Taylor meets another cape duo, albeit not an entirely stable one.


I expected this to be out a lot sooner, I just… well, life decided to vibe check me to the next dimension.


"So, I take it I'm not the only one who thought that question about Melissa Byron was weird, right?" asked Taylor once they got inside.

"Nay, lass, it was… odd," said Odin, eyes gaining a faraway look, at the same time that Danny frowned with a "Now that you mention it…"

"Yeah. That's probably a…" Taylor trailed off then swore. "Holy shit, they lost Vista."

"Who?" asked Danny, frowning.

"Oh, right, you wouldn't have known. She's one of the Wards, something like thirteen years old. If she went missing… well, she's a strong Cape. If she's missing, she'd probably have at least a couple of the gangs looking to get her on side…"

"So, she's a kid in danger because of her power?" Seeing Taylor's nod, Danny sighed. "I don't suppose I can convince you to not go out with logic, like by saying you don't have a costume?"

"Sorry, dad. If nothing else, I'm probably the one who can find her fastest if no one knows really where she's going, and I can actually manifest a costume." She held up the notebook she'd taken with her to Truth's office with which to occupy her time, which showed a rough sketch of a woman in mail armor with a conical helmet. "I think I can make this with the runes, like this."

Two runes manifested, hovering over Taylor's head in silver light. One rune resembled a Y with the stem extending up into the triangle formed by the upper section, and the other resembled two angular p's, the triangles facing inward and touching.

In a flash of light, Taylor was wearing a silvery shirt that appeared, on closer inspection, to be made of tiny chain mail, as well as leggings of the same metal, silvery leather bracers on her arms, boots on her feet, and the helmet in her sketch, covering her face from the nose up. Picked out in gold on the chest and helmet was a rune consisting of two parallel lines angled down and to the right at the top of a long vertical stalk, surrounded by a golden circle of other, smaller runes.

Odin lost his distant look for a moment and nodded in approval as Taylor tested her range of motion amidst the sound of rustling metal, catching her figurative breath after her mystical exertion.

"See? Ready-made armor." Taylor grinned at her father.

Danny sighed. "Fine, but be safe. Odin, make sure she stays safe."

"Will do, dad," said Taylor quietly.

Odin just nodded, still gazing off into the distance with a pensive look.


Once Taylor had left her house (through the back, to try and obfuscate where she was coming from), she traced a rune that vaguely resembled the letter R, albeit more angular, in the air with silver light, which burst with the sound if a ship's oars dipping into the sea.

Taylor then set off, the sounds of her armor quieter, on an irregular path, almost meandering through her neighborhood and beyond.

As she traveled, her mind reached out to all the bugs in her range and they stirred, forced to wakefulness in the still-strong chill of winter to cast their senses out, looking for Brockton's wayward Ward. When Taylor's range left them behind, they hid away once again, shunning the biting cold of January.

For a handful of hours, Taylor came up empty, occupying her attention (the portion of it not carried through the Administrator to her searchers, that is) with discussion of the Runes with Odin, and she started drifting towards the Docks.

Then, abruptly, she found something.

Her head jerked off to the side, interrupting Odin's explanation of how to weave together kaunaz and hagalaz for the restraint of prisoners with ice without the risk of frostbite, and Taylor started jogging off towards a warehouse.

"What did you see, lass?" asked Odin, eye narrowing.

"Found her, I think," said Taylor quietly, booted feet tapping out a quiet rhythm on the asphalt as Taylor crossed a number of streets. She gestured to a warehouse that appeared much the same as any other, saying "She's in here, so if we can check in on her and ma-"

A thrown brick bounced perfectly off of Taylor's helmet with an oddly disappointing 'thwack' sound. "Not another step," came a high, clear voice, "or the next one isn't a brick."

Atop the warehouse stood a tall, dark-haired woman with a bow in her hands, red vaguely samurai-like costume contrasting with the drab concrete of the warehouse.

"Now," the archer said, "what the fuck are you doing here, and how do I get you to leave?"

"I, uh… well, the PRT kind of outed Vista as a missing child, and I just wanted to see if she was okay?"

"You say that as if it makes things better," said the taller woman, nocking an arrow. "Why were you in a position that the PRT would have outed her to you?"

"Uh…" Taylor floundered, trying to come up with a reason.

"You're under suspicion for being a Cape, methinks," said Odin quietly.

"Well?"

"I, uh… they think I might be a cape, so they were probably thinking they should try and recruit me early, I think? I'm not sure, we just came home and they were there." Taylor shrugged.

"Right. Sure, Othala Jr. would just show up out of the goodness of her heart after having a Ward outed to her. You got Hookwolf waiting in the wings in case you don't get what you want, or what?" She drew the arrow back, teeth bared.

"Mina. She's not a Nazi," came a wavering voice from behind the archer.

"And how do you know that?" asked the newly-identified Mina, no small amount of bite remaining in her voice.

"Because," said Melissa Byron in her Vista costume, stepping into Taylor's field of view, "that's Taylor Hebert. With that name, none of the Nazis in this town would touch her."


"So how do you know about me?" asked Taylor once they'd retreated inside the warehouse, camping furniture scattered across the bare concrete floor.

"Same reason I left the PRT building on Thursday," said Vista, removing her visor to reveal a jagged, prismatic starburst in the place of her irises and pupils. "I found your file in the PRT archive."

Taylor's blood froze. "What?"

"Yeah, it's surprisingly thorough for just being a couple of weeks out from your Trigger Event." Vista all but collapsed into a low-slung fabric chair, pulling a bottle of water from nowhere.

