Earning Her Stripes

Part Forty-Two: Meanwhile …

[A/N: This chapter commissioned by Fizzfaldt and beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]

Uber

"Holy shit, have you heard about this?" Leet looked up from where he'd been browsing PHO. "Says here, Butcher's been sighted in the Bay."

"You're shitting me." Brendan's interest in schooling the trash-talking little shit on the other side of the screen abruptly waned. His thoughts went immediately to his bug-out bag, then he started wondering if Leet had kept his up to date. "Maybe it's time we got out of town."

"Maybe." Leet jumped up from the chair, sending it rolling backward. "Or maybe we make it so she leaves town before she fucks everything up." There was a manic energy in his voice that Brendan had heard before; it had never turned out well.

"What did you have in mind?" That was always a good question to ask when it came to Leet. Sometimes, when he heard his own ideas coming out of his mouth he would slow his roll; other times, Brendan had to do it for him. And once in a while, he needed to be reminded that he'd already done something like whatever he was proposing. "And what game are we going to be working from?"

Leet shook his head. "Nope, no game." He put up his finger before Brendan could interject. "This isn't a game thing, or even something we can put on the show. It's pure self-defence. If we can chase Butcher away before she gets settled, we're gold. Otherwise, we'd always be looking over our shoulders."

"I think it's a bad idea." Brendan weathered Leet's look of betrayal with the same ease he'd done it every other time. "Best case, you accidentally kill her and you become Butcher. Worst case, she somehow figures out that you're fucking with her, and she kills us."

"The fuck?" Leet managed to say those two words with such emphasis from his body language and hand movements that his meaning still would've been understandable by someone who was blind, deaf and entirely ignorant of the English language. "You're not listening, dude. Best case is, we chase her the fuck out of Brockton Bay. I'm not gonna, like, hit her with an eighteen-wheeler or shit like that. It'll just be small stuff, like walking into doors and tripping over her own feet."

"And how are you even going to do that?" Leet had come up with some stupid plans in the past, but they'd always been based around one of his inventions. Brendan figured that said as much about the inventions as they did about Leet himself. "Zap her with a bad-luck ray?"

"Well, yeah, actually." Leet eyed Brendan suspiciously. "Have you been reading my notes or something?"

"Yeah, like I'd even touch them. Half the time they're either radioactive or contaminated with something that doesn't exist on the periodic table, and the other half the time they're about as legible as … wait." Brendan's brain finally caught up with what he'd just heard his buddy say. "Bad luck ray? Really? How fucking stupid of an idea is that?"

"It could work. You know, maybe." When Leet was being defensive, he hunched his shoulders, almost folding in on himself, and today was no exception. "I've never done one before, that's for certain."

"Yeah, because it's a stupid idea. If it's even possible." Brendan paused; he didn't actually like yelling at Leet. Maybe it was a better idea to guide him into realising that it was a bad idea, a little bit at a time. "Okay, fine, let's assume it's possible. What made you think of it, anyway?"

Leet hesitated, then glanced at Brendan. Apparently finding some kind of encouragement there, his closed-in stance opened up a little. "Um … I was actually reading the capefics on PHO, and there was one where we were kinda heroic, and I made a bad luck gun and a good luck gun, and we wrecked the Slaughterhouse Nine with them. So, um, I was thinking that maybe I could make it work in real life …?"

Brendan ran his hands through his hair, trying to figure out exactly what to say in response to that. Capefics bear zero resemblance to how powers actually work, you colossal moron! came to mind, but he was actively trying not to sound too harsh, so he did his best to tone it down a little … or a lot. "Okay, so do you have any idea how to make this work? And will it use a principle you've already used?"

His heart sank when Leet brightened. "I'm pretty sure I do, yeah. And no, I've never done a luck effect. Plus, we'll be able to use it from right here in the base, so we don't have to go near her."

"Well, that's definitely a bonus." It was more than that. The more Brendan thought about it, the more he considered it to be the keystone aspect of the whole stupid idea. If Leet could employ his ill-conceived venture out of sight and out of mind, they could get it over and done with, and clean up the inevitable flaming wreckage afterward without anyone (especially Butcher) being the wiser.

