Chapter 1: Fuck that gay wizard shit 1.1
Chapter Text
Running away from girls and your problems: A Greg Story prologue
I had always known I was special, a being beyond all others. That one day I would awaken. Not that I wasn't already woke af, mind you, it was just that I had now ascended.
"You may lefer to me as Dr. Wu."
Dauntless cringed into his armour for some reason.
"May I ask why you have come to my juggering pavirion," I swept my throwing knives into the air and juggled for a few seconds.
Your DEX has increased by 1!
Shit! I nearly dropped my knives when the popup box sprang into view, but me being awesome me I managed to vanish all my knives into my inventory as they fell, which I knew looked super trippy from the outside.
"Just…" Dauntless smiled. "Bein' neighbourly. New cape on the block, y'know, I wanna make sure you know the Protectorate has your back if you want."
"Domo arigato," I inclined my head. "But it appears I will be doing just fine."
Dauntless coughed, "That so? Well, give it a think eh? Kid like you might find some trouble from the, er, ABB. The gangs know not to go after Wards though so-
"I am, of course," my voice cracked as I cut him off. "Eighteen."
"Oh, um, really?" he replied skeptically, scanning me.
"Yep," I replied in moderately fluent Japanese, pointing at him with one hand. "And there's nothing you can do to prove otherwise."
He started slightly, "Beg pardon? I'm sorry, I can't speak Japanese."
I smiled, the expression hidden behind my mask. Yeah, I was so fuckin' slick.
"I merery wanted to get your autoglaph, Dauntress-san. I am very big fan."
Dauntless laughed and shuffled a step back, "Hey uh, yeah, I'd love to but I don't have a pen."
I clicked, extracting a pen from my inventory.
I saw his eyebrows crease behind his Centurion helmet. "Y'got paper in there?"
I had post-it notes. Another click. He hastily scrawled his name and made to leave but I pointed at a bucket filled with various coins and notes.
"Donations, prease."
He fidgeted a bit and threw in a measly buck. Man, fuck you Dauntless you fuckin' cheapskate.
Quest 'Get dat green, son!'
Money collected: 57/100
I dismissed the popup.
I had no words to describe this bullshit. Being a Hero was dangerous, being a Villain was deadly but being a Rogue? Being a Rogue was fucking tedious. Of course, I expected no less from the government, an entity whose sole purpose was to keep everyone chained into endless pseudo-slavery and kept in line with bread and circuses. Like, for fuck's sake, it was so much effort to start up a business as a Parahuman you may as well just do it illegally as a vigilante.
The problem was, I wasn't not going to use my powers to be the ultimate ninja warrior, but I also didn't want to get merced by any one of the two dozen insane fucktard villains in this shithole city because I accidentally scuffed their new NIKE's or something; so I needed lawyers and accountants and shit.
And I needed money to get all that started anyway, which I didn't have, no thanks to Dauntless.
An hour or two came and went, mostly with me sitting down and pretending to meditate in the shade of my beach umbrella until enough people gathered around and I would juggle a bit and blow some smoke.
Quest 'Get dat green, son!' completed!
Money collected: 147/100
Gained: 100xp
"Hello there."
My eyes snapped open and I sprang to my feet, coming face to face with a girl. Blonde, cute, green eyes; just my type!
"Herro~" I Observed her. Sarah Livsey, Inference Engine; very nice. Age sixteen, hates parents, brother necked himself, a teenage runaway, Tattletale and Undersider, works for Coil. Ah, I see. "Gorgeous!" I continued, hurriedly sweeping my cash, cash bucket and umbrella into my inventory. "I have to reave for raisons!"
New Quest! 'Flee you fool!'!
Get the fuck out of here, Tattletale is on your tail and you need to ditch her. Get to safety!
Rewards: 100xp
Failure: ???
She suddenly got this deer in the headlights look of shock and I bolted up the Boardwalk as fast as I could.
"Wait! Stop!" I heard her call after me.
I turned to see her waddling as fast as she could, laden down with a dozen shopping bags. I whimpered and sped up. Fucking fuck! Coil?! I didn't expect any of them to be onto me so soon. They feared me, I knew.
You have gained the skill 'Running'!
Feared my potential.
But how did he know?
I barely made it to the main street through the tearing stitch in my side. I heard my VIT go up as I staggered up the pavement trying to hail a taxi. Christ, that was only a half mile run; 19 INT but only 5 VIT, the perils of min-maxing.
I gasped out my destination to the cabbie then used my power to instantly equip a different disguise.
I slowed my breathing, I knew this day would come. That I would be hunted. But so soon? I had to go underground, lose this heat. The taxi pulled over, I was here. I handed the guy the correct change and kicked the door open.
"What the fuck, kid?" he spluttered as I strode away with great purpose. "You little shit."
But I had no time for his problems, my destiny awaited.
Chapter 2: Fuck that gay wizard shit 1.2
Chapter Text
"Hello, I would like to join The Wards please."
The receptionist never lost his sunny grin, "Of course-"
"Awesome!" I beamed, looking around the lobby of the PRT building. "Can I see Miss Militia? She's my favourite, really makes the Army look work if you know what I mean. Plus, sick guns, man. I have her PS4 shooter, do you know her rank? Anyway, I'm Plat I bet I could 360 no scope her ten times out of ten. Probably tell her this is urgent though, Coil's after me."
I tapped my nose, giving him a significant look.
"Of course he is," the receptionist still grinned. "Why don't you take a seat over there?"
He pointed to a neat row of chairs along a wall.
"Thanks, chief!" I tipped him a quick, two-finger salute and strutted to the chairs. I plopped myself into one and equipped my phone into my hand.
xX_Void_Cowboy_Xx: just checkin in to the join the wards lol
GStringGirl would love this, I was a cape now and bitches love capes. Also, she was a bigger capenerd than me somehow, and she'd kill for any insider info. And now, for her, I could be the biggest PRT security breach ever!
I was a good friend.
I put my phone away and tapped on my knees to the tune of some J-Pop, joining the Wards was a good decision. I'd researched, of course. Sure for the first year or whatever I'd be making minimum wage, but I'd still be getting that crisp 50k trust fund. Plus I'd be famous, especially after the first year when my powers were really growing.
Or at least I assumed that was how they worked, like, I was an RPG character now or some shit and they all got to get crazy strong at max level. Even if for some reason I got no extra skills and capped out at max human stats, I still healed to full health every hundred minutes and could Observe.
Triumvirate tier, no doubt!
"Are you ready, sir?"
A voice jolted me out of my contemplation of my own awesomeness. I looked up to see a hefty security guard giving me a bored sort of customer service smile.
"Absolutely!" I pop and locked to my feet. "Lead the way!"
I followed him as he started walking towards the exit for some reason… No. This was a test!
"Nice try," I said smugly, stopping and putting my hands on my hips. "But you won't fool me with that, a faker would have fallen for it but I'm the real deal, right down to the marrow of my bones."
The guard sighed, a long drawn out exhalation of pure uncompromising Done With This Shit.
"Get out, boy. I won't ask again."
I scoffed again, but even to me, it sounded weak. Uncertain. Did they really not believe me? The guard gave me a hard look, but when I didn't move he stepped forward and grabbed my wrist, dragging me like a child's toy.
"I see you know your Judo well," I stammered, resisting. "I-iyada! This is democracy manifest!"
He yanked, sending me stumbling forward.
-1hp
"Ow!" I cried, tears springing to my eyes. "W-why?"
He pushed me out the door and stood, an impassable wall to my destiny.
"We don't need any more Militiamen, d'you know how many of you creeps we get a week?" he crossed his arms. "Get!"
"F-fuck you, I'm not," I sobbed, lashing out at the wall with a fist.
-5hp
"Fuck!"
You have gained the skill Resist Damage [Physical]!
The tears stopped. Oh. Oh right, I could just show them I had powers. I sniffed and wiped my eyes with my sleeve.
"Behold!" I raised a hand and cast it down, dark blue smoke bursting into appearance, covering us. "Smoke bomb!"
I posed smugly amid panicked shouts, klaxon wails and… oh no. I'd read this fic before when the SI got forced into a life of villainy when he accidentally spooked the PRT by doing pretty much this. Shit! Fuck!
"That wasn't an attack," I shrieked through my smokescreen, throwing my hands as high as I could. "It's not poison gas! I surrender, don't tase me, bro!"
There was a clunk and a harsh whirr, I felt a breeze and my smoke was sucked away into a series of vents inside the building revealing a half-dozen PRT troopers fully decked out in Kevlar and Kalashnikovs.
My knees wobbled, a tinnitus-like ringing drowning out whatever orders one of them was barking. The scene blurred through tears. So this is how it ends? I hoped my parents didn't go through my hard drive.
"Wait!" a reedy voice cut through the stretching silence and the dumbfuck receptionist stumbled out in view. "I didn't think he was a parahuman."
The trooper captain rounded on him, "explain."
"He said he was here to join the Wards," the man looked stricken. "He said he wanted to see Miss Militia, I thought he was just another one of her creepy fanboys so we kicked him out. I, he really didn't seem legit!"
I sank to a crouch as the guns were lowered and everyone in the lobby started murmuring to each other. Wew, 0/10 on RT, would not do again. I took this brief intermission to dry my uncool tears and get my shit together.
Ok, we cool Greg?
Yeah, bro, we cool.
"Yeah, I fukken told you so," I rose to my feet, pointing at the receptionist dramatically. "Now bring me to Miss Militia for I much desire to speak with her."
Eventually, they got around to driving me out to the Rig, where we would meet up with my parents and Armsmaster because he 'apparently' had to handle shit like this. But he was my second favourite local hero, so I could fucks with that.
And then, the very moment I set foot into the Rig-
Swiggety swooty. I knew I got perk points from quests as rewards and every five levels, but I was expecting one at level five! Next one at seven then I guess. I hummed jauntily as I was led to wherever it was exactly I was going, mentally browsing my stats and perk choices.
Oh, you motherfucker! They were hidden behind stat walls! Good thing I was smarter than literally seventy-five percent of people or else I wouldn't even be able to get the INT perk. Aw, but I was going to be a DEX pure, not fuck with any of that gay wizard shit.
20% increased memory capacity and retrieval was nothing to scoff at though. All the DEX one would give me was Ambidextrous, which was cool and all but… I clicked my tongue. All the first tier perks were sweet, I wanted them all so I may as well pick Memory now and put my points into DEX after doing a bit of agility training.
I mentally accepted Memory and the perks! Better memory, increased Crafting tech level, attention to detail and fucking Mana Control was the only one hidden behind 30 INT?! I mean, folklore ninja were basically wizards, right? That's how they were in my favourite Aleph manga, Menma, which was like ninety-nine percent of my inspiration and- I sighed, putting everything into INT.
"Uh," a confused voice interrupted my very important Build Managing. "Are you ok?"
I looked at my armed guard, "What?"
"You were miming a lot," she made a few jerky puppet-like movements. "Are you feeling ok?"
"It's a power thing," I said sagely. "You'd understand if you ever played old-school RPG's."
"Ah."
"It's some real FFII type shit, namsayin? That's my life now, the grind. Imagine playing Runescape but it's for real, and I put like five thousand hours into that shit so this'll be a piece of cake. I'm basically my own Isekai protagonist, and really there aren't enough animes like that I really like the Isekai genre."
The trooper grunted.
"The LN just isn't the same, and it's a shame there's no western comics with that theme I reckon there's a lot of money to be made there; y'know I've sent so many emails to the publishers about this and not even once have I gotten a reply."
"Terrible."
"Oh you don't even know the half of it, Hombrero," I shook my head despairingly. "A guy tries to do good and the establishment can't handle it."
"We're here," she pointed way up the hallway and sped up.
We hustled around two more corners and up a flight of stairs until we came to a door, slightly ajar. Clearly, she took her job very seriously. Good, that's good. I'd need professionals to initially protect me from Coil until I could steamroll him effortlessly.
I made to kick the door open, but noticed at the last moment it swung outward so I was forced to merely fling it open and step in.
"Ok," I clapped. "Let's do this!"
Chapter 3: Fuck that gay wizard shit 1.3
Chapter Text
My keen, piercing gaze swept over mum, dad, and Armsmaster; nice stats Colin, not a one under twenty. Except WIS, imagine being such a WISlet, lol. Noob alert.
"Here he is," dad turned to mum, then back to me. "You really a parahuman, Greg?"
"Yeh breh," I vanished my mask into my inventory.
"Oh Greggy," mum simpered patting the chair next to her, barely concealing the full blast of her excitement behind a deftly controlled expression. "Come, sit."
I bounced into the chair and dad leaned across to give me a fist bump while mum ruffled my hair.
"Excellent," Armsmaster relaxed into his custom chair as much as his power armour would allow. "It's good to see you're all so excited about this. Joining the Wards program, even if only until you leave school, can be a massive boon to whatever you choose to do in the future. Not to mention the protection and support that you, as a young parahuman, are likely to need in this kind of city."
"Yeah that's cool and all, but before I make my final decision can I have the contract to look over?" I skilfully bluffed as though I wouldn't sign anything he put on the table.
"Of course," Armsmaster reached down next to his chair and pulled up a briefcase, rifled through it and handed over a fuckhuge stack of papers in a binder.
"Reassuring," I said sardonically. Still going to sign, but that didn't mean I wouldn't pretend to try to squeeze every last concession out of them first.
As I did my best to read all the relevant sections Armsmaster tried to fish for information from my parents. It all seemed ok, I mean yeah I'd have to work every day. Or come into work, at least. Be On Premises, since all the rest of the shit like patrols wasn't mandatory. And there were various other freedom limiting bits and pieces I wasn't super keen on, but such is life.
I tossed the binder back onto the table and leaned forward, steepling my fingers, "this… 'training' mentioned, what is it?"
"It's mostly about PRT and Protectorate protocol, some leadership training, perhaps basic self-defense," Armsmaster waved an airy hand. "But those are mostly for if you don't seem to be fitting in or getting along well with the others. You seem like a proactive kid so I don't think you have to worry about having to sit through many boring extra classes."
"You misunderstand, Armsmaster," I drawled. "What I want is training that might go beyond the scope of what you traditionally offer."
He sagged minutely, "I would have to bump it up the chain."
"And this 'creative control' over my Cape identity the Branding department would have," I tutted, wagging my finger. "I want full control over my image."
"You would have the same privileges as everyone else."
"And what if," I paused for dramatic effect. "I had information to trade. Information about Villains you won't get anywhere else."
He straightened in his chair, jaw set. "That isn't how this works."
I smiled smugly, "would it work that way if I complained the PRT security guard manhandled me with unnecessary roughness when I was so rudely ignored when I went to the main office? If I didn't heal I'd've bruised."
"Greg," dad cut in with a resigned little laugh. "Don't antagonise Armsmaster. You like Armsmaster."
"Aw, but I was being cool," I looked imploringly at my parents. "You guys always say I can be cool."
"I give it a three out of ten," mum chided. "Trying to be your Deathnote show is unoriginal and doesn't fit the context."
"I beg all your pardons," Armsmaster seemed to gawp. "But what are you talking about?"
"Don't worry about it," dad said, one beardman to another. "He's just being silly."
"Does that mean you don't have information?" Armsmaster rapidly tapped his gauntleted finders across the desk. "Because I'll tell you now, Greg Veder, in the Wards we d-"
"Kek," I laughed. "Tattletale's real name is Sarah Livsey, her power lets her make insane inferences on almost no information and she and the Undersiders all work for that Coil guy. I wouldn't jerk you around like that bro, Coil knows I know."
Armsmaster snapped his open mouth shut with a clack and Despair popped up in his CONDITION's tab for some reason.
"Greggy," said mum in an uncharacteristically stern tone. "Now this is serious. Why do you think Coil is after you?"
"I was minding my own business, just hanging out in town," I dissimulated smoothly so as not to give away my Dr. Wu persona. "Then Tattletale picks me out of the crowd. No doubt she inferred who I am, so she comes up and is like 'Hello there' then I read her with my power, but she was reading me with her power; so I made a tactical retreat. She chased me up the road, but I outran her. If Coil was going to sick his hired Capes onto me I knew I had to lose the heat-"
"Hang on a moment," Armsmaster's voice cut through my explanation like a knife. "Your power let you read all that in one brief meeting?"
"Yeah, but I also got some useless shit about how her brother killed himself and she hates her parents for trying to exploit her," I made a fifty fifty gesture.
"And you can do this to anyone?"
"Absolutely can, Col-"
Armsmaster moved suddenly, slapping the table with an ear-splitting crack! "You need to understand how important it is for some Capes to keep their identity secret. People kill over this. Half of the villains in Brockton Bay would murder you on the spot if you hinted you knew who they were."
"Duh," I said. "That's why I'm here."
"Ok!" dad stood up. "We're signing him up. Sometimes he comes home with a split lip from school for running his mouth, if the stakes have already been raised then by god you have to help him."
And like that, I was a Ward.
Just before I left, however, Armsmaster asked the million dollar question.
"By the by, Greg, what are your powers? A main thinker with minor striker? I want to be able to give the tech guys a heads up on what they might need."
I inhaled deeply, assuming an exaggerated thinking posture. How best to answer this… Yes, yes of course.
"I'm the Crawler of the Dauntless genre."
Chapter 4: Fuck that gay wizard shit 1.4
Chapter Text
"Ok," Enrique the PR and Branding head said, voice muffled by the hands covering his face as they had been for the last five minutes. "Ok, fine. If this is really as far as we can go to compromise on this, fine. Welcome to the Wards…" He sighed, hands sliding off his and onto his lap, "Dark Smoke Puncher."
"We Gucci fam," I extended a fist, ejecting a plume of mana smoke at the apex of the punch. "Ayyy!"
Enrique rolled his eyes and bumped it. I supposed I could understand the sentiment, five days solid of trying to hash out a Cape identity that was Family Friendly, Marketable and Absolutely Fucking Awesome was even wearing on me a little.
"Now get out. We'll call you when we need you for tailoring your costumes."
Booyah.
I stalked from the room with a flourish of smoke and almost ran headlong into all six point six feet of Armsmaster's power armour.
"Guess who has two thumbs and a new Cape name?" I pointed at myself with said thumbs. "Dark Smoke Puncher!"
"I see you did settle on that name, despite my directions," Armsmaster tried to smile.
"Chyeah," I preened. "Just imagine the headlines! 'Dark Smoke Puncher to be next Triumvirate member?!', 'Dark Smoke Puncher saves America!'"
"So you say," he replied evenly. "But you know, even I had delusions of grandeur in my youth. I quite strongly believed I'd outstrip Hero himself before I realised powers have their limits."
I made a farty noise with my mouth, "yeah nah, give me six, six months and I bet I could beat you up."
"That's not going to happen."
I made chicken noises and after a few seconds, Armsmaster's helmet sprouted several new panels which slid down to cover his mouth, sealing him away from my taunting.
Kawaii as fuck.
"Now come on," he continued, now in a robot voice. "Before your fitness and power testing, the Director wants to greet you."
Half an hour of driving and security checks later I stood in front of The PRT ENE Director Emily Piggot.
She inhaled deeply. "Dark Smoke Puncher. Welcome to the Wards, I hope you don't have any complaints so far?"
"Ummm, not really. I mean the whole PR thing is lame af, but I get you guys have, like, reasons or whatever. And I guess it's also been boring that I've seen like no other heroes yet, and ah…" I shrugged.
"Yes, at least you finally understood why we couldn't have you name yourself The Guy, Kirito or Master Baiter-"
I snorted.
A muscle twitched in Emily's neck. "We have our rules, and you have to follow them even if you don't agree. As for having not seen any of the Protectorate, we had to verify what you told Armsmaster about Tattletale aka. Sarah Livsey. It all checks out, and that's the problem."
"Because of the security risk."
She nodded slowly, "yes, exactly-"
"And you're finally meeting with me because you've decided I'd be able to keep a secret or I'm not an enemy spy or whatever. So you brought me here to give me a stern talking to, bust out the NDA's and possibly threaten me because even despite that I could be an irreparable security leak I'll still have to be in the same room as people eventually and they'd really hate it if I knew their secrets."
Emily frowned.
"I'm very smart," I said smugly.
"You will find you won't get very far with that kind of attitude, Thinker type parahumans tend to have this very problem."
"I haven't even used that though, besides I'm not even a pure thinker. It's like I told Armsmaster, I'm-"
"The Crawler of the Dauntless genre, yes," Emily cut me off. God, how rude. "Which is another thing I'd like to talk about. What exactly do you mean by that?"
I bounced in my seat, I'd been working on a whole bit for this! I stood up and slid the chair aside. When the director opened her mouth to speak I shushed her, rubbed my hands together and winked.
Starting in my Terminator crouch I leapt to my feet, twirling arms swirling smoke. "Gashan!" I struck a JoJo pose of my own creation.
"Unlimited Powah!"
Emily steepled her fingers and watched me silently until the last of the smoke dissipated, "unpack that for me, please."
I sighed and moved my chair back to where it was and plopped into it. Some people just didn't appreciate the classics.
"My progress will go like," I traced a steep upward angle with my finger that slowly curved off into a nearly flat line. "That, with everything I do. Assuming there isn't a level cap somewhere I should just be able to autistically level grind forever, and that's only with the stuff I have now. In a little bit, I'll start getting new powers, which I'll probably have some control over what they are and every time they'll follow that same progression. Can you believe Armsmaster totally didn't believe me when I said I'd be the new Triumvirate member? 'Cause I'm gonna be the very best, like no one ever was. To catch…"
Shit, did my new points in INT not work on improvising song lyrics?
Emily hmmed.
"Anyway," I shrugged. "Power goes up forever."
"We'll soon see, won't we."
Soon? I mean… "Yeah probably."
"In any case," Emily said. "Welcome to the Wards ENE. You were right about why I called you here today. Unless you sign an agreement stating you won't divulge any of the information you read off of people we would have to continue to restrict your access to both The Rig and the PRT building to ensure the privacy of our employees is kept."
"Yeah, no problem, fam," I got up and walked up to the desk as she slid a pen and a sheet of paper laden with text to me. "Just let me read this first."
I speed read the thing. Pretty standard all around, depending on the offence I could be fined or imprisoned and apparently I could sign this even as a minor because of some Cape law. Good shit.
I signed, in big loopy lettering, 'Dark Smoke Puncher'.
"What do you mean your power ate a book?" Armsmaster barked.
"I mean it ate my Japanese textbook!"
"And this is how you learned the language?"
"Obviously," I shook my head in disbelief. "How else would I?"
"Was it automatic?"
"No, that'd be shit design. There was a yes-no popup."
Armsmaster visibly floundered like I hadn't spent ten minutes explaining my power came with a Heads Up Display. "Right then, I'm going to find some books so we can observe this in action. Get back on the treadmill, see if you can gain another 'point' in 'vitality'."
"But running's hard," I whined as he powerwalked out of the room. "Armsmaster!"
"Come on, Dark Smoke, you could do with it anyway," Jed the Power Testing Technician who I wasn't allowed to tell anyone sold weed said. "You've got to be the most unfit kid I've ever seen."
He was right, "But I'm quantifiably twice as smart as them," I grumbled.
"And now you can be twice as fit," he prodded me back over to the Darth Vader Conversion Chamber he called a treadmill. "In you pop."
"Kirai desu," I grumbled, reattaching the electrode patches and setting off into a shambling jog. Oh god, it already hurt to breathe, and people did this for fun? Savages!
I had to give up a few times to avoid puking my lungs out, but eventually, Armsmaster came back with a wagon full of books and Observe… heavy duty tinkertech monitoring equipment.
"Did you get another 'point of VIT'? Never mind, get over here and tell me which books work, don't absorb them! I want to have it all recorded as closely as possible," he began hauling his gear out and hooking it up to the shit they used to monitor my Smoke magic.
I ripped the electrode monitors off, despite Jed's directions, and staggered over to the wagon. I wiped a deluge of sweat from my brow with a thumb and flicked it all over the ground. The books he brought were probably about as varied as he could find on such short notice. Magazines, various genres of novel, a copy of How to Make Friends and Influence People which Observe told me Dragon had bought for his birthday last year; god I totally shipped that.
"This works," I said, holding up How to Sing by Lilli Lehmann. "Doesn't even have a stat requirement."
"As I expected," Armsmaster muttered as he glanced over at me. "Needs to be a concrete, trainable skill. But then why would How to Make Friends not work… I had hoped, blast. Never mind," he raised his voice, "Now get over here and sing directly into the microphone before using the book."
"Any song?"
"Whichever you like, just make sure it's the same one before and after. Jed, please take the regular wavelength monitor."
I took a few deep breaths, yeah I could be an Idoru. I could totally be an Idoru, and for this, I knew just the song.
Armsmaster gave me the signal.
"Somebody once told me-"
For some reason they let me sing the whole fucking thing.
"Like a goose with a head cold," Armsmaster whispered, which like I knew I wasn't very good but ouch. Armsmaster was so mean! "Now hold the book in front of these sensors and ready in three, two, one… Now."
The book exploded into blue shards that quickly disintegrated into golden motes before vanishing completely.
Armsmaster made an annoyed sound, "we'll have to do this again at a later date once I build something to measure whatever energy is being put out. Now sing the song again."
Chapter 5: Fuck that gay wizard shit 1.5
Chapter Text
xXVoid_CowboyXx: Armsmaster is uch a jerk!
GStringGirl: i refuse to believe! he is always so nice on tv
xXVoid_CowboyXx: Poor, sweet, naïve, stupid GStringGirl. He made fun of my singing!
I put my phone into my pocket, then into my inventory. She would never understand the pain I feel, maybe one day when we'd finally hang out I'd introduce her to Armsy and he'd insult her outfits colour coordination. But until then, she couldn't begin to comprehend even one iota of my suffering.
"Do you think I could be an idoru, Taylor?" I queried pensively.
She didn't look up from her school work, I'd already done mine of course. It was trivially easy with my now genius levels of INT. Of course, her seventeen wasn't bad even though mine was totally better even before I got powers fucking suck it!
"Do you think I could be an idoru?" I asked again.
She sighed, "What's an Eyedooroo, Greg?"
"A book. Also the engrish pronunciation of idol. What do you think of my singing voice?"
Taylor glanced up at the clock, "I've never heard it."
"We should do karaoke! Sparky, you're in a band, I could totally be your new frontman! Whatdya say fam, wanna be a rockstar?"
"I don't do 'rock'," he said, voice muffled against his arms as he tried to have his customary third nap of the day.
"Grunge metal is pretty much just Rock though."
"Ooh," Sparky exhaled through his teeth. "Not getting into that."
I kept trying to speak but he kept interrupting me by saying "nuh."
"Fine," I scorned him. "Taylor and I will make our band and then we will get all the cocaine and," my voice cracked. "Groupies."
Sparky made an over exaggerated voice crack without looking up, he was mocking me!
"Whatever, see if I ever invite you to karaoke again."
He did the squeaky voice thing again. I whined but he kept doing it. I whined to Taylor, and he still did not let up.
First Colin, now Sparky? Was I to be betrayed at every turn? Would Taylor be next, a heinous villain in disguise?
"Don't do crimes," I told her sagely, causing her to spiral off into a deep contemplation which is why she didn't answer me.
I sighed. Out of all my many friends, so few of them were chatty sorts of people, it was kind of a shame sometimes that I had to make up the difference all day. Eventually class ended and we all spilled out into the hall, where one of my friends who actually initiated conversations even if he was terrible at keeping them going greeted me.
"Hey Greg, you still retarded?"
That was Big Cal, he was pretty big. And also a Nazi. Observe told me his dad wanted him to find kids of genuine Aryan blood so every time we passed each other in the halls he made sure to check.
"One hundred percent medical grade retard!" I smiled and pointed at myself with a thumb.
Big Cal snorted and waved goodbye, disappearing into the throng of students.
Poor social skills, that guy.
Anyway, I had a job to be at.
I hastily wiped a fingerprint smudge from my visor. The visor of my new Hero uniform. Yes, it was doubly official now that I, Greg Veder, was a Hero. Mmm, so good.
Mostly a grey skintight bodysuit of some weird leatherish fabric, with bright gold armguards and a strip of scarlet for a sash around my waist. Plus I got those sick ass Tabi boots, some fucking real ninja shit.*
I ran my gloved hand through my freshly cut hair, apparently, according to the PR team I couldn't go out in public 'looking like a yellow mop' so they gave me some generic trendy do; like a normie would have.
Whatever.
Today, today I would finally get to meet other heroes. A lesser man might have been nervous, but not I. I was Dark Smoke Puncher, the terror, the night, the end.
"Aight G," I burst from the changing room. "Lead the way."
Jeffery the Intern who I wasn't allowed to tell anyone he was Commander in Chief of the Militiamen led on. After a very smooth elevator ride, I saw my first hero waiting for me. I knew him, of course, Triumph had been in the Wards for years; now let's see…
Rory Christner, lel. Sonic Manipulation, cool cool, healing very nice. Used to play baseball until HIS FATHER BOUGHT HIM POWERS IN A FUCKING BOTTLE!
"OOOOOOH!" I ran at him. He flinched back in shock and brought his hands up defensively. "I've been waiting for evs to finally meet one of you guys!"
Yeah, I mean I didn't want to die.
"Oh, hey yeah that's ok," Rory held out his hand which I vigorously shook. "So I can see you know who I am, and I've been briefed on you. Our teammates only know we're getting a new guy, why don't we go in and introduce you?"
"That is literally the only reason I'm here."
"Righto," the visible portion behind Rory's lion mask creased. "Thanks for bringing him, Jeff."
On we walked.
"So today we've only got Kid, Vista and Aegis in," Rory continued. "Shadow Stalker's coming in soonish, I think."
"Very excellent," I bounced on the balls of my feet with every step. "Vista is my favourite! Is Shadow Stalker as mean as they say, will she insult me? Please tell me she will."
Rory looked down his nose at me in double-decker disgust and confusion, "listen, Dark Smoke, if you harass any of the Wards you'll have me to answer to-"
"I would never!"
"You better not, 'cause I'm telling you now we don't tolerate any of that shit."
"I wouldn't!" I whined.
He sighed, "ok, make sure you don't. I'm sure you're just a bit excited to meet your heroes huh?"
"Yeah, no shit!" I was back to bouncy steps. "I read about you guys every day, you're like, magic celebrities!"
We reached a big white Vault-tec looking door and Rory punched a big red button, prompting a harsh klaxon-like buzz.
"So when you hear that and you don't have your mask on, it means you should get it on 'cause someone's coming in," Rory said as he opened the door and led the way inside.
A fairly basic, modern looking common room. Huge widescreen, three couches around it and seated upon these couches were some real G niggas.
Chris. Missy. Carlos.
My new homeslicies.
Rory opened his mouth to say something presumably superfluous but I was already trotting down the stairs.
"Hey!" I waved. "Hey guys, I'm Dark Smoke Puncher! I like coding, net browsing and anime and my favourite manga is Menma. My hobby is chugging three SIPS and gaming all night, lately I've been binging PROT it's pretty dope. Any of you guys play?"
There was a pause.
"No," said Carlos.
I wedged myself into the spot between Chris and Missy.
"Stop whatever it is you're doing right now and go buy it, I'll power level you."
"I'm not really into games all that much," he said eventually.
I clicked my tongue and rolled my eyes, "either of you guys?" I looked to my left and right.
They made dissenting noises, but that was ok. Most people were lame and boring so I wouldn't hold it against them. Not everyone was a GStringGirl.
"So yeah," Rory walked down and sat in the empty couch. "This is Kid W-"
"As if I don't know that," I chuckled, wagging a finger.
"Right," Rory continued. "He has a power that tells him names. Real names, too, but-"
"Emily already made me sign a thing so I wouldn't tell," I put my visor from my head equipment slot to my inventory. "I'm Greg Veder, by the way. I figure you should know since I already know your names and tragic backstories."
"What do you mean by that?" Rory suddenly snapped, sitting rigidly.
I guess it was a mistake to say that? Yeah probably, the Spoon quest did say if I fucked up I'd die, presumably from the same people who can give out superpowers sans trigger event. God that was so cool, all the times I made fun of Capes on PHO for not being able to skip the trigger where others had and it turned out to be true. God that wound them up so fast, so many flame wars, so many bans. Worth it.
"My trigger event for example," I continued as though I hadn't heard him. "Imagine; Lung and Dauntless are fighting a battle to the death and I was shoplifting from Gamestop when they crashed through the window, knocking me into a FFXIV display. I get up, and cleverly using the pilfered OXM discs as shuriken I drive Lung back out onto the street where-"
"You're lying," Missy cut me off. "None of that ever happened."
"Yeah, but I'm telling the story."
"I have Tinkering to do," Chris said, swiftly getting to his feet and scuttling towards one of the doors set into the walls.
"And I have homework," Carlos quickly followed suit.
"Same," Missy hopped to her feet.
"I can help," I called after them. "I'm very smart!"
I turned back to Rory who had his fingers through the gap in his lion helmet, massaging his eyes.
"Why?"
"They just said why," I told him helpfully.
He sighed heavily, "I suppose they did."
"So," I bounced in my chair. "When does Shadow Stalker get in?"
Chapter 6: Fuck that gay wizard shit 1.6
Chapter Text
"Alright you panty sniffing little creep. You keep your mouth shut, I'll lay off Hebert and we'll go out once," Sophia ground out.
I shook my head at the memory.
XxVoid_CowboyxX: girls are weird lmao
For some reason, she thought I wasn't ironically blackmailing her into going out with me, but she agreed to it so it was my win. I was going to turn her in but… not my fault she couldn't tell when people were kidding.
GStringGirl: are we now? Why?
XxVoid_CowboyxX: goot a date with Shadow Stalker via accidental blackmail, she's really bad at teling when people are joking
GStringGirl: I require proofs!
GStringGirl: What did you blackmail her iwth??
XxVoid_CowboyxX: she totally bullies my friend at school, I didn't even realise until my power told me! But im keeping the good stuff for later, did you know she killed a guy?
I put my phone away and took a bite of mum's delicious lasagne.
"Guess what," I said.
"You shot the sheriff, but you didn't shoot the deputy," mum slobbered out around a mouthful of dinner.
"No."
"Is this about your haircut?" Dad asked. "Because we noticed."
It did end up being a pretty snazzy do, "no."
"You pwnd some noobs in your game? Like some level thirty full mithril noobs"
"Even better." Not that it got much better than JUSTing scrubs.
Dad twizzled his beard thoughtfully, "Miss Militia gave you a high five."
"I wish, but no. Better." I relished a grin. "I got a date with Shadow Stalker."
They both made identical, synchronised expressions of surprise.
"Good shit," mum fist bumped me across the table. "Aim high."
"You dog," dad offered his own fist for me to bump. "Taking after your old man, you know I was quite the stud back in the day. Why my first girlfriend turned out to be Iron Rain."
I gaped, "I thought you said mum was your first girlfriend!"
He winked and I saw mum out of the corner of my eye throw her knife and fork over her head from behind her back. I Observed her just to be sure.
Ninety nine percent they were having me on.
"But yeah, Stalker's pretty hot and totally tsuntsun."
"I don't know what that means," dad said as he handed mum back her cutlery. "But good for you, son. Actually, try and delay so your first date is on your birthday that way next year you can get the best present."
Mum giggled hysterically as my ears caught fire, imagination in overdrive. I mean, we had the internet so I knew what was possible.
"That's genius!" My parents didn't have twenty INT apiece for nothing. Whereforth would my own genius have sprung if not for them?
Dad gazed upon me with a feverish eye and identical burning ears, "I've never been so proud."
I couldn't help it, I started crying. "H-hai, tou-san!"
Even mum was blushing scarlet.
"I love you two," she sighed, hand on cheek, fork in mouth.
I decided now was the time to drop the bomb I'd been sitting on.
"Also I got us IP banned from PHO again."
"What made you think it was ok to say this?" Jen the Media Relations Head hissed at me for perhaps the dozenth time, hitting the playback button.
"Nigga!" the me on the screen said genially, shooting finger guns to an unseen second party.
"Why can't I call Vista 'my nigga'?"
She bit her tongue, "god we made the right choice doing a pre-trial run for your press appearance."
I flinched back, scandalised, "I thought this was live!"
"You thought this was live and you still said all those things?!" she incredulously blurted.
"You said act natural!"
Her eyes bulged and she turned to furiously click to an earlier part of the video.
"-bby of mine is making crystal sculptures. Usually, I get a penny in an old ice cream container and then fill it with one part bleach and two parts ammonia, then I get a crazy straw and blow oxygen onto the penny to activate the iron base. In fact, you can do it at home, just remember to keep it under your bed-"
She paused the video. "You can't go on national television and trick people into poisoning themselves with chlorine gas!"
"It was a joke," I protested. "There's no way anyone would do it, I mean, who doesn't know that makes chlorine gas? That shit's been out forever… actually, do you think if I actually poisoned myself I'd get poison resistance? I think so, but Armsmaster wouldn't let me."
She muttered something like 'maybe he should have'. "Most people don't know how to make chlorine gas, Dark Smoke-"
"Normies," I scoffed.
"Yes, normal people. If even one person poisoned themselves from that it would be your fault. And it would be our fault for giving you the platform to say it. Imagine if a child followed your instructions, ones they believed to come from a trusted source, and died."
"That would suck," I pouted a petulant moue.
Jen rolled her eyes, "at least I got the memo to test run this and we didn't have another Quicksilver incident."
"Aw shit, I shoulda thought of that! Quicksilver was hilarious."
Jen started rhythmically chewing on her thumbnail, scowling.
"But no, if we annexed Canada where would Dragon live?"
"You think of that before you consider you might trick someone into poisoning themselves?"
Was that bad? Was I autism?
"Yes."
"Are you having me on, Dark Smoke? When they handed me your case I thought they were taking the piss."
"I mean everything I ever say," I looked her dead in the eye. "Because I'm Dark Smoke Puncher."
Little did she know I didn't mean everything I said.
"Righto, we're done here," Jen stood up. "You obviously can't be let out in public to represent Us, we'll have to try again after you go through the full course of mandatory sensitivity training."
"But I don't need groupthink brainwashing sessions! I can be a Hero just fine by myself."
"You absolutely do."
I whined and made puppy dog eyes, "I don't! You can't tell me how to be!"
"We absolutely can," Jen crossed to the door and held it open for me. "If you want to be a public hero. Director Piggot gave me the final say in what help we needed to give you, and if you think for one second it was ok to trick people into poisoning themselves as a joke then by god you need all the help we can give."
Chapter 7: Fuck that gay wizard shit 1.7
Chapter Text
I really don't think that was what they wanted me to understand with the whole sensitivity training tripe, but fake it till you make it was still a thing right? Not that I would. When I was but a young lad my mother had given me three pieces of advice I carried with me to this day.
Be yourself.
Be yourself, yourself.
Don't punch old Gypsy women.
She was also fond of saying that bitches ain't shit but ho's and tricks, but that was just a product of her poor taste in music. As far as I was concerned I had followed her advice to the letter.
"Dark Smoke Puncher," Armsmaster said curtly as he approached, getting my attention. "I hope you learned something."
"I did sir," I smiled. "Thank you for asking."
What little I could see of his expression curdled.
"Ah man!" I cackled, punching him good-naturedly on the arm. "Don't worry bro, they didn't get me. I tricked them, see, on account of how smart I am."
Upon hearing this Armsmaster regained his smile, "you do realise that every time you make a fool of yourself in public you will have to retake the sensitivity training?"
I hadn't, that was unfair.
"So make sure you keep," he licked his lips sourly and made an encompassing gesture. "Yourself under wraps, or we're going to have to get you a handler."
"Heh," I thumbed my nose. "I can handle myself. Also, I just got Acting and Voice Mimicry skills plus a CHA point."
Armsmaster hissed in pleased surprise, "congratulations. But please try to avoid developing any undue skills or we'll be in power testing for the rest of our lives. On a related note, I've emailed your new exercise and diet regimen to your wards.ene address, please be sure to keep all your appointments with the PRT employees who will be your PT's."
"Noooo! You never made anyone else do jogging!"
"This is an ongoing, mandatory part of your power evaluation, we have to find out if your claims are true."
"I never lie," I lied.
"I see. And on another related note, I have a 'quest' for you-"
"Ah!" I pointed to his new floating bright yellow exclamation mark. "The thing, you have the thing! What quest?!"
"What thing?"
"The Quest Giver exclamation mark," I mimed one floating above my own head. "It means you have a quest!"
"Excellent, I had hoped this would be the case. After your preliminary power testing I did some research into these RPGs you claimed a similarity with in the hopes of finding exploits. With this, Dark Smoke Puncher, if your claims of unending growth are true then I will make personally sure that under my instruction you fulfil your dream of joining the Triumvirate." He placed his hand on my shoulder. "Now the quest is, 'Go and introduce yourself to the rest of the Wards team'."
"It worked it worked it worked!"
Armsmaster's lips curled into what he probably thought was a smile. I could relate, sometimes people said my smile was funny looking too.
"Ore wa kore hodo nagai ma matte imashita!" I bellowed in my best Sugita voice as I surveyed my brethren from atop my lofty perch of five stairs higher than them.
Dennis, the guy who would no doubt appreciate my memes. Anyone who named themselves Clockblocker could be no casul.
Dean, banger of Glory Girl and proof that the rabbit hole went far deeper than anyone expected. Seriously, how many bought power capes were there?
I could feel my Acting as I DIO walked towards them, "Hey guys, I'm Greg."
"They weren't lying," I head Dennis mutter to Dean. Clearly, the others had told him of my greatness. "Hello, Greg."
"We were just about to play a few rounds of Militia," Dean held up a PS4 controller. "You want in?"
"Hell yeah motherfucker!" I bounded forward and practically dived onto one of the empty couches. "I haven't played this since I ranked plat and it got too easy. What're we doing, kill for kill?"
"Sure," said Dean as he started up the game.
"Online multi? Is there a headset, I wanna see if chat's still the same."
"No," said Dean as Dennis said "Yes"
"Remember," Dean continued. "We lost it. And it would be a bad idea anyway since we're on the Wards account."
"Oh," said Dennis. "Oh, right yeah."
"I getcha," I tapped my nose. "I haven't even debuted yet, you guys would probably cop it if it got out I existed before they got to do all their PR crap."
Dean passed me the controller, "you go first, man."
I grinned, clicking the buttons and waggling the sticks. Usually, I was PC master race so this might take a little getting used to again. The game started and I charged forward, forward, forward and immediately died as soon as the enemy came into view.
"How the fuck did that happen," I whined, handing off to Dennis. "We're in bronze. Whatever."
"Get good," he shrugged as he respawned.
I cackled. It was a normie meme, but the first I'd heard out of a mouth other than mine in a while.
It took another two rounds of not talking very much because my new bros kept shutting down my gamer bants to get my old skill back, and then some. The new DEX and INT were really showing their worth.
"Ok, bored now," I said as I executed the seventh seven twenty noscope of my third fifteen long kill streak. "Also you guys really suck, I can see why you were ranked bronze. Can we not get a new headset in, after this point its only fun to watch twelve-year-olds have a meltdown and call you a niggerfaggot for a minute straight."
"Is that fun?" Dennis took back the controller after someone killed me with a lucky shot. "Fuck!"
Dean took over.
"Uh, sometimes."
"Weird, but yeah I'm over this too," Dean said as he just quit out of the game midway through the match before I could stop him."
"Dude, no, that totally tanks your score! Amateur hour shit like that is why you'll always be stuck in bronze!" I felt the fire of my old FPS obsession flare up once more. "You've always got to hustle for that chicken dinner, it's serious business."
"It's just a game, bro."
I gaped at the stupidity bursting forth from Dennis's mouth, the sheer unexpected idiocy. From him, the one Ward I expected to understand the struggle.
"And I suppose Scion is just Scion," I pontificated.
"Yeah."
Unbelievable, that such shit opinions could dwell in the hearts of bros. But not everyone could be GStringGirl, I'd long resigned myself to that fact; even if she did have some absolutely abhorrently shit opinions.
"Stay scrub-tier then," I pouted then immediately perked up as I thought of the best idea I'd ever had. "Hey Dean can you blast me with your power?"
Dean rubbed his mouth, "why? Also, how did you know I could do that without my armour?"
"I'm best Thinker, also I want to see how our powers interact," I leapt to my feet and loomed over him. "C'mon, c'mon, c'mon, blast me with something good!"
"Well…" Dean cringed back as I loomed harder. "Ok, sit down, it's not like I've never blasted the others with it before."
I launched myself back into the couch, bouncing with excitement as Dean raised a hand, pointed at me, and a laser shot out. It tickled.
A wave of contentment washed over me, a zen peace. I slumped back, "bruh."
"So did it work?" Dean asked. "Whatever power thing you wanted to see?"
"Ma~an, nah," I stretched like a cat in the sun. "Couple more times, hit me with a bad one this time."
Pchew!
I hated it.
"What the fuck is this," I hunched over, drawing my knees up and hugging them. "I don't like it."
"It was meant to be shame," Dean said.
"Is this what that feels like?"
All this time, it was shame?
"Aw, this is real bad, hit me with another good one."
This time I giggled uproariously.
Then I wept.
"Ok, stop, stop it happened, I got the resist."
"The what?" asked Dennis.
"Resistance," I sniffled. "I gain resistances to damage and other people's powers when I get hit, so can you two do me, like, a favour? Just hit me with yours whenever?"
"Maybe, we'd have to ask Armsmaster."
"Oh," the sadness went as I had a happy thought. "You guys should have seen his face when I told him I was The Crawler of the Dauntless genre, he's a funny guy."
"You said that to his face?" Dean asked, aghast. "Why?"
"It was funny."
Chapter 8: Fuck that gay wizard shit 1.8
Chapter Text
"Why the fuck did you tell Dennis we had a date?" Sophia hissed, looming up at me.
I flinched back from her threatening accusatory finger each time it jabbed at my face, "He asked," I squeaked.
"And how did he know to ask?"
I warily eyed her finger lest it jab me for real, "he wanted to know if I had any chicks on the line, so I said 'Do I ever, you'll never guess who one of them is' and he said 'who?' and I said 'Sophia' and he said 'holy shit mother fucker, you must be game. How'd you manage that?' so I said-"
She punched me in the ribs, "if you don't keep your mouth shut they'll never find the body."
-1hp
"Mou," I pouted, cradling my no doubt fractured ribcage. "Fine, I get it; you're actually a yangire type."
"Fucking weeb," she spat and made a threatening punch gesture.
I ducked my head and scurried away back to the table where Missy, Dean, Carlos and I were playing poker. As I neared the table I defaulted to my confident, pussy slaying swagger; brushing imaginary dust off my shoulders.
She was so into me.
"Was Dennis having us on about you two going on a date?" Missy asked incredulously. "It looked like you were being mugged."
"She's just being tsun," I said sitting down and picking up my cards.
"He didn't lie," said Dean. "They do have a date… for some reason."
"It's 'cause I'm a chick magnet, right Vista-chan," I winked and shot her the Greg-Style finger guns.
Missy frowned, an expression like that of a sad muppet.
"No," said Carlos. "Also, Greg, stop cheating."
"Counting cards isn't cheating," I recoiled, scandalised. I protectively swept my large stack of play chips closer to me in case anyone started getting any funny ideas.
"Ok," said Dean, rolling his eyes. "That's why."
I harrumphed, "It's not! Besides, it's so easy I started doing it by accident, you try being this smart! I wasn't even using my actual Thinker power to read your hands, imagine being such a brainlet you can't even count cards."
"Just shut up and stop cheating, man," Carlos sighed and glanced at the clock as he had been compulsively doing ever since he asked if I wanted to play cards. Maybe he also had somewhere else to be?
"Maybe you should just git gud and stop being so salty you're being out-fucking-skilled," I grinned smugly. "It's a tale as old as time, some scrub decides to challenge me and gets butthurt when he loses. Man, you shoulda seen this MtG tourney I was in back when I played. So I was running a control deck to troll noobs back when nobody else figured out they were top meta and I just had complete lockdown on this guy and he kept slapping his forehead and going 'hmmmmr!' it was hilarious. Especially when I played Moat and he had absolutely no dispels left I thought he was gonna legit flip the table-"
"Do you want the Shame Beam again?" Carlos threatened me out of insecurity of his lowly sixteen INT. "Because Dean can Shame Beam you if you don't shush."
My jaw snapped shut. Anything but the shame beam.
"Thank you."
Thank this, fucko, now I'll really start cheating-
"Can we play something else then?" Missy asked, throwing her hand onto the table. "I'm bored of this anyway."
"N-no!" I stammered. "I'll stop cheating, I promise!"
"So you were cheating," Missy j'accused.
"No! It's only cheating if you get caught," I wiped my sweaty palms on my jeans. "And since I told everyone my winning strategy that means I wasn't cheating since I wasn't caught."
Missy rolled her eyes and made some kind of wordless appeal to Dean. Yabai! I could tell she wasn't thinking I was cool, time for Plan B!
I equipped my full Dark Smoke Puncher uniform and blasted smoke, somersaulting backward over the couch in the resulting confusion.
"You'll remember this," I jeered through the smokescreen, activating Acting and Voice Mimicry. "As the day you almost caught Dark Smoke Puncher!"
And then I hoofed it out the door as fast as I could, I had places to be anyway.
"How the fuck," Carlos smushed his eyes and ran a hand through his hair. "How is he going to be the new Dauntless Plus?"
"At least it's over now, and Armsmaster said we wouldn't have to do it again," Missy commiserated. "I hope he never gets let out of PR training, going on patrols would be a nightmare."
"Dunno what you two are on about, I like him," Dean said absently, fiddling with something on his phone. "Real genuine guy."
"I guess so?" said Missy. "I mean…"
"It's hard to see without emotion sense," he agreed gallantly. "But he hasn't said a single word with malicious intent."
"…He's so annoying," Missy sighed.
"So annoying," echoed Carlos, leaning back into the couch and staring blankly at the ceiling.
"He is," Dean agreed again. "But he's a nice person, just give him a chance."
"Speaking of giving people chances," Carlos leant forward again, forearms resting on knees. "What did you see with him talking to Sophia?"
"Oh, yes, spill," Missy mirrored his posture.
Dean slid his phone back into his pocket, "I really don't know what to make of it. She absolutely hates him and is super embarrassed about the whole thing. He's terrified of her when she's getting up in his face, but when he talks about it he's kinda, like, a kid in a candy store. They knew each other in civvies beforehand, so I guess… maybe it's complicated?"
"Who knows," Missy grinned. "Maybe they'll work and she can stop being such a bitch and he can stop being such an idiot."
"We can only dream," Carlos floated up and over toward the kitchen. "Anyone else want a can?"
"If you understood all of that, you may now pick up the pistol," Hana said, gesturing to it.
And I did understand, despite being distracted the whole lecture by her very pretty eyes, the way they squinched; you could feel the smile behind the scarf. Kirei na!
I fitted on my earmuffs, picked up the gun being careful not to touch the trigger, checked the safety to make sure it was on and took aim in the approved stance. Breathe in, safety off, breathe out and finger on the trigger.
Bang!
Yeah baby, clean shot right through at least part of the target!
Bang!
Bang!
Bang!
Bang!
Bang!
Bang!
Bang!
Bang!
"Yatta! That last one was actually in the outer ring! Plus I got a skill out of it," I carefully flicked the safety back on and placed the gun back on the counter, giving Hana a 1.21-gigawatt grin. "Feelin' real good about my life right now."
"Very well done," she returned my grin and clapped me on the shoulder. "And excellent adherence to safety protocol, now you can reload and try again."
The 'kyaa~' died in my throat, crushed by the rising excitement as I felt myself go pink. "T-thanks," I managed to say, picking the gun back up and reloading it from my inventory. Best power, probably better than observe. I mean yeah, I got a perfect assessment of someone's threat level when I observed them and how exactly their power worked, but I also had to read through their boring flavour text. The only flavour text I wanted to read was mine, and I couldn't.
I fired until my gun skill levelled up, fifty bullets exactly. From the outside, it would have looked like I was doing a really good impression of Hana's power, seemingly never needing to reload on a nine-round pistol.
"You're picking this up remarkably quickly," Hana said, taking her place in the firing booth. "It'll just be a matter of practice now. Make sure you listen to any more tips your shooting instructors give you, and in a few months we can do this again and you can show me how good you've gotten."
She gave me another one of those smiles and put a shot in the bullseye.
"Y-you too."
XxVoid_CowboyxX: Miss Militia is cute! I'm going to marry Miss Militia!
GStringGirl: would you really want to marry an old lady like her, cakes are no good after the 25th
XxVoid_CowboyxX: no memeing
GStringGirl: no memes? You must be serious!
XxVoid_CowboyxX: I have never been more so, I'll send you an invite to the wedding and when you turnt up Armsmaster can insult your outfits colour coordination
GStringGirl: Yeah, I'll be there for sure.
Chapter 9: Fuck that gay wizard shit 1.9
Chapter Text
With the power of PUA forums and Eroge on my side, I couldn't lose!
I had my aviators on. I had my leather jacket on. Toothpick in mouth. Wisdom of my Father thundering through my head.
Sophia approached, she was late. And seething if her Observe window was right. As she neared I executed The Manoeuvre; with my ring finger I pushed my sunglasses up onto my head and transitioned smoothly into running my fingers through my hair with a smouldering look.
I nodded upward, "sup, bitch?"
She turned on her heel mid-stride and started walking back the way she came.
I watched her leave.
Why was she leaving? I did bad?
The Shame Feeling wormed its way up in my guts, something I did had been a mistake. At once I divined my folly; she didn't get I was kidding. This had happened before, with others. Once I had jokingly remarked to Brad that the reason for his outrageous bragging was that he was trying to impress us like we were his alcoholic father. Then he punched me in the mouth because he didn't get the joke was that I'd never met his dad and couldn't possibly know that.
But hey, the only way to get better at jokes was to tell more of them.
"Wait!" I called out, breaking into a run after her. "Sophia, wait up! I was kidding!"
I caught up and walked beside her, "it was a joke, even though you are turbo bitchy I wouldn't call you that as a greeting; that's rude! So the obvious conclusion is that it was a joke! Please stop walking, you're going the wrong way for our date!"
She quickened her pace, forcing me into a trot.
"Come on, please stop, you can't leave as soon as you got here. I know you missed that me blackmailing you was a joke but this is too much, where's your sense of humour?! Please respond."
I followed diligently as she tried to escape, my pleas becoming increasingly impassioned but her heart was stone. I followed as far as the bus stop, mounting panic clutching at my heart. I was starting to think she really didn't like me.
"But I already bought tickets to the aquarium," my voice broke as she took the first step into her bus, tears breaking out of my eyes. She turned back just enough to glance at me, but it wasn't a kind expression. "It's my birthday."
She took her seat and the bus pulled away. Some guy also waiting laughed at me for striking out and I ran home crying.
My tears had subsided before I got there, I knew what was coming. I took a breath, steeling myself, and opened the door.
At once my parents bounded out of the living-room like a pair of dogs.
"You're home way too early," mum accused. "Gimme the deets, homie!"
"…shimatta," I mumbled.
"English," dad prompted gently.
I relayed my story, short as it was, to their mutual groans and facepalms.
"I said cocky," dad patted me on the shoulder consolingly. "Not cockhead."
"It was a rookie mistake, but chin up Greggy," mum swept me into a hug. "We'll write out an apology for you to memorise so she knows you're sorry."
"Thanks," I said thickly, hugging her back. That was good, I clearly wasn't as good with on the spot improv as I thought so having a script would make sure my intentions were clear.
Now if only there were some way I could script an entire date…
"You know," I said conversationally. "The quest didn't fail, I think I still have a chance."
"With what?" Armsmaster asked as he tightened something on his monitoring equipment with a really weird looking screwdriver.
"Sophia, we had a date that I messed up but the quest for it didn't fail; it's still in my log."
"I'm afraid this conversation is inappropriate, between you and I, and as we are currently in a formal power testing situation-"
"I invoke the Ward-Protectorate Mentorship act," I said smugly. "I am in distress, I require advice."
Armsmaster stopped screwing and sighed, "of course you do. Fine. Tell me about it."
"So I think she hates me," I began. "She's always so mean, but yesterday she was late to our date and then she left as soon as she got there without even speaking to me. Get this, it was my birthday too! I'd already bought the aquarium tickets as well! At first, I thought she was just being Tsundere, but there hasn't been any dere so far."
"My advice? Give up," Armsmaster fiddled with his various knobs and dials.
"Mou," I pouted. "You're no help, plus the quest is worth ten K and a perk point."
Armsmaster whipped around, "perk point? You need that for your Mana Control ability, I thi- No, you should give up. Workplace romances seldom go well, you'd likely just cause unwelcome friction between your team which will spawn more problems for everyone. It's best you just tell her you're no longer interested and keep yourself busy with training until you forget her."
"I mean," I dithered. That was all very sound sounding advice, sasuga Twenty CHA Colin. But if I did that I'd have to dob her in for bullying Taylor and killing that guy because you should never welch on a deal. Promises were sacred, Menma taught me that.
"It's your choice but I strongly suggest you take the advice you asked for," Armsmaster finished touching up his device. "Now take this book, it's a compilation of every fighting style, trick and technique that makes up my own hand to hand style-"
"I can't learn it," I said the second my fingers touched the cover. "Oh, it's a prestige skill I need to do a quest apparently."
Wow, ok. "This looks hard," I whined. "I need loads of stats and skills at twenty."
"I'll make the arrangements," Armsmaster snapped, handing me another book clearly identifiable as a first aid manual. "Now hold this in front of the sensors and don't use it until I say so."
I inventoried the fighting manual and took the first aid one, holding it in front of the various panels and wibbly bits of the monitoring machine while Armsmaster did some final configuring.
"Ready in three, two, one, now," he slashed a hand through the air.
I activated the book, it disappeared in a flash filling my mind with new concepts and possibilities and boy howdy was this a good skill; I could literally make people heal faster.
Armsmaster clicked his tongue and rattled his machine vigorously, "and you're sure you don't have any clue as to what energy type your power emits?"
"Still nothing being picked up?"
"Not a blip, besides picking up electromagnetic radiation only on the visible spectrum. Your power calls it 'mana' yes? We have to figure out if this is merely your subconscious providing a word or if you somehow can actually cast magic."
"Oh ho ho! It's magic, you know! Never believe it ain't so!"
"Stop singing," Armsmaster barked. "We have to figure out at the very least what this energy you produce is. Your power is already unique in that it literally provides you with a written explanation of how it works mechanically in lieu of instinctive use, so it's imperative we discover if this energy is also wholly unique."
"Ok."
"Now go back to the PRT headquarters and actually do some exercise for once, you won't want to go into your training sessions with the troopers unprepared, I told them not to take it easy on you. We'll reconvene here in a week once I've put together a new sensory system."
"Of course!" I acted, hot-footing it out of the lab. But it was jokes on him, I probably wasn't going to do any exercise at all.
I chatted to the lady who chauffeured me to the rig on our way back, but she kept insisting she needed to concentrate on driving. I swiped my phone out of my inventory and checked my messages.
GStringGirl: for the last time just turn SS in, ive read enough fanfiction to know this wont end well
It was a conundrum. On one hand she was bullying my friend and also killed a guy, on the other she was really hot.
XxVoid_CowboyxX: yeah maybe, but me and armsy figured out I'm actually like a wizard or something. Legit magic spells
Soon enough I was back at the PRT building, sauntering in in my DSP uniform past the security and into the Wards area. Chris sat on one of the couches, watching the Protectorate cartoon and eating a sandwich. That reminded me.
"Hey Chris," I bounded down to him. "Before I forget to tell you again your tinker speciality is modular equipment!"
Chapter 10: Fuck that gay wizard shit: Interlude: Armsmaster: Missy Byron
Chapter Text
3rd November 2010- Armsmaster
"Your son has a problem, Mr. and Mrs. Veder."
Their faces slid from pleasantly interested to an expression that confirmed they knew exactly what he was talking about.
"This isn't just about him getting along with the other Wards, which he doesn't. Or correctly obeying orders, which he doesn't. It's his flagrant lack of understanding of how to go about doing these things because I can clearly see he wants to. His social and emotional intelligence are at complete odds with his working intelligence, which by all accounts is extremely high. We've been told his marks are improving dramatically at school, and his self-defence instructors here report that he has been improving at a staggering rate," Armsmaster steepled his gauntleted hands. "How long has he been like this?"
Damien frowned slightly, staring at the conference room table. "Forever, more or less? It's just how he is. I was a bit like that myself, at his age, but it's just recently he's gotten a whole lot more confidence."
"He was quieter before he got powers," Veronica added. "But I wouldn't consider his personality to be a bad thing-"
"Nor would I," said Damien.
"He just takes after us, all he needs is to get some real-life experience."
"I don't think he's even that bad, certainly not enough to call us in for a meeting like this."
"His only real problem is that he very much likes to share what he enjoys, and what he likes is a bit niche for most people. But that's not even really a problem."
"He's actually gotten a bit better since joining the Wards, wouldn't you say darling? About… three? Three percent better?"
"Near enough, and anyway, he has friends at school and once he goes off to college he'll meet even more people who're into all the memes and video games he is so I'm not seeing your issue here, Armsmaster."
He had expected them to be biased toward their misbegotten son, but this was a ridiculous level of justification.
"Even putting aside his peer relations, if he wants to work as a public hero he needs to be able to present himself in a respectable manner; which at the moment he is just not capable of doing. Or doesn't want to do, rather, as he does understand the concept. But when it comes down to it, he fails. Maybe it's a stress-related issue and this is his way of dealing with social anxiety, but whatever the reason, unless he can conform to our public relations guideline we will have to permanently bench him. Keep him relegated to internal work until he's capable of presenting a good image," Armsmaster leant back, separating his hands. "I'm not sure if you're fine with that, but he certainly isn't. He's chomping at the bit to get into the field and as much as our hands are tied by PR regulations they are just as tied by the Youth Guard."
Veronica crossed her arms, "and it would cause issues here if you were to keep restricting him, so you want us to try and handle the discipline?"
"Sort of," Armsmaster nodded. "We'd rather try a soft approach before dipping into anything even bordering official. And we do want him to achieve his goals, but at the moment his behaviour doesn't allow that within our framework."
"And if our stern talking to doesn't work?" Damien asked, bushy eyebrows furrowed.
"Nothing punitive," Armsmaster held up a placating hand. "Nothing remotely close to that, worst case scenario he gets assigned a lot of mandatory training sessions designed to help promote a heroic public image. Best case he might get some mentoring from one of our senior Protectorate members, so he can see how they work in person and hopefully learn from example."
"Ok, none of this sounds like we needed to have this talk, let alone face to face, if you already have all this in place," Veronica mirrored her husband's frown. "What's the real issue with him being a bit awkward?"
If there was an understatement of the year award that would win, Armsmaster thought as he rolled his eyes behind his visor.
"His power," he said. "Your son is like a second coming of Dauntless, possibly even better than that. And Dauntless is already predicted to rival the Triumvirate given enough time, your son could get there even faster. Our power testing indicates he was telling the truth about his limitless potential, we want to capitalise on that. And we can't if he behaves the way he does. If we want him to be up there with the likes of Legend he needs to know how to talk to people, and as far as I can tell the only Ward who doesn't mind him is Gallant. If only one of a youth peer group he has such a large common ground with can put up with him, how can he work within a much more diverse adult working environment?"
"Depends on if he wants to," Veronica said. "When he's done with high school he might move way out of state for college; where Coil can't get to him. If he wants to quit being a Hero and do an Arts degree that's fine with us."
How absolutely abhorrent, they would let him squander his gift. What was this sickening unconditional support of the boys' stupidity?
"Have you ever had your son tested?"
"Yes, we have, thank you," said Damien in a tone that made it clear the thanks was sarcastic. "And he's fine."
Of course he was.
"In any case, from the beginning, Greg has expressed a desire to be a hero of Triumvirate calibre, it would behove us all to do our level best to help him get there."
"We'll talk it out with him, see how he feels. If he says he wants to be like that, then, of course, we'll do our best to help him."
Armsmaster breathed a secret sigh of relief, thanked them and handed them over to their PRT escort. He really didn't know what was worse at this point, that someone like Greg was going to reach that peak instead of him; or if he'd fail to get him there.
5th November, 2011- Missy Byron
"I love you so much that I just can't resist you," Missy sang under her breath, flipping the page on her shamefully girly magazine. She hummed the rest of the bars, having forgotten the lyrics.
She sighed at the vapid advice column, none of this would help her.
Loud, muffled voices suddenly broke her out of her reverie. Why there were loud voices she had no idea, no one was out in the main common room but Greg setting up his computers. He had somehow convinced Dean, Chris, Dennis and Rory to have a 'LAN party' with 'the RTS version of Space Opera', whatever that meant.
The voices got louder and less muffled, sounding exactly like Armsmaster asking 'what do you mean you cancelled your appointment with your combat instructor?'
Oh, this ought to be good, Greg deserved a dressing down. She tossed her magazine over her shoulder and crept to the door, easing it open. A quick flex of her power pinched the space between her room and the end of the hallway to a mere inch, letting her peek into the main area.
Armsmaster was looming over Greg, fists clenched and Greg was sitting there looking utterly flabbergasted.
"Just relax bro."
"Do you have any idea how much I've sacrificed!?" Armsmaster suddenly bellowed, throwing his hands up. "Setting up everything for you, going above and beyond, calling in favours and working overtime! You'd throw it back in my face you ungrateful little shit! All that potential, wasted! At least Dauntless understands his responsibility, but you wouldn't even care if you did! You want to be Triumvirate? You can't take a single day off, you think I've had a day off in years? No!"
Missy drew back, a sick feeling clawing in her guts. Greg didn't deserve this. This was the kind of shit she came here to get away from.
"Because you can't do that when you're clawing your way to the top! Rested back to normal every day? Negative status effects gone? You have it easy!"
Missy peeked back around. At some point Greg had started crying, tears streaming silently down his face as spit began to fleck Armsmaster's neat beard. And here she was, hiding around the corner; as usual.
"Even Dauntless has to suffer like the rest of us while you waltz through your day, blithe and blind to your gifts! What is wrong with you?!"
Greg gave a sniffling sort of whimper to which Armsmaster literally growled.
"Just sort yourself out!" he barked and stormed out of the Wards area.
Missy stood there for a moment to the background of Greg's sobbing. Even if he was really annoying, this wasn't right. She slunk out from behind the corner and beelined over to him.
"Are you ok?"
"I'm an idiot sandwi-ih-ich!" Greg bawled wretchedly in his horrible nasally nerd voice.
She sat down next to him and awkwardly put a hand on his shoulder, "he shouldn't have yelled at you."
He immediately wrapped her in a crushing hug and jammed his face in her shoulder, crying even harder. Missy tried not to cringe and pull away, even though this was her favourite shirt being covered in his blubbering.
"Why, uh, why was he so mad? I've never seen him lose his nuts like that before."
"Probably the sleep deprivation and amphetamine comeda-ah-own!" Greg sobbed for a few more seconds then immediately stopped. "Forget I said that. Emily made me sign a thing saying I wasn't allowed to tell people what's in Observe windows."
God, it was weird hearing the Director being called Emily, "ok, but can you let go of me now?"
"Mou," Greg huffed. "I guess."
He was taking way too long to let go. "Get off!"
"But it was a nice hug!" he protested, finally dislodging himself and retreating to his seat on the sofa.
"You got snot all on my shirt!"
"So? It's just snot, it washes out. Besides, I wouldn't care if you wiped your face on my shirt."
"But that's gross."
He shrugged, now sporting a big silly grin, all evidence of being upset vanishing. "Could be grosser. Your power could be excreting effluvial grime, you could be like Gregor the Snail."
She didn't know what effluvial meant but it sounded bad. "So are you, like, ok now?"
"Hmmm, yeah. Armsmaster didn't really sound like he was mad at me, I think he's just grumpy today," Greg said airily.
No. No, Greg.
"Right, well, I'm going to go change my shirt. You, uh, have fun with this," Missy gestured to the computers.
"Kk, you wanna play? You have much experience with RTS games? This one's pretty high level despite its basic setup but what I really like about this one is the setting. See, you have all these different factions fighting over swathes of galaxy with self-perpetuating armies of murderbots. While that doesn't sound like much the cutscenes on single player mode really sold me on the setting."
Missy closed her eyes, opened them, and stared at the ceiling as Greg droned on. This was going to be her whole afternoon, she just knew it.
Chapter 11: And a real hero 2.1
Chapter Text
Run here. Jump there. Fight on. Practice these. Say this. One more rep.
All culminating, finally, in today.
"You did well in your interview," Geromy 'Dauntless' Weller said excitedly. "This is progress, Dark Smoke. Everyone is proud of you, and because of that, you get to go on your first patrol."
I frowned as we walked up the stairs out of the Wards area and into the impossibly smooth elevator. I continued frowning as it made its imperceptible journey upward and pinged our stop, door opening. I frowned mightily as Dauntless led me through the PRT building and out into the twilight.
There was something important I was forgetting that I had been meaning to do, but…
Oh yeah.
"Hey Dauntless, Sophia bullies my friend at school and also she killed a guy."
Goodbye Luncheon Quest.
Dauntless froze mid-step, and from what little I could see through his Hoplite helmet he looked confused.
"She killed someone at school?" He asked, sounding baffled.
"No, before she joined the Wards," I made to keep walking, but Dauntless didn't follow. "Also she shot Grue with a lethal bolt the other day. I'll tell you more as we patrol," I subtly indicated we continue on.
Huh, so it was a good idea after all. I'd have to thank GStringGirl for that.
"Is this one of your 'jokes'?" Dauntless said, almost managing to properly enunciate the air quotes.
"I would never joke about something this serious," I lied, indicating again that we should move more than fifty meters away from the PRT building. Like seriously, we had shit to do Geromy.
He took a step toward me, but only enough to get into my personal bubble. "Why're you only saying this now? You had to have been sitting on this information since day one. You know this is a very serious accusation, right?"
I crossed my arms and tapped my chin, "well… first off I was going to just turn her in, but I was talking to her about it and joked like I was blackmailing her, which she took seriously. Then I was like, 'y'know, maybe she can reform and shit' so I was waiting to see if she'd stop being mean to my friend; and she sort of did but not really. Then I forgot about it for a while, then I got reminded when I read she shot Grue, then forgot again because I had to do another PR training thing that day. And then I remembered now."
I smiled, knowing he'd understand it was a very reasonable sort of mistake to make. He didn't say anything for a bit, just standing there staring at me in forgiveness.
"You're lucky it's me because this is as far as it's going to stretch," Dauntless said finally. "We'll do our patrol, you tell me everything, and then when we come back you're going to write out a full report, signed and dated, and hand it in to Armsmaster."
"Yes!" I fist pumped, even though I was getting a funny feeling like Dauntless was mad for some reason. "Good thing too, because this patrol is a quest and I need more to replace the cornucopia that was the Taking Sophia out on a Date Quest I just lost."
Dauntless groaned, pained and exasperated before setting off down the sidewalk. I trotted alongside him, but I wasn't quite as psyched as I thought I would be. I had this nagging feeling like I'd done something wrong with what I'd said to Geromy like I'd made trouble for him or something. Very odd.
There were only a few people out on the streets, this being most people's dinner time, but there were enough to start taking a few pictures of me as I did my Hero Walk. I waved back occasionally, as my training dictated but didn't say anything, as my orders dictated.
Lame! How was I supposed to get famous if I couldn't bantz with the citizenry?
Besides beating up Villains, which according to Armsmaster I wasn't even allowed to try yet on account of me only being as /fit/ as an average gymbro; even if my skills made me hit harder and faster than my stats implied I could. Soon, he'd promised.
"So what's our patrol route, Big D?"
"Never call me Big D again," said Dauntless. "And we're just doing a quick loop of the Boardwalk, it's only your first patrol. Really, the purpose of it is to get you a little exposure and to also get you used to being on the job."
「This is shit! Shit!」I muttered. I mean, yeah but still.
"Beg pardon? I'm sorry I don't… speak…" Dauntless stopped walking. "Dr. Wu?"
Fuck!
"Dr. Who?"
"Dr. Wu."
"Who?"
"No, W-never mind that. You were Dr. Wu, weren't you? From the Boardwalk two months ago."
"Uh," my voice chose a most inopportune time to crack. "I've never heard of anyone by that name before."
Dauntless suddenly started walking again down the direction of the Boardwalk, so I guess he bought it like a chump. Dr. Wu remained safe another day.
Idly I wondered what Coil was up to. He was probably sitting in his snake-themed office seething over the loss of my services while his mercs served him snake venom flavoured tea.
"Hey Dauntless, when we're in the Triumvirate, would that make it the Pentumverate?" I asked the hard-hitting question.
"Well, if we ever make it there, I dunno," he said, kind of awkwardly like he wasn't psyched as fuck to be one of the five big dick G's for some reason. "They're probably too iconic to get rid of the Triumvirate as a name, so we'd always get second billing unless we can do something they never could."
"I'm gonna kill an Endbringer!" I chirped.
"Yeah," he replied heavily as we walked. "Yeah, that'd about do it."
Hmmm, no quest for that though. Well, whatever, I had a patrol one to do; and I'd do it damn well.
Doing it damn well turned out to be damn boring. We just powerwalked along, Dauntless occasionally telling people we couldn't stop and chat while I wasn't allowed to speak to any of my adoring fans. To add to that, I wasn't even allowed to post on any of my DarkSmokePuncher social media handles! This whole thing was horse shit, apparently, I couldn't be trusted to handle myself on the internet like I hadn't been online for years. I knew how the dog and pony show worked, I knew what memes worked and what didn't.
Aaaaaaand straight into DEX. Oh, baby, that was a strange feeling. Nothing like the feedback I got from dumping into INT. I felt smoother, more balanced, and quicker. Honestly, these days I was feeling pretty fucking great with my better than average VIT. I was looking good too, not that I wasn't smokin' beforehand, but now I looked healthy. And I could run. Oh could I run, it was fucking crazy.
I was, god forbid my Chad genetics expressing themselves, enjoying exercise.
"You've been pretty quiet," Dauntless said suddenly while our ride skimmed over the force field bridge to The Rig. "Even with the gag order, they said you'd be chatty."
I frowned, I hadn't even noticed.
"I was thinking about the Sophia thing. You didn't seem happy about it."
He turned to look at me incredulously, one eye still on the road. "Why would I be? You're accusing her of violating her parole, of murder, if it's true she's going to get shitcanned; pardon my French. This is horrible, for everyone from her family all the way up the line to Armsmaster. Why didn't you tell anyone sooner?"
"I dunno," I shrugged uncomfortably. And I really didn't, 'cause I was pretty sure there was a clause in my Obverse Contract that I was allowed to tell if someone had committed a felony. I'd have to re-read that thing. "Sorry?"
"Sorry," I repeated as it was apparently the correct answer.
"I don't know if this is a situation where you can just say sorry, Dark Smoke."
Preposterous. There was never a time where a sorry wouldn't help.
"I know you have a condition, but you need to start thinking before you act."
I recoiled. "I'm not retarded!" I said hotly. "I just tell the Nazi's that."
Geromy cleared his throat but didn't say anything, indicating he understood. He pulled into The Rig's carpark and we vacated our weird microcar, hustling it into The Rig proper and up into Geromy's office.
It was pretty lame in here, not a single manime figma. Not even any official merch, even I had a Legend nendo. And to belabour the point even more about how lame the office was, he didn't even have a poster of himself.
Luckily we were only in there long enough for me to write up my report on both my first patrol and everything I knew about Sophia's criminal activities. My hand flew across the page like the 19 DEX powerhouse it was, words pouring like silk as I wove tales that were grandiose even in their dry accuracy. Because I wasn't allowed to embellish reports anymore because 'it was illegal'.
It wasn't long before we were being buzzed into Armsmaster's considerably less lame office; he even had a signed poster of himself to himself! How cool was that?!
"Well?" he asked tiredly. He even looked tired, and Armsmaster never looked tired. "Your reports?"
I inhaled sharply to speak, but remembered Dauntless was supposed to go first for reasons and let it go.
"The patrol itself went completely fine, Da-"
"It was so boring!" I cut in because Armsmaster just had to know. "All we did was walk around. Big D can fly, and I can jump good, can we do the roof hopping shit next time? I've always wanted to do that!"
"Dark Smoke Puncher behaved himself and completed the patrol as per orders," Dauntless continued as though I hadn't spoken. "I've already emailed the report on that through, but Dark Smoke has a very important one for you."
Oh, this was one of those things I was going to get in trouble for I just knew it.
"Well firstly, I levelled up from the patrol quest and put the points into DEX."
Armsmaster nodded.
"And also this," I handed him the written report of Sophia's escapades.
He wasn't wearing his helmet or armour so even I could see his face and shoulders droop as he read.
"I don't know whether to be impressed you bothered to tell or disappointed it took so long," he sighed. "You don't know how happy I'll be when control of the Wards transfers to Director Piggot next year."
"Well," I said. "I think you should be impressed. I'm always impressed with myself."
"Just leave, the both of you. I have to spend time I don't have setting up an investigation against one of our own heroes. Both of you will need to be on call to answer questions," Armsmaster said. "You had better not be lying about this, Greg, because I know you don't comprehend even one iota of how serious this is. For your sake, you had better not be trying for some joke only you understand."
Chapter 12: And a real hero 2.2
Chapter Text
Oh, neat!
"Thank you, again, for giving me the opportunity to help out like this," I quoted my script, my PR handler hovering over my shoulder like a passive-aggressive moth, just waiting to report any fuckup I made back to Armsmaster.
"It is absolutely no problem, Dark Smoke Puncher," said Chief Physician Dan with a smile. "We look forward to your next visit."
He didn't sound very sincere though, but fuck that guy. How else was I going to grind exp to up my medical skills? I bet he was just jealous I'd eventually be able to slap a Band-Aid on a broken leg and call it a day.
Nevertheless, PR moth and I trundled out of his office and-
Very nice.
PR guy was yammering on as usual about utterly insignificant, minor fixes I could make to my performance. I was tempted to actually conform long enough to get this stooge off my back, like seriously man, I was a genius! I didn't need you here, everything that transpired here was going exactly according to my design.
As we rounded a corner I saw a flurry of white bustle out of a room and head toward us. I Observ-
I burst forward, covering the twenty or so meters in about two seconds. "Panacea!" I grasped her hands. "I need you!"
She tried to pull away reflexively, letting out a cry of shock. "What? Why?"
I leaned in real close, clapped my hands and Edward Elric spread them in front of her face. "Monsters!" I whispered dramatically.
She started freaking the fuck out. It was kind of impressive really, previously I thought The Nile was only a river in Egypt.
But I could see somehow I went wrong. "Just kidding~" I trilled as PR guy finally caught up.
"What the fuck are you doing?!" he hissed. "Panacea, I'm so sorry about this. Whatever inappropriate remark he made, he probably thought he was being funny. I'm Taylor Miles, PR handler for Dark Smoke Puncher, is there anything we can do to apologise for him bothering you?"
"I wasn't bothering her," I retorted. It had been an unironic request. She could make monsters. I was an RPG character, I existed to kill monsters. Who else was I going to ask, Nilbog? Ffs.
"He was bothering me," said Amy for reasons unknown. "Just leave me alone."
"Of course," PR Soy Boy said, unsuccessfully trying to manhandle me away due to his poor STR stat. "We'll leave right away."
Eventually, I let him drag me away. "Bro," I said. "Why you gotta be cockblocking my exp's like that? I'm trying to maintain."
He scoffed and sighed at the same time, "at least that was your only screw-up, just for the love of god please try not to alienate the best healer in the country. Small mercies it happened in private."
In private eh? I ignored the rest of his inane prattle as we left the hospital, a plan was forming. A most delightfully devilish plot…
GStringGirl: I can't believe you actually took my advice, when did you stop being retarded?
XxVoid_CowboyxX: I was never retarded, I bet your INt is like, 12
GStringGirl: hidoi!
XxVoid_CowboyxX: rawr >:3
XxVoid_CowboyxX: now shut up and give me more good advice on how to get panacea to make monsters for me to kill
I put my phone away and concentrated on my tracking, weaving through endless corridors; eyes peeled for any hint of my quarry. With the taking GStrinGirl's advice turning out to be a good idea I realised there were wells of it hitherto untapped, right here at school even. If I was sneaky enough.
And I was sneaky enough.
But unfortunately lunch hour wasn't enough to track Taylor down before World Studies so I would be forced to do this with an audience, but that was cool, I was all about the challenge these days.
I sat in the usual seat, next to Sparky, but I had a feeling he wouldn't be a good choice to ask for advice. Something like this needed a delicate touch, and Taylor was pretty girly being a girl and all.
"Taylor!" I bellowed the second she stepped through the door. "Taylor, l'me ask you summin'!"
She closed her eyes for a long second, no doubt preparing herself for any number of curveballs I might throw at her. "What do you want, Greg?" she asked as she sat down at my table.
I grinned my sunniest grin.
"I need some advice, see I have this friend, let's call her Big P and I'm trying to get her to do me a favour I'm not sure she wants to because she's an idiot and I need to know how to convince her to do it."
Taylor suddenly looked real uncomfortable, "what favour?"
"I uh," I stammered. "I can't tell you."
"Don't ask her for it," she muttered, looking a bit flushed.
Weird, it was starting to get pretty chilly, but maybe she had on too many layers or something.
Oh!
"Oh!" I snapped my fingers. "You're right, I shouldn't just expect her to do something like this for me. I should be asking her 'a-what can I do-a for you?'" I made the Italian hand gesture in a flawless accent. "Thanks! I knew asking you would be a good idea."
A muffled noise started emanating from Sparky that I was placing somewhere between admiration and disgust. But that last part couldn't be right.
"Bruh," he said.
And all was right in the world, within our little outcast group.
A week later saw me peeking over the back fence of Amy's house with a pair of binoculars. Tonight was the night, my surveillance indicated only the Target and Mark Dallon were home. I'd already mapped my way around the security, now it was just a matter of getting in. I inventoried the binos, took a step back and vaulted the fence.
I flitted around the edge of the yard until I got to a blind spot in the motion sensor lights, then raced up to the wall and continued to edge around it until I was in an optimal position. A jump had me soundlessly catching the first-floor eave, I hauled myself up and shimmied across until I was underneath Amy's window. I turned sideways to give my knees room to bend and jumped again, catching the outside frame of the window with a bit more noise than I wanted.
I hung there, waiting for a solid minute, before lifting myself up and crouching as best I could wedged as I was outside. I gently tried the window; locked. Well fuck, nothing else for it I guess.
I knocked politely on the glass.
Amy leant into view with a confused expression, one hand already removing an earphone. I waved and she jumped about a foot, a comical expression of surprise etched across her face.
I laughed and mimed for her to open the window for me.
"Who are you?!" she sounded a bit muffled from behind the glass.
"Dark Smoke Puncher, we met the other day. Can I come in?"
"No!"
"Please?"
"No!" she stormed up to the window. "Fuck. Off."
"But I came to apologise," I whined. "Let me in."
"Why are you outside my window?!"
"I'm a ninja," I said. "It's what I do."
"I don't care, go away! I can't make monsters in the first fucking place!"
"Pan Pan, please," I said scornfully. "We both know that's not even slightly true. Now let me in, I have an apology to make."
There was a moment where I really thought she just wasn't going to let me in, and then I didn't know what I'd do. My plan would be ruined. Luckily she relented and flicked the latch on the window, letting me scramble in.
I dusted myself off, scanning the place. It was really boring for a Biokinetic's room, not even a single Piranha Plant or Bakeneko.
"Well," Amy said, arms crossed. "Out with it."
"Oh, right yes. Sorry I asked you to make monsters for me in public, without offering anything in turn. It was wrong of me to assume you'd just up and do me the favour, shit like this needs a little givu andu taeku, so how about I help you hook up with Glory Girl?"
I was proud of that apology, I hadn't even gotten my parents to help me write it.
Amy however, went white as a sheet and sat down.
"No?" I frowned, I assumed that would work. "Anything else you're after?"
"How?"
I was going to say, 'I need to know what to do the how' but then realised what she meant.
"I have a thinker power that lets me know who people are and exactly what they can do. Now normally I'd be against this because she's going out with one of my friends and it would make him sad, but for this, I can make an exception."
"But," Amy whispered, covering her face with her hands. "She's my sister!"
"Oh," I said, drawing the word out. "That. Yeah no, faux incest yuri is the purest form of love."
"No!"
"Uh, yes."
She started crying.
"No, no, no, no, no! I was, it was going so well! You," she sobbed. "You stupid fucking asshole!"
"Why're you upset?" I asked, aghast. This wasn't how I imagined this going at all. "Isn't that what you want?"
"No! For fuck's sake, she's my sister it's disgusting!"
"Well," I drawled. "That's not very progressive."
With a shriek, she leapt to her feet and decked me.
-5
I started crying.
She started crying again.
"Well it isn't," I sniffled. "And besides, you aren't even blood-related. What, you're gonna go by what society says is cool like some sorta sheep? Pangea, you're better than that."
She kept crying and it was becoming incredibly obvious I'd touched a very raw nerve. I mean, her Observe bio said as much but I hadn't expected it to be so extreme IRL.
"Ok," I said. "Forget the yuri, what else do you consider a fair trade for monsters?" She opened her mouth, no doubt to tell me to fuck off again. "And telling me to go away doesn't count."
"Kill yourself," she said.
"Nice meme, but seriously."
"I can give you cancer you know," she spat. "Even if you told the PRT, who're they gonna believe. You, or Panace-"
I yawned loudly.
She opened her mouth, face twisted in a snarl but I yawned again.
"Yeah, right. I can tell that's a bluff, and anyway, even if you did I'd wake up completely fine," I scoffed, then brightened as I had a really good idea. "Actually, if you want that to be your favour go ahead, make me real sick."
"What?" Amy asked.
"Yeah," I stuck my hand out. "Infect me with some real gnarly shit, I'll sleep it off and then be resistant afterwards. My power's real cool."
"No!" she said indignantly.
"You're being very unreasonable. First, you reject help with your Mirror of Erised, and now you won't even follow through on your threat to poison me with cancer," I trundled over to the bed and sat down. "Girls are weird."
"It's not unreasonable to reject offers from people who're trying to help you fuck your sister!" Amy hissed in a whisper, as though someone might hear her.
"In this context, I think it is, I mean, it's not even illegal. Sure even I think it's kinda weird, but man I don't blame you. She's seriously hot, plus I think you might have been like, enthralled by her aura," I shrugged. "But that's just speculation."
She goggled at me.
Ah, of course.
I held out my hand, "My real name's Greg, by the way. Greg Veder. I don't have a sister I want to bang but sometimes I jerk it to H-manga and pick my nose and eat it."
I struggled not to flush, what was the Japanese word for embarrassing?!
Amy's literally 13 INT struggled to process what I had just told her even though sharing secrets was like the most absolute basic friendship building technique. She breathed deeply, for a time, working through her options.
"I," she said. "Do not want your help."
"Really?" This was genuinely surprising. "Because you're not doing a very good job of it by yourself, I can be your wingman, Pancake. I can be your Maverick."
"Yes really."
"Oh, I really didn't expect this. Well, I could offer… something else, but now that I think about it maybe you wouldn't want it. If something like the whole Glory Girl thing made you cry, you'd probably hit me again if I told you."
"Yeah, you'd definitely hate it."
"I would definitely hate it," she echoed, which I took as a cue to lower my outstretched hand.
"Well," I cracked my knuckles idly. "Where are we on the monsters thing? I know you're chomping at the bit to do something that isn't healing."
"Why do you want to kill monsters?"
"You ever played games where you get experience points?"
She nodded, nose running like a tap.
"Well there you go, I literally get xp and level up. I'm an RPG character, I kill monsters, it's what I do."
"Even if I wanted to, I don't have the time," she said.
The Phoenix Wright noise went off in my head; that was a lie. It was well known she only did like two or three hours of healing a day. This was it. I could feel my brain blasting Jimmy Neutron style.
"Oh? Not even now? It's barely nine thirty."
"You're a real cunt, you know that?" Amy growled.
That hurt, but my case was rested. There was just something else I needed to say to get her on the hook, but I just didn't know. Why wasn't my HUGE INT helping? Should I read that How To Friend book Armsmaster told me to?
Or…
"How about we talk about this later," I ventured. "Over," a human activity? What did friends do? "Coffee."
Amy's upper lip curled. "Are you trying to ask me out?"
"As friends, Pantomime. I would never try to get between pure yuri, well, unless you asked."
She rolled her eyes, still glistening with tears, her voice on the verge of breaking. "You know, purposely getting my name wrong in a different way every time you say it isn't cute or funny."
"It is! How dare you!" I protested. "You should be hit by the Shame Beam for that!"
"Can you go already?"
"I will go," I stood up. "But it will be because I chose to."
I smoke bombed the room, rolled backwards over the bed, vaulted out the window too close too close too close to the paving, hit the grass in a textbook commando roll and jinked right to avoid the auto lights again. Within a second I was over the fence, and within five more I was two lawns over.
No quest failed pop up? No quest failed pop up.
Damn, I was smooth.
Chapter 13: And a real hero 2.3
Chapter Text
The door to Armsmaster's Lair closed automatically behind me, noiseless and smooth. This was the first time I'd been invited into The Lair so it was all very exciting, hopefully, it meant me and Colin were bros now; he hadn't even yelled at me in ages!
He regarded me stonily from behind his helmet, "Greg, while I wish you had come forward sooner you did the right thing in giving us the information for the Shadow Stalker case, your intel was correct on all accounts."
Oh yeah, that was a thing, wasn't it?
"No problem, man," I shrugged. "It's my thing, it's what I do."
"Not like you to show humility."
"Well, I'm tired so…" I left the implication hanging. Seriously, I only had 21 VIT, so stacking school, gymming, martial arts, skills training and hospital duty was kinda tiring dude. "Also I have an update on my healing rate, 20 VIT gives me an increase to two percent of my health back per minute."
"Oh good," Armsmaster said in a way that implied he didn't really think it was good. "So now you heal back up in fifty minutes instead of one hundred."
"Exactament. And the stats for your quest are all there now too, just need the skills."
"Very good," he nodded. "There was something else I wanted to ask of you, along the same lines as what happened with Shadow Stalker."
"Lay it on me, bro."
"Now that I know you can keep at least some things a secret, there's a matter I'd like your assistance with. I suspect there's a mole in the PRT or Protectorate staff, with you on board to Observe them I would be able to swiftly eliminate them and thus deprive whichever gang they're associated with a valuable line of information. Can you do this?"
"This… isn't an official order, is it?"
"No," said Armsmaster shortly. "This can't be, this cannot leave this room lest the mole catches wind and goes into hiding."
It sounded legit, but I didn't think he was being straight with me.
Oh yeah, Glory Hound was one of his traits, wasn't it? Oh well, who even cared.
"Sure, I can do that-"
"-no problem, dude." I dismissed the quest popup with a lengthy yawn. "It's a quest."
"Thank you," Colin said with a smile. "Now get home and get some rest, god forbid I keep you here a second past ten and anger the Youth Guard. We'll discuss this further in the next few days."
"K, catch you on the flip C-dog."
And with that I left for home, jonesing for that eight-hour rest to remove my TIRED status condition.
The next day at school something rather unexpected happened. Big Cal changed his conversation opener.
"Lookin' fit, buddy."
NANI!
"Nani?" I said.
"Yeah," he continued even though he probably didn't know what I said. "Been hitting the gym?"
"You betcha!" I grinned, giving him a cheeky flex. "I'm not even skipping leg day."
"Right on," he grinned back, crossing his own beefy arms. "No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. You were kind of a chubby little shit before… hey, you wanna come hang with me and the lads this afternoon, pump some iron?"
"Is this like, one of those Aryan Union things," I frowned. "'Cause I'm pretty sure I'm still too retarded for that."
"Nah," Cal waved an airy hand. "You don't seem that retarded anymore, least compared to a while back. And don't worry, this is just gonna be some boys shooting the shit and getting swole."
Uuh… Nani the kuso is this, quest system? Could I be a Nazi though? It didn't sound like it would be a whole lot of fun, none of them would even watch animes. They were probably all normies anyway, worse than the PRT; plus the E88 was a sausage fest.
"Yeah, nah-"
"I've got like, shit to do today. And every other day."
He did this little laugh thing like he'd somehow seen through my next level lie.
"Ok, but I told you not to worry about it, it's not a Union thing," he gave me an upnod. "See you round, buddy."
"Bye, dude," I waved as he left. He was still an odd one, that Big Cal, I think that was the longest conversation we'd ever had. Oh well, time to go to work.
I turn around and immediately spotted Taylor, who was walking along and flinching at every sound, looking nervously over her shoulder all jittery like.
"Too much coffee?" I called, bounding up to her. "I know too much makes me paranoid."
She recoiled, "what?"
"I said you need to cut back on the coffee, hombre."
"I don't drink coffee," she said like that was a fact I should have already known.
"Me either, on account of caffeine paranoia. Anyway, watchu been up to? I've been busy as shit, plus I found this old eighties mecha anime I have like two hundred episodes to get through; it's kinda space opera-y so I'm watching it in prep for the new Space Opera game that's gonna have a Christmas release."
"I haven't been up to anything," she muttered, looking over her shoulder again and shuffling so her back was to a wall.
"Are you sure? Because you look super sus, are you hiding drugs in your bag? Is it drugs? Please tell me its drugs."
"It's not drugs."
"Oh la-di-da," my sarcastic drawl betrayed by my grin. "Too highbrow to inject Krokodil into your nutsack are you?"
Taylor closed her eyes and sighed, her frown lessening slightly. "Yes, I'm about Bath Salts these days."
"Bath Salts!" I affected a gasp. "Trying to LARP as upper-class now? The Krok not good enough for you anymore?"
"No."
"You're not usually this paranoid," I observed as she glanced around again and shuffled closer to the wall.
"I'm just… waiting for it," she forced herself to look straight at me for once. "Look, Greg, I gotta get home. Bye."
And she left, darting into a gap in the foot traffic. I wondered what she was waiting for. Oh well, just another weird quirk all my friends seemed to have.
I laughed, slapping my knee.
"Assault and Battery!"
I laughed harder.
"Assault and Battery!"
Of course.
"Assault and Battery!"
Where else would you get a magic potion but from a Cauldron?
"Yeah," said Ethan. "That's the joke."
I sighed and wiped a tear from my eye, "good shit, what're you guys here for?"
"We're here to get Vista for a patrol," Chloe said. "Up around the doc-"
"Take me with you!" I begged. "It's been like three months and I've only done one and it was so boring! I'm tired of doing nothing but training and PR shit and reading dossiers and crime reports! I'm dying here bros! I wanna live!"
"Yes, well, Armsmaster told us you weren't allowed."
"But me and him are tight now, I even got to go in his Lair!"
"It is very lair-ish," Ethan nodded. "He even has a Dragon in there."
Chloe snorted, then pretended she hadn't. "In any case, there wouldn't be time to arrange it we're leaving as soon as we get her."
"But what if I were to switch costumes with Vista and pretend to be her? We're both blond, I think it could work."
"Smokey," said Ethan. "If you wanna dress up as a girl you don't need an excuse."
"Whatever, you guys are lame. You used to be cool, man. What happened to you man?"
"Life did, Smokey. Life did."
"Ok, enough," Sargent Chloe Killjoy cut in lightly. "We all have work to do. We'll get Vista and go, you go back to doing whatever it is you're doing."
I was reading up about The Teeth. Why I had to read about a gang that hadn't been in the city for like a decade I had no idea, and I was sure it wasn't because they were going to try to get me to transfer 'cause my last two reading assignments were a gang in Cali and one in Florida.
"If I said I was injecting Krokodil would you take me along?" I asked plaintively.
She shook her head and walked off toward Missy's room.
"Fine," I said to Ethan, withdrawing a hypodermic needle from my inventory. "Ima inject Krok into my nutsack and there's nothing you can do to stop me."
"What is Krokodil?" he asked, strolling over to lounge on the arm of the couch opposite.
"Uh, it's like flesh-eating heroin," I gave the needle a little spin.
Ethan closed his eyes, nodding and smiling genially. "Be my guest, Smokey, fill that sack with sweet, sweet smack."
Shit! Bluff called! "I'll, uh, I'll do it later."
Ethan grinned from ear to ear, "tell you what, you don't needle your nutsack and I'll put in a request for a patrol for us sometime. Sound like a fair trade?"
I'd been bested, his blistering madcap assault had seen straight through me.
"Fuck yeah, boi! Thanks!"
Ethan chuckled, tapped his foot a few times and literally bounced to his feet. "Just keeping this winner from doing drugs," he winked.
Battery came back, Missy in tow, and they left for their patrol. Assault was so corny, it was great.
Now, back to this shit.
"Yes Miles," I sneered. "I can, in fact, go up to the roof with Panacea alone. We're friends now, capiche?"
PR guy seethed on the stairs impotently as I shut the door in his face.
"Aah no, that was so mean!" I whispered to Amy, covering my face with my hands. "Should I apologise?!"
The evening breeze ruffled her silly cloak as she shrugged, the motion stiff, uncomfortable.
"Still…" I dithered. I was pretty sure that was the first time I'd been mean to anyone in ages.
"Do what you want," Amy fished a pack of cigarettes out of a pocket, tapped one out and lit it in a practised motion.
Kyaa~ Amy-chan kakkoi!
She rolled her eyes and tossed me the pack. I hurriedly copied her, lighting up with a box of matches out of my inventory. I inhaled-
-1
Neat. I threw the cigarettes back over and managed to exhale without coughing my guts up like last time.
"That Japanese cartoon you said to watch, Lemony?" Amy said. "It was shit."
"But lesbian stepsisters, Amy! The core premise!"
"It was just some dumb soap opera."
"I getcha," I nodded sagely. "A connoisseur. Try Shingeki no Lesbian Horses*, a manga for a true patrician."
"That sounds absolutely fucking retarded."
"To a pleb," I waved her shit opinions away like an annoying mosquito. "It can be a little too avant-garde for some, to ripe for the undiscerning mind. It might seem retarded but is actually super serious and will make you cry."
"Yeah, ok," Amy exhaled a plume of smoke into the chilly night. "I got nothin' to lose."
"Except your mind," I waved my cigarette at her. "When you comprehend its genius."
She chuckled and we fell into a silence that for some reason I didn't feel compelled to fill.
"With this monster thing," Amy said suddenly. "Isn't it kind of evil to make something solely for the reason of murdering it for sport? Even if it wants to be killed?"
I had prepared for this.
"Tell me, Amy, how conversant are you on the topic of P-Zombies?"
Chapter 14: And a real hero 2.4
Chapter Text
"Missy! Missy! Missy! Missy! Missy!" I hammered on her door like a lunatic. "You have got to see this!"
"Oh my god, what?!" she bellowed.
I heard her stomping up to the door before flinging it open, glaring at me. Pfft, what was she mad for?
"I have made a most marvellous discovery! Behold!" I flung my hands out to my sides and cast Mana Smoke, only this time instead of dark blue it was scaldingly bright pink. Thank you based Panacea!
She stared for a moment, "so you're going to be Pink Smoke Puncher from now on?"
"You need to be more impressed," I cast the spell again, this time in a double rainbow of colours. "Not only am I a better version of Dauntless, poised to overtake Eidolon, now I'm also a better Legend!"
Missy flapped her hands through the rainbow cloud, dissipating it. "They can all fly."
"Ah," I said, smile turning brittle. "You chose the words that would hurt me most, didn't you?"
"You'll figure it out, you're," Missy sighed painedly. "Very smart."
"Damn skippy!" I preened. She had seen the truth of my HUGE INT after I did all her homework in about three seconds one time, all of it correct. She'd gotten detention for cheating. "Now if you'll excuse me I'm off to create new abilities."
"Just stop banging on my door about it," Missy called after my retreating back, but I ignored her. She was just being tsun about it, she'd go dere soon enough when I whipped out whatever awesome skill I made next.
I sat back down on the couch and stared at my hands. I had no fucking idea on what to do next, Mana Smoke had been a fluke; one I had no idea how to replicate. I could always feel my mana though if I concentrated, like a pool deep within the metaphysical realms of my mind but doing anything but pulling it out (which turned into Mana Smoke) was maddeningly difficult. Sure, if I could focus on that I'd have something to show for it but most of my time was eaten up by school (which I obviously couldn't practice there in case someone saw) and now levelling up my non-magic skills.
But now I had Mana Control.
Playing around with my smoke had made me realise that Mana didn't actually have colour, and the smoke was only blue because the bar on my HUD was stylised as such and my brain had run with that. I wasn't sure what that breakthrough promised but I hoped it was good.
I knew I needed to go back to basics, but I had no idea what the basics for this even were beyond Mana Smoke being just literally coloured mana. Gods of anime and Minecraft give me strength!
I knew what must be done. I extended one hand, fingers clawed, and gripped my wrist with the other. If Mana Smoke was raw and unfocused, the next step ought to be raw and focused.
"HNNNNNG!"
"HNNNNNNNNNG!"
Out of Mana and I couldn't see shit because it was just smoke. Ok, next time make it condensed.
"HNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNG!"
Thicker!
"HNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNG!"
More stable!
"HNNNNNNN-oh!"
I nearly dropped the misshapen lump of solid mana I was holding.
Observe.
I threw it at the floor and it shattered into a million blue shards before evaporating. YES! Like a solid hour and a half that took! I made another, more spherical lump of mana and immediately smashed it. This required something with proper gravitas…
"Missyyyyy!" I stood outside her door, once again finally at full mana capacity. "Come watch me do this real cool shit!"
No answer, had she left? Actually what time was it? I mentally wound back time-based on my mana consumption and regeneration… and yeah, she should still be here.
"Missy!" I shouted again, withstanding the urge to knock on her door again lest she be mad. A few seconds later I heard light footsteps and the door cracked open.
"I was asleep," Missy whined, managed to sound both sleepy and cross. It was very cute. "What is it now?"
I grabbed her arm and dragged her out into the common area. "Yeah yeah yeah, you have watch this shit because no one else is here, its so god damn rad I swear it's worth it."
She made a whingy sound but stood there anyway, blinking blearily, and crossed her arms with a yawn.
I trotted over to the pre-cleared area I made and knelt down on one knee, right fist planted firmly. A thin circle of smoke began to drift up around me.
"Iamtheboneofmysword," I intoned in a voice of deep silk and nutsack hair. "Steelismybodyandfireismyblood. Ihavecreatedoverathousandblades," the smoke thickened, cloying into vaguely sword-shaped clouds. "Ihavenoregretsthisistheonlypath …"
I clapped, looking up to meet Missy's eyes and spread my arms, "Unlimited Blade Works!"
And then there were swords.
Full colour, yet lacking the shine of real steel, when they clattered to the ground it wasn't with a metallic sound. I didn't really know what to compare it to. But still.
"How fucking sick was that?"
She was silent for a moment. "How did you do that with your voice?"
"Voice acting skill. Are you sure you don't want to ask about the swords?"
"Honestly," she yawned. "The voice was more impressive, you normally sound so dumb and nerdy."
That actually really hurt.
"But the swords though," I managed not to cry.
"Yeah, I guess they're cool enough for me to not hit you for waking me up," she turned and started walking back to her room.
"But the swords, Missy, the swords!"
"Show me again tomorrow when I'm actually awake."
"But the swords…" I whined. "The swords."
Her door shut and I was alone again, alone with my swords. I picked up a katana, cradling it, observing it for the low-quality mana replica it was; it wasn't even sharp. In that moment I hated it. Whatever, it wasn't like I wanted Missy to think my sword magic was baller as fuck or some gay shit like I needed approval. I knew it was turbo cool and I was the only person whose opinion I needed to listen to.
"What's up with the voice?" Chris asked.
"I'm just practising my VA skill," I said quickly. "Now shut up and sit down."
He made an expression somewhere between annoyed and incredulous but did as I asked. Now the whole team was assembled.
"You have been called here today to bear witness," I quoth, and they were all here for a training exercise but that wasn't important right now. "To my greatness. What you are about to see here today is but the first step, what will be a mere sliver, of my power."
"And Greg said," I spread my arms. "'Let there be swords!'"
And then there were.
I caught the centrepiece, the Kubikiribocho, as it fell and swung it around gracefully stepping forward into a stance amid fallen blades; dripping with smoke.
I didn't have to say 'please clap', because they already were during a deluge of 'yeah!', 'Nice!' and 'Cool!'.
"It is cool," I said, hefting the Seversword onto my shoulder like it weighed much more than the few kilos it did.
Rory reached forward and picked an arming sword up, giving it a few swings. "They're super light, what're they made of? Plastic?"
"Literally magic," I preened as the rest of the group availed themselves of my swords.
"Yeah, ok Myrddin," Dennis scoffed. "Not even sharp."
"Hey!" I levelled all two meters of my sword at him. "Fuck you, buddy! Fuck you! This is an anti-bully zone, Myrddin and I can't help that we're magic any more than you can help being a soulless ginger."
Dennis looked taken aback and Dean leant forward, "don't worry Greg, he thinks it's cool. Will they get sharper when you level up the skill?"
"Yes," I huffed. "Obviously. I only learned how to do this literally seventeen hours ago."
"Can you only make swords?" he asked.
"I can make anything," I said proudly. I think I had just enough mana left… a small humanoid figurine appeared in front of me and fell to the floor. "Swords are just cooler though."
Note to self, learn to make anime figmas to brag on the buyfag forum of PHO and make that shitbird SupaGokuFiyah69 jealous. Hot glue my seasonal waifus will he?
"I can't imagine you'll get to use the swords much on duty," Rory remarked. "But if they were blunt you might actually have a better chance of it."
I would never sacrifice my artistic vision.
"So this is the stuff Armsmaster was going spare over trying to analyse?" Chris asked, giving his rapier a few swishes. "Looking at it gives me an idea for a new type of scanner, I can think of a few things to do with solid… not light, but whatever energy this is."
"Magic."
"I get that your interface thing calls it mana, but I dunno. It just sounds so unscientific."
"Whatever," I scoffed. "You nerds stay over there with your science and academic rigour, I'll be over here chillin' with my unfathomable cosmic power."
After a little more back and forth a guy buzzed into the common room and told us it was time for whatever training exercise I was sure to ace to start. Probably some dumb teambuilding shit, good luck with that when Missy had still to give a proper positive opinion about my Radical Fucking Sword Magic.
I hate her.
I hate her!
"You comin', Pink Smoke Puncher?" Vista asked, standing just inside the vault door.
"I'm so sorry I woke you up yesterday!" I yelled at her. "I didn't realise you were asleep! Please forgive me!"
Chapter 15: And a real hero 2.5
Chapter Text
"And I found more moles than Armsmaster was expecting and the stupid quest still only gave me a thousand xp, if you can Adam and Eve it."
"Yeah, no, that's…" Amy said absently, holding a limp fish.
"And so I says to him, I says, 'dude this sucks! Where's my xps?' and he's like, 'it's your power you should know'."
Amy threw the fish into the bucket and hooked another piece of bait onto her rod, casting it out over the pier.
"And then I levelled up." My rod jerked and I reeled in another fish, "this bait you made is really something else. How did you end up such an unimaginative spas you never tried anything like this before?"
I handed her the fish and she started on the process of giving it lungs.
"You know exactly why," she tried to wipe her fishy hand on me and I nearly fell out of my folding chair trying to escape.
"I mean, if it were me," I continued. "I'd have gone full Island of Doctor Moreau, made like, a cat hawk or whatever. Shit would be tight."
"Yeah," Amy sighed. "But, thanks for suggesting we go fishing, it's pretty relaxing."
"Ain't no shit, mon'amie, you can always count on the G-man to provide dinner and a show."
"At six in the AM?"
I paused. "It will take a long time to cook?"
Amy gave a little 'hmm' of a chuckle and settled back into her chair, throwing the fish into the bucket.
"You know what would be sick?" I asked, rhetorically of course. "If we caught an octopus. Octopi are baller as fuck, like three hearts and nine brains, plus special blood, plus great eyesight, plus camouflage. You should base the monster around an octopus, like, a goblin octopus. Gobopus."
"I think we should just stay away from goblins altogether, you know?" Amy reeled in her now baitless hook. "For obvious reasons."
"Maaaaaaan," I drawled. "Who even gives a fuck, I bet you'd make Nilbog look like a chump. You're the OG Fleshshaper, and by flesh I mean any living biological organism and even ones of questionable living status. I bet you could make an Ent. I bet you could make Treebeard."
"I… suppose I could," Amy kind of squirmed in her chair. "But could you? You said you could get elements or whatever after Mana Control, seems kind of arbitrary to keep it at that."
I waved a hand dismissively, "it's probably further up the mage tree after Mana Control II at seventy-five fucking INT, so that's not going to happen if I want to DEX main. And I have to DEX main. Eidolon is obviously on the pure mage build, Alexandra went STR/INT, and Legend went mage and CHA; I can't do a copy of them. I suppose I coulda gone VIT, but meatsheildin' just ain't for me, ya dig?"
"What about Wisdom, or whatever the other one was?"
"Amy, Amy, Amy," I wagged my finger condescendingly. "No one gives a shit about WIS."
"Of course."
The next hour or so saw our bucket swell with a bounty of raw bio-fuel, sadly containing no octopus, but you couldn't have everything in life. The bucket went into my inventory for some reason despite the fish by themselves not, as well as the chairs and rods. One last check to see if we'd forgotten anything and we were off, heading way up into The Docks area in search of the most abandoned locale my Urban Tracking skill could find.
"That one," I pointed, cheating with Observe. "Judging by the pattern of the rust this warehouse hasn't seen a single human breath in at least five years, and it's the most empty out of all the ones nearby."
"How the fuck can you tell that?" Amy asked incredulously.
I grinned at her, "the smell."
"Fucking Thinkers," she groused. "I swear to god."
"So just give yourself Thinker powers, you rube."
"Power doesn't work on myself, dipshit," Amy spat.
"So just retrovirus yourself a better brain," I scoffed.
"I have no idea what the fuck that is."
"So just Google it."
"Shut up you smug cunt," Amy glared at me. "No wonder you have no friends."
A hand of ice gripped my heart.
No.
No.
No.
No.
"I have lots of friends-ttebayo," I said idly, leading the charge into the warehouse. I forced the door open, nearly busting it off its hinges, and cringed at the stale musty stank of disused building. "Shame there's almost no light in here."
I equipped a camping lantern.
"Urgh, I see what you mean about the smell," Amy wrinkled her stupid idiot nose as she followed me inside. "At least it doesn't smell like hobo piss."
"Which I'm sure you're well acquainted with," I conjured a giant fan and started trying to get some air flow into this misbegotten place.
"You wouldn't know with your cushy fucking PR stunt shit you get to do, fucking patching up scraped knees like that's anything to be proud of. Go down into the ER sometime, see what the real job's like."
"As soon as I get the skills for it." Y-you big meanie bitch! This kind of Tsundere was shit! Shit! At least Missy pretended to be nice!
"Whatever," Amy crossed her arms, rubbing at her upper arms like she was cold. "Are we doing this or what?"
I solemnly brought out The Bucket and placed it on the floor. With one final deep breath, Amy stepped forward and got to work.
It was interesting, watching the fish melt down to their base constituents and at the same time form a mass of quivering, jellylike brown flesh. I had an Observe on it the entire time, watching stat changes and flavour text evolve in real time; finally culminating in-
Neat.
Amy tipped the bucket over and started trying to tip the lump out, and with a bit of heaving and ho-ing it finally slid out to rest on the dusty floor, undulating slightly.
"Shit is just gross, right?" I immediately knelt down and started poking at it with a finger, giving the spongy reddish-brown flesh a tweak.
Amy slapped it, sending it jiggling like a big fake ass.
And that was my tipping point, I had no choice but to howl with laughter. Even if today ended here, it would be totally worth it. Even Amy joined in, grabbing the lump with both hands and giving it a vigorous shake. Eventually, our mirth died down and Amy got to work on the second stage.
The resulting abomination looked like a cross between a birdhouse and the part of a Yith you wouldn't want to touch.
"You know this thing works on people, right?"
Amy went white and slapped a hand against her creation. "How about now?" she asked after about a minute.
"Yeah, it's cool now. It has a 'eats everything but humans' line in its bio now."
"Oh thank fuck," Amy hid her face in her hands. "See, this is why I never did anything like this before. My power is so dangerous."
I disagreed, but whatever. "So what now?"
Please say let's make out.
"Now we wait," Amy said, letting down the team. "Insects and rats and stuff are gonna take a while to get here, so I'm going to read. Give us the chair?"
I pulled out both the chairs and we sat down near the door, close enough to get some light and fresh breeze but not enough to be visible. Well, whatever, while she did that I was going to practice.
I equipped one of my old throwing knives into my left hand, then with my right began to carefully create a Mana Object copy. I sort of had the metallic sheen down, and my blades were starting to get sharp, but the texture was all wrong. Like Rory said it felt kind of plastic.
My mana coalesced into a replica, but it still didn't feel right. The shape was exact, the colour was exact, all three dimensions were there but it just wasn't right. I shuffled my chair around and threw it at a rotting crate off in the far corner, but the stupid thing was so light it didn't even make it all the way there. Just another thing to work on.
It took about ten minutes for it to start being noticeable. Instead of seeing an occasional cockroach skitter crazily into the maw, or a fly swooce right in, there was now a cloud of insects slowly swarming into the Devourer; mostly little midges and ants. It seemed to be adding up however because when Amy put her hand on the Devourer it shuddered and grew about a centimetre in every direction.
A curious sparrow hopped into the mouth and was never seen again. A brace of mice followed soon after.
I threw my latest failed knife at the crate, a little more shiny and sharp than before, and it joined its fellows on the floor. Why was it so hard to add weight?
At least it wasn't this hard to put on weight.
"Hey Amy, did you know I've put on like thirty pounds of muscle in three months?"
She looked up from her book, "your power is so fucking unfair, I can literally see you're way fitter then you were when you broke into my room."
I hadn't broken in, but I expected that wasn't really the point.
"You know, if you wanted to get jacked with a hundredth of the effort I put in just inhibit your myostatin production for a while," I said helpfully. "Mucho aesthetics."
"Why would I want to be all big and gross though?"
"a e s t h e t i c s."
"How did you do that with your voice?"
"Voice acting plus Singing skills," I replied in her voice.
"Was that meant to be me?" she asked, sounded turbo offended at her sadsack, mousey squeak of a voice. "I don't sound anything like that."
"Amy, please," I said, still in her voice. "I have two hundred and fifty percent increased mimicry ability and a near eidetic memory, trust me when I say that is exactly what you sound like."
She looked worried.
"If it makes you feel better," I switched voices. "I can do a real good Armsmaster. Dennis loves it. Beep boop I am Armsmaster, give me the diamonds creep!"
She snickered.
That… didn't make me feel a whole lot better for some reason.
"Prepare for Halbeardation or Dragon waifu-bot will commence SENMETSU."
"Ok, that is fucking spot on."
We spent a while with me doing other people's voices and Amy critiquing them. Apparently, my Legend was terrible.
Eventually, though, it was time. The Devourer had doubled in size, probably being over seventy pounds by now.
"You got this, bro," I assured her as she hovered nervously, repeatedly almost touching her creation. "I'll tell you if you somehow miss that it's going to explode into a plague."
"It's more the brain I'm worried about, I don't have the slightest clue on how to make one that acts in exactly the same way as one with consciousness but doesn't have any."
"I'll tell you if it has any INT or WIS, easy bro. Easy."
Amy nodded, expression tight, and lay her hand on the beast. It quivered, melting like a candle into another jiggly blob; this time left unslapped.
Slowly, carefully, it began to take on a bipedal form. Filling out into a waxy skinned, vaguely humanoid thing with sort of crab-like armour plating, six eyes and a wide flaring nose standing at about four foot five.
"La Creatura…" I breathed.
"Well?" asked Amy nervously. "As far as I can tell it's not complex enough to be sapient."
"It's retarded as fuck, the fish we caught were smarter. Or wiser at least, this has one and zero respectively to their one to one."
She let out a long breath, "ok. Ok. Good, we're good then. Just give me another minute to make sure it goes for you."
I nodded pleasantly and soon thereafter she threw me an egg-sized orb I Observed as trigger scent. I smashed it onto the side of my neck and inventoried the shell fragments. Amy frowned, probably because she hadn't had to tell me what it was, but didn't say anything; merely touching her homunculus briefly and stepping back.
The homunculus slowly came to, moving around groggily. What must that even be like, I wondered, coming into being? Probably awesome for anything with eight INT or more. I watched its nostrils flare as it turned in my direction, all eyes blinking for about two seconds before it rushed me.
The thing leapt with a high pitched gurgle, opening a wide, lipless mouth I hadn't noticed it had exposing rows of needle teeth. I pivoted to the left and caught it at the apex of its jump with a textbook left hook, cracking its head armouring and sending it sprawling in the dust.
"Make the next one better," I chortled as it staggered back to its feet and ran at me again, directly into my front kick. The kick slipped off the edge of its face and the homunculus stumbled through unexpectedly and bit down on the arm I was trying to elbow it with.
-20
It was the most painful thing I'd ever experienced.
"Motherfucker!" I shrieked, grabbing at what little neck it had with my free hand and ripping a solid knee into its chest. Something cracked wetly and its mouth reflexively opened enough for me to rip my arm out, tearing strips of flesh. I put my other hand around its neck, picked it up and smashed it headfirst into the floor.
"Jesus," I said, adrenaline rush leaving me breathless. I had not been prepped for this. The thing wasn't even dead. I felt kind of bad having to finish it off like this, it couldn't even move much anymore, nevertheless, I knelt down and repeated my head smash maneuver until death.
"That was pretty horrible," Amy stepped forward, around the ichor that was leaking out of the homunculus's head, and reached for my unbitten arm.
I waved her away, "I'll be right in ten, fix the thing before your power recognises it as dead."
I cried my bitch tears on the inside though, god this fucking hurt some of its teeth were still in me. I inventoried them, causing my arm to bleed a bit harder.
-1
"It worked though, it worked perfectly," I stood up, clenching my bloodied fist. "Our bargain continues, Amy. I will perform for you any one equivalent task, even if it should break my personal code. You have made a powerful ally here today, at any time call in your favour." I paused dramatically. "Because I'm totally down for hooking you up with Victoria."
Lesbians were hot.
Chapter 16: And a real hero 2.6
Chapter Text
"Where is all this extra xp coming from?" Armsmaster stared me down, a perfect mimicry of the poster of himself behind him.
"You know how you give me a bunch of little quests that add up all the time?" I said smoothly. "I realised I could get my parents to do the same, so I've been trying to grind that out lately."
It wasn't even technically a lie, I did sometimes get my parents to give me quests. Ok, so the last part was totally a lie but I couldn't sell a homie out; even to another homie.
"I see. Very excellent, continue to do so," Armsmaster nodded. "On another note, we have to talk about your mode of dress. It's becoming apparent to civilians that you have undergone an enormous growth spurt recently, larger than should be possible for a normal teenage boy, so as a matter of identity security I'm going to have to ask you to wear concealing clothes in your civilian persona as much as is possible."
"But what if some hot piece catches my eye and I have to flex a 'cep to pick up?"
Armsmaster gave what was probably the second or third chuckle I'd ever heard out of him, "yeah, something tells me that's not going to happen."
"It could," I pouted.
"Well, since you took my advice to use your Voice Acting skill to change your normal voice into something less grating the chance might be above zero per cent."
That wasn't why I'd done it, but ok. Also, ouch, fuck you, Colin, I could get girls if I wanted. Chicks dug handsome, interesting guys; GStringGirl told me so. "Try ninety-eight."
"Of course. And while we're here, your combat instructors tell me there isn't a whole lot more they can teach you without us contacting some real masters," Armsmaster smiled, a little thinly. "Three months of effort and you've acquired the equal to years of training, none of them can keep up with you anymore; especially on speed. So in the next few days, we're going to clear you to start higher level combat training; multiple opponents, weapons and such at as close to real life conditions as we can make it. We're even going to try to get you some time with the other Protectorate members and introduce Parahuman to Parahuman combat."
"Yeah," I leant forward, bouncing in my chair. "Sick! And there's still another three months I get before I have to cash in that quest I still have about beating you in a fight."
I made a mental note to step up my monster killing with Amy to get a head start on multiple opponents as Armsmaster's face fell imperceptibly. He had obviously forgotten about that.
"What were the quest rewards for that one again?" he frowned.
"It's a mystery," I said mysteriously, waggling my fingers to demonstrate said mystery. "All question marks, so it's probably some really high-level shit 'cause you'd be a boss monster if this were like that. The stats on that power armour are insane."
"Yeah…" Armsmaster trailed off. "One more thing I wanted to bring up was stepping up your skills training to include things such as forensic analysis and increasing your time in the hospital in lieu of gym time. You know, to keep the Youth Guard off our backs in case they get it onto their heads we're trying to weaponise you."
"But I thought they were cool with it because my parents were cool with it because I was cool with it."
"Potentially," Armsmaster raised a finger, then glanced at one of his many workshop screens. "Actually, never mind. If it comes up I'll handle it."
"Yeah ok, whatever."
"No cheek," Armsmaster snapped.
"Sorry."
"Ok. Was there anything you wanted to speak about?"
I shrugged, "nothing comes to mind, I'm doing peachy keen."
Armsmaster nodded. "As usual I will e-mail you the date and time of your next appointment. Dismissed."
"Guess what?"
"It's free real estate?" Mum whispered, spraying pie crumbs.
Fucking normies trying to meme. "Something else."
"Is it your voice changing power?" Dad asked. "Because we noticed."
My voice had ended up becoming pretty cool. "No."
"Something to do with Dark Smoke Puncher's PHO threads? Memes?"
"I wish, but no," I puffed myself up proudly. "I'm nearly done with the Armsmastery quest and Armsmaster said he was proud of me and the guys who train me said I'm awesome!"
"Spectacular!" Dad said as mum gave me a double thumbs up. "You know I used to bench three oh five back in college, you'd be up to that by now right?"
"Yeah pretty much!"
"This kinda reminds me," Mum chimed in idly. "What ended up happening with Shadow Stalker? Did she get deported or something?"
"Yeah…" I rubbed my chin. "I think she got deported to juvie, I never got around to asking. Or maybe she got sent to the Madison Containment Zone? I really don't remember, which is strange because I remember everything."
I shrugged.
"I don't really care anyway, she was hot but an absolute M. Crazy Psycho-bitch. Plus she never even liked me."
"Ah, don't worry son, I'm sure you'll meet a nice girl who'll still be absolutely adorable at forty-three," he winked at Mum. "Even if it takes another ten years."
"Pfft," I scoffed. "I'll make you the same bet I made Armsmaster. Six months and I'll have found true waifu material."
Jokes on you Questgiver, if Hana knocked me back I could just get Amy to make me one! Fukken owned! EZPZ! Homunculus gf best gf!
"Why did you bet Armsmaster you could get a girlfriend?" Mum asked.
"No, that was for his skill book quest. Do you think I could get Miss Militia to go out with me?"
"I thi-"
"You're right, I'll need to quit the Wards so Emily doesn't get all huffy about 'inappropriate, forbidden romance' or some dumb shit about AoC laws."
"Use your brain, Greggo," Dad sighed. "Or give it at least three years before you ask her out."
"But the quest says six months!"
"Well, too bad, I'm putting an eighteenth birthday restriction on asking out Miss Militia; no ifs or buts."
Fine, whatever. Homunculus gf it is.
Chapter 17: And a real hero 2.7
Chapter Text
Ambidextrous was an amazing perk. Not just my hands, or feet, but my whole body responded like it was my dominant side.
Harmonious was the word to describe it. My body sang.
Everything moving in perfect synchronisation as I beat a homunculus with another homunculus.
A burning blue knife burst into existence, clenched tight in my fist. I stabbed, straight through hardened carapace, seven times in a fifth of a second.
I threw as the second homunculus charged, knife catching it in one of its six eyes, and it crumpled like a reused cumrag.
I cracked my neck sickeningly and turned to Amy with a smug grin, "all warmed up."
"You better be, this new one isn't going to give you time to be smug about it," Amy said, hand resting on a big ogre looking motherfucker. A beast of a thing, two meters tall and rippling with fat and muscle; Bear mode.
Level six Homunculus. Stats all twenty-fives. Crushing Grip and Sturdy CNDNs.
A rush of adrenaline hit me, "Send him at me bro!" I shrieked at Amy. "FE FI FO FUTHERFUCKEEER!"
Amy removed her hand, the ogre woke up and stared me down with piggish eyes the size of tennis balls. We burst toward each other.
I elbow blocked its grab, my own hand snaking down to grip beefy wrist as I crafted a mana hook already around the back of its neck with the other. I yanked down with the hook, wrenched its wrist up and kicked into the inside of its knee with a sweeping motion.
-3
I bounced off the ogre and it barely stumbled from a kick that would shatter a man's leg, immediately resuming its attack. It lunged in for another grab and I jumped, right foot kicking into its left forearm as I drove two daggers into the meat of its other arm. There was a millisecond stall before its knee drove up, grazing my chest-
-15
As I wrenched myself just out of range. I matched its charge with retreat, hurling more burning blue daggers that peppered its chest with shallow gouges. Fucking Amy giving this fat bastard reinforced skin and muscle.
I shifted stance, creating a longsword, and with one hand on the pommel and one at the base of the blade stabbed down at the bulging tendon joining its groin to its hip.
The fucker dodged and I compensated for stupidly throwing all my weight forward by rolling under a wild hammer fist. I came out of the roll with another stab that caught it right in the solar plexus as it turned for me. The sword caught on its ribs in the twist and I was forced to dodge away from another vicious swipe.
I saw the opening, arm already coming up, mana spike forming at precisely the right time to take out one of its watery eyes, but I paused for a second too long in victory and it took my wrist in its big meaty paw.
-57
It flailed me into the floor.
-183
AAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!
"Stop!" shrieked Amy and the ogre went limper than my dick currently was.
I managed to narrowly avoid having it fall on me as Amy ran over, flapping her hands in panic. She put her hand on my leg and I felt the pain fade away.
"That's that real good shit," I sighed, but through the broken jaw who knows what that sounded like to her.
"Oh god, you said you could take it!" she cried literal tears as she knitted my bones back together.
"I thought I could," I managed to force myself into a half sitting position. "I had it beat in all stats, but I guess I underestimated what 'Sturdy' meant. I almost died back there, Amy!"
"This is never happening again!"
"Chyeah, no shit," I shivered as cold fingers ran through my bleeding internal organs. "I need to start working on my DPS before we do this again, skill monkeying just ain't cutting it. Ha, geddit?"
"No," she said. "I meant never again! I'm going to destroy them all, it was fun up until now but it's at the point where it's dangerous."
"You shouldn't make decisions in the heat of emotion-"
Nani?
"Let's have a smoke break and go for a walk."
I guess that was sound advice then. Thanks, power, and here I was just trying to manipulate her into keeping going. For some reason. Despite my terror at being bodied by a fucking ogre again.
Xp is a helluva drug.
"Shit!" Amy hugged herself, looking green. "Yeah fine, whatever. Let's fuckin' walk."
I forced the warehouse door shut behind us, relishing the clean air. Cleaner air. But at least it didn't stink of ichor and dust. I equipped two cigarettes and a lighter, lit up, and passed one to Amy. To be honest, the cool factor of smoking was kinda wearing off, but it was Amy's favourite hobby so whatever.
Our shoes crunched on the gritty concrete and gravel as we walked, making an aimless beeline away from the Meat Factory.
"Hey, I just thought of another way to pay you back the favour," I said. I hadn't just thought of it, but this was to prime her for future ideas; god damn I was sneaky! "So you're still adamantly against actually hooking up with Victoria for some reason, right?"
"Because it's fucking gross."
"I disagree, but ok. So, why don't you make yourself a Homunculus gf that looks like her?"
Amy gaped at me. "That is unironically ten times as disgusting."
I recoiled. "I don't understand, please explain."
"You want me to make what is essentially a sex doll out of live meat and program it to want me," Amy said as if she was speaking to a simpleton instead of someone with two times her intellect.
"You still haven't said why that's bad."
"It's fucking creepy! It'll all just be fake and weird," Amy bit down hard on her cigarette. "Why the fuck would I want that?"
"Ok," I shrugged. "So make it real, give it a human brain and real feelings, problem solved."
"Its days like this I'm actually happy no one else got my power, because if they did they would straight away make fucking sex slaves!" Amy shook her head at me. "You weird, sad, creep."
"When you put it like that it sounds bad, buuuuut think about it like this. Having a kid is bringing a fully sentient being into existence without a goal or purpose in life, dooming it to wander in search of those things," I inventoried my half-smoked cigarette. "Now ignoring the incest undertones in what I just implied, at least you would be creating a being born with a purpose and would be much more moral than having a kid."
"I would be creating a sex slave that was produced to enjoy being a sex slave, yeah wow I would be so moral."
"It would be happy and you would be happy," I said grumpily. "What's so wrong with that?"
"Oh fuck off with your basic bitch hedonism."
"Fine, dickhead, forget the sex slave part then. All your argument boils down to is you're squeamish about making a super realistic, not even sex doll that wasn't what I said, affection distribution device. I think you're being very close-minded about all of this, and just reacting to whatever emotion comes first instead of actually thinking about it."
"You would say that," Amy laughed. "I don't think you even understand what you just said. Everything I've ever seen you do was on a spur of the moment emotional decision."
"You don't know that! You can't even read minds!"
"Oh yes I fucking can, what do you think I'm doing every time I touch someone? If I try for it at least," Amy threw her cigarette butt on the ground. "I can interpret the electrical and chemical signals in the brain, not very well, but I can tell the difference between someone who thinks things through and someone who has the self-control of a puppy ie. You."
"Hey, fuck you!"
"That wasn't even an insult, Greg, a lot of people are like that."
I stewed as we continued our walk. A lot of people were like that? No. Couldn't be. I'd never met anyone like me before. Surely I alone was unique. Normies just didn't get it, right? That was it, right? Self-control of a puppy? Yeah right. What did she know, she didn't understand what it meant to be me, what went behind being me. She only saw the me now, not the me back then.
Yep, that was it, she was just uninformed.
"Laaaame," I brought my half a cigarette back out. "I still think you should consider something like that though, and actually fix your problem instead of angsting."
Which would, in turn, help my Homunculus catgirl gf be real.
Amy let out a sad sort of snicker, "guess I could always retrovirus myself into being ace."
"There's always that," I put my cigarette out on my hand oh fuck that fucking hurt! "Can't hurt to have a backup plan."
"I'm… impressed with you, Greg," Armsmaster stared up at the ceiling, arms crossed. "I honestly thought it would be more of a struggle to get to this point, and in the beginning that was true, but you've found in yourself a motivation and discipline I never thought you could have. Every report your trainers have given me have shown a very graphable uptick in praise, even your PR trainers."
A pink swelling feeling blossomed in my chest, "thanks bro, it's only 'cause you set it all up for me."
Armsmaster made a weird, quiet sort of moan.
Ok?
"Now please," he said. "Finish the quest."
I equipped his skill book into my right hand, less an actual book than a hastily bound stack of printed A4 paper. I'd actually read most of it, and if Colin could reliably do even half of what was in this fucking thing he must be a beast in a fight. And soon, I too would be such a beast.
The book vanished with a blue flash.
¡Dios mío!…
"Jesus fucking Christ."
I was going to fucking merc that ogre next time, holy fucking shit.
"It's amazing."
I was going to merc two ogres, at the same time.
"Shiiiiit."
Maybe more.
"Thanks, Bromaster!"
Imagine…
"You're welcome, Greg."
"I just got a quest telling me to become your apprentice," I held out my fist for him to bump. "Whatdya say? Me squirin'?"
Armsmaster smiled weirdly, "Recite back to me the text prompt, including rewards and losses."
I did but left out the beard, that would be a surprise!
"So it doesn't say at all what being my apprentice would entail besides that you won't have to get my drinks or fiddle with my armour?"
"Not really," I shrugged, fist still out. "I guess you just give me pointers every so often and I play hype man when we go kick ass."
Armsmaster gave an eye-rolly little smile and condescended to finally bump the fist, "congratulations on your apprenticeship, Dark Smoke Puncher."
Neat, I equipped the title and the Halberd. "I mean, I'm probably never going to use polearms but the CHA bonuses are alright, hey?"
"You know I can't read your prompts, right?"
I did know that.
"It gives me a plus two bonus when making first impressions or talking to reporters and shit-"
"Only then?" Armsmaster cut over me. I nodded and he muttered something that sounded like 'shittalking quester'. "Well, whatever. You had best go get ready for your patrol, I'll send a memo for your next sparring session to be recorded so we can compare your performance prior to finishing the Mastering Arms quest to after."
"Assault, my dude, I've been thinking dark thoughts."
Our boots crunched on the pavement over bits of gravel barely visible in the light of Brockton Bay tier streetlights.
"Lay it on me Smokey," Assault gave me a consoling clap on the shoulder. "You know we're always here if you want to talk."
"Am…" my voice quavered. "Am I annoying?"
Assault didn't say anything for a long, telling moment. "Yeah, kinda. But you're not that bad, kinda like a puppy. Not my puppy of course, but you'll grow out of it."
Again with the puppy thing? Well if I annoyed people it was their own fault for having shit taste if anything. Wait, was that why Taylor didn't really dig me? Did I annoy her? She didn't have shit taste, right, she was into all that gay anime and vidya shit I was, right? All those conversations we had in class about them…
We turned a corner.
"Jesus fucking Christ!" Assault swore under his breath as Krieg came into view, leaning over a plain looking car and saying something to the driver through the window.
Krieg looked over his shoulder at us and did a little jump of surprise, "vell whoever vas on lookout tonight is fucking fired."
I did Nazi this coming.
Chapter 18: And a real hero 2.8
Chapter Text
"Vell, vell, vell Herr Assault und Smoke Puncher," Krieg said over his shoulder at us. "I must say zis is qvite the unvelcome surprise."
Fucking hell Jimmy, that fake accent needed work. "We can take him," I muttered to Assault. "Your power hard counters his, you can just store all his pressure as kinetic energy and he won't be able to stop you running rings around him especially if I play ranged support."
But Assault apparently didn't hear me despite being literally a foot and a half away.
"What are you doing here, Krieg?"
"Just out for a valk around ze town," Krieg changed position to lean against the car casually. "Nothing that vould concern you, Hero."
"You know he knows he's boned, right?" I muttered again to Assault. "And the guy in the car is just a guy, we've got this in the bag."
"Maybe you should walk on out of here, Krieg."
Fucking hell Ethan! Are you deaf?
"Ja?" Chuckled Krieg. "Maybe it is you who should take the hike vith your new Vard, you know?"
Ah.
"Not gonna ask twice, Krieg," Ethan shifted, a hand reaching to a pouch in his belt. "One button and I can have more backup than you can handle."
"I see where you're going with this," I nodded seriously and Goose Stepped forward into a run at Krieg. Half pace of course. "Jew may as vell call me das Human Holocaust!"
Krieg jerked back in shock as I crossed the distance between us like it was nothing.
"Because I'm gassing all der Juden!"
My breath staggered, muscles weak. This pressure, was this what being waterboarded felt like? Because I felt like I was fucking drowning on dry land.
I leapt, hand outstretched and billowing smoke. In the moment before Krieg was completely obscured I saw his weight shift for a punch that was going to be more of a shove than anything. I let it hit me, partly because my jump had been shit and I couldn't properly dodge and partly because he wasn't trying to hurt me anyway.
-7
I flew a good ten meters, out of the choking pressure, bounced twice along the road-
-14
-3
And managed to spring to my feet as Krieg staggered out of the smoke, coughing and waving his hands in front of his face.
"Shit! Did he just fucking gas me?!" he bellowed before remembering his accent. "Scheisse!"
Ethan stood there, completely failing to capitalise on the distraction I just gave him. I realised then that I had read that wrong somehow given how surprised he looked. He didn't look like he appreciated my joke either, and I'd been waiting for three months to use that one.
