Popping back up inside your room, the first thing you do upon your return to your home dimension (or at least the one of your birth) is to plug a couple of important things into your telepathic network, distractedly making sure nothing happened while you were gone- nothing much could have happened by definition, as a little less than a second passed here on Bet, but it's a matter of principle.
After all, if shit hits the fan, you don't see why it wouldn't do so in the split second of your absence. That kind of feels like the kind of thing you'd have to deal with.
But no, everything comes up green, from the base's systems (via the Thinker) to the city of Brockton Bay. 'A finer shithole you'll never find', as some of the locals might say, for all that there's plenty of perfectly normal people and industry of its own going on and all.
Just also, y'know, a whole lot of people with fuck all for work and large parts of it filled with public order and safety comparable to a African warlord's personal fief. Or an African warzone, for that matter.
Well at least it used to, before you went and basically took the place over the hard way, by expelling any other criminals and cape-led gangs you could find. As one does, clearly.
Maybe your perspective changed at some point after your death and resurrection (note to self, you could make a religion out of this, as one Father Wales has already proven), but it just feels terribly messy, to have rivaling criminal organizations vying for territory within the same city, once they grow beyond a certain scale.
Also stupidly inefficient, but that's beside the point. Not that you aren't happy about the model of drug distribution you've set up with the Crypts, or the decent conditions for prostitution as a business model, or the way you pointedly collect actual protection money: by way of just not bothering anyone that doesn't want protection and installing your own security for any business owners that do want it.
It's still a form of unofficial taxation, but a purely voluntary one, for the most part. You're very insistent on that part; the Lord Street Crypts just don't need to do any extortion as parahuman gangs usually rely on as a source of income very commonly.
You're just above that, pretty much. Also, smuggling mind-boggling amounts of drugs and weapons up and down the coast (and across the world, through Accord) provides more than enough cash for anything you'd care to want it for.
And if you one day decide to amass more wealth than you'd ever know what to do with, you can always just forcefully take control of the world's economy. Again, technically, after Earth Rapture; the very existence of a stock market means the Thinker has practically no real barriers towards economical world domination, no amount of trying to stop that exact kind of thing from happening on the part of various government agencies, from Watchdog to… literally the rest of the world, can actually stop her.
Like, they'd have to just straight up shut the markets down entirely, and hey, good luck with that, schmuckos. You'd enjoy spectating the circus show resulting from that particular endeavor, if nothing else.
Ah well. For now, all you have to do is-
Something 'pomf's up right behind you, followed by the sensation of a soft pair of breasts (you can identify it instantly on account of your experience with them) pressing against your back, perky nipples rubbing against your skin.
"…Alicia," you say, closing your eyes as you immediately recognize the psychic presence connected to yourself, "at the risk of coming across as passive-aggressive over here, I have to ask. What. The fuck?"
"…Performed an experiment. It was successful."
Just then, the door of your room opens, revealing one other than Sarah, who is just as naked as yourself- and Alicia. Dimensional travel still doesn't play exceedingly nice with clothing, and since your personal part of the base is a no-clothes-zone, it's only to be expected, but still-
"No blowjobs, boobjobs or other sexual activities until you've been vetted by the council," she immediately declares, darting towards you to pull Alicia off yourself.
"There's a council?" You ask, once again feeling like you may be missing something important.
"Yup, all your lovers came together and founded it at some point. Naturally, I'm the chairwoman, no matter what Kate says," your sister explains.
"I look forward to getting to know everyone," Alicia notes neutrally.
"Look, don't worry about it, it's girl business, now we gotta go because council business, be back in five so you can tell me everything about your vacation!"
…It's good to be home…?
Alright, the sheer mind-boggling fact that Alicia actually managed to follow you to Earth Bet using her new power and her subsequent abduction at Sarah's hands aside, you have an entire dimension to reacquaint yourself with- perfect recollection of everything that happened before you departed is all well and good, but it takes a little more work to put yourself into the right headspace again, y'know?
A quick overview of your operations confirms that nothing has gone catastrophically wrong since you last looked in on the Crypts' activities in Brockton Bay. The drug distribution centers you set up pretty much unchallenged continue to operate as intended, making some tidy cash while regulating the flow of illicit substances and offering a safe environment to partake in such, whereas your hotel and your nightclub operate at slightly above predicted capacity at the moment.
In general, anyways; it's morning, so the Raveyard is currently busy sending off the last people that had too good of a time and cleaning up to be ready for the evening crowd again. Cherie is doing good work with the place, keeping partygoers engaged without doing anything regrettable (for themselves), but even so cleaning all the assorted bodily fluids takes a small army of robots.
…Note to self, maybe design a dedicated cleaning model of robot, the Bobs can do it fine enough but maybe some specialized units wouldn't go amiss. You're aware that a glorified roomba may seem a waste of your time, but it might be a surprisingly good idea to set up a host of designated cleaning robots for your various enterprises.
Alternatively, you could always repurpose the design of a certain sex bot you built to house a certain Karen of a disembodied brain stuck inside a brain tank. A frilly miniskirt and she'd fit the bill just fine.
Such thoughts and more go through your head as you casually insert the Thinker's 'temporary' core storage into the mainframe access you built for her here in your secret base, waving at the duo of Frank and Chariot along the way, the walk taking you through the workshop and all.
"Full personality merge initiated… Personality merge complete," the Thinker's soothingly artificial voice announces. "Please restart the system to apply updates."
"You and me both know you weren't designed to be restarted on account of never turning off," you deadpan at the general direction of her massive, deeply buried 'body'.
"This statement will be a lie. This statement is false."
"You know, growing a sense of humor may not have been the best decision on your part…"
The place was lit by blue neon lights, twisted into thin lines that shone down on the large round table in the middle of the room. Sitting at it, three figures huddled inside their dark robes, faces obscured by the hoods worn over their heads.
These figures were rather short, and the central table would be too high for them to sit at properly if not for the pillows piled onto their chairs. This went unremarked, however, as none of them cared enough to mention it.
Instead, there were some question that had to be asked. "So why are we here, and why do we have to wear these stuffy things?" Missy Biron, the now supervillain formerly known as Vista, asked, waving with the dark cloth covering her entire hand. "I thought the Crypts are more high-tech than illuminati, as far as villains go."
"We usually are, but Aisha insisted," Dinah shrugged, a comical motion under the robe she was dragging behind herself.
"Hey, you gotta build up a vibe, okay? Drama's important," the third of their number complained.
"Look, I appreciate the effort, but this thing is hot. And not in a good way," Missy told her, fighting to push the garment off herself to reveal the black leather jacket she was wearing these days. Synthetic leather, that supposedly worked as light armor- she hadn't asked too many questions, just wearing it was cool enough.
It was the kind of clothing she would never be allowed to wear at all in her old life, despite being a literal hero and all. Why she could wear a bright green costume, but no clothes that didn't scream 'childish' in bright colors was beyond her.
"Fine, whatever," Aisha whined, pulling her hood back and reaching behind herself to grab a trolley loaded up with assorted sweets and soft drinks. "Anyways, I called you here today to discuss the situation of the younger generation of Crypt capes, and how we should organize to ensure our rights are guaranteed."
"You want us to form a union?" If her voice was incredulous, that was because Missy was. "Don't get me wrong, I don't really mind, but… why bother? It's not like we have any issues. Or I don't, at least."
"Pretty sure she just talked with Taylor too much," Dinah remarked, cheek resting in the palm of her hand. "Her dad works for a union, I think."
"Look, don't think of it as a union," Aisha said, "think of it as… a subgroup! Our own little clique inside the gang!"
"Again, why bother? The Crypt are pretty inclusive as is," Missy pointed out. Then she blushed. "A bit too inclusive, really. Kate keeps dragging me to the gun range before she even gets dressed in the morning."
"That's normal, and I don't think she usually gets dressed in the morning at all," Dinah shrugged. "Remember, Gabriel's place is clothes-free."
"A-ny-ways! You guys wanna found the Brat Brigade or no?"
"…Can't we just be the Crypts' junior division?"
"What, like you were with the white hats? We gonna call ourselves the Wardens next?"
Oh, now Aisha was just questioning Missy's cred. That could not stand. "Fuck no, and fuck you for the idea! I'm just saying we have to invite everyone if we do something like this!"
"Can we get this over with soon?" Dinah asked. "My parents don't know I'm ditching school for this, but they'll find out if I don't make a call in a bit."
It was at this point that Aisha grabbed a cupcake, munching on it before she spoke up. "I just want us to have our own secret clubhouse and shit down here. Y'know, like a pillow fort or a treehouse, just villainous and stuff."
"…Okay, now you're talking sense. What kind of clubhouse are we talking about?"
Dinah just sighed obnoxiously, but nobody was forcing her to be there. She could always go make that call and come back. Or just do it right there? Missy wasn't sure what the villainous protocol about rudeness like that was, but until she knew, she wasn't about to give the game away by commenting on it.
"Hm."
"Mhm."
"Ah."
"Hm."
"You know," you say, reclining on your bed, "watching those two communicating is pretty interesting in its own way."
It's been a while, from your perspective, but now that you're back home and nothing particularly urgent is happening, you can finally make use of the extra large bed you built inside your bedroom, complete with your mother still chained up beside it.
This means it's finally time to catch up with everyone, for all that no real time passed for them compared to yourself. You still have to catch up. So you're pretty much just hanging out in a big pile of naked bodies, currently idly observing Alicia, who has since been released from the clutches of your other assorted lovers, 'talking' to Okita.
"It really is. If I still got headaches, my power would drive me crazy just seeing them," Sarah agrees, cuddling closely against your side, your sister's breasts pressed against you as she takes in your scent. She's been glued to you ever since that business with the… Council… was over an done with, and nothing you do can shake her off.
Not that you mind. As you were informed by the Thinker, once upon a time, it turns out that you're a very 'physically affectionate' kind of guy. Not that you needed someone to put it into words to know you like to snuggle every now and then.
On your other side, you have a hand full of perfectly shaped ass, courtesy of Kate who's currently telepathically reviewing footage of some of your more recent fights. And the ways you went out of your way to wreck that one planet. "You know, some of this look pretty cool. I definitely have to come with you blow up a joint or two, sometime."
"I'll pencil it in, I guess. Still no idea where we'll even go, but hey, we can figure it out as we go."
"When don't we?"
You just smile, leaning over to kiss her… Only for Sarah to pout and tug at your arm, wanting to get her own.
As usual with her, really. She gets jealous pretty easily, though she's also easy to placate again. It's one of her (many) cute points.
Well, it's nice to cuddle up, and you never say no to some skin-on-skin contact, but despite your personal preferences- it really is time you got back to work, one way or another. Of course you could just delegate just about any of your day-to-day tasks to someone else, but part of being the leader of a very successful 'informal business' (aka gang), in your opinion, is to actually be present and act as such.
Same shit, different day, in other words. Traveling to other dimensions to snatch up goodies and fuck around for the hell of it is all well and good, but right now, well, you're Cain. You have a job to do, for all that your 'job' barely involves you actually working.
And no, just telling everyone about everything that happened via telepathy isn't sufficient. Look, remote communication works well enough and its convenience really can't be overstated, but you still find some meetings are better had in person.
And, with the level of free healthcare available to anyone part of the Crypts (that you care about), there's never an excuse in regards to being sick or anything! Not that you'd mind if someone just wasn't feeling like coming to one of these meetings, but that's beside the point.
Long story short, you once again gather the leadership of the Crypts (or what amounts to some equivalent of such, given how casual you like to keep things) inside your usual conference room, the usual refreshments piled on two tables this time after you received some feedback about needing more of them.
Pretty sensible, to be fair, and the added opportunity to arrange the stuff to look nice doesn't hurt, either. Presentation is an important part of cooking, after all- nobody likes a dish that looks like shit, even if it's actually tasty.
Anyways, everyone is present once more, Sarah, Kate, Henley, Cupcake, Lea (in place of Sherrel), Curie and, naturally, the Thinker, now represented by one of her actual bodies, for once. Technically, you could've asked more people to come, but honestly just having the 'department heads' present like this is about as much corpo-crap as you can stomach already.
The terrible time of overflowing paperwork, back when the Crypts just started to come into being and you didn't have the Thinker to take care of administrative minutiae yet is still seared into your memory. Of course you didn't do any of it, but making Sarah and Kate do so in your stead broke your heart, it really did.
But anyways, your shadow council has gathered and it's time to make a few announcements. "Good news, everyone," you begin, because honestly every meeting should start like that, "I have figured out how to feed on sex instead of blood. Further testing is underway to confirm the same ability in other vampires, but I figure it's nice to have more food sources to work with."
"Wait a- Are you serious?" Kate asks, actually sitting up instead of slumping in her seat while waiting for all of this to be over.
"Dead serious."
"How does that even work? That's…" Cupcake tilts her head. "That would explain why you're always horny."
"No, he was like that even before he pulled a Jesus and resurrected," Sarah informs her. "If anything, I think Gabe's… Gabe-ness is influencing how his body works now."
"Fascinating as that may be, am I right to assume you will continue to drink blood?" Henley asks, his glasses glinting in unison with his bald head above his interlinked hands. He really is getting the whole villainous accountant look down pat these days- the complete lack of hair and losing a couple dozen pounds compared to when you first met him really make a difference.
"Yup, still need souls to grow and I ain't no vegan," you shrug. "In other news, I got some new tech and new tonics for everyone, sourced from the many things I killed while I was on my flash vacation!"
"That explains all the work being done around the workshop," Lea comments, obviously having noticed the Thinker updating a lot of your equipment, and adding portal technology to your infrastructure. "Also, did you even do anything different than usual while on 'vacation?"
"…No comment. Now, do you guys want to hear about the specifics or not?"
It takes a hot minute to actually inform everyone of all salient points that came up during your subjective absence, but while it'll probably take some time to actually implement all of the changes your recent advances require, you can certainly get right to facilitating some of them, at least- and hey, messing around in the chemistry labs slash alchemy facilities is always fun.
Because yes, of course you have to get right down to brewing the potions with permanent effects you figured out by now for everyone important. The boosts they provide are small, but every little bit helps, and you do make a point of actually using everything you have to mass-produce your own capes.
Just because it's great fun to do so, and the fact you can is the kind of thing that would have half the world lose its fucking mind if it got out. Well, you aren't really keeping it all that much of a secret, but still…
Well, if nothing else, it's also amusing to watch Cupcake, who along with the Thinker is helping you do this, take her own shot of your Juggernaut Potion (whose ingredients were gathered in a jiffy by the Thinker making extensive use of teleportation and portals to grab stuff you couldn't just fabricate in updated manufactories) and test out how much stronger it makes her.
By way of opening a drawer in one of the many worktables lining the area containing, as it turns out, a small collection of walnuts, pulling one of them out and… exerting all her strength to try and crack it open with one hand?
"Uuuurgh… Ruuaaghh…!" She makes funny noises along the way, too, really putting effort into her, her free hand clutching her wrist as she puts her whole soul behind the attempt to aggressively crush the nutshell open. "Naaaagh!"
Standing by, you idly wonder whether you should help her or something- or mess with her by enhancing the molecular density, and therefore toughness, of the object of her wrath. Before you can decide, however, it happens; a quiet crack echoes out, signaling Cupcake's victory over her adversary.
"Yes!" She screams, loudly. "I got you now! I got you now! No escape, motherfucker!"
You just continue to stand there, awkwardly watching on as her efforts redouble.
Then, when she actually gets the shell to crumble apart, breathing hard in the face of her hard-won victory, you finally clear your throat. "You, uh… You good?"
"I'm… good," Addie gasps, nearly dropping the now opened walnut in the process. "There was a guy, once… in college… that did this… as a party trick. I always wanted to copy that…"
"…You're thralled, Cupcake. Your strength was already enhanced beyond anything a baseline human should be able to muster, even if you're comparatively a little weaker due to your frame."
"Lies and slander… Walnuts are too strong…"
You have no idea whether this counts as trauma or something, but at least it seems she's overcome it…?
Living in Brockton Bay, these days, was a strange experience. Not so much because the gangs were gone, because to the average citizen they were not a matter that sprang to mind at every turn, but rather because of what had replaced it.
Sure, the E88 and the ABB had been… big. They had many members, and their gang tags and people wearing their colors could be seen at what felt like every street corner, outside of certain residential districts and the area kept free of such by the Protectorate.
But while just about anyone with vaguely Asian features had to pay protection money or risk loss of life and limb (or worse), and everyone knew to avoid certain places on pain of having to justify themselves to skinhead thugs, it was by and large easy enough to keep one's head down and minimize chances of being the next victim of organized crime in a city that consumed people that failed to do so.
Even the Merchants had been like that- just stay out of certain parts of the old trainyard and you were fine. Heck, for a while you probably got your drugs from one of their people, unless you lived where the other gangs peddled their drugs instead and could afford their prices.
All of this changed when the Lord Street Crypts (LSC) rose to power, in a succession of confusing, violent yet largely self-contained events, outside of the short, yet collateral-rich 'civil war' of the Empire, as some called it.
Where before the gangs were opaque, not easily apparent unless one knew where to look, the Crypts had literal storefronts all over the city, selling drugs and renting room to use them to anyone that came in and asked. The sheer amount of graffiti replacing old gang tags with their own signs indicated a mild, but noticeable upswing for certain businesses on the stock market, and their gang colors were surprisingly pervasive among the population.
It likely helped they openly sold merchandise along with the drugs. And, as rumor had it, there was a much larger, more exclusive selection of such goods in a 'secret' market hidden beneath the Raveyard, this particular night club one of the few businesses clearly known to be connected to the Crypts.
It did not help that, due to the sheer strength of the parahuman-led organization in question, there were few heroic organizations or individuals capable of and willing to put a stop to their activities. For while they, contrary to most such criminals, were exceedingly open about their presence and impact, violent crime was at an all-time low under their rule.
You either profited from their activities by way of safer and cheaper drugs, increased public safety and surprising communal spirit, or you were ignored if you didn't want anything to do with them.
Additionally, economical upswings in the form of more jobs of many kinds were attributed to them, unofficially of course. It truly would just look bad if what it took to get the city on track was the right kind of organized crime, after all.
That said, in terms of the Crypts' absolute dominance over Brockton Bay, one factor cannot be overstated, and that would be the overwhelming strength of their capes. It was public knowledge that their leader, Cain, had all but singe-handedly driven off Leviathan, the sheer feat of fighting an Endbringer alone putting him on the same pedestal as the Triumvirate itself.
And that didn't even account for the other capes known or purported to be part of the LSC, many of their appearances brief and during times of combat- such as the aforementioned attack on Brockton Bay by Leviathan, or the day since christened, by some internet communities, as the Slaughterhouse Laughter Day.
Incidentally, those same communities also tended to argue about what capes were 'actually' part of the Crypts and which ones merely lived in Brockton Bay and came to its defense.
Still, it remained fact that, despite the brazen criminal activity (and elevated amount of underground armaments and other illicit goods trickling into the world at large, sometimes connected back to the east coast at large), the Crypts' immense presence and power allowed them to remain largely unmolested by law enforcement… All the while half the world argued that they should not be considered a criminal organization at all.
As it turned out, curing cancer without claiming any profits in doing so had left somewhat of an impression, one anyone with access to the internet could take in.
This state of affairs may or may not continue from this point, of course, contingent on several factors. Chief among which was, discussed with hushed voices in PRT offices all across the continent, the future of Endbringer fights… And whether such immense might as that of the twisted, winged form Cain had taken, or the sheer number of hitherto un- or barely known capes that had risen to oppose Leviathan, would be turned against humanity's ultimate enemies in the future.
What could be accepted, in exchange for massively reduced casualties? Was it acceptable at all, to make allowances for criminals? Would Cain show up- or would it be better if he remained in 'his' city, a boogeyman that could be isolated and forgotten about the way most were? Was pineapple an acceptable topping for pizza?
Questions over questions, with few answers in sight. Yet.
Perhaps somewhat closer to home, if one lived in Brockton bay, was the matter of tinkertech. To the average person, a Tinker's handiwork was just as obscenely rare and sensational as that of mostly any other cape; whether it was seeing an Alexandria package deadlifting a car or touching some arcane bit of technology nobody could quite explain the working of, the common citizen didn't often get a chance to do so, despite what one may think.
After all, Tinkers made plenty of tinkertech, so some of it making its way into the hands of the public sooner or later would only be natural, right? Wrong. The inherent need for continuous maintenance to keep it from failing, sometimes catastrophically so, ensured that any tinkertech not actively used by its creator, or another Tinker at the very least, soon became rather unusable.
All the more exciting, then, that the upscale hotel now open to reservations in the middle of Brockton Bay's 'mysteriously rebuilt' section was seemingly chock full of it. Impossibly smooth elevator rides truly were just the tip of the iceberg; holographic interfaces controlling ever-shifting rooms, allowing guests to configure their stay to their preferences on a literal whim, gravity-changing energy fields as easy to turn on and off as light fixtures and, of course, the virtual reality.
Hitherto a concept relegated to science-fiction, any that were brave enough to try it out had to agree that a fully virtual environment offered immense value, even 'only' as a proof-of-concept; allowing the user to interface with various media and interact with text and video as a whole on a deeper, more intuitive level was enough for anyone with half a mind for such things.
Being able to edit the laws of physics one was subject to while within the simulations freely available to any paying customer, too, left an impression. Niche and limited as it may be, tinkertech was being used to chart possibilities for the future, an act that would have seemed quaint, at best, before the nigh victimless attack of Leviathan.
Finally, after Cupcake's… episode (and finishing most of the work you need done to begin producing more of your good potions) is all done with, you get on to the last part of your little 'getting used to this shit again' plan: A little patrol around town with a few of the other capes that tend to be more public-facing.
It's the same old thing you've done a couple of times before, essentially just showing your (shadowed) face around, making a point of wearing your favorite suit and, all in all, just swaggering around town. It's less looking out for trouble and more letting trouble know you are, in fact, there and will probably end it if it shows up.
Kind of the same as the PR patrols the Protectorate and Wards do, just inherently a little edgier on account of you being a villain. And a lot more erratic, compared to what they do, but that may just have something to do with you having taken over the city for the most part- in most normal, non-Brockton Bay places, the Protectorate actively does patrol territory 'claimed' by villains just fine, after all.
Just a reality of how things are. As it stands, you just make it a point to be as unpredictable as possible while still staying within city limits and keeping routes from being too much of a pain.
You, after all, don't actually do this whole thing all that often, contrary to a good couple of the others. Thunderstruck, who may just be one of the most powerful kinetic manipulators around with his parahuman power alone, is just the start of it- a bunch of the others basically join in on this whole patrolling business whenever they feel like it.
It's not like this is really all that important to the Crypts as a gang, to be honest, but it gives them something vaguely productive to do so they don't end up finding their own ways to 'help'. Part of the whole people management thing that ended up being your job, somehow.
And no, neither Dinah nor Missy are allowed to go on patrols, despite their protests; Dinah is the mayor's niece, has neither a mask nor a costume at all nor does she have powers to really keep herself safe (on a level you'd consider sufficient) in a pinch, and Missy would just be too recognizable so soon after her 'mysterious disappearance'.
That said, just about everyone else can chip in where and when they want, and you do consider patrols a reasonably safe way to get capes used to being, well, capes, out in public. Not everyone has to be an overachiever of Taylor's proportions and help you murder an A-lister cape of a gang leader (followed by several dozens of their unpowered minions) on their first night out, after all.
Which is one reason you take Kassy along while you're at it already, the technically greenest cape under your employ needing to actually get a taste of this business, for a start, in addition to Tammi and Emily; Kassy needs to actually find some more friends than 'just' Aisha, no matter how much enthusiasm that particular gremlin throws into their relatioship.
It's just for the best to have a couple people you can casually hang out with at minimum, y'know? Also, both Tammi and Emily could stand to have more friends themselves, having struck up a quick friendship but not really reached out too much from there, so you're really just doing that thing where little children mash dolls they ship against each other while making kissy noises.
Just with actual people, much subtler and with more style. You still like to think the principle of your actions is pretty much the same, though.
Hey, human resources is your shtick; may as well make as much use of it as you can.
"Alright, everyone ready for a walk?"
"One s-sec," Tammi asks, tugging at the broom of her witch-y hat- modifying her costume after she joined the Crypts was a matter of course, but you do have to say you kind of like how it turned out. Though she still can't settle on a mask that actually works with it. "Have to get this just r-right so it won't fly off."
Also, her stutter really improved by leap and bounds, you have to say. Then again, the only reason it's taking so long even with her being thralled and all probably is that it's a neurological issue- those, you're finding, tend to take longer to fix with passive processes like that. Probably just a brain thing, brains are super fiddly at the best of times.
You'd know, you've run tests on a couple subjects by now to figure shit out.
"Yeah, these costumes are great, but they're not easy to put on quick," Emily adds, adjusting her own gas mask. Being a vampire with the power to just, turn herself into fire, it really shouldn't be much of a problem for her to just shapeshift into any given set of clothing her size, but apparently that's not ideal, either.
You wouldn't know, you've just been shapeshifting into your suits since forever. Because fuck actually putting these things on manually.
"I'm… actually feeling a little underdressed," Kassy chimes in, her blank facemask and casual clothes betraying her status as being 'really new'.
"Well, you're a Breaker, any really fancy costume would just get in the way for you," you point out with a shrug. "We can probably put something thematic together, but I figure letting you go out caping first might help give you an idea of what you'd want in terms of design choices."
That and you think it's kind of cute to have her traipse around in a shirt and her own shorts. But hey, same difference, right?
It takes a bit to actually get the girls talking, with Kassy too tense, Tammi too awkward and Emily too uncaring about either to really do anything about it. That said, you don't let teenager awkwardness stand in the way of a perfectly fine working break, going out of your way to get an actual conversation going as you all shuffle along.
And climb onto rooftops once you decide you've done enough public showcasing of your presence and switch it up, to traverse the city in style- if you're a cape and walking around like the plebs to actually get anywhere, rather than show off, you're just doing something wrong. You have to either use your power to move, ride in some adequate vehicle to match your cape persona or, as in this case, hop from rooftop to rooftop.
It's just about actually appearing larger than life, pretty much. Capes can't get away with being all lame and taking the bus to get where they need to be- if you're in costume, you need to actually hold yourself to the appropriate standard.
…You're HR, not PR, so you don't actually give all that much of a fuck, personally, but you did study this shit back in university, Parahuman Studies 101 was weirdly comprehensive in that regard. May as well put what little you learned before the accident to some good use.
The relative privacy afforded to you by this method of movement, using your control over gravity when you don't have Tammi (or Charmcaster, in costume) do it with her power instead, just for the sake of training (controlling four discrete objects at once needs some getting used to, her parahuman power itself can do it as long as she stays mindful of it) to propel everyone from one rooftop to the next allows you to speak more or less freely. Whether that's a good thing or not remains to be seen, but you have a good feeling about this.
"So, how's joining the Crypts been? You know, the life of crime treating you well so far?" You finally ask Kassy, having had to push the conversation along largely under your own power. Which you can, it's not that hard, but it does get emotionally exhausting at some point.
Then you poke Tammi via telepathy, because she really could stand to add her own two cents, and that's enough to have her at least try. "Y-yeah, we try to be all inclusive and stuff, but with so many people, it can be…"
"What she's trying to say," Emily shrugs, "is that actually talking to everyone hanging out in the lair would be a full-time job, so we haven't really done much together yet."
"Yeah, that's… definitely a thing," Kassy nods in response. "The Crypts are kind of a huge organization."
"Exactl-ly," Tammi agrees, stumbling over her speech impediment for a moment. "Just wanted to ask if you're okay. I guess."
Kassy hums, not saying anything as you gesture and all four of you softly float over the next rooftop. Once there, she finally decides to respond. "I'm… okay, I guess. It's not like I had much idea of what would happen once I joined, so I guess I just built it up into this big thing that would be my whole life, but…"
"But that didn't happen, mostly because we're all pretty casual," Emily follows up. "I get what you mean. A bunch of us live in the lair, but it's not like anyone actually has to. It's just convenient."
"Yeah! And… No offense, I guess, but you're a lot nicer than I thought," the newest Crypt member present tells Tammi. "Given, you know, ex-nazi and all?"
She giggles awkwardly, but drops that quickly. If you had to guess, she's about to apologize, but the ex-nazi in question is faster on the draw. "Don't w-worry, I get it. It's a good point, but it's, like… I just… Don't want to m-make excuses, but at the time it was all I had, yeah? My folks weren't…"
"Take your time," you chime in, casually 'sitting down' on nothing in particular, your old self-levitation trick more than enough for that little maneuver. "We should take a break, anyways, may as well do it now."
"Th-thanks. So yeah, I didn't really… get along with my parents, and our family was kinda connected to the whole neo-nazi thing but they'd left, so I just drifted into that. Got close to an uncle, he involved me in some shit, then I went to juvie because he wouldn't have my back," the blonde explains. "Triggered, and all of a sudden I was important enough to break out. But at that point I didn't have anyone else to rely on, and the clan kinda sent me off to the Empire, because a lot of its support came from them. From us, I guess."
"So you didn't really buy into the whole, y'know…" Kassy gestures vaguely. "Nazi ideology stuff?"
"Not… really?" It's very much a question, rather than a statement. "It was more like… a fact of life for me, I guess. Just something everyone said, so I didn't dispute it or anything. Didn't have much opinion about it, I guess."
"It's hard to see how that kind of thing hurts others when it's designed to make you consider it fine." Emily's insight is a bit unpolished, but yeah, that's generally how this kind of brainwashing works.
"Guess I can see it," Kassy nods. "But that changed?"
"Hard n-not to, when you just see all kinds of people and realize they're fine," Tammi shrugs. "Or it could just be the Crypts version of ideology replacing the n-nazi stuff."
"Yeah, the Crypts have a habit of recruiting vulnerable young women in order to spread their influence," Emily comments with a pithy little smile, probably remembering being homeless before she found her way to you.
You, in turn, whistle conspicuously in order to signal your utter innocence. "It's probably a coincidence."
Three pairs of eyes give you a look drier than a desert. You get the feeling that, for whatever reason, you may have managed to unite these three against you.
Still, when they all realize what they're doing and share a surprised look, then break out in a short fit of giggles, you figure you can't have done that bad. Mission accomplished?
Probably so, actually. Even if they keep giggling while glancing at you, probably using telepathy to communicate whatever teenage madness they're getting up to now. Or just teenage girl communication over whatever wavelengths they usually use, independently from that- you're convinced women can just do that to this day, somehow, and they just pretend otherwise.
