2.8
-- Lisa Wilbourne Tattletale --
I stepped into the room and closed the door. It wasn't likely that Tanya would come looking for me at the worst possible moment, but that was just how my luck was going. So I turned around and closed the door. I turned back and studied Taylor while she stared back at me.
She sat on her bed, back straight, hands in her lap. She was wearing her knife, but I thought she just hadn't taken it off. Her expression was completely slack and I noticed no tension in her hands or arms, which would have been pretty reassuring if I didn't know she could just opt out of having body language at will. I glanced around the room and didn't see any bugs -- not that they weren't there, obviously -- except my two 'escorts,' who didn't slow in their agitated buzzing. I eyed one with evident anxiety, though not too much.
"Are you going to hurt me?" I asked neutrally.
She hesitated for a second but only one.
"I haven't decided yet. You should explain yourself before I do."
Ouch. I'd expected her to pretend she hadn't meant to threaten me. Making her commit to that would have helped move things in a less adversarial direction. But she was more pissed than I'd thought, apparently. At least she was letting me explain.
(Fuck, why did I tell her I couldn't read her when she did her statue impression? Oh, right, I was worried about other Thinkers and hadn't thought I'd need the advantage. Silly me, ever thinking for a second I'd had things under control.)
So, this was... pretty bad. She wouldn't actually follow through, of course. Not because of her morality or our friendship or because Tanya would fucking obliterate her or anything silly like that -- there was very little she wasn't capable of in service of her goals -- but because it wouldn't promote her goals. On the contrary, she couldn't afford to piss me off. She'd said Tanya listens to us yesterday, but if she'd been eavesdropping she should be keenly aware that in fact Tanya only listens to me. And however angry or hurt she felt, Taylor could be counted on to keep her eyes on the prize.
Didn't mean she wasn't angry at me. Didn't mean I hadn't hurt her.
Should I go to her? No, not yet. If she was focused on the weakness of her position, she'd read that as me rubbing it in. Better to act guilty and a little intimidated. Which, well, wouldn't take all that much acting.
"I just... needed to do something to help. You know I worry about you, right? If I could have made it right, I'd have done that instead."
Taylor's capacity for empathy could be spotty -- her rigid morality actually derived from her personal victimhood narrative, the anger and indignation it produced, and, more and more, self-disgust -- but feelings of worthlessness and the need to be useful? She'd get that. Good thing I was confident on that, or her complete non-reaction might have flustered me.
"So you lied to me?"
I let out an exhausted sigh.
"I can't tell you how often I wish my power would lie to me. Sometimes the truth is critical, sometimes it just hurts. I had to bear this but you didn't. I'm sorry."
I didn't really like taking this tack. Even if she bought it -- which she probably wouldn't, for all that I was being as candid with her as I'd ever been -- it'd hardly restore her trust in me. I'd have preferred to convince her that I'd lied to Tanya about lying to her, and I might have managed that... right up until she worked out I'd refused to testify under lie detector to the version of events I'd given her.
Sure enough, she'd raised an unimpressed eyebrow.
"Are you sorry for doing it or for getting caught?"
Aww, that's cute. She'd set a trap where the obvious 'correct' answer contradicted what I'd just said. That might even have worked on me... when I was seven. Maybe eight. I'd never argue she'd had an easy life, but it had certainly been simple. I wanted to ruffle her hair with a 'Keep at it, Sport!' but I was supposed to be apologizing. So I looked down instead, shamefaced.
"You realize this whole thing is on me, right? How were you supposed to figure out they were decoys?" I looked her in the eyes. "I fucked up and I'm sorry."
She stared at me for several seconds, motionless. I mean, I didn't really expect a 'No, Lisa, this isn't your fault! You did the best you could!' but it might have been nice to hear. The total lack of feedback was actually starting to get to me. Which was the point, obviously.
Taking responsibility for the whole debacle might seem counterintuitive, but I reminded myself there was no real risk. It wasn't like she hadn't already formed an opinion on my culpability. Better not to be seen attempting to minimize it. And she wouldn't let me take all the guilt. That'd leave none for her.
"And the clones? They're not 'mindless power creations' after all?"
Probably time to show a little backbone. There was inducing empathy and then there was becoming a target for her own self-loathing, and too much weakness might push me over the line. Or maybe I wasn't even close. I'm good, but manipulation via dead reckoning isn't easy.
"You knew that was a lie when I said it. Hell, Aisha knew." I stumbled over to the bed, caught myself on a post, and sat down beside her. I still kept some distance but standing while she sat sent the wrong message. "What does making me say it accomplish? They still need to die."
She turned to look at me, still utterly emotionless.
"When exactly did you and Tanya discuss this 'fallback plan?'"
I groaned.
"Never. She made it up. Or maybe in her mind killing everyone is just understood to be the default fallback. You were there, when could we have discussed it?" I glared at her. "By the way, you really need to listen to me when I tell you to shut up around her. Now, are you ready to cut the interrogation bullshit and have an actual conversation about this?"
She paused for a few seconds. I noticed a faint buzzing from outside and jerked.
"Did you know about Dinah before the bank?"
