Read aloud to me alt Taylor

by Kahlil Johnson

Dnd

27. Goac3

Orientation 2.6

I didn't get fifteen minutes before somebody else came to check out the cable room. I don't know if these guys had missed their check-in or if somebody had spotted my addition to the outgoing feed but it didn't matter why, they were here. I could hear the voices of the team outside the door starting to stack up on it. And that door and that wedge weren't going to stop a team of trained men with breaching charges so comm line out or no comm line, it was time to leave.

There were two ways out of here besides the door. Back up and doing the ceiling cat routine again, or down out through the HVAC vent. The backup servers kept in here, apparently as some sort of auxiliary datacenter, needed active liquid cooling to operate. And that meant a raised floor enclosure with enough space for a human to crawl through to service the pipes, and an other end that would come out in whatever utility space held the nearest water main connection.

I dropped a fresh dose of my gas grenade in the room so that the air would be nice and full of sleepy juice for whoever was about to bust in here and thus slow down how quickly they could call away that I'd left here. Then, murmuring grateful prayers that at least this time I wouldn't be crawling upside down and by my fingertips I lifted the grate, got down on the ground, replaced the grate above me and then began to squirm like a worm.

Even with a firm mental grip on my adrenal glands to supply only the necessary and no excess, the several minutes it took to crawl the seventy feet to the utility junction still felt like several hours. I reached the other end of the crawlway and stood up, hurriedly replacing the grate here. This was only the most temporary of safety, because the cable room only had a finite number of exits to check. I had no time to play it safe.

My brain helplessly stuttered on the realization of 'only two ways' and what that would mean, just as the door flew open. Throttling such a high level of controlled panic that it seemed as if things were moving in slow motion, I saw the flash-bang grenade lazily float in through the doorway and towards me.

But prana-bindu meant that even my most desperately fast reflex actions still could have the same accuracy as aimed fire for other people, so in what would normally have been something that anybody with a working knowledge of firearms would have deemed outright impossible, I snapshot it right out of the air with my zap rifle.

I then dropped my zap rifle because it wouldn't have enough stopping power vs. these two. Even on the agents I'd hit earlier it had worked largely because I'd had clear shots at unarmored legs or less-armored backs. Those two guys were in heavy tactical outfits with plate inserts, and shocking them through it wouldn't be possible. So I'd lost my zap rifle as non-lethal option vs. them.

Of course, them wearing the heavy plates also meant that bullets were now technically a non-lethal option, and so even before my zap rifle had hit the floor I had one of the sidearms I'd taken from my guards out and clear and gave each man a fast double-tap to the chest, bang-bang bang-bang.

And don't believe what you watch on TV where the hero takes a bullet in his soft vest and then just gets up and goes on to the commercial break. Even with Kevlar and titanium plates getting shot still hurts. These guys probably didn't have broken ribs since they were in the heavy stuff but they'd still both just gotten the functional equivalent of being elbowed in the ribs by a mildly annoyed Lung. And that left them both paralyzed from the shock, curling up from the agony, and not at all in any shape to get up and run after me as I leapt right through the space opening up by their respectively slumping to the floor and frantically checked as soon as I cleared the door to make the turn into the hallway and get the fuck out of-

And then the universe delivered its own dose of irony as the man standing behind me used exactly the same disabling tactic on me as I'd just used on those two men, by firing several shots from a pistol directly into the body armor covering my torso. Unlike them I could ignore the pain and almost immediately compensate from the shock, but that didn't change the fact that the momentum of the impact would still stagger me and create a moment of vulnerability. A moment which my attacker took advantage of, as well as his being half again my size and almost twice my weight to simply bull-rush me to the floor.

Yeah, another thing that doesn't work except on TV? Girls my size casually throwing around men his size without superpowers. And I don't just mean 'because I'm not at full strength right now'. I could certainly do more to surprise or hurt a larger opponent if I were in peak condition but even then the fact would remain, certain categories of moves just wouldn't be as effective. I weighed maybe 115 pounds and this guy felt like he was pushing 200 and change on top of being several inches taller. If I hypothetically ran at him and did a flying dropkick like in the movies then it wouldn't launch him soaring into the nearest wall while I landed as pretty as a ballerina. No, what would happen if I'd tried that is that he would stagger, but I would bounce. So try to imagine what happened when it was him doing a flying charge into me.

Its amazing how many things can go racing through your head during the fraction of a second that lay between the instant when it would start to really really hurt, and the instant in which it had still been early enough you could have done something about it.

I hit the ground with a painful thud and he hit on top of me, knocking out my wind. I control'ed right through what would have been an immobilizing stun to a normal woman and started an escape but the man on top of me had close-quarters combat training intended to give a non-parahuman at least one last desperate chance to deal with a Brute, let alone a girl almost half his size with some nerve-control and adrenal tricks. All of the normal assumptions that standardized martial arts had built in about when an opponent would stop, what kind of blow would be a disabler or a finisher, all the hesitations and pauses of normal combat had been trained out and instead replaced with an awareness that you had to keep hitting and hitting and hitting until the laws of physics meant your opponent was unable to keep moving.

So my attempt at a reversal was interrupted with his attempt at a joint-break, and I began the counter for that, and then something went entirely wrong and I felt the sick knowledge that I'd failed when he somehow disengaged at exactly the right instant and then came right back to put his full standing weight on the back of my kneecap on one foot, mangling it between his heel and the floor tiles.

My leg snapped like a dry branch and that was it, I was officially going nowhere. Even though I could still do something to fight this man from the ground as of now I could no longer run. And if I couldn't run then even defeating him would still leave me barely able to limp to the nearest corner before the men that had to be scrambling to get here would finish arriving.

As I lay still facedown he jammed a pistol – I wasn't sure if it was his or mine – into the base of my skull beneath the edge of the helmet. The all-too-familiar voice confirmed what I already knew, what I hadn't even needed to turn my head to see.

"Hands in sight immediately!" Coil hissed.

And that told me everything about how he'd caught me. They'd noticed I was in the cable room enough minutes in advance of the men actually arriving there to make me run that they could also stack up on the exit routes. There were only two ways out of the cable room and of course Coil could use his power to cover them both. After he knew I was using the utility closet and not the ceiling he'd just split the timeline again. The men sent in to the utility room first would either take me down or else I'd somehow disable them and come out, but if I came out I'd have to turn either right or left to go down the hallway. And of course he'd just keep the split where he had a clear shot at my back. He'd probably somehow managed to split time once more in the middle of when we were wrestling to get that final miraculous blow in, which is faster and more subtly than I thought he could use his power at all.

And given that I knew he would immediately kill me at the slightest sign of non-compliance, I had no choice but to put my hands out in front of me and spread my fingers wide with my palms flat on the floor. I thought with sick frustration about my last-ditch option that I couldn't reach to draw or arm in this position and waited feverishly for Coil to give me an opening.

After pulling my helmet off with his free hand, Coil stood back up. "I was one of the PRT's best agents before I got into this line of work, but I suppose you already knew that," Coil spat. "So I don't imagine that I'd miss the headshot at this range! Now crawl forward to the wall and I don't care if it hurts! And if I don't see all ten fingers every second of the way I will fire immediately."

I did what I was told and crawled.

"Roll over, then sit up and push yourself back up against the wall with your good leg. Hands above your head at all times."

I flicked my eyes left and right once I got into sitting position on the floor. "Your men aren't coming?"

"That's not your concern. What you need to do is tell me what you've-"

The ground trembled beneath our feet for several seconds as we both confusedly wondered what was happening, and then my nose caught a faint whiff of molten rock and ozone. Okay, what was-

And then every emergency loudspeaker in the base blared as the man in the control room panicked. "THE PROTECTORATE HAVE ENTERED THE BASE! THE PROTECTORATE HAVE ENTERED THE BASE! ALL HANDS EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY!" and then a squawk as our annuniciator apparently decided to drop the mike and start running too.

… note to self, stay on Dragon's good side. Because anything that could rip this quckly into a reinforced structure intended to survive a near-miss from a rampaging Endbringer had to be eek! I couldn't imagine anything even in Dragon's arsenal that could make a man-sized entrance through that kind of resistance this quickly. How many laws of physics were broken tonight? Taylor, tinkering is later but raving psychopath who has you under the gun is right now.

"Let's deal!" I said brightly and very fast, racing to get ahead of Coil's 'Oh fuck it!' killing me out of spite now that his situation was, to put it charitably, devolving.

"With what?" he spat, his own eyes flicking from side to side continually. I idly wondered if he'd already shot me and started running in one of his other timelines. How many times would I potentially die during this conversation? How many forks would sparing me have to prove the better choice in for me to actually reach the end alive?

"Identity!" I said. "I didn't put that in the upload, the bandwidth was too limited! I just wanted to get out of here alive!"

"Let's say I believe you. You're saying that you'll not tell the Protectorate who I am, and let me unmask my way out of here?"

"Or leave that mask on someone else and you were just someone he was maybe blackmailing or threatening, the man who ran his front business for him," I spoke quickly but urgently, knowing that my hypothetical death could became actual at any word.

"I need you for this why?" he asked intelligently.

"Cable room. Left my computer hooked in there." I said. "Take me to it and let me live after and I'll do the edits before the PRT evidence teams get it."

He looked at me silently.

"I don't want to die!" I said, letting naked desperation appear on my face. "Trust me that much at least!"

"Okay," Coil decided. "We'll give it a try. Get moving."

I don't know if he thought I was legitimately dumb enough to think he wouldn't just kill me as soon as I finished doing my end or if he was remembering that a lot of people would take even what they already knew was a hopeless chance just to postpone death for a few minutes more.

"Errr, broken leg?" I pointed out. "It'd take me forever to crawl there. You'll have to give me an arm up."

"Fucking cowards," Coil cursed his men who had, judging from their failure to arrive as they apparently should have earlier during this conversation, apparently decided that the Protectorate breaching the base meant it was time to go update their resumes instead. "You know what happens if you try anything, anything at all," he husked out. "And remember that part about you not wanting to die, little girl."

"I'll remember," I promised him.

"First step, unfasten all your web gear and drop it on the floor. Then take the straps off the vest."

Yes!

I smiled now that I could actually lower my hands and touch the proper gizmo. For the first time since Coil's first bullet had struck I had a chance to play my last trump card, my doomsday option. So as I obediently unbuckled and dropped my web gear my sleight of hand let me pull off the arming sequence without even Coil's hyperawareness twigging and right on cue I closed my eyes and twisted to one side as the bright blue flash came of it detonating. As I'd planned, the evasion and my body armor turned the one bullet he'd fired reflexively at the flash into a painful graze and nothing more. I felt my bones tingle with phantom warmth that was probably psychosomatic, but all I'd need now was barely a dozen words to leave Coil with absolutely nowhere to go and utterly in my power-

-a dozen words I suddenly realized I wasn't going to get because the fucker must have had anti-glare in that fancy custom mask and he wasn't blind and his pistol was coming right back down from the recoil to smoothly line up for that kill shot he'd promised-

-and suddenly everything stopped as his weapon didn't fire and we both incredulously stared at the brightly-colored hand that had just blinked into view out of nowhere and the man attached to it.

Velocity, the Protectorate's speedster, must have charged right in from the breach at full speed to come searching the lower level where Dragon had said she'd have me met. And even though his ability to actually transfer any momentum to anything else decreased in proportion to the speed he was moving at, to the point that in his speedster mode he couldn't possibly have hoped to so much as shove Coil's gun aside, he had been able to stick his thumb directly in front of the cocked hammer before Coil could fire. Coil's trigger pull left his gun going *click* instead of *bang* and merely trapping Velocity's one hand in a painful pinch, and the shocks just kept on coming for us both as Velocity brought up his other hand, with a very un-Velocity-like PRT-issue sidearm in it, and jammed the muzzle of his pistol directly underneath Coil's chin.

"It's been a long time since I carried a gun," Velocity said, "but I don't imagine that I'd miss the headshot at this range." He smirked and continued. "Or do you think your next move can be faster than my trigger finger, asshole?"

Coil was speechless with rage as he let go of his pistol and let Velocity secure it, and I could hear heavy footsteps running towards us from distantly down the hall and I just went limp as an overcooked noodle because I knew it was all finally over.

I barely paid attention to the first agents on-scene reaching us and handcuffing and marching away with Coil, or Velocity bending over me to check if I was all right and reassuring me everything was now fine. I was too busy being sick with shame. All my skills, all my plans, all my hacks, and I'd still failed to be even a self-rescuing princess, much less a hero. I'd needed so many assists, from Dragon herself on down, just to even stay in the game. I hadn't beaten the bad guy. I hadn't been able to win.

And then I suddenly felt an urge both to laugh and to slap myself. Sure, I hadn't been able to win. But the Protectorate hadn't been able to win vs. Coil either. Dragon hadn't won this, the PRT hadn't won this, even Velocity hadn't won this even if I was so going to give him the bestest thank-you gift I could think of later. I hadn't done anything any more than they had. What mattered was what we had all done, together. I'd provided the information, Dragon had coordinated the response and cracked the bunker, Velocity had rescued the hostage, and all the heroes and all the tactical teams put together would wrap up this base and everything in it.

Maybe I couldn't always save the day alone. But maybe I didn't have to.

Ohhhhh, right. That other thing.

"Two immediate problems," I said, snapping out of my fugue and looking at Velocity. "First, this guy would almost certainly have had the psycho Bond villain self-destructs. Armsmaster needs to defuse those ASAP."

"You copy that?" Velocity said into his mike, while bending over to let me talk into his microphone too and brief people directly rather than us playing Chinese whispers.

"Copy," Director Piggot's voice replied. "The second concern?"

I took a deep breath and dropped the bomb. "Coil and I will both require drastic life-saving intervention by Panacea within the next several hours to avoid inevitable death within a day."

A wordless choking noise came back at me in stereo, and I rushed to explain.

"My ultimate last-ditch option, in case I was stuck face-to-face with Coil and about to die. The no-win hostage stand-off. That problem is logically insoluble so I built it to turn the problem around and make it Coil's problem instead of ours, to take him hostage. To make him have to surrender to you immediately and bring me still alive with him if he didn't want to die."

"By using…?" Director Piggot asked me with dull surprise while Velocity started down at me, still slack-jawed.

"A neutron implosion device I'd made out of an X-ray machine tube. One-shot semi-shaped hard radiation burst, call it 2000-2500 rads in a near radius. That's-"

"I know what that does," Director Piggot said incredulously. "Holy shit. All right, Velocity, get her medevac'ed to Brockton Bay General immediately and notify Coil's prisoner detail of the medical emergency. We'll page Panacea- wait. Velocity, were you exposed?"

"Was I?" he asked me quickly.

"Unless you were already within let's call it seventy-five feet at the time you saw a blue flash, no." I reassured him.

"Didn't see one at all so I must have still been around the corner then, thank God!" he shot back. "Dragon, nearest way out from where I am?"

"Vista's had to drop the tunnel so not the way you came in, and it will be at least ten minutes before the upper floors report all secure. So that would be the escape tunnel two floors above you. Northwest corner, hidden inside an auxiliary storeroom. I've marked it on your portable." her voice replied over the his comm.

"Right, let's go," he said, reaching to help me up.

"Broken leg too, sorry."

"What the hell is your pain threshold?" he asked me incredulously as he swung me into a carry instead and started to run towards the nearest elevator. Apparently Armsmaster or Dragon had managed to at least partially gain control of some base systems.

We arrived at the escape tunnel, being held as a strongpoint by a team of PRT support agents.

"Coil go through here yet?" Velocity asked. "We've got a medical alert situation with him."

"Nobody's moved a prisoner through here since we set up," the squad leader of the door guards said.

"Coil bragged-" I began.

"Yeah, Dragon got those files you sent her about the PRT infiltration. Shit! We knew there was a possibility that some of his might be in the entry teams but- fuck!" Velocity swore.

"Maybe they still have their radios on," I said. "Maybe they'd still bring him back if they knew-"

Velocity gave the names of the two agents who'd taken Coil away from us as their 'prisoner', but even the most frantic pages for them put out on the net went into the void and nobody reported sighting either them or Coil. Velocity, as senior agent present, had the fun job of calling this one in to the command post.

"If it wasn't for the fact that the miserable sonofabitch just committed suicide by running," Director Piggot shot back, "I'd be a lot more pissed at you than I already am. Velocity, start searching as fast you can and maybe you'll catch up to the idiots anyway. Piggot out." He put me down and nodded to two of the nearest agents to come take charge of me, and they started unfolding a stretcher from a nearby pile of supplies and made to move me onto it.

And then we were interrupted by the sight of Assault following up behind two more agents trying to drag a frantically struggling Tattletale out by the elbows. Even with cuffs on both her hands and feet she was so hysterical that she was a handful and a half to keep moving.

"You have to listen to me!" she begged frantically. "This base is going to explode, do you get that? It's going to explode!"

"That would confirm this young lady's intel," one of the agents told Assault, nodding at me.

"YES!" Tattletale said, focusing on him with desperate intensity while sparing only a moment to glare her hatred at me. She turned back to Assault and kept pleading. "Enough charges to not just do the base! It'd blow a larger hole in the downtown core than Leviathan could! And it's on a deadman timer!" she followed up.

"Armsmaster, you get that?" Assault said worriedly.

"We haven't even found any evidence of a timer," his tinny voice came over the comms. "Are you certain this intelligence is even worth anything?"

"Apparently our rescuee gave us the same info as our prisoner, sir," Assault replied. "We have to assume it is."

"And I can give you the code if you'll just let me go!" Tattletale finished.

"We can offer a reduced sentence if-" Assault began.

"Fuck the reduced sentence! Fuck your promises! I get free and clear now or I just fuck off and let you deal with it!" Tattletale screamed back, well and truly at the end of her rope. I get that she's hysterical and not dealing well and probably having Thinker headache but for fuck's sake if she couldn't see how she could get off well and truly ahead of where she'd be otherwise if she just negotiated a little and I just couldn't take it anymore.

But for the rest of my born days I will entirely blame the headache and nausea that were already starting to creep in from the terminal radiation sickness, beyond even my prana-bindu to do more than partially mitigate because seriously, for the words that left my mouth next.

"Just handcuff the stupid bitch to the console!" I screamed in frustration, and everybody turned to look at me like I'd just vomited in church.

I took a deep breath and continued wearily. "If she's really so far gone that she won't even care about losing the entire downtown, if her own life is literally the only one that has the slightest value to her, then put that life where it goes first! Let's see how stubborn she is about not turning the detonator off when she's still sitting on it at the two-minute warning."

"Okay, I get that you're really pissed at these people right now but we can't just-" one of the agents began, only to be interrupted by Director Piggot's voice. "Did I just hear what I thought I heard?" she asked curtly.

"Ma'am, the young lady's been under an incredible strain-" Assault started to apologize for me.

"I heard her contribution clearly," the Director snapped. "I meant the part about the self-destruct."

"If you heard that this base is apparently on a timer that will take out the surrounding blocks when it ends and the only person in our custody who actually knows the code is holding out for the moon before she'll give, then yes ma'am," Assault finished up, looking worriedly at Tattletale. "Um… your orders, Director?"

For a timeless pause we waited for her decision as Tattletale leaned forward in anticipation, smiling hopefully…

"Handcuff the stupid bitch to the console," Director Piggot said smugly, and Tattletale fainted dead away.

My helpless laughter mixed with Assault's own as I let my head fall back onto the stretcher's pillow, and still chuckling the entire way they carried me up the tunnel and to freedom.

Author's Note: And there, we've finally gotten past the climax and struck down the villain. You have no idea how many times I sweated blood and rewrote this thing. As is, I'm still praying its not an anticlimax.

But yes, Coil is set up to die what I earnestly hope will the most ironic, painful, slow, and agonizing death a Coil has ever gotten in fanfic and the best part is that he did it to himself at every step of the way. I wrote that part first and then had to beat the entire framework into shape to get from where we left off at the last arc to where we were now.

And yes, Coil whooped her ass. Of course he did. He started with an unopposed shot at her back and split the timeline at least three times during that fight and that's just the splits that Taylor could deduce. She didn't have any real chance once Coil personally intervened and concentrated all of his powers solely on the task of reducing her to helplessness. On top of Coil himself being a one-time elite PRT agent who still had his skills re: close-quarters with parahumans and a big, strong, fast guy who at that moment was so close to berserker rage that he was about ready to froth at the mouth.

Of course, concentrating all his powers on Taylor alone meant he was 'LOL get fucked' for options when it came time to escape. And even the lucky break of two of his inside men on the PRT reaching him first turned out to be the worst luck he'd ever had, indeed.

And no, Tattletale is not normally that callous. But TT says dumb stuff normally sometimes, let alone when she's in the middle of an absolute monkey-brain screaming panic. And she'd been solidly in "bring me my brown pants!' territory ever since the Dragon roared.

All we need now is a couple of wrap-up POVs and the telling of the aftermath, and Arc Two can close. I should have that done before my knee surgery, I'll almost certainly wait until after it to even begin posting Arc Three. Again, surgical recovery may mean a disruption of muse, so no promises but we'll do our best.

(add) Oh, right, 'Why no mama Dragon in base?' Because that was one of her anti-Endbringer suits and they don't exactly fit underground very well. :)

Last edited: Oct 15, 2019

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cliffc999

Jul 13, 2019

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cliffc999

cliffc999

Jul 14, 2019

#1,634

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Topic: Midnight Raid?

