Read aloud to me alt Taylor

by Kahlil Johnson

Dnd

4. Mag4

My tower had fallen on my neighbor's house. Fortunately, the same water that had knocked the tower over had destroyed all the houses in the neighborhood, so no one was likely to complain that much. At least the tower had pinned down some of his belongings.

That was more than my other neighbors had. There was nothing left other than the foundations of what had been their homes and a lot of scrap and lumber in the streets.

At least thirty percent of the city had been destroyed, and the parts that remained had been damaged in ways that would take years to repair.

My dream of revitalizing the city hadn't seemed unobtainable before, but as I looked at what was left I had to wonder if it wouldn't be better to relocate somewhere better.

Sending Leet's drones over the city while I was still in the heroes camp was just a precaution. The cell phone towers had mostly been destroyed. I had no doubt that the ones in the rich part of the city would be up soon while the ones in the poor districts would lag behind, or might never be repaired if people deserted the city in droves as seemed likely.

Glancing back at the assembled heroes, I noticed that many of them still seemed to be in shock. Endbringers had been the one constant in most of their lives especially as the average hero tended to be young. Heroes didn't often live to be old, and not simply since powers were a relatively new phenomenon.

"What are you doing?" Armsmaster asked.

I handed him my glasses.

He looked at them dubiously, then frowned. "This is Leet's work? I'm surprised you are willing to wear something like that so close to your face."

"I keep my force field on under the glasses," I said. "I'm not stupid."

I didn't admit that I'd worn them under the force field until my grandfather's avatar had told me that would make any explosion even worse. That would be an ignominious end; my brain turned to chunky salsa by one of Leet's failed gadgets.

He scanned the device, then scowled. "The loss of property is worse than previous estimates."

"Well, the whole city didn't sink," I said. "But yeah, this is pretty much a disaster for the city. I was kind of hoping to get the city back on its feet again, but this..."

"Don't feel guilty for destroying property," he said. "The world will thank you for what you've done, no matter the cost to this city."

"I don't feel guilty," I said sharply. "I'm just frustrated. Any time we seem to be getting ahead something comes up to knock it all down."

"I've noted that," he admitted. "I think your armored factory idea was a good start on helping the economy of the city."

"It'll still happen," I said. Staring out over the city I sighed. "I'm not sure it's going to make much of a difference. There are going to be logistical challenges to dealing with a hundred thousand homeless people that I'm not ready to take on."

"There's a reason the PRT exists," he began.

"You don't have the manpower to do this," I said, glancing at him. "Not and take care of your other duties in other cities. Assuming the United States government helps I'm still not sure its going to happen in time for some people."

"We'll advocate with FEMA," he said. "Although Endbringer disaster sites are sometimes underfunded."

People tended to look at Endbringer cities as a lost cause. I tended to blame the Simurgh for that. New York was an obvious exception.

"Was there a reason you came over to talk to me?"

"We are gathering together a group to discuss and coordinate the recovery process," Armsmaster said. "Strangely enough Lung was the one who suggested it, and he suggested that you might be interested in participating as well."

I was silent for a moment. Apparently Lung was taking my suggestion to heart and was starting his plan early. Using the ABB to deliver food and supplies to people, while protecting their supplies would establish them as a legitimate authority in a city where other authority had long since broken down.

"There's been some disagreement about whether to include him or not, and some people are wondering about your input."

"He's got eight hundred men," I said. "Which is something none of the rest of us have. We need that kind of manpower if we're going to do what has to be done. That's my take on it. I'll be happy to talk to whoever about it."

They still didn't know about my alliance with Lung.

Given that I was allied with the ABB and had destroyed the Empire, that meant that the only other major villain group in the city was the Merchants, assuming Butcher wasn't still floating around somewhere. There were still a few independent villains like Circus, and I suppose Coil was still out there.

None of them would be able to hold territory, not easily, which meant that we were the only game in town.

"In that case, there will be a meeting in thirty minutes," he said. "It'll be at the third tent from the right, since most of the wounded have been cleared out."

Panacea did good work. Also, as she'd said before, there hadn't been that many wounded, at least until I'd done my sonic tricks and whatever my portal had done to people.

With that he left.

He was treating me with more respect. It wasn't the fawning, awed looks I was getting from some of the heroes when they thought I wasn't looking, but it was more like he was treating me like an adult. It was nice not being patronized.

I had the sense that most of the heroes were a little reluctant to approach me. I wasn't sure if it was because of what they'd seen me do, or because of what they were afraid that I might do.

A fat man waddled over to me. He wore an ill fitting suit of armor, and he wheezed a little as he walked. It made me wonder what kind of hero that someone like that could possibly make.

"I once had a minion named Blob," My grandfather's avatar commented. "He weighed almost a thousand pounds and his power was that he was so fat he could not be harmed."

Sometimes I wondered if my grandfather's avatar might be embellishing things a little when he told me these stories. A man whose power was to be fat seemed a little weird.

"There was a hero who could grow stronger by becoming hugely obese," it said. "Her team was mostly a joke, except when it had Squirrel Girl."

Before I could say anything, the man had reached me.

"I want to thank you for saving my life," he said.

I squinted at him. I didn't remember seeing him in the battle at all. Of course I had been focused on Leviathan, and most of the brutes on the ground hadn't even registered with me.

"He was crushing me when you knocked him off with one of your massive balls," he said.

I stared at him, and he looked back at me silently for a moment, then smirked.

"I was just surprised that you didn't make them out of brass."

"Are you secretly Assault in another costume?" I asked, semi seriously. "Because I haven't heard a pun that bad since..."

"Since you tested Leviathan's metal?" he asked, smirking.

I could hardly protest that it hadn't been me who'd made the pun. With my luck it was going to end up on T-shirts everywhere as a quote.

"Who are you?" I asked.

"Chubster," he said. At my look, he held up his hands. "I've got a sense of humor, so sue me. You live in a city with Clockblocker, Assault and Battery, so you can hardly say I'm the only one."

I couldn't imagine living with a hero name like Chubster. In school, that would have been a nickname bullies assigned to you and taunted you with.

Had he been bullied and simply taken a name that had been a curse and tried to make something good out of it?

"It's not just heroes who have black humor," he said. "Cops have it. So do doctors and paramedics. The kind of things we see day to day, it wears on a person. Sometimes you just have to laugh a little to get through the day."

I stared at him for a moment, then nodded. That would explain a lot.

"I'm glad you aren't dead," I said. "But I hope you can understand if I'd be happy if you were the last one to make the balls joke."

"Well, the Internet is down," he said. "So you might have some hope. But it won't be forever. I think you are about to have a degree of celebrity that you aren't used to, so I think it's important that you know it's good to laugh."

I hadn't laughed in a long time, not really. The last time I could remember being open and happy enough to laugh was before Emma's betrayal. Even though I'd had my power to console me, losing her had damaged me.

Maybe the fat man was right.

"All right," I said. "I'll think about it. Maybe catch a good movie in Boston when this is all over. I think we'll be busy for the time being though, so I doubt any of us will be doing a lot of laughing, at least right away."

"When times are bad, that's when you need to laugh the most."

Glancing back at the third tent, I sighed. "Well, I'm about to have a meeting with a bunch of people and I think it's going to be pretty gloomy. People will probably blame me for what happened."

"I think you'll be surprised," he said.

Taking a deep breath, I shrugged. "It'll be whatever it is."

I heard a buzzing sound, and I glanced around. A swarm of bees was approaching.

"ARE YOU ALL RIGHT TAYLOR?"

"Tone it down a little," I said. "I'm here, so obviously I'm all right."

I didn't mention having my arm blown off. It was fine, even if it was some kind of weird fish transplant.

Would that make me cannibal the next time I ate seafood? I wasn't sure.

Checking Dad's Endbringer shelter had been one of the first things I'd done with Leet's drones. It had been fine, but there had been a lingering worry that he might not have made it in time despite my warning.

It was a relief to have that small worry over with.

"Come up here as soon as you can," I said. "The tower is on its side, and it doesn't look like I'll have time to put it back up for a little while."

"Will do," he said at a more normal tone, as normal as creepy bugs speaking could be anyway.

A sudden thought occurred to me. Loss of communication was a killer sometimes in situations like this; without phones people having heart attacks and medical emergencies couldn't get help. People couldn't be reunited with relatives.

Responders couldn't coordinate with each other.

"How would you like to help put the city back together?" I asked. "Really help people I mean."

"I helped people get to the shelters," he said. "With my bugs. My powers seemed a lot stronger during the attack."

It was probably the danger. People could do things when they were angry or afraid that they couldn't normally do. Did adrenaline work on powers?

"It can on some mutant powers," My grandfather's voice said.

"People are going to need a lot more help," I said. "You've led the Dockworkers all these years; we're going to need some leaders in the community who aren't gang members or thugs."

I felt a little guilty for manipulating him like this, but he needed a sense of purpose. He'd been navel gazing for long enough that he was starting to have mold grow on him. Maybe this could be a blessing in disguise, as much as the pain and suffering of a hundred thousand people could be anyway.

"I'll be there when I can," he said. "But it's a madhouse down here. I'll have to go by foot, and so it'll take a while."

"How are you reaching this far then?" I asked.

"I'm getting stronger," he admitted. "Which is weird."

A moment later the swarm dissipated. It probably wasn't good to have flies and bugs near injured people anyway. If Dad got here in time I'd have him clear them out.

Chubster was staring at me.

"I live in a Cape family," I said. "It's metal for me, bugs for him."

"That's weird. Usually powers are more closely connected than that," Chubster said.

I shrugged.

"I need to get going," I said.

"If you are ever up around Los Angeles, give us a call. My daughter would probably like to thank you for saving my life. Oh, and probably for making it safe to go out in a bikini again."

I allowed myself a small smile. "It was nice to meet you."

Weirdly enough, I meant it.

I'd almost gotten used to the way people treated me, with fear and anxiety as though I was a bomb that was ready to go off. The glances I was getting from people now, an almost worshipful reverence made me deeply uncomfortable.

Chubster treated me like a normal person, and I appreciated that. Of course, it was obvious that he had courage. He had to in order to choose a name like Chubster and keep it.

I made my way to the tent Armsmaster had indicated, and I heard raised voices from inside.

"You've never shown any kind of civic responsibility before," a woman's voice said. "Why now?"

I heard Lung speaking.

"I was in the camps after the fall of Japan, and I know better than anyone here what can happen when the world turns its back on a people. My nature tells me to protect my own people and allow everyone else to struggle, but new voices have convinced me that I am being short sighted."

"You just want to consolidate power," she said sharply.

"Of course, but is that entirely a bad thing? Most of the worst offenses by men nominally under my command were in response to racist attacks by the Empire. Left on our own we would prefer to be more of a civic pride group."

The woman was silent for a moment before gasping out "Do you really think we'll believe that?"

I stepped into the room.

A heavyset red faced woman was leaning over the table with her hands gripping the edge. I didn't recognize her, but she had to be someone highly placed if she was willing to take potshots at Lung while he was within lunging distance.

Of course, the presence of Alexandria, Eidolon and Legend standing against the back wall of the tent might have had something to do with it.

"You'll pretend to," I said. "Because we need the manpower if we aren't going to have a humanitarian disaster on the scale of some of Leviathan's bigger victories."

The woman glanced at me and scowled.

"None of you have to tell me that it's very possible that me might have won the battle but lose the war. If we don't do something, it's not just that people are going to go hungry. They'll turn violent."

"It happened in Japan," Lung said. "And Japanese culture is much more... ordered than American. I fear that without Japanese discipline the death rate will be high here."

"Like you care about how many whites die," the woman said snidely.

"That sounded a little racist," I said mildly. "Is there something you want to tell us?"

She glared at me, but didn't say anything else.

"Is FEMA doing anything?" I asked. "We need to get camps set up. People are going to need food, fresh water, and most importantly toilets. If they don't have them we'll have people getting sick faster than Panacea can heal them."

"They are on their way," the woman said. "But Endbringer attacks aren't like hurricanes. With hurricanes government has time to move supplies into place for a quick response time. Even with your warning, we had less than thirty minutes of warning, and its taking time for things to move through the chain of command. The governor has declared this a disaster area."

"Making this a tent city isn't a good idea," Alexandria said. "We're going to need Boston and other cities to take refugees."

"How will we transport them?" Legend asked. "Strider may be powerful, but I suspect even he isn't up to the task of moving a hundred thousand people."

"We should move the sickest people first," I said. "People with diabetes, who have medical needs that require electricity- emphysema, COPD, stuff like that... if we don't do something they'll start dropping like flies."

"How do we know they won't just be cheating the system?" the woman asked.

"We'll use the people we have to vet them as well as we can," I said. "The ABB, the Dockworkers, I've got a feeling that people know their neighbors. They'll know who is sick and who needs help."

It wouldn't always be true, but it was the best I could think of, and I didn't hear my grandfather saying anything.

"Once that's done we need to get port a potties up here and we'll need tents, food, doctors... anybody who has organized a large outdoor concert can tell you some of the things you'll need."

"I've been to Burning man," Assault said.

"Of course you have." The woman glared at me and Lung both. "I have deep reservations about this, but the one thing that you are right about is the need for manpower. I'll declare a temporary truce until all of this is over. That does not mean that you have been pardoned... you've pulled off enough crimes against humanity that you ought to be in the Birdcage."

"I hope to prove that I'm a changed man," Lung said. He sat calm and relaxed. "A businessman, and a community leader. Whatever I may have been in the past I'm turning over a new leaf."

Lung was surprisingly good at lying.

"So we've got some planning ahead of us," Legend said. "Let's talk about just what everyone is going to need to do."

938

ShayneT

May 15, 2018

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ShayneT

May 17, 2018

#4,896

Apparently the others knew a lot more about logistics than I did.

My initial contribution was pretty much all I had to add to the conversation. What did I know about organizing trucks and paying workers, directing volunteers to where they needed to go?

Many cities had plans in place for what happened in a variety of disasters, including hurricanes, fires, floods and the like. However Endbringer attacks were different. They were less predictable, and almost invariably city governments were completely disrupted.

The PRT had communication systems that would not take as long to repair as the communication systems of the Brockton Bay government. They had manpower and they had housing when many of the police were now among the homeless and displaced.

Lung, surprisingly seemed to know a lot more than I did. Apparently having been in a refugee camp gave him a very good idea of what things were needed and what potential pitfalls might arise because people didn't bring just one thing on time.

The needs were simple.

Food, water, shelter, medicine, toilets. Lights so that people didn't get killed in the darkness. Protection for the same reason.

Brockton Bay didn't have a police force large enough to help with this, and it would take time to mobilize the National Guard.

People needed transportation to shelters in the surrounding cities. Food alone was going to be a massive undertaking. Feeding a hundred thousand people was going to be a challenge all on its own; most people ate three to five pounds of food a day, which meant that they'd consume a hundred and fifty tons to two hundred and fifty tons of food every day.

That was a lot of Happy Meals.

Worse, people would have to load and unload all the food, and then distribute it to people so that everyone got food equally. Lung had seen food riots because some people thought that others were getting food when there was simply none to be had.

Society depended on trust, and when everything broke down you had to keep people's trust or everything would go to hell faster than you could manage it.

The one good thing was that Wal Marts and Sam's clubs from the surrounding five states were stripping their warehouses of water and food. They were loading the food into metal shipping containers, which they would apparently be happy to have me transport.

There weren't enough tents for everyone, but tarps could be used. Strider had agreed to transport groups of the most ill to surrounding hospitals, and Lung's people would be out in the neighborhoods, letting people know where the shelters were going to be set up and that transportation was available for the ill.

Despite everything we were trying to do, people were going to die. Those with cars were already trying to leave the city and there had been traffic accidents. With the hospitals incapacitated, doctors were limited to what they could accomplish.

Panacea was making up for her previous lack of work.

Logistics as it turned out was incredibly boring after a while. Getting lost in minutia wasn't something I really wanted to do. With everyone's permission, I took a PRT cellphone, and set out to Boston for the first of the Big Box stores.

I was gone for four hours, and by the time I returned I had twenty storage containers floating behind me, filled with as much as the corporations could fill them with.

