Emily leaned back in her chair as Glenn Chambers entered her office following a brisk knock. "Mr Chambers. I'm slightly surprised you're still with us." She waved to one of the chairs in front of her desk, which he availed himself of.

"I'll be out of your hair later this morning, Director," the man said, his face showing tiredness. "I had a few things to deal with on the local Image front, nothing too important but as long as I was here anyway…" He shrugged, almost smiling. "I have to admit I don't particularly want to come back in the near future if I can avoid it. No offense of course."

"Of course. I understand, and I can't disagree." She slid the pen she was holding back and forth in her fingers as she regarded him. "This whole situation has been a massive pain in the ass, to be honest. One that could have been avoided, but…" Waving a hand she dismissed the thought. "Far too late for that. What's done is done and it could easily have been a hell of a lot worse."

Glenn sighed, nodding. "I have nightmares about how bad it could have been, believe me," he muttered. "Between you and me, you are completely right. This should have been avoided, and we got off very lightly all things taken into consideration."

She raised an eyebrow. "That's not quite how you described the situation to the Chief Director," she commented.

"I know," he replied, looking morose. "The politics of the whole thing are… tedious. Not to mention very odd even by PRT standards." He looked out her window for a while as she waited, apparently gazing at the Rig, before turning his attention her way again. "The Chief Director is not an easy woman to work for," he continued, making her almost smile. She knew that far too well. "I'm not sure why she's so fixated on having this entire state of affairs brushed under the carpet, and frankly I don't much care at this point. I did what I was ordered to do, you did what you had to do, and everyone else played their parts too. Sophia Hess is no longer your problem, which I imagine is something you're pretty pleased about."

"I'd have preferred that outcome without all the baggage that went along with it," she growled.

"So would I," he admitted. "But we're stuck with what happened. We all, like I said, have our parts to play. Sometimes without knowing what the script says." Shrugging, he shook his head. "At least it's done. We can both move on to something more important. And if the Chief Director still has problems with how it worked out, I will politely suggest that she deal with it herself, because I've other things to do."

Emily snickered. "If you say that to her face you're braver than most."

He almost laughed. "I might reserve that for when I feel like retiring. Anyway, I just wanted to clear the air a little. I didn't show off my best side, I fear, and I apologize for that. And, again, for any offense given to you and your people when I arrived. We have our differences but I can see that you run this command with a lot of extremely hard work and competent people."

Examining him a little suspiciously, she finally decided that he was being honest. "Thank you," she replied. "Hopefully should you have reason to come again it will be for reasons that aren't quite so… annoying. Or expensive."

This time he did grin. "That would definitely be an improvement, Director. Well, my flight leaves in about half an hour and I still need to finish off a couple of small things, so I'll be on my way." He stood again. "Good luck keeping a lid on this madhouse."

"We've managed so far, more or less," she replied, nodding. As he turned to leave, she paused, then added almost reluctantly, "Glenn." He turned back with an inquiring look. "Watch your back. Something about all this stinks and I really don't like it. I don't know what's going on, but it's not quite politics. Not in the usual way."

He gazed at her for some seconds, then nodded. "Oddly enough I've been feeling much the same, Emily," he replied quietly. "Thank you for the warning though."

Lifting a hand in a brief wave, he left the office, closing the door behind him with a click. She looked at it for a few heartbeats then went back to the report she'd been reading and annotating, pondering the mystery of why Costa-Brown was such a massive irritation to those under her command.

It was something she'd wondered about for years and was no closer to an answer.

But at least things could now get back to what passed for normal around this hell-hole, and Hess was gone for good. That alone almost made the entire debacle a net positive.

Emily snorted under her breath and turned the page.

"Yeah, right," she muttered, before writing some acid notes on excessive expenditure of confoam during training. Some people needed to learn better trigger discipline.

Listening to Lisa tapping away on the keyboard in the background, Taylor sat in another chair and leaned back with her feet up on Coil's former desk in the secure room. After the little episode with that poor Mr Fields guy first thing that morning they'd returned to poking through Calvert's servers looking for useful information. She was pleased that they'd managed to rescue someone who was completely innocent and with any luck improve his life a lot, and it had given Matt something amusing to do. And all of them something funny to laugh at when her father kept muttering about running an insane asylum…

Writing a few more words on the essay she'd been working on, she put the pen down on the paper and stuffed the clipboard back into her inventory, as she thought of it with distinct glee. Just being able to do that was worth all the effort, never mind all the other cool things Papa's notes had led her towards. Having done enough of her home study work for now, one major advantage of the current arrangement being able to pick and choose what she worked on and when, she retrieved one of her other notebooks and flipped through it, mulling over the various things she'd learned about Anton's trick and beneath. Every time she reexamined the whole thing she noticed something new and interesting to ponder. Last night she'd spend a while carefully going over all the things they'd… acquired… from Coil. Including Coil.

And sure enough, she'd noticed something new. Or at least, noticed something that had been there all along but she'd missed until she was looking very carefully indeed.

Turning to a fresh page, she wrote for a while, pausing occasionally to think hard, then continuing. Lisa, who was making a lot of her own notes while every now and then producing a small smirk as she turned Calvert's entire life to shit and strip-mined it for useful information, glanced at her. "You've had an idea," the other girl said.

