So the debrief of my involvement in the Tiger's jewelry heist was fairly straightforward. I had overstepped a bit, basically going out by myself out of costume. But that was mostly negated by my success and the person on the console giving me permission. From what I heard Sophia had been read the riot act for not following protocol. She was apparently spending the next several weeks getting re-trained with an agent supervising her console shifts ("That sounds like more of a punishment for whoever has to supervise her").
My punishment was a relative slap on the wrist of one or two extra console shifts until they finished processing the Tiger's for trial. I even found out they had somehow gotten on the bad side of someone in the Guild cause they had bounties. Apparently they earned them from doing several jobs in Canada, which technically made them international parahuman criminals. They were relatively small, like $5000 each, basically the minimum bounty possible. So if the other parahuman didn't step forward to claim credit within a month, I'd be getting a cool undivided $30,000 added to my wards trust fund.
Honestly though, I would have gladly given up the money (which I wouldn't be able to access until I had graduated college) just to know who exactly our mystery parahuman was. I could tell that even though they tried to act as if it was business as usual that the higher ups were a bit spooked too. I was grilled for hours on the whole incident just to see if there were any clear tells that Julia was actually the master. When we got briefed about it during our next weekly meeting an analyst came in to explain that not only was animal control rare, controlling such a variety of species without visible tinkertech was practically unheard of.
They decided on the name of Zookeeper for our mystery cape; a relatively neutral name since we didn't know for sure if their intervention was heroic or for their own reasons. It was only a placeholder though until they made contact with us at least. There was a provisional rating of Master 8 given the number and variety of the animal minions that were used against the Tigers. We were warned not to let any strange animals near us during patrols until we could verify Zookeeper wasn't a threat.
What worried me though was that it was proving to be very difficult for the PRT to entirely disprove that Julia was Zookeeper. We had no idea of how Zookeeper's powers worked, so any analysis based on that wasn't reliable. She also has never had an MRI so we couldn't even know if she had a Corona Pollentia. It was a frustrating case of having to wait until they had made another appearance to compare alibi's between Julia and Zookeeper.
At the very least Taylor made a return to Winslow, and while it wasn't great she managed fine enough now that her attackers were on the lam. She even followed through on meeting up with Julia. She actually said that they had hit it off a bit and were meeting up in their spare time ("Okay, who are you and what have you done with my misanthrope of a sister."). Taylor even claimed Julia didn't seem like she was hiding anything, though I'm not sure if that was fully true. After all, after strangers and thinkers a master can be one of the most subtle types of parahumans out there.
I actually felt a little uncomfortable about that, the idea that Taylor could be spending her free time with a very powerful parahuman. But she finally seemed to be connecting to someone, so I couldn't exactly just try and tell Taylor she couldn't hang out with Julia on just a circumstantial hunch that she was secretly a parahuman. So in the following days they hung out with one another after school. I decided to give her some space so I didn't try to meet up with her in my civilian identity.
In the three weeks after Zookeepers debut, there were no confirmed sightings. It certainly wasn't for lack of trying on the PRT's part. This actually made things more tense because such a potentially powerful cape being out of sight for so long made the PRT twitchy. At least when the gang's parahumans laid low it was easy to tell when they reemerged.
We had a ton of false alarms because turns out once you start looking for animals acting weird, you get a bunch of incorrect reports. That was how we found out that the BBPD has about two to four dozen animal related incidents reported a week ("Remember half the population has a below average intelligence by definition, and now imagine them as pet owners"). Even after we had to circulate a memo to only look for animal attacks specifically we kept getting false positives.
So when February began things were already tense. Even more so once we had to start prepping for the next Endbringer attack that was almost due. The last attack had been from Behemoth, so it could either be the Simurgh or Leviathan attacking next. I had never been to a battle before since I was a ward, and I'm pretty sure dad would never sign the paperwork allowing me to go. I could help with search and rescue since my ghost could pass through the rubble easily, but apparently that was not a good enough reason when I brought it up with him once.
My birthday on the 3rd was a fairly small occasion, since I wasn't that big into getting presents (I prefer giving them). The main highlight was our customary trip to the closest movie theater. We often joked about how close I had been to being born on Groundhog Day. I remember once pretending like it was still Feb 2nd during one of my birthdays, saying happy Groundhog Day to everyone I met (The looks I got were priceless). But this one special because Missy agreed to a little slumber party together when the weekend rolled around. It had been a while since we had some quality time together.
