Walking along next to her dad, Taylor looked around. It was a fine early morning, just before seven AM, and they'd decided that as they were a little earlier than the others, they'd go outside and wander around the hotel area for a bit, mostly to familiarize themselves with it. This applied much more to her dad than her, of course, as she could easily find her way around a large part of the entire city at this point. And, in many ways, was doing exactly that even as she accompanied him.
It was fun being her, she thought not for the first time, with an inner contented smile.
They were currently exploring the outdoor pool area, her dad examining the large and rather elaborate artificial body of water with an impressed look. "That's a pretty nice pool," he commented, nodding at the glittering blue liquid, which was nearly dead still. A single young woman had just got in at the far end and as they watched started swimming with strong strokes, clearly practiced at the task.
"Yeah, I'm definitely going to enjoy that," she replied with a smile. "The indoor one isn't quite that big but it's pretty impressive too. This is a good hotel."
"I've never stayed here before," he noted, "although I've been to LA quite a few times. Usually at places not quite so high end though." Turning to look to the east, he added, "Handy for the conference center too." The huge building just across the road was the location of the shipping conference would be held in, and as far as she could tell at least two thirds of the attendees were in the same hotel. It made sense, as this was the normally off-season time, so the hotel would probably usually be under-used at this time of year. Which presumably was one of the reasons this location had been picked in the first place, and likely the time too.
"It's a hell of a lot hotter in the middle of summer," he went on with a reminiscent smile. "I've been here in August once and it was almost unbearable. This is pretty nice at the moment."
"Yeah, warm enough to be comfortable, but not too hot," Taylor agreed. Double-checking that no one was close enough to overhear, the nearest person being the girl in the pool and over thirty yards away, she tentatively asked, "Dad? Does the name Geoffrey Fields mean anything to you?"
He glanced at her in curiosity. "Geoffrey Fields? Why do you ask?" As she opened her mouth, he looked thoughtful. "Huh… Now I think about it… that does ring a bell. Where do I know it from?"
"What about combined with the date April nineteenth, nineteen ninety five?"
Her dad stopped dead two steps further on, Taylor halting too, watching his face go through a series of odd expressions, before settling into a sort of annoyed realization.
"April nineteenth, you say?" he queried in a very flat voice.
"Yeah."
"Oddly enough I find myself recalling a name and a face now. I won't forget that date any time soon, nor will any of the rest of the people who were there." He rubbed his chin as he examined her, Taylor shrugging apologetically, before he began walking again fairly slowly. Neither of them said anything for a minute or so.
"Who is he really?" he finally asked, in a tone that suggested he had a fairly good idea of the basic issue in play.
"His real name is Charles Young. Apparently he was a navy SEAL, they kicked him out for misconduct, some sort of dishonorable discharge I think."
Her dad looked sidelong at her, his eyes hard. "Let me guess. He found new employment with someone we know."
"Oh, yeah, he did that all right. Galveston Investigations LLC, which is owned by Detection International, Inc, which in turn is funded by WWM, Inc." Taylor watched her father absorb the information.
"Your friend is very good at her job," he muttered after a few seconds, sounding coldly furious to a level she'd seldom heard before.
"Young was also known as Michael Stevens and Ben Chesterton," she added with a nod of agreement. He thought, then shook his head slowly.
"Neither sounds familiar. Nor does Charles Young, but I guess that's obvious. Geoffrey Fields, though… Him I remember. Kurt would recognize the name too, he met him quite a few times." Her dad was scowling, making her sorry to have brought back what were apparently unfortunate memories, but he needed to know. They walked on in silence for a little while, rounding the end of the pool and heading along the far side in the opposite direction to that which the woman in it was swimming. She reached the end and flipped neatly, then began swimming back, Taylor watching idly and thinking that whoever it was had good technique. Eventually he sighed very quietly.
"I try not to think too hard about those days," he commented quietly. "Bad things happened. A lot of people got hurt. Some didn't make it. Many of them friends of mine, or your mom's."
"You've told me some of it, and I overheard you talking to Mom about it more than a few times," she replied as quietly, watching the sun rise behind the buildings.
"Yeah, guess I did," he nodded. "But I didn't tell you everything, believe me. It wasn't something you'd tell a child."
"And now?"
"You're not a child any more, Taylor. You're a very intelligent and thoughtful young woman I am extremely proud of," he said with a glance at her, meeting her eyes with his own gaze, in which she could see the truth of his words. She nodded her understanding. Motioning to his left with his head, he added, "Let's sit here." Both of them moved to where some outdoor furniture was clustered around a low table, all of it clean and neatly positioned, the hotel staff having gone over it just after Taylor woke. He sat on one of the chairs, she taking another next to him, and both leaned back. Crossing his legs at the ankle he stared towards where the Pacific could just be made out through a gap in the buildings, around a quarter of a mile distant.