Sometimes, he wondered if the reason Director Piggot and the local PRT had never mobilised to capture and incarcerate them was due to the entertainment value of the after-action reports of their many (many) screwups.

"Well, it's mainly because we aren't going to be targeting her now," Leet continued, warming to his theme. "She's already here, and she's probably got a base set up and everything. I want to make things inconvenient to her from the moment she gets here, so she just gives up in disgust."

"Wait." The dark foreboding that usually hung over Brendan when Leet was about to try something particularly ill-advised came back in full force, and it even brought friends along for company. "Attacking her then? Like, time manipulation? Didn't you swear to me on bended knee that you weren't going to do that anymore? Especially after what happened between Uber-3 and Leet-9?"

"Dude. We agreed never to bring that up again. Anyway, nothing's going to happen like that." Leet rolled his eyes, apparently going for carefree nonchalance, though the fact that he'd crossed his fingers for luck didn't escape Brendan. "Anyway, this isn't about generating alternate timelines. It's about directing an attack back through time. You know, using the thing I worked up for the ChronoCop episode we never actually worked out how to do."

"Yeah, well, that's because you couldn't figure out how to get the time-folder small enough to fit into a gun. Pity, though. It would've been cool." Brendan paused, pulling his mind away from his appreciation of the classic game. "Wait, you never trashed it after that, uh, thing we never talk about?"

"Like I said, it doesn't generate alternate timelines. Plus, once I make something, it's made. If I'd trashed it, I'd never be able to rebuild it. So, I just put it away." Leet headed over to a set of cupboards and started rifling through them. "Judge Dredd helmet … Spartan rifle … Ghostbusters ghost trap … come on, where is it?"

"Ghost trap? We never did a Ghostbusters episode, did we?" Brendan picked up the black and yellow striped device and examined it. It looked like some of Leet's better work, too.

"Nah, I think Leet-6 left it behind when he went back to his home alternate. He said to never open it, but wouldn't tell me why." Leet opened a different cupboard door and kept searching. "Ah-ha! There you are, you sneaky little rascal! Come to papa."

Well, shit. He found it. Brendan's initial hope, that Leet's perennial lack of organisation would kill this idea aborning, had been categorically shot in the back of the head and buried in a shallow grave. Not unlike the fate he foresaw the two of them suffering if this idiotic venture went anywhere nearly as badly as had happened in the past.

"So, uh … how exactly are we going to do this?" He knew exactly what he was letting himself in for by making the inquiry, but he had to keep himself in the loop somehow. Otherwise, the bad shit that was currently chugging down the track toward them like the juggernaut of doom—all acceleration, no brakes—was going to catch him in the back of the neck at the worst possible moment. If he could see it coming, he figured, he'd have half a chance of ducking and covering at the right moment, and maybe even dragging Leet out of the line of fire too.

Well, it was a plan, even if it wasn't a great one. Or even a good one.

"Okay, so here's the dealio." Leet gestured with the hand that wasn't holding the time-folder. "Building this into a gun is no longer necessary. Besides, I need to design the luck reservoir, as well as the filter and projector. Which reminds me. Are you okay with me tapping you for bad luck?"

"Me?" Brendan frowned, entirely unsure as to where Leet was going with this. "Why do you think I've got any bad luck? Seriously?"

"Dude. Don't play dumb." The look Leet gave Brendan said quite clearly, 'we both know what I'm talking about'. "The number of times my inventions have crashed and burned, there's got to be a serious source of bad luck in my vicinity. Process of elimination says it's you."

What? Brendan had heard the phrase 'could not believe my ears' before, but now he was living it. If either of them was afflicted with bad luck, it was Leet. How could his buddy not see that? "You're pulling my chain, dude. You honestly think it's down to me?"

"Well, who else could it be? Anyway, we're getting off track." Leet hustled over to the pile of disassembled parts that he'd salvaged from the last dozen or so fiascos. "Time to put your talent to good use for once. As soon as I build the luck siphon and the reservoir, I'll start tapping you for bad luck while I finish up the console and integrate the time-folder into it. Think you can hold still long enough to let that happen?"

