Read aloud to me alt Taylor

by Kahlil Johnson

Dnd

3. Mag3

"We don't really worry about whether your roof is going to leak or things like that. That's between you and the contractor, and since you did your own work... it's on you. Mostly all this is about whether the building is structurally sound and about safety."

Big Mike was a former dockworker now owner of a private permit service. His company managed the paperwork for homeowners building new houses or remodeling, taking a lot of the headaches out of the permitting process.

There were apparently a lot more rules and regulations when it came to home construction than I'd thought. The mayor had been nice about it, at least, not demanding that I knock it down and rebuild it the right way.

I agreed to add more lights to the tower for airplanes; it was a sensible precaution since the last thing I wanted was airplanes hitting my house.

Furthermore I agreed to allow building inspectors in to check for code violations. Apparently there were things I hadn't thought about when building my house, some of which seemed like good ideas. I still didn't have fire detectors for example, and I wasn't sure if the rail height on my stairs would be adequate to keep Dad from flying to his death in the middle of the night while he was going to the non-existent refrigerator looking for a snack.

The mayor assured me with utmost sincerity that the inspectors wouldn't be spies out to find things in my house to prosecute me for.

I assured him that I had nothing to hide (other than my gaudy throne); all my crimes had been committed out in public.

Still, I was suspicious of the PRT or possibly some supervillain using the opportunity to put bugs in my house or worse. Big Mike was a compromise. Not only did he know my father, but he knew every building inspector in town. He'd know if they tried to slip a ringer into the mix.

I'd talked to Dad about it, and he'd agreed, but that we'd only allow inspections while we were there. He'd use his powers to keep an eye on the whole process, and I'd follow up to see if they left any little metal bits that they shouldn't.

"I think you'll be fine structurally. Those pylons you put in are beyond what the code would ask for, and the mayor already agreed to give you a waiver for the building height and for not leaving enough clearance in the driveway."

I shrugged. I hadn't wanted the thing to fall over during the next big storm

"I can already see some problems they'll want to address," he said. "Your handrails on the stairs need to begin and end in the wall. The reason they do that is because if you have it open the way you do, purse straps and sleeves can get caught on it and cause a fall. There's been cases where firefighters went running up stairs and got fire hoses caught, pulling them down.""

I frowned. I could vaguely see why that would be a rule, although it seemed unlikely to be a problem in our house.

"You need carbon monoxide detectors and smoke alarms and they need to be properly placed. I've heard you like to tinker, and tinkers tend to have explosions so it's a good idea. Also, I've seen your dad try to cook, and I think you probably need twice as many as is required."

"Hey!" I heard Dad call out from the other room.

"Smoke alarms are how we know dinner's done, right?" I asked, grinning.

He laughed. I'd seen Big Mike at family barbecues before everything had gone to hell after my mother's death. It was actually good to see him again.

"The doors and windows can't require a key to exit," he said. "I don't know exactly know what you've done with those front doors

"The big main doors aren't meant to be easy to open," I said. "There's smaller side doors that can be opened easily."

He looked at me skeptically.

"You may be able to blow a hole in any wall, but your Dad can't," he said. "If the other doors get blocked how will he get out?"

I scowled. I had a feeling that this was going to be a longer process than I thought.

Floating silently, I dropped down to the floor of the warehouse. There were cameras covering all the doorways and I could detect traps that would undoubtedly slow most intruders down. I could have tried to deactivate them, but you never knew what tricks tinkers had up their sleeves.

It was easier simply to remove part of the metal roof, slip inside and replace it.

The benefit of my flight ability was that it was utterly silent. I moved quietly over the floor through the darkness. The only source of light was a big screen television which was currently split into two screens.

I could see piles of clothes on furniture, with pizza boxes and chines food cartons on the table. It looked like neither of the men who lived here knew how to clean, or at least that neither of them cared about cleaning.

"We really need to edit that last part out, dude," I heard a voice say. "You remember how much flak we got for that Grand theft Auto thing."

"Yeah, I'm tired of arguing about it." the other voice said tiredly. "I just want to get this done and over with."

Two men were sitting on the couch. One was typing furiously away at a laptop while the other had an ice pack on his head.

"You shouldn't have had so much Jaegar last night," the first man said. "We've got to pay the bills."

"I could help you with that," I said, leaning over the couch.

The man with the ice pack flipped over the couch, landing in a defensive crouch. The other man simply turned his head and stared up at me.

Neither of them had masks.

"Dude! Not cool!" the man on the couch said. "You don't break into Capes houses and unmask them! What if we'd been naked or something."

"I'd have told you to put clothes on," I said dryly. "Do you spend a lot of time naked together?"

The two men glanced at each other for a moment, then shook their heads.

"Who are you and what are you doing here?" the man who was standing demanded. "If you don't start talking I'll be forced to defend myself."

"I'm Taylor Hebert," I said.

The color drained from both men's faces.

"Are you here to kill us?" the man on the couch asked.

"What? No! Why?"

"We didn't really mean that You Tube video we put up, or all those memes we made, or the jokes or that thing where we shipped you with Shadow Stalker."

"What?!?" I couldn't help but stare at the man on the couch. Was he an idiot?

"Or shipping you with Glory Girl, Panacea, Clockblocker and Armsmaster. Or saying that your favorite kind of music is heavy metal."

Maybe I should have been checking the PHO.

"Armsmaster? I'm a minor you twit!" I said.

"Or saying that your favorite sport is Squash," he continued.

I felt a headache coming on. "Maybe you'd better stop talking right now. I'd appreciate it if you would stop doing things like that, but that's not why I'm here."

"Why are you here?" the man standing asked.

"To ask you to build me a poison detector, or if you've already build one to let me use your lab."

The man on the couch sprang up suddenly. "A job? Why didn't you say so? That's something I haven't built yet. What's the pay?"

"I could not squish your heads like a grape for all the things you just told me," I said.

"Don't be like that!" the guy who couldn't stop talking said. "We've got expenses too. Parts, materials... wait, you're a Tinker too? That is such bullsh... unfair."

"Have you built one?" I asked.

"Yeah," the man who I decided was Leet said. "Early on."

I grimaced. I'd have preferred to leave this to them, but Leet's problem with devices exploding was well known.

"Take me to your lab then."

"You can't come here and just demand to use my lab!" he protested.

"Technically you two are villains. I could just drag you both to the PRT and then come back and use your lab, or I could just do what I'm here for and leave."

He froze and seemed to think for a moment. "Right. It's off to the lab then."

The lab was apparently in a basement area under the warehouse, a space that had apparently been created through the use of tinkertech since the walls looked like they'd been melted organically. The space was much larger than the warehouse up top, and I had to admire the setup.

"So what do you want to do?" he asked. "I can..."

Leet had materials stored in bins, and after a couple of minutes I was ready to begin work. My grandfather was already flashing instructions into my mind. I began levitating pieces, thankful that Leet kept his laboratory much better organized than his living space up above.

I was levitating multiple pieces at the same time, putting pieces together and using my power to weld pieces together. Leet was standing beside me, staring opened mouthed.

In all it took less than five minutes, in part because I re-purposed some of Leet's equipment that my grandfather assured me was commercially available and not some monstrosity that Leet had created that was likely to explode in my pocket.

The final product was pocket sized, but I would have to remember to use it every time I ate. Even once would be enough to get me poisoned.

"Damn... " Leet whistled. "That's not even tinkertech. I think anybody could replicate it given the plans. You can make tech that is replicable?"

I shrugged.

"I don't suppose you need a lab assistant."

I looked at him, surprised. "I thought you were dedicated to villainy, or You Tube or something."

"You could probably use some documentarians," he said, glancing back at his partner. "After all, the only thing most people know about you is the thing with the boat and the fact that you murdered a whole bunch of Nazis."

"I only killed a few of them," I said defensively. "I'm trying to be better about it."

"That's why you need a public relations department!" he said enthusiastically. "The other gangs have had people talking them up for years and a lot of people have followed them."

"I don't have a gang," I said automatically.

"And what do you think you are going to accomplish without one?" he asked. "You can't be everywhere, and that's going to limit your ability to accomplish your goals."

I stared at him. He'd been an idiot upstairs, but he was sounding a lot smarter now that he was in the lab. Was it part of his powers, or was he just situationally an idiot?

"Why would I want you guys?" I asked. "It's not like you guys have the best reputation. Wouldn't hooking up with you hurt my brand, or whatever you call it?"

He winced. "That's kind of cold."

Uber stepped forward. "The nice thing about being a cape with a secret identity is that you can change that identity whenever you need to. We've done undercover work for other capes before, and we've never been caught."

"Like who?" I asked.

If they were as stupid as they'd seen they'd blab, which would show I couldn't trust them with my secrets.

He shook his head and smiled. "Part of the deal is that we don't talk. We play clowns because that's what gets us clicks on the internet. We're really a lot more competent than we seen."

I looked at them both skeptically. I could believe that Uber was competent. He gave off that kind of vibe. A rumble of agreement from my grandfather confirmed that feeling.

It was Leet that I was worried more about.

"I don't have any money," I said. "I may have some soon, but it's not like I can afford you."

"You haven't tried pulling gold from the ocean?" Leet asked.

"That's just a dream," Uber said immediately. "Like, a thirteenth billion parts of gold per liter of seawater. She'd have to go through water a quarter mile on each side and a hundred feet deep to get one gram of gold."

"She's strong enough to do it," Leet argued. "Not counting rare earths, which are probably easier and more profitable now that I come to think about it."

"Or she could just sell some of those designs she has in her head, the ones that people can put together without a tinker to help them," Uber said firmly. "That would be a lot easier."

"It takes time to get a patent and to sell people on the ideas," Leet said. "By the time you go through lawyers and everything it could take months. Kind of like her lawsuit against the protectorate."

"How did you know about that?" I asked.

My lawyer had told me that the lawsuit would probably take months unless the PRT decided to settle suddenly and so I hadn't been worried about it. It had never really been about the money anyway; it had been more about spitting in the eye of the Protectorate, and making it politically difficult for them to attack me, either in the media or in person.

"Who doesn't?" Leet snorted. "It's on the Internet."

"And does the Internet know the details?" I asked.

"A lot of speculation," he said. "Something about bullying maybe... it's pretty vague. Most of the information everyone has comes from Void Cowboy, but he's pretty unreliable so everybody takes it with a grain of salt."

Greg.

I scowled. He'd tried to get me to look at some of his posts, and I'd found them either inane or offensive. He was like these guys without the sense of self preservation.

"What else do you know?" I asked.

"The splinter factions of the Empire consider you Enemy number one. They think you are some kind of Jewish Hell Queen out to kill them all, and so several of the larger groups have offered bounties on your head. They're calling Capes in from out of town to take you down."

"Wow," I said. "Thanks for the warning."

"It's on the Internet," he said. "I'd have figured that you'd know almost as soon as I did."

"I don't spend all my time on the PHO," I said. "I'm too busy with other things."

"Like building a full scale Iron Throne right in the middle of your living room?" Leet asked. He looked overly enthusiastic.

"How did you know that?" I asked.

"One of your neighbors talked about it when he was complaining about your new Fortress of Doom," Leet said. "He didn't know what it was, but he described it well enough that anybody who knows anything would know what it was."

"Did you offer to work for me just so you could look at my throne?" I asked suspiciously.

Leet shrugged nonchalantly. "We take jobs all the time. Thinking we have ulterior motives is just a sign of paranoia."

I sighed. Part of me thought hiring these clowns was going to be a mistake. Another part of me thought that I might have a use for them.

Dinah had said that I formed a group, and having one twelve year old girl wasn't exactly the definition of a team.

"If you work for me, I'm the boss," I said. "And it's important that no one knows who you are. The last thing I need to be known for is working with villains."

"Like Bitch?" Leet asked.

I ignored him.

"I'm not sure I trust you guys to do propaganda," I said. "Although having you work as cameramen might not be the worst things. You could disguise your cameras, and people would think I was lifting them magnetically."

"You'll need some cash flow before you hire a real PR guy," Leet said. "Which is where the whole gold from the oceans thing comes in. There's two thousand times as much uranium in seawater as there is gold."

"I'm not mining uranium," I said firmly. Even though Scion had gotten rid of the nuclear weapons that didn't mean that people had forgotten how to make them.

Uber punched Leet in the shoulder. "Are you trying to get a kill order on all of us?"

"Magnesium then," he said. "A cubic kilometer of seawater contains a million tons of magnesium."

"Is it worth much?" I asked.

"About three thousand dollars a ton," he said.

I stared at him. So he was saying I could pull three billion dollars of metal from the ocean?

"The whole market is like seven million tons a year, so if you tried to sell that much you'd completely crash the market. Still, you should have no problems making money."

"Why'd you start with all that crap with the gold," Uber asked under his breath to Leet.

"Because it's gold!" Leet said. "From the ocean! That's way cooler than Manganese."

I was starting to see why these guys hadn't been particularly successful as villains. I realized that I was going to have to talk to my lawyer to see if he knew anything about mineral rights and who to sell the materials to.

1077

ShayneT

Apr 23, 2018

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Threadmarks 20. Pain

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ShayneT

Apr 25, 2018

#3,655

Checking everything I ate with the device was a pain. It was inconvenient and I was surprised to realize just how often I ate throughout the day. It was a sign maybe that I needed to cut back a little, and I found that I hated having to be this paranoid every time we had a pizza delivered.

I did an experiment and found that I could indeed pull metals from the ocean, even if it took a lot of water to do so. I even managed to pull a little gold from the bay; it wasn't for the cool factor, but simply because I knew I'd be able to sell it at a cash for gold place a lot easier than something esoteric like manganese.

Pulling four ounces of gold from the waters surrounding the bay wasn't easy, but market value was something like five thousand dollars. I went with Dad to the cash for gold place, and they looked at us funny; apparently they were more used to buying gold chains and teeth and grandma's jewelry than gold nuggets. The results came back as twenty four karat and they paid us twenty five hundred dollars.

My grandfather suggested that we were being cheated and that I should shop around for a better deal, but it wasn't like the gold had cost me anything other than time and effort.

We got a microwave for the house and a refrigerator; we also bought food for the pantry that I carefully checked with my detector. It was possible that food inside the cans had been tampered with, but I'd check those when I actually ate.

Dad even took me clothes shopping when I could pull him away from whatever he was doing in the Animal-o-sphere. He didn't really bother to talk much about it, but he took the time off to go shopping with me, and it almost felt like old times.

That didn't mean that I wasn't alert. The last thing I needed was for Dad to be shot in a drive-by because I wasn't paying attention. It occurred to me that the faster I got rid of the remnants of the Empire the faster I'd be able to get back to going to school and living a relatively normal life... as normal as you could while living in a Fortress of Doom.

School proved to be easier than I'd expected once I settled in.

In the next two days I detected poison twice. Once was at Fuggly Bob's; someone slipped something into my Burger. I found Bob in the back being held hostage by several goons.

The next time was at school, when my school lunch was poisoned by a lunch lady whose family was being held hostage. The poor woman had been so pale white as she served me that I'd wondered if she was coming down with something, in which case I'd have reconsidered eating what she had to offer anyway.

There was a big production, with the police coming and the PRT and the school ended up being shut down for almost two hours. It wasn't exactly the kind of introduction I wanted to make to the student body.

The last thing I needed was to catch hepatitis or food poisoning because someone couldn't afford to take off when they were sick. My detector wasn't able to detect everything after all. After all, for all I knew there could be Empire sympathizer's spitting in my food in the back just to spite me.

I stopped eating fast food.

Stepping up my actions against the Empire was easy at first. I simply looked for large concentrations of guns. In the first two days I busted a dozen different safehouses and warehouses holding supplies. I wasn't sure which of the new groups they belonged to; it was possible that they only belonged to the two or three largest groups.

I didn't care. Every kilo of drugs I took off the street and every dollar I took from the gangs was money that they wouldn't have to hire people to poison me or attack me in my sleep or do other things that I couldn't even imagine.

It got harder once they scattered. There were a lot of people in the Bay who had guns; I could hardly pull in everyone who was exercising their second amendment right not to be murdered by the gangs. They also started covering tattoos and wearing hoodies.

In apology for his antics on the Internet, Leet offered me one of his old security systems. He promised that it wouldn't explode because it was actually from a commercial system that he'd redesigned. My grandfather looked it over and didn't see anything wrong with the design. Setting it up had given me a little sense of relief. I'd been afraid that someone would find a way to cut my throat in my sleep.