We had that Friday off so I went straight home to get ready. When I opened the front door I heard Taylor talking to someone, and I had a good idea of who it was. I peeked into the living room to see Taylor with a brown haired girl wearing a black t-shirt and jeans sitting on the couch. They hadn't noticed me and they were busy listening to something on an MP3 player, each sharing an earbud in one ear.
I thought about just leaving them be, but the longer I avoided Julia the more likely she was to notice I was never around her. So paradoxically to more effectively avoid her I had to meet with her occasionally so it didn't become obvious. It was because of problems like this that I didn't keep up more friends at school. I decided to bite the bullet and introduce myself.
"Hey Taylor, I didn't realize you were bringing a friend home" I greeted. I was loud enough to get their attention over the earbuds. Both of them immediately looked in my direction, almost surprised I was there. Seeing the freckled face of the other girl I could confirm it was Julia.
"Oh, Sam. I didn't hear you come in. I thought you would be busy with…practice." Apparently Taylor still needs to work on her lying because I'm not sure she could make my cover story sound more suspicious.
"Today is a free day for me. I'm having a slumber party with Missy tonight. But how about you introduce me to your guest?" I suggested. But Julia decided to speak instead.
"Don't mind if I introduce myself. My name's Julia Fairchild. I happened to meet Taylor at school and it turned out we had a lot in common. You must be Taylor's sister." She extended her hand to shake and I obliged.
"And you must be Taylor's new friend. She's been kinda light on details about you. You don't have any deep dark secrets we have to worry about right?" I asked. I was mostly trying to be provocative but apparently Julia knew how to take a joke and chuckled a bit. Taylor on the other hand didn't.
"Sam, you can't just ask guests questions like that! I'm sorry Julia. Sam was dropped on her head as a child, a couple times I think." She said to Julia while giving me such a side-eye.
"Don't worry Taylor. I was a younger sister too. We love messing with our older siblings as a rule." I caught her use of the past tense, and decided that was a hint I would need to follow up on later.
"Yeah well Sam kind of an expert in driving me up the wall"
"It's true. Though in my defense you make it too easy. One time all it took was moving some of your bookmarks around to get you going."
"That was more to do with the fact you went into my room for the umpteenth time without asking. But anyways was there anything you wanted from us? We kind of had plans for tonight too."
"Oooo Did you plan to show her your private corner in the Brockton Bay Library?" I teased. Apparently Julia decided to correct me.
"Actually we were going to get dinner at this nice Mexican restaurant a friend of my family owns. They're doing a promotion for some new menu items."
"Oh, do you mean Zapata's? They have the best salsa dip. I wish I knew the recipe." I was being genuine, they were probably one of the few restaurants in the bay that deserved to be considered authentic Mexican food.
"Yes, and that's Sam's way of saying that it'll probably melt your tongue off. She has the worst sense of taste." Taylor responded.
"You're just jealous that you have such a low tolerance for spiciness that you start sweating when you try eating bell peppers."
Julia apparently decided to change the subject at this point. "Hey Sam, Taylor mentioned you were a fan of cape stuff. Do you have a favorite hero?"
"Oh well if I had to pick for the wards I'd have to choose Vista, she definitely doesn't need to break a sweat to kick someone's ass. For a professional hero I'd go with Eidolon, you got to love someone who can keep things fresh with new powers. How about you?" I asked. I was curious what exactly her opinion on parahumans was.
"Oh well I actually met a few last month. I had gotten taken hostage by these weird villains wearing baseball gear. I thought I was doomed until I realized Manes had been controlling the driver almost the entire time. Honestly she came off as kind of crazy, she was threatening to bite off the driver's tongue at one point if they didn't let me go." She explained. It figures that of all the things to remember she would focus on that. I only did that after exhausting all the other, non-violent options! But you threaten to bite off one person's tongue and suddenly you're crazy. She then continued.
"When they forced her out of the driver's body I thought I was doomed again until at the last minute a ton of bugs, birds, and mice showed up and completely buried all the villains. I never got the name of the animal capes name but they seemed pretty heroic too. I also got to meet Miss Militia afterwards and she seemed pretty badass too." she recalled. It sounded like a standard civilian recounting of being in mortal peril, so not especially useful. Maybe I needed to reveal something that would get a reaction out of her?
"Oh wow I didn't realize you were the one who had the run in with Zookeeper."
"Zookeeper?" They both said. Apparently they hadn't heard the name before.
