Coil has officially lost control of the situation.


My brain is too fried to make a good intro note, rip me.

One thing is that you all should go check out Shadelight's Realignment over on SB and show it some love. It's a power copier Taylor which jumps the rails of canon right at the start, and as someone who has advance knowledge of what's coming next, it's going to be,,, inch resting. Also I've got an omake there, if you're into that sort of thing.


"This is… not what I expected," said Taylor, frowning.

"How so?" asked Glory Girl, hovering in front of Taylor as they proceeded down the corridor that the door into Coil's base had let to. "I see the flashing lights, I hear a breach siren, that's about what I'd expect from a wannabe Bond villain like Coil."

"No, it's… There's a bunch of weird bugs that I don't think I've ever seen before, and they feel… weird." Taylor frowned, then made the connection between the bugs and what was making her feel uncomfortable. "They're cape constructs, I think…" Taylor diverted one into a vent, where it was abruptly set upon by a spider. "But they persist on death."

Glory Girl frowned. "The only cape I know of who can make persistent minions like that is… Nilbog, and I really don't think he'd be able to get out and into this city without anyone knowing about it."

"Shit," said Taylor.

"Yeah," said Glory Girl. "Let's see if we can't hunt the snake down in his hole and see what capes he's released in his defense."

"In that case…" Taylor frowned, focusing on both the senses of the bugs she had throughout the base and pushing energy into the ansuz rune inside her eyepatch to allow her to better parse those senses. "He's this way," said Taylor, jogging down the corridor and turning right at the intersection of another, with the pair just narrowly dodging a small squad of mercenaries fleeing from what looked like a bear made out of solidified shadow.

The bear stopped, sniffing the air, then turned, growling, towards Taylor, and advanced menacingly.

Taylor, in turn, flicked off a bolt of lightning with Sowilo at the same time that Glory Girl's aura flared to life. The bolt seemed to pass through the bear's head, fading as it seemed to smear the shadowy stuff that the head was made of through the air, before it abruptly snapped back to the original shape.

"Shit," panted the flanged voice of the bear-cape, "Hebert?"

Taylor's eyes narrowed. "Who's asking?"

"Okay, so, full disclosure: I'm a clone of Sophia who's been made to oppose her and… huh, that's gone. Okay, introspection later. Anyways, yeah, Sophia decided to work with Coil to fuck you over, so I'm trying to fuck him up first. It's, uh… not working super great… could I come with y'all?"

Taylor frowned, drawing more on the wisdom channeled through ansuz, then turned to Glory Girl. "Am I just reading her wrong, or is she telling the truth?"

The Alexandria Package glared at the ursine form. "I'm not sure you are, but… well, we do know she isn't Sophia Hess. I guess that's good for something."

"Cool," said Taylor. "Come along, then."

"Thanks," said the bearlike cape, falling into step with Taylor as the shadows making up the ursine form vanished, revealing a well-muscled, dark-skinned young woman who looked like Sophia's slightly older cousin, wearing ill-fitting fatigues that looked similar to the ones worn by Coil's troops.

Taylor spent perhaps a moment longer than strictly necessary scrutinizing her, but in her defense the similarity to Sophia was… uncanny. Fortunately, there was something in her eyes and the set of her face that made it immediately clear that she wasn't the girl who had cost Taylor her eye.

"You okay, Hebert?" the clone of Sophia asked, genuine concern in her voice. "You're, uh… staring."

Taylor cast about for a good reason to be looking at her like that, and fortunately a good question presented itself. "What should we call you?"

"That's a fair question," came the reply, a shrug drawing Taylor's attention to the sharply defined muscles of the shoulder exposed by the poorly sized fatigues. "For now, call me Styx. I'll decide on a personal name if I walk away from this fight."

"Sounds like a plan. I'm Volur, in costume," said Taylor, turning sharply away from the well-built form of Styx and back to the corridor. "Now come on, if we hurry we can catch up to Coil before he escapes with my dad."

The trio continued down the corridor, following Taylor as she turned through a maze of corridors and featureless doors.

After a period of about five minutes, the trio turned a corner to come face to face with Coil, flanked by two parahumans in red and black, a boy in a t-shirt and jeans, a fearsome draconic creature pushing an unconscious girl in a wheelchair, and Danny Hebert.

"Stand down," snapped Taylor, even as Styx gestured and each of the other group's shadows rose up in a blade aimed at their throats except for Danny's and the boy's.

"Not now you fools," snarled Coil. "Noelle is loose and we have to evacuate the base now!"

"What the fuck is Noelle?" asked Glory Girl, frowning. "And where the hell is Amy?"

