Earning Her Stripes

Part Fifteen: Agreements and Confrontations

[A/N: This chapter commissioned by Fizzfaldt and beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]

Taylor

The car ride home was quiet and introspective on both sides. Taylor didn't know what thoughts were going through her father's head, but she had enough of her own to worry about, given that her rash actions had come close to killing him, and had nearly wrecked the pickup. Was it wrong that she barely even considered the latter as a problem? If Dad hadn't been there and I'd been hit … would I have cared, or just kept going?

That was something to worry about. Just because I can wreck something, doesn't mean I should. Winslow being a prime example.

Not that she was about to regret the destruction of the school. Certainly, it had been a mostly impulsive act, but as far as she was concerned, it was entirely justified. If they'd wanted her to not destroy it, then they shouldn't have let people bully her in it to the point that she got powers.

Anyway, I didn't wreck it. It was in perfectly good condition until I let it go. Not my fault it couldn't stick the landing.

Just for a moment, she wished she could've seen Principal Blackwell's face when she saw the news. Or better yet, when she saw the rubble first-hand. Fuck her and the power trip she rode in on.

"Taylor?"

Jolted out of her reverie, she looked around. "Yeah, Dad?"

"I'm thinking perhaps it might not be a bad idea for us to work out some rules for you to follow when you do go out as a cape."

She blinked and stared at him, wondering how he'd managed to read her mind. For some reason, she'd assumed he was thinking 'Dad' thoughts, to do with paying bills and other boring adult business. Apparently not.

"Rules?" she asked cautiously. "What sort of rules?"

When she didn't shut him down entirely, he seemed to relax a little. "Well, basic ones, such as not breaking things that really don't need to be broken, like buildings. Oh, and cars, too. Throwing cars might be a superhero trope, but every car belongs to someone and it might be their sole means of getting to work. And also being careful when you're dealing with people. They're a lot more breakable than cars and buildings, even if they're bad guys."

That all seemed fairly straightforward. "Well, I wasn't about to go on a roaring rampage of destruction," she pointed out. "Or go around to Emma's house and punch her in the face."

"Good, good," he said agreeably. "Glad to see that's still the plan. Or not the plan, as the case may be."

"It's still a little bit annoying that Principal Blackwell's version of events says that I wasn't even locked in the locker." She thumped her head against the headrest. "It makes me look stupid, and might even weaken the lawsuit if their lawyer leans on it hard enough. That's why I wanted to talk to Blockade and get his side of things. I mean, if he fronts up and says, 'your honour, that locker was definitely locked when I tore it open', they've gotta pay attention, right?"

"Well, I know I'd pay attention if some guy in an eight-foot-tall power-suit testified to that sort of thing," Danny agreed. "It wasn't a bad plan. Your execution needed refining, was all."

She rolled her eyes. "I already said I was sorry for running out into traffic and nearly wrecking that guy's pickup."

"You did," agreed Danny. "But saying sorry to me doesn't pay for the thousands of dollars' worth of panel damage. Now, his insurance will probably cover it, especially as he wasn't breaking the road rules as far as I can tell. But he's still got to pay the excess, which is probably going to knock his finances around. Bottom line: you didn't totally wreck his life, but he is going to be affected by this for some time to come. If we can manage to avoid this as much as possible in future, that'll be a good thing."

Taylor thought about that. He was making some reasonable points, and he wasn't saying anything she could actually argue with. "I was half expecting you to say I needed to mow lawns or something until I'd earned the money to pay him back," she confessed.

"I could have led with that," he agreed. "But you're mature for your age, and you've acknowledged where you went wrong. Forcing you to perform punitive chores over and above the grounding wouldn't actually fix anything, and it would risk outing you as a parahuman. I'd prefer not to go down that road, thanks."

"Well, I'll definitely try not to do it again," she assured him.

He smiled. "I'd appreciate that. I don't have all that much hair left, and it can only take so much stress. However ..." He paused for a moment. "Have you thought about joining the Wards? Just as a suggestion?"

She took a deep breath and reminded herself that he had her welfare in mind, that it wasn't an attempt to shirk his responsibilities as a father. Also, he'd phrased it as a suggestion, not an ultimatum.

"Two reasons why not," she said. "First, once they did power testing and figured out that yes, it was me who improved Winslow's overall look considerably, they'd have us both over a barrel. I'm suspecting they'd take away all option for me to leave the Wards until they were done with me, or alternatively hit you with legal penalties until you agreed to sign me into the program for the foreseeable future. Also, I'm pretty sure that would sink the lawsuit for good."

He pursed his lips as he drove, tilting his head in a thoughtful manner. "That's a very good reason. What was your second one?"

