I know birthday presents are supposed to go to the birthday person, but…
CW: a little body horror at the beginning if you squint (Echidna clones) and Max Anders' perspective. Friendly reminder that just because I write something from a character's perspective does not mean that it's right, or that I endorse that something.
So, uh… I'm not dead? In my defense I ran into a bunch of issues in my personal life, then when I actually started wanting to write again (I was hoping to get this out on my birthday, and I missed that by like four days rip) I got slammed with both being busy and also a really bad day. But I'm here now, so,,, yay?
Brockton Bay can have little a sodium vapor streetlamps, as a treat.
To those readers who were hoping for more sane clones… sorry to disappoint, that's primarily an interaction between Glory Girl's aura, the Runes cheating for author fiat nebulous reasons, and Styx's power being regenerative in nature, so none of the other clones would benefit from the same thing and be sane.
I know people were hoping to see the fight between Taylor and Division, but it was really anticlimactic when I did try to write it- it was pretty much just Taylor kiting Division until QA bonked it over the head with the reconfigure stick, mostly tedious and draining of Taylor's reserves instead of actually worth writing, so I cut it in favor of the rest of this interlude.
When Victoria saw Trickster's eyes flicker away from Taylor under his mask, she immediately started moving to slam into him.
It was too late for her to prevent him from teleporting a different clone in, one who was moving almost superhumanly fast, but at that point she was already close enough to the both of them that she could just plow into both the clone and the cape, and then jam the hat on Trickster's head down over his eyes hard enough that it would take a Brute rating to get off without destroying it (well, any more than it had already been, at least), leaving him to fall over and complain.
The clone, however, just blurred away across the roof when she hit him, slamming first Ballistic and then Coil into the ground with the cracks of breaking bones.
That stopped when Styx gestured, dark blades erupting out of the shadows cast by the yellowish light of the streetlights, and the almost taffylike flesh of the clone split as he ran directly into the blades and fell to the floor without a sound.
More blades swept in and slashed across the back of his bare limbs as he tried to push himself up, cutting through the clone's pale flesh and sending him collapsing to the floor as he glared up, switching between Victoria and Styx with no real regard for the "conventional" notion of human speed.
"What the fuck are you doing?" snapped Victoria, glaring ineffectually at Trickster, who gingerly was prodding at his hat with the arm he wasn't holding to his chest. After a moment, she realized her glare was wasted on the blinded cape and shifted it to the clone.
"He protects mother," said the clone in a familiar voice Victoria couldn't quite place. "We protect him."
"We protect him," echoed the other clone who had been subdued by Ballistic.
"Great," groaned the semi-armored cape, holding his side gingerly. "Krouse, you got a bunch of simps on your ass that your BO can't drive off."
"Screw you, Luke," replied the other cape, letting himself fall to a supine position and leaving his hat where it was covering his eyes.
"If you're quite finished," slurred Coil through what looked to be either a dislocated or broken jaw, "we have a significant obstacle presented, in that Miss Meinhardt has escaped containment save for Vista's efforts. It would probably be wise to rectify that situation." Genesis' reptilian form gently lifted him upright, drawing murmured thanks from the morph suit-clad villain.
Ballistic groaned as he pushed himself to his feet, reaching into a pocket on his armor for a small handful of ball bearings, then inched gingerly over to the edge of the building to look out at the clones on the ground, gauging the situation.
"I have… no idea who I should be trying to hit first," he said, his sentence punctuated by another of Quarrel's arrows detonating in a flash of lightning.
"Clones of Amy or the Cornell Bomber," Victoria said, cracking her knuckles. "They do weird things with Amy's power so we don't know but they could have a bunch of weird things, including disease powers, and the Cornell Bomber's whole thing is explosions."
"And Volur?" asked Styx, charging the air with tension.
"...I'm not sure that that's something you should be worried about," said Quarrel, having literally leapt off of an exploding clone of the Cornell Bomber (who she promptly perforated) to reach the roof again. "Volur, Panacea, and I all have… nonstandard powers, and they might be strong enough in Volur to disrupt the cloning process."
"That's…" Ballistic looked out at the battlefield, then visibly made the decision not to pry. "Yeah, okay." And with that, he started firing his ball bearings with the staccato crack crack crack of them breaking the sound barrier (and, more distantly, bones).