"Uh… about that," said one of the capes, a man wearing red football pad-like armor covered in red pouches.

"What did you do with my sister." Glory Girl didn't need to raise her voice, her aura blooming out to fill the corridor and cow everyone present save Taylor.

"We- we tried to get her to cure our Case 53 friend, and she got captured and cloned by her!" whimpered the cape in the top hat.

Taylor and Vicky both turned to Styx.

"Don't look at me," she replied hotly, "when I was there the only other clones I saw were of Sophia and that blonde with fire powers."

"Great," said Glory Girl. "Evil Panacea clones. That's not gonna end poorly."

"Precisely! And she's also taken Shadow Stalker and Sundancer! We must evacuate the base immediately, and call in the Protectorate to contain her! Her massive stature and regeneration prevent almost everyone in this city from killing her, but they can help!" snapped Coil.

"Evacuate, maybe," said Taylor. "But the Protectorate ain't gonna be much help. Even if you were hoping for reinforcements, from outside the city, we haven't gotten any since before I was in middle school, and the locals are all tied up with either the Empire and Lung fighting the Butcher, and they probably don't have the firepower we'd need to handle things unless you convinced Miss Militia to build, like, a pocket nuke launcher and managed to drag her away from whatever fight she's in."

Styx laughed. "As if that's gonna happen. She may be deepthroating the boot and all gung ho against the villains, so you might be able to convince her to hunt down Noelle if you spin it right, but she really hates making shit that blows up. Bad memories, I think."

Taylor sighed. "So, it's down to me to deal with her, great. What does she look like?"

"You won't live long enough to find out what Mother looks like, let alone hurt her," came a snarled voice from behind Taylor.

She turned to see three different forms, all naked and moving in such a way that, had it been less dire circumstances, would have made her blush. Two of them were visibly distorted clones of Panacea, one crawling with bugs and the other splattered with blood, and the last was a waif-thin blonde with a hellish glow in her hands.

Before Taylor could parse the new arrivals, they moved.

The blonde glared directly at her, twin energy beams blasting directly into her hard enough to bruise even if the armor she was wearing deflected them away. The beams started heating the concrete to a glow where they landed on it after scattering off the individual rings of mail on Taylor's chest.

She returned fire with isa, pumping enough power into the rune to cool the clone's eyes enough to shut off the beam at the same time that she blindfolded and bound her.

Vicky exploded forwards, slamming through the bug-covered clone hard enough to shatter her against the wall, and as the corpse fell limply to the ground, Taylor felt the bugs she was covered in snap into sharp relief, some of them crushed by Glory Girl's attack but not all.

Styx screamed in pain even as she shifted into her Breaker form, the shadows practically exploding off of her as blood ran down her face under where the blood-splattered Panacea clone was holding her. Then, the clone screamed as she was swallowed by the darkness, more blood weeping from her before she vanished within the darkness.

She didn't emerge.

"Gah Jesus fuck that hurts," Styx panted, blurred shadows around her head slowly coming back together.

"This only highlights the urgency of evacuating this base immediately," snapped Coil, who at some point had drawn a gun.

"By all means," said Taylor, "lead the way." She fixed the cape with the top hat with a glare. "What does Noelle look like?"

"Huge," he said, following after Coil. "She's a girl on top of a massive pile of… things, arms and legs and tentacles and mouths. She looked relatively normal when she first got her power, and we thought it was just a strong regeneration ability, but… it kept changing her, and half the time it's not even her in charge."

There was a pulse of concern from the link between Taylor and the Administrator, mixed in with… something else. When Taylor started to consider the possibility of using the Runes to help rein her power in, that something else came through again, strong enough for her to clock it as hope, which Taylor took to mean that the Administrator might be able to do something about the situation.

"I'll see what can't be done about that, if I get the chance," said Taylor, noting the hope that shone in his eyes that was visible through the mask he wore. "But if what you all are saying is true… she might be a full-on S-class threat, what with being able to clone Panacea. She might end up creating a clone that specializes in, like, diseases, or something like that, and that'd be pretty close to a worst case scenario. I might not have the chance to help her."

"Whatever it takes," he said in reply, killing the conversation as he lengthened his stride to get away from the taller girl.

"What do you bet that he tries to dump you on top of her and damn the consequences if you say you can't help her?" asked Styx under her breath, ursine muzzle split in a tongue-lolling grin.

"No bet," replied Vicky, equally quietly. "He gives me yandere vibes."

Taylor burst out laughing at the abrupt contrast in her head between the serious hatted man and the mental image of a schoolgirl carrying a bloodsplattered knife that she associated with the term yandere.