Making a nightgown of tiny chain links proved to be a nonstarter; I couldn't sleep with it. However, buying a comforter and then slipping the chain links inside, restitching it afterward gave me a small sense of security, as false as it probably was.

On the fourth day I'd just gotten home from school when I heard the huge front doors booming. Someone was knocking, hard.

Cautiously, I approached, looking through the small viewscreen by the door donated by Leet. I saw Glory Girl and Panacea standing outside in full costume.

Opening the door, I stared sourly at them.

"If you've come to fight, I don't feel like it," I said sourly.

"No!" she said. "I've heard what you are doing with the Empire and I want in!"

I stared at her, wondering what she could possibly contribute other than annoying me into attacking her. She was incredibly perky, and I wondered if she'd been talked into trying to be my friend by the Protectorate. After all the lawsuit was still pending, even if it was likely to take months, and they probably wanted to stay on my good side until it was over.

"I'm just here to keep anybody from being hurt permanently," Panacea said. She grimaced. "You're starting to get more of a reputation than my sister."

"Hey!" Glory Girl said. "I haven't torn that much up, and I certainly haven't held an entire ship up over the city."

She glanced at me and said hurriedly, "Not that there's anything wrong with that."

"I don't suppose you have a place the Empire is meeting," I said.

If they had information on an actual location I might let them come, once. It was getting hard enough to track down the Empire offshoot gangs that I was willing to take any help that I could get.

Of course, the fact that they had to move in such small groups meant that the ABB and Merchants were moving in on them and rolling them up. They were hemorrhaging members; I knew if I could just keep up the pressure I'd be able to be free of them within a week.

"Yeah," she said. "A big meeting of the main gangs that are left. They are meeting outside of town, probably so that you won't find them."

"OK," I said slowly. A big meeting sounded exactly like the kind of thing that I was looking for.

"Tell me what you know," I said.

I worried a little bit about the holographic projector I was using to change my features. Leet assured me that he'd never built anything like it, but I wasn't sure I trusted him. I'd gotten him a supply of both Magnesium and Manganese and he'd promised to fence it in return for a portion of the profits.

Tinkering was expensive, after all.

If it kept him from doing crimes, I was more than happy to contribute. After all, part of the reason I was doing all of this was to make the city the kind of place my mom and dad had loved once. Reducing crime was part of that, even if it wasn't the main thing.

The main problem wasn't that I was afraid of the Empire. The problem was that if they scattered like roaches I'd never have as good a chance to capture them again. Panacea was on standby with the PRT on speed dial.

It disappointed me a little to see that there were almost five hundred people at the rally, which was being held in an old quarry outside of town. I'd thought that I'd whittled their numbers down by more than this.

Besides getting all of them, I wanted to know what they were planning. If they were planning to hire some mercenary master, or kill my dad I wanted to know.

Right now I was wearing the form of a bald headed man emblazoned with numerous tattoos. I could feel my grandfather's anger at being forced to wear what were to him hated symbols. He'd tried to encourage a frontal assault, but I knew that wouldn't get me what I wanted.

Instead I made my way through the crowd carefully. I used my force field to fill out my form, so that people I was bumping into didn't feel a small female instead of a hulking man.

Three men stood up on a hastily constructed stage. One had a cordless microphone, probably tinker made. My estimate of their resources went up.

"My brothers, thank you for coming. My name is Herman Stein, and these men are Tom Harris and Eddie Smith. We are the leaders of the three largest groups remaining out of what was once the greatest organization in Brockton Bay."

He paused, and looked out at the crowd, which had grown quiet. "We have lost many brothers, some through cowardly attacks and others through cowardice, but we have many new friends, drawn to the Bay to help the cause."

Maybe I had driven more off than half. If more kept coming I might never be able to beat them. It'd be like playing whack-a-mole.

Better that I finish it here and now, or it would never end.

"We all know who the enemy is," he said. "They claim she is just a teenager who is simply powerful, but no cape is that powerful without flaws. She was created specifically to destroy us, men who are simply trying to do what's right."

"There is an organization, a conspiracy out there that is trying to destroy us, to replace us, to emasculate us. If they got their way the white man would go extinct. They are a greater threat than the Endbringers. At least the Endbringers are open about their intentions."

There was the sound of an explosion in the distance; a moment later the man with the microphone had a sword sticking through his chest. A tall Asian woman was standing behind him. Her costume was covered in blades, and I wondered who she was. She contemptuously shoved him off her blade and grabbed his microphone.

"These men are fools," the woman shouted. "Thinking skin color matters. All that matters is the willingness to kill, to fight and survive. Are you willing to survive, or will you die like the dogs that you are?"

The implication was clear. Work for her or die.

Asking a group of die hard racists that question as an Asian woman had to be particularly stupid.

I heard angry shouts all around me. Men lifted their fists, and some men lifted weapons, pointing them in her direction.

Fifteen men with submachine guns were suddenly facing us; I scowled and lifted my hand. The men opened fire, sending hundreds of bullets flying through the air.

All the bullets stopped, hanging motionless, and everybody froze. I switched my image emitter off and allowed myself to levitate above the people around me. I gestured and the barrels of the machine guns bent all at the same time, rendering them useless. The men who had been using them fell and began to dissolve into nothingness.

"As much as I hate to save the lives of these men, I can't let you massacre people," I said. I grimaced. I could already hear people running in the distance. I was going to lose my chance to gather them all up.

She looked at me and she smiled. There was almost something predatory about it.

"The hero of Brockton Bay," she said. There was something in her voice that I couldn't identify, a combination of dread and anticipation. "Such power. What is it like to have practically infinite power with the mind of a fifteen year old?"

"Beware," my grandfather's avatar said suddenly. "I cannot read her. The fact that she knows who you are and still seems confident is enough to be cautious."

She gestured and suddenly I fell to my knees as pain beyond anything I'd ever experienced filled my body. It was fire and ice and cutting and every physical pain I'd ever experienced and it was everywhere.

I dropped to the ground like a puppet who had her strings cut. I managed to keep my force field up, even as I manged to keep control of my bowels, but it was a very close thing.

The massacre resumed around me. I saw bodies beginning to fall all around me, and there was nothing I could do about it. Fifteen more men appeared, all identical and they'd gotten new submachineguns from somewhere. A group of Empire men tried to fight back, but the place was flat without cover. It was a killing field and there was nothing I could do to help them.

"Pain is an illusion!" my grandfather barked out. "You can still fight!"

I wanted to shout at him that I wasn't some sort of infallible demigod like he had apparently been; I was a fifteen year old girl and it was all I could do to keep myself from peeing on myself. Standing up, making some kind of witty quip, none of it was possible.

My muscles were all locked together and it was hard to breathe. It was like I'd touched a live wire and couldn't pull my hands away. The pain was incredible and it only seemed to be getting worse.

The woman walked slowly toward me, her face contorted into an expression I didn't recognize. It was almost like she was grinning and scowling at the same time. Her body moved unnaturally.

"You can make it stop," she gritted out. She didn't look like she wanted to say what she was saying, and I wondered if she was being mastered herself. "You have the power."

She gestured toward her costume, covered in blades. "All it takes is one command. Kill me and it will all stop. You don't have to feel this kind of pain ever again."

I shook my head, and the effort seemed overwhelming.

A moment later the pain was gone and there was an explosion where the woman had been. It didn't get through my shield, but I saw three people fall to the ground. I couldn't tell if they were injured or dead.

It bothered me that for the moment I didn't care. I was so relieved that the pain was gone that the blood and gore around me weren't really registering.

Some of the attackers were falling now as the Empire men fought back. It was chaotic, and I saw some men accidentally shoot their own people.

My body tightened as I realized what had happened. I hadn't done anything to her and she'd given me more pain in an instant than the Trio had in my entire life. I'd thought myself invulnerable and she'd cut me down more easily than Sophia ever had.

She was murdering people this very minute. She...

Looking around at the men running, I felt my sympathy drain away. They were a scourge on humanity, a waste of space. They were actively draining society and getting rid of them wasn't a terrible thing. Why had I tried to protect them anyway? Wasn't getting rid of them the whole reason I'd come here in the first place?

They'd hurt my father and not only did they deserve what they were getting, but I felt they were getting off entirely too lightly.

The people killing them were stealing my vengeance, though. I pulled the guns from their hands and made them explode into a thousand different pieces. Shrapnel floated in mid air as I began to float up into the air.

These people were all my enemies, and I had to deliver justice to them.

The metal floated around me. I saw the Asian woman tearing through the crowd with a sword, moving with the speed and strength that only brutes had. She looked up at me, her face covered in blood and she smirked.

She smirked!

Rage filled me and I gathered my will. She deserved to die more than anyone.

Men began to scramble to get out of the path between us. It wasn't just the Empire men either; people on the other side did the same.

I gathered my will, planning to turn the spikes on her outfit into an iron maiden. Killing her wouldn't just be justice, it would be insurance. If she was dead I wouldn't have to suffer through that pain again.

Before I could complete my plan, I felt something massively powerful hit me from the left side. While I had my force field up, I hadn't bothered to anchor myself and so I fell to the side.

I looked up, ready to kill when I saw Glory Girl laying on top of me.

"That's Butcher!" she said urgently. She grimaced. "If you kill her, she'll take over your body and all your powers!"

I looked up at the woman who had been doing everything she could to goad me into doing exactly that.

How was I going to fight someone I couldn't kill, who could teleport and from my vague memories of her powers had the abilities of thirteen or fourteen other capes?

"Well damn." I said.

943

ShayneT

Apr 25, 2018

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Threadmarks 21. Butcher

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ShayneT

Apr 27, 2018

#3,781

Dealing with an opponent that I couldn't kill normally wouldn't be a problem. All I'd have to do was cover her in metal until she settled down, leaving it to the PRT to get her out.

Unfortunately, this parahuman could teleport, which created an entirely different problem. She would be able to escape most of the big things I could do to her, and it was possible that her teleportation would be good enough to teleport her out of cuffs too.

Worse, I had a faint recollection that the Butcher had a whole lot of different powers, and I didn't remember what they all were. The teleportation, pain projection and anger projection were bad enough without adding other powers into the mix.

Glory Girl was still on top of me.

"What other powers does she have?" I asked.

Glory Girl frowned. "Uh... some kind of brute rating, immune to pain, can always hit at range... I don't remember them all."

Right.

"Regeneration?" I asked.

"Not that I've heard," she said. "I could be wrong."

It meant that I couldn't count on her not bleeding out if I did certain things, in which case I'd have all sorts of nifty new powers as well as a whole host of insane voices in my head. That was something that I wanted to avoid.

The Butcher was almost as bad as the Slaughterhouse Nine in terms of what she was willing to do. There wouldn't be any kind of gentlewoman's agreement here. I wouldn't be able to talk my way out of this fight. I couldn't kill her or incapacitate her.

My options were very limited.

One option would be to make her wish she was dead, but with her being immune to pain there weren't many options for that.

"Heat," my grandfather's avatar muttered.

I nodded as Glory Girl rolled off of me.

"Amy's safe?" I asked.

Butcher was living up to her name, shooting arrows with stone tops in all directions, hitting men where they would cause the most pain and incapacitation. She seemed to take a savage sort of pleasure in mutilating people.

"Oh!" Glory Girl said. "She can cause festering wounds. Mom went over her powers with us just in case she ever left Boston, but that was six months ago."

I nodded and floated to my feet. I sent out a series of metal pieces to deflect her arrows.

She scowled at me and a moment later the pain resumed. It wasn't as debilitating this time; my muscles weren't completely locked up despite the fact that the pain was just as bad.

I lashed out, sending fragments of metal into the men with machine guns. I was pretty sure they were just projections since they all looked alike and all had vanished once before. They vanished this time too, which meant that I hadn't gotten the leader.

Nearby Nazi's grabbed up the submachine guns and turned them on the other members of the Teeth.

This pulled Butcher's attention away from me and the pain vanished even as Butcher dove into the Empire men with machine guns. At least five of her own people had dropped, but now she was tearing into them. She was strong and she was fast, and none of them stood a chance.

I'd always wondered why Capes were treated as unbeatable by ordinary people. Most Capes were anything but bulletproof; given a determined assassin almost any Cape would fall. A bullet to the head would kill any cape that wasn't a brute, or who didn't have defensive powers like I did.

Butcher was different though. She really was everything the humans thought Capes were; she was a force of nature.

Fortunately I was one too.

Heat could be created with magnets by putting magnetic material in a high frequency oscillating magnetic field that made the magnets polarity switch back and forth fast enough to create friction. It was something I could do easily; now that I thought about it, I could probably do it myself and save myself the cost of buying an oven, although Dad did sometimes like to make a cup of hot cocoa on the stove.

In any case this had gone on long enough.

There was metal everywhere; guns and trucks parked in the distance, metal in the ground, metal on her costume. It was a surplus of what I needed. I gathered the materials; a glance back showed the vehicles disassembling themselves as the Empire men tried to pile into them. I'd done too much to let them get away this easily and this was the easiest way to stop them.

"You should have stayed in Boston," I gritted out.

"What are you going to do hero? Kill me?" she taunted. She smirked again. "I doubt you want to know what I'd do to the world with your kind of power."

She vanished in an explosion as metal flew through the air of the space she'd been in. She appeared next to us, trying to stab Glory Girl. The blade slipped off of her, but a punch to the gut immediately following made Glory Girl fall to the ground retching.

"People think I'm crazy, but I do my research," she said. "Your little friend's force field vanishes for a little while after she's been attacked for the first time."

Glory Girl didn't look like she was going to get up soon, so I concentrated on going after Butcher with metal. She was fast; every time I thought I had her she exploded and ended up somewhere else. Apparently a danger sense was an amazing thing to have in combat.

It didn't matter. The Empire men were throwing themselves on the ground as the flying shrapnel wounded some of them. It was a storm of flying truck parts that was gradually enveloping the entire bottom of the quarry we were in. I'd pulled fifty cars and trucks apart, which was a lot of metal flying around, and it was getting thicker every minute.

She was having to move faster to avoid the metal, and hopefully I was keeping her off balance to use her pain abilities or any abilities that required concentration. That was part of my plan.

Appearing next to me, she lashed out with her sword. I took it from her, bending it into a pretzel. She vanished in an explosion that had no effect on me.

Appearing at the top of the ridge, she looked down at me. Pain slammed into me again, but I didn't let it stop me this time.

Instead I slammed a slab of metal through the back of her knees at almost supersonic speed. Her skin was tough, but not that tough, and the flesh parted under my attack. Blood sprayed from the back of her knees, and I knew if I pulled the metal out she would die from blood loss.

Vibrating the metal, I caused it to heat up, cauterizing the flesh. At the same time I drove spikes into her flesh, holding the metal to the stumps that were left behind. She fell forward, her face staring at me from the edge of the pit with hatred in her eyes. Despite not feeling any pain the fact that I was crippling her had to be annoying to say the least.

I used other metal to yank her legs from the calves down back; a moment later they came off with a spray of blood. It would have been worse, but the molten hot metal was cauterizing the stumps. It was dangerous to do this; there was every possibility that she could go into shock and die from blood loss even if she wasn't in pain.

She reached out, pointing toward me. Instinct made me dodge, and an Empire behind me had a wound appear on his chest. It smelled terrible, rotting even.

Glancing contemptuously at me, she narrowed her eyes. Pain enveloped me, but it wasn't as strong as before. She was having trouble concentrating; not from pain of her own but because she was going into shock. Blood loss probably played a part in it.

She exploded away, but the metal I was bonding to her legs went with her, and I could sense it as she tried to teleport behind me.

Metal grabbed her arms and forced them behind her. Without any legs to fight with she fell to the side. The hatred on her face was palpable, but I could tell that she was close to losing consciousness. With that much damage to the body, pain wasn't needed to go into shock.

"You really shouldn't have come here," I said.

A moment later blazing hot slivers of molten metal pierced her eyes, blinding her. Without being able to see me, I hoped her pain projection wouldn't be usable. I had no defense against it, or her rage power.

She exploded away again, but this time the jump was blind. She fell on top of an Empire man who screamed.

It was going to be a balancing act; how much to hurt her without actually killing her. Too much and she'd take control of me. Too little and she'd get away.

A moment later she disappeared again, and this time I could detect the metal vanishing off into the distance outside of my easy range. Apparently she didn't need her vision to direct her teleportation abilities.

I could hear sirens in the distance now, and so I put the metal I still had floating around me to good use. A hundred vehicles was more than a hundred tons of metal. Properly applied it worked very well to tie Empire men up.

