The silence in the room was profound, only broken by the faint sounds of people shifting place slightly, the ventilation fans in the air ducts, and occasional taps caused by a finger on a touchscreen. It was so quiet that the buzzing of a fly bouncing around near a light in the ceiling could clearly be heard, although everyone ignored it.
They were far more engaged in their own thoughts, and watching as Director Piggot read the report on her tablet. When she finished, she put it down gently, then raised her eyes, scanning the various people assembled around the conference table.
"How could this have been allowed to happen?" she queried in a voice that was deliberately calm, but contained elements that made a number of them wince. "And how was it that none of this came to light literally months ago?"
Quite a lot of uneasy glances were exchanged, before Trent Johnson, the senior PRT ENE legal representative present, apparently decided to take one for the team. "It appears to be a potent mix of corruption, stupidity, incompetence, and pure accident, Director," he said somewhat reluctantly. She leaned back in her chair, her eyes fixed on him, and her hands folded in front of her.
"Go on," she invited with a certain growl to her voice. "Enlighten me as to how Miss Hess managed to bypass every single check we're supposed to have in place to stop this exact sort of scenario happening."
He took a breath, then looked at the notes he had in front of him, before wincing a little and raising his eyes to hers. She was somewhat impressed that his gaze was steady. "A large part of it can be laid at the feet of Thomas Calvert, I regret to say."
"That does not surprise me, but continue."
He did. "During his tenure here, predating your appointment to Director, he appears to have been establishing a significant network of individuals he could, via one method or another, exert pressure on to tilt events to his liking. We still don't know exactly what his long term goal was, but he was certainly working towards an outcome that would likely have gained him your position, or possibly that of the Mayor. The previous Director's illness which led to him stepping down and therefore you taking this posting was, as far as we can currently discover, at least partly his doing." Johnson shook his head a little. "We're not entirely sure how he arranged it as records are missing, staff have been reassigned or retired, and so on, but it seems that a number of medical checkups had their results altered, leading to the wrong medication being prescribed for an originally fairly benign cardiac issue. Medication that actually exacerbated that issue to the point of cardiac failure after several years."
"Which didn't kill Olmert, but forced him to step down on medical grounds," she filled in as he paused, making him nod.
"Exactly. It's quite likely that Calvert was actually hoping for Director Olmert to die, but the two heart attacks he suffered were severe enough to fulfill the same goal. It's obvious from the evidence the BBPD have dug up that Calvert had no qualms at all about assassinating anyone who was in his way, but he was subtle in the previous Director's case, subtle enough that no one realized until we laid hands on the new evidence. Probably because if foul play had been suspected the amount of interest that would immediately fall on the ENE division would risk uncovering his plans." The lawyer shrugged. "There's plenty of evidence that he was much more direct with other lower-profile obstructions to his goals. At least a dozen murders the BBPD are sure of, and likely two to three times that they suspect were either on his orders or via his manipulations. Not including such things which ultimately were due to him interfering with the gangs. There are indications that he spent years playing all sides against each other, feeding information to the gangs, the BBPD, us, and half a dozen other places, all for the purposes of advancing whatever it was he was working towards."
"We are fairly sure he's responsible at least indirectly for a minimum of forty excess deaths among the PRT staff in the city over the last eight years, and the true total could considerably exceed that," Armsmaster put in from the other end of the table, looking very angry although you'd never know it from his even voice. "It's more difficult to tally up the equivalent effect on the civilian population, and various Parahumans, villain, heroic, or otherwise, but there's no doubt he engineered a remarkable number of poor outcomes. Including, I'm almost certain, the death of Fleur."
Emily winced. If New Wave found out about that… They were unlikely to take it well. At least the fucking man was dead, so the city probably wouldn't have to worry about a family of significantly dangerous Parahumans going out looking for vengeance.
Although she had a nasty feeling that if it wasn't handled properly, it could come back to bite the PRT in general. Yet another problem to work on. She wasn't foolish enough to believe the evidence would never come to the attention of New Wave. If Armsmaster had it, it presumably came from studying Calvert's records, and the cops and FBI had got to those first. Which meant that they probably knew, or would when they put the pieces together. Sighing, she pushed that problem to one side as it wasn't important right at the moment but made a mental note to come back to it as a matter of priority, before someone else beat her to it.