The pair were silent for a while, Taylor letting him think, until he turned to look at her. "The whole thing didn't happen out of nowhere," he began, as she listened carefully. "It was the end result of years of trouble. The Union was a lot bigger then, of course, we had thousands of people working on the docks, and lots of associated businesses. The Dockworker's Association was by far the largest, but there were… nine, maybe ten, other unions connected to it just there, and we had good relations with every other union in the city and for that matter the state. Lots of shipping going in and out of the Bay, up to Canada, all the way down to the Gulf, across the Atlantic… Far from the amount of work there was in the heyday of the port, back in the fifties and sixties, but still a hell of a lot of things going on."
She nodded, understanding what he was explaining. A lot of that she already knew, both from her parents and from school, although Winslow had never really bothered with actual teaching for the most part.
"Of course things weren't exactly rosy though," he sighed. "Trade was steadily dropping due to any number of problems. Leviathan was the big one, obviously, even though as far as I know he's never actually gone after any shipping at sea. Wrecked a lot of cities on the coast though. But people were, and are, terrified of the fucking things, and one way or another that really screwed up the shipping industry. Which in turn severely affected the Bay. But it had been going downhill for, oh, a couple of decades at that point anyway. It just got worse after Leviathan turned up. More and more freight was moved by air, which hit the shipping industry fairly hard. That made the railways less profitable, which had knock on effects back to shipping. It fed on itself in a sense. And that caused a lot of job losses in the Bay, and in other ports around the country. Around the world, for that matter."
Pausing, he gazed at something only he could see, something she suspected was far distant in both time and space, before continuing. "I'd been involved in the union one way or another since I was only a little older than you. Dad was in it his entire life. I grew up with the Docks being right there, always knew I'd end up working somewhere locally, and I was fine with that. I wanted that, really. Friends, work you could be proud of, helping everyone else as they helped you… It's not paradise, not at all, but it was honest and rewarding effort." He grinned briefly at her as she smiled. "Your mom didn't have quite the same background of course, which is probably one of the reasons her mom wasn't entirely keen on me. But Annette was completely in favor of the Union, and liked everyone there. Which was very much reciprocated. And of course her own… proclivities… tended towards jumping in if needed." He grinned again in a rather odd manner, making her giggle.
"I mean, I met her at a protest at College, after all. Nearly got laid out by her and her baseball bat, for that matter. Good thing I ducked quick in those days."
Taylor's eyes widened slightly, making him smirk a little. "Oh, yeah, your mom had some interesting skills," he chuckled. "And wasn't shy about direct action when required. Of course that whole Lustrum thing got out of hand a little later, and luckily I got tipped off early enough by a friend that I was able to get Annette out before it all went to crap. Along with some others, friends of hers, who listened to me. Quite a few didn't and they… well, let's say it didn't end exactly how they'd have wanted it." He sighed with a shrug. "Some people won't let you help them no matter how much you try, and in the end you just have to let them handle it themselves. Anyway, that's another story for another time. The point is, your mom was definitely Union material even if she wasn't, technically, part of the Dock Worker's Association. She fully supported me and the rest of us. And in some ways was more of a firebrand about strikes than I was…"
"The things you learn about your parents," Taylor mused out loud, smiling to herself, which made him snort.
"Tell me about it. One day…" He shook his head as she peered at him with interest. "Long story for another time again. Anyway…" Clasping one wrist with the other hand he massaged it as if he was recalling a distant pain, making her look at it for a moment, then go back to watching his face. "Around October ninety four things kind of came to a head. Several of the shipping companies that did the bulk of the work in and out of the Bay were complaining that profits were down, and started making cuts all over the place. It started off fairly simply, as it always does. A little less overtime here, a couple of positions moved around there. We'd seen it before, it was the usual sort of thing the management did all the time to try to get the most work out of people for the least pay, but it wasn't too blatant. People grumbled about it, sometimes one of the shop stewards had to go complain to someone higher up, occasionally that actually worked, more often they came back with excuses from the shipping owners that… kind of made sense. Enough that the grumbling died down for a week or two."
"And then they'd do it again," she commented, fairly certain she knew where this was going.
"Yeah. Classic salami slice process. Take a little off the top, wait for the complaints to die down, do it again. And again, and again, until in the end you have the whole sausage and everyone else starves to death. Problem is it works. Each little change is so small it's not worth the effort of putting a lot of time into fixing, but the cumulative effect is huge." He sighed a little, still absently massaging his wrist. "Like wage theft, which is another example of the same damn thing. Biggest theft of all time, in a way. Companies asking their workers to do just a little more after they clock out, or maybe just ten minutes before they clock in, or could you just come in for half an hour on Saturday to help out, sorry we can't pay overtime, the economy isn't ideal at the moment you see… Each worker loses a fairly small amount, yeah, although in some cases it's ridiculously exploitative, but the total amount of time stolen from the workers is absolutely insane. Billions and billions of dollars worth of labor that doesn't get paid for every year. The companies make a vastly larger profit and the workers, the only reason the company even exists, find their lives just that little bit harder. Less money, less time, more stress… it all adds up. All of it to siphon time and money from the less well off directly into the pockets of the ones who are already so rich they couldn't spend it all in a hundred lifetimes even if they tried."