... Fuck. I'd miscalculated. It'd been something like half an hour since I'd admitted to lying to Taylor, and she'd spent that whole time thinking about all the other times I might have lied. New obsession or not, if she decided I was ultimately responsible for Dinah's kidnapping and everything that followed I really might be in danger. Not as much as she was in -- because, again, Tanya would turn her into a bloody smear if she attacked me -- but that was hardly reassuring. And 'I had no choice' really wasn't going to cut it, here. She'd have died for Dinah and right now she'd hold me to the same standard. All I could do was reiterate the old story and hope she'd accept it. For both our sakes.
I turned to face her squarely and made firm eye contact.
"I did not. I've lied to spare your feelings when the truth didn't matter, I admit it. On something that important? Just so you wouldn't be angry with me? Never." Good execution but hardly an airtight argument. Time for a distraction? "You know Coil had that stuff prepared for me, right? Tested it all on me in dropped timelines. Made sure I knew what was waiting for me if I disappointed him. All he really had to hide from me was the plan to use it on someone else."
He hadn't, of course. Acquiring the precog had been too important to him to leave me out of the planning process, albeit with heavy supervision. Not that I couldn't have subtly sabotaged things anyway, but he'd made it very clear just how disappointed he'd be if anything at all went wrong. And what then? I certainly hadn't been happy about it -- still wasn't -- but when it came down to it, I'd had a reasonable shot at taking Coil down and Dinah hadn't. Hell, he'd have captured her anyway sooner or later.
That was not how Taylor would see it, though.
Fortunately, it seemed I'd convinced her. The buzzing hadn't quieted, but she nodded and broke eye contact.
"Sorry," she said, voice still flat.
I relaxed. That had been a hell of a--
"This can't happen again. I need to be able to trust you," she abruptly asserted. "Don't use your power on me outside--"
"Fuck that," I snarled, shoving her shoulder. "Like you don't-- Actually, no, I'm not having this conversation with a fucking mannequin. Stop that."
I glared right into her dead eyes, arms crossed, for a couple moments before life returned to her face. Oh, she was still offloading most of her reactions -- and maybe that was for the best -- but to me, it was the difference between bare ground and a cross section of archaeological strata. Confusion layered over anger and betrayal and pain on top of guilt, desperation, fear, and more anger. I felt a knot loosen in my chest at finally getting a look at what I was working with. Didn't do much to quench my own anger.
"You use your power to keep track of me from the moment I enter your range to the moment I leave it. You keep it up in your fucking sleep! Did you think I didn't notice?"
She hesitated for a moment, face twisting with reluctance. Well, a few specific muscles tightened to a nearly imperceptible degree, but it stood out clearly against the literal nothing she'd been showing before.
"I... suppose that's fair. I'll stop--"
"I don't want you to stop! We're teammates, I depend on you. What if I really need you and you're ignoring me for the sake of privacy of all things? How are you going to feel about this idea then?"
A mulish glint entered her eyes.
"That's hardly the same--"
"Hey, I've got an idea!" I brightly interrupted. "Wouldn't your power be more effective if no one could get to you? What if we hide you away in, I don't know, a small metal box?" I dropped the false cheer. "Get it? I'm not doing it!"
I watched impatiently as anger melted into realization and shame. She looked down.
"Sorry. I shouldn't have asked."
My crossed arms tightened over my chest.
"No, you shouldn't have." I sighed, trying to let it go. "Christ, Taylor... You want to know why I lied? Because I couldn't stand to see what you'd do to yourself. Are doing to yourself. This shit hurts everyone who cares about you too."
I clamped down on my power as I said the words. I knew what they'd do to her and I didn't need to hear it. She wouldn't know how to respond. Or, more accurately, she wouldn't be able to figure out how to phrase 'I know but I'm not going to stop' in a way that let her maintain the moral high ground. There was a reason I'd talked around it before: making her feel even more guilty wasn't productive. But she had to understand I wasn't going to sit back and let her hurt herself no matter how much she thought she deserved--
"You didn't sound so concerned about me earlier."
What?
She was still letting some of her reactions bleed through, so when I let up on my power I could tell the faint resentment in her tone was genuine -- substantially understated, actually -- but, uh, about what? She'd barely come up in that conversation and I didn't see what would have bothered her in what I did say. I considered pushing my power further, but I really didn't have much to spare if I wanted to be functional tomorrow morning. And if she'd misunderstood something it was probably better to appear confused, unpleasant though that was.
"If this is about laughing when--"
"This is about drawing attention to my civilian identity just to distract the PRT."
Huh. I needed a couple moments to work out what she was even talking about, mainly because she was pretending the problem was the threat to her secret identity.
"Oh, the blackmail on Stalker? No, I was just going to tell them about the 'extra' patrols and the lethal bolts. Like I said, nothing too serious." I paused, considering the implications of her misunderstanding. "Fuck, Taylor, you really think I'd do that to you?"
That hurt. It was one thing for her to think me a liar -- I was, no getting around it -- but to think I'd betray her trust like that? Reduce the worst day of her life to a simple distraction? And she had thought I'd do that, clearly. And -- I watched her expression with growing horror -- she still did, didn't she? I almost wanted to protest the unfairness of it. Out of all the lies I'd told her, it was this simple truth she disbelieved? I guess I hadn't thought I'd needed to be that convincing. It was just a stupid misunderstanding... Fuck.
I wrapped her in a hug. My skin crawled but I sucked it up. She didn't push me away but she certainly didn't hug me back. She looked away.
