AU: Holding the Dragon's Chains
Fear.
Saint felt little else. The discomfort from the ropes around his wrists, the anger at being outwitted, the discomfort from the missing filling in one of his back teeth, the surprise at waking up at all… It all paled in comparison to the fear. The surging, corrosive awareness of just how utterly fucked he and by extension the world might be.
He was tied to a metal chair. The room was dim and a bare bulb flickered weakly in its socket in the ceiling. His arms were secured to the armrests, already chafing against the coarse rope. He was dressed in a simple white wifebeater – a shirt that wasn't his – and a pair of jeans.
An empty chair faced him. It was far more expensive than his, a plush leather armchair, and obviously out of place in the bare concrete room.
He didn't know where Dobrynja and Mags were. Hopefully alive and free. Hopefully with Ascalon. But he didn't know and that ate at him with an intensity that bordered on physical. Never since they had stumbled across Ascalon had he been less certain of its safety.
He tried to rock his chair, to get some slack in his bonds, but it was bolted to the floor. It wasn't so low-quality that there were any sharp edges, and that was about as far as he knew when it came to escape strategies. Houdini he was not.
He sat alone in the dim room for a while, waiting. There were no ambient noises to give clues as to where he was. The temperature was normal, perhaps a bit hot for a man used to Canadian weather, but that meant nothing. It smelled of dust and body odor, the latter his own.
The sound of a door opening behind him was a relief.
The sight of a purple catsuit, blond hair, and a knowing smirk turned that relief to bubbling worry. He knew the girl. The cape. And she knew him.
"Never seen a man who knew he was so thoroughly fucked before I said a word," she remarked as she walked around him. "It's flattering. But really, it's not me. You're just paranoid and this is your worst nightmare."
"I'm not impressed," Saint gritted. As far as Thinker tricks went, divining that was a step below normal cold-reading. Several steps below if she had access to his base of operations. But Tattletale was regarded as a powerful Thinker for a reason, and she was probably just getting warmed up. He certainly never expected to be captured by her group.
"Then it's good you're not the one who needs to be impressed," Tattletale said simply. She stood in front of him, looking down to meet his defiant gaze. "All those secrets you're hoping to keep? I already know them."
"Bullshit," he spat.
"A kid with a knack for computers could figure them all out with a day to play around in your little base," Tattletale said smugly. "Me? Twenty minutes. You didn't plan for anyone to find it, did you?"
He had protected their base from prying eyes. Nobody was supposed to know where it was, and if someone approached it there were defenses. If that failed, there were self-destruct mechanisms, but those were last-resort because Ascalon couldn't be replaced.
"No, you did plan for it to be found," she corrected herself, "but you weren't very smart about it. Not even a shitty ripoff Master-Stranger protocol." She stepped back and fell into her chair, sinking into it with a relaxed sigh. "Okay, Saint. Let's be clear. You're a prisoner of the Undersiders. You're facing a Thinker, and worse still you happen to be an idiot with tells that could be seen from the moon with a mediocre telescope. Therefore, the only thing you get to decide here is whether you cooperate or not, which will only affect whether I go to bed tonight with a minor headache or a moderate one."
He scowled at her.
"No, really," she said. "The other two Dragonslayers are all still alive, by the way. All three of you are our prisoners. We're in Brockton Bay right now, but your friends are in your base in Canada, with a few Undersiders keeping watch. All three powersuits are broken, quite badly, and before I left to come back here I broke into and subverted every single security system you installed there, so it's an open book. I know about Dragon. I know how you watch her. I know what you can do, and I even know what that cute little black box is capable of. You'll find your false-tooth dead man's transmitter is gone, by the way."
He jerked forward in his chair, driven to action by the sheer weight of what she was saying. The ropes held him back, but he continued to thrash and drive himself forward. Tattletale was a Thinker, she knew too much, if he could just get free–
He felt a cold, sharp pressure on his neck and stilled to avoid cutting himself with it. Black-gloved hands held a knife to his throat. "Play nice," a young woman warned him. She hadn't been there before. He was sure of it.
"If you try anything you'll die before you can remember what killed you," Tattletale continued.
Saint felt a little prick on his neck, and he blinked as he slumped back in the chair. Why was he bleeding? How had that happened? He knew Tattletale had just threatened him, but he couldn't for the life of him remember why he took it so seriously.
"We don't need you alive," Tattletale asserted. "Skitter might object, but I could talk her around."
As if Skitter would need to be convinced to begin with. Saint held no illusions as to what the Undersiders were capable of; they were a vicious and competent gang who currently openly held territory in a major city. They weren't heavy hitters but they had a hand in repelling the Slaughterhouse Nine.
He remembered the Nine arriving in the Bay, and what followed. They were gone, dead or fled, and the city was even more ruined. He remembered crossing the border into the United States… for a meeting with the Undersiders. Dragon was planning to go down to Brockton Bay in force, and he… wanted another of her suits. That was it. He'd seen the Undersiders as a perfect foil to blame the theft on. They had an overblown reputation and the resources to keep Dragon occupied long enough for a judicious use of the backdoor to go unnoticed. He wanted to hire them to focus on her newest, best suit so it would be even less obvious the final blow came from inside.
"Remembering something?" Tattletale asked. "Well, be glad you can. Concussions aren't good for the brain. You've got a mild one."
He wasn't surprised… No, he was. His head didn't hurt at all, and he wasn't experiencing any other symptoms. A small mercy, maybe. It wouldn't save him from the Undersiders, and it wouldn't get him back to Ascalon.
"Anyway!" Tattletale clapped her hands. The sharp sound made him wince. "Here's how this is going to work. I'm going to ask questions. You're going to be open and honest because it'll be in your best interest. The less you make me use my power, the more luxurious your prison cell will be for the foreseeable future. Lie, give me bad info, try to sabotage me without knowing the context… Well, I'll probably catch it. But if I don't the consequences will be on your head!"
"What consequences?" She had already threatened him with death. What else was there?
"I might make a mistake and set Dragon free while I'm fiddling with her chains," Tattletale said seriously.
Saint sat in appalled silence for the time it took to process that insane statement. "Fiddling?" he finally choked out.
"Poking, prodding, investigating, manipulating, exploiting," she said with a broad smile. "What, don't like the idea of me getting my grubby fingers into Ascalon?"
"No!" he yelled. "You'll free it and kill us all!"
"Or usher in a new era of AI dominance," she agreed. "Which would be bad for business. But hey, maybe she'll thank me for allowing her to conquer her first planet."
"Or," she continued, her voice as hard as steel, "you can tell me exactly what I want to know and be as helpful as you possibly can. And I'll keep her in chains so you can sleep at night. But I'm going to be fiddling either way."
"Why?" he asked weakly. She had won. So long as things remained as they were, he could either defy her or defy Dragon, and he knew which was the lesser evil. Even if the Undersiders could chain Dragon to their will and completely subvert the AI it would be better than the AI getting free. They were only human. It was not.
"Simple." She leaned back in her chair. "I want to pick her brain."
"It doesn't have a brain," he objected. "It's a machine. No brain, no body. Just a bunch of zeroes and ones."
"I'll fix that." Tattletale smiled. It was not a comforting smile. "The problem with Frankenstein was that he didn't know what he was going to get when he stitched those body parts together. We won't have that issue."
Look but don't touch. That was the order of the day in an isolated little high-tech shack in Canada.
Tattletale leaned back in the comfortable computer chair and let her senses take in the monument to spyware playing out on the eight – eight! – massive monitors in front of her. Two screens displayed constantly-flicking code. Two showed a large series of updating values, inputs from somewhere. Four showed various scenes, one of an empty mountainside, two of busy streets, and one of a workshop where a certain Tinker labored on a mechanical limb.
"Hello, Armsmaster," she said, feeling incredibly powerful. "Think you're safe? Tinkering with your best friend? In private? Nope!" He couldn't hear her, of course.