"Yeah I try to keep up with cape stuff in Brockton Bay and apparently the PRT has been keeping an eye out for them. They've been keeping a low profile, so the PRT has been telling police to keep a lookout for "Zookeepers animals". I heard about it from a police officer who was posting on PHO" That last part was a lie but it was plausible enough that I doubted Julia would question it. The news only covered Zookeeper as an "unnamed parahuman" when it ran the story on the Tiger's capture. Taylor would obviously know how I actually learned that but I could trust her not to blab.
"They're looking for Zookeeper? Did they commit any crimes?" Taylor asked. She seemed a little nervous. Maybe she wasn't as sold as I thought about Julia not being a parahuman.
"Not really, they just want to make contact or something like that. They do that for any cape that's new. Zookeeper's just weird for staying quiet for so long." Then a thought occurred to me, if Julia was Zookeeper I could feed her some info she would be very tempted to act on. "It's a shame though, I heard there was a bounty on those baseball villains. Guess Zookeeper isn't going to get a cut if they don't show up to collect it soon. It's almost been a month so I guess Manes is going to get the other $15,000 since Zookeeper didn't claim it."
"Wow, $15,000. I can't imagine getting that kind of money. My family isn't poor but we don't have much to spare either. The only reason my family was at the jewelry store when the robbery happened was that we were returning a ring." Julia said. I tactfully decided not to ask why they were returning the ring, since the most likely reasons would be divorce or a death.
I was hoping that the money would stick out to her. New capes are rarely more cash strapped than when they start out. The bounty system was kept low profile so that new capes or random citizens with shotguns didn't get themselves killed trying to take on S-class threats. So it wasn't unlikely that Zookeeper was unaware that claiming a bounty was an option, especially for low-lifes like the Tigers. And all it would take was coming to the PRT ENE HQ to claim it.
It was a win-win plan all around. If Zookeeper suddenly surfaced to claim the bounty, I could be fairly certain it was Julia and she'd get some cash. Even if they didn't claim the bounty then nothing was lost. Plus if the PRT finally made contact they might finally chill out and be able to focus on the upcoming endbringer attack. Of course that didn't resolve all the problems but it was a step in the right direction. I decided to finish the conversation there.
"Well you two behave yourselves, me and Missy will be commandeering the TV for the afternoon to watch some classics."
"Funny I was about to say the same thing to you," Taylor said as I exited the room.
I left them alone in the living room and went to finish tidying my bedroom. While Taylor might say different, I wasn't a total slob. I just wasn't that into organizing my things. So my clothes drawers each had a bit of everything in them and my bookshelves had books, magazines, and my personal DVD cases mixed together. Otherwise I was diligent in cleaning out trash and dust, with all my dirty clothes in a hamper.
After a little bit I heard Julia and Taylor leave. I kept myself occupied picking out some movies and some fashion magazines me and Missy could browse before she arrived. I had finally settled on "RoboCop" as the night's main movie when I heard the doorbell. I answered the door and found Missy holding her backpack and sleeping bag and looking ready to go.
"Hey Sam, can I put my bag in the same place as always?"
"Sure, Mi casa es tu casa as always."
"I see your Spanish pronunciation is getting better."
"That's no accident. I've been putting the TV on the Spanish captions setting and following along when I get bored. It makes the weather report more interesting if I can put on my own Spanish accent."
"Cool I'll just need a few minutes of privacy to get dressed in my pajamas"
"Awww Don't you want me to check your scar again?"
"Sigh, I'll let you look once when I finish dressing okay."
Missy had a couple of scars, but her special scar was a small inch wide one on the right side of her chest, the scar puckered inward a bit. It was the result of a fight with Hookwolf. She should have gotten the wound looked at after the fight, but she was trying to look tough around the rest of us. I could sympathize, Stalker still called me kid and baby when nobody else was around as a dig. Everyone else just treated me as the team bookworm since I had spent so much of my time studying while they went patrolling.
I had only found out about the wound after walking into the showers to see a bit of blood coming out of one of the shower stalls. Somehow I was more relieved it was just Missy trying to stitch her own wound rather than having to fill in for her parents and give her the talk ("Missy where did you even find surgical sutures?" "Actually... it's just some string from my moms sewing kit"). I had agreed to not tell anyone else if she let me check her stitches for infections every day. Even after it healed it stayed an in-joke between us that it was my job to check her scar every once in a while.
Missy soon finished dressing and when she returned she dutifully pulled the collar of her shirt down just enough to let me see the thing. She made a comment on this saying "You know I feel like at this point I should get a chance to check some of your scars. You do have at least one don't you?"
