Sitting in her father's study, Taylor looked through the window into the back yard, a light dusting of snow lying on the ground and more coming down steadily. Winter in the Bay was usually fairly mild as far as temperature went compared to a lot of the state, due to proximity to a large body of shallowish water, but that same body of water tended to mean they got a lot of rain. And in the winter, snow. As it was still only early November there wasn't much built up yet, in fact this current flurry was slightly out of the ordinary since they normally didn't get the first snowfall until a couple of weeks later, but it seemed to intend to keep coming for a while.
She rather liked this time of year, the crisp temperatures bracing rather than really cold yet, and on a day like this where it was flat calm, you could go out and walk around without freezing your ass off. By the time January rolled around, though, it could get pretty unpleasant with winter storms and high winds making the streets less than fun to navigate.
A beep from beside her made her turn her head to look at her dad's computer, the screen showing that the latest recordings had been downloaded. Moving the mouse she clicked a few times, copying them to the right directory, then backing them up as well onto the USB hard drive plugged into the back of the machine, before she deleted them from the audio recorders. After that she unplugged both to put on charge in her room, for now slipping them into her pocket.
Moving over to the chair next to the window, on the other side of the room, she curled up in it and went back to watching the snow fall while thinking about life, the universe, and Papa. Or at least his journals, one of which she was holding absently as she pondered the things she'd learned so far. A squirrel ran along the branch of the big oak tree in the garden, pausing to look around as she tracked it with her eyes while smiling a little, then leaped towards the fence and vanished over it.
Shaking her head she opened the journal and found her place, reading with interest the next entries. As she deciphered the text, by now very familiar with Papa's writing and his idiosyncratic way of expressing his thoughts and ideas, she reflected that if nothing else this was improving her ability with German. It would have pleased her mother, and probably amused her as well, she thought.
"Ah…" she breathed, finding another small part of one of the things she'd been wondering about, that being just how her ancestor had made his crystals. The information was, like many of his ideas, scattered around the journals in a not entirely logical fashion, as if he'd sometimes just randomly thought of something and noted it down. She was fairly certain that was literally the case, in fact, as the old man while in his own way brilliant was also clearly in other ways a bit of a twit. Or at least somewhat scatterbrained at times, based on his documents.
Probably got distracted thinking of women, she mused with a small grin. He was definitely more than a touch fond of the opposite sex, and from what she'd read, assuming he wasn't exaggerating, this had been reciprocated rather more assiduously than one would have expected from the age differences he'd noted here and there. It wasn't something she was sure she should consider good, but the old goat had certainly had something going for him and in some ways she couldn't help but admire that.
Even though in person she'd probably find it infuriating, she thought with another smirk.
Putting the journal down she retrieved her notebook from her dad's desk, along with a pen, and added some notes to her own documentation, referring to the journal a few times. She was slowly but surely working out a plausible method to recreate Papa's work, allowing her to make her own gnurr-pfeife resonator crystals. He'd left quite a collection of the things, there were several dozen of them in the cache of his stuff, but she wanted to be able to replace them if they broke. Not to mention that she'd had some interesting ideas about modifying the design, which if she was right could produce some really neat effects even compared to what they already did. The last couple of months had taught her a lot of how his technology worked, even though it went against most of the science she'd been taught.
But you couldn't argue against success by claiming it was impossible, when it clearly wasn't. There were two warehouses a few miles away that had been nibbled to pieces that proved that pretty well.
Taylor still didn't quite know why she found all this so… not easy as such, but plausible and learnable… when she suspected a lot of people wouldn't, but she did seem to have something of a talent for making sense of the writings of a crazy self-taught inventor from decades ago. Which was something she was both pleased as punch about and very much enjoying.
Her father wasn't quite as enthused, it had to be said, but he was going along with it happily enough, something she was also pleased about. Since that awful day when her flute had been stolen, her relationship with her sole surviving parent had improved by leaps and bounds.
Who'd have thought that actually talking a problem out would help?
She snorted to herself, shaking her head. Madness, it was, sheer madness. Actual communication. So crazy it actually worked.