He glanced at her, his expression distant and depressed. "Yet they still want more. People like that, they're…" Her dad shook his head. "Sociopaths, if not worse, for the most part. Other people are just… obstacles in the way of them winning the game. Whoever dies with the most money wins or something fucking idiotic like that. I don't fucking know, it doesn't make a lick of sense if you really think about it, but I've met people like that. I've had to hold them off for pretty much my entire working life, and the destruction they've caused to the country, the world… It's worse than an Endbringer, just a lot more subtle for the most part. They seem to look at everything and think 'One day I'll own all that. And if I can't have it, no one can.' Not a thought spared for the other ninety nine point nine nine percent of us. We're just pieces on the game board, disposable means to an end."
Taylor was silent as he took a moment to come back from whatever memory he'd lost himself in for a little while, which wasn't a pleasant one based on his expression. Eventually he carried on in a low voice. "Sorry. I try not to rant about this sort of crap but thinking about those days brings it all back much too clearly."
She put her hand on his shoulder and rested it there, smiling a little. "I understand, Dad."
Taking a couple of breaths, he smiled back. "I know you do. Far better than a lot of people can." He shook his head briefly. "It's hard to explain this sort of thing to some people without them thinking you're some sort of communist or something. Way too many people already think that unions are suspicious as it is. Not helped by some of the historical problems, of course. But… the only reason we even have labor laws, protection of workers, hell, even OSHA and things like that, is because unions fought like hell for it. For everyone. God knows what it would be like if all those things vanished one day, but I guarantee it would ruin more lives absolutely everywhere than I can even imagine. What we do, what I've spent my adult life doing, is important."
Falling silent again, both of them sat there and watched the swimming woman start her sixth length of the pool, until he resumed talking as she neared the midpoint. "So anyway, minor union diatribe aside, that was what was happening in late ninety four. We'd seen it before, of course, and usually things settled down after a while, the unions fought back, everyone shouted at each other on and off for a couple of months, and life went back to more or less normal. Except… That time, it didn't." Glancing back at her he shrugged. "They just kept going. More and more cuts happened, lots of very dubious business deals were made in the shadows, we kept finding out that the company owners had been sneaking around doing stupid shit without informing any of the union members about what they'd planned until it got dropped on them with no warning… You can imagine that didn't make anyone happy." Taylor nodded with a grimace.
"Warnings were given, even from some of the smaller company owners who could see what would happen if that sort of crap kept building up. I mean, they're not actually stupid, and some of them weren't even malicious. They wanted to make a living same as anyone else. But a company with two freighters and about a hundred employees is way different from a vast multinational with an entire fleet, tens of thousands of people working for it, and a valuation around that of the GDP of a small country. You can generally deal fairly with the first one without too much effort and everyone knows it. The other type… half the time you don't even know who actually owns the fucking ships. It's one hell of a mess of shell companies all over the place, hidden investors, money being shuffled around from account to account specifically to avoid anyone knowing where it came from or where it went, all manner of tax avoidance methods being leveraged like you wouldn't believe… Even the government probably can't work half of it out. Even if you assume the companies didn't have their own bought and paid for senators, which I know for a fact was and is true. And those companies absolutely consider the workers a part of the machine that costs them money and ideally could be done away with. They really don't like anything that costs them money. It's supposed to go the other way, of course."
He smiled a little grimly as she chuckled.
"So the bigger shipping companies, the ones that accounted for about eighty percent of the business going through Brockton at that point, ignored all the rumblings and kept on playing with peoples lives. It got to the point that the amount of work being done by each worker doubled from what was a sustainable level, while they kept cutting jobs and loading more and more onto the people who were left. Add in lots of tricks to claim no one was owed more money for that work, dubious methods being used to reduce benefits, increase hours, remove safety precautions because they'd slow things down too much and cost more… It was a total mess by the end. Everyone involved kept calling for negotiations, having all the layoffs reversed, even just a simple sit down meeting to explain how all this was going to end really badly, but the companies simply would not listen." Her dad shook his head as she listened and watched.
"There were so many attempts at trying to get them to see sense, and we had all the evidence you'd ever want that none of this was sustainable, or even legal in most cases. Didn't stop them. So in the end, the only option left was industrial action. A couple of small strikes were called, which we thought might do the job, and for perhaps a month we thought it had done the job. We got several high level people to meet with us, held talks with them pointing out all the ways this was going to end really badly, for them and us, and honestly thought we'd made our case."