In: Boards Places America Brockton Bay

Admin (Original Poster) (Moderator)

Posted on January 25, 2011:

All right, to briefly recap:

At about 10:15 pm last night several of our more dedicated cape-watchers start seeing a sudden rush of traffic straight down the force field bridge to the Rig. At the same time, the Rig starts to light up like Christmas. No official announcement was made at the time but it looked almost exactly like the last time the BB Protectorate did a full alert.

Then, shortly after 10:30 pm anybody outdoors and looking up can see the Dragon lady herself come rocketing out of the south, in one of her /anti-Endbringer/ suits no less. And instead of heading straight to the Rig as you'd expect instead she starts circling around the entire town at approximately ten thousand feet, running a pattern like she's searching for somethig.

About ten minutes after /that, police scanners pick up an APB on all local and state police bands that the PRT wants any sightings of the Undersiders immediately reported to the watch center onboard the Rig. Now the Undersiders are parahuman criminals, but normally the only small-timers smaller than they are around here are Uber and Leet and whatever solo acts are sliding on through down I-95. But the APB is being put out at an urgency level you'd expect more from the PRT trying to verify a Jack Slash sighting than those guys.

A little before eleven o'clock police bands report a Hellhound sighting in E88 territory, solo. That's fact. Speculation is she's just out on another one of her raids against Hookwolf's dogfighting ring, which is a thing she does every couple of months. Only this time it doesn't get the usual 'send a couple of of guys with confoam and whoever in the Protectorate was on-duty and drew the short straw' to chase after where she was half an hour ago, but instead first has Velocity immediately blaze out there and start searching a multi-block radius around the site /and then/ has Armsmaster himself roll out to back up Velocity, backed by two vans of PRT troopers. So they fall on her like an avalanche and wrap her up.

Meanwhile, there's /another/ burst of traffic going up the Rig like they called in some stragglers. Except that its several of the custom vans with blacked-out windows, you know, the secret identity transports that the folks out at Arcadia see on a regular basis. So it looks like not just the Protectorate and the full PRT muster but also the /Wards/ just got rousted out in the middle of the night, and on a school night too. At this point the local capewatchers who are up and following things in real time are just a step short of expecting the Endbringer Sirens to go off because shit is getting /real, people.

And then the police band calls every cop on the graveyard shift to the downtown plaza, right outside Fortress Construction, and the PRT and the Protectorate head straight there as well. At the same time Dragon stops her searching and drops on the place like a rock. So something is going down at FC plaza and whatever it is is worthy of what looks half of all the troops on the Rig and the entire Protectorate, /and/ our celebrity guest-star Dragon.

At this point I shift over to the testimony of our respected member BondMaven, who by great good fortune has a window view that can see into FC Plaza.

(Showing Page 1 of 2)

BondMaven (Veteran Member)

Replied on January 25, 2011:

Here's what I can remember of the action at FC Plaza.

Dragon arrives and uses her loudspeakers to demand everyone clear the courtyard. Some people do, others rubberneck, but then the first police cars start arriving and start threatening to arrest people so everybody clears.

A couple dozen cop cars later the Police Emergency vans arrive and the full-on crowd control teams start setting up a formal perimeter. And they're pushing it out to cover the entire block, plus the block the Fortress building itself is on. Now, you might remember that the Brockton Bay PD usually has better things to do than spend their budget standing outer perimeter security for your average PRT scuffle so this level of cooperation means somebody must have pushed the BIG red button.

The PRT and Protectorate people start straggling in, except for Armsmaster who's still burning rubber trying to get across town from the Hellhound scuffle that just finished.

Dragon finishes doing something involving placing some kind of Tinkertech sensor rods in a pattern all around the block and stands in the center of the northside plaza, waiting for something.

Armsmaster finally shows up and goes to talk to Dragon, and then he stomps away in a huff because he apparently didn't like what he'd heard. And this is all weird because Dragon's an ally of the Protectorate but she certainly isn't Protectorate herself or in command of anything and she hasn't even been in Brockton Bay in at least a year and a half.

And then the /crazy/ part begins. Dragon's had this one area on the ground marked off with traffic cones, not near any building or anything, just a random plot a couple hundred yards north of Fortress Construction and part of the nearby plaza/park thingy. But now she gets on her PA system, with the volume cranked to 11, and announces in a voice you literally heard blocks away that everybody had to 'clear the impact area' and 'not look at it without eye protection'. And everybody except Armsmaster, who's apparently too cool for safety warnings, immediately does a duck and cover like something out of a 1950s public school. And I'm doing the same because if a couple hundred cops and agents are all hunkering down like they know something I don't, I'm going to believe them, OK?

So I don't actually /see/ what goes down because I like not having permanent retina damage but I remember that /sound/ from prior cape footage and what it is is Dragon's /anti-Endbringer cannon, you know, that bigass particle beam on her heaviest combat suit? The one we all remember from that video clip of her trying to fish-fry Leviathan with it last year? And she's apparently just let it off /in the middle of downtown/. When its safe to look again I clearly see that she didn't use full power because half the block isn't on fire, but even so that 'impact area' has no traffic cones now and is made out of molten rock for dozens of feet around. Some guys start moving in and cooling down the hot spot with fire hoses.

/And then/ the night goes from crazy to downright /surreal/ when a PRT helicopter swoops in and Director Piggot herself stomps out, and she's personally escorting /Vista/ of all people. This is some kind of ultra high priority super crash operation where they've called in the entire world to fall on /something/ like the wrath of God and then the Director herself walks Brockton Bay's most dangerous middle schooler right out into the middle of it. The youngest member of the Wards team who are in theory not supposed to be deployed anywhere near where the actual fighting is and usually aren't anyway, and they just march her straight up to whatever Dragon's just blown in the ground for whatever reason and tell her 'Hey, you know that we just shot up the ground here in the middle of the city with an anti-Endbringer cannon? Yeah, well, I still don't think we've made /enough/ of a mess here yet. So go nuts, kid!'

And so Vista proves yet again that she's earned every single bit of her Shaker 9 rating when she just twiddles her thumbs and turns whatever hole Dragon had punched into a literal I swear to God /giant underground parking garage ramp/ leading straight down into the bowels of the earth, and then Armsmaster leads his entire team down there in a charge with like two entire platoons of PRT troops hot on their heels.

After that stuff gets kind of anticlimactic. Nothing moves topside. Vista stops being able to hold the tunnel after ten minutes but by then I can spot a few of the agents who charged in coming back out of the entrance to Fortress Construction's underground parking garage on the next block over, so clearly something's down there that had some kind of tunnel access. They'll keep her out there like maybe 45 minutes more to open and close the tunnel a few more times whenever they want to move large shipments of anything, but eventually they get the clue its way past her bedtime and put her in a transport to presumably head back home or to the Rig.

A couple hours past midnight most of the troops down there finally wrap up and head away, along with the Protectorate, leaving behind a dozen or so guys plus a small police detail to put up the crime scene tape and keep rubberneckers from poking around.

So last night/very early this morning some kind of huge, presumably unscheduled raid was conducted on what was by all appearances some major underground base secretly built underneath the city? I know we live in a world of parahumans and Tinkertech but when did Bond villains start becoming a thing?

At any rate, that's my eyewitness report.

Bagrat (The Guy In The Know) (Veteran Member)

Replied on January 25, 2011:

Regarding 'secret underground base', I'd just like to point out that Fortress Construction's business is making Endbringer Shelters and that they've had a fine sample of their own product underneath their corporate HQ ever since they set up shop.

And it occurs to me that a structure theoretically hardened to where it can survive even near misses from Endbringers is something you might need an anti-Endbringer cannon and our city's cutest little non-Euclidean nightmare combined to open up in any kind of hurry without using an actual nuclear earth penetrator.

I'm just theorizing.

ShockJock

Replied on January 25, 2011:

So, what, the Endbringer Shelter was actually the secret HQ of some major criminal activity?

Okay, logic check. It has to involve parahumans or at least Tinkertech because otherwise the PRT and the Protectorate wouldn't bother. It has to involve Fortress Construction, presumably as some kind of Legitimate Front for the Evil Organization. And it has to have done something in the recent past that /really/ stepped on someone's crank because if the authorities wanted to do this without a serious time pressure they'd have just sent a warrant service team to the CEO's house and all other parties involved one at a time. I can't remotely speculate on what that might be, so back to wondering about gangs.

So, who's behind this? The Empire Eighty-Eight entirely has the money for this kind of setup except Fortress' CEO Thomas Calvert is black so for once we can actually give the Nazis the benefit of the doubt here..The ABB is out because while they do have corporate fronts theirs are things like small businesses and storefronts, because that's what they can afford, and Fortress is one of the larger corporations in the city after Medhall. The Merchants are out for reasons that don't even need explaining unless you are yourself /that/ high because you're a regular customer of the Merchants.

But who does that leave? Coil? Because we kinda just ran the table here.

WagTheDog

Replied on January 25, 2011:

Coil? Very funny. Oh wait, you're serious. Let me laugh even harder!

Seriously, Coil's a bottom-feeder who thinks that wasting his money on Toybox leftovers instead of just giving his crew AK-47s makes him a parahuman crimelord. Dude probably doesn't even have a power, just a costume. And he's so small even the Merchants piss on him.

But regarding ShockJock's point about somebody having to have done something recent that stirred things up, remember that the only parahumans actually known to be involved anywhere in the ruckus going on last night outside of the Protectorate themselves are the Undersiders. So, presumption is, /they/ did something. Any clues what?

Bagrat (The Guy In The Know) (Veteran Member)

Replied on January 25, 2011:

Hasn't been an Undersiders sighting I've heard of in a couple weeks, except Hellhound last night. But the Undersiders' M.O. is being thieves, not enforcers or mercenaries. They're a small team of specialists who rob places. So, /assuming/ the Undersiders were doing their thing in the past couple of days and /assuming/ that's what kicked off the ruckus then the question is, what did they take and why was it so important?

XxVoid_CowboyxX

Replied on January 25, 2011:

Government secrets! No, the Protectorate sounded /really/ mad last night. Okay, I bet they infiltrated the Rig and stole all the secret IDs!

Uber (Verified Cape)

Replied on January 25, 2011:

First off, the Undersiders couldn't touch the Rig on the best day of their lives and with Armsmaster holding the door open for them. We made a study of that job when we were pondering making it the target of our Splinter Cell special and walked away with the conclusion that it would be safer to just go tell Alexandria, to her face, that we thought her costume made her look fat.

Which for the record it does not. Not at all. Moving on.

Second off, if that kind of breach had even been rumored to occur in this town then you'd have known it from our sudden and glorious announcement of "Uber and Leet's Canadian Gaming Experience" because nobody short of maybe Lung or Kaiser would want to stay within /fifty miles/ of Brockton Bay and the heat that would come down if something like that happened.

And not that anybody thinks VoidCowboy of all people is ever right about anything, but this is not a topic on which you want any stupid rumors to get started. So take it from me, the word on the cape street around town this morning? It's... actually not clear on what just happened, but we're pretty clear on what didn't happen.

Reave (Verified PRT Agent)

Replied on January 25, 2011:

I have been authorized to say that a press conference will be held at noon today to explain further details about the Fortress Construction matter.

The Brockton Bay Wards are all safe and unharmed, and none of their identities have even been suspected to be compromised. Their withdrawal to the Rig last night was due to an error in the automated alert system, now resolved. Vista was separately tasked later on due to a situation best suited to her unique talents. We thank Vista for her invaluable assistance last night.

GraveMan

Replied on January 25, 2011:

Nice try, but I work at the hospital and if no Wards were harmed then why did Panacea have to make an emergency run to the ICU last night? She'd already been there Monday evening on her normal healing shift, and then gets she gets yoinked back by a full PRT escort a couple hours after she gets home and presumably to bed? The PRT means it wasn't a normal code so that adds up to a a Protectorate hero or Ward is bleeding out on the table. But all members of the Protectorate have been accounted for either last night or this morning after the action went down, so who does that leave? Give us the truth!

Christ, where's the Youth Guard when you really need them?

Dragon (Verified Cape) (Veteran Member) (Guild)

Replied on January 25, 2011:

If my word would help reassure you, then I give you my word that no member of the Brockton Bay Wards was harmed last night. Panacea was required to assist with someone who had received a life-threatening hazardous materials exposure in the process of securing the base.

I might also make the theoretical observation that Panacea's talents are such that it is hypothetically possible for a Protectorate hero to have required emergency medical attention last night and be walking around this morning.

End of Page. 1, 2

(Showing Page 2 of 2)

GraveMan

Replied on January 25, 2011:

... okay, I feel a little stupid now. I blame graveyard shift and caffeine deficiency. Thank you for the reassurance, Dragon. Time to get some sleep.

Antigone

Replied on January 25, 2011:

So, to sum up, we don't know anything except that they were storing hazardous materials down there and that it was worth the full-court press. We also speculate that the Undersiders were the catalyst of this by poking their noses somewhere they should not have been or taking something important.

I'm going to add two and zero to get four and say that a parahuman burglary crew doing something that ends up blowing up like this around a major corporation with some kind of secret research facility in the basement that has hazmat and enough other problems to need a full Protectorate push to deal with? They did industrial espionage with Fortress hiring them, Fortress was doing some kind of illegal Tinkertech research, and the PRT tripped over the thread starting with the Undersiders and followed it all the way home.

Admin (Original Poster) (Moderator)

Replied on January 25, 2011:

This speculation has been interesting and we thank our loyal and dedicated capewatchers for their ever-vigilant inteligence-gathering efforts, but this thread is now being closed because if the PRT is just going to put out the official story at noon today anyway then even if it is the official story, we can open a new discussion in the thread that will be created about the press conference.

Thank you all for your participation, and until we meet again!

End of Page. 1, 2

Author's Note: This was actually kind of unplanned. Oh, not the events they were referring to, I already had a timetable mostly in my mind, but that there would be a PHO perspective on this at all. Still, I started doing it for my own thoughts and realized its a nice slice-of-life look into the cape geek scene in Brockton Bay, plus it at least gets a few details out there.

Previously planned interludes and Arc 2 wrap-up to start tomorrow.

Oh, and Thomas Calvert actually is black, or so I vaguely recall from a WoG somewhere?

Last edited: Oct 15, 2019

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cliffc999

Jul 14, 2019

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Threadmarks Interlude 2-F: Panacea

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cliffc999

cliffc999

Jul 14, 2019

#1,744

Interlude 2-F: Panacea

I didn't even bother looking at the clock after Vicky had lifted the end of my bed a couple feet off the floor and then dropped it. That was her method of getting me up now whenever I was too exhausted to actually respond to the alarm clock or someone talking to me, and had been ever since I'd accidentally cracked my knuckle on her force field when trying to give the person shaking me awake a reflexive fist in the eye that one time. There were more and more nights that I just wasn't sleeping easy at all and that meant I didn't wake up easy either if interrupted too fast.

"Amy, emergency," she told me in her completely serious voice. "The PRT just had a detail arrive at the door. Somebody's dying and they said it's maybe a two-hour case."

"Okay, okay," I said, shaking it off as best I could and rolling out to grab the set of clothes that experience had taught me I'd always needed to leave set up and hanging before I went to bed. Not that this kind of thing was an every night occurrence but right now I couldn't remember the last time I'd gotten through a solid month without at least one midnight call. And I'd just gotten back from an evening shift.

With all the practice I'd had in having to get dressed and going on the crisis schedule it was less than sixty seconds for me to finish socks, pants, blouse, loafers, purse, and go. I might have looked like an unmade bed and be dressed barely a step above bag lady chic but if they wanted me in office casual and my hair done up then they could wait for normal working hours. Vicky looked like she wanted to hover but the PRT guys assured her that this was purely a hospital run and not an on-site thing and the parental unit put her foot down on both of us doing an all-nighter during the school week so I said goodbye and let the escort agents wrap me up and into the waiting Suburban.

The ride in was the same as it always was so I just leaned my head against the window and tried to rest my eyes a little, and they walked me in the employee's entrance by the ER and told me that my patient was waiting up in ICU critical. I asked for a heads-up on what I was dealing with but the admitting nurse didn't have anything because the PRT brute squad had just ran my star patient up in here without even going through normal admitting so the hospital's internal paperwork was still catching up and I was jumping in blind. But hey, its not like it's a necessity to tell me something about what to expect right? She's Panacea, she can heal anything!

I grimaced inwardly when I saw an entire detail of door guards. That meant prisoner and prisoner meant villain and I had to get up past midnight after already being sleep-lagged to come heal a villain, just eugh. OK, just go in there, slap on the hands and patch whatever up, then go home and crash. Maybe beg off from school tomorrow if I can convince Vicky to convince her that I strained something-

So I wasn't exactly paying attention to notice that the agents weren't following me in and instead leaving me privacy to work, which meant VIP and not prisoner, and so I jawdropped when I recognized the gangly brunette girl laying in the hospital bed. Not that I hadn't healed hundreds of people between then and now but you don't soon forget a case of late-stage full-body sepsis that had barely needed six hours to go from zero to 'start picking the grave site'. Even in Brockton Bay that was rare.

"You again?" I greeted her.

"Hey," she said weakly, sounding nauseous. "Sorry to bug you but I kinda tripped and fell on-"

I'd already stepped forward to grab her hand and start the diagnosis and if I thought I'd been shocked before, when my power started giving me the sense of what was going on with her cell structure and active biological processes it was lucky the bedside chair was already mostly under my ass or else I'd have been sitting on the floor.

"I don't even know what-… wait, is that acute radiation syndrome? What did you do, bust into a nuclear reactor and lick the core?"

"Actually-" she began embarassedly, but between my surprise and my exhaustion its like my brain-to-mouth filter had suddenly decided to run away to the same never-never land that contained things such as Jack Slash's humanity, Kaiser's racial tolerance, or my odds of ever getting a vacation. So I just kept on with my little out-of-body experience and listened to myself explode.

"Seriously? Two weeks ago it's rolling around in the worst bacterial infection I've ever seen on anybody who still lived and now its French-kissing a cyclotron? What's the fuck are you planning next month, taking a sauna in the gas chamber so you can complete the NBC trifecta? Do they give you a prize if you can punch out all the holes on the card?!?"

I finally managed to get a lock on my mouth and sat there horrified at what I'd just heard myself say. Sure, it had been a long night after a longer day but screaming that kind of crap at a dying girl in a hospital bed was just fucking evil-

And then she burst out in hysterical laughter until she gasped, and that set me off like a sympathetic detonation and I went until I snorted, and then we both went off again until we ran out of breath, and by the time it was over I was reaching over for the box of tissues so I could give her some to blow her nose with because we both needed it bad.

" I was hoping you'd heal me, not kill me!" she said chokingly. "I think you're gonna have to put those ribs back along with that knee after you're done with the radiation!"

"You're lucky I can heal you," I said, getting back to business. "Molecular damage is pushing the limits even for me. Did they tell you how many rads you'd gotten, or am I going to have to go find someone who knows?"

"Rough guess was two thousand-plus," she replied matter-of-factly.

"Whoo," I whistled softly. "Yeah, about ten to fifteen hundred more on top of that and I don't think even I could have caught everything. Take a little more care of yourself, okay?" I said to her concernedly. "Jokes aside, this is the second time this month that I'm the only reason you're not dying. And uh, if it's not busting PRT privacy or something can you tell me how you keep getting into this shit?"

"I lead a charmed life?" she snarked weakly.

"Charmed by who, Maleficient?" I fired back, and we both grinned. "Okay, that's the immediate stabilization but the deep tissue damage is going to need all my concentration, so hang up the mike for a few." She nodded and I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and went all-in.

Fixing this kind of damage was tough. So many little things you had to catch, and since the patient was female then you had to fix gamete damage too unless you wanted to just say 'cut your losses' and give them a hysterectomy. But my power seemed to actually start flowing easier and better the more I pushed it, and by the end I was eagerly pouncing from trouble spot to trouble spot and resolving things I'd never really had to deal with before as if I'd done it my whole life. It was actually pretty fascinating.

Only after I'd finished making sure that Taylor wouldn't have any neural damage either did I realize that I'd gotten so caught up in the momentum of what I was doing that I hadn't actually thought about my dilemma of admitting whether or not I could actually do brains, just for that one moment. Oh, I wasn't going to tell her I'd had to touch the brain and honestly it wasn't really touching touching the brain because all I was doing was telling the underlying cell structure to keep doing what it already wanted to do instead of going off course and I didn't have to even think about brain chemistry at all. But its not like the hospital bothered to seriously review my cases anymore because ever since the lawsuit idiots and how that had ended, it was pretty much my word vs. nobody's as to what had actually been wrong with someone and how I'd dealt with it. I was Panacea and I could fix anything.

Still, work like this was not a pace I could keep up forever so eventually I sat back and raided the pitcher at her bedside for a glass of water. "Okay, good news. You're going to play the violin again."

"Impossible, Doc, I never played the violin before," she threw back right on the cue.

"More seriously, you are now officially recovering," I said. "And there won't be any permanent genetic damage. But if I had the authority I would order you to stay in bed for at least a week this time."

"I'm up for that," she agreed.

