A Wizard In Alexandria's Court
Chapter Fifteen
by Skysaber
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Story Day Eleven, April 16th 2011, Saturday - Early Afternoon
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The Thunderbolt GreaseSlapper vaulted over a fire hydrant, trying to take the last corner sharper than the van painted as the Mystery Machine was able to, but Danger-Prone Daphne was earning her title that day as the van caught air bouncing up and over the curb inches from that hydrant, forcing the Thunderbolt GreaseSlapper to adjust its jump at the last second to where it sailed over the van's roof - as the only option she'd left other than hitting her.
Taking a jump that high put the legendary racer's landing too far out of position to make the turn as sharply as required to pull ahead of the van's manic driver. So Danger-Prone Daphne roared up to their corner of the Brockton airport's lot first of the duo who'd been racing there, whereupon a pair of race technicians (probably Empire thugs, but for this event who cared? At least this kept them off the streets, too busy to commit crimes) in uniform jackets led them to the places reserved for them in the starting lineup.
Seeing them parked, news copters who'd been following them peeled off to cover the event taking form around and over the airport.
"What I want to know is how you trained a kangal to say 'Rooby rooby roo!' during one short trip!" Jared declared as he and Lisa parked their vehicles in the first rank of the starting lineup and he came around to congratulate her.
"I will never reveal my secrets!" Lisa defied him playfully, a smile on her lips.
Jared shared a grin with her, absently fitting her closely into his side, his arm around her waist, holding each other closely as they stood looking out over the track together, while other newly arrived cars and trucks filled in the positions behind them.
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Taylor was dressed in a classic race car driver's costume, the three-layer jumpsuit and helmet combination that were meant to give some minor protection from injuries such as might happen during a race. Both were in white, with a single pair of red and blue stripes down each side going from collar to ankle, although she was wearing a close-faced helmet with a reflective visor rather than the open-faced version from the movies.
Taylor had practically fainted when Jared had asked her to be the Love Bug for this race.
Car 53.
A Volkswagon bug done primarily in white with a single pair of red and blue stripes over the top from the hood going all of the way back to the tailpipe, and the number 53 on the front and doors. She didn't know how many movies were made about the supposedly self-aware little vehicle.
She did know that she was in love, and her power was bugs.
What could he be doing by asking her to be the Love Bug other than acknowledging that?
And if he was acknowledging that... did that not mean he was returning it? What else could all of those hugs and gestures of affection mean? He had to be telling her he loved her back, right?
What else could it be?
Taylor, like most teenage girls, was intensely interested in relationships - specifically hers, but really any would do, they were all fascinating. She could, like most her age, go on for hours over whether this student liked that one. She'd done it before, back before Emma betrayed her. So although she'd been feeling the lack of those conversations (and doing it with Lisa was no fun, as instead of endless 'suppose' and 'well maybe...' arguments, she'd just straight out give you the answer, then smile when that annoyed you - while doing it with Rachel was almost worse, as she held a simplistic view that could almost be summarized as "If you are mating, mate." Both girls took all the fun out of those conversations) the mere fact that she was out of practice with those 'giggling in a corner' discussions did not mean that she was ignorant, or lacked interest.
She did not know if it was hormones, or what, but she logged everything she could think of in regards to her not-so-secret crush, and did daily, sometimes hourly, reviews of that information.
All of the while coming back to the same conclusion: He *liked* her!
Partly, that was so unbelievable, that someone so confident, so accomplished, so successful and admirable and heroic in every way thought that she had merit, that she had to do those self-examinations for fear that she was somehow fooling herself. On another level, she kept doing them because they Felt. So. GOOD!
So she found herself doing the relationship calculus over and over to not only check herself for errors, but because it was FUN to come to the same conclusions time after time!
The boy she was interested in not only hung out with her, not only was willing to meet her father - but to declare they were in a (somewhat more serious than it actually was) relationship the first time they'd met! THEN to not back down when her dad had half his friends from the Dockworkers Union at their house cleaning guns?
As if Emma would EVER have a boyfriend willing to do that? Hah!
And he stood up for her! Not just against her dad's unwillingness to accept she had a boyfriend, but against Emma. Jared had faced down Emma's Winslow crowd, trio plus hangers-on, in their entirety and not backed down an inch!
Then, when they'd gotten violent? He'd *BEATEN* them!
One man against twenty, and it was *her* boyfriend who came out on top! Who casually walked away after threatening the beaten crowd that they'd better not have this conversation again.
Taylor was already considering baby names for their children by that point - but then things just kept Getting! BETTER!
One man had taken a personal interest in her life, and by doing so turned it around from a hellish existence she could barely endure another day of, transforming it so completely, in so short a time, giving her friends and everything she'd ever wanted that it honestly confused her sometimes whether she was awake, since it seemed like she had to be dreaming.
