AU: Medical Diversion
There were very few things Amy Dallon, also known as the healer Panacea, did on a daily basis that actually interested her. Healing was not one of those things. It was interesting for the first month or so after she got her powers, but not any more. All else aside, it took a special kind of idiot or unlucky sap to come in with something new for her to heal. Broken bones, torn muscles, amputated limbs, burns, burnt-out nerves, hair turned to glass and then driven into their skull, womb turned inside out…
Maybe it was because she lived in Brockton Bay, but even those medical novelties were rare now. Seen one Hookwolf-flaying victim, seen them all.
Healing was good, she did good and every moment she spent there was a moment she wasn't wasting not saving lives, but it was soul-crushingly boring.
Aside from using her power, her normal life wasn't all that interesting either. Stressful, guilt-laden, aggravating… All sorts of things, but those things were the banal backdrop of her life. A pillow could smother someone to death if held down, but nobody would say the pillow was interesting in its own right.
She could use a laugh. Or a scare. Or even just a new flavor of boredom to distract her.
So, when the Protectorate sent Armsmaster to ask for her help with something that wasn't healing in any capacity but would be 'potentially life-saving on a broad scale', she agreed. Despite Carol saying she shouldn't have to bother doing the Protectorate's mystery work for them.
She was regretting that decision now.
"They do what?" She asked, hoping she had misheard. Sparkplug's teleportation was disorienting, and her ears were still popping every few seconds. Strider he was not, though he was employed by the Protectorate so they didn't have to pay out the ass for his services like they did with Strider.
The brightly-clothed cape – she didn't remember his name, only that she had met him in the presence of Alexandria a few years ago so he was definitely legitimate and probably important – shrugged his armored shoulders. "Some sort of combination Tinker and Striker. They do brain modification, brain transplants, and can grow bodies. We want you to meet them, watch them work, and make sure we know exactly what they really do and whether there are any side effects."
"I thought you said something like that," she muttered, rubbing her ears to soothe the odd numbness that Sparkplug's teleportation induced. At least now it made sense why they wanted her specifically, and why they had refused to explain to Carol exactly what she would be doing. She probably shouldn't have leaped on a week-long getaway to a government facility in the middle of nowhere, but… well, it beat sitting around the house watching Vicky and Dean make up for the fourteenth time. Not that she was counting.
"This way," the cape whose name was still slipping her mind instructed. She followed him down a boring beige hallway… She hoped this particular facility had windows. "Everyone above me wants to be sure we know what's what with this one, and our usual tests just aren't cutting it when it comes to efficiency. So, here you are!"
He pushed open one of the many doors that lined the hallway seemingly at random, and they both glanced in at what was unmistakably a gym. "Sorry, wrong door." He went one door further down and opened that one. A small lab was revealed. "She'll be in here tomorrow. They want you to make sure the room is clean before she comes in."
"Paranoid much?" She swiped her hand over one of the bare metal tables. The room had been chemically sterilized recently, based on how barren the surface was of even the usual microbes. "I'll be a few minutes."
She was still recovering from the teleportation, and she had the distinct feeling she was being rushed, but she found she didn't really care. This was… not interesting yet, but it had the potential to be. And the cape was nice…
"Oh. Wait." She looked up at the guy whose name continued to evade her. "What's your power?"
"Not as fast as last time we met, but still pretty good," he said casually. "I'm Friendly Face. Just to remind you, people like me but they can never quite remember why or who I am. I'm a Nice Guy who's actually a nice guy. You'll forget in a few minutes, but the effect grows less effective over time."
"Right." Stranger power. She remembered now. He was Alexandria's… cape secretary was the polite way of putting it. Lackey was the less than polite way. Disorienting. She was having trouble thinking straight. "Can you… not?"
"It'll wear off in a few hours," he assured her. "Someone will be along to give you a tour you'll actually remember soon."
Later that day, after walking off her befuddling encounter with… that guy… and being shown around the facility, she flopped back on the bed she was going to use for the next week and pulled her phone out.
"Vicky," she narrated as she typed. "Made it safely. Of course. Tell Carol I'm not being held hostage. Ran into the annoying guy again, though. Forgot his name, you know him." Her text would be screened before it went out – some Tinker probably had a cushy job maintaining the security measures in places like this – but she hadn't broken any rules. This was all old hat to her.
She hadn't done it recently, but back when her powers were fairly new the Protectorate was shipping her to places like this all across the country as often as she let them. First to heal important people, then to test the limits of what she could heal, then to try and give some help to the different less-than-fortunate case number victims they had in asylums… It tapered off as she figured out what her limits were and Carol grew more reluctant to let her work with the Protectorate or do anything beyond the usual healing. But for a few months she could get a whirlwind tour of government buildings at the drop of a hat.
This place was pretty nice, as government testing facilities went. Clean, modern, with a good cafeteria and a gym she definitely wasn't going to use. The room was big, and there was a complementary laptop on the desk that she was going to use later.
But the real prize was the job. The one she knew she had gotten explained to her, but… that guy. He either hadn't explained it very well or had been so boring she already forgot. Luckily, they had left her with a file that almost certainly involved the cause of her week-long work vacation.
Inside the yellow manilla folder she found a one-page memo, the sort she would expect to see on a secretary's desk somewhere. A lot of it was boring boilerplate, 'recommend petitioning independent hero Panacea for assessment', 'Low level biohazard facility capable of mid-level containment if assessment judged inaccurate,' and so on. One paragraph in particular got to the heart of the matter, though.
'The independent parahuman was personally approached by Alexandria and voluntarily remanded to Protectorate custody pending an evaluation of her claimed capabilities. She professes to be a Tinker who specializes in brain manipulation and transplantation, with a secondary power in organic matter manipulation and arrangement limited to human forms. Preliminary observations support these claims, but due to the potential for misrepresentation more thorough analysis is required to validate that what has been claimed is the true scope of her powers.'
A small shiver worked its way up her spine as she reread that particular passage. It was… eerily familiar. Not that Amy was really hiding anything. She couldn't do brains, and she knew better than to experiment with things other than healing.
This cape, though? An unknown that sounded like she had just been picked up off the street by one of the Triumvirate? Amy suspected that there was a lot more to the story in files and memos she wasn't cleared to read, and that worried her. This cape very well could be hiding or misrepresenting her powers, and she was claiming to be a brain Tinker who might very well warrant a high Master rating depending on what, exactly, that meant. If she was hiding something it would be even worse than that.
And they wanted her to investigate. Because they knew she could see the biology of anything she touched.
She was many things now, but 'bored' could not be said to be one of them.
There were a lot more guards around when she went to the cafeteria the next morning. The complex had been all but deserted the day before, but now it actually looked like an active government facility. Specifically, an active prison. Lots of big, bulky PRT officers in gear that covered their entire body. No prisoners, but then again, the new cape was here voluntarily.