Yeah, sure, you could just change gender yourself, but past tests haven't turned anything up. You tried anything you could think of, but that just means you haven't discovered the truth yet.
It feels good to slide into a well and truly comfortable role, an act you've grown familiar with and close to, despite the slapdash nature of it all back when you started experimenting with it. You do, of course, mean the tweed jacket of none other than Abel, your alternate persona posing as your own 'brother'.
And general curmudgeon of, as he would put it, 'entirely rational and appropriate proportions'. He's just that kind of guy.
Well then, your little recording studio has received a few upgrades, mostly an afterthought from the Thinker during one of the many successive waves of improvements made to your little underground bunker, but it looks more or less the same as it always has ever since you moved in here, shortly after taking the place from Coil the hard and fun way, so you quickly settle in, adjusting the exact proportions of your shadowed face a little.
It's not easily visible, of course, but you pointedly have a few extra inches of your throat transformed to make it look like there were differences between Cain and Abel- as well as Professor Abraham and Lilith, for that matter. You don't expect anyone halfway reasonable to actually notice, but it's these small little things that can make or break the performance, y'know?
And if there's one thing you want to do, when you're showcasing your art and all, it's to perform. Would be kind of embarrassing if you just somehow couldn't, after all, even if it could happen to just about any guy.
You're not just any guy, and you always aim to be ready and raring to go for at least one more round at all times. People appreciate that about you.
Still, head in the game. Or the right personality for the occasion, at least. Turning the cameras on with a thought, you pointedly clear your throat, as though you were interrupting your viewers from whatever it is they're doing.
Which very much is the vibe you're going for. "Greetings, assorted deplorables and further… challenged… viewers. I would claim to hope I was not imposing, but I can imagine what you get up to at the best of times."
You shake your head, as though in disappointment. Really, couldn't they at least wait until you're done before they handle whatever devices they use to watch one-handed?
"Nevertheless, I am once again here to distract you from your pitifully limited lives, if only for a short time and inevitably spiraling towards your obsession with endless perversion. Why I do this to myself exactly is beyond me at the moment, but I am sure there is some reason… At any rate, the selection of themes for our first piece this evening should be available to you now. Go ahead, peruse and disregard it at your will. You always do."
Being a streamer of any description means a lot of talking, by the way. Not a huge problem, but you definitely wouldn't be able to keep going for as long as you usually do without your superhuman endurance letting you speak for hours on end without interruption. Fun little advantages like these are what keeps you glad to be undead, or whatever exactly you are in general, anyways.
When the poll comes in (and you don't even have to look at any screens, because direct brain-to-machine interfaces are just as handy as they are extra), you mime a reaction consisting half of disappointment, half of exasperation, shaking your head with a hand over the black 'void' where your face should be. "Of course your thoughts and ideas are limited to the realm of skimpily dressed capes. What else should I have expected?"
At the same time, you use your other hand to pull up some fresh blank pieces of paper, though, because of course you're going along with the poll's results anyways. Even if people really are having a one-track mind as far as this stream's concerned.
Well, can't really be helped. It's basically a celebrity thing, of course they'd want to see skimpy versions of whatever capes are trending at the moment. Or just popular in general.
Which is probably what brings you to Mouse Protector, who is pretty popular for a largely indie hero as far as those go. The people have spoken, and they say they want to see her in lingerie, so… There you go, pretty much.
"Hoods," you say as you begin to mechanically assemble the outlines of your piece and the background you want, a brightly lit window showing hazy images of other buildings outsie the room you're depicting making up most of it, "are an interesting design detail, aren't they? They can look either heroic or villainous or neither of those two depending on how you wear them, so they're one of the few costume choices you can't really go wrong with… If they don't clash with the rest of your costume."
Naturally, your version of Mouse Protector has her red hood and cape going, with the mouse ears on top and all. That said, the lacy push-up bra, garter belts and two panties she's got on are very much an addition of your own.
And her mask, of course, covering only the area around her eyes. You go right ahead and make it look much smaller than it is in reality, too.
As opposed to her puppies, or 'mousies', rather. If anything, you accentuate and emphasize the size of her breasts a little, compared to what you know of their actual size based on pictures of her in costume. She totally wears small pads, by the way, and you aren't sure whether it's meant as a confidence boost or tit armor.
Though honestly, everyone can use some tit armor. If you made a habit of armoring yourself up beyond your, well, less-than-natural armor, you'd totally add some extra protection for the girls yourself, whenever you're in your female form.
Breasts are sensitive, dammit. They aren't meant to be punched, shot at or otherwise maltreated.
Anyways, your precision and speed are still increasing to this day, your actual ability to convey what you want using art supported by… the wild potpourri of weird shit and methods to enhance yourself you keep on adding up whenever you find a way to, so you can put something fairly good-looking together pretty quickly.
Yup, lookin' good, beautiful.
"Hah! Wish my mousies were actually that big. Don't think bust-up exercises are gonna work in my age, though. Or at any age. Kind of a scam, a mousetrap baited with false promises! …That's a good one, I should write it down."
The next request for you to take care of is… honestly, you aren't sure whether it is better or worse, from Abel's perspective. Well, it's probably better- and nobody can fault you for saying it, can they?
"Cat girls. Of course. When all else fails, stick animal ears onto a human body and call it a day, hm? Not that I can complain. I also happen to think cats are quite cute. Perhaps not to the point they should be… fetishized like this, but if I learned one thing during our time together, it is not to expect too much from you lot."
And it just so happens that you've been thinking about Serena's fascination with Japanese mythology and customs a little lately, so you may as well go ahead and theme them accordingly. Two big-tittied cat girls wearing traditional garb just wrong enough, coming right up.
"Meow." 'It shouldn't be called Dogetown, it's racist.'
"Woof." 'I see where you're coming from, but it's named after the Doge. Nice try, though.'
"Mroow." 'Are we playing poker or gossiping? Calling your bluff, by the way.'
"Woof woof!" 'I raise you two treats, papa's feeling good about this hand.'
Meanwhile, in another place entirely, a certain Thinker is performing a certain test.
"Contessa."
"Doctor Mother."
"Why are you actively interacting with him? We agreed direct causal relationships might be a danger to the Path."
"I believe we can say with some certainty his influence spreads through them, but it doesn't stay in place indefinitely. More importantly, as it keeps on spreading and he stays on Earth Bet, it is becoming increasingly important to find out how well the Path can navigate around him."
"Is that why your suggestion contains the word 'fedorable'?"
"The Path determined it would be the best approach towards manipulating poll voting."
The repeated requests for more naked pictures of yourself are a tad bit weird, but in the end 'Miss Fedorable' gets her will and you acquiesce, in the end; you were only really hesitant because you already did something like this before, and you generally try to avoid repeating yourself when it comes to these silly little streams, but hey, if the viewership wants it badly enough, you can be convinced.
No skin off your back, at any rate. You get to fuck around on camera either way.
Still, by the time you're done streaming, saying your mildly acidic goodbyes, it's a little late in the day, or rather kind of the middle of the night. You take a moment to think about what you could do, now that you have somewhat of an unoccupied time slot in your schedule for the moment.
You haven't really had the time to load it full of all the miscellaneous stuff you usually keep yourself busy with yet. Normally you just go with a mix of 'let's do whatever' and 'wait, didn't I want to do something', but the latter approach hasn't quite kicked in yet since your return to this dimension.
You'll probably come up with a pool of busywork to take care of in-between other stuff soon enough, but for now… You're kind of feeling like goofing around for the heck of it.
So the next step, obviously, is to go down your list of acquaintances and casual fuckbuddies, thinking about what to do with any of them. And, well, you wouldn't be you if you couldn't come up with something.
Asking if your idea is alright with a certain someone, you soon end up perched on a rooftop opposite from the Dallon residence, holding onto your co-conspirator, your partner in crime.
Missy Biron is the one that warps space between your current location and an open window, shortening it in that very interesting way that always reminds you of some of the things that can happen when you install too much eldritch circuitry in something. It's not exactly the same thing, of course, but hey, all spatial warps are the same when your back is turned, or something.
Look, coming up with proverbs on the spot isn't necessarily easy, okay?
Anyways, the distance between you and the window shortens drastically. The other side of the window, of course, is a room, one that contains two girls. Two girls who just so happen to be naked, sharing a bed and making out vigorously, though they stop the moment Missy groans as loud as she can.
"Seriously? You don't have anything to do other than each other?"
"Missy!" Vicky hisses, pushing herself up and into her usual flight. Still naked, of course. "You're alright!"
"Can't you knock before you open the window?" Amy complains grumpily, covering her sweaty skin with a blanket before she rises. Her sister realizes she doesn't have any cover like that herself around now, but whether it's her natural confidence or her increasingly kinky mindset, she doesn't make any effort to hide herself as you poke your head through the window.
"It was open already, I just went from there," Missy complains right back. "Now do you wanna stay here munch on each other or are you coming with us for ice cream instead?"
"I taught her to forget all the Wards nonsense already and replaced it with real diplomacy," you comment from behind.
As you'd expect, news that Missy, who has been missing for over a week now, is perfectly fine and currently part of the Crypts, end up being a… point of contention of sorts, to put it politely.
Less politely put, Victoria immediately launches into trying to interrogate you (while still naked, of course), but Missy cuts her off before you can just settle down in Vicky's room to deal with this. Apparently, she quite dislikes just being ignored when she's right there and any questions may as well be addressed to her as the party in question directly.
Instead, you just kind of sit down on the bed, pulling a few bowls of ice cream out of your 'pockets' to Amy's half bemused, half cranky entertainment. "I got a couple flavors just in case," you whisper to her while the two blondes in the room initiate whatever strange rituals colliding blondes have to partake in to get anywhere. "Any favorites?"
The curly-haired girl sighs, sitting up and largely discarding the bedsheet to move unimpeded, in doing so once again showing how surprisingly curvy she is. The cloak that makes up her costume really hides a little too much, you think. Then again, apparently your opinion is unreliable, according to Sarah. "Got any strawberry?"
"Enough for everyone twice over," you smirk, pulling a fresh, cold pre-filled bowl out. On a related note, your pocket shadow dimension hammerspace really is pretty convenient in that it preserves temperature pretty well, on account of being mostly vacuum. "Literal buckets of the stuff, so don't holdback."
With that, you casually toss one of those little kinda shovel-shaped spoons up in the air, the colorful plastic thingies that make eating ice cream twice as fun just by being there. It rotates in the air a couple times before it buries itself in Amy's frozen treat head-first, like some epic sword cast upon hardy, rocky ground at the end of a great battle.
"Cute," Amy comments acerbically, pulling it out and using it to scoop some of the ice cream you brought up. "Mhmm… Dammit. It's too good to bitch at you instead of eating."
"The recipe is continually improving. I'd love to say it was handmade, but not even I have that much time."
Meanwhile, as the two of you are chatting as amiably as a clamjammed Amy can, Missy and Vicky are actually achieving some kind of understanding, from the sounds of it. "So you ran away from home?"
"Yes! It was getting unbearable to listen to them scream at each other all the time and I didn't want to stay, so I left."
"And joined the Crypts instead."
"I knew Cain already and we met, so we talked and, y'know."
"Gaaabe!" You're glad Vicky at least remembers not to actually shout when she wants something, wouldn't want to alert the whole house. "Did you have sex with Missy?!"
"Sure did, she wanted and needed some way to work off her emotions," you shrug, still eating your bowl of ice cream. Oh, you should pull out the colorful little sprinkles or the chocolate drops for the next one. "Also, she's cute."
Missy looks at Vicky triumphantly, arms crossed as though to emphasize her (modest, though certainly very fun) chest.
"You know we're both fucking him, right?"
"Yeah, but so am I."
You, on the other hand, somehow find yourself with a handful of Amy's butt, massaging it while she 'steals' your ice cream. Until you reverse the weight of one bite she's trying to take, making it swoop upwards and paint the tip of her lightly freckled nose a peachy pink.
She gives you the driest look she can muster, which is very rich considering how wet you know she still is. Your response is to lean in and kiss her nose clean again, gently plucking the sugary treat off as you go.
Good, solid lip-work is the foundation of any good kisser.
"Yeah, well, maybe I like being a villain. I have a gun now! It's a big-ass gun, too, and it can transform!"
"I just can't believe you'd become a villain! I mean, the Crypts aren't that bad, but you of all people, know what I mean?"
"Maybe if the Wards paid me half a million dollars a month to loaf around I'd still be with them, but on second thought, that still wouldn't be worth having to stay with my parents."
"Half a million?" Amy asks you, quietly.
"Crime pays, what can I say," you shrug.
Honestly, it's kind of entertaining, to watch these two argue from one point to another with seemingly zero connection in-between.
"Also, you're the weird one for staying naked like this!"
"Hey, you busted into my room, I can be naked all I want!"
As they descend into yet another miniature catfight, you shoot Amy a mildly confused look. It's not like either of them have any issue with others being naked in their presence, as you can personally attest, so what gives?
"Haah… Missy used to have a crush on Vicky's boyfriend. You know, like younger kids do."
(PSA: Missy Biron has, at this point in time and any time she was referenced in the course of this literary work, reached the age of consent already.)
"I'm pretty sure they're just measuring each other up now that they've both realized they're both into you," a still grumpy-sounding Amy continues, pushing her weight against your side. "Vicky doesn't know how to share."
You tilt your head.
"Outside the family."
"Eh, fair enough."
You do wonder how long either of the two will take to realize you're basically making out with Amy, who is now rubbing herself against your lap, now. More ice cream may or may not be involved, of course.
In the end, it does take a little bit, but you get everyone dressed at least a little (much as it's regrettable to cover beautiful things up, it'd be a shame to damage Amy's skin along the way) and spatially warped over to one of the rooftops in the northern part of town, where your reconstruction efforts after the 'clinical' and 'careful' removal of the last competing gangs in town were the most thorough and expansive.
It's one of many small places you may or may not have added to the city's overall layout, meant to just be a space for you and your people to relax in that isn't underground. Not that you couldn't construct a convincing replication of just about any environment out there (note to self, see about setting up an artificial private underground beach to go with the private beach near LA you bought that one time), but it's the principle of the matter, y'know?
Why be a supervillain taking over a city when you can't rebuild parts of it to include a secret rooftop hangout domed with one-sided glass and a pool that makes use of excess heat rising from the building below for heating? This is where things such as 'style' and 'living the life' come in, in your humble opinion.
It actually remind you a bit of your mansion in Remnant, come to think of it. The pool on its roof has the same kind of vibe, y'know?
Anyways, the four of you, once relocated, proceed to consume prodigious amounts of ice cream, to the point Missy and Vicky both suffer from slightly distended bellies afterwards; maybe letting them turn it into a competition wasn't the best idea, but hey, the consequences are their own problem, so really, what's the harm to you?
…Well, you do have to rub their bellies better at some point. You suppose that counts? It's a nice bit of hangout time either way.
All good things have to come to an end, however, and this one is no exception. The trick, as you like to think of it, is to immediately follow up with another good thing whenever that happens, and just keep the daisy chain of tolerable circumstances going from there.
If you were philosophically inclined, you totally could write a book about this particular kind of 'optimism', you suppose. You're not, though, so fuck all of that, your insights on how to live life are your own and you ain't sharing so easily.
As it stands, you have to bid the girls you're hanging out with farewell, as you're scheduled to go have a little meeting tonight- it actually is getting pretty late measured against normal people's idea of time, so it's for the best that the Dallons present around you get home before their parents notice, if nothing else.
Said meeting, on the other hand, is a perfectly good and fun thing to have, as you aren't discussing any boring minutiae you don't even bother with during the weeklies, as your weekly meetings with all 'department heads' have been called at times (despite your best efforts at making them not sound like some corporate team-building exercise bullshit), but rather a quick get-together with a few people about a plan you mean to execute in the near future.
Specifically, you're meeting with Taylor, Emily and Mimi, the respectively most devastating and pyrokinetic capes around the city. In order to discuss how you plan to obliterate Nilbog, one of the many little 'issues' that arose when random people started getting random powers and used them to do whatever it was they wanted.
And, like, you may not be one to talk, given how you usually conduct yourself, but essentially wiping out a whole city and replacing its inhabitants with your twisted little creations is pretty problematic on the scale of 'things that someone should care about'. Mostly, you just want to ensure he won't ever get any ideas and turn himself into a bigger problem, really.
That and you can't stand anyone being a bigger monster than yourself. Call it what you want, but being the bigger baddie is a winning strategy and you don't plan to abandon it anytime soon- so disposing of Nilbog means you have one less rival for the 'worst person in existence' award.
What can you say, it'd just bother you to have him sitting around your backyard if and when you get around to taking control of North America, here on Bet. You don't even want to talk about world domination, like on Earth Rapture, but you'd bet you could keep at least this one continent stable and under our control if you really tried, parahumans being a thing or not.
But anyways, your plan to deal with Nilbog and the annoyances he prepared as a failsafe in case someone came for him. It's a good plan, everyone says so.
"I will not dance and I will not sing," Taylor declares when you get to her part in the plan. "Why can't we just kill everything normally?"
"Because we're supervillains, not just villains," you argue playfully, leaning back in your seat around the table. "Besides, didn't it bother you how many people are irrationally terrified of you? This could be your chance to change your public perception."
"Somehow, I doubt a musical number in the middle of consuming screaming abominations with a giant swarm will make people change their minds," she counters, unimpressed.
"Yeah, I'm with Skitter here, pretty sure it'll just reinforce the narrative," Emily agrees, Mimi nodding in the background. The former S9 member still is pretty shy around the others, so you aren't surprised she doesn't speak up all that much.
"Alright, so it'll just reinforce the image then," you shrug, unable to really make any claims to the contrary. "Think about it, you aren't just casually stomping extremely dangerous shit in Ellisburg, you're doing it while making a show of it. Whether people fear you beforehand or not, they'll all have to admit you're strong by the time you're done."
"…Why do you want this so much, anyways?"
"I just think it'd be fun."
Taylor sighs, shaking her head. You all know she'll go with what you want in the end, it's just a matter of wearing down her resistance to singing in front of an audience.
In the end, it really just comes down to convincing Taylor that she has a beautiful singing voice she doesn't have to be self-conscious about and that you really would like to hear her sing for the occasion of your attack on Ellisburg. Some details are discussed and particular parts of your big plan elaborated on so everyone's on the same page, but that's it, by and large.
Oh, and you do agree to let Vicky and Amy know when the action starts, just in case. Actually bringing them would be… ill-advised to say the least, considering you're at least trying to pay lip service to the illusion of them not being Crypts themselves, but they'll be just a quick teleport away should they be needed.
Largely to make use of Amy's power, in case Riley judges it's needed to counter any of the shit stirring in the cauldron known as Ellisburg. No offense to Vicky, but while her power is pretty decent going by the standards of capes in general, all it can really do for you in this context is brute force… And you have plenty of that already.
Compare that to giving whatever cape bullshit Nilbog's got set up a big fat middle finger just because. Sure, Amy can't really work on unicellular life- if it's a virus or some shit, she'd have to interact with it indirectly- but if you're talking spores, parasites, prions or any of that zany crap, she has a good chance of figuring something out, at least.
May need some additional support, as her power doesn't really work automatically off of commands like 'make this stuff stop being alive', but telepathic connections to share information and solutions in real time are a thing, so hey, she's a pretty great backup for this operation.
Speaking of, how to call said operation is still hotly debated. Personally, you favor Operation Goblin Slayer, but you don't think there's any definite winner on the telepathic network so far.
Now then, you have lots of science and assorted experiments to perform, so the additional time you can get inside your inner world really helps out with all of those little things you like to get into, but don't really have time for normally.
It's somewhere between a hobby and a useful way to kill time, really. Hey, some people collect post stamps or coins, play video games or something like that, you just happen to prefer poking reality to see what kind of stuff sticks. In-between exercises of artistic depression and thinking up practical ways to apply what you know of physics.
You're still more a engineer than a scientist, and you doubt that'll change anytime soon. It could happen, it's not like you'll die at some point if you can at all help it, but you wouldn't bet on it at this point in time, is all.
Anyways, experiments! Using the gravity-manipulating materials you obtained through hell, you get a couple of tests done, mainly relating to what happens when they're combined with each other or other 'interesting' technologies you're aware of. Most of the results are fairly dry and not particularly relevant for you, though you do manage to advance your understanding of how gravity works in general some.
You've also managed to figure out how to add this stuff to pre-existing gravity tech you already had, until driven by Eldritch Cores. Well, there's nothing speaking against continuing to use the things, of course, but you can enhance the devices you build a little bit with the right composition of anomalous materials built into them, is all.
Also, combining the wonderful bullshit that is Lutece Particles with some of this weird alloy you threw together allows you to produce 'shockwaves' of altered, highly increased gravity, which very much has some possible applications to it you could explore. Heck, you're pretty sure you could create a perpetuum mobile with some setup here.
Take this, laws of thermodynamics! Once again you are cast down by the hand of Gabriel the Great!
In other news, you also got some improvements to the holograms you copied from that Vault in Earth Fallout. Naturally, you also do test the changes thoroughly to ensure everything works as intended.
"Do I really have to do this?" Yoshi asks, standing in the currently clinically empty test chamber.
"It's either you do it or some random souls around the palace," you shrug, keeping the microphone turned on. "I figured you'd object to the latter. Anyways, Test H1, go!"
In front of the member of your science team, a person, or image shaped after one, materializes. Bald, tall, two meters of muscle and bad mood stare down at him.
"Amazing… If I didn't know better, I would be sure he'd be real," Yoshi notes, reaching out to touch the hologram's arm.
In response, said arm cocks back and slams into him with a nicely articulated haymaker, throwing him back as your fake becomes just real enough to touch him back.
"Ow! Uuugh… What happened? What did you do to this thing?"
"Well, I figured I shouldn't tell you beforehand so as to keep the data pool usable, but I figured out how to give the holograms temporary mass," you note. "Next, try to navigate back to the entrance."
Dozens of copies of the bald man you programmed into the hologram projectors materialize all around him, all ready to perform violence. Some of them start to move, actively barring his way.
Suffice it to say, it takes him a bit to get back out. He's very resentful about it, but it also does give Indigo and Nolac the opportunity to 'nurse' him, so he really doesn't have any room to complain.
What's a concussion or two between friends?
Outside of your own head (Or wherever you'd describe your inner world being- stomach, digestive track, heck maybe even the heart? Meh, it's some soul-space shenanigans, whatever.), of course, you only take a brief break before you proceed onwards to take part in your next meeting; this one concerns one of those smaller matters that you don't usually bother paying attention to.
This time around that's not gonna fly, though, seeing as you're kind of taking an important role in the topic of discussion. Who knew that the prospect of opening a magical portal all the way in LA would have everyone involved in planning and logistics actually bothered?
Anyways, that's how you, Sarah, Henley and Accord end up in your usual meeting room, the latter having been teleported over from Boston to take part in this session. He's usually a little more distant from Crypt business, in practice being more like a separate entity attached to your gang than anything, but this particular case does concern him a lot as well, so…
"Alright, here's what we got," you begin the meeting without wasting any time. You know Accord is really uncomfortable (in the homicidal meaning of the word) around things that don't meet his criteria of 'order', so minimizing potential exposure on his part seems the right way to go in general. "Using some new powers that do not require elaboration, we can create a stable portal between two points in space, provided they are kept in relative darkness. The current plan is to use this capability to link Brockton Bay and Los Angeles, therefore allowing smuggling independent of teleportation, which we aim to keep secret. Any questions?"
Accord immediately tilts his head, the tinkertech mask he's wearing shifting to show you a thoughtful expression. "Are there any distance limitations for this power?"
"No. All it requires is that I use it on both locations meant to be linked. As long as the portals are secured and not subjected to elevated levels of light, such as particularly strong sunlight, they remain stable indefinitely. There is a limited number of them I can create, however. For now."
"Los Angeles is Alexandria's turf," Sarah says, immediately ticking Accord off as you can see by the micro-twitch of his fingers- definitely deliberately so, your sister always did enjoy needling people, "but if we can establish a ground presence and spread some love around the west coast, it'll just reinforce the Crypts' reputation."
"While I agree in principle, I don't really care about whether we expand over there or not," Henley adds. "I'm just here to do the accounting regardless."
"I see." If Accord wasn't at least some level of germaphobe, you're pretty sure he'd be clearing his throat right now. "In this case, I would like to ask a question. Have you considered establishing a portal overseas instead? Cutting out a significant amount of shipping and transportation costs in regards to Europe or, say, Africa, would be a significant boon in itself."
A good suggestion. See, this is why you talk your ideas and thoughts through with other people- you were planning to spread to LA purely because it's your hometown, but he's bringing up a good point here. Of course you could just teleport or use the new portals you stole from that one alien spaceship, but both of those remain somewhat of a secret for now; there's a note difference between the Crypts having access to a very limited number of portals connecting two points in space and, well, you just being able to bring anything and anyone anywhere on the planet if you really, really want to.
One's worthy of being considered Mover 10, the other one is an instant declaration of war against just about any sovereign nation in the world, to put it as clear as you can. And while it would be fun, openly challenging any world powers to come and get some should probably be thought through a little more than that.
After a quick discussion as to the specifics, you end up agreeing with Accord, and soon figure out the specifics of where you would open a portal, if not in the US.
You start with generalities, of course, and work your way through a couple of candidate continents first, mostly because your operations are just as such a grand scale that this is where you have to start. Given your ability to fairly easily travel just about anywhere, it's not like distance is a limitation at all as far as this goes.
In the end, you settle on 'somewhere in Europe' as your most likely location, with further detail not yet established because, well… There's a lot of options, a lot of advantages and drawbacks to consider for this and, to be honest, Sarah and Accord keep on trying to annoy each other to the point you eventually just call a stop to the meeting.
Hey, you've narrowed it down to one continent, that's a lot more progress than a lot of corporate meetings of this kind would manage. And Accord hasn't even been driven into a blind rage yet.
You'll have to get back this eventually, of course, but for the moment everyone that wants a say can do their own bits of research and form their own opinion for later. The big question so far is who you plan to piss off first when you start operating in Europe, insofar as whatever place you choose will inevitably have some people that might object to the presence of your people.
Whether that's the King's Men over in England or Gesellschaft, in case you decide to go straight for the nazis (and you do like yourself some fresh nazi souls every now and then).
Anyways, that's all for later. Because right now, you have a little mission to take care of. Well, more of an errand, really, but a fairly fun one.
After all, your meetings with Sarah Pelham have been nothing but fun so far.
It's a bit of a repeat of something you did before, but, well, it's about time you go shopping once again. You… rarely do so, these days, purely because you can just fabricate pretty much anything you could buy and groceries aren't really a thing you have to worry about either.
Food? Drink? You don't need either. Cleaning supplies, well, if you didn't have Codsworth and a healthy amount of Bobs you subordinated to him taking care of the place, maybe you would need some of those, but even then vampires don't have any of their skin flake off continuously the way the living do, and again if you don't make food, don't go to the toilet and rarely, if ever, shower, there's only so much cleaning you need to do.
And let's not even get started on toilet paper and how useless it is to you now. Complete waste of space.
That said, you still can and do enjoy eating tasty food… And for all that your enhanced sense of taste can detect a lot of the chemicals they use for a lot of commercially available foodstuff, you still can appreciate some of what stuf is meant to taste like.
Sure, you mostly do so in order to be able to recreate the taste yourself later, but still, that's your excuse for why you end up browsing for a bunch of food while waiting for Mrs. Pelham to 'coincidentally' meet you. Mhm… You suppose you could hold a cake testing party with the younger Crypt capes, see if they like any particularly weird variation you could then imitate yourself?
You end up so lost in thought actually are mildly surprised when Sarah Pelham finally comes by. She, too, recognizes you on sight, so you waste no time to strike up a conversation. "Hey there, fancy meeting you again Sarah," you smile, waving at the blonde mother of two as she pushes her shopping cart along. And letting your eyes dip towards her chest for a moment, just to let her know what you're thinking about.
"Gabriel!" She smiles, but it's a polite smile, despite the slight acceleration of her heartbeat, the smidge of red on her cheeks that you really do need your enhanced eyesight to spot. "Here we meet again, I guess."
"That we do. Need any help with the shopping again?" You ask, playing the part of the nice guy that doesn't mind helping out, for all that you both know the heroine is perfectly capable of carrying her own shopping bags. It's part of the game you're playing by this point. "You know how narrow the elevators around here can be, an extra pair of hands might come in handy."
"I really shouldn't bother you to help me out like that again…" Despite herself, her smile takes on a coquettish tone as you gently rap your fingers against the side of your shopping cart.
Contrary to how things have gone with this Sarah until now (you always have to keep the names straight, what with your sister and Sarah Pelham having the same first name), you make sure to keep it slow and steady, in part to avoid spooking her, but mostly because you want to see what she does when she's at the steering wheel.
You've already kind of made it clear what you're after, but you don't really go after it, instead preferring to let her take the lead, in essence. It's not like what she wants is much different from your own ideas for this meeting, after all.
So you don't try to get her anywhere out of the way to fool around, and instead accompany her a the two of you finish your shopping first. Then, once you're past the cashier (you pay in cash, just because you tend to carry a couple hundred bucks on you more often than not), you help her bring her stuff to her car.
One thing leads to another and she offers to take you to her home for some tea, coffee and cake. A little bemused, you agree, and just like that you're taking a ride with her.
A guy tries to take pictures of the two of you as you get in, but a gentle, nuanced and exceedingly peaceful application of gravity manipulation crushes his smartphone into fine bits. As well a the hand holding it. And the rest of the man.
The remains are summarily disposed of inside a portal the Thinker creates and added to your stores of miscellaneous biomass. Being a cape stalker is a high-risk occupation, don't'cha know?
Anyways, you happily keep up some small talk as you secretly use telepathy to keep Vicky and Amy update on how their aunt has lured you into her car with promises of cake and is now kidnapping you. You do have to focus on what you're doing, so you can't quite focus on bantering over how you word the situation with them, but hey, it's pretty fun.
Before long, you arrive at the Pelham residence and soon help Sarah lay out some cake she had around the house already while she brews up some tea. Tea that is hardly touched, because not five minutes later you're stripping Sarah of her clothing and she you of yours, right there on the living room couch.
It turns out she did want to have another romp. Not that you doubted her, mind you, else you'd have never listened to the promises of cake.
It doesn't take much to have her naked, legs spread wide as you grab both of her thighs. She's splayed on the cushions, hair already lying messy over the backrest as she burns with anticipation; gaze meeting yours, she wordlessly urges you to do something, anything.
…There's a reason you like her, despite not interacting with her much compared to her sister.
