nor undead mists. You are not listening. I am talking to myself because the idea of pretending with naivety soothes me. I can see how people fall into delusions. Insidious and welcoming. But the human mind is not suited to considering nonexistence. The idea itself is too alien to consider. So even if I know you don't exist in any capacity, not anymore, I can't fathom where you might be. I have seen The Void, but not the true nothingness it leaves behind, because nothing intelligent nor alive truly can."

She was rambling, wasn't she?

She looked up at the ceiling, watching the flames rise and lick at chipped paint and dusty fake plants at the edges of her vision.

"I just hope that nonexistence is as soothing and calm as I imagine it to be, because you deserve to rest. And I hope that my monologue will please the petulant child in me that demands that an afterlife exists even if I know it doesn't. It's... Look at me, making this about myself…" She trails off, and scoffs with a faint, bittersweet smile as the flames crawl towards the center of the ceiling, barely hearing herself over the crackling of flame.

"I guess I'm selfish. Because you aren't listening." She whispered, only for herself to hear.

An afterlife might not exist, not here.

But she could fix that too, couldn't she? For some.

She turned into smoke, and flit through an open window, rising up into the sky to watch the dawn.

Surprisingly quickly, the first fire truck arrived.

She didn't look down.

She flew off to meet the girl cursed by a witch's brew.

Chapter 32

Notes:

Previously:

Taylor mastered all the remaining Travellers aside from Noelle, worried about the Simurgh, a lot, then made a shopping list. Then she enchanted two scumbag's appearance to look like her and her father, then shot them through the head with a crossbow, faking her death and pinning the blame onto Shadow Stalker. She sent her father to live in Houston right across Eidolon's base of operations for security, with fake papers and a new identity.

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

The situation demanded a much more subtle and cautious approach than usual.

Because despite Coil's seeming inaction, he had actually tried a lot of things for Noelle in alternate timelines, if only so he could leverage a certain cure to the Travellers.

Panacea hadn't been able to do anything. Cutting Noelle off at the navel had proven nigh impossible because she claimed she just couldn't let them do it, which indicated either intense survival instincts or something more sinister.

The one time they'd managed to cut her off from the upper half via tinkertech laser fired out of nowhere without warning had ended up giving the most answers as to how she worked, ending up with a rotting, rampaging mass of flesh in the compound, while Noelle had already begun regenerating and making a second one.

Killing Noelle hadn't proven effective either, at least not exactly. It seemed to make the mass incredibly upset, then quickly expend itself to remake her before it finished rotting. It severely reduced the size and drove Noelle to a screaming rage, but didn't provide a possible solution to Coil.

Noelle seemed like a standard fallback regenerator. She'd seen things like this before, when things got really desperate against the Void in Noxus and the elite began to look for alternate solutions to the problem.

The main operator and power giver was Noelle, but if she happened to perish, the mass would expend its energy to reform her, like a parasite desperate not to lose its host.

The rest were hare brained attempts made just to see if something stuck, none of which worked, of course.

His report was quite extensive on the matter.

So, this had to be a delicate approach on all fronts.

First of all, if she knew that she was about to be Mastered, Noelle was likely to defend herself, regardless of whether she agreed to being Mastered or not, and regardless of her wishes, simply because of the mass being so instinct driven that it would lash out at things Noelle didn't even know were there..

But Taylor also couldn't just walk up to her without introducing herself a bit.

She'd simply sat the Travellers down and brainstormed with them about how to convince Noelle to go for it, with backups for if she failed to master her.

The result was… dodgy.

The plan was good, and she'd had long discussions with the group on what to do, contingencies and such, but still, it felt… uncertain. She didn't like that, but what else could she do with lacking information?

"No, she seems legit. She tried it on Jess with permission, and figured out that we weren't from this world in like, ten seconds. And no, it's not mind reading, because she didn't seem to figure out why or how we got here, despite her best efforts. It's a Thinker power that just sort of makes someone blank out then gives her some insight into whoever she's looking at by looking into their eyes for a few seconds. Very random. Might give us a clue to the nature of the problem." Trickster said as he leaned on a console, speaking to a camera, his free hand gesturing with his cane.

At Noelle's pensive silence, he continued.

"I mean, it's not exactly a solution, but Coil's under a new employer and they loaned her out to us to test if she can gleam some insight into how to help you." Trickster added.

"Can… okay. Alright. Who's the new employer?" Noelle asked, sounding like a scared teenager, and Taylor closed her eyes with an internal sigh.

She wasn't sure when she would be able to genuinely fix Noelle, when she could afford to, but she knew that she fucking would, eventually.

God, she was just a kid.

"Ah, some person named Summoner. They're some kind of hidden mastermind so we don't know anything about them but their name, but Coil seemed to be their subordinate now. Not much changed, actually, so don't worry too much about it." Trickster lied smoothly.

"Okay. And this uhm, Tinker?"

Trickster scratched his head a bit.

"We haven't met the guy yet, actually. Coil said he's an eccentric bastard, but agreed to do the job. He should be able to make a sort of… time cage for you, that should freeze you in time until the switch gets flicked or they have to do some maintenance. It's the only way he could come up with to stop your power's growth. Then the plan is for the Tinker to eventually work out a device that can rewind time for your body, to before you drank the vial, and cure you. You'd lose the past year and something of memories, and you'd probably miss a lot of stuff and time… but…"

"But that's probably for the best." Noelle slurred, appearing somewhere between sleepy and tipsy. "And really worth it. Okay. I'll let them work." The girl said, voice growing light and determined.

So it was that Taylor let the giant vault door swing open with an ominous groan, the Travellers behind her, walking in unperturbed and ignoring the unsettling sound of a dozen snouts and noses and limbs huffing and puffing and slobbering and squelching away somewhere in the darkness ahead.

Fuck, it stank.

The first thing she noticed that gave her genuine pause was Noelle's soul.

It was completely and utterly mundane. Simple.

The second… was not. It was like she suddenly had a flaring sun at the edge of her perception.

It wasn't exactly a soul, but it wasn't exactly a spirit either. It was just a ball of consciousness and intelligence, enough to register as something similar to the echoing remnant that a soul was, but without any of the things that made it one.

Its nature reminded her of necromancy revenants…

But it wasn't the same. It wasn't a soul, a spirit, or an undead. She couldn't make sense of it.

It was like seeing a blank canvas with a violent chicken scratch scribble on it.

Yes, it was in a frame, but it wasn't a painting, it wasn't art. It was too… empty, for that. Too lacking in the forms that gave a soul its beauty, too flat, too simple, too amateurish.

Its "emotions" were a twisted thing like broken wiring more than the echoes of the mind. Its thoughts were less a fluid stream of emotion intertwining with reason, action and reaction, and more of a singular stream of frozen directives trying to fit every stimulus and information to its mould, twisting reality and understanding to something utterly alien and incomprehensible.

This reminded her of that question she formed when she first tried Evelynn, and realized that souls existed in this world too.

Souls were essentially that first spark of life within a person, before it evolved into a… book, of sorts, or a well of essence, unique to each person. When its holder died, that collection, that echo, moved onto the afterlife, where it gained back some type of sentience and malleability until it resolved its past regrets and history and allowed itself to fade, or simply wandered the spirit world, butting its head into other stories and realms as an observer.

When put like that, souls tended to lose a lot of their magical mystique, but it was true and oddly simple.

So why did this world have souls when no afterlife existed?

She knew this world had no afterlife. There was no question. She could just tell. Call it intuition borne of a dozen dozen thousand years of life crammed into a few seconds. And if intuition wasn't enough, picking Evelynn for the first time and feeling like the world around her was nothing but a completely and utterly blank gray slate of physics and nothing else had been enough to confirm it.

The only thing she could come up with was that the world rune fragments in her chest caused souls to form when the connection happened. That the reason souls existed in their fiction and mythology was because of dimensional overlap or parallel patches, and only came to exist because of her.

Because despite their broken, fragmented selves, the Rune fragments were still a piece of primordial creation in Runeterra's world.

And they were all crammed into her fucking chest cavity.

There was nothing stopping them from changing the world itself around her for their rules and laws to play together, she didn't have that kind of control and Ryze and the old man didn't account for such trifle when trying to make a final trump card.

How would the world continue to change because of her? Would magic start popping up all of a sudden?

It was a frightening thought, and the question of what exactly she was looking at made her circle back to those questions.

And despite the mass of flesh being attached to Noelle and clearly influencing her, it wasn't connected to her soul. Which meant that it was messing with her head via the simple art of brain chemistry and hormones, most likely.

She'd never seen something like this before, not even as Evelynn.

There was also the distinction of placing.

Noelle's soul was up in the air, about twenty feet up and fifty away. In her lower stomach, like all women's.

The… spirit, if it could be called that, was suspended about five feet off the floor, well within the mass of flesh, in fact almost nestled close to the ground.

Was that what was happening? Some kind of mitosis? The girl's power trying to split her into a monster and a person?

Who would hold the leash of which, when all was said and done?

Taylor's appearance was more akin to a middle aged woman in a business suit and pencil skirt than herself, vaguely frumpy in that way that suggested hints of motherhood. No mask, obviously.

Something disarming, or at least boring enough to not have Noelle get frisky.

"Lights?" She asked, in a calm, soothing voice that sounded… not bored, but professional enough to not be much of anything in general.

Not that she needed them, but the illusion was important.

"Uhm, if you're sure." Oliver said with false hesitance, and reached up to a lever.

The chamber lit up, and Noelle stood there, wringing her hands in front of herself as the monstrous half continued writhing and huffing and puffing.

"Hm. Intriguing, but I'd understandably prefer to be out of reach of the lower half. I'll go up on the catwalk, I think, and then… could you angle yourself up towards me?" She asked, and Noelle stared at her dizzily for a moment, seemingly surprised at her nonchalance, then nodded.

She turned to the metal stairs nestled in the corner of the room, and began to go up.

A minute later, she was looking at Noelle from just six feet above, out of reach of most of her appendages but not all by any means, and with a deep breath, her eyes flashed gold.

She'd barely touched the girl's mind before she felt the connection snap and her surroundings shift.

She watched the walkway she'd just been on get flattened into the wall along with a cabinet where her body used to be, hairline cracks crawling over the wall, and Noelle whirled around, eyes wild and confused.

Their eyes met.

Noelle gasped, and Taylor tensed.

"Oh my god I'm so sorry." Noelle rushed out, sounding horrified and relieved at the same time.

Taylor relaxed.

"I- I swear I didn't move a finger, this- this STUPID FUCKING-" Noelle's voice rose to a screech, before she bit into her own wrist, blood pouring down her arm as she panted for a few tense seconds, gigantic spider legs scraping at the floor, heads biting each other, the entire mass shuddering and snarling, huffing, rasp-laughing and hissing in rage.

Even to her, it was mildly unnerving.

Noelle's teeth eventually unlatched, and she gave her another look, scared and sorrowful and jittery as the flesh knit back together.

"I-I'm sorry. It- it moved on its own. Without me present to- to keep it down, It just, I think it reacted." Noelle clarified, voice still breathy with anger.

She gave her a gentle smile.

"It's quite alright. I knew the risks when I took this job, and we expected this kind of reaction. We have devised another method of trying this, but I must warn you that it'll hurt." She said with genuine sympathy.

Noelle blinked at her, then nodded, determined.

"Let me get as close as possible." She said, and when Noelle nodded again, she strode forwards, swapping to the Inspiration Rune.

She judged the distance.

Flash, the summoner spell, could take her about ten feet in any direction.

The distance was a bit iffy, but possible.

She looked back, and Trickster gave her a nigh-imperceptible nod.

Evelynn's feelers slowly pressed to the floor, making her levitate up fifteen or so feet, slowly.

Noelle stared.

"I thought… you can fly?"

"If you could close your eyes, I'll tell you what I'm doing. It's not flight."

Noelle tilted her head, and closed her eyes, staggering a little.

"Well, you see, it's not quite flight-" She began, then without warning, Flashed up and forwards, both diamond-tip feelers lashing out at the junction point between Noelle and the blob beneath, cleaving right through with a hissing tearing sound, shadows and forms blurring and wavering as she flipped backwards through the air using momentum and flashing to immaterial, her feelers extended as she spun midair.

Noelle's body was replaced by a metal table as the mass of flesh screamed.

Sundancer's sun flashed to life as Ballistic began using the remaining objects in the room to buy time, a veritable barrage of things ranging from an out-of-commision forklift to filing cabinets to plain old cinderblocks cracking through the air to pummel the blob.

Taylor turned into mist mid-fall and zipped to where Trickster was clutching Noelle, the girl weakly gasping and eyes wide in shock.

She materialised just long enough to grab her before kicking forward to the wall, Flashing out into the hallway, then casting two Heal spells on Noelle, enough to regenerate her human body and ensure she wouldn't die.

Malformed flesh already began to gather at her navel as Noelle blinked down at herself, mouth agape.

Taylor didn't have much time. The regeneration speed of the blob wasn't insane, but it was very, very fast.

And according to Jamie's chatter over the comms, it seemed to know its… creator, wasn't dead, because it wasn't trying to make another Noelle. Maybe it couldn't with the original still alive.

The flesh mound left behind would deteriorate rapidly, and with Sundancer there, they could probably kill it or at least hold it back enough for it to die on its own. The room would be fucked almost beyond repair, but that was fine, she wasn't intending to keep Noelle here anyway.

She inwardly apologized as she grabbed onto the girl's chin, yanked it up, and sent a flood of haze into her mind, immediately plunging into her mind as mercenaries rushed to her location, ready to continually amputate the blob growing out of Noelle's navel.

An unholy, screeching, rasping roar made the entire base vibrate, and Chameleon froze stock still, wide eyed.

Dread mixed with frustration.

She'd spent days on this stupid fucking assignment, following troops and inching around until she found a way into the base, looking for a single corner uncovered by a camera so the mystery portal man could zip her out of this hellhole and back so she could keep looking for intel.

She hadn't gotten much. There was movement and whispers of a new boss, and new capes, but nothing useful.

And Cauldron had gotten very impatient as of late, so now she was to grab someone of importance.

And now, right as she was outside Coil's goddamn door, this had to happen now?

Whatever this even was.

She didn't know what to do at this sudden upset, so she simply moved on, carefully approaching what she believed to be the main office.

The guards in front of the door looked at each other as something was said over their earpieces, and she crept forward, so close she could practically breathe in the first guard's sweat.

They turned and opened the door, and she inwardly sighed in relief as they moved into the room.

She crouch-walked behind them and off to the corner, inspecting the room.

From the structure of the office, she could guess that Coil had taken a secondary role, and the whispers of a new boss were true.

Her thoughts were sidetracked by a violent shiver.

Fuck, she was cold .

She hated her power so much.

Coil waved a man over, and gave the guard what looked like a cheap mp3 player.

"Pass it through two relays before giving it to King."

King? Was that a cape or someone with a really badass name?

She pushed the thought aside.

Not what she was here for, not her job.

The guard nodded, and both of them exited.

She crept up behind Coil, ignoring the ever-present chill seeping into her bones, wishing she could wear anything with this stupid ass power. Slowly but surely, she was behind the man's chair as he tapped away at the computer.

Coil was apparently too paranoid to have cameras in his main office, so this made it infinitely easier to conceal her existence.

She took a deep breath, braced herself, moving up and to the side, arms extended and muscles tight.

"Door me!" She rushed out and threw an arm over Coil's chest as he immediately jerked to swing at roughly where her voice came from. She ducked and put her foot against the base of the chair as she pushed him backwards.

The portal opened right as his chair toppled backwards with him in it, and a fist clipped her in the jaw, momentarily disorienting her.

She stumbled for a moment before diving into the portal after Coil, who was getting manhandled into submission by two normals in a blank white room.

The portal closed behind her.

Notes:

small update, was planning on something beefier but im writing this story really slow rn due to irl stuff and ADHD suddenly making me more interested in Mom Militia than this story for a bit.

things will start to go to shit, a bit, for a bit, because otherwise this story would be too easy and boring, wouldn't it? :d

also, this is the first fic ive read where anyone tried to separate noelle and the mass and has a concrete conclusion to what will happen, and i found that an odd thing. It's not even adressed in canon.

Chapter 33

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

By the time she came out of Noelle's mind, she was nursing a mind-splitting migraine, and tasting blood on her lips, breathing in rust as she took slow, deep breaths.

"Ma-"

"Shut." She whimper-growled, and staggered upright, holding her head, staring at the wide hallway covered in rotting sludge, a group of guards cautiously positioned around them, one holding a tinkertech heat blade, ready to chop at Noelle's lower half.

She turned, and glanced up through squinting eyes at the Travellers, all standing on the end of the hall.

Trickster gave her a thumbs up as he jerked his head to the vault door, tightly shut once more, and likely empty, from his gesture.

They'd open it once the toxic fumes got pumped out of the room.

She wiped the blood away, and stared down at her vaguely pink-purple flesh, Evelynn's original form covered in muck and grime and guts and rotted flesh.

Her form, at the moment. Her skin.

Thank fuck Evelynn didn't have a stomach or she would have felt quite green at the moment.

She licked the trail of her own blood off her hand, and regarded it with an exhausted sense of confusion.

She knew intellectually that overusing the summon core put strain on her body and soul, regardless of if she had a Legend equipped or not, but it was especially bizarre to be bleeding from a migraine in a body that had neither a real brain or blood. Was the Legend splitting? Spatial distortion? How did this work?

She could Master ten people semi-effectively and not be anywhere near this wrecked, and that was a testament to how much she'd messed with the girl's head. Hopefully the restraint and understanding would help blunt any untowards effects.

Her curiosity was pushed aside for the moment as the heat blade began to hiss in the air once more behind her.

"Stop. Let her up." She whispered, and the guards quickly raised Noelle, the hiss fading.

She slowly turned, and looked at the girl. She looked horrible.

Noelle was practically covered in tears and blood, her eyes unerringly laser-focused on Taylor like she was the only thing that mattered in the whole wide world.

She likely was, at least to her, but there was so much restraint she'd put into the girl that she wouldn't have any obsessive problems, hopefully.

Her lower body was like a tree trump of flesh at the moment, eyes and shapes that might one day be limbs squirming and bulging.

"Move her to chamber two. Jamie and whoever else wishes to, stay with her. She could use the emotional support. Give the girl some food too. Everyone else, you're dismissed. Send some people to start cleaning up the mess. Get Coil's subordinate to wipe the cam feed of this hallway." She whispered, only audible due to the sheer silence of the hallway.