I realized with embarrassment that while I was totally familiar with her face, I couldn't get her name. "Ugh, sorry but I'm a bit punchy here so I don't exactly remember… I'm Amy Dallon, and you are…?"

"Taylor Hebert," she said to me. "Which you'd have found out again as soon as you went and looked at your calendar for two weeks ago anyway, so, might as well."

"Wait, you have secret ID concerns now but didn't then- so you did trigger in that locker!" I realized. "I thought your corona pollentia was throwing weird readings before but I-" and then I realized what I'd just said and turned absolutely white.

"Are you all right? " Taylor asked me urgently. "Should I get the nur-"

"I can't do brains," I said reflexively in near-panic. "I mean, I-"

"It's okay," Taylor said soothingly. "Whatever it is, its okay."

"I can't do brains," I whispered to her desperately. "If anybody thought I could-"

She seemed to pick up on what I was saying before I even got around to explaining, and nodded. "So you didn't touch anything from inside my skull because you can't do that and there is absolutely nothing and no one that will ever say different, check. Hey, I get having secrets, all right? You should imagine some that I'm carrying around right now. Let me tell you, they're pretty heavy!"

"If I could imagine them that easy they wouldn't be secret now would they?" I let Snarky Amy reply for me while I tried to get a handle on my racing panic. "All right, you swear you won't tell anyone about my having gone a little into your neural structure or even that I can? Anyone at all, not even the PRT or my sister or especially not my mother?"

"I swear to God and to the woman I owe a life-debt to twice over that I will not tell anyone without your permission." Taylor replied with a serious voice that made Vicky's serious voice sound like a toddler on a sugar high.

"Thank you," I husked back desperately.

And then we both startled as there was a sharp knock-knock on the outside doorframe. "Clear to enter?" a familiar voice rasped out.

"We're okay," I replied, and the door opened to reveal Director Piggot. She stepped in, nodded to her agents still guarding the outside, and shut the door behind her. Then she pulled out some kind of Tinkertech gizmo and waved it around for a little while.

"Is that a bug scanner?" I asked, thinking I might have recognized something like it from before.

"This is going to be a secure conversation," the Director confirmed. "What's her condition?"

"Stable, safe, full recovery inside a week," I replied in my professional voice. "I'd like another session sometime this afternoon but that's to check progress and catch possible complications, not acute treatment."

"Good work," Director Piggot answered me, before stopping as if remembering something. "You've treated her before, correct? So you know her name?"

"NDA territory?" I asked.

"NDA territory," she confirmed. "Tell Agent Riordan outside that I said you needed the paperwork. Anything else you need to finish here?"

"No ma'am." I nodded, and headed to the door before she could order me to leave. "I'll be outside in the waiting room if you need me." She acknowledged that with a nod and turned towards Taylor's bed, and I threw a goodbye wave to Taylor behind the Director's shoulder from the door and caught her little wave back before I turned and left.

Author's Note: Well, at least Amy's shard got to have an unabashed happy tonight, even if Amy's evening was more mixed. (Which is why PanPan's reactions seem slightly different in the middle, her shard is pumped at finally having gotten to sink its teeth into something new, complicated, and incredibly challenging.)

And thus two of the most dangerous young women in Brockton Bay finally go head to head, and let the heavens tremble!

Or not, because they've actually gotten off on a pretty good (even if still kinda complicated) footing. :)

And yeah, I don't go for cliche Woobie!Amy but on many levels I respect the goddamn hell out of Amy Dallon. She carried an impossible load with the worst support system in Brockton Bay. And did it for more years than I could even dream of doing under similar circumstances without going so insane that I'd fail my S9 entrance examination not the way she did but because Jack Slash wouldn't want to be anywhere near me.

So, even though I haven't fully worked out what her role in Taylor's life will be from now on, she's gonna get my best efforts to give her some face.

As to why Director Piggot is showing up here on a night when she's got a ton of other shit to deal with, its because 'Is Taylor going to survive?' is a data point that affects a lot of the other decisions she has to make coming up, so she's going to go make sure of that in a timely manner.

Last edited: Oct 15, 2019

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cliffc999

Jul 14, 2019

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Threadmarks Interlude 2-G: Coil

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cliffc999

cliffc999

Jul 14, 2019

#1,808

Interlude 2-G: Coil

Warnings: Character Death, Prolonged, Painful.

Spoiler

Even as the ruins of my dream came crashing down around me, I still had cause to rejoice. I had escaped. Even when brought to the very brink of death and with unaccountable, impossible devastation tearing through all that I had so painstakingly built up I had still triumphed. As long as I was still alive I could always eventually overcome any obstacle, however impossible-seeming. My power gave me an infinity of second chances in a world where most people spent their pitiful lives begging for only one, and that made me superior to all of them.

The timeline where I immediately executed Taylor Hebert instead of hearing out her pleas had surprised me when it ended with an enraged Velocity catching up to me before I could reach the exit passage and executing me on the spot. His remarks as I 'died' in that timeline indicated that he had found her corpse first and then picked up on my trail. I hadn't thought the man capable of cold-blooded murder but they say everyone has at least one stimulus that could move them to murder, and apparently his failure to save a young woman taken hostage was his.

The other timeline that would result in my capture by Velocity before I could kill that maddening little bitch reminded me that even with my power, life could still surprise you. I certainly wouldn't have anticipated it to be the option that actually freed me from the situation, and would not have retained it had not my other available binary choice been immediate death. But it was a pleasant surprise that the PRT agents following most closely behind him were actually two of my men, and that furthermore they had apparently still remained loyal to me. With their 'arrest' of me and Velocity's attention focused entirely on giving the Hebert girl medical attention, it was simplicity itself to find the exit route the PRT had not yet secured.

My men lived down to my expectations of human nature when it turned out their reasons for 'saving' me were not so much loyalty as wishing to share my escape tunnel because they didn't have any expectations of not being outed by the Internal Affairs investigation Emily would no doubt be launching in the weeks to come. And so they had decided if they were going to be fugitives they might as well be successful fugitives, helping themselves to all the resources I'd cached for that eventuality along their way. And thus their plan to disable me and extort whatever bank account numbers they could out of me as soon as we reached the first safe house was an entirely rational plan for those men in their circumstances.

Of course, trying to betray a man before he betrays you is futility incarnate when that man is me and I had my power to split the timelines, and even with the unaccountable headache I'd started to have I still only needed one split to successfully shoot them both in the back before they did for me. I'd simply leave their corpses in the safe house and-

And then I felt a sudden clenching of nausea and before I'd been able to stop myself, I was kneeling on the floor heaving the contents of my stomach all over.

Where had this come from? I hadn't had any symptoms so much as six hours ago. It certainly wasn't stomach flu, not this quickly and violently. It wasn't food poisoning because I hadn't had anything for dinner except one of the TV dinners stored in the bunker, the workday having been what it was, and I'd eaten from that stash multiple times before without incident. It wasn't exposure to anything because I-

I vomited again, noting that the nausea was spiraling upwards, the headache was rapidly increasing in severity, and there was an increasing lassitude. This was simply going too fast to be a normal illness. Was I being subjected to some unknown parahuman's power or Tinkerte-

Wait. That last desperate escape attempt of Hebert's, that pitiful little flashbang. It had been the wrong shape and the wrong color and not quite intense enough for a flash proper grenade but I'd dismissed all that as having been artifacts of her limited Tinkertech and improvisation. But something about that color…

I hurriedly booted up the laptop and began an internet search for the symptoms I had displayed, and the weakness I was now starting to feel that the adrenaline of the recent fight was ebbing. Something about this was all so familiar… something from the old training, the PRT training. The first aid module? No. The hazardous materials module? Yes… no…

Dear God. The NBC training module.

I refined my search terms and almost vomited a third time directly onto the keyboard when my suspicion was confirmed. That blue flash had not been a blue flash. It had been Cherenkov radiation. Somehow that insane girl had built an enhanced radiation weapon out of scrap and then deliberately detonated it in her own hand!

I frantically split timelines before I realized it was too late. I'd already taken the dosage almost an hour ago, and had split the timeline multiple times since then. I couldn't wish away the lethal dose of radiation I'd taken as it was already inside me, corroding my very cells and bones. My power couldn't help me.

My power couldn't help me. My power couldn't help me.

No! NOOOOO! This couldn't be happening, this had to be a mistake, this wasn't fair!

Panting desperately I tried to regain control of myself. I was more than just my powers, dammit! I was not just another stupid monkey who'd have been forever a useless nothing without a vial or a trigger, not like Lisa was, not like they all were! I was Thomas Calvert! I was Coil! I was the most intelligent, most well-trained, most focused and most outright dangerous sonofabitch that I had ever met! I had walked out of the heart of Ellisburg and I was going to walk out of this!

Think think think! Options! What are my options!

Cauldron? No. I could beg and plead with them but they were as commendably ruthless as I was, and I already owed them a substantial unpaid debt. A debt I would not be in any likely position to repay for quite some time even before we factored in my current condition. They were far too likely to simply write me off as a bad investment at this point. And I needed more than a chance right now, I needed a miracle.

Panacea? Absurd. Taking her by myself and with my current limited resources and health? I could not possibly hope to defeat any fraction of New Wave in this condition. Glory Girl alone would almost certainly tear me limb from limb if I even looked like I was threatening the life of her sister, and that was entirely aside from the fact that if Panacea didn't want to heal me she could simply knock me unconscious as soon as I forced her to touch me! And threats were impossible at the moment and she wouldn't compromise herself for me, not under the circumstances, not merely for money. And Taylor fucking Hebert would already have the PRT calling Panacea in now to save her own miserable skin anyway so even less point!

Blasto! An experienced bio-Tinker, already a villain, operating barely more than an hour's drive down I-95 in Boston, and I could still pay him from one of the emergency reserve accounts! I didn't have his current contact information but Accord did and I knew where to get in touch with the Ambassadors when I reached Boston. That was it, that was my play! I could still win this!

There was already a car available at the safe house, so all I had to do was drive. From what I could vaguely estimate of the dose I'd taken my time would not be long, so I risked the speeding ticket and kept the car pushing at least 70-plus as I desperately fled Brockton Bay for Boston and salvation.

The headache was reaching migraine territory now and I didn't have anything left but dry heaves but I refused to quit. My willpower and my will to power had always been my greatest strengths and I could-

When the time came, I never even noticed exactly when I lost control of the vehicle. Perhaps it had been the increasing trembling in my hands, or perhaps there had been a slippery patch in the road. It didn't matter. I'd felt myself becoming unable to drive while still maybe halfway to Boston and in the thinly-populated part of Massachusetts near the state forest, and in desperation I'd decided to risk pulling off the highway and finding a truck stop or something where I could use the ten thousand dollars in cash from the safehouse to bribe someone into taking me the rest of the way in their vehicle. But I'd cut things too fine, and so shortly after making a hurried turn out of the off-ramp I skidded out on the frontage road and I just couldn't seem to compensate before my vehicle went across the road, through the ditch, well into a field, and finally into a tree. The airbag deployed as I instantly went from over forty-five to zero and the impact knocked me semiconscious for an indeterminate amount of time.

When I finally awoke I realized that I was trapped. Either I'd grown so weak that I couldn't move or else something had broken in the impact. I could only feel one of my legs. Trying to focus through my vertigo I noted that all of the electronics in the car were dead. My head-on impact must have broken the battery.

Look out my side window told me I was far enough off the road that in the darkness of the night and out here in a semi-rural district with no street lamps, I was almost certainly a dark silouhette – I had of course not chosen a brightly-colored car for an escape vehicle – in the middle of a dark field in the middle of a dark night. With the electrical systems down there were no lights I could flicker to gather attention. I couldn't even honk the horn. And I couldn't get the door open and I doubted I'd be able to walk far as is. I had virtually zero hope of being found until daylight… and I wasn't sure if I could go that long. And even if I was found, could they help me?

As the pain began to fill my head to the exclusion of all else, I tried but failed to think of any other options. I prayed for the sight of one of those impossible doors opening and the woman who represented Cauldron coming for me anyway, but she didn't come. She wouldn't come, I was certain of it. Nobody would come.

As I felt warm fluid starting to drip down from my nose and knew that the mucous membranes had started to bleed through, I wondered how many more hours it would actually take. I wondered how much more it could possibly hurt before it was finally over. I wondered if I'd be lucky enough to at least see one more sunrise.

I wondered where it had all gone so horribly wrong.

Author's Note: And here we are at last, the most desperately-anticipated scene in the entire story to date. I hope its everything you all imagined it would be!

And in before anybody points out Coil was still technically kinda sorta alive at the close out so its possible yadda yadda yadda...

Enjoy! :p

Last edited: Oct 15, 2019

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cliffc999

Jul 14, 2019

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Threadmarks Orientation 2.7

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cliffc999

cliffc999

Jul 14, 2019

#1,896

Orientation 2.7

I waved goodbye to Amy as the door to my hospital room closed, and then turned my attention to the woman who was now turning to face me. Without saying a word she walked up to my bedside, pulled out the chair, and sat down staring at me.

Director Emily Piggot, head of the PRT's East-Northeast branch headquartered in Brockton Bay. Physically she didn't cut an impressive profile, being a short, fat middled-aged woman with fading blonde hair, undistinguished features, and a painfully stiff way of walking from her lingering injuries. But then you looked at her face and suddenly that didn't matter, because her expression neither gave ground nor challenged. The usual petty intimidation/submission games that people normally played with each other consciously and subconsciously were absent in her. She just did things or said things, and other people either followed along or got out of the way.

She was, plain and simple, the proverbial Honey Badger Who Didn't Give A Fuck. With an iron will combined with a perennial suspicion of all parahumans, she was the domineering unsympathetic authority figure that loomed over much of early Worm canon on the hero side just as surely as luminaries such as Coil or Kaiser did on the villain side. She was a woman of strong will, great intelligence, and intense prejudices that her intelligence and will could only partially mitigate, and she did not like capes. I'd only met her in person once before, very briefly, as a participant observer to the preliminary legal proceedings surrounding the Winslow incident.

And right now, she was the woman who could hold my future fate hostage with a single word.

Her lip twitched briefly and she leapt straight into her opening gambit. "You've given us quite a strenuous night, Miss Hebert."

"Am I in trouble, ma'am?" I asked her, the obvious question for someone in my shoes.

She snorted derisively. "If I tried to press charges against you, the state's attorney would laugh me out of his office. You were an underage kidnap victim being held hostage by a literal maniacal psychopath, who had already fired at you once and was mid-way through the process of firing again when Velocity arrived on the scene. There is absolutely nothing you could have done to the man prior to Velocity's arrival that would not be ruled by the court as legitimate self-defense, if I even wanted to waste my time and budget trying to take it to one."

"So no," she finished. " I do not have any intentions of charging you with any crime, and to the best of my knowledge you are not at this point in time a suspect in any crimes. You may speak freely."

"About why I made the bomb?"

"Armsmaster's been and will be quite busy tonight with a lot of things, but at my request he spent some time doing a preliminary evaluation of your device. He said it looked to him as if it were operating on some kind of…" She reached into her pocket and came out with a PDA, which she looked at. "Partial quantum resonance." She took a breath. "And he also said that using the same principles and a fully-stocked workshop, it would been in theory possible to build a similar device the size of a small refrigerator that would have irradiated the entire city." She focused her gaze upon me intently as she continued. "Were you aware that your device could have been scaled up like that?"

"Yikes!" I said, temporizing.

"Yikes indeed," she agreed sardonically. "The world should not be a place where adolescents are looked at as potential weapons of mass destruction. But you are one, and not just in the sense that you have a parahuman ability but in the more literal sense that you have demonstrated not just the hypothetical capacity to make such devices but at least some actual ability at it."

I honestly couldn't think of anything to say at this point that might not make it far worse for me, so I just kept my mouth shut.

"You are a convalescent patient very recently off a life-threatening experience so I don't intend to stress you any more than necessary at this moment. I primarily came here tonight simply to check on your progress." She sighed and continued more softly. "If Panacea hadn't been able to save you then someone would have had to notify your father. And that's not the sort of job you just push off onto a flunky."

"Thank you for that, ma'am." I said, nodding to her. "And for obvious reasons, I'm glad it wasn't necessary."

That got me an actual quirk of her lips. "But that doesn't mean all the decisions involving you can be postponed forever. Given the circumstances we were willing to give you 'your space' up until now but since that is no longer possible, I must ask you directly."

Aaaand, here we go. Well, at least its just the recruiting pitch and not the handcuffs!

"Taylor, why have you been so consistently avoiding the option of joining the Wards? Did you really think they were all like Shadow Stalker? Even going just from what you can see for yourself with your own two eyes, consider that I wouldn't have gotten rid of her if I actually thought behavior like hers was acceptable."

"No ma'am, I didn't think that they were," I said. "I honestly don't think any of them are. And a lot of my thoughts on the topic over the past couple of weeks have acknowledged that it would be nice to have people my own age who understand what I'm going through, who I can talk about both sides of my life with without having to worry about secrets." I sighed, letting my actual feelings through on the topic. "That it would be nice to have friends again, if I could."

Director Piggot nodded her head in acknowledgement of that, her expression not so much softening as refusing to harden further. "That's the primary attraction in it for most of them, as I understand it. So if not that, and not being afraid of us, then what was it? The Tinker restrictions?"

"Yes," I agreed. "Even if Dragon hasn't already told you about it, I'll admit that I gave her an earful during my uh, apprenticeship interview I guess you'd call it, about the underage Tinker review process and everything I'd heard about it. Which, um, wasn't anything good."

"Normally this is the point at which I'd say something reassuring about how its probably not as bad as you've heard, but given that your first Tinkertech submission to the PRT – so to speak – was an enhanced radiation weapon that could potentially have been scaled up to a city-killing warhead without much effort by Tinker standards, honesty compels me to say that in your case it probably would be that bad."she admitted frankly.

"Are you here to ask me to join the Wards, ma'am, or to tell me to?" I asked as politely as I could.

"Actually I'm here because unless your father goes further outside expectations than I believe humanly possible, he will be demanding that you join the Wards before I can even bring up the topic with him," she replied. "You won't be seeing him until morning because he hasn't had any sleep since you were abducted, and right before I came up here he had enough of an anxiety attack in the waiting room the hospital family services people finally had to give him a pill and a bed for the next few hours." She waved her hand. "He'll be fine, and to be honest, he sounded like a man who could really use the rest."

"I can only imagine," I said sadly, and then stepped on my tongue before I gave her more openings.

"So, yes, there is an extreme likelihood that you will be enrolled as my next Wards recruit within the immediate future without any coercion on anyone's part, except in the sense that as a minor your legal guardian gets to make decisions like this for you." she finished. "And I thought you deserved the courtesy of a heads-up." And then she pre-empted my next remark by holding up her palm.

"Allow me to be clear. I am not arm-twisting you. You've already met the last person that 'the experts' had decided that the Wards program could make into a cooperative citizen and you know better than I do exactly how that mess ended. I'm not just covering my ass when I say that I'd already told them it wouldn't work last time, and I am not foolish enough to think it would work this time either. So if you really do not want to be there, and can somehow talk your father into agreeing with you, then you won't be. Even if it would make my life tremendously more complicated in some ways, I would still accept it because the alternative would be worse."

"But you're also saying that you think it is a good idea if I would agree to it, and that I should," I said.

"You've already been targeted for one kidnapping attempt," Director Piggot replied, "and while the next one won't be so fortunate as to have had your secret identity delivered gift-wrapped for them, unless you intend to never go out publicly at any point – which would be absolutely unprecedented behavior for any cape in my experience -- then that just means the next one will go after your other identity. Different road, same destination."

"And Dragon isn't enough?" I asked.

"If she comes down here to Brockton Bay every time you are in danger, then that publicly announces your close association with her for anyone with eyes to see," Piggot pointed out. "Which exponentially increases your potential threat, not reduces it. Consider that, for just one possibility out of all the ones that I'd have to juggle, that being known as a hostage useful against Dragon means that you are a potential target for anyone who might want to compromise the Birdcage. Because Dragon's the single point of failure for all of those systems."

"I'd just wanted her to look over my tinker designs over the network to make sure they weren't going to be… bad," I said. "I certainly hadn't anticipated her and me going public."

"It hasn't gone public yet," Director Piggot said. "We can explain Dragon coming down here once with any number of plausible reasons, especially given that she was an indispensable part of the one-two punch that got that bunker cracked in time. Furthermore, since taking that bunker down brought an entire parahuman villain's operation down we don't even need to publicly admit that all the… highly visible moments… of last night were a rescue operation at all. So no, outside of the people in my office who already knew and the people who took you – who are with the exception of Coil all wrapped up – you are not yet blown. We just don't want to establish a pattern later on that would be too likely to blow your cover. And that means arranging a more… locally-based potential defense for you."

I sat and thought hard, looking for holes in her logic. I came up with… unfortunately, they're actually right this time. Especially on the Dragon thing.

Dammit, Coil! That plan would have entirely worked with suitable discretion if you hadn't charged in. Restrictions or no restrictions, I can't just walk away by myself until at least the heat from this has died down for a while.

Well, I had just had that huge revelation in the base that maybe trying to save the world all by myself was a bad idea. So even if I didn't know yet how I was going to work around several of the downsides of what was going to come next, I could at least embrace the upsides too while I got to work on the rest of that.