By the time the vans arrived I'd captured three hundred men. At least fifty lay dead, which meant that a hundred and fifty men had vanished into the hills around me.

Multiple members of the Protectorate had shown up as well; Armsmaster, Miss Militia, Assault and Battery, Velocity... they were all there.

"We were hoping you'd decided to cut down on the casualties," he said, looking around.

"It wasn't me," I said. "The Teeth decided to attack the Rally."

"The Teeth?" he asked cautiously. He took the smallest step away from me. "What of their leader."

"I sent her running," I said. "After a fashion. You can collect her legs up on the ridge there, and I blinded her, but she's still alive. Glory Girl told me she was Butcher. I'm not sure she was, but she had a lot of powers."

"Powers?"

"Pain and anger control, teleportation, strength and durability, perfect aim," I said. "Maybe more."

He nodded. "And you are sure she was alive? Sometimes people die of their wounds, and if she does..."

I could tell that he was uneasy around me, something that I hadn't really seen from him before. Before he'd been arrogant or cautious or sometimes simply businesslike. Now he smelled a little like fear.

Everyone had the same attitude; uneasiness combined with anxiety. People were giving me a wide berth, and I could understand why. If the Butcher died because of what I had done to her, I would be the Butcher. If I became the Butcher, Brockton Bay would burn.

"There won't be anything any of us can do about it," I admitted. "I couldn't think of anything else."

"Protocol with the Butcher is to disengage until a tactical plan to contain her is found," he said. "Given that her abilities are always evolving it isn't easy."

"She can teleport!" I said. "How do you contain someone who can teleport?"

"Water," he said. "The hero she got the power from couldn't teleport underwater; the explosions are necessary for the process."

"Can I get a copy of her known powers and methods?" I asked. "I suspect that she won't want to stay in the same body for very long, which means I'm going to have to face her again."

He nodded. "Normally we wouldn't be as accommodating to a rogue who was suing us, but under the circumstances it's probably in everyone's best interest for you to have the information."

"You don't want me becoming Butcher, I guess."

He nodded grimly. "It's bad enough when it's just you. Even without being actively malicious you cause damage everywhere. Someone who wanted to cause harm would be worse... much, much worse."

"I'm trying to cut the property damage and maiming down," I protested.

Two PRT agents were on the ridge trying to decide whether to put Butcher's legs into a property bag or into a body bag. Neither seemed to be exactly the right size.

He looked at me significantly.

"I slipped," I said. "And it wasn't like I had some kind of fancy Taser in my Halberd or knockout drug or something."

"You should leave drugging people to professionals," he said. "It's easy to get the dosage wrong and actually kill someone you did not intend to. Even most non-lethal weapons aren't as non-lethal as people think."

"Are you guys going to be able to handle all these guys?" I asked. "Some of them ran for the hills and I'd like to collect as many of them as I can. They've been trying to poison me and if they are in jail I might be able to order a pizza again."

He looked at me sharply. "I haven't seen any reports about attempted poisoning."

I shrugged. "I didn't mention it. I've got a detector now and everything, so I've been fine."

"Incidents like this need to be reported," he said stubbornly. "The PRT has investigative resources that no single Cape has, and we might be able to find out who is doing it and stop them."

"I wasn't sure if you would care," I said. "It's not like we've had the best relationship so far."

"The Protectorate and PRT stand for justice for everyone," he said. "Even people we think are loose cannons. You mean well, and I think we all know that, and even if we didn't, it's our job. It's what we're here for."

Assault was nearby, listening.

"Besides, we want to figure it out just in case we might steal a cookie or two while visiting."

"I will not steal your cookies," Armsmaster said. "Given that I have more self control than some people."

He was so serious about it that it made me want to laugh.

"Well, I need to go Nazi hunting," I said. "Nazis are a little like Pokemon; you've gotta collect them all."

"Right," Armsmaster said. I wasn't sure whether he'd gotten the reference or not, but he at least pretended that he had.

A moment later I was in the air.

Finding the fleeing Nazis was easier than I would have thought. Pieces of metal moving away from the scene were easy to differentiate from metal laying on the ground. A smart Nazi would have thrown away his guns and knives, but it was possible that members of the Teeth were still around, in which case they wouldn't want to leave themselves defenseless.

Because they were so scattered, though, it took longer than I would have thought. After two hours I'd only captured seventy five additional Nazis. Seventy five additional members had vanished into the wind; either smart enough to have ditched their weapons, or canny enough to have had a vehicle waiting nearby so that they could get out of range.

After all, I could hardly be attacking all the moving vehicles I felt moving toward Brockton Bay.

The Empire's back was broken, though. After tonight, and knowing that the Teeth were moving into the area, I couldn't imagine that any of the remaining groups would keep all their members. While the smartest Nazis had already left the city, those who remained wouldn't just face me and the teeth; they'd be facing Lung and the ABB and the Merchants and the PRT.

They might stay around for a little while, but my bet was that they were going to bleed members.

By next week they would simply be a bad memory. I might even be able to enjoy eating out again.

My bigger concern was the Teeth. The Butcher would probably find a new body soon, and she would have a definite grudge against me. The Teeth were known for being a little crazy, which meant that Dad might be in danger.

Being immortal meant that you didn't worry as much about things like retaliation. They'd be more than happy to kidnap my father.

Landing with the last of the fugitives, I saw Panacea waiting. She was glaring at me.

"You let my sister get hurt," she said. "She had internal bleeding from that punch to the stomach."

"I didn't know that her force field would go down like that," I said. I shrugged. "I wouldn't have brought her if I'd known."

"And then you'd have been the next Butcher," she said. She grimaced. "I don't think any of us are meant to do this alone."

"I don't think I want to work for anyone else either," I said. "I don't exactly work well with authority. I've been told by a precog that I'm going to form my own team though. We could always use more members."

She stared at me for a moment, before asking, "Who do you have so far?"

"The precog I was telling you about, me and maybe Uber and Leet."

The minute I said it I wondered if mentioning the villains was a mistake. After all Uber and Leet didn't exactly have a sterling reputation.

"That sounds... terrible," she said. "Those guys are idiots. Besides... working with villains?"

"Don't you think people deserve a second chance?" I asked. "Especially when they haven't done anything terrible? Except that Grand theft auto thing, I mean."

For some reason that made her look thoughtful.

She looked conflicted. "I couldn't leave New Wave."

"Who says you had to. I read my dad's old comic books, and there were people there who were on like three of four teams at once. Besides, when was the last time New Wave did anything as a group? Isn't it mostly just you and Glory Girl these days anyway?"

She was silent for a long time before finally saying "I'll think about it."

It wasn't a no, which I took to be a good sign.

930

ShayneT

Apr 27, 2018

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Threadmarks 22. Argument

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ShayneT

Apr 29, 2018

#3,922

I wasn't really sure how the Butcher's powers worked. Was she a conglomeration of all the Butcher's who had been before her, or did she simply have voices whispering in her head, much the way my grandfather's avatar did?

Either way she was likely angry at me for the whole maiming thing, and she seemed like the kind of person who would be coming for revenge. What worried me wasn't so much what she could do to me, although it was possible that she could put me into so much pain that I had an aneurysm.

However, she seemed like exactly the kind of person who would go after Dad.

Worse, it was possible that she wouldn't be in the same body the next time I met her. If she was smart instead of crazy she'd be able to sneak up and attack before we had time to react.

The Empire was likely broken; those who were foolish enough to stay would be gobbled up by the other gangs soon.

I called Dinah.

"What are the odds that the Butcher will try to kill me or my Dad today?" I asked.

"Three percent," she said. "The PRT took me for power testing yesterday. They seemed pretty impressed."

I hadn't went in for testing myself because I didn't particularly want to, but testing her basically served as advertisement for whatever business arrangements we could make using her powers. Since I would be getting a percentage on every answer, at least until she felt she no longer needed protection it was in my best interest to advertise her far and wide.

"We'll get more money that way," I said. "You'll have a college fund ready before you are twelve."

"We met with your lawyer the day before yesterday and he went over the contract. He seemed to think thirty percent for you and fifteen percent for him was enough, is that all right?"

My lawyer really ought to consult me more about these things; maybe he was talking to Dad.

"Well, having somebody doing the legal work is probably worth the money," I said. "Are you all right with my taking that much?"

"Considering what will happen to me if you don't help me, I have to be,' she said. "Besides, I wouldn't be making any money at all if I was locked away in some dungeon somewhere and put on drugs."

"Drugs?"

"Don't ask," she said. "I don't like to think about the things I've seen. I still get headaches whenever I think about it."

"So is there anything bad coming that I need to know about?" I asked.

"You have to ask a question that can be answered specifically," she said. "I'm not omniscient. If my power worked like that I'd just ask myself "What do I need to know today?"

"Right," I said. "What do I need to know today?"

"Not to annoy your precog," she said irritably. "I'm making a habit of asking if you, I or anyone in our families is going to be attacked every morning; after what I heard about yesterday it's probably going to be important."

"Yeah," I said glumly. "At least the Empire is mostly gone."

I'd enjoyed my first pizza in days after the battle yesterday, and it had been glorious.

"Keep your phone on you," she said. "I have a bad feeling that I can't put my finger on; I didn't detect anything bad now, and the percentages get weird the further out you ask."

I didn't understand how precognition worked, really, so I didn't know what questions I needed to ask.

"I have known precognitives," my grandfather's voice whispered. "And the one thing I have learned is that the future is never preordained. There are many possible futures and they have to comb through those that are most likely. However there is almost always at least one course to victory."

If that was true why had he lost so often?

"Well, I'm not exactly the best at business, so it's probably good that we have people who can do the work for us. Maybe ask if they are cheating us once every couple of months or so and we'll be fine."

She seemed content with that, and after a little small talk we hung up.

Despite her assurances that there was only a three percent chance I would be attacked today, that didn't mean that I could assume everything was going to be fine. After all, the unlikely had an unpleasant tendency to happen around me.

In a better world everyone would be in awe of how powerful I was; unfortunately Brockton Bay wasn't that place. People seemed almost suicidally inclined to be jerks; everyone from Armsmaster to Panacea to my neighbors.

People were just too used to capes; once they decided you belonged in a category they put you there. Despite my declarations that I was a rogue some people had decided that I was a hero, which apparently meant that I wasn't at all dangerous.

Except accidentally, at least according to Armsmaster.

Well, hopefully I was done with killing people and cutting off limbs. I decided that I needed to talk to Leet about something to help me deal with Butcher. Maybe some kind of stasis field so I could drop Butcher off the face of the Earth and she wouldn't wake back up until I was long dead.

Apparently the sale of the magnesium and manganese had worked out better than he'd hoped. He'd even delivered several thousand dollars to me, which meant one thing.

Shopping!

I'd finally be able to get curtains, more bed covers, more of a wardrobe than a single week's worth of clothes, maybe even a washer and dryer.

It was really kind of horrifying how many things went into a new home and it made me wonder how people who didn't have family members to hand them down a lot of stuff dealt with it. A quick check on Google showed that the rule of thumb to furnish a home from Scratch was twenty five percent of its value.

I had no idea how much my home was worth. Hopefully the tax assessors would be kind, although it might be hard for them to judge too since it didn't really fit into any of the usual categories.

Going to his room, I knocked on the door. There was no answer.

I could sense the metal in his body so I knew he was in there; I sighed and undid the lock on the door. He'd been spending more and more time in there. It was getting to the point where it was almost worse than it had been right after Mom died.

At least this time he wasn't losing himself in a bottle.

I sniffed as I stepped into the room. There was already a strange sort of stench to the room, which was odd considering that the place had only been built days ago. Wasn't he bathing?

He was laying on his bed staring sightlessly up at the ceiling.

"Dad?" I asked.

I shook his shoulder and he didn't respond. He was still breathing, and his eyes were still open and covered in a milky white film.

It took longer to wake him this time. Last time it hadn't been long at all; this time it took me almost three minutes. I was starting to wonder if I needed to call Panacea when he finally stirred.

"Taylor?" he asked groggily.

"How long have you been in here?" I asked. I realized suddenly that I hadn't seen him all weekend. "Have you eaten?"

"It's not important," he said. "I can eat later."

He looked thinner than he had; how had I not noticed it.

"What's so important that you aren't eating?" I asked.

"You have no idea," he said. He stared off into space. "The worlds I've seen. There's so much to know, to understand, and there's so little time."

"The Butcher is in town," I said bluntly. "I cut her legs off yesterday, and I think she's probably out for revenge. I think you should probably watch out; if she can't get at me she'll probably come after you."

He blinked at me uncomprehendingly.

"Also, we need to go shopping. You need to take a shower."

"What?" he asked.

"Clothes, a washer and dryer, maybe some more deodorant. There's stuff we need."

"You can take care of it," he said. He looked longingly back at the bed.

"If you don't start moving your body I'll kill every animal in a ten block radius," I said. At his look I said, "Except the dogs and cats. And parrots. Have fun pooping on people's lawns and staring out the window waiting for Miss Winslow to come home."

It was an empty threat, of course. There was no way I'd be able to kill every insect, every earthworm, every bird that flew through the area, even if I wanted to.

Still, it was enough to make Dad scowl and decide to go along with it.

"There's no need to start acting like your Grandfather," he said grumpily.

"What?" I asked. I froze.

He looked up at me. "I can hear through the ears of every insect, every bird, every animal. You think I haven't heard you talking to him?"

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"I don't know if it's a ghost, or just some part of your power that you haven't seen fit to tell me about, but I listen."

Maybe I hadn't been as discreet as I'd thought. Still...

"Like you've been listening to me since Mom died?" I asked. "If I hadn't had my powers Emma and Sophia would have made my life hell. Even with my powers they did, I just always knew I had another out. If I hadn't who knows what might have happened?"

I might have dropped out of school, or triggered and become a supervillain. I might even have blown up the entire school, and as I'd recently learned the authorities tended to frown on massive destruction.

I suspected that if I'd triggered with some lesser power the authorities wouldn't have been nearly as nice about it. No hero had attacked me, really, other than verbally, and the government hadn't come to my house trying to either recruit me or arrest me.

They'd treated me with kid gloves and it was all because of my power.

"If you'd been there instead of... wherever you were mentally, I think I could have handled it better," I said. "But you barely noticed me. Kind of like now."

I needed to make sure that the helmet was protected somewhere he and his animals couldn't get to it. I could already feel the disapproval radiating from him, and I wouldn't put it past him to send roaches trying to slip into any cracks and eat wiring, or maybe rats.

"I am made tough enough to survive the X-Men," the helmet said. "Mere insects would not injure me."

I ignored my grandfather's avatar. After all, he'd been known to be wrong in the past. Given his sheer power he shouldn't have had much problem conquering his world, unless it was filled with capes of nightmarish power and ability.

"It was," my grandfather's avatar said. "You cannot imagine the horrors of the Phoenix, Galactus, the Beyonder, Squirrel Girl..."

Squirrel Girl? I'd have to ask him later.

"That may be true," Dad said. "But did you ever try to talk to me? You act like I abandoned you, but you were the one who never said a thing about what Emma was doing. You think I wouldn't have at least tried to do something?"

"What could you have done? Alan is a lawyer, Sophia had the PRT backing her...Madison was just kind of there."

"He's a divorce lawyer, Taylor," Dad said. "I've spent years negotiating with the real thing. You think I couldn't have done something? It wasn't like we were starving for money; your art projects saw to that."

A few hundred dollars a month had made a difference in our finances. We hadn't ever really struggled the way we probably would have without it.

"The thing is, you never trusted me enough to take the chance that I might actually be able to be your father."

"If you really believe I'm talking to my grandfather's ghost, why haven't you said anything before?" I asked. "If you disapprove of him so much."

"Your mother said that he was always good to her," he said. "And you think I've abandoned you, but I was always there. If you'd stumbled or fallen I'd have found some way to save you, even if I'd had to use squirrels to do it."

"Squirrels," my grandfather muttered.

"I don't need you to fight my battles for me," I said. "And if there's something I can't handle I doubt Squirrels will make much of a difference."

He stared at me for a moment with a hurt look on his face.

It was like he didn't understand that while I didn't need him for the big things, I still needed him to be there for me emotionally. He'd been a good dad once, before Mom had passed. I wanted that dad back again. The way he was now, it was like he was a zombie.

"I don't understand how running around in the trees as a squirrel can be so much more fascinating than living here in the moment."

"Squirrels, birds, insects... " he said. "They don't worry about failing their children, about not being good enough. They just worry about what's right before them."