Taylor nodded, still writing. "I have, yes. Not sure what it means though."

"Something cool?"

"Might be. Could be nothing, but… something feels very strange about it."

She looked up as Lisa put her own pen down and spun the incredibly expensive chair she'd taken a liking to towards her. "Want to talk about it?"

Writing the last few observations, Taylor read back her notes, flipping a couple of pages, then nodded slowly to herself. "Yeah. And I might have a favor to ask you."

Lisa looked narrowly at her, then blinked a couple of times. "My power is telling me you want to experiment."

Taylor grinned. Lisa looked worried.

"Little bit."

"On me."

"You're the only Parahuman in range right now."

"Oh, hell." Lisa sighed heavily. "Is it going to hurt like the last time? Because if it is, I'll probably just start running right now."

Laughing a little, Taylor shook her head. "I don't think it will hurt, because I think that why it hurt was that you were in my pocket for quite a while. I'm obviously not sure about it yet but I have a feeling that if I keep you in there for a short time, it probably won't cause any problems." Waving the notebook, she went on, "I can't prove it, at least yet, but I'm starting to think from things you've said about your power, and things it's said, that the problem was that it really is an external thing that's somehow connected to you. My guess is through those brain structures Parahumans have."

"Which does make sense," Lisa agreed, nodding thoughtfully and looking intrigued. "I mean, we already know they are a key part of the Parahuman power thing, because that's been experimentally verified. In ways that have usually gone horribly wrong for that matter. Damage to either of them once a Parahuman has Triggered always ends… badly."

"Yeah, I know that much, I've read about it." Taylor made a face. "Some of the reports were really nasty."

"I'd prefer not to have my brain fucked around with," Lisa pointed out. Taylor grinned a little.

"I'm not planning on that. Well, not directly anyway."

Her friend examined her closely, obviously letting her power have a go too. "So what are you planning on doing?" she inquired curiously, Taylor getting the impression that her power was also part of the curiosity.

"OK. Let's see if I can explain it." Taylor produced a small whiteboard she'd stuffed into her inventory in case it came in handy, and a marker for it, then propped it on her legs while Lisa rolled the chair a little closer to get a good look. "When I put something in my pocket, it ends up like this," she said, drawing a horizontal line across the top of the board, labeling it 'Time.' Then she made a short downwards extension of the line, with a crude sketch of clock face at the bottom. "Normal flow of time here, beneath at right angles to it, and something I've left there, see? Time doesn't pass for that object as far as I can experimentally determine, and if I'm right about what's happening, that makes perfect sense. It's gone in a direction orthogonal to the flow of time, so time doesn't actually apply any more."

"With you so far," Lisa nodded. "And it matches what I experienced. No time at all seemed to pass. It was very, very weird."

"Great. And then when I bring something back from beneath later, like this…" Taylor drew an arrow from the clock face back up to the horizontal line some distance along it. "...It rejoins reality and the normal flow of time again, without any fuss or any time having happened from the perspective of the object. It's basically moving between different frames of reference in physics terms, if you want to think of it like that."

"I'm not sure a physicist would be all that happy about what you're doing to reality, but sure, call it whatever you want." Lisa grinned at her. "And even my power is feeling confused. Again."

"Reality is my bitch," Taylor growled in as deep a voice as she could manage, before chuckling. "Anyway, when something is beneath, I can still… kind of see it? It's not really vision in the normal way, or even how looking beneath is, but it's really hard to actually describe. English doesn't have the right words at all. The point is that I can sense, feel, whatever you want to call it, all sorts of interesting data about those things. One is, as I showed you, the part that determines the momentum vector. There are an awful lot of others."

"Like that 'string' you talked about…" Lisa commented, looking fascinated.

"Yeah. That one is important, but really subtle. It took a lot of time and effort to spot it and work out what it was," she replied with a nod. "And it took more time and practice to be able to break down a single… operation, I guess, into the component parts. Like when I grabbed the van, I just took the entire thing in one shot. I didn't bother to do all the bits individually. That's only a slightly different process from grabbing anything really since everything can be broken down into smaller parts. A car engine is all the pieces that make an engine, and a lot of those are made of smaller pieces again, and it keeps going right down to at least atoms as far as I can see."

"Holy shit. You can actually analyze something you put beneath down to the atomic level?" Lisa stared at her in shock.

"I… think so. That doesn't mean I can understand it though of course. Some parts are fairly simple and some really aren't. A lot of it is still a complete mystery to me," Taylor shrugged. "Every time I start experimenting I discover new aspects of the whole thing. Anton probably didn't take it anywhere near the level I've been looking at, as far as I can tell from Papa's journals. He didn't need to for what he was doing with it aside from anything else."

"Stealing shit, you mean."

"Pretty much, yeah." Taylor grinned. "He was definitely a little light-fingered."

"It clearly runs in the family," Lisa giggled. Taylor stuck her tongue out at her, then laughed.

"Only for a good cause."

"Or if it's funny."

