Friday, January 28th, 2011
Somewhere in the Docks, Brockton Bay
One of the unfortunate side effects of having three mostly non-functional people as teammates, was that Lisa often found herself doing groceries. Rachel couldn't do them, because she was a known criminal - her name and identity were a matter of public record. Alec could do the groceries, but chose not to - because he was perfectly content to just eat pizza for every meal. Also, he knew that if he chose not to do them long enough, that Lisa would. Greg, might be able to manage the groceries, but for a combination of minor problems made that prospect untenable. For one, the blond boys body was visibly uncanny when looked at too closely. He could wear clothes that would mitigate that, but combined with the fact that he had a tendency to habitually trail after people with body parts he was interested in, and you ended up with someone distinctly unsettling to the general public.
Hence, why she was angrily trying to drag half her weight in pizza pockets and soda cans up the stairs of the Undersiders hideout.
"Alec! Greg! Why aren't either of you two idiots coming to help me right now?!" She yelled up the stairs in annoyance. It wasn't like she was weak, but this many bags were inherently unwieldy.
Also, being part of a supervillain team shouldn't include this much babysitting.
Television volume in loft increasing.
Alec pretending not to hear me.
Greg unlikely to be present - likely healing in room.
'Thank you power, very helpful.' She thought irately, while also carefully tamping down on her power so that she wouldn't be immediately bombarded by much more information than she really wanted the second she opened the door. She couldn't really turn her power off. She could limit it, but such was an effort of will that she typically couldn't maintain while doing anything particularly focus intensive.
When she finally made it to the top of the stairs, she didn't bother to put her bags down to, choosing instead to merely nudge the door open with her knee. The door, of course, was supposed to be locked, but Rachel never bothered to do so, and Alec never locked it behind her when she left. Once she had stepped inside, she marched across the small intervening distance to the couch - and promptly dumped all of her bags in Alec's lap, ignoring the squawk of protest he let out as she blocked his view of the television behind her.
"Aw come on! I was gonna win!" Alec complained petulantly, before immediately switching to pawing through the bags she had dropped on him in order to extract a drink for himself.
"I'm sure. Where's Greg?" She said, stepping away from the lanky teen to look around. Alec and Greg were... she wouldn't describe them as friends because that implied a level of attachment she wasn't sure Alec was actually capable of. But they got along better than any two other members of the team, if only because they shared an interest. That interest, of course, being video games.
The fact that neither of them was particularly good at said games, while simultaneously claiming to be the exact opposite was not lost on her.
"Eh, pussied out forty minutes ago. You know how it is." Alec said with a shrug, poking continuing to poke about in the bags on his lap and withdrawing a box of pizza pockets, wrinkling his nose at it in disgust.
"No bacon? Do you even know me?" He whined, throwing the box behind the couch.
"Pick that up. And put the rest of this away." Lisa told him absentmindedly, checking the time. She wasn't worried about Alec choosing to simply let the food rot. He was a brat, not an idiot. And even that was mostly an act he put up in the absence of any other response to things.
'Brian will be here soon...' She mused to herself, considering her options, and then walking over to Greg's room with a resigned sigh. She didn't hate the boy. She actually quite liked him in a very general sense. He was well meaning, kind hearted, and so obscenely open about everything he thought and felt that her power rarely felt the need to chime in on anything he was doing, provided she had it clamped down to the bare minimum.
The problem was, that when her power did decide to provide her with anything on Greg, it was usually highly depressing.
Like right now.
"Greg? Can I come in?" She asked, knocking on the door to his room and waiting.
"Yeah, I'm good. Not uh, naked or anything!" He yelled out weakly.
Only one lung.
Want's to ensure I don't think he's mast-
'Yeah, I got that. Thanks.' She forged onward, opening the door and stepping inside. The room was sparse. Basically completely lacking in any personalization or decorations - ostensibly because Greg insisted that the situation was temporary. He was under the dubious impression that once Coil was handled - a prospect that looked like it was getting further and further away with each day - that the Undersiders could just pick up and join Nexus' team instead of being criminals. The fact that most of them were villains by choice, and that - from what Lisa could tell anyway - Nexus positively despised people who lacked loyalty, didn't seem to register with him, even when she had taken a day out to explain it in full. For all Greg was acutely aware of how unforgiving and shitty people were, his belief in Taylor Hebert was as unwavering as it was mildly unsettling. The one time Lisa had personally encountered the girl her power had promptly told her that she was one bad day away from being a Slaughter House Nine candidate and that she should keep her mouth shut if she wanted to survive the night.
And that was saying quite a lot considering she was already well on her way to an early grave at the time.
Greg sat in the middle of the room, in a pair of jeans and nothing else, atop a pile of paper towels he had carefully placed in the center of the room to absorb all the blood currently leaking out of him. Every few seconds, a different part of him would shift, becoming wounded, while another part would revert to a pristine state, presumably miming Alec's current physical state of being given Greg's range. The boy himself seemed completely unbothered by this, deftly paging through a textbook on biology he had asked her to get for him, held in his lap at a distance that would prevent blood splatter.
Lisa had to resist the urge to scowl at the behaviour, instead merely reaching into her purse and throwing a bottle of painkillers at the blond idiot.
"You know, Nexus does Hospital runs now. Doesn't even check the patients, just does a whole floor at once. If we got you in at the right time-" She started.
"No- it's fine. I gotta do this." Greg answered resolutely, lifting his gaze from his book to smile boyishly at her. Greg wasn't really what she would consider attractive. As a point of fact, she didn't really find anyone attractive. She could objectively determine how attractive other people might find them, but she herself was largely ambivalent.