Though at this point, Taylor silently acknowledged that if she was dreaming she never wanted to wake up!
And it felt like a dream. She'd danced through schools and crowded hallways restoring life to students and faculty the world had already accepted as dead. Threads on PHO covering those reached into hundreds of pages of speculation, and she'd read every word and watched every accompanying video. Seeing *herself* as the hottest topic of conversation on PHO was such a thrill! It seemed the entire world was on fire speculating about how awesome they were, and to the attention and affection-starved girl, it was the greatest relief to feast upon this new source of validation.
She knew now that her life had not been destroyed by those high school bullies who, Lisa had admitted now she saw that danger as passed, had nearly driven Taylor to suicide.
And that wasn't even everything. Taylor had assisted in the take down of one of the gangs. Oni Lee had once been a rampaging force of destruction, but now that threat was ended. Never more would the citizens of Brockton worry about the teleporting suicide bomber with the exploding clones. He'd done his last suicide bombing!
Taylor had *been there* when Jared had just casually swatted down that gang's bomb tinker who had been terrorizing the city!
Lung had first been neutralized by Regent, and *she*! Lowly little Taylor Hebert, had been in on that! She'd provided scouting and reconnaissance support on those operations from the beginning! Of course, now even the Empire was getting in on that, but she had been an active participant from the start!
Jared himself had called her a reconnaissance cape, giving her a role to fill that she could live up to, even excel at! Then he'd admitted that they could not have pulled off those operations without her. She was IMPORTANT! He'd even given her credit for a major strike against that gang's critical infrastructure by stealing all of their cash! A strike they had compounded, by then blaming it on Shadow Stalker.
For the first time during Taylor's lifetime, life in the bay seemed to be actively getting better. Vista had taken on Lung and defeated him, as had Glory Girl, and before either of those they'd even had a visit by Alexandria!
The bay was getting better! It was *improving!* And hope seemed to be cropping up everywhere, in shy and tentative little clusters, as at last some of their perennial problems started to be cleared away!
Jared had fought for her. Not just against her trio of bullies, but against Vista. He'd faced down against Victor of the Empire Eighty Eight and not only survived, but worked that gang deeper into a web that he assured her would destroy them - and she believed him!
Jared had Brought Back The Dead! NOBODY did that! Not in the entire history of parahumans had anyone made that claim, and yet her boyfriend had not only done that, she'd been *present* when he'd made good on that promise!
Vista was on their team now because he'd both killed her, and restored her to life. So now they had one of the greatest heroines of the bay on their little team - and someone that Taylor was rapidly becoming close friends with.
And not only that (as if that was not enough) her boyfriend had already promised her that her mom was going to be raised too.
As much time crying, as much agony she had suffered over her mother's loss... she felt now like that was all about to be refunded, like any moment now all of that pain, all of that grief was going to be not only gone, but repaid somehow with a full measure of happiness.
She could hardly wait.
There was a paper calendar in Taylor's room with her upcoming sixteenth birthday circled in red, and once he'd raised her mother, Taylor had promised herself she was not only going to get her mom's permission to marry him, but they were going to spend mother and daughter bonding time planning out her wedding!
Oh, and they would probably end up holding the actual ceremony in one of those Muslim countries that allowed one man to take several wives, because Taylor knew her limits, and short of actual fights to the death, there was no way she was keeping Lisa nor Rachel from marrying this boy too.
Oh well, they say that sharing is caring, after all. She did not suppose it would be too different from what they had now, all sharing the same house and spending time together, except there would be sex and babies involved.
Was Sheridon a good baby name? She couldn't tell. She'd have to ask her mother once they got her back.
She pulled her little bug up into the starting lineup, quietly giggling to herself as she did so - as one of the major signs of hope cropping up in the bay was Cape Ball, and now this race!
If those were not a sign that things were coming out that were different than what had come before, what was?
They had crowds coming out to see these events. There was talk online of having events like these regularly. One group in Austin Texas was already trying to organize a new Cape Ball event... although the villain whose head they were attempting to use as the ball was reluctant. Who could've guessed?
Eh, they'd probably have to come out with an alternate set of rules for when they could not find the head of a regenerating villain to use as the ball. But whatever.
Jared had already raised the idea of taking their own group, setting them up with new costumes and identities as the Pink Panthers, and participating in Cape Ball games in other cities to help it get off the ground, and they were considering it.
Taylor was not the sportiest girl in existence, but even she felt interested.
She was, after all, Jared's Love Bug.
And wasn't that little shiver that passed through her body over that thought the single most delicious feeling ever?