"Armsmaster is correct, Director. Calvert's fingerprints are all over a horrific number of past gang operations, once you can recognize the pattern and cross reference it with the information found in his bunker," Johnson commented. "My department considers him quite possibly responsible one way or another for up to perhaps fifty to fifty-five percent of all criminal actions in the city for certainly the last five years, and plausibly up to nine or ten. We would be facing a much less problematic and more stable situation without him. Hopefully with him gone a new equilibrium can be reached, although I suspect it will be rather chaotic until things settle down."
"One man was behind half the total of all crimes in the entire city?" Dauntless's voice was incredulous. "How?"
"To be clear he didn't usually commit such acts himself, Dauntless," Johnson replied, glancing his way. "With fairly rare exceptions, everything else was a result of careful manipulation of information, people, events, and a whole host of parameters only made possible by his Parahuman abilities. That's one of the big problems with Thinkers in general; their effectiveness can be much greater than one would expect even with fairly minor powers according to the normal classifications. As Calvert was so deeply embedded into the PRT and therefore had almost unrestricted access for close to a decade to some highly sensitive information, and a network of spies, informants, and patsies all over the city, he was far more effective and dangerous than he might otherwise have been even taking that into account. Hence the end result. Luckily he wasn't quite as good as he might have been and didn't clean up his operations as well as he probably believed he did, although it was more than sufficient to evade detection for far longer than it should have done."
Returning his attention to Emily as Dauntless nodded thoughtfully, he continued, "Calvert wasn't the only one bribing or threatening people in many positions throughout the city administration, the state government, our organization, and a host of others, of course. But he was by far the most prolific. The various gangs and a number of external actors also worked on the same basis although their contributions were relatively minor for the most part, but even so it all added to the problem. And the previous city administration was, ah… let's call it porous. At best. Anything was available for a price, to anyone with the money and the knowledge of where to put it. Again, a depressingly large amount of that is indirectly attributable to Calvert, as he not only engineered the appointment of easily corrupted individuals into key roles, but also in some cases managed to get people he couldn't buy off or threaten removed from those roles. By simply having them assassinated in at least five cases."
Emily felt, once more, that it was a shame that dear old Thomas had managed to escape what she, and probably an awful lot of other people, would have enjoyed doing to the man. She'd have made enough to retire on if she'd sold time in five minute chunks and rented out baseball bats…
How one man could have caused so much chaos was insane.
"And of course once a culture of bribery and special favors gets established, it's devilishly hard to stamp it out, especially if it's running for years," Johnson went on having taken a sip of water from the glass at his elbow. "And those providing such favors tend to start offering them to anyone who can pay the price, not just the first one to kick things off. If it's not caught early and dealt with, it spreads like a weed. It becomes just business as usual. And that appears to be what happened here. He certainly wasn't the only person running schemes like this, of course. The city has always had a problem with corruption, as has anywhere you care to think about, since it tends to be endemic no matter how much one would wish otherwise. But he was by a large margin the most prolific instigator of corruption, via a network of agents we still haven't fully tracked down, and had an enormous budget."
"So he dumped so much money into bribery and manipulation he set the stage for everyone else to benefit from it." She sighed as he nodded. "Fucking Calvert. And how much of that was deliberate too?"
"Unclear, I'm afraid, and it will probably remain so without a living Calvert to question," he responded. "I would imagine that at least some of it was planned, but probably not the bulk of it. All his agents freelancing for anyone who had some spare cash wouldn't necessarily help him, if only because their clients might be working at cross-purposes to him, and the more people who knew about it the more chances there were for someone in a position to stop it to find out. But once he'd got it running, it took on a life of its own and I doubt he fully realized just what a monster he created. At least until it was far too late."