That said, since she wants you to go ahead, you do the very opposite, staying right there, hard cock pulsing in the air above her, but otherwise you just hold her like that, hands on her legs.
"Is something wrong?" Sarah asks, and for a moment you can't help but smile at her.
"Nothing at all. I was just thinking about how beautiful you are," you tell her, one hand stroking along her side, the other one holding the side of her face-
And you lean in to kiss her, right there in the living room she spends her usual life in. Sarah's eyes are wide for a moment, then close, her warm body shifting as she reciprocates.
You only really remember to actually fuck her when you pull back from her soft lips, the taste of strawberry still on yours afterwards. It's one of your favorite tastes, too.
Leaning down, you rest the tip of your cock against her wet folds, already waiting for your intrusion, and you inside her smoothly and easily; Sarah moans, throwing her head back a you penetrate her deeply, hilting your entire cock inside her in one stroke.
That's a lot of cock, so it takes a moment, but you do manage, her tight entrance giving way easily, but also almost sucking you in. One of her legs hooks itself around your waist, that twinkle in her eyes telling you she's doing something naughty and enjoying it.
Grabbing hold of her full butt, you finally start to properly fuck her, hammering your cock into her pussy like it was an Olympic sport. Every heavy thrust of yours shakes her body, her breasts shaking and wobbling in an almost hypnotic fashion, and it takes almost titanic effort to stop long enough to adjust your position to properly rail her.
Sarah yelps and giggles when you push her around so she's lying on the couch, yourself perched atop her, but it's much easier now- with this angle, you can just hold up one of her legs to plunder her pussy, leaving your other hand free to roam her body, groping and touching and returning her touch as she does the same.
Holding you tight, she smiles gently, almost longingly. "This is kind of romantic, isn't it? I'm feeling like a teenager again."
"I'd say so," you chuckle, "and I'm sure you're twice as beautiful than you were."
"No need to flatter me, now, you're already getting everywhere…"
Close like this, you can virtually feel her heartbeat, hear the excitement running through her body, taste the hints of emotion coming off her sweat… The thrill of the danger, of being caught cheating like this, no doubt about it.
Not that it matters to you. You've managed to get through being found out fooling around with someone others had feelings and slash or commitments for or with often enough.
You lose yourself in the sensation of it all, as you often do, just filling her out as hard and as often as you can, circumstances permitting, fucking her into her peak. It's only when Sarah scratches at your back, teeth grit to stop herself from screaming, that you realize she's been coming for a bit too long, so you lean over her, hand on her shoulder to steady her.
"I'm gonna cum," you let her know, like it was the most natural thing in the world. In a way, it is.
"Inside," Sarah gasps. "I want to… feel you…!"
Doing as she asks, you speed up just a smidge, her wetness trickling down onto the upholstery as you take her on the couch. Finally, you slow down again, a few last thrusts all it takes to push yourself over the edge as well; you come inside her in thick, heavy spurts, painting her inside white.
"Haah… haah…" She pants, eyes still bearing that same look as before. "Can you stay… like this… just a little longer?"
Well, you do have a policy about proper aftercare. "However long you want," you promise, staring right back at her.
It's kind of nice. Also, it gives you time to sort through the storm of thoughts coming from Amy and Vicky right now, who are still getting a first row seat to everything that's going on right now.
Of course, as you have already noted plenty of times, no good thing can last forever. The saying also applies in this case, as you lie in Sarah's arms.
Of course you notice long before she does- you can hear the car outside, see how the blood signature moves. Quite simply put, someone is coming home…
And judging from the size of the body, it's probably her husband. Kind of a bad situation and position to be found in. Pretty awkward at the best of times, if nothing else.
You still have to wait until he parks the car before you can speak up, though. Freezing, you turn your head. "Sarah… Do you hear that?"
"I'm not sure what…" Outside, a car door is thrown closed, near enough to be unmistakably parked out front. "Oh, this is bad."
Time to think quick, you suppose. "Quick, put on your clothes and sit right here to hide the wet spot."
Alright, the situation might seem bad, but you totally have it under control. This is far from the first time you have to deal with this kind of thing, so there's at least that.
While you take a moment to help Sarah dress herself as quickly as you can (without revealing any of the many, many things you're keeping secret from her), you quickly change gears once she's got that on lock, grabbing your own clothes still scattered around, as well as the plate and the cup still holding your tea and cake- all signs of a second person being present must be removed, after all.
Silently gesturing at Sarah, you motion for her to stay in place, then quietly move off. Now where to hide until it's safe to sneak around again…
The front door opens just as you close the door of the upstairs wardrobe, spider-walking your way to its top where you can't get in the way, the stuff you're hiding folded up (in the case of your clothes) and balanced on top of your back. It's a bit cramped in here, but hey, you'll live.
"Hello, darling! you're back early."
"Ah, Sarah! Yes, I was just picking something up, I didn't expect you'd be home either."
"Oh, don't mind me, I was just having some tea since shopping went quick, traffic wasn't too bad today. Would you like some as well?"
"No, no, I'm technically still at work… I'll just be upstairs if you need anything, just give me a call."
With that, the deceptively quiet (for its size) form of Neil Pelham, aka Manpower, comes up the stairs, soon opening the one wardrobe you're hiding inside of. Thankfully, now that you've lodged yourself in place, you can be as close to perfectly quiet as a dead human body can be, not even the slightest twitch betraying your presence.
You also just straight-up turn yourself invisible while you're at it, though. Just because you're confident in your ability to hide, having used it to great effect all the time since when you first started out, doesn't mean you can't make sure.
But hey, you don't even try to attack this guy- just wait until he's done putting stuff away while you're cramming yourself against the top of the furniture he's doing so in. He doesn't linger, and so before long you can finally relax.
You don't, though. Not growing uncomfortable, or sore, from holding a position for too long is a privilege of yours and you will make use of it.
From your hiding spot, you can observe as events unfold from this point, Neil wandering off into another room and soon sitting down at what you'd expect to be a computer of some sort while Sarah remains downstairs for a bit, finishing off her tea and giving him time to settle down.
Once she's sure he won't come back down for a bit, she gets up, fiddling with the couch. You can only really make out her own actions and movement through your blood-sense, plus what you can hear from inside of this wardrobe, but yeah, she's totally hiding the wet spot she was sitting until now.
Next, she quickly moves around the house, opening a window and putting away the dishes before coming upstairs herself. You stay quiet as she moves past, calling out to her husband that she'll be taking up the bathroom for a bit.
While she goes for that, you take the opportunity to come out, sneaking down the stairs to put away your part of the dishes as well, your clothes stored inside that same wardrobe you come out of. May as well keep them out of the way, y'know?
Naked like this was your own home, you follow after Sarah, who has since started showering- to remove any and all evidence of your little playtime, probably. Silently opening the bathroom door, you slip right in, closing it behind you and soundlessly approaching the blonde currently just standing under the shower, letting herself get wet all over.
The dividers are easy enough to side out of the way, so you join her in short order- hands on her hips, she's surprised, but a quick nuzzle over her shoulder lets her know it's you. "Hey there, fancy meeting you here."
"Gabriel?! I thought you'd have left already," she says, taking a deep breath to dispel the tension momentarily overcoming her.
"What can I say," you murmur, pulling her backwards against yourself, "I can't resist such beauty, now can I?"
"We really shouldn't, this time. My husb- Neil is there," she objects, shaking her head- but doesn't actually move to push you away or anything of the sort.
"Then we'll have to be quiet, won't we?" You smile, proceeding to explore her body with your hands; being wet and warme up by the water, it's a whole new joy to do so, Sarah's soft skin giving against your questing fingers.
Stepping right behind her, your erection pokes against the globes of her beautifully rounded ass, which she swiftly rubs against the rod of your hardened flesh, obviously eager for more despite her words.
She still freezes up when your hard cock slips between her cheeks, poking at her asshole while you're fondling her breast with one hand, nipple rubbed between your fingers, and circling her clit with the other. "What's your opinion about anal, by the way?" You ask, pressing a kiss into the crook of her neck that has you lick up a few drops of water. Right where you would bite others, not that she would know. "Inquiring minds wish to know."
Sarah swallows heavily, but doesn't answer, instead bracing herself against the wet tiles of the wall so her butt presses backwards. Taking the wordless approval for what it is, you push back against her, the head of your dick slowly through her plush ass cheeks and into her back entrance.
Where her pussy was inviting and greedily pulling you in earlier, the woman's ass is tight, almost unbearably so, resisting your entry with great force, but once you're past her pulsing sphincter muscle, penetrating her gently so as to not hurt her, your cock is enveloped by a sleeve of incredibly hot velvet, Sarah moaning despite herself as you make your way inside her.
Embracing her from behind, you steadily fuck your way inside her, making her spread her ass for you, and she absolutely loves it- you have to pull her head to the side and silence her with a kiss for fear of her crying out the way she clearly wants to. Soon enough, you've buried your entire length inside her now also greedily pulsing asshole, evenly fucking her ass in a steady rhythm that's just fast enough to drive her wild without hurting her or making her cum too fast.
As shown by the crazed look in her eyes, and the urgent push backwards meeting your every thrust, Sarah using her entire body to go back and forth against the convenient surface of the wall. Despite your best efforts, it doesn't take long for her to come, shuddering breaths growing belabored and shorter, faster, her jaw torn between clamping shut to hold in her voice and hanging open in unabated pleasure.
You end up pulling her against your chest, the sound of the rushing water just barely masking the splat of your hips meeting her ass, fucking her straight through her peak and into the next one. And another for good measure, before you sink yourself as deep into her ass as you can, pumping your second load into her amidst the warm water covering both of you.
Her head torn backwards in explosions of pleasure, Sarah finally slumps down, still taking your cock as she comes down from the high of consecutive climax. It takes a couple deep, heaving breaths for her to find her voice again, having lost it somewhere along the way.
"I haven't been fucked like that since college," she murmurs almost drunkenly, lidded eyes peering at you over her shoulder.
"Oh?" You ask, eyebrow raised as you gently fondle her breasts. They're pretty fun breasts, as far as that goes, though then what pair isn't?
"Neil isn't into butt stuff," she shrugs. Then, she looks up. "We should probably get done here before the warm water runs out, by the way."
"Now that would just suck," you nod. "Want me to wash your back while we're here already?"
You do, in fact, help Sarah wash up, and take a shower yourself while you're at it; you don't actually need it, your body maintaining itself in the condition you want it to be, but you're there already and it would just be weird not to, at this point.
Following that, you make a show of sneaking outside the house, once you give Sarah's butt a pat and promise you'll be around. She insists you do, the fire of a horny teenager lit inside the grown woman at some point of your acquaintance.
You're innocent in the entire affair, of course. After all, it was you that was lure in with promises of cake. You ate the rest of your piece while still inside the wardrobe, too.
But yes, you leave, soon just ducking into a convenient hiding spot to teleport back to your secret lair. Obviously in order to conduct some villainous, villainous business, because what else would you be doing?
Well, as it turns out, Okita wants to go on a date. With Sabah, aka Parian. And you.
Yeah, you'll be honest, you're not exactly sure why, but then, it's Okita- she just does whatever she wants more often than not anyways, so you just roll with it. That's mostly a winning strategy, far as you're concerned.
…Of course she could at least figure out where she'd like to go with yourself and Sabah beforehand, but according to her, you're the one responsible for that part. Which is… Yeah, a very Okita thing to do.
A lesser man might be uncomfortable, accompanying a pair of ladies that is generally, visibly uninterested in most things in sight and would prefer to be with the other one without you there to 'interfere', respectively.
You are not a lesser man, and while you appreciate Sabah's enthusiasm for Okita's okitatas, you magnanimously and entirely ignore her temporary animosity- knowing Okita, she probably just neglected to mention that you'd be present on this little date of hers, too.
One of those little things you learn to just not mind at some point in your life. If you don't, you're basically just pissing yourself with anger over every, well, little thing, and that's just no way to really live, now is it?
Anyways, you're visiting your very own hotel, designed and built by yours truly (through the usage of plenty of Bobs, naturally). While using the upscale, fancy-pants place it turned out as as a love hotel would be amusing in and of itself, you figure, that's not what you're here for.
Today, anyways. You might just get back to the idea on another occasion.
But no, for now you're here to peruse the hotel's very own restaurant, while taking these two out for a date. Appropriately for the location, you're dressed in a casual business suit, which is very different from the casual suit your normally wear, you are told, and the girls are dressed in dresses that actually hide some skin.
And not in a way that suggests more than it hides. For one, Sabah insisted, and for another, hiding Okita's front-facing property (hard to really describe them as anything else, with their size) is a lost cause to begin with.
The entrance is guarded by two bouncers, a profession that is kind of experiencing a renaissance within city limits as you, by which you mean the Lord Street Crypts, have plenty of uses for people standing around in a vaguely intimidating manner as a form of obvious deterrence against making trouble- all the real, serious security tends to be electronic and mechanical, of course, but a surprising amount of troublemakers can be frightened off before those ever get to see any use.
And, well, feeding vagrants and generally anyone without a job of their own you took in properly and dressing them up in black jackets is surprisingly cheap, all things told. Or maybe your sense for money is just distorted, but with the basic training course (that's still more thorough than what most cops get, by the way) weeding out anyone that really isn't suited for the task, it works out pretty well.
Just one of the many little initiatives the Crypts have going to reduce unemployment in Brockton Bay. It's not much, because there's only so many glorified semi-affiliated thugs you really need for anything, but at least it's honest work. It also helps that your people teach basic self defense and how to use it very non-defensively to these guys, too.
At any rate, you nod at the two standing around to make the entrance to your hotel look more important than it really is as you pass, moving from a moderately bustling street (business has been picking up a bit in the districts you renovated as of late) into the almost oppressive calm and quiet of the lobby.
It was designed that way- to be like a hit to the face composed of tranquility. It's nice to see it works as intended.
"So why are we here exactly?" Sabah asks, her black dress shifting and drinking in the light as she keeps step with you.
"To see how the restaurant turned out, mostly," you shrug, casually. "Ethan taught them how to cook, so the menu can't have turned out too bad, at least."
She relaxes a smidge, apparently having the same thoughts about love hotels you had earlier. "That's good. Ethan's a sweetheart, you can really see how he enjoys working the kitchen."
"There's a reason he does it. We're also letting the kitchen staff use a manufactory, so there's not too much pressure on them, but I'm still excited to see how this little initiative turned out."
Next to you, Okita nods happily. "I want to see how the knives feel."
"I'm sure they'll be satisfactory for the task at hand," you smile. "And if not, we can always have them change the design."
Time for a lovely little date under the guise of a surprise business inspection. You swear, sometimes it feels like you're playing part in some soap opera, with the addition of a little ultraviolence and plenty of sex to add to the whole spectacle.
Naturally, being part of a building you had a hand in designing, the in-house restaurant has a couple features that match the rest of the hotel's; for one, the first thing that one may notice, upon entering the designated dining hall is the ceiling of the room.
Said ceiling is fully equipped with holographic technology, largely the simpler stuff that hasn't yet been upgraded with your more advanced versions. Not that it particularly needs anything like that, seeing as it's 'just' used to project images of the sky above any guests that happen to be present.
Incidentally also hiding the upper reaches of the walls, thereby making the place look bigger than it is. Not that it's small by any means, mind you, it's just not quite as big and open as the carefully calibrated images make it look like.
Right now, the ceiling is set to show you a magnificent, starry night sky, occasionally twinkling stars shining down at the tables as you stroll right inside; dimmed lights mean that while it's perfectly easy to see even for baseline humans, the atmosphere is that of a night in the midst of nature, without any light pollution making it harder to see the stars.
You even made sure to add in a reasonably accurate model of planetary movement within the solar system so you can see a couple other planets, if you know what they look like. It wasn't necessary, but hey, you figured it would be a nice touch.
Casually making your way inside, you move towards a round table with three chairs around it, silverware already prepared for your perusal. You did, in fact, call ahead- this isn't a surprise inspection or anything, so you got everything ready as soon as Okita told you she wanted to go on a date.
"This place is really… ritzy?" Sabah asks more than she says, her rich, brown skin looking absolutely delicious under the pale starlight shining onto your table as all three of you sit down. "I'm glad we got these dresses."
"They do look gorgeous," you comment with an acknowledging nod. "Not that you couldn't have made an even better one yourself if you felt like it."
"Not without buying the fabric first. And designing one." Disagreement delivered, she looks around a moment. "Still. Really glad we fit in."
You already knew this, for your own part, but there's a couple guests already dining here- mostly people in suits and dresses and those kinds of things. Your hotel, evidently, is a place with a certain level of propriety, manners and outwardly visible wealth expected of everyone, including those that pay money to even be here.
"Eh, I technically own this place, under one identity or another. We could've come in jogging pants and slacks for all I care," you shrug. "And Okita wouldn't even have noticed the difference, either."
"This is a little tight," the Japanese ex-school girl says at this point, tugging at the neckline of her red dress. The poor thing rebounds into place when she lets go, and more than a few eyes around the room can't tear themselves from the wobbling expanse of her Okitarines.
Not that you can really begrudge it- she really is just that big, and they're entirely natural to boot. Implants don't tend to have quite the same level of elasticity, unless they're actually good ones.
Disregarding the men and women now occasionally glancing at the three of you, you wave a hand over the middle of the table, causing three dimly glowing rectangles to appear before each of you.
Yes, you did, in fact, program holographic menus into this place. They wouldn't be much good without being controllable, of course, so you used some of your telepathic interface stuff so people can scroll up and down (or forward and backwards, depending on preference) to see all the delicacies available.
You went all-in on turning this hotel into high-tech paradise, this is just part of that.
"This is… a large menu." Sabah is almost reluctantly impressed, as though admitting as much were some kind of loss against you. Ridiculous, of course, it's not like Okita would be impressed or not either way, but hey, may as well let her get it off her back. "I don't even know what half this stuff is."
"I wouldn't know either if I hadn't looked this stuff up way back when. There's a few translation settings you could try tweaking," you suggest with a smirk.
"'Dining for Dummies'?" She asks with a raised eyebrow.
"That's the one! It explains what each dish is in simple words. Most are really just pretentious names for particular preparation methods anyways. Any idea what you'll order already, Okita?"
"So they have seafood?" She asks you instead of looking it up. Just by thinking the question, the hologram should be shifting to the appropriate page, but… Yeah, she wasn't even considering finding out through any way other than yourself, so it didn't register it as a command, you think.
Look, this is some cutting-edge technology. It can be a little fiddly.
"They better have," you reply and navigate your own menu to look for seafood instead of expressing any of those thoughts. "Their ingredient budget is 'have anything you want'. Yup, everything from sashimi to fried shrimp and back."
"I like tuna sashimi."
"Guess we may as well get a whole platter to share."
In the end, you don't 'just' get a full-on sashimi platter (with extra fatty tuna for Okita), you get a full selection of the finest seafood Brockton Bay has to offer. Which, to be fair, isn't that hard; while the city is, well, coastal and used to be a somewhat large and important port, it very much always was a cargo port, due to the relatively scarce fishing to be had in nearby waters.
Even before the oil tanker was sunk into the harbor and fucked the minor domestic fishing over, that is. While frying fish with oil and some other ingredients certainly is a wonderful standard recipe in itself, crude oil usually doesn't factor well into culinary experiences of any kind.
Just an observation from the sidelines.
Anyways, long story short, Brockton Bay isn't necessarily known for its local specialities in the realm of seafood, so it's really about high time someone went and just got ingredients from elsewhere and worked with that instead. Restoring the local aquatic biosphere into something vaguely functional might be a fun project, come to think of it, but it's really no priority for now.
What you order, all in all, is two platters of assorted sushi (you know Ethan went around former ABB holdings at some point to track down some Japanese chef that migrated here after Kyushu went the way of the drunken sailor to learn from him), a bunch of fried prawn and shrimps, a lobster you make a point of taking apart the proper way so the other two can watch and learn, a small bucket's worth of clams and of course a dozen varieties of fish and preparations thereof.
Some are fried with soy sauce and lemon juice, some are fried with a thin wrapping of egg, then of course you have the deep-fried breaded fish… Someone in the kitchen really likes their fried fish, it looks like.
Not all of the dishes are complete winners in your book, but all of them are at least acceptable. Considering you've been growing increasingly snobby about food ever since you started accumulating thousands of people's worth of thoughts on what constitutes a good meal, that much is plenty good already.
Actually eating everything you order takes a bit, but that's just one of those first world problems, you figure, so you just deal with it and move on like any other sane person. Okita, for her part, is very particular about manners while eating, to the point she can't move her cutlery once she's started chewing something, and only resumes handling it once she's swallowed, her hands freezing and unfreezing as she eats.
It might be considered weird by some people. Mostly, even, probably. Far as you're concerned though, it's just one of her cute little quirks, a rule she made up for herself to better work in society she now follows without thinking about it too deeply.
She's always been like that, you're pretty sure. The memories of the summoned 'heroes' you consumed up to this point suggest as much, anyways- she was never terribly sociable, but Yoshi does recall her behaving a little off from time to time.
Honestly, you'll never get why some people (or entire cultures, for that matter) can't just deal with people being different, sometimes. Human brains simply aren't uniform designs churned out with mechanical precision, they obviously end up with some varying chemistry going on inside them.
All you really need to do is to adjust how you treat someone a little bit and they're easy enough to get along with. Doesn't matter if it's someone with autism or a serial killer, they all just… think different, and as long as you keep that in mind they're really not that different from anyone else. With some exceptions, of course.
Like religious folk. They have their own rules, but randomly decide to ignore them all the time, and then it's your fault for not realizing their arbitrary rules defined by some made-up worldview arbitrarily don't apply. Man, they're always such a pain…
But yeah, you eat a lot of food, followed by a quick tour of the secret parts of the hotel- Okita really likes the grav-tunnels you use as freight elevators and to transport people in a pinch, though Sabah grows slightly nauseous after you go and use the things a couple times.
It's probably her being full, then the sensation of falling into directions the body isn't use to being 'down'. Can't really be helped when you put it like that, so you take things a little slower from there.
Of course some people aren't as considerate as you are. "You need a roller coaster."
You look at Okita. "Elaborate."
"This place lacks something. That something is a roller coaster."
She nods, satisfied at expressing her opinion in a verbose manner (measured against her usual, anyways). You are left considering her words, on the other hand… And Sabah, who, standing behind Okita, is shaking her head and crossing her arms.
"I'll consider adding one, but adding all the space necessary would be a big investment of time and effort, so I make no promises," you finally say.
That seems to satisfy everyone, at least for the moment. Well, keeping more than one woman at a time satisfied may be a great feat for one, but for you it's really just the same thing as always, when you get down to it.
Speaking of large installations, and around half an hour after you're done showing Okita and Sabah around your technically newest business, you finally get around to doing a bit of maintenance on a certain little part of your secret base you've been meaning to look into for a while now.
That is, you take another look at Dogetown, the surprisingly huge expansion to your lair housing, by this point, literally any stray cats and dogs that formerly lived in and around Brockton Bay. The place has been growing accordingly ever since, with the Thinker keeping an eye on everything to ensure it all keeps running decently.
You aren't sure whether it's because it reminds her of managing Rapture or whether she kind of developed a one-sided bond with the animals you kind of adopted en masse, but she's kind of taken over administration of Dogetown in full. Which is probably a good thing; someone needs to take of the furrier citizens of your little utopian project, despite their increasing intelligence allowing them to build their own little society while you weren't looking at what Rachel was doing.
And, to be fair to everyone involved, it actually is looking pretty well-organized, despite the general absence of opposable thumbs in the residents.
Past the town gates that, with no exception, spell out 'DOGETOWN' in cast iron to anyone coming inside, large enough to allow human-sized visitors in, an orderly network of streets stretches in all directions. There are no maps, largely because even with the enhancements to their cognitive functions that kind of thing is too abstract for many of the cats and dogs around this place to really grasp, but most directions are pretty self-explanatory anyways.
There's food-dispensers that give you however much you want to eat, unless you're the kind of animal that'll easily overeat, in which case they'll automatically shut down in case of you being nearby once you got a certain amount of eating in (there's usually one or two cats or dogs plaintively scratching at them, if nobody else is using them at the time), marked by the scent of food, and a bunch of housing in all directions, which is really easily visible as such, for a start.
While not the same as full-on human habitation, purely because it would be immensely impractical for them, the doggy mafia (it's inclusive enough to take cats in as members as well) lives in what amounts to downsized houses, with plenty of pace for them to do their own things. It's actually stupidly cute, and you've noticed that pictures of the place have been showing up on your telepathic net.
No surprise, really. If the normal internet's data flow largely comprises of pornography and cat pictures, it stands to reason that the same would sooner or later become true for your mental network modeled after it as well. Now where those pictures of yourself factor into that, you aren't quite sure, but you trust Sarah and her shadow council of your various girlfriends have ood reason for doing what they do.
But back to Dogetown- it has just about everything it may need, from housing to a supply of food and drink and even it own sewer system and a few 'market places' for various dog- and cat toys, particular treats and stuff like that.
That said, you think it could have a little more than it does. And so, as you walk the streets of the 'town' named after your wolf form, patting plenty of animals and shooting off a bunch of mental videos and snapshots of the sensations involved, you draw up a couple plans for fun little additions to make to Dogetown.
They named the place after you, which means it's yours, and you'll be damned if it'll be less than it could be just because it's good enough as is. Perfection may be the enemy of good, but better is still preferable to worse, dammit.
Getting yourself a decent amount of usable soil is easy enough- all it takes is a quick bit of research on the Thinker's part followed by a portal created close enough to some of the stuff suited to your purposes, followed by some minor exertion on the part of your brain to make it 'fall' into position.
Similarly, installing more space inside Dogetown to work with is as simple as installed a bunch of additional Eldritch Cores in the machinery maintaining its current state of spatial expansion, the handy little devices you've come to value as a cornerstone of your own engineering able to bend a lot of rules when used correctly.
The stage thus set, your next step is to spread the soil evenly, once again by manipulating it weight accordingly, while you get everything else ready. Having decided to build a sort of park that also bears plenty of opportunity for both canines and felines to exercise under the guise of playing with stuff, you naturally do need some plants for the 'park' part, and while you're at it, well, may as well hit two birds with one highly unstable ball of virulently mutagenic fluid, right?
…That totally didn't get away from you. Anyways, you end up just pulling out a good old Seedcaster, one of those devices you made back on Earth Fallout to better work with that dimension's bullshit- the important part is that these things let you basically 'reprogram' certain plant seeds on a genetic level to turn them into whatever you need, within reason.
Your idea of what is and isn't reasonable might be a bit out there compared to the layperson, but then it's hardly your fault not everyone considers the scientific field of genetics a toy store filled with whatever you can dream up.
Aside from Tenenbaum, but then Brigid actually does tend to be more careful about what she does after she essentially adopted all the Little Sisters in Rapture. Just a matter of parenthood, really; you weren't too affected by your own daughters' births yourself, but that probably has more to do with you having to babysit whatever examples of humanity you don't intend to massacre at the time anyways.
You're just kinda used to herding cats already, is what you're saying.
Back to the playground-park you're working on, though, you make a point to construct as much of it out of grown plants as you can, aided by technology that may well be declared an unholy abomination against all that is good and right if the kind of person that has an issue with your methods were to inspect it. Joke's on them, of course; you mostly just adapted stuff you stole from other sources, so it's not like they'd be casting judgement on you or anything.
First off, you load up the genetic sequences you had the Thinker help you preparing, then you start to literally shoot seeds into the ground using the Seedcaster, beginning with a framework of trees meant to be climbable, but also capable of automatically catching any cats that manage to fall off, the branches growing thick, soft leaves and reacting to fast movement in their immediate vicinity.
Once you have that done, you proceed onward with placing the shorter trees meant to grow into playground equipment appropriate for the target audience, from little wooden platforms that you have to jump between to traverse an area to 'naturally' grown rope that secretes a variety of tasty substances to have both cats and dogs play with them, danglig at varying heights all over the place.
You're not sure whether you're gardening, landscaping or criming against life itself, but one way or another you're kinda having fun with it, letting your creativity run wild as you methodically set the Seedcaster against the ground or, in some cases, other plants to 'plant' the symbiotic variants modifying the ones already rapidly growing in your wake.
Also trailing behind you is none other than Riley, who has been sent to 'keep an eye on you'. "Honestly, it's not like I'm doing anything I haven't done before, and it didn't result in any horrible plant monsters or anything," you grumble, knowing she doesn't mind listening to you do so as you work.
"Kate insisted, and I wasn't about to turn down the opportunity to play with the puppies," the blonde girl happily reports, nuzzling one of the aforementioned puppies hanging in her arms. "There's so many!"
"That's just what happens when you put a bunch dogs, and cats for that matter, in close proximity for an extended amount of time. If they don't fight, they fuck," you shrug. "You think I should put another tree here, have them connect?"
It's a bit of light field work, combined with, as Riley put it, playing with the puppies. And kittens. There's very few things you'd rather do with your time, and while your daughters would be available, you don't want to be the kin of dad that hovers over their shoulders all the time, y'know?
"Hey Crystal, you have some time later?"
"Kind of. What's your opinion on light BDSM and lesbian stuff?"
"See, there's this cape that may or may not join the Crypts. She also may or may not be into that kind of thing."
"Oh, no worries, she's older than you are. Besides, do I look like the feds?"
"Gotcha. So, you coming or not?"
"I knew I could count on you. I'll send you the place in a moment, it shouldn't be far from your place."
…
"Hey Carol? Look, I know your daughters haven't been easy on you, so I thought I'd offer you a chance at building up some endurance against their kind of games."
It was almost too professional, this setup of Gabriel's. Cain's, rather, it wouldn't really do to mix it up like that. Being in the position she was as an open hero in a family of open heroes, it wasn't always easy for Crystal to keep these things straight, but it was important to, even if she would always think of her family with their real names before their cape names.
Call her a worrywart, but she disliked the idea of being so much of the cape, being Laserdream, that she stopped thinking of herself as Crystal. It wasn't like she resented her parents for the situation she was born into or anything, she just wanted to stay herself, rather than have part of her life take over the rest.
It was one reason she was always vaguely worried about Amy; she didn't really have the time to get into her cousins' business or anything like that, and aunt Carol would probably get mad at some point even if she did, but the girl really put too much of herself into healing people. Which, at the face of it, was a great thing- curing cancer used to be a big deal, before Cain- but still, burnout was a thing, too, and one that was a very real danger to her.
But again, it was hard for Crystal to really say much, and she was busy with her own life on top. Reaching out wasn't easy when you had your hands full.