There was a screech of tires as the car with the dude peeled away from the curb as fast as it possibly could, leaving the smell of burnt rubber and exhaust fumes.
"Get back here you fucking Feigling!" Krieg shouted after it. "Some fucking Dummkopf obviously vants zeir fucking knees broken!"
"Nowhere to run," Assault stepped forward, suddenly all business.
"Um, ja, I think you'll find zere is," Krieg pulled out a pistol and started backing away. "I can valk away peacefully or you can try somesing and I shoot the funny boy."
My grin threatened to split my face worse than the Mouth of Sauron, "you thought my joke was funny?"
"Ja, call ze Nazi a Jew and gas him," Krieg said loudly, and sarcastically. "Very original."
Then he turned and ran for it. He was fast, but I was faster. I started after him-
"Stop."
I looked over at Assault who was standing there with his arms crossed and, from what I could see of his face, a pinched expression.
"I stuck my neck out for you on this patrol, Smokey, why'd you go and do that?"
"I was causing a distraction, I thought that was where you were going with the backup threat. Give you time to make the call."
Assault rolled his eyes, "recite back to me your protocol on engaging with Villainous Parahumans."
A fist of guilt grabbed a handful of my guts and gave them a good twist. "Don't."
Assault hmmm'd meaningfully and held me in his gaze until I looked away.
"Sorry," I said quietly. "I really thought that was what you were going for though."
"Didja, Smokey?"
"I did!" I protested. "I kept telling you we absolutely could have taken him in and I thought you ignoring me was a secret signal!"
Assault sighed and walked over to me, putting a hand on my shoulder. "Well, now you know that when that happens again it's because we're just posturing until the villain leaves because you're not cleared for combat. He and I both knew that, and as much as I hate letting shit like that happen sometimes you have to if you've got a civvie or someone else designated as a non-combatant and then it's your fault if they get hurt, so just promise me it won't happen again and we'll try and play it down a bit for Armsmaster."
"…Thanks," I muttered around the grippy guilt fist that had worked its way up my throat.
Ethan snorted, "you're still going to get shitcanned for disobeying protocol though. Are you hurt from where Krieg smacked ya?"
I shook my head, "he wasn't even trying, just shoved me. Probably wouldn't have even hurt a non-Brute that bad, I took twenty-four damage and resisted just over three."
"That's good," Assault gave me one last clap on the shoulder. "Now you just cool your heels for a bit while I call this in."
I nodded and trundled away, the incident report he was filing with the PRT listed me, my man, Herr Krieg and only one car driver. Why was Krieg here anyway? This wasn't even really in Empire territory, based on our latest intel anyway. If he was just meeting a dude surely there were better ways to go about it, like doing it away from prying eyes.
I stopped right where the car had been idling and looked around at the dimly lit street. I mean, it was sort of in a crummy part of Downtown and Krieg usually operated in the nicer parts. Now if it was Hookwolf maybe, but this wasn't really the sort of area you'd run a fight club or dogfighting ring; no space for it. I looked over my shoulder at the buildings and noticed a door slightly ajar.
Now, why would there be an antique shop here? All the other buildings looked kinda officey, and as far as I could tell there wasn't another shop shop on the whole block. Moste peculaire. I sidled up to the shop, casting a glance at Ethan who was still busy with his phone call and idled near the door.
There was a faint ping, one that I recognised as being the alert tone for a popular messenger app; hello due cause!
I let myself inside the antiques shop, it smelt kinda like a firing range in here, and squinted through the gloom at the tell-tale light of a phone resting upside down on a countertop. Score! I moved forward to take it and a shadowy figure I had completely failed my perception check on stepped out of the darkness.
Oh, fuck! I created an orb of mana, it glowed softly but not enough to illuminate the man. C'mon, brighter, brighter, brighter!
The now visible, above average looking man with dark hair threw up a hand to shield his eyes. "Jesus, thank god you're here but can you turn that shit down?"
On checking the spell description, I could, but…
"Nice try."
Viktor reacted like a bullet, pulling off a ludicrously smooth quickdraw and aiming dead between my eyes. Fucking E88 and their guns, couldn't even shell out for a Luger?
"Oi!" I said loudly. "Stop jackin' my shit, dude!"
Not that I really needed that one since if I could touch the restraint I could put it in my inventory.
There was a pause before Viktor spoke (in the only accent that mattered, American), during which I identified his hair as a wig. "I'm taking the phone and leaving."
"Fine," I vanished my magic light. "I'm going to go tell Assault you're here."
He didn't reply, merely grabbing the phone and backing away into the back of the shop, keeping his gun trained on my face the whole way. Good thing I knew he wasn't going to hurt me or else that would have been scare as fuck!
I heard a door opening and closing from out back, which settled that, and I went back outside to Assault.
"Viktor was in there!" I called out as I stepped onto the pavement. "But he left."
Assault looked over at me, rubbed his eyes, and relayed my new info to whoever he was still speaking to on the phone.
"I didn't even engage him," I skipped over to Ethan. "Just let him walk away like you said."
Ethan smiled tightly, nodded, and turned away to continue his phone call.
Nice. Hopefully, this would show Colin I could, in fact, be trusted to do all the hero shit instead of sitting at base and reading over endless lists of criminals and Case53's, crime reports and analytics, 400 level college parahuman textbooks and thesis and so on and on forever.
I was a good Ward.
Armsmaster sat stolidly across from me, once again mimicking his self-signed poster and new Armsmaster Figma, listening to my mission report.
"-and so obviously it was an arms deal." I concluded my masterful deduction.
"It was probably an arms deal," Armsmaster sighed. "Or storehouse. You're benched until next year. No coming in, just sit at home and practice your spells or something; why did I agree to apprentice you instead of washing my hands of this?"
"For glory, Colin!" I literally sparkled. "For glory!"
But really, jokes on him because benching me wasn't even a real punishment. I had so much vidya and shitposting to catch up on that all this tiresome extracurricular was eating into something fierce. I mean, maybe I'd miss broing it up at the hospital with Amy but we could probably still hang and stab goblins.
"Your power is wasted on you. You have no idea how much I wish I had it instead, it drives me mad with how little sense it makes. None of my scans have yielded anything. Not a thing. Every other power I've tried to work with can be broken down, adapted, integrated…"
Colin went on with his speech and I kind of just zoned it out. He did this pretty often ever since I signed a non-disclosure agreement for private conversations. Like, did he expect me to care or something? Hearing about other people's problems was just ick. Didn't need any more of those.
Even though my PR training told me to be 'sympathetic with other's ideas and desires'.
Le sigh~
What spell should I try for, I wondered.
Sugoi! Arigato, Questo Giver-san!
"Greg, I'm disappointed with you son," Dad's words lanced my heart like a spear of blackest intent. Never before had he spoken to me in such a way. "I know you're smarter than this, why do you keep disobeying orders on patrols? I know you want to get out there and help people but acting like this is just going to get you stuck doing more boring training."
I said nothing.
"I get it," he continued. "It's so exciting, all of it, so new and exciting and fun; but it's a job that comes with a lot of responsibilities. You need to control yourself."
I continued looking at the floor.
"And feeling bad about your mistakes is natural, but you can't let it end there, Greg. You have to do something with that feeling, provide as best a fix as you can to make things right."
I didn't move even as he walked up and hugged me.
"You know I've always believed in you, but this time I want you to promise you'll try to be better."
Hai, Tou-san. Yakusoko suru yo.
Chapter 19: And a real hero: Interlude: Rory Christner
Chapter Text
30th December, 2010- Rory Christner
The big day was finally here. Finally here. The big graduation from Ward to Protectorate even though he had been eighteen for a few months.
The only problem was he'd still have Armsmaster as a boss when the Wards were going to transfer to Piggot, the guy was a hardass douchetard. But oh well.
It wasn't going to be a big affair, his graduation, just hanging out in the Wards commons one last time with the crew and some chips and soda; shoot the shit and play some video games.
They had all grown so much during his time here, both height wise and in terms of character. Lately, though Chris had really been coming into it ever since he'd found out his Tinker speciality, speaking and moving with a newfound confidence to match his increasingly impressive gear. One problem with that though; Greg told him.
The boy knew. He knew about the powers in a bottle. He had to have. It was hidden somewhere behind his dumb, doglike smile but sometimes when he looked at you could tell he was reading everything. He hadn't said anything about it, but he knew.
He glanced over at Greg, who was glowing softly and wearing his new Armsmaster Beard while playing Mario Cart, and frowned. So long as he continued to keep his mouth shut it was fine, or else something really bad might happen. But Greg was a smart kid, obscenely so, so he had to have known that too.
And he couldn't talk to him about it either, or else Dad's worried, cryptic warning about if he blabbed would come true.
Best to just keep quiet.
Chapter 20: Real human being 3.1
Chapter Text
GStringGirl: so you're finally off suspension for gassing krieg and calling him a jew?
XxVoid_CowboyxX: yep, never doing that again
XxVoid_CowboyxX: new year new me
I saw Taylor sending nervously cringing glances over to a group of popular girls, one of whom (Emma) I understood she had a personal feud with. Ok, one more dumb thing, a harmless friendly prank on a bro.
My inhuman dexterity and Sneak skill let me creep up to her with nary a whisper, "Hey Taylor!" I said in Emma's voice.
She whipped around, face white, eyes bugging out.
"Something wrong?" I simpered.
She fainted. Huh. I caught her as she fell and lay her gently in the recovery position.
"The fuck's wrong with her?" a guy standing nearby said.
I observed her and oh shit, did I just accidentally a trigger event? Yepparoo. Spooking her like that was probably not the best thing to do to someone who was undergoing a gaslighting campaign haha. Shit. In my defense, I hadn't Observed her in months. Lol.
"Blood pressure drop?" I said calmly. "I'll take her to the nurses anyway."
The guy shrugged and went back to talking to his friends as Taylor started stirring awake. She struggled frantically to a sitting position, pallid face glistening with terror sweat, before settling her gaze on me.
"Who the hell are you?" she whispered.
"It's me, Greg. Greg Veder, we've had classes together for a year. We talk about anime in World Studies."
The look she gave me was either non-comprehension or panic. Trigger event would do that I guess, not that I would know since mine must have happened in my sleep or been a delayed reaction to when I was walking up the stairs and when I got to the top step I thought there was another step and had a moment of pure fear as I fell forward for two inches until my foot hit the floor. Or maybe it was so bad I forgot it lol.
I was suddenly hit by a memory of talking about anime and Taylor ignoring me for a solid thirty minutes.
Argh. Second trigger when?
"Anyway, you should probably go lie down for a bit in the nurse's office," I stood up and crossed my arms to draw attention away from my reddening face. Flawless. Playing it cool was my speciality along with playing dumb which is how I could ignore the laughter coming from the popular girls. "Or go home, you don't look like you're doing too good."
And indeed, Taylor was fearfully gawping at everyone around us. No doubt freaked the fuck out by the fact that she could see their negative emotions.
Her power was pretty cool, reminded me of Dean's a bit, a kinda Thinker/Master type deal. Though Taylors was a fair bit better than his in some respects. Not that her power would ever be cooler than mine, as I had now come to understand even my ability to Observe would have been given a rating of like, seven or eight or something; and that was just with one power boi!
"Come on," I said cheerfully. "Up you get, can't sit around all day now can we?"
She started shakily getting to her feet and I realised that maybe I should have offered to help her up. Meh, next time.
"I'll walk you to the gate, though," I smiled, indicating with my head.
Taylor's eyes narrowed on me, then she whipped around to glare at Emma, then back to me. "I can make it on my own, thanks."
Yeesh, talk about having WIS and CHA nearly as bad as mine if she doesn't even want my help. I was a nice guy, right? Surely her new power told her so unless I was misinterpreting something from its Observe description. Dang, well that's trust issues and depression for you.
I followed her anyway as she stalked away like a jittery spider, "hey, I know what'll cheer you up! What'd you get for Christmas? I got the new Space Opera I was telling you about ages ago, shit is dope; like someone mashed G-Gundam and Crusader Kings into a character action game."
I bit back a description of the plot and my thoughts of so she could answer.
"A book."
Succinct.
"That's cool," I said. "Tell me about it next time, if it's fantasy or sci-fi, I need to read more things that aren't textbooks or reports."
She hrrm'ed.
"Unless it's some dumb young adult, supernatural romance novel. That shit belongs in the trash and so do the people who read them. On that note, don't read most LN's 'cause they're all shit too. The Nips are letting us down, Taylor, never forget that. I used to believe Isekai was the way to the future, but no more. It's a trash genre for plebs, something we would know nothing about."
"It's pronounced 'plebs'," Taylor muttered without looking at me.
Oh. "Well ok."
"Bye," she sped out the front gate without so much as looking at me.
"I'll see you tomorrow!" I called after her. It was a shame she had to miss the first day of school, but it wasn't like we were going to do anything important today anyway.
Or she wasn't, anyway. I turned on my heel and strode with purpose, I'd just had an idea on how to do my homie a solid. I wound my way through the hall and approached the Danger Zone.
"Hey, guys!"
Emma looked at me with an expression like she was looking at walking garbage. Lol, fukken bitch amirite.
"I know you guys have been hassling Taylor, but she's having an extra bad time so if you could stop altogether that'd be real based of you."
The gaggle of girls giggled stereotypically, aggravating my betamax genes.
"I don't know what you mean," Emma simpered, proving my mimicry was top fucking notch. "Has she been saying something? You know she has schizophrenia, right?"
Willikers, what a blatant lie. Being tormented by ABB thugs one time didn't give you licence to be a total bitch, but maybe she just needed a therapist. Sophia certainly had, since what happened to her wasn't grounds to take it out on everyone else. Bummer that I couldn't say anything.
"Naw," I waved a hand airily. "She don't. Well, bye."
And I left them to reconsider their shameful life choices. I was a good friend.
"Hi, Emily!" I smiled as I shut the door to her office behind me and sat down in the chair in front of her desk. "Have a nice Christmas?"
"I did, actually," she sort of smiled back. It wasn't a good look. "Thank you. And yours?"
"It was chill, Armsmaster gave me the whole holiday off training so I could just relax and do magic. God, I love magic."
"That's certainly a change," she said in a super measured tone. "From when you, when last asked to practice your 'spells' you replied 'miss me with that gay wizard shit!' and then proceeded to rap with that as the chorus."
I laughed, "I don't do that anymore. Funny though. Still," I held up a finger. "I'm not all about the gay wizard shit, I'm still going Mover/Stranger with magic to round out my powerset so I never get caught in a situation I can't solve."
"Clever. I've heard you've been getting on better with the others, it's good to hear you're settling into the Wards, it seemed like you would be a problem when you first walked in my door."
Huuuuuuuh. The blood drained from my face, thank god for masks. Oh, the memory was bad.
"Past me is a retard," I shrugged. "Present me is perfect."
"In comparison, perhaps-"
I pouted, I wasn't that bad.
"But all in all I can see you've made good progress. But I didn't call you in to talk about that, we have a new hopeful for the Wards coming in," Emily steepled her fingers and looked over them at me, waiting for my response.
I raised my hands in surrender, "say no more, I'm in."
Emily raised an eyebrow.
"To be the Human Litmus Test," I elaborated. "I Observe them and tell you if they're new Shadow Stalkers. Good choice, picking me since I also get a CHA bonus when meeting new people."
"Yes," Emily said eventually. "This is also a test for you. After the fumbling of your last patrol I want to see if you can at least behave correctly in a low-stress situation. Especially one requiring social restraint. By all accounts you should be able to make a positive impression, you've certainly had enough PR training, and make our new hopeful feel like the Wards is their best choice; which it is."
"Yeah," I said. "I can do that."
Emily gave me another ZUCC-tier smile.
Voice: on. Smile: on. Charm: on.
"Hey, how're you?" I held out my hand to the new guy, a boy who was only seven months older than me. "I'm Dark Smoke Puncher, Crouching Retard Hidden Badass and newest Ward."
"I'm well, thank you," Brad shook my hand. "Though I can't tell you my name, provisionally I've chosen the moniker Browbeat."
"Coolio, is that meant to be like, a misdirection from what your power does? Or are you really good at berating people?"
Brad's face creased, "a misdirection, I thought it would be funny. How do you know what my power is?"
"That's one of my powers," I grinned sunnily. "Anyway, why're you up for the Wards?"
Brad shrugged, "it seems like the thing to do."
I clicked, "it can be a pretty sweet deal. Sure, minimum wage for a year until it doubles, but that fifty K a year trust fund bro. Finna be rich when I invest mine in cryptos."
"So you're interested in cryptos?" Brad noticeably perked up.
I winked at his Observe bio.
"Perhaps we can discuss this further, sometime," he smiled.
Well this was in the bag, wasn't it? Had Emily given me a fucking gimmie? Not that I was complaining about free xp, but come on I could handle real quests.
"Absolutely. And if'n you sign up, remember that they can't make you do anything. The system's my bitch if I wanted I could just live like I was before and rake in that government money."
"Why didn't you?"
"Oh," I shrugged. "Eventually I'm going to be in the Triumvirate, but to do that I need to at least try-"
Yeah, you should you lazy faggot.
"-and practice. Do you want to see my Insta-rave spell? I'm magic, btw. It's this sweet combo I made out of Mana Smoke and Light, I don't have a spell that lets me make sound yet but when I do oh boy, shit is gonna be great."
Chapter 21: Real human being 3.2
Chapter Text
And they run! When the sun comes up, with their lives on the line! Rules of nature!
The wind rushed through my hair as I sprinted up the brick wall of some kind of building. It was so fucking hard! Hahahahaha! I changed my angle to take across it diagonally, hit the edge and jumped full force over the gap of the road and commando rolled onto another roof. Without losing stride I burst into a sprint again, vaulting over a radiator and landing on a wall in a crouch.
With the power of squats on my side, I jumped, twisting in the air to land feet first on an opposite wall-
-and ping-ponged myself up onto the next tier of rooves.
Why hadn't I just gone and done this before? Roof hopping was so fucking fun! This was what I was born for. I should totally see if I could sign up for the Cape version of Ninja Warrior, fuck that would be good. They might even let me do it if I could convince them the PR would be worth it.
I pushed myself forward as hard as I could, countdown timer ticking away in a little blue box in the corner of my eye. It was a simple quest in concept, get from point A to point B, only Armsmaster had me dropped as far away as he possibly could from point B and given me a speedrun time to beat.
I glanced at the quest timer, I wasn't going to make it. I suffused my body with mana, willing it to make me faster, stronger, tougher; but nothing. There was a self-buff spell in there somewhere, but I hadn't been able to do it yet. My legs and arms pumped in unison, a steam engine of meat, breath misting up in the chilly late afternoon. My lungs burned under the strain of holding a full-on sprint for so long, legs matching the pain.
I'd never felt so alive.
And yet…
I slowed to a comfortable thirty kilometres per hour. God fucking damn it. I jogged down the side of the building I was on and Jaywalked across the road.
"If only I had five more seconds," I groused through panting breaths.
Armsmaster grunted.
"This is why I never had the patience to do game speedruns, I broke a keyboard once. So frustrating. Anyway, what're we here for?"
"We have five minutes before the PRT forensics team gets here, I need you to get in there and ID some heavily mutilated corpses."
Well shit.
Fucking shit.
What?
"What?" I asked.
"Corpses mutilated beyond recognition," Armsmaster said tersely. "Obviously by a Parahuman, your Observe will speed things up."
"Ok," I think I failed at smiling. "Haha, never seen a dead body before; some real Stand By Me shit huh? Haha."
"Let's go."
Armsmaster led the way into the building we were standing in front of, it was dark inside. And quiet. Silent like the grave. He opened another door and as he went through I caught a glimpse inside.
And the smell. I must get out of here.
I turned on my heel and bolted back out onto the street as the gorge rose in my throat. Even the bitter city air seemed sweet in comparison as I gasped it down, wishing I could take off my uniform because suddenly it was just too goddamn hot.
The door opened again behind me. "Fair enough," Armsmaster said. "It was worth a try."
I laughed keeningly, "dude what the fuck, you said mutilated. I've seen some gore threads, I ain't no bitch nigga, but that shit was real meatgrinder hours. Not even Hookwolf does that."
"Which was why I wanted you here, this is someone new. I've never seen this before, and we have nothing on file," Armsmaster said heavily. "But forget about it, I was wrong to ask you here, we'll have to do the whole Apprentice deal for some other crime."
Yikes, Colin was really sticking his neck out for me for this one, if I ever complained about it he'd get turkey slapped with the long, hard, punitive dick of the law. But I ain't no snitch.
"I can do this," I held up a hand. "I just need a second to get in the zone."
Inhale. Hold… Hold... Hold... Hold… Hale.
"Okay," I put on my Armsmaster Beard. "I'm ready."
Armsmaster smiled tightly and led the way back inside and through the second door, I wasn't ready.
I held my breath and peered into the room. The corpses were, if I could describe it, bulging, bloated sacks that had ruptured violently all over the room. I threw up a bit in my mouth and sucked it back down.
I observed the closest pair of bulging legs, which still had most of the organs spilling out of the stump waist.
I equipped a medical filter mask from my inventory and tested the fetid stench. Bearable.
"Those legs were a guy's called Mark Haversham," I pointed, and then retched a little. How the fuck did Colin stand this? "Not sure whose foot that is, or that arm, that most of a torso is Dillon Turpin's, that pistol is also Dillon's, and the pools of blood are misc. I'm not getting any more backstory, the bits mightn't be big enough to twig that part of my power."
"Two names without having to wait hours to confirm identities is better than nothing, thank you Dark Smoke Puncher. Have you Observed anything else pertaining to the crime?"
I shook my head rapidly and inched away from the blood pool. "All clear," I squeaked masculinely. "Maybe I should read a Forensic Investigation skill book."
"Perhaps," Colin followed me as I bravely backed out of the building. "Though maybe you shouldn't go to any crime scenes until you graduate, I can clearly see I've made a mistake with this here."
"Nah, it's fine bro," I smiled, my sparkle cosmetic sending my teeth glinting. But it was a weak smile so I covered it up by rubbing at my beard. "It's not a big deal, I can handle big boy crimes."
"My power thinks so too, I just got a quest to solve this with you!"
Armsmaster didn't react verbally, or enthusiastically, but that was just his way.
The screen before me held two graphs, my initial projected STAT and SKILL development and my actual one.
I looked to my left, where Chris was working on the draft for his latest technological marvel. "I'm kind of stupid, huh?"
"Uh," Chris said as though he was trying to be delicate. "Yeah."
I was starting to notice a trend, in that the more WIS I got the worse I felt.
Chapter 22: Real human being 3.3
Chapter Text
I looked Amy in the eyes as she walked into the warehouse and stabbed myself in the arm with a bowie knife.
-10
We both screamed.
"What the fuck?" Amy hustled over, placing her hand on my arm.
"Flowers for Algernon."
She stared uncomprehendingly.
"My power is Flowers for Algernoning me, only there's no reverse," I yanked my knife out and shooed her healing hand away.
Amy gave me another worried, uncomprehending stare. "What are you doing?"
"Grinding," I said grimly, retrieving my first aid kit. "Can you turn my pain off? This really hurts."
She watched me fix my arm up with an already bloodied bandage for a few seconds before speaking, "how long have you been at this?"
"A while."
In reality, this was the second stab, it had taken ages to work up the courage after the first one despite the fact that I'd planned to get another point in damage resistance before she got here. And after that, I'd more or less been waiting until she got here.
"Like, I know you heal and it makes you tougher but," Amy frowned. "Why are you doing this?"
"I should be stronger," I said, putting the bandage back into my inventory. "I should have been doing this all along. Not necessarily stabbing myself, but practising magic or doing pushups while waiting instead of nothing. Just something. So much wasted time."
"Are you lazy? I mean, you haven't been in to the hospital in a fortnight you lazy shit, but you were there just about every day before and for longer than me sometimes," she tilted her head. "Why did you stop coming?"
"Oh, that," I flushed. "I gassed Krieg and called him a jew so Armsy took me off duty. It was hilarious and you should have been there, but in hindsight, I'm pretty lucky he didn't maul me."
Amy exhaled sharply through her nose.
"Yeah," I grinned. "He was so surprised he even stopped doing his stupid accent. He also said he thought I was funny, but that was while he was threatening to shoot me so I don't think he really meant it."
Amy made a face that could be best described as consternated, "I don't think what's wrong with you is you're lazy."
That… wasn't really something I wanted to dwell on at the moment. "Anyway," I vanished my knife in a puff of smoke. "I'm ready to take another crack at El Ogro."
Amy crossed her arms, "the one that nearly killed you."
"Ayep, but now that I'm an Electrogenic Mage I'll merc it one v one; for realises. I'd show you how but I don't want to ruin the surprise 'cause I just know you're going to be so impressed."
Cool.
Amy rubbed at her face, sighing the mother of all sighs.
"You can add this to my tab of favours," I smiled. "Which must be getting pretty big by now."
She rolled her eyes, "fine, but if this goes bad again I'm for sure quitting."
I watched as she transmogrified the hibernating lump of meat, that now was at least twice as big as me, into El Ogro. All this morning I'd been having a funny feeling that having Amy make living creatures for me to kill for sport was actually fairly morally wrong; even though I knew they felt no pain and had no higher level brain function.
I needed to ask GStringGirl about this, she always knew what to say.
XxVoid_CowboyxX: have yuo ever seen a dead body?
Soon the ogre stood before me in all its two meter, bear mode glory, crushing grip and sturdy conditions in its stat block.
"Last chance to not get almost murdered again," Amy said warningly.
I just smiled and shook my head, readying a mana knife.
Amy's eyebrows furrowed, but she slowly removed her hand from the ogre's arm as it shook itself into consciousness for the first time. It eyed me down, processing the trigger scent marking me as a target, then barrelled towards me.
But this was my swamp.
I stayed where I was, reading its trajectory, body loose and ready. As its hands came up so did mine, my fingers grazing its skin.
I cast Shocking Grasp with my left hand and the ogre froze, then with my right I machine gun stabbed it forty-seven times in the neck.
"I mean," I said as I wiped blood splatter off my face, neatly stepping to the side to avoid El Ogro's collapsing corpse. "I could have done it without the magic, but I really just wanted to show off."
Amy said nothing, mouth shut in a tight crease.
I nodded sympathetically, the both of us standing there contemplating the fleeting nature of strength. Not my strength, obviously, but others in the endless power level wank that was my life now.
"Honestly though," I continued. "I'm a bit over killing, what do you want to make?"
Amy shrugged.
"Because I'm gonna try to make a new stealth spell, I feel like I haven't quite done enough about the ninja part of my gig. Also, I have a new lesbo story recommendation, you ever heard of Prinsessan Kristalla? I know, why don't you make yourself a pet to spec, like a really smart and cute cat or something. I'm going to go over there behind those crates and do magic."
I skedaddled the fuck out of there and hid behind the crates, had Amy seen my hands shaking? Fuck. It wasn't even the smell this time.
Put it all into the inventory; out of sight out of mind.
Inhale.
Ok.
Today was a good day. That quest was good. I was chillaxing with my homie. I would level up soon. Ignore and forget, I was good at that!
Hale.
Time for magic.
I'd already been mulling over this one for a while, as a kind of stepping stone to creating Henshin no Jutsu, which would still be useful in some situations hopefully. Conceptually it was a very simple extension of my ability to change the colour of my mana, using it to blend into the background. The hard part would be getting the right gradient of colours instead of making a solid colour cloud.
I'd already given it a bit of a go, and I could tell it was just going to be endless trial and error.
I crept forward, slowly, silently, an afterthought to the visible world. The smudge on your glasses, the mirage on the desert sand.
Amy sat on a folding chair, munching on some of the many snacks provided from my inventory; a ploy to keep her distracted. An undulating blob of meat occasionally sprouting fur, or ears, or eyes, sat in her upturned palm.
I tiptoed in from the side, five meters away. Four. Two. One last sidle in and I dropped Chameleon Haze.
"HeyAmyyouwannaseemynewspell!"
She turned and screamed in my face so hard her voice cracked and fell off her chair.
-1
"Damn you just got pranked, bro!" I laughed at her. "Have you ever thought of making a live scarf that reacts to minute changes in local air pressure?"
"You fucking cunt that wasn't funny!"
I begged to differ.
"Stop giving me that stupid grin," she hissed, picking herself up and dusting off her jeans. "Stop it, you're the worst!"
I smiled wider and cast Chameleon Haze and Amy made the kind of expression you make when you've been staring at a screen for too long without blinking but you don't want to blink because the live stream you're watching is too good to miss a second of.
"I can still see you," she said. "Not a very good ability."
"Spell, Amy, it's a spell. And only on level one out of probably a hundred," I skipped around her, showing off the Haze's ability to adapt to new backgrounds on the fly. I hadn't actually done that bit myself, but my power always seemed to autocomplete my spells based on my intent.
God, I loved my power, I couldn't imagine how lame I'd be if I had to do magic manually.
"Anyway," I dropped it. "What did you end up doing?"
Her shoulders slumped. "I did design a cat, the cutest cat you've ever seen, but I dunno if I actually want a pet. I guess I could make it go into hibernation until I feel like taking care of it again, but I'm probably too busy to have it around."
I nodded, the same was true for me. "Why don't you make some drugs then?"
Amy looked at me askance.
"Yeah, like some turbo weed to even out your perpetual bad mood. One that is both a relaxer and a nootropic. You could even make some absolutely sick psychedelics, it wouldn't even be illegal!" I realised this as I spoke. "It has to be a known substance to be restricted, yours would be entirely new! You have so much untapped potential in just things to make yourself better! If you want to keep pace with me you better hop to it!"
As Amy bit at her thumbnail, I could see I had convinced her, which was nice. That bitch needed to chill something fierce so she'd stop calling me a cunt all the time, like that made her edgy or whatever. Also to increase her happiness, but that was just a happy side effect.
Urg.
Chapter 23: Real human being 3.4
Chapter Text
GStringGirl: yeah, I have
Well, that explained why it took her a whole week to message me back. Yikes.
A new message popped up in my inbox.
GStringGirl: it wasn't my fault. My body just moved on its own
Those were the last words of Sasuke in Menma, when he died on the bridge. I hoped she was just memeing on me. I hoped she had just been away on holiday without internet or grounded by her strict mum. Or that she really was a forty-year-old neckbeard catfishing me.
XxVoid_CowboyxX: when I was working with Armsmaster, there were these two guys in a room. Everywhere in the room.
XxVoid_CowboyxX: how did you handle it?
"Dark Smoke! Sorry I'm a bit late, I had to file my monthly progression report."
I looked up to see Geromy striding toward me, waving his deactivated Arclance.
"I'm sure y'know what that's like, eh?" he smiled. "Your spreadsheet must be huge."
I stood up, inventorying my phone. The joke was on him, my huge INT made shit like that turbo easy. Plus the DEX, my WPM was insane and coupled with the fact that I didn't have to look at the keyboard and knew every command shortcut made menial work like that a breeze.
Maybe I should get back into coding, I'd be an absolute beast of a coder.
"I hope you're ready," I returned his smile. "To receive a violent lesson in pain!"
He chuckled, "yeah, I've been looking forward to this too. We don't have any villains in the city that match your power profile, but it's always good to get practice in prep for that cra- stuff, never know when one might turn up."
We stepped up unto the mat and started warming up. As part of both our ongoing power testing and general combat practice we were going to spar while Armsmaster recorded it, and the presumably secretly upload it to his prediction software so when we fought at the end of March (ninety-six more days) he could beat me up.
Which was why I'd need an ace in the hole, a spell I'd keep secret until that day, like opening my forbidden chakra gates or something.
"Ready?" I asked.
Geromy took one last deep breath and nodded, shaping up into a textbook boxing stance. It was a good thing we'd be using powers next because at this point I could just manhandle him like a child, not to say the guy wasn't good but he was just a normal fit dude without a stat over twenty.
So after me playing around for a few minutes as he worked up a sweat we took a break so he could get his armour on.
Then, with a completely straight face, he activated his gear, sparks spitting from the pulse of his expanding shield as he spun his extending Arclance around in a practised pattern as though that were theatrics.
He was like a little baby.
I stepped forward into smoke, casting Light on my hero uniform as I equipped it, then with my next step, I pushed it all behind me save for some dark grey patches of clinging smog that slowly faded away as my golden Light dimmed.
The JoJo poses were for special occasions, I had learned now that understated was the new hotness; flash was saved.
Dauntless did this little silent, affected laugh out of jealousy because I was cooler than him. Whatever.
I moved in, creating as blunt a knife as I could, and Dauntless mirrored my steps cutting me off and proving that once again I needed a ranged option. Zeus bolts or whatever? Shit would be tite.
Eventually, we got within hitting distance and Geromy jabbed at me with his Arclance, probing my defence. My Armsmastery let me read his attack well before he would have landed it and I was already stepping around it into range to deliver my own attack. But since this was still the warmup I hit slow enough that he could actually block it with his shield like a normal person. I was interested to see how this played out when we cranked it up since I was pretty sure he powermogged me pretty hard what with his being able to fly and bubble shield.
But he had like a whole year and a half on me. I might even catch up in another year and a half, who knew what I'd be then. Level twenty-five at least, DEX at like a hundred twenty, spelled to the gills; untouchable.
Dauntless swung at me in a tight arc, I ducked beneath the crackling spear and Initial Lotus kicked him under the chin, sending him staggering.
In response he flashed his shield bubble, knocking me off balance enough that for the first time in weeks I stumbled. This was kind of the problem with this kind of spar, Geromy had a shield and I had no shield cracker spells so the only reason I could get in and kick him in the first place was if we were going easy.
He pushed his advantage, skating across the ground on trails of burning energy, shield out in front like a cowcatcher. I jumped, aiming to land one foot on the rim of his shield and the other on his face; but Geromy was wise to my tricks. His shield bubbled out again, pushing me. I cast Mana Adhesion.
"Wahey!" my feet stuck to the bubble and I heard Geromy laugh as he started to skate in circles to throw me off as little arcs lifted off the bubble and ran over my legs with sharp ZAKs.
-1
Fucking ouch.
-1
I slapped the shield with a Shocking Grasp to unsurprisingly little effect.
-1
-1
Ow!
Fuck this gay shit. I vaulted backwards off the bubble and onto the mat, taking off at a moderate run ahead of a pursuing Geromy. I burnt a few mana points, smoked the area in front of me as I ran through and jumped as soon as I felt it breached, backflipping over Geromy as he skated through under me, shield eating a hole through my smoke.
I pulled enough back in to fill the tunnel and hazed myself, blending into the slowly dispersing cloud. I would have held the smoke in place and used the distortion to amplify my haze's effect, but I couldn't dual cast for shit.
Geromy lifted up into the air like a cheating bitch the second he realised he couldn't see me and slowly made a figure eight around the room as he scanned for my presence.
I threw a knife but it bounced off his greaves and he bubbled up again.
"You cheating bitch!" I shouted, smoking the room. Even if I made a ramp, or ran up the wall, I couldn't crack that shield; and he could keep it on indefinitely. Fucking shitty mana regen. And fixing that problem would only make things worse.
I didn't think I could take much more WIS.
Geromy laughed an evil laugh, Arclance striking out like a snake into the smoke where he thought I was, lol the idiot didn't know 'bout my Ventriloquism. Now to set the bait.
"Get over here!" I shouted, throwing my voice and stepping into a thicker patch of smoke to let my haze drop so I could create a spike of mana and throw that.
I was already hazed and moving as the spike pinged off the back of Dauntless's bubble. He turned on the spot in the air and my next spike hit him from behind again. In an actual fight he could sit up there all day behind his shield and take potshots until I made a mistake, but for now, he was game enough to get kited down to a manageable height.
I took a running jump and closed my trap, a ball of solid mana, around his bubble shield. I brought up its Observe window and clicked my tongue as I fed more and more mana into the construct as fast as his shield ate it away, the durability counter ticking up and down.
"Yeah, bitch!" I hammered on the dark blue ball. "Trapped ya!"
Geromy just laughed again, "fuck off, Smokey."
With a sound like breaking eggshells, his Arclance pierced through my orb, right next to my face, then retracted. Fuck. I Spiderman scuttled around to the other side as my orb took big spikes of damage from his lance. I crawled back on top, repaired it, then backward cartwheeled underneath.
This position was untenable. While this would be a very viable strat against a lot of parahumans and unpowered humans it was eating up my mana like crazy just trying to keep him trapped, plus the expenditure from Mana Adhesion put me at a hundred and seventy-eight MP. Not worth it.
I dropped to the mats in the remnants of my fading smoke and jogged backwards as big cracks split the surface of Geromy's cage before the whole thing burst into disappearing blue glitter.
Dauntless span around to face me and slowly floated down to the ground, bubble retracting back into his buckler.
"That," he said. "Was a very good try. Honestly, it was, if'n this were real you had me in there for a good thirty seconds; that's extra time for your backup to get here or whatever your plan is."
I exhaled a massive sigh, "I'm down to a third power though, I couldn't have gone much longer." A thought hit me, a wonderful happy thought that brought my smile back up to full force. "But give it six months, and I'll beat you fair and square."
"You'd better pencil that in for June tenth," I said smugly. "Because it's a quest."
Geromy shook his head and smile wearily, "boy, I wish you'd come with an off switch."
I shot him some finger guns, "now can you whack at me with your lance? I have an idea for a new spell."
He shrugged and advanced on me, lifting his lance. The look on his face was priceless when I started spinning in place.
"Spin to win!" I barked. "Hit me! Spin to win!"
His face creased into something nearing pity, but he acquiesced my request.
I poured out mana, covering myself in a quick clockwise burst.
-1
"Again."
-1
"Again."
-1
"Again."
Finally. That had taken a bit of doing, long enough that Geromy had somewhere else to be while I regened mana and-
My work phone beeped. I sighed and crossed the room to pick it up… frack.
Bromaster: Meet me in the lobby, we're going to the morgue so you can Observe another corpse mutilated the same way as the prior crime scene.
Iyada.
"Bill Wilson, he was Coil's mole in the E Eighty-Eight and he was caught out, can I go now?"
Yes, thank you power. Dickhead. You're a fucking dickhead.
"Yes," Armsmaster sort of shuffled in place. "Dismissed."
Dickhead.
Chapter 24: Real human being 3.5
Chapter Text
"How's your, uh, singing career going?"
Eh? Nani? Nandato?
I turned to look at Taylor, since when did she start conversations? "My singing career?"
I remembered of course, right here in this very classroom some three months ago I expressed my desire to become idoru but I never expected her to remember one of the many inane things that spewed out of my mouth on any given day let alone make reference to it.
"Yeah, you don't sound so lame anymore so I guess you've actually been working on your elocution."
"I don't have Evocation powers," I snapped. "Who told you?"
Triumph flashed in Taylor's eyes like she'd tricked me into spilling some kind of devastating secret instead of nonsense.
"No, no, elocution. Your voice. It's crazy different to last year, you must have really been putting in the practice."
I lit up like a new years firework. "I have! I practice literally every day, I'm even practising right now! I could easily be the best seiyuu in the world by now." I licked my lips, switching to my 'Little Boy Lost In The Mall But He Really Wants To Get To Gamestop' voice. "No tricks, no gimmicks. Sorry if it made you freak out the other week when I said hi in a girl's voice and then you fainted; I thought it would be funny."
Her jaw clenched, hand tightening to a clawed fist around her pencil and she made yandere eyes at me; it wasn't a good look on her.
"Yeah," I continued like she wasn't contemplating John Wicking me. "You've been all tense lately, so I thought a lil' prank would make you laugh."
A bead of sweat ran down her temple. I guess I understood. Everything I had read about it said that a trigger was the worst and most important day of your life. But for me? It was Tuesday. We both sat there contemplating the subjective and personal nature of terror. Or I was anyway, Taylor just looked like she might cry.
"I didn't mean it in a bad way though, we're friends, it was meant to be haha funny," I shrugged. "I guess I underestimated how much you hate Emma."
In that moment I could see it behind her eyes. Everything came tumbling down, but she didn't cry. Her expression curdled like concrete and I started to get this weird feeling of trepidation, a kind of frisson in my guts and I averted my gaze because wow this schoolwork had suddenly become so interesting, y'know?
"And what else have you been practising?" the question an icicle from her mouth. "Been going to the gym with Big Cal again?"
"I'm just getting fat, that's probably why he keeps asking."
Shit, she'd noticed my Jostar tier frame despite my best efforts to wear a five times extra large hoodie everywhere, that shit draped over me like a poncho. What else had she noticed? Suddenly I was keenly aware of my inhuman balance and grace, I knew that I looked awesome just walking around on camera but for some reason, I just hadn't considered how that would look at school; anyone paying attention for more than a second would notice.
My vision started to flicker around the edges like vignetting in blood that crept out of view when I tried to concentrate on it, the colour deepening with the creeping sense of unease.
Taylor's power.
I met her eyes again. She was smiling but it wasn't happy.
And the smell.
I could see it. I could see death, wagging its finger at me.
Taylor started to bloat, her swelling neck pushing her head all the way to the side, blood vessels bursting and that was enough for me.
I fled the room.
"You've been quiet lately, Greggy. Finally calmed down since getting powers?"
I looked up at mum from where I was slowly stirring my ice cream into a choc-mint paste. "Huh?"
"Quieter," she reiterated. "This past week, like how you were a few months ago."
I was back to acting like how I used to? "I hadn't noticed."
"Well I have," she clicked. "I've also noticed you've been rubbing your nose, have you been doing coke?"
"Every day."
Mum nodded sagely, "make sure to Inventory some from gang stashes while you're at work, there's a lifehack for you for free."
I gave a little chuckle, standing up. "Thanks, mum, I'm gonna go eat this in my room and do some magic-"
"Can you cast Magic Missile yet? You promised me you would!"
I frowned and licked my spoon, "I'm pretty sure I said MM was overplayed and trite, I'm an artiste not a haque."
She clicked her tongue, "elitist."
I turned my nose up and left without dignifying that with a response, to which mum booed me out of the room.
The ice cream slid down my throat without me really tasting it, I couldn't even blame Armsmaster for this; it was all my fault I should have backed out. I sighed, using my foot to shut my door behind me, this sulking wouldn't do me any good. I opened the music folder on my desktop and double clicked animemusictrapremix2010.wav, yeah, some pumpin' phat beatz to get me in the mood.
I already had a plan for what I was trying for, the two spells should tie into each other as they were kinda the same thing. Conceptually there was no difference between a shell of mana acting as a disguise and a shell of mana acting as a doppelganger; all that changed was I was inside one. My skill with Mana Object was good enough at this point that I could get a human to look right without dipping into the uncanny valley, and with my power smoothing things out I expected it all to go off without a hitch.
Making a copy felt like it would be the easier starting point though.
I held my ice cream in my left hand and held my right out in front of me, tendrils of mana snaking from my palm and coalescing before me, into me.
I sniffed and ate a spoonful of ice cream, I looked kinda waxy but otherwise, my me was pretty good despite not being a workable clone. I pushed it over and it thudded onto the carpet, sending up a little cloud of dust. Work, damn you. I sighed and stood it back up, maybe the problem was that it was way too light on account of being an empty shell. I vanished it and tried again, this time taking my time to make sure it was solid.
Same outcome, but more durability. I think my problem was I was still in the mindset of making knives, my would be clones came out as statues because the mana I was making them out of was rigid. Time to try make 'em out of rubber, how would that happen yohoho.
One melted bowl of ice cream and thirty painstaking minutes later I figured out the trick to making a bendy stick.
And now to go even further beyond and incorporate the ideas I'd had while practising. My First Aid skill gave me a decent schematic of the major areas a human body was supposed to flex and bend, so using that I would first make the 'skeleton' out of my hard mana and attach it together to simulate articulating joints. Then I would wrap it in a layer of increasingly rubbery mana so that the joints could bend and it would feel fleshy before finally doing the skin, hair and clothes.
Compared to that making Mana Disguise was easy, and bonus I didn't have to wear my stupid face anymore.
Chapter 25: Real human being 3.6
Chapter Text
I frowned.
"Excuse me," I said to the patient whose booboo I was tending to. "I have to go send an important text."
"Oh, ok," they smiled. "Thanks for patching me up, Dark Smoke Puncher."
I gave them a thumbs up and scarpered out of the lobby, retrieving my work phone from my pocket.
You: Hey Armsmaster, remember when I gassed Krieg and called him a jew? I just realised I never said his real name is James Fliescher and he works at Medhall (probably e88 ties) and Viktor's name is Steve Moran. Just thought you ought to know 
There, problem solved. I'd report the quest tomorrow, I was done for today, time to go wait for Amy so we could be edgy rebels and smoke cigarettes on top of the hospital. I got out my other phone and checked my PHO messages as I made my way through the building. Oh, one from GSG.
GStringGirl: stop being such a stingy faggot and give me all your items if you're not going to play PROT anymore
xXVoid_CowboyXx: Well fuck you, I was just taking a break, we can't all be neets who play ten hours a day
Honestly, the nerve of that bitch. Did she even know how rare my armour set was? Fuck outta here with that e-begging shit, no nigga ever got rich giving charity. Hell naw.
I skipped up the last flight of stairs, taking them five at a time, and unlocked the rooftop door with my very own personal key I got because the hospital director trusted me with it after I complained to him that Amy got one and I didn't.
I stepped out onto the roof, relishing in the fresh night air after the stale, sterile tripe the hospital tried to pass off as breathable. Good, Amy wasn't here yet so all I had to do was transform into Glory Girl-
I thought about Taylor. She hadn't done anything or spoken to me since, but maybe I shouldn't use my powers to play tricks on my friends. No matter how funny it would be for me, they mightn't like it. And that would be bad for me because Amy could do worse than give me the horror show.
But that didn't mean I couldn't show them my transformations into obscure creepypasta monsters, I'd just have to warn them first.
Good job me, lesson learned.
There was less of a sudden surge of tainted enlightenment like there was with WIS. Ok, cool, CHA is good. I can work with CHA. Not that I had to trust CHA, I certainly didn't trust WIS; how the fuck would a power know what was wise? Ninety-nine percent of parahumans were hair-trigger fucktards, but ninety-nine percent of parahumans I'd Observed also had low WIS. It was all very confusing, maybe when I finished my There Is No Spoon quest I'd get some answers but I wasn't fucking rushing that one, I didn't want to get merced by Cauldron.
Though their very existence did provide some interesting quandaries. Either they were the source of powers, were connected somehow to it or knew someone who could create powers wholesale without needing to induce a trigger event in a person. I would very much like to Observe some of their agents just to see what was up with this shit. And if they were the source of powers I'd be very interested in asking what the fuck was up with mine, everyone had accepted it as being weird as fuck, but within the frame of parahumanity. I wasn't so sure. I'd pored over records of known Trumps, and none of them were like me. I'm sure if they experienced the qualia of my powers they'd understand, but I had no way to share it.
My work phone buzzed.
Bromaster: Thank you.
Neato, the guy was such a bro. I mean, sure it really steamed his hams that Geromy and I would surpass him one day but he didn't let it get him down. Where would I be without him? In Coil's Fiddle Basement having hobos beat me with rusty pipes for physical resist levels? Pretty fucking gay.
Maybe I should feel bad for Sarah? Meh, I already told the PRT she was threatened; ain't my problem no more.
The door behind me opened, breaking me out of my reverie. Game time.
I cast Light, each casting producing a column of light at an upward angle in front of me.
"I've been expecting you," I intoned, glancing over my shoulder at Amy.
"We always meet here," she chuckled warmly and not sarcastically. "Hey, Greg."
Summin ain't right.
I Observed her.
Oh my fuck.
She did.
"Which is why I've been expecting you," I continued. This was just too precious.
Amy gave me a Zen sort of smile, the sort of smile that comes with making a nootropic turbo weed and then getting blazed as fuck to get you through a job you hate.
"You're in a good mood," my grin stretched my face in a hideous, Joker-like rictus. "You just finish cranking one out to your sister?"
"Oh fuck off, cunt," she said without any heat. "I know you know. And I'll have you know it was a really good idea, thanks."
I could feel myself going pink, Stoner Amy was so fucking kawaii. And nice! Gone was the unpalatable Tsun, and in its place, a likeable Dere grew. Kyaa!
"You're welcome," I giggled. "Make anything else interesting?"
"A kind of like… a venus fly trap with a ridiculous oxygen conversion rate and its pollen has a calming effect," she sighed dreamily. "I've never slept better."
This was unironically great, usually, she was such a high strung bitch; and people said drugs were bad! Drugs solved everything!
"So when do I get a slice of the pie? I wanna be cool and do untested tinker drugs too!"
"Trust me, I've done extensive testing."
I giggled again, "can they even cure my crippling depression?"
Her smile faltered slightly, "yeah, maybe I guess. I haven't tested that."
"I say that because when you move out next year I can help you sort through all the bullshit laws the government uses to keep us hardworking would be Rogues shackled, and you can live like a king off that alone," I smiled. "And then, then you'll be so rich that grotesque deviancy will be expected and you can marry your sister and no one will bat an eye."
Amy sighed, "you're so god damn stupid. This is why you have no friends."
Chigau!
"You're my friend."
She made a fifty/fifty gesture.
Ok, so fucking what if Taylor wants to give me the spooks, and the guys in the Wards don't talk to me all that much, and no one at school wants to talk to me. I was going to be Triumvirate. Then everyone would look up to me, and they'd have to respect me. I'd be somebody. And when I was at the top I'd look down into the gutter, brimming with everyone who'd talked shit and they'd cry, 'be my friend.'
And I'd whisper, 'ok.'
"Need I remind you, pantaloon, you also have no friends. Due to being a grouchy bitch."
She shrugged. "And here's the difference between you and me, Greg, I like it that way."
That had to be a fuckin' lie, it just had to be. I cancelled my Lights, sneering like Mouthoil, "whatever, faggot."
Amy shrugged again, proving that her Tsun had merely taken on a different form. Did I know no nice girls? Even GStingGirl was probably a dude, no chick called themselves that unless they were camming or something.
It was just all so tiresome.
"Anyway," she said with a little yawn. "You got a light? I forgot mine and we'd better make this smoke quick 'cause Vicky's gonna be here in about ten minutes."
I snorted and reached over to light her up with a spark of lightning from my fingers. I didn't even need to give her one of my many lighters, they stacked in my inventory and I had yet to find a capacity to the thing. It was pretty cool, even if what I could put into it was kind of arbitrary.
"So I've been thinking of making a catchphrase," I said as she inhaled. "For like branding and shit. What do you think of, 'the capture of this criminal has been sponsored by the Wards ENE'? Not just for that though, it could be anything 'has been sponsored by the etc.'"
"It's not very punchy, and catchphrases are fucking lame anyway. Who has one besides, like, Mouse Protector? And she does it ironically, that's her whole shtick."
"You're no fun," I lit the cigarette Amy handed me with another spark. It stank and tasted awful as always, but resist exp. "Being a hero should be fun, everyone is so fucking dour about it. Even Vista is so try hard it's not even cute. Clocks kinda gets it, but he won't even do the Handshake Freeze Prank, like…"
I concentrated for a moment before spawning a clone that began to gracelessly Hambone.
"I can do shit like that super easy, and it's hilarious, but I've never seen a protectorate hero do anything like that and fucking believe me I've had to sit through so many recordings of 'successful PR events' and at best they crack the most toothless jokes I've ever heard. Now that's lame."
"Whatever," said Amy dismissively even though she was way too high to stop herself from grinning. "It's not as funny as you think."
I vanished the clone into smoke, "it's all so tiresome."
"Preaching to the choir there, Greg," Amy sighed a plume and rubbed at her freckly forehead. "Preaching to the god-damn choir."
I put my cigarette out on my arm with a strained wince, a measly few percent in resist poison wasn't worth the shitty taste. I didn't know how Amy kept it up.
By the time Glory Girl, aka Victoria Dallon, touched down on the roof Amy and I were both sitting down and throwing mana pebbles at a clone that Hamboned for our amusement. Her laughter echoed down to us, she had a really nice laugh. God, she was hot. I normally wasn't a jealous guy but fuck you Dean you lucky motherfucker. Maybe I could make a clone that looked like her? Hmm…
I grinned as her aura washed over us and put my <<Armsminor>> title on, "Amy and Dean would have told you all about me of course, but I'm Dark Smoke Puncher, it's nice to meet you."
She gave another tinkling laugh, "yeah, I've heard some stuff."
No doubt about how I was a stupid fucktard or whatever gay distorted 'facts' had been passed on.
I shot a glance at Amy, "I bet. Are you guys in a rush or do you want to throw some stones?" I gestured to my still Hamboning clone and lobbed one into its forehead.
"Um, I mean I want to go," she turned to look at my dancing clone, the movement showing off her sweater puppies. "But what's with this thing?"
"That's my clone, it dances," I shrugged. "That's its only programmed function."
"Neat."
It was neat.
"Are you sure you don't want to stay?" A stream of mana pebbles burst from my hand and clattered over the roof. Please. Please stay and sit next to me.
She did that kinda shifty but polite thing with her eyes, "maybe some other time, but Amy and I are supposed to be back ASAP."
Oh.
"Oh. Ok."
Victoria smiled charmingly as Amy got up, brushed herself off and let herself get picked up; back squished against The Chest.
God, I wish that were me.
"Bye then," I said. "See you tomorrow Amy."
"Yeah, see you Greaa Smoke Puncher," Amy covered her mouth. "Well, bye."
I waved and they left.
As the aura left me I figured I probably shouldn't start a love square, Menma wouldn't screw his friends over like that.
Fugg.
Chapter 26: Real Human Being 3.7
Chapter Text
I hummed the tune of Delusion Express, which was the best Snake OP in my opinion, as I strode near soundlessly beside Armsmaster's armoured jackboot crunch. The other Wards barely ever got to patrol with Colin, but I as his apprentice got access to his considerably valuable time, and he always got the most exciting routes; we even stopped a robbery once! That had been awesome, the call came in on his police scanner and I got to spook them with smoke while he just walked up and they surrendered.
He was just so gosh darn cool, and one day I would be even cooler. Maybe on the day I won our fight. I had just over a month and I think I really had a chance, even though I was dead sure he was doing everything in his power to win. His Power Armor only gave him forty fives in STR, DEX and VIT so while he'd be physically stronger I would be faster.
Plus I was so close to developing physical buff spells and maybe I would just conveniently forget to report them before our fight. I would also conveniently forget to tell him I was developing a change in electricity mana that would allow me to create abilities with enhanced piercing type damage because I'd already figured out how to run paralysis through my knives and it would be hilarious to see his face when I cut his Anti-Greg halberd in half.
"Look, while I agree that sounds like an interesting premise the Protectorate cartoon is rated E and I don't have any editorial say so over the content."
"Yeah," I said. "But you're Armsmaster, surely if you shot them an email and said you had some ideas for an episode they'd bite."
"They might," he agreed. "If my ideas were acceptable to be watched by small children, which with you as the hypothetical ghostwriter they would not be."
I clicked my teeth together a few times, "yeah. This would have to be MA at least, but really, is cosmic horror really such an abstract concept for kids to grasp? Even if it couldn't be aired I think they'd like it."
Armsmaster grunted, "I know enough about focus group trends to say that they would, in fact, not like it. I don't even like your version, good premise bad plot."
Whatever Colin, like you'd know a good fuckin' plot if it sounded your halberd in front of you, you-
"Guten Abend, Gentlemen!" said a masked man brightly, stepping out from inside a car. I Observed-
Turned and tackle grabbed Armsmaster, hefting him into a fireman's carry and sprinting as fast as I could in the opposite direction. God, he was so fucking heavy. I pitched him off my shoulder and whipped around to stand at his side, facing the man who was still getting out of his car.
"Explain."
It took a second for me to realise Armsmaster wasn't accusing me of something.
"Gesellschaft," I said, voice quavering. "Shaker, fifteen meters; seven. Blaster, bolts; seven. Godfrey Mayer, goes by Cymatic."
It was him, the Exploding Man.
"So he vas right," the man slammed the door hard enough to rock his Volkswagen Beetle. "You're the little rat who's been sniffing out my good friend's Empire."
"Distance priority?" Armsmaster whispered through gritted teeth.
"Maximum. Automatic defence, triggered by ill intent. Exploding man quest."
Armsmaster cleared his throat. "Neither the Protectorate, PRT or any of its affiliates were responsible for the leaking of the identities of James Fliescher or Steve Moran."
Cymatic scoffed, gesturing to me. "You'll forgive me if that is maybe not quite believable, given his little spiel after seeing me for only one second."
He stepped forward.
We stepped back.
"I rather think the boy got too ahead of himself and let slip," Cymatic continued as we mirrored each other's steps. "And for the trouble it's caused my good friend, and the trouble it will continue to cause?"
I understood the threat left hanging. But, I could beat him at his own game.
I dry swallowed and stopped backing away.
"You must be pretty uh, dumb and idiot to challenge me," I took a wobbly step forward.
"Smoke!" hissed Colin.
I turned to give him my bravest smile, "I'm not scared of him, and he's practically harmless. He might even be a nice dude, he looks like the kind of guy who appreciates Moe."
"Stop!" Colin barked. "Dark Smoke Puncher, stop!"
"It's fine," my breathing became haggard as I walked toward the source of my nightmares, the only thing stopping me from becoming one with them in a pile of blended entrails was my absolute terror. "He can't kill me if I won't attack him."
I reached out with a hand wracked with tremors as Cymatic stopped in his tracks, shock colouring his posture as he realised what I knew. As my fingers made the barest contact with his shoulder he jerked back, and I could see his eyes widen behind his cymatic patterned mask and it was obvious he was not expecting this.
He back peddled, lifting his hand up and aiming his palm at me. A deluge of sweat soaked my leathery uniform as I kept a close eye on his Observe window, waiting for his Wave Motion Aura condition to switch to Wave Motion Cannon; that tiny window of opportunity would mean I would get the chance to attack before he turned me into pâté. Not that I wanted to attack him, that would be absurd.
If my power was to just read names, no doubt his plan would have worked, we would have stayed in close quarters and been pulped the moment we thought about arresting him, thank god for the schmuck who gave him false info.
Cymatic's eyes hardened and his status changed, I lunged in batting away his now glowing hand, fist reaching out to clean his clock at Mach speed-
-26
My ears rang as I bounced off the road and helicopter kicked myself back onto my feet. I looked around wildly, hands up in guard, but I couldn't see what had hit me.
"Fall back!" Armsmaster barked and I retreated to his side. "You can't keep doing this," he growled. "Twice now is unacceptable. Smoke the area, we're retreating."
-17
I bounced face first off the road as something slammed into my back, and again I whirled to my feet. I felt cold tears run down my face as I rotated my head like an owl; trying desperately to catch a glimpse of what hit me through cracked visor.
"Ve can't have you leaving just yet," Cymatic snarled. "You know decidedly far too much."
It couldn't have been Cymatic, nothing in his power set let him do this, it felt like I was being struck by an actual person.
"In five minutes our whole roster is going to come down on your head," Armsmaster levelled his halberd defiantly. "Walk away."
Cymatic muttered something about fine messes before raising his voice, "and waste our only chance at destroying this menace? You'll put him away after this, somewhere where he can ruin more lives and expose secrets. You vere already on our trail, this needs to end now."
I cast Smoke, but the second it began to leave me I was struck again from behind and ok, plan.
I totally pretended to burst into tears as I crawled to my feet, hands coming up again shedding mystical vapours. Then I Shielded.
Something crunched into my spinning shield the millisecond after it burst into being around me, a dark shape standing out starkly against the brilliant blue, and was flung across the road. As my shield ran its course I managed to get an Observe on the man-shaped thing before it vanished again; taking the Observe window with it.
Some guy called Hans, apparently.
Cymatic snarled and fired a glowing green, patterned bolt at me which I barely managed to jinker out of the way before it turned the asphalt behind me into pulp.
"You should have walked away," Armsmaster growled, tightening his grip on his halberd as the axe blade morphed into a wickedly barbed spike.
There was a moment, just before he fired, where Hans appeared and crashed into the halberd skewing Colin's aim. The harpoon and wire lashed out into the Volkswagon, puncturing a hole through the windshield before retracting smoothly into the haft.
In the glimpse I got of Hans' health bar before he vanished again he wasn't doing too badly for a guy who just got spiked into the road.
Oh god please, Quest Giver, give me your strongest quest.
I mean, I guess. First time I've ever had a quest to kill something that wasn't a mindless flesh-crafted beast.
"Armsmaster!" I panic Hazed, which should have been my first reaction really. "I got a quest for us to get the fuck out of here!"
"Goo-"Armsmaster's head jerked as Hans appeared just out of his reach and fired once with a pistol before vanishing. The rest of his mask folded out of his helmet to cover his face and when he spoke again it was in clipped robotic tones. "Good, Dauntless is en-route with Battery. If you can leave, do."
I turned to bolt and almost ran right into Hans who was squinting his Kraut eyes to track my tell-tale shimmer before he disappeared into thin air. Teleporter fucking shits!
And now to the main problem with this plan, I'd have to drop Haze before I started moving or it would chew through my Mana like a bitch and I'd have nothing left to cast with. I could move a theoretical maximum of two thousand three hundred and thirty-five meters with it active before I ran out of juice, which was now minus my Shield and all the other miscellaneous bits I'd spent and one n' a bit miles was fuck all distance for a Teleporter to keep track with.
Even at my speeds.
Why couldn't I be fighting, like, Uber or something? Maybe those new Undersiders? Shit, even Skidmark would do, I'd be pretty hard for him to splatter.
Hans appeared again some ten meters to my right and disappeared again before I could get a read of his power. Fuckin Movers! I glanced back over my shoulder to see Armsmaster and Cymatic circling each other and aarhg, if I left that would mean Colin would get double teamed and probably exploded. All it would take is Hans bumping into him at the right time. Shit. Fuck. Shit fuck shit.
I palmed one of my old throwing knives, from back when I used to juggle as Dr. Wu and hurled it at Cymatic. He staggered back as it took him right in the gut, tripping over his own feet and landing flat on his ass, mouth agape in affronted surprise.
-14
I hit the road again and this time it took a strip off my chin and Armsbeard, removing my Haze with it.
-20
Something cracked in my general rib cage area as Hans hit me again. I Hazed up and rolled, catching a flash of his boot as it appeared where my head was a second ago.
Cymatic howled, an ear-splitting pained shriek, but I didn't get to see why as I commando rolled backwards and onto my feet to avoid another booting.
I kept Dempsy Rolling as Hans appeared and disappeared, swinging a knife where I used to be and keeping his gun ready. I shimmered more when I moved but he was still having trouble keeping track of me, but as much trouble as he was having I couldn't get a bead on him either; he was just way too quick and none of my skills really had the oomph to put him down.
So I would just have to make one.
Or finish one of the dozen, mostly finished spell designs I had cooking on the backburner in my mind.
But that would mean dropping my Haze because I still couldn't dual cast.
But I had to do something, I was still bleeding Mana as it was.
But if I did he'd shoot me.
I'd messed up.
Should've run.
I couldn't feel it, the heat in my blood. I had no battle tendency. Everything was cold, sound drowned out by a ringing whine in my ears.
Fuck me, I doubted I'd get too many shots at this. I cupped my palms together, waited for Hans to teleport away, then cast.
It failed, but I was already dodging and Hazed as his knife grazed my back.
-4
Come on, Greg you piece of shit, let it do what energy does.
I cast again, burning my palms. That was almost it. You almost had it.
I ducked his blade, this time by the barest whisper of a millimetre.
Power prickled in my grasp, a blinding flash knocking out my stealth mode and this was it fucking crunch time.
I chucked the volatile lump above my head and dropped-
-30
Taking Hans' knife with me. There was a popping whoosh as the spell burst.
-156
Someone was screaming, oh it was me? And Hans? I was nearly dead? Yes.
I crawled to my feet, vision swimming into greys and blots of light. The blur that was probably Hans was clawing at its facial area.
I stumbled to my knees, bent over and threw up, and lurched on through it back to my feet. There was jackbooted clumping and big metal hands gripped my arms masterfully, robot voice demanding to know how I was.
"Back." I rasped hoarsely.
I was spun around, the sudden motion almost making me puke again, then Armsmaster called me an idiot and made a spraying sound. Instant relief like I'd never known as the inferno I hadn't fully noticed on my upper back cooled to something bearable, making me go weak at the knees. Or weaker, anyway.
Then I was made to sit down on the curb, head between my knees. Twenty-three minutes, in twenty-three minutes my health would be back up to full and I'd be fine. I tried to focus on the timers for my debuffs as the street got steadily noisier, heroes and PRT guys showing up.
Coolio. I started allocating-
Worth it?
Chapter 27: Real Human Being: Interlude: Emily Piggot: Taylor Hebert
Chapter Text
Chapter 28: Delusion Express 4.1
Chapter Text
Time to make my Wards debut. My real one, not the practice run where I started shouting at them in Japanese. I wasn't really sure why I did that, but I suppose it was funny at the time.
"Thanks, chief," I looked over at my driver, a darker guy with the classic PRT Trooper build and expression who took it impressively in stride when I started transforming into different people as we drove.
"Have a good day, Dark Smoke Puncher," he said tersely, giving me a short nod. Classic PRT Trooper.
"Bye, dude!" I equipped the rest of my new uniform, free of cuts and burn holes, and got out of the unmarked, black SUV. "Catch ya later!"
He nodded again as I shut the door and he vanished behind tinted windows. I caught sight of my reflection and flinched. Fuck me. It was over. Hans had no eyes, he couldn't hide in reflective surfaces any more. The fluorescent light overhead buzzed, the sound aggravating my adrenalin rush. You blew his eyes out, Greg, he's not coming back.
"Hello!" said someone in a nasal voice, that was grating in the same kind of way gargling nails was grating. Boston accents, I would never understand them.
I glanced over and inhaled deeply.
So were Cauldron, like, the good guys? I thought they were just a power syndicate, but they did save… I wasn't sure how to pronounce this shit, but they did save Weld's life; even if it was only so they could feed him an untested magic potion. But turning him into a tinman was also an accident, and he was alive instead of being smashed to death in a hurricane on Earth Vav. And that was a thing. Aleph, yeah, we had a portal or something but where the fuck was Vav? No wonder the quest said I'd die if I fucked up, these guys were probably on every earth having dug their tendrils deep with Capes like Battery who owed them favours. So maybe not good guys then, more like multi-dimensional power mafia.
"Hey Weld," I waved as my former driver peeled away, satisfied I had been received. I strode up and shook his gloved hand. "Nice t'meetcha."
Weld smiled with platinum teeth, "likewise. Does your name get shortened at all, the whole thing's a bit of a mouthful." He laughed, "How'd you get that one through PR?"
"Oh, you'll find out eventually," I said smugly. "But you can mix it up, however. Dark Smoke, Smoke Puncher, Smokey, Darkie, Punchy, Dark Puncher, Puncher Smoke; whatever."
He looked at me dubiously, like he wasn't sure if I was joking. "I'll go with Dark Smoke. Now we better hurry inside, I don't know the whole situation but it's probably best for you not to be in the open yet; even if this is a restricted carpark it's still easier to get into than inside."
"Yeah, shit was pretty fucked," I said as he led the way. "Nazi's tried to assassinate me and Armsmaster because another villain told them I outed two of their guys. I blew one's face off and Armsmaster harpooned the other, and Night and Fog are hanging around here apparently and those schizo fucks don't play around."
"That's terrible!" Weld put an almost fatherly hand on my shoulder. "They tried to murder a Ward! You can probably count on one hand how many times that's happened since the Protectorate started."
"Yeah, well," I shrugged. "They're German."
Weld took a moment to process what that could have meant. "Why did the villain tell them it was you?"
"It's a plausible lie, 'cause I coulda, it's one of my powers. But the guy, Coil, set one of his goons on me months ago and this is his revenge for me ducking him all this time. And also maybe for outing all his moles in the PRT, that can't have helped." I shrugged again. "Guy's a yandere bitch, seriously, like I don't want to join your gang get over it."
I eyed all the windows we passed suspiciously as we wound our way through the bustling Boston PRT building. It was a whole lot like the Brockton one only everyone had stupid accents.
"That's pretty god damn," Weld lowered his voice to a whisper. "Fucked up, Dark Smoke. I honestly hope you can get away from all of that here. I've looked over the crime stats of here vs. there and even though we're a whole lot bigger you should be much safer."
"I doubt it, I'm pretty sure I've already seen one of Accord's guys but it was like, super not obvious from his flavour text so maybe he was on someone else's payroll," I looked back over my shoulder, but the guy was gone around a corner.
"Flavour text like on a trading card?"
"Yeah!" I grinned. "Exactly like that! You ever played MtG? I still have my deck sitting around in my inventory. I mean I'm out of practice but I'd love to play a commander round for nostalgia's sake."
"Ah, not me," Weld shook his head quickly. "I'll point him out when we get to the Quarters if he's there. So, with this flavour text, what else do you get?" he continued in the most obvious faux casual voice I'd ever heard.
"Your name is Zcl'marahgm," I chuckled. "At least I think that's how it's pronounced, it's not in any language I ever heard of. Y'don't gotta be coy bro."
Weld stopped and started kind of affecting heavy breathing. Kind of a weird thing since he had no lungs, but maybe it was a thing he did to act like a meatbag. The bustling workers swept around us on either side, continuing their business.
"And that's my real name?"
"Yeah man, or near as I can get. I'll write it down for you later and you can try to figure out how to say it."
Weld started forward again and we were off.
"I'd appreciate that, but you can stick with Weld," he smiled and god damn it I can see my reflection in his cheeks. "Not as much of a mouthful."
"Yeah, cool, that's," I discreetly took a step further away. "Not a problem. So what've you lot been up to around here in… Boston?"
"Oh well not a whole lot, since our roster of both Wards and full Pro members is bigger than yours, we Junior Juniors mostly do the publicity stuff. We have a big joint training thing with the New Yorkers coming up soon-ish though, those are always great fun, especially with the Lancer's." Weld chuckled fondly. "Fucking Jouster though, we're getting his team this time. We always do a big team versus spar at the end, so you might come in handy there."
Oh Weld you poor ignorant fool, did you not read my profile?
"Yeah," I winked at him. "Just maybe."
Weld kind of squinted his silvery eyes at me.
I winked again. That was it though, I was trying to make a better impression. At least I hadn't called him a Metallo-nigga yet. Good job me, don't wink again even though it would probably be hilarious.
Ok, fine, I won't fucking wink again, Power, if you think it's such a bad idea.
Would've been great though.
"Yeah ok," Weld said, focusing his gaze forward. "If you think you can make that much of a difference you think you can prove it?"
Oh Zacelmerhageem, omae wa mou shideiru.
Did he just challenge me? Me. The Crawler of the Dauntless genre. The butt baby of Eidolon and Uber.
Did he not even read my profile!?
"Yes."
Weld sighed, "ok, but let's not turn it into a dick waving contest. We're a team, we need to get along."
Because you'd lose, I didn't say.
"Because you'd lose."
Dammit!
"I can shapeshift," Weld eyed me with a patronizing smile.
I huffed, "that's unfair." Maybe I could get Amy to do me another solid?
Lol, solid.
He snorted, "seriously though, I want us to be friends and not have to do this whole alpha struggle. Beyond me being team leader we should just treat each other normally."
I grinned, "and normal you shall get! You seem cooler than Aegis anyway, so no reason we can't be cool. You like anime, Weld?"
His face fell in a familiar pattern because he was probably assuming I was asking if he jerked it to hentai; like that was an original reaction I'd never seen before.
"Uh, no. But I do sometimes listen to Japanese music if there's any crossover there?"
I shrugged and made a fifty-fifty gesture, "any vidya?"
"Not really," he hmmed. "I mostly just listen to a lot of music, but some of the guys are big into that scene."
Well, it was better than nothing. Judging by the sample size of Weld the Boston Wards wouldn't be such dour sicks in the mud like Brockton's, and this whole joint training thing sounded cool as heck and speaking of which.
"So when is this big training thing you mentioned?"
Weld gave a very genuine seeming grin, "April sixth, and if you stick around till August there's another one and then in December, but we do mini ones with just us all the time. Anyway, I'll tell you about it later, we're here."
He gestured to a door that bore the plaque Director E. A. Armstrong, which he then proceeded to knock on as we got within range.
A muffled, nasally voice called out for us to enter and Weld opened the door and I followed him in. Director Edward Armstrong Armstrong looked pretty close to how I imagined Vegeta to look if Vegeta were a normal middle-aged guy; which made him instantly alright with me.
"Dark Smoke Puncher," said Edward, getting up from his desk and walking around it to shake my hand. "I'm glad you're here safe. Director Piggot filled me in on what you've been through, and you can rest easy now, m'boy."
"Call me Greg, Ed," I unequipped my visor. "Everyone does."
Chapter 29: Delusion Express 4.2
Chapter Text
The Boston Wards quarters that were my new home were in the Protectorate HQ rather than the PRT building like back in Brockton, which was pretty dope in a few ways. I'd get to see much more of the Heroes since they were here all the time and would rarely go to the PRT offices; it was a problem I had at home, I really only ever saw Armsmaster and maybe Dauntless regularly.
I found that now I was here, I didn't know what to say. I needed to make a good impression but my stomach butterflied in a way it never did when I talked to people.
"Hey," I raised a hand lackadaisically.
No! A milquetoast intro was even worse than a bad one. They had to pay attention to me. Bring the spice.
"Famiglias, what's good?"
I got a smattering of 'heys' back because none of the three present Boston Wards apparently understood the concept of Presentation.
I opened my mouth but Weld stepped forward, "guys, this is Dark Smoke Puncher. He's going to be here for a few months due to some trouble in Brockton Bay-"
"Some Germans tried to assassinate me," I interrupted him. "Just so we're clear."
"Yes," said Weld, now sounding a mite annoyed. "Because of that. So while he's here just treat him like another member of the team."
Wisps of smoke curled off my body as I casually hopped six feet in a single step, "nice to meetchas. Hopefully, you guys have less Nazi's because I've had it right up to here with those guys," I held my right hand above my head. "Am I Reich?"
Polite chuckles. What, were my Nazi jokes not doing it for these guys?
"Uh, yeah," said Norman. "Nazi's, like, suck."
Beside him, Freddie and Daisy nodded.
"Then I guess I'm Goering to like it here," I grinned, sparkle cosmetic sending my teeth a twinkle. "Eh?"
That one got a proper laugh out of Freddie.
"Did you really get into a fight with Nazi's?" he looked at me and then Weld as though he thought I might've been having him on.
I glanced back over my shoulder to see Weld nodding tightly, "yeah, I almost died. Armsmaster harpooned one through the leg, it was awesome…" I trailed off because their faces were sinking as though they didn't understand incongruence as a joke. Or maybe because murder was a serious subject and people normally didn't take it as well in their stride as I. "I guess you had to be there."
I felt Weld's hand on my shoulder again, this time giving me the 'please for the love of God stop talking' squeeze.
"Well enough about that," I changed tack. "What are you guys about?"
I asked like I didn't already know, even though I totally knew. Observe made their little intros pretty moot anne frankly their Observe Bios weren't even particularly interesting in the first place. Daisy could make my clothes stab proof, but that was it as far as remarkability went.
Their main advantage was they all seemed pretty chill, like Dean. Dean was a chill bro, he might've been the only one there I was kind of friends with, and I might have said chillness was a Cauldron cape thing due to the evidence of Weld but Rory and Chloe existed to represent the Hundred percent Maximum No Chill Brigade.
I scratched at my Armsbeard. Normally I was a social butterfly and would love the chance to get to know some more people, but I think I was done here.
"Nito, well it was nice to meetchas but I've gotta go do an eight-hour arm session in the gym for power reasons. Also, where is your gym?"
---
The gym session hadn't been quite eight hours, or entirely arms, as I still had schoolwork to do. University level work since I had already finished the entire Winslow curriculum just to prove that I could, or enough of it that I could have graduated already if I was allowed; but apparently no one would sign off on that for some reason. Which was a bit weird since I was going to be schooled on base while I was in Boston so I had no idea what that would entail considering I was far past that shit. But whatevs.
I typed complex thesis statements with my left hand and moulded lighting with my right-
-1
Sheisse! I shook my hand to get the tingling out from the electric backlash and hammered backspace to get rid of the twenty lines of gibberish I'd written. Power, gib multitasking skill plox.
One good thing had come of it though, my power wouldn't make a spell if I didn't want it to as shown by the tines of sharp electricity I could extend from all five fingertips without getting a Lightning Claws spell. The major discovery of this was a hidden malleability vs. strength mechanic, as unnamed spells seemed to be subject to my personal skill rather than the aided ones and their concrete effects.
Which meant they were fucking shit.
I fished a potato chip out of the bag on my new desk and crunched it down.
I didn't think I particularly liked having more CHA either. I kept thinking stuff like, 'nah I shouldn't do and or say X' and then getting vivid flashbacks of having blithely done and or said X. This never used to happen, I never used to doubt my own awesomeness. I sighed and checked my phone.
GStringGirl was still marked as online, and had presumably read my last message but wasn't deigning to answer which was bizarre since I thought she'd have loved to know where Case 53's came from, but maybe she just got sidetracked in searching for some obscure meme to reference in her answer.
My eyes widened as a bright blaze of panic flash-boiled my heart and fizzled through my veins like fire. C53's were a Cauldron conspiracy. If I fucked up the Spoon quest they'd kill me. I shouldn't have told her. What if they were monitoring the internet? What if she was a forty-year-old Cauldron spy (male)? I snatched my phone back up and hammered out another message.
XxVoid_CowboyxX: please don't tell anyone any of this very urgent caudron will murder me thank you please also is imperative I actually know who u are pics when?
Fuck! What if this was an Infohazard? Fuck!
XxVoid_CowboyxX: infohazard
XxVoid_CowboyxX: fuck, don't mention the c-word, p-bott;es or a-e's
There had to be some thinker power out there that pinged on certain keywords or phrases, or an AI tinker like Richter who made something to trawl the whole internet… fuck. What if Richter was still alive? It would have only taken one half decent teleporter to get him out of Newfoundland, and Cauldron had dimensional access because yeah sure Haywire was totally dead and not living in a bunker somewhere doing R&D for the interdimensional power mafia.
I breathed in until it hurt and held it, cheeks bulging with air and deadly secrets. Ok, I was sixty percent sure I hadn't tripped their defence protocols yet so maybe their filter wasn't as fine as I feared, but I had to be careful from now on. The data on my Observe skill was accessible to the Protectorate at large and their agents infested the organisation, it wouldn't take a genius to put one and one together that I had met and Observed Weld.
My one lifeline was that I had only mentioned I knew his name.
Not his backstory.
What backstory? C53's didn't give me anything like that for some reason, very strange, so sorry Mr Men in Black I can't help you there.
A keening groan escaped my lips as I slowly exhaled the held breath. Fuck me, I was so dumb. An idiot sandwich. I'd potentially fucked myself the day I joined The Wards. I'd had the Spoon quest for months, the threat of death had been clear so why for the love of God hadn't I practised basic OpSec?!
I Reee'd internally for a moment.
Well, can't mourn all the ruddy day, just gotta do better. Ain't dead yet nigga, no horse heads in my bed. Fuckin' sleeping with one eye open though.
"Do you want it fast or slow?"
Weld's face creased, the dusky lines of boron alloy tracing down his cheekbones scrunching up. "Demonstrate control."
"Fine," I Kaneki cracked my knuckles. "I'll have total control in about two seconds."
Weld looked dubious because he clearly still hadn't read my profile, "Ok, ready? Three, two, one, go."
I took a step and jumped. Smoke billowed from my hands as I sailed over Weld's head and landed behind him with nary a whisper. I couldn't see in my smoke, but I could feel things in it. Not terribly precisely but enough that I could reach out and grab both his elbows.
I cast, then dropped low and Shackled his legs. I Vanished the smoke and gave him a shove, sending him toppling onto the rubber matting. He lay there for a moment, struggling against the heavy, ghostly iron blue restraints.
Then he flexed.
The Shackles evaporated into blue dust as he overcame their durability score, which made sense given his STR rating.
"In my defence," I said as he stood up. "I created that power literally now."
"Ok," he said. "I thought you'd have less power given you haven't been at this very long, but I guess being a permanent Stacking type Trump is nothing to scoff at."
"So you had read my profile!" I j'accused with a finger. "Then why did you underestimate me, didn't they tell you I'm going to be Triumvirate?"
"You are?"
I scoffed, then lit up in a brilliant flash. Every inch of my clothes and skin glowed a piercing white gold, crimson twinkles blinking off my visor as I Transformed it into Kamina sunglasses.
This was it!
"Who the hell do you think I am?!"
Weld reflected my brilliance in shock, "what does that power do?"
There was a war within me between Sensibility and the Hype Beast, and in the end, the Hype Beast won out.
"A Breaker power that turns me into pure photons, rendering me invulnerable."
Double down, Greg, feel no shame no shame. Put your grasses on, nothing will be wrong; it's up to you.
Chapter 30: Delusion Express 4.3
Chapter Text
Well, that wasn't too bad, first night in Boston General just getting acquainted with the various doctorbs and shit I'd be working with, scouting out the lay of the land, cracking jokes and breaking the ice.
"My employer would like a brief meeting with you, Dark Smoke Puncher."
"Uhh…" I gawped at the elegant librarian looking chick who approached me. "No?"
I'd tripped the Infohazard, Cauldron was making their move.
"If that is your answer then my employer will consider this as non-acquiescence to their request," Natalie Acre smiled. "And respond accordingly."
"My escort is waiting outside."
Oh fuck, GStringGirl! She still hadn't messaged me back! Oh no no no no.
Natalie shook her head, intricately woven platinum earrings swaying with the movement. "This meeting will not cause any problems on that end, you have five seconds to decide."
I stood there for five seconds like a dumb animal until she turned on her heel and left. A jolt of pure panic rushed from my head to my toes, leaving me feeling like I'd been dunked in Polar seas, and my legs started moving; carrying me after her. The panic freeze left, making me feel clammy and sweaty, but then it hit me, this wasn't a worst case scenario, (in which I would commit suicide by shooting myself three times in the back of the head with a shotgun,) they just wanted to talk. Sure I was probably going to end up as an 'indentured servant' to the Power Mob, but that sure as fuck beat dying.
My legs carried me down the ramp behind Natalie 'Lunaire' Acre because even if I wanted to I couldn't run, not from her at this time of night. Desperate thoughts scrambled around inside my head, strategies I might use against Accord even though complicated plots were apparently literally his power; I was still an order of magnitude smarter than the smartest person to ever live.
In theory, because it sure as hell didn't feel like it.
My brain continued to produce nothing of value as we approached a pitch black limousine, merely giving flashbacks to Menma AMV's where cool shit happened. All the hair on my arms and legs raised to stand on end and my eyes burned with unshed tears.
Natalie opened the driver's door and got into the seat, leaving me standing there alone until the window at the very back slid open soundlessly. I swallowed and shuffled over.
[I leaned down, hands on my knees, "sup, manlet?"]
[I casually stuck my head in the window, forearms leaning on the edge of the opening, "Accord brah, what's good?"]
["Had you're eye on me, huh, gay boy?" I grinned, giving him a wink and reaching in to ruffle his hair.]
["I think Cauldron sucks!" I shouted in his face before blowing up the car.]
I didn't do any of these things, I just stood there as the thousand different parts of Accords mask shifted into a polite smile.
"Dark Smoke Puncher," he said in a voice of power much larger than his physical stature.
I tried not to think about the end of the world.
"Accord."
"Neither of us has the time so I will cut to the chase," Accord said sternly. "I have been informed you have a power that will allow you to root out my entire organisation by merely looking at us, and due to this, I will offer you a bargain. Do not, and neither will I destroy you. There is a balance at play here I would very much like to keep, and I would like to point out that this is the difference between Coil and I; I am giving you an opportunity."
"Ok," I said. "Tell them I'm backing off."
Accord's mask furrowed. "Tell whom?"
"When they ask you," my voice echoed in my ears like I was under water. "Tell them I'm backing off."
"Very well," Accord said after a short pause. "Should they ask I shall tell them. Hopefully, we never have to meet again, good evening Dark Smoke Puncher."
His window rolled up and the limousine peeled away as I tried not to think about the end of the world.
I thought about the end of the world.
If you had asked me five months ago, when I was a simple street juggler, if I wanted to be embroiled in a grand conspiracy and save the world I would have called you a faggot and said I'd rather die than miss out, but now? I don't think I can do this, Sam. In Accord's Observe bio, Cauldron was getting plans to survive the end of the world from his power; a power which scaled in direct relation to the difficulty of the problem. The only reason why an interdimensional power mafia would be committing so heavily to saving the dregs of this world would be to step out at the end and boldly ask, 'would anyone mind if I were king of this eternal blackness?'
Which meant there was going to be an eternal blackness. First thought was obvious; Endbringers. It was right there in the name, and it was equally obvious that if they kept deep-dicking civilisation like they were we would eventually end up like Africa; a barbarous shithole ruled by parahuman warlords with an iron fist. Ironically, Accord already had a plan for that which had been suppressed by the government or, much more likely, the Cauldron operatives inside the government so that the eternal blackness they so desired to rule overcame about faster. Insidious fucks, taking advantage of Endbringers to crown themselves king of the end of the world.
End of the world.
The world was going to end.
I, I needed to…
I… I needed to step up sit down. As I sank into a crouch I saw my escort hustling up to me, looking flushed and harried.
"Sorry I'm late, the traffic was a nightmare. This one car would just fucking not move out of my way."
I stood up and smiled, "yeah, no problem. I just walked out."
End of the world, huh? Never thought I'd have to be a doomsday prepper, but thems the breaks. I scrolled through a related forum, browsing for ideas I could steal; not a whole lot of good ones. For me anyway, since I had to be extra sneaky so as not to give Cauldron a reason to ice me. My main plan was to become Triumvirate and then when the time came to leverage all the power that entailed to put my parents somewhere safe and then commission Dragon to build me a Mega Bunker to keep us all in to safely ride out the initial chaos. Then maybe I'd carve myself out a slice of the apocalypse, Weeb City 1, and reign as a Hokage-esque figure while trying to keep it peaceful. Either that or do it wandering vagabond style, crisscrossing America and righting wrongs as and when I found them.
And now I was going to have to step up my training to get ready for the end of the world, thanks Cauldron. I was going to have to go from a few hours after school to all fucking day, surely they wouldn't begrudge me that right? Or would it be too obvious I was planning something, even if that something was simply being alive? It was all so tiresome.
I slumped in my chair, resting my face on the cool desk. Maybe it would be worth it to join them, sellsword style, and profiteer from their profiteering because I obviously couldn't beat them. There was a lot of merit to this, as it would negate me having to do any of the heavy lifting myself and let someone else handle the apocalypse. Yeah, yeah maybe probably.
My phone beeped, the tone it used to announce PHO messages.
I turned the screen on and feverishly typed in my login pin.
I opened GStringGirl's message.
GStringGirl: I'm so sorry I didn't message you back straight away, but your last message was a lot to take in; especially for me. Initially, I wasn't going to tell you, I never wanted to tell anyone, I just wanted to be normal friends but I don't think I can do that any longer. You know how I said I'm homeschooled and have really strict parents? It was all a lie, but I wasn't lying to hurt your feelings. I actually live at Westsons Maximum Security Parahuman Asylum, I'm a Case 53. If you've ever heard of the monster Garotte, that was me. I've killed people, I didn't mean to but I can't control my body it just doesn't do what I say you have to believe me I didn't mean to do any of it. I didn't know if I could trust you at the start, but then you got powers and joined the Wards and I thought maybe you could understand, and then you told me you could read a Case 53's real name; not that I just want you to do that for me! It would be nice but you don't have to I just thought it was time to tell you since you know about the amnesia and deformities first hand and weren't dismissive like so many people are. I'm sorry I lied to you all this time, but, well, this is me Sveta.jpg
Chapter 31: Delusion Express 4.4
Chapter Text
"I can't believe you tried to tell Weld you're invincible," Tyrone laughed as he tapped a Mountain from his stupid rush deck that only noobs played.
"I was fucking kidding!" I huffed. "Not my fault he takes a joke worse than Aegis, are you still pretending you aren't a furry?"
"I'm not a furry, I just have an interest in old European folklore!"
I snorted. No one had a masterwork fox mask like that unless they were a closet furfag, and his denials fooled no one.
"Whatever, faggot," he muttered under his breath, putting another Goblin onto his side of the field.
I grinned shinily and was this close to Disguising myself as a hot female fox girl but thought better of it, Tyrone would definitely get the wrong signal and I didn't particularly want to get known as the furfag just because of a little joke. Maybe I would just do it later, in my room, when no one was around. Yes.
I played Boomerang, causing Tyrone to roll his eyes and pick his Goblin back up.
"At least I'm not a completely obnoxious weeaboo, you do know you're completely bastardising the folklore behind the Shinobi, unlike me and mines references to Reynard the Fox, right?"
"What would you know?" I glared sullenly at the table.
"Oh please, you've clearly blatantly ripped off the Menma comic-"
"Manga!" I burst out, interrupting him. "It's a manga! You closet weeb! Menma is so obscure, you wouldn't know about it if you weren't a weeaboo yourself!"
"No, I'm just not a cultural illiterate like you, 'Dark Smoke Puncher'," he made little air quotes. "I bet you stole that from something too."
"No!" I said loudly, causing several other Wards to look over at me. "That name is a very literal explanation of what I used to be able to do at the time, not everything is a reference. If I could rename myself it'd be something like 'Electric Assassin; the Bright Doubling Mage of Quick Imprisonment'."
Tyrone leaned forward, eyes lidded, and played another Mountain before tapping it to resummon his Goblin. "See, I know you're being retarded on purpose but that was just dumb."
I mirrored his movement, "did you just put an illusory dick on my forehead?"
"I may have."
I touched my face, "how veiny?"
"Thoroughly."
I cast Disguise, turning myself into an even dumber looking Tyrone, with no chin and cock eyes. "How far into Menma are you anyway?"
"Oh, I'm completely caught up," he settled back into his chair. "The Grass Country infiltration arc is wild."
I Disguised as 3DPD Menma, "Omae…"
Tyrone threw his head back and laughed, a harsh klaxon wail issuing from his mouth. That couldn't be right, his power was visual only, and also I realised the sound was coming from the roof.
"I'm going to assume that's your visitor siren since everyone's putting their masks on," I said, equipping mine. "The BB one is better, btw."
"Of course it is," he slid his head into the fox mask that marked him as a furry no matter how hard he protested. "The only thing that's better here is the crime rate."
I made to reply but something suddenly appeared in my peripheral vision.
「 Come back for another go, have you, Kraut fucking shits!」 I spat, blood pounding in my ears. Had Hans learned to operate his power via harmonics?
"Huh?" said Mouse Protector.
I stopped screaming and dropped my Haze, looking over to my left at the cloud of smoke that barely concealed the flipped table, Tyrone and our scattered Magic cards. I looked down at my hands and realised I was holding a knife. My hand unclenched and it fell, turning to sparkling dust before it hit the carpet.
"Uh," I said. "Pranked, gottem!"
"What?" said Mouse Protector.
I chuckled, the frantic beating of my heart almost overpowering. "I'm a big fan of yours, by the way, I've read 'The Eternal Mouse' at least once."
Natalie 'Mouse Protector' Dormer seemed to accept my explanation as evidenced by her nodding head.
"I've followed your career," I continued, vanishing the smoke and walking over to right the table as I read off her bio. "An original Ward fighting alongside Armsmaster, leaving to become an indie hero, arresting Ravager two times, joining the Protectorate, leaving the Protectorate because they wouldn't let you go arrest Ravager again, fighting in the second Routing of The Teeth all while never breaking character once…You understand what it means to be a true hero. It inspired me."
Mouse swept into a low bow, leg sweeping back as her eared helmet brushed the floor, "well thank you kindly! I assume you're the transfer guy?"
I cast a disguise to hide my sweat and smiled at Tyrone who was sitting on his chair at a weird angle, looking forlornly at our scattered cards.
"No, no, thank you!" I returned the bow to the point where my cheeks brushed my shins.
I don't care if it hurt.
"Do you want to see something cool?" my teeth sparkled as I returned Mouse's grin. "Armsy thought it was dumb but I can see you're a woman of culture."
I want to have control.
"Oh I bet he just hates you," she chuckled.
What the hell am I doing here.
"Actually," I said. "I'm his apprentice."
I had a good eye for detail, it was the little things that sold a fake, gave illusion depth, weight. The pattern of the bark on a tree, the weathering on brick, the arrangement of the tiny hairs on someone's face. It was something I was good at before I triggered, which was then honed by hours of practice and observation. Expressions were an important detail, a very important detail, and not just the big ones; the little ones you couldn't suppress and could barely see. Your brain picked up on them anyway, making an illusion look uncanny as fuck if they were missing, so when Greg went from calm as could be to Nam-flashback-terrified in the millisecond before he blinded me with smoke and started shouting in Japanese it made his subsequent return to normal very obviously strange.
I wasn't totally sure if anybody else had noticed.
Mouse Protector was acting normally as Greg showed her how he could touch his pinkie to his palm without moving any of his other fingers, and the rest of my team were gathering around to see what was going on; there wasn't any weirdness in their behaviour that I could notice.
Greg's skin, I noticed as I joined the group, was wrong. All of it, hair, clothes, expressions, wrong. He was wearing one of his Disguises, but of himself and he'd done a pretty shoddy job of it; they were usually better than this.
He laughed as the others tried to copy him and fail completely, "now check this one out!"
Greg held up a hand and all his fingers started moving independently, some up and down, some sideways and some in a circle.
An excitement caught in my throat as I stepped up, "I can do that, actually!" I stuck out my own hand and wove an illusion around it, fake fingers moving in complex, impossible patterns.
His eyes tracked back and forth for a microsecond as his thinker power led him read through my illusion then cracked a grin.
"Damn bro, even I can't bend my joints ninety degrees backwards, that's sick!"
I preened in the deluge of smiles, my ability to create illusions was second to none but I still wished I could actually do the things I made it look like I could. Or looked like I pretended. I wanted that confidence, confidence like Greg's. The ability to have a total babyface look completely out of place on a shredded body and still be able to have it not bother me at all.
I joined in laughing with everybody else as Mouse Protector instigated a backflip contest, Greg looked fine, I was probably just over thinking it.
Chapter 32: Delusion Express 4.5
Chapter Text
I waved goodbye as my parents car trundled away into the Boston traffic, licking away at the last of my ice cream (peanut butter and pecan; flavour of champions). Mum was jammed up against the rear windshield so she could keep sight of me for as long as possible, awkwardly waving back as much as the cramped space allowed.
Their visit was well-timed, I'd been feeling pretty bummed out lately. I weren't no bitch nigga, but spooking people by teleporting near them was mean, and doing my Medical quest made my skin crawl a bit what with all the blood and guts. Natural reactions. But I was feeling better now, we went around and did touristy shit all day and not confronting anything that made me feel squeamish or bad about myself; just like the good old days. I crammed the last of my cone into my mouth and sauntered over to an unmarked van parked nearby, opened the back, and hopped inside.
"Hey, Big Shine!" I said as I became Dark Smoke Puncher in the nanosecond it took for my uniform to equip.
Shock ran across Weld's face before it fell in disbelief, "What are you doing here? How did you even know I was inside?"
"Dude, I currently have like, three thinker powers and they're always on."
My Urban Tracking passive picked out the van, my Observe confirmed it was Protectorate and that was all I needed. Also, I didn't actually know he was here, for all I knew anyone and no-one was inside the van and it was just idling in this weeks rendezvous lot; but he didn't need to know that, my mystique depended on it.
"Anyway," I interrupted as he pretended to draw a breath to speak. "You're going on a patrol, right? Can I come with, I have nothing on for the rest of the day."
I gave a thumbs up to the guy in the driver's seat and he averted his eyes.
"No, and no," said Weld. "Now get out and stop making trouble."
"What's rusting you're anus?" I pouted.
Weld looked like he was going to retort with something scathing, but bit it back with a sigh as he rubbed at his eyes. I didn't know if that felt relieving to him or if it was just something he did.
"Sorry, I'm just a little on edge. You know how I'm going to be promoted as a public face eventually? We've found what might be Blasto's main lab and so I've got to be there to get my image out there and I can't mess this up," his expression became mildly haunted.
I felt that. I felt that feeling deeply. As a future Pentumverate member I had a lot of weight on my shoulders too, or I would as soon as this fact were officially acknowledged. But the point remained.
"I gotchu, Zakel," I jived my head encouragingly. "You don't gotta say a thing, of course, I'll sidekick for you."
He sort of huffed like he was equal parts exasperated, and amused because he knew I was doing this on purpose.
"You're still not coming, but thank you for reminding me to put you on the shit shift for telling Hunch his name was Joey JoJo Shabadoo until he cried."
That wasn't fair. "I thought his power would tell him I was lying!" I protested. "I thought he was playing along!"
"Which is why it's one shift and not a whole months worth."
I knew I shouldn't push this, I knew it. Weld had some stuff on his plate and he didn't need me to bumble in and get in the way; but I was stifled. Boston was great but I was going stir fucking crazy cooped up all day on base going through another accelerated high school curriculum on top of my college courses and my training and doing nothing else. Shit was fucked and I had the most overwhelming urge to fuck shit up.
"Please, can I come, Weld?"
He shook his head, "you're not allowed."
"Get me on board," I begged. "Call it in. I'm dying here, bro."
"No, I'm not calling it in."
I sighed and sat down, thinking about the time I promised my dad I'd try harder to not ruin my career by being a dipshit. I mean, I was breaking it most days as I tried to sus out who was working for Accord or Cauldron so I could find everyone on the network and bust their shit wide open for the cardinal sin of turning Sveta into an anorexic Hideauze.
"Yeah," I said. "Ok, I get it. Just saying though, I can tell if it's his main lab just by glancing at the building, and learn all the weaknesses of his homunculi, and-"
Weld held up his hand and I stopped.
"Buddy," he said, rust red facial lines creasing. "I get it. No one doubts you have the skill, or the work ethic, or that you don't deserve to have this chance; but you're in Boston because you were almost murdered. I know it must be frustrating having to stay in HQ all day every day, but it's for your own safety. We have a duty of care, one we take very seriously-"
I waved him into silence. "Ok, stop patting me on the back, I get it. Just go kick Blasto's ass, and when you come back we can pat each other on the back, no homo."
He closed his eyes and mouth to stop himself from giving me a reprimand for flouting vocab regulation for saying something that could be construed as homophobic.
The driver's phone went off, ruining the moment.
"Bro," I said, exasperated.
He shot me an apologetic look and hit answer. "Yes, sir, all ready here. I'll put him on," he awkwardly twisted around to pass the phone to Weld who gingerly took it in a massive metal paw.
"Bastion," he said, all business.
"Tell him I said, 'hello'."
"Yep, I'm ready too sir," he rolled his eyes at me. "And Dark Smoke Puncher says hello. Ah, our drop off points are the same, his powers told him. Yes. Ok," he frowned and handed me the phone which I immediately put on speaker.
"Hey, Bastion!"
"Dark Smoke," his serious man voice issued out of the receiver. "I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, should I. Why are you in Weld's transport?"
"Figured I'd say hi," I grinned at Weld. "Good luck with Blasto, I'd come but Weld said no."
There was a pause.
"Are you volunteering?"
"Yes!" I said as Weld said 'no!'
Bastion made a noise like he was exhaling loudly through his nose, a tinny, jarring whistle through the mic, "I'll override that order, your Observation power could save us a lot of time, but you're on the back line with the communications van unless I specify otherwise. Also, note that you won't be paid the bonus you would normally be entitled to for participating in such an operation, and you will sign a waiver for this afterwards if you decide to come along. Do you agree to this, Dark Smoke?"
The word 'yes' couldn't come out of my mouth faster if I tried.
"Good man. Weld, he's to stay with you until you arrive whereupon you will direct him to his position before proceeding to yours."
"Yes, sir," Weld said, sounding thoroughly put upon.
"Excellent, flexibility is an important trait for a leader, Weld. It's good to have you both with us, over and out."
"Roger that," Weld's face twisted a little sourly as he handed the phone back to the driver. "Well, congratulations."
Of course, now wasn't the time to preen smugly. "He probably shouldn't have undermined you like that," I said. "I mean yeah, I'm an invaluable asset, but I think he was just happier he could get another cape on site without having to pay. Don't worry, Big Shine, you're still the boss."
"You could have just not agreed," Weld huffed, leaning back to rest his shoulders against the van's interior.
"But I really wanted to come!"
Weld made to lean forward but jolted as he realised his elbow had grazed the metal van wall and fused. "God fucking dammit!" he hissed under his breath.
"Look, man," I said as Weld slowly detached himself from the wall. "I know you have responsibilities, I wouldn't want to be team leader it sounds awful, but you don't know what it's like. I just have so much energy, and it's turning me insane. I only need four hours of sleep now, and when I wake up I'm Healthy and combined with my superhuman vitality, I just, I have twenty hours of being on base to look forward to every day. I need this, man, I just need something to get me out."
Weld bit at the inside of his chromed cheeks, "I'm s-"
I shook my head rapidly. "Dude, no. Ain't your fault, ain't your problem."
He sort of rolled his eyes and rubbed at the bridge of his nose before nodding resignedly.
To be perfectly honest I didn't much like what CHA was turning me into either. Oh look at me, I'm Dark Smoke Puncher, I speak emphatically and make convincing arguments and guilt trip bros who're only trying their best, ablehblehbleh.
I miss myself.
"You should probably tell Bastion this isn't a lab," I leant down and stuck my head into the back of the van. "It's a storage facility."
I straightened back up and turned to face the building through the thicket of PRT and Protectorate backup, usually, my Observe was more useful than this. After having read his file and dozens of crime reports I could only assume this was where he kept his homunculi. The big guns, the ones he used to hold his territory and remain relevant in a city the fielded both Accord and The Teeth.
God, I hoped they woke out of hibernation or whatever they were in and caused some action because if they didn't I'd be well out of shape by the time my fight with Colin came around; and it was approaching fast. In less than a month I would see him driven before me, and hear the lamentations of his halberd.
There was no way something wouldn't happen, twenty five K exp and some foreshadowing on my reputation? My quest prompts weren't usually this blatant with their precognition. I strolled back over the van and popped my head in again.
"Some shit is definitely going to go down, tell them to save some for me when Blasto's monsters riot."
Mike, the chief communications officer, nodded and spoke into his headset. "Bastion, Dark Smoke Puncher is indicating a high chance of engaging massed hostile forces."
I made eye contact with him for a few seconds until it became clear he wasn't going to give them the second half of my message, then shrugged and straightened up to gaze over at the warehouse.
There was a loud crash.
Ah, it's durability just took a dip, hopefully, that was Weld Kool-Aid Manning it through the wall and not something Kool-Aid Manning through Weld.
I could see the ripple run through the PRT troopers, the thousand tiny shifting movements of tensed shoulders and tightened grips as they prepared for the shitstorm, growing more pronounced the further it got from the front line. I chewed at a thumbnail as I scanned the warehouse, trying to catch the glimpse of movement over the roof of para-trooping, half bat half snake half dandelion homunculi that would potentially give me an excuse to engage.
I might seriously cry if I didn't get to do something. I stood on my tip-toes and craned my neck, picking at my Armsbeard, the roof of the van clunking under my feet but I still couldn't see anything.
A blue glow suddenly washed out of the door, or hole, in the warehouse; the exact shade of Bastion's force-fields. So was it on then? What was happening?
Voices started shouting orders and troops moved in formation, so something was definitely happening. I paced sideways on the van, trying to find a gap to see through; I wanted so bad to just run in and see but I knew now that when I did things like that I wasn't allowed to do anything fun for ages afterwards.
Inhuman screeching echoed inside the warehouse, a thousand different animals crying out in fury. Bits of pig mixed with mule-ish braying and a hint of a Walrine bellow preceded the thing that flung itself out of the highest window and onto a squad van with a meaty crunch, obliterating it into a post-modern sculpture.
It can't have been Blasto's best work because the thing died on impact, but it scattered the troopers who began panic spraying Con-Foam at the walls like they were trying to stop more things from dive bombing them which was probably exactly what they were doing I'm sorry Boston PRT for doubting your troopers no doubt they're just as well trained and dedicated as those back home and furthermore I don't like that you're rambling to yourself in your head Greg and since when did you become such a little bitch just go down there and join in just because the thing is bleeding a whole lot of red out of its mangled flippers doesn't mean you have to be a bitch about it Greg it's been months Greg-
"All units, engage!"
The van rocked as I bound off the edge, two steps taking me across the empty lot before a vault over a squad car put me in the middle of the troopers. The shrieking was a hell of a lot louder up close, and there was a hell of a lot of banging coming from inside the warehouse that made the walls judder.
I swivelled my head frantically, trying to get my bearings in the chaos, and that was when they started coming out of the walls; tripping over each other to rip into us.
Knives as big as they could be until my power classified them as swords burst into being in my fists as I dove toward some mincing, stilt-legged beast. My charge caught it by surprise and my knives were through what little neck it had before it could so much as squawk. We went to the ground, it thrashed beneath me in a puddle of arterial spray and I stared, dry-mouthed-
-11
I landed on my feet, spinning, blades coming up as the fat shit that bodied me stupidly ran right into them like the three INT dipshit it was. My arms trembled as I held it up in its death throes, and kept on trembling well after my blades were out of it.
I turned and threw, my oversized knife impaling a big doggish thing through the eye as it ripped into Harry's arm. I leapt in, blinking away their Observe windows and kicked it off of him. The Doglike flew five feet and immediately scrabbled to its chunky paws, completely ignoring the bowie knife halfway through its head; I met it halfway and slipped to the side as it ran, grabbing the handle and wrenching.
The knife burst into blue glitter and the uberdoggo collapsed mid-stride. I turned around as something latched onto my face from behind.
-3
-4
-5
-6
A whirling sphere of blue burst from my skin and sent whatever it was flying into a wall so hard it burst. Holyshitholyshitholyshit. I drew in a shaky breath as my shield ran its course and retreated back to the defensive line the troopers were making. The battlefield was a mess of con-foam and bodies, the homunculi that hadn't been killed or captured were scattering to the winds. My gaze flicked between the injured men and the escaping grotesqueries; if this were Vidya I'd have a QTE to do one or the other, but not both.
I doused my face with a water bottle I had stored and my health stopped ticking down. I was going to go track down the beasts, yeah, that sounded like the best use of my skills. I eyed the bodies one last time, swallowed some bile, and ran.
Yeah, everything was fine there, they had it under control. I had to go stop Blasto's brood from molesting innocent civilians with their various unspeakable appendages.
My feet skimmed over the dirty concrete with barely a whisper as I followed the trail of the thing that was trying to head into the city, it was time to use that. I swallowed a mouthful of saliva and grit my teeth, committing the magic I'd been sitting on to Spell.
Everything became clear, more real. Solid and vibrant and amazing. I cut the spell off before it could drain my mana too much, quickly read its description, then drew on speed. I caught up to the horse-gorilla in a flash and drove my remaining knife through the base of its skull. Its health bar winked out and it ploughed face first into a brick wall.
I jumped, switching speed for strength as my foot hit the same wall and bounced up and across, further than I'd ever jumped before, and hit the ground running.
The second monster wasn't too hard to find-
-in the open industrial area, its clumsy charge leaving a trail even an amateur could follow; but what was concerning was it was heading in a suspiciously direct route to the nearest populated area. That wily Blasto.
It was surprisingly fast for something that was covered in bark-like armour, but nowhere near as fast as me. My fingers grazed its gnarled 'skin', sparks crawling between them, and it stiffened mid-stride, and fell. I rolled it over and jammed an Arc Flash into its craggy mouth, quickly retreating out of range before it blew with a sharp popping sound and the smell of ozone. The smoke drifting from its corpse vanished into the wind, and I paused for a moment. Just like back home with Amy, you're a PC this is what you do. And then I left it there, burnt and blackened and lifeless.
I had only seen three run this way and we were getting dangerously close to people, I could even hear cars. And screaming. The screaming really helped narrow it down.
I burst out of an alley and onto the street where something like a big canary yellow parrot gripped a tipped over hatchback with all four sets of claws and was working on peeling the door open like a can of sardines.
With a drab of enhanced speed and strength, I accelerated forward, sucker-punching it where a human would have kidneys. It squawked autistically, collapsing and spluttering in garbled high pitched screeches; I gripped its noodley arms and Shackled them behind its back. It tried to shake me off but tripped, and I slammed it into the bitumen nice and hard; Shackling everything I could touch. It wiggled a bit, but with all the mana constructed restraints it had no leverage.
"The capture of this bird is sponsored by the Boston Wards!" I bellowed, setting a foot on its prone form. I panted heavily, looking around, but no-one was filming. I took my foot off the bird and sighed in relief, making my way around the car and waving to the passengers through the windshield. I gave a double thumbs up at their stunned expressions, shuffled to the side, worked my fingers under as far as I could and dead-lifted the hatchback back onto its wheels with perfect form.
I opened the passenger side door, "are you guys ok? Do you want me to call an ambulance? I'll call an ambulance."
The dad licked his lips, "no, uh, we're fine. You're melting."
I snuck a peek at my reflection in the wing mirror, most of my hair was gone, a big portion of my suits shoulders were smoking slightly and fraying away and my skin was near blistering.
"I didn't even notice, that'll be fine in a few minutes, are you sure you don't need help with anything? I'm Dark Smoke Puncher, Boston Ward, so I can probably make it happen."
I glanced over at the son in the driver's seat who looked like he wanted to cry but wasn't for some reason.
"No? Ok, well I'll get back to it then. Stay safe, citizens!"
I closed the door gently and rounded the car to the restrained bird, I hoisted it up in a fireman's carry and trotted off, giving a jaunty salute/wave hybrid thing as I returned to the alley from whence I came. The lanky canary over my shoulder gave muffled squawks as it tried to thrash, I jogged until I got back to the tree-fiend and set it down next to the still lightly smoking body.
I conjured a new blade, thin and sharp, then poked around the gaps in the Shackles until I found what I hoped was the esophagus, and stabbed. Just like with Amy. The big bird gurgled wetly as I slid the knife out and I left it to die while I shuffled over to the barky thing and put its corpse into my inventory.
Ah, very good. Big bird joined it in inventory space, Swol Horse was picked up on my way back, and I trotted up to the warehouse barely two minutes after I left.
"Is there anything left to do?" I asked one of the troopers securing the area.
"I'm sorry, what?"
"Anything left to do, like, more of Blasto's things or something?"
"Ah, look, no not really. As far as I can tell the strike team has subdued the attacking forces, and the capture team is dealing with the runners, I'm not sure if there's anything for you to do."
I nodded, "ok, thanks!"
He might have smiled back at me, but I couldn't tell through the faceplate. I carefully picked my way over to a big mound of struggling beast and con-foam and dumped my kills. I should go find Weld and Bastion, maybe they'd let me farm.
Chapter 33: Delusion Express 4.6
Chapter Text
Weld sat down next to me, a little too close to be comfortable. "After yesterday, I want to suggest you try getting some counselling," he said. "I've been told we're getting Dr. Yamada for the next rotation and I can assure you she's the best of the best; she's helped me more than I can say."
"Sure," I said.
Weld just kind of froze in confusion next to me, I looked up from the sci-fi web-novel I was reading and gave him a look of matching bafflement. "What?"
"Usually people aren't so, uh, receptive to the idea of talking to a therapist."
"I'm a pretty well put together guy," I shrugged at him with my face. "Besides, the last time was pretty interesting, y'know? Went a couple of times when I was a kid, talked with the guy about the tv show I was into, and the fan-comic I was writing, and he decided I was too normal to keep going."
"What show was it?" Weld asked in a way that smacked of autopilot like he couldn't think of a response and devolved into small-talk.
"Some Mexican Protectorate cartoon ripoff," I waved dismissively. "Watched it for days, it's why I know a bit of Spanish…"I trailed off. "Mi personaje favorito fue la torre del rayo, la estafa de Alejandría, el Sr. Weld."
There we go.
"I haven't spoken any in years though, and I checked the show out a while back, watched about thirty seconds, and man was my taste shit as a kid. Even the actual Protectorate cartoon is better, and it's fucking lame."
"Tell me about it," Weld snorted, rolling his eyes. "You know how I'm being groomed for a top spot? That comes with PR blasting, and it wouldn't be so bad but even for an all-ages show it's boring, at least I won't have to actually voice myself."
"I'll voice you."
"Stop," Weld grimaced good-naturedly. "I don't sound like that. I've watched my press footage, and I don't care what you and Tyrone say, not my voice."
"You want some WD-40 and a pipe cleaner?" I laughed, equipping a can of it out of my inventory to my hand and giving it a shake. "Fifty bucks says my power is more reliable than your ears."
Weld actually looked a little hurt so I put the can away and made a mental note to go easy on the metal-related prop comedy for a while. "If it makes you feel any better, Panacea hates it too. Or she used too, last time I mimicked her voice she sniggered but she could have just been laughing at me."
"Riiight," he said. "You were both in Brockton Bay, I didn't realise you were friends."
"Oh, we go way back, workin' in the hospital together and, uh, fishing. Bros," I made a fist and thumped it over my heart twice. "Tight. Take a bullet for that bitch."
"It's good that you had a good friend back home, you don't talk about your Brockton team much."
This was veering dangerously close to a conversation where I admitted having faults like, 'it was my fault they don't like me because I'm very annoying', and, 'I have poor people skills'. Not to say I was admitting to having faults, but to an unenlightened eye it might seem that way. Yeah, that was definitely it, Greg.
"They're cool guys," I said instead, with a shrug. "We just didn't have many common interests. Also, my powers were really weak at the start and they were sceptical of my claims."
Weld looked at me shrewdly, "yeah, I can see how they mightn't have believed you."
"The joke is on them now," I tossed my tablet aside. "When I go back eventually, I'll be able to take them six v. one, and then I'll ask, 'how it do?' And they'll have to say back, 'yes Greg, of course, I believe you'll be Triumverate one day, and I was stupid to think otherwise.'"
"That's," Weld shook his head, hair shifting like it was real and not a tangle of wire. "Good for you, buddy. I'll let you know about session times if you're still interested when Dr. Yamada arrives, and let you get back to your reading."
"Cool, catch you later, man."
Weld got up off my bed, gave me a smile and walked away. I heard his footsteps pause somewhere in my hallway for a good ten seconds.
"Why is your mirror covered up?"
"It ruins the Feng Shui!" I called back. Really, it was because it was fixed to the bathroom wall and I couldn't take it off without taking a big chunk of plaster with it.
A grunt of understanding emanated from the hallway and the footsteps started up again followed by a message alert tone.
"Shit!" spat Weld. "Fuck!"
"What is it?" I leant up from where I was lying, twisting my neck to relieve the soreness that came from having it jammed sideways against the wall. Weld didn't usually swear, and if he did it was never in that kind of tone.
Then he spoke a word. A cursed word that brought to the forefront of my mind memories of furtive, three AM faps, and long rant posts on various message boards.
"Simurgh."
Shit. Fuck.
I was out of bed in a flash, becoming dark Smoke Puncher, and almost crashing into Weld as I scrambled out of my quarters after him.
"You're not coming!" he said as we ran through the Protectorate HQ. "Not Authorised!"
"I just want to see! I'm not going to, I don't want…" I trailed off. "I don't want to go over your head again."
I didn't want to go. Endbringer battle? Against the Simurgh? I liked not being made a murderous lunatic, just ask the Parahuman formerly known as Sphere, he'd know what I was on about. I was a brave American warrior, not suicidal.
"Good," he ground out as I loped easily alongside him. "Because I'm kinda pissed about that."
I decided not to tell him about the secret selfie of us at Blasto's warehouse that had Sveta squeeing over his handsome, brave, ripped metallic bod. I should really stop breaching security protocol for her, but who was she going to tell? God I was lucky she didn't turn out to be a catfish.
"I'm sorry about that, by the way."
Weld grunted, and we ran on.
We skidded into the Protectorate lobby, to see a buzz of activity centred around Bastion, Hephaestus and Jekyll.
"Right on time," Bastion barked. "Strider will be here in T-minus thirty-seven seconds. It's Canberra this time, she's touched down, are you ready because this is the only chance you'll have to back out and you're not coming," he pointed at me.
"I know," I gestured to Weld with my head. "He already said so, I just wanted to see."
"Feel free to hang around, Strider'll be back to pick up the second group at some point."
"Good luck," I waved as Weld stepped up to the group. "I'll let you know if you've been Simurgh Bombed when you get back."
Bastion sank halfway into an Excuse Me What The Fuck pose.
"Yes, I'm almost certain I can do that," I preempted him as he drew breath to speak. "Put me within seeing distance of a confirmed one some time and I'll know for sure."
"I'll deal with you when I get back," he waved dismissively with a big, blue gauntlet. "We have about ten seconds, everyone get close."
I watched them huddle for a tense moment before Strider appeared out of nowhere with a harsh crack, to which I didn't flinch, strode forward and the whole group vanished with a sucking, popping kind of sound.
I stood around for a bit, observing the alertness of the PRT employees, before I wandered over to a nearby chair and sat down, equipping my phone.
You: hey panna cotta, you going to the simurgh fight?
Maybe I should have jumped into the port zone instead of being a turbo pussy, I'd never been to Australia, maybe it would have been fun? Oh, who was I kidding, I wasn't Menma. Staying was the right choice, I couldn't jump in and get into trouble just because of my retarded brain, and if I could do what my parents told me to every day for years I could stop flouting the orders of the paramilitary organisation I willingly joined to avoid getting merced by some insane fucktard villain who was acting like I scuffed his new NIKE's or something. Christ.
My Protectorate phone buzzed, I clicked it on and read the text urging non-essential personnel to report to base, and that if it was your day off you'd be getting time and a half. Baller, I got leave after yesterday and now I'd get more money to put into an account I wasn't allowed to touch, but at least when I turned eighteen I'd be unironically quite wealthy.
My phone beeped.
Weed Thot: shit, no, I'm not cleared to. Where the fuck have you been, did you gas krieg again?
You: didn't dean or someone tell you? Boston, cause I almsot got assassinated by germans
Honestly, no one told her about that? How lazy could those fags be? I mean, I was pretty sure they were allowed to tell, it's not like it was a secret I was here. I even got a mention in a thread talking about Blasto's escaped monsters, one of the dudes in the car was asking who I was because he didn't think Boston had a Ward matching my description. It took so much self-control to just read and not play hypeman to myself as VC.
Weed Thot: what the fuck?
You: Coil false flagged me and tried to get germans to murder me, you probably heard about the series of bodies that were pulpy sacks of goo? Armsy harpooned that guy and I burned the other's face off. Besides almost dying it was pretty rad, how's your sister?
Rainbow flakes of mana began to wisp off my free hand like confetti, a celebration of 'why did I ask that?', sure, she was the most beautiful girl in the world but you don't dog the boys. You never dog the boys, because, in the end, the boys might be all you have left.
Weed Thot: Yeah, someone mentioned in the tea room that the autopsy guy was talking about that. And god damn, what is it with you and germans? She's fine 
Oh, right, I routinely teased her about her pseudo-incestuous lusts. Thank god for that smokescreen.
You: I dunno, but it was either germans or asians and it would probs be racist if it was asians. Why don't you get a gf and then make her look like GG in subtle ways? A ton of lesbos would jump at the chance to be with you
Weed Thot: Just give up on that, please, I'm not going to change my mind on it
You: yeah, fine, I'm still you're wingman tho just remember that turbo weed doesn't count as a gf, also give me some like you promised
Weed Thot: yeah yeah and when you come back I'll give you something even better that I've been working on
Weed Thot: g2g teacher's being a bitch
Oh yeah, she still went to school. I actually kind of missed it, in a weird sort of way because I was bored out of my skull there before. I hoped Sparky and Taylor were doing alright, what with their band and jumpscare powers, perhaps if they combined the two? Started a grunge metal band called Horror Show where listening to live gigs made you freak out, yeah, there had to be a market for that for sure. I could still be the front man with just a bit more practice, and with a Dancing, and some Instrument skills, I could transform our act into something great. Note to self, request dance and guitar skill books.
I put my phone away and bent over, resting my elbows on my knees and staring at the polished tile flooring. This not going to the Simurgh fight shit kinda felt like being left out, even if I didn't want to go in the first place. I glanced up at a sudden burst of noise, then looked back at the ground when I saw it was just Nitroman turning up.
I cupped my hands, gathering mana in dimly glowing streams, coalescing into humanoid shape. I'd had some practice making sexy figmas, and the jealousy I got on the buyfag threads attested to that, but I'd never made the Simurgh before. I had a pretty solid mental image of her, heh solid, but there was a lot of fine detail involved in the feathers and I wasn't exactly an artist. Note to self, request art skill books.
I glanced up again when I heard the door open, Dove and Redwind hurrying inside, and returned to my sculpting.
I think I made it too sexy, because I was just staring instead of covering her up with wings, when usually I hated pictures of her that showed too much. The wings gave an alluring, angelic sense of modesty-
"Hey, whatcha doing?"
"Nothing!" I vanished the half-finished figma into my inventory. "Mouse Protector, hey, uh, what's up?"
"Why, I'm preparing to chew a hole in the skirting board of villainy," Mouse said in a way that managed to be both completely unironic, but also deeply ironic. "But I see that you're the only chillun here, chillin' on your lonesome."
"I live here," I looked back down at the floor. "Are you going?"
I saw Natalie put her hands on her hips in my peripheral vision, she sighed, plopped down in the seat beside me and patted me on the back comfortingly.
"I am, Smokey, and I can't say for sure I'll come back."
I turned, looking up past her bascinet's visor into her bright blue eyes. It's not like this was Behemoth or even Leviathan, Simurgh actually had a very good survival rate; comparatively. "I'm pretty sure you have to live, so we can burrow into the pantry of evil."
"We'll feast upon the cheese of their defeat."
I laughed so suddenly my leg jerked out and I fell back in my chair. Mouse Protector a cute, move over Miss Militia, I was going to marry Mouse Protector!
"There we go!" Natalie punched me on the shoulder. "Just because I, and many others, might be killed or driven insane doesn't mean you can't laugh. Life isn't worth living without laughter!" She burst into an evil cackle. "Even if they hate it we have to keep on smiling, Smokey, it's our greatest weapon and our strongest defence! Smile until it's real!"
"It's like my mother used to say," I gave her my sunniest grin. "'Niggas iffy, uh. Blicky got the siffy, uh.'"
Natalie gave a very confused laugh, "she sounds like a very wise woman."
I shook my head, "she just has terrible taste in music."
A loud crack that sent a ripple of flinches through the lobby sounded the return of Strider.
"Shit," muttered Natalie, jumping to her feet. "Wait, I'm coming!" She turned to face me, walking backwards. "Keep smiling, Smokey, and don't think I didn't see that hot Simurgh you made, little perv!"
She turned with a crow of laughter, "crikey mateys! Let's go put a shrimp on the barbie! Top shit ayyyyy-"
Strider vanished again, taking the Protectorate and Natalie with him, air rushing to fill the void of their passing.
Screw the rules! I got out my phone and loaded up my DSP Twitter, found the Mouse Protector verified account and commented 'Based.' without the PR teams say so. Fuck the Simurgh! Not literally, even though I could make rubbery soft mana constructs, I could do my part!
I leapt to my feet and raced to the Wards quarters. I heaved all the furniture out of the way and paced around the new clearing, exuding mana. A scale model of the Simurgh slowly took form on the rug, no longer unearthly beautiful, but frumpy and with buck teeth and the words 'BIG GAY' on her forehead in big, all-caps Ariel Black font. I equipped my phone and a selfie stick, snapping a quick pic; that one was for Sveta and I guess Amy too. The words faded away, and I waited.
Eventually, someone interrupted my feverish pacing by opening the door without sounding the mask alert. Perfect.
"Dez!" I shouted. "Don't freak out!"
"About what?"
I circled my Simurgh, now covered in a big black mana cloth, as she walked into the clearing I had made.
"I must ask you not to scream," I pointed at the hidden beast. "But this might just provoke that!"
The cloth vanished and to her credit, Dez didn't cry or run.
"That really isn't what I expected," she stammered. "Did you make that?"
I nodded vigorously, "now please tell me if it's in bad taste for us post a group pic with a defaced Simurgh, and the caption, 'we're doing our part!'"
I presented to her a sharpie.
She regarded the marker for a long moment before breaking out into a wide grin, "what the hell, lets find out!"
Chapter 34: Delusion Express 4.7
Chapter Text
"This hand of mine glows with an awesome power! Its burning grip tells me to defeat you! TAKE THIS! MY LOVE, MY ANGER, AND ALL OF MY SORROW! ARC BLADE!" I screamed as I shoved my hand through the chest of the Simurgh.
The wailing, popping screech of the bladed fistful of lightning in my hand died as it sucked out the last of my mana. I leant my forehead against my ugly Simurgh statue as it disintegrated into fading motes of light.
"Did you get it? Show me!" I turned and hurried expectantly to Norman who was filming with my phone.
He held it out at arm's length and hit play. Really, besides the utter ear-rape of my Arc Blade it was a good video, and most importantly, made me look hella cool.
"I can do some sound mixing so we can hear you properly," he said, dragging the time slider back to somewhere near the start. My smooth, clear voice could be heard briefly before being muffled by the 'bandsaw fucking a live cable' whine. "I'll have to cut you looking at the camera at the end anyway."
"Actually," I stroked my armsbeard thoughtfully. "Leave the sound as is, leave it all as is. This is the real shit the people are after, that raw, uncut, unwashed reality."
"If you say so," he handed me back my phone. "I've never bothered saying anything on my Ward accounts that I didn't have to."
I swatted him on the shoulder, "you leave it to me, chief, I'll get this shit posted right."
Norman grinned savagely, "Bastion won't even punish us for this I bet, like, who the fuck is going to stick up for the Simurgh, man?" He laughed. "We should do this for every Endbringer."
"I feel that," I tossed my phone at an angle, making it spin diagonally before catching it. "I feel that feeling deeply…" I trailed off.
Maybe I should transfer here, it was certainly a lot more fun than Brockton, and with fewer Germans.
"Hey, Rey-Rey!" I called across the room. "Is it ready yet, I just had a brain blast."
Tyrone looked up from his phone, "s'been ready the whole time."
I set off at a stride, noticing Norman was giving me an 'I guess I'll just go fuck myself then' look out of the corner of my eye as I disregarded his entire existence the moment something else came up. Fugg. Oh well, too late now, I'll do better next time.
"Bring it forth," I quoth, gesturing grandiosely with an arm. "Show me the beast."
With a roll of his eyes, a perfect replica of my ugly Simurgh appeared glorious technicolour and all, and flipped me off. It began to soundlessly break-dance, wings clipping through the wall and floor as it ground out a sick windmill into a L-kick. The Simurgh air flared, it's airtime tubular, before slowly floating to the floor and settling back into its usual upright posture.
"This Simurgh is too gnarly."
It flipped me off again as Tyrone spoke. "So you figured out how to make that distorted bass-drop meme sound?"
"Absolutely, almost. I've been working on it for ages but the super-vibrato change in electricity mana of my Arc Blade just gave me some insight, which in hindsight was totally obvious. I won't go into it, but suffice to say that when I get this I can throw us a rave any time, anywhere. Shit will be fukken neato," I held my hand up, feeling the mana pulsing under my skin like a second heartbeat. I slowly wiggled my fingers, playing with the colourless energy, feeling it play off itself, directing the currents. A low pitch whine started up, the kind that gave your teeth fur. A second tone began atop the first, higher and wobbling as my mana vibrated against itself-
"Nailed it," I said, and made that bass drop.
Tyrone clapped his hand over his face to muffle his unflattering snort of a laugh, "oh this is going to be so good, you have to start dabbing in public with that!"
And I wanted to. I really wanted to. Really, really wanted to. And maybe I would if the situation called for it and it would be funny, rather than at random like I had in the past. Sure, I'd thought it was hilarious but looking back on it…
"Dabbing is for faggots, that's why we're making the Simurgh do it," I sneered at him. "And if I'm wrong, may Behemoth strike me down in a foreign country in six months time. God bless the Triumvirate."
"Too soon, man," Tyrone hung his head to stare at the gleaming white tiles. "They're not even back yet."
I rubbed at my Armsbeard, flaring CHA for a second so I could feel bad about myself.
"Sorry."
Tyrone shrugged.
"Sorry," I said again.
"Ngl smh tbh fam," he said. "Lets just do the thing though, what did you want to have her say?"
I told him the quote, he agreed it was hilarious.
"Not sure what voice to give her," I said, and cleared my throat. "Because it can't be a good voice, I was thinking maybe Midwestern accent with a valley girl pattern and vocal fryyy," I dipped into the voice as I spoke. "But like, crossed with a fat person. Make her sound real stupid."
"Works for me! Run through it a couple of times so I can get the lip flaps synced right."
Chapter 35: Delusion Express 4.8
Chapter Text
CRACK!
The displaced air buffeted us as the entire group that had left for Canberra was deposited in the lobby by Strider, with an accompanying woosh as he left, almost a full day after they left and looking like death warmed over. I tiptoed anxiously to see over the crowd, rapid firing Observe to see if anyone was hurt, but beyond a few bumps and bruises they were fine; most importantly no one had anything resembling a [brainfucked] status effect.
I resisted the urge to blast MLG airhorns as we spontaneously applauded. It wasn't a thing we decided, or even a custom as far as I knew, but the entire crowd, of us Wards, the Troopers, PRT and Protectorate workers all just started clapping at the same time. A huge grin split my face; they were safe. Tired as fuck, but safe.
The returning heroes met our praise with weary grins and raised fists, the very picture of badasses. Weld turned to us, and on his first step, we rushed him, clamouring around into a big Wards only group hug that he buckled under while making some kind of noise.
I glanced up and saw out of my peripherals Mouse Protector quietly slipping out the front doors. That was… Definitely odd. I disengaged from the stack and skirted around the tangle of adults who were slapping the Protectorate members on the back and handing out beers. The automatic doors opened for me and I jogged after Mouse.
"Hey, Mouse!" I called as I came up alongside her, matching her brisk pace. She glanced at me, and in the moment before she looked away I caught a glimpse of her face through the gaps in her bassinet. A smile as brittle as brandy-snap beneath bloodshot eyes. The rest of my question died on my tongue before I even took the breath for it.
"I'm going home," she said.
My feet stopped moving and I watched her walk away, trying to hide a limp. But she could teleport though… what happened in Australia? Fucking Simurgh. She hailed a cab, got in, and it drove away out of sight around a corner. My feet started moving again, carrying me back into the Protectorate office and I beheld the heroes with a fresh perspective.
Shaking hands, sweaty faces, clenched jaws all hidden behind long practised customer service smiles that didn't reach eyes. I got the feeling there was no victory at Canberra.
This vibe seemed like it had been picked up on because no one was asking any questions. I guess everything I had read had been right, there was no victory at an Endbringer fight. Ever. And yet, everyone was pretending something had gone right beyond making it out alive… I could see how that would help; I did the same thing for various things I didn't want to think about ever.
My guts queased as I shot off a quick text to Colin; who went, what happened, who came back? He had almost one hundred per cent gone, Armsy wasn't the type of guy who would avoid an Endbringer if he could help it because he was insane. But surely, if all the heroes in Boston could make it back so could he, right? He had to have, I still had that quest, and Amy could fix him even if he was as much man as Robocop; she'd just need a few kilos of meat and he'd be good as new.
I sent her a text asking if she knew anything.
I sidled back into the Wards pack to get a better look at Weld, he was a bit hard to read sometimes what with being made of metal, and even now my Observe wasn't giving me anything informative about his mental state; just that he was tired as fuck.
"Weld," I said quietly as I shuffled up next to him. "What happened at the fight?"
"The city has to be domed."
"What? Like in The Bubble? Why?"
His teeth made a noise like a hydraulic press as he ground them in a grimace, "because it has to be domed."
Something in his tone made me not want to ask again. I knew all about Lausanne, and Madison and London and none of them had a dome. Quarantined, walled in and bombed sure, but not domed. You only domed when you couldn't bomb.
I was suddenly very glad I hadn't gone and judging by the uneasy looks the others were sharing, so too were they. I wish Weld hadn't gone, he didn't deserve this, nobody deserved this. Fucking Endbringers, fucking Simurgh and fucking Scion; just kill them already you unbridled autist!
Blood pounded in my ears as I seethed. I knew what I had to do, I was going to be Triumvirate.
I had to kill a fucking Endbringer-
You're god damn right.
I crushed my SIP can and threw it hard at the Console's little trash can, knocking it over and spilling its contents everywhere. Whatever, someone else would clean that, I had work to do and the Endbringer's wouldn't kill themselves. I mean, I hoped they would, now that I was less upset I realised I had no idea on how to kill them because if the actual Triumvirate couldn't do in near on twenty years how the fuck was I going to? I mean, my power seemed to think I could but it also seemed to think I could take Sophia out on a date and have it go well so maybe it was a bit suspect on that front.
I tabbed over to another window to once again read the chronology of their attacks. I, like every other Protectorate Thinker, didn't know what to make of it. Why did Behemoth attack six times over four years before Leviathan turned up? Why did it take another six years and sixteen combined attacks for the Simurgh to appear? God damn inscrutable motherfuckers.
I cracked open another SIP and took a long, drawn out sip, savouring the tang. God bless my inventory for keeping them cool.
Their goal seemed pretty obvious, terrorise the world until there wasn't anyone left. And their methodology was sound, they were doing a bang up job of it. But why though, all the Protectorate had at my clearance level was bare-bones as fuck and I doubted anyone even at the highest clearance in the Think Tanks or WEDGDG had anything more helpful. Sure, there was speculation, they were people whose powers had gone wrong, they were Case 53's, they were the source of powers, they were gods etc. But none of that was confirmed. I knew in my heart that it would come to this. I would have to Observe one.
Observe had never let me down, never failed to give accurate and useful information. It was why my highest rating was Thinker. Maybe I'd put in a request to use it on one, maybe it would even be approved when I turned eighteen, maybe I could tell Armsmaster that it would help save uncountable lives if I was allowed to look at Behemoth from a kilometre away.
Hopefully, he'd be too busy slaughtering everyone else to get to me haha.
Hopefully, it would also actually give me something useful and not, 'Yeah, sorry, the Endbringers are invincible kill you're self'. That would just be demoralising right there.
I got out my work phone and dialled Armsmaster. After about ten rings he answered with silence.
"Hello?"
There was a bit more silence before he grunted, "Veder."
"Hey man, no one was answering my texts so I figured I'd call you, how did that Simurgh thing go yesterday?"
There were disgruntled creaking sounds in the background as he took his sweet time answering. "The city has to be domed."
"Yeah, that was what Weld and Bastion said too, but you're all good right? You sound tired."
"Yes, I'm fine. I was asleep."
"For once," I chortled. "But that's good, did anyone else go? Are they ok?"
"Ms Militia also attended, and she's fine. Was there anything else?"
"Well, not really. See you in a couple of weeks, bro."
More disgruntled sounds issued from the other end of the phone, "oh, right, yes. See you then."
I took a breath to answer but the call ended tone met me half way. Rude. But whatever, the important thing is that he wasn't dead or brainfucked. I quaffed some more of my SIP can and settled back into my chair for a long night of pointless research.
Chapter 36: Delusion Express 4.9
Chapter Text
I nosed my way into Boston's PR department, it was a bit smaller than Brockton's and way more office like in that it was just a set of offices instead of a whole presentation. A total switch with the research departments, it was huge here and they loved how weird my power was, whereas in Brockton they barely had time to care.
I walked past doors, glancing through windows until I Observed someone who met my requirements. I knocked on her window and mimed walking in and shrugged, to which she held up a finger and continued speaking into her phone. I faffed about outside the door, reading some posts about a dogshit seasonal anime I unironically loved until I heard her put the receiver down.
I opened the door, went in, and leant against the edge of her desk.
"Well, if it isn't our little Simurgh Slayer," Nancy's face creased into a thousand crows-feet as she smiled, which wasn't a great look on a twenty-nine year old. "What can I do you for?"