"Hey, don't pretend this isn't a big deal. I know it is. You shared a confidence with me and I've never -- would never -- use that without talking it over with you. I phrased it that way earlier because I wasn't going to tell Tanya, either."
I almost went on, explaining why doing that wouldn't even make sense, but I stopped myself. She wasn't upset because it would have been a tactical blunder, whatever she'd said, and convincing her I understood the tactics wouldn't fix anything. She'd caught me in a lie and felt betrayed, and part and parcel of betrayal in her mind was using her secrets against her.
(Never mind her 'origin story' really hadn't been a secret when she'd blurted it out three whole days after we met. Back then she couldn't forget it for a moment. Her circumstances had barely changed and what she had needed from us was the validation everyone else had denied her. But now she'd escaped, now she'd built up a dangerous, confident persona who no one would dare treat that way. Except someone had. The story had become a threat to her new life and she feared that even as she'd told herself she'd grown past it.
Pretty bog-standard parahuman psychology. Which just made tripping over it all the more embarrassing.)
Still, it wasn't like there was nothing more I could do.
"I've shared things with you I wouldn't want spread around either, you know."
That hadn't been easy -- understanding parahuman psychology didn't make me immune to it, obviously -- but I'd... Shit. I'd actually been about to think 'I'd made myself vulnerable to her as a form of precommitment to our friendship.' I really needed to spend less time around Tanya. As soon as that wouldn't be suicide, anyway. So I'd just have to deal with it for the foreseeable future, I guess. Whatever, the point was telling her that had meant something, and she knew that.
And after a long moment she nodded, relaxing slightly.
"Right."
And that was it.
I sighed and released her. She did believe me. Mostly.
We each took a few moments to collect our thoughts. That had been a hell of a lot. Actually, I'm surprised she gave me a chance to... She'd wanted to be convinced, hadn't she? Like, what could she have done if she decided I had betrayed her? None of the options I could come up with were good. She was better than me at that sort of thing but sometimes there was no winning move. And if she were serious about this, she knew better than to let me speak. She'd known she needed my help with Tanya and she'd feared losing me as a friend. So she'd decided her suspicion was the problem, justified or not, and set this all up to let me work my magic.
Hell, Taylor, only you could fool me into reading a cry for help as a hostile interrogation.
... And I'd still bungled it. Fuck. Oh, I had excuses. I was exhausted both mentally and emotionally, and so was my power. She'd taken time to prepare and given me none. I'm a Thinker, not a Master. And this was a real fucking dumb way to approach the problem. (Though, again, very characteristically Taylor.)
But when it came down to it, if she'd wanted me to restore her faith in me, I'd failed. It certainly could have gone worse. I'd done an OK patch job, considering, but the fault lines were still there. I could fix it, really fix it, with enough time and power... Which, practically, was the same thing as not being able to fix it. Well, at least it was over.
"So, how'd you pull this off? You didn't really bug your own hideout, did you?"
She raised an eyebrow and I rolled my eyes.
"You know what I mean. Hidden microphones."
She relented.
"The other meaning was closer, actually."
I blinked.
"Damn, you got that working with your power? Since when?"
She shrugged.
"Intelligence and coordination are now my primary roles on the team, right? I've been practicing... a lot and I'm still not very good. I need a lot of different types of bugs pretty close to understand speech, and sight is still unusable."
Oh. She'd described trying to use her bugs' senses as extremely disorienting and painful, hadn't she? She'd hit on an arguably productive way to hurt herself and jumped right in. Well, maybe that wasn't giving her enough credit. Hearing through her bugs really might have let her figure out the decoy trick. Which, uh, I should be very careful not to point out just in case she hadn't realized.
"Hey, that's useful." And terrifying. She'd gotten that far in a day? How long until she was listening in on every conversation in a quarter mile radius? July? Well, I can't really call anyone else out for Big Sister tendencies. "Maybe it's even useful enough to spare you from banishment to the apiary."
She gave me a flat look. Flatter.
"Come on, you have to admit that was funny."
"I don't think I do, actually."
I hesitated. Were her feelings really hurt? She could handle some ribbing these days. I'd made a point of it as a form of exposure therapy -- so had Alec, though he was just an asshole -- but in the context of everything else... Well, I really couldn't afford to spend power on this but explaining cost nothing.
"I think she was genuinely trying to be nice, you know. She's just bad at it."
"She called me 'a lovely young woman for a career criminal.'"
"She really did, didn't she?" I couldn't suppress a little chuckle. Taylor glared. "Look, it's funny because she actually meant it. As for suggesting a career change, it's an opportunity she would have liked to have had. Or she's convinced herself she would have, anyway."
"She could certainly retire to the country now. Somehow I don't think that's the plan."
"God no," I laughed. "She knows that's not an option for her -- well, I say 'know' but I doubt the explanation she's settled on has any overlap with the real reasons -- but she thinks you can still get out."
She was wrong, of course. Taylor's combat experience might not amount to a percent of a percent of Tanya's, but she was just as psychologically dependent on it. Well, no, not nearly, but still dependent enough there was no chance she'd voluntarily give it up anytime soon.
"She also thinks you're dangerously naive and it's going to get you killed. Maybe her too if she's foolish enough to rely on you," I continued. Taylor wanted me to be forthright with her, right? She needed to understand this even if she didn't. "I know you're trying to meet her in the middle, but she's not going to see any reason to move at all if you don't put things in the right terms."