At least things seemed to be going better for her cousins; while the Dallons had their own trouble of late, Amy and Vicky had been much more relaxed from what she'd seen lately. Then again, there were times to think about stuff like this, and driving to a private location to have some fun with a tied-up older woman at a supervillain's invitation probably wasn't it.
So! Business face. She'd received a key from an envelope that she'd found a moment after she agreed with Cain's suggestion, which was all kinds of terrifying for all kinds of reasons, so all she needed to do was reach the address written on the outside and use the key to get in.
And once she did, well, she'd forget her own crap for a little while. That was why she was doing this,
In retrospect, she didn't really have any idea what she'd been expecting, but somehow that was exactly what she found when she came inside the house. Discreet, but easily accessible, the basement was decked out with dark panes of cloth hanging from the walls as she came in, and there totally was something to muffle noise as well.
Past the stairs, she was in the main downstairs room, and what a room it was. The floor covered in soft, dark carpet, thick enough to be comfortable kneeling on, the walls were lined with cabinets holding all sorts of objects, from whips to clamps to dildos of all sizes and shapes all the way to things Crystal had no idea what to even call.
There was a bit of a collection, in short, of all kinds of tools meant for depraved activity of even more kinds. Which only made sense, considering the centerpiece of this… it felt wrong to call it an 'attraction', but then, it was why she was there.
Arms tied behind her back, a woman was standing in the middle of the room, legs spread a little by the chains that kept her in place. She was otherwise almost entirely naked, practically on display, and Crystal had to admit she liked what she saw.
Blonde, which she didn't have any preference on one way or another, short hair, partially hidden by the mask keeping half her face hidden behind a layer of black velvet, a ball gag tastefully arranged to keep her unable to talk, but let her jaw rest comfortably still. Smooth skin, shoulders just the slim side of average, or that could just be the position they were contorted into at the moment, with pleasing curves and legs Crystal could spend an hour or two just touching and squeezing all over.
Seriously. Good legs were a godsend. They didn't always help to disguise a shit personality, but carrying it with style made it less unbearable. Her last not-quite-girlfriend could attest.
Coming closer, Crystal smiled, stretching out a hand to palm a breast, the unnamed woman's chest voluptuous, but not overly so- compared to her own pair, anyways, but then she did convince Amy to help her with that. She could stay completely silent, and that would be its own fun, but…
She Leaned in to whisper into an ear. "What's that, a naughty toy someone left out?" She asked, making the tied-up woman twitch. "Well, it would be a waste not to play, wouldn't it?"
Stroking smooth skin with her thumb, she quickly found a hard little nub, her nipples already poking out. Someone really was naughty… But then, that was why she was here, like this, in the first place.
Appreciating the woman she'd have free reign over for the next while, Crystal hummed to herself, hands sliding up and down her sides. "Looking good. Wonder what fun we can have…?"
Stepping around her, she made a show of examining the blonde, assessing her like a piece of meat. A nicely flowing back, wide hips, nice legs, a very nice ass, too. Grabbing it once she was behind, she almost kneaded it with both hands, round cheeks deformed under her fingers.
"I know what I'm gonna do to you first," she whispered from behind, already eyeing the surrounding toys. She really meant it, too- the spread legs and forcibly upright posture were just too enticing.
Grabbing a particularly phallic tool in short order, Crystal eyed its size and compare it to the woman, judging it to be appropriate. Just a little on the large side, meaning it was just what she needed. Laying a hand on her bare shoulder, she leaned in, letting her hair fall over naked skin as she maneuvered it into position.
"Relax. Make it easier on yourself."
With that, she gently prodded forward, poking at the woman's back entrance. She struggled for a moment, but, remembering the situation she was in, quickly relented, and the tip slid into her ass in short order as Crystal circled it, keeping up the pressure from all directions.
She had been beautiful before, but now? Now her ass was turning into a work of art, the sizable, veiny toy (very anatomically correct, actually) spreading her cheeks around it to facilitate its entrance, pliable flesh kissing hard, synthetic love.
Gently, Crystal continued to work the dildo inside, taking particular pleasure in pushing its entire tip past the woman's back entrance, her ass so tight it almost held the thing in just by itself, despite the artificial organ's heft and weight. Stepping back around to her front, she could confirm that the university student wasn't the only one enjoying herself; rivulets of clear fluid were trickling down the insides of smooth thighs.
Kneeling down, she smiled up, knowing nobody could see her right now one way or another. "Remember," she said, "this is just the beginning of our time together."
With that, she dived into the immaculately shaved muff right in front of her, licking and kissing and stimulating as she steadily kept the dildo going, reaching around to keep it stable and ever deeper, pushing and pumping from below.
Ever since she'd been with Cain, she'd studied up on how the female orgasm worked, and how one may elicit them as repeatedly and thoroughly as he had. The internet wasn't exactly a reliable source of information on this topic, so she'd mostly just experimented a bit, as befit a college student.
Now she just had a great opportunity to put it into practice, to try and compare. Good thing she had a few hours…
"She totally recognized her niece's voice, didn't she?"
"My sensors detected a notable uptick in body temperature and heartbeat when she first spoke."
"Yup. Totally recognized it."
"Alright, alright everyone!" You say over the hubbub of too many voices, making them quiet down for a moment. You'd think Aisha, Dinah and the Cluster Six, as they continue to be called around the bunker wouldn't be enough to make all that much of a racket, what with some of them being older than the others and others being pretty quiet girls in general, but as it turns out…
Well, you suspect certain individuals among them (looking at you, Aisha) are making an effort to produce additional noise to make up for those that don't, whereas it's surprisingly easy to get some of them to open up and start chatting on their own once you know them and get them to talk about things they're interested in.
That's not to say someone like Beverly is about to engage in any animated discussions of her own volition, the doll-like blonde about as distanced from what's going on as ever, but Catrin has been getting into cartoons and video games of late, so she's been easier to approach over this particular topic, among other examples. Even Jackie is more animate than usual, likely because she feels safe with the whole cluster gathered together like this.
The cluster triggers here still have to sleep in close quarters so they can rest easily, but most of their day is actually spent in the company of only one or two of the others, purely because it's much easier for them logistically speaking.
Anyways, you're here to spend some time with this particular herd of cats, both to make sure they're doing alright, to strengthen bonds between capes you figure can get along in a way that doesn't lead to more fires for you to put out down the line and to let all of them have some fun; it's basically like a school trip, only much more casual and infinitely less sucky.
Literally so, thinking back on that one trip in particular. So many blowjobs. It's not something you'd think about all that often, but at some point you do get sore from them, y'know? Not to mention when they just got weird.
Long story short, school trip but with blackjack and hookers. Not literally so, you hope, but in case they're needed you have the numbers of a few dozen hookers on hand anytime. "Let's not make this any more of a nursery school thing than we have to and figure out what everyone wants to do, shall we?"
Aisha raises a hand. "Can there be hookers?"
"Not if you ask like that, no. Sex workers have hard work to do-" A couple snickers resound at the unintended pun, "-and we aren't about to interrupt them from doing their thing unless their services are actually needed. Let's call that 'Plan B' and discuss our Plan A instead."
Personally, you never did get super deep into card games as a whole, growing up; it just never was a super huge concern for you compared to all the other crap going on in your life. That said, poker, specifically strip poker, was one of those skills you couldn't help but get good at, in retrospect, what with how regularly you ended up playing it.
Translating that into regular poker is pretty straightforward, and so the time has come for you to had down your hard-earned skills. Specifically, what you picked up about how to cheat at the game, since without cheating poker's way too luck-based for your sensibilities.
Why rely on dumb luck, after all, when you can just take your fate into your own hands? Oh, sure, you ended up doing just that anyways when you died and didn't have much choice but to get lucky enough to be somehow reanimated as an eldritch abomination in the approximate shape of a vampire, but that's just how life is sometimes. Or death, or unlife or however you want to call it.
Point is, you know how to properly play poker well enough and you may as well teach the girls, is all. Unwarranted confidence may be unwarranted, but it is what got you pretty far, if you do say so yourself, and it's half the game when you really get down to it- be utterly, stupidly confident, without so much as verbally indicating you've got a good hand.
It's what professionals call 'skill'. Skill as a conman, but skill nevertheless. You can't exactly pick your talents nor your cards, you just gotta play the hand you're dealt, at the end of the day.
And if that hand is useless, all you gotta do, all you can do, is cheat. Not that you shouldn't cheat otherwise, in case it's convenient and gets you a better hand to begin with. Which brings you back around to why you're also teaching that part to the girls, naturally.
As it just so happens, some of them have some hammer poker faces. Others, on the other hand… struggle.
"Gnununu… Dinah's cheating with her power!" Frustrated, Aisha calls out and points, surprising exactly no one. "There's no way she's getting good hands this consistently otherwise!"
"I'm not. And if I were, you couldn't prove it," the brunette harrumphs, looking at her hand. "Raise, by the way."
"The rules are clear. You have to have some form of proof," Kumi nods along, placid smile unwavering as a wall of steel as usual. "I suppose that would make cheating with her power rather easy, wouldn't it?"
"Mm," Jackie makes, wordlessly adding her chips to follow the raise, then adding some more. "Raise."
Only for Ayane to smirk at her, like she has been since this game started. Incidentally, she has also been losing chips since this game started. "I'll-"
"Calling your bluff," Beverly murmurs with an almost bored voice, interrupting her.
"Oh you gotta be kidding me-"
"Oh! Um, hey…" Catrin tries to get everyone's attention. As usual, actually getting it has her freeze up, and so she plaintively turns towards Phoebe, the dusky-skinned girl smiling at the Tinker and giving her an encouraging nod.
A quick moment of telepathy later, she's pointing at Aisha. "Look, Aisha's cheating!"
"Am not!"
"Did you forget vamps can see through your power?" Ayane comments.
"Mm," Jackie agrees implicitly, sealing Aisha's fate.
"Nooo!"
"Alright, it's punishment time," Phoebe exclaims happily, throwing her hands up into the air. "You know the rules, everyone."
As per the rules you made them all agree on, anyone that's caught cheating has to be punished by whoever caught them- you could probably pull some deep reasoning for that out your ass, but to be honest you just thought it would be funny, so you went with it. Not everything has to be some massive scheme or plot or anything.
Everyone looks at Catrin, who blushes. Both at the attention and at what she's planning.
A minute later, Aisha has to spend the rest of the round naked, which is a surprisingly common punishment for the girls to inflict on each other as you eventually find out. The Tinker that first did what everyone was thinking, for her part, is super shy about it, which is really cute on her, something Aisha teases her over as well.
You think there might even be some chemistry between the two. At least as casual friends, anyways. And yes, you do mean casual by your definition, which Sarah continues to insist is not the same as the average person's.
Really, it's fine, you don't care what she likely did with the other girls in the changing room, back when you were both still human and all. It's perfectly normal.
At any rate, Jackie ends up winning this round, her poker face triumphing over even that of Beverly, and so she soon gets her prize for winning- you doing anything she wants until the next round ends. As it so happens, her wish is something really small, something you'd have done if she'd asked at pretty much any time anyways.
That is, she wants to sit on your lap and be fed sweets. Naturally, you do end up doing just that, despite your suggestions. "You know, you could've just asked. No need to burn a victory on this."
"Mm," Jackie denies, shaking her head before she opens her mouth, 'nom'ming a bit of chewy candy from your fingers as you hold it up to her face. "Much better like this. Victory always tastes sweetest."
Well, you do get that. And you can't really deny it, either. The fruits of your labors always do taste best when you snatch them from the jaws of everyone else, after all.
Things escalate a little from there, though the girls keep themselves from going too wild, interestingly. Normally, excess and getting carried away at the drop of a hat is somewhat of a trademark of your people, but it looks like the most they get up to, this time, is making you spank naked cheaters and feed the winners sweets.
Aisha, incidentally, gets spanked quite a lot, to the point you go ahead and use this opportunity to refine your technique a little- putting just enough strength into it to be felt, but below the threshold that would have someone's aura actively disperse the force of the individual blows.
Her cheeks are polished by the time she gets good enough, or rather subtle enough, to get away with what she pulls, but the idea behind this whole thing, turning it into a lesson on how and when to cheat (specifically when you can get away with it) seems to have sunk in, in the end.
Or alternatively, y'know, take full advantage of any given system, of reward and punishment or otherwise. You're pretty sure some of the girls went and arranged to 'catch' each other so they could give each other 'punishments' they preferred, but as long as they keep it halfway believable, you're playing along.
So what if you have to feed winners sweets coated in the juices of cheaters after you 'manually coat' them? Still nothing big by your standards, after all.
Anyways, plenty of fun is had by all, though you call it quits before anyone decides to break the fragile balance keeping all the girls you're keeping an eye on from escalating their demands to you.
The entire situation would be unthinkable if Taylor was around. Girl just goes straight for the push to the next level anytime she's presented with an opportunity.
Your next stop, once you've seen to it that this particular herd of cats won't get into any trouble in the next quarter hour or so, is the workshop that is increasingly considered the Engineering Bay, a name that keeps you wondering how, exactly, it became so common among your people it's turned into its actual name these days. Well, not that it really matters, it's probably just one of those things where language and what amounts to company culture take on their own life and develop in the interactions between individuals.
It's a thing that happens, what can you do?
Of course the reason you're there, on the other hand, is related to what's being done inside… And the things you could do, with some elbow grease. Tinkertech, as it has always been, is beyond you, which only makes sense considering it's not supposed to make sense (according to Riley's theories about how it works, and you trust her expertise there in the complete absence of other experts to compare opinions), but there's a couple of Tinkers around that have been experiencing increased ease when working with their powers, so far.
And, as it just so happens, you have a whole bunch of technology up your sleeve these days that would be considered 'exotic' by most. Look, gravity adjusting devices seem super funky at first and all, but as someone that actually designs, builds and modifies the things, they quickly lose that luster, so they're more just… useful little gadgets, far as you're concerned.
Like batteries. Or computation devices. Undeniably handy and with loads of possible applications, but that's all.
One of these possible applications, then, is the combination of your newer tech with whatever tinkertech the others can cook up with it. Of course you have to do it personally, because this stuff is very fiddly and seemingly contradictory when it comes to the usage of things like Eldritch Cores, the likes of which even the Thinker prefers to just have you handle new developments if nothing else, and that in turn means everyone wants to have you on their proposed projects first.
"Look, I don't like pulling our the seniority card, but I was the first Tinker with the Crypts," Sherrel argues, perched on a worktable not currently in use. Not that it would stop her if it was, granted. "The Doomtruck-Spider needs to keep up, alright? I want that baby updated. It has to blast down skyscrapers at the least by now."
"Screw that, I wanna try more gravity bombs! I got a bunch already, but imagine if we could, like, multiply the power," Alice argues, waving her hands animatedly. "If we could harness those ECs as a power source for the right kinda bomb, think about just how big of a boom it could be!"
"Uhm…" Lea, not to be outdone, also waves a hand for attention. "If you wouldn't mind, I have a design proposal for an improved glove, because apparently I just put everything into gloves for some reason. Telekinetic Gloves would be kind of neat, if we could miniaturize the required parts."
"…Did she trigger and get a Tinker power while I wasn't looking?" Sherrel 'whispers' at normal conversational volume.
"Nah, pretty sure she's just imitating the boss. You know, integrating tech, stealing ideas?"
Lea glares at the other two, arms crossed. "It's not stealing if you ask for permission first, okay?"
In the end, you mostly decide to go with Sherrel's initiative to improve on one of the oldest single pieces of tinkertech in the possession of the Lord Street Crypts as a compromise of sorts, because it's much easier to add other Tinkers' work to it compared to the other options you have for the moment.
Not that everyone's entirely happy with it, but it's one of the joys of being the guy that makes the infinite materials supplying the needs of everyone that when you put your foot down, nobody wants to argue… Much, at any rate.
You incorporate a bunch of varied, yet solidly interesting new ways to destroy whatever the Doomtruck is pointed at, or indeed in the same postal code as. For one, it can easily float now, much the same way your general robots have been updated to, and even fly to some extent; it's not quite as maneuverable in the air as it would be under most circumstances, though you fully expect Sherrel to be fixing that little oversight soon enough.
You did install no less than three Lutece Particles inside their respective little containment units, this thing is meant for combat after all. They can always be vented out and abandoned for the alternative systems you installed that let the vehicle navigate through the air- or enhance its mass while driving into something, for that matter- but having a couple backups is just good sense, really.
Naturally, you also went ahead and added what Lea calls the Telekinesis Protocol; technically, it's really just some machinery that mimics what the telekinesis plasmid does, less efficient than the structures the ADAM would grow inside a living body, but scaled up far enough it barely matters in practice.
ADAM is and remains pretty fiddly, just saying. It doesn't like to be used outside the context of a living organism, if you had to explain it, which complicates matters. Hence why you had to improvise a bit to get this stuff to work at all.
Anyways, while you were at it, you and Alice threw together a few 'explosive' munitions for the various launchers of the Doomtruck you can only call gravitational collapse detonators, as that' what they do, pretty much. Collapse the gravity of thing within their area of effect in such a way they just kind of… fall in on themselves. Or implode outright, if they're heavy enough.
It's a handy way to get through any obstacles to the sides of what the rest of the Truck's weaponry is pointed at, if nothing else. Speaking of, though…
You're aware you've just kind of been adding weapons to the thing, but to be fair it's kind of the one thing the Doomtruck needs to fulfill its purpose. Kind of in the name, that. However, the newest addition to the veritable armory you've turned a considerable amount of its expanded internal space into, next to the robot storage and manufactories specifically for building more on the go, is just a little… extra.
Somehow, and you don't know which combination of tinkertech specialty and physics-circumventing technology allowed it, but Sherrel suggested you give it a try, and it worked. The issue is what worked, and how.
The 'what' is what amounts to a light-projector, of sorts, and the 'how' is that you took the grain of solidified light you created, that couple of times you used Pandora's Box, as the tinkertech box you've been kind of afraid to touch when you realized it, somehow, distilled light into a solid form and you couldn't figure out anything about the process it does so by even after using it a couple times.
Like, it's cool, you just don't like playing with things too far outside of your control. Your usual bullshit isn't that risky, in that regard.
As for the result of the 'projector', well, you've somehow managed to cobble together some weaponized form of light… teleportation? That is also half-solid for a few moments before dissipating?
Long story short, there's a massive pillar of blinding radiance in the approximate direction you aimer the prototype, raging within its area of effect for a second or two before fading out again.
"You know," you comment after it's over, this whole thing one of the few incidences of actual mad science you've ever been involved in after the Box itself, "if we didn't have so much protection, I'm pretty sure the heat would've just burned off a couple eyebrows."
Looking at the twisted, perfectly circular crater of melted metal in the solid adamantite you made this entire chamber out of for exactly these kinds of tests, Kate, who's been drafted to help oversee this whole thing, whistles through her teeth.
"As the Crypts' Chief Shooty Person, I grade this thing to be very shooty," she gives her verdict. "Four out of ten on the warcrime scale, but eight on the Äfuck this place in particular' one."
"Well, that's something to work with, I guess." After all, if your Chief Shooty Person says it, you have an expert opinion to rely on the veracity of.
While you'd love to focus a considerable amount of potential insanity you could get up to with the Doomtruck, even beyond what you've put together so far, it's getting kinda difficult to fit more stuff inside of it without straight-up making it larger, despite your best efforts- and replacing the updated machinery inside of it seems like one of those things you should only do when you've completely run out of better shit to do.
Which, as it so happens, isn't an issue! You have loads of things to do, tests to run, science to settle in your damn favor, that kind of stuff. The Crypts are mostly running themselves for the moment, and with your plans for a European expansion being put into practice slowly for the moment in light of the other events you've got in the works, you actually can take your time for a few vanity projects on the side.
One of those little side projects now stretches through a dedicated part of the base, a large room surrounded by more security measures than should be able to fit- standard Crypt measure by this point, basically- and filled with a sizable, vaguely oval construction, a thick ring of mechanical parts largely covered by thick, protective armor.
"Alright, test number one," you say to yourself, because you just love the sound of your own voice sometimes. "Let's see how this one works out."
The ring's inner parts start to spin, somehow, both clockwise and counter-clockwise, slowly speeding up until what you can see through the gaps of the outer plating becomes a blur, the stabilizing spikes pointing inside starting to look like a solid object even to your enhanced dynamic vision. You can almost feel just how cool this whole magitech-stuff you put together is, now that you've figured out a way for it to not just break itself the moment you try actually using it.
Technically, you didn't really need anything like that, of course; a simple ring of solid material would do the job just fine. That said, you already touched upon why you added this whole song and dance on top- it stabilizes the results of the spell you're currently casting, hopefully allowing you to target it just right to actually replicate the targeting involved.
It's not every day you open a random, actually physically present portal into literal hell, after all.
The portal rotates faster and faster, the very air thrumming in the wake of its movement, before finally, it happens. Like an eye snapping open after being stuck shut for a little too long, an iridescent glow emanating from the flat, rounded pane now brimming inside the ring you built to contain it.
"Well, there we go," you shrug, somehow a little surprised it actually worked, despite being the one that made it happen. "Let's take a look."
Approaching the literal Hellgate you just set up, you waste no time to poke your head through, noting the vague scent of sulfur- literal brimstone- and ozone as you do. The transition itself feels a little tingly, your skin almost sparking as you push it through, but it doesn't seem to be harmful in any way.
The first thing that really strikes you, when you get your primary suite of sensory organs on the other side, is the sound. A steady, uneven rumble of voices and feet and claws, a massive level of ambient noise produced by uncountable individual beings moving, walking, talking, shouting, killing each other…
It's a city, a pretty dang massive one. Looking around to your sides, you find that your portal's perched on the side of an enormous building, literal miles up in the air, which only puts you at some decent elevation compare to your surroundings- more such literal skyscrapers dot the horizon, pushing into the heavy cloud cover hanging like a heavy veil over distant ranges of what could be mountains, but are probably more of these buildings.
The sky is overcast so heavily, its deep, abiding gray matched by the darker version of the same color the literally pointed architecture all around you sports. Peering down, you find the streets are flooded by the main source of illumination in sight- streams of lava, pouring from some unseen location, roll through the whole city, falling from openings inside the buildings themselves in the city's version of waterfalls, all coming along at once.
It's certainly pretty atmospheric, if nothing else- and as you watch, you spot no less than a dozen instances of still living demons being thrown into the streams by their contemporaries, many-limbed bodies flailing and sinking down into the molten stone (or that's what you assume it is anyways).
Some of them even manage to climb out again and take a shot at payback, right next to or under the bustling areas you suspect might be marketplaces, or else just really busy streets crossing up and down as much as they do back and forth.
As it turns out, your timing couldn't have been better, as before your very eyes what can only be described as a flood takes place, the flow of lava all over the city accelerating noticeably all the while it grows aglow with power, a deeper red replacing the in hindsight half-cooled orange.
Following the course it takes, you can't help but notice how the stuff flows from one singular location from all over the city, visible from your current location when you twist your head a little. And you have to say, the place actually does look pretty nice.
You appreciate the aesthetic they went for pretty consistently, if nothing else, and they even kept the surrounding rock bare of too much construction, about as natural as anything really gets in hell, you suspect.
Right outside the (flood-) gates of the massive 'inner district' surrounding the eve more massive palace.
There two thoughts in your head, right this moment. No, make that three.
On the one hand, the smart thing to do right now, now that you've confirmed the gate works more or less as intended, would be to pull your face back out of it, grab a couple of expendable robots to remote control and chuck them through, have them do the heavy lifting while you dick around at home. Beig expendable is a big selling point for a reason, after all- hell, far as you know, isn't exactly the safest neighborhood.
On the other hand, you're by far the most… flexible combatant around, if not necessarily the strongest- Okita, for one, may well beat you in a straight fight, were you to entertain any such crazed notions at taking her head-on- and, more importantly, the place you're looking at is a city.
There is a certain level of organization there, of social hierarchies even among literal hellspawn, of currency exchanging hands and living conditions and a million hooks you could leverage if you just went out and kept a hand on the situation in person.
On the third, spontaneously grown and probably clawed hand, you can't help but look upon this place stretching before you, glancing over all the many demons inhabiting it, their armored forms, many-limbed bodies and scowling faces, the sea of ever-differing skin colors even among those that actually have skin, the motes of something hopping around the lava channels all over.
You look upon them all, and your third thought is a pretty simple one.
You could take them.
So you do the natural thing. You let Sarah know what you're doing, ignore the instantaneous reply telling you not to do it via telepathy and jump right through.
It's just hell. You'll fit right in, you're sure.
It's an interesting experience, walking around streets laid throughout enormous buildings made of some kind of semi-natural concrete in temperatures that would be patently too hazardous for a human to endure without some serious protection against it. Getting there did require you to take a brisk walk across the side of one of said buildings, but, well, you can just casually do that, so whatever.
The ambience of the place aside, and damn it sure has some considering the way the interiors of these massive constructions are lit up by the lava that seems to define the whole area, giving the grey and black stuff everything is seemingly made of a pleasingly sinister glow, blending into the crowd actually isn't that hard for you, surprisingly.
While there's plenty of completely monstrous-looking demons around, their twisted and varied forms ranging from scaled to animalistic all the way to 'how does this thing even stay alive, and why does it have so many painful-looking piercings', there's just as many humanoid ones- and while few of those actually look entirely human, it seems that's not a completely unusual notion, either, so you don't even need to shapeshift yourself.
Ironic, considering most of those that look like they're human are probably shapeshifters themselves choosing to take on the look at the moment. Devils of some sort, if you had to guess, which does suit you just fine; being one handsome devil is one of your strengths, you're told.
For a short while, you just keep to yourself as you let yourself drift in the foot traffic, the… unique nature of the city's infrastructure seemingly preventing any real public transport from catching on. Most demons you see just walk to wherever they need to go, shoving and killing whoever's in the way if they're in a hurry, and strong enough to do so, though other mods of transportation do exist, as you soon come to realize.
Mostly as a matter of individual capability, anyways. There's plenty of demons just flying from one building to the next, winged or otherwise, and there's several access points that allow these big, dark red caterpillar-looking ones to just crawl along the sides much like you casually walked around yourself earlier, rather than brave normal traffic. You're also pretty sure teleportation is a thing, somehow, and there's several tunnels dug through the walls as needs drove their creators you pass through or by.
Passively taking everything in, though, as fun as it may be, isn't the best use of your time, you don't think. Sadly, you don't exactly understand a lot of languages being spoken around you, if some of them even are actual language (the slurping of a face full of tentacles might just be a direct result of the gnarled humanoid's anatomy), your translation powers not picking up on any of them on account of these not being animals in the sense that counts nor you having traveled through your usual interdimensional channels so you could just pick this stuff up on entry, but with a bit of time and patience you can pick up a few things about where you are, at least.
Relative to the rest of the city, anyways, which is all you need right this moment.
You make your way across a bridge and into a neighboring mega-building, kicking some starved-looking half-humanoid spider demons off the side and into the still glowing streams of lava below the moment they slow down in front of you, just to fit in and all. It wouldn't do for your casual clothes to be mistaken for the mark of an easy target.
Not that anyone around seems interested in fucking around with you, anyways. Looks like being able to demonstratively and casually stroll around all over the place, confident you can, in fact, take anyone that makes trouble at you, is enough to keep most troublemakers thinking better of anything.
Sure, there's still a couple of shits too dumb or too cocky (same difference, really) that try to angle themselves into your direction in the crowd, but after the second very short bat-winged little imp you squash between your palms without breaking stride it seems the news of you being strong, rather than an idiot yourself, seem to have made the rounds already.
The joys of being a badass. Or enough of one the literal vermin doesn't want to risk your attention, anyways. Literally, these kinds of imps are basically the rats around here, in an ecological sense.
Digging up trash, annoying people, being exterminated without a second thought… All the hallmarks, really.
Anyways, the destination you aimed for was none other than the nearest marketplace, one that's actually large enough to be worth the mention. So, here you are, surrounded by the chaos you've come to be intimately familiar with from ten minutes' walk so far, all sorts of demons speaking all sorts of tongues, some of them with blood inside of them, some without, your supernaturally enhanced senses picking up the weirdest of shit from the stalls and shops and hawkers all around.
You absolutely love it. It's a cool new environment, and you can't wait to explore.
One of the things you already noticed on the way, by the by, is that there's no solid doors or window panes or anything like that, presumably because closed rooms would quickly heat up beyond even the normal temperature in this lava-filled place; instead, you just have open squares or round holes, with at most curtains made of these colorful (or very non-colorful) strings instead, if someone bothered at all.
It's actually vaguely reminiscent of those hippie 'doors' that work much the same, come to think of it.
Just makes it easier for you to listen in as you take a look around the market, which is pretty massive in itself. No less than three whole floors are filled with it, and it's not even the largest one in the city, you think. And these floors are huge. Just saying, this whole place looks like some over-the-top design you would put together yourself if you had the right circumstances to make it work out.
"Pain! The finest pain you'll see this side of Mol'Nach! Headaches, fevers, anxiety, freshly pressed!"
"Rrrrgh, you call this an amulet! This insult won't stand!"
"Come one come all, domestic lavasprites just ripe! They got that pep, you know what I'm talking about, good sir! A culinary experience you'll find nowhere else!"
"Here, dearie, let me read your fortune… 'Less you don't mind me taking a chunk from it, heeheehee…"
The place is bustling, to say the least. Lots to see, lots to find out… And despite your current linguistic issues, you can still pick up plenty of little tidbits in passing, just putting together pieces of conversation between the residents of this particular corner of hell.
Wandering around and observing your surroundings like this, you quickly come to a couple conclusions. In no particular order… Souls, while a very stable and generally accepted currency, are by far not the only thing being traded, and most stalls and shops you look in on while they make transactions accept a couple of other things in trade a well.
Bartering for valuables is alive and well in this economy, it's all about convincing whoever you're looking at that what you've got is worth what they've got. That aside, you also spy another form of currency, coins in roughly the same size as souls tend to be when minted, the form they're usually used as in this context, though these ones are obviously different- obsidian black, with veins of deep red running through them.
Most likely a local alternative, just guessing off of how they look. You wouldn't bet on them being accepted anywhere all too far from this city, but you suppose it makes sense whoever's in charge would look into doing something like this.
Wealth being retained just a little better while they can issue some of it themselves, that is. It's a pure plus from their perspective, even if many non-local demons are annoyed by having to handle the stuff as opposed to alternatives.
Another thing, the market is actually guarded, and while the constant violence you see elsewhere isn't entirely gone, a bunch of heavily-armored guards are around (mainly composed of Dracons and Devils, with a few Fiends and other miscellaneous types thrown in for good measure), keeping an eye on things and hauling any troublemakers straight out of everyone else's way.