Brockton Bay was the first city ever to beat an Endbringer, and as such it represented hope in a way that previous cities hadn't. Most people didn't want to think about Switzerland or Japan or any of the other places ravaged by the Endbringers.

Being on record as having helped the Endbringer Ending city was probably going to provide the corporation with incredible public relations advantages, or maybe I was just being cynical.

Using the storage containers for shelters sounded like a good idea to me, but my grandfather informed me that they sometimes had toxic chemicals inside of them that weren't healthy, both from wooden flooring on the inside with chemicals for pests, and from paints with phosphorous and chromate.

As I reached the future site of the refugee camp, I began laying the supplies out in a grid pattern, spaced over the future sight of the camp. The camp was still sparsely populated; people were undoubtedly going home to see how bad the damage was and whether they could salvage anything.

That would change by nightfall, and so we needed to be ready. There weren't a lot of tents, and I wasn't really sure what was in the various storage containers, so I settled on setting them down randomly, spacing them out as wide as I could.

Looking back at Brockton Bay, I could see that the city was dark.

I saw an Asian kid waving from the ground. I dropped down to stare at him. It took me a moment to recognize him. It was Wu, the boy who'd come with Lung during our first meeting.

"What are we supposed to do with all of this?" he asked.

"It's supposed to go to the refugees. Get it to the people who need it, but make sure no one is hoarding or going back for more than their share."

He nodded. "I'll spread the word."

I returned to the healers' camp, and as I landed I saw the mayor stepping inside the tent. He looked haggard and pale.

Stepping inside after him, I saw other people I didn't know. From the way they were dressed they were probably officials of the local government. All of them looked like they'd gone through hell.

"Communications are down," a man I didn't recognize was saying. "We've been passing out as many walkie talkies as we can, but it's not much of a solution. It'll cripple our ability to respond to any emergencies, especially medical emergencies. There will likely be fires, too. There always are during this kind of thing, especially if the power and gas gets restored without anyone there. There's been enough damage that we could easily lose another portion of the city."

"FEMA is taking it's sweet time," another official groused. "They say it may take a couple of days to get the things they need together from Atlanta and get it here."

"I could go down there and take it," I said. "If we really need it that bad."

"Who are you?" the official asked, looking down his nose at me.

"Taylor Hebert," I said. I smiled sweetly at him. "Just get me a list and I'll go and pick up what we need. I've already delivered twenty storage containers to the site from Wal Mart and some of the other Big Box stores."

Everyone in the room that I didn't recognized froze for a moment, staring at me. Some of them nodded respectfully, while others simply continued staring.

The official paled and he stumbled back. "I'm sorry I didn't..."

I shook my head.

The mayor stepped forward and said, "As much as I'd love to do an end run around the red tape, I suspect that stealing from the United States government won't do us any favors when it comes time to get the money we need to put things back together."

"We need port-a-potties today," I said. "And I'm not really sure what all the stores loaded the containers with; it might all be bottled water for all I know."

"The weather report earlier today said it will be cold," the first man said. "In the forties. We need heaters and power and a lot of things if people aren't going to freeze...blankets at least."

"The best bet will be to take care of any traffic jams as quickly as we can. Anyone who has the means is trying to get out of the city until this all blows over. That means that the people left behind will be the ones who either didn't have money in the first place or who have lost so much they can't do anything else."

The mayor shook his head.

"I'm afraid some of them won't come back. It always happens that way in Endbringer cities. Still, the more of them leave the easier it will be to take care of everyone else."

I understood. Fewer mouths to feed, fewer logistics challenges. If they were in a hotel in Boston they weren't our responsibility.

Lung was no longer in the room, but the older Wu was. It occurred to me suddenly that Asians sometimes reversed their names. Was this man Wu's father or uncle? I could see a family resemblance if I squinted the right way.

"We will have a field hospital set up tomorrow within the camp," the elder Wu said. "It will be set up to treat minor injuries and to be a central position for people with more serious injuries to go in order to be sent away for treatment."

"You've got doctors?" the mayor asked incredulously.

"Field medics," Wu said calmly. "Our former activities could sometimes be hazardous, and going to formal hospitals could be problematic."

"I don't suppose these medics have any formal qualifications?"

"Some of them are licensed paramedics,' Wu said. "The others will officially just be helping as volunteers."

The mayor scowled, but he glanced at me and then didn't say anything.

I felt someone tap on my shoulder. I turned and saw that it was my dad. In contrast to the others, he actually looked better than he had in days. There was a look of determination on his face that I hadn't seemed in a long time. He stood a little straighter, and there was a confidence in the way he looked that hadn't been there since mom died.

Hugging him tightly, I held on for a while.

Finally I pulled back and looked at him.

"I'm glad you're all right," he said. "And I'm proud of you."

Glancing at the men gathered around the room, he said, "I've got the Dockworkers working to set up distribution in the southeast quadrant. That'll leave the Northwest and Northeast quadrant to the ABB and the Southwest quadrant to volunteers from the Red cross. They've already shown up and they seem pretty open to doing things our way."

"I'm a little concerned about the border between our territories," Wu said. "Our organizations have not always gotten along harmoniously."

"I'll keep my guys under control. I'll keep the hotheads on the far side of the park. You do that on your end, and we shouldn't have much of a problem."

As a ranking member of the Dockworkers Dad had a lot of experience with logistics I realized suddenly. After all, the Dockworkers had once been all about getting things to people who needed them efficiently.

What's more, people here were listening to him. Whether it was because he was the head of the dockworkers, or because of his association with me it didn't matter. People were giving him the kind of respect that he hadn't had in a long time, and he was obviously responding to that.

I patted him on the back fondly.

"If you all think of something I can do, send someone for me," I said.

It was difficult knowing exactly what to do. I could build people houses, assuming I could find enough metal, but I doubted that most people would want to live in metal houses. My neighbor was an example of some of the people who would doubtlessly try to sue if I tried to build houses without asking them.

I could repair pipes that were broken, but would that be the best use of my abilities?

Leet might be able to devise something to heat the people and maybe even shelter them, but his inventions tended to explode, which wouldn't do much for our reputations.

"You could build Quonset huts," my grandfather's avatar said. "They were used during the War for all sorts of purposes."

Images and construction schematics filled my mind.

"Ok, but where will we get the metal? We'll need to build a couple of thousand of these by nightfall, so we can't go far."

"We could probably get by with a thousand of them if we make them large; eighty feet by eighty feet perhaps."

"Still," I said.

"Start with the debris from the destroyed buildings. If necessary you can cannibalize the tower. I know you decided the throne was not in good taste."

I scowled. I'd just started to like the tower; losing it now would leave me without a place to stay.

"Have you ever considered an asteroid base?" my grandfather's avatar asked mildly. "It takes care of all of the problems with neighbors and the views are spectacular."

"Even assuming that the people of the world didn't assume it was a declaration of war, it would be a little hard for Dad to come home for dinner."

"Islands are also nice," my grandfather's avatar said. "Perhaps you can raise one in the bay and give your father a boat."

Scowling I lifted into the air.

It occurred to me suddenly that my grandfather could have used his power to control gravity to fly in space. Why hadn't he?

"Flight by gravity control is less quick than by magnetism," he said. "And I was afraid that the monster had tricks we hadn't seen yet. I wanted to be far away before he had a chance to do something unexpected."

Ok, that seemed reasonable.

"Also, what we did was more dramatic."

Wait. What?

"I hadn't had a body in a long time and I wanted to flex my muscles a little bit."

"The next time you take my body, just take care of things. Don't do things just because they have flair."

I was beginning to see why he'd been defeated so many times. He'd probably stood around monologuing until someone had a chance to bash him in the head.

Flying over the city, I began pulling metal up from the ruins of the destroyed houses. There were thousands of houses that had been destroyed, but each house only had so much metal. I pulled metal from wherever I could, although I didn't do anything to buildings that looked like they might be salvageable.

It took me forty five minutes and five passes over the city.

A brick factory had been largely destroyed, so I used some of the metal to lift a large quantity of bricks. At least half of the bricks had been destroyed, so I took what was left.

By the time I reached the camp ground more people were already arriving, most of them by foot. I'd cheated a little by stealing metal from destroyed cars. People could declare them washed out to sea and the insurance companies would pay, assuming there was not an Endbringer rider.

It didn't take long to build the first of the huts. My grandfather informed me that they were supposed to be set up on concrete foundations, so I put metal stakes deep in the earth on each one to provide some stability. It hadn't helped the tower against Leviathan, but if we faced something like that again, everyone was dead anyway.

I didn't bother with doors on the end of the buildings; I was trying to build these as quickly as I could.

Within ten minutes I'd built fifty of the structures. I was already running out of material though, so I flew to the tower.

Disassembling it seemed like admitting defeat, but we didn't really have much of sentimental value inside. I'd simply have to build something better; I wasn't sure Dad had liked living in an all metal building anyway. I think he was afraid that a single lightning storm would be the end of us.

Like I hadn't compensated for that.

Pulling away the metal I looked down and sighed.

Returning, I was able to double my rate by building multiple buildings at once. Soon the Dockworkers were holding people back, and swarms of insects warned anyone who didn't want to take direction.

Building them all took three hours, including two more trips back to the tower. It used up most of the metal in the tower, but hopefully it would be worth it. I was sure Dad would approve. Preserving the city had been one of his goals for as long as I could remember.

I saw that Lung was keeping his word; Asian gang members were handing out food and water, not just to their own people, but to everyone.

They were keeping the peace too: I saw several intervening in fights that started to break out.

The floor of each hut was lines with brick; not only would this provide weight and stability, but I'd run an electric wire through the bricks and then under the ground. When electricity was passed through the bricks, they'd heat up.

It was a system my grandfather told me was sometimes used to take advantage of cheap nighttime energy.

I proceeded to build two windmills with the remainder of the metal, one for each side of the camp. They weren't as large as I wanted, but they'd have to do . With luck they'd provide power to warm the huts, and to provide power for at least some lighting and other things that the camp needed. The power would be intermittent and spotty, but at least it would help keep people warm.

A swarm rose up to me.

"There's enough for the people who have shown up... barely. We'll be in trouble tomorrow morning if help doesn't come."

"Help will come," I said. "I'm make sure of it if I have to go to Washington and talk to the people in charge."

"Try not to get into a fight with the government," Dad said. "We're going to need them if we're going to get through all of this."

The old Dad would have sounded exhausted and depressed. Although he sounded a little tired, Dad sounded motivated.

"I had to use the tower to make all of this," I said.

Dad was silent for a minute. "Well, I guess that means we're sleeping in a hut tonight."

"How do you feel about an island?" I asked.

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ShayneT

May 17, 2018

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Threadmarks 31. Speech

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ShayneT

May 19, 2018

#5,019

"It's her," I heard the voices whispering.

A low murmur filled the crowd. As I walked through the crowd, people parted on both sides of me. The noise of the crowd quickly fell silent.

We were at the center of the camp. The main medical tents had been set up there so that no quadrant was any farther away than any of the others. It had also been turned into the inadvertent center of government.

A massive crowd had gathered here, angry people demanding things that the administration couldn't deliver. Looking around I had to assume that there were more than ten thousand people gathered, and from the sound of it people were getting close to violence.

"Who put a group of thugs in charge?" one man, angrier than the others was shouting. "A group of Chinks shouldn't be telling righteous citizens what to do."

It was almost funny how quickly people stepped back from me. It might have been the fact that I was floating a foot off the ground, or it might have been that at least some of them had seen me put together the shelters earlier in the day.

In any case my reputation apparently preceded me.

The people I passed were staring at me in ways that even the Capes hadn't, as though I was some combination of the savior and the devil all at once.

I even saw a few people make the sign of the cross. Did they think I was that vindictive?

Lung was coming from the opposite direction. The people were giving just as wide a berth to him, but the expression on people's faces was less friendly. The ABB had done a lot of damage in their time, which was something that most people would be slow to forgive.

I had hopes that could change. Some of that would depend on how Lung handled the encounter we were about to have.

Reaching the center of the group, I saw that the mayor and his aides looked harried and anxious. If we hadn't shown up it was likely there would have been violence in spite of the mayor's bodyguards, all of whom had ditched their usual suits and were now wearing what looked like slacks and shirts that hadn't been washed in a couple of days.

Everyone else looked worse.

"I'm sure you don't mean to suggest that you followed the Empire," I said mildly as I stepped behind the man. "Because their ideology is quite... dead in this town."

He turned and stared at me.

"Who the hell are you, bitch?"

"Funny you should ask that," I said. "It's the question I'm sure Kaiser had when he died, that Leviathan had when he was sent floating out into the eternal void of space forever. It's the question that a lot of people are going to have, and I've got one answer."

He suddenly seemed to notice that my feet weren't touching the ground, which was why I was facing him eye to eye.

"I am a child of Brockton Bay. This is my city, and you are all my people... unless you want to be my enemy."

A man standing behind him whispered in his ear and the color drained from the man's face. He stumbled back.

I turned and faced the crowd.

"Most cities attacked by the Endbringers get ignored, left behind by a people who don't want to be reminded of the guilt and horror they feel. People worry if they talk about the Endbringers that they will bring bad luck. Seeing a survivor simply reminds them that it could have been them... and it still could be."

I floated up five feet and looked out over the crowd.

Projecting my voice over the crowd was easy; no one in the crowd was speaking at all.

"Does the rest of the world care about any of us? They should. People have always assumed that the Endbringers could not be beaten. Insurance companies consider them to be Acts of God, and governments often write off entire cities. The thing is, today we have proven that they are not invincible."

I paused and stared out over the crowd. Lung was standing at the edge of the inner circle staring at me through his mask.

"They can be beaten, and this was the city that proved it. Brockton Bay isn't just one more defeat; it's a symbol of hope."

One particularly brave soul piped up. "What does any of this have to do with us?"

"I plan to make this city the shining jewel it once was... the kind of place where people can live good, happy lives. Unfortunately that can't happen unless we work together. If we fight among ourselves the rest of the world will point and say that we aren't worth saving."

"We're hungry," one man said. "There was too much water and not enough food."

"You can go a night without food," I said. "Water is more important. There is a fleet of trucks coming from FEMA. If they choose not to come, then I will go to their warehouse, rip the roof off and take what we need. Whatever happens there will be food tomorrow."

The crowd murmured among themselves for a moment.

"Nobody prepared for this," I said. "And so services are slow to come. That doesn't mean that we are forgotten. I understand how upsetting it is; I lost my home too. But the only way we will get through this is if we all work together."

"We've got gang members distributing the food. How do we know they aren't keeping the best stuff for themselves?" a heavyset man said angrily. "Or if not them, then the fat pigs that run the city? Everybody knows they take bribes."

"The honorable Lung has spoken to me about his desire to turn over a new leaf. Despite that, I suspect that none of his men would like to make him angry. No one wants to awaken a sleeping dragon after all."

I glanced at Lung, who stared at all of us impassively.

"However, should there be complaints about anyone, bring them to the section chiefs. They are the ones wearing the green scarves. They'll make sure anyone mistreating others is kept in line."

"And if they're the ones abusing us?"

"Talk to me or Lung," I said. "If you think it's important enough. Of course, if you keep pestering us with unimportant crap, I think we'll both be... irritated. We all know what happened to the last being who irritated me... he's going on a one way trip."

The crowd broke into conversation, but it was soon clear that the danger was over. I floated to the ground and approached Lung.

"Walk with me?" I asked.

He grunted.

For some reason he always seemed more eloquent with the PRT than he did with me. Perhaps it was because he enjoyed needling them and he did not want to risk needling me.

Or maybe he just didn't have that much to say to me.

"They will never accept me or my kind," he said, as we left the crowd behind. "It is foolish to assume otherwise."

"Your people did kidnap and enslave women, push drugs and force people to pay money or have their houses burned down," I said. "That tends to stick in the mind a bit."

"So why all of this?" he asked.

"Their houses are already burned down, at least metaphorically. They'll remember the people who helped them put it back together. The fact that the government and PRT isn't doing anything fast enough is an opportunity for us."

I looked out at the sea of campfires in the darkness. It spread across the horizon. Using electric lights was limited to government areas, and a lot of people had resorted to the thing that people had always done, going to bed when the sun went down.