Giggling under her breath and wishing she'd managed to open up to him months earlier, she wrote down some more ideas and sketched a little diagram of a possible crystal growing device. It looked possible to make out of fairly normal plumbing parts, which from his notes she suspected Papa had used as well. Very little of his work seemed to have been done with anything approaching high tech, even from the fifties and sixties, although his skill with mechanical construction was blatantly far higher than most people possessed.
Presumably working in a Swiss clock-making factory was at least one reason for that. Some of the things she'd pulled out of his box of bits and pieces were incredibly complex and delicate. And well beyond her ability to even get close to duplicating, she knew that beyond doubt. But then he'd had at least seventy years more practice than she had, so she wasn't at all put out about it.
Her skills were up to the jobs she'd taken on for now, so all was good. As time passed she'd learn more.
Finishing with her note-taking, she read over what she'd written, nodded to herself, and closed the notebook. For now that would do. Her father would be home soon and she needed to do the dishes for dinner. So she got up and headed towards the kitchen as the snow kept falling, whistling softly and in a good mood despite the tedium of the day she'd had at school.
The girl absently wondered if it would be possible to make a gnurr-pfeife that you could whistle through while she loaded the dishwasher, filled it with detergent, and managed to persuade the rather elderly and sometimes recalcitrant appliance that yes, it did want to work this time. It took a couple of carefully calibrated thumps with the heel of her hand in the right place along with a good kick but it finally decided to leap into action.
Putting some water on to boil, she rummaged through the cupboard looking for teabags, eventually locating the box. Making a note on the small whiteboard on the door of the fridge that they needed more since it was nearly empty, she made herself a cup of tea, then sat at the kitchen table to drink it and think. The low whooshing sound of the dishwasher filled the silence as she sat with her chin in her hand staring out the window into the snow-filled early evening gloom, intermittently sipping from the tea.
A few minutes passed quietly, but in the end she finished the tea and put the cup down. Glancing at it, she turned her head to the dishwasher, smiled slightly, and put the cup into it from where she was sitting without opening the appliance. More than a little amused at her own self-taught skill, which was getting more effective the more she practiced, she dried her fingers on a cloth then jumped to her feet. As she was moving to put the cloth back on the counter-top where she'd taken it from, a thought struck her and she stopped dead, looking blankly at the fabric.
"Huh… I wonder if that would actually work?" she mumbled to herself, thinking very hard. It would certainly be cool if it did.
Experimentally, she did the little mental exercise required, and put the cloth into one of the drawers where such things lived, then pulled it out again. As she did, she carefully watched exactly what was actually happening when she casually caused normal physics to scream and hide, Little Anton's clever little trick bypassing normal space without effort. Repeating the exercise a number of times, she concentrated as hard as possible on examining the whole process from start to finish, her eyes oddly crossed.
It was fascinating, she mused. When she did the thing, it was almost like normal reality sort of… wavered. Like she was looking at a reflection on a still pond, focusing on the image shown there, then suddenly looking past it into the depths and realizing that there was far more below the surface, past the image that you normally saw and thought was all there was. And the more you looked, the more you saw. The effect was bizarre and disorientating although at the same time absolutely engrossing in a manner that defied easy explanation.
Peering around through this strange effect she found she could with fairly little effort 'focus' on different things, moving her viewpoint not only through the cupboard doors, but even through the walls and the house itself if she pushed hard enough. Although 'hard enough' wasn't really the most accurate description of what she was doing, since it didn't take much more effort, but required a lot more concentration of a type that was very different from anything else she could think of. Again, describing it even to herself was remarkably difficult. Doing it wasn't trivial, but it wasn't really amazingly hard either once you got the basic idea down. That had been the bit that needed a lot of practice.
Little Anton had clearly had a real talent for thinking around corners, she thought to herself, in a very literal way. Luckily, it seemed she probably did too…
Anyway, that aside, would she be able to put her own spin on the original concept? Although she admitted after a moment that perhaps Anton had also had the same idea but never mentioned it. Perhaps not. She was unlikely to ever know.
Shifting her attention from examining the world through a strange window, she returned her attention to her original idea. Carefully setting things up, she tried putting the cloth in her hand back into the drawer it came from. That, as she'd expected, worked, as her hand was now empty. Nodding to herself she reached and collected the cloth, rubbing her fingers on it and thinking for a few seconds. Then, very delicately, she tried again. But this time she didn't put the cloth into the drawer, she put it half-way into the drawer.
