1.5
"You kidnapped the Mayor."
"Now, okay, I know that it sounds bad-"
"You kidnapped the Mayor."
"Look, I just wanted to talk to him about some ideas, okay? Like the ones we had about me bringing more stuff to the bay, maybe getting a building project started? But he was meeting with some other people and I kinda didn't want to do that in front of them."
"So you kidnapped him?"
"I just took him out for a couple hours. We had some food, discussed our plans for the future. Like I said?"
"So… instead of kidnapping the Mayor, you took him on a date at Fugly Bob's."
Taylor winced.
"Could you please not describe it like that? I'm pretty sure the guy is married."
'And has a kid.'
Right right, there was that too.
Taylor did not want to even entertain the thought of what people might say if they came to the same conclusion her dad did. At most she'd rather they think she was being an unhinged or overconfident villain who was tweaking her nose at the law.
"And you publicly dragged him to a fast food joint."
"Look, what else was I supposed to do?"
"Take a rain check."
"But I can just make it rain whenever I want."
"Then pretend you can't. Taylor, I'm not angry or disappointed, I'm just a little worried. Especially when you ended up in a hostage situation with a bunch of people with very twitchy trigger fingers."
She slumped forwards, head in her arms.
"Ok, dad, I understand."
Shouldn't being a supervillain excuse her from actually having to explain herself? Was that not how it worked? Why was she sitting at her kitchen table, pretending like she wasn't considering knocking her books into the floor just to get out of the lecture she was sitting through, and just getting told to… to… to wait in line! The whole reason she was doing what she was, was so she didn't need to do that!
"Well, did you at least manage to tell him everything?" Dad sighed, back sagging against the couch as he tried to stave off a migraine.
"Kinda?"
"Kinda?"
Her father's tone was… aggressively dry.
"We were interrupted, okay? The PRT was there and I didn't want to hold him up so I let him go and talked to the heroes for a bit. You know, try to explain I'm not actually a big scary monster who wants to take over the city."
"You are just a very powerful self declared villain who is telling the Mayor she wants to build in it. After abducting him from his office."
Taylor sighed, feeling a migraine of her own coming through.
The conversation she was planning to have with her dad wasn't going the way she hoped it would. Not that it was going badly by any means, there wasn't any screaming or any threats of being grounded yet, but having her impromptu plan dissected in front of her wasn't how she wanted to spend the rest of her afternoon.
Besides, she was sure that Mayor Roy appreciated the break from work!
"Well, it's not all bad. I got the go ahead on the salvage plans, and I can even start thinking how and where to put my base. The only thing he really had a problem with is that the boats I took out of the graveyard haven't started making money yet."
At her pointed look, the Union man rolled his eyes.
"The process is ongoing and we've had multiple people show up at the docks trying to claim ownership of the materials. I've had to call more lawyers last week than I've had to in the past ten years."
"Really? Even with me breathing down their necks?"
Dad made a so-so gesture.
"You got a heck of a reputation boost after Canberra, Taylor. And all that positive press now has people thinking that you aren't all that scary anymore. They actually think you might be reasonable or plain uninterested in messing with them."
Her? Reasonable?
She fought an Endbringer. Literally butt heads with Ziz. What part of that was reasonable?
'You take an awful lot of pride in that fact.'
Yes, she did.
"Well, I better go do something to convince them I'm still the big bad wolf then. Seriously, you'd think they wouldn't wanna get into a fight with me, no matter what."
She started this entire villain campaign because she didn't want to be tied down by red tape and useless authorities telling her how she should go about helping people. And sure, she might not feel exactly the same way about them as she did a few months ago, Taylor was still loath to relinquish her ability to act in exchange for a gold star and a thumbs up from some paper pusher.
"After today, I think the message was sent loud and clear."
Just not in the way she meant to do it.
Still, it did bring up a problem Taylor was gonna have to deal with. The fact that she had improved her reputation and acted heroically meant people might stop fearing her, or think that she was this crisis scenario responder who wouldn't bother unless something big was happening.