I scowled. "While you are off storing nuts for the winter I'm dealing with real problems. The Butcher is probably going to try to kill anybody I think of as friends, which fortunately isn't very many people."

I'd made some acquaintances at school, but I hadn't really gotten close to any of them. Even Sarah... there was something that put me off about her. She'd approached me too quickly on the first day and I couldn't help but feel that she was hanging on to me the same way as Emma's groupies had hung on to her.

They'd been there to leech off the light of her reflected popularity. If it had meant bullying others to stay in her good graces, they'd have been all right with that. Would Sarah go along with it if I decided to bully others? I didn't know.

The thought that she might was part of what kept me from getting closer to her.

There weren't many other good candidates at school. There were a lot of people who were outwardly friendly, but part of me wondered if that was just because they were secretly afraid. After all, I was the girl who had held a ship over the city and defeated the Empire's capes in a single battle. Staying on my good side was just good sense.

Glory Girl and Panacea could have been my friends, but Glory Girl was a little too enthusiastic, and Panacea was kind of a bitch. Not that I'd have turned her away from my team, of course. Her power was too useful.

I'd have been a lot better off keeping my secret identity. Then I'd have been able to know who my friends were, and I'd have been able to not worry about villains murdering me in my sleep or killing Dad in retaliation for me cutting off their legs.

Not that I planned on cutting off a lot of legs in the future. That was apparently frowned on by polite society, or at least that had been the vibe I got from Armsmaster.

"I just want you to be here for me," I said. "Here, now. I don't need someone to defend me. I need a Dad."

He grimaced. "I'm not sure I ever was a good father."

"Before mom you were the best. It's just that you checked out after she died."

He was silent for a moment. "You know that I'm not ever entirely here, right?"

"What?"

"My power is always on; while I'm sitting here talking to you I'm also a bird sitting on a tree outside of Mrs. Johnson's house. She's having an argument with her daughter about not calling more."

He took a breath. "Old man Smith is complaining to the PRT about the lights at the top of the tower for the fifth time this week. You probably shouldn't have specifically pointed them in the direction of his house."

"He deserved it," I muttered. "He's a jerk."

I'd actually increased the brightness thirty percent on that side of the house just to spite him. I was a fifteen year old girl, and I could be as pettily vindictive as anyone else.

"There are a half dozen gang members down the end of the street," he said. "They are talking to themselves about trying to talk you into a truce with the ABB, but most of them are afraid you'll turn them into the PRT or cut their legs off."

Apparently that had already gotten around. I wondered for a moment if my reputation was turning kind of dark.

"If you can see all of that and still be here, why do you check out?" I asked.

He shrugged. "It's superficial knowledge unless I go under. Right now I'm still me, and that's not exactly who I want to be. When I go under I am the squirrel, the bat, the bug. All my problems go away and I just am."

"He's addicted," my grandfather's avatar whispered. "Also, he's trying to get out of shopping."

I scowled. "Take a shower. We're going shopping if I have to float you to town in your pajamas. Try not to embarrass us both."

He stared at me for a moment then glanced back at his bed and sighed. "Fine. But I'm not buying you ice cream."

I'd been buying my own ice cream for two years. Still, the comment hurt.

659

ShayneT

Apr 29, 2018

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Threadmarks 23. Ambassadors

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ShayneT

May 1, 2018

#3,956

Dad wasn't himself as we shopped. I could tell that he was distracted, and I wondered if this was all I was going to get for the rest of my life. Were other Thinkers like this?

I'd heard about Tinkers going into fugues, but the Internet was pretty vague about the daily lives of most Capes, outside of the usual celebrity junk; who was dating who, who had a new line of clothing out and the like.

But knowing whether your father's animal addiction was normal wasn't something easily found.

At least he was up and moving. The last thing I needed was to find out that he had bedsores or to come home and find him with flies flying all over him like one of those African kids from the old charity ads, before Africa had turned into a parahuman hellhole.

I was kind of vague about Africa really; in my mind it was pretty much a place like the old Mad Max movies, except everyone was black. Given all the parahuman warlords there it might even be true. Of course I could be wrong too; America had never been particularly interested in the rest of the world and it had gotten worse since the world had started falling apart.

Maybe I needed to expand my ambitions. I'd thought about improving the city and although it hadn't been long I'd made changes. Getting rid of the Empire was something, and the fighting was dying down already.

After all, with the large swathes of the city left undefended by the Empire, the ABB and Merchants were going to be too busy expanding to fight each other.

However, I'd heard that Medhall was closing its doors. They were a national corporation, but they'd chosen to keep their headquarters in Brockton Bay for more than twenty years. Losing them was going to cost the city jobs it couldn't afford.

My armor idea was going through the approval process, and I'd made it clear to the lawyer that I wanted at least one factory to be here in the Bay. Given that unemployment was so low, wages would be easy to manage here, and property values were low. Unfortunately, the review process for the armor, much like my lawsuit was something that was more likely to take months than weeks.

My lawyer had suggested that lawsuits sometimes took years, with big companies hoping that the people suing them would struggle financially enough that they'd settle for pennies for the dollar in an effort to get something.

Fortunately, money was beginning to come in. I was planning on making a second trip out over the ocean to gather minerals; selling them would give me money to pay my lawyer and to set up the advertising for my agency that I was opening for Dinah.

"What do you think of Oracle?" I asked.

He looked up from where he was staring at a pair of pants that were clearly too frumpy for him.

"For my company name?"

"There was a computer company named that," he said. "They lost a lot of their upper management during a conference in New York when it all went down, but I think it's still around somewhere."

I frowned.

"Insight solutions?" I asked.

He nodded. "It might work, assuming it's not taken. The main thing is to go professional. Go with some kind of a cutesy name and people won't take you seriously. You already have a disadvantage because you are a kid; the last thing you want is for people to treat you like one when you are trying to conduct business."

I nodded. It seemed like good advice. Given that I didn't hear my grandfather's avatar complaining, I assumed that he didn't particularly disagree.

"Come up with at least three good ideas for names," he said. "Odds are if you come up with something great someone else has thought of it first, and the last thing you want to run into is problems with trademarks and copyrights. Big companies have teams of lawyers whose job is to drag out legal challenges until they make the little guy bleed out."

Right. I'd have to depend on my lawyer.

"You also nerd to start holding some of your money aside for taxes," he said. "Otherwise both of us are going to have a nasty surprise next April."

His face seemed to liven up as he noticed that I was actually listening. His expression sharpened from the vacant look he'd had since we left the house.

"You know, there's a lot of things we should have been talking about."

Suddenly I found myself in the middle of the longest two hours of my life. Apparently Dad had an entire litany of things he'd been planning to tell me, but that he'd never gotten around to.

Apparently credit cards were a scam devised by the people in power to keep the underclass poor. I had to admit that a twenty percent interest rate sounded outrageous, but I still had a few years yet before I could even get a credit card. Did he think he wouldn't be around by the time I was eighteen?

Of course, the fact that I was starting to come into money might have something to do with it. Apparently Dad thought that everyone my age was an idiot with money; apparently he and everyone he knew had been all throughout his childhood and teenage years.

I suppose it was probably true for most kids my age, especially at Arcadia. I'd seen too many kids there who had spent a month's salary for a kid at Winslow's parent on some new phone or piece of jewelry.

But I'd been buying the groceries and doing the budget at home for the past two years. Unlike the other kids my age, I knew exactly how hard money was to make, which was why I had been supplementing the family income with art pieces.

A sudden thought occurred to me. Now that I was semi-famous, would my art pieces be worth more than they had? Maybe I could try something a lot bigger than I had done before, maybe even something life size? At the very least it would make conversation pieces for the throne room, which might distract from conversations about the throne. At best it might give me a little pocket money. Of course, pocket money was now starting to mean something different than it had when I was younger and poorer.

Maybe that was why Dad was lecturing me. I hadn't exactly been making brilliant financial decisions lately.

"And variable rate mortgages are a fools game," he said. "They suck you in with low payments and then they'll take your house later on."

He hadn't stopped talking for an hour and I found the beginnings of a headache. Some of the advice was good, but some of it didn't apply to me much.

When was I ever going to take out a mortgage? It was three more years before I could even own property; I'd checked when I thought about building a secret lair. As a minor there were legal limits to what I could do. There were workarounds; I could have the property held by a corporation, but there would have to be at least one adult representative.

I wasn't likely to go to a payday loan place either; for one thing I didn't earn actual paychecks. I probably wouldn't Rent to own furniture either, not unless something went disastrously wrong.

Technically Dad could take all my money no matter how much I made. I didn't think he would, but the important thing was that he could.

As a parahuman, at least as far as the world was concerned, I actually had more rights over my money than most minors, but there were still limits.

Looking at my Dad babble on, I was happy to see him look a little more animated than he had. He'd been practically a walking zombie since he'd gotten his power.

I was going to have to devote time to my relationship with him if I wanted to make it work. In a better world he'd be the adult and make the first moves, but it was becoming clearer and clearer to me that it wasn't going to happen.

Being a better daughter was the only way I was going to pull him out of his shell. Right now he was pulling his shell in behind him and if I wasn't careful I'd lose him forever.

Still, he seemed a little manic, almost as though he was trying to get five years worth of advice into a two hour conversation. Was that because he realized how little we'd talked recently, or was it because he wanted to get it over with so he could go back to what he'd been doing?

We were pulling up to the tower in Dad's car when I frowned. There were three men standing in front of the tower. They were all of them Asian, and all of them were carrying guns.

The fact that they were all wearing red and green told me quicker than anything which gang they represented. No Asian who was not a member of the group would dare to wear those colors.

What was the ABB doing on my front lawn? Not that I actually had a lawn, but still. Were they planning to attack me? Hadn't they seen what I'd done to the Empire, not once but several times?

I'd have thought Lung would have wanted the honor of attacking me for himself. By this point did anyone think that normals had a chance against me?

Reflexively I put up a force field over the entire car and I considered telling him to turn around. I even considered making the car fly like that Disney movie I'd seen when I was young. I couldn't remember which movie it was, but it didn't matter.

"I know." my grandfather's avatar said smugly, but it didn't enlighten me. I was starting to feel that my grandfather's avatar was a jerk sometimes.

"Oh, it's them," my Dad said suddenly.

"Who?" I asked.

"Lung called earlier today and said he wanted to send some people over as ambassadors to talk about a peace treaty or something."

"And you didn't think that was important?" I asked incredulously.

He shrugged. "I was busy."

"This is Lung we're talking about."

"And he wants to talk about peace instead of fighting," Dad said. "How is that not a good thing?"

"He runs prostitution rings," I said. "And drugs and people get killed all the time because of him. Why shouldn't I just go and fight him?"

"If you don't take him down right away, a lot of people will get hurt," Dad said. "Compared to the Empire he's pretty laid back as a leader and if you take him out other groups will move in to the city."

I scowled. It sounded like the balance of power crap I'd been reading online from some theorists about how the PRT operated. Void Cowboy was especially vocal about it.

So what if it created a power vacuum. Did that mean you assume that crime would always be a problem or did you do something to make it better?

I didn't want to be part of the problem.

Still, I probably at least needed to talk to Lung. After all. I might be able to wring some concessions from him that might actually make the city better. If not I could always beat him up later.

I spared a moment to wonder how long they had been waiting, but I remembered my grandfather telling me that forcing underlings to wait was actually a show of power, much like the giant stupid chair and Blackwell's desk.

"I'll get out and talk to them," I said. "But we're going to have to talk about getting my messages on time. Why did he call you instead of me?"

"He knows where I work and the number is in the directory," Dad said. "Also it's kind of old fashioned to talk to the parents first."

"We aren't getting married," I said in disgust as Dad pulled to a stop. The hidden garage door began to open, automatically triggered by a device inside Dad's car. I stepped out of the car as Dad pulled inside.

"You came armed to meet with me," I said as I approached them. "That doesn't seem very bright."

"It's proof that we don't mean any harm," the oldest of the three men said. "Any weapon we carry is a weapon you can use against us. Carrying them proves that we have no intention of betraying you, as we are hostages to our own weapons."

"Also, it's freakin dangerous going through ex-Empire territory," the youngest of them said. He looked vaguely familiar; I suspect that he was from Winslow. Unfortunately all gang members looked alike to me.

After all, you learned early on not to look at faces. They tended to be a little like dogs in that looking them in the eyes could be seen as a challenge.

Had they brought him hoping to sway my opinion? It hadn't worked very well for the Empire, and they had to know that. The oldest man was in his fifties, and he looked reasonably wise, although how wise he could be and still be in a gang at that age I couldn't tell.

The oldest man bowed to me and the man and teenager behind him bowed. "May we introduce ourselves?"

I didn't say anything, simply staring at him.

"These are my associates Hao Wu and Harold Chang. I am Hao Jianguo, and I am pleased to represent the irrepressible Lung in these negotiations."

His tone was pleasant, and I couldn't detect any sign of the condescension I usually felt from some of the Protectorate members when they dealt with me (mostly Armsmaster really, the rest of them were fairly respectful.)

"Forgive me if I do not invite you in," I said. "But my father always told me that inviting strangers into one's house is a poor decision."

He'd said that fifteen minutes ago, actually, and he'd mostly been talking about religious people and people campaigning for politicians. Door to door salesmen weren't really a problem in our area since everyone knew we didn't actually have any money.

"Your father is a wise man," the older man said. "Our discussion will hopefully be short."

"Your boss wants to meet with me?" I asked bluntly. "Couldn't that have been discussed on the telephone?"

"You do not wish us in your house. Would you have come somewhere simply at the behest of a voice on the phone?" Jianguo asked. "Our presence is an assurance that master Lung is serious in his intentions. We are to serve as hostages, as proof that he means you and yours no harm."

"Assuming that I believe that, what does he want exactly?"

"Assuming certain provisions are met," the oldest man said. "First, both parties will agree not to attack the other on the day of the meeting. Second, that you will not tell anyone else about the meeting beforehand. Third, that the meeting will be held at Somer's Rock."

"Where?"

"A restaurant owned by a deaf family. It is widely considered to be neutral ground by heroes and villains alike. Their disability is... advantageous when matters of discretion need to be discussed."

"Why should I bother to even meet with your boss?" I asked.

"While you may not consider yourself to be a hero, it is thought that you wish this city well. Who out of the entire city has more power than you and he? The ABB has the one thing you do not, manpower. If you wish to make a positive change you will need allies, and we can be very good ones."

"They seem sincere," my Grandfather's avatar said. "Although it could be that they simply were not informed of their master's true plans. That is one of the best ways to fool telepaths; have them interact with fools who believe what they are saying."

I nodded. I probably ought to add stipulations to show that I wasn't a fool or a rube, but I couldn't think of anything.

"If you have enough power you do not have to have any stipulations. This Lung has already made a major concession by reaching out to you. In doing so he has conceded a certain amount of power to you, something that has to gall him if he is as proud as his reputation makes him out to be."

Pride was certainly something my grandfather would have known about.

"If he wanted you dead, he has the money and intelligence to do it the way the Empire should have; hired contractors with powers that act as hard counters to yours through several layers of intermediaries so it didn't get traced back to them."

The way he said it, so coldly. Was it something he'd done in the past to an enemy?

"Fine," I said. "But I'll set the time. I'll see him at five o'clock tomorrow at that restaurant, assuming I can find it."

"It's on google maps," the youngest said helpfully. "One star rating."

The oldest man cuffed him on the side of the head, and I could see the resemblance now. Was the older man his father, his uncle, his grandfather? I couldn't tell, and it didn't really matter.

"Neutral ground it is," the older man said, bowing to me.

They all turned and a women later a limousine that had been parked at the end of the street pulled up in front of my driveway.

I frowned. I'd just committed to a meeting with Lung with only one day to prepare.

What could go wrong?

837

ShayneT

May 1, 2018

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Threadmarks 24. Lung

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ShayneT

May 5, 2018

#4,080

The moment I saw the restaurant I decided I would use the poison detector on everything, possibly even the seats. Not because I thought that Lung would try to poison me, but because I suspected that the proprietors had been bribing the health inspectors for years.

Paint was peeling on the walls, and the bars on the windows were covered in rust, badly enough that I suspected anyone trying to get in would die of tetanus before they managed to actually crawl through the windows. It was bad enough that the rust had actually run down the wall, blending into the gray white paint.

None of the other buildings on the street were anything to write home about either. They all looked like little hole in the wall places, but the restaurant looked like the worst of them all.