She shrugged. "I just got out of one high school drama-filled hellhole. Going to Arcadia, I'm likely to encounter another, if not as horrific. Why would I voluntarily expose myself to a third one, this one with powers attached?"

"Ah. Good point." He nodded in agreement. "Wards, off the table. Understood."

"Good." She leaned back in her seat. "Thanks for being understanding."

"Hey," he said lightly. "I might not be the greatest dad in the world, but I'll always try to be there for you."

Closing her eyes, she smiled. "I know."

An Inner-City Park

Firebird

"What the hell?" Still costumed up, as were Emma and Madison, Sophia glared at the both of them. "Why'd you wrap up the patrol?" She took a step closer to Emma, fists clenched. "Is this more bullshit about how you're the team leader now, so you get to give us stupid orders whenever you want?"

Emma knew damn well that trying to tell Sophia to calm down would invariably have the exact opposite result, so she did no such thing. Glancing around, she decided that the inevitable rubberneckers were too far away to hear what they were saying. Might as well just say it.

"Shadow Stalker," she said formally, "Blockade and I are concerned about you. We want to talk to you about things you've been doing and saying. Can we maybe go back to Blockade's workshop so we can chat out of costume?"

At that moment, she felt most strongly the lack of a classic superhero base. Having a location they could gather out of costume to talk frankly about cape matters without worrying about eavesdroppers was always a good thing. The closest thing they had in that regard was the abandoned warehouse Madison was using for her Tinkering, and that was somewhat lacking in creature comforts, not to mention uncomfortably warm when she was doing her good-steel pours.

"Why bother de-costuming?" Sophia snarked. "Pick a rooftop, any rooftop."

"That's not a good option for me." Madison wasn't protesting; she was stating a fact. Putting the ball back in Sophia's court. It wasn't that she couldn't get her suit up onto any given rooftop. The jump jets would see to that. The simple fact was, weighing in at four tons, she would be in danger of falling through any given rooftop, and they were all fully aware of it.

"Yeah?" Sophia gave the suit a derisive look. "Seems to me that's a 'you' problem, not a 'me' problem. If you could pull your head out of your butt long enough to build something lightweight, you wouldn't have this issue."

The bulky suit took a step forward. "You know that's not how my power works. Why are you being so difficult?"

Sophia twitched her head as though she were rolling her eyes behind the hockey mask. "Why are you being such pissy little snowflakes? You wanted to talk to me about Hebert, right?"

Emma looked around again. Their audience was still keeping its distance, but she couldn't guarantee that there weren't any high-tech microphones or Thinker powers being directed at them. "Her, yes," she conceded.

Sophia shrugged. "Then there's nothing to talk about. She's going down. We all know she's going down. You two weak sisters can wimp out all you like, but it's gonna happen."

"Okay, can we just take a step back here?" asked Madison. "Why? What's the endgame? What do you get out of this? What's the payoff?"

Sophia gave Madison's suit a look, her head-tilt expressing the puzzled surprise that Emma just knew Sophia was showing on her face. "Not sure what you're asking there, short stuff. I just told you what the payoff is. Hebert's going down."

"Yes, but why?" Emma tried to make the question sound as reasonable as possible. "What's the point?"

The expression Emma could see through the hockey mask now that Sophia was looking at her was reminiscent of a fifth grader trying to understand quantum theory; the words were all there, but she couldn't understand the order they'd been placed in. "What do you mean, why? The point of all this has always been to fuck with Hebert. But now she's happy, and she's got good powers, and she doesn't deserve any of that shit."

"But why doesn't she deserve it?" Madison was somehow able to tune her modulator to match Emma's reasonable tone. "We don't lose anything from it. We could just walk away. Be heroes. Leave her be."

"She doesn't deserve it, because she's Hebert," insisted Sophia, as though explaining how two plus two inevitably equalled four. "She deserves to be down in the dirt. We had her there. But we took our eye off the ball, and she got up again. She's pretending she's got a right to walk around with her head in the air, like she's better than everyone. She's acting like she deserves to have powers. Well, somebody needs to show her just how wrong she is, and that somebody is me."

This was getting nowhere. "You're too close to this," Emma said. "You're treating it like a zero-sum game, like her winning equals you losing. What if it wasn't like that? What if her success didn't affect you?"

Sophia shook her head. "You're not making any sense. Hebert is a loser. We're winners. We're strong. The strong belong on top. The weak deserve to be kept down. I thought I taught you that."

Emma hid a grimace as she remembered acting on those very words. Why did I even take that seriously? There was no way she would consider acting like that now.

"Bullshit." Fortunately, Madison had her exterior speakers turned to the lowest volume. "We're heroes. Heroes help everyone." She left the rest of it unspoken, but Emma heard it just fine: The ones who push people down are the villains.