"That's a good cause. But anyway, yeah, you can break anything down into smaller parts, and it goes the other way too. I can group a whole series of things together into one 'object' then just grab it as a single piece, and once I figured out how, I can then examine that 'object' and only bring parts of it back." She waved a hand at the contents of Coil's office that surrounded them. "So we get this, but leave the bomb behind." Considering her words, she added thoughtfully, "One way to think about it is it's a bit like one of those really good CAD programs, where you can build a complete machine in software and take it to pieces right down to the individual parts virtually."

The other girl nodded thoughtfully. "OK. I get that part, and that explains a few things I was wondering about. My power is still confused but it's very interested too, by the way. And complaining that this shouldn't be possible."

"Your power lacks imagination," Taylor laughed. "Right, so that's the basic explanation. This is where it gets interesting." She thought for a moment while Lisa listened intently. "One thing I worked out is that the various parts of something I've stuffed beneath includes things that aren't actual physical objects. Like the momentum vector, it's not something you can just pick up, it doesn't exist as a thing, but it's very real and I can alter it. I'm certain there are more parameters that can be changed too, but I haven't really thought too much about them yet. But…" She trailed off, considering what she'd noticed.

"But?" Lisa prompted a few seconds later.

"But… There is one thing that I did notice last night when I was going over all the people we grabbed out of Coil's base. I was checking them for anything dangerous and making sure I removed them, like weapons and phones, to save time when we bring them back. Something kind of pinged my curiosity when I got to Coil himself."

The other girl leaned forward in the chair, staring at her. "What would that be?"

"Well… He's a Parahuman, right, so I was wondering if I could see his coronas in his brain. If I look hard enough I can certainly see inside a body without any real trouble, and see all the bones and organs and so on. I got curious whether I could distinguish one part of the brain from another accurately enough to discriminate between normal brain structures and the Parahuman parts." Taylor paused as Lisa looked startled, then very intrigued.

"Can you?" her friend asked.

Taylor nodded. "Yeah. I can. I had to find a 3D model of the brain online to make sense of what I was looking at, but I can see a definite difference between his brain and any of the other guys' brains. And it matches perfectly to the description of the corona structures that are related to Parahuman abilities."

"Holy crap. That's impressive. And kind of terrifying…" Lisa shook her head in wonder.

"That's what I thought too," Taylor admitted. "But it might be useful at some point. Even so, that's not the really weird part."

"What's the really weird part?"

Taylor looked at her notes, then back to Lisa. "The really weird part is that there's something connected to those structures. Something that's not physical, it's a lot closer to the string I follow to get stuff back, but it's not that either. It's a… a… conduit, maybe? I can't think of a good description because it really doesn't fit into words, but that's kind of not too inaccurate?" She shrugged helplessly. "I can't describe it any better than 'a connection.' Or more accurately like an imprint of a connection, or a memory of one. Being beneath stops whatever it is from actually connecting, like it stops radio waves working or anything else that needs time to, you know, pass, to do anything. But it's enough of a real thing that when I look at it just right I can see it's there."

She gazed at Lisa, who was listening with an odd expression visible. "I think that whatever's on the other end of that connection is what makes a Parahuman power work. The source of a power, basically, whatever that actually is."

"Jesus," Lisa finally breathed, shock apparent on her face. "That's… unbelievable."

"It's definitely weird as hell," Taylor agreed. "But it might explain a lot of things that aren't known about how Parahuman power work. Like where the energy needed to do what they do comes from. If powers don't use beneath, which is what your power more or less flat out said, the energy has to come from somewhere else. I can't see how a human body can possibly generate enough to be able to make a force field you can bounce a tank shell off, for example, but several of the New Wave capes can do that without any problem. No one can explain it, as far as I've been able to find out, but it's real. Maybe the power needed is being passed along that conduit I found. Or something along those lines anyway. I'm sure it's connected one way or another."

Neither of them said anything for a while, Lisa thinking over Taylor's words, and Taylor rechecking her notes to see if anything jumped out at her as wrong. Explaining a problem like this to someone else, she knew, often let you see the flaws in your own thinking, but as far as she could tell it all hung together so far. Although she didn't quite know where it was going to end up.

"And you want to experiment on me because…?" Lisa finally said, looking up at her from where she'd been staring at her own hands. A moment later, she answered her own question. "Because you want to double check if I have the same thing going on, or whether it's just Calvert. Because if I do, probably all Parahumans do, and that means you're more likely to be right."

Taylor nodded. "It's still only a sample size of two, but that's better than one, and if I see the exact same thing, it's a useful data point. I also think your own power pretty much confirmed my hypothesis already, although I didn't realize quite what it meant at the time."

Lisa appeared thoughtful, then enlightened. "Partial disconnection…" she murmured. Taylor pointed at her.

"Yeah. That. It was flat out telling you that its connection to you was disrupted. Not broken, but interfered with. And when the interference went away, it reconnected, which somehow caused the pain you got. And, I suspect, confused it enough that it tried to reinforce the connection to prevent another error, since it didn't know what had caused the error in the first place, and that may well be why it's not causing you so much pain now when you use it." She shrugged a little. "Honestly I'm getting the impression it's a lot closer to a computer or something than anything else, and I accidentally unplugged the ethernet cable when I put you in my pocket. Then plugged it back in again when I took you out. Or something like that, only much more complicated."

