Bait
A/n This is not a real chapter. It's more of an alternative snippet of what would have happened if Vin had joined the Undersiders at the start of the story instead of joining Taylor after the Endbringer fight. Enjoy.
Vin couldn't believe that they were going on the offensive. What was even more insane was that it was working.
She listened as Oni Lee's bronzepulse grew softer and softer until he was out of her range. She expected him to come back the moment she let her guard down, but ...
"He's not coming back," Tattletale said, as confident as ever. "The man's a born lackey. Without Lung giving orders ..."
"Then where is he?" According to Tattletale's intel, Lung was supposed to be leading the charge, not ... whatever he was doing.
Tattletale peered into the darkness in the same direction as the second bronzepulse. The second ... and the third. She couldn't burn bronze, but she smiled all the same. "It looks like Lung just ran into some trouble. A new cape came out to play." She turned and grinned at the rest of the crew. "What do you say we go lend a hand?"
Grue climbed up on the back of one of the dogs. He had done the most to drive off Oni Lee, but his powers wouldn't do much against Lung besides slowing him down. "Are you sure about this?"
Tattletale shrugged, climbing up behind him. "The boss said to go on the offensive, right? He's never led us wrong before."
He's never sent us against Lung before. Or showed his face. Or told them his name. Just monthly payments and enigmatic advice for a purpose Vin could only guess at. Why any of the other Undersiders put up with him, Vin could only guess at.
"This is insane," she muttered.
Bitch shot her a sneering glance through her mask. "Wimp."
"We have a chance," Grue assured her. "Hit him hard, hit him fast, and don't give him time to ramp up." With that, the three dogs took off, carrying their riders to yet another fight, while Vin?
Vin took to the sky.
She leapt off a building and shot into the air, flaring steel, soon outpacing the others. With tin the city lights blazed like the sun, and she could pick out Lung in the distance. He was on a rooftop, a much smaller figure curled up in front of him. Vin pulled out a handful of coins ... but waited. Not yet. Wait for a better shot.
The moment she landed on the roof, Lung spun on her, all eight feet of him. Great plan. Hit him before he ramps up. She shot her coins at him now that she was at an angle where she wouldn't hit the other person, and they bounced off his metallic scales. They didn't even slow him down as he lunged at her, forcing her to roll out of the way. She was stronger than she looked with pewter, but Lung looked like a monster and was even stronger than that. She needed leverage if she was going to win, and she wasn't going to get that on a roof.
Vin darted toward the other cape, a girl, tall and slender with a professionally made costume and long hair that smelled a little burnt. What could she do? She'd find out later. Vin grabbed her before leaping off of the building onto the street below.
The girl clutched at her arm, letting out a panicked squeak as they fell. Vin dropped a coin to slow them before they hit the ground, and Lung came crashing down a second later. The girl scrambled away and Lung turned toward her. A ball of fire appeared in his hand, and—
Vin threw her entire coin pouch at him. It hit him square in the chest, and she Pushed, not just on the coins, but on the metal in the building behind her. She felt her entire body being crushed between the two forces, but it was just enough ... to knock Lung off balance. That was all.
Then several tons of dog landed on his head, which did significantly more. After that, the fight was over. She darted in to hamstring him while he was distracted, but even that seemed unnecessary. It turned out the new girl had left him partially blind with several ounces of venom flowing through him, and they knocked him out and left him for the Protectorate.
No one was hurt, no one was dead, and they won.
This was too easy.
WWW
Life hadn't been easy when she had first arrived on Earth Bet before meeting the Undersiders. No money, no metals, no knowledge of the rules of a strange world. She had been too afraid to even beg. In Luthadel, only people who were hurt or too weak to work were allowed to beg, and the garrison patrolled the beggar's quarter to make sure that no one was faking it. And to carry away the bodies.
Stealing was out of the question, too. The weapons common guards used terrified her, to say nothing of the "heroes" she had seen. She couldn't face risking either without her metals, and getting Allomantically pure metals was going to be a pain and a half in a world without Allomancy. Running a con might be safer than a smash and grab, except for the thousand things she didn't know that could give her away.
That left scavenging. Digging through trash, sleeping in alleys. Trying to avoid anyone who might hurt her. She shouldn't have gone to the soup kitchen. Free food? It was an obvious trap, with obvious bait.
She took it anyway. It had gone well at first, until that man had started talking to her. A social worker, he called himself. He wanted to help, he claimed. He asked her questions. How old was she? Did she have any family, anyone who would notice if something happened to her? She left, and he followed her. She ran, and he chased her. Then she swallowed a penny.