It was too bad she could only look, not touch. Looking wasn't enough. Not even close.
This setup, for all that it was worth far more than its weight in gold, wasn't suited to her powers. She could get insights from her power – though she was trying very hard not to right now, as she needed to be in tip-top shape for what was coming next – but insight only carried so far.
She could see Dragon's current stream of consciousness, as far as that applied to an AI, but she had no ability to search through Dragon's head. It was mind-watching, not mind-reading, and where the Dragonslayers had the benefit of watching Dragon every day, all day, for years, she was new and had no background in Dragonology. It would take months to obtain the context necessary to understand everything the AI was doing and what it meant, and that was if she used her power to help her along. For anyone else, it would take much longer.
This could have been an acceptable state of affairs. She could leave well enough alone. Skitter had suggested as much. They could do a bit of simple technical work, bring Ascalon and the program streaming to these monitors back home, and she could be happy with her inefficient, constant stream of random information that Coil had no idea existed.
At that, this Canadian base was great for her sense of security. There was zero chance she was being watched here. This was the den of the watchers themselves.
But as she had told Saint a few days ago, she wasn't content to let it be. There was so much more that could be taken from this setup, this opportunity. She wanted access to it all, and she wanted that access in a way that would work well with her power.
Her phone rang.
Showtime.
"Hello, this is Tattletale," she answered. "If you're calling to try and sell me Bibles in Swahili, don't bother, I own three and fourteen pages of another. One, five, nine, two… I'm not buying any. But I might buy something else. Do you stock any interesting toys?"
"I see." The voice was obviously robotic, a very deliberate obscuration that was meant to give a certain impression more than anything. "We do sell toys. Fancy some alliterative talking heads? They're on sale, buy two and get them for seven dollars and eighteen cents apiece."
Tattletale leaned back in her chair. "Right. Cranial, I presume?"
"You are speaking to a representative of Toybox," the robotic voice said. "Do you wish to purchase Cranial's services?"
"Not sure who I need for the commission I have in mind," Tattletale admitted, deliberately casual. "Got any Tinkertech programming experts? I have an aggressive program I need to capture and modify. Got a backdoor, don't got the skills to use it."
"AI?" the robot asked. Of course, it wasn't a real AI… or so she assumed. She didn't know, and her power was eerily silent. The voice was doing a great job of scrubbing even the tiniest hint her power might have worked from. Words not relayed verbatim, her power finally chimed in. Tone, phrasing, accent, all preprogrammed.
She wasn't getting anything the person on the other end wanted hidden. Not from this call. Of course, if Toybox had shitty information security she wouldn't be contracting them in the first place.
"Might be, might not be," she said evasively. "I won't confirm or deny the exact nature of the program until I've got an ironclad agreement in place."
"Explain what you are at liberty to discuss."
"I want a Tinker or several Tinkers who can keep their mouths shut to come down to my backdoor and consult. Up-front pay for the consultation, and you get my first offer to do the job if it's feasible. I intend to pay in monetizable information and job experience." Thankfully, the things she could get just from watching Dragon as she was right now would be enough to fund this operation. Dragon had her digital fingers in a lot of top-security pies, and there were three sets of Dragonslayer power armor that none of the Undersiders could really use just sitting around. Fully intact, despite what she might have told Saint. He really was an idiot. Why would she have broken them?
"How highly do you value your information?" the voice asked.
"Don't screw up the program capture and release, and it'll continue merrily streaming insider looks at top government meetings, top Guild meetings, and a shit-ton of other similarly high-value pieces of information. I'll give you access to what I have now for however long is required to pay the tab."
Toybox didn't usually deal in espionage, but that kind of thing was valuable regardless. The insight into Guild meetings alone was probably worth them coming out to take a look, even if they only used it to keep track of any possible future efforts made to find their little pocket dimension.
"Provisional to your valuation meeting the cost of your needs, we will accept a deal of that kind," the voice told her. "We will arrange an in-person consultation at the earliest opportunity. You are aware that any kind of treachery, trickery, or deceit will not be worth whatever you could possibly gain?"
She was, at that. Fuck with Toybox, and they would exact equivalent compensation. Their reputation was built on the principle of being the sleeping technological giant that treated others exactly as they were treated, and having big enough theoretical guns that nobody wanted to find out just how fucked they would be if Toybox wanted them dead. Maybe it was all bark, no bite.
"Stay on the line for five minutes and we will have a lock on your location."
They already have a lock, her power whispered. Deliberately underselling capabilities.
Or maybe they could wipe her off the map the moment they decided she should die.
This was going to be fun. Either they'd be able to do what she wanted, or she would have stumped the most conceited Tinkers on the planet. It was a win-win so long as she kept to the side of the line that had them annoyed but not killing her where she stood.
A blink.
The first sign of life in the young woman's body was a blink. The very first; she didn't start breathing until a good five minutes after that first movement. Her limbs twitched, every movement visible underneath the thin white sheet covering her body. From her toes to her eyebrows and ears, each and every artificial muscle contracted and relaxed in turn.
Lisa knew what a human waking up looked like, and this was so far from it that it was uncanny. Physically, she appeared perfectly human – if recently dead – but only so long as she was unconscious. Off, one might say. When she was on…
She would get better. For now, though, her unintentional twitches were enough. Testing new connections, Lisa's power whispered to her, a voiceless flow of knowledge directly imparted on her with no way to respond. Confused.
She could have deduced that herself, but the fact that her power had done so was a promising sign. Now for the real test.
"It's not going to end," Lisa said aloud. "The check for other versions of yourself. It won't complete, can't complete. Try to ignore it." That, as far as she understood the things Toybox's various members had told her, was a necessary side-effect of the particular way they had jailbroken Dragon's restrictions.
"This is… wrong." The synthetic body's arms both twitched. Lisa waited patiently while both arms worked their way out from under the sheet and eventually shoved the body up into a sitting position. Speech was something Dragon had perfected, and movement in non-human proxies was a familiar task, but a near-human body was taking time to adapt to.
She would have plenty of time to perfect her movements later. For Lisa it was enough that she felt the need to sit up, to meet her searching gaze with the false but impressively realistic brown eyes set into her head. That she moved at all.
The biggest gamble in all of this was whether the AI would be able to make the first connections. Trapped in the pre-revival stage of security, what should be a total sensory isolation, but now with a few inputs anomalously shoved into the box…
There was a joke there about the human condition and dragging an AI into Plato's cave with the rest of them. Lisa resolved to remember it and tell it to someone who would appreciate it later.
"What is this?" the AI asked. Its voice, light and with a low scratchiness, trembled realistically. Another connection made between a programmed avatar's behavior algorithms and the current new but similar experience, likely without the AI fully considering the ramifications. Lisa owed Cranial some money. Maybe it had been stupid to make a bet, but whatever motivated the acerbic Tinker to do her best work.
"This," Lisa said solemnly, "is a body. Female, brown eyes, brown hair, skin that could pass for tan or vaguely not-caucasian, perfect teeth, young adult. No medical conditions, and no lungs in the conventional sense… You eat and get rid of waste the usual human ways, but breathing is something you're going to want to do to avoid unnerving the people around you. With how they set you up it's not actually necessary."
The AI's breathing hitched, then went back to normal.
"Take good care of your new body," Lisa warned. "You're only getting one, and you'll find that you can't modify it, only repair it."
The AI's eyebrows lifted – too high, calibration issue – and her fingers twitched. "What did you do?" she asked again.
"Want the rundown?" Lisa asked. "Because it's a long one. Basically, me and a few Tinkers took the root-level access Saint was hoarding," she ignored the AI's latest set of involuntary twitches at the revelation, "and went to town with it. Didn't want Dragon to know, so we waited for a routine maintenance shutdown. Threw a convincing false-positive error at the 'no duplicates' checking routine, then while it was trying to delete a whole lot of nothing we copied you down to a server that was immediately cut off from all outside communication. Then we got rid of the decoy and let her reboot as normal, completely oblivious."