"Thank you for explaining all this to me, Director. I hadn't really thought about some of it. And… you're right. This is what I should do next, even if it means finding a compromise."

"That last one is called 'pending adulthood', by the way," she replied with rough humor. "And while we'll delay any public announcement for several weeks so that its not visibly connected to recent events, and it still will require your father's signature to officially happen, in anticipation of all those events then let me just say… welcome to the Wards."

"Thank you, Director."

"And now that you're de facto if not yet de jure one of my subordinates, I can speak frankly with you," she said. Oh crap, what trap did I just step into?

"About…?"

"Taylor," she said with surprising gentleness, "the overwhelming probability is that we will find Coil's remains within the next several hours. His real identity was Thomas Calvert, by the way. You'll almost certainly find out more about his history later, but the important thing right now is that tonight you took a deliberate, premeditated action that will result if it has not already resulted in the loss of a human life." She waved her hand. "I already told you that legally you were in the clear on that and you are. But life is not solely a thing of laws and administrative procedures, especially not when it comes to people." She sighed sadly. "In theory, none of the Wards are ever supposed to even risk facing actual kill-or-be-killed situations. In practice we still closely approach that ideal, even in Brockton Bay. But by an incredible amount of ill fortune none of which was your fault, you got thrown into one headfirst at your age and your only way out required your assailant's death."

"Ma'am, I-"

"I am saying that in my sincere belief, and with the benefit of all my years and professional experience, that you did the best you could. It may or may not have been the best thing in a world of perfect objectivity, or even the best thing you will think of later on when you've gone back and over your decisions in hindsight. It may not have been the thing that I or one of my people would have thought of in benefit of our greater experience in such manners. But none of us were there, and you were. You took the actions you had every reason to believe necessary given the information that was available to you, and as extreme as some of them may have been, none of them were really wrong." She shook her head. "Fifteen years old is too damn young to have to face this. Hell, sometimes I think eighteen years is and the law actually lets you enlist for the Army or the Marines… or the PRT or the Protectorate… at that age. But you have faced it, and the only thing we can do now is concentrate on what comes next."

"Which is?"

"You deal with this, and you move on. Its not easy but its been done. By many men and many women who have served, in the armed forces or law enforcement or just stood their ground against a home invader with that gun they'd bought at the hardware store. Some do it with a smooth adjustment and some don't come to terms with it without a lot of rough patches."

"And then some don't adjust at all." I replied.

"Not on my watch," she replied flatly. "So yes, I am saying that if at any time you think you are not dealing well with what has happened, you are allowed to come to me – you are expected to come to me – and inform me of your concerns, and let me work with you to see what can be done then. And you will not disappoint me by admitting that you need help if you genuinely do, do you understand? If you want to find the fast-track to disappointing me, young lady, then try huddling around your pain and pretending everything is fine when its not. That's not strength, that's just lying to yourself."

She paused for breath, and then continued. "And in full knowledge that I'm deliberately hitting below the belt, let me point out that Shadow Stalker had poor cooperation with her therapist and kept pretending everything was fine on her own."

"I'm getting a therapist?" I asked, both because it was a legitimate question and Piggot's new tack was starting to get a little intense for me.

"Not unless you think you need one," she said more matter-of-factly. "Or you visibly aren't able to keep it together at all."

"I… wow. Thank you for you concern?"

"Don't thank me, its my job," she replied. Apparently feeling a need to ease off the mood herself, she continued more matter-of-factly. "Anything else you feel you need to ask me right now?"

"No ma'am," I said.

"Then get some rest," she said, starting to stand up. "Tomorrow's going to be a long day for all of us."

Author's Note: Yes, its official now. Arc 3 will be The Wards Arc.

And to all of you swearing and cursing and going 'A fucking Wards arc? Oh FFS! That's the death of a Worm fanfic!', I'm just gonna say that's what a lot of you were telling me about doing a Coil arc and look where we are now. :)

I hope to find a way of handling it at least as original as my way of handling Coil, if with less fatal irradiations.

Also, for those wondering what the hell got into Emily Piggot tonight, consider this. She's got a young parahuman who's a potential WMD tinker to deal with and they just killed a guy. Granted that the killing was totally righteous the point is that taking life for the first time has emotional effects, Piggot is hardly ignorant of those potential emotional effects, and just ignoring them and letting them be untreated would be the stupidest idea ever to the point that all the dumbest fanon caricatured Piggots, Taggs, and Greg Veders would get together to all laugh at how dumb that idea was.

(Well, OK, she has Invictus so actually just ignoring it would be fine. Its just that based on the information Piggot has I would then have to write her as dumber than fucking ditchwater to even contemplate not counseling Taylor here, so of course she did.)

So instead she charges right in and starts to deal with it. In the way she knows how to do best, which would be to give at least some of the same counseling she'd give to a fellow agent or soldier who'd just hit that one for the first time.

Plus, y'know, the part where I try to make my characters act like people, which means they do things not just for one totally unambiguous motivation.

But Arc 2 is not yet over, folks! We need one last round of reaction shots. And the foreshadowing, of course.

Last edited: Oct 15, 2019

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cliffc999

Jul 14, 2019

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Threadmarks Interlude 2-H: Danny Hebert / Director Piggot / Alexandria

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cliffc999

cliffc999

Jul 15, 2019

#2,281

Interlude 2-H: Danny Hebert / Director Piggot / Alexandria

Danny Hebert

They didn't let me in to see my little girl until the following morning. One of the bureaucrats had told me after I'd gotten up that she'd already agreed to an offer from the Director's office for the Wards and that I could just sign the contract now if I wanted but I told him to shove off and that I was going to talk to Taylor. I was certainly going to agree with her about joining the Wards, I'd always thought that's what she should have done from the start, but first things first.

"You're all right?" were the first words out of my mouth as I came in and saw her lying in her hospital bed. Another goddamned hospital bed. And another time it took a miracle healer just to keep her alive at all. Why did the world keep doing this to us?

"Full recovery," Taylor replied and I didn't so much sit in the bedside chair as slump into it at those words. "Panacea said it should just take one or two more sessions before its all fixed."

Taylor looked back up me at with her little sincere smile. The same smile she'd been constantly giving me all along, and especially since she'd triggered. The smile that said she was okay, that I didn't need to worry about her so much, that she was taking care of herself and she'd be fine.

The smile that I'd been too stupid to notice hadn't been remotely sincere for over a whole year before it all happened, and that I was still afraid to let myself believe in even now. She'd been kidding herself and me for so long that she'd been OK when she wasn't, she'd never let herself ask for help for so long until it was too late, and now she had parahuman powers and everything was changing for her so much? How could she really know whether she was OK or not, especially when it wasn't just facing high school dangers now but life-threatening situations? She was only fifteen!

My God, even her high school had turned into a life-threatening situation and that was before she'd even gotten powers in the first place! I'd aged at least a year for every week since her trigger event, and just when I thought things might be going to go all right when Taylor said she'd ask Dragon for some cape advice first and then suddenly there's this horrible kidnapping?

No, it was my job to look after my baby and keep her from getting hurt. And to protect her from herself, that goddamned determination she had to always try to go it alone and then let herself get hurt. My letting her run free and look after herself unsupervised before had been what had led to the entire Winslow disaster. And I'd done that letting her run free because I hadn't been doing my job, I'd been so wrapped up in myself after Annette and wrapped up in things that didn't really matter compared to what I should have been doing-

I fought down an urge to crush the bedrail or punch the wall as I took a deep breath and directed my anger away and down, away from me and away from the person I was talking to, just like the counselor had always recommended. To 'virtually' let it out on something inoffensive and inanimate in my line of sight so that it didn't risk exploding out on someone real.

"They said you'd talked to someone about joining the Wards?" I asked, focusing again.

"The Director came in last night and explained why it would be a good idea now," Taylor said.

"I'm glad you're finally seeing sense on the topic," I told her with firmness, and her own expression firmed up.

"I'm rolling with the punches, Dad, not 'seeing sense'." Taylor told me curtly. "This was not how it was supposed to go-"

"That's the thing about real life, young lady!" I came back. "It never goes how it's supposed to go! That's why you need to-"

"Do you think I don't know that, Dad?" she said sadly. "After all this?"

Oh, that was just hitting the below the belt. Why did she always have to be so stubb-

"Dad," she continued plaintively. "I don't want to fight." She sighed and continued more softly. "And this whole thing is a messy mixed bag anyway."

"I agree," I said, breathing out heavily. "And I don't want to fight either but-"

"What did you tell me about 'but'?" she said with a tiny bit of her cheek returning, her cheek from way back. Back before that damned car crash and before Emma had gone crazy.

"The proper punctuation for a sentence ending with 'but' is to put a period right before the 'B'," I repeated, saying the old maxim we'd always used to shut down Taylor's grade-school explanations of why her latest cookie jar expedition or unauthorized outing with Emma or all that wasn't really that bad, honest. It really wasn't fair when children actually remembered what you'd told them and then tossed it back at you when they needed it for ammunition. Even if they were-

"Okay, okay," I said, and waved for her to continue.

Taylor stopped to compose her thoughts for a long pause, as if she was trying to find just the perfect words, and finally went with. "Analyzing how we both ended up here and why I was vulnerable to Coil's kidnapping is something we're going to have to do eventually, so that we don't do whatever went wrong again the next time we face the same type of problem."

"That makes sense," I agreed, my thoughts immediately leaping to workplace accident reviews and compensations claims I'd had to help adjudicate. "But you want to do it later, not now, when we're not both so-"

"So much, yeah," she said. "And in the category of decisions that do need to be made right now…?"

"You've already made it," I said, nodding along with her. "The Wards."

"Yeah. I mean, maybe it won't be so bad. I can hope."

I sat and thought over how many times I'd seen that one work out before.

"If it does start to 'go bad' then you promise you'll tell me this time, all right? After Winslow-"

The sudden smile that broke out on her face as soon as I'd started to say that made me think that maybe, just maybe, I'd started doing my job again after all.

-and then I thought about what my job was. My paying job, that is.

"Did you sign anything yet?" I asked her urgently.

"Nope. All verbal," she agreed.

"Good." I said with heartfelt relief. "Because as much as I want you in the Wards, I also want to read every line of that paperwork before so much as a drop of ink touches paper. And not just me, but whoever in the Dockworkers office I can get to help pro bono. Because negotiating employee contracts and making sure my people don't get taken advantage of by the corporations -- or the government -- is what your Dad does, remember?"

And the smile that one got me could have lit up the world.

Director Piggot

God, I was exhausted. My dialysis meant that I had to worry about fatigue syndromes anyway and that was before all-nighters like this erupted. Let alone all the critical decisions I'd had to make in the past hours…

I lay in my bed in my quarters on the Rig, staring at the ceiling and suffering through the damnable 'too tired to sleep' that every soldier was familiar with. As always happened when this occurred, my thoughts kept going back and back and rechecking my recent decisions, examining my process, looking for overlooked clues or failure factors.

Of course, being as fatigued as I was meant that this was just another way of counting sheep. Except in the very rare cases that being in a half-dream state enhanced intuition, which were far rarer than fiction would have you believe, then thinking while chronic-fatigued was exactly as productive as thinking while drunk. If I hadn't had any useful insights while I was still capable then I almost certainly wasn't going to have them now.

Still, going through my recent memories was far better than going through my older ones. And so I left myself drift and waited for my exhaustion to finally turn into rest, and as I did so my thoughts kept coming back to the most confusing thing of the entire affair.

Thomas Calvert's big reveal as the villain Coil? I was still confused as to what could have made that self-obsessed psychopath trigger after Ellisburg if he hadn't triggered in that fucking mess, but the rest of his deal was merely a huge goddamned shock and not an actual surprise. Its not as if I hadn't known that the fucker was pure walking evil from the day I'd first met him. The day he actually bragged to me about fragging his own squad leader during Ellisburg, as if that made him special and not just a mad animal. Nothing short of a direct order from Director Costa-Brown's office would have made me accept his 'services' as a 'special consultant' to my PRT branch and I made yet another a note to check those files tomorrow to see if they'd tell me which Senator he must have blackmailed to get that contract.

An entire goddamned supervillain Bond base underneath my city? In hindsight not shocking at all. He'd hidden a hardened underground bunker underneath a corporation set up for the purpose of selling hardened underground bunkers, and cleverly disguised it as a hardened underground bunker. I gave Calvert a minimal point for having read the 'Purloined Letter' – very minimal – and kept listing.

The degree of infiltration into my office? Just the few I'd already found made me want to vomit and even with Coil's files to accelerate that process I was still dreading how much further it might go from there. But I'd goddamn well turn them out root and branch. I'd already bypassed HQ to get directly in touch with Armstrong down in Boston and ask him to send at least fifty of his own people to help with the mole hunt, boots on the ground and striking while the iron was hot. Let the suits up top cry about procedure later, I'd get forgiveness rather than permission. And if I got no forgiveness at all then hell with it, if they wanted to relieve me for this mess or how I had to fix it then I'd go out swinging for the fences. So no, the mole hunt? Appalling, but not puzzling.

Taylor Hebert. What was that young woman made of?

My crime scene people were still arguing over how much of that trail she'd cut through the base was real, how much was them reading too much into what wasn't there, how much had been pure luck and how much had been a plan, but even the most conservative estimates required her to start from practically naked in a secure anti-Tinker box that made my high-grade confinement cells look like a Holiday Inn, somehow fake a cardiac event that had fooled an experienced nurse who had her hooked up to hospital-grade diagnostic equipment, then compromise every single internal network in the base with just a cell phone – the biggest argument against admitting her to the Wards would be putting that talent right here on the Rig and on our internal systems, but I had to place faith in Armsmaster's ability to out-Tinker even a teen Tinker prodigy…

Two, maybe four or six veteran mercs taken down before they barely even known they were being hit. We'd confirmed the job she'd done on the two men found lying nearest to where Velocity had made contact with her, the mercs who'd each taken a double-tap to their vests smack dab in their X-rings from a girl who had zero record of having touched a pistol before and all in the instant of time they'd have been blinded by their own flash-bang which had somehow prematured in mid-air right inside the door - I'd have been going good to make those takedowns back then.

And Annie Oakley herself with a laser sight couldn't have hit that fucking flash-bang in mid-air. Had to have been some kind of proximity detonator, like what the Marines used to make car bombs premature before they'd actually reach the gates…

It really said something about Taylor's whole sequence that night that the stunt at the end with the improvised neutron bomb was one of the things making the most sense in hindsight. And I still had a chuckle over the console…

But the most puzzling thing about this kid was how she kept reacting to things. Before and after. She just-

Capes were damaged. The nature of trigger events meant that they'd inevitably have psychological issues, issues that never seemed to really get better for any of them no matter how much the psychs tried. The best you could hope for was high-functioning cases that channeled it into mostly useful directions, like Armsmaster or Miss Militia…

But Taylor was civil and entirely rational even during situational stress that would have put my best tactical teams into beast mode. Her conversation was full of de-escalation phrases and tension relievers like a trained negotiator's, except with her it was intuitive as if that was just her nature. Like most teenagers she wouldn't budge on things she wanted, but unlike most of them she didn't act like always pushing back was the only way she knew how to hold a position…

Capes they weren't the heroes that the Protectorate and the PRT wanted everyone to believe they were, either. I knew that. I knew that I was sworn to helping maintain an illusion that I didn't remotely believe in because the only solution that anyone had come up with for a world gone mad was to take that lie and sell it so hard that hopefully they would believe it.

But I really doubted that they did, or ever would. I'd seen the truth that day. For all that capes puffed themselves up, when push came to shove they'd only fight if they thought they could win, and if it was your life or theirs then you could kiss your sweet ass goodbye because it wasn't going be theirs. Our cape so-called support had been the first people to cut and run in Ellisburg. Even fucking Calvert had stood his post longer than they had before breaking.

But here comes Taylor and she's thrown alone into hell and without a moment's hesitation she just stares down the goddamned nightmare and then fucks it in the eye socket. She'd grabbed everything she had and everything she'd made and kept firing it into the waves and waves of opposition and it kept her alive long enough that even bleeding out on the floor and the gun at her head she'd been still in the fight right up to the moment the cavalry finally came…

Capes cared about you only when they could, and when really up against it they took care of number one first instead of taking one for the team.

But while what Taylor had done in the base could have just been a cornered rat trying to keep its hide intact, any kid who'd pass up a free shot at a 25 million judgement in court for a measly 250,000 settlement and the rest for school improvement? To try and help clean up the shithole that had helped torture her? To give up a pile of free money to try and bail out all the same kids who'd abandoned her?

To hell with all of Armsmaster's hyperventilating over the alleged 'socially maladjusted tendencies' of anyone who'd build a homebrew neutron bomb, he couldn't be right on that score for this to make any sense. If it wasn't for her Tinkering you'd sometimes wonder if Taylor Hebert were even a cape…

I finally closed my eyes, and as I drifted off I thought about a young Lady who'd once gone to Ellisburg.

Alexandria

"Thomas Calvert is dead," I said.

The news had come in shortly before I'd had to leave for the scheduled meeting, so after we'd handled the scheduled agenda I'd brought the matter up as it was Coil who had been the primary subject of our parahuman feudalism experiment in Brockton Bay.

"What were the circumstances?" Number Man asked me, his being here and doing preparatory work this morning having put him behind me in the news cycle for a change. "And is it confirmed?"

"What's left of him is currently in the morgue in the Boston PRT office, and DNA, MRI, and dental work all matches," I said, pulling up the relevant reports on everyone's display. "Although as you can see-"

"What kind of power does that sort of damage?" Eidolon asked, staring at the grisly imagery.

"You don't recall from Behemoth engagements?" Number Man asked. "Given the available context, I would say this was either Tinkertech or an industrial accident. Because that's not a parahuman power exposure, that's acute radiation syndrome."

"Somebody detonated a neutron bomb in Brockton Bay?" Doctor Mother asked incredulously. "And you didn't bring this up first?"

"Some teenaged girl who'd Triggered as a Tinker two weeks ago took exception to Coil's press-gang," I said, "and chose to express her displeasure by improvising a hand-held suicide device of some kind and irradiating the entire room with it. Coil was by all appearances attempting to flee and seek medical aid from Blasto, who would have been the nearest available bio-Tinker plausibly available for hire."

"Possible but very unlikely that would have helped him," Number Man said.

"So the whole experiment's down the drain just because one kid went 'Carrie'?" Eidolon said. "How did we not see this one coming?"

"I have to prioritize my time," Contessa replied tonelessly, "and Coil was not a sufficient priority in the time frame under discussion."

"Overall Path divergence as a result?" Doctor Mother asked.

"Minimal, Contessa replied with mild interest. "The experiment was a significant hope of ours for the aftermath, but not a necessity for the primary goal." And then she sat back in the way that signified she had nothing to say on the matter.

"I'll start sanitizing the data trails that could potentially lead to us," Number Man said. "You can do the same internally to the PRT, of course."

"Actually, it occurs to me we can salvage the experiment," I replied. "Parahuman feudalism would be important in the post-Entity world, and I am reluctant to abandon our proof of concept so soon."

"Continue it with who?" Eidolon said. "Because even I can't raise the dead."

"Remember that there had been two other potential candidates already native to Brockton Bay that we had been considering before Calvert appeared on the scene," I reminded him. "Marquis was Birdcaged and it turned out there were Path concerns about potentially interfering with that, so we did not. But-"

"Oh you have got to be kidding!" Eidolon shot back heatedly. "There's a reason we didn't just go ahead back then after losing Marquis, remember?"

"I'm sorry," I said in a voice as cold as liquid nitrogen. "But when we founded Cauldron and swore that we would do whatever was necessary to save as many Earths as we could, that to that one single objective we pledged our lives, our fortunes, our sacred honor, and our immortal souls, was there some sort of unspoken 'But not if it means being tacky about it?' exemption that I'd missed? I will grant that there were reasons he was not our first choice, but might I remind you that our first choice is now dead?"

"Kaiser, for all of his organizational ability and current advantage of position, does still have certain significant flaws," Number Man pointed out.

"And Coil didn't?" I said. "We're not in the business of making saints here."

"We're not in the business of making the next Hitler either!" Eidolon objected.

"That's exactly why he would be useful here," I replied. "As you are demonstrating for us right now, the Nazi ideology is one of the single most polarizing ideologies that exists. Kaiser cannot abandon it without abandoning his power base, but so long as he clings to it he cannot hope to gain popular acceptance on the larger scale in any scenario short of an outright post-apocalypse."

"At which point questions of even remotely conventional ethics would already be forfeit," Doctor Mother acknowledged. "And so it's a neatly a self-containing experiment. If parahuman feudalism is a viable concept at all, then with a minimum of setup work we can give the Empire Eighty-Eight a fair opportunity to demonstrate that by seeing if they can take control of Brockton Bay. And yet they will never have any serious hope to leverage that power substantially beyond a single parahuman city-state and out into a large regional or national scenario because…"

"Because except for their own few goose-stepping fanboys, everybody hates Nazis," Eidolon said. "And once they've succeeded on the proof of concept we don't have to let them stay succeeded, do we? Everybody would be screaming for the Triumvirate to come down anyway."

