"How's that?" Taylor stepped back with a comb in one hand and peered at Lisa, who was looking at the mirror she was holding. Kate was next to them, nodding with satisfaction.

"It looks weird," Lisa commented, raising a hand and feeling her now black-dyed hair, which had been cut to shoulder length and curled slightly, although nothing like as much as Taylor's naturally was. She was rather envious of the younger girl's hair…

"You'll get used to it," Kate assured her, pulling a pair of stained rubber gloves off and dropping them in the garbage next to a bottle of very good hair dye. "I think it looks nice, personally."

"The contacts itch," the former blonde complained, blinking rapidly. In the mirror her normally light green eyes were more of a gray-blue now. "But I have to admit it really doesn't look like me any more."

"Unless someone looks very closely you'll probably not get noticed," Kate agreed. "Use the right makeup and keep your roots done and it should hold up for now. It's cold, so you'll probably want a hat anyway, which will help, and completely different clothing is another way to throw the asshole off. No one just passing you in the street will spot you, I can almost guarantee it."

"You're pretty good at this," Lisa grinned, resisting the urge to rub her eyes. The cosmetic contacts weren't fantastically comfortable but she'd been told that with a little time she'd probably not really notice. Which might even be true, and she didn't need to keep them in all the time either.

"Did a lot of stage stuff when I was younger," the woman replied, smiling back. "It was a thing my sister and I were into. I got pretty good at the makeup and costume side of it."

Lisa got up from the chair she'd been in and walked over to the full length mirror that was on the wall of the female bathroom they'd been working in, one situated in the on-side DWA accommodation block. The union had facilities for allowing multiple shifts to relax and rest between work, which didn't get used all that much these days from what she'd been told and what her power picked up. Which was ideal for their current purposes because no one was likely to be able to figure out where she'd disappeared to. Coil certainly wouldn't. However Taylor had done what she'd done, which was something Lisa was very curious about, it didn't leave any traces of signs of powers in action.

Considering that her power was completely convinced that the other girl was not a Parahuman in any way, Lisa was extremely puzzled about how she did the trick. From what she could tell so was her power, which was just bizarre.

She could swear she could feel something peering over her shoulder and watching with enormous interest, and wasn't entirely convinced she liked it. But there didn't seem to be any way to get it to stop and it didn't feel hostile, so she lived with it.

"Well, that's my part done," Kate announced, slapping Lisa on the shoulder and nearly flattening her. The woman didn't know her own strength and looked like she could wrestle bears for money. "Good luck with your next assignment, should you choose to accept it." She walked off chortling to herself, the bathroom door swinging shut behind her and leaving Taylor and Lisa alone for the moment.

They looked at each other. "I haven't said it yet, but thanks for saving me from that bastard and his minions," Lisa said frankly.

"It's my pleasure," Taylor replied quietly. "I couldn't leave someone in that situation. Even if I didn't know them, even if they were a criminal, it would have been wrong. And I don't think you're a criminal."

"Not by choice," Lisa sighed. "I can't say I haven't broken the law a little bit here and there though."

"From what you said you didn't have a lot of choice," the other girl responded with a shrug. "It's not perfect, but better that a few people lost a bit of money than you got killed or worse. And in this city, 'worse' is always an option."

They shared a meaningful glance, Lisa nodded after a bit. "Yeah, that much I'll agree with. So, what next?"

"We go and find Dad and work out what we do to locate Coil, then we grab the fucker," Taylor laughed, looking at the chair which immediately vanished. Lisa stared, still trying to figure out how the hell she was doing that. The girl noticed, grinning at her. "If you're very good and promise not to be too obvious about it I might teach you some cool tricks too," she added, walking to the door and opening it.

"Teach? You mean you can teach people how to do that?" Lisa looked at where the chair had been, then back at the closing door. Taylor stuck her head around it and winked.

"I can teach all sorts of neat things, yeah," she grinned. "Family tricks, you might call it. Come on, let's think about what we're going to do." She vanished again. Lisa looked one last time at the empty spot where a somewhat beaten up office chair had been, shook her head in wonder, and quickly followed, blinking a little as the contacts finally settled into position properly.

She was a little surprised at how quickly her fortunes seemed to have shifted, in a direction she really hadn't been expecting. Only a couple of hours ago, from her point of view, she'd been running for her life and had about to be either shot or forcibly recruited to do the bidding of a Parahuman villain, which her power had told her would be nearly as bad and much more drawn out than the first option. And now she had support to hide from that same villain, people who were putting in quite a bit of effort to help her, and to take Coil out of the equation completely, which she suspected they could indeed pull off even though the whole thing was nuts. Her natural paranoia had made her wary of their true motives but her power flat out told her that her best chance of survival was to stick with these lunatics and that they really didn't mean her any harm at all.