Some would suspect Master powers could be involved. After all, how many boys could legitimately get several girls to be interested in them at once? But she'd had plenty of doubts, concerns and misgivings along the way, they'd just all been resolved the normal way, by talking, and the things he'd done. She'd even gone over some of her mom's old books on relationship dynamics, and he was doing the type of things that made normal relationships work. It wasn't something she was making up in her head to justify her liking him, he was actually that nice.
And how many nice people did she know, anyway? He was the only one. So in that context it was not unusual at all for several girls her age to want him. How many successful football players or rich kids had mobs of girls after them? How many pretty girls had tons of admirers among the boys?
Having attractive qualities made one attractive. That's all.
But there were plenty of football players and boys from rich families around. How many kind ones did she know?
Exactly one.
Stated that way, it was no wonder the girls of Jared's little social group were all unwilling to give up on him. That they all acknowledged the others as being unwilling to give up on their share of him, and acknowledging that no one would win if they fought over him, was unusual but not that odd. Sure, it was easy to think so in an age when most of the population lived in countries where polygamy was illegal. But she knew enough to be aware that the modern situation was actually an outlier, a comparatively recent statistical anomaly.
Taylor's mom had been an English professor, but classic literature came with knowing a bunch of history, so she knew for almost all of written human existence the vast majority of humans had lived in polygamous societies. Culturally, men had always been the ones to have borne the brunt of any fighting - and thus they had always been the ones to do most of the dying. Since large numbers of young men died in war, polygamy was how they addressed the gender imbalance. Plural marriage had helped protect the welfare of widows and reduced the number of unwed, and thus unprovided-for-women, who would otherwise have starved to death.
Modern machinery and automation provided easy work and desk jobs for as many as wanted them now. But those had not existed back then, when sheer muscles had provided the only 'engine' there was.
Back in pre-industrial times having 'a provider' in the household was the single most important thing in a woman's life, because most professions involved backbreaking work their bodies were ill-suited for - and without antibiotics or birth control, prostitution was the last resort of the destitute and the desperate, to be avoided at all costs if you had any choice in the matter.
And the industrial revolution was only a touch over two hundred years old. A mere blip on human history.
Taylor considered herself a practical girl, who acknowledged that she lived in a world where lots of rules were changing. When her mother had been a girl, the world had been a different place, a primarily peaceful one where you often heard of little wars in distant lands, or crime statistics, but they never affected you. And that had been true for generations. So they did not need social conventions based on compensating for the large numbers of men who typically died fighting whenever there were conflicts.
However, she acknowledged that world her mother grew up in was completely unlike the one Taylor lived in now, where most of the world's governments were crippled and broken or just plain gone, large scale social welfare programs had collapsed completely (Taylor was one of the few of her generation who even knew that UN programs to feed the poor in Africa had even existed, once), and combat was constant and everywhere, from the simmering conflicts and tribal wars covering most of the globe, to the cape battles occurring in every town.
While they did not have large wars, there wasn't any place you could call peaceful, either. Armed conflict was everywhere. And men, as always, had stepped up and taken on most of the duty of fighting.
And whether they fought as gang members, police, soldiers, or PRT troopers, where there was fighting there was also a lot of dying.
So in a world where bread was cheap, nearly everyone could have bread. And in a world where men were plentiful, nearly every woman could have their own if they wanted one. But in her current one, the world she actually lived in, no one could guarantee every woman would have access to a man... or bread, come to think of it.
Lots of women were going without one, or both, of those.
Taylor felt SOO lucky that she did not have to be among them! Not anymore, at least. Now it was like she'd won the lottery of life, as she not only had a man, she had a GOOD one! One who was an excellent provider, kind - and not nearly as likely to die in conflict as some others.
She'd seen him fight, and he was effective. He also did not seek it out just to prop up his own opinion of himself.
So it wasn't that weird that other girls appreciated those same qualities and wanted their own share of him. She might have resented that, but as a group they were more powerful, and thus safer, than any of them were alone - and she'd prefer if they ALL made it through!
Taylor had lived on the other side of that situation. She'd had enough of uncertainty and fear over the years of bullying from Emma, and wasn't willing to go back to that without giving the fight of her life to prevent it, first!
Just as Taylor was celebrating in her heart over how good her current situation was, a very familiar Camaro pulled up to the starting line alongside of her, drawing her out of her introspection - and as she glanced over and saw Rune at the controls!
What was an Empire cape doing driving HER car?
Had she stolen it?
Taylor's scouting power soon had her answer, on finding and reading the ownership papers in the glove box.
Why had her DAD sold HER car to RUNE, of all people?!
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Regent, having rebranded under the name of BlackJack, had been working as a back-alley doctor and unlicensed surgeon ever since they'd faked the demise of his Regent ID.
Looking back, he still could not believe how easy making the shift had been. Their boss, who he'd learned from Lisa went under the cape name of Skysaber, had put him in a chair Lisa said he'd bought from Toybox, and a little while later the former Regent had been standing up with an array of medical skills that were frankly dizzying!