Enough people had stayed up to make the camp look like a sea of stars. There was more than enough wood for everyone to have fires, although I worried about the chemicals in the paint and varnish that covered the remnants of destroyed houses.

"People are looking for a lifeline, and if they see us as the ones who give it to them they'll follow us instead of the PRT and the government. If you ever wanted to be something more than just a thug and a warlord, this is your chance."

It sounded cold when I put it that way, and in part it was true. I needed to create a movement if I was going to save the city. I needed to be people's guiding star if I was to make the city better.

My hope, though, was that individual members of the ABB would actually like helping people. Not all of them were soulless monsters. Many of them had probably joined because they had no place to go. Give them a chance to be heroes, to feel what it was like to have real respect and to be admired instead of feared, and I suspected that a lot of them would go for it.

It might even work on Lung.

"You are more of a villain than I am," Lung said, looking down at me. His tone didn't sound critical; it almost sounded like he admired me. "After all, I was content to simply rule over my domain and never try for more, but you would eat the entire world with your ambition."

I held my hand up. "I don't want the world. Just a little part of it. Maybe an island somewhere."

"You wish to save the Bay. How will you do that when the entire world is going to end? The only way that will change is if you save the entire world, which will mean you will need allies everywhere."

"I've heard something about that," I admitted. "But how do you know?"

"Isn't it obvious? We are coming to the end of days. Walk in any city and you will see a concealed horror in people's eyes. They laugh, but it is hollow. Why do you think I was content to sleep. If dying was inevitable, why fight?"

"Because it's not," I said.

"I never believed that before today," he admitted. "I find myself actually interested in what tomorrow might bring."

"Problems if we don't get more toilet paper," I said.

I'd managed to deliver one thousand port a potties at the last minute, taken from a dozen companies in the five states surrounding us. It was barely enough, but they were already getting disgusting, which was only going to make people more angry.

He chuckled. "It's always about toilet paper and the next meal."

"They wouldn't be people if they didn't complain," I said. "We've got to do something, though, or it's going to turn ugly."

"Take what you need," he said. "If the government complains, go to the press. Make them look like people who don't care about American citizens. They will capitulate."

It was funny that I found myself agreeing more with Supervillains than with Superheroes, even though I'd always wanted to be a hero.

I glimpsed a face in the back of the crowd, one that was familiar in a way that made my heart drop into the bottom of my stomach.

What was she doing here? Was she stalking me, or had the affected area somehow included her house?

"I'll talk to you later," I said.

I vanished into the darkness, something that was much easier because it was after all very dark in the spaces between campfires. I had no doubt that there would be crimes committed in this space; human nature was too ugly for people to simply work together, even for one single night.

The smart thing to do would be to stay together, but there were always people who were foolish, or maybe who needed to go to the restroom.

Still, I had a lock on the iron in her blood. I could feel her making her way rapidly away from the crowd, and I cheated and flew over several of the buildings I had made.

I dropped into a path in the darkness, one she was making her way up presumably to whatever hut her family had made their temporary abode.

She paused for a moment, gasping for air.

"Hey Emma," I said mildly.

The moon came out, and I saw the blood drain from her face. She staggered back as though I'd struck her.

"D...don't hurt me," she said.

"Why would I hurt you?" I asked. "Aren't we friends?"

"W...what?"

"We said we'd be friends forever," I said.

She was silent, staring at me like I was the Simurgh standing in front of her, ready to pull her sanity from her head and make her into a living bomb.

"I beat Leviathan today," I said. I paused. "You know, I think that's the first time anyone has ever got to say that and mean it?"

She still didn't speak, although I could hear her hyperventilating.

"You know how I got rid of him, right? I opened a portal into interstellar space, to a place where no hero or villain has been able to go. I dropped him into a void that doesn't have air, where you freeze on one side and boil on the other, and you can't even scream because there is no sound."

I stepped forward and she swayed on her feet. I reached out and grabbed her arm.

She was trembling like a rabbit, and her eyes were as huge as saucers as she stared at me.

"Funny thing about doing something like that," I said. "Somebody could just go... missing, and nobody would ever know what had happened to them. They'd just drift out in space forever with no one to mourn them. It'd be the perfect murder."

I tightened my grip on her shoulder until it was almost painful. Leaning forward, I said in her ear, "And even if they did figure out who did it, what do you think they'd do to someone who'd gotten rid of one of the Endbringers?"

She fell to her knees and I patted her on her head.

"Asking for forgiveness is one of the steps, or at least that's what I hear," I said.

"I...I'm sorry," she said.

"Don't say that to me," I said. "There's a whole line of people you've screwed over. It's funny; even Lung can turn over a new leaf. I'm working with the ABB to make the world a better place, and you are still here doing what you can to make everyone miserable."

I heard her retching on the ground.

"There was a time when I thought about you constantly, thinking about what we had. Now? I'm going to put this city back together, and people are going to look up to me. You'll be back to where you always were... petty and spiteful."

Stepping into the night I wondered why bullying always felt so much better than being a nice person. Were we inherently evil?

I hated that I was so petty. I should have been the better person and not taken out my anger on someone who was at the end of the day beneath me.

My shield stopped something being thrown at me from behind.

Emma screamed and scrambled to her feet, running toward me. I didn't look back, even when I felt her bounce off my shield, falling back into the puddle of puke.

"You aren't worth thinking about, really," I said.

With that I rose into the air and headed out into the night.

There were enough people that wanted me dead that I'd built my own shelter with thicker walls than those of everyone else. After all, while the Empire was dead there had been a lot of sympathizers. I was sure that not all of the ABB was happy with the new direction their organization was going. Butcher could teleport; there wasn't much I could do about that, although I had recovered my chain mail blanket from the tower. My building had lockable doors too.

Our building was personal sized instead of a communal building like everyone else had, a luxury I doubted anyone begrudged me. The last thing I wanted was for one of my roommates to slit my throat while I was sleeping.

Dad was sitting around a communal fire with ten men I recognized as members of the dockworkers. He was laughing, and his laugh was freer than I'd heard in a long time.

He was looking better too.

He glanced up at me; apparently his bugs warned him what was going on at all time.

"Taylor!" he called out, this time with his human throat.

He gestured and the men sitting on logs beside him moved quickly to make room.

I landed beside them. They were roasting marshmallows of all things and making S'Mores. I knew most of them, even if only casually because they'd been over to our house for barbecues, back in the good days before Mom died.

"Taylor!" Kurt said. He was sitting on the other side of my Dad. "We all expected great things from you, but ending Endbringers wasn't part of it."

I smiled and I felt myself relaxing.

It was funny. As time went on I felt more and more like I had a persona that I had to use in front of people. Even though I'd chosen not to bother with a mask it was like I was wearing one for the world nonetheless.

These people knew me from before, though, and despite the fact that I was practically an Endbringer myself, they considered me one of them.

I laughed and took a marshmallow with a stick on it.

It wasn't until a couple of hours later that I got up to head for my small hut. Dad and the others were staying up talking about old times, and one of the men was passing a liquor flask around. I had a flash of worry for Dad, but I suspected that he'd be fine.

As I approached the door to my hut, which was set well away from the fire, I realized that there was someone standing in the doorway.

I wondered why Dad hadn't seen them.

As she stepped out of the door and into what little moonlight and reflected light from the fire existed I blinked.

I couldn't make out who she was in the darkness, but I could recognize her voice the moment she spoke.

"Hello Taylor."

Why was Alexandria standing at my door?

876

ShayneT

May 19, 2018

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Threadmarks 32. Bribe

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ShayneT

May 21, 2018

#5,156

"You've been busy over the last few weeks," Alexandria said. "Which is surprising, considering that you've had your powers for years."

I could barely see her face in the darkness, but I shrugged anyway. I didn't need my grandfather to know that she was trying to keep me off balance by stating something that I'd kept secret, even if it would have been relatively easy to deduce from my art sales.

I'd admired her for a long time. Once she'd been my hero; I'd had Armsmaster panties, but Alexandria was the culmination of what I'd dreamed of being. When I was younger I'd have squeed at getting to meet her, and I'd have been her biggest fangirl. Even now there was a trace of the old excitement, but I shoved it down violently.

The Protectorate always had ulterior motives, and she was one of their most important members. They'd left a bad taste in my mouth. I wondered if she was here to have me drop the lawsuit, or if she wanted me to join.

Neither one of those was going to happen. I didn't care about the money anymore, but I was going to see Sophia in jail and Emma too.

Why had Emma been out of jail anyway? Alan had probably paid bail even if he had to mortgage his house. He'd always given her anything she wanted no matter whether it was good for her or not.

"People keep pushing me," I said. "What did you expect me to do? There aren't many individual people that I actually care about. Hurting them is really just hurting yourself."

She was silent for a moment. I hoped she caught my warning.

Alexandria was supposed to be invincible, but I'd seen videos of previous Endbringer fights in which Leviathan had tried to push her head under the water and she'd worked awfully hard to make sure that didn't happen.

If she needed to breathe it didn't matter how strong she was. All it would take was a force field wrapped tight around her head like a plastic bag and she'd be gone inside of a minute. As long as I kept her from disrupting my concentration during that time, she was dead.

If that didn't work, I could always give her the Viserys treatment. Molten metal over her head wouldn't bother her, but in her lungs probably would.

Even if I was wrong, all I'd have to do was give her the Leviathan treatment. It'd take her a while to get back even given all her speed.

She stared at me and stiffened. She was rumored to have a thinker power. I wondered if she'd just realized that I knew how to kill her.

"People talk about Capes as though they are all the same, but that's not true. There are definite differences between the power levels of someone like Chubster or Skidmark and someone like me. You've proven yourself to be one of the capes at the top tier."

"So?" I asked. "I didn't ask for this power."

"But you have it, and that means you have responsibilities that other people don't have."

"That sounds familiar," my grandfather's avatar murmured, but he didn't elaborate.

"Are you saying I haven't been living up to my responsibilities?" I asked. "Because if you know of any I'd like to hear them."

"You've been working with villains," she began.

"Like the Protectorate doesn't?" I asked. "It's an open secret that you use reformed villains... and sometimes villains that aren't even reformed, like Shadow Stalker."

She sighed. "Aren't you ever going to let that go?"

"No," I said. "You let that girl torture me for two years because she was useful."

"Like you're using Lung?" she asked. "His men kidnapped girls and raped them. They've murdered people. They've done everything the Empire did, except that they didn't do it to you or yours. How is that any different from what you accuse us of doing?"

"Because I'm making them better," I said. "Hiring Shadow Stalker wasn't the problem. The problem was that you purposefully ignored the fact that she was still hurting people. If you'd stopped her and turned her into a real hero I'd be first in line to applaud you."

"What makes you think that we even knew anything about her?"

"Because that was your responsibility," I said. "You knew she was a closet sadist, and yet you left her in the middle of a school full of children who couldn't defend themselves. If I hadn't been as strong willed as I am, she'd have been dead in an alley somewhere with the iron in her blood yanked out of her body."

"You can do that?" she asked, startled.

"I can do more than that if I have to," I said. "I'm not Manton limited, and if I want to murder someone it would be as easy as a simple act of will."

She was silent for a moment. "You think it's not like that for me? I live in a world of wet tissue paper, where killing someone would be as simple as pushing just a little too hard. Neither one of us can afford to get angry, not if we want to remain human."

"Who says we are?" I asked.

From my grandfather's perspective I wasn't human at all. I personally didn't agree with him; I suspected that his whole homo superior spiel was part of what had led the humans of his earth to reject mutants. Insisting that you aren't only different but actually non-human, and then complaining when people treat you as a non-human seemed like it wasn't the brightest strategy in the world.

Not that I'd tell him that. He seemed really touchy about the mutant rights thing.

"That's not a road you want to go down," she said sharply. "The whole reason the Protectorate exists is to keep humans and parahumans from going to war with each other."

"I thought they were there to, you know, protect people?"

"That's just what we tell people so that they'll accept us," she said. "We need them to see us as not only human but as more than human; otherwise we'll all be facing sniper bullets that will hit us before we even hear the sound of the thing that killed us."

"It wouldn't bother you much," I said.

"But it would Vista, or Clockblocker. Armsmaster has to be out of costume sometimes. The number of capes who can't be killed by conventional human weapons is actually fairly small. Even most brutes are in trouble if they are hit with an anti-tank weapon or a Hellfire missile. A nuke will kill almost anyone."

She stepped forward.

"Ordinary people outnumber us by eight thousand to one, and if they wanted to exterminate us, it wouldn't be that difficult. That's the kind of genocide the Protectorate was designed to stop. Helping people is just a benefit. It's a little like policing; the police are not legally required to protect anyone. I can show you the legal precedents if you wish."

"That seems kind of terrible," I said. "So you are saying heroes aren't really heroes... they dance around in costumes and play cowboys and Indians so regular people won't kill us?"

"I prefer cops and robbers, but yes."

"So why bother with any of it if it's all fake?"

"It's not," she said. "The Endbringers are real. There's a reason people give heroes and villains the kind of leeway they do, and it's not just PR trickery. It's because the world is really under threat, and we have to do everything we can to save it."

"The Endbringers are a danger," I admitted. "But they don't really kill as many people as humans do to themselves."

"They are a smaller portion of the real threat," she said. "Didn't you ever wonder where powers come from?"

I shrugged. "I assumed it was some kind of biological phenomenon."

"Powers come from alien experimentation on the human genome," my grandfather's avatar said. "Giving humans the ability to manifest powers and mutants the ability to do so spontaneously. Aliens experimented on humanity before we'd mastered fire."

I tried to keep my surprise from showing on my face, but I must have failed in spite of the lack of light.

"Uh...alien experimentation?"

"How did you know?" she asked sharply.

"What, that's right? There was a kid at my old school who had a lot of whacked out conspiracy theories and that was one of them."

"Do you remember anything from the day you triggered?" she asked. "After you triggered and before you got your powers I mean?"

I shook my head.

"Pity. Very few people retain those memories. There are Entities who live in another dimension. They send parts of themselves into people, granting them powers."

"That... seems strange. Why would they do something like that?"

"To learn," she said. "They aren't very imaginative, so they leech off the creativity of other species to learn how to use their powers in new ways."

"That doesn't seem that bad," I said. "So they give us powers and then they get them back when we die. It seems like a good trade."

"And what do they learn if all the people they give powers to is make small statues and sell them at trade fairs?"

"How to make better statues?"

"There has to be conflict," she said. "So not only do they make sure to send the parts of themselves to the most damaged people they can, but they also push them toward conflict. To make it even worse the have agents who push that conflict even further."

"Endbringers," I said.

"When they get what they wanted they destroy the world," she said. "Not just this world, but all of the alternative versions of the world so that humanity will be completely extinct in every timeline that ever was, and that could be."

I stared at her. I'd heard vague predictions that the world would end, but this seemed a lot more concrete than what I'd heard before.

"So what do we do?" I asked.

"We fight back," she said. "We've managed to kill one of them already, through an accident and sheer luck mostly. The other won't be nearly so easy to kill. He has a projection on this planet, pretending to be a hero."

"Eidolon, right?" I asked.

She stared at me for a moment. "What?"

"It's kind of suspicious the way that he has every power," I said. "But if he was the one who'd created them..."

"Scion, it's Scion," she said hurriedly.

"Scion?" I asked.

Of course if had to be the most powerful parahuman on the planet. When people talked about power levels, it was generally assumed that Eidolon was the most powerful, but that was because people didn't even consider Scion or the Endbringers in the same category as all the others.

Apparently people were right.

"Scion wants to destroy the human race?"

"He's a projection," she said. "But not completely. Part of his existence is here while the rest of his body is stored elsewhere on an abandoned earth, safe from anything we might throw at him."

"How long do we have?" I asked.

"Two to thirty years, depending on a number of factors," she said.

I stared at her, suddenly feeling numb. The entire world being destroyed, possibly in two years? It was like being told that you had a fatal, incurable disease.

It was almost impossible for me to process.

"There's a reason that we don't tell the public," she said. "If people knew it was all going to be over they'd riot in the streets. There would be chaos... and what little we could have possibly accomplished would be impossible."

"Does the whole Protectorate know?" I asked.