Victoria rose into the air, then swooped down, traveling in erratic paths to slam into the odd clone here and there while remaining mobile enough to return to the rooftop if needed, but there honestly wasn't all that much for her to do- even with the rate that the Case 53 was creating clones, Quarrel and Ballistic were dealing with them almost entirely on their own, with intermittent aid from Styx weaponizing shadows, and ultimately most of the clones Victoria dealt with were the copies of (presumably- they were naked, after all, so she couldn't be sure) Oni Lee who were able to teleport away from the rapid attacks that Ballistic and Quarrel could put out.
The end of the battle, when it came, was relatively anticlimactic- the flow of new clones joining the battle abruptly stopped, and when Victoria looked up to see why, she managed to catch most of the mass of the Case 53's animalistic body splash to the ground in a wave of slightly rotten-smelling sludge, revealing seven people (one of whom promptly dissolved into the telltale ash of Oni Lee's power) in various states of dazedness.
The least dazed of the people was Taylor, who landed on her feet, armor somehow dry despite the wave of sludge that the Case 53 had released. Near Taylor was Amy, whose eyes were unfocused but she was clearly lucid enough to help a wobbly-looking girl in tight red and black to her feet.
"Hey, Vicky," said Taylor, her words slurred just slightly with exhaustion. "You got a chair or something? It's been a long… however long I spent in there, and I just wanna sit down.
Amy was a little jealous of Taylor for being able to use Vicky's thighs as a pillow after her ordeal.
Not specifically about sleeping on her sister's thighs- that boat had well and truly sailed, since while she wasn't strictly speaking subject to the Westermarck effect with regards to Victoria, the externally-enforced obsession that had resulted from Shaper's mental manipulations combining with her sister's aura had been wiped by her apotheosis restoring her to "perfect health", the implications of which she was unwilling to really think about.
That said, it wasn't all bad- Coil was (presumably) completely dealt with, given that according to Vicky, Vista was all but sitting on the man, even beyond his broken bones, and hopefully-
Her train of thought was abruptly disrupted by the bass-heavy style that John Williams preferred for his Sith characters, immediately spiking her adrenaline at the prospect of talking to Carol.
Intellectually, she knew she probably shouldn't be so apprehensive over Carol calling, but given that in the past most of their phone conversations had been over not being home in time for her curfew and the like, long exposure had conditioned her to react a certain way, and she was still a little worked up after getting kidnapped.
"Hello?"
"Where the hell do you think you are, young lady?!"
Amy pulled the phone away from her head and looked at it incredulously. "What?"
"Where. Are. You."
"Uh… outside a cape battle's aftermath, hang on." She turned around before she found an intact street sign. "About Second and Park, with Vicky and Taylor."
"And how did you get there?"
"I don't know," said Amy, no small amount of sarcasm in her voice. "It's not as if I had a choice in the matter, what with being kidnapped and unconscious and all that."
"Watch your tone, young lady," said Carol. "There's no excuse for such impoliteness."
"Yeah, well, again, just got kidnapped, so I'm not exactly inclined to be charitable to anyone telling me to stop bitching," she shot back.
Carol's reply was interrupted by Styx, who plucked the phone out of her hands with surprisingly dexterous claws and walked over to Vicky, who took said phone and held it up to her own ear.
"Mom," she said, voice low out of consideration to the sleeping god on her lap, "it's me. Ames is okay, she got kidnapped and then stuck in a weird cape with cloning powers, but she's good now. The cape is… dealt with."
Amy glanced over to where Sundancer and Genesis were fussing over a blonde woman who she quickly looked away from upon realizing that she was lacking clothes, who was apparently the big cape? She wasn't sure, and when Taylor had tried to explain what had happened she just chalked it up to rune magic bullshit after Taylor and her sister had started going on about "vindication of passenger theory" and "holy shit how high is your Trump rating now".
Amy was abruptly jolted back to reality by a wave of Vicky's aura and the sound of her phone creaking. "I don't care about my date or your publicity event getting interrupted, damn it!" she whisper-yelled. "I care about my sister getting kidnapped by some asshole who wanted her for her power!"
Amy could all but hear the creaking of the plastic case on her phone as Victoria started to lose control of her strength, the thunderous expression on her face growing more tumultuous as Carol presumably kept speaking. "I'm not Amy's babysitter, mom. I'm allowed to have my own life, and just because you don't like Taylor is no excuse for- look, if you're going to blame me going out on a date for bad shit when you haven't done so in the past when Dean was the date, that just tells me that you're either being homophobic or don't like Taylor! Or do I have to remind you that you weren't around to prevent Amy from getting kidnapped either?"
Vicky pressed her lips together. "Look, mom, I'm not dealing with you like this and the aftermath of… whatever the hell you want to call what went on here at the same time, and I sure as shit am not gonna do it over the phone. When you get back, bring Aunt Sarah over to the house, and we can talk."