Anatomy, Biology, Chemistry, Diagnostics, General Medicine, Pharmacology, Surgery... There was not a specialist in the world in any of those fields that he did not make look like a child playing doctor, by comparison.
Superpowers were like that. They were a cheat code, just like a Brute made the best weightlifter look like a toddler.
Alec did not have to buy any drugs from Medhall, as he could easily synthesize his own. Of course, he still bought some of what he used anyway, just to give them the confidence that they'd been getting their share, a cut of the proceeds of his little back-alley business, and so stay more interested in covering for him, extending that bit of gentle protection from the law that their influence granted, rather than turning him in as a competitor.
Speaking of not being competition, Blackjack had already begun working on improving those drugs he bought from Medhall, as they had far too many side effects, and were too dangerous overall. Corporations like Medhall used to spend billions per year on researching new drugs, most of which they could not afford to do anymore. However Alec, as Blackjack, could do it in half the time and for one-tenth the price - and the only reason it wasn't much faster and much, much cheaper was because of the time it took for testing, and because there were still a few important specialties Alec did not have, so they'd still have to hire experts on. But that second was the only thing stopping him from cutting the costs in time and money by ten again.
So when his boss had dropped the offer of another session in the skill training chair in return for a favor, Alec had jumped on it.
With the pharmaceutical market as stagnant as it was, most of the new drugs they did get were formulas imported from Earth Aleph. Aside from that, all they had were some crumbs dropped from off the table of the PRT, invented by some Tinker somewhere. Not everything invented by Tinkers was impossible to reproduce, just almost all of it.
So tinkertech drugs that were successful in going mainstream were rare. Very, very rare.
And that just meant more demand for Blackjack's services! He'd already begun working with Lisa, who had acquired business skills such that he'd outsourced all of the non-medical aspects of running his back alley chop shop to her, on devising a plan for approaching Medhall on allowing them to produce new drugs that he would invent and patent.
If that worked, he was going to be richer than Gill Bates, most likely. Plus, he could even claim to be doing it out of a desire to help mankind, not just because he wanted to be filthy, stinking rich!
That thought stopped Alec cold, reasoning out that not that long ago, getting rich truly would have been the goal, the helping people part a mere excuse, a sideshow to that at best. But now... now it was the reverse, wasn't it?
Heaven. Hell. Those used to be just words, something he'd felt certain that he could safely ignore as unimportant.
Now? Now he'd seen someone raised from the dead. Someone who Lisa said had remembered experiences carried back from the other side, things that Lisa's power had confirmed as genuine.
That put rather a different spin on things, didn't it?
Alec was still reevaluating his life. That was not a trivial thing to do. Certain base assumptions had been proven faulty, so everything he thought he knew had to be reexamined, and that was taking some time, as it was recursive, one thing changed moving another until it was like an avalanche, each change affecting his thoughts, his personality, even his actions.
Who was he going to be at the end? He did not even know, at this point.
Regent was dead, long live... who?
Alec was still working on that.
At the moment, however, that was not the question at the forefront of his mind. He'd already worked out a costume for Blackjack that he'd been using, and happy with. It used a Michael Jackson costume and wig as the base, with a labcoat and doctor cosplay elements added. It did not sound that good, but it worked out great for what a cape costume was actually for - concealing the wearer's identity. A surgical mask and sunglasses concealed most of his face, except for a jagged scar that it looked like he was trying, yet failing, to fully conceal.
A deliberate bit of misdirection, applied because Lisa had warned him that the supervillain Coil was not respecting the Unwritten Rules about leaving a cape's civilian ID alone. So, though he would not have bothered ordinarily, that kind of deception was now called for.
That kind of 'mistake', 'failing' to hide a distinctive mark, was usually the first thing a potential investigator would seize on.
Anyone looking for Blackjack's civilian ID would go first looking for someone with that scar. But his was fake, applied via makeup. Alec had even picked a kind of injury that was not all that uncommon, as scars go, so there were plenty of people with it to find. One of the things the ABB did on their official initiations was to get the future gang-goon to ambush some innocent and carve their face up. Cutting off the victim's nose was one of the more popular options among ABB recruits. So, by the laws of natural consequence, Brockton Bay Emergency Room Surgeons had become somewhat adept at sewing noses back on - but it was the sort of procedure that often left distinctive scarring, among those whom Panacea had not seen to directly, anyway.
And she couldn't see to everyone, there just wasn't time.
His fake scars were of that type. There were probably a couple of hundred people in Brockton Bay who had similar, providing plenty of false trails for all potential investigators to get lost down.
The endless rabbit trails of people trying to conceal their real IDs while running around in costumes amused him.
