Noelle is causing problems, whether that is on purpose or not is unclear.
Content warning: non-graphic depiction of dismemberment and blood, Nazi POV at the end. Just a pre-warning: Gladly leans on his power a little too much for his understanding of human psychology and behavior, to the degree where it starts to let his biases directly harm his judgement on that front.
So, anyone who saw my post in the Inheritance thread or the gaylor discord server knows that, uh… I heard about the accusations of Nazi-ism going around.
Honestly, I expected this fic to be something of a popcorn fic where Taylor would blaze through the Nazis immediately too, and my plans just… developed in other directions. As of now, I plan to make them more long-term foes, which… apparently some people don't like.
Which… is fair, I made certain statements in the threads early on that didn't end up panning out, and if I recall correctly one of those was that the Empire would be Taylor's priority, so I get the disappointment. But at the same time, calling me a Nazi sympathizer over it is… uncalled for.
Also, as a separate thing: to the people who don't like the fact that I'm having the PRT/Protectorate as antagonistic or absentee at best: I'm a queer person of color from a red state, do the math.
Also, to jdboss1: you have been blocked. Take your Nazi apologia elsewhere.
"Well then," said Taylor, all but goggling at the trail of destruction that had been left in the wake of Coil's basement Case 53. Then, she turned to the man himself. "What the hell have you been keeping in your goddamn base?"
"Save the judgment for after the crisis," Coil snapped.
"I'm saving your beating for after the crisis, unless you've forgotten that you made the mistake of kidnapping both my father and Panacea," Taylor shot back. "You can fucking cope with the judgement."
A further response from either Coil or one of his cape lackeys (who were already getting twitchy, standing in the trail of cracked asphalt and smashed-out building detritus) was forestalled by a streak of gold and white resolving into Glory Girl, returned from reconnaissance in the general direction that Noelle had gone.
"I've got good news and bad news," she said, touching down gently. "Good news is that Vista and Quarrel are doing a decent job at keeping them contained. The bad news is that there's not nearly enough close-in capes to help them out. Krieg and Rune are there, and I think so is Oni Lee, but they're not nearly doing well enough against the clones to keep up with them, even with Vista and Quarrel running artillery. They're about to break, and hard. Best case scenario, they die or run. Worst… well, Vista and Quarrel can probably escape from where they are."
The fact that she wasn't including the incredibly mobile Oni Lee or Rune in her list of potential escapees was telling.
A flash of raido accompanied Taylor waving in the direction of Noelle's path of destruction. "Let's get moving, people, and if you can tell me what you can do that would be greatly appreciated."
"Me too?" asked Danny.
"Uh… I'm not sure where you could go that would be safe given that the city is going buck wild, but if you want to go to, like, Alexander's or Kurt and Lacey's once we get to Vista, then I won't stop you."
"Why not home?"
"Because the door got actually broken and I'm not sure if the rune I left there fixed it? Also safety in numbers."
He didn't respond before they started moving.
"Well then," said the man in the top hat, his voice taking on a pompous, almost showman-like air. "Going back to the original question, I'm Trickster, the leader of the Travelers and teleporter extraordinaire. My expertise lies in tactics, teleporting things within my line of sight with each other, and card tricks."
"Is this really the time for that?" asked the man in the red armor, seeming to almost deflate a moment. "Don't answer that. I'm Ballistic, and I can fire anything I touch like a projectile."
"I'm Genesis," said the reptilian thing pushing the wheelchair-bound woman. "I'm pushing my own wheelchair, and I can change my projection given enough time to myself."
The group lapsed into silence after that, walking through the gaping wound in the city with the tension of combat to come weighing down the group of capes to the point where not even Danny, with his perspective so divorced from the capes he was surrounded by, could stand to interrupt.
The sounds of crackling lightning and detonating attacks got louder as they approached, and mere moments saw the group standing on a roof with Vista and Quarrel, who turned out to be the source of both the lightning and explosive attacks.
Down in the street was a chaotic mess of clones, blood, chewed-off body parts, and the massive, chimeric form of the Case 53.
"What's the situation?" asked Taylor after Vista had twisted space so one step for her father had taken him to the DWA building.
"Not great," replied Quarrel. "Whatever that big fucker is, it just keeps spitting out naked clones, and-" she paused her speech to nock an arrow, which swiftly found itself embedded in the eye of a blonde clone covered in flames and detonated in a sphere of icy blue light that left hoarfrost around the body, which collapsed to the floor covered in frozen fire.
"Where was I," she continued as if nothing had happened, ignoring the gobsmacked looks all the capes save for Taylor, Victoria, and Styx were giving her. "Oh, right. Yeah, so she managed to grab one of the Oni's clones and it didn't disintegrate, plus whatever fire user and shadow cape she has in addition to Panacea, and also- fuck."