A trio of the aforementioned guards – all interchangeable in her mind, with their blank visors and bulky black riot gear – escorted her to the lab from the day before once she finished eating. The cape whose name she couldn't remember was there, sitting on a stool in the corner, but when she waved to him he didn't say anything. She assumed he was here to watch and provide a friendly face… Was that his name? It sounded right.
"We'll be right outside if you need anything," one of the guards told her before they left the room. She pulled out a stool for herself and perched atop it to wait.
Fifteen minutes later, a futuristic coffin was pushed through the doorway. It was on a metal cart that had seen better days, and the top was clear. The goop inside looked interesting, a featureless pool of off-white liquid, but the cape laboriously pushing the trolley immediately stole Amy's attention.
She was young, maybe fifteen, and quite short, tan with straight red hair that went down to her waist and sported a bright white stripe down the middle. Her costume consisted of an oversized lab coat and a dark red domino mask, the latter perched on a cute button nose and outlined by freckles.
This was the sort of girl Amy would have labeled as 'cute like a toy poodle' if it weren't for the metal coffin she was pushing around. She was the sort of cute that would have less cynical people cooing over her well beyond the age where she would appreciate it.
"Hey," the potentially terrifying cape chirped, her voice bright and painfully high-pitched, "a little help?" She wheeled the techno-coffin over to the side of the biggest table. "I need it off this cart before we start."
Amy glanced over at the guy in the corner, but he just gestured for her to do it, so she did. She took one side of the coffin and the cape took the other, and together they heaved it onto the table with little difficulty.
"Thanks, Panacea," the girl said as she pushed the cart out of the way. "You are Panacea, right?"
"Yes, that's me. What's your name?" she asked.
"Haven't picked one yet," the girl admitted with a small frown. "My power isn't easy to describe with a catchy name."
The door swung open again, and one of the guards pushed in another cart with a wireframe cage on it. Three white mice scurried around inside. "Ask if you need more," he grunted.
"I keep telling them I can't do the good stuff with mice," the cape grumbled. She lifted the cage and stared inside. "But at least you'll be fine afterward!" she said, apparently addressing the mice. "Don't worry, you probably won't even notice that you're in each others' bodies. Well… assuming you're all male."
"What are you going to do?" Amy asked, choosing to ignore the girl's obnoxiously cheerful attitude for the time being.
"Well, I could do a lot of things," the girl said. "Hey, did they bring my tools in yet? I don't see them in here."
A third cart came in, piled high with metal implements straight out of a nightmare's dentistry office.
"Perfect timing!" the girl chirped, and Amy had had enough.
"Just so you know," she said as the girl was digging around for exactly the right scalpel, "you're going to want to be less… cheerful."
"No, I don't think I do," the girl retorted with a smile.
"Cheerful biological Tinkers are not well-received," Amy warned. "Because of Bonesaw."
"She doesn't have a monopoly on positivity," the girl objected. "Besides, I went to a lot of effort to make myself properly cheerful, I'm not going to undo it."
"What?" She couldn't possibly mean what it sounded like.
"No more talking, not while I'm working!" the girl demanded. She opened the techno-coffin and stuck her fingers inside. The white liquid crept up her hand and solidified into an opaque glove. "You're here to watch me, right? Want to touch this?"
Amy did want to touch it. She also wanted to bring this Tinker down to a tolerable level of inane cheerfulness, but that didn't seem to be likely to happen, so she settled for sticking her hand in the liquid.
It was… mostly proteins and carbohydrates, actually. Not exactly a biological slurry, there were some inorganic components that made Amy think someone had added pulverized plastic to the mix, but close enough that she could use it herself if she needed some extra mass for healing. "Did you make this?" she asked, putting aside her personal annoyance.
"Yes and no?" the Tinker said uncertainly. She opened the cage and grabbed one of the mice. It bit her gloved hand, but its teeth didn't penetrate at all, and then it slumped over like it had been sedated. "I can make it, but I didn't make this batch. Too much plastic. They made it for me after I gave them the recipe."
"Is there supposed to be plastic in it?" Without the plastic it would be ideal for use with Amy's own power.
"Oh, I definitely want the plastic," the Tinker assured her. Her left, gloved hand rested against the table. She had her thumb and forefinger propping up the mouse's head. Her right hand held a little rotary drill. "You're not squeamish, are you?"
"No?" It wasn't possible for her to be. Not after spending thousands of hours examining, fixing, and just generally looking at mutilated, diseased, or otherwise damaged human bodies. But she did find herself wishing that the Tinker was going to be working on less appealing animals. Where were the ugly lab rats?
"Great! You can get your hand in here and watch me with your power as soon as I'm done cutting the skull open."
Amy flinched as the rotary saw flicked on.
"First impressions?" the cape whose name she kept forgetting asked her that night, over a late dinner of overcooked cafeteria steak. "Not the biology nitty-gritty, I don't know the first thing about that. The person."
"Does she have a name?" Amy asked after a moment's thought. So long as she didn't think too hard about the one asking her the question, it was easy enough to think. Friendly Face… that was definitely his name… He could control the effect his powers had to some extent. Like Victoria.
"We've been calling her Alice in official documentation, but that's a placeholder and she doesn't answer to it," he offered. "You can use that when discussing her. Her real name is locked up so tight I don't think anyone below Alexandria has clearance to see it."
"Right. Alice." She grimaced and jabbed at her steak with her fork. "Is she trying to ape Bonesaw? Because she's definitely acting a lot like her."
"We don't think the two have any connection," Friendly Face said diplomatically. "But yes, some of her mannerisms… We have confirmation that Bonesaw is still with the Nine."
"And doesn't that say a lot about her, that you had to check to be sure," Amy muttered. "She didn't do anything wrong, today. Her power is a lot more bio-striker than bio-tinker, but she definitely needs those tools." It was fascinating, really, in a sick way. Alice definitely manipulated biology, possibly through that glove of hers or maybe just from skin contact, but she was clumsier than Amy ever would be and didn't seem to have the same 'sight' that let her see what she was doing, at least not as clearly as Amy could. On the flip side, she definitely had some Tinker in her, and most of the actual brain transplant was done with her tools.
"Are you sure she is both a Tinker and a Striker?" Friendly Face asked. "Capes with multiple mostly discrete powers are rare and tend to have certain defining characteristics. She doesn't have those characteristics."
"I…" Amy had to stop and think about that. Her first impulse was to confirm that yes, both powers were definitely real, but really… "I can't say for sure yet. Tinkers make things, don't they? She made those tools?"
"I didn't see her make them," Friendly Face said slowly. "I can ask. I assumed so."
"Because she didn't make anything today," Amy said. And when she thought about it, that was suspicious. "She cut the mice open, took their brains out, swapped them around, hooked them back up again, closed the skulls, and did it without harming them. But none of that was Tinkering, it was operating and using her Striker power. The tools helped her, but she could just as well be some sort of Thinker to go with the Striker if that's the only evidence we have." All of the parahuman elements of the surgery had come from her hand and the glove. The tools didn't do anything obviously impossible for normal tools.
"Let's not jump to conclusions just yet," Friendly Face told her. "You've got a week and she specializes in human operation. For today… Did you see any signs of her misleading us, or of hidden, harmful effects?"
