Once everyone is dressed, you consider what to do next, before you nod to yourself and address both of them.
"Okay, so here's the list of things we should get done in the immediate future. First, I'm going to need to draw up the schematics for a robot workbench, two of my souls and Lea are going to build it. Don't worry about the programming, I actually memorized everything. I'll have to take some time to improve the design so it can be used with a computer interface later, but that has time.
Meanwhile, I'll talk to Sherrel and find out where to look for Skidmark. I want this whole little gang quarrel over with by the time we're taking control of everything the Merchants had, and he needs to die for this.
You two, on the other hand, will have to pick up the slack in getting the rest of the gang up to snuff, getting more recruits, territory, the works. I'll see about figuring out mass production of handcranked laser weaponry that explodes if anyone tries to open it up later, so that's something to look forward to."
Getting an indulgent smile from Kate (she was likely doing just that before you yanked her with you) and a serious nod from Nora, the three of you move out.
Entering the workshop warehouse, you sneak onto Sherrel, groping her tits from behind when she puts her tools down for a moment.
"Hey Sherrel... wanna talk about your ex?"
Giggling at the situation, she turns around. "That's one ah the worst pickup lines I ever heard, Gabe. But sure, lemme tell you what I know."
Unfortunately, Sherrel isn't too sure where Skidmark (or Adam, as she told you his name is) is hiding out, as he likely vacated his previous flat the day after you grabbed her. He seems to be the paranoid type, which, to be fair, is a survival trait if you're the leader of a band of human cockroaches.
Nevertheless, she can tell you about several places he might have gone to ground in, so you have a chance to get at him, at least. Not like he actually knows what happened to her, so while he might've ditched the places, he also might not.
It's not perfect, but it's a nice first step.
"Alright, that already helps a lot, Sherrel. Now I'm going to question the soul of a Merchant cape I ate earlier and compare what he knows to what you know, so hopefully it'll give us a complete picture of where he's hiding for the moment."
"Huh. Skids mentioned something about getting a new cape named Mush, but I never met him."
Turing towards the middle of the room, you breathe out your favorite trashman, apparently named Mush.
Unfortunately, it seems Skidmark's paranoia wasn't only justified, considering you're really out to get him, he also made sure Mush couldn't tell anyone where he was if he was captured.
Annoying, though he does know of a few safehouses he might have used, as well as several he gave up after you captured Sherrel. This is far from a complete picture, you don't doubt Skidmark would have several hideouts he told nobody about he might use now.
But at least you have a handful of locations with a decent likelihood of him being present. This is pretty good already, you feel.
Actually, you might be surprisingly suited to doing detective work like this.
Breathing the guy in again just to make his voice stop (he's just as ugly as he sounds), you go outside for a moment after taking out your eye soul, ordering him to find Skidmark for you.
You're confused for a moment when he just points you at the street, until you see the skid marks. Okay, time to slap him across the head and elaborate.
Telling him to find you the parahuman known as Skidmark, civilian first name Adam, leader of the gang known as the Merchants, you get a better result. memorizing the location he's pointing at, you dismiss him and instead go back inside, quickly drawing up the schematics for a robot workbench.
Sherrel seems quite interested and decides to join in on the construction, which you don't have any real opinion on, so you leave her and the twins you call up to it, telling them to get Lea to help later.
With that done, you get outside again and turn into an owl, flying upwards and taking a bit of time to memorize the city from a bird's view. It's oddly freeing, being up here, actually, with all the hussle down there to observe.
Still, time to get back down. Flying back to the main lair warehouse, you get inside your room and open your laptop, verifying where to find Skidmark when the times comes, assuming he hasn't moved by then.
Not like you can't just have your spotter point you in the right direction at that point, anyway. This is just you doing some preparations, that's all.
Wandering off to find Kate, you see she's hard at work, explaining things to Nora and delegating gang expansion work at a blistering pace. Looks like your recent vacation has lit a fire inside her... or maybe she's just that happy about getting a proper shower again and in a good mood due to that.
Either way, you wait for a moment until she's got a moment and ask her for what you wanted.
"Hey Kate, I forgot to mention something earlier. I actually used to draw before I got powers, so if you could have someone go buy some art supplies, you know, pencils, blocks of paper, acryl colors, all that stuff, so I can start again, that would be great."
"Huh. I thought I saw you a few times taking something onto paper, but I'd have never thought you were an aspiring artist. No worries, I'll have one of the girls pick something up later. Anything else?"
"Yeah, I may need to borrow Samantha for a bit to get a PHO streaming account set up. May as well do art right, and that means sharing it with the whole world. May even get useful criticism that way."
"Sure, no problem. Not like she's too busy at the moment. I'll definitely have to watch what you do sometime."
"Yeah.", Nora adds, "Now I really want to see you in action. Don't keep us waiting for too long, Gabe."
Alright, that's that taken care of. Now...
Oh yes, Cupcake. Time to thrall her. Taking a look inside her room, she isn't there, which means she's likely at the lab.
Which is, indeed, where you find her, tinkering with the equipment and mixing together one thing or the other.
"Hey Addy, want me to give you some superpowers?"
"Hwuah...? Oh, idsh you, Gabe. Yeah, sure. Gimme whatever you have."
She seems to be lightly high. Nothing too hard, she's just slightly dazed. Well you can fix that.
Extending your claws, you make a small cut along your wrist, holding the bleeding would onto her mouth.
"Here, drink this. Take it slowly, too, no need to rush."
Doing as she's told, your little Cupcake starts to slowly gulp down your blood... slowly but surely shifting her focus to what she was doing to what she's doing now.
"Mbwuah?", she says as she takes her mouth off of you.
"Gabe? Why was I drinking your blood? What's going on?"
Ah, as you thought, she was hyperfocusing on making drugs and just did what you told her to on autopilot.
"Why are you asking? I just explained everything to you. Or could it be you were ignoring me?"
"No! I'd never... have totally ignored you."
"Well, I'd say this calls for punishment. Strip."
Addy gulps, but once more does as she's told. Heh. Always nice to mix business with pleasure.
Summoning the soul of that raider leading the first real big group of them you encountered, you use the soul mechanism on him to see what happens.
First he's doing the same as the other soul you tried this on, squirming on the ground in terrible pain, even though no sound escapes him. Then he slowly gets up, this time with no funny little lightshow, but with a small distortion appearing next to him instead.
Grabbing onto it, he suddenly has a simple 10mm pistol in hand.
He immediately aims it at you, but just tenses up.
"Yeah, sorry bud, you can't ever hurt me or act against my orders. Tell you what, though, your power looks pretty useful, I'll call you again when I need something shot real hard."
"And I thought Jared somehow managed to get high..." he trails off as you breathe him in again. You did some good work here, you feel.
Well, first thing you do is go visit Kate. She just nods at a small pile of shopping bags lying in the corner. Looks like she got everything you need.
"Alright, if Samantha is done, I'll likely do the stream tonight. Looking forward to really getting back into it."
"Yeah, let's hope it'll go well. In the meantime, you know where to find me; I've got a busy day ahead of me. Oh, btw, finally got that big drug shipment you stole in a seperate warehouse now, so that's good. I may yet get this pile of sloths to stay organized."
Smiling and saying your goodbyes, you move over to see Samantha, who, indeed, has set everything up that you need. Only thing still lacking is the 'verified cape' tag for your account, something she can easily take care of with a photo of you standing in front of a nondescript concrete wall while a shadow conceals your face. Perfect.
With everything taken care of, you set up one of the other storerooms as your streaming room before retiring to your own room for the day. Best to pass the time productively, you think.
Well, it took literally all day to do it, but you learned the spell that lets you take... something. Ah well, not like you could take a stroll instead, so what do you care?
Anyway, the sun is going down as you speak, so it's time to get a move on what you're planning next.
Well then, time to take your first shower in... weeks? No, months. Funny how quickly you just forget those are a thing when you don't sweat, have bits of skin flaking off of you and all that jazz and can always just turn into a shadow for a moment to clean yourself up.
But this isn't about cleanliness in the first place. You're taking a shower more to mentally prepare yourself, and still turn into a shadow afterwards. Taking a moment, you look through the small pile of clothes you have lying in your room, taking out a tanktop you can just feel the girls picked out for you while giggling, putting it on with a simple pair of jeans and some nice shoes.
All that you need now is your shadowed face, and... perfect.
Making your way over into your streaming room, you dart back up and have Samantha help you set everything up. Okay, time to do this.
Taking a stance and watching the timer on the screen run down, you look over everything once more, clear your throat (even if that doesn't make any difference whatsoever) and get ready.
Any moment now. NOW.
"Hello, everyone, and welcome, to painting with Cain! You may wonder what exactly this is about, but it's literally what it sounds like. Today, I am going to go over how to draw and paint with you, mostly the drawing part, though. I am planning to go deeper into painting and other forms of art later on, but for today, we will start at the very basics.
So, to that end, all you need if you happen to want to try any of what I'll be showing you yourself is a pen and some paper. If you have any questions, suggestions or just want to tell me your opinion, feel free to leave a comment."
Oh god, what is wrong with your voice? You suppose it may come across as just right, but ahhh!
Lightly clapping your hands, you grab a pen, switch the camera over to have a good angle on your drawing desk (god, buddha and whoever is listening bless you Samantha) and get to work, narrating what you're doing in the meanwhile.
"So, first we'll do a rough picture of a lakeside vacation house I once saw a picture of. Simple in theory, but quite complicated in execution. First, we're drawing the outlines of the house itself, as it is the central piece everything else is focusing on. Don't worry if that doesn't make sense to you, it's just how I like to go into things like these. Get a good idea of the central piece, go on with everything else from there.
Also, feel free to add more consistent lines to it than you want in the final picture- you'll see I'm going to remove or redo a bunch of what I'm doing right now. This is just to give me context for the rest of the picture."
As you say this, you finish up with the rough outline of the house you'd visited against your will so often. It happened before your perfect memory had any chance of happening, but it's still burned into your memory from how much you hated having to interact with your parents so much. But hey, at least you actually drew it back then, so you have some practice already.
It's why you chose it to start this off with.
"Next, we're drawing the lake itself, again just the rough outline. It's important to get this down early so you don't have issues midway through and can't get in everything you wanted to. In this case, we're putting it to the front of the picture, giving the viewer the illusion of watching out from the lake... or it being a river, with them on the other side, both are fine. Beauty in the eye of the beholder, and all that.
Now we'll need some greenery, fill the picture up a bit while still leaving a little space to show the open sky behind the house- that's not always necessary, but it does help in this case. The picture would look overcrowded otherwise."
As you speak, you continue to draw, slowly but surely adding in more detail at one place or another, making sure to keep talking the whole time.
"Now I feel like adding walkways to the front door and around the upper parts of the house, I'll probably have them be a different color, to give some contrast to the rest of the picture.