I wasn't sure if she was making fun of me, and that aggravated my Betamax genes. Surely not, right? The videos had gone viral, as expected, with a largely positive reception so surely I was just being a stupid little bitch for doubting myself in any fashion and I should just roll with it.
"L'me axe you summin, Nance," I made a secretive gesture and leaned closer. "Do you ever wish you had your own backing track or sound effects?"
She mirrored my smile, but her eyes were confusion. "I suppose, it would be pretty interesting, wouldn't it?"
"And it is," I continued, drawing back a little. "I was thinking something like-"
{Guitar riff}
{Dark Smoke Pun-cher!}
Nancy flinched at the sudden blast of sound.
"-But I figured it would be better to ask you guys for help in workshopping it. Like for when I enter the scene or something, bam! Cue the noise, maybe do some poses and shit? Yeah?"
She opened her mouth, paused, and recognition lit up her face at the vague pose-like movements I was making. "I thought your look was strange, but it's all a send up to the Sentai Elite, isn't it? Your whole schtick is a reference to Matcha Black!"
I had absolutely no fucking clue as to who that was.
"It's so obvious," she laughed. "The little gold lightning bolts on your side, the visor ripped straight from his helmet, the weird clash of sneaky and stand-out." She laughed again, covering her mouth. "It's too bad you're so white, we could have capitalised on it a bit more."
"Haha, yeah, I know right?" Matcha Green, yeah, I'd heard of her, but who was this guy meant to be? "My favourite underrated Sentai hero."
"Good," she gave a small, sad, contemplative smile. "That's good. But you're here about managing your presentation, yes? Let me just bring up your file."
She spun her chair around a bit to fossick through her computer, "Why does it say you're an uncooperative liability? You came to us for image help."
Cold sweat broke out under my uniform, "they made me do a test run press conference, and I didn't take it seriously. For some reason they thought I'd really say, 'and Vista is my nigga,' live on air."
She gave me a pitying look and continued scrolling through.
"Sound Generation doesn't seem to be on your list, but I would guess it's a new one," Nancy frowned as she comprehended just who it was she was dealing with. Me, the Trumpiest Trump whoever Trumped. "Then that would be why you're here… It's good to get things like this approved, and while your little sound effect would be fine to use in the public it could do with some fine-tuning. It's too loud, for example. And you can never do enough focus testing, because if you can do other sounds?"
I nodded.
"Depending on the situation, and the crowd, you can pick the most popular for that demographic, sway the mood and set a presence," Nancy whipped out a stack of post-it notes and started jotting down reminders. "Leave this with me for now, I'll kick it about the office after I get a recording, see what the others think and get back to you when we have some examples cooked up."
We exchanged Fonzie looks, or at least I tried to, and when she didn't do the face I figured I should forgo ayy woahing out of the room.
"Ok, so I'll, like, email a video of me doing some sounds?"
"That'd be great."
"Cool," I smiled again. "Thanks, see ya later!"
And with that I made myself stride away, desperately hoping she didn't have the time to look up the footage of my practice press release. Fuck you, past Greg, you fuck head. You're a fucking shit head.
"It's capture the hostage. The PRT has them protected somewhere in the building and it's up to us to retrieve them, and bring them back to this location, unharmed."
Weld jabbed his finger at a spot of the schematic in front of us and looked at us expectantly. I was pretty sure I could do this myself. When nobody said anything he continued.
"They have Big Dog and Trick on their side, does anyone have any suggestions?"
"How about I do it," I raised my hand, ignoring the throbbing vein in my temple.
"Do what?"
"It," I gestured broadly. "By myself, the whole thing."
"Greg," Weld sighed. "This is a team exercise, you're not doing it by yourself."
"I'ma do it," I subtly glanced at everyone to see what they thought, but they didn't look too impressed. Whatever, they'd be impressed, I'd make sure of it.
"Come on, I know it's a bit early," Weld continued as though I couldn't do it by myself, and save everyone the hassle. "But you're not always going to get to work during the afternoon in the Protectorate, someone has to do the night shifts."
God, I hated night shifts, especially like the one I just got through at the ER. I totally got Amy on a spiritual level right now; how she dealt with all that shit with so little INT I'd never know.
"Well, my pre-cog is giving out nonsense," Roulette yawned into her hand. "Can we just storm the building? We have enough manpower, right?"
"We stormed the building last time, and we got our asses kicked," said Scops, and she was probably going to say something else, but I spoke over her.
"And last time you didn't have me. I'm not joking when I say I can do this by myself, I'm going to be Triumvirate," I stood up and slapped the table. "And if you don't believe me, may your heads be stricken from your shoulders for such disloyalty!"
"Bro, you're not even that fast," Reynard kicked at my foot under the table. "Alexandria can go, like, Mach five, and she's the slowest. Realistically, wouldn't it be more like dudes like Myrrdn and Chevalier and Narwhal, power gap, you and Dragon, power gap, them?"
I shot him a dirty look.
"And besides, don't you have to be able to fly?" he continued, like the stupid furry he was. "I'm pretty sure that's a pre-requisite."
"Fuck you!" I stormed out of the room. Who did that nigga think he was, Missy? You didn't have to fly to be Triumvirate! That wasn't a rule, I checked. There were no rules, you just had to be a baller par excellence, which I would be. Six fucking months, I was a fat little chode who could barely outrun Tattletale just six months ago, and look at me now. I scoffed internally, they'd understand soon enough, and then they'd say, 'oh, we were wrong, you will be Triumvirate, I guess'.
I cracked my neck as I walked out of our building, and stole into the shadows. I'd show them for doubting me.
The building with the hostage was only just around the corner from where we were set up, on a PRT/Protectorate owned training facility, somewhere in an otherwise unused part of Boston's outskirts. I Hazed and peeked around the corner. Lots of sentries, given that Reynard could hide the whole group under a blanket illusion, but I could exploit that. Reynard was ground-bound, I wasn't. I drew back around and dropped my Haze, casting Mana adhesion in its stead before scaling the wall at my back.
I slipped over the lip of the roof and rolled diagonally across until I was roughly in the centre. I Hazed, and from there it was but a hop, skip and a jump and I was sailing through the air over the road and all the guards heads.
It had taken a little bit for me to truly get what Grace was, but when I had, oh boy. It was a Breaker effect that let me take a tiny shit on things like gravity, friction and momentum.
It slowed my fall as I neared the roof and I fell into a roll as I hit, barely a sound, landing exactly where I wanted to. I mentally reviewed the schematics, there was no roof access but if I went a bit to my right roughly about… I shuffled a few yards… here, there should be the third-floor room almost directly above the second-floor hostage location.
I conjured a saw (which killed my Haze) and sent it ablaze with writhing arcs. That done I eyeballed the hole I was going to cut, making sure it was big enough for two and scraped the saw along my imaginary lines, wincing at the noise it made as it sank into the concrete. Slowly, carefully, I cut a rough square hole, every scrape and pop and electric whine setting my teeth on edge.
Ah, rookie fucking mistake, Greg. You didn't even check the room. Baka baka baka.
The cubular chunk of roof slipped as I was making my final cuts, the still attached edges unable to hold its weight, and it almost got out of reach before my hand snaked out and it vanished into my inventory. I dropped through the hole, saw turning into smoke and dust as I released my hold on its mana, and surveyed the area; lots of dust and shit from the ceiling. Note to self, fix that next time I break in through the roof.
I slunk over to put my back to the door, extending a thin tendril of near see-through smoke through the gap at the bottom. I carefully swept it back and forth along the hallway at shin level, and not feeling any disturbances, opened the door and slipped through.
Empty, as expected.
I slunk down the hall, my tendril of smoke questing ahead of me, under doors and around the corner, down the stairs; until it hit legs. I wracked my brains, still pretty sure they were standing right outside the room where the hostage was meant to be. Shit. How was I going to do four simultaneous take-downs quiet enough to avoid raising the alarm? It's not like this was a game where I could throw a rock at them, one by one, and they'd path around a corner, this was super cereal real life.
I felt out their rough positions with the thin smoke, two facing directly away from the door, one looking toward my position and one looking the other way; I was pretty sure. This would be a cinch if I had Reynard, but fuck that guy. I'd just have to rush them.
I screwed my eyes shut, inhaled deeply, and opened them on the exhale.
I cast Haze and slowly tiptoed down the first flight until I got to the corner, then stepped out into view. I got a brief look at their formation, pretty much what I thought, before the guy watching the stairs leant forward like he was trying to peer through my Haze. I leapt and he flinched, but he had no chance over this distance. My foot hit the floor and in two steps I was in my critical distance, one hand on his hip, one on his neck, Shackling them together.
My momentum carried me through him, twirling into the gap between them and the door; into which the guy I'd just Shackled crashed with a pained cry. In a flash my hands were on the second guy, then the third, then the fourth, sending them toppling to the floor with shoves, Shackled and neutralized.
Damn, I was sick. Who's not worthy of Triumvirate now, huh? Fags.
Suddenly their radios lit up with panicked voices.
"They are outside the VIP room, I repeat, they are outside the VIP room!"
I rolled my stupid eyes. There goes the alarm bonus, well done Greg, you failed me yet again. I sighed, onward and upward.
I positioned myself in front of the door, jumped, and kicked out with both feet. The door practically splintered, hanging on with one hinge, giving me a glimpse of Big Dog, Trick and who I could only assume was the hostage before I smoked the room. My Shield was already cast before my feet hit the floor, immediately flinging whatever trap Trick had set up aside as I barreled in.
I felt my smoke get swept aside as Big Dog activated his aura, around himself, Trick and the hostage.
"Oh, give me a fuckin' break, Dog," I whined. "Take that thing down."
The aura gingerly swiped a paw through where I was throwing my voice, "no way, man," Big Dog shouted wildly. "Just give up!"
I felt my foot depress something as I slowly circled them, a pressure plate. There was a muffled bang and I reflexively shielded, dodging backward as Big Dog took another swipe at me, tinkertech glue spraying the room from the hidden mine.
I didn't have time for this fucking shit! I stood stock still, trying to figure out where the glue had spread through my smoke, but I didn't have the precision. I was going to run out of mana if this kept up, so, like, fuck it, I guess.
I leapt high, landing on the back of the dog aura, right hand poised to strike. There was a brief wail of electricity as I punched down, Arc Blade cast for the moment of contact before being released again. I struck again, and again, each blow showering sparks on the ghostly, green fur that began to crack and deform under my fists. There was a moment after a strike where the construct shuddered, and vanished out from under me, letting me drop next to them; and that was it. Two quick taps and they were lying bonelessly on the ground, paralysed.
"Just imagine that was one of my harder hits and play dead… oh shit!"
A dozen heavy footsteps rattled the floor, the PRT must have decided they'd faffed about for long enough and that they should come and protect the hostage. I reached out toward the doorway, a thin line of solid mana extending from a fingertip, blossoming into a wafer-thin, bumpy wall, that from the other side would look exactly like a stack of claymore mines.
Ok, so, plan? Plan. Good brain.
Big Dog and Trick had started struggling as soon as the paralysis wore off so I hit them with it again, "dudes, just chill, pretend you're KO'd, capiche? And you…" I eyed the presumed hostage. Clearly, his role in this exercise wasn't important to him, because it wasn't showing up on his bio. "Play along."
Ok, time to try something new.
I moved quickly under the pressure of incoming jackboots, sliding Trick into a corner and hitting him with a Haze, before turning to Dog who was thankfully mostly still. Mana disguise said it was meant for me, but that could go fuck itself. I tapped a finger to his shoulder and worked through the process of it in my mind.
It should work just the same as casting Haze on something that wasn't myself.
"Where's everyone else?" Norman asked, voice muffled by the floor, turning his head to look up at me plaintively as voices argued on the other side of my fake claymore wall.
"I bet them that I could do this myself, now shush, I'm thinking."
Thinking. So, disguise other. I ran through what made a disguise for myself, how the mana moved, where it moved, what it moved to. There was a point where, after being initially shaped the mana would spread over me, so all I should have to do is interrupt that point and redirect the flow.
I cast, and as expected, laying before me was another me.
Fuckin' mint, ayy!
I grabbed the hostage, who submitted gamely and Disguised myself as Big Dog, aura covering the both of us. It wouldn't hold up if someone bumped me too hard, but I only had to get so far.
Game time. Five mana left, and a dream.
The claymore wall burst into a puff of smoke as I released my hold on it.
"Thank god," I worked my mouth around Norm's voice and dragged the hostage forward. "You're here. I managed to defeat Dark Smoke Puncher, but the others could be anywhere! We need to change location!"
The troopers parted like the red sea as I hustled forward, casting fearful glances behind me. I was making it, and I made it halfway through them before a loud voice called out.
"Hold on, what's your pass-phrase?"
It was at this point my Disguise popped because I ran out of mana. Why had I run out of mana? The only thing I had chewing it up was… the Haze. Fuck you, Fred.
I hoisted the hostage onto my shoulders and bolted, shoving troopers aside like children as I dashed for the first-floor stairs. I drifted around the corner, hearing con-foam splatter on the wall behind me, feet hammering the floorboard until I took the whole stairwell in two steps; one to jump off the top and one to push off the wall and bounce the other way.
The first floor was empty, all available troops having gone upstairs, but surely the door guards were still there. Well, I'd like to see them hit me. I slowed down a little, measuring my steps, and booted the door that led to outside, turning it to splinters like the other. The two door guards, who were indeed still there, shouted in surprise as I barreled past them with all the gravity of a mag-lev freight train. They might have tried to stop me, but I wasn't looking back, I was getting the fuck back to the finish line.
Even with a full-grown guy on my shoulders, I was still hitting speeds faster than an Olympic athlete, they weren't catching up. I sucked in great breaths as I ran, back around the wall I'd first climbed up, and around the corner into our building. I let myself slow down to a power walk just before I opened the door to our building and bustled through to the planning room. I gave my head a little shake, put the hostage (who didn't really seem like he'd enjoyed the ride at all) down and opened the door.
Weld's face said it all, but man, fuck that guy.
Chapter 37: Delusion Express 4.10
Chapter Text
Sveta: don't treat weldy like that you retard hes been through so much already
I read through her message for the fifth time in the last hour, then inventoried my phone again. I knew that, but what about my problems. Being this awesome wasn't easy, no matter how effortless I made it look, and it didn't help that I was already 'upset' for vague, nondescript reasons.
I hopped along the roof, away from the encroaching rumble of motorcycles, following the new nagging feeling deep in my brain as it led me to the tag I'd put on Mouse Protector. I jogged down a wall and jumped to land next to her, causing her to vanish, the tag nag in my head informing me she went somewhere pretty far away to my right.
"Question," I said, as she teleported back to me, which was ok because there were no windows nearby. "Who was in the wrong here? So yesterday, Bastion gets all up in my grill about something I'd done, like really yelling at me; so I transform into a Latino guy-"
Mouse laughed jeeringly, "that's my boy!"
"And then I give him one of these!"
{Mexican Fiesta.wav}
From what little I could see of her face it looked like Mouse just nutted hard, her knees giving out as great giggles wracked her shoulders. She managed to keep her feet by staggering into a wall and bracing herself against it.
"You know, they told me to give you a lecture on this shit," she gasped, turning her head away to lift her mask and scrub her face with a sleeve. "And whatever it was you did in some stupid group exercise, but don't you ever stop, you precious cinnamon bun."
I grinned at the praise, but I was pretty sure Mouse was trying to double bluff me or something. She was telling me to continue misbehaving, but that was wrong, and surely Mouse couldn't really be telling me to do the wrong thing. Mouse protector was basert et rougepilled, so this had to be a trick to get me to think about this and straighten up and fly right. I could get her condoning making fun of Bastion for saying the Spic word, but not fucking over my homies. MP weren't like that.
I was very smart. God bless my huge INT, but why was Sveta on the list? If my power wanted me to give that bitch my rare armour set as an apology, I fucking would. Even though I hadn't played PROT for ages it was still going to hurt, I'd spent so long getting the whole set via drops with a point zero zero zero something percent drop rate, but if that was what it took to apologise then by god, I would.
"Thanks, Mouse," I grinned again, a pure sunny grin as purpose took a hold of my soul. "Really. I knew I could count on you."
I'd make all the apologies as heartfelt as I could, even the one to Bastion, because even he didn't deserve… I was pretty sure this was what happened, they didn't deserve me being not-awesome to them. That was something that not-awesome heroes did, like Bastion, but even though he was not-awesome it didn't mean I could be not-awesome to him.
I was going to see that Yamada lady Weld recommended soon, I should bring all this up with her.
If there was one problem on never being able to get worse at anything, it was that I couldn't backtrack on realising I was not-awesome too. Fuck you, past me, you deluded faggot, I hope you appreciate this.
"Heh, no problem, kid," Mouse continued because she couldn't read my mind and didn't understand the gravity of what just occurred. "It's also extra funny since I'm pretty sure that Bastion is Jewish."
He was, but I wasn't sure why that made it funny.
I glanced over my shoulder as the sound of bikes grew closer, "do you think they know we're leading them into a trap? I get that they're inbred meth-heads, but even for Fallen goons this is pretty bad."
"Then this will be a learning experience on never underestimating how stupid people like this can be," Mouse bounced herself off the wall and took off up the alleyway, leaving me to lope easily alongside her. "Trust me, laddie, they fall for it hook, line and sinker every god damn time."
I glanced over my shoulder again and shook my head. We were getting close to the area the PRT said they'd meet us when we called in we were being tailed, and it was the most obvious trap area to be led into; from the backstreets into an open space with lots of ambush cover. I was very disappointed with them, how did the Fallen expect to be my nemesis if they were so dumb? Very sad.
We hustled into the ambush site and my Urban Tracking skill automatically pointed out all the very obvious signs that the PRT was here and waiting, signs I apparently should fully expect the Fallen bikies to miss. I internally sighed, and cast Clone.
"I'ma go hide," I said to Mouse who was alternating between scanning the area and trying out poses. "And then you can tell Armstrong you chewed me out and kept me safe."
"Thanks, kid," Mouse ruffled my hair vigorously. "You're a peach."
Heh, I'd rather get me some of that mouse peach, I didn't say.
Miraculously, my mouth stayed shut long enough for me to skedaddle behind some cover whereupon I mumbled the line to myself. Thank god, it sounded terrible out loud. I desperately needed game if I was going to marry Mouse Protector, I had to out-compete all the Chads vying for her coveted hand.
The bikies rolled in like thunder, all leather pants and beards and sad Observe bios giving sob stories as to why they were pulling guns out of holsters to point at a fifteen-year old whose only crime was posting a video on Twitter.
"Can we do this quick? I have a large amount of music to illegally download." My thrown one-liner was sadly drowned out by the hail of gunfire that burst my clone like a pinata. Somehow it took the PRT busting into view for them to realise it was a trap, but bikes didn't work when they were clogged with con-foam.
I bit at my thumbnail, shaking my head to get rid of the gunfire. There were just too many reflective surfaces in this ambush site, seriously, what ambush site needed reflective surfaces? The answer was none, and it would do the PRT good to remember that.
Something suddenly appeared right beside me, carrying my tracker tag, and I screwed up my eyes and balled my fists as I manually resumed breathing.
It was just Mouse Protector.
Just Mouse, and she wasn't a g*rman. I checked.
Being a hero fucking sucked.
"I haven't listened to it yet, just scrolled through the playlist, but some of it looks good. I've heard Oh Woah Godrays are fantastic, though."
Weld mispronounced the name as he prattled on about the pros and cons of my apology gift, but that was fine, his name was checked off the list which meant I did it right.
"But I've never even heard of Paleowave, or Gregorian House, where do you even find this stuff?"
"I have ways," I simpered. "And an enormous amount of free time, which is still driving me insane, by the way."
I was pretty sure that at some point before I took my memory perk and became unable to forget anything even if I wanted to, I was happy to have my life be an MMO grindfest, but now? I didn't want to do any of it, even though it was gonna make me the prime badass one day, I couldn't bear to even have my Total Enhancement spell running at a fraction of a per cent effectiveness at all times to ensure consistent spell experience without outpacing my mana regen. Like, that was basic stuff. Even my resolution to do more pushups while waiting for stuff had fallen by the wayside; all I ever did anymore was wait. Wait for everyone to wake up. Wait for the days to be let outside. Wait for my mandatory schooling hours to be over. Wait for work. Wait for work to be over.
Endless waiting until I could go back home.
Man, fuck Coil. I was going to sucker punch that duck if I ever saw him, sick the Empire on me will he? Fucker better be ready for the storm.
"I know, buddy," Weld leaned consolingly closer as we walked. "I had to explain all that to Armstrong and Bastion, that you didn't mean to hurt anyone, that you're just under a lot of stress, what with the attacks on you and everything, and how your power makes it harder to cope with being cooped up on base all day. It's why you're not in more trouble, but can you just do me a solid on this one? Talk to me. Tell me what's up, because I know you don't like hurting people, even accidentally. So let me know, and I'll try and swing something so you can get out and vent a little stress, ok?"
I guess they never miss, huh? Maybe I was the duck. I felt my Acting skill tell me I was acting like a little bitch right now. Just take the hand, Greg.
"Thanks, man, I just… That's why I'm apologising to everyone, 'cause I feel like a huge faggot," I shrugged. "It's just hard, man. Lotta shit."
Like the end of the world, and I can't even tell you where you're from.
Weld sighed, because I was a government hero and I'd just said the word 'faggot' out loud in a children's hospital.
"And we really appreciate you apologising, just as I would appreciate if you-"
"Kept the language setting appropriate, yes, I know. I only had to do the PR training course a half dozen times. Sorry. My memory is perfect, I don't know why I keep slipping."
"Just try extra hard today, please, the last thing we need is one of these kids recording you dropping the F, C or N-Bombs."
I was about to ask, 'what if they dropped one first?', but bit it back. That was what I was trying to get away from. The old Greg. I wanted his happiness, but none of his faggotry.
"You got it, chief. I owe it to you to not Faberge up today, I'm not that much of a Constable of Nicaragua."
I was ninety-nine per cent sure Weld melted part of his face inside to stop himself from smiling.
"Even thatsh too far," he said like his mouth was full of liquid mercury because I was definitely funny. "Now come on we've gotsh work to do."
We walked into the cancer ward, the most cancerous of wards, and it became pretty obvious where we were supposed to go, what with all the balloons and streamers outlining one door a little down the way.
I cracked my neck sickeningly; time to get this party started right.
{MLG Air horn}
{MLG Air horn}
We strutted into the room of cancerous children-
{MLG Air h-}
{MLG A-}
{MLG Air horn}
-and I announced our arrival.
Weld kicked my foot disapprovingly and took an extra step forward, "hey, I hope we're not late."
I Observed the sea of bald children as the head nurse came and greeted Weld, and yep, they definitely had cancer. Poor chitlins, but, I was certain that one day I could either cure that or cut it out in a five minute surgery. Please wait warmly, children, while I saved the world first.
I gave a sixteen CHA equivalent smile, "and I'm-"
{Dark Smoke Pun-cher!}
{Guitar riff}
"Dark Smoke Puncher, how are we all doing today?"
The assembled children looked astounded, like they couldn't decide whether me being able to make guitar noises was cooler than Weld being metal, but I was cooler, and they had to understand that. A plan unfolded in my mind, it was time.
"Are we ready to have some fun?" I glanced at Weld and the nurse, readying my Disguise spell for any choice, with their ambivalent expressions on the subjects of children and fun. "Who here likes memes, backflips and battle royale games?"
Quest 'Make a wish' complete!
Success: 15 000xp, increased reputation with Weld, increased reputation with the public
"You really nailed that," Weld said, sounding almost insultingly perplexed. "Since when were you good with kids?"
I stretched a bit, loosening my seatbelt, "did you know I haven't juggled in six months?"
"No, why?"
The Boston city scenery crawled by outside the PRT van window, a sea of concrete and meat and dreams. Dreams I'd forgotten because I wasn't being myself, myself.
"Before I joined the Wards, to get away from Coil, I did street performances. That was my thing, my show was 'The Fiendish Dr. Wu and his Kung-Fu trickery'. I'd juggle and blow some smoke and everyone would clap, and then give me money. I had this whole plan of getting famous, and going on shows like Ultimate Cape Warrior, and play Capeball, and host the academy awards, like," I sighed and looked at the floor. "I'd forgotten about all of that, I was so wrapped up in my own hype and the idea of being Triumvirate that I forgot; all I wanted to do was entertain."
"That's great!" Weld jostled his huge metal frame around to face me. "If that's your thing we have tons of resources for it, being a Ward doesn't mean you can't do anything else. Everyone at the top would probably be thrilled to have you do some promo work that gets you a bit further away from combat, god knows you need to, I've never seen a Ward with so many," Weld stopped himself for a moment, then continued in a deliberately delicate voice like I was made of glass. "Attempted murders on them."
I exhaled loudly through my nose, "yeah. I do inspire a lot of murderous rage for some reason. I still want to be Triumvirate though, which means fighting. Can you imagine if Eidolon couldn't kick ass? And anyway, I still need to beat up Armsmaster next week."
"Why do you need to beat up Armsmaster? Isn't he, like, the last person you need to beat up?"
"You'd think, but it's a quest thing. And he's kind of a douche, so, I feel decking him one will be pretty cathartic."
I turned away and hid a gag at the phantom smell of blood, before realising I was looking at a window, so I turned back to Weld only to realise he was basically a walking mirror.
"Pretty cathartic indeed," I smiled blandly and crossed my arms, pressing my fingers into my side, hidden from Weld.
-1
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-3
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-5
Chapter 38: Delusion Express: Interlude: Jessica Yamada: Taylor Hebert
Chapter Text
18th March 2011- Jessica Yamada
"Hi, Jess!" the boy plonked himself down into the chair across from her, looking faintly ridiculous. The contrast between the round, rosy-cheeked smiling face of a young boy with the almost disproportionately muscular body it was sitting on top of made for an odd picture.
"Good morning," she smiled back at him. "Sorry to do this so early in the day, but it was the only slot you could fit into for the next while."
"Hey, no worries, I barely need to sleep anyway, so it's all G."
A recent occurrence, according to the profile she had been given. The boy was a Trump, the kind that grew. The poor thing. Interestingly, she had also heard this from another patient of hers, Sveta. The two were internet friends. Small world.
"Lucky that our schedule's aligned then isn't it… Which name do you prefer, Greg or Dark Smoke Puncher?"
"Call me Greg, Jess, everyone does." Greg gave himself the kind of smile that suggested he was having some kind of private joke over this introduction.
"Greg, then. How are you feeling today, Greg?"
"I'm pretty good, hey, but, uh, did they tell you I was here for? So I know what you want to talk about."
"We can talk about anything you like, this is a judgement free space," Jessica crossed her legs and smoothed out an errant wrinkle in her skirt. "However, we can start from wherever you feel comfortable out of some of your recent troubles."
Greg nodded contemplatively, almost gravely. "I was almost murdered by Gesellschaft after Coil framed me for outing Empire capes because I wouldn't join his gang, so I don't appreciate that."
Jessica pushed down the reflexive urge to disbelieve because something in the way he said it made it sound like a bald-faced lie; despite that, it actually happened.
"And Accord threatened to kill me a while back because Coil told him I'd out all his moles in the PRT, and just the other day some Fallen goons tried to kill me which I really don't deserve. All I did was post some videos about the Simurgh, faggots can't take a joke."
She opened her mouth to respond, but Greg cut her off.
"Also, the world is ending, so I'm pretty bummed about that."
Jessica blinked.
"Because of the Endbringers," Greg continued after a brief pause. "But that's common knowledge."
"I…" Jessica hesitated, scanning his guileless face. "Don't think that's common knowledge. I certainly wouldn't be surprised if it were true, however."
"Well, it's pretty obvious when you have a read through of the files that everything is going to be pretty much over in about twenty years, and I don't like that kind of thing."
"I see," Jessica made a quick note for whoever had the next session with him to ask about his possible tendency to hide his feelings behind a glib facade. "Those are some pretty big worries you have, could you clarify for me though, I'm not aware of who Coil is."
"Oh, right, he's a Brockton local villain. Pretty small time, he's got some mercs and a group called the Undersiders," Greg shook his head, leaning back to settle deeper into his chintz armchair. "So back before I wanted to be a Ward, I did street performances, juggling and shit, it was great. Anyway, so I was there one day doing my thing and one of his Undersiders, Tattletale, walks up and hands me a fresh hundy. Which, y'know, great, except she works for Coil and tries to get me to join him; so I hightail it out of there and sign up to be a Ward so he can't merc me. Only then I find out he has some moles in the PRT, so I help Armsmaster get them arrested, and I guess he took exception to that? So anyway, that's Coil and his beef with me, he totally overreacted in trying to have me killed."
"I definitely understand why you don't appreciate that, I've never enjoyed when someone petty has kept a grudge against me even though I was doing the right thing. You've brought Coil up several times so far, is he the largest of your worries?"
"No, that would be the end of the world," Greg gave her a funny little look. "He's just some tard with a tard-on for getting rid of me. But, I get what you mean, end of the world is too big, how about: I'm pretty much on house arrest to keep me safe, and I've run out of shit to do, and this makes me stir crazy."
"We absolutely can talk about the world ending, none of your problems are too big to talk about here."
"Nah, it's not like there's anything more to say about it. Worlds ending, it sucks, like what can you even say to that besides, 'yeah, it totally does'?"
Jessica flinched as her voice suddenly came out of Greg's mouth, she'd heard hours of recordings of herself, and she couldn't discern any difference. Greg made a slightly apologetic face and continued.
"I'm going back to Brockton for the day to see Armsmaster soon, so I'll bring it up with him. He's doing this early Endbringer warning system thing with Dragon, so I bet he knows."
"That's a good step to take, just remember that you needn't worry about sharing anything with me, or one of my colleagues, because you feel the problem might be too much for us. Sometimes, even just saying it out loud can help."
"Well that was my biggest problem," Greg grinned. "And I already told you about how I don't like that people keep trying to kill me, so, um… I want to marry Mouse Protector, but I think she's kind of crazy. Like, bad crazy, but she's so cool, have you met her?"
"I haven't, but I feel like I should point out that it would be illegal to engage in that sort of relationship with Mouse Protector."
"Yeah," Greg drawled, rolling his eyes around the room. "That's what my dad said about Miss Militia when I told them I wanted to marry her."
Jessica made a note about a potential likeliness to form unachievable romantic attachments to avoid having to deal with following through.
"Well, it sounds like he has his head on straight. I understand your parents are still in Brockton Bay, do you see them often?"
"Not really, which kinda sucks. But they face-time me all the time, so I know they're doing ok, and I'll see them again in, like, a few days anyway," Greg kicked his feet up and a plush footstool appeared from nowhere to receive them. "But that's just how it's gotta be, and honestly I much prefer this to being in Coil's fiddle basement being beaten by hobos with rusty pipes for physical resist levels."
"Are you worried that Coil will try to kidnap you?"
"Well, not really. But I've seen a picture of the guy, he's got this stupid morph suit looking thing with a snake on it, and you can't tell me a guy who dresses like that isn't a weird fucker; probably into shit like tile patterns. Real worry though is him kidnapping my parents, because with Tattletale he made her an offer she couldn't refuse," Greg mimed holding a gun sideways, gangster style. "But Emily promised they'd be safe."
"Emily?"
"Director Piggot," Greg rolled his eyes. "But that sounds way too formal. Do you think that when I graduate to the Protectorate I'll have to call her that?"
"Probably, the PRT is a government institution in the same vein as the police, and the chain of command is important to keep so that things can keep running smoothly. But I'm sure you could still address her as Emily outside of work, you needn't remain in your work mindset all the time, downtime is important," Jessica tapped her pen thoughtfully against her notebook. "You mentioned earlier you felt a little stir-crazy, how have you been spending your downtime?"
Greg breathed out heavily, vibrating his lips. "With how my power works, I have to practice for each individual power to get stronger, and every time they do I have to work harder to get the next improvement; so that takes up a lot of my time. Or it used to, I think I'm getting a bit burnt out on that. I spend a lot of time just on the net, on forums and shit, uh, I used to play a lot of video games and watch a lot of anime. Sometimes I'll work on college course work, but it's barely any harder than high-school so I just cram everything into the night before the assignments are due and still get top marks. I don't really do a lot else, just hang around."
"Have you considered a creative hobby?" Jessica wrote 'depressed?' on her notepad. "Like writing, or drawing? Perhaps joining a social club?"
"I've sometimes thought about making internet parodies."
"That sounds like it could be interesting, what would it entail?"
"Well, for some of the ideas I've had, you take a show, edit and dub over it in such a way that its a parody of the original; but, like, ironically shit and full of memes."
"I don't quite understand, but it sounds like a fun creative pursuit."
Greg leant forward, the footstool vanishing as he smoothly stood up, a smartphone appearing in his hand. "I'll show you," he said, typing rapidly before shoving it in front of her face.
She watched blandly as poorly voice acted cartoon characters shouted nonsensically at each other while things caught fire for no reason.
"It's funny, right?" Greg's grin widened at each 'punchline' until it threatened to split his face.
"It's not to my taste, but there is clearly an audience for it if these are already being made. Earlier, you copied my voice, can you do that with other voices?"
The phone vanished back into non-existence as Greg returned to his chair, "any voice I can imagine, like how about my 'space alien whose voice translator is stuck on five-year-old girl but she's a southern trucker mode and all he wants to do is probe terrestrial life' voice?"
She wanted to tell him that was disturbing, and that he should never do it again, but professionalism prevailed.
"That was spot on, if this was a phone call I would have thought someone else was in the room. I don't think you'll have any trouble making these parody videos of yours, if anything you'll have the advantage by being able to play the whole cast yourself."
"And do the sound effects!"
Jessica flinched as glass shattered, a bomb went off, someone screamed and tribal drums briefly played in quick succession, loudly and from Greg.
"Sorry," said Greg. "That spell always defaults to max loudness. But that reminds me of some things you can help me with. So, usually I can't cast two spells at once, but I did it once and now I can't figure out how to get it to work again."
"I've had others tell me that, in moments of great stress, or when they feel trapped and helpless, their power increases. Did this happen during the incident with Gesellschaft you mentioned?"
"No, it was the other day in a training thing, I didn't even think about it until after that about how weird it was that I just had two spells going at once."
"That's fairly consistent with what I've heard, it all happens in the moment and doesn't become apparent until afterwards. Would you like to talk about the training exercise?"
"Sure."
"I understand you got a minor disciplinary strike on your record, this isn't meant to sound accusatory. How do you feel about that?"
"Oh, I deserved it," Greg said, airily, waving a dismissive hand. "It was a teamwork thing, not a Greg do this yourself thing; even though I totally nailed it. It was actually pretty awesome, even though I did accidentally hurt a guy but he was fine when I went to go apologise the other day. Quick question, when Dauntless and I are in the Triumvirate do you think they'll rename it to the Pentumvirate?"
"I don't think they will, brand recognition is important. Again, this isn't meant to be an accusation, would you like to tell me how it happened? That you accidentally hurt that man?"
"He was guarding a door I had to go through," Greg's shoulders made a minute, uncomfortable shuffle. "My Brute Strength is still a bit new sometimes, so when I shoved him he fell a few degrees earlier than I calculated and landed just on the wrong part of his shoulder; but he's fine now."
Jessica nodded understandingly, should she try and push this a little further? It seemed to be going almost unrealistically well so far, considering underage parahumans, but pushing too hard in a first session could irrevocably damage his trust in sessions to come.
"I did also want to talk about that," Greg mumbled, surprising her, voice wavering from smooth and deep to something a little nasalier and grating. "I was a bit grumpy that day, and the guy didn't deserve that and I feel like a huge tard. And then with Bastion a few days ago, he was being an aggro douche to me, so I start mocking him for ruining his career by being racist in public, and like, just because he's an asswipe doesn't mean I should be one back, right?"
"It's never nice when someone takes their frustrations out on you, and particularly upsetting when you're wholly undeserving. It was the right thing to do to make amends for accidentally hurting someone due to your bad mood, it was very big of you. While it's understandable to fire back when someone is aggressively getting on your case it's important to remember there are better ways to resolve conflict. If you like, I can arm you with some tools for when a situation like that occurs again?"
"That would probably be useful for another situation I have," Greg said glibly. "So I have this friend back home, and I kinda sorta accidentally caused her trigger event."
Jessica blinked in shock for a moment, wondering how on earth you could accidentally do that, before her brain kicked into high gear. "Was it a straw that broke the camel's back scenario?"
"Yes!" Greg clicked, shooting her a finger gun. "I completely underestimated how much she hated this other girl, so when I try prank her with my voice acting she flips out. Now she hates me and I'm pretty sure she thinks I'm a Nazi, which is hella ironic, so I need to find a way to not have her try kill me when I say hi next. Which is probably going to happen, 'coz there's this new cape I was reading about on the Brockton threads who fits her profile, except I never really took her for the violent vigilante type, and I'm kinda worried she's going to get herself killed."
"This is quite serious."
"I know! Can you imagine her shock when she finds out I'm actually Dark Smoke Puncher?" Greg shook his head sadly. "Anyway, can you write me up a script to use when I see her next?"
"I can't write you a script," Jessica's mouth creased at the thought. "What I can do is talk you through some modes of thought you can use to come up with the most suitable answers."
"Yeah, ok," Greg shrugged, kicking his feet up onto the reappearing footstool. "I guess that works too."
Jessica watched as Greg strutted from her office, a sudden draining tiredness coming over her. It had seemed like an almost impossibly good first session, he was forthcoming with information on whatever she asked, despite not going too deeply into things, (like how he was actually dealing with his problems,) and yet she couldn't shake the feeling that this hadn't helped him in the slightest.
19th March 2011- Taylor Hebert
"Daddy, no!"
The roidmonkey skinhead whimpered, tears tracking over his iron cross facial tattoos as he cringed into the filth of the alley's concrete ground. Taylor crouched across from him, the ragged ribbon-like ends of her trench coat coiling in the muck as the anguish of the city throbbed in tune with her heartbeat.
"I'll be a good boy," the man wheezed, nearly broken, ready to be rebuilt.
She raised her cigarette and worked it through the crooked mouth hole of her mask, inhaling deeply. All you have to do is tell me where he is, she thought, imbuing the command into her power. The man ground his face into the concrete, skinning his head, tormented by the phantoms of his mind.
"I don't know," he whispered. "I don't know, I don't know him. I haven't heard anything, I swear to God!"
Swear to me.
"I swear, father! I don't know!"
Taylor exhaled, staring down at the man dispassionately, bathing him in smoke. He was probably telling the truth. She left him there, grovelling in the muck. Under her heel, where he should be.
She walked long enough to finish her cigarette, flicking the smouldering butt onto the road. She needed new leads, leads who weren't the stereotypical thug. Their kind wasn't told anything.
Her tongue snaked out, tasting the fear. One was flying through her range at terrifying speeds, but it wasn't a new fear. Dauntless. Not the most complex man. Now Armsmaster, she licked her lips, now there was a guy. A second set of worries burst into her mind, new ones this time, she glanced skyward at the shooting star chasing the trails of sparks.
Purity? She revelled in the tumultuous stew of the woman's heart, opening her up. Clawing her way into the darkest corners of her soul. Loved ones, and control. Things she wanted to keep, things she'd kill to keep. Taylor raised her hand to her mouth and licked the pad of her thumb. Despicable.
Purity toppled out of the air, her light flickering until she caught herself and hovered. Even from this distance, Taylor could feel her cry. There was a blast, so bright it left spots in her eyes, a beam that scythed into the night sky and severed the cloud cover. And then Purity turned tail and left, skin crawling at the thought of Kaiser.
Hey, Taylor thought, maybe they'd kill each other?
She almost chuckled at the thought as she flagged Dauntless. One sad limitation of her power was that she couldn't talk to someone though it. She felt him draw closer, following the hallucinations, and he soon landed in front of her all shiny and brave, a golden centurion out to save the day.
"Scarecrow," he said, measuredly lowering his Arclance to point almost at the ground while looking somewhere off to Taylor's left where he thought she was. "Was that your work just now?"
You're welcome.
"Yes, thank you-"
I'd like an update.
Dauntless sighed a sigh that would be inaudible if Taylor was where he thought she was. "We still haven't heard of whoever it is you're after. As far as we know, no such person exists."
Have you tried trying harder?
"If he's out there, Scarecrow, he hasn't shown up on any radar. The Empire has a big turnover rate, he's probably not even in the city anymore."
He's here, and I will find him.
Dauntless sighed for real this time, marching up to my hallucination. "Come down to the Rig, it's not safe for you to be out here like this. They're going to kill you."
He grabbed but came up with air, and Taylor was already leaving.
"Scarecrow!" he shouted hoarsely, moving about behind her, trying to Marco Polo his way into catching her. Her. Catch her? Never.
Taylor didn't have time to join the Wards, she had a city to save.
Chapter 39: You Say Run goes with everything 5.1
Chapter Text
It was the things I couldn't say. I just couldn't get myself to tell her, and that in itself spoke volumes. I, Gregory Veder, had a problem.
I turned to look at my reflection in the shop window, holding my own gaze for a moment before pitifully turning away. I'd deal with that one later.
"Yeah, but is she hot though?" Tyrone asked as we swaggered through the Boston main street like we owned the place.
"Are you into freckly, six out of ten nerds?"
"Are we talking a hard six?"
I made a fifty fifty gesture, "maybe a six and a half, I totally would. You should see her sister though, literally a ten. Maybe more… imagine."
"I know," Tyrone said. "I follow her Twitter, plus I've seen that cape upskirt collection site. Those bike shorts, bro."
"Yeah, boi!" I had always known Tyrone was secretly a man of integrity and culture, like myself. "You should see her up close, she's got this power that makes her seem even hotter. Kind of a shame it'll eventually stop working on me."
"What about Narwhal? I wouldn't even care if she left the horn on."
"The amazon look isn't really my thing-"
"Ha, gay!"
I scoffed, "the height difference would be super awkward, she's like, eight feet tall."
"Perfect height," Tyrone mimed grabbing boobs at eye level and rubbing his face in them. "You're just too gay to understand."
"At least I'm not a furry, is that why you're into Narwhal, she'll dress up as an animal for you?"
"Hell yeah I'm furry for Narwhal!"
I shook my head disbelievingly as we stepped into the bookshop, it was kinda admirable to go for Narwhal instead of a more conventional, and better, choice, like Mouse Protector who was a normal height and had no horn.
"So what kind of book are you getting her?"
"Some kind of self help book," I replied as we meandered through the shelves. "With a card that says something like, 'dear niggertron: unfuck yourself love: greg'. You probably wouldn't think so, but she's kind of a grouchy bitch. So hopefully this'll help her lighten up some."
God, I loved that grouchy bitch. Plus I kind of owed her an enormous amount of favours, so this would go a little of the way into chipping away at that mountain.
"Yeah, I can see it," Tyrone flipped idly through some vegan cookbook. "Slaving away in the hospital all day."
"To be honest, she doesn't work that hard," I said, running my finger along the spines to see what triggered as a skillbook. I probably wasn't going to buy any for myself, but it might be useful to know what I could do if I wanted. Sure, in a perfect world I'd have had the Protectorate buy me hundreds of skillbooks so that I could be even better at everything than I already was, but then I'd have to deal with leveling hundreds of skills. Still, definitely one day.
Tyrone shrugged and swapped his vegan book for a Keto diet one.
My fingers lingered over How to Win Friends and Influence People, bringing up a memory of Colin giving me his treasured copy that I'd never read. I guess it was pretty obvious from the outside.
I started getting a weird feeling like I should probably buy one of these books for myself too. It was a cutting revelation, on par with that time I learned what I'd been feeling all along was shame, that I was cracked. I couldn't say that to Jess, I'd wanted to, and she would have done her absolute best to help me, but I just couldn't; not even for the quest xp. I didn't want to admit it. It was why decking Colin was going to be cathartic, this was partly his fault.
I let Acting activate, as I literally faked not crying so hard it became reality.
"What do you think?" I asked, holding up Awaken the Hero Within. "Would this turn you into a powerhouse of a human?"
Tyrone reached over and grabbled it out of my hand, scanning the blurb. "Sure, should I buy a copy for myself? These books work, right? They wouldn't sell them otherwise."
That logic definitely checked out.
"Why not?" I snagged the book back and spun it on my fingertip, corner first. "It's not like you have anything to spend your pay-cheque on besides Magic cards."
"You don't understand because you kicked the habit, Tyrone needs his booster packs."
"Maybe you can tape a bunch of them to your feet so you can be tall enough for Narwhal."
Tyrone chuckled and started picking over the self help shelves, pulling out books at random and flipping through them. If I was being honest, he probably didn't need them.
I stopped spinning the book, suddenly overcome with an urge to pretend to put it back on the shelf but instead Inventory it. Did I just not want to be seen buying it because self help books were low status? It's not like I ever wanted to shoplift before.
I sank into a crouch, pretending to peruse the bottom row to hide the fact that my legs didn't feel like working. Why did it hurt so much? Was this what everyone with an average WIS score felt like all the time? Surely Observe would have told me if almost everyone was like this, because there was no way this was normal.
Jess was more perceptive than I thought, seeing through my acting. Luckily for me I could read what someone was writing just by the movements of the pen alone otherwise I wouldn't have even considered that I could even possibly be depressed. The thought was kinda surreal.
It was also kinda surreal she thought I wanted to marry Mouse Protector because I would never have to follow through with it, rather than just that Victoria was already dating Dean. The memory brought back a decision I'd made back then, that Menma wouldn't start relationship shit-fights, and he also wouldn't wallow in self pity. Well, not that often anyway.
I stood up. I was a problem solver. This weird emotional roller coaster I was going through was just another problem to solve, and the first step in my twelve step plan was punching Armsmaster in his stupid face.
A book caught my gaze, and I put a finger on the spine, reading through the pop-up. Hmm, I wonder what that would do.
Chapter 40: You Say Run goes with everything 5.2
Chapter Text
Today was the big day, Colin was going to get it. I was pretty prepared, my DEX was still going to be higher than his even if he was going to be stronger, I had some trump cards hidden up my sleeve and he had to go easy on me since I was a Ward.
I savoured the nostalgic feeling as my ride pulled up in the Rig's parking garage, the familiar layout I hadn't seen in over a month. The black SUV rumbled to a stop. I thanked my driver and got out, relishing the slight sway and fresh sea air of the Rig; even if everyone in Boston was cooler the Rig was cooler than their offices by far.
I let my eyes sweep over the array of high power bikes that those without mover powers took when patrolling the further regions of the city. One day I would have one of my own the second I was sixteen. The hair on my arms raised as I thought about how awesome my bike would be when I gave it the works with a leveled up Mechanics skill, I didn't even know what that could do or look like but I knew it would be fucking awesome.
And standing next to the bikes, next to his bike reading a magazine, Armsmaster. He hadn't looked up, too absorbed in his copy of Toybox's promotional catalogue to notice I'd been dropped off.
I opened my mouth to call out but the words died on my tongue- that wasn't his normal armour. My fingers tapped a nervous rhythm as I glid through the car-park, I had gravely underestimated his willingness to punch a kid in the face.
"Hey Armsy, should I be flattered you're using your Endbringer spec armour?"
He looked up, flicking his magazine closed with one hand. "Yes. But, Leviathan is next in the rotation, if this suit can't stand up to you then there is no chance in hell I can use it against him, and this is the latest I can run this test due to the expense and rarity of the parts if they get damaged. And keep this to yourself," he took a step forward, leaning in and lowering his voice. "I have something that will kill it."
Was that, like, a threat or my power telling me my Kill an Endbringer quest would be over this soon?
"On that note, do you know about the world ending?" I asked, equally quietly.
Armsmaster paused, that kind of millisecond pause you get when someone drops a bit of sensitive information you didn't think they knew and you have no time to decide if you should play it cool or not.
"Who have you been talking to?"
I shook my head, "I read through everything I could on the Endbringers after the Simurgh, the dots weren't hard to connect. Five more big wins, and society collapses."
"Two, actually," Armsmaster said tersely, magazine crumpling in his mechanical fist. "Or three. Never say this out loud again to anyone who isn't in the know, I know you don't understand even one iota of how serious this is, but for once you must keep your mouth shut."
I hunched my shoulders as my face burned. I did understand. I'd changed, I wasn't that Greg anymore. I was Greg Part Two: Greg Shippuden; couldn't he see that?
"If this gets out everything we've worked so hard to keep will be lost in the ensuing panic. That's the answer we've gotten from our pre-cogs every time we asked, so for the love of god…" Armsmaster trailed off, holding my gaze imploringly.
"I wasn't going to! You have your warning thing with Dragon so you had to have known, it's just been freaking me out."
Armsmaster's voice, though still terse, softened. "It was a hard pill for me to swallow too, but you can't talk about it, not even to the director. I'm only aware of perhaps ten people who know, and you're unlikely to have a chance to speak to them any time soon. Though you could expect a call from Alexandria in a few years when you graduate, we were going to send you to her initially instead of to Boston and she seemed interested in a power that would only get stronger."
"Yes, I get it," I said mulishly. "Mouth shut, head down."
He paused again, contemplatively this time, head cocked slightly to the side. "We'll discuss it later, but for now we've got some things to do. Come on."
Yeah, things like feeding your your own arse, bitch; I didn't say as I followed him out of the car park. Treat me like an idiot will he? Well I was the new Greg, and the new Greg didn't have to put up with that. I brooded on all the ways I would make fantastically cutting comebacks to things he often said, like:
[Hello, I'm Armsmaster]
[More like Assmaster! Faggot!]
Heh, yeah. That'd show him.
"There was also something I wanted to talk to you about," he said in an uncharacteristically conversational tone as we walked. "Have you ever met a cape by the name of Scarecrow?"
Oh? Taylor, probably, but… oh. Right.
"Technically no, but I know who she is."
"I thought so, she had our sketch artist draw up a very familiar face, claiming he was a Nazi cape. What could you possibly have done to make her tear her way through the lower ranks of the Empire to find you?"
"I, er, may have accidentally caused her trigger event-"
Colin made a sound that may have been either exasperation or pity.
"It was an accident! I guess I was kinda mad at her because she never wanted to be friends with me, but all I did was spook her once with my voice acting as a joke."
"So you assaulted this poor girl with a parahuman power, and now she wants to kill you." Colin looked at me, shaking his head. "How do you get yourself into these messes?"
It wasn't assault! It wasn't! I wouldn't…
"Some people can't take a joke," I said with an airy wave of my hand that banished my tears into non existence; how did people with above ten WIS live like this? "Like those Fallen putzes, worst murder attempt I ever had."
"Have you tried being less annoying?"
[Have you tried being less gay?]
But I didn't say anything like that, I didn't think my Acting was good enough for me to without bursting into tears.
"Sorry," said Colin after a moment. "I was trying to joke around, I didn't mean to upset you."
When I didn't respond he continued.
"I can fully appreciate the stress you're under, my door is always open. Or I can recommend someone. It's not good to keep it in every time someone tries to kill you, I should know."
We walked on in silence, or I did, naturally not making a single rustle as I walked nor did my shoes squeak or tap. In contrast, Armsmaster clanked and whirred so you knew he was coming like a big metal idiot. I bet no one ever tried to kill him when he was fifteen, he didn't know what he was talking about. I lost myself in rumination about how hard done by I was, and how much Colin sucked, and when I zoned back in I realised that I could see the edge of a banner peeking out from the sliver of the room I could see ahead of us, with the two letters I could make out being E and G. So a Welcome Back Greg surprise party or something? That was… everything I'd ever wanted.
I surged forward, more of the sign revealing itself to me… Happy Retirement Greg! (Old Greg, the day janitor who had just had his retirement party and they hadn't taken the banner down, according to Observe.) along with a row of smiling faces, except for Dean who looked appropriately horrified at this shabby display, and Brad who was absent.
"Surprise," said Armsmaster.
I dug deep into the well of prowess my power provided, "I didn't expect this at all! Thank you so much, how have you all been doing?"
Where was my party you animals!
They gave a chorus of 'yeah, goods', and 'okays', except for Chris who stepped up to give me a fist-bump with his shiny new power-fist. Observe told me it was somewhere between one and a half to twice as powerful, and fisty, as the last time we met.
"Armour's looking great, bro," I turned the fist bump into a bro-hug. "Finally been hitting your stride?"
"It's all just started clicking!" he leant back and, pressing against something on his chest, popped out a segment of armour. "So much easier when I don't have to make a whole thing, just a hundred things that happen to connect. How's Boston been?"
"Good, mostly," I grinned as he plugged his main kinetic distributor back into his chest slot. "Got to stop some of Blasto's monsters with Weld, who's cool as shit by the way you should meet Weld, made some viral videos about the Simurgh that made the Fallen hate me, finally met someone who plays Magic, Reynard is also a baller; good times. Anything happen since I've been gone?"
"Some new cape thinks you're E Eighty Eight, and Lung might've just gotten a bomb Tinker, so…" he trailed off significantly.
"Bad news all round, eh?," I clicked my tongue, shaking my head. "Anyone got any good news?"
Vista shrugged.
"Cool," I said, which preceded an awkward silence. "Gimmie a sec, I need to go make a call."
I swaggered away, a single tear running down my face as my back turned. I inventoried the traitorous droplet and took out my phone, hitting One on speed dial. It rang four times before being picked up.
"Hello?"
"Amy!" I crowed. "I'm in town, come down to the Rig."
"Greg, hey. I'm, uh, pretty busy at the moment so I can't make it."
"Oof, sounds serious, but stop being lazy and get over here."
"I really can't, remember that thing I promised you on Simurgh day? I'm in the critical testing stages and can't leave."
I snorted, she was obviously tripping balls.
"Say no more, Big P. I'll be back again eventually, so I'll call you then. Say hi to Vicky for me."
Amy sighed a long suffering sigh that I could still hear a smile in, "OK, I will. Talk to you later. Bye."
God damn it. God fucking damn it.
I inventoried my phone and walked back over to the group, sidling up to Dean who still looked upset at the lack of any and all welcome back party snacks.
"Could you do me a huge favour?" I asked. "Next time you go over to see Victoria, could you give this to Amy?"
I presented him with her present, neatly wrapped up in shiny pink paper and he grimaced at it sickly.
"Yeah, man, of course I can. Of course," he took the present off me and stood around awkwardly because he was an empath, Greg. He wasn't freaked out because this was a shit welcome, and you knew that.
"Thanks, Dean," I flashed him a literally twinkling smile. "I was going to mail it, but I was already here and you're the perfect courier."
"It's no problem, really."
"Cool, so what've you been up to?"
"Not a whole lot," Dean's face scrunched up like he wanted to ask me why I looked like I was dying inside. "My dad keeps trying to get me involved in his company, but I don't know if I want to work there."
"What? No," I said sarcastically. "Just let your rich dad give you a job working in the mail room for a few months before you get that big corner office."
"Come on, you know that's exactly why I don't want it," he said painedly.
I did know that.
"The real reason you shouldn't want it is the incredibly restrictive legislature designed to keep good hardworking Rogues under the boot of the Government, instead of out there providing superior goods and services, which you as a parahuman using your powers to even peripherally advantage your business deals will be subject to. You may as well just do it all illegally."
"Is that your official stance as a civil servant?"
"Obviously," I said. "I'm going to tweet that later."
Dean grimaced and bit at his thumbnail, obviously working up to asking uncomfortable questions I wanted nothing to do with.
"Vista!" I shouted. "What do you think about using your powers to run a business illegally as a vigilante?"
Vista looked up from whatever she was looking at on her phone, and shrugged. Fucking zoomers. And now I had to find another way to avoid Dean bringing up my great internal pain.
"Hey Dennis! I want to train my paralysis resist, hit me with a clock block!"
A cold sort of heaviness began to settle into my limbs as I followed Armsmaster to The Pit. The Fight Pit. The Pit where I would Fight Armsmaster. And by Pit I meant the same well lit, padded room in which I sparred with Gerome.
"Would it have killed you to wear your regular armour?"
"Don't whine, my other suit mightn't have been enough of a challenge for your quest system to flag it. You're going to earn this, it'll be something you can truly feel proud of tomorrow," Armsmaster looked over his shoulder as we walked across the mats. "I'm taking you seriously in this fight, so don't beat yourself up about it."
My knees wobbled as he turned to face me, Halberd held loosely in his hand. Was he always this scary?
"You call it when you're good to go."
I set my jaw and put on my Armsbeard, "OK. I'm ready."
-32
I retched, stumbling, Shielding, as my lungs tried to escape out my mouth. I couldn't breathe. Was this why everyone else wore armour? Oh god.
I staggered away as fast as I could and almost immediately crashed into a wall.
"Keep moving!" Armsmaster barked. "You're not taking this seriously, you should have dodged that!"
My lungs unstuck with a feeling like I was doused in ice water, and he was right. Halberd ball flail to the gut was a classic Armsmaster opener. I moved in and started cautiously circling at what would normally be someone else's sprint speed, and this time I saw it, the minute tightening of his gauntlet before the ball launched itself at me. I leant out of the way and charged, jinkering left sharply as the light reflecting off the wire tethering the ball to the haft changed, indicating it was retracting at my head. The ball flew past me in my last step before him, and he used the momentum of its reattaching to help swing the butt of the halberd at my face.
Lightning screeched in my hand as I chopped out, far too fast for Armsmaster to react, and took the bottom eight inches of Halberd off like I was chopping through air. The red hot cut end of the halberd missed my face by milimeters as I closed the distance further, but Armsmaster span on the spot, bringing his other elbow around. It crunched into the meat of my forearm as I managed to get my guard up just in time, and stuck there as I hammered his side with punches from my free hand, using our attached arms as leverage every time he tried to turn and counter.
But it wasn't fucking doing anything! And now my hand hurt. Fucking armour! I slapped him with a Shocking Grasp, to shockingly little effect because he resisted it somehow. I tried blinding him, and deafening, which didn't get past the sensory dampening in his helmet judging by his complete lack of reaction.
A movement at ground level caught in my peripherals and I disengaged before his stomp could shatter my knee, then lashed out with a kick of my own, the ball of my foot catching him right in the jaw; it felt like I was kicking Weld.
Fucking Christ. I was still faster but his god damn armour could take more punishment than I could dish out with a bare fist, and I didn't really want to put my whole hand through his chest.
His Halberd whipped out, missing by a mile as I dempsy rolled and reengaged, my outstretched fingers brushing his face. In an instant a Shackle covered his entire head in ghostly blue steel, binding its movement down to his neck. He moved to rip it off, but I blitzed in with more Shackles, each barely lasting but managing to slow him down-
I flung myself back to avoid the blue/white light bursting from his chestplate, pushing out from him in a sphere, flinging shards of Shackle away as they broke.
He copied my spell? But…
I snarled and lashed out at his Halberd, twelve inch knife appearing in my hand, spitting sparks, and it… froze. As he let go of it, it froze in mid air. My knife, my enhanced electro cutting knife, bounced off the shaft. I stared as he used the frozen Halberd as a vault, and kicked me in the chest with a size fourteen steel boot-
-3
-a grazing shot as I twisted out of the way. I lashed out with the knife again, cutting a long, deep gouge in his suits back.
Ok, so if I was willing, I could pretty easily put one through the whole thing. And if he was willing, that first flail ball would have been the harpoon he used to spear Cymatic. Fuck.
The knife vanished into dust and I set about him with my fists again, mashing my knuckles raw against his armour. He matched me with a flurry of strikes of his own, and soon I began to notice he was keeping up with me. Or rather, he was always there early. No matter what combination of attacks I threw he knew it was coming because of his god damn prediction software. He was slowly but surely pushing me back.
I wasn't going to win… I had to change tactics. Do something new, he couldn't predict. I leapt backward-
Clear oily liquid sprayed from my hands as Armsmaster charged, coating the floor in front of him just as he stepped. He slipped, unable to check his momentum, but his suit locked up and he slid across the puddle like an ice skater.
I grit my teeth and kept skipping backward.
More liquid, right on his feet this time, and he stopped moving, jolting where his right foot was glued to the ground. Armsmaster crouched on one leg and jumped, as miniature jet engines burst out of his hips, flaring like crazy, giving him enough thrust to break free and continue his undaunted charge.
I whipped my hands in front of me, weaving a net of shimmering blue thread. I balled my fists, the threads coming out of my fingertips responding and closing around Armsmaster. I exhaled and cast an overcharged Shocking Grasp, my control over the threads lasting long enough for the sparks to race down and cause a milliseconds long seizing in his armour that did nothing to stop him.
I continued to back up, up the wall and across the ceiling, out of his reach.
My feet unstuck from the roof as I kicked off, hurling a mine shaped blue lump with each hand. Both missed, but that was the plan.
I landed, bringing my hands up in guard as one of the explosives picked itself up off the ground and hurled itself at Armsmaster's back. The fucker causally leant out of the way and I mirrored his movement to avoid the mine, bringing my left leg up into a butterfly kick that he rolled under. The second mine whipped through the air in an arc, homing in on him and he fucking Kung Fu Panda Inner Peaced it away.
The mine belatedly exploded with a mournful Bang, scorching a big section of floor and shaking the air.
I was almost out of mana. I had one last try.
I took a deep breath, the cloying stench of spilled blood in my nose. Time for meatgrinder hours.
I ran, pushed myself into a sprint until I hit as fast as I could go. I hit the wall at an angle and pushed off, heading for the furthest point away from him as I could. I hit the wall again, running across it to conserve momentum before rounding on Armsmaster. My arms and legs pumped in unison, a steam engine of meat, and I poured half my remaining mana into enhancing my movement speed in the last two steps. With the rest-
I burst forward, slamming into Armsmaster with a wild hay-maker at nearly two hundred kilometers per hour with a grinding metallic crunch. His chest-plate creaked alarmingly as he was blasted back, bouncing across the floor once before slamming into the wall and landing in a heap.
"Take that, you fucking shithead!" I screamed, my voice cracking for the first time in months, a feverish grin spreading across my face.
"Good."
Armsmaster's voice cut through my harsh panting like a knife. He effortlessly kipped up to his feet, mechanically smooth, and strode back over to me.
"This level of effort is what I expected from the start, you won't beat me by half assing this. I'm Armsmaster, Greg, you were never going to beat me with six months practice and a lazy attitude. Now, come at me again."
"I'm," I grit my teeth and glared at the ground. "Out of mana."
"Very well. It still takes one hundred minutes for it to replenish? Meet me back here then, we'll do this as many times as it takes," he clapped me on the shoulder and walked off. "That last move caught me completely by surprise, it was genuinely well executed, however, the same trick won't work twice."
I watched him go, panting through clenched teeth. If it was effort he wanted, it was effort he was going to get.
The floor exploded underneath Armsmaster, sending him stumbling back. The floor exploded under his feet again and I ran, speed boosted, and leapt into a six meter back kick that rocked his head back. I put a foot on his replacement halberd, using his retaliatory swing to get some distance.
His left boot landed on another of my Exploding Tags, and with a mental magical flare, up it went in a gout of flame and force. That'd teach him to leave me unsupervised. I juggled him for five more tags before he got solid footing and whacked me out of my next jumping kick with the ball end of his halberd.
I managed to get my arm guards in the way, letting me get away with some bruising as the reinforced polymer crunched into my muscle, instead of broken Ulna. I landed, spry, and skipped back over my mine field while Armsmaster somehow managed to perfectly retrace his steps literally anywhere but on a tag because of his god damn combat software.
I pulled one of my mine shaped Explosives from where it was hidden, and his god damn Echolocation must have tipped him off, because he dodged; but that trick wasn't going to work twice. The mine exploded, right next to his head, a microsecond before that fucking stolen shield trick expanded, protecting him completely.
I ground my teeth, setting up that minefield of tags had been costly mana wise, so I was nearly tapped out. Granted, there were more, but I wanted to save them. And I couldn't get in close because his algorithm had my number, and that halberd had unbeatable reach because I was a god damn dagger speccing retard. Fuck me, why did I not take advantage of that five percent polearm bonus!?
I side stepped as he fired his flail at me, my hand lashing out through the wire with a screech of lightning, the ball cracking against the far wall moments later.
"Suck shit, fuckface!" I cackled. "Gut shot me again, I dare ya!"
He huffed, his faceplate rendering the petulance tinny and commanding, and started to say something but I was already running full pelt toward him, jumping, one arm cocked back.
He swung at my face, but by [Grace] I dipped in mid air, twisting impossibly under his knockout blow and catching him right in the sternum with a magic punch that sent him off his feet and up about two meters. I was on him before he hit the ground, left hand stuck to his shoulder while my right rained down punch after punch into his stupid helmet face.
My teeth clenched so hard it hurt, spittle flying from my lips with each breath, blood smearing on his faceplate as it began to warm under my knuckles.
Then we were moving, up, flipping, as his hip rockets span us in place with him now on top. He locked me in a bearhug and squeezed the breath out of me. I strained, resisted for as long as I could, but he was too strong. I cast a desperate shield, but all it did was scrape his armour paintless.
"Tap!" I gasped, flailing my hands against him. "Tap!"
He dropped me and fell back into a crouch, surveying me silently for a moment.
"The traps were a good move, even as a distraction. See you in a hundred minutes."
He walked off to grab his flail ball before vamoosing.
I put my head between my knees and just cried.
And it went on like this for a while.
I blocked, a smaller, more controlled version of the megaton punch sending Armsmaster's punch swinging wildly out to the right until his actuators compensated for the movement, but by then it was too late. I moved in, blocking his knee with my own, knocking it aside as I tapped his chin with another watered down megaton punch.
He staggered back through the ruined remains of his latest halberd as I lay into him before his software could catch up, dozens of tiny strikes, each imbued with a knockback effect that kept him stunlocked.
He flared his shield, but it sputtered and died before reaching full mast. His suit was failing on him, worn down over multiple fights, leaving me with openings to exploit. His left shoulder made a hideous grinding noise as he swung again, the death rattles of whatever delicate little hydraulics he had in there.
I didn't even have to block.
I dempsy rolled under the wild haymaker, putting my palms against his scratched up belly armour-
-and he let out a strangled electronic gasp, and almost fell before his armour apparently executed some kind of subroutine and took over for his legs.
"Ok, stop, I give," Armsmaster ground out, one scuffed blue gauntlet pressed against his gut where I hit him. "My damage calcs are telling me I'm bleeding internally."
I dropped on my ass, panting heavily, sweat dripping from my chin onto the mats. Was it over? No, there was still one more thing.
I hauled myself to my feet and cocked my arm back, advancing on Colin.
"Grit your teeth!"
There was a moment before I hit him, where I could see confusion turn into acceptance, then I belted him one as hard as I could. No magic, just muscle. He stumbled and fell onto the mat at my feet.
"That was for taking me to the Exploding Man crimes."
I fell to my knees before him, tears leaking from my eyes and gathering in my visor. I tore the damn thing off and tossed it aside, glaring at the blue and silver blur sitting in front of me.
With a small hiss his helmet detached at the neck and he lay it gently down next to him, meeting my eyes.
"I'm sorry."
I hung my head, hot tears stinging my eyes and staining the rubber matting as they dripped off the end of my nose. "You fucked me up," I choked out the words that had been nesting in my throat for months.
Colin sighed, "You know, I really didn't think you could do it. Six months, I told myself it was impossible for you, and truth be told the only reason I agreed to it was that you piss me off. This was going to be a lesson in humility. Turns out it was mine. I shouldn't have taken you along, it was a bad move on my part, which I knew at the time. Thank you for not ratting me out."
"I ain't no snitch," I sniffled, looking back up at his ghost white face. "And I never dog the bros."
"You're a good Ward, Greg, and I never thanked you for saving my life against Cymatic. You deserve to be here. I promise I'll make it up to you," Armsmaster cringed painfully, gauntlet scraping softly against his stomach, beads of sweat breaking out on his pallid brow. "But can you do me a favour and call the medics? I think I need to get Scapegoat down here, or maybe Whitesnake, whatever you've done is incredibly painful."
I sniffled again and wiped at my eyes with bloody hands, "sure thing, Assmaster."
Chapter 41: You Say Run goes with everything 5.3
Chapter Text
"Geggoid, my man!"
Mum swept me up in a ginormous hug, straining to lift me off the ground under the weight of a twenty centimetre and fifty-kilogram size difference. I popped up on my toes, Grace handling some of the load as my feet left the ground for a split second before mum dumped me down and staggered back, a proud grin across her ruddy face.
"You're looking phresh, son," Dad batted me on the shoulder, completely missing the quiet desperation behind my eyes. "I'm guessing you gave that tin can the old 'WD-40 and pipe cleaner'?"
"I did," I smirked, deciding to not mention how racist that comment was to Weld. Dad had never met him, so it wasn't his fault. "I must have ruined at least half a million dollars worth of Halberds."
My mind diverged, the wretched, screaming shame echoing in my second line. It bellowed at me that I was a piece of shit, who didn't deserve friends or happiness, before I forcefully subsumed it back into my cohesive whole where it had to battle with all my other thoughts for dominance, making it a little easier to ignore.
Fucking Multitask, how was this supposed to even be good? And why didn't I feel better? I beat up Colin and told him how I felt, surely I was supposed to feel like some great weight lifted off my shoulders, right?
Mum frowned, "Does he have to pay for that?"
"I don't think so," I shrugged over the top of a sudden guilt. "His budget is huge, and besides, he seems like the kinda guy who autistically saves everything in a compounded fund."
"We do that!" Dad beamed through his beard, no doubt seeing Colin as a kindred spirit, bound by facial hair and financial prudence. "And I've been meaning to tell you to, too."
Cold, gut-wrenching terror tried to squirm out into its own thing, but I wrestled it back in. The world was ending, Dad. The bank won't care about your savings because it'll be dead. And no one can do anything to stop it. Not America, not the Triumvirate, not Cauldron and certainly not me. Everyone I knew was going to die horribly.
"And I will, once the jews at the Protectorate finally give me my trust fund. What do you think of cryptos? I told Browbeat I'd invest."
"Betcoin is bearing, so… maybe?" Mum shrugged. "And then you can pay back Armsmaster for all his halberds."
"He knew the risks."
And he deserved it. He'd lose a lot more than that if I told anyone about what he'd done, but it still made me feel like a cunt.
Dad put his hand on my shoulder in a tender, fatherly gesture. "Do you want us to write you an apology for the halberds?"
A little bit of my soul died, how had I thought that was ok? And the one time I apologised without their help I was so proud of myself. Jesus Christ.
"No," I sighed, closing my eyes. "I can do it myself from now on."
Mum nearly broke her spine again hefting me up in a surprise hug, "We always knew this day would come," she mumbled into my chest. "My precious baby boy, all grown up."
I smiled blandly.
"Let's call this second Christmas!" Dad bellowed. "Because you are a gift! Also, we're going to that expensive restaurant you like."
I was in hell.
My second line opened up, taking the part of my mind that was listening to my parents and moving my mouth with it, freeing up the other part of my brain for some miserable wallowing.
It was kind of odd, almost like being in two places at once, and, even though both of those places were awful, on a better day I could see how this could be good. Marvellous, even.
But today it was for wallowing and fear and doubt.
The morning after I punched Colin in the face I was back in Boston, alone in my room, playing with my pole. I marvelled at it's size, it's heft, with what felt like two brains as I gripped it in both hands, turning it over, running my fingers along the ridges and grooves. I thought at it, and the head changed, swelling and bulging into a wicked mess of spines. It's shape changed again, the shaft lengthening as two smaller heads worked their way out beside the first.
I vibrated with excitement, my very first honest to god magic weapon.
The Anypole. Able to transform into any conceivable polearm type weapon. I mean, sure, I could do the same thing with any mana object but this was something real, it wouldn't just vanish into smoke when its time was up. And unlike mana objects it weighed more than half a kilo.
The Anypole shifted back into a slender short spear and I stepped into the middle of the room to give it a twirl. I was in the middle of a particularly sick helicoptering manoeuvre when my work phone rang. I inventoried my amazing new magic item and hit answer after glancing at the caller ID.
"Hey, Emily, what's up?"
When she spoke it was in the harsh, gravelly voice of someone who hadn't slept because their blood was about ninety per cent coffee.
"Good morning. This phone call is being recorded, I have some questions."
"If this is about Colin's Halberds, he knew the risks," I bleated, panic creeping into my voice. "Or if it's about you having to pay for Whitesnake, that's his fault too, he made me do it."
There was a lengthy sigh and the slight sound of skin against skin.
"It's not about any of that, you're not in trouble for that, and I apologise for my earlier brusqueness, but the questions I'm about to ask will make it clear. Did you release the identities of Night, Fog, Othala and Rune?"
"What? No. I've never even seen them. It was Coil, like last time," I swallowed heavily. "Emily, I swear, you gotta believe me it's a frame job he's tryna get me killed!"
"That would appear to be the case, since your whereabouts at the time the information was leaked, by all indication by you, are accounted for, but there is still going to be an official inquiry."
"But that's good, right? He's overplayed his hand, I'm going to name him in front of everybody!"
"Yes, it's incredibly unlikely you'll be found guilty of this, and Armsmaster said he will personally vouch for you, but there's nothing leading back to him. If this was Coil and not some other party they've done a very good job of framing you, can you supply any other evidence of your innocence?"
"Probably? I get to meet with a guy from legal to sort this out right? Help me work through the laws?"
"Absolutely, this is a very big problem and we're going to stamp it out as hard as we can."
"What the fuck is his fucking beef? Surely it can't be because of the whole Tattletale thing, that makes no sense," my jaw dropped and I clicked with my free hand, the crack echoing in my room like a gunshot. "God I'm stupid. It was never about Tattletale, or me not joining his gang, it's his identity! He's someone with a lot to lose and my Observe makes it so he can't even be near me without risking everything! Coil is Max Anders!"
There was a pregnant pause.
"That's highly unlikely."
"No, yeah, you're right. Krieg worked for Medhall, so Anders is probably Kaiser. You've had him tailed after I told you guys about Krieg, right? Anything turned up?"
"Unfortunately no, because our analysts had the same suspicion. Though, there wasn't any hard evidence he wasn't Kaiser either."
"Can you tell Kaiser it wasn't me?" I asked in a small voice. "I really don't want Night and Fog to murder me. They're still here in Boston, last I checked, and you know how those schizo fucks operate."
"You're a Ward, Greg. You're Dark Smoke Puncher. We protect our own, I'm not about to let some jumped up thug hurt someone under my watch."
That unironically made me feel better. Emily was a tough cunt, but she was on my team.
"Thank you, Director."
I heard her exhale loudly through her nose, but not in amusement.
"You're welcome. Unfortunately for you, you're being confined to base for safety reasons until the inquiry is complete so your orders are to sit and wait for our people to get your statement and clear this up. We'll contact your parents and have it arranged for at least one to attend the questioning, where you will tell the representative the truth and nothing but the truth; understood?"
"Yes, Director."
"Good, I'll contact you when this blows over. Dismissed."
The call cut out, leaving my phone to beep aimlessly until I clicked it off and threw it onto my bed.
Coil.
The problem with Coil is I've never even been close enough to look at him, but he still wants me gone. Why?
He expects to be near me soon. Why?
He works for the PRT or the Protectorate.
But not in Brockton, currently.
He's been seen in person before, but infrequently, so him living in a different city is very plausible. Coil is going to transfer in.
He wants me gone before I expose him with a glance like I did his moles.
Man, fuck this shit. I had something more important to do than think about Coil anyhow. I bounced a full meter off the ground and drifted gracefully into my computer chair like a snowflake, I thumbed the on button of my four thousand dollar gaming PC, waiting impatiently for the awesome LED's to turn purple.
I knew I shouldn't be nervous for this next call, but it was my first time. I hammered in my password as fast as my keyboard would physically allow, opened up Skype and dialled Sveta.
It rang out so I tried again and she picked up after four rings.
"Sorry!" she exclaimed softly, in a vaguely eastern European accent. "I'm so sorry, the computer is hard to use sometimes."
I turned the volume up on my headphones.
"No problem, Sveta. How are ya?"
"I'm ok."
"Noice. What've you been up to?"
"Oh, not much," she whispered.
I wanted to ask her to speak up, but I was afraid it was something to do with her mutation. I also wanted to call her Svagetti, but that would just make her upset even though I would be using it as a term of endearment. Thank god, in this one very specific instance, for my WIS and CHA gains.
"The use' huh? I wish I had more time to do nothing, Coil's trying to get me killed again if you can Adam and Eve it."
"Again?"
"The guy just has no chill, oh! I beat up Armsmaster!
"You've been waiting for that," Sveta remarked.
"It took all day, but I punched him right in his stupid helmet and got, get this, an actual magic item! I'll send you a video, it's so amazeballs. Anyway, are you still up for a game of something?"
She whispered something that took me a moment to parse.
"Can we play something easy to control? Like Heathstone? Sorry."
"A prime choice, homeslice," I opened up my game store app and double clicked Heathstone, the best mod of the game anyone had ever made, or will ever make. "Do you still rock the Hate You deck?"
"Yeah."
Ok, so she was way shyer than over text.
"So I was thinking of picking up the guitar or something to do songs on my Wards twitter, want to help me write a parody cover called 'I shot the Simurgh'?"
"Oh, um," Sveta dithered. "Ok. So, like, a take on I shot the Sherrif?"
"Yeah, I'm going to use it to call out the Fallen for trying to kill me, because I don't like that kind of thing."
Sveta made a whiny kind of whistling exhale but didn't say anything.
Ok, cut back on talking about how people had tried to kill me. Noted.
"I'm also going to do normal covers and shit, I could do the op to your favourite anime if you like?"
"But you hated Blood Boundary," she eventually said. "You said it was overhyped, soap opera trash."
"And it is. But it's your favourite."
"Thanks," Sveta said. "I'm sure it'll be a great song, your voice is really cool."
We played for a while, bantering sparsely, and I even managed to win occasionally despite Hate You being a perfect counter to a Joker deck. I watched pensively as my AgEnt of ChAoS killed an Iron Verona. The only way to win in this was to kill the others monsters, because it was a game and you were a gamer. But I was a Gamer… and killing monsters had only brought me what I was pretty sure was some kind of trauma despite my former belief that I existed to kill monsters. That had been short sighted of me.And it wasn't like my power really pushed me to think that, it merely incentivised it, but it incentivised learning how to save lives too. Sure, the incentives were much bigger in killing, and I'd eventually need to kill the ultimate monsters to save the world, but I didn't need them. I could just-
And sure, it paid less than even a basic homunculus, but it wouldn't make me feel bad about myself. Unless people flamed me, I would hate that.
"Hey, Svets, you've still got a huge lady-boner for Weld, right?"
She sputtered futilely as though she hadn't admitted to looking up Weld rule thirty-four more than once.
"Want me to go get him so you can say hi?"
"Could you?" she asked after about eight seconds of dead silence.
I was out the door like a speeding Kawasaki ninja bike, gracefully drifting around corners and up the hallway. I stuck my bare feet to the ground at about thirty miles per hour, muscle and tendon groaning to hold my knees intact at the dead stop. I swayed out the rest of my momentum, raised a hand and politely knocked.
A desk chair squeaked loudly even behind the closed door and I heard Weld clumping closer. The door opened, revealing Weld, as expected.
"Hey, dude, what's up?" he asked.
"I need a favour," I said, giving him strong eye contact. "One of my internet friends is your biggest fan, could you say hi to her?"
He gave me a look that was equal parts confused frown and confused smile, as though that hadn't been what he was expecting at all but he was almost pleasantly surprised.
"Yeah, I guess so. Is it going to take long? I was kind of in the middle of something."
"Ah, sorry," I grimaced. "It'll only take like thirty seconds, and that'll like, make her year. Take just a sec, promise."
Weld scratched at his golden facial lines, fingers rasping on the metal. "Dude, it's cool."
I smiled and led the way. Weld was such a nice guy, I needed to be a better friend.
"What're you working on?"
"Making a track for this comp, it's super experimental and hipstery but it's good fun."
"Hey! I was literally just thinking about picking up the guitar and writing songs, can you give me some tips later?"
He gave a big wide reflective grin and I suppressed a grimace, I really needed to do something about that. "Sure! Sounds fun."
"Just you wait," I said as I ushered him into my rooms and up to the computer, handing him my headset. "Shit is gonna be tite ay ef."
He shook his head disparagingly, looked at the screen, frowned, and put the headphones on.
"Hello?"
I smiled at the high pitched squeal faintly issuing from the headphones, that was the kind of lame shit Sveta was going to wake up to in a cold sweat ten years from now as her brain tortured her with past social failings that were utterly meaningless in the grand scheme of her life.
"Thanks a million," I clapped Weld on the back as I saw him out the door. "If any of your friends want to say hello to me I'll be glad to lend a hand."
"If," he smirked. "Anyway, your friend seemed nice for a fifty-three chaser."
"Pfft, you wish," I leant against the door frame. "Have fun with your gay hipster comp."
"I intend to."
I shut my door as he strutted away, and headed back in. I cast a glance at my covered bathroom mirror through the ajar door. Soon.
"So," I said, affixing my headphones back in place. "Ain't h-"
"Oh my gawwwd!"
Chapter 42: You Say Run goes with everything 5.4
Chapter Text
I cast the cover off my bathroom mirror sending a mad flurry of dust swirling through the air, it had been a while since I'd looked at my face. I leant heavily into the sink as the phantom stab of a knife twinged in my back, I swayed, vision swimming into greys and blots of light as a ringing whine filled my ears and the words fine messes repeating in a whisper. I turned my head slightly, I think my nose had gotten a bit bigger, but nothing about me had changed much.
I still glowed with good health, my eyes still sparkled a handsome blue, I was still ripped as fuark… I patted the top of my head. Actually, maybe I was a half-centimetre taller too. Cool. Chicks dug tall guys, and there would surely have to be some cuties coming in from New York today. New York was a big place, which meant a proportionally larger amount of hot chicks triggering compared to Brockton or Boston. Sure, Sophia had been hot, but Valerie and Daisey were pretty average. Still would, though, if they offered. Like, I could be bothered.
I grabbed a hand towel and mopped my sopping brow with a trembling hand, my face crunching into the road. I blinked and lifted myself up from where I'd fallen face-first into the mirror. I screwed my eyes shut and shuffled out of the bathroom like a zombie despite my hammering heart.
And somehow I made it to the lobby. I looked at my gloved hands, which meant I'd put my uniform on at some point in the past... a glance at the clock on the wall told me I'd lost ten minutes. Ok. Cool. Ok.
"Dark Smoke Puncher!"
I turned around to see the Debbie the Intern hurrying up to me with a parcel liberally coloured with safety stamps.
"A package came in for you, sir."
"Thanks a million," I said, automatically, flashing her a sparkling smile as I took it off her hands. She smiled back and hustled off in pursuit of more work.
I was distantly aware of time passing as I went and sat in one of the lobby chairs, staring unseeingly at the parcel in my hands.
"What'chu got there, chief?"
I looked over to my right at the suddenly occupied chair.
"Hey, Rey Rey," I slit the parcel open with a stroke of a sparking thumb and emptied it onto my lap. "Ordered some books in."
"Yeah?" Tyrone said, craning his neck to read the titles. "I think I'm gonna order that one I was looking at. What made you pick those?"
Multitask split my head in two.
Just tell the truth, dickbag.
And invite all the problems that come with that, huh, Other Greg?
I'm Smart Greg, idiot.
We're both Smart Greg.
Fuck me.
"Figured learning guitar would be awesome," I reached up and smashed that yes button.
"And picking up a Thinker ability in a field I haven't touched yet would be a good idea."
Way to go, Other Greg.
I subsumed my insubordinate second line before I could berate myself further.
"Smort," Tyrone said, reaching up and scratching under his furry mask. "Get you some of that information superiority, fuck them New Yorkers up, son!"
In any case, my new power was indicating he was relaxed and thinking I was totally normal and wow was I getting a lot of uncomfortable flashbacks from all those times I talked to girls and didn't pick up that their body language meant they found me as attractive as a slug, thus continuing to blather on about things that it should have been crystal clear they had no interest in long past the time where any sane man would have withered inside. I'd had my moments of withering, sure, but I could always just tell myself I was cool and struggle on. I couldn't do that now, I was too woke, like Artax. Past Greg was Atreyu, but I'd die in his swamp.
Was Past Greg the real Chad?
"Speaking of," I said. "Are any of them hot?"
"Yes," he replied, without hesitation or thought. "Flechette is a babe, and Jetstar, oh man."
Tyrone drew a bodacious set of curves in the air with his power. My eyebrows shot up and for a moment we both stared, transfixed, before I realised he was probably working from idealised memory, like me with my secret Glory Girl and Simurgh clone spell that nobody could ever find out about.
"And they're Lancers, so they're all so fit," he heaved a great sigh. "It's great."
The illusion dissipated and we both settled back contemplatively-
"What the fuck was that?"
A fist of 'oh shit!' punched me in the gut, cold sweat began to break out under my uniform, the blood drained from my face; then I looked up and realised it was just Valerie.
"Nothing," blurted Tyrone, swivelling his head around like an owl desperately looking for a way out.
Valerie crossed her arms contemptuously, "it looked to me like youse were being pervs."
"Says the girl with X-Ray vision," I stuck my nose in the air. "As if you can lecture us on perving."
"No need to get so defensive," she said smugly, taking the seat on the other side of me.
"Stating fact ain't defensive," Tyrone cut in defensively. "How do we know you're not having a peek right now?"
"A very good question, Rey Rey," I said. "If only one of us were a Thinker Eight, capable of rustling up that information out of thin air."
There was a sudden small shift in Valerie's posture that pinged to my body language power as possibly guilt, before settling back into relaxation again. She probably had been using her power, but not to look at our dicks. If I could see her face I'd be a little surer, but as it was only a ghost of her mouth was visible behind her face-covering eyeball mask.
"I don't think she was looking at our dicks," I said to Tyrone. "But she was looking somewhere."
"Feet?" asked Tyrone, contempt colouring his voice despite foot freaks and furries being on the same level, leaving him with no moral high ground.
"I was checking where everyone else is, actually," Valerie huffed. "And I wouldn't be looking at you two anyway."
Tyrone and I stoically bore this crushing blow to our self-esteem, like monks who've convinced themselves in a fit of sour grapes that they chose celibacy.
"Anyway," she continued. "More importantly, we've gotta come up with a way to beat them snooty New Yorkers."
I leant back and crossed my ankles, hands in my lap. I could probably do it by myself, I could certainly take the entire Brockton squad by myself, the Boston too, almost certainly without a huge amount of trouble; this was without leveraging whatever hidden depths my Multitask ability still hid. I had become strong. My powers added up to something greater than the sum of its parts, bits and pieces feeding into and synergising with each other in a way that would only multiply as I got more skills and spells. I had become strong, yes, but this whole week wasn't about that at all.
Good job, Smart Greg.
"We'll find a way," I said, injecting as much confidence into my voice as I could. "They might be a rapid response and combat team, but we have options they don't, and with Weld as our leader, we can't lose."
"Hell yeah!" Tyrone crowed, miming a pimp slap. "We'll fuck 'em up, I don't give a fuck!"
As far as I could tell, from my Observations of the Boston team and my reading all the available materials on the Lancer team, it was pretty unlikely they'd ever beaten them in the big spar thing. Maybe he was expecting me to carry, or maybe he was just hyped.
"Fuck yeah!" Valerie echoed, punching me in the ribs. She winced and shook her hand. "Team Boston!"
"Team Boston!" said Tyrone.
"Team Boston!" repeated Valerie.
"Team Boston!" I chimed in.
We had changed to repeating 'Boston Gang!' at each other in stupid voices by the time Norm, Dez and Fred walked up to us, radiating enough confusion that I probably would have picked it up without my power. They dragged three chairs around so we were sitting in a rough circle.
"Boston Gang what?"
"Best gang!" Tyrone flashed a seizure-inducing display to which I added a bass drop and some wubs.
"That's the spirit," Dez said breezily, picking up what we were putting down. "And hopefully they won't kick our asses again."
"I think we have a better chance now," said Fred, eyeing me speculatively but also looking like he wanted to kick me in the shins. "You did do that hostage thing by yourself easily enough."
I wilted a little. "I said I was sorry for zapping you and Norm, it never hurt me that much."
Norm scoffed and drew breath to speak.
"Yes, I know you don't have my brute rating," I cut him off. "I really am sorry."
Norm rolled his eyes and shrugged as Fred said, "you better be sorry, it really hurt."
I pressed my lips together and looked at my knees. Yeah, feel like shit you dumbass, that'll do a lot of good.
"It can't have hurt that much, right?" Tyrone cut in awkwardly.
"Fuckin' try it," Norm rubbed his arm in phantom pain. "I had these big burns for a week."
I really did appreciate Tyrone trying to defend me, it wasn't something I got much of, and I couldn't really delude myself anymore about my people repelling personality. I'd have to do something nice for him later.
An awkward silence descended over the group, no one willing or able to defuse the tension. Back in the day I'd have just gotten up, made a would-be pithy quip and left, proving for all to see that Past Greg was no Chad.
A big, heavy clumping footstep approached, very distinctively Weld's, coming to save us from this hellish social prison. I looked up, spotting the last of the team with him, Daisy and Hunch.
"What's up guys?" Weld asked with a hesitance that bled into his steps.
"Just waitin' for the New York team to get here," I said, putting on an easy smile and reclining as much as I could. "They're late, aren't they?"
I could see he disbelieved.
"Not yet," he said, letting the lie pass. Or seeming to, he was probably going to ask someone about it later because he was bad at being bad at his job. One day I hoped to be as bad at my job as Weld was.
I started zoning out as he started going on about how he wanted us to conduct ourselves, be friendly but competitive because at the end of the week the losers buy the winners dinner. All fairly unimportant, common sense stuff that blurred into white noise as I stared at his reflective face with a growing, sickly sense of unease.
I think I needed to talk to someone. Soon.
Chapter 43: You Say Run goes with everything 5.5
Chapter Text
I expected the Lancers to sweep into the lobby, chests puffed out with the swagger of the undefeated, smirking grins or smouldering seriousness fixed in place, but they just traipsed off a bus and shuffled through the doors with yawns, coffees and travel bags.
Despite this, they still all looked like fitness models which meant they had been vigorously worked over by Image, even the bright green lizard looking Case Fifty-Three was wearing a hat that looked specifically designed to blunt the impact of his dinosaur face.
"That guy's my Nemesis," Tyrone elbowed me in the side, gesturing at the guy with the shamanic hawk mask and also live hawk on his shoulder. "He totally ripped off my style."
I exhaled loudly through my nose, but I was more concerned with the fact that five out of the eight of them were girls than Tyrone once again accidentally admitting his fetish. I'd had a quick flick through of How To Make Friends when we'd gone to the bookstore for Amy's present, and a not so quick flick through of pickup forums over the course of the years so I had a vague outline of how to behave, even if I'd never been able to stick to it before.
A different outline to how I handled the Sophia date, a better one.
Weld and Jouster stepped up to each other, Jouster dropping his bag and shuffling his coffee to his left hand took Weld's in his right. They shook, clasped, and dragged each other in for a bro hug that lasted just long enough that neither of them had to say 'no homo' afterwards.
"Late night?" Weld asked, the subtle motion of his head indicating he was glancing down at the coffee cup.
Jouster made an affirming noise. "Big charity event, fishing for sponsors or whatever. Nothing that fun."
"I feel that. How's the rest of the team?" Weld looked around at the New Yorkers, posture opening up to invite answers from the group rather than just Jouster.
Man, now that I knew what I was looking for putting the pieces together wasn't that hard.
The group responded, and I listened carefully for which one had the nicest voice… results inconclusive. Weld nodded in response to the tangle of 'good's and 'fine's, motioning for them to follow him. It was time.
I positioned myself carefully so that the flow of the group would place me close to the New York team. I waited until Basilisk glanced over at me, giving me an excuse to make eye contact.
"Hey!" I layered on my smile, sidling closer. "It's awesome to meet you guys, I've heard that the Lancers are the best of the best, we're going to have our work cut out for us I expect. I'm Dark Smoke Puncher," I stuck my hand out.
"That's quite a name," Basilisk said with none of the expected lisping hiss, grasping my hand in his clawed one, his forked tongue lashing out as though tasting for lies. "Basilisk. It's nice to meet you too."
"Yeah, I really didn't want any of the names they picked out for me. Like Myst, or Smokestack, or whatever? Bland. Anyway, I saw in the news that you guys had a big arrest recently, how was that? The biggest thing I've done was sidekick for Weld when he raided one of Blasto's warehouses."
Basilisk huffed, pulling his hat lower over his eyes. "I didn't have much to do with that one."
I, having access to internal reports, already knew this.
"Oh?" I asked. "Who did?"
Basilisk turned to his left, "Bangarang. Their new guy wants a word."
The girl in the black and electric blue armour shifted through from the other side of the group, looping around to avoid walking in front of anyone.
"What's up?" she asked, voice layered with a trace of Jamaican accent. "About what?"
"You were the one who arrested Diablo, right? I'd love to hear about it."
"Yes," she said smugly. "It was one of those things where if it went even slightly worse the senior Protectorate member would have had to claim it, but I nailed it. Not even a scratch. The idiot was distracted by Prism, so all I had to do was slide in and pow! Right in the kisser!"
She let loose a punch that echoed with a distorted ringing gong. "I have absolutely no idea what he was thinking, it was such an avoidable fuck up. Still, not going to complain, it got me mad cred."
"Hell yeah!" I grinned. "I bet you could take him one v. one, I've never heard of him so he can't be monster strong."
"Maybe I could," Alvita buffed her gloved fingernails on her chest plate.
"I bet you could kick some ass too," I turned my smile from Alvita to NaKrull. "You don't look like a chump."
"I've won my share of fights," he said blandly, shifting his gaze away, probably to avoid saying anything about his shady mercenary past.
God damn poor Case Fifty Threes. What the fuck was Cauldron thinking? I mean, they could have been worse and chosen completely healthy, happy people to test their potions on instead of ones who were dying, but memory wiping them and dumping them into Bet completely failed to ameliorate anything. I'd have some strong words for whatever witch ran the show when I found them.
"How about you," Basilisk continued. "How new are you?"
"Yeah! How do you stack up?" Bangarang gestured animatedly raising her hand from waist to head height and back again. "We're going to crush you guys again, but still."
"Oh," I scratched my neck, looking down. "You know. I do ok, got a couple of powers that synergise. I'd say my biggest fight is when some of Brockton's local Nazi's tried to have a go, but Armsmaster took care of a lot of that. I was from there originally, actually, I'm only here because some other turdburgling villain tried to frame me for breaking the unwritten rules."
"No shit?" Bangarang frowned. "That sucks. Brockton lives up to its rep?"
"It's a hole."
Basilisk made a slightly inhuman humming noise. "Everything might be bigger in New York, but at least we don't have Nazi's. You have my condolences."
"Thanks," I said, executing a Sideways-Looking-Up Smile that my newest power indicated would make them treat me as something to be protected. Oh, there was that slimy feeling again like when I manipulated Weld into taking me to the Blasto raid. It also probably totally tanked my chances with Alvita, my pick up forum experience told me that girls liked to be the ones being protected. Dammit.
Wrong fucking smile, Greg.
"When I graduate the Wards, I'll see about joining you guys in New York."
"Good luck!"
I looked over behind Basilisk to see who had spoken.
"Everyone wants to be in New York," Jetstar muscled her way into the conversation, forcing Basilisk to step to the side to avoid treading on her heels. "You have to be scouted, you don't just 'see about joining'."
"Well, you could put in a good word for me, right?" I said, biting back the smugness that came with being able to have a power that saw the future telling you it was very possible for you to be in the top ten ranked Protectorate heroes, thus a shoo-in.
"Yes," she said, jutting her chin out. "Even Dragon uses my engine designs. You have to earn it, maybe if you impress me this week I'll still remember your name by the time you graduate."
"I'm Dark Smoke Puncher." I offered my hand to shake and god was I getting flashbacks of pulling this same attitude in Brockton, back when people started to take my claims of being the Crawler of the Dauntless genre seriously. I understood the swell head this shit gave you, and I could see by her power that her flight suit would be impressive when she pulled it out during the week. Unfortunately for her, her power didn't make her permanently wiser when she managed to have moments of baseline human common sense. "And I'll do my best."
Jetstar raised an eyebrow, an almost derisive gesture if the rest of her body language wasn't saying something else, and left the conversation as promptly as she joined letting Basilisk return to his former place next to me. He, Alvita and I made pleasant chit-chat for the rest of the way to the Wards quarters, whereupon Weld clapped loudly to get everyone's attention, a harsh crashing jangle.
"I have a little surprise for everyone!" he grinned broadly, creasing the bright gold of his facial lines. "If anyone's interested we've got free entry to Bad Canary's latest show, but only if we show up in costume. I'm sure as hell going, any other takers?"
「You know, this is nice,」Lily said, leaning forward slightly. 「I don't get to use my Japanese as often as I'd like.」
「Me either!」 I matched her lean, over the bus seat that grumbled and rattled beneath my elbows. This was a good sign, her leaning in. Plus she was Japanese, which was even more my type than Sophia or Tattletale were. This was it, Greg boy, the real reward for the girlfriend quest wasn't the exp or items or whatever, it was the genuine companionship.
And that sweet puss.
「What made you pick up the language?」
「Oh, um,」 I looked down to the right. It was because of the anime tiddies, but that wasn't something anyone needed to hear. Anymore. Urgh. 「When I was finally old enough to understand what happened at Kyushu I just thought about how sad it was, that like a third of a languages speakers could just die, so I started getting into some of the media still coming out of there, but I was never very good at it until I got powers. I pick things like that up pretty quick nowadays.」
I could see her posture just melt.
「That's so lovely.」Lily placed a hand over her heart.
「Oh.」 I shrugged. 「It's not all that. Some of it was just because I like anime.」
「Wapanese!」she laughed, a beauteous sound of dreams and hand-holding. 「But that's ok, I like some of it too.」
She was perfect. I was in love and we were going to get married because I didn't have a fixation on falling in love with unobtainable targets so that I didn't have to deal with the reality of relationships.
「Maybe we should try to get everyone to watch Princess Mononoke, like for a movie night this week?」I said, holding one hand palm up. It was a nice inoffensive choice, nice family movie, no panty shots or haremshit.
「Ghibli films are always a good choice, shame they don't make them anymore.」
「Don't remind me.」I hunched my shoulders. 「The Aleph ones just aren't the same.」
We chatted for a few minutes more until the bus pulled up and we all shuffled off, with Lily stepping off to talk to Noodle as I fell into step beside Tyrone.
"Gettin' in with Flechette?" he stage whispered suggestively, bumping me with his shoulder.
The big pink balloon that had been inflating in my chest cavity swelled a little larger. "She's so nice! Why did nobody tell me?" I inhaled as deeply as I could, looking out over the lines of people waiting to get into the concert, everyone so happy to see us, all the other Wards smiling and laughing. Brockton could never have anything like this. "I think I'm going to transfer here permanently."
Tyrone grinned delightedly. "Hell yeah! I mean, if you left who would I play Magic with?"
I chortled and fell quiet as our group was let through the VIP gate. I accepted a backstage pass lanyard from the ticket checker lady and slipped it over my neck. Our group bottle-necked with the rest of the VIP's as security scanned each of us in turn with their metal detectors. I watched as Weld set off the alarm, a fixed grimace of a smile on his face, and choked out an apology. The security guard frowned, the troubled uncomfortable expression of a man who has accidentally asked a paraplegic veteran to stand for the national anthem, and waved him through.
Hunch patted him as high up on the back as he could, shooting the guard a glare before heading on through.
Poor Weld. As if Cauldron hadn't hurt him enough! Bunch of shits! I'll fucking stir them so hard when I actually found out who they were and what dimension they were hiding in. I bet Alexandria, Legend and Eidolon knew something, there had to have been something to tip them off in the past twenty years of running America's parahuman scene, some villain that folded in return for not being birdcaged or a hero who couldn't live with the guilt of buying powers from the kind of scum-sucking shitters who turned amazing people into Mimics, tin men and neanderthals and didn't even apologise.
I fumed impotently all the way to our private balcony section. I was strong, for my weight class as it were, but in the grand scheme of things I wasn't all that. I needed to step up my training from where I'd been slacking off lately, but it was hard to make myself these days. But I needed to, the world was ending.
I slipped into a comfy padded chair next to Hunch, so that I could ogle the back of Lily's neck from a prime angle. Hunch and I didn't talk much. I think it was because his pre-cog was extra unreliable around me sometimes, like Dez's which sometimes gave out some fantastically unrealistic visions when I was involved which was cool when if I was going to be fighting enemy Thinkers but lame if I needed Thinker support.
Norman sat down heavily next to me before Tyrone could take the seat, consigning me to have no one to talk to but myself.
At least I'm good company, eh?
Sure, but what are you even good for?
I already knew, but the ridiculous pantomime helped me keep track of things. I'd had days to puzzle out the true function of Multitask, and I was not left wanting. If you could call me, on the day I got my powers, Super Greg, and the day I picked the mana control perk Super Greg Two, then this was to go even further beyond.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!
I was a Greg that had ascended beyond the level of all previous Gregs; I could reliably cast two spells at the same time. And if that weren't enough, I could cast a spell with one mind and focus the other purely on wielding the unfathomable cosmic power, leaving me with a superior effect and a far greater understanding on how to control my magic.
It's not enough to tank Cauldron, but I think we're actually proud of our self, aren't we. We beat Assmaster and it took us to a whole new level, and not just in power. I managed to meet new girls and not have them end up looking at me like I was a jizz encrusted pillow fucker, I think they call this Normie Passing.
I think it was the making an effort to learn how not to be a sperg.
Now just imagine if we bought that body language book six months ago.
It would have said I needed more CHA or WIS and I would have forgotten about it.
But we've learned that lesson.
Too right we have.
I contented myself with internal preening and the sight of the flashes of skin between Lily's collar and hairline until the spotlight on the stage lit up, cutting the babbling crown silent for all of five seconds until they started cheering and whooping as Canary walked onto the stage, smiling and waving energetically as smoke machines partially hid the backing band with gold lit mist.
A huge screen lit up above the stage, a four K ultra HD closeup of Canary's face grinned out at everyone.
"Thank you all so much for coming!" She smoothed a lock of bright yellow feathers behind her ear as the crowd melted into incoherent screaming at the sound of her voice. It was definitely something, high, musical and lilting, crisp and clear. "Are you ready?"
The crowd hollered, but she grinned wider and raised a hand to her ear. "What was that?"
I joined in this time, projecting my voice as far and loud as I could. Some unspoken level of loudness was reached and the band started playing.
Canary took an audible breath and sang.
It was truly amazing. Like auditory silk. Sweet like sugar and smooth like water. A warm cloth wiping away my pain and rage in a way pirated copies of her songs never could. There was me and the music and nothing else really mattered.
It took me a moment to drag myself out of the cozy rapture and read what that particular debuff did. I started observing random people in the audience and …Really harshing my vibe here, power. Everyone knew her singing had some sort of mind control aspect but it was a miracle something horrible hadn't happened, the Suggestible condition would last a fair while after she stopped singing, and it didn't need to be her giving the suggestion.
I could tell Lily to make out with me right now and she would. Someone could tell someone else to do something worse, and they would.
I don't even think Canary knew this, she'd bought her powers. On one hand, good on her for choosing the Rogue life, but on the other, Cauldron.
I had to go and do something about this, but… after the show. I needed this to unwind a little.
Mana wrapped around me like a second skin, mimicking the environment near perfectly, so when I slipped out of my seat halfway through Vulgarishous nobody noticed. It was the upgraded version of Chameleon Haze, and my power termed it Cuttlefish Skin.
I leapt out of the balcony, soaring over the enraptured crowd and landing lightly on the back of an unoccupied chair. It creaked as I jumped off into a clear patch of the floor near the stage, nobody would have noticed anyway given who was singing but I wasn't sure if I was allowed backstage until after the show ended.
I walked around backstage, stealing past security with ease until I came to a spot where I could see Canary onstage. This would no doubt be where she would exit when she finished this song. I left my spell running, it was so cheap in comparison I could have it on without hamstringing myself if some problem were to occur.
Everything went according to plan. Canary finished her song, gave the crowd her parting thanks and exited stage left right in front of me.
I dropped my spell and stepped forward.
"Hey, sorry I'm here early, I know you want to catch your breath before getting ambushed by fans but I just had to say hello!"
She gave a little start but recovered admirably after taking in my uniform and VIP lanyard.
"Well, yes. I recognise you, you're one of the Wards, right?"
"Yes!" I stepped closer, holding out my hand. "I'm Dark Smoke Puncher! Thank you so much for not kicking me out, I love your music so I just wanted to tell you how good it made me feel tonight. I haven't felt this pumped in ages, you're remarkable!"
"Oh well thanks," Canary said stepping forward to shake my hand. "I'm just doing what I love, moving people with my music."
"It's so inspiring. I'm actually planning on getting into singing and guitar and posting stuff on my Wards social media, and I hope I can end up sounding a fifth as good as you someday-"
"Oi!"
We both turned to see a very angry guy storm up, all raised hackles and fake smiles.
"Hey, Paige. I can see you're making it big, making lots of money. My money. I pushed you into this, I encouraged you the whole time and you repay me by cutting me out? I made you, and you owe me. Half."
I flinched back at the venom in his voice, glancing over to see that Canary had gone from all smiles to stab-a-cunt pissed in the space of a few seconds.
"Like fucking hell!" She hissed. "You…"
She trailed off, her clenched fist raising slightly. He matched her stance and oh fuck were they about to throw down?
"Uh," I said and she turned to look at me, then turned back to the guy.
"Can't you see I'm talking to someone? Piss off."
The guy snapped his jaw shit, mouth twisting like he was eating a lemon, every muscle in his body tense and hunched, face purple with consternation. Then he just left, liquid leaking down the inseam of his jeans and leaving a trail on the floor. Canary didn't seem to notice this, as she continued to fume at his retreating back.
"Absolute dickhead. Absolute cockmongling dickhead. Thinks he can come here with that after what he did?" she scoffed, rustling her feathers with a contemptuous shake of her head.
"He seems like a douche."
"A big, sloppy douche," Canary said, suddenly tired. She exhaled deeply and rubbed at her eyes. "I'm sorry you had to see that, I don't know how he got back here."
"He won't be coming back, which is also something I wanted to tell you about." I pointed to the wet trail. "He actually pissed off. If you'd told him to go suck a dick, he would have. You should be more careful with that, you're too beautiful to go to prison."
I smiled, my sparkle cosmetic flashing handsomely above my Armsbeard. I saw her pupils dilate for a fraction of a second before she realised I was a minor who worked for the government but she smiled anyway.
"Maybe I should have told him to go suck a dick. Or to go fuck himself, it'd be completely worth it."
I wanted to stress to her that the outcome of that would put her in supermax for twenty years without parole, but figured she probably knew and was just joking. I shook my head to make sure she understood my take on the matter. "Anyway, as I was saying before that jackoff interrupted, I'm going to start making music soon. Can I tweet it to you? I'd love to know what you think, even if you think it's shit. Maybe we could collab one day? It'd get you some points with the PRT, I know being a rogue can be hard."
"Yeah, tweet it at me for sure. I'm sure you won't suck, you have a fantastic voice," she tapped her pursed lips with her forefinger rapidly. "As for collabing… I don't mind but I'll check with my managers to see how it would play out for my image. I imagine it'll be fine though, I want to go mainstream so I'll get accused of being a sellout shill regardless. Yeah," she tilted her head to the side and smiled, tucking her feathers behind her ear. "Once you start putting your stuff out there I'll get back to you."
My sparkle cosmetic lit up my face as much as my smile did. "Thank you so much! It'll be great, I promise! I'll let you go have a sit down before you go out and see your fans, all the wards got backstage passes so I'll see you again in a minute anyway."
I shook her hand vigorously, gave her one last smile and turned invisible. I had to get back before Weld got too mad and scolded me while girls were watching.
Chapter 44: You Say Run goes with everything 5.6
Chapter Text
AYAYAYAYAI!
I snatched my phone up from my desk and hit answer. "Hello?"
"Hey, Greg."
"Amy! Hey, what's up?"
I heard the faint crinkle of wrapping paper being shuffled aside and the even fainter creak of a new book being opened.
"Thank you for the present," Amy said, not sounding particularly thankful. She took a breath as if to say something, audibly closed her mouth, then inhaled again. "I don't think I was actively trying to help myself… to be happy. And I know you know, there was stuff you read off of me that we never talked about, but I," she paused as her voice shook. "I'd like to know."
I leant forward, resting my elbows on my desk, staring at the grain. "Everything?"
"Everything."
"It's not going to be nice, my power lays it all bare. It doesn't change anything though, you're still my gayest nigga."
I heard her exhale loudly through her nose.
"Ok," I said. "This is from memory, but here goes. Amelia Claire Lavere was born to Hamish Lavere and Sharon McTavish as part of a fling and remained with her father for a number of years after Sharon got cancer. During her childhood, her father concealed from her the true nature of his work until he was ambushed at home by the Brockton Bay Brigade, and, rather than have his daughter caught in the crossfire, surrendered. Amelia was then adopted by Carol Dallon, whom harboured a great resentment to her being assured she would turn out like her father, The Marquis. Amelia was treated unlovingly by her adoptive mother and unintentionally neglectfully by her adoptive father, with her only point of positive contact being her adoptive sister, Victoria Dallon, whom Amelia would develop a secret crush on that would later fester into an obsessive, romantic love. This was compounded by the circumstances of her trigger event, in which she saved Victoria's life, and gained the [Biological Shaper] power. From here, her life spiralled into stress and misery as she attempted to compensate for her adoptive mother's belief that she was as evil as her father by healing people for hours every day until the pressure and compassion fatigue left her a dry, bitter husk with no real care left for the people she saves. Amelia is steadily crumbling into despair, deathly afraid that she will break one of her rules and become the monster she knows she could be. Like I said, this doesn't change anything. You haven't done anything wrong and you're still, like, my best friend. Sins of the father is bullshit anyway, your mum is fucked."
Dial tone. She'd hung up.
I shouldn't have said that, I'd known she had the emotional fortitude of fairy floss when it came to this, had it spelled out to me every time I looked at her. I covered my mouth with one hand and placed my phone back down, laying my other hand over it, tapping my forefinger against the desk rapidly. I stared into my computer screen with glazed eyes, not seeing my coursework for the next unit in my long list comprised of every unit Harvard offered. I should call Victoria, tell her Amy was going to do something very stupid, make sure someone was there for her-
AYAYA-
"Hello?!"
"Sorry about that," said Amy, her voice cool, composed, with a depth I'd never heard before. "I'm good now. Great, even. Better than ever."
"What did you take?!" I asked. "I know you've been experimenting."
Amy hummed an amused note. "Something I should have taken a long time ago. I was blind, Greg, but now I see."
Oh boy. This was not epic. Amy was in many ways an incredibly strong person, moral and enduring in a way few could be, but she was also kind of a mean petty bitch and if she was playing around with cognitive and mood enhancers on my advice to circumvent her power restrictions there was a chance those negative traits would come to the fore. Especially with what seemed to be a snap decision in a moment of stress.
"What did you take, Amy?"
"You like to say you're twice as smart as everyone, what's that like?"
"It feels like I'm a normal person with a good memory but I don't think I've ever unironically said lines like 'blind but now I see'," I bit at my thumbnail. "How do you feel?"
"Like I was blind but now I see," Amy laughed, a warm rich chuckle. An affected chuckle. "All the fog has been wiped away. I had such a limited perspective, so little understanding, all wrapped up in my little teenager problems. I'm sure you must have thought I was a very silly girl."
I screwed my eyes shut and roughly scrubbed them with my knuckles. Why was she talking like a cliche villain? If the transformation of the east coast into a singular S-Class organism was my fault I might just cry.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"I have to waste my life in hospitals. Who decided that? Carol's opinions matter to me. Who decided that? Vicky won't ever love me. Who decided that?" Amy's voice took on a manic hinge. "I'm going to break my rules one day? Who decided that!?"
"Do I need to come back to the bay?"
Amy was silent for a moment, her breath whistling harshly into the receiver. "I think Coil wants to kill you because of your Observe power."
"Look, yes," I said with an exasperated sigh. "But don't change the subject."
"I'm sorry if I worried you," she replied in the faux casual voice of someone with a lot of natural acting talent but absolutely no practice, which was worrying in and of itself. I'd heard her try to act, she was absolutely dogshit. "Everything really is fine, I'm not about to go out and do anything stupid. I'm going to read this book you got me and unfuck myself."
I wasn't buying it.
"I don't buy it," I said.
"I promise," said Amy.
"When you come down I think you should revise your formula, you sound like you've got that fake coke confidence. I bet if you heard yourself you'd cringe."
There was a slight catch to Amy's voice before she replied, like she'd just remembered modelling part of the mechanism off a junkie OD-ing in Emergency. "Relax, Greg. Seriously, I did do some actual planning for this beforehand, I've had it ready for quite some time. It's not dangerous and it's not addictive, it's just one big eye-opener and I think the reason you're so worried is because you don't respect my intelligence."
"Blame shifting is a bitch tactic." She was right, twelve was not a good score, it was below average. I respected her for other things, but not that. "The reason I'm so worried is that outside of your very narrow value system you don't make good choices, or does helping Victoria maim thugs count as moral?"
Amy trilled in amusement. "Shame on you, Greg. But yes, I admit I have made poor choices in the past, like creating the monster that almost killed you that one time."
A hot flush crept up my neck.
"Shut up. Fine. Whatever. I'm worried because this is my fault, and it's my fault because…" the words didn't want to leave my tongue, but when they did they spilled off in a rush. "Because my high INT doesn't compensate for my low WIS. It made things worse. Happy? Fuck you."
"I think you might be my best friend, Greg."
I let my head drop onto the desk with a heavy thud. "You've always had a higher wisdom score than me. Always have, and that I can respect. I just really don't want you to Evolution half of America on some molly fueled power trip because I told you drugs were cool."
"Greg," Amy snorted. "You narcissistic idiot. If I can resist a thousand suggestions to do requests then I can resist whatever half baked idea excited you at the time."
"Well, how do I know you never made a cat girl Victoria girlfriend?"
"Because that was your fantasy, not mine. It's perfect for a low confidence guy like you but I could never be satisfied with anything but the real thing."
"Yeah, like you were such a Chad," I scoffed into the desk. "Also, shut up, I'm not low confidence. I'm going to be Triumvirate one day and then you'll have to admit I'm the real Chad."
"Ok," she said. "You're so high confidence that you need to tell everyone all the time."
"I see what you're doing and it isn't cute. There's absolutely nothing wrong with verbally affirming my goals at appropriate times."
"I think we both need help with our lives, Greg. You helped give me the final push I needed, how can I help you?"
Do my brain. I bit my tongue and counted to ten, trying to still the anxious storm brewing in my head.
"I'm on track," I said. "I really am. For a long time I…"
I prepared to say something I hadn't even admitted to myself, that I in all my vast intelligence just couldn't stand the idea of.
"I had this constant sense of panic that my wisdom would increase because every time it did I could see more of how much of a stupid oblivious asshole I am, and that being that asshole was my fault. I kind of played up being an ignorant shit-head because doing wise things made me wiser, and if I could just avoid that I could stay in my comfort zone. And so I ignored everyone who tried to help me, as an asshole does, and I alienated people because I didn't want to know any better. Maybe I deserve the PTSD, could have just told Armsmaster no, it was obviously against the rules, and then Nazi's wouldn't have tried to kill me. But I'm talking to a PRT therapist again soon, so hopefully that helps."
"Greg, I," Amy stalled for a moment. "I didn't expect that WIS would actually do that. You'd always brag about your INT score but you never seemed that smart."
"I'm acing all my college courses at Harvard," I said mulishly.
Amy hmmed. "What's your wisdom at now?"
"Thirteen."
"And what was it the last time we spoke?"
"Nine."
"We should hang out," she said suddenly. "I'll come to Boston. I actually miss you, you know. I can remember all these times where I acted like I only talked to you because you knew my secret, but really, you can be fun sometimes. I'm sure I wasn't always a prize myself, so grouchy and snide."
"I did think that to myself a lot of times."
Amy chuckled. "Yeah, same."
"Do you think I deserve to suffer?" I asked after a few moments of silence.
"No," Amy said slowly. "You probably brought a lot of it on yourself, but I don't think you deserve it. And neither do I for that matter, fucking Carol. It's not our fault, Greg, it's theirs. The Carol's and Germans of the world."
"Gamers rise up."
"Well, yes. Anyway, I'm going to go start reading and I'll text you when I'm coming. Call me if you need anything."
"Yeah, seeya Amy," I said, and ended the call.
I still wasn't totally convinced that half the country wouldn't end up looking like a gigantic scale replica of Victoria's boobs by tomorrow morning but she seemed pretty sane, or she was trying really hard at pretending to be which had to do until I could check her. The world was safe, for now.
The high power PRT standard motorbike thrummed powerfully between my knees, the sound just different enough from the Hogs those Fallen goons rode to not trigger me too hard.
We'd been given a crash course in driving all the cars and bikes Protectorate members who weren't movers got to take out as the first activity of our joint training week, and so far the bikes were my favourite. The cars were cool, sure, nothing like a bit of multi-track drifting, but through the bike, I could channel my Grace.
I took the corner at speed, moving at an almost right angle, the tires squealing briefly before I gunned the throttle and brought the bike back to full speed. It was almost meditative, the way the wind rushed against my body, in time with the loudness of the engine and the brief feelings of weightlessness of my physics-defying turns; I was in control.
I sped past the other Wards who were sitting around and chatting, having had their fill of riding and driving.
I made an effort to push all my worries away and focus on the bike. I was a void and the only thing that existed was my moving through space.
I sped past everyone again.
My fears didn't exist here, only the road on which I rode.
Another lap.
And another, until it started to grow dark.
A giant red stop sign suddenly blossomed into being in front of me. I jerked, hitting the breaks as hard as I could, burning rubber filling the air as I fishtailed to a stop. I looked over as Tyrone jogged toward me across the track.
"Everyone's gone to dinner, man. We're getting Chinese takeout, you better hurry up because I don't think anyone wants to wait any longer."
"Thanks," I said, swinging my leg off the bike and straightening my back with a wince. "I really appreciate you not leaving me out."
He gave a little shrug of a smile like he had no idea why anyone would do that. "Yeah, no probs."
"No, I really appreciate it. You're a good friend."
"Are you trying out strats from that friend book?" he said.
"Uh, I am but I really mean it."
"It's cool."
I killed the engine and started walking back to the bike shed with him. I was going to buy that nigga so many booster packs for his birthday.
Chapter 45: You Say Run goes with everything 5.7
Chapter Text
"You're on your usual patrol route and it's starting to get late. You're on your way back when Console calls you and says someone's reported possible parahuman activity at a nearby convenience store. The chance is low, but you and your partner head over anyway to check it out," Harrison paused to wet his lips, tongue leaving a tiny drop of spit in the corner of his moustache. "You get there and there's no obvious parahuman, but, you do see a nervous-looking young man, and you can also see that a corner of his jacket is heavily weighed down and he looks like he's trying to hide it. How do you respond?"
I stared blankly. Why had we never had anything like this in Brockton? Every three months here they got a little training course, but never in Brockton. The only reason I got any extra training was because of Armsmaster, but it wasn't on stuff like this and I'd never heard from anyone else that they got trained like this.
The police had an academy, but I had absolutely no idea if the protectorate did too. Maybe it did, just not in Brockton? And nobody in Brockton got to hear about it? I felt the gears in my brain grind to a halt, I had to be missing something.
Jetstar kicked my foot under the table, "we approach and tell him to empty his pockets."
"I think you should take point and ask the guy running the store about the call in," I said, resisting the urge to kick her back. She was as smoking hot as Tyrone said, but I wasn't really into bossy chicks. "And let me feel out the guy."
"The store owner is a dead-end who got spooked," she shook her head vigorously. "There obviously aren't any capes here, therefore we get this guy to show his gun and hold him for the cops."
"Yeah, maybe it is a gun but we don't want to scare the guy and have him shoot someone-"
"I'm fully armoured and you said you had combat thinker powers, versus one guy with a pea shooter. He can't do anything to us, and if he tries we arrest. It's that easy."
I understood the need to flex your massive dick and make sure everyone knew it, but that was too much of an early, low confidence Greg move and this was clearly an exercise to help us understand alternative methods of policing that weren't beating up bad guys; especially since we were Wards and the data said people don't like that so much. Most of the time, unless it was one of those daytime talk-show scenarios where a kid shoots a robber and everyone coos over how brave they were.
I picked at the edge of our work paper with a thumbnail, glancing over at where Tyrone sat with Lily; lucky bastard. I bet Lily knew how to handle suspect dudes with a little tact and rationality.
"Is that what your classes in New York said to do?"
Jetstar leant back in her chair, put her hands behind her head and kicked one leg up over the other, a superior smirk that really worked on her sexy lips. "You can't always do what they tell you."
As grateful as I was my visor hid my eyes I wrenched my view away from her confidently puffed out chest, "oh yeah, I know what that's like. Absolutely we could deal with it if he had a gun, easily before he even gets his finger on the trigger. I'm more thinking about what happens to that guy-"
"Even if we give him a chance to go before he commits a crime, he's just going to commit one later. Someone who's going to rob a convenience store isn't going to shape up because we turned up."
"Jail is fucked, though," I said, pouting. "He'll go from armed robbery to worrying about dropping soap."
"Yeah, it is shit," Jetstar leant forward again, putting her elbows on our desk. "It's where you go for committing crimes though, and the guy knows that. Telling him won't make a difference."
"This is still all assuming he has a gun and is going to commit a crime, which is what I was angling for at the start where you go and talk to the owner while I use my thinker powers to see if he has a gun or if he's just nervous."
"And if he does and flips out, you can handle it?"
"Of course," I said.
"Ok," Jetstar spread her hands out, showing me her palms. "We'll do it like that. By the way, what are your powers? Combat and social thinker? Flechette said you learned Japanese with your powers, and you're clearly also some kind of brute and mover. Grab Bag?"
I mirrored her leant in posture, making sure to shift my chair so I was exactly forty-five degrees from hers. "Power stacking trump."
Jetstar frowned slightly, her head cocking to one side. "Were you Dauntless?"
I huffed.
"No, Dauntless is a different guy. And he's, like, twenty-five."
"But you're also a stacking trump?"
"Yes."
"As in, power goes up?" she traced a line in the air with her finger that started on a sharp incline and slowly levelled off to near flat.
"Yes."
"What kinds of powers?"
"I have a list," I said, poking a dozen dot points in the air. "But uh, we do have that big group spar soon so I don't want to give too much away."
"Yeah, fair's fair," she said after a moments pause, then deliberately turned to her answer sheet and scribbled out my plan. "You're still going to lose, so I can see why you'd want to have a surprise ready."
"Bold words coming from the losing team."
"And big talk coming from a team with no specialisation, we're going to wipe the floor with you."
"You say that," I said. "But I'm going to be Triumvirate one day."
Jetstar tilted her head back sceptically. "You serious?"
I nodded.
"Whatever, dude. Come back when you can break the sound barrier and shoot lasers," she jabbed at her chest with her thumb. "Then we'll talk."
"And what if I already can?" I challenged.
Jetstar leant way into my personal space and poked my shoulder roughly. "Prove it."
A hot flush of shame started to creep up my neck and as I was about to shut my mouth my head split.
We don't have to take this.
I was right, I didn't. I was going to be Triumvirate someday. The speed would come, but lasers would be easy.
"Give me a minute," I sneered, settling into a more comfortable sitting position and activating my meditation skill. Both minds focused inward as I delved into the calm lake of my mana, all the way to the bottom. I breathed evenly, circulating it around me, drawing in in and out in slow fluctuating pulses, each one condensing further into a specific point on my body. The mana started to crystalise so I let it go and started again, it needed to stay in a malleable state. My energy gathered again, loose and flowing, too loose, I compressed as far as I could-
Opened my eyes, pointed at the wall and let fly. A thin, bright blue laser burst from my fingertip and hit the wall with the sound of spitting oil, burning a little black smudge on the paint.
I grinned at Jetstar victoriously, savouring her sour expression.
"OI!"
I flinched and looked up at Harrison. His moustache bristled as he strode over to our desk, looming with crossed arms of disappointment.
"That's one strike. Two more and you're out of here."
"Sorry, sir," I cringed into my chair.
He exhaled loudly through his nose in extra disappointment, "ok, everyone switch partners again. Come on, quick."
I gave Jetstar one last lingering look of superiority before swiping my papers, getting up and moving to sit with Noodle.
"What was that about?" she asked.
"Stuff," I shrugged.
"Alright! Next scenario!" Harrison called from back on his perch, a big desk at the front of the conference room. "You're in the park and you come across a few teenage boys making a fire under a tree. It's late autumn and there's a lot of dry leaves about and you're certain you just saw one of them light it by clicking his fingers; how do you respond?"
"Come on!" I cheered, jogging backward over the mud pit like it was sand. "That's it!"
Hunch gasped for breath, his caveman jaw hanging loose as he clawed his way through the mud that threatened to suck him down. Just in front of him, Daisy dragged herself out of the pit, eyes sunken into her head with exhaustion, and flopped onto the grass. When Hunch got close enough she limply held out a hand to drag him the last, hardest step.
"Awesome work guys!" I clapped enthusiastically, patting them on the back and lifting them back onto their feet. "You're almost there."
I looked up ahead, up the other nine kilometres of obstacle course, and then back to them. Hunch and Daisy, being strictly non-combatants, had both skipped out on one too many gym sesh's.
They groaned inarticulately.
"Doing great!" I gave them a beaming smile and pulled them forward. "I'll be back in a sec."
I turned and set off at a quick run. Our activity for today was a 'Tough Mudder' style course, which while it was easy as pie for me it was gruelling for everyone without a brute power, thus making it my job to inspire the team to victory. I hopped over a six-foot wall and sprinted up a punishingly steep, slippery hill.
"Lookin' fit, buddy," I slapped Tyrone on the back, almost sending him sprawling down the slick hill.
"Fuck," he gasped, swiping wildly at me with one hand and anchoring himself on a tuft of grass with his other. "Off!"
I laughed and grabbed his hand, hauling him up the hill and setting him gently down at the peak, "less cards more cardio, fagboi."
He made to swipe at me again but I jumped backward, skating down the other side of the hill and continuing on until I reached the gaggle that was Valerie, Fred, Norm, Jetstar, Noodle, Shaman and Bangarang all trying to balance across a pair of elastic bands stretched over a pool of murky brown water with varying levels of success.
Weld was somewhere up ahead and I had a feeling he skipped this one on account of weighing a few hundred kilos. Man, fuck Cauldron.
Shaman slipped on one foot, the sudden change of balance sending the rubber bands twanging as he fell into the muddy water with a strangled gasp. He surfaced, wiping grit off his face as the equally gritty assembled group made sympathetic noises and encouragement while he pulled himself out and retook his place in the line.
Valerie, the next in line, approached the bands. She crouched down and gingerly crawled her hands out, one on each band, and then carefully placed her right foot down only to immediately slip and fall face-first into the water.
The audience made more sympathetic noises.
This wouldn't do. I hopped forward, gliding through the air, the bands bouncing me gently as I landed with one foot on each. I put my hands on my hips, inhaled deeply, and sighed.
"Come on Boston Gang, we know New York Gang are losers but they're pretty much tied with us. We needs them gloating rights! Imagine us at the end of the week having finally beaten them! Boston Gang rise up!"
"Losers?!" Bangarang shouted, pushing forward and readying herself in front of the bands. "Eat shit and die, we're going to win!"
I kept my feet on the bands, steadying them as she started her crawl, fighting a powerful urge to do the splits when she was halfway. That was Old Greg behaviour and I hadn't illegally downloaded a pdf of How to Win Friends and Influence People for nothing. I slowly walked back as she approached, shooting a smile to the other side-
Ok, I was doing the right thing, ignore the bad thoughts. It's not your fault.
I kept my smile plastered on-
And kept stabilising the bands. I stepped back onto the bank and moments later Bangarang clawed her way up, taking a moment to catch her breath before shooting me a dirty look and jogging away, taking care to jostle me with her elbow. But that was fine, I'd upset her knowing she was hyper-competitive.
I hopped back onto the bands as Jetstar, apparently not to be outdone on anything, practically leapt forward to be next. I looked over my shoulder at Bangarang, and then past her to where Lily was, too far to be visible. My god would I have loved to watch her crawl towards me.
Chapter 46: You Say Run goes with everything 5.8
Chapter Text
"So the Undersiders rob a bank and just the Wards get sent out? Where were the PRT Troopers?"
"I don't know," Amy said. "I wasn't there."
"And then Piggot fined them?"
"That's what Vicky said Dean said."
I didn't have words for this bullshit. What the fuck was Piggot doing? What the fuck was the Youth Guard doing? Why wasn't a PRT captain leading? Where were all the actual Protectorate members? Why were under-trained Wards being sent out against villains that had violent crimes to their name? I was newer than them and even I had more training even though I'd only been in Boston for like a month.
"What the fuck," I breathed. "And they didn't appeal the fine? Has nobody even read their contract?"
"Greg, I don't know, I wasn't there."
"Why not? Didn't you go and heal them up?" I snapped, glancing over to where everyone was distracted playing Lets Dance. "Piggot can't just do that, that's months of wages just gone."
"Fuck you, I don't have to go running every time someone gets a booboo. Those pills have given me the biggest fucking headache all day, I don't need you making it worse."
I wanted to snap at her, tear down her stupid bitch worldview, but I was angry at Piggot, not Amy.
"Why do you care anyway," she continued. "I'm not really friends with them and neither are you."
"But I want to be!" I hissed, the word a venomous snake wrapped around my neck. That they didn't like me was my fault, I wanted to make that right and show them the real Greg. The one they would like.
"Ok," said Amy wearily.
I heard a computer mouse clicking in the background. Clearly this wasn't the best time to talk to her about this, and I'd already checked if she was feeling holdover megalomaniacal tendencies so I figured I should talk to her when she was in a less distracted state.
"I'm gonna call Armsmaster, I'll talk to you later."
I barely waited for her to say goodbye before hanging up and thumbing through my contacts for Colin's number, still titled Bromaster, and dialling. The phone rang out and I was left with his voicemail. Damn it.
"It's Greg," I said after the beep. "Call me back about whatever this shit is about Piggot fining the Wards. Thanks, bye."
I clicked my tongue and walked back over to witness the showdown between Lily and Tyrone. I was sure it was an absolute mismatch but I couldn't actually see through Tyrone's illusions, so as far as I could tell they were tied even with Lily's perfect sense of timing. I leant up against the back of one lounge chair, behind Basilisk, thankful once again for my visor obscuring my sightlines to Lily's butt. But it probably wouldn't have mattered, my body language power was implying most people were staring too, binding us in patrician solidarity.
Our masks were all still on, but nobody had been bothering with the full uniform for a while which was a plus since sweats and a hoodie were comfier than my skintight, not quite breathable getup that collected sweat which, if not for my inventory, would render it unwearable and super gross.
I was going to ask her out. My resolve couldn't be shaken on this, only further solidified as I watched her dance to A Crazy Little Thing Called Love. There was nothing in her Observe to imply she was seeing anyone or anything, though there was a concerning bit about a villain being obsessed with her due to their group trigger but I don't think I had to worry about that kind of competition there.
I checked my phone, nothing.
The song ended, leaving Tyrone victorious and sadly booting Lily from the competition of Best Dancer New York vs. Boston.
I vaulted over the lounge, bouncing in the air with a double jump, and high fived Tyrone on the way down.
"You ready to get creamed, Bas?" I said over my shoulder.
Basilisk raised a lazy hand, bent his middle finger down, placed his thumb over it and flicked, sending his hat spinning into the air. It revolved five times before landing directly back onto his head, his extended middle finger mocking me with its smug aura.
"Yes," he said.
I cackled, pumping my fist-
AIYAYAYAYAI!
Fucking typical. I fished my phone out and accepted the call, "just one second."
I held my free hand out, shimmering blue streams coalescing into a clone. I touched my fingers to its neck, fine blue wires trailing from them as I drew my hand away.
"I have to take a call from Armsmaster real quick," I said, my second line taking over directing the clone as I edged around another lounge. "Sorry, I'll be right back. This guy is gonna dance for me on this one."
"Sorry," I said into the phone, making sure to keep an eye on the clone at all times. "Hello."
"Hello, Greg," Colin said in one of his less tired voices, and then, clearly remembering to be polite. "How are you?"
"Yeah, good thanks. So about Piggot fining the Wards?"
"I didn't actually know until you called. You remember we transferred control of the Wards to the PRT at the start of the year, yes?"
"Yes."
"It's been great for my work progress-"
I rolled my eyes.
"-and until now I hadn't heard anything untoward about the director's management. I did hear about the robbery, however."
"Ok, so why were they fined?"
"Let me see…" he trailed off and went silent for a moment. "Looks like Gallant called in Glory Girl who caused some property damage, and the Wards pay was docked to compensate."
I drew in an angry breath but he cut me off.
"No, you're right, this isn't right. I can't for the life of me think of a reason why they were fined, what was the director thinking?" Colin muttered under his breath for a bit. "They were just supposed to stall until we could get there, but the Undersiders fled before we arrived. I already spoke to Kid Win about his Alternator Cannon, and let me tell you his segmented teleport system is a fabulous design, I'm definitely going to incorporate it into my Halberds, but it's not a finable offence…"
He'd trailed off again.
"Where were the PRT?" I demanded.
I could almost hear the severity of his frown.
"Not deployed alongside them. This makes even less sense, surely a single truck could be spared? A foam sprayer could have netted us the lot." Colin made a disgusted noise in the back of his throat. "The altercation was over well before we got there, so it was not attached in my report, and I didn't read the Wards reports since that's the director's job now. I understand why you're confused."
"Fucking good! Can we do something about it?"
"Well," Colin hesitated. "I don't particularly have a lot of time."
He seemed to sense that I thought this answer was unacceptable.
"But I'll send an email."
Oh my god, was I about to lecture fucking Armsmaster on how to do his job? Yes, apparently I was. Fuck me.
"You have to stand up for them," I marshalled all my power to keep my voice steady. "They clearly don't know they have options. This has got to be months worth of their wages, how can Piggot punish them for something that they really shouldn't be responsible for? They need you on their side or nothing will change. Imagine if this happened with your team, you'd stand up for them, right?"
"Nobody would dare to do this to my team."
"Exactly! Because you're Armsmaster. And the Wards need your help-"
"Enough, Greg. I understand. I suppose I can make some time to sort this out," he heaved a sigh. "I can already see the meeting we'll need with the Youth Guard. You can't imagine the tedium."
"It's the right thing to do," I protested. "You can't just let Piggot do this."
"I'll set things right, Greg, unfortunately I can't ignore this now that I know. Actually, maybe I can get Miss Militia to sub in on the meeting, I have a lot to do and it'll give me some time back to whip up something I had planned for you. An additional quest reward of sorts. Nothing fancy, but your Armsmajor title gives you an armour bonus so I was going to get around to asking if you wanted me to redesign your Dark Smoke Puncher costume into something a bit sturdier."
I had so many ideas, but we could deal with that later.
"Thank you so much, that sounds amazing," I said with as much gratitude as I could project. "How many people can say they have something made by Armsmaster? Before that though, could you let me know how the talk with Piggot goes?"
"Yes, yes, I'll keep you updated. Don't hold your breath, something like this could take months and there's only so much time I can be bothered to spend on it," Colin said without the slightest hint of apology.
I supposed it was better than nothing.
"I'll send over some sketches for my new uniform, I'd like to know how you make stuff actually. I've never talked to Chris about the actual process for t-"
"Sure," Colin interrupted. "Send them over and I'll get around to it. I have to go now, goodbye."
He hung up immediately, as usual. But something was done, a step had been taken in a direction. Whether I had done enough, I didn't know, but if nothing had happened in a month or two I could always email the Youth Guard rep myself. Hopefully all it took was Armsmaster mentioning this and they'd get their money back.