"Like you did?" she asked archly.
This at least was an issue I'd anticipated, if not quite so soon. Taylor could be as ruthlessly pragmatic as anyone, but she sometimes needed coaching to get there. Coaching that would at best annoy and confuse Tanya, who instead of needing moral excuses for pragmatism needed pragmatic excuses for morality.
It wasn't that big a problem: if Taylor really objected to properly framing a message for its intended audience, she couldn't have managed a tenth of what she had with Rachel. Even without any preparatory work on my part, she'd realized what I was doing. It was probably a bit of a shock to hear me indulge Tanya's casual sociopathy, but that would have been easy enough to smooth over on its own. In the context of the rest, though? The reminder of my skill in that area probably didn't make me seem more trustworthy.
But that damage was done. All I could do now was address the object level concern.
"Yes, like I did! I'm making progress. Do you want this to work or not?" I took a breath. "Look, I'm not saying your way won't work"-- it wouldn't, but I wasn't saying that --"but how long will it take? Weeks? How much of the city will be left by then, you think?"
"I have a plan for that, actually." Uh-oh. "They need the orbs to do anything, right? And they're potentially extremely valuable if there are more mages on Bet. It should be easy to stage a theft; there probably will be attempts to steal them. Harder to stage a recovery once we can trust them to behave responsibly, but we'll have time to figure that out."
... Thanks, Taylor. At this point I just wouldn't know what to do with myself if I went five minutes without experiencing mortal terror. Well, at least she was talking to me and not just doing it.
"Not that I don't see the appeal of putting Tanya in timeout, but would you prefer to hand the city to the Merchants? Lost Garden? The Teeth? Because that's what you're proposing. We made this power vacuum. If we just walk away, we're responsible for what follows."
Of course, the much bigger problem was the possibility we'd bungle the theft and die. They were at least as aware of the threat as we were and vastly more capable. But starting with practical concerns would implicitly concede it was a good idea if we could manage it, which it wasn't.
"We -- the Undersiders -- can defend the city. That was the plan before they showed up, right?"
"Sure, that was Coil's plan. Do I need to remind you he was a moron? He insisted we take separate territories despite building our whole team comp around synergy. Anyway, we were supposed to have the Travelers for that. We don't have the muscle on our own to claim the whole city." I spoke over Taylor as she tried to respond. "And even if we did, we certainly don't look like we do. We'd have to fight it out, and that comes with collateral damage."
That gave her some pause.
"I'm not sure it would be enough, anyway," I continued. "The orb is an aide, not the source of their powers. Don't know what that means in practical terms, but I wouldn't want to count on it. And if they remain active, they'll be much less willing to hold back if they don't comfortably outclass everyone."
She drummed her fingers on her knee, considering.
"If it came to it, do you think we could beat them without their powers?"
Why, Taylor? Why are you so determined to get us killed?
She interrupted while I tried to formulate a response.
"Stop. You're seriously going to try to convince me we can't take three guys and a scrawny child?" she accused. "Fuck, Lisa, what's gotten into you?"
I glared at her. What was this trick question bullshit?
"It's about the fallout, not the fight. If it comes to that, we're never going to rebuild trust." Also, I had no confidence we could take them. I'd believe Tanya wasn't dangerous when she was dead and buried and not a moment before. Maybe wait a week just to be certain. "And this whole idea is counterproductive. Getting robbed in the night doesn't make you less paranoid."
She shrugged.
"It'd take longer, but we'd have the time. No more massacres."
And we'd finally gotten to the issue I'd thought I was here to address.
"Look, I'm with you on this. This can't happen again. But overreacting makes it more likely, not less."
"Overreacting?" she demanded, strident. "To sixty one dead?"
"Sixty one Chosen. Not desperate opportunists looking for food and security, either. Committed officers of the old Empire, the ones who didn't think Purity was violent enough."
"They deserved to go to prison, sure. That's not what happened."
"That was never on the table. How would we have gotten them to the police station? Not that they have the capacity to hold or feed that many."
"So killing them is just fine?"
"So letting them continue robbing, hurting, and killing innocent civilians is just fine?" She hesitated and I pressed. "Why don't you ask Brian how he feels about this?"
"Yeah, seriously, Tay?" I jumped and so did Taylor. "You're getting this bent out of shape over Hookwolf and his buddies? I can't decide whether I want to point her towards Skidmark or Purity next."
Aisha leaned casually against the wall by the door. Really? What next, Fog hiding in the walls?
...
Is Fog hiding in the walls?
No.
Right, of course not. That'd be dumb.
I restrained myself from double checking and gave the bag of chips in Aisha's hand a pointed look.
"No popcorn?"
She smirked.
"I looked. You need to restock, Taylor."
"This is a private conversation," Taylor said stiffly. Bad move.
Aisha recoiled, face contorted in... I think that's supposed to be guilt?
"Fuck, I'm so sorry. I had no idea. Well, maybe I suspected when Lisa closed the door the second time... I'm just overcome with shame." Her face relaxed back into the smirk. "Well, now that I've apologized to you, don't we both need to apologize to Tanya?"
She was making a joke of it -- because of course she was -- but if she'd quietly waited and watched both conversations, this wasn't some lark. I thought over what had been said. Well, she hadn't been entirely passive, but she hadn't screwed with us enough to really disrupt things. Had Brian put her up to this? Probably not. Alec? She could have just been curious herself. Not worth using power.