It helps a lot to keep the final work in mind when considering what to draw how. Of course, if you're just reproducing a landscape, that's less important, which is one reason I'd recommend to begin with that if you're interested."
Getting into the windows, those damnable windows you hated for being too small, even though they were just the right size in hindsight, that was just your young mind applying the hatred of your parents to everything they did, you show and explain how to get reflections and light gleams just right by estimating where the sun and the viewer are standing.
"This, again, is more important if you're interested in this. Your first tries should probably avoid any reflective surfaces; I sure wish I kept that in mind when I started out," you say with a chuckle. "But once you get some practice and got the trick down, it's quite easy to do."
As you say this, you pay attention to the lake/river, giving it a border and a reflection of the same. Lastly, you go over everything again, adding a lot of detail on the trees and foliage surrounding the house, but also give the house itself some love, and really get into the shading, using it to indicate pathways to the side and behind the house.
"There, I think that's good. Now we'll get to the hardest part, at least for me; adding colors. Because there's more than just one way to use a pen, and now I'll show you how to use this to your advantage."
Doing as you said, you pay special attention to how you use the same colored pencils to make different colors, and how you combine this with shading to attain a wide palette of colors with just six different pencils.
When you finally lay down your work utensils, you kinda feel the urge to shiver, though you really can't do so unwillingy by now.
"And this," you say with a small pause, "is how you draw a simple lakeside house."
"Next off, we have some time left, so why don't we draw a few different pictures to compare how backgrounds can work?"
As you say this, you mentally tally up the scenes of your inner palace you're going to draw, adding and discarding a few things you've seen for fear of running out of the time limit you'd set yourself.
"Of course, the different things we're using as inspiration will be differing wildly in terms of mood and impression, but what I'd like you to pay special attention to is the viewer perspective we're drawing it from, and how it affects what you think about the finished picture."
And so you do.
An icy ruin, with an outer walkway being what is shown, the door promising warmth and safety barred by a seemingly insurmountable gap in the floor, lined with ice.
A mysterious ruin, overgrown and filled with statues seemingly focused on an empty throne.
Lastly, a picture of a ruined building in the middle of a forest, overgrown yet strangely sturdy in spite of it.
Of course, all of these are things you cribbed 1:1 from your time on the throne, but hey, if it works, it works.
Of course, you kept on speaking while drawing, narrating your thought process on what you're doing and why. You're slowly getting the hang of this, you think.
"And so I think we'll leave it at these three for the purposes of this little thought exercise. Well, what do you think? How does your perspective as a viewer inform your opinion on what is shown? How did the similarities in the first two feel when compared to the last one? Look over the finished pictures as opposed to the process of drawing them, and feel free to leave a comment, or just think on it if you want."
Looking over at the clock, you frown a bit while thinking, before you nod to yourself and look back at the camera, having switched back to the central one for a moment.
"Okay, looks like we have enough time for one last picture. How about... a city from above, at night? I figure that's a nice and romantic end to our little time together for the time being.
Okay, to start with, note how I'm using lines, this time not to denote perspective? These are my guiding lines for drawing buildings along; in a real city, they'd be the streets. This is much easier in most bigger american cities, as they're planned and built in just such a way. Some other countries would make this much harder, though that's not necessarily a bad thing.
It's a lovely view either way."
Prattling on, you continue to draw big, blocky buildings and proceed to make them more with tiny dots of light, slowly but surely lighting up the whole picture.
"...and this," you finish up, "is how you can get buildings down from a great distance. I wouldn't recommend drawing this many finely detailed things all at once, though, or your wrist will be in a rather sorry state afterwards," you smile at the camera, slowly rotating your wrist as though it were in pain.
Looking over at the clock, you note "So, that will be all for today. Thank you all for watching and see you in the next episode of Painting with Cain," you continue to smile into the camera before doing what Samantha told you to turn off the livestream and your equipment.
This was... mentally exhausting, and you'd come to believe you weren't capable of feeling such. Following your irrational urge to stretch your limbs for a moment, you carefully pack away everything, to await the next episode.
That is, unless nobody liked it, you suppose. You'll have to ask Kate about it later, she seems like the kind to have an idea of stuff like this.
Interlude: Reactions and Reactions
Emily's eye was twitching. This was going to be a sign, a bad one. She could already feel it.
"Director Piggot? I think you need to see this," Renick said as he waved a PRT-issue tablet at her, coming inside her office. Waving him closer to let him put it onto her desk, Emily rotated it to see what was going on.
In the upper corner of the livestream she could read Painting with Cain in cursive letters. Immediately getting a bad feeling, she watched the confirmed mass murderer give an introduction to drawing pictures.
What in the everloving hell.
Taking a moment, to ensure she was seeing right, she heard him explain the importance to 'keeping the final picture in mind' when drawing.
"Of course, if you're just reproducing a landscape, that's less important, which is one reason I'd recommend to begin with that if you're interested."
"Of course..." Emily echoed, her bad feeling worsening by the second.
"Renick. Get me Watchdog on the line. Then the Chief Director, and PR if we have time afterwards. This is going to be a catastrophe, I can feel it already."
Alec breathed out, cracking his knuckles in relaxation after a long afternoon of owning noobs, using his laptop to pull up that new villain's crazy PR stunt. It didn't take long, however, for him to nod along with the points shadowface was making as he drew.
Good drawings, good advice. He was kinda feeling the urge to try this out for himself if he ever had some time between his busy periods of gaming.
Hearing someone else come into the loft's living room, he waved behind himself, having figured out who it was by her nerve system. "Hey Lisa, check this out, it's pretty neat."
"And this," came with a small pause, "is how you draw a simple lakeside house."
Lisa just stood there, stunned, before she dropped her own laptop and scrambled towards his.
Alec just rolled his eyes.
Shawn frowned, paying as much attention towards the screen as he could. This new villain he'd briefly confronted as Dauntless was trying to do something, but for the life of him he couldn't figure out what.
He'd gotten some flak for retreating in that confrontation, but not even Colin could begrudge him the decision. Unknown capes and all that, and yes, capes, plural. The Protectorate had to bow out of fights regularly, even if they were actual planned face-offs rather than a new gang to the face.
Regardless, that wasn't why he was fixated on the screen. There he was, having overseen the brutal mass murder of a warehouse full of people, giving out drawing advice. Inconceivable for a normal villain, but then again, nothing about this new villain was normal now, was it?
"Of course, the different things we're using as inspiration will be differing wildly in terms of mood and impression, but what I'd like you to pay special attention to is the viewer perspective we're drawing it from, and how it affects what you think about the finished picture."
A message? A threat? A call for help? Honestly, he had no idea how to interpret the man's actions. Still, he was going to watch this to the end, and then likely keep on watching it for a while yet on repeat.
At least it was good drawing advice, he supposed. May as well learn what you can, you never know when your child may want to try it out.
Taylor looked on thoughtfully, watching the villain she'd come upon in her research draw a variety of fantastical pictures.
"And so I think we'll leave it at these three for the purposes of this little thought exercise. Well, what do you think? How does your perspective as a viewer inform your opinion on what is shown? How did the similarities in the first two feel when compared to the last one? Look over the finished pictures as opposed to the process of drawing them, and feel free to leave a comment, or just think on it if you want."
She honestly didn't know what to think about this. On the one hand, he was a villain. On the other hand, these were some really nice pictures he was drawing, far beyond anything she'd have thought possible.
And... those were some tight abs. Yum.
Hesitating a bit, she clicked. There, she was following his channel now. All the better for future research.
Yes, really. She had to keep an eye out for villains, considering she was going to become a hero.
Missy's heart jumped as the man, apparent villain notwithstanding, looked to the side and frowned, and it melted when the scantily clad man looked back at the camera, smiling ever so slightly.
"Okay, looks like we have enough time for one last picture. How about... a city from above, at night? I figure that's a nice and romantic end to our little time together for the time being."
At his words, her heart attempted to jump out of her chest. This was so unfair! All the comments said he was a PRT-confirmed villain, but why did she not know about this?
More importantly, why was he doing an introductory art course clad in a very tight tank top? Honestly, this was ridiculous.
Not in a bad way, unfortunately.
She squeaked in embarrassment as she realized she'd missed half of his progress on drawing a lovely city from above at night. Licking her lips, she made sure that yes, she could rewatch this footage again later, before her hand wandered back down...
Victoria was angry. Why didn't anyone tell her what was going on? How could she have missed the most hunky chunk of villainous manflesh to have ever lived doing a livestream on art?
On art?
This was not acceptable. To make up for this grave injustice, she was going to have to drag Amy into watching the recorded stream together with her.
Funnily enough, it didn't take long to make her cuddle up next her and watch the whole thing. Once she realized what it was about, though, she raised an eyebrow and looked at her.
"I thought you were still with Dean?"
"Pfshaw, Dean Bean, he's old news. I'm single and happy with it!"
"You mean again? Doesn't that get a bit old, the whole break up-get together repeat thing?"
"Hey, do you want to watch this hot guy expound on his artistic talents with me in my bed or not?"
"Pretend I said nothing," Amy answered, blushing as she turned her eyes back towards the screen.
All was well in the Queendom of Victorians.
Contessa watched the screen.
She looked at the pencils she was gripping.
Watched the screen.
Watched the pencils.
For the first time in... honestly longer than she could remember, she used her birth language.
"This is fucking bullshit."
Taking a moment before leaving your broadcast room, you look back on your desk, thinking back on what you did for the past few hours.
Comparing the act of drawing on a sheet of paper and twisting and shaping reality the way you do whan you use magic, you have a moment of inspiration. Quickly thinking back through every time you have done either, you soon realize there are some fundamental similarities between both.
Thinking about the ways you may be able to apply this realization to your practice of magic, you smile as you head out.
You try to go upstairs to see Kate and ask her how your little livestream event was received, 'try' being the operative word here.
Kate preempts you by running into you at the foot of the stairs, hugging you and fixating your eyes with hers.
"Fuck me against the wall as I tear your tank top off! Now!"
Shrugging, you push onto her, giving her a deep kiss and tearing her clothes off as she does the same to you, with great relish.
An hour or so later, an exhausted Kate lies heavily breathing on your corner pillows, lazily drinking some water out of one of the water bottles she'd made sure were available in your room.
"By the way, did you see how my livestream was received?"
Kate just giggles.
"Gabe, you're a wonderful boyfriend and the best catch a girl could ever ask for, so I'll only say this once. You will continue doing those art streams."
That's... good? You think that's good. Good enough for you, at least.
"Hmm... Okay, I'll be off to do a thing for a bit. In the meantime, why don't I throw some help at you?" You say as you breathe out two souls in particular.
One is your new discount Miss Militia, the other one that one Merchant chick you ate as an afterthought when you grabbed Sherrel. You think she looked the type to be a decent secretary, though you're not sure.
Only one way to find out for sure, you suppose.