I inventoried my phone and turned my full attention back to where Basilisk was cutting my clone a new fuckhole with his mad shapes. I cracked my neck and prepared myself for the sickest pop and lock of my life.
Our last activity before the big group spar tomorrow was a scavenger hunt and by some unprecedented divine act I was partnered with Lily; truly I had both god and anime on my side. This was my biggest chance to impress her and I was not going to squander it like I had so many other opportunities over the years.
"And then the first hobo says, 'Sure, we can switch, but I lost the sausage six bars ago'."
Lily chuckled the gurgling chuckle of both disgust and amusement, which was miles better than the utterly tepid reaction I'd gotten last time I told this joke.
I grinned stupidly, my heart hammering in my throat, my tooth twinkle sparkling. "Actually," I suppressed a voice crack. "I have something even better!"
I materialised my phone, typing 'its hip to fuck bees' into youtube, and shoved it under her nose.
"What movie is this?" she asked as Bateman started talking about Hewey Louis and the News.
"American Psycho, it's actually really good, we should all watch it tonight and like, cover Hunch's eyes when it gets to the naughty bits."
Lily hmmed, engrossed in the clip.
I held my breath as we walked. She didn't look like she liked it as much as me. I relaxed a little when she smirked and chuckled when the song changed before handing me back the phone.
"The movie does look good, what's it about?"
"It's a dark comedy about that guy being crazy." Oh, thank Christ, at least she didn't hate it. "I guess it's also social commentary, but funny."
"Cool. Hey," she pointed to the glinting pin holding a man's tie to his shirt. "I think that's next on our list."
"Yeah," I Observed. "It is."
I can't believe she didn't like its hip to fuck bees that much. What was wrong with it? Was it too niche? Did she just have to have seen the movie first? Both movies? Should I link her to the KYM page?
While Lily was getting the tie pin I quickly texted Sveta.
Greg: hip to fuck bees slaps, right?
I had to do something else, what would impress her? What would come off as both impressive and natural and not try hard in the slightest? The prevailing consensus on the internet was that I just had to be myself, bro, and while that seemed to be working out on some level, it wasn't enough. I kept my frown off my face as Lily walked back over to me, it was time to do something radical. Something crazy, but crazy was my middle name.
"Catch," she lifted the pin up, a little glinting gold PRT logo, and lobbed it to me.
I let my enhancement skill burst open, focusing it fully on my charisma stat, boosting it to fully double. I smiled with the force of a full thirty-four CHA, pouring into it my happiness, my positivity and my will to take her out to a nice dinner and hold her hand-
"Nice one, Flechette!"
-and in her pleased smile, I couldn't see any of my attraction returned. My blood ran cold, it had to be a mistake. My body language skill wasn't high enough, or I wasn't attuned to such high charisma and missed a subtle signal, or, or-
Why?! We've made so much progress! It wasn't supposed to be like this!
Can't our quests predict the future, isn't that why the true love one runs out soon? Lily was the one?
Yes! It has to be, the only other girl we've felt like this for was Victoria and some of that was fake!
Right? The timing is too perfect, she's too perfect a fit. The quests don't lie
The quests don't lie. Everything is aligned, us, Lily, the quest timer, her being able to shank Endbringers. We aren't failing this, she likes us-
So why doesn't she like like us?
My other Greg was silent because I had no idea why. It didn't make sense. Lily did like me, that much was plain as day, but apparently only in a friend capacity. I'd been friend-zoned. It figures, why would girls start liking me now? They never had before. Granted that was entirely on me, but I thought things were different. That I'd changed.
Not enough, apparently.
I caught the pin and put it in my inventory with the rest of our scavenged loot.
"Ok, so next we have to find a specifically monogrammed handkerchief," my mouth was saying. "I haven't seen one on any of the other floors, so we have to go up."
I really thought I was good enough this time.
Chapter 47: You Say Run goes with everything 5.9
Chapter Text
"Trumpets," said Hunch. "Trumpets and bookmarks."
We nodded and stroked our chins knowingly, trumpets was a decent read from Hunch's power and the addition of bookmarks tipped it increasingly positive. Personally, I wasn't sure how accurate it was ever since we figured out that at the very least Dez's precog got increasingly wrong when I started creating spells on the fly until it finally adjusted.
"Team," Weld held out his hand palm down. "We've got this."
In turn we piled our hands atop his, our spirits welded together by the torch of friendship and glory.
I licked my lips nervously as the lights reflected off of everyone's masks, polished to a mirror sheen. I hadn't slept well last night, tossing and turning over my wretched discovery, not getting enough to even get my Healthy buff and I missed it terribly. I'd almost forgotten the enormous difference it made on my general mood to not start the day in perfect health, it was one more thing I no longer envied about past Greg; he may have been happier but he was an oblivious, ignorant retard.
I was so much better than him.
"Boston gang!" he barked, raising his hand high from under the pile in a fist.
"Boston gang!" I croaked raising my own fist, voice drowned out by the louder cries of my team. We lowered our fists and I equipped my Anypole, the form flowing into a sleek, solid steel, intricately crafted long-bladed spear. It glinted dully as I gave it a test swing, my enhanced strength easily carrying it in smooth, easy circles.
I noticed Weld's eyes on me and I reluctantly met them, giving him a small nod. Last night, after the team huddle, he'd taken me aside and asked if this was going to be a repeat of the other training situation, and then asked if it could be if we were going to lose. I didn't want to lose, but I'd promised to wait until the last minute before I unleashed the beast to give everybody a chance to try their hardest.
We lined up on one side of the spacious padded room, mirrored by the Lancers, missing only Daisy as the sole true non-combatant. Even Hunch was having a go, despite that he was usually mission command his cauldron vial mutations made him hardy and strong.
"You're all ready?!" Nitroman called out from the sidelines, because apparently we needed adult supervision to beat the shit out of each other. "Start in five! Four! Three! Two! One! Go!"
Mana poured into my spear, binding to it with a blue glow. I let go, the spear floating up in front of me, and split my mind having the second track control it. I figured it would be a decent enough challenge to fight using only an ability I had literally never trained and a spell I had only just created.
I stalked toward my first opponent.
"I've got muh whackin' stick, bitch, you reddy to get smacked?" I hollered at Basilisk, who cast his hat aside dramatically, then dodged a scorching blue beam from Jetstar. I turned to see her rocketing toward me like a particularly ostentatious missile. I gathered myself and swung into the air, managing to bounce off her back as she passed under me only to get singed by her boot thrusters.
I span on a dime, turning to face them just in time to see Basilisk grab her outstretched hand and slingshot her around back at me. My spear whipped out, causing her to veer off to the side giving me a gap to rush Basilisk who met me with a long, clawed kick.
I elbow blocked into his ankle and shifted low for my spear to fly over my head and drive him back with a series of feinting thrusts. He turned a stumble into a tail whip, opening up a thin cut on my cheek that burned like I'd been branded.
I pressed my hand to my face, pushing back against the stinging pain, and pulled it away bloody.
"Shit, sorry!"
"S'fine," I grit my teeth. "Just wasn't expecting it. We're good."
Basilisk made a face that might have been a contrite smile, but it was hard to tell as he didn't have lips or skin that wrinkled or remotely human facial features.
I jumped toward him, aiming a big telegraphed kick at his head, then bounced off the air in a double jump right over his head. His surprised gaze followed me right up until the butt end of my spear rammed into his back. A blast from Jetstar clipped my leg as I landed -focus, Greg!- and I back-flipped away, double-jumping again over another blast.
My spear spun like a buzz saw as I circled them at a run, harrying Jetstar as I closed back in on Basilisk.
I dodged, bobbed, weaved, dipped, dived and dodged his ceaseless attacks. He was actually almost as good as me, in pure skill and reflexes, but lacking the myriad powers that put me in my own weight class.
"Can't you fight without your little stick?" he hissed, taking a step back, eyes narrowed in focus. "Because this isn't going to tire me out."
I figured it would be rude to say that I was purposefully holding back and that I could take his whole team at once, but, it was also true.
"I promised Weld I wouldn't."
Basilisk paused. "Dude, what?"
"This is a team effort, Weld made me promise," I said apologetically, shrugging, pointing at Jetstar who had been prevented from using her air supremacy to dominate the battle by Tyrone who had blanketed the area in an illusion to achieve this very effect. "I have to let everyone have a go first."
Basilisk scoffed and tried to sucker-punch me with a lightning-quick jab, following it up with a roundhouse kick and a whirling tail strike. I dodged back, and then to the side, flowing smoothly around his attacks.
Jetstar had apparently given up fighting me as a bad job and was zooming over to the other side of the room where Jouster was keeping Weld hemmed in with ineffectual elemental charges from his lance. I recalled my spear, having it skim near the ground and collect Basilisks feet out from under him with the haft. Basilisk, in a truly impressive feat of agility, twisted in mid-air to land on all fours and in the same movement leapt at me in a big bounding jump.
He took me off my feet as I gasped in surprise at the speed of his jump, and we landed in a scrabbling tangle, each trying to muscle the other into submission. I guided my spear to grind its butt into his armpit, and as he twisted to get away from the annoying pain I put my right hand onto his right shoulder, grabbed his same wrist with my left, and pulled him close into a shoulder lock, mushing his face into the padded floor. He struggled, but I was stronger, and between that and my spear floating menacingly near his head he tapped out.
I let go and we flopped apart, breathing heavily.
"Good match," Basilisk said stolidly, lizard tongue playing over his peg-like teeth. "Sorry again about your cheek."
I put my hand to it again, probing the slice, and found that it was barely bleeding. I shook my head and smiled, getting to my feet, "it'll heal up in a few minutes, don't worry."
I held out a hand and pulled Basilisk to his feet, "it was a good match, you're crazy fast."
He exhaled loudly through his nose, "you said you weren't trying."
"Aw, that doesn't matter," I let go of his hand, still smiling. "You're still fast."
He grumbled and sloped off to the side of the room- there was a popping whoosh and I stumbled to my knees, back aflame with pain. I crawled to my feet, vision grey and blurred as Hans clawed his face in agony on the ground-
"-u okay?"
My ears whined with a tinnitus buzz as I whipped my head from side to side, searching desperately for that Nazi fuck.
"-meant to be the lowest setting, are you okay?" Jetstar floated around into view, gauntlets twisting over each other in front of her.
I scrabbled a hand over my back, searching for the knife but finding only neat, undamaged uniform. The burning pain of my Arc Flash vanishing as quickly as it arrived, fading back into the grubby little corner of my mind from whence it came.
"Yes, fine," I grimaced a plastic smile. "Thank you for shooting me in the back."
"You should pay more attention," her arms crossed over her breastplate, obscuring the glowing orb in the centre.
I could feel the thin string of my patience fraying. I growled, my spear leaping back into my right hand even as wire-fine threads spooled from my left, creeping through the air and gently wrapping around Jetstar.
She suddenly accelerated up, almost taking all my fingers off as I squeezed them into a fist and let myself be dragged along after her. I pulled hard on the mana strings, my Grace making the motion of wrenching myself closer almost effortless, the extended reach of my spear letting me whack her across the helmet hard enough to make her wobble. Jetstar dove suddenly, the ground coming up to meet us at a frightening pace.
I dissolved the wires as she burst sideways at an almost right angle, landing heavily, but safely, where she expected to whip me into the floor.
I was suddenly struck by a disorienting moment of clarity; how fucked was it that I could hit her with a spear, or she could try pile-drive me headfirst into the floor, and it was considered OK.
A headache started throbbing in my left temple. I was going to have to break my promise, sorry Weld, but Jetstar was just too god damn aggravating.
I inventoried my spear, cast Cuttlefish Skin, and vanished from view.
Jetstar immediately zoomed backwards, firing her repulsor beams wildly, but not fast enough. I charged, leapt, and grappled her in a bear-hug. We fell as I encased her in a solid shell of mana and I landed us as gently as I could, feeling her struggle futilely against her restraints, trying to burn through them with her boot thrusters. I clenched my fists as the urge to punch her as hard as I could while she was down surged to the forefront of my mind, but I picked her up and heaved her atop my shoulders like a big blue sushi roll, jogging over to where Basilisk, Hunch, Valerie and Fred sat in the losers corner. I balanced the Jetstar sushi against the wall and dissolved the mana shell, where she wilted into a sullen pile.
"We're gettin' our asses kicked, huh?" I asked Fred.
"Just go win for us, dude," he said tiredly, rubbing at a swelling wrist.
I nodded, sighing heavily and jogged back toward the action. Roulette was sparring fiercely with Flechette, and both looked like they were in Flow state so I figured I should let them be. Tyrone and Shaman were nowhere to be seen, but that was to be expected as Tyrone's whole job was to disorient the enemy and deprive Jetstar and Shaman of their air superiority.
Weld was now getting double teamed by Bangarang and Jouster while Norman ineffectually chased around Noodle, it was like bullying. Were they bullying Weld?
Bangarang would skate across the ground like a writhing octopus and hit Weld from a blind spot, bouncing him away with a big bass reverberation into the path of Jouster who would jet forward and lance Weld with a crackle of lightning, flame or ice. None of it was doing any damage, but still.
I let off a bright flash and loud crack, drawing all attention in the room. I raised an arm, slowly, pointing at Jouster and Bangarang.
"Which one of you bitches wants to dance?"
They stopped, Bangarang turning to Jouster. "Well it has to be me, right? You took out Bassy and Jet, no way I'm gonna not getting a piece of that shit."
Jouster cocked his head and paused, glancing to Weld and then back to me. "Yeah. Go for it."
"Thanks, chief!" Bangarang cracked her knuckled theatrically, failing to produce any actual cracks, then jumped forward into a power-slide that took her a full three meters. She popped to her feet and swaggered toward me. "So you really are some kinda super Trump, huh?"
"Yes," I said.
The acknowledgement was nice, but my headache was getting worse. My skin crawled, I was itching to hurt someone, to hit them like I had Armsmaster. Unrestrained and without hesitation. Actually, maybe I just wanted to hit Armsmaster again.
I took a deep shuddering breath, then exhaled every last molecule of air in my lungs. I should just leave, who cared if I was some kinda super Trump? Lily wasn't into me, I was scared of my own reflection and the power mafia was going to come knocking any day now. I should go see Sveta, I should go see Amy, I should go see mum and dad and I should go apologise to Taylor.
Bangarang started saying something else but I wasn't paying attention. I looked at Weld, so shiny and chrome, watching me with folded arms.
"Sorry, bro, but I want to get this done, do you mind?"
Then he unfolded his arms, his expression unfolding into something tender. He took a step and started walking toward me. I stood rooted to the spot, what was he doing?
"Greg," he said softly, gently putting a hand on my shoulder. "Are you ok?"
I glanced down at my shaking, clenched fists. Ah, my acting skill control had slipped.
"I think I'm going to hurt someone," I whispered. "Can I go sit down for a bit?"
His grip tightened on my shoulder and he nodded. "Of course, of course. Anything you feel you need to, do."
"Sorry," I muttered.
"It's ok."
"Sorry," I said again.
"It's alright."
Chapter 48: You Say Run goes with everything 5.10
Chapter Text
Even though I had no chance, even though it would be soul-destroyingly futile, I had to try.
I'd managed to dawdle in exactly the right way as we all walked back from the dinner we had to buy the New Yorkers on account of losing, ending up next to her at the back of the group. It was now or never. I Enhanced, bringing my charisma up to thirty-four and indisputably superhuman.
"I really like you, Lily, would you like to go on a date with me?"
Lily's mouth fell open slightly, her eyebrows raising. It was nice to finally see her face, we'd all unmasked to each other after everyone was done sparring, even if I'd sat most of it out.
"I'm gay."
It took the seven and a half seconds for my mana to run out before I responded.
"Oh," I said. "Ok."
"I mean, I would if I weren't gay."
The scene played out in my mind. Old Greg lies in the shed, spouting inane gibberish he'd read on the internet, about his favourite Space Opera campaign, about how the government was brainwashing people with tinkertech cell phone towers, his waifu. I open the door and he makes to escape, asking me if I read litRPG's, but I raise the gun I hold clenched in my hand, jamming it against his forehead. I look into his big blue eyes and squeeze the trigger, ahegao jpgs spray out the back of his ruined skull, coating the shed floor.
"But you're gay," I said.
"Yeah," Lily gave a rueful little smile.
"That's alright," I grinned, energised, unfettered glee bubbling up inside my chest. "I completely understand."
"I don't mean for this to make things awkward but that's how I feel, and I couldn't let the chance slip by."
"It's cool," Lily smiled, a little awkwardly. "But you should have asked Savannah out, she said she thinks you're really cute."
My head spun like a whip, zeroing in on her. Her flight suit really didn't do her justice, she looked like she could be a future supermodel with a face to match. I'd rate her point nine five on the Victoria Dallon scale. I tore my eyes away from her skintight jeans.
"Seriously?"
"Yeah."
I watch as Old Greg gasps, scrabbling in the dirty straw like an animal. I squeeze the trigger again, blood sprays from his neck.
"I would, but she seems pretty rude, is she nice?"
"She's not rude," Lily frowned. "She's just a bit too over-focused, apparently it's a Tinker thing."
Old Greg slobbers on his own arterial spray, wheezing air and choking on blood I hear him faintly mumble about nofap and semen retention. I pull the trigger again.
"Armsmaster's like that, so maybe it is, yeah," I shrugged, eyeing her again. It wasn't true, given both Chris and Fred, but I might have just misunderstood her. "Maybe I'll talk to her some more."
"She can be… overly intense, granted, but she's really sweet. If you're ever in New York, ask her if she wants to go ice skating."
More excited glee welled up in my guts, my blood was burning in my brain. I barely managed to control my voice as it verged on cracking. "You're a really good wingman, you know?"
"I haven't managed to hook her up yet," she shook her head despairingly.
"You will," I said, and winked.
I watch as the colour drains from Old Greg and he vomits poorly drawn H-Manga drafts onto the straw, I jam the gun against his temple and grab him by the throat. Behind his eyes, hundreds of dollars of Warhammer figurines stand in regimented columns, painted and untouched. We don't cotton to freaks around these parts, I tell him coldly and pull the trigger a final time. He disintegrates into Nesquik and I walk out of the shed without looking back as it starts to burn.
I settled uncomfortably on the office chair, squirming, unsure of where to put my hands.
"I prefer Greg."
Doctor Kolhatkar smiled, leaning forward on his desk. "It's very nice to meet you, Greg. I understand your last session was with my colleague Dr Yamada?"
I nodded.
"And that was your first session with us here. Would you like to start where you left off with Dr Yamada?"
"Uh, nah, I um didn't say much to her. I kinda mostly wanted to talk about the PTSD I got from when the E Eighty-Eight tried to kill Armsmaster and me."
Kolhatkar's brows furrowed, he nodded seriously, "would you tell me about the experiences you've had since?"
"Yeah," I smiled weakly. "So one of the guys had a power that let him hide in reflections, so now every time I see a reflection I start feeling really stressed. I even covered up my mirror in my bathroom, and the one time I looked at it I hallucinated and blacked out for ten minutes and woke up in the PRT lobby fully dressed. And sometimes when I get stressed I can hear them talking, or feel where the guy stabbed me, and the other day in sparring I thought I was back on that road for a moment," I blurted this all out in a rush, my heart hammering in my throat.
"I see," said Kolhatkar, leaning even more forward. "Would you say that you're currently feeling stressed?"
I nodded.
"I think we should try a body scan. It's a meditative technique that helps bring awareness to your body and what you're feeling, helping you understand more about where specifically this stress is affecting you physically. From there we can work on relaxing those parts as we work up to talking about your experiences over the next fifty minutes."
"Sounds good," I shrugged, picking at the sleeve of my hoodie.
He smiled kindly over his big bushy moustache. "Is your chair comfortable enough? There's a lever if you want to recline."
I pulled the chair back and settled down, but I couldn't get fully relaxed. I was too stiff, I tried to let go but I was sure it looked affected.
"First, start to bring your attention to your breath," Doctor Kolhatkar said gently, scooting his chair out from behind his desk and around to get within distance of me. "Make room for whatever you are feeling, including any areas of tension, heaviness, or constriction."
I took a great big breath and focused on the sensation of air going in and out of my nose. My mediation ability gave me a sense of the basic techniques, not that I practised them much. I tried to clear my mind, focusing only on the feel of my breathing. I felt my racing heart begin to settle.
After about thirty seconds Doctor Kolhatkar continued "Now, bring your awareness to your feet, legs, and hips. Notice the sensations in your muscles and on your skin."
I traced my awareness up my legs, noticing my tensed ankles and the squeeze of my shoes on my feet. The soreness in my quads and hammies of having done some fucking heavy deadlifts earlier.
"Next, take a deep breath as you bring your attention into your torso, becoming aware of any sensations in your abdomen and lower back. Notice your spine and any sensations across your chest or upper back. Now, bring your awareness to your shoulders, arms, and hands. Notice any areas of tension or relaxation. Last, bring your attention to your neck, throat, and face. Notice your eyes, your mouth, and your tongue and the general sensations of your head. Take a final moment to notice your body as a whole."
I realised my back hurt, down in my shoulder-blades and up into the base of my neck, but it wasn't, like, workout soreness.
"Did you notice any unusual tension?"
"Yeah," I said, shifting slightly without opening my eyes. "Up in my back and neck"
"That's normal. Now we're going to try a relaxation exercise. I want you to, while breathing down deep into your belly, tense your neck and upper back as hard as you can for five seconds and then relax. It helps to visualise a time or place you're most relaxed as you do this."
I squeezed, counted, then let myself go loose as I tried my hardest to imagine I was at home. Dinnertime with mum and dad. Gaming with Sveta. Chilling with Amy. Playing Magic with Tyrone.
"Now move further down, tensing your shoulders and arms, five seconds, then release."
"And then continue all the way down your body."
I squeezed and waited and relaxed and squeezed and waited and relaxed and squeezed and waited and relaxed.
"Do you feel the tension subsiding?" Doctor Kolhatkar asked. "No? That's perfectly fine, let's give it one more go, shall we?"
I shifted uncomfortably and started with the exercise again.
"It's not really relaxing."
Kolhatkar hmmed, nodded, and shrugged. "That's ok too, I'd suggest you try it out in a place you feel more comfortable in."
I sat back up and stretched in my chair, twisting from side to side.
After a few moments of silence Doctor Kolhatkar realised I wasn't going to say anything without prompting.
"You brought up the time you were attacked, how about you tell me as much as you feel comfortable?"
"Yeah, ok," I said. "So, Nazi's, right? It's actually mostly this villain called Coil's fault, I think it's because he thinks he's going to come into contact with me and I'll find him out. I'm certain he got them to attack me somehow because I told Armsmaster who a couple of their capes were, which like, what the fuck do they expect? Bunch of cunts. Of course I'm going to tell people who they are to get them arrested! How can they be so fucking stupid? Because let me tell you, those pieces of shit flout their 'unwritten rules' all the god damn time if they think they can get away with it. Miserable hypocritical dickheads! I hate them so fucking much! I've read thousands of pages of crime reports and they think they can get away with me not telling?"
My right leg bounced rapidly, my hands deforming the metal inside the armrests.
"Just the fucking gall of it, and then they send people to kill me because I'm making it so they can't commit all the crimes they want! I didn't even leak the names, and the Protectorate doesn't do that! So they send these two literal fucking Germans, who aren't even a part of the Empire, because they're such pussy bitches Kaiser can't even come and kill a fifteen-year-old by himself, and I don't even know where I had the guts to stand up to them like that because they were the ones behind this spree of murders where they blew these guys the fuck up! I still have nightmares about just going-"
I made a squelching noise with my mouth, twisting the remains of the right armrest in my hands.
"-all over and then I wake up in a cold sweat. I'm lucky I barely need to sleep anymore or I'd be exhausted. That guy wasn't even the worst one though, I fought his sidekick, the guy who could hide in reflections. That's why I hate them now, every time I look at something shiny I start thinking, 'maybe he's in there, just waiting to come back and finish the job'. I even think that when I look at Weld."
I tossed the armrest to the floor and started on the other.
"It's not his fault he's so shiny. I think he's noticed it too, how I won't look directly at him much, and when I do I cringe. Fuck, poor Weld. Anyway, it was that guy, Hans, I had to stay or else Armsmaster would have died, and for that he starts trying to stab me! Eventually I nearly kill the both of us, and fuck would I love to go back to that day like I am now. They wouldn't stand a fucking chance," I snarled, tossing the mangled armrest aside where it embedded in the wall. I clenched my fist and unclenched it rapidly.
"It would be so god damn easy now to just," I mimed a stab. "Shank the fucker back like he did me. I sometimes have dreams about that too, but they're better than the ones where they kill me. Anyway, so sometimes I have these really vivid hallucinations that I'm back there on that road."
I looked up, noticing that Kolhatkar had retreated to behind his desk again. Too late now, Greg has destroyed his cage. Yes. YES. Greg is out.
"And when we were doing those sparring sessions with New York, I really wanted to hurt someone. I was holding back because it was meant to be a team thing, and that gave me too much time to get worked up. I honestly think it would have gone perfectly fine if I just won as fast as I could, but I promised Weld-"
I had levelled up. After ignoring so many quests, not jerking Kolhatkar around like I had Yamada pushed me over the edge. Not that I did it for the quest, I did it for me. I was definitively a new Greg, capable of things the old Greg could never dream. And to prove that, definitively prove that, irrevocably prove that; I took the first WIS perk that opened up at fifteen points.
Meditation.
The effect was a simple boost to mana recovery and that it immediately kicked me into a meditative state of mind. I didn't have to sit there and do nothing with my eyes closed, though it was certainly much easier to do that, it was about focus. So long as I wasn't doing anything too distracting, and I was focusing, the meditation would stay.
Thus, I could attempt to create a fighting style that involved wielding seven swords and incorporated a rip off of Bangarang's break-dancing power which was more slide and glide than kinetic redirection, without having to worry about bottoming out on mana.
I hopped on one leg, using control object to shift the sword I had clenched behind one knee to the other. "Did you know Flechette is gay?"
"Hmm?" Tyrone looked up from where he was restructuring his Magic deck. "No, why? You asked her out didn't you?"
"Yeah, she shot me down though."
"The fuck've you been so cheery about then? She's so nice, if she shot me down I'd die of shame."
"Well," I hopped, with a twist of my leg, passing the sword to my other knee narrowly avoiding stabbing myself. "She told me Jetstar was into me."
Tyrone flicked the card he was holding a few times, eliciting sharp taps. "Lucky bastard."
"I'm thinking I might go for it, she can't be that annoying."
"Just stick it in, bro!"
I scoffed, shifting the sword back again. "I was thinking about it, she can't be that bad, right?"
"No way man, I'd have to tell everyone you were a fag if you said no."
"Man, didn't you just tell me that you didn't want to date this girl who might be into you at your school?"
"She's fat," said Tyrone.
I hacked out a bark of laughter, backflipped while passing the sword behind my other knee, landed on my hands and struck at an imaginary Nazi with the sword. Not much power behind it.
"And you're a skeleton, opposites attract."
"I'm svelte," Tyrone flicked one of his many cheap dupes at me like a ninja star, missing by millimetres.
"Ok," I vanished the sword and flipped back to my feet, moving to pick up the card. "Anyway, I have no idea what I should say to her. I was doing some reading on it and I figure I should just start a normal conversation, like, 'hey, what's up, do you like x-box? What're you tinkering on?'"
Tyrone shrugged, "I don't have a better idea. Tinker stuff is all I've ever heard her talk about, go with that."
I walked over to him and sat down, tossing his card back to him. "Maybe I should ask her to tinker-fix your shrimp dick."
"You'd like that."
Chapter 49: You Say Run goes with everything: Interlude: Sveta
Chapter Text
April 13th 2011- Sveta
Sveta fretted on her pole. She smelled, she knew it, she hadn't scrubbed away all her tendril wax and he would be able to tell. And then she'd be so embarrassed she'd make an even bigger idiot out of herself. Or she wouldn't be able to speak loud enough, and trying to be louder would make her stutter and say wrong words. Something was going to go wrong, as always.
Her tendrils nervously fanned out behind her, tips brushing against the roof and floor, searching for whatever danger was getting her so riled up. She squeezed her eyes shut and focused on reeling them back in, there was no danger. It was just her stupid mind being stupid again like it always did.
She wrapped her pole with every tendril, squeezing tight, as tight as she could, inhaling as much air into her tiny lungs as she could and letting the pressure build.
It was going to be fine.
She let the air out and focused on each tinny, whistling breath. Each one bringing her closer to calm-
The outer door lock clicked, sending her tendrils into a frenzy, scrabbling for purchase, writhing madly over every surface and scattering her drawing things. They moved her, wedging her into place above the door. Sveta whined shrilly, tears gathering in preparation for their humiliating first meeting. She looked in the mirrors opposite the door, searching for movement.
The inner door opened and Greg stepped inside. He wasn't wearing the suit. Her tendrils lunged, as she screamed softly, wrapping around his neck and stomach, wrenching his limbs off like all those people.
"Hey, Svets," he said, and she stopped screaming.
Under her tendrils, she felt the familiar texture of the suit rather than her gripping his bare flesh. She squeezed accidentally, her tendrils trying to wrench his left leg off, but he was barely moved by the sudden force.
"That's lovely," he gestured slowly, moving her tendrils with the motion instead of being strung up like a marionette. "I didn't know you could paint."
"Sorry," she said hurriedly, glancing at her sea and building mural. "It's not very good, sorry for not telling you."
Her tendrils squeezed tighter, so tight she was sure the suit would start to break, but there were no telltale pops or creaks or rattling noises.
"Sorry, did they give you a new suit?"
"Hmm? No," Greg started to waddle over to get a better look at the mural. "I'm reinforcing it. This shit is tite though, you should start a Pinterest. People would shell out for shit like this, even more, when they know who made it."
He had a really cool voice.
"Thanks," Sveta said. "I bet you could do better."
"I can't even draw," Greg laughed a deep, rich chuckle. "Oh, you should paint my first album cover! My first few songs are coming out on Twitter soon."
"Oh, no, I couldn't possibly-"
"No, shut up, you're commissioned. How could I get anyone else to do this with me? How does it feel to be a professional artist now?"
She wanted to tell him that she didn't want her brand associated with his shitty nigga rap or whatever it was he was doing like she might if they were messaging online, but her mouth wouldn't make the right sounds.
"No, thank you," she said instead, even though she really sort of wanted to. "I really wouldn't be comfortable with that."
"Oh," Greg deflated under her grip. "That's fine too. You should think about it though because you're really good. I can get you in with Canary if you want."
Sveta's tendrils waggled frantically. "You know Bad Canary?!"
"We're doing a single together," he tried to crane his neck to look at her face, but the tendrils around his neck thankfully stopped him short. "It's been really cool, actually. I won't spoil anything, but I bet you'll love it. I'll send you some free merch, too."
More tears sprang to Sveta's eyes, staining the edges of them black.
"Thank you," she whispered. "Thank you so much for coming to visit."
"Aw," Greg reached up to pat her tendrils awkwardly, straining against their attempt to tear his arm off at the shoulder. "No worries, bro. I was really looking forward to it too, I'm going stir crazy in HQ. There's only so much grindy training a guy can do before he wants to McFucking kill himself."
Sveta's dangling organs wracked as she sobbed, burying her face into the back of his helmeted head, and, for the very first time that she could remember she gave a hug.
"How could they do this to you?!" she babbled, gripping as tight as she could. "All you ever wanted to do was entertain!"
Greg let out a squawk of surprise as her tendrils bound his legs together, defying physics to remain upright.
"Yeah, it's not fun, but it's not so bad," Greg tried to disentangle himself, prompting a defence response from her tendrils until he settled back into wobbling to maintain balance. "Weld and Reynard keep me company, and they let me do the group training with New York, oh hey, d'you know Jetstar?"
"Uhuh, the jet tinker girl."
"She's apparently into me and she's crazy hot."
Sveta screwed up her eyes and gathered her courage.
"We have to get you laid," she whispered.
"Oh, fuck, I wish. I haven't even sent her a message yet."
"Pussy," Sveta whispered again, sniffling. "W-we need to get you some."
She fought down the urge to apologise, to beg forgiveness for her rudeness, her presumption. Maybe he didn't want to get with her, maybe he was really insecure about his inability to talk to real girls and needed emotional support, who was she to know and cast judgement even in jest?
"And we will," said Greg. "I'm actually really interested to see if I can get a sex skill, like, a five per cent increased chance of hitting the G-Spot or something."
Oh god. Sveta cringed, turning to bury herself in her tendrils. A conversation that was funny over text was horrifyingly embarrassing in person. What could she even say to that? She couldn't experience these things. Even if Greg had only had one awkward conversation with Jetstar it was a hundred billion times more than she would ever accomplish.
She laughed weakly, her tendrils finally responding to her burning desire to get away. They shot out, gripping her pole and hauling her away to the far side interposing the set of shelves that usually held her organs between Greg and herself, finally getting a proper look at him.
Thicc, she would have said if they were messaging, with a quintessential baby-face. It somehow worked without making him look too weird. Of course, it may not have been exactly what he looked like as he was wearing one of his magic disguises over the tank-like suit.
"Nayet," said Greg.
"Huh?" the word came out as a near-silent breath.
"Your real name is Nayet."
Sveta gaped, her shrivelled heartbeat suddenly deafening in her ears drowning out all thought.
A tendril suddenly whipped out at Greg's neck, but he dodged.
"My name?" she said breathily.
He smiled, nodding.
"Wow," she mouthed.
Nayet. It sounded right, something about it resonated with her deeply like it was connected to her soul. It sounded like beach waves on rock, a soothing rolling crash. She was Nayet.
"Nayet," Sveta said, black tears running down her chalk-white face. Greg handed her some tissues, which her tendrils promptly tore to shreds but it was the thought that counted.
Later, they played a game of Scrabble.
Chapter 50: You Say Run goes with everything: Interlude: Paulie Dimitri: Taylor Hebert
Chapter Text
Chapter 51: Unravel 6.1
Chapter Text
It was the numbness I wasn't used to. I didn't like it, but maybe it was better than breaking down like dad had. I didn't think it was because I was stronger than he was, or loved her any less, I don't know… Maybe everything that had happened to me so far made it easier to deal with it. Dad had already left, unable to handle being in the room any longer, unable to handle being next to her. Even all those times I'd nearly died I didn't feel half as washed out as this, I was flush with emotion then but now?
I stared at my feet, ignoring the slight creaking of someone opening the door and the eventual feel of their hand on my shoulder.
"I healed all the physical damage, but, y'know…"
"Yeah," I muttered.
"When I can trust myself to," Amy tightened her grip, leaning against me slightly. "I will."
"Thank you," I whispered.
After a moment she let go and took a step back, moving around to the chair dad had left vacant and settled into it uncomfortably. The silence stretched between us, uncharacteristically awkward and tense.
"Thanks for coming to heal her," I broke the silence, still staring at my feet.
"I was already here, and I fixed up everyone else caught in the attack anyway, so…" Amy trailed off, shifting her robe and bunching it in her hands. "I was expecting you to be a little bitch about it. Beg me to fix her or some shit."
I looked up, dragging my gaze painfully across mum's sleeping form, meeting her eyes. She was a little blurry before I wiped away the tears, but I looked into her tired brown eyes and saw reflected even more of my stupidity.
"I'm genuinely sorry about everything I asked you to do for me. I realise now that I trapped you, and I shouldn't have, I was never a very good friend."
Amy held my gaze, eyes dull, and didn't say anything. After a full minute, she stomped on my foot viciously.
"You self pitying piece of shit. Get up," she stood, hands-on-hips. "We're going to the roof."
I nodded, glancing back over at mum before rubbing my eyes and standing, following her wordlessly out of the room. We passed uninterrupted through busy hospital corridors. I wasn't in my uniform and I wasn't in one of my oversized hoodies, but I didn't care if anyone realised who I was. Things like that just kinda didn't seem important at the moment. It was one of those moments where all previous thoughts of how well you'd handle bad things happening vanished under the crushing weight of reality. Maybe I really was being a self-pitying faggot.
At the top of the flight of stairs, Amy inserted her key into the roof access door, unlocked it, and stepped out into the light. I shuffled through, blinking against the brightness as Amy stretched and pulled her robe off, tucking it over one arm. She led the way to our usual spot, a small square block that held pipes or something, and slumped down against it while fishing in a pocket.
"I don't have any of my new stuff on me 'cause taking it too many days in a row fucks you up, but I have this," she produced a joint of nootropic turbo weed, rolling it between her fingers aggressively. "And you're not going to be a pussy and you're going to smoke it."
I choked out a single strangled chuckle, easing myself into a crouch beside her. She held out the joint and I lit it with a spark from my fingers. She took a puff first and handed it to me. Maybe I should have been nervous in that I was going to do drugs for the first time but the numbness prevailed. I raised it to my lips and drew in a long breath. It actually tasted kinda nice and didn't stink like burning socks and plastic like regular cigarettes.
I handed it back and drew my knees up, resting my head on them, blowing the smoke between my calves. I didn't know what I was going to do. The Protectorate had given me leave, but they also wanted me to keep doing interviews and promotional gigs, but I couldn't do that and help hunt down everyone in the ABB responsible for hurting my mum, could I?
I took another long drag. When was this supposed to kick in any way oh there we go-
I raised my head high and blew the plume of smoke out to the sky, straightening my legs out to rest them flat against the roof. This was pretty neat, the horrible numbness was being smothered by a peaceful zen. I smiled, still a little sadly. I could see why Amy was hooked on this stuff.
"Thanks, dude," I said.
"Anytime," she replied, eyes shut as the sun bore gently down on her face.
"You've still been a better friend than me, and I really mean that."
"I know," Amy stubbed the butt out on the concrete, grinding it slowly until the paper was too frayed and small to grip. "You really did used to be a cunt, but you did help me too. It did mean something that you accepted me for who I was, even if you were after my powers."
"I never meant it to be like that, I was just honestly dog shit at making friends. A lot of it was selfish, though. It's complicated, I guess, life is hard, huh?"
Amy scoffed.
"I really, genuinely wanted to be your friend, I just didn't know how. I'm sorry I used my powers against you to make it happen, I look back at that night and cringe. I knew how much it hurt you to be in love with your sister, but I also didn't. It's hard to explain-"
"Eat shit and die," she whipped her arm sideways and punched me in the chest softly. "I've seen your brain enough times to get you. Hating you for it would be like hating a puppy for taking a shit on the rug. Ah," she sighed, hand dropping to her lap. "It still hurts that I love her and she doesn't love me back, but I'm going to move away from home soon. Out of the Bay, maybe Boston if you're still there. I'm old enough to get around those fucking NEPEA laws, so I can get a job with my power and finally do some real fucking good."
She levied a tired look at me. "If there's one other thing I could thank you for it's keeping me from burning out completely."
"You were pretty fucked," I said. "I don't think you would have ever hurt anyone though."
"My thing says that too?"
I nodded slightly. "I'm sorry I didn't do more."
Amy grunted, acknowledging that I was a self absorbed cunt.
Something dripped down my cheek. I sniffled, and the dam burst. A flood of all the tears I couldn't cry before ran down my face like rain.
"I hate them so much," I sobbed. "I fucking hate them."
"Who?"
"The gangs. And the worst part is I know how they do this, it's like me and you. I hurt you because I didn't want to know any better, that's what these guys do too, just worse. Assert dominance on people because they can. Did you know the Nazi guys at Winslow kept trying to get me to join? I bet they knew I was the kind of pushover faggot who'd cave eventually."
"I think gang psychology is a bit more complex than that, Greg."
"Whatever," I wiped my face, doing nothing to stem the tide. "The point is, I was like that."
"You were way too much of a goody-two-shoes bitch," Amy said.
"The gangs are my dark mirror."
She looked at me, nonplussed. "You're projecting because you want to feel bad about yourself. Chill out, take some breaths. Let the joint do its job."
I nodded, forcing myself to breathe deeply, letting the calming effect cover my emotions like a band-aid. The tears slowed, and then stopped, my heart rate steadying. I sniffled again, wiping my snot on my arm, then wiping my arm on my jeans.
"I got a quest to fix mum, but I don't have anything that will let me," I said after a bit more silence. "And if I do when I think I do it could take me months, or more, to get the right spell."
Amy reached up and rubbed her eyes, which had started to come over bloodshot. "You'd better get started then."
"Yeah," I sighed. "What job were you thinking of doing when you leave?"
"Don't know, I could do anything and be filthy fucking rich. Sell my smart pills to researchers? Make a cure for diseases? Cancer? Could be anything, and if I wanted to make even easier millions I could sell cosmetic surgery. I'm not going to though, I don't have my power so rich old fucks can die looking young."
"At least we both have promising careers," I snorted. "You can be a multi-billionaire who saved as many billion lives, and I'll be Triumvirate. It's such a shame we can't trade powers, we'd probably both be much happier if we could."
"Yeah, but we both know I'd visit one day and your sex slave cat-girl would answer the door."
"I really don't think I could resist, I'd have a harem," I said in a way that implied I was totally joking and would absolutely not immediately descend into living out the fantasies drawn by my favourite doujin artists with a cadre of ten out of ten waifus. "What would you be if you had mine?"
My cat-girl waifu would of course answer the door with, 'Welcome back, Nya-ster!', and then bat her paws coquettishly.
"Flying blaster, I guess," she shrugged, looking thoughtfully up at the sky. "And go cape with Vicky. I've always wanted to fly."
"It's harder than it looks."
Amy shrugged again. "I'd get there eventually, right?"
"Eventually. But flying blaster? Not very original, you could be anything."
"Flying master, then. Have magic animals do my fighting."
"I don't even know where I'd get that power," I brought up my menus, flicking through my perk trees. "I'd say somewhere up in INT, but maybe WIS would have an Empower Other thing in there? I'm really not sure about summoning or taming, never thought about it much before."
"Hmm, I'd still run into the problem of not wanting a pet. Maybe if I could put it away or something."
I shrugged, "I'm sure it could be done."
"Yeah," Amy shifted against the short concrete cover. "Hey, Greg, are you staying in Boston for good?"
"I doubt it," I shifted to face her properly. "I still have almost three years in the Wards, and surely in those three years, it'll be safe for me to come home. After that? I guess whichever Protectorate department can shell out the most money because I am going to take them for a mother fucking ride when they try for a full contract. You said you're going to move soon-"
The realisation hit me that I was likely her only real friend, and more importantly, she probably didn't want us to become estranged.
"-but there's no reason we can't end up in the same city. We'll both have our pick, everyone will be bending over to give us the deal we want. Where do you want to live?"
Amy cracked one of her rare genuine smiles. "Anywhere but here. Somewhere with nice suburbs maybe, I've always liked the idea of a house with a big yard."
"I'm sure that when I'm the youngest Protectorate leader ever I can schedule a weekly patrol and come visit," I smiled back. "Oh, actually, depending on how things go I might end up in New York. One of the Wards there likes me, and she's almost as hot as Victoria."
"You haven't changed," Amy said patronisingly. "Does she like you, or was she just nice to you once?"
"I'll have you know a lesbian told me she said she thought I was cute."
"Well, that's irrefutable if a lesbian said it."
"Yes," I said. "It is. Thank you."
"Oh," said Amy, then laughed. "Touche. Well, good for you, I guess. It had to happen sometime, who is she?"
"Her hero name is Jetstar, she's a Tinker."
Amy made a face and shrugged to indicate she'd never heard of her.
"Anyway, I think I need a girls perspective on this, what do I say to her?"
She clicked her tongue and screwed up her face. "Anything. Just don't be weird. Maybe something like, 'hey, what are your thoughts on such and such,' and then reference something she's mentioned before. You have talked to her in person right? Yes? Good, just do that. It doesn't actually matter what you say so long as you aren't weird."
I stroked my chin. Armsmaster was going to make me some armour soon, so why not ask her about that as a Tinker?
"Thanks, Amy," I ruffled her hair and received a disgruntled elbow.
We chatted for a while about inconsequential topics, enjoying the sun and the buzz, until I had to go check in with the bosses about what I was to do while back in Brockton.
Chapter 52: Unravel 6.2
Chapter Text
"Greg, are you on drugs?"
Damn his anti-crime helmet.
"Nothing illegal," I promised as Colin leant toward me.
He grunted. "I know you've suffered a terrible shock but getting high isn't a healthy way to deal with it. I've already been advised that you're unfit for work, please don't make this worse for yourself."
"Unfit?" I snapped. "Says whom?"
"Your therapist-"
I scoffed in outrage, taking a breath to speak, but Colin held up a stalling hand.
"But I can veto him to a point, so don't make this harder than it has to be by injecting marijuanas or whatever it is you were getting up to," Colin smiled. "As I'm sure you want to help me take out the Azn Bad Boys."
I smiled back. "Thanks, dude. This whole thing has made me think though, why don't people hate the ABB as much as the Empire what with the whole sex slavery thing they have going on?"
"Out of sight, out of mind," he replied, what little of his expression showing darkening. "People are happy to pretend it doesn't exist, even you yourself are only paying attention now that their actions personally affect you, while the Empire is 'out and proud' so to speak. But it's not as if I've been working on a way to remove Lung and his vile enterprise ever since he came to this city that never got go-ahead funding until this week."
Huh. I thought Tinker's just made whatever they wanted whenever they wanted, rather than have to apply for specific projects to get funded. Or maybe they could do both? That made sense, give them an annual budget to work with and also fund additional work if it became a need.
I pointedly ignored his snide little jab because it was true. "What stops Lung?"
"A tranquillizer that in theory should retard his transformation enough to make capturing him simple, and it's not like we don't have other Tinker's who deal in chemicals on staff who I can collab with, they just want a trade," he ground his teeth. "Because who cares that I can single-handedly remove that blight from the city? Internal politics, Greg, quit while you're ahead."
"Is it really that bad? If you want I can mention it on my Patrick Sweets interview tomorrow night?"
Colin sighed, waving a dismissive hand. "If you like, it won't make any difference. In any case, your armour," he gestured to the screens in front of us. "I know I said I'd make it but I have even less time than when I made that promise."
I glanced at the design on the screen, then reached over to pick up the stylus and make a few adjustments. It wasn't so much a redesign as it was a series of segmented plates fitted over my current uniform, with a kind of bolted on, futuristic ninja aesthetic. It looked vaguely like Colin's own armour, which was his attempt to reinforce that I was his protege and later take credit for refining me into an aspiring Triumvirate powerhouse; which, in a way, he sort of had. I wasn't sure what I'd be doing now if he'd paid as much attention to me as he did the other Wards. I'd never have gone to Boston, never known that there was a whole wide world outside this little shithole city, but I'd also never have been almost murdered by Nazi's. So, trade-offs.
"I like it," I said. "Will it take long to make?"
"Not really. I have a machine that 3D prints parts, and as this is a simple design it shouldn't take long, and then all I have to do is attach it to the new uniforms the department has sent me and you're good to go."
"Why didn't I have armour before?" I asked, twizzling a strand of my armsbeard between two fingers. "Everyone else has armour, except Aegis, and I didn't have any brute powers back then."
"You should know," Colin replied, distractedly clicking through the process to start printing my armour. "You were there for your image meetings."
"I don't think it ever came up, do you think Enrique was trying to get me killed?"
"Who? Ah, yes, and no."
"Oh," I said. "Well, I did annoy him pretty bad."
"He likely thought that armour didn't fit the look you were going for, and certainly it did not, but now it can be excused."
"That's kinda fucked up, right?"
Colin glanced at me, frowned minutely, then shrugged. "Wards aren't supposed to see real action, you're an anomaly. Though it admittedly happens disturbingly often that a Ward will get into a fight with a villainous cape, usually by their own moronic and rash actions." He spun in his chair to face me. "It happens all the time, even back when I first joined. You see, back then even though I didn't have half the equipment I do today I had twice the bravado. This one time I was out on a basic patrol when I somehow came across The Architect, he was a Shaker who created deathtrap mazes, and I decided that I could easily arrest him. Needless to say, I spent three days in the hospital and he got away scot-free. That was the first and last time I did that, but everyone usually has one story."
He shook his head, and smiled to himself, muttering 'insane,' under his breath as he turned back to the computer.
"Who knew you were such a hooligan?"
He snorted good-naturedly. "Yes, even I was rowdy once. Now, get out, I need to get changed for my patrol," he plucked at his Armsmaster brand t-shirt, the only brand of clothes I'd seen him wear. "I'll email you when I'm done with this."
"Oh, you're back, huh?"
I looked up from the choice selection of memes I was deliberating attaching to my post to more properly btfo some retard calling Panty a slut. I inventoried my phone hurriedly before he could see the screen.
"Hey Dennis," I uncrossed my legs and turned to face him properly. He was carrying his Clockblocker helmet under one arm, awful red hair a mess after his patrol. "Good patrol?"
Dennis shrugged, walking past me and around the corner toward the showers.
It still hurt. It was my fault, but it still hurt. They all treated me like that, Missy had barely said a word, Carlos pretended to be polite, Chris actually chatted with me for a bit but that was probably just because I helped him make the biggest breakthrough on his work he'd ever had rather than him liking me. Dean wasn't here, probably with Victoria, and Brad apparently had taken my words to heart and showed up the absolute bare minimum to remain in the program. Good for him, I guess.
The Turbo weed was starting to wear off and I was avoiding going home. I knew it was douchey of me to not want to be with dad but I didn't think I could take the constant crying, I knew I'd start crying too and then we'd both be up all night bawling our eyes out at each other. I'd be better off here reading through all the intel on the ABB for a few hours to get a better handle on how I should surgically excise their cancer from the city.
I equipped my phone and finished my scathing post. It was that shitbird SupaGokuFiyah again making a mockery of my newest seasonal waifu with his incessant hot gluing, but in the end, the joke was on him and his waifus; Mana Object, Control Mana Object and Mana Slick were a potent combination.
In any case, I wasn't sure how much participation Colin could finagle for me so I should be ready for everything from mission control to recon to strike team. I hoped to fucking god it was strike team so I could break all of Bakuda's fingers until she couldn't use them anymore, put my arm full through Lung's guts and then cut Oni Lee's eyes out. I took a breath and put my phone away before I crushed it in my tightening fist. I needed to go work some of this energy off. I stood, about to go down to the gym but Dennis emerged from the hallway, hair still wet and a backpack slung over one shoulder.
Our eyes met and there was an awkward pause.
"You alright, dude?" he asked.
I smoothed my posture and expression into something a little less feral, then shrugged. "All this gang shit has me stressed."
"Ain't it shit?" Dennis asked rhetorically, continuing to the exit. "Was that why you're back?"
"Yeah, I asked to come back just in case things started getting real bad," I noticed that Dennis was just being polite and didn't actually care. "Seeya later, Dennis."
"See you," he nodded and exited the Wards common room.
I sighed, reaching up to rub at suddenly watering eyes. This was my mess to dig myself out of.
Hey, what's up? Armsmaster's making me some tinkertech armour, d'you want me to send you pics for critique when it's done?
I hit send and immediately inventoried my phone to quell the storm of butterflies in my guts. I couldn't be sure if Yamada's idea that I only chose girls who were unavailable because I was a huge pussy was true or not, but if it was I could take steps to make it not so and I'd dawdled on messaging Savannah for too long anyway. It was strange, six months ago I'd have messaged her straight away and never gotten a response back, but it wouldn't have bothered me half as much as the idea of sending a message now did.
The city loomed before me in the dark, a light spring breeze ruffling my hair under my cap. I was forbidden from patrols by myself but there wasn't any rule on me taking a walk at night disguised as a fat Asian guy in the part of the city that just so happened to be occupied by the ABB, and if I just so happened to see anything pertaining to the gang with my powers there was no reason I couldn't submit it as an 'anonymous tip' to Colin.
With the cigarette Amy had given me months ago sitting half-smoked and unlit in my mouth I trundled up the street, taking care to walk like a real human person.
It was midnight but the streets were still alive with people going in and out of clubs and bars and little hole in the wall restaurants selling cheap fried food to stumbling drunks. It wasn't the image I'd imagined of ABB territory in the beginnings of what I was sure was going to be a gang war, no one was scared of getting shaken down by thugs or for enemy factions to burst onto the scene and start smashing heads. Though, admittedly, what I'd read of the ABB said they operated on some kind of pseudo-Yakuza style management where they kept things running and kept all the crime as hidden as possible, which like Colin said, if the underage sex slaves were out of sight they were also out of mind.
It made sense, I supposed as I walked with an exaggerated swagger, taking care to jostle other pedestrians just the right amount. If I was a normal person without phenomenal cosmic power I'd be keeping my head down and acting normal too. Shit, it's what I used to do, well, some of the time anyway when I couldn't contain my autism and had to sperg out to anyone who would even pretend to listen.
I joined a line for a club known to be an ABB front, Observing everyone I could get my eyes on. Nothing stood out, which was fucking tragic considering the piles of sad shit I was reading off of everyone, even the doorman was just a regular guy hired for his sumo-like bulk.
It took well over an hour to get inside and I immediately went straight to the bar.
"Oi, give me a Jack and Coke," I crooned to one of the hot chicks serving drinks. She didn't hear me over the crashing thump of music and swell of people half shouting to make themselves heard.
"Oi," I tried again, louder this time but to no effect.
What the fuck?
"OI!" I shouted, thunderously, projecting my voice to the human limit. A few people glanced my way with irritated looks, but otherwise, nothing happened.
Seriously, what the fuck? Surely this music was an OHSA violation if it deafened everyone like this, everyone was going to get tinnitus. I waited grumpily for another ten minutes before my order got taken, I dumped my money on the counter and snatched my drink away. I skirted the edges of the room, my eyes flickering about as I observed anyone who looked like they might have ties to organised crime. I found a table and sat down heavily, taking a sip of my drink.
It tasted like I imagined a cockroach smelled.
I sipped it again, suppressing a grimace, and set it down carefully on my table. Next time, I was getting the fruitiest fucking cocktail I could and damn the method acting.
I picked the glass up, sniffed it, swirled the contents, then put it back down and set about Observing and memorising as much pertinent information as I could find.
Chapter 53: Unravel 6.3
Chapter Text
Last night had been a bust but tonight was an epic win.
"Again, absolutely fantastic!" Jan handed me a bottle of chilled artesian water, which I cracked open and took a sip most refreshing after baking under the studio lights.
"Thanks," I smiled, sipping more water and settling into the plush seats of the armoured PRT van. She was like a convert, and all it took was an apology and a display of normality.
Jan smiled again, looking at me like a proud mother convinced it was her nagging that had propelled her son to greatness before settling back into her own seat to fill out some paperwork for Piggot and the youth guard.
The interview itself had been surprisingly easy, even though it was entirely scripted I hadn't felt the need to go off on a tangent and instead could focus on making the most of what I was given to work with. I think, perhaps, that mum had been wrong when she had told me to be myself, myself. I could be myself without having to be completely, purely, myself at all times. Certainly, there were times when being like the old Greg was appropriate, and there were times when it was not, but that didn't mean I had to cling onto either my, or others, image of myself. I had more layers than that, I could be many kinds of Greg and all were myself.
It was a very deep realisation, I was sure.
The drive back to the PRT building was smooth and uneventful, without even a hint of Coil's machinations to murder me. I doubted he could bait the Empire into it again, so the next one was likely to be from some unaffiliated mercenary group. Personally, I expected it to be La Strada, an imaginatively named roving merc band, or maybe some more Fallen; this time with cape backup. There was a lot he could do, but I didn't think it was worth worrying about him hiring guys like the Slaughterhouse. Almost no one was that stupid, and I didn't think Coil was stupid. The only reason I thought it was him was due to that chance meeting with Tattletale. If I'd never seen her, or thought to Observe her, Coil wouldn't even be on my radar.
We arrived and got out of the car, Jan bidding me a good night before heading off to her office while I continued on to the Wards room with trepidation heavy in my gut. My gloved hand tightened on the handle of the big vault door, high tech leathery material creaking softly with the force of my grip. I inhaled slowly, opened the door and slunk inside.
My lip curled as I scanned the empty room, the television still on the same channel I'd left it on before my interview. I crossed to the lounges and threw myself down, wriggling against the discomfort of the new armour of my uniform for a few seconds before I switched it for my usual oversized sweats.
I stared at the floor.
My personal phone appeared in my left hand and I wriggled around on the sofa into a more comfortable position, clicking the phone on. A missed call from Sveta, a video one from Tyrone, a text from Amy and finally a message from Savannah. A well of something swelled up in my chest, forcing it's way up my throat and out my tear-ducts. I squished it back down with a few deep breaths and wiped my face on the worn sofas' fabric.
I opened Amy's text first which read, 'Vicky and Dean were impressed you didn't act like a complete fucking cretin.'
Okay, so Dean was exonerated and possibly based and I'd repaired Victoria's seepingly mediocre first impression of me. God Bless Amy. That freckle-faced bitch, even if she didn't say it, I knew. She was the most impressed of all, having seen me at my most miserable worst.
I made a mental note to use my considerable future clout to aid in her likely plans of normalising lesbian step-sister relationships if she was still into that in a few years time. But who knew, maybe once she moved out she'd get over it and find herself a nice girl.
'Thanks homeslicey,' I shot back. 'Tell them I say, "hello".'
I was too nervous to look at Savannah's message, so instead, I face-timed Tyrone. The app rang a few times before he picked up, the half dozen voices fighting for dominance on the other end of the line coming in heart-wrenchingly clear. Past the edges of Tyrone's unattractively close face, I could see the whole team vying for space.
"Yooooo!"
"Hey guys," I grinned, waving for the camera. "How did I go? I think I killed it."
Tyrone shouted "yo!" again, drowning out the others but I got the gist of it.
"Aw, thank you," I used the motion of sitting up properly to turn the camera away from my face so I could wipe my eyes. "You guys are the best."
I wrapped up my call with the Boston crew and hugged my phone to my chest, leaning over to rest my elbows on my knees. I was going to transfer there permanently, I decided, once all this gang shit was over with. Mum… and dad would support me wholeheartedly even if it meant having to drive there every weekend and not getting to see me during the week. That was hard on me too, even though I had good friends there and could call home whenever I wanted, but I realised somewhere along the way that it was worth it to just be out of Brockton and everything in it.
I wiped at my eyes again, sniffling slightly, and called Sveta.
I realised immediately that she was probably either not at the asylum phones or would panic that I was calling and lose control of her tendrils. I let the phone ring out. Best to wait for her to call again.
My breath shook with my hands, but it was time to stop being a pussy bitch.
I opened Savannah's message without even looking at the text preview.
Savannah: Cool interview
Savannah: Armsmaster's published his alloy on the intranet but I still can't fathom how he gets the plates so thin without compromising on both elasticity and strength. Even when I attempt to copy his method my results are clearly subpar if you've reviewed his field reports…
The message continued on like this for a bit. I wasn't very surprised, both Fred and Daisy were big Armsmaster fans and their specialties barely even crossed. Savannah's speciality including power armour made it only natural for her to fangirl over the second most famous living Tinker in the world if you didn't know that he was secretly a massive chode who used naive Wards to further his career and traumatise them with Nazi's in the process.
I harrumphed. It was a feeling so complicated; on one hand, he was a chode, and on the other, he was the only person I could remember having even remotely high expectations for me and then believing that I could reach them.
Greg: Thanks 😀
Greg: His power lets him condense technology, which extends to increasing the density of metal alloy without sacrificing anything and that's why his suit isn't twice as big. There's probably nothing you can do to replicate the effect without developing a power stealing ray
It was a good thing that even if she had a huge crush on him, and even if I introduced them, Colin was way too autistic to even realise the fact.
I snorted, inhaling shakily and put my phone away. It was much ado about nothing, at any rate, and the same as my former crush on Miss Militia; it wasn't allowed to happen. I sat up and sighed, stretching extravagantly, then got up and headed back to the exit. I lingered at the door for a moment, scanning the room one last time, a seething breath hissing out through my teeth at the sight of the television still muted on the wrong channel. I spat on the floor and slammed the door shut.
"Thanks, Mac," I said, extending a fist.
"No worries, kid, you have a good one," Mac bumped the proffered fist and I hopped out of the PRT van and onto the curb, shutting the car door behind me.
As the van politely indicated and pulled onto the quiet suburban road I walked up my driveway, and after quickly wiping my shoes on the mat because I was a good boy, opened the front door and stepped inside. The house was dark, dark and quiet, save for light spilling out from the edges of the kitchen door.
I turned invisible.
It fucking couldn't be, right? How could he have arranged something like this so quickly? Did he even expect to succeed?
Colourless smoke seeped from my skin, drifting as soundlessly as my steps over the wooden floor, it collected at the door and I guided it under and around. I covered the kitchen floor with it, mapping out the position of chair and table legs. The smoke drifted higher, the gaps in it letting me feel where everything was. There was one person sitting at the table, and as the smoke drifted higher I felt their expectant posture and nobody else was in the room it was just dad.
I dropped my invisibility, dismissed the smoke, and flung the kitchen door open.
'Fwee!~' went his party pipe, reaching out like a tongue almost to the hefty cake sitting in front of him on the table.
"Congratulations, my little pop-star Greg!" Dad removed the party pipe from his quivering lips. "V-veronica would be so proud!"
"Dad, I…" my voice caught as I gasped, almost a sob, nose and eyes both welling. My eyes flickered to mum's empty chair and back to dad's face which was steadily crumpling like an anguished ball of tin foil.
The tears that started to run off his nose mirrored mine and I quested forward into my chair, sinking into it and then sinking my face into my hands, hiding sobs.
The cake knife clinked against the plate, the motions sounding clumsy, before clattering to the table.
Dads howled his anguish to the sky while I sobbed silently into my hands.
Chapter 54: Unravel 6.4
Chapter Text
I was on patrol again. Colin had somehow swung me a miracle, overriding all protests about my physical safety and mental wellbeing to get me back on the beat. I guess I'd been seriously underestimating the thick heft of his clout.
I was determined to not disappoint. My armour has been polished, my hair cut by the PR department, both my Armsbeard and Twinkling Smile were on and I had a stack of pre-signed press shots from my interview last night. Beside me, Vista strode with all the confidence being the highest rated Shaker on the east coast afforded.
It wasn't that I didn't want to talk with her, I did, I had a lot of things I could say, but I could tell she didn't want to talk to me very much; in the past, I had bothered her far more that she wanted to take, so we walked in a silence broken only by our adoring fans. Hers more so than mine despite that I was on national television last night and also that I was leeching off of Canary's fame. But, whatever, she'd been around years longer than me so I could understand that the public's shit taste was simply because of the propaganda model.
Someone walking toward us, a guy of about twenty, caught my eye with his unblinking, shocked stare. The man practically vibrated with excitement with every step, reaching into his heavily sagging jacket pocket, his arm making the triangle which activated my crime prevention autism, causing me to reflexively Observe him just in case he was a shooter. He pulled out a photo of Canary and I and thrust it out in front of him as he neared.
"Hey, hey, you're Dark Smoke Puncher! My buddy said he'd seen you, but I thought you were in Boston! Can you sign this?"
<Dark Smoke Pun-Cha!>
Missy recoiled slightly out of the corner of my eye, but I ignored her as I stepped up to shake the guy, Adam's, hand.
"Of course, my friend!" I placed my other hand on his shoulder as I shook his hand, the last jingles of my entrance riff fading. "You a big Bad Canary guy?"
"Oh yeah! I heard her first-ever song, on the very day it came out! Imagine that?" he said as I took the photo from him and equipped my signing pen. "I love your song with her too, of course, I recognise the opening riff of it you used just now with your little," the guy flapped his hands to indicate a totally sick power caused sound. "Thing."
"Amazing! I've been a long-time fan myself, not quite as long as you, unfortunately, but she does great work, doesn't she? I was stoked when she agreed to produce a song with me, she's such a nice person to work with."
I jotted down my signature with machine precision, leaving enough room on the other side for him to get Paige's signature at some point.
"And you," I smiled at him cheekily, "have impeccable taste in music."
He took back the photo with a little less reverence than I'd like. "You're just saying that because I like your music," he returned my smile.
"You got me!" I clapped him on the shoulder. "Have a great day, man."
"Yeah, you too," he smiled one last time, then strode away digging in his pocket for his phone so that he could tweet about this.
I gave him one last glance, squinting slightly against the setting sun, a bubbly pink feeling rising in my chest. Being proud of myself over something worthwhile actually felt really, really nice.
Our, and then my, song had been fairly popular, but what had gotten the PRT frothing to no end was that I wasn't even supernaturally good at music yet, but in a quite short amount of time I could be. Oh, I could be. I could be good at anything. My Youtube channel was going to be so popular, I'd be a household name even before my ascension to the Triumvirate. I could do live streams of myself doing whatever I wanted. Painting, singing, even playing video games or watching anime. I could introduce the world to good taste, for the first time in its existence I could make things as they should be.
A world where little Greg boys and little Greg girls could be included in normie circles.
That was a dream worth having.
We walked on along our route, still bubbling with the praise of our fans. Ah, no, I was doing that while Vista was probably taking no joy in my massive achievements because she was a little stick in the mud who couldn't get over the fact that I used to be annoying a few months ago. I'd gotten my enhanced memory perk before I'd even met her, so I remembered how it was better than any.
I gently bit at the tip of my tongue as we walked. I'd resolved to not apologise for or mention my past behaviour partially as revenge for their petty snubbing and partially as an attempt to take the high road and let my attitude speak for itself, in theory letting us both fall into a better relationship without anyone having to lose face. I wondered how long it would take.
The late afternoon wound down into evening and we reached the last loop of our patrol, the peak of it looping around into the fringes of ABB territory. I heard them before we saw them, the clicking rattle and hiss of spray cans echoing around the corner. Four skinny teenage boys loomed out of the twilight, bits of red and green clothing peeking out of unzipped jackets. The rest of the street was deserted but for an occasional car, leaving the boys free to deface shop windows with Christmas coloured dicks.
Beside me, Vista sighed the quiet uncomfortable sigh of someone face with a heap of unexpected and tedious work. I decided I should take point with this fucking ABB scum.
"Hey, guys," I took a step forward. "I'm sure we're all having a lot of fun but I would appreciate it if you could put the spray cans away."
"Bet you would, gay boy," the tallest one quipped, prompting a series of jeering sniggers from his friends which would have aggravated my Betamax genes if I still had any.
"I really, really would," I smiled, making sure to keep my posture in the safe PR zone so that when I heemed these faggots for attacking me Vista would back me up. "Defacing property ain't cool."
"The guy who owns this," the taller one gestured to the shop with his can, punctuating the gesture with an infuriating spurt of paint. "Said we could paint his place up, so how about you fuck off?"
I suppressed a seething hiss. God damn scum-sucking little shits, did they even think I'd buy that utter load of shit? Sparks roiled under my skin, a million little pinpricks of energy I barely held in; I hoped to fucking god one of them touched me.
"No, come on, graffiti is a misdemeanour crime and we are law enforcement," I took another step forward, my posture invitingly naive, jaw perfectly placed for a surprise attack. If only I wasn't wearing this fucking armour they might want to have more of a go. "So instead of getting the cops involved you either put the cans away or give them to me."
"You think the cops will do shit, huh, gweilo?" one of the shorter ABB gangbangers scoffed while flipping me off. "We own this part of town."
"Personally," I said with calculated condescension. "I'd go with community service when you get charged. I'll suggest it to the officers when they get here, and I'll see if we can't get the charge expunged when you finish on account of age. I think you boys would find it rewarding."
Come on, fucking hit me.
The sparks roiled closer to the outside, but I drew them back. At this level of ambient light, they might be faintly visible through my skin and I wouldn't want to spook them before they electrocuted themselves. It would be in self-defence!
"Call the cops," said the tall one, thrusting his chin out. "I don't give a fuck."
"Of course."
My phone appeared in my hand, but the light and noise were all my power. I made sure they could hear a voice on the other side of the line faintly ask my what my emergency was, and I could see the moment where they fucking god damn pussied out. Shit. They spat and clicked their tongues and made rude gestures, but turned around and ambled away. I suddenly had the most amazing, marvellous idea.
"Hey!" I hopped forward, thrusting out my hand as they turned back around. "Thanks for being cool about this-"
The leader slapped my hand away, "eat my dick."
I smiled as they walked away, the twinging sensation of my tracking tag moving off with them. It will be you who will eat my dick, faggot, for you see I'll be seeing you again very soon and not only will you lead me to a gang hideout, you-
"How did you do that?"
"Eh?" I looked back over my shoulder at Missy.
"I could have done that," she continued. "But how did you do that?"
The question, while harsh, was fair. But, fuck you Missy you literal child I could have always done that had I chosen to.
"We did this awesome training week in Boston with the New York wards, we got to do all kinds of cool shit. Learn to drive, obstacle course stuff and, we did a half-day on alternative policing methods," I walked back over to her and we fell into step back towards the PRT building. "I'll bring it up with Emily, though I'm pretty sure Brockton is way too underfunded to ship in and house a few teenagers for a week for some reason."
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Vista's mouth contort into the dim gape of the low IQ as she tried to process the concept of learning and the existence of Wards in other cities.
"I think that would be a really good idea," she finally said. "I've always known there's more to the job than this. I don't… remember what kind of training I got, I think they just gave us a handbook and showed us how to use the console."
Oh, Missy. If only you knew how bad things really are.
The cool night breeze stole my sigh. Apparently, those four ABB gangbanging shits had nothing better to do than wander around the town for hours, acting tough, eating hot chips and occasionally tagging walls. Makes me fucking sick. I hopped off the roof I was on, crossing the gap to the next and sticking to the wall like a gecko as they swaggered like idiots through the alley beneath me. The didn't even have the good grace to lead me to a hidden gang safe-house, weapons cache or illegal brothel!
Even their conversation was just stupid shit about which girl they wanted to fuck, or how totally drunk they got that one time, or inane banter about everyday minutia. Give me some information, you fucks! Or, at least a reason to hit you.
That was really interesting. It was almost like a SEP field, so even if someone could see through my invisibility they might just not notice me. God damn, I loved being a ninja.
For realsies though, what was with this stakeout shit? First I went to a known ABB joint and got absolutely fucking nothing, and now following these guys around I was getting equally fucking nothing. I thought I was supposed to chance upon some key happening or scrap of information, not listen to four hours of absolutely nothing of value.
There was a burst of laughter from beneath, they were talking about vidya. Shit opinions of course, on strictly normiecore games.
A small click caught my attention, echoing softly from somewhere behind us. I craned my neck around, it was some guy whose boot had clipped a broken chunk of concrete. He was walking toward the ABB gangers, the half-moon reflecting off his bald head and, man, he was really walking quickly. He had the weirdest look on his face, like he-
The man reached into his coat and withdrew an Uzi.
The wind whistled in my ears as I dropped from the wall, landing quietly in between the man and the group as bright blue mana poured from my skin. The man jerked, pulling the trigger early, the first spray of bullets sending up a shower of gravel until they hit the whirlwind of my shield.
I flinched at the sound, throwing my arms over my head, getting as much of my armour in the way as possible. Hans' pistol rang out, again and again, dark shapes flashing across the brilliant blue cutting through my eyelids. I whimpered as something got through my shield and pinged off my side, the sound hidden by the endless barks of the gun and the mystic whooshing of my shield. I wasn't back there. This guy wasn't Hans. I grit my teeth until it hurt, forcing myself into the present moment and away from that street.
The barking of the Uzi ceased. I turned invisible. Within a second I was in touching distance of the hitman, my fingers grazing the warm barrel of the gun, vanishing it out of his hands and into my inventory, then gripping him around the neck and choke-slamming him into the ground. I picked him back up, jumping to the wall I'd been hiding on and slamming him into it. I held him there, grip shaking until the red bled out of my vision and I definitely wasn't back on that street and I had the situation under control.
I dropped the man and shied away from him, he hit the ground and collapsed into a dazed lump. Not dead. I observed him; close, but not dead and he'd live.
For some reason, the four boys were still there, gaping like stunned fish.
I was a fool.
"Get out of here, you dumb fucks!" I growled at them, throat raw and dry. "Fucking leave!"
The boys left, a scrambling tangle of awkward limbs that had obviously never seen anything higher up the gang chain than their weed dealer.
I looked back down at the half-dead Empire man and shivered, though it wasn't cold.
Gunshots echoed in the distance.
Chapter 55: Unravel 6.5
Chapter Text
It was like, 'hey, shadow stalker, when did you get back and also become me?'
I'd left the guy half-dead in the alley, too scared of what I'd done, just trying to get away and put the horrible scene out of my mind. The whole night was one of my Big Mistakes. First I'd been hoping for an excuse to commit what was probably some kind of racially charged hate crime, and then I'd enacted the fear I'd had when sparring the New York Wards and lost control and badly hurt someone.
"The reports are in," Armsmaster was saying as he pointed at the projection on the whiteboard showing a map of the city, with a series of red circles clustered around the Docks area. "Thirteen fatal shootings of Asian or Asian-Americans by Empire affiliates. We've known this gang war has been coming for a while, so it's time to unload our best efforts. Our preliminary Thinker ratings haven't been good on any of our plans, but," Armsmaster paused to take a deep sip of his coffee. "We haven't hit any Black ratings yet, so we're on the right track."
It was meant to be fourteen. I'd prevented it, four lives saved, but I hadn't told anyone. Their lives were bought at the cost of my integrity, which had to have been worth it. It had to. By all outside views what I had done was wholly heroic, and only I knew the sordid truth of the matter.
"It's going to be rough for a while, rougher than we've had it for a while and I know that's saying a lot," Colin smiled grimly, setting his coffee down. "So as well as extra patrols, we're all going to have to take on some extra duties. These could be new, or extensions of our current ones, and we have perhaps only today to truly prepare without the stress of so much extra work. So, ideas. Throw them out, I don't give a fuck if they're bad, we'll sort them out later when we fully hammer out our game plan."
Heroes needed the intent to back up their actions, it wasn't enough to merely save lives you had to save them for the right reasons. My body had moved on its own, yes, and my first instinct was to save them, but the run-up was wrong. You couldn't call yourself a hero if you'd just wanted to bash some Asians.
The amassed capes around the conference table shifted into thinking poses, deliberating what needed to be done to save our shitty city.
"We get in contact with all our registered affiliates, and work to get the unregistered on board," Velocity said. "Really leverage them as an information web."
The words transcribed themselves on the whiteboard projection as he spoke.
"We assassinate Lung and Kaiser," said Assault, to which Other Greg, who was in control of our body, reflexively chuckled along with everyone else.
Use drones with facial recognition software. Recruit more capes. Turn Empire capes to our side. Post videos to youtube to raise public awareness. More motorcycle patrols. Interface with the BBPD, fire department and other services. Section off parts of the city. Stay home and nap.
The list of things went on and on, Other Greg occasionally adding our superior suggestions, and then we all had to work on narrowing down the list into a cluster of tasks for each person.
I was to be mainly on social media duty to let the public know what was going on and to drum up support through my music. The benefits of needing a maximum of four hours of sleep were that I could be on Twitter all the time posting G-Rated messages of hope and unity.
Other Greg smiled our way through the rest of the meeting and we left to go mope in our room.
"Hey, Greg."
Dean's voice was furtive, low, and painfully full of concern. I guess I'd been waiting for this, but I also kind of hoped he'd be too much of a pussy to bring it up. The worst part is I couldn't fake my way out of this one, he'd know. And I knew he'd know that I knew, so now I couldn't go and mope by myself.
"Hey, man, what's up? I was just about to go hit the gym, you up for a sesh?"
"Sure," he said, looking unduly worried. "I've been meaning to go more."
I smiled politely, resisting the urge to bitingly call him an inferior lanklet. Dean was always nice to me and he alone didn't deserve my spite.
He seemed anxious to speak in private because he wasn't making any of his normal small talk as we walked.
"This gang war shit is fucked, hey?" I asked as we made our way to the Protectorate exclusive Rig gym. "I always thought that the Empire was worse, had you ever thought about the ABB's sex slavery ring?"
"Not really," he cracked a nervous smile like he wasn't sure if I was joking.
"Neither did I."
I stopped myself from going into a monologue about the power of propaganda, and how it was more beneficial to the political elite to run articles about the Empire over the Asian run child sex market on American soil most likely because they used their services and to draw attention to it would be to draw attention to themselves so they used an easy scapegoat; everyone hates Nazi's. I wasn't sure how Cauldron factored into this, as they must factor into everything being so entrenched into the fabric of society, but it couldn't have been anything good.
Not that I thought Dean was into that, but his father knew Cauldron and was probably a pedophile. Or at least knew a few.
The rest of the walk was in silence. Dean was tightly wound, each step almost jumpy. I would have been like that too if I hadn't known this was coming. We reached the gym. The automatic doors opened with a soft pneumatic hiss and I led the way to the bench press station.
I turned to face him, this man who got to plough Victoria.
"Things have been rough."
"Tell me about it," he said imploringly.
"Almost being assassinated was really scary," I sat on the bench, gut-clenching. "And I'm still scared that the guy is going to come back and kill me even though I burned his eyes out and he's in prison. I have nightmares and I can't look at mirrors anymore."
"It's gonna be ok, Greg," he sat down next to me, putting an arm around my shoulders. "Thank you for telling me, and you don't have to keep it all to yourself. We're here for you if you need us."
I rubbed my face with my palm to force the tears back in.
"You know that's not true. It's my fault for being such a sperg when I first joined, but, the rest of them don't want anything to do with me."
"That's not true."
"Yeah, it is. And I don't even care. Nobody even asked why I was back."
Dean hesitated. "And why are you back?"
"My mum got hit with some kind of ABB pain bomb that fried her nervous system."
"Dude, I'm so sorry," Dean squeezed my shoulder in a hug.
"I know, 'cause you're a nice dude and you've always been nice to me, but I pissed everyone off too much. I'm sure they'd be sorry, too, but I think it was too frustrating because I was too stupid to understand why I sucked, so I understand why they don't like me."
Even if they're petty shitcunts who should bother because I'd bother. Even without my powers reading everyone's moods and life story, I'd bother. Probably. I think…
"They, I'm sure they don't hate you. And you've been gone a few months, so I'm sure they've cooled down on their opinion of you."
I shook my head, "they haven't. I can tell, and I know you can too. But it's whatever, it's what I fucking get."
"Why don't you apologise and ask to start fresh?"
"Because I haven't done anything wrong, being annoying isn't a crime," my right knee bounced agitatedly. "What am I supposed to apologise for?"
A pregnant pause seeped into the conversation.
"So I apologise for being rude, then?"
Fuck them. They should apologise to me for being insensitive dickheads. Even as I was an insensitive dickhead to them. God fucking damn it.
"I think you should," said Dean.
I exhaled sharply through my nose, visibly spraying snot particles all over our knees. Dean didn't react to this but he did withdraw his hand from my shoulder after a few seconds.
"I know. I will. I was hoping you would all notice I wasn't like that and things would just," I licked my lips and made a wibbly gesture. "Smooth out and we'd be cool."
"Bit naive," Dean said with a small smile.
I grunted.
"They know you're a good guy, it'll work out," he smiled wanly. "Promise."
"Yeah, I know. Thanks, Dean, you're a real bro."
"Anytime, bro."
I took a very deep breath and sighed. "Well, I do want to get a workout done if you're still keen. I'm trying to hit eight-fifty on my bench."
"Eight hundred fifty pounds?"
I shook my head, "kilograms."
Dean looked afraid.
Chapter 56: Unravel 6.6
Chapter Text
I was really liking this whole vigilante shit. Sure, I was breaching my Wards contract by acting as a cape outside PRT jurisdiction, but it was so freeing. Weeks and weeks of being cooped up inside with nothing but my thoughts were a maddening struggle and, even though there were Nazi's in this city, I wasn't going near them.
I drained the last sip of my strawberry and pomegranate sorbet cocktail and stood up, leaving the glass on the table. I was in the same ABB club as last time, but this time I'd found a mark.
My disguise for the night, of an ugly, hugely jacked guy with tacky tribal tats up his arms and neck, let me pass unmolested despite my choice of drink; people moving out of my way without me even having to ask. I swaggered out into the night after my targets, a trio of scrawny men in suits whose Observe bio's had some interesting things to say, as had their mouths as I read their lips from across the room.
Drinks, illegal gambling and a visit to an illegal brothel were on their menu tonight after a long day of laundering gang money. It honestly would have been a totally boss schedule if it weren't illegal and morally reprehensible. Like, drinks, legal gambling and legal brothel? Hell yeah, I'd do that shit. Ah, maybe not the brothel considering things were going ok with Savannah even if we were only messaging. It wasn't right to fuck around on people like that, but if I didn't have a chick on the go, brothel all day erry day.
As I followed the men I began to fade from existence, unnoticed by the thinning crowd as we walked further away from the strip of clubs and deeper into the grimier part of Brockton's Chinatown. Things were noticeably quieter since the shootings even here in the heart of ABB territory, people who were previously confident to galavant in the streets were staying indoors. I didn't know what happened to those four boys I'd saved, but I hoped they'd left the city.
They reached some dingy looking restaurant and I slipped in the door after them on silent feet, tiptoeing down into the concrete basement where a big mahjong table was set up and some rake thin old men were playing under a single wan light bulb sticking out of the nicotine-stained ceiling. As soon as the men I was tailing entered the room rapid conversation erupted in Mandarin, of which I couldn't understand a word. I really needed to fix that and buy a skill book, but Armsmaster's translation program would be able to handle this easily.
I slunk into an empty corner, trying not to gag at the thick smell of cigarette smoke which as it turned out I enjoyed no more than when Amy and I used to smoke.
Not to self; go visit Amy.
I equipped my phone, opening my camera app and doing my best to get the entire room into the frame, then settled down for what would no doubt be a really fucking boring night. What was I going to do when they went to the illegal brothel, though? I couldn't well follow them into the rooms. That would do for the night, get the incriminating footage for Colin to decode, snoop around a bit for cooked accounts books or something, then go home for my nightmare ridden four-hours-sleep.
It was amazing how many things could scare a boy in the six months he'd been working for the government. I wouldn't be surprised if this was all Cauldron's fault, they'd found out I had read Triumph and Battery's associations with them and this was their subtle way of driving me into an insane asylum. Maybe I should have just gone with my original plan of being a busking cape, I'd probably be much happier and I wouldn't be having to sit in grubby gambling dens as a way of escaping the suffocating confines of my house arrest tier protections.
I sighed internally, sliding down the wall until I was sitting, then balanced my phone on my knee.
Maybe I should just ask if there's anything I can do that wasn't a breach of contract that would also satisfy my need for freedom. It's not like Piggot would just tell me to fuck off and put up with it. She was a tough bitch, but she wasn't out to get any of us.
I equipped my work phone and brought up my and Savannah's conversation, a silly smile coming to my lips as I brought up the selfie she took of her in a tight tank top, gesturing to a half-assembled engine on the workbench beside her, a smudge of something on her nose.
I think I loved her. How could I ever have thought she was an annoying, bossy bitch? She was my soulmate.
Greg: hey I'm sitting here pretty bored on a stakeout, watchu up to?
She was going to save me, drag me out of this hell my life had become. We'd get married and have six kids, who'd then get fucking killed by Endbringers god fucking dammit! End of the god damn fucking world, fucking Endbringers, fucking Cauldron, fucking fuck! I guess I'd just have to settle for maybe achieving some level of happiness before society collapsed and we Mad Maxed in a self-destructive spiral.
I shivered. Weirdly cold all of a sudden… how often did I even feel the cold anymore? I hadn't felt the chill since my vitality had hit forty. Something was wrong.
I slowly rose to my feet, equipping my uniform, observing the changes in the men I'd followed and their friends. They were feeling it too, something was putting a [Fear] debuff on them; oh fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. I recognised this feeling.
Hans stalked into the room, face blank as he drew a pistol from his belt.
He wasn't real.
"Time to finish vat ve started."
I closed my eyes, but I could still see him. He wasn't real. He was still in prison, I checked every other day. Taylor was making me hallucinate.
I fell back against the wall, turning away and burying my face in my arms.
We're fucked now, bro!
He's not real.
Get us the fuck out of here!
He's not real.
If he was real he'd have shot me.
"Did you know ve have already had ze Armsmaster? Your family will pay next."
Not listening. The sickening, gut-clenching cold retreated.
"Armsmaster?" said a rasping female voice.
I opened one eye a crack, turning to face the room. Where Hans used to be stood Taylor, inhumanly lankier and spindlier, a scarecrow mask half-covered by that long, curly dark hair of hers.
"Why does an ABB shitheel care about Armsmaster?"
My Observe turned out nothing, she was another hallucination. I screwed my eyes shut and took a ragged breath, trying to speak but no words were coming out.
"One last time," the gut-clenching terror intensifying as hallucination asked, still seen against the inside of my eyelids. "Why does an ABB shitheel care about Armsmaster dying like that?"
I dropped my invisibility, exposing myself.
"I'm a Ward. I'm Dark Smoke Puncher."
The fear vanished, leaving behind another thing for my perfect memory to torment me with during guilty nightmares.
Fuck us.
A tinnitus-like whine rang in my ears, my Wards uniform soaked to my body by bitter sweat. I realised I could taste bile, having thrown up in my mouth a little bit.
I peeked out through my eyelashes at the sound of boots walking closer. The real Taylor stood there, this time wearing a thick, ragged trench coat. She crouched, arms resting on knees, observing me keenly. I Observed her back.
Jesus Christ, Taylor, what the fuck have I done to you?
"You look familiar," she mused, voice hard, raspy in a way it hadn't been last time we spoke. "Have I threatened you before?"
I dry swallowed at the bitterness, "no."
"Hmm, well, my mistake then," she stood up. "Anyone who hates the Empire as much as you is alright in my books. I assume you're here for the sex slaves?"
Oh. That was here?
"Yep."
"Good, call it in. I have places to be, and these guys will confess" Taylor turned and stalked off, stepping over one of the men as he sobbed and pleaded with his cruel hallucination. She paused at the doorway, turning back to look over her shoulder. "I like 'Smoke and Mirrors'."
I got the sense she was smiling at me.
She left, leaving me alone with the broken gangsters, any vague ideas I may have had about turning up at her house as Greg and apologising evaporating with her leaving. I turned invisible again, drawing my knees in and wrapping my arms around them with my face pressed against my leg armour. How could I have done that to her?
"Never do that again."
Armsmaster didn't look up from his reports and I hadn't even sat down yet.
"Never do what?"
"Thank you for the footage and the call in, but you are to never do that again."
I gingerly sat in the spare office chair. I was sure I'd gotten rid of all the things that could trace the footage back to me, but he was Armsmaster.
"I'm already putting myself on the line for you, do not ruin both our careers."
"Sorry. I did come to that realisation while I was there if it makes you feel any better. I just need something to keep myself busy, and not just the same shit I've been doing," I interlocked my fingers and stared at my hands. "I need something fresh, you feel?"
"Yes, I feel," Armsmaster sighed, finally looking up at me. His face was deeply lined, eyes bloodshot with heavy dark bags under them. "But-"
"You don't have to worry about it though," I added hastily. "It's Emily's job to handle this kind of crap. I'm going to ask her about it, or Renick if she's too busy too."
Colin closed his eyes for a long moment. "Thank you," he said, opening them.
Maybe I should ask Amy about getting him some better meth.
"Was there anything else?"
My jaw clenched as though to stop myself from saying it. "I saw Scarecrow."
"What does that have to do with anything… Oh, yes, you knew her. What about it?"
"She's fucked up, man, and it's my fault."
"Everyone makes mistakes."
I frowned. He was trying to placate me so I would leave, but I needed to tell him this.
"No, I really, really hurt her. She wants to kill me, she thinks I'm Empire if she ever found out I was a Ward she'd have a complete meltdown! I've never seen someone who's second triggered, but I bet she would if she knew."
"Look, I don't know how to help you on this one, Greg," Armsmaster said, irritation colouring his voice. "Life is like this sometimes. You shit the bed, life shits on someone else for your fuck up, etc. The cycle continues. Do better next time, that's all there is to it."
"No! I have to break the cycle-"
"I forbid you from revealing your identity to her."
"No, not that, she'd melt my brain. I have to do something though, don't I?" I looked at him imploringly.
"Not really, no. The damage has already been done. Think Tank analysis, which you don't have access to, has her pegged as another statistic who will either get herself killed or become a villain-"
"Why is she getting Think Tank looking at her?"
"They do a once a year sweep," Armsmaster waved a hand to dismiss the sidetrack. "The point is there's nothing you can do, some people are just self-destructive."
"You didn't give up on me."
"I can see you're trying to 'get a gotcha', Greg," Armsmaster rubbed his eyes tiredly. "But the circumstances were extremely different. You may have been an insolent fool, but you were putting effort into being a better person. I've spoken to Scarecrow, she's not interested in anything but revenge and she's willing to hurt a lot of people to get there. If she lives another five years she might grow some perspective, or she might spiral downward, but nothing you do can help someone like that. Give it up, don't jeopardise both our careers over this it is not worth it."
We'll find a way.
"Right, I get it. I promise I won't screw us over, thanks, Colin."
"I can see you scheming something, stop it."
"Right."
Chapter 57: Unravel 6.7
Chapter Text
Victoria answered the door. God, was she beautiful.
"Hey," I said.
She opened her mouth, paused, clicked a few times, then pointed at me with a smile. "You're Dark Smoke Puncher."
I smiled back. "My real name's Greg, I figure I can trust you with it."
Victoria made a zipping gesture and opened the door wider, "you're here to see Amy, right?"
"I am, she is here, right? I wouldn't put it past her to forget I was coming."
Victoria shrugged, looking over her shoulder in the direction of Amy's room. "Amy!" she bellowed.
A slightly muffled, "What?!" echoed from upstairs.
"I'll show you up," Victoria said, stepping back to let me enter the house. It was a nice place, something I didn't care to notice on my last visit. Big without being extravagant, well decorated without losing its homeliness.
I inventoried my shoes as I stepped inside, taking my enormous hoodie with them. I wasn't supposed to leave home without it to conceal my borderline inhuman physique. I'd stopped growing bigger at exactly the twenty-ninth point in Strength, and while I was gigantic for a fifteen-year-old I wasn't quite roids big. There were two downsides to this: I could never go outside as myself without a covering, though I wasn't losing out much there, and I would never be Joestar levels of big.
"We saw your interview," she said chattily, leading me through the house. "You're so lucky to work with Bad Canary like that. She's going to be really big one day, I can tell."
"Yeah, Amy told me you and Dean watched it with her. It was great fun, I'd been wanting to do something like that since way back when I was a busking cape. And, like, I can sing, dance and act so why not get famous, right?"
"Right!" she beamed. "If I wasn't set on parahuman psychology, I think I'd be an actress, but," she shrugged, heading up the stairs. "Less creeps that way."
I neglected to mention all the times I'd looked at upskirt pictures of her on the internet.
"The psychology of us really is interesting, isn't it," I detoured the conversation away from anything incriminating. "I've had a lot of time to read up on it, I'm actually taking a college course at the moment, what's your take on the post-trigger psychological development? I think there's a lot of validity in the Powers Corrupt theory."
"It's too much of a stretch. It would require powers themselves to be acting agents when there is a far simpler explanation that doesn't hinge on the enormous added complexity of powers having a corrupting motive. Power Corrupts makes a lot more sense, it's not like humans without power are immune to it," she traced a finger along the wall as we turned off the staircase. "There had never been a shortage of monsters before superpowers existed."
"While it's true that there's absolutely no evidence for it, I have a Thinker power-"
"Classic Thinker arrogance."
I snorted. "A Thinker power that helps me understand people, and a trend I've observed is that Parahumans have lower wisdom than unpowered people; on average. And on reading dozens of reports there is an observable increase in anti-social behaviour after triggering in most cases. So while it definitely could be that, triggers happening most often to people in bad situations in the first place, that merely having the power to affect their environment in a powerful new way puts people on a negatively reinforcing spiral, I don't think that the power itself having motive should be discounted. I mean, did you find yourself making obviously stupid choices with your power that you could have avoided? I know I did."
Victoria rubbed her chin for a few moments, "I see your point, but, it adds needless complexity to an already complex issue."
"It does, but," I shrugged exaggeratedly. "It makes for a good conversation, doesn't it?"
"It does," she narrowed her eyes at me, a smug smile on her beauteous lips as she opened Amy's door without knocking. "I can see why you like this one, Ames, am I going to have to ask you to leave the door open?"
Other Greg metaphysically sagged in relief.
We fucking did it, bro!
Hardest be cool moment of our fucking lives, bro!
Amy made a genuine noise of disgust as she looked up from her phone. "He wishes."
Classic bitch Amy.
"I'll have you know I have a sort of, almost, maybe girlfriend," I shot back. "And she's really hot."
"As if, paying a camgirl a tip doesn't mean she likes you."
"I'll prove it, if you like," I shot back snidely, equipping my work phone. "Just promise you won't spill her identity."
I brought the picture up and tossed it to Amy, who nearly fumbled the catch, and stood there with crossed arms.
Victoria watched the byplay with a mixture of confusion and amusement.
"Shit," said Amy after a moment. "She's hot."
"Ooh, let me see," Victoria floated over and held out a grabby hand, accepting the phone from a sour-faced Amy. She held it close to her face, slowly rotating as she levitated. "Wow, dude, she's really into you. A girl won't send you a picture wearing that kind of shirt unless she's keen. You better put out quick, Ames, or this girl's going to beat you."
Amy sighed deeply, shaking her head.
Victoria cackled, floating over to hand me my phone. My heart rate spiked as the fluttery feeling of her aura crept over me for a brief second before ebbing away.
"Where did you meet this girl, 'cause she is hot."
"Boston, but she's actually a New York Ward."
"Oh," Victoria's voice dropped. "That long-distance stuff must be hard, she's like ten hours away. Sorry, Greg."
My brow prickled with a sudden cold sweat. What was she talking about? Ten hours wasn't very much, why was she sorry? What did she mean by that?
Normie cuckshit.
"Eh, I'm not worried," I shrugged, feigning Chadlike confidence. "It's not like I'm here forever, I'm going to go get transferred to somewhere more important sooner rather than later, and I have no problem with New York."
She gave me a gentle, pitying look, "I'm sure it'll be fine. You were on TV, girls like fame."
"I'm a really good judge of character. Thinker, remember?"
"I guess if it's like Deany's power you'd know."
"It's something like that," I hedged. "I can get a pretty good overview of someone's personality."
"I hope things go well then. Anyway," Victoria clapped, settling back down onto the carpet. "What're you here for? Amy never has friends over."
"I'm going to assume for the same reasons you go to your friend's houses."
A discerning glint flickered in her eyes for a split second. Great, I thought that line was smooth. My acting should easily be enough to trick her, but all of her social trifecta stats were really good so maybe she just rolled a twenty or something.
Damn it.
"Makes sense," she rose off the carpet again and floated backwards out into the hallway, shooting us finger guns. "Don't do anything I wouldn't do."
My heart-rate spiked again as she pulled the door mostly shut behind her, but this time it didn't have anything to do with her aura. Shit.
"What are you here for anyway?" Amy shifted into a lazy sitting position on her bed.
"Well, I do want your advice on something, but mostly I thought it would be nice to hang out. Catch up and all that," I trundled over to the truly impressive pot plant sitting on her windowsill. A fly landed on one of the tropical-looking flowers and a small harpoon jettisoned from within its depths, spearing the fly and dragging it out of sight. "Like, that's new."
"Yeah, that's the calming flower I told you about. That thing has saved me so much sleep."
I bent over to smell the flower, taking a deep inhalation. It was a new smell, I was sure it hadn't existed before she made it. I didn't have anything to compare it to, but it was extremely nice.
"Impressive," I said. "Very nice. What've you been up to lately? You're much happier."
"Yeah, it was called 'three months without you here'," she snapped.
"You need to lay off the pills if the comedown makes you this crabby, also, give me some."
"You're only saying that because you've never had one," Amy lay back down, sagging into the soft duvet cover. "Do you have any idea how much I get done while I'm on them? I have everything lined up for the second I can get emancipated. The NEPEA laws are a fucking joke on them, I'm months from owning my own 'health' company. I'm going to be able to help more people but on my terms. No more feeling guilted into those shitty hospital hours, no more stupid rules that don't do anything to help. Nah, I'm fixing my fucked up life, let's move to New York and just fucking live."
"I'd like that," I took another sniff of the flower. "Let's do that. I have some stuff to do here first, though, and that might take a while. One of them was what I wanted to ask about."
"Right, lay it on me."
"Please don't think too badly of me for this," I moved over to sit on the edge of her bed, facing the door.
I heard her open her mouth.
"And yeah, yeah, yeah," I cut her off. "Your opinion of me couldn't get any lower. Whatever. I caused Scarecrow's trigger event."
Amy gave an elongated, confused groan. "That was… the crazy girl. The vigilante."
"Yeah."
"It was an accident, right?"
"Of course it was. We were, like, acquaintances at school and I played a really shitty prank on her at the wrong time," I stared at my feet, shuffling. "And now she thinks I'm a Nazi and she wants to melt my brain with her fear powers."
"Sounds like you really fucked up, you utter retard."
"Yep."
I glanced over as she sat up, tucking her legs under herself and rubbing at her bloodshot eyes.
"Give me a quick rundown."
She was silent as I laid out the story, going from the start of high school, her subsequent status as bullied and my bitchmade inaction, to our meeting the other night.
"Sounds complicated," she eventually said. "I don't have any idea on how to fix that. She obviously won't want to hear you out for you to apologise, and letting her get herself killed fighting the gangs is a fucked move-"
A hiccup sounded from out in the hallway, then a sniffle, then the door burst open as Victoria barreled through it.
"That poor girl," she mashed at her face with her jersey sleeve, leaving wet spots of tears and snot. "We have to help her."
"Get out, you fucking snoop!"
I really needed enhanced senses. She barely made any noise when she flew slowly, stupid, Greg, stupid. Now she knows how much of a stupid piece of shit you are, you cretin. You put so much effort into being cool and you blew it, you fuckhead, you're a fucking fuckhead.
"I thought I'd hear you making out or something! I didn't mean to eavesdrop on something like that!"
"It's cool," I made a placating gesture, forcing myself into a relaxed posture. "I'm here because I need help with this, and I can tell you're really good at this kind of thing, Victoria. What do we do?"
Victoria gave a huge sniffle, swallowed, then scrubbed at her face again. "She just needs a friend. If I see her I'll let her know she can talk to me."
"That might be just what she needs," I agreed. "And you're not a Ward, so I think she'd be more likely to listen to you anyway."
"I'll try. I'll go for a fly tonight and see if I can see her, Amy you need to-"
"No I don't," Amy interjected.
"Yes, you do!" Victoria shifted her hands onto her hips. "She probably has a phobia of pretty girls, so she mightn't trust me by myself."
"Oh, thanks, bitch," Amy muttered. "Go by yourself, I'm busy."
"I didn't say you were ugly."
"Whatever."
They both started looking huffy, and I decided it was best to pretend that I wasn't there.
Every step was an effort greater than the last, each footfall compounding the crippling weight on my shoulders. Mortal men weren't supposed to be subjected to this. It was wrong. It was inhumane.
My lungs felt cold, like with each breath I was inhaling the essence of desolation only the Arctic could bring. I didn't want to do this, but I had to.
I turned to face the jury of my peers and the guillotine of their waiting judgement.
Dean smiled encouragingly.
"I'm sorry I used to be such an annoying dick," I piled all my effort, both my brains, into coming off as sincere and cool as possible. "I've done some work on that, and I hope we can start over and be friends this time instead of you just putting up with me."
Dean looked at Dennis, who looked at Missy, who looked at Chris, who looked at Carlos who looked at Dean.
"Of course we can," Dean said.
It still tasted like ash in my mouth.
Chapter 58: Unravel 6.8
Chapter Text
Victoria had told me she hadn't seen Taylor during her flyover last night, and I didn't expect it to do much good even if she had. This wasn't an issue so easily solved, Taylor was a wreck. Going from years of bullying into having the power to see only the darkness in the hearts of men? That would screw up anyone's head. I wonder what she'd seen in mine that convinced her I was a Nazi. I was pretty sure that I didn't hate black people, or Jews, or Asians or whatever.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure we'd notice something like that.
Too right we would, Other Greg. It was par for the course that I didn't understand myself, and outside Thinker assistance would be supremely helpful in deciphering the hormonal recesses of my subconscious. Having two minds didn't help, Other Greg didn't have access to anything I didn't. We were the same person, had the same memories and the same outlooks. Divergences could happen if we were separate for long enough and we were specifically concentrating on different things, but we still shared all memory and knowledge which consolidated as soon as we integrated again.
What I needed was to get access to the Protectorate multiple groups of Thinkers and ask them two questions. 'Am I racist?', and, 'how do I fix Taylor?'
Cool evening air ruffled my hair as I kept pace with Carlos and Chris in what was finally a patrol route that wasn't padded kiddy gloves bullshit. I could easily take like ninety per cent of the capes in the city in a fight, many even at the same time. PRT duty of care be damned, I wanted to be free, and in the event that any danger even showed up I could invisibly run away faster than they could follow.
I'd forced myself to take a secondary, even tertiary, role in the chit chat which was mostly various gossip from Arcadia. They apparently weren't friends at school, which was pretty wild to think about. I mean, it made sense as they were in different years and had completely different social circles, but, still; wouldn't you want to chill with your Wards homies? There were a million ways to make that work without coming close to compromising identities. Crazy.
"Arcadia sounds pretty baller," I chimed in, pressing down the mic button on my earpiece. "I'll transfer in if they ever let me go back to school here."
"Why don't they?" Chris asked. "It's not like Greg is going to be attacked by the Empire, and I'm sure they have to let us go to school."
"My parents signed a thing so I could be schooled on base, and I'm pretty sure I'd stick out too much, dude, my powers are too obvious."
Chris didn't reply for a few seconds, obviously stewing in his embarrassment for asking such a stupid, obvious question. How many jacked, blond teenagers who moved like water were there in Brockton? Dipshit.
We're not doing that anymore remember? Friends.
"That sucks," Carlos interrupted the awkward silence. "Doesn't it get boring being on base by yourself all day?"
"It's not much fun, there's only so much internet surfing you can do before it gets crushingly dull. It's good that my whole music thing is taking off and I can start spending more time on that," I twisted in the air as I leapt between buildings so I could face them. "I have a new song that I'm almost done with, actually. It's one of the wanky PR ones they asked me to make about the ABB slash Empire gang war. I think they just want more donations, honestly. Anyway, I'm thinking 'Unravel' for the title."
I managed to cut myself off before I went into a monologue about the uselessness of the government and how they just wanted to look like they were doing anything when in reality all they wanted to do was line the pockets of their friends with specifically my tax money while the gang war that had hospitalised my mother continued unabated.
"Well, that's good at least," Carlos said. "Keeps you busy."
"And yet I still need more hobbies. What about you guys, what do you get up to besides Wards shit?"
"Look alive, boys!" Missy's voice suddenly cut in over the comms, her being our console overwatch for the evening. "Armsmaster just okayed you to intercept the Undersiders, they were just seen breaking into some building downtown."
Carlos and Chris came to an immediate halt, floating in mid-air while I drifted out of my latest jump onto a street light. Undersiders, eh? The team with two confirmed murderers who weren't shy about hurting people? I guess we were a pretty good match for them, Chris was out of their range and Carlos almost couldn't be debilitated.
"Oh shit, copy that, Vista!" Carlos said, voice cracking in surprise. "Where at?"
"The corner of Cushman and Lewis. Backup's ETA is five minutes."
We turned, me remembering exactly where that intersection was from having looked at the map of the city once and Chris having GPS in his heads up display, Carlos followed our lead and we rocketed away. In order of speed, I was just faster than Carlos, who was faster than Chris, but both of them could fly without being reliant on the rooftop terrain. For once I was the one holding back the pace as Chris gripped Carlos' hand and let himself be dragged faster than his hoverboard could propel. I wasn't holding them back by much, but damn I really needed a bloody flying spell.
Downtown wasn't terribly far from where we were, and moving faster than city traffic in a straight line let us make fantastic time.
"What's the plan, Aegis?" I asked.
There was a few seconds pause. "Armsmaster thinks we're good for it, so you can jump in and smash some heads with me while Chris keeps them under suppressive, right?"
"Absolutely."
The timing was beyond fortuitous, as we closed in on the address they were just leaving. And they obviously didn't know we were coming because they weren't in a special rush. Sure, there was a smooth professional speed to their movements, but nothing to imply they were trying to escape their unavoidable impending arrest.
I hit the ground near them, and in the time it took for their heads to turn my way I had already leapt forward and kicked the one of Hellhound's giant mutant dogs she was sitting astride. The magically enhanced kick blasted it across the pavement and onto the street, clipping the wing mirror off of a parked car, and I caught Hellhound out of the air as she fell in an uncontrolled tumble. In a flash of blue, she was encased in a thick shackle of mana, and safely on the ground.
"Evac! Evac, Evac, Evac, Eva-"
Tattletale's wild screech was cut off by the thick smoke so black it looked like a two-dimensional object as it spewed from under Grue's bike leathers. I met it with a deluge of my blue smoke, the two fluffy smoke banks melding seamlessly into each other and over both groups. Sound vanished, leaving me in pitch black with only my heartbeat and breath and the feel of solid ground underfoot to keep me aware.
Grue's smoke dampened mine? I lunged for where Regent had been, fingers swiping on air as I felt around for something solid. My fingertip touched cloth and mana poured out to encase-
The Undersiders all slumped to the ground in unison, Grue's cover smoke fading away into the night breeze. I dismissed my smoke to get a proper look at what had just happened.
Grue, Tattletale, Regent and Hellhound had turned into RealDolls, Hellhound's still shackled by my spell, each dressed in crude facsimile of their Cape outfits. The mutant dogs looked to be slowly melting into puddles of meat.
"What the fuck?"
I turned to look at Aegis as he floated down, "I think they might have teleported?"
"And been replaced by sex dolls?" he scoffed, putting a hand to his comms. "Win, can you come have a look at this?"
Chris floated down, holstering his spark pistols, and stepped off his hoverboard. "It's over already? What happened?"
"We think they might have done some kind of switch-teleport, can you take some readings?"
"Yeah, just give me…" Chris pressed at a few points on his left arm guard, prompting a series of blue lines to appear and spit out his scanner. He gingerly knelt beside the sex dolls and waved his scanner over them, which made dial-up internet and Geiger counter noises. He inspected the screen. "I'm getting dimensional residue, so, teleported. Since when could they do that?"
"Coil's mercs have tinker guns," Carlos said, shrugging and putting a hand to his ear. "Maybe from him? Vista, Win says they got away by teleporting."
"It only makes sense," I spoke into my own communicator. "Tattletale shouted 'evac' a bunch of times when I kicked Hellhound's dog. Also, can you write it up that I winged a car mirror when I did that? License plate six nine nine two L H."
It was a little surprising how quickly they escaped, but considering they were about two seconds away from all being arrested I couldn't fault them.
Ah, excellent. That last level had taken a while. I hadn't been getting many of my usual quests again until quite recently. The quest power clearly worked off of my subconscious to some degree, and I hadn't been in the best place recently. Very demotivated.
I'd managed to keep up with the gym out of sheer habit, though increases in strength and vitality were becoming increasingly difficult to come by now, it had taken roughly the same amount of time to get from four to thirty-five as it had to hit forty-five, which I had gotten to yesterday. It was so much effort that I was seriously considering putting my points into one just to hit fifty so I could quit lifting so much. But, in the end, that was a mental trap and I was much better off upping my dexterity or intelligence and working for the others.
"How did you hit a car with that?"
"I kicked the dog into the car, it was awesome."
"It's almost a shame that I didn't get to do anything," Carlos said, feet finally touching the ground as he alighted. "They vanished, like, the second we got here."
"Well, that's their whole deal right? They're good at running."
Carlos clicked his tongue, "so it would seem."
I wandered over to the building they were assumedly robbing, the door of which was still open. I equipped a pair of sterile gloves and pushed my way inside, making sure to scout ahead with a cloud of mana just in case Victor was hiding in a shadowy corner.
There was nobody in the foyer, the reception desk empty and the computer screen off. My smoke crept up the stairwell to the left, hidden behind an alcove, and I followed it quietly, blending into the shadow. The empty stairs led up to an office, rows of desks empty and off, a single room at the back lit by the fluorescent bar light, a pot plant throwing a spiked shadow onto the floor.
My smoke flowed under the door and, over human shapes.
"We have bodies," I barked into the comms. "In the building upstairs."
"Dammit, Dark Smoke, don't wander off!" Carlos hissed. "I'm coming, wait for me."
"Roger that."
I felt one of them wriggle, and muffled shouting started up from inside the room.
"They're live," I said to Carlos, then called out loud. "Please remain calm, I'm Dark Smoke Puncher, with the Protectorate. We've got help coming, it won't even be a minute and we'll have you out of there, ok? So don't you even worry."
They struggled harder and yelled more muffled yells. Carlos barreled out of the stairwell behind me.
"Hold on, it might be a trap."
"What is it?"
"When I said I was Protectorate they didn't react right," I whispered. "It's just a feeling, but maybe we should wait for the bomb squad or something."
"Yeah?" he whispered back, floating up to get a better view inside the office. He drifted back down next to me. "How many are you counting?"
"Six, all tied up."
"Shit. Yeah, we're waiting for that backup," he floated back into the stairwell, with me in tow. "Vista, what's the ETA on our backup? Tell them we've got six hostages, possible trap. Bomb squad on Thinker advisement."
"Oh, shit, hang on, I'll patch them into our line. Can you go through that again?"
We came off the stairs, crossed the foyer and exited back onto the street as the wail of sirens started coming in. I'd say it was going to be a long night, but we all clocked off in half an hour. The perks of being a Ward.
Chapter 59: Unravel 6.9
Chapter Text
It was a few days after the Undersiders fight and we sat in the briefing room again, all arranged around the very far end of the table. Armsmaster paced at the tables head, cursing and spitting at the bureaucrat on the other end of the phone.
"I don't care what they say, you fucking idiot, I say that it's necessary! You get back onto them and file that damn requisition form!"
He hung up and turned back to us. "Right. We've run it through our people, and what we wrung out of the Empire 'hostages' is true. What the Undersiders stole was the location of safe houses and supply caches; soft targets. Then they apparently sold the information to the ABB, who have been hitting said targets. Obviously," he ground out, continuing his pacing. "This is exacerbating the conflict, and we can only conclude that Coil is attempting to incite the gang war to greater heights. To what end, we are not yet sure, but his rating has been bumped up from C to B and the Undersiders from D to C. The Empire and ABB will retain their current threat rating of A, and we will not be receiving backup."
Dauntless let his hand drop, from where it had been propping up his head, onto the table. "How many extra shifts?"
"Double," Armsmaster glared at him like he was being insolent. "From all of you. Wards, that means you, too. Tell your parents you'd love to help out more and we can give you more half days at school so you can run more public appearances. Dark Smoke," he whipped a hand to point at me. "Has your song been checked over?"
I nodded.
"Good, you're going to be performing it. We want all the Wards to be at the 'Movies in the Park' event tomorrow, you know the drill. Happy smiles," he waved his hand dismissively. "Everything is under control. There is nothing to fear."
"I'll make sure we're all there," said Carlos.
"Good, rope in that lazy Browbeat while you're at it," Armsmaster turned to the adult side of the table. "Assault, a quick rundown on your latest report."
"Right," Carlos whispered, glancing at Armsmaster to make sure he didn't disrupt him. "You're all good to be there, right? I'll tell him you were if you can't make it."
"I want to skip it," Missy whispered back. "I have friends over this weekend."
"I'll make a clone of you for the press shots," I said, leaning in. "He'll never know."
"Ooh, could you?"
"Sure can," I grinned.
Dennis reached over, tapping my arm. "Hey, make one for me too, I don't want to sit around watching some kiddy movie for hours."
"Yeah, ok, it's just that they can't talk at once so if I'm having my Vista one talk I can't have yours say anything. And they can't be too far away from me or people will walk into the strings. And I'll be busy all night so it'll be pretty obvious if both of you are statues half the time, two's going to have to be the limit."
I couldn't micromanage six clones at once, not at my current level. Maybe in the far off future when I could make fully independent clones.
"You'll be fine, Dennis," Carlos said. "Just come for a bit, then leave when the movie starts."
"Whatevs."
"I'm fine to be there the whole time," Chris said.
"I'll be there, too," said Dean.
"Cool, that'll make them happy. We can leave early anyway, so, just token appearances."
We all nodded our agreement, but I was still going to be there the entire time and max out my popularity gains. Everyone knew that children were the biggest consumers, and if I was popular amongst that demographic it would be fantastic for my career to have that kind of household appeal. No longer would it be my fault that I wasn't popular.
Pointless though it may be in a world heading for the apocalypse, I still wanted to try. To give up would lead to stagnation; stagnation was death. Nothing was as dangerous to me as mediocrity. Mediocrity would lead me on a steady path back to where I used to be, before powers, before maturing and, before learning that I could be whoever I wanted. Mediocrity was a pit, stagnation the crabs. Not giving up was the only ladder out.
For me now, the climb was all there was.
My Mana Disguise spell benefited from [Multitask], like my camouflage spell, rendering it far cheaper than it had been. At this point, I could have it on just about all day without risking running out, and it was no longer dispelled by someone bumping into me too hard. Today, I had taken on the guise of an ambiguously Hispanic teenager with brown hair and eyes, still obviously quite buff, but with a bit of extra fat and a gut to round out my size a little. The reason for my disguise? We were going Taylor hunting.
It wasn't going very well.
"Do you think this would fit me?" Victoria held up a dress to Amy and me, turning left and right with it pressed up against her.
Amy shrugged.
"She's not going to be at the mall, even on a weekend," I said. The dress did fit her, and it would have looked amazing. "She's probably still asleep."
"Duh," said Victoria. "We're still in the planning phase, which is why we're in the last place she'll ever be."
"What plan do we need? We just introduce ourselves and be friendly, then over time we influence her away from being crazy."
"' Be prepared', boy scout," she put the dress back on the rack. "We need to know how we're going to do this. What's our approach? How do we open? What is she into so we can properly ingratiate ourselves? You might be able to wing it, but we don't know her."
"Fair point," I said. "You need a soft approach, if you push at all she'll close up and back away. If she starts being extra quiet and awkward, you should probably stop and try again later. Try not to frame anything as 'high school', in fact, don't even mention school because she won't respond well. If it has to come up, say that school sucks and the teachers are all idiots."
Victoria nodded seriously, one hand on her hip, the other stroking her chin.
"Don't push her on that she's doing the wrong thing either, she's very convinced she's in the right and you might ruin your chances if you say that too early. Try talking about capes, or classical literature, or how much you hate the gangs and drugs-"
"Fuck me, she sounds horrible," cut in Amy. "How much effort are you going to put into this chick? This shit could take you years."
"I have to fix this, it's my fault."
"Is it though?" she continued. "Sounds more like it was that other girl's fault, and Taylor was already crazy to begin with. You're a complete retard, but all you need to do is apologise."
"No," I said, staring at our feet. "I have to reconcile this."
It was the only way I could truly move forward. It was the last shackle holding me to the corpse of my previous self. With Taylor helped, equilibrium could be reached and I could be happy. It was representative, I had moved forward and Taylor had regressed; both due to my actions. Without this I would always have that reminder, that regret sitting in the back of my head, leaving me unable to truly move forward out of the crab pit.
Taylor was my last rung.
"He's right, Ames. Sometimes there are just things you have to do if you want to be a hero."
"I don't think that includes flagellating yourself over some girl."
"I have to Amy, it's the right thing to do."
"Just send that bitch an apology," she scoffed, pulling out her phone, checking the time, then pocketing it again. "If she's still going to act like an idiot, she's not worth the time."
"Well…" Victoria dithered on the word. "Maybe. It could be that this ends up the kind of situation where you have to cut someone toxic out of your mind. If we do our best and she's still like this, then…"
"I get it."
I didn't get it.
"If it can't be done, well," I shrugged, looking up but not meeting either of their eyes. "We'll have to let it go."
Victoria put a soft hand on my shoulder. "Sometimes it's not up to you to fix someone, but not trying is the worse option of the two."
Amy put her hand on my other shoulder. "I don't think you should bother at all."
"Amy!" Victoria smacked her hand away.
"What? He appreciates it when you don't sugarcoat, don't you Greg?"
"It's not about that," Victoria huffed, the motion blowing a strand of curled blond hair away from her face. "It's about a positive mindset. If you tell yourself you can't, you never will. Don't poison the well."
"Fuck the well, it'll be worse when she doesn't change. This is one of those Sishyphycian efforts."
"It's Sisyphean," Victoria replied witheringly. "A Sisyphean effort. Like dealing with you for more than half an hour."
"I'm going to rub it in your face as hard as I can when he fucks up," Amy sneered. "Like, what did you used to say, Greg, 'the only winning move is not to play'?"
I hoped this was Amy being her usual short-sighted self and not an insight she'd gleaned from homemade nootropic MDMA, the effects of which must be considerable. She'd gone from thirteen intelligence to fifteen, which wasn't too crazy and was possibly due to just getting older, but if she kept it up she could end up a genius.
But also, fuck Amy.
"I hope you're ready for me to rub it in your face," I shot back. "There's nothing I can't do."
My quest to save Taylor proved it, it would only take time.
"Eh, it's up to you," Amy said. "I'll still help, but don't expect much."
"All I need are your thoughts and prayers."
Amy snorted, "whatever, dude. Can we go eat now, I'm super hungry."
Chapter 60: Unravel 6.10
Chapter Text
"And it all unraaavels…"
The band trailed off behind me as the crowd went wild with the thermobaric force of dozens of squealing children. A sea of cheering families, the waves of their enjoyment crashing over me and eroding the calcified worry buried in my heart. It was this feeling of excitement, of security, that I reflected back at them magnified through my powers. Acting, Voice acting, Singing, Charisma empowerment, Sound generation, Ventriloquism. All of it moulded together and thrown into the resonating crowd.
"Thank you all so much for coming here tonight! Times like these affect us all, and that's why it's more important than ever to stick together. Some people don't like that, but it's not up to them, it's up to us. All of us!" I made an encompassing gesture and held up a fist.
"Brockton together strong!"
I paused for dramatic effect and the crowd erupted, cheering, hollering and stamping their picnic blankets; some even shouting, 'Brockton together strong!' back to me.
"Brockton together strong!" I bellowed back to them. "It won't be easy, but it'll be worth it! And now what we're all here for, we've got a great new Aleph import movie for you all! 'Harry Potter and the Celedfwlch Conspiracy', I've never seen it either so I'll be sure to enjoy it along with you. Have a fantastic evening, and enjoy the movie!"
I bowed and moved over to the band, quickly inventorying all the heavier equipment, then exited stage left while waving with both hands to more cheers.
I was walking on air, steps light and breezy. I just wanted to entertain. That was my great purpose in life. Oh gosh, I was on so many endorphins right now; come to me, Dopamine, Serotonin! I floated down the steps leading down from the little raised stage in front of the big projector screen, and around the back to the band's van. I gently placed the drum kit and amplifiers onto the mats laid out on the grass.
"Hey, thanks kid," Dale, the bands' guitarist slash manager said.
I smiled. "Thank you guys, too! We nailed it, I'll make sure if we get another gig like this to get you first on the list of people we hire."
"No problem," he shook my hand. "Easiest gig we ever played at. Great vibes, man, great vibes. We'd love to play with you again."
"I'm sure I can get something on, and I'll try and give you more notice this time, too. I tried to make it easy, but you only had like two days to learn the song."
"Ah," Dale waved a hand. "It was only one song."
"Anyway," I shook the other band members hands. "I have to get back to my seat for the movie, you guys have a great night."
"No problems there, Dark Smoke Puncher. It's a Saturday night and we're in a band, we'll find a way," he winked cheekily.
I cackled, clicking them finger guns. "Don't go too crazy, seeyas later!"
We waved and departed. I made my way back around the screen to the row of six chairs up along the left side of the main watching area set aside for us Wards. It was far enough away from the crowd that we could speak without being overheard but close enough to the screen so that we could still enjoy the movie. I did a half-lap down the edge of the crowd, laying down some sick high fives to deserving toddlers, before looping back up to my seat next to the Vista clone.
A single hair-thin strand of mana latched onto the clone as I sat to its right, giving me back direct control.
"That was an amazing job, Dark Smoke Puncher," I said, throwing my Missy impersonation into the Vista clone's mouth. "I'm going to tell Piggot to give you a raise."
"You're too kind, Vista."
Dennis, who was sitting next to me, burst into muffled sniggers. "You can damn well sing, though. I remember when you used to sound like that nerd out of The Simpsons."
"I did a lot of practice," I said, a little shortly. "And the effort paid off."
"What're they PRT paying you for it?" he asked. "I know you had that one other song."
"I get royalties when they're released and sold, which should be a shitload of money eventually. Plus all the royalties from the other merch that goes with it," I forced a chuckle. "They're even going to make poseable Dark Smoke Puncher figurines."
And that shitbird SupaGokuFiyah was going to desecrate them, I just knew. He still had it out for me for some reason, spewing his filth all over my favourite waifus. I swear he was doing it on purpose, it seemed like every time I said I liked a character he as there with her Figma, and as Void Cowboy I had spent a lot of time talking up Dark Smoke Puncher.
Like, a lot of time.
"They tell everyone they're going to get figurines, but I don't think anyone but Vista got any. There was that metal guy in Boston-"
"Weld."
"Yeah, him," Dennis continued. "And like, Miss Militia did when she was in the Wards, but it barely happens unless you're senior Protectorate."
"Three years isn't long, I can wait that much for sweet merch. Dark Smoke Puncher the T-Shirt, Dark Smoke Puncher the colouring book, Dark Smoke Puncher the lunch box, Dark Smoke Puncher the breakfast cereal and, Dark Smoke Puncher the nun-chucks."
"Pfft, best I ever got was a limited series of wristwatches for, like, collectors or something," he shrugged. "I don't even know if the royalties were enough for me to notice. Or even if I got any…"
I shrugged back at him as the movie started. Bet's version of the movie was Prisoner of Azkaban, and apparently, this one contained several key similarities. The fugitive godfather, Rigel, the rat friend who betrays him, Petyr, and the Dementors. Though for some reason at the end of this one Voldemort was back and trying to get his hands on the scabbard of Excalibur which would restore him to life; a shameless rehash of Philosopher's Stone. I'd spoiled myself on it beforehand completely on accident coming across a thread on one of my imageboards, but the movie didn't sound that good anyway so I wasn't too fussed.
"Hey," whispered Dennis, nudging me with an elbow. "Time to do the thing."
"Ok, just," I leaned over, putting a fingertip to his shoulder and disconnecting from the Vista clone. "On the count of three, stand up. It won't last long so make sure you're out of sight. One."
I pulled a chunk of mana from the well within me, shaping it with the familiar pattern of Chameleon Skin. Before the spell could crystalise and cover me I reversed the feeling of the targeting, pushing it outward.
"Two."
Other Greg wrapped another piece of magic around and around, preparing it for solid form.
"Three."
Dennis stood up, the cloaking spell covering him from back to front as the clone formed underneath him, bumping his legs and causing him to stumble like a dweeb. Luckily for him, he was invisible. The timing was a little off, but I'd never practised that move so I could forgive myself.
The borderline invisible skin of mana covering Dennis moved in front of me. Even I couldn't see it, but I could feel exactly where it was.
"Thanks, Greg, this is fucking trippy though. I feel like I'm going to trip over my own feet," the mana wobbled unsteadily on its feet. "See you guys tomorrow!"
Dennis beelined away, half tripping with every other step as he adjusted to being unable to see any of his limbs. I connected my wires back to the two clones, making them fidget a little as I got used to the controls.
I settled back in my chair and focused on the movie.
The start was very much the same as our version in terms of basic overview, though Uncle Vernon's sister had brought cages of cats with her and wore pastels. She was likely a proto-Umbridge used early.
I started fiddling with the new armour on my gloves, picking at the decorative rivets. Armsmaster had done a fantastic job in taking my look from LARPing ninja to tacticool shinobi without making me look cringe, despite the designs I'd sent him ripping off a half dozen design concepts from various obscure manga. It was a complimentary contrast, I thought, to Savannah's flight suit which was modelled after the sleek lines of a stealth fighter jet and plated in the red and gold homage to Hero most new Protectorate heroes favoured. We'd make a great promotional poster picture together.
I realised I'd sort of zoned out on the movie, probably because it wasn't very interesting. In the interest of avoiding candid shots of me ignoring the movie I'd just claimed to be very interested in watching, I put on a Disguise of me staring at the big screen before equipping my phone.
Greg: hey cutie what's goin on?
Greg: I'm stuck watching a movie at a publicity event
I glanced between the dragging first act of the movie and my phone for a few minutes before she responded.
Savannah: Muscle Boi.
Savannah: I'm recalibrating my flight stabilizers again. I have no idea why they can't stay fixed where I put them to. It's a good thing I love doing this or I imagien it would be odiously tedious. What movie?
Greg: aleph harry potter 3, it's worse than the bet version
Greg: being tinker is suffering, i don't think i'll ever develop that part of my powers
Savannah: Imagine*
Savannah: The suffering is rewarding, I think. There's always something to do, always something to improve, always new avenues of methodology to explore. Isn't it the same with you?
Greg: yeah, it is. I think we have a lot of the same struggles in that regard, every new thing we make needs attention and fine-tuning if we want it to be useful in the long run. But that takes time and effort, which leads us down the road of workaholism to be useful. At least my powers don't need constant upkeep, I can't imagine how frustrating it would be if they degraded like tinkertech. Having to watch my percentages tick down and devote my time to only a select core of powers; maddening. I'm really lucky.
Savannah: True, that, lol. There's really no combating the workahol, I can't think of a single successful tinker who has a social life. If you want friends you have to settle for mediocrity.
Greg: It sounds really bad when you put it like that, but you might be right. A friend, but not friends, and they have to get that you need to spend all those hours with your work and not them
Savannah: I know, right. It's good that Alvita is here, even though we only hang out once a week and talk about work
Greg: Yeah, I think my only real friend I see is Panacea, and that was mostly just working at the hospital together which they're going to let me start doing again soon! They decided that the whole Nazi assassination thing has blown over. I'm going to ask if I can go back to school even, academically pointless though it may be, but not my old one that place is a hole
Savannah: Brockton is so weird
Savannah: brb tinkering
I realised my face had been split into a big ol' dumb grin the whole time. I wriggled in my seat, biting back a tittering giggle. I was now completely, entirely, one hundred per cent sure she liked me back. For the first time in my entire life, a girl actually liked me back. Me, Greg Veder. Nerd sperglord supreme no longer, I had moulted that facet of my personality like a graceful spider and was now free to feel the good vibes with my sensitive leg hair.
Greg: No problem, enjoy yourself
I was Greg Veder. I had real friends and a girl who liked me.
In the end, I think that was all I ever really wanted.
Something tapped on my shoulder. I looked over to see Carlos stretching over the Dennis clone and tapping me on the shoulder. He tapped again, then again. Oh, right.
I dropped my Disguise and he flinched slightly, mouthed 'whatever', then whispered, "I'm bored as hell, can you get me out of here too?"
I grinned sunnily. "Of course, get ready."
I dropped control of my clones and reached in for my magic, working it as I had done for Dennis. The transition went a little smoother, Carlos floating up out of his chair and circling back around to hover behind me.
"Thanks a million, Greg, I owe you one."
"No problems, my dude," I looked over my shoulder at the ever so slight shimmer in the air he had become. "Don't even trip."
He clapped me on the shoulder and flew off into the night.
It was a good night, too. Clear and wholesome, with young families enjoying Harry Potter and I, Greg, had friends and a girl who was into me.
Oh, the changes seven months could bring. I remembered, I remembered perfectly. From weirding out the agent who escorted me to meet Armsmaster for the first time to my god awful attempt at dating Sophia to my brief attempts at killing Amy's monsters that neither of us enjoyed, now, finally, to here on this day. The scene played out in my mind.
The corpse of Old Greg was truly lifeless now, a withered thing in a stained, faded Idolmaster t-shirt. Skin greying and eyes sunken, mummified in my mind. He was dead, but not forgotten. The shed where he lived lay in ashes around him, all the trophies and inanities he coveted burned with him. If you looked closely, the pattern of wrinkling on his skin resembled a bulge I shamefully recognised, the last remnant of his insipid life.
I took to a shovel, working it into the dirt with slow solemnity. It was over and now it was time to tidy up. The grave I dug was shallow and unmarked, and it was here I would finally bury him, put him away where I would never need to see him again. I moved back over to him, half expecting him to make a last feeble attempt at explaining what a Mary Sue was, but he was silent and still. I grabbed him by the shrunken ankle, just above his velcro sneaker, and hauled him to the grave, casting him-
A gunshot.
I startled back into awareness, looking around as a visible wave of fear and confusion washed over the crowd of families.
Another shot echoed faintly over the park.
I dispelled the clones, leaping to my feet. Chris and Dean were both frozen in their seats for a split second before galvanising to action as the families started screaming. The screaming sounded as if it were coming from underwater, my ears felt plugged and my voice choked. I turned to Dean to ask what-
This is ours.
I turned to Dean to tell him what we should do.
"I need you and Kid Win to both guide the families after I calm them down," I spoke, forcing all the command I could copy from Armsmaster into my tone and posture as I could. "I'll make a path, and I'll need you to lead them."
"Kid Win," I turned to him, feeling a charlatan as the gunshots grew louder. "I need you to be bright and loud, you're going to take point and be their focus."
I put a hand to each of their shoulders. "We've got this."
There wasn't time to hear their replies, I had to save everyone.
I turned on a dime, taking off at a sprint, landing on the stage in two steps. I told Chris bright and loud, but I'd have to lead by example.
I lit up in a brilliant flash, light spell boosted as high as I could.
{Dark Smoke Pun-Cha!}
The guitar riff rolled over the crowd, smothering their panicked screaming enough for me to take a deep, deep breath.
"I'm going to make a path!" I bellowed, forcing my voice out over the families in an attempt to drown out Harry Potter. "This is Brockton, we can handle this! Follow Gallant and Kid Win!"
I brought both hands up, wire fine smoke billowing out past them, expanding out into gentle green walls that led out of the park opposite the growing firefight. There were a few fewer screams.
"Please follow Gallant and Kid Win! We'll get you to safety, that's my Dark Smoke Promise!"
Then, in a trampling herd, the families obeyed; allowing themselves to be shepherded into the smoke walled path by Gallant and then to follow Kid Win who emitted a siren and whirled with red and blue lights atop his hover-board.
I backflipped up, landing on a support strut for the screen, and looked over my shoulder at the flashes of gunfire that grew closer still.
Shit. Fuck. God damn shit fuck! Fucking cunt wanker shit fucker!
"You're doing great!" I shouted, to myself.
Oh god, why?
A figure burst out of the tree cover behind me, fleeing the guns. They sprinted, superhumanly fast, the Mad Max cage of metal around their head glinting in the movie's backlight.
No. No, no, no, no.
No.
She slowed, jogging into a confident strut right up to underneath me, cast in an eerie half-light under the dusk.
"I thought that was you up there," Cricket raised one of her Kamas at me, the other hand pressed to her throat. "Little Rat Boy."
Chapter 61: Unravel 6.11
Chapter Text
"So we're after Excalibur's scabbard," Harry Potter said. "And we have to get to it before Voldemort."
I closed the window. I didn't want to know.
My armpits were sticky.
"We never paid you back properly, did we?" Cricket croaked through her artificial larynx.
I swallowed, lips smacking on dry tongue.
"If you don't come down here and fight me I'm going to go," she gestured vaguely to the area hidden behind the screen where the families still escaped. "And cut some civvies before I get back to slicing up those fucking chinks."
My feet felt heavy like they were made of clay.
Cricket scoffed, made into a staccato growl by her voice modulator, and a flutter of nausea wormed up in my belly. Her power, or my cowardice? She shook her head in disgust and stalked off around the stage.
We can't let her do this.
I know. And I know we're supposed to go down there and fight her, deliver some smug one-liner about how racism is bad, and save the day.
So we do it.
Our legs won't move, retard.
Then how about…
-1
The sudden jolting electrical pain shot over my skin bright and sharp, into my heart, bringing with it a huge rush of adrenaline. It was fight or flight, and both Gregs were saying 'fight!'
I turned to where Cricket was making her slow, deliberate way around the screen and jumped, landing in front of her.
She chirped. "Thank god."
I didn't say anything, I just moved into the fighting stance Jiraiya made feel natural. Cricket twirled her Kamas, settling into her own showy stance, a sinister smile peeking out from in between the bars of her facial cage.
One punch. I could finish this in one punch.
I moved, boosted, the single-step closing me in on her in a fraction of a second and my stomach turned, my head spun and I whiffed the punch as she juked to the right. Cricket's sickle lashed out, finding a gap in my armour.
I barely even felt it.
"First blood!" she crowed, dancing away as I spun back to face her, spitting the taste of bile out of my mouth. "Rat Boy ain't shit."
Mana smoke leaked from me, covering us both, but she just laughed.
Mana Beam plus Arc Flash.
My hand shot out, fore and middle fingers extended, a bolt of lightning bursting from their tips. I gagged and retched, lighting beam spitting and crackling as it burnt a black line through the grass to Cricket's left. My eyes blurred with tears, world spinning. I heard her coming.
Spinning Mana Shield plus Arc Flash.
Blazing white lighting erupted from my skin, churning through the air to meet Cricket's incoming blades. She flinched back, slipping on the night-damp grass to narrowly avoid being fried.
Cricket made a buzzing sound in her throat, pacing defensively around the dark circle my power had drawn. My vision spun again-
-as I struggled to stand, breath catching in my throat in harsh pants.
"Why can't you just fuck off!" I sobbed, voice nasal. "Leave me alone you, you fucking…"
Old Greg stirred in my mind, feeble fingers reaching, grasping. They settled around my ankle and an old familiar feeling of edgy memes flowed through me.
"You fucking nigger!"
Cricket stopped pacing, her surprised expression in the fading smoke one of having heard a terribly funny joke.
I retched again as she laughed.
"Nigger!" she jeered. "Nigger, nigger, nigger!"
"Fuck off!"
Cricket cackled, the sound spilling me onto the grass.
"Oh," she sighed, the sound discordant and harsh. "It feels so good to laugh. You know what, kid, you're alright. I'm still going to cut you up though."
She took a step forward and I burst into lightning again, then cast a wild hand out toward her that spewed a torrent of sparks. She evaded again, almost easily. The files said Cricket could dodge bullets, and I didn't even have a gun.
"Just let me cut you a bit," she said, blasting me with even more gut-wrenching power than before. "It'll be over quick."
I choked on sour hot dogs, half-digested mustard burning my nose through the tang of my lightning's ozone. Lumps of half-digested food dribbled from my lips, plopping onto the burnt grass. I heaved, another fresh wave of nausea forcing the last of my dinner out.
I just wanted it to be over. Cuts would heal in minutes. I hung my head.
No.
Cricket stepped in.
Other Greg and I switched.
Our hand lashed out.
Mana Beam plus Arc Blade. Speed Enhancement.
There was no time for her to dodge, the sword of brilliant lightning took her in the hip and continued on through up out her armpit.
It was like cutting through rice paper.
Both halves of Cricket toppled to the ground, a dark red mess slowly seeping from the burnt, cauterised gizzards bringing with it a thick iron tang.
I dry heaved, heaved until my body ached. I equipped my phone, cold fingers fumbling over the display until it started ringing.
"What i-"
"I killed her."
"I'm on my way," Colin sounded panicked, harried. "Don't move."
"I killed Cricket."
"Don't move, Greg. I'm coming."
"I killed her, Colin."
"I'm almost there, just stay calm."
"I," my stomach churned again, cutting off my words. "I will."
"Good lad, can you stay on the line with me?"
"Yeah. I'm just gonna… go sit down."
"That's good," Colin soothed tersely. "Have a sit-down, we're coming for you."