"But—" Brendan cut off his own protest, and thought fast. It was totally an embarrassment, sure, to be thought of as a source of bad luck when anyone with half a brain could see what was really going on. But if he was correct, and Leet was just shit at what he did, then the bad luck projector would do exactly jack and shit once it was turned on. Which meant they would be safe from not only Butcher's wrath, but also any actual malfunction from the device. After all, if it didn't work, then it couldn't explode … right? "… okay, yeah, hook me up."

"Ar-right!" Leet set to work with a will. Sparks flew as he soldered the smaller components, then welded the larger ones. To Brendan's dubious eye, the 'luck siphon' that he assembled seemed to include a number of parts strongly reminiscent of the vacuum cleaner that had mysteriously vanished a couple of weeks ago.

Of course, when a Tinker was involved, any disappearance of electronic equipment was to be treated more as a suspicious circumstance than a mysterious event.

"How intrusive is this going to be?" Brendan asked, fully aware that it was something he probably should have checked on before agreeing to being the subject of the 'luck siphon'. "Because if it involves inserting it into a body cavity, I'm out."

"Nah, nah." Leet put the final touches on the device, then turned to him. "Here, just point the open end toward yourself. If it's within a few inches, it should suck up the bad luck just fine." He offered it to Brendan, who noted that (among other things) there were now lines of LEDs running up and down the length of the tube joining it to what he gathered (from context) was the reservoir. When Leet pressed a switch, it began to warble softly, with undertones and overtones that raised the hair on the back of Brendan's neck … or maybe that was just his presentiment of doom kicking into high gear. "Okay, get to collecting that bad luck."

Accepting it gingerly, Brendan eyed the aperture. "How will I know how much bad luck it's collected? And what happens once it's full?" He didn't believe for a second that bad luck was something that could be simply collected. However, it was evident to him that the siphon was determined to grab something, and he'd experienced enough explosions as a direct result of Leet's tech underperforming (and sometimes overperforming) that these questions were absolutely essential to ask up front. Usually from a safe distance.

Leet gestured toward a dial set in the side of the reservoir. "Oh, it'll beep and shut itself off. If it doesn't, just hit the red button there. Or was it the green one?" He frowned, looking from one to the other. "I know I was building in an emergency dump system, in case the bad luck concentration got too high. Or was that the pull-handle there?"

Peering closely at the dial, Brendan saw that the needle was quivering far to the left of the scale. Instead of numbers, there were instead words and phrases to mark (he figured) how much bad luck had been gathered.
THAT'S ODD

OH DAMN

SERIOUSLY?

YOU HAVE TO BE KIDDING ME

WHAT THE HELL?

OH, FOR FUCK'S SAKE

JESUS CHRIST, NOT AGAIN

FUUUUUUUUUCK!

It hadn't quite gotten up to 'That's odd' yet, even when he gave the siphon an experimental wave over himself, so he figured it was safe to relax for the moment. If the cockamamie contraption failed even to charge itself with whatever it considered to be bad luck, maybe Leet would give up on the idea of attacking Butcher. Not getting in her way, and keeping his head down, seemed a vastly wiser choice than pointing some of Leet's tech at her and suffering the consequences of either success or failure.

Among other things, Brendan hadn't forgotten that the Butcher had the ability to shoot around obstacles to hit her enemies dead centre, ten times out of ten. He was good at what he did—he'd be the first to admit that—but she had him beat in that regard, by a solid country mile. Not to mention the other downside of fighting her: if she was killed, her killer became the new Butcher. It was theoretically possible to beat her without killing her, but nobody had managed that yet, and he certainly had no idea how to do it.

"One of these days, you're gonna have to start writing notes for this stuff." He wasn't quite sure how many times Leet's tech had malfunctioned due to its hapless inventor pressing a bunch of buttons in precisely the wrong order, but it had to be more than a few. Of course, sometimes it just blew up because it had apparently gotten bored with being in one piece, but there wasn't much Brendan could do about that.