'Outside of exiling Lung and dealing with his underlings, you haven't actually acted out. Both times just happened to be emergencies. And then you focused your efforts on cleaning up large scale environmental issues in your hometown. Laudable as those efforts were, I believe we might be near the end of your "honeymoon" period.'
And if people weren't scared anymore, or got used to her, that meant they would be more comfortable acting out.
Whether they were heroes or villains.
"This is going to be a mess."
Dad leaned forward, suddenly startled.
"Is something wrong?"
"No, no. Just, well, I guess I shouldn't be surprised. People aren't gonna leave us alone just because I'm the strongest thing in town."
Smiling wryly, Danny Hebert pat his daughter on the shoulder reassuringly.
"They'll keep their heads down so long as you're in sight. But that's the problem, isn't it?"
"Hmm. So maybe if I put a water clone on every street corner…."
He paused, can halfway to his mouth, before slowly taking a swallow of his beer.
"Can you do that?"
She shrugged.
"If I want to, sure. It's not like making a copy of myself is difficult. But if I wanted it to be believable it might take a bit more effort."
Having chosen to not mention that she didn't need to be present to pick things up through her powers, her father relaxed, apparently taking a modicum of calm out of his only child not being an all seeing surveillance system.
"Avoid that for now. No, what you're facing is essentially a lot of people with ideas about what you should do. But it's going to be on you to decide how to react."
Taylor gave him a nod and decided she'd have a good, long think.
"So, um, when is, uh, Mighty Lung-"
"Yes, that's right. Your Japanese is fucking terrible. Are you really the best speaker out of your whole clique?"
"Apologies, boss, just ignore him."
One of his underlings stepped in, grabbing the new recruit by the back of the head and bending him over at the waist in a deep double bow.
"He knows a lot about getting guns in the city, hooked us up with the party favors that got used back in the Bay. I'm the one who decided to recruit him properly."
Waving them off, he sighed and took a deep drag off of his smoke. Because Kei was tired. And he knew all of this was a bad idea. But the pistol in his coat was heavy and the night was cold.
'And if I fuck up, Lung is going to cook me alive in one of those fucking sand baths of his.'
It was an open secret by now, but the man avoided water as much as possible. Even exclusively drinking beer or wine. The only thing protecting him from full on liver failure being the Dragon's passive Brute rating. But that did little for his temper or the ever growing paranoia.
But Kei wasn't here to bitch and moan and his cigarette had burned low.
'I could smoke another one.' He shook the pack, appreciating the silence of his followers. 'Probably better for my health than dealing with "Sparkle".'
She was a mess.
The ABB was a mess.
Everything was a mess.
"Let's go." He switched to English. "The underboss has a timetable. Best not to screw it up." Mistakes were fatal when dealing with explosives. "Besides, it's payday, right? So you guys can go out and drink when the work is done."
That got a round of cheers and the nervous atmosphere broke. Kei himself no longer getting quite so many unsure glances his new guys thought he didn't notice. Money was always nice. Better than honor, to boot.
Less likely to leave you starving.
About as likely to get you shot.
He continued supervising.
That involved showing his face around the warehouse, making sure the large mac trucks had their cargo unloaded carefully and slowly. In fact, he only screamed twice, once because some jackass was trying to move a pallet by hand when they'd shelled out for lessons on how to drive a forklift and another time because some absolute, complete, utter moron was fucking around with pressurized oxygen tanks.
His hand had moved to his pistol out of pure anger, with only his hesitation in discharging his weapon in the proximity of such explosive materials saving the fool's life.
But the thirty or so young men were working quickly now, all Japanese, most speaking English, but all at least greeting him properly.
And so he had no cause to delay further. It was time to go speak to his boss.
There were a few women guarding the entry to her operating suite, the gangsters wearing fox masks and cradling submachine guns. Guns he hoped were unloaded, with they casually waved them around, loudly gossiping and chatting. And, of course, viciously brutalizing anyone who denied their leader.