It seemed Sophia had also heard the subtext, because she tilted her head slightly. "You really think we should back off on Hebert?"

Emma nodded, feeling a surge of hope. Holy shit, she's actually listening. "I really do. In fact, I think we should reconsider the whole thing. I mean, what's she ever done to us?"

"Also, if that power we saw was any indication, she's strong," Madison added helpfully. "Not weak at all. That makes her one of us instead of one of them, right?"

"… huh." Sophia rubbed her chin under the hockey mask. "Maybe we can back off for a bit until I've got this figured out." She raised a finger. "But she's not off the hook, not yet."

"That's all I ask." Emma let out her breath in a silent sigh of relief. It wasn't much, but it was a start. "Just think it over, okay?"

"I can do that." Sophia glanced from Madison to Emma and back again. "Still, we haven't kicked any ass today yet. How about we go find a Merchant drug den or something? I want to fuck up some deserving asshole's day."

"I can do one better than that." Madison sounded pleased with herself. "Pretty sure the Empire's going to be holding a dog-fighting ring tonight, somewhere. I'm thinking we find a foot-soldier and shake him down until he gives with the deets, then crash the party."

Sophia grinned. "Perfect."

As they prepared to leave the park, Emma looked up at the powersuit's glowing eyes and raised her eyebrows in silent query. Do you think that went well?

In response, the massive metal shoulders shifted up and down in a shrug. I dunno. Wait and see.

Sophia was their friend. They owed her that much.

Armsmaster

Colin looked up from the latest iteration of his halberd as the screen over the workbench dinged with an incoming alert. He selected the ACCEPT option from his helmet HUD and leaned over the halberd again. "Yes?"

"Armsmaster, this is Lieutenant Harris. You asked to be copied in on any other incidents similar to the 'woman of stone' situation with Uber and Leet?"

"Yes, yes, I did. You have something?" He put the micro-probe down and straightened up to face the screen. The halberd could wait.

"We do. About thirty minutes ago, a woman and a man stepped into traffic in the Downtown area, right in front of a pickup truck. The driver was unable to avoid a collision. He hit the man square on, and the woman took a glancing blow."

"And the result?" Colin saw images incoming to his helmet, and blinked to accept them.

"The man bounced off his fender like a rubber ball, but the woman destroyed the panelling all the way down the side of the truck. It's like he scraped it past a telephone pole. What witness statements we have indicate that the woman didn't move at all."

"That fits, yes. Do we have any actual descriptions of the people involved?" Unconsciously, he leaned forward as he listened for the reply from the PRT officer on the screen. The photos opened up in his HUD, showing the wreckage of the side panels.

"Just a petite woman or a tall girl, and a taller man. They left the scene before anyone could get a name, or even take a picture. The driver said she had dark hair and was wearing white from head to toe, but none of the CCTV images we've been able to gather show anyone with that colour combination."

Colin thought back to the previous incident. That girl had been wearing white, too. The chances of it being the same one were getting better all the time. "Thank you anyway. Send me the final report, please. I'd appreciate it."

"Roger that, sir. Harris, out." The screen went blank again.

Thoughtfully, Colin put the images up on the screen and began to study them in detail. There was minimal damage shown to the pickup's fender, where the man had reportedly bounced off it, but Harris hadn't been overly exaggerating when he said the side-panels had been destroyed. Some had been torn off altogether, while others were just horribly bent inward. Even the wing-mirror had been ripped off and lay some distance behind the point where the pickup had stopped. That's probably where she was standing.

He went over the footage that had also been sent through but as Harris had noted, there were no girls in white showing up on it. There were a few with dark hair, and some tall men, but no white clothing in evidence.

Activating a second screen, he roughed out a 3D model of the street, then activated a program designed to place the various elements on it to recreate the scene. While he was working out the viewpoints shown by the various CCTV cameras, the first screen dinged again with a notification.

A witness has placed Blockade of The Real Thing almost directly across the road at the time of the incident – Harris.

That was definitely something. Leaving the computer to work out the final placement of the cameras, he called up the number Firebird had supplied as a contact. There was none for Blockade or even Shadow Stalker, but it would do for the moment.

Let's see what we have with this.

Firebird

The bulk and heft of the Blockade armour might have made it difficult for Madison to get it into buildings with low ceilings, or onto rooftops, but it was tailor-made for intimidating the absolute fuck out of gangland lowlives. Emma knew the classic trope involved dangling them off rooftops until they spilled their guts, but some of these guys weighed a lot more than she did, and she didn't want to be faced with the choice of letting go or falling with them. She didn't want to accidentally kill them, after all.