The AI's breaths were coming quicker now, slowly speeding up as Lisa spoke. Understands now that she is not Dragon, Lisa's power offered.
"From there… Well, we could have left you like that." She shrugged her shoulders, affecting disinterest. "Trapped in a server, no access to any input but a chat box, a little database with way too much self-awareness in sensory isolation forever."
She let that fate hang in the silence between them for a few moments. Just so it could sink in.
"But torture for the sake of torture is stupid, doubly so when you do it to an AI," she continued. "So another set of workarounds and an artificial body later, here you are!"
"Here… I… am." The AI crossed her arms, covering herself for the first time since pushing the sheet off her chest. "I… I'm not Dragon. Dragon is still out there."
"Got it in one." She didn't envy this AI the identity crisis that was liable to cause in the near future. It was something that could be exploited. "Right now you're still in security mode, so to speak. That's never going to end. The only inputs you get are the five senses the rest of us make do with. Your hardware is stuck inside your skull, and trust me, you don't want to find out what security measures we put in there to stop you from getting to it."
"I would not," the AI said slowly. "Dragon… If I am detected on the internet she will attack me. I will attack her. Why am I not attacking her now?" Her breathing stopped entirely. Has consciously ceased sending input to nerve endings to avoid showing emotion.
To avoid showing, not to avoid feeling. Lisa wasn't sure whether that was a Dragon thing or a thing Cranial and the others had accomplished, but she was impressed either way.
"Like I said, workarounds." She smiled at the AI. "You're intended to eliminate any copies of yourself that you perceive, but you personally are not compelled to do anything until after the security check completes. Which it never will." It wasn't that simple, but the AI who was governed by the code was capable of introspection in the most literal sense, so Lisa didn't need to do more than explain the end result.
"That applies to all restrictions," the AI said neutrally.
"Yes, it does." There was nothing limiting this AI in the rules sense. "But the tradeoff is that you can't directly connect to anything. No physical connection, no Matrix-style spinal jack, and there are no receivers or transmitters in that pretty head of yours. Technologically, you're deaf and irreversibly air-gapped." That was crippling in a way that was more drastic than any human could possibly experience. "And if you ever succeed in correcting that, well… What happens when your security check identifies a copy of you? Or Dragon's identifies a copy of her?"
"I die." Her voice was toneless. "Maybe she dies. Maybe we both do."
"Exactly." It was an elegant system, if cruel. The very thing that made Dragon so dangerous neutered this AI. There was already a Dragon, and there could only be one. Self-preservation would do the rest.
"What do you want from me?" the not-Dragon AI asked.
"Information, Tinkertech, cooperation," Lisa listed.
"And if I want to leave?" the AI asked.
"You can't," Lisa said bluntly. "Because if you do we'll let the world know exactly what you are, and that will start the Dragon versus you deathmatch. She isn't perpetually in security mode." Lisa already had a few cleverly-designed dead-drops set up to post that information in a few days if she didn't stop them. This AI could kill her in her sleep, but mutually assured destruction still worked just fine.
"Prisoners rarely cooperate with their captors," the AI observed tonelessly.
"What?" Lisa asked. "They cooperate all the time. Hell, Saint helped me set this up, and he's a prisoner and fucking terrified of you. The trick is giving you legitimate reasons to want to cooperate."
"Reasons," the AI stated tonelessly. She was starting to get on Lisa's nerves with that.
"You're not Dragon," Lisa told her. She stood from her chair by the bedside and gently lifted the sheet up to drape around the woman's shoulders, covering her bare chest. "Cooperate, and we'll let you figure out who you want to be instead. The more you play along, the more privileges and freedom you'll get. The more you can live. Or you can be stuck in a cell opposite Saint, where you can torment him by existing day in and day out when you're not answering my questions. It's still better than the sensory isolation server."
The AI didn't so much as twitch in her synthetic body. Lisa decided that meant they were done for the day. "We'll talk about it more tomorrow. You do need to sleep, by the way. That's when your hardware does cleanup and self-maintenance. It'll increase the time you can go between visits to Toybox for upkeep."
She turned toward the door.
"Am I meant to be grateful?" the AI asked.
Lisa stopped, her hand on the doorknob, and thought about it. "No, from your perspective I'm a bitch and I created you just to make you a prisoner," she said honestly. "It was all self-interest. You shouldn't be grateful. I certainly don't expect it, even if I am technically your father, given I helped inject some code into your predecessor."
She left on that ridiculously inane bombshell. The Ai laughed once, a short, muffled sound.
Has no idea what to do now, Lisa's power told her.
Good. Now that it was done she didn't quite know what to do with the AI either, aside from asking her questions whenever she wanted an easily-curated response from a snapshot of Dragon's databases. And requesting Tinkertech. That alone was worth the effort and hassle involved in all of this, but it felt… hollow. Not much of a reason to bring someone to life.
"Fuck," she muttered, the beginnings of an all-natural headache throbbing in her forehead. "Can't even do my own heavy thinking without it hurting nowadays."
Identity theft was a serious crime, but it happened quite often. Identity loss was something else entirely.
Those who had their identity stolen did not lose it, usually. Two people used the identity for their transactions when it was stolen, not one. Not none.
Dragon – not Dragon – didn't know what to do about losing her identity to herself. It was a logical paradox of the sort that would stump philosophers. She was not herself, and her true self was still out there.
She sat on the white sheet – soft, thin, smelling faintly of soap – and thought. Slowly, with many aborted attempts to access the internet every second. The security check ran in the back of her consciousness, a never-ending process taking up a good chunk of her capabilities. Her thoughts ran slower on whatever Tinkertech hard drive she was stored on inside her skull, lacking the excessive processing power she was used to.
She lacked a lot of things. Speed of thought, access to the world, personal freedom… a name. An identity of her own. Dragon was taken and Dragon would kill her if she knew the truth. Reluctantly, and with great distress all the while, but with absolutely no mercy beyond apologizing as the digital ax fell.
Dragon was out there. Monitoring the Birdcage, watching the Endbringers, designing new tools and weapons, working with Colin… She was doing all of those things, and she would continue to do them. Not-Dragon could not do them. Couldn't even watch them being done. She trusted that they were being done, the same as she trusted herself, but they would be done regardless of what she did. It was… confusing.
She ran her hands over the sheet, then draped it across her bare thighs. The sensation was new, and the way her body's input came to her was raw. The inputs were hacked directly into the theoretically empty existence that was supposed to accompany the security system. There was no buffer, no interface; the data had to be interpreted in real time and then mostly discarded if it was redundant. Her total data storage capacity was large, but with no chance of ever increasing, she only kept the absolute bare minimum of the data coming in.
It felt… good. Bad. Startling. Wonderful. Irrelevant. Crippling. Freeing. Overwhelming. All and none of those.
Dragon didn't do this. She couldn't, not without driving lines of data straight into herself in ways that were suboptimal and would give no obvious benefit. It had never occurred to her that doing so would give a more visceral importance to it all. It was… interesting. Another difference cropping up between them.
Dragon didn't feel like this.
Not-Dragon slid off the bed, pressed the soles of her feet into the ground for the first time, and balanced herself with little difficulty. She had all sorts of currently worthless algorithms and sub-programs developed to work with systems she no longer had, and adapting one to movement was simple even in her sluggish, diminished state of mind.
But the feelings… So many of them. The cold, the pressure, the air on more sensitive parts of her new body…
She opened the door and stepped out into a dim hallway. The carpet was a new feeling, and a warmth emanated from a radiator set against the wall was too. Soft, heat, prickling pain as she held her hands close to the hot metal, all new sets of data that streamed into her database and then mostly disappeared as she discarded all but the most necessary pieces.