And Alec *was* amused - that was something that blew him away, and he was still getting used to.
Emotions had been rare for him, before. Feeling any emotions at all had been abnormal, then.
Alec himself would have compared his former state to being a quadriplegic on a respirator, emotionally speaking. He lived, but not much else. When your father was Heartbreaker, an incredibly cruel and selfish supervillain whose predatory behavior was responsible for reinforcing (if not causing!) much of the hatred and fear human-affecting Master-style capes were held in, and who had freely used his emotion manipulation abilities to torment his many children to keep them under his control, growing up normal was not an option.
Growing up at all had been difficult enough. Alec himself had lost count of how many of his siblings and half-siblings had perished under their father's experiments with trying to force them to all trigger with powers.
But a man's choices defined them, and Alec, born Jean-Paul Vasil, had chosen to get out of there, change both his name as well as his cape name (from Hijack to Regent), and lay low for a while, content to have escaped the family that tried to this day to reclaim him.
So the death of Regent had not been the first time that the former Jean-Paul had rebranded and changed who he was, or his cape life.
No, but this time the former Regent had also undergone a shift far more fundamental than just switching out names and costumes, because he'd been hired to attend a church service, of all things, and his payment had come in the form of a little pink vial that had fundamentally changed his entire universe.
He compared it to being a quadriplegic on a respirator, only to put it in terms people could visualize when he then asked them to picture that same person leaping up out of bed and dancing, no longer needing artificial support at all.
It may not be an exact comparison, but it gave an idea of the scope and scale of the change.
Suffice it to say, Alec did not think it an exaggeration at all when he said it had fundamentally changed his entire universe, because his mind, his thoughts, his thinking... his very Being! was nothing like what he had lived before. His very lens for viewing the universe had been altered in so great and fundamental a way that nothing was the same anymore.
Heart's Ease. So simple a name, yet it had promised to repair all emotional damage, and Regent knew that he had been damaged - a lot! By what his father and siblings had done to him while growing up. So, intellectually speaking, he had decided that repairing that damage must be a good thing and had drunk the vial.
It was lucky he'd chosen to do so in his new hideout, because he'd then spent most of a day knocked for a loop, effectively stoned out of his gourd while his mind and spirit healed themselves.
He'd woken up feeling great!
Regent had never felt anything. The physical sensations of pleasure, yes, but emotions? Not hardly. But he'd woken up feeling legitimately good, happy, content, as well as satisfied.
He now fondly recalled an old movie, the original Wizard of Oz where they'd filmed the first few scenes in black and white, then switched over to color when they'd reached the magical Wonderland.
This was not like that, but only because it was so much greater it was like contrasting a firecracker to a volcano!
Now Alec had expected to be spending months overcoming the trauma, or learning how to do emotions again, like a guy who'd had surgery to fix his broken back going through physical therapy learning to walk again. But that magic potion just skipped all of that, and left him not only with the capacity to feel, but as comfortable with his emotions as any normal person.
Who knew that normal was so great a state?
Everyday, average, normal people had it so good, and they did not even realize it!
Alec had watched a comedy and nearly wet himself laughing. Nobody laughed over 'I Love Lucy' episodes anymore! It was something lame that he'd thought might be safe to start out on, and yet he'd nearly choked, unable to hear half of the jokes over his own laughter.
He was almost afraid to watch real comedy... but at that same time, was secretly looking forward to it.
He had already purchased a bootleg copy of every 'I Love Lucy' episode ever made, and bought up other comedies to a considerable collection, as well, and was very much looking forward to enjoying them. But he had to pace himself, as this laughter was serious business.
He could not believe that other people did not appreciate humor better, when it felt like this!
Which explained why, in his day job as a back-alley doctor Alec had been spending most of his startup time going out among cape groups through the local towns, as far south as Boston, telling folks about this great product, Heart's Ease, that Toybox now had available for sale.
Jared had bought his skill-programming machine with tons of those, and other, potions. So Blackjack felt it only right that the people who were most likely to need them at least heard about them; and since the web regularly got scrubbed of any advertisements for cape stuff (it was well known, and even infrequently admitted, that the government wanted to establish a monopoly over cape supplies and support, so they could get more capes working for them), he had chosen to inform people directly while establishing his own reputation as an off-the-books surgeon, and all-purpose doctor.
His skills were easy enough to prove in that capacity, and the effectiveness of the potion? Even easier! A few free samples handed out and Heart's Ease was now among Toybox' top selling items.
The former Regent felt it only proper that, since such a miraculous cure existed, the people actually knew about it. Besides, it earned him a ton of goodwill among the local cape communities.
Well, gangs, actually. But that was all part and parcel of proving his usefulness as a neutral back alley physician.
It did not hurt that he was also able to offer round the clock service.