"What?" Vicky asked, indignant that both Taylor and Styx had burst into laughter.

"Don't worry about it," said Taylor. "Just… imagining him in that damn hat and mask, but his head's been plopped on top of a schoolgirl with a knife."

This time, it was Vicky who burst into laughter, which tapered off as she replied with an "okay, fair."


Quarrel wasn't sure what the fuck had gotten into the city tonight.

It had started with the Empire and the Teeth getting rowdy, with the Empire trying to create a beachhead in ABB territory, because of rumors that both Lung and the Oni were out of town. Unfortunately, they were not, and worse, they had managed to recruit the goddamn Cornell Bomber.

Lung had shown up to handle the Empire, who promptly fell back to let the Butcher occupy him and run wild in ABB territory, which had stalled out after the Protectorate had responded in force to both the Empire and the Teeth. Meanwhile, the Oni and the Cornell Bomber had pushed into Empire territory near the commercial district, and it was clear that Krieg and Rune, who had been sent to handle them, and it was there that they were going in order to contain the fight and protect the bystanders.

Or at least that's how Quarrel was justifying it, since she wasn't willing to bring up the odd new intuition that had been nudging her in the back of her head since she accepted the bow from Revel until she had a little more to ascribe to it than "just a hunch".

"Why," puffed Vista, hunched over with her hands on her knees, "is New Wave not doing jack shit?"

"No clue," said Quarrel, drawing an arrow and nocking it. "I heard some shit about Brandish going out to a conference out of the city with her family, but I'm not sure if that's true or not."

Below the building they were standing on, a chunk of floating concrete was blocking the roadway and more specifically an open-topped jeep, in which a short figure in a gas mask and a trench coat stood, gesticulating grandly with the grenade launcher she held in one hand.

"She's stalling," Quarrel murmured.

"What do you mean by that?" Vista asked.

"She's a Tinker who builds single-use items, and it's only been like a week since she was sprung," said Quarrel slowly, thinking through the issue slowly. "She hasn't had a whole lot of time to set up and build shit, so she's limited in what gear she made between setting up her lab and settling in here in Brockton. Except…" Quarrel looked up at a roof across the street, where a green-striped red mask was leering down on the Nazis.

"He can replicate Tinkertech," she hissed as he vanished, reappearing between Krieg and Rune.

Krieg backhanded the figure, collapsing it into a pile of ash, but the cylindrical device that he flicked upwards didn't, bursting into a sphere of concussive light not dissimilar to Purity's blasts, albeit much more diluted, that cracked the chunk of concrete and shoved both Nazi capes aside.

Rune slowed down even as half of the concrete slab moved ponderously over to catch her, and Krieg landed in a crater of his own creation, dazed but unhurt, but it was clear the tide had turned against the Empire members.

When either of the Nazi capes tried to attack the jeep, they were either distracted by the Oni or, less common, the Cornell Bomber's grenade launcher came up and spat a concussion grenade at them, smaller than the ones that the Oni was using to throw Krieg around but no less distracting.

"Come on," said a now-recovered Vista. "Let's leave them to it, and go help out somewhere else. I can see the Teeth making a mess over in the Trainyard, and if we hurry, we can keep them from starting any fires."

Quarrel frowned. There was something here, something she wasn't seeing, and-

Then she heard something crumbling on the other side of the jeep.

"Wait, something's coming."

A massive body of flesh, covered in writhing tentacles and slavering mouths, burst out of an alley, slamming into the jeep with the sound of metal tearing, and then a mouth-tipped tentacle swallowed the Cornell Bomber wholesale.

"Jesus Christ!" shouted Vista, stumbling back.

Then, the body of the thing down below spat out multiple naked bodies. Some were flaming, some were seeming to dissolve into shadows, others were seeming to twist into inhuman shapes, and the rest of the figures just writhed before getting to their feet.

"Fuck," said Quarrel, the faces of the figures coming into sharp focus. "Vista, prevent anyone from leaving now. That's a replicator, and it's got clones of Panacea and the Cornell Bomber." She stood up above the edge of the roof and started to draw the arrow back.

"What are you going to do?" asked Vista, concerned.

Quarrel smirked, lightning crackling along the shaft of her arrow. She loosed, and it detonated once it hit in the center of a cluster of Panacea clones, charring them almost beyond recognition. "I'll think of something."


And that's that!

I wasn't exactly planning on Styx being a thing, but she kind of stole the mic and ran away from me, so now I've altered my long-term plan around her. Oops.

Remember to check out the discord! ( /gaylor)

That's about it, so read, review, enjoy, and have a great day!