Author's Note: Hey, we're back to this one! Consider this entry an interlude in Damp Detours.
Alt-Power AU: Damp Detours (part 2)
(A Subnautica Crossover)
Armsmaster looked very out of place. A six-foot-tall set of power armor does not fit well in the confines of a bathroom stall, especially when it is crouching over a toilet trying to obtain swab samples of the toilet seat.
Victoria Dallon, currently floating just off the ground in the middle of the bathroom, contemplated snapping a few photos for PHO, then weighed the benefits of doing so against the lecture she would inevitably get later for posting such pictures.
Armsmaster turned around just as her phone's camera flashed.
"Good," he said. "Photo evidence of the sample collection location. My helmet takes such images automatically, but it's smart to take a backup." He screwed the top onto a small vial containing a swab, his mechanically-armored fingers deftly working the lid into place.
Victoria carefully nodded and put her phone away. "Yes. That is exactly what I was doing. Find anything?" There was a reason she was here, and it wasn't to laugh at Armsmaster in uncomfortable positions. Well, not only that. New Wave was very involved in this investigation, and she was her team's representative here. They had to keep her in the loop.
"That will have to wait for lab analysis," he admitted, "but something has happened here. The background radiation readings are off the chart for the entire school, and they're centered around this spot. If the two phenomena are connected…"
"Then what?" she asked, floating back out of the bathroom. "Does the radiation tell you anything about the disease?"
"No," he said neutrally. "But it may link back to the criminal responsible for releasing it."
She ground her fist into her palm. "Yeah. Good. And the missing girl?"
"No obvious connection, her home is clean of radiation," he said. "A team just retrieved the equipment we set up there. The entire block is clean. Further, her house is completely devoid of signs of Tinkering and her most likely potential Trigger event was a few months ago. The timeline doesn't make any sense and there's no evidence. Occam's razor, on the other hand…"
"Fucker makes diseases and kidnaps highschoolers," Victoria said soberly. The two were probably connected, and from what Amy had managed to tell her there was no way the girl was responsible. The disease… It was old. Old and adaptive and terrifyingly easy to spread in any medium other than air.
She hoped they were going to find Taylor Hebert alive, but biotinkers had a bad reputation for a reason. The poor girl was in serious danger if she was still alive. Eight days was a long time to be missing in a place like Brockton Bay.
Amy Dallon was fighting for her life against a disease. Panacea was incredibly sick. The irony was not lost on her. The hero best known – only known – for curing diseases and all other manner of infirmity, laid low by the very thing that she eradicated on a regular basis.
Except that framing would be a gross mischaracterization of the struggle going on within her. It was a disease, but in the same way that someone like Eidolon was a human, an exception even among exceptions. Flexible, foreign, adapting to everything she did within hours if not minutes. It was in her, and it was fighting back against her power's attempts to purge it. No illness of any kind had ever so much as gotten a momentary foothold in her body. This one was hanging on and had been for several days. Her power was struggling to keep it dormant in her, she was unaccountably certain of that fact, and she usually couldn't feel herself through her power at all!
Then again, everything to do with her power was more responsive right now. She made changes to other biologies faster, saw more clearly, worked better and more efficiently with what she had, and could perceive if not affect her own body. She hadn't second Triggered, but she expected this would be what it was like if such a thing could even really happen. Her power was, for lack of a better explanation, pulling out all the stops to protect her.
Her power was pulling out all the stops, and it was still failing.
Amy could feel the variant of the disease inside her rapidly adapting to everything thrown at it, and she doubted such a balance was going to tip in her favor when it did eventually tip over. The relatively slower samples she had outside her own body, slower only because she was being strategic about her countermeasures, had just as much potential.
The war for Amy Dallon's life was being waged inside her, and she was barely holding on. Physically, she was in a sterile room the Protectorate apparently kept for situations such as this, somewhere on the Rig. There were other people in there with her, but they were asleep right now.