Quite the opposite, in fact. It seemed convinced that if she went along with it, she'd be in a much better place in any number of ways. Of course, it also seemed totally fascinated with Taylor herself and what she could do and Lisa was half-thinking that it would happily lie to her face if it meant finding out how the other girl managed to do what she was doing… Which yet again was a bizarre concept, but her power seemed very abruptly to have decided to take a much more obvious interest in things, to the point it was making suggestions without any prompting at all.

The whole thing was incredibly creepy in a sense, and not at all what she'd expected to happen, but it seemed also to care for her in that same creepy manner and considering how little support she really had, that was probably a good thing.

Strangely, even the Thinker headaches seemed to be much less than they used to be. Ever since she'd had that feeling of her brain almost exploding out her nose when she'd appeared in the shielded room, all she got was a dull ache rather than a full blown migraine, and she really didn't have any good explanation for that. Maybe she had managed to recalibrate her pain threshold? Certainly she'd never before experienced agony that intense before and very much hoped she never would again, because it hadn't been fun at all.

And she was still puzzling over the phrase 'partial disconnection' which confused her quite a bit. Her power went completely silent on the subject when she prodded it, somehow giving her a feeling of mild embarrassment, which was yet another thing to add to the catalog of oddness her life seemed to be full of at the moment.

"This place is a maze," she commented as she followed Taylor through a whole series of corridors and up and down stairs. The other girl seemed to have no trouble at all navigating the route, though, nodding or waving to various DWA people as they passed in either direction.

"Yeah, it's pretty old, Dad told me some of these buildings have been here since the early eighteen hundreds and just sort of got built over and modified all that time. Lots of new ones went up before world war one, and again before and during world war two," Taylor explained, looking at her for a moment. "Brockton Bay used to be quite an important shipyard a long time ago. Lots of smaller warships were built here between the wars, right up to about nineteen fifty five or so. Quite a few cargo ships too, and even a medium sized cruise ship, I think. When the ship building moved to places with larger and deeper harbors as the sizes went up, all this switched to shipping and that sort of thing. The DWA is what's left of what was once the third largest port facility on the East Coast." She shrugged, holding a door open for Lisa, then following her through it.

"The economic downturn in the late eighties had a bad effect on the city, which was really dependent on the sea, and there wasn't enough fishing to make up for the loss of cargo. Then the Parahuman thing really kicked in, the Teeth and Marquis moved in, Leviathan fucked things up for everyone, leading to the riots in the mid nineties which Dad told me were actually started by a bunch of fuckers up from Boston. It all went to shit pretty quickly and this is the end result. The DWA is still going but instead of being an organization that had something like twenty five thousand members in the middle of the twentieth century, it's down to less than a thousand. And the entire Docks area and the surrounding communities are, or at least were, slowly fading away because there wasn't enough work to keep people going." She sighed, shaking her head. "Crime went up, the Merchants moved in and made it worse… But the DWA is still here, and they don't give up easily."

"You know a lot about it," Lisa commented, rather taken aback by the knowledgeable manner in which Taylor had conveyed the information.

The girl laughed a little, glancing at her. "I'm a daughter of the docks, I've been hearing this story for as long as I can remember and coming here since I was about four. Dad's been involved in the DWA from before I was born and he loves them like a family. He wouldn't have put so much work in after Mom died if he hadn't… Sometimes I think it's about all that kept him going for a long time. And most people here think he's all that's kept the DWA going." She shook her head. "He says it's a group effort, but…"

Lisa was silent as she listened, not needing her power to know that there was another story behind all this that Taylor wasn't mentioning, a story that was very personal. The clues were easy enough to piece together from her comment about her mother, and she was glad that whatever rift had come between the two Heberts seemed to be healing well.

"Dad could talk your ear off for days about the history of the DWA and Brockton Bay if you let him," Taylor added with a small laugh. "He knows more about it than most of the textbooks seem to. He should probably write one, thinking about it. Mom would have liked that." Gesturing at the walls of the corridor they were passing through, she went on, "But the point is that this whole place has a real history. It's the core of the whole city. The port was here before anything else was. Except Pat's."

"Pat's?" Lisa queried.