"No." She hadn't. Everything went exactly as expected, and she saw no manipulation of the mice brains at all, let alone secret sleight of hand manipulation.
"Then you'll be getting a volunteer tomorrow," Friendly Face told her. "A normal brain surgery."
As if any of this could be considered normal, least of all the sort of person to volunteer to have a parahuman tested by doing brain surgery on them when it wasn't absolutely necessary. There were words to describe that kind of decision, but normal was not one of them.
Amy had expected the patient to have already been put under when he was wheeled into the room. And he was. At first.
"This won't do at all," Alice complained. "Panacea, would you mind waking him up for me? I could, but you'd be faster, and I want him awake to consent to surgery before his skull is in pieces on the operation table." She had everything set up, her tools and vat of plastic-laden biomass ready to go, but she was seemingly set on getting consent first.
Amy nodded and reached out for the man's exposed forehead. He was buff and had a military look about him, even in a simple surgery gown. A strong chin, a head as bald as a cue-ball, a faint scar across the side of his nose… and his body was riddled with minor bone fractures and evidence of past injuries. A military man or just somebody with an inadequate sense of self-preservation and an obsession with fitness.
She cleaned out the chemicals keeping him asleep, after checking to be sure they weren't being pumped in by some unseen intravenous setup. He woke immediately, his eyes flicking open. The first thing he saw was Alice looming over his head with a rotating saw.
"Am I supposed to be awake?" was his first question. Amy admired his composure… Or she would, if she knew for sure it wasn't a product of self-assured stupidity instead of courage.
"Yes, because somebody decided I was going to operate on you without you telling me yourself," Alice explained. "Could you tell me why you think you're here?"
"I need brain surgery and my commanding officer said I could get it and get back to active duty quicker if I let a cape do it," he said.
"So you know this is my third-ever brain surgery on a human?" Alice asked.
"Not the exact number… " he said slowly. "But you can do it?"
"Oh, yes, it's easy," Alice assured him. She could definitely stand to work on her bedside manner; she still hadn't even put the circular saw down. "And one of the other people I've done was myself, so if I couldn't do it I wouldn't be here."
Amy almost choked on her own spit. "You what?" she croaked.
"That's good enough for me," the foolish, suicidally oblivious military man decided. "Go ahead."
"Great! You need that tumor removed, right?" Alice asked. "Nothing else?"
"Just the tumor," he confirmed.
"Okay. We're all set." She waved her saw at Amy. "You can put him back under now."
Amy did so, but only because she didn't want his stupidity sabotaging the very serious questions she was going to demand Alice answer. "You operated on yourself?" she asked, utterly horrified. She didn't even understand how that was supposed to work.
"Yeah. I said I worked hard to be this cheerful, didn't I?" Alice frowned as she rubbed an alcohol cloth on the man's bald head. "I think I told you that. I had problems, so I went in to fix them, and while I was doing that I decided I wanted to change a few other things, so I did."
"How?" Amy looked to the third figure in the room for support, but the nice guy whose name she couldn't remember seemed content to watch. He must trust her to dig into this insanity. That was why she was here.
"Well, I had to do it in stages," Alice explained. She powered up her saw and started cutting, and Amy kept one hand on the man to monitor her work even as they talked. "I didn't do the extra stuff in the same surgery as the important stuff. How would I ever know when to stop if I made decisions about what to change while changing the thing I make decisions with? That's… recursion, I think? But I went in, fixed the actual problems–"
"But how did you do that?" Amy interrupted. "Even just poking someone's brain is enough to randomly impair their senses, or fine motor control… Touch the wrong thing and you would drop the scalpel into your own head. And how did you even reach your own brain? Do your powers work on yourself?" She had so many questions.
"I got special extra-long tools and used mirrors," Alice explained. She spoke like she was explaining a simple math problem to a curious child, all smiles and small words. "And I know how the brain works even though I can't directly affect myself, so I planned ahead. I knew what each cut or move or touch would do. So what if I smelled pineapples halfway through? I knew I would. It was tricky, not touching anything that would seriously impair me, but the things I needed to fix were easy to reach so it wasn't so bad."
"That's insanity," Amy breathed. "Actual, deliberate insanity."
"I wouldn't do it now," Alice said petulantly. "But I was going to die if I didn't do it then. Like, within a few days. And I had practice on my first patient, so I knew I could do it. The second time wasn't as necessary, but I wasn't in the mood for half-measures, so I did it."
A chunk of bloody bone was removed from the back of the patient's head, and Alice's scalpel went in alongside her special bio-gloved hand. As far as Amy could see, she was doing exactly what was necessary to remove the obvious tumor, and not a single thing more.
"It was crazy, but I was crazy when I did it and I'm not now," Alice concluded. "So that makes it okay."
Amy could not possibly have disagreed more.
"You heard her," Amy said after the surgery, out in the corridor. Friendly Face had been there, and now that he wasn't exerting her power she had enough presence of mind to remember that he had been in there with her. "I really don't think you need my input."
"I do agree that it is disturbing," he assured her, "but she does have a point that she was fixing herself. This doesn't necessarily discredit her. She's been nothing but honest with you so far."
"You… I don't even know where to start." She wrung her hands, putting some of her upset energy into the motion. "That's the person you want doing brain surgeries?"
"Did she mess it up?" he asked, as calm as ever.
"No. Not this time." It was less complicated than what she had done with the mice, and her combination of metal tools and biological manipulation handled the entire operation with ease.
"Did she do anything untoward?" he continued.
"No." On the ethical side of things she had been flawless, even going above the bare minimum to make sure she was operating on someone who knew what they were getting into. "So you're going to let this go."
"It's not my call," he said. "We're going to keep moving forward on testing her. You keep engaging her in conversation. I can't tell you to dig into her past, but if she volunteers more information…"
"Information you don't have in your top-secret files?" Amy asked.
"I don't see those either," he told her. "But… I can look into maybe getting us both elevated access. This does raise questions about her past, I agree. It's just not immediately clear whether it's relevant to the question at hand, which is whether she is misrepresenting her abilities or intentions."
Day three. Another human surgery. This time, Alice was operating on a young woman with a conventionally inoperable form of brain cancer who had brought along a signed consent form.
The jump from 'normal, doable surgery' to 'surgery that's only just out of reach for normal surgeons' was a small one, but to Amy it was huge. The patient from yesterday was the sort of person she had to tell that she didn't do brains, and then point in the direction of the actual doctors with the assurance that they would be fine if they listened to the experts. Today's patient was the sort she had to gently console when they broke down at the news that not even she could help them.
She wasn't good at that, and it didn't make her feel good. Especially when she knew that she could probably help them, if it wasn't such a slippery slope waiting to happen. So it was with decidedly mixed feelings that she watched, with her eyes and her powers, as Alice casually excised the death sentence lurking in the woman's head.
"You were telling me about your previous human operations yesterday," Amy said as Alice worked.