Without waiting for a response, Vicky hung up, tossing the phone to Amy who nearly dropped it, the shaky fingers of an adrenaline crash betraying her.
"Well then," she said, quietly for the sake of Taylor who had somehow not woken up after the not-exactly-quiet phone call, "looks like mom's not happy."
Vicky gave Amy a level look that spoke to her supreme lack of amusement with the level of understatement in that statement, then sighed tiredly and rubbed at her face with one hand. "Tell me something I don't know," she said without too much heat.
"You should start a team," said Styx, dropping heavily onto a piece of rubble next to Vicky.
"I… huh. I'm not gonna commit to that one way or the other but it's definitely an idea worth thinking about, once she wakes up," replied the blonde, gesturing at Taylor still sleeping on her lap.
"Fair," said Styx. "I just… it might be something that gets her the support she needs in a way she can't deny, after what Emma Barnes did to her."
That effectively killed the conversation, leaving the three conscious capes to their own thoughts.
Max Anders was… not particularly enthusiastic about the way things had been going of late.
Don't get him wrong, he was pleased with the way that recent events had been favoring his organizations (both legal and otherwise), but there was something about things that made him feel… odd.
The feeling had started, to some degree or another, when Victor's younger brother, Clausewitz, had really started to push for his preferred strategic and tactical moves for his Empire.
It had started… well, not innocuously, per se, but it was about as close as a criminal organization such as the Empire could get, with the man's suggestions helping them to expand their recruitment, both of the overt gang members that they needed from a street warfare perspective and the "respectable sympathizers" which were spread throughout various different agencies, both law enforcement and otherwise, the kind of people who would massage situations and turn just enough of a blind eye to their activities to really keep their operations running. This was where their moles came from, the informants in the police and PRT that supplied them with insider information (well, that and Thinker intel from both Gesselschaft and the Herren clans).
Speaking of the Herren clans, he chose to believe that both Rune and Othala had decided to join the Empire of their own volition- after all, the latter had been engaged to Victor for months before the Herren clans hand sent the quartet to join his Empire, and Rune had joined the Herren clans before that.
That said, he had been privy to Clausewitz's longer-term power conditioning exactly once, and it had left him profoundly uncomfortable.
He did his best to avoid the man outside official business, after that.
Still, despite the level of separation he held from Clausewitz, the pattern of escalation he was undertaking was… worrying. The gradual subornment of the PRT and police was one thing, and in fact something that both he and his father had been attempting to accomplish, albeit with less success.
But the blatant manipulations of Director Piggot, both overt and covert, to weaken the PRT? Working with the Butcher, that mad collective willing to call in the Slaughterhouse when they failed to get their way against Marquis? Exploiting a Trigger event to recruit a cape, even if it was mostly indirect? Any one of those could spell disaster if it got out, and the latter two also had the potential to directly backfire on them if not handled delicately.
The fact that any of those ideas were what Clausewitz immediately chose to use as strategies to pursue spoke to either a disconnect from the nature of capedom or a willful disregard of the established nature of capedom, the distinction being largely arbitrary in practical terms but important in terms of predicting Clausewitz's actions.
That said, he couldn't deny that the man's methods were producing results.
Clausewitz's manipulations with regards to the Director were hampering the PRT's responses against his Empire far more than just what low-level informants they had, and as much as he hated to admit it after what the Butcher had cost him over the years, he had to admit that the mad collective's presence in his city was helping, both by their almost suicidal willingness to throw themselves at Lung (the only thing preventing it from being actually suicidal was Lung's restraint to prevent himself from becoming the next Butcher) and the disruption to PRT and otherwise heroic operations within the city, even if this latest event hadn't been directly related.
No, apparently Coil had been stupid enough to keep a monster under his base, and the situation had degenerated enough to the point where Oni Lee, Bakuda, Rune, Krieg, and even some independent capes with surprising levels of power, including Clausewitz's next recruit, had all had to intervene together to put the creature down.
He was just thankful that none of his capes were injured too permanently by the beast, and Othala's aid would have them fighting fit in no time.
Still, he needed to keep an eye on the man, for security's sake, if nothing else. There was no telling when one of his risky strategies would backfire on them, and as the stakes of said schemes rose, they needed to be ready for the consequences.
And that's that!
I had one more segment I wanted to push through but if I keep trying to beat my head against that wall right now I'm going to end up delayed by another month. There's still a bunch of fallout from Echidna I'm going to go into, so don't worry about that.
That's about it, so read, review, enjoy, and have a nice day!