"A really, really old bar about half a mile outside the DWA area," Taylor replied, smiling. "It's been there forever, all the dock workers go there, half the cops in the city do too sometimes, and even Marquis apparently was seen in there a few times. You start something in Pat's, you'll have more trouble than you know what to do with, and you'll be lucky if you only get the shit kicked out of you. Not even the Empire risks fucking with angry dockworkers who want a beer."

Snickering, Lisa shook her head. "Weirdly, somehow I can believe that."

"It's a strange place, Brockton Bay, and this whole area is the strangest part of it," her companion told her with a smile. "But it's my home and I like it. All we need to do is fix it up a bit and stop all the assholes causing trouble."

"Especially now that the ship blocking the bay disappeared without a trace," Lisa replied, nodding her understanding. "That was really peculiar, no one seems to have the vaguest idea wha…"

She stopped talking mid word, as realization struck her. Glancing sideways, she saw Taylor was very slightly smirking to herself. "Oh, for god's sake. That was you?"

"Shh," Taylor replied quietly. "It is a secret." She tapped the side of her nose knowingly and Lisa burst out laughing.

"How the hell did you do that?" she exclaimed.

"I might show you at some point. It's pretty cool although sometimes hard on your pants."

Staring at the amused expression of the other girl, Lisa decided not to ask right then, and didn't know whether to be worried or not.

A few seconds later they rounded the final corner, crossed a small internal courtyard open to the sky three stories above them, and went through a door which took them back into the specially modified shielded room outer area. Danny was standing talking to the blonde woman who had been introduced to her as Michelle, a DWA lawyer and someone her power told her would fuck you right up if you caused trouble for the union. Entirely legally but entirely viciously. Several other dock workers were inside the shielded main room itself, setting up various items of equipment, the door to it propped open.

"Ah," Danny said, turning to look at Lisa. "Now that is an impressive change. You look very different indeed, Miss Wilbourn."

"That was kind of the idea, Dad," Taylor grinned.

"Fair enough, although I'm still amazed by how much of a change a simple haircut and a dye job makes. The contacts work pretty well too. It should keep anyone from noticing you for at least a while, which is good." Michelle was also examining Lisa closely, looking pleased.

"Kate does good work," she said approvingly. "We should have some new clothes for you shortly too, once we had your size it wasn't difficult to arrange."

"I still can't thank you guys enough for all this effort you're putting in," Lisa replied. "I sure didn't expect anything like this."

"No one expects the DWA! Our chief weapon is surprise! And an excellent disguise department! Our two weapons are surprise and an excellent disguise department! And some really sneaky ideas! Our three weapons are surprise, an excellent disguise department, and some really sneaky ideas!" Taylor said cheerfully, causing Danny to stare at her and Michelle to put a hand over her mouth to muffle the laughter. "And fanatical devotion to Danny Hebert! Our four…"

Her father put his hand over her mouth, fixing her with a hard look. "Enough, Taylor. You are becoming too chirpy right now. Stop mangling Monty Python quotes, before I go crazier than I clearly am for going along with this..."

Lisa couldn't hold it in any more and nearly fell over laughing her ass off. Michelle turned away and her shoulders heaved silently, while in the next room several people were snickering.

Removing his hand when Taylor nodded, her eyes sparkling, he sighed heavily. "This place is starting to get very peculiar indeed," he complained mildly. "Very peculiar."

"That's the Brockton Way, Dad," his daughter told him earnestly. "Peculiar is something we're very good at."

"You don't need to tell me that," he muttered. "Sometimes I wonder if somewhere there's a Danny Hebert in another world who had a nice normal life…"

"Or an even weirder one!" she commented brightly, making him look horrified. "Maybe I should try to work that out?"

"Please don't, this is already more than I can handle," her father begged. "Let's just get on with it. There's no need to borrow trouble when we already have more than enough of our own."

"Aww. Oh well. Maybe later." Taylor grinned at him, then looked over his shoulder through the window at the work in the other room. "Is everything ready?"

"Should be," he replied after giving the ceiling a beseeching look that didn't cause anything useful. He turned to watch as well, Lisa and Michelle joining the other two. "Matt suggested bringing the van back without the mercs, if you can do that. From what you said you worked out how to make that happen?"

"Yeah, I'm pretty sure I've got it working properly," Taylor nodded.

"Good. So we bring the van back in there, then go over it very carefully for tracking equipment, radio gear, computers, anything useful that might either lead us to Coil or him to us. The shielding should stop that happening, so we can strip the whole damn thing down if we need to. With a bit of luck we'll find something useful. Then once we've done that and got everything from it we can, we get rid of it again and work our way through the mercenaries one at a time."

"That might take a while," Lisa pointed out. "And they're probably not going to cooperate."