"Yeah, and how I'm crazy," Alice replied, her eyes locked on her work within the woman's head. "Going to tell me about how bad that is again?"
This was the least positive and chirpy Amy had ever seen Alice, though she was still downright cheerful. It made Amy optimistic. At least it would be easier to talk to her this way. "No… I was just wondering who your first patient was?"
"Oh." Alice paused her work and looked up at Amy. "I probably shouldn't tell you. Aren't there rules about not prying into the identities of other capes? Or do those not apply to you since everyone knows yours?"
"I'm not prying, and you don't have to give details I could use to identify you or the patient," Amy rushed to assure her. "But I was curious."
"Well… If you don't mind a very, very vague story?" Alice asked. "It'll all be true, but I'll have to cut out a lot." She pulled her scalpel out of the woman's brain – with the utmost of care, of course, disturbing nothing – just to poke it in the air to illustrate her point.
By this point Amy considered herself innured to Alice's horrifying casual treatment of her work. "Yes. If you would."
"This will be fun," Alice laughed. "Maybe. It's like a puzzle but I'm taking out all of the key pieces. How do I start… Okay. So I had a mom."
Most people did, but Amy still considered that one more piece of information added to the aforementioned puzzle that was Alice. Possibly an important one, possibly not.
"I had a mom," Alice continued. "And she was really, really, really casual about sex, and had a thing for having kids. But she had a few nasty medical problems, and none of her attempts at having kids ever lasted long, and she really wasn't in a good state of mind."
Amy already regretted asking.
"She met this guy, and he got her a place to live and everything. But he was a real creep, and he had a really weird obsession with finally being the one to give her a kid despite her medical problems. I'm talking full-on creep who you wouldn't want around kids anyway."
Amy watched as Alice continued to treat the cancer. She was using her power more than her tools this time around, possibly because this wasn't something she could just excise with precision and sharp blades. All the while, Alice kept spinning her strange story.
"He tried the obvious, normal way, and it didn't work just like all the other times. Up until that point it was just a little weird. After that, though? He brought in doctors and picked out genetic donors and went all-in on getting her to have a viable kid no matter what it took. He tried everything, and she went along with it because she was dependent on him and all her friends thought he was good for her. His plans got so convoluted that at one point he got the necessary donations from another woman who had no idea this was even going on–"
"How?" Amy asked. "And why?" Why a woman? That would just make it even more complicated than it already was. Not impossible, DNA was DNA, but just… why?
"I don't know, I wasn't born yet," Alice said with a shrug.
Amy mentally classified this entire story as having happened at least fifteen years ago. That narrowed things down a little, at least. That said, she now had a bad feeling about where and how Alice personally entered this particular story.
"So technically I have two biological mothers and no father," Alice continued, immediately confirming Amy's new suspicion with an innocent smile completely at odds with her hands currently firmly inside the bounds of a woman's head. "It worked, for some reason. They had me, and, well, he was thrilled and she was kind of done with the whole thing. To his credit, he actually wanted me and not just, like, the thrill of having done the impossible. He treated me fine. Mostly. I didn't like him. I love my mother, though."
"That doesn't sound so bad?" Amy offered. Alice had triggered at some point after all of this, though, so it must have gotten worse. She didn't expect Alice to go into detail about that. Almost nobody ever did. She wouldn't unless someone she really trusted asked, and her trigger hadn't even been that bad, relatively speaking. Or so she was told by other capes who weren't second-generation. Mainly Carol.
"Well, you see," Alice said slowly, "he didn't want to stop there. She definitely did. And she was dependent on him, because by this point her various issues were so bad her friends couldn't handle her and he was the only one who knew her and was able to accommodate all of that. So after she had me they just got worse and worse. He got more controlling, and she was basically forced to keep trying for another viable kid, but it wasn't working and she was getting worse and nobody could help her."
Alice took her hands out of the woman's head and clasped them together, the scalpel clutched between them. "And the thing was, it turned out I wasn't exactly healthy either. She passed on a whole new set of issues to me, and they started to show, and the doctors couldn't help me either. So when I got my powers," and there was the skipping over the actual trigger that Amy expected, "the first thing I did was fix my mom. She was my first ever patient."
"Did you actually fix her?" Amy asked. "You do brains, but it sounds like she had problems in way more areas than just the brain." She would have been able to fix this poor woman's other issues, but apparently they had never come to her for help, or this had all come to a head before she got her powers.
"I do transplants to new bodies too, remember?" Alice reminded her. "I can grow them… I'm going to get to show you that tomorrow, I think. I grew her a perfect body, then fixed her brain and put it in there. She was so happy… I'm so glad I could help her. She told me I should help myself if I could, so I did. If it wasn't for the guy, well… I'm not sure if we would still live together, she was kind of distant after I helped her. But it would probably be better."
"You don't live with your mother?" Amy asked. She actually felt sorry for Alice; the girl's love for her mother shone through every time she spoke of her.
"I talk to her on the phone every week," Alice assured her, "but she wasn't really all there for longer than I've been alive, and she doesn't know how to be my mom now. She's trying, though. Right after I did those surgeries, the guy, her weirdo boyfriend? He wanted to basically pimp me out as a private surgeon for his friends, which was so not cool. He got really aggressive about it when I didn't like that idea. But then he told one of his work friends about me, or she found out somehow, and she basically told him to let me go do my own thing or she would… something. I think blackmail him? My mom was kind of a secret from his work friends. I was never really clear on that. I only met her once, and she just told me that I should go meet my other mom someday, when I felt ready. I didn't want to leave my mom, but she had a chance to go away with her friends now that she didn't need all of her medical equipment, so we went our separate ways. Her to get away from him, me to go meet my other mother… eventually."
"Did you?" Amy asked, genuinely interested in what the answer would be.
"This was only a few months ago," Alice told her. She had put her gloved hand back, and was maneuvering the removed piece of skull back into place. The operation had flown by, at least from Amy's perspective. "She doesn't know yet. I want to be a real hero before I tell her. That's why I'm here. I think if I just told her 'hey, I'm your daughter and I specialize in parahuman brain surgery' and nothing else she would react… badly."
Amy thought of Carol. She winced. "Yes. Very badly." Earning a reputation as a hero or heroic healer before broaching the subject was a very sensible decision, but if Alice's mother was anything like Carol, it might not be enough.
"But hey," Alice concluded, "I'm done! Another life saved!"
Amy saw that Alice was indeed done. Done curing a woman she herself wouldn't have been willing to help.
"I'm not saying I trust her, and my previous reservations all still stand," Amy said that night during her nightly powwow with Friendly Face, "but I think I understand her a lot better now."
"I'm still working on getting us a semi-unredacted version of her files to see what might be in there to corroborate or contradict her story, but yes, I know what you mean," Friendly Face said as he absently lifted a five-pound weight. They were in the gym, as Alice was currently in the cafeteria.
"She was crazy and might still be, but if that was all true her heart is in the right place." It was a big if, and Amy hadn't had the presence of mind to touch Alice while she was telling her story to verify her truthfulness – a mistake she wouldn't be making again – but it had the ring of truth, albeit truth scrubbed of identifying details.