"This guy can conjre guns and is a decent shot, so I figure he could train the girls in shooting and shit. The chick is... probably good at organizing shit? I figure you could use some help on keeping the gang on track. If she turns out to be useless, you can always just shoot her and be done with it."
"Eh, another pair of hands is always welcome. Also, I think one of the warehouses we bought nearby is properly soundproofed, so I can have the girls set up a shooting range or something."
Ordering both of your minions to follow Kate's orders, you excuse yourself and go shadow, racing through the city towards the location you'd been thinking of ever since you unlocked your latest spell.
Time to return to the scene of the crime, heh.
Reaching the place, you're somewhat annoyed when you see the sheer mass of PRT troopers moving about.
You'd think they'd have gotten everything they could from this place by now, but nope. Looks like you have your work cut out for you.
Slithering around, you find that they have deployed floodlights to actually let them see. At least you have enough shadowed areas to move about, though.
Well, best to avoid a confrontation for now. Taking a look around, you spy one of the side room doors. This'll do.
Or it won't, you think to yourself when you see the mooks inside the room, taking pictures. Okay, next try.
Finding another room, unattended this time, you materialize and nudge the door closed, then casting Freeze this thing so it may not move! at it, thereby essentially barring the room to anyone outside.
In relative safety now, even if anyone outside were to hear you, you proceed to chant the spell you came to try out; Take all that is left behind of the departed and make it mine!, closing the spell by balling your hand to a fist, and actually feeling how you have taken something.
Curious.
Alright, you got what you came for. Time to leave and figure out what exactly it was later. For now, you once more shadow your way out of the building and race back towards the lair.
Home sweet home. Or at least more at home than you ever felt before, honestly.
Finding yourself back in the workshop warehouse, you decide to finish what you started on making your laser musket design harder to steal.
Working off of your earlier work on the topic and testing things with one of your earlier muskets (the capacitor has changed, but it's close enough you can work with it), you can rig the whole thing up in just such a way that, should someone open it up, it fries itself into charred nothing.
It doesn't explode in an enormous fireball, unfortunately, but it should protect it from anyone casually reverse-engineering it. You doubt anyone will try anytime soon, as it looks like tinkertech and everyone knows it doesn't make sense, but it doesn't hurt to be careful about this.
Incidentally, you also think it should mess with scans that don't open it up, though you can't exactly test that. Better to just leave a note saying that messing with the insides will destroy it and leave it at that.
Well, that was... something. You'd originally approached the maids to train you in evasion, figuring all they'd need to do was keep on trying to hit you.
You were wrong.
So, so wrong.
Turns out that they responded to the request you made of them with extreme enthusiasm. On the plus side, you now know what it's like to run from literally endless human wave tactics, as well as the dread of getting forcefully overwhelmed, pulled to the ground and getting your dick sucked while being groped all over against your will.
Repeatedly.
Yes, at least you learned something. Gotta look at the bright side in all this. Oh, and the maids now all have a very happy smile, so that's a plus, too, you think...?
Anyway, once you recovered from your little ordeal of a training session, you take a look around the workshop warehouse, which you luckily decided to spend your day in beforehand.
Noting the robot workbench seems to have been completed, you take a few hours just typing the code you memorized into the terminal. The honestly oddest thing about this work of superscience is using a terminal. Like, where did they even find the parts to make one?
Nevertheless, it takes a while, but soon enough you're finished. The workbench is now operational. Now all you need is a lot of parts, whether in the form of proper materials or junk you can recycle, and you can get started on producing robots.
Incidentally, Sherrel came by a few times, spending a while just watching you work and asking questions about how the workbench works. Seeing nothing wrong with indulging her a little, you tell her about a few things it can do and how it can do them while typing away. Not like you were using your brain for the actual work, honestly, so not like a little multi-tasking was difficult.
For the next few hours, you do nothing but refine your ability to levitate yourself.
By jumping up and down. Repeatedly.
It looks silly as fuck, and you often accidentally turn it on the whole way or don't turn it on enough so it just doesn't activate, but eventually you get the hang of slowly floating down rather than the extremes of gravity or no gravity.
Also, Kate came by while you were doing this, asking if everyone had everything, so you mentioned the robot workbench and the kinds of stuff it needs, as well as taking the opportunity to ask if there's any news on the cape recruitment front. Unfortunately, it seems as though she doesn't have any news for you, though she promises to look into that one cape she told you about before again.
Apparently she thinks Painting with Cain may have changed her opinion on the prospects of joining your little group for some reason? You think you'll just leave the details to her, after all.
On another note, she mentioned the gang expansion was going well so far. Seems like your exploits so far have gained the Crypts a decent bit of street cred, so there aren't any big hickups on finding willing recruits, whether they're former Merchants smart enough to jump ship or unaffiliated gangsters.
In fact, she is planning to have a bunch of them start spraying your tags all across the first bite of territory you're taking from the Merchants tonight. Looks like things are really gearing up.
According to her, again, what you need now is to build up and keep on building up momentum, until you're so big none of the other gangs, including the Protectorate/PRT, can dislodge you without leaving themselves open to the other players in town. Kinda the same niche the Merchants were trying to fill, just with cleaner grunts.
Mentioning to Kate it'd be great if she could get you some kind of suit for the occasion, just to make a good first impression as a cape to everyone involved, Kate snorts, but just nods, looking like she has to hold back laughter.
Weird.
Anyway, with that out of the way, you proceed to the little drawing board you and Sherrel have taken to use, carefully taking her notes off and to the side (they look like gibberish to you but eh, tinkers), you begin to draw up the schematics for your automated assembly.
While you'd like to build it yourself, if only to give yourself some inspiration on how to improve it, it's not like you need the inspiration, thanks to your memory letting you think things over. Honestly, all you'd need to do would be to install more tools inside and add a terminal to let you change modes towards different production outputs... aaand you really should be concentrating on what you're doing.
Anyway, once you have the plans drawn up, you proceed to find Lea (who has since woken up and is assisting Sherrel when she isn't marveling at the robot workbench) and press her into working on assembling it with you.
Not that she seems to mind once you tell her the process involves using the workbench to fabricate a few parts. Heh. Sherrel's all up for helping too, of course, so the three of you spend a nice time together just slowly assembling bits and parts of the final piece.
You have a lot of fun, actually.
Once night falls, you regretfully excuse yourself for the time being and return to the main warehouse, whence you find Samantha and have her help you set up a timer system, letting you announce when your next episode of livestreaming will happen. Thanking her for the help (you're starting to think she might take you for some kind of luddite or something), you move on to the rest of your preparations for tonight.
Namely, Kate and the suit she promised you. Luckily enough, she finds you first, smugly handing over a package.
"Don't leave the girls waiting..."
Great, she totally got you some stripperific suit knockoff, didn't she?
...Okay, you take it back.
This is one nice suit. In fact, the usual catcalls take a moment to start once you emerge into the main living room(s), so Kate probably did something right.
Watching as the whole core group of the gang assembles, you adjust your tie for a bit before shadowing your face. The last thing you do before your face sinks into darkness is winking at Kate, though everyone saw it, naturally.
Interestingly enough, this time they're catcalling at her. Seems you're making progress on this whole socializing thing. Kate, of course, just smiles and shakes her head a bit before addressing everyone.
"Okay, you all know what to do. Leave the actual work to the grunts and look imposing, until someone has a problem with what we do. Then you shoot them. If anything happens, use the burner phones to call and we'll sort it out. All clear?"
Receiving a series of affirmations and nods, Kate gestures and everyone moves out in small groups, with only her, Nora and Sherrel remaining behind.
"So, wanna see what I've been working on?" Sherrel asks.
Well, if she asks like that...
Arriving back in the workshop area, Sherrel unveils her latest work. It's... not terrible? You'd been under the assumption all her work was essentially a dumping ground on wheels, but this looks surprisingly normal.
Maybe it's because she has access to proper materials and isn't restricted to using junk, like you, ironically, had been while in your other dimension. Maybe it's because she isn't so high all the time anymore, though she never turned down a little blood from you. Maybe it's just because she wants to put that part of her life behind her, and this is her way of showing it.
Whatever the reason, before you stands one of the unmarked vans your gang has taken to using whenever possible, with a minigum mounted atop it, something weird about the wheels and you heavily suspect she worked over the insides something fierce, but still, it looks surprisingly normal. After all, you could totally mount a minigun on a car yourself if you felt the need to.
"I made sure to make it look as normal as possible. That, and I didn't have enough time to do something really impressive, anyway. The minigun can be controlled via a gaming setup from the inside and it's got limited invisibility, nitro-boost and the wheels can detach their outer coverings as little drones."
Well, this is... pretty nice, you think? You should be able to get some decent mileage out of it... and Kate started making shiny eyes the moment the gaming setup was mentioned, so you suppose she'll have fun with it.
That's honestly the most important part of this, you'd say.
The three of you get inside and you have to say, this is one nice ride. The seats are comfortable as fuck, and the ride smooth as can be.
Honestly, Sherrel could've spent all her time just on making this ride this perfect and you'd accept it. Kate, of course, wants to claim the shotgun seat for herself, but when she realizes there's three seats in front, she relents and takes the middle one.
Naturally, this gives her the perfect position to look onto the screen showing the car's surroundings as viewed from the roof, but you're sure that's just a coincidence.
As is the controller she's holding.
Anyway, you're soon driving through the wrecked streets of Brockton, Sherrel maneuvering expertly through potholes and random debris here and there. Kate, naturally, is busy keeping this whole little operation coordinated.
"Okay, shit's going alright with the first group. They're just running along the borders we're trying to establish. They saw a few nazis, but nobody did anything, so things are going as expected.
The second group is encountering some difficulties by the Merchants camping out in the trainyard and surronding areas, though the third group is doing fine, filling out the space in-between the first two, as well as group four. So I'd say we pay a visit to the 'yard, make a few examples and..."
It is at this point that Kate gets another call. Rolling her eyes, she takes it, listening to what they have to say.
Frowning, she speaks into her burner phone "Okay, I want you to stand your ground and wait for us, we'll take care of it."
Turning to the other occupants of the tinkertech vehicle, she clears her throat.
"So like I was saying, group three sighted Velocity. We should probably take care of that."
Giving Sherrel the address, the three of you zoom through the streets, the invisibility and 'nitro-boost' letting you eat through the distance like a landwhale at Fugly Bob's.
By the way, this thing also has a navigator built in. Nifty, that.
Arriving at the right place in short order, you take a moment to look around from invisibility. Velocity is squared up in the middle of the street, looking to all the world like he has the situation under control, there's no need to worry, ma'am.
Opposite to him your people are standing, a few of the girls backed up by several dozen hoodlums with spraypaint to hand.
Looking over at the girls, you just nod.
"Don't worry, I got this."
As you speak, you open the door, activating your self-levitation as you hop up just a bit.
The end result is you basically flowing out of a sudden opening in the air, then (as you reduce the amount you're giving physics the middle finger) slowly floating downwards.
While posing.
God, this is embarrassing.