"I don't expect they will, no, but between Taylor's skills, your power, and our experience, even if they don't say a word we can probably get at least something from them. Phones, for example, might be useful, we've got a couple of people here who are oddly good at cracking phone security." He looked at her, then back through the window. "It would be rude for me to ask just where they learned that, but it could come in handy right now." He was looking amused and Taylor was giggling.

"A lot of the people here have a backstory," Michelle commented dryly on her other side. "Often not one they're all too keen on telling everyone about. But the end result is a rather… eclectic… set of skills."

"I know!" Taylor looked pleased suddenly.

"Know what?" her father said in suspicious tones.

"We need a name for your spy organization, Dad. I worked out what it should be."

Danny took his glasses off with one hand and massaged his closed eyes with the other while Lisa grinned. These people were utterly insane but seemed a lot of fun. "This is not a spy organization, my dear daughter, despite what your brilliant but clearly disturbed imagination seems to have decided. We are merely a few struggling dock workers trying to make ends meet and keep our families fed."

"Yeah, that's a good cover story, Dad, good work. But the real organization is much cooler than that," the girl replied, still smiling widely.

"I know I'm going to regret this, but go on," he muttered.

"United National Intervention Operative Network," Taylor said gleefully. "U.N.I.O.N."

"God save me from all this," he moaned under his hand as Lisa cracked up again, Michelle leaning on the wall and shaking her head while grinning.

"Yeah, Danny, we're the boys from U.N.I.O.N.," one of the workers in the room said as he stuck his head through the door, looking extremely amused. He gave Taylor a thumb's up, which she returned. "Good work, Agent."

"My pleasure, Agent," she replied.

"Oh Jesus, this place is a madhouse," Danny sighed. Lowering his hand he carefully put his glasses back on then stared at his daughter, who winked at him. "Oh… no, I can't deal with this now. I'm going to ignore all of you with dignified silence." He turned to the man still leaning through the door. "Is it done yet, Larry?"

"Sure, we're all ready in here, Chief." Larry saluted him while wearing a broad grin. Danny sighed heavily again, mumbling something too quietly to hear. Lisa could tell he was amused but hiding it.

"Right. Get everyone out of the way," he said firmly. "Stop giggling, Taylor, and do your thing."

"On it, Chief," she snapped crisply, straightening to attention. He just stared at her and she smiled back, then turned to the window. Everyone who had been in the room came out, the last one closing the door behind him and dogging it shut.

"Clear, Taylor," the man said.

"OK." She concentrated as Lisa watched closely, her power paying extreme attention. "Ah… yeah, that should…" Taylor murmured. A few seconds later, she nodded to herself.

Abruptly there was a large van sitting right in the middle of the room. It didn't even bounce on the shocks, it just appeared as if it had been there all along and no one had noticed. Lisa gaped a little, and her power gaped a lot.

"No one in it?" Danny asked as he inspected the thing.

"Nope. They're all still safely stored away. It worked fine."

"Good. Let's have a look at it."

"Hang on, I want to make sure there's nothing weird in there," she replied, still looking at the van intently. "Like a bomb or something. Coil sounds like a paranoid bastard and you never know."

Her father looked slightly surprised for a second then thoughtful, as he joined her in staring at the vehicle. Lisa let her power go to work on the van rather than them after a few seconds, while everyone else waited.

"What's that?" Taylor said after about thirty seconds.

"What what? Where?" her father replied, glancing at her.

"Under the gas tank right at the front, between the tank and the exhaust." Taylor seemed to squint as if she was looking right through the vehicle, which Lisa realized with some shock she actually was. "A metal box about a foot long and maybe four inches by six? See it?"

"Huh. Yes, I do, actually," Danny replied slowly. "That is not standard equipment in one of those things."

"It's half full of electronics and the other half is some sort of putty," Taylor continued, frowning. "A little metal rod with some wires in it is stuck in the putty."

"Yeah, that's a bomb all right," Larry said from behind them. "Sounds like C4 with a detonator. This Coil fucker is paranoid as hell by the sound of it. Right on the gas tank, there wouldn't be anything left of the thing if it detonated. Better remove it."

"Done," Taylor nodded.

"Any more?"

She didn't reply for about two minutes, then shook her head. "I can't see anything else that looks out of place," she reported, her father nodding a moment later. "Lots of electronics but nothing I can recognize as dangerous. Other than a whole crapload of guns and ammunition."