He shrugged, before taking another drink. Putting the glass down he carried on, "The investigation begun by Brockton General's administration was the point it all started to unravel. As far as we can so far determine, a number of people involved with Winslow High School have for a number of years been merrily embezzling some quite remarkable sums from the budget, aided by at least two members of the school board, and several other people in the city administration, the state government, and even the state police. It runs into several million dollars at an absolute minimum and from what I've been able to find out may well be upwards of twenty to thirty million. It was an ambitious scheme that by rights should have been detected quite easily, but with accomplices in a position to cover up the hole in the finances at multiple levels, it wasn't. Some of this was down, again, to Calvert's influence, albeit inadvertently. He may well not even have known about it, but his agents turned out to be quite open to competing offers from different people for the same information or services at the same time. In essence, being paid several times for losing a single document, for example."
She nodded, understanding the scale of the problem. By the looks of it so did everyone else. "Mayor Christner was working on reducing the endemic corruption, I know that much. Did it have any effect on all this?"
"Quite a large one, yes. Calvert's documents show he was putting in considerable effort to undo what the Mayor was achieving, with limited success in some cases. It put quite a crimp in his plans in a number of areas, which he wasn't pleased about. The Mayor is fairly unyielding when it comes to the public trust and was responsible for a surprising number of Calvert's patsies being detected and removed, but there were too many of them to fully clean house. And of course he had no idea that there was so much in the way of money and other resources arrayed against him, so he was fighting something of a losing battle. Even so, his campaigns did have a significant effect on Calvert's operation and undoubtedly caused the man a lot of annoyance."
"Good. Roy is a pain in the ass, but if he irritated Calvert, I'll shake his hand for that," Emily grunted, then waved for him to continue, which he did.
"The corrupt regime at Winslow predates Sophia Hess attending the school, of course, but those running it instantly realized they could leverage the enrollment of a Ward to their own gain. Mostly because of the fairly generous stipend such arrangements come with although it's likely that having a Ward on the premises was considered some form of insurance against the gangs causing trouble which might interfere with their own schemes," he said. "Most of the funds that were allocated to the school for such things as security upgrades and the like simply vanished into their pockets, while all the paperwork was fraudulently arranged to indicate it had been used for exactly what it was intended for."
"Which shouldn't have been possible if Hess's caseworker and at least one other person who was supposed to audit the school regularly had done their jobs," Emily snarled.
"Correct. Which is why they cut a deal with both people." He sighed and shook his head. "There are supposed to be checks on this sort of thing and unexpected payments should have been flagged up, but a combination of Calvert's previous manipulations having resulted in several of the checks being completely neutered, Winslow's schemers having far too much practice in this sort of thing, and pure bad luck in a couple of cases, meant that it slipped through the cracks. Everyone involved went to considerable effort to make sure the usual reports were filed, all of them showing everything was working correctly and all of them completely false. It was a whole chain of things any one of which failing would have made the whole house of cards collapse, but unfortunately as a result far too much historical corruption, they got away with it."
Looking down at his notes, he flipped a couple of pages, then looked up again and resumed, "Miss Hess, unfortunately, is apparently more disturbed than we realized. Once she was enrolled at the school she seems to jumped headlong into becoming as vicious a bully as she could possibly manage, her relationship with Miss Barnes having apparently exacerbated the whole situation for reasons I don't know. The pair of them ran roughshod over half the school, while the administration went out of their way to pretend nothing was happening because it might threaten their little retirement scheme. Up to the point of covering up serious physical attacks, theft, verbal assault, and a whole host of other issues. From the information I have available so far this is a pattern the school has been involved with for years before Miss Hess enrolled, but she happily took advantage of it and they appear to have found that entirely acceptable. Brockton General has records of an appalling number of serious injuries coming from Winslow, far outweighing the sum total of such events from every other school in the city in both number and severity. We have a Ward as a direct result of one such event a while ago, of course."
"Assault to the level it can cause a Trigger event should not be part of the school experience," Armsmaster commented with a growl in his voice. "Especially when it was apparently a murder attempt."
"Agreed. Yet it happened, Brockton General reported it correctly, the report went into the system, and… nothing at all happened." Johnson shook his head. "Again, corruption and malfeasance played their roles, and the school successfully covered up yet another injurious medical event." He flipped meaningfully through a stack of paper next to him, dozens of sheets making a riffling noise as everyone watched. "This happened far, far more times than should have been possible. Miss Hess was responsible for at least a dozen of these reports. Culminating in the final one, the one that was the tipping point."
"The so called prank in the locker," Emily said.