Once you lightly tab the ground with your boots, you begin to speak.
"Velocity! Such a pleasure to meet one of our city's most distinguished heroes, you probably heard of me, but I am Cain and we are the Lords Street Crypts," you say as give him a light bow. More a slight incline of your head than anything else, honestly.
"Now as you see my friends and I are out for a little redecorating, would you be so kind as to not interfere? I would hate for my new suit to get damaged."
Now you just smile while waiting for him to come to the correct conclusion.
"I didn't know these were your guys. In this case, I'll promptly move out. Take your time, no hurry," he says as he blurs into a red afterimage.
"Okay, you heard the man. He'll be back with reinforcements asap, so finish up what you need and skedaddle. You can skip the immediate surroundings if you need to, just don't be here when he returns with a van full of troopers. Good work, everyone," you proclaim as you open the door again, once more vanishing into your mysterious rectangle of doom.
You can practically hear the speculations on PHO. Your bet is they'll claim it's a pocket dimension, but the shit they throw around on the internet can be hilariously out there.
"Well done. Though you do realize the internet speculations will be hilarious? They're already painting you and Dauntless as a pair, this'll just make it worse."
Well, okay, you'll admit that wasn't what you were thinking about, but sure.
Driving off, the three of you indulge in some lighthearted banter while Kate keeps on getting periodic check-ins.
Soon, however, it turns out the Merchants you haven't eaten or recruited so far are mobilizing all across their former territory, trying to boot out the groups you have systematically 'redecorating' everything they see.
It's not like they can effectively stop your efforts, but they certainly can slow you down. Pretty much all groups have encountered resistance, though most of it stops after the first few shots are fired.
Most of them with an actual backbone are working for you now, after all.
That said, when the report of a bunch of skinheads comes in, all of you look at each other before speeding off to the location in question.
You set to repeat your earlier move, but this time, you also summon your new gun soul and shockwave guy, having given them a few instructions ahead of time.
Alright, showtime again.
Setting down on the street, you clear your throat (for show) and begin to speak in a lightly mocking tone.
"Gentlemen, I will make charitable assumptions as to your education, and assume you have some rudimentary understanding of history, now, which of you wishes to reenact Stalingrad?"
The two dozen skinheads confronting your lackeys waver for a moment, but once you narrow your eyes, with your two souls flanking you and their match in numbers opposing them, the little sense they have wins out and they turn and run.
With that taken care of, you nod towards your minions and get back into the black rectangle hanging in the air. Actually, that's a pretty neat trick. Sherrel must've added it into the invisibility for when the doors have to be opened.
It's great for being all theatralic.
Regardless, once your souls 'climb in' and are promptly reabsorbed before they can take up space, you close the door and Sherrel drives off. Good work all around.
In the next half an hour or so, all is calm on the western front. All groups have cleared their previous issues up and are progressing along their planned routes.
Eventually, you're nearly done and begin thinking about molesting Kate and/or Sherrel (not that they'd mind), before being shaken out of your mood.
Rolling her eyes, Kate hangs up on the latest call.
"Looks like the rest of the rats have banded together. A big pile of Merchant rabble is making their way towards group four, though groups two and three are about to converge on their position anyways. We could just leave the cleanup to them, unless you feel the need to participate?"
"Sure, let's relax by mowing down a few idiots."
Driving off, you can see Kate playing with the controller. Looks like someone is eager to play.
Once you arrive, you immediately see the issue. Several dozens of Merchants in ragged outfits are milling about the area, the streets deserted aside from them and your people, approaching from several directions.
Actually, you may want to finish this quickly, else you may get the PRT after your ass... again.
"Okay, then, time to mop these guys up hard. Kate, you go nuts with that machine gun. I'll use a few of my minions and fly above them to shoot a few sharp pieces of ice into the mob; I figure we can do this in five minutes or less. Oh, and if anyone looks important or interesting, try not to kill them, I'm getting just a little peckish."
With that out of the way, and also informing your souls of the plan, you once more step out of the Sherrelmobile. Actually, you may need to think up a new cape name with her. Thought for later.
Either way, here you are, your summoned minions coming out behind you. Well, no use letting these guys stay alive. They're the ones either too dumb or too unlucky to join your gang.
They have no use beyond their corpses and souls to you, and the latter is questionable.
So, you jump lightly, getting a nice angle on them. Some of the mob see you and aim what little guns they have, but once you complete your first cast of Freeze water and shoot at my enemy in a glorious barrage!, not even really needing to aim, what with them being in one big group.
Gravity assisting your effort, mostly anone struck by your three projectiles is struck dead. Unfortunate how you can only shoot three at once, but then again, not like you can't just cast over and over, either.
Your brand new suit being capable of repelling bullets amuses you greatly as you do this. In fact, a few of these idiots may even have found out why you don't shoot straight above you and wonder why bullets rain down around you after hitting something.
Of course, once your souls and Kate join in on the festivities, the situation below you turns to sheer mayhem, the invisible minigun mowing them down in rows, while the translucent fire makes anyone it burns scream in utter agony. A few of them actually keep enough wits about them to shoot themselves to make it stop.
Good, good times.
Okay, first, taking a look around... there, one is moving!
Dropping to the ground, you stride over to the one survivor of these idiots, bashing your fist against his head and making said head rebound off the floor. There, one unconscious Merchant, ready for takeout.
Dragging him along by an arm, you shove him into the suddenly opened car door, asking Kate to shove him into the back seats for later. Turning around and looking at the massacre you left, you chant Take all that is left behind of the departed and make it mine! to collect more of that diffuse stuff, just n case you find out what to use it for.
With that taken care of, you get into the car and close the door.
"Shame about the corpses, but I figure we'd best not push our luck in regards to the PRT's response times."
Still, for now, you summon your mad doctor soul, ordering it to restrain your captive on your drive back to the lair. Incidentally, Kate looks to be rather happy. The joy of shooting an invisible minigun will keep her happy for a while yet, you reckon.
"Hey, minion, got him secured back there?" You ask after a few minutes of drive, Sherrel having turned off the speed boosts and using the invisibility only for the minigun, letting the van look like a normal one while using up much less energy.
Incidentally, the extra features are fueled by a battery of fusion cells. You have no idea how it works, just that it somehow manages to extract far more energy out of those things than it should be able to.
Anyway, once you hear your minion responding in the affirmative, you continue.
"Alright, feel free to wake him up and interrogate him. Try not to get blood or other fluids on the seats if you can, but otherwise, I just want to know whether this guy is interesting enough to eat or better off as a bloodbag."
Turning towards the girls, you decide you don't want to distract Sherrel from driving, leaving you with Kate to chat with to pass the time. So, as the confused noises from behind are turned into pained screaming, you find yourself starting a conversation.
"So, Kate, I never got around to asking more about you. Where do you come from? How did you end up fighting those nazis the night I met you? How'd you like the date?"
First giggling, the laughing for a moment, Kate speaks a little louder to be heard above the muffled screaming from behind.
"God, Gabe, you really know how to ask the difficult questions, huh?"
Waving your response off, she continues.
"First off, yes, I liked the date a lot. The minigun was a lot of fun. So, about my past, huh...
Okay, I was born to my parents, like most people are. They were... okay, I guess? They weren't too bad, but I never really got the feeling they loved or even liked me.
To them, I was always just... there, you know? They tolerated my existence, but that's it. Later on, I guess they wanted to get some use outta me for bragging rights, so they had me be the best student, go do child acrobatics, the works. Thing is, I wasn't that good, no matter how much I tried. Above average, sure, but never the best, or even the top ten percent.
They always made me feel like a total disappointment, so when I hit 16 and sat there alone on my birthday? I just left. Out the door, out the street, out the city.
Eventually, I wound up joining up with a few other kids. A street gang, you know how it is. We did grunt work for the 'real' gangsters, and we got by well enough. A few fucks tried to take advantage of me, of course, but I learned early on to shoot early, and after the third fucker lost his balls to a bullet, people left me alone for the most part.
Eventually, though, I just wanted... more, you see? I didn't wanna spend my life in the shadows of 'real' criminals. So I took a few of the other kids with me and became the leader of my own little gang. It wasn't smooth sailing, but I learned how the walk walks, how people work, and we always had enough to eat and a little extra for the bullets.
Of course, the established gangs around didn't like rivals, so we had to keep moving around, from one district to the next, until we eventually left the city, repeatedly. We were kind of a nomadic gang, and over time, I tended to attract others who thought like me.
People, though mainly girls and women, that had to live as criminals for one reason or another, but that didn't want to just exist for others to take advantage of, one way or another, and after a few years of that lifestyle, the group wound up here, in Brockton Bay.
We were planning on just mooching off of the local market for a bit, change locations a few times, and then fuck outta here before the nazis ran us off. But then we met you, and I saw the chance to really go beyond what we'd been running from for all those years. Having our own gang, with cape muscle and strong enough people just have to accept that we're there.
So I took the chance, and, well, here we are."
Laughing quietly to herself, Kate adds a last part to her story.
"And here I am, having fished out the best boyfriend ever. You never know how things go, huh? And of course I vomit all o' that out the moment I get a chance. Forget it, I wanna watch the guy in the back seats get tortured."
Turning around, she does just that, leaving you and Sherrel to share an awkward glance.
Well, at least you're nearly back at the lair, so this atmosphere will be dispelled soon.
When you finally arrive, you have to flee downstairs, Kate making a weird face and just poking you whenever you aren't looking at her, and only taking refuge in your room makes her stop following you.
Thinking about it, you've left those zombies you made back when you ate trashman in one of the rooms for a while now, so you may as well go ahead and refresh them. Better they don't start to stink up everything down here.
Okay, no, you can't hide in your room until your girlfriend stops poking you. Time to go and face the music!
After, that is, you have put it off for a bit longer. Finding your minion in the main rooms, putting up a little show of making horrible wounds appear and disappear on your captive for a few of the girls, though he stops when he sees you approaching.
Kurtis always thought himself better than the others. That wasn't just his pride talking, though he had a lot of that as well.
Being born in the poor parts of Brockton Bay would make you believe he was just another poor fucker, but you couldn't get further from the truth. He was strong, smart, good looking and when the Merchants eventually became a thing, he was naturally one of the first ones scouted for a leadership position.
When that crazy cape starting eating their people, he wasn't too worried. After all, if the fucker dared to come for him, he would get what was his and he'd get a nice promotion to boot.
So when they got wind of a bunch of shitheads trying to clain their turf, never would he have expected to encounter him in the worst way possible.
Grabbing the bound torture victim, you raise his throat to your face, biting deeply into it and drawing out as much blood as you can.
Once you're done and safely secured yet another soul to question about the current state of the Merchants, you bid the girls pouting over lost entertainment farewell and carry the corpse down to the basement to where you're keeping all your corpses, animated or not.
Now... now it's time to go see Kate.
Knocking on her door, you don't receive an answer, so you let yourself in and soon find the reason why. Kate seems to be taking a shower.