The thought that even little Vista was burdened with the knowledge of the end of the world was incomprehensible. She was just a child, a grade schooler most likely.

"No," Alexandria said. "There are just a few of us who have been trying to find a way to stop the world from ending."

"Why?" I asked. "I understand that you can't tell regular people, but surely... "

"How many people can truly keep a secret?" she asked. "Every person who is told is a risk, and if it becomes public the odds are that Scion himself will hear about it sooner or later. If that happens he will likely choose to end this little experiment sooner than later."

I was silent, staring at her. "So you're the Illuminati, and you are here to recruit me."

There wasn't any other reason she'd be telling a secret this important to a fifteen year old girl. If I was her, I wouldn't tell any secret at all to a girl my age. After all, teenagers were horrible gossips.

"And your father," she said. "After all, he's been listening this entire time."

Right. Of course he had been.

"I'm surprised you'd come to me, considering that I don't particularly love the Protectorate."

"You care about this city and its people. If you didn't, you'd have never shown up to the Endbringer fight in the first place. If the world ends, the city ends too. You won't be able to hide on another world either."

"We could make an ark," I said. "I could gate us past the Simurgh, send us to another solar system. I know of some faster than light designs for starships."

"Powers don't work past the radius of the moon,' she said. "Which is one of the things we wanted to talk to you about. Also I doubt there is time to build such a craft, and if Scion learned we were doing it he would start destroying the world early."

The mutant thing wasn't something I really wanted to talk about. Maybe I could deflect her with something else.

"So you want me to become part of your secret society," I asked. "And then what? I have no idea how to defeat Scion."

"Nobody does, really," Alexandria said. "But we have some of the best thinkers in the business, and every person who joins the fight is one more slim chance that the world will survive."

That wasn't what she'd said when she was talking about secrets, but whatever.

"I'll have to talk about it with Dad," I said. "But we'll probably say yes."

Alexandria smiled for the first time.

"We can talk about what that will involve in a minute," she said. "But there was something else we need to talk about."

"Oh?" I asked.

I fought an impulse to check where I had hidden the helmet. I'd secretly dug a put under one of the buildings I'd made; not the one I slept in because that would have been kind of obvious. Seeing Alexandria stare at the helmet had made me uncomfortable, as though she knew what was happening.

"Do you ever have times where you don't remember what happened? Moments of lost time, maybe?" she asked.

I shook my head. "No, nothing like that."

"Then you know whoever it is who is mastering you," she said, staring me directly in the eye.

"Nobody masters me," I said. I had a sense that she was planning to take my grandfather's helmet away from me, maybe even destroy it, and that was something that wasn't going to happen.

It was all I had left of my family other than my father. She was as much as suggesting that she'd kill my family, and I'd already warned her what would happen.

"This isn't something I want to talk about," I said. "In fact, I feel a little threatened by your even bringing it up."

I stepped closer to her. I was tall for a girl, but I had to look up to her. It didn't matter. If she took my family away I would end her.

The moment she realized that I was serious, I could see her position shift. It was subtle; in anyone else I wouldn't have even noticed it. But Alexandria was renowned for having control over herself, so even the tiny fraction of a step that she took backward was a triumph.

She didn't show it on her face, which remained impassive, but she knew I knew she'd blinked.

"I don't like being threatened," I said.

"I'm just concerned for your safety. Someone with your kind of power under the control of someone else is a risk to everyone."

"I'm not a risk to anyone who doesn't attack me and mine," I said. "Of course, what I consider mine is growing from day to day."

"Perhaps one day you will consider us to be part of that group," she said.

I stepped back and forced myself to smile. "I'll help you with the saving the world thing though. I'm sure Dad won't mind. I'm guessing that you and the people you work for have a lot of influence and money though."

"Are you asking for a bribe to help save the world?"

"I've got people here who are going hungry now. I know your people consider this kind of thing to be petty, but maybe greasing the wheels of the bureaucracy might make things better? After all, if I'm spending all my time looking for pirates' gold to help people get fed or to rebuild their houses I won't have any time to help you with your vital work."

She stared at me for a moment, and then said, "Sometimes I hate teenagers."

987

ShayneT

May 21, 2018

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Threadmarks 32. Speculator

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ShayneT

May 23, 2018

#5,285

Caravans of trucks began arriving the next day.

Apparently Alexandria's group, whatever it was called had a lot more clout with the government than I'd thought. Red tape simply melted away, and the claims that FEMA simply couldn't get help anytime soon vanished in the wind.

Or maybe it was already going to happen anyway and I was giving credit to something that hadn't had to do anything at all.

I was grateful anyway. People had spent the night without blankets, and the wind had been spotty, which meant that the floors were only heated sometimes. The brick held the heat in for a while, but go three hours without power and things started to cool.

There were bricks that held the heat better, but I hadn't had access to any of that.

Still, people seemed grateful to me as the day wore on and they got over their awe of me a little. I helped move supplies faster so that other trucks could make their way into the camp faster. I also spent part of the day resolving disputes between neighbors.

I wasn't sure why people were coming to me; for all my power I was just a fifteen year old girl. Maybe it was the way both the Dockworkers and the ABB deferred to me. Maybe it was because I was more approachable than Lung.

Probably it was because the police and city authorities were still in disarray.

Although I'd stripped part of the city to build the shelters, there were empty shipping containers everywhere. I gathered them together and melted them, creating a communication tower in the corner of the camp closest to my sleeping place.

I then created small radios with my grandfather's help that I handed out to the Dockworkers and Lung. The representatives from the city didn't want a system that the ABB had access to, so I simply ignored them.

That this gave our forces more of an ability to respond to emergencies and in a way more authority than the city I was more than aware. It was almost like I was becoming a warlord in control of the city without even trying.

It bothered me less than I would have thought. People needed help now, not just when the government finished sifting through red tape.

There were emergencies too; people who were going into diabetic comas, people who had gotten mysteriously stabbed in the middle of the night, even people who had somehow fallen into the campfires. You couldn't have a hundred thousand people in a small area without having some kinds of injuries.

There was a continuous stream of people to the medical tents, sometimes being carried by members of the ABB. At least there the ABB medics worked in unison with the employees from the hospital.

Members of the Mayor's officer weren't stupid. They obviously saw that authority was slipping from their fingers, and so they came to me with a request.

I'd built a chair made out of metal; while admittedly it was overly large it gave me a view of the surrounding area and the back was high to protect me from getting shot in the back. Calling it a throne would have been an entirely unwarranted reaction.

The fact that the mayor was coming to me hat in hand however did make it feel a little weird.

"The laws say that only licensed electricians can work on the power lines," he said. "Which in general is for very good reasons. But people need power if they are to get their businesses running again."

"I'd like to help," I said. "But what can I do?"

"We'd like you to be an electrician's assistant," he said. "Bring a licensed electrician with you who is officially doing the work. Legally the work will be under his purview. Unofficially..."

"You want me to fix the power lines," I said. "Are there even parts for that, or am I supposed to make unapproved parts with my powers?"

"They've been bringing materials in all day," he said. He looked a little confused. "We didn't even get around to asking for them yet."

I rose to my feet. Fixing power lines sounded better than listening to one more iteration of neighbor's arguing that one of them had stolen the other's dinner.

It quickly became apparent that it was not.

At first it wasn't too bad as I learned what was involved. I sat on my throne, which I had widened into a throne built for two with a man named Tony who was old enough to be my grandfather... my father's father, not my mother's, who was apparently older than dirt.

He'd insisted on my building hooks he could strap himself into, as though falling in an unsupported fall wouldn't kill him just as quickly as his falling out. It did mean I didn't have to concentrate on keeping him safe as much.

I'd wanted to bury the electrical lines and make all sorts of improvements, but he insisted that if the government didn't know where the lines were then sooner or later someone would dig them up by accident.

My grandfather knew how to make a smart grid, but Tony insisted that using standardized parts wouldn't confuse the people who came to work on the lines after me. Apparently that wasn't something that was safe for those people.

Still, I was able to repair lines at a rate vastly faster than an ordinary lineman, who would have had to have machines to relift power poles and who had to worry about whether lines were hot or not as they slowly climbed their way up the poles.

We started with the main lines that had been affected. Apparently power crews had been out assessing the damage for the past couple of days, almost as soon as the battle was over. Despite the lack of power and lack of communications they'd been making a list of what needed to be done by hand.

We started with the main lines, the ones that would restore the most power to the most people. Apparently in electrical work the biggest problem were the smaller branches, downed power lines that were dangerous but that repairing only helped a few households.

Those took forever to fix, simply because there were so many more of them.

We made sure that the hospitals and nursing homes got priority.

Replacing utility poles was the most time consuming part of the process. A crew might finish doing two in a day. I finished a hundred and sixty in ten hours. This apparently freed crews up to do a lot of other things.

Tony told me that replacing a transformer could take as little as two hours if the pole wasn't damaged. The power company didn't even have enough crews to handle all the poles I replaced in a day, but they did their best.

By the time I was done for the day, a quarter of the city was lit in a patchwork with power. There were still gaping areas of darkness, but compared to the complete blackness of the night before it was much better. The first area to get power back was the wealthy districts; I wasn't particularly surprised. After all, that was where the hospital and other necessary infrastructure was.

Besides, the poorest areas had been washed completely away.

The sight of the renewed lights seemed bittersweet to the people in the camps. On the one hand it was a sign that things were getting better, but they also had to deal with the fact that other people were resuming their lives while they were still stuck in a kind of limbo.

A quarter of the city was gone, and I doubted that the city would let me build metal houses, even if people would accept that. Still, what they had already was better than what some cities would have done. They were together in groups of ten or twenty at most, whereas most cities would have warehouses them in the hundreds.

Things were getting better, too.

Usually sending money was better than sending old clothes because workers had to sort through them and make them presentable. There was a huge backlog of clothes that mostly ended up going to foreign countries, ruining their own garment industries and helping keep them in poverty.

People were sending clothes and other things though, and this time it was actually helping. Nights in Brockton Bay were cold, and even the sometimes heated floors I had provided didn't help that much without blankets.

FEMA was providing Mylar blankets, although they were incredibly light and thin. They were better than nothing, though.

Still, city officials seemed to have a dozen things for me to do at all times, and I suspected that it was because they didn't want people seeing me as the authority.

I didn't mind, though. Repairing the transformers the next day went a little slower than putting up the poles, despite the fact that most of the time the previous day had been poring over a map to find the location of the next pole. Putting down the poles was simple, but transformers had to be checked for safety and efficiency.

Two hours work for a work crew could be done by me in two minutes, with five more minutes for the electrician to check my work. We got our rhythm down and repaired sixty in a ten hour day. We singlehandedly did more than the work crews, even though temporary electricians were coming in from other cities around the state.

Still, it was two long days in a row.

I was tired sitting by the fire that night. The dockworkers were off doing something; a last minute project for Dad. He'd sort of taken over my role as unofficial leader in the camp, and the Administration couldn't stop him because he was too useful. He could see problems happening and respond to them faster than anyone, and his insects were almost as intimidating as Lung, at least to some people.

MRE's weren't particularly tasty, but they were convenient. I could have slipped over to Boston for a real meal, but I thought it was important that people saw that I was suffering the same as they had.

I was staring down at my empty package when someone sat down on the log across from me.

Looking up, I was surprised to see Bitch.

I hadn't seen her in a while, not since the first time really. She was staring at me with an expression that I couldn't interpret.

"Don't ask me," my grandfather's avatar said irritably. "She's more difficult to read than an ordinary person."

"Hey," I said.

She stared at me for a moment, then said, "I hear you sent Leviathan on a one way trip."

"Yes."

"You aren't worried he'll come back?"

"Depends on if he can make his own water or not," I said. "There's not a lot of water in space, but if he can make his own he could use it like a rocket maybe."

"Then he could come back?"

I smirked. "Thing about Leviathan is that he's blind. It's going to be a real bitch to figure out where Earth is from all the way out there."

For once she seemed to get my humor. She gave a short, barking laugh.

"Why are you here?" I asked.

"Lot of dogs were killed in the fight," she said. "People are too busy to help, if they even cared in the first place."

"You want me to do something?" I asked.

"People say you are the one to go to for things," she said.

"Why don't you go to your boss?" I asked, probing.

I'd learned a lot about the criminal underworld since the last time I'd seen her, and my grandfather's avatar had some speculations about who the Undersiders really worked for, based in part on the targets they'd chosen and their amazing success rate.

"Don't work for them anymore," she said. "They didn't like me helping you."

Was it the Undersiders or their nebulous boss? Did he worry that Bitch's loyalties would be divided, or did he simply want to put as much space between me and him as possible.

"Have you considered working for someone else?" I asked.

"You killed them all," she said. "Empire might have took me. Can't join the ABB... too white. Merchants might hurt my dogs."

"You could work for me," I said. "I've got some money coming in, enough to run a shelter, and I might even have enough pull to keep you out of jail. How would you like to be a rogue instead of a villain?"

"What would you want?" she asked, looking suspicious.

"Well, to start with you could help the Dockworkers keep the peace. Not everybody believes I'll hurt them the way Lung will, and so some people get rowdy. I don't want anybody killed or even seriously hurt."

"So you want an enforcer," she said.

"For right now," I said. "I'm sure I can get the truce to cover you too while people are in the camps. Afterwards, we'll see about getting your name cleared."

"I've killed people," she said. "People don't forget."

"So have I," I said. "But you didn't know what you were doing, not the first time at least. We'll figure something out; I've got a pretty good lawyer."

"Why would you help me?" she asked.

"Think about it like this; if I don't help you, you'll keep doing what you've been doing; stealing things and hurting people. If I do help you, you'll stop doing that and just start helping dogs. Which choice makes the world a better place?"

She stared at me dubiously. "People don't think like that."

"Maybe the world would be better if they did," I said. "People think that charity is just helping somebody else, but it's not just that. People in Africa starve a lot, mostly because of all the warlords and parahumans running around over there. When people starve, they get sick easier. The kinds of sick the Africans get is worse than the kinds we get over here, but all it takes is one sick guy in an airplane to make a lot of us sick."

Her look was inscrutable in the firelight.

"So?" she asked at last.

"So if I went over and took care of the warlords over there, got people the kinds of food they need, would that be charity? If it meant that I didn't get some kind of horrible disease a year from now?"

"So... you help yourself by helping other people?"

"Right!" I said. "I hate the way Brockton Bay has turned into a cesspit of crime and despair. If I was an ordinary person there wouldn't be a lot I could do about it. But I'm not ordinary, and there are things I can do. I could turn around and move to New York because fixing a city that's hurt this bad is too hard, but that's not what I'm all about."

"Some dogs have to be put down," she said.

"But what if you had a dog that could get better," I said. "that just looked really bad, but was strong underneath. Wouldn't it be wrong to kill a dog like that?"

Reluctantly she nodded.

"I look at you and I see a dog like that," I said. "One that's been beaten down by the world, but that is really good at heart. A dog like that can be loyal in ways that an ordinary dog might never be, and loyalty is really important."

She was silent for a long moment.

"I'm going to need some things," she said. "Dog food's not cheap, not for a lot of dogs."

"You'll need a building too," I said. "Something that's large enough to take care of the dogs, with enough room that they can run. Does it have to be inside the city?"

She shook her head.

"I think they'd be happier with a little greenery, and I don't think Brockton Bay is going to be green for a long while."

Trees had been washed away when houses had. The nicer parts of town still had trees, but the poor districts wouldn't for a long time. There had been a time where there had been lots of abandoned warehouses for her to set up in; those times were long gone, especially since the warehouses had been by the docks.

"I can build a place no problem," I continued. "The refrigerator won't be up to spec, and I'll have to send some people out to put Freon in it because of some stupid government regulations."

"Didn't think you'd worry about things like that."

"Trust me," I said. "You can thumb your nose at most of the government, but parts like the EPA and the IRS you'd better play nice with. Just ask Al Capone."

She looked confused.

"He was a gangster, like eighty years ago? Prohibition? None of it rings a bell?" I shook my head. "It doesn't matter. What matters is that you pick your battles for things that matter, and this whole Freon thing ought to be left to the professionals anyway."