She only kept the Legend equipped for long enough to find an empty room, stumble into it, and Teleport into her bunker, the darkness and silence so incredibly pleasant by comparison that she immediately slid down to the floor and swapped to herself, her mind empty of thoughts.

As pleasant as this was, she couldn't afford to disconnect.

She Teleported out to an empty apartment that Coil owned, slowly getting up and breathing in and out, in far too much pain to consider doing… practically anything, and slowly put herself on the old couch, sinking into a deep, meditative trance, aided significantly by her brain almost refusing to think actual thoughts.

Maybe ten, or a hundred minutes later, her phone started buzzing in her pocket.

She lowered the volume, and clicked accept, bringing it to her ear.

"Hey, Sam? So, huge development!" Lisa said with an odd amount of cheer in her voice, sounding slightly out of breath. "I found Spitfire! Problem is that she is with Rune at the moment and they're both running away from the E88 on the border between topside and downtown. I have no idea how or why, don't ask. This is drawing a whole fuckload of attention and they're starting to fly into ABB territory to shake the nazis off, so this is likely to turn into a giant war any second because the nazis don't know that Oni Lee is back. And while I have a lot of power and autonomy here, you're the boss, so tell me what you want to do about this and do it fast, my driver's barely keeping up." She finished, speaking a mile a minute.

She hummed, strained, and rubbed her temples as she struggled to think.

Okay. Spitfire was grouping up with Rune. Rune defected. They found Spitfire. Good news.

Bad news was that she still hadn't spoken to Dinah or Sophia, her captive, the bay was about due for its sudden warzone phase, and from the sound of her buzzing phone, both Oni Lee and Bakuda were probably getting called in to deal with the giant cluster of nazi capes gunning it down the street straight towards their "boss's" turf.

And she had zero juice in the tank. Maybe enough to just hold a Legend, a weak one, but that was it.

"Get the Travellers…" She started, then frowned, gritting her teeth as her brain screamed for mercy.

Marissa didn't like fighting, using her power, or hurting people and property.

The least she could do was respect that.

"Get the Travellers to run interference and peacekeeper. No lethal force, minimum harm and property damage if possible. Just try to stop people from killing, or jailing each other. Do not go on the offensive. If things go south, you're all priority, so run. Get me blood samples from capes if possible. If possible also get Spitfire and Rune. Treat them as innocents and try to bring them into our fold, gently. Be the negotiator, please. No needling. I want them, but they're not a huge priority or concern, just do what you can. My head hurts so much I'm bleeding from my nose right now, so I'm... probably not going to do anything after this. Noelle is secure, and I can't function much at the moment, talk with Coil for strategy. I'm going to go sleep for a few hours, so his power should work fine." She finished quietly, using her whole hand to massage her forehead and scowling.

Lisa was silent for a moment, then groaned.

"Shit, okay."

And with that eloquent response, she ended the call.

Taylor took a deep breath, worrying her jaw for a moment as anxiety warred with the simple reality that she couldn't nod right now, nevermind fight or do anything else, really.

This was pretty much out of her hands at this point.

She ignored the constant buzz of messages, her informants and dealers and contacts all likely spamming her about what Lisa just told her, blocking it out by covering her ears and curling into a ball, lamenting the fact that this whole clusterfuck chose right now to start, right after the sole time she made herself almost completely debilitated.

Two painkillers and a pair of earmuffs later, she curled up into a ball on the couch and cast 'Heal' on herself on repeat while meditating, letting the pain slowly ebb away enough to sink into an agonised sleep.

One she was torn out of a mere fifteen minutes later, or so.

She fumbled for the phone, and dragged it up to her ear.

"Hi again! This is kind of out of our pay grade at the moment! Lung's rampaging and the Empire is trying to kill him and the heroes are trying to capture the stragglers which are Spitfire and Rune and there's a fucking Stranger somewhere around here and this whole block is burning to the ground and there so many fucking gang members that I can't even peek my head out of my cover without feeling a bullet fly by my head. Oh and Coil is not in his office and isn't answering, the fucker vanished into thin air. It's too hot, we're retreating. You might lose capes, I'm sorry." Lisa rushed out, to the background sound of what sounded like world war two footage.

Fifteen minutes. How? Just how did shit escalate this bad in fifteen minutes?

"Save Spitfire and Rune, take them with you if you can. Go back to a safe house." Is all she said before she closed the phone, and started thinking.

The Empire was trying to kill Lung. They probably wouldn't succeed, but if Crusader and the entire cape gang was there, they might, even with Oni Lee there.

She couldn't afford to lose Lung.

Fuck, she would trade the entire Empire roster to not lose Lung.

He was the focal point of her entire anti-Endbringer plan, outside of outing her abilities to the whole world and the Simurgh by extension.

Additionally, Oni Lee with Bakuda's bombs would probably slaughter people. Specifically, capes. She told him not to, but she wasn't very sure that information would stay in his head considering how his power worked.

But what could she realistically do here?

Using powers and mana was out of the question entirely. She'd probably get literal brain damage.

She called Oni Lee.

Surprisingly, he answered.

"Lee. Don't kill anyone. Aim to disable."

"Understood." A soft, raspy voice whispered. Oni Lee hung up.

She briefly considered just declaring her job done.

She'd done all she could, right?

But, curse her and her fucking greed, she could come up with so many goddamn ways to use everyone, even beyond warfare.

She could use Kaiser to supply her entire goddamn city with the highest quality steel available, something so good that the PRT scrambled to scrape the iron off any fight he's involved in to take for themselves.

She could use Krieg as a lieutenant and a battering ram, she could use Hookwolf like a living bomb, just drop him in Ellisburg and let the bastard start shredding, she could use Viktor for everything including making sure that any potential threats she encounters have the skills that allow them to be a threat taken away without undue hassle, she could use the weird leotard-wearing giant twins to test spacial magic artifacts and have them be her personal shield and spear, she could use Crusader for search and rescue or even to hurt an Endbringer, assuming his power worked the way the PRT thought it did, she could use Othala for so many fucking combinations, she could use the Empire for so many schemes and operations that would allow her to gain even further funds, legal ones too.

Even a single loss was a loss of so much potential, and with no Travellers there to play peacekeeper, someone would die.

An idea began to form, fairly questionable but relatively risk free.

She made a phone call, and inwardly cussed at every passing second, knowing full well how fast fights could go.

She teleported into Coil's office, where on his desk, a full sniper's kit sat, ready for use. A Glock 17 pistol and a gigantic anti-material rifle chambered in bullets meant to punch through helicopter and vehicle armour.

She picked Orianna, The Lady of Clockwork.

She was the only humanoid yet utterly brainless Legend in her arsenal.

She swung the rifle over her shoulder by the strap and slung the gunslinger belt around the iron skirt, and paused for a moment, wondering if this really was a good idea.

Maybe it wasn't, but she wasn't going to be risking much here, not really.

She switched to the Rune of Inspiration so that Unsealed Spellbook would give her another cast of Teleport, and immediately cast it in one of Coil's front businesses, the brass ball that was her companion clicking as it turned to glance around the small, dark room, with something akin to curiosity.

Not that it had emotions. Technically, Orianna didn't either, but the summon core messed with things to let her without impeding her.

Without human anatomy to exacerbate the migraine or slow her thoughts by force due to biology, and with a short resting period giving her enough juice to act a little, she raced up the steps, finding the sensation of absolutely nothing besides her balance modulator terribly curious, and walked out of the room, through a thin, tiled hallway, and out the back, where a car awaited with its engine rumbling.

She accidentally tore the door off in the process of opening it, startling the driver for a moment, and after a brief moment of frustration that did not show in her mechanical movements nor blank face, threw it aside and climbed in with a chorus of clicking clockwork, the brass ball floating in behind her.

"Go." She said in that voice like a harping trill and a musical box. The driver did, flooring it as she lowered the window.

Merely holding a legend was preventing her migraine from subsiding, but it also wasn't worsening it. And with Orianna having no brain or sense of pain for her body to cross with, she didn't have to worry about every kick of the rifle making her brain bounce in her skull until she could do nothing but sob.

"Go faster." She ordered, and watched the man shiver in unease from the voice as he did so, swerving around cars with manoeuvres that made her both impressed and annoyed at not having a helicopter or a flyer in her employ to ferry her there.

As they got closer, the more frantically the traffic was directed in the opposite direction, making their trip significantly hasten.

Even from far away, she could see the destruction.

Thick plumes of smoke rose into the sky as a non-stop series of pop-pop-pop sounds gradually got louder, a hail of unending gunfire that made her shift with frustration. She watched a building explode, and another's left side simply flash freeze into ice before crumbling down, Bakuda's work.

Lung's roars made them sound like bubble wrap in comparison.

She felt a strange excitement roil up within her, a phantom sensation of her features begging to curl into a wide, teeth-baring grin, one denied by Orianna's unbending 'face'.

She acknowledged the blood lust, and briefly questioned why she felt it. If she should allow herself to feel it.

Another swerve, a screech of tires as the car drifted around the corner, then jerked back to speed forward, engine roaring.

"Good job, Jake."

The man grinned wide, and fiddled with the level thing beside the seat, whatever it was called.

She put the rifle barrel to the window, and switched to The Rune of Precision, locking in Lethal Tempo as her main effect.

The world became a mere cell, squirming under the microscope that were her eyes.

She saw Assault out of the corner of her eye, Battery close behind him as they skirted around the main battle, likely unwilling to get involved and escalate Lung further, but they were gone just as quick as she saw them, blocked by a building.

Another tire-screaming drift, and they came upon a blockade of cars, something like thirty gangsters with their backs to them, shooting away an endless hail, with a dozen more of them dead or bleeding out. Cars weren't good cover, but gangsters didn't seem to be the brightest bulbs.

"Stop or go through?" The driver barked, the muscle car roaring down the street towards the oblivious cannon fodder trading shots with ABB flunkies.

In the distance, she caught a glimpse of Lung.

She wanted him. She needed him.

Four wings, six legs, a genuine dragon bathed in silver and fire.

She felt a phantom sensation in her chest, powered by sheer, overwhelming nostalgia.

How long has it been since she'd seen something so fitting to Runeterra? Something familiar for once instead of all these stupid fucking buildings made of dry ugly stole sludge and cracked sand tiles and blocky metal?

He might be human scum, she might not even know anything about him, not really.

But some part of her she could never excise saw him and screamed home, even if he wasn't a real dragon and no magic ran through his veins.

Lung was impaled by spears and metal spikes as he roared. A jet of fire so bright it looked more like a laser burned through the car Krieg had just thrown in his face and continued through to send Menja crashing through a building with an agonised scream.

Much as she would like to have them all on her side, Lung took priority.

She pulled the rifle barrel out of the window and dropped it on the seat, hooked her pointed fingers into the roof of the car, unclipped the pistol, and tore the roof open, raising her upper body through the hole she'd made, aiming down the street one-handed.

A brief moment of consideration passed before she discarded it.

Unpowered minions were never in short supply.

And they were in the way. She'd pick her driver over these guys any time.

"Go sideways. Strafe around the battle. Let me fire." She ordered in her mechanical trill, and the driver nodded.

A moment later, she pulled the trigger, jerked her arm an inch to the right, again, again, and again, and again, each shot filling her with strength and stacking her effects, each shot coming faster as Lethal Tempo amped up.

The first magazine disappeared in three seconds, leaving behind seventeen dead bodies with holes in their heads and a dozen more people panic-shooting at their armoured car as they scrambled to the sides and stores for cover, only making her job easier and achieving little to nothing as the driver ducked under the top. She quickly reloaded before Lethal Tempo could wind down.

The second magazine unloaded as if the pistol was an assault rifle, each shot making the next come by even faster, her finger a blur on the trigger, leaving another dozen dead gangsters, and a few dead on the ABB side for good measure, because they were just as bad and in the way, albeit on another path.

Her eyes followed the fight ahead, catching glimpses of Oni Lee fighting Crusader with knives and pistols and keeping him at a standstill, while Lung was increasingly looking like a giant pile of angry, shredded meat, getting impaled by giant spikes from Kaiser who was somewhere, she couldn't tell, all the while the Valkyrie twins and Hookwolf worked on trying to cut his head off.

The car swerved, losing its view right as she saw the empire capes leap away from Lung, who was keeping one of the twins at bay by breathing fire at her. Another roar full of fire rocketed down the street and hit one of the twins' shields, spreading out into a blowtorch-like cone of flame to the sides, charring the street black. A brief moment later he burned through and the twin tumbled down the street with a girlish shriek.

Her view was cut again.

Another short moment of empty dilapidated storefronts flashing past, and she got a glimpse of the main battle again as they cut through an alley..

Only Hookwolf seemed to be able to withstand the asphalt-melting temperature of being near Lung, twisting around his upper body and spinning like a deranged snake to flay Lung as the man in question thrashed and clawed at his own throat.

Three giant spikes, each eight feet long and a foot wide, punched into Lung's stomach, awkwardly throwing his lower half up, legs kicking the air while his tail flattened a squat building and a few of his own goons, the fifteen foot tall and thirty foot long dragon already melting the rods by sheer proximity.

A hail of Bakuda's bombs were shot out of the air by Viktor before they could reach the Empire capes, and landed near Lung, one of them crystalizing a leg and a large chunk of his side. The crystal shattered instantly, bearing a lung to the world, heaving and growing as ribs already began to squirm around it.

Lung thrashed and tore Hookwolf off him like a hated scarf, grabbing the two squirming ends of the snake form the nazi had taken as he breathed in, his neck glowing orange through the smoke like the gleaming visage of a snarling monster, blocking Viktor's shots with a wing and swatting projectiles out of the way with his tail.

Hookwolf was about to get cut in half via plasma cutter, Lung version.

Much as she disliked the bastard, he was the third best brute in Brockton.

He had too much potential to fizzle out like this.

She curled her arm in, and jerked her elbow out and to the side, tearing the car's roof further apart, then ducked down to grab the rifle, shoving it through the hole and following, shouldering it.

She got a glimpse of searing white through the scope. She corrected as the car swerved and a wall closed in on the dot of her scope, ready to block her shot should she delay even a millisecond.

The anti-material rifle cracked and rocked her entire body back like shooting a cannon from the shoulder, and the round went clean through one of Lung's four eyes, tossing his head to the side and startling him just enough to allow the melting Hookwolf to reform, the beam snuffed out almost as soon as it began as Lung's jaws cracked shut and wrenched to the side.

The same jaws split four ways and lit up with another blast, being interrupted by a spear as long as a telegraph pole being launched through Lung's throat. The wall blocked her sight as the car sped down a side road, making her wonder if Hookwolf got out.

They'd call it quits soon. Lung was unstoppable, and they only had so much firepow-

A blinding white light lit up the entire sea of smoke she could see over the buildings, while a hazy swirling white shape blinked through it. The car bounced along the road for a moment from the sheer impact. She could only stand there in sheer disbelief.

Purity was back.

Fuck.

What happened to all that cape bullshit about not escalating too much or not killing if you can help it? Was this a special occasion or did this happen often before she 'triggered' and she was too mired in her civilian life to even fucking notice her town becoming a bi-monthly warzone?

Her suspicion of Purity being back was confirmed when the smoke was followed by a shockwave blowing smoke and dust into the alleys they were driving past and clearing a section of the sky, followed by another strobe-light of white flashing with each blast the woman sent.

Did she fly here all the way back from Boston?

It felt like there was some kind of evil god messing with her, sending her as much bullshit to deal with as possible the moment she was unable to exert even a fraction of her actual strength.

She couldn't do anything while the driver gunned it down a side street for another relatively unobstructed view, so she briefly considered her Summoner Spells.

They were all so good, but none of them were fucking applicable here, not in a way she was comfortable revealing to the gangs and the PRT.

She didn't want to heal or burn someone, she wanted them to not kill each other so she could nab their sorry asses later.

She fingered the trigger of the rifle, gently, mechanical eyes following the white star zipping around to dodge shots, the ground shaking constantly as she just kept. Blasting.

How much juice did she have in the tank?

Then another blur shot straight towards Purity from the side, and she breathed out a sigh of relief as the two shapes began chasing each other in the skies.

Glory Girl was buying Lung time.

Thank god.

Figuratively.

It was so odd to feel emotions while not physically feeling them too. Relief felt so much more bland.

She flickered for a moment, and held her phone in one hand, the other keeping the rifle pinned to the roof of the car.

She opened Oni Lee's message first, likely sent by a clone for all she knew.

NL: bakuda's hit.

NL: convenience store across the street from the empire, one floor tall, green sign, on fire

NL: Secured her. Bleeding from the head. Can't help her.

She thought for a second, then ducked under the hole she'd made.

"Avoid the heroes at all costs, and slow down. Look for a grocery shop on fire, green sign, on the ABB side of the fight, park around it and be vigilant."

The driver whose name she believed to be Jake but wasn't certain, nodded, and switched speed with the lever thing, taking a sharp turn for a more open street.

Their tires crunched on glass and wove past abandoned vehicles, slowing them down, while the occasional civillian rushed past on the street, whatever few of them were left around the area.

Thankfully this was mostly a Chinatown thrift shop and warehouse area, so actual civvie casualties should be low. Most people shopped here, they didn't live here.

Her mind itched for someone else to kill, a desire she found to be both alluring and vaguely concerning because wow she was so battle-starved it wasn't even vaguely amusing.

This wasn't the time however.

Her eyes flicked to a dash of green, and frowned when she realized it was some restaurant or another themed after jade, a small place with now-shattered windows and not a lick of flame.

Voices came from ahead, and she pulled out her pistol.

For a moment, she wondered if there was any benefit to killing these guys.

To be frank, she would have use for regular gangsters, and they weren't going to go down that alley, nor be at risk from them.

With a mental sigh she blamed on a missed opportunity to stack up her permanent effects, namely, Legend:Alacrity, Tenacity, and Bloodline, she lowered the pistol into the belt's holster, and put her hand back on the handle of the rifle.

The white light that was Purity was now fighting both Glory Girl and some… blue forcefields that kept trying to cut her off.

All they were managing to cut off seemed to be the woman's restraint, because helix blasts of light started getting tossed around as if from a machine gun, one narrowly missing their car to slam into and through the side of an abandoned store to their left.

Purity seemed to mostly be trying to get away, however. An outright retreat that was turning desperate.

She turned, and took aim.

Her scope moved a few degrees off target, accounting for the fading shockwaves of the fight that seemed to be winding down, and then accounting a bit more for the breeze that came from the opposite direction, judging by the way the fires licked at the air.