Mostly by tossing them into the lava, once they're divested of anything valuable. Waste not, want not, you suppose.
It's not immediately obvious at first glance, but you also manage to make out the way the market is structured. There's no really hard delineation or anything, but it's fairly obvious that there's certain areas mainly occupied with arms and armor, trinkets and decorations, stuff meant for battle and similar, whereas the more leisure-oriented shops and stalls cluster together elsewhere, interspersed with many a demon offering services from essentially acting as mercenaries to prostitutes and anything in between.
There's book shops, ones with travel supplies specifically to deal with the environments of more accessible, 'neighboring' layers and phases of hell, stalls with barrels full of magical staves of some kind, tarot readers that claim to influence fate with their cards… Pretty much anything you could think of and then some. There's even some local smithies right here at the market, deeper into one of the lower floors, that offer custom jobs for arms and armor so you can actually find something that fits you if you aren't all that humanoid.
You don't get to peep in on them much, but you can say with some certainty that they use the ever-present lava flowing and pooling throughout in place of furnaces, producing tough, black-scorched metal you're pretty sure isn't steel. Or at least a version with a lot of other additions to the alloy.
It's pretty decent for what the locals have to work with, though, and the smiths do good work. You can recognize that much, if nothing else.
Also, if it wasn't already kind of obvious, the lava seems somehow connected to the ruler of the city, who isn't a demon lord themselves; they just sit inside their palace and supply the stuff so it can flow throughout the city freely. It cools down sometimes, which actually is a problem for the demons living and doing business, but usually not for long.
No idea how said ruler is even called, nor what kind of demon they are, this is just something you happened to overhear from two Fiends (could've been Archfiends too, it's hard to tell sometimes) grumbling to each other.
Now then… Time to move on to doing some more direct information gathering. By actually talking to a few demons directly yourself, naturally. You aren't shy about this kind of thing, after all.
The informant you settle on tapping first of all, in the end, is largely determined by what you consider your chances of pulling any actually usable intel out of them. While the smithies would be highly interesting on the level of technical craftsmanship, most of the smiths aren't exactly the chatty sort, and while a particularly slimy specimen of demon selling some potentially magical gemstones is very tempting to tap, you ultimately decide to seek out someone capable of speaking a language you actually understand.
Maybe next time. You're pretty sure you could interpret its gurgles reasonably well, but there's no need to risk it when alternatives exist.
Alternatives like a certain bookstore you visit instead, one offering both actual paper books and ones made of more resilient materials, like a few carved plates of stone or something you spy as you come into the air-conditioned room; there's obviously some magical crap going on here, but you're pretty sure it's mostly just because books have a tendency to not do well in the temperatures you have outside.
You're not sure they'd just spontaneously catch fire or anything, but all it would take would be a single spark or moment of inattention near motes of fire rising from the lava and they'd basically burst into flame like tinder in an instant in this environment. You suppose it only makes sense to go the extra mile, at least in the store itself.
"Ah," a drily cracking, yet somehow still dignified voice greets you, like an old man speaking up from beyond the grave, "a customer. Feel free to look around and browse, if you read half or more you buy it."
"Entirely fair," you nod at the demon lounging behind a counter. Looking roughly human-shaped at first glance, its skin is the stark white of a long-deceased cadaver and exceedingly wrinkly and shriveled, to the point it obscures any facial features that may otherwise be visible on it. It also doesn't have any blood, so you can't make out any details about its anatomy that way, though you don't need that particular trick to figure out it has no less than four pairs of arms.
They do hold several books, after all, idly leafing through them. If there's any eyes on that face, they're not easily visible, nor do they ever blink, which you would see. Well, not that it matters to you, anyways.
"Any recommendations, popular sellers? I'm new around here, so feel free to surprise me."
"Mhm… New around here indeed," the shopkeeper (and likely owner, for that matter, or at least that's the impression you're getting) comments, looking you over. Or, y'know, gesturing its shrunken-in non-face into your direction. "How's the heat outside? I can't stand it myself. Delicate skin, you understand."
"Oh, totally. It's not for everyone. Personally I don't mind, but I've never been too bothered by heat or cold," you shrug, waving a hand dismissively. "It's a nice place, though. I've even considered getting a vacation home down here."
"Well, in that case I'd recommend you look on the other side of the big floodgates," the shopkeep advises you, putting down one of its books. "Less traffic congestion, cleaner lava, nicer neighbors… Don't tell anyone I said it, but the rabble does get tiring. Of course actually getting a house is another story entirely, but I figure you have your ways."
See, he already gets you! He probably also already surmised you're not actually a demon somehow, with just how 'new' you are around here, but it's not like you give afuck if any news make the rounds. Worst come to worst, you can just shapeshit to disguise yourself.
"That's an idea, I suppose," you nod. "Anyways, books. Anything interesting you have here?"
"I wouldn't say all of them are interesting, but I don't stock useless crap, at least. Take a look in that corner there," the demon gestures with two left hands, "there's a history of the city, a few magical tomes and an opinion piece collection somewhere. Might be the place to start."
"Much obliged." Now then, let's see which of those are actually what you want here…
The good thing about being in hell, in retrospect, is just how easy it is to grab a bunch of money when you need it. While you stay in the shop and take a look around to properly catalogue potential purchases between 'want' and 'not want'- reading a couple pages to make sure they're what you think they are, comparing against others you may also want, that kind of thing- you also split off a separate body, essentially temporarily cloning yourself to simultaneously go out and 'withdraw' the money you need to buy your preferred picks.
Where do you withdraw it from? Why, random demons that won't need it after you've disposed of them, of course. It's frowned upon to do this within the marketplace, of course, but crossing over a lava bridge into another building, shaking down a few Fiends by repeatedly punching them in the face (or face equivalent) and coming back circumvents this issue just fine.
With a few of these lavacoins in your pocket, you assess how much time you could take while taking it slow in the shop, and quickly get to work making more money now that you have some to start with. Ironically, here in hell it's actually much easier to do so, as you just have to figure out what kinds of stuff to buy that you can then sell off elsewhere for a profit within this same market, without needing any of your phenomenal cosmic power beyond simple observation and pattern recognition.
Like, it's much, much harder to actually accrue wealth in modern society if you don't have any to begin with. Unless you're a criminal, but you were thinking about the average person, not your own experiences as a cape spontaneously grabbing the first couple of potential henchmen you could find and robbing the Merchants blind.
But yeah, you trade around a bit, exchanging a few weapons and miscellaneous valuables you profit off of without a sweat. In the end, you can buy the books you were interested in and keep a little extra on top, all the while some casual conversation with the shopkeeper gets you even more information on the side.
The supposedly magical books you set to the side to just have the Necronomicon absorb them later, much like the translation guides meant to make a couple of infernal languages more accessible- if it works as intended, you may just learn a couple the quick and easy way later on. So, yeah, that's something to look forward to.
More immediately relevant, you also speedread a few sources on the city itself, which combined with what you managed to overhear in the meantime and what you can get out of the demon that seems to own this little shop, is enough to give you a somewhat complete picture of what's going on.
Simply put, Brimstone City here (it doesn't have any 'official' name, but that's what it ends up being called sometimes despite there being tons of places named like this) was constructed out of the same lava that flows through it at all times, the stuff pouring out of the palace that was technically the first building that actually went up.
The ruler of the city is theoretically subject to the demon lord of this layer, but really just does their own thing and is being ignored as long as they stay inside their own turf. The lava is literally a byproduct of the ruler's existence, not so much deliberately created as it just has to be constantly vented somewhere; the 'palace' was originally just a convenient place they used to let it flow off instead of building up into a lake of molten rock around them.
Which is neat, you suppose. At some point, someone saw this really powerful demon constantly pumping out lava and thought 'hey, couldn't you use this somehow?' and, through a period of trial and error, the method used to combine the stuff with some other building materials to literally pull entire buildings out of the ground was born.
The lavacoins were a later attempt to use the palace's facilities to create a whole currency whole cloth, and while they're meant to be a fiat currency they're only really taken seriously within the city- literally not accepted anywhere else. About what you expected, really.
The city's roughly divided into the 'noble' district, closer to the palace where the lava is the hottest and buildings were designed with a lot more care, and the rest where you just have a bunch of haphazard construction put together into something halfway serviceable. The two halves are divided by a great set of gates that never actually open, as they're technically more like enormous grates that let lava through- you actually saw the things from afar, earlier.
They're actually guarded so the rabble can't easily cross over the top walkways that connect the whole thing. You could stroll in at any time, of course- it's not like those guards are really all that strong, and being more powerful than them basically serves as your entrance ticket if you don't have anyone to vouch for you or you're a known resident of the better part of town.
Demons, man. You aren't sure whether they're overcomplicating this whole thing or making it more straightforward, at this point.
The brimstone city is somewhat well-known for the quality of its lava-forged arms and armor, which correlates to what you've observed so far. It also is famous, as far as you can call it that, for its arenas, where combatants fight each other while the battlefield is increasingly covered with more and more lava flowing inside, or the floor is just partially removed mid-match to spice things up, or everyone just dies because something breaks and everything's submerged.
Apparently, blood sports like that are a favorite pastime for many more violently inclined demons, so this whole gimmick is kind of a hit with that crowd. It's by no means unique, of course, but still a solid thing many demons enjoy.
Well, death not necessarily being permanent for you tends to do that, you suppose.
There's also a map of the brimstone city included inside the pages of your purchase, which may just come in handy. Landmarks, marketplaces, safe zones… There's even a warning that this thing may be inaccurate because some things shift over time, which is only fair, you guess.
A pretty decent haul you got, here, and all it took was a couple hours of work. You could've done it faster by just rampaging around a bit, but you didn't want to become a public menace quite yet. There's always next time, but for now you're jut here to get the lay of the land and all.
395 days (plus around a decade and some bits of hibernation) since rising from the grave
Interestingly, your telepathy can now be confirmed to work cross-dimensionally… If hell even counts as a dimension in the classical sense rather than some weird quasi-dimensional nonsense, considering its spiritual connotations as an actual place that you can go into.
But yeah, you're kind of sure you could just communicate across dimensions, if your particular way of dimensional travel wasn't so weird in regards to relative time shenanigans and all of that crap. You shall have to experiment further later on.
It takes you a little while to get back to business as usual, as your lovable sister is, to put it lightly, not amused by your spontaneous decision to have a gander around hell.
Look, you would've just pulled out if there were any demons that could be an actual threat to you the moment you spotted any, you were entirely safe the whole time. Sarah disagrees with this assessment and urges you to be more careful lest your daughters have to grow up without a father, and the whole thing kind of ends up with you being scolded a bit.
Yes, you're aware your daughters are arguably grown up already, because vampire maturity comes somewhat quicker compared to the human kind and the decade you pent on Earth Rapture pretty much covered it in terms of time for them to find themselves. No, it doesn't matter, Sarah has a point anyways.
No matter how much said daughters protest on principle and you end up arguing with them. In a playful way of course, you mainly just tease them about it.
But, well, speaking of your descendants, it has come to your attention that, while most of the others aren't ready to turn more of your people into vampires yet, you yourself are off cooldown thanks to the time you spent on that crazy hellworld version of Earth. The timing works out to mean that you may well get someone vamped, then hop to another dimension again and come back ready to go for the next mass-vamping event, which is convenient enough to go for it, you suppose.
The only question, then, is whom you should go for… Which is complicated by the fact you don't have any strong preferences as to who should get the good immortality juice next. Thralling allows you to make just about anyone unaging to begin with, not that you expect old age of all thing to be the main cause of death for any of the Crypts, and it's not like any of your guys discriminate against non-vampires or anything.
You're actually really proud of them over that, by the way. There's an almost inevitable level of elitism that comes with having immense powers and literally feeding on people, but there's almost no differentiation between vamps and non-vamps within your organization's core. Probably because pretty much everyone at this level has some powers of one sort or another, but still, this is some good internal cohesion here.
It's another story entirely when you look at Crypts sentiments toward non-Crypts, but nobody is going around butchering civilians for fun just because they figure they may as well, which is good enough for you.
However, as you don't really care who gets the ticket to the big leagues this time around, you just send a message to everyone in your network and tell them to figure out who should be turned. The Crypts aren't a democracy or anything, but you don't mind putting some decisions up for a vote every ow and then.
Aren't you a benevolent crime boss slash dictator slash walking war crime?
Democratic activities continue for some time, so you just leave that be for the moment while you go ahead and figure out how to kill time while a couple of the others discuss.
As it so happens, the solution to your troubles can be found right amidst the tapestry of thoughts spun together into a network in its own right; while you don't by any means monitor what's going on inside of it, being thoroughly uninterested in the effort itself as well as any reasons you can think of for doing so, you do sometimes just explore it a bit on the side, when you don't have anything better to do.
Side note, you just realized it, but you may have created a version of the internet that's even easier to access than through a smartphone and practically welded to the inside of your skull. Fun. Ah well, you probably won't suddenly grow any internet addictions or anything like that, so whatever.
The thing you find, as you take a leisurely stroll through Memory Lane, as the biggest general 'forum' part of your network has been named at some point, is an offer for singing lessons and stylistic advice… From the looks of it, it's basically Paige McAbee, formerly known as Bad Canary, getting together with a few of Kate's girls to have fun dressing people up and stuff.
Essentially the whole thing where women, when shopping, just have to try out a dozen of everything, just by proxy. Getting willing victims to play dress-up doll for them to pass the time in a vaguely constructive manner, especially in Page's own case- she's been holed up inside your base for a while now, and with nothing to really look forward to other than not being birdcaged (which she does feel thankful for, last time you looked), she just needed something to do, pretty much.
Ethan is a part of this little clique as well, by the way. You'd believe it, too, the guy's got some good sense for fashion. Yes, it's a whole cliche, him being gay and dressing better than ninety percent of hetero men, but you can't really help the facts in this case, can you?
But yeah, Paige also gives singing lessons, is the thing you were thinking about- you don't exactly need lessons, with the insane things you can do with your voice already, but there's nothing wrong with just singing for fun, either.
And your twins have been thinking about just going out and being stars on Earth Bet just as much as on Earth Rapture, the minor issue of the authorities being wary of blatantly abnormal shit like their incredible singing be damned. If they're gonna do it, they may as well get some experience with what a professional on this version of Earth can teach them about the current state of the industry- what genres have been popular, any obvious faux pas to avoid, that kind of thing.
It take you around fifteen minutes until you've got a karaoke session going where you're subtly competing with Paige for being the obviously better mentor as far as this whole business is concerned, so… Mission accomplished?
"…That doesn't count."
"It's opera-style and it's epic," you declare.
"It's way more you standing there making instrumental music with your mouth than actual singing!"
"But the voiced parts are what the challenge was about. Now go ahead, try and do a counterpart. I'm waiting."
Next to you, Ivy and Iris are watching with rapt attention, turning their eyes towards Bad Canary in expectation.
"Ugh. I'm a pop singer, I can't do opera singing! My voice can reach the pitch, but it's impossible to hold it!"
"All I'm hearing is the whining of a defeated loser. How can you say that without even trying? Besides, if it's really that bad, we can always deal with the problem through medical procedures…"
"Alright, good news everyone," is how you open this particular meeting of the Crypts' top level planners, thinkers and Thinkers. "It seems popular demand has called for Henley to get the out-of-season vamping ticket on account of his, well, accounting. And seniority."
"Technically, I'm a few days older as an employee!" Cupcake insists. The very fact she calls it it is the reason she was passed over, this time.
"I keep telling everyone it's an opportunity wasted on me," the bald member of your inner council sighs as you bring it up. "I am the accountant. There is precious little need for me to become a vampire."
"Still got voted for it," Kate throws in, a 'what can you do' shrug following immediately after.
"Indeed. I suppose nothing much speaks against it, either… Still, I maintain it is a waste."
"Amusing as Henrey's reluctant stance towards his future promotion may be," you drawl, calling the meeting back to attention, "it's not the main reason we're here today."
"Right. Our expansion to Europe," Sarah nods along, making it a point that she can lead the discussion all on her own. So precious. "We can put a portal pretty much anywhere, so deciding on the 'where' is just that much more important. There's a few obvious options, and a few that don't even merit mention."
Alright, then. Time to deliberate who gets to feel the Crypts' version of a friendly takeover first.
At the end of the day, once all options are laid out and briefly discussed by your personal shadow council, there's really not much of a question which one you end up picking as the site of your potential Crypt expansion plans. Which is almost a shame- you were looking forward to making this whole thing a vote and all, with the big holographic display you were using for the preliminary discussion and all, but ah well, there's always next time.
"So," you say, "we're totally going with Germany, aren't we?"
"It's tradition to shoot up nazis for fun," Kate nods, giving you a lopsided grin as she twirls one of her guns around one hand. It's one of your ion 'laser' guns, the things that disintegrate matter on contact and have a few preset firing patterns. You're pretty sure she's got a small army's worth of armory on her at all times these days. "Like the good ol' times."
"You know, I've always wanted to go to Europe one of these days. Already did, but not here on Bet," Sarah mentions. "Figure it counts separately?"
You shrug. "It's a very different version, so why not?"
"Definitely gotta take the kids on tours when we're there."
You aren't sure whether she means the younger Crypt capes or your biological kids, but then, it's not like you really make much of a distinction between those things anyways. "Sounds good."
Y'know, you probably should have thought this through before you went ahead with it. It's not that you don't get that some people have an issue with the ways people treat each other, mind you, you just figured Taylor wouldn't have asked you if it was okay to show her pets to her mom if she thought there may be some… friction about it.
Case in point, Annette is looking violently disappointed in Taylor right now, having seen Emma's current accommodations. "Young lady, I expected better of you. This," she says, hand sweeping out to gesture towards the sealed cell, "is not how you treat a sub."
Jesse, who came along after you assured her she wouldn't be somehow pushing herself into Annette's family life by doing so, pointedly clears her throat. "I think you should start with the part where locking people up for fun is bad, m'kay?"
"This is Emma, Taylor would never do anything to actually hurt her," Annette waves her concerns off. Taylor, for her part, displays that notably motionless reaction you've come to associate with vampires in general and her in particular telling you that yeah no, she absolutely would.
To be honest, you don't really get it, but even if it bothers the women here, you don't see why that would stop Taylor from doing her thing. She's a big girl and all, she can make her own decisions.
"She brought it on herself," Taylor explains her rationale behind kidnapping and effectively enslaving her former best friend turned bully turned victim. "I'll let her out once she earns it."
"Taylor, sweetie, that's not how these things work," Annette sighs. "Nevermind. Let me take care of this."
Emma Barnes had no idea how long it'd been since she saw sunlight. She knew you're supposed to lose the concept of time without reference for it, such as being stuck inside a deep dark hole, but that didn't help her when she was wondering about just how long it'd been.
Taylor still came. Sometimes. She didn't tell Emma anything that would help, and it felt like she wasn't coming as often as she used to. It made her hyperventilate sometimes, imagining just being stuck there, alone in the dark, slowly starving to death. She used to have nightmares, but all of them had been replaced by now.
It wasn't even like she had it in herself to care about what Taylor did to her, anymore. Anything was better than the oppressive silence and the dark and the-
The door opened. It had a very distinctive sound. Perking up, Emma tried to nudge herself towards it, eager to feel something, maybe even be allowed to talk-
It wasn't Taylor. There was a person there and it wasn't Taylor. Arching her back to see better, she saw the woman entering her personal hell looked similar to her, but not quite the same, and Taylor hadn't ever looked different ever since she got powers.
She almost looked like an older version of… Emma's eyes went wide.
"Hey Emma. Long time no see, hm?" Auntie Annette smiled at her.
There was water in her eyes. Lots of it. All of a sudden, everything felt like it was falling away, like everything she'd ever done had been completely pointless. The room was shaking, or was that just her?
Auntie Annette came closer, only now Emma was cringing away. It was one thing to look at Taylor, but this… This was somehow worse.
A gentle, yet firm hand reached for her, holding her head steady as the gag was taken out of her mouth. Strands of hair were falling across her face, but she didn't even have the drive to wriggle them away.
Emma tried to speak, but her voice was too rough, too raspy, so it took more than one try to get out the words. When she did, they were the most profound thing she'd ever said. "Am I in hell?"
"No, sweetie, not at all." The hair was being stroked away from her cheeks, back behind her ears. Being touched like this felt good, and it reminded her way too much of how Taylor would touch her sometimes, now.
"But…"
"No buts. A lot of things happened while I was gone, as well as since you were put here. All that matters is that I'm here now."
It was impossible to hold it back now; Emma started sobbing, remembering life before, when Auntie Annette had still been with them. "I'm…" And what had happened since then. Everything. "I'm so sorry…"
"It's alright, it's alright…" A soothing hand on her back, just like when she was five and bawling her eyes out because of some childish thing she couldn't even remember now.
"'S not," she cried out, Emma's throat tight and painful. "We… I broke your flute… 'M sorry…"
"There, there."
It took an uncomfortable amount of time for her to calm down enough she could do anything else than cry against her Auntie's thigh again.
It's almost fascinating to see, as Taylor watches her mother comfort the very last person in the world she'd want to see comforted like this. Mostly in the sense that she's making a point of not expressing her discontent and anger at the situation at hand, something you suspect she can only do because she's a vampire and possesses the bodily control over herself that comes with that.
If she wasn't? You'd suspect she might even cry right now, for very different reasons than Emma over in the next room, the camera you're watching through still trained on her as she lies on the bed, partially tied up. That and maybe march in there, slap Emma and drag her mother out of the cell again.
"Not something you like to see, is it?" You ask, taking a step to stand next to her. Taylor looks at you, her being relatively tall meaning she doesn't even have to crane her neck.
"…No." And that's all the reply she gives you, not that you expected much more.
"You know…" You consider what to say here, for a moment. "It's alright to be pissed about your mother being concerned for her."
Taylor balls a fist, slender fingers curling with stone-crumblng strength. Letting it stay like that for a few seconds, she proceeds to grab your hand instead, squeezing it hard enough a human hand's bones would have simply shattered straight away.
"Yeah. I know I probably shouldn't talk, but…" Jesse speaks up, Annette's lesbian ex-nazi lover and fellow former dead person (sometimes, it really is hard to forget you're very much extra out there, even compared to most capes) clearing her throat. "It's fine. Just, don't let it consume you. You can be angry with your mom and it doesn't make anything else you feel for her less valid."
The girl holding your hand takes a deep breath, mostly just to get air into her lungs to talk with. "I know. It's fine. She has a point anyways."
You silently wait for her to continue.
"I probably did take it out on Emma for too long by now. I just kept her here because I didn't want to let go of how angry I was with her… I didn't want to let go of her."
"She was with you for a long time, despite everything," you comment.
"She was. Even when things got bad, and worse. When the bullying just went on and on, I thought I just never wanted anything to do with her anymore, but when I had the chance…"
"When the situation changed and you could have her back, one way or the other, you just went for it anyways," you nod along. "I get that, I really do. Sometimes people don't give you much of a choice."
"Fuck, am I the responsible one here?" Jesse mutters, brushing her blonde hair back. "Okay, fine. I'd just like to point out that this kind of thinking isn't healthy and kind of like some stalker killer's. Maybe you should reevaluate what you're doing at that point."
"She still deserved it for being a cunt."
"Well, when you put it like that…"
Jesse is pretty terrible at being the responsible adult in the room, you think.
When Taylor came in, Emma's mouth was still free, though even so she didn't say anything for a bit.
"So." Her captor's voice was strange. She didn't sound angry, or emotionless, like she usually did. Instead she just sounded… Normal. Like she did… before. Casual. "Mom's back."
Emma shifted a little. "…Really?"
"You literally sobbed into her thigh just now. I don't know how much more real she could be."
"Could've been you in disguise." It felt like she was talking more today than she'd had in weeks, and talked back to someone for the first time in months. "To give me false hope."
"As if I'd bother." There was a long bit of silence again, almost long enough to make Emma say something, anything, just because she could, now. For now anyways. "Being a big ticket cape with big ticket connections can be nice. It turns out Cain can bring some people back from the dead, so yeah. She's back."
Then Taylor did something that made Emma's skin crawl. She turned to look at her, but not like a normal person did, by turning their joints and shifting where they were facing, no- instead, chitinous extensions pushed themselves through her pale, perfectly smooth skin, like mold growing in fast-forward, reaching out and obscuring her from the neck up.
And then, it reversed, pulling back to reveal she was looking Emma straight in the eyes.
"I have been too hung up on you, I guess," Taylor said with the tone of someone discussing the weather. "Letting things between us take up too much effort on my part, when I had the power to define our relationship."
This sounded a lot like a confession. And potentially an announcement Emma was about to be killed in cold blood.
"Would you like-"
"Pleasedo'tthrowmeawayI'lldoanything!"
"…"
Opening one eye, Emma peeked upwards to see Taylor's reaction.
"If I knew all it would take is to let mom meet you, we could've saved a lot of time."
It is now night
One of the things you didn't even really realize you were missing until you got it back, here on Bet, is Riley's blood beverage serve machine down in your… basement? Space down here is honestly tied into so many warped knots it's kind of hard to figure out where what is relative to other stuff sometimes.
Just take Dogetown. Theoretically, it's somewhere to the side of the original abandoned Endbringer shelter converted into a supervillain base you took over, but it's also above the core of the base so the many small secret tunnels and entrances to it that let the Doggy Mafia move around town unseen can connect, while simultaneously being below just so it has enough space to expand.
Ugh. Anyways. The flavored blood that actually hits the spot in a way that tickles your soul-tastebuds is pretty nice, just because it's a way to taste something in this way easily and without needing to consume a whole soul by eating someone. It's not that you'd mind having a human snack every day as such, it'd just be kind of a pain logistically speaking.
On Earth Bet, at least. Especially considering how many other vampires you've made by now.
Your next course of action, with Taylor redefining her personal relationships a little before she gets ready for her part in this little show you've been planning to put on for a while now, is to get yourself ready for the stream you have in mind; it's not like changing clothes is any more time-consuming for you than changing shape, you just so happen to be doing both simultaneously right now.
To be fair, you're better at taking dresses off than putting them on. It's just way too much effort to dress yourself as a woman when you can just as well briefly turn into a ball of mist, smoosh yourself into whatever outfit you intend to wear and then grow corporeal in whatever shape you need at the moment.
Long story short, 'Lilith' is once again ready to rumble, your face reduced to a dark, persistent shadow in what may be some of the most overdone make-up there has ever been.
Literal blackface over here. You're kinda surprised nobody's accused you of that one on the internet yet, actually- or at least not anywhere you'd have actually noticed somehow.
Regardless, it's almost showtime, so you hurry it up to your recording studio, tight red velvet dress flaring out below your thighs.
"Hello, hello, hello everyone, and welcome to another issue of Lilith's Lullabies," you speak into your mic as soon as you're in position and ready to go, voice low and even like this was an ASMR. "We have a special program on for tonight, with a few mystery guests I'm sure you'll absolutely love. But before we get to that part of the show, let me just get us all in the mood for another lovely evening together…"
It's probably pretty confusing for some of your viewers, what with tonight's stream being set to the NSFW section of the site only; ignoring the hopeful suggestions of yourself doing a striptease and finally opening an OnlyCapes account (that's an idea for later, actually, if Sarah lets you), the speculations you see scrolling through the chat while you do your thing range from you planning to sing some particularly filthy sea shanty to you doing another Machine Army, just to someone that's made out of flesh and blood this time.
Which, really, is more correct of a theory than its defenders realize. Ah well, may as well let the mystery cook a bit until you're ready.
Said readiness doesn't take long to happen, however, and so after only a couple quick songs, you pause the program to introduce one of your guest stars in tonight's program. "Hope you didn't forget what I said at the start already," you shadow-smile with your shadow-face, invisible to any of your viewers. "Let's welcome the first of our two main stars this evening, hm? Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for… Skitter."
Taylor enters the stage, by which you mean the area visible through your cameras. She stands there for a few moments, the internet starting to heat up with the immediate reaction to her presence on camera. Then, the one Crypt cape feared the most among your roster waves, her costumed form as outwardly emotionless as a brick wall.
Hell, even a brick wall is more stoically inclined than as fully neutral as she's managing to be right now. Say what you will about the girl, but she's impressively unexpressive even amongst vampires, when she wants to be. Whether that's often the case or not naturally depends on perspective, you suppose.
"Don't mind her being taciturn, she's just being shy," you shamelessly reinterpret the truth at the audience, who seem to have turned the chat into a bit of a cognitohazard with how quickly messages are being posted now- may need to have someone switch the settings around to forcefully slow that down a bit. "More importantly, how about we take a look at our absolutely stupendous stage for the main attraction?"
You gesture towards one of the walls, making the camera swivel on the robotic arm it's set upon, around the room and towards the window.
The window through which one can see the high walls erected all around the town of Ellisburg, one of the more notable containment zones in your little corner of the world.
Taylor buzzes a little without shapeshifting outwardly. Kinda cute, actually.
The first thing that anyone could tell around the carefully managed quarantine zone, outside of those that watched a certain live stream on the internet, was a massive forcefield asserting itself around the walls erected all around the area, forming what would be a nigh-perfect globe if it continued underground.
Watchful eyes soon found the devices responsible for this, half-buried in the ground in a wide radius around the Ellisburg quarantine zone, using satellite imaging. Within moments, observers of aforementioned live stream alarmed who they were meant to alarm, as was to be expected of the personnel responsible for monitoring the internet presence of the organization known as the Lord Street Crypts, and Cain in particular.
This did not mean the PRT and Protectorate immediately acted in response, however. Not only did any confrontation with Cain (or any disguises he put on, regardless of how convincing they were) bear risks that may well be utterly irresponsible to take in themselves, he had previously shown capacity to deal with threats that had to be quarantined sufficiently enough.
Or, in Director PRT ENE Emily Piggot's words, this 'couldn't happen to a nicer place'. A certain vindictiveness may have been present as well.
At any rate, a visible, curved pane of some sort was erected around the former town, colored a pale orange and quivering slightly against the wind, like the air pressure sent ripples across its surface. This caused the automated defenses of the quarantine zone to react, only for them to be unable to do much of anything; the outward enforcement systems were not designed to deal with anything more than small groups making the unwise attempt to breach containment.
Next, a large oval of a portal appeared, pitch-black and floating ominously within the perimeter of the containment zone. From it, two figures emerged in short order- the face of 'Lilith' obscured by impenetrable darkness, her red dress clinging tightly to her voluptuous form, while Skitter's dark, chitinous carapace woven over layers of silk drank in any light that hit it.