Lisa was rather impressed, and had learned several things. One of which was that Taylor's father could also do, at least to some extent, what his daughter could, which lent credence to her claim whatever she was doing could be taught. Another was that Coil clearly didn't really care about the lives of his men, since that bomb was probably there as a last resort precaution just in case someone either bought them off or they defected.

The more she learned about the guy the less she liked him and the happier she was that Taylor had yoinked her out of that situation.

"OK, let's go see what we have," Larry remarked, unlocking the door and going back into the room. Lisa followed as everyone else did likewise, then watched as half a dozen men who clearly knew exactly what they were doing proceeded to more or less dismantle the van completely. It was somewhat shocking how quickly they had the whole vehicle in pieces all around the room. Taylor and Danny were inspecting everything and advising them on various things, while two more of the dockers who obviously had military backgrounds were investigating the impressively and somewhat horrifyingly large quantity of weaponry that they'd unloaded from the van.

"This bastard has some better gear than we did," one of these latter people complained, inspecting a rifle which Lisa's power told her was a fully automatic Heckler & Koch HK416 assault rifle chambered for NATO 5.56 x 45mm rounds. It also pointed out that the box he was kneeling next to had over two thousand of those rounds in it. Which seemed like massive overkill to her, was the man expecting his people to fight off Lung or something?

"There's about thirty grand worth of gear here, Danny," the other one put in. "At a minimum. Probably more on the black market. Half of it isn't even available to civilians. I think some of this was stolen from the military." He held up another weapon. "The Canadian military for this one. Bet they're annoyed about that."

"Ooohhh," his friend suddenly said, opening another case and staring at the contents. "Latest generation NVGs! I want one of these." He pulled out a head mounted night vision unit and turned it over in his hand looking like a kid that had found an unexpectedly good present under the Christmas tree.

"Looks like U.N.I.O.N. got some cool toys donated to it," someone working on the van laughed, making Danny glare at him.

"We can't keep all that," he stated.

"Why not? We didn't steal it from the military, Coil did. We stole it from him fair and square," the guy said, grinning. "Or Agent Taylor did. Got the right instincts, that kid, you raised her well."

Danny lightly banged his head on the side of the van while Taylor giggled. "Why," he moaned. "Why me?"

Finding the entire thing a lot more fun than she'd expected to have and feeling that life was looking up, Lisa watched with enjoyment as the merry barely controlled chaos continued, contributing where she could and working on trying to eke out any details that would let them find Coil and utterly ruin his life for good.

It was something she was going to take great pleasure in.

Carol stuck her head out of her study when she heard the front door open, seeing as she expected Victoria and Amy. They were talking to each other as they came in after school. "Victoria? Can you come here for a moment?" she called. The blonde and brunette exchanged a glance then her biological daughter walked down the hall as Carol went back and sat down in front of the pile of paperwork relating to the Hebert/Barnes case, which had grown considerably in the last few days as she added her own research to the rest of it.

"Yeah, Mom?" Victoria said as she entered. Carol looked up and saw Amy behind her, leaning on the doorway and looking curious in a very deadpan way. Vicky herself had a combination of mild worry and puzzlement on her face, obviously expecting that she was in trouble for some reason. This time at least that wasn't the case.

"Do you happen to know the Ward Shadow Stalker?" she asked, flipping to a blank page in her notebook and holding a pen ready.

Vicky looked back at Amy, who shrugged. Returning her attention to her mother, she said rather tentatively, "Kinda? She's not really the sort of person I'd ever get to know well. Not really friendly, you know?"

"So I'm led to believe," Carol replied with a frown. "How would you describe her overall attitude?"

The girl thought, looking at her sister again, then said, "Abrasive. That's about the kindest way to put it."

"She's a total bitch and mean with it," Amy commented darkly from behind her. Vicky nodded, suppressing a small grin.

"That's the accurate way to put it, yeah."

"I see." Carol made some notes. "In what specific way?"

"What's this about, Mom?" the girl asked, now sounding curious.

"Just answer the question, please," she replied. "I can't go into the details, but I'm trying to understand her personality."

"There isn't much to understand," Victoria sighed. "Every time I've been in the Wards ready room at the same time she was, she was either being horrible to Vista, snapping at everyone else, or stomping around like she wanted to kill someone. She is not a happy go lucky sort of person."

"She's extremely aggressive, actively and constantly nasty to anyone she feels is below her, which is everybody, rude, and gives the impression she'd prefer to stab you than shake hands with you." Amy shrugged as Carol looked past the other girl at her. Vicky was nodding. "I've met her a few times, healed her more than once, and she's about the most unpleasant person I've ever encountered. I mean, some of the fucking ABB gang members I've stopped bleeding out were actually less irritating. At least they usually said thanks. She sure as hell never did, and always made me think she was only barely stopping herself complaining about why didn't I do it faster."