"We'll have to stall long enough to make sure that it is a viable lasting conquest and not merely a blitzkrieg," I pointed out, "but yes, the anticipated endgame even in the case of experiment success is an eventual day of reckoning for Kaiser. He just gets to have the Bay for a while first. So, is the proposal on the table?"

Doctor Mother nodded. "It certainly sounds viable enough to have Number Man and yourself start a formal study of its feasibility, and if that checks out then yes. We'll do it."

"We'll need to study fast," I pointed out. "If we are going to do it then 'Director Costa-Brown' needs to start putting the pieces in place while the immediate post-Coil investigation is still in progress."

"If they are pieces you can move back later should the proposal not check out, then just go ahead and start moving them now," the Doctor said. "Anyone else? Very well, meeting adjourned."

Arc Two Concludes

Author's Note: And that's a wrap! We've shown the aftermath, we've gotten peeks into character's heads and motivations, we've start the family reconciliation, and we've foreshadowed at least one of the main antagonists of Arc Three.

And yes, the whole 'there were prior candidates for the experiment before Coil came along' thing is my invention, but its a plausible fit into an empty part of the backstory. At least in my opinion. Seriously, who the heck would pick Coil as first choice for anything? When I think 'stable parahuman warlord candidate' Marquis is one of the first names on that list... and for all the fact that he's a motherfucking Nazi, Kaiser's one of the second.

So they didn't use Marquis because by the time they were ready to move he was Birdcaged, and they didn't use Kaiser because they were hoping for a better candidate than Swastika Man and it was simpler to procrastinate a bit back then, and then the experiment is finally a "now" thing with Coil and its just about to get to the good part and whoops, Coil just died.

Eh, fuck it, swap in the guy whose resume we sent back last time. It's a patch, its not supposed to be perfect!

That's what Cauldron is thinking right now.

And y'know, Alexandria does have a legitimate point. Legitimately awful, but still a point. 'Okay, people, considering the full list of epic crimes against humanity we've already all done here without losing a minute's sleep, can anybody say with a straight face that this is our one uncrossable line? Seriously?'

And yes, Emily Piggot alone with her thoughts in the middle of the (well, day, as she's crashing from an all-nighter). Useful to note where her head is right now, plus, also gets in more on what's happening in the Bay immediately post-Coil.

Last edited: Oct 15, 2019

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cliffc999

Jul 15, 2019

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cliffc999

cliffc999

Jul 18, 2019

#2,815

Evolution 3.1

It was several weeks before I actually got to meet the Wards.

One of the reasons for the delay was of course so that the that the public reveal of Brockton Bay's newest Ward would have no apparent connection to the Fortress Incident, as it was now being referred to. The revelation that Coil, once thought to be one of the city's minor parahuman ganglords, had actually been a major player with significant underground forces in Brockton Bay and had built a Bond villain base so hardened that it had taken some of Dragon's most powerful technology to crack it open had certainly made a major public splash. A splash that fortunately been so large that the revelation that it had actually been a rescue operation for me was able to be invisibly buried beneath it. So while I'd been quite thoroughly outed to the PRT, Coil's now-confirmed death and the total collapse of his organization plus Coil's own internal compartmentalization meant I still should have a valid secret ID as far as anyone else was concerned.

The arrests of the Undersiders concurrently with the Fortress Incident was seen as having tangential relation to the whole affair at best, with the 'failed industrial espionage job that had led the PRT to Coil/Fortress' theory on PHO being the one that had the most popular acceptance. Yes, the PRT had gotten them all. Tattletale had of course been taken during the base assault itself, but Bitch/Hellhound had been wrapped up shortly before they'd hit the base when she'd made herself too visible on one of her anti-dogfighting raids in Empire 88 territory at the exact wrong time. Apparently her teammates had left her so far out of the loop on their 'special job' for Coil that she hadn't even known what they were doing, simply that they were off on a mission that didn't include her. So she'd gone out on her own to take care of some private business and the Protectorate had taken her right off the street.

The Undersiders had really hosed themselves with what they'd done to me. And I'm going to admit, watching karma crash down on them step by step was very satisfying. Still, I'd had done my best to make sure I didn't exult in it too much. Helping deliver just punishment for someone's crimes was one thing, but going 'Ha-ha, I can get away with being cruel to you and rejoice in your misery! ' was outright pulling an Emma. And I was calling a big fat nope on doing that! Some enemies, such as Zion or the Endbringers, deserved absolutely no mercy from anyone and certainly weren't going to get any from me. But the world wasn't exclusively divided into people who were on my side and things to ruthlessly crush.

Which is why when I'd made the original file upload to Dragon from the heart of Coil's lair I'd made sure to highlight some particular items for her attention. Of course many of those things were items of immediate tactical relevance, such as exact base schematics and composition and the base alert procedures for knowing how many guards they'd be up against and where they were supposed to be. But several highlights were things that I'd felt were simply too likely to be overlooked by the PRT in the rush if their noses weren't rubbed in it, such as Rachel Lindt's special needs situation.

Because as much as I was really not happy with the Undersiders for what they'd done to me and disgusted at what they'd been willing to already do to others in general, that didn't mean I had to go overboard about it. And even if I didn't want to reveal my meta-knowledge or my unique perspective on the situation, if I was going to be handing a datadump to the authorities anyway then I could at least do good by making sure it was handed over in the right order and with the right emphasis. And it's not as if anyone reviewing the case would find it at all curious I'd taken a moment out to go 'Please pay special attention to the stuff that will help you catch the people who actually kidnapped me!' It's not like I didn't have a perfectly understandable grudge.

But I'd done my best to get and by great good fortune had actually succeeded at getting Rachel the most lenient treatment of them all, both for her total uninvolvement in the breaking of 'the unwritten rules' and because she was seen as mentally unable to stand trial. The PRT psychologists were of course recommending prolonged confinement but also recommended giving her a modified therapy approach involving someone who really understood canine psychology, as well as allowing her at least limited access to therapy dogs as a reward/privilege in return for her continued cooperation. Even despite the obvious downsides of giving her access to dogs. I didn't know how or where her story would end, but at least she had a chance now.

The nice thing about Coil's positively German-esque obsession with record keeping is that there was a valid excuse for almost anything being noted in there, including full psych profiles of the Undersiders and what Coil had seen as their most useful control levers. Which is how I'd also made sure Dragon and the PRT knew the whole scoop behind Aisha Laborn's crappy situation, the special needs of her case that she wasn't having met, and the abusive neglectful guardians that the system had failed her in escaping. And exactly how Grue's desperation over that had allowed Coil to steer him around like a hand puppet. Not that I felt much if any mercy towards him for how utterly stupid he'd been in his "plans" (by courtesy so called) to "fix" his sister's situation, but the fact that he'd been such an epic failure at doing it himself didn't mean that it wasn't something that still needed doing.

For that matter, only Coil's promise of a payoff in the form of finalizing a custody transfer to Brian was what had finally gotten him to agree to help kidnap me, even if he'd believed right up until the moment I'd revealed my abilities that it had been merely a play to get a lever on the Dockworker's Union by kidnapping the perfectly mundane daughter of its hiring manager. So its not like Aisha's name wouldn't have leapt right out at the investigators during the follow-up to my case anyway, I'd just further emphasized the context.

Which is why despite her situation not earning Grue much if any leniency on his sentence, Aisha was at least now out of there and into a foster home with people who'd worked with ADHD children before and under the supervision of somebody in Social Services who actually did their job. And even if that had taken special privilege and special circumstances to invoke instead of being what all children in her situation should be able to expect from the government, just because I couldn't make the world perfect today didn't mean I was excused in walking past someone in immediate need because I was 'too busy' on a long-range Utopia. Or in going 'If everybody can't have it right now, why bother giving her any?' Even if all of John's memories had painted Aisha Laborn out to be an amoral brat without much redeeming feature, I still had empathy for children who'd gotten into bad situations where all the people who should be helping them weren't helping at all. And so, I'd done what I could.

Heck, even if I had been willing to be a Hard Woman making Hard Choices about it I'd still have done Aisha that solid. The last thing I wanted was a homicidally-enraged Imp shanking me on a street corner somewhere and me dying without even knowing how or why. Her power would have made for a terrifying assassin had she merely been given a different motivation, so if I could head off that trigger event before it even got started then I certainly would.

Oh yes, they'd caught up to Grue and Regent both within a day. The address of the Undersiders' current lair had been in Coil's files, after all. Regent was more than experienced enough at living as a fugitive to deduce that they'd been blown the instant the first public announcement of Coil's capture had been made, and so he'd immediately given Grue the warning and then grabbed his bugout bag and headed out on his own. Not that that had helped him, because Dragon had taken my kidnapping a little personally. And so she'd been willing to donate enough of her time to her no-sparrow-shall-fall act re: public camera searches to make sure neither of the remaining Undersiders were getting anywhere. When she'd caught Regent on a security feed from the Amtrak station, her tipoff had had a PRT fast-response team already waiting for him at the next stop.

Picking up Grue had been even easier. The first place he'd gone was of course to where his sister was living, to ask her to come with him. The fact that she'd agreed to hadn't saved him from an additional charge of kidnapping on top of mine, because taking a minor out against the wishes of her legal guardian with intent to cross a state line with her was still kidnapping even with the minor's enthusiastic cooperation.

Tattletale had managed to escape additional charges for her non-cooperation in defusing the self-destruct because the official story was, of course, that she had cooperated. Its not like the PRT could actually write into the official record that they'd handcuffed the stupid bitch to a console. But as disappointing as it was, the fact remained that they'd gotten away with stuff like that in the past before and would get away with it again, and had gotten away with it this time. And yes, these were the same people I was now going to go work for/work with. I'd already known it would be a compromise solution when I'd first put it into the contingency plans, let alone when I'd finally agreed to it.

Also the handcuffs had been my idea in the first place so I'd really be a hypocrite if I tried registering a moral objection to it now. But for the record, I'm still blaming the radiation sickness for that one.

Still, all the charges Tattletale was legitimately up for combined with her inability to just take a knee at the end and make a peace gesture without being forced to it had drowned out any possible goodwill her situation might otherwise have given her. And had left her still facing a long long stretch, even without terrorism charges on top. Kinda hard for you to plead being originally recruited at gunpoint when you were visibly living large and actively cooperating without any guns involved for quite a time, right up to the moment when Dragon and Vista had done their thing. Or when you hadn't tried to turn Coil in at any earlier time, once you'd had knowledge of which PRT officers were honest and which were Coil's… or for that matter could simply have hopped a train to Boston or New York and turned herself in there. Its not like somebody with a Thinker rating like hers could get away with pleading 'But I hadn't thought of that!', even when by all appearances she actually hadn't. Ah, Tattletale, you were the dumbest smart person I've ever met and never wish to meet again.

And so to cut a long story short the Undersiders except Rachel were all facing long prison sentences, and Rachel a psychiatric sentence. And while none of the others were even considered for it, Regent had gotten the full Birdcage treatment because his prior activities as Hijack had meant at least two severe enough strikes already on his record to add to his third strike on me. Ouch. I can't say it wasn't legitimate, but still, ouch.

But enough about the Undersiders, back to talking about me. Another reason for the delay re: me meeting the Wards had of course been the negotiations prompted by my father's promise to get the best deal for me that he possibly could. I'd done my best to refocus him onto what was most important to me (lightening up a little on the Tinker restrictions, allowing me to continue my special access to Dragon, etc.) as opposed to what was most important to him (safety guarantees, fewer hours, higher salary and benefits, a better percentage on my merchandising – hey, Protectorate heroes got action figures, Wards got action figures, and that meant we got royalties on those action figures, future commercial rights for my Tinkertech, and so forth).

I was pretty surprised when Mr. Barnes turned out to be the lawyer that my dad had been able to get to help us, pro bono, to review the fine details of the contract and make sure we weren't being taken advantage of in the fine print. I wasn't quite how to feel about that, to be honest. But him and my dad had been friends, and I chose to believe that Emma's father might feel that he also had some amends to make, both to Dad and to me, for his own past failures at being a dad to Emma.

Also, since I'd already put a charge into Lawyer way back when to make sure we weren't being taken advantage of on the out-of-court settlement with the school district, that allowed me to discreetly review Mr. Barnes' contributions to our case and make sure he was sincere. As it turned out, he was actually trying his best to help us. Whew.

And a charge into PRT Bureaucracy synergized with that and my other already-existing skills to be able to give my dad intelligent and helpful commentary throughout the process without doing more than looking like I was just paying close attention and being naturally smart. And this was what my father legitimately did for a living and he was damned good at it in his own right, so we did all right for ourselves. Even despite the the fact that the PRT was certainly not going to just give us the moon for free no matter how much they'd rather have Neutron Bomb Girl working with them rather than running free across the landscape doing God knows what, we got the best deal we could reasonably afford even if certain prior concerns meant that the Tinker review cycle would still be a thing for me. It turned out that many of the things said about said review cycle on PHO and elsewhere actually had been exaggerations. Not all of them, but certainly some of them.

So, despite my dad actually taking a leave of absence from the Dockworkers' so he could spend eight hours a day in conference rooms making the PRT's legal department desperately wish that Danny Hebert had been a hardware store owner instead of a veteran union negotiator, things were eventually wrapped up. And to be fair, its not as if the PRT were morally offended by Wards parents who'd actually read contracts and get legal advice about them before signing anything, however frustrating the process could get. One of the PRT legal team who'd misinterpreted my concern as impatience had even taken me aside to give me some friendly advice that I should see all of this as proof that my dad really cared about me and not just see this as an obstacle between me and my going out in costume right away. Which was nice of them even if they'd completely misunderstood what was going on.

Then there was the time I spent with the PR consultants. While I'd gone in with the determination to willingly accept any cape name and theming offered that was marginally less obnoxious than 'Princess Butterfly' or similar absurdities, their collective sigh of relief at "Oh my God finally one of the kids listens to us without needing hours and hours of beating sense into their heads first." earned me enough goodwill that I'd been able to get them to look at my costume sketches right off the bat instead of them having me pick one out of their scrap books. A single charge in Visual Design had of course let me make some really good sketches to offer them, so I walked out with their sanction for a so-dark-blue-it-was-looked-black tech-themed reinforced bodysuit with dull silver 'circuitry' all over it, woven in an irregular pattern that suggested both microprocessors and Tron lines without being too obvious about either. They'd even accepted my proposed Tinkertech feature that let me swap out the colors for a reverse-palette of dull silver with dark-blue highlights. In fact, seeing that feature prompted the senior consultant to suggest a cape name of "Binary" for me, and while it was hardly the flashiest cape name ever I'd decided that I liked it. It had a nice solid sound, it made sense as a name for a Tinker who'd shown a lot of handiness with computers, and it wasn't an immediate invitation to bad jokes.

Of course I'd originally made that color scheme and those switchable day and night modes as a way to have my costume be useful as digital pattern-disruption urban camouflage, but if I could do that and also make it look enough like a superhero art project to leave PR completely ignorant of why I'd really picked it and get a decent cape name out of it in the bargain, then we could call that one a win-win.

Which is how Binary of the Brockton Bay Wards would be making her public debut in just a few days.

Another thing that had demanded quite a bit of my time during those weeks was, of course, getting back in shape. Amy had given me that promised follow-up a day after she'd saved my life (again) and even done her best to clean out a lot of the damage I'd done to my system with adrenal overstress and not allowing sufficient recovery time after the first near-death experience, but some things simply needed rest, calories, and scientifically-optimized exercise. Still, I had almost a month to work in and by the end of that month I could have been Winslow's star jock just for the asking, notably above even Sophia (who had been an exceptional female athlete even if she'd been utterly horrid as a person, let's be fair) in many respects. My build meant that I'd have to worry about situations where overwhelming momentum or mass were still a factor, and I would just not get around that without using technological boosts, but the next thugs who tried to come at me would still not get off anywhere near as easily as Coil's mooks had.

Because in addition to my physical conditioning I'd also given myself a notable upgrade to my martial arts skills, straight-up dumping 2 charges into Martial Arts as a comprehensive broad-based course in all the fundamentals and a good solid understanding of design principles. I might have made it three charges except that my new life philosophy was "If I'm caught without my tools then I have already lost the first round", so outside of the necessary rehab I was not making PT my highest time priority. I'd certainly needed to correct my mistakes of trying to use just generic PRT CQC training and my prana-bindu boosts to do all the work instead of tailoring a combat style specifically to my needs, body type, and physical stats, but now I had all the knowledge necessary to do that and could work on refining mastery into grandmastery later.

Even with it all mostly having been various flavor of quiet setup work, the time between the Fortress Incident and my scheduled Wards debut had hardly been idle, after all.

Because when it came to the actual meat of the matter, my Tinkering, I first had to finish making my costume. I couldn't wear what wasn't there, after all. So among all the other things I'd needed to make time for during those several weeks was both Tinkering and then going through meetings about my Tinkering. The PRT had been fairly generous in fronting me some resources for an initial set of protective gear so I could at least get my first costume and set of body armor done.

Regarding the review process, I'd held back a bit on my first round of submits to things that they would have trouble finding any reason to object to or that they already knew I could build. It's not like they didn't want a Ward hitting the street with really good body armor, after all. So I gave them things such as form-fitting low-profile impact-absorbing body-armor, upgraded ballistic cloth, a full-head-covering armored helmet with advanced faceplate HUD, a production-model version of my zap sticks (two of them in paired leg holsters), a utility belt for further 'approved' gizmo expansion, etc, etc.

Now, revealing that I could make Tinkertech that was mass-producible and maintainable by mundanes would have freaked everyone out, but fortunately the Worm v1 CYOA gave you full control over your powers. Including the ability to switch any of them on and off, or even to dial-a-yield their intensity, and to do so selectively. So I simply took the feature that anti-black-boxed my Tinkertech as a matter of course and cranked it back down so that all my work would be partially black-boxed. Other Tinkers could at least get the vague gist and some clear pieces and principles here and there, and there would be those rare moments of clarity where it would make sense even to conventional science, but nothing that fell outside the various outliers that previously known Tinkers had already established. Dragon's prior total comprehension of my submits to her would be credited as both a lucky break and the fact that Dragon's power was already understood as the ability to comprehend and reverse-engineer lots of other Tinkertech.

The review board had straight-up rejected the zap rifle, though, even after I'd demonstrated 150% safety and guaranteed non-lethality was built into the design, simply because the image of a Ward running around with something looking like an assault rifle was an outright NOPE. But I'd at least gotten them to agree to letting me put zap beams into my forearm launchers, so I still had them. When I had some time later to figure out a good excuse for coming up with an effective and safe paralysis drug that could be dart-injected, and hopefully get them to approve combat pharmaceuticals beyond my already demonstrated chem sprayer, then I'd add armor-piercing drug darts to my forearm launchers too. I certainly had no plans to go looking for Lung, to name just one person a chemically-based quick incapacitator would be useful for, but that didn't mean I'd have a guarantee of not finding him anyway. It's not like that hadn't already happened with Coil!

I'd also gotten them to agree to officially sending the zap rifle specs to Dragon to see if they could be made into a viable PRT general-issue non-lethal weapon, as had already been pulled off in the past with an obscure Tinker's invention that she'd been able to refine into mass-production containment foam. So, that was at least the first brick out of that wall…

I was a little annoyed at my particular restrictions in Dragon's case. Not that I hadn't intended my original association with her to be a huge public sponsorship for me anyway, but thanks to the security concerns both surrounding the Fortress Incident in general and Director Piggot's point in particular that letting it be widely known that I was a possible hostage to use against Dragon would be an epically bad idea, I was basically forbidden from telling anyone who didn't already know about our connection.

Which meant no public crediting for any work I did with her, no open Tinker collabs, and virtually no one brought into the loop who wasn't already there. We'd managed to successfully argue that I should at least be allowed to tell the Wards because the alternative was me continually lying by omission to people who were supposed to be my teammates and the epically bad team synergy that could come from that, plus them all being supposed to be security-cleared and NDA'ed anyway. But at the moment the circle of trust re: 'Dragon's secret apprentice' was being kept narrow enough that it would be notably more secret than it was apprentice.

Look, I could deal with it just so long as Dragon was still paying serious attention to my contributions, which God bless her she entirely was. These projected Endbringer-killers certainly weren't going to build themselves and I didn't imagine I'd have much luck getting them authorized for building in the Rig's workshop either.

Not that I'd shown her any Endbringer-killers just yet, I first had to get her believing in me more. Right now I was helping her with her Endbringer tracking program, and since between my Computer Programming and my Endbringer Physiology knowledge I could have done the job by myself in a few days I'd certainly be able to wow her socks off by having brilliant insights that helped us finish the job by the end of February. It still wouldn't be a perfect Endbringer attack prediction program simply because the sensor grid to all the necessary data around the world to make it perfect didn't physically exist, but it would give warnings at least as good as her canon version had. And once that program was up and proving a success, then it would be time to start the serious anti-Endbringer collab.

And speaking of collabs, since I didn't want to give myself away as an Everything Tinker just yet I'd held off on actually putting any movement powers such as a flight harness into my gear. Kid Win already had working antigrav tech for his hover platform, so once I was officially in as a Ward I could just "Tinker collab" with him and hey, it turns out that if we both put our heads together we can miniaturize his antigrav tech for easier use by both him and me. No suspicions, right?