A barrier zipped through the air to intercept Purity as she tried to book it for the clouds, something vaguely purple-blueish and shaped like a bowl, moving above her as she kept firing down at Glory Girl.

She switched the main effect to Fleet Footwork.

Her rifle cracked.

The barrier shattered, and she immediately ducked into the car, hoping they wouldn't know where that shot came from as her body glowed gold for a brief moment, a soothing chill momentarily relieving the pain of her skull splitting apart before it faded.

She stared at the open sky above for a few seconds before poking her head out again, watching Purity gun it for where the Empire were roughly stationed.

She could assume that meant a retreat.

She sighed in relief, but without lungs and with the voice box of a text to speech program that decided to impregnate a music box and an off-key clockwork harp, it just sounded like she made a shut-down sound as if she was some kind of automaton.

Orianna technically was, but whatever.

She rose up again, and put the rifle against the roof, scanning for people to save or kill.

A flattened building still roaring with flames broke the monotony of warehouses and old industry buildings flashing by, and gave her an image that genuinely surprised her.

The PRT had sneakily surrounded the Empire roster from the back from what she could see, and were letting Lung and Oni Lee retreat.

So the Empire could retreat in Lung's direction who was about half the size of fucking Leviathan, or fight their way out of the encirclement.

Why Lung was retreating, only he could guess, but she was still surprised at the PRT actually… doing something. She was used to the spandex boys being pretty for the camera and pretending to be useful and not much else, or at least she was without the rose tinted glasses of young adolescence and admiration.

"Found it!" The driver yelled, and punched the roof, in case she hadn't heard.

She turned, and saw the exact building Oni Lee had described.

He stepped on the gas, pulled another expert drift, and hurriedly straightened the car in the small street next to the store.

She kicked the door open and off its hinges and mentally reminded herself to keep this guy and fix up his car for his excellent driving, when her head didn't feel like a ball of agony.

Then she raced across the street in an awkward strut that looked like she was power walking in a video put on fast-forward, a look both unsettling and natural for her to do, before jumping up and Flashing onto the roof with a flash of golden sparks from both her teleport point and her destination.

Bakuda was easy to find, sprawled out on the roof in her stark white costume, with a concerningly large puddle of blood around her cracked visor, and a worryingly steep dent in her helmet.

Viktor probably sniped her.

She resisted the urge to slap the woman for even being here as she zipped to her, swapping to the Inspiration Rune and hurriedly casting two Heals before bending down to take her helmet off.

To her relief, all she saw was a bruised and bleeding Mia rather than a mass of barely alive gore. She knew the bullet hadn't penetrated, but the chance to burst someone's skull open from the mere impact of a round was completely possible.

She pulled the helmet back on, gently.

"Damn it Mia, what the fuck are you even doing here?" She asked in Orianna creepy, vaguely emotionless voice.

She flickered, and her phone was in her hand again, calling Oni Lee while she lightly shook the woman's shoulder.

He picked up almost instantly.

"Bakuda should be healed somewhat, enough to not die or have long-lasting problems. She's somewhat coherent, waking up. Come pick her up. Is the fight winding down?"

He grunted in a way that sounded both exhausted, painful, and affirmative.

Well he's shit out of luck, because she had no more heals to spare.

"Good. Casualty report?"

"None that matter. Injuries, plenty. Some severe." He succinctly rasped, and she took that at face value.

Cricket should be fine, Hookwolf was alive, Stormtiger seemed to be alive considering the sheer volume of explosions she was still hearing, Kaiser and the twins were almost definitely alive, Purity was fine, Crusader, Krieg and whoever the hell else she was forgetting, they were all alive and ready for the taking.

So why did she feel like she just lost a fight she didn't even know she was a part of?

"I'm leaving. Come pick her up."

She hung up.

She Flashed off the side of the building with another burst of golden sparks and a sharp sound she couldn't quite categorize, then fell ten feet down to land next to the driver's window, making him jump half a foot in his seat and curse loudly.

"Dismissed. Excellent work. We'll fix your car up later."

He wordlessly nodded, and with a screech of tires, drove off.

Now… should she try to make sure the Empire gets out of the encirclement?

She walked into the alley as she thought, faintly hearing Oni Lee's teleporting get closer and reach Bakuda above and to the side.

If she did not help the Empire, she was practically certain that they would lose capes to the Protectorate, numbers advantage or not. This was the perfect set-up to gut the Empire, and if the local director didn't take it, they'd be a complete moron.

Kaiser wasn't stupid either, of course.

Considering she didn't catch a single glimpse of him, he must have been hiding the entire fight or in a really good position.

So the Empire wouldn't crumble, but it could still get crippled.

Normally, she could care less, but if the PRT got a hold of Empire capes, locating and gathering them in the aftermath would end up very frustrating and demanding of her resources, assuming the E88 didn't just bust them out for her.

Something she could probably nudge in their direction, actually, and get a favour for doing, under the guise of Coil's scheming...

Conversely, she also couldn't jump into the fray herself. It was one thing to swerve around the outskirts of a fight with a sniper rifle, and a whole nother thing to jump on another one without any real guarantee she could get out, escape, or win at all, with uncertain or zero allies.

Of course, she could escape from anywhere and anything should she be captured by the heroes or something, but the information they'd get on her in the meantime could prove highly frustrating to deal with.

She flickered, and quickly called Lisa.

Two rings this time.

"Hey Sam, big sister mine." Lisa chirped, sounding pleased as a cat. Taylor could hear her stretch like one too. "We've got three extra passengers, but we're fine. Heading to a safe house. You will be one very happy girl when we catch up." Lisa said with an audible grin, and Taylor hummed to show she heard, still thinking.

They were probably still in the getaway truck. She could order them to turn back and help the Empire.

But after a brief moment of thought, she reigned herself in, and changed her mind.

Some greed was good.

Too much, and she'd end up getting burned, nevermind the chance one of her own would be captured with what looked like the entirety of the local Protectorate branch brawling it out with the tired and scorched Empire capes. To have her own captured felt like a betrayal to an unspoken agreement.

If the nazis got themselves caught, she'd deal with it in due time.

"Good job, Lisa. Who is the third passenger?" She asked, trying to force some warmth into the mechanical voice.

Lisa took a moment to reply.

"That… is the coolest and creepiest voice I've ever heard. Wow. Ah but, our third passenger is uh… hey, do you mind if I tell her?" Lisa said the latter end of the sentence from further, likely asking someone else.

"Eh, go for it." A young, nonchalant voice replied.

"Huh. Well, do you remember Grue? My old teammate before lizard-brain decided to kill us?"

She glanced around the alley, and ducked into a small alcove as a car drew near.

"Yes. Grue, Brian. You talked about him a bit."

She was genuinely curious where this was going.

She also was fairly sure she could not manage to speak if she turned back into herself at the moment, so she held onto Orianna as Oni Lee and some presumed ABB gangsters loaded Bakuda up into the car around the alley's mouth.

They drove off a moment later, right as Lisa began to explain, her voice calmer and more subdued.

"Yep. Well, turns out his sister triggered as a Stranger at some point, and she found my new gal-pal Spitfire, and they grouped up for a while, on the run, having fun and doing… homeless adventures, I don't know. Unfortunately, while, uh, what'd you say your cape name is?"

"Imp!" The girl said brightly and proudly, and Taylor had a feeling she'd like the girl.

Lisa chuckled.

"Yeah so, while Imp was out on a supply run for them, which is why I couldn't figure out how the hell Spitfire was staying upright without stealing stuff while looking for her-"

"Wait, you were looking for me?" Spitfire asked, voice high in surprise.

Goddamnit people, let her talk.

"Yeah, we thought you might want to join a group that isn't completely evil and won't make you kill people or gut you for being a "threat", but you were surprisingly good at hiding." Lisa said, then probably waved her off or shrugged.

Lisa's body language was practically ingrained in her brain for some reason, to be able to tell that without any audial cues.

" Anyways, when Imp went on a supply run, half the damn Empire roster showed up as if they forgot Imp existed-"

"They did! That's my power! I just didn't realise we were being watched so that kinda backfired that time!" The girl exclaimed, and Lisa growled with mock frustration.

"Hey, let me tell the damn story, do you know how hard it is to tell my sister something she doesn't know these days?"

Her sister.

It felt really nice to hear Lisa say that, and… seemingly somewhat mean it.

Oh, wait. Ugh, of course that's what this is about. Lisa wanted to act like a know-it-all smartass for once because she knew something Taylor didn't and had probably been itching to do so for ages.

She rolled her eyes, already feeling significantly better about deciding to not help the Empire any more than she already had.

"Anyways, Imp goes to relieve some supermarket of their food supplies, Spitfire gets ganged up on, and almost immediately captured, then she gets dragged off to Empire territory. Like deep, deep in Empire territory. Then Kaiser him-fucking-self shows up to give her a speech to make her join them, but Spitfire's not really into the whole world war two cosplay scene, and says no, and instead of giving her a better pitch or anything, the motherfucker shrugs and says she'll make a fine 'breeder for Gesellschaft'."

She stilled, and imagined that so did the occupants of the truck, from the odd pause.

"I still don't know who the hell that is but I can guess from the name that he's not exactly good news, huh?" Spitfire mumbled, barely audible.

Spitfire- no, Emily was sixteen. She is a teenager.

A fucking child.

She's not entirely sure why children are such a sensitive subject to her, but the mere thought of what might have happened to her makes her lock her ball joints in place so she doesn't crush the phone in her hand. Or turn around to blow up Kaiser's head with a 50-cal BMG round to the side of the skull.

"Gesellschaft are the German equivalent of the Empire. Now, surprisingly, a new heroine arrived to save the day!" Lisa said dramatically, and Taylor felt faintly amused.

"Ugh, fuck off." A moody voice grumbled from afar, followed by a chorus of background humm that might be snickering or shuffling.

"That heroine was Rune! Apparently, saying that kinda shit about a teenage girl in front of a teenage girl wasn't Kaiser's best idea, nazi or not-"

"I'm not a nazi, I'm just racist!" Rune said with clear exasperation in the background while Lisa continued, and Taylor for some reason found what Rune said so fucking funny she almost choked her voice box into playing an alarm sound.

She wasn't even sure what was so funny about that, but it was.

Lisa didn't seem to find it so, and continued.

"-because when they started tying up Spitfire, Rune pretended to assist, then zipped out of there with her and managed to find a trashcan they could use as a transport."

"I still have vomit all over my fucking leg…" Rune grumbled.

"Yeah, we can smell it." Krouse laughed in the background.

"Hey, I get it, can we stop bringing that up?! It was like riding a rollercoaster except it had no rails, I had fucking zip ties on my wrists, there were no safe bars, we were getting shot at and there were spikes popping up everywhere so we were practically flying in zig zags and Rune's a shit driver! And we were in a trashcan! It STANK!" Spitfire exclaimed in a voice somewhere between mindlessly venting and genuinely offended.

And maybe the others couldn't hear it, but she could. That tremor hidden beneath the frustration.

She wanted to wring Kaiser's neck like a towel for that.

Lisa chuckled.

"I'm not a shit driver! We should have crashed fifty times before we did! I turned our trashcan into a plane! I'm fucking excellent! " Rune barked.

"Yeah, well, anyways, they took a fall, got hit a bit, and then Imp stole a bike and found them, helped them stay free until Lung got there, and then it devolved into that giant shitshow until we came along and found the trio trying to escape the heroes, which we helped them with, and that's about it. Did you do anything in the meantime?"

She sighed, an artificial action in this body.

"Yes. I couldn't sit this out. Too greedy. I got here after you, saved Hookwolf and Purity from getting torn in half or captured, and got our girl Bakuda stabilised so that Oni Lee could take her back. Done for today. Can barely talk."

Lisa waited for more.

Taylor didn't give her more, because that was all she really achieved here.

"That's it? You suck at storytelling."

She could do better, she just didn't care to.

"Maybe. Regardless, I have a skull-splitting migraine at the moment so the instant I drop my current mechanical cape I'm likely going to collapse. You'll have to do things on your own at least until tomorrow. If you could get our three new guests somewhere to chill out until they can hear my offer, that'd be appreciated."

"Hm, alright. Also, I changed my mind on my cape name. I think Insight is better. More fitting, and it's more independent if we break off in the future or if something happens. Only downside is that it reveals what my power does, to some extent. The whole magic medieval aesthetic is cool and all but I think that's mostly your style, you know? You cool with it?"

"Of course. It's your name. I was just suggesting. I'm going to go and pass out now. Be ready to brief me on what I missed."

"Sure thing."

She closed the phone, dug a bit further into her little alcove in the alley, and Teleported to her bunker.

She put her head on a leaf and root near the bottom of the breather plant, and swapped back to her real form.

Instantly, the headache seemed to turn from a phantom sensation to something akin to someone pounding a spike through her skull with every pulse of her heart.

She whimpered and curled into a ball, only having the brain capacity to cast Heal on herself off cooldown.

Notes:

Trouble does not end here, unfortunately for Taylor.

See you all next chap, and tyvm for the comments and criticisms, they motivate me to keep writing. :)

Chapter 34

Notes:

ty very much for your comments. I read them all, but I don't have the time to reply to all of them or i just dont have anything to rly say besides "ty".

:)

enjoy a huge chappy

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

"We're missing something. It doesn't make much sense otherwise." Alexandria noted, making connections in her mind, discarding them once she'd poked enough holes in them, then repeating.

The computer screen in front of her was frozen on a still frame from Coil's confession footage.

Finally, they had found a combination of Master powers that worked on the man.

Mostly because Coil seemed partly immune or resistant to emotional manipulation. Very strongly so. They could get… some results, but the effects seemed extremely diminished, and the moment the Master lost focus or stopped exercising their power, the changes just didn't stick. A few seconds later and Coil would be back to keeping his mouth shut.

So even if it was the most time-consuming Mastering she'd ever seen, they eventually cracked through the effect. Mostly. He was silently crying while talking to them like a robot, but he had talked.

It still wasn't enough.

"No, it really doesn't." Eidolon hummed, fingers tapping the table.

"I don't have a Thinker power like you two, so, could you try to summarise your scepticism? It doesn't seem that complicated to me. A bit stretchy on the suspension of disbelief, but peripherally possible." Legend mumbled, rubbing at his chin as he swung his chair towards them, pausing on the last five minutes of the video.

Alexandria's jaw shifted, a tiny bit.

"It's not that simple. Nothing connects right. I cannot tell if this is such a multi-layered plot we can't make heads or tails of it despite our resources, or if it's a series of nonsensicalities providing the illusion of such. Coil claims that 'Summoner', the person supposedly responsible for this mass anti-thinker effect, is Taylor Hebert, and that she has some kind of giant shapeshifting, Brute, and Master ability. And some kind of teleportation. That's not how powers work. At all. She can't be a Trump because Shadow Stalker was on the other side of the school when she Triggered and so was Rune. The mechanics of trigger events just don't allow her to be a Trump here, and it's pretty much impossible to have such a combination, especially of such strength. Grab bags exist, but she wasn't part of a cluster trigger, we'd know since hers was so public and scrutinised. So there has to be some other explanation for the abilities displayed. Some power-sharing, maybe. Or she fooled Coil, expecting something like this." She hummed, quietly.

Eidolon tilted his head in agreement.

"There's also the annoyance of Taylor Hebert, or Taylor Livson, herself. People are changed by both trigger events and their powers, yeah, but I find it highly unlikely and suspicious that a teenage girl left the asylum after three months of catatonic behaviour and barely a month of being conscious and aware, then decided to change her name, duck out of the Ward program for no seeming reason, send her father away in a cryptic new life, and then take over a supervillain before faking her own death. Considering that in her Wards interview, Alexandria and every lie detecting program in existence feels like she was being entirely sincere, it just doesn't make any fucking sense. We're missing something big , and I cannot tell what it is." He added. "It all feels like a giant red herring, you know?"

Legend's brows lowered.

One of her own rose, curious.

"You think there's another figure pulling the strings of the people pulling the strings?" She asked.

Eidolon worked his jaw, frowning.

"I'm not sure, but it's a possibility."

She didn't outwardly react, but inwardly, she was concerned. She liked the challenge, the puzzle, the plot, she wanted to unravel it all, but they didn't have the time.

Contessa was a person who had shaped the world, and kept it in shape. She was the reason there were few to no anti-cape sentiments in the USA. She was the reason that a regular person executing a cape with a sniper rifle was unheard of, to keep that possibility and thought out of the public consciousness, to cement the feeling that guns were useless against capes, even if that was extremely incorrect.

Contessa had shaped the American continent and the world into its current cape culture, and without her, everything felt like it was a moment away from crumbling.

She kept thousands of agents in line by existing, she kept a solid third of all their operations functional and hidden. Politicians, lobbies, companies and backroom deals and entire networks of people, they all depended on Contessa's paths catching betrayals and information slips so she can prevent them before they happen.

The longer they went without her the bigger the chance something would go catastrophically wrong.

So, much as Alexandria would like to untangle this, they just didn't have the time for it. Every second Contessa was a twitchy wreck, watching her paths rot before her eyes and unable to do anything about it, the closer they got to a catastrophe of world-ending proportions.

Of course, they weren't entirely reliant on the woman, but the chance of failure went from small to high in the course of a week.

"With powers involved, the possibilities are endless. It could be a doppelganger who killed Taylor Hebert at some point then took over to ensure its own agenda. Then they faked the death of the person they took over to cast more confusion and free themselves of their old persona, or some such deception. It could also be an intentional misdirection. Alternatively, Miss Hebert, or 'Livson' as she changed her name to, could be under some kind of Master effect, or there could be a complicated agreement between Taylor Hebert and someone who is providing the ability to teleport and have an anti-thinker field to the girl. The Yangban have a cape like that. Ability sharing is exceptionally rare but not unheard of. The long and short of it is that we don't know enough." She finished, glancing at Keith. Or, Legend, rather, while his mask was on.

Legend frowned.

"I'm not too… deep into all of this, and I'm fully aware there are tons of things you guys do I'm not aware of and will not be trusted with, but uh, don't you have someone who could just find this person? You talked about something of that nature in the past."

"They can see everything, but they can't know everything or remember everything. They identify people on visual cues, like an ID in their pocket, or how a person in their periphery refers to them as, what hidden papers in their closet say about their identity. When someone lacks anything and everything connecting them to a solid identity, there's not much he can do to find out where our 'summoner' is. Even monitoring the word itself on a multiversal scale hasn't given anything but false flags and it's severely overtaxed the agent." Eidolon said, more or less ranting with frustration, working his gloves through his hair.

He revealed a bit too much, but she couldn't bother with that right now.