"That you, Gabe? Come right in."
Well, only one way to go from here, and that way is forward.
There she is, still making that face at you. And being naked, which immediately does things to you. Not that anyone can see, but you know the truth.
"Well? What're you waiting for, big boy?"
Wordlessly taking off your suit and clothing in general, you join her in the shower, leaning in a bit to give her a deep kiss.
Her moan means you're on the right track, you bemusedly think to yourself as you begin to knead her tits and grinding your body against hers, paying special attention to her nipples.
Soon enough, you're fucking her against the shower wall.
Neither of you is going to leave the shower for a good, long while.
Leaving an exhausted, naked Kate safely tucked into bed, you leave her room, thinking about what to do next and just how cute she looked after orgasm number 24.
On your way back into your room, you're wayliad by Cupcake, who tells you all about her day and how she 'totally shot that motherfucker' after taking a dose of buffout.
Why she took buffout to shoot a guy you don't get, as you remember the stuff being basically steroids on steroids, but maybe it was just to deal with the recoil? Anyway, you nod and 'mhm' at the appropriate points as you move on into your place.
Once there, Addy, having followed you, slowly stops talking while getting a big ol' blush, before shyly asking if you want to have sex while fidgeting a little.
Deciding you may as well test one of your older theories, you suggest that she's way too dressed for sex, following which you start yanking her out of her clothes, to her squawking displeasure,
You, though, just grab her and sit her atop your shoulder. Facing you, naturally.
As you begin to probe her pussy with your tongue, she gasps and grabs onto your head. This will be a long few hours...
Eventually pulling your dick out of her thoroughly abused pussy (not that she objected at the time), you leave Cupcake securely warmed by your pillow pile, thinking to yourself you may as well get a few blankets one of these days.
Regardless, it's about to be day. Time to decide what you'll be doing throughout it.
Well, you have once more learned your lesson. It seems the maids in the soul palace just aren't safe to interact with.
When you'd asked one of them if you could sketch her for practice, you'd expected the blush. You even expected the enthusiastic agreement. You'd even factored in the possibility of more maids spawning in.
What you didn't expect was the sheer deluge of maids, making sure you were sketching the one posing in front of you while the rest forcefully dispatched your clothes and groped you, even as at least one of them had her lips around your dick.
You don't think you spent longer than two seconds of your dick being cold, all in all. At least you got used to working while under pressure? Huh. And looking your sketches over, they actually become better over time in small, but notable ways.
...does the maid collective know something you don't?
It can't be... can it?
So, with your latest ordeal over, you move on to delegating stuff. First, you ask Samantha (you're so happy you got the girls to sunproof the main rooms) to either remind you to set the timer for your next livestream around noon or to do it herself if you're too busy at the time.
She seems to perk up at the mention of the next stream, so maybe she enjoys watching? Would be neat to have a fan.
Next off, Kate is unfortunately unavailable for the time being, so you run around to make sure everything she needed doing is taken care of for a few minutes before you summon your Knockoff Militia and one of your souls handy with machines, to train anyone the girls want trained and to help Sherrel and Lea with the manufactory, respectively.
With all that taken care of, it's time to go off into your room again and train.
You train for the entire day, eventually taking a short break to set the timer when Samantha comes by and just keep on going afterwards.
At least you're getting somewhere here.
Alright then, time for the stream. Taking a shower again to hype yourself up (and shadowing to get rid of the moisture), you position yourself again and wait until everything starts to begin.
"Hello everyone and welcome to Painting with Cain! Today we'll start things off with a very technical picture that lets you glean a lot about perspective, followed with me just painting whatever comes to mind and one thing suggested by the stream. All good?"
Naturally just moving on (and mighty proud of yourself for actually noticing you could read comments as you were streaming), you move over and switch the camera perspective once again.
Taking your pencil to hand, you begin to draw the same basic lines you did the last time you drew a city from above.
"As you can see, I am drawing the same lines as I did with the last picture I drew in the previous stream, though this time they're looking quite different. You'll see why in a moment."
Prattling on about this and that as you continue to draw, you eventually arrive at the complete picture. Taking some additional time to color everything in correctly, showing everything you do to the camera.
"...and this is just how extremely perspective can effect a picture."
Now then...
"Now, with that out of the way, how about we go on ahead and draw something purely for fun? Oh, I know, how about a Dragon?
And I don't mean the utterly awesome hero of the same name, though I certainly wouldn't mind drawing one of her suits. No, we're going for a proper fantastical dragon."
As you speak, you start to pencil in the outline you have in mind, a long, agile neck, with a robust body and a long tail, most of it offscreen and bending around.
Yes, this will do.
As you finish up the arduous task of getting all the colors just right, you can't help but smile.
"So, here we are. A right and proper dragon. Took up a little more time than I'd planned, but still, looks great, doesn't it? I'm actually especially proud of the background and how well it works with the focus of the picture."
"Alright then, everyone, I promised you a picture, so let's talk pictures. Use the comments to agree on a common idea or theme and I'll go for it. Keep in mind, I do reserve the right to refuse anything inappropriate. Ready? Go!"
Phew, those are... a lot of comments scrolling through. You can't help but smile at just how enthusiastic people are being.
Deciding to help them along a bit, you make sure to respond to the occasional comment and chuckle at some of the things scrolling through.
Eventually, things come to a head between the proponents of rabbits and chicks. Happily enough, you can do both.
"Alright everyone, looks like we have a theme between rabbits and chicks. Not to worry, I have an idea on what to do."
As you say it, you begin to draw the outline of a big, round something right in the middle of the picture-to-be, followed by rough and blocky icicles lining the top, still leaving enough space for what you plan. Yes, this will work.
Moving at a frantic pace to include everything you want to, you continue to add little balls all across the big ball, with a few lines to the side to denote cave walls.
Adding detail everywhere on whims as you go over it again and again, turning balls into little animals and sketching out a head comically small compared to its' body.
Soon enough, it is possible to make out what it depics; a very big rabbit lying in a cave, a horde of chicks atop and all around it, toppling from its sides.
Lastly, almost carefully, you draw out a figure standing before it, giving the rest of the picture scale and giving a profound expression.
Of course, you keep on talking throughout the drawing process, explaining what you're doing and why, but even so, you can't help but get caught up in the process of drawing.
Finally, when it is time to add color, you smile mischievously as you take the blue pen.
"And here we are. One complete picture with a big, floofy rabbit and all the chicks you could want for.
Now, looks like we have a little time leftover, so why don't I draw one last practice picture? Shouldn't take too long, after all."
Idly chattering, you move your tools across paper and enjoy the simple act of drawing things.
"Here we are, just a few silhouettes moving across a reflective surface, but you can learn a lot about drawing when you really analyze it. So, looks like our time is nearly out, so I'll bid you all farewell and hope you had fun, as well as to see you again next time. Until then!"
Interlude: Reactions And Reactions
Adam cursed. The fucking piece of cuntducked shit was doing it again for some reason.
It wasn't enough to take everything from him, fucking Squeals, the shit Merchants, the fuckmothering Drugs, no, he had to mock him with the pretext of 'lifestreaming drawing advice'. Pah!
"...and this is just how extremely perspective can effect a picture."
Even just the dickmuncher's voice was grating on his motherfucking ears. Fuggeddabout it, he'll just go and snort something.
Cindy snorted as she watched her new boss, clad in what could almost be mistaken as stripperwear, nerd out on screen about dragons, of all things.
"Now, with that out of the way, how about we go on ahead and draw something purely for fun? Oh, I know, how about a Dragon?"
Watching him was somewhat of a pastime among the new ranks of the Crypts, though really, who could blame them? It was soothing and nice to look at.
No, really, those abs were nice to look at. But even beyond that, watchin a simple set of pens being used to slowly but methodically construct the most stunning landscapes and fantastical sights just had something... magical about it.
The way his voice just kept on going and drew you in helped, too, turning the simple watching of a video into an excursion to elsewhere, where things were just a tiny bit less bad. No wonder everyone was so fascinated by it.
She clicked on the repeat button.
Tess frowned, or at least did the closest equivalent an artificial intelligence was capable of. The new villain in Brockton Bay had used the word 'dragon' in his livestream and so triggered her search algorithms, but while she had expected many things, him complimenting her career as a hero wasn't among them.
Nevertheless, she made it a point to watch the whole thing from start to finish, and found his way to explain and motivate people to be oddly soothing.
"So, here we are. A right and proper dragon. Took up a little more time than I'd planned, but still, looks great, doesn't it? I'm actually especially proud of the background and how well it works with the focus of the picture."
It didn't hurt that dragon he drew was actually really nice, even to her senses.
Victor sneered as he watched the fool pandering to the masses. Not enough that he had to come out of nowhere with his own gang and an unknown amount of parahumans, impressive though that was, he also had to try and grapple with the Empire at the point of its greatest strength.
"Alright then, everyone, I promised you a picture, so let's talk pictures. Use the comments to agree on a common idea or theme and I'll go for it. Keep in mind, I do reserve the right to refuse anything inappropriate. Ready? Go!"
Hilarious. As though a livestream channel about art was going to win him the hearts and minds of the people. No, the Empire was strong, as was its message.
This mad motherfucker was going to fail, but the longer he tried to slam his head against the wall, the longer he was out of the picture as a credible threat. So, good riddance.
Dean looked on thoughtfully. The Protectorate and PRT did not like talking to the Wards about the more dangerous villains beyond cautioning them to stay away from them, and from what he was hearing, that was absolutely justified in this case.
"Alright everyone, looks like we have a theme between rabbits and chicks. Not to worry, I have an idea on what to do."
The man he was seeing was... charismatic. Friendly and approachable, even. Considering the official press release on him and the proven repeated mass murder... It didn't paint a pretty picture.
An extremely dangerous parahuman capable of committing such atrocities, but still presenting himself as an entirely normal and reasonable person spelled trouble. It smacked of a manipulative personality disorder, or perhaps his power modified his mental processes somehow.
The thought made him shudder. To trigger, to suffer through the worst day in your life, was bad enough. But to come out of it (presumably) so starkly changed compared to before? As a murderous psychopath using who you were beforehand as a weapon to hook in others?
If it was anything like that, Dean could only hope he would be captured before he could commit any more such abhorrent crimes and get the help he needed. Then again, maybe he was just falling for a ruse. Either way, bad news all around.
Missy squealed in excitement. Oh, it was really, really happening!
"And here we are. One complete picture with a big, floofy rabbit and all the chicks you could want for."
He drew it! He drew a big floofy rabbit! WITH FLOOFLY BLUE CHICKS RIDING ON IT!
This had to be the best day in her life. Screw him being a mass murderer, for just this moment all could be forgiven. This picture deserved to be immortalized. In fact... yeah, she was going to make a screenshot of this and use it as her background.