In fact, I hoped to be getting a lot of mileage out of 'Tinker collab! Hey, isn't synergy great?' in the near future as an excuse to how I could keep doing so many things, by apparently conforming to the whole "There is no 'I' in 'team'" ideal they tried to teach kids anyway. Now this all depended on if Kid Win and I could successfully work together, of course, but I wasn't really expecting to find out that all of the meta-knowledge telling me the Wards weren't jerks was just fanon and not canon. Even 'Trust But Verify' assumes some measure of trust first, after all. And I certainly wasn't intending to be anything but nice on my end.

As is, so far I'd managed to successfully convince the PRT that I was "merely" a dual-focus tinker who was still only partly sure of her own specializations but already knew she was really good with computers and quantum computers and also had found herself very able at making protective gear and personal defense options when she'd been thrown headfirst into a threatening situation. Since both dual-focus Tinkers, combat Tinkers, and computer Tinkers were a thing and the exact circumstances of my trigger event would by the PRT's prior experience be highly likely to produce a dual-focus Tinker or a combat-themed Tinker, they had every reason to believe it. Likewise, my 'secondary powers' of mind-over-body and exceptional agility and reflexes for a teenaged girl were tagged as a very minor Brute rating alongside my Tinker rating and considered perhaps a bit odd but hardly a cause for major suspicion, given that 'almost died' trigger events were well-known for producing Brutes.

And I certainly hoped they'd be willing to believe that the radiation bomb was a one-off combination of ultimate desperation and the quantum-mechanics elements of the bomb being a synergy both of my suspected Tinker focuses and not an indication that I actually was a full-on WMD tinker. I'd certainly done all I could in my overall presentation to set up such a belief. Because even though the Director seemed not more than rationally concerned by it and several of the others not even that much, Armsmaster was still quietly freaking out about that radiation bomb. I was just lucky he wasn't the sole voice in my Tinker review process, and that I'd also taken care all of my early submits had been such conservative, sensible, well-documented choices, or else I'd still be stuck arguing about the zap sticks.

Admittedly most Protectorate Tinkers, even underage ones, weren't vetted quite like me but I had to admit that 2000 rads of hot ionizing death that could far too easily be scaled up to city-frying doomsday weapon wasn't exactly the ideal first impression. My bad! I was really going to have polish the old apple for a while to convince them it would be okay to ease up, but I could do that.

Now, given that part of the Wards contract was that the PRT was allowed to do unscheduled home visits to check for unauthorized Tinkering in the basement because not even rocks were stupid enough to believe that the kids wouldn't try at least once and the PRT certainly wasn't, and we hadn't been able to negotiate that clause away despite all our efforts… well, I intended to be able to get an off-site workshop set up somewhere once I'd cleared out my current to-do list a little more. For right now I was concentrating on gaming the system and not going full outlaw on it. Everything was a case of juggling priorities right now, after all.

But given that Armsmaster had already twice used his inspection privileges just in the past couple of weeks to come around and scan the house looking for any signs of unlogged Tinkering, which was far more than the usual frequency of such visits? Yeah, that meant not even trying for any basement factory for me just yet. Unexpected and certainly unwelcome, but I'd just have to find a way to deal with it. And it's not that I was actually forbidden to Tinker in my own basement, I just wasn't allowed to hide separate projects from the PRT. "Just".

Honestly, while I hadn't expected to immediately make an awesome first impression with Armsmaster given his nature and general sociability neither had I expected that Armsmaster's first reaction to me was to act as if I were guilty until proven innocent of being the second coming of Bakuda. Or given that she wasn't actually a thing in Brockton Bay yet – her recruitment by the ABB hadn't been until towards the end of March in canon and my Wards debut was scheduled for February 18th -- the first coming of Bakuda.

But at least I'd managed to put a spike in that.

Worm canon was actually not explicit on the when and where of Bakuda's trigger event, and there was only some vague words from the author on the why. But one of the most popular and consistent Worm fanons was that Bakuda had been named Grace and that she'd triggered due to her ego not being able to accept failing an exam and combined that with epically unhealthy levels of student stress and burnout. And it was actually mostly-confirmed by the author that her first criminal act immediately post-trigger had been trying to hold the campus of Cornell University hostage with bombs in several buildings, and that she'd ended up in Brockton Bay and recruited by the ABB by the end of March. So I had hope that early February was early enough to still be before her trigger event, and that I could head it off.

Because if I could do that, then John's meta-knowledge told me I would clear out the next several months in Brockton Bay. Having taken down Coil so early and completely and the Undersiders all being put away meant I'd already butterflied away such things as the Lung Fight and what that had led to, the Empire-88 Mass Identity Reveal and what that had led to, the arrival of the Travelers in Brockton Bay and thus the Echidna incident and what that had led to, and so forth. Plus, without the existence of Skitter or the Undersiders still being around there would be no Bank Robbery and thus no kick-start to the part of Amy's insanity spiral and what that had led to.

So the major things still left on the canon pain schedule for Brockton Bay in the near future were first the Gang War, which I didn't know a single-point way to avert just yet but I could at least hope that I already had. And the second would be Bakuda's rampage, which I definitely know a single-point way to avert… if I could find her in time. So I'd start at Cornell.

Even from a publicly-accessible wireless hotspot in Brockton Bay, some Tinker-assisted hacking easily put me inside the Cornell University student administration systems. Not long after that a cross-referenced search for female students from Masachusetts (Bakuda canonically had a strong Boston accent) turned up a Grace Koizumi from Boston. A simple dive into her student transcript confirmed that she was an engineering student, that she had multiple notations on her record regarding 'poor interpersonal action' with other students, and that she was still regularly attending class.

Good. Still pre-trigger. Although it clearly won't be long…

Grace's personal computer was plugged into the college LAN for convenience's sake and access to online educational resources, meaning that since I'd already back-hacked through Cornell's Internet gateway I could get in there as well. Going through the hard drive on her computer turned up a rather disturbing impression of diary entries and rants, as the intensely private Grace apparently had nowhere else to vent to. It read exactly like what you'd expect to find in the diary of a school shooter as they were still in the ramp-up to final crazy phase and had yet to crack. Which made sense because that's exactly what the-woman-who-would-be-Bakuda was.

So, praying to God that the stress of being arrested wouldn't make her Trigger even worse, I used my hacked admin account to her computer to start e-mailing some of the death threats she'd made in private to her own diary to the e-mail accounts of the students she'd actually written them about.

Sure enough, my follow-up a couple days later turned up the notation in campus records that a Grace Koizumi had been temporarily withdrawn from the student body as the results of an internal campus investigation had turned up a very disturbing pattern, and medical intervention was noted. Let's hope that the Thorazine they're giving her in the psych ward keeps her from triggering any time soon, if ever. Let's hope the therapy actually works.

Let's hope that with Bakuda at least delayed and hopefully done, and everything else that the downfall of Coil has already prevented, Brockton Bay can get a quiet year at last.

Author's Note: This chapter had already been partly written before I went in for surgery, so even on the meds I was still able to finish it up and get it out. Now I have to get back to the Arc Three overall design, as well as work on my recovery, so, don't expect a follow-up soon.

But at least I'm able to get out Taylor's cape name and identity, a good outline of what her plans for the immediate future (or at least what they will be until and unless some new black swan event blows them up for her, because the first casualty of any battle is always the battle plan), wrap up what's happening with the Undersiders, and throw Bakuda's Birdcaged ass on top of the already immense pile of Stations of the Canon that have just been butterfly bombed into oblivion.

So, enjoy the "cold open" of Arc Three and I hope to see you all when I finally get fully back into the writing zone that I'm still kinda wobbling around the outskirts of.

Oh, and to answer an earlier reader question, Blank only works against hostile uses of Thinker abilities so that's how Taylor keeps her actions from creating too epic a blind spot. If your path and Taylor's aren't really set up to cross in a bad way, you don't get much if any signal interference.

Edited to resolve major continuity error: I blame the meds for having me confuse Cornell University with MIT. As Taylor could not possibly reach the former on a day trip, a much less dramatic and more remote-control solution to the Bakuda problem had to be retconned in. The prior version is now zotzed as if it never was. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Bakuda has no canon first name in canon, let alone a last name, so I just made it up.

Last edited: Oct 15, 2019

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Jul 18, 2019

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cliffc999

Jul 19, 2019

#3,099

Evolution 3.2

(Taylor's nightmare is given more detail in the Sidestory "Golden Ending?").

Why did I feel as if it still had not been enough?

My eyes shot open and I realized that I was still in my own bed. My gasp of terror stuck in my throat as Invictus came crashing down, and I didn't release it until I was sure that I'd caught my breath and wouldn't make any noises that might wake Dad up.

It had been that fucking nightmare again.

I'd been having them at least every several nights since I'd first woken up in the hospital. They all had a common theme, one where I abandoned my life and my morals to concentrate on ruthless progress, justifying myself with the rationale that my mission was too important to allow me to take unnecessary risks or delays.

Sometimes I voluntarily sought out Cauldron and immediately volunteered for service as their living weapon, leading to scenarios where we had war across the heavens with indescribable technological terrors at our command and the implied ending was me along with Cauldron's survivors optimally poised to rule the semi-shattered aftermath of civilizations.

Sometimes I joined Coil or the Empire Eighty-Eight, smiling sweetly up at them as they dreamed of using my "young and vulnerable" self and I ended up using them instead via various technological Master effects I'd created, from hypnotics to nanites. I'd eventually make them all all my puppets as I quietly assembled my world-breaking technology behind their corporate fronts. Those generally ended with the implication that Earth-Bet's civilization would continue along superficially as it was. Just with me possessing all the real power, playing both cops and robbers via my pawns while no one could deny me anything.

Sometimes, like in the nightmare I'd just finished, I went for it alone in various flavors of techno-Khepri. I'd find a way to upgrade myself into some sort of post-Singularity being and just tear the Entities from the heavens on my own. Those nightmares usually had collateral damage counts ranging from planetary to indescribable. The most recent one had been an exception in that I'd only killed one man, Armsmaster.

And I didn't know what was worse, the nights where after I awoke I couldn't actually remember the particular Tinkertech theories that I'd been using in my nightmare scenario… or the nights where I could.

But this was also the first time the nightmare had run long enough that it didn't just fade out on a vague dream-ending of Zion dying and an implication of what happened next, but an actual fully detailed aftermath. One that remained as sharp and clear as any dream could, right up until the moment I "died".

So no, I didn't need an Inspired Inventor-given psychology degree to get the message. My subconscious fears were revolving around the sheer immensity of the potential power I'd been granted, the incalculable potential I had to eventually change the world, and my doubts as to whether or not I should.

Every hero Tinker of course told themselves that they wanted to make the world a better place. And there were indeed so many unambiguously good things I could potentially do. Not just things like killing Endbringers or inventing better weapons for the PRT or the police to let them catch more villains, but things like clean energy, pure water, medical tech, etc.

I had potentially unlimited power, which meant that I bore potentially unlimited responsibility. But no even remotely human mind could possibly carry the load of unlimited responsibility without feeling unlimited guilt, and unlimited guilt would drive any remotely human soul to howling madness. Even Invictus would only let you remain a functional broken person, not a well one.

It was a philosophical trap that could only be escaped by consciously accepting a lesser role, to see yourself as just a girl and not a nascent goddess. To believe that a higher power – and I didn't mean ROB – was ordering the universe and that things happened for a reason, and that if you tried your best to be a good person then at worst you wouldn't be too bad.

But that did nothing to stifle that inner voice that kept crying out 'That's just an excuse for you to pretend you're not as strong as you are! You have a responsibility to use all your powers, as long and often as you can, and any failure on your part to do less means that all that potential blood is on your hands!'

Yeah, there was a reason that I'd 'clicked' with Amy Dallon as soon as I'd met her. Because I could empathize. And it was an example of how perversely human minds could work that I could simultaneously accept that Amy was being too hard on herself (if it wasn't her mother being too hard on her) and that there was nothing wrong with her being a finite human being however potentially unlimited her power was. With wishing that she could just take some time to be Amy Dallon and not the all-healing Panacea. Even though every time I told myself the same thing, that I wasn't committing an irredeemable sin by letting myself spend some time being Taylor Hebert rather than Inspired Inventor, I never quite believed me.

I sometimes wondered what nightmares Amy had about going too far, about losing herself in her power and never coming back. I also wondered how often she had them. But I never wondered if she had them. I didn't even have to ask her, or read anything about it in Worm. I knew.

As I lay awake and pondered all these things for at least the tenth time, I realized that this time I was reaching at least slightly different conclusions. Or that if I was reaching the same conclusions, I felt more resolved about them. My final Khepri nightmare and its definitive ending had at least made me realize there was a difference between jumping on a grenade to save someone else, and methodically amputating your own human sensibilities because it let you move faster.

That last nightmare where even only one man's murder had still not made the scenario clean enough had told me, clearly and unambiguously, that the only thing sacrificing 'everything' to get the job done truly meant was that when the job was done, your life would be too. And that the only acceptable amount of deliberate cold-blooded murder of innocents to get the job done was 'zero'. Even one was too many. Accidents were one thing, failures were one thing, but outright pushing the button on someone for expediency? Just. Plain. Wrong.

The Hard Woman making Hard Choices was an illusion, a trap. Depending on context you could consider it either a self-justifying fallacy or a nihilistic endpoint, but however you parsed the word salad it all ended up in the same place. It was a dead end. If the situation was such that you truly could not save the day without having to cross that particular event horizon, then you just weren't coming back.

And so if you believed that in this universe things happened for a reason, then you also had to believe that it was possible to save the day without needing to take that last fatal plunge. And I don't mean in the sense of 'dying on the battlefield', because heroes risked that as a matter of course and were right to do so. I meant in the sense of 'sacrificing your own soul to take your enemy's with you'. No. That was wrong, because it had to be.

It wasn't wrong to concentrate on individuals, on people, on connections and the human touch, instead of abandoning that all in pursuit of 'what was important'. People were important. Connections were important. They were what made us human. And ditching your humanity as an acceptable trade for saving the world was a self-defeating paradox, because your humanity was the only thing that let you really see the world. To know it was a place where real people with real feelings lived and wasn't just a game theory problem or a mathematical abstract.

How could you possibly save anything after you'd already forfeited your ability to actually perceive it as it was, or as it should be?

So yes, I believed that, because I had to believe that. Because the alternative was to become someone that would come to see the world as theirs to save, or theirs to change, or theirs to protect, or theirs to destroy. And that was the fundamental error that had been underlying all my nightmares. Choosing to see the world as mine instead of as ours. Because no matter how much power that Inspired Inventor could give me, it wasn't just my world. And it never would be.

This world, and all worlds, belonged to all of us. And we all belonged to them. And even if the world or worlds needed someone unique like me to help them fight the battles that they never could, that still didn't mean I could ever let myself lose track of this key insight.

And if letting myself try to help the world one person at a time, starting with those nearest to me and working outwards, was what helped me to never lose track of that important a principle… then that's what I'd do.

Of course, even with all that being true that didn't mean I could or should focus solely on the immediate concerns of my local environment and never look at the big picture, but as with all the things the trick was trying to find the proper balance between all your competing priorities and responsibilities. That was called life.

So I'd keep one eye on the horizon and the other on the next step in front of me, and try to do the best I could with what I had and not kill myself with guilt even if what I did wasn't perfect and never would be.

I sighed. That's what I'd been already trying. and I was still laying awake at night after nightmares like this. But as plans went it would just have to do until a better one came along.

My alarm clock beeped just as I'd finished repeating my affirmations to myself and processing my latest insight, and I looked over at it. 6:30am, February 18th, 2011.

Time to get up and get dressed. This is the day Binary debuts on the Wards.

But first, it was time for high school.

"So, today's the big day?" Amy said softly, using the schoolyard prison-whisper every student knew for talking about private topics in public. We were sitting in our usual seats together at a table one down from the throne where Victoria Dallon, leader of the Very Populars at Arcadia High School and unquestioned queen of her domain, would hold court over all she surveyed.

Up until now Amy had sat at her sister's right hand because Vicky of course wouldn't make her sister sit anywhere else. It didn't matter that Amy was mousy, reclusive, and socially not awesome when Vicky and the girls that gravitated around her were the exact opposite of those things, Victoria Dallon loved her sister and was certainly not going to cut her out or let anyone else cut her out over such trivial concerns. So if you went to Arcadia then you accepted the Dallon sisters as a package deal and that was it.

The problem was that as one of God's natural extroverts, Vicky simply didn't get that introverts like Amy found being in the middle of the crowd exhausting and not stimulating. That to them social interaction was a thing they wanted to do in measured amounts, in-between periods of just quietly being by themselves to recharge their batteries. Its not that introverts felt emotions differently than other people. They cared and had friends and enemies and loved and hated as deeply as anyone else. They just expressed differently, and had different… social energy flows, you could call it.

The ideal way to express affection to an introverted friend or sibling was about the same way you'd do so with a cat. You'd let them know you were nearby and that if they felt like coming over and socializing, you'd love to have them. But then you let them have their space and decide when to make the final approach on their own time. You didn't isolate them, but you didn't just go and clasp them to your bosom or parade them at your side either.

And, yes, anybody who'd ever so much as seen Victoria Dallon could understand why Amy could get a little worn out by her sometimes, because when it came to emotional things Vicky just didn't do subtle. You were either gleefully clasped to the aforementioned bosom or else you were a disregarded part of the background as she flew on by. 'Middle ground' to Vicky was a word in the dictionary between ''Huh?' and 'What?'

So that delicate little balance that I mentioned worked great for introverts? I was still trying to figure out how I'd explain it to Vicky. It's not that she was ignorant or possessed poor social intelligence. Vicky was actually one of the smartest people in the school and it wasn't just her superhero good looks and aura powers that made her so damn charismatic. But just like doctors really sucked at diagnosing themselves, Amy was simply too close to Vicky for her to see Amy's situation at all objectively. So Vicky was simultaneously Amy's primary source of emotional support in her life and a wearying drain on her social reserves whenever they were in public together.

Huh. Now that I thought about it, that might be the reason for Amy's whole… confused emotional situation… about her sister. Having your life suck so hard that only one person in your life gave you any real emotional support was an emotionally unhealthy situation as is, but if even that one person was only a welcome relief to you when you were in private together and became just another environmental stressor when you were out in public, then yeah, that might get cross-connected with intimacy down in the subconscious.

Let alone the fact that Vicky was simply so damn gorgeous that even I felt a little gay for Glory Girl and I was as straight as Euclid's ruler. And that Amy, with the exquisitely poor timing that accompanied so many historical events in Worm, had been adopted into the Dallon family only immediately after reaching the cutoff age for the Westermarck Effect. You know, that subconscious response that kept you from perceiving the people you'd grown up in childhood with as sexual beings at all? That basically stopped working at age six and Amy had been what, seven or eight?

In fact, the more closely I observed the more I wondered if that whole aura thing had been just fanon. I mean, I certainly wished Vicky could get a better handle on that damned thing because feeling sudden bursts of excitement or anxiety whenever anything caused Mount Victoria to boil over at the next table was pretty annoying, but I had every opportunity to observe Amy's subliminal twitches as Vicky entered or left the room and Amy certainly didn't act like an addicted person would as their 'fix' either came or went. She seemed to just be somebody under conditions where anyone's feelings might get a little confused, then constantly subjected to a massive amount of completely unrelated stress which, as chronic stress did, had the effect of magnifying all emotions out of normal proportion.

Which thank God, because that meant I could hopefully help with this whole thing simply by being Amy's friend instead of having to get into some complicated psychological manipulation scenario. Which would be patronizing, possibly ethically dubious, and far too likely to explode in my face.

It was part of the high school social paradox that unless someone was Unpopular then them sitting alone at a table meant that you were required to sit down all around her and begin the social circle, but if they were sitting at a table already discussing something quietly with a friend then that plus a little body language was immediately accepted as 'Privacy Please!'. So simply by hanging out with me, Amy could get more alone time then she could by actually being alone. Look, we were all teenagers in this school and that's not exactly a form of life famous for its rationality.

As far as Vicky's opinion on the whole matter, she was just happy that her sister seemed happy and if Amy wanted to spend her time geeking out in a quiet corner with a fellow geek then sure, why not. She'd still charge over every now and then to touch base, and of course I'd first been given the hairy eyeball for a while to make sure I wasn't some social climber or jerk trying to cultivate Panacea under false pretenses – which actually had happened before -- but a quick word from Dean to her that I was actually the next Ward-to-be, after the Wards themselves had finally been informed, had then cleared up her suspicions.

Yes, I was at Arcadia. In fact, they'd fast-tracked me into Arcadia as quickly as possible after I'd had my conversation with Director Piggot. The reason for that is because they'd have had enough trouble keeping 'new girl must be the new Ward!' from occurring to everyone as it was, and they certainly didn't need to make that harder for themselves by doing something as idiotic as having my public debut and my school transfer being simultaneous.

As is, by rushing me in here back in late January my transfer looked more like 'Wait, wasn't she that girl in the locker from Winslow? I guess she just got out of the hospital and of course she can't go back to that horrible place so now she's here' as opposed to 'So, new Ward, huh?' And by the time Binary would have her big reveal I'd already have been part of the background here for several weeks, and no new girl showing up immediately after Binary's' debut would be taken as 'Huh, I guess Binary goes to the same school Shadow Stalker went to, because I don't think she was here either.' A nice little double-shuffle.