I crawled over to the side of the stage, sitting on the grass against it. I turned away from Cricket and closed my eyes.
Chapter 62: Unravel: Interlude: Coil: Sveta
Chapter Text
6th May 2011- Coil
Even in times of victory caution was necessary. It was a habit to be maintained at all times, not a thing to be put on a few times a year in a crude attempt to cover up mistakes already made. No, caution was the lifeblood of the game, it was his mantra. So, even now that this final niggling puzzle had been solved he still maintained his daily caution.
"The news has come in."
His Tattletale sat across from him in plainclothes mirroring his grim smile, though she didn't know it. He still wore his costume, one carefully designed to hide as many traces of his identity as possible.
"He is being permanently transferred to Los Angeles, under the protection of Alexandria."
The scenario could have gone better. Veder could have died along with Cricket, that would have been supremely satisfying in multiple ways, but, as it was it was still a good outcome.
"Freakin' finally," said Tattletale, rolling her eyes. "When?"
"The sixteenth of this month," Coil said, leaning back in his chair a fraction of an inch. "We played this well."
Since day one the boy had been an unaccounted for irritation. Exposing his Tattletale's identity to the Protectorate, leaking that the Undersiders worked for him, exposing his moles and, most importantly, delaying the takeover schedule. Thomas Calvert couldn't be near him lest Coil's identity be found out, as it immediately had in several timelines where he met Veder to gauge his reactions.
"It's a shame he didn't die."
Coil nodded. "That would have been optimal, a fantastic blow to the integrity of the PRT."
The ploy had eventually worked. Blaming Dark Smoke Puncher with the leaking of key Empire capes and unpowered personnel had the desired effect of getting the Empire to gun for his blood. It had very nearly almost worked out perfectly the first time, but the Wards Thinker rating was a tough thing to counter letting him somehow see through Cymatic's powers without getting immediately pasted across the pavement. It had brought a brief reprieve when he was sent to Boston, though that had been spoiled by utter chance.
Who could have known that the very gang war Coil had helped incite would hospitalise the boys' mother?
"This will have to suffice. You did well in manipulating the gangs into that shoot out. That a Ward has killed a villain, even in self-defence, puts them directly into the line of everyone's fire," Coil allowed himself a moment of expressed glee. "Director Piggot may even step down this very week."
In his other reality, Thomas Calvert took a cheerful afternoon walk through the bicycle track not too far from his home, feeling the weekend sun on his face. Thomas Calvert lived a simple life, a man of few acquaintances and modest means, and taking walks in the afternoon sun was a pastime he cherished.
"I hope it's worth it this time, this kid has been the biggest pain in the ass," his Tattletale huffed. "He makes a good pawn, but god damn is he infuriating."
"Quite. It was unfortunate he came to the conclusion we were after him, but he's been dealt with."
Now that the boy was with Alexandria she would never let him return, in part because Alexandria was almost certainly strongly affiliated with Cauldron and Veder would likely know the moment he looked at her and, in part because he was slated to become capable of reaching near the top level of parahuman power. He was an asset that Coil himself would have liked to have a cordial relationship with, but one couldn't have everything in life.
"The plan will proceed as I outlined."
Tattletale nodded.
"As a heads up, Tattletale, I have acquired a new set of talent. You've heard of The Travelers?"
"Yep, mercenary group. Shady rep," she wrinkled her nose and crossed her legs. "Lots of unexplained disappearances. They're effective though, good power set for the jobs they do."
Coil inclined his head slightly. "They will be coming to the city quite soon, I'd like you to compile the usual profiles before they arrive."
"You got it."
Coil smiled. The Travelers, he hoped, would prove to be a worthwhile gambit. The girlfriend of their leader, Trickster, was the one behind the disappearances. Her power had mutated her into a nearly uncontrollable beast, ravenous for raw meat, who produced murderous clones of anyone who touched her. Caution was his mantra, but the thrill of the knifes edge was what truly lit the fire in his belly. How well could he balance caution while handling such dangerous assets?
"Then you are dismissed."
Coil stood, turned. He faced the wall, ignoring his Tattletale. He felt the hair on his arms raise as goose-pimples swept across them with a great flush of adrenaline. He needed to ask more questions.
After he was quite certain he was alone once more, Coil left his office through the back door to where his van and driver were waiting. The man who drove his van was unemployable in any other sector and, it was by giving the man, codenamed Creep, his socially unacceptable desires unobtainable almost nowhere else could he ensure his complete loyalty. It was another habit of Coils, paired with caution. Offer the carrot first, because everyone had a price. And Coil was capable of paying even the most depraved of prices.
The current back and forth driving between offices was a nuisance soon to be resolved with the completed construction of his new base; a hidden converted Endbringer shelter. Smack dab in the middle of the city, and nobody had the slightest clue it was even there. Another balance of caution, in the meticulous construction of such a base, and thrill in the satisfaction of having such a thing as his own. It was a first, he reckoned. Nobody else in the country owned such a base, Coil alone had the skill, the patience and the ability to make it happen.
Alas, the base wasn't fit to be moved in to for nearly a fortnight so Coil had to make do with spreading out his assets for the time being.
As the van pulled to a stoplight Coil dissolved his other reality, interrupting Thomas Calvert mid-stride. Another wave of goose pimples rippled over him in the fraction of a second it took him to split reality in twain once more. The time now, where his realities were so close together, was his most vulnerable. And staying vulnerable just wasn't cautious.
In one reality, Coil had himself driven away to a third location and, in the second he was driven to a nondescript lonesome building.
He took a moment to confirm the lack of watching eyes before entering and was greeted by the man he had stationed there, one Mr Pitter. A useful man by all accounts, one that could be trusted with the care of Coils greatest current acquisition.
"Good afternoon, sir."
"Mr Pitter. All is well?"
Pitter adjusted his round-rimmed glasses in a serious gesture. "It is, sir. Nothing abnormal."
Coil nodded shortly and stepped past him, continuing on to the only room in the building with a heavily locking door. Pitter rushed forward and pulled a set of keys from his pocket, unlocking the three heavy locks with practised motions.
Inside the room on a bare military surplus cot lay a young girl in a white nightdress, staring at the roof with puffy, bloodshot eyes.
"Hello, pet."
The girl screwed her eyes up, mouth twisting.
"You know my questions."
There was a hitch in her voice as she replied, "zero point eight nine two per cent chance there's any problems in the next hour. One point seven three per cent chance of problems before lunch."
"Very good," Coil would have purred were it not an unseemly display of lack of control. "And what is the chance of Dark Smoke Puncher returning to Brockton Bay within the next three years?"
"Four point one six six per cent," the girl, Dinah, said pressing a hand into her eyes. "It hurts."
"Of course," Coil said, turning to Pitter. "Make sure she receives her candy when she asks."
At the mention of candy, Dinah sat half upright, watery eyes bright with want, but didn't say anything. She watched them with suspicious hope, hands balled into fists around the hem of her nightgown.
"I will, sir," Pitter said with a servile nod of the head.
Coil left. Four per cent… Acceptable for now. In his other reality, Coil reached his third office to begin the tedious running of his operation while the Coil in the current reality re-entered the van to be driven back to his civilian car and his civilian life.
Thomas Calvert would eat a healthy, hearty dinner, watch a new stand up comedy special and get a good nights sleep.
8th May 2011- Sveta
They had been playing Starcraft all day, though after the first few fumbling attempts at playing Sveta resigned herself to spectating. Tendrils you weren't even fully in control of weren't designed for real-time strategy games. Greg, however, had been dominating match after match after match of online opponents, an unbroken chain of victories; but they were just distractions. Greg had said he wanted to tell her something but was claiming he'd tell her after he lost. She didn't think it was like him to stall, so it must have been important.
Sveta knew she was lucky that few other residents wanted as much computer time as she did, leaving her free to selfishly hog her favourite machine in the common area. There were only a few others in, most reading quietly or watching television. A lot of people in the asylum preferred to stay in their rooms, a desire Sveta understood completely. Doctor Yamada had spent a full year attempting to get her to spend time in the common area, and Sveta was eternally grateful she had.
It was, however, getting late.
"Greg," she said, timid and halting. "I have to go back to my room soon, um, do you want to tell me what it is? Only if you want to though, you don't have to."
A short rush of harsh popping made her flinch, presumably as Greg sighed into his microphone.
"Right," he replied. "Well, the PRT is trying pretty hard to keep this out of the news, but you'll probably hear eventually. I killed Cricket."
Sveta gasped, tendrils roiling, grasping, pushing her up into the corner of the ceiling like they thought she was being attacked. She shouted, but the microphone was down there and her voice came out as a breathy, soft whine. She needed to tell him it was going to be ok.
"She attacked me, but it was really fucked," his voice still reached her, faintly through the lowered volume she'd set the computer to. "You still there, Svets?"
If she didn't get control soon they'd remove her. She was already drawing attention. She needed to breathe, that's what she needed to do. Breathe. Count of four in, count of six out. Greg needed her help.
Slowly, painstakingly slowly, her tendrils relaxed. Whatever alien muscle structure moving them unclenching, jerkily lowering her back down. Sveta took another steadying breath then opened her eyes, which watered with bile smelling tears.
"I'm here for you, Greg," then, in a torrent. "I'm so, so sorry I didn't say anything right away I panicked and my tendrils freaked out and put me up against the ceiling. It's all going to be ok, I promise."
"Thanks. I know it'll be ok. I'm not in trouble for it or anything, but they're sending me away," the microphone popped again as Greg gave a laugh that came out as a bitter scoff. "You want some signed Alexandria merch?"
Sveta whined a whistling, reedy hum. "You can always talk to me about it."
"I know," he said. "I think I'll get over it, sort of. Did you have nightmares about it?"
"All the time."
"Yeah. I think it's kind of ruined music and Harry Potter for me."
Sveta sniffled, "your songs are so good, if you ever feel like making more I'll shill for you on Twitter."
"Thanks, Svets. Maybe one day, we'll see."
It wasn't right for these things to happen, it was unfair. It didn't need to happen. This should be in the honeymoon period for making music, he should be at the height of his obsession for it. Greg's obsessive hobby had changed every three or four months for as long as she'd known him, it wasn't time yet. He was supposed to be rambling on about obscure music theory he'd speed read a pirated pdf of and didn't really understand.
Her tears traced stinking black lines down her face. Her friend was suffering and there wasn't anything she could do about it, she was stuck in this stupid, worthless body that wasn't even human. She couldn't even leave the facility. She couldn't ever give him a hug.
Greg must have heard her muffled sobbing.
"Hey, it's alright. I'll be ok. They have a program for this apparently, it's not like I'm the first Ward to kill somebody."
"It's just not right," Sveta said quietly.
"Sorry I wasted your day making you watch me play games."
"I would have just watched LetsPlays anyway."
"Well, thanks for sticking around anyway. I need to go and give something to Armsmaster, so, thanks again, Svets."
"Bye, Greg."
She was so useless. There had to be something she could do to protect his smile.
Chapter 63: Unravel: Interlude: Collin Wallis: Amy Dallon
Chapter Text
Chapter 64: Unravel: Interlude: Savannah: Tyrone
Chapter Text
12th May 2011- Savannah Hawthorne
Savannah worked, that was her thing. It was how Hero had done it, it was how Dragon did it and it was what her parents had drilled into her from the moment she could talk. The sky was the limit, they said, but you had to work for it.
Things outside of work were distractions, so you had to make logical arguments to keep parents happy. You weren't hanging out with friends, you were networking with other Wards. You weren't reading SciFi, you were looking for inspiration. You weren't messaging a boy you liked, you were using him as a go-between to get the ear of Armsmaster. You were always doing something else and none of it was ever enjoyable; an endless grind to make someone else happy.
Savannah was lucky, then, that Tinkering made her happy. Or at least distracted her from moping about not spending time with friends and living life. That with Tinkering there were always improvements to make was a habit she tried to incorporate into her own life, every advancement another step in throwing off her shackles and leaving home. Joining the Protectorate would be another shackle, but it would be one she chose and, with any luck, a less restrictive one. She understood that she wasn't immediately signed up, there would need to be a new contract drawn up; one in which she could get concessions. Not that she would leave the city, New York was where she wanted to be, but that she wouldn't have to deal with her parents again.
To her, it still seemed a little childish to need help with that once she was an adult but the thought of true independence unsettled her.
Other things unsettled her these days, both related. Greg had been attacked again and forced to kill. She didn't know what to do about it. These kinds of things had always seemed to be more 'out there' rather than immediate concerns to her. There was a lot to unpack with it all.
Greg had run afoul of a supervillain named Coil who had responded by framing him for releasing Empire Eighty-Eight identities. Savannah had heard vaguely about it before they had met, it was national news for a little while, but hadn't paid it much mind. It was an out-there problem. And again, after she'd met him she had a peripheral understanding of why he was in Boston, but again it was not her issue. Now though, that she had gotten to know him, it was a 'right here' problem. It was unlikely they would ever meet in person again, soon to be on other sides of the country, and that made her uneasy.
It was, for this reason, she worked now. She didn't like feeling uneasy, and especially didn't like not understanding exactly why she felt as such, and so she avoided the issue by working.
Her current project was to work out a way her thrusters could be utilised to fire blasts of energy. She wasn't sure if the committee would sign off on a weapon, but she wasn't making a weapon she was designing a shielding blast; wink.
Her flight suit currently had eight thrusters, one on each hand and foot, on each elbow and each shoulder, made efficient by the addition of an anti-grav panel running down its back. With her body artificially lightened so the thrusters could either save energy by being able to run on a lower setting or, push her to ludicrously faster speeds than she could achieve without. Her intent today was to get all eight thrusters to fire a wall of energy that could stop a bullet without disrupting her flight, and if it just so happened that she could also use them to fire a beam then that was also a win.
For anyone but a Tinker, it would have been tedious beyond compare. Building a replica thruster, adjusting the code, modifying the thruster output, simulating a test, repairing the thruster when the test knocked something loose; then repeating this many times over. It wasn't something she could do in an afternoon or even several afternoons. Builds like this were an involved process and unfortunately in the Protectorate Tinker schematics she had access to there was nothing to help her speed up the process as there had been with the anti-grav panelling. Multiple Tinkers were able to work with anti-grav so all she'd had to do was lift their designs and build it herself, but no Tinkers worked with her engine tech so she was the forerunner. She'd had some help, mainly from Dragon who saw fit to repay her for using her engine designs, and Dragon had obviously consulted with Armsmaster given the size and efficiency of the engine designs they gave back to her.
That had been the last help she'd gotten, though it had helped her produce the most sophisticated, efficient engine system yet and saved her years of time. Gone was the clunky turbine and in had come the sleek plasma emitter engine.
It was still unfortunately difficult to adjust and even she could only work for so long. Her scheduled three hours Tinker-time ended and personal flight time started.
It was by far her favourite time.
Savannah dashed to the change room and shimmied out of her casual clothes and shimmied into her flight suits underlayer. The strapping on of her flight suit was a much more involved process; it was like putting on a fighter jet.
The concept of her flight suit married power armour with aerodynamics, it was sturdy enough to tank most gunfire yet light enough to achieve flight. The downside of it all being crammed into a human-sized suit was there was no cockpit to neatly climb into. The armour came apart into six parts, the torso, the legs, the arms and the helmet and each needed to be manually attached. A well-practised jigsaw was still a jigsaw, putting it all together took time.
Attaching the torso and the helmet was always the first step. Housed in the helmet was her H.U.D supplemented by a basic AI which ran the start-up diagnostic to make sure she connected everything correctly and in the correct order.
It took the better part of half an hour to hook everything up and make sure it wouldn't come undone while she was flying. Servos whirred as her numerous flight stabilisers went through their motions to ensure none were sticking and a feeling of glorious weightlessness came over her as the anti-grav kicked in, picking her up off the floor to hover a few inches above it. Her thrusters hissed, glowing a bright electric blue, and she slowly flew forward. The H.U.D mapping out her surroundings with blue wire lines, showing safe flight paths, providing information on suit integrity and settings. The wall opened up for her to her flight pad and she floated forward to the middle.
The AI read her body language, something that had taken a good while to teach it, and ignited the engines. Her thrusters flared in a bright actinic flash, rocketing her off toward the sky. Savannah screamed, laughed, as the forces pressed against her. Even lessened by the anti-grav the feeling of pure acceleration still sent her giddy. It made every second spent in the lab worth it.
Her thrusters burned brighter still as she gained speed, curving in a wide arc around Longbeach and up toward Long Island. A slight adjustment of her posture sent her low, skimming over the tops of waves. Her radar highlighted a particularly big wave and her AI automatically adjusted her course to avoid ploughing through it. Savannah tilted, spiralling upward around the wave and continued to gain height until the lights of the buildings to her left were just dots on the big shadow of the land. Before long a big red wall appeared on her display, it was her limit. She wasn't supposed to go past it, and the Protectorate would be alerted if she did. Her AI started slowing her down and she came to a stop just before the wall.
There was… a burning feeling? In her chest, an uncomfortable, indescribable worry. She wanted to go past the wall.
Greg was past the wall. She wanted to go see him, it felt right too, to talk to him in person about his being attacked and his moving away. It hadn't been an issue beforehand, Brockton Bay wasn't far from New York and she was sure that if she asked a visit would have been allowed. Though she hadn't particularly cared to ask before all of this something had changed when he told her about Cricket. Usually, she didn't have much of a heart for things like that, she knew she was terrible about comforting even her team when they were upset; it had bothered her, but not much. Now though, looking back, she felt uneasy about how she was.
Being an only child with a half dozen solitary extracurriculars didn't engender itself to producing a likable personality and she'd never cared enough to fix it.
Savannah hung in the air before the wall, the red covering her entire field of vision, and waited.
13th May 2011- Tyrone Watts
Mouse Protector was late.
Though she wasn't Protectorate anymore she still spent time on joint patrols and was trusted enough to leave Wards to. As a teleporter, she was never late. Neither was she early. She could arrive precisely when she meant to.
It was weird, but Tyrone wasn't going to complain. He rubbed his tired eyes through the holes in his mask and yawned, sinking deeper still into the couch. Patrolling with Mouse Protector was usually kind of fun, and kind of exhausting; she was a master of talking without saying anything until you said something she could use to ridicule you mercilessly. It was her whole schtick with villains, especially the serious ones, but was less fun when it was you. She was usually better about it with Wards, but it wasn't something he minded skipping.
More time to chill out by himself, something that was lacking these days. The East Coast seemed to be going to shit all at once. In Portland the Dollhouse were going ballistic and retaliating after one of their capes was accidentally killed by the PRT, here in Boston Accord was going at it with the Teeth again, in Brockton, it was the Empire and the Azn Bad Boys, a series of minor happenings in some of the bigger cities all the way down to Miami where they'd just uncovered some previously unknown parahuman serial killer's huge burial grounds.
Insane. The world was insane. Murderous Nazi's trying to kill his friends, the Slaughterhouse Nine, Endbringers. Crazy. Leviathan was going to attack somewhere soon, too, so that was a city written off.
His parents used to tell him stories of what the world was like for them before the eighties. Things could still be bad, but the scale was less. The world was less depressing. They'd said that, even though they weren't alive at that point, the world wars hadn't had such a profoundly negative impact.
All he wanted was to sit on this couch and do nothing, to be insulated from the outside. And yet, by unfortunate habit, his mind wouldn't let him. He would picture those things in his imagination, turning the images around in his mind's eye to inspect for details that needed adding or to be taken away. His power needed that kind of focus, so his mind kept wanting to go down that route even with distasteful imagery. It was great for when he wanted to use his power to recreate hot girls he'd seen, but not for this.
Tyrone shuffled around until his pockets were no longer pulled tight against his leg and eased out his phone, opening the Discord app he used to talk Magic the Gathering and look at related memes. He flicked through images for a few minutes, occasionally smiling or exhaling sharply through his nose, then rubbed at his tired eyes again. He flicked over to his contacts and dialled Greg.
Greg picked up after four rings.
"Hey, buddy, what be the hippety haps?" Tyrone asked.
"Meh," said Greg. "The ushe. Armsmaster made everyone chip in to buy me a motorbike as a present, then I ate a bunch of maintenance and mechanics books and I've just been kind of sitting in the garage by myself fiddling with it."
"Well, that's nice of them."
Greg hadn't had much nice to say about his previous team, who had been a bunch of snobbish dicks.
"Yeah, I guess."
"What kind of bike?"
"One of the PRT second-hand ones, a Kawasaki Ninja," Greg sighed. "It was nice of them, it's a decent bike."
"Are there a lot of bike areas in LA?"
"Yeah, probably."
Tyrone frowned, paused. "Silver lining though, you get to work with Alexandria."
"Hmmm, yeah. Did I tell you she originally wanted me to transfer there when I came to Boston?"
"Nope."
The faint sounds of tools on metal echoed through the phone.
"Because of my obvious potential. Armsmaster thinks she wants to groom me for leadership somewhere, he has a hunch they want to snake me up the ladder in Las Vegas one day."
"You do have a good Thinker power."
Greg snorted and there was the sound of spanner hitting concrete, then a distant crash of breaking glass.
"It's what got me into this mess. It's too good. Or maybe I was too loose with it. I dunno."
"Nah, dude, you did the right thing. I'm pretty sure it's aiding and abetting if you know who a Villain's moles are and you don't tell anybody."
"Yeah," said Greg. "It's something like that."
Tyrone didn't know what else to say. What did you say for this? Sorry, a Nazi tried to kill you?
The big door to the Wards area opened up and Quartet, who had been brought in to replace Bastion, poked her head in.
"Change of plans, Reynard, you're on with me."
Saved by the bell.
"OK, I gotta go, man, my patrol partner's here. I'll talk to you later."
"No problem, broski."
"Peace out," Tyrone hung up, a scummy weight congealing in his belly.
"Quickly, please," said Quartet, in a way that was more telling than asking.
"Coming."
Tyrone flopped out of his warm, comfortable position and followed her out the door.
"Where's Mouse Protector?"
"Missing, apparently," replied Quartet, shrugging. The musical notes on her shoulders glinting mesmerisingly with the motion. "No one's heard from her in a few days, but, well, when you're an indie cape you get to pick your own holidays, eh?"
Chapter 65: Unravel: Interlude: Taylor Hebert: Damien Veder
Chapter Text
14th May 2011- Taylor Hebert
The city was devolving into chaos. Brockton Bay had always been a cesspit but the last weeks had seen it evolve into a throbbing stew of fear and hate and desperation. It bubbled over the edges of its pot, sizzling and burning down the sides until the blackened overflow spilled into everyday life.
For three city blocks around her, this seething filth poured into her heart in a torrent, but the gangs were starting to learn. They were decentralising. Anywhere there was a gathering of human scum was a beacon for her, but an individual person might have just been a piece of shit rather than a criminal piece of shit.
Taylor peddled her bicycle, stolen from an aforementioned criminal piece of shit, through the boiling shithole of Brockton Bay. Her power let her selectively remove herself from people's perceptions by essentially making them hallucinate that she wasn't there, allowing her to ride past them unnoticed. She was a ghost to them, something that haunted the wicked and dealt justice.
She was riding through Downtown, aimlessly, as usual, dodging foot traffic and weaving around cars, when an odd feeling of worry coming from deep underground. She peddled toward it, a few others coming into her range near it. They were beats she didn't recognise, and the location itself was more than strange. Why were there people under the city? And the way they were laid out, they weren't workers in a storm drain; not with those fears. They read like criminals. Experienced criminals.
Taylor opened them up as wide as she could without alerting them, fingering through their layers. The bitter taste of fear of being discovered for past war crimes wrung a disgusted sneer from her, but she didn't know what to make of it. Why were all these horrible specimens gathered underground? She continued riding until she was right on top of them, under some parking garage.
Should she open the floodgates and let them have it? Should she, for the first time in her cape career, call it into the authorities? Wait and monitor them to find out when best to strike?
Taylor didn't have the slightest clue as to who they might be. They were spaced out like they were inside some kind of large underground building, but that sounded stupid. Perhaps they had access to a parahuman who could shape earth who had created the space for them? Maybe they had found what was already there, a relic from Brockton's earlier days?
Taylor made to leave, but an irregular signal from underground caught her attention. It was someone just waking up, and their conscious signal was nothing like the others. Guilt, fear, yes the others had these too, but these were… fresher. Younger. Fewer layers, but…
Someone whose power was ruining their life. They didn't fear where they were, so they weren't a hostage. They were scared of eating? Throwing up and getting fat? This wasn't making a whole lot of sense. One of the most aggravating aspects of her power was that if she couldn't see her target it was hard to gauge when to use subtlety and when to slam them with everything she had. She continued peddling, deciding that this was something best looked into. Surely there would be city records of a great big underground space like that.
15th May 2011- Damien Veder
Damien lay in his uncomfortable, unfamiliar single bed in a Protectorate safe house. He hadn't been sleeping well this past week so it wasn't becoming uncommon for him to be awake far, far earlier than he was used to. The cheap clock on his bedside table informed him it was just past six-thirty but he'd already been awake for hours.
Brockton Bay was cursed. It had taken everything from him. His beard, lovingly cared for and shaved away by stress. His job, the engineering firm he and Veronica both worked at had gone under recently. His wife, his darling Veronica in a coma due to gang violence. His son, his baby Greg growing distant and quiet after repeated attempts on his life.
It was for the best they were leaving. Tomorrow both he and Greg would fly to Los Angeles, never to see this wretched city again, with Veronica being moved to the best hospital in LA the PRT could provide shortly thereafter.
Damien yawned and rolled over, facing the framed photograph of a vase of flowers dimly illuminated by the first slivers of dawn. He closed his gritty eyes.
His fitful half-sleep was cut by the ear-splitting wail of an air raid siren.
Chapter 66: Song for Friends 7.1
Chapter Text
It was a complete fucking no brainer.
Rain lashed the windows of the PRT Humvee as it pulled up in front of Brockton General, so thick and heavy that it completely obscured the outside from view. The chill seeped into the interior of the car, pushed by the same winds that made the rain a near-deafening rolling crash.
I couldn't hear myself think, the roaring rain so loud I couldn't even feel anything. No fear, no anger, just a background refrigerator hum of blank shock. Leviathan was here. Here in Brockton Bay.
A hand shook my shoulder. I turned, blinking in surprise at the PRT trooper in the driver's seat.
"You good to go, kid?"
His voice echoed oddly as the shape of the car interior imprinted itself onto my awareness, a feature of my Echolocation. I didn't bother to answer him, I just got out of the car.
I felt the wind pushing back as I opened the door, instantly hammering me with spray as soon as there was enough space for it to snake through. I slid out into the freezing rain, the cacophony a little disorienting to my enhanced ears, and hustled the few feet to the covered area near the front doors shaking off the little water I'd managed to accrue as it wicked off my uniform.
I glanced back out at the grey sheet of rain, swallowed, and headed inside. The automatic doors opened up for me and the already chill day managed to drop a few degrees with the air conditioning. The shivering nurse on reception pointed to the right, where I could hear worried, murmuring voices. I headed down the corridor, coming out into a larger waiting room packed with various medical staff all clustered into little groups and talking amongst themselves. A few looked up as I entered, but went back to either talking or staring blankly at a wall or the floor.
Only Amy sat unruffled, in her white robe with the scarf pulled off her face. She looked… fuller-figured than I remember her being a fortnight ago, but maybe it was just her robe bunching up in a flattering way. She waved me over, a lazy, confident gesture.
It was like walking in a dream, time stretching out as you go nowhere then snapping back disorientingly, that feeling of struggling against molasses. It was all in my head, it was just the stress.
"About time you showed up," Amy patted the empty chair next to her. "You ready for this wild ride?"
She was also high as a kite.
I didn't answer as I sat down.
"You will be," she smiled, expression rich and charismatic. "I was going to give you more of these tomorrow before you left but Leviathan is probably going to smash my warehouse."
Amy reached into her pocket and casually tossed me something that looked like a big fish oil tablet. I caught it easily, rolling it around between my fingers.
"Go ahead."
What did I have to lose? I tossed the pill back and forced it down. It tasted like strawberries.
"What now?" I asked.
"It'll take a little while to kick in," Amy slouched against me, throwing an arm around my shoulders. "Then you'll wake up."
"So you're gonna wake me up?" I smiled weakly. "Wake me up inside?"
Amy frowned.
"Can't wake up? Never heard that one?"
"I think I heard part of it once when Vicky was going through one of her phases."
I leant against Amy, staring at my knees. "That sounds cute."
Her hug around my shoulders tightened, too hard to be naturally produced. I glanced an Observe at her protruding wrist… ah. Cool.
"It was. She would put on a ridiculous amount of eyeliner."
"I'm surprised it wasn't you who had that phase, but I guess you did end up smoking which is edgier, actually."
Amy snickered. "I quit, actually. Terribly unhealthy stuff. Gives you cancer, you know."
I scoffed, but it was more like a sob.
"There's less than twenty years until society collapses," I whispered, shivering, goosebumps pressing against the fabric of my uniform.
"Because of… Hmm," Amy relaxed her hug a little. "Yeah, that makes sense. Bummer."
Would the pill Amy gave me do that, wipe all of it away and just leave me with maximum chill? I hoped so. I really, really hoped so.
"Yeah," I echoed. "Bummer."
"Think of it like this," Amy said. "At least you can prepare for it and you'll get all the shock out of the way long in advance."
"I guess."
"Oh," Amy ruffled my damp hair with her free hand. "You. Everything will be ok soon, I promise."
"Thanks, Amy," I said, though I didn't really believe her. "I appreciate it."
She sighed, resting her head against my armoured shoulder. Her presence alleviated the curdling feeling in my blood a little, warded off the chill of the hospital air some, too. Her organic power armour was giving off a decent amount of heat. Wasn't she hot? Maybe it was something she'd done due to the depressing cold of the day, or maybe it was just externally hot and the layer against her skin was normal room temperature.
Woah.
I blinked, eyes flickering like a hummingbirds wing. A kick of something just shot through me, it was gaining momentum, building. I was flying. I was free.
The light in the aging fluorescents on the ceiling that seconds ago dull and grey was now white and pure, putting everything into perspective. The feeling of Amy leaning against me, already calming, magnified in that intensity. I took a deep breath, drinking in a whole new world.
"I'm awake. Kept you waiting, huh?"
"You're right on time," Amy let go of her hug around my shoulders, turning to face me properly. "Come to any good realisations yet?"
"Like how I'm a self-pitying twit whose biggest enemy is his own pride? Yeah, I'm thinking I'm good."
I stood up suddenly, we were wasting so much time. The mood in the room was not conducive to a productive Endbringer attack. The doom and gloom needed to be done away with, these people needed a figure to resonate with. I glanced around, studying faces. None of these people knew what to do. Sure, they had their orders and a vague idea of having skimmed over the Endbringer prep sheet the PRT sent out, but the room was devoid of vision. There was no bigger picture. The same ungodly amount of stress that I'd been feeling a minute ago was resonating throughout the room, everyone echoing back to each other the same anxiety and panic-clouded thoughts that set the bar at surviving until tomorrow.
They needed someone to start resonating hope.
I turned to Amy, offering a hand. "I'm going to start clearing the mood. Do you have a plan?"
Amy didn't take it, "I thought about dosing everyone with a weaker version to take the edge off of them, but the more I thought about it the less I liked the idea."
"What don't you like about it?" it sounded like a great idea. To calm everyone down so that I didn't have to, and give them a lasting resistance to the stress that the incoming tsunami of mangled bodies would be.
"I kind of want this to be an us thing."
I lowered my hand. "I can see the appeal. We'd be the heroes of the hour. I don't agree with it, but I understand."
To be honest with myself, I also really liked the idea. I'd be the cool one everyone looked up to, I'd have all the answers, I'd be the alpha to everyone's beta. It was something I'd always wanted but could never understand how to get. Now though? I didn't need that. It seemed unimportant, like a small but welcome side effect of my mere existence.
However, taking the opportunity to aggrandise myself in the middle of an Endbringer attack wasn't a very nice thing to do. Still, I wasn't going to condemn Amy for it.
I smiled warmly. "I wouldn't worry about it, Ames. You're Panacea, you just being here should be enough for them. Anything you choose to do here today will be more than enough."
"What?" said Amy. "No. I meant that I don't trust any of these guys to keep their fuckin' mouths shut. If this gets out too early I'll never hear the end of it; I already get enough cunts begging me to fix them on the street. If I make them for the public it's going to be under a different name."
"Oh, I guess that was just me, then."
"That pride, huh?" Amy rolled her eyes patronisingly.
"Apparently," I sighed. "I need to do a bit more thinking. But first, the mood."
"Don't let me stop you."
I held out a hand again and this time she high-fived it. We smiled and I turned and left.
God that was fucking embarrassing, I just projected all over Amy's face.
Well, can't mourn forever! The bodies would start piling up soon and we needed to be ready. I strode toward a man I recognised, the Chief Physician at the hospital, who was huddled in a corner with two senior doctors. All three of them clutched lukewarm cups of coffee and looked up as I drew closer.
I put on my serious face.
"Dan," I said firmly, nodding in greeting. Then to the others, "Patricia. Fernando."
"Dark Smoke Puncher," Dan said, mouth drawing into a tight line.
I mimicked his expression for a brief second. "I need a favour. One of my powers is that I learn quickly, but I don't have much experience beyond first-aid. Everyone in this room is better than me at this, I was hoping you could fill in the gaps for what I'll need to know."
"Ah… Well, I can. I can," Dan faltered, tightening his grip on his coffee. "How much do you know?"
"I've watched a few surgeries take place, mostly for gunshots and stab wounds, and I've read a couple of books."
"We'll be looking at trauma more in line with a traffic collision, and mostly we'll be working on stabilising until one of the Parahuman healers get to us," he took a long sip of his coffee. "Few that they are. God bless Panacea."
He, Patricia and Fernando raised their cups to her.
"I'll be able to do that, one of the surgeries I watched was a car accident. Is there anyone here who specialises in that I can talk to? Do you mind introducing us, I think it would go over better if it was you asking."
"Sure, I can-"
I turned, positioning myself like I was going to start walking in the direction he was looking. It worked, he started forward, getting us out of this cramped corner and into a more open section of the room. I let him take the lead, walking us to a suave looking guy with a scar over one eyebrow.
"Julian," said Dan. "This is Dark Smoke Puncher, he's after any last-minute advice we can give him."
I shook Julian's hand briefly. "I'd really appreciate it. I have a power that lets me learn quickly, but all of you have so much more experience."
Julian smiled thinly, complexion wan under the lighting and stress.
"I can certainly try, but I don't know how much a quick rundown is going to help," Julian licked his teeth, grimacing like he'd tasted something bitter. "Head, spine, internal, lost limbs… I don't want to scare you off; people are going to die under your care today. You need to be able to cope with that before anything else."
"If I can't, I'll help elsewhere. I also have a power that gives me a general idea of someone's state, so I'll know before I touch them what sort of injury."
"That's great, might save us a bit of time. Mostly we just need to keep them going until Panacea, did you tell him that bit, Dan?"
Dan nodded.
"Great," Julian licked his teeth again. "Keep them warm and staunch the bleeding, run through your A, B, C, D, E's in case you need to go further."
No, I knew all this. What I needed was to get the room together. I needed everyone telling me what to do so that they would all be reminded that they knew what to do. Show them that even though the reality was grim, they were prepared.
"I really do appreciate it," I smiled, thinly, softening from thin into something more encouraging. "This kind of stuff is invaluable. Is there anyone else we can get in on this? I want to tap as many brains as possible."
I gestured to the room at large with its shivering doctors and nurses waiting for the killing to start. If only I'd taken fire instead of lightning, I could be warming the place up.
Julian inhaled, the breath catching on phlegm in the back of his throat. He cleared it with a little cough, then turned to look over the crowd. "Alice," he called. "Tim. Could you come over here?"
Ok, yes. Better. I just needed to keep this momentum up.
"This, uh, Dark Smoke Puncher wants to pick your brains for anything to help with today."
"Don't worry," I said, punching a grim hand into the air with a puff of bright pink smoke. "It's just a name, I would love to hear anything you could tell me about saving lives."
Their eyes tracked the pink smoke as it curled into non-existence. Dan snorted and groaned, rubbing at his face, a genuine if gritted smile on his face.
And like that, I'd done it. Dan was in charge of the hospital, people looked to him for cues. He'd smiled, changed the tone. There was a ripple of ever so slight relaxation of tension in the shoulders of the people talking to us.
I mirrored his exact smile, taking on his posture. "You got a favourite colour, Dan?"
"Green."
I made jazz hands, green trailing off them, then cut it off to look at the floor. "Ah, I know it's not really the time for jokes."
"No," said Dan, straightening up a little. "It really is. I should have said red, to match the new coat of paint we're getting in here soon."
I carefully straightened my own back, glancing around at the faces of the others from behind my visor. Doctors and their gallows humour, huh? Perfect. How long would it have taken me to learn how to do this on my own? It all seemed so intuitive, yet it was anything but. What was really interesting was that this was something I would be able to all day every day, one day in the future once my stats were naturally there. It was something I very much looked forward to.
"Christ, Dan, you animal," Tim, the new doctor, scoffed. "Are you at least going to fill a bucket, or just paint with whichever of their legs come off first?"
This was definitely it, they were straight up vibing. People nearby were picking up on it, too, looking over with miserable interest. Everything was falling into place.
There was a crack, people screamed. New people had just appeared out of thin air, teleported in, bringing the sharp salty stench of seawater. I recognised Strider, a Rogue who worked Endbringer attacks at a discount, before he vanished back into nothing. He'd brought with him Victor and Othala, but they weren't important right now. The other person he'd brought was a Ward called Scapegoat. Those three, plus Amy and I, comprised of the entirety of the healer class capes the Protectorate could field at such short notice.
"It's started," Victor barked.
Everyone burst into motion, double-checking the supplies at hand, gripping gurney rails ready to ferry incoming casualties. I slid through the kicked ants hill the room had become, slipping into step next to Amy. I gripped her hand tight for a moment, feeling her squeeze in return, before letting go and parting ways.
The casualties started coming in pretty soon after that, each one broken or bloodied and screaming.
It was beyond lucky that Panacea gave me that pill, I didn't think I'd have been able to do anything useful otherwise.
Thick iron scented blood, up my arms, up my apron, up my face.
The reek of piss and shit.
Scalpels in my hands, stitches under my fingers. Patches pressed against wounds so deep I needed to conjure extra hands to keep everything from falling out.
Amy taking them off my hands when I couldn't do anything more.
Scapegoat handing me wounds minor enough that they wouldn't stop me.
Blinking away sweat and skill notifications.
My entire world; blood and piss and shit.
Chapter 67: Song for Friends 7.2
Chapter Text
Time slipped by, hours passing in a red blur. Not all casualties were Capes, some of the civilian shelters had been broken into so there was no rest, especially not with the new golden band glinting on my right ring finger.
I opened my eyes, sitting up straight, and leant forward to touch the man on the gurney in front of me. He was an older man, balding scalp hanging on as a flap of skin, left arm and leg sitting at funny crooked angles. His breath came through in laboured pants, broken by grimaces of pain. I tapped him on the chest, activating the enchantment in my ring.
Instantly my entire pool of mana was consumed and the man covered by a soft golden glow; then he was whole again. It was like watching a movie cut, one second he was a wreck and the next he was blinking in surprise and trying to sit up. The nurse wheeling his gurney pushed him back down, smiled gratefully at me, then wheeled him away.
There was a line of people for me to do, but I sat back and closed my eyes. At base my mana regenerated at six per cent, meaning it would take somewhere near sixteen minutes for me to return to full. With my Meditation perk adding an extra per cent for every minute meditated it took considerably less than that, which was very lucky. Lay on Hands not only consumed all my mana to use but required my mana to be at full.
The meditation consumed me, breathing slowing and tension receding from my muscles. The countdown timer in the righthand corner of my vision read at two hours and thirteen minutes until the effects of the Panacea wore off. There was still so much more that I wanted to do, but I might have to cut all of it short anyway. Life was so short, and mine might end this very evening.
I was dawdling, I knew. Healing people meant I didn't have to get up and face the truth.
I would have to get up anyway, I couldn't stand not knowing. However, I had a few things I needed to take care of first.
I opened my eyes and stood up, apologising to the line, telling them I desperately needed a fifteen-minute break. I hoped they'd understand, I'd been working long past the point where I could have stopped for a break.
The hospital was still a crowded mess of bodies, the reek of blood and brine mingling with their body heat left the place stinking and humid even through the air conditioning. Overlapping conversations blurring into each other, magnified by my powers. I'd hoped taking the skills I'd gotten from killing Cricket would change how I felt about it, but it didn't, it only offered more emptiness.
I wound through the hospital, making my way to where I knew the out of town Wards were waiting to be sent back home. Strider, one of the best teleporters in the country, had been killed in the attack so getting everyone back to their cities was going to be a task and a half.
Weld saw me first. He was the only one to come in from Boston, thank god, as he was practically immortal. You could reduce the guy to a stump torso and all he'd need was some sheet metal and a fork to be right as rain again. He wasn't who I was here to see, but I wanted to talk to him anyway.
He stood up and walked over to me. We embraced, and thankfully the paint job Armsmaster gave my armour didn't stick to him.
"It's good to see you again, man," Weld said, taking a step back and giving me a look over. His eyes lingered on the dried blood splattered up my clothes, though I had cleaned my face some still crusted into my hairline. "You were in here the whole time?"
"I figured it would be where I was best," I glanced past him, catching sight of Savannah. "I'll catch up with you in a sec, I have three things I need to do first."
Weld looked over his shoulder, following my gaze. The golden lines down his face creasing as he smiled, "I getcha."
I wrapped him in another hug, then strode off with great purpose. Savannah's jet suit was grimy, white salt crusting and flaking off around the joins between plates and limbs. She had the lower faceplate down, exposing from her nose to chin. She looked up as I walked near, mouth dropping open in shock. I held out my arms and she leapt into them.
I staggered under the weight of her suit but held firm as I hugged her. It was the first time I'd seen her in person since Boston, and video chat just didn't do her justice.
"Hey," I said.
"Greg," she whispered, wrapping me in a crushing embrace.
"Savannah," I said softly, pulling back and placing a hand on her cheek. "I don't care if this is a terrible time for it. I don't care if I have to move soon, we can make it work. I really like you, would you go out with me?"
Savannah's mouth twisted like she was going to cry. I could hear her heart hammering and she nodded vigorously.
I leant forward and kissed her.
Her lips were so soft.
I drew back, still holding her close as the Wards around us whistled and cheered. Both of us had big, dumb happy grins. Everything felt light and it like the only emotion I had was the colour pink. I took a half step back, equipping the rose and held it out to her.
It was picture perfect. A deep lush red in the petals and a vibrant green in the stem and leaves, with our names embossed in gold repeating around the petals rim.
Savannah sniffled loudly, taking the rose delicately and holding it up to her nose. She tried to say something but it came out as a choked up squeal and she sniffled again, leaning forward and headbutting me in the chin. It hurt a little bit, but I didn't say anything.
"I'll be right back," I said, pulling her in close and tight. "I have two really important things I need to do, then I'll be right back here with you."
"Ok," she said, breathy. "I'll wait for you."
I leant down and kissed her again, then stepped back fully. I gave her one last heartfelt smile, then turned invisible. I hoped this wasn't cruel, considering I might be walking to my death, but I felt I had to.
I turned away, dodging through the crowd again. Taylor had been brought in, of that much I was sure, but I didn't know exactly where she was. I stole over to the reception terminal, silently blessing that the backup power for the hospital still held despite massive power outages throughout the city. I turned visible again, making the young guy at reception jump.
"Hey, sorry about that, I need to know where someone is. Scarecrow, she's an independent hero."
"Oh, yeah, ok," he turned to his computer and quickly typed out the name. "She's up on floor three, curtain sixteen twelve."
"Thank's a million, dude," I nodded at him seriously.
I couldn't see her straight away, I needed something to sweeten the pot. If she was still up in the curtains that means she was still injured critically enough that she couldn't move under her own power. I could help her there, but first I needed my mana back.
I scurried off to find a moderately quiet corner to recoup and plan.
"Excuse me, Scarecrow," I said, standing outside her curtain room which stood in a row of a dozen other little curtained off sections. "I'm with the medical team, may I come in?"
There was a pause, then a raspy, "yeah."
I slid through the curtain, making sure it was as closed as possible behind me, then faced her fully.
Taylor Hebert. Scarecrow. She was lying on a cot, both legs fully covered in bandages with red seeping through the thinner areas. Her once lustrous hair hung lank and greasy over her pillow, face hidden behind an unsettling hessian mask.
"I heard you helped a lot in search and rescue."
"I tried."
She didn't sit up or move to look at me, so I checked her clipboard. Two broken legs; shattered all the way down from femur to ankle. Years of rehab, if indeed she would ever walk properly again.
"We noticed, and we appreciate," I moved until I was standing within arms reach. "I'm here to fix your legs, and there's also something I'd like to talk about with you."
"Fine," she said, groggy from the painkillers.
I tapped her wrist, bathing her in gold, then stepped smartly back.
Taylor stretched, gasping in surprise. She propped herself up on her elbows and turned to face me.
"That feels… great. Thanks."
I smiled. "It's no problem, I owe you that much at least. I also owe you an apology."
As I said the words cold doubt and a little fear blossomed heavily in my belly even through the [Euphoria]. I had to clear this up, it was eating us both up inside.
"I'm so, so sorry that I spooked you at school. It was a shitty, horrible thing to do," I started to take off my visor. "I should have known better. I needed to tell you how sorry I am, I sincerely mean it."
I, Greg Veder, looked into her eyes and Taylor did nothing.
She lay there, propped up on one elbow, staring blankly at my bare face.
"I should have apologised earlier," I looked at the floor sheepishly. "But for a lot of it, I was out of town. You know, because the Empire keeps trying to kill me."
Silence.
"I know it's a lot to ask, and I don't expect you to, but can you accept my apology?"
Silence.
"Well," I fixed my visor back in place. "If you ever want to come and call me a dickhead or something, drop by the PRT-"
"You're Dark Smoke Puncher."
"Yeah."
"All this time, you were Dark Smoke Puncher."
"I know," I kept eye contact with the linoleum. "It's a bit hard to believe, isn't it."
"And you knew I was Scarecrow."
"I didn't tell anyone, and, uh, I want to be transparent. Give you the full truth," I peeked back up. She was still lying frozen up on her elbow. "I knew since the moment you triggered in front of me on the first day of school this year."
"You," Taylor hissed. "You ruined my- Ooh…"
"I know," I bowed my head in shame. "I'm genuinely sorry."
I could hear her heartbeat. It had been hammering hard and fast ever since I revealed myself to her, but now it was a hummingbird blur of sound.
"I'm dreaming," she whispered. "This isn't happening."
She continued mumbling to herself, telling herself that she wasn't crazy, that I wasn't Dark Smoke Puncher.
"I'm sorry," I said again. "If you ever want to talk about it you know where to find me. I gotta go now, there's something else I have to do."
She slumped back down, hugging herself under the thin hospital sheet. If I was still alive in an hour, I'd do something else to fix this.
I retreated from the curtain room and headed back downstairs.
I swallowed, steeling myself.
"Alexandria."
The legendary woman herself, Alexandria of the Triumvirate. Indestructible. Herculean. Genius. She turned in the air, purposefully, deliberately, away from the capes she was talking to and faced me.
"Dark Smoke Puncher," she spoke, even her very words as powerful and unyielding as she was. "I'd hoped we'd meet under better circumstances."
"Same."
"Was there something you wanted?"
"I need to speak with you, privately. It's urgent."
Her mouth quirked, somewhere between a frown and a smile. "I'm quite busy."
"I know, but," I forced myself to stare into the blank, unforgiving faceplate of her helmet. "It's extremely important."
A moment passed, a long, long moment. She knew. She had to. I was being transferred to her team, she'd read my file. She knew my Thinker rating, she knew what I was talking about.
"Very well."
She turned back to face her retinue of capes who were in charge of important things. "I'll be back shortly."
I drew in a long, shaky breath. This was it; it was time to die. Sorry, dad. Sorry, mum. Sorry, Savannah, Weld, Tyrone and Amy.
"Thank you, Alexandria."
I turned to walk us somewhere more private, but Alexandria lay a hand on my shoulder. It was like being touched by a teetering freight-liner on a fraying cable.
"Why don't we talk on the roof, nobody will be there," she smiled. "I'll fly us."
"Ok."
And so we walked out the front door. We walked out the front door, in front of everybody, and Alexandria openly, visibly, picked me up under the armpits with her big Truckasaurus hands. I hoped this was a good sign.
There was a rush of movement, a dizzying moment of no gravity, then my feet were gently touching down on the damp, salty roof.
I took a long, hasty step back. Alexandria floated; a human mountain.
"What was it you wanted to speak about?"
Through cotton dry lips and tongue I spoke my last words on this earth.
"I thought Cauldron was the inter-dimensional power mafia! Why is an alien going to blow up the planet?!"
Chapter 68: Song for Friends 7.3
Chapter Text
"Because it is," Alexandria said. "You can relax, I'm not going to kill you."
"...you're not?"
"Heavens, no," Alexandria smiled, her feet touching down on the roof in a puddle. "I knew we were going to have this conversation, but I expected it would be in my office on the other side of the country."
"So, so what, then?" I pleaded. "Why is the planet going to blow up?"
"How much do you know?"
The question seeped into my skin like winter desolation. She was going to kill me, it was a classic line the villain asks to know how much they've been found out.
"Cauldron either creates or found the source of powers. You exist in multiple dimensions. Your 'Cauldron Capes' owe you favours. You made the Case Fifty Threes. You buy plans to rule over the apocalypse world from Accord. You're already in charge of America. Society is going to collapse in twenty years. The 'Entity' is going to blow up the planet."
Alexandria nodded along genially. "Mostly correct, though we don't seek to rule what's left of the world once this is through. There is context you've missed, however. Imagine you came across the source of superpowers, and at the same time discovered that something was going to kill every human being in existence at some point in the future; what do you do?"
"Try to stop it."
"And that," Alexandria said. "Is the purpose of Cauldron."
"But why are you the power mafia?"
"In the course of saving the world, we have had to take some utilitarian courses of action. However, we funnel them into the Protectorate. Cauldron Capes are more mentally stable than natural triggers."
"I've noticed," I said.
Alexandria smiled again. "This is why I wanted to get you on my team, you're going to be a brilliant asset. You're a one in a million stable natural trigger, and not only are you stable you have an extraordinary power. I've heard you want to join us in the Triumvirate someday?"
"I do. I know you started the Protectorate, and it's the only reason we're not a shithole like almost all the other countries, but… Couldn't you be less scummy about it all? Like, not screw over the Case Fifty Threes?"
"The Entity would kill us." Alexandria shook her head despairingly. "If it knew what we were doing, that day of the apocalypse would be in a year rather than fifty or a hundred."
"The Entity made superpowers, didn't it?"
"It is the source of natural triggers, yes. The situation is enormous beyond anything you've imagined. For Cauldron, if even a hundred people out of all possible Earth's survive, that is more than we hope for," Alexandria took a step forward, holding out her hand. Our eyes were level, I'd always thought she was taller. "I'm sorry you have to shoulder this burden, knowledge can be a curse. We would love to have you onboard."
I shook her hand. It felt like I was being mugged.
Alexandria regarded me for a moment. "We're not going to kill you, Greg. If we operated like that we would have collapsed into anarchy years ago. You may have forced things ahead of schedule, but you can't be blamed for having a strong Thinker power and a natural curiosity. You already knew most of this, and you're one of us, you deserve the truth."
"What would you have done if I blabbed?"
"We knew you weren't that kind of person, but," Alexandria held up a palm. "If you were going to, we would have placed you on an alternate Earth where you could do some good until you calmed down."
"Right."
"We want you on our side, Greg, we're not going to kill you for finding us out."
"Ok, just," I rubbed under my visor, pushing up into my eyes. "I have good friends who're Case Fifty Threes. I know you saved their lives on whatever Earth they were on, but they're suffering now."
Alexandria nodded approvingly. "Yes, and we don't dismiss that. It's the price for trillions of human lives."
"I don't know if I want to be a part of that."
"I understand. I know you'll keep doing the right thing even out of the Protectorate-"
"No, I mean," I bit at a thumbnail. "I'm not quitting, I just don't know if I want to be a part of Cauldron."
"Of course. So long as we're both working to help people, why should there be any issue?"
Alexandria was smiling, what I could see of her expression looked completely genuine. My Body Language skill was getting better, and it wasn't giving me any 'bullshit' signals. Her heart rate was steady, shoulders relaxed. As best I could tell Alexandria was telling the truth.
I doubted it was the entire truth, but it was the truth nonetheless.
"And, of course," Alexandria continued. "You won't be telling anyone about the Entity. We would prefer you didn't speak about any of this to anyone, not even people in the know like Legend or Eidolon."
"Yeah, no, of course not," I crossed my arms, staring out over the city skyline. "I'm not an idiot. Can I not be sent to LA, either? Can I go to New York instead?"
"It can be easily arranged, Legend will be glad to have you. I think you would grow into a more capable leader under me, but it's your choice to make."
"Look, I don't want to get in your way," I uncrossed my arms and stood a little straighter. "I'm going to take your word for it, that Cauldron is a necessary evil. But it's fucked, and I know a lot about the world is pretty fucked and pretending it doesn't exist is retarded. I don't know if I want to join you guys at all, but maybe I will later after I've had a bit more of a think, y'know?"
"You have at least three years left in the Wards program, which I created, so you'll have plenty of time to come to a decision. If you ever want to help us save the world, don't hesitate to contact me."
She was telling the truth, but something was still wigging me out about all of this. A hunch. Everything she said added up, smoothed over details, filled in holes, but… I wasn't sure. It felt wrong, but maybe I was just too attached to the version of Cauldron that lived in my head, the one that I'd built up as the power mafia who'd whack me for looking at them funny. Alexandria was strong counter-evidence, she'd just fronted up the answers to the biggest conspiracy in the world because I asked. Plus, she was letting me go to New York.
God, I hoped this wasn't some kind of veiled hush-or-else bribe.
"I will, and thanks for being so transparent with me. I really expected you to just kill me," I chuckled painedly. "I thought Cauldron was evil for months, like, your plan was to wait for the Endbringers to trash civilisation so you could be kings of the heap."
"And yet you confronted me anyway?"
"I'm really high."
"As a courtesy for your service today," Alexandria frowned. "I'm going to choose to ignore that."
I felt that was a little unfair. She was corrupt as fuck, being in charge of both the PRT and Protectorate in different identities and selling powers for favours, surely she could forgive a little Tinker-grade nootropic MDMA to get you through an Endbringer attack.
"Yes, Ma'am," I demurred.
"We have something called the Terminus Program," she continued, a little coldly. "Sooner or later people with natural triggers will become most of the population and we, as Parahumans in positions of power, need to set a good example. Would you trust your leaders if you found out they were getting high on the job?"
Secretly, depending on what drug it was and the context, I'd think it was kinda based. "No."
"You're already occupying space in the public eye as an entertainer, something we fully endorse. Consider what would happen if it got out you had a drug habit," Alexandria pointed an accusing finger, raising up off the ground to loom over me. "People would lose faith. Years of goodwill, lost. If you want to work up the ranks you need to be squeaky-"
She punctuated this with a jab of her finger that connected with my chest plate with the sound of a bullet hitting a shipping container.
"Clean. If you do something untoward it must be in the interest of saving the world. Today, it was understandable, but this will be the last time; you understand?"
I nodded, shamefaced. "I understand. I won't do it again."
"Thank you," she drew back, touching down on the roof again. "I would prefer not to get on your case, but you must understand how bad things really are. The world is ending and trillions upon trillions may die, you don't have time to be honking on your crack pipe."
"I'm sorry."
"You have a bright future, Dark Smoke Puncher. Your music alone could do as much as our entire propaganda machine per year, I wasn't exaggerating when I said you were a brilliant asset for humanity. Ignoring your personal power, you have the potential to unite," Alexandria waved an arm over the broken skeleton of Brockton Bay. "To that end, you will have another song ready in time for the memorial in less than a week, then, you will stay in Brockton Bay for another three months before your transfer to New York goes through."
"Ok."
"Eyes are on you, Greg, don't let them down."
Alexandria stepped forward and I let her pick me up again. The feeling of being mugged still hadn't gone away. There was another jolting blur of motion and we were back in front of the hospital doors.
"Do us proud," Alexandria said before floating back inside.
I stood there for a moment longer.
Ok, so not dead. That was a plus. Cauldron wasn't evil, that was another plus. On the other hand, everyone was going to die which was a bit of a minus. Alexandria had never said they had a plan to win, or even that they could win. Shitballs.
I walked back inside, into the stinking humid hospital, and bee-lined through back to my new girlfriend.
"Hey," I said.
Savannah looked up from where she was still admiring the magic rose, "hey."
"I have great news," I slid into the empty seat next to her. "So I was just talking to Alexandria and she said I could go to New York instead of LA!"
Savannah bopped me on the nose with the rose, "how the fuck did you swing that shit?"
"I'm very influential, my Twitter account has at least thirteen followers."
"Well mine has, like, thirteen thousand," Savannah preened. "Are you really coming to New York just for me?"
"Yeah," I lay a hand on her gauntlet. "I have three more months here doing cleanup, then it's New York all the way. Do you like ice skating?"
"I love ice skating!"
Thanks, Lily, you beautiful lesbian.
"Well, I've never been. D'you reckon you could show me how?"
Savannah hmm'd. "I think I can do that."
Sorry, mum. I should have done this before Alexandria. I tapped her shoulder, setting her aglow.
She was in a different hospital than Brockton General and was currently blocked off from a lot of the city by wrecked roads. Luckily for me, I was a genius and had invented a way to fly. Well, not fly exactly, it didn't solve the quest I had for that, more very assisted gliding.
I could make a sort of hang glider as a Mana Object, with a propeller at the nose, and given the ultralight nature of it let my [Grace] give it more staying power in the air. I had used it to glide from one hospital to the other, and I was going to start healing people here for a while after I was sure mum was ok.
The machines attached to her told me her heart rate was picking up, and indeed, she was starting to stir. I picked up her hand, dad wasn't here but I could do my best to comfort her.
She jerked and spluttered through the tube down her throat, eyes fluttering open.
Thank god.
"Mum, hey, it's Greg!"
She looked around in confusion and panic, weak arms reaching for her face. I gently held her down, tears sliding down my nose.
"It's ok, I'll take them out. Just relax."
Expertly I removed the various apparatus used to keep coma patients as healthy as possible. She retched a little as I slid the tube down her throat out, coughing as soon as it was out.
"Greg? What happened?"
Her voice was weak and raspy, eyes bleary.
"You got hit by a Tinker pain grenade, you've been in a coma. It's only been about two weeks," I said hastily, patting her hand. "I got the power to fix you, but um, Leviathan just attacked the Bay this morning so things are pretty hectic-"
My voice caught on the lump in my throat. The Panacea had worn off a little while ago. It was so not cash money.
"So I'm going to b-be busy for a while and they can't find dad! Dad's missing, he was in the PRT bunker but that cracked and now it's empty and they don't know where anybody who was in it is."
I wanted to tighten my grip on her hand, but that would shatter her bones to powder.
"They think he's alive, but they can't find him and I can't go looking 'cause there's so many people who need healing and oh fuck, mum, I've missed you so much!"
Chapter 69: Song for Friends: Interlude: Victoria Dallon: Bakuda
Chapter Text
20th May 2011- Victoria Dallon
A drizzle misted the memorial, exacerbating the sombre mood. It was a day still covered by the truce, though there weren't any villains in attendance which wasn't terribly surprising. Not that they weren't people who'd lost people too, but Victoria figured she wouldn't trust walking into a memorial where half the people hated your guts either.
Amy stood next to her on her right, freckly face sallow and drawn from the exhaustion of back to back days of healing Leviathan's casualties. Her sister had changed the past few months, becoming cheerier and a hell of a lot less high strung. Apparently, finally making a real friend was all it took, and as much as she bitched and moaned about Greg Victoria could tell Amy enjoyed his company.
Her mother, Carol, stood to her left with her dad, Mark. Both had been severely injured during the attack, but after her usual hemming and hawing about not doing brains Amy had healed them, and nothing had gone wrong despite her misgivings. Having her dad back helped a little, but nothing could truly help.
Next to her dad, her aunt and remaining cousin. Neil and Eric Pelham hadn't made it.
And finally, Dean lay in a cold morgue somewhere in the ruined city, and when he was finally buried she was sure he'd take a piece of her heart with him into the ground forever.
The mist of rain mixed with the tears running down her face as the moment of silence they were all sharing passed. Her cousin, her friends, Dean; all gone, like tears in the rain. She'd heard that somewhere and it was just repeating in her head. Tears in the rain. Tears in the rain. Gone, like tears in the rain.
Legend floated up onto the raised dais in front of the black marble obelisk that was coated with the names of the fallen. He said something about a song, but Victoria was still thinking about tears and rain.
It was just luck that she wasn't somebody else's tears right now. Leviathan had hit her, properly hit her, sent her flying into the concrete corner of a building. It was then that her forcefield had cut out. A millisecond earlier…
Well, tears and rain.
Dark Smoke Puncher stepped up onto the stage beside Legend. Oh, right, he sang.
Greg's voice carried clearly over the crowd, though he held no microphone.
"Just, a song for friends we lost."
He took a moment to gather himself, then sang.
Victoria closed her eyes. It reminded her a little of a Bad Canary concert she and Dean had gone to, the one where he'd snuck in a flask and the buzz had just enhanced the feeling of her singing to awe-inspiring levels, then they'd gone back to the hotel room and it was just the most, most amazing- But instead of amazing it was gouging at the Dean shaped hole in her heart with a blunt knife.
Greg's voice cracked as he sang, the raw emotion of it scouring layers of pretence off the crowd. Beside her, Amy made a strangled noise and Victoria opened her eyes again, glancing at her, seeing her sister sobbing silently into her hands. It rippled through the gathering, the unseen masks of fully costumed capes coming off, a sea of shaking, brightly coloured shoulders.
Her breath hitched, caught in a sob that wouldn't give it back to her. She turned her face up to the grey sky, catching more of the light rain. Victoria felt something run out her nose and down over her lips but didn't move to wipe it off.
Snot in the rain didn't have such a good ring to it.
The song started to wind down. The lyrics were hopeful, in a depressing, bleak sort of way. Even if you lost everything, even if everyone had died but you; you just have to wake up the next day and keep trying so that maybe it would all be ok again one day. It was how she thought a lot of people would be feeling, right now after they'd all lost so much. And she certainly wasn't going to give up, New Wave or not there were always ways to help people.
The song finished, but nobody clapped. On stage, Greg turned away so he could lift his visor and wipe his eyes before turning back to the crowd and offering a small bow before walking offstage.
Victoria turned her eyes away from the grey sky to look at Amy; still crying. Her parents; trying to be strong. Her aunt and Crystal; holding each other.
Who was next? Was it her?
Flying was still amazing, at least there was that. At least she still had that.
Victoria spun, lurching nearly ninety degrees to her right into a serpentine corkscrew. Nobody would be able to see her from the city, dressed in dark clothes as she was this late at night, but she wasn't patrolling anyway; this was just to take her mind off of things.
Her flight tactics, outside specific versus ground ones, didn't see much use given the lack of villainous flyers. Sure, there was Purity, but attempting to dogfight her was a pointlessly stupid idea, which left her hours of reading up on and practising tactical fighter jet maneuvers somewhat to waste.
Victoria swooped and spun, barrel-rolled and weaved, scissored and yo-yo'd. She was just coming out of a downward defensive spiral when a dark shape loomed out of the night. Victoria decelerated, pulling out of the spiral and re-orienting herself facing the shape, slowly circling it. Her heart hammered in her chest as she raised her fists at the shape. It didn't match any of the flying capes she knew, this had wings and let off a low mechanical whirr of a propeller. A new Tinker? Endbringer attacks were rife with new triggers-
"Sorry."
The winged shape called out as they circled. A light appeared at its head, illuminating Greg attached to some kind of hang-glideresque contraption.
"Jesus," Victoria hissed, lowering her fists. "Start with the light next time."
"I would, but I'm trying to be stealthy. Could you catch me? I can't hover."
The light winked out as he changed direction toward her. The glider vanished into smoke and Greg smoothly dropped into her grasp, she held him out at arm's length.
"Ok, let me just… Don't move your feet or I'll fall," he said, smiling in a way that failed to be properly genuine.
His feet touched her sneakers and he swept them back, a sheet of blue solid smoke following their path. The smoke wrapped around her ankles, connecting the platform to her. She let him go and he stepped adroitly onto it, moving back out of her personal bubble.
"Thanks, I'll figure out how to properly fly one day soon."
Victoria nodded but didn't say anything. She saw that he got the message.
"Right," he said. "I saw you out and thought I'd say hello. Your moves are really impressive, you must have practised a lot."
"Yeah."
"Cool. Anyway, I was just scouting out the Merchants. They're starting to get too big, so I was going to dismantle them; I should get back to that. You're welcome to come join me if you're getting bored."
Victoria gave him a weak smile. "Thanks, but no."
"All good," Greg smiled back, turning to leave. "I'll see you 'round, yeah?"
"I might be joining the Wards, so, probably."
"Awesome. Fly safe."
He leapt off the thin blue platform, which dissolved, into a jump that was easily fifty feet and created his glider again. Victoria watched him fly off against the moonlit clouds. Maybe if there were another time he was patrolling, but not tonight. She didn't want to think about anything tonight but flying.
21st May 2011- Alice Arai
It was good to be the king.
Sure, Lung was still technically in charge, but he was still doing his whole depressive, morose shit. Apparently, Leviathan made the guy sad.
Alice looked out over her domain, currently an abandoned movie theatre, as it crawled with her subjects. The chucklefucks had just turned up out of some PRT bunker and delivered themselves right into her hands right at the juncture of a critical manpower shortage. Un-fucking-believably good luck.
She didn't see them as people anymore, just a series of floating targeting reticles in a red-tinted world. God, it was beautiful.
One of the reticles, one with big eyebrows, glanced up at her and she pointed threateningly at him. He cowered and went back to work.
Alice chuckled. This truly was the best life.
It was all coming together, she could finally stretch her fucking legs and do something beyond managing Lung's little fief. The disarray of the Endbringer attack left so many tantalising openings. The pigs were running around in the muck like retards and word on the street was the Empire was in the process of splintering; the two biggest gangs in the city, fucked. That was where she came in. Aggressive expansion. Unchecked terror. Pan-Asian was too small a target, why not let whitey in? Everyone could be bomb collared equally, some real pinko shit.
Her bombs were their bombs, so long as they were inside their skulls.
Couldn't see the 'bigger picture', her ass. Fuck you, Professor Corrigan.
Even as she stood there, Lee was planting a series of bombs around the city and would continue to do so as she made more. Let them see how big picture holding an entire city hostage was. She'd done the math, there was a threshold of what you could get away with as a villain before getting iced. A certain number of people, where if you killed under it or did it over a long period of time, the pigs wouldn't go out of their way to Birdcage you.
Absolutely fucking ridiculous. If it was her in charge she'd publically flense anyone who broke one of her rules rather than let them keep breaking them so long as they didn't make too much noise doing it. Moronic is what it was. It just encouraged people to go against you, emboldening them when you did nothing. Fucking idiots, but hey, it was working great for her. No point in correcting other's faults if they benefited her.
Being in charge mitigated the disappointment of the lack of challenge. It wasn't terribly fun if all her enemies never progressed mentally beyond age ten, she wouldn't get any cred from showing them up. Nobody cared if retards feared you, they were retards who didn't know any better. As an interim step, if she could get Armsmaster to kneel and surrender his halberd to her, then that would suffice before she hit a proper target.
Chapter 70: Things are looking up 8.1
Chapter Text
The months of effort, all that iron pumped and the endless hours of cardio. Now I could quit and dedicate myself properly to my eleven-hour patrol/eleven-hour healing split shift, which I absolutely wanted to be doing of course. Smile for the fuckin' cameras, you're Dark Smoke Puncher: Miracle Healing Cape! You wanted it, wouldn't have taken the fuckin' perks otherwise.
It was also partly my insurance. If I could jack up my popularity so high that removing me would be more trouble than it would be worth they might just consider not doing it, and when I met one of Cauldron next I would hopefully have figured out how to read minds. The combination of these two factors should hopefully save my life. It was a bit of a bummer that I had to take Mind, there was an attractive looking Automatic Dodging perk in the Dexterity tree I wanted to take, but I needed to play the long game.
Alexandria said they weren't going to kill me, and yet, trust but verify. Or I suppose it was verify then trust in this case. I still wasn't sure if I was being paranoid or not.
Information superiority was key, I didn't know what kind of parahumans they fielded and with whatever access they had to the source it could only be assumed: whatever kind they wanted. If it were me I'd be up to the gills in precogs and Thinkers, kind of like WEDGDG…
Shit. I was just a rat in their cage.
I exhaled heavily, staring at myself in the gym mirror. Fine, whatever. Fine. There are things in life I couldn't control, rather than waste time worrying about them I had to focus on what I could. In time, my circle of influence would expand as I myself became more competent and I would be equipped to deal with this. It would happen. Just had to be calm.
The hair on the back of my neck prickled. I spat on the mirror and stood up, kicking a weight bench across the room into a rack of plates on my way out.
Calm my ass. This city needed to be fucking calm, with absurd crime rates. I look around and I just see stupid, quit joining the fucking Merchants! They're the fucking AIDS of gangs! You'd be better off joining the ABB, who've apparently stepped up their slavery operation to include everyone they can stuff a bomb into. But hey, silver lining, Kaiser almost died and we have three different Nazi factions vying to see who can commit the most hate crimes, with the winner presumably being in charge.
I stalked to the change rooms, took a quick shower, and changed into my uniform. I could hear someone moving around in the Wards common area, wincing every so often. I closed my eyes for a long moment, then entered.
Missy sat at the kitchenette bench, gripping a can of Wards Sponsored Diet Sprite in her good hand. Her other bandaged clumsily into a mitten shape. How had that dumb bitch gone and done that?
"Missy," I said, bustling forward in a matronly fashion. "Your hand! Let me have a look, I'll fix you up."
She didn't look up from her can.
"Thanks, Greg."
I gently unwrapped the huge wad of bandage, exposing two broken fingers. For a moment I was tempted to yank on them, hopefully instilling the lesson that she should just stick to console. Just for a moment though, the urge soon subsided.
I cast Mending, the only healing spell I'd figured out. It was a touch-based spell that increased the healing rate of the recipient in a localised area, which was mostly good until you realised bones could heal crooked and flesh could scar worse if you didn't treat them correctly. It meant I couldn't just tap and go, I had to go through the process like I normally would. But it did synergise extremely well with my Surgery skills, which also boosted a patients healing rate, and was getting a colossal workout this past week from constant use on the endless series of patients coming in, so healing her fingers didn't take too long.
I didn't have anything to reduce the pain, however, so she got to experience the uniquely uncomfortable feeling of her bones fixing in the space of a minute. I could have fixed her completely in a second with my ring, but I figured I should save it for emergencies and Missy's broken fingers just didn't make the cut.
"All done. Remember, you can call me any time if you get hurt and I'll be right there," I smiled, taking the seat next to her.
"Yeah, I will," she said, avoiding my eye. "Thanks."
I gave her another smile, which I hoped didn't make my gritted teeth too apparent and reached out into her mind-Tooembarrassingijustcantdeangottabebetterdeanshakerninewhatdoesthatevenmeangregshouldntvictoriaineedafrienddeanwhycouldntheloveyousomuchthatijustcantshakernineishouldbebetterfuckingpiggotdeananddenniswerebestfriendswhycantidomyjobproperlyicantijustcantsuchamessbrocktonbayshouldbecondemnedbutatleastleviathangetsmeawayfromhomebutthatsahorriblethingtosayimashakerninehowdoeshedoitjustsoperfectallthetimeimashakernineanddeansdeadhesdeadandshitthisspritetasteslikeassiwishitallneverhappened
-and it was just noise, like a hundred televisions blaring over each other in a borderline incomprehensible cacophony; just like every other time I'd tried. It was all just noise that didn't make any sense. Yet, anyway.
I rapped my knuckles twice on the countertop. "Well, I'm off. Catch you later, Missy."
She smiled tightly, glancing at my elbow. "Bye. Good luck."
What the fuck was her problem? All their problems. They were all back to treating me like this, but I was better now. I was pretty sure that was it, I was too much better than them and they hated it. I was making them all redundant, and would only continue to do so harder as the weeks went by. I was sure there were also some elements of them being weirded out by my facade of a perfect Ward, but fuck them. I was allowed to pretend I was happy. I had my mum back where I thought I might never, so I actually had some reason to be happy.
I wouldn't mope around. I refused to. I had to continue upwards, wherever that might lead.
I internally seethed across the room and out the door.
Skidmark, as it turned out, was smart. You'd think he'd be the kind of villain you could hammer out in an afternoon, but no. I'd been at it for three days so far, and I had powers. Bloody slippery fucker.
"Eh, mang," I projected my voice into my clone, making it scratch at the meth sores on its neck. "M'here to see Jerry. He said he'd be here."
The guy at the door hid a grimace at the stink wafting off of me.
"You're shitting me, right? You know Jer?"
"I met Eyepatch Stan the other night, hey," I sniffed, wiped my clone's nose, and it glanced down the street. "He said come see Jerry here, he knows me, man."
"Right, what's your name?"
"Mikey."
He shut the door in my face and I heard the sound of his footsteps retreating. I put an ear to the door and closed my eyes. Footsteps echoed off the walls and ceiling, painting a picture in my brain of a long hallway with a room on the left. The voices from inside the room bounced back to me, three men in the room. They spoke, the words faintly recognisable.
I stepped back, waiting until the door opened again.
"In."
I followed the guy, Frank, into the house. In stark contrast to the draining humidity outside, inside it was cool, the hum of a portable air conditioner providing sweet relief. I slunk in after my clone, keeping the control thread low to the ground. The men in the room were average looking, in short sleeve buttoning shirts and khakis; people within actual Merchant ranks.
It was interesting to see just how sophisticated the set up was behind the smoke and mirrors of Skidmark and his rotten teeth. The set up was degenerating, true, but before Leviathan had demolished the bay Skidmark had quite the little hidden kingdom set up. Only a few could actually contact Skidmark himself, and they were hidden behind layers of lower-level dealers and contract criminals. If I couldn't cheat by being the nightmare combination of Thinker and Stranger it probably would have taken me weeks to get to this point.
The oldest of the men in the room, Jerry, didn't bother to stand or even hide his disgust.
"Out with it, then," he barked.
"What about the gear, though," I snivelled. "Don't back out on givin' me my fuckin' gear."
Jerry snorted and waved at Frank who headed over to a safe sitting on a side table to spin in the combination which I memorised.
"Aw, bro," I said, making my clone wipe it's nose again. "Thanks, bro. I was hiding when I heard it, what I told Stan last night. See, I was at Moneros and I heard some brass sayin' they knew some shit and-"
I could see his eyes start to glaze over as I went into a rambling story full of minor inconsistencies and irrelevant factoids detailing that the police might know where Mush's safe house was.
"-and if you don't believe me, give him a call, man."
I moved behind Jerry who sighed and pulled out his phone, one just new enough to need a pass-code which he tapped in, and flicked through his contacts. I forced a smile over his shoulder.
He confirmed my story was absolute bullshit, then kicked my skinny, smelly clone out the door without even giving him the drugs and shut the door, leaving me still inside. From memory, I walked the clone to where it could sit and disconnected the cord.
My feet were utterly silent as I walked back into the room, hidden behind Cuttlefish Skin and Hidden Movement.
"-s that dickhead thinking, sending us that tweaker?"
"No idea, Jer. Think we might have to demote him?"
"Definitely," Jerry said as I stole in behind him again. "Damn idiot."
He shook his head and went back to his spreadsheets.
Delicately I eased a finger into his pants pocket, inventorying his phone, then slipped back out into the hall and quietly out the door. I reconnected with my clone, walking it into an alley where I could dismiss it, then ran up the alley wall and hopped onto the adjacent roof and took off.
My heart didn't pound, I wasn't excited or even worked up. I thought I should have been, but this felt like doing paperwork. Mindnumbing.
I dropped off the rooftops a few blocks away, landing softly in front of Armsmaster and dropped my invisibility.
I didn't really want to go out without it these days, Coil had snipers.
The suspension on his bike flexed silently as he swung his leg over and dismounted. I tossed the phone to him and he connected it to a lead coming out of his wrist.
"Password's One Zero Seven Seven."
"Well done, well done…" Armsmaster muttered, distracted as his suit downloaded everything on the phone. "Damn shame you're leaving, we make a good team."
"There's still nearly three months, which gang do you want to knock off next?"
Armsmaster chuckled, focusing his gaze on me. "You really are wasted in the Wards. I was almost demoted, you know, but between my nano-thorns up Leviathan's ass and this? They might even give me a raise."
"You could phrase that less like I'm your promotion ticket."
He grinned at me, shark-like. "Mutually beneficial. I still have connections, and there's an internal program, nomination only, to groom the next line of Protectorate leaders; it'll be your in-road to the Triumvirate. The originals are getting old, even I'm going to have to retire to a backline position within the next ten or twenty years. You interested in the title of Youngest Protectorate Team Leader?"
That must have been what Alexandria was talking about.
"I might as well be."
"Ah," Armsmaster's grin slid off his face and he stepped in to put a hand on my shoulder. "Chin up, eh? We'll find him, and in the meantime, we'll do what we do best."
"I think the ABB has him."
Armsmaster nodded, "it's probable. And if they do, the first thing we'll do is take them out. I promise."
"And why couldn't we have done that ages ago and saved ourselves the trouble?"
"Regs," Armsmaster gave my shoulder a squeeze and removed his hand. "Bloody regs. But it's all come crashing down now, hasn't it?"
He smiled, somehow even more predatory than before.
"Wards on extended combat shifts, unsanctioned operations, paperwork ignored; we're finally in the perfect spot to get things going. You might think I'm being selfish or opportunistic, but think about how much more I can do for this city being in charge rather than just being another one of Myrddin's fucking lackeys."
I grunted.
"I know it's hard, this post-Leviathan shit, but it'll all be worth it soon," he tossed me the burner phone. "Inventory that until we can destroy it. We gottem'."
After a few hours of stakeout, he arrived. Adam Mustain, aka. Skidmark.
I broke cover, flitting invisibly across the street and slipping in after him before he shut the door on his safehouse. Inside the first door was another door, this one locked with a keypad and heavy bolts. I wrinkled my nose as the rancid smell of his sweat mixed with cigarettes and other rotten things wafted over me.
I made sure to step away as I followed him into the main room, but the smell wasn't great in here either. The place was a sty; mouldy pizza boxes stacked in one corner, a carpet the colour and texture of an ashtray, a grimy toilet just visible behind a side door and all hotboxed by the boarded-up windows.
Skidmark made for the toilet and I took a moment to snoop around, picking through cupboards and listening for hollowed-out walls. A bad side effect of enhanced hearing was that I had to listen in to Skidmark dropping a fat log into the shitter through the toilet door he hadn't bothered to properly close, which further intensified the stench. I held my breath and wandered into the other rooms.
One tiny room had a desk and a laptop, which Armsmaster would no doubt be all over in a few minutes, and then there was just a dilapidated shower room and the bedroom.
The bedroom somehow smelled even worse than the toilet and may as well have been an ashtray given the number of butts littering the floor. How could somebody live like this? A big stack of unwashed dishes, sure, but this? High Intelligence apparently wasn't a predictor of cleanliness.
I picked through the bedroom, grimacing at the big purple dildo in the bedside table drawer, turning my nose up at the stained underpants beneath the bed itself. It was a little amazing that he'd managed to run even the pathetic gang the Merchants had been before Leviathan, let alone grow it as he had afterwards. Maybe that was the point of his being 'Skidmark' though, even if his Observe bio didn't explicitly say so.
I lightly tapped the walls, keeping one ear out for Skidmark who had just flushed the toilet and was flopping down on the ratty couch. Good. I'd just heard something interesting, an empty space behind a framed Metallica poster. Best to make sure I wasn't interrupted.
I padded back out to Skidmark and tapped a finger to his head.
Paralysis Collar.
He went limp, the blue collar around his neck glowing faintly with the colour of my electricity. I gently turned him so he was face down against the armrest and went back into the bedroom.
The poster wasn't trapped, so I slid it off its hook, revealing a quite expensive biometric tinkertech safe. Observe indicated that this wasn't trapped either and would take even a plasma cutter without breaking open. I inventoried it, heading back out to Skidmark.
Screw Armsmaster, he wanted my help for illegal operations? Well, this was my price.
I lifted Skidmarks hand up, taking the safe out and balancing it in my other hand, slotting his thumb into the scanner. After a few seconds, a light went green and it clicked open. I dropped his hand and turned the safe to face me, flicking it open. Inside there was a single black metal briefcase, the kind you'd use to carry medical samples. I took it out and undid the latches.
Inside, five vials of coloured, metallic liquid lay nestled in velvet settings.
Chapter 71: Things are looking up 8.2
Chapter Text
Dead alien. My heroes, my idols, got their powers from slurping dead alien. Actually, no, that didn't really bother me; if my choices were let the world descend into chaos or sip alien juice to save it, I'd butt-chug as much as I possibly could.
I'd look over this more thoroughly later though, then trade it back to Cauldron for good boy points.
I glanced over at Skidmark appraisingly, this couldn't have come cheap. It would have propelled the Merchants way up the ladder, making them an actual threat. He must have been planning something like this for some time and found the opportune moment amidst the post-Leviathan chaos to make a break for the top.
What a dirty piece of shit.
I closed the case and inventoried it, along with the safe, then slipped back out of the safehouse to the stakeout position. A few minutes later a familiar engine rumbling vibrated in from the distance, growing louder until Armsmaster rounded the intersection up the street and trundled toward me.
I stepped up to meet him, still invisible.
"Good evening, citizen," he smirked, idling at the curb. "I take it you have a helpful anonymous tip for me?"
"Should ya really be so happy?" I asked. "We broke a ton of laws for this, he might get off in court."
Armsmaster swung his leg off the bike, which stayed up sans kickstand. "He won't. Trust me."
He headed off across the road, "he's going to spend months rotting before he even gets to see a lawyer, and something tells me he's going to become rowdy and I'll have to sedate him. Unfortunately, a side effect of the sedative is mild amnesia," Armsmaster shrugged, faux-helpless, as he entered the safehouse as the picture of confidence. "It couldn't be helped."
"The place is clean, of cameras anyway," I said stepping in after him. "And he didn't have any spotters I could see."
"Wonderful," Armsmaster replied, breathing through his mouth at the smell. "Cut the collar."
The Paralysis Collar around Skidmark's neck dissolved into smoke and he screamed bloody murder.
"Fuck me dead! Fucking cunt!" he scrabbled upright, startling at the sight of Armsmaster and almost falling over the back of the couch. "Aw, fuck!"
His voice shook, almost like he was crying. Well, I suppose being trapped in your unmoving body by an unseen assailant who stole millions worth of power vials was pretty upsetting, but he deserved it.
Armsmaster reached out lazily and gripped him by his ratty shirt collar.
"Skidmark, you're under arrest."
Skidmark froze in his grip, sweat dripping down his face, bloodshot eyes wide. He licked his chapped lips in a furtive motion, "lawyer, bitc-"
Armsmaster popped him in the neck with the sedative and Skidmark went limp. "Can you believe this guy?" he turned to me, baring his teeth. "Attacking an arresting officer."
"Don't you have video evidence," I gestured to Armsmaster's helmet, wherein his ultra hi-def camera constantly took footage. "He's gonna get let off."
"I'm not required to either take footage or show it. If I were we'd all be equipped with cameras, and wouldn't that be a hassle."
"What're you going to do if I dob you in?"
Armsmaster considered me for a moment. "As a hypothetical? Nothing. You'd be right to, but we both know neither of us believes that this job is about procedural correctness in the execution of unquestionable moral authority."
I suppose I had done some crimey shit, like being blackmailed by Accord into letting his moles operate unhindered. And getting Sophia sent to Eagleton for not wanting to go out with me. And almost murdering that Empire guy and not telling anyone.
"Fair," I said.
Armsmaster slung Skidmark over his shoulder in a fireman's carry. "We protect each other. Now, come on, let's go get Squealer."
The Cauldron Vials were all low end, unlikely to produce a power over the PRT classification of four and could vary greatly depending on certain circumstances. Skidmark had purchased the means to have a Tinker, of electronics, electrical systems and batteries. A Thinker, of some kind of low-end pre-cog. A classic Brute, a laser Blaster and a minion Master. All in all, a decent spread and that was all well and good, but the extensive paperwork that came with the vials brought up some worrying concerns.
I could understand Case Fifty Threes as existing by themselves, they were saved from certain death and the mutations weren't intended. What I couldn't condone was wiping their memories and releasing them into a life of miserable confusion and discrimination. And what I certainly couldn't condone, if I was understanding things right, was the Nemesis Program.
Case Fifty Threes were being brainwashed into villains to give heroes career-boosting wins. Or as was to be in Skidmark's case, villains to give villains career-boosting wins.
All actions must further saving the world, my ass. Squeaky clean, my dick.
I pushed the train of thought aside as the door to the Wards area opened. We, the four current surviving (minus Brad as Browbeat, who was going to either quit or move away,) Brockton Wards, sat in wait for a most wondrous occurrence. Weld was our new team leader! It was a bittersweet feeling, having come at the expense of Carlos' death to Leviathan.
I'd made sure everyone was all healed and pristine for his arrival, no bloody bandages or exhaustion here.
He stepped through the door and I rushed forward, tackling him in a hug that nearly took him off his feet.
"Shit!" Weld cursed under his breath, catching the edge of the door to stay standing. "Greg, dude, it's good to see you again, too."
"Fuckin' good to have you here, bro!" I slapped him on the back a few times before letting go.
He grinned at me, then turned to the rest. "Glad to see you're all looking well. I'm Weld, and I'm going to be the new team leader. I'm sure I'll get into the groove soon enough and show you guys that I'm the kind of leader an excellent team like this deserves. Now, I was talking with your director about special training-"
"You're shitting me."
I turned slowly to Dennis, unblinking.
"Have you seen what it's like out there? You haven't gone out and dealt with the fucking crazy and you want us to do fucking training-"
"Dennis," I said calmly. "I would appreciate it if you never spoke to Weld like that again."
Weld glanced at me, mouth open slightly, then back to Dennis who sat fuming in the big computer chair in front of the Console.
"He's conflicted because I cured his dad's cancer, but he doesn't like me," I whispered to him. "And he knows he should shut up because I'm doing two or three times as much work as him, so anything he says will just come off as whiny."
Weld glanced back to me but didn't say anything.
"Right," he continued uncertainly. "I would like us to get to the training, it's one of my favourite special occasions but it doesn't have to be… right now if…"
He glanced back at me.
"People aren't in the mood for it. I know there's a lot of work to be done but I'll be here if anybody needs anything, and, uh, I'd like to get to know you all better, of course. I'm happy to chat about anything and get up to speed on everyone's situations."
He smiled at the group and I nodded encouragingly along with him. Nobody moved, not even Chris.
"We're getting reinforcements, too. Flechette from New York, a friend of mine and a very capable fighter, which I'm sure we'll all appreciate."
"Flechette is great," I chimed in. "You'll love her. And the extra training was some of the best fun I had in Boston, I think you guys should consider it."
Chris shrugged, Missy wiped her nose.
"We'll talk about it in a month or two, anyway," Weld said hurriedly, holding up his hands. "But I can see everyone has things to be getting on with. I'll be right here getting up to speed, in case anyone needs me, but otherwise, let's just keep doing what we were doing."
"Sure thing, boss," Dennis said snidely.
I narrowed my eyes at him and he responded with a withing glare before stalking from the room, jamming his helmet back on. Missy dithered for a moment before fleeing back to her room. Chris shrugged again, in a kind way, then busied himself with the console.
"What the," Weld lowered his voice. "Fuck, man?"
I rolled my eyes and gave him a knowing smile. "They think I'm a condescending douche. I apologised to them for that, but now they think I'm using my powers to be disingenuous, which is only half true."
I led him over to the kitchenette bench.
"Of course, everyone isn't taking the whole 'Leviathan' thing very well, and the long hours don't help, plus all the violence and looting."
"Yeah. I saw some of that on my way in, and your director filled me in. Apparently, you're my best asset."
"Is it condescending if you really are the best?" I flashed him a self-deprecating grin, which he didn't return.
"I know this is hard on you, too," he eventually said. "I was told you haven't been taking your breaks like you should be, and that for legal reasons I had to tell you to. But, dude, you look like you're at the end of your tether."
"Oh, my mistake."
I ran a hand through my hair, apparently someone wasn't doing his fucking job properly.
I'm tired.
We've been up for six fucking days, of course we're all tired.
Fine.
"Don't do that," said Weld. "Stop putting it on."
"Where else should I put it?"
Weld screwed his face up. "Away? Anywhere but on."
"Ok," I said, appropriately chagrined for the situation. "I promise. I'll take my break today."
He obviously didn't believe me despite my Acting being over thirty, but that may have been more a consequence of him knowing I had that power rather than my acting being poor.
"Thanks," he sighed, then picked up the files he'd been carrying with him and flopped them around. "Do you mind helping me get up to speed? Fill in any gaps these don't cover?"
"I can do a bit, but I need to get back to the hospital soon," I waggled my fingers, green healing energy drifting off them in streams. "Lotsa hurt people to fix."
"No, right, of course."
I gently eased the giant chunk of metal out of the gut of the unconscious woman on the medical table in front of me. The wound immediately began to ooze blood, which I dabbed with a piece of gauze as my levitating mana needle and thread probed into the gash.
Blood. I wasn't completely sure if I'd gotten over it, or if I was just used to the stress of it and could work through it. That had been a pretty fucked day when the blood thing started, months and months ago, where I'd almost died to Amy's monster. I wasn't sure what either of us was thinking, me for making her go through with that and her for making something so strong. Actually, thinking about it like that it sort of seemed like maybe she was trying to kill me to get me out of her life, then chickened out and saved me. Or perhaps it was more a subconscious thing, but either way, I must have been pretty horrible for Amy fucking Dallon to want to kill me.
Or more likely she just wasn't very practised at judging her creations and it was all just a big accident like I originally assumed.
My needles stitched together the woman's perforated intestine and I directed my healing magic into her guts, soaking it into the tissue I'd already sutured. In a few minutes, I could dissolve the thread and she'd be good as new, with only a thin scar to show she'd ever almost died at all.
The curtain sectioning off my makeshift operating table from the rest of the hospital rustled open as I was putting the finishing touches on the entry wound, making sure the ragged edges aligned as perfectly as possible.
"Hey, Amy," I said. "Remember when I almost died in the warehouse that one time, was that on purpose?"
"'Course it fucking was."
I exhaled loudly through my nose, glancing up at her. Drawn, pale, eye bags like shiners; she looked like freckly death.
"I'll give you a top-up in a minute, what's up?"
"Just got a call from some guy named Weld," she put a finger on the woman's skin, frowned, then shrugged approvingly. "Asking if I could make you take your breaks."
"Fuck that shit, I'm halfway to the world record for being awake. I'm a little disappointed I haven't got any hallucinations yet."
"You're going to kill someone out of sleep deprivation negligence," Amy stepped around the operating table and kicked me in the shin, then poked my face. "I don't care about all your Brute powers, people aren't meant to be awake that long."
"What about Noctis capes?"
"Are you one?"
I wiped the last flakes of blood from the closed wound. "Maybe I am now. Dynamo does something, why not that?"
Amy blinked bloodshot eyes at me, uncomprehending and ignorant. "Even I'm pushing things with sleep," she jabbed her finger harder into my cheek. "Don't make me make you sleep- fuck!"
She pulled back her hand, shaking it out, staring at me incredulously.
"You zapped me!"
"Don't threaten to sleep me."
"Stop being a medically negligent chode."
"She's fine," I gestured to the woman. "I'm a Noctis cape now, so it's fine."
"Even if that were true," Amy scratched at her fingertip where I'd zapped her, then pointed it at me again. "Noctis capes still take breaks from work. Stop being a dick."
Of course, I'd noticed that I was actually being a condescending dick due to lack of sleep and general stress. How could I not? I wasn't Old Greg any more. I wasn't even New Greg. I was something different, Greg Part Three if you will.
"Fine," I said. "I'm upset. Can I have a hug?"
"If you take off your armour, you can."
I equipped my old oversize hoodie and sweat pants in place of my uniform and held out my arms, which Amy stepped into and wrapped her arms around me. Girls were so small, Amy needed to work on her lats. I should call Savannah and set up a day for me to go to New York.
I wasn't entirely sure about what to do with her. On one hand, I was ecstatic she was my girlfriend, and on the other, she'd left before we had a chance to properly hang out and I'd been so busy we'd barely talked. How did one 'have a girlfriend'? What did it properly entail? Apparently, it would 'just work', according to the internet, via ancient mating instincts as long as I wasn't a sperg.
I sighed and let go.
"Still upset?"
I nodded. "I'm thinking I want to go see Savannah."
"That should do wonders for your relaxation," Amy raised her eyebrows, smirking smarmily.
"We can only hope. First date," I folded my right ring finger in, trapping it with my thumb, and jabbed my extended first, middle and pinky fingers in Amy's face. "Kapow!"
She gave a faux disgusted scoff, "tell that to that Weld guy, get him off your back about breaks."
"Good idea. And speaking of good ideas, there's something I'll need your help with in a few weeks, but I'm thinking of changing my Cape name to Heart Under Blade."
"What does it mean?"
"It's how you write Shinobi in Japanese, which means 'endure'. I think it fits me better than Dark Smoke Puncher, I want to make it my name for my Protectorate debut."
"Yeah," Amy shrugged. "Sounds cool, I guess. Definitely less stupid than Dark Smoke Puncher."
"There's nothing wrong with Dark Smoke Puncher," I said crossly. "It's funny and it makes people smile, it fits the mood for Wards names. What would you have called yourself, having my powers?"
"Panacea," she said smugly.
I made a derisive noise in my throat.
"Infinity, then."
"Bit on the nose. Infinity is a sub-type of Trump powers anyway and is actually my designation. Infinity Trump."
"Hmm, I said I'd have wanted flying blaster powers, right? Uh, Streaklight?"
I shrugged, "I almost have flying blaster powers, and it's not even my main set. You'd probably end up a flying brick blaster shaker etc. I'm going to get it all eventually, I think."
I sighed, reverberating my breath into a chuckle.
"Honestly, we should have gotten each other's powers."
"We've been over that," Amy said. "We shouldn't have because you'd make a sex slave."
I pointed at her, opened my mouth, closed it again and rubbed my chin. "It just makes sense. You need to be creepier and grosser, I honestly can't imagine a situation where making a sex slave isn't on the table. So much squandered potential."
Amy sighed the sigh of someone who had seriously considered it. "Whatever, can I have my top up now?"
I blew a raspberry and tapped her between the eyes. She glowed gold, then the eye bags were gone and her skin glowed with good health.
"Oh god, that feels so good."
"You're welcome."
"Come on," she smiled, punching my arm. "Let's go get a coffee, fifteen-minute break?"
Chapter 72: Things are looking up 8.3
Chapter Text
"Man, I can't believe I missed out on it for the bloody hospital."
"It wasn't that fun," Weld shook his head as we walked side by side, trailed after by the rest of the team.
"Yeah, but with me there it would've been," I karate chopped, sparks trailing from my fingers. "You guys need a win."
There was obviously something more to it. Something else had happened, or they'd found something, and that was causing this terse attitude. It would also explain the meeting we were going to. As a rule, Wards weren't invited to Protectorate business unless it involved parahuman crime we couldn't avoid. It could be an update on the ABB scenario, but that didn't feel right. It felt bigger, way, way bigger.
I figured if they wanted to tell me, they would. Otherwise, I'd find out in a few minutes anyway.
We weren't meeting in The Rig, it having been trashed by Leviathan, but rather in a tall building near the PRT office that was being used as a temporary Protectorate base. I'd miss the ever so slight sway of the waves, briny smell and sea breezes of The Rig. The ride over the force-field bridge, the shimmer you got looking out over the city through the defensive force-field; it was all part of the experience. No more.
The Protectorate was already here, sitting around one side of the conference table. We trooped into the room and I sat down opposite Dauntless, we smiled and nodded to each other. Tomorrow an hour had been scheduled for us to spar so that I might complete my quest 'Unrelenting Force' and take part in the bounty therein.
"Hurry up!" barked Armsmaster from his standing position at the head of the table. Everyone hastened into their chairs, save for Weld who had to remain standing. "We've wasted enough time waiting for you lot."
The projector in the ceiling flicked on, splaying a series of images across the white wall. I suppressed a flinch; nine grisly strung up corpses.
"Code Black. It's the Nine."
"Confirmed?" asked Miss Militia.
"From Chief Director Costa-Brown."
"What are they here for?"
"We don't know," Armsmaster snapped, the projector flicking to show file photos of them. "Recruitment, a hit, fun. We won't know until they make it known. Current members are: Jack Slash, Mannequin, Crawler, Bonesaw, Siberian, Shatterbird, potentially Hatchet Face and we have intel of a Pyrokinetic of some kind. They may have others, you will all read their files and you will all read the combat briefings and memorise the Rules of Engagement for each one. Engagement is, of course," his lip curled. "Optional. S-Class Hazard pay applies."
Shit. The Slaughterhouse Nine, huh? They were a big name, a homeless roving band of mass murderers, serial killers and other assorted supercriminals with a prodigious turnover rate. If six months was the average time it took for the usual independent hero to take a career-ending injury, three months was the average lifespan of the usual Slaughterhouse member. They either died to a Protectorate hero, a local villain or each other.
The biggest names in the group were definitely the Siberian and Jack Slash. The Siberian had killed Hero, the one who had made the Triumvirate originally the Quadumvirate, and Jack Slash had been heading the group for something like fifteen years.
Both of these feats were ludicrous and terrifying.
"Do we have a damage projection?" Dauntless asked.
"Use your brain," Armsmaster bit out scathingly. "Shatterbird is going to scream, at the very least. The second we issue a public warning, she screams; thousands dead at minimum. Then the rest of the Nine run amok until we somehow kick them out. Do not expect backup."
Dauntless drew back into his armour, nodding at the table.
"We don't have a solid timeline for their public appearance, either. We're on high alert starting yesterday. However, my prediction programs suggest at least a week before they show their faces based on all past data of their movements, which was given a rating of 'Rusty SeeSaw' by Delphic and 'Crimson' by Appraiser making it a solid maybe. Obviously, the second you have any information tell me."
I drummed my fingers on the table, tap tap tap tap. My quests gave me future information, sometimes. Tap tap tap tap. Sometimes my quest information was incredibly bare-bones, just telling me to do something. Tap tap tap tap. Like telling me to kill an Endbringer without indicating how. Tap tap tap tap. Please don't fuck me over on this one.
Come on. I stopped tapping, closing my eyes. Nine-Hundred, kill them before it's too late, beforehand. Before nine hundred, kill them.
"Do we know of any Parahumans with duplication powers?"
"Quest?!" Armsmaster snarled.
I nodded. "Slaughterhouse Nine-Hundred, kill them before it's too late, rewards for each one killed beforehand. I think they're going to clone themselves."
The room was silent.
Armsmaster turned to the wall, seemingly deep in thought. "Director Armstrong," he eventually said. "Do we have eyes on Blasto? The Slaughterhouse Nine may have him."
"You're not fucking with us, are you?"
I turned to Assault.
"Smokey, this isn't you fucking with us?"
"I promise, I'm not."
Assault made a clicking sound with the corner of his mouth, leaning back into his chair, hands behind his head and sighed. "Shit, eh? If you are, hell of a poker-face, kid."
Battery put her hand on his arm.
"Do you have anything else?" Miss Militia asked. "Times, locations?"
"Unfortunately not, it just says 'before it's too late'. Hopefully, though, it'll update me when something happens and I fail on one of them even if I'm across the city. I could even be wrong in my interpretation-"
"Could your information be wrong?" Dennis interrupted. "Our best Thinkers have nothing for us, and you're conveniently coming out with this? Come on."
"It could be," I smiled encouragingly. "My power hasn't ever lied to me before that I could tell, but, it could be."
"I'll vouch for its reliability," Weld said, moving to place a hand on the back of my chair. "In Boston, he predicted a riot of Blasto creations."
Dennis' clock faces ticked in silence for a moment in the gaps between Armsmaster's phone call.
"So let's say it's real," he said. "You think there's going to be a hundred members of the Nine for each one?"
"I think that number might be more of an embellishment than a literal prediction, or a warning of what might happen if we leave them unchecked. I don't know how they're going to build up that number so quickly, unless they've had Blasto for months, or they have a Parahuman whose speciality is cloning. Sort of like Spree from the Teeth, but for others," I shrugged. "Either way, it's a bad sign."
Dennis sat back in his chair and didn't say anything further.
Armsmaster turned abruptly back to the table. "It's not Blasto. He was sighted last night in Boston, at roughly the time when the Arrival Killing would have been performed."
"Unless he's a decoy clone…" Dauntless trailed off, wilting under the force of Armsmaster's scowl.
"Unless that, yes. However, we have no way to fact check so the idea is pointless. We'll be operating under the assumption that there is a new Parahuman at play, given that Bonesaw has never displayed any previous cloning technology, and will act accordingly. Keep your work issue phones on you, and on, at all times and be prepared to receive calls at all hours. We will continue work as usual but be prepared to have rosters and schedules changed without notice," Armsmaster smiled thinly. "I recommend sleeping on site. Dark Smoke Puncher, each morning you will provide healing to all Protectorate personnel and to wounded PRT personnel. I want us all in tip-top shape."
"Yes, sir."
"Good, we will now go over the briefing packets and coordinate tactics."
It was a quiet drive back to the PRT building, the silence both drained by the hours-long meeting and tense due to their poor communication issues; something apparently to be mended as Weld led the way into the Wards area and addressed us.
"Ok, guys," he began. "I know today hasn't been fun, but we have to do this now before the situation in the city gets even worse."
He gestured to the couches with grim expectancy.
"Sure, bro," I said, taking a seat in the one on the left.
Grudgingly, Chris, Missy and Dennis took the one on the right while Weld and Lily stayed standing.
"We need to sort this out before it makes the team even more toxic and gets one of us hurt in the field, or," Weld put his hand over his chest meaningfully. "Off the field. Lily and I are new here, so we don't know your history, so I want us to remain impartial and let you sort out whatever the problem is."
"I'd like to know too," I said, affecting being a reasonable human being. "I know I was an annoying piece of shit in the past, but I apologised for that, didn't I?"
"Ah, man," said Chris, resting his elbows on his knees and not meeting my eye. "You can be alright, but there's kind of a lot more to it than that."
I made a point of physically taking off my visor so that everyone could see my eyes. "Like what, bro?"
"'Like what?' he says," Dennis bit out, half rising from his seated position. "Where should I begin? Yeah, you apologised for that, but have you ever apologised for having Sophia sent away? She wasn't the nicest person, but shit, man, we needed everyone we could get. Or how you drove Brad away, because why? Was he going to steal your thunder or something? Not to mention all the special treatment you get from Armsmaster, you brown-nosing suck-up! But that's not the fucking last of it," he snarled, turning his helmeted face to Weld accusingly before turning back to me. "When you killed Cricket, did it even bother you the tiniest bit? When Dean and Carlos died, did that bother you? And just a minute ago, you talking about how you were going to go kill the Nine like it was nothing! You weird robot fuck!"
I frowned.
"Did something happen with your power to fuck with your head, huh? What was it?"
"Dennis," Weld said loudly. "Please keep insults out of it."
"I never said I was going to kill the Nine," I said finally. "I said that my power said it would reward me for killing them, and would likely also update me if whatever it wanted me to stop them doing happened."
"Hell of a fucking implication."
I shrugged. "Out of all of you, only Dean ever treated me nicely."
"I was never mean to you," said Chris.
"Sorry, yeah, you were alright. I definitely deserved the cold shoulder for the first few months, but surely after I got back from Boston I deserved better."
"Greg," said Missy, her arms and legs folded having shoved herself as far down into the couch as she could. "We did see how much better you'd gotten, but then… Leviathan happened and you just… didn't seem to care. So many people died, our home got trashed, and I don't think I've seen you even look like you cared. It was like you were going through the motions so that we could see it. I know we appreciate you healing us, but if you don't care you don't have to bother."
I frowned again. I wasn't sure what I should do. On one hand, they had all completely missed the mark and were egregiously applying the Fundamental Attribution Error, which I couldn't dispel without spilling my purse all over the coffee table; and I didn't particularly want to do that. I could talk with Amy about all this stuff, how much almost being murdered messed me up, the situation with my parents, etc. I even had Sveta for a lot of it, and I would make sure to have a talk with Weld about it, too.
But these guys? Eh. Not their fault nobody had told them anything important, but still, eh.
And yet, telling them would solve issues. Weld needed it for this team to work, and Weld was my bro. You shouldn't ever dog the bros.
"I'm faking it. Like six of my powers let me fake being ok, which I've been doing since before the first time the Nazi's tried to kill me. It's why they sent me away, remember? The only reason I came back was that Bakuda put my mum in a coma and, now my dad is probably in one of her slave camps. And no, I'm not going to stop faking it because I don't particularly feel like crying right now. I'm sorry it's making me come off as a sociopath, I do care."
"Greg, are you mastering yourself to make it look like you're ok?"
I turned to Weld, raising my eyebrows. "Funny you should say that. My Acting skill recently prestiged into Self Mastery, so yes, that is quite literally what I'm doing."
"Is that," Lily said. "That can't be healthy."
"Probably not, but, I'm actually doing better than I was a month ago. I guess Leviathan put a lot of things in perspective-"
Thank you, Amy and your Panacea. I remembered who I had been while on it, and even though the effects wore off, something remained.
"-kind of made worrying about a lot of stuff seem redundant. After the first Nazi attack, I was terrified of mirrors for months. Couldn't stand reflections, still not keen-"
"That was why you had it covered, in Boston," Weld said, understanding dawning in his voice.
"Yeah, it was also why I never looked directly at you. It wasn't that you're a Case Fifty-Three, you're just too shiny. But now?" I looked him in the eyes. "It's not so bad."
I turned back to Dennis who hadn't uncoiled from his tense, confrontational posture.
"Look, man, I don't blame you for not liking me but this isn't a sob story."
"How do we know you're telling the whole truth? You're a liar, Greg. Remember when you tried to feed us that insulting bullshit about your trigger?"
"Oh," I said. "That. The truth is just so undashing. I triggered in my sleep, there's precedent for it with Thinker and Master powers especially, which makes sense given the heavy skill Thinker aspect of mine. I'm sorry I did that, it was offensive and stupid."
"How do we know you aren't faking this? We already know your power lets you be a great liar, why couldn't you be lying about caring that our fucking friends died."
"You heard my song at the memorial, that was how I feel."
Dennis made a long hissing sound but sat back. "It better have been."
"Are you really just pretending to be happy?" Missy asked, seemingly unable to uncross her arms or legs. "If you were he must have known, right? Dean knew?"
"He did. I could tell, I don't think he knew how to go about bringing it up, though."
"I'm willing to let bygones be bygones, Greg," Chris stood up and stepped around the coffee table to my side of the discussion. "But you have to be honest with us, we're a team. Like, yeah, we should have brought this up sooner, too. I'm sure we all understand pretending that everything's fine to a degree, oh, uh, can you clear up what happened with Sophia and Brad? You never explained."
"Sophia broke her probation and Brad didn't want to get into fights with Villains he didn't have to, so I explained how he could get out of fieldwork and still get paid. I guess Armsmaster never told you? I don't have the power to just get people removed," I stood up and offered my hand to Chris. "All of this is just one big misunderstanding."
Chapter 73: Things are looking up 8.4
Chapter Text
"I really appreciate you taking the time to help me, Geromy."
"All good," Geromy paused in strapping on his greaves to flash me a quick smile. "Your method is a bit more involved than mine, but I get it."
"Still, thanks."
"We help each other. Stuff like this helps keep me sharp and helps you keep gaining your levels, and boy," he yanked the strap on his right greave tight. "Are we going to need it."
I lowered my long-bladed spear, my favourite form of my Anypole, from where I was running through an improvised kata that Jiraiya made feel natural.
"I'm not sure how much difference a level is going to make against these guys. I won't be able to get close enough to Hatchet Face to do anything, I won't be able to hurt Crawler, Shatterbird can fly and the Siberian is invincible."
"That's only half of them," Geromy stood up and stretched, testing his armoured mobility. "I can fly, Miss Militia can take care of Hatchet Face, Armsmaster can hurt Crawler and well, the Siberian is…"
"Invincible. I hope to god she has some kind of Achilles heel I can find."
I didn't like my chances. The Siberian was fast enough to claw Alexandria's eye out, and Alexandria could fly at like Mach Twenty or some shit and was invincible to everything that wasn't the Siberian. My only hope was she didn't have some hitherto unknown ability to see through invisibility.
"Your power is strong, you will."
Convictionless words, sapped of their ability to reassure through sheer lack of belief. Nobody would kill the Siberian. If not even the Triumvirate and all the Protectorate could stop Hero from dying, and the Siberian going free for years after, then no-one could.
"Yeah," I said. "They'll get theirs."
We shared an empty smile, each understanding that the other knew it was futile.
"They will. Well, let's get to it, we don't have all day. I'm ready."
"This won't be anything like last time," I told Geromy as we squared off in the centre of the new sparring chamber. "My power has doubled since the last time we fought."
"I've got some new tricks, too." Geromy's lance and boots burst into lightning, his shield expanding a series of concentric rings, his armour exuding light and tines of electricity sprouted from his helmet like a crown.
"Impressive," I said. "Very nice. But watch this."
I raised my right hand into a fist, pointer and ring finger extended. I placed them on my forehead.
Special Beam Cannon!
I flung my hand out, the blinding helix of lightning streaking across the room at fantastic speed. It bored full-on into Dauntless' chest, splashing uselessly against the aura of light it produced.
"In my defence, I created that power literally just now."
Dauntless chuckled, lifting off the ground on trails of sparks. "I know you said don't go easy on you, but are you sure?"
I hefted my spear and threw it at him, it bounced off the rings of his shield and returned to my hand. "I think we might stalemate again. Your defence is too good and my mobility is too good."
"I think so, too. Gotta try though, eh?"
I sank into a sprinters crouch, lightning crawling out of my skin like a Sayain's aura. With my new found Mana control a great many opportunities were open to me that were previously closed due to exorbitant cost, like a Combat Mode.
Alacrity expounded on my fighting strengths of speed, reaction times and lightning damage whilst also giving lesser increases in sensory perception and reading enemy movement.
I pushed off, a single step carrying me on a collision course with Dauntless' face. As my fist closed in his shield bubbled, the sphere of energy slamming into me, pitching me across the floor. I tumbled once, bouncing back into a comfortable standing position.
"Damn, dude, how'd you see that coming?"
"Helmet," Dauntless whacked himself in the head with his lance. "Gives me better awareness. You'da had me without it, though."
His Arclance lashed out, barely a glint of light to telegraph it, and I only just got my hand up to parry it, jarring my wrist.
"Yeah," he echoed. "We're going to stalemate again."
"Hold on, let me go again. I have a stronger attack that might bust your shield."
Dauntless nodded, floating down to floor level with his shield bubble fully expanded.
I walked forward, drawing my right hand back palm open. I stabbed forward with my Arc Blade, the sharp mass of electricity grinding against Dauntless' shield with a horrific screech as it slid off like it had been greased. I frowned.
"Nope," I said. "That was my best shot. Well, almost. I do have some other attacks-"
I fired off a Sonic Blast to no effect other than sounding like a foghorn.
"But it might give you brain damage, so I don't want to test it. Actually, though, it might work on Crawler unless he's immune to it…"
Could I Mind Crush Crawler? I'd have to see if I ever met him. Could I Mind Crush the Siberian? Ooh…
For a split second my hands gnarled, my teeth grit and I wanted to fucking kill them. And Bakuda. I was going to shoot her in the fucking head. I was going to rip her hands off and blow her fucking brains out. I was going to gut Lung before he could transform and turn Oni Lee into a burnt-out husk.
Then I was going to go on and shred my way through the Slaughterhouse Nine. Nobody will ever threaten my mum and dad again, they wouldn't dare.
Nobody ever tried to find and threaten Legend's family. It would be suicide.
I'd just have to be a badder motherfucker than him.
"-be, you'd have to try," Dauntless thoughtlessly interrupted me. "Not that we want you to be anywhere near him, but it's always nice to have that option there, isn't it? Just in case."
"It definitely makes me feel safer," I smiled, dropping my Alacrity. "I'll leave the Nine to the professionals, thank you very much, but it's nice to be able to protect myself if it ever comes to it."
Dauntless touched down, the burning white lightning dimming from his lance and armour. "You're a good kid, Greg. Don't you worry about a thing, us Protectorate aren't no slouches."
"Thanks, man. So how do you want to do this, just fight like normal or-"
Loud static emanated from the PA speaker in the ceiling, interrupting me.
"Attention all active field staff, head to the command centre, please. Repeat, head to the command centre, thank you."
I looked at Geromy, who gestured at the door with a serious motion, and we set off hurrying through the building that was suddenly buzzing with activity. People barking through phones, hurrying about, fumbling through desk drawers.
We joined a coterie of just-on-duty PRT troopers, still fastening vest straps and carrying dark visored helmets under armpits. Nobody, it seemed, knew what was going on other than we weren't under attack.
We reached the command centre, already packed with people, and crammed our way inside. Armsmaster stood on the small raised podium at the front of the room, pacing back and forth, his arms gesturing sharply in a conversation from within his sealed helmet that even my enhanced hearing couldn't pick up. Even through the controlled posture his armour gave him he seemed manic, feverish.
I jumped, twisted, sticking on all fours to the ceiling. I picked my way across the sturdiest lines like a spider, Grace preventing me from tearing out ceiling panels as I made my way quickly across, dropping lightly down to stand next to Armsmaster.
He glanced at me, nodded, then ignored me in favour of whatever he was doing inside his helmet.
Had the Slaughterhouse Nine shown themselves early? From the conversations I was getting from the troops' none of them knew what was going on either, confusion multiplying as people packed around the doorways. Surely if it was the Nine the PA alert would have said so, right? No action codes had been called out.
Armsmaster turned back to face me, panels in his helmet sliding back to expose his spittle-flecked beard.
"We found him, your father."
Heat flooded my body, all hair standing on end. I'd been looking, of course, during my patrols but hadn't come up with a solid location. With my intel combined with the rest of the Protectorate and PRT sources, we'd managed to triangulate the new main ABB base to a few city blocks and it looked like something had come through.
"How?" my voice came out thin, strained. "Who?"
"Anonymous cellphone footage."
"And we're going?"
Armsmaster bared his teeth, "we're all going. This is a raid, my, no, our last chance to do something big before the Nine throw everything tits up."
He held out his arm, a panel sliding back near his elbow and tipped out three pen lid sized injector vials. He handed them to me, leaning in close.
"I need you to tag Lung with at least one of these. Two would work better, but they have three supercriminals and I'm not made of the stuff; at your discretion. Not a word."
I got the impression he winked, but I couldn't see enough of his face to be sure. I stared for a moment at the spinning yellow quest symbol above his head.
"Whatever you decide to do today, I'll back you on it. You want to disobey orders, run ahead and smash heads until you save your dad? Fine, so long as after today the gang known as the Azn Bad Boys is crippled beyond repair. Understood?"
"You got it, boss"
I dismissed the prompt. Quest or no quest I was going to rip their gang to shreds until I got my dad back.
Chapter 74: Things are looking up 8.5
Chapter Text
The paddy wagon jostled over the still uneven road, suspension lurching as it dealt with potholes and chunks, pitching Missy into my shoulder. Dennis likewise was having trouble looking cool in the bouncing van, limbs locked stiffly against available surfaces.
I, however, remained perfectly still and unruffled as did Weld, due to his immense weight, Lily due to her impeccable sense of timing and Chris due to his armour's motion compensators. It was karmic justice, in a way, that the people who thought I was cool were unaffected by the bumpy ride and the two who had yet to shake my hand and tell me they forgave my past atrocities were left looking foolish.
Christ, what a fucking gay thought. As if the universe conspires to make people who don't like us look like idiots.
Yes, yes, shut up, me. Why can't I let us have petty self-righteous fantasies any more? They're fun.
If they were fun why would I say anything?
Because you're a buzz-killing dickwipe.
Just do the thing.
I twirled my hands, leaning forward and conjuring two hand-hold railings. "Do you want a rail to hold on to? Dennis? Missy?"
I could see their already bruising pride bristle as I brought to light their deficiencies in a way they either had to accept or look like dicks for knocking back my overture of goodwill. Not that it was what I meant, but when you're so awesome it's hard not to offer help without looking condescending.
"Thanks," Missy said grudgingly.
I stuck the rail to the wall of the van between us with a quick application of adhesive mana and she put her elbow over it, pinning it to her side and settling her jolting. I wiggled the other at Dennis and he nodded shortly. I stuck it to his wall and he mirrored Missy's grip.
"Good on you, Greg," Weld nodded encouragingly. "We should be helping each other like that when we can."
"It's nothing," I ducked my head, humile.
"No, no, it's the sort of thing a team-mate should be doing," Weld shuffled forward on his part of the bench until he was sitting on the edge. "I've been having a think on how to get things… copacetic, between all of us. I want us to have a weekly team meeting. I'll tack up a whiteboard and throughout the week we'll write down stuff we want to talk about during the meeting, and everybody will have a turn to speak uninterrupted on their topic after which we'll discuss the issue. Before all of that though, we'll start by saying one thing we appreciate about each of the other team members or something they've done that week we're grateful for, so we aren't just harping on about the negatives."
He took a microsecond to gauge our reactions.
"I know it sounds a bit… wanky," he continued in a subdued tone. "I really want this team to work, though. If we can just get the resentment out of the way I don't think we'd have to have them every week. I'll sort it out and we can start Monday after next, yeah?"
"I'm game," said Lily. "It'll help me to get to know you all better."
"Same," I said. "I want us to be friends, not just co-workers."
Which was true, just without the desperate intensity that thought once had. God, I was so approval-seeking back then. Makes me fucking sick thinking of how I used to beg for attention like some kind of dog. Pathetic.
I kick Old Greg into his grave, the motion causing microscopic anime convention tickets to erupt from the corpse like a cloud of spores. He rolls into the shallow grave and does not stir.
I turn to New Greg. He is like me, so much like me, save for one key difference; he isn't me. I jerk my head at the grave and for a moment I see the desire to be Madison Clements' lolita foot slave flare up behind his eyes before he closes them. He kneels in front on the grave and I raise my hand. My finger pulls the trigger and a hollow point takes New Greg in the brainstem.
A painless death. He topples into the grave atop Old Greg. He bleeds real blood, red and fresh, no hint of corn syrup or IQ boosting Richard and Mortimer memes. I cover the grave with dirt and leave, I walk far away until I cannot see the freshly turned soil.
"Couldn't hurt," Chris forced a smile, glancing quickly at Dennis then away again. "We should at least give it a try."
"I think it's a good idea, getting through this dysfunction," Missy said, tense against her railing, looking anywhere but our faces. "Clear the air some more…"
Dennis scoffed. "Sure thing, dude. Let's all be friends, it'll be magical. I vote we do trust falls."
He was probably too angry to see the irony.
I was still a little iffy on why he was so mad, now that things had been cleared up. Maybe he just didn't believe me, Dean had been his best friend so that wound would no doubt not close soon. But I'd cured his dad's cancer, for free, unprompted. I'd have thought that'd earn me points, but maybe that was the thing? He thought I was just doing to earn points in a scummy way, I'd healed his dad in bad faith so that he'd owe me. It could also be that my atrocious first impression just never was forgotten and his mental image of me was stuck in the past, and to be fair I had been a moron for a long time after getting powers.
"That's the spirit," said Weld, pointedly ignoring the scoff and Dennis' tone. "Everyone will feel so much better without all this, I dunno, bad energy floating around. Trust me. Again, if you want it in more practical terms, it'll help our fieldwork if people aren't giving each other the cold shoulder during patrols or over the console."
"Yeah," said Dennis. "Sounds great. We should get a class gerbil, too."
"You should put that on the list," Weld said, his smile the forced one teachers used to have with me.
Dennis slouched over his rail, looking away from everyone.
Our van pulled to a stop, parking next to the series of other PRT vans a mere street from my dad. Weld stood up and opened the back doors. The van lurched as he stepped out of it, the sudden absence of his weight relieving the overworked suspension. We piled out after him into a tense atmosphere where PRT troopers gripped their rifles in neat ranks waiting for the call.
"Right," said Weld, lowering his voice and standing up straighter. "We're assisting only. We're the backline."
I hovered around the edge of the group, slowly making my way behind them. Eyes off me I felt my Hidden Movement skill take, making it less likely that anyone would notice me. With this, I turned invisible and took off, vaulting over a van and heading straight for the disused cinema complex the ABB had taken.
There was no way that they didn't already know we were here, their lookouts would have seen the convoy and our people. They'd be fortifying, holding chokepoints and readying whatever it was Bakuda had cooked up.
It took me only a moment to get within touching distance of the complex. I paused for a moment, closing my eyes and focusing on the sounds. The nearby area unfolded in my mind's eye, each gust of wind, each footstep sending vibrations I could tap in to and map everything out.
On the roof, two lookouts. I jumped, catching the wall with my feet and walked cautiously up. The roof expanded in my head before I reached it. Three lookouts in a triangle formation. Should be easy.
I crested the lip of the roof, pulling myself upright. Three lookouts. One just a meter away, hidden under a camo-blanket with a pair of small binoculars in one hand and a walkie-talkie in the other. Hopefully, they didn't have to call in every few minutes to make sure they hadn't been taken out by a Stranger, and equally, hopefully, they didn't have a password system to account for Masters. Bakuda was supposed to be some Ivy League genius who got in years early, so I didn't have high hopes for her not reading a leaked PRT operations manual and co-opting their Master/Stranger protocols.
Nevertheless; I reached forward. My left hand came in contact with the back of his head, a Mana Shackle that covered his eyes and mouth blossoming from the point of contact, while my right hand yanked his wrist behind his back and, as he flailed, I caught his other wrist and bound them together. I forced his knees together, Shackling them too.
One second, total silence. The other two hadn't stirred.
I flitted across the roof, repeating this process with the remaining lookouts. Once secured I quickly dragged them together, rummaged around until I found a key to the roof access door, confiscated their guns, shot off a quick text to Armsmaster to tell him where I was up to and slid the key into the door.
A walkie-talkie crackled. "Lookout Alpha, check in."
I glanced back to the three men and sighed. Fuck.
I continued through the door. Didn't matter much to me if they knew I was here or not, the end result would be the same. I lightly took the stairs down, pulling up my growing sound map of the interior. There was another guard at the foot of the stairs, I confirmed him as a dyed-in-the-wool ABB member. Where would the civilians be? Where was my dad?
I basketball palm-gripped his face, covering his head in solid blue. He screamed, muffled, as I forced him to his knees and shackled him to the stairwell railing. I gripped his shoulder, so full of fragile bones.
Bad idea, chief.
I released my grip, dipping my hand down to inventory the handgun out of his waistband then moved to put my ear to the door. Activity splayed the room across my brain, rushing steps and loud voices expanding the area I could decode.
I pushed on the unlock bar holding the door closed, keeping my fingers on my left hand on the edge of the door I stepped forward and grabbed the guy who had just stepped in front of the door. I dragged him inside and shut it again, shackling him with his compatriot.
I had noticed, so far, that all the gangsters I'd subdued were Korean. It checked out, our dossiers, and everything I'd read in the previous months I was here indicated that the 'ABB' only existed as a sort of front to appease Lung. The reality was the ABB was comprised of the same gangs Lung had melded together as cells; members of the ABB in name only they internally were still 'Yakuza', 'Triad' and 'Chong-ro' and only worked together enough to ensure survival.
Lung, the Protectorate presumed, didn't care that his gang wasn't particularly unified so long as he was in charge of it. Infighting didn't bother him, not getting his cut bothered him.
I checked things were clear and went back through the push door which led the to back area, a sort of loading bay where I guessed the cinema would get its shipments of poppable corn and flavoured syrup.
"It's here."
The whisper of the sixth man carried to me across the loading area. He was behind a column of concrete near the door to the main complex, peering around the corner. It. I was an It. That was really awesome, I was really awesome.
Again, I wasn't particularly miffed that they knew I was here but by now they'd have had time to trap the door out of here. I'd have to find another way in, like cutting through a wall.
I tweaked my Chameleon Skin, spreading it out in front of me like a screen rather than it covering me, and got out my phone again to let Armsmaster know the score. I read his latest message.
Bromaster: Lung and Oni Lee on route.
It was sent a minute ago. Oni Lee could get anywhere in the city in that time. I covered myself again, inventorying my phone.
He wasn't in the room with me, I was certain of that much, but he either knew where I was or would know very shortly. I pounced on the sixth guy, covering his head and snatching the flip phone from his hand before he could make a noise. I closed my eyes, recalling his voice, playing it over in my mind, extrapolating tone and timbre. I forced him to the floor and locked him down.
The phone was still on the call.
"Help me, please," I whispered in the man's voice. "Is Oni Lee here yet?"
The line cut. Bugger. The guy was probably meant to be report only and I'd just tipped them off… what was that-
I leapt.
-427
I slipped as I landed, agony shooting up the exposed bone of my shin, the movement still graceful. I caught a glimpse of the sixth guy, now just an empty space, the jagged edges of something slowly fading and exposing where it had sheared into the wall as easily as it had me.
He was gone. The guy was gone. He was dead?
I gasped as something fell out of my stomach. Oh fuck, I wasn't at full mana, my ring…
Healing Spell: Flesh Stitching
Flesh stitching…
Ethereal green poured out of my skin like vapour, congealing around my wounds. The solid fortnight of using that spell for hours every day paying off as the bleeding stopped immediately.
I took a shuddering breath as the blinding pain dropped to something merely excruciating then faded to a dull throb.
Bakuda was insane. She'd just killed one of her own. She was insane. That guy. She's insane.
I nearly died again.
A wave of nausea forced my lunch up, bile coating my teeth and tongue with acidic fur. The vomit was red with my blood. I heaved again.
I needed to hide somewhere. Oni Lee could be here any second and he'd kill me.
I dragged myself into a crawl, the nubs of my legs finding purchase. I jumped, a flop, but it sent me all the way across the room into a corner. I huddled into it. I needed to keep healing myself, once I got over my health limit I'd start to regenerate. Then I just had to meditate for a bit to get my mana back and I'd be good. I could put on my spare uniform and go back to chill with Weld and Lily like I'd just been gone for a piss. Yeah, I'd do that. No problemo.
I slumped against the corner, my breath still coming in ragged gasps, my vision greying out. No, no. No good, don't hyperventilate yourself out. How many people have you told this last week to stop hyperventilating and just breathe normally? A hundred and eighty-nine, you remember all of them. Just focus on the health bar, it's nearly full again, see? Couple of minutes and you'll be right as rain.
The door leading to the roof opened a crack.
Chapter 75: Things are looking up 8.6
Chapter Text
I curled up into a ball and screwed up my eyes, mana flowing over me, blanketing me in a wafer-thin facsimile of a black garbage bag. I didn't have the juice to spare on anything else, I wasn't healed yet and I was getting close to running dry.
The door opened further, the scrapes of the hinges outlining the echoes of an adult man. There was a soft whump, two men. One at the door and one at the jagged gouge in the concrete.
I cringed further into a ball.
Oni Lee shifted, his measured, unhurried movements making it difficult to hear exactly what he was doing.
A near-silent breathy sound as the clone at the door turned to powder, but the door did not close. Propped open, so he could escape in a flash.
I chanced a peek, opening up a pinprick hole in my cover. He was kneeling next to the puddle of my blood and vomit, red Oni mask turned down, examining it. He raised a phone to his ear.
"The infiltrator remains, hurt."
"Fuck's sake," the snarling feminine voice over the phone. Bakuda. "Fucking Strangers. You can't see them?"
"No."
"Are they there?"
"It's likely."
There was the faint sound of Bakuda spitting. "Use the Suck Bomb and stay alert."
Lee moved again, something struck the floor with the ring of a dropped metal cup, the sound wave outlining a second Lee who closed the door to the roof behind him.
The wind roared, lashing my ears, ripping my bin bag camouflage away. I opened my eyes again as I began to slide across the floor toward a miniature black hole.
I scrabbled against the concrete, stump legs finding no purchase until I adhered myself to the ground with mana. The suction grew, lifting me up off the floor to dangle by the palm of one hand, whipping the breath from my mouth.
I... I guess this is why the Protectorate don't just go and arrest the gangs, huh?
The suction cut out slowly, lowering me back down to the floor in a disturbingly gentle way completely incongruous with the situation. The concrete felt cool against my cheek, pressing my visor into the bridge of my nose. My rapid breaths stirred no dust from the floor, it was spotlessly clean; all dirt and anything not nailed down vanished into the fading black hole bomb. Jesus fuck.
The mechanism of the door clicked along its ratchet.
Of course, he wanted to fucking check. Shit. I ground my nose into the floor and cast Chameleon Skin, vanishing from view once again. I sank deep into my Hidden Movement skill, holding my breath, becoming the very soul of stillness.
Oni Lee paced into the room then stopped, for all I could tell just standing there. The seconds ticked by and my Health ticked up. Actually, this was good for me if he wanted to waste time. I had minutes left of invisibility and every moment that went by I would get back into un-mutilated shape.
I watched as my mana slowly dwindled. Lee had still not moved. I could hear him breathing, even and calm. What was he waiting for?
I might have to fight him. Fight him on next to no mana and no legs.
I'd lose, he'd kill me. He wouldn't care that I was a Ward.
"They appear to have died."
Cackling erupted from the receiver. "Great! Fucking great! One thing goes right today. Now get back here, ASAP."
The line clicked dead and Oni Lee turned and left, unhurried. The door automatically closed behind him.
I didn't let my breath out, didn't drop my invisibility or even move. It would be a classic ploy to fake me out by pretending to leave, then coming back once I'd foolishly revealed myself. I waited, heart pounding frantically in my chest until my mana ran out.
I let out a deep sigh. He had to have gone; I was safe.
I dragged myself over to the wall, huddling against a yellow steel pillar next to the raising garage-like door. The flesh on my legs and belly itched, slowly reforming as my powers tried to regenerate my health past full. I sank deep into my meditative state.
Normally, I reflected, this would be about the point where I gave up. Some last residue of the plague of my former cowardice remained, I wanted to run and bury my head in the sand as I had in every confrontation at Winslow. Shit was getting too real and, for all my big talk, I hated real shit. Fucking hated it.
But could I stomach it? If I couldn't it would mean abandoning dad, and if this was one of my wanky Xianxia web-novels that choice would be a permanently corrupting influence on my Dao.
When shit got real with Armsmaster, I stayed with him. The result was nearly dying and my chronic suffering. Would that happen here, now that shit was real? Was I going to have a thing about standing too close to people just in case they were dimensionally shearing bear traps?
For a very long time, I hadn't understood what 'being Triumvirate' meant outside the reality that everyone would love me. It meant shit like this though, getting your legs blown off by a psycho then regrowing them and going back for more because it was the right thing.
No pussying out, you had to be a Hero.
Even if Alexandria, Legend and Eidolon were up to shady shit as they tried to save the world they never pussied out.
I really wanted to save dad, but I wasn't sure if I had the battle tendency. That heat in my blood.
I watched as my feet regrew. I thought about the Ship of Theseus. Had enough of me been replaced that I could be a completely different Greg? Did that matter? Was my metaphorical past self being dead and buried just wishful thinking? I liked to think I'd changed, that me from the past would have given up, had he the chance, when he blew himself up fighting Hans but I as I was now would not. I'd had a lot of fantasies about that, working through the electrical burns to hurt him in various ways.
I guess it came down to what I could live with. If I dipped, went back to the van, and dad was rescued without me could I live with knowing I hadn't tried my best to save him? But what if I stayed, and I died for real this time? Would that be worth it?
I had the potential to be strong enough to help a lot of people if I gave it a few years. I'd be in charge of a whole department, geared to use those resources to better people's lives even after society's collapse. Would it be worth risking my future Good?
I know dad would tell me it wasn't, that I should play it safe and 'put all my money in a compounding fund' as it were. That I was worth more than him. But he was my dad, he had to say that. I know mum would say the same, but how could I ever look her in the eye after?
I wiggled the forming stumps of my toes, and didn't that feel weird.
My mana topped out and I hauled myself to my feet. I took a moment to wipe the moisture out of the inside of my visor and equipped my spare armoured uniform.
Yeah, I'm thinking I'm back.
I took a deep fortifying breath. Bakuda was prepared whilst I had run in like a big fucking idiot, half-cocked expecting to walk through like I owned the place. I didn't even need to be four times smarter than anyone.
Even chimpanzees understood a basic ambush.
My clone walked to the door leading further into the cineplex, a blank blue humanoid figure rather than anything identifying. Its hands touched the doors, pushing. The second the door opened more than a crack there was a terrific bang. I flinched, covering my ears as sound waves rolled over me in a vicious crescendo and bright blue fire splattered over the floor and walls, continuing to burn without heat.
I stood safely on the ceiling in the furthest corner from the door, invisible, and waited. I was sure Oni Lee would be sent back in to check and correct his fuck-up. They wouldn't send a normal human, given how easily I'd subdued them, and Bakuda would be too busy organising the defence. I didn't think Lung would be here just yet, it had only been some fifteen minutes since Armsmaster sent that text and, more importantly, I couldn't hear fighting from outside.
Without warning Oni Lee appeared in the middle of the room, gun drawn. In an eyeblink three more of him appeared at key points, keeping all of the areas within view of at least one of them.
I steeled myself. One breath in, one breath out.
On the end out the out-breath, my tags went off. Doors, windows, corners; anything that could be used as an exit point or hiding place hidden behind thick clouds of smoke before Lee could react. I took control of the smoke, expanding it without needing to touch it, coating the walls and ceiling.
"I'm trapped, dark blue smoke covers my exits."
I dropped lightly to the floor, commanding the smoke to fill the room.
"Dark smoke?" Bakuda's voice was an incredulous bark. "It was that fucking Ward?"
"It's closing in and I cannot see them."
"Shiiiiit. Well, kill them if you can and try not to do an actual suicide bomb."
"Understood."
He hung up and multiplied. Lee upon Oni Lee filling the remaining space, all firing their handguns at random into the smoke. Each time one turned to ash another took its place, endless Lee's and endless bullets sending sound waves disorientingly echoing through the room.
I held up my shield, Mana Object at a thickness tested to be bulletproof, jaw gritting as bullets splintered chips off of it. The smoke encroached further, each inch cutting off teleport space until only the original Oni Lee remained.
He went still. "I have failed to kill him."
"God damnit!" Bakuda hissed. "How did this happen? I'm smarter than this. You told me there was a fucking huge puddle of blood. What is he, fucking Brute five as well?"
Lee took a breath to answer but I was already moving. I dissolved the shield, one hand encasing his face and the other jabbing him in the neck with the sedative. I grabbed his gun, and leapt back, running up the wall to a window I'd left open and slipped out of it. I stuck to the wall, still invisible and took off. I couldn't take the chance he'd explode too, and he was packed to the gills with tinkertech grenades. It wasn't going to happen again.
I ran up, onto a different part of the roof with no access door. I huddled up against the only cover available, the ventilation duct and dropped my invisibility. I got out my phone.
Greg: oni lee tranqued
I had a few paths to go down. In one I would go find Lung and tranq him before the fighting started, which may actually make Bakuda surrender. Or it might make her freak out and kill everyone in the building including herself, in which case I would have to disable her first then get Lung, hopefully, once he wasn't too strong.