"What do you mean, 'my file'? Why does the PRT have a file on me to begin with?" Odin put his hand on Taylor's shoulder, all but radiating calm and somewhat blunting her reaction.

"Oh, yeah, that. They have data on a lot of prospective parahumans, especially ones who spend a lot of time around theirs."

Taylor blinked, gobsmacked. "What does that mean? Do they think my dad is a cape, or something?"

Vista laughed bitterly. "As if. No, as it turns out, Shadow Stalker's been harassing you for a year and a half, plus causing your Trigger, and the PRT fucking knew."

"She what." An exterminator in a house about two blocks away was very surprised by the sudden, ferocious activity of the termite colony he was trying to deal with.

Missy frowned. "Wait, you didn't know?"

"If I knew," said Taylor, all emotion missing from her voice, "I very much would have done something about it by now."

There was a moment of tense silence, then Mina broke it by laughing, a sharp-edged sound that distinctly unnerved Taylor. "You've got bite, kid. I like it. Just make sure you've got an alibi whenever you disappear the bitch."

Taylor blinked, startled out of her anger. "Wait, what?"

"Ignore her," said Vista, clearly trying and failing to conceal her irritation behind a professional façade. "My cousin picked up bad habits from her previous social circle, and I'd like to help work with her to rectify that in the future.

"What kind of social group jumps straight to murder?" asked Taylor, frowning. Odin, meanwhile, gazed at the archer with new regard and perhaps a shade more compassion.

"The Teeth," replied Mina, taking a bow before Vista could stop her. "My apologies, I don't think we've been properly introduced. Mina Byron, better known as either Missy's cousin or Quarrel, the Woman who Never Misses."

Vista brought down her fist, and in an odd twist, it slammed down onto Quarrel's head with an odd sound not dissimilar to a wooden mallet impacting on a human head. "Like I said. Bad habits." Then, she looked up. "It's about time we get going. The Empire is closing in on us here with heavy Cape support, and as much as I would take great pleasure in beating them up, I'm not sure you're up to it, since you haven't even had a debut yet." The diminutive Shaker stood and stretched, then slipped her visor back on. "For now, you should probably go back to school. The PRT is gonna start looking for inconsistencies in your records so they can try and press-gang you into joining them, so try and avoid giving them leverage as long as you can until the lawsuit really gets off the ground."

"Wait, how did you know we were suing?" asked Taylor.

Vista gave her a look that conveyed profound disappointment in Taylor's mental faculties. "That's the way that things work in this world, unless you want to become a villain." With that, Vista took a step in a direction that humans don't have words for and vanished.

Mina sighed, scooping up her bow. "Look, the kid's just a bit of a drama queen right now. I'll try to get her to talk to Panacea more, or something, but… well, you're coming off your Trigger Event about now anyways, right? Imagine that, but worse, and she feels like she can't trust anyone to do anything reasonable, standard teenager shit turned up to eleven." Quarrel looked up, visibly calculating, then reached into her pocket for a scrap of paper and scribbled a phone number on it. "Here. It's the burner we're using. Hopefully talking to people around her own age would help her, but you don't have to." With that, she took a step in the same odd direction that Vista did and vanished.

Taylor looked towards Odin. "What just happened?"

"I believe," he said, "that you just blitzed the friend-making process."


"What the fuck happened here?" snarled the Butcher, looming over Hemorrhagia.

The shorter woman coughed, glaring up at the taller cape. "What happened," she growled, wincing, "is that Quarrel fucking abandoned us. She said something about me being a kid, or something, then just fucking attacked me and left."

The tenth Butcher would have questioned Hemorrhagia more. He had spent far more time with Quarrel, as a function of being the one who saved her and thus being more aware of how Hemorrhagia's story was bullshit. He would have known (and did know) that Quarrel would have done anything for her little cousin, and would have made the connection of Hemorrhagia's use of the word kid. He would have, in short, stood by Quarrel and averted the issues to come.

Unfortunately, the tenth Butcher was too broken by his own death to convince the rest of the Chorus to stand by Quarrel, whose seniority Hemorrhagia had always been jealous of, or even to make the connection to her cousin.

"Alright," growled the Butcher, teeth bared. "You got my attention. Any idea where she's going?"

"Brockton, probably," replied the (internally) smug Hemorrhagia. "She's always missed that fucking shithole of a city.

"Okay then," said the Butcher, face twisted into an expression that only a small number of people would make the mistake to call a smile, and an even smaller number would survive unmolested. "Get everyone else, have them ready to leave tomorrow. We're paying the bitch a visit, and seeing if we can't set up back in the Bay. Marquis and the Nine are gone, now, so let's see if we can't reclaim what's ours."

"Gladly." Hemorrhagia left the kitchen, and only then, out of the Butcher's sight, did she let the smirk fighting its way onto her face out to play. Finally she was getting that arrogant bitch Quarrel dealt with, one way or another (killing the Butcher was a death sentence, if she even managed that with such a weak power), and she couldn't be happier.


And that's that! The two runes used for the armor are Algiz and Mannaz, the rune on her helmet is Ansuz, and the "speed" rune (it does much more than that) is Raidō.

This chapter fought me a lot more than previous chapters in this work, but at least I have a concrete direction to go from here.

Horny Jail population: 3.5 (Manton, Siberian, Hemorrhagia, and Quarrel)

One note: Shaper contained an OC alien god who is dead and gone, and will (probably) not be back outside of Panacea's inherited memories.

That's about it, so read, review, enjoy, and have a nice day.