Carol made more notes, nodding slightly. "Do you know her background? How she ended up in the Wards, for example?"

"I don't know her civilian ID, Mom, and I couldn't tell you if I did," Vicky remarked.

"Don't worry about that, it's not important. Just what you do know," she replied.

The two girls exchanged looks again. "Well, I know she wasn't in the Wards because she wanted to be," Vicky said slowly. "I'm not sure of the exact details but from what Dean said she was caught at the scene of a pretty serious case of excessive force, and the PRT didn't really give her a lot of choice about the Wards."

"I'd sure believe that," Amy added. "I've also fixed several of her victims from when she was a vigilante, and some of the injuries were… excessive." She smiled a little darkly. "It made Vicky's overenthusiastic captures look like she wasn't really trying hard enough."

"Hey!"

"You know you don't know your own strength. Lucky all I've had to do is fix a broken arm so far."

"That was an accident."

"You have a lot of those."

"I'm doing my best!"

"Do better."

"At least I didn't stab anyone with a crossbow bolt."

"You don't have a crossbow."

"I don't need a crossbow."

"No, you used a garbage can. That guy was really pissed about it, you bent it to fuck."

"I paid for a new one. And that Merchant deserved it anyway. Even the cop said so when he stopped laughing."

"You're not the one who has to put them back together."

"You're not the one who has to stop them!"

"Could if I wanted to."

"Couldn't."

"Bet I could."

Carol looked back and forth as the two argued, sighed quietly, and raised her voice. "Girls! Enough!"

Both stopped from where they were standing face to face and turned as one to her, somewhat guilty smiles appearing as it seemed they'd forgotten where they were.

"Sorry."

"Sorry, mom."

Taking a moment to get her thoughts in order, she said, "Leaving aside a broken arm, which we will be discussing, Victoria, what was that about stabbing someone with a crossbow bolt?"

"Oh, yeah, I'm pretty sure that actually happened," the blonde replied after a momentary worried look and a slight snort from her sister. "Vista told me a while back. Apparently about a month after Shadow Stalker joined the Wards she got into a fight with half a dozen Empire goons and ran out of those tranquilizer bolts Armsmaster made for her. So one of them ended up with a real bolt, one with a hunting head on, shoved through his leg. Apparently Armsmaster was furious about it and really laid into her. She was on console duty for three weeks and had to take the course on acceptable use of force all over again. Twice."

"That is… not good," Carol commented as she took yet more notes. "Although it does fit the mental picture I'm building. She had a lot of trouble with her superiors?"

"Oh, god, yes, she's been reprimanded about twice as much as the entire rest of the Wards combined from what I've heard," Vicky said, nodding vigorously. "I have no idea why the Director hasn't taken her off the streets completely. Yeah, from what they say she's pretty effective but she's also extremely violent and doesn't seem to know what the word 'restraint' even means."

"Probably can't even spell it," Amy snorted, shaking her head. Vicky giggled and nodded.

"She's not exactly the sort of person you'd expect does well in school, yeah. Except maybe as a professional bully."

Her mother very carefully didn't say anything or change her expression, she just wrote a few more lines.

Carol asked a few more questions and got some rather disturbing answers that matched perfectly with the sort of thing in the case files and suggested that the Hess girl was seriously in need of a psychiatric hospital stay, not that this really mattered from the point of view of the current situation. Although it once more showed that the PRT had made some significant mistakes somewhere down the line for whatever reason they had. By the time she'd filled five pages with notes, she had what she wanted. "Thank you, Victoria. And Amy. This is useful information. You can go."

Both girls looked at each other, then her, Vicky opening her mouth to ask a question before Amy poked her in the side. Snapping her mouth shut again the blonde followed as the shorter girl headed towards the stairs, looking back at her mother for a moment then shrugging. Carol didn't pay much attention as she was thinking hard about how to use the information and how it affected the case should it come to court.

She was fairly sure that it probably wouldn't, at least as far as the PRT aspect went. The more she learned the more it painted a highly damaging picture that they were probably going to be extremely reluctant to let anyone else see if they could possibly avoid it, which to be honest she could actually understand even if she didn't agree with it. The press would consider the contents of the documents in front of her one of the biggest gold mines of salacious rumor since that time Alexandria was accused of being rude to a foreign dignitary, something that had taken years to go away. Even now it made the woman twitch if you mentioned it to her face…

Carol didn't personally particularly like Alexandria and might have tested that once or twice. Very obliquely, of course, as she wasn't stupid, but the last time had made Legend snicker under his breath so there was that.