"I know this is a bit, but please don't admit anything to Tanya. How would I explain your death to Brian?"
She rolled her eyes.
"Come on, she wouldn't really do that." She paused. "Right?"
I pretended to think about it.
"Probably not?"
That got to her, at least a bit.
"Not going to tell me not to listen in?"
"I would if I thought you'd listen." I grimaced. "I'll have to talk to her about her plans for Stranger countermeasures. If she senses a Stranger and can't remember you, she'll pretend nothing's wrong and flood the room with invisible, odorless poison gas."
There it was. Aisha could be difficult to manage but she wasn't actually trying to get herself killed.
"I wouldn't need to if you weren't keeping secrets." She stood up straight, crossing her arms. "This should be a team meeting."
"This isn't team business," I responded. "Tanya's replaced Coil, not Brian. Your orders from the boss are to sit back and enjoy your absurd salary, and everyone else is happy with that."
"It's team business if Taylor is volunteering us to fight every villain on the East Coast instead of letting Tanya handle them."
Huh. We both turned to Taylor.
"Actually, that's a good point," I said. "Even if the team can do it, you and I certainly can't. They deserve a say."
"Not like you're pulling off this dumbass plan without me, anyway," Aisha added.
Taylor hesitated but ultimately folded under the combined assault.
"Fine. Nothing drastic without a team vote." Which she knew full well she'd lose. "Was there something else you wanted, Aisha?"
"Nah, feel free to get back to it. Pretend I'm not even here."
She leaned back and ate a chip. She didn't use her power.
Taylor sighed and looked at me.
"Can't you make her go away?"
"Not really," I said. Not without crossing lines, anyway. "If I start detailing Brian's fetishes you're more likely to flee than she is." Aisha laughed and Taylor blushed, proving my point. "Best I can do is bore her until she activates..."
"I'm not saying they were good people," Taylor said after a long pause. "Maybe the city's better off with them dead. But this didn't just happen. We killed them. Sixty one people who'd still be alive if not for us. Doesn't that bother you at all?"
I blinked. Wow, she was working hard to make excuses for Tanya. Not surprising, exactly, but this was a bit blatant even for her.
"I don't know about you, but I was doing my best to save them. Tanya decided to kill them against our advice."
Her expression hardened.
"Were you trying your best? You managed to convince her it was a mistake pretty fast after she did it."
I really hadn't pushed that distrust down very far, had I? Though, uh, she wasn't completely wrong. I hadn't pushed as hard as I could have, cautious about getting caught. Overcautious, given later revelations. But with my understanding at the time, I'd maintain it was the right decision for minimizing long term issues. If she'd killed me for manipulating her, we'd definitely all be in a much worse position now. And of course killing everyone there wasn't actually the plan and I still didn't know why she'd changed her mind.
Still, the implication certainly wasn't true. Pretty insulting, too. I dwelled on that for a moment to get mad enough to respond properly.
"You think this is easy? Fuck you. Why did that tack work and not any of the others? I don't know! Is that what you want to hear? Tanya is ridiculously, impossibly confusing and I challenge you to find anyone in the world who could have done a better job."
Taylor raised an eyebrow.
"Didn't you just remind me how great your power is at this sort of thing? How you can figure a person out in moments? Sure, she's had an eventful life, but you've had days to figure out how to help her."
"My power tells me how to hurt people," I growled, genuinely angry now. "That's what it does, that's what it's for. You get it? If I want to help someone, I have to put the pieces together myself. And--"
I stopped at the look in Taylor's eyes. I looked away. Fuck, why did I say that? And not ten minutes after I'd admitted to compulsively using my power on people I care about. Even Taylor's not enough of an idiot about this sort of thing to fail to connect two dots.
"Lisa..." she started, unsure of how to continue. I felt her hand on my back and shuddered at the unexpected contact. She pulled away.
"Why do you think you have bug powers, Taylor?" I asked after a long moment. "They're cruel jokes at our expense, every one of them."
I looked at her, at her dawning horror. She'd suspected, of course, but she'd gotten good at not thinking about it. Saying that was over the line but the pity was intolerable. I rubbed her back, as much to prove I could make myself do it as to comfort her, but it still seemed to help. I didn't tell her it would be alright because she'd insisted on honesty even when it hurt.
We sat in silence for a minute, not looking at each other. Finally, she started back in as though nothing had happened.
"Tanya is a kid who's had the most profoundly fucked up childhood I've ever heard of. She doesn't know any better. We do."
I startled and double checked the door. It was still closed. Tanya wouldn't stoop to pressing her ear to the door, but if she was going to show up at the worst possible moment, this was it. I hoped it was, anyway.
"You really can't say things like that. She does not appreciate people discounting her agency."
She stared at me for a moment.
"She's still down the hall, Lisa. The men are downstairs. Seriously, what happened? You're never this twitchy, not even when you should be."
Nothing happened, Taylor. You just lack the self-preservation instincts God gave a sea cucumber. But whatever, no harm in going over the bounty meeting at this point.
"... and that was the truth?"
"Notarin's power wouldn't have worked otherwise."
"Fuck, that's horrible."