He shrugged tiredly, leaning his head back on the chair and staring at the sky. "Unfortunately it turned out later than this had all been a delaying tactic by them. Even while they'd been holding the talks with us, they were setting up a whole series of mergers and company ownership transfers that were obviously designed at moving as much money out of the city as they could manage. We didn't find out until too late what they'd planned, which in the end was the catalyst for a general strike that encompassed the entire dock area. Everyone walked out, downed tools, and told them that nothing would move in or out until they came back to the table and held honest negotiations."
"Which they didn't."
"Which they didn't, correct," he agreed sourly. "They instead brought in about four hundred people of their own to resume work, which I guarantee you cost more than it would have done to pay us a fair wage for the same job. Of course the various unions nearly exploded in rage at industrial-scale scabbing like that, and within a week the entire city had pretty much gone on strike. Every associated union within fifty miles walked out in sympathy with the dock workers, and it even had knock on effects in Boston and Portland. Of course that made the assholes dig their heels in even harder, because if they buckled, they'd have to stick to the deal and it would have been a massive boost to unions everywhere. They knew full well it was make or break. We weren't going to give in, we were in it for the long haul, and the support we had was amazing. Anyone even loosely connected with labor in Brockton Bay was well aware that if these bastards got their way it was the beginning of the end for an awful lot of businesses. Even the city administration was… well, not on our side per se, but oddly quiet about things."
"So what kicked off the riot?" she asked curiously.
He glanced at her, then went back to studying a far distant aircraft that was coming in to land at LAX. "There was always some question over that," he replied after a moment. "It went from a relatively peaceful if quite boisterous strike, about a month or so in, to total chaos practically instantly. There were reports coming in of strikers attacking cops, and of cops attacking strikers, and gang members going after both sides. All of that happened within a couple of hours, early one morning, without any warning at all. There were news articles from Boston and New York full of photos and incendiary reporting on how the Dock Workers had rioted and were rampaging around the city, and the funny thing is that at least half of those articles would have to have been written at least a few hours before it all kicked off." Her dad gave her a meaningful look, making her nod her understanding.
"Amazing timing those reporters had, really," he added sarcastically. "Almost like they'd known in advance somehow. Odd thing was that at least four of them vanished afterwards, and the newspapers claimed they had no idea who they were or where they'd gone."
"How very strange," she commented wryly. "I can't imagine how that came about."
"No. It's a complete mystery." After a moment or two he resumed, "We always knew it was outside agitators who started everything, but we couldn't prove it. Several people who had only been in the city for a few months kept popping up in the middle of it all, then disappearing again just in time to avoid the consequences. The main one was our friend Geoffrey Fields, who somehow managed to keep accidentally being right there when something violent started going off. No one ever actually saw him throw the first brick, or pick up the first baseball bat or crowbar, but I certainly noticed him in the thick of it more than once. Kurt and several other people said the same thing, all in different places. And now that I think about it, the last place anyone reported seeing him was near the mooring for the tug that was assigned to the container ship, which was anchored about two miles from the docks in deep water. It had been there for nearly six weeks by then, since no one would dock it or unload it due to the strikes. Somehow it found itself right across the entrance to the bay with all the seacocks open and at least two hull breaches, and not one single person I ever met would admit to having been involved. Believe me, I checked, and so did a lot of people."
"Let me guess. He vanished right after that."
"You are wise beyond your years. Damn right he vanished. Along with quite a lot other people we really wanted a word with," her dad agreed with a scowl. "Several bus loads of them, actually. By that point the riot was in full swing, and was a riot by then. It was… very nasty indeed." His face showed disquiet, making her wonder again what he'd seen years back.
"A lot of people got badly injured, and at least a dozen people I knew, friends of mine, didn't make it," he added quietly. "The death toll was nearly a hundred and fifty in the end, all across the city. About fifteen cops, two Parahumans, one minor hero and one minor villain, both of who tried to help and paid the price for it, over a hundred dock workers, and quite a few random civilians who just were in the wrong place at the wrong time. At least four times that injured to one degree or another. And something like thirty buildings burned to the ground, over eighty ships cast adrift or sunk, including the container vessel, god knows how many cars and trucks wrecked… It was a really big mess and cost the city millions. And of course absolutely fucked the economy, so the final bill was much higher over the years. By the time it finally burned out nearly four days later, the city was in shock, the DWA was crippled and being blamed for the whole thing, the bay was blocked to the point no shipping could get in or out… And the people who I know damn well were behind the whole thing had disappeared like the mist in the morning."
"No one ever looked into that?" she queried.
He sighed. "We tried to get the authorities to chase up the people we knew had started the riots, but they basically didn't believe us. There was no real proof, it was our word against that of the shipping companies, all of which swore up and down it was a terrible accident and all the fault of those pesky dock workers who wanted a fair day's pay for a fair day's work, the swine, so in the end they just went with the easy option and claimed we'd started the whole thing. We know we didn't, and there are a lot of people in Brockton and other places who believe us for various reasons, but the official story was that it was a major strike that got out of hand. And it still is."