God, the first episode was great, no questions asked, if only due to his... physique... but this? This was entirely worth making a half dozen fake accounts to steer the comment war towards the correct outcome.
Yes, totally worth it... and his smiles as she commented had nothing to do with it. God, why couldn't he have been a hero?
Brian knocked on Lisa's door.
"Lisa? I know you're in there. Mind telling me what this is all about? You haven't left your room for three days now."
The door opened, letting him into the faintly rank room and admitting him to see an enormous conspiracy nut whiteboard, filled over and over with notes and comments.
Moving over to her bed, Lisa returned towards the position Brian suspected she was keeping until he knocked- crouched on the bed, staring at her laptop with frightening focus.
"Here we are, just a few silhouettes moving across a reflective surface, but you can learn a lot about drawing when you really analyze it. So, looks like our time is nearly out, so I'll bid you all farewell and hope you had fun, as well as to see you again next time. Until then!"
"Look, Lisa, whatever has you so on edge, it can't be important enough to-"
"It is. He's either back from the dead or some sick biotinker stole his corpse and is making it dance like a puppet."
She looked him square in the eyes.
"I was at his grave. His corpse isn't there."
Amy was scratching her chin as she watched the villain move about, excitedly sketching something. She certainly could acknowledge he had a certain appeal to him, though it was naturally far behind that of Vicky.
When she heard the recording mention a comment-chosen picture, her mind wandered off towards Vicky almost immediately, but she shook it off. When she then saw him sketch out unproportional chicks riding a rabbit, she had to smile. When he then added a human before the rabbit and the proportions became clear, she was first stunned, then thought about whether it was possible for her to make- no, bad thought.
Once he colored them blue of all things, all sense was lost. Amy just had to laugh.
Dinah squeed when she saw the fluffly rabbit with the fluffy chicks.
Finishing up the cleanup, you look around again to make sure everything's put away as you consider what to do next tonight.
Okay, first, time to go see Kate for a sec. Finding her in one of the main living rooms, you tell her you're planning to find Skidmark today so you can finish this little gang scuffle tomorrow night, and how it'd be great if the girls are prepared for the legwork involved in taking the rest of the Merchants' former territory.
Getting her affirmative answer (and a kiss on the cheek), you move out as a shadow, choosing a deserted street a little distance away from your lair, summoning your dead compass (as opposed to a living compass), ordering him to find Skidmark, as in, the same as last time.
Getting the correct direction, you once again go shadow and follow it, eventually recognizing the address you're arriving at.
The building in question is a medium-sized apartment complex not far from the coast... or at least it used to be, it's a burnt-out ruin now, like most buildings in the area. Except, of course, for the few signs of habitation you can see.
Someone, or rather a group of someones is living here, and combined with your clarification that Skidmark is somewhere in this direction, it doesn't take a genius to guess this is where the remaining 'hardcore' Merchants are holed up in.
So, you have a location and you're fairly sure Skidmark is inside it. The question is, what else may be inside? Whelp, only one way to find out, you suppose, as you start to slither your way inside.
Whelp, looks like these guys were (or rather, are) preparing. Whether to attack you or to defend against your inevitable attack, it doesn't matter.
What does matter is that they have actually rigged up some improvised traps, with tripwires triggering what you think are homemade explosives, along with heavy weaponry you see all around on the wretched creatures thinking themselves human walking around.
And that one rocket launcher. Can't forget the rocket launcher.
You don't enter the room you suspect to be Skidmark's due to the bright light making unseen infiltration exceedingly difficult for you, though you have gained confirmation he actually is present and not in some other place you'd arrive to if you kept following the direction you have. That cursing is pretty distinctive, and his repeated screams about being the leader of the Merchants and so to be followed unconditionally make it clear.
That or he has a good body double, a possibility you think about with slight amusement before discarding it. Anyway, you couldn't enter all the rooms, but from what you can see, there seem to be about three to four dozen people living here. Not too many compared to the wild mob you'd encountered yesterday night, but they seem actually minimally competent, so you expect them to put up somewhat more of a fight.
You have seen enough for tonight. Retreating unseen for the time time being, you make good speed towards the lair, whence you move into your corpse storage room. Time to get to work.
Taking stock, you have... what was it again, Mush's corpse? His corpse, and five other corpses, the four you took on the same occasion as him and the freshest one of the Merchant lieutenant you snagged during your latest massacre.
This, while not perfect, gives you some... options to work with.
Okay, so time to get to work. You're not sure how well you'll be able to work with the parts caused by power usage, but let's see how things go first.
First, you take some muscle from one of your normal corpses and try to transplant it onto a tendril, which seems to work. Ordering the zombie to move it, it seems to have gained better articulation and control of it, as well as likely having just that much more strength.
Good enough.
Stripping your other corpse of all the muscle you can find, you slowly but surely turn the various tendrils into tentacles of varying thickness, stretching the muscle you have available out along them and making sure they all can move properly.
With that taken care of, you look at the leftovers of the corpse you just ravaged, wondering if it's possible to use the bones for something really interesting.
Well, you are experimenting around anyway, so...
Using your magic to slowly but surely twist a few of the smaller bones into sharp little spikes, you add them to tentacles of fitting length. Envisioning them being used, you can't help but smile thinking about them wrapping around and utterly shredding anything they touch, especially people.
You try to fashion a thighbone into a longer, pointier weapon, but your zombie seems far too clumsy to use it properly, so you take it out of the tentacle again for now.
By this point, two more things have become clear- first, you don't want this thing to become too squishy, and second, you can't stand to look at this face any longer. You need to change it, or, better yet, replace it entirely. Moving to do so, you first twist the face off, balling it up and throwing it onto the pile of stuff to recycle later.
Good riddance.
Next, you take the skull from your first source, using your magic to make it fit around the skull of your zombie, with a split down the front due to limited material. Good enough for you.
Collecting the eyes from all the corpses, you cluster them down the split, making it look like a pit full of raw flesh and eyes. Also incidentally much more handsome than before, funnily enough.
Though you take out the two eyes originally in this body and transplant them onto the back of neck to both sides, letting your creature see behind it thanks to your ability to work with nerves. May as well make use of all of the tentacles, after all.
With your base design down, next all you do is strip off everything you can from the other corpses and adding it to your work. Thicker, stronger tentacles, more muscle all around, bones turned into spikes where appropriate (and a few sticking out of the main body for flare) and flattened out a bit before being inserted strategically to attain better protection.
Oh, and you threw in all the useless organs and leftover materials as additional padding, protecting the actually important bits. You're especially proud of how you used the spines by winding them around each other to give your creation a more impressive stature while also making it harder to injure.
Of course you also had to keep on making the outer skull bigger, or rather, drew a layer of muscle and fat over it before adding a bigger one made out of two sifferent skulls while keeping the gap's size constant. This thing will be able to take a beating, you reckon.
The only thing you're a bit worried about are the somewhat lanky arms, which you did still improve, but just not as heavily as the rest of the body or, say, the legs (to make it possible to walk for this thing). Then again, it has tentacles. Those should be its main weapon anyway.
Well now, with your newest abomination against all that is right or at least vaguely non-horrific sittinng ready in your basement, you think over what to do next, before a stray thought intrudes on your considerations.
Yeah, you could totally have your souls pretend to be capes. Not like they don't have the powers to show for it, at any rate. All you'd need are some masks... And of course, you do the same thing you do whenever you need something, you run to Kate to make her get it for you.
Secure in your trust a gas mask and some kind of plague doctor mask will be ready tomorrow night, you get back to what you were doing. Right, messing around with those fuzzy thingies you started collecting at the sites of the massacres you commit.
Concentrating a bit, you can feel how several of them... fuse, becoming one thingy, but denser.
Well, this is... something.
Taking one of the two denser ill-defined things you now have and pushing it into your little tentacle monster, you observe as it groans for a moment, a long, drawn out sound full of what you'd guess was pain.
Curious, considering this thing's incapable of feeling pain. It's stopped, though, and returned to standing around, staring blankly like they usually do.
Weird.
Hopefully having actually done this right, you leave your newest undead abomination in the corpse room and get back to Kate, this time to give her an in-depth briefing on what you saw and the capabilities of your creation.
Quite happy about having this much information, Kate promises she's looking forward to seeing your tentacle monster in action before shooing you off while she phones in with someone about organizing a few small groups of taggers to make sure everyone knows what's what.
Leaving her to her work for now, you return into your room, taking a seat in your pillow corner and fiddling around with your mysterious spell.
You spend the day training your mysterious spell, trying around and poking at things to figure out exactly what it is actually doing, at least after you send off a pair of souls to help Kate organize tonight's raid.
That secretary soul you sent her seems to have been useful, so you decide against terminating it for now.
Anyway, after a long day of nebulous effort and results, the sun is finally going down. Time to get ready.
Coming up the stairs, looks like everyone's assembling in preparation of the operation. Homing in on Kate's location, you take position and wait for her to have a minute of time, busy as she is with coordinating things.
"Okay, so I'm summoning these two for this," you say as you breathe out Painfire and Mad Doctor.
"He can create spectral fire that doesn't burn, just hurt things immensely, and he's a good doctor that can basically create whatever he needs to operate on people. I'll also leave him in control of the abomination while I'm busy; we can pretend these two are actual capes and everything.
Oh, and you make sure there's some survivors," you caution your doctor soul.
"I need some bloodpacks and experimental subjects for later. Anyway, once we're there, I'll go in as a shadow and start sabotaging everything I can without being discovered. Once I am discovered or done, I'll send a telepathic message for the main assault to begin while I attack them from behind.
That okay?"
"Sure, that works for me. Just keep in mind we'll be using Sherrel's ride, so we have a minigun just waiting for any of them trying to run."
"Oh, and before I forget, I may need a spare laser musket if we have any lying around to counter Skidmark if I have to delay him before the rest arrives."
With the plan out of the way, you grab a musket from the workshop and get into the invisible van, getting on the way once both Sherrel, Kate and Nora are inside, your summoned minions in the backseats while the abomination you've begun to mentally call Gash is waiting in the trunk.
Time to end this.
Once your ride arrives a few streets away from the correct location, you get out and nod at the others before shadowing as they drive off.
First stop, the last Merchant stronghold. Let's see what you can do to ease up the main push, hm?
Okay, first things first, the fucker with the rocket launcher has to go. Looking around slowly and steadily, no point in busting your cover at this point, you soon find him in one of the old apartments, playing cards with another Merchant.
Silently twisting along the ground, you position yourself so you can reach both of them at once, then suddenly rematerialize and grab for them, letting electricity spark along your palms and fingers.
Grabbing onto both of their shoulders, you let the juice flow through them, making them twitch heavily for a second before they both just... fall over.
You think you may have accidentally killed them for a moment, but when you move your head closer, you can faintly see them breathing. Good.
Well, here you are, with two paralyzed Merchants and an unsupervised RPG. On the one hand, you can do whatever you want, on the other hand, you have no idea when someone else may come by.