There was a sort of mental resistance for a second, which she almost instinctively figured out a way around, until things sort of clicked into position.
Taylor smiled as she let go of the effect and looked at her empty hand.
Walking over to the drawer she opened it and saw to her satisfaction that the cloth wasn't there either.
Feeling very pleased with herself, she concentrated again, reached out, and plucked the cloth into existence from where it had been, which was not anywhere in the normal three dimensions.
Then she jumped up and down in the middle of the kitchen laughing like an idiot for a few seconds, before trying again.
By the time her dad came home, she'd emptied half the contents of the cutlery drawer, some things out of the fridge, three saucepans, a pair of shoes, and a dozen eggs into a place that didn't exist outside her own imagination and the fuzzy quantum uncertainty that lay below normal reality.
Taylor felt very, very pleased with herself and could see some quite useful applications for her spin on Little Anton's technique...
"You made a hammerspace pocket," Danny said flatly as he gaped at his daughter, who was pulling things out of nowhere with the smuggest look he'd ever seen in his life on her face.
She nodded happily.
He ran a hand down his face and sighed heavily. "Only you. Papa, this is your fault. What next?"
"Hey, it's cool, right?" his daughter chirped, producing the frying pan and waving it around with a big grin.
"I will agree it's cool, yes," he allowed as he sat down and shook his head in wonder. "It's also probably technically impossible. Unless you're a Parahuman, which I'm pretty sure you are not."
"Nope. Definitely not a Parahuman," she replied, putting the pan down and making a can of soda appear. Popping the tab she took a drink from it, her eyes alight with amusement over the top of the thing. He sighed faintly, although now he was more or less over the initial shock, the distinct pride he felt towards her exploits came to the fore. She'd certainly taken the old man's writings and run with them.
"If the PRT ever find out about this they're going to crap themselves," he grumbled, accepting the second can out of nowhere which she handed him with a laugh. He opened it and took a long swig. "Thank you."
"No problem!" she said cheerfully. "Want me to show you how it's done?"
"Of course I do," he remarked, grinning back. "After dinner, though. It's been a long day and I'm starving."
An hour later they were sitting down eating spaghetti and meatballs, with a salad, and discussing their respective days. She had, by the sound of it, had the by-now standard steady bullying that made him want to strangle someone. Hopefully they would be ready to make a move and put a permanent end to it very soon, as he told her.
"Michelle has been getting everything in place to drop the school and everyone involved in the shit once we're certain we have everything we need to make it stick properly," he said as he reached for the grated parmesan again. "We've definitely got enough evidence that damn close to every teacher in that pestilential excuse for a school is at a minimum in serious breach of their contractual obligations to keep the students safe. Not only from outside threats but each other. You've done good work giving enough context on the recordings to prove that beyond doubt. Not only in your own case but for several other students too, which she thinks will help a lot as it proves a pattern of negligence, if not active conspiracy to cause distress."
Taylor nodded, her face showing how upset she was about the whole affair, but he was as always impressed by how well she was bearing up under the strain. He hated to think how it had been before she'd finally come clean and explained the truth, back when she'd been entirely alone in handling the entire fucking mess.
"What are we going to do when we start this?" she queried curiously.
He put the parmesan shaker down, leaned back, and considered his reply before speaking. "We've got several options. The nuclear one is to go straight to the media, which would bring a complete shitstorm down on the school and anyone even peripherally involved, like the board of education, but the downside of that is the publicity would be a nightmare for us, especially you. It's something to keep as a last resort, she and I both agree. We could go to Blackwell and threaten her with the recordings, along with everything else we could dig up, but that's probably also not the best solution as she'd likely try to pretend it was all your fault or something like that."
"Which she's already done more than once," his daughter grumbled. "Called me a troublemaker the last time I tried getting her to do something."
He reached out and put his hand on hers. "For which she'll pay, trust me," he told her quietly.
"I sure hope so," the girl said morosely. He patted her hand then leaned back again.
"Another option would be to take the recordings and talk to the parents. But… Alan has a protective streak a mile wide for his family, and he'd probably have a knee-jerk reaction to deny everything if we did that in the wrong way. You know what he's like." She nodded.