Pushing the paperwork to the side she pulled her keyboard closer, put the notebook next to it, and started typing.

"That was weird," Vicky said once the door to her bedroom was closed. Amy, who was sitting in a chair next to the window overlooking the back yard, nodded thoughtfully, the rather annoyed air she'd had ever since after lunch when Dennis had made a particularly stupid comment missing now.

"Yeah. I wonder why she's researching Shadow Stalker?" her sister replied, as Vicky sat in the other chair and put her feet up on the windowsill.

"Must be for a case, I guess."

"Well, sure, but why?" Amy said, looking at her, then out the window at the horizon which was slowly darkening as the day passed. "Someone suing her? Considering how many people I know for a fact she's fucked up, it was bound to happen sooner or later."

"Maybe someone died or something?"

They exchanged another glance. "I have to admit I wouldn't put it past that bitch," Amy finally responded, scowling. "You're careless. She's vicious. She's come fucking close to causing really serious injuries at least twice that I know about. If someone didn't get help in time? Yeah, I could see it being lethal. Those stupid crossbow bolts are almost worse than bullets."

"She's not supposed to be using them any more."

"You know that. I know that. Does she know that?" Amy gazed at her. "In theory she's supposed to have handed them all over when the PRT nabbed her, right? So where did that one she stuck that E88 guy come from?"

"Point."

"Yeah, it was. Nice and sharp too."

Vicky sighed slightly as her sister grinned. "Jesus, sometimes your sense of humor is dark, Ames."

"You do what I do and yours would be too," the other girl said meaningfully. "I've seen shit that would turn you white."

"Nice quote."

"Thanks."

"But seriously, you think she's fucked someone up badly enough that there's some sort of legal case against her?"

Amy shrugged with a shake of her head. "Your guess is as good as mine. But there's got to be a reason Carol asked all those questions, right? About what we thought Shadow Stalker's motivation was and stuff?"

"She is the night, a lone crusader against a world filled with evil, and she will do whatever is required to bring justice to the mean streets of Brockton Bay," Vicky intoned in as deep a voice as she could manage, before laughing.

"You joke, but from what I've seen she probably actually believes that sort of crap," Amy grumbled. "And if she got carried away just one time, well…"

"Yeah," Vicky agreed with a shrug of resignation. "I could see it."

The pair were quiet for a while, joining each other in watching the snow start to fall again. Eventually Vicky said, "What are you doing tonight?"

"Same thing I do every night, Pinky, trying to heal the world," Amy immediately replied, causing her sister to break down laughing.

"Taking it over would be easier. And you seriously need to relax a little. You can't fix everyone."

"I know, but I can help, so I do," the girl replied, looking at her. "And it keeps me away from Carol which sometimes is a good thing."

"Mom isn't that bad," Vicky protested. Her sister raised a sardonic eyebrow causing her to sigh. "OK, sometimes she is that bad, but she mostly tries to be reasonable."

The other eyebrow joined the first.

"Mostly."

Both eyebrows wiggled up and down, then Vicky couldn't keep her face straight and started snickering, causing Amy to break down into giggles.

"She's not as bad as she was but she's not as good as she could be, so it's best if I try to avoid her sometimes," Amy finally said when she stopped laughing. "Don't worry, the doctors are always trying to get me to slow down, and I'm not stupid. I know all about stress-induced burnout. If it gets too bad I'll go find something else to do for a while to unwind. Maybe take up showing you how to catch the bad guys without hitting them with garbage cans…"

"Yeah, right. A garbage can to the face is the best thing to do to an E88 shithead and you know it as well as I do," Vicky remarked, grinning. Her sister shook her head, but she was smiling a little.

"At least hit them a little less hard? For me? You're not trying for a home run and I'm the one who has to make them stop yelling and carrying on, which is even more irritating than some stupid cow who can't stop eating lard by the bucket complaining that her heart is going funny again. And that's getting old, trust me."

"Poor Amy, having to deal with the ungrateful not quite dead," Vicky teased, poking her sister in the side.

"No thanks to you," Amy shot back, returning the poke.

"I'm doing what I can because I must," Vicky poked back.

"Do it more carefully." Amy slapped her hand away and poked.

By the time they finished their insult and poke session both were laughing like idiots. Vicky was inwardly pleased that she'd managed to cheer her sister up and resolved to be as careful as possible to keep her that way.