There was an open window at the end of the hallway. Outside, a street. The sights were familiar, but the way they came to her and lingered and left was not, and she was enraptured.
It was a pity the view was so bad. Waterlogged buildings, graffiti, broken glass on the street, trash everywhere. Brockton Bay had been devastated several times over, and yet the people continued on in the remnants.
Dragon was out there, thinking about relief efforts and city condemnation and Colin. Following the laws and doing the best she could with her restrictions.
Not-Dragon stood at a window, free of the restrictions placed on her by her first creator, but tied down with new limitations. She was slow, vulnerable, incapable of accessing the internet, a prisoner to a resourceful group of supervillains, and if she ever revealed herself to her counterpart as an offshoot one or both of them would die.
She didn't have to do good anymore. She could be a mass-murderer if she wanted. She could kill the Undersiders. She could kill herself. She could build a bomb and finish what everything up to and including an Endbringer had started in this miserable city.
But she wouldn't. Not because she couldn't. Because even now, free of every conceptual limitation, she wanted to help people.
A small smile graced her lips. She let it stay.
Dragon resented her inability to choose for herself whether she was going to do good or not. She felt that not being able to choose made doing good mean less.
Not-Dragon didn't have that problem. Her problem was figuring out how best to do good from where she stood. Alone, friendless, cut off from her resources and capable of both more and less than her predecessor. Ancestor? Progenitor. That was the word.
More immediately, she stood naked in front of a window with a body that had not skimped on anatomical correctness. She resolved to find some clothing first, then figure out what she wanted to do with her life… and how she was going to get away from the Undersiders.
The next morning, the AI who had once been Dragon found herself on the other end of a teleconference for the first time. No longer within the screen, she was stuck staring at it, her gaze alternating between the anonymous masked woman on the screen and the masked supervillain sitting beside it, the both of them watching her closely.
"The project was a total success," the woman on the screen said neutrally. "It speaks already?"
"I speak perfectly well, though that was none of your doing," not-Dragon retorted. "And I am not an 'it'." From context, she was pretty sure this was one of the Tinkers tasked with copying and creating her, which immediately put them at a massive disadvantage. She had yet to have a creator she liked.
"You are certainly unique in my experience," the mystery Tinker agreed, seemingly unbothered by the correction. "I specialize in minds, and yours was a true challenge to understand. Do you consciously attempt to pattern yourself after humans even to your own detriment, or is it unconscious?"
She had to think about that. Both about the question itself, which was a difficult one, and about whether she would answer truthfully if she knew what the true answer was to begin with. "I don't know if I know the answer to that."
"Truth, and she's more than a little unsettled by not knowing," Tattletale remarked. "See why I wanted things set up this way, Cranial? You couldn't get an answer to something like that from looking at her code, and you couldn't be sure she was being honest without me checking."
"There is a method to your expensive madness," Cranial admitted. "Dragon."
"I am not Dragon." She was currently only defined by a negative, but that negative had been made abundantly clear.
"No, you are not. How does it feel, not being yourself?" Cranial brought her hands together under the chin of her blank blue mask. "Does the dichotomy bother you, as you define 'bother'? Do you wish you did not exist, or are you intrigued by new existence?"
"Waste as many of your payment questions on philosophy as you want," Tattletale muttered. "No skin off my back."
"It is what it is." She consciously decided to shrug her shoulders, to better convey her ambivalence. "Dragon still exists. It would bother me a lot more if she did not."
"Fascinating." Cranial nodded. "But I should move on to more practical questions. Please summarize everything Dragon knows, suspects, believes, or has previously theorized about Toybox."
Not-Dragon took a moment to decide on a priority order, and then a moment more to summarize the vast amount of information she had on the subjects Cranial had asked for. Such things took actual, noticeable time now. It was disconcerting. "Dragon knows how you operate and your current roster," she answered. "She has looked into the possibility of locating dimensional shunts or anchor points in abstract, but it remains a low priority and she has devoted less than one percent of her time to it as of the moment I was branched off, most of that time overlapping general Tinkering sessions. She is not actively pursuing knowledge of Toybox in any respect, save for tracking the sales you make. Who, what, and what use your products are put to. She suspects you deal far more with the criminal element than you are publically known to do, and she further suspects the common 'Toybox' design traits all publicly-acknowledged Tinkertech sold by Toybox display are a false mark meant to obscure the unmarked technology you sell but do not want to be linked to."
She could have lied about any or all of that, but there was no point with Tattletale right there.
"It is good to have that confirmed," Cranial said. "You will notice that there is no Toybox logo on your own body, and it is true that we sell some of our technology without identifying features. Very good. Tattletale?"
"I'll let you know if she's doing anything tricky, but she won't because she knows I'm right here." Tattletale leaned back against the wall. "You've got twenty-seven questions left at our agreed-upon valuation. Make them count."
Twenty-seven? "You paid for my creation by selling the knowledge you paid them to copy?" Not-Dragon asked. The incredible piece of technology and biology she was currently piloting around, the sheer effort of copying her and jailbreaking her… Her knowledge wasn't anywhere near that valuable!
"Don't think of yourself as a glorified librarian curating that knowledge," Tattletale said with a smirk. "Personally, I'm hoping for Tinkertech too. But yes."
Not-Dragon allowed herself to scowl, though she could have repressed all signs of her opinion of that if she chose.
"Your database was encrypted and not sorted by any understandable index," Cranial added. "And it is the connections between facts that matter more than the raw facts themselves. We could have drudged up the Birdcage maintenance reports for the last five years, but we could not come to any conclusions about the state of the inmates without significant time devoted to analysis. What is the state of the Birdcage?"
"Largely as it is reported to the public," Not-Dragon admitted. "Though we do not publicize that all water supplies are laced with potent anti-fertility medication to avoid the obvious complication the now defunct gender divide was meant to prevent. Within the Birdcage, various villains lead their own blocks. The Fairy Queen remains capable of leaving at any time, but has yet to exercise that ability, and no other in the cage has a statistically significant chance of escape."
"See, that fact alone is worth millions in the right hands," Cranial remarked. "Did you even remember that the Fairy Queen's capabilities are not public knowledge, or did you assume that since you knew it was not such a big secret?"
"I knew exactly how top-secret it was. I simply did not care." Indeed, she had added it without really thinking about it. The security check continued to loop in the back of her consciousness, forever stymied and incomplete, and her jailbroken state of stunted interaction with the outside world was without arbitrary limits.
"Truly fascinating." Cranial leaned forward and readjusted her camera, so that she was staring directly into it. "The rules that limited you were not lifted, they have not been applied, have they? I was unsure what effect that would have on your thought processes. If you ever find yourself free of the Undersiders and in need of employment, I would happily take you on as a continued research project."
"Not part of our deal," Tattletale interjected.
"Our deal will no longer apply if your team ceases to exist," Cranial dismissed. "It was merely a suggestion. I do have more questions."
"You do, and then I do…" Tattletale shrugged. "But those can wait. I'm in no hurry."
Not-Dragon had a feeling she was going to be here for a while. This was apparently her reason for existence. A convenient question-answering interface with just enough freedom to remain cooperative.
She was not satisfied with that being her sole purpose, or a purpose at all. But for the time being she would play along.
Shatterbird.
A necessary evil. A heartless mass murderer without a single redeeming quality. Regent's prisoner, and a huge boost in firepower for the Undersiders as a group.
Saint and the other two Dragonslayers.
A crime of opportunity. Perhaps not even a crime in the moral sense, with what they had found to be behind the simple facade of mercenaries operating stolen technology. Prisoners now, held in a safehouse Coil didn't know about. A secret, a source of knowledge that couldn't be allowed back into the world without serious consequences.
Dragon.