Scratching his neck for a moment, he dropped his hand to his leg and shook his head. "We tried for years to find some evidence to prove what had really happened but never managed it. In the end everyone more or less gave up and moved on with their lives. The shipping companies all used the whole thing as a convenient excuse to bail on the city, since there was no way to get anything much bigger than a rowboat past the sunken container vessel, they filed a lot of insurance claims which all got paid off suspiciously rapidly, and that was that. Brockton Bay was a port no more, from a commercial viewpoint at least. Thousands of people lost their jobs almost immediately, and the Docks died for all intents and purposes. The DWA hung on, like it always does, and has done for two centuries or more, but it's been incredibly difficult since then. As you know."
"Yeah," she agreed sadly, thinking of the last few years.
"So that's basically the story. I mean, there's far more to it if you really want to hear it some day, but I could talk for hours about all the things that happened then and we don't have the time now," her dad said, sitting up a little. "But I think we can be pretty sure from what you and your friend have found out that WWM, Inc is probably the cause of all of it. If they had Geoffrey Fields on their payroll, I'd be stunned if they weren't also paying for all the other people who so mysteriously turned up then disappeared after everything hit the fan. And I'd be very interested in who the beneficiaries of those insurance policies were. I can guarantee there was a hell of a lot of extremely dubious actions going on in that area. Shipping insurance is absolutely rife with fraud at the best of times anyway, but even in those terms the whole thing stunk. No one settles a claim as big as that container ship was that fast. It normally takes months, even years, but from what I recall they got paid inside a week. A huge amount of money too, I wouldn't be surprised to learn it was well over the actual value of the damn thing."
"I think I know someone who can answer a few of those questions," Taylor replied with a secretive smile, which made him chuckle.
"If she can, that would probably help a lot." He looked towards the conference center. "Because I have a very good idea that a lot of people who were involved back then are going to be right over there tomorrow…"
She followed his eyes, nodded, and got up as he did, the pair of them heading in for breakfast a little later than they'd originally planned. She was mulling over his words, even as on the other side of the country she was reading the notes she'd taken while he spoke and working out the best queries to hand over to Lisa.
Taylor suspected that her new friend was going to enjoy digging into the things she wanted to investigate. And she was going to enjoy making sure that the people behind it all found justice staring them in the face at some point soon…
For her dad and all his friends, if nothing else.
"A giant dragonfly."
Amy's voice was completely flat, while around her the other people at the table were listening with interest.
"You're telling me you went flying and raced a giant dragonfly around the city. One that can fly at five hundred miles an hour."
She didn't sound convinced. Dennis, sitting on the opposite side of the table next to Chris, who was next to Amy, seemed to be trying to hide a grin. Dean, next to Vicky, and Carlos, next to him, were staring at her with odd expressions.
"Yes!" Vicky insisted for the third time. "It was at least as large as I am. Wingspan was probably eight feet or maybe even more. And it was incredibly quick and agile. I've never seen anything like it."
"No one has since the Late Carboniferous and even back then they didn't get that large," her sister remarked with a sigh. "And no insect alive can possibly fly so fast. The biology simply won't support so much energy output. It would burst into flames at a tiny fraction of that sort of power level."
"I don't burst into flames and I can do nearly two hundred and fifty miles an hour," Vicky replied, grabbing her soda and taking a long swig. "Explain that." She smirked at the other girl who glared at her, visibly trying to come up with a riposte. And failing.
"Yeah, Amy, how does Vicky fly?" Dennis asked cheerfully, before flinching when Amy turned a dark gaze on him.
"You know full well no one understands how Parahuman powers work, Dennis," the brunette grated. She'd been in a slightly grumpy mood since she woke up, Vicky thought, and seemed to be taking much of the world as a personal insult at the moment. Which wasn't that unusual, admittedly, but her sister had been a lot better about such things for some time. Hopefully she'd cheer up after she got some more food into her.
"Well, maybe Vicky's little friend is a ParaInsect, did you ever think of that?" Chris said after swallowing his mouthful of tuna casserole. Amy transferred her gaze to him, which seemed to mildly worry the boy, but then she looked back at her plate and frowned.
"There's no such thing," she replied slowly.
"What about the HOUS?"
Amy was silent for some seconds, then sighed. "I have no idea about the HOUS. I can't explain that either." Viciously stabbing her chicken with her fork, she muttered, "Which is really damned annoying. I have to get a look at that thing…" Everyone else at the table heard the aggrieved low comment and exchanged glances. After a moment, Chris seemed to decide not to ask.
Instead he said, "So we've already got proof of one insect far too big to be possible without something to do with powers. Why not two?"
"It irritates me I can't find an answer to that," Amy growled.
