This is a soft crossover - really more of a heavily retooled power theft - from the manga Freezing, written and drawn by Lim Dall Young and Kwang-Hyun Kim. No knowledge of the manga is needed for this crossover, and in fact, many of the mechanics of Limiters and Pandoras have been ripped out and rebalanced for setting and story reasons.

However, for those unfamiliar with Freezing, be advised if you look it up that it's an 18(non-hentai) series with lots of gore, nudity, abuse, gratuitous violence, and it's got more than a little Evangelion in its DNA.

Worm, of course, belongs to John McCrae, alias Wildbow.

1 - Gifts

"God, what a mess," Miss Militia said, looking over the scene. "What could drive someone to do this?"

Armsmaster didn't reply immediately, holding out his halberd to dock a mini-drone that had been surveying things with a variety of passive scanning antennas. "Obsession, power-induced mania, a grudge of some sort? Sometimes, powers drive people down strange paths, we both know that."

The warehouse was on the north end of town, abandoned for years as the shipping trade died. Until about ten weeks ago, at his estimation, when it had become the home of the lab they now found before them. The right third of the warehouse featured a pressurized tent cobbled together from stolen and improvised parts; it housed a surgical suite of sorts, and a workshop he knew from the raid footage was full of implants, armor and weapons in early stages of prototyping. Mostly prosthetics and armor pieces with cybernetic elements, many too crude and heavy to be effective, but for how short of a time she'd likely been set up in the area, the sheer variety spoke volumes on its own.

Two units vaguely recognizable as tanning beds were mounted against the left wall of the remaining space, crudely sealed and altered from their original components to some sort of medical stasis tanks. They'd been full of pinkish-clear fluid an hour and a half ago, housing the two known victims of the unnamed parahuman.

It was an unfortunate twist of circumstance that one of the victims had been their new Ward; without her particular weakness to electricity, they might not have checked the power grid at all. That it had taken them two weeks to go from assuming she had violated her parole to making that leap in logic was a failure on multiple levels, including, regrettably, his own.

"The tinker, she was roughly the same age as her victims," Militia ventured. "Biocompatibility, or something else, you think?"

"Hard to say, but I suspect a bit of both," he commented, frowning as new data came through facial recognition. A match for the tinker; one Taylor Hebert, found in a Winslow High School database and an ongoing missing persons case file with the BBPD. "She went to the same school as Hess and Barnes, in the same grade. Says here her father was found dead four months ago, signs of a struggle and bloody clothing placed her at the scene as well. She hasn't been active here long enough for that to line up, though, and there are other oddities."

Miss Militia sighed. "That just complicates things more. If she'd kidnapped them immediately following a crisis point like that, it might have gone better for her in court. Still, at least she surrendered before lives were lost."

"That we know of," Armsmaster corrected gently. "She might have previous victims, with that timeline. Perhaps even her own father, though the profile doesn't really fit."

"True." There was a pause in the conversation, during which he requested PRT oversight be directed to Winslow for the girl's records and those of Miss Barnes. "So, in your professional opinion, is the building safe to examine in further detail?"

He glanced at the drone data, still being collated in another tab. "While the data hasn't been fully processed, there's no signs of high energy readings or EM interference that might be harmful in the short term. Biohazard concerns aside, I believe we're clear to start going through the evidence."

Militia reached forward and cut the caution tape. "After you."

"Miss Hebert?"

The girl didn't shift on the screen, but that wasn't too strange of a response. She had her head buried in her arms, sitting with her back to the wall on the bed, her knees pulled up to her chest in a classic defensive posture. Keep a wall between yourself and the world. The question was, did she want to shut out the world, or shut herself off from it?

He preferred to be in the room with patients, but given the circumstances, the PRT had elected not to let any non-brute-rated human into the cell. It made his job more difficult, and given her tinker rating, even if they got one of the asylum's brute-suits over to the ENE, the policy likely wouldn't be changing anytime soon.

"Would you prefer Taylor? Anne?"

She jerked at the second name, and he made a quick note not to accidentally mention it again. However, it got her to offer a response.

"Taylor is fine."

He smiled, though she couldn't see from her current position. "Alright, then. Taylor, my name is Doctor Padilla, but you can call me Tory if you prefer. There should be a screen nearby, if you'd feel more comfortable talking face-to-face."

She didn't move.

"I've been tasked with assessing your mental state, and have a few questions regarding the events that led up to your time here. This is not a confidential psychiatric session, and the camera is recording this for later review.

"However, I want to ask first if you have any complaints? Personal needs that haven't been met, within reason. Potential issues or dangerous interactions with your powers? Thoughts of hurting yourself, or others, in ways you can't or won't fix?"

The girl shifted her head, her frazzled, poorly-tended dark hair bobbing slightly to make it more noticeable. She didn't look up, but might be wiping her eyes or nose.

"Did I kill them?" Taylor asked at last. "I didn't mean to, but something was always missing. I couldn't make them stronger, not like they wanted."

Tory looked over the case file, saw the note he'd written earlier. "I can't speak to their current prognosis, but they survived, and Panacea would likely be able to put them back together if she takes the case."

Taylor lifted her head. "That's… good. Good." She retreated once more, and he didn't try to stop her.

"You knew them, then? Can you tell me why you did what you did, walk me through the process?"

She didn't answer.

"I can't help you if you don't talk, Taylor. You don't have to tell me, but you might feel better if you do."