"We're not necessarily here to judge that, though," Friendly Face reminded her. "Does her power work as she said? Are there hidden side effects or downsides, or ways she could use it to exploit people? These are the questions we brought you in to answer."
"I'm keeping an eye out for that," Amy said, "but I haven't seen her do anything I didn't immediately understand the purpose of. We know and she admitted that she can make major changes to someone's brain, the question isn't whether she could exploit that. It's whether she's the kind of person you can trust not to exploit it."
It didn't occur to her until she was in her bed that night, waiting to fall asleep, that what she had said could be applied perfectly well to herself.
She could have healed that woman. If it wasn't for Alice, though, that woman would have died, because Amy didn't do brains. Even though she could. And yet the Protectorate wanted Amy to judge Alice. To watch her.
It wasn't hypocritical of the Protectorate. They didn't know. Amy did, though, and it bothered her. What moral high ground did she have here? She hadn't saved that woman's life today. Alice had. Messed-up Alice who had seen her own problems and decided to literally cut them out of herself. Amy didn't have that luxury. She couldn't trust herself the way Alice did.
It was possible Alice was hiding something. That she was a villain in disguise, or obscuring the true purpose of her admittedly very strange powerset. But it was also possible that she was exactly as she appeared, and that she was more worthy of the responsibility of working with brains than Amy ever could be.
They had four more days of this. Maybe by the end of the week Amy wouldn't feel so conflicted.
Alice was literally hopping with barely-contained excitement the next morning, a stark contrast to Amy's sleepy morning exterior. There was no patient today, and the biomass techno-coffin was the only thing in the room.
"Let's see it," she suggested, cutting right to the chase. "You can make human bodies?"
"Yes, but can we talk about it first? Just a little? So you know what I think I'm doing before you see me doing it." Alice dipped both hands in the biomass fluid and obtained a white coating on each. "I want to see if you could do the same thing the way I do it. Have you ever tried?"
"Making a whole body?" She tried to sound like the idea was new and slightly ridiculous. In truth, she knew she could, but it was something she wouldn't do for the same reason that she didn't grow her own garden in five minutes or give people armor plating over their skin. She was a healer, and healing was the only thing she did. The only thing she was allowed to do, the only thing she was safe doing.
But she couldn't just say 'no, I can't do that.' Not to Alice, who might know enough to catch her in a lie. "Why don't you explain to me how you do it?" she said instead. "I've never tried." That was safer than refusing outright, and had the benefit of being true.
"I can do that," Alice agreed, "but you really have never tried? Wouldn't it be easier than fixing some full-body conditions, or people with a lot of different problems? Even if you can't modify brains, surely you can transplant a head and then just shape it to match the new body?"
"How do you do it?" Amy asked, shamelessly avoiding the question. "Do you grow it from the bones out, or do you use stem cells, or what?"
"I start with the bones, you got that right," Alice began, and she was off, explaining in minute detail the processes she used to grow a body from nothing. Amy listened intently, doing her best to follow when the terminology got too technical for her mostly intuitive grasp of biology. That didn't happen nearly as often as she would have expected. Alice was a Tinker, but her grasp on biology seemed to be almost as intuitive as Amy's own, with few truly medical terms and a lot of very common-sense explanations.
Eventually, they put their hands in the vat of biomass and Amy watched as Alice began doing what she had spoken at length about. It was… something else. There were no tools involved at all, it was all the Striker aspect of Alice's power, and that aspect took an approach that was not entirely unlike how Amy would have handled it.
She also got to see what the plastic was for, finally. As Alice sifted out the useful biomass and formed it together, shaping structures and fragile parts, the plastic was shepherded into place to act as structural supports, filtering out into a sludge at the bottom of the pod that perfectly fit the body as it formed, holding it together until the more structurally vital muscles and eventually skin grew in. It was a dynamic process, but it was an ingenious approach that Amy was itching to try for herself, sanity and safety be damned. She could see the value of the plastic now, and she could do it all ten times faster and more perfectly than Alice, whose power was ponderously slow to make widespread changes.
She wanted to try it so very, very badly. "This is really useful," she said, genuinely impressed as the last details on the top of the body – nude, male, young adult, genetically nondescript but unique as far as Amy could tell – formed and solidified. "I think… I could maybe do this. If I had biomass like the kind you have here." It would be a lot harder and messier to make do with random sources of mass. As it was, the plastic had formed a neat pellet-bed under the body by the end, and Alice had used up all of the biomass in the coffin.
"Really?" Alice asked, excited but seemingly tired by the hours-long process. "I thought you healed?"
"Give me a bit of living flesh to heal from," Amy improvised. She might not strictly need such a thing, but it was a good explanation for why she was suddenly able to make bodies 'from scratch', as it were. She should have just left it alone, but it was too temptingly benign and new. "I can heal outward from an organ or something."
"Yes, to trick your healing power into 'fixing' everything around it, I see," Alice smiled at her. "That's great! You can get the biomass from the Protectorate, they already know how to make it."
"Do you have an extra coffin-full right now?" she asked, directing her question to the silent observer in the corner of the room. He was helpful, if they did she was sure he could get it for her.
"Let me go see," he offered, hopping up from his stool.
"Today seemed to be productive," Friendly Face said later. "I take it there's nothing wrong with what she showed you today?"
"This must be what being a Tinker is like," Amy said, tired but more satisfied than she could remember being in years. "Working with somebody else. I don't know about everything else, but this? This was useful for me and there's nothing wrong with the bodies she is making." She had made her own, with Alice's guidance every step of the way, and while it wasn't easy or fast it was actually doable.
"They did come out dead," Friendly Face reminded her.
"No, just inactive," Amy corrected. "No brain to regulate anything, and no fancy hospital equipment to regulate from the outside, either." They were alive enough that her power worked on them. The biomass itself was alive enough for that, so long as Amy took the time to build up from the tiny organisms contained within.
"Any chance they could be Mastered in that state?" Friendly Face asked.
"Any power that could Master a brainless body would probably work just as well on store mannequins," Amy said. It was a foolish fear. Alice was dangerous, but making mindless biological puppets out of raw biological materials was not what she was hiding, not even if she could puppet them. She could do so much worse by fiddling with brains. Why bother making bodies from whole cloth when she could probably just take over bodies already walking around? Making the bodies she controlled would be the more humane way to get the same outcome anyway, so they should be hoping she could do that if she went evil.
"Be sure to explain your reasoning in the report," Friendly Face told her. "If you're still certain she's been forthright…"
"I still haven't seen a single sign of deception or ulterior motives," Amy confirmed.
"We'll be allowing a brain transfer to a new body tomorrow," he concluded. "Watch her very carefully, and if you can try to throw her off while she's performing the transfer."
Amy opened her mouth to question his sanity and moral compass.
"So long as you are certain you can take over if she messes up," he added before she could complain. "Don't endanger the patient, but we want you to test how she performs while seriously distracted."