"It's completely bizarre but it almost makes sense if you look at it from the right angle," Lisa finally commented, appearing somewhat stunned. "A very strange right angle. Christ. You might have just worked out more about how powers work than anyone else has managed in thirty years…"

"I might also be completely wrong," Taylor pointed out. "I'm extrapolating a hell of a lot from limited information, but it hangs together at least in my own mind."

"I have a feeling that you're a lot closer than you think, just because my own power has gone suspiciously quiet while you've been talking," Lisa replied. "It's been a chatty little bastard since you rescued me, but as soon as you started explaining, it felt like it was staring in shock then went very thoughtful. And I have no idea how I know that, which is deeply strange if I'm completely honest about it." She shuddered a little. "Ever since you grabbed me my power is definitely different. Better, sure, the lack of migraines is worth it just for that, but it's also fucking freaky the way it's started staring over my shoulder all the time. I can feel it."

Taylor examined her with interest. "Huh. I don't quite know what to say to that."

"You want to try it from my side," Lisa muttered. "It's weird as shit. Fine. You've convinced me it's something we need to try, but if I end up writhing in agony again I'm blaming you."

Smiling, Taylor replied, "I'm fairly sure it won't if I keep it short. I just need to quickly check. And if your power is taking notes too hopefully it won't panic and do whatever it did the last time." She got up and walked over to bend down next to Lisa's head, tapping her on the skull a couple of times. "You hear me in there? This is just a test. Please do not panic."

Lisa pushed her away with one hand, sighing heavily. "You are very, very strange, Taylor."

Taylor grinned. "Weird. Dad says the same thing. I have no idea why."

"You know exactly why."

Lisa braced herself in the chair as Taylor retook her seat. "OK. Do it before I lose my n..."

Nodding, Taylor pulled her beneath before she'd finished speaking. Lisa's chair was suddenly empty. Concentrating, she examined her friend's temporarily stored body, quickly zeroing in on her brain and studying the makeup of it. As she'd expected, she could easily see what she now recognized as the two mysterious Parahuman-related structures, the pollentia and the gemma, although they were in a slightly different place than they were in Coil's brain, and different sizes too. Even so they were clearly the same thing and stood out from the rest of the brain tissue in a way that was impossible to describe but very obvious when she looked for it. Comparing the still-stored super-villain to her friend, she made a page of notes on her results.

And, as she'd suspected she'd find, there was indeed the same 'conduit' connected to Lisa's brain that there was to Coil's. Not the exact same, it was subtly different in many ways, but it was clearly the same type of thing.

Her hypothesis confirmed, or at least now having correlating data, she put Lisa back where she'd been.

"..erve." Lisa finished, before twitching. "Fuck. That will never be anything other than fucking peculiar. How long was it?"

"About five minutes," Taylor replied, watching her closely. "Any pain this time?"

Her friend shook her head. "No. Everything sort of jumped, and there was a very short sort of… noise… in my power, I suppose? Hard to explain. It more or less glitched for a second. But it seems fine now and nothing hurt. And it's watching you very carefully by the way."

"How nice." With a grin, Taylor made more notes, checking her results carefully. "As I suspected. You also have the same sort of connection. I wonder where it actually goes?" She tapped the pen on the notebook thoughtfully for a few seconds, pondering the question. "Presumably to whatever is doing the heavy lifting of a power. I have no idea where that is, or what it is, but I'm damn sure it's a thing. I wonder if I can follow the connection and find it…?" She trailed off, thinking hard, as Lisa watched curiously. After a while, she added very quietly, "The other thing that springs to mind is… I wonder what happens if I cut that connection?"

They eyed each other speculatively.

"I don't know whether to be horrified or intrigued," Lisa finally replied, looking disturbed. "Can you actually do that?"

Taylor shrugged. "No idea. It might be easy, it might be effectively impossible. The only way to find out is to try it, probably, and it'll take me a while to work out how. And even if it works, I don't know if the thing at the other end would reconnect it immediately, or even be able to find the connection to reconnect it. I haven't got a clue what would happen without experimenting."

"I have to point out that I'm not willing to go that far," Lisa remarked, shaking her head. "I owe you a lot, but there are limits. And despite the problems with my power, I kind of like it, and don't really want to lose it." She smiled a little worriedly. "And now my power is looking concerned too, somehow. While telling me that it likes me too. Which is freaking me the fuck out."

She looked it, so Taylor smiled at her. "I'm not going to risk anything like that with you, Lisa, I promise. I have absolutely no idea what might happen, and I can't rule out something fatal, so no way in hell am I going to do that to anyone who doesn't deserve it."

Lisa nodded slowly, her expression starting to change into a rather evil one. "But we do have a Parahuman in stock who deserves just about anything you can do to him…"

"A valid point indeed," Taylor grinned. "And to be honest, if something unfortunate were to happen to Mr Calvert I can't think all that many people would be too upset…" She chuckled as Lisa nodded vehemently. "However it's probably not a good idea to resort to human experimentation on a captive right away."