"We're probably not going to uncover this, not without more information. Information gathering takes time. I think we'll just have to make a decision and rush through it, ASAP. If this anti-thinker field affects Scion, we cannot afford to kill Summoner or whoever is giving her that anti-thinker field. We need them. They would be a game-changing presence if they could scramble dozens or thousands of Thinker powers that Scion has in his arsenal. Doctor Mother spent some time observing things and she thinks that she's only lower priority than Contessa and Eidolon. I happen to agree. She's certainly more important than me and you." She summarized, nodding to Legend, allowing her lips to dip in distaste.

Legend's brows rose, "Really? That important?"

Eidolon scoffed, scowling at the screen.

"If Scion's thousands of pre-cog and thinker abilities he's got could be blocked by her, then yes. She could help me beat Scion more than anyone else I can think of at the moment."

She resisted the urge to sigh.

David always had to make everything about him. His ego needed a check, sometime yesterday, but she couldn't be arsed and Contessa couldn't path him into being less arrogant.

"The point is. We need to make a decision, and make it fast. Contessa…" She frowned, thinking of how to say it. "Is becoming a decoration more than an asset, the longer this continues. We need to put an end to this, now. "

Perhaps the wording was a bit strong, but it was true.

Contessa was starting to become… more than twitchy. She was erratic and flighty.

The woman had grown so reliant on Path to Victory doing everything for her that she could barely function without it. Not on Earth Bet or Aleph, at least.

She was no psychologist, but she could easily recognize that look of sudden, panicked dread that took over the woman's face during a discussion with her, that sudden snap where all her cool composure and stature and expression and stance all just cracked and tilted and broke in a thousand imperceptible ways as her eyes widened in fear.

Contessa wasn't scared of her, Alexandria.

She just lost the ability to Path her long-term, at that moment, before promptly retreating like a frightened bird.

That was likely what she was scared of, and Alexandria couldn't blame her. She'd likely feel the same, were she to suddenly lose her power or be unable to use it.

The woman was practically on house arrest working on vials with Doctor Mother, and even on Earth Belial, she was reporting that she was rapidly becoming completely blind to anything beyond that specific facility and the Garden of Flesh. At least anything that mattered.

Eidolon sighed, a growly noise.

"I say we just door the girl into a cell and-"

"No." She shut that down instantly, allowing a frown to mar her features. David's mouth clicked shut, and he turned to glare at her.

His ego, for being so large, was unfortunately fragile.

"Standard escalation of force. We're going to have to go in hard and fast, but let's not just be outright hostile. Let's door this Taylor girl somewhere in Brockton Bay, somewhere private, show off how Coil is perfectly fine, and try to convince them-"

"Oh, just convince them!" Eidolon said with overblown joy, putting his fingers up to his temple then opening them while throwing his hand away as if mindblown. "Of course! We just have to politely convince someone, maybe a teenage girl, to go off to another planet in another world until the end of the universe comes via angry golden alien, after kidnapping her Mastered supervillain. I'm sure that'll go just splendid. "

"We can try. " She snapped, wishing she could still crack her knuckles. "I think the end of the universe being at stake and a two to five year timeframe in a cozy village in a medieval world where they can play god over the peasants is quite a convincing argument. If that doesn't work and they don't want to prevent the end of this universe, we can just grab them and throw them into a barren planet with a giant building full of supplies and let them stay there away from Contessa until we need them."

Or try to Master them.

Legend frowned, working his jaw for a moment, before nodding.

Eidolon made an affirmative grunt.

"And if the girl's nothing but a red herring, mastered, or some meaningless puppet to hide the real Summoner?" Eidolon asked, dryly.

"We kill or interrogate everyone involved until we get them. We're running out of time, we can't afford to open some long-winded investigation. This Lisa Wilbourn girl might have to be collected as collateral. Coil said they seemed quite close."

Legend frowned heavily, turning away to stare at nothing, pensive.

"I… I can't condone that. Or be involved. They're just kids. " He whispered, then sighed. "But you're going to do it anyway." He shook his head as he got up, walking away, shoulders heavy.

"We don't even know if Taylor Livson is a child, or Taylor at all." Eidolon pointed out.

Legend didn't reply.

She wanted to apologize to him, but she knew it'd ring hollow.

Rune didn't think that she was evil.

Sure, she wasn't a good person, she couldn't claim as such no matter what kind of mental gymnastics she might try, but there was quite the large fucking difference between being disgusted at the sight of a black guy dirtying the streets with his existence and wanting to kill the guy.

The former was normal, albeit more racist than the average person, the other was just fucking psychotic.

Inferior people were still people, and despite the world's preconceptions of her for being part of E88, she wasn't very keen on fucking murdering anyone.

No amount of dehumanising bullshit could make her look at a black guy in the eyes and just casually slam a baseball bat into his head until he fell unconscious, likely to die in the hospital from brain haemorrhage. She just couldn't.

She hated having to chaperone some of the initiations. A test by Kaiser.

One she failed by puking on her third security escort, where an asian girl and a lighter was involved, and could conclusively say had added considerable weight to the scale of her current decision.

She just couldn't fucking do it.

She'd even gotten into arguments over it when some fucker or another tried to goad her into popping someone's skull like a grape.

Did she think the dirtskins were inferior people?

Yes. It was fucking obvious, in every way possible. Observable in reality, in history, on the world map, everything.

Did she think they weren't people?

No. She could never understand how someone could look at a person and dehumanize them so completely and utterly to where killing them or maiming them was considered a good deed. She sure as hell couldn't do it.

Did she wish they'd go back to their warzone shithole and stop dirtying the white countries with their stink?

Yes. White countries had enough problems, and so did the people living in them, no need to burden all the good people with their existence unnecessarily. And she could admit much of that belief was taught, but she couldn't say she believed it was wrong. There was too much stuff that made too much sense, and if sense didn't work, the emotional knee jerk disgust would do the trick regardless to at least make her dislike their kind.

But there was no way to kick them out except with force, and she just wasn't willing to fucking do that.

A line she couldn't cross. Maybe her early childhood was too cushy, maybe her kindergarten and elementary school teachers were too nice people and taught her too much compassion for this line of work, whatever it was, she just couldn't do that.

She'd rather deal with her personal disgust than know the only reason she couldn't see black people was because they'd been lynched or murdered out of the country.

If someone else heard her thoughts, they would likely be beyond puzzled and confused at the strange lines she drew within her mind, how arbitrary and almost nonsensical they were, and she couldn't blame them. Sometimes it didn't even make sense to her. Days where she was stuck in this internal debate, going in circles until she gave up and went to sleep. But most of the time, it made sense to her.

One thing to dislike or even be disgusted by someone, and an entirely different thing to want to genuinely harm them or ruin their life or end said life.

She just couldn't fucking do it. She didn't want to, either.

That wasn't the sole problem, of course. Her situation was a massive shit heap, but at the top of it were her own values, if someone as young as her could be said to have such things.

It all just added up over time.

She also missed her family, truth be told, even if she was the one who broke ties with them in a wild spur of teenage rebellion that led her in this pit that felt like it kept getting deeper.

The second part which weighed in on her current decision, was the sheer whiplash she got when she came here and saw all the racism towards asians and hispanics.

Which a Brocktonite would be confused about, because duh. E88, hates anything that isn't white.

Except it's not like she was given a fucking briefing about any of that. She just wanted to leave her controlling family, contacted some relatives who still had ties with the Empire even after the Herren clan broke off, and ended up here in what felt like a blur of action.

She fit in here, somewhat. She was given respect, and treated like an adult. Somewhat.

But the ideology of the gang slowly began to confuse her.

She wasn't exactly a white supremacist, as much as she believed that some people were just inferior. Whether it was culture, their race having a bad run of luck in the genetic lottery, or just a mix of a dozen things, she wasn't truly sure, but the first part, she had been pretty easily convinced of.

The wording of 'white supremacy' insinuated there was some desire to dominate or lord over the lessers or whatnot, and it might be something others in the gang wanted and wished for, but she sure as hell did not. It was more of an observation of reality to her than an ideology.

The Herren clan might be considered backdoor hillbillies, but they weren't. Her family had convinced her through equal parts logic, raising her, and lived experiences from her brief stints in the public education system, however brief they were before she was taken back in for private teaching.

And she'd always brushed aside racism towards the rest of the people her family disliked, because despite her needling, they'd never really presented her with anything to convince her, and she hadn't had many if any negative experiences with anything other than black kids in the schools she'd been sent to.

But here? The E88's rhetoric?

It made no fucking sense.

For her case, she was convinced by logic and observable reality, and then emotion grew from there. There was a process to her thoughts.

She was cautiously open to the idea because she grew up being tugged between very kind people early in her life and her own family which was very open about their beliefs, then in time, evidence came because her family saw she wasn't being convinced, and she came to believe some parts of the whole… ideology. If it could be described as something so coherent.

If someone asked her why she thought black people were inferior she had entire fucking sheets of explanations that would make even a skeptical guy pause and frown in thought.

People that thought the E88's only recruitment strategy was to have a fat white guy scream "they're coming for your jobs" at people were idiots. There were many, many good arguments to convince someone. Hell, some of the more intellectual people in the gang even quoted fucking Plato and Aristotle to explain some of their ideas, which flew over her head, but it proved that not everyone involved in this line of thinking was even remotely as stupid as the media and common people seemed to think.

Just very hateful, and if initiated, very immoral.

Oh of course there was the buck-toothed white trash here and there, but the Empire was a gang built around an ideology, and that tended to draw more than just druggies and gangbangers, like with the ABB.

Regardless, her original thought process was that she had seen why, and been convinced of why, through many more avenues than just 'I was raised this way', and came to believe some parts of the whole.

Which meant, in short, that she understood the racial hate towards black people. It was logical, it had data points, she could see with her own two eyes why it was there, it made sense. Their negative impact on the world, everything they touched, and her personal quality of life in the public education system was indisputable as far as she was concerned.

So why did the E88 here hate Asians?

She asked. She expected something vaguely well-formed, some kind of idea, hell, maybe a giant sheet of graphs like what she'd been shown back home to convince her of the main enemy.

All she got when asking here, was some contradictory insults about how Asians were bugs or something. Not a single real reasoning was brought up. Nada, zit, nothing.

So she looked into their culture, their home countries, she looked at the same data points her folks in the Herren clan had used to convince her, because she was an emotional person like everyone else, but she still liked to operate on logic first of all.

Mnh, mostly.

And it continued to not make sense.

Asian culture was… honestly admirable, weirdly enough. At least the parts she looked into like Korea, China and Japan when it was still around. Their work ethic made her brows raise, their academic scores were great, better than white people, their contribution to the economy was not a negative red line going down smoothly off the chart like with other inferiors, it just-

It made no sense. It confused her.

Same thing with hispanics. They didn't even do anything! They were basically performing and doing the same as whites! Across the whole board of graphs she could get her hands on!

The worst people had to offer was something about cartels or something, and she wanted to groan and just scream that 'that's not even in fucking AMERICA, WE'RE THE CARTEL EQUIVALENT HERE WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?!'.

There was nothing she could find that justified anything past the animosity towards black people, not here in Brockton. Too many conflicting points, too many conflicting opinions, too many ethnically ambiguous people in the gang to even make their own hatred make sense.

There was a guy there who looked Mediterranean, let's say, instead of Greek or Iraqi or Turkish. And nobody called him out on it, and he himself didn't seem fussed over it.

She kept asking and talking and the more she talked the more she realized that none of this shit was… resonating with her. She rarely if ever got to hear an answer that made sense to her or that she could accept without killing any sort of morality and faith in actual information rather than rhetoric.

Hell, she wasn't sure if it was resonating with even the top dogs, so to speak.

Not even E88 capes were really into the whole shtick. About half were actual believers, the rest seemed uncaring.

The real believers were the twins, Krieg, Viktor and Crusader. Maybe Kaiser too, she couldn't read the bastard.

So she kept asking. Anyone and everyone willing to give her an answer, no matter how much it pissed off the big dogs in the gang.

Oh Asians were bugs because their work ethic was too good? Because they're too obedient? So now you were complaining about them having too much of a good thing James, weren't you complaining about the 'nigs' having too little of the same ethic and being too rowdy and being good for nothing thug wannabes and wow is that not ironic coming from a fucking flunkie like you.

Fuck James. Absolute dipshit.

It was goddamn infuriating, to come here and slowly realise that she was not surrounded by people concerned about actual problems, but merely a bunch of angry, lost people whose search for meaning in a meaningless world led them to an ideology that didn't make much sense as a whole, guided - mostly - by blind emotion instead of observable reality or data.

So that was another giant rock to add to the scale which led to her current… situation.

Another far larger problem besides the nonsensical fucking crap she was hearing and her rapidly dirtying image of a supposed noble and reasonable cause, was the general vibe she got the longer she stayed.

She could feel how Kaiser and his dogs kept trying to control her thoughts and direct them, almost like her controlling family, and it fucking pissed her off, one word at a time. It felt like she was just having other people dictate her every move without hope of advancement.

Kaiser trying to set her up with Theo and making creepy comments about her private life had practically unfurled the entire armada of red flags and started waving them in her face as well.

The creep was just itching to get her a 'partner' her own age so they could "hit it off" and then make more fucking soldier babies for the Empire or whatever he wanted out of it. Kaiser thought he was being slick and sneaky in his maneuvering and prods, trying to make her a fucking breeder for his worthless army of muppets.

They could frame it like she would be fulfilling a noble role and helping the cause and the white race et cetera all they wanted, which… honestly, she even somewhat agreed with, because yes, motherhood was the most noble and worthwhile endeavour a woman could partake in and there could always be more white people in the world, that'd be great and all, but she was fucking sixteen right now and too confused about who the fuck she even was to consider any kind of relationship. Especially with an empire kid.

Not happening. Maybe when she was in her mid-twenties she'd try to find a good guy and make a nice family and whatnot, but there was no way she was going to let that be tied to the gang in any way.

She didn't have a… terrible childhood, but she didn't want her own kid to be raised like that and around such ideas. Not because she disapproved, of course not, but because of how mentally and emotionally taxing it was to live like this.

People really didn't realize how much hatred burned and ate away at someone until they had to live with it themselves. And even then, they could probably never see her side of it, having that fire since she was a preteen, nestled in her chest.

It was draining and taxing in a way she couldn't say was good to her mental health, at all. If she had less morals she could easily see herself indulging in a hate crime or two to just satisfy or get rid of that soul-devouring acid inside her that burned and burned and never left.

She could see why people in the gang would do the things they do, because if she was any more of a bad person or more violent, she'd probably do the same, if only for relief.

Then, Maria. Or, Othala, in public.

She loved Othala, she really did, and the girl was family. A second cousin, yes, but still family. The girl was sweet to the bone, without a doubt the kindest soul in the entire gang. Despite all that, she didn't want to end up like her.

Would she too be barely seventeen and have to go up to a young cape one day and talk about how she and her chosen partner were 'trying for a new addition to the family'?

She kind of liked Viktor. He was a very decent person to her. He was one of the few if only people who she felt like… could really see her, and liked her. He was almost family, through Othala.

But.

Viktor was thirty-fucking-something.

Othala couldn't legally drink yet.

That brief discussion had made her stomach feel… unpleasant, even if Othala seemed perfectly content and happy with her lot in the gang.

Neither of them were people she'd denounce, but it was still weird, to have an age gap that large and knowing Othala was practically set up with Viktor by Kaiser.

Thank god she ended up with Viktor rather than literally any other male in the gang, because he was honestly the best of a bad lot, but still, the whole situation was… vaguely gross.

The inner scale she held had gone from heavily weighed in the Empire's favour to a fairly ambivalent, sour feeling that had her eyeing the exit doors, despite the fact that they were winning.

There weren't any exits though, not really.

Another small pebble to the scale was how the Empire had reduced her to a fucking taxi service because Purity picked up the two murderfreaks and dipped for wherever the hell she had been to until now.

All she did these days was be ordered around to pick people up and drop them off somewhere. Kaiser's hit and run tactics had been working wonderfully, but she didn't fucking care if it was working or not, she wanted to either actually do something or be allowed to relax at home. It was so frustrating to have to waste hours of her life doing this shit. She'd rather be doing anything else.

She could be watching a movie, but no, she had to wear this stupid suit and go push her chest out and use her power to taxi a bunch of people around in the freezing, wet noons and nights in this shithole of a city.

Told to do things by others and told to sit in her place.

The scale tipped a bit more towards just… leaving.

The fight with Lung down at the Docks had also proven as a nice deterrent for her. She'd only watched from afar, but it was enough.

It was one thing to know something and another to see it.

Having seen the fiery equivalent of Leviathan ravaging that stretch of desolate concrete while wiping the floor with the local Protectorate had made it abundantly clear to her that fighting that motherfucker was suicide.

Then, they found Spitfire. Viktor's stolen skills helped a lot with tracking someone down.

And of course, Tammi was called forward to act as transport and support. She got to personally ferry their newest catch to Kaiser himself, for whatever reason, and she couldn't really say she was completely against the girl joining. She could use another girl her age around. They might even be friends. She seemed nice, if extremely green from how terrified she looked.

Maybe she could finally make a connection to someone other than Viktor. A somewhat normal one.

Then Kaiser just shrugged in the face of her denial, and said she'd make a decent enough breeder for Gesellschaft.

Like the girl wasn't even human. Like she was just a hole and her power.

She wasn't stupid. She'd looked up Gesellschaft, having heard the whispers in the high ranks.

They were fucking monsters, and not in the good way that made Hookwolf grin. They were monsters in a way that made the Yangban look like a good alternative.

It wasn't hard to extrapolate what would happen to the girl after they sold her. German media was very open about what their local nazis did. A good way to utterly demonize them, not that it worked. It just looked like propaganda from the government, trying too hard.

The point was that it was true, and Kaiser had confirmed it.

Brainwashing, torture. Forced breeding programs, forced trigger events.

It made her fucking sick.

It made her chest tighten to the point it felt like it was hard to breathe.

It was as she was securing the last zip tie that she finally made a decision.

A stupid, hasty decision, one borne of urgency and mounting discontent and a faint sense that she didn't belong here.

"I'm sorry." She had whispered to Viktor, who'd only let himself show a slight frown at Kaiser's decision, eyes forward as she secured the struggling girl by his side.

He didn't acknowledge her in any way, likely thinking she was talking to the panicking girl trying to squirm out of her bonds.

It took the action of her placing her palm on the flat of the truck's back for him to realize what she meant, and stiffen.