Alec did not mind, as he only had to work a six hour shift each day, with each of the body doubles his boss made him doing likewise, in order to appear to be available all day long. Sure, six hours was longer duty, and far more regular, than most villains had to put in. But for a doctor? That was nothing.
He did not even have to be on-call!
It was also one of those rabbit-trails, establishing an important difference between the identities of the now 'deceased' Regent, and the new doctor Blackjack. Because say what you like about conspiracy theorists, there were people out there trying to keep secrets, and there were other people suspicious of those first people who were trying to notice and figure out the truth anyway - and it would not be the first time that a cape had tried to rebrand and pass himself off as another cape, only to get caught on that deception more or less immediately.
But by having Blackjack's office hours make it plain he did not need to sleep (there was a term for that, Noctis capes, a small but well-documented category, the only example of which locally being Miss Militia) that clearly had him using a power that was never demonstrated by the dearly departed Regent.
The biggest thing people checked for in determining if someone was a new cape or just rebranded was if their power was too similar to someone else's, typically a cape who had disappeared recently; just as one of the biggest things people looked for in medical care was constant availability. So by faking being a Noctis cape, a rare but frequently envied power, he accomplished two important things: One, establishing a visible difference in known powers between his former identity and his current one, and Two, preventing desperate people from tracking him down and breaking into his house, determined to wake him so they could force him to stitch their wounds up.
Because people would rouse you out of bed for medical care if they felt it was an emergency...
... and they nearly always felt it was an emergency.
To be fair, as a back alley surgeon, what Alec mostly dealt with was gangs and other criminals, the sort of people whose wounds demanded emergency room level service, but did not dare go to an actual hospital for fear of the suspicious nature of their wounds being reported, and waking up in handcuffs, or a cell.
One of the things Alec had been planning to ask his boss for was another four body doubles, as working every day of the week was a drag, and having another shift available would let him cut it down to only half a week.
Because six hours a day did not sound like much, until you started and realized just how exhausting offering emergency care was!
Three days on, three days off, sounded much more reasonable.
Especially since the ABB was currently desperate for doctors. The Empire Eighty Eight had somehow learned a startling amount of detail about their rival gang's inner workings, and since the Feds were in town anyway investigating Coil's kidnappings, the Empire had somehow leaked that info about the ABB to the government agents, allowing the legal authorities to take out their enemy for them.
So the Feds, the cops, even some National Guard troops, had made a clean sweep of most of the ABB's paid members, the core support and the leaders, which had left them without any support from their usual back alley doctors. Those people were in cells right now, awaiting trials, along with their lawyers, the people that owned businesses that did money laundering for the gang... Lung even had his own hairdresser that was currently occupying a cell.
Who'd have thought that gang leader was so vain?
So despite his short hours, Blackjack was feeling overworked. Some of the ABB's key people had escaped the net the lawful authorities had cast for them, but not many. Even Lung's vast prostitution ring was getting broken up, the Feds going in, overcoming the guards, and rescuing those girls, identifying them and in most cases returning them to their families. Ordinarily, the government would never have dared, as Lung would have made them pay dearly for even making an attempt at such a thing. But Lung wasn't available so much anymore, he was too busy losing fights each day - so much so that he was starting to become a joke!
Alec had bet three hundred bucks on Lung losing to Squealer sometime in the next week.
Mostly he'd done it as a joke. He was well off enough now he'd never miss it if he lost, but at a hundred-to-one odds he would not mind winning, either.
With gang fighting going on every day, the ABB never having had a healing cape of their own, and now their usual medical support rotting in cells with Lung not available to go rescue them, Blackjack was swamped. He could have a private clinic with a dozen doctors and not keep up with the flow of needy patients. This was made even worse by Panacea having been turned to glass. Her not being available to blunt the effects of the violence had left Brockton Bay's usual medical services in a crunch, so it was not just Blackjack feeling overwhelmed.
What made it worse for the ABB was they were soon going to run out of the ability to pay. They'd been robbed blind, both of cash and, rumor had it, their various bank accounts, both secret and not. Many of their most profitable businesses had been closed by the Feds, nor was Lung's hobby of threatening wealthy people for cash working so well right now, as he was too busy losing fights.
The gang did not even have their usual accountants working to set things right, as those men who'd normally have been smoothing things over were in jail cells right now.
Blackjack, and many other independant care providers, had quietly approached the Empire for protection. Because when the ABB ran out of the ability to pay, did not mean they would stop demanding his services. So arranging for a little protection in advance of that seemed wise.
And though the ABB kept fighting, they kept losing. So the Empire was currently viewed as the much stronger gang.
The loss of Oni Lee was really hurting the Yakuza-wannabe gang. Lung could not be everywhere, and nowadays whenever he appeared he soon had opposing capes descending upon him, leading to fights that increasingly Lung lost. So his value as a deterrent was over, and his worth as a heavy hitter being called into question, leaving their grunts on the ground more or less entirely without cape support.