"No, we interrogate him and find out if he deserves it as much as I think he does, then experiment on him," Lisa replied happily.

Taylor nodded and shrugged at the same time, and by the time Danny came to see what they were up to both girls were deep into Coil's accounts.

Amy looked at her sister, who returned the gaze, then both of they turned to inspect Carlos with interest. "Retiring, you say?" Amy commented rather dryly. "How… convenient."

"That's what we were told," the young man replied, picking up a fry and sticking it in his mouth. "Family reasons, apparently. So yeah, Sophia's gone."

"Hur-fucking-rah," Dennis commented, stealing a few fries from his friend's tray. "She will be very unsadly not missed."

Carlos slapped at his hand, far too late, then glared. "You have your own you prick," he snapped.

Dennis ate the fries and grinned at him. "They taste so much better when they're yours," he replied insouciantly, causing the other boy to sigh heavily and move his plate further away.

"You're an asshole sometimes, Dennis," he grumbled.

"But you love me anyway, right?" the red-head snickered.

"No. Stop stealing my food!"

"That was Amy," Dennis pointed out, causing Carlos to turn his attention to the brunette, who was indeed pushing some of his fries into her mouth. She smirked at him.

"Oh, for god's sake," the older boy sighed, giving up and shoving his plate into the middle of the table. "I'm going to get some more for myself." He got up and stomped off.

"Bring back some more ketchup!" Dennis shouted, before grinning as his friend held up a middle finger without looking back. "He likes me, honest," he added to the two Dallons, who were also grinning.

"Sure he does, Dennis," Vicky replied, laughing a little. Dennis winked at her. Lowering her voice, she asked, "So what's the true reason for Sophia going?"

Dennis shrugged. "I honestly don't know," he replied very quietly after a look around to make sure no one else was close enough to hear. "That's what we were told and they won't say anything else. But I have a pretty good idea you guys were right. It's way too… secretive… at work. Everyone is looking very upset about something and they stop talking if they see us coming." He shrugged a little. "Honestly? I don't really care why she's going as long as she's not coming back. Which I really doubt she'll do. Something bad happened and she's definitely mixed up in it up to her eyebrows, whatever that was."

"Huh. Interesting." Amy nodded slowly. "Very interesting indeed." She glanced at Vicky again, who was looking thoughtful. "We'll have to do a little digging ourselves. Just because I'm really curious."

The boy leaned in conspiratorially. "If you find something out, let me know, OK? I'm incurably nosy."

"Yeah, we know that much, Dennis," Vicky giggled. All three of them looked up as Carlos came back, Chris and Dean trailing behind him with their own trays. Dennis inspected the older boy as he sat down, pointedly keeping his new plate as far away from them as he could manage.

"You forgot the ketchup," he pointed out helpfully, then ducked as his friend tried to slap his head, grinning widely. Amy shook her head in amusement and stole a fry while Carlos was distracted, wondering what had really happened with Sophia Hess.

Because she was absolutely certain it was something bad.

On the other hand, Carol was in a very good mood at the moment, so perhaps it would be best to just avoid the subject entirely for a while. The elder Dallon was a lot easier to live with when she was like this than she tended to be when she was less pleased with life.

Shrugging to herself, she put her curiosity to one side for the moment and opened the book she'd been reading, leafing through to find her place, while her sister began discussing her upcoming date with Dean and Chris and Dennis made silly jokes about it.

Even so, she couldn't help wondering what Sophia's fate would be.

"Thanks for this, Danny," Lisa said, causing him to glance at her and smile.

"It's not a problem, Lisa," he replied as he turned left and headed towards the central shopping district. "You need new clothes and other things, and I don't mind at all giving you a ride. I'd feel better knowing you were safe all things considered, especially after your experiences since you've been in the city. It's not a place for the unwary to wander around even these days."

"I managed on my own for several months, you know," she chuckled.

"I do know, and I'm not denying that," he nodded, slowing as someone coming the other direction veered around an icy patch on the road, then speeding up again as they passed. "But you're not on your own any more, are you? And we look after our friends in the DWU."

The young woman looked both amused, and rather grateful. "I can't say I enjoyed being on my own and being hunted by Coil," she admitted, turning her head to look at a shop they were passing for a moment before going back to looking out the windshield. "I'm just glad he's out of the way."

"So am I. But there are a lot of other people around who are as bad, if not worse," Danny sighed. "I'm not letting someone your age who might have a target on their back go out into Brockton alone. We have no idea if Coil still has some assets lurking around, for a start. Until you go through all his records, it's probably better to be safe than sorry."

She nodded thoughtfully but didn't say anything in reply. He kept navigating through the streets he knew so well for another ten minutes, pointing out various interesting things as they drove. Taylor wasn't with them as she was working on some schoolwork that she'd wanted to finish off. When he'd suggested that they go out to pick up various supplies for their new house-guest, she'd begged off for that reason, but suggested they should go without her. Neither had a problem with that which led to the current trip. He was also intending to look at the computers she'd mentioned in the used electronics shop while they were in the area.