"He'd go all lawyer and shout, then make threats, and not believe us," she sighed.
"Probably. He's a good man at heart but just like I would, he'd prefer to believe his daughter was innocent. In my case I know it's true, of course." Danny smiled at her, getting a small smile back. "So if we do that, we have to do it very carefully, and I'm still trying to work out the best method. I don't know the Hess or Clements parents, so I don't know how they'd react, but 'badly' is more likely than otherwise I suspect."
"Yeah." She sighed again. "I still can't believe Emma turned on me like she did even after all this time. Sophia, yeah, she's just aggressive and horrible, but Emma was…" His daughter rubbed her eyes tiredly as he watched with concern and sympathy. "I wanted my friend back for so long but I finally realized that was never going to happen," she added in a small voice.
Both of them were silent for a few seconds, until Danny cleared his throat. "Anyway, to cut a long story short, we're still trying to work out the best method to get all our goals done with the minimum chance of failure, but Michelle is sure we'll come up with a good plan. She says to keep on collecting the recordings, and leave it with her."
"I guess I can't ask for more than that," Taylor replied after a moment or two. He nodded, both of them going back to eating until they'd finished the meal. Once everything was cleared away, they retired to the living room where she began showing him how she'd pulled off her latest trick, something he was very curious about.
Looking up at the sneering face of the girl she'd once been closer to than almost anyone on the planet, Taylor suppressed the urge to do something very violent. The urge became close to irresistible when Emma took the opportunity to kick her in the hip a lot harder than seemed reasonable. Wincing, she swallowed the first few words that came to mind, ones she had learned from listening to dock workers over the years, breathed out through her nose in a long silent exhalation, then glared at the smirking little shit.
"That's two, Emma," she said in an icy calm voice. A momentary desire to reach inside the fucking asshole and pull her spleen out, something she was fairly sure she could actually do now, came and went as she levered herself to her feet. Bending down she picked up her backpack, swung it onto her shoulder, and walked away with a slight limp as her hip throbbed. Behind her she heard Sophia laughing viciously and Madison giggling like the little sociopath she was.
"Bye, Taylor!" Emma called. "See you tomorrow! Sleep well!" Her voice was triumphant and malicious, causing Taylor to almost turn around before she forced the Hebert temper under control and kept going.
'I look forward to your downfall,' she thought with a sensation of vast irritation. 'It will be the stuff of legend.'
Hopefully that wasn't wishful thinking.
As she passed Mr Gladly, who was standing in the doorway of his classroom, he raised a hand, then let it drop when she met his eyes and silently demanded the reason he was so fucking useless. The man lowered his own gaze and turned away.
"Surprise, surprise," she muttered almost inaudibly, not even slightly shocked by his actions. He'd clearly seen and heard the entire thing, as had happened many times before, and for whatever reason didn't care enough to do his job. It no longer really affected her, as she'd utterly lost respect for the entire staff with one exception during her time here. Mrs Knott the computer teacher was at least sympathetic to her, but seemed unable to do anything much outside her own classroom.
Disgusted with the whole edifice Taylor stomped out the main door, heading for the exit to the street and the bus stop a little way along it. Other students surrounded her, although simultaneously leaving her in an isolated bubble, none of them really wanting to associate with her. Again, this was entirely normal in her experience. She'd reflected more than once that when even E88 junior gang members didn't feel like being in your presence there was definitely something badly wrong with your life, but that was how it seemed to work these days. Not that she in any way considered such people, or their ABB counterparts, any more desirable than they apparently considered her.
Getting onto the bus she found a seat near the back by the window and slumped into it, wincing when the bruise that was obviously developing on her hip made itself known. She rubbed the spot and growled under her breath, feeling righteously aggrieved at the little red-headed shit's actions. She could see Emma and Sophia looking at the bus from a distance, talking to each other and smiling victoriously. Madison was conversing with one of the other interchangeable secondary assholes, few of whom Taylor bothered even learning the names of. They came and went and were without exception a waste of oxygen in her opinion, merely joining in on the game to jockey for position in the social hierarchy of the school. Something that was pointless even when it wasn't doing its best to torment her mercilessly.