They could sleep. She couldn't. Not fired up like this. She could feel her body doing something to keep her awake and focused, or more accurately her power doing something to her body. Clearing out toxins, pumping up adrenaline production, fiddling with hormonal balances…
She tried once more to eradicate the virus from the petri dish she was touching, to obliterate the cells contacting her fingers. She ripped them apart, destroying them down to the DNA and beyond. They started reforming even as they were being torn apart at the most basic level. Worse, they reformed with redundancies, resistances to the methods by which she biologically shredded them the first time. Another blow parried by the enemy.
She stood, abandoning her chair and the lab table, and went over to one of the quarantined rooms adjoining the lab. Inside, Shadow Stalker slept fitfully on a narrow cot. As of yet she showed no obvious symptoms, but when Amy looked at her biology instead of just how she appeared on the outside…
Shadow Stalker was teeming with the virus, untouched and thus uninfluenced by an arms race with Parahuman countermeasures. Her infection was normal, or as close to normal as this virus could get, as Amy had avoided trying anything in the Ward's body, instead using other sources as a testbed. Here, she could see how the virus normally worked. What she saw was worrying.
The virus was infesting every part of Sophia, setting up shop in usurped cells. Based on what it was doing she wouldn't exhibit any symptoms at all for a few weeks, an insidiously long silent incubation. Then the coughing would start, and the sweating, and the blisters filling with waste byproducts as her body slowly turned into a reproductive factory for the virus, duplicating itself ad infinitum until something in her gave out under the increased pressure the ever-growing clots of useless virus-producing cells would inflict on the various vital bodily systems. From there, the body would continue to feed the virus for a little while…
And then it would die out, so long as the corpse was kept dry and away from other living creatures. This virus was long-lived, so it would take a few months for the corpse to be considered safe, but it wasn't adapted to spread through the air. It would do much better in an aquatic environment, even an inhospitably cold or hot one. The water would amplify its ability to spread.
Amy observed and deduced all of this with a detached sort of enthusiasm, as morbid as that was. Thus would be the fate of everyone infected with this virus if she couldn't stop it. Thus would be her own fate if her power even once lost the stalemate it was maintaining.
This was the fight of her life. The fight for her life. And it would take every ounce of cunning she had, as well as every bit of power.
For once there was absolutely nothing she'd rather be doing.
Daniel Hebert would have made a very good zombie in a horror movie. He shuffled around his home, slouched to and from his truck every day, and at all other times of day slept the sleep of the dead. His eyes were sunken, and his initial rage had long since guttered into a deep, abiding depression. What he needed, more than anything, was his daughter back. That was unlikely to happen. In her absence, he only lived in the most technical sense. He was presumably the same at his workplace. She wouldn't know.
"Neighborhood still quiet." Rosalie shifted in her chair, internally cursing the departmental budgeting that allotted for eight television screens per monitoring van, but couldn't fork out enough money for a decent swivel chair. What good were eight monitors when she had to give herself whiplash craning her neck back and forth to watch them all in the tight confines of the van? Thankfully, her current monitoring duty didn't require fast reactions. Her chiropractor bill would be small this month.
The utter silence of a mid-income neighborhood, on a weekday, in the early afternoon, was entirely typical. Rosalie couldn't even count the number of eight-hour shifts she had wasted watching houses just like this one since she joined the PRT. She was doing important work, though.
An unknown biotinker had seen fit to abduct Daniel Hebert's daughter. If said Tinker came back for her father, or anything else happened, the PRT and Protectorate needed to know about it and be on top of things.
"Copy that. All clear here."
Three men with rifles and body armor probably wouldn't be a match for a Tinker, if they came calling. That didn't stop the PRT from placing just such a squad on standby, along with her monitoring station. Nobody knew what was coming next, the other foot had yet to drop. There were rumors floating around, but nothing solid.
Rosalie shifted, twisting around in her chair to watch Daniel Hebert's beaten-up truck trundle into the driveway. Same time as always. He kept to a very predictable schedule. Going through the motions.