For that matter, the Locker was also a good public explanation for how and why Amy and I were sitting together. By letting it out that she'd saved my life after the Locker then well of course I'd look her up to say thank you once I got to Arcadia, and if we apparently hit it off from there…?

No, I wasn't sitting with the Wards yet. For one thing, secret ID concerns meant they didn't want to sit together with each other every day and they actually did have friends like normal kids. For another, they hadn't been told who I was -- or vice versa, but of course I'd already known -- until several days before my scheduled public debut. We'd already gotten the masks-off and introduce-each-other session out of the way before being expected to go on stage together, but we hadn't really had much of a chance to get to know each other well yet. That would come later as I settled into Wards training and console rotation and patrols.

And yes, I'd originally had plans to get my GED. Those plans were now junked. Both because from my dad's point of view it was an entirely legitimate concern that 'diploma from Arcadia' looked far better on the college application than 'GED from Brockton Bay', because the Wards were offering to pay for the full-ride, and because I certainly couldn't help Amy get herself a safe space to breathe in if I wasn't at the same school she was. It's not as if she was a Ward, even if her sister was dating one.

"Yup," I told her after first making sure we had no eavesdroppers. "The others already got the day off for the event, and I stay here for the half to maintain the optical illusion that I'm not the new one. Then I zip out right after lunch while I'm officially in the office having transition stuff with the guidance counselor, and hopefully nobody notices new girl wasn't actually on-stage during the late morning run-up."

"They put a lot of work into those optical illusions, don't they?" she said. "I honestly wonder how much the logistics cost just on you guys alone."

"Well, you know why its extra important in my case."

"Oh do I ever," she nodded. "So, still no urges to huff the sulfuric acid in chem class?"

I rolled my eyes and gave her an imitation Glory Girl shoulder punch just to let her know no hard feelings over the running trifecta gag, and she almost-smiled back.

"Nope. And speaking of unpleasant smells, I've got-" I looked at my watch. "Six minutes to dine and dash before I have to slide out and get ready to talk to the reporters."

"Good luck," she said with honest reassurance, dropping the snark for a bit before grinning. "And remember, no matter how badly you stutter you can't possibly make a worse first impression than Dennis did."

"Amy Dallon, you have the pure and kind heart of a Disney Princess-" I began.

"-in a jar in my bedroom." she finished, and we both chuckled.

"-and I'm looking forward to having a productive and inspiring time with the Brockton Bay Wards," I finished the prepared speech.

"Thank you, Binary," Deputy Director Renick said. "Now, we're willing to take a few questions from the crowd…"

"Aegis, how do you feel about your new teammate?" one reporter yelled at him.

"She's made an excellent first impression on all of us and I expect great things from her in the future," he replied smoothly. Yeah, they gave us a lot of media prep for things like this.

"Clockblocker, is it true that that you prank all new entrants to the Wards and how did you get Binary?"

Clockblocker actually sighed on hearing that one before replying with a legitimately serious tone of voice. "That rumor is not true, and I did not 'get' Binary. I know my reputation, but being deliberately cruel or obnoxious to your teammates is what a d- unintelligent person would do." he cut himself off, after deliberately saying just enough of his original word to leave it unambiguous what his opinion had been. Nice microphone skills.

Wait, did he just get in a zing at the not-so-dear departed Shadow Stalker without anybody but us even knowing what he'd said? Hah!

The Deputy Director looked like he wanted to say something, then seemed to shrug and decide that Clock's answer actually had said the right thing if not in exactly the right manner.

"Binary, what's your thoughts on how the heroic capes in Brockton Bay are outnumbered almost two-to-one by the villains and gangs?" a third reporter broke in smoothly. Ah, the ambush question. Even without any media experience, just the coaching, I was entirely unsurprised. Blood in the water brings out the sharks, after all.

"That outnumbered or not we are still here, and that we're not going anywhere." I replied calmly and without hesitation. The Deputy Director, checked before he could step in and run interference, did a little double-take and then micro-nodded at me as if in approval of how well I'd fielded it.

"Is it true that Shadow Stalker was dismissed from the Wards?" another voice called, but their having forgotten to address it to any particular Ward meant it was wide open to be grabbed by one of the adults.

"Shadow Stalker chose to withdraw from the Wards to concentrate further on her educational opportunities, and we look forward to her having an honorable career with the Protectorate in the future," the Deputy Director replied with the standard boilerplate the PRT had been using ever since Shadow Stalker had first been thrown into the memory hole, and every Ward on-stage maintained our patented neutral expressions. You learned that one fast if you had to do media appearances on a regular basis. "And we're coming up on time, so, last question?"

"Binary, what's your Tinkertech specialty?"

"I'm still going through powers testing but so far I've had a lot of success with things involving computers," I said. "And yes, that's part of why I picked my cape name."

"Thank you Binary, and thank you all," the Deputy Director said, and with that we wrapped up the press conference and headed out.

Whew. Okay, that's day one over without any disasters. Now we'll just see how this goes from here.

Author's Note: I thank whoever gave me the idea for the nightmare sequence, because that folded so neatly into character development I already had planned but hadn't quite figured out how to show. In fact, that particular inspiration let me get an entire chapter out ahead of schedule.

So yes, now you know part of what's been riding Taylor all along and how she reaffirms her beliefs to herself regularly because she has to. She's not oblivious to the tremendous weight and responsibilities upon her, she just cries on the inside. Plus, natch, her belief that her humanity must be something she preserves, or else she won't be able to do her mission properly. Because motivations matter along with actions. And because at moments like these, human beings cling to faith in things.

Also, did anyone ask for some slice of life? Because you can have some slice of life. :)

And yes, right now she's much closer to Amy than the Wards. She hasn't even met the Wards for intros until shortly before her public debut -- they didn't even find out until a couple days before the 18th that the new girl at Arcadia who's hanging out with Panacea is also their new teammate - but she's had weeks to start her friendship with Amy.

And yes, I have my own take on Amy Dallon's Vicky thing instead of just going straight for the aura, because, well, why not try something new if you can? Besides, I am an introvert IRL, even if I've never been a teenaged girl, so I can entirely write from what I know there.

Last edited: Oct 15, 2019

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cliffc999

Jul 19, 2019

#3,151

Evolution 3.3

"And this is The Console," Dennis said, pronouncing the words with deliberately stentorian tones. We were both sitting in the console room in the dedicated Wards quarters beneath the downtown PRT building, and there were no visitors scheduled, so we were masks-off and using first names.

"Yea at first you will hate it, but soon you will learn to love it as you would your Big Brother," he continued on, deliberately dropping the 1984 reference. "Because they will give you no choice."

"What, they let Wards run the dispatch center?" I asked him. "Isn't that a critical node?"

"They let us train to run the dispatch center," he replied in a much more normal voice, "but no, we're not being left alone to actually run it. This is just a mirror to the real console at HQ, and mostly we're just following along behind the duty agent as he calls the shots."

"Why wou- ohhh, because we're supposed to grow up and eventually join the Protectorate, and this way we've learned how PRT field operations are run and know all the moves and don't accidentally friendly-fire the support agents behind us because we're not on the same page."

"That's it," he nodded. "So, older brother who played team sports or military family? Because normally that's not an immediately intuitive concept to people. I needed the full explanation before I got it."

"No siblings," I said, "and my dad's in the Dockworkers. I just read a lot. A whole lot. There's basically a random library's worth of stuff up here," I said, poking a finger at my temple.

"Do you have total recall?" he asked. "Because don't let Carlos know that or else you will never get out from doing all the Wards paperwork."

"No, just a really effective cramming method I sort of worked out. I… might actually be able to teach it to other people," I continued in thoughtful realization. "I've never actually tried to, or even thought of doing that."

"Keep doing that," he said, reclining in his chair. "Thinking about and bringing up random stuff with us, that is. Chris tends to have more ideas flow for his own Tinkertech when he's bouncing them off other people then when he gets all wrapped up by himself in the lab, even if none of us are Tinkers or really understand what he's talking about. Everybody talks about Tinkering like it's all about diving deep into the solo Tinker fugue, and that actually seems to work for Armsmaster, but after watching Chris work I'm starting to wonder if more Tinker collabs wouldn't be the way to go."

"Hey, I'm all for Tinker collabs," I said. "That's one of the things I was looking forward to the most when I got here. I just haven't had a chance to really compare circuit boards with him yet because we haven't shared a shift."

"We have team bonding things a couple Saturdays per month as well, so you'll definitely have a chance to discuss it with him there if not earlier," he said, before looking around and then continuing more quietly. "Okay, I'm not pressing but I notice you didn't mention Armsmaster when you said what you were looking forward to more Tinker collabs. And he's one of the top hero tinkers in the world, I'd expect you to be all about getting a chance to learn from him. Chris definitely was when he first got here."

"If you're really asking 'Taylor, are the rumors about you and Dragon true?', the answer is 'Which ones?' I was trying to get in touch with her on PHO right before I got Coilnapped, and we have stayed in touch since if you're asking. Right now she's got a major software project I'm assistant coding on. Telecommuting is the best commuting."

"Actually, I was asking why does Armsmaster seem to have such a problem with you? Because its like the temperature drops ten degrees every time you're in the same room. And he normally leaves dealing with routine Wards stuff to Miss Militia, but ever since you've arrived he's been dropping by more often."

"Blunt truth? He thinks I'm Tinker crazy." I said, circling one finger around my ear. "As in Bonesaw crazy."

Dennis blinked in honest confusion. "He thinks you're crazy? Um, did your name and Sophia's somehow get swapped on his incident reports or something? Taylor, you know exactly why we'd know what a psycho teammate really looks like and, um, yeah. So did you have a really bad Tinker fugue once or-?"

I sighed. "How much do you already know about my rescue from Coil's base?"

"Well, I did hear about someone getting handcuffed to a console," he said, grinning.

"To cut a long story short, I got out of my cell but not out of the base. I did get a message out to Dragon but then I got re-taken, and ended up alone with Coil and him about to kill me. Velocity ran in for the save at literally the last fraction of a second. As in, the trigger was already pulled and the hammer was already falling towards the round in the chamber when Velocity got there and put his thumb in front of it."

"Damn. But even Armsmaster would understand your having a, um-"

"Episode?"

"-episode over a close call like that. So I'm a little confused."

"Assuming the hostage-taker is a total psychopath and completely untrustworthy in normal negotiation, how would you logically solve the hostage problem?"

"Wait, that sounds familiar... The hostage problem is logically insol- you're quoting Lois Bujold, aren't you? The Miles Vorkosigan series?"

"Miles had judged the hostage-problem logically insoluble; therefore, clearly the only thing to do was make it Cavilo's problem instead of his own." I quoted from The Vor Game. "Right before Velocity arrived I was trying to flip it around and take Coil hostage just like he'd taken me hostage, so he wouldn't shoot me."

"How do you do that with a gun already to your head?"

"By being crazy prepared enough to have already worried about the contingency of ending up stuck in this no-win situation before you even started your escape attempt, which as it turned out I was right about… and being crazy enough to make a, er, Tinkertech radiation grenade. As in 'Coil, I've just dosed us both with approximately 2000 rads. Your only choices are to surrender immediately so we can both get to Panacea in time, or not surrender and kill us both. And you were going to kill me anyway so you're the only person in the room with something to lose right now.' But he started to shoot me before I could tell him, but then Velocity saved me anyway so we thought it was all right, but then Coil escapes before-"

"Taylor, stop." Dennis said, palms out as if to ward me off physically, and then he lowered his hands and looked at me intently. "Are you okay? And please don't say you're fine, because what you just said is not fine at all."

"I'm coping," I said. "Trust me. I had already this conversation with the Director, and I know about the available support options."

He looked at me for a long while and sighed. "Okay, I'm about to say something really offensive and I apologize in advance, but I just have to clear the air." He stopped and continued with deliberate emphasis. "Bullshit."

I just looked at him.

"That's exactly what I mean!" he replied "You just told me about something incredibly PTSD-worthy in your recent past, then explained how it was even worse than the nightmare I was imagining, then confessed that you accidentally manslaughtered someone – even if it sounds like the bad guy did it all to himself and totally had it coming -- and then you had me direly insult you on a personal level and you still haven't so much as raised your voice. You should have gone off on me like a rocket for that last one. No normal person is that self-controlled!"

I sighed regretfully. "So, do you think I'm crazy?"

"No, I think you're repressing like crazy," he said earnestly. "I think you're bottling up more stuff than even Missy does and have even less outlet for it. I think you're going along pretending that if you don't let anyone ever see you need to vent then that means you have nothing that needs venting." He said, leaning forward pleadingly. "And Taylor, I really, really don't want to watch you have to find out the hard way how much that one won't work. Because I've been there, done that, and gotten the trigger event."

I desperately tried to think of something, anything I could say that wasn't a lie. Because… no, its not that I couldn't lie.

Its that I didn't want to.

"You already know about my trigger event, right?" I asked him.

"The Winslow locker incident? I know the outlines. We all do. They had to tell us about Sophia's real case, not the PR version."

"Something happened to me in that locker, and I mean besides my coming out a Tinker," I said. "Something… my head hasn't worked quite the same way since. I'm not irrational, and believe you me, they tested for that. But my emotions are… best analogy is, I don't have an off switch for them like my Brute rating lets me off-switch my pain sensors, but its something related to that. I have a bypass for them. My rational thoughts can be rational through almost anything because I'm still in touch with my feelings, I still know what I should be feeling, but I can simultaneously keep intellectual focus as if I wasn't actually feeling."

"And you do that all the time?" he asked a little nervously.

"Oh God no!" I said passionately, and caught his exhalation of relief. "I'm pretty sure that would make me genuinely crazy. I call it my Invictus mode, and I mark it 'For Emergency Use Only'. But used in moderation it hasn't hurt me yet, and it lets me get through intense moments without needing to vent trauma later because the, ummm, emotional charge never accumulates in the first place"

"It matters not how strait the gate / How charged with punishments the scroll / I am the master of my fate / I am the captain of my soul." he quoted from Henley's famous poem of the same name. "Good name for a power for emotional self-control. But I didn't see 'secondary Thinker rating' on your power test, just that mind-over-body thing they finally decided was a minor Brute rating and not a Thinker power."

"Dennis, I just got through explaining to you that part of my chain of command thinks I'm sprained in the membrane, and you thought I was actually going to tell them about neurological differences?" I said incredulously.

And for the first time since I'd met him I saw how Clockblocker had gained his reputation for inappropriately timed humor, because despite his best efforts he couldn't avoid snorting in laughter. "Okay, now I'm convinced you're a mentally normal teenager like the rest of us," he said. "Right down to burying dumb stuff that you're afraid would get you in trouble. Although my advice is that you'd still better find a way to fess up about that one yourself before they catch you out on it the hard way, or Miss Piggy will have you on console duty for a month when they finally do."

"She really doesn't deserve to be called that, you know," I said as gently as I could.

"Wait until you've met her for more than a recruitment pitch and tell me that again." he shot back. "I can't recall a single positive interaction with her since I got on the team."

"Have you ever seen her for anything other a mess that escalated so high they had to call her office?" I asked. "Do you think that might have had something to do with it?"

"You are a depressingly logical young woman and the fact that you likely have a point will not save you from soon enduring my formidable collection of Vulcan jokes," he replied more calmly. "Speaking of which, look! An obvious distraction!" He actually went and pointed behind me, and I didn't bother to look.

"Yes?" I said amusedly.

"Lightening the mood, can I ask you why you shook hands with me without hesitating at the intro session? Because ever since that stupid rumor about me being the compulsive 'Freeze!' prankster went around even some of the agents are afraid to let me touch them, let alone other kids."

"What did I have to lose?" I said, shrugging. "Your power doesn't do the slightest bit of permanent damage. So if you actually do it then I lose a couple minutes and now I know to never let you stand behind me with any ice cubes, and if you don't do it then I haven't offended someone who didn't deserve it."

"As I said," he replied warmly while saluting me with his soda. "You are a depressingly logical young woman."

"Just call me T'alor" I replied using the abbreviating convention for a female Vulcan name, and we both laughed.

My finally revealing the existence of Invictus to Clockblocker several days after my formal induction is what seemed to finally break the ice for me with the Wards, because before then they'd been a little standoffish. Oh, they's been entirely polite – even when the grown-ups weren't watching – but not entirely open. It hadn't occurred to me except in hindsight that the Shadow Stalker experience would have left emotional scars on them too.

Just as I might have been afraid to open myself up to Sophia's old teammates for fear of receiving more of the same treatment, they were also leery of immediately accepting Sophia's replacement on the team out of worry that I might have been a basketful of issues buried underneath a surface layer of competence like she'd been. And the part where more details you knew about the incident in Coil's base the less normal I looked certainly hadn't helped there. The details of the incident clearly hadn't been distributed across the entire team judging from Clockblocker's reaction, but from a couple things Aegis had said and the way he reacted to me I was fairly certain that he at least had been read in on the complete version of events as Wards team leader. And Gallant's reaction to me was also mixed signals, probably because Invictus had been confusing him.

But the fact that I hadn't tried to hide anything from Clockblocker when he'd asked had opened up the circle of trust, and Gallant finally relaxed with an actual explanation provided for why my emotional readings were different from anyone else's. And with Aegis helping run interference for me we got my 'secondary Thinker ability' on the rolls as an honest misunderstanding of not mentioning it during the power testing instead of a deliberate attempt to conceal it. I actually did do much of his paperwork for Aegis for the next week as a thank-you for that, as Clockblocker had joked to me about doing. Besides, as the greatest expert in PRT Bureaucracy on the team it was far easier for me than for him.

… now that I think about it, I think I've just doomed myself to being team secretary forevermore. Oh well, she who wields the pen wields at least some of the power and all that.

And it certainly wouldn't disappoint Vista's image of me for me to be the secretary because Vista was, to put it charitably, a little star-struck by me. Having been directly involved in the base assault herself meant that she'd been the next most-informed on the team after Aegis of my exact circumstances over there simply because like most precocious middle schoolers forced to spend lots of time among older kids and grown-ups, Vista had become a grand master of the fine art of eavesdropping. And that was before you factored in what a power to bend space could do to let you overhear things.

So she'd walked away from that night not only ecstatic at the opportunity to prove a key linchpin of a major Protectorate assault herself – because neither I, Dragon, nor anyone else involved could imagine how they'd have gotten into that base anywhere near as quickly and easily without Dragon and Vista to both open that tunnel – but also under the impression that the new girl on the Wards was basically every female action hero rolled into one as well as a Tinker supergenius. That much admiration is… really flattering, but also not healthy. I mean, you're just asking for an explosion of disappointed outrage the first time you're caught stubbing your toe like a normal human. So every time the topic came up, I tried to gently de-escalate.

Still, it was really hard to dislike Vista and nobody even tried to dislike Vista, even when she was being waaaaaay too intense for a twelve-year-old. She was legitimately a very good person. She didn't lie, cheat, or steal, she always did her work 100% without shirking or complaining, she didn't need constant supervision to avoid goofing off, and did I mention she was only twelve? Most of us weren't this together with our lives when we were eighteen! And she wasn't some humorless child-bot either. If you actually got her going enough to relax her posture, she could almost trade snark with Amy. Even if half of it didn't come out sounding remotely as tough as she'd intended it to.

So it really said something about horrid Vista's home life was that her parents were apparently entirely incapable of recognizing that either they'd set some impossible expectations on their child or else had gotten impossibly lucky in the kid lottery. Not that I could ask her about her home life, because one of the first things everyone else had told me after I'd arrived – out of her hearing, of course – is that you did not ask Vista about her home life. You didn't even bring up the topic. Doing that would make her go monosyllabic in a heartbeat and it could be hours before she'd relax enough to talk again. It was a sad thing to say that you were actually glad that someone's parents were completely neglecting their child's career as a Ward, but in her case it was a mercy because it meant at least she had us for a partial safe space from her own parents.

Yeah, this was not really a picture of long-term mental health here. But Vista was still coping for now, and when I asked Aegis why the hell nobody was doing anything for her permanent situation when it was this obviously horrible to anyone with one working eye, his answer made me want to vomit harder than the radiation sickness had. It also made me vow to never bring any of my problems to the Brockton Bay Youth Guard office because while they might do good work elsewhere, something must be direly wrong with the people there.

Because what kind of ultra level master con job had her parents run on Youth Guard here that YG had expended virtually all their political capital in Brockton Bay on gaining a binding court junction that said the PRT had lost the right to intervene in Vista's particular home situation, and that it was solely up to Youth Guard to make that call from now on? Out of alleged concerns that the PRT would unhealthily exploit her because she was a Shaker 9?

OK, that last one is superficially plausible. I mean, I get how it could be sold to an audience even if I couldn't really see the PRT people I was actually interacting with treat her like that. But that was still no excuse for the court to just instantly assume 'PRT bureaucracy bad, child's parents sacred, court order granted, next case!'. If family court had worked like that all the time then Family Services could never get any child out of a genuinely abusive situation.

And not even Director Costa-Brown swearing on a stack of Bibles could have gotten the Brockton Bay Wards to agree that Vista's situation was not genuinely abusive. In hindsight, now I saw part of how the hell everybody missed Shadow Stalker's mental malfunction for so long. Clearly YG's local office wasn't holding up their end at all, and that meant it took only one PRT worker goofing on the job to cause the situation at Winslow.