Maybe if I hadn't had my art income for the past few years and had been used to eating much more poorly I wouldn't have noticed. Still, the place gave holes in the wall a bad name.

I closed my eyes and checked. Only three people in the place. And none of them were large enough to be Lung. None were carrying weapons, and there weren't any metallic bombs or unusual devices in the place that I could detect.

I'd arrived early of course. The moment I'd gotten off school I'd come directly here; arriving more than an hour early was only prudent considering that this could easily be an ambush. If it was I'd make Lung and the ABB regret that they were ever born.

Considering that Lung could regenerate I wouldn't even have to hold back, although the last thing I wanted was for Armsmaster to complain about even more severed limbs.

Stepping inside, my impression didn't get any better. The entire place was dim, dingy and depressing looking. Dim yellow light from old flickering bulbs made the place look even worse, although my fear was that the reason that they didn't go with brighter bulbs was because brighter lights would have revealed even worse horrors.

What would my father have said about this place? He'd have been able to tell me whether the walls were actually fifty percent made up of roaches or not. Fortunately he was out of range for this.

The wooden floor was old and stained, with wooden counter tops. The curtains and tablecloths were dark green.

What irritated me was that all of it would be easy to fix; better light bulbs, a coat of paint, new table clothes... for less than two hundred dollars they could have made the place look like a real restaurant, and with that they might have had better business.

Of course, that might be the point. If this place's main draw was as a meeting place for villains, the last thing they'd want was a large lunch crowd. Maybe the whole thing was designed to push people away so that no one would be here when the real business was being conducted.

Even so, they could have simply been closed on certain days and kept the place as a real business the rest. I wasn't sure why it irritated me so much; maybe it was because it reminded me a little bit of the rest of the city.

People had given up on the city really. The people who had energy and drive had left the city a long time ago, with the only ones remaining with energy being the gang members.

I'd grown up seeing graffiti on walls everywhere, even in my school, and no one had the energy to clean any of it up. There was trash in the streets. That was partially because the city didn't have the trash revenue to clean properly, but it was also because people had lost a sense of pride in their neighborhoods.

I wanted to change that, but I wasn't sure how. I had vast amounts of power, but it did nothing to change the hearts and minds of the people, which was something I needed if I was going to make any kind of real, substantive change.

"I have no experience in community refurbishment," my grandfather's avatar admitted. "Mutants rarely found peace for long enough to actually build communities."

Maybe they'd have been better accepted if they had.

The staff was in the back. I wondered how they'd know if a customer came. Was the doorbell connected to a light in the back?

I quickly checked; the answer was no.

So the service here was probably bad too. It made me wonder if the whole thing was some kind of front, maybe for the Protectorate. After all, wouldn't the PRT like to know what villains were discussing?

Or maybe it was Coil or Lung himself who owned the place. I wasn't sure whether I should waste one of Dinah's precious questions on the answer. The one thing I wasn't doing was taking the whole thing at face value.

Before the waiters could return I stepped outside. If the attack wasn't coming from inside the building then it would probably come from one of the other buildings nearby.

For the next thirty minutes I wandered inside the buildings that were open to the public. Only once did I have to quickly leave once I realized what kind of establishment it was. As I went I started attaching small objects to various buildings along the way.

Magazines and videos covered the walls of that store along with strange toys whose purpose I wasn't sure that I wanted to think about. The over twenty one sign had apparently fallen off, and the whole place smelled strange in a way that I found revolting.

I hadn't realized that places like that still existed; I thought everything went through the Internet these days.

My face felt hot for at least ten minutes afterwards, and so I took that opportunity to slip inside the buildings that weren't open to the public. The number of rats and bugs in these buildings made me even more certain that I didn't want to eat at the restaurant just a few doors down.

Finally I found myself back at the restaurant.

Lung hadn't arrived yet. Undoubtedly he was planning on arriving fashionably late, a subtle way of establishing dominance.

I could do something similar, but I didn't want to.

Stepping back into the restaurant I sat down at a table. I kept my force field up; it was possible that they were planning to gas me or use some other kind of non-metal trap. I had no plans on letting that happen.

Opening my hand I let a small object float up until it attached itself to the ceiling. It wasn't intrusive; considering the state of the ceiling and the lighting it blended right in.

I touched my glasses, and a moment later several different viewpoints emerged.

Leet swore that these wouldn't explode and turn my face into a mangled ruin, but I wasn't sure. Views from the several tiny drones that I'd placed appeared on my retinas. The drones would alert me if there was movement, and the muscle movements of my eyes would activate any particular screen.

There was movement now.

Lung appeared at the end of the block, followed by Oni Lee and the same group of three that had greeted me at the tower.

He was actually a little early, which surprised me. I'd expected him to have more pride.

"You are beginning to think like me," my grandfather's avatar said.

Like a supervillain... was that supposed to be a compliment?

Who was Lung expecting to meet? A scared fifteen year old girl, or the monster that some people liked to make me out to be?

What was the play I needed to make. Would trying to intimidate him only enrage him and make him escalate, or would being too submissive lead him to try to take advantage?

I'd been wrestling with the question all night, and even my grandfather's avatar could only tell me to play it by ear. Apparently he didn't know enough about Lung to make any kind of good judgment.

Looking around I scowled. Screw this place.

My grandfather's avatar had told me that negotiations over a meal were considered customary in China; there wouldn't be any meal that either of us would be willing to eat in this place.

Getting up I stepped outside. Lung was already halfway down the block. He stopped, and Oni Lee stopped with him.

Technically neither of us were on neutral ground yet, and I could conceivably attack him.

I floated up to him.

"That place is a shithole," I said. "Do you know some place that isn't made of roaches and spit, maybe someplace with good food?"

"Such a place would not be neutral ground," he said after a moment.

"I doubt calling it neutral ground would make much of a difference if either of us chooses to violate it," I said. "Either we choose to accept the truce or we do not."

He frowned, then nodded.

"We could go to my grandma's restaurant," the kid said. "She opens at six, but food should be ready before then."

"The food there is good, and it's only a few blocks from here," Lung admitted. He looked at me. "You trust that it is not a setup?"

"I defeated the Empire in less than three minutes," I said. "If it is a trap I will make sure that you and yours go the way they did."

Hopefully I sounded more confident than I felt. After all, this was Lung, the Bogeyman of Brockton Bay. I'd been holding the PRT and Protectorate off for days, but he'd been doing it for years.

He looked at me and then nodded.

"Get us a table for six," he said to the boy. "In the back. With some privacy."

The boy started calling.

"We can walk and talk," I said.

I carefully pulled the cameras from where I'd placed them, levitating them out of sight. If anyone came to attack I'd know long before it happened.

"This wasn't the agreement," he said. "If you are fickle in this how do I know you will keep any agreement you make in the future?"

"You were the one who suggested we meet here," I said. "And we did. Nobody said we needed to stay."

"Any place I suggest will be suspect," he said.

We walked in silence for a more than a minute. My grandfather had warned me that this might happen. People were uncomfortable with silence and they felt the need to fill it with something, anything, and that could be used to lead them into a position of weakness.

Still, I was the first to speak.

"You aren't what I expected," I said.

"What did you expect?" he asked, turning his head to look at me. He was slightly over six feet tall and he was shirtless, with his only concession to Capehood being the metal mask he was wearing. I could see his eyes through the mask, but nothing else. Dragon tattoos covered his body, and I did my best not to stare at them, as much as I wanted to them. Some of the artwork was exquisite.

I respected him a little more for not changing the metal mask to something else.

"Someone who wouldn't listen to a fifteen year old girl," I said. "After all, given the way your people treat women I wouldn't have expected much respect."

"Power is all that's important," he grunted. He turned away from me and gestured to the city. "Would the city be like this if its people had any power?"

I thought about it and shook my head.

"Those who have power can make the river go around them, or even change the course of the river. Those without are bounced by the currents, helpless to change their own fate."

"I suppose you are the one who makes the river go around you," I said.

He shrugged.

"Don't you want better for your people, for this city?" I asked. "The city is dying. In twenty years will there even be a city for you to rule over?"

"You are wrong," he said. "It is not the city that is dying. It is the world."

I shook my head, although I remembered an offhand comment Dinah had once made and I felt a chill go down my spine.

"So why not do something about it?" I asked. "It's your world as much as anyone's. If the world dies, so do you."

"Are you trying to talk Lung into being a hero?" Wu asked incredulously. He'd already hung up the phone and he and the others were walking behind me. Oni Lee had vanished; he was now teleporting along he rooftops, which made hiding the cameras difficult.

Before Lung could slap him down I said, "And why not. He just said that power is what matters. He's one of the few people who have enough power to make a difference, so why shouldn't he be a hero?"

"I am no hero," Lung said. "Heroes are a lie the weak make up to comfort themselves when the monsters come to the door."

"So be the monster that protects the weak," I said. "The wolfhound that protects the herd."

He grunted but didn't say anything.

My grandfather's avatar whispered a suggestion in my ear.

"I've heard that being compared to a dragon in China is a sign that someone is esteemed and considered a person of great achievement. Someone who is lacking achievement and ability is considered a worm or a rat or some other lowly animal."

He glanced at me impatiently. Considering that he'd named himself it didn't say a lot about the esteem he was held in.

"How do you want to be remembered if the world doesn't end?" I asked. "Because I'm going to do everything I can to make sure that doesn't happen."

"What do you want for a truce?" he asked shortly.

Apparently Japanese or Chinese politeness... I suddenly realized that I didn't really know what ethnicity Lung was... didn't apply when he didn't like what I was saying.

"I can understand prostitution," I said. "I don't like it, and I don't think it's really ever a choice that's made without some form of coercion, whether it is economic or emotional or whatever. Still, I realize it's probably not going away, and if so there will be people who try to regulate it."

He didn't speak to me, but I could tell he was looking at me. Because of the mask I couldn't tell what he was thinking.

"What I can't abide is the sex slavery," I said. "Kidnapping girls and women is wrong; in some ways it makes you as bad or worse than the Empire was."

"I don't care about the gambling," I said. "People go to Atlantic city and its totally legal, so why shouldn't it be here? Protection money on the other hand isn't something I like much."

"So you are asking that we gut our business of some of our most profitable enterprises," he said. "What do we get in return?"

"Respectability," I said. "I've handed you half the city on a plate. I could do to you what I did to the Empire, and possibly even easier since you only have two Capes instead of more then ten. But with half a city under your control, you don't need to make women slaves. There would be plenty of business to keep your people occupied without that."

"You would not find us such easy meat as that," he said. His voice sounded irritated.

"You become a dragon with metal scales," I said gently. "I've seen some of your leftovers on E-Bay. Against someone like me you wouldn't stand any better chance than Kaiser did... assuming I wanted you dead."

He was silent for a long moment. "And you don't?"

"I think you've let yourself believe that the river can't be moved, that simply standing still is enough to show the world your power. But a rock that stands still will erode away eventually."

I pressed the point.

"You will be assimilating areas that are primarily white," I said. "Asians may be willing to accept certain things for cultural reasons that whites never will. You will spend all of your time fighting fires and forcing people to comply, and the PRT will be forced to respond when people complain, and they will."

"So what is your solution?"

"Become heroes to the people," I said. "Change the narrative. Right now everyone thinks you are thugs and punks, violent people who would rather shoot someone than look at them."

"Some of us are," he said.

I wasn't sure whether he included himself in that or not.

"You are a forward thinker; other Asians are content to simply be Chinese or Japanese or Korean or Vietnamese. You took all of these groups and welded them together into a bigger force. Now it's time to stop being ethnic and become an organization that accepts people of all races. You won't have the numbers to control the whole city otherwise, and then the new gangs moving in will chip away at you if you try to control too much."

"It's only a matter of time before other gangs try to move in," I said. "The Butcher is already here with her gang; others are sure to follow. If you continue with the old ways you'll always be fighting."

"But if people are happy to see you there it will be harder for the other gangs to get a foothold."

"Happy?" he asked. "Why would the sheep be happy to see the wolf at the door?"

"Because the wolf was protecting them from the hordes of monsters in the shadows," I said.

We were approaching the restaurant in question. This place looked a lot better, and the food from inside smelled good too. I didn't detect anyone with guns inside either, and I didn't detect anyone in the cameras either.

"I agree to nothing," he said. "But I am willing to talk. Would you ally yourself with us against the PRT?"

"I don't like them," I admitted. "But I'm trying not to be an outlaw. Still, what do you think your becoming a folk hero would do to the morale of the Protectorate?"

He chuckled. It was the first indication that I had that he might be a little amenable to my suggestion.

"The food here is good," he said. "Hopefully the company will be better."

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ShayneT

May 5, 2018

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Threadmarks 25. Treasure

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ShayneT

May 6, 2018

#4,155

"You have much in common, you know," my grandfather's voice said.

The meeting had gone well. Negotiating over the meal had proven to be the right choice. He'd relaxed a little and I'd been able to draw him out. I was still somewhat leery and cynical, though. It was easy for Lung to make promises, but it was considerably harder for me to verify that he was keeping them.

It bothered me, making a deal with him. He and his had done horrible things to women, having made slaves of some of them. Even the women who thought they were entering prostitution of their own free will were probably pressured into it, either by boyfriends or addictions to drugs or by simple economic need.

I'd flattered him on my grandfather's advice while pretending to be a little arrogant; it was possible that I was actually more arrogant than I was aware of, but how would I know that?

"I don't see how," I said. "He's a thug who uses women and kills people."

"You have killed," my grandfather's avatar reminded me. "You are both proud, both somewhat petty. You both believe in taking two eyes and a hand in return for an eye."

"I'm not petty," I muttered.

"You put twice as many lights on the side facing your neighbor," it said.

"The airport is on that side," I said. "And besides, I'm tired of people trying to push me around."

"Like the lawful authorities?"

"They know what they did," I said sullenly. "And they keep treating me like a child."

"You are a child," my grandfather's avatar said. "What would you say if it had been Emma who did all of the things you have done... killing people, delegging people, holding ships over the city."

"I'd be trying to leave the city," I admitted. "But I'm not like her."

"The Protectorate will not like this alliance," it said. "And it will not be long before it is known."

"The city needs help," I said. "And they don't have the manpower to do what it takes."

Outside of the gangs nobody did. True change required feet on the ground, something I'd thought long and hard about before agreeing to see Lung.

It still made me feel a little dirty. When I was younger I'd fantasized about being a hero, about being famous and rich and being able to save people.

Now I was faced with things that my powers couldn't fix. How did you save a dying city?

I'd moved the ships from the Ship Graveyard, but new business hadn't moved in immediately. While it was true that it had been less than two weeks it still didn't match my fantasies. There had been a time when Brockton Bay had been a jewel in America's crown, when there had been work enough for everybody.

Part of what I had tried to convince Lung to do was to funnel his money into buying and building legitimate businesses. Success bred success, and if he could revive the city, buying up land and buildings cheap, he wouldn't need to extort money from people anymore.

Lung the Landlord sounded a lot better than Lung the gang leader. I doubted that he'd have a lot of people reneging on their rents or damaging his property.

If I could get him to buy property, then the ABB would have reason not to tag everything. They might even 'encourage' people in those neighborhoods to clean up, maybe plant a few plants and clean up the place.

My knowledge of urban renewal was scant; I knew that it would take a lot more than just planting a few trees and cleaning up the place. Still, you had to start somewhere.

Even though the ABB had already ruined the lives of countless young women, if I could keep it from happening to more because of my agreement it might be worth it. I'd checked with Dinah; if I destroyed Lung the ABB would go underground and I'd never get all of them.

"There are no good choices," my grandfather's avatar agreed. "There is only the smallest of many evils."

Was this the slippery slope? Was this the deal that would have me sell my soul?

Was this how the Protectorate had sold theirs, reasoning that an intact Shadow Stalker was worth more than the lives of the children she was bullying? Pragmatism worth more than idealism; the end the only thing that mattered.

I'd pretended that what Lung represented didn't repel me because I needed his leadership to do what the Protectorate couldn't. Dinah had told me that something was coming that was going to threaten the city, and it was going to come soon. The fact that she couldn't see what it was, but could see the ripples that it made indicated that it was major.

I couldn't afford to be a hero if I wanted to save the city.

Not that I wanted to be a villain, but I had to wonder if this was how my grandfather became what he did; a series of bad choices and taking the easy way out instead of doing what was right.

Maybe I was fooling myself, worrying about dirty streets when something was coming that dwarfed anything the city had seen before. The problem was that while I didn't know what it was, there were only a few things that I knew of capable of destroying entire cities.