"Might even be three if some of the rumors on PHO are right," Dennis helpfully added. The rest now looked at him, Amy particularly intently.
"What do you mean?" Carlos asked before Amy, who was clearly about to, spoke.
The red-head shrugged. "Some rumors on PHO are saying that the Empire bust the other day, the one that got Stormtiger and Alabaster, had something to do with some sort of enormous bug. One guy claimed it was a spider the size of a truck, someone else claimed it was a giant cockroach… No two stories are the same, and there's no proof of course. Just like that guy Laotsunn, the one who gets drunk at people and complains about there being two HOUSs. No photo, no evidence, not a lot of people believing him. Maybe Vicky's imaginary dragonfly is the same thing." He grinned as Vicky stared at him with her eyebrows up.
"If it exists of course."
"Which it does."
"Yet you bring us no photos. You, the girl with the fastest thumbs in the west, who posts at least two dozen photos a day to several internet forums." He smiled slyly at Vicky, who groaned and put her head in her hands.
"I forgot, all right?" she mumbled. "I got caught up in the chase and then I was so shocked I completely forgot I had my phone right there. And by the time I remembered the fucking thing had vanished."
"Of course you did," Dennis soothed. "I'm sure you'll remember the next time you get the zoomies and race a giant dragonfly."
"I will hurt you, little man," she threatened, raising her head and meeting his eyes. He winked with a smile.
"Nah, you love me. We both know it."
"Just keep thinking that. One day…"
Amy, who had been frowning at her chicken, deep in thought, put in, "Giant spider?" in a slightly bemused voice.
They turned to her again. "That's one of the rumors, yeah," Dennis confirmed, shuddering a little. He was not fond of bugs, and apparently mention of spiders was enough to start his imagination working. "I sure hope it is just a rumor. That fucking hornet is bad enough."
"What about the dragonfly?" Vicky demanded. "Doesn't that count as horrifying too?"
"If it existed, sure, but…" Dennis grinned at her as she scowled. "Bring us proof and we'll add it to the list. Without that, well…" He shrugged helplessly as she sighed heavily. "You know the rules as well as I do."
"There's no such rule and you know it."
"Photos or it didn't happen."
"You are such a pain in the ass."
"Just one of my many gifts!"
"For…" The blonde ran a hand down her face, then very deliberately turned away from Dennis's smirk and looked at her sister. "Are you feeling better now?" she queried, ignoring how Dennis was chuckling under his breath.
"Better?" Amy queried, looking up from her food where she'd apparently been deep in thought. "I'm fine. What are you talking about?"
"You were old grumpy Amy for a while there."
"Yeah, not new grumpy Amy," Dennis chipped in with a smile. "She's even more sarcastic. I like her."
"Shut up, Dennis," both Amy and Vicky said at the same time, before exchanging a look and laughing for a moment. After a second, Amy sighed faintly with a shrug. "Sorry," she added, "I was really tired even after sleeping in and I had a headache. Too much caffeine last night, I guess."
"Pity your powers don't work on you," Carlos commented, smiling sympathetically.
"Yeah, I know," she agreed with a frown. "It's annoying. But that's life. Oh well. But yeah, I feel better now that I've eaten. Low blood sugar too, probably." She yawned widely, before returning to eating. "Are you sure about the dragonfly?" she asked her sister a few seconds later.
"Yes!" Vicky growled. "It's real and it's stupid fast. And has a weird sense of humor."
"God. This city just gets stranger and stranger, doesn't it?" Amy sighed, before shaking her head and getting back to the important task of wrapping herself around her lunch. Her sister grinned, shrugged, and did the same.
But the brunette girl was still thinking hard about giant, impossible arthropods for the rest of the day.
It was a puzzle, and one she was getting more and more interesting in solving. Somehow...
Reading the report Aegis had filed via the Wards encrypted portal during lunch at Arcadia, Emily sighed heavily. She raised her eyes to meet those of her deputy, who just shrugged, then looked at Armsmaster and Miss Militia, the two capes having also just read the same thing she had.
"Now a giant dragonfly of all things. What the hell is going on?"
"I have no idea, Director," Armsmaster replied after some seconds, his voice conveying a certain amount of resigned bewilderment. "Based on Glory Girl's testimony, the creature would seem, like with the HOUS, to be a scaled up version of an extant insect. Although obviously without any corroborating evidence such as photographs or video, it's hard to be sure she is accurately reporting what happened."
"You think she's making it up?" Emily asked, almost hopefully. Her face fell when he shook his head.
"As it happens, no, I don't believe she is mistaken. On balance the young woman is quite honest and more observant than most. Her eye-witness testimony, although it likely suffers as is almost always the case from inaccuracy due to simple human nature, is likely to still be much more accurate than that of a wholly untrained bystander. As such I tend to believe what she claims happened did in fact happen and was reported correctly and truthfully, within the limits of her knowledge and experience."