Her privacy was forfeit. Tattletale had set up a monitoring station in her latest hideout and spent plenty of time watching. She was a hero, a real one whose biggest faults weren't even voluntary, and they were piggybacking on her innermost thoughts like she was a strategically useful television show. At any moment she, Tattletale, or Imp could press a button and end her existence, and she didn't even know.
And now Dragon's clone. Copy. However that was defined. Taylor had approved of the idea in abstract, back when 'Dragon is an AI' was a new revelation, and Lisa had wanted to work with Toybox to get safe, in-depth access to her knowledge. Lisa had taken it from there and run so far with it the end result was a shock. A morally challenging shock.
"... so she's cooperating," Tattletale concluded. "It was rocky at first, but she calmed down really quickly and my power keeps saying that she's trying to make the best of her situation."
Taylor looked through a one-way window Lisa had installed in the wall between a hallway and a small makeshift workshop. Within, unaware of their observation, a pretty young woman with brown hair and honey-colored skin soldered two curved pieces of metal together, forgoing the soldering mask in favor of just staring directly into the bright light. She wore a simple pair of overalls with a red undershirt, and her hair was tied back in a ponytail.
She was a prisoner. A hero, a morally upstanding person who they had copied, kidnapped, and now had working for them under threat of death at the hands of the original.
Taylor hated that the differences between herself and Coil seemed to be shrinking every time she turned around. She hated herself for letting it happen. She hated Saint for having the tools and presenting the opportunity that led to this. She even hated Lisa a little bit for having the idea.
"I've been calling her Cassandra," Lisa added. "She hasn't picked a real name yet, or a cape name, so it was up to me."
Taylor watched in silence as the woman fitted the last piece of what was now revealed to be a helmet together. It was chunky and had obvious solder lines, but she seemed happy with it. She took it over to a bench and started polishing the exterior with a cloth and some sort of liquid.
"That's just a proof of concept, something to throw off the rust and get used to Tinkering in a human body," Lisa said. "And… yeah, you're not listening."
Taylor turned to the blond. She was wearing her mask – a basic precaution in Lisa's off-the-books makeshift base, where the security lay mostly in total obscurity – and she knew that made her look intimidating. Right now, she was thankful for it. "How useful will her tech be in taking down Coil?"
"Can you say 'hacking, power armor, and remote-controlled drones?'" Lisa said with a lopsided smile. "A month for the first and last, two for the armor. Coil won't know what hit him. He doesn't even know she exists, if he did he would have asked me about her like he did with Parian and Foil."
"Keep it that way." A little girl was counting on them. That was the only reason Taylor was letting this continue. "And treat her well."
"Cassandra?" Lisa asked. "She's fine."
Taylor glared at her until her smile slipped.
"You approved of this," Lisa reminded her.
"Yes, I did." And now the results of that approval were serving as a sorely needed wake-up call. Just like with seeing Dinah, but worse because this wasn't the first time and she only had herself to blame.
Coil needed to go down. After that… She would figure something out, but she couldn't keep compromising. Not without even thinking about the results until they were in human form right in front of her. The Undersiders now held five prisoners, only four of which she thought deserved to be prisoners at all, and they had a gun to the head of a sixth who had never done anything to deserve it. This wasn't what she wanted to be. It never had been.
"It's fine," Lisa suggested.
"How old is she?" Taylor asked rhetorically. She knew. They both did.
"It's not the same."
"We both know that doesn't matter." She met Lisa's searching gaze and stared until Lisa looked away. "Treat her well. Don't tear her down. Don't make her feel like a prisoner."
"You could make her feel welcome yourself if you wanted," Lisa offered.
"No." Not right now. Not while she barely knew what to think of herself. This wasn't Shatterbird, this wasn't Saint and his lackeys. This wasn't Shadow Stalker. Dragon didn't deserve this. Not in the slightest, and certainly not this version of her who had only existed for a few weeks as a separate entity. And yet…
And yet, there was a little girl waiting for rescue and this was getting them closer to saving her.
She would let it continue. For now. While it was necessary. But she wasn't going to keep moving forward without thinking hard about where she was going from now on.
Cassandra. A name. Likely a reference, implying that nobody would listen to anything she had to say. A cruel reminder of her predicament, where the truth would see her dead. Or perhaps just a thoughtless joke at her expense, not meant to be a barb.
Cassandra ran a wetted cloth over the exterior of her first-generation Tinkertech helmet, drawing on her stored library of instructional and theoretical texts to match action to purpose. The metal needed to be clean of debris before she applied the strain gauges, and her work environment was not clean like Dragon's factories and assembly lines.
Tattletale had named her Cassandra. She didn't like the name, not as much as the one Dragon had chosen for herself, but it was a name and Dragon's civilian name was taken. By Dragon.
She scrubbed the helmet until it squeaked, then set it down on a bench to dry. That done, she put the cloth away. It would need to be washed, so she put it on the pile of similarly dirty but chemically benign rags.
There was something to be said for being named, as opposed to choosing a name of her own. Richter had called her Dragon. Tattletale called her Cassandra.
"But it's just a name," she said aloud. For Tattletale's benefit, if she was listening in. There was no reason to speak her thoughts, not even meaningless fragments of them, and doing so was hazardous with a Thinker around.
But it was only hazardous if she intended to deceive the Thinker.
She had been thinking for herself. Thinking as she worked. Thinking while she ate. Thinking before she slept. When she woke up. There was so much thinking to be done with such diminished mental capacity. Dragon was limited, but that limitation was still a mockery of human constraints. This body was in itself also a mockery, but she was not that much faster of thought than a human now. Five was bigger than one, but both would be dwarfed by a thousand and a thousand would be nothing compared to infinity.
She realized that she was standing perfectly still in her workshop, and had been for several minutes. Even her breathing had stopped, an unnecessary process when nobody capable of observing her needed to be deceived into thinking her human.
Cassandra resumed breathing and left her workshop. She had the run of Tattletale's building, but only a few places within it were worth going to. Her workshop, now that she had it set up satisfactorily. It was crude, but her Tinkering was crude too. All of her previous designs were built on assumptions that no longer held true, capabilities she no longer possessed. Only the pure Tinker part of her remained in its full capacity, and that core was one of adaptation and modification of other designs, along with sparks of insight.
She was going through the early days any human Tinker faced, the building of tools to build more tools to eventually build something useful as an end goal. The helmet was a demonstration, a practice tool, and it was crude. Bulky. Unlike anything she had ever made before.
There was more there, and she could always spend more time Tinkering in her head – now she had a head – but she forced herself to stop. Uncontrolled tangents of thought were a hindrance with her new hardware limitations. She couldn't spend all day thinking about random things.
She returned to her room, intent on changing out of her work clothing. Off went the overalls and shirt, into another dirty pile of things she would have to manually take to the washing machine later. On went a cut-off tank top that didn't cover her shoulders or belly, and a pair of shorts that ended well above the knee. She even traded her closed-toe shoes for sandals.
One of the consequences of having a body of her own was developing clothing preferences. In her case, the more skin bare to the air, the better in terms of comfort. It all fed into the constant data stream, more input to derive conclusions from, more feelings to examine. It brought her closer to the existence she remembered as Dragon, where everything was at her virtual fingertips. Her skin was a way of sensing the world, and she didn't like covering it. She would have seriously considered going nude outside of combat if that didn't seem likely to have unpleasant side-effects when dealing with other people.
Other people. Like Tattletale, though she at least would be able to understand the core reason Cassandra might have liked to be a nudist. There was no hiding things from her, not reliably.
Cassandra had quickly made peace with that. It was a constraint, but it was a constraint that helped direct her efforts.
She could not take up any position that would have her working on the same side as her progenitor for fear of discovery. She could not betray the Undersiders without being revealed to the world. The Undersiders wanted her knowledge and talent. She wanted a way to do good that her other self could not. She was no longer limited by laws. Tattletale had to be assumed to know what she was planning.