Then all hell broke loose, and she used her knife to free Spitfire to the best of her ability, making a moving warzone as she struggled to get them out of Empire territory.

Now, here she was. In the back of a truck, again, just this time, heading to an unknown place with a fuckload of complete strangers and a black girl that was staring at her. Incessantly.

At least she could bicker with Spitfire every now and then in the relative quiet of the transport, while the blonde chick with the domino mask and weird bodysuit and bracelets got her own little corner deeper into the bunk, whispering heatedly into her phone with a hand over her mouth as the Travellers practically shielded her.

She still had no clue who the fuck that was.

The confusion was paired with the fading of that adrenaline high she'd been surfing off of since she first made her decision, and she was starting to feel that familiar sensation of jittery weakness.

Nothing like Spitfire though.

Spitfire was downright quivering in her seat, trying to discreetly take deep breaths and looking like she was quite confused about why she was feeling so strangely.

She was also still unmasked, and it didn't seem like any of the people in the transport were carrying spare domino masks around, which probably left the girl feeling uniquely vulnerable, even if almost everyone kept their gazes politely turned away.

She frowned, and fingered at the zipper holding her hoodie in place.

Eh, she never liked this stupid suit anyway. Felt too much like an Empire suit rather than a Rune suit.

She unzipped it, then yanked the cord out, before unsheathing her knife and frustratingly chewing a hole through the damn thing by twisting the tip into the fabric, back and forth until it poked through.

"What's with the random DIY session?" The black girl asked, and she ignored her as she threaded the cord through the holes and made a simple knot at the back.

It was pretty shitty, but it should help, somewhat.

She thrust the makeshift facemask to Spitfire, whose entire body jumped at the simple brush of the fabric meeting her bare arm, before her head jerked to her.

She shook the hoodie.

"Wear it. It's a shit facemask, but if you tighten it up by yanking the cords at the back, it'll tighten enough to make do until we get to wherever the fuck you guys are taking me." She offered as a simple explanation.

"Ah… oh. Thanks." Spitfire hurriedly mumbled out, and yanked the hoodie out of her hand with shaking fingers, putting the cord coming off the corners of the hoodie over the back of her head, then tightening it until the hoodie was acting like a very heavy, baggy facemask.

"Also, you're crashing after an adrenaline high. It's normal after something like that. Drink something sugary later."

She ignored the looks from the truckbed's occupants.

Hookwolf told her to do that, and it actually worked. Somewhat. Sure helped keep her feet under her after a fight, until she could go crash at the apartment-

The apartment she could no longer go back to. The apartment that had everything that was hers and was provided by Kaiser.

Her mood took another nosedive, the reality of the situation weighing on her shoulders.

She felt trapped. Alone.

Fuck, she had nothing but her power now. No allies, no belongings, no- no fucking nothing.

Her eyes flicked up to the Travellers opposite her, most having gone back to talking about random inane crap, while the girl in the black bodysuit and red suns stylized all over it seemed to be studying her.

It was probably a bad idea to jump into something right after jumping out of another, but fuck, she didn't have many options and from what she knew of the Travellers, they were far better than the Empire to run with and they'd wander away from the Bay, away from all this crap.

"So… I'm shit out of luck and I just betrayed my gang to save a random girl I've known for less than an hour. You guys got an open spot, or are you just taking me along because I helped?" She asked, keeping her tone even, despite her emotions swirling into a soup of isolation and long-awaited panic.

The tophat guy took off said tophat, tilting his head to the blonde in the corner.

Said fellow blonde with a bodysuit poorly concealed beneath casual clothes- and absolutely fucking strapped because holy shit that was a huge fucking gun how did she not notice that before-, turned, and held up a finger, before hurrying back to her phone.

Tophat- oh, Trickster, she remembered now-, gave her a look, then shrugged.

"I'm not opposed at all, but the decision isn't really up to me. We've got a weird chain of command here. I'm the group's leader, but H- Insight over there-" he tilted his head to the blonde, "- is above me. And her, uh, sister, she's top dog."

Her brows lowered.

A few dots connected as she realized that Insight was actually Tattletale, considering how she called Grue a 'teammate' and complained about Lung trying to kill them.

She didn't know Tattletale had survived. Resilient girl.

Imp made a sound like a 'huh' of intrigue.

"So, you guys really don't mind a random white supremacist gangster joining you out of the blue?" Imp asked, brows raised, laughter in her voice.

Her brows lowered more into a scowl.

Imp saw it, and raised her hands.

"Hey, you're pretty chill for a nazi and all that, but come on. This is weird." Imp said, gesturing vaguely at the oddly silent Travellers then back to her.

There was something a bit odd about this whole situation, yes, enough so to where she didn't even object to the nazi label.

Now that she thought of it, and wasn't stuck in her own head thinking about how much she'd fucked herself over to save a stranger, she realized that there was a whole lot of shit that was really odd about this whole thing.

Trickster opened his mouth, hesitated, then gave another glance to Insight, who was still on the phone, her whispers growing heated and worried as she massaged her forehead. Then he shook his head, and went back to fiddling idly with his hat in his fingers, glancing about.

The Travellers were never the type to just jump into a gang conflict, from what she knew. They were just a random group of capes that seemed to be on a tour across America doing god knows fucking what. So they just… what, happened to go out of their way to help Spitfire in the hopes that she'd join them?

There was also the oddness of this sister figure and the odd nonchalance they had towards her. Did Tattletale and the Travellers both get nabbed by a new player or something?

Fuck, the bay was already busy enough. She wanted out.

As she thought, she idly watched the Travellers shrug, except the girl with the red suns on her.

She was expecting more hostility, truth be told.

"Well, anyways. So, hey, Rune." Imp began, swinging slightly from side to side. "Got a question. Would you have still saved Spitfire, knowing she's friends with me?"

Her brows rose in sheer incredulity, offence rising and dragging anger alongside it.

The hushed, somewhat awkward silence continued for a beat.

"Are you fucking serious with that question?" She asked, incredulous, and felt even more pissed off when the ni- when the bitch nodded.

"I mean, yeah? I don't know ya, chief. All I know is that you're from a nazi gang. Throw me a bone! Humour me!" Imp exclaimed, light heartedly, and she felt a tiny bit of the tension inside her fade.

Right, no, that made sense.

No shit, she was still wearing a goddamn Empire bodysuit.

"Yes, I would have. Being racist is entirely separate from being a fucking monster and letting something like- that, happen to someone. The former is just a character flaw, at least to most people, the other is just evil." She said, tightly pressing down on her frustration, because she might have to join this team with Imp and she wasn't in a good enough position to be antagonistic to her, even if she disliked the fact she was here.

Spitfire gave her a befuddled look, while Trickster tilted his head, swinging the hat back on his head.

"Makes sense." Trickster nodded.

"It does?" Spitfire mumbled, jittery and soft and confused.

"I- why be racist at all? Like, why be a dickhead for no reason?" The girl with the red sun-themed dress spoke up, halfway between angry and just confused, and Rune felt her eye twitch.

The fuck kinda question was that? Where was this girl raised, the world's most sheltered neighbourhood? Or was it just wilful ignorance?

"There's so many reasons and justifications that your question is the equivalent of asking a teacher to give a scientific thesis on a new theory in an off-hand, spoken conversation, and expect it to be concise and legible." She dryly replied, a line that… she couldn't lie, she'd had prepared in her head ages ago in preparation for a potential debate that never happened until now.

"I mean- gah, that sounds poshy and arrogant as fuck." She huffed, leaning back to stare at the canvas covering on the truck's roof. "It's not that complicated, but its too big of a conversation to have in the back of a truck and one that I'm frankly not interested in having right now because I'm kind of having a permanent internal debate going so kindly fuck off. I don't wanna talk about it." She grouched, and the sun girl opened her mouth, let out a sharp, baffled sigh, then closed it.

"You do know I'm gonna needle the shit out of you to explain the whole shtick, right? It's not every day I can communicate with a tame nazi! Captured in the wild, in its natural environment, and cooperative!" The girl stage-whispered, her voice getting all… weird, like she was trying to mimic some old man's british accent or something.

"Can't wait…" She hummed sarcastically, unamused, and crossed her arms, observing Imp and trying to weigh her emotions about her presence here.

It was so much harder to hate and dehumanise someone when they weren't a caricaturized image in one's head, but a breathing, present person, however fucking obnoxious.

There was some distaste there, a mild tang of disgust, but it was nothing like the burning acid in her chest whenever she passed through this shithole of a city and saw what Imp's… people, had turned the place into. Like walking through a metaphor of why they were an infection to America.

Face to face, it was hard to genuinely hate someone she didn't really know.

Asking herself why she disliked the girl then trying to push the reason away and ignore it, to experiment, was equally as difficult.

She removed the ever-present concept of race hanging over Imp's head, squinting at the curious-looking cape, and…

She was just another… girl. A bit more bouncy and annoying than she'd like, but that was about it.

It was so fucking confusing.

She didn't even know what she felt anymore, bouncing between disliking Imp for her race then pushing past that to just see her as an individual rather than a symbol or representation of her race and people and crossing over into mildly annoyed acceptance but certainly not likeness.

Why was this so fucking hard? Why did she keep doing these stupid goddamn mental experiments that always gave her another piece of strange self-knowledge that left her more and more perpetually confused?

"I know I'm pretty, but I have a feeling that's not why you're staring." Imp said, rocking side to side like a hyperactive toddler.

"Hm." She grunted, wordlessly, and turned her head away to stare out the open back of the truckbed.

Nothing to do but wait.

Twenty minutes later, during which time her nerves continued to endlessly ramp up, the truck stopped.

She felt isolated in a way she hadn't felt in a long, long time.

In a way she'd only felt when she was in prison and Triggered.

Trickster got up, and stretched, while the guy in the aggressive football-adjascent outfit slowly rose with a groan. The girl with the sun patterns stayed seated, while Imp jumped up, leaning forward to stare out the back of the truckbed with open curiosity.

"Well, we're here, and Insight isn't done with her phonecalls. You guys coming?" He asked, jerking his thumb to the, frankly, abandoned looking box of concrete that could only be called a store by the most generous of folk. The only notion of safety the place provided was a very rusty wall of those wiggly sheet metals winding around the sides and out of the back, where they'd parked.

"Where is here anyway?" Spitfire asked with clear trepidation, her voice and body significantly more relaxed than earlier.

Good, someone else was a bit skeevy about being taken to the sketchiest looking building she'd ever seen right after a very life-threatening situation.

"It's a safehouse. It's much better on the inside, it's supposed to look like a locked down piece of trash from outside. Come on, I'm sure you two want a shower. And you won't get seen, don't worry." Trickster said, gesturing to the back of said building as he climbed out.

Oh, fuck.

She really wanted a fucking shower. So fucking bad.

She was covered in trash, puke, sweat, dust and dirt and dried blood. She'd never felt so utterly filthy as right now before in her life.

She was still uncertain and- though she would never admit it- she felt quite vulnerable and isolated in a way that was viscerally uncomfortable.

She had expected to be kicked out of the truck the moment it stopped, not to be invited inside alongside the rest.

Then again, the Travellers were villains, maybe that helped.

She nodded, and hurried to the edge of the truckbed, jumping off and straightening up just in time to watch Spitfire do the same and crumple to the floor with a startled yelp.

By instinct, she went to grab her before she fell, but only managed to drag herself down with her, her legs tangling with Spitfire's arm and sending her sprawling to the floor elbows first, a little sideways.

She hissed in pain as she scrambled upright.

"For FUCK'S S-" She startled, whirling on Spitfire, then bit her tongue, squared her shoulders, and took a deep breath as the girl made similar hisses of pain and rose to her feet, knees quaking.

Be nice. Be nice, Tammi.

"Sorry." She growled quickly, reaching out to stabilise her. "Weak knees. Normal to get after your first couple brushes with real danger. It wears off quick." She explained.

Another nugget of "wisdom" from Hookwolf.

Spitfire nodded.

"Oh, uh, alright. Thanks?"

She huffed, let go, and turned around to march into the safehouse behind the girl that she just realized the cape identity of, Sundancer.

She was getting to that shower first, niceness be damned.

Insight kept her distance, still on the damn phone and looking increasingly troubled as she followed Ballistic in, last in line.

Rune almost stumbled on the slight upstep of the linoleum floor inside the building, and decided to stop looking at everyone in hearing range like a skittish rat and pay attention to what was in front of her.

It certainly looked like a safehouse.

It reeked of an enclosed space, plastic, and faint gunpowder.

Two couch beds against what might have been front store windows once before they were bricked up, giant crates and shelves lining the walls, covered in random shit she could summarise as what one would need to crash a big group in here for a week or two, lit up by a crappy yellow lightbulb in the ceiling, its wires exposed.

Two benches were near the center, covered in toolboxes, while under and around them, various cans and tubs of stuff she had no idea the purpose of were tossed about, along with a surprising amount of protective gear. The biohazard and contamination kind.

It was essentially a giant concrete box crammed full of stuff everywhere.

The only lacklustre part was the lack of floorspace. If the building was about forty by forty feet, only about half of those were unoccupied by one thing or another.

Her eyes lingered on a pistol laying in the open on a military green crate, barely the size of a suitcase.

"Shower's back there. Don't take too long, there's probably not that much warm water here." Ballistic piped up, pointing to a tiny hallway in the corner she hadn't even noticed, likely thinking she was looking around for the shower, and she turned to him with a nod.

"Thanks."

No need to be rude to what… might be her new team?

Fuck, she had no idea.

She quickly went to the shower, and planned to use all the warm water.

If Spitfire wanted to warm herself up, she could just hawk up a loogie on the shower floor, it wasn't her problem.

Besides, it was always best to cry under a warm showerhead than a cold one.

She hoped Othala would forgive her.

Viktor could suck shit, but she hoped he wouldn't hate her either.

Notes:

In which we get two different POVs from two different unlikable characters.

If you say you dislike Rune and what she believes, that's cool and all and completely normal, but frankly I just don't care much about the real world political side of sht and I will delete any comments complaining about it.

This is a fictional, not a political debate about current real world topics. If you can't separate the two, that's not my problem, but it will hinder your experience, plainly put.

That aside, I want Rune in the story, so I have to fit her in in a way that is both realistic and makes sense considering her past. Think what you will of her opinions, good or bad, I could geniunely not care LESS. This chapter isn't about that, specifically, but more to lay the foundations of redemption or at least an uneasy change with Rune further down the line like in Ward.

Also, one thing that always bugged me in stories with Rune in them is that people just do NOT handle her well at all.

If they add her, they tend to do one of two things: either make it so that she doesn't REALLY believe what she believes in canon because that's the easy road, or they make her change opinions faster than one changes their jacket. One is just a mini-AU, the other is unrealistic and stupid because that's not how people work unless they never believed what they said they did in the first place.

Wildbow handled Rune excellently, so I took some light inspiration from how he handled her in Ward and added some of my own experiences of having a shifting worldview and the confusion of identity and belief that comes with it to hopefully make something that's both realistic, and has a plausible way to change.

Yeah that is about it. This story will have in-world politics to keep things believable and realistic to some extent, but if you can't separate Earth bet fictional politics from irl Earth politics, at least have the grace to keep your whining to yourself.

Chapter 35

Notes:

holy shit a lot of things happen here

also im not used to writing stories that step on the gas pedal like this and just don't let go, this is very fun to write, even if its exhausting.

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Coil was gone.

Not just gone, he completely fucking vanished.

He did not use the secret exit, he did not even open it. He took nothing, and from Taylor's words, she could easily deduce the fact that he was somehow kidnapped in the middle of their base without much to show for it.

So she had to ditch their new, cautionary additions and go personally investigate, because her power was made for this kind of stuff.

She'd combed over the entire room, and only caught a single thing out of place.

An almost imperceptible, naked footprint.

She could extrapolate something from that, which was that someone, likely a female from how small the foot was, walked in here, grabbed Coil, and probably teleported out.

So an invisibility power, and teleportation.

Some janky teleportation, probably, because if they could teleport someone out of here by just thinking of doing so, they would have likely done so without even sending someone down here.

It didn't take too much to extrapolate that Cauldron heard of what Coil had told them, and had come to collect their blood debt for the betrayal.

Either that, or the power was blocked by Taylor's Eidolon-tier bullshit… somehow, so whoever this woman was had to get close.

Or.

Or they only sent someone here to send a message, of sorts. If Cauldron was as all-knowing and all-powerful as Coil said, they probably knew about her power, right?

So what, was this an intrusion that couldn't possibly be interpreted or uncovered by anyone else except her, and they just sent the woman in here to notify her that they were responsible, knew who they were, and could infiltrate them at any moment without even using teleportation?

Discarding most of the paranoid-sounding, somewhat convoluted plots, she only had two things to work on.

One, someone invisible walked in and took Coil away.

Two, the bitch probably worked for Cauldron and came to collect the price of betrayal for her masters. There weren't many, if any, other things she could chalk this up to.

Now, if only Taylor would crawl out of whatever hellish hole she'd crawled into and get a signal so Lisa could tell her any of this…

Usually, when someone wakes up, they get to feel their consciousness slowly come to awareness.

All she felt was pain, and the almost incoherent sludge of thoughts in her mind pulse in time with her heart as she began to cast Heal on herself again, knowing it would do nothing but offer a moment of relief but still craving that singular second.

Compared to when she passed out- because what she did could NOT be called 'falling asleep'-, however, this headache was… manageable.

She could at least walk without feeling like someone was squeezing her brain with live wire.

With how fast things were moving though, she knew better than to assume there was something that didn't require her attention, so grudgingly, over the course of a couple hours of miserable writhing, she straightened, took a deep breath, and Teleported into Coil's office.

She flinched away from the bright light, raising a hand to block it, and turned to observe the empty room.

She had many things to do. Dinah Alcott was still in the base, likely about to wake up, then she had to deal with Shadow Stalker, then hopefully finally start to cripple Lung's human trafficking empire because it fucking sickened her.

It was especially viable now that the Empire likely lost a few capes, as it meant that her fucking with Lung's business wouldn't end up with the nazis owning the entire Bay because of her.

She had to get a sitrep first though.

As if to remind her it exists, her phone started buzzing.

And buzzing.

It just didn't stop.

With a slight sigh, she moved up to the door, locking the massive mechanism, then leaned back against Lisa's desk, perusing through her messages, using her free hand to massage her temples.

The usual spam from Bakuda, which loosely explained that she went to the fight in person to prove herself and how she could work without killing people but ended up flunking the whole thing and how much she's sorry.