Something that the Empire, with their wide roster of capes, was eagerly exploiting.
It was too early to call it over for the pan-Asian gang, they were large and still very powerful, but word was out they'd do nearly anything in order to recruit more capes, and soon.
Alec had heard from Brian, and his sister had managed to screw up the smuggling operation he'd set up in Louisiana by offending some of the local gangs down there. So he was looking to escape that heat, and was considering a return to Brockton Bay. The hilarious thing was, he did not even intend to contact Alec with this. No, the former leader of the Undersiders had contacted him in his ID as Blackjack, inquiring as to how difficult it would be to obtain cosmetic surgery to appear Asian.
Apparently the ABB was offering some very sweet deals, hoping to lure new capes in, and Brian's power to generate darkness over a broad area was very useful for shutting down most gang-scale fights, so quite valuable to them under their current circumstances.
Brian must be desperate if he was actually considering working for Lung, a cape who had previously tried to kill him.
But the antics of capes were odd at the best of times. Alec was able to appreciate the humor of that now, as he looked over his three body doubles, all arrayed before him, each in a different costume.
For this gig he had them all cosplaying as different villains from old racing cartoons.
First in line was Baron Otto Matic, one of the frequent recurring villains from the old Tom Slick cartoon - something that he had not known existed until Jared, his boss, had pointed them out, along with the alert that they would be cosplaying as the other characters, and the request for him to play the part of some almost painfully incompetent villains opposite them.
But that was alright, because now Alec could see the humor in it, not the least of which came from imagining the looks on the PRT's faces as they tried to figure out whether this was serious, or whether someone was yanking their chain.
Group triggers with shared themes did exist, after all. And one of the PRT's biggest recurring public relations problems was trying to keep new capes from taking on the names and themes of already known and copyrighted characters. Uber and Leet had, when that duo were first starting out, originally tried to take on the names and themes of Batman and Iron Man, after all. It was rumored that Leet still had that arc reactor somewhere.
But if anyone needed proof that lawyers still ruled the world, they could find it by contrasting how the PRT carried out their responsibilities, as on the one hand the PRT were meant to protect civilians from parahuman crimes, which occurred all of the time and were blatant, and on the other hand they had what was supposed to be a minor side duty to protect copyright holders from having capes infringe on those copyrights in setting up their cape IDs - at which they were nearly perfect.
So they could not protect banks or local businesses, but of the dozen or so guys worldwide who'd triggered with some form of eye lasers last year, not *one* of them got away with calling himself Cyclops.
Alec had no idea how the PRT kept such a tight lid over what capes in collapsed countries like Paraguay, who did not even have phones, were calling themselves.
But they did.
They could not keep your daughter from being kidnapped to fill an opening in one of Lung's brothels, nor could they keep most of the town from being extorted for protection money by one gang or another, or even keep villains they'd already captured from being rescued, but they could stop a villainous Tinker in the former Yugoslavia from calling himself Doctor Doom, and wearing a duplicate set of the iconic armor.
Priorities. Gotta love 'em.
Baron Otto Matic's outfit was all done in shades of purple, which amused him as that used to be Tattletale's thing, and consisted of a jacket, shirt, pants, and helmet, with black gloves and boots. The entire ensemble would not have been out of place on the racetrack in the 1920s. Only the full face mask with goggles was not a direct cosplay of the cartoon character, which amused him more.
Dick Dastardly's costume was mostly the same, only a different cut to the clothes, and some different colors, with red gloves and a red striped hat instead of the helmet with a spike on top.
Crusher, the henchman of Baron Otto Matic's, just wore purple work clothes with a stupid-looking rubber mask under a cheap disposable cape mask. It would not fool anyone into thinking that was his real face, but that was not the point.
Each of them had their faces fully concealed, which was the point.
Ridiculous. But that was all part of cape business. One of the hardest parts of the job lay in keeping one's identities straight and secret.
The former Regent, currently Blackjack, on hand to provide medical support for the race, watched as the two of his body doubles who would be racing, Baron Otto Matic and Dick Dastardly, each gave a villainous laugh and twirled the mustaches glued to the outside of their masks in the mirror before he opened the door in the abandoned garage's restroom and revealed the vehicles they would be using.
He had no idea if the characters they were cosplaying as were still under copyright or not, but he had a guess the PRT was going to pitch a fit either way.
"Gentle-villains, start your engines."
OoOoO
Regent was not the only one of Heartbreaker's children to try and escape from that dismal household.
Cherie Vasil, also known as Cherish, wayward daughter of Heartbreaker, aka Nikos Vasil, was first and foremost a survivor. Raised in an environment of hedonism and exploitation, she had been used and abused until, like her younger brother, Jean-Paul, she lacked emotional capacity to the point where some would call her a sociopath.