He paused for a moment then added, "Additionally I checked the air traffic control records from the Protectorate base scanning system, and it logged her transponder's ID code this morning during a flight that covered some twenty eight and a half miles total distance between roughly ten and eleven AM, at altitudes up to flight level one five zero and speeds of close to two hundred and fifty miles per hour peak. Which is rather faster than I was aware she could reach, in fact. The flight path on the outbound leg was fairly straightforward, showing a simple recreational trip out to sea for some distance then returning, while shortly after reentering the airspace of the city, the last half of the flight showed extreme high g maneuvers consistent with a very fast pursuit of something. It matches well with what she claimed."
"Did anything else show up on radar or any other scanners?" Emily queried.
"Not as such, no. There were intermittent very faint returns on radar that might have been from something organic roughly the size of a human, but the system is not optimized for tracking non-human living creatures moving that fast. If it was this putative giant dragonfly, which unfortunately I can't prove, the peak speed recorded was absurd. Barely below supersonic velocity, in fact." He shook his head as she and the other two stared at him in shock. "However, as I said, the system isn't designed for tracking something of that nature, and it's possible the signal was either a sensor ghost caused by the heavy fog below a thousand feet, which does sometimes happen despite our best efforts, or reflections from an actual object interfering with scattered returns from the city. The fog blocked thermal scans very effectively so there was nothing useful on that system, and currently we don't have anything else configured for this sort of job."
"Considering how many flying Parahumans there are just in Brockton Bay that seems like something of a hole in security," Renick commented, causing the Tinker to glance at him.
"This is true, yes," Armsmaster agreed with a nod. "Budgetary constraints are partly to blame, of course. And most flight-capable Parahumans either carry some form of transponder, or have enough metallic objects on their person, such as phones, or flight systems, that we can get a reasonably good sensor return on them at least at fairly close range. Even villains, who tend not to comply with FAA regulations. So it's not been a priority matter since we've had far more pressing problems to deal with over the years, which has absorbed the budget we do have far too effectively. I have brought this up in the past as something that should be addressed but…" He shrugged, and Emily sighed again. The man was right. She could recall almost this exact conversation eighteen months ago, and the point had been mentioned to head office, who had basically said no, there wasn't any earmarked funding for the sort of system he wanted, which was pretty damned expensive even in such terms.
And now they were finding out the repercussions of that policy. Which wasn't surprising but was annoying.
Once again in the privacy of her own mind she cursed the Chief Director and her penny-pinching. How the hell she was supposed to do her job properly while her superiors seemed to go out of their way to avoid providing more than the minimum support was a vexing question she still didn't have an answer to. One day she was determined to find out what the hell was behind the whole thing.
"All right. Assuming that Glory Girl is being both honest and accurate for the sake of argument, where does that leave us?" she mused out loud as she spun a pen through her fingers, thinking hard. "Yet another outsize insect that appears to have only a vague connection with the laws of physics. Clearly some form of power at work, although at this point we don't know for sure if it's a Parahuman power, something from another world, goddamn aliens, or anything else useful."
"That would appear to be the facts, yes," the Tinker replied.
"We have no idea where they're coming from, where they go, whether they're bioconstructs resulting from a wet Tinker, dimensional visitors, projections, mass hallucinations… Am I missing anything?"
"Changer is still vaguely possible although it seems less likely with each example for a number of reasons both obvious and esoteric," Armsmaster remarked after some thought and a glance around at the others, who were all listening closely. "A projection would appear unlikely, at least in the case of SHE, as we have examples of spider silk left behind. It was definitely created by a living creature, although the DNA traces so far analyzed don't match anything on record. They do correspond well in general with some sort of new species of spider though, and it would appear from the preliminary results to be at least vaguely related to other terrestrial species."
"So not an alien then."
"Probably not although we can't yet rule out a dimensional analog of some form. The DNA results would still match what we have even if the spider originated on a different version of our planet. We can be reasonably certain it didn't evolve on a completely alien world. I think." He didn't look entirely convinced of his own words, she noticed, but she accepted them on face value as it was much simpler and removed a whole slew of potential issues she really didn't fancy thinking too hard about right now.
"Unfortunately we don't have samples from either the HOUS or… whatever we call this new one," he added. "So there's no way to compare those to known terrestrial insects. However we do have enough visual data on the HOUS, as we've previously discussed, to be certain it's a vastly enlarged version of a known species. The dragonfly, going on the description Glory Girl gave, certainly sounds like it is also most likely a similarly outsize version of an existing species. I checked, and there are a remarkably large number of different dragonfly species known to science, some three thousand at last count. And if you include the order Odonata, bringing in damselflies as well, which look to an untrained observer very similar to true dragonflies, that increases the count quite significantly. However the subject is not my field of expertise so I can't add more than what I found through some basic research."