The ear-shatteringly loud explosion that came without warning sprayed fragments of metal and glass across the street, causing Danny to slam the brakes on and slide to a halt in a cloud of smoke. Everyone else around him did the same, mostly successfully, showing that Brocktonites in general tended to have fast reactions and a keen ability to instantly assess dangerous situations. A few crunching sounds came from around their vehicles as those people who didn't react fast enough slammed into those that had, which added to the chaos.

From their position they could see where the blast had originated, which was a shop about fifty yards down the street, whose windows were now glittering shards of glass spread out in an arc across the roadway. Flames were visible in the places where the windows had once been, and random passers-by were lying on the ground, many bleeding profusely with two ominously still.

Silence fell, broken only by the sound of a horn from some distance away, as the entire block instantly grid-locked. Even as they watched, an all too familiar figure appeared in the middle of the street outside the shop. Oni Lee, the murderous ABB enforcer, yanked a grenade free from the harness full of the things he was wearing over his chest, then threw it through the former window into the shop before he dissolved into ash, his short-lived teleportation clone collapsing with a poof. A moment later another thunderous blast rocked the area and debris flew out of the shop, windows on the other side of the street exploding into fragments from either the shock wave, the shrapnel, or both.

"Holy shit!" Lisa yelped in shock, ducking as something pinged off the roof of the car.

"Oni Lee," Danny growled, watching as the man reappeared in the street and threw another grenade into the next building, following it with two more. Again he vanished as they exploded. "I hate that bastard. He's killed dozens of people just in the last year…"

The villain popped into sight standing on top of a van, looked around, and crumbled into dust. Searching the immediate vicinity for him, Danny asked, "Lisa, does your power tell you where the real Oni Lee is?" She looked at him, then back at the scene outside. Sirens were now going off and people had started screaming as the shock wore off. Another building exploded from within, as more devices detonated.

"He's… there," she said, pointing to the side. Danny looked and watched as the villain appeared on a second-story roof, then again a second later fifty feet further down the street. Even as he did the first clone fell apart. Two police cars screeched around the far corner three hundred yards away, before one of them slewed sideways and rolled over as a grenade went off just in front of it, shattering the windshield. A motorcycle followed them around the corner, the rider dumping her bike as she saw the car now blocking the way and rolling several times in a manner that made it clear she knew what she was doing. Miss Militia neatly hopped to her feet after the somewhat spectacular entrance, a large gun in her hands, and opened fire on Oni Lee who had paused his popping around the scene to watch her arrival.

Beanbag rounds made his clone explode into a cloud of ash as the real villain vanished once more. He reappeared next to Miss Militia and swung at her with a large knife, which she blocked with the gun in her hands as she whirled to face him. A moment later the gun became a machete which she parried his next strike with. The pair spent a couple of seconds engaged in a high speed knife fight until Oni Lee again teleported, his clone once more falling to pieces. A grenade landed at her feet from off to the left, the heroine reacting instantly and kicking it as hard as she could then diving behind the wrecked cop car. The ensuing explosion shattered glass yet again, still another building falling prey to the serial bomber.

She jumped to her feet and charged across the road to new cover, jumping over a bench at a bus stop and ducking down, then firing back at Oni Lee as he reappeared where she had been. Yet again the clone vanished before she could hit the real Oni. More sirens were coming closer, the PRT ones and BBPD ones distinctly different, but it was apparent that the villain wasn't going to be easy to stop.

Danny glanced at Lisa, who was still pointing, her finger moving every time Oni Lee teleported. He followed it to see she was now indicating where the ABB villain was about to appear almost every time, her power clearly able to predict his movements with high accuracy.

Eventually Oni Lee appeared directly in front of them, right where Lisa was pointing, about fifty feet away. He was looking to the side where Miss Militia was now taking cover behind a parked van, her weapon peeking out from the side. The villain looked in another direction for a moment, back to her, and mockingly waved.

Then he exploded.

This time there was no ash.

Instead there was a rather gory eruption of body parts, and what was left of the man, primarily only the parts above his neck and below his waist, fell to the ground while most of the rest spread itself across the road in a fine mist.

The entire scene went dead silent, as everyone watching from various cover and vehicles, and peering cautiously out of windows in the buildings on either side, gaped at what had happened. Miss Militia slowly came out from behind the van, looking around and up at the roof line with an air of someone who was completely taken aback, before she carefully approached the remains. A couple of the cops, several more of whom had turned up during the battle and had been hastily dragging survivors away, did the same from the other direction, their weapons drawn and ready.

All three looked down at the remains. Miss Militia squatted down and inspected what was left of Oni Lee. She shook her head, standing up again, and looked around. Several hundred people stared back, many of them starting to smile.

Danny dropped the pair of grenade pins in his fingers into the center cup holder and looked at his watch. "Hopefully they'll get this traffic moving soon," he commented quietly.