Copper kept her hidden from Seekers. If this world had an equivalent, Vin hoped that would work. More importantly, the penny was only plated in copper. The inside was zinc.
She Rioted his emotions, Pulling on his confidence and his ... other appetites. He didn't see her knife until she slashed his throat. And after that, no more soup.
Not long afterward, the Undersiders found her. They had a spot for her in their crew, and they had money, connections, and not too many questions. The offer seemed too good to be true. Another obvious trap. More obvious bait.
She took it anyway.
WWW
"You want to do what?"
Brian shrugged. "You saw what that girl did to Lung. If she's unaffiliated—"
"She is," Lisa inserted.
"Then it won't hurt to make her an offer."
Vin stared at him. "What do we even know about her?"
"She helped us," Brian said. "And we helped her. That's a lot more than we knew about you, Vin, and we let you on the team."
"And we know that she picked a fight with one of the biggest monsters in the city," Vin said. "Why? Do we know?" She turned to Lisa, the one person on the team likely to know, or at least pretend to. "And I don't believe for a second she helped us out of the kindness of her heart."
"Actually," Lisa started, and Vin cut her off with a flat look. "Okay, it was more a matter of her wanting to see what she could do and miscalculating."
"So she's reckless." That could be as dangerous as welcoming a spy in its own way.
"No, not reckless. Her powers have some range to them, and she wasn't expecting Lung to connect the swarm of bugs attacking him to the girl standing on a roof across the street in the dead of night." She smiled. "So let's just chop it up to bad luck and inexperience."
Vin narrowed her eyes. Lisa knew more about this girl than she was saying. But then again, Vin suspected that she knew more about Vin herself than she let on, with her knowing smile and unsolicited explanations about things like cellular phones and internets. But why keep the bug girl's secrets?
"I mean, we could do more of a background check on her," Lisa offered. "Figure out her secret identity and home address. Go to her school as fake transfer students, worm our way into her confidence, invite her over for a slumber party, paint each other's toenails and gossip about celebrity crushes all night long before we can decide, once and for all, that we could let her join our team." She rolled her eyes. "Of course, that could take weeks or even months, and by then she'll be either established, dead, or recruited by that insufferable know-it-all Faultline." She gave Vin a patient look. "Early bird. Worm. You know how it is."
"Let's vote on it," Brian decided. "Rachel, you've been quiet. I'm going to assume ..."
"Hell no," the girl growled. "Don't know her, don't like her, don't want her." Vin suspected that had been her response when Vin herself had joined.
Brian nodded. "Thought so. Alec?"
"Sure. Anyone who can melt a dragon-man's balls off is someone I want on the inside pissing out rather than the other way around."
"Vin?"
She shook her head. "It's not worth the risk," she said. "And it doesn't add up." A mystery cape showing up out of nowhere to turn a hopeless fight in their favor? The whole thing seemed like a set up. But if it was a trap, why didn't Lisa recognize it? Unless ...
"Lisa?"
"Bring her in," she said easily. She grinned. "The more the merrier." She knew more about this girl than she said. She knew more about Vin than she said. And she knew more about their boss than she said. All those secrets, and not a word.
"I guess I'm the tiebreaker," Brian said. He looked across the team. "Rachel, if we bring her in, will you be able to deal with it?"
She glared back at him. "Sure. Whatever."
He turned to her. "And you, Vin?"
She took a deep breath. "Yeah. I'll just keep an eye on her." And an eye on every cobweb, fly, or flee she came across, night or day. Lord Ruler, this was going to be hell.
"Great," Brian said. "Lisa, arrange a meeting."
WWW
A/n So there's always a tradeoff when you write a story because of all the stories you're not writing instead. Vin and Taylor make a good team in a lot of ways, but for them to work together at all in Vindication, I had to tone down a lot of their respective issues. They're both very guarded people, and early on in their character arcs they needed very open people to invite them to collaborate with, like Kelsier, Brian, and (eventually) Lisa.
But I also didn't want to go through the stations of canon again, the Lung fight, the bank robbery, the ABB arc, et cetera. I'm doing that right now with Leaf, and I don't want to rehash the same plot with two stories at the same time. Which is a shame, because in a lot of ways, Vin is the most Vin-like when she's dealing with her trust issues, and when Taylor joined the Undersiders she was not trustworthy, but became trustworthy because they first trusted her. One of the themes of Mistborn is that it's better to trust and risk betrayal than to not trust at all, and the idea of trust being transformative fits in pretty well with that.
So yeah. I'm not saying I have any regrets about where I took Vindication, this is more of the grass seeming greener on the other side, so I wanted to get it out in a side story thing. A what if. You know how it is. Thanks for reading.