That part made her feel more than a little bad about her minion, so she sighed, and sent a simple ' I'm just glad you're okay Mia' message back, not paying too much attention to the hyperactive spam surrounding the important bits.

She'd have to clear an hour or so for Mia eventually. The woman missed her a lot, which... she wasn't sure how to feel about.

She went to Coil's contact, which, oddly enough, hadn't sent her a single thing. She checked Lisa's.

By the time she was done reading, the back of her eyes felt like they were getting stabbed with needles, so she closed them, and began to breathe in and out, slowly.

Coil got kidnapped. In the middle of their base. In the most secure room.

Time to move, she supposed.

Another task to the endless list.

She switched to the Rune of Domination, then focused on the Ultimate Hunter effect.

Coil was… alive, but clearly in another world.

The effect couldn't open portals. The best information she got was that he was most definitely not in this one world, and by extension, not on Earth Aleph either. He was somewhere, but it didn't know where because direction between dimensions didn't exist.

So Cauldron had a cross-world teleporter of sorts. She already knew that, but she wasn't exactly happy about being vindicated on their existence.

She wasn't sure what to do with this information.

She switched to the Rune of Sorcery for the Absolute Focus effect, pursing her lips.

Some part of her was furious that someone messed with her people, because Coil might be a despicable sociopath with an ego the size of a skyscraper, but he was her despicable sociopath. She controlled him.

A more practical part of her knew when to cut her losses and move on.

She knew how to find Coil regardless. She had a Legend in her arsenal who could teleport to him with a thought and a mental image, through worlds and realms if need be.

But she was too diminished to jump into a fight into what she assumed was the center of hostile territory in another world. She couldn't risk something like that for someone like Coil.

Lisa's speculation sounded about right. The chance of Cauldron giving them Coil back after he betrayed them was practically nil. He was likely to be tortured and killed in retribution. Maybe used as an example or a fear tactic against them.

It stung, but there wasn't much she could do about it at the moment.

She also had to assume he'd spilled everything about them. She had no testing with Master powers, but if Cauldron was as scary as Coil claimed, she would assume the worst.

Lisa had already implemented a three man squad protocol for everyone on base, and had used some of Coil's capital to get a couple tinkertech sensors, and for a moment, Taylor was so infinitely glad she had Lisa on her side, doing so much work while she was a vegetable in her bunker.

She checked through more reports on her phone, working her jaw.

Maria said that the Wards were all on thin ice and under watch, and reported that her increased work ethic was getting good results.

She briefly reminded the woman to keep having a social life for self-fulfillment, thanked her for the office gossip, and moved on.

Oni Lee reported that Lung was surprisingly beat up, and was practically crippled so far. He'd ramped up an incredible amount, but he ramped back down so quickly that his regeneration faded before it could deal with the overwhelming damage.

A day or two and he'd be fine for fighting again. A small window.

She briefly considered going after him to Master him now that he was weak, but discarded it.

Too much to deal with. Way too much. Her usage time was improving extremely fast, but not enough to deal with the overwhelming chaos.

With a deep breath, she kept scrolling.

Spitfire and Imp seemed to be on board, on the basis that they got paid well and could leave when they felt like.

Imp especially was invaluable, if she was alright with killing people. To have someone in her team that could just walk up to someone and slit their throat without them even noticing she existed was… incredibly, incredibly powerful. It was the kind of power that made the hairs on the back of Taylor's neck rise with caution and alarm.

Even as just a spy, she'd be amazing.

Spitfire, she wasn't sure what she wanted to do with her. Her power was mediocre at best, but as long as she could keep the girl away from her enemies and relatively safe, she was fine with paying for a cape she had not that many uses for.

Rune had asked to join the Travellers, but seemed to be under the impression that they were going to be leaving the Bay soon-ish. That seemed to be one of her main motivations.

Rune was another thing she hadn't expected to just tumble into her net.

But the synergy she could have with Taylor's magic cards, or Bakuda's bombs…

She felt her spine stiffen in response to the mental image, a strange glee that felt out of place within her mind.

The glee of a child cackling at destruction…

Ah. Jinx.

She was too tired to reel it in and examine the maddening glee, much less stomp it down. Simply suppress it.

She skimmed through the next message, not really reading it, her mind stuck on the actual child she had on base.

Dinah Alcott.

Her finger tapped on the phone meaninglessly.

Taylor had committed untold atrocities in another world. Whether she was wearing the skin of a demon, a rotting demigod sealed into his own sword, a soldier or commander, a general who had to give the order to bombard thousands into paste for the wider campaign... short of the most degenerate acts known to man, she'd done every evil she could think of.

But she'd also done many good things. Saved many lives as healers, wanderers, philanthropists or sacrificial figures. Even beasts.

She didn't want to be defined by what she did in another world, wearing other people's skin and feeling their emotions and going through their thoughts in parallel tracks like they were one and the same.

She wanted to do good, in this world, even if she kept slipping and slipping in different directions from moment to moment.

As her finger tapped the side of the phone, her previous idea, to gently let the girl know what had happened to her family, and then give her a choice, felt like the idea of another person now.

The power dynamic was off, the girl was scared, and she was a child. She shouldn't be given such monumental choices. Taylor wouldn't ever feel alright about having a child working for her. Dinah should be in school.

She quickly sent a message to Mr Pit, the odd, creepy caretaker, to cut the dosage and prepare the girl for transport.

She couldn't do much in this state, but she could sort her business real quick before starting the liquidation protocol Coil had prepared and scattering her assets.

She unlocked the door, and marched to Shadow Stalker's cell while Dinah slowly stirred awake.

Sophia looked quite pitiful like this.

She couldn't say she took any pleasure in it, honestly.

The ankle devices that Sophia wore were still in place, scratched a little bit from her manic attempts to break or file them off, her jumpsuit was lightly scorched and torn, and her hair was almost an afro at this point, not the least helped by the electrical shocks she no doubt got every time she tried to break the ankle restraints or use her powers.

The cell was basically just a dead end hallway with bars and a metal door slapped in front to contain someone. The only thing even mildly advanced about it was the electrical lock.

She patted the shoulder of one of the agents to her side and jerked her chin to the end of the hall.

He nodded and walked off, the second guard following him.

Sophia, likely hearing the light clatter of their weapons and equipment moving, lifted her head, a glare on her face.

One that faded into befuddled shock.

They held eye contact for a moment, before Sophia, surprisingly, ducked her eyes down, a face of terrified and furious realization slowly forming on her face.

"Fuck. Fuck. This is what this is about, isn't it? I made you fucking Trigger so you join a supervillain for revenge or some shit?" Sophia hissed, gaze still never reaching higher than Taylor's knees, her body tensing.

Evelynn's senses tasted fear.

Odd, odd behavior.

She swapped runes, Cosmic Insight flickering to life.

Views the world as predator versus prey. Does not believe the weak should be protected. Believes they should be dragged to their feet to defend themselves, or left to die. Views it as the natural order. Despises the idea of reliance. Despises those who choose weakness. Not as naturally aggressive as she is at the present time, outside influence. Hates feeling trapped.

The short snippet was followed by a bizarre, headache-inducing mess of ideas that seemed to explain that her power seemed to be alive and making her constantly overaggressive.

She didn't know if that was just faulty wires crossing and her rune couldn't make sense of how powers worked, or if powers were actually alive, but the strange collection of ideas stuck with her.

Wouldn't be the most bizarre explanation, truth be told, but it was still a bit out there.

She focused back on the short snippet, something about it bugging her, until it clicked.

Her eyes widened, shivers erupting up and down her arms.

For a moment, she felt like she was hit by a truck full of memories.

"What do you Noxians believe in? How do you keep this… mess, even vaguely coherent? There has to be a unifying factor." Luxanna mumbled, gesturing at the Noxian section of the camp, lightly shivering from the Freljordian weather beating down on both Demacian and Noxian with equal, foreign hostility.

Flecks of white clung to her blonde hair like moths to a flame, and she once again slapped at it in vain, sighing as she worked to shove more of her hair under the fluffy hat.

The camp's color palette clashed between brown wood, white fabrics and snow, blue ice and the warm orange of flames, and it was much too soothing after being so used to seeing nothing but dizzying hues of pink and magenta and purple for days.

Draven glanced aside to their side of the camp, his brother's pauldron resting heavy on his shoulder, above the stump of his arm, massive in comparison to his slimmer frame.

A mess of different races shifted around their tents, countless tribes with countless customs and looks, a riot of color and organised chaos of both living people and chained, necromantic abominations, the only unifying factor being the clothes given to them by Queen Ashe's supply delegation.

A pitiful, cautious gift that felt more like a temporary appeasement to the sudden massive army yelling at her messengers that beyond her frozen mountains, the continent was melting pink and bleeding purple while she tried to confirm for herself.

She liked the Freljordians, she really did, but their distrust and isolative nature made them a nightmare to deal with.

And she wasn't even the one doing most of the diplomatic work.

Draven sighed, a tired, heavy thing, slowly turning his head to stare ahead at the horizon, that thin line of barely-visible pink that seemed to brush over the plains of their broken kingdoms like an unerring brush below.

"Strength." He simply said, low and rumbling. "The unifying factor, is strength. Noxus believes in no god, reveres no science nor harmony. Only strength. To quote the old crow." He huffed, jerking his thumb somewhere behind him.

Presumably at the late night light emanating out of General Swain's tent.

She frowned.

"How does that work though? I don't get it." She grumbled.

How did 'strength' unite anything?

Draven shifted, a slow, stiff thing, his scarred hand brushing down the flat of his bizarre, spinning… throwing axe thingie at his thigh.

"The basic idea is that strength is the ultimate goal, the most revered aspect of a uh… eh, a person, I guess. Don't have the energy to give a fuckin' speech." He grunted, working his tongue at his teeth before shifting again, his charred, odd moustache swaying with the motion.

"I remember what Darius told me when we were kids. It's okay to be weak. Everyone is, at some point. It's encouraged, for the strong to push the weak forward, so all of us can be strong, for one man to help another be better. But there is nothing more disgusting and pitiful than someone who chooses to remain weak. So long as someone is fighting for strength, they live life right. If they're complacent, if they're content with being protected by walls and their betters, they should be crushed like a worm. And we're not talking just physical strength either, even if that's the most pure and respected kind. You think that old white bastard got to where he is by armwrestling?" He scoffed, once again likely referring to General Swain.

She took a deep breath, considering it.

It made some kind of twisted sense.

And it was a lot less barbaric than what she thought Noxians believed in, being a warmongering Empire and all that.

To think that less than five years ago, they were still at war.

Now look at them. A mixed group of refugees who hate each other, one half trying for diplomacy and the other half saying they should just barge into the Avarosan capital and take over, bickering for hours on end while the Void kept crawling forward.

"Your brother wasn't that bad, for a Noxian…" She started, and Draven grunted, his brows lowering a little bit. "Should have grabbed his axe though, I have no idea how you use that thing on your leg." She mumbled.

Draven burst into roaring laughter, something more like his usual self, loud and brash and almost mocking, throwing his head back and using his remaining arm to hold his stomach.

She couldn't get that memory out of her head now.

She couldn't get the dozens of memories out of her head, of being a Noxian and having that same concept explained to her a dozen different ways.

Sophia was just half an inch away from being the closest thing to a Noxian she'd ever find in this world, even if her worldview was stupid and crazy in this more modern age.

"The fuck happened to you, Hebert? How many people've you killed?" Sophia growled, and Taylor blinked, returning to the real world.

It took her a moment to realize what Sophia meant.

The unnervingly intense stare thing.

People she interacted with often sort of got used to it, so she'd forgotten about it.

She could guess that Sophia interpreted that as the gaze of a killer. She wasn't technically wrong.

She didn't speak, thinking.

"Well?" Sophia raised her voice, still not looking up at her, acting like a chihuahua, unsure if she should bow down to something more dangerous than her or keep barking at it just in case she fooled it into thinking she could back the commotion up with a bite.

"Sh. Thinking." She mumbled, squinting down at her.

Sophia scoffed.

She'd planned to just Master Sophia, throw her into Noelle for a test run, then execute her and make more clones from the clone she'd gain, but now she hesitated.

When she took over this city, she planned to model the culture of her organisation from Noxus and Demacia, but mostly Noxus.

And she couldn't help but think that it would be so nice to have someone by her side who would get it instantly when she explained what she believed in, or at least, some parts of it. Who believed in it enough to have internalised it already.

Alongside that, she just… couldn't really feel any of the hatred she thought she'd feel.

Sophia was just a stupid kid. An evil, psychotic stupid kid, but still just a stupid kid. One that had in some ways ruined her life beyond repair, and in others, might have indirectly saved every life that Taylor would.

The locker also just… didn't feel like it was even in the top hundred worst things that had happened to her.

But she also could never trust Sophia. Not like this.

"I'll make this simple, Sophia. Come closer for a sec." She said, squatting down to be equal height with her.

Sophia finally raised her head to meet her gaze with a glare.

"Fuck you, don't tell me-" Sophia started.

She flicked her fingers through a dozen patterns, lowering her eyelids in a lazy, challenging look, and finally, just to draw her attention, snapped her fingers in the blur of motion before opening her palm.

"-what to-"

A steady flame burst to life on her palm, one of the spells she trained for her personal mana pool, roaring up high to lick at her chin.

Sophia stopped talking, staring at the fire.

"Do as I say before I cook you alive in your little box. You can't phase an inch." She said, calmly, and Sophia briefly glanced up, meeting her eyes. She lowered her eyes, hissed out a cuss, and got up to walk closer, dropping to her knees once she was at the bar, at the same height as Taylor.

"Look at me."

Sophia instantly replied with a furious, constipated glare, likely stuck between her ideology and her pride.

Taylor's eyes flashed gold, pushing a numb haze into her captive's mind.

This time, she'd worked with exceeding delicacy and caution.

Evelynn used to be a rather all-or-nothing type. She would either use none of her mind-bending ability, or crush someone with it just to get it over with.

So despite her absurd lifespan, Taylor didn't have extensive experience with slight tweaks, and she had very little juice in the tank at the moment.

If she wished to be able to still function after Sophia, she had to go for exactly that though. Slight tweaks.

For that reason, she spent a lot of time in there, just thinking.

What few small changes she could make to have the biggest and most trustworthy impact.

It was three-fold. Loyalty, acceptance, and trust.

She didn't brute-force it, slowly inflaming them and eyeing them with a careful consideration for both her reserves and her 'relationship' with Sophia.

When she exited, she only took a sudden deep breath, blinking rapidly as she stumbled back to fall on her ass.

A moment passed as Sophia did the same, blinking rapidly.

Then she squinted at her.

"Did you just fucking hypnotise me or something?" Sophia gruffed, suspicion written all over her face.

She slowly got up, and cracked her neck, stretching her stomach to check how winded she felt.

It was manageable. Little exertion.

"Sort of. Wanted to test something." She replied, feeling mildly nervous, on top of the slowly worsening headache.

It could probably qualify as a migraine at this pace.

Thankfully, Sophia's suspicious look faded, switching to a vaguely confused one.

"I feel weird. The fuck did you do?" Sophia half-mumbled, staring at her with an intense focus, like she was trying to dissect her with her eyes.

Moment of truth. Acceptance would either hold up, or Sophia's indignation would push higher and she'd get angry at her.

"Mastered your behaviour so that you're less of a snarly mess towards me." She simply said, dusting off her butt, even if she didn't really need to.

Sophia's expression slowly blanked as she stiffened, averting her gaze.

"Oh."

A moment of silence.

"I'm going to assume this is going to stick?" Sophia asked, expression shifting once more to a confused, almost constipated look.

"It should. How do you feel about that?"

"I dunno. Don't really feel anything. It is what it is." Sophia shrugged, face smoothing over to her usual, bored RBF.

That was a lot better than some of her other tests, where people would be angry at the fact they weren't angry at her. More stable.

Or Sophia was a good actor, getting ready to stab her in the back.

"Good. Now, let's have a chat about the ideology of my little organisation, how you fit into it, and what I want from you."

Sophia blinked at her, wide eyed. "Wait, this shit's yours?" She asked, incredulous, gesturing with her hand and eyes around and above them before returning to her. Then she paused, her brows furrowing. "No, wait, what the fuck. Why do you want me to work for you? I made you trigger."

She shrugged, trying to speak in a way that Sophia could resonate with.

"Wasn't the worst thing that's happened to me. Besides, you're useful, and I think you and I will see eye to eye quite a bit. Well, in some ways." She conceded with a tilt of her head. "I'm going to ask you a broad question."

She bent down again to be on eye level with Sophia, resting on the floor with her legs to the side as she flickered back to her real self, hoping to give her brain a slight rest as she set the foundations of her working relationship with the girl.

"What do you think strength is?"

Sophia scowled.

"The fuck kinda question is that?"

She tilted her head, staring off into the wall as she switched Runes and envisioned what she wanted for her organisation, for the Bay.

"Strength. What is strength? Most people would say it's physical or mental fortitude, but it's something more than that in my opinion. Strength can manifest in many ways. It can manifest in a predator who's physically weak but terrifically fast, in a general with a mind as sharp as a razor, a man who can read others like open books, or traditional strength, like someone turning over a car with their bare hands."

Sophia gave her a weird, skeptical look.

"Okaaaayy…?"

She was going to lose her on the idea at this pace.

"I think strength is something to be sought and fought for. Whether it takes the form of physical power or mental fortitude, an aptitude with numbers, et cetera. That strength should be used for the good of the organisation or nation the people are a part of. Most people will deny this, but the desire to be part of something greater is an intrinsic part of human nature. To build something great, you need great people. Of course, to achieve that without cruelty, the weak should be uplifted by the strong to be strong themselves, and if they refuse to improve, left behind in the dust. Does that make sense to you?"

Sophia only thought of it for a moment with a tilted head, before nodding.

"Yeah. I guess. Seems a bit like cultish mumbo jumbo bullshit, but it makes sense. Don't agree with the entire thing, but It makes sense."

"Does it resonate with you?" She asked.

Sophia frowned, working her jaw and glancing to the side.

"Besides the whole 'help the weak be strong' shit, yeah. If they won't fight for something first, the strong shouldn't bother helping them."

She bobbed her head.

"Alright. I want that to be part of our culture in this organisation, or gang, or whatever name we give it in the future. I want someone who believes in it to spread it, someone who gets it. Do you think you can be that person? You seem to believe in most of the idea already."

Sophia considered it for a moment, biting her cheek.

Then she glanced up at her.

"I'm not going to be your motivational speaker or some shit. But if you want something like a uh… drill instructor who believes in the same thing, I could probably ride that. Tell me more first. Explain it."