"Indeed. Murder attempt might well be a better description, but at a minimum it was assault and depraved indifference," he agreed soberly. "That girl could easily have died. Without Panacea's intervention, from what the medical staff who read the record tell me, she would at least have suffered life-changing injuries, probable sepsis, and death was quite plausible. Luckily she got to hospital in time for them to stabilize her and allow Panacea to heal her fully, but another hour…? We'd be looking at a manslaughter charge at a minimum. Of course the school claimed there was no proof of who filled her locker with the medical waste, nor of who shut her into it, and even went so far as to claim it was entirely self-inflicted. Clearly impossible if only because Miss Hebert was in the locker facing the back wall and couldn't possibly have both closed the door and locked it behind her even if she had put the medical waste into the thing. Which, since it appears to have been done during the winter break, seems to be highly unlikely."
Looking at his documents again, he added, "The school also tried to bribe the girl's father to drop the complaint in exchange for paying her medical bills, but apparently didn't realize that he is not someone who appreciates bribery, is someone who is extremely protective of his daughter, and that Panacea had already healed her anyway at that point. Then they seem to have tried to make the records go away, which they've apparently done successfully before, but this time their person on the inside got caught. Which sufficiently irked the hospital administration, who were already highly upset about how many serious medical emergencies were coming from Winslow and subsequently disappearing without trace that they completely bypassed the normal route and took their concerns directly to someone much higher up the food chain. While also hiring a very good PI firm to investigate the whole situation extremely thoroughly. Which ultimately kicked off the massive legal mess that's embroiled the city and the state for over two months now, resulted in one enormous lawsuit and multiple lesser ones, and completely upset Calvert's applecart."
He spread his hands a little helplessly and remarked, "As incredible as it sounds, everything we've seen is connected, one way or another, to, through, or because of Thomas Calvert. He didn't create the Winslow embezzlement problem, or the dozens of other cases of corruption all over so many different organizations and places, but due to his own scheming he's massively worsened all of them, weakened the underpinnings of the entire city, probably the state, exacerbated the gang problem, caused tens if not hundreds of deaths, and may well have initiated any number of undesirable situations we might not see the end of for years. It's almost impressive in just about the worst way imaginable."
There was a long pause as everyone mulled over his words. He drank some more water then put the glass down with a click and folded his hands on his notepad. "So to circle back to your original question, Director, after that rather long winded explanation, ultimately Sophia Hess was able to do what she did directly or indirectly due to Thomas Calvert undermining those very checks and balances that should have prevented it. We simply didn't know that we didn't know what she was truly like or capable of. Despite warnings from her fellow Wards, for example Vista, who have said for some time that she was a loose cannon. Many of the reports that should have resulted in a much more thorough review of her actions simply didn't make it through the system at all. The proof we needed to revoke her parole vanished, leaving enough ambiguity in the official records that we legally couldn't do what we should have been able to and bench her at least a year ago, if not remove her as a Ward entirely."
"Until Saturday." Emily rubbed her forehead tiredly. It was all too plausible. The bureaucracy the PRT ran on was complex at best, and a total nightmare much of the time, even before you had external groups like those pernicious Youth Guard idiots sticking their noses in. Luckily they had little real official power, but they were a damned nuisance for the most part even if some of then genuinely meant well. Unfortunately they were mostly also completely out of touch of the realities of wrangling underage Parahumans and generally made things much worse if they got involved. Not even the Wards liked most of them.
So the idea that because of that asshole Calvert a system that was barely functional in many ways a lot of the time had become completely non-functional in some specific areas made far too much sense. She well knew from her time as a trooper just how much trouble a corrupt supply sergeant could cause if they got carried away, even long after they got found out and dealt with. Calvert running round causing wholesale deliberate, or even accidental, sabotage of everything he could lay hands on was never going to end well. It was a miracle that something worse hadn't happened, really.
They'd be rooting this shit out for years. Johnson was entirely correct there.
Damn that fucking man. She should have shot him immediately after Ellisburg…
"Yes, indeed. Miss Hess deciding to upgrade her bullying tactics to attempted murder in front of about fifty witnesses was not the most sane thing she could have chosen to do," Johnson replied dryly. "Apparently her judgment is even worse than I imagined from her dossier. In both her actions and her choice of target."