Emily dropped the pen and ran her hands over her face, groaning. "And of course that means I'm going to have to ask that madman of an entomologist yet again to utterly terrify everyone with some wonderfully fascinating facts about dragonflies…"
"Professor Brooks is the obvious source of data on the subject," Armsmaster agreed calmly. She glared at him through her fingers, then lowered her hands and glared more. To her immense irritation the Tinker appeared to actually like the entomologist, the pair of them getting on much too well, and proving to her once more that Parahumans and Academics had far too many similarities for her mental wellbeing…
"It's a pity Glory Girl didn't have the presence of mind to acquire some photographic evidence, but we'll have to live without it," he added helpfully. "Perhaps she can describe it more accurately than the second hand report from Aegis…" His voice trailed off as he made some notes on the tablet he was still holding. "I'll check."
"You do that," she said tiredly. "While I'll call BBU and ask our local insane insect expert if he'd consult again on yet another insane insect. Christ. I have no idea what is happening in this city any more."
"Far less crime," Renick put in with a small smile.
"Which I doubt we can put at the many feet of our various arthropod visitors no matter how hard we try," she grumbled, looking through her address folder. "Wherever they're visiting from. The worst part is I can't help wondering what the next one is going to be."
"You expect more?" Miss Militia asked. Emily paused, her hand on the computer mouse, and fixed the younger woman with a hard look.
"One is an incident. Two is a worry. Three is a pattern," she grated. "Four is inevitable."
The room was quiet as she picked up the phone and dialed.
"Professor Brooks? This is Emily Piggot again. We've got another problem we need your expertise for."
The delight in his voice as he accepted her invitation to expound on his favorite subject was, in some ways, the worst part of the whole thing. He was much too pleased with all the things that she herself was heartily wishing would go away and stop bothering her.
Academics.
They were worse than Parahumans...
"Nice job on the painting."
"Oh, god, you're impossible," Lisa sighed, although she was grinning to herself. She looked around her office with a sense of a job well done, as the paintwork had come out really well. And of course her phone had rung the moment she'd finished…
To be honest she'd been rather expecting that. Vespa apparently had quite a knack for dramatic timing.
"So, you have a new job for me?" she queried brightly.
"Yes, ma'am, I do," Vespa replied just as cheerfully, making her grin again. "I would like to commission you to do a very special task, one related to the information you dug up yesterday, which has opened up a number of intriguing avenues of investigation. I'm sending you a list of questions, and some leads that may help. Anything you can locate on any of them is likely to be very helpful to quite a lot of people, and absolutely ruin the day of whoever is behind our old nemesis WWM, Inc."
"I like ruining the day of enormous multinational corporations," Lisa commented with a giggle.
"Somehow I thought you might," Vespa chuckled. "This should be right up your alley in that case."
A moment later her email client dinged and Lisa grabbed the mouse to click on the incoming document. Once it opened, she started quickly reading it, her eyes widening, then narrowing in thought. "Holy shit," she muttered almost under her breath.
"Yeah. Think you can find proof of any of that?"
"I'm not sure, but I'm definitely going to have a good try," she replied after reading the whole thing. "You realize this is likely to make quite a few very powerful people extremely angry, right?"
"Oh, I'm counting on that, trust me," Vespa snickered. "Have fun. Let me know how much you want once you've figured out how long it'll take."
"This definitely comes under the friends and family discount," Lisa told her with amusement, already making notes and thinking of her first line of attack. "But if anyone comes after me because of this…"
"Don't worry, they won't get anywhere near you," Vespa assured her with a certain level of dark joy in her voice. "And if they try, well, we've got more useful information. And some people to… question. At length."
"You do realize how terrifying you are, right?"
"Yeah. Fun, isn't it?" Vespa laughed, then added, "Talk later. Good luck, and good hunting."
"Later, Vespa." The line dropped and Lisa put her phone down, sparing only a minor thought for whoever 'Vespa' really was, since most of her mind was now firmly on the task at hand. Her power seemed to find this sort of thing immensely entertaining and was more cooperative than she'd ever experienced before, for some reason. Lisa wasn't going to ask why, she was just going to use the fact to her own advantage. And, with a little luck, cause total chaos in a number of financial areas, which for some reason brought a distinct smirk to her face.
This was far more fun than stealing random crap at the behest of a lunatic, and paid a lot better too, not to mention would actually help quite a few people if her suspicions were correct. Getting paid to do something she half suspected she'd do just for the fun of it was wonderful, and it seemed likely to garner her a few favors from various places that might well come in handy at some point.
Cracking her knuckles and stretching, Lisa got to work. The truth was out there, and she was going to stalk it, catch it, and drag it home whether it liked it or not...
Several thousand miles to the west, Taylor accompanied her dad and the others out of the restaurant after a very good breakfast, looking forward to the rest of the day in many ways. There were all manner of things to do she was anticipating with great interest.