"Sorry, dude. No can do. If I stop to write stuff down, I lose my train of thought." Leet shrugged and went back to the construction of the other half of the bad luck contraption. This was what he'd called the filter and projector, the latter of which incorporated the time-folder. To Brendan's vague relief, it looked solid and non-portable, which meant they probably weren't going to be lugging it out of the base and going in pursuit of Butcher with it. There were lots of blinking lights on it, though, as well as a large screen.

Brendan held Leet in the highest regard—there were no bro's like gaming bro's—but he couldn't resist rolling his eyes at that. Might actually improve your stuff if you did lose your train of thought from time to time. It certainly couldn't make it worse.

"Actually," he ventured as a thought occurred to him. "Why do you never set up a camera where you could replay the footage and remind yourself what buttons did what?" It would certainly bypass a lot of the fiascos (and lost eyebrows) that they'd undergone of late.

Leet turned and gave him a long-suffering look. "Now why didn't I think of that? Hell, we've got the Snitch to watch over my shoulder and all. I could even give a colour commentary to make sure I didn't forget anything." He threw a baleful glance across the workshop to where their little hover-cam sat in its charging cradle.

Now Brendan knew he was missing something. "So why don't you?" If there was a good reason, he sure as hell didn't know what it was.

Leet sighed expressively. "Because when I do that, even if I can't see the camera, malfunction rates go way up. It's like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle or something. I even tried with cameras that turned on at random, so I didn't know they were operating. But no matter what I tried, it was always the same. If the process was recorded, something went fucky with it. So, I stopped trying." He turned back to the luck filter and set to work once more. The tension in his shoulders matched the bitterness in his tone, so Brendan decided not to pursue the matter any further.

When the device in his hand didn't seem about to blow up, short out or otherwise pose a risk to life and limb, he left off passing it over himself and waved it around in the air experimentally. Nothing much happened until he chanced to direct it Leet's way, whereupon the needle jumped and started to rise. Blinking, he pointed it back at himself, and the needle stopped again. Aimed at Leet once more, it caused the needle to rise again.

You're shitting me. Is this the reason his tech fails on the flimsiest excuse? He's actually afflicted with bad luck? It's really a thing?

By now, the needle was past 'Oh, damn' and heading for 'Seriously?', and didn't seem to be slowing down any time soon. Brendan was torn between equal and opposite urges: on the one hand, he kinda wanted to see what happened once the reservoir was filled with whatever the siphon was drawing away from Leet; on the other, he wasn't sure that he really wanted to. The third option was to tell Leet exactly who it was drawing 'bad luck' from, but that would probably just serve to piss his buddy off and cause a scene, and he didn't want to do that at all.

Self-preservation vied with the urge for entertainment, and entertainment won out.

"Uh, so what were you going to do with the bad luck anyway, once you got it? I mean, exactly?" He made sure to keep his tone light, so Leet would take it as simply making conversation, rather than an interrogation. "Hit her with a huge burst of it all at once, have a meteorite land on her or something?"

"I was thinking that at first, but then I decided to go a different way." Fully back in the groove now, Leet kept working even as he answered the question. "I'll start tuning it backward in time, hitting her with random bits of bad luck here and there."

"Right, right." Brendan kept experimenting with the gently warbling device, waving it around in the air, then at himself, then back toward Leet. Whenever it was pointed directly at the Tinker, the LEDs rippled faster and the needle rose on the dial, passing by 'You have to be kidding me' and 'What the hell?' as he watched.

"Nearly done here," Leet reported, his voice muffled as he was head and shoulders inside the cabinet enclosing the luck filter and projector. "How's it going with your bad luck?"

"Oh, it's pulling it in hand over fist." Brendan kept his tone level, while he thanked his lucky stars that there were no cameras to see him hovering the end of the siphon about two inches off Leet's butt. At this range, the needle was closing in on the red-printed 'Fuuuuuuuuuck!' at a ferocious rate of knots. "It'll be full up real soon."

"Oh, good. I knew there was a reason my stuff kept failing." Just as Leet edged backward out of the cabinet, there was a beep from the luck reservoir.

Brendan hastily turned the siphon so it stuck straight up in the air, well away from both of them, so by the time Leet turned around, there was no proof of what he'd been doing. "Yeah, totally. No idea why I didn't see it before."