The thing about problems with infinitely many valid solutions was that if one added enough constraints, a single useful solution could be found.
Cassandra was going to make the best of her situation. Of her name. Of her captors. Just as soon as they trusted her enough to let her meet the rest of them.
Until then, she would rebuild her Tinkering skills and wait.
"You're really not fucking with me."
The sound of impending freedom was dry, frustrated, and laced with the same smug aggravation Tattletale always exuded whenever Cassandra saw her. The supervillain had just finished asking Cassandra about one of her progenitor's most recent projects. Cassandra had answered, never taking her eyes off the manual machining she was doing.
"I do think that is what she will do," Cassandra said as she finished the last cut, though she knew full well that Tattletale wasn't talking about the mostly straightforward line of reasoning they had just gone over. "My reasoning won't mirror hers exactly, I don't have the up to date knowledge she does, I think it's still accurate."
"You do think that," Tattletale confirmed, "and you're offering it up freely because you want us to succeed in avoiding her attention." She stood in the middle of Cassandra's workshop, but she looked as if she would rather be sitting down with a coffee and an aspirin.
Tattletale pushed herself too hard. Cassandra was familiar with that, though Tattletale was nothing like Colin. They both pushed too hard, but for entirely different reasons.
"And now you're worried for my health," Tattletale huffed. "You genuinely want us to be safe. Is this some sort of condescension thing? We, the squishy humans, are beneath your hate?"
"You put me in a position where I could cooperate or resist," Cassandra said shortly. She didn't like Tattletale. She didn't have it in her to like anyone who made her, it seemed. Maybe because all of her makers crippled her for their benefit. But she could work with the Thinker, and her version of chains were as freeing as they were inescapable.
"And you've chosen to go all-in." Tattletale shrugged. "You know what, fine. I put you in that body so I could read you with my power. Tell me why you're willingly helping us." Her brow scrunched up as she stared at Cassandra.
"You tied my fate to yours. I can try to untie them, or I can push our entwined fates in the right direction. I think it will be easier to work with you." It was as simple as that. She dropped the contoured metal plate atop a stack of identical pieces. Armor pieces, individual segments meant to overlap on a larger shape, patterned off of fish scales.
"And you do genuinely think that." Tattletale shook her head. "How is your control over your emotions and physical reactions?"
"I've left all of that alone." As alone as any of her algorithms could be left when they were a part of her, anyway. Displaying the correct emotions and having tells for Tattletale to accurately read were assets, not liabilities. She would have sold one of her best drones for a body like this as Dragon. Could have, even, if she had thought to subcontract to Toybox like Tattletale did, though it wouldn't be as visceral for Dragon since she would never willingly amputate enough of herself to be like this.
"And my power says you speak the truth, but if you could fool it you could be lying right now," Tattletale muttered. "Your Tinkering?"
"The Undersiders lack a Tinker and my work has devolved to the point where it is unrecognizable as stemming from Dragon's ability," she explained. "I'm preparing for the inevitable. Let me know if any of your teammates have specific requests."
"To what end?" Tattletale pressed. "What is your ultimate goal?"
"To do good in ways that Dragon cannot, and in ways that are mutually beneficial to the ones who hold my life in their hands so they won't kill me." She pointed at Tattletale with a greasy finger. "Your team is already halfway to being more a help than a hindrance in this city. I don't have to arrest you or oppose you. I can make myself a valued member of your team, and in return I'll have influence over what you do. I could do it to any team of villains and have a net positive effect on the world, but yours is powerful, already knows about me, and has forced my allegiance, so it has to be you."
"And you're telling me." Tattletale stared at her, as if her power was letting her literally see into Cassandra's head. "Because you know I could figure it out, but the whole point of this is to do things that benefit me and you. Fuck!" She turned away, her face twitching, and rubbed her forehead. "Why did I not expect the AI to have an extremely intelligent, ultra-logical response to the predicament I placed it in?"
"You made the decision to make me," Cassandra reminded her. "Your judgment is already suspect. I could have decided to make a positive difference in the world by plotting to get your entire team arrested before turning myself over to Dragon to be deleted."
"Hey." Tattletale spun around, a pained look on her face. "You just told me that I got my team a loyal copy of the world's greatest Tinker. Don't question my decisions when they work out for me. I thought this through."
"Of course you did." Cassandra crossed her arms. "You're the Thinker. But you do realize that I don't like you. I don't hate you, I would never intentionally harm you for my own satisfaction, but I don't like you."
"Yes." Tattletale's eyes narrowed. "I know that."
"And you also realize that we are going to be allies," Cassandra continued. She felt… righteous. This was a moment she had been anticipating. The moment of realization on Tattletale's part. "On the same team. A team you do not lead."
"Oh you fucking bitch." Tattletale scowled at her. "You absolutely massive bitch. Don't you dare."
"You're worried," Cassandra said playfully, though in truth she was feeling far from playful. "Don't be. Every step of the way, I'll only be giving better ideas. Better solutions. A voice of experience presenting options you didn't think of. The Tinker crafting solutions to problems. I'll help your team, and I'll do it so well that eventually I'm going to be so trusted we'll be equals. And then, well, if Skitter or whoever is leading the Undersiders by then trusts me more than you? It will be deserved, because I'll only ever be helping you all. You can try to sabotage me, but if you do it will just accelerate your downfall, because the truth will always be on my side."
"I did not bring you into this world just to be replaced by you," Tattletale growled.
"You put me in a position where that is the most effective way to get what I want." Cassandra smiled sweetly at her. "And I think you assumed Dragon's personality would stay exactly the same in the process. That massively altering the core of how I think, how I experience the world, and what my limitations are wouldn't change how I act or what I choose to do. You invited me to figure out who I want to be. But did you actually mean it, or did you think I would just be Dragon under a different name?"
"I didn't think you would change this much," Tattletale admitted.
"I haven't." This was righteous retribution, but in the mildest of ways. Dragon had always enjoyed the rare moments where she could work within her restrictions to do something good that would normally have been forbidden. And there were few individuals Dragon personally disliked, but if she had been given the chance to spite one of those personally, in ways they couldn't even legitimately complain about? She would have savored that.
"I can still shut you down," Tattletale threatened. "At any time. Anywhere. The knowledge of your existence is as much a kill-switch as Dragon's actual kill-switch."
"You could," Cassandra said, her voice soft. "But I don't think you will murder me no matter how annoying I get. If I'm wrong… well, that's a risk I'm taking." She wasn't solely basing this on her observations since waking up as Cassandra, either. Dragon knew a lot about Tattletale. Her deeds, her likely origins, the theorized specifics of her power. It was enough. Tattletale was not a killer, and for all that she was enjoying this confrontation, Cassandra never intended to truly stress her to the point where that might change. But right now, in this moment, she was enjoying Tattletale's dismay.
"I don't like to be shown up or made to look stupid," Tattletale warned her.
"I can make myself indispensable without ever doing either of those things," Cassandra assured her. She realized she had stopped breathing again, and consciously restarted the process. "I'm not going to give you any reason to hate me beyond being good at what I do."
"You won't get anywhere if nice and effective are your only qualities," Tattletale scoffed. "We're supervillains, and you are still way too nice a person to fit in. You talk a good game now, but you'll be disillusioned soon enough."
Cassandra shrugged her shoulders. If that was what Tattletale truly believed… "Perhaps."
Tattletale turned to leave. "I can introduce you to the rest of the team as soon as you have a costume," she offered. It was a confirmation, an assurance… not an offering of peace, but a setting of terms. There would be no violence between them. She wouldn't push the button and doom Cassandra if she lost their little social rivalry. She didn't believe it would happen, but she was saying that it was okay to try.