Lilith nodded at Skitter. In response, the infamous villain's body bulged outwards, uncountable insectile legs and wings pushing from beneath her skin, growing larger and larger-
To say she burst apart would be to ignore the fact she remained perfectly intact, merely releasing dozens, then hundreds of giant insects from within her body. They did not look like anything found on Earth, some being the size of a person, only bulkier, some being buzzing, flying creatures that proceeded to swarm out in all directions, armed with enormous stingers and clawed legs.
All that was sure was that all of them were under Skitter's control, marching on towards the twisted caricature that Ellisburg had become under Nilbog's reign, a children's book turned reality using the blood of innocents as paint. The creations of the Goblin King immediately recognized the intrusion, warped humanoids and quadrupedal things alike rushing to meet the invaders-
Only to be charged in a violent clash that only grew more chaotic as Skitter proceeded to produce innumerable insects of more normal size, stinging and biting and swarming all over any flailing body that had failed to flee on sight, an almost solid, black mass of chitinous doom that had brought Skitter her infamy.
Before the eyes of any that had access to the satellite footage, as well as any that watched along through the cameras still streaming all that happened live from several angles, courtesy of 'Lilith', the first wave of goblins was consumed alive… Only to be turned into more and more insects, as Skitter had stopped producing them only for still more to come into existence as the flesh of these first victims was consumed by her swarm.
And amidst this hellish, bloody sight of torn-apart creatures, their attempts at resistance only ever temporary before pincers and stingers and a million tiny mandibles tore them to shreds so they could be summarily consumed, a voice rose over the mind-consuming buzzing and clacking.
"Meet, my, friends, my new friends…"
Suffice it to say, Skitter made an impression on the kingdom of the Goblin King.
Ellisburg, or Site Q4 as the quarantine zone as such is called in the PRT's documentation (which you naturally read five minutes into getting the idea of attacking it), is, in a word, kind of fucked. In a very interesting way, that is, that mildly amuses you to watch.
The entire place has more or less been completely remodeled from the time it used to serve as human habitation, buildings turned into twisted little towers that shouldn't be standing from a standpoint of structural integrity, painted colors that make it look like everything is somehow melding together, and though it's obvious for you with your wildly enhanced senses, there's dozens of nooks and crannies for ambushers to hide within for every step one takes into what remains of the town.
If you had to describe it, it would be… like from a fairy tale, more or less, you suppose. Only it's stuck somewhere between the family-friendly twenty-irst century versions and the old 'the fae are watching you an will take you in your sleep' versions of fairy tales from times past. One of many topics you educated yourself on when it became obvious your whole vampirism deal was loosely based on some actual folklore, what feels like ages ago now.
Ah well. Ellisburg's inhabitants are about as fucky as its architecture, of course, not that this bothers Taylor as she proceeds to swarm anything and everything in sight. While at first she summarily dealt with plenty of easy targets, the creatures Nilbog created not necessarily the best at actually fighting, she is by now having to contend with plenty of mild danger, if at a great remove thanks to just how… dispersed her whole body is by now, despite her humanoid self walking right next to you as you stroll onward.
The most common actual fight-worthy minions of the Master you're here to have a word with are long-limbed, pale humanoids themselves, if only in the loosest sense of the word; covered in aggressively pale skin, their features are elongated and running to a point, their snouts anatomically incapable of snarling aloud as they swing their bone-spears at any parts of Taylor's swarm that come close.
While capable of knocking out and even wounding any of the larger flying insects, from bloodbugs to stingwings, if they get in a good hit, the smaller, eating masses of mutated cockroaches empowered by Taylor's aura and other enhancements overwhelm them easily enough, usually, as they can't really bring enough force to bear against the kind of area they'd need to cover to actually stop them from crawling all over and into their bodies, tearing them to miniscule pieces one very small bit at a time.
More annoying in that regard are the many big-heads, as you've decided to call them. Walking around almost like small humans, their proportions don't fit that of the children they would match in height; their most notable characteristic, however, are the oversized heads you named them for.
Their whole deal is that those heads explode violently in concussive blasts of gore and bone shrapnel, which is causing Taylor to actually lose the smaller parts of her swarm lieu of wasting the aura it would take to protect them from the damage. Then there's also lizard-headed horse-creatures with clawed feet, some of which are walking on two and some on four legs, that spit globs and streams of acid at any concentrations of the swarm and the mirelurks used to push into tougher masses of 'goblins', and then there's the rhinos.
Like, they're literally just rhinos. The changes compared to the actual animals are minimal and mostly comprise of some plates of biological bone-armor growing out of them, but they're just running around smashing into anything that moves. Their eyes are usually taken out quickly through pinpoint stingwing assaults, but that doesn't exactly stop them, just makes them slightly more likely to hit something other than the larger bugs.
Seeing just how many bugs Taylor is concentrating literally all over town, that's still not particularly likely, of course. It does help she's actively using the entire swarm as a cohesive unit, though, sacrificing masses of simple cockroaches to block short-ranged acid artillery from reaching more valuable parts of the whole and coordinating a constant assault that is already threatening to break the entire 'war front' you're witnessing here apart.
It really is pretty amazing, to see her at work like this. Almost inspiring, really. Honestly, anyone should aspire to commit butchery on such a scale and with such efficiency. And already, you can see her winning strategy at work, even.
Bugs die in droves, to the explosions and the defending horde of little fairy tale abominations, as well as to the living defense systems you see here and there- most of the stuff is buried under the swarm and deliberately triggered faster than you can really take it in, but you spy several variations of living 'land mines' blowing up in response to the assault, some of which actually are effective- the swarm is immune to any pathogens and toxins released into the air thanks to it vampiric nature (you think that's what's going on going by the scent, anyways), but the fiery explosions, immense suction force vacuuming them up and short-lived streams of lightning still work just fine.
Yes, bugs die, both the small ones looking to all the world like actual normal insects and the bigger variations Taylor introduced to push the horde she fights. And anywhere they do, a second wave of more bugs follows, not to avenge the fallen ones but rather to consume them immediately, any dead insects in sight immediately torn apart just like successfully overwhelmed enemies are.
The dead of both sides are eaten, and as they eat the bugs split up into more of themselves, a seemingly self-proliferating swarm under perfect control of none other than Skitter, who's still humming and singing at the moment as she keeps step with you.
It's a neat trick, you have to admit no matter what. Once any applicable biomass is eaten by the swarm, it technically counts as part of it… And, as the entire swarm counts as part of Taylor's body as far as you're aware, and she can freely shapeshift herself into bugs, anything her insect-parts eat can just split off more insects, which can continue to eat more biomass or merge into larger insects or just do whatever else she needs them to.
Taylor was a pretty powerful cape when you first met her, assuming she abandoned any and all morals and went for excruciating death for anyone fighting her as a baseline assumption in combat. With the improvements and synergies added after you consumed/assimilated/turned her, you'd honestly consider one of the most powerful capes on the planet, second perhaps only to some Endbringers, Eidolon on a good day, Legend, Sleeper and probably Okita.
And that last one's only because Okita is patently ridiculous enough to keep up with the ridiculousness of what you're seeing right here.
Of course that's when the literal dragon made of mushroom-like flesh bursts out of the ground, breathing fire onto half the swarm and incinerating it along with the creatures it was consuming in a blazing inferno, the shockwave of heated air rushing over you together with the million popping sounds of bugs bursting like popcorn inside their own shells right on the spot.
In response, Taylor regurgitates a second swarm of steadily growing bees burning with heat themselves, the things absorbing other bugs to increase their size as they buzz straight towards this new target protected by 'scales' of hardened mushroom plates, their stingers glowing with the portents of explosive destruction contained within them, all the while the surviving swarm consolidates itself into roaring mirelurk queens, the building-sized abominations of 'nature' well-armored enough to survive another assault like the previous one if necessary as the bugs meld into them, their shells gaining a sickly-green sheen.
One that you immediately recognize to be Taylor's semblance- it looks like she's getting serious now, or at least actually leaning into the attack.
As such, you naturally hold out a hand to her, once her face has finished reassembling itself into human proportions under her costume- it's easier to 'spit out' bugs with a set of four-parted jaws, apparently. "Shall we?"
"With pleasure," she replies, her song already finished and her voice back to expressing not the slightest bit of emotion… Even when she twirls into your arm, the two of you spontaneously turning this into a proper dance session, yourself whistling a tune to keep the waltz going.
Classical dance isn't exactly your strength, but hey, you can manage. And really, you have the time to indulge her and make this more of a show to watch for your audience, eh?
They have souls, by the way. I can feel them struggle every time I eat.
Oh? That is pretty interesting. Anything particularly juicy?
No. They're pretty one-note. Too bad, that. Ah well, you weren't really expecting particularly nutritious souls to be waiting for you here. They all love him, too. Nilbog. They know he recycles them, because they don't live long after he uses his power.
Huh. Do they feel anything about how you're eating them, body and soul?
They're in despair. They want to be made anew and useful to their king, but what I'm doing to them instead is the closest to sacrilege they can imagine.
Well, least we can do is to mop up the rest over here and make sure their king won't ever have need of them again, you smirk at her, visage still transformed into darkness incarnate.
Would it be alright… If I ate him? They want nothing more than to serve him. I think it might be… synergistic, to let them. Somehow.
Mhm…
The event that was already being called the Battle of Ellisburg, on PHO if nothing else, would later be considered one of the most easily accessible examples of high-level cape combat, thanks to the several angles of footage being recorded live for the whole world to see and the resistance to censorship anything the Lord Street Crypts touched, despite the best efforts of certain federal bureaus.
What had begun as a large-scale battle between the merciless swarm of the cape known as Skitter and the Goblin King, Nilbog's, creations soon evolved into a full-blown campaign of brutal combat after combat, the quarantined zone around the town filled with skirmishing forces encircling, massacring and out-massacring each other. To begin with, several 'standard' combatants had converged and given battle, but it seemed that the longer the violent confrontation lasted, the more outlandish both sides' minions became… As though not to be outdone by the opposition, in fact.
What were big, strong Brutes, acidic Blasters and suicidal bombers were countered by what some had describe as Skitters's most 'normal' minions, mildly mutated giant insects supported by endless swarms of normal-sized ones. Some of the larger ones were soon discovered to be some form of enormous and obviously vastly abnormal shellfish, courtesy of two marine biologists that were actively engaged with the discussion ongoing on one particular message board ancillary to the live footage being broadcast.
Discussions of whatever changes they had undergone and how they may have been influenced by environmental factors, possibly through simple evolutionary factors, were stifled, however, when the literal dragon rose from the earth to fight back the swarm… Only to be faced with another facet of Skitter's power, one that had been totally unknown until now and was sure to cause an increase of brick shithouses being built with all the bricks produced through this revelation.
Not only could the infamous Butcher of Brockton Bay (a title ironically only added to her person some time after the Battle of Ellisburg) take control of arthropods already in the surroundings and even demonstratively created them from her body, somehow, they could also, for lack of a better word, merge.
Merge into giant abominations now roaring their challenge against Nilbog's kingdom, their clawed limbs flailing awkwardly, yet with enough strength to deforest any nearby terrain. As was plainly obvious from the trees torn from their stumps or the ground entirely within moments.
Not that they were particularly needed for now, as a barrage of explosive, giant bees proceeded to strike the side of Nilbog's dragon, its fiery maw snapping in agitation yet failing to hit any of them, the beast instead thrown onto its side through several detonations incomparable to the biological landmines placed in the perimeter of 'Monster Town' proper.
The following fight was brutal, of course, the great dragon proving itself capable of regenerating most of its wounds and tearing down two of Skitter's massive war-thropods (a description thoroughly rejected by the PRT's filing system a day later) thanks to its breath of fire and surprising speed, yet even so finally brought low due to the acidic ballistic attacks (imitating Nilbog's acid-spitters on a greater scale, some claimed), cunning teamwork and self-proliferating nature of Skitter's current swarm, egg-like projectiles fired onto it so smaller, new-born versions of her initial crustacean creations could bury into any gaps within its hide.
They were fully grown by the time they climbed out again, having eaten away at the dragon from the inside while the 'queens' battled it from the outside, which kindled renewed debates about their potential 'natural' lifecycle.
The loss of the dragon, alas, caused Nilbog's horde to change tactics, the surviving minions rallying to ambush the queens and strike at their backs, where only their shells would protect them from attack, rather than any active counters. Alas, climbing onto them was a lost cause, the long-limbed 'bone hunters' fruitlessly plummeting to the ground in short order as the queens promptly turned into thousands of oversized scorpions that soon began to burrow through the ground and counter-ambush the surviving enemy forces in turn.
Military afficionados, armchair generals and actual military personnel alike soon found it in themselves to discuss the tactics and strategies employed by both sides at this point, despite the limited insight over the battlefield as a whole, only the view of what was visible from the 'music stream's' cameras available to the public at the time.
And throughout it all, as legions of flaming bombers and heavily-armored vanguards met an unending swarm ever reinforcing itself at a rate greater than its losses, a particular part of what was once Ellisburg was seemingly untouched… safe for the two dancers steadily making their way into its direction with every well-measured step.
It doesn't take long until you're inside the, well, 'castle' Nilbog reigns from, it looking like a converted school or hospital or something; it's pretty hard to tell at this point, after the walls were all replaced and painted over, internal walls demolished to make more space inside.
Not that it matters terribly much, at the end of the day. As interested as you may be in the results of delusional minds left to their own devices for extended periods of time and with the power to exert themselves onto their surroundings beyond the norm (call it an… artistic interest of sorts, if you have to define it), you're here to play the part of the observer slash 'emotional support' while Taylor does her thing.
Originally you were planning to split up halfway through so you could consume Nilbog while Skitter dealt with the rest of Ellisburg, but seeing as the plan changed, well, here you are. It's all the same to you, in the end.
Smoothly transitioning to marching straight inside once your dance is done (the latest song involved sounds like it's from two generations before your own), you stride straight through the doors with a backdrop of bone spurs being launched into the sky like demented fireworks, bursting into splinters to try and hit the hovering carpet of buzzing, skittering moths dropping razor-beetles onto anything that moves at ground level.
Yeah, things are getting ridiculous out there. Still, at least there aren't any chainsaws involved… yet.
Nilbog, Jamie Rinke, awaits you in the courtyard both you and Taylor beeline towards, in a fashion anyways. The creature you meet is a large, grotesquely 'overweight' man, face obscured by a paper mask and wearing a paper crown on top, looking oddly… childish, you'd say.
If you can look past the monstrous size of this thing, its quite inhuman face and the way its subcutaneous layers wobble in ways that don't indicate any human body structure; no amount of fat will be that liquid, naturally.
You also notice its body structure is very much inhuman in itself- it has blood, but not much of it, and it's almost flowing around large parts of its body. That aside, though, it's already glaring down at you through its little mask from the height advantage its bulk gives it, even sitting down. "Invaders! Murderers!" It screeches, waving its overlong arms at you petulantly.
It should, at this point, be noted that you can also see the real body of Nilbog through the thin, faint line of blood connecting an actual human body to this thing in front of you, buried quite a ways underground; at a guess, he's remote controlling this body separately from himself. Not a bad thought, just woefully inadequate for the ridiculous lethality of, well, yourself.
Or Skitter, as the case may be.
"That's us," you smile when she doesn't make any effort to respond, pointedly not so much as nodding in acknowledgement. Lucky you, Taylor already shared some of how Nilbog's creations see him, so you know how to phrase this stuff. "We heard there was a king in this realm, so Skitter came to slay him."
"Perfidious butchers," Nilbog's mouthpiece spits. "All my children wanted was to live, you monsters!"
"Ah, you hit the nail on the head, though," you agree without batting an eye. "We're monsters. What else can you expect?"
And with that, Taylor erupts into a massive surge of burrowing insects, her claws and legs and bladed appendages counting in the billions- and empowered with the green glow of her semblance as she makes short work of the ground between her and her target.
"Stop that! Get out! Nooo!"
Tad bit too late there, buddy. You're getting skittered.
Urban dictionary entry for: Skittered
Expression for suffering utter defeat at the hands of someone stronger than oneself.
Example: The other school's football team got skittered ten minutes into the game.
Facing the camera, you take a moment to pose for the audience once Nilbog's remote body stops struggling and spitting out explosive acid creatures in a last-ditch effort to save him. You're pretty sure some kind of slurry was pumped from it to him and back, but as you don't have direct observations of the anatomical processes in question to draw from, you'll say it's just a guess for now.
Anyways, though, Jamie Rinke is quite dead the moment Taylor reached him, and no amount of traps buried between himself and the surface could save him. It's almost a shame, he actually was smart enough to leverage his power and all.
He was also just, y'know, batshit insane. So much so not even you would be willing to try and get him to join you, not to mention the amount of attention he'd bring- sure, the Crypts are considered just as dangerous in their own way, but Nilbog was damn scary to the majority of the public specifically because he could create monsters that could self-proliferate, making him the kind of cape that could kick off a one-man apocalypse (or cataclysm, at minimum).
And honestly, while your PR can handle capes like that, it sounds like way too much trouble and effort for you to bother. Especially when you can just kill him and be done with it.
So with that all taken care of, you proceed to… snap your fingers, making the music start again.
A stream of yours wouldn't be quite done, in this situation, without a closing number!
Gotta respect the classics.
And of course as you sing, Emily and Mimi get the pyrotechnics started, now that Taylor's confirmed she's taken out all of the creatures that multiply rapidly when subjected to great amounts of fire- meaning it's much more feasible to sterilize the site the hard way.
The fire can be seen all the way from New York, as you're later told. A good time indeed. You actually have to use your powers to just rip a stage off the ground and hover over the inferno as you go along, which really only contributes to the performance, in your humble opinion. The inertial canceling field serves as a nice backdrop, too.
You don't exactly stick around once everything is done and your cleanup crew consisting of the most pyromaniac capes you had on hand have finished literally glassing the very earth to make sure nothing crawls out of the ruins of Ellisburg; only waiting for their confirmation, you proceed to mess around with the atmosphere a bit, just to take the potions you mass-produced (well, that the Thinker mass-produced) from the two huge-ass vats you had teleported in and make them rain down all over the area, first with your inertial field still on, then turning it off.
You really, really don't want to deal with any repercussions resulting from any of the stuff Nilbog made as a failsafe getting out and causing… issues. It does help Taylor can literally just tell you all about everything he prepared, having eaten him and all, so that's convenient if nothing else.
Really, you just love your ability to find out everything someone knows by killing them. It's one of your oldest strengths, right next to being a stealthy motherfucker (literally so), and it makes you just a little happier every time it comes in handy.
"Alright, so what's the verdict?" You ask Sarah once you got an even precipitation going and finally returned to Brockton Bay. Upstate New York is… nice and all, let's call it that, but you generally prefer to keep to your territory when you don't have any pressing business elsewhere. You're still a big dumb caveman at the end of the day, so what?
"Enough internet discussion to fill out half the PRT's collective threat assessment departments, a couple dozen cape-fiction stories, fanart of both you and Taylor and too many shipping wars to count," your sister summarizes her and the Thinker's findings.
"Excellent."
PRT Director ENE, Emily Piggot, was, for all that her injuries forced her into a purely administrative position, very much a military woman. It was obvious in the way she spoke and acted, in her style of leadership and the way she weighed risks and rewards; when lives had value, but certainly not an absolute one.
It was also abundantly obvious in the way she eyed one Colin Wallis, still dressed in his civilian attire, otherwise known as Armsmaster. It was to be expected- he had, after all, called for a meeting the moment he'd returned from spying on the city's criminal element. The irony of the fact his greatest use lay in his ability to employ his three-dimensional omni-recording device, when faced with the greatest threat he ever would be tasked to tackle, was not lost on him.
Still there was nothing he could think of that would work better than to keep a better eye on the Lord Street Crypts, whose estimated threat level as an organization had been unofficially raised once again of late. Confronting them directly being a fool's errand, mitigating serious damage until and unless the entirety of the Protectorate moved against them was the next best option available.
"We're all here," the Director said gruffly, a glint of petty satisfaction in her eyes despite herself, once the rest of the Protectorate ENE had entered the room. Colin wouldn't have noticed it two months ago, but making an effort to be more empathetic after he'd noticed how much he was… not, might have shown results already.
If only to let him know she did, in fact, find some measure of succor in knowing Jamie Rinke, aka Nilbog, had been 'skittered'. The new lingo was already becoming common in certain parts of Brockton Bay, predominantly those heavily influenced by the Lord Street Crypts- including the place he had been in until recently.
Clearing his throat, Colin took a look around the room, making it a point to look at everyone present briefly. He'd been told it made him seem more attentive, directly speaking to his audience, and although it still didn't make too much sense to him still (he would hardly be speaking to them if not to speak to them, logically), he just went with it on account of the good authority the advice had been given from.
Dragon always was better with people than him, despite her extensive agoraphobia. Another one of those little ironies.
Director Piggot, Vice Director Renick, Miss Militia, Assault, Battery, Dauntless, Velocity, Triumph. Indeed, everyone was present and listening. Good, good.
"I doubt I have to tell any of you," Colin began, "but the Lord Street Crypts' recent activities have been making waves."
"No shit. The fire was pretty visible," Assault spoke up, still somewhat irreverent, but with less of a joking undertone than usual. "Are they just dismantling the quarantine zone around Ellisburg, or…?"
"Most of the automated systems were destroyed in the aftermath, so there's little dismantling to be done," Director Piggot explained. "There's a cordon around the area, it likely won't be declared safe for a while just in case. They literally glassed it all to be sure before they left."
'They' being the capes the Lord Street Crypts had sent for cleanup, it went without saying.
"What about the rain?" Dauntless asked. "It was, pretty unnatural as far as that goes, I heard."
"Presumably another cape, or just Cain himself, who knows anymore." Hm. Usually, it took the Director until the morning shift to be this grumpy and utterly done with the world. Did she not have enough coffee before he called in? "It doesn't matter, Ellisburgh isn't ENE's jurisdiction. Armsmaster called this emergency meeting for something else."
Yet more subtext was packed there, something to the tune of 'you better have, or else'. He thought, anyways, the Director could be frustrating like that. Not that Colin sought to disappoint, mind.
"Indeed. Shortly after the live stream of the events in Site Q4 began, a contact of mine informed me that the 'Raveyard' was gearing up for some manner of particular festivities far and beyond the usual. Figuring it would be for the best to investigate, I prepared the tinkertech recording devices I am cleared to use in my civilian guise and infiltrated it posthaste."
Pressing an unseen button on said device, currently displayed on the meeting table they were sat around, caused a holographic projection to emerge from it, colorless outlines depicting the process of him casually making his way past the pair of (heavily armed, as the recording showed) bouncers, arm entwined with the woman that had notified him of this opportunity.
"Oh hey, you went with Candi?" Dauntless asked for clarification.
"Indeed. She insisted we exchange cellphone numbers last time we met," he confirmed.
"Don't," Battery said, warningly.
Assault looked at her. He looked at the gathered heroes all around him. Then back at her. "Sorry puppy, but I have to. Are you guys telling me Armsy… has game?"
"Not all of us enjoy the sedentary lifestyle of a boring, married man," Colin informed him. For some reason, Assault proceed to choke momentarily. And was summarily ignored. "Regardless of the nature of my contact, I made my way inside and began gathering information."
"Question," Velocity said, raising a hand. "Why didn't you call us? It's not like you to risk doing things like this by yourself."
"Time was of the essence, and I had only so much of it. Also, I didn't want to risk calling on Dauntless on a school night. It's not easy to be a single parent and we should be more accommodating whenever the opportunity arises."
"Much appreciated, but next time just call. The Raveyard's still technically enemy territory," Dauntless told him.
Colin just nodded. "I will. Though I should note the risk was low in any case. We could show up in costume and be just fine, assuming we did not start any fights or attempted to enforce any laws."
"Yes, your thoughts on the criminal night club are noted. Did you find out anything important or did you just end up having another orgy?" Director Piggot asked testily, her hand balled into a fist. Likely a sign he should hurry up and get to the point.
"My apologies. We were sidetracked by Assault," he immediately deflected. "Regardless, after some cursory examination of the premises, I came to two conclusions. Firstly, the Raveyard was pretty full." Tapping the tinkertech box to set the hologram to fast forward to save time, everyone had a moment to confirm what he meant; dancing to techno swing was quite difficult when no less than three well-endowed women took turns rubbing themselves against him.
He'd had to give them his number to escape notice, which only led him to similar issues at the bar where he proceeded to order a drink ('black funeral', one of several originals served in the locale, with crushed blueberries to give it its particular color) to serve as an excuse for not dancing while he made his way across the floor of the club.
"Secondly, my information had been correct. Drinks were free and there was more foot traffic around several corners I could later confirm were taken up by guests partaking in similarly free drugs, courtesy of the Lord Street Crypts. Even more so, the toilets were uncommonly well-visited, compared to what I recalled from my earlier visits to the place."
The hologram went from showcasing the drug issue, highlighting everything that was powdery and packed tightly as well as smoked, snorted, mixed into beverages or otherwise consumed, whether it was hidden underneath jackets or bandied about openly, to zooming in as Colin went to the toilet himself, quickly entering a stall despite the considerable amount of traffic he'd mentioned.
As the holographic tinkertech recording was entirely unimpeded by such things as walls, it was also clearly visible why so many men were coming and going. A row of small rooms, each adjacent to a toilet stall, was filled with women that were manning what would be called 'glory holes' in a less professional context, some even dealing with two at the same time.
They were fellating and being penetrated by the various male members being thrust through holes conveniently placed in various rooms throughout the building, in short. On the recording, Colin gestured towards a door opening, two young women exchanging a 'high-five' as they exchanged places, one going inside the hidden room while the other one proceeded to fall into the arms of a young man approximately her own age.
"As you can see, all of this was happening entirely voluntarily, of course. A witness I talked to later, still in my guise as an unimportant and only mildly observant party-goer, compared the Raveyard to a normal nightclub 'with blackjack and hookers, but more hookers instead of the blackjack'."
"And why," Director Piggot asked, teeth grit, "did you proceed to have sex in this situation?"
Indeed, the recording went on to show how Colin received a cursory blowjob himself, before the woman on the other side of the wall turned around, bent over and bounced along his shaft for the next eight minutes and twenty-one seconds.
"I had to maintain my disguise, of course. It would have been strange if I did not make full use of the facilities. More importantly, however, the exact location and angle of the stall I chose was just close enough to let my devices pick up specific sounds from the upper floor of the Raveyard." Colin looked at everyone once again as the faux-anonymous glory hole sex continued on in the background, secondary to his report. "The VIP Only second floor of the Raveyard."
Another press of a button and the adjusted, cleaned-up audio began to play. "I'm telling you, porn stars get shafted, pun intended. The internet makes it way easy to get all the free porn you could ever want and the actors often don't see a fraction of what their work is worth."
"I still think you could make it, heck, the issue isn't really with porn in particular, it's just how the internet affects pretty much all media," a female voice replied. "Porn is just the forerunner in that regard because it's not as protected by copyright laws and other legislation like that."
"So the Crypts were talking about… what, pornography?" Triumph asked, looking profoundly uncomfortable, as he had been for half this meeting.
Colin held up a hand, spooling forward to the critical bit with the other.
"So, Germany, huh? I've never been overseas, so I'm kinda looking forward to it."
"We'll probably have to set up a rotation or something so everyone can take a turn doing the most American thing in existence."
"Any day's a good day to kill a nazi, eh?"
Colin crossed his arms. There they had it. "The Crypts are likely going after the Gesellschaft, as it turns out. Which makes this an international affair."
Director Piggot got up, grabbed a mug of coffee from the side of the room and returned to her seat, taking a long, slow drink from it. "As if we needed any more bullshit around here. This'll ruin my week, but at least it'll ruin it for everyone."
The little afterparty you threw after the pleasantries all about Nilbog were dealt with is good fun, as far as these things go, and though you have to go to some lengths to lay out how and why being a porn star wasn't high up on your list of potential careers, fresh out of high school, it's not like you mind getting into your thought process back then or anything.
Mind you, being a porn star was still on the table if getting into some profession about parahumans didn't pan out. Yeah, being a sex worker comes with a hell of a lot of issues, but really, what jobs don't? Incidentally, you also considered just being a stripper or something, at the time- some people may have suggested having you pop out of a giant cake while dressed up as whatever political figure was 'in' at the time and saying 'let's get political' would be a sustainable career, back then.
Yes, the idea was just that specific. Hey, being a callboy would've been fine with you on principle, just, y'know, sex work ain't easy, like you said. It's tough, people give you shit for it and it can be dangerous in itself.
You're ultimately trading your body and skills for money, much like any other job, it's basically being a form of entertainer, really. Just one that involves much less appreciation of your talents than most comparable ones.
And you do so hate a shitty working environment. It didn't help your parents basically rented you out to wealthy cougars for a while, and making your hobbies into your job, no matter how fun they are, inherently changes the dynamic of how you think of pursuing them inside your head.
Sex is fun, you doubt anyone can really argue otherwise- even completely asexual people that just don't get that pleasure because they're built different have to acknowledge that other people are having way too much fun with it. Or, well, it's pleasurable and everyone likes pleasure, if you want to be a bit more technical about it.
But doing it as a job makes it very different; as it is, you make sure whoever you're having sex with is having at least as much fun with it as you are, because it's just a nice thing to do and you may as well, while you're at it, right? But if you're being paid for it, it's not just something you do because you want to; you have to, from a certain angle, that being that you want to be paid, because duh. That's the whole conceit of it.
At the end of the day, you would've considered it. It's not like it would be a deal breaker, and there's nothing saying you can't find pleasure in it even if you're doing it for money, but yeah, it wasn't your first choice. If it was, you never would've come to Brockton Bay, stayed in L.A. instead and probably be molested in a changing room or something right now, never gotten T-boned by a fucking truck, resurrected as some weird vampire-thing…
It's funny, really. You aren't sure whether to call it fate or just, y'know, coincidence, but the way things worked out is probably for the best, all in all. You couldn't exactly do anything about it at the time, but maybe always trying to make the best of the hand you were dealt was worth it in the end.
Even if you don't always get to play all your cards, have to trade them in regularly and some of them just don't work out in retrospect even if you did do everything you could in the moment. Not having the power to do things, or to influence the course of events you're very much invested in sucked, and it still sucks, but then, you literally stumbled into a big-ass lottery ticket that won the kind prize anyone with a shred of sanity would be all over in a heartbeat.
And all it took was to lose your brother and die in a fucking car accident yourself. Aren't you the lucky one. No, really, looking back, you really were damn lucky.
"What are you thinking about?" Okita's words pull you out of your reverie, her blank face turned towards you as her, Lilian and yourself walk the streets of Brimstone City, occasionally kicking anything in your way that moves too slowly aside and into the nearest stream of lava.