But right now, there was nothing we could do about it except give Vista all the emotional support she'd let herself accept from us. Well, I was basically becoming the team admin person and I did have all this II-given knowledge, so I'd see if I could manage something. In my copious free time.

Because in-between Wards training, Wards getting-acquainted, getting that Tinker collab set up with Kid Win, helping Dragon with her Endbringer tracking algorithm, using that project to start getting Endbringer data from Dragon to help me actually turn these hypothetical Endbringer weapons designs to successful-in-simulation-at-least Endbringer weapon designs I could actually submit, Arcadia, actual friendships, PR events, and a very very slow and painstaking quest towards an actual automated assembly of my very own even if I had to stealth build the fracking thing one fraction of a piece at a time in-between Armsmaster paranoia moments… well, it's a good thing I didn't sleep much.

So, during my first week on the Wards I'd managed to break the ice, start to get within their circle of trust, keep up with my training, help Dragon finish her tracking algorithms, and even begin the preliminaries for the next phase of my Tinker Cycle. At last I'd found my feet and started to gather legitimate resources. I'd thought I'd finally started to get a handle on things.

And then the Simurgh attacked Canberra.

"Taylor, it's not your fault," Chris said, letting me lean on his shoulder and cry. Dennis sat on my other side just trying to be reassuring with his presence, and Missy was hovering nearby in a nervous fret.

I wasn't even trying to use Invictus. For one thing, they all knew I had it and 'Don't let Taylor emotionally repress without an actual tactical need' was rapidly becoming as much an informal Wards SOP as 'Don't talk to Missy about her home life' or 'Don't let Chris have more than two minutes to try and explain his Tinkertech to a reporter'.

And for another thing, I wouldn't use it because I deserved to feel all of this pain. Because on the console screen I was busy watching the worst of the Endbringers condemn another city to a worse hell than death and I should known and I should have done something. But I hadn't even known that there was an Endbringer attack between the date of the Locker and the Leviathan assault on Brockton Bay. John hadn't read about that anywhere?

Gods, was there even going to be a Leviathan attack in May or would I be wrong about that too for some reason? Nothing made sense anymore!

So I was busy sitting in the Wards console room bawling my eyes out while my friends surrounded me. Not that anybody was ever happy during an Endbringer attack, anywhere in the world, but none of them were me. None of them had been the Inspired Inventor.

It didn't matter that none of my weapons designs were even half ready yet. It didn't matter that I hadn't had the slightest chance to test them on a proving ground, because they weren't even built, and had only just yesterday started to get enough data from prior Endbringer events about Dragon to even set up a simulator chamber. It didn't matter that I'd helped Dragon finish the tracking algorithm and that was the only reason Canberra had had enough time to do an even 65% successful evacuation. It didn't matter because, because-

Behind me the door opened, and I vaguely heard Miss Militia's voice. "Somebody told me that there was a situation?"

"It's Taylor, ma'am." Aegis said. "She just… broke down, right after the Endbringer attack started."

"It's new Tinker syndrome," Kid Win said hurriedly, trying to explain for me. "Like the whole angst party I threw about my Alternator Cannon not being already done and a proven Endbringer-killer after the Leviathan attack last year. She feels like she should have already already invented something that could have stopped it even when she couldn't possibly have. But that's not her fault, really!" I could feel Clockblocker nodding his head along vigorously to that on my other side.

"Taylor, do you need to lie down?" Miss Militia came over and asked me gently. "Or would you like to go home?"

"I-I'll be all right, ma'am." I said, sniffling. "I don't need to go home. I need to-"

"Taylor," Miss Militia said, kneeling down to take my hand. "No one expects you to single-handedly solve the problem of the Endbringers. And we all know that you did brilliant work helping Dragon with her tracking algorithm. The initial projections are that you have already helped save hundreds of thousands of lives. You did good, Taylor. But the fact that you've done so much to solve the problem already doesn't mean that you should raise your expectations on yourself even higher. Please don't torture yourself for Canberra. This is not your fault."

"W-with all due respect, ma'am, you are wrong." I said. "There are so many man-hours of work I could have done in the past months and didn't, so much I could have-"

"And halt." she said firmly, raising one palm to cut me off. "Taylor, as you may know I am a Noctis cape. I have zero natural requirement for sleep, exceeding even your own abilities as a partial Noctis cape. So in theory I could patrol at least 18 hours a day, needing the remainder for my administrative duties and some brief rests for any overstrained muscles. Do you know why I don't?"

"Ma'am?" I said blearily.

"I don't because no matter what the limits of my physical endurance are, the limits of my emotional endurance remain largely the same as any other person's," she told me. "And I am aware that your secondary powers allow you to push yourself longer and harder, with less cost, than most people do. As I said, I share many of those same gifts. But any finite number can be reduced to zero with sufficient effort, and even the strongest person will shatter themselves if they do not let themselves rest. Human minds are designed to require things like social bonds, sources of recreation, and time to decompress. No cape can drive themselves like a machine, not even ones like us."

"It's not the same," I said. "I had so many designs I never-"

"Then work on them," she replied, "but on a sane schedule. If you truly think you have something that will contribute to the next Endbringer attack, then don't procrastinate… but don't think you are a failure if you can't have it ready immediately. Even Armsmaster or Dragon doesn't carry the weight of such expectations, and there is no reason that you should."

Oh, there were quite a few reasons I should, even if I couldn't share them with anyone.

"I… I'm sorry about this, um, episode ma'am. I'll-"

"You will stay right here with your friends, and let them help you," she said. "And that is all that you are expected to do today. If you don't feel ready for duty tomorrow then I expect you to seek me out then, all right?"

"Yes ma'am."

"Aegis, please feel free to call me again if you think there is anything else requires my attention. Unless anyone objects I'll let you have your privacy back now."

'Thank you," I heard him say, and he walked her to the door and saw her out.

Two thin arms snaked awkwardly around me from the front, and I incredulously noted that the person trying to give me a hug was Missy. I leaned down and into her to make it easier for her, and let Dennis pat me reassuringly on the shoulder while Chris hovered nearby trying to think of something else to say and make it better, and the remainder stood behind them and kept an eye out. And even through my sorrow and guilt I was still grateful that they were here. And I was happy that I'd been able to make such friends.

But I still should have done something.

Author's Note: In before anyone starts end zone celebrating - the event of 'Taylor fails to know Canberra is coming due to John's incomplete knowledge and she collapses in guilt when it does' had already been scheduled to happen before I'd finished 3.1. I'd been building up to this moment the entire time. You didn't make me course correct at all. I even had already decided Clockblocker would quote the poem, before someone else had referenced it.

And oh yeah, its still not going to make Taylor shift immediately into God-Queen Speedrun mode. In fact, what with all the chaff flying up around the issue I've actually become uncertain of what it will do for her. I have reached the current limits of my story outline and will need to re-evaluate a bit.

But I will say this much. Arc Three? Is not going to be nearly as short as Arc Two was. I got lots of fluff to get through in addition to the main arc, and the secondary arc, and things I probably haven't even thought of yet. So if you think its not getting to somewhere, wait a while.

That having been said, so, how do you like my Wards?

And yes, Clockblocker in particular. Folks, its important to remember he's actually like the second or third oldest kid there at the start of canon, and by far the one who is most perceptive about people. He's a comedian, not an immature jackass. And good comedy is hard. Hell, there's a reason that being a clown is considered the most intellectually and physically demanding task in the circus.

So yeah, he's not being promoted to co-protagonist or anything, but I took the chance to try doing something other than the usual fanfic cliches with Dennis while still keeping him recognizably Dennis.

Last edited: Oct 15, 2019

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cliffc999

Jul 19, 2019

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Threadmarks Interlude 3-A: Armsmaster / Danny Hebert / Contessa

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cliffc999

cliffc999

Jul 20, 2019

#3,281

Interlude 3-A: Armsmaster / Danny Hebert / Contessa

Warning: Child death, neo-Nazi ideology

Armsmaster

"Are you saying that the reaction scales proportionately to the density of the material?" I asked Binary suspiciously.

"Yes sir," she replied with her characteristic faux-meekness. Her manipulative attempts to constantly ingratiate herself with authority figures by feigning compliance were so transparent that I was honestly mystified as to why nobody else seemed to see it. Even the Director's reliably cynical nature seemed to always contain an exemption for our newest Ward, and despite Miss Militia's superior experience with the nuances of social interaction she also kept consistently missing the clear warning signs that I kept trying to point out.

"That could lead directly to an exponential cascade scenario!" I insisted heatedly to the rest of the Tinkertech review board. "You can't possibly be thinking of sanctioning this reckless proposal for a moment."

"As I understood Binary's point, since the secondary reaction scales proportionately to density that would mean it would fail to propagate through less dense mediums. Such as water or air." Dr. Hendricks, the seniormost non-Tinker scientist on the review board, interjected.

"Yes sir," Kid Win, her co-presenter for this presentation, interjected. "The minimum density cutoff for the disintegration reaction to take place at all is determined by the interaction of the quantum resonance frequencies hardwired into the primary firing matrix and could not be changed without physically disassembling and reassembling the fine structure of the entire assembly. As constructed, the Quantum Alternator Cannon would register minimal surface damage and zero penetration on anything with a density equal to or less than than 1.22 grams per cubic centimeter."

"Armsmaster, isn't the density of human flesh only equal to that of water? Which is 1 gram per cubic centimeter?" one of the technicians asked me.

"It varies from 0.9 grams per cubic centimeter for fat tissue on up to approximately 1.75 grams per cubic centimeter for bone tissue," I answered matter-of-factly before continuing. "But yes, the effects of this beam striking a human being would… not inflict serious injury." I conceded. "The reaction would have long since failed to propagate through the skin and muscle to even reach the bone. Unless the subject were struck directly on their keratin or tooth enamel-"

"Thank you, Armsmaster," Deputy Director Renick interrupted me. "So to sum up in layman's terms; this weapon should inflict substantial harm on hardened structures, or ultra-dense tissue such as that which is known to compromise the makeup of Endbringers, while still inflicting minimal if any collateral damage on people or animals caught within the beam. And it would fail to propagate the reaction through air or water at all, save of course for the primary beam pulse itself. Am I substantially correct?"

"Yes sir," Binary said, smiling. "Furthermore, since the efficiency of the disintegration reaction also scales up proportionately to the increasing density of the material encountered, and in theory would do so indefinitely, then the known phenomenon that Endbringer flesh becomes enormously tougher the further you try to cut into it should work against them for once."

Preposterous. My nano-thorn technology had better odds of working, when I finally completed it, than this promised 'magic bullet' would and would certainly have less side effects. Binary's tendencies towards recklessly optimistic weapons design and characteristic lack of safety- ah.

"I believe that you have failed to adequately consider the problem of waste heat," I said, staring down at our two careless young Tinkers as best I could. "If that large a volume of material of exponentially increasing density was actually being disintegrated, then where would that energy be released? I remind the board that Binary already has a prior history of dangerous lack of consideration for energy byprod-"

Director Renick cleared his throat loudly. "Thank you, Armsmaster, but we have already taken that last factor into consideration." I grumbled inwardly because I quite clearly heard the We have long since grown bored of your bringing it up at every session without it actually being said out loud. Why was everyone but me so complacent? Still, at least he turned back to them and continuted to ask, "But I am interested in the answer to Armsmaster's first question."

Kid Win and Binary both started to answer at once, then looked at each other and after a moment or two somehow came to a wordless agreement that she should do the speaking for them. More suspicious behavior again! Why was the Wards' more experienced Tinker so instinctively deferring to the unproven newcomer? Not that Kid Win's own record was that of a paragon of sagacity but his track record was at least adequately proven.

Binary nodded to Kid Win and turned back to the review board. "The full mathematical abstract is in appendix B for Dr. Hendricks' and Armsmaster's review-"

I grumbled inwardly again at the review boards' apparent obliviousness to her clear attempt to subtly undercut my authority in front of the review board by making me sound as if I were merely the assistant evaluator instead of the most experienced Tinker of the Protectorate.

"-but in layman's terms, the disintegration reaction is scaled so that it takes almost as much power to disrupt the next layer of molecules as the last layer's disruption provided. The energy balance is made up by the Alternator Cannon's primary power impulse, of course."

"So it's a largely self-sustaining balancing act," Dr. Hendricks said. "Very elegant in theory, and I will grant that you have already had successful laboratory experiments with the principle, but there's still no guarantee it will scale up symmetrically in large-scale field use."

"We know, sir." Binary answered. "That's why Kid Win and I brought our proposal here today for an intermediate scale field test, one on a static target series. A test that would let us verify the feasibility of the exothermic balance and measure the margin of error should our balance calculations not be entirely exact, and all before we actually asked Dragon to mount the weapon on one of her heavy platforms for a trial combat deployment."

"And where precisely do you think you will find a series of capital-scale high-density targets conveniently located far enough away from inhabited areas and mounted in a large enough heat sink to absorb the massive amounts of waste heat if it turns out your mathematics were wrong?" I inquired challengingly. "And what ridiculous percentage of our budget did you imagine we'd be remotely willing to allocate to set up such a target range?"

And my momentary satisfaction at having finally found a way to shut down this incipient madness collapsed into bitter gall at the board's pleased reaction to her next statement.

"The Boat Graveyard, sir. And for virtually zero cost save that necessary for cordoning off the impact area and a network of sensor buoys."

I honestly could not have told anyone else at that moment if that girl was more frustrating to me when she was being wrong, or when she was being right.

Danny Hebert

"Test firing in ten seconds…"

I stood there trying to keep my facial expression to one of pleased anticipation only instead of the pride that was threatening to burst every vein in my body. Officially I was here as the representative of the Dockworker's Union, and not because that was my little girl out there and she'd finally figured out a way to fix the Boat Graveyard! I had to keep Taylor's identity a secret and that meant I couldn't just charge right over there and give 'Binary' the big damn hug she'd well and truly earned. That would be for as soon as we got home.

Even after Taylor had gotten powers I'd never imagined that she would go on to do things like this, but despite having only been a Ward for a couple of weeks she was already having Tinkertech designs for things like this 'Quantum Alternator Cannon'. Which I'd overheard was actually intended to become an anti-Endbringer weapon after the preliminary field tests like this one helped them refine the design further.

My little girl was going to grow up to help kill Endbringers? Thank God that it would be from a safe distance or else that would be the world's most terrifying thought, not pride-inducing!

"Test firing in five seconds…"

They weren't making a big public ceremony of the test. Oh, the city had been notified and the harbor patrol had closed off the harbor this morning and all the standard safety precautions had been taken, yes. And the nearest derelict ship to the shore wouldn't even be fired at today because they didn't think it was far enough away from the city to be safe. But they were afraid the test firing might not be 100% successful the first time so they weren't making a live media event out of it. A camera crew was in place so that any successes could be broadcast by the Protectorate's PR people later, but if the whole thing fizzled then they didn't want to embarrass anyone.

I noted with awe that the various parts of this 'Quantum Alternator Cannon' were apparently being teleported in somehow, a piece at a time, and assembling themselves as they arrived. Kid Win, who'd apparently been Taylor's partner in designing and building it, was supervising the final assembly by tapping commands onto a keyboard built into the forearm of his own techno-armor, a bright red-and-gold affair that contrasted neatly against my Taylor's dark-blue-and-silver.

The final pieces of the cannon clicked together just as the countdown reached the one-second mark, and the hovering platform it was mounted on finished locking onto the ship intended for the first target…

"FIRING!"

And a golden-white beam leapt forth from the muzzle of the energy cannon to touch the wreckage of the first target, the farthest-out of all of the rusting derelicts that had been blocking the Ship Channel for years. I stared in awe as beam touched the ship and it too turned into gold and white energy, the reaction spreading out across the ship in what had to be only a couple of seconds but by some optical illusion looked as slow as time-lapse photography, and my breath caught in my throat because it was working and Taylor had done it! She'd done it!

The scientists standing at the nearby table full of instruments were babbling things about 'exothermic release calculations' and 'self-sustaining cascade reaction within nominal projections' and sensor buoys in a dispersion pattern to pick up readings and all sorts of other things I didn't understand. As the first ship finished disintegrating and the water rushed in to fill the hole in the water it had left, the Alternator Cannon locked onto the second ship in the program sequence and that one began to go away too. According to the projected schedule it would take approximately twelve minutes to clear more of the wreckage out of the Ship Channel than the city would have been able to do in years.

Oh, there'd still be things to do before it would be clear for shipping, the last couple of ships to be moved out by hand and then possible wreckage below the water dredged and cleared, but the projected cost of dealing with the Boat Graveyard had just been reduced to at most a hundredth of what it had originally been. The background of my mind idly daydreamed about possible arguments and proposals to bring to my next argument with the Mayor's office about the ferry restoral, but the foreground was all Taylor sharing a triumphant high-five with Kid Win as the PRT scientists clustered around to ask questions and Armsmaster was a statue still staring out to sea where the ships had been and only one real thought filled my mind.

My little girl had done it.

Contessa

I stepped out of a Door into the interior of an apartment. Neither particularly rich nor poor, it was just another example of an average urban domicile in an economically depressed city undergoing slow decay. Brockton Bay.

It didn't matter.

I walked past the middle-aged black woman slumped in her armchair, a habitual alcoholic by all appearance given that she was already so drunk as to be unconscious despite it being early afternoon. Her race was irrelevant except that it would particularly focus the rage of the intended target of today's psychological destabilization operation, given what that target's particular racial prejudices were.

I reached into a nearby table drawer for a pack of cigarettes that had to be there. I pulled out the pack, shook loose one cigarette, and then dropped the back adjacent to the armchair as if it had fallen from a careless hand. I lit the cigarette and puffed on it expressionlessly several times, before shaking loose the ash on the floor next to the pack and tucking the lit cigarette neatly in-between the fingers of the unconscious woman. I already knew that the forensic traces of my saliva upon the cigarette butt would be entirely consumed by the fire, and also that no one would be looking for them in the first place.

Having seamlessly created a scenario that the fire marshal's investigation would conclude had been a simple case of an alcoholic smoking and then passing out drunk before extinguishing their cigarette, I called for another Door to return to base.

This woman would die in the fire that would soon engulf this building. Since most of the inhabitants were at work this hour of day, only five other residents would die as well. Four of them did not matter.

The infant child in the apartment upstairs, currently being tended to by a baby-sitter while her mother was at work, did matter. Her death apparently via the carelessness of a drunken wastrel of what the child's mother fervently believed to be an inferior race would drive the bereaved mother to reconcile with her estranged husband and take up his cause again with doubly renewed fervor. Kayden Anders would fully return to the fold of the Empire Eighty-Eight, freed of all the conflicted feelings that had led to her partially stepping away in the first place.

Between this single action and Rebecca's own subtle interference in the post-Coil investigations to prevent Kaiser's own informants from all being discovered, Kaiser would now have his opportunity. All of his old forces would be unified under him once again and he would have, as Coil had had, his window to make inroads into the PRT to the best of his ability. He would have a fair chance to succeed, but no more.

The preparations were complete. And when the proper moment arrived for actually beginning the active phase of the experiment, he would be given the final push.

That mattered, because it was one of the Paths. And the Paths were all that mattered.

Author's Note: Have an interlude! And now you see Taylor actually starting to get things up and running.

Yes, Armsmaster is really seeing Taylor in Armsmaster-o-vision(tm), to the point of starting up the ol' Self-Rationalization Engine. We already knew he got that way sometimes.

And before you go 'Taylor should have done this earlier!', in addition to the already-existing notes about how her schedule up until now has been kinda filled with unscheduled crap, notice also how much time she saved herself by folding her own efforts into Kid Win's already-existing anti-Endbringer project.

He'd already gotten the assembly, the gun, the power source, etc. All Taylor had to do was soup up the beam, from a straightforward 'big laser' into a technobabble quantum disintegrator effect designed to be more effective the denser something is. Like some EU interpretations of Star Trek phasers. It definitely let things go quickly, he had entire weeks if not months of work already put in there that could still be largely used.

So, first field test successful. Whether or not it actually scales up enough to really make Endbringers go poof yet? Wait until an Endbringer actually gets shot with one and we'll see what happens. :p

And yes, Danny gives Taylor all the credit and barely considers Kid Win an afterthought even if the reality of the situation was likely quite different. This is called 'He's her father and his is the least objective set of opinions about Taylor in Brockton Bay.'

And now, to talk about the un-fun part...

Before anyone screams about Cauldron killing a baby... yes, they did. And they'd do it again in a heartbeat if Contessa's power told them to.

And yes, the target of the frame-up totally didn't deserve what Contessa set her up for, and was specifically chosen for the purpose of hitting Purity right in her racial prejudice. That was as eugh to write as it was to read, but its the Brockton Bay Nazis, folks. They're ugly people who believe ugly things.

Don't forget that Kayden Anders originally defected from the Empire-88 because she was fed up with Max Anders' bullshit, not because she didn't want to be a neo-Nazi anymore. Because she was still totally a neo-Nazi. And now she's a really pissed off neo-Nazi, exactly as intended by Cauldron.

Reminder: The 'warlord experiment viability' debate is still on the Thread Off-Topic List. So don't.

Last edited: Oct 15, 2019

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cliffc999

Jul 20, 2019

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