Shrugging, she stared into the fire. She looked as bedraggled as all the other survivors did.

"I'll even pay for the land. The one good thing about all of this is that a lot of people are going to think that Brockton Bay is worthless, and the land is going to go for super cheap. I'll prove them wrong."

It might not even be a bad idea to buy up some of the land by the docks. I wouldn't try to cheat poor people, but a lot of them hadn't owned their own homes anyhow. If my urban renewal projects went off the way they hoped they would, then the land price would skyrocket.

Even better, if I decided to build another tower I could make sure that I didn't have any more crabby neighbors around me.

Taylor Hebert, land speculator. Why didn't that sound weird?

I had an image of myself dressed like the guy on the Monopoly game, including the monocle. I snorted to myself.

Maybe I'd get rich enough to buy myself an island.

880

ShayneT

May 23, 2018

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Threadmarks 33. Business

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ShayneT

May 30, 2018

#5,375

For the first time in a week I smelled food that wasn't an MRE. Hot pizza filled my nostrils, and I could see people lining up around the corner. It was my first venture into capitalism, and it was already paying off.

"I would not have thought of this," Lung said.

He was standing beside me, and we were sharing the very first pizza that had been made on the site.

Taking a bite, I shrugged.

"People needed something to make them feel better," I said. "Buying old carnival concessions stands wasn't that expensive, and it makes being here a lot more tolerable for people."

I had fifty different concession stands spread throughout the camp. Each specialized in one kind of food. Some sold pizza, others sold burgers, others Chinese food. None of the foods required a lot of work, but they were all fresh and hot and the smells made the camp feel a little more like a fair than a dismal place where people had been left to die.

Paying for them had been easy. I'd been going out each morning, pulling different minerals from the sea. Leet told me which were most prevalent and which were most profitable and I started with those. I varied minerals so that I would not saturate the market for any one, although Leet seemed to think that wouldn't be a problem for at least some of them.

"It solidifies your hold on them as well," he said.

He was holding one of the work chits I'd made. People were going crazy with nothing to do, and most people didn't have enough money to buy pizza or burgers. So I gave them things to do, paying them in the traditional form with pizza.

I'd considered paying them in beer as well, but Lung and my grandfather both had nixed the idea. The camp was close to a powder-keg as it was. Adding alcohol to the mix was a recipe for disaster.

Letting three of the oversize metal coins I'd created float in the air in front of us, I rotated them. On one side of them was my face, done in detail enough that it would be difficult to counterfeit. On the other was a denomination.

The ABB and the Dockworkers were sharing the running of the food stalls.

Taking a bite of pizza I looked at him.

"Somebody was going to have to do something. Why not me?"

I'd made a second set of work chits with Lung's face on them; mine was on the back of these. They were less valuable, something which clearly irritated Lung, although he seemed pleased to have his face on money.

People were already trading the work chits among themselves, trading blankets and MREs and even extra work for a chance at pizza and some recourse from the dreadful sameness that was their lives now.

"Sending them out into the city in work crews was a good idea," he admitted. "It gets them out of here and it gets them to work on their own neighborhoods."

"People were going stir crazy," I admitted. "I was afraid people were going to start using drugs just out of being bored, if nothing else."

"They don't have enough money for very many drugs," he sniffed.

I was sure he knew what he was talking about. Drugs had not been one of the things that I had demanded that he stopped during our first meeting. I regretted that now, but I suspected that it would have been one thing that kept us from making the deal at all.

After all, the involuntary sex trade had only been a small portion of his business. Gambling and voluntary sex work had been much larger, along with drugs. Even now I sometimes saw ABB members setting up small betting rings around things as small as which tortoise would win a race.

They'd made some sort of deal with Dad not to interfere with things like that; in return they offered extra help to the Dock workers, and relations between the two groups had thawed somewhat.

"I thought the PRT would blow a gasket when they saw the work chits," I smirked.

The city government had been doing everything they could to separate me from the people. Obviously they saw my influence with people as being as great a threat as my actual parahuman power. However, rebuilding the electrical grid had been the work of less than a week given the powers I brought to bear.

All of the major junctions had been repaired, and the work crews had focused on the wealthier areas. They were now working on the poor areas, which I found a little optimistic. After all, there were no houses there to run electricity to.

I'd cleaned the streets of downed electrical lines and debris as much as I could. The work crews were now helping people to retrieve their belongings, scavenging under the watchful eye of supervisors. In general the people who owned homes that were now being scavenged were sent out with the crews.

They were given cameras and were told to photograph everything. It was necessary for insurance to pay for their claims, and for FEMA money. FEMA generally paid only thirty three thousand dollars maximum, and that wasn't nearly enough for people to replace their homes, but every dollar helped.

Unfortunately, due to the sheer numbers involved, people were being told that it might be as long as five to six months before FEMA inspectors could be out to inspect properties. I wasn't sure why that was. After all, during a normal storm there was a lot of damage that could be hidden and inspections took time. In this case, houses were usually razed to the foundations, which seemed like something the Inspector could simply drive by, take a few pictures and then make a check mark.

"I'm not sure it's worth what they are paying though. They found fourteen bodies today... I'm not sure there's enough pizza in the world to be worth that."

The work crews weren't the only ones to find bodies. I'd found a lot myself when I was clearing out debris. The difference was that I was usually floating in the air high enough that I didn't have to smell the stench of death and decomposition and that I wasn't close enough to see the faces. The people working the crews did, though.

Nobody seemed to resent me, though. They took pictures and posted them on several boards that had been set up at the center of camp. That way if people saw a relative they had not known was dead there were people there ready to console them.

The area was cordoned off from children for obvious reasons.

"I hear you are offering people money for their land," I said, staring out at the line of people. They looked happier than they had in days, even happier than they had been when I'd set up portable showers. People had been stinking for a while, and it was something I should have done earlier.

"Only because you were doing it first," he said. "I assumed that you knew something that I didn't."

"I was just buying out my neighbors," I said. "I wanted to build a bigger complex without people complaining because I'd put a shadow over their flower garden."

"Renovating the neighborhoods is going to take money that these people do not have," he said. "Most of them probably won't be coming back."

"It'd be nice if they had a chance, though," I said.

I knew what he said was true, though. There had been a constant trickle of people leaving the camps as they'd found shelter with family members in other cities and states. It wouldn't take much to turn that trickle into a flood if people had other options.

The problem was that a lot of the people in the poor areas had worked in the poor areas in businesses that had been destroyed. Without jobs there was no way they'd ever be able to reestablish their lives or rebuild their homes.

Yet without these people Brockton Bay wouldn't be the Brockton Bay that I knew. Having the poor leave and the rich remain might be good for the bottom line, but it would be bad for the culture.

"We will rebuild this city like a Phoenix from the ashes," he said, looking off into the distance. "I did not think Leviathan could be faced, that he was an inevitable force of nature and that the end was as inevitable as the sunrise. I am glad you convinced me of different."

"Still, we can't keep people working on scavenging forever. Eventually we're going to run out of houses and basements to search, and then we'll need some real work to give them."

Also, the amount of pizza I was going through I'd actually need to find some buried treasure before long.

"I have heard that the Protectorate has been making dolls of you even though you are not one of their own."

"I get five percent of the sales proceeds," I said. "And the other five percent goes towards things the camp needs. When this is over it will go to charity."

It was amazing how fast the production had ramped up. I had no access to the Internet, being too busy to go to Boston to check, but Leet apparently thought that I'd somehow 'broken' the Internet.

I wasn't sure exactly what he meant, but apparently I was all that people had been talking about for the past two weeks. Interest in me had exploded, and there were talks about a Hollywood movie being made about me.

My lawyer had made sure I would get a cut.

Apparently they were thinking about having some actress I'd never heard of play me. Personally I couldn't see the appeal. They hadn't even talked to me, so how did they think they were going to get my story right?

With my luck Emma and Sophia would be made out to be heroes for triggering the Ender of Endbringers.

Lung chuckled. "I'd never thought that honey would work better than vinegar, but you have proven me wrong."

"What?"

"You are now the undisputed warlord of the city. People look to you before they look to the government or the PRT. You even have your own money. None of us would have been able to do that through intimidation or fear."

"Love is stronger than fear," I said. "People only fear you as long as they are within your reach, but if they love you they will follow you even when they know you are nowhere near."

"They fear you as well," he said.

I shrugged. "Fear helps to motivate people. You think children don't fear their parents even as they love them?"

"So you see people four times your age as your children?" he asked. "How condescending of you."

"If they act like children, how am I supposed to treat them?" I asked irritably. "They keep putting blockades in the way of doing what is right for people because it threatens their positions or their sense of how things have always been done."

Lung chuckled. "Superheroes always think they know better than everyone else... otherwise why try to change the world?"

"Maybe because some people actively try to tear it down?"

"When you are on a sinking ship, why worry about tearing off doors?" he asked, ignoring my dig at him. "It is different when there is a chance that the ship can be saved."

I wanted to argue with him, convince him that there was always a chance, but he'd just think I was young and idealistic. He'd probably say that it was my power that made me think that, and that ordinary people had none of the leverage I had to change things.

"I understand you are trying to save the dog girl," he said.

I nodded. "I think it's going pretty well. The PRT are being a lot nicer about it than I'd expected. My lawyer thinks they can get her off with probation and community service, or maybe with some time in a minimum security facility working with dogs."

"Power has it's privileges," he said. "Anyone else who asked would find her in prison unless she agreed to become a Protectorate patsy."

"Yeah," I said. "I get the impression she's not much of a team player. I don't understand how the Undersiders have managed her. Speaking of, have you heard anything about them?"

I'd had thoughts about folding them into my group. I wasn't sure what Tattletale actually did, but Lung thought she was some kind of a thinker. I needed all of those that we could get. Their leader's darkness control wasn't really all that useful, and nobody knew what Regent even did, but I'd rather have them with me than against me.

After all, the time I spent fighting useless battles with other gangs was time away from my plans for the city and for the Endbringers.

It wasn't as though I had any real plans for them though. I doubted they'd fall for the same trick Leviathan had; the Simurgh would know what I planned before I even planned it, and there was no guarantee that my grandfather's helmet would protect me.

Energy went wonky around Behemoth. Killing him might be beyond me as well.

Still, people seemed to have confidence in me, which meant that I had to pretend to know what I was doing. I couldn't dwell on the thought that some of the bodies people had been finding might be a direct result of what I had done.

Had my mining of minerals from the ocean been enough to draw Leviathan's attention? Some people thought the Endbringers were attracted by conflict. Had my destruction of the Empire been enough to trigger a visit?

Had the buildings I'd used as ammunition really been completely empty? I'd given them a casual scan, but there hadn't been time to be thorough. People hiding in bathrooms or places with a lot of metal might have been invisible to me.

Still, I knew better than to focus on that. If I did, I'd spiral into the same sort of pit as my dad had after Mom died, and I'd be useless to anyone.

"There are rumors that Coil simply moved elsewhere. Perhaps it was your demonstration of the kind of hospitality this city has to offer. Perhaps one of his thinkers saw something that we have not seen yet. The Undersiders have simply vanished with him, although Tattletale did show up to the last battle."

It was inconvenient, but I'd make do. I suspected that a lot of parahumans would want to work with me after what had happened with Leviathan.

"I've been thinking about companies we can start," I said. "Get people to working again. You've got some money; would you consider going into business with me?"

"We aren't already?" he asked. He hesitated. "Funds are growing difficult to acquire for the moment. No one is working, which means that money is not being made. Even if we did not have the restrictions you imposed, you can hardly squeeze money from people who have none themselves."

"Getting people jobs is kind of the first step to getting the city back in order. Infrastructure would help, but every time I bring something up the city shoots me down."

My ideas for a high tech ferry, something I could have easily built had almost seemed to offend everyone. They'd claimed that untested Tinkertech would have to be extensively tested, and that building it myself would break a dozen federal laws.

Replacing roads would be considered defacing public property. The roads belonged to the city or the state.

Even building people low cost housing had run into roadblocks. Building permits were required, and the building that the permits were issued from had been destroyed. Blueprints would have to be sent to the city and examined, and I doubted that my grandfather had ever bothered with blueprints in his life.

There were all kinds of rules about facades and colors that were allowed and building materials. It was frustrating; I sometimes felt as though I was slowly but surely being strangled in red tape.

"Lung," I began.

Before I could say anything else, I heard a song in the distance. It was powerful and mesmerizing, and my world suddenly shrank until all I could hear was the song. I'd heard the voice before, but I couldn't place where.

In the distance I saw people falling down, dropping as though their strings had been cut.

Around the corner walked a group of three people. All three were chillingly familiar; one had been in the news recently.

She had a collar around her neck made of metal and with blinking lights. She looked terrified.

The other two were worse. A small girl in a blood stained lab coat and a tall, slender goateed man stood on both sides of he girl. The man had his arm around her shoulders. He was looking directly at me and smirking.

The little girl barely seemed to notice me. She was looking down at a device in her hands.

I stood frozen, as did Lung. I tried to force myself to move, but all the energy had left my body. I couldn't force myself to do anything even though in the back of my mind part of my mind was screaming.

As I stared at them I had one thought.

When did Canary join the Slaughterhouse Nine?

838

ShayneT

May 30, 2018

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Threadmarks 34. Trapped

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ShayneT

Jun 2, 2018

#5,550

"Taylor Hebert," Jack Slash said. "So many ripples from such a young girl."

In the background Canary was still singling, but it was low and almost inaudible. I could sense the design of the collar on her neck, and the bomb inside it was obvious to me. That wasn't all that was there, though.

"The collar amplifies her power," my grandfather's avatar whispered. He sounded intrigued. "It makes her stronger while hobbling her at the same time. It's not a design I have seen very often; in mutants it can lead to instability"

"I wouldn't have expected such a diamond in a place like this," he said. He gestured at the camp around us. "Living among the normals as though you were one of them."

I still couldn't speak. Canary's voice kept me from wanting to do anything. I felt drugged, like I had once when I'd gotten a tooth pulled when I was eight.

The normal noises of the crowd around us were gone. The only sounds were the tinny sounds of music in the distance from portable radios, and the sounds of insects flying through the air. Otherwise there was only silence. It was eerie, and it sounded like we were in a graveyard.

How many people had the Nine already killed while I was chatting with Lung and eating Pizza? I should have been more prepared, asked Dinah to check the future for me.

Instead I'd been content to focus on city building while the barbarians were at the gate.

The Nine had been ruining lives for longer than I'd been alive. Even now I was trying to improve the lives of a hundred thousand people and knowing the kind of atrocities they tended to commit, they were planning on killing them all.

They'd torture them first. By the time the Protectorate was even aware of what had happened, all the people I'd promised to help would be left either dead or maimed, physically or emotionally. The Nine would get away, the way they always did, and the world would barely mourn.

I felt anger growing inside me slowly.

They didn't have the right to ruin people's lives. None of these people had done anything to deserve this. They'd had everything stripped from them by a monster beyond their comprehension only to work together to try to rebuild. I'd seen people help each other, neighbors who would never have even spoken to each other in the normal world supporting each other.

These monsters wanted to take all of that away.

My anger didn't show on my face, and it didn't seem to make much of a difference in my ability to take action either. I couldn't exert my power or even move a finger. I simply sat and stared up at Jack Slash as he approached.

Jack Slash sauntered up to me, ignoring Lung. He squatted down in front of me and he reached up and touched my face. I should have felt that it was creepy, but there didn't seem to be anything sexual about it. Instead it was almost as though he was examining a puppy he was planning on buying.

"So much power to make change," he said, staring into my eyes. "And all it would take would be a little push to spin you off in a completely new direction."

He stood up and chuckled.

His laughter caused my anger to spike. He thought this was all funny? All it would take was a single mistake and this would all go very differently.

"I heard about what you did to the Empire," he said. "Apparently you already have a little bit of the cruelty and creativity that's needed to be truly great in this business. Your power is certainly not in question. The only thing that's needed is a little difference of perspective."

Him calling me cruel? That was like Hitler calling someone a racist.

"We're going to create a new world, you and I," he said. "But before that can happen you have to be made better. The best metal has to be forged before it can be useful."

Glancing behind him, he gestured toward the little girl.

"I suppose it's ready?"