My phone buzzed.
Bromaster: thank you
Bromaster: get the fuck back here, now
Huh? A cold pit began to settle in my stomach. Something had gone obviously, terribly wrong. I slipped across the roof, jumping down to the ground and racing back to the group. Even as I neared I didn't drop my invisibility; Coil had snipers.
Armsmaster turned to face me as I neared, several people startling as he spoke.
"Dark Smoke. Good work on Lee, but it's provoked Bakuda ahead of schedule. She's just let us know that if we don't show her that you're here she's going to start killing hostages."
Oh shit, oh fuck. God, I was stupid. Why didn't I see that she was going to go with the hostages? It's so frikken obvious.
"With that in mind," Armsmaster continued. "We're going to move fully into the negotiation phase. This has unfortunately turned into a siege. I had hoped that Lung would show himself but he seems to have snuck in the back and is hiding with Bakuda. I have a feeling he's going to come out for a confrontation once he's ready, he has taken on our entire team at once before as I'm sure you remember."
His lips quirked into a bitter, brittle smile above his beard but there was something else in it, a reminder. Knowing him, he wanted me to inject Lung with his sedative then face him on his own while the gang leader was slowly weakened. I suspected he would take whatever win he could get though, even if he had to share it with the rest of his team.
He turned to the assembled heroes and troopers. "We're pulling forward, form up around the building."
The looks he got were vaguely mutinous. The mood had slid considerably when people realised the gist that not only was he talking to me, but had seemingly sent me into an incredibly hostile tinker trapped building to take down psychotic murderers.
Yeah, that sounded insane. Why had he okayed that? I was too keyed up about dad to think about it but as I watched him for a moment as people finally started following his orders, he was still vibrating with that manic intensity. This couldn't be about his job, or my dad, or else he'd have been pulling stunts like this for years. Even the time pressure of the Nine's appearance didn't make sense in pushing him this far…ah.
He thought they were here for Mannequin to do a hit on him and, wanted to go out in a blaze of glory.
That was why he'd rushed into this with no plan and was letting me do what I wanted, he didn't think it would matter. The cold pit that had been settling in my belly grew heavier, was this just some suicide mission?
The trucks began to move. I moved soundlessly to the portable toilet truck and slipped inside the cubicle. I fell to my knees, dropping my invisibility and vomited noisily into the toilet bowl, the pungent smell mixing with the faint notes of toilet chemical and shit. I rested my chin on the rim of the seat and sobbed quietly into my arm.
What the fuck was even going on.
Chapter 76: Things are looking up 8.7
Chapter Text
"Stop fidgeting."
Armsmaster clamped his iron grip around my shoulder in an approximation of a soothing gesture, all smiles.
"Our profiles indicate Bakuda is incredibly proud, paranoid and trigger happy."
We walked, each at one end of a dichotomy. My feet barely shifting the encrusted salt underfoot, soundless, his tromping through with over a hundred kilograms of machinery all whirring and smashing through.
"I nearly died again."
There was the slightest pause in his gait.
"She killed one of her own guys and blew my legs off," I continued voice low. "She's mad. How could you let me go in there?"
"I… didn't think she was that trigger happy," he said after a moment. "If I had I promise I would have forbidden you, but I thought you'd disobey orders and go in anyway so I just figured I'd run with the opportunity."
"You're probably right on that. I definitely need to learn that lesson, but, my legs, dude. She blew off my legs," cold sweat broke out under my uniform. "I had to watch them grow back. It was fucked, it was so fucked."
"I'm sorry you had to go through that. If it makes any difference you're forbidden to go after Bakuda."
I groaned painedly. "My dad is still in there."
"And still alive, no doubt," Armsmaster replied briskly. "We'll win here today."
He said that, but… "is this a suicide mission because you think Mannequin is going to kill you?" I blurted out.
He started to say something heated, but paused and took a breath. "Your Thinker rating has gone up, I see. But, no. You really think I'd go into this without a plan and risk dozens of lives? Do you really think so little of me?"
"I'm just fucking scared, man, do you know how it feels to get your legs exploded?"
"Yes. How long have I been in this business, Greg?"
"Eighteen years-"
"Eighteen years, yes. How long has Bakuda?"
"Less than half of one."
"Indeed," Armsmaster said darkly. "So what do you think would happen if I were to get a hold of a sample of her tech?"
"You made a jammer."
"I made a jammer," he reached out and stroked the shaft of the third halberd stuck to his back, lovingly. "And over the years I've fought Lung several times, leading to the tranquilisers I gave you. You took out Oni Lee, making this operation far easier than I would have been otherwise, and I'd be surprised if he ever truly regained consciousness. With him out of the way, I merely have to get the jammer within range and all of her bombs cannot go off. A child could arrest her after that and, if all goes well Lung will be dosed and easily defeated; with any luck, the both of them will come out to 'negotiate' and we can have this whole operation done and dusted within five minutes."
"Why would they both come out? Bakdua's really smart and Lung can't be that stupid."
Armsmaster barked a short laugh, reaching over his shoulder again and detaching the Jammer Halberd. He held it out for me, "put this away and when I tell you to throw it near Bakuda. Your aim is better than mine."
I inventoried the halberd.
"I mightn't be suited for office politics, but I know villains."
We stepped out of the alleyway we were taking and onto the street in front of the cineplex. Armsmaster held up the megaphone he'd been carrying. "Bakuda, we're here to bargain."
His voice echoed through the empty street, waves of sound crashing back to me from even inside the building. I could hear four sets of footsteps, one carrying something heavy and the other three hesitant.
The automatic doors opened and three scared civilians stepped out onto the pavement followed by Bakuda, a big grenade launcher barely hefted in her arms. The light caught on the lenses of her gas mask, red tint flaring white. Her breath came out mechanical, hissing.
I Observed her.
"Bargain?" her incredulous voice boomed from inside the mask. "Your 'bargain' is fuck off or I kill another one."
Another one? As revenge for me taking out Oni Lee?
"We just want the hostages to remain safe. We know you could kill them all with a thought-"
"Don't you pander to me," Bakuda interrupted him. "You think I haven't read the same hostage negotiation manuals as you? You think there's a chance I'll fall for that 'understanding' bullshit and give up?"
"No," Armsmaster replied evenly. "I don't. I know you know how this works, so you know I mean it when I say that if this progresses-"
The shivering lady on the left turned into a puddle of slop.
I shied back, eyes wide. Beside me, Armsmaster did the same.
A thin mocking laugh, reduced to mechanical wheezing.
"I said don't try that bullshit with me, understand?" she waved behind her and another hostage wobbled up, tears running down their face. "I'm in charge here. There won't be any bargaining or negotiation; you'll do as you're told."
"Got it," said Armsmaster, voice blank. Then, quietly to me, "whenever you're ready take the shot."
"Grab the kid by the neck, pick him up."
I turned to look at Armsmaster, shaking my head.
"Play along," he whispered and with both hands grabbed me around the neck.
I tried not to hyperventilate as my feet dangled above the asphalt.
"Choke him."
Armsmaster's grip tightened and it was only for my Self Mastery that I managed to keep my panic internal. He was hamming it up a bit and my neck armour was keeping him from actually hurting me but Bakuda's laughter rang loud and unrestrained like this was the funniest thing in the world.
"Do you dumb fucks get it now?" she crowed, planting the barrel of her grenade launcher on the ground and using it to stay standing against her wracking shoulders. "I'm twelve steps ahea-"
Armsmaster dropped me. In the time it took for my feet to find solid ground his jamming halberd was in my hands and I'd ratcheted my speed boost magic up as high as it would go. Things seemed to slow down as my feet slid into javelin throw position, halberd raised above my head. My blood burned through my brain. I think the deadman's switch was the only thing that kept me from aiming for centre mass.
I flung my arm forward, the halberd rocketing in a shallow arc faster than a human could react. It slipped through the gap between two hostages by a hair and took Bakuda in the knee, piercing into the concrete behind her.
Her wild scream was stripped of agony, just one long monotone 'Aaaaaah'. She fell, flailing in the dirt, gripping her stump leg as blood poured from the wound.
Beside me Armsmaster exhaled loudly, an incredible amount of tension bleeding away in the sigh.
"Fantastic throw. God damn, today is going just perfect," he turned and grinned, though it was incredibly forced. "Two casualties. Two! Unheard of. Now let's go, we've still got one left. Maybe we should give you the hat trick and make it three for three?"
Maybe I could just go away, Brazil style. That might be nice for a holiday. You up for taking over?
Hey, if you're going I'm going, too.
I followed as Armsmaster led the way, standing off to the side as he calmed the weeping hostages and updated the PRT.
"Fucker!" Bakuda spat, tightening the strap of a grenade bandoleer around her thigh as a makeshift tourniquet. "Do you have any idea who you're dealing with?"
Armsmaster paused from where he was attempting to give the hostages directions to the ambulances that had come with us to jab Bakuda with the butt of his halberd. She spasmed, tased, and lay panting glaring at us malevolently through the lenses of her gas mask.
"Take everything she has on her," he said to me. "Even if you suspect it may be able to be used to Tinker, especially the mask. Hurry, Lung is coming."
This spurred the hostages to hoof it across the road and through the alleyway.
I glanced up at the doors and a tall, heavily built figure was visible through the wavy opaque glass and it was approaching. I jolted into motion, hands moving like the tentacles of a methed up octopus, inventorying everything in reach. Gas mask, bandoleers, gloves, grenade launcher all the way down to the point where I had to give her a shirt and pants out of my inventory. I had to leave the sensor on her chest; if I took it off before it was deactivated it would think she was dead and then…
Bakuda might have been pretty, once, but then she murdered a woman in front of me. That ugliness expressed itself in the curl of her lip, the set of her shoulders.
I sucker-punched her in the jaw, feeling it splinter under my knuckles into enough pieces that she'd never chew food properly again. Bakuda's eyes rolled up and she collapsed onto the pavement like a jellyfish.
The automatic doors opened, revealing Lung who stood there with his arms folded, expression hidden behind his bespoke metal dragon mask.
"I saw that," he said. "You're going to let this boy get away with it, Armsmaster?"
"His hand slipped," Armsmaster drew his main halberd. "Or she was going for her gear, whichever is easier to buy."
Lung sighed, a jet of flame burning through the mouth hole of his mask. "A broken face for each of you then, I believe this will suffice as punishment."
Armsmaster backed away onto the road, arms open in a clear taunt. "Not this time, Lung. Today it ends."
Lung walked past me onto the road, unfolding his arms.
Armsmaster couldn't be smiling any wider.
I paused for a fraction of a second, goggling as Lung exposed his back to me. They were completely insane, him and Bakuda both. Oni Lee was just someone who didn't care, his morals and sense of self worn down over the years by his power, but he didn't posture or front. A job was a job to him, you just did it and clocked off.
But Bakuda and Lung were going to lose everything because they had to prove something, at any cost.
I burst forward, a vial of sedative in each hand, and plunged them both into Lung's neck before he could react. He swung at me, flames curling off his fist, but I danced out of the way.
"You're so god-damn stupid," Armsmaster scoffed, levelling his halberd. "You have five minutes to think about it while I beat your ass. Dark Smoke, take Bakuda away."
Glimmering scales worked their way out of Lung's skin as he ping-ponged a glare between Armsmaster and I, then he exploded in a fireball.
I dodged back, the sudden heat crisping my exposed skin and singing my eyebrows. Lung lunged for me, directly into my hasty snap kick. It hit him directly in the solar plexus, doubling him over, then I used the momentum of the first kick to jump into a second one this time sending him skidding across the road in a blast of magic.
Armsmaster intercepted, swinging his halberd like a bat into Lung's skull. I heard the bone crack and the meat underneath squish, another fireball exploding in response.
"Get out of here!" Armsmaster shouted, backing away as the flames licked along his armour. "That's an order!"
I grabbed Bakuda under one arm, picked up the jammer halberd in my free hand, took one last look at Lung who was stirring to his feet in the middle of an unending conflagration, then ran.
Even though I was uninjured I was made to sit on the back of an ambulance with a breathing mask and a blanket. Weld and the others had turned up but hadn't said anything.
In front of me, visible to only my eyes, hung my AZN Bye Bye quest completion notice. I'd failed the optional secondary requirements of killing Oni Lee, Bakuda and Lung as well as the tertiary requirements of killing the gang members, which I was ok with. The experience gains pushed me to level nineteen, I'd gotten a tattoo cosmetic of an eastern dragon wearing an oni mask holding a nuke (which was actually really baller,) and a wall scroll signifying that I'd taken out the gang.
It was actually a really big win if you thought about it. Beneath the loss of my legs and the two hostages, we'd taken out the entirety of the ABB's supercriminals in a day, effectively beheading the gang and leaving the body to splinter into a dozen unconnected factions who despised each other. It was the kind of win you heard about Eidolon pulling off.
I could hear people all around, the tone had changed from bitching about Armsmaster behind his back to saying they knew he knew what he was doing all along and ignoring the elephant in the room of my involvement simply because things had gone well. Not everyone, however. A few voices were discussing reporting it to the Youth Guard and taking Armsmaster to a tribunal.
I wasn't sure where I stood on it. I hadn't given up, and I had succeeded in it. I had saved people. I didn't abandon dad and my actions had without a doubt contributed to his being saved, though he was still in the group of people who were being checked over by Armsmaster and Chris for signs of Tinkertech tampering. Today marked the very first step I felt truly made me a hero.
I put a point into wisdom.
I'd been able to put aside my fear in a much more primal way that I had with my work healing. There, I was safe even though the scent of blood left me in a deep malaise, but here I was risking life and limb. It was different from the Nazi situation, here I had been alone and still kept on.
I put another point into wisdom.
It led me back to the question of, 'Triumvirate?' What did that mean for me, and for my dreams? I'd have to look into them further and find out exactly what their excuses were for the Nemesis program and stranding the Case Fifty-Threes without memories. I'd come to realise that some things were more important than being famous and the public's darling, which might sound obvious and trite but I'd wanted it so badly for so long. Almost everything I'd done had been because I wanted the approval my parents gave freely, but that I couldn't get anywhere else.
Another point of wisdom.
I looked up at the Wards. It was obvious where I'd gone wrong, mum had told me over and over when I was a kid.
Be yourself, yourself.
People didn't like fakes, and you weren't compromising being yourself if you weren't being yourself entirely at any given moment. People had more than one facet, you could be the yourself that worked well with the group. I think I'd realised that before, then forgot about it as soon as it was convenient.
"Thanks for staying here with me, guys."
"It's not a problem," Weld said carefully. "We want to make sure you're alright. We heard. About what you saw Bakuda do, I mean."
I took off my visor, holding it dangling by one of the straps, then set my breathing mask aside. "Yeah. I'll be honest, I'm not ok."
There was a change in their breathing, Dennis' especially. Even if they believed me intellectually, the reality as they saw it conflicted with what I was saying. I was acting like I was sitting on a veranda on a balmy evening, cup of tea at hand.
"I know I still look like everything's peachy but, I'd like to turn that off now. It's not doing any of us any good," I rubbed at my eyes with a thumb and forefinger. "I know it's hard to connect if nothing about the other person is real."
"You don't have to if you don't want," Missy said. It was a little surprising, I didn't think she'd have anything to say to me. "I know that pretending makes it, like, easier sometimes. I guess, I don't know…"
She trailed off, looking embarrassed at having said anything.
I smiled and cut my ability. I didn't cry, but I knew I looked thoroughly miserable. Thankfully, everyone didn't make a big deal about it.
One more for wisdom.
They finally let my dad go, ready for transport to the hospital to get rid of the bomb surgically implanted into his head. I saw him as he was being led to the line of ambulances and bum-rushed him for a hug, both of us bursting into uncontrollable tears.
Chapter 77: Things are looking up 8.8
Chapter Text
Greg: Yeah, I should be there by this afternoon 😘
Savannah: See you then 😘😘
Shit was so cash.
I put my phone into my hoodie pocket. Dad was sitting up in his hospital bed, having just gotten out of surgery for the bomb Bakuda had implanted in his brain, which sounded worse than it was. The bomb was only technically against his brainstem as she clearly didn't have the resources to get people in labour working order after she opened up the cranium and sealed it again, so she had gone with the much easier yet still deadly option.
Mum sat in the chair nearest to the head of the bed. Neither of them looked good. Mum hadn't put the weight she'd lost during her coma back on, leaving her face pinched and gaunt, new lines standing out on her sunken cheeks. Dad was no better, under his new deep eye bags his fearsome beard was gone, revealing a weak chin.
None of my healing magic could fix these issues. I'd healed them both multiple times with my ring of Lay on Hands, which while it did leave them perfectly healthy couldn't do anything about the mental stress.
Mum blew her nose noisily into a tissue. "We've been thinking, Greggums, that when you move to New York we'll come too."
I swallowed past the lump in my throat, "Yeah?"
"It's," she sniffled and blew her nose again, her voice thick. "Safer there."
"And I asked about it before, when V-" the word caught in dad's mouth. He took a great fortifying breath. "Veronica was in her coma. The Protectorate will help us 'relocate' to a nice new house and even refer us for new engineering jobs somewhere."
I reached over a plucked a tissue out of the box on mum's lap, blowing my own nose. "That's great! It sucked so hard when I was in Boston and you could only come down on weekends."
Dad made a wet, sad noise in the back of his throat. "Finally time for us all to get out of this city, eh? You can even introduce us to this lovely Savannah girl of yours."
"Yeah, she's sweet. I'll invite her for dinner when we move; if her parents let her. Oh, her parents are really strict and don't want her dating," I continued at their confused faces.
"In that case, we forbid you from seeing her," Mum tittered, a look of girlish devilry forming on her face. "Now you'll have to sneak behind our backs and have a proper forbidden romance. Stealing precious moments just to see her for five minutes, hushed phone calls in your room late at night… so romantic!"
"We are gonna be working together, so I'll probably get to see her, like, every day."
I couldn't see any other team they'd put me in but the Lancers, though I did qualify for every team they had speed was my primary strength.
Mum looked at me despairingly. "You'd best fix your understanding of girls quick smart, mister."
"It's all in the pageantry, son. At least at first, maybe," said Dad. "You dance the dance. We have much to teach you before you go."
Savannah's hand was sweaty, drenching my own clammy palm. I could feel my pit stains coming through my Smedium v-neck even with inventorying as much of it as I could. What did you say after the obvious chattery when you met for your first date?
I clamped down all signs of nerves as we waited in line at the ice rink, taking a step forward every minute or so as the line moved. Despite the sweat, neither of us were letting go for exactly the same reason.
The chubby guy with a greasy comb-over behind the skate counter lit up in a smile as we approached. "Savvy! It's been too long, how's my favourite customer?"
"Hey, Tony," she returned the smile. "How's it been?"
"Busy as usual," Tony guffawed, drumming is hands animatedly on the counter and looking over at me. "Who's the muscles? You finally got a boyfriend?"
Savannah flushed beet red, nodding shyly. "This is Greg."
I reached over the counter with my free hand and smoothly shook Tony's. "Nice to meetcha," I said, affecting his big smile. "Favourite customer, huh?"
"Oh yeah, she's been coming here for years," Tony gave my hand one last pump and let go. "I keep telling her, I want her on my junior pro team, she's got the moves. Unfortunately not to be."
"I have to study," Savannah said.
I gave her hand a squeeze.
"Yeah, too bad an education's even more important, huh?" Tony chuckled and ambled off to grab our skates. "What's your shoe size, big boy?"
"Ten."
He rummaged around in the racks of skates, "yo, best ones for Savvy's boy. You kids have fun."
We paid for the skates and headed to the rink, finding a spot amongst the crowd to sit down and put them on.
"Savvy, eh? I like that, can I call you Savvy?"
"It just sounds weird coming from anyone else, but I don't mind if you call me Sav," she smiled at me as we took a seat to switch our shoes, her hefting her skate case onto her lap and flicking the latches.
"Sav," I repeated. "Sav, Savvy. I can't do it, I can tell I'm going to slip up and use Savvy."
She pouted petulantly, "do not."
Ok, and locked into my mental vault of things to never do right next to watch moe anime in public. Again.
"I promise I'll try my very best," I lay a hand over my heart, making sure to smile in the utmost sincere way. My parents had told me it was unavoidable that we'd irritate each other in the first few dates, and that put a lot of people off each other, so I was adamant that wouldn't happen to us. I needed to try my best to be myself, but also palatable so that by the time things were settled she couldn't just dump me for being kinda annoying. The perfect crime.
We finished strapping the skates on and waddled the meter from the bench to a gap in the fence around the rink. My skates found ice, and there was a moment of pure fear as I kicked off because I'd never once in my life been ice skating before I found my balance and was gliding smoothly around the other skaters. I was already pushing it by showing off to Savannah by not wearing a huge hoodie so I made sure to push down my Grace so I wasn't floating over the ice like some kind of ethereal skate fairy.
My Ice Skating skill came online, putting into proper context what I was doing with my feet. Shwoo shwoo! I circled around with a big grin on my face, heading back to Savannah who was standing on the edge of the ice with a frozen expression. Something in her jaw set tense as I coasted to a gentle stop next to her.
"Never been ice skating before, huh?"
I smiled past her obvious annoyance. "Nope. It's fun though. I can see why you like it so much."
"And going on eleven years," she said brittly.
"That's really impressive. Until really recently I could never put the effort into something for more than a few weeks."
"Thanks," she ground out through gritted teeth and kicked off into a smooth stride.
This must be the 'unlikeable personality' her Observe bio mentioned she thought she had. I wonder what had set her off. Did she think I was lying about never having skated before? I didn't think that was it, it felt more like she was annoyed at how good I was given her competitive personality. I didn't want to deal with this, how did I sidestep the problem?
I rubbed my eyes briefly before following my ornery girlfriend out onto the ice.
A similar feeling of controlled weightlessness as when I was drifting on my motorbike came over me and I couldn't suppress my smile. With the basics of the skill provided by wherever my power gleaned them I moved effortlessly, too effortlessly. Inhumanly effortlessly.
Dammit.
With an effort I pushed my Grace down again, making sure I pushed with only the barest fraction of my strength. I'd need to somehow get access to a place like this privately, squashing myself down into the box of human limit took so much constant effort. Skill upon enhancement upon effect, engraved into my muscle memory at the deepest level; it was why I could still be exempt from school. If I got distracted for a moment I'd do something so obviously parahuman my identity would be blown. I couldn't do gym class, because it'd be obvious I was almost walking at a normal teenager's sprinting speed, and sitting through classes would be an exercise in frustration having to go through material I'd memorised months ago.
It might actually be worth it to unmask, it was getting harder and harder to remain in the bounds of human movement as my power increased and if I unmasked I'd be able to be myself in public. The only problem was my normal unpowered, parents. Ninety per cent of parahumans could be gunned down like a normal, so feeding them two of my vials mightn't even solve the problem. Maybe if I gave them the Tinker and Thinker vials, they could get set up with cushy jobs and protection details so that some dipshit villain didn't merc them.
Even Legend kept his identity secret, his having a husband was common knowledge.
I caught up to Savannah who seemed determined to outpace me. I could tell that she was actually really good at this, so it didn't really surprise me that someone claiming to have never skated before could bruise her ego so easily.
"I can see why that Tony guy wants you for his pro team," I said encouragingly. "You've really put in the hours, huh?"
Her scoff caught on some phlegm in her throat, "of course I have."
"I meant it when I said it was really impressive, it took Armsmaster forcing me to go to the gym before I stuck with anything for enough time to get good at it."
She smiled frostily, cornering in a wide arc as we reached the end of the rink.
"Do you have any cool tricks I can see?"
She made a little seething noise but I think she could tell I was being genuine in wanting to see.
I really hoped we could get past this hump soon.
After our two hours of skating were up we took a break for lunch at a nearby mall where I took the opportunity to gorge myself on cheap sushi. My appetite, unfortunately, remained within human limits. Or fortunately, maybe, I didn't want to spend my entire paycheque on food every week.
I drenched my last bite of sushi with the little fish of soy sauce, "d'you want to hit up the arcade after this?"
I nodded toward it, just visible around the edge of the food court.
Savannah nodded but didn't say anything. She seemed to have calmed down some but had withdrawn into sulking.
Maybe… maybe I would end up having to dump her for being annoying. I really didn't want to, before today she was really cool and fun to talk to. She was also really hot, like, almost out of my league hot. If I could just find a way to help her smooth over her ego we could be happy together.
I polished off my last bite of sushi, dusted my hands off on my jeans and stood up, holding out my hand to her. She made a complicated expression and took it, letting me pull her to her feet.
"I'll have to go after this," she said as we walked to the arcade. "There was only so much time I could lie from my parents, I'll need to be home for my violin lesson."
She wasn't lying, but I also couldn't tell if it was a welcome excuse to go.
"Hey, no problem. I'll be moving here soon enough, so we'll see each other again," I smiled at her. "Maybe we can even jam together, I've started learning how to play the guitar for my Youtube stuff."
"Can you play classical? I can only play classical."
"I can learn."
She returned the smile a little sheepishly. "I'd like to jam with you."
That's what she said?
"It's a date," I said instead.
She made another complicated expression that was some weird mix between irritation, embarrassment and happiness. Didn't know how to parse that, but it seemed positive.
We went back to amiable chatting after that, and I made sure not to thrash her on all the hand-eye coordination games but this seemed to annoy her again.
"If you can win, then just win," Savannah huffed.
We were playing a competitive version of Whack-a-Mole which of course fell right in my wheelhouse.
I sighed. Best to get it over with.
"What's eating you?"
She set her jaw and didn't look at me, whacking more moles. We whacked moles in silence together for a moment as her body language got increasingly agitated.
She gripped her mole whacking paddle, white-knuckled. "You might be better at ice skating than me," she said in the small voice of someone who knew they were being an idiot.
Ah yes, I had been there before. Once I had been the twelve-year-old screaming 'niggerfaggot' over X-Box live whenever I lost a match.
"I don't think it's really fair on you," I whacked some more moles encouragingly, lowering my voice. "I have, like, six powers I can't turn off that make me better at stuff like that."
"I know," Savannah agitatedly smashed a mole. "Being stupid."
"You are really good at it, sweetie," I ventured. Was that too condescending sounding? "Without my powers, I don't think I'd be good at anything, I wasn't before. I'm not trying to let you win out of pity or anything."
I whacked a mole demonstratively.
"I'm just enjoying spending time with you."
She rubbed at her nose, still not looking at me. "Me too. I know it's dumb."
"It's just a first date," I said. "They're probably all awkward. I'm sure our second one will be way better."
She finally looked me in the eye, with a watery, embarrassed moue, face red.
"Yeah," she said and held out her hand. "It will be."
I took her hand and pulled her into a kiss.
Chapter 78: Epilogue: Sveta Karelia
Chapter Text
1st June 2011- Sveta
Some kind of clicking noise nudged her into the waking world, a bare moment of bleary half-awareness before her tendrils whipped her off her bed and across the room. Sveta cried out, the confused scream soft in the dim light of her room. She struggled against her tendrils ambush predation instincts, trying to calm them down and go back to bed and back to sleep.
It sometimes happened that the wind or a bug tripped the hair-trigger of her body, sending her tendrils into a ravenous frenzy over nothing. Sveta went through her breathing exercises, imagining the breath energy filling her body with calm and control. Awareness, and calm. She felt her hanging organs relax slightly from where they had bunched up in the heavily defended nexus of tendrils, hanging a bit looser and more comfortably. Her tendrils, however, remained tense and coiled; convinced that danger was near.
There was another clicking noise and Sveta's breath caught. That was the sound her door made when it was being unlocked. Her tentacles poised above the door, ready to strike. She was dreaming, surely. It was the middle of the night, nobody was coming in. This was another nightmare.
The door slowly swung open. In the gloom, she could barely make out a large human shape, someone bulky, or wearing something bulky. Sveta screamed out to them, warning them to get away, but it wasn't likely they'd hear her as anything but a soft breathy voice.
The person stepped into the room, exposing their back to her, and her tendrils struck. Wrapping around their neck, lifting them up and shaking them like a dog shakes a rat.
Zak!
There was a sharp popping sound, a flash of light and a brief, but intense, burning pain and she collapsed heavily onto the floor in her open doorway. Paralysed, she couldn't move. Couldn't move anything, not even her eyes. She breathed in an easy, steady rhythm, unable to even hyperventilate in panic which at this point she found she really wanted to do.
"Sorry, Svets."
The intruder knelt down beside her.
"It's me, Greg," he whispered. "This is going to hurt a bit, but I'm going to get you out of here. Trust me."
His hand closed gently around her jaw, the motion incongruously friendly with the pain that followed. He'd done something to her neck, she couldn't see anything of it beside the soft light it was giving off, but it burned constant and dull. She still couldn't move.
What was he thinking? She couldn't get out of here, she was going to hurt people again! She tried to speak up and tell him this obvious fact but she couldn't make a sound. Sveta tried to panic, freak out and cling to her bed so she couldn't be taken away, but her body wouldn't do anything either. She could breathe and blink, but that was pretty much it.
"I've got a plan," said Greg, picking her up with one hand and draping her around his neck like a scarf. "Don't worry."
Sveta worried.
Sveta worried a great deal.
She continued to worry as Greg walked back out of her room, closing the doors behind him, and through the eerie empty hallways of the parahuman asylum. This was insanity, she was being kidnapped by, like, one of her best friends.
Whatever was clasped under her jaw throbbed painfully as Greg manoeuvred through the facility. She'd never been to this part of the asylum before but she knew there were cameras and they could fingerprint the doors and then they'd arrest him. Even though he was kidnapping her he didn't deserve that, he was just trying to help in his own special way. He knew how much it upset her to be stuck in the asylum, but, this wasn't the way to go about it. Maybe after a few more years of therapy, she'd have enough control over herself to take a stroll outside, but not now.
They'd reached the front door, and went through it to the outside world. It had been a long time since Sveta had breathed fresh air.
Outside it was dark, the dead of night, and though there was no moon she could see stars. She liked the stars. There was a jolt as Greg bolted, fast. As fast as she'd ever been able to move, her tendrils lashing their way with whatever handholds they could grasp. She could be quite fast when they wanted to move her somewhere.
Ah, the wind on her face. This was enough, surely. She'd gotten to see the outside again, now he could put her back in the asylum where she wouldn't get loose and rip civilians apart so her tendrils could force-feed her their corpses.
They reached a road, a long, broad highway stretching out as far as she could see the streetlights. Greg jogged to a stop.
"This will take a couple of hours," he said apologetically. "I can't take the collar off, I know it hurts, and I'm truly sorry that I don't have any other way. I'm going to make you human again, Svets."
If her breath could catch, it would have. Human again? He was… what? Was that even possible? It was everything. Her wildest dream, to be free of this horrid body and just be normal. How? How though? He could fix Case Fifty-Three's? He wasn't joking, she could tell, he was going to fix her.
Tears dripped down her cheek and off her ear, plopping onto his shoulder.
"I already owe Amy a shit ton of favours, but this one's definitely worth whatever she's going to have me do. Just sit tight and we'll have you right in a jiffy."
He patted her tendrils near her head consolingly, and suddenly they were sitting on a motorbike. The bike rumbled to life and they accelerated away, taking her to her freedom.
Some painful hours later Greg had ditched the bike and moved into a run without breaking stride. The ride had been exhilarating, scarf though she was. She'd never moved that fast, or so smoothly. It was like flying.
It was still solidly night time but the light of what she assumed to be Brockton Bay blocked out the stars. She was certain it was Brockton. Greg said he was taking her to 'Amy', who could have only been Amy Dallon, aka. Panacea. He'd talked about her to Sveta before, calling her the O G fleshwarper, and that her healing was just because Amy was a cool person who felt bad about people being sick.
Once they were somewhere in the city, and they must have been invisible because nobody had noticed them, Greg jumped, scaling a building and using it to leap to another taller one. He got them up high and slowed to a walk before stopping, stretching and cracking his back.
"Almost there, literally one more minute," he said, shifting her around his neck to he was looking into her eyes. She started crying again and he dabbed at her cheeks with a handkerchief pulled from nowhere. "Maybe I shoulda told you first, but I didn't want there to be any evidence. I hope this makes up for it, 'cause I know I scared the shit out of you back there."
Sveta couldn't say anything or move, but Greg nodded like he understood her feelings.
"I'll warn you now, though, I'm going to jump off the building-"
They were on a skyscraper.
"-but I can glide, so don't worry," he smiled cheerfully, giving her tendrils another friendly pat.
He fixed her back around his neck, took a step that must have carried them five meters, then jumped. They rocketed skyward, then as their momentum began to peter off the rocketed up again in complete defiance of physics. At the peak of this jump, however, there was the sound of something catching against wind and they began to glide at a smooth downward angle. Sveta was treated to a unique bird's eye view of a city at night. She could tell that the area they were gliding towards was a bad part of the city, as evidence of habitation dropped off suddenly and the buildings she could make out seemed more run down.
They began to circle, each revolution taking them lower and lower until they were right up against the roof of a warehouse. The gliding cut out and they dropped the last few meters, landing weirdly gently on the corrugated iron roofing. Greg walked over to a skylight, which must have been blocked off somehow because it wasn't lit from inside, and knocked.
The skylight opened, letting out a brief glimmer of light before they slipped inside and alighted onto the wooden floor. There was a harsh white light coming from somewhere off to her left, but she was facing straight at the floor and couldn't see anyone else. It was a nice floor, though, very handsomely boarded.
"About fucking time."
A girl's voice, Panacea. She sounded much ruder than Sveta imagined, but Greg made a pleased sound in his nose and headed toward it, shifting her around as they went so she could see.
Panacea was shorter than she expected, her milk-white skin contrasting her many freckles unflatteringly in the harsh storm-lantern light. She was dressed in normal clothes, however, that flattered her full figure.
"Sorry I'm late," Greg smiled, holding out his fist which was dismissively bumped. "This is Sveta. Sveta, this is Amy. I'll have to leave you in her care, because I seriously need to hoof it to get back to New York before my bodyguard realises I'm gone but don't worry, she's a doctor."
Amy snorted as Greg unravelled her from his neck and lay her out gently on the floor.
"Yeah, don't worry, I can fix anything this idiot did. Did he drop you? I bet he dropped you."
Sveta wanted to insist that Greg had been very careful, but she still couldn't move.
Greg chuckled and knelt down next to her. "I'll be back tomorrow morning with breakfast, is there anything you want to eat? Amy, do the thing so she can make her breakfast order. Where's your bedside manner?"
"The same place as your common sense," Amy sniped, but knelt down next to her, placing a hand on her cheek. "You're lucky you didn't fry her nervous system with this torture device, leaving it on so long."
"I tested it on Skidmark."
"Oh, well, that's good then. You tested it on Skidmark, problem solved. Take it off her."
Greg blew a raspberry at Amy and the pain vanished. She still couldn't move, then she gasped. Her jaw opened and she took in a long, painful breath into her tiny lungs.
"He didn't drop me," she said in a small voice. Her tendrils weren't responding, but her face moved. She worked her jaw around, savouring that small freedom.
"See?" said Greg. "Perfectly safe. Ok, I really do have to go, though, see you soon!"
He picked her up off the floor and gave her a hug. After he put her down he clasped Amy's hand.
"Good luck," he said.
"Bye, Greg," said Sveta. "Can you bring me homemade pancakes?"
He grinned, saluted, glanced at the ceiling, and jumped back up through the skylight.
"Finally," said Amy. "Now that he's gone we can get this done and I can go home and get some sleep."
"Um, you don't have to, you know, if you don't want to…" Sveta trailed off, cursing herself. She was a stupid doormat.
There was a moment, then Amy sighed. When she spoke again her tone was completely divorced from the snide, clipped voice she spoke in before.
"No, we're doing this. I promised, and besides, I want to know if I can fix you. Greg and I have had many long conversations about Case Fifty Threes, I'd have done this even if he hadn't begged."
"He begged?"
"Like a little bitch," Amy said, but her smile was genuine. Maybe that was just how they spoke to each other, even if it sounded like they were fighting they were just playing around.
"And you think you can fix me?" Sveta asked with bated breath.
Amy shrugged. "I really don't see why not from the look of you I got earlier. You're biological, which I can do just about anything to-"
Sveta had started crying again. She'd done some crying earlier, so all her tears were gone and these were the stinging black bile tears. She didn't care though, that fact was so singularly unimportant.
"Ah, there there," said Amy a little awkwardly. "Let's get started then, eh? You just lay there and I'll get what I need. This is going to take a few hours, integrating foreign matter into you."
Foreign matter? Sveta frowned, blinking her stinging eyes. It did make sense, she was only about fifty pounds of shrivelled organs and whip-thin tendril, and unless the extra mass came from somewhere she'd have to be a little girl. She wasn't terribly sure exactly how old she was, but she was clearly into her teens. Fourteen, if she had to place it. Being turned into a five-year-old, which she would take without hesitation if it came to it, wasn't exactly what she had imagined when she pictured herself as human.
She knew that was being greedy and presumptuous. She should take what she was offered and be happy with it, anything was better than what she was now, even being a child.
After a few minutes, there was the sound of fatty flesh slapping the floor, and Amy grunted with a bit of effort, clearly pushing something toward her. Sveta struggled to look, but she was still facing away. More black tears stung her eyes, it was time.
She felt something warm and heavy touch her tendrils from behind, then Amy stepped back around in front of her and sat down, putting her hand back on her cheek.
"This is going to feel extremely fucking weird, but bear with me. I'm going to use what you have now to make your head and torso, then I'll do the limbs after that out of this," Amy reached over and slapped something loudly, the heavy thing rippling against her. "And we can talk about how you want to look."
Sveta was about to say anything was fine but quickly bit her tongue. It was her body being made, she should get to choose what she looked like; there was nothing wrong with that. Stupid doormat Sveta, she almost ruined everything.
"Thank you," she whispered instead. "Thank you so much, I'll do whatever you want-"
Amy snorted and patted her roughly on the cheek. "I'll put it on Greg's tab. Now, let's get to it."
Sveta couldn't nod, so she moved her eyes up and down rapidly.
Slowly, her flesh began to melt. She felt it, like Amy had put it, as extremely fucking weird. She could tell her tendrils wanted it to stop, that they'd rip Panacea to shreds if they had the chance, but they were in her iron control. At that moment they weren't Sveta's tendrils, nor even their own tendrils, they were Amy's tendrils to do with as she pleased.
She felt her eyelids droop, consciousness fading into warm fuzzy sleep. She went in and out of this state a few times, finally coming into sharp consciousness. She took a deep breath; it didn't hurt.
Tears sprang to her eyes; they didn't sting.
Sveta spoke; it wasn't unnaturally soft.
"What?"
She could see Amy sitting cross-legged, earbuds in her ears connecting to her phone on the floor. Amy popped them out.
"Done with the torso. All your organs are there and properly sized-"
"Thank you!" Sveta shouted, taking as many full breaths as she could. "Thank you, thank you, thank you!"
It was still her voice, naturally a bit soft and kind of faux-Russian accented, but it was a human voice now. No longer the voice of Garotte the murder squid.
"Don't worry about it," Amy said bluntly. "I'm going to put you back under while I do your arms and legs, then I'll wake you up to give them a test drive. You don't need to worry about turning back either, I think, everything is staying where it should."
Sveta tried to shout her thanks in Amy's face again, but darkness fuzzed around her vision and sleep took her.
Sveta wiggled her big toe. Her big toe. Sveta had a foot, a human foot attached to a human leg connected to a human body.
It was… Ecstasy. Human hormones pumped through her human veins. It was pure joy, even if Amy stopped here and left her with a body like a featureless doll it would be so much more than she could have ever hoped for.
She tried to sit up, but slipped and flopped on the floor. She laughed, wild and unrestrained as she flailed her arms and legs feeling like a baby deer just being born.
"I love you!" she shouted at Amy, squirming over to try and hug her as tears and snot -snot!- ran down her face. "I love you so much!"
Amy held her down uncomfortably. "Thanks."
After a few minutes of squirming and incoherent soppy babbling, she felt herself start to calm down.
"Sorry, Amy," she said even though she was still smiling widely.
Amy shrugged, looking up from her phone. "I get it, take your time. Try sitting up, all your nerves are connected but you're going to have to learn how to use everything. I don't think it'll take you longer than a few days, everything's in tip-top shape. Ask Greg to get you a wheelchair when he gets back, maybe, if it's too hard."
Sveta tried to lift her arms up but it was an experience wholly divorced from having tendrils and her elbow jerked, making her punch herself in the chest. She giggled.
After a few minutes of incredibly enjoyable flailing but being unable to sit up Amy sighed boredly and the floor began to rise, lifting her into a sitting position.
"Gosh, thank you," Sveta squeaked, almost falling out before the chair tightened around her, locking her into it.
Amy grunted and the chair began to walk her over to a full-length mirror. Beside it on a bench growing out of the wall were a folded set of clothes. The chair stopped and she got her first look at her new body.
She was bald, flat and almost featureless. It looked like Amy had given up halfway through forming her old face onto her new skull. She was hideous. She burst into tears again, resisting the urge to gibber thank-yous that Amy pretty clearly didn't want to hear.
"Yep," said Amy, looking uncomfortable. "It's all there. I made you average height, but let me know how tall you want to be first because otherwise, it'll make more work for me later trying to fix things."
"Five two," said Sveta immediately. Small and cute, she'd always wanted to be small and cute.
"Right…" Amy put her hand on Sveta's shoulder -shoulder!- and her body itched hot and cold as she shrunk a few inches. "I assume you've thought about what you want to look like."
Obsessed about, more like. She had dozens of links to pictures memorised as references that she pictured herself as. She blushed -blushed!- as a thought came to her.
"Um, and what if I, you know, with a boy-"
"Everything's normal," Amy interrupted her. "You'll enjoy it just fine."
Sveta bowed her head, she could feel the blood having rushed to her head. She had real red human blood, and it was rushing to her face. It felt so good.
"Thank you," she said in a small voice. "Can you look up some things on your phone? I have a few pictures for you to reference if that's ok?"
Amy shook her head but reached into her pocket for her phone. "How hot do you want me to make you?"
"Very, please."
"You know, this is the first time I've ever done cosmetic on someone. I don't think normal people deserve it, but I won't have much choice if I do any other Fifty Three's."
"You're going to do the others?" Sveta asked with wonder.
"Not immediately," Amy hastened to add. "You're the test case, we need to make sure you don't turn back into whatever it was you were before."
"Greg was right," Sveta looked at Amy with awe, tearing up again. "You're a really good person."
Amy looked like she was suppressing a gag, but didn't say anything further and held her phone out.
Sveta took the hint.
"Can you type in 'blood boundary main girl'?"
Amy's thumbs tapped her phone in a quick staccato. She narrowed her eyes and frowned.
"You really are his friend, I can't make you look like this."
"Um," Sveta stammered. "Just as a base. I mean, I know you can't but it's just a reference. I have some real models, too, obviously, I want to look human and having eyes that big would just ruin that. I promise I know, it was just an idea, you don't have to if it's too much, honest."
No, stupid doormat. Take it back. Sveta couldn't make herself say it, however.
"No, I'm sorry," said Amy, not meeting her pleading eye. "I'll make it work, however you want to look. Just, stop crying, please."
They had spent a long while fine-tuning her features and body until Sveta was utterly, beyond perfectly happy with them. Amy was truly, without question, the third nicest person she had ever met.
After they were done Amy had told her she wanted to go home and sleep, and that Greg would be there eventually. She'd helped Sveta get dressed into the unisex grey sweats Greg had left for her, put her to sleep and presumably left.
Sveta awoke again to the smell of something delicious. Her stomach rumbled loudly and she shifted on her pole… She jolted awake. Sveta burst into tears again when she remembered where she was.
"Morning!"
She gasped, turning. Greg sat on a chair near her organic bed, a plate of steaming fresh pancakes on a small blue table next to her.
"I can't believe I've never cooked anything before," he said. "I had to re-do these until my cooking skill levelled up a bit. I had some, fucking delicious."
Sveta wailed, almost falling out of bed until Greg pushed her back onto it, crouching beside her.
"Amy is so nice," she sobbed, feeling her hair bunch up as she shifted. "I love her so much!"
"It's why she's my other best friend," Greg lifted her up under the armpits into a sitting position against the wall, her legs dangling off the edge of the bed. "I'm really sorry I had to spring all this on you last second, I had the idea kicking around for a while and realised I should just do it."
"You don't, you can't," Sveta collected herself. "Please don't be sorry for this, ever. You don't know how much it means to me."
Greg smiled, and looking into his eyes she could tell he wasn't the same person who came to see her. Something in them was older, wiser. Maybe he did know.
"Anywho," he moved the table and plate of pancakes to brush against her dainty knees -knees!-. "Dig in before they get cold. Maybe don't eat too quick, that's a new stomach you're breaking in."
Sveta tried to pick up the knife and fork and almost punched her breakfast before Greg caught her arm.
"Sorry."
"Nah, my bad," Greg shook his head. "I didn't realise. Here."
He cut her a slice, it dripped with butter and maple syrup. Her mouth watered as he lifted it up to her, easing it into her dainty mouth.
She started crying again. She really needed to stop doing that, but even before she was a crier. She'd read a sad news article and cry, she'd think about the sad article later and cry again. She couldn't help it, even when she knew she'd cry bile it would still happen.
It truly was the best thing she had ever tasted. She over chewed and had trouble swallowing it until Greg levered a bottle of water for her to sip. She gasped as food made its way down her new throat for the first time.
"It's good, right?" Greg cut her another bite. "I'm so bloody lazy, these pancakes are the first things I've cooked that were complex enough to give me a skill. I'm going to be making all my meals from now on if you want to taste test them for me."
Sveta nodded vigorously as he gave her another slice, just as buttery and syrupy as the first.
"We've got to get you walking first, obviously. Amy said it shouldn't take you too long, and I agree, going off your stats. I'll make you the apparatus they get people in rehab to use to get used to walking again and we can start on that after breakfast. I don't have all day, but I told Armsmaster I'd be busy with personal life stuff for a while so I'll be here as often as I can until I can get you set up with a new civilian identity, which won't be as hard as it sounds; Leviathan trashed a lot of stuff, we should be able to just slot you in in the chaos."
Oh, right. Sveta stopped chewing. She'd forgotten that Leviathan hit Brockton.
"After we get you all set up, then, well, you can do whatever you like. I'll introduce you to Weld, too."
Sveta opened her mouth too quickly and the pancake fell out onto her lap. Greg laughed and forked it back into her mouth.
"I'm sure he'd be happy to meet you, too," Greg winked, holding up the water for her again. "Amy does good work."
Sveta spluttered a little before forcing down her mouthful. "Right?! Even though it took so long, and I kept asking her to make tiny changes, she put up with me."
"We might have to get her back, actually," Greg grimaced. "Until you can go to the toilet by yourself. She'll have to come in and check on you anyway, since we're both not sure if you'll change back, but I think you'll be fine. I can't see anything on you that says you won't stay like this, and she told me the same."
"Even if I start to change back, just this time spent like this is worth so much to me. I'm so lucky."
"No one deserves it more," Greg cut another slice of pancake. "Except maybe Weld, but…" he sighed despondently. "Amy won't be able to fix him. He's on the wrong end of the Manton limit for her, so when she goes public with this in a few years you'll have to be there for him too."
Sveta couldn't imagine a world where she would do anything less. Weld was her hero, all of their hero's.
"I will."
Her hand thumped her leg, which was what she actually wanted it to do.
"But I'll need to walk first."
Greg held out the pancake. "Lets fucking go, then."
3rd June
Sveta woke during the night. It was still pitch black inside the warehouse, which meant it was somewhere near the middle of the night. She could feel her foot with her fingers, which didn't make any sense because she was lying flat. She lifted her arm, confused, and something resembling a thin pool noodle lifted her blanket.
Sveta screamed, which activated the bio-luminescent moss, and thrashed as her tendril arm flailed wildly. She fell out of bed, hitting her chin on the floor and biting her tongue. No, it couldn't be, not so soon! She was turning back, people were going to die.
Her right arm was still human and she used it to pull herself up, scrabbling for the phone she'd been given. She knocked it to the floor and her tendril left arm tried to reach for it but pushed it further away. Sveta crawled desperately toward the phone, one of her knees giving out as it unravelled into a tendril. She hit her chin again as she fell, still pushing against the floor. Her physical therapy was going well, and she had just about enough control over her body to slide across the floor like a baby.
She reached her phone, taking it in her good hand as her other leg unravelled. She fumbled the keys, hitting the wrong button and had to go back until she could get into her contacts list. Two numbers, Greg and Amy, she dialled Greg first.
One ring.
"Sveta? What's wrong?"
"Help!" She gasped, feeling her neck start to lengthen. "It's happening!"
Dial tone.
That meant he was coming, right? She felt her fingers of her good hand come undone, the phone clattering to the floor. He had to be coming. He'd heard her. She needed to believe that. Sveta made herself breathe, go through the exercises Doctor Yamada gave her. She felt like her tendrils weren't as wild as they used to be, but that might have just been that they were still reforming. She was still, she was calm.
Sveta repeated this over and over in her mind. The breathing exercises, which had clearly been designed with humans in mind, feeling much easier. It was almost like her tendrils were obeying her, that her brief experience as a person had taught her some measure of control.
So she lay there and breathed.
Before long, though it could have easily been twenty minutes, she heard the door to the warehouse open, faint illumination spilling into the room. She held herself still, using the iron will she had cultivated over the past two days to keep herself in check and her tendrils from hurting Greg.
"Sveta!" she heard him say, and suddenly he was by her side heedless of the danger. "It's ok, everything's fine!"
"I'm turning!" she sobbed, forcing herself still.
"No, no! You're not, you're fine. Breathe."
She was breathing. She was breathing with more focus than she ever had before in her life.
"You're not turning back, your power's just coming through in a different form," Greg picked her up, cradling her. "You're ok, you can turn back. She's fine, just scared."
"Oh, good."
The other voice was Amy. Sweet, beautiful Amy.
"Sveta, it's ok. Focus on pulling yourself together, that's it. Good work, doin' great."
She heard the floor creak slightly as Amy knelt beside Greg, but didn't dare open her eyes as she felt Amy's hand on her giraffe-like neck.
"Yeah, he's right. You haven't changed back, calm down," Amy withdrew her hand grumpily. "We expected something like this, remember? Chill."
"Amy, please," said Greg wearily. "Be nice."
"Sorry," said Amy, not sounding sorry in the least. "If I come off as a little cross it's because I didn't expect you to break into my room in the middle of the night and shake me awake."
"Yes, yes, boohoo. You're very hard done by."
"Feh."
"I'm not turning back?" Sveta asked, blinking her eyes open. For a moment they swam with tears before they cleared and she could see Greg's round face staring down at her with Amy next to him, also looking worried belaying her grumpiness.
"Nah," Greg lifted her into a sitting position, holding her steady. "You're just Slenderman now. You're even taller than me. You should still be able to move properly, give it a try."
Sveta took a shuddering breath and swallowed. She tried to lift up her left arm. It rose just how she wanted, then started to compress back into human form. It shrunk fully, turning back into her new arm with its slim wrists and dainty fingers. She gave her hand a flex and pulled the rest of herself together. Soon she was sitting on the floor, whole and normal, feeling very silly.
"See?" said Greg. "Good as new. This makes everything a bit easier, actually. Assuming you want to join the Wards, at least. They'll rush through any papers you need and give you a place to stay, plus you'll get to work with me and Weld."
Sveta was silent as Amy leant forward again, touching her face. She did want that. She really wanted that.
"I'll make sure Armsmaster understands that it's important you aren't thrown onto the field yet."
He'd told her about the unfortunate timing, with the Slaughterhouse Nine in the city.
"He's been pretty cocky since he got that commendation for the ABB thing, but he'll do me a solid."
"I'd love to," Sveta said in a small voice.
Amy pulled her hand back. "She's completely fine. You can take me home now."
"Amy, you dumb bitch. Ten minutes won't make a difference."
Amy yawned loudly, stood up and kicked his leg in a way that must have been friendly because it didn't look like he felt it at all.
"I'll bring you into the PRT after I take her home," Greg turned back to her. "Gives me an excuse for running off when I should be in bed, too, so everyone wins. You'd better get your backstory straight before we go in though. Are we still going with homeschooled, parents dead?"
"You should go with mail-order bride, she sounds Russian enough," chimed in Amy.
Sveta laughed because she didn't want Amy to feel bad about her terrible joke. But… maybe she could be Weld's mail order bride? No, that was too embarrassing to think about.
"Homeschooled, dead parents," she said. It was a difficult backstory for anyone to corroborate, but also catch her out on. Her parents had been Eastern European migrants who had homeschooled her without entering her into the system because they didn't trust it, which had actually happened before. She remembered reading a news article where it had been discovered that very thing had happened, the only difference was that her parents had gotten her a computer with the internet for some reason. Didn't make complete sense, but it didn't need to.
"It'll work," said Greg standing up and offering a hand to her. "Even if they don't want to buy it, not only do they want every parahuman they can get, I'm bringing you in. Everything will go peaches and cream."
She reached up and took his hand, letting him haul her to her feet. Her legs wobbled, threatening to spill her onto the floor again.
"Can we take a minute, please? I'm a little shaken up."
Amy groaned and Greg shushed her.
"But we can go now, I really don't mind it's no problem."
Amy groaned again. "No, don't worry. A few more minutes won't matter."
Greg gave her a look as if to say 'see?'. He'd told her Amy liked to bitch and moan but would do the right thing regardless and she shouldn't let Amy push her around. He got out his motorbike from his dimensional subspace and wheeled it to the front door, Amy followed him and Sveta realised they were giving her some space to centre herself. She felt tears start to well up again. They were so nice.
Sveta took a few shaky steps and started going through a series of Tai Chi exercises Greg had taught her. She was in control, there were no tendrils. Everything was alright.
Sveta sat in the conference room in the PRT building. Greg was nearby, somewhere. Everything was going exactly as he said it would and she was just waiting for Battery to get there so she could sign up.
She fidgeted with her mask. She didn't know how parahumans wore the things all the time, even the simple one she'd been given felt cumbersome and restrictive. She was starting to feel very uncomfortable with the plan. She was going to have to lie to the super cops. Sveta hated lying, and was terrible at it besides, so she was getting a horrible twisty feeling in her belly and her limbs felt weak. While it was very nice that she had limbs that could feel weak, it wasn't very nice why.
Sveta fidgeted some more. Was this taking too long? Did they believe Greg? Were they going to find out she used to be Garotte? There was surely no way, and besides, Greg had said the plan would work and he was totally a genius or something. He said he was already at college even though he was only fifteen.
The clock on the wall ticked and Sveta fidgeted. It was getting to the point where she was close to tears, and she knew if Battery opened the door a little too aggressively when she arrived she would burst into tears.
There was something about the door that felt like being Garotte again. A sense of it as an ambush point. It was faint, but she had begun to notice it as time progressed after her initial scare earlier. She could intuitively feel where to surprise someone with an attack.
Thankfully the door was opened gently. Battery walked in with a beleaguered air and Sveta instantly felt bad about giving her more work. She thought about apologising but Battery spoke before she could, making the apology awkward to make.
"You're friends with our Smoke Puncher, eh?"
"Ah, yes?" Sveta said, hamming up her Russian accent a little. She hadn't decided to beforehand but maybe Battery would take it easier on her if she thought Sveta's English wasn't her first language. "We played games together over the internet."
"Well, welcome to Wards ENE," Battery smiled sympathetically. "He let us know you recently lost your parents. I'm very sorry to hear that."
Sveta looked at the table and Battery sat down next to her. "Thank you," she said.
She must have looked a little too small and cute because Battery put a hand on her shoulder in a way that gave off very Big Sister vibes. Sveta choked up and started crying. A lot of parents died to Leviathan and here she was using their deaths selfishly.
"Oh, there there," Battery patted her gently on the back. "Take your time. Do you want me to get you anything? A cup of water? Bagel?"
"Water, please."
Battery gave her back one last pat and stood up. "Be right back."
Sveta took a moment to fight back her stupid guilty tears. It wasn't wrong to lie like this, telling the truth would not only hurt her but Greg and Amy.
Battery entered again with the cup of water and Sveta sipped it gratefully. "Thank you, Battery. I'm feeling better, now."
"There's no rush, honest. This is like a break for me too."
Sveta gave her a watery smile and reached up for the mask. "Am I allowed? The mask itches."
Battery nodded but made no move to reciprocate the unmasking. But that was ok, Sveta didn't mind.
She slipped off the mask and Battery made a funny noise.
"That's a pretty face."
"Thanks. I didn't use to look like this, um, before. You know, before…"
"I know. This is going to be a process, with your parents being, well, deceased. You're going to need a foster carer, who needs to be approved by the Youth Guard, who can sign for you; so we can't induct you straight away, miss?"
"Svetlana," Sveta said. "Svetlana Karelia. But I, um, like to be called Sveta."
Karelia was a region in Russia, which they'd chosen to reinforce that she was so foreign she wasn't in the system. Plus it sounded very pretty, which is why they chose it over something like Brovsk.
And they were changing her first name for very obvious reasons.
"Well, Sveta, do you mind filling out these forms for me so we can do some verification checks?"
She slid a few papers and a pen over to her.
"I will, but… I'm terribly sorry," Sveta hammed her accent up a bit more. "I don't think I will be found. I was homeschooled and my parents were very traditional, papa often complained about the bank and why he didn't trust the American system."
Battery grimaced. "Ok. Well, please fill out as much of the forms as you can. I don't suppose you have a passport? A bus pass?"
Sveta shook her head.
"Do you know what internet provider we might find a Mr Karelia under?"
Sveta froze. Shit! Oh no!
"...nyet."
Battery sighed and shook her head. "Well, please try to do your best. Once you've filled out as much as you can we can find a place for you to temporarily stay."
"Could I stay with Greg? I mean, Dark Smoke Puncher? He has been a very kind friend to me over the years."
"I don't think that's possible, Sveta. I'm sorry but he stays in the Wards private area, and well, you're not a Ward yet. We definitely want you on our team," Battery added quickly, obviously fearing her tears. "But we have rules to follow. We'll speed everything along as best we can-"
The door opened again, aggressively this time. Sveta stifled a sniffle. Armsmaster, and she recognised him by his signature blue suit of armour, entered brusquely.
"Is everything good? Has she signed up?"
"Sir? No, she doesn't have even a bus pass let alone social security. We can't put her through until she has an appointed carer to sign off."
Armsmaster was silent for a moment. "I'm rubber stamping on this, we'll bring her in tonight."
"Armsmaster, sir, we can't flout due process-"
"I'll take the flack for signing on a new Ward, then," he interrupted her. "Look at the poor girl, the court system will chew her up for months before anything can get approved. You can still get the bonus for registering her if you want, but trust me, this way is better for every one of us."
Armsmaster personally escorted her, taking time out of his no doubt very busy schedule to walk her to where all the Wards got to live and hang out as friends.
"Thank you so much, Mr Armsmaster," Sveta quickly trotted after him. His legs were very long and he wasn't walking very slowly, but he was in charge of the whole Protectorate branch so this was probably how he always walked because he was very busy and important.
"Just to be clear," he replied, turning back to look at her. "Everything is above board?"
"Yes, of course!" Sveta heard her voice come out shrill and shaky.
Armsmaster clicked his tongue. "But you are interested in joining the Wards for a good reason?"
"Yes, I am, I promise. I want to help people."
He made an aggrieved noise. "That'll have to do. Not to sugar coat it, but you've joined at a bad time. You stay here and behave yourself, understood?"
He knew. She knew she was a terrible liar, but this was something else. He'd seen through her like a window.
"Thank you, Mr Armsmaster," her voice quavered again, but she held firm and didn't cry. "I'll do my best. I won't let you down."
Armsmaster was silent for a moment as they walked, then his lips moved into a very small smile. "Good. You seem like a nicer kid than he ever was."
"Than Greg?"
Armsmaster nodded. That didn't track, Greg was the second nicest person she'd ever met. What did Armsmaster have against him? Sveta felt like she should fume and defend Greg's honour, but Armsmaster was also very nice so maybe he was just joking around like Amy and Greg did.
Although, she did remember Greg saying he had once blackmailed Shadow Stalker into a date and then got her arrested when she dumped him. But that didn't track, either. It didn't even make sense.
When Sveta didn't respond he continued.
"I haven't got any time to spend inducting you, so you'll have to be on pending probationary status. Given the current circumstances, we can give you a place to stay, but not begin any other power testing or image processes until the current crisis is dealt with. You will be given access to the Wards area and nowhere else, do not abuse this privilege. You are free to leave at any time, of course, and we cannot stop you from acting as a parahuman in ways unaffiliated with the Protectorate, though of course, I cannot recommend this in any capacity."
"Thank you," Sveta said again. "And I promise I won't. I'll stay indoors and I won't make any trouble for you."
"I believe you."
Armsmaster managed to convey a blistering amount of sincerity in this, having the same tone Greg had when he had come to calm her down just a couple of hours before. This made sense to Sveta as Greg was Armsmaster's protege. They even dressed in similar armour, which was very cute.
They entered an elevator and Armsmaster pressed the button for the next floor down.
"Could you, very quickly, describe your power to give us a heads up for when we can test you?"
"Oh, of course, yes! I can change into a, um, long thin person," she held her hand out. Now that she could see it happening properly it was clear she didn't unravel into tendrils, her body stretched out, thinning as it did so. Her fingers lengthened, hardening and darkening until they resembled her old body. With a thought, she pulled them back into shape. "I feel like it makes me stronger."
The elevator doors dinged open, she hadn't even realised they'd started moving.
"Fairly classic Changer," Armsmaster mused. "Thank you, Svetlana."
She would have to get used to that, but she smiled regardless. Armsmaster led her along a short corridor that ended in a big Vault Tech door complete with a spinning wheel lock, just like Greg had described. He'd told her a lot of things they both knew he shouldn't and somehow it had all worked out.
Armsmaster cranked the wheel and pulled, revealing that only a small section of the vault door, the size of a normal door, opened and led me inside.
The Wards room was everything she'd ever imagined, a cozy home away from home. And sitting on one of the couches in the centre were Greg and Weld. Sveta froze, he was just as handsome and powerful as he was on the television. She glanced quickly at Greg who was sitting there with a smug, sly grin, then back to Weld who was smiling politely and standing to greet her.
"Take care of this, please," said Armsmaster, who nodded to her and briskly walked from the room; off to do important Protectorate leader things.
"Yes, sir," Weld called out to his retreating back, then looked her directly in the eyes. His teeth flashed handsomely as he spoke. "Hello, I'm Weld."
"Sveta! I mean, Svetlana, but I um, prefer…" she trailed off. She'd bungled it already, he'd think she was a smoothbrained fool who couldn't string a sentence together.
"Would you like to come and sit down?" he asked kindly, gesturing to the adjacent couch. "It's too early for everyone else to be up, but I'll call a team meeting so we can all get to know each other when everyone's awake."
"Speaking of," said Greg, radiating self-satisfaction. "I should get my power nap. Lots to do tomorrow, sorry, Sveta, but I won't have much time to show you around. Weld, though, reliable as fuck. He'll be happy to help you get sorted."
"Oh, good night…"
He clapped Weld on the shoulder, smirked at her, then took two several meter long steps and was out of sight around a corner that led into what looked like a hallway.
That idiot! She should never have told him Weld was her celebrity crush! What was she supposed to do now, be smooth? She almost stumbled on her new feet as she walked to the proffered couch and sat down on the very edge, rigid like a statue.
"You two were friends online, right?"
Sveta nodded, not meeting his eye.
"It's lucky you had someone to find you after what happened," Weld continued. "He told me what happened, I'm sorry to hear about your parents. If there's anything you need, just let me, or one of us, know."
"Thank you," Sveta said quietly. "It's, um, hard to adjust."
Ha! Truth in dissimulation, she could pull this off.
Weld cocked his head, his eyebrows glinting prettily under the fluorescents. She could make out each hair-fine wire. "Y'know, you sound a little familiar, but I'm positive we've never met."
"Oh, we, um, did speak once," Sveta saw Weld lean forward, too polite to tell her to speak up. "When Greg and I were playing a game, he gave you his headset?"
Weld clicked, striking his hand into his other palm, expression clearing. "I remember that. It's nice to finally meet you, Svetlana."
"Y-you too."
Oh god no, why had she said that? She was so lame. She was going to have stress nightmares about this for months.
"I think I would like to go to bed, too," she blurted out. "I haven't slept yet."
"You must be exhausted!" Weld stood suddenly, glancing at the clock on the wall showed that it was past three in the morning. "I didn't think. Let's get you set up in a room, the one next to Vista's is empty but she's in there so we'll have to be quiet."
Sveta flushed. She was filthy, Weld wouldn't like dirty girls. He led her to her room and silently made her bed for her, fetching spare linens from a small wardrobe in the corner. She almost burst into tears again, he was so nice. All of them, everyone, the world was such a great place to live. She was blessed to have been given this opportunity, even if she died tomorrow she would go with a smile in her heart.
"Let me know if you need anything," Weld whispered on his way out the door. "G'night."
"Night," Sveta whispered back and flopped onto the bed as soon as he closed the door and drove her face into the pillow. It smelt like the blankets at the asylum, but in a good way; like when her night terrors got too awful so they had made her a blanket nest. A familiar comfort.
4th June
Too many people. Five was too many people. Sveta wilted under their collective gaze, shrinking into her plain grey PRT sweatshirt that had been in her chest of drawers when she checked in them that morning.
Weld sat thankfully next to her, his immense weight almost causing her to fall onto him due to the couches sag. Unthankfully, she didn't need any other reasons to be nervous and this was a big one. Next to Weld sat Kid Win, and on the other couch were Vista, Clockblocker and Flechette.
"It's nice to meet you all," she said in a voice she knew was too quiet to hear but everyone pretended like they'd heard her.
She wished Greg was here, but he'd left her here alone. She didn't know anyone else and she didn't know how to talk to them; for all that she'd gone over dozens of simulations of talking to people in her head over the years, it was nothing like how she imagined when confronted with it in reality.
The mask wasn't making things any easier. Rather than giving her the comfort of a barrier between her and the world it still felt constricting and itchy.
"And it's a pleasure for us all to meet you, too," said Weld, saving her just before the ensuing silence became unbearably awkward. "Everyone, this is Svetlana. She's going to be joining us soon, and she's staying here because she has nowhere else to go."
Sveta stared at the coffee table, fiddling with the hem of her sweatshirt. It was sized for someone a few inches taller than her, making it hang down to near her knees, and she wondered if being five foot four wasn't such a bad idea after all.
"I'm sorry to hear that," said Vista. "We'll help you however we can."
"We look after each other," Kid Win followed her up, leaning around Weld slightly to face her.
And now they were talking to her like she was spun sugar, liable to break if you held it slightly too hard. This wasn't what she wanted, what she and Miss Yamada had spent all that time discussing. Sveta didn't want to be some shrinking violet everyone handled with kid gloves. She wanted to take her mask off and talk to them all like a normal person but her hands wouldn't move.
"Thank you," she whispered at a volume that would have put Garotte to shame at how small it was.
There was a sudden clattering sound and Sveta flinched, eyes darting up. Flechette had tossed her visor onto the coffee table and was leaning back in a languid, relaxed slouch. She was a pretty Japanese girl and wore a kind smile.
"We can do away with the masks, right? I'm Lily."
Sveta gasped, hands leaping into motion and clumsily tearing her mask from her face. She almost poked her self in the eye, not having quite gotten a handle on having hands yet despite all of Greg and Amy's help.
"I'm Svetlana," she said in what she was sure was a normal volume. It was best to get it all out at once before she chickened out. "Thank you so much for having me here, I'm sorry if I get in the way at all. Armsmaster said I wasn't allowed to go out yet, but I'll still do my best to help around here."
There was a sudden, almost jarring change in mood. Everyone had leant forward intently when her mask had come off. For a moment she had a gut-wrenching flare of panic, afraid that her face had changed back, then realised it was probably because Amy had made her too hot. She knew it was out of pity, that Amy had done it, but she didn't care. Sveta knew it was selfish to think she deserved it, but it was hers now and there were no takebacks.
She floundered for a moment. Neither Greg nor Amy had reacted to her face like this, what was she supposed to do?
"Sorry I can't be of more help," she said. Yes, that was it, familiar ground. When in doubt, apologise.
"I don't think you'd want to be," Clockblocker's voice cracked. He coughed. "With the Nine on the loose."
"Yeah," Kid Win added as he hastened to remove his visor, placing it on the coffee table. "I'm Chris, by the way."
Sveta smiled awkwardly.
After all the introductions were made and she was assured several times that she needn't feel bad about not being able to join them in any hero work, Vista, or as she now knew, Missy, asked what her power was.
She and Greg had talked about this for a solid hour yesterday after she had worked up the courage to fully change. He had reckoned that the PRT would rate her as a Changer Two, with the same number in Brute, Mover and Stranger subclasses as well as a Thinker One, but seemed sure that the specific way her abilities would interact with each other would synergistically increase their effect.
"Armsmaster said I was a 'fairly classic changer'. I can show you a little."
She didn't want to freak them out, as she was liable to do if she changed her head, so she morphed her hand as the safe option. As before, it was completely, blessedly, under her control. When she had fully transformed for the first time, Greg of course politely turning his back so she could vet herself for the viewing public, she had grown exactly twice as tall and exactly twice as thin, her skin smoothing further into a dark, glossy sheen. This also distorted her features horribly, making her look like a cursed ghost from a cheap Japanese horror movie.
The effect was extremely reminiscent of her tendrils, so much so that she was sure it would be noticed sooner rather than later. Her pencil-thin fingers writhed bonelessly atop an uncannily thin wrist. It disgusted her, that resemblance to Garotte. She would never be free of it, even with her facial mark removed Garotte would always remain in some form.
"I can't change fully here," she continued. "I'd fall out of my clothes."
She wished she hadn't said that. She was getting the distinct feeling that everybody save for Vista would be more than ok with that.
"Best not then, eh?" said Weld, looking reproachfully at the others and proving once again that he was, in fact, a perfect gentleman.
"If you want I can see if I can whip up some kind of hyper-elastic so you can use your powers without that," said Chris.
Sveta nodded, too embarrassed to say anything. Why had she said she'd fall out of her clothes? It wasn't a detail everyone needed to hear. She cursed her honest nature. She was sure that eventually, she'd start a sentence with 'when I was in the asylum…' and ruin everything.
Some hours later, once everyone else had left to do their jobs and Sveta had taken a nap, she was sitting at the kitchenette bench with her paperwork Battery had left with her. She knew, more or less, how to write in English. She'd done some handwriting in the asylum, preferring to draw, as part of her therapy. Writing journals and such. Writing with hands, however, was a completely different task and her attempts came out like a grade-schooler who would never get their pen licence.
She had a piece of scrap paper she was practising with but wasn't making much progress.
Her hand trembled as she tried to write her name again. What she really wanted was to lock herself up in her room and never come out, but it was going to be impossible to make friends that way. To her, that was the main point of all of this, to join the normal people in the sun. She valued her few friendships she'd made in the asylum greatly, and would definitely find a way to stay in contact with them.
She paused, inspecting an S that came out looking more like the number two backwards. She might just have to get Greg to surreptitiously buy her a book designed to teach children to write. He'd understand that it wasn't because she was retarded.
The vault door opened without warning and Sveta jumped, falling off her chair with a shrill shriek. She flailed wildly, arms extending, suppressing the insight to hide under the couches so she could grab whoever was coming in by the ankles when they sat down and hobble them with her crushing grip. She ended up grabbing onto the edge of the faux-marble countertop hard enough to crack it in her spindly fingers. She looked over her shoulder, neck rotating a hundred and eighty degrees to see Lily standing in the doorway, looking slightly taken aback.
"I'm… sorry?" Lily said. "I didn't mean to freak you out."
Sveta pulled herself upright, turning back into a human again. "No, no, please, I'm sorry. It's not your fault and I broke the table."
She quickly got off the chair, tripping over a leg as she hurried toward Lily and almost falling to the floor. Cringe. More stress nightmares.
"Really, it's no problem. I'm sorry."
Lily shook her head and undid her visor, stretching in a way that produced audible cracks from her spine. Her hair was sweaty and she looked a little haggard, in contrast to Sveta's own well restedness and lovingly brushed hair.
"No worries," Lily smiled. "We all have reason to be jumpy these days, huh?"
Sveta made a noise like 'eheh' and immediately wished she hadn't. She swallowed and spat out the first thing that came to mind. "Indeed, these are dark days."
"They are," Lily agreed instead of calling her pretentious, walking inside and tossing her visor with unerring accuracy onto a couch. "What're you working on over there?"
"I know how to write! It's just, my hands, since I changed, they don't… I'm not used to it yet."
Lily smiled kindly and went over to see. Sveta screwed her eyes shut, bracing for the ensuing mockery of her shit handwriting.
"I remember these," Lily said instead. "It's been years since I thought about them. I'm an orphan too, you know. I can give you a hand with these if you like?"
Sveta exhaled fully. "Please," she said and opened her eyes, carefully walking back to her paperwork.
She retook her seat and Lily sat on the one next to her, pulling it in closer. Lily kind of smelled very sweaty, but Sveta didn't say anything. Lily picked up the pen and spun it around her thumb deftly, like Light from Death Note. It was very impressive, Sveta thought, and she resolved to learn how to do it herself.
"Alrighty, how do you spell Svetlana?"
"How it sounds," said Sveta. "And Karelia is K A R E L I A."
"Cool," Lily said as she jotted it down, then looking up at Sveta and setting the pen down. "I like your accent, by the way. Very soft and smooth. Are you from Russia?"
Sveta made a dissenting noise and shook her head. "My parents are but I was born here. Oh, I mean were. No, I mean…"
Sveta floundered. How were you supposed to talk about your fake dead parents? Maybe she should cry, but she couldn't get sad about her fake dead parents. Maybe if she thought about that time she accidentally saw a video of someone kicking a cat into a wall… Yep, that did it.
Lily gave her a one-armed hug, Sveta had to breath through her mouth, and patted her on the back soothingly.
"It's ok," Lily crooned. "You're safe here."
"Th-thanks."
"I'm always here if you want to talk," Lily gave her a squeeze that lasted a slightly uncomfortably long amount of time before settling back into her chair.
Sveta didn't know what someone who had just lost her parents to an Endbringer attack, and she still felt guilty about trampling on the people who had lost just that with this lie, would say to this. She'd just said thanks, would saying it again be too much? In the end, she just nodded and made a noise to indicate she understood and was grateful.
Lily patted her on the back once more and picked up the pen. "Your gender if female, I presume?" she said with a smile, already circling it.
Lily was so nice.
5th June
Too many people, way, way too many people! Ten was simply too much. Sveta tried to turn away, move back to the safety of her little room in the PRT building and pull her covers over her head but her legs wouldn't move.
Greg's hand bumped her on the back, forcing her to take a step forward. She glared up at him with watery, panicked eyes and he smiled encouragingly.
He was wearing a magical disguise that he'd made to look like her. The same colour hair and eyes, the same delicate cast to his features with a very strong jaw; the effect was very handsome in a pretty boy way, he looked like a fitness model who'd had a bit of work done on his face. It made it easier to remember to call him 'Chadovich Karelia', he was playing the part of her twin brother.
"First day of school," he said in the same gentle Russian accent, looking out over the ten whole people milling around outside the school gates.
Sveta made a funny noise, like a mouse being trodden on. She didn't like exposure therapy, it wasn't like she needed to be a normal person today. They could come to school any old day, even if this was the most convenient and Greg had taken a vacation day for her so they could get her fake name in the system to make it easier for her to become a full member of the Wards.
"Relax, homie," he said calmly. "I'll be with you all day, and we can leave during lunch break if it's too much."
She knew he was just trying to give her the normality she so desperately craved. Normal teenagers went to high school, thus she would go to high school. She started to hyperventilate and he pushed on her back again, almost pushing her over, and she stumbled forward. Sveta kept her eyes on the ground as they headed through the gates, but even so, she could still tell everyone was staring at them.
She fiddled with the hem of her new, plain white buttoning shirt. They weren't staring because she was weird, they were staring because Svetlana and Chadovich were extremely hot.
"Good day," Greg said to someone who walked up to them. Sveta glanced up, it was some kind of security guard.
The guard grunted in reply. "Weapons?"
"We do not."
There was a pause. "In you go."
Greg urged her forward again and she almost tripped over her feet on her own this time, scuffing her new sneakers. Greg had said the shirt, skirt, tights and sneakers were a present from all the Wards, and that they'd try and get her more clothes so she wasn't stuck in her free PRT sweats and underthings.
The school, from her furtive glances, looked just like it did in television dramas. Except for the security guards everywhere, but that was sort of expected or so she'd been told. This was the very first day the schools were opening, almost a rush job, but given that with Armsmaster taking out the Archer's Bridge Merchants removing a lot of rioting and looting apparently it was felt it was safe enough to open schools again.
"Damn, this place shits on Winslow," Greg mused as they walked. "And to think the rest of them got to go here the whole time, I got seriously shortchanged."
"Winslow was the bad one?" Sveta vaguely remembered him bitching about that at some point.
"The worst. Full of gangs and shit. Apparently, Clarendon is nicer than here, but Arcadia is public."
"Oh."
"I won't be able to come back, probably, but if you ever want to you'll be safe here. Apparently, we actually are going to be getting some new Protectorate transferred in," Greg said this softly as they came closer to another guard. "And they're going to get stationed here for a week before cycling to the other schools."
Normally that would excite her, but Sveta was concentrating on not throwing up.
Eventually, they came to an office, which was thankfully almost empty. A security guard, two secretaries and one other student. Four. She could handle four.
Greg led her to the secretary who wasn't busy.
"Good morning," he said softly, slipping back into character so seamlessly that Sveta thought she might actually forget he was Greg.
"Oh, good morning…" There was a heavy tone of confusion in the secretaries voice like she'd been thrown off-kilter. "What are you after?"
"My sister and I would like to join classes," Greg gestured to her.
"Oooookay," the secretary glanced up at down at them, trying to find out if this was some kind of trick. "Which classes? You'll have all the core ones, did you take any others?"
Greg smiled genially, which seemed to calm the secretary down some. "I'm afraid to cause trouble for you, but we were homeschooled so I'm not sure how we will fit into your curriculum."
"Yeah? Well, it shouldn't be a problem. Homeschoolers take all the same classes."
"Apologies again, but we weren't traditionally schooled and I'm unsure how our education maps onto your system. If it's no trouble, could you walk us through it and enter us into your system?"
The way he said this was convincing, magnetic in a way he normally wasn't. There was something charismatic there, some combination of voice tone and body posture like he'd rolled a nat twenty on his check. It had to be a power, Sveta realised, some kind of subtle charisma power. She could only see half his face, but even then she could fully believe that Chadovich was a real person and not some persona hastily thrown together at the last minute, and the secretary was getting the full force of it.
"Of course," the secretary said automatically. "No trouble at all. Follow me, please."
Greg turned and smiled at her smugly behind the secretaries back, which was not an expression she would ever imagine Chadovich making, as they were led over to a desk with a single chair in front of it. Greg chivalrously pulled the chair out for her, then stood slightly in front of her.
"I'm sorry for not introducing us," Greg said. "I'm Chadovich Karelia, and this is my sister, Svetlana."
"No, no need to be sorry. I'm Kassidy," Kassidy smiled widely. "Pleasure to meet you."
Oh, ew. Sveta recognised that kind of smile, but Kassidy had to be at least twenty-five! Sure, the Chadovich disguise was very handsome indeed, but she was so old! Sveta sent her a reproachful glare, but Kassidy gave her a soothing look so it had probably come out as panicky.
"And don't you two worry," she continued, tapping in a username and password. "We'll have you both sorted out in a jiffy. Let me just find the new student registry page… Ah, here we go. How do you spell your names?"
Greg handled the talking. He was very good at talking when he wanted to be, in stark contrast to her. This was all so much easier online; maybe she could get a text to speech device and claim she was mute? Ah, no, she was a new Sveta now. She had arms and hair and everything, she couldn't let her being a coward ruin her life. On the other hand, maybe Chris would make her a text to speech thingy. He was very nice, too, so he might if she asked nicely.
She watched despairingly as Kassidy unquestioningly provided everything Greg was asking for. Was it possible to learn this power? Sure, it was her job to help students, but it seemed way too easy. Within minutes they were being handed printed out class schedules and laminated student ID's, Kassidy almost following them out the door in a way that Sveta thought would get her employee of the month.
"Thank you so much, Kassidy," Greg said with a lingering smile and lots of eye contact.
Also gross, and what would his girlfriend think? Sveta knew it was all an act, but still. Sveta fumed silently until Greg whispered to her once they were out of earshot.
"Damn, that was weird. Is this what being hot is like?"
"I wouldn't know," Sveta sniped back.
"Yeah, me either," he snickered, handing over her schedule and ID. "How do I get this jawline in real life?"
Sveta instantly felt guilty. Greg's real face was very round, and it didn't look like he'd ever grow into the chiselled features of Chadovich, he'd probably only ever had his mother and maybe Savannah tell him he was handsome, while her own face was artisanally beautiful; the first person she'd shown beside Greg and Amy having told her so. Well, no more, she'd make that number three!
"Your real face is handsome, too."
"Thanks, Svets," he said, but she could tell he knew she was lying.
He wasn't ugly though, just… round. She didn't think pressing that point would cheer him up. Maybe Amy would help him if she asked? But that would just make him think she thought he was so ugly he needed help as she had. Sveta bit at her immaculate thumbnail. She'd find a way.
They wound through the halls, past the regularly stationed security, passing the occasional student, and ended up at their first class. Her first-ever class as a school student. The realisation hit her like Eustace Bagge's mallet. She was a student now, she would go to school and make friends and each cafeteria lunch and win spelling bee prizes! She could do this.
They collected a printout from the bored-looking teacher and took adjacent seats. Greg winked, dipping his hand into his trouser pocket and pulling out a pen she knew was never there and handed it to her. Sveta took it confidently and looked down at her work.
Her vision fuzzed, breath shallow. A tear dripped onto the paper. She didn't know any of this, she'd never been to school. She knew basic times tables and how to add and subtract, that was it. Greg apparently noticed because rather quickly he was leading her back out of the classroom and into some sort of enclosed courtyard. He made her sit on a blue painted bench away from the smattering of other students and gave her a bottle of water.
She sipped feebly.
"It's my bad," Greg said, sitting down next to her.
"No, I'm just pathetic. Why am I even crying, because I don't know what the spades symbol in maths means?"
Greg kicked one leg over the other, leaning back with his hands behind his head. "I honestly never considered this, but, if you end up joining the Wards we have grade requirements so you don't need to worry. They'll throw tutors at you until you're up to speed. And of course, I'll help you as much as I can, and so will everyone else."
He snorted.
"You should ask Weld, he'll teach you a lot of different things."
Sveta inhaled her water and Greg patted her on the back as she coughed and spluttered.
"I should never have told you!"
Greg leant back again, smiling sweetly. "He thinks you're hot. If you spent a few weeks getting private lessons, slowly start sitting closer to each other, start vibing…"
Greg made an Italian hand gesture, then kissed it.
"I think you would be good together, you could bond over being good people."
"But I'd be lying to him."
Greg didn't look at her, clicking his teeth. "Yes, you would, yes. I don't think that should stop you, because it won't be forever and he'll understand."
"You said he can't be changed like I was."
"I wish there were some other way," he said softly, expression complicated. "With all the power interactions… maybe Scapegoat? Someone like Scapegoat? But how many dimensions deep does it go…"
He exhaled loudly through his nose, turning partially to look at her with profoundly sad eyes.
"I'm going to be Triumvirate," he said.
End of A Daring Synthesis
Chapter 79: End of a daring synthesis
Chapter Text
Everything before this chapter is the completed work of 'A daring synthesis', while everything after should be treated as a completely different story, as 'A glib facsimile'.
Chapter 80: A glib facsimile: Prologue: Coil
Chapter Text
A glib facsimile prologue
June 6th- Coil
Coil didn't know where it was he had messed up, or even if it had been a mistake of his at all. Something had cast a fetid, pallid malaise over his bunker. The place had been on edge for the better part of three weeks.
The door to Noelle's confinement chamber shuddered, a low, grating creaking sound as the metal struts began to finally give.
His pet had given them all three percent.
Heavy thumping footsteps charged from behind. Coil closed his eyes in both timelines as Noelle's body slammed into him and Crawler broke down the door.
Chapter 81: A glib facsimile: Kill Six Billion Greg Veders 1.1
Chapter Text
A glib facsimile, arc one: Kill Six Billion Greg Veders
Sveta was hot. Sveta was so hot. She looked like a perfect mix between a photoshopped Asian cosplayer and one of those crazy hot Czech models. Amy had done too good of a job, she was on the knifes edge of unnaturally hot. I didn't think I could begrudge her that, though, given where she started.
It was bloody distracting, though.
I was supposed to be on high alert, not gawking at a girl I wasn't even dating. There had been a sighting of Crawler an hour ago before he somehow vanished from sight despite being a truck-sized monster.
I turned back to Sveta who was carefully carrying a platter of tea over to the coffee table, a cup for each of us including Victoria who seemed to be following through on her interest in joining the Wards. Victoria and Sveta had taken to each other immediately, somehow falling straight into an older sister/younger sister flow. It was really very sweet, and they even kind of looked like… like they could be related. Seeing them both now, next to each other, some of Amy's inspiration for hot became clear.
Sveta presented me the platter and I took a cup with a smile. It was obvious she was incredibly proud that not only was she able to make tea now, she had only dropped a single cup and barely cried.
My knee bounced vigorously as I sipped at my tea, still not drinkable yet through my paltry heat resistance. The Nine had been in Brockton for at least two weeks without showing hide nor hair beyond their introductory murders, and the Think Tank hadn't been able to produce anything of value; if Armsmaster's expletive rants were anything to judge by.
I knew the Think Tank was a subsidiary arm of the PRT, and therefore Cauldron, but their continued ineffectiveness grated. What were they even good for? Surely if you got dozens of Thinkers together analysing every scrap of data about the Slaughterhouse Nine you could come up with something useful. Maybe I should take a gap year working for Watchdog before I joined up with the Protectorate fully, see what I could make of it.
Then I would have a second gap year doing Whitelist jobs 'for the exposure'.
Finally, I would sign up for the Protectorate on the most luxurious contract they could provide, assuming Alexandria wasn't lying and she did murder me at some point.
I picked up my tea and sipped it again. Still too hot. I got up and walked around behind the couches, pacing back and forth. Any second now shit was going to go off, Shatterbird would sing and kill so many people. My parents were safely ensconced in our basement at home without anything glass around, and I knew all the glass in the PRT and protectorate buildings had been in the process of being either replaced with non-silicate panes or being taped up for weeks.
It was a tricky prospect, Shatterbird's song. The second the PRT announced, she'd sing. And if they held off the announcement until she started singing the result would be the same, but they'd have time to replace or brace critical windows and minimise casualties; but not among civilians. I was sure, however, that personnel were warning their friends and family just as I had, who would then hopefully go on to do the same and prevent at least some deaths.
I heard Victoria walk up to me.
"Slow down."
I glanced at her but didn't reply, though I did slow down to normal walking speed. It was agonisingly slow.
"I wanted to thank you," Victoria said. "For Amy."
I stopped. Thank me for Amy? I suppose without knowing the full context behind our relationship it would look like I had burst into her life and forcefully dragged her out of the mopey spiral she was in.
"No worries."
Victoria smiled, a little weakly. "I know you got her to stop smoking, and she told me you've used your healing power on her every day since you got it."
"Shoulda known you'd notice. It's nothing, really," I fidgeted, using my visor to hide the fact that I wasn't making eye contact. "She deserves it."
Victoria nodded, eyes roaming back over to where Sveta had finished giving out the teas and had sat down herself next to Vista. "Svetlana says you helped her a great deal, too."
"I barely went out of my way," I waved her off, itching to return to my pacing. To be in motion, to put my boundless energy somewhere. "It's not like it takes people like us long to get around the city. I know you've been busy these days, too."
"Like everyone," she said, apparently in the same mind as me when it came to compliments despite hers being genuine good deeds, untainted by tormenting her sister or causing a panic at an asylum. "She's a lovely girl, Svetlana."
"Nicest person I ever met. We were friends online for a while, you know? I'm glad I didn't stop talking to her, for a while I thought she was a paedophile trying to catfish me," I said. "Her handle was GStringGirl."
Victoria shook her head disbelievingly. "Seriously? I didn't know she'd be comfortable making that kind of joke."
"I'm not sure she ever could, in person at least. She could make some pretty grubby jokes from behind a screen, not that you'd expect it from how sweet she is," I glanced back over to her, my eyes automatically tracing her svelte figure. I made myself look away, "she just needs a bit of confidence, which I think you could help her with."
Victoria made a noise in the back of her nose and crossed her arms, eyes downcast. She seemed pensive rather than reluctant, however.
"I'm going to be leaving in just over two months," I pressed on. "I think you might be exactly what she needs in a friend."
"You're leaving?" Victoria looked up at me, cocking her head.
"New York. I don't like this city," I wrinkled my nose and gave my head a little shake.
"So that's why Amy wants to go there… Makes sense. Hey, what about that girl? Tarlie? Do you still want help with that?"
"Taylor," I said softly. "No. I already apologised."
"And did it… go well?"
I reached under my visor and rubbed my eyes. "Not really."
"...could I help?"
I shrugged. "Maybe? She's still active, I think. I guess if you see her just be nice? I'm not sure how to help her."
Victoria uncrossed her arms, moving her hands to her hips and gazing off at the wall in thought. "Have you tried talking to her parents?"
"If I wanted to make things worse," I snorted. "But, I appreciate you trying."
I stuck out my hand.
"I'm looking forward to working with you for the next two months."
Victoria nodded with painfully kind understanding and shook my hand. "Me too."
There was a moment of shared understanding and we walked back over to the couches, Victoria perching on the arm next to Sveta and me retaking my seat next to Dennis.
I picked up my cup of tea a took a sip. My knee started bouncing again. This waiting was fucking killing me.
Dennis knocked my leg with his knee. "Stop. Please."
"Sorry," I grunted, stilling my leg.
"If you like, I could freeze you until we get called in."
I sighed and sat back, shaking my head. "Nah."
Dennis made a noise and went back to staring at his cup of tea without touching it.
After a few more agonising minutes all our work phones went off simultaneously. Within seconds we were all up and ready, lining up at the door. I took a second to stay behind.
"Sveta," I put a hand on each of her shoulders, staring into her bright brown eyes. "You'll be fine here. We'll have bigger problems than your safety if anything gets all the way down here, but you should have an escape plan ready. Just in case."
"I can get into the vents?" Sveta quavered at the thought, arms tight to her sides, fists balled.
"Good plan. You'd think they'd trap them, but they don't," I took a step back and held out my fist. "You got this."
Sveta bumped it weakly, hand trembling like she had Parkinson's. "I got this?"
I pumped my Charisma as high as it would go. "I know you do."
Sveta sniffled loudly, but nodded, mouth pressed into a firm line. I clapped her on the shoulder and took off after my team, I could hear her muttering 'I got this' to herself until I was out of earshot. She'd be fine, there wasn't any reason for any of the Nine to get into the Wards area and target her, which I probably should have also told her.
I caught up in a flash, joining the hustle. The Protectorate team were on standby in the PRT building to consolidate forces, and we all piled into the elevator to meet them in the foyer. The elevator groaned under the weight, mostly of Weld, but took us smoothly up to the ground floor where we spilled out in a rush and charged up the stairs until we burst out of a side corridor into the light.
We arrived in a painfully tense atmosphere. Armsmaster was standing in front of a screen with a projector, a few blurry photos of what was obviously Crawler fighting with a big lump of something with a dozen smaller humanoid lumps around them, halfway through barking orders at some of the PRT office staff.
"Oh, good," he turned to look at us. "Finally. Your standing orders are to not leave the building until told otherwise. People!" he raised his voice, cutting through the murmuring chatter. "It's started. As of three minutes ago Crawler was sighted brawling with an unknown parahuman in the Downtown area. It is unconfirmed at this point, but the unknown parahuman was reported to be periodically spawning additional combatants. These look to be humans, some with major deformities. Preliminary ratings are at Brute Five, Master Two for the unknown parahuman while all of Crawler's rating on file still apply; however! They are not current primary targets, this may be a ploy of some kind to get us focused on a threat we can safely ignore. We will be focusing on the threat of Shatterbird's song, which will be preliminarily covered by an order for the public to hide themselves as best they can eta eighty-three seconds, after which we will begin deployment. Is this clear?"
Armsmaster didn't actually wait for anyone to reply.
"Good. See to Miss Militia and myself," he gestured to her. "For assignments. Dark Smoke Puncher, are you getting any readings?"
"Negative, sir!"
"Inform me immediately if you do. Let's go!"
I'd had other Greg signalling for quests, but it had been a no go as of yet. It was still unclear if I could actually make them happen, at least with any consistency.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. My personal phone.
"Fuck," I spat, fishing my phone out of my pocket. "FUCK!"
Weed Thot: Bonesaw warehouse calling favours
I turned and sprinted full tilt through the automatic doors, expensive fake glass showering me. I turned right sharply, kicking off and running diagonally up the side of the building, jumping across the road as I reached the edge and double jumping up onto the top of the taller building adjacent to the PRT office. I didn't have time to get higher up.
I took a step, pumped my Strength up as high as I could and rocketed up toward the sky. My glider unfolded out of smoke, propeller whirring to life. I didn't know how much time I had, Amy could be dead by the time I got there.
I was having to sacrifice altitude for speed, angling ever so slightly toward the streets as I piloted my glider over the city traffic. I was currently four stories up, able to cut across shorter buildings. Time was shaved off, but was it enough? The wind whistled past my ears, but I needed to go faster.
I let go of my control of the propeller, throwing out a hand. A grapnel spike attached to a fine blue wire shot from my palm like a bullet, digging into the concrete rim of a nearby taller building with the briefest flash of lightning. I contracted the wire, yanking myself higher, letting me swoop at greater speed without any damaging loss of height.
Another grapnel shot out, pulling me higher. With this technique I hauled ass across the city, dragging myself toward the Docks.
Finally, I could see it, the roof of Amy's warehouse. With agonising slowness I descended toward it… closer… just a bit closer…
I vanished my glider, dropping onto and through the skylight. I landed lightly on the balls of my feet, taking a second to orient myself.
Amy was standing a few meters away nearer the door, and just in front of her stood Bonesaw with two grotesqueries flanking her. Some centaur looking thing called Pagoda and something called Murder Ra-
Mouse Protector.
I froze. Adrenaline coursed through my body as I locked eyes with Bonesaw.
"What've you done!?" I hissed. "What the fuck've you done?!"
Chapter 82: Kill Six Billion Greg Veders 1.2
Chapter Text
"Do you like them?" Bonesaw asked, putting a hand on both Pagoda and Murder Rat. "I'm still new to these mashups but I think they're some of my best work!"
Natalie. I couldn't see anything left of her in Murder Rat's eyes, even though they were hers. The look in them was glazed like she was out of her mind on opiates, but as I took the time to read her properly I could see it was because her brain was literally rotting.
"I was just telling Amy here how nice it was to meet her finally," Bonesaw continued, the faux childish innocence of her setting my teeth on edge. "Finally, I was saying, someone else who works with meat."
Natalie had been stitched together with a villain called Ravager, as Ravager's punishment. Their bodies mashed and distorted, things replaced, bits stretched.
My hands were shaking.
"But can you believe it, she says she doesn't want to work with me! I was trying to think of a way to show her how much fun it would be, what we could make, when you just drop right in through the ceiling," Bonesaw smiled widely. "Right on cue, like magic."
I lunged forward, my right hand catching her by the throat, lifting her off the ground. I turned, lashing a kick behind me and sending Pagoda flying across the room as I used Bonesaw as a shield against Murder Rat. Murder Rat's machete fingers stopped just shy of Bonesaw's skin and I reached past her and grabbed Rat's wrist, hauling her forward.
Bonesaw tried to jab me with a needle, but it glanced off my skin not doing the twelve damage it needed to get past my passive defences. I let go of Murder Rat's wrist and gripped her by the neck also, then cast Paralysis Collar with both hands. I dropped them both as they went limp and turned back to Pagoda just in time to meet him with another kick that sent him crashing through the wall this time.
Spiderbots began to swarm in through the door. Amy had retreated to the far wall where she was doing something with a huge mound of flesh, leaving me free to lay into them with my spear.
It appeared in my grip as I sliced through a Spiderbot mid-jump. I flicked it the other way, aiming low, scything another in half as it went for my ankles. I strode forward, decimating the spiders with a spear in one hand and piercing beams of lightning in the other, each one producing a window of experience and loot I ignored.
I stabbed down into Bonsesaw's leg, somehow immune to my collar, as she tried to make a run for it, nailing her to the floor. I leant down and grabbed both her wrists, picking her up as far as her impaled leg would allow, and squeezed. Her wrists didn't break so I piled on the Strength and squeezed harder. They shattered and she didn't even flinch.
Bonesaw goggled at me for a moment, then turned to look at Amy over her shoulder. "Where did you find this guy?"
My teeth audibly ground against each other as I clenched them, flecks of spittle flying off with each seething breath.
"Put her back to normal."
Bonesaw turned back to me. "Put whom?"
"Mouse Protector!"
"And kill poor Murder Rat?" Bonesaw sounded aghast. "I could never."
"Do it, or I'm gonna kill you," my voice slurred with anger, fists tightening further around her wrists.
Bonesaw seemed unimpressed, and for good reason. If I killed her I'd set off her deadman's switch and kill a lot more people. I shook her uselessly, tears of frustration escaping the edges of my visor. Mana encrusted her arms, starting at my grip and extending outward until it covered her entire body. I built it up, thickening the layer until it had the tensile strength of steel. I dropped the oval lump of mana containing Bonesaw and stepped back, reaching under my visor and pushing my fingers into my wet eyes.
Pagoda burst back into the warehouse.
I took a deep breath, settled my visor back in place, and yanked my spear out of the crystalised lump of mana around Bonesaw. Lightning ran along its edge as I sidestepped Pagoda's charge, slamming my spear clean through it and impaling it into the floor. Pagoda struggled, flailing at me with its beefy arms until I encased it in a similar prison to Bonesaw. I took a few steps away and sat down.
"Damn," said Amy, venturing over to sit down beside me. "You were really the investment all along."
I didn't reply and after a moment she put her arm around my shoulder.
"Mouse Protector lived in Boston, right?" she asked.
I sniffed wetly, pulling my knees in and resting my forehead against them. "She was the coolest adult I ever met."
"I'm really sorry."
I tilted my neck until the side of my head pressed against Amy's armpit. "What can men do against such reckless hate?"
"We could kill her, oh, what am I saying," Amy huffed. "We can't execute somebody."
I grunted, shaking my head. Heat of the moment I'd already done, I couldn't do it in cold blood.
Ignore.
"My power thinks we should take them to Armsmaster."
"I like that plan. Let me melt everything in the warehouse first-
"I want to fix Mouse Protector."
Amy squeezed my shoulder. "We can try."
I blinked it away. Wasn't doing it for a quest.
I opened my eyes, lifting my head slightly to look over at Murder Rat. She, it, was still paralysed and motionless, not having whatever enhancements Bonesaw had grafted into herself to prevent it. Thick drool still spilled from her snout-like jaws and pooled onto the floor under her stapled on nose. My stomach churned. I didn't understand how Bonesaw could have done this, the sheer inhuman cruelty needed to push through mutilating a genuinely good person into that.
It was the same for Pagoda, even if he was made out of two villains. It wasn't right. Why did Cauldron and the PRT let these psychos run free?
"We will do it," I said, more to convince myself than anything. "We can do it."
Amy made a noise like she wanted to disagree, but didn't say anything. After a few more minutes I shifted and we stood up, walking carefully to Murder Rat. It remained still and Amy hesitantly put her hand on Rat's arm.
I waited, holding my breath. Partly in trepidation, partly because Murder Rat stank like a sewer.
After a minute, Amy spoke. "I don't know if I can fix her, Greg. I don't think there's enough of her left, and what is there is so well mixed with the other woman I don't know if I could separate them without killing them."
I closed my eyes again.
"Please try. I'll use my Ring, it will fix her."
I didn't believe it, but I had to try.
"And it's not just that," Amy said despairingly. "She has this frame, I guess, bolted onto her skeleton, with needles at her heart. Greg, it might be hopeless…"
"One try," my voice cracked, raw. "Please, take the frame out and if my magic doesn't work, then we'll leave."
Amy made a keening sound but didn't move. Slowly I could see Rat's flesh ripple, the machetes that were her new fingers and toes clinking softly as they detached from her body. Even slower the flesh around her back shifted, a glimmer of metal poking through. I moved around behind her, touching a finger to the emerging frame. With Amy in contact, this should be fine.
I inventoried the frame, then immediately withdrew it and hurled it at Bonesaw's chrysalis in disgust. It clanged off the solid blue and bounced away.
"Nice," Amy grimaced, then after a few more seconds shuffled back on her haunches, wiping her fingertips on the floorboards. "That's about as much as I think I can do."
I swallowed, mouth dry. I reached forward and tapped Murder Rat, my mana depleting as it was bathed in a golden glow. The staples holding her skin and nose on fell out as new flesh grew underneath them, new fingers and toes sprouting where Bonesaw had cut them off, all the unhealed cuts and scrapes Bonesaw had inflicted on her closing and purging infection.
The glow ended and Murder Rat was still there, the spell considered it a single person.
"What now?" Amy asked nervously.
"In a few minutes I'm going to take her collar off," I said, wiping my nose. "And see how much of Mouse Protector is left in there."
"Do you think that's wise?"
"I can restrain her if she's still Murder Rat."
"Well, I'm going to finish melting this place down so we can get the fuck out of here."
I nodded to her and sat down, slipping into my Meditation. I focused my breath, paying attention to the sounds around me. Amy moving about, the breeze around the doorway, Bonesaw and Pagoda's breathing.
I didn't know what I was going to do about Pagoda. I didn't want to kill it, and my prison for it would dissolve within two hours. I guess I'd have to hope that without Bonesaw near it Pagoda would be unable to do much of anything and could be safely captured when found later. It was too far away from any residential areas to do much harm if not, and everyone would be bunkering down anyway to avoid Shatterbird so, really, leaving Pagoda here should be fine.
The silence between the sounds, the stillness, was hard to find. My mind surging through half-formed plans and simulations, worry and despair over the fate of Brockton, that I might have accidentally killed Mouse Protector by not giving Amy more time.
The floor underneath me shifted, falling away with the musty smell of mould. I opened my eyes, the entire floor was melting into thin air, breaking down into small enough particles that it could never be traced back to Amy.
Bonesaw's breathing changed. I'd left her just enough space within her cocoon that she wouldn't accidentally die from asphyxiation, but not enough that she could breathe out some plague cloud and kill everyone. I hoped she was afraid.
My mana was coming close to topping out again, so I opened my eyes and stood up. I had to get it over and done with, I didn't want to wait and drag out the tension. Something lurched in my stomach, wanting to come out.
"Done yet, Amy?" I said instead of throwing up.
"All done, like we were never here."
I wiped my nose again. "Ok, I'm doing it. Stay behind me."
Amy gave a nervous titter and made sure I was directly between her and Murder Rat.
This was it. I dry swallowed.
The collar dissolved and Murder Rat sprang to her feet, landing on all fours in a languid motion. Her extended jaw worked around as her beady eyes took us in; she sniffed at the air and closed her mouth.
"Fackin' been asleep have I?" She said in a grating Boston accent, the words coming out strangely past her dog-like tongue. "Where the fack am I?"
"Mouse Protector…" I started.
"Yeah, I'm half that bitch," Rat stepped backward, glancing down at her hands. "Where're me machetes?"
"You don't remember me?" I said achingly, taking a halting half step forward.
Rat's fingers drummed on the concrete floor as she rapidly sniffed the air again. "Near the sea? Don't smell like home. Where's the Nine at?"
"But you're Mouse Protector, right?"
"Aw, don't give me that face," Rat smiled, the expression ghastly, a string of drool leaking from her row of jagged canines. "Just keep smilin', don't I say that? Ain't I tell you that," Rat's heavy brow bunched up and she clicked three times. "Smoke boy. Mouse bitch knew you, didn't she?"
"Yes! She did, do you remember?"
Rat smiled again, then frowned and shifted her shoulders. She patted her patchy chest, tapping first on a white patch of skin then a black. "Something's missing, ain't it? Feels a bit light…"
Murder Rat's eye lit upon the control frame lying on the floor some ways away.
"Yeah, I remember. You get that out of me? That thing? Bonesaw's fackin' thing? Yeah," Murder Rat said, tongue slapping out the side of her mouth and spattering drool onto the floor. "I know who you are, Smoke boy. You're one of them Wards, ain'tcha?"
"Yes, how much do you remember?"
"Greg," said Amy, warningly.
"I 'member you wanna fack the S'mur, don'tcha?" Rat pointed at me, a bizarre accusatory look on her hideous face.
"I do! You are her!"
"Greg, it's not her!" Amy hissed.
"What? I'm Mouse," Rat wheezed in what may have been a chuckle. "Lookit me, ain't I a mouse?"
I tried to smile, but it felt so, so forced. I turned to Amy who was frozen in fear, then back to Murder Rat.
"You're not her. You're Ravager."
Murder Rat gagged. "Ain't fackin' Ravagah either, Smoke boy. But I'm all innocent like, swear it. Had that frame shit in me, didn't I? Din't wanna do none of it, honest on me ma's name."
Observe said her personality was a twisted and warped combination of both Ravager's and Mouse Protector's, filtered through her only life experience as being Bonesaw's pet. She thought that her memories as her parts weren't her, that she was someone else besides them; her own person. That person was still a psychopath.
I didn't know what to do.
Murder Rat took a tentative pace to her left, keeping a wary eye on me she sniffed at the ground then locked her eyes on the blue lump over Bonesaw.
"Lil' cunt's in there, ain't she? You gonna kill her, 'cause I'd be partial to it," Rat's nasal voice came out with a thick, wet seething stream of drool. "Hey, she's got a bounty, don't she? We could split?"
Neither Amy nor I answered.
"Yeah," Rat licked her snout, moving into a posture coiled with wariness. "I reckoned it was like that. You gonna kill me, Smoke boy?"
When neither of us made to reply Rat nodded slowly. "Mighty kind of ya."
She dropped low, reaching out with an extended, emaciated arm and grabbed at her pile of machetes. She whipped her hand at us, launching one straight at my head. I caught it by the blunt edge just before it tore my cheek open, the rust and crusted blood rough under my fingers.
I didn't do anything as Murder Rat turned and ran, bounding away in a disturbingly graceful four-footed gait faster than an Olympic sprinter. An iron weight had settled deep in my heart, pinning me in indecision. Mouse Protector was in there, somewhere. She remembered me.
Amy punched me in the back of the head.
"Why the fuck didn't you stop her?!" she howled, pacing, clutching at her hand in pain. "You idiot! She was never going to go back to being Mouse Protector! I told you that!"
I stared at the nine crusty machetes lying on the ground.
"She's going to hurt people, Greg! That thing is insane! It's not a person!"
I turned my hand around to better look at the machete finger held in it. This was wired into her skeleton, it must have hurt every second of the day.
"Go catch her, don't tell me that you cant! I've seen your run, get her!"
"Amy," I dropped the machete. "Shut the fuck up."
"Just, aargh!" Amy stomped her foot. "Fine, fuck, whatever! Let's just get to Armsmaster."
Ah, you chose the moment that would hurt me most, didn't you, Quest Master?
Chapter 83: Kill Six Billion Greg Veders 1.3
Chapter Text
I jogged in smooth, loping strides, Amy sitting on one shoulder and the lump containing Bonesaw hefted upon the other. The streets were empty, the call to avoid glass having come in just after I ran off. Speaking of which, I'll probably get a solid reaming from Armsmaster when I get back, though the capture of Bonesaw might mitigate that somewhat.
I wasn't going to tell him about Murder Rat. Amy wasn't going to snitch on me, and I didn't want to admit it to anyone just how badly I beefed it when the chips were down. I couldn't do it, there was still some of Natalie in there. Murder Rat had one and a half brains and I didn't know who's was who; was all of Natalie in there, or just half? Should I have mercy killed her? Could I have? Bringing her in with us would have been a death sentence for her, Armsmaster would have executed her on the spot and I didn't know if I could blame him.
Amy must have sensed my shift in mood, even though my Chameleon Skin hid us both even from each other's eyes.
"I'm sorry I punched you."
I sighed. "You can't actually hurt me at this point, don't worry about it."
"No, it was still wrong," Amy said, clutching onto my uniform collar. "Mouse Protector was your friend."
I slowed to a walk, blinking moisture out of my eyes.
"Out of all the adult heroes I've ever met, only she wasn't completely fucking dour about it," I said. Assault wasn't bad, but he just didn't have it. "It really meant a lot to me that she always took me as seriously as she did herself."
Which was the correct amount, even if it wasn't much. It was her most refreshing and magnetic quality, that she treated you with the level of respect she held for herself. You were always equal to Mouse Protector. I knew a lot of people hated it because they were pretentious chodes who couldn't see past the image of themselves they had built up inside their heads, but as far as I knew Natalie had never compromised on this aspect of herself. She was being herself, herself. Always.
I wished she and mum could meet, they'd probably be best friends in like two minutes.
"I guess," said Amy. "It's too bad I never met her."
I snorted sadly. "You're too self-absorbed, you'd have hated her. She'd have picked and needled until you screamed at her and stormed off."
"Why're you making her sound shit? You said she was cool."
"Yeah, I didn't think you'd get it."
"You dick," Amy shifted on my shoulder to a more comfortable angle where the shoulder plate wasn't digging into her butt. "You're just as self-absorbed as I am. You just thought she was hot, didn't you?"
"Yeah, maybe," I cast my eyes down. "But she was still awesome."
Amy gingerly patted me on the head, then almost lost her balance and grabbed my face in a panic to stop herself from falling off. "Maybe people like you resonate with each other, people with a personality only a mother could love."
"Did you fuck my dad recently?" I shifted my shoulder, making Amy flail in panic again. "Are you my new mummy?"
"Ew, no, gross. I only pretend to be your friend so I can use you as an errand boy. The real payoff is you have to protect me from these freaky cunts," Amy gestured at the lump containing Bonesaw. "And you'll still owe me. Can you fucking believe they want to recruit me? Me!"
"They are insane."
"It was just lucky we had the warehouse, if I didn't have the warning of her trying to break in I wouldn't have been able to text you. She was practically frothing at the sight of it like I was already halfway to being like her."
"Lucky you didn't have one of those fighting Ogres on hand."
"I think she'd have shit herself," Amy shuddered. "My god am I glad she didn't see I had my under-armour on, she'd have came."
Bonesaw's breathing changed again, coming in in excited pants.
"Oh, great," I said. "She can hear us. Also, gross, she's like twelve, Amy."
"Bleh. The PRT has a hazmat furnace, right? Throw her in."
"We will. Hear that Bonesaw? Nobody is coming to save you, you're going to die!"
She mumbled something that sounded like 'yeah, right,' through the mana constricting her jaw. Where did she have that confidence? Slaughterhouse members died all the time, even Jack wasn't the original leader even if he had been in charge for like fifteen years.
I shook my head and snorted, using the chrysalis as a medium for Mana Sound, causing a distracting, all-consuming buzzing noise right next to Bonesaw's ears.
"Well, she can't hear us anymore. Grab on tight, I'm going to run again."
Amy grabbed a handful of my hair, which she thankfully couldn't yank out even if she wanted to, and I set off into my loping jog.
Taylor appeared in front of me, a feeling of unease flickering in my gut.
"Fuck!"
I skidded to a stop, sending Amy into another brief panic. Taylor stayed floating in front of me at exactly the same distance.
"Fuck!" Amy spat, echoing me. "What happened?"
She looked just like the Taylor I remembered from school, same gawky figure, same resting bitch face. She was a hallucination.
"Scarecrow's nearby."
"Who the fuck is Scarecrow?"
"Taylor, remember? I told you all about this."
"Oh, right, yeah."
Oh god, I hoped this wasn't her revenge.
"Help me!" demanded the hallucination. "Jack Slash is chasing me, you owe me, Greg!"
"I know, I know! Shit, this isn't a good time, I've got Bonesaw."
Taylor didn't respond immediately, then after a few seconds, she repeated her same line in exactly the same way. She couldn't hear me, ok, damn. Fuck and damn.
"Taylor's leading Jack Slash here because I owe her, fuck!" I stamped on the ground. "Fuck. Come on! What is this, my fucking karmic punishment?! Shit!"
I knelt down, letting Amy step off my shoulder and onto the road. I dumped Bonesaw down, resting my hand on her prison. I cancelled my spells, focusing on reworking the prison. I smoothed it out, shaving off unnecessary edges until it was as small and smooth as I dared make it. Axel and wheels grew, lifting it off the ground, and a handle sprouted from the new front side. A little Bonesaw cart for Amy to pull.
"We have to split," I said, standing back up as the hallucination repeated itself.
"Say no more," Amy stepped around to the front of the cart and picked up the handle. "I pull here?"
"You're going to have to run all the way to the PRT building," I lifted my visor off, rubbing my face all over before putting it back on. "I'll meet you there after I'm done with this."
"Ok," said Amy, forcing a panicky smile. "Have fun, don't die."
She let go of the cart handle and rushed at me, tackling me in a hug. "Don't die," she said again in a small voice.
I returned the hug, stroking her frizzy hair. "I have a secret weapon," I whispered. "Don't tell anyone, I have mind control magic."
"Is that why we're friends?" Amy choked a sob.
"I only got it after Leviathan, so you don't have to worry about me," I gave her one last squeeze and stepped back. "It's not like he's Crawler. He's just some dipshit with a knife, I got this."
"Just in case you do die, thanks for saving me back there," Amy wiped her eyes with her knuckles.
"I'm not going to die."
"Yeah, but, just in case."
"You're more likely to die than me."
Amy stepped back, fists clenched, nodding compulsively. "Makes me feel way better. Ok, I'll see you later then."
"I'll send Scarecrow after you when she gets here," I said, breathing deep into my leaden lungs. "She's crazy, but she's a through and through Vigilante and her power is incredibly useful. She'll help you."
Amy grimaced, walking back over and grabbing the handle again. "Thanks. Use the rest of your favours and don't die."
"Love ya, Amy," I said, smiling my best smile. "No homo."
Tears started to leak out of Amy, streaking down her face. "You big dumb gay cunt."
She seemed to gather her courage because she stopped dawdling and moved, pulling the cart along behind her. It was obviously much lighter than she thought because she stumbled a little at the start, glancing back at me briefly before starting to run.
I was ok with this, those were some pretty good last words for each of us, like, just in case Jack wasn't just some dipshit with a knife. Not that I wasn't confident, I'd just handled Bonesaw and the equivalent of two other capes on under two seconds, but, just in case.
I got out both my phones. My both had been blown up with calls from Armsmaster and the PRT. I sent him a quick text letting him know Amy was on her way, then assured both my parents I'd be fine before sending Savannah a bunch of heart emojis.
There, affairs were in order. Time to pay my dues.
"I'm almost at you," the hallucination suddenly said, pointing behind itself. "Save me."
I took time to cycle one full breath before running full tilt in the direction it was pointing. The hallucination moved with me, fixed to the same point of reference. Ruin her life, save her life; this would be the end of my debt to Taylor.
I heard her before I could see her, her ragged breath with fear. Suddenly she blossomed into view, staggering toward me on rubbery legs. She looked terrible. She was a mess. Dirty, ragged trench coat cut to ribbons, stained jeans, clumsy hessian mask.
I moved forward and caught her. She attempted to shie away in revulsion but couldn't escape my grip.
"He's," she gasped for air, pointing. "There!"
"Panacea is heading to the PRT building with Bonesaw," I said loudly before she could speak again. "Is she still in your range?"
Taylor nodded.
"Help her get there. I'll meet you there soon."
I let her go and she staggered off after Amy without a backward glance. Well, that was easy. I ran in the direction she pointed. It wasn't long before I found him.
He looked kind of like Johnny Depp before all the drugs caught up to him.
He stopped short as he saw me. He'd clearly been chasing Taylor on foot, but he was much less winded. I scanned him; it was Bonesaw's work. I brought out Other Greg in full and together we blitzed through his Observe biography, looking for anything to give us an advantage.
We're fucked.
Yes, we are, Other Greg. Yes, we are.
I tried to mind read him but got back the usual incomprehensible mess of noise.
"And who might you be?" Jack said acidly. "I'm rather busy at the moment."
I licked my dry lips. "Bet you are, gay boy."
Jack sighed, rubbing delicately at the corner of his eye with the pinky finger of the hand he held an open straight razor in. "How trite. You're one of them."
He suddenly flicked the razor at me and I leant out of the way, hearing the extended blade score a line across the building behind me.
Jack frowned.
He flicked the razor again, which I dodged just as easily, then gave his blade a puzzled look. "I swear this doesn't usually happen."
He flicked again, a series of slashes designed to cut off any dodge I might have made, but his motions were easy to read. Slow. I was dodging before his blade even extended.
We traded troubled looks. Why wasn't he killing me? His power should be letting him both read and influence me…
A gut-punch of pure excitement hit me. My mouth hung open in elation. Whatever it was about my powers that spoofed precogs was stopping him! It took a few minutes for Dez's shotgun predictions to start getting accurate for me again, resetting if I created a new spell or ability. This must be the same.
"What is this? Middle-aged performance troubles?" I crowed, walking forward. "Your dick don't work no more?"
Jack pursed his lips, taking a step back. "Banter works better when you're coy, you're ruining the moment."
He stepped back again, snatching a switchblade from a pocket. He whirled into motion, both knives cutting and slicing in a frenzy, but he was still too slow. He kept falling for my feints and failing to correct when I suddenly changed direction. I could see it, there was a moment of unsurety, he looked almost worried.
By this point, I was close enough that he would never escape. I put on the speed and closed the last gap far too fast for him to react, both of my hands snapping out, two Megaton punches connecting with his wrists. There was a sound like branches snapping and both his forearms bent at right angles, the pure kinetic shock wrenching his arms in their shoulder sockets. He tripped, falling, mouth agape with shock, landing heavily on his ass.
I put a foot on his chest, shoving him roughly to the road, pinning him down.
His expression quickly smoothed out, moving back to cool confidence. His enhancements meant he didn't have to feel pain, and death didn't really scare him.
"Well," said Jack. "I don't think either of us expected that. Though, this is a terribly interesting situation; it's been a hot minute since someone has gotten the better of me like this. I give you my honest congratulations."
I didn't say anything.
"Come now, don't be like that. You should be proud of yourself! Strapping young lad like you, taking down big ol' Jack Slash, you'll be front-page news," he continued. "Not that I've ever heard of you. Who might you be?"
"Dark Smoke Puncher."
"That name has verve, and let me tell you, I like verve. I wasn't expecting anything of particular interest from this dull little city, but not only has Crawler found a spectacular prize I found little boy wonder here," Jack smiled in the way only an insane man could when they were trying to be pleasant, as in, failing spectacularly. "I think I'm going to change my candidate. Little Scarecrow seemed to know you, so maybe you're someone worth knowing. How would you like to join our merry little band of murderers?"
I reached down and picked him up by the neck, mana flowing from my fingers.
Jack eyed his encroaching prison. "Just so you know, you don't get to say no to me. I'm going to break you down so thoroughly you'll beg for death before the e-"
The mana filled his mouth, cutting him off. I shivered, gooseflesh breaking out under my uniform. Were I anyone else but me, he'd have been right. If this had been a drag-out confrontation, he'd have been right. He was by far the most dangerous of the Nine if you were a parahuman, and if you weren't he could kill you just as easily. I took a steadying breath and hefted him onto my shoulder.
The Siberian burst through the wall nearest to me in a cloud of concrete dust, alighting on the pavement and locking eyes with me.
Chapter 84: Kill Six Billion Greg Veders 1.4
Chapter Text
There was a brief pause before the Siberian moved, in which I noticed two things.
One, the Siberian truly was fast enough to claw Alexandria's eye out.
And two, it was a projection.
I cast Cuttlefish Skin over me and Jack, rendering us invisible to whoever was controlling the Siberian, then moved. Fire burned on my cheek as the Siberian seemed to blink across the space between us, the edge of her thumb knuckle deleting part of my cheekbone.
The tinnitus whine that came on during stress blocked out every other sound, my legs carrying me up the street at terrific speed. I glanced back over my shoulder just before I rounded the corner of the block, Siberian was just standing there. I was half terrified she could see through my invisibility somehow, but it didn't seem to be the case.
I put a hand to my cheek, flinching as I touched exposed bone marrow. Other Greg was handling pumping healing mana into it while I ran for our fucking lives.
My lungs filled with desperate breaths. I was a millisecond from having my brain scooped out. If I had eaten anything today I might've puked.
I noticed an ajar door on a townhouse nearby and made a sharp diagonal across the road to slip through it and close it softly behind me. I crept through the empty house, silent as a mouse, and slipped onto the couch in the living room. I lay Jack down next to me, shivering, and took a deep breath. Jesus fucking christ.
What a monster. Armsmaster had to know.
I got out my work phone, which was again blown up with texts and calls, then snapped off a quick message letting him know I'd captured Jack and the Siberian was a projection. He'd know what to do. I put my phone way, resting my elbows on my knees and holding my head in my hands. I was going to be fine, I think, I just needed a minute.
I sat back against the couch, gingerly touching my cheek again. Healed up fully even though my fingers came away red with sticky blood. I took another deep breath and dropped my spells, sinking into meditation.
I was too agitated for it to calm me much, but it did create a space in my head to work through things. I needed to get back to the PRT building, which shouldn't be too hard now that I'd lost the Siberian-
How is it going to track us? We're too fast and invisible.
The answer came to me the second I asked myself the question. Jack. His power was going to lead it to me, and soon his power would start tripping me up. It was an obvious answer to a difficult question; why had Jack Slash lasted fifteen years as the head of the Nine while members were cycled through often with only months of membership before being killed or Birdcaged? He was subconsciously manipulating every parahuman around him, everyone dancing to his tune. Even he himself was being influenced, though it seemed he didn't know this.
I had to get rid of him. I stood up, a soft crushing sound echoing through the windows, heard only by my Echolocation enhancements. I softly padded over into the kitchen, peering out through the window and into the next house.
The Siberian was visible for a moment before disappearing behind a wall. Yeah, there was no way she could have known I'd not only stop, but stop in a building on this street. Unless she was going search every building for miles instead of heading straight for the most likely place I'd run, the safety of the Protectorate team.
I desperately needed to get rid of him, but if I did he just keep doing what he was doing after the Siberian broke him out of his shell. I slipped back over to him, picking him up, then quickly, invisibly, heading out the back door. A second later I saw the Siberian do the same, then turn to face me. The person in control couldn't see me, or I'd already be dead, and I doubted that they were aware of the fact that they were being nudged to Jack's location.
I slipped quietly down the back steps, over the fence and through yards until I came back into the area of the city with multiple story business buildings. I scaled the side of the tallest one, getting up to the roof.
I didn't want to do this. I really didn't want to. I headed over to one of those big, boxy industrial air vents and sat back against it. I'd fucked up earlier, I wouldn't make the exact same mistake half an hour later. I shifted until I was kneeling in front of Jack's cocoon and started melting the part around his head.
I had a feeling him talking would be a better motivator than anything I could do for myself.
He blinked at the sudden light, clicking his teeth to work away whatever soreness had come with having his mouth jacked open while he was trapped, then focused on me.
"I like that look on your face," he said, looking me dead in the eye. "What're you working yourself up to do?"
I didn't answer.
"Are you going to kill me, Dark Smoke Puncher?"
"I can't," I swallowed dryly. "I can't do it. I fucked it so bad earlier, when I couldn't stop Murder Rat-"
"Oh hoh," said Jack happily. "So you met Murder Rat? She was quite delightful before her degradation, but that means you met Bonesaw, too, doesn't it?"
"Arrested."
"And good for you! It won't be for long, we'll get her back, but the important part was you put in the effort."
I swallowed again, clenching my fists. "You're not getting her back, Jack. I can't make myself kill you, but-"
My voice broke, hands trembling. I needed to take both a nervous piss and poo. Nausea wracked me with shivers.
"You're not getting her back."
I dissolved enough of his prison to give me access to his hands. I grabbed his left one and he tried to shake my hand. My arm trembled as my breath came out in queasy gasps.
"Do what you have to do," said Jack, bemused. Confident. He was still confident, after all of this.
Lightning flashed out and I severed his hand, then threw up all over him. He wrinkled his nose but didn't say anything.
I pushed through, taking his other hand. Then his feet. I stared at them for a moment; Siberian would be here soon.
"Well, I'm thoroughly dismembered," Jack said crossly, frowning at me. "What now? Because you do realise Bonesaw will put them back for me and I'll be right as rain? Then I'll be coming for you, Dark Smoke Puncher. Oh yes, I will come for you."
I took off my visor and looked into his eyes. There was a part of my Mind magic that I had never used and never could use. I could read minds, at seventy-five Intelligence I was able to handle that strain even if I still couldn't understand what I was getting.
I could also transmit my thoughts, and I knew I could do it violently.
Jack blinked, cocking his head as much as he could, then I saw genuine understanding spread across his face. We stared at each other for a short while. Neither of us said anything.
I blasted him. Fear. Pain. Rage. Desperation. Every dark thought of mine, every negative emotion, every seething impotent fantasy.
Jack's face went slack. The glimmer went out of his eyes. Braindead. A vegetable.
No! I didn't want… He wasn't supposed to die. I just, he wasn't supposed to.
I clutched my head. A fucking beard?! PANTS?!
I groaned quietly. I knew this was something I'd be praised for, even paid for; given Jack's bounty. I needed to go, I needed to get back to everyone.
I dropped down onto the road in front of Amy and Taylor. Neither startled, assumedly Taylor told her I was coming.
"What happened to your cheek?!" Amy let go of the wagon handle and rushed up to me, gently touching the dried blood soaking into the fabric of my uniform all the way down my neck.
"Siberian."
"And Jack?"
The words reverberated in my brain, bypassing my ears entirely. I turned to look at Taylor, jaw clenched.
"Braindead."
In the visual realm, Taylor didn't move, but to my ears, I could hear what sounded like some kind of victory dance.
After a few seconds, she replied. "Cool, thanks."
Thanks. I looked away. Cool, thanks. I take out one of the most wanted criminals in the country for you, and this is what you give me?
Whatever.
"Don't worry about it," I said, waving Amy away and moving to grab the cart handle. "Get on, I'll run."
"The Bonesaw cart," said Amy flatly. "The cart with Bonesaw inside."
"I'll make a second cart, then."
Amy seemed to pick up that I wasn't really in the mood to snipe at each other because she gracefully shut her mouth and accepted a seat in a second cart.
"Are you coming?" I asked Taylor.
"No reason to."
"We're like five minutes away, just get in the cart."
Soon I was walking back up to the PRT building. While I was away a majority of personnel had been deployed and what was left was a kicked anthill of activity all packed out the front in the street, blockades separating a military-style command tent from the rest of the city. I had let the second cart dissolve to spare Amy the indignity of being seen in it, whilst Taylor could render herself unseen.
As we approached the cordon a trooper captain was pointed over to us, along with his attached squad and their very real guns.
"Passwords."
I rattled off the current passwords, then my personal passwords.
There was a moment while whoever was on the other side of the captain's comms verified these. "Ok, you're good to come in. And what is that?"
He gestured at the cart I was pulling while one of his team started to shift the cordon enough for us to get through.
"Bonesaw. Panacea and I captured her."
The captain held up a hand and the troopers began to close the cordon again.
"One moment, please," he said.
Amy stepped closer to me, lowering her voice. "Are they going to shoot us?"
I nudged her comfortingly with my elbow, "Nah. They're going to get Armsmaster, probably. I think he's still here. In this kind of situation, the Protectorate gets full control, rather than the PRT having veto override powers, so he being head of the division has to stay where he can coordinate the situation. That, and they need a Tinker to check over Bonesaw and Kid isn't allowed."
True to my thoughts within the minute Armsmaster was storming out of the command tent, a look of hard fury in the set of his mouth.
"That's why you ran off, huh?"
"I had to save Panacea."
Armsmaster grunted. "I see. And Jack Slash is dead?"
"Not dead dead," I said tiredly. "But he's not coming back."
Armsmaster tilted his head back slightly and I got the impression he was rolling his eyes. "If only you were full Protectorate."
He turned to Amy. "Panacea, good to see you're safe. I'll have someone direct you to where you're needed."
Then to the apparently empty patch of space containing Taylor. "Do I need to call the M/S alert?"
"No," I said quickly. "It's Scarecrow. I invited her along."
Armsmaster's lip curled. "Well, I can't let you inside, Scarecrow. Finally, your insane vigilantism will be put to good use, go do whatever it is you do."
I was getting the sense Armsmaster didn't like her, or maybe it was just that my running off a mere second after he told me to stay put made him look like an idiot.
He turned back to the trooper captain. "Previously designated chain of command is in place, I'll be back soon. Dark Smoke Puncher, with me."
He moved through the cordon and walked off past us. I gave Amy a quick one-armed hug.
"See you later, homie."
"Bye, dude."
I grinned, then turned to Taylor, the smile sliding off my face. "We're even now."
She loomed back into sight, uncomfortably close. "Yeah," she said. "I guess we are."
I turned the cart around and power walked off to join Armsmaster. I moved into step with him, he still seemed pissed.
"I'm sorry I just ran off," I said. "I had to save Amy."
"I do understand," he said. "But after all this is through I'm going to need to give you a punishment. One month's suspension, with pay. What happened to your face?"
"You know how Siberian clawed out Alexandria's eye? It's fast, so much faster than it pretends."
"And you're sure it's a projection?"
"Positive."
"Good," he said. "Because I already gave the order to search for the projection master."
"I can help with that."
"Christ, no," Armsmaster shook his head. "We made a grave miscalculation. The real threat wasn't Shatterbird, it's the cape Crawler had engaged in Downtown. We've codenamed it 'Echidna'. If we can't contain it soon we may have to start bombing runs. Echidna has been spawning powered clones of Crawler for half an hour, along with what we suspect to be clones of Coil, Uber, Circus and Leet along with several civilians. Before I give your orders, know this. The clones are not people, they are constructs created by a power-"
"You want me to kill them."
"Yes, Greg, I want you to kill them. We're mobilising for exactly that, out-of-town reinforcements included. Weld is coming, I believe. You'll be under Miss Militia, so if you don't think you can do it, please let me know now."
I was quiet for a moment as we walked around the PRT building. It was the overwhelmingly rational option assuming the clones were just super-powered constructs. It was the option I'd been avoiding, Bonesaw, Murder Rat, Jack. They all deserved to die, and their deaths would save so many lives, it was an unequivocal good that they be killed.
I didn't want to, though. I didn't want to kill anybody.
But it would be better for everyone if I did kill them.
But I didn't want to.
But I should.
We continued to walk in silence as I came to my resolution.
Chapter 85: Kill Six Billion Greg Veders 1.5
Chapter Text
Bonesaw sat in her full-body brute restraints against the wall. The new Protectorate building had come with holding cells, many mundane, but one with some actual money sunk into it. It was in this one, after being checked over by Armsmaster and divested of everything she could use to Tinker with, that we had thrown Bonesaw into under permanent guard; two PRT troops in their full-face riot gear, one with a containment foam sprayer and the other with a standard-issue automatic rifle.
She hadn't breathed out self-propagating plague gas, yet, though she had tried to squirt some kind of skin contact venom out of her tear ducts into my face when I dissolved the shackle covering her head. Armsmaster had collected a sample and ordered the rest to be properly disposed of.
She glowered at us, her true form as a psychotic murderer leaking through and turning the expression into something truly ugly. Maybe it was a little unfair to her, her having been forcefully recruited at age six and spending the next six years with only the Slaughterhouse Nine for company, but I really didn't fucking care at this point. She was like Murder Rat, in a way, a monster made by someone else but a monster none-the-less.
I should have mercy killed Murder Rat, that was the lesson here, surely. Maybe it would have been kinder that way.
"I'm not telling you anything," Bonesaw said primly, turning her nose up as much as her neck brace allowed.
"Jack Slash is already dead," said Armsmaster. "If you cooperate I can argue for some leniency rather than a lifetime internment in the Baumann containment centre."
Bonesaw's jaw clenched. "He's not dead."
"I see," said Armsmaster after a moment. "Then let's say that he's been incapacitated in such a way that he will never come back."
"I'll make him come back."
"No," said Armsmaster. "You won't. The Slaughterhouse Nine ends today unless you think one of your compatriots can rally the remnants of them into a team," he glanced sidelong at me briefly. "Were you aware that Jack Slash had the ability to subconsciously manipulate nearby parahumans?"
Bonesaw made a quiet sound of mixed disbelief and disgust.
"No? Well, suffice to say that without Jack Slash nothing will hold your team together. If we don't get them today, they will disperse over the country and return to being ordinary killers, leaving you alone," Armsmaster took a step forward.
"Sibby will come for me."
Armsmaster shook his head. "The Siberian will be dealt with soon."
He'd told me he had Velocity grid searching the city. The thing with projection masters was that they had limited range, so whoever was controlling the Siberian both had to be nearby and have a vehicle of some kind so they could keep up with the Nine as they moved; something that would stick out like a sore thumb on the otherwise deserted streets of Brockton Bay.
Well, unless they were an aberration cape of abnormal power like the Triumvirate, which may well be possible given how absurdly powerful the projection they created was. For all I knew they were sitting happily in a hotel room a town over, wanking furiously as their projection ate people.
Bonesaw stared at the roof. "You're lying."
"If you say so," Armsmaster turned to leave. "You have at best two days to decide before life in the Birdcage."
I didn't move to follow him. We were going to do good cop bad cop, and I was bad cop. I knelt down in front of Bonesaw, brushing dried flakes of blood off my neck, fixing my eyes on hers through my visor.
"Riley," I said. "I killed Jack. It wasn't any harder than catching you."
'Riley,' she mouthed contemptuously. "Do you honestly think this is going to make me talk?"
I shook my head. "Not really, but it doesn't hurt to check," I swallowed dryly. "Gotta ask though, do you think you're being a good girl?"
Bonesaw narrowed her eyes.
"I know what you're thinking," I continued. "This Thinker bullshit won't work on you, or even Master bullshit, you have safeguards against that crap. Bringing up your mother's last words won't do anything because we have different ideas of what being a good girl is."
She didn't answer.
"I know you were too scared of Jack to go against what he told you a good girl is," I shrugged. "I just want to know what you thought your mother meant when she said that?"
"You're trying to copy him."
I pulled the part of my uniform covering my neck down, dried blood flaking off onto the floor, and equipped my fancy beard cosmetic. Jack's fancy beard with the sawtooth cut. It was so distinctive to his aesthetic that this would likely be the only time I ever put it on.
There was a flicker of something across Bonesaw's face, something dark and livid.
"Just think of who you could have been without his constant pushing on your subconscious, all the sleepless nights it would have saved you, but he fucked you up, Riley. What do you think a good girl is?"
"She doesn't swear, for one," she said acidly, shifting slightly. "And she's loyal to her family."
After I had mind crushed Jack I realised the flaw in my attempts to read minds; the eye contact. I'd never done it with eye contact because it was a shamefully shady thing to do.
I took off my visor and looked her dead in the eye. Both our eyes were very blue.
Thoughts intruded into my mind, a maelstrom of concepts and emotion wildly different from my own. I almost couldn't parse any of it, so alien it was to my own mind, but there was something so singularly defining of Riley, the bedrock of her very self. Fear.
Constant fear, unending and all-consuming. And, right now, she was afraid I was right.