"Oi, oi, oi, and where the Hell do you think you're going?"
Or causing him trouble, as the leader of the Kitsune jabbed the barrel of her weapon in his chest.
"Out of my way, bitch."
One of them was stupid enough to try and stop him, though, and found her weapon violently yanked out of her hand - breaking the girl's fingers - before he ejected the Uzi's magazine and ejected its only round.
"And if any of you try anything, you can explain to the Mighty Lung exactly why you started a gun fight in his warehouse, damaging his property, and wasting his time."
That stopped the growing shrieks of opposition and Kei was glad that not a single one of them had been selected for anything but loyalty and an absolute lack of scruples. Because they were the sort of people that Lung cowed with just a mention of his name.
It was rather dramatic to watch him rise out of a mound of sand, that alien maw already spreading wide, as it cooks and bites a man in half instantly.
He rarely needed to repeat that particular performance.
Not when Kei remembered the way that poor bastard's legs had stumbled forwards before slumping over, letting steaming organs spill out onto otherwise perfectly unmarred white sand.
Still.
Watching a young woman poke around in a sobbing, very much awake man's brain was perhaps one of the grimmer things he'd seen.
'At least when I had people's lungs or kidneys cut out, they were asleep or already dead.'
"So, you've got the materials?"
She didn't bother with Japanese, didn't speak a word of it either.
"Yes ma'am."
He simply replied in English.
"And it's all being sorted now?"
"Into the bins you had labelled, yes."
"What about Lung?"
"Preparing to deal with two distant Protectorate teams. They will be out of the way when you make your move."
"You know, you could stand to be a little less stiff, Kei-kun, add a bit of flair to your persona! Just because you're a minion doesn't mean you have to act so droll! Especially when we're gonna make the Boston Games look like a bad case of indigestion! Still not as bad as this poor idiot's ticker's gonna burn. But close enough!"
He inclined his head.
"As you say, ma'am."
Times were changing, rather, they had already changed. A career criminal like Kei didn't need to be told why. But even then, there was only one way for men like him to make a living. Rather than climbing from the bottom of a hole, it was all he could do to try and steer the ship as it slowly took in more and more water.
'Not metaphorically, either.'
Off in the distance, he could hear the echoes of thunder. The tell tale sign that they would be seeing rain soon enough, and that Mighty Lung would soon be digging himself as deep into the dirt as he could to wait out the passage of the bad weather.
He wondered what that said about him.
Serving a man afraid of a light drizzle.
"Uh… boss… you might wanna take a look at this." One of the boys who tagged along with him from Brockton Bay called to him, standing near an open window.
"Close that, before you land us in trouble. We'll see rain soon."
He grunted in annoyance.
The young man, however, didn't respond. Instead, he moved aside to give Kei a full view of the city, the traffic which had seemingly frozen in place, the hurried steps of the people as they took off from the streets and into the safety of whatever building they could find.
More importantly, he could see it.
The pulsing swirl of mist and water that cycled overhead, pulsing as if it was alive, each ripple sending fresh waves of drizzle.
A scar in the heavens.
Water around Brockton Bay was much cleaner these days.
Ever since she forbade people from littering and made it abundantly clear that any waste tossed there would be tossed back out with extreme prejudice, most people shaped up and respected her decision.
Most of them.
She still had to scare people away from time to time with a shark or two.
'You're very fond of that.'
It was only fair to give someone a spook if they thought they could ruin all her hard work. Why, after the first few weeks, Brockton Bay's water was positively sparkling and there were plenty of fish coming in. Maybe she'd have to go about asking what the laws were for fishing, get an industry going if they started multiplying.
'I doubt it. Your city doesn't have the port space for much. Best to focus on one goal at a time.'
Taylor nodded, pushing away the annoyance she felt at being told no.
She had taken the time to think and realized it had little to do with Focalors' pushing back against her, per se. But that she bitterly, miserably loathed those who were simply bystanders. Of course, there was a line between micromanaging the entirety of a population or engaging in the kind of surveillance the CUI would view as "almost good enough" and putting her foot down.