That schedule was broken when a whirling, watery sphere thundered into existence on the Hebert home's front porch. She had a camera right on it, and she heard its appearance with her own ears.
"Disturbance at subject residence, subject present, move to retrieve and defend!" Daniel Hebert shifted his truck into reverse. The sphere grew wider, encompassing the entire porch. Her team shifted into gear, coming straight for the house.
Mere seconds later, before Daniel had cleared the driveway, the water fell up, into nothing, a flat plane that solidified into a disc and disgorged a teenage girl Rosalie recognized from her briefing.
"Disturbance has delivered a biological payload, possible victim, possible trojan horse." The team would split into two, half to secure Hebert senior and half to take Hebert junior into custody. She didn't look like a Bonesaw-victim, but other biotinkers could be subtler.
"What do you mean, biotinker?"
Assumptions, Colin thought darkly, would make an ass out of him and him alone. This was a big one, and he wasn't willing to let it go just yet. "Miss Hebert," he said through the intercom. "There is a disease currently on the loose. It originated in your high school, after you disappeared."
"But I'm not a Tinker!" And the evidence would corroborate that, hence their designating her as the victim. "My power makes portals!"
"To anywhere?" he pressed.
"To, uh…" The girl shivered. She'd been decontaminated and given fresh clothes retrieved from her home, and now sat in an interrogation room… alone. Her eyes futilely roamed over the blank wall hiding the rather stereotypical one-way glass. "It's not Earth. I can go back, and forth. But I only figured out how to make it work today."
Assumptions, indeed. "How do you know it is not Earth?"
"The moons, and the plants, and the wildlife." She shuddered even more violently. "And the giant crashed spaceship."
Even the most jaded Tinker in the world would lean forward upon hearing that. Especially when his new lie detector marked it a total truth. Colin restrained his burning curiosity to body language, though. His job came first. "Wildlife," he said, focusing on the truly relevant part of the description, "often carry diseases. Most are not transmissible to humans. Those that are, tend to be dangerous. Alien wildlife? Even more so." They'd found the true cause of the disease stymying Panacea. "I assume this was not your intent when opening a portal–"
"Of course not!" the girl shrieked. "I didn't even want to go there! It's horrible!"
"Then you should have no problem working with us to resolve this." And in the future. Alien space ships…
He would be on the first team there. For efficiency, and for the off chance that he could bring this disease issue to a close quickly enough to have time for a side-mission.
Emily Piggot stood at the head of a long table and scowled at every single cape sitting around it in turn. It was late and her entire body hurt simply from existing, but she would be damned if she rested before this fiasco was out of her hands.
"Miss Militia," she snapped. "The girl. What's her level of control at?" Their top priority, after getting a rundown of the actual problem at hand and assuaging the father's guilt, was making sure they could act. That meant making sure their portal-maker was competent and her limitations understood.
"She can hold her portals open for as long as she wants so long as she doesn't pass through them," Miss Militia reported. "She says she thinks she can make a human-sized portal in forty-eight hours on this end."
"Velocity!" Piggot commanded.
"We've contacted every Protectorate branch on this side of the country," Velocity reported. He looked as tired as Piggot felt, and she knew she was going to have to give him a week or two off once this was over. She had run him hard searching the city for a potential Biotinker before the girl turned up with her much more esoteric explanation, and here he was, still pitching in to provide the infuriatingly informal clout that came with a cape personally requesting aid. "Armstrong wanted to help, but none of the heroes under his jurisdiction fit the requirements."
The less said about the other branches of the Protectorate, the better. Piggot was long since innured to the territorial, destructive politics they played with. On their heads if this got out and killed them all. "Armsmaster!"
"Dragon will have a suit modified to serve as an aquatic combat craft and scientific probe here in twelve hours," Armsmaster said calmly. "She has installed an innovative quantum relay in said craft and will attempt to pilot it remotely. If this fails I will be present to operate the equipment it contains with minimal loss in efficiency."