"Those two girls certainly cleaned her clock pretty effectively," Assault commented with a grin. "That high kick was amazing! The kid has some impressive skills."
"Miss Cheung is an accomplished martial artist, from the information I gathered," Armsmaster said approvingly. "She is highly competent in at least two styles of Kung Fu, Changquan and Wing Chun, what is termed an external style and an internal style respectively. High competitive ranked in both. She also holds a black belt in Karate. I believe she's been training since the age of approximately six, and takes it seriously. As can be seen from the videos. Sophia Hess is a competent fighter but leans far too heavily on her power, and the use of weapons. At close range, taken by surprise, she is far less effective than she should be. Miss Cheung simply acted faster than Hess could react and she paid the price."
"Her situational awareness tends to be rather poor when she's angry," Miss Militia put in, speaking for the first time having been listening closely with a rather resigned expression in her eyes. "She's been warned about it many times. But if she gets worked up she often target fixates on a specific opponent and basically ignores anything or anyone else, which has won her some fairly unpleasant injuries in the past. From what I saw she was so invested in trying to hit Miss Hebert with the chair she forgot there was someone else right behind her. It's not the first time that happened."
"Does she make a habit of throwing chairs at people?" Assault asked innocently, receiving a hard look in return.
"You know full well what I mean," the woman grumbled. "Be serious for once."
"I was more impressed by the elbow break," Velocity put in with a slight grimace. "That took a pretty strong stomach to pull off. And a fair bit of strength."
"It's not as hard as you might think to cause an injury like that if you hit someone just right," Emily noted. "You need to know how to strike and where of course, but if you do, you don't need all that much force. Still, it was a very solid move. I wonder where she learned to do it?"
"Miss Hebert grew up in the docks," Johnson replied, picking a page off another stack of documents near him, glancing at it, then sliding it across to Emily who retrieved it to scan. "Her father works for the Dock Workers Association, and her mother was a professor at BBU until she passed away. As well as having had some… interesting… experiences in college." Emily read one paragraph and recognized a name with a frown. "I would be completely unsurprised to learn that Miss Hebert has been taught some quite effective street fighting techniques by her father, her mother, or both. Or acquaintances of either. Being able to take care of yourself in that part of the city is a survival tactic, of course."
"Why would she let Hess and Barnes bully her to the point she got hospitalized if she could fight back like that?" Emily asked, handing the document back. She had her own opinion but was interested in his.
He shrugged. "I can't say for certain, obviously, but perhaps she believed that escalating the violence would only make things worse? She was quite likely correct if so. Or she might have been brought up to avoid conflict when possible, which does tend to fit the evidence. I would also imagine that having a former friend of hers, which seems to be what Miss Barnes was at one point, turn so viciously on her as she was starting at a new school might well have caused so much cognitive dissonance she didn't know how to react, and by the time things got to the point that she should have fought back, she was so depressed by events she couldn't find the energy to."
Shaking his head, he added, "I can think of many reasons, all of which might be wrong. But I also think that after having been out of school for over two months led her to reevaluate her outlook and when Miss Hess decided to try to resume hostilities, she simply had had enough. You'll note she was obviously avoiding any real reaction other than staying out of the way right up to the point Hess pulled a knife on her friend, and even then she struck precisely once, in a way perfectly calculated to remove the threat immediately with the minimum damage. It was clear self-defense, of herself and her friend, and she just disabled her attacker, made sure the weapon was out of reach then let events play out. Told the manager to call the cops, cooperated with them when they arrived, did everything I'd have advised her to do to the letter. Quite impressive for a teenager."
"Hmm. Plausible, I agree." Emily nodded slowly as she thought over his words, then looked around at everyone else to see if anyone had any other input. At the moment the answer seemed to be no. "We'll come back to that. Right now, the question really is, why the hell did Sophia Hess go so completely unhinged in public like that? Even for her that was… unexpected."
Miss Militia sighed heavily, making everyone look at her. "We've had her in custody for twenty four hours at this point, which took some effort as the BBPD were not keen on releasing her to us. And they definitely know she's a Parahuman, of course. That much was unavoidable. She's been assessed by the medical staff, and the psychologist. Medically she's highly stressed, in considerable pain from the fractured elbow although that's been treated and is stable, and even with quite a high dose of painkillers she's still absolutely furious with essentially everything. Considering how much morphine they pumped into her, that's slightly impressive."