Sometimes she felt she might be developing a bit of a hard line attitude to teenage habits, oddly enough…
Sighing quietly she waited for the bus to pull away on the first leg of the twenty minute drive past her house, wanting to get back to something important rather than the painfully annoying exercise of going to school. At times it was hard to remember that once she'd actually enjoyed the experience. Those days seemed very distant now. A tapping on the window made her jump then look, to see Emma making faces at her, Sophia grinning next to the other girl and apparently amused by the childish stupidity. Shaking her head minutely Taylor looked away again, ignoring the sounds from outside as best she could.
Eventually the last of the students climbed on board the bus and the driver pulled away. Glancing back, Taylor saw that Emma and Sophia were walking off towards what she recognized as Alan Barnes' BMW, idling beside the road. The girls were talking together as they moved through down the snowy sidewalk.
A second later Taylor happened to notice that there was a large slushy puddle right in front of the pair, caused by runoff from where the city had spread salt on the road a little while ago to melt the snow. She also spotted a three foot long branch that had fallen from one of the trees alongside the road, on the school ground past the fence that ran down it.
She quickly looked around, seeing no one was paying any attention to her, and that Emma and Sophia were both looking more at the car they were coming up on than their feet…
Feeling a little vindictive, Taylor concentrated. And reached out just for a moment.
As Emma lifted a foot to hop over the bit of the puddle on the sidewalk, an offshoot of the much larger quantity of muddy slush next to them, she suddenly emitted a squawk loud enough to hear inside the bus twenty yards away as she somehow managed to trip over a three foot long branch that was barely sticking out of the snow right at ankle height. Her feet went out from under her as she flailed around, grabbed Sophia's arm reflexively, and only managed to yank the other girl off her feet too. Sophia tried to correct for the unexpected pull but also seemed to get tangled up in the branch, rather unluckily.
The splash they made as they measured their lengths in the large puddle was really quite impressive. It turned out to be surprisingly deep, too, leading to both girls getting totally soaked and absolutely covered in crud. Everyone who turned at the sound of Emma's short and aborted scream of shock stared, then began laughing. The girls pushed themselves to hands and knees as Mr Barnes came running, before they started shouting at each other and everyone in range, which only made the laughter grow.
The bus slowly cruised past as it accelerated, Taylor leaning back in her seat and keeping her eyes fixed on the front of the vehicle. Internally, she was giggling, but externally she looked as passively neutral as long practice had made her able to.
The yelling outside the bus, diminishing into the distance behind her, warmed her nicely.
'Sometimes I think I might be a bad person,' she mused idly. 'I guess I can live with that.'
"Are you sure this will work, Taylor?" her dad asked a little skeptically.
She gave him a look of confidence, which was mostly real. "Of course it'll work," she said cheerfully.
"I recall a recent event in which you perforated an entire building, and I can't help but think there's scope for a rapid reassessment of your guarantee," he grumbled.
"I'm not going to call those guys again, don't worry, Dad," she assured him. "Not unless I really need to."
"I dearly hope you never have the need to summon millions of flying balls of teeth that go through solid walls like they were toilet paper."
"Me too, but you never really know around here," she grinned as she kept working on her latest little modification to the gnurr-pfeife. It was the result of several weeks of careful calculations, pensive thought, and cautious experimentation. Not to mention several cracked Papa crystals before she'd worked out how to make minor alterations to them without causing them to fall to pieces. Whatever they were made of was very hard, and quite tough, but if you hit it wrong, well… you needed a new one.
Inserting the newly tweaked resonator crystal into the upgraded gnurr-pfeife flute add-on, a duplicate of the original one with a few changes that she'd come up with, she very carefully tightened the screws to hold it in place in the little padded clamps. Peering inside the copper structure through the jewelers eyepiece she was wearing on her right eye, another of Papa's tools, she made some tiny adjustments to the fit, before raising the flute to her lips and blowing gently.
The entire house vibrated slightly as the eldritch overtones rang out, echoing through more than the right number of dimensions. Both of them watched the walls flutter in a multidimensional manner that probably only someone who knew Little Anton's trick would notice.
Taylor nodded in satisfaction, tweaked the clamp once more, and tried again. The effect was stronger, and her dad winced.