Okay, you're not going to dawdle long over these two. First, you grab a chair from the nearby seating area your victims were using and jam it under the doorknob, hopefully keeping anyone from coming inside for the time being.
You would just lock it, but you can't see the key anywhere, and you don't want to spend time searching.
While you're at it, you take a look around the kitchen, but it doesn't seem as though they had any alcohol nearby, nor had they any on them. Too bad, but eh.
Anyway, with all of that out of the way, you take the rocket launcher and start to take pieces off until you're fairly sure nobody is going to be able to use it. You don't touch the rockets inside and on the former owner, though- you don't feel like getting blown up for now, thank you very much.
Leaving your paralyzed victims securely tucked away in a corner, you shadow again and get moving.
The next half an hour you spend on silently shadowing to where you found traps earlier, going solid and either taking out the homemade explosives so the tripwires can't trigger them or just casting Freeze on them to ensure they won't go off anyway.
Unfortunately, after a while one of the actual patrols (and man, these aren't the merchants you know) going around the place semi-randomly stumbles across you, scrambling backwards to draw his gun while screaming.
"H-he's here! HE'S HERE!"
Well shit, your cover's blown.
Mentally contacting Kate, you think "Cover blown, starting to eat my way through them now. Didn't get all the traps."
"Gotcha," is all you get back. Concentrating on the situation at hand, you ram into the guy that saw you, slamming him against the wall and letting you grab onto his arm and mouth, leaving him flailing a bit, but without the ability to make any loud noises.
Not that that's going to help, from what you can hear from the surroundings, but it's the thought that counts, you ponder to yourself as you ram your teeth into his neck.
Frankie didn't like this, but then again, since when did it matter if he liked a situation? He was still in it and he still had to deal with it.
So when Skids called all of the higher-ups to one place to prepare for the psycho that seemed determined to murder them all, he didn't raise any objections. Sure, it lost the gang as a whole millions of dollars, not to mention the missed opportunities for 'acquiring' new customers and bitches, but none of that was of any use to a corpse.
So they assembled, and so they used all the money they had to get ready. Frankie would've never expected to be the first to greet the visitor they'd been expecting, but hey, that's just how the coke lines up, y'know?
Letting go of the corpse as it starts to slide down the wall, you reorient yourself. You know the location of the room Skidmark was in the last time you were here, so you get to walking.
Only to be met with two Merchants lobbing something in your direction one corridor later! One molotov, one grenade of some kind.
It is also in this moment that you hear a loud crash from downstairs. Looks like the cavalry has arrived.
Jumping backwards and gripping the wall you hit to throw yourself to the side, you manage to escape the blast radius of both explosives, the distinctive thump deafening you for a short moment. Phew.
Deciding to pay them back first, you lean around the corner, chanting Freeze and shoot! at the one to the left, immediately running the the other one that already opened fire on you by the time you're done.
Not that it will help him.
Hooking your claws into his bulletproof vest, you use your momentum to take him to the ground, ignoring the other guy opening fire into your back (and doing exactly jack shit) and tearing into his throat.
His gurgles don't last long.
Unfortunately, by the time you're done drinking this guy, the other one has drawn a combat knife and is taking a swing at you! Shit!
Launching yourself forwards and off of the corpse, you immediately turn around, getting up and facing your opponent. That was close; he nearly ruined your suit.
Grabbing onto his knife hand before he can try again, you dig your claws through his gloves, making him drop his knife even as you ram your other hand into his neck to pull it towards you.
He struggles for a bit and tries to get you into an armlock of some kind, but by that time you're already closing your jaws around his neck. He seems to realize there's no escape for him just a moment before you start to bite your way in.
Barney was confused. Why did they have to put on the good stuff? Still, he just did what Raff said.
Raff was pissed. First that fucker had to kill a bunch of them, and now he refuses to leave them alone, just like what Skidmark said.
Well, if he wants it, he better be prepared to get it.
Leaving the two fresh corpses behind, you continue on your way through the building, You can hear the sounds of fighting from downstairs, interspersed with screaming and low groans.
Comin to another intersection, you're met with a choice. You could either come down and shoot a few barrages at the enemies' back and have the main group back you up, or you could proceed alone and murder Skidmark by your lonesome.
Ooor you could double back, reanimate the dead bodies in your wake and have them go first, just in case. Choices, choices...
Continuing on, you telepathically contact Kate once more.
"Kate? How're things going down there?"
"Gabe? Things are great! Your little toy is completely wasting these idiots. And the walls. I'm using the minigun to keep any of them from running, too."
"Heh. Good times."
Looks like everything's going well, then. You doubt it'll be long before the main group will finish things down there and come upstairs. Hopefully Gash doesn't manage to accidentally destroy the building by knocking out a load-bearing wall before then; most of the buildings in this area aren't in any decent condition in the first place.
Regardless, time to finally eat Skidmark and put an end to this.
Except, as you arrive at the hallway leading towards the room you were going for, something's not right.
While you would accept the lack of loud expletives in the area as Skidmark concentrating on the situation, you can't hear anyone else moving either. Perhaps they actually went elsewhere once the alarm was sounded?
Oh.
Oh shit.
Looking up, you can see the ceiling has been coated in a dimly-lit field. Just as you work your way through this realization, you see a blink of light reflect off of a mirror under the door leading to your target.
In the next moment, you jump away as far as you can, even as the door is thrown open and several fucking grenades are thrown upwards, hitting the ceiling and being thrown towards you!
Thank fuck you saw this coming and got away just in time.
"YOU SHITMOTHERING CUNTWIT! I'LL SHOW YA HOW FUCKING FUCKED YOU FUCKER ARE!"
Well, there are the expletives. And now, of course, he refuses to come out and just starts throwing stuff at you while using his power on the ground to keep you away.
Alright, if this fucker wants to play, let's play.
First, you start to crank the musket you got just for this occasion, even as you chant Make the world a colder place! at the room he's in. Good thing you don't need line of sight for this one.
Before you can do more, however, this motherfucker throws a bunch of kitchen knives at the ceiling, even while intensifying the fields on the other surfaces!
"You slimelicking shitmuncher! I'm gunna EMASCULATE YOUR FUCKING SHITHEAD!"
Using your claws (or your one clawed hand that isn't busy holding the musket), you slap the knives out of the air, even as you strategically step back and to the side to avoid the brunt of the cloud.
Your next act is to chant Let the grasp of winter coat all before me in its icy breath!, coating the floor of the hallway in ice, even while you keep on turning the handcrank.
"YOU SHITTING PIECE OF FUCKMOTHERING CUNTSLIME!"
This time, what you get is what seems like random furniture; a chair, some upholstery, even the empty frame of a bed. How did he even lift that, let alone throw it?
Luckily enough, you manage to sidestep all his haphazard projectiles. Continuing to crank the laser musket in your hands, you ponder how to get an angle to actually attack him. He's hiding in that room, and there's no real way to get to him outside of the hallway he's using to launch projectiles at you.
You, uh, you don't think you can really go through there.
Well, thinking about it... you raise your musket to the ceiling, shooting out the crappy lights and also confirming that the laser it shoots does, in fact, ignore Skidmark's field.
Good to be sure of that.
Anyway, with the hallways suddenly pretty dark, you retreat a bit and take the time to go shadow, completely outside of your opponent's perception.
Who then promptly uses a flashlight to try and find you with his little mirror.
"I CAN SEE YOU! I CAN FIND YOU, SHITPAINTING SUNOFADICK, AND I WILL!"
Luckily it isn't one of those high-intensity flashlights, so it won't be an issue for you in shadow form. Still, just how well prepared is this fucker?
Sliding into the hallway, you easily avoid the small ray of light that is Skidmark trying to find you in the dark. Interestingly enough, you actually start to hear a conversation as you approach the room.
"It's fucking cold in here, man! Nobody told us to wear winter clothes for this!"
"Well if you're so fucking cold, then GET THE FUCK OUT THERE AND FIND ME THE CUNTSHIT PSYCHO TRYING TO KILL US ALL, YOU SHITFUCK!"
Just as you approach the door and get to see Skidmark, he grabs onto a shivering guy in shorts and a tank top, forcefully pushing him out and into the hallways, where the fields immediately push him around and in the direction you were standing in.
"UAAAAAAAHHHH-h-h-he's not here!"
Moving past him in one smooth motion in a moment he looks at his mirror, trying to see the 'bait' he just threw, you move into the room he was likely occupying for a few days now. Looking around, you can see a few more Merchants in what you presume was a kitchen, once upon a time, clutching guns, everything from simple pistols to assault rifles.
Not the issue for now. For now, it's time to focus on the man of the hour himself. Taking position to the back of the room, a decent distance from him, you idly take note of the small pile of projectiles he's got in a pile next to him.
Why does he have a bunch of teddy bears in there? No, not important. Besides, the pipes and grenades look far more dangerous.
Materializing, you cast Feel the bite of winter in your bones! at him, immediately making him shiver and slow down, not like he seems slow in the lest. The very moment he hears your voice, he turns around and starts screaming.
"RAAAAAAAAAAAAGH! WE GONNA FUCKING FUCKMURDER YOU LITTLE SHITLICKER!"
Well, with him basically offering himself up like this, how could you not? With a hearty Freeze and shoot! at the pile of projectiles to his side, even as he hegts up with alarming alacrity.
Hitting the grenades you were aiming at, they go off with a small oomph. Meanwhile, the idiots in the kitchen start moving towards you.
Still dazed by the explosion, you jump at Skidmark, grabbing his, frankly disgusting, hair and arm. As you do so, the idiots behind you (there are four, plus the one outside that can't get in due to Skidmark's field) storm at you from behind, trying to pull you off of him, but you hold fast and shake them off in short order, even as you prepare to bite into him.
Even as they keep trying to pull you off, you pull on Skidmark, who is trying to ram a knife he pulled from somewhere at you, but you take hold of his arm before that can go anywhere and bite into his neck, right beneath that scarf with cut out eyes he uses as a 'mask'.
The retards behind you slow down their efforts when they realize they're far too late. Heh.
Adam Mustain, aka Skidmark. A leader of a gang of petty drug dealers turned human cockroaches.
Of course, if you asked him, he'd tell you the merchants were the next big thing, but he actually had a pretty accurate idea about what they truly were. Hard not to, with more than a handful of brain cells to rub together. Not that he gave a fuck, though, so long as they did what he said and got him money that way.
Adam was practically born a petty criminal himself; never really having any perspective in life and taking drugs early on, he soon became a proper meathhead dealing out drugs himself. When the bunch of fuckers cornered him in that alley and made no secret of what they were going to do to him, he triggered while envisioning his own strung out corpse, and that moment stayed with him. So once he got his wits back together, he really thought about his future, and decided he'd either go big or go bust.
So he started using his power to impress and press others into his service, working his way up from commanding a few druggies to commanding a lot of druggies, eventually taking over the lighthouse overlooking Archer's Bridge and assimilating the bunch of other petty gangs in the area, claiming the trainyard, the boat graveyard and a few slums for himself.