The reason for the invective, as it turned out, was the tentacle that had latched onto the figure wearing a gas mask that was standing on the jeep and holding a grenade launcher at arm's length, causing them to go limp and start twitching, and yanked him into the main mass of the cloning cape.
"On a scale of 'puppies and kittens for everyone to the world is ending' how bad is that particular person getting dragged in?" asked Styx, somehow managing to convey a frown through her power-distorted voice.
"Krieg? Not that bad, relative to who she has already. She already has the Cornell Bomber, so we have bigger issues than one Nazi." Quarrel punctuated the statement with another arrow to a clone just emerging from the main body of the cape, which burst into an expanding sphere of knives. Some of the blades slowed as they went towards a man in a long coat and a gas mask who was wrestling a version of Panacea that was twisted and swollen up, but the rest carved through clone and cape flesh alike, sending the girl on top of the Case 53 slumping forwards even as the rest of its body started to rampage.
"What have you done!" screamed Trickster, glaring hatefully at Quarrel momentarily. Then, he looked away and she vanished, replaced by a newly extruded blonde clone who looked around, a little confused, then turned to Taylor and glared, miniature orbs of flaming force appearing around her and hurtling out at all the capes on the rooftop.
Meanwhile, down in the street, Quarrel leapt up, firing an arrow that burst on impact with enough force radiating out to shove her away from the Case 53's grasping tentacles and into a roll, letting her come up running back towards the building she'd been sent off of.
Ballistic swept his hand out, returning those targeting him and Trickster to the clone with enough added velocity to break bones and splatter the semi-solid flames all over her to little effect.
Coil desperately dove for the floor, rolling to extinguish the fires that the near misses of the projectiles had set along his back and arms.
Vista took one step to the left and ended up three buildings over, the attacks targeting her slamming fruitlessly into the roof of the building.
Glory Girl shot up several feet, avoiding the projectiles completely, as Styx crossed her arms and tanked the impacts, smearing across the roof before snapping back into cohesion once the flames guttered out on the odd not-quite-matter that made up her ursine form.
Taylor was too stunned to react before the orbs of force impacted her armor with bruising force, shocking her out of the stunned state just as Ballistic's counter subdued the clone.
She stomped over to Trickster, who was still taking cover from the clone behind Ballistic, then grabbed him by his (reinforced, probably) collar and hoisted him up into the air. "Explain yourself," she snapped, glaring at him.
"Can't hurt Noelle," he ground out. Then, he turned his head to look at the fight, and Taylor abruptly and unceremoniously found herself standing, fists raised but empty (and far less imposing than when she was holding Trickster), in front of the onrushing form of the Case 53 (presumably Noelle, although she couldn't be sure).
"Fuck," she said just as a tentacle wrapped around her leg and yanked, pulling her just enough off balance for another tentacle to wrap around her unarmored throat.
Taylor wasn't entirely sure what she was expecting from the experience of getting subdued by the large case 53, but ending up back in the same stormy crystalline landscape that she had met the Administrator in was… not it.
Off in the distance, Taylor saw something that looked vaguely like a dying octopus, if that octopus had been rolled around in a pile of half dead, glue-covered clones of itself, with its tentacles wrapped around various beings that looked like they'd belong in the same general ecosystem as the Administrator's not-quite-uncanny-valley form.
"Careful," came a chittering voice, and it was only the awareness link that gave Taylor the certainty that that was the Administrator that prevented her from blasting the spiderlike being with a bolt of lightning.
"Administrator! How did that Case 53 pull me here?" Taylor relaxed a little, seeing the (slightly smaller than she remembered-had she grown that much since she'd first met Panacea?) form of the Administrator, a relaxation that only increased as Odin appeared to step out of thin air at her left.
"Her power is… I don't have the words to explain it in a language that you will understand, but the closest thing that comes is [MisconfiguredBroken," said the Administrator, with the last two words coming out at the same time in a staticky hiss that whispered of extra information just beyond Taylor's hearing.
Odin frowned. "That is a bad thing. How long would it take to rectify?"
The Administrator shrugged, a vaguely unnerving action from an arachnoid being. "It will take as long as it takes, but I lack the raw power to disrupt [Division] long enough to [ReconfigureRepair] it."
Taylor sighed. "Great. So I have to fight a power long enough for you to perform percussive maintenance?"
"Not percussive, but yes," said the Administrator.
Taylor sighed, then clenched her fists. "Alright."
She started jogging towards the octopus creature (that the Administrator had called Division, she thought), drawing the power of the runes into herself as Odin faded from visibility, and after a moment, she snapped one hand up, hurling a bolt of lightning from a sowilo rune glowing on the back of her armored fist to strike home against Division's deathly gray flesh.