"That was what Militia said, more or less. Tanya immediately decided it was a trick and told her to fuck off. I'm not certain if she straight up doesn't realize sympathy exists, doesn't believe it could ever apply to her, or if it's something about that incident in particular. Either way, don't make that mistake."
Taylor reluctantly nodded.
I'd saved Tanya's little flight test anecdote for last in hopes of distracting Taylor from the rest. So far so good. Time to take the initiative back.
"Look, I know this isn't good, but take a step back and consider how this all would have gone without us. Imagine Tanya in her 'infantilizing' dress proudly explaining to half the world how she gassed sixty people hiding in an Endbringer shelter. We are helping, even if it's not as easy as we'd like."
Taylor grimaced.
"Right, she wanted to seem harmless. How the hell did we get here from there?"
I dropped my head into my hands.
"Fuck if I know. I thought this was such an easy win. How do you lose the moral high ground to Nazis?"
She didn't have an answer for that.
"So... what now?" she asked.
Getting with the program, Taylor? Fucking finally. Though honestly the last thing I wanted to do at this point was dive into an involved planning session.
"Fact finding. Despite all this talking about it, I still don't know what actually happened. I think I can get the men to cough up some details."
She nodded and I started to get up. No, you know what? I didn't need to just let Taylor get away with this bullshit. I sat back down and glared.
"And you need to decide whether you're really committed to this project or not. I need a partner, not another draw on my attention and power."
Harsh? Definitely. Unfair? For sure. I knew she was hurting. And, hell, I'd deserved... some of that. But Taylor handled pain by channeling it into obsessive dedication, and I -- we -- needed that working for me and not against me. She couldn't run from her problems forever but I was a lot more concerned about the next two weeks.
She looked away. After a moment, she nodded. I squeezed her shoulder and prepared for the next conversation. At least it couldn't be as intense as this one, right?
I took a moment to observe the table before I approached. The men were still playing their card game, exchanging jabs in German. They'd found beer somewhere -- I was sure Taylor didn't keep any -- but none of them seemed drunk. Weiss was technically their commander, wasn't he? They all looked comfortable including him as one of the guys. Perhaps that made sense. The battalion was Tanya's much longer than it was his and he was in charge now because she said so. It'd be natural to just coast on the respect they had for her.
I really didn't understand their dynamic as well as I'd like. Focusing on Tanya had made sense: they did what she said, not the other way around. And ignoring them made it somewhat less likely Tanya would decide I was trying to suborn them when I annoyed her and she started looking for reasons to distrust me. (Not that she wouldn't concoct elaborate conspiracies out of whole cloth, but you do what you can.) But maybe it was time for that to change.
I hadn't taken Tanya's implication I'd be a full-fledged member of her team all that seriously when she'd made it. Maybe she thought her word mattered more than the years of combat and camaraderie the four of them had shared but I didn't. But if that was how she was starting to view me in truth, I should have some leeway to interact with them. And while understanding them might not be as useful as understanding Tanya, it should be much easier.
Of course, I didn't actually have any power to spare for that at the moment. Fortunately, this shouldn't be too complicated. I walked up to the table.
"Hey guys. I'm trying to work out how much info postcogs and other Thinkers will be able to get from the aftermath of the Chosen fight, but the whole thing is pretty confusing from Tanya's perspective." That was a safe bet. If she'd tried to talk at all she'd have been right in the middle of them when the fight started. "Mind showing me your recordings? Of the whole encounter, ideally."
They all stopped their game and looked at me. Koenig turned his chair and stared. I shivered.
Each of them had taken on some of Tanya's characteristics. Or, less euphemistically, Tanya had hammered them into forms she found more pleasing. Weiss was meticulous and polite. Granz was clever and unpredictable. And Koenig? Tanya turned to him when she wanted someone shot. They were all dangerous, to be sure, but only he looked at people the way she did. Like you were an object, a fancy stimulus-response machine, a puzzle to figure out what input will produce the desired output. If you were lucky. An obstacle to remove if you were not.
Like he was looking at me now.
"Piss off."
I pissed--
"Wait," Weiss called.
I turned back, a few steps further away. It didn't feel like enough, but the other side of the room wouldn't either. They were ignoring me for the moment, involved in a quiet argument in German. They'd known I was lying, clearly. About having seen Tanya's copy? Probably. What happened there to leave them so certain?
My power could translate -- it was pretty cheap, even, provided I'd flicked through some grammar and vocabulary references at some point -- but I ultimately decided against it, and not just because I was running low. Koenig had been willing to let me walk away and Weiss hadn't sounded too angry, so I wasn't in immediate danger. The longer they thought they could hide information from me this way the better, and the easiest way to pretend I couldn't understand was to in fact not understand. I could always ask my power for the translation later.
Weiss won the argument, of course. Well, maybe it wasn't a foregone conclusion if I was reading the situation right. His authority derived from Tanya. Would it apply when he acted against her wishes? Which, uh, was a pretty big step. She allowed her favorites a pretty long leash, but there was a limit. What the hell happened?
They'd all gone back to staring at me, but it was clear the others were waiting on Weiss, eyes calculating.
"Why do you want to see it?" he asked after a few uncomfortable moments. "The truth."
I dropped my eyes in shame. Well, do or die time. What's going on here, Power?