The little girl smiled. Her face looked innocent, blonde ringlets framing a face that looked like she'd never done anything wrong in her life. The blood on her apron said differently. "It's ready. It's some of my best work, really. When I'm done she won't be able to do anything to any of us without getting eaten from the inside out. Best of all, there's no metal in any of it, so there will be nothing she can hang on to with her power."

The needle she pulled from her pocket didn't have any metal in it at all. I suppose that was meant to be some kind of defense against me.

It wouldn't matter under normal circumstances, but as things were going now, it didn't look good.

The things the Slaughterhouse did were there on the Net for those who were willing to look. Most people didn't want to know. They were the only parahumans who were feared almost as much as the Endbringers.

The insects were growing thick, now. Usually they only grew this thick around the trashcans when people put something sweet inside. It was strange that there were this many alive; just a week ago it had been too cold for them to be around much.

I suspected that Dad had been fostering their growth. He'd been using them, and I think he'd been using some of the heated buildings vacated by people headed for other cities as incubators. There was enough leftover detritus from a hundred thousand people to feed them all forever.

Was my mind wandering because I didn't want to face what was going to happen? The Nine tortured people, which was bad. Worse was when they turned people into one of them. Turning me into one of the Nine would be the worst thing ever. I had the power to do Endbringer levels of damage to cities, and I wouldn't be working on a three month cycle.

I could build a base on the other side of the moon and the Nine would be out of reach of everyone except when they wanted to rain destruction down on the world.

This couldn't happen. I gathered my will, as much as I could and struggled to use my power. It wouldn't take much power to make one of the tokens in front of me into a bullet that would go through Canary's forehead.

My grandfather had told me countless stories about how he'd struggled to defeat attacks by telepaths, real telepaths, not the bargain basement versions we got here. He'd told me he'd won as often as not through sheer force of will.

It wasn't working for me.

Jack stared at me and frowned.

"This is too easy, It's almost boring," Glancing behind him, he asked "Can we at least let her speak?"

The little girl looked down at her controller and she made some adjustments. Suddenly I found that my ability to speak was back, even if I still couldn't muster the will to actually do anything.

"You know what's about to happen," he said.

"You're going to try to kill the people that I care about," I said. "Murder my friends in front of me, make me like you. There's a funny thing about that, though."

"What's that?" he asked.

"I don't have any friends," I said. "But my family isn't the kind to go down easily."

Canary choked suddenly, staggering back as insects swarmed and filled her mouth. I'd seen the swarm growing behind them, but Jack hadn't read my expression enough to realize what was happening. Birds were pecking at her eyes as well.

They were trying to attack Bonesaw at the same time, but most of them were dropping dead as soon as they got near her. It was some kind of biological poison.

The collar around her Canary's neck exploded, but I already had a force field around her so that the explosion was directed away from her. Metal shards and bird parts pelted the little girl, who screamed.

I levitated to my feet.

"People like to underestimate me," I said, staring at the man who'd threatened to use me to destroy everyone. "Threaten me with laws, or threats of killing me. I can handle that. But when people threaten to hurt my family... well, some people are suicidal I guess."

Jack's right leg exploded as I pulled the bone from it while holding the rest of his skeleton in place. He would have fallen, but I lifted him into the air by his skeleton. It was probably painful, at least from the wince on his face. I telekinetically smashed him in the face with his own legbone, and his nose exploded with blood.

"Jack!" the little girl screamed, but I'd frozen her as well, and I was already disassembling the spiders surrounding her, discarding the rudimentary brains and turning the rest into blades that were slowly surrounding me in a cloud.

"Putting metal mesh around your bones probably sounded like a good idea when you had her do it," I said. I stared down at the ruin of his leg. "Not so much now."

He stared up at me, a look of wonder on his face.

"You're more than I expected," he said.

"There's an implant in his brain that regulates pain," my grandfather's avatar said. "It's relatively easy to reverse it and make pain worse instead of better."

People were watching in the distance. They should have fled the moment they realized what was happening, but instead they were simply standing there, frozen.

They'd started seeing me as a hero. If I did what I was inclined to do, would that be reversed in a moment of anger?

After all, legally I'd be in the clear if I killed both of these people right this moment, but that wouldn't make people accept me any more.

"We have Panacea and the little Seer girl," Jack said. "If that makes a difference. Also, we'll release a plague if we're killed that will make what the Endbringers did look like child's play."

Rage filled me. If they'd hurt Dinah...

My grandfather whispered in my ear. His voice sounded curiously distant.

"You always wanted to be immortal, didn't you?" I asked. "Wanted to be remembered, for evil if you couldn't do anything good."

"Trying to steal my trick?" he asked. "You can't play the player."

His leg had already stopped bleeding, probably from some of the implants that had been placed in him. A little twist and the bleeding started again.

"Sure I can," I said.

"So you are willing to let your minions suffer under the delightful attentions of my colleagues?" Jack asked.

"How long do you think people with metal bones can hide from someone like me?" I asked. "I'm going to kill you all, and I'm going to use the money to actually help people. I might even give it to charity."

He grimaced as I suddenly turned off the pain regulator, but he didn't cry out, not even as I reversed it to intensify the pain to something beyond natural levels.

"When I'm done, everyone will look up to you," I said. "Every night when they look up at the moon."

I twisted reality in the way my grandfather showed me, and suddenly a great wind rose. The world shifted behind Jack, tearing in a way that felt wrong. A portal opened, and I could see gray rocks and a dark sky behind him, the Earth high in the sky behind him.

"To the moon, Jack," I said.

Before I could push him through something hit me from the side like a freight train. Startled, I flew through a building and the portal collapsed. I saw Jack fall to the ground.

Right.

I'd made fun of my grandfather for monologuing; I should have simply sent a token into Jack's brain and then spun it like a blender.

The stripes of the woman who had run into me were startling. She was crawling through the hole in the wall of the building I'd just flown through.

"She has no metal in her body," my grandfather's avatar pointed out. He still sounded strange, tired a little.

"Yeah," I said.

It was weird. Humans had iron in their bodies, even if it wasn't a lot. Any with red blood did as well. Even blue blooded animals had copper in their blood, but there wasn't a single trace of metal in the Siberian.

She was very very fast, and very very naked.

In the space of a moment she was on top of me, a scrabbling whirlwind of claws and teeth, death just inches away from me.

The metal from the disassembled spiders flashed through the air and into her side, but she didn't even seem to notice. I tried cutting into her with it, but there was something very wrong.

Pushing her away wasn't working either. It wasn't a matter of strength. She didn't have any leverage and she shouldn't have been able to hold me down.

The entire building contracted around us, focusing on containing her, but she simply tore through it like tissue paper. I'd fought Leviathan and had less problems. She was an immovable object and that should not have been possible.

I could feel her tearing away at my shields, and as much as I struggled against her I couldn't move her away.

Insects suddenly swarmed us, turning the sky black. I couldn't see anything, and neither could anyone else.

The Siberian wasn't harmed, but she was distracted for a moment, and that was all it took for me to propel myself along the ground and out from under her.

The next moment I was up in the air, and the Siberian was jumping from point to point, as though the air had suddenly become solid. How many powers did she actually have?

She was faster than me, even in the air. I began grabbing up everything I could to throw at her; parts of metal buildings, even cars.

The moment I threw one van at her she stopped coming after me. She frantically turned toward the van, leaping through the windshield and grabbing the driver.

"She doesn't strike me as the kind to be altruistic," my grandfather said. "It's likely that she's a projection. Perhaps the man she is racing away with is the Tinker who made her."

She was fast enough to dodge the missiles I sent after her. She was not, however, fast enough to stop me from turning the filling in his right back molar into a missile that turned his brain into a blender.

She turned and stared at me with hatred in her eyes a moment before vanishing.

Her owner's body fell, dropping to the ground with a sickening thud. Strangely, his body didn't have the characteristic alterations that the rest of the Nine had.

It didn't matter. I had no doubt that they were going after my Dad and possibly other hostages.

Jack had said that they had ways of releasing plagues on the world if they were killed. The man who'd controlled the Siberian hadn't, but he hadn't been modified either.

"Taylor," my grandfather's voice said, suddenly urgent. "Something is happening."

My head snapped around. There was nothing coming for me that I could see. I would have expected Crawler at the very least.

It occurred to me that he might have meant at the camp.

Sensing them was easy; as I'd told Jack, very few people had metal in their bones. I knew Crawler wasn't one of them. Any modifications they made on him wouldn't last long. I'd have to watch out for him attacking me , although from what I'd heard he wouldn't bother with surprise.

I went straight after them, resolved that this time I wouldn't bother with torturing them or even talking to them.

The Nine had proven that they didn't deserve to live, not just once but time and time again. Some of them might have once been victims but they were now monsters, every single one of them.

I saw them standing in a group.

Mannequin was the first to die. I simply willed all of his protective metal to crush inward, crushing his brain and organs before he had a time to as much as move.

Flame sliced toward me, and glass burst harmlessly against my force field. Burnscar and Shatterbird were decapitated as I pulled their heads from their bodies using their own skeletal enhancements.

I didn't see Bonesaw anywhere, but Crawler was leaping toward me.

He'd be harder to kill, but it didn't matter. Metal surrounded him, coating him more and more as he struggled. It was growing into a massive ball, and unlike the Siberian he wasn't able to simply tear out of the growing mass. Physics still had at least a little effect on him.

Jack Slash was the last of those I saw, and I froze as I saw what he was holding.

"It took me a while to figure it out," he said. "This is pretty important to you. I thought I might at least give you something to remember me by."

He was holding my grandfather's helmet in his hand, crushed, probably by Crawler.

I saw red, and his entire body exploded into viscera.

A gesture and everything nearby was pulled out into space. I followed; hopefully whatever plagues they'd released would be vented with the atmosphere. I'd still have to have the PRT quarantine the area and do whatever it took to keep the world safe.

Feeling numb I stood in the space above the earth as I sent the metal covered Crawler in an arc toward the sun. Alexandria had said that powers didn't work past the moon. If that was true, good.

If not, then Crawler would be trapped on a trip taking years toward the sun. It was possible that he might be able to survive inside the sun itself, in which case he would burn in its fires forever.

Good.

836

ShayneT

Jun 2, 2018

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Threadmarks 35. Quarantine

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ShayneT

Jun 14, 2018

#5,802

"There isn't really much in the way of technology here," Leet said. "Certainly nothing in the way of an artificial intelligence."

I'd done my best to rebuild the helmet, but it hadn't brought my grandfather's avatar back. Going to Leet had been my only choice; of all tinkers he was the one who knew about every kind of technology, even if he could no longer build many of them.

I was looking through a window in at Leet as he worked on my grandfather's helmet.

"That can't be true," I said. "My gran... I mean I was talking to one this whole time."

"This isn't an artificial intelligence," he said. "But the technology that is here is actually an amplifier of some kind. It gives me a little bit of a headache really... whatever it amplifies shouldn't exist."

"Telepathy maybe?" I asked.

"Don't be silly," he said automatically. "Telepathy doesn't exist. Everybody knows that. But if I believed in something like that, I'd say yeah. Theoretically it could amplify mental defenses and maybe even the ability to communicate... if telepathy really existed."

"Can you fix it?" I asked.

"I already have," he said. "It should be working like it did before."

I hadn't heard a word from my grandfather since the helmet had been crushed. If what Leet was saying was true, it meant that his intelligence wasn't actually in the helmet, it was somewhere else and the helmet was simply the link.

I should have been relieved. My grandfather's intelligence wasn't gone; it was hidden somewhere. The problem was that I had no idea where to find it and I certainly had no way to communicate. It was frustrating.

Even though he'd been talking less and less, I'd depended on my grandfather for everything. I'd assumed that he'd been speaking less because I needed him less, but what if he'd been conserving energy?

Power sources didn't last forever, after all, and it was possible that it'd been flooded during Leviathan's attack and damaged somehow. But why wouldn't it have told me? I'd have found some what to move it, to protect it even if it was the size of a building.

"Thanks for everything."

"You really shouldn't trust anything that doesn't have a brain," Leet said. He grimaced. "It's trite but it's true. As far as modern day science... even by Tinkertech standards that thing might as well be magic. You can't trust magic."

"I barely trust things that actually have brains," I said. "Look at how people are reacting."

We were inside a mobile laboratory Leet had built. After he'd lost his last lab in the floods from Leviathan he'd decided that he wanted something a lot more secure. It was in an extradiminsional space through some sort of Tinkertech trickery. Doorways to various places in Brockton Bay had been set up, including one in the refugee camp.

I suspected that he'd bought the equipment from Toybox, not trusting his own designs. I didn't blame him.

I wouldn't have been allowed outside the camp otherwise. The whole place was cordoned off, with more and more military forces arriving by the hour. What was startling was just how many people had showed up and how quickly. Having heroes like Strider on call probably had something to do with it, but the amount of equipment involved made me suspicious that they'd been prepared for something like this.

Despite the people fleeing the scene, they'd been rounded up before they could leave the camp. Had the PRT been planning on keeping people in the camp all along?

Apparently there were concerns that the Slaughterhouse had released viruses on their deaths that would result in pandemics that would ultimately destroy humanity.

The PRT had sprayed the entire area with huge masses of a decontaminating foam, designed to kill bacteria and viruses of all types. Despite this they were worried that people were already infected, and they were taking no chances.

Even Leet was wearing a full bio-hazard suit. He'd insisted that I stay inside I decontamination chamber and he had never actually handled my grandfather's helmet, using machines and Waldo's to do all the work.

People were frightened and afraid, and this was undoing all the good work I'd done so far. Yet while I could easily break through the cordon, part of me had to wonder whether it was the right thing to do.

What if they were right?

It still seemed suspicious that while they'd had trouble bringing enough food and supplies for a couple of days, they had no trouble finding enough shipping containers to wall off the enormous area around the camp.

"What am I going to do?" I asked him.

"Fix everything?" he asked.

I scowled at him. Maybe if I'd had my grandfather I'd have been able to do something, but now I was just a teen-aged girl and I had no idea what to do.

"I'm serious," he said. "Everybody in the camp looks up to you. People should be celebrating the fact that you got rid of the Nine, but instead they're dealing with all of this. You have to give them hope or they'll fall apart."

"But how?" I asked. "I can't just magically create food or build houses for people. I can barely take care of myself."

"Look like you know what you are doing," he said. "That's sometimes more important than actually knowing. People who panic are people who do dumb things that hurt themselves."

I nodded and stared at him.

"How do you know all this?" I asked.

He shrugged. "I've seen war movies... not just the sci-fi ones. Mostly those, though."

Right.

"All right," I said. "Hand me my helmet."

His mechanical arms passed it though the slot, and another blast of disinfecting gas sprayed me and everything I was wearing. Undoubtedly he'd probably set the tiny anteroom I was in on fire the moment I left.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.

The only way to know whether the government was right to Quarantine us was to wait. Diseases tended to spread best if they were asymptomatic but contagious. Bonesaw knew that and probably intended for there to be a maximum spread of the diseases she made.

I stepped outside and into the real world. I could hear people screaming at the perimeter, even as men with guns were holding them off. The storage containers were already up around thirty percent of the camp.

Lung was standing near the doorway, staring impassively at the chaos.

Glancing over at me, he said, "They intend to let us die. They will treat us like a city of Simurgh victims."

"They won't," I said. "I won't let them."

"I do not see you stopping them now," he said.

"They might be right," I said.

"And if they are?"

"I'll build a place on Mars if I have to," I said. "I'm sure Leet can show me how."

I was going to miss the instant access my grandfather had given me to Tinkertech designs, even if it wasn't actually Tinkertech.

If that had been the only thing I was going to miss it wouldn't have been that bad. The problem was that my grandfather's avatar had filled a void that I hadn't even known I had. Our family had never been particularly large, and when I'd had both Mom and Dad it had been enough.

Once we'd lost Mom, though, it had all changed. I'd lost my entire family, and getting a grandfather I hadn't even known about had filled some of that loss.

"So what now?" Lung asked. "Do we show strength, or do we abandon the plan?"

"We double down," I said. "If everyone dies none of this will matter. If they don't... "

"Then we will have tightened our hold on these people even further," he said. He looked at me strangely. "For all your claims not to be a warlord, you think very much like one."