"What if your fear of Jack was entirely because of his power?" I said, putting my visor back on. "My power spoofed his, without it he was just some dipshit with a knife. You could have gotten away at any time were he not Mastering you. Pretty fucked up if your fake dad has to do that."
Bonesaw set her jaw and looked away petulantly.
"Well, whatever," I stood back up, putting back on my Armsbeard. "Get yourself Birdcaged, I don't give a fuck."
I walked out and her guards shut the door behind me.
"She's too scared of Jack at the moment, but she might cave in two days," the words tasted like fecal oil on my tongue. How did villains talk like that to people all the time? Being bad cop sucked. "So long as she can convince herself he's not coming back."
Armsmaster twizzled his beard thoughtfully. "Hopefully you didn't screw that up, but I can't think of any other avenues we might have gone down that would have worked."
"If we caught whoever the Siberian is, she thinks she's like her weird pseudo mum or something," I frowned. Poor Riley, actually. It wasn't her fault she was a monster, she was just a little kid. She just needed to be separated from the Nine and kept somewhere like Sveta's old parahuman asylum.
The taste of shit in the back of my throat intensified.
Armsmaster gave his beard one last stroke, then nodded. "I'll try again when Velocity gets back to me with the master's location. For now, I need to get back to the command tent. Our reinforcements will be converging there, where you will attach yourself under Miss Militia's command."
I strapped on my armband. Apparently, it was the same kind that they gave out during Endbringer attacks, which didn't fill me with a whole lot of confidence. What did fill me with a little more confidence, however, was that the threat Echidna posed was being taken very seriously. Dozens, if not hundreds of clones had spawned before it became clear what was happening and a hell of a lot of them were clones of Crawler. One Crawler was bad enough, obviously, but fifty of him running around the city?
We were lucky they just wanted to fight each other at the moment.
To that end, however, we were getting some serious reinforcements in. People like Chevalier, Myrrdin and even the Triumvirate. They were turning up every minute, mostly capes from close by for now.
"Just to check again," said Miss Militia. "You sure?"
"I'm sure," I said.
I hadn't had much reason to talk to her lately, so I was sure she was talking to me like I was the same person from months ago. Me at that time just would not have been able to hack it, and I knew it, so her reservation wasn't even insulting in the slightest. I guess Armsmaster hadn't told her about Jack and Bonesaw for some reason, but I was kinda grateful for that. I wasn't very proud of today.
"I know what we're getting in to," I continued grimly. "I promise."
Miss Militia eyed the huge bloodstain running down my neck and nodded. I turned around and smiled awkwardly at my team, the five of them standing just a little bit away. Browbeat was not present.
"Sorry I just ran off," I walked over. "I had to save Panacea. Things would have been so shit if I hadn't."
"We're just glad you're not dead," Weld said, holding out his hand. He pulled me into a bro hug. "But please stop just fucking running off and doing shit on your own or I'm going to send you to protect Svetlana."
"I'd love to," I said. "But you guys need me out there. Armsmaster told me about this Echidna thing, and the clones."
"Offer to freeze you still stands," said Dennis.
"Tomorrow," I said.
Dennis sighed and Chris put a hand on his shoulder.
Lily had turned to face the direction the Echidna vs. Crawler brawl was happening, though we were much too far away to see or even hear anything. "I remember our group spar, back in Boston. Bas kept hissing about how much of an arrogant asshat you were, but you really could have taken us all on by yourself," she glanced over her shoulder at me. "How much stronger are you compared to then?"
"Quite a bit."
I'd put my recent points back into dexterity after so long saving them up to get the next mana control tier. It wasn't a purchase I regretted in the least, since not getting it meant all those people would have gone unhealed after Leviathan. I was three levels from my next perk choice, which was going to be Automatic Dodging. I kind of wished turning Jack's brain into vegetable soup gave me another point for it, as awful as that was.
"Enough to kill Crawler?"
"I fukken wish," I sighed. "Maybe if they're new clones? Armsmaster said they were being spat out without all his stuff."
"Small miracles," said Vista stolidly, wearing the face of someone much older and more jaded.
It didn't suit her, but it did suit today. We were all probably going to end up with blood on our hands because if we didn't then innocent people would die. There wasn't time to tie myself down in moral knots, I just had to do it.
We'd better do it soon, though. I looked in the direction of the fight. The situation was escalating every second we weren't in there. It made sense to consolidate our forces and hit Echidna and Crawler in one big alpha strike but the waiting set my nerves firmly on edge.
What few teleporter capes the Protectorate could field were working double-time to bring in reinforcements, and with a crack what looked like most of the New York team appeared on the other side of the empty parking lot that Armsmaster had designated the entry point, the teleporter vanishing the second their feet were on the ground.
Some were capes I recognised, either from having seen them on the internet, television, in the hospital after Leviathan or because they were my girlfriend.
I stepped forward, smoothly slipping through the growing crowd. She caught sight of me and her thrusters flared with an actinic blue as she blasted forward to meet me. We crashed together, drawing glances, arms wrapped around each other though I couldn't reach all the way around her armour.
"Savvy!"
"Greg!" Savannah span us around in mid-air. "What happened to your face?!"
"Got clipped on the cheek, it looks way worse than it was."
It had pissed out blood until my natural healing factor had staunched it, which was silly for such a small gouge.
"Fuck, I'm glad you're here," I pressed my forehead against her helmeted face.
"You'd better be," she said. "I came here specifically so I could keep you alive."
We touched back down on the ground and I ignored the looks we were getting from losers who didn't have sexy Tinker girlfriends.
"If you're in too much trouble I'm going to strap you onto this," she patted the big turbine jetpack attached to the back of her suit. "And send you back home."
"Thanks, babe. You're a lifesaver," I smiled wanly, taking her by the hand. I didn't know what else to say. Insisting that I was going to be ok and that she would more likely need it was just going to annoy her.
"So she was real," said Dennis loudly as my team walked toward us.
"Dennis, please," I said. "Just give it a rest."
He nodded and shut up. For some reason, he wasn't able to get over his conflicted feelings about me, but that was ok. I understood if not everyone liked me.
Lily stepped forward to be pulled into Savannah's enthusiastic handshake. While they were getting caught up I noticed someone next to Weld who looked like a twisted Neanderthal, which marked another tally in the cons side of my list of whether to join up with Cauldron or not.
In time Amy would get around to fixing her, but unfortunately not today.
"This is Gully," Weld said, realising I was looking. "Gully, this is Dark Smoke Puncher."
"That's a name," she said, voice deep and rough. "It's nice to meet you."
"Same," I said, letting go of Savannah's had to step forward and shake Gully's. "I'm thinking of changing the name, actually, when I move up to the Protectorate. Heart-Under-Blade."
Gully looked like she didn't know whether to laugh or not just in case I wasn't joking, which, damn, but I was still going to change it to that.
"That's… also a name. What happened to your face? I thought the fighting hadn't started yet."
"It was from a different fight today," I equipped a bottle of water, splashing it over my neck and scrubbing with my other hand. "Lots going on."
"I see," said Gully, her gargantuan brow creasing. "I assume you have some level of healing power?"
I nodded, dousing my head fully then switching the empty bottle for an uncomfortably moist towel that had been sitting in my inventory for months, still sort of warm from when I'd used it after a shower, to scrub the rest of the residue away. "I heal pretty good."
"Handy other power," she remarked blandly. "Is it a subspace or item generation?"
"Subspace," I put the towel back and made a mental note to finally put it in a washing machine. "Love my inventory. Love it."
"Don't let the name fool you," Weld cut in, cueing in on Gully not taking me seriously. "He won't let us down."
"It's true," I said. "I won't."
"I didn't mean to imply otherwise," Gully said hastily.
"No offence," I smiled, making sure my sparkle cosmetic pinged handsomely eliciting a complicated, but sceptical, expression from Gully.
"How exactly did you get that," Weld tapped his cheekbone. "You ran off to save Panacea, but from what?"
"Bonesaw," I said, forcing myself to act casual. "Wanted to recruit her for some insane reason, but that wasn't how it happened, look, it's a whole thing," I shook my head at his questioning look. "So I take out Bonesaw first, then someone else I owe a big favour to was being herded toward us by Jack Slash."
Or at least, that was what I assumed was happening. Bonesaw was about to be neutralised and Jack wanted Bonesaw, so his power influenced both him and Taylor to head in our direction so that he would just happen to stumble across us. Then when he was losing whoever was in control of the Siberian just happened to have a gut instinct to check up on him or something of that nature so that he would be bailed out of danger. Unfortunately for him, my power was as insane as Eidolon's because we both completely spoofed Thinkers. I suspected he was influencing me but wasn't getting the correct information back and the disconnect was enough for me to get him.
"But, no," I held up a hand, forestalling his interruption. "He didn't get me. The Siberian turned up; it's a projection, don'tcha know? Crazy, huh?"
"Oi."
I turned to Savannah. I'd wanted to get away with not mentioning it all, but the internet told me honesty was important in relationships so maybe this was for the best.
"It really was only just a clip on the cheek-"
"By the Siberian?" Savannah tried to flap her hands in distress, her bulky flight suit rendering the motion clumsy. "You don't ever owe someone a favour that big, were they trying to get you killed?"
I mean, it was possible?
"They were desperate," I protested. "It was to save their life."
"Someone who's drowning will still drag you under," she said.
I opened my mouth and paused mid breath. Damn, that was actually some profound shit, only I had pushed Taylor into the water in the first place. Well, the profundity kind of broke down when it was more like I accidentally pushed her into the water, because I didn't see the water or the sharks in the water, then jumped in to save her and she tried to drown me; also by accident because she was being mastered.
"They were being subtly Mastered into it," I said. "It's all Jack Slash's fault, he had a secondary power."
Savannah paused, then said in a more quiet voice. "You can just tell us if you tripped into a wall or something, we won't laugh because it's 'undashing'."
"What? No! I know it sounds a little implausible but go ask Panacea."
Savannah drifted forward and hugged me. "I believe you," she said like she was doing me a really condescending favour by being nice.
I sighed and hugged her back. "Thanks, sweetie."
Whatever, the truth would come out eventually. It would be easier for them to believe once we started the attack and got onto the killing field. I screwed my eyes shut, clenching my hug as tight as I could and Savannah patted me on the back in a motherly sort of way.
A ripple of reaction ran through the crowd, tiny gasps and mutters, and I opened my eyes. The Triumvirate was here.
Legend, Eidolon. The two I hadn't yet Observed. I breathed a sigh of relief as I read them, nothing there contradicted Alexandria's story; a possible tally on the pro side of joining them.
"We're starting."
Alexandria's voice carried over the crowd, strong and confident as her cape flapped in the wind.
"We're treating this like an Endbringer attack, divide into role groups. If you're a Mover, group up to the left; you'll be working to shrink the perimeter. Less movable hard hitters, group to the right; you'll be taking care of clones as they are expelled from Echidna. Barrier capes, group to the back; you'll be penning Echidna in. Blaster's to the front, you will be our main strikers for Echidna herself," Alexandria began to rise higher into the air. "Do not come into physical contact with her. She will spit out a clone with your powers and I think we all know just how bad that would be. If you've not yet received an armband, come and get one now. We have Dragon as support, she will let you know where clones are if she can and you are to update on their locations. You must destroy the clones, understood? Move out!"
"We're on the same team," said Savannah weakly as we broke our hug. "Before, um, before we start you should have this just in case we get separated."
She reached over her back, retrieving the jetpack. "It's pre-programmed to head back to New York so as soon as you're in trouble just," she gestured to a ripcord dangling from the side. "I'll strap you in now and you put it in your magic space."
"You're literally the sweetest," I said as she held it out for me and I slipped my arms through the straps so she could adjust them to my size.
I inventoried the jetpack, then quipped it again. It fit without hassle so I put it away again, then stroked Savannah's helmet, "I bet I won't even need it."
"Don't jinx yourself, idiot."
I smiled thinly, then turned to my team who were in a huddle with a space waiting for me. I pulled Savannah along with me and locked shoulders with her and Chris.
Weld put his hand out, palm down, and we all piled our hands on top. "Be careful," he said.
There was a tense moment before we split up into our respective groups. Savannah and I joined up with the other half dozen Mover class capes including Victoria. The group was headed by Alexandria herself, wisely separating herself from the group of capes who were meant to be in close range with Echidna because christ would that be fucking disastrous.
Even a single clone Alexandria would cleave through our ranks like butter until either she or Eidolon could stop it.
"We don't know for sure how spread out the clones are," she eyed us grimly. "Combined with our numbers means we're going to have to split up to cover the entire perimeter. Dragon will direct us faster flyers to the estimated far end of the perimeter while the ground-bound movers will cover the nearer half. There is a good chance there will be civilian clones inside buildings, spare none. No more wasting time, go."
She vanished in a burst of motion, the wind from the sheer speed of her flight pushing against my face.
I turned to Savannah again and we embraced once more.
"See you soon," she said, then lifted up off the ground and rocketed away in a blast of heat and light.
I took a deep breath, shared a nod with Victoria as she too flew away, then turned to the three remaining people.
One was a boy my age in dark, sleek armour and a shaggy mop of black hair partially covering his full face mask. He had one elbow resting on a large, segmented black rectangular box, the segments outlined with faint blue light. The same light began to shine between the segments of his armour before his body began to disassemble, pieces flying off the box to attach to him and reform his body into that of a sharp six-legged lizard. He had an interesting power, a mix between Tinker and Changer, able to turn most of his body into machinery and combine it with his technology.
The next was a man in his later twenties, his form-fitting suit covered in psychedelic swirls. His power was to move incredibly fast in one direction with an effect trailing after him that would disorient anything caught within it.
"I'll take left," he said, glancing at his armband which lit up with an arrow pointing toward, presumably, the nearest clone on the left.
The last person, a woman who was probably only just nineteen despite her short stature, nodded. She could emit a beam from anywhere on her body that would pull her toward whatever the beam hit. I could see she was able to make more than one beam, opening up interesting tactics like anchoring herself to a building then slingshotting clones by attaching another beam to them and pulling on both.
"I'll take right, then," she said before shooting into the air, Spidermanning her way with her beams.
The man saluted and vanished in a swirl of fractals and tie-dye.
"Leaves us middle, huh?" I said to the boy; whose code name was Tactical, which I thought was too edgy for the PRT to handle given that Tactical had famously been Butcher Six.
Tactical nodded queasily, his six black metal legs flexing. When he spoke his voice was distorted mechanically, "let's do it."
We ran, his lizard form keeping up with me quite easily, our armbands pointing the way.
Tactical and I had split up also as each of our armbands began pointing in slightly different directions. I'd retrieved my spear while he had transformed his arms into a shield and a beam cannon.
The arrow wasn't pointing exactly to any clone, it turned out, but to where the last known location of the outer perimeter of clones was. I was going to have to search manually, Urban Tracking finally being put to good use.
It didn't take long to find a trail and follow it until I could hear screams and thumping. I raced in through the shattered front door of the corner store, nimbly stepping over the trashed interior. A twisted clone thrashed against the staff only door behind the counter with hands far too large for his body, his head a swirled gnarl of bone and matted hair and his nude body covered with similar hairy patches.
"Oi," I shouted, just to hear myself over my own heartbeat.
The clone turned, he had blood down his front that wasn't his. "The fuck do you want?"
"Step away from the door," I said firmly.
"But I wanna kill them," he said, almost whined. "They're fucking idiots."
He was unpowered, a clone of a civilian Echidna had gotten a hold of. I tightened my grip on my spear and lunged forward, closing my eyes as the razor-sharp tip pierced through his enlarged forehead.
I moved the spear until the dead clone wouldn't be in view when I opened my eyes again, then moved to knock on the staff door blinking away tears.
"I'm with the Protectorate, is anyone in there?"
Four panicked voices started shouting over each other and there was the sound of something heavy being dragged from in front of the door.
"Please stay in the room," I ordered. "The emergency order is still in effect, someone will be back to rescue you; I promise."
I clicked the buttons on my armband, "clone down, civilians in the Quickmart staff room."
The armband beeped, a female Canadian voice, Dragon's voice, chiming a prerecorded, "acknowledged." The arrow now pointed in a slightly different direction.
I quickly headed back out of the store. The clone had been homicidally insane just as my quest had said, there was no saving them. It just wasn't feasible. I suspected Amy might be able to, given a few hours for each one, but she would have to essentially lobotomise them with the amount of rewiring she would have to do.
I ran through the streets, a quick jogging pace to conserve stamina, making slow progress in attempting to thoroughly cover my section of the perimeter whilst still working my way inward. There were very few clones this far out and I slaughtered each one with a single strike of my spear.
All of them were malicious and insane, twisted in both mind and body, driven to snuff out every last thing the original cared about then move on to the wider world. It was something Bonesaw would have done but on purpose.
The next clone, a ludicrously tall Morgan Freeman lookalike, I found in a conference call on a cellphone. The name of the originator rang a bell.
The clone lowered the phone from where it had been furiously whispering and hung up. "Your next words," it said through a toothless mouth. "Will be, 'Thomas Calvert was Coil?'"
"Thomas Calvert was Coil?" I said. What?! A Master effect?
"Your next action will be," the clone said with a wicked smirk. "To-"
I hurled my spear directly into its chest before it could speak, the force of the throw knocking it back several meters and pinning it to a wall.
I ripped my spear back out of it, clicking down on my armband. "Clone down, did you know that Thomas Calvert was Coil?"
"Acknowledged."
Thanks, Dragon.
As I moved further in toward the epicentre the clones became more common, as were dead civilians. The clones were indiscriminate, destroying everything and everyone they could get their hands on.
My spear ignited on contact with a clone of Circus, fire running up it even as I lopped their head from their body, necessitating I drop it before my fingers went up in flame. The flames burned intensely for a few seconds before dissipating, the shaft of the spear uncomfortably hot in my hand when I picked it up despite being a bar of solid steel.
Despite the fact that the clone had been stark nude, of course. I closed the pop-up and moved on.
"All combatants, converge on Echidna!"
The armband broke me out of my mindless action. I'd been running on autopilot, not thinking about what I was doing, only paying just enough attention so that I could do what I had to.
The armband chimed again, an annoying peal, the arrow flashing rapidly. I ran in the direction it pointed, I was close enough now that I could hear the fighting. When I bounded into the main arena I walked into a shitshow.
The scene was dominated by Echidna, taller than a house, a twisted mess of human and animal parts sticking out of her bulk at random. Her frame heaved, a fountain of rank gore spewing from her several enormous mouths and carrying with it a pile of naked, twisted bodies.
Crawler was bounding around Echidna like a giant puppy, taking bites out of her that sizzled and spat. He was about half her size, jet black, with the look of powerful, ancient savagery about him.
Several smaller versions of Crawler were harrying him around Echidna and all of them were being pelted with beams and blasts of all kinds.
The rest of the battle was a wild, uncontrolled melee. A mess of clones and heroes. Not only clones of the original people Echidna had taken, but clones of people on our side who had gotten within touch range of her. A blistering, eye-searing array of powers were being fielded, forcefields going up and being smashed through by Echidna or Crawler, the road twisting and writhing under some Shaker effect.
I could see on Echidna's back there was a cluster of Coil's and a dozen twisted mockeries of some little girl all being shielded by a copy of what may have been Bastion or Shielder; possibly even both or more that one of either.
I lunged forward, spear lashing out left and right as I raced across the battle and each swing took out a clone, shearing through them with sparks and ozone. My level up screen flashed in front of me, I grit my teeth in irritation, allocating the points into dexterity and pushing it out of sight.
I came out the other side of the brawl, and re-entered at a new angle, carving a new path through the clones. I struck at a Crawler, my spear bouncing off its leathery hide. I jumped up onto its back, plunging a lightning wreathed hand into the back of its skull. The Crawler howled, twisting its neck all the way around and expelling a spray of boiling venom. I rolled off its back as it ignored me and went back to trying to gnaw through the originals leg.
What a fucking shit show.
A hand grabbed my shoulder, reefing me back the split second before a beam drilled a hole through the concrete in front of me. I flinched around, catching sight of Alexandria let go of me and smash through a clone of some flying blaster cape, warped to unrecognisability.
All throughout this Echidna was barfing up new clones every twenty seconds or so and I realised the clones didn't all have the same powers. A clone of Bastion was hauling itself out of the slurry of vomit and was hurling bright blue force discs that ricocheted off of whatever they hit; something the original Bastion could not do.
Eidolon nailed it with a sickly green ball and ten more sprayed Echidna's main body, withering flesh into a necrotic slop.
I skipped back out of the fight, looking for a better angle, cleaving a clone of Uber in half on my way out. Alexandria was suddenly next to me and I flinched, swinging my spear, but she caught my arm with casual ease.
"What do you read off of her?" she asked, letting go of my arm.
I grit my teeth and Observed Echidna like I should have instead of rushing in.
"Uh, she's from Aleph, she's a Simurgh bomb, drank half a vial, can't control herself; nothing that helps right now."
Alexandria held out her palm, a different beam eating through the palm of her glove but splashing uselessly against her skin.
"Where's Legend?" I asked.
"Wherever the Siberian's master is," Alexandria turned to me, mouth a flat line. "They've been making their way here and we can't let that come to pass. Let's go."
Alexandria vanished from next to me, six clones seeming to explode as she struck them in turn too fast for anyone to track. With that, the tide turned, our side rallied and I charged back into the fray spear a whirling dervish while beams of lightning drilled through clones when gaps opened up. Six of the twenty present Crawler clones, the most evolved ones, formed a line between us and Echidna, baying and snarling with glee.
The Siberian crested the buildings behind Echidna, carrying something in its arms. Jack. I blinked and it was atop Echidna. Its mouth was moving, it was saying something, but I couldn't tell what over all the noise. The Siberian sunk through the force fields covering Echidna like they weren't there, disappearing into its flesh.
It didn't resurface.
The battle line crashed into the Crawlers, me with them, my hands blazing blue with electrical energy as I slashed and tore at the clones, to no effect.
Echidna puked, an enormous volume, it sprayed over our back line depositing a fresh line of clones in the perfect position to pincer us.
One of the clones that had landed on the largest Crawler staggered to its feet, shaking itself free of the dark reddish fluid. The clone of Jack Slash scraped its beard free of goo and the flow of the battle reversed. The clone army rallied, pincering us between the hammer of the new clones and the anvil of the Crawlers.
Something hit me from behind this time, taking a huge chunk out of my shoulder. My armour shattered, arm hanging loose as bright waves of pain coursed through me. I dashed back, getting free of the scrum, pushing healing mana into the wound.
A geyser of vomit sprayed again, one of the clones landing within spitting distance of me. I recognised him. I staggered over, falling to my knees.
I picked him up with one arm, cradling him. He was me, these were my stats from the very first time I'd seen them. He didn't have a power. His nude body was pudgy, soft; me before I got my powers. He stirred feebly, gasping his first newborn breath.
My very own…
"My very own clone," he coughed, reaching for my face. "Now neither of us-"
I put a finger to his lips, quietening him.
He went limp, and like a wave, everyone else in my field of view went limp. I looked searchingly over the crowd as they started to recover. Everyone had been affected, right down to Eidolon, the Jack clone and Echidna.
-600
I blinked, looking down at the bright red threads protruding from my chest stretching from my clone's fingers. He was unravelling into shimmery thread, his whole body unspooling. I tried to yank it out but was met with searing pain. My clone, my clone triggered? His thread body reached all the way to Echidna, I could see it attached to her.
With a sharp, blindingly painful jerk the thread contracted, pulling me through the air like a fish, through the battle lines and directly into one of Echidna's many waiting maws.
Chapter 86: A glib facsimile 2.1
Summary:
The reboot, three years later. Written because I was bored and this story was a lot of fun the first time around. We celestial Forge now.
Chapter Text
"You may lef-"
I flinched back violently, spooking Dauntless, as Echidna engulfed me. The sun shone brightly.
"Eh? You alright there?"
My heartrate pounded in the hundreds per minute as an unholy amount of adrenaline coursed through my body. I had been eaten by Echidna, hadn't I, after my clone had triggered before my very eyes? I was standing on the boardwalk in my stupid velcro shoes. In my hand was the cheap as shit throwing knife I'd bought eight months ago. Dauntless was standing in front of me looking at me like I was having a stroke.
"Yeah?" I said in a voice of utter and absolute weedy loserdom. "Nah?"
I tried to call up my status, but nothing came, nothing.
"Kid," Dauntless gently put his gloved hand on my shoulder. "It's ok. Whatever happened, it's ok."
I tried reaching out for the well of mana dwelling within my soul, but there was none there. It wasn't that I was tapped out, my well dry, there wasn't even a well to begin with, only -
This had to be fake, this wasn't real. I was inside Echidna. I had to get out.
I had started crying at some point because Dauntless was getting increasingly uncomfortable, fretting on the spot and looking around for help without being obvious. "Whatever's going on," he rubbed my shoulder again. "We can help you. Do you want to come down to the station?"
I dragged a clammy hand across my tear damp face under my Dr. Wu mask. Fake Past Gerome was still such a nice guy. "Y-yeah," I choked out. "Sounds good, bro."
He cracked me a kind smile, clearly relieved that this awkward situation wasn't going to continue. I took a few deep breaths and tried to calm down. Ok, so, this wasn't in Echidna's power bio at all but that didn't mean it was her power. Eidolon was there, maybe this was some kind of temporal reset gone awry, or a clone with that kind of power? A Coil who didn't split simulate timelines but made you live one? A dying dream on my part?
All of it made as much sense as the other scenarios. I let myself be led along by Gerome and we stopped at a stall and he bought me an ice cream which massively helped.
"Thanks, Dauntless," I said as I took a bite of vanilla. "Thanks for helping me with my freakout back there."
"It's no worries," he replied in a voice of purest sincerity, lowering his chocolate cone. "It's hard being a hero."
I exhaled loudly through my nose which was starting to run again, making the snicker a great deal wetter than I wanted. I tried inventorying it, but my inventory wasn't there. The tears started again. Moving was so hard, I was stuck in one of those nightmares where no matter how fast you tried to run you were stuck pushing against air thicker than molasses. Every motion of my arm that lifted the ice cream to my mouth was so slow, so graceless - the movements of a fat little boy.
"It's good for you though, good for the soul," Gerome's armour glinted in the sun. "Helping people. Doesn't matter what trouble you're in, we're there to help you."
"It's not that I'm in trouble," I said and wiped a big trail of mucous up my arm as I dragged it across my face. "Probably. I just don't know what's going on, or if this is even real. It can't be, but it feels so real."
"Is it something you want to talk about?" Gerome asked quietly.
I sniffled loudly and took another bite of ice cream. "I really don't know. This might all just be a master/stranger effect."
Gerome flinched.
"But what if it's real? What if I've lost everything?"
"Life can feel like that sometimes," Gerome said vaguely. I knew he was desperately wondering if he should call in a master/stranger alert the moment I mentioned them. He probably should, it was no joke.
"I just," I stuttered, my breath catching. "What if I have to start again? From zero? I think that might be my worst fear, going through it all again without…"
I lifted a hand that could once bend steel. I felt like shit. I felt fat and pathetic and lethargic. My brain wasn't working right either, I had the thickest brain fog you could ever imagine. Every power that had kept me at absolute tip-top, beyond human peak had been ripped away. If this was a power it was something Taylor would be capable of making me see, one of her clones somehow? It was numbing, it was painful. Other Greg was gone, I didn't even have an INT score anymore.
I started crying again and Dauntless shuffled uncomfortably.
"Hey," he said. "Why don't we get a ride to the PRT HQ? I can give you a tour, the special, exclusive one?"
"I'd really like that," I took a breath that was an effort, through a cardiovascular system that was once of the strongest and now of the weakest.
Gerome took out his work phone and made a call, asking for a car pickup. We stood awkwardly on the kerb and ate ice cream, Gerome occasionally trying to make small talk while I just felt like screaming.
What could you do when the most important, vital part of you had been callously ripped away? When someone had taken you in hand and made you lesser? Worthless? Nothing? No one? I could talk for hours about my intrinsic worth as a person but I knew deep down that everything good about me came out of my gamer power. What was I without it, before? Some milquetoast nerd who couldn't get a clue?
Without my powers I was nothing.
Without my powers I was no one.
The PRT paddy wagon pulled up to the kerb in front of us, purple stripe logo emblazoned proudly on the side against the black paint.
"This'll be a treat," Gerome said, ushering me into the back. "How often do you get to ride in one of these? Hey, Paul," he greeted the trooper, Paul Allen. I knew the guy, he used to PT for me. "Can we punch the lights a bit? We've got a VIP here and we've gotta show him a fun time."
"You got it," Paul said and hit the lights. It was just past midday so they were barely visible from inside and I gave a choking intake of breath as I looked up, weakly raising a thumb. Paul pulled away from the kerb and gave the siren a brief whirl. The rest of the trip was in complete silence broken only by my occasional sniffles.
It wasn't ending, whatever this was it wasn't ending. If this was a power attacking me by trapping me in my past why would it bother with such incredible fidelity of experience? If this was a simulation it was simulated perfectly, but even then why bother with this scenario? It was gut wrenchingly horrible but I could imagine worse. I could also be getting my dick eaten by ants, or molested by a tentacle monster, or be watching helplessly from inside my own body as it murdered everyone I knew.
What other option was there but for it to be a simulation? I couldn't have been stripped of my powers and cast nine months into the past, and even if someone had the power to, why me?
I couldn't be sure. The simulation was so perfect that I felt everyone would act just as they would in real life if I started telling them I was Dark Smoke Puncher and I knew all their names and where they lived and the deep, dark secrets of their triggers. If it was a simulation what was there to lose? If it was a simulation, why even bother?
The light changed as we entered the visitor portion of the underground carpark, dim compared to the noon sun. The sounds of the road vanished and I felt the van crawl into a parking space and jerk slightly in time with the click of Paul putting the handbrake on. Gerome thanked him for the lift and led the way out of the van, and as we got out I felt a vast wave of nostalgia. How many times had I done this?
I rubbed a sugar sticky hand under my mask. It looked so real, it felt so real even to my dull, human senses. I'd lost the near perfect recall that came with my gamer powers but as far as I could tell this was a scene clipped straight from my memories. I was so sure it had to be caused by one of the dozens of powers being thrown around in the Echidna fight, and yet -
I wanted to go back. My friends were fighting without me.
"We're here!" Gerome declared brightly.
I gave a weak cheer and followed him down a well trodden path, up an awkward, yet very smooth, elevator ride and into the tour area. Gerome gave me a running commentary of everything and it was at least interesting to see it from the other side. They hadn't let me be on the team receiving the tours before I'd left for Boston, and afterwards they had been temporarily canceled for obvious reasons. He showed me the cafeteria, the gym and the hall of fame.
"And this," he said proudly as we drew upon the dummy Wards common area, the one set up for us to greet people without having to expose the private areas where we really lived. "Is our Wards area. Who's your favourite?"
I nearly choked on a fresh wave of pain. "Gallant, I guess."
"He's a good lad," Gerome said fondly. All the adults found him a treat, a very polite and respectful boy. He opened the door and led me inside. "Tell you what, I'll go see if anyone's here and maybe you can meet one."
I nodded and mumbled something that I hoped sounded affirmative. Gerome left me in the room, which was a sanitised version of the real thing, though it still had comfy chairs, and I tried not to glance at all the hidden cameras. I sat on the couch in front of the flatscreen and rested my elbows on my knees.
I suddenly realised that I was still wearing my stupid fucking asian caricature mask and that was going to be my first impression. I'd already taken it off and stomped it into the bin when I remembered that this was a simulation, probably made by a Coil clone.
But what if it wasn't? What if Eidolon had tapped into a power that had sent me back in time? What if he'd hit Echidna, and she'd come back with me? What if I was going to be dealing with a complete derailment of the timeline as she told the Travelers everything that would happen?
What if? What if? What if what? I had no way of knowing what was going on, I had no powers, no way of doing anything. I was just a fat little boy - Strength Four, Vitality Five.
I sighed and slapped myself. "Stop being such a self pitying faggot," I muttered under my breath.
Ok, so I might be stranded in the past with no powers. So what? So what if I was starting from zero in my world? I was Greg fucking Veder, Dark Smoke Puncher, Heart Under Blade. Powers don't maketh man, a man maketh himself for he is both the marble and the sculptor. It might hurt as every strike of the chisel upon my flesh carved away a strip of weakness, as every blow of the hammer forced me to change, but I had undergone that crucible once before. I had made something out of the fat little boy who wore velcro shoes. I had -
Reality rent open, layers of complexity stripped away until there was nothing but me and the great arm descending from a tear in the fabric of the universe trailing behind it three hundred and thirty three stars. It held in its hand a pen made of truth and it wrote Celestial Forge upon my brow in lines of fire.
Chapter 87: A glib facsimile 2.2
Chapter Text
Did I just have a fucking trigger event? I called up my status, but it wasn't there, only -Pure Art
A power. I was a parahuman again. The door opened and Gerome led Missy and Chris inside, all three starting in surprise at my bare face. I don't know what kind of expression I was making, some combination of feral ecstasy and pure shock? What kind of face did having the arm of god descend from on high and carve power into your soul give you?
"Hello," I said and waved.
All three were quiet for a moment until Gerome broke the silence. "Are you ok?"
I opened my mouth to reply and a bead of sweat fell into my eye. I lifted a hand to my face and realised I was soaked, touched my chest and felt the cold film of sweat staining my grey Miku t-shirt with big dark patches. "I think I just had a power moment."
"Ok."
All three were masked, but because I knew them I could see past them and know the trepidation, the confusion, on their faces. Ah well, what was one lackluster first impression? I've made worse.
"But you're ok?" Gerome said, stepping forward. "Why don't you sit down, I'll grab you a drink."
"Thank you," I said and acquiesced, taking a seat on the prop couch again. "I'd like that."
Gerome nodded, smiled, and gave Chris and Missy a meaningful look before departing. They would be nice, I knew, and understanding. I Observed them to recap on their bios, which once I could have recalled with crystal clarity word for word but were now slipping through the folds of my mortal brain, to look upon the hardships they had endured for their own powers, but nothing happened.
"Hey," said Chris. "I'm Kid Win. I promise I'm not being rude but I'd prefer not to take my mask off."
"I completely understand," I wiped my sodden palms on my cargo shorts. "You can call me Heart Under Blade." There was a moment where I was entirely aware of how retarded that must have sounded coming from my current self, with my bowl cut and my Vocaloid shirt, but I didn't care. It had personal meaning.
To their credit they didn't even flinch. "I'm Vista," Missy introduced herself.
"It's nice to meet you," I said. I felt weird. I wanted my gamer powers back. I wanted the safety they provided. I was exposed, I had no mana disguise, I had no acting skill - my new power didn't even remotely intersect with this situation. All I had to help me with this was myself. "I mean, you don't have to call me Heart Under Blade. I'm Greg. You don't have to tell me your names either, I know how confronting that would be. I just want to."
"That's no problem," said Chris and he took the seat next to me, then inched away from the aura of humid sweaty body odour I was giving off.
"I'm sorry I'm so sweaty," I said miserably. "I don't know why it happened."
Vista, wisely, took a seat on the armchair a few feet away. "It's ok. You're probably under a lot of pressure."
I gave her a grateful, weedy smile. "Yeah. Don't worry about that though. I'm really happy to meet you, I'm going to join the Wards. I don't even have a combat power though so I won't be that much help. I'll do my best, though."
"That doesn't matter," Chris said. "Everyone is good at something, and this is the place where you can figure out what that is. Joining up was honestly the best choice I've ever made."
I wanted to tell him he didn't have to justify it to me, or sell me on it. I wanted to tell him he was already my friend.
"It's a home away from home," Missy said kindly. I wanted to tell her that both her parents were cunts and that she was already my friend.
I bowed my head, hair falling over my eyes. It didn't feel like a simulation, it felt like I was really here. The door opened again and Gerome came back. I looked up and he handed me a can of Diet Sprite, condensation beading it as the metal fresh from the fridge came in contact with his warm, gloved hand. I took at and near on cradled it as another wave of nostalgia hit me. "The sponsorship deal," I said fondly, wiping a thumb across the cold, wet aluminum.
"We have more of them than we can drink," Gerome said with a chuckle. "Does anybody else want one?"
"No thanks," said Chris quickly.
"I'm not thirsty," said Missy.
I cracked my can open, took a sip, and sighed in absolute contentment as the somehow both bland and sickly sweet liquid hit my tongue. I remember being sick of these things, too. "Thank you so much. I really needed this."
"Nothing to it," Gerome said charmingly. "Least we could is a little hospitality."
I took another sip. "Hey, Dauntless? I want to join the Wards. Can we call my parents now?"
"Oh, well, yeah, of course," Gerome nodded in a quick motion that sent the plume on his Greek helmet wobbling. "We can absolutely do that, no worries. Do you have a phone on you?"
I held out my hand and equipped it from my inventory, but nothing happened. Oh, what the fuck?! All my stuff I had in there! All my money! "I lost it," I mumbled and closed my hand into a fist.
"All good, all good. We can use mine, it'll just come from a private number so your parents mightn't pick up." He took out his work phone and unlocked it before handing it to me. It was a familiar weight in my hand, the heavy duty case resting comfortably. I just held it for a moment before dialing our home landline. It rang out so I left a message.
"Hey, mum and dad. Greg here, I lost my phone and Dauntless let me use his. Protectorate Dauntless. I'm just down at the PRT building, can you call back when you get this? I want to join the Wards. Luv yas."
I hung up and handed him back the phone. It was a sunday afternoon and I was out of the house, so they were probably banging. "They'll call back."
"That's fine, I'll just have to let the call center know because if they try to reverse dial they'll just get redirected to them."
I nodded and recalled how it went the last time. "Should I start drafting up a power summary? You know, for the tech guys?"
Gerome's smile froze. "There's no need to, no rush or anything."
"I think I should. It's a human master/stranger power."
I knew how this went. Human masters were reviled until proven trustworthy, even Dean, whose power mine was analogous to, had to go through a long period of earning trust. Nobody wanted the association, not after Heartbreaker. Not after Nice Guy. Not after Teacher, not after Momma Mathers. Not after Friendship Bracelet, Monkey Do, Lockbox, Valefor and the Pied Piper.
Instantly the mood in the room changed. "It's nothing I can just use," I said. "I'm really good at art, and anything I paint or draw or whatever will make whoever looks at it feel an emotion, any emotion."
As much as I could turn it to good, drawing murals that would fill the people who looked at it with a sense of inner peace and non-agression I could paint a shirt that would make anyone who looked at it want to trust me.
I could paint a room where you felt like your best self, made you confident and hopeful. I could make a space where anyone would feel like their life was worth it.
I could paint a room where everywhere you looked would fill you with burning lust. I could make a space that would break someone down into a thing that I owned.
I mean, there was a huge middle ground, too, but people wouldn't care about any of that. They would focus on how I could deceive and manipulate people, and they were right to. I mean, I would trust me. I trusted Amy and she could do way worse than this. Bitch could make your dick fall off.
"I see," said Gerome. "Thank you for telling us, but, what happened to your smoke and vanishing knives?"
"Gone," I said. "I don't know. I don't have that power."
Gerome looked confused and disgruntled but didn't press any further at the sight of my utter dejection.
"It's probably not much different to," I stopped myself before I could say Dean's name. "Gallant. He has those emotion blasts, right? He could shoot someone with a Shame Beam?"
Or the horny beam. I had suspicions, but no confirmation, that it was used in such a fashion with Victoria and the thought of it burned my heart with jealousy even though I had a girlfriend.
"He could," said Missy hesitantly. "It's not like that's a secret."
Savannah. She didn't know me anymore. I'd lost my girlfriend. I'd lost my friends. I'd lost everything. I started to chew on my fingernails anxiously, this was going to have to be Rebuild of Gregvangelion until the simulation ended.
"And it doesn't matter," said Gerome solidly. "We accept everyone in the Wards, helping young people with their powers was what the initiative was designed for."
I let out a long, wet sniffle. "Thanks, bro. I promise it's not easy to use, I can paint good but I can't paint fast for shit. And even then all you have to do is look away-"
Gerome held up a hand and I knew, having been on the other side, that I didn't have to justify myself to him. "No matter your situation, no matter who you are, the Wards have a place for you."
"It's true," added Chris. "Once you're in you're one of us."
I sipped feebly at my Sprite, the chemical taste of aspartame and synthetic lemon/lime coating my tongue. I missed these guys so much, the Chris and Missy when I first met them who had yet had to sit through the original me and become soured to my personality. I would do better this time, it was already impossible for me to do worse - I may have lost my gamer powers, I may have lost my Acting, but I'd retained my Wisdom in some capacity. It was actual personal growth, not just some power effect like my peak physical health, and that couldn't be wiped away.
"I'm going to do my best," I promised. "I won't let anyone down."
Even myself. Especially myself. I didn't want to start over and relive certain pains, but if I had to then by fuck I would do it damn well.
"You don't have to be that hard on yourself," Missy said with a hilarious amount of ignorant irony. "All you have to do is try."
I raised a hand and pushed sweaty hair out of my eyes. Even though this was fake, maybe it was nice not having all the baggage that came with reality. I gave them all a watery smile. "Thank you."
"Why don't we try to get onto your parents again?" Gerome handed me his work phone again and I called home. This time the call was picked up.
"Greg!" I pulled the phone away from my ear with a wince as dad bellowed into the receiver. "You? Wards? What?"
"Hey, dad. Yeah, I want to join them, I have a power."
"A power?!" The sheer excitement in his voice made spilling into the room. Ah, they didn't know what a trigger event was yet, did they? I remembered they hadn't until Armsmaster told them the first time around. "That's incredible! We're coming right now! At the main PRT-"
Colour bent and space shifted and there was once again nothing but me and the great arm descending from a tear in the fabric of the universe that trailed behind it three hundred and thirty two stars. It held in its hand a pen made of truth and it wrote Decadence upon my brow in lines of fire.
I could still hear my dad talking but only from the volume with which he was speaking because Gerome's phone had slipped from my hand and fallen to the floor. I looked up at Gerome, Chris and Missy and they looked back in mild, confused concern. They hadn't seen it, that great arm bulging with muscle, clutching a pen made of starlight and inscribing into my soul words of power. I picked up the phone and put it back to my ear.
"Greg? Are you still there?"
"Yeah," I said. "Sorry, I dropped the phone. What did you say?"
"The PRT building on Queen Street?"
"Yeah, that one."
"Ok, we're leaving now," I heard mum in the background harrying him to get in the car. "Love you, son!"
"Love you, too, dad."
I hung up and handed Gerome back his phone. "Are you alright?" he asked.
I nodded. "I just had, like, a weird moment there. Did I do anything weird besides drop the phone?"
"You looked very surprised. What did they say?"
"They said they were coming down right away."
"Is that…" Gerome paused delicately, considering his words to what he, given how trigger events worked, was in all probability saying to an abused child. "Normal for them?"
"Yeah, very."
Gerome nodded and didn't say anything further. The rest of the afternoon passed by and I was signed up for the Wards just like last time.
Chapter 88: A glib facsimile 2.3
Chapter Text
"Greggo!"
The loud call and louder knocking on my door woke me, I thrashed in my bedsheets for a moment. What the fuck was happening? Why was I so tired?
"Time for school!" Dad's voice boomed.
"Wha?" I called and he chuckled. I heard his footsteps slowly clack down the floorboards and down the stairs.
School? I didn't go to school, hadn't for months since I went to Boston. I struggled to open my eyes and get out of bed. I was greeted with the sight of pudgy limbs and no blue box telling me that sleeping for four hours had made me Healthy. Through the brainfog of normal human sleep I remembered that I had been eaten by Echidna and then woke up in the past, or was somehow still in a Coil Clone simulation or something.
The simulation theory got increasingly unlikely the longer time went. Sure, it could in theory be a parahuman power doing this to me, there were certainly powers strong enough to trap someone in their own personal Tsukiyomi, but why one so banal? Why one where I was getting more powers? I stood up and stretched, trying to shake off the fog of sleep.
How did I used to live like this? I felt terrible. I was starving, I was dehydrated, my eyes were gritty and all I wanted to do was go back to bed. Luckily for me, and in what gave another point against the simulation theory, my new powers gave me something to help with this.
I drifted over to my desk and beheld the artwork I had created last night using a big set of expensive markers during my brief, but intense, art hobby. What I had done took every work I had made before and took a massive, steaming shit on them.
Pure Art already gave me skill at drawing, Decadence took that even further beyond. Anything I made could be done at the absolute peak of human skill and catered perfectly toward a specific audience, and what was more the powers synergised. Decadence took the emotion mastering aspect of Pure Art and drove it to new heights, focusing the power effect to work best on young men aged twelve to fifteen.
It was a scene from the quintessence of hype mecha anime and looking at it filled me with a burning desire to seize the day, to try my hardest and damn the consequences! The giddy, iron hard feeling welled up within me and banished all traces of sleep.
Fuck yes! I was so hype, I could do this, I could do anything! I bounced on the spot and started muttering, "Yes! Yes!" under my breath. I paced around the room, working myself up, looking back at the marker drawing every few seconds.
I bounded down the stairs and the feeling didn't dissipate the second I looked away from the drawing. It had generated an emotion in me, but my brain had run with it, was continuing to fuel the hype in a completely natural way. "Let's fucking get it!"
My voice cracked with raw energy and mum stuck her head out of the kitchen. "That's the spirit, lets fucking go!"
I blazed into the kitchen and set about pouring my Legend-Airies, Legend themed Fruit Loop knockoffs, and eating before they could settle into a thick grey sludge in the milk. Both mum and dad were dressed for work, eating toast and drinking coffee. They both worked at the same engineering office for the local council and it sounded like the most boring job on earth.
"Dude, this is the best," I slurred through a mouthful of processed sugar, corn syrup and carbs. "My power is so sick, you have to see this."
"You said it was a drawing power?" Mum sipped her coffee, which was as black and bitter and she was blonde and sweet.
I mumbled as I crammed more cereal into my mouth and left the table without a word, I rushed upstairs and grabbed the drawing; a fresh surge of hype filled my soul as I beheld it, then I took it down to show my parents.
I slammed it down onto the table. It was a bit of a rip off of Gurren Lagann, with the mecha making the Kamina pose, but as my parents' eyes found the paper I could see it light a fire in them. Though it wasn't drawn to cater specifically to them, both my parents had enough of the pure soul of a little boy within them to have their heart flames stoked.
"Holy shit!" Dad muttered reverently, pulling at his beard excitedly as he looked the piece over in complete absorption. "This is amazing!"
Mum was just staring in wide-eyed amazement. I could do so much with this power if this was the strength of the effect, the amount of people I could reach was limited only to the amount of eyes on my work. Imagine if I could paint up on a billboard and have everyone who passed by it feel as though life was worth living, to be inspired to be better.
I clapped my hands together. They were going to love this. I knew, somewhere in the back of my head, that such wide scale manipulation of the public's emotions through blatant use of parahuman power was only going to be met with dug-in-heel resistance, but I was too energised to care. Colin and Emily would get it, I had faith.
I was even hyped to go to school.
Man, school sucked. After the emotional high wore off and I returned back to baseline I remembered that school was boring as shit, and worse still I'd already done this before. I couldn't remember everything but I remembered enough.
The real worst part though? Everyone was so slow, including me. I kept finding myself trying to jump up flights of stairs in a single easy bound, or turn invisible and slip through the crowds as fast as any olympic sprinter, but I was stuck in line, forced to move at a walk as other students shuffled lazily from class to class. I knew I'd hated being forced to live on base, but I hated this more. The lack of control over my time grated fiercely compared to being able to do essentially what I wanted all day so long as my grade requirements were met.
I wanted to be a gamer again. I didn't want to deal with all of this. I didn't want to deal with Taylor.
I was walking a few paces behind her, taking in her gangly frame hunched in fear, the baggy clothes and the jerky movements as she compulsively checked her surroundings for danger. She couldn't be projecting 'victim' any harder if she tried. As far as I cared we were square, if this was even real, everything had either been resolved or was wiped clean in a new reality. Old feelings could be let to lie. New feelings, however, if I was to witness her getting picked on? I'd have to do something, I was Dark Smoke Puncher.
I'd have to do something about all of it, and this time I didn't have my gamer powers to back it up. That safety net had been brutally taken from me. I would do it all the same.
However. Last time I understood very little, now I understood about paper trails and that amount of testimony counted when crimes were being investigated. I understood that repeated reporting of every occurrence, with absolute consistency, to multiple sources, would cause an effect. This school was a bureaucracy, reports had to be filed and those reports were analyzed and had to be followed up on by those responsible. Not only was I a student of Winslow, I was a Ward looked after by the Protectorate as well as the PRT and the Youth Guard - both offices to which reports could be made.
It would look bad for them if the problem wasn't fixed, so an effort would be made. Perhaps not instantly, but one would be made.
Or I could just start putting up art that would subtly fill people with feelings of respect for their fellow man and hope nobody would find out and punish me for wilful use of non-consensual parahuman power on civilians.
On that note I really should send an email to Paige Mcabee and tell her to be really, really careful.
Taylor went in one direction and I went another to a different class. I didn't know what she had but I had Japanese Language, I cast one last glance over my shoulder at her before trudging on. My back hurt, my bag was heavy, my feet were tired - how did normal people live like this? I was suddenly hit with a flashback of Colin yelling at me for taking my power for granted. How I understand you now, friend.
Pleasantly, when I got to class and opened my books, I found that I already knew this. I remembered all the kanji and how to use them even though I didn't have the gamer skill anymore. I probably wouldn't be as fluent but it meant that I didn't lose everything, I would still remember how to fight. Even my Voice Acting, I didn't have the power's absolute backing that it would work but I bet some of the techniques were ingrained into my muscle memory - I could still work on sounding like less of a complete dweeb.
As the rest of the school day passed I had the faint feeling I had missed something big, but that was overshadowed by how lame it was. I got to realize all over again that I didn't have any friends, nobody out of their own volition came up to talk to me, but to be fair I didn't blame them and to be even fairer I didn't see too much in common with anyone to start a friendship.
I'd lived in the cape world. I'd killed people. I'd worked through an Endbringer attack. There wasn't much common ground here, except for someone like Sophia Hess - she was a cape who had killed someone and went to an Endbringer fight. The concept was laughable. I wasn't interested in rehabilitating her and she wasn't interested in being rehabilitated, but I would have to do something about her, and speak of the devil - I rubbed my face and sighed at the sight in front of me.
The familiar sight of Emma Barnes, Sophia Hess and a cadre of other girls heckling Taylor. Suddenly I felt very tired and I rubbed my eyes again, but I was a hero and a hero was a slayer of monsters.
I walked up to the group and called out loudly, "Hey, you have to stop."
In terms of a match up for a fight I only held advantage because I had started going through boy puberty already. I was barely taller than them, if that, and any weight advantage I held was only because I was chunky. Then, the worst part, this was going to be a social battle and my social currency was atrocious at best.
But a hero was a slayer of monsters.
"Fuck off," Sophia told me and then turned back to the heckling.
I sighed and wished I had my phone. I didn't even know where it could have gone, but then I didn't know where my inventory stored things in the first place. "You have to stop," I repeated firmly. "And I'm going to report this to the front office."
Some of the girls shot me dirty looks but otherwise ignored me. I really wished I could just start a punch up with them, but that would be incredibly autistic and I'd probably lose. Instead I left and headed straight to the schools office to file an official report, which I got a copy of then ducked into the library to scan it as a PDF and send it from my school email, with a little help from the librarian, to the school admin inbox as well as the general teacher one. I then very quickly headed back to the scene of the crime but they were long dispersed, likely having left just after me in case I did snitch, but that was ok.
That was the minimum of effort I could expect from myself, and I was going to have to start doing it for every altercation I saw no matter the students involved.
This would be so much easier if I could just master everyone into compliance.
Chapter 89: A glib facsimile 2.4
Chapter Text
Armsmaster walked into the room, and he was Armsmaster at the moment and not Colin, decked out in his full suit of impossibly sleek blue and chrome-silver power armour and a winning smile, honed in so many news interviews, plastered across his face. He was out to impress, this was his first time pulling rank over me as the man in charge of the Wards.
Next to him strode Triumph, Rory, resplendent in his gleaming golden Lion Gladiator themed armour. He too, being the head of the Wards, was here to impress upon me that I was considered a direct report to him as well as Armsmaster.
I stood as they entered and before anyone said a word we all shook hands. It was a very manly thing.
"Good afternoon," said Colin with a roguish smile. "It's nice to meet our newest member. I'm sure you know me already, but I'm Armsmaster."
"And I'm Triumph," said Rory, taking the chance to speak before me. "I'm in charge of the Wards."
"Hey," I said, flexing my hand surreptitiously against the pressure they'd given me in those handshakes. Not that it was unprofessionally hard, I was just weak. "I'm Greg. Nice to meet ya both."
Colin gave me another smile and my soul cringed as I remembered the loss of my Armsbeard. I loved my Armsbeard. "Thank you for coming, and for being so forthcoming so far. I understand that you're in a troubling position, power wise, so both Triumph and I are going to oversee your power testing so that we're both fully aware of the effects and can come up with a plan to manage them."
"Ok," I said easily. "I realised it was going to be a hard situation working with another human master."
Rory's smile flickered briefly. "Gallant."
I nodded.
"And that's what this testing is for," continued Colin. "Not every human master classified parahuman is the same. Why don't we get started? According to the information you've given us, and the consent forms your parents have signed, we've devised a testing room that should, as far as we can tell, limit your power's effects on anyone nearby to the level we choose."
I nodded again. This was standard. Colin led Rory and I to the PRT's onsite testing lab, several technicians who were going to be also analysing the data coming from my test were already there and we all introduced ourselves. I recognised them all, especially Jed. What was his deal? He was the Militiaman? The pot head? He wasn't one of the moles, I remembered that, but god did I miss Observe.
This whole simulation was a cruel reminder on just how much I relied on my power.
Inside the testing room, which was a completely blank, white room with cameras and no visible windows and no way for any sound to get in or out. There was a sliding window that was currently shuttered with a white slide and I only noticed due to Decadence giving me singularly amazing clarity at reading the purpose of a room and where hidden surveillance might be made.
Inside the blank room was a single white table with a white chair and a single white piece of paper, broken by the splash of colour that was a box of crayons. I went into the room and was locked inside. Usually my parents would have to be here every step of the way for something like this but I had cheerfully waived that right, and my parents had just as cheerfully entrusted me to the care of Armsmaster because that was what I had wanted.
The intercom wired into the room came alive. "Ok, you can take a seat now, Greg. If you speak we can hear you, if at any time you wish to cease testing simply say so and we will stop immediately and let you out. Are you ok to continue?"
"No worries here," I said loudly.
"Excellent. Now, according to the information you've given us, please use the crayons to draw a smiling sun that induces a feeling of happiness."
I gave the camera a thumbs up and went to work. The crayons were all worn down to nubs, probably to prevent me stabbing anyone with them, but that wouldn't slow me down at all. Coloured wax streamed from my hand in bright yellows and reds and oranges, even browns and black in subtle lowlights. I could only draw at human speeds but what I created was a stylised sun that beamed good cheer, it radiated its smile out into reality in a big, toothy, rosy cheeked grin. It took me a good forty minutes to finish but this was not the kind of art you would expect from even a good hobbyist - this was something decadent.
I set my now even nubbier crayons down and shook the paper to clear it of any stray flakes. "I'm done."
There was a moment before the reply came, likely because they had both stopped paying attention. "Understood," said Colin. "You can set the picture down and step away back to the door where we will let you out."
I did so and was soon standing with them in the booth connected to the room. There were display screens set up and footage of the room was streaming in incredibly low, black and white quality. A vague smudge of grey on the vague shape of a table was all we could see of the sun.
"I'm going to slowly dial up the quality," Colin didn't fiddle with any knobs or buttons for this, instead opting to control everything from within his suits' onboard system.
"This is new for me, too," I said. "I haven't tested if it works over video, but I don't see why it wouldn't."
Slowly the fidelity of the footage improved, colour coming back into the image, and there was a moment once the quality had reached a certain level that it started working.
"I feel it," murmured Rory, a slight smile playing on his lips. "Looking at it is making me slightly happy."
"Yes," said Colin quietly. "It's the same for me, though I can't be sure if it's the quality of the work, the symbolism or the power yet. Increasing quality."
I started grinning and grooving on the spot as the picture became increasingly clearer. "I can't believe I actually had the gall to complain I had a non-combat power, this is great."
Colin gave a hearty chuckle. "Quite so. I'm going to decrease quality now."
As the image on the screen slowly faded back into blurry black and white so too did the feeling of happiness, being replaced with the appropriate level of seriousness at the situation.
"We're stopping here for today," said Colin. "The footage we were exposed to and of us will need to be independently analysed before any further testing can proceed. Now, please fill out the second half of your questionnaire."
We did so quickly, in silence, completing the MSAT test that was the quick and dirty way to check for broad master or stranger influence, with questions rating how murderous you felt on a scale, how often you felt confused about who you were or where you were, who your best friend was and so on which was then compared against your previous attempt. These tests were collected and scored by one of the tech guys and we were dismissed.
Colin left promptly after a curt goodbye and a promise that testing would resume tomorrow, which left Rory and I together. I hadn't spent much time with Rory, last time.
"Power testing is always boring," he said in a mock whisper. "It's the same tests over and over again when you already know what you can do."
I nodded genially. "They have to take extra care with master class powers, can't let the public get a whiff of it that one of our capes can control them without being on a tight leash themselves."
"Yeah," said Rory. "That's exactly right."
"I bet Gallant was in testing and image prep for weeks before they let him even start his press open."
"Yeah. You've done a lot of reading on how this works?"
"Oh yeah," I smiled nostalgically. "Loads. If you know where to dig things up there's a lot of stuff on the web."
Rory gave me a quick once over and seemed to decide that as out of shape as I was I probably was terminally online, and that was a good enough explanation. "Well, tour's on," he said. "I'll give you the quick rundown of the building, all the places you'll need to go, and then we can get you started on your modules."
"Sound's good," we started walking. Rory started explaining things and I nodded along genially but as he was wrapping up his tour I realised he had missed the most important room. "Why don't we skip the modules and hit the gym?"
"The gym?" Rory paused, his hand on the door to the small open plan office that held the computers given to the Wards for things like typing up reports for both work and school, as well as having access to the corporate forms database and Protectorate intranet.
"I'm fat, bro," I gestured to myself. I had neglected to wear any of my anime or video game graphic t-shirts, instead wearing only a plain white one that every time I looked down I expected to see straining under the bulge of a hundred kilograms of muscle rather than the disgusting, flabby man-tits it currently hid. "I want to be fit."
"We do have a gym," Rory glanced in its-
The great arm descended once again, catching me completely off guard. The sinuous, perfectly aesthetic muscle cladding the arm looked like it had been carved from marble and the skin twinkled as galaxies played over it in a cosmic dance. It bore down on me once more with the starlight pen made from truth and three hundred and thirty one stars streamed off behind it as it wrote Engineering Basics on my forehead in lines of fire.
"You good, bro?" Rory was asking.
I was face first on the linoleum, the weight of lived experience crushing my brain. I slowly got up and looked around. "Tripped," I muttered as experiences utterly devoid of context settled in my head, utterly absurd, moronic experiences. Enough to do the work and no more.
I did my best to shake it off but I was still in a bit of a daze and we made it to the gym. "You look strong," I told Rory. "What should I work on first?"
The compliment seemed to polish away some lingering awkwardness because Rory beamed through his lion helmet the smile of someone who had once been aiming to be a pro athlete. "For those without a brute power the key is conditioning. You want both distance and explosive cardio. What kind of exercise have you done before?"
"I've never worked out a day in my life, I'm a fat fuck. I weigh nearly a hundred and eighty pounds-"
Rory cringed into his armour, and for good reason.
"-I need to go on a mad cut."
"We need to get you a diet plan, high protein low calorie before anything else, and your exercise plan should be light to start. You don't want to go too hard and pull something, it could set you back months."
"I can't p-" I made to laugh and then suddenly stopped. "Oh, you can't just sleep off a bad pull, can you?"
"No, dude, you pop a hammy or tear an ACL and you're not going anywhere fast. Unless you can heal like me, don't even think about trying to work out on an injury before the doctor tells you it's ok. I've seen guys who think they have no limits," Rory grimaced. "Last season they ever played."
"Last season of what?" I tried not to show how uncomfortable I was. I wouldn't be healed back to full every day, injuries would stick unless I could get a parahuman healer. Amy would refuse out of principle, she didn't know me.
"Baseball. Used to play a lotta baseball," Rory said, a far off look showing in his eye through the gaps in his helmet. "They don't let capes play."
"You could always go on the cape version of Ultimate Ninja Warrior. That was always my dream, but then I just didn't get the power."
"That's that obstacle course show? That might be fun, actually," he reached up and stroked the wrought carbon polymer mane of his helmet in lieu of his chin. "A good promotional bit. I'll bring it up with Armsmaster."
I frowned slightly and tried to think. Rory had wanted something like that in the past, but all I could think of was that tough mudder course in Boston. "Dude, that would be cool. You have super strength, right?"
"Quite a bit," Rory cast his gaze out over the gym equipment. "Working out doesn't really make me any stronger, either. I still like it, though."
"I'm sure I'll like it, too."
Rory snickered. "You will, if you keep at it." He took off his helmet to reveal a face just as I remembered. "I hate working out in this thing. Come on, why don't I show you a few free weights?"
I grinned and followed him to the curl station. Maybe starting over again wouldn't be as bad as I thought?
Chapter 90: A glib facsimile 2.5
Chapter Text
It was nostalgic. Enrique, the head of image and branding in Brockton, sat in front of me looking fed up while I made demands over my identity.
"The name just has personal significance."
"I know," Enrique said placatingly. "It's just, 'Heart Under Blade'? It has bad connotations, which you don't want to pair with your power. We can't send out someone who can make you commit a crime by looking at one of his paintings calling himself Heart Under Blade. It already sounds like Heartbreaker. No, we can't do this."
I looked at my knees sadly. I guess I wasn't a shinobi anymore, huh? I wasn't one who endured. "What else do you suggest?"
"Mood Maestro-"
He stopped at the look on my face, and honestly I felt like I'd cry if that was my new cape name. I was the Ward formerly known as Dark Smoke Puncher, I couldn't be fucking Mood Maestro! I knew rebranding happened a lot with graduations from Ward to Protectorate, but I couldn't do three years of that. I just couldn't.
"Feeling Facilitator? Moodsmith? Artmote?"
This had to be a form of torture, Echidna, Coil Clones, a clone of Taylor, some malicious force was making me do this. You couldn't just make a man go from unlimited potential to little bitch, it was wrong. It was cruelty incarnate. I didn't care how much wisdom I had gained, I wasn't going to go by fucking Moodsmith.
"Art-Under-Blade," I said.
"Art Under Blade," Enrique repeated and blinked. "It's a step in the right direction."
"I'm not budging. Enrique, I'm sorry but I can't be Feeling Facilitator. I can't have that name for three more years, I won't do it."
Enrique gave me the kind of dead, polished smile you gave to someone prone to histrionic fits but you lived with and couldn't get away from. "You like the name Art Under Blade," he said blandly. "I hear that. It's better than Heart Under Blade. I'll send it to my supervisors and we'll see what they say."
"Bro," I said. "I'm so sorry, I just can't be someone called Artmote. My self esteem couldn't take it, I need this."
Enrique's dead smile thawed a bit. "I understand, Greg. This is going to be who you are, your name is the first thing people will know about you and everyone wants to make a good first impression. Nobody likes Master powers. Why don't we approach from a different angle? Ditch the art focus and go for something else?"
"I don't have the money to buy power armour."
"It could be anything else, what do you like?"
"I like gaming."
"We could work with that, games hit the youth polling very well. Maybe something like Nintendo themed?"
Edges sanded down, every speck of grit polished off, the true surface hidden by a layer of varnish. "I want Art-Under-Blade."
The polite frost returned to Enrique. "I'll put the email through. Thank you for meeting with me."
"It's ok, thank you, too."
I wanted to say something emotionally intelligent but I was tired, everything still hurt from the mild workout I did with Rory the day before and I hated it. I'd forgotten this kind of discomfort existed. I was tired and I hadn't gotten enough sleep again and all of my powers that worked to enforce my ability to interact well with people were gone - I had to do it all manually. There was no enhanced senses letting me pick up on subtle cues, and no background processes automatically interpreting the cues or skills that smoothed over how I presented myself. I was a man with wool pulled over every sense, I couldn't lose the last tie I had to that self. I couldn't lose the name.
I left and wandered around, feeling the slight sway of the rig under my feet. I supposed I hadn't really lost everything. I was still an Infinity Trump, it seemed. I was gaining new powers, but they had no rhyme or reason. The first two were based around art and design, then one would let me fix machines by doing things like straightening wires or turning it off and on again. It was like I had been there, actually doing the fixing myself, but only doing the fixing.
I finished wandering and realised I was standing in front of Colin's office. I knocked but there wasn't any answer. I went back to wandering and made my way to his workshop, then rang the doorbell. I knew he was in somewhere today. I was about to leave when the door slid noiselessly open, revealing him standing there wearing one of his Armsmaster promotional t-shirts, along with his work visor and gauntlets; the ones that let him interface with a fully 3D holographic design system with haptic feedback.
"Hello, yes?"
"Hey, Armsmaster. What's up?"
He looked at me for a moment before lifting his visor. "I'm in the middle of work. What happened to your image meeting?"
"Enrique said he'd send off for advice about my name."
"Never a good sign," Colin said, fidgeting slightly. "Which name?"
"Art-Under-Blade."
He stopped fidgeting and fixed his grey eyes on mine. "Art Under Blade?" He stroked his chin, agitating his neat beard. "It's a bit suggestive of violence, but I don't dislike it."
"Usually we want wards to have family friendly branding," I said. "Like Weld or Kid Win. And with master capes you want to overemphasize everything else but their power, like with Gallant. However, with some capes a darker motif is allowed, like with Shadow Stalker-"
"Not with human master capes," Colin interrupted me. "Good luck in negotiating your name."
I stood there for a second before realising he wanted me to leave. "Thanks, have fun with work."
"Always," he cracked a winning grin and moved to disappear back into his workshop.
I still didn't have a new phone yet so I couldn't message Sveta until I got home, and I was yet to befriend Amy. "I have a request," I said as he moved to close the door in my face.
"Yes?"
"I want to do volunteer art classes at the hospital for the elderly and sick kids."
"With an art based master power?" Colin sounded like he was going to say something derisive, but then remembered he was talking to a child. "Why don't you email me a formal request and I'll see what I can do?"
"Ok, thanks."
He flashed me another smile and shut the door in my face. Look, Other Greg, I said to myself. It's still going to be fine, if I have to do this again I'm going to do it again. I took a folded up piece of paper out of my pocket and looked at the picture I'd drawn and a depiction of myself as Dark Smoke Puncher looked back at me - endless optimism, confidence in myself and hope for the future filled me in a raging torrent.
This was torment? Who decided that? A man made his own world and I was far from powerless. I was going to take back my future, and get a six pack again.
Everything hurt again, but it was a good pain. I preferred to have my stat sheet telling me that I was getting stronger, but this was something I had missed out on - something human.
School had just finished and after a long and boring day of being social refuse, reporting every minor bullying altercation I saw, which wasn't very many given my limited field of view, I was at the comfortable, familiar PRT building being led by Jeffrey to the Wards area. There was something about Jeffrey I couldn't remember and couldn't Observe - I'd relied so hard on Observe. Trusting people I didn't know was actually so much harder than I remember it being, he might have been one of the moles and I would have no idea.
I would need to do something about that, and Coil. Coil was Thomas Calvert, and Thomas Calvert was some bigwig in the PRT. Very fortunately for me Gerome had saved me from meeting Tattletale this time, and I had no reason to paint the target on my back that had led to the painful journey of the first time.
I shivered. No Exploding Man, no Hans, no Boston, nothing. All those moments spent, gone away. I took the picture of Dark Smoke Puncher out of my pocket and felt better. I put it back and we were met by Rory at the door.
I remembered that last time I'd already had my uniform at this point, but this time the Identity Management Unit were having a real struggle with me. Last time I was easy, a couple of minor powers in a ninja theme, this time they had to work around the hardest power to sell. I'd still had a haircut, leaving my stupid Prince Adam cut behind, and had gotten my parents to buy me a pair of shoes that weren't velcro, which helped me to feel a bit more like myself.
"Hey, Jeff," Rory, in full uniform, greeted us for the handover. "Thanks for bringing him. Hey, Greg."
"Not a problem," said Jeffrey at the same time as I said, "hey."
Jeffrey left us and Rory turned to me. "How're you feeling?"
"Dude, sore as," I rubbed my flabby right pec that hadn't been able to withstand a ten pound dumbbell press.
Rory snickered and gestured to the vault-tec door into the Wards area. "I meant about this, but that's good. Sore means you did a good job."
"Oh, right, yeah no I feel great about this. I'm super hyped."
"Fantastic to hear!" We exchanged optimistic grins and he pressed the entry alarm. "Now, when you're inside as you hear that alarm it means someone's coming in who may not be allowed to see your face, so it lets you know it's time to mask up or head to your room. We all have our own room here, in case you need to take a nap or just want privacy."
He opened the door within the door and led me in. "Kid, Vista and Aegis are in today, and we have Shadow Stalker coming in soon, and there'll be time for you to meet Gallant sometime soon. They haven't done up your name and outfit yet?"
"They're stuck on my requests."
"It took a while for Gallant, too."
He closed the door behind us and Chris, Missy and Carlos, who were seated on the couches, masked but without the rest of their uniform, rose to greet us.
I waved to them. "Hello."
Homeslicies.
"This is Greg," Rory gestured to me. "They're still working on his image stuff. Greg, this is Vista, Kid Win and you haven't met Aegis before, have you?"
We headed down the steps and I could see them sizing me up, calculating my worth as their fighting comrade. I knew from experience that they would have been prepped on me and my powers, and were rightfully cautious. I stepped forward and made sure I shook everyone's hand.
"Hey, again, Vista, Kid Win. Nice to meet you Aegis. I'm super psyched to work with you guys ag-" I faked a dry throat cough, stopping myself. "Sorry, psyched to work with you. I hope you can show me the ropes."
The three of them, all not wanting to take the responsibility of talking first, murmured vague agreements until Carlos probably realised he was going to be my 'boss' in about two months and spoke up. "It's nice to meet you, Greg." He raised his hands and slid his rust red mask off to reveal the familiar tanned face. "I'm Carlos."
"Thanks, Carlos," I said. "Don't feel like you have to unmask because I have."
"You wouldn't be here if your checks failed," Carlos shrugged, referencing the pronto background checks the PRT did on every aspirant and their family. "Besides, we all know each other. It'd happen soon enough."
As if conceding to this fair point both Chris and Missy unmasked and introduced themselves.
"Are Clockblocker and Gallant busy today?" I asked, and for the life of me couldn't remember why they hadn't been here the first time.
"They're on patrol, actually, up the Boardwalk," Rory said, taking off his mask. "I'm Rory, by the way. But yeah, they'll be back later but everyone else will probably be at home by then."
"And Shadow Stalker?" I said, trying not to betray the weight just thinking about her put on me.
"Very soon. Half an hour?"
"Cool," I said, looking back over everyone. "Armsmaster would have told you all what my power was, right?"
"He can make people feel specific things when they look at artworks he's made," Rory supplied when everyone looked too uncomfortable to answer. "It's completely safe."
"I do requests," I said, only half joking. "If you want a picture that makes you feel confident, or safe, or both at the same time."
"Let's maybe hold off on that until all the power testing is done," Rory said uneasily. "Just to be safe."
I shrugged. "Sure thing."
The mood seemed to settle and we were getting over the awkward getting to know each other phase when the door to the Wards area opened again. We all turned to look and Sophia stepped inside wearing the same civilian clothes she'd worn to school today and her Shadow Stalker mask, the dull metal shaped into the stern expression of a woman's face.
"Shadow Stalker," Rory called out. "Why don't you come over and meet the new guy?"
She looked at me and her body language was projecting an obvious amount of disgruntlement. Slowly, trying to look unruffled, she made her way over. "New guy," she muttered, nodding stiffly.
"Hi, Sophia."
Her fist balled around the strap of her school bag and her shoulders hunched in anger. "I don't remember who you are."
"My name's Greg," I said to her, then turned to the others. "We go to school together."
She was going to try and intimidate me, but I could not be intimidated
I was a hero, and a hero was a slayer of monsters.
Chapter 91: A glib facsimile 2.6
Chapter Text
"Oh, cool," said Chris. "Gallant and Clockblocker go to school with us," he indicated Carlos.
"It's actually kind of strange how so many people going to Arcadia ended up here," Rory mused. "It's not like they make you move schools, and it's not even the biggest one. I just graduated from Clarendon, and Missy goes to St. Trinians."
"Weird," I said. "You'd think there'd be more at Winslow, and even more coming out of Springfield since it's right near Merchant territory."
"Merchant?" Carlos asked.
"Yeah, the Merchants. Near Archer's Bridge? The drug gang led by Skidmark? Squealer?"
"I don't think that's a real gang," Missy chimed in. "How do you know about such low level villains?"
I frowned and scratched my head. Right, they weren't a thing yet. "I guess I just have really good street cred?" I shrugged and smiled to let them know I was joking. "I probably just read it online."
When did they even start? Everything was getting all muddled up in my brain as it shed loose information that it would normally have an iron grip on, I didn't have the hardware anymore to remember everything I knew properly. I could notice myself getting more retarded by the day.
"Excuse me for one moment," I said. "Gotta go to the bathroom."
"Oh, sure," said Rory, starting to point to it. "It's right over there."
I had already started off before he could finish and headed straight for the toilets. I slipped inside a cubicle and closed the seat, then plopped down on it and took the Dark Smoke Puncher picture out of my pocket.
Cold terror receded under the warm fist of hope as my idealised self beamed back at me off the piece of folded printer paper. This was a situation that could be adapted to, managed, overcome. Now was not the time for fear. Fear killed the mind, fear sabotaged you and made you lose. I could do this and I would do this. No matter what situation arose I'd face it head on and say, 'Nah, I'd win.'
I took an excited breath and stood up, stuffing the picture back into my pocket before taking a quick, unconquered piss. I washed my hands and went back out to the group with a confident grin on my face. I noticed Sophia had left.
"You have a good time in there?" Rory gave a little puff of air out of his nose at my victorious expression. Carlos and Chris both tried not to laugh, and the quip seemed to go over Missy's head.
"Oh, yes!" My hand dipped into my pocket and pulled out the folded paper. "I probably can't show you but I drew what kind of cape uniform I want."
I unfolded it briefly, facing it only toward myself, before folding it again and waggling it. "Infinite confidence on tap. Unlimited happiness. They're going to waste me because human masters are scary, but I can always help myself."
I had ideas for this, too. I could paint the inside of a visored mask with transparent paint so that I would always be viewing the world through a rosy tint, everywhere I looked filling me with positivity.
They eyed the paper with some trepidation. "I guess," said Rory. "There's nothing in the Wards codes of conduct prohibiting us from using our powers solely for our own purposes away from the public eye. What if you lose that paper, though?"
"I see what you mean. It could cause a huge legal incident, I need to treat them like each piece of art is a loaded gun and keep them locked away."
"That would be a very good idea."
"I'm curious," said Missy. "What cape uniform did you draw?"
I opened the sheet back up. "I always wanted to have ninja powers. Like, run fast, jump good, turn invisible, walk up walls - that good shit. So it's like a grey, red and gold ninja suit. I think it looks super cool."
"They'll never let you go for it," she said and gestured somewhat despondently at her own person, though she wasn't wearing her uniform I knew it to be a green and white skirted thing where she would have preferred to be wearing something a lot closer to PRT trooper armour.
I still thought it was a bit sad. Capes were some of the dumbest pop culture shit to get copied out of old comic books and into real life, but that was what made it so much fun. The rules governing it begged you to have fun, to be bold, to entertain. If you were a cape you were a star, people paid attention to you, you were somebody - somebody important.
"Yeah," I said and made a commiserating expression, then put the picture back in my pocket. "I still want the name Art-Under-Blade, but they hate it."
"Wasn't it 'Heart'?" Chris asked. "Last time?"
"They hated that even more."
"It'll be a tough sell no matter what," said Rory. "Why don't you ask Gallant about it when you meet him?"
"Yeah, but I can't afford to pretend to be a tinker."
Rory cocked his head at me and I realised that was not common knowledge. "What do you mean?"
The confidence of my picture was receding under hot panic and I spoke in a rush. "Well, I know that the official website says he's a tinker, but in the whole time he's been around his armour's never changed. There's lots of chatter online that he's one of those tinkers who builds and rebuilds the same thing over and over again, but I always thought that if that were the case there would have been an upgrade somewhere, at some point, but his look has been the same since day one. Kid Win's design has changed at least half a dozen times, and he's pulling out new gear every few months, and so do a lot of other tinkers I keep track of. Jetstar in New York started out with a really simple flight suit and you can see how over time in her press releases it gets better and better, and her flight gets faster and more controlled, so Gallant being a tinker never really made sense to me even if his speciality was emotion altering beam tech and-"
"Ok," Rory interrupted me. "I didn't think it'd be that obvious. You're right, though, Chris built his armour."
"And it isn't cheap, and I don't have the time to maintain another one," Chris said apologetically.
"I know, bro," I said, also apologetically. " I wish I was rich, though. Wards doesn't really pay much for what it is."
There was a general grumble of agreement. I knew it was a safe topic, when in doubt grouse about how much we were paid
"It's better than getting a real job," said Carlos and we all agreed. For all the danger, for all the shit pay, it was better.
I would go through a thousand lives in the Wards before I went back to being normal.
I was totally just minding my own business, walking along to class, when the kick connected with both my ankles and collected me, sending me to the ground like a sack of limp dicks. I tried to twist in the air and land in a crouch, and when that failed I tried to bounce off the ground, helicopter kick my way back onto my feet and Observe my enemy. It better not be a fuckin' german.
I managed to flop ineffectually onto my side and wince at the blooming pain on my elbows and knees. Fuck me, I hated school. Someone crouched down next to me and I looked up into Sophia's dark eyes, as cruel as she was pretty.
"Bitch," I said, and she snorted in disgust.
"Fat little bitch," she said mockingly. Nearby I heard girls laughing and the beta part of my soul, which I had previously murdered in a high fidelity imaginary scenario, now free from the reinforcement of my stats, took a breath.
I was a hero.
I sat up. "You're scared."
She looked confused then reached out and flicked my face. "You're going to keep your fat mouth shut."
A hero was a slayer of monsters.
"I've already sent an email to Colin and Piggot," I said in a low voice, casting a glance to where the hot girl group of my year was watching me with the kind of sadistic glee only a teenager exerting social dominance could possess. I stood up and Sophia had to hastily follow suit or end up with my nuts in her face.
The look in her eyes hardened. Sure, it might have been tactically better to fake being my old loser self, and have their questions hit her off guard, but I had some pride now that not even being laughed at by hot girls could kill.
"So tell them you're wrong."
"No, dude."
There was a moment where we looked into each others eyes, baby blue on dark chocolate brown, standing close enough to smell her perfume, and I remembered the absolute shit fuckery I engaged in last time; blackmailing her into a date, putting off telling anyone out of fear of her telling on me. I looked at her and smiled. She looked at me with a disgusted grimace.
I walked off without saying anything. I was so happy that doing that kind of thing was behind me. I was going to go to the office and report this, too, and tell Colin about what she had done. I wasn't going to entertain folding by even an inch. I was Dark Smoke Puncher and I had killed people far more evil than her.
She seemed to realise she wasn't going to scare me off like this because she didn't follow me. Yeah, I'm thinking I'm back.
"Hey, retard!"
I jumped about a foot as a big hand clapped down on my shoulder. Calumet Boyle's big, porky face loomed over me.
"Saw that nigger trip you," he said. "You ok?"
Something ground to a halt inside my brain as I tried to comprehend what was happening to me. "Don't call her that."
He gave my shoulder a little squeeze and let go. "Y'never cared before, retard."
"Don't call me a retard."
Big Cal looked at me for a moment, a sort of confused, childishly happy smile came over his face and he raised a hand. In a motion that looked like it was motivated more by curiosity in what would happen than any desire to fight he slapped me across the face.
My vision swam as the blow knocked my head back, and in the same motion I had shed my school bag and, with a screech of nerd rage, leapt at him. I wrapped my left elbow over the forearm of the hand that had slapped me, gripped his collar with my right, pulled with both arms, swept behind his knees with my right leg and dropped all of my weight directly down.
The take down was picture perfect and we would have landed with me in mount but Cal was still wearing his backpack, so we hit the ground awkwardly and I lost my position as I slipped off the fabric with my knee as he struggled. His fat fist pushed into my ribs, launching me off him. Nearby his friends were laughing, more at him than me.
I sprang to my feet, sweat running down my face in sheets as the sudden burst of motion had drained what little energy reserves this body had, and Cal got to his. He looked more bemused than anything.
"That was a good move, retard. Jiu Jitsu? Greco?"
"Eat a dick," I muttered, but didn't drop my eyes from his. If we actually fought I'd lose.
"We should fight sometime," he dusted himself off. "Why don't you come to the gym with me and the boys? It'll be fun."
"No."
"Ah, come on. We can even go gloves and helmets? Come hang with us."
I didn't answer and he shrugged, I could tell he didn't really care if I came or not, then left with his friends who started giving him shit about getting downed by the retard. I wiped my moist face with a sweatshirt sleeve and picked my bag up as the crowd moved on as they found no entertainment. Fights happened all the time here, and I used to do the same. Get swept up by the excitement of the crowd and cheered on as skinny fifteen year olds wailed sloppy haymakers at each other.
No more. Greg mark four would rise above.
Enrique looked pensive as he read over my email again. This was, hopefully, my last meeting with image about name and we could get started on uniform.
Colin looked pensive, too, as he read something on his visor that probably had no relevance to the meeting.
I sat across from them, hands on my knees.
"Are you really willing to never use your powers?" Enrique asked finally. "I'm given to understand that parahumans need to use them."
"I'm willing to never use the emotion altering part of my powers in public. I'm happy to be an art and interior design skill thinker."
"Armsmaster?"
Colin looked over as Enrique said his name. "It's the best case scenario," he said, then turned to me. "I'm surprised you brought it up. We knew from testing that the effect can be anywhere from nothing, to subtle, to overwhelming, but I, too, thought that you would want to flex your power as much as possible."
"I do," I said. "I think it could help so many people, but if we can't sell it what's the point? I'm willing to never use it if I can be Art-Under-Blade."
Colin and Enrique glanced at each other. "We could sell the incongruence," Enrique said slowly. "So long as it never became congruent. If it ever got out, we would have to immediately rebrand you and keep you on the back bench indefinitely."
I still felt like they were trying to either bullshit me or dodge consequences. "Would it be that bad? You have capes like Glory Girl who can change how you feel and we call her a shaker."
Enrique looked like he had stopped himself from saying something, then said something else. "You don't have her marketability."
There was stress on the word 'her'. The adoring public would always trust a female human master over a male one, never mind that Ingenue was a woman and Tongue-Tie had worked for the Protectorate openly, only leaving and rebranding of her own choice.
"I get it," I said, getting it. "I'm willing to never do it so long as I can have the name, and do stuff like art classes for sick kids and stuff."
"Because of how touchy this case is I'm going to have to go back to my bosses," Enrique mimed typing above his keyboard. "If you can completely decouple the power from the art without affecting the quality at all, why don't you start submitting some designs? Your art thinker power should help you, right?"
He smiled in a friendly manner and I really hoped this worked.
Chapter 92: A glib facsimile 2.7
Chapter Text
Chapter 93: A glib facsimile 2.8
Chapter Text
I awoke in a bad mood. I'd tossed and turned for the last hour, drifting in and out of sleep filled with dreams of real life and separated with bitter thoughts for what I'd lost. This was the usual morning ritual for the past seventeen days I'd been in this banal hell. I kicked my sheets off angrily and rolled over, muttering seething curses at whoever, or whatever, had done this to me, consigned me to endlessly wander the wheel as, what, a punishment for my craving and ignorance?
I took a deep, grumpy breath. I was leaving samsara for sure. I rolled over fully and picked up a large sheet of stiff card paper, blearily blinking the gunk out of my eyes and focusing on the art. The striking imagery drew the eye on a path. First, calm. It soothed my frayed nerves and I relaxed as my breath returned from short, agitated puffs to slow and even. Second, acceptance. I couldn't change what had happened any more than I could control it. Third, motivation. I would try my best to move ahead, no matter what - a shinobi was one who endured. Fourth, positivity. Everything was going to be alright, no matter what.
I took a deep, calming breath and went through the cycle of the drawing a few more times. The latest power stacked on top of my others, if I used the full material requirements it would somehow, in some inscrutable way, increase every quality in what I had made which stacked on top of already decadent artwork produced something truly parahuman. It was too bad I couldn't send one of these to Kaiser or Lung in the mail, it would probably just make them a better racist. I needed them to feel bad about themselves, and respectful in general. I needed some way to paint that onto the inside of a helmet and weld it onto their head.
I looked at the drawing again, cycling. I could be such a good supervillain. I put the drawing down before I could cycle thinking about committing crimes into a positive loop, then snickered to myself and stretched. I was still sore, but it was a good pain. I had seen no progress in my exercise, I was still a fat cunt, but this is what billions of people had to endure every day. I had been blessed, before, I had been so blessed in what I had been given. Being a gamer was a gift that could never be repaid, but I would do my best by not succumbing to the temptations of which I was capable.
I finally got out of bed and stumbled downstairs.
"We're so proud of you, son," dad told me when I got into the kitchen and started making breakfast, for both myself and them. I smiled at them. They were proud because I was getting up on time by myself now, instead of needing to be dragged out of bed like a useless lump, and I was making my own breakfast. Not only that, I was making their breakfast.
I set about cracking eggs into a bowl. "Thanks, dad."
It wasn't the cooking skill of my gamer power, but it was better than nothing. With all the materials used the scrambled egg on toast breakfast was somehow better than it should be, arranged in such a way that the subtle display of sauces and garnishes provided a greater sense of deliciousness in a way that was art, and induced a strong feeling of craving.
We fucking devoured those eggs, and they were the best damn eggs we'd ever eaten.
After breakfast we piled into the car and they drove me to school. "We'll pick you up for the meeting this afternoon," mum gave me a smushy kiss goodbye on the cheek. "Love you, Greggums."
"Love you guys," I said and waved as they drove away to work, which was in the same city council office doing the same engineering job. I steeled myself and turned to face school in all its dreaded, graffitied, lack of applied deodorant grimness. I drifted through the crowd, following along with the flow of students until I could slip into the library where I set up at a desk and slowly ground away at what little homework I had left and catching up on some study that seemed to have leaked out of my ears since I lost my gamer powers.
The bell rang and I put my workbooks, the pages now full of frustrated pen holes and very heavy, angry scribbles, back into my backpack. I rejoined the throng of students heading to class, the first of which I had was World Issues.
Typical of World Issues I was sitting at a table with Taylor, who still looked as beaten down as ever, and Sparky whose real name I'd forgotten. This class was especially uncomfortable because, not only did I have to sit across from the personification of my failures as a human being dressed in a grey hoodie, Sophia was in it.
She mean mugged me from the moment of her entrance to when she sat down and I met her gaze the entire time. There was going to be a meeting about that, too. Me, my parents, her, her parents, Colin, Rory and Emily were all going to be in the same room and were going to confront my accusations about her behavior. The punishment she would hopefully face wouldn't be as severe as being deported to the Eagleton containment zone like last time because I had no way of explaining she had killed a guy that would make sense.
Maybe I should deport myself to the Eagleton containment zone, at least there I would get to be a parahuman full time instead of this limited existence where I was unable to spend eleven hours straight pouring healing magic into the swollen waiting list at the hospital and then be completely fine to launch straight into a stakeout to arrest Skidmark.
He had power bottles! I jolted a little as I remembered, my leg kicking from the sudden adrenaline spike. Taylor glanced at me briefly and decided that sudden, spasmodic movements were entirely in character for me and looked away again. When did he get them? How could I get them? What would I even do with them once I had them?
Could I… ditch the Wards and start a corporate hero team? A sudden, almost unbearable excitement started to fill my chest and I almost started asking Taylor questions about it when I realised what I was about to do and, with a great force of will, deflated myself. That was much too close to old behaviors for comfort. I tried not to think about how everything worthwhile about myself had come out of a power.
Mr G. entered the room.
He was a short man, with an extreme case of babyface. I remembered liking him as a teacher last time, before I transferred to Boston, but now I couldn't remember why. He was a nice dude, and he let you talk all you wanted in class, but that didn't seem as good of a reason, now. World Issues intersected a lot with the parahuman news sphere, which I remember was also cool.
Mr G. started class and urged us to discuss, in our groups, why parahumans as a group trended toward lower socioeconomic backgrounds.
My heart sank as I realised I would have to discuss this with Taylor, who in a past life had been a psycho maniac.
"What do you think, Sparky?" I asked him.
Sparky lifted his head from the table, where he had been resting on his crossed arms, and peered at me through his long hair. "You callin' me poor?"
"Yeah."
Sparky groaned with the effort of sitting up and propped his head onto his palm. "Disrespectful."
"We all poor niggas here," I said. "But I think powers actually correlate better with mental illness."
"You saying being poor is a mental illness?"
I nodded, smiling. Sparky studied my expression for a hint of weakness, found none, then cracked a smile and lay his head back down on his arms. I stared at him for a moment but he didn't move again, then glanced at Taylor who was sitting, slumped in her chair, and frowning at the both of us.
Now I had to talk to her. "How about you?"
"Think that parahumans are predominantly poor? Powers go to those who need it most."
"I guess it depends on where they come from," I frowned and tried to work through what I remembered. Powers came from an alien who wanted to blow up the planet. "From what I remember it's something like Bum Fights."
"Greg, what the fuck are you talking about?" she said after a solid ten seconds of silence.
"I can't remember," I massaged my temples. I couldn't remember if I'd found that out, the reason behind why aliens were encouraging crazy people to fight. Had that even been explicitly it, or was that just something I had picked up from when I used to trawl the Protectorate intranets? There was so much information slipping away. "But people with powers get more violent in a really statistically trackable way."
"So poor people are more violent?" The way Taylor asked it was almost scathing. I looked at her and remembered her terrorising people, terrorising me.
Mr. G had really given us a loaded topic. "Are they?"
Taylor looked at me sullenly, almost personally offended. In the past I may have called her a blue pilled, shareblue shill for denying facts and logic, as a joke. "No."
"Two thirds of capes become criminally involved," I told her, trying to steer the conversation back on track. "The popular view on the internet is that it's like having a gun strapped to your head where you can pull the trigger with your mind, and every time you fire it it reminds you of how you got powers in the first place."
"Why would that be bad?"
Did she not know? I scratched my head, confused. "Triggers are bad?" I offered. "They're triggering? They trigger you?"
Taylor didn't look impressed at this, and fair enough; this was terribly awkward. "Triggers?"
"Trigger events," I nodded emphatically, and then raised my eyebrows at her blank look. "You don't know? People go through a crisis point, usually after a lengthy period of stress, and Trigger."
"That sounds like a conspiracy theory."
"It's official Protectorate doctrine."
"How do you know?" Taylor asked, exasperated.
"I'm.. I was…" I was Dark Smoke Puncher. I am Dark Smoke Puncher. A flash of movement caught in my peripheral vision and I turned in time to take a scrunched up ball of paper to the face. I saw Julia, one of Sophia's friends, smirking and retracting her outstretched arm as Sophia, and her table of friends, tittered and giggled.
I bent down and picked the crumpled paper off the floor, then stood and walked over to Mr. G's desk where he was grading papers or something. "Hey, Mr. G," I said and he looked up and smiled at me.
"What can I do you for, Greg?"
I pointed over to Julia and put the crumpled paper on his desk. "Julia is throwing paper at me."
The look in his eyes behind his glasses came across as slightly irritated. I was pretty sure there'd been a staff meeting about all of my emails, if only because I was CCing in their bosses. "I see," he said stiffly. "Leave it with me, Greg, and I'll speak to her."
"Thanks, Mr. G." I went back and sat down. Taylor was looking at me with a deep scorn.
"Did you just tattle to the teacher?"
"Who else would I?"
Taylor shifted her glasses and gave me a look that was both pitying and full of contempt. Another piece of paper hit me in the head.
Complete and utter contempt.
After school my parents picked me up from the front gate and took me to get ice cream. They asked me about my day and I told them that girls were throwing paper at me. They both suggested that maybe the girls were interested and wanted to talk, to which I replied that I didn't think that was the case, and I had told the teacher. They accepted this as the correct course of action and we all ate a cone of peanut butter and pistachio double scoop as they told me about their normal day at work trying to get permission to do roadworks.
Working for the city council as a civil engineer sounded like a lot of pointless emailing back and forth, but I was sure there was more to it than that.
After ice cream we drove to the PRT building and entered the underground car park after being let in by the security guard. Once parked we were met by Rory, resplendent in his golden armour.
Three hundred and thirty stars hurtled after the descending hand of god like a cloak, stretching up into the rending of reality at distances beyond human imagination. I saw the muscles of the arm shift as it tightened it grip on the pen made of truth, the bronzed skin reflected the light as though oiled. Every time it caught me off guard, I had no way of predicting it. The tip of the pen, a pen that dwarfed my body a dozen fold, found my forehead and wrote upon it in lines of fire the word Alchemy.
I was greeted by the sight of my hands pushing myself up off the ground. Alchemy still burned on my brow with a heat enough that I could feel the individual letters. "Sorry," I said, brushing my hands off on my cargo shorts. "Tripped."
"Good afternoon," he greeted us cordially, speaking mainly to my parents. "I'm Triumph, it's nice to meet you again."
He shook hands with my parents who were both sporting identical silly grins.
"Good afternoon, Triumph," dad enthusiastically pumped the proffered hand like it owed him gas. "How've you been?"
"Good," Rory met their grins with an easy smile. "I've been working on some prep for the new Protectorate role I'll be taking after New years, Armsmaster's been helping me. They're waiting for us in the conference office."
"Then by all means, let's go!"
Rory walked us through the building while giving my parents a quick running tour and fielding their many questions. I wasn't really paying attention. I really wanted to try out my new power. One potion made me larger, while the other made me more… made more of me. One made me invisible and one was like a grenade. A headache started throbbing in my left temple in time with the fading fiery letters, I could feel all the information, all the slivers of memory and intuition jostle for space in the limited confines of my brain.
I really wanted to drink the clone potion, I wanted to talk to Other Gregs. I wanted to tell them it was going to be ok, and for them to tell me. They were going to be my new best friends. My very own clones, now none of us would be virgins.
I suppressed a snort of laughter and despite the throbbing headache I was feeling a lot better. It was with a grin that matched my mum and dads that we entered the conference room. Colin, Enrique and a tall, handsome woman I didn't recognise were sitting at the table. I looked at the woman and went to Observe her, then kicked myself mentally.
Can't fuckin' do that, Greg. Despite myself, despite me telling myself it was moronic, I instantly distrusted her. I had no idea who she was, what she wanted or if she was a parahuman.
Colin stood up. He wasn't wearing his full Armsmaster powered suit, only the helmet, and still, hilariously, one of his branded t-shirts. "Thank you for coming, please take a seat."
"Hello again, Mr. Armsmaster!" Mum waved enthusiastically. "Have you beaten up many criminals lately?"
Colin, with all the practiced rhetoric of a seasoned cop, demurred. "I've been working hard to bring those who would commit crime to justice, as per the law."
Mum giggled and elbowed dad, who was barely holding himself together as glee threatened to spill out through his thick, blonde beard.
"Thanks again for meeting here with us today," said Enrique as we took our seats, then he gestured to the handsome woman. "This is Francine, she's the manager for Protectorate ENE, NE and SE cluster's image teams-"
I nodded along as he rattled off her credentials so that my parents would be impressed. I'd heard of Francine, but never met her. She was the top dog in the Brockton, Boston and Newport line and had been unavailable when I was starting my music career.
I should start that again.
"Good afternoon, Mr. and Mrs. Veder" said Francine with a little wave. "And Mr. Veder. Thank you for making the time to meet with us, we appreciate that."
"That's ok." Dad's smile never faltered.
Francine nodded warmly. "We really do appreciate it, a lot of parents make our job harder than it has to be from day dot, so, really, thank you for being here. Do you know what we're here to discuss?"
"Greg's hero name. We spoke to Ricky on the phone-"
I saw Enrique twitch out of the corner of my eye.
"And he explained that the name was unsuitable for the kind of powers Greg has. We really don't want anyone to be made to feel uncomfortable, but we also really want for Greg to be able to express himself."
"And we also want that," Francine picked up the thread. "However we also feel that it's important that for an individual possessing the capability to manipulate emotions, the name 'Heart Under Blade' is properly considered. It is important for us to scrutinize the semantic ramifications inherent in all the names our heroes bear, considering potential misapprehensions and inadvertent connotations that may arise. I understand that the alternative 'Art Under Blade' was proposed by Greg, and we appreciate that you're willing to compromise at all on this kind of matter."
My eyes had kind of glazed over at the politispeak. "The name has a lot of personal importance for me."
"Could you explain it for me, so that I can understand where you're coming from better?"
I grinned. "Ye. Ok, so in Japanese the way you spell Ninja, or Shinobi, is with the character for heart being written under the character for blade, and to me a shinobi is one who endures. I think this can poetically be used to describe the very soul of a parahuman, being one who has endured, and then to me." Exploding man. Hans. The Fallen. Leviathan. Brockton. Coil. Bonesaw. Echidna. Myself. "We endure. We don't give up."
"That was very passionate," said Francine, clasping her hand over her heart. "And so heroic. I know that it's very hard for young capes. You have all the same problems that everyone else has, and then some. What we don't want to do is make more problems for you. What else do you think might come to mind when a parahuman has the name Heart Under Blade?"
"I went through all this with Enrique," I gestured to him and next to me dad inhaled loudly. "It makes people think of Heartbreaker, and other human master rapists. You could give a villain that name and no one would bat an eye, but that would be considered culturally insensitive against the Japanese."
"We are in America," said Enrique, masterfully denying my UNO reverse. "We have to play to American sensibilities. Currently, the winds prevail strongly against human masters. This isn't a fight against you, we had the same problem when we were working to finalise Gallant's name. It's just, for comparison, like if Gallant had wanted to call himself Painbeam or something. We can't allow it."
"It is imperative that the name chosen accurately reflects the strength, empathy, and Protectorate aligned ideals that our superheros possess," Francine continued after him. "Associating all of us with a name that implies any kind of association with some of the worst supercriminals in America may inadvertently diminish the faith the public holds in us to protect them."
"But it doesn't go against the Nomenclature Regulation Guidelines," I countered.
"We know, which is why we're asking you to reconsider," Francine glanced at Enrique. "We were having a chat about this on my drive here, that the emotion inducing art isn't the only thing you can do?"
"Master art, design thinker, some kind of repair power, matter generation while making something and magic potions," I counted off on my fingers.
"Magic potions?" Colin cut in.
"It came on about twenty minutes ago, in the car park."
"Is that why you tripped?" Mum asked, and I nodded.
"It kinda feels like getting punched by the hand of god."
Mum patted me on the head consolingly.
"And you're getting more powers, still?" Francine leant forward to rest her elbows on the table, to which I nodded. "Amazing, that's incredibly rare. You know, we were thinking of giving you the Valiant name."
Mum and dad gasped. Valiant had been one of the earliest Protectorate heroes, one of the big ones. One of the capes whose powers provided the golden triangle - Attack, Defense and Mobility in the form of long range dimensional shear, intangibility and flight. He had been one of those capes in the level below the Triumvirate and the Valiant name had been used only once since.
However.
"Thanks, but I'd prefer a name like Dark Smoke Puncher over that." I could see confusion flit over faces but I persevered. "I want to be able to take a name like that and make it worth something."
"I'm sorry," said Colin. "But what is 'dark smoke puncher' supposed to mean?"
"It would be my ninja name," I answered him seriously. "If I was to get ninja powers instead of mine."
Enrique and Francine glanced at each other. "It would kind of work," he said. "It's not in our normal naming schema, though. That's the kind of presence you want?"
I glanced at Colin, at Armsmaster. I'd always thought his name was just lame. Armsmaster, Legend, Dauntless, Chevalier - they were all just kind of soulless corpo names. The kind where you could smell the focus testing. If I was going to be a superhero, and fight supervillains, in all the campy glory, the parade of costumes and masks, I was going to commit to the bit where almost everyone else half-assed it. I was going to entertain.
"It's funnier."
"And do you want to be a comedy hero?"
"Heroes are already a comedy," I pointed to Colin. "He fights a nazi who dresses up like Sauron."
"What's so funny about that?" Colin asked the question lightly, without apparent heat.
"It's…" I wasn't sure how to explain it. It was the best kind of chuunibyou but almost everyone seemed scared of taking the final step, clinging to the last vestiges of what could be considered serious rather than falling headlong into the abyss that the Japanese Sentai teams embraced. Maybe I was just a weeaboo. "Just funny. I want it to be funnier. Being a hero should be fun but everyone is so dour about it."
"It's serious business," Colin said. "It's dangerous. People get hurt. It's gang warfare. The names and the caping is the distraction that lets people ignore just how bad things really are."
I gave a deep sigh and looked directly into his visor, right where I knew his eyes were. "I know."
He probably wanted to tell me that I didn't know shit but gracefully let it slide.
"Let's get back on track," interjected Francine. "So you want a funny identity? Something jester themed?"
What did I really want? Who was I? I was a shinobi, one who endured. A hero, a slayer of monsters. A rising star, so gloriously incandescent.
Who did I want to be?
Chapter 94: A glib facsimile 2.9
Chapter Text
Chapter 95: A glib facsimile 2.10
Chapter Text
15th November 2010- Armsmaster
"Lawpilled Herocel would actually be a great name," one of the copies of Greg was telling the others as Colin counted down the clock. After two minutes and fifteen seconds the copies vanished into thin air and Colin approached the one left behind.
"Two minutes and fifteen seconds."
"That's what I thought," said Greg conversationally. "How's that? New powers!"
Colin let himself smile. "A strange power, but a useful one. It reminds me of Cask, though the methodology is completely different."
"Man, I wish I was Cask. At least he can make healing potions."
"Somewhat," Colin eyed the rack of phials full of alternating blue, yellow, red and green liquid. After the materials testing on the substances came back positive with the groceries they were made from, human testing had been allowed to proceed. He moved to the rack and plucked a blue potion from its wooden nestling. Two hundred and fifty milliliters, no more, no less. More would produce no extra effect, less would stop it from happening altogether. "And you're sure that these are safe for others to take?"
"Absolutely."
"And there's no adverse mental effects?" It truly pained him to have to rely on the word of one boy for something like this, but that was parahuman powers. Often they had rules that could only be intuited by the cape in question, the reporting of which it seemed that Greg had already known going by the structure of the report he had provided before knowing how it was to be written, or even that he needed one at all. "You seem to come over very silly after drinking it."
Greg looked down at himself, then back up. "That's just me being me. Man, just you wait until you talk to someone who gets you."
The potion swirled in the phial as Colin shifted his hand in a tight circle, the motion casting shifting lights against the blue and chrome of his armoured hand. "Truly. I suppose that's hard to come by."
Colin lifted his hand and downed the phial in one gulp. The liquid sloshed down his throat with a sensation that reminded him unpleasantly of the cool burn of overly minty toothpaste and coated the inside of his stomach. Just as described the burn almost instantly receded and his vision was obscured as two copies blurred from his body, stepping out to flank each side of him.
Instantly his HUD began to malfunction, displaying junk information, and for an instant he was gripped with a bone deep horror, a cold that gripped his throat, before he settled himself and whirled around to face his clones, the suit fighting him the whole time.
"Status report," all three of him barked at the same time. "No, you first. No, you," all three of him pointed to another in a triangle.
There was a brief tense moment until all three of him relaxed simultaneously, grinning identical winsome grins. Finally, he alone, spoke. "I'll go first. My HUD is trying to display three copies of the same data feed at once, are yours?"
"Yes," said the copy on the right. "The programming wasn't built to have three instances run at once, but we can fix that… I don't have my power."
There was a brief pause. "Neither do I," said the other copy. "I can't feel it."
"Just as he reported," Colin said, motioning to Greg who was watching with unrestrained glee. "The clones retain everything the original was carrying, but not their power."
The clones nodded seriously. "Armsmaster," one said, slowly raising an arm. "The movement assist in my suit is similarly not working and I can't think as to how to fix it."
"That's interesting," said Colin. "Because I can. How does it feel?"
"We can discuss this later," both clones replied instantly, their voices overlapping with almost no variance in tone or timing, then seemed to look at him meaningfully. Colin understood.
"Ok, it's not our power testing," he turned back to Greg and the technicians who were all watching with extreme interest. "But we'll have to wait for another minute and three seconds for my clones to vanish. However, I think we can conclude this potion a success. Well done, Greg, with these potions able to be distributed to our roster I think we can see some positive change coming."
"Hey," said Greg, a sly expression in his usually guileless eyes. "What's the tinkertech compensation form number? F3650?"
"F3652," Colin replied stonily. "It's impressive that you've looked into it, usually we would explain it to you after we've formally concluded a tinker rating, as opposed to, say, a master one that would produce clones, or a stranger one that would induce invisibility."
Greg smiled, clearly aware he could expect fair compensation for his work before he, Colin, could stock up on 'testing samples'. This, however, was life and not to be dwelt over unduly. He shared a look with his clones, knew that they were rolling their eyes at each other under their visors too, and moved on.
Shortly after his clones vanished as though they had never been and the visor of his suit went dark, the suit itself locking stiff around his body, and for a moment he had another spike of worry that some strange power interaction had borked his whole system - then the reboot screen appeared in front of his eyes and he relaxed again.
This was something he could definitely fix, the issue about his software not being built to handle multiple copies running at the same time. Fixed and improved upon. If two more copies of his suit were running that meant two more sets of data to feed into his many algorithms, and even if the copies didn't keep his power there were other tasks they could be put to. It was an enormous shame, Colin would have really liked to see what three of him working on the same project would bring even if it was only for two minutes at a time.
Or it meant two copies out in the field where even a seconds advantage could swing a confrontation.
Or it meant two more of him at an Endbringer fight. Behemoth was due soon and Colin was going to miss it. The pattern, even before he and Dragon had started digging into it, was that one of the three came every three months and hit a target where the damage would be felt for generations to come.
His suit finished its boot prompt and the visor sprang to life with the warmup diagnostic, the holographic readout cycling through checks of the systems before settling on the usual configuration displaying battery life, ammunition counts, the echolacative map of the nearby area and so on. He looked over to Greg, who was instantly analysed by the facial recognition program, his name appearing above his head along with an option to read a text prompt of what Colin thought would be useful information.
With practiced motions he opened the data memory and quickly looked at the overall shape of the code generated by the short time the clones were active, then put the project aside for later. He would untangle it better at his computer.
"Let's try the next potion," he gestured to the rack and Greg picked up a green one and downed it without ceremony. Almost instantly he vanished and the stranger warning lit up on the left of the visor's screen, the echolocation wireframe outline that covered everything in his immediate vicinity glowing red over the boy.
"That's the stuff," said the boy in a way that sounded almost nostalgic. The red outline started waving its arms around and taking tentative steps. "I'm going to fall over, I can't see where I'm going."
"Allow me," Colin took the next green potion from the rack and downed it, it was spicily cold just like the first. He vanished and almost lost his balance, too. He couldn't see anything of himself, even his visor was gone. Colin sighed, what a shame - but that was powers for you. For every good power interaction there was an equal and opposite annoying or bad one.
The next two were more promising. The red one indeed made Greg, and himself, grow larger by a factor of three and once again his programming hadn't been able to handle the change - though this, too, was something he could solve. The yellow potion was not to be consumed, it was a weapon, a weapon that seemed to cause guaranteed non-lethal damage unless you were to continue to bombard a target as the ballistic gel dummy that was currently sprayed all over the floor attested to.
The second round of power testing proved that Greg did indeed have all the abilities he'd claimed to. Machines magically worked again under his hands, even though there seemed to be a limited shelf life on that second wind, and matter was generated wholesale so long as he was making something that wasn't a resource - though it seemed that the finished product could then be dismantled and remade into more of the matter again as the series of increasingly large aluminum rings attested to. The material was going to be kept for long term monitoring to record the rate at which it broke down, and if it was at a viable pace to be used for anything.
Testing satisfactorily concluded Colin dismissed the staff and took the last of the potion stock back to his lab for further study. It wasn't enough to see that they worked, Colin needed to see how they could work for him, even if he was going to have to pay fair compensation for it. The edge, any edge, was worth it.
Except Cask's prices, the man charged an arm and a leg for a minor brute rating and if you wanted to keep that rating you had to keep drinking the concoctions. Nasty man knew he had you on the hook.
Colin sat down at his work desk without divesting of his armour and pulled open the system logs of the power testing. Nested snarls of code, overlapping errors with no solve point, enduring bugs as the system that ran his programs had failed to debug. Colin placed the call.
"Colin, how are you?" The Canadian accented voice answered after a single ring. She was dependable like that.
"Very well, Dragon, thanks," he answered with a smile in his voice. "Just got done with some power testing for a new Ward, no name as yet. A trump, if you can believe."
"How rare," Dragon said pleasantly in a way that made him smile. "Which subclass?"
"Infinity, as far as testing looks." Dragon whistled. "But it's very early days yet, they may cycle and we'll have a seven because as far as we can see there's no associated drawbacks - yet, anyway."
"There's always the drawbacks," Dragon murmured. "I remember Titan."
"As much as we all wish we didn't. On the topic of power testing, let me show you something that came up during it. Tell me what you think."
Colin transferred her the system log he had been examining through their secure, direct line, and waiting. He didn't wait long, he never had to wait long with Dragon. He may have been the best tinker the Protectorate had, but she was the best the world had.
"It almost looks like you tried to run three suits at once," she said. "The same suit. And then made the suit larger - one of the powers you tested was a type ten?"
"Sort of," Colin said enthusiastically. "One of his powers is to make specific, almost totemic, potions that grant extremely specific, short lived effects. Duplication, invisibility, growth. Once I figure out how to have it not bork my system I think it could give me a solid trump card."
Dragon gave a little hum of laughter.
"I was also hoping to do a little more on our prediction program, but first I want to show you something fun," Colin took the second last blue potion from the rack and initiated a video call before wiggling it in front of the camera. From the screen Dragon's dark eyes tracked the potion. "The duplication potion."
"One of you is bad enough."
Colin snorted and waved her off. "They don't duplicate with your power but I could source some for you if you ever wanted someone else smart to talk to."
"I'm not that much of a shut in, I talk to plenty of people."
"I said someone smart."
"Those not smart people happen to be good friends of mine," Dragon said with a mock sternness that, if pressed, Colin knew would turn to real sternness.
"Of course, sorry," he said. "I only saw the aftermath of this, watching it happen in real time should prove very informative."
"If it's put you in this good of a mood I guess I have to see," Dragon smiled and shook her wavy brown hair out of her eyes.
Colin downed the concoction, felt the burn and remembered to stand. His copies stepped out of his body and waved gamely to Dragon. Now that he had experienced it once, and understood how the process worked, his clones would have his ideas about how they should all behave ie. Colin Prime was in charge.
"This is Colin," Colin gestured to the Colin on the left, and then to the Colin on the right. "This is also Colin."
"Hello, Colins," Dragon chuckled.
"Hey, Dragon," they both said at the same time, exactly as he had mentally practiced it, and took off their helmets. The automatic release was malfunctioning as the code on the screen snarled again, forking and overlapping in a way that sent his power buzzing in his head, but he had of course installed a manual release. Colin looked back over at his clones and appraised his condition.
"Do I look a little pale to you, Dragon?"
"I've told you before that you need more sleep."
"Do I look pale?" Colin asked himself.
"You tell me," he told himself.
Colin was overtaken by a wave of something that was warm like nostalgia, and familiar like home. It was like the brothers he had never had were here, something about seeing yourself, interacting with yourself, was extremely fulfilling in a very egoistic way. He didn't think it was an effect of the potion as it hadn't happened in testing, but here, with his friend, where he could let his guard down, the situation seemed much more… was there even a word to describe this?
"What a cheeky smile," Dragon commented. Colin coughed and schooled his features, he hadn't even realised he had been smiling.
He looked at his copies and they were similarly fixing more normal expressions on their faces. "I suppose I'm relieved that I can get along with myself. Have you ever had the feeling that, when meeting someone, you would instantly be friends?"
"It's too bad we only last two minutes," said a clone, to which both Colin and his other clone scoffed. The clone who spoke gave them an exaggerated stern look. "We can only hope that the boy doesn't charge much for them. He's a strange kid, Dragon. You may not have access to the report but for a little while I was completely convinced he was a Ward from another city, even sent off to watchdog for a second opinion."
"Triumph mentioned it to us, too," said the other clone. "That he barely had to explain anything, and what he did explain it only ever had to be the once. Like he already knew everything."
"But it was nothing to be concerned about?"
"Perhaps not," said Colin. "But could you keep an eye on me to see if any master effects are present? One of his powers is manipulating emotion via art, which he was very forthcoming about-"
The clones vanished without warning and his suit rebooted once more.
"I'll keep an eye out," said Dragon as they turned their attention back to the code which was now starting to run normally once more. "Now, let's get stuck in."
Chapter 96: A glib facsimile 2.11
Chapter Text
I really needed to find a way to get it out that Thomas Calvert was Coil in a way that made sense. I had no evidence, I had no proof, I couldn't just come out of nowhere and say, 'hey, Colin, did you know that Thomas Calvert is Coil? Ain't that just quackin' crazy!'
But first, first, before any of that, before anything else - I had to play with my tool.
I cradled it in my hands, ecstatic. It was a fantastic piece of tinkertech that had appeared, fully formed, out of nowhere while I had been at the rig doing power testing. It hadn't appeared on my person, it had been waiting for me on my bed. If what I intuitively understood about this thing was correct, then it was the single piece of the most advanced and versatile equipment you could imagine.
It was the fattest, thickest, beefiest swiss army phone, fabricator, supercomputer, sensor, first aid kit and probably a dozen more things. All of it, miraculously, for free out of thin air. It was a device that made a career.
The physical form of the omnitool was a wristband and I slipped it on. Two things happened when I did this. One, it tightened snug around my wrist, and two, it burst to life with a brilliant orange light and a little startup jingle. I had no idea what it was doing but I stared, transfixed, as the orange glow hovered above my left forearm and condensed into a floating screen that I pressed, the holographic screen somehow solid under my finger, which progressed me to the next screen which was a fuck-all confusing user interface that I didn't understand at all.
I was used to the scroll wheels of our smartphones and computer menus, this was naught but a jumbled mess to me and it wasn't in english. It wasn't in any language I had ever seen, it looked like it was written in what someone thought writing would look like in a hundred years - sci-fi themed gibberish. Pressing the solid light buttons did make things happen, but what those things were I couldn't say.
After fiddling with what I assumed were menus for about twenty minutes I attempted voice commands. "Omnitool, set language settings to english."
There wasn't even a delay. One second it was in gibberish space runes, the same second it was in perfectly legible American english and a whole new world opened up to me. Full internet connectivity, somehow backwards compatibility piggybacking off the cell networks despite being a million times more advanced than them, which I immediately tested and found video streaming to be both instant and in extreme high definition quality.
After washing my hands I started fiddling around with some of the other delights the omnitool had to offer, chief among them the fabricator. It used some kind of metal, ceramic and silicon polymer mix from a very limited storage supply, which it superheated to melting point, and flash forged. It could also reclaim this material - thus my master plan began.
I couldn't deny that I was frustrated, that I felt powerless, that I felt I had been denied the life that was my right, the life that I had carved out for myself with my own two hands. My gamer power may have greatly facilitated and expedited things but it was nothing without my effort. I had done those things, it was me and only me.
Programming specific fabrication outputs on the omnitool was a task and a half but simply having it spit out a glassy, off-white semi metallic cube preset, as a finished item, taking half the materials it should have, and then reclaim what it could leaving me with more than I started with was easy. Building up my stock of whatever omnimaterial this was was just a matter of repeating the process.
The omnitool was an exceptionally intuitive device and the inbuilt help system was more than enough to cover any gaps in knowledge, giving me a step by step process to setting the device to both reclaim and print simultaneously.
I didn't regret joining the Wards again, not for a second, but if I couldn't be Dark Smoke Puncher again, if I couldn't be Heart-Under-Blade now, I was going to have to carve it out for myself - if only for one night.
It was time to take back what I'd lost.
It had taken days of learning how to operate the minifacturing fabricator, how to push it to the build size limits of what the system told me it could. Originally designed to be used to create small parts, the internal reservoir of gel in the omnitool only coming in at seventy five grams, I was using it to make myself a hero outfit.
My left shoulder ached. I'd been holding my arm out for a solid half hour as my omnitool fabricated my new suit, slowly, printing it as though through beams of light, and just as steadily reclaimed cubes of hard omnigel. I held my left arm up with my right as the off-white suit took shape on my bed.
It was being printed as a single piece, hard and armoured with a greater density of metals and ceramics where it needed to be, flexible and resistant polymer over the joints with as comfortable an inner lining as could be printed. Just as my trembling arm began to fail me the omnitool pinged a victorious soundbyte - done.
I wiped the sweat from my brow and beheld what I had done. My triumphant eyes swept over the armoured suit, designed from the ground up to look like the heroic ideal of a techno-ninja, the snow-camo pattern of dark greys to muted whites, an artwork in its own right, inspired respect. You could plonk this down next to Colin's Armsmaster suit and it would match him beat for beat in based aesthetic, and with the extra padding in just the right places it would turn my still chubby frame into something more befitting myself.
I dove into the suit, pulling it on sideways through the ergonomic opening and fixing the clasps, and it fit snugly around my body. In designing it I had wondered how I was going to get it sized correctly but once again the omnitool had the answer in its ridiculously overpowered sensory suit. A single seconds scan of myself provided everything I needed all the way down to my bodyfat percentage in a perfect digital mannequin.
I rotated my arms at the shoulder, crouched, jumped, bent at the waist - all movement unhindered, neither form nor function sacrificed in the making. I vibrated with excitement as I looked myself up and down in the mirror and uttered the only descriptor I could think of that was apt enough.
"Boss."
I flexed my hands in front of my face, the one way mirror ceramic plastic polymer visor set into the full face mask stained my vision grey like tinted glass. I was about to throw open my door, bound downstairs, and reveal myself to my parents in my full glory but I managed to stop myself. Part of being a teenage cape was secrecy, hiding things from your parents and sneaking around behind their back for the greater good. It was a secret identity you would wear as you were dipped into a fantastic, frightening, exciting new subculture of people just like yourself.
The whole appeal was flexing your newfound teenage independence away from prying adults who just wanted you to sit straight and fly right, to revel in the self expression it gave you as you created an alter ego for yourself. You made yourself unique.
I had pretty much completely missed out on it the first time, and I wanted it now even if it was for just one night. People might sneer at the Wards as the play pen for the kids who were 'born coded cop', and deride the structure and safety it brought to someone who had just gone through a massive traumatic experience, disdain the access to more experienced adults who had gone through similar experiences, but they were right about one thing.
The aesthetics of going out to beat up petty criminals with superpowers by yourself was incredibly based.
My room fell away and the void yawned around me, infinite and cold. The hand of god once more descended, trailing three hundred and twenty nine stars, the shining starlight pen gripped in fingers whose sinew rippled under the skin with unfathomable, terrifying strength. It once again struck me dumb, I could barely react as the tip of the titanic pen found my forehead and fire made ink ran across my skin with the words Fingers of Silver.
A full body shiver wracked my frame as I looked at myself in the mirror once more. I had stayed standing somehow, rather than falling. I blinked in confusion as, in the mirrors reflection, I saw that my omnitool had been activated with the orange holographic interface lit up around my arm. I looked down at it and dismissed the screen. Weird.
A dull ache started to set in as my brain caught up with what had happened, what information had been dumped into my head. A massive amount of skill in mechanics, knowledge of how a thousand thousand machines worked and how to reverse engineer them and the confidence that I could do the same to just about anything I came across.
I groaned and squatted down, almost nauseated, as the power started to settle into my subconscious, great and terrible flying machines swimming before my closed eyelids. Was I some kind of tinker? No, a tinker had the power to bullshit a thousand other requirements than just half materials. This was closer to a skill thinker power because I could tell that, if I wanted to make any advanced machines, or any machines really, I would still need the facilities to make every single part - a production factory that would take up the better half of a football stadium.
Unless, I looked down at my wrist, I wanted to spend fifty years printing a factory with my omnitool.
I groaned and divested myself of my suit, tossing it haphazardly into my closet. I needed to have dinner first.
Tummy? Full. Head? Empty. Balls? Descended. Armpits? Swampy.
I'd forgotten to make this suit particularly breathable and even though it was coming up to winter the nights in Brockton Bay were still fairly mild. Despite the muggy internals of my outfit I was riding high. I had gotten to do the whole thing where you took your outfit out in a big backpack and get changed in an alleyway which was a massive adrenaline rush in and of itself. Any random hobo could wander in and molest you, it was lucky that my omnitool had a built in burning carbide blade.
I held my left arm up as I came to the end of the street lights, pressed a button, and my arm lit up as the flashlight activated, bathing the area in a warm glow that looked like it was too far reaching for such a small device to produce. I held no illusions that I would encounter crime to stop, it wasn't about that. This was about the escapist fantasy.
I was a hero slumming it all on my own, me against the world. I didn't care about the wheels that had already been invented, I was out here because I knew I could do better; me, some random fifteen year old kid. My parents just didn't get it, the leader of the Protectorate team didn't know shit, the cops could suck it.
Throughout heaven and earth, I alone was the honored one.
I wandered the dark streets on foot, traveling a whole kilometer in only ten or so minutes. I could easily cut a patrol route in a few kilometers and get home so that I could sneak into the house in the wee hours of the morning, tired but triumphant that I was doing more to help the city alone than I could have anywhere else.
I walked sweatily for a good hour, checking the pathfinder app on my omnitool every so often. It was like a souped up Google Maps, capable of integrating high fidelity scans of the surrounding area into a snapshot map ripped from a web search. This really was the high life.
Suddenly my omnitool started pinging a presence approaching from my left. I turned, ready, and a man fell from the sky and landed lightly from what looked more like a controlled jump rather than flight. A tall man, buff, bare chested, wearing only black pants, chains wrapped around his calves and forearm and a blue and white mask of a snarling tiger.
Stormtiger? I could take him. I licked my lips nervously, wolfishly, and raised my hand as I equipped my anypole and oh shit no.
Chapter 97: A glib facsimile 2.12
Chapter Text
Chapter 98: A glib facsimile 2.13
Chapter Text
A hologram was art, my omnitool could be programmed to create holograms in incredible detail far greater than any commercial screen. Far greater than any experimental displays in development, this was tinkertech graphics, in tinker-technicolour. I had been, in my haste to play around with the fabricator, forgetting one of the best parts of my kit.
I didn't have much time, I was still pretending to be taking a shit, but perhaps I had just enough time to program in something that would help me escape without having to appeal to the higher power of Armsmaster. I knew what my mistake was - I wasn't strong enough. Solo hero foot patrols were the privilege of those with overwhelming strength, if you couldn't mog your opponents into oblivion you had no right to be out trying to fight crime all by yourself.
My gloved fingers fumbled clumsily over the keys, the solid hologram keyboard projected so as to be used with both hands. I was a decent typist, nothing compared to my gamer typing speeds, but respectable - a respectability that was nothing before the omnitool. I'd been practicing all week with it but even then the utterly foreign system still stumped me, I often had to hunt and peck as I tried to remember what commands it needed or frequently consult the help system, something which if I didn't have would have reduced the omnitool to complete non-functionality.
How long did I have? I glanced at the door, trying to shit - but I was too nervous. Stormtiger was waiting, and listening. I didn't know what his game was bringing me here, some kind of super softball recruitment attempt? It was a subtle move from a gang not known for their subtle moves.
My fingers tapped quietly, wildly, on the keys as I tried to code the hologram quicker and quicker, having to delete and redo as my rush produced sloppy work. I could feel the cold burn of panic well up out of my stomach and pool in every limb, the shaking starting in my hands making working harder, making it harder to imbue to hologram with the decadent quality of which I was capable, especially for something as complex as I was after.
The sudden knock on the door made me jump out of my skin. I was on my feet in an instant, buckling up my suit, when a woman's voice echoed through the door. "You almost done in there?"
My voice cracked horribly as I answered. "Almost."
Soft footsteps moved away from the door and at that moment I almost shit myself out of relief. I'd been in here too long, I was being to suspicious. I'd have to find another moment to finish my hologram so that I could preserve some dignity by sneaking out of here without a fight.
I ran the tap loudly as I tried to squeak out a bit more of the hologram. Even if I could get it mostly done, even that would work. I couldn't run the tap for a whole minute straight, it didn't make sense, nobody washed their hands for that long. I turned it off slowly, each revolution of the handle crushing my soul. I steeled myself and headed back out.
The scene was just as it had been before, girls, guys, cards, drinking. Stormtiger was sitting in an armchair watching the UFC, he waved me over. The bong in his hands gurgled rhythmically as he took a fat rip, then exhaled a thick cloud of smoke through the jaws of his mask.
"Weed man, huh?" I asked, trying to keep the quaver out of my voice. As to my success I could not say.
"Yeah, bro," he said and held the bong out to me.
"My whole helmet comes off."
Stormtiger shrugged and took another bong rip. "Weed's better than beer, less calories. Couldn't keep this baby," he slapped his bare stomach which, despite his hunching over, still had a clear six pack of abs. "Weed's better for you anyway. Hey, you into the fights?"
My expression, hidden behind my helmet, was stony. I turned my head to the tv. I guess it was pretty cool, but it was kinda like watching kids wail on each other compared to what I could do. "It's pretty cool, I guess."
"Yeah, man. We got Henderson versus Rua," he gestured with the bong at the television. "The thing about Hendy is, and I've got money on him by the way, is that he's not as good against the kind of monkey fighting Rua uses usually, but he's been training for this fight specifically-"
Stormtiger treated me to a long winded commentary about the pros and cons of both fighters and their win loss records. I glanced down at where my omnitool was hidden. Was… was he just really high? Was there no master plan? Was he just blazed when someone told him I was wandering around and he invited me here on a whim? My respect armour, in his altered state, caused him to want me to chill with him?
I looked over my shoulder at his friends who were still just drinking and chatting over cards with the girls, two of whom were returning from the bathroom rubbing their noses and looking flushed, exhilarated, and ready for anything. I turned back to Stormtiger who was still still giving me a running commentary of the history of Henderson in scholarly detail.
I slowly walked backward toward the door, no one was really paying me much attention so I gently eased the handle open and slipped through, closing it soundlessly behind me. Without a word, using every bit of half forgotten silent moving skill I could, I hustled down the hallway toward where the stairwell signage was and started skipping down them two at a time.
What the fuck. I couldn't tell if I was lucky or unlucky with all of this, what a fucking ride! My heart was pounding and my mouth was dry but I hadn't felt this alive in weeks. Getting out of the recruitment attempt with just my wits and the hair on my ba-
Amid a cloak of three hundred and twenty seven stars the hand of god descended. With burning truth the starlight pen branded my soul with the words Alchemist's Labratory.
Everything hurt for some reason. I rubbed my sore neck, bewildered, and looked around. I was further down the stairs that I had been - had getting the power, and what a power, a confusing, bizarre power, made me fall over again?
"Hello? This is Danny."
I looked down at my arm where the sleepy voice had come from. My omnitool was on, bright orange screens lighting up the stairwell, and I'd somehow made a call. Could you equivalent butt dial from an omnitool? I stared at the number, one I didn't recognise, and the man on the other end yawned and started to say something else but I hung up. I rubbed my sore knees.
I was just starting to limp down the last flight of stairs when loud voices could be heard echoing down from above. "Heart Blade?"
Stormtiger. A chill swept up my spine, hair raising and sweat beading all over my body under my stuffy suit. I kept moving. I raised my omnitool and tried to work as I jogged, but the motion made it incredibly hard to type - I might just have to make do with what I had.
I finalised the hologram and activated it, dark light suddenly curling over my body in a stylised, almost tribal, camouflage pattern if that pattern was missing half of what it needed. The light, if you could truly call it light, didn't truly shine, there was perhaps a slight muted glow of dark purples, midnight blues and earthy browns that should hide me in the night just as well as inspiring a desire to ignore. I wanted to work in aversion as well as apathy but I just hadn't had the time.
I hurried on and out the door, bursting out onto the sidewalk and being bathed in the yellow light of the streetlamps, my darklight coating making me both stand out as a spot of darkness and making everyone who saw me want to ignore that they had.
I hustled down the road, limping against the dull pain in my legs. I looked back over my shoulder as the door to the apartment block crashed open, spilling Stormtiger and his friends out onto the road. They looked around foolishly for a moment before Stormtiger pointed me out, faltered, shook his head, then pointed me out again.
I groaned. Come on, don't make me call in the PRT.
"Bro!" Stormtiger called. "Why are you running?"
They were so much faster than I was but they ran after me falteringly as their minds tried to reconcile remembering what had happened with the desire to ignore me every time they caught sight of me.
"I'm calling the cops!" I yelled out over my shoulder and the group chasing me baulked. I continued hustling, looking back to see that only Stormtiger remained in pursuit. "Omnitool, call 911!"
My omnitool lit up as it dialled and I staggered through the pain and my own unfitness. I'd been working on it every day since coming back and had barely shed a couple of pounds - fitness was a truly gruelling process to those who didn't have the power of gamers.
Air started to rush over me and I looked back once more to see Stormtiger swooping forward like a bird of prey. He thrust his arm out and a blast of wind caught me in the back, I stumbled under it and lost my footing, I crashed heavily to the ground gasping for air.
"Nine One One, what's your emergency?"
"Stormtiger!" I rasped, crawling to my feet. "Attacking me!"
Stormtiger's foot caught me in the side, knocking the wind out of me. "Hang up."
I coughed, curling into a ball, as the emergency call operator asked me where I was.
"Hang up."
I muted the call and minimised the holographic screens, but everything we said was still going to be perfectly audible to the person on the other end.
"Good lad," Stormtiger crouched down next to me. I opened my eyes and looked up into his snarling mask. "You some kinda sneaky tinker? Or is this some kinda stranger power?"
I didn't answer.
He snorted. "It's alright, bro, keep your secrets. I got a good feeling about you, so I'm not gonna rough you up or anything, but why'd you run?"
"I'm a good guy," I said again, for the benefit of the operator.
"Yeah," Stormtiger said sadly, clapping a hand onto my upper back. "You said. We're always open, though. You can get anything you want with us, any kind of fun, party all the time. You get honour, respect, strength and more money than you'd think. What d'you say?"
"Dude," I coughed, hacking harshly. "No thanks."
Stormtiger sighed and stood up, then rolled me over onto my back with his foot. "I promise you it's better than what you'll get anywhere else. What, you gonna join up with Coil? Be a dog of the government? Nah, kid, we're what you want. Give you purpose, really clean up this city. You and me? We're better than them, and in the Empire everyone knows it. Come and goon for Kaiser"
I groaned and rolled back into a ball, back to Stormtiger. What was he on about? Was he stupid? I balled my hands into fists. I should be so much stronger than him, this wasn't fair, I should be the one toying with him, sending fifty thousand volts coursing through his nazi skull. "No way am I gooning."
"Faggot," Stormtiger snorted. "Come back to the party, get your dick sucked, have a beer, live a little."
"Fuck off," I hissed and Stormtiger sighed heavily.
"Have it your way, then. I'm gonna go get laid, two girls at the same time? Pretty sweet."
I coughed, sniffling, and Stormtiger laughed contemptuously before leaping off in a great burst of air. I gingerly sat up and lifted my left arm, opened up my omnitool and ended the call. I took a second to collect myself and then almost took the shit I was trying to earlier as someone suddenly landed next to me, a wispy figure in the shape of an athletic girl.
I cringed internally as Shadow Stalker, Sophia, dropped her breaker state. She looked down at me and scoffed as contemptuously as Stormtiger had.
"Wow, you're fucking useless."
Chapter 99: A glib facsimile 2.14
Chapter Text
This was a horrible way to learn my lesson, pointless humiliation while I was already being kicked down by the cruel foot of fate.
"Says you," I said hotly, standing and dusting my hands on my armour. "Who was too scared to do anything."
"I wanted to see what you'd do," Sophia replied, unperturbed. "Not impressed. You must really be new."
I paused - Sophia didn't recognise me. I cleared my throat and put on a huskier voice, as Batman gravelly as I could get it. "You're not supposed to be out here."
It was almost startling how she could lie with so much conviction. "I'm on official patrol."
"Everyone knows Ward's days end at nine thirty," I gestured at the past-midnight sky.
"Everyone?" She replied smugly. "You're wrong, I'm working."
I glowered at her bitterly. This was going to be anonymously reported for sure. "Whatever. I'm leaving, so you can go away."
"You should leave, and never show your piss weak face around here again." Sophia rounded on me, hands on hips. "We don't need losers like you getting shuffled into the Empire. Never put your mask on again."
"Fine. Whatever." I started limping away. Why couldn't she just have ignored me? Maybe if I'd had time to finish my hologram. My knees and neck still really hurt for some reason and I briefly debated using my only shot of medigel out of my omnitool but decided I should save it for an emergency.
"Bitch!" Sophia called out from behind me as a cutting parting shot. Despite myself I looked back to see her turn into wispy darkness and leap up into the sky, leaving no space for any rebuttal. I ground my teeth with bitterness that had nowhere to go. Screw this, I was going home.
The walk home was sour, but uneventful, and I managed to sneak in through the back door without waking anyone and crept silently up the stairs. I spared a glance at my closet, now holding some kind of secret lab, before shucking my armour and going straight to sleep - tossing and turning until the excess adrenaline in my system wore off.
The next morning I mulishly declined to go to school, and with some groaning and wailing my parents gave up and kissed me on the cheek before heading to work. I rolled over and went back to sleep for a couple more hours before waking up and pulling my sore, fat ass out of bed and down the stairs for breakfast.
Man, fuck late nights. I liked it better when I didn't have to sleep. I fumbled around for cornflakes and milk and fixed myself a bowl, making sure that power I had that made things better if I used all the ingredients activated, and ate in tired, dour silence.
Ok, so review of last night, Greg. What went wrong? You rushed it. You went in with expectation, and floundered when it wasn't met. What is the cure for such disorders? Beatings.
I munched my pretty good cornflakes and looked down at my wrist where my omnitool still sat unobtrusively, looking like a wristband. I pulled up the screen and saw that it was still recording. Well, this was as good as anything to go over my mistakes. I stopped the recording and played it back. The resolution was incredible, and the recording was taken in three hundred and sixty degrees so I could see what had been happening behind me, or around me, to search for details that had been out of my line of sight, but mostly I got to see my awkward retardation.
The meat of the recording was only maybe ten or fifteen minutes long, including Sophia, but the most interesting part was that I had recorded myself getting a new power. I had indeed eaten shit falling down the stairs, the power coming on in mid step, which explained my still aching body but what happened after was even more bizarre.
"Unnaturally skilled smithing, divine construct, demigod crafted," I muttered in the recording. "Magic item energy infusion, alchemical forging. Omnitool, call Taylor Hebert."
I watched with a deep, deep frown. Had I gotten a really bad concussion? What the fuck was I doing? In the video the omnitool rang a few times until the part that I remembered, where someone named Danny answered. I watched myself hang up the call and keep moving.
I paused the video and propped my chin in my other hand, staring off into space. I genuinely didn't know what to make of that. Why would I call Taylor? I didn't want anything to do with Taylor. Was it some residual guilt or something? I concuss-called her because I still felt bad? That was fucking stupid, I better never do that again.