She nodded, and gathered her thoughts.

She'd spent enough time chatting with Sophia and explaining what was going on in her organisation for Dinah to reportedly wake up in full, understandably scared but compliant in one of the base's rooms.

As she walked to her destination, face mask in place, Sophia walked beside her, scratching her neck and gazing around with shrewd eyes.

"Hey, hold it for a sec."

She paused, turning a little to look at her new acquisition.

"I know this is kind of a sudden request, and that you legit just explained stuff to me, but I want to go see my mother. Can I do that?" Sophia asked, voice surprisingly… not soft, just tired.

For a moment, Taylor's own eyes softened in sympathy.

It had been entirely too easy to forget that before Sophia decided to ruin both their lives for her stupid, sadistic amusement, they both had families. Painfully easy.

At least her own dad was better off now, far from her and hopefully building something new. He might have some cognitive dissonance and mental disturbance from knowing his daughter was dead yet somehow walking around, but he shouldn't be thinking about that too much.

Sophia on the other hand likely hadn't seen her family in something like five or six months.

"Yeah. Go for it. But do try to keep a certain level of distance and stealth. You're a very wanted fugitive now."

Sophia scoffed, frustration in her eyes.

"Blaming me for your made up murder likely didn't help."

"Accurate in an ironic way though." She mused.

Sophia didn't reply, just giving her a confused look.

She shook her head at the inside joke.

"Whatever. Feel free to visit your family whenever you're not on the job, just be aware of the risks to everyone involved."

"I'm not retarded, He-"

She whirled, flickering to Evelynn in an instant, her hand snapping shut around Sophia's throat, holding her just high enough for the balls of her feet to brush the floor as she choked and grabbed her wrist, wide eyed and barely resisting the urge to kick her in the stomach, judging by the spasms in her legs.

"Did I not say to refer to me as Sam or nothing in public?" She slowly whispered, eyes slowly gleaming gold as she dragged Sophia to her height and closer.

Sophia tried to nod, a vibration travelling through the throat inside her palm, a word she couldn't get out.

She let up, not letting go but lowering her and allowing her to cough and gasp in a breath.

"Ye-" cough "-Yeah. My bhgh- bad." Sophia forced out after what sounded like a heave.

She knew she should have ramped up the idea of secrecy connected to her.

Fucking Sophia.

Some other time.

She let go, and Sophia backed up a step, grimacing and massaging her bruised throat.

"Do not ever slip up with sensitive information, Shadow Stalker . I may have given you another chance to do some good in your unique, violent way, but I will turn you into a drooling puppet if you compromise me even once." She calmly said, quietly, trying to not turn this into a commotion in the same hall as Dinah's room.

Sophia made a face, but nodded.

"Good. Now, head to the guard at the end of the hall, tell him Sam cleared you. He'll give you a nondescript suit and your old belongings. Do your business and keep your phone on. Things move fast in the Bay. We're going to move out before the day is even over. Good luck with your personal business." She dipped her head in a dismissal and acknowledgement both, and Sophia just continued clearing her throat while massaging it, walking past her.

A paranoid dreg inside her hissed that Sophia was bound to betray her, Mastering be damned, but she tamped down on it.

Sophia knew pretty much nothing but this location, and they were leaving it within the day. She could enforce better mastering later.

She flickered back to herself, and took a deep breath as she began walking, ducking into a small, brightly lit hallway leading to a single white metal door.

The singular guard jerked a thumb to the door behind him with a questioning tilt of his head, and she nodded.

He tapped his knuckles to the door, then opened it a smidge, facing away from it.

"Incoming visitor, little miss." He said, muffled through his facemask, and she thanked him as she stepped past him and into the room.

It was like someone took a jail cell and tried to make it cozy. Sure, it somewhat worked, but something was still off and restrictive about it.

Her gaze turned to the side where Dinah was, giving her a squinting look from where she was sitting at a little table, writing something down.

There was far too much weight behind those eyes for a girl that age.

There was nothing to talk about. She was just planning to let the girl know what had happened, that she was safe, and that she was going to be delivered to a police station soon.

Until she swapped to the Rune of Inspiration and a deluge of useless information framed a single batch of information that stopped her cold like a statue as Cosmic Insight did its thing.

The little girl staring at her knew who was going to set in motion the end of the world. Or at least, used to know.

Whether that meant the identity of the person changed, her knowledge vanished, or the end was prevented, she didn't know.

What she knew was that the mere idea of a single person being able to bring about the end of the world horrified her.

She stepped forward, a tad too quickly, and the girl tensed.

She stopped, shifted her stance to something more open and friendly, and took a deep breath, silently.

She'd take the face mask off, but she couldn't afford to show her face nor use a Legend too much today.

"Hello, Dinah. My name is Sam." She began, and the girl glanced up at her eyes, gaze still heavy.

"What did you do to my power?" The girl replied.

She moved to the girl's bed, and sat down, rubbing at her neck, aiming for a more casual air.

"One of us unfortunately scrambles precognition powers everywhere they go and have been and will be. Can't fix your power if I wanted to."

She turned to look at the girl, who seemed to grow increasingly frustrated and scared, looking down at the paper.

"So I'm useless now. Am I going to get killed too?" Dinah asked, voice surprisingly steady for how obviously scared the girl was.

And for how it seemed the girl already knew her parents were dead.

She slowly closed her eyes.

Fuck you, Coil. Should have helped Lisa beat you halfway to death when I had the chance.

"No. Dinah, the person who wanted to kidnap you was Coil." She began, and the girl looked up at her. "A supervillain, as you can guess, and he wanted your power, as you deducted. He's out of the picture now. He'll never harm you or even be involved in anything to do with you ever again. We've… taken over his gang. Stole it, in a sense. He's powerless and likely going to die sometime soon from some enemies he made." She said, then glanced aside, feeling guilt churn in her gut from what she was about to do.

She just couldn't let the girl leave before she knew exactly who the hell had the ability to end the world. She had to get that information first. Then the girl could go do as she wished.

She still felt bad about asking for a condition to free her.

"We're going to let you go. I-"

"Are you heroes?" The girl asked, cutting her off, and she paused.

She didn't want to lie, but she was unfathomably good at it.

She chose not to, this time.

"No. I wouldn't say we're villains either, but we're not heroes. We do bad things, but we mostly do it to bad people. We're going to help people, but we have to make sure we're secure first. Our goal is good and noble, but the process so far has been a little ethically questionable."

Dinah was silent.

"I appreciate you not talking like I'm mentally disabled just because I'm twelve." Dinah mumbled, staring at the piece of paper. "You said you do bad things to bad people, right?"

She nodded.

"Yes. That's one of our main goals. To kill those who should be killed but for whatever reason aren't. "

Dinah pressed her hands into her eyes, taking a deep, shuddering breath.

"Do you know what my power did? Before your guy broke it?"

"Likelihood based precognition?"

Dinah nodded.

"I- think that's what my power is. Just with numbers. Absurdly specific numbers. I ask a question, I get a number possibility of it happening. The- the numbers told me something."

Her body fought to react, but she kept herself outwardly calm. Was Dinah about to…?

"Something that someone horrible is going to do, and soon. I couldn't go to the PRT because then this Coil man would be there, and with me knowing that Coil was hunting me, I haven't really been able to tell anyone, but. Before my power got messed with by your guy, I knew that Jack Slash would come to Brockton Bay within the next year. That was a couple months ago."

One of her fingers twitched minutely, but other than that, she remained silent.

"I asked a lot of stuff to my power at the first days I got it. And it told me that somehow, some way, Jack Slash is going to end the world if he leaves Brockton Bay alive. As in, he's going to start some kind of event or domino effect that will result in the death of the entire world. "

She still said nothing, watching Dinah's breathing get deeper and more erratic.

"And it's- it's stupid, isn't it? I know that no matter who I tell this to, I'll just get laughed at. I could have gone to a hero and they might play along as I tell them what my power does, but the moment I tell them a serial killer with a knife power will end the world, I'd get laughed out of the building. I'm not lying- "

"I know." She said, simply. "Don't worry. I believe you. I'll kill the bastard. Keep an eye on the news." She said, then after a moment of digesting this insane information and whether she truly believed it, she glanced at the door.

"I believe it's best you left for now. Sorry for your power. If you tell the PRT, they'll likely do their best to place you somewhere our precog blocker won't be involved in. And I'd really appreciate it if you didn't tell them anything about us. Just claim you woke up in the car we're going to drive you to the police station in."

Dinah nodded.

"Alright. Before we go, how long have I been out?"

She looked up to the ceiling, struggling to parse the days.

So much shit happened so fast she felt like a month had passed, but counting the sunsets and mornings…

She only had Coil on her side for three or four days, right?

Wow.

It was insane to think it had only been a little less than two weeks since she came back here.

"Less than a week, I think."

Dinah nodded, averting her eyes.

"How long are people dead for before funerals happen?" Dinah asked, her voice wavering a little, and Taylor sighed, getting up and digging into her pocket for the blindfold.

"They usually wait for a week. They did so for my parents. You should be able to catch your parent's funeral." She softly said, and laid a gentle hand on the girl's shoulder as her breaths deepened even more.

To her credit, she did not sob nor cry.

"I'm sorry. Let's go, Dinah. Things are happening around here. Best we get you to your uncle as soon as possible."

Dinah nodded jerkily, crumpling the paper and throwing it in the little trashcan in the corner, then turning to her and getting up from the chair.

Taylor stepped back and let go, giving the girl room.

She presented the blindfold in an open palm, and Dinah took it, wordlessly putting it over her eyes.

"Will you take me there yourself, Sam?" Dinah asked as Taylor put a light hand on her shoulder and began to guide her, her other hand fishing for her phone.

"No. I'll put one of our workers to drop you off near a police station. From there, just go inside, and try to explain that you were kidnapped by bad men before waking up in a car and being told to go outside and talk to the cops. It wouldn't really harm us if you mentioned us, but I'd really rather you didn't." She mumbled, pushing the door open then flicking her phone on as she walked the girl to one of the vehicle depots.

She'd miss this base. It was so fucking good.

Fucking Cauldron bastards.

"I'll try not to. T-thanks." Dinah mumbled, and Taylor's eyes tightened in pain.

She hated seeing children hurting, but there was nothing she could really do here.

The next five minutes of walking were done in silence, until they reached one of the car garages attached to one of the entrances.

The driver wordlessly helped Dinah into a nondescript car, and they drove off.

It was oddly anticlimactic considering the new information she'd gained.

She could feel stress like a physical sensation, digging into her shoulders and pulling relentlessly, trying to drag her under.

After a short few minutes spent in the dark in utter silence, relishing the quiet darkness as her headache momentarily cooled, she turned, and walked back to the door she walked in from.

Just for her peace of mind, she switched to the Rune of Domination, directing her attention to Ultimate Hunter.

She stopped cold, hand on the door's handle turning white from her vice-like grip.

Lisa was gone. Alive, but not in this world.

She turned to her father.

Gone as well.

Her hand spasmed in rage, her mind whirling with both pain and fury.

She dug into her pocket, grabbing her phone, then picked Evelynn, flickering back to her real appearance, leaving her face a blank slate of skin.

As gently as she could manage without crushing the phone, she sent three simple codewords to the base's operating system, and a simple timer.

The alarms blared instantly, every number and comms device in the network buzzing with a mechanical voice, repeating the codewords into agent's ears, buzzing on their handhelds.

Within two hours, the base would be empty.

Within two and a half, it would be rubble.

She could deal with making a new one after she was done dealing with Cauldron in one way or another.

She swung the door open and walked through, forming eyes.

The moment her shoulders crossed the door, she paused, going very, very still, eyes scanning the endless plain of sun-lit grass stretching out under her in all its morning glory, a golden sun peeking over the distant mountains like a goblet holding a flame.

Grass tickled the fake sneakers she'd formed at her feet.

A single soul stood behind her, at rest.

The door suddenly went slack in her grip, and she held it in place with her hand, teeth grinding as her face remained blank.

With a casual flick, she tossed it away to crash into the far grasses, invisible feelers vibrating in the air with the urge to rend and tear.

Her chest burned.

Her facial features returned, the same as ever, forming rapidly on her face.

"And here I was, coming to meet you. " She said, voice playful and downright pleasant as she turned around, a slight, condescending smile on her face.

Self-control was fraying, but she held herself in place as her eyes met a black reflective mask like glass atop a black and white suit, sitting calmly in a chair, a wooden round table in front of them, a single chair tilted to the side on Taylor's end, a tea set steaming in the cool morning air.

Something horribly out of a place in a valley that looked like it had never been touched by a single mortal hand.

The woman in the chair nodded slowly, gracefully, her brown, curly hair bobbing with the motion.

"I'm glad we got to be the hosts of this meeting then, before some rash action was taken. We do apologise for all the inconveniences and the scares we've given you. I believe Coil told you about us. Would you please take a seat, Taylor? We wish to negotiate." The woman asked.

Her mind raced.

Coil didn't know everything. He barely knew anything beyond the surface details. He didn't know of her plan with Noelle, he didn't know what the deal with her power was.

But he still knew a lot more than she was comfortable with an enemy knowing.

Had she already fucked this up? How should she act? What misdirections? Or maybe she went for brutal honesty?

Acting got very tiring, and she was in far too much pain and stress to take to the task with vigor.

She switched to the Rune of Inspiration, Cosmic Insight activating as she slowly walked to the chair.

Human puppet under molecular stasis. Loved by millions. A woman who wishes to save the world, has the intelligence to, yet is too inhuman and prideful to see the most likely solution. Part of the upper echelon of a secret organisation that heavily influences the majority of the western world of Earth Bet, and many smaller portions of multiple other planets in other worlds. The world will never see the real her.

Her steps didn't stutter, switching rapidly back to the Rune of Sorcery for Perfect Focus, ignoring the pain in her temples to think fast and hard, each step a frantic swirl of thoughts.

Loved by millions?

Who the fuck was this person?

Old celebrity? A hero? A politician maybe…? African warlord?

Something about this woman was tickling the back of her mind, but she couldn't figure it out. It wasn't like she'd ever heard that faint accent before, and the voice was too deep to be forgotten so easily. Maybe she was changing it on purpose?

After returning from Runeterra, she was quite used to sudden, overwhelming deja Vu, but this wasn't quite the same.

It was bothering her.

The entire batch of information she got on top of that, raised so many questions she wasn't even sure if the answers she got were worth it.

She turned the chair, and sat down, pushing aside the teacup on her side to lounge back, hands resting on the table as they regarded each other.

The woman had no emotions, yet she could still taste them, or something like an aftertaste. It was like holding a scentless flower, yet being able to taste the rose and morning dew in the air.

It was bizarre.

She'd never seen molecular stasis like this. Her inner magic nerd wanted to take the woman apart and see if she could recreate it.

A bigger part of her wanted to crush the woman to pulp just to make her thoughts on this situation abundantly clear.

She slowly blinked at the black slate across from her, unamused, unafraid, and barely keeping herself from being even the tiniest bit aggressive.

"Is kidnapping some of our most useful assets and my father a part of your regular negotiation tactics?" She asked coldly, and the woman fingered the teacup's rim, tilting her head.

She really did move like a puppet. Or a statue.

"How did you know that?" The woman slowly asked.

She tilted her own head, eyes lowering in a bored look, pondering how best she could kill this… woman? Creature?

Molecular stasis was tricky.

But it all depended on what kind of energy was keeping the cells in that kind of state.

Whatever that energy was, she doubted it was magical.

And magic always broke physics.

The question was whether she had enough power to force through whatever physics-twisting bullshit was keeping this thing together.

So she could kill this woman. It would have a steep price, but she could.

If physical destruction didn't work, she had other ways.

"Why would I ever answer that?" She scoffed with derision. "Let me guess. Your strategy was to play nice, and if I denied you, you'd use your captives as leverage to force us to agree." She calmly accused, ignoring the woman's question.

The woman nodded.

"I'm afraid that's the kind of measures we're forced to take, considering our goals."

She resisted the urge to quirk a brow.

The woman wasn't lying, at least from what little aftertaste of emotion she could feel in the air. She really did believe they had to do this.

"Rest assured, they are all unharmed. We had to use a Master power on Coil, but whatever you used on him seemed to take back control very quickly. The other two are untouched, mentally and physically."

She tilted her head back, drooping her eyelids.

"Am I supposed to be grateful? You said you're here to negotiate. That's not happening until you bring our assets back and leave my father to go live his boring normal life. A negotiation is a discussion between two equal parties on equal ground. What you're attempting is a juvenile, childish and frankly embarrassing blackmail tactic while trying to dress it up nicely. I'm young, not stupid."

The woman made a pensive hum.

"I'm afraid we cannot do that. Too much is at stake to entertain an equal ground. This is not blackmail yet, we simply arrived prepared and you did not, because we set the pace. But, this conversation is quickly moving to a hostile tone, which we do not want. Would you allow me to explain some things to you? Who we are, what we do, our goals, and why we need your cooperation?"

She hadn't expected that much. She expected demands.

She nodded.

The woman nodded, and very carefully took a sip of her tea, pushing the glass mask with the rim of her cup.

Taylor did the same.

For some reason, she doubted either of them tasted it.

"We are Cauldron. Our organisation was formed with a simple goal in mind. To save the world."

She would have scoffed, was her goal not the exact same thing.

"You're doing a very, very bad job of it." She mused, and the woman made a short hum of acknowledgment, not deflecting or commenting, continuing.

"To explain further, and for anything to make sense, I have to share some information first. The kind of information that must never, ever, get released to the public, or even mentioned in passing. The kind of thing you treat with superstitious caution."

She watched on, silent and blank-faced as the woman's mask.

"The origin of powers. What brought them into our life. For what purpose. And what will happen inevitably, if we do not stop it. To rip off the band-aid, so to speak, powers come from alien entities we simply refer to as Entities with a capital E. They're bizarre, foreign lifeforms, and we have spent the entirety of our existence researching them with the strongest and most versatile powers in the multiverse to understand them, their motives, their way of operation, everything down to their very names, if our primitive language could vaguely mimic theirs."

All of a sudden, she felt like she was taken here for a very, very, very different reason than she expected.

She leaned forward, allowing her face to show interest and scepticism in equal measures.

It sounded insane.

That's exactly why it sounded true.

"These entities are some kind of alien lifeform, to put it bluntly. They seem to travel in pairs. Their life cycle consists of them arriving at a planet, or a cluster of the multiverse, locking it in place, then descending down on it to spread parts of themselves down to its inhabitants. The general population calls these 'powers'. We call them 'Agents', and that is because these powers are not inert packages of interdimensional and physics-shattering impossibilities, but actively learning alien consciousnesses that seem to operate like a gestalt consciousness of some kind with the main two controllers."