It undulated in pain, then turned too many glowing red eyes to her and screamed with over a dozen mouths and all but exploded towards her, ready to fight her instead of the other beings that it had left behind.
"Come get some!" shouted Taylor, charging up a larger bolt, and she grinned, blood pounding in her ears as she bared her teeth, ready for proper combat.
Victor Gladly ran his hand through his thinning hair and breathed out, visibly relaxing as his lungs emptied.
Even had it not been for this evening's… festivities, he would have been flagging, with his power not doing anything to keep him up and running (unlike his brother, whose vast assortment of stolen skills put him far and away ahead of Clausewitz in regards to, among other things, managing his own stamina to last as long as possible, both within a tactical context and… elsewhere).
Still, he felt he was making significant headway in accomplishing the Empire's goals.
Despite Judge Myra's strange resistance to even the short-term effects of his power, Gladly had managed to manipulate enough of the staff around him to cause a significant delay to the court case, then convinced Mr. Hebert that it was the PRT's direct fault. Not that the thing was hard- the man was a lifelong union administrator, and he also had a staggering amount of distrust built up towards the PRT, so exploiting that was child's play.
He had also… gently persuaded some of the members of Brockton's alleged Finest to allow him to get in to visit one of their… guests, albeit in civilian clothes instead of his preferred guise as Clausewitz (although given the degree to which the Brockton Police Department was filled with both members of the Empire and their sympathizers, most of what he did was actually gentle persuasion and not coercion).
"Mr. Gladly? What are you doing here?" asked Emma Barnes, looking on the whole rather deflated in the holding cell.
Before he responded, he took a moment to think over the situation at hand.
Ms. Barnes had very definitively fallen in with the wrong crowd, in a way that wasn't entirely Ms. Hess' fault- although the wayward Ward was certainly a significant factor in the situation, his understanding of her reactions in certain situations suggested that Lung and his group of Oriental thugs were involved in some way.
That said, she was by no means unsalvageable- given enough time, either he or his brother could sway her to their side, despite her stubborn unwillingness to relinquish her foolish dependence on Ms. Hess, which would in turn grant them greater insight into Taylor Hebert's mind, which was something that both he and his brother sorely needed in order to properly plan around her- the information he'd gathered of Taylor Hebert during her time in school was… inconclusive, given the severe changes to her personality and decision making process her Trigger event and subsequent power acquisition had made.
His pre-Trigger understanding of her behavior was that she would have remained very passive despite the… severe escalation that Ms. Barnes had indulged in, so given where she was intended to fit within the Plan… he needed more information, and Ms. Barnes was likely to be the best source of that information given her own longstanding history with Taylor Hebert, as well as her not insignificant understanding of manipulations (which, sadly, she hadn't brought to bear on the vilest Ward's molding of her).
To whit, a significant part of his effort tonight had gone to setting up enough uproar that no one would be able to tell it had happened, not even the freakishly well-informed Coil, which was aided by Thomas Calvert not taking nearly enough precautions against his power to prevent Gladly from pushing him into making a far more overt move against both New Wave and Taylor Hebert than he would have chosen otherwise.
"I'm here to see you, Miss Barnes," he said, eschewing his usual "hip with the kids" façade in favor of revealing some of the exhaustion he'd been feeling- a simple manipulation, but to someone in as vulnerable a state as the young redhead, the show of emotions would do almost as much to get her on his side as his power.
"Why… why would you come here?' she asked, a glimmer of suspicion in her eyes.
"Because," he replied with a sigh, nudging his power just enough to make her believe him, "I know I failed you, and I wanted to know how, and why, you arrived at the conclusion that your pattern of behavior was necessary, so that I might be able to prevent it going forwards." He had no intention of preventing similar situations, going forwards, at least when they were under his control- being able to induce Triggers independently of Gesellschaft would be a massive victory for the Empire, after all- but she didn't have to know that.
She sniffled, then begun to speak, and with every word out of her mouth, another piece of the puzzles that were her actions with regards to Taylor Hebert, as well as the girl in question's mind.
Victor Gladly left the holding area and stalked off to his brother's house, nursing a headache from running himself ragged but with a vastly more advanced understanding of the Empire's soon-to-be newest recruit. The longer hewalked, the more the plan in his head came into focus, and by the time he returned to his brother's home to begin planning, he had a solid framework for the execution of said plan.
Gladly entered the empty house and beelined for the white board they had always used for planning. He'd need his brother to help refine the plan with his more varied skillset, but there wasn't anything stopping him from starting to fet the framework down physically.
There was much planning to do, after all, and not much time to waste in doing so.
And that's that!
I wanted to actually write out the combat scene with Division, but I feel like if I tried it'd delay the chapter by another like three weeks, so… I'm not sure I'm gonna write it next chapter, either, for further delay reasons. We'll see.
That's about it, so read, review, enjoy, and have a nice day!