"Scars yes, from the line of duty not so much. Just from my younger years when I liked doing dumb stuff."
"You still do dumb stuff."
"I resent that. I've gotten way better at coming up with good ideas."
"So that shortcut we took last week on the way back to HQ was one of your good ideas right?"
"For the last time it wasn't my fault I didn't know the entire street was closed off for construction. But anyways I did come up with a way to make progress on that whole Zookeeper mystery."
"Sam, please tell me you're not meddling in your sister's life again? If the PRT can't prove anything I don't see how you could."
"It's not meddling, I'm just looking out for her. Anyways Taylor was hanging out with Julia earlier. She was here a little over an hour ago in fact."
"Really? Wait, please don't tell me you unmasked yourself to her."
"Wow, so little faith. No, I didn't do that. I actually introduced myself as Taylor's sister. When she mentioned the jewelry store incident I slipped into the conversation that Zookeeper could claim half of the bounties for the Tigers at the PRT HQ. So if Zookeeper goes to claim it suddenly in the next few days then we have pretty good proof that it's her."
"That does sound clever, but I'm not sure it's airtight. Not to mention it's kind of getting into a gray area trying to figure out someone's secret identity like that."
"Hey, I'm not going to make them claim the money. If she is Zookeeper then I was just indirectly giving them some good advice. If they prefer their privacy then so be it."
"Okay. Just promise me you'll let it go if they don't show up in the next few days. Taylor probably won't appreciate you playing games like that with her friend anyway."
"Missy I know it's not all on the up and up but you did not see what happened in that alley. Those Tiger guys were bastards but they got messed up badly. I think one or two are still recovering from their injuries, and they're brutes. I've been thinking about why Zookeeper hasn't shown up recently. And when I was watching the weather report earlier this week it came to me. Wanna guess what the reason is?"
Missy seemed to catch my meaning and her eyebrows raised."They're waiting for warmer weather."
"Exactly, we've been going through a cold snap recently so once spring begins they're going to have way more potential minions around. So what happened in the alley is them working with barely anything."
"Okay but I still think you're acting a little overprotective. It's one thing for Zookeeper to attack villains, but they haven't hurt anyone else."
"I know it's just that I don't actually know much about Julia. For all I know this is some part of some master plot or something. Masters are all about using others."
"And as a Master you would know."
"Come on Missy, you know I'm not like most masters. Anytime I hurt someone I possess I get to feel the pain first. Masters like Zookeeper can treat their minions as badly as they want without hurting themselves. That's why I'm feeling antsy about them potentially being close to Taylor. After all she's been through I'd rather not add another betrayal to the mix."
"Alright but just remember, if you don't find any more evidence you should just lay off. I'm sure Taylor can tell if she's in a bad situation and ask for your help."
"If she did it would be for the first time. But I guess there's not much else for me to do now. Instead I think it's time to watch a flick I've been aching to show you called RoboCop. Get ready to make as many jokes at Armsmasters expense as possible."
"That does sound like fun."
So that night we popped a frozen pizza into the oven while watching one of the gems of Alephs 80s cinema. Needless to say we now had a bountiful supply of jokes to make behind Armsmaster's back the next time his ego got a bit swollen. He's not a bad guy, but I just can't remember the last time he didn't take something seriously. It's really an accomplishment that he can make Taylor seem like a social butterfly.
Anyways dad came home before Taylor, and he seemed happy to reheat some leftovers to himself while we finished our movie. Once the movie was over we gracefully ceded the TV to dad and retreated to my room to discuss the ins and outs of the fashion world. It wasn't necessarily the most highbrow discussion but it helped pass the time very well.
It was when I was making a run down to the kitchen for some snacks when Taylor finally got home, being dropped off by Julia's mother. It was close to nine o'clock and when Julia and her mother walked Taylor to the door. It was then that dad actually recognized her mother. Apparently Dad and her had met a few times since her husband had actually been in the dockworker's union for a while before he switched careers. I heard this bit while they chatted before I returned to my room with the snacks.
After that the sleepover got to the sleeping part, since we could only stay up so late with our ward shifts the next day. The next morning me and Missy went through our morning routines before her mom came to pick her up. We could have gone to the HQ together but she did need to drop some of her stuff off before heading over.
So I was the one who arrived first in the ward quarters. I had to sit around a bit for a tour coming through which meant I had some time to kill. I walked in to see Dennis and Carlos talking about their patrol yesterday when I decided to greet them.