Her anger was not forgotten, but she was never ready to just… hear all of this out of the blue, with complete and utter conviction. She could only listen with a bizarre sense of disbelieving dread, knowing that this woman really believed what she was talking about.

And that this was too detailed to be some hare-brained theory. It made too much sense.

"These entities seem infinitely more advanced than us in every way but one. Creativity. The power of imagination. They have none of it, it seems, so they rely on the most creative species of all to do the work for them. Tinkering away new combinations and technologies, coming up with new uses for their powers, mixing and combining them in interesting ways the entities would never be able to, for one reason or another. They give us powers so that we do their homework for them. Once that ends, and they have harvested sufficient data and we've run out of creative ways to use what they gave us, they're done with the cluster of the multiverse they've locked away."

The woman took a sugar cube off one of the little plates, and held it up, her gloves not crumbling the tightly packed grains.

"Then, they detonate it."

Her fingers crushed the cube, and flicked the sugar over the side of the table, scattering to the grass.

"They combine their powers to detonate the sun, or just outright detonate the planet's core, then they use the resulting explosion to propel themselves to another cluster of the multiverse without using any of their own energy. In a way, ingenious."

Her throat felt tight as the magnitude of this began to bear down on her.

Anything, anything that could detonate a fucking sun or a planet, was effectively unbeatable. No parahuman could stand against such a thing. The Void couldn't possibly stand against such a thing. The scale of power was too ridiculous.

"Why do they do all this?"

The woman shifted, steepling her hands over her stomach as she leaned back.

"Frankly, we do not know. Our best guess is that this is simply their life cycle. Like a parasitic alien pair of a world-ending scale. Another less credible theory we've formed is that they are seeking immortality. These things probably live for endless billions of years. We're less than the blink of an eye for these Entities. The heat death of the universe, the march of time, whatever you might call it. The truth is that nothing truly lasts forever because entropy will always crawl forward, and for us, that is so distant a concern we don't even register it as a problem. For them, it could be a terrifying thing that looms over them. The fact that energy is not endless. Aside from those two hypotheses, we have no clue what they're after."

She paused.

An errant thought wormed its way into her mind, and she paused, unable to help the widening of her eyes, the sharp little inhale of shock.

The whole 'entropy' thing was just a theory, from what the woman was saying, but...

The phantom sensation of a heartbeat tugged at her chest, where the answer to entropy now lied, and she suddenly felt dizzy at the realization.

The runes were endless energy. Something that fundamentally broke this world's rules. Mana could be an endless array of energies, and inexhaustible. The World Runes had no limit, even as mangled and cobbled together as they were into the strange ball of crystal in her chest.

If they could just figure out what the damn alien wanted... she could give it to them. Then let it shoo off into the deep reaches of space.

Maybe she could even find a way to live through doing such a thing. Probably not, but just maybe.

She felt a hysterical laugh bubble up in her throat, and she tensed to suppress it.

As if there wasn't enough weight on her shoulders.

Now she just realized that if this woman was right… she could save the entire multiverse by simply sacrificing herself and the last remnant of Runeterra that would ever exist. Billions, trillions of lives, universes and planets.

All on her.

It wasn't a small weight to bear, no matter how uncertain it was that entropy was the problem, rather than something even simpler, like this being their life cycle.

But even if she sacrificed herself, what good would it do? Earth Bet and countless other worlds would no doubt slowly crumble under the endless assault of Endbringers and powers and gods knew whatever other sadistic bullshit some coked up alien made up to harvest creativity, a death by a thousand cuts.

Additionally, there was no guarantee she could ever properly communicate with a completely alien lifeform that resided in fuck knows where, much less ensure it wouldn't detonate planets anyways just to clean up its tracks before it floated off into the ends of space to enjoy its new toy and figure out how it worked, that little answer to entropy.

In fact, how would it learn any of the runes required to utilize that energy? How would it even sense mana, and what would it do with that endless energy? Would it enslave her to teach it for centuries before it killed her?

Would her teaching it magic just make it descend into another cluster of worlds and gift it magic to watch them figure things out for it over the course of a couple thousand years because it got bored of immortality or something?

Would sacrificing herself even fucking do anything in the short term, much less the long term?

And that was all working on the assumption and possibility that they might be running from entropy. They might not be, this might just be how they fed, or something so incomprehensible human minds could never get it. Maybe they just used the connections to the 'Agents' to feel alive and experience real imagination, like some kind of mental drug or an addiction.

"Based on the information I've given you, you would be led to believe that this is impossible to confirm, and if it were true, we'd stand no chance. Fair enough. But, we disagree. Something went wrong when the Entities descended. One of them crashed into another Earth, and was killed." Someone spoke, and it took her a moment to remember there was a Cauldron agent right fucking across from her.

She forcibly focused, pushing that aside to agonise over later.

One of the aliens dropped dead…

Could she kill the one that was left?

Something clicked.

"Your vials." She said, and the woman paused, the first genuine sign of a hiccup in her motions so far. "That's how you make them. That's how you give people powers. You're using the alien somehow…" She trailed off, intrigued.

"Surprisingly intelligent." The woman remarked. "Let's not get off topic, however. The second Entity died. That leaves another one, waiting to torch the human species. That's what we are preparing for. A final confrontation of world-ending proportions. That is why we try to create Parahumans. Soldiers for a war they don't even know will happen. That is where your precog blocker comes in, as a massive, massive problem… or a potential asset that could turn the tides of all this, assuming their power might work on even a tiny fraction of this Entity's own powers. Normally, powers like that of whoever is emitting this effect are programmed and restricted by the Entities to not be used against them, but the death of the first entity has allowed a tiny, almost impossible margin of error chance that it might. So, we need you to give this person to us. We're ready to reimburse you with whatever is within our means."

She tilted her head, then frowned.

She could surmise from that simple request that their organization likely relied a great amount on precog work…

"What would you do with them?" She asked, inwardly trying to puzzle out where they were going with this and how she wanted to play this without outright admitting anything until she'd made up her mind.

"Ideally? Nothing. We'd put them in a secluded corner world where they have absolutely no chance of affecting or reaching anything until the final fight began, then we'd try to see if we could utilise them against the Entity. Simply having them out of the way would be more than enough for us. Our organization is heavily dependent on the work of our precogs. Their mere existence is threatening the entire human species, even if it doesn't seem that way to you and even if that seems like an exaggeration. Cauldron cannot afford mistakes. They tend to snowball quickly."

She frowned, feeling cautiously open to being convinced if only because of the sheer devastation at play.

She was also fully aware that she could be getting duped, however. Or lied to.

"What's your timeframe?"

"Five years at the absolute max. Anything beyond that rapidly reduces our chances of winning. Societies and cape numbers decline too much, too fast, and as powerful as we are, not even we can do anything about the Endbringers."

She ducked her head, frowning in both thought and pain.

Five years. A shorter timeframe than she'd ever be comfortable with at the pace she liked to move, but she'd just have to speed up further wouldn't she?

If the only option was to step on the gas, she'd floor it.

"What can this thing do?"

"It has access to every power it gives out. Unrestricted, untethered versions."

That…

That was not a fight that could ever be won. Even if it was just one, that was impossible.

That sounded like something the Void would get crushed by. They had no fucking chance of overpowering that thing.

And what if it could control the Endbringers too? It was obviously what made the fucking bastards. How could they possibly win against all three Endbringers and the thing that made them?

"What is your plan for dealing with this entity? Because for an organization that's supposedly trying to save the world, I honestly don't see you guys achieving even the bare minimum, much less defeating this alien simply because you throw our precog blocker onto a random planet. I'm dubious at best of this proposal." She said, allowing some of her fury to bleed into her tone.

She sounded mildly annoyed at most, still.

The woman seemed to fractionally relax, glancing aside at the softly swaying grass.

"We have many plans. But as for a specific battle plan, it's deceivingly simple. The main plan, is to produce unique power interactions that multiplicatively add to each other. With proper cooperation and the right combination, you can achieve more with ten powers than a thousand. The secondary plan is to mass produce as many capes as possible with our vials and hope to stumble upon a strong enough formula to make an ace-in-the hole like a second Ash Beast or Siberian or something of the like. That aside, more Parahumans cannot possibly hurt our chances. But if we were to somehow stumble onto something even vaguely comparable to The Triumvirate, it might be enough. The rest of the parahumans will simply be nothing but cannon fodder, but even if they were to distract the entity for a mere fraction of a second, their deaths would be worth it. "

She waited.

An awkward moment passed, the woman turning back to her.

"...And then…?" She prompted, rolling her wrist, starting to feel incredulous.

The woman tilted her head.

"Then nothing. That's it. That's the only thing we can do and hope for. To make a strong enough power combination to have a chance, or alternatively, make enough powerful capes to hopefully put a decent resistance to the Entity, or outright defeat it."

She felt that anger return with a vengeance.

That was it? That was it? No mention of how the hell they'd group and organise into an army, any tactics, a battleplan, cross-power experimentation, purposeful experiments to create things like Noelle as absolute final solutions, no attempts to break through whatever block this alien had on their dimension and flee, no convoluted plot to try and communicate with the fucking thing or try to emotionally manipulate it or reason with it or- or using someone like Shatterbird to see if they could just make the fucker explode into a pile of crystal dust, no discussions of how the hell they would manage morale and dissent in a scenario of high stress like a world-ending fucking battlefield, nothing at all except the most... simple plan?

She couldn't call it much else. For all this plotting and intrigue, the base plan was insultingly simple. It was... ridiculous. They couldn't possibly defeat this thing, even with a hundred Eidolons. Could a hundred Eidolons detonate the damn planet? No!

She wasn't sure if she was offended at the sheer simplicity of it all or furious at herself for taking this cadre of fucking clowns seriously.

"You-" She sputtered for a moment, then ground her teeth with an audible scraping sound, glaring at the woman as she slowly rose from her seat. "You are supposedly facing some kind of alien lifeform that has the power to destroy our fucking species across every iteration of Earth in this cluster of the multiverse…" She began, her voice a barely restrained hiss, hands clenching into fists.

"And your grand plan of winning such a confrontation is to fucking fistfight it with whatever fucking dregs you can cobble together by gambling on a one in a million chance you can make another inferior version of the Triumvirate or the Siberian, and sheer, brainless numbers? What's your battle plan, how will you handle morale, what other things have you tried? Have you tried to talk to the damn thing?" She demanded, feeling her chest quiver in indignation and stress and frustration and barely withheld violence.

"Morale will hardly be an issue, I believe, when the world is facing total annihilation." The woman started, her tone starting to get vaguely condescending.

She resisted the urge to burst out into bitter, roaring laughter.

That's what Demacia thought as well when they released their captive mages from the dungeons in a desperate bid to hold back The Void.

The world is ending, how could they do anything but fight with us?

Once the mages realized they would die regardless, only placed on the frontline with the soldiers to buy time for the helpless folk of Demacia to pack up and run, they turned on the people that had persecuted and imprisoned them, and ensured that Demacia would die with them, a final act of spite.

Jarvan's stupid naivete had buried the capital in ash, and she was seeing the same here again, except instead of naivete, it was just a puppet's inability to think about how human beings thought.

Even if she were to strip away the context of wrongful imprisonment from this comparison, not much would change. She'd seen this song and dance before. People would not fight to the death just because the world was ending.

They would not throw themselves into a meatgrinder just to buy a single second against an unstoppable force. They'd scatter in a million directions, some seeking to run from terror, others wishing to die without regrets and enjoy something one last time, others would just sit on a log and watch the end approach until it lopped their head off.

Without hope, humans and the cohesion between them broke like a dry twig.

These Cauldron people couldn't be trusted with Earth Bet alone, nevermind the multiverse, if she could even consider the woman's story to be true.

"Secondly, any attempts to communicate with the Entity so far have proven from anywhere between ineffective to genuinely detrimental to our plans. Thirdly, with the numbers involved, communication barriers, and the general chaos that will ensue, drafting any kind of battle plan is bound to fail."

She'd personally led an army of over eleven million civillians, warriors, monks, mercenaries, mages and savages with nothing but fucking crow formations in the sky and a magical voice amplifier, in a battlefield ravaged by a dozen different magics and creatures and scattered regiments.

She'd personally led the most chaotic yet effective army in the world, comprised of Noxians and Ionians and Demacians and Shurimans and jungle beasts and Yordles and spirits while staring down the maw of entropy itself.

Numbers and uniqueness and language barriers as thin and frail as they were in this reality were excuses for a fucking simpleton who couldn't be arsed to commit basic effort to what they claimed to be the end of the fucking world. All one needed was authority, a vision, and the old adage of not putting one's eggs in the same basket.

"You're delusional. Absolute clowns." She grit out. "All this meeting has done is show me that whatever is coming, placing you at its helm would ensure that we will all die scattered and panicked. Return our assets and my father, and we'll pretend I never heard anything and let you do as you usually do, nice and far from us."

The woman took another sip.

"I'm afraid we cannot do that until we know for certain who is emitting this anti-precog effect."

She was fucking stuck.

She could just fight this woman, probably manage to kill her, and be done with it, but that would leave the simple problem of the two most important people in her life being in the hands of immoral mad scientists who were also incompetent beyond measure.

She also just didn't have enough juice in the tank to fight the entirety of Cauldron. She didn't know enough about their capabilities. The best she could hope for was a hostile, temporary ceasefire until she could destroy them.

Possibilities ran through her ravaged mind, the pulses of her headache turning into the insistent scrape of a migraine.

She had a way of getting to her dad, Lisa, and Coil, but her only way of taking them back with her was likely to kill her in this state, and she couldn't afford that. It just wasn't worth it, cold as it sounded.

She needed them to voluntarily give back her people, without showing herself to be weak.

If she gave an inch, they'd look for a mile.

The question became an unfortunate gamble…

How much did they value this messenger they sent?

"That would be me." She coldly said.

The woman's emotions had the faintest taste of puzzlement, even as she waited for a moment before nodding.

It just occurred to her that there was no way this wasn't being watched in one manner or another by someone else. She had a platform, small as it was, right here.

"Just over this tiny hill we're on, is a bunker full of supplies that should more than last you a decade. Enjoy your life as this planet's sole human. Your assets and family will be safely delivered back home, with a touch of memory erasure to forget we ever took them."

She didn't react, Perfect Focus straining to keep up with her rapidfire thoughts.

Getting what she wanted without capitulating any further…

If she just said nothing, she'd get her people back. Then she could just Teleport back home and scatter like a rat. They obviously hadn't even considered the chance her Teleport could work across dimensions, because they still thought she had conventional powers like their own.

Where would that leave her, however? They would obviously work to kill her from the shadows, and that was the one thing she absolutely did not need to have as a problem while fighting a hundred other enemies in the open.

And she doubted they'd ever collaborate with her to fix their crap. They wouldn't take her seriously enough.

The only option left was violence to establish some measure of equal ground.

A gamble that might cost her her only loved ones' lives, in exchange for dodging the possibility of a potentially omnipresent, half-omniscient foe finding her at her weakest and killing her.

As much as it might hurt, she was always prepared to sacrifice whatever it took for this noble, naive goal she'd set for herself. And with the stakes having grown so unfathomably, knowing that if she died, the world would be stuck with these monkeys as their only form of leadership or protection?

What choice was there, really?

"What makes you think I can't get back home, exactly?" She calmly asked, anger still boiling and roiling in her chest like a blast furnace.

She knew the outcome of that simple question.

She switched to the Rune of Sorcery, locking in the Arcane Comet main effect.

Much as she hated to show this much of what she could do, she had to make a show of strength here, or Cauldron would never hold back from taking every chance they could to interfere and kill her.

With what was at stake, they couldn't afford not to.

The pale indigo glow of the little rock drew the woman's gaze as it seemingly formed from nothing and began to slowly orbit Taylor's waist.

"I see you've made up your mind on the matter of cooperating with us." The woman said, rising from her chair for the first time, working on her cufflinks.

They sized each other up for a moment.

"You're important, aren't you? You're not just some lackey agent." She surmised. Cosmic Insight had told her as much.

Loved by millions. A public figure of some kind. In the upper echelons of Cauldron.

The woman put her arms behind her back, standing tall and still.

"I suppose you could say that."

She nodded.

"How about a trade then. Cauldron gives me my people back and doesn't involve themselves in our business. And In exchange, I'll give you back to them, and I'll pay the same courtesy back."

"You won't have to do anything to involve yourself in our business. That's a rather bad deal isn't it?"

She conceded with a dip of her head.

"It's the only deal incompetents like you are going to get. I need nothing from you that you can offer. And I won't back down just so you can mess everything up when it's most important. Last chance. Give me my people, and steer clear."

The woman said nothing.

Her mind reached for the highest damaging thing she had in her arsenal that wouldn't strain her, the sole Summoner spell she could never use in an urban area without drawing every eye for miles.

'Smite' tingled at her fingertips as she held it in place, the clear sky above them suddenly muddying with golden fabric-like clouds swirling in a tunneling vortex to the unseen stars, lined by silent golden lightning.

In an instant, from zero to a thousand, the woman charged through the table, practically detonating it as she bullrushed her faster than Taylor thought possible.

She only had enough time to twitch before a fist buried itself into her gut, Evelynn's toughness the only thing preventing her from splitting in half from the sheer force as she flew back in a straight, spinning line.

Notes:

i have no idea what im doing

but i also know EXACTLY where im fucking going

yes im confused but im not

its very strange

Edit: For people wondering how she didn't recognize Alexandria, Alex does a lot of things to place distance between identities. For starters, as Alex, she's always flying at least a little bit with a long cape which makes her look a lot taller than she really is. She also changes her voice, and makes her body language more rigid. Combined with the mask, all Taylor had to work with was that this person was some kind of public figure and had the same haircut as Alexandria, which is a haircut that's so generic I'm not sure it can be called one.

If someone is wondering how she didn't recognize her as Rebecca Costa Brown, that's because all the documentation of the main director is of the body double, to prevent any Thinkers from figuring out something they're not supposed to, and Taylor hasn't exactly looked into the main director, as she has no goons anywhere close to the woman to bother looking into.

That's what I was thinking of in my head as to why she doesn't recognize Alexandria. It made sense, but some people seem to think it's a bit unrealistic or dumb. Honestly, I don't see it, but sorry if you think of it that way, I wasn't expecting people to focus on that so much. xd

hope you enjoyed