"Mhm… Probably something stupid," you shrug, pushing the thoughts of your past from your mind to smile regardless. "You know how people can get."
"Mm. Can't kill thoughts. Yet." Note to self, figure out what happens if Okita gets her hands on a weapon that can directly attack minds. "How long?"
"We're nearly there, actually. You can see it already," you say, gesturing for the building jutting out of the ever-present lava in this place, right at the end of the bridge you're already on. "That entire place is it."
"I can't wait," Lilian smiles on your other side, her ruby eyes glinting in the light of a city whose average inhabitant can see in the dark just fine. "It's been far too long since I really stretched my legs."
"Cramped legs are the worst," Okita agrees with a nod.
Ten minutes later, you're standing in what may be generously called a registration room crossed with a reception, if both of those things involved utter chaos and far too many beings crowding a far too small space. Summarily executing a handful of Fiends with your bare hands, you force yourself to the end of the 'queue' such an overly generous observer might make out in this mess.
"Hey, you. Yes, you. These two want to kill something, either give them a spot in the arena or you're first in line."
When in Rome, do as the Romans do. Or in this case, when in hell, be a giant asshole and murder anything that gets in your way. It has yet to not work out for you.
The big arena, like just about everything else you've seen of this city, or hell in general, really, is… chaotic. To say the least. Not as a matter of some fundamental need of demonkind to be chaotic, mind, you- you know full well that there's plenty of demons that can and do keep their surroundings orderly, from your lawyer (slash secretary, no matter how much she complains about it) to the Maiden of War leading your little infernal pocket army.
Rather, that's just how it works out, here. There's tons of selfish little jerks around, all with supernatural powers to one degree or another, and they're fundamentally incapable of getting along with each other unless given pressing reason to. Take a functionally unlimited number of such individuals and throw them all into one big city, and the result is what you see now, more or less.
Without any stronger demons around to keep the rest in line, things end up in a massive, sprawling chaos, and nowhere is this clearer to see than here, in the arena. A microcosm mirroring the rest of the Brimstone City. There are no defined 'matches', and to be part of the brutal melee raging across the bare stone of the arena floor is as easy as forcing your way through the tunnels leading the Pit, as it is affectionally called by the locals.
Or, if you're in the audience already, as simple as jumping in. There are no rules about who's allowed to participate, or when. All that matters is that you're on the killing floor and getting your hands, or claws, sword, club or other assorted weapon, part of your body or otherwise, dirty.
Every now and then, large, claw-like iron spines emerge from the walls, turning into a cage that still lets the spectators see what's going on. This is the one thing you might call a rule, here; once this happens, everyone that's in is in, and everyone that's out is out. At this point the fighting intensifies, because only the ones that still stand (or do some equivalent thing, depending on their biology) get to leave the Pit.
You can still force your way inside, but if you do, everyone currently fighting focuses on you. It's the cutoff point. It's the moment when odds are set, when the dice is cast, when only the victorious may even think about leaving alive.
It is how betting works, here, in the one big arena found in the city. You bet on who will be alive by the time the Bone Cage opens up again, and your odds depend on how they did before the cage closed. Doesn't matter how many participants are still alive, everyone that's not dead by then is a winner, the rest are the losers.
Exactly how it takes is supposed to be random. It's not, you're absolutely sure the 'organizers' make it a point not to leave too many survivors each 'battle royale' going on and all, but this does mean it's perfectly viable for groups of demons to gather and cooperate… Though most just end up turning on each other before the cage releases them again.
That's just how it is, in hell. Still, because of this, even lowly imps have a chance, if they get lucky and manage to overwhelm anything stronger in sight faster than they're killed.
The bottom of the Pit is covered in mountains of gore and bodies, only cleaned by the occasional lava flooding. The arena never stops. If you happen to be in it while it's being burnt out, well, that's just your bad luck, your own fault for being at the right place at the wrong time.
All of that's to say that both Okita and Lilian will have a lot of fun, here.
As for yourself, well, you have your own fun to find… And find it you do.
Okita and Lilian don't exactly need your help to get into the Pit, after all, and while they're down there already, you waste no time to go find yourself a couple easy marks. There's plenty of demons hanging around the overcrowded spectator areas and taking bets, most of them connected to what amounts to the management of this place, and so all you need to do is place a bunch of bets by the time the cage closes.
As in, using all the money left over from your last visit to this place. And any you can snatch from the crowd, of course. It's not like any demon whose anger is worth thinking about is just gonna carry their coin, whether the obsidian kind or souls turned to currency, in a place you can easily find and take without its owner's notice, right?
The demons you bet with aren't exactly happy when you make a bunch of cash off them after your girls jump in relatively last-minute, but that's just how it goes. Then, of course, they aren't going to give you the kinds of odds you want, after they've seen what Lilian did to the one Archfiend that wasn't smart enough to just die the moment Okita got into range.
The pieces flew all the way to where you're watching. You're so proud of your daughter.
Incidentally, Okita is currently using the sword she had on her when you first met, purely to reminisce when she first started using it to kill demons. Those were the very much mortal versions of such made in the image of the actual infernal beings she's massacring now, but it doesn't look like that's slowing her down much, if at all.
In the end, only her and Lilian stand, so the odds change, as you noted already. They change again when you subsequently manage to find and push a couple of demons renowned for their skill in the arena in with them for the next round, allowing you to reinvest the cash with both old and new bookies.
Which leads you to a series of short skirmishes when they wizen up to your scheme, but then it's not like they can really keep you from your hard-earned cash. As in, their cash that was hard-earned that is now yours. This also involves some security demons, as hilariously unlikely as that sounds, employed by the area, but, well…
The Pit doesn't care about whether you want to be in it or not, the fight works out all the same. Meaning, all they really do, in light of your telekinesis and gravity control, is to feed more meat into the grinder that is Okita and Lilian getting bored between matches and fighting each other.
Really, what're they doing? You have a hustle to run up here.
Disregarding the flashing clinging of sword meeting shadows and claws and more swords, you end up having to acquire a few sacks to keep all of the assorted coinery you're making in.
Yes, you do, in act, resort to carrying this shit with telekinesis. The sheer amount and consequent weight would make it too unwieldy not to, simple as that.
Looks like your operations in this particular corner of hell are pretty well finances for the near future, huh? Oh, and as for the girls…
They're having too much fun fighting, so you'll just leave them be. They know the way back and all. Or Lilian does, at least- Okita is surprisingly terrible with directions, despite her vampirically perfect memory.
With the denizens of hell suitably cowed by the continuous slaughter in the Pit- well, more of one than usual anyways, same difference- you return back home, once more confirming the stability of the hell portal you opened; as long as it remains open and functional, there shouldn't be any problems with it, at least.
Now, if it were to close, for whatever reason, that would be a different story altogether. Mostly insofar as you aren't sure you could reopen it in the same spot, or in the same layer of hell, even. And even if you could, there's no telling where within it you'd get it open again, which is an issue in itself given the sheer size of hell as this spiritual dimension construct that's just way too big overall.
Sure, you could probably navigate around and find your way back to the Brimstone City, but it would be a pain in the ass and fuck knows how long it would take you. Better not to risk it, all in all, until you've done some more testing.
At a time when none of your people are on the other side of the portal, that is.
In terms of other preliminary tests that have been conducted already in the meantime, you can confirm that while solid and fluid matter can permeate the portal, gaseous stuff is kind of… indeterminate, in that regard? Like, you can smell the scent of lava and burning things, with a hint of, well, brimstone, from this side, but it isn't quite always there, unless something is passing through at the moment, in which case the scent is always present, but air analysis would have you believe there's nothing in the air to cause this on your side of the thing.
Sound, too, is pretty weird about passing through the hell portal- it seemingly needs to be 'directed' or deliberately made in order to be heard on the other side, no matter from which one you're coming, and radio waves and similar media you tried to pass through seem to be either spotty or cut off completely, it looks like.
Which is kind of a shame. Means you can't just send an unending robot army in to invade parts of hell for fun. You'd have to actually put the infrastructure on the other side, for one, and controlling it wouldn't be as convenient as you're used to from operating from somewhere on the same planet as whatever place you're throwing robots at.
Makes it riskier, and while you're perfectly open to the idea of some asshole stealing your technology to try and use it against you, if there's any one place that has the power and infrastructure to actually turn that into a problem, it would be literal hell. So, uh, maybe it would be for the best to exercise discretion in that regard.
For now, anyways. You aren't categorically precluding the idea of invading hell or anything.
It is now day, the 2nd of June 2011, Thursday
396 days since rising from the grave
You didn't really pay attention at the time, but as it turns out Taylor went and passed through the hellgate earlier. She's been in hell for a couple hours, but when you asked she just said she was fine.
Whelp, it's probably just fine indeed. You see no way for this to possibly go wrong.
It's not exactly entirely convenient, to be limited the way you are with your activities here on Earth Bet, what with not particularly owning over ninety percent of the world and needing to keep your head down in case of random Thinkers figuring something out the moment one shows up whose power works just right not to be disrupted too much by your existence, random Endbringer attacks or just general bad luck getting in the way, no matter how much the Thinker insists it won't happen because she checked for it.
She's good, but you introduce too many additional variables, you'll take her into advisement but exercise caution anyways. Earth Bet is many things, but polite enough not to throw a left hook your way the moment you look away is not one of them.
But back to what you were doing, because for all that you enjoy the idea of a life of leisure as Brockton Bay's local kind of benevolent crime lord you have to be doing something just to keep yourself busy more often than not. Currently, you're overseeing the activation of a certain portal, this time (presumably) not going straight to hell, for a change!
That is, the Thinker is done building the prototype copy of the Flaxans' dimensional breaching technology (it's about as inaccurate to the actual physics involved as any other thing you've called it, or so Yoshi tells you, but it sounds cool and it delineates it from your other ways of dimensional travel, so whatever). Naturally, you didn't exactly want to put the thing anywhere close to your actual home, as much like the people you stole the tech from, you don't exactly have much of an idea of whatever will be on the other side before you open the door.
Which was a minor dilemma, when you first got to figuring this whole bit out. Put it in Brockton Bay, probably a new part of your secret underground villainous lair that just grows more space as needed, for convenience, with the understanding that it'll be a pain if anything comes through to your side? Or find some other place to put it, at the cost of said convenience and making it a mild logistical annoyance to manage any extended operations through it?
In the end, you went with option number two, mostly because you recall a particular little place way out in the middle of nowhere. You wanted to use an abandoned island in the middle of the ocean first, but hey, you already got this one.
It's the little teleport waystation between Brockton Bay and Boston, a remainder of the time your technology had a much harder time covering longer distances.
It was originally put there when you were first feeling around with the direction the Crypts should take going forward, but has fallen into disuse at some point after you just started hijacking normal radio signals all over the place for the sake of keeping operational overhead to a level that doesn't stress Henley out too bad; it used to be manned by a few of Kate's girls rotating in and out that basically used it as a party bunker back then, but has since been left to fully automated systems and taken over by the Thinker by the time she joined you here on Earth Bet.
It's still an already prepared secure location you just needed to expand minimally, and while you aren't exactly limited in terms of budget this was the fastest and most convenient place to go with- the land is technically owned by one of your numerous secondary companies, so that's also nice enough. Nobody is within their rights to come and annoy you on your own property.
And if they do, you can go full redneck at them and shoot them with a laser shotgun, because you figure that's hilarious enough to invest the energy of making one into. Most of all, though, it's still close enough that even if your teleportation network gets knocked out or blocked somehow, you can just get there reasonably swiftly anyways and yet far enough you can just pretend it was the work of some unknown Tinker or something if you have to trigger the self-destruct and rain some debris all the way to the highway.
Most of the construction work itself was taken care of by the Thinker, of course, purely because an AI with access to decent robotics and unlimited materials can do this kind of construction at speeds and efficiency that outweighs and trivializes any amount of assistance you, or anyone else for that matter, could render.
Artificial intelligence, man. It's the future. The rest of the world is just too backwards to see it, mostly because they don't exactly have any real-life examples to look at. Except for Dragon, maybe, but she's too shy to let anyone know and also not as productive as the Thinker in the first place, so really, does she even count?
Anyways, the whole complex of machinery required to make this dimensional breach work has been built by this point, so all that remains is to turn it on and watch the not-magic happen. There's only yourself and the Thinker present in the away-bunker right now, along with a bunch of equipment; according to what you know from the time the Flaxans used this kind of thing themselves, the signal of your drones should work through it, so you'll just hang out and see what's on the other side before you do anything else.
Sarah made you promise to, and you quote, 'not stick your dick into portals you haven't scouted out otherwise first'. So, well, here you are.
"Now then," you say just to fill the silence in your little observation post, a room above the portal hangar with a nice, thematically appropriate pane of armored glass to let you observe the location of the portal itself, "let's go see if we have any neighbors, eh?"
The first thing you notice, once the perfect circle of the portal manifests itself, is the water. If you were actually in the same room, you'd imagine it would likely be the scent instead, but as it stands the squall of water emerging from the lower third or so of the thing is pretty visible, too.
"Salt water. Composition is within tolerances to be declared oceanic in origin with high likelihood," the Thinker announces over this base's intercom before you can ask. "It is very similar to surface water layers in recorded oceans of Earth."
"Guess it's good to know we didn't bust into anyone's swimming pool," you remark, even as you watch the squad of Hammers meant to scout ahead step forward, a swarm of Bobs already converging to install a flood break and keep this shit from turning your interdimensional invasion base into an underground lake or some shit. "Alright, link me into their feeds."
What follows is the brief, but nonetheless interesting experience of seeing through the optics of the twenty humanoid robots all at once, the Thinker doing you the favor of transmitting what she perceives through them straight to you. Telepathic conveyance of perception can get really wonky if you do it with a machine, so you just lean back and try to keep focused as you delve into it.
Just goes to show why she's the one manually and semi-manually controlling hundreds of thousands of robots whenever you really need something done. You have trouble multi-tasking when you have to do more than one or two things at once, in comparison, so the difference between you having to set up orders and program in behavior in advance and her just doing it flexibly on the fly is pretty immense.
Also, you never did get your robots to work in unison quite as well as she did. Didn't hinder you from doing some amazing shit with them, but still.
Now, as for this new dimension… Your forward scouts spread out as soon as they're through, scanning the surrounding area, then the horizon as they move.
And what you see is… water. Quite a lot of water, in fact. Your portal ended up connecting on a relatively small island, looking pretty tropical overall if not for the plants on it reminding you more of, well, inland stuff. No palm or coconut trees, or even banana ones or anything. Are those pines or something?
Anyways, the Hammers engage their respective methods of transportation, using Lutece Particle devices and gravity manipulators to fly up into the air and dive into the ocean, respectively. And through them, you see…
Even more water and a whole lot of nothing much else.
"Should have brought a book or something…"
Exploration of this vaguely 'adjacent' dimension to your own (you really should, like, develop a model of how different dimensions work, both parallel and otherwise, one of these days) soon reveals some actually interesting facts, for all that it takes a bit to actually get to them. For one, you didn't get a portal that brings you to the ass-end of nowhere, insofar as the soon water-proofed location, the deserted island, you mean, isn't located in a random ocean or anything.
That is, it's not 'an' ocean, it's the ocean, over there. As it turns out, the majority of this Earth's surface is entirely covered by it, with what used to be mountaintops now turned into islands here and there. Any low-elevation ground was swept up at some indeterminate point in time, and the remnants of a few cities are actually still down there, as your diving Hammers can confirm.
In some places, said cities were evacuated, if at all, in a hurry, items of daily use left lying around and pressed against one wall or another by the ocean currents now filling up homes and offices and whatever else. In others, you believe, people were aware of what was coming and tried to get out and all, to somewhat mixed results overall.
There's a lot of people that just ended up drowning, judging by the water-worn skeletons dotting the ocean floor. The fish ate well, at least, which immediately just pisses you off- if all these people ended up dying uselessly and feeding them, they should've been eaten by yourself instead.
At least that way they would've really contributed to something greater (that being yourself, naturally). As it stands, most of the planet seems flooded, with a few patches of still solid ground standing out from the high altitude your scout robots are taking on the other end of the height differential.
The Himalayas turned into some prime real estate when the rest of the world went tits up, you're sure. As it is, some of the islands that remain are actually inhabited, though you don't send any of your bots closer for the moment- wouldn't do to get sighted or anything.
Aside from those small settlements, mostly clustered around whatever mountain ranges make it relatively easy to dive to the local ocean bottom thanks to their general elevation, there's also some enterprising folks that ended up living on whatever ships they could turn into more permanent living quarters, and some even built small cities on interconnected rafts here and there,making heavy use of the massive amount of flotsam drifting through the water.
Turns out when you flood literally everything, a lot of crap that floats ends up coming up. There's a couple of drifting huts standing on mats of old plastic bottles, the buoyancy of the air inside them just barely enough to keep them afloat.
It's pretty interesting, in a way, how humanity persevered in the face of almost global destruction of its natural habitats. Of course, there's also plenty of places where that didn't exactly work out- sunken and beached ships aren't exactly a rarity, as the Hammers explore every direction in sight, and floating ghost towns show off where and how rebuilding efforts didn't pan out.
Judging by the analysis of coral growth, down on the ocean floor, and the state of structures and entire cities remaining underwater, their decay and how far the local wildlife has adapted to these newly aquatic habitats, it seems whatever catastrophic flooding happened happened around twenty to thirty years ago, long enough to be the reality of a whole new generation, but not so long nobody remembers there being a bunch of dry ground to stand on that isn't there anymore or anything.
Also, as the Thinker tells you after running a few comparisons of the night sky from the half of the planet currently not blanketed by sunlight, it looks like this is a good fifty to a hundred years into the future compared to Earth Bet. Well, not like they really made much progress beyond a standard Earth in that time, not that you'd have expected as much or anything.
Also also, there's a lot of plastics in the water, washed out of the remains of humanity's greatness. Well, they'll just have to adapt to that at some point, you suppose, considering fishing is basically the industry around now, considering farming got fucked without farmland. The fish, for their part, have been rapidly adapting themselves, a few species emerging over others in the suddenly massively expanded space filled with nutrients to work with.
They don't look all that different, but most of the changes would've happened in their internal organs and all, to deal with the changes in their environment and diet. Luckily for you, you ain't no biologist, though, so you don't exactly care beyond making sure a few samples are taken and ferried back through the portal for later study and dissection.
In more mildly exciting news, there's a whole bunch of sharks, too, and a lot of them seem to have taken to eating humans after they were so abundant a food source in the recent past. Quite a departure of how they normally act in nature, but then, shit changed, what can ya do, eh? A bunch of them try to eat the diving Hammers and are summarily blown up in sudden heat explosions.
Pro tip, generating a ton of heat deep underwater, where it's generally comparatively colder, is a recipe for suicide, unless you have a body made out of highly resistant metal. In which case it becomes a funny method of explosive attack.
There's also a couple sightings of giant octopuses (and no you don't care whether that's the correct plural of the word), not unlike some of the wildlife you got used to seeing back on Earth Rapture. Good old times.
But yeah, the state of this version of human society is pretty interesting from a sociological point of view all around, though it doesn't look like there's super much else of particular worth to you around. It is, in the end, just a very flooded Earth.
…Could do some minor terraforming to turn it into a globally tropical paradise or something? Or could, like, create some underwater societies, maybe, if you can be arsed. Ah well, there's no equivalent to yourself, or Viltrumites or anything, over there, so it's not like you're in any rush to decide what to do here.
Most of the more on point scouting, exploration and observation of this new Earth, which you shall simply call Earth Raft for now (name pending) that'll happen next doesn't really require your input, now that you have a general idea of what's going on over on the other side of your portal, which means it's about time for you to get a move on. The Thinker can take it from here and keep you updated in case anything really interesting pops up.
Further operations on Earth Raft will have to wait for the moment anyways, just because you don't really feel like rushing in half-cocked. If and when you send someone through (or go through it yourself), it'll be with a clear plan and goal in mind, a couple of which have already popped up in the brainstorm section of your telepathic network; Kate insists you should just turn this dimension into a convenient vacation spot while you do your usual thing, Iris and Ivy have suggested using it as a semi-aquatic human form to supply vampires with plenty of additional souls in the long term and Sherrel and Curie, along with a few others, have been exploring the potential use of it all as a research opportunity.
Something about u-boats and the psychological effects of widespread societal collapse. You aren't sure how that's connected, but you also don't really want to risk getting an explanation, so you just leave them to it.
In the meantime, you have some other options to look into, in terms of places to go and things to do. Lots of 'em, really.
Such as, well, the Crypts' expansion plans. The whole affair with Nilbog was prioritized at the time, just to get that particular ticking time bomb dealt with, and now that you've done just that, well… It's a good thing you've got the Thinker in your head 24/7, because you don't actually speak German, so someone needs to translate a bit.
It's really weird, too, how that particular power of yours works- the one that lets you just speak languages when you're hopping across dimensions, but then retracts its effects when you go back. It's definitely one of the more esoteric bits on your list of phenomenal cosmic powers, but yeah- you could speak any and all languages spoken by man when you were on Earth Rapture, but now, well, you're back to square one on that one.
You remember knowing how to speak German, and even how those weird umlaut things they have there because the normal alphabet just wasn't enough, how literally every proper noun in existence is given a set 'gender' which changes the grammar around it that you just have to know by heart or some shit, but for all that you've got a perfect recollection of anything and everything that ever happened after you rose from the dead, you couldn't order a meal in this particularly fucked up language to save your life right now.
Not that you won't learn pretty quickly as is, of course, but still. It's almost amazing how baseline humans even manage to string two sentences together in German, never mind speaking it as their native language.
Now then, step one for you is to go right ahead and take a gander across the big pond, which involves teleporting straight into a random, quiet alley in the middle of Berlin, wearing your suit, but not your shadow in place of your face. This is meant to make you more relatable and less easily discovered.
How that works out remains to be seen, you suppose.
Ah well. First thing, you suppose, to note about being in Germany, the cities are literally built different. There's a lot more… Well, curves, and the buildings actually look pretty different from one to the next, at least in some parts of town.
You actually wandered into the older ones, too, and man, you can see just how old some of these things are. In a surprisingly good way, for once. Just a natural consequence of some areas here being older than the United States are themselves, you guess.
Another notable thing, then, would be… the bakeries. Those aren't really a thing in themselves, the way you're used to it, but the inner city has a bunch of shops just selling baked goods all over the place, despite the late hour- locally, anyways, because time zones.
You got some fresh buns, too, while you were at it, using some local currency you… found. In a few pockets. They're pretty nice, surprisingly fresh and crunchy.
But yeah, not at all what you're used to seeing, entire storefronts full of assorted bread and cakes and what-have-you. So that's pretty neat.
There's also an air of general weariness in the streets, people seemingly unenthused for their everyday lives on a level on par with that of the average US citizen on a Monday morning. You could make guesses as to why, but the most likely one is that having a more active version of the S9 regularly paying a visit to the nation's capital to blow up whoever' in charge is kind of demoralizing to these people.
Just a thought, really. It's not like that's contributing, anyways. Alternatively, it might be the knowledge that you have a nazi infestation that just won't stop existing despite its fundamental and profound stupidity making your entire country look bad the world over. Heck, why not both, even?
This place still looks pretty different, all in all. Like, there isn't even any trash piling up in the corners of every other street! Not something L.A. can say, or Brockton Bay before you had some minions collect and dump all the trash lying in the streets in a manufactory a while back.
Say about the Germans what you want, but they do have some actual trash management going on in places outside the suburbs and high-rise districts. Neat. In fact, there aren't any real skyscrapers around at all, with most buildings way shorter than you're used to even in a relative dump like Brockton Bay- another one of those little architectural differences, huh?
Not that any of this crap is really relevant to you, mind you. You're here to do a job, and that job needs you to actually get an idea of the local scene in person, so you get right to that.
Just as soon as you're done finding a decent ice cream place. Priorities, right?
Villains over here, as it turns out, don't really form 'gangs' the way they often do back home. Or rather, the way many do- there's plenty of solo villains just doing their own thing, without any non-powered henchmen around, or even just small teams of villains and all.
That said, this seems to be the more common thing as far as that goes, hereabouts, with the one big exception of the Gesellschaft. The neo-nazis that are slightly less a collection of wannabes, as seen in the E88 for contrast, though they're still neo-nazis and objectively evil, stupid and on your shortlist of future meal sources.
This still puts you into a bit of a bind, though; the original plan was to figure out the scene of organized crime, then insert yourself into it seamlessly as you expand your operations, but, well, not much of a scene to work with here. Apparently there used to be a bunch of Italians that did a lot of money laundering in Germany because it's easier to do this way than back home, but that kind of went out the window when the Meisters (literally Germans for Masters, which is kind of terrible for a heroic organization's name, even with the connotations being pretty differentin German) kicked them out back when they got established.
Those guys are pretty much the local equivalent to the Protectorate, by the by, a nationally-backed team of heroes and all. Those are pretty common here in Europe, kind of mimicking the US model. Hey, if it works, good for them.
But, uh, yeah, the only organization comparable to the Crypts, hereabouts, is the Gesellschaft (literally 'Society', in case anyone wonders), which is a comparison you do not particularly like. More active and tolerated in the Eastern parts of Germany, which apparently always were more 'open' towards their kind of thinking ever since the cultural divide between the two halves of the country happened post-WWII, the neo-nazis are the one big group of what you'd consider villains around, more or less.
More domestic terrorists trying to reach out and become international ones, really. They're pretty disliked all over the place, and any cape that doesn't have a big safety net to fall back on has to watch out for their attempts at 'recruitment'. Which really means being kidnapped and getting obedience beaten into you, in a physical way if you're lucky.
That leaves you with the dozens upon dozens of small-time villains, crooks and the occasional powered criminal, in terms of non-heroes or rogues. The heroes, of course, are government backed, with smaller hometown teams of them popping up here and there, though none of them are household names or anything the way New Wave was for a short time, back in the day.
There's always some parahumans that just don't want any spotlight too, of course, and the aforementioned rogues, but there's none of that cape culture you would otherwise integrate yourself into in an attempt to undermine existing power structures.
So another approach it is, ultimately. Good thing you can be flexible about this stuff.
In the end, you don't really get much done during your brief, probing trip mostly serving as a diversion to kill some time while you did some first-hand research to accompany the research being done by Sarah, Kate and the Thinker.
As it turns out, Kate actually did have some contacts way back when, from when she and a handful of the girls were basically going around being petty criminals smuggling guns and, on occasion, drugs, and so she actually did have some knowledge about how the crime scene looks like over here, which you drew on when you put together your initial analysis, of course. So that's neat, you suppose.
Not like it comes up often these days, considering you're basically a modern-day version of that romanticized idea of the mafia, complete with crime on a scale far and beyond what pretty much anyone else could muster purely because the literal army (or equivalent) would start to bust down doors at this point of ridiculousness, but a lot of the Crypts' core members used to be criminals before they joined you in your quest to break laws on an obnoxious level while still getting away with it.
Honestly, a lot of the crime you do these days is at least partially for fun, come to think, isn't it? Like, it's not like you really need to do most of it, with the amount of money and resources you already have on hand as is.
Not that it really matters, you're having fun with it so you don't really see any need to change anything.
Anyways, you'll continue working on your encroachment on this new frontier and the transformation o the Lord Street Crypt into an international crime organization (as opposed to a purely domestic one, as it has been so far as far as anyone on Earth Bet knows- technically, you're an interdimensional criminal already, which is weirdly funny to you for some reason), but in the meantime you're falling back and leaving that cooking in the background.
And while that's going on, you can just go ahead and play around, preferably with someone's thoughts and feelings. And as it just so happens, you have what some may call a target-rich environment to work with, even!
Isabel Cruz has, for the last… quite a while, let's say… been staying pretty much quiet, living in your base and helping out around the engineering bay whenever she could; with her background as somewhat of a genius when it comes to practical engineering in general and robotics in particular, she's been making some small, but marked improvements to various systems both around the place and in your robot designs.
She even has a little testing area where robots are run through their paces to determine how well they function under various conditions. Even a small increase in efficiency ends up important when you use them on massive scales the way you prefer to, so it's really for the best someone actually goes deep into your individual designs- your work is leagues ahead of anything humanity in generally can manage, sure, but more eyes and viewpoints on this kind of thing never hurts.
Also, you'll never take Isabel's simple, down-to-earth kind of genius for granted again. That hell-dimension of a parallel Earth you visited last time had plenty of 'geniuses' of its own, but Isabel doesn't go around turning herself into a big blue bodybuilder or building literal fuck-you-rays or what have you out of nowhere, only loosely based on normal physics, the way people did there.
No, she's a good girl that keeps her exploits at least vaguely believable, and you think she deserves a reward for not, like, overdoing it the way pretty much any jerk with a lab coat and mildly above average IQ did on that side.
Hence you're currently taking a stroll through Boston with her, taking a little tour of the historically interesting parts of town, traffic running through the streets and the sun high in the sky. The city is fille with the scents of people and of burned-up gasoline, from all the engines running as intended, like old concrete and much less misery than Brockton Bay used to smell like.
Still a rather notable note of it, but much less all the same.
"You know, it's weird every time," Isabel tells you, holding your hand as you walk right on along. "I know it's obvious the city would be there, back in time and across dimensions, but… I've seen Boston as a bombed-out ruin. I crawled through it looking for salvage, a couple times."
"Just goes to show life can be funny sometimes," you smile at her, leading her towards the nearest museum. They got a couple of those, here in Boston, and you decided you should get some culture into yourself, or what little amounts of it the US has that wasn't just imported or stolen anyways. "We can just go take our time until you're used to it."
"Mhm… Thanks," Isabel smiles back. "Where are we going first?"
"Well, we got a couple choices," you shrug. "The Museum of Bad Art, the Museum of Burnt Food, the Plumbing Museum…"
"…Did you go out of your way to find the weirdest museums in Boston for me?"
"Maaaybe," you say, all but confirm, really, and shrug again. "So, which one would you like to go to first? Pick your poison and all that."
Isabel giggles, despite herself, and shakes her head. "You're lucky you're so handsome," she tells you a little shyly, peeking at you from the corner of her eyes.
"So I've been told. I don't really see it myself, but, well, what can ya do?"
It's a surprisingly pleasant afternoon you're having with Isabel, all told. Boston is about the same as Brockton Bay this time of year, in the grand scheme of things, but when that means you're getting some slightly warmer temperatures and moderately less crappy weather, you'll take it.