The patient was relatively young, an eighteen-year-old girl with serious congenital malformations and third-order complications all over the place. Not immediately life-threatening, and Amy could have healed most of her in a few minutes, but all together it was bad enough that the woman was apparently dead-set on just getting rid of her entire body and starting with a new one. The dossier Friendly Face had provided gave a list of previous medical issues three pages long, even though the entire thing seemed to be written in eye-wateringly small fonts. It was a medical miracle she had lived this long, and her quality of life was absolutely abysmal.
Amy didn't know where the Protectorate was finding patients like this on short notice, but she was going to have a word with whoever was in charge of the search. This was the kind of emergency job she should have seen months ago, a top priority. She could have fixed almost all of this poor woman's problems in a single day at any point in the last two years. Now she was here, apparently desperate enough to let a Tinker transplant her brain on the off chance it might work. Her paperwork even mentioned a specifically worded 'do not revive' request if the transfer didn't work, which Amy wasn't even sure was legal depending on where in the country they actually were right now.
Suffice to say Amy was not impressed with the Protectorate for arranging this instead of just contacting her directly and finding someone less unfortunate to test Alice with, but they were here now and she was going to make sure everything went right, so it didn't matter in the end. And fuck Friendly Face asking her to 'test' Alice further by upsetting her.
"Okay, this might actually be tricky," Alice admitted as she worked to form the woman's future body. "She's got some brain issues and a tumor that's actually pressing against the inside of her skull. Right?"
"Yes. Two." It was a medical miracle the woman was still alive, so long as one considered living in constantly changing forms of pain to be miraculous. Amy could see the long, long history of mundane surgery and drug regimens splayed out through the woman's constantly rebelling body. She itched to heal, but it would soon be rendered pointless.
"I'll have to take those off before I take her brain out, her new skull won't fit them and they might do more damage if the pressure is taken off and then put back on again," Alice reasoned. "It'll need to be fast."
"Tell me where I can help," Amy requested. "This is your show, but if you need a second power to fix something quick, I'll step in." Forget testing Alice. That could happen with some similarly tricky mouse diseases or something else with lower stakes. And if Friendly Face shifted uncomfortably on his stool in the corner, well… His power was having less and less of an effect on her as the week wore on, and that meant she remembered his shitty request right now.
She wasn't going to get much done in investigating Alice today, but that wasn't her fault. Some things were more important.
One long and complicated surgery later, Amy wiped her sweaty hands on a rag and watched as the perfect, normal body Alice had crafted sat up under her own volition for the first time. The woman broke down sobbing before she could even be told the operation was a total success.
Alice patted her arm, passed her a hospital gown, and helped her out of the techno-coffin. From there she was bustled away by the guards and a few normal doctors who were apparently waiting just outside the room, and Amy helped Alice clean up the remnants of the surgery. They packed her things away, Amy having seen where everything went over the last few days, both exhausted and presumably satisfied.
This was where they would usually have parted ways, but Amy didn't feel like letting that happen. "I'm looking forward to something leafy, green, and not flesh-related for dinner," she remarked.
"Really?" Alice asked with a tired smirk. "I was thinking steak. Rare, with plenty of hot sauce."
"Hot sauce on steak? I have to see that atrocity to believe it." She pushed the door open and they both left the room. Guards fell in behind them, but they were easy to ignore.
Amy didn't meet with Friendly Face that night. She had a pleasant meal with Alice, talked of nothing in particular, and then went to bed, content. What she had done today, what she helped Alice do… That was why she healed. Not Carol, not for fear of doing anything else. Not just for those reasons. And it was good to know that there was someone else almost as capable as her now. Someone who could and would fix brain issues just as easily as Amy handled the rest of the body.
It was a relief. She didn't have to feel so bad about not healing brains. She wasn't the only one anymore. And if the other was possibly crazy, strange, and maybe dangerous…
Well, it was still an improvement, wasn't it?
It was hard to think badly of someone after spending a day helping them save a life.
Friendly Face seemed to be grumpy the next morning. Amy fought the impulse to feel sorry for him, even when she saw him nursing a cup of coffee on his stool.
"You don't want to be drinking or eating while we're working," she told him instead.
He reluctantly set his coffee aside. Alice wasn't there yet, so it was just the two of them. "This is the last session," he told her. "Tomorrow you'll write up your final findings and we'll take you home."
"I thought I had a full week, not six days?" she said. Then she decided it didn't really matter. "Never mind. If that's the schedule, that's the schedule. What's on the list for today?"
"Your file says you can tell whether someone is lying by watching their biological systems," Friendly Face said bluntly. "Use that. No patients today. We need solid answers."
"You could have had me do that on day one, you know," Amy said coldly. She didn't like this. He wasn't wrong, it was a smart move. But ordering her to do it? Now, when he was obviously frustrated? She wasn't employed by the Protectorate, she was here voluntarily. He had no authority over her.
"You could have done it on the first day," he agreed. "But you didn't. You still haven't. Touch her, ask her, watch her responses. That's it."
"Does your power let you get away with being a dick so much that you just do it by default?" Amy asked.
"Yes, and in a few weeks you'll have forgotten," he said solemnly. "No matter what I do, you'll forget. You ask me some variation of that question every time you're around me for more than five days. This is the fourth time you've asked since we first met. Why should I be polite? It won't matter in the long run. Everyone likes me at first."
There was something peculiarly sad about that, but Amy was in no mood to sympathize with him. Thankfully, Alice bustled in, short and cheery as ever, and she didn't have to think about him anymore.
Just what he had told her to do.
"We going to be making more bodies today?" Alice asked. "They're late with my biomass. And my tools."
This shouldn't feel like a betrayal. It shouldn't. Alice probably wasn't hiding anything, and Amy checking with her power would simply lend that last bit of evidence needed to prove her trustworthiness.
Amy shrugged her shoulders and stood opposite Alice at the lab table. "They don't really have anything else to test about your power," she said. "Or so they tell me." She didn't want to be associated with them right now. She was an independent contractor here to help them with one specific thing.
It was times like this that reminded her that Carol, for all her bitchiness, had valid points about the failings of the Protectorate and not wanting to be officially connected to them. Amy didn't like feeling that she was doing their dirty work.
"We could have done more difficult surgeries," Alice suggested. "You and me. You make it a lot safer. A backup who can keep things from going sideways if I make a mistake."
"Yes, well, they trust your power." She wasn't procrastinating. She wasn't. "They just want me to ask you a few things and… make sure you're being honest. Then I'll give you a stamp of approval and you'll be off helping people as fast as you possibly can, I assume."
"That's the plan," Alice said brightly. "What do you have to ask?"
"Can I have your hand?" Amy set hers on the table, laying it palm-up. "They want me to be sure."
Alice frowned at her, though even that expression looked cute on her. "I don't know if I'm comfortable with that," she admitted. "I've avoided touching you, and you're really good about not touching me. I'm wearing a mask, but you would know me if you touched me. DNA is unique. You might even be able to tell who my parents are, and that's not fair to my mom."