'Making the bay mine is good.'
Gulls squawked and squabbled over stolen fries, a few people walked by the water side as the cool afternoon was gently warmed by the sun's rays, finally chasing away the last of the day's clouds.
Off in the distance a small ship came trundling in, pulling a large solid platform of overflow cargo from Boston, the chubby tug trundling along as calm waters coaxed it back to land.
Behind her the city was quieter, too.
Less horns honking, less hustle and bustle, less… intensity.
'The energy's there. People still move along and live their lives, but there's a little peace to it.' Turning away from her demesne, Fontaine continued her stroll through the former ABB's territory. PHO rumors about them setting up an outpost in Boston aside, things were good. 'Quiet. No calling, no shouting, no brusqueness. And no fear, either.'
There was a sense of… security.
She was proud of that, the realization that what she was doing, that by her being there, was actually making life better for people. Even if it would be a long way before it went beyond the surface.
As for her?
She was lounging on the sandbar.
Who needed to worry about sand or salt or cold when you could simply will it not to touch you? Sure, it was a smidge decadent to do that in full costume, but she was a villain, as she kept pointing out to people, and was allowed to be decadent. And it let her keep an eye on things while still being in earshot of the city itself.
Which meant she didn't need to tell her dad where she was.
Taylor was proud of that particular loophole carving out she'd done, no matter how awkwardly she'd forced herself to phrase it at the time.
Mostly, though, she was ready to get back to work. And that meant figuring out a plan of action. Or at least carving out a rough estimate of what her progress was looking like.
'Well enough, I should say. There have been no fluctuations in the mass or your energy levels in some time.'
'Some time?' Taylor flexed her will and lifted the orb of softly glowing energy up about two feet. 'I've been here for more than an hour.'
'Yes.' Focalors agreed. 'And for about half the time now, you've been handling the exercise. But only when you relax.'
She could see how the mass fluctuated in the sunlight. It was brighter underwater, but, now that she was focusing on it, the power seemed to… strain? Like it did not appreciate being actively constrained and pushed against the limits she placed around it. But Taylor strengthened her grip on the energy, refusing to allow it to expand.
"Damnit!"
And it winked out.
Crushing the ball of power with her mind purely on accident, Taylor grunted in annoyance and tried to conjure it back into being.
'Let it rest.'
'Do we have time for me to let it rest?'
'Yes, dear child.'
Focalors sounded so, so tired in the moment.
'We do.'
Taylor turned her voice over for a few moments and realized something.
'When I crushed it, you were put under strain, weren't you?'
There was silence from the other voice and the young woman knew it was true.
'I'm sorry. I didn't know my mistakes… hurt you.'
'They do not hurt me, but they are a little draining. Let us both relax and we will try again later.'
Swallowing, trying to do just that, she couldn't help but speak her mind.
'I do have a few questions.'
'As do I. Are you going to ask them?'
Rolling her eyes, Taylor ignored the silly woman's word play.
'Yes. I will.'
She just had to parse out which one to start from. Yet, given her circumstances, there was one pressing matter she had to take care of first.
"How do I avoid death?"
That was the biggest concern right now. Though she was powerful and there wasn't much she couldn't do with her powers, the fact they would kill her in a few months was still a problem. Even if she pressed on full steam ahead and tried to get the city back on its feet, that was the work of years, not months.
Anything she did now threatened to be undone as soon as she wasn't around to keep the plates in the air.
'Do you recall when we met within the Primordial Sea?'
The weird mindscape that was supposed to represent her powers, right? The mass of translucent liquid that threatened to swallow her up was hard to forget. Some days she still panicked when going out for a swim, reminded of almost dissolving inside that place.
'Indeed. Right now, the only thing keeping a lid on that pressure is me. Holding back the hydro energy from bursting through the link between you and the reservoir. But that lid cannot last forever, nor will I be able to save you a second time once it's gone.'
Yes, they'd had that conversation before.