Thinks he loves me. Unhealthy dependence on my opinion. Knows I don't love him back.
She deliberately didn't flinch at that, not allowing her expression to change in response to the information that her power chose to throw at her basically every time she interacted with Greg.
"You really, really don't." She answered flatly, eyeing his constantly shifting form with a grimace. An unfortunate side effect of Greg's trigger event was that whenever he turned his powers 'off' he would revert to how he was when he got them - namely, dying. This meant that, for all intents and purposes, Greg couldn't really use his own body for much of anything. He was entirely reliant on his power for survival. At some point he had worked out how to only shift certain parts of him back to normal though, and had taken to doing so for hours at a time in order to allow them to heal. It had made him disturbingly good at tolerating pain, and made him entirely too blase about his own injuries for Lisa's tastes.
"'Course I do. It's the hero's journey. Besides, once I'm healed everyone will see my true power!" He declared lamely, standing up too fast and ending up subsequently coughing up lungfuls of blood as he did so.
Considers pain a form of atonement for past wrongs. Believes Nexus will forgive him if he can show he earned it.
Lisa could feel her fingernails digging into her palms just watching him. When she had first found him, he had definitely been a few days away from just killing himself. She had wanted to prevent that. She just didn't want his continued will to live to be pinned entirely on her and her self appointed mission to rid the world of her boss.
"Are you going to be okay?" She asked, although she already knew the answer.
"...ah... man that tastes terrible... yeah I'm good." He answered her easily, scratching idly at his chest as he straightened.
"Wanna help me put away the groceries?" She asked, positively despising herself for the suddenly interested and happy expression Greg shot her at the offer.
She wasn't using him. This wasn't using him. He already knew how she felt about him. She had told him from the first day that it wouldn't happen.
So why did she keep finding stupid reasons to be around Greg, when she knew it was probably for the best if they just didn't interact?
"Sure!" He said eagerly, flickering to a healthy state and then gingerly stepping over the pile of reddening paper towels towards his dresser.
An hour later found all the Undersiders seated in what passed for their living room, around a pile of nacho's Greg had made. Mostly because they were the only food he really knew how to cook that anyone else would eat.
"So, let me get this straight. The boss wants us to do the good old 'take over the news station' routine? Do people actually do that? Is that a real thing?" Alec asked incredulously.
"No. There's no point most of the time." Lisa conceded with a shrug. "But he's willing to pay us ten grand each and all we have to do is get in, be pests on the evening news for ten minutes, and get out. Should be easy." She posited, surreptitiously glancing at Brian who was looking at her with a worried expression on his face.
"Except Nexus can get anywhere in the city in less than a minute, and none of us have a way of stopping her if she shows up." Brian pointed out.
"We can take her." Rachel growled, arms crossed belligerently in front of her.
"We absolutely can not." Brian answered irately.
"I mean, if Jigsaw boy turns into whatever her imaginary friend is this week, maybe we can confuse her long enough to get away?" Alec offered thoughtfully.
Nexus considers Projection a real person. Entire worldview centred around Projection - likely to respond to tampering lethally.
"No, she'd probably kill him. If Nexus does show up, just don't screw with her Projection and you'll be fine." Lisa put forth, ignoring Greg's scandalized look at her blunt statement.
"I thought she was on the up and up - no killing." Brian asked quickly. As their leader, the presence of an unstoppable Brute who could cripple you from a thirty yards away without visible effort had been something of a sore point for Brian. He had kept her up for many nights trying to work out contingency plans for if the Bay's newest powerhouse showed up.
Most of those plan's consisted of running and praying.
"It's part of her trigger. That interview she gave a while ago makes me think she's a lot more stable than the last time we met, but all bets are off if you mess with her 'friend'." Lisa explained. To her annoyance, Greg seemed mollified by that, as though the use of the word 'friend' somehow made the behaviour sensible.
"Besides!" She added after a second, perking up cheerfully. "The Boss says he's got a distraction ready so we won't have to deal with her. At worst we get one or two Wards on sight. They're so busy recovering from the Empire that they won't be able to respond properly if we do this right."
"We'd still be outing a Ward on television Tats. We can't take that kind of heat." Brian countered.
"Technically, she's not a Ward anymore. And we won't be outing her - just explaining that Predator and Shadow Stalker are the same person, and that Shadow Stalker totally made Nexus trigger. Heck, we'd be doing her a favour. Right now the PRT is turning a blind eye to Stalker and her bullshit. If the city knows she's got bad blood with Nexus, things are going to get alot harder for her and that friend of hers." Lisa replied. She had already figured that the real reason for this little charade was to put Predator and her partner on a collision course with Nexus, handily dealing with the both of them. She couldn't even fault his logic this time. No one had ever actually seen Junior Hatchetface, but her existence was a matter of public record at this point with the way she had taken out Kaiser and the twins. That kind of power negation was a nightmare for Thinker's like her. She was either a completely baseline human or - ostensibly worse in many cases - so overwhelmed by her power that she was basically stuck in one prolonged seizure. She shuddered to think of the kind of damage she might have suffered if Greg didn't conveniently call Nexus that night.
"So?" She prompted when no one immediately answered her.
"Eh, I'm in. Ten grand for ten minutes of work is a steal." Alec said easily.
"I'll go." Rachel said simply.
"I mean... if Shadow Stalker really is Sophia..." Greg muttered, his eyes going hard before he nodded once at her.
"Well? Looks like the I's have it." She said cheekily, turning a smile she didn't feel towards Brian.
"...Fine. What's the plan?" The larger boy said, not managing to hide his frustration, causing her normal smile to stretch into it's much less pleasant vulpine configuration.
'One step closer to freedom.' She thought as she began to lay out her plan.