"My memory isn't perfect," Amy assured her. "And I would have to touch you in your civilian identity to recognize you. Other capes have no problem with me healing them in-costume."
"We both know that's not really how it works," Alice said softly. "Biology… It's like giving out the key to my house, and a hand drawn map, and the times I like to set my alarm clock. I know better than most how much can be done with a biological sample taken from someone who doesn't know. One of my moms doesn't even know she is a mother because of something that probably happened like this. I'd like to think you wouldn't do anything, even if you remembered everything that defines me. But I don't want to take a risk."
It was a fair reason. A valid one. An understandable one rooted in her past. Amy wanted to let it go and do something else. But she had to know. "I swear I won't do anything with what I see, but they need this to be sure. They might not let you do everything you can if they don't have this."
"Amy," Alice said quietly, "I won't. Not even if I felt safe letting you look. My body is mine. My mind is mine. I made it. I cut into it and fixed it and made myself who I wanted to be. I don't want anyone seeing that. You could tell… what I did. What I fixed. That's just too personal. If me refusing this means I can't be a hero as effectively, that the other heroes don't trust me like they should… That's hard. But I can't compromise on this."
"And I won't force you." She wouldn't. Not even if Alice was hiding something. Amy was no saint. Alice was probably a better person than she was. She wasn't going to force the other girl to lay her body and mind bare to examination. Not when she was so acutely aware of what that entailed.
She wouldn't force Alice. But… But. What had this week been, if not her watching the other girl do amazing things that surpassed the limitations Amy placed on herself? "Can you give me something else, then?" she asked.
"What?" Alice asked.
"Heartbeat, adrenaline levels, muscle tension around your neck and chest," Amy listed, laying bare the criteria by which she usually evaluated someone's truthfulness. "I need to monitor those things. But those aren't you. Not if we can isolate them. Give me a way to watch them without seeing into you. I'm limited by the organism I touch."
Alice's eyes lit up. "You are," she said thoughtfully, her fingers drumming against the table. "Blood pressure is easy, I can just redirect a vein through something else. Adrenaline too. Muscle tension is trickier, but I can probably make something to hook into myself… I can air-gap it with plastic or metal, it wouldn't be healthy in the long run but we don't need it to last long."
"If you hooked all of those things into a separate living organism, connected with inorganic materials, I could read those vital signs without actually feeling anything inside you," Amy concluded. "Make the exterior of the false vein out of plastic too, I only need to feel the pressure it puts on the flesh around it, and that way I can't see your blood."
"This will actually work." Alice rounded on Friendly Face. "Well? Where are my tools? We have work to do!"
Several bloody hours later, Alice lay on the lab table, her chest bare to the air. Usually this sort of thing would have been obscene, but thanks to the bloody metal stints peeling back her skin in six different places and hooking into a raw flesh orb sitting on the table beside her head, it was obscene in a very different way. Medically, not sexually.
She had to do all of the physical attachments to her body personally, because Amy doing it would have defeated the point. Friendly Face had provided painkillers, but Alice had only taken them after the surgery was done. Her muscles were exposed to the air and to the inorganic mounts connecting to them and transferring their every twitch into the sensitive makeshift organ they had crafted together. Blood ran through a plastic tube, out of her left arm and through the organ before going back into her arm, a diverted stream that would slowly suffocate Alice as her heart failed to keep up with the new distance and extra pressure it needed to exert.
Slowly. Long enough for a few questions. This was the most insane thing Amy had ever done with her power, but it worked. The organ itself was made from randomized DNA that meant nothing, and it was a living thing for the purposes of her power. A living thing that was not Alice, but that conveyed all the information Amy needed to know whether she was being truthful.
Amy put her hand on the organ and her power snapped into it, revealing it for all that it was. She reminded herself of exactly what the various pressures inside and on the organ meant, and established a baseline as Alice rasped for breath on the table.
It said something about the both of them that this was the compromise they had come up with, when the original proposition was holding hands. Amy wasn't sure what that something was… But she knew she wasn't going to tell Carol about this. Maybe Vicky.
"Tell me a truth," she said.
"I have freckles," Alice answered. Her baseline metrics held relatively steady.
"Tell me a lie," Amy continued. "A very obvious one."
"I'm ten feet tall and green," Alice said. Her heartrate didn't spike like one would be led to believe, and none of her other reactions obviously changed, but Amy was no stupid mechanical 'lie detector.' Her power gave her far more insight into even the most minute of changes, and they were there, exactly as she expected.
"Tell me something that is true, in a way, but not the whole truth," Amy commanded.
"I like you as much as you dislike yourself," Alice said enigmatically. Again, her reaction was not something that could be quantified, but the tensing and relaxing muscles and pressure and chemical streaming into the organ all told a story, and that story gave her an idea of what she would be looking for.
"Yes, this is working," Amy confirmed with a glance back at a very disturbed Friendly Face. She resisted the urge to flip him the bird. "Lie detection without invading her bodily privacy. This good enough for your bosses?"
"Go ahead," Friendly Face conceded.
"First question." Amy looked down into Alice's face. "Your powers. What are they, exactly, and are there one or two of them?"
"It's complicated," Alice answered. "I don't think I'm really a Tinker… I can see and manipulate biology, but it's fuzzy and it works better if I do some things with tools. A lot of things, actually. It's one power, not two, but I get why it looks like two from the outside."
Total truth. Amy nodded. "Your biomass?"
"I know what I need to work best," Alice said. "You saw, it's easy to build up from. I need to be working on living or recently-deceased things, like you. I can't make new bodies without material to use."
Another total truth. Amy was satisfied on that front. "Are there any downsides to your power that you have concealed from us?"
"None," Alice answered. "I'm not hiding anything about my power or what I want to do with it, or why."
Truth. Amy relaxed. "Do you want to be a hero to prove yourself to your mother?" she asked.
"Yes, and to help people," Alice confirmed. "I want them both to be proud of me, and not to be afraid."
Total truth, though her heartbeat picked up when she spoke of her mothers, which was easily attributable to her feelings. It was an emotional subject. "Are you hiding anything from the Protectorate that they would want to know about?" she asked. "I mean from the top people, not the random grunts that work for them." Suck it, Friendly Face. Amy couldn't give two shits if Alice was hiding things from him. So long as the people at the top knew whatever it was.
"I think Alexandria knows everything about me," Alice said truthfully. "She definitely knows all the important things."
"Okay." She looked back at Friendly Face. "If you have any more questions, tell me now, because we're not setting all of this up again."
"Ask if she's capable of creating plagues," Friendly Face told her.
"Well?" Amy asked. "Are you?"
"I think I might be," Alice admitted. "But I might not. I've never thought about it."
It was a partial truth. But Amy understood. Even if she couldn't, she would certainly have at least wondered. "True," she announced. "Do you plan to explore that facet of your capabilities for any reason?"
"No," Alice said truthfully, validating Amy's trust in her.
"Ask if she plans to be loyal to the Protectorate," Friendly Face demanded.