Endbringers, the Nine, Nilbog, maybe the Sleeper, although no one seemed to know a lot about him. Any one of those in my city would be a nightmare, but the problem was that I suspected they weren't the only things of that level out there.

It didn't even have to be from this universe; my mother had come from another universe, and whatever had happened there had been so bad that my mutant supremacist grandfather had sent his very human daughter away for safety.

"What happened in your homeworld," I said. "That made you send mom away."

"I will not tell you that," my grandfather's avatar said. "You are not yet ready."

"If I was squeamish I'd have already gotten post traumatic stress just from the things I've done," I said. "I've de-legged people."

Actually, hiring a counselor might not be a bad idea; not for myself but for Dad. I was clearly fine, but Dad was showing worrying signs of addiction.

Were there self help groups for power addicts?

"I would not share the kind of pain I have to live with," my grandfather's avatar said. "Not to anyone I cared about."

I grimaced.

People were always trying to make decisions for me, probably because they thought I was too young to make decisions on my own. That probably happened to other fifteen year olds, but unlike other people my age I was perfectly rational and in control.

My grandfather's voice chuckled.

"What?" I asked irritably. "Do you have something to say?

It was conspicuously silent for a moment, then said, "The adolescent brain isn't fully developed yet. The reward center of the brain develops quicker than the rest of it, meaning that adolescents are more likely to take risks that are... not well advised."

"I am not a risk taker," I said, frowning. "I'm perfectly considered in what I do."

"The ability to reason develops later," my grandfather's avatar said. "Which is why many of the authorities see you in much the way you would see a toddler with a loaded gun."

"That might be true of the other kids," I said, "But I reason perfectly fine."

"How would you know?" it asked.

"I've done fine so far, haven't I?" I asked.

Its voice was silent again.

"Fine," I said. "But something terrible is going to happen according to Dinah, and I'm going to need an army to pick up the pieces. Lung has an army, and assuming the cities survives whatever is coming, he'll have his chance to rebrand himself."

"And if he chooses to renege on his promises?"

"Then I'll cut him off at the knees," I said. "Both figuratively and literally. I've given him one chance to turn his life around, I won't give him another."

"Vengeance is mine sayeth the Lord," its voice said.

"He'll think I'm the Hand of God if he betrays me."

In the days that followed, Lung seemed to be a man of his word. There were reports on the news about sex slaves being released. Whenever the police raided the places they'd been released from the buildings were always empty and property records showed that the places had been owned by no one.

Whether the ABB had agents inside the records department, or whether they had habitually set up in abandoned buildings I wasn't sure. But the fact that the women were being released was a relief to me.

Of course, it was possible that he was keeping other girls and women hidden in more exclusive clubs. Without some kind of power or at least investigative skills there would be no way for me to know. Unfortunately I didn't have any of those.

What I did have, apparently was a contract with the PRT to produce plans for the new armor. Working on writing up the plans took several days; apparently doing something and writing out all the steps were something completely different, especially when powers created all kinds of shortcuts.

Still, Armsmaster looked over the plans, and apparently Dragon did too, and they approved them. I would soon be receiving royalties of fifty thousand dollars a month as soon as the factory was set up. I'd insisted that the factory be built in Brockton Bay, bringing back a couple of hundred jobs that had been lost when Medhall left.

Of course they tried to place the money in an account I could only access when I was eighteen, but I had my lawyer put a stop to that. Dad still had to sign off on everything, because apparently minors couldn't be held to contracts and they were afraid that I'd stop production simply because one of the Protectorate members was being an ass.

Apparently they weren't confident enough in their own people to be nice, but whatever. It wasn't like I was that vindictive.

Besides, the plant would start the revitalization of the city. It was a necessary first step.

I wondered if there were other technological secrets my grandfather could share. With enough of them the Bay could become a technological hub. Success tends to breed success, and so my hope was that when businesses saw that the city was starting to revive, they'd try to come here too.

The only problem was that the money wouldn't start coming in until the plant was built, and that would take a year. I had to console myself with the thought that change on the scale I was thinking of wouldn't come quickly. Incremental change would be agonizing, but it was the only kind of change that would keep long term.

I kept in contact with Uber and Leet, who were seemingly staying on the up and up. I even spent a couple of evenings helping them with special effects for their You Tube channel.

One day Leet came to me with an idea.

"How would you feel about looking for sunken treasure?" he asked. "You can feel metal, right? Well, I think I've narrowed the location of the Whydah Galley to a hundred square miles. It's up around Cape Cod."

"What's the Whydah Galley?" I asked.

"The first shipwreck in North America, at least that people know about," he said enthusiastically.

"Why were you looking up sunken treasure?" I asked. "I thought you were all about the science fiction."

"Pirates!" he said. "Pirates are still cool. Arr...parrots."

For some reason history had made murderous thugs cool. Nobody idolized Somali pirates before the decline in the sea trade had made them disappear.

"The ship went down in 1717," he said. "Almost everyone died. Black Sam Bellamy was the Captain, and they say it has the treasure from over fifty ships on board."

"Even if we find it, what are the odds that some state or another won't just take it from us?"

"Salvage law and the law of finds," he said. "We can keep it as long as it's not within three miles of the coast. There's some different rules if it was a privateer or a warship owned by a country, but he was just a pirate, which means it's open season."

"It sounds like a lot of work," I said dubiously.

"Four hundred thousand coins," he said. "That's what they say is on board. Think of what you could do with all that money."

"You do have the ability to make your force shield permeable to oxygen only," my grandfather's avatar said.

"So what do you want for all of this?" I asked.

"Ten percent and take me with you," he said. "I'll have cameras to document the wreck."

"I'll have to talk to my lawyer," I said. "The last thing I need is to be arrested for stealing valuable historical artifacts."

Stepping outside I noticed that it was raining again. It had been raining a lot over the last few days, unreasonably so. I would have expected it in Earth Aleph; apparently they had more trouble with Climate change than we had.

After all, our fishing industries had taken such a hit by Leviathan that fish had had thirty years to make a comeback. Those fishermen brave enough to go out on the water made very good livings.

I wondered if there was some way I could sponsor fishing boats. If I made some money, maybe I could buy the boats and rent them to people who wanted to make a go at commercial fishing?

Maybe this buried treasure idea wasn't the worst idea Leet had ever had. At the very least it would be an adventure.

"Wow," Leet said. "I guess we won't need these rebreathers I made."

I'd never expanded by force field into a sphere before, but it was remarkably easy. Making it permeable to oxygen but not the other components of seawater had been difficult. Getting rid of the carbon dioxide generated by two people was even more difficult.

Apparently my grandfather had somehow been able to make it work even in space, but I wasn't certain how that had worked.

Hopefully I would never have to know that, unless I started some kind of satellite launching business, which suddenly occurred to me might be quite lucrative. The Simurgh had put a crimp in the whole satellite business, but there were still countries and companies still crazy enough to risk launching communications satellites.

Usually they did it from isolated areas, s as not to risk a visit from the Simurgh.

We floated over the ocean near Cape Cod. It was late in the afternoon, and I'd talked to Dad about what I was going to do. He just muttered something about all the animals leaving town and trying to figure out why.

It had still been raining when I left, and it was still raining here. Whatever storm front that had taken hold of the East coast wasn't letting up. Some of the streets were starting to flood. We were safe, of course, unless it was a hundred year flood, and even then I thought the first floor of the tower would be safe. After all, I didn't keep anything of value there.

I'd been extending my senses as wide as I could, and it was surprisingly easy here. Back in the city, there were so many sources of metal that it was hard to discriminate the signal from the noise. It was like trying to listen to a single conversation across a crowded room when everyone was talking at once.

Out here, though it was much easier. The ocean had an underlying amount of metallic materials inside of it, but that didn't hold a candle to the metallic source I was detecting now.

"Ok," I said. "Here we go."

A moment later we plunged beneath the waves.

"This was worth it just for the view," Leet said, staring outside the limits of my sphere.

There were fish everywhere. The waters weren't as clear as I would have liked; I supposed that I'd have to go south to the tropics. Still it was impressive. Having the sphere meant I could see everything on all sides and below me, which was a view that couldn't be matched.

We plunged deeper, the water around us darkening. Like a submarine, I didn't have to put the oxygen inside the force field under pressure, which meant that we didn't have to worry about getting the bends coming back up.

Soon it was twilight all around us, and less than a minute later it was dark around us.

"You've got the lights?" I asked.

Leet nodded and fumbled for the devices at his feet. A moment later he lit a lantern at our feet and then pulled out a spotlight.

"Forty five million candlepower,' he said smugly. "And I bought it off the shelf."

"Don't point that thing at me!" I snapped, holding a hand up in front of my eyes. There were spots in front of my eyes.

It took almost a minute for my eyes to clear. There was sand everywhere, which made visibility limited.

We approached the wreck, and as the hull came into view, I felt sudden disappointment.

"It's a U-boat," Leet said. "I didn't know any got that close to the United States."

No treasure here. I felt unaccountably disappointed.

"Did you see something move?" Leet asked. He frowned and turned the spotlight over to our side."

Suddenly we were slammed to the side. My head slammed into the side of the sphere and it was all I could do to maintain the sphere.

There was something huge outside the sphere. The spotlight had fallen to the bottom of the sphere, and all I saw was the bottom of a massive reptilian tail as it moved past with unnatural speed.

877

ShayneT

May 6, 2018

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Threadmarks 26. Lives

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ShayneT

May 8, 2018

#4,262

"Don't you have any kind of inertial dampeners on this thing?" Leet asked. There was blood running down the side of his face and he looked groggy.

I shook my head. "I'll just have to make sure we don't move the next time. What the hell was that?"

"Either Godzilla is real," Leet said. "Or we need to get out of here and fast."

Nice to know he didn't think we needed to leave quickly if Godzilla was real. Most likely that was because we'd be fast enough to dodge Godzilla at least until we could get away. If it was the other thing, the thing that neither one of us wanted to say out loud, it was likely that we wouldn't get away until he was ready to let us go.

"We should probably go," I said.

He nodded.

A moment later the shield shuddered again, but this time I was ready for it. I held it steady.

This time there was a glimpse of multiple glowing red eyes staring balefully at us as they passed, almost too quickly to see, along with a massive body that seemed to go on forever.

Was Leviathan this large, or was my mind playing tricks on me?

I began to push the sphere upward, probably faster than we should have, and my legs trembled a little at the acceleration. Leet was on the floor of the sphere and he didn't bother getting up.

"I guess we know where Leviathan likes to spend his evenings," he said shakily.

As we broke from the water a massive column of water slapped down at us. I managed to push through it though, and a moment later we were in space.

Looking down we could see a massive trail of water moving behind something that was slicing through the water at an impossible speed. Happily it was moving away from us; unhappily it was moving in the direction we came from.

"Where do you think it's going?" I asked slowly.

Leet looked at me, and said, "Our luck couldn't be that bad."

I nodded and a moment later I began to head for shore. There was no way I was going to keep up with Leviathan's speed in the water, but the one thing I could do was warn people, and that would require my cell phone to work. Those mostly didn't work very far out to see.

I hit a button on my phone.

"Armsmaster here," the curt voice on the other end of the line said.

"I'm up by Cape Cod," I said. "I was treasure hunting and I just saw Leviathan heading in your direction. I'm not sure which city he's after, but I've got a bad feeling."

"There's a theory that they are attracted to conflict between Capes," he said. "There has been a lot of conflict here recently. Usually they stick to a fairly regular schedule; if this is what you think then it's early by a couple of months."

I could hear the sound of keys clicking.

He cursed under his breath.

"I'm checking the satellite feeds now, and I see what you are seeing. I'll alert everyone. I'm assuming that you plan to participate?"

"As soon as I can get there," I said.

"Hurry," he said.

As soon the phone went dead, I dialed another number.

"Dad," I said.

"Taylor?" he asked. He sounded groggy, which shouldn't have happened during a work day. Was he skipping work?

"I just saw Leviathan and I'm pretty sure that he's heading for the Bay. Get to an Endbringer shelter, and make sure the Dockworkers know. We're going to need them afterwards if Leviathan hits."

He suddenly sounded much more alert.

"Are you sure?"

"No. He could be hitting Boston or someplace nearby, but I don't think we have that much luck."

"All right," he said. "I can help from inside the shelter anyway."

Right. Like dogs and cats and birds could do anything against an Endbringer.

"Be safe," I said.

"Don't die," he said. "They're going to want you on the front lines because you are so strong. You've been able to steamroll everything you've ever me, but this is different."

He was silent for a moment. "I can't tell you not to go. I'm not sure I'm able to tell you anything anymore. But the one thing I can ask is that if you think you are going to die, get out of there no matter what you have to do. A dead hero is less valuable than a live pragmatist."

"All right," I said.

A moment later I switched the phone off and made my third and final call.

"Lung," I said.

"Yes?" he asked curtly. "I hope you aren't calling to ask for more conditions?"

"I'm in Cape Cod and I just saw Leviathan passing by. I think he'd heading for the Bay. It could be to Boston, but I've got a bad feeling he's headed straight for you. Get your people close to the shelters, and have them help other people into the shelters. You want to change your image, this is the kind of first step that you couldn't pay for."

He was silent for a moment, then he said, "And you believe this is true?"

"I'm sending my own father to a shelter and I warned the Protectorate ninety seconds ago. Hopefully you'll be able to get the word out in time to save most of your people."

"All right," he said. "I have faced the monster before, and I know what it can do. If the city is completely destroyed, then our deal is off."

"Agreed," I said. "No point in trying a campaign to win the hearts and the minds of the dead. Let's try to keep that from happening."

He grunted and the phone went dead.

I handed the phone to Leet, who shook his head.

"I just uploaded the video to Uber for our YouTube channel," he said. "He's going to alert all of our followers."

"Weren't we going to try to keep our association a secret?"

"If Leviathan attacks, do you think it will matter?" he asked. "People have to know, and by the time they decide to sound the Endbringer Alarms, it might be too late."

I nodded grimly. There were always people that couldn't make it to the Endbringer shelters. People who were immobile, or who couldn't walk well and who didn't have a vehicle. People trapped in hospital beds. It was often the weakest and least able to defend themselves who suffered the most, and in the aftermath it was the poor who would have the hardest time rebuilding.

At least with hurricanes people had days worth of warning. Endbringers often left people with fifteen minutes.

I'd have thought Dragon or Armsmaster would have come up with some kind of predictive program.

"We were moving as quickly as we were able now, the ground flashing by beneath us."

"I'm gonna need stuff from my lab," Leet said. "If I'm going to fight."

"I hope you have some kind of giant mecha," I said. "Or a space cannon, or a railgun or something."

Scowling, he looked down at his fists and clenched them. "If I'd known this was going to happen I'd have built all of that. A glitter boy maybe or a gundam. Thing is, I don't usually go for big weapons."

"Then you'll have to help get people to shelters and help with the wounded," I said. I glanced at him. "You aren't planning to chicken out, are you?"

He stared at his fists for a long moment, then looked up at me.

"No. I'm going to do what I can. I just wish I'd had more time."

"Don't we all," I said grimly.

If I'd known Leviathan was coming, I would have been pumping my grandfather's...well, not brains, but whatever it used to think for plans for the defense of the city. I'd have also been asking him for tactical advice as well.

"You had to know you would eventually face off against them," its voice said. "Beings tend to seek out and fight other beings of the same power level."

As if I was as strong as an Endbringer. I knew I was strong, but nobody was that strong. Even Eidolon and Legend and Alexandria could barely slow one of them down, and that was working as a team. No one of them would be able to individually fight an Endbringer, and Eidolon was the most powerful parahuman in the world.

"The most versatile perhaps," my grandfather's avatar muttered. "But his powers wouldn't hold a candle to many of the upper tier beings in my universe. Nathaniel Richards, Hope, Rachel Summers... any one of them would make this world tremble with their power."

I'm sure he had to walk a mile to school every day through the snow and it was uphill both ways. Old people had a tendency to exaggerate for effect. Although... considering that he'd been in a concentration camp when he was young the school thing and the snow was probably an insensitive thought.

"I'm not sure what we'll find when we get there," I said. "I may not have time to drop you by your lab."

"No problem," Leet said. "Uber is taking a truck to bring my armor to Protectorate headquarters. We'll meet him there."

"Do you really think you'll be able to fight Leviathan with your armor?" I asked.

He snorted. "I've seen the statistics on the force Leviathan generates. He'd tear through my armor like tin foil."

"So why go?"