"Well, you were too close to the problem, weren't you?" Leet puzzled over the luck reservoir for a few moments, then gingerly pressed the green button. The warble changed note, and Brendan got ready to duck and cover. But nothing else happened, so he allowed himself to relax a little.

"Yeah, probably. So, what happens now?" Brendan handed the siphon back to Leet, and watched as the Tinker disconnected the head from it, then plugged the hose into the side of the cabinet that housed the filter and projector. "What else do we have to do?"

Leet shrugged. "Nothing. Now we fire this bad boy up, and start inflicting bad luck on Butcher." He flipped a row of switches, and a bunch of vertical light displays lit up, starting at red but transforming to green one after the other. "Luck filtration up and running. Everything looks good."

Brendan wondered what 'luck filtration' actually did, but wasn't inclined to ask. "How are you going to actually target Butcher?" was what he said instead. That was also a valid question, as far as he was concerned.

"Oh, uh, I got a photo of her. Once I let the guidance computer have a look at it, it'll pinpoint her anywhere within twenty miles. To make it easier, I'll calibrate it so it only locks onto capes." Leet tapped buttons, turned knobs, and pushed sliders. "And there we go! It's got a lock. So I'll warm up the time-folder, turn it back just an hour or so, and zap her with a ranging shot. Just a teensy bit of bad luck."

"Sounds like a plan." Brendan moved closer, interested in seeing how this would go. He watched as Leet fiddled with the controls, and the time-date stamp on the top corner of the screen rolled backward.

"Okay, then. Let's do this thing." Leet drew a deep breath and let out a gusty sigh, revealing that he was a lot tenser than he'd been letting on. He pressed in a button, then manipulated a couple of controls; in another moment, a picture sprang up on the screen, showing Butcher pacing across a paved area, with people all around her. Brendan recognised them as unpowered members of her gang, the Teeth. "I'll just give her a touch of clumsiness …" A knob turned gently under his fingers, and the warbling of the luck reservoir ramped up slightly.

And then the view swivelled, and Brendan saw the costumed woman coming at Butcher, sword reaching out for her. "Oh shit! Cut it off! Abort!"

"Wh—" Leet began, but Brendan was already acting. He'd seen how Leet had focused the projector in on Butcher; knocking his buddy's hands aside, he twisted the knob and slammed the slider all the way to its stop. Leet pushed him back. "What are you doing? Are you nuts?" But it was too late: the image on the screen had already flickered and changed.

Brendan outweighed Leet by several dozen pounds, but the shove forced him back a step anyway, and his elbow connected with one of the buttons on the reservoir. A sharp buzzer sounded, and the warble went to ultrasonic after passing through a sonic phase that felt like it was shredding Brendan's eardrums. The next thing that happened was a sharp pop inside the console, and a very familiar plume of smoke began to rise in the air.

"I had to do it." Brendan gestured at the now-dead screen. "She was in a fight against another cape." He hadn't actually recognised the costume, but it had to be one, with a military uniform and a rabbit mask involved. "If the other cape killed her and you were responsible, you'd be Butcher now."

"Oh. Yeah." Leet grimaced as he prised off a panel. "Yup, thought so. Time-folder's screwed, and the bad luck projector's slagged as well. So much for that." He looked over at the reservoir. "And you managed to hit the emergency dump just after you broke lock on her and fixed it on some poor random asshole in Brockton Bay. So, they got all the bad luck in the world, in one big hit."

"Shit." Brendan actually felt bad about that, then he remembered what Leet had said before. "And it was calibrated to only lock onto capes?"

Leet's eyes opened wider as he processed the ramifications of that. "Yeah. Yeah, it was."

There was no way in hell they were ever going to be mentioning this on their show, not after fucking over some random cape so badly. "Any idea who it was?"

"All I know is what I saw on the screen, just before the projector blew." Leet gestured at the console, then mimed an explosion. "A fuck-off big chunk of concrete, going right through someone's house."

Brendan blinked. "Huh. How do you think it managed that?" Every way he tried to figure it out, he ran into a solid blank.

Leet shrugged, looking just as much in the dark as Brendan was. "Fucked if I know."

And not another word was spoken about it.

End of Part Forty-Two