"That should do it, I think," she commented as she made sure that all the lock screws were done up properly. Putting the flute down she stretched widely, then grinned. "We need to test it."
"We're running out of warehouses," her father muttered, but he nodded after a second. Both of them got up and headed downstairs, Taylor having put the flute into the case she'd bought for it next to the original gnurr-pfeife, brought just in case she needed a backup. Each were carrying bags with spare clothes. Again, just in case…
There had been some mistakes made in the recent past, and it was quite cold. Shortly they were driving towards the docks, heading to an abandoned area even the junkies avoided.
"The PRT has been poking around, some of the boys said," her father commented as he drove, slowing for a four way yield then continuing when the way was clear. Taylor glanced at him. "Had a good look at the warehouses, then went away with puzzled expressions."
"Do you think they'll be back?" she asked, slightly worried.
He shrugged. "Who can tell? They don't normally pay any attention to the docks unless one of the gangs kicks off, and nothing like that has happened for months. Not around here. All the action seems to be closer to the commercial district. So hopefully they'll keep their noses out a little longer."
"Yeah," she nodded. "We don't need them getting in the way right now. If this works…" Taylor laughed as he snickered. "It'll be hilarious seeing what their reaction is."
Her dad nodded with a smile. None of the people who lived and worked around the docks had a terribly high opinion of the PRT, for generally good reasons, and by and large would prefer them to keep away. The docks traditionally policed themselves fairly effectively, something that more than a few people had found out the hard way in the past. To many in the city, this whole area was bizarre at best. To Taylor, it was home, and like her father she wanted to see it reclaim the pride it used to have in itself.
With a little luck, that might be possible soon.
She caressed the flute case with her hand. If she was correct in what she'd calculated the modified resonator would do when the slightly altered tune was played, the results should be extremely impressive and much more… useful… than the first attempts had turned out. Papa had apparently never really looked into the sort of goals she had in mind, but she was fairly sure she was on the right path despite that. And she sort of hoped the old guy would have liked her ideas.
The girl sat patiently and watched the world pass by, going over the process in her head until she was certain she had it down perfectly.
"If this works, the weather should be right next Tuesday," her father commented as they pulled up on a potholed road far out on the edge of the docks on the other side of the old train yard, only about a hundred yards from the water of the bay. Dark waves lapped at the snow-covered shore, the dim light of early morning barely showing the remains of an old wharf vanishing into the mist that rose off the water. Taylor looked at him and nodded her understanding.
"It'll work, Dad," she said with a confidence she almost had, opening the door and getting out with her flute case in hand. He looked slightly unconvinced but followed as she headed for the vast and tumbledown rail shed that was just in front of them.
Both disappeared inside. Shortly afterwards music sounded, and the gnurrs came once again...
"Yeah, we're ready, Jeff," Danny said into the phone, tapping a pencil on the pad of paper on his desk with his free hand. On the pad were a number of doodles, and he idly added a silly mustache to the drawing of Armsmaster, briefly smiling a little. "Tuesday, just before dawn. Yeah. Great. I'll see you and the guys there." He hung up, turning to look at his daughter who was listening from her seat near the window. They met each other's eyes and smiled, before both getting up to find breakfast.
"You do know that when making bacon and eggs, it's traditional to crack the eggs?" he asked a little later in a long suffering voice, although he was quite amused.
Taylor put the last empty and completely undamaged eggshell back in the box and laughed as she wielded the spatula. "That's the old fashioned way," she giggled. "This is much easier."
Patting her head with his hand, Danny sighed, then started making the toast.
Standing at the window of his office that overlooked downtown, all the way to the water, Roy Christner, Mayor of Brockton Bay, went over the meetings he was scheduled to have today. Most of them were, as usual, probably almost pointless considering the state of the economy and the city, but he still had to put the work in. And who knew, perhaps someone would eventually come up with some sort of plan that might actually help? Stranger things had happened…
Scrolling through his phone's memo app, he nodded to himself, tapping in a few notes on things he needed to find out before he met with Councilor Edwards at eleven. Eventually he put the phone in his pocket and leaned on the edge of his desk mulling over how he was going to fill the major holes in the budget this quarter. Christmas was rapidly nearing and with it all manner of seasonal issues that always caused problems on top of the routine ones.