Lisa gaped at him with wide eyes, then down at the cup holder, before turning to stare at where several PRT troopers had joined the heroine and the cops. "Fuck me," she muttered. "Remind me never to piss you off…"

He looked at her with dark eyes, feeling old for a moment. Then he turned back to the windscreen as a PRT scene control van made its way through the stationary traffic from the other direction, cops directing drivers to move their cars out of the way one by one. "One thing living in Brockton Bay teaches you, something everyone in the city knows, and something we who live near the docks really know far too well, is that sometimes you don't have much in the way of choices," he said in a low, tired voice, leaning his head back against the headrest. "Like most people here, I've seen things that anyone lucky enough to live in a richer, less violent place probably can't really imagine. I've always tried to shield Taylor from it, because that's what a father is meant to do." He chuckled mirthlessly for a moment as the young woman listened, both of them keeping an eye on the scene outside the vehicle.

"I haven't really succeeded in that as much as I'd have liked," he went on after a momentary pause, thinking over his words. "My wife's death… it didn't do either of us a lot of good." He glanced at her, the girl meeting his eyes. "She's a stronger person than I am in many ways. I threw myself into work, into keeping everyone else going, and managed to neglect the one person who I should have been supporting. Luckily, not enough to lose her. And we're repairing that issue very quickly. Thanks to circumstances, and old Papa, I guess. I still don't know if I'd hug him or punch him in the face if we ever met, ninety odd years old or not."

She grinned briefly, making him smile. He looked back to where the PRT people were collecting body parts, finding his reaction rather to his surprise was merely one of resigned mild interest combined with a certain amount of vicious satisfaction. "But the point is, this city shits on innocence very, very quickly. By the time you reach my age, you've seen a lot of death. I've lost more friends than I like to remember. Quite a few of them to that bastard. More to the E88." He sighed a little. "Even more just to time and despair. Which is why I've fought so hard to keep the union afloat. Sometimes to the point that more important things slipped my mind."

Running a hand over his face, he massaged his brow as the girl quietly listened. "Things are looking up now, in ways no one expected, and perhaps with some luck we'll turn the corner and be able to push the violence away. Or at least into the dark corners where it can be controlled, rather than letting it take over everything like it's done for so long. The riots, the ship, all that was a symptom of the problems, not a cause, but it also kicked off a slope we've been sliding down for longer than Taylor's been alive. I hate to think what was waiting at the bottom of that slope…"

He watched Miss Militia talk to the PRT scene commander, the woman describing something with her hand as he made notes, nodding occasionally. "Taylor's managed to kickstart a series of events that are going to cause more chaos than I can really understand, but it's also already lifting us back up the slope. Even if no one knows why everything's suddenly changed, pretty much everyone wants it to continue. And people like Oni Lee just want to push us down that much faster. Coil, he had dark plans, too. He's dealt with. Now Oni Lee is gone as well. As much as I don't like violence, I won't regret for a moment that he's spread all over the street."

Danny looked at Lisa again. "See, the problem really is, I don't like violence, but I'm pretty good at it if I have no choice. Everyone in the Docks is. Some of the things that've happened in the past…"

He shrugged a little. "Let's say there are some reasons Marquis was polite. I don't know all of them, definitely, the man was… private… but at least part of it is probably down to the fact that the Docks don't bend over for anyone. People have found that out the hard way in the past, going back a lot further than Parahumans."

"I get the feeling that you have one hell of a weirder backstory than I'd thought," Lisa finally commented when he fell silent.

He grinned at her a little more cheerfully. "Damn right I do. I'd prefer not to think about some of it, but yeah, I've been around the block more than a few times."

Glancing back to the scene where the PRT were talking to various witnesses, he added, "One day I might tell you a few stories, but not right now." Nodding in the direction of one of the PRT troopers who was working his way down the line of cars in front of them, Danny said, "Looks like we're going to be asked for a witness statement."

"Easy enough," Lisa replied, her face shifting to placid calmness with an ease he was rather impressed by. "Oni Lee went bang. No idea why." She glanced at the cup holder again for a second. He followed her eyes, then made the grenade pins vanish.

"Strangest thing, wasn't it?" he commented calmly, putting his hand on the window control. "Must have made a stupid mistake. Shit happens, I guess."

"Sure does."

Pressing the button, he ran the window down as the trooper reached them. "Can I help you?" he asked politely.

"Trooper Daniels, sir. Just a witness statement if you don't mind. Did you see anything unusual in the recent Parahuman interaction?"

"Aside from an idiot teleporting around blowing the shit out of everything in sight?" Danny commented with a wry grin. The trooper sighed, almost laughing.

"As I said, anything unusual, sir. Oni Lee causing chaos is, unfortunately, not as unusual as everyone would wish."

"Yeah, I know." Danny shrugged. "Nothing helpful, I'm afraid. He was doing his thing, and I guess he fucked up. Next thing I know he's blown himself to pieces. Didn't see anything like another Parahuman or anything if that's what you're curious about. Just…" He mimed an explosion with his hands. "No more Oni Lee. Can't say I'm broken up about it."

"He sure was," Lisa put in with a small smirk, Trooper Daniels stopping himself mid-chuckle a moment later.

"It seems so, yes." The man bent slightly to see Lisa. "Did you notice anything, miss?"

"Sorry, it's just like Danny said. That idiot just exploded after fighting Miss Militia for a while. She was taking cover behind a vehicle and as far as I could see didn't have anything to do with it."