It was a bunch of useless turf, but it was his, and the other gangs had no way of forcing him out of it. The Merchants were too numerous, too replaceable and too stubborn to dislodge.
At least until he came.
Rising up off of Skidmark's corpse, you turn towards the leftover enemies in the room, who are currently slowly moving away from you. Cute.
Visibly smiling at them to keep the cowed for a moment, you dart outside to find the one Skidmark threw at his fields.
"Uh, guys? The fields're gone. Did we win?"
Coming out the door and grabbing onto his lapels, you push your shadowed face towards his.
"Sorry to burst your bubble, but I just ate Skidmark, and you and your pals are next."
Enjoying the almost violent widening of his eyes, you commit your own little bit of violence as you pull him upwards a bit to have easier access to his throat.
Nom.
Coming back into the room and throwing the lifeless body to the side, you let your eyes roam across the little buffet arrayed before you. Before you can choose who to eat first, however, one of them throws himself onto his knees and starts to beg,
"Please don't eat me! Skidmark forced me to work for him. I'll work for you instead, I'll do anything, please!"
Making it a point to really display your still bloody teeth, still framed by nothing but shadow, you smile at him.
"Congratulations! You passed the test. You others failed it, by the way. Now, tell me, why should I bother keeping you alive? What did you do for Skidmark that's worth not eating you instead? And don't even bother lying, I'll know."
As you speak, you mentally contact your newest inmate, and immediately cut Skidmark off.
Shut up and answer my questions, you think at him, before describing the guy you're talking with and whether he's saying the truth. Seems he actually was forced to work for him, for once.
"I-I was an accountant, just looking for work, when a bunch of thugs dragged me off. They made me keep their books straight and everything, but that's all I did, I swear!"
According to your dead informant, that's not quite the truth. Apparently, Henley over here actually advised Skidmark on business policies in addition to doing the books once he got used being a white-collar gangster, and the suggestion to forcibly addict customers originated from him.
He seems to be under the impression you'd care about that, huh.
"I have no idea what he thought when he had me dragged here, but I swear I'll do anything you want me to if you just let me live!"
Asking from the source, he was just fairly sure this guy was too deep into the merchants to ever betray him. Nothing beyond that mattered to him.
Mhm... now what will you do?
Looking deep into his eyes with your shadow, you slowly speak in a relaxed, almost smug voice.
"Okay, Henley, I'll let you live... but don't go underselling yourself like this again, hm? You're a smart man, but so am I."
Shivering along his whole body, he actually pisses himself as he nearly falls over in his kneeling position.
"Yes! Thank you, sir! I won't disappoint you!"
"While we're on that topic, your first job will be to help me eat everyone else in this room. To prove you're taking this seriously, you see."
He keeps on shivering and sweating all over, but just bites his lip and nods. Good, you don't have to eviscerate him for being an idiot, after all.
"In fact, as my second gift as your new boss, I'll let you choose which one to eat first."
Leaning in close to him and watching his pupils dilate, you continue in your favorite tone of voice for this, the same you used to use when you caught your siblings in a lie and had to teach them to do better.
"And when you point them out, one by one, I want you to tell me what they used to do for the Merchants. Understood?"
He just keeps nodding, swallowing hard. Good. He gets why you're doing this; to punish him for whitewashing the truth earlier.
Pointing a shaking finger at the only other guy in the room, Henley speaks.
"T-This is Jordan. He used to be Skidmark's enforcer, the guy he sent around to point guns at people until they did as we told them."
"Good. Now then, Jordan, you're about to die. How does that make you feel?"
"Fuck you, you freak!" Jordan screams, pointing his rifle at you and letting loose. Too bad bullets don't do jack shit to you, so you just step forward before he can get any ideas about going for your new minion, grab his gun and throw it out the door.
The door you're now blocking access to. Nobody is getting out of here without coming within your grabbing range.
Slapping Jordan hard, he falls to the ground, disoriented. Perfect.
"Well? What're you waiting for, Henley? Feed him to me. Come over here and hold onto him as I eat."
As you speak, you grab hold of your prone victim, holding him at just the right height to drive your teeth into him. You really don't need any help, and everyone in the room knows it.
Coming over, Henley obediently takes hold of Jordan and keeps him steady. That's honestly all you need from him, so you take your own hands off, making him sag a bit as he tries to shake his head slightly to clear it.
Not that he will ever get to finish that line of thought, you think to yourself as you unhinge your jaws and feed.
Taking the last gulps down, you release his throat and leave Henley to lower the suddenly much lighter body to the ground.
Looking expectantly at him (not that he can see your expression), you wait a moment before you speak, letting him stew on what he's doing as he just stares at the newly fabricated corpse.
"Well? What're you waiting for?"
When he just stares blankly at you, you have to hold back your chuckle.
"Next one."
His shivers seem to have gone down a bit. Seems he's getting used to this, or maybe he's just earning himself some real PTSD and is just in that phase of it? Who knows. Regardless, he's pointing at the next one.
"This is Jennifer, she's just a slut Skidmark kept around to fuck people into doing what he said."
Jennifer scowls, but ignores him to turn to you instead. If you had to guess, Henley himself was of of those people Skidmark whored her out to.
"Please don't kill me, I don't mind being your slut instead, anything you want!"
As she speaks, she's making big eyes at you and putting on a face likely meant to be seductive, but to you, it just comes across as desperate.
"I already told you, he passed the test, and he's the only one that started this off by begging for his life. You missed your chance. Come over, Henley. Bring her to me."
Henley obediently marches towards her, even as Jennifer tries to back away from him.
"NO! LET GO OF ME! LET GO, YOU FUCK!"
All her screams are useless, however, as he just drags her towards you.
"LET GO, YOU IMPOTENT SHIT! YOU LIMP-DICKED BASTARD!"
Whoo, and now she's started insulting his manhood. The intellectual level of this discussion just skyrocketed, you see.
Once she's in easy reach for you, you grab hold of her, turning her screams towards you.
"NOOO! LET GO, YOU SHIT!"
Not like you care, though. Pulling her towards you, easily overpowering her feeble struggles, you wait for Henley to get a good hold on her before you bite.
He's gotten the rules to this little game down. Good.
This time, as you bite into the loud bitch (and man, even her gurgles are pretty loud), Henley just... seems to black out for a moment.
Huh. Either his way of dealing with stress is to blank out randomly, or Parahuman Studies 101 has actually taught you something useful. Who'd have thought?
"Mhm... I think you just triggered, Henley. Does anything feel different?"
"I-u-y-t," okay, seems like he's busy for the moment. Leaving him be, you approach the last meal in the room.
"I'm not going to beat around the bush. Sorry about not immediately kneeling, didn't know that was what you wanted. I was making drugs for the Merchants, can I please just work for you instead of getting eaten?"
Well, this chick's very much to the point, huh?
Well, at least she's less obnoxious than the others so far. Alright, time to question Skidmark again while you continue talking...
"Heh. Honestly, if the others hadn't been so whiny, I'd probably have hired them as well. Welcome aboard...?"
"Nell. Just, Nell. Happy to join up, boss. Honestly, if Skids didn't have people keep an eye on me, I'd probably have run off to ask to join myself, but he got really paranoid at some point."
Huh. Probably after you raided that big drug lab, you suppose. Not that it matters by now. She seems to be telling the truth, or at least Skidmark isn't contradicting her, so good enough.
Turning to Henley again, he seems to have gathered his wits about himself, so you wave him to follow you, which he does meekly. Time to ge reunite with Kate.
Coming down the stairs, you're greeted with a Merchant being sent flying towards you, missing your face by a few inches at most. Looks like someone's been busy.
This specific someone seems to be Gash, being fired on by your mad doctor minion, even as Painfire is busy making the few survivors scream in existential pain. Deciding to stop them from wasting any more warm bodies for now, you step forwards.
"Alright everyone, I just finished murdering Skidmark. If you would surrender yourselves so we don't accidentally kill you while apprehending you, that would be great."
For some reason, your happily spoken message seems to just get them to try to fight back harder. Oh well, you tried.
Just stepping back for now and observing the fighting, your abomination is doing better than you'd expected. The tentacles you turned the tendrils into are having an easy time wrapping around limbs or torsos, using the spikes to dig into the flesh and becoming virtually impossible to remove before yanking them into a random direction and throwing them away while ripping off a decent chunk of flesh.
More often than not, this leads to a slow and torturous death, and the thing can aim well enough to throw its victims at other enemies. Gunfire impacting it doesn't really seem to do much damage in return, just penetrating through the outer layer of skin and being stopped by the layer of random organs you used for just this purpose.
The head is pretty hard to penetrate, too, what with the several layers of skull you gave it. The eyes you threw into the gap in front are fulfilling their purpose, too, rather admirably freaking out anyone looking at the front of your creation, what with the eyes all looking into different directions before they all converge on its next target.
Of course, it does help that Painfire and a few of the girls with laser muskets are making sure none of the Merchants can form any effective resistance by concentrating fire (literally) on any groups they try to form, letting the main assault eat through any oppostion with ease.
Out of the corner of your eyes, you see the mad doctor ordering Gash to throw minorly wounded victims towards him, getting busy with his power for a bit before he hands the delirious (with pain) bodies off to the girls to be carried off. Looks like everything is working so far.
The only issue you can see are the small holes in Gash's body, likely due to some of the traps you didn't manage to disable before being discovered. Ah well, not like you can't just patch that up again later.
Walking by once things get a bit more quiet, you nod to everyone as your little group moves past them. Henley is staring at Gash in a horrified manner for a bit, but keeps on moving the best he can while keeping his distance.
Nell just glances at it, but ignores it afterwards.
Anyway, you make your way out of the building at a leisurely pace, telepathically contacting Kate again.
Ate Skidmark and took a pair of recruits, one of them got powers, I think.
Cool, meet me at the Invisivan.
Smirking a bit at Kate being Kate, you lead your recruits to where you can see the minigun firing at a fleeing Merchant from.
Yup, just Kate being Kate.
Opening the door, you motion for your new minions to get into the back seats before taking your place at the front once more.
"Hey Gabe, had fun?" Kate asks, scanning the surroundings via the refitted game console controlling the minigun.
"Yeah, I got to sneak around, eat a bunch of people and I didn't even get my suit dirty!"
You and Kate share a little chuckle, before simultaneously directing your attention to the back.
"So, these two are Henley and Nell, former merchant accountant and drug mixer, respectively. Henley, Nell, meet Kate. She takes care of stuff in the gang. Assume she's the highest authority in everything.
So, Henley, ready to talk yet? What changed ever since the moment you blacked out for a sec there?"
"I, uh, I can... know what to do, I think? It's hard to put into words. I can concentrate on a problem and ways to solve it come to mind, one after the other, with increasing likelihood of success."
Huh. Well, that's something.