Worried, Defensive. New internal tensions and defiance of authority indicate concerns over leadership. Likely--
Huh. Only now realizing that Tanya was batshit insane? Unlikely. Doubt they were having moral qualms over a few dozen murders, either. They'd done worse. Add in their certainty Tanya hadn't shown me the recording? That implied... a bigger problem than I'd been thinking. Well, the right approach was clear at least.
"I can't help if I don't know what happened."
"That's why, then? Helpfulness?" He didn't sound convinced.
"You were listening in on the meeting, right? We're publicly associated now. Your success is my success. Your failure, likewise."
He nodded after a moment.
"No more lies."
To him, presumably. I doubted he wanted me to share this conversation with Tanya. But the fact that every last person in the world is a hypocrite isn't news to me. I nodded.
"Is there really no way back to our world?"
I blinked.
"Nothing's impossible, but it's an extremely rare effect. I wouldn't even know where to start looking. Dodge from Toybox, maybe? Though--"
"You won't find one."
"Probably not, no."
"Not probably. You will not find one."
Oh. Bold of him to put conditions on receiving my help. But if he thought I was desperate enough to-- she wouldn't expect me to come, would she? Fuck, who am I kidding? She absolutely would.
"Got it."
He nodded and pulled out a chair for me.
I double checked the fly on my sleeve -- Taylor would have it buzz if Tanya started moving this way -- and sat down.
...
"--debasement? Look in the mirror!"
Tanya's voice emerged from the air. Weiss's view wasn't great -- the magic telescope thing made up for the altitude, but I couldn't really make out anyone's expression from above and the constant irregular motion certainly didn't help -- but the audio was clear. Piped in from Tanya's orb, presumably.
She really was quite the orator. Not the best I'd ever seen or anything -- probably not even as good as Kaiser had been, and he'd only really been good for a cape -- but far better than she had any right to be. Well, I could see how it might have happened. Before she learned magic persuasion would have been her only real means to exercise control over her life, which I was confident had always been a top priority for her. She'd set out to master it in blissful ignorance of just how poorly suited she was to it, and the result was... this.
She had the technical aspects down, naturally. Logos and ethos, too, though of course the latter owed less to her oratory than to her kill count. Pathos, though?
"--give you till sundown."
Well, there was definitely pathos. It was... Well, it was like a kid with a gun. Any other kid. Powerful, maybe, but she barely had a clue what she was doing with it. She made a strong impression, for sure. Just not always the one she had in mind.
"--expect you to do something stupid and give me an excuse to kill you. Honestly, my preference was to simply have the lot of you executed as looters and bandits. Questions--"
I winced. Maybe this wasn't usable, even before the killing started.
"--I am a fundamentally peaceful person driven to violence by necessity. I'm--"
Now, that was interesting. Not because it was insane, obviously, that was old news. Was that what she told herself? Had told herself? It was a surprisingly normal defense mechanism, really, but here it sounded more like habit than a strongly held belief. In the time I'd known her, she'd sometimes pretended to want to avoid violence and sometimes... not. I'd vaguely theorized that the inconsistency came down to some obscure principle that only made sense to her, but if it was a more recent development...
Yeah, I could see it. Major Degurechaff, commander of the vaunted 203rd, could pretend (to herself) to hate violence to her heart's content because she really didn't have much of a choice, at least so long as she also insisted on pretending (to everyone else) to be the perfect little jingoist soldier. Lieutenant Colonel Degurechaff, on the other hand, had a whole Kampfgruppe to command and could easily justify leading from the rear. Hell, maybe that was why she pursued the promotion in the first place, working hard to get something she didn't even want. Maybe she got a bit restless and twitchy without her fix, but she was comparatively stable then and her inhuman willpower was well established.
Then Visha bit it while she was playing officer.
A few more details clicked into place. The occasional bursts of overconfidence standing out against her normal paranoia. The way her moments of insecurity focused on everything but fighting. Her absolute insistence on always putting herself in the most dangerous positions. It all stood out because it was new. Something I'd probably have realized sooner if I'd paid more attention to the men, but oh well. How many of the contradictions in her character had propped up the Tanya-of-two-weeks-ago and how many were symptoms of its collapse?
Then came the duel, wherein Tanya decided the best way to persuade the Chosen attacking her was a good idea was torturing a Brute 7 to death by staring at him. I sighed.
"You're not Manton limited?" I asked as the scene dragged on. At Weiss's blank look, I continued. "The Manton Effect refers to the tendency of powers to include protections from their effects. The most common one is limiting the application to exclusively living things or the reverse, so a telekinetic has to throw things at you instead of just pinching your arteries. Not ringing any bells?"
He shook his head, frowning. I suppose I hadn't really expected the normal rules to apply to magic, but that raised some questions.
"But your power works on both people and objects?" he asked before I could start.
I shook my head.
"My power works on information. It doesn't do anything directly to anyone but me. Which is another common limit, by the way: powers that work on people tend to only work on the user or on everyone but the user."
"Ah." He nodded in recognition. "Mental spells can only be cast on oneself."
Huh. The possibility of getting in on that mental acceleration hadn't even occurred to me. Oh well. Though, damn, that also meant no analgesic formula... Probably wouldn't have worked, anyway. Nothing else does.
But, by implication, physical effects aren't limited. You could boil your own blood as easily as anyone else's? Well, I suppose that's why they train mages. It's something, anyway.