But it never went farther than that, even when Taylor started practicing again with her magical powers, it was always with an uncertainty of what she was doing, and whether it would help at all.
"How can I tell that it's working?"
'That is the question, yes. As it stands, you have been getting yourself accustomed to wielding raw hydro energy and that awareness is paramount to regulating the 'pressure' under which you are under. Once you are able to suppress and release this power by yourself, I can regulate the pressure and allow manageable amounts of Hydro to seep through this link.'
But if she took too long and the pressure built up….
'Pop.'
Taylor grimaced. Did she have to put it like that?
'I am as fond of hyperbole as most, but I feel the blunt approach works best in this case.'
The heroine sighed, raising a hand as if to reach over and through the water that surrounded her. There was a brief flash of something in the back of her mind as a familiar blue glow seeped through her fingers and into the water, bubbles of sparkling sapphire floating aimlessly like stars drifting in the night sky.
"How much am I using now?"
This much she could control. This much she could understand and feel comfortable using.
'This should be about a third...'
That wasn't so bad.
'Of a percent.'
"Ok, that was purely for dramatic effect."
Grounching, Taylor pushed the energy away from herself actively. Not rejecting it, but making it go be elsewhere. Which wasn't difficult, but that very little trick wasn't exactly good for much but destressing.
'Perhaps.' The voice tittered. 'But you do need to understand that this will grow exponentially difficult as we proceed. Equally, the more you master, the less strain I will face and the longer we will have. Even just the little you've managed today bought you a few more, hmm, hours, perhaps?'
That trade of almost a week of on and off practice for a few hours of extra time didn't seem to be a winning exchange, but Taylor felt a sense of calm from Focalors. So she decided to follow her lead.
At least for the moment.
'Truly, your progress is acceptable. I would compare it to just a little below the average Oceanid's rate of growth. Which, considering that we started training in the forms of games and play from the moment of our creation, that is remarkable.'
'So I'm behind where a bunch of kids should be? Gotcha.'
Her pride was a little stung, but Taylor was a big girl. She could take it.
'That's not what I said.' Her teacher actually seemed a smidge annoyed. 'Taylor, you are a human and - gah!'
Water rushed around her as Focalors manifested as a body once more, a bubble popping as her clothes fully manifested a single, tiny hat floated down to the top of her head.
"Listen, child, if you have the energy to be dramatic, then we shall be dramatic."
"That's not what I was trying to-!"
A wave of salt water swamped her, sending Taylor sputtering, flailing, and choking until she realized she didn't actually need to breathe. At least not when it was just water around her. So, righting herself, standing up on the sand bar, she glared at Focalors' manifestation and sent a wave right back at her.
"Now, now." The smirking witch simply walked up the side of the attack. "Is that any way to treat your mentor?"
"No. But you didn't pay attention to your surroundings."
Taylor, with her arms crossed, watched in smug satisfaction as a rock she'd had the wave kicked up splashed through the infuriating piece of faux-fabric settled at a jaunty angle just so.
Standing on top of the wave, slowly being pushed out to sea, it took the other girl, with her too perfect hair and too perfect face, a full thirty seconds to respond.
Which she did by suddenly rematerializing ten feet in front of Fontaine, who was by now fully dried out and regal once more.
"I should be proud you realized the advantages of extracting all water from the stone and in its path." Arms stretching out wide, fingers slowly closing around the handle of what looked ominously like a riding crop, the alleged goddess began to cackle. "But the hat was too far! It's time for some discipline, my wayward student!"
By the time the ten story tall tidal wave, pointedly ignoring her commands to please go back out to sea, turned into a giant stuffed capybara of all things, well, Taylor understood she might have fucked up.
Kanmon Straight
3356′49″N 13056′48″E
Jun was a fisherman. Not a particularly glamorous job. Not a particularly interesting one.
He was also watching massive bubbles, each one bigger than his boat, float up and out of the ruins of Kyushu to pop in the sky above. Some popped as they rose, showering the small boat in specks of blue light. Others climbed higher and farther into the sky.