Outside the window the foggy early winter day loomed, the sun barely high enough to cast long shadows through the mist from the taller buildings. Even here, five stories up, he couldn't make out much more than silhouettes, with streetlights below him showing dimly as small orange spots. He could hear traffic as a distant drone, muffled by the window and the fog. It was, in other words, a typical late November day in Brockton Bay. Snow was forecast again tonight, which meant that the streets would have to be cleared tomorrow morning, which in turn meant yet more costs for everything from salt to overtime.
He sighed faintly. It never ended, and even past the usual civil costs, there was always the ongoing gang related problems which were expensive even before one or other Parahuman issue arose. Sometimes he wondered why he'd ever wanted this job, but since he had it, he was going to do his best to do it well.
Sitting at his desk, he pulled the first of the documents needing his attention up on his computer and began reading, wondering at the back of his mind what the weird distant sound that he thought he'd heard as he got up that morning had been. A peculiar faint sort of creaking groan, it had seemed to come from the direction of the waterfront, and he'd also heard some odd metallic rumblings. But the sounds had stopped within minutes, even as he'd opened the bedroom window and stuck his head out curiously, so in the end he'd put it down to the sort of thing that happened near the ocean. Probably one or other of the hundreds of old wrecks that littered the bay had slid deeper into the water as it rusted away or something of that nature. It wouldn't be the first time, and some of those damn things had caused some pretty big problems in the past when they unexpectedly shifted as the tide turned.
One day someone was going to have to do something about them although no one seemed keen on being that someone.
As he worked, the day outside slowly brightened as the sun rose. An hour later, near half past eight, he got up to get a reference book from the shelf next to the window and idly looked outside, seeing that the fog was gradually drifting away as the temperature rose a little above freezing, leaving a glaze of ice on everything in sight that was undoubtedly going to cause quite a few pedestrians some problems. He turned away, paused, then turned back with a frown. Below him was a layer of mist that left halos around the still running streetlights, which were beginning to blink out one by one as he watched, and car headlights moved through the streets in greater numbers as the city awoke. At his level, the fog was barely present, only making the distant scene a little cloudy and vague rather than entirely invisible as it had been earlier.
He stared at one specific part of that distant scene for several seconds, then looked for his binoculars. Finding them in one of the desk drawers, he came back to the window and lifted them to his eyes, made an adjustment, and waited for a wisp of fog to drift out of the way.
After about another ten seconds, he lowered the binoculars and said in total disbelief, "What the fuck happened to that goddamn ship?"
Peering through the optical device once more, his mouth open, he searched in vain for the obstruction that had plagued his city for longer than he cared to remember.
There was no sign at all of it.
Eventually he shook his head quite hard, very gently put the binoculars down on the windowsill, danced a dignified jig, raised his eyes to heaven and thanked whoever had just given him the best pre-Christmas present of his life, and went to make the first of a large number of phone calls.
The thought of what the PRT were probably thinking right at that moment had him grinning for quite a while.
It was going to be a good day. He could feel it.
Helping his daughter off the old trawler, Danny smiled at her, getting a happy grin in return even through the reddened and chilled face of the girl. She was holding her flute case with both hands and seemed very pleased with herself, a feeling he shared. When she was safe on the dock side, he turned to the men standing nearby. "I think that did the trick," he commented calmly.
"Jesus, Danny, you have a gift for the understatement there," one of them replied with a deep chuckle. Several others laughed.
"Yeah, I guess I do," he replied with a look of amusement. "It went well, definitely."
"That it did." Jeff nodded. All of them looked towards the mouth of the bay, before turning away. "Drinks on me, since you two did all the work."
Putting his arm around Taylor's shoulders, Danny followed as the trawler crew headed across the wharf in the direction of Pat's bar, feeling that the day had started well.
And very proud of his daughter, who was definitely getting quite good at whatever it was that she was learning to do...
Armsmaster studied the scene for quite a long time, before lowering his Armsbinoculars and shaking his head in confusion. Beside him, Assault was gaping a little.
"I fear the Director is going to have some questions," he sighed, feeling that the day was starting rather annoyingly.
But then, that unfortunately wasn't unusual around these parts.