"Do you plan to be a hero who helps people?" Amy asked instead.
"I do," Alice promised.
"Okay. We're done here." She used her power to rip through the organ, reducing it to useless flesh and nerves. "Let's get you patched up." She couldn't use her power on Alice, and Alice couldn't directly use her own power on herself, but she could sew herself up and take some heavy-duty painkillers.
Later that night, Amy glanced over her final report for perhaps the tenth time. It was very much a 'fill in the blanks' situation, with a pre-designed template for her to complete, and for the most part it was easy. Alice had never, not once in the entire week, shown even the smallest sign of being anything more than she professed to be. She had her flaws, plenty of them, and her mannerism was still reminiscent of Bonesaw, but her heart was in the right place and she had a firm grasp on the ethical implications of her powers.
Really, it was hard to fully express how Amy had been impressed by her fellow bio-Striker without coming across as foolishly trusting or possibly Mastered. It wasn't to the point where she would ever want Alice cutting into her own head unless it was vital to saving her life, but then again, Alice didn't want her looking in either. Amy thought that she trusted Alice as much as Alice trusted her… and she was a celebrated hero and world-renowned healer.
Amy would rather have Alice operating on brains than herself. That was not, in itself, high praise. But it was the standard she held the other girl to, and a standard she easily met and surpassed.
Amy finished dawdling over her report and went to the bathroom for the last time that night. She was looking forward to returning to her own bedroom and the open spaces of Brockton Bay. Also to getting away from Friendly Face and regaining the freedom to go where she wanted, within reason. She wanted to get back to healing at the hospital, too. It would still be boring at times, but some of Alice's enthusiasm had rubbed off on her and put a bit of the shine back into the mundane routine of saving lives, at least for now.
She was less enthusiastic about leaving Alice, but they would meet again soon enough. Endbringer battles always brought the healers together, if nothing else.
Also, Amy had no intention of leaving without properly saying goodbye, so there was that.
Alice had a room elsewhere in the facility, doubtless under heavy guard, but Amy knew enough to know she didn't have to find that room on her final morning in the facility. There was only one cafeteria, and her ride wasn't going to show up until noon. She woke up early and camped out in the cafeteria with a big mug of coffee and a stack of pancakes.
Sure enough, Alice was escorted in an hour after Amy arrived. She made a beeline for Amy's table, and that was that. Contact made despite the uneasy looks Alice's guards were giving Amy's, like none of them actually knew whether this was okay.
"You going soon?" Alice asked.
"Yeah, but I figured I'd catch you here first," Amy admitted. "I gave you a glowing recommendation, just so you know."
"Even though I'm crazy?" Alice asked as she stabbed a waffle with her plastic fork. She waved it threateningly at Amy.
"Yes." Amy did think Alice was still a bit touched in the head. Just… she was touched by herself. Literally. And if that was who she wanted to be, how she wanted to be, then Amy wasn't going to hold it against her. "It doesn't stop you from being a damn good healer. Just… try not to play up the cutesy angle too much. Or off Bonesaw first, at least."
"I'm happy, not cute," Alice objected.
Amy snorted so hard she almost had syrup go up her nose. "You're kidding."
"No?" Alice eyed her warily. "Don't tell me you have a crush on me…"
"I don't," Amy assured her. She really didn't.
"Good. That would be weird." Alice went back to dismembering her waffle with her fork. Very little of it was actually being eaten, Amy noticed. She probably knew that her guards would get antsy about her sitting around in the cafeteria if she was obviously done eating. "What kind of person develops a crush after a week of watching a girl cut skulls open?"
"A very, very sick and twisted individual," Amy agreed. "No. If anything, you're the sickeningly cute puppy I can't bear to kick like I should."
"Do you often kick puppies?" Alice asked.
"No, but if I was tempted to I think it would be a lot like this." She took a sip of her lukewarm coffee. "When you get set up somewhere, doing your thing, give me a call." She pushed a scrap of paper across the table, one she had prepared the night before on the off chance she only had a moment or two with Alice in the morning, instead of the nice, leisurely goodbye they had going now. It had her personal number, email, and PHO handle.
"I'll text you so you have my number," Alice promised, carefully tucking the paper away. "You won't mind? I'm sure you're very busy back home."
"Alice…" Amy paused as she thought about how to phrase what she wanted to say. "I hope you never get bored doing what you do. But I do get bored sometimes, and anyone who can make life interesting again is worth talking to."
"Glad to be of service." Alice mimed saluting her with her fork. "Maybe you can meet my mom sometime. Once she and I work out our relationship a bit more."
"I hope you won't take this the wrong way, but I'm never introducing you to my mom," Amy said seriously. "But I think I'd like to meet yours."
"Sure. We'll set it up sometime." Alice looked over Amy's shoulder. "There's that guy again. You've probably got to go now."
"Yeah." Something occurred to Amy. "Actually, do me a favor. As soon as you can, text my phone, and send me this exact message."
She felt a presence behind her. A nagging, friendly presence that she knew enough to reflexively dislike now, though that wouldn't last long once she was away from his constant presence.
"What message?" Alice asked eagerly.
"Text me 'This is Alice, reminding you that Friendly Face is actually a massive asshole once you get used to his power," she dictated, well aware of the cape likely standing right behind her. "And 'Past Amy says to warn future Amy so she can get to the insulting-him phase faster next time. He deserves it.'"
Amy left Alice laughing in the cafeteria, and her own smug smile didn't go away until well after Sparkplug's teleporter took her home.
As far as week-long distractions from the boredom of life went, this had been a good one.
Author's Note: There aren't enough low-tier Strangers in Worm fanfiction! (Perhaps because coming up with unique pure Stranger powers is actually kind of hard?) Friendly Face isn't at all important to the broader plot and intrigue of this story, but I needed a cape extra to provide an escort and foil and 'guy whose power just mildly befuddles you and predisposes you to like him but not remember him after' seemed like a fun power to give him. Not strong, but I imagine he's great at doing the detective thing of going to a bar and fishing for information. Or what he's doing here, which is observing powerful capes without having to worry about rubbing their various neuroses the wrong way. He makes a great mediator and de-escalator, though one assumes that's not what his Shard had in mind for him. He'd probably also make a good infiltrator or assassin. Not Imp-level good, but still pretty good compared to a normal person.
Anyway, on to the challenge of this story. Can you, my intelligent, hint-seeking readers, answer the question that Panacea did not?
Who is Alice really, and what is her deal?
There is a very specific answer that I've tossed out clues to all throughout this story, some of which Amy picked up on and some she didn't. I don't actually think it's a hard mystery so much as one that requires out-of-context knowledge Amy doesn't have, and I suspect most readers figured it out sometime around day three of seven, but please let me know! I'm really curious to hear about how it actually works for the average reader, because obviously it's hard to accurately judge the difficulty of a mystery I came up with myself. The correct answer adds a whole other dimension to this story once you do know, so if you really can't figure it out, go check the comments below because I'm sure plenty of you got it with ease.