"Huh."
His feet scraped against the smooth deck of the ship, as almost nonexistent waves gently pushed him up and down.
"Don't see that every day."
Hauling in the last of his nets, he couldn't afford to leave any of them behind, he watched as they burst in mid air. Sending out spiraling webs of blue-green energy into the clouds.
"I hope they aren't radioactive."
Some part of him told him that this was going to be trouble. And probably the sort of trouble that caused him a sudden shortage of good fishing grounds. So he wasn't exactly pleased by this recent development. Still, his catch was loaded and his work was done for the day.
He had a few minutes to stare in wonder as a bubble larger than his boat rose from the depths. When it failed to pop and instead hung overhead, Jun decided to do the smart thing and call it for the day.
"Souls flying free, soaring on ocean breezes, drifting with clouds."
Nodding, he resolved to write a poem about this properly when he was back home. If he hurried now, he'd probably make it before the authorities, whatever was left of them, showed up to investigate what was happening.
Minister Shirasagi was a good man.
But that didn't mean his men were liked. And those around Kyushu rarely had the luxury to do anything but fish for ghosts. If only because their fellow citizens could not bear to look on such a grave without sadness in their hearts. So it made sense that those who would police such a place would be hard, too, so they might do their work with dignity.
"Amidst the heavens, the moon rises with the tide."
In the distance, Jun heard thunder, and made haste. The last thing he wanted to do was get caught by a storm at sea.
Damaged boats were expensive to repair and made little money.
Hadhayosh's Scar
3051′13″N 4950′19″E
"Do you believe lightning can strike twice?"
"Sir?"
The man out front, an older general who had been called upon to save the nation following the disaster that once took place in Marun, didn't turn around. Instead, the veteran's eyes never once left the heavens above, the sight of cloying smoke pillars rising into the air a familiar sight for anyone stationed at the now abandoned oil field.
Even now, nearly two decades since the demon they called Behemoth rose from the depths, the oil fields continued to burn, necessitating their country to keep a tight vigil should the flames threaten to spill forth into the remains of their land.
What claimed their attention, however, was not the tragedy of days gone by.
But the sword hanging above their heads.
There, amongst the darkened plumes of soot and ash, hung the strange phenomena they reported. There, almost like cracks in the sky, were strange rivulets of blue light. A spiderweb of coursing rivers, flowing from thin air into what looked like a rippling mass of water.
When it first appeared, the General assumed it was the work of some parahuman.
There had been some such being talked about amongst the higher ups lately, but it was nothing but gossip that a glorified janitor like him wasn't privy to. Yet when he received calls to evacuate the nearby areas, he assumed there was something else afoot.
So Cyrus did as he was commanded to and led his men and issued a warning to the closest areas.
Even so, he refused to keep his eyes off it.
"Do you believe it is one of the other monsters?"
Cyrus shook his head.
"The creature haunts the deep and strikes at our shores. It never has shown any interest in dry land." He never heard it capable of bringing along this much water unless it was pulling it from the sea.
No, this was something else entirely.
"We should have evacuated with the others."
Cyrus nodded.
"Yes, that was my order to you."
The young man, a parahuman with uncommon green eyes and a short mane of dark hair stepped closer, standing beside him.
"And leave you alone? I believe that would be cowardice in the extreme."
Cyrus snorted, feeling every bit his own age as he watched the spectacle unfold above them. Not unlike glass which struggled and buckled under pressure, the heavens themselves seemingly buckled as more spiderweb cracks spread across the plume of smoke.
"I hope you can run fast then, for both of our sakes."
For a moment the young man seemed lost, hefting a short polished bow over his shoulder as he turned from the General to witness the heavens as they finally swelled and burst, a torrential flood bursting forth as if a waterfall had crashed through the firmament.
Cyrus committed the image to memory.
He planned to remember it for however short a time he had left.
The moment Hadhayosh's flame was put out… and a rain without reason swallowed the land.