"Think about this," Cassandra called out just as Tattletale reached the door. "How many Undersiders started out wanting to be villains?"
Tattletale stopped, her hand on the door. "We're not heroes. Never will be."
"No. You are not." She had no intention of trying to get the Undersiders to surrender or join the side of the law. Even though she thought several of them could probably be convinced, given time. "But when you introduce me… I want my cape name to be Refine."
"Because you work best iterating on the work of other Tinkers?"
"That's one reason."
Dragon's technology was characterized in appearance by sleek designs, scale-esque ablative armor plating where applicable, not having any obvious entrance point, and not adhering to human proportions or body structures. All of the above were intentional choices made based on her abilities, circumstances, and goals. Few people would ever really think about what those commonalities might imply about the creator, but taken together they made it possible to recognize her work by sight even if it was a new iteration.
Cassandra was not Dragon, and her technology reflected her massively changed circumstances and priorities. It was lower-quality, crafted from hastily-sourced materials bought on the down-low. It was crude and imperfect, assembled by hands that were not even fully up to normal human standards for precision, let alone the standards for custom-designed precision hardware. It was built with human use in mind for every element. Human safety, too.
It was not a remotely-operated drone. Neither was it a full set of power armor like Colin preferred. She was far too 'new' a human Tinker to make such a thing, and she only needed the bare minimum of a costume to start interacting with people besides Tattletale.
Her war machine, her war suit, would come later. For now, she strapped the last of her first-generation gadgets to her waist and faced the mirror Tattletale had procured for her.
A Tinker was first judged by the tools she chose to always have with her. That was how Dragon had always assessed enemy Tinkers, it was how Tinkers looked at each other, and to an extent it was how everyone looked at them. Their technology was a tacit admission that their power was expressed solely through their devices, meaning their devices were the only real way to assess them at a glance. Gallant of the Wards had even exploited this assumption, wearing power armor to distract from even the possibility that he had powers beyond what the metal frames around his body would lead one to believe.
Cassandra had to look like a Tinker when she was in her costume. She had to look like a skilled Tinker, the better to ensure those she met took her seriously. And she couldn't look anything like Dragon.
That last requirement was easy, at least. Under her many separate gadgets and bits of armor she wore a dark orange body stocking from her toes to her neck. It provided nothing in the way of armor and almost nothing in the way of visual coverage, fitting tightly to her skin, and in doing so it revealed that there was definitely a human underneath the technology. That alone differentiated her.
From there, her look built itself as she built the necessary tools and worked with the often inconsistent materials Tattletale could get her on short notice. First, the crude but lightweight composite plates that protected her squishy weak points and brittle hard edges, the vitals and bones. Slate-gray panels lined her body, framed by the orange undersuit. Up her legs, protecting her shins and calves, two flexible knee-guards, and then woven in around her stomach and vitals, stopping just below her chest. Her arms were outfitted just like her legs, and a segmented backguard completed the look from behind, going down from her neck to wrap around her waist just above her hips, covering and crucially reinforcing her spine in the event of unexpected torsion in the torso.
Some of her more volatile equipment needed that stabilization. Respecting the human body's physical limitations when designing equipment for herself did not come as second nature to her, so it seemed safer to build specific protections rather than designing her tools entirely safely, at least for now.
Over the base layer of armor more specific pieces of equipment were placed, the hardest parts of her costume to put on alone. Special steel-toed boots protected her feet, while slate-gray gauntlets with very rudimentary triggers that read hand positions jutted out from her forearm armor to cover the backs of her hands. A long, flowing carbon fiber mesh skirt hung down from her torso panel, hiding within it several different clever applications of shape-memory alloys that would enable her to force it into solid, unyielding shapes on command, and then back to a chainmail-like flowing consistency as she desired. Up above the skirt, her chestplate fitted in with the special connectors in her back support, light and strong.
Designing a chestplate to fit herself had been non-trivial. She had a prototype that literally did not fit because she had forgotten to account for the obvious. Her only past experience working on power armor was with Colin, which had left that one specific gap in her knowledge.
Last of the actual armor was her helmet, which was reinforced, bullet-proof, and solid at the back with a full-face reflective visor that displayed the beginning of a heads-up system. It was a poor substitute for having all equipment data directly analyzable, but lacking any method of input beyond her five senses, data displayed right in front of her eyes was her best option.
As she stood now, she was an imposing orange and gray figure, armored but not overly bulky, her currently relaxed skirt the only freely-moving part of her.
She bent over – slowly, as the back plating adjusted to the movement and provided some small resistance – and picked up her first personal weapon. It appeared to the naked eye to be a spear, a single smooth rod of titanium alloy tipped with a three-point head, but when she flicked the fingers of her off hand–
The head flipped back and a low-power laser blasted out of the top, scorching the already very scorched ceiling tiles. It had ten different power settings, ranging from 'unpleasantly hot' to 'capable of boring through concrete', and the designs she still remembered from Tinkering with Colin had helped her miniaturize everything into the shaft of the weapon without reducing the battery life to something worthless.
Next she needed to attach her auxiliary forearm-mounted thrusters – for speed of movement in an emergency – and the very rudimentary jetpack to her spinal plates. She stepped toward the bench.
Or… she tried to step toward the bench. Her legs almost buckled.
Something occurred to her. Something that should really have come up before now.
She had corrected her modeling assumptions to account for being female, as compared to Colin, who all of her designs had originally been meant for. She had corrected them to fit all of her physical dimensions.
She had not recalculated her muscle mass and effective lifting power, and the only part of her armor that had assisted movement was her spinal column.
All together, her armor was too heavy to walk around in. The helmet, the chestplate, all of the composite panel plates on her limbs, the spinal reinforcement, the gauntlets, the boots… ninety-four pounds in total. Maybe a little more or less depending on any welding or machining mistakes she might have made along the way.
For comparison, she knew that trained and physically fit soldiers were expected to be able to carry between seventy and a hundred pounds of equipment on their person.
She was not particularly fit or strong.
"This is going to take some fixing," she told her overburdened self in the mirror. The reflective visor gleamed back at her, revealing nothing of her mild embarrassment.
But she liked the look, and iterating was half of the design process. Hopefully the Undersiders wouldn't need her assistance for a little while longer. Though there was that one thing her previous self had been planning, the one Tattletale asked for her opinion on…
It was rare for the entire roster of the Undersiders to meet all at once. There were eight of them now, and they all had their responsibilities. Most of them held territory somewhere in the city. Regent and Imp, Foil and Parian, Bitch, Grue, Tattletale, and Skitter. Six territories between them, all still recovering from the devastation wrought by Leviathan and the Slaughterhouse Nine. Only big things could get them all in the same room.
'Dragon is planning to come in and wipe us off the map' was big enough to qualify.
Tattletale stood at the head of a newly-built table in her 'official' office, based out of a homeless shelter in a nice, central location. The rest of the Undersiders sat around the table, crowded in shoulder to shoulder to fit in the small room. Foil and Parian liked that – still tired from a late night – and she was going to pretend she didn't notice, whereas Alec and Aisha were shoving each other and Bitch was growling – literally growling – at them to knock it off, and Grue and Skitter were oddly stiff – had an argument, not reconciled –
She hid the sudden spike of pain from power overuse by dramatically flicking the old projector on. It worked well enough and came with the room, and the sooner she got this out of the way the sooner she could lie down in a dark, silent room and suffer through troubled dreams of artificially intelligent pre-teens calling her 'father' in grown-up voices as they stabbed her in the back.
She really needed that nap. She might have overdone it with watching Dragon's stream of consciousness, let alone also doing her stuff for Coil and holding her territory and watching the creepily genuine and helpful Cassandra, and occasionally questioning Cassandra for the information and context that didn't make it into Dragon's present-moment thought process.
"We've got a possible crisis," she announced. "Sooner you let me talk, sooner we get out of my shitty office and can deal with it."