She still didn't answer. He sighed again, leaning back in his chair. Sometimes you had to wait, and sometimes waiting wouldn't change anything. The ball was in her court, at least for now, and pressing too hard might only make her retreat further.

His patience paid off when she lifted her head six minutes later. She turned to look at the camera, short disheveled bangs parting so one green eye caught the sterile fluorescent light for a moment. Taylor studied his image on the screen, squinting. Her high school ID had her wearing glasses; he jotted down a note to have the PRT provide an accommodation that wouldn't violate tinker guidelines.

"I don't know what the bastards who took me poured down my throat, but it was tainted, because I know I'm supposed to forget. But when I sleep, I remember things. Things that can't be real, but they must, because I can tell my designs are missing something and - and their hides look so right. I'm not sure if I'm crazy, but I know I wouldn't have done the things I did if I wasn't seeing those things."

He nodded along. "Your kidnappers, they drugged you? And you've been suffering from hallucinations ever since?"

She nodded hesitantly. "They were testing something on me, making sure it wasn't poison. But they gave me a bunch of things to get me hooked, and after… I wouldn't tell them it gave me powers, wouldn't give them that satisfaction. So they - they said I had to make myself useful the only way I could, pay them back for wasting their time. Put me with the girls, kept… kept me too high to care." She pulled her knees closer to her chest, turning her head to hide her eyes.

"I'm genuinely sorry you had to go through that, Taylor," Tory said, once again wishing they'd let him be in the room. Physical presence, even at a distance, was vastly preferable to the cold detachment this format conveyed. "If you're willing to give the PRT more information on your circumstances, it might help stop it from happening to anyone else, but I understand completely if it's too painful to discuss, or if it's uncomfortable to discuss with me. We can arrange a female psychiatrist for future assessments, if you'd prefer?"

She didn't talk for a long time, turning her head to stare at the wall across from her cot. Finally, she turned back to the camera, and brushed her hair out of her eyes.

"Emma told me, after I got away from the hole they kept me in, that I'd finally proven myself. That I was a survivor, and that was what she'd always wanted. I don't know if she's right, not after what I did to her, but I'll tell you what I can."

"She was Emma's thing," Hess explained, after they got her in a debriefing. "Some titchy loner she knew before she met me, liked to lie for attention. We ran into each other in the halls most days, and I could tell it always tore Barnes up after, seeing her broken like that. Her mom died, or something, I never bothered to ask."

She shrugged, and her right hand unconsciously shot up to her left clavicle, replaced by Amy Dallon only a day prior. The hand switched to an affected gesture, picking at her shirt for a bit of nonexistent grit and flicking it off with a false carelessness. Her eyes challenged him to acknowledge the action, but he wasn't going to touch that with a ten foot pole. Parker was a lieutenant, not a shrink, and a long career in the PRT had taught him not to interfere where a cape didn't want it. Eventually, Hess grunted, and got on with it.

"After Hebert disappeared, Emma and I drifted apart. Thought she could hack it, but she just stopped talking, you know? Then, one day, she comes to me all like, 'You'll never believe this, meet me after school!'. Bet you can guess the rest."

Parker sighed. "For the record, we're going to want more details than that. Did Miss Hebert ambush you? Did she know your secret identity?"

Hess huffed, grimaced like she'd eaten something sour, but continued. "Hebert was even more crazy than before, and I guess she got Barnes to drink the punch. I don't know if she told the freak I was Shadow Stalker, or if Hebert figured it out somehow. Either way, there was a trap waiting for me. Next time I woke up, using my powers wasn't an option anymore. Fucking psycho bitch."

He hummed noncommittally. "And Emma Barnes?"

She scoffed, but there was a hint of something more painful in her expression. "What about her? She flipped, worked with a villain to capture and - and mutilate a Ward. She's not my friend, she's a coward, a criminal. Throw the book at her. Please."

The next few weeks were about as far removed from exciting as possible, as far as the Hebert case went. It quickly became abundantly clear the girl had been suffering from hallucinations, heavy mood swings, and withdrawal symptoms from a cocktail of drugs for several months, on top of the turmoil of emotions involved in the murder of her father concurrent with the kidnapping and the sex slavery she'd experienced afterwards. It was an extremely clear-cut insanity defense, and she was going to be remitted to a facility that specialized in parahuman cases like hers.

The Barnes girl was a less clear case, as she remained adamant that her captor had her full support, but her mental state was clearly unstable and her father had made pressing charges difficult. Her case was not being handled as swiftly, but it was likely she'd end up with court-mandated psychiatric care of her own.

A number of mysteries still surrounded the case, even after the tinker was housed in the parahuman asylum. Miss Hebert's creations, while technically functional, were all a confusing combination of dramatically oversized or robust, and barely functional; the modifications to the body of Miss Hess had included encasing and partially replacing her left arm and supporting structures with an armored cybernetic sleeve that had proportions more fitting for a polar bear, but despite clearly being designed as a weapon, it had no internal power source, could barely move under the power leeched from its victim's nervous system, and weighed so much the user would need superhuman strength to compensate for the imbalance. Miss Hebert herself was insistent that something was missing, but she wasn't able to describe it properly, if it even existed. Her hallucinations and dreams, while curious from a psychiatric standpoint, were dismissed almost universally by the best thinker analysts the Protectorate had to offer, and her kidnappers were never conclusively identified, though a single Merchant-run brothel was raided successfully.

By the end of 2010, Brockton Bay had returned to business as usual.