She shrugged somewhat helplessly. "That girl is the angriest person I've ever met on a good day. Since Winslow closed, she hasn't had any good days. I'm pretty sure she knew, even if only subconsciously, that sooner or later evidence was going to come to light which was going to cause her a major problem and she's been wondering when the ax would fall, which added to the stress. I know that Aegis has complained that she's been even harder to work with since then and so has Gallant. Who warned me she was about to blow a week ago, but she simply wouldn't talk about it, so there wasn't much we could do."
The woman paused, apparently considering her words, then continued, "The incident with Vista and Hookwolf made things worse, somehow. Sophia was… resentful, possibly? I honestly don't know what was really going through her mind. But she very much didn't like how Vista was getting a lot of respect from the PRT staff, and the other Wards. Words were exchanged a few times from what I was told, and the two of them were avoiding each other for the last week. As best as I can work out, on Saturday she went off duty in an absolutely foul mood even for her, found herself frustrated at the burger restaurant due to the length of the lines from what Vista reported, which made that mood worse… And then she spotted Miss Hebert and simply forgot where she was and that behavior that she could get away with in school due to all the reasons Mr Johnson mentioned wasn't going to be ignored in public."
"It fits the available evidence," Armsmaster agreed. "If she'd become conditioned to being able to behave as she wished with the aid of the school staff, if only by their lack of repercussions, she may well have just assumed she could get away with the same sort of thing anywhere. Seeing Miss Hebert triggered a pattern of behavior she'd learned worked. Right up until it very spectacularly didn't."
"That girl is not sane, you know," Assault commented in an unusually serious manner, causing everyone to switch their attention to him. "I mean, all Parahumans are a little off, it's pretty much the definition, and if we're honest with ourselves we'll admit to it." His smile was somewhat twisted and Emily felt a weird momentary sort of respect she immediately tried to suppress. "Sophia Hess is way past that. I have no idea if she was nuts before she triggered, but I'm damn sure she's fucked up in the head now. Some of the things I've heard her say…" He shook his head slowly. "She does not have a particularly firm grasp on reality in some fairly serious ways. Her mindset is… well, I wouldn't turn my back on her if she was pissed with me, let's put it like that."
"That, unfortunately, does match quite closely to what the psychologist reported, in rather more clinical terms," Miss Militia reluctantly said. "She is extremely revenge-motivated, almost certainly suffers from intermittent explosive disorder, and has some form of superiority complex which feeds off that. Her personal philosophy of life is both strong and deluded, he said. Some form of nihilistic predator versus prey ideas that don't hold up to analysis, but as soon as you try to talk about it, she either screams at you or just ignores you. In his view she's a danger to anyone she dislikes, which at this point is almost everyone. Exacerbated by her powers, of course. He warned that it was important that she didn't escape because if she did he was convinced she'd immediately try to go after anyone she believed had wronged her."
"And with her specific power set and training she could be remarkably dangerous," Emily groaned. "Wonderful. Armsmaster, are you sure your countermeasures can keep her contained?"
"I am, Director, yes." He nodded. "Miss Hess isn't going anywhere until we allow it. If she attempts to use her powers, the taser collar will knock her unconscious immediately. And relatively safely. Although I doubt she'd particularly enjoy the experience."
"And having her dominant arm badly broken is definitely going to slow her down if the worst happens," Dauntless pointed out, making the Tinker both look somewhat insulted at the implication his tech could fail, and like he reluctantly agreed with a valid point.
"I'm tempted to have her sedated until we can work out what to do with her," Emily mused out loud. "If she does try to escape, that's still on the cards. We really can't afford to have her get loose and cause even more trouble than she's done already. That little idiot couldn't have made it worse for herself if she'd planned it. And now I have to tell the Chief Director that on the one hand I was entirely right and the girl's a fucking liability, and on the other we want her out of here immediately. Which won't go down well, that much I'm certain of. On either point." She massaged her forehead again, wishing she had some decent painkillers right about now. She'd had a headache nearly constantly ever since the whole city had gone nuts and this was only adding to it.