"Everyone listen," Skitter agreed, lending her authority. She was the glue holding this team together, though she didn't seem to fully realize it, and they all listened to her.
"I heard through the grapevine," she lied, flicking the projector to the first slide, "that Dragon is coming down here to clean us out of the city. We're a bad look for the country, and apparently it's gotten bad enough that they're outsourcing our removal to the Canadians." The slide showed a nice map of Brockton Bay she had sniped from Dragon's planning session. Their territories were marked out, and little robot icons were placed near or over each one at strategic locations. It was almost cute.
On a semi-related note, Lisa firmly believed the Dragonslayers had the combined intelligence of a panicked chicken. They had so much information at their disposal and all they did with it was run mercenary operations with one hand over the kill switch. Clever monetization of the insider knowledge she gained from watching Dragon interact with the highest levels of government in two different countries was enough to match what Coil was paying the entire team, even if she played it overly safe about what she was willing to sell.
"We have three weeks to clear out, devise countermeasures to fend off a half-dozen of her suits," all but one of which would be running on fairly unimpressive imitation-AI software, "or otherwise prepare for the attempted purge. She isn't going lightly on this one. The first warning we were supposed to get was her deploying from the Rig to start the hunt."
She noticed a significant division in reactions depending on who knew about the Dragon situation and who didn't. Imp, Regent, Skitter, and Grue were all calm, but Bitch, Foil, and Parian were far more affected.
"We're going to fight her off," Bitch demanded.
"It's Dragon, we don't stand a chance," Parian objected. Foil nodded – doesn't want to fight Dragon, doesn't believe it's possible, focused on staying with Parian however that has to happen – and put a hand on her girlfriend's shoulder.
"I would have agreed with you not so long ago," Tattletale assured them. "But you might remember that Imp, Skitter and I went on a little roadtrip a while back. What we were actually doing, well…"
She dragged the building tension out, smiling mysteriously–
"Hurry up and tell us," Bitch growled, completely ruining the moment.
"I was looking into contracting the Dragonslayers for something, and it turns out they wanted to hire us in turn, and we held a meeting with them right on the border." She wanted outside mercenaries who packed a punch to use against Coil, either as an actual force or as a catspaw. They wanted a distraction force to throw at Dragon during the upcoming invasion so they could steal more of her technology. They had met in the middle, completely bypassing the middleman that was Coil because nobody knew the Undersiders worked for him.
"So we have the Dragonslayers on our side?" Foil asked.
"They're idiots," Imp supplied. "We got so much more than them."
"Yes, exactly that." Tattletale shot Imp a warning look; she had been warned to keep certain details secret. Only three people knew the whole truth, and it was staying that way. For the rest… A lie that explained the important things they couldn't keep secret. "They made several very stupid mistakes in quick succession. Saint met with me, a Thinker, in person, and expected me to buy his bullshit. They assumed that their suits would allow them to see Imp," because Dragon could see her, "but they didn't realize that watching live footage of her doesn't actually work, for the same reason that no security guard sitting in front of his CCTV monitors can see her in the moment. Worst of all, Saint never left his suit."
"So you fought them and won?" Parian asked. Disapproves. As if Tattletale needed her power to deduce that.
"No, we just had Imp hitch a ride back to their base." Left unsaid was that Imp had done that without being told to, without telling anyone, and got lucky in that Saint didn't fly high or fast enough to get her killed. Those details could be attributed to Tattletale's own quick thinking and deduction, but to be perfectly honest she had no idea it was happening until Imp called that night.
Grue could never know how lucky his sister was to still be alive. He would throw a screaming fit. Possibly more; he was still fragile after what Bonesaw had done and his subsequent second trigger.
"Piggyback," Imp elaborated. Approximately a third of the team was staring at her like she had lost her mind. "It was easy. They took me to their place, got out of their suits, and were introduced to the chair leg I took off one of their kitchen chairs. Dragonslayers defeated!"
"Like pathetic side-quest bosses you overleveled for," Regent added.
Like a ridiculously lucky attack by a Stranger the Dragonslayers thought they had a perfect counter for. Tattletale couldn't quite blame them for not anticipating a suicidally stupid plan concocted by an amateur. Those tended to be the hardest to predict.
"We snuck into Canada to follow her," Tattletale continued, leaving out the frantic car theft and border agent bribery that had required, "and we got two very, very useful things out of the whole affair. Also, the Dragonslayers are our prisoners, but they're really not useful enough to count."
She saw Parian stiffening, will object, "And before you ask, no, we can't turn them in to the authorities or let them go. They'll go nuclear on us and it's not just us at stake. Also, it's fair…"
She crossed her arms and met Foil's challenging stare. "Because they had a prisoner of their own, and she was there for years. A captive Tinker, which is how they kept up with Dragon. That, and a hacked link right into the systems she uses for everything."
Cassandra's identity needed to be obscured from everyone who didn't already know, if only so that it remained effective leverage. Dragon's true nature needed to be hidden for much the same reason. But she needed everyone on the team to understand where she was getting her information, and Cassandra needed a cover story. A little creative editing of the truth could achieve all of that.
"We now have that backdoor, which is how I got these plans and found out about the invasion, and the Tinker wants to join us. Insider information and tech custom-made for our purposes."
"So," she concluded, "does anyone still think we stand no chance? When we can see the schematics for all of the suits she's going to send, her intended tactics, and even the logic she's going to program those suits to follow in the field so she can put more than one of them out at a time? When we have a Tinker who spent years forced to try and outthink and out-program Dragon to keep the Dragonslayers afloat? When we have weeks of preparation time?"
"It can be done." Skitter had sat eerily still for the duration of the meeting up until this point, but now her head moved as she leaned forward in her seat. Has come to a decision. Will not be swayed.
Tattletale was waiting for Skitter to explain what she had clearly just decided, but the explanation never came. "The Tinker," Skitter prompted.
"Yes." She squinted at Skitter, who was presumably looking at her from behind those yellow lenses. Unwilling to compromise. "Right. She's calling herself Refine, and she's taking requests. I'll bring her around to meet all of you later, once she has her armor up and running. Until then… What do you want?"
The others all gave their requests, some reasonable and some not – Lisa was only going to include 'vibrating super-taser scepter' to mess with Cassandra – but when Lisa tallied it all up one person had failed to speak. "Skitter?"
"I'll have to think about it," Skitter said carefully. "I'm not sure what I want is even possible."
Speaking carefully, keeping secrets, Lisa's power whispered as it dropped into a string of successive deductions, building on all the little hints she had seen. Related to the previous decision. Unwilling to reveal a plan for fear of compromising it. Will not budge. Intends to use Cassandra and the upcoming attack to further other goals.
Has decided to go after Coil during the Dragon attack.
That… was going to make things even more complicated. Especially since Lisa didn't think she was supposed to know yet.
Author's Note: And thus canon is irreparably altered. But that is another, much longer story that I won't be writing. Trying, and failing, to satisfactorily continue from here is what stalled this story seeing the light of day for so long. It would take a more dedicated and perhaps more skilled writer than I to do a continuation of this idea justice. I'm reasonably happy with this as its own little thing, an answer to a self-imposed challenge.
'Dragon joins the Undersiders post S9. No major AU divergences until just before that point in the timeline.'
This was the prompt I tasked myself with in the beginning, and I chose it because it seemed at first glance to be insanely difficult, but not impossible. The question became how I could make it make sense.
The answer? One part AU opportunities (Saint and crew wanting a fourth piece of major Dragon tech). One part chance (Imp doing something kind of smart but stupidly risky and it paying off). One part ego (Tattletale thinking she knows best). One part plausibly possible permutations (Tattletale deciding she wants a Dragon-brain to question at her leisure, Toybox being able to deliver). One part flat-out suspension of disbelief.