His hands tightened into fists and he closed his eyes.

"I know people think I'm a laughingstock, that Uber would be better off without me. The thing is, I'm ok with that as long as I make people happy. I was always the class clown in school, even if I wasn't very good at it."

Leet was essentially Greg Veder with powers I realized suddenly. Socially maladjusted but endlessly eager nonetheless.

"But my Mom lives in Brockton Bay, and all the people who were nice to me in school. I love the city, and I'm not going to let an overgrown lizard stomp it into the ground."

He wasn't looking me in the eye.

"He is terrified, but doesn't want to show it in front of a girl," my grandfather's avatar said.

As though I couldn't tell that on my own. He practically stank of fear. Still, he was willing to step up when he was much much squishier than I was, and I had to respect that.

We were both silent as the ground sped by beneath us. Cape Cod was about seventy five miles from Brockton Bay, and the trip out had seemed like it had taken any time at all.

The trip back seemed to take forever, the minutes stretching out interminably.

"Are you sorry you took up with me?" I asked, when the silence grew almost unbearable.

"It's not like you gave us a choice," Leet said. He was silent for a long moment before he said, "But I like that you are at least trying. If you weren't here I'd probably be hiding in a shelter along with everyone else. Or maybe not... I guess we'll never know."

"Feeling afraid doesn't mean you're a coward," I said. "Everybody feels afraid."

"Even you?"

I looked away. Putting a name to the feeling in the pit of my stomach would make it real, something I didn't want to do.

"Maybe we need to talk strategy," I said. "I haven't studied the Endbringer fights as well as I should have. Does anybody have any idea what works against them?"

"Nothing?" he said. "I mean not really. People have taken chunks out of them, but they always show back up again a few months later as good as they started."

"Are they smart?" I asked.

There weren't a lot of videos of Endbringer fights, not that got distributed to the public anyway. Seeing heroes being slaughtered wasn't apparently considered respectful. The authorities probably felt that it would be damaging to people's morale to see how one sided the battles really were.

They might be right.

"They're smarter than people think. The Simurgh is a genius; I've seen the designs for some of the things she's tried to build, and they are a Tinker's wet dream... if you like things that destroy entire cities or states."

The PRT had procedures for everything. If they'd had anti-Endbringer tactics, they'd have doubtlessly distributed them. The fact that they didn't was worrying. Were they keeping them to themselves, hoping that the villains got slaughtered, or were the Endbringers simply so adaptable that no standard tactics would work?

Leet went over a few other things with me; things that he'd read online, speculation about Leviathan's capabilities, possible tactics that might work.

Even at my top speed getting back home took fifteen minutes. I could maybe have gone faster without the bubble, but I doubted it.

As we approached the shoreline of Brockton Bay, I saw that the Docks looked like they had been hit by a bomb. Most of the buildings there were gone, and water was filling the streets. I could see the bodies of animals washing away in the water.

A swarm of insects coalesced in mid-air. I could see them flying in from every direction.

I was horrified to hear a voice coming from the middle of the swarm. It was creepy as hell, and it was a little hard to understand, but it was clearly a voice.

"Taylor, this is Dad," the voice said. "Go to PRT Headquarters to get an Armband. Dragon will direct you to where Leviathan was last seen."

"There's no time for that," I said impatiently. "Can't I pick one up from someone else?"

There was silence on the other end of the line. "You can pick one up from the dead," Dad said. "Of which there are already many."

I grimaced.

"I need my armor," Leet said. He looked at me, then grimaced.

He touched something on his lapel, and a moment later there was a flash of light and he was gone. Had he prepared a transporter just in case I proved to be less trustworthy than he thought?

I shrank my force field until it was skin tight. It was stronger that way, and I suspected that I'd need all the help I could get once the fight really started.

"The last place he was seen was by Lord's Market," my father's hideous, buzzing voice said.

I nodded.

"We're going to have a talk about just what you are able to do," I said. "After all of this is done."

He could talk with bugs?

Finding them wasn't hard once I knew the general area. As I approached what was left of the Market, I started seeing bodies lying everywhere. Most of them were wearing costumes, although no one that I immediately recognized.

Some of them were dressed like norms, though, and I wondered if they were people who had been too stubborn to get to the shelters or if they had just been too slow.

Leviathan was nowhere to be seen, but it looked like the heroes were picking up the pieces.

I gestured, and an armband detached itself from one of the corpses, rising up to me. A quick glance at it with my senses showed nothing wrong.

Slipping it on my arm, I was startled to hear a voice coming through the speakers.

"Slipknot up," a voice I belatedly recognized as Dragon's said.

"Are you all right?" Dragon's voice asked. "We thought you were dead."

"This is Taylor Hebert," I said. "I just got here and I'm borrowing his comm. It doesn't look like he'll be needing it anymore."

"Acknowledged," she said. "Leviathan has currently gone underground and has not been spotted. There have been thirty casualties so far."

"Is this normal?" I asked.

"Endbringer fights can't be predicted," she said. "Trust me, we've tried. We think he's going to try to sink the city using the aquifer under Brockton Bay. We need to keep him hemmed in so that doesn't happen."

She was silent for a moment. "While there isn't much hope of doing real damage to him, if you damage him enough he'll go away. We've got great hopes in you."

"There are two buttons," she began.

"Leet told me," I said, interrupting her. "He found the schematics online. I say Hard Override if I need everyone to hear what I have to say, right?"

"That's... disturbing," she said.

"Long Range attackers are following Legend," she said. "Those who can take a beating up close are under the command of Alexandria. Which group would you prefer to follow?"

Given Leviathan's speed I realized that I probably shouldn't get up close. It would be too easy to make get confused and make mistakes.

"Legend," I said.

"I will inform," she said. "Proceed two hundred meters to the northwest and you will find the group of survivors."

Meters... right, she was a Canadian.

I saw a group of people gathered in a clearing. There had been a building there once, now nothing remained but the outline of its foundation. They were busily working to bandage people who were injured.

"Taylor!" I heard a voice call out.

I looked behind me, and there, floating was Legend.

"Your advanced warning saved a lot of lives today," he said.

I'd seen bodies everywhere. What was an Endbringer fight like when they didn't have warning?

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ShayneT

May 8, 2018

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Threadmarks 27. Decision

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ShayneT

May 11, 2018

#4,377

"Leviathan has been spotted emerging at sixth and Elm," Dragon's voice snapped out.

It sounded different, colder and more impersonal than it had when it talked to me before. I hadn't even had time to engage in any fangirling over the fact that I was face to face with Legend, and he was already gesturing.

"Follow me," he said curtly. "As quickly as you can. Hit him and don't stop. Don't worry about damage to property; under the law Endbringer fights make everything fair game."

It made sense; better to lose your car or your house than to end up drowned, or burned to death by radiation or worse yet insane and ready to murder the people you cared about.

He was gone a moment later and I struggled to keep up. Considering that he could move at the speed of light there wasn't much chance of that.

Still, sixth and Elm wasn't that far away. It was a residential district, so I reached behind me, grabbing up the shattered remains of metal warehouses. The metal behind me grew larger and larger, and I found myself wishing I'd left at least one of the ships from the ship graveyard alone.

Still, by the time I reached sixth and Elm I had enough metal detritus to cast a shadow over an entire block.

Alexandria and a half dozen other Brutes were fighting Leviathan, but he was unbelievably fast. It made me happy I was in the sky instead of down in the middle of it.

From what Leet had told be about the durability of Endbringers, I wasn't sure that any of the metal I had with me would be strong enough to penetrate very far into it. Worse, Leviathan's speed and agility meant that any force I brought to bear would likely be used against the other people who were fighting for their lives on the ground.

"If you can contain him the attacks of others would be more successful," my grandfather said quietly.

Legend was already lighting him up, but the blasts didn't seem to be having much of an effect.

I gestured, and the metal behind me flashed through the air toward Leviathan, parting around those people who were fighting him.

Leviathan dodged to the side, but the metal was able to move faster than he could move, at least on land. He had a water clone, and some of the metal splashed through that, but I simply sent twice as much metal to hit them both.

Accumulating metal on his limbs wasn't easy. It was difficult to get purchase on his flash for one thing. I chose the hardest metals I could sense and I created spikes to sink into his flesh. They were followed by more and more metal, which I crushed onto Leviathan's limbs.

His head snapped up, and he looked up at me with eyes that were surprisingly green. Hadn't they been red before?

It brushed away at the metal that was accumulating on all it's limbs. I was crushing the metal as it encircled him, and doing my best to use the metal to slow the motions of his limbs. I had to be careful though, or he'd simply tear right through the metal.

Before I could get more than a ton of metal on each limb, I was startled by a missile flying through the air. It was moving fast, and before I could fully understand what was happening I was struck by nine tons of monster.

Leviathan could fly? Or was he so strong that gravity barely had an effect on him?

That was all I had time to think as I fell backward, plunging toward the ground because I hadn't had time to brace myself. I landed on the ground with the monster on top of me, and it clawed away at my shield, applying pressure like I'd never experienced before.

Up close he was surprisingly massive, and he did everything it could to keep me off balance. He smashed his head repeatedly into my face while he clawed at my sides. All the while his body pressed into mine holding me down onto the pavement.

I actually felt this pressure.

My shield held, though, and instinctively I pushed, sending Leviathan flying. Bits of metal flew off his bonds as he went, though.

Before I could fly away, he was on me again, but this time I was ready for him. I managed to stand, and I braced myself, and this time as he rushed toward me I did not move.

This time it was Leviathan that bounced away, for all that at thirty feet and nine tons physics should have dictated otherwise.

"As long as the beast is focused on you, it is not killing your comrades," my grandfather said.

Keep him occupied. Hurt him. Slow him down. That was how we were going to win.

I held my hand out to him and I gestured. It was rude and probably unnecessary, but the monster seemed to get the gist. It launched itself toward me, and I pushed myself toward it.

This time I put my power behind me, turning me into a battering ram powered by as much force as I could muster. Leviathan was the one who slid backward, sliding into a large building, and a moment later we'd both pushed through the walls.

I covered his eyes with metal, but it didn't seem to slow him down in the slightest.

"He sees without his eyes," my grandfather's avatar said. "Given his hydrokinesis I would assume that he detects water much like you detect metal."

A moment later he was gone, moving through the building and toward the others. Apparently I wasn't providing him with enough carnage.

"No you don't," I muttered.

Metal from everywhere coalesced toward him. He dodged, but the metal went where I willed it, and much faster than I could move myself.

He lunged toward Alexandria, but I yanked back. The metal sheered away, but unlike me Leviathan had to make at least a token acknowledgment to physics.

More and more metal piled on. Alexandria launched herself forward to hit him, and she seemed to knock him back a little. I concentrated on piling more and more metal on. It was going to take a lot to do what I needed to do.

As strong as Leviathan was, the weight of the metal was probably almost immaterial. After all, Alexandria could lift seemingly impossible amounts of weight, although most big objects she tried to lift would shatter under the pressure of their entire mass resting on her tiny hands.

I began launching pieces of molten metal at Leviathan, hard and fast enough to make small divots in his skin. It wasn't much, but it worked as a distraction.

Still, he was slowing. The metal got in the way.

"Lift him off the ground," my Grandfather said. "He needs traction to move."

Right. I should have seen that. It didn't matter how strong someone was; if they couldn't touch the ground they weren't going anywhere.

I began wrapping metal around his center of mass. He'd be able to tear through the metal on his limbs, but a harness of metal wouldn't leave him with anything to fight against.

He lunged toward me again, and I lifted him off the ground.

For a moment he struggled, moving his legs quickly and moving his tail. He tried to grab at the metal that was holding him, but I held his arms fast, and as quickly as he pushed though the metal I added more. I was pulling metal from the buildings nearby now. There was almost a thousand tons of metal on him, compressed as much as I could.

Leviathan's water clone lashed around, moving now in ways that its master was not able to.

"Light him up!" I heard Legend say.

A moment later all the parahumans around me began to pummel him with beams of fire and cold and light and darkness. It would have been impressive if it had looked like it was doing any good. Unfortunately it didn't look like it was doing much. Even Legend's beams, the best of all of them only seemed to be burning off the surface.

The water clone moved suddenly, and the light of Legend's beam was diffracted though the water.

My world exploded with pain, my shoulder hurting more than anything I'd ever experienced in my life. I lost concentration and Leviathan crashed to the ground.

He exploded into motion, tearing the metal off himself as he lunged toward me.

My force field had faded and I was barely able to bring it back up in time despite my pain. It almost looked disappointed as it hit my shield.

My shield was harder to hold than it had been though. Apparently whatever had happened to my shoulder was making it hard for me to concentrate.

He clawed at me, smashing me again and again, and this time I could feel my concentration beginning to crack. Sweat was pouring down my face and getting into my eyes. It burned, but I couldn't raise my hand to wipe it out of my eyes.

Leviathan grabbed my leg and it twisted, slamming me into Alexandria, who was rushing up from behind. She felt like she was made of something stronger then metal, and I felt my spine bend close to breaking.

Alexandria went flying.

The world spun around me as Leviathan used me like a club. The moment I lost control of my force field I was dead and I knew it, but my vision was graying around the edges.

"Get away from her you bitch!" I heard Leet's amplified voice cry out.

I was confused by now, but I thought I saw the Iron Giant running toward Leviathan. It was almost as large as he was, and rockets emerged from it, filled with some kind of plasma that I'd never seen before. They actually seemed to be doing damage to Leviathan.

Leviathan threw me at the Iron Giant, but Alexandria caught me, and a moment later I was moving through the air.

Leviathan was cutting through the Iron Giant like a mouse through cheese, but I could see the tell tale blue flash of Leet teleporting out of the Giant's head.

"Panacea will get you back into the fight soon enough," Alexandria said as she landed on a nearby building. "Strider, one to transport, priority."

"Taylor Hebert down," I heard Dragon's impersonal voice saying from the speaker on Alexandria's arm. "Resolute deceased, Harsh Mistress deceased. Woebegone deceased."

A moment later I heard the sound of rushing water, and then I didn't know anything else.

Time didn't seem to have a meaning; it seemed like an instant before I woke up in a tent. I didn't know where I was and I was confused. My pain was gone.

Panacea was standing over me, staring at me like she'd never seen me before.

"You aren't right," she said.

I flexed my arm, which felt fine. "That's what everyone tells me. What happened?"

"You were hit by Legend's beam," she said. "That's the problem with having a force field you can see through. Legend could have stopped his beams from hitting you. But it happened so quickly he'd hit you before he had a chance to stop it, or at least that's what I've been told.""

"There are ways to overcome that kind of weapon," my grandfather's voice said. "I will show you."

An image flashed through my mind and I knew what to do. Legend wouldn't catch me the same way next time, accidentally or not.

"How long have I been out?" I asked.

"Ten minutes," she said. Her lips compressed. "There haven't been a lot of wounded to deal with, and you were considered a priority case anyway. I had to regrow your arm and you didn't have a lot of extra mass to deal with, so I had to improvise."

There was a large plastic barrel sitting beside the bed; it smelled like fish. Had she grown me an arm out of cod?

I flexed my fingers; it felt the same, and it even looked the same, even though I no longer had even a remnant of a shirt sleeve.

"That's good, right?" I asked distractedly. It was weird to realize that part of your body wasn't really part of your body. "The small numbers of wounded?"

She shook her head, and I suddenly realized that I could hear Dragon's voice through a speaker on the desk. She was reciting a litany of the injured and the dead.

I forced myself up.

"I've got to get back,' I said. "I can make a difference."

Part of me simply wanted to lay on the cot and stare up at the ceiling. I'd never really lost before, not even temporarily and Leviathan had used me as a club. The sense of invincibility that had been making me grow more and more overconfident over the past couple of weeks was gone.

I could have died.

The realization was chilling and horrifying.

No matter how prepared I thought I was, Leviathan would find something unexpected to use against me.

In a better world I wouldn't have to do this. I was only fifteen; I shouldn't have to be a soldier. Unfortunately there was no one else who could do what I could do. If Leviathan sank the city, all the Endbringer shelters would become tombs for the people inside. They were waterproof, but eventually the people would die of suffocation, like people trapped in the bottom of the sea on submarines, dead in the cold and the dark.

My father was one of those people, and my new acquaintances from Arcadia. I wasn't even sure I'd actually want Emma dead; I still hadn't had a chance to rub my success in the faces of her and Alan.

"Maybe you should rest," Panacea said, staring at me with a look I couldn't interpret.