"What do you think the Chief Director will want done with her?" her deputy asked.
"I honestly don't care as long as I never have to deal with her again, Renick," she replied, glancing at him. "In my view she should be in big girl prison for attempted murder, and if the cops are right about some of the things they've been suggesting might well have her behind them, possibly actual murder too. We still don't know where she got that fucking knife from, but it's far too similar to one of the types a lot of the gang members tend to like for my comfort. Which implies she probably picked it up on one of her off the book excursions and kept the damn thing, possibly as a trophy. I can't help wondering if the person she took it from was still kicking afterwards…"
"You think she'd have killed a gang member for a knife?" he queried, looking disturbed.
"For a cheap crappy switchblade? No. For being a gang member and in her way, unfortunately yes." Emily shook her head as he winced. "That's why we got her in the first place, after all. She came far too close to killing other gang members with those damn hunting bolts at least twice and it was pure luck that she didn't have a body count as a result. If she's been going out and carrying on that little hobby, which we know she has a few times, and it's anyone's guess how many times we don't know about, possibly she didn't get lucky. Rolling her victim for anything useful wouldn't be much of a step past that."
"Shit. Yeah, I take your point. I wish I didn't have to, but…"
Again, the room fell silent as they all tried to absorb the situation. Emily glanced at her watch, then sighed very faintly. They still had a lot to go through even after the whole Shadow Stalker mess was discussed and all the fallout from it too. Speaking of which, that brought her to the next point.
"Going back to the two girls she went after… Hebert and Cheung. Taylor Hebert was hospitalized by the little idiot and her accomplices in a highly unpleasant and traumatic manner. I'm wondering if there are… repercussions… from that which fall into our remit."
"You believe she might have Triggered, Director?" Armsmaster queried, causing her to nod and shrug at the same time.
"Her experience does seem plausible as a Trigger event, from what I read about it. It was fairly horrific by anyone's standards."
"I agree, however in counterpoint there is no actual evidence of Parahuman abilities I can immediately point to," he replied.
"Her performance in that… I hesitate to call it a fight… that smackdown, was possibly a little too good. Wouldn't you agree?" She looked at him, then at the others.
"She might just have really good reflexes," Renick pointed out. "She's damn tall for a girl that age, long arms, lots of leverage, and obviously just from looking at her is in good condition and works out. Having watched the videos from several angles, you can see she was well aware of Hess behind her. I'd think reflections in the windows, maybe? As well as from her own glasses. I knew a kid in school years back who was almost impossible to sneak up on from behind because he could see you coming in the reflections in the corners of his glasses. And he was a paranoid little bastard, probably because people kept trying to sneak up on him."
He smiled briefly as Assault chuckled. "The manager shouted, she turned, and was fast enough to grab the chair as it got close. Good reflexes, definitely, and some good luck too, but nothing there I'd instantly say was outside normal human performance levels. At the top end, sure, but still within them."
This was entirely valid in Emily's view, but she wanted to hear other opinions. Looking around she waited, sure someone would say something, and wasn't disappointed.
"On the other hand she's only, what, fifteen or sixteen? How much training in Chair Fu can she have had at that age?" Assault asked, although Emily got the distinct impression he was arguing for the sake of it. As usual.
"Perhaps she's naturally gifted that way?" Renick replied with a small grin. "Look at her friend. Armsmaster said she's been training in multiple martial arts since she was six. Perhaps Miss Hebert has some form of training herself that helped her pull that off. She learned that palm strike to Hess's elbow from somewhere after all."
"Or just read a book on anatomy and has a good imagination," Miss Militia put in, looking mildly amused.
"Well, sure, that might be true. We don't know. But I've been in some of the bars in the docks, and I guarantee that people throw chairs at each other there sometimes just for fun. Maybe her dad taught her how to deal with that sort of thing." Mike chuckled as her eyes crinkled in amusement.