"Not everyone is Manton limited, just to be clear. Narwhal can split you in half from fifty feet with no warning. If you're not Manton limited, why don't you do things like that?"
He shrugged.
"Moving manna on its own is slow. With a few minutes to work a mage can do that"-- he nodded to the illusion --"but it only takes a few seconds to attach a spell to a bullet and fire it. And mage shells block manna."
That was... well, he had a point. There weren't a ton of people they could kill with this method they couldn't kill faster, easier, and from a longer range with an artillery spell. Tanya only bothered with it because she didn't want to tear the crowd apart with shrapnel, I think. Though given how it turned out that might have saved her some time. Still...
"If this gets out, it's going to be a big deal. Non-Manton limited capes are scary and it's not obvious from this recording that there are other limits in play." I paused, considering. "Well, maybe not that big a deal. Not far up to go from demolishing the Nine."
He gave me a level look.
"I don't see how it would get out."
I shrugged.
"Just saying."
I glanced back at the illusion. Tanya was starting to get annoyed no one else had volunteered for roasting but she wouldn't give up for a while yet.
"What happens if you try to use a mental spell on another person?"
He shrugged.
"How would you? There's no way to reach another's mind."
What?
"You can affect the rest of the body but not the brain? Why?"
He frowned.
"Not the brain, the mind." He glanced at Koenig. "Am I using the right word?" They shared a brief exchange in German. "Ah, the better word in Albish might be 'soul.'"
What.
Observing my expression, he shrugged.
"If you want to understand the theory you'll have to talk to the Colonel." Not only did he not look the slightest bit embarrassed about admitting a kid half his age knew more about his job than he did, he didn't even seem to realize he should. The effects of long term exposure to Tanya, I guess.
"When you do, don't say 'soul.'" Koenig hastily advised.
Weiss turned to him, perplexed. That turned to irritation as he got the context in German. Koenig shrugged, nonchalant, and Weiss turned back to me.
"Excuse the Lieutenant, the word I was looking for definitely was not 'soul.' The Colonel... disapproves of superstition."
Huh. I mean, no way was she genuinely religious, but I'd have guessed she'd have pretended. Though maybe religion meant something different on their world. What did it have to do with magic? If--
"--know we agreed that fight would settle things, but--"
I looked back to the illusion.
"--that warrior spirit when he needed you?"
Oh. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, I'd still kind of expected she'd just wanted to cover up an embarrassing mispronunciation or something. This was... Well, it certainly could have been worse. Words can't express how fucked we'd have been if this had happened at the truce meeting. Or maybe not? I probably could have diverted her if I'd been there; I'd certainly have figured out where she was going long before she did. Actually, I had distracted her when her thoughts drifted that way at the meeting. Maybe I'd already--
Illusory Tanya barked out some German and the killing started.
I'd thought it would be over in an instant, a quick sequence of explosions turning the crowd into paste. But that wasn't what happened. Maybe they were worried about hitting Tanya? A single anemic explosion blew apart Fenja's torso while Tanya split Menja's skull with her bayonet. Weiss carved Stormtiger in half with a laser as he shot down to join Tanya in cutting down the normals. It got hard to follow after that.
Maybe if I'd seen a little less I could cling to a sense of unreality, treat it like some over-the-top grindhouse flick. But I'd killed eight clones in the past few days and watched maybe a hundred more die and I knew this was real. The whole thing was over in less than ten seconds and I could already tell they'd be replaying in my head for a good while. Weiss let the illusion fade and I took a couple moments to pull myself together.
"And the rest?" I asked. "That's the important part, but the more I know, the better."
"The rest?"
"When you..." Uh, there'd been about sixty people there, hadn't there? "You forgot to clear out the shelter." Noting his expression, I revised. "No, Tanya forgot to clear out the shelter. And you didn't remind her."
He shuffled a bit.
"I'm sure she had her reasons."
I raised an eyebrow. Really?
His expression firmed.
"After Operation Revolving Door broke the Republican Rhine Army Group we all thought the war was over. Millions captured in the greatest encirclement ever attempted. Imperial troops marching through Parisii. We performed the decapitation strike ourselves, turning a great army into so many milling thugs. We all thought the war was over... except the Colonel. She ordered a strike on the Republic Navy at Brest the day before the cease-fire went into effect. When the General Staff shot her down, she was inconsolable."
He paused, staring a hole through my head. Very dramatic, not that it was hard to figure out how the story ended. The war was still going on, so obviously it hadn't been over. Still, I decided to let him have his moment.
"Rumors spread. They said Rusted Silver loved battle more than the Fatherland, that she'd rather burn the whole world than face peace. They laughed at the little girl's flight of fancy. They whispered that the Front had broken her, like so many others. I'm ashamed to admit I had my own doubts."
"She was right, of course. That very day that snake de Lugo fled with the remaining Republican forces from Brest to establish a government in exile in Africa and continue the war from there. And it was only with that support that the Commonwealth dared enter the war, and only with those two fronts sapping our strength that the Federation felt secure in invading."
"And it was no general, not Zettour nor Rudersdorf nor Hans nor Romel who saw it. It was then Major Degurechaff. The Colonel simply sees further than you or me and you'd do well to remember that."
That's an impressive story and all, but do you really think that's what this is, Weiss? There was no point in asking; he wouldn't have brought me in if he didn't have doubts. I could work with that.