Daniels nodded, straightening up again. "That matches the other witnesses. Thank you both for your help on behalf of the PRT." He looked to the side where a number of cops were directing traffic, which was slowly beginning to move away. "Looks like you'll be out of here soon enough. Have a nice day."

"It's a better one than it was an hour ago," Danny responded, lifting a hand in a wave as the trooper nodded to him.

"A lot of people seem to think that, sir," Daniels replied. "Myself included, if I'm honest about it. He killed a good friend of mine six months ago." Nodding again, he moved past to the next vehicle, while Danny ran the window up again. He and Lisa exchanged glances.

"Yeah, I don't think anyone's going to miss the fucker," she said with a small smile.

"No, I doubt they will." He started the car again as the truck three vehicles in front of them began to move.

"You OK after doing… that?" she asked with some concern, watching his face. He looked at her and nodded, smiling.

"I'm fine, Lisa. Don't worry, but thanks for being concerned." Shrugging, he put the car in drive and waited. "Pest control is a pain but sometimes you don't have a choice."

She was still laughing as he drove off, following the hand signals from the cops. Ten minutes later they were miles away.

"What the hell happened?" Emily asked, looking up from the report in her hands. Miss Militia shrugged helplessly, while Armsmaster kept reading his copy, and Renick leafed through one too.

"I really don't know, Director. Oni Lee was doing his usual pattern of spamming clones and blowing them up as I was trying to catch his real body, until he presumably made a fatal mistake. We still don't know what started his rampage, although people are looking into it, and the best guess at the moment is that it was something connected with a local group of merchants that decided not to pay the ABB protection fee in a show of defiance. He was certainly destroying businesses quite deliberately when I and the PRT team arrived. Then he switched to trying to get us, which he would usually do for a while before retreating. We've see that in the past several times."

"But this time it went wrong," Renick commented, putting the report to the side and paying full attention to her.

She nodded. "It certainly looks like that. I didn't use anything lethal on him, I was restraining myself to rubber bullets and beanbag rounds, while the PRT squad were using confoam grenades and sprayers. All we could manage was to herd him away from the shops a little. He was definitely trying to kill me, he wasn't shy about using his knives and grenades. I can only assume he got the timing wrong on one of them."

"Or had a faulty grenade," Armsmaster put in from next to Mike Renick. "If the primer was damaged by shrapnel, or was simply manufactured incorrectly, it's conceivable it could have detonated the moment the spoon was released rather than after the normal delay. It's a very rare fault but not unique. He might have used that specific one for the first time while fighting you and paid the price."

"You're sure no one else was involved? The E88, some independent, even a civilian with a grudge?" Emily queried. The heroine shook her head.

"I can't absolutely prove that, of course, but as far as anyone on scene could determine, it was only us fighting him. The PRT squad took witness statements from everyone in the traffic jam and the eye-witness accounts correspond almost perfectly to what we saw ourselves. No one reported seeing or hearing anything that would imply a third party being involved, even given the variations in their stories. The entire area was checked thoroughly and there's zero evidence anywhere that could be found to show outside involvement. A scene investigation squad is still sweeping the area to be completely sure but I'm pretty convinced they won't find anything if they haven't so far." She spread her hands for a moment. "It really does look like he screwed up and died as a result. There's no evidence to the contrary so far, at least."

With a sigh, Emily nodded, looking at the report again, then closing it. "That's certainly going to change the gang politics a lot. I can't work out if it's a good thing or not, but it's going to be our problem whatever happens."

"No one is actually going to miss Oni Lee, Director," Armsmaster pointed out with a small smile. "I still find myself puzzled as to why he didn't already have a kill order. He's murdered at least fifty four people I'm aware of in the last eighteen months."

"Politics, as usual," Emily grumbled. "I agree for what it's worth. That man should have been put down years ago. Well, he's not a problem now, so there's that at least. Lung won't like it, and we're going to have to keep an eye on both him and the E88 in case they start pulling stupid shit again, but having him publicly cock up and kill himself is probably about the best possible thing that could have taken him out. Even Lung isn't going to be able to blame someone else for that considering how much video there must be of the whole affair."

"There are at least twenty videos showing the entire thing from multiple viewpoints on PHO already," Renick put in, holding up a tablet which was playing one of those silently. "The overall tone is relief from almost everyone, and even the obvious ABB commentators are coming off as embarrassed more than anything else."

"Having your own cape kill himself by rank stupidity isn't going to help your street reputation," Armsmaster said, almost sounding amused for a moment.

"No, I expect it wouldn't," Emily agreed with a tiny dark smirk. "Fine. We'll put it down as death by misadventure and move on. We've got far more important things to deal with." Picking up the next report she looked at it and sighed heavily. "Oh, lord. Those two idiots. What did they do this time?"

They spent the next twenty minutes discussing Über and Leet's latest escapade with significant annoyance, but that was pretty much normal.

In his penthouse suite, Max Anders read the PHO thread about the ABB fucking up and laughed his ass off, even as he made plans to take advantage of the change of circumstances. While wondering what Lung was doing for the same reason.

They'd find out, sooner or later, one way or the other. That was how the things worked, after all.