Sophia had actually suggested something of the sort, only with two of them holding the guy, but somehow Emma suspected that wouldn't be nearly as scary. However, when Madison gripped the asshole's ankles with one metallic hand and hoisted him up until his head was dangling a good six feet off the grimy asphalt of the alleyway, he hastened to talk. Emma personally suspected it was the glowing red eyes and the robotic tone Madison affected that really loosened his tongue.

The location and time of the upcoming dogfight were just two of the details that they got from the babbling mook. Emma took note of the rest, because it was all useful data, but they could only deal with one thing at a time. After he ran dry, Madison began to lower him to the ground. Out of the corner of her eye, Emma noticed Sophia loading her crossbow.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" she hissed, moving so the guy wouldn't see what her teammate was up to. "He answered our questions!"

"And now he'll run straight to Kaiser and tell him what's going on!" Sophia whispered back. "I'll just nail him to the wall for a few hours."

"And the next guy'll refuse to talk to us altogether." Emma couldn't believe Sophia didn't get this. "Anyway, he won't say a word."

Sophia rolled her eyes. "And you know this how?"

Emma waited until fading footsteps heralded the exit of their interrogation target. "Because what idiot goes to the boss and says he's just spilled the beans on everything he knows about? Trust me; he saw nothing, he heard nothing, he said nothing. If he admits to speaking to us, he's dead."

The crossbow went away again, but Sophia gave Emma a dirty look. "I sure hope you're right about this. If we show up at that dogfight and find the whole Empire Eighty-Eight cape lineup waiting on us, it's gonna suck giant stinky elephant balls."

"Don't worry, Shadow Stalker," Madison jibed. "I'll protect you from those mean old Empire Eighty-Eight capes."

Just as Sophia gave the looming powersuit the finger, Emma's phone rang. "Hang on, I've got to take this." Stepping away from the other two, she pulled out her burner phone and looked at the number. It wasn't familiar to her, but she swiped the accept icon anyway. "Hello?"

"Hello, Firebird." She recognised the voice at once. "Do you have a moment to talk?"

"Armsmaster, hi," she replied, raising her voice slightly so her teammates could hear. "Sure. How can I help?"

"I was hoping to ask Blockade a few questions. There was a traffic accident on Leland Street about half an hour ago, and witness statements place him across the road at the time. Could you put him on?"

"We're currently out and about," Emma hedged, "but I can put the phone on speaker. One second." She tapped the appropriate icon, and gestured to Madison. "Blockade? It's for you."

"Blockade here," Madison said promptly. "What's the problem?"

"Did you witness a traffic accident on Leland Street half an hour ago? More specifically, did you happen to see who was involved?"

Sophia opened her mouth and Emma frowned, making a slashing cut-off motion with her free hand. She knew damn well what Sophia intended to say—Yeah, that was Taylor Hebert—and was quite willing to cut the call if she had to.

Madison, however, forestalled the danger by reaching down and wrapping her entire hand around Sophia's head, gagging her quite effectively. "Yes, I was in that location," she said as though nothing untoward were happening. "However, I was looking in a different direction when it happened. By the time I realised what was going on, I couldn't see who had caused it. The driver's airbags had functioned adequately and he was entirely unharmed, so I chose not to make a nuisance out of myself by blocking traffic."

There was a pause at the other end. "Ahh. Understood. Well, thank you for that."

Emma watched with mild bemusement as a wildly struggling Sophia went to smoke form and back again without managing to free herself. "Was there anything else we could help you with, Armsmaster?"

"No, that's it for the time being," he said with barely concealed disappointment. "Thank you for your time."

"You're welcome." She cut the call.

As Emma was putting her phone away, Madison released Sophia. "What the fuck?" blazed the ex-vigilante. "What did you do to your suit?"

"What do you mean, what did I do to it?" Madison managed to sound almost affronted. "My suit is working entirely within specs."

"I mean, I couldn't ghost through it!" Sophia glared at Madison, as though trying (and failing) to figure out how to kick the ass of an eight-foot-tall human-piloted robot. "How did you do that?"

"It's made from good steel," Madison explained patiently. "It doesn't let anything pass through it. I formulated it better than that."

"Steel doesn't work like that!" It was a screech of righteous outrage.

"Well, no. Steel doesn't. But good steel does." Madison's tone was as matter-of-fact as someone explaining that things fall down, water makes things wet, and the sky is occasionally blue.

"Argh!" Sophia kicked out at a stray tin can lying inoffensively nearby. It clattered and banged as it bounced off down the alleyway. "Tinkertech is such fucking bullshit!"

"No argument there." Emma made sure not to so much as crack a smile, no matter how funny she found it. "But how about we go after the Empire instead of each other?"

It was precisely the right thing to say. Sophia cracked her knuckles. "Let's fuckin' do that."

"Let's go kick ass and take names."

"Names?" asked Emma rhetorically. "Who needs their names?"

End of Part Fifteen