I shrugged.

"Warlords rise when the system fails the people. That's what's happening now," I said. "We've got an opportunity to make things better for people, and we have to take it."

With that I levitated, floating toward the cursing people.

"People of Brockton Bay!"

Slowly the shouting and pushing stopped and people turned to face me.

"We have seen what the Protectorate and the PRT thinks of us," I said. "Because we were poor they think they can lock us away and contain us, forget us as though we were Simurgh victims."

I heard angry shouts at that, but people were listening.

"I won't let that happen. They fear that we may be diseased, and because of that that we must be separated from the rest of humanity. There is a chance that they are right."

The crowd fell dead silent with that.

"That is why I am allowing this, because otherwise the fact that they are surrounding us with metal shipping containers would mean that they were only giving me the weapons I needed to free us."

"They're trapping the uninfected in here with the infected!" a man shouted.

"How do we know which is which?" I asked. "How many of you have people you care about that are outside of those walls... friends, family... do you want them to die?"

The crowd murmured, their mood turning ugly. I was losing them.

"If there is a disease that Bonesaw created, it's going to be slow so that there's more time to infect as many people as possible. That's good, because it buys us time to fix it before anybody gets killed."

The crowd settled. This was apparently something that hadn't occurred to them.

"Panacea can handle the people here, given enough time, but if there is a disease and it spreads to the whole world she won't be able to do anything. I've got money now from killing the Nine. I will use some of it to hire the best parahuman healers and medical tinkers to come and help solve this problem."

The crowd looked up at me expectantly.

"What parahumans create, parahumans can solve," I said. "But if we start fighting each other and acting like animals then we will prove that we are exactly what the government and the PRT thinks we are... worthless specimens."

It was the same everywhere. In my grandfather's world, everyone had hated mutants. Here it was the poor and the disenfranchised. These were my father's people, and I was going to protect them, even if it was from themselves.

The crowd growled.

"These people are not our friends," I continued. "But we have to live among them. There will be a day of reckoning, but that day is not today. Today is a day for us to show that we are better than they think we are. United we will stand, divided we will fall."

"And if we start getting sick?" a man shouted out.

"You'd be just as sick out there as you would be in here," I said. "Do you really think Bonesaw wouldn't have spread the disease to the whole camp? Either we're all sick or none of us are."

It wasn't true, of course, but crowds tended to be stupid.

Seeing that I had them, I said, "I will see that something is done. In the meantime everyone should get some rest. If there is a disease, it's best if you have lots of rest to fight it off long enough for us to save you."

I wondered if Leet had ever made a healing machine. If he hadn't, I'd make sure he got the money to do so.

Floating to what looked like one of several gates that would be used to truck supplies in, I faced a PRT commander.

All of the PRT were carrying Tinkertech weapons made of plastic. A quick check showed no metal inside any of them, an impressive achievement even if it wouldn't really do anything to stop me. The fact that their armor contained metal, probably because of the extra environmental equipment that turned these particular sets of armor into clean suits meant that the effort on the weapons was wasted.

It looked like they had Tinkertech filtration systems in their armor. The whole suits were designed to be hazmat suits without looking like Hazmat suits, probably in an effort to avoid looking threatening.

As though faceless men in black armor wasn't threatening enough. There were hundreds of PRT agents in the cordon around the camp, more than Brockton Bay actually had, which meant that they'd undoubtedly teleported agents in from other cities.

That also meant that these agents would probably be less sympathetic, in part because they didn't have relatives in the camp that they'd be tempted to sneak out.

I wondered if there were any native born Brocktonites under those masks at all. If it had been me I would have rotated them out and relied entirely on foreign agents. I wasn't sure if the PRT was that pragmatic though.

"You can't leave," he said.

I couldn't see his face through the mirrored mask, but he sounded anxious. Even if he wasn't a local he probably knew me by reputation. After all, I was the Endslayer, the Slaughterhouse Slaughter, the Empire Ender.

The PRT agents had all undoubtedly been briefed on me before they'd been posted here, which meant they had at least some idea of what I could do.

"I expect to see some progress on seeing these people diagnosed and treated," I said loudly. "If I don't, I'm going to start throwing things, and I doubt anybody is going to like that."

"That's not up to me," he said, holding up his hand. He very carefully did not aim his weapon at me like the PRT troopers had been aiming at the crowd.

The nervousness in his voice was increasing, though. If he shot at me, I was going to make him regret it. He had a metal pin in his hip, and it wouldn't take much to make him bleed.

"Find out who is responsible, and have them call me if they are afraid to come into the camp," I said. "Otherwise things might start getting ugly."

Not all of the crowd was gone; posturing for followers was one of the things my grandfather's avatar had taught me.

It was almost as important to look like you were negotiating from strength as to actually have strength.

Of course bullying a low level lackey wasn't really going to get us anywhere, and behind closed doors I would be more polite with the people who mattered. What was important was that people thought something was being done, whether it was or not.

As long as they had hope, something they could set their compass to they would remain calm. Let them lose that hope and they really would turn into animals.

The government could make all the promises they wanted, but they'd lost these people's trust in more ways than one. I still had it and I planned to keep it.

Still, in the end there a lot of what was going to happen involved waiting.

Hordes of men in bio-hazard suits were moving through the camp, taking samples and checking people's health. Those who had been checked were being stamped with a Tinkertech marker that couldn't be counterfeited, not with the equipment these people had.

I'd volunteered to be one of the first to be checked, in part to assuage people's fears that the government wasn't trying to poison us like some of the rumors I had heard.

The funny thing was that the men had already been on their way when I'd made my speech to the crowd, but now the people in the camp were assuming that I had bullied the government into finally responding.

Nothing the government men were trying to say would change people's minds, and while I probably should have felt bad for taking advantage of the situation, I didn't.

I really did believe that the people in the camp were low priority for the government, and I believed that it was mostly because they were poor. If the neighborhoods where the Arcadia kids came from had been effected there would have been all kinds of aid that simply wasn't coming despite everything I could do.

There were people who would deny it, but I knew it the way the people here knew it, in my gut.

I'd lost my grandfather; the last thing I wanted to do was to lose anyone else.

It had been two days since I'd made my ultimatum, and the men in bio-hazard suits were already thinner on the ground than they had been. I'd managed to call Dinah; her family had returned to Brockton Bay.

According to her there was a ninety eight percent chance that the camp was clean, which was part of the reason they were returning to the possible site of biological Armageddon. Despite her assurances, part of me would be worried until the very last test result had come in.

Still, if removing an Endbringer from the world hadn't increased my popularity, destroying the Nine was almost certain to have put my face on every magazine.

The PRT had an entire publicity machine designed to make their Capes popular and accessible. I would have to do it on my own, unless I hired someone with the money that was now flowing into my bank accounts.

Strike while the iron is hot seemed to be the one piece of advice to the newly famous, whether they were actors, musicians or reality stars. Fame was fleeting, and I needed to take advantage of my newfound popularity while I still had it.

Becoming a celebrity would advance my plans, but I felt a little uneasy about it. What did I know about magazine interviews and talking to late night talk shows?

Still, I could learn if it would get things moving for the people here.

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ShayneT

Jun 14, 2018

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Threadmarks 36. Interviews

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ShayneT

Jun 18, 2018

#5,876

"It's going to be a new era," I said. "For a long time Tinkers who could really make a difference were afraid to try for fear that the Slaughterhouse would come to visit. Very often they did."

The female host sitting across from me was the sixth or seventh in the past week; they were all starting to blur together. Still, I was getting better at staying on message.

"Are you dating anyone?" she asked.

I forced myself not to scowl. For some reason some of these people seemed to focus on the most inconsequential things. My grandfather probably would have had some advice about how to handle them.

"I hardly have time," I said. "I'm trying to help rebuild a city that's been devastated by tragedy. I've set up a foundation for Tinkers who have reproducible tech; there aren't many, but those are the ones who will change society forever. I want to encourage those people to come to Brockton Bay and let us have a look at what you've got."

With any luck I'd be able to keep them there, which would mean that Brockton Bay would eventually become a technological super center. There would be factories and companies like Apple and Microsoft might open up headquarters there if it was profitable to do so. The more money that flowed into the city the fast people would be to get back to work and get back to their lives.

"I also want to ask people to send whatever aid they can," I said. "And to encourage their congressmen to expedite help from FEMA and to ask for money to help rebuild the city."

"You are asking for a lot," the host said, looking uncomfortable. I'd seen similar looks on the faces of Oprah, Colbert, Kimmel and that guy from NPR.

"This city is the one place in the entire world where an Endbringer was defeated," I said. "That makes it more than just a memorial. It should be a place of celebration, a place that gives hope that the human spirit will triumph over adversity, no matter what the universe throws at us. That can't happen as long as there are people who have lost their homes."

"Things are hard all over," the host said. "A lot of people barely have enough for their own families."

"That's true, but it doesn't have to be," I said enthusiastically. "Leviathan is gone, which means that shipping can start again. That means more trade, which means more manufacturing, which means more jobs. We're at the start of a new era, like I said, and that means things are about to start getting better for everyone."

"So are you planning to start a new clothing line?" she asked, smiling brightly.

I fought the urge to say something negative. I needed these people's goodwill no matter how stupid they were. The world was indecisive about me; half the people thought I was the next Endbringer, while the others thought I was the savior of humanity. I needed the public to see me as being ultimately benevolent.

Actually though...

"I hadn't thought about it, but that might not be a bad idea. I can make bulletproof clothing for a fraction of the cost that other manufacturers do. All I need I is some designers to offer designs that people will actually want to wear. After all, fashion was never my strong suit."

"And to work with you they'll have to come to Brockton Bay," the host said.

Maybe she wasn't as stupid as I thought she was. I smiled and nodded.

The rest of the interview was as banal as the host could possibly make it. She was skilled at turning the conversation away from anything of substance no matter how hard I tried to stay on message.

At least the conversation was going better than the grilling I'd gotten on Fox. The host there had seemed to think that I was the Anti-Christ. He'd ambushed me and pressured me about my anti-Protectorate viewpoints.

That was a little hypocritical since Fox seemed to think that the Protectorate was dangerous too, mostly because they weren't strictly owned by the government. Or maybe because they were too owned by the government. I couldn't ever quite follow their reasoning. It probably had something to do with the Clintons.

I could understand the desire for accountability, and I had my issues with the group, but that wasn't any reason to take it out on someone who could crush your head like a melon with the slightest of thoughts.

I'd barely even been tempted.

My NPR interview had been difficult too. They'd asked some hard questions which were difficult to answer no matter how nice they sounded on the air. They'd been concerned about putting so much power in the hands of a teenager.

For some reason nobody believed that I was totally in control and not pettily vengeful like other teenage girls. I could hardly understand it. After all, I was the soul of restraint, except for that one time with my Dad, and that other time with the Nine, and maybe a couple of other times.

I was starting to think I needed a publicist. I wouldn't have thought that managing a public image would be as hard as it was, and the last thing I needed was something like the Protectorate horror stories that one heard about sometimes from comments made by Wards in various cities about being forced to wear stupid costumes because public polls suggested that pink would make you less threatening.

Wearing pink was not going to happen, although red or black seemed like good colors.

The moment I was out of the interview, I stepped out of the studio and took a deep breath. Chicago seemed like a nice city; it didn't have same smell New York had or the terrible sprawl of Los Angeles. I could see myself settling here, assuming I was willing to let go of Brockton Bay.

As I flew upward, I focused and twisted space. Brockton Bay appeared before me.

My grandfather had apparently not used that ability very often, and I couldn't really understand why. It was effectively teleportation, and that made everything so much easier. It would have taken me hours to fly back to Brockton Bay the normal way, and the more I used it the easier it got.

I'd even considered talking to Vista to see if we could learn from each other about how to use powers like that. There were ideas that I had that my grandfather hadn't talked to me about.

Now that he was gone, I was starting to realize that I'd leaned on him too much. He'd had decades of experience in using his powers, which meant that he'd thought up ways to use his powers and by extension mine that I'd never thought about.

But it was possible that in trusting him I was missing out on uses that he'd never even thought about. After all, even if our power sets were very similar that didn't mean that the way we used them would be.

My mind worked somewhat differently than his did, which might mean that I did some things differently.

Who wouldn't teleport if they could manage it? If it was easier and didn't play havoc with local equipment I'd have used it to go to the refrigerator. As it was I could justify using it as being that I needed to practice or I might lose the skill.

There were other skills I was practicing. I'd let whatever telepathy I'd had atrophy, having used it only once to taunt Emma and to communicate with my grandfather, and for nothing else. If mutant powers worked like muscles, then I needed to use it or I'd lose it.

Unfortunately, right now I seemed to be weaker than a lot of television psychics. During times of high emotion I could get flashes from people, but otherwise nothing.

My idea for a Mars colony would have to wait, not because I couldn't reach Mars but because aiming would be difficult.

I wondered if I could get paid for warping satellites into orbit, or maybe simply lifting them magnetically. I'd be able to defend against the Simurgh maybe; although my grandfather's helmet didn't hold his spirit anymore, there was a chance that it might protect against the Simurgh's mental affect.

We wouldn't know until her next attack, though, and I'd hate to depend on it and then discover that it didn't work against what passed for mind control in this world. If it did work, it was technology that I'd gladly pass on to the Protectorate. It'd make fighting the Simurgh and other Masters much much easier.

The technology was going to be the biggest loss from my grandfather, at least as far as the world was concerned. The things he built could be replicated by anyone with enough know how and the right tools. It was almost as though Tinker abilities intentionally left steps out of deigns so that we couldn't replicate them.

Still, that wasn't always true.

Dragon was able to reverse engineer some things and there were other capes who could do the same. I suspected that the Protectorate intentionally withheld some technologies just so that they would have an advantage.

Science worked best when information was shared. That was why there had been an explosion in knowledge once the printing press had been developed, and another with the development of the Internet. Communication was key, and anyone who stopped that was acting as a brake to the development of science for the whole human species.

I wanted to hire a think tank of some of the smartest normal people around, people who would have the best chance of understanding some of the Tinkertech devices that weren't that advanced. Not everything was a laser gun or a singularity generator after all.

If we could create new science, then we'd help bring humanity get one step closer to the stars. We'd be able to scatter, and then even if Scion or the Endbringers or someone else destroyed us we'd be too dispersed for anyone to ever destroy humanity.

I had big dreams for someone who was still living in what was essentially a metal hut. I had the money, now for the Slaughterhouse members I had killed; twenty five million dollars sitting in an account somewhere. That was after they'd already taken taxes out and after I'd already paid for the healers for the camp just as I'd said they would.

There had apparently been a nasty strain of cholera going around the camp; not everyone was drinking bottled water. It made me a little ill to think about what might have happened considering that the port-a-potties weren't the most sanitary things in the world.

I generally flew into town to do my business, and I'm not sure what Dad did. I didn't want to know.

Creating showers in the middle of everything hadn't hurt people's attitudes toward me much. Although they were metal they were otherwise much like RV camp showers. They cleaned and reused water using a design Leet had showed me that I suspected wasn't even Tinkertech. Some water was lost, of course, but they only had to be refilled every couple of days.

Being clean was one more step toward feeling like a human being, and it had done a lot toward making people calmer about their lots in life.

I'd even managed to set up laundromats all over camp, although the machines were constantly breaking down from overuse.

There was talk about sending kids back to school next week even, splitting the Winslow kids, who were almost unanimously in the camps to Arcadia and the other schools in the area.

Now that I thought about it, the Winslow kids had been avoiding me in the camps. It wasn't like I was going to pull their spleens out for not helping me when I'd been bullied, or for laughing when they saw what was happening.

I was a hero after all, or at least not a villain.

The temptation was there, sometimes, when I dealt with annoying talk show hosts asking about my shoes when a hundred thousand people in my home town barely had blankets. It was there when I dealt with bureaucrats who tried to obstruct every idea that I tried to implement.

It seemed that there was red tape everywhere, and it all seemed like it was designed to keep people from actually accomplishing anything. I could understand that some of the rules had good reasons behind them; that wasn't the problem. The problem was that there was a rule about everything, and there were so many of them that there were entire professions of people whose only job was to navigate those rules.