Like most children who had been severely abused, she had predictably developed what psychologists would identify as a rather extreme streak of ruthless pragmatism, where she would do or consider just about anything if that would help her survive.
This often led to such children becoming criminals of one sort or another, as they had never internalized the set of rules that others would term "Civilized behavior".
From their perspective, anything they did that contributed to their own survival was fair game, to put it bluntly.
Cherie's father, Heartbreaker, had endangered their family through reckless and petty behavior, recruiting movie stars and other high profile targets into his harem. That brought down attention on them, increased the cries and pressure for them to be 'dealt with'. Since there were capes out there who could destroy them, enough of that kind of pressure would end in results.
So she'd escaped him. Naturally, her exploitative father sent other members of the family after her to chase her down and bring her back, in this case two of her half-brothers, Guillaume and Nicholas, both human-affecting Master-style capes like her, like Hijack, and most of the rest of the family.
Guillaume could see through the eyes of anyone he touched, and with casual swipes and brushes disguised under normal interactions he could generally search an entire city in short order. While Nicholas could induce paralyzing levels of fear in his targets. Between them, they had everything they needed to detect and capture her, delivering her back to her father who could easily reprogram her so she could never even think of escaping him again.
The pair had already found her a few times, forcing her to pack up and run, escaping elsewhere to avoid them.
From Cherie's perspective, she had tried simple distance. That had not worked. She had tried disguises, hiding, and going to ground. Those had not worked either, as her brothers knew her as only family could, so could recognize her through any disguise she'd been able to put together, and she'd always had to use her own abilities to detect and manipulate emotions in order to get someone to serve as caretaker to her while she hid - and with enough coverage Guillaume would invariably find such a person and they would lead him to her.
Her brothers were too good at tracking for her to lose them that way.
Right now that "willing to do anything to survive" streak common to severely abused children everywhere was beginning to rear its ugly head and make itself known in Cherie's planning, as if neither simply running away nor hiding were options, then she would find some other way to lose her pursuers, as being taken back to her father after 'betraying' him meant personality death. Even if her body would survive, her emotions would be so rewired that she would not even recognize herself.
So steadily more risky, and even dangerous measures were being considered among Cherie's plans to break free.
Like in those movies where a pilot dives into some severely dangerous canyon, or asteroid field, in order to shake their pursuers, Cherie was basically plotting the same thing.
And if that did not work, she would go and find some powerful capes that she could control via their emotions, to use them as bodyguards.
Little on the New England seacoast was currently as dangerous as Brockton Bay, with all of those bomb explosions. Cherie figured that she could find out whatever Tinker was behind those bombs, then use them as her way to drive off her brothers.
Or, failing all else, to kill them; transform them into glass, or whatever.
Ruthless pragmatism was, well, ruthless.
But upon arriving in Brockton Bay, Cherie found the town in the midst of celebrating that bomb Tinker's demise. That had been a disappointment, to be sure, but not the end of the game, as Cherish's power was being able to sense emotions, to hear them like music, and do so over a city-wide scale, even identify people she knew through their familiar patterns. When close enough she even had the ability to alter their music to control what people felt.
While her power did not have the long-term effects of her father's, she had managed to figure out a few tricks.
So it was basically impossible for her not to notice, as she approached the city, that Brockton Bay was host to a large number of things that looked like people, but the music of their minds was the sound of gears and carefully tuned machinery, nothing like the wild flights of whimsy, bursts and trills common even among the most stern and pragmatic business types. No, there was nothing about these minds that was human. They might emulate the outward behaviors fairly well, but that was them running programs, not what came naturally.
Cherish was delighted!
This! This was the perfect threat to people like her family! While *she* could detect them, neither her father nor her half-brothers had anything like her sensing ability. So while she could detect and avoid them from range, those pursuing her could not. And when Cherish tried delicately to control one of them, that attempt not only failed, the not-a-person had turned immediately to glare at her and start to walk menacingly in her direction!
Cherish had immediately scampered out of there via an already-prepared escape vehicle, of course. But she had been forewarned and prepared. Should one of her brothers try their tricks on any of these not-people, they would not be so prepared.
This made Brockton Bay the perfect place for her to hide!
And whoever was making these not-people (and they were being made, not born. She could sense that), was still controlling them, as she could sense the coordination of their activities. They were like the bees of a hive, all working under the direction of a single queen. So this was better than the bomb Tinker! As whoever that person was, Cherish could track them down and see if she could use her influence on them.
Her family would never be able to get her, then!
OoOoO
Author's Notes:
So there is now a crocodile sneakily approaching us in the water as we swim.
Beta work by Dogbertcarroll