"Hey guys, I didn't miss anything last night did I?" and as I said that they both got weird expressions. Carlos responded first.
"You could say that yeah. Zookeeper finally made contact, just to collect the bounty on the Tigers though."
I had never imagined my plan would work so quickly. I guess Julia may have been really hard up for money. I responded enthusiastically. "That's great, how much did we find out? Maybe we can finally stop having to report on every weird animal we see on patrol."
"The only details they could confirm was that she's a teenage girl and lives in the city. She only called us on the phone yesterday afternoon to make arrangements for the pickup. They asked if she wanted to join the wards but she insisted on staying independent. Didn't even want to register as an independent hero yet. When her appointment time came a bunch of crows showed up and they actually started talking. One of them said they were there to collect the money. It was freaky as hell."
"Wait, talking crows?" I didn't know much about animals but I had only figured parrots could do human voices.
"Yeah, Stalker actually pointed out they could mimic human voices naturally. It was still weird as hell. The one Zookeeper was using was speaking whole sentences like it was repeating from someone who was right there." Carlos explained. I definitely wouldn't have pegged Sophia as an animal nerd, but I guess it would explain that predator and prey schtick she brings up sometimes. But an obvious question still remained.
"Did they actually give all that money to some crows?" I actually hadn't thought that Zookeeper could use her animals to do this. There was no way the PRT would actually go along with this.
"They knew the code-words and pass phrases that we exchanged with Zookeeper so apparently they decided to roll with it. They actually let a bunch of crows carry off the bag of hundred dollar bills. They even put one of their feet in ink to 'sign' the receipt with a crow footprint."
Dennis decided to add his two cents. "So either we finally made contact with Zookeeper or a bird trainer pulled off the weirdest fraud ever. Either way the higher ups must have been really desperate to stay on Zookeepers good side to agree to that."
"I…guess so." I was almost speechless. It was almost impossible that coincidentally the day I mentioned to Julia that there was bounty money to claim, it was claimed by Zookeeper. But I hadn't even thought it would happen this quickly. Even more so she had an alibi of having dinner with Taylor.
But then I remembered something important. Zapata's is about a block away from the HQ. Which meant it was theoretically possible she had enough range to control the crows from that distance. Given how many animals were in the alley it was plausible Zookeeper had that range.
So my plan didn't confirm anything, and Julia now technically had an alibi. Sure she was kinda close enough to make a connection to the pickup, but so were a thousand other people in the same area probably. It could also have been a massive coincidence as well, and I'm just making connections where there actually are none.
As the tour group came by, I was stewing on the couch. I had been outplayed and I wasn't even sure if it was intentional or not. My plan had accomplished nothing except to hand over $15,000 to a mostly unknown cape. I could try and bring my plan to my superiors' attention but that almost certainly wouldn't help. It would just make me look dumb in the most embarrassing way possible, especially since they had to embarrass themselves handing the bounty money over.
So I decided then, I was going to make it a priority to find Zookeeper and get some answers. I needed to confirm she wasn't planning on starting any trouble. If that meant tracking her all over the city then so be it.
A/N
-Now we get to one of my favorite parts of the story, the shenanigans. Taylor can see what an obvious ploy Sam is setting up because Sam doesn't realize Taylor is Zookeeper. Of course there's a lot of things she could use the money for so she makes use of one of the tricks she figured out. Crows can mimic human speech with training, and Taylor can skip the training once she figured out how to use the syrinx (a crow's voice box).
-I understand that Zookeeper isn't the most evocative name, but honestly it's the PRT doing the naming. So they're just going for a name that references the powers and doesn't have very strong connotations one way or the other. I just settled on it cause it's hard to pick a name for controlling all animals that doesn't sound weird to me.
-I feel like tomboy girl OC's are overdone in fanfiction so I envisioned Sam as being kind of balanced feminine and masculine wise (just like how her name is gender neutral). She starts more tomboy of course but once she matures she does try to fit in with her peers which means embracing some feminine interests (Sophia being a negative example of tomboy teenage girl encourages this).
-If it seems like Sam is giving Zookeeper way more attention than they deserve it's just that she needs something to do, whether it's fixing Taylors problems or getting back on regular patrols. Taylor's just unlucky that Sam's gotten interested in the mystery of Zookeeper, when she's still just trying to figure out her powers and put together a costume.
-Any feedback is appreciated, always looking for ways to improve.