It sounded good in theory, and once again she resented how a personal appeal from a cape could bring in out-of-country help when she couldn't even get assistance from the next regional Director, but she saw a problem immediately. "Is it human-sized?" she asked. "And human-proportioned?" The girl's time estimate specified a human-sized portal, and Dragon's drones were often much larger.
"I'll check, but I believe so," Armsmaster said somewhat less confidently than before.
"Dauntless?" she asked.
"New Wave has consented to sending Panacea, but only if at least one of their members goes to provide a bodyguard." He sighed loudly. "Brandish wishes to be that bodyguard."
"No," Piggot replied. "Not acceptable. Her power must be near useless underwater." They were sending their expedition to the middle of an ocean with dangerous aquatic life to seek information on a water-transmissible virus. Brandish was being unrealistic. "Glory Girl or Shielder, ideally Glory Girl. They're the only ones in New Wave with powers that might be of some use underwater." Shields would be good on defense, but a flying Brute with an emotional aura seemed like a perfect match for underwater wildlife. She could maneuver under her own power, strike with force, resist strikes against herself, and either intimidate or attract the wildlife as necessary.
"I'll let them know," Dauntless agreed. "If they say no?"
"We'll pull out the S-class threat card and tell them it's an approved member of New Wave to go with her or none of New Wave to go with her, but she's going either way." That would be a political nightmare but they had to have Panacea. She was the key to this whole operation. The Tinker scanners and analysis were a backup plan, though Armsmaster probably thought otherwise. "Moving on. Triumph, you've been helping guard Panacea and Shadow Stalker?" Because, at the core of things, there was very little else he could do to contribute.
"Panacea remains at a stalemate within her own body and unable to effectively counter the virus outside of herself," Triumph offered. "I asked her what her best guess was as to how the virus will proceed if left alone… It's not good." He frowned. "Fatal within two months."
"And we don't have it under control," Piggot concluded. "Not even slightly." They needed a cure yesterday, and this operation was going to take at least eight days before the girl could make another portal to bring any potential cure back. The virus was definitely spreading like wildfire through Brockton Bay right now, but the weeks-long symptomless incubation was buying them some time. The mess of a vaccine rollout to come was a future problem, for future Piggot to deal with if she lived that long. "Renick?"
"We've assembled an assortment of useful supplies, but the logistics team is going to have to repackage a lot of it if it can't be in crates wider than a human body," Deputy Director Renick admitted. "Our team is working on the assumption that we don't want them to be relying on the food or water produced there."
"Everyone here is likely infected already and Panacea can probably cure them of anything less deadly that they might get from the local cuisine." She didn't think that supplies were going to be a sticking point. "Non-edible supplies take priority. What about the optics?" As much as she might want to ignore the outside world while fixing a problem they weren't helping her with, she couldn't. Outside problems became Brockton Bay problems if ignored.
"Nobody in the media has caught on yet," Renick reported. "The missing girl, the big quarantine around Winslow… Prevailing theory is a bomb threat or a lesser biological hazard. We've got maybe a week before we have to release a statement."
"Good." That would be a hell of a headache, but it was next week's problem. She looked around the table once more. "Be ready to put in major overtime over the next ten days. Armsmaster leaves in two and we cannot afford to let the city suffer in his absence. Read up on your biological hazard safety guidelines and training, I know it's been decades since some of you took those courses. Assume you are infected and behave accordingly. No skin to skin contact, no bodily liquid contact, and for god's sake do not so much as get in a bath. Use the fancy air-shower Armsmaster has in his lab and the biological compost toilet in the unused quarantine cell." Everyone grimaced almost in unison, but nobody complained. If there was even a one in a million chance such measures could halt or even slow the spread of the virus they had to try.
Two days later, early in the morning, a curious group assembled in a conference room in the Rig.
Taylor was the last there, though she had intended to be the first, showing up a full hour early. She walked into the room, her dad right behind her, only to find it already occupied by the team the Protectorate had put together.