Setting up a business shouldn't be so hard. Neither should providing charity to people, or building shelters or any of a dozen things I'd tried in the past week alone.

People were more afraid of lawyers than they were willing to keep people alive, and that was wrong.

Flying over the camp, I looked over the work that had been done. People were slowly trying to resume their lives, for what that was worth inside the camp. My food stands had been expanded by entrepreneurs representing some major brands; apparently killing the Endbringers and the Nine had been enough that major corporations were sponsoring food carts.

The new carts actually accepted my coins, as I paid at the end of the month at a discount. At least half the food was donated. I suspected that they were trying to get brand loyalty as a cigarette manufacturer had tried to set up a stand.

I'd nixed that one.

Those people who were the most addicted were making their way into town to get their fixed, or having others do it for them. I'd heard that some people were making a profitable living doing that, despite the high cost of cigarettes.

Still, there were people who had given it up and I didn't want to make it more difficult for them to quit. After all, if there could be at least a little good to come out of monstrous tragedy I'd be pleased.

FEMA was finally sending inspectors out, as were the major insurance companies. Apparently my shaming them in my first and later subsequent interviews had been enough to get the ball moving. Even with the army of inspectors it wouldn't be enough to get everyone what they needed in any reasonable time frame.

Even if it did, more than half of the people who had lived in the poor neighborhoods had been renters.

I'd been quietly buying up properties under an assumed name from former landlords for pennies on the dollar. The landlords knew that it would be years before their property was rebuilt, and most of them wanted quick profits.

Lung had been doing the same, although I'd been insistent on letting him know that no one was to be intimidated into selling. Even if it wasn't ethically wrong it went against the image we were trying to pursue.

No one believed that we would be able to rebuild the city, and even with the money we had now between us it wouldn't be possible.

If it worked we'd be left richer than ever and people would have places to live, maybe even rent to own. I'd make a decent profit and people would be grateful to me. If it didn't work I'd be left with hundreds of lots of worthless land.

Under his advice, I now had a dozen different shell companies buying land in my name. I was selling minerals from seawater at an accelerated rate; just because I had millions of dollars didn't mean that it would last.

After all, the food stalls were costing money despite the donations, as were the movies I was setting up to keep people entertained.

The sun was setting right now, and I landed next to Dad.

There were blankets spread out all over, real blankets, not the cheap FEMA stuff. People were chatting and passing food and drinks around.

The people in this section of the part were used to me by now, and no one blinked as I set down gently by my Dad.

"How are things going?" I asked him.

"Everybody's excited about the movie," he said. "We haven't had hardly any fights in the last two days, probably because we limited the amount of beer that stalls can sell to any one person."

That had been a problem for a while. Some people were abusing the system, or maybe were just alcoholics. The ones who drank too much tended to get rowdy, and preexisting agreements turned into fights.

As the sun set, someone came out and told everyone the movie was about to begin.

The same scene was occurring all over camp. Mostly it was old movies that were shown, but since getting some money I'd paid a little more to get an actual first run movie.

I could see Lung over in the corner with a couple of beautiful Chinese women under his arms. He still had habits I didn't exactly approve of, but his personal life wasn't something I could really talk to him about.

Still, it was good to be on top.

I laughed with everyone else as the movie wound to its conclusion, and then I heard the sounds of whispering all around me. I looked up to see what everyone was talking about.

Hanging in the air above us was a golden man.

I'd always heard that he barely even noticed people, but he was looking right at me, his face utterly expressionless.

I froze.

Everyone else thought he was the world's greatest hero, but I knew what he really was. He was the source of the Endbringers, the source of all of the misery of our world. He was the one who intended to eventually end not just our world, but all of the worlds everywhere with humans on them.

And now he was here.

797

ShayneT

Jun 18, 2018

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Threadmarks 37. Alexandria

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ShayneT

Jun 20, 2018

#5,952

Scion didn't have any metal in him, and as far as I could tell, he didn't breathe. He was simply there, staring down at me with a look that wasn't any look at all.

I'd been trying to fix the world and he wanted to destroy it. Did that mean he was here to kill me?

People were gasping, staring up at him. They thought he was the world's greatest hero, but I knew better. Even if Alexandria hadn't told me, I think I'd have suspected. There was something alien about his body language, about his unnatural stillness.

He was more like a statue than a person.

I tried to think of his known powers, but my mind kept coming up blank. He was stronger and faster than any of the Endbringers, so powerful that Capes like Eidolon and Alexandria barely even rated.

Even with my force fields he might be able to pull my head off before I could react to him, and if he was the one who gave everyone their powers like Alexandria implied that might mean that he had powers that I had no counter for.

I couldn't even move to defend myself, because that might be the one thing that set him off.

Alexandria's entire clandestine organization was dedicated to defeating him. They had the best thinkers in the business, and they'd been planning the fight for longer than I'd been alive. Yet they still didn't think they would be able to win.

So what chance did I have?

It was true that my powers might not be something he'd seen before, but if he'd been on other planets he'd probably seen other beings with powers and he'd undoubtedly had experience in dealing with them.

I'd only been doing this for a few weeks.

Missing my grandfather had been something I'd been trying to force to the back of my mind, although the people around me had certainly noticed that I was different over the last week. Things that had seemed important no longer did, and sometimes it felt like I was going through the motions.

Staring up at Scion I suddenly wondered if that was how he felt. Alexandria had said something about their killing another one of his kind. Was he alone now, and was that why he never bothered to interact with everyone?

Or was this just an act, like a cuckoo bird stuck in another bird's nest, hoping to force the other bird to expend all the food and energy of raising the chick.

I rose to my feet, and from there I levitated into the air. If he was going to kill me, he would kill me. Otherwise, I wasn't going to back down.

My grandfather was Magneto, first among mutants, hero and villain, savior of his people and sometimes enemy of humanity. I couldn't let his memory die with me, and I couldn't back down.

I rose until I was facing him.

"Can I help you?" I asked.

Inside I was trembling, tense. This could end very badly. Even if I was somehow capable of fighting Scion, there were people all around that I cared about, including my Dad.

He didn't say anything. He didn't move at all, and the silence stretched out to an uncomfortable degree.

I felt the urge to keep talking, but I remembered my grandfather's advice. People will rush to fill silence, and usually to their detriment. How I acted here and now could affect the future of the entire world, even though Scion didn't look like he particularly care whatever I said.

Before I could think of anything to say his head snapped around. A moment later he was gone, moving at the kind of speed that even Alexandria would have been envious of, yet he barely created a wind in his passing.

People were taking pictures beneath me; getting everyone access to their phones may have been a bad idea.

How would the world react to Scion facing me down. There would be people who assumed that it meant that Scion thought I was a villain, even though he never bothered to interact with parahuman villains.

Others would assume that Scion was passing on some kind of mantle.

I suspected that he'd been scanning me, and that this was only the opening salvo of what was inevitably going to be a war.

As I dropped to the ground, I ignored the fact that my knees were shaking. People expected me to be the powerful person who knew what to do, and I had to project that image, at least until I found a way to be alone.

"What was that all about?" I heard several people asking.

"Maybe he made a wrong turn at Albuquerque," I said, shrugging.

Bugs bunny references never hurt. They made people think I was a huge dork, but that just made me more human. I think that was where my grandfather had gone wrong. He'd been so traumatized by whatever experiences he'd been through that he assumed that all humans were evil.

If people thought you were on their side they tended to like you.

It took almost ten minutes to get away from the crowd and head off to my hut. I had a separate hut from Dad now that I wasn't as worried about people assassinating either one of us.

I wasn't surprised to see a form in the darkness sitting on my metal couch. It was a female shape, and the voice that called out to me was familiar.

"He's aware of you now," Alexandria said. "It was only a matter of time. I'm only surprised that it took this long."

"Do you think it was Leviathan?" I asked. "That's been more than a couple of weeks ago."

"We're still not sure of his psychology," she admitted. "We're not even sure he's fully sentient. What we have been able to figure out is that finding new abilities and new uses for old abilities are his entire reason for being. That means that he's going to be particularly interested in you."

"Oh?" I asked.

"You don't have a shard," she said. "We still haven't figured out exactly where your power comes from, but presumably he is as intrigued as we are."

"Was it Panacea who told you?" I asked. I felt a surge of anger. She was supposed to keep things confidential! She acted like she was bound by doctor type rules and the first thing she did was betray me.

Alexandria said,"We haven't spoken to her. We didn't need to. We've got access to all the best thinkers in the business, as well as some of the best bio-tinkers."

"Bonesaw?" I asked.

I'd worried about Bonesaw a lot; she was the member of the Nine that had gotten away, and it could have easily been that she'd spent the time since I'd killed her teammates building something horrible- a horrible plague, or a Nilbog style clone army or something.

"We've got her contained in an extradiminsional prison," Alexandria said. "She's actually afraid of you, but she's been very useful. Where she is she won't be able to hurt anyone else though."

It was a relief, even if the fact that they were harboring one of the Nine was ethically dubious.

"So what are we going to do?" I asked.

"We're going to have to bring you even closer into the fold," she said. I couldn't see her face in the darkness, but her voice sounded irritable. "There's been some discussion about that, even though the way is usually a lot clearer. The problem is that precog and Thinker powers don't work around Scion, and now that you are involved with him you are getting harder to Path."

"Ripples in water," I said. I'd had a few conversations with Dinah. "If you can't see it, look for the effects. I think the first thing I'm going to need is as much information as you can give me about his capabilities, and about what we have that might be able to hurt him."

That was the least they could do.

"You aren't going to tell me where you got your powers?" she asked.

I snorted. "Trust goes both ways. You think that I haven't noticed that you aren't introducing me to anyone else in on your little conspiracy?"

"That's still being decided," she said.

"Meaning you aren't in charge," I said. "That must sting when you are used to being the head of the PRT."

She didn't move at all, being as still as Scion, which was more damning than if she'd immediately tried to deny it.

My grandfather had figured it out before he'd... left.

"I think you mean the Protectorate," she said. Her voice was chilly.

"Right," I said evenly. "I get them confused sometimes."

Outing a cape was dangerous business, and I'd just subtly threatened to do so to her. How she'd react I still didn't know, but it was possible that it wouldn't be good.

Still, I had to convince her that I was competent enough to trust with the information I needed. I couldn't fight someone I couldn't understand, not at his level of power. He wasn't just some low level gang member whose head I could crush with a nearby aluminum can.

"You should keep track of things like that," she said. "Mistakes can be unpleasant."

"Even for someone who is important to the Plan?" I asked.

"What do you know about that?" she asked. She stared at me for a moment. "No... you are just fishing. You haven't been up to your usual standards lately, and I have to ask myself why?"

"Maybe I'm just tired of living in a refugee camp," I said. "It's tough to get any privacy to shower."

"You've got enough money to buy yourself a mansion anywhere," she said impatiently. She stared at me for a moment. "Oh, you are trying to distract me."

Alexandria had a thinker rating, if I remembered correctly, and it wasn't just for her eidetic memory.

"You talked to yourself in the past, but you haven't been doing it since your confrontation with the Nine. Maybe you weren't talking to yourself. Maybe you lost someone you aren't talking about?"

Now she was the one who was fishing. I forced myself to keep my face as neutral as possible, but there wasn't anything I could do about microexpressions. Worse, part of me wanted to tell her. It was possible that her people had resources that weren't available to Leet. They might be able to fix him.

They'd hold him hostage for my cooperation. I didn't need my grandfather's input to realize that.

If they were strictly on the up and up, they'd have been public, at least to the Protectorate. Instead she was here talking to me in the darkness, which meant she didn't want her own people knowing she was talking to me.

That suggested that they were willing to use any means necessary to accomplish their goal. Considering that they thought they were saving the entire human race, I suspected that their methods had to be less than humane.

A little blackmail would seem a small price to pay if I could help them in their war.

I fully intended to do so, but I wasn't willing to be a foot soldier or cannon fodder. I'd do it on my own terms.

"Talk to your people," I said. "Let me talk to your thinkers. Maybe we can come up with something that you haven't come up with in the past."

"There's an element of secrecy involved," she said.

"That's solved easily," I said. I gestured, and something began to form in the center of the room. Alexandria didn't jerk back, although I had a feeling that she wanted to.

After several moments a glittering figure appeared. It was vaguely in my shape, but made of small shards of metal suspended in the air.

"I can speak through this by vibrating the metal shards like an amplifier," I said through the metal avatar. I frowned. The words sounded a little fuzzier than I would like. Of course, I'd only had a week to practice.

"I can hear through it as well, but not see," I said through my avatar. "I was thinking about what my father does with his insects, and about Leviathan and the way that he couldn't see but sensed people through the water in their bodies, and that led indirectly to this."

She was silent for a moment.

"And you can't see through it?"

"I can't figure out a way to do it," I said. "I can sense the vibrations in the metal, and it took a bit of work figuring out how to use it to hear; interpreting the vibrations sound causes in the metal wasn't easy, and I'm still kind of refining it. If I really wanted to see I'd have to use tiny cameras and send to a TV receiver."

"Which you could do easily, especially as Leet is one of your contacts."

"You could scan for cameras," I said. I was assuming they had access to anything the Protectorate did. They probably had thinkers give them information through intermediaries who didn't know what was going on so that they wouldn't give anything away. Possibly through more than one layer.

Silent for a moment, she sighed audibly. "I suppose it wouldn't hurt to set up a meeting. I'll let you know the time and we'll take you to the place."

I smiled, although I wasn't sure how much she could see in the darkness. I gestured, although I didn't really need to and I dismissed the shimmering figure in the corner. The little metal shavings that composed it went back in my pouch. They weighed less than two pounds.

If necessary I could turn them into a weapon that would kill a lot of people at the same time, not that I would. I didn't really need any help, except against creatures like Scion and the Endbringers that didn't have any metal in them, and were in fact too tough to be affected by metal.

"I feel like time is running out," I said. "Maybe sooner would be better than later."

"I'll let you know," she said shortly. She rose to her feet. "There aren't very many people who threaten me, not anymore."

"You have to breathe," I said. "And parahuman powers don't work past the radius of the moon. Mine work just fine, though."

I grinned at her.

"Not that it's going to come to that. We're on the same side after all. We need each other, and we both like having the world not destroyed."

She stepped forward and as she came closer I saw a scowl on her face.

"You make it tough to really like you."

"The people seem to like me well enough," I said. "It's just the people in power that seem to have a problem with me."

"There's a reason things are done the way they are, Taylor," she said. "Sometimes when it seems there are simple solutions there are very good reasons those solutions are not followed through."

"Unintended consequences?" I asked. "Isn't that what old people use to justify not changing? Except you aren't ever going to get old, are you?"

"And you will," she said. "Assuming we all survive, of course, Enjoy your youth while it lasts."

"I'll just have Leet whip up a tinker tech potion," I said. "Or have Panacea learn to reverse aging. There are ways. Accepting the status quo just because that's how it has always been done is stupid."

"There are reasons for everything," she repeated. "Which suggests that telling you why things are done might be the best thing. You are very much the bull running around in the china closet."

"Better that than the bull who is afraid to ever do anything," I said, frustrated. "Standing in one spot terrified of breaking a plate. Doesn't it ever get frustrating never getting anything done, leaving the villains on the street to run rampage."

"We need them!" she said, then scowled.

"That's why we're doing all of this," I said suddenly. "Fighting, letting the villains go. You are training an army to fight Scion."

"Using the powers he gave us against him is appropriate, don't you think? He gave us these powers to destroy us, but in the end we will make him choke on them."

There was conviction in her voice, a grim certainty that I didn't know how to respond to except in one way.

"How has that been working with the Endbringers?" I asked. "And they aren't even the end bosses. Until I'd come along you hadn't really hurt any of them, Maybe it's time to think outside the box."

I was getting better at talking a good game, but the question was whether I would be able to follow through. In the end it was all going to be up to me.

It always was.

"We'll be in touch," Alexandria said.

With that a bright doorway appeared in the wall of my metal hut and I blinked at the sudden bright light.

A moment after that she was gone, and I was left with my own thoughts.

763

ShayneT

Jun 20, 2018

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