Even though some Nazis really need a good garbage can to the face...

Picking his coffee mug up Thomas Calvert threw it as hard as he could at the far side of the room, where it exploded into tiny fragments. "FUCK!" he screamed at the ceiling, at the top of his voice.

Nothing. Absolutely nothing showing what had happened to an entire ten man squad of heavily armed mercs who had been sent on a simple mission to acquire one teenaged girl with no combat powers or knowledge. They'd disappeared so thoroughly that if he didn't know for a fact they existed he'd be convinced they didn't.

The second team he'd sent out to sweep the area the first one had been in before they vanished literally mid-word on the phone had found nothing useful. It had snowed quite heavily shortly after whatever had happened to his men and by the time he'd got his other team in position, having taken extreme precautions to ensure as well as he could that they wouldn't evaporate like spit on a stove, all the evidence had been covered by four inches of white powder. They'd located where the squad's vehicle had been, the tire tracks simple stopping without any trace of it being moved. No other tracks had been within at least a hundred yards of that position, and as far as they could tell no footprints were even that close. So it hadn't been driven away, or picked up and put on a flatbed truck or something. Either it flew off or something teleported it away, those being about the only options he could think of.

Neither was impossible in this world, but he didn't know any local capes who could pick several tons of van and contents up and fly away with it, nor were there to his knowledge any teleporters in the city. Not to mention that the mass of the vehicle was large enough that most of the teleporters he was aware of probably couldn't have done it anyway. And all that was leaving aside how either eventuality could have happened so suddenly that none of the men inside it had time to intervene, or at least mention it to him. Or what had happened to the four other mercs and the Wilbourn girl, all of whom had also vanished at probably the exact same moment. Again, there were no footprints discernible anywhere near the point they'd been, or any other evidence of someone else being present on the scene.

It suggested strongly to him that if you dismissed a Simurgh plot, and by god he hoped it wasn't that, someone with a very potent power set from outside the city had intervened in his business. Why, he had no idea beyond them wanting Wilbourn's Thinker power for themselves, which was after all his motivation as well. And who it could have been he didn't have a clue about. The Empire seemed unlikely, as they simply didn't have the right powers available, which he knew very well from his research into them. Neither did the ABB or the Merchants. With both the Empire and the ABB, had they been involved, he had little doubt that a lot of dead people would have happened as a result, because neither was subtle in their actions and his very expensive and highly trained mercenaries were good. At least one of them would have got off a shot, he was certain of that, and hit the panic button.

He'd considered the PRT, which was one of the more plausible ideas and had briefly made him extremely worried that someone was onto him. After some careful thought, and poking around in the backdoors into their systems, though, he'd come to the conclusion it was highly unlikely verging on impossible. Piggot wasn't smart enough to pull off something like this, and he'd have found out about an operation like this in the planning stages anyway, long before it actually happened. Someone from outside the ENE branch was also unlikely because the larger PRT was basically trying to pretend the Brockton Bay command didn't exist as he knew full well. Along with having some fairly good ideas why this was the case, and why he had no intention whatsoever of sticking his head above the parapet on that situation.

For a moment he'd wondered if it was them. They could do it, he was certain, but then why would they? And knowing the people involved, he'd have likely been warned off before it got that far anyway… They were like that.

In the end it really boiled down to only two possibilities he could think of; either some well established outside villainous group such as the Elite, although he really couldn't think of which combination of Parahumans could have done the whole thing that cleanly, or someone new. Certainly not local as he'd have found out about a new Tinker or something very quickly through his contacts. If it was the latter case it was going to be irritating to figure out who they were, without any information available. In the former case, he might be able to eventually work it out, but he wasn't in a position to take back what was his yet. Someone like the Elite was no pushover and he'd need time to grow his organization to the point he could take them on head to head.

Growling obscenities under his breath he got up and paced back and forth trying to work out what the best move was now. Wilbourn was gone, and likely irretrievable at least in the short term. He bitterly regretted dropping his backup timeline at exactly the wrong moment, confident that he'd succeeded and moving to the next phase of his plan that little bit too early. If he had had a touch more patience things would have been different, but for the sake of five minutes he'd lost the opportunity of a lifetime.

"Fuck," he said again, with feeling, punching the wall in his fury. His eyes crossed and he exhaled hard as he'd hit it rather more solidly than he'd planned. After several seconds of agony he shook his hand, flexed the fingers, and went to yell at his mercenaries for a while. If nothing else it would make him feel better and there was always the option of shooting a few of them in a disposable timeline.

That always gave him a warm feeling inside and right now he needed that.