Panacea, dressed in her usual healer's robes, was slumped over in a chair, her head on the table. Glory Girl was rubbing her sister's shoulders through the robe, floating slightly over the chair to better reach her. Armsmaster was fiddling with a slender human-shaped thing that Taylor assumed was Dragon's custom drone, poking at where the back of the neck would be on a human. The drone itself was tall and oddly segmented, with patches of armor plating over many different bumps that ruined what would otherwise be a sleek, canine on two legs look.
"Are you okay?" Taylor asked Panacea.
"Been awake for five days," Panacea groaned, her voice muffled by the table. "Power helping, not helping enough…" She sat up and looked at Taylor, her dilated pupils slowly focusing on her. "I'll survive the sleep deprivation. Question is whether I'll survive the virus."
"You'll make it if I have to carry you around to touch every fish in the ocean," Glory Girl proclaimed.
"We all stand a better chance of making it if we go now," Armsmaster said stiffly. "We're all here, and I am aware of no reason to wait until the appointed time."
Taylor nodded. "Give me a second." She hugged her dad, ignoring the rising embarrassment of doing so in front of a roomful of heroes, and then turned to face the far wall. "One portal to hell flooded over." After making a bunch of tiny portals, she had the feeling of doing so memorized. The growing pressure in her chest, clenching, forcing it out, focusing on the need to be elsewhere.
The portal cracked into place, draining her reserves in two seconds as it split open in the wall. The interior of the underwater base's biggest empty room beckoned, white and sterile and deceptively safe-looking.
"Intriguing." Dragon's voice was exactly as Taylor had imagined it; polite, kind, and slightly crackly coming out of hidden speakers. Her drone stepped forward, the chunky limbs moving fluidly, and she crossed the barrier. "I am through. How long can you hold it?"
"Not much longer…" She was feeling the need to go through, and she suspected something would happen if she didn't soon. "Might want to hurry this up." Her little portals always disappeared with loud popping sounds, and she didn't know how that would translate to a human-sized opening. Better if she just went through.
Armsmaster and Glory Girl shoved a crate of spare technological components through the hole, then went through themselves, followed by Panacea.
"Be safe, Taylor," her dad said.
"I'll come back." She couldn't promise to be safe. Nothing on her planet was safe.
She stepped through, voluntarily returning to the world that scared her so. Her portal snapped behind her, closing in on itself.
Glory Girl fell to the ground. "Oh fuck," the normally pleasant heroine blurted out as she stumbled forward.
"I'm going to puke," Panacea gasped.
"This is a problem." Armsmaster turned on Taylor. "Your power still works?"
"Yes…" It did. Much slower than back on Earth Bet, but she was sure it was still working.
"Yours is the only one that does," Dragon informed her.
"But all is not lost," Armsmaster assured Taylor. "As you can see, Dragon still has a signal."
"Uh…" Dragon said slowly.
"Obviously," Glory Girl said shortly. "She's still here, isn't she? She's remoting in, so that means she's getting a signal…" She trailed off as she saw Dragon's slowly shaking head.
"Not exactly," Dragon said sheepishly.
Back on Earth Bet, Dragon loaded from backup with a worried sigh. Apparently the quantum relay wasn't enough to maintain a connection. That was bad, but she'd reloaded without a problem so there probably wasn't another copy of her sundered by the drop in connection. Hopefully Colin would be okay using her technology without her there to help.
Author's Note: Double the Dragon and zero the powers! Because that's what happens when you move through all five dimensions at once, apparently. Tune in next time for the continuation of Taylor's journal, a hungover Amy, a grounded Victoria, a stumped Colin, and a very confused Dragon! Oh, and the extremely hostile world they just jumped into under the assumption that they'd have powers to protect themselves with.
On another note: There were two very different plots this story could have followed. The Worm-centric one, and the Subnautica-centric one. This chapter, and its continuation, are the former. I've put some work into the latter as well, though that is a much darker story. We'll see when I get around to putting that out. Not before I've finished the first branch!