I shook my head. "People are dying, and if I lie here when I'm perfectly fine, then it's at least partly my fault."

"I know how you feel," Panacea said. She grimaced. "I'd better get back to work."

Rising to my feet I stepped outside of the tent. The camp had been set outside of Brockton Bay, as far from the shore as possible. Leviathan didn't like leaving water behind, as it was his greatest strength. That didn't mean that he wouldn't, though.

"Where is the fight now?" I asked, tapping on my communicator, which I'd grabbed from the table.

Dragon's voice said, "Winslow high school."

A moment later I was in the air. I looked down as I flew. Parts of the city had been utterly destroyed, while other parts were still in good condition. The wealthier parts of the city tended to be farthest from the ocean, which meant that the impact of this was going to rest disproportionately on the poor.

Winslow was a disaster area. There had been a time when I would have assumed that demolishing it and just starting over was probably the best thing, but it was different seeing part of it actually in flames.

Half the building had collapsed.

To my surprise Lung was actually fighting Leviathan. He was already almost twenty feet tall to Leviathan's thirty, and he was blowing fire in Leviathan's face, for all the good it seemed to do.

I wouldn't have thought he'd have kept with the plan with me incapacitated. Maybe he was playing the long game. Maybe he thought that he could win the hearts and minds of the populace without me.

The important thing was that he was here.

I started toward them only to find myself stopping. Leviathan had beaten me like a pinata; the last thing I wanted was to get up close again.

Nothing I'd done had worked. I could increase gravity, but that would probably hurt Lung more than it did Leviathan. Electricity would probably be useless.

Metal wouldn't penetrate far enough to make any kind of a difference. I could try to bind him, but he'd shrug it off almost as fast as I wrapped him up.

I couldn't think of anything I could do that would help, and as I sat helplessly by, I saw a single sweep of Leviathan's tail turn a man in a red and white costume into a red mist.

People were dying because of me.

I'd been arrogant, thinking I'd be able to solve the problems of an entire city. I felt my heart starting to race and I started to hyperventilate. My hands tightened by my side.

I was frozen with indecision. There had to be something I could do, something that would save everyone and justify my having a ridiculous amount of power that people with three times my age and experience could have used to win instead of just whining.

Experience was the one thing I needed that I did not have. My grandfather would have beaten this thing with one hand tied behind his back.

"It is your decision," my grandfather's avatar said. There was a hint of longing in its voice, though.

I lifted my hand, and I called.

From it's place hidden in the walls of the tower, my grandfather's helmet came flying. I hesitated as it landed in my hand. This was a major step. Was I ready for it?

Leviathan stepped on another brute, who screamed in agony for a short moment before going limp.

I put the helmet on my head.

There was a moment of connection, a click as my body suddenly began moving without my own volition. My posture changed; even floating in the air I'd been slumped, defeated before I'd even begun. My posture straightened into something that was martial and almost arrogant.

"HOLD, MONSTER!" I shouted. My voice somehow seemed magnified a hundred times, but I couldn't quite understand how I managed it. "WE HAVE UNFINISHED BUSINESS. ALL OF YOUR POWER WILL NOT SAVE YOU FROM MY WRATH!"

A moment later the real battle began.

1007

ShayneT

May 11, 2018

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ShayneT

May 13, 2018

#4,554

A simple gesture of my hand and metal began to rise from the buildings around us. Buildings collapsed, and while there was no one inside I felt myself wincing at the damage I was doing. Hopefully I wouldn't have to pay for all of it.

Leviathan shoved Lung away easily, almost as though he hadn't been struggling with him before and he leaped for us again.

Another gesture and Leviathan's course changed as his localized gravity field changed enough to deflect him thirty degrees to the right.

Lung grabbed his foot and swung him around, smashing him into Winslow. I wondered for a moment if he was doing it as a favor for me; after all I was known to hate the school.

The metal around us coalesced, forming into three balls of metal that shrank from the size of buildings to the size of a bus to a car.

My fist tightened, and they gelled into liquid metal, becoming spheres the size of bowling balls. I could feel the pressure as I compressed countless thousands of tons of metal into something the size of a baseball. The process generated an amazing amount of heat, enough that I could see the brutes on the ground backing away and squinting up at me.

Leviathan had shrugged Lung off, backhanding him hard enough to send him flying at least three blocks. He was coming for me again.

A gesture, and the balls slammed forward, striking Leviathan in the center of his mass and sending him tumbling backwards into the ground, creating a massive gouge in the foundation of Winslow.

"I am the hand of vengeance," I called out. "The wrath of a God who never created a monster such as you."

Leviathan tried to move forward, but the balls were everywhere, slamming into his legs and his arms, crushing his tail. They were doing damage too; each impact was causing his flesh to crack and crater, almost as though he were a statue instead of made of living flesh.

Still, there was something about the situation that didn't seem right. The monster acted like it was injured, but it didn't add up.

My grandfather apparently came to the same conclusion.

"He's not hampered by any of his injuries," my voice said quietly. "A redundant physiology?"

It didn't make a difference in his strategy. At first it looked as though the strategy was simply to keep him off balance, but I began to see the pattern.

My grandfather was trying to see if there was any area of Leviathan's body that he tried to protect. Presumably that part would be more vulnerable and real attacks could be made there.

So far, though, Leviathan didn't seem to favor any one part of his body over the other, including his head. It was almost as though none of his body mattered.

"I don't think he has any organs," I said.

It was strange talking inside my own head.

My grandfather didn't dismiss my observations, though. Instead he simply changed his pattern. More metal rose from the ruins of Winslow, from the cars and trucks all over the city, rising and moving to cover Leviathan.

It had been raining all this time, but suddenly everything stopped. The drops of rain in the air simply froze in place, and the sudden silence was shocking.

Leviathan hadn't made a sound during all of this. I'd expected a roar or a hiss or something, but he simply stared at me with a piercing expression. A moment later his tail whipped out, and water sprang toward me, the drops of rain coalescing in much the same way my metal had.

The water hit me and for a moment it actually drove me back, the sheer weight of it surprising and unexpected.

I chuckled.

"You've burned through your bag of tricks, monster," I said. "Accept defeat with grace."

I groaned mentally. Never taunt fate. Even though I'd never really been a hero of a villain I knew better than to risk everything like that.

People were suddenly screaming, looking behind me. I could see the flicker of force fields going up as people huddled under them.

Right; the tidal wave.

The world around me was suddenly a confused morass as thousands of tons of water slammed into me all at once. I did not move, and the water parted around me like the red sea around Moses.

I simply rose higher and did not let up on the assault. My expression never changed at the plight of the people around me; my only focus was on the monster in front of me.

It had managed to free itself from some of the metal around it by using water to blast away at it.

From what I'd read on the Internet, Leviathan shouldn't be capable to using water for detailed tasks like this. He was supposedly limited to being a blunt instrument.

He'd apparently been hiding at least some of his power all this time.

Suddenly I leaned forward. I could feel a smile forming on my face. Apparently Leviathan had made a mistake. I couldn't see it, but apparently my Grandfather could.

"I see," my voice said. "The whole body is a puppet, controlled from the inside by the only part that is real."

"What?" I heard Dragon's voice on the comm.

Had I been pressing the communicator without realizing it,. Or had my grandfather intended that to be a message that got out to everyone.

I heard Tattletale's voice over the communicator.

"She's right, although I don't know how she guessed it," Tattletale said. "His skin is as hard as aluminum, and each layer down is a little more than twice as durable as the previous layer. All the damage he's taken is superficial. It's always been superficial. I don't know why he'd pretended that it wasn't."

I felt my power stretching throughout the earth's crust, seeking something; some combination of elements that I'd never seen before.

"Adamantium," my grandfather's avatar said. "Unbreakable, unbeatable. A single bullet would conquer armor even as powerful as this monster has."

Some of the elements he seemed to be looking for were missing, although most of them came roaring up through the earth.

"Pity," I heard my voice saying. "I'll have to go looking for the last element before I meet with the monster's siblings."

The idea dazzled me. An unbreakable bullet? The Endbringers would be ended.

That assumed the element he was looking for even existed on my earth and wasn't just missing from the local area.

"I can transmute elements if necessary," my voice murmured. "But it would take time that we do not have now."

My hand switched the communicator back on.

"I'd suggest that everyone back away from Leviathan. I'm going to escalate."

One of the metal balls I was using to keep Leviathan off balance shifted and chanced, becoming a javelin with points that were of monomolucular thinness. More and more mass rose and was compressed into the javelin.

"I have to avoid compressing it too much," I heard my voice speaking to Legend, who had risen up beside me. "Unless I want to create a black hole."

"That would be... bad." Legend said, staring at us.

My grandfather's avatar was exaggerating. It would take at least three kilometers of material collapsed into a pace smaller than a pea to create a black hole. I'd actually talked to him about it once.

Not that I wanted to create my own black hole or anything. That would be crazy.

Still, more and more metal was coming. Ton after ton was being pulled from the Brockton Bay landfill. I was a little disappointed that we hadn't done a better job at recycling.

Old refrigerators, stoves, rusted cars, all of them were being compressed into a javelin that was ten feet long. It's density increased exponentially, and I could feel the pressure; it wanted to expand back into its normal form. You couldn't simply crush several thousand tons of metal into a small space and not expect it to expand back into its normal form when you stopped applying pressure.

Still, Leviathan was slowly starting to get his bearings back.

Another wave was coming. I could see it in the distance, massive, bigger than anything that appeared on the planet naturally. Leviathan was determined to destroy the city, and if he couldn't do it in person he'd use his power to do it.

Metal broke off from the javelin I was assembling, a hundred tons of metal separating and forming into shapes that I didn't understand. They almost looked like amplifiers of some kind.

Each was the size of a small building, and three of them were settled onto devastated portions of the city. My power reached out and began to vibrate the amplifiers at a frequency that I could feel even through my force field. It was incredibly low, and it made my teeth ache.

It obviously affected the people around me even more as I saw brutes drop to the ground in pain. Leviathan didn't seem affected. Neither did Alexandria, or after a moment Eidolon.

For a moment it didn't look like anything was going to happen, but a ripples appeared in the middle of the waves heading toward us, and a moment later the waters collapsed.

Leviathan froze as the tidal wave vanished.

A moment later he straightened. He slapped away one of the balls that had been harrying him as though it didn't even exist.

"The monster shows his true colors!" my voice said. "No longer content to pretend, are you beast?"

Leviathan launched himself toward me; my grandfather tried the gravity trick again, but Leviathan simply had his water echo slam into it, redirecting him into his previous course.

Alexandria tried to intercept him, but he slapped her out of the air contemptuously. That fortunately shoved it off course, and I moved higher.

The Javelin had been completed. It now vanished into the distance. I stood, staring down at the monster.

"Your full might is no match for mine," my voice said. "Care to test your mettle?"

Great. Include a pun; who wrote my grandfather's lines? He sounded like something from a cheesy comic book. Maybe it was a cultural thing; were villains in his world expected to sound like old serials from the thirties?

Next he'd be screaming about DOOOOOMMM!!!

Leviathan filled my field of vision; after what had happened the last time I would have certainly flinched. Under my grandfather's control I simply stood there impassively, as though my force shield was a sure thing against a creature that had thrown Alexandria as though she was a sack of feathers.

A moment before Leviathan would have hit us though, something came roaring across the sky faster than the eye could see. All I saw was a flash of light as something red exploded on impact, hitting the Endbringer in its center of mass.

The Javelin struck at a speed that made its outer layers molten, it's tip a single molecule across, forcing the following metal further inside the monster.

The sound as it struck made my ears ring, and the impact created a concussive wave that knocked down the brutes closest to the fight. I could see that people's ears were bleeding.

The Javelin sank only a foot and a half into the Endbringer.

I frowned.

"Finding the core will be a matter of time," my voice said. I glanced around. "And I do not think this city will survive the kind of battle that would take."

Leviathan was scrabbling at the Javelin through its stomach. The Javelin held it in place in the air, unable to move in any direction.

"Everyone move as far back as you can!" my voice said as I hit the hard override. "If you do not want to die."

Although the Brutes did not seem to be able to hear the command, those who still had their hearing communicated what they needed through gestures.

Another Tsunami was coming, this one twice the size of the last, and I doubted that the same kind of sonic trickery would work this time.

We gave everyone two minutes to get as far clear as they could, and then we began to twist the universe behind Leviathan in a way that felt wrong.

A moment later a portal opened in the sky behind Leviathan. Through the portal I could see the empty blackness of space.

Air rushed by with hurricane force; we shoved the javelin, pushing Leviathan toward the portal.

A moment later he was through the portal; before we could close it though, a massive impact struck us from behind. We tumbled through the air, and I saw a massive amount of water formed into the form of a fist.

Before we could react we were through the portal as well.

Suddenly there was utter silence; the only sound was that of my own breathing. We were spinning and as we did I saw what I thought to be the sun. From this distance it looked like a very bright star.

There was a planet below us. It was covered in ice, with what looked like many mountains covering it. It was small, at least as far as I could tell without anything to compare it to.

"Is that Pluto?" I asked.

My lips smirked.

We were being pushed further and further from the portal by the force of the atmosphere coming through it. I could feel us attempt to fly, but without the Earth's magnetic field there was nothing to grab hold of.

I started to panic. We'd be trapped in the void of space forever!

My grandfather simply released his hold on the compression of the Javelin, causing the whole thing to expand into its previous size.

The Endbringer was durable enough that this didn't immediately turn its body into a fine mist. Instead the Javelin expanded into the one direction actually available to it, flying back toward us at an incredible speed.

Newton's third law was in full effect. The expansion of the Javelin, which weighed a thousand times what Leviathan did in his normal state pushed back on him in the opposite direction at a speed that was much faster than the already tremendous speed at which it was coming toward us.

He was being sent in a direction past the orbit of Pluto.

I could see him trying to spray water in the opposite direction, but there wasn't enough water available to it to do much; the water evaporated away as fast as it was generated.

The Javelin flew toward us, now huge. Pieces of it broke off and pushed us toward the portal while the rest of it shoved past us.

It his us with a jolt that I felt even through my shield. A moment later we reached the rest of the anomaly and we were through.

The anomaly vanished as we flew through the air, landing in the bay.

The tsunami had lost its motive power from Leviathan, but it was still being propelled by the force of inertia.

I rose from the water and went straight up. I vibrated the amplifiers, and the wave partially collapsed.

"TAKE SHELTER!" my voice screamed through the hard override.

A moment later the tsunami hit.

It turned the houses closest to the docks into kindling wood, wiping out millions of dollars worth of property in the space of an instant.

If I hadn't hit it with the sonic frequencies I had it would have destroyed the whole city. As it was, it wiped out more of the city than I would have liked.

It took almost ten minutes for the waters to recede, and I wondered how many had died in Leviathan's last gesture toward humanity.

My beacon wasn't working. Apparently none of the others were working either.

"An unfortunate side effect of creating a portal that distance," I heard myself say. "An electromagnetic pulse that will likely cause certain difficulties in the coming days."

I found myself hoping that we founded the materials we needed for an Adamantium bullet soon. Doing more damage to a city than an Endbringer wasn't exactly going to help me reach the hearts and minds of the people.

Everyone seemed to be heading for the healers tents, possibly to get their ears looked at, so I formed metal stretchers from the remnants of the Javelin that had landed all over the landscape, creating so many craters that it looked like the moon.

I wondered if I'd killed anyone with that, maybe someone a little slower to follow the evacuation order than the others, or confident enough that they thought their powers would protect them.

There were more than forty people needing stretchers; half of them from damage from what my grandfather had done.

It took us ten minutes to reach the camp, and another thirty minutes before enough of the people in charge were healed to the point they could hear what I had to say.

"You opened a portal," Alexandria asked.

My hands hesitated for a moment before I reached up and took the helmet off.

"Past Pluto," I said. "On a path that will take it outside of the solar system. Even if he somehow manages to slow himself using water and tries to come back, it'll take at least ten thousand years."

My grandfather was helpfully feeding me the statistics I needed to know.

Alexandria was staring at me with a look that was unusually intense. I didn't like the glances she was making toward my helmet.

Everyone else was staring at me for a different reason. I saw mouths open and people sagging into chairs in shock.

Nothing humanity had ever done had more than superficially damaged an Endbringer. Getting rid of one permanently was big; at this point there was no doubt that I'd made my place in the history books forever, even if I dropped dead right now.

Suck on that Emma.

"Two more to go," I said, smiling broadly at the assembled capes.

1044

ShayneT

May 13, 2018

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