"Ultimately we don't have enough evidence to make a decision one way or another," Armsmaster remarked. "It's of course possible she Triggered as a result of the locker assault. But it's also just as possible she didn't. Her performance in the attack was very calm and collected, and precise too, which might indicate some form of combat Thinker power combined with a something like a Brute 1 rating, but on the other hand it might just be a calm person going out of her way not to overreact and taking the necessary steps to defend herself and her friend. Nothing in my analysis of the videos definitively points at a Parahuman ability or abilities. At best we can currently say it's possible but completely unproven."
"If you're looking for a Parahuman power in those videos, I'd be looking at that Cheung girl," Assault said with a grin. "That kick was almost impossible. How flexible is that girl? She got her foot level with her face from a standing start, hard enough to nearly lift Hess off her feet. I've never seen anything like that outside a film."
"Or a martial arts competition. Or a ballet performance," his wife pointed out with a sigh.
"I don't go to a lot of ballet performances, Puppy," he replied happily. "Or martial arts competitions, although maybe I should?"
"There is even less evidence for Miss Cheung to be a Parahuman," Armsmaster said calmly. "Although I will admit her performance was exceptional. It's still well within the parameters of a highly trained and practiced expert in martial arts, which she is."
"And Miss Hebert?" Emily persisted, not so much because she really though the girl had to be a Parahuman, but because she wanted to hear his reasoning.
"We have no information that she has trained in martial arts, and not that much information on either of them at all as they've never come to our attention before, but as Mr Johnson suggested, it's entirely plausible that she has received practical training in less formal fighting techniques from her family and friends. Absent more evidence that's probably the only viable conclusion, I'm afraid. Possible, but unlikely."
"So you don't believe that at present we have any reason to believe she's a Parahuman."
"No, Director. If further evidence comes to light we can reassess that, of course, but at the moment I think there is nothing more we need to do regarding either girl."
"If at any point it does turn out that Miss Hebert is a Parahuman, Director," Johnson said after a moment, sounding somewhat concerned, "There may well be an issue if you were considering the Wards."
Emily had a feeling she knew exactly what he was going to say, but asked anyway. "Which is?"
"If and when she found out that Sophia Hess, the girl that almost literally tortured her, assaulted her severely enough to hospitalize her, then assaulted her again in public and apparently was willing to commit murder, was a Ward, I expect she would be less than impressed with us. Especially if we were not immediately up front with her about it. Concealing the facts only to have them come out at a future date would be highly likely to result in an extreme, and to be honest, justified loss of trust. And the likelihood that the facts would come out sooner or later is near a hundred percent. If at any point she does come forward as a Parahuman and if she wishes to join the Wards, I highly recommend that you are completely honest and up front with her about exactly what happened, and accept whatever decision she comes to as a result. I feel that to do otherwise would be inviting potential trouble down the line we could ill afford." He looked evenly at her for a moment, until she nodded. "The point may well be moot anyway as we have no evidence other than entirely circumstantial and very weak suppositions that she is a Parahuman anyway, as Armsmaster explained, but please bear it in mind just in case."
"You've made your point," she replied after a moment or two of thought. "We'll see how things work out, but for now we can let it rest. We've got more than enough trouble already without borrowing more anyway."
"True enough, unfortunately."
The list of things that needed doing never seemed to shrink, she thought with irritation as she made some notes about the Hess problem, what to do about New Wave in light of the information she'd heard, and several other things that came up from the meeting so far. When she was done, she put her pen down and looked up. "OK. Moving on. Where the hell is Lung?"
Everyone looked at each other. It was a good question, and one that had been puzzling them all for some time now...
Half a mile away and nearly eighty feet underground Taylor explored the subterranean river she'd finally located, proving her dad correct, while also pondering what she'd overheard in the PRT building. It had some interesting implications. And warned her that she had to be more careful not to let anyone see her do anything that couldn't be explained without bringing powers into it.
She had no intention of joining the Wards or anyone else. Her powers weren't something she wanted to use to go around fighting everyone, although she had no qualms about prodding here and there to help people without them noticing. Mostly she wanted to learn what she could do and have fun while doing it, even though she was still curious to find out what other people would think about her drider form…
Perhaps the chance would arise to find out. For now, she had a far larger than expected underground waterway to investigate, and more experiments to run.
Glowing bright green she scuttled on, while making copious notes. Her dad would find all this fascinating, she was sure. And, just perhaps, Lucy might too?