It's an odd thing, how comfort and your kind of undeath interact. You can be perfectly fine and comfortable in just about any conditions that don't physically stop you from moving, whether you're talking taking on blizzards with your bare skin or heat that would kill baseline humans in minutes, and neither hard surfaces nor holding bodily contortions in place indefinitely can particularly bother you.
If you felt like cosplaying as a statue, you could do it just fine, just stop breathing, don't do any of those little subconscious movements people usually make, and you'd have it down just fine. Heck, you'd probably look better than most statues out there, for that matter.
But yeah, it's like there's this level of comfiness you can't go below, but you can go above it; you still do prefer to lie on soft pillows and comfortable couches as opposed to the bare ground. It's just that the bare ground doesn't particularly bother you, either, and the same principle applies to the temperature and everything.
In short, you'd do just fine if a deadly radiation storm was currently blanketing the sky and choking the city with tons of sharp hail or something, but it being nice out is, well, nice.
Which does help with your date, as Isabel is much easier to grope at when she doesn't have to wear her power armor to deal with environmental conditions. You'd still do it either way, this way just involves less effort along the way.
The museums you visit are surprisingly fun, especially the Museum of Bad Art, to you personally; the Plumbing Museum ends up more interesting to Isabel, by comparison, but you figure it's surprisingly educational as well. Seeing as you sometimes moonlight as something of a vicil engineer yourself and all.
Hey, you designed a bunch of the sewers and accompanying infrastructure back on Earth Fallout and on the Titan, when you really got into civilization building. Sure, you didn't really change much about those old designs afterwards, so they're kind of outdated by your standards- you don't even utilize any tricks from your serious robotics to control systems like that, it's all old-school stuff that relies on leveraging simple, straightforward physics- but hey, that just means the museum is relevant in that regard!
Mostly insofar as you can literally see how humanity developed plumbing step by step and how your own work mirrors much of that. As for your date, she's just comparing the information in the museum to some old plumber magazine she read back when she got into tinkering with any and all old technology she could find in her childhood, so you insist she tell you all about it, while you're there.
It's a nice time, all in all, despite the whole… Taking a girl out to tour museums. It's not the worst idea you deliberately came up with for a date, but it's up there as a classic in that category, that's for sure. But hey, long as she enjoys herself, you can't really ask for much more, now can you?
You also do happen upon a short fight between some Teeth gangers and Accord's people politely telling them to fuck off, using some machine guns as radio transceivers and lead as coded messages.
Gang violence has actually been going down for a short time ever since Blasto 'disappeared' from the city, but it's already back on the upswing in the relative power vacuum; Accord alone just doesn't have the… Let's call it clout to present no opportunity for any up-and-comers from coming in after e took over most of the temporarily open territory.
So Boston has the problem you made sure to avoid in Brockton Bay by showing off the Crypts' sheer firepower whenever you wiped out another gang, a couple of capes and unpowered wannabes popping up every now and then trying to make a name for themselves. Not that the other villains entrenched in the city are particularly happy about this either, but a new status quo has to settle in for a bit, you suppose.
Of course the Crypts are also in this particular game, but you simply don't have a particularly notable presence here, as opposed to your main stomping grounds. A couple of your capes show up every now and then, but they're too sporadic to really make a statement, you suppose.
Ah well, you'll figure it out. Or it'll figure itself out, anyways. Same difference. At least Isabel isn't particularly perturbed by the sudden violence erupting momentarily; as it turns out, being raised in a 'society' that involves constant threat of lethal danger shines through at times.
Didn't stop you from holding her close and copping a feel while you were at it, though. She just gave you a small little smile and looked away so you wouldn't see her blush.
Getting Circus' ass to move into your vicinity isn't particularly hard, as she's been living up to her self-appointed duty of your personal clown call girl, thanks to you wiring her into your teleportation network and base defenses; you haven't been calling on her as often as you'd like for a bit, ever since you ended up having access to complementary free succubus summoning thanks to your lawyer moving up in the world, with all the work you're giving her powering her up, but it's not like you're entirely neglecting the resident clown cape either.
Still, while this is mostly a formality at this point, considering how pretty much any kind of cape business going down in and around Brockton Bay is happening with the tacit understanding that it happens with your approval or not at all (on pain on of sudden obliteration if anyone manages to piss you off), you've been meaning to get around to making a certain relationship of yours a little more official.
That is, 'officially' having Circus join the Crypts, as it were. Being a blessedly non-official organization, this process doesn't involve any paperwork or anything, it's really just you telling the person in question you'd quite like it if they considered themselves part of the gang. One of the guys. Member of the hood, in cringier terms.
Of course Circus, for their part (she does prefer to be gender-neutral while in costume, and you do try to keep that in mind when you aren't balls-deep in someone at the time), doesn't just shrug and go along with it without question. "I don't know, big guy, that's kind of a big commitment, you know? I was hoping we'd keep it nice and… casual, yeah?"
"I do get that," you say, your arms circling Circus' waist as you lean back to look into their face, the clown makeup hiding their beauty only to make them somehow cuter in exchange. It's their special getup for when you call, as you're given to understand, subtly yet noticeably different from the usual cape costume version used to make them look androgynous instead. "It's just that we may as well, at this point, and it'd make it easier to keep you safe."
"Aww, you ol' lug, you. I can take care of myself!"
"Yeah, but you could do it better with some upgrades we give out to members," you point out, gently putting the tip of your finger over her pouty lips. "Besides, we have a free cafeteria and plenty of goodies for everyone. It'd just be a waste not to take advantage of that, wouldn't it?"
"Why're you so insistent all of a sudden? Don't get me wrong, I'm just…"
"A bit cagey about it?" You smile at her.
"Yeah. That. I've always been just kind of drifting along, because staying in one place for too long just gets complicated," Circus spits the word out like a PG-13 friendly curse, "and I don't do well in groups, you know? I'm a solo act kind of clown."
"Mhm," you make, nodding along. What she doesn't mention, of course, is that she's a very notable grabbag cape, one with plenty of individually strong powers… Which traditionally suggests, according to your education in Parahuman Matters 102, that she's pretty likely to be part of a cluster trigger of some sort, which usually has a whole host of implications.
She could be running from a deeply uncomfortable situation, with her clustermates trying to kill her or, worse, falling on the other side of the kiss/kill dynamic most clusters fall into. Or she could have killed all of them already, or survived where they died for some other reason anyways, and the experience of being 'rewarded' for it by the cluster mechanism they had could be what she's trying to get away from in her constantly drifting villain lifestyle.
All the same, you don't want to dig unbidden, and you can only speculate so much without getting more information the hard way- which you're pretty sure Circu would actually find objectionable, so you don't want to jeopardize your working relationship as it is. "You kow you're safe with us, yeah?"
"…I guess." Now, clown makeup can make it pretty hard to tell, but you're fairly sure she's trying to tell you she knows intellectually, but some part of her brain hasn't gotten with the program quite yet.
"One of the many employment benefits we have in the Crypts. Anyone messes with you, twenty capes with Triumvirate levels of power smite them down like the wrath of me," you continue, unabated. "And if something goes wrong, I'll just bring you back to life and you can pay whoever did anything back yourself."
Huffing, Circus wiggles on your lap, her legs spread so she can straddle you properly and all. "Like you wouldn't do that anyways."
"I'd do that anyways," you agree without a second thought. "But I want you to be my clown, not just my clown call girl."
"You'd think a guy would be happy with just one of those. I don't do birthday parties, you know?"
"Drat. There goes Plan One."
It takes a while of soft persuasion, interspersed with plenty of cuddles and honking her hooters a couple times, but in the end Circus didn't really object to being part of the family all that much; she just needed a bit of help to overcome a few reservations, that was all.
Good thing you're very good at wearing those down, huh?
With Circus officially moving in, whether she'll actually use the standard-issue apartment inside the base or not, you're looking forward to seeing what, if anything, she does with the place. Though her mentions of 'holes to get stuck in' kind of tickle your curiosity…
Amy Dallon wasn't the kind of girl that liked to go clubbing in the evening. In fact, she wasn't the kind of girl that would go out of her way to go out pretty much anywhere, unless it was for business (volunteering at the hospital counted for that, screw you if you disagreed), never mind so much as going on dates or, horror of horrors, doing sports.
No, Amy Dallon was the kind of girl that preferred to spend the evening at home, curled up in her bed reading a book or surfing the net. Leaving the house was for extroverts with too much energy for their own good. Lately, she'd also acquired a taste for more… directly pleasurable hobbies, but if she wasn't living with her sister and mom anyways, she wouldn't be having sex with them so often.
Yes, it was some really weird pseudo-incestual stuff she was doing a lot of. No, she did not care. Please direct comments and concerns to . Not. Because she'd changed her PHO mail after certain flame wars happened and some sore losers couldn't fucking deal.
Lilith supremacy, ship her with all of New Wave or perish, scrub!
…Oh yeah, she also wrote a few slashfics in her free time, when she had the inspiration. That was a thing, too. Not that she often found the odd hour or two these days, when she could be either at the hospital or groping her sister. Or Crystal, for that matter, whose boobs were indeed very grabbable.
Amy had done good work on them. It was the first time she'd really, well, done that kind of thing, vanity changes to someone's body, but with some regular checking to make sure she hadn't accidentally given her cousin some, uh, giant breast cancer or anything like that it had worked out surprisingly alright.
Not the kind of thing she'd have even considered just a few months ago, but there it was. Similarly, there Amy was, in the kind of place she wouldn't have possibly imagined herself ever stepping foot in, bass-y music washing over her and shaking her body to the core with every beat in the relative darkness of the Raveyard's interior.
For a night club of this kind, it was… Well, she didn't really have any metric to compare it against. Gabe had invited her and her sister to come by for the nightly festivities, that apparently never really stopped so much as they paused during the day, for a bit, and of course Vicky had wanted to come.
Sadly, Amy was terrible at shutting her sister down after being eaten out, and hadn't recovered her better judgement until it was too late to stop- they'd already been there, teleported into a booth on the upper floor of the building.
Of course Vicky had immediately run off before she could hold her hand and paralyze her legs, and so now Amy was walking around in the dark, trying to find her sister- Gabriel was still upstairs, boning some kind of clown of all things while a chick with horns was waiting on both of them.
She'd say it was just cape weirdness, but she knew from experience capes were mostly normal people. That was not normal. Nothing about anything he did was. If anything, 'abnormality' was defined as anything similar to anything he was involved in at some point, that was how not normal Gabe, or Cain, anyways, was.
But that still left Amy looking for Vicky, because someone had to keep an eye on her just in case. And make sure she didn't hook up with anyone that wasn't family or some abnormal guy she could just barely stomach.
Which… wasn't going too well, because the Raveyard was damn full and her sister was somewhere on the dance floor. So… She had to keep on the outskirts of the spastic action and keep an eye out, because no way in hell was Amy about to go and dance.
Her tits bounced. And that sounded nice, but it would just chafe like a bitch at the moment- she didn't have a bra on after hastily getting dressed earlier, so, yeah, not happening. The Dallonites were staying in place.
The lower floor was crammed full of people, but only around half of them were busy dancing and walking around- a lot were sitting in the booths and at the tables scattered all around, most of them keeping themselves entertained ogling the dancers in the cages suspended all across the walls- wait, those were all naked already, moving in the beat of the music, and for a minute or two Amy was just staring at the gyrating hips of a blonde that smirked down at her, then reached across her own body to grab her cheeks and-
Yeah. Spread them. Showing Amy everything there was to see, before she turned around and played with her breasts, setting one foot forwards on the cage bars she was stuck in and languidly shaking her body left, right, left, right…
Uh… Anyways, so Amy took a while, so much so it was unlikely she'd catch up to Vicky anytime soon. Back on the topic of the people she looked at while continuing her search, it wasn't just the professional strippers that were getting, uh, pretty frisky; plenty of clothing was just scattered across the ground and nearby furniture as she passed by, and at least five girls she saw were just shagging right there in the open, one even being double-teamed from both sides in one of the booths, on top of the table.
Thaaat wasn't something she should stare at. And it definitely wasn't something Amy should come closer for to fondle the breasts of the girl on all fours, a guy below and behind her each. Also, pinching her nipples and making her squeal while she was being creamed in her ass and pussy at the same time definitely wasn't proper behavior, no matter how inviting they looked.
She'd have kissed her, too, but she could see the sperm stuck in the girl's mouth and throat, as well as filling her stomach. Sloppy seconds were fine if they were from people she knew, but not otherwise, okay?
While she was there, though, she also had the opportunity to see a lot about the insides of this anonymous slut's body, what was going on inside her at the moment, and so she realized that she'd ingested quite a bit of alcohol and cocaine, not so much she'd be seriously affected come morning but, yeah, she was totally high at the moment.
It was one of those things Amy could just tell at a glance using her power, having seen plenty of drugged-up people's insides by this point to remember how what looked like, at least for the more common kinds of drugs. It was thus that she realized a lot of the people around here were probably very… influenced… at the moment, and had probably come here precisely to get blitzed and fucked up in the literal way.
Which posited the question. Using her power, what could she do in this context, and more importantly, what should she do…?
Five minutes later, she was talking to a striking blonde that was just short of bombshell in terms of curves. Yes, she had a type and she was aware she did, what about it? Fuck off, subconscious, there was booty to be had!
"Hey," she began, because being socially awkward just came naturally to her. "Wanna get real fucked up?"
"Uhm… Hey, sure, why not. How much?"
"Oh, don't worry about that. I'll have you pay with your body." Consent achieved, Amy reached out, grasping the bare arm of her victim new friend.
It took approximately two seconds for the chemicals she added to her bloodstream to take effect, lowering motor control, causing a surge in arousal and the sensation of heat all across her skin. "What…?"
"Perfect, now come along, I remember something about private booths…"
The penetration of various orifices is and remains the ultimate source of desire the human condition generates.
-Quote attributed to the memories and thoughts of Gabriel Livsey
In the depths of human existence, desire takes shape through the delicate exploration of countless sacred openings. The human condition yearns for the intimate union, where sensations intertwine like threads of divine poetry. It is in this intoxicating dance of connection that our souls find solace. Imagine, if you will, the moment of tender encounter. It begins with a symphony of anticipation, a gentle flutter of the heart.
The air thickens with a heady mixture of curiosity and longing, a sweet fragrance that envelops the senses and lingers upon the lips. As fingers trace the contours of an open door, a world of possibilities unfurls. Like a master sculptor's touch, each caress sculpting emotions into existence, painting strokes of desire on the canvas of our flesh.
The exploration becomes an intricate dance, a choreography of vulnerability and trust, inviting us to surrender to the symphony of pleasure. In these private realms of connection, time becomes a mere whisper, fading into the backdrop of eternity. Every sensation is heightened, every touch a reverberation of ecstasy. The secret embrace of warm whispers and gentle sighs becomes a symphony in its own right, resonating with the language of our primal desires.
It is here, in these sacred spaces, that the human condition finds its true essence. The depth of longing, the cusp of surrender, and the vulnerability of baring our souls intertwine, molding us into the very fabric of existence. In the exploration of our various orifices, we glimpse the profound interconnectedness of our shared humanity, a reminder that we are all vessels of desire, seeking solace in the exquisite tapestry of life.
-Excerpt from the First Book of the Lord, Chapter Three, 'On Carnality'
Dragging the blonde she'd found herself back towards the elevator she'd taken to follow Vicky earlier, Amy quickly poked whoever was in range of this whole telepathy thing she made a point not to think about too much about something she remembered Gabriel mentioning earlier, when they'd first arrived at the Raveyard; placing her palm against a particular part of the wall, relatively hidden from the rest of the club by the arrangement of nearby furniture and light levels, a hidden door opened up.
"Whoa, this is…" The blonde shuddered, her breath coming out in short, heated bursts thanks to the aphrodisiacs Amy may or may not have studied in some depth of late so she could replicate their effects on the human body. Like she was doing right now. "What's going on?"
"Don't you worry your pretty head about that," Amy grumbled, pulling her into the room and slapping a panel on the other side, sealing the entry up again by making the piece of wall slide back into place as soundlessly as it had moved aside in the first place.
It was impossible to tell at first glance, but this building had… more secret doors than just about anyone she could think of would ever need, but if Cain wanted to build a place like this, it wasn't like anyone could really stop him.
Peering around the secret room she was now in, Amy found herself nodding in satisfaction at the fittings- a large bed was central, right in the middle of the floor, and thanks to the telepathic rundown she got on the place's 'features', she knew how to get the walls to engorge themselves with shelves upon shelves of all kinds of perverse 'toys', not to mention the chains suspended from the ceiling on demand, among other things.
Not that she was going to need anything like that for the moment. Not unless a certain someone really, really needed some additional encouragement to behave. "Now that we're all alone, let's see what I'll do with you, hm?"
The as yet unnamed blonde (whose name Amy wasn't asking for) blinked, confusion turning into a mix of fear and realization as the cogs inside her head spun. Not that it mattered, either; her opinion was entirely secondary to what Amy was going to do tonight, at the minimum. She'd undo the changes later, of course… Unless a certain someone liked them so much she wanted to keep them.
Now, as for the changes she was thinking of…
How did one go about making a Bimbo? To answer this question, one first had to define who or what was a bimbo, then recognize the steps needed to attain this state and be able to go through them.
Sadly, Amy Dallon wasn't much for philosophical debates on the nature of bimbo-dom, and as much as she appreciated thought experiments and mental gymnastics like the next girl she kind of had some more immediate priorities to consider. Such as the blonde chick slowly working her way into a panic attack whose wrist she was still holding onto, letting her feel the hormone balance shifting as adrenaline began to stream through her.
Which wasn't exactly productive at the moment, so she cut that shit right out, instead rebalancing the emotions the blonde's body was experiencing. Without touching her brain, of course. That was a rule she wasn't willing to break, even now.
That didn't mean she couldn't skirt it a little by doing non-brain stuff. Which was a very different topic and anyone that disagreed because they knew how biology worked could fuck right off.
Hooked into her body like that, Amy could see, in that weird way her power let her do this she'd have grown so used to it was anything but weird if it didn't come automatically the moment she got it, how tense and uncomfortable a certain someone was.
This wasn't exactly ideal, so she went ahead and forcefully made her muscles un-tense, then began walking her towards the bed, while she was at it already anyways. Normally, her power worked much better to make fundamental changes to living beings she was touching, but it was perfectly possible to use it like, to puppeteer someone instead.
Sure, she may have had her stumble a time or two, but that was what learning experiences like this were for!
"Stop that," the blonde demanded as they came to a stop in front of the bed, just a large expanse of sinfully soft, black cloth.
"Stop what?" Amy asked, knowing full well what she meant.
"Get out of my head and- ah!" Wide open eyes looked down at herself, as the sensitivity of her skin was increased massively, literally so as additional nerves grew in. Being as nice and helpful as she was, Amy was even making sure to deaden them during the process, reasoning it probably wasn't pleasant.
In contrast to the end result, judging by the heavy blush on her subject's cheeks as her own clothes provided vastly enhanced… stimulation, just by being worn. "I'm not inside your head. This is all you," Amy lied, badly, but that didn't matter right then. Giving the blonde a good push, she moved er onto the bed, so she finally wouldn't have to keep her balanced anymore.
"Gh-!" Judging by the sound, the sudden increase in stimulation was perhaps a bit much, too. Bugger.
"Alright, you signed up for feeling good. So… Give me a second," she said, lamely climbing after the spasming form of someone just having realized she had a chance to escape. Not much of one, and just trying to push herself away from Amy made her shiver so uncontrollably the motion never found its completion.
Grabbing her again, she grimaced at the way all those new nerves were firing continuous signals at the brain, no sign of them calming down to a point the blonde's gray matter could blend them out. This would need some calibrating if she wanted her functional.
…Did she want her functional? Well, to an extent. She didn't want her entirely non-functional, so that probably counted. Still capable of thinking, just also constantly, nicely distracted and horny.
There probably was a way to achieve that, so first things first. "Hey. I'm taking off your clothes," she informed her test subject current focus, immediately getting to the loose blouse in the way between herself and visual confirmation of upper body changes.
In other words, she wanted tits, and this chick had some. Simple as that.
"Whoa, buy a girl a drink first, geez. Ah." A flushed face wasn't really good for communicating, y'know, discontent. Just saying.
In fact, yeah, that's what she should be saying. "You can complain when you aren't turned on by it."
It was a bit of work, but short work was made of everything in the way, finally letting Amy touch and grope to her heart's conten- Uh. Feel for any noticeable irregularities. That her power, that never failed when it came to doing its job, didn't pick up. Yep.
Which still left the blonde's pants however, which were harder to take off purely thanks to her being able to resist more vigorously than before, with only the air tickling her upper body rather than the constant friction of her now discarded clothes.
"Give it up already!"
"No! I'm not into girls like that!"
"Methinks the lady doth protest too much," Amy grumbled, pulling at the back of the blonde's pants. Then, louder, she cleared her throat. "You will be by the time I'm done with you. Congrats!"
As though to emphasize her words, she slapped the butt she was all but groping anyways, then pushed a hand inside the waistband of these damnably tight pants, squeezing the soft, grabbable butt beneath.
"Ahn!" There! That exact kind of moan! That was what she was after!
Just a bit of improvised wrestling for pieces of cloth later, she was (finally) holding onto the black, lacy panties of her victim, ignoring the way she was currently holding a hand over her breasts to hide them. The tearful, yet anticipatory look in her eyes couldn't be hidden that easily, and it told Amy she was on to something here.
This little slut was into this. There was no doubt about it.
Panting due to the constant stimulation, she didn't even twitch anymore when Amy laid a hand onto her shoulder, trying to find a compromise between 'bitch in heat' and 'thinking human being'. Taking out some of these nerves again was a good start, but what if she could find some way to make the activate based on others activating nearby?
A cascade effect of horniness, that sounded like what was required, here. But… She wasn't so far out of her mind she would be just fine blithely performing human experimentation, so maybe…?
While she was thinking, Amy's power already activated on its own, doing just what she'd been intending to do without further input. Which felt… weird. Normally, she had to be stupidly precise about the changes she wanted, but this time she wasn't even sure how to do what she'd just done.
"Ah… What did you do? It feels different now," the blonde shivered, calling attention back to the fact she was, well, a person. That could be talked to. Probably something she should've done earlier, huh?
Ah well, who cared. "Alright, cards on the table," Amy announced. "I want to turn you into a horny, brainless bimbo begging for sex. With a fat ass and huge tits. But! Only for tonight. If, by tomorrow morning, you want me to undo the changes, I will."
"Uhm… That's pretty direct, I guess," the blonde laughed. "Do I get a say in this?"
"Participation is mandatory."
And with that, she got to work.
One of the limitations of Amy's power was that she could only use biomass from living beings, her power simply not responding to anything that wasn't a living being. It could be a plant, an animal, heck it could be a fungus, it didn't matter, but it needed to be alive. This meant she couldn't just, say, carry some slurry made of onions or anything on her and use it to replace lost body parts; if they were gone, they were gone, unless she could reattach them by manipulating the original body, reconnect it essentially.
Normally, that wasn't too big of an issue, to her. Most of her time actively using her power was in the hospital, where she fixed stuff that was wrong inside people's bodies; at most, she had to use some fat tissues while doing so and prescribe them a heavy diet for a few weeks to let their bodies recover.
'Normally' was not now, and to get that proper bimbo look going she needed a bit more to work with than what she could safely take from the blonde's body. Luckily, it turned out these exclusive rooms came with exclusive room service- and so all Amy needed to do was ask about it to get a pipe filled with nutrient slurry to poke from the wall.
How that worked she had no idea and she didn't want to know, either. Screw Gabriel and whatever underground black market tinkertech construction company he was running.
Of course there was still the issue of her not being able to use the stuff directly, as it was. That said, there also was an obvious solution, right there.
"Sho tashty!"
"It can't be that tasty, can it?"
"Try it, it'sh amazing!"
"…Dammit, it's pretty good."
So yeah, Amy just made The Blonde (trademark pending) eat the stuff. The moment it was halfway digested, a process that took pretty little time in this case, it counted as part of her body… And, therefore, perfectly usable material, according to her power.
It was one reason a certain someone was now sporting a set of huge boobs looking almost fake (but only almost, and that only due to their sheer size on her frame), along with a nice, fat ass that was just inviting anyone in sight to come and grab it. The overall result was the kind of hourglass figure both models and porn stars would kill for, plus a couple cosmetic changes here and there.
Perfectly clear skin (designing pores that would ensure it stayed pretty was one of Amy's secret little achievements, from dealing with her sister for years- if she'd have had to listen to her complaining about acne one more day, she would've done something she might have regretted), a bit longer hair, pouty lips and rounder eyes… Nothing particularly overt in that department, Amy wasn't running some implant lab or anything, but for a bimbo you need fat lips, right?
Right. Blondie better be glad she didn't have to speak with a lisp due to the sheer size of her lips or something.
At the moment, though, all Amy was focusing on was kneading those big-ass jugs she'd just lovingly crafted, to make sure they were perfect. They were, but she had to make sure.
Oh, and of course while all of that was going on, she'd kept tweaking the sensitivity issue, to get it just right. The goal was to get her horny and all but brainlessly addicted to sex, but simultaneously keep her capable of being her own person. Results were…
Reaching around, Amy cupped Blondie's butt cheek, pushing a finger between her legs and all the way to the front, stroking her labia. "Aahn, time for more sex?"
Looking positive so far.
"Yeah, you know what, that sounds like a good idea," she agreed, suddenly realizing she'd been so caught up getting her prototype bimbo perfect she hadn't even gotten off. Time to change that ASAP. "For a start, how 'bout you get me off for a change, huh?"
"Vicky!"
"Amy, there you are! I've been looking everywhere for you."
"You could've just asked, but never mind that. I need your help."
"Did someone hit on you? Do I need to beat someone? Was it a guy or a girl?"
"Nothing like- well, like of, but not quite. Look, I need you to carry something."
"Oh great, my specialty. So what's this about?"
"Over here, this nondescript black crate needs to get out of this joint and to a safe location."
"…Did you, like, become a drug boss while I wan't looking? What's in there?"
"No, don't-"
"Mhgggh…"
"Amy."
"I can explain."
"Why is there a naked girl that looks vaguely like if I date a plastic surgeon gagged and tied up with a dildo in her- no, two dildos- inside a crate you were trying to get me to smuggle out o Gabriel's club?"
"I can… explain?"
"This had better be good. I'll do it, but it better be good. Unless you want me to tell mom."
"Jesus cucking Joseph in Mary's ass behind the barn, don't tell mom!"
You know, maybe it could be taken as somewhat mean-pirited, to watch as Amy and Vicky make their first steps in the realm of human trafficking like this, sitting at your usual spot and having a laugh about it as Vicky pretends (unconvincingly) to carry something much lighter than the container she is currently dragging outside.
On the other hand, it's absolutely hilarious watching them try to be subtle about it, even as your security gets in the way- you made sure of that, just to mess with them while they try to commit what is absolutely a pretty serious crime on more layers than a layperson could sum up in a sentence or two.
Seriously, Nora is currently writing up a full summary, and unsurprisingly enough the usage of parahuman powers complicates everything and just makes it worse. From a legal perspective, anyways, it's not like you're about to sue them or anything, but it is pretty hilarious just how much legislation is out there specifically to define how much to not use powers on people without a legally binding agreement from them of some sort.
Preferably in writing, of course. Interestingly, you can get away with a purely verbal agreement, but it's apparently very open to interpretation from the judge and slash or jury whether it counts. The more you know.
In the end, you arrange for the pair of sisters to make their way downstairs into the little underground market space below the Raveyard, forcing them to try and figure out where the accessway towards the basement is, then take it to get out.
Without so much as budging from where you're currently making out with Cherie, who as usual hangs out around the club you have her watch over on the regular. All in a day's work, you'd say, though exactly why Amy is going around trying to abduct some random chick is still beyond you.
Then again, maybe she's just looking to get some practice in, in case you go and vamp her later on? You could ask, but you're not quite sure you're that invested in finding out…
You await the pair outside the Raveyard proper, in one of the many alleys surrounding it after the mild reconstruction you did at some point in this area; most of it is the same warehouses and administrative buildings there used to be, if in better condition, but the resulting topography did allow you to put a few nice little hidden entrances around the place, when you built your very own nightclub.
So it is that you're right in front of the grate set into the ground when it opens up, allowing a surprised Amy and a sheepish Vicky to see you leaning against the wall opposite from one of the discrete entrances you built to make the basement more accessible to those in the know, smiling at them. "Heya there. Leaving the party already?"
"Hahaha, you know how it is, Amy isn't much of a party girl," Vicky tries to, badly, direct the conversation. "Can't keep her up past her bedtime too long."
"Mhm. And I suppose the girl in the suitcase has nothing to do with that?"
"Dang." Looking back at Amy, Vicky shrugs. "I tried."
"Look, I'm not about to make a stink about you two developing a sudden interest in human trafficking, but-"
""It's not trafficking!"" Both of them assert in unison, only for Vicky to halt. "It isn't, right?"
"It's not. It's technically a sex thing, she's in there consensually and all," Amy claims, rolling her eyes. "Were you spying on us?"
"I can literally hear her heart pumping and I'm sensing living beings in general. I can't exactly not be aware when you pull something like this," you wave her off. "Now fess up, what's this whole thing about?"
"…" For a moment, it looks an awful lot like Amy's about to pout like a kid, her freckled nose scrunching up as she crosses her arms. "It's a deal I made with her. I changed her body and she has to decide whether she wants to keep it like this in the morning. So I can't just leave her to run around unsupervised."
"And that translates to making your sister carry her in a crate how?" You ask, grinning at just how cutely absurd this whole situation is.
"She'd wander off and be gangbanged by whatever guys are in sight the moment I'd take my eyes off her. The modifications to her body worked out too well, in hindsight, but I don't want to undo all the progress I made with her."
"So you're just, what, going to keep her in a suitcase until morning?"
"…Noooo?"
She totally was going to.
"Yeah, that's not okay, sis," Vicky says, raising the drink she's been holding in the hand not carrying the subject of the conversation until now. It's a CrypDrink, as the labeling on the paper cup says, the kind of which you can get in vending machines and the snack bar in the Raveyard's basement. Kind of a test drive so far, feedback has been okay about them last time you checked. It's really just a fizzy soft drink, but with some sugar substitutes that are actually something approaching to healthy. "Pretty sure that's a human rights violation at that point."
Hah. Human rights. Man, she makes some hilarious jokes sometimes.
"Fine! We'll release her in a safe environment. And then get back to making sure she makes the right life choices. Happy now?"
"That sounds kind of coercive, Amy. Are you sure this isn't a human trafficking thing?" Vicky raises a good point, there.