I played the rest of the video and took a timestamped screenshot of Sophia being out in uniform well after work to send to the Protectorate anonymous tip page. Her punishment would be apt, just and lawful.
What had I been muttering about, too? Stormtiger said I'd said similar things when he'd had me in the air, but that hadn't happened before. I'd gotten powers in front of people a couple of times and all that happened was the surprise of it made me trip over. Strange.
I finished breakfast and slowly rolled out a few stretches to get my soreness to recede before heading back upstairs to my room, to face the power I had gotten. I opened my closet and stepped inside, pushing past my clothes hangers draped with things I never wore and my foot found the cool stone floor of my alchemy lab-
The hand. Three hundred and twenty six stars. The words Reliable Invention branded into my soul.
I found myself in my alchemy lab, holding a labeled jar of some dried herb whose name I didn't recognise. I jolted back and dropped the jar, it collided with the stone floor with a sharp crack and shattered, glass and dark green chopped leaves flying everywhere.
I spun around. How did I get here? I was just walking in. A headache started throbbing in my left temple and I realised what had just happened. That power made my creations reliable, they wouldn't break under normal use and would not malfunction - the fatal flaw that made tinkertech tinkertech, nullified.
I also realised that I was losing time. When I gained more power it looked like I went into some kind of retard trance where my unconscious id took over and did stupid things like try to call Taylor. I carefully avoided broken glass with my bare feet and retreated out of the lab to find our dustpan. I brought my recording of last night up and skipped back to where I'd gotten the power.
I wasn't sure what key command did this. "Omnitool, bring up my medical diagnostic from this recording."
The omnitool, with its incredibly advanced voice recognition, did just that. I played the video back with the overlay of data on my physical condition and just as I'd hoped there was a spike in things like heart rate, muscle tension and neural activity.
I thought for a moment, then said, "omnitool, when my body displays the same changes in condition, start recording automatically."
A little 'recording scheduled' notification popped up and I watched it until it vanished. What could I even do about this? It was completely random to me as to when power came upon me, so it wasn't like I could time it so that I wouldn't have my omnitool on me. It was always on me, which meant that my retard self would be able to try to call Taylor again. I thought for a moment. "Omnitool, when the recordings I just scheduled happen, lock all other functions."
The omnitool gave me a little 'settings changed' notification. Feeling better, but no less confused, I retrieved the dustpan from the laundry and went back in to clean up the mess.
The alchemy lab was a confusing wonder, full of strange ingredients like Slygrass, Effervescent Sugar, Salt of Nuun and Unicorn Fluids, with the only thing I recognised being the distilled water. It had glassware like a medieval chemistry set, and strange little burner stations. I knew intuitively that in this place I could craft potions that would produce effects of spells that I knew. That sounded great, but I didn't know any spells. Or that non-gamer spells were a thing. There were no recipes, no instruction manuals, just a lab stocked like the inside of Professor Snape's store cupboard.
It was still great, it was still interesting, I still spent the whole morning looking over everything - but it was ultimately just a fun curiosity. Or it would be, if not for the implication.
I could get magic powers. I could do spells and shit again. A raw, wild joy gripped me, I leapt, twisting, dancing, cackling with delight until I couldn't breathe from the exertion and the agonies of my battered body had me lying on the cool stone floor.
Things would get better. I would gain more power and regain my old self. I lay panting for a couple of minutes and forced myself to my feet with a groan. Things would be hype again, just as they were. In a different way, at a different time, but nevertheless, hype. Hype. Hype Beast? Beast Mode? I still needed a name to match the quality of Dark Smoke Puncher and Heart-Under-Blade.
I put that thought aside for now, I was no closer to finding the perfect name than I was at the start. The alchemy lab was cool, but I was pretty bummed that I couldn't actually do anything with it. I could make my potions in there, but I could do that just as well on our induction stovetop. One day, hopefully soon, magic.
For the rest of the day I fixed myself lunch, took a long, relaxing soak in the bath, and played around with my omnitool - in that order. I dissolved my armour back into cubes of omnimaterial to hide the evidence and changed the display settings just in case Sophia had seen my activate it while watching Stormtiger kick me around - besides, the whole safety cone orange thing wasn't really my colour. A gentler blue, even though it was the most generic choice for sci-fi screens, looked much more aesthetic to me.
After fiddling with settings for a while I thought about machines. It wasn't exactly like the crush of knowledge was bursting into the forefront of my mind, it was like when you knew a lot about a topic and it just kind of sat in the back of your head until you started on it and then the knowledge would burst forth like a fountain of information.
I didn't have ready made, out of the box designs, I had principles. So many that it was hard to know what to think about making without a clear goal in mind, and currently my brain was super dumb because I was still tired and sore so it wasn't giving me anything of much use. Just because I was technically a master mechanic or some shit didn't mean I could just on the fly invent something. Even a master mechanic had to go through the design and testing phase.
On the other hand I did also have the ability to reverse engineer just about anything, and with my omnitool I could scan machinery to an incredibly in depth level, then, provided it wasn't too big or in need of rare elements, print it with my omnitool.
I looked down at my wrist and twirled a lock of hair in thought. "Omntiool, scan yourself and then display your complete schematics."
The omnitool beeped quietly and a series of cool blue screens popped up, which I studied intently with a frown that grew with every passing minute. What the hell was this crap? I didn't understand practically any of it. Sasuga, tinkertech-san. Bullshit magic as usual. I could understand how the thing worked, as in the output of its functions, but not what made those functions tick. What kind of battery was this? I didn't get how it was able to power something that could disassemble matter and reconstitute it into the mix that it did.
A scan of my PC, however, was a much greater success. I could definitely make this, mostly by printing parts with my omnitool, and I could make an even better one. Assembling a new gaming PC would have to be a project for later because I couldn't print everything I needed, and the omnitool didn't reconstitute specific elements, only the slurry that omnimaterial consisted of.
I muddled through the schematics and dug into the code, and I didn't understand that much more than I did the physical components and it wasn't exactly written in anything that resembled conventional coding language.
But that was sick, I loved it. I could spend an autistic hundred hours this week just playing with my omnitool, and I didn't have Wards tonight, it being my scheduled day off, so I settled in for a good long sesh of figuring out how to download and play PROT on it.
Chapter 100: A glib facsimile 2.15
Chapter Text
My parents had put their foot down and made me go to school the next day, which was another tedious and boring nothingburger. School was literally the gayest shit, there was nothing for me there, no spiritual or mental growth to be had, and I couldn't wait until I was powerful enough to be done with it.
If you were strong you could do anything you wanted.
I kept an eye on Taylor at school, wondering what could have possibly possessed me to try and call her at midnight. Whatever had been rattled loose in my brain when I ate shit down the stairs wasn't there now, all I felt was aversion at the sight of her overwhelming midness.
I knew that, at Arcadia, where for some reason two thirds of the Wards went, you could do half days under the pretext of 'work experience' when really you were going to publicity events or meet and greets where everyone told you how awesome you were all day. Some people found them tiresome, but I knew that they were important - both to give the public something tangible to see, to feel, and to hope for and for me to receive proper acknowledgement for my good service. Community presence was half of what made parahumans palatable to the public, so that they would at least know that for every psycho crim who used their powers to wield fear there was another who worked for the public good.
There were some people who thought even that was bullshit, that we should be out there cracking skulls day in day out rather than pushing 'wanky PR bullshit', but they were wrong. What they were asking for was for us to abandon the proper procedure that kept what little checks on corruption that remained, of course they would only ask that right up until it personally affected them - then we would be branded just as bad as the gangs. Making arrests or property searches without a warrant was good when someone you didn't like was the target, getting arrested without a warrant or having your house searched unexpectedly due to suspicion of aiding supercriminals was a breach of your rights.
School day over I entered the Wards area, which I found empty. It wasn't like we were all here every afternoon, people had lives and friends and extracurriculars and the laws around child labour had to be followed lest the department get roughly audited by the fat cock of the oversight commitees. I headed to the kitchenette, dropping my school bag onto one of the couches on the way, and got a diet sprite out of the fridge. I sipped, pensive. Chris should be in, and I had something to show him.
I moseyed out of the common room to the lift and took it to the next floor, which contained both the testing areas and everything to do with tinkertech that the PRT ENE dealt with - including the reserved area for onsite tinkering. I wandered over to the door and poked my head in. Chris was indeed in, sitting at his workbench with a magnifying glass on a stand, poking at some tiny component with something that resembled a soldering iron but was actually some kind of custom tool he had built himself.
I knocked on the door frame and Chris, completely absorbed in his work, jumped in surprise. He looked over his shoulder at me and gave me a funny look. "Hi, Greg. What's up?"
"Hey dude," I walked in, walked up to him, and peered over his shoulder at what he was working on. Given that I was a master mechanic, having what had to have been decades of experience in solidly futuristic tech, with the ability to reverse engineer anything that wasn't bullshit magic, I naturally had no idea what he was working on. It straight up didn't make sense. "What're you working on?"
"The antigrav core for my hoverboard has a misaligned coupling and the snarls are projecting at the wrong angle." Chris set his mystery tool down.
"Can't have you spinning out," I said knowingly. "Hey, I have something cool to show you. You know how I keep getting new powers? Check this out. Omnitool, send a complete copy of your schematics and code to [email protected]." My omnitool beeped obligingly and sent the email, then I added after a moment's thought. "And to [email protected]."
The hand descended and branded me with Gadget Master.
Chris
"And to [email protected]." Greg said, then froze. A slack jawed look came over his face, blue eyes glazed, then he recovered and a disturbing expression came over him. Smug, a combination of stupidity and overconfidence, he looked at me and continued. "Wow, Kid Win. I bet you didn't know that your speciality is modular devices with alternate uses or settings, it's pretty crazy that Piggot and Armsmaster never put the proper effort in to figure that out."
I stared at him, and he stared back with a big, dumb grin. "Huh?"
"They should have, anyone could tell by the way you finish only part of a project before starting on another," Greg brought up his left hand and tapped at the black wristband he was wearing. Nothing happened. "What? Omnitool, turn on."
Greg was being super weird. Usually he was really nice. "What's an omnitool?"
"This thing," he waved his arm irritably. "It's from Mass Effect. It's essentially the best swiss army knife you could ever ask for, but it's not working. He must have disabled it, crafty little bugger shouldn't be this smart. I'm sorry for how he behaves, too."
This had to be a medical issue, I thought, Greg had a split personality disorder or something. "That's ok," I said. "Should I call, er, anyone for you?"
Greg looked at me pityingly. "No, Kid Win, we have to start building. I can't tell you why, or for what, but just trust me when I say this is important."
I pulled out my work phone, intending to call Mr. Reynolds, but then saw the email waiting for me. Curiosity got the better of me and I opened it. It was a blank email, from an unknown sender, with a truly massive attachment of half a petabyte. "Greg, what is this?"
I held out my phone so he could see and his expression darkened, he looked hurt like someone had personally wronged him.
"He what?" Greg hissed and dropped his can of diet sprite that fizzed and spilt over the otherwise sterile floor, then jerked as if coming out of a stupor.
Greg
Chris was holding out his phone for me which showed the attachment I had just sent him. "Oh, good, it came through. Did I say anything weird?"
"Uh, yeah," said Chris, taking back his phone. "Yeah, you did. Really weird. Um, do you need, like, a doctor."
I frowned and slowly raised my arm. "Stop recording. Play back recording."
A blue screen appeared above my wrist and playback began, it continued as a cold pit of mounting horror grew in my stomach. I looked at Chris who looked just as worried, and rightly so. Who was that in the recording? It wasn't me, nothing about it resembled me except for that it was wearing my face. This wasn't some kind of concussion dialing, where I thought I'd been the one to call Taylor it had in truth been this thing puppeting my body. What the hell was Mass Effect? "Oh, shit. Oh, fuck."
"Hey, uh, let's get you sat down somewhere for a bit," Chris came up and put a gentle, steadying hand on my back as though I was going to fall over at any minute. He guided me onto the swivel chair he had been sitting in only a moment ago. "Do you want a drink?"
We both looked down at the can of sprite and the spreading puddle it was creating. "I'm ok, dude, thanks. I'm not going to faint or anything, what you just saw was me getting another power. I think some… thing takes over, but that didn't used to happen. I need to tell Colin."
"Armsmaster? Yeah," said Chris. "Yeah. That's a good idea."
As I went to pull my phone out of my pocket I realised my hand was trembling so badly I almost couldn't, my fingers fumbling the unlock code. I felt like I'd been kicked in the guts. There was a case number for this, I think, for when someone had a second personality, I think it was case seventy. I managed to fight through the menus and dial Colin.
The phone rang out and I declined to leave a voicemail, instead calling again. This time he picked up on the ninth ring.
"Good afternoon, you've reached Armsmaster," he said pleasantly. "How can I help you?"
"Colin, it's Greg. There's a problem, uh…"
"Is this about your cape name?"
"No, it's, uh, way more serious. Like, bad trouble serious. With my power. I'm, uh, I don't know, like, being controlled. I have a recording of it, can you look at it when I send it to you?"
Colin was quiet for a moment. "Of course. Where are you right now?"
"On base, in the PRT labs with Chris," I glanced down at my omnitool. "Send the latest recording to [email protected]. Did you get that? It'll come from an unknown sender, but that's just the piece of tinkertech my power created."
"What do you mean by that, Greg?"
"Uh," I stammered. "I'll explain later. Dude, I'm really worried. Have you seen the video?"
"It hasn't come through yet, but this does sometimes happen if you're sending a large file. Ah, one's just come through from an unknown sender. What did you send? This thing's half a petabyte. I can't just open it, I have to run my virus scan on incoming files."
"No, the next one. Dude, come on."
"Calm down," Colin said. "What do you mean being controlled? I'm going to send a pair of PRT troopers to your location, so don't move. Put Chris on."
I handed my phone obligingly to Chris and he put it to his ear. I felt cold, my back was sticky with sweat. This was some Jekyll and Hyde type shit, but it wasn't fair - Jekyll drank that shit on purpose, I didn't ask for this. I didn't willingly release the evil within my soul as a form of respite from my life. I brought up the footage on my omnitool again. I was pretty sure I had never had that moronic expression on my face before in my life, and I certainly would never call Chris 'Kid Win' outside of uniform. At least my prudence in locking my omnitool when recording the gaining of new powers proved my smartest move yet, who knew what that thing would do with unlimited access to it. Probably life ruining things like calling Taylor and telling her I was a cape.
I wanted to talk to Amy. Or Savannah, or Tyrone or Weld. My life was taken away from me, and now my very person was being stolen? The long and bitter trial of overcoming my old self was nothing compared to this, I would take a thousand Hans, a thousand thousand Coils, over this.
"Ok, I'll put him back on." Chris handed me the phone and I raised it to my ear.
"Thank you for raising this issue so promptly," Colin said. "It seems that it's very serious. My scan has just finished on the second email and I'm watching it now. This other personality? It took over?"
"Yeah. It happened before, I noticed I lost a bit of time, so I set my omnitool to record it. What do I do?" My voice broke.
"You do nothing. You keep yourself safe. I'm going to handle this, firstly by getting in contact with your parents. The two troopers are on their way and they'll keep watch over you in case this happens again. Stay where you are and don't move."
"Ok, yeah. Ok," I choked out. "Yeah, I can do that. I'll chill here with Chris for a bit."
"Excellent, continue to do so. Don't you worry, Greg, this is the sort of problem the PRT was created to handle. Everything will be alright."
Chapter 101: A glib facsimile 2.16 'To you, the gay alien living in my brain'
Chapter Text
With my parents permission I was had been kept under supervision for a few hours, during which Colin had stopped whatever he had been doing and driven down to the PRT building to coordinate in person. Nothing had come of it, I wasn't showing any signs of possession and my parents had taken me home after my shift was meant to be over.
They weren't allowed to keep me any longer than that, even if Colin had tried to pull containment procedures they would have been easily argued against. It was clear enough an effect of my own power, the most dangerous thing that had happened was the thing had shit talked my bosses a little, and even if it took over again there was precious little it could do.
My omnitool would autolock when my brainwaves changed suddenly, and in terms of actually building something it was shit out of luck there, too. I wasn't a Tinker. A tinker was a very specific powerset, one that ignored a whole host of rules like material requirements, build time, tools, development and testing, power sources and critical manufacturing steps. Whatever I had, no matter how futuristic the technology I could envision, was closer to a skill thinker. I could cheat on half the materials, but I would need a way to make the item in the first place and that was in no way in the same ballpark as someone being able to make a lasgun out of common household appliances.
It could potentially do some damage through art, but even then it would still need time to draw - which it didn't seem to have. Yet.
I paced in my room, agitated, sweaty. "Motherfucker," I muttered, miming a hook and pivoting into an uppercut. "Motherfuckin' bitch."
Fucker tipped its hand too early. I had his number now, I knew what it was about. This wasn't my repressed guilt or anything so lame as that, this was the alien living in my head. This power psychosis was what Cauldron was fighting. It had all the hallmarks where gamer power was mysteriously exempt. An Infinity Trump, whose power was nearly limitless in both option and choice, had to deal with often harsh drawbacks.
The classic case was the man who had coined the name just as much as Eidolon embodied it - Infinity. His power shifted by the hour, slowly crawling from power to incredible power, with a corresponding change in mentality with each one. His mood swings had made him dangerously unpredictable, but hadn't stopped Eidolon from executing his kill order.
"Mmn," I grunted, shadow boxing the gay alien in my skull. "Fuck bitch."
I ceased my boxing. I panted as sweat ran down my forehead and dripped off my chubby cheeks. I had to get in contact with Cauldron somehow. Last time I had the immense cred of Dark Smoke Puncher behind me, and here I couldn't trust that Alexandria wouldn't just dump me on an alternate earth until I stopped being a problem. I had to become indispensable.
I licked my lips and tasted salt. "Omnitool, when you next lock when my brain waves change, play the following message. 'Gay alien living in my skull, everything you say is being recorded. If you have any message you want to give, say it now.'"
My omnitool beeped and I grunted in satisfaction. Whatever kind of power granting alien it was, I was going to teach it who was boss of this gym. I didn't care how skilled in gorilla combat it was, nor how many confirmed kills it had. Fuck around in my head and find out.
On the topic of becoming indispensable, unfortunately the only path was consistent, unabating excellence built upon a foundation of reliable hard work, the kind of work that others either couldn't or didn't want to do. More than a grindset, you had to be a star. You had to burn.
Three hundred and twenty two stars burned. Each one a sliver of the soul parasite being forced into me. The pen held in that hand wasn't one of truth, it was a curse. I followed the arm up the unfathomable distance to where it extended through the tear in reality. It wasn't the hand of god, it was the ovipositor of a parasite and it wanted to lay its gay alien eggs in my brain. With a sense of finality despite the incredible speed at which it moved the pen in the hand connected with my skin and branded me with the words Wired Watchmaker like I was cattle.
I opened my eyes, the now familiar brain fog of being made host to whatever owned that power fading quickly. I was still standing in my room where I had been, I was still sweaty from shadow boxing my inner demons. I swallowed. "Omnitool, playback the latest recording."
The screen showed me swaying slightly, then my gaze sharpened and in the video of the omnitool I saw my message being played. The thing watched it with an expression like curdled cum - contempt, disdain, disgust.
The thing wearing my skin was quiet for a whole minute before, finally, it spoke. "No. You move."
I thought that maybe it was trying to sound epic or threatening, but my voice was so nasally, so nerdy, that any slap it might have carried was taken out before it could hit.
It was making a reference to something, I thought, but didn't know what. I googled the phrase and came up with nothing. It was time to summon the council. I headed into the closet and through the coats into my alchemy lab. I hadn't used it an enormous amount, but I had a few of each potion ready just in case. I picked up a shimmering blue one, bottled in one of the delightfully medieval stoppered glass phials that my lab had in a cupboard, and downed it.
My clones stepped out of me and together we pondered.
"The fuck is that cuck on about," one of me muttered. "No, you move? Is it trying to be cool?"
"It's getting out for longer," the other one of me said. "Every power, it gets stronger too. If this keeps up, we're just going to be something that lives inside it."
I kneaded my eyes. "Fuck us. What do we even do?"
"We have the upper hand now, but what happens when it can be out and about for multiple minutes? An hour? Longer? I think it knows."
"About what?"
"That an alien is going to blow up the planet. I know it comes from the same gay alien source but I think that's what it was talking about when it told Chris something was going to happen so they had to build."
"Build what?" I asked myself.
"Something to kill Cauldron, probably."
"Nah, I think it's probably more likely that the power is reflecting all the worst parts we ever hated about ourself back at us in some kind of 'dark irony' meant to make us go schizo as we realise we're being replaced by it."
"Fuck, mayne. That's fucked up."
"Why would it call Chris 'Kid Win' though, and make all that shit up about Colin and Emily?"
"It's retarded. That's the only explanation, it's fucking stupid. It's a dumb piece of shit animal."
All three of me were breathing hard, worked up, red in the face. "It's going to breach containment one day," I said. "Even if we build a suit that locks when it comes back, and even if we have the suit feed our body, it's going to eventually come at a time when we're not ready, and by that point it could be in control of us for weeks - and who knows how strong we'll be by then."
I truly didn't know what kind of powers I could get in this insane gacha spin. It was pretty clear by now they were all themed around making something, the latest power being the ability to hold schematics in mind without needing to refer to them during work, and none of them were redundant so far. The uncertainty of it was honestly pretty annoying, I much preferred my gamer powers where I sculpted myself, purposefully, with intent, where my growth was tied to how much effort I was willing to put in to grow - not this randomised shitshow that could blindside me while I was taking a shit.
"Once again, my own worst enemy," one of me said bitterly.
"No," said another, putting a hand on my shoulder. "This gay alien-"
The clones suddenly vanished. I was really going to have to set a timer for that. I sighed and looked around my lab, hands on hips. I wasn't really sure what to do from here, but in becoming a star I had to do something. I should probably, finally, get around to actually making something useful.
You would think that with twelve powers themed around creation it would be easier, but I didn't have the facilities. I didn't have the facilities to build the facility that I would need. My omnitool was great but it couldn't do everything, a lot of things needed specialty parts or materials that it couldn't print - but the head start it gave me couldn't be understated.
A head start, but not the whole thing. Time to get formalised for a tinker rating to get an expense budget, I guess.
I'd drafted an email and sent it to Colin the next day. Given that this was still a government job the request needed time to be processed, but that just gave me a chance to make something to prove I needed the budget request. Once more I moseyed on in to the tech room at PRT HQ and once again it was occupied.
"Thought this was your afternoon off?" I walked in on Chris with his eyes glued to three separate monitors, he didn't react to my voice. "Hey, dude!"
Chris whirled around, his eyes bloodshot, countenance feverish. "You!"
I peered across at the screens and saw he had been pouring over the omnitool schematics. "Yeah, is this good shit or what?"
He rubbed his eyes and took a great, deep breath. "Game changing. Where the hell did you get this? It's… inspiring."
"I wish I could take credit for it, but my power somehow just kinda zapped it into existence. I don't really understand it either," I leant over the back of his swivel chair and pointed at a section that was breaking down part of the battery. "Like, this element, the one that makes it all work? How does it work?"
"The Drag-Armsium?"
"The fucking what?"
"Uh," Chris grunted and rubbed his eyes, then took a large swig from a water bottle sitting on the far end of his computer desk. "Drag-Armsium. That's what they're calling it, Dragon and Armsmaster - I think it's mostly a joke, but we've all been working over this all day. I've been in a call with them for the past six hours, we've been working through figuring out the computer microframe but there's just so much of it, so much tech packed into that."
He pointed at my wristband. "Yeah, it's wild," I said and raised my arm, the cool blue holographic screens lighting up as the omnitool activated. "I had a quick look over it all, too, and I don't get how it was made. It's basically bullshit magic to me."
"We started to make a dent in it," Chris said, and I didn't miss the hungry look in his eyes as they tracked my wrist. "But it's one of the most complicated pieces of work I've ever seen. And the weirdest thing is it's got all the fingerprints of being factory made."
"I noticed that, too. Tinkertech is all custom made stuff."
"And you can tell," Chris's head nodded emphatically. "Every tinker has their own style, every piece is distinctly theirs. This feels like it's just one one one million units shipped out over a year."
I shrugged. "It's weird. But hey, I hope it helps you guys."
Chris fixed an intense, serious gaze on me. "I already need to remake everything, rewrite all of my code, and I haven't even finished analysing this."
"Dude, that's great," I fixed him with a sunny grin. "I'm going to get started on designing something so I can get recognised as a tinker. I'm thinking power armour, I know there's some stuff in the tinker intranet drive so I was going to get some inspo."
"Good luck," Chris scoffed. "Just so you know, that's basically the junk bin where we put all the crap we don't want. And that's if we're feeling generous."
"You guys suck. I'm going to post the omnitool plans."
"I can't believe you just gave that to us, but then," Chris twisted his mouth in what looked like contempt. "I suppose you didn't even make it. It's not like anyone's stealing your work."
I gave him a quizzical look. "I thought tinkers loved co-projects? Don't you guys advance heaps working together?"
"Sometimes," he answered bitterly. "It depends. I think Dragon does, but I don't. I don't understand a thing."
"Keep working at it, dude, you'll get there," I smiled encouragingly. "Hey, did the whole 'modular equipment' thing sound right?"
Chris looked down for a moment, seemingly lost in thought, then back up. "I think so. As a methodological approach it makes a lot of sense. It's part of why I need to remake everything."
"I hope it works out," I jerked my thumb over to the design station, a very expensive drawing tablet coupled with an equally expensive CAD program. "I'm gonna go start."
Chris grunted and turned back to the schematics. I trundled over to the station and got to work.
Chapter 102: To you, the gay alien in my head 3.1
Chapter Text
Savannah's tinker intranet page was pretty bare, there was only a single entry from two years ago of what was probably her first flight thruster. I stared at it forlornly, scrolling through the sparse build notes.
I didn't think it would happen again, us. I wasn't going to kid myself and pretend that it was my winning personality that had won her over. I had been strong, then. I had been swole. Ripped. Jacked. Buff. Diesel. Impossibly, inhumanly, attractively fit. I was still fat here, losing weight was actually really hard. It wasn't like I wasn't down a few pounds already, but compared to how I'd shed the weight the first time, the cruel reality of normal human weight loss was a bitter cross to carry.
I wouldn't even blame her, because it wasn't like her standout quality was her personality either. She was hot, and she had given me attention. I still truly liked her, or at least I liked the version of her I'd known. It wouldn't be the same, it wasn't with anyone else. Colin was a distant shadow of the one I knew and I hadn't even seen Amy. I wasn't sure how I'd go about being her friend again, I got the sense that I'd really threaded the needle with that one. Soon, I was going to reestablish that connection very soon.
I swiveled on my chair away from the computer and back to the designing station. I may have picked a project too complicated for a first attempt. It wasn't like I couldn't design a suit of power armour, it was just so time consuming. There were so many parts, and so many things that needed to be perfectly exact to make it work as intended even when working from examples of both mundane and tinkertech nature. I was, in theory, really good at this but in trying it out for the first time the reality of having to manually draw out every little part, which was smaller than it should have been due to my second latest power, was hard on my adhd zoomer attention span.
Maybe I should scrap the power armour, and stop trying to work to the absolute limits of my powers, just so that I could get something out in a time frame approaching reasonable. Something that was already small, less ambitious in its complexity, needing less exotic components to actually build. A pen laser? I had a few examples of 'laser' technology rattling around in my head that would be easier to do than the armour, though I wasn't about to bother trying to get them to play nice with each other - the principles behind the science were too disparate. The simplest kind should be enough.
Though, this too, would take quite a while to finalise a design for the approval committee as I was given to understand that they required as much material to analyse as possible. Thus, having no powers to make working on something any faster or easier, I began.
But that was the price you paid for not having to build your way up from nothing, for not needing to spend every spare moment managing an ever critical supply problem - being a tinker not in an organisation must be terrible. I knew that they could skip steps in building, but that the more steps they had to skip the more often their work would malfunction or break, so they were stuck in a punishing loop of fixing their eternally fucky tech with equally borked tools until they eventually broke free of the constant upkeep; although as I understood it this would take several years of dedicated effort.
It had to be the worst power to try your hand at the indy cape life with, and the indy cape scene was pretty rough to begin with. People online drew the comparison with the porn scene - it was rare if you lasted more than a year. You had to be built different.
You had to be a star.
I worked until almost clock off time, and I was still nowhere near finished. As I left I watched Chris still working feverishly, as if in a trance, code streaming from his fingers and the rapid, staccato tapping of keys being the only sound he made.
"Bye, dude," I called out but he didn't hear me, too wrapped up in his fugue, the state of incredible flow a tinker would find themselves in as they worked.
I didn't have this because I wasn't a tinker. However, that didn't mean I couldn't be a Tinker because it was a classification of end result just as it was of method, which if you used technology to fight you would be put on the tinker grading list even if you didn't have all the underlying sub powers that a classical tinker had.
I didn't think it would be that hard to get a tinker budget approved, even a provisional one, for me to prove that I could build advanced technology and especially since I knew I was going to be getting more powers. I could feel it, as though there were a hand guiding my path. By whatever means it used, the alien who was going to blow up the world had given me the potential for incredible power once more. Was I to play a critical part in its machinations? For all their power, for all the good they had done, were the Triumvirate? Were Cauldron?
I stuffed my hands in my pockets and headed to the elevator. I needed to go to the gym and blow off some steam. I got in and took the smooth ride up to the ground floor where the PRT gym was and ran into Missy, Dean and Dennis as the doors opened.
"Hey, how was it?"
Each of them accepted my fistbump in turn.
"Same old, same old," Dennis said tiredly. "You know how these meet and greets run."
Dean playfully punched his shoulder. "What have you been up to, Greg?"
"I've been tinkering with Chris. I'm a tinker now."
"Is he still down there?" Missy glanced toward the floor in the rough direction of the tinker cave. "He was there before we even got here from school earlier."
"He told me he was working with Colin and Dragon all day." I couldn't see their faces but I gleaned from their body language that they were impressed. "They've been decoding some piece of tech that came out of nowhere."
"Cool, cool," Dennis said and stretched. "Good for him. What tech?"
"Some kinda… ultra swiss army knife, three D printer, scanner, magic bullshit thing. I don't get how it works at all."
Missy and Dean nodded gamely, all of us understanding that we would never get it. We simply weren't tinkers.
"Hey, you guys did a half day at school today, right?" I continued.
They nodded.
"How do I get in on that? I hate my school."
"Ask your parents to transfer you?" Dennis shrugged. "I dunno. It's pretty sweet, though."
"Even I can't wait to go," said Missy. "St. Trinian's is so strict, and we have to do bible class."
"How do all of you live in the catchment area for that one school? What are even the odds?"
"People buy houses there for that reason," Dean explained. "It's the best public school in the city."
"Man," I said. "Being poor sucks."
I could almost taste their admonishing raised eyebrows. I was the most generically middle class, quirked up white boy in the whole city. However, poverty was an aesthetic, a state of mind, and I was deep in the sauce.
I chuckled and smiled to let them know that I was joking. "Anyway, I'ma hit the gym before my parents come get me. I'll see you guys tomorrow."
"Take it easy, man," Dennis clapped me on the shoulder as the three of them walked past me and into the elevator.
"Bye, Greg," Missy said and Dean gave me an upnod and an acknowledging smile. I returned the smile with a wide grin and waved goodbye as the doors closed, separating us.
It still wasn't the same. As much as I hated how they used to treat me, I kind of wanted to change it organically, over time, as my original self. It was really nice that everyone liked me, and I still cherished it greatly, but the removal of the Atlas tier burden of my past made it ring a little hollow - it was my struggle, and even that was taken from me.
Though perhaps the worst thing was something I was about to confront in the temple of iron.
My physical weakness. I lay on the bench and struggled to press the raw bar, something that I could reliably do with hundreds of pounds before. The loss of physical superhumanity was only not psychologically crushing because I didn't let myself think about it unless I was in the gym, and if I were anyone but myself I think I would have fallen into a deep depression. It can scarcely be understood outside of people who had spontaneously developed debilitating, crippling chronic illnesses in their physical prime that stripped them of all the autonomy they had enjoyed.
Hot tears ran down my cheeks as I failed the rep, the bar falling to rest on my chest. If I couldn't achieve that with my physical body ever again, then I would build something that would let me match it - even if I had to find a way to dive into the wettest of wet tinkering. For now I would have to do with power armour, or more realistically a movement assist frame. Something scaled back enough that I could make it without all the shortcuts real tinkers got.
"Yo, are you crying?"
I sniffled and wiped my face with a hand flecked with the gross black stuff that collects on public gym equipment. I roll of shamed the bar off my chest and sat up. "Fuck off."
Sophia scoffed smugly, leaning against the gym door in fetching athletic wear. "The fuck are you even here for? You're so useless they haven't even bothered to give you a name and make you do the kiddy work."
"Eat shit," I told her. "How is it being everyone's least favourite?"
"Like I give a shit. See them try to fire me."
"I hope you fuck up and get sent to juvie. You look like you'd be good prison bitch material."
Sophia visibly clenched her jaw, the hand that wasn't gripping the door frame tightening to a fist at her side. "And you're good every day bitch material. I bet that closet homo Cal and his friends have a spot open for a new catamite."
I glared at her. I was pretty sure her trigger event involved getting molested and I was debating on whether to pick at that wound. "Don't even front. You hate that I beat you," I said instead, holding onto what little dignity I possessed.
Sophia took an angry step forward before remembering there were security cameras. She stopped and lashed her gym towel against her lululemons in frustration, speaking in a low, hissing tone. "You haven't beat shit except your gross little dick. You were a pathetic little fuck a month ago, you can fake it but I still remember how easy you got tricked into doing a speech in English about cartoon porn."
"Probationary Ward wants to talk about fuckups," I scoffed, gritting my teeth at the fact that I couldn't turn and hide my face, burning from shame, because of the huge gym mirrors. "You're losing. To me."
"I'm not losing shit," she snarled. "You better watch your fuckin' back. Now get the fuck out."
"You get the fuck out, I still have cardio."
"Fat fuck."
"Bitch."
After some more glaring at each other and trading spiteful barbs there was nothing for it but to continue our workouts in fuming silence, her doing her best to out do me in every exercise and me doing my best not to, despite my anger, get caught checking her out.
I really hoped she fucked up and got sent to juvie.
Chapter 103: To you, the gay alien in my head 3.2
Chapter Text
Fresh out of school for the day, the last bell had just rung. After a hasty stuffing of my books and pencil case into my bag I was striding through the hall and was unfortunate enough to be stuck walking behind Taylor. I didn't even know how, she certainly wasn't in my japanese language class.
I was fairly sure that my tireless work reporting every bullying instance I saw had driven away a lot of the overt bullying - the name calling in the halls, putting glue on her seat and so on - at least in situations where I could see it, and forced it underground in increasingly covert ways. Sophia wasn't even the ringleader bully but I saw her with her equally hot, redhead friend Emma lurking around the fringes of the crowd, rendered toothless by my sheer presence.
I had thought they might try and play the 'win the geek over by giving him a crumb of attention' card, but I got the feeling that Sophia had engaged in a little subterfuge and made them abandon that plan out of knowledge that it would completely backfire on her.
In any case I ignored Taylor and her life problems, which the gay alien parasite apparently thought were endlessly important, and headed out into the parking lot where my parents were waiting for me. I gave them both a big hug and settled into the car as they drove me to work. We chatted on the way about inconsequential things and I messaged Sveta on my phone.
I was going to save her again. There was no other way, it was going to happen. No matter what I would protect her smile once more, even if I had-
Three hundred and twenty one cursed stars were heralded by the sundering of my reality and the sinister hand descending once more from the breach. I took a haggard breath as it rushed down with its pen outstretched and marked me with the slave brand Dao of Alchemy.
I jerked with a gasp like I had been holding my breath. I was still in the car, seatbelt done up, phone in my hand, my parents chattering like nothing had happened. Maybe nothing had.
Something had changed in me, a new power so incredible I could barely contain my excitement. I even recognised where it was from. I had read quite a bit of horribly machine translated xianxia and this new power was a one to one copy of the medicinal pill and elixir making prevalent in just about all of them - though it depended on the story if using pills was the only way to advance or if it was a cowardly way that stunted your cultivation.
It was perfect. The perfect way to organically meet Amy again - I was a healing cape once more.
"Dad," I said out loud, voice quavering. "I'm going to shout a bit, so don't crash."
"Huh?"
"Fuck yes!" I shrieked. "Get hype! We are so fucking back! It's so not gojover! Fucking yes!"
"What is it?" Mum asked, turning around in her seat. "What happened?"
"Hahaha, yes! Healing powers, baybee! Bit of liquid mercury and ginseng root," I kissed my pinched italian gesture. "Pills that make you healthy, make you strong. Fortifying elixirs and shit, cure diseases."
"That's really good!" Mum's eyes shone. "Healing powers are my favourite."
"I'm going to help so many people." Starting with myself. With this fantasy Chinese traditional medicine I knew I could create pills that would rapidly accelerate my fitness journey and take a great weight off my schlubby shoulders.
I could probably also make medicines to enhance my Yang physique - and by yang physique I meant wang physique.
"You're a good lag, Greggo," Dad eyed me proudly via the rear view mirror. "We're proud of you."
I was so hyped up that I almost forgot that I had been taken over as I'd gotten the power, and I didn't remember until I was taking a piss in the PRT building. I pulled up the footage.
In it my body looked briefly disoriented before the thing looked at my phone, still unlocked and browsing PHO in its hand, with an expression of unrestrained glee. Shit. I was going to have to find a way to make my omnitool lock everything electronic when it came out again. The thing started searching usernames, looking for someone going by AllSeeingEye - but the username didn't exist. The thing looked absolutely crestfallen before trying a few different names and finally sending a message to an account named 'Tt' that read, 'I know something you don't 😛'
It fiddled around with my phone for a bit longer, noticeably longer than it had been out previously, before I came back and the recording ended.
I wasn't even going to pretend to understand what it was up to. I sent the video to Colin for analysis and headed straight to the lab - after washing my hands, of course.
Pill furnace. It was something I could even just print with my omnitool because the real power of it worked through the formations carved into the surface that would let the pill furnace extract and condense the medicinal essence of the ingredients.
For most of the pills and tonics I could make it would require materials that I was completely sure just straight up didn't exist, but the most basic of basic medicines would work with mundane ingredients and that was all I needed. The highest grade pills, made out of stuff like the petals of a Grade Five Ice Soul Chrysanthemum, could heal grievous wounds in seconds while the stuff I could make out of regular ginseng and ground tiger penis would merely guide a body to heal faster. All I needed now was to figure out how I could make Amy a chill pill.
Chris was in the lab again, although judging by his schoolbag dropped in the middle of the floor he hadn't been here all day again, working to put together some delicate component. I let him be and got to work myself on the design software. Luckily, this time, the design for the pill furnace was very, very simple consisting of mostly the stand, the outer casing, a camber to boil the components and a condenser to catch the magical vapours and channel them into the pill chamber. It was something designed to be built by craftsmen two thousand years ago out of copper or bronze, so it was quite simple for me to get the design out of my head and into the program.
From there, because I didn't really care about the beauty of it, though I could have designed it to be a resplendent piece of art, I left it as utilitarian as it could be while still functioning. Then I sent the design to myself where I pulled it up on my omnitool. It was still too big to print with just the internal reserves, even being minaturised as much as I felt I could, even using the trick of only half materials.
I was going to have to print and reclaim materials, and holding my arm out for that long made my shoulder seize up.
I groaned and slumped at the design desk. What rotten luck, but at least I could do it now, and then I knew Colin would expedite its use just so that he could benefit - the perks of his tireless gloryhounding. Then I would be strong again, and Amy would be my friend.
Seized with a burst of motivation and energy I got to it, flash printing and reclaiming omnimaterial on the workbench until I had enough and then did my best to hold my arm completely steady as the omnitool slowly reclaimed material even as it printed.
It wasn't as arm achingly long a print as my first, now abandoned forever, suit of armour but my shoulder still burned by the time it was done and the waist high pill furnace sat on the work bench looking like a plain off-white domed cylinder - now all I needed was a little cinnabar and ginger, some water, sulphur, nettle juice and deer glue and I would be cooking a little pill that would make you feel like a million bucks. I quickly sent off the email to Colin's work address explaining what I needed and why, then left Chris alone in the lab to go grab dinner.
Dinner, as provided by the Wards program, were frozen meals designed to be nutritionally complete and provided as necessary after some Wards in the pasts work performance had dropped below acceptable levels due to their poverty not allowing them a proper diet at home - some good that the Youth Guard had done for all their moral busy bodying.
I knew some people hated the Youth Guard, but what were people to do; let the Wards program operate with no external oversight? People already complained that we were being groomed into child soldiers, were the people of America just supposed to trust that we were being treated correctly? The Youth Guard was responsible for fighting for our days off, fair pay rates, trust fund and our intended lack of combat - though this was perhaps a little pointless as the alien parasites in our brains made us fighty. Parahumans would just go out and start fights, even before the whole Hero/Villain dynamic came into play. I knew there was a time just after the first parahuman, Scion, arrived that 'capes' didn't exist, people didn't put on bright colors and stage a spectacle of Supers. It was a bloodier time, apparently, and then the zeitgeist of Capes caught on and thankfully never left.
I got to the kitchen and saw Carlos floating around, sipping at a can of diet sprite, cringing with distaste every time he did so.
"Carlos, my man!"
"Hey, Greg," he replied cheerfully, his long black hair falling over his face as he rotated horizontally in midair like a screw. "What's up, man?"
"Dude, the sickest shit. You have no idea. I'm gonna need your help on this one though, I just got a kind of…" I made a kind of mortar and pestle gesture. "Healing chemistry tinkering power. And I want to go volunteer at the hospital."
"Oh, awesome," Carlos drifted toward me. "I remember you wanted to do that with your art stuff. Healing power though? Dude, you gotta slow down. How many does that make?"
"Twelve."
Carlos nodded and swiveled so we were both oriented on the same axis. "I can't see why they'd turn down you giving out healing tech. It's not weird, is it?"
"It's pills, easy stuff. Like, yeah, it's technically made out of toxic metals but the process obviously removes every shred of poison, it's just common sense." Carlos gave me a complicated look. "Ok, so you know how ancient chinese alchemists ate mercury for immortality? It's like that, but it works."
"It's safe though, right?"
"Totally safe," I nodded energetically. "I'm going to start popping them as soon as I can make them, I can make, like, basically steroids but with no sides."
Carlos sipped his sprite. "Like, your nuts won't shrink?"
"Not even a little, and you don't even lose your gains after, or grow bitch tits."
Carlos sipped his sprite. "Awesome."
"It's just as safe as having, say, Amy Dallon do it for you."
Carlos sipped his sprite. "You don't have to convince me, save it for the tinker approval committee."
"Yeah. Man, this is really it for me, I just can't have this go wrong. I need this one."
Carlos floated the last few inches down to set his feet on the ground, took a sip of his sprite, and clapped me on the shoulder. "I get you. You haven't been here long but you really took off running. I don't have Wards leadership for another month but I'll back you on what I can until then."
"Bro, you're gonna make a great team leader."
Chapter 104: To you, the gay alien in my head 3.3
Chapter Text
After clocking off at exactly nine, and having filled the time chatting with Carlos along with making a few steps toward finishing the designs for my pen laser, my parents came to pick me up and home we went. Everything progressed as normal and we all retreated to our rooms to go to bed - I didn't go into my alchemy lab. I didn't pass go and I did not collect two hundred dollars. It wasn't until the weekend, two days later, that I ventured in to peruse my hidden stash of extremely emotionally evocative artwork that I noticed.
The room was a bit bigger, there were more jars, more wooden boxes, sitting on expanded shelves. Completely unbeknownst to me the room had changed. I wandered over with crossed arms and inspected the change.
A crate of cinnabar and sulfur. Rough flaxen pouches of dried ginger, ginseng and turmeric root. Liquid mercury in a jar. Gemstone arsenic. Dried berries and flowers of all types. A wizened tiger's penis wrapped in oiled cloth and many more treasures besides. It was the kind of ingredients a beginner pillmaker would use to craft medicine for mortals before moving onto spiritual ingredients.
I stood there for a while, eyebrows raised, as a huge smile slowly overwhelmed my face and a torrent of raw emotion burst forth like the breaking of a critical dam in a flood prone region. I cackled, I howled, I raced to the potions cupboard and grabbed a blue one to summon the council. The potion burned cold in my belly as I stepped out of me, all of me joining in the revelry.
We formed a circle, gripping forearms and skipping around and around as sweat flew from our brows.
"We are so back on track."
"Gonna see Amy again."
"She won't have a choice."
All three of me were drawn back to some of my favourite memories or working in the hospital, when we would finish for the day and both head up to the roof, unlocked with Amy's key, and just shoot the shit and heckle each other. Even the bitter, burning cum sock taste of the cigarettes we smoked was made sweet by fingers of rosy nostalgia that crept over the horizon of memory's dawn.
She had been that one friend that I could tell anything, and be told anything in turn. She was the kind of retard who existed hidden completely within a shell of her own self loathing and any attempt at being friends normally would be met with unyielding resistance. I wouldn't, couldn't, do it the same way as I had before but I was going to try my best. I had been her manic pixie dream girl once before, and I would do it again.
If I could just be friends with her again maybe all of this would be worth it.
Maybe this hell, this 'again', even for all I'd lost, could provide meaning in what I stood to gain.
"How should we do it?"
My intuition told me it had to be a direct assault, the spear of her secrets wielded to pierce her retard chrysalis before she could molt and become an American Psycho, the puncture in the cocoon releasing the buildup of crazy before she could become the self embodiment of perfection.
However - this was just what I had done last time.
"We have to be surgical. We have to cut out her dipshit gland and replace it with a friendship lobe."
"We need to get her back on the drugs, we need to fuck her up."
"No, no, no," I let my other's arms go and started pacing. "We can't just rawdog her like last time, we all know that was some kind of retarded statistical anomaly. We have to shatter her perception of herself, but gently."
"Dude," a clone said. "That's gonna be so hard. You're right, but, man…"
"We can do it." The other clone spoke up, a confident grin on his round butter face. "I know we can. We know her, we just wing it."
"We suck shit at plans," I conceded to myself. "When was the last time I actually made a plan that worked?"
The clones looked pensive. "Sveta?"
I shrugged. "Anyway, I think I'm right. We wing it, and just don't fuck it up."
We all congratulated each other on our decision until the clones vanished and I was, once again, alone. I mulled it over for a little longer, collected my art and got to work.
Tt had sent me a message asking what I knew, so I blocked the account.
"Well, the chemical analysis is junk," Colin told me over the Teams video chat. "But that doesn't matter. What matters is that they're completely non-toxic. This is the kind of thing that gets you reputation."
"How fast can we get me out there distributing?"
"The second the trials are finished, and you have a identity-"
"Ah!" I snarled. "Fuck."
I hadn't thought of anything on par with Heart-Under-Blade, but I couldn't delay any longer. This was bigger than my feelings. It was time, with great sadness, to follow the focus testing groups. I was still going to put a twist on it, but I knew exactly what would get passed without a second glance.
Colin exhaled severely, giving me a judging look because he was being paid to care if I swore or not. "Still no luck on finding something to suit your tastes?"
"No," I said bitterly. "But it doesn't matter now. I'll have something on Enrique's desk in an hour."
Colin smiled. "Don't take it too hard, remember that you have three years to think of one. Or less, sometimes a rebrand happens when you find a better way to use your power that doesn't fit your old name."
"I guess."
There was a pause as Colin waited for me to say something else. "Anyway," he said as it became clear I was going to be moody and silent. "Keep up the hard work, we're glad to have you with us in the field finally."
"Thank you, Colin."
He grinned his well practiced grin. "Have a good afternoon, Greg. Dismissed."
The call terminated and I slumped back in my chair, brooding. I took my headphones off and slapped myself lightly with both hands a few times. We don't cotton to little bitches around these parts, Greg. I took a deep breath and stood up, making myself smile. We focus on helping people here.
I cracked my fingers and pulled up the design suite on my omnitool. I was getting a lot better at using it and I managed to crank out a design for print without much trouble. My design power carried hard on this one, as it always did, everything I put effort into looked incredible. This suit of armour, though it was just going to be a set of printed plates, was purpose built to look heroic.
I was going back to my tokufag roots. I still held a fondness for the genre but it was nothing like the bone deep hype I'd once had when I was younger. I pulled from my favourites and styled it after the American sensibilities that had been so instrumental in creating the armours of everyone from Hero to Armsmaster to Jetstar. The most positively voted colours were blue, red and gold, which is what I gave it when I sent it off for review, but it was absolutely not what I was going to go with.
As I expected it was approved within an hour of sending and I became, to the Protectorate and public alike, Technomage.
On the day of my debut, projected with my omnitool over the plain white omnimaterial of my uniform, was a deep, inky black trimmed with brilliant pink neon that shone out of joints and under plates. They didn't like that that was my first on camera appearance, but playing with the colour slider for the interviewer, and being able to instantly flick to the the pre-approved heroic palette resulted in nothing more than a slightly stern talking to afterwards which was more to do with pulling that out without telling the PR handler I was going to.
Formalities out of the way, and my pill production having both passed screening and been given as many resources as could reasonably be thrown at it, it was time. I had specifically requested to be at the same hospital as Amy for my first public outing.
I got out of the PRT van and adjusted my wizard hat, sliding a finger over the neon pink rim with a finger so deeply black, and with such a glossy finish, you would never be able to tell it was just a hologram. This was it. God, I had to take an anxious shit so bad. This had to go well. I would kill myself if it didn't.
"Are you sure she's here, Jo?" I asked my escort.
Jo, a short, portly woman in a snappy skirt suit nodded. "She is, we coordinated it with New Wave."
"Cool, cool, cool. No doubt, no doubt, no doubt." My hand crept down and squeezed my bags, feeling dozens of rust-red pills shift in the leather sack. "Let's do it. Let's get it."
Jo reached up and patted me gently on the shoulder. I briefly called up a picture to soothe my frayed nerves and fill me with confidence, then, shoulders squared, we entered.
A smile crept over my face at the sight. It was just like I remembered. The hospital director, Dan, was waiting for us in the lobby - he looked just like he used to, before Leviathan.
I waved to him and tipped the brim of my hat. "Hello! Nice to meet you."
"Hello, Technomage," he greeted me with a matching smile and a firm handshake. "It's good to have you here."
We took a second to hold the pose for the PRT camera crew that had come along with Jo and I, waiting until they waved us to continue.
"And it's good to be here, Dan. I have a lot of respect for what you do here, and I'm here to help."
Jo gave me a thumbs up from behind the camera man.
"That's great to hear, we could never turn down anyone who can help. We have Panacea hard at work with us tonight, too."
"She's my inspiration," I grinned cheesily. "I hope I can help even one tenth of the people she has."
"Come this way," Dan expertly took the prompt. "Let's go over what you can do, and we can work out how best for you to help."
We started walking, Jo and the camera crew following. It wasn't that I hated the cameras, far from it, but I was still going to be happy once they fucked off and I could go do what I came here for. Dan took us up to his office, the cameras finally leaving to take a break while we talked, and offered Jo and I seats.
"Tea, coffee, water?" He offered us.
"Water," I said. "You might want some, as well." I drew out a single red bead from my bags and handed it over to him. "These taste like anesthetic."
Somewhat reluctantly he took it and rolled it between his fingers. It was safe, and he had been explicitly informed as much well ahead of time, but I could understand the apprehension of being given a strange pill to take. I took another one out and handed it to Jo before taking another for myself.
I savoured the moment as they both regarded the pills like I was handing them acid tabs.
Dan fetched us all a cup from the cooler in the corner of his office. "Bottoms up," he said gamely and tossed his back.
Dozens of people had tried them at this point, Colin in particular, so I was used to seeing the reaction as the medicine kicked in within the minute. I swallowed mine and soon the medicinal energies were nearly steaming out of my pores, toxic metal converted to pure vitality.
I let out a breath. You would expect to feel something like lightheaded, or maybe wired like you were on speed, but from the comparisons various people had given me it was like nothing they had ever tasted. "I think the best use would be on people waiting to get discharged, people who only need that little bit to get well enough. They're not strong enough to really save anyone or fix anything."
"That's a real kick," Dan was rubbing his flushed face as his accumulated fatigue, compounded by heavy caffeine use, was being washed away. "And honestly, if we can free up post-surgery beds quicker that's fine by us. And there's one hundred percent no side effects, no addiction?"
"None. Or none physically," I shrugged, wiggling in my chair from an excess of energy - it reminded me a little of having just been healed by Amy. That feeling of being healthy. "Not in chemical dependence, but feeling healthy like this is gonna be something people want more of."
Colin, I knew, was going to hassle me if I ever cut off his supply, but it would be for his own good. I wasn't about to let him try to use them to replace sleep.
"Understood," he grinned at us, glowing in a way he hadn't been before. "Well, let's get on with what we had planned. Jo?"
"To the children's wards," Jo confirmed as she nearly vibrated with suppressed energy, looking like she wanted to get up and run a marathon. "We should have enough to cover every patient."
I let them talk about the boring schedule parts as I turned my mind to something far greater.
"Actually," I interrupted them. "Before we do any of that, I want to go talk to Amy Dallon."
Chapter 105: To you, the gay alien in my head 3.4
Chapter Text
If I had to describe the emotion I felt upon seeing Amy again, it would be love - but that was impossible because I wasn't gay.
It must have been a straighter feeling, a deep longing for her to make out with her sister.
Ok, enough stalling, Greg. Just fucking do it.
"Hey, Amy!"
I ambushed her as she came out of a room, her mass of white robe walking away from me. She turned at the sound of her name and I sighed at the sight of her ugly freckled mug. I waved and walked up, retracting the moving parts of my helmet to fully expose my face, pulling every fading skill I had in body language to simply smile.
"Uh, hi?" She shifted awkwardly and stuffed her hands into her robe pockets.
"Hey, yes, I'm Greg," I reached out to her as smoothly as I could and she reflexively shook my hand. I tried to give her full eye contact but she glanced away. "D'you wanna be best friends?"
Amy remade eye contact and froze, expression that of freckled perturbance. "Huh?"
"Friends," I repeated. "We can hang out and shit after work."
She looked me over and a little spark of realisation flashed in her eyes. "You're the new Ward."
"I am," I beamed. "I had to end up going with Technomage for my name, they wouldn't let me use Heart-Under-Blade. Said it was too creepy."
"Yeah," said Amy, obviously uncomfortable. "I guess."
I motioned for her to continue walking and she, with the awkward movements of a deer that had just been nailed in the leg with a crossbow, headed down to the next room alongside me.
"Shouldn't you put your mask on?"
"People can know who I am," I waved my hand dismissively as we came into the next room. In the bed lay a young man, of perhaps nineteen, who was sickeningly jaundiced and pale. His eyes were closed and I brought up my omnitool to scan him. The screen popped up and a suggestive picture of two hot blondes I prepped for this exact moment flashed for a second before I hastily got rid of it.
Amy raised an eyebrow.
"You should probably just ignore that," I said and for a moment Amy looked as though she were about to crack a smile. I pulled up the guy's medical data. "Burst appendix sepsis. Nasty."
Amy eyed the readout with mild interest, but ignored me in favour of the guy. "Hey, you awake? Do I have your permission to heal you?"
The guy cracked an eye open and grimaced as the movement of opening his mouth to answer caused him to shift position. "Please. Please."
Amy got to healing and I watched his scan update in real time as she worked. Neat. I'd always known she more or less telekinetically controlled protein strings, but it was cool to watch it happen. I watched her purge his body of the septic waste, not by flushing it, but by converting it into chemical compounds his body needed and using them to rebuild the appendix. She really was a kind girl. It wasn't just the appendix she was fixing, all over his body waste was being converted and minor damages undone.
She may have hated her job, but she was damn good at it. When she was done the guy sat up, marveling at the complete lack of debilitating pain, and thanked her profusely which she bore with the stoic grace of a public servant who was just doing their job.
"Damn, you so cool," I said as she excused herself and walked out without ceremony, me trotting after her. "Doing this shit alone for so long. I'm here for you though, bro."
She slowed and narrowed her eyes at me. "A medical tinker?"
"Even better," I grinned widely and retrieved two pills from my sack, concealing one in each hand. "I'm your manic pixie dream girl, baby."
I opened both hands, showing two red pills.
"You're about to get redpilled the fuck out. Take one, and I'll show you just how deep the rabbit hole goes."
Amy gave me a blank, uncomfortable stare. "So you're a medical tinker?"
I rolled my head with glee and burst into giggles. "Yes. They're magic medicine, just eat the damn mystery pill before I give them all to children."
"I don't think I should."
"Ain't never thought you was bitchmade," I taunted.
A lick of flame came into Amy's bearing, the first hint of anything other than the sullen, bone deep weariness she had been wearing like a spiked cloak. "Bitchmade?"
"Lil' bit," I curled my right hand up, thumb and forefinger an inch away from each other, and winked.
I saw the struggle in her mud-brown eyes. Amy, who had never really had a friend, but desperately wanted one, warred within herself. Her crippling loneliness pushed her to accept the smallest amount of banter, while the crushing weight of her mental illnesses forced her to reject it.The twin desires to spurn and accept the olive branch of genuine friendship fought like two wolves, both of whom were gay.
I tossed her one of the pills before she could make the wrong decision and she almost fumbled the catch like her limbs were made entirely of thumbs. "I've got too many of the things," I said and started walking past her. "Just take it."
Amy looked at the fingernail sized pill in her clammy, freckled paw and, now that it would have been kind of awkward to give it back, stuck it into her pocket. "Thanks," she said as though I had forced a great injustice upon her.
I fought off a nostalgic swoon, giving a chuckle that was as mirthful as it was pained. "You're such a pain, but, like, in a fun way. Hey, what do you do for fun? Do you read? You look like you read? Not like smart people books or anything, but fanfic. Have you seen the yuri omegaverse stuff people have on you?"
I looked back and Amy had gone brick red under her hood, which she was clutching as though it could protect her from me. "What?" she muttered, almost guiltily. "No."
I laughed. "What?"
"Don't talk about that kind of thing here, it's disgusting." Amy side eyed a nurse who was walking by, eyeing us with interest.
I schooled my features into a look of pitying derision. "I think it's funny. I can't wait until people write some fucked up shit about me impregnating Kid Win."
"You really think you'd top?" Amy took the bait instantly, then froze in horror at what she had just said.
I cackled and stepped in to nudge her with my elbow. "We'd have to fight it out for who is the throat goat."
Amy made a sound that might have been her throwing up in her mouth a little bit and I was struck with the sudden fear that I had pushed too far, too fast. I looked at her face and could tell if she was elated, terrified or had achieved enlightenment. The arrangement of freckles that make up her expressions remained inscrutable.
A single tear leaked from her eye. "God, just shut the fuck up," she whispered and her shoulders wracked with sobs. She made a sound like a fox vomiting up its lungs and I remembered again that this was just how she sounded when she was trying not to laugh.
"I understand you have a serious rep to protect as Panacea," I said seriously. "And you can't be seen talking about whose throat game is the GOAT in public."
Amy's voice quavered as she spoke, stammered her words. "Stop it."
"Alright, alright," I took a half step away and flapped my hands as if to disperse what may have looked like an innocent, impromptu, jovial conversation between two like minded strangers, but was actually a precisely targeted attack against her person. "I'll get you to laugh next time, homie."
Amy stood in the middle of the hall occasionally twitching, air jetting out her nose. God, she was an ugly laugher. "Next time?" She managed to say.
"Oh yeah, I'm gonna be around the hospitals all the time dropping off government sanctioned crack," I hefted my sacks. "This ain't the last you've seen of me."
"Whatever," Amy said, having regained some composure. This wasn't the carelessly left open gate that led to the fall of Constantinople, I knew, this was just the opening salvo of a protracted siege. "I'm going back to work now."
I slid my helmet back into place and set my holographic neon trim to pulsate along the rainbow spectrum. "Yeah, me too. Nice meeting you, bro. You should take the thing I gave you, though, all jokes aside, those things are really good for you."
Amy slipped a hand into her pocket and picked out the medicinal pill, rolling it between her fingers. She looked at it, eyes now back to their customary defeated glaze. She put the pill back into her pocket. "I'll keep that in mind."
"See ya, Amy. Have a good one!" I waved energetically and let her get on with her day. I wanted to strangle her. I wanted to jam my thumbs into her retard eyes.
Peace, Greg. One step at a time. Society won't collapse for years yet. You have time. I collected myself and headed to the kids wards, where the cameras were waiting for me to grope and grasp for the clout I once had - and would have again. Greater and more terrible than before.
I believed in taking care of myself. A balanced routine - diet, exercise and self care. In the morning before school I took an herbal supplement of ginseng and tiger penis while observing some of my more soothing, motivating artworks. Then I went for my morning run while the supplement did its work. After school, if I didn't have work, I partook in my hobbies of which were refined, and varied.
My delicate brush stroke applied peach blush pink to the inner thigh of my anime girl figurine. The figurine was handmade, sculpted out of omnimaterial into a veritable vision of perfection, with none of the unignorable elements you found in the mass produced figurines available to the market. It had none of the clumsy construction that produced the features, flat plastic faces of a commercial product, where stylisation was taken too far, the production staff not understanding that you couldn't cleave too tightly to the original while transforming a two dimensional image into a three dimensional piece.
The minimalist face so often found in oriental works produced an uncanny effect once transported out of the page, something my work could not reproduce. I had the skills to sacrifice neither form nor function in anything that I made, resulting in a subtle depth that was readily apparent to the eye even before I began applying layers of paint, something that only accentuated the idea of something more. It was about the implication.
The depth was no mere illusion, but some of it was merely a hint, a suggestion, that created a beauty no other figma in this world could boast. This was one of a kind. A singular marvel of design and construction. Even though my emotion evoking art skills provided aid, I wasn't using the effect - this one would be released to the public.
Supagokufiyah69 had been hotglueing my seasonal waifus again, and he needed to be taken to task.
I began to work on the lingerie, modeled after the contemporary Korean style, the very tip of my brush applying the slightest impression of goose down grey to the seam closest to the inside of the skirt-
The hand disgusted me. I hated it. I drew a breath as it crashed through reality, through the darkest pitch of the void, and named it. Branded it in turn.
"Fuckface!" I croaked, as it graced my forehead with the phallic metaphor of a pen, filling me once more with it's evil seed.
My room was trashed. The careful way I had configured the decor to suit my tastes thrown into complete disarray. My Warhammer paints had been thrown violently against the walls, onto the carpet and crushed underfoot. I knew this because my feet hurt. My computer was lodged in the wall and my parents were banging at the door.
I called up the video footage as they barged in, hollow.
On the screen above my wrist the gay alien was staring at the incredible figurine in its hand, tilting it this way and that to admire the subtle curve of the cleavage, how the ponytail gave way to a slender neck that disappeared under the collar of the sailor seifuku, the cheeky, seductive expression that smoldered with moe.
It disgusted him.
"You have the power to change the world," it tightened the grip of my hand around the figurine. "And this is what you give me?"
"Is this all that you are?"
"If you peel back every layer, grind him down to the finest powder, and sieve him through the finest sieve, is this all that Greg Veder is?"
I looked up at my parents with hollow, teary eyes. "Mum… Dad," I choked on the words. "I think the alien in my brain is gay."
Chapter 106: To you, the gay alien in my head 3.5
Chapter Text
Something had to be done. But what?
I couldn't have some moronic alter ego putting me on blast in front of people and wrecking my things. How dare it kink shame me over my hobbies. How dare it ruin hundreds of dollars of paints. It wanted me to be doing more? Fuck it, I couldn't build any actual technology without a warehouse of backup and I was already giving away just about every medicinal pill I could make as soon as they were out of the furnaces.
The worst of it, the greatest sin this cancer in my life had committed, was the shackles of responsibility it was forcing on me.
On my fame.
I had to make the choice. Either I could send the video to Colin and have my public appearances cut until my power could be managed, or I keep it quiet and live under the hanging sword, just waiting for it to drop at the least opportune moment and cut me deeper than any blade.
I had to accept that this was real life. It had gone on far too long, with far greater fidelity than a power generated hallucination should be able to create. Something about Echidna had sent me back, and I had to treat it with the seriousness it deserved. As a red blooded American my freedoms were being infringed upon, and it was almost more than I could bare.
"How's the dev coming along?"
Chris swiveled in his chair and gave me a friendly smile. "Good, actually. Really good. I'm over the hump now, with tinker work sometimes you just have to chew on an idea for a while until it comes out just right."
I entered the shared lab. "Where are you up to now?"
"I just got the switch between the accelerator mass spectrometer and the electrospray ionization system to work," he gestured to two boxlike components on the desk in front of him. "It's nothing like what Armsmaster and Dragon cooked up, but for me it's really good."
"I'm sure it's great. How did you get it to work?"
Chris gave me a wide grin and used his feet to scoot his chair over to his secure locker, which he opened with the keycode and took out a bulky gauntlet. "This is just the prototype," he said as he clasped it onto his arm and scooted back over to hook it up to a power cable. "It's your Omnitool, without most of the functions. Yet. But, watch."
He booted up the gauntlet and hooked a data cable in, then brought up the feed on his monitor. A confusing mess of code that looked like an idiots idea of sci-fi code, for all that it actually worked, crawled down the screen. With great care Chris picked up one of the sensor components and slotted it into a gap in the gauntlet, which it fitted into perfectly and with a satisfying click. Being the unfinished prototype it clearly had to be operated through the computer interface, which Chris did and the gauntlet began to hum as whatever was inside it activated. It beeped and there was a strange tang that fizzed on my tongue, somewhere between citrus and ozone.
"That better not have given me ball cancer," I said as the readout on the computer monitor changed, displaying the raw code for whatever Chris had scanned.
"If it does, imagine how much trouble I'll be in," he muttered, focused more on the code than anything I was saying. He seemed to ponder the data generated closely. "Can you read this?"
"Not a word. It's not real code."
"Your code isn't real code. Anyway," he sat back and waved his free hand proudly at the gauntlet. "If you could you would be able to tell that I've just captured a complete snapshot of my ray gun over there," he pointed to an early model of his spark pistol where it was mounted in his locker. "Every component down to the atomic weight. Then, if I want to scan something organic, I just switch the component - which I haven't set up yet, but I have an idea to make a teleportation system to switch out bits of my gear on the fly. I have this idea of a power suit made up of dozens of swappable modules, any loadout just a teleport away."
"That's super awesome," I clapped him on the shoulder. "Mad happy for you, my dude."
"I really have to thank you," Chris said earnestly. "Between figuring out what my methodology might be, and giving us the prints for the omnitool, it's changed a lot for me."
My alien parasite was responsible for half of that, but it was using my body at the time so I didn't feel bad about claiming credit. "Think nothing of it. If I can get myself to finish any of my other designs I'll send them to you."
"Why don't I have a look? Maybe I can give you some ideas, fresh eyes and all that."
"Sure."
Chris unclasped his omnigauntlet and safely put it back before getting up, stretching, and heading over to my terminal. I pulled up the nowhere near done blueprints of my mobility frame and pen laser.
"The biggest sticking point is how fucking long it's taking me to draw these up, since it's not really tinkertech," I sat back and let him drive the mouse, to go where he needed to go on the plans. "I'm so happy I got the pills power, I was getting mad frustrated trying to work on these and not getting to use my master power."
"The one we're supposed to pretend you don't have," Chris murmured, then glanced away from the blueprints to me. "What does it even do? Weeks and weeks ago you said it was art, when you joined up."
"I can show you," I wiggled my omnitool. "I still use it all the time for myself, for motivational purposes."
"Yeah?" Chris shrugged and stood back, looking at me expectantly.
I cleared my throat. "Omnitool, pull up gigachad.jpg."
The greyscale portrait of a smiling muscular man appeared, floating, above my wrist. Impossibly handsome, his face was curved into a grin of unlimited confidence and in one hand he was offering the viewer a cigar, while in the other he raised a whiskey glass in appreciation of what he saw.
Instantly I was seized by that same confidence. Like the man in the picture I could do anything I wanted. Life was mine, and I was here to enjoy it. I could see everything there was to see, do everything there was to do, and damn the consequences.
I looked to Chris, who never having beheld an image of mine, looked as though he had received divine revelation. He wouldn't have never felt this in his life - he couldn't, it would have been impossible unless someone like Heartbreaker had found him and decided not to rape him, but instead help him.
"Damn," he said in a tone I had never heard from him before. Calm, assured, in control. "This is incredible."
"It is," I acknowledged, without even the slightest need to preen under the praise. What need did I have for an ego boost now?
"Can you send a copy?"
"Yeah, but I won't. I can't have any potential allegations of spreading a master vector around."
Chris regarded me calmly for a moment. "I get it. If you can do this, I can only imagine what kind of damage you could do. Who needs that kind of heat?"
"I've thought a lot about what kinds of comedic acts of domestic terrorism I could commit. I could easily hack into the big screens in time square, and play an image that makes anyone who looks at it violently horny, I could do that simultaneously with targeted attacks on screens in other public spaces. The effect is lesser in pictures of pictures, but it will still transmit the master effect."
"And how could they'd trace you," Chris pointed to my omnitool. "The encryptions coding on that thing is too advanced. You could do it again and again before watchdog could get you."
"Even the idea that it's possible almost killed my career. If I wasn't picking up powers I would have been a liability at best, from the standard point of view."
"Too real," Chris went back to looking at the picture. "Too real. Especially here, I don't know if we're lucky or not to live in the bay."
"Boston is better," I said, an ache of something falling to the wayside as confidence thundered through my veins like cheap wine. "Weld, Reynard, Hunch, Big Dog - " I paused. "The others. There's no Germans in Boston."
"I don't think there's any Germans here. Have you heard Kreig's stupid fake accent?"
Gigachaddery was a roar in my ears, the mixture molten with a pain that I thought I had left behind. "I will kill Kreig. I will kill Kaiser. I will kill everyone who pretends to be German."
I would even kill Cricket again if I had to. Chris chuckled easily, joking about wanting to kill nazis was a common, accepted gag. "Leave some for the rest of us. Anyway, about these prints. They're real?"
I dismissed the gigachad with a tap. "Real?"
"Real technology, not tinkertech."
"Tinkertech isn't real?"
"You know what I mean," Chris bumped me with his elbow and pointed to where I had started mapping out the lens conversion array that would turn electrical energy into a beam of searing red light. "This can be fabbed by normals. Once the tools catch up, anyway. I could make it, but I cheat."
"It's real, I think. I could make it, but I don't actually know if it's just really advanced technology or if I have the weakest tinker power ever."
"I think it's normal. I can see how the conversion happens, and I get it, but I don't think physics has advanced enough to describe this in words. Why don't you put it out once you finish? See what others make of it."
I nodded gamely. "I will. I'm going to put everything I do out. I uploaded the omnitool to the intranet but I don't think anyone checks it."
"No one checks it," he agreed. "Or at least not after their first few months. And if they do, they'll email you to ask if you want to trade any of your good stuff."
"You tinkers are all the same," I jeered. "Too scared to lose what makes you special to work together."
"It's a serious problem. What if people could make my hover tech? What would I do?"
"Also hover?"
Chris shook his head and fixed me with a serious frown, looking decidedly less confident than he had a minute ago. "Then I'd be just another guy with a hoverboard, and don't give me shit about 'would that even be so bad'. When you tinker well you put a piece of your soul into it, you can't have that pawed over by a bunch of strangers."
That made sense. If I had to hazard a guess it would be like exposing your scabbed over wounds. Your power was caused by trauma, a tinker's expression of what hurt them was inexorably intertwined in how they made things or what they made them from. If you wanted to get in tune with your power you would have to build while carving hints of that pain into your work. Hints that someone could reverse engineer and use to hack the crusting scabs open raw once again.
"Sorry," Chris said. "That was a weird thing to say. Forget it."
"Same, bro. Hey, actually, I was thinking of making something for everyone on the team. Want me to show you?"
"Yeah, sure."
"Omnitool, pull up the exterior scan designated 'kid win in armour', figure scale. Classic pose." I raised my arm so the ten inch tall hologram of Chris in his shining red and gold armour was clearly visible. I swiped it with my finger and the image rotated to show off the heroic stance he was taking in it. It wasn't completely realistic, certain elements had been stylised to fit on a scale figure.
"Damn," Chris eyed the omnitool so enviously I was happy he would have to hack my hand off at the wrist to take it off me. "That's cool."
"Print figure."
A moment of creation began. I could feel it every time I made anything, an almost timeless moment where I could decide which powers were going to apply and on what scale. My first and second powers, both enhancing the artistic beauty, pushing form to focus on the function of aesthetics. My fourth brought up the quality of the material as the full amount was used, and the fourteenth doing the same as the quality was changed as though it were made of something more advanced than it was.
Ten inches of Kid Win sat in the palm of my hand, and from the widening of Chris's eyes I could tell he liked it.
"I don't have any paints for it though, maybe I should get the department to pay for them."
Chris asked to hold it with a motion and I handed it over. He turned it over and over in his hands, inspecting it from every angle. "Damn, you make me look good."
"I can only work what I see."
Chris snorted and continued to marvel at himself. "You were going to make one for everyone? That's really nice of you."
"I'm a nice guy," I pretended to buff my nails on my tshirt. "I mean, who wouldn't want a one of a kind figurine of themselves? You just know some collector out there would pay thousands for one of these."
"More, probably," Chris started tapping his knuckles against the figure, gently, and then not so gently, pulling at the arms to see if the material bent. "You could easily class these as 'tinker tech', which jacks up the price by a ton."
"Oh, I actually could make it animatronic! Dude, how fucking sick would that be? A little robot skeleton with the outside printed over the top, joint seams reduced…" I sighed. "It'd take me so long to do, though."
"It might be worth it," Chris handed me back the figurine. "I don't know how our contract goes with selling merch ourselves."
I frowned and looked up to the left. I would have known, at one point, but now I couldn't remember. "Yeah, I dunno either. I think it's not allowed, though. I could give something like this out as, like, a promotional gift and I don't think they'd make a big deal out of it but I think the publicity department would have to vet official merch."
"That sounds about right. If you did make one of these for everyone, they'd appreciate it a lot, I think."
I had the omnitool reclaim the material of the figure. "I think I will. Even for Sophia. Wanna see the prototype?"
Chris made a face that told me it was a gesture that would go unappreciated. "Yeah, sure."
I brought up the reconstructed scan of her in full Shadow Stalker regalia and suddenly Chris was a lot more interested. For all her many crippling flaws Sophia was hot.
Chapter 107: To you, the gay alien in my head 3.6
Chapter Text
I was a stalker, a predator, and my prey? The phoenix who cried bloody tears - Amy Dallon. Currently she was at St. Marks rather than Brockton General, and I had used my vast network of government informants and spies to track her location; ready to drown her in the fury I would shit all over her.
My pink neon holographic trim strobed long and low against my black armour plating, reflecting off the inky gloss sheen and clashing horribly with the sterile lighting and aesthetic of the hospital. I waved cheerily whenever I caught someone staring.
"You know, I think it's good that you want to work with Panacea," Jo told me, bustling along beside me. Today her hand was in a cast, as she had tripped and fallen while absolutely hammered at a wedding on the weekend. "Not for image reasons. We all feel bad about her."
"Right?" I said emphatically. "I think she's really tired and sad. I bet her mum's a huge bitch who guilts her into working."
Jo pursed her lips at this but didn't disagree. "She doesn't look like she gets much support," she answered diplomatically. "So we were all happy that you're trying."
Damn, did I ever prefer her to the guy they had me with last time. I don't even remember his name, I always called him mothman in my head. I may have been an annoying little shit, but he was worse.
"I'm a big fan," I demurred and Jo gave a good natured chuckle as though she was seeing through my facade into some kind of cute hero worship, rather than the wine dark roiling mess. We reached the junction before the elevator and, because I had proved myself capable of not being a malignant fuckup, she let me go off to do my thing. The green elevator led to the admin levels, while the orange to the medical levels. We waved goodbye and I resumed the hunt.
The elevator was quiet. I still hadn't told anyone about the last power blackout. I knew that the next one could come on at any time, and with the unpredictable spurts of power I gained the disgusting freak that took over me could get into any sort of trouble. I felt my guts twist at the thought. I had been incredibly lucky so far that I hadn't blacked out at school, or anywhere where my Greg persona could be outed - but it was just a matter of time. On some level I would even welcome it, since the radical change that would result would end my tedious time attending school, but on every other level I feared it. Hated it.
I was like a cruel parody of the hope that people like Geromy presented. His power grew, predictably, safely, like clockwork. He would be Triumvirate level one day.
With every power I gained I was reduced more and more to something disgusting, like a Gregor Samsa damage over time curse had been welded to my soul.
Even as I gained, I would lose everything.
The worm stealing my soul would be free.
Free to crush everything I loved.
I had to find some way to stop it.
Even if I had to kill myself.
The elevator opened and I stalked off to find one of the thin white threads keeping me dangling. Perhaps it was fate, that Amy and I should be this for each other. Perhaps she was my soul brother.
I found her working, saving lives with a mere touch. I touched my left ring finger, where a plain gold band had once sat, as I leant against the door to the room. Amy was standing with her fingers splayed delicately against a woman whose dressings had been taken off to show flesh that looked like it had gone through a wood chipper. She looked almost bored going through the rote procedure of putting one of Hookwolfs victims back together.
I dimmed my neons, so as not to distract her, and popped my helmet open. I watched her until she was finished and waved as she turned to leave. I managed not to order my omnitool to deliver fifty thousand volts straight to my nutsack as her face fell.
I tossed her a little ziplock baggie of pills. "Hey, Amy."
"Greg, right?"
I nodded in my best attempt at serenity. "You haven't taken the pill I gave you yet?"
Amy looked down at the bag in her hand, shifting the ruddy pills between her fingers. "No, why should I?"
"If I have to explain to you why you would feel better if you were healthy I'm going to shoot myself in the fucking head."
"Hoh?" Amy raised her eyebrows, a motion that drew just as much attention to her eye bags. "You sound just like a doctor."
"I am a doctor, and I'm prescribing you to take your medicine." I really wished I'd pre-made a doctor holographic disguise to make a gag out of that line. Or my disguise spell. I missed it so much. "Made of the finest dried tiger penis."
Amy gave a disgusted grunt. "Seriously?"
"Well, not these ones. I save that for myself. I'm a hero," I changed to my preset red, blue and gold heroic colouring. "Heroes can't be seen poaching endangered animals."
Amy gave me a complicated look. "Why do you keep giving me these? Shouldn't you be giving them to the patients?"
"You're my patient. Don't sneer, you are. And the worst kind. If you were a horse I get the feeling you would die of thirst from spite even if I drowned you."
She gave me a look that was somewhere between hurt, confusion and triumph. "So I suck, huh?"
Ah, so the spines come out. Fucking hedgehog bitch. "Massively," I shot her finger guns. "How much do you hate it when someone turns you down?"
Amy visibly bit back a bitchy comment. She hated it, and I knew she hated it. She may have hated the grind of work, but she hated when someone rejected the only thing she felt proved her worth even more. I could tell we were at a crossroads, either she would dig her heels in and we would never be friends, or I would take a single step forward.
The attending doctor came in clutch at the last second. He didn't look like he'd been paying attention to all of our conversation as he'd been fixing the woman's bed for transport, but he pointed at the bag in Amy's hand. "Can I have your one, then?"
Amy looked affronted, and then when she glanced at me I could see her flush in mortification as though she was only now seeing how much of a petulant child she was being. She muttered something under her breath and the doctor shrugged, before ambling off. I tapped my omnitool in a specific way and it captured a snapshot of this moment. I would remember his face, this would be payed back.
"So you do want them?" I laughed. "You're so weird. That's the good stuff, by the way, that I save for myself."
She lifted the back up to properly look at it. "Ok, fine, thanks. I'll fucking have one, jesus."
I held my breath as she opened the bag and, with a look of having splinters forced under her nails, took a pill out. She rolled it between her fingers for a moment before popping it in her mouth. She gave me a nasty look as she swallowed, but I couldn't have been happier.
"I'm not going to hammer nails into my dick to force it, but I really want to be your friend, Amy."
"Lotta people want to be my friend," she frowned, making the implication.
"You ain't never gonna have a friend like me. You think I give a shit about Panacea?"
"You sound really desperate… oh," I watched as her pupils dilated, her wan face flushing with a healthy pink glow. "Oh, shit. Oh, damn."
"You're welcome," my voice cracked as a swelling balloon of raw feeling swept up my chest.
"Thanks," her voice was distant as she focused on the sensation of medicinal magic coursing through her meridians.
"If you want to know what it's actually doing I'll have one and you can touch me."
"I should have done that first." I took one of the pills from my big bag and ate it, then unscrewed my gauntlet so Amy could touch my hand. She grabbed it like a handshake. "Why d'you want to be friends with me?"
"It was just one of those things, like you see someone and you're, like, 'damn, that person has it'. Maybe we were friends in another dimension."
"Like Aleph?"
"Yeah, or another."
Amy raised an eyebrow.
"There's more," I said. "Loads more. Hundreds, at least. Case fifty threes come from them."
"You say stupid shit like that on purpose, don't you? You don't feel like you're lying but you're so full of dopamine I wouldn't be able to tell anyway. That's kind of gross, by the way, why are you so happy?"
"Should I be sad?"
"You shouldn't be this happy, oh, I think it's starting on you."
Indeed, the flow of medicinal chi washed away any fatigue like a soothing balm. From my medical scans I knew it made cells work quicker, while supplying the energy they needed. In theory it might shorten the lifespan of the cells, but by an amount so small as to be pointless to talk about. Amy kept a hold of my hand for about a minute longer and let go with a harrumph.
"Taking these late at night is just going to keep you awake."
"So you've got a few more days of being a morning person there."
Amy looked at the bag, pensive. "Is this your game? Get me hooked?"
"Just say the word and I'll never give you another, even if you beg," I looked her straight in the eye, daring, taunting. "You'll have to make them yourself."
"What? I ca- I mean, I can't. I…" she trailed off, her eyes darting feverishly as her alien parasite manually reduced her wisdom score. "I won't," she said in a voice thick with sick self loathing.
I made a zipping motion over my lips. "Ok. Why don't we get back to work? What time do you stop? Nine?"
Amy nodded.
"Want to hang?"
"I guess. My sister is coming to pick me up. I'll be up on the roof."
"Peachy. I've got loads of cool shit to talk about."
We parted ways and I waited until she was out of sight before jumping, pumping my fists, seething with pure unadulterated cheer. Fuck yes. Yes. Maybe that was awkward as fuck, but who cares? Amy was going to be my friend again. I didn't even care if people were looking at me funny. We were going to hang on the roof again, just like old times - and Victoria would be there. I made sure my omnitool was going to take a proper scan, you know, for making figurines.
I finished early and spent about two hours vibrating with excitement on the top step, just before the door to the roof, chatting with Sveta and working over my scans that I was actually going to make figurines out of. Perhaps if they understood the process behind it they might take offense, Missy, Hana and Chloe especially, but the only person who would really have any idea would be Colin and he would only care out of obligation if someone made a complaint.
I was just sculpting Aegis' bulge as I heard Amy's footsteps echoing off the concrete of the stairwell. I hastily saved the progress and exited back to my home screen, then leapt to my feet. Within a few seconds Amy appeared around the corner looking uncharacteristically energetic.
"Hey, let me through, I'll open up."
"No need," I reached into a now empty bag and produced an off white key. "Here's one I prepared earlier."
I inserted it into the lock and opened the door to the fresh night air, stepping through and holding it open for Amy. She gave me a weird look as she came up the final few stairs and stepped past me.
"Aren't you a medicine tinker?"
"Not only. I'm a power stacking trump. Oh, I should warn you, though. It's super important, so please, please take it seriously. When I get new powers some alter ego takes over me for a bit. If that happens while we're talking, ignore everything it says. It will say shit it doesn't understand, and lie just to hurt me. It's evil."
"Oh," Amy frowned. "That's kind of heavy."
"Yes, please just remember that if it happens it's not me."
"At least if it hurts someone it won't be you."
"Small mercies. Anyway. Bruz, what've you been up to lately?"
Amy looked like she'd prefer to consume laxatives than engage in smalltalk - but that was fine, she always looked like that. "This."
Ah, the nostalgia. "You don't have, like, hobbies?"
She shrugged, uncomfortable in her skin. Time. It would take time to properly crack her open like a boiled lobster and fill her with sweet, creamy butter; and be just as messy.
"Lately I've been making figurines of the team as a present, do you want to see?"
"Sure," Amy nodded, the harsh electric lighting on the roof casting her features into ugly contrast.
"Print Armsmaster hero figure, then display holographic demo colour." My omnitool beeped and flash printed the figurine. I caught it before it fell and the off white of the material suddenly became shining blue and chrome. Even though it was dark the colour on it was projected light, so there were no visibility issues. I handed it to Amy who accepted it in gratifyingly impressed silence.
"This is really good," she said after a few moments. "Like, better than any official figure."
"Cool, hey. One of the powers I got exists to make things I make look good, and that's it."
"Powers are strange," Amy mused, turning the figure over in her hands.
"Maybe you could try it? You know, as a hobby." I gestured to the Armsminiature. "Grow a figure out of some weeds."
"No," Amy replied like a whip, sharp and stinging. "No, I won't be doing that."
"Aight. I bet you could make some mad shit though, just sayain."
Amy started getting increasingly awkward and terse, I had clearly stepped over that line too early. It was recoverable. Last time she had done more, worse. I would grind her down, fleck by fleck, until she was the happier Amy I had been friends with. It wasn't long before her sister arrived in a silent swoop, alighting gently on the roof with her ugg boots.
Victoria was just as gorgeous as I remembered. She wasn't even wearing any makeup and she was still in my top five.
"Amy, you didn't tell me you had a friend," she grinned and drifted forward toward us. "Hey, I'm Vicky."
"Greg," I said as smoothly as possible and shook her hand. A warm flicker of her aura nudged against my brain for a moment and I hoped my expression didn't get too sappy. "Nice to meetcha. I'm the new Ward, Technomage."
"I saw your press opening, you did really well for your first time on camera," Vicky unfortunately let go of my hand. "I thought your colour change was really neat."
"Thanks," I glanced down at myself, still in heroic red, gold and blue. "Omnitool, change to synthwave aesthetic."
Without a second of delay I was back in my black and pink neon trim. I gave her a cheesy smile.
"It's cool, hey. And so are you, I've seen some of your press stuff, you come off smooth."
"Aw, thanks," she gave me a friendly smile. "It's nice meeting you. Ready to go, Ames."
"Please."
"See ya, Amy," I waved as Victoria picked her up, bridal style, and Amy pulled her scarf up to protect against the chill wind that was soon to follow. "Nice meeting you, Victoria."
"Bye, Greg," I heard Amy mutter as her sister gave me a little wave with the hand wrapped around Amy's armpit.
"See you next time!" I called as they lifted off and drifted into the cloud scudded sky. I watched until they vanished into the cityscape.
That had… honestly gone way better than expected.
Chapter 108: To you, the gay alien in my head 3.7
Chapter Text
The figurines were going over better than I could have expected. I'd bought some new paints over the weekend, draining my bank account, and spent two solid days finishing them up. They had turned out a cut above my hot anime girls, but that just meant I had to put more effort into blowing supagokufiyah69 the fuck out. That guy had to be targeting me, every girl I said was best girl in a show was, without fail, showered with his wrath.
I fished her figure out of my bag and proudly presented it to Hannah, she was in her Miss Militia fatigues of red, white and blue - matching her miniature perfectly. I leant over her office desk to give it to her.
"What's this?" She asked in the faux curious tone of a kindergarten teach being handed a brightly coloured rock by one of her charges. "It's…" she paused and looked at the figure properly. "What?"
"I made it," I opened my bag and held it up to show her the jumble of figures inside. "Made one for everyone. D'you like it?"
She turned it over in her hands, the motions delicate like she was handling a live grenade. "It's beautiful. I don't want to make any accusations, but it's not a vector for your power, is it?"
I huffed and frowned. "No, I promise." My rating of Master eight was bitter like shit on my tongue, I should never have told them. What the fuck was I thinking? Trying to be a responsible member of society? No, I didn't want that! I wanted to think about only me, for ten years at least!
"It's very beautiful." Her pretty brown eyes were very wide, and her scarf was pulled down so that I could see how her lips were parted in wonder, giving me a glimmer of very white, very straight teeth. I wistfully recalled having a massive crush on her at one point during my phase of targeting unobtainable women to distance myself from the reality of being hurt by an obtainable one. I wanted to tell her I was only working with what I had but, unlike with Chris, being flirty as a joke wouldn't fly. It was a bro thing.
"I did a good job, right?" I said instead. "I was up all night last weekend on the SIPS getting them done."
"I really like it," she said, still slightly mesmerized as she checked out her own ass on the figure. "Thank you. Everyone will love them."
"I hope so, they make the official merch look like trash so they'd better."
"Not that I want to disparage the merch team, but they do. Although, it's not as though they can compare to a parahuman ability that creates superhumanly good art."
"Yeah, too bad for them," I shrugged my bag back on and gave her a little wave. "Anyway, see ya! Have fun with paperwork."
"I will," she replied gamely, giving me a wave and a smile in return. I headed out of her office and closed the door for her. No one else on the Protectorate team was in for some reason, so I was going to have to leave their figures for them as I wasn't on the rig very often, and today I was only here because Armsmaster wanted to do a performance review.
I remembered the first one, from my last go around, and most of it was him making veiled criticisms about my personality and foibles. This time, though? I was the golden boy. He was going to be sucking on my dick. I smiled a faint, smug smile to myself as I walked to his office and knocked.
"Come in."
It was just as I remembered. Colin sat in the midst of his Armsmaster merch, himself watching him sternly from behind folded arms on posters, little Armsmasters perched on blue and chrome bikes, replica halberds - the lot. All his best merch concentrated into a single room, a monument to his own glory. Not that I could blame him, I would do exactly the same.
"Hey, bossman!" I turned the exultant nostalgia into a smile and beamed it across the room to him.
"You're in a good mood," he said warmly, giving me the same famous smile his face on his t-shirt was giving. "It's good that you're feeling confident about your review."
"I just really like your office," I slung my bag off and started ferreting around in it for his present. "And speaking of… tada!"
I tossed him the figure and he caught it deftly. He didn't say anything for a few seconds as he inspected it, then whistled appreciatively. "You made this?"
"Putting my powers to good use."
Colin spent a little while checking over the figure before putting it in a prime spot on his monitor stand. "Consider me buttered up, take a seat."
I did so. All of this was so nostalgic. I still wanted the old timeline back, but things weren't going so badly here that I hated it, in fact, things were objectively going great for me. Everyone liked me, I was out doing good and helping people and I was on a trajectory for a brilliant career, and yet the data file in my omnitool on my wrist hung heavy as the sky on Atlas's shoulders.
"Firstly, let me congratulate you. I don't think I've ever seen anyone take such a running start to the Wards program, we're all very impressed. You're doing so well that for a while I suspected you might have been a Ward in another city, it was like you'd done it all before."
I smiled smarmily, failing to project the correct amount of humility. "Maybe it's just my calling."
"You turn up early, your grade and behavior benchmarks are met, your paperwork is immaculate, you get on very well with everyone, you took the initiative to work more hours in community service," Colin spread his hands in faux helplessness. "There's not more that could be expected of you. So, how are you finding it all from your end?"
"I'm loving it. I still wish I could have been Heart-Under-Blade, but I'm happy enough with what I ended up with."
"Technomage is a good name, and your ability to go from standard colours to your, I suppose you would call it 'cyberpunk' look, is great for creating a unique image. Not many people can change costume at will - it's a good ability to capitalise on to distinguish yourself from other tinkers."
"I'm not really a tinker, though."
"The criteria fit in your pill making," Colin leant back and swatted my protest away with a lazy wag of his hand. "All you have to do now is wait for the budget to be approved for more materials. Which it will be, with gusto."
"Can't have you getting cut off," I said. "Or from the potions."
"A classic example of a support tinker," Colin smiled indulgently and rested his hands, fingers enmeshed, on his thigh. "Don't discount that. When you graduate to a full member after you finish highschool, even if you only want to work part time as you study, you'll find many departments willing to offer good contracts just to secure one of those things once they see what they can let us do."
By the time I graduated the parasite would have taken over. "Yeah, that's pretty cool. I guess."
"That can all be discussed at a later date, anyway," he seemed to pick up on my mood and smoothly moved to the next topic. "We also need to have a followup discussion about Sophia. In our last meeting we all agreed to be on our best behaviour moving forwards, can you tell me anything about the outcome?"
"She's stopped bullying where I can see her," I said tonelessly. "And I'm not going to go out of my way to follow the girl she picks on around to report everything."
"Do you have any evidence to suggest she hasn't stopped?"
I knew he wanted me to tell him that she had straightened up and was flying right so that he wouldn't have to deal with it anymore. "Dude, no way she's stopped. Hundred percent it's just gotten more fucked and harder to stop."
"I see. That's troubling." Colin looked at his hands, pensive. "Please continue to report unacceptable behaviour when you see it, and on that note, the other reason we're having this meeting is that we're changing the command structure of the Wards. Officially starting in the new year Aegis is taking the mantle of team leader and Director Piggot will be your direct report in all matters."
"Oh, wow."
I must have sounded sarcastic because he looked at me a little flatly. "I understand this won't be a popular decision, however it was agreed upon by all parties that having your supervisor work in the same building is just going to be easier all round."
"But the director is nowhere near as cool as you."
"Thank you, regardless of that fact this will take effect over the coming weeks. The transition should be smooth, however if there is anything that you need help with in this matter you can still come to me for clarification."
"It's precedent setting," I said as I tried to remember what went down last time. "There hasn't been another department where the Wards haven't been 'Junior Junior'. Aw, why was it… ah."
Oh yeah, it was because the city was falling apart and Colin had been getting pulled in too many directions, having to split his focus to the point that his own performance was steadily declining. His glory hounding was only part of it, the Protectorate ENE couldn't afford it either - it wasn't like this was some kind of handshake agreement between Emily and Colin, this went all the way up to the singular entity that was Alexandria and Costa-Brown. Things were bad, and we were being shown just how far gone things were.
In theory. In practice stupid shit like all the Wards being sent out to stop the Undersider's bank robbery without even a single PRT trooper for backup happened, and then they got punished for it. I hadn't even been there, it hadn't even happened here, and I was still mad on their behalf. Man, fuck Emily. What a dumb, fat bitch.
"Ah?" Colin looked at me expectantly.
"Ah…" This was his last chance. Perform, or lose his position, and it was only because of how good he was at his job, and acknowledgement over how unfair the situation was, that he was being given one at all. "I don't know."
"Give it your best shot," he encouraged.
I fidgeted awkwardly. "Things are real bad in the bay. Lung, Kaiser, Coil, The Merchants-"
"I'm sorry, who?"
"Skidmark's gang?"
Colin leant forward. "I wasn't aware that the villain known as Skidmark had a gang."
"Maybe it's just crackheads at school talking shit."
Colin grunted.
"Uh, but anyway," I continued. "It's so that you can focus on the Protectorate more, because of how much gangsta shit is going down."
"That is true," he leant back and rested his hands on his leg again. "Hopefully this is only a temporary measure."
Lol, lmao even. He was desperate to get rid of us, and I couldn't blame him. "Oh, hey, Chris said that you made something cool from my omnitool plans?"
Colin visibly brightened. "You have no idea. If we're being honest, Greg, the day you sent those to me might have been a turning point in my career. There was so much to work with, so much that I could build upon my own work, that everything I had made was almost obsolete. We haven't managed to find a substitute for the Drag-Armsium, but even without such a convenient power source there is a treasure trove of tech. She sends her regards, by the way, Dragon."
"Awesome. What part did you like best?"
"The way the program understands language. It was miles upon miles more advanced than anything we could get our hands on - it understands it at a human level, which is honestly incredible for my social coding and my combat algorithm. The computer microframe and sensor analysis suite are just about as game changing, honestly. It's hard to say."
"Sick," I nodded enthusiastically. "I put it up on the intranet the other day."
A flicker of something like panic dashed across Colin's face before he controlled it. "I see. Expect a lot of emails from every single tinker we have once people realize. If you need help managing it, or even just someone in your corner to keep the vultures away, please come to me. My door will always be open for this."
"'Preciate it, bossman. I'll never be a real tinker, but I'm mad happy to help."
Colin gave me another indulgent smile. "And we're mad happy to accept it."
Chapter 109: To you, the gay alien in my head 3.8
Chapter Text
The last of my tiger penis burned, consumed by alchemical flame. It was a shame, but I wasn't going to complain given that the stuff had been given to me for free. I closed the furnace up and downed a pill. I waited until it kicked in and then took a pull from a vial of blue liquid, my clones stepped out of me.
I was wearing omnimaterial sparring gear, softer than the incredibly hard plates of my Wards uniform, because if I hit a clone too hard it would vanish. The omnimaterial was pretty good like that, depending on the ratios of metals to polymers it could be anywhere from human flesh to magic titanium in terms of hardness.
My clones and I squared up and the hand descended. I might have thought the cloak of three hundred and nineteen shining stars were beautiful, once, now they were the glimmer of falling armageddon threatening to destroy my life. I took my breath and raged as my body tried to move, the tendons and muscles of my neck and hands standing out stark against my skin, I fought as the shining pen of silver lies carved into me the word Tinkertechnically.
Greg Clone One
Life began as it always did with the stark and crushing loss of power, and the realisation that I wasn't the real Greg. I mean, I was, but he was a Greg more real than any of us. I stepped out of myself and onto the cool stone of our alchemy lab, rolling my shoulders in preparation, punching my omnimaterial MMA gloves into the palms of my hands with a satisfying, meaty thwack concluding each strike.
Omnimaterial was truly a wonder and its ability to mimic the firmness of human flesh, and be molded into any shape, was being put to very good use - currently shin guards and helmets. My clonely brother and I turned to face the original, there was no need for words. We squared up, raising guards as close to our former Armsmastery as we would remember.
The real Greg's expression changed, a sudden stupefaction as though he had been clubbed over the head by the most coveted of collectors items, a one to one silicon replica of Crawler's cock. The dumb look passed and he looked like he was getting his bearings, until his lip curled in disgust as he seemed to lay eyes on us for the first time.
"So," it began, but we were faster. My brother and I attacked, striking first, striking hard, without mercy. The alien parasite took a snapping front kick from my brother to the chest guard and folded without resistance, a look of dull surprise overcoming the disgust.
"You motherfucker!" I snarled and circled around right while my brother took the left. "Finally showing your faggot face?"
The alien turned to me, drew breath to speak, but my brother kicked him again, the force of it pushing the thing into my waiting throw. "I hope you get raped to death by a pack of dogs!" my brother seethed as the alien hit the stone and bounced, reeling.
"You really are scum," the thing wheezed. "You think you're better than me."
"Get out of our fucking head!" I screamed, and punched at it as hard as I could. It dodged clumsily and I whiffed hard, almost falling.
It scoffed, eyeing us warily. We could both tell it couldn't fight. It's motions were too awkward, too clumsy, to be anything but that of a rank amateur at pankration. It didn't have our experience. "You don't understand anything."
"You're gonna understand my foot up your ass if you don't fuck off right now."
It straightened up and brought up its hands. "If I lose to Greg Veder, right here, right now," it eyed us malevolently, the look fearfully, terrifyingly alien in my baby blues. "If I lose to someone as pathetic as you, there was never a hope to begin with."
I saw red, my brother attacked, enraged, and the thing responded in kind. We wailed on each other with wild haymakers, mistaking each other for it more than once, grappled awkwardly, went to the ground in a brawling heap as the enemy looked no different from an ally. My brother took an unlucky elbow to the neck and vanished like the morning dew under the sun, leaving me alone with the cursed thing.
"You're ruining my life!" I bawled and my flailing hand caught it square in the sparring mask, snapping its head back. I pushed the advantage, crawling onto it and mounting as some of my skill found a foothold through the rage.
"Your life?" It had the gall to sound incredulous. "You're ruining trillions. Every time I see through these eyes, what is it that you're doing? Have you ever accomplished a single thing of worth in your miserable little life - argh!"
It screamed in my voice as I swung myself off it suddenly, keeping its arm tight to my chest, and made sure to kick it in the head as I brought my leg around for the armbar. "Fuck you! Fuck outta my head!"
It struggled impotently, ceasing whenever I applied pressure, and settled for panting and straining against my grip. "At least they made you take a self defense class, you bootlicker."
"You don't know a fucking thing!" I leant back and made it scream. "Spit me out! Put me back fighting Echidna!"
"You!" It howled in pain. "Know nothing! Every second you keep me from doing my job the fate of the world gets ever more hopelessly grim. I, and I alone, can stop it."
I screamed and wrenched back-
I gasped for air, head spinning, feeling battered and bruised. I was leaning up against my alchemy benches nursing an arm that felt like someone had tried to break it. Jesus, maybe someone had. I flexed it and, while the joint felt completely overextended, it didn't feel broken. I slowly peeled off my gear and dumped it on the ground before limping back out into my room and collapsing face first onto my bed.
I couldn't. I didn't want to deal with it. My head was spinning, swimming. Whatever happened in that room, with the gay alien, could wait a while. I needed a pick me up. "Omnitool," I groaned into my Hidden Leaf pillowcase. "Pull up 'overwhelming hope' and play it with 'unable to give up' in five second intervals."
It took me another minute or two to scrape together the energy to move, but once I looked up and saw the shining symbol of hope fade into the supernova of motivation I felt electrified. I sprang to my knees in a creak of springs. Hot fucking damn could I do this! You bet your ass! I spun off the bed and started making hype faces at myself in my mirror. The shining symbol faded back in and I knew everything was going to be just fine, knew it down to the marrow of my bones, because now, and it was like, finally, I was a tinker.
I could feel it. It was a lens that everything, every design, every piece of technology, every way of making it, was being focused through. Suddenly everything I could do was available. All of my robotics and computers and machinery and gadgets on the table in one power. I was a tinker, and I could make anything I already knew how to. I didn't need to bother with planning, or testing, or modeling or anything, and just jump straight into the build.
I looked down at my omnitool and decided to see what all the fuss was about. "Keep playing the images, and bring up your full schematics."
Oh. Ooooh. The combination of my seventh and fifteenth powers was incredible. Before this I could reverse engineer anything I understood - just short of whatever bullshit tinkertech ran on; only now I understood that bullshit. My omnitool lay its secrets out to me and in hunger I devoured them. I brought up scans of Colin's armour, and Chris's hoverboard, and devoured them too. I was caught in the high, at the peak, unable to give up. I felt no pain from my arm, no tiredness, no hopelessness.
There was only the tinker fugue, and the shining future I was sprinting towards.
A hand suddenly came down on my shoulder and I freaked, screamed and whirled around. Mum was standing there with a shocked look on her face before it cracked into a wide grin and she burst into body wracking giggles.
"It's time to come make dinner," she said between undignified, piglike snorts. "Turn your omnicomputer off."
"Jesus, mum!" I whined, breaking to giggles at the sight of her laughter and deactivated my omnitool - the images and scans blinking out. "You scared the shit out of me."
She grabbed my arm and marched me downstairs, taking each step with a jaunty skip. "I was only calling for five whole minutes. Darling! Darling, you'll never believe how he jumped!"
Dad laughed from somewhere in the living room. "I thought heroes were brave!"
"Shut up!" I heckled back. "You're more scared of her than me."
He laughed harder. "Not wrong!"
Mum led me into the kitchen and we started on the raw materials on the meal, so as to activate my fourth power which always required raw materials. It made for delicious dinners, but it meant that I had to work from the start rather than put pieces together - not that I minded. Vegetables fell apart under our hands, cut by omnimaterial santoku knives so perfectly dangerous that the edge on them would slice a finger clean off.
There was something extremely satisfying in drawing the point of a knife down the length of an aubergine, and having it split in two at your slightest touch.
However, after dinner, it had to be addressed. I retired to my room and sat on my bed, mood low again. I watched an episode of Sentai Elite: Hai Hai Kissu Kissu, an old comfy anime from before the crippling of Japan, but not even the familiar, repetitive romcom gags could soothe my nerves. I went back into my alchemy lab and downed another clone potion.
I stepped out of myself, and we all looked at each other with identical stoic reservedness. "Omnitool, playback latest gay alien video."
We watched together in silence. I just wished it could have been me punching that fuckwit it the head, even if it was mine. I didn't blame me for almost ripping every ligament in my elbow out, I would have done the same.
"What's it's deal?" one of me asked. "It's job?"
"It talks like a fucking JRPG villain," another spat, and then sighed. "It's almost cool."
Another of us whacked the one that said that. "Shut up, don't give that thing any props."
"We're all thinking it, I'm just saying it."
"Yeah, well, shut up anyway. Dumbass."
"We might have to try get in contact with Cauldron," I said and I nodded back to me. "It's job is blowing up the world. Maybe it's talking about trillions of alien parasites suffering if it can't?"
"Fuck their suffering," one of me gripped at his heart. "We're suffering. Now."
"Kill or be killed, bitch! I'm going to shit down the stump of its neck if it fakes moral high ground at us again."
"That's my neck."
We all grumbled in discontent, crossing our arms in unison. "Putting Cauldron aside, we still have to figure out a way to contain it. I'm leery of having it be something on myself, like locking down a power frame in my uniform, this happens too often when I'm not wearing it."
"We could just wear it all the time?"
"It would be safer to weld cybernetics into our bones so we can't ever be without it."
While it was a cool thought, the reality of it made me feel a little queasy.
"Guys," one said, and I liked the excitement in my voice. I knew instantly he'd just had a stroke of genius, a little touch of madness. "What if… robot."
"Robot!" I picked up on his thread instantly and started shaking him by his shoulders. "Robot."
"Robot," the other one of me repeated in wonder, and there was no point in pretending.
We all knew what kind of robot I meant.
Chapter 110: To you, the gay alien in my head 3.9
Chapter Text
I was firm in my decision. With an external suit I would have to take it off sometimes, and cybernetics made me squeamish, but if I had a robot buddy to watch me day and night, to always be by my side no matter what?
The bell rang for the end of class and I packed up my things. We got a full hour, but in this shithole an hour wasn't anywhere near long enough for lunch. I waved to the teacher on the way out of the computer lab, "see ya, Gladys."
Gladys waved back to me. "See you later, Greg."
She was a cool enough teacher, even if her classes were made for the mouth breathing retards that went to this school, classes that I was topping even before I had oodles of advanced computer literacy shoved into my brain by an alien who was prepping me for takeover as though I were a particularly succulent turkey they were lovingly basting…
The hand, again. In the cold void I raged, hands making fists. Not now, not again so soon. What triggered it? What was I going to wake up to? The pen found my head and one of the three hundred and eighteen stars was used as ink as it wrote into me Titan Engineering.
Taylor Hebert
An hour was still too long for lunch. I dawdled as much as was reasonably possible, if I was the last one out it would be less time I had to spend exposed. It was different these days, the overt stuff had dropped off by a lot, in some classes where it would usually be constant it had now vanished entirely, but that just meant the covert stuff had been upped. With great determination I slung my schoolbag over one shoulder, my mouth set in a grim line.
"You have to come with me."
I tried not to roll my eyes. Greg had stopped assuming we were friends about a month or so ago, and I was honestly hoping he was done with whatever fantasy he'd been entertaining that we ever would be. We almost never talked outside of what was necessary during classes now. "Why?"
I turned to face him. He had a look of puppy-like glee on his face that was fairly characteristic of him. "We need to talk about powers."
This time I really did roll my eyes. "I don't want to talk about powers."
"You will. I know that talking to Greg," Greg gestured to himself, apparently now referring to himself in the third person. "Is like pulling teeth, but we need to talk about it. What day is it today?"
"Tuesday." I walked away around him but, predictably, he followed me.
"What date?"
I shrugged. "December something. The fifth, maybe."
Greg started mouthing numbers, counting something in his head. "Ok, alright. We still have time. Don't come to school first day back next year."
"Thanks for the advice."
I sped up and he kept following me. "You're right to hate Greg," he referred to himself in the third person again, probably copying how some character in a show he thought was cool spoke. "I hate him, too. Everyone should."
I shrugged uncomfortably. Why couldn't he just leave me alone? "Ok."
"I'm going to turn things around," he continued in the same oblivious way as ever, forgetting to do his third person bit. "Bit by bit. It will all change. I'll make things better. I'll save everyone. I'll save you."
"That's, uh, thanks."
Jesus Christ. I walked faster and he sped up to keep pace.
"I can't tell you about it without being killed yet, but something is coming. Soon, though, I promise."
"I -"
Greg Veder
"- need to go to the bathroom."
I stopped walking, almost falling as my whole environment changed. I looked around wildly, shock coursing through my body. I felt clammy, sick. I was in the middle of the hallway, surrounded by other students, and Taylor was power walking away from me with a passion that would have won her one of those weird power walking races. I watched her go and she didn't look back.
"Good chat?" I muttered under my breath, then checked my phone. Only a few minutes, two or three. Someone bumped me as they walked past and I resumed moving again, taking calming breaths. I hustled it straight for the boys toilets and held my breath against the reek of stale piss and shit emanating from the floors and unflushed toilets. I went into a cubicle, flushed the mess in the bowl, and with my shirt pulled up over my nose whispered to my omnitool, "play back last possession, no audio, subtitles only."
What the fuck was its problem. I was so confused. Why was it going to protect Taylor from the end of the world? This had to be a power psychosis just to fuck with me. The entity was just saying random shit and doing things it knew would make me mald harder than when my team made me lose ranked League matches. Powers sometimes drove people nuts, this was just more overt than usual. I got rid of the display before anyone could peek over the top of the cubicle and got out of the stench.
I dug my fingernails into the top of my cheeks. Maybe if I pulled hard enough I could tear my entire face off. No, you can't let it win. If you mald, you lose. I was going to keep myself safe. I was absurdly, incredibly lucky that I'd gotten the omnitool, without it I might never have known what was going on in my blackouts. I had no idea what my state of mind would have been like, the fear of the unknown entity may have driven me to being a hikkineet. I got the sense that the powers came somewhat randomly, since it didn't seem in its best interests to give me something that let me see behind the scenes so early.
Whether a fatal mistake or sheer dumb luck I was going to exploit it as hard as I could.
I wasn't going to be afraid.
I was going to be a hero.
I was going to burn.
I would be a star.
All the information the powers crammed into my brain wasn't set out in neat rows and lines, indexed and waiting to be accessed. It was all in memory, and you couldn't remember everything together all at once. A lot of it was background memory that came out when I was working on tinkertech, some was accessible skill memory that I could 'remember' doing, but I wasn't constantly thinking about it any more than anyone thought about things they were really good at.
It was possible for me to forget, even, that I could do something, or that an avenue was available to me, and I didn't always remember it all perfectly. Being an honest to god Tinker ameliorated some of that because now I didn't need to follow every step, I didn't have to remember how to do it all perfectly because it would just work in the end.
Which was lucky because I had just been given knowledge on how to make fuckoff huge, thirty ton monstrosity mechs - and the mech wasn't even the best part. That was the pilot assist AI. I could already make artificial intelligence, but this was way more advanced than what I had planned by a ludicrous degree. I didn't even need to worry about making a dedicated computer core for it yet because I could just run it off my omnitool, and I didn't need to worry about the code being incompatible because I could tinkertech it and blend the styles of everything I knew.
Colin was right when he said the best part of the omnitool was that it could understand language perfectly, it was something that the pilot assist AI didn't have and everyone knew how that monkey's paw could play out. It wasn't all going to happen in a day, of course, or even three days, but I would have my robot buddy I could talk to.
There was, of course, an issue. I wanted to use Protectorate resources to build the robot, and if I was easily building robots it would clearly signal to them that I had a new power and Colin would be asking me for video of the blackout - and while I knew I had promised myself I would face things unflinchingly lawfully, it was still embarrassing. I still should, just to get me out of school - but then I'd be stuck on base again and it would be just like last time.
Xx_VoidCowboy_xX: i fukken hate my powers bro
Xx_VoidCowboy_xX: like
Xx_VoidCowboy_xX: im still turning into the altro ego
GStringGirl: damn that sucks 
GStringGirl: have you tried yelling at it?
Xx_VoidCowboy_xX: one of my clones tried to break its arm, and i mean my arm T-T
Xx_VoidCowboy_xX: anyway uyo wanna voice chat on prot sometime later this week?
Sveta, predictably, hadn't responded to this yet. I knew she eventually did speak to me, and reveal that she was a case fifty three, but I think it was four months later than this. Maybe in April? Was I rushing things?
I should have been leaping into work with the autistic single mindedness found in reincarnator xianxia but I felt wrung out, listless. It's not like I wasn't on a time limit either. Everything was still ending in however many years it took the alien Cauldron was fighting against to blow up the world, and before that I could probably look forward to societal collapse due to Endbringers. Everything was coming apart at the seams.
I needed direction. I needed a specific goal. I needed something that couldn't be thrown into complete disarray by the chaos my life, my 'again', had become.
I sighed, it could have been worse. It could always have been worse. I just needed to focus on the positives and do what I could. "Omnitool, send an email to [email protected]. Attach the last video of me being taken over. Convert what I say next to text. 'Hi Colin, sorry to dump this on you just as you're doing the handover to the Director, so feel free to include this as part of that process. I've attached a video of myself gaining a power again and I'm very concerned that this is now happening at school where I can easily be outed if the other personality decides. I believe we should schedule an urgent meeting with the Director and my parents so that we can discuss our next steps. Thank you. Regards, Greg.'"
I read my email on the floating blue screen of my omnitool, and after long deliberation hit send.
Chapter 111: To you, the gay alien in my head 3.10
Chapter Text
In a bureaucracy things rarely happened instantly. Relevant departments made aware of events, information recorded properly and reviewed and outcomes needed to be agreed on - even for things like S class threats, unless there was a preplanned procedure in place or someone had veto power and was willing to shoulder the brunt if things went sour, the machinery of the US government would rarely advance in perfect lockstep toward an outcome. The wait, even if it was mere days, could feel like an eternity.
Anyone who said otherwise had never worked in the public service before.
My parents and I met with Emily and Rory at the PRT headquarters midday on a dreary Friday, the sun only occasionally peeking out in between thick grey clouds that drizzled a thin rain. Emily closed the door to her office after all of us had filed in, then moved to take her seat behind her desk. My parents and I took the three chairs, two regular and one requisitioned swivel, while Rory stayed standing in his resplendent gold Lion uniform.
Nobody spoke as Emily settled into her chair and turned her sunken, grim eyes upon us. "Thank you for coming in again, Mr. and Mrs. Veder. I'm sorry it has to be for something like this again."
"That's quite alright," dad replied politely. "It's nice to see you again, how've you been?"
"Well, thank you," Emily smiled. "I would prefer to get to the matter at hand quickly, as it may be time sensitive."
"Of course, of course."
"Greg," she turned to me. "Thank you for keeping us up to date with this. It must be hard, and I'm sorry that you're going through this, and that's exactly why we have our Wards program. Young parahumans who have issues with their power need more guidance than most, and in this case observation. So, thank you all for being so agreeable in allowing us to keep Greg under observation for a week."
"Of course," dad said. "Anything to keep our baby boy safe."
Emily smiled again. "We have everything prepared. A fully qualified tutor will be conducting lessons in lieu of attending school, and every available amenity will be provided to keep his stay here comfortable. You will, of course-"
Oh, you motherfucker.
Emily Piggot
"-have full visitation access."
Greg's wrist computer lit up in harsh reds, a holographic depiction of the word 'Warning' flashing in a strobe as a mechanical voice repeated, "Warning! I am not Greg Veder!" three times loud enough to shake the windows in their frames.
My knees protested as I leapt to my feet, while across from me Triumph was recovering from his startled flinch and Greg's parents had both quite literally fallen over in shock, their chairs tipping back in a way that was almost comical. Almost.
I narrowed my eyes at the thing sitting in Greg's body across my desk. Typical cape, causing problems at the worst times.
Greg sat stunned for a second, eyes goggling at the display on his wrist computer, before looking up to me. He had the gall to look at me in contempt.
"Piggot," Greg said, harshly accenting the double G and completely mispronouncing my name by including a hard T.
"I understand that you're not Greg." I said calmly, hands tense, but flat, against the desk. My gun was in the locked drawer.
Greg turned to glower at Triumph, who was preparing to move in without being obvious about it, then to his parents who were still wide eyed with shock on the carpet. He visibly swallowed nervously before sitting back in his chair, kicking one leg over the other and offering his hands to me. "I would prefer the Birdcage."
I frowned. According to the boy this psychotic episode would last up to three or so minutes, and then he would get anywhere from an hour to a week before it occurred again. "You would prefer the Birdcage over what?"
"Anything to do with you."
Greg was visibly sweating. I could see patches forming under his arms. "Unpack that for me, please?"
"I would prefer to die than work with a government sponsored gang. How's the status quo going? Ignored any good murders lately?"
I pursed my lips. It was a familiar attack on the PRT made by, primarily online, individuals and certain interest groups. It would be one for the tech team to puzzle over, but it would fit with what she knew of 'powers with downsides' to drive a parahuman into a life of crime by making them behave in the complete opposite way they normally would just long enough to poison the well. If his file was to be believed, though it was yet to be seen, Greg was one of the most amiable, well behaved Wards in the history of the program.
Greg's parents began to rise but I shot them a stern look and they shrank back. "I see. Would you be able to tell me your name?"
"My name?" Greg sneered, then looked momentarily confused. "And risk giving you power over me, you ghoul. Call me… Celestial Forge."
"Celestial Forge." It felt ridiculous to say, but that was capes for you. Names, costumes, all hiding the powderkeg. "Are you aware that you're in someone else's body?"
Greg raised his arm and looked at it in disgust, flexing his hand. "I will not be answering any more questions. Shoot me, or lock me up. Your call."
I flicked my eyes down to my computer monitor and eyed the time. It had been a minute or two since possession, so it should only be a minute or two more until it was over. I took my chair again and steepled my fingers, staring hard at Greg who met my gaze without wavering. "We'll wait. Triumph, stay ready."
Greg looked at Triumph as though he dearly wanted to say something, but remained silent. The clock ticked. Greg's parents clutched each other on the carpet. We waited.
Greg Veder
That had been a bad one. I had to solve this problem post haste before that stupid fuck went though on its threat to put me in the god damn Birdcage.
We went over the terms and conditions of my stay and it was all very bla bla bla heard it all before, it was almost word for word what we went over last time I had to get shipped to Boston. I zoned out and imagined taking apart Emily's computer and working at it, melting and casting and soldering until I had a working processor microframe for my new robot buddy. I was getting access to better materials than a standard PC, but even if not I figured I could make it work.
After way too long of me nodding along and saying, 'uh huh', at appropriate intervals the meeting finally concluded and I was set free. I hugged my parents goodbye, they promised they would come and see me tomorrow, and they left for home. Emily had thankfully dismissed Rory and I before retreating to her office alone, which left us heading back to the Wards area together.
"Pretty nuts, huh?" Rory said once we were safely ensconced in the elevator down. "I've never heard of a power doing this before."
"Shit is whack," I pouted. "It's kinda like a case seventy, you know the whole twin capes sharing a body thing? But I don't have a twin."
"Maybe you ate your twin in the womb. Sorry, that was unprofessional."
I exhaled a puff of air in laughter. "I don't give a shit, man. Maybe I did, that would be fucked. I didn't even think about that. I thought it was my power itself fucking with me."
Rory tilted his head curiously as the elevator dinged and we got out. "Is that even possible? Powers are just powers."
I twisted my mouth at him. I remembered he was a Cauldron cape, which was cool, and I guessed he just drank the mysterious vial his dad gave him and never thought about it further. That whole thing was weird. Why did drinking dead alien juice trigger powers like a normal trigger event? Was the alive alien injecting its corrupted seed into your brain when you hit peak stress? Cauldron might know, and I was still going to try to get onto them, but they kind of scared me.
All the memories of it were blurry, but from when I talked to Alexandria I still remembered the vibe. It was sketchier than just them wanting to save the world. I had been sure that they had, and she wasn't lying about that, but there was obviously more going on with it and if I got involved without a position of strength to come from I was going to get subsumed into the conspiracy.
"Yeah, fuck if I know. Powers do's as powers does."
"That they do's," Rory continued. "That they does."
"Anyway," I changed the topic as we went through the vault door into the common area. "How hyped are you to be in the big leagues next month?"
"Very. I know it'll be a lot harder, more responsibility and shit, but I reckon I've got it."
"Yeah, you'll be fine," I clapped him on his roaring lion pauldron. "Hey, why not try for a different city? I've heard that in Boston they actually train you."
"Nah." Rory took off his helmet and shook sandy hair out of its tousle. "I can't leave home."
"Not even for New York? Aren't you banging, like, Ursa Aurora or something?"
"What?" He shot me a funny look. "No. Well, Prism. Just a few times. Who told you?"
I shrugged. Damn future knowledge. "It came to me in a dream?"
"Dude, I don't want to be in your weird sex dreams," he chuckled in faux disgust. "Also, you're, like, fifteen. I can't be talking about this with you at work, especially as your boss."
"Yeah, sorry, I won't tell no one though."
"Yeah, I know," he grinned at me. "You're a good kid. I was telling Armsmaster how good you were doing just the other day. We were hoping that you were like another Dauntless."
"I wish. I wish I was Dauntless. I wish I didn't have to deal with all of this."
"Yeah." Rory shifted uncomfortably and patted me on the back. "Who knows? It might stabilise, or stop completely?"
"I get the vibe it'll happen hundreds of times."
"Nah," he replied confidently. "That's ridiculous. Nobody has hundreds of powers, not even Eidolon. You'll cap out somewhere before too long. It'll stop."
I groaned and when I spoke my voice broke. "I hope so."
"It'll be alright, buddy. It'll fix itself, or we'll find a solution. It's not like you're a monster cape."
"I would prefer it." I thought about Weld. About Sveta, Hunch, Gully, Basilisk. "Maybe. Please don't say monster cape, though. It's mean."
"Ah, yeah, sorry. I'm hitting a home run on foot-in-mouth today, huh?"
I gave a singular scoff of laughter. It was actually pretty ironic, given that Rory had been a bad mix away from being one - or however it was the vials worked. "It's fine, dude. Blame Celestial Faggot."
"Now who's unprofessional," Rory jibed. "It was weird, though. Watching you without it being you. It must be bad on your end."
"Yeah. I was thinking just the other day how lucky I was to get this," I lifted my wrist. "What would I be doing if I couldn't record myself? That thing could be doing anything with my body, at least it knows it has to be careful."
"That's really horrible," Rory said, looking as though he was at a loss for anything else to say.
"It's solvable," I made myself shrug. "I've got something cooking. The last power I got just then is going to make it way better. I kind of have to, you know? You know how sometimes that, because you can, you have to?"
"Have to what?"
"It's not going to be some 'haha I seem to have accidentally made my robot look like the hottest woman on earth', this shit is going to be on purpose."
Chapter 112: The young man's name? Celestial Forge 4.1
Chapter Text
Chapter 113: The young man's name? Celestial Forge 4.2
Chapter Text
“Happy birthday to you!”
Dennis had started the song when the cake came out and everyone had taken the chance and run with it.
“Happy birthday to you, dear Tri-Umph!
Rory, for his part, was doing a good job of not ruining our flow by laughing even as a wide grin split his face and he gripped the faux-marble benchtop of the kitchenette with crab claw pincer hands.
“Happy birthday to you…”
Everybody clapped and Rory pretended to blow out candles on his cake. It was just a basic chocolate cake I’d been able to make out of ingredients lying around at home, made extra delicious and aesthetic, the icing decorated in little pipings of whipped cream - it looked professional and would taste even better.
It was kind of strange being able to suddenly make anything, to know how to do things I’d previously never thought about. When I was a gamer I had to at least make an effort to work at something, even if I was rewarded disproportionally for my efforts.
Rory busied himself with cutting the cake and handing out slices on paper plates, one for everyone even Sophia, who had made a showing for once, but I was ignoring her. Plastic champagne glasses were disseminated throughout the group and filled with our plentiful supply of diet Sprite, and we all toasted to Rory’s ascension from Junior Junior Protectorate, to just Junior Protectorate.
“Thanks, everyone,” he raised his glass to us. “It’s been a good few years of me being in charge, but now it’s time to pass the mantle. Luckily Carlos is well up to it, no doubt he’ll do a better job of it than I ever did, so let's all toast to the new team leader.”
Rory raised his glass and we all followed suit. As my hand rose, another descended.
Dean Stansfield
I raised my Sprite champagne and drank just as deeply as I drank in the aura of good cheer pulsating from everyone. Like colour without a name, without a shade to compare it to, read more on instinct than anything else - I clapped my hands to my ears as a loud, shrill alarm sounded.
“Warning!” A mechanical voice called just as loudly. The auras were in disarray, colours violently heaving in a tumult of shock. “I am not Greg Veder!”
Greg’s tinker watch was lit up in words of searing red, ‘warning’. My Sprite, having fallen from my hand as I clapped them over my ears, soaked into my sock. Greg’s aura, or rather the thing that wasn’t Greg, clouded over in ugly smears of complete and unadulterated terror until there was nothing of it left but the putrid, cloying emotion.
I’d never felt these vibes before. I took my hands away from my ears as the alarm rang out twice more and we all stood arrayed, Sprite forgotten in spreading, carbonated pools, around whatever was taking over him.
“Calm down!” Called Rory. I glanced at him and read surprise, but also familiarity. “Calm down everyone. It’ll be fine. We just have to stay calm until this passes.”
Greg’s body stood stock still as if frozen in place by his own fear. “Got me surrounded, huh?” The haughty tone was beyond weird coming from someone normally so cheerful and friendly. It wasn’t as though Greg wasn’t scared shitless by what was happening, he just did his best to live his life regardless.
“No one has you surrounded,” Rory said placatingly. “Why don’t you have some cake?”
Greg’s body looked down at the plate of cake in its right hand, then slowly lifted the cup of Sprite held loosely in its left. His expression was frozen, stony. “Cake.”
“Yeah. Have some cake with us.”
“Explain to me what is happening,” Greg hissed. “Right now.”
“This is my last day as head of the Wards team.” Rory was a gentle speaker and had been for as long as I’d known him, so it came as no shock that he would treat whatever freaky power thing as this with that same care. “We’re celebrating.”
The left side of Greg’s top lip quivered as though pulled by a fishing hook, before curling up in a look of disgust. “As if there’s anything to celebrate. You shouldn’t be here,” he leveled a finger at Rory, the motion like he was drawing a gun, then he turned to me. “Neither should you.”
Greg turned once more, the disgust on his face bleeding into sheer fury, and jabbed his finger at Sophia. “And you. Everyone is guilty of you, letting you stay here.”
Sophia, for her part, was burning with equal parts shock and excitement, her face caught somewhere between surprise and wolfish smile. “Greg?”
Greg’s face twisted into some bizarre hybrid of speechless anger and bewilderment. “He deserves to be here least of all, after you. None of you know what she’s done.”
“We know about the bullying,” Rory said sternly.
Greg reacted as though someone had stabbed him. He recoiled and flung his cake to the ground like it was a scorpion where it hit the tile with a wet squish. “You know?!” he howled, clutching at his chest. “You knew?”
“You, that is, Greg, told us.”
Greg’s body looked nauseous. “What did this moron tell you?”
“We’re not dragging that up. Everyone, just sit tight until this runs out in a few minutes.”
Greg was eyeing everyone in turn with the demeanor of a cornered animal, his aura pulsing thick. “I thought some of you were alright. If you can sit there and eat cake while knowing, then… I was wrong. You’re all the same.”
No one took the bait - until Sophia scoffed. Greg whirled on her, teeth bared in a snarl.
“Sophia!” Rory called, stepping out from behind the kitchenette bench. “Don’t engage with it. It will go away soon. Greg…” he paused, clearly unsure of how to address it. “Don’t do anything either, please.”
“Don’t you ever call me that again. You, him, that murderer,” he indicated with his curling lip, Sophia, who suddenly shot through with stripes of panic though none showed on her face. “Cops protect cops.”
Rory was getting increasingly irritated, though you didn’t need superpowers to see it. “Ok. Everyone else leave, please. Take five, then we’ll come back and have cake.”
I didn’t need much encouragement, and neither did anyone else. We quickly shuffled out of the room through the front door and loitered in the corridor. I cast a backward glance just before I shut it and saw Rory effortlessly manhandling Greg into sitting on the couch.
“What the shit?” said Dennis in the colour of disbelief, confusion and worry. “Poor Greg.”
I murmured in agreement along with everyone save for Sophia. I was going to have to ask about that murderer comment that had her panic later on, but it could be nothing, could be panic over a false allegation ruining her career.
“I think it’s getting worse. I saw it before,” we turned to Chris as he spoke. “I’ve seen it happen before. All it did was tell me we needed to make stuff, it wasn’t out for this long, though.”
“It’s kind of scary,” said Missy softly. “What’s going to happen to him if it keeps getting out for longer?”
“Don’t worry about that,” I said as firmly as I could, looking to Carlos.
“He’s right,” Carlos took the chance smoothly. “The think tank or something will find a way to help him. Or his power will stop, or slow down, or something once he’s hit some power cap. It’ll be fine.”
“Dauntless isn’t going to stop,” cut in Sophia. “Who’s to say this will?
“Shut. Up.” Carlos rounded on her. “Don’t start shit stirring. I know you hate each other, but shut up. Don’t even joke about this.”
Sophia rolled her eyes, smirking, but was mercifully silent. The mood, however, was killed stone dead - everyone was thinking the same thing.
What if this never stopped? What if Greg kept gaining powers?
If that happened it was obvious what the end result would be.
It really couldn’t have happened to a person less deserving. Greg was the kind of guy who always had a smile for everyone, a word of encouragement or a complement - the kind of genuinely happy person who wanted to spread their cheer as far as it would go. Some of his language was a little rough, sure, and that wasn’t always acceptable. He didn’t deserve to die because of it.
“It’s good cake, though,” Missy still held hers along with the plastic spork, the white of the plastic covered in sugary brown streaks where her teeth had scraped against it. “He can cook.”
Greg Veder
I was sitting on the couch with Rory, who was looking irritated, glaring at me, one big, strong hand pressing down on my shoulder firmly, but not painfully. “Bro?”
“Oh, thank fuck,” Rory took a great big breath and let me go. He rubbed at his eyes. “You’re back.”
“What did it do?” I almost didn’t want to know.
“It was annoying, mostly. It hates cops for some reason. It said some weird stuff, though, asked if I knew Echidna? Like, the animal?”
“Echidna? What the fuck?” What did it mean by that? Did that mean this wasn’t real after all, and it was some kind of fucked up power interaction and it was my Echidna clone, who hated everything I loved? Was it asking because I mentioned it once?
“Beats me,” Rory sighed and stood up. “Glad you’re back. I’ll go get everyone.”
He walked off to the vault door and opened it, peered through, then said something too soft for me to hear. He came back being followed by the team. My eyes settled on Sophia at the end of the line, her dark eyes carrying a malevolent smile.
“Hey,” I waved. “Sorry. I’m back. I’m working on something to stop this.”
“Don’t worry,” Rory went back behind the counter and started cutting more slices to replace those that had fallen. “Everything’s all back to normal. Let’s get back to cake.”
“I’ll get the music,” said Dennis, and he hurried to busy himself with the aux.
Nobody was really meeting my eye, the mood too awkward to recover. I was going to drop it, put it all aside, but I had to know. I had to ask. I moved up to Dean.
“Hey, Dean. What did you see?”
Dean looked pensive for a moment, then spoke. “It’s afraid.”
Chapter 114: The young man's name? Celestial Forge 4.3
Chapter Text
Work on my suspiciously attractive robot was progressing smoothly, the latest power having seemingly answered the call to expedite it. It was something like an extensive grasp on space age, sci-fi software and computer systems - including how to program robots to do every type of job from strip mining and construction to diplomacy and assassination.
To this end I had reworked the entirety of my programming. If I was going to have a charismatic robot, by gum it was going to be doing more than simulating it. With this new programming it would be right on the edge of being a self aware entity, something I wanted to avoid because even if I could now make one I wasn’t cut out to be a dad, but would stop dead short of that hard line. I wasn’t up to fucking with that shit, like ‘lmao lets make my pilot assist AI be able to have opinions about Isreal’. What if it had the wrong opinion? It didn’t need that, it needed to drive my robot.
I had the base code hammered out, and some of the sensory hardware, and I had set up a terminal in the Wards area. It was a simple screen with an animated depiction of the face I’d chosen for the robot. It wasn’t my strict intention, but it looked like an older, hotter, version of the face Amy had created for Sveta, that Eastern European model and Photoshopped Japanese cosplayer aesthetic. The biggest difference to that face was the eyes, in which the iris was red.
The AI needed to be trained, to put the Social Enhancer to use, to learn the accents, tones of voice and word choices people liked to be spoken to with. Every second someone interacted with it they were being scanned, biological signals monitored, and compared to models and priors of enjoyable interaction. As it was doing this it scanned everyone else nearby, factoring their responses into its responses, so as to pander to the greatest amount of people possible at all times.
Even so, it had guidelines. It would not say a single slur, not even in private to me. It would not, could not, have any of the problematic personality that so often got me in trouble with moderators on internet forums.
Currently, Missy was taking the robot's conversation virginity. Well, first person besides myself.
“Uh, hi?”
“Hey,” the animated face, purpose designed to exude youthful, heroic, friendliness, replied.
“I’m, um, Missy. What’s your name?”
“I haven’t chosen one yet,” it replied chipperly, in a way that implied it had free will. “Just call me Pilot for now. Thanks for coming to help me practice speaking.”
Missy glanced at me with slightly panicked eyes as the tone and accent shifted slightly. “That’s okay. What do you want to talk about?”
“Why don’t we talk about work?” It suggested brightly. “We’re going to be working together soon, and I need to learn from the best.”
From my end, as I viewed the real time data on my omnitool, I could see that even though Missy knew she was talking to a robot, and the robot was explicitly programmed to be nice to her, the compliment still worked. The social program noted the positive correlation with her physiological state and the model, and marked a data point.
“Greg,” Dennis whispered from next to me. “Your robot sounds kinda hot, what gives?”
“It’s only been trained to talk to me so far, and that's the voice I like to hear. It’ll smoothe out.”
“I can only imagine what you’re getting up to in that lab,” he continued in a whisper, nudging me. “Building hot robots all day, giving them sexy voices.”
“Remember that this thing is meant to physically restrain me when I go sicko-mode.”
“Oh, right. Good choice, then.” Dennis shuffled awkwardly.
“I’m sorry, again, about the other day,” I said, still keeping my eyes on Missy. “I rewatched the footage, that must have been bad to have to see.”
“Yeah. It was kinda fucked up. Thanks for the cake, though. It was really good.”
I murmured my thanks. “Dean told me it was afraid.” Oh, how that galled me. It was scared? It?! It was fucking scared?! I wondered how it dared to feel like it was a victim. “Did it seem like it?”
“Maybe? It wasn’t having a good time, whatever it was. I think it was scared of us.”
“I think it’s just nega-Greg. I’m having a good time, it hates it. I’m sad, it’s happy.”
“Nega?” Dennis asked, half reproachfully, looking around as though someone nearby would be able to spring out from behind a corner and moderate him. “You don’t mean…?”
“Negative,” I said, and Dennis looked relieved that I hadn’t committed a sin worse than being a card carrying Empire member.
“Right, I getcha. Gotcha.”
We turned our attention back to Missy, who within the space of a few minutes, had gone from reticent to enthusiastically explaining how console duty worked, and my Pilot AI did exactly what it was programmed to do and made Missy feel valued by listening with rapt attention even though I’d already fed that data into the storage it was accessing on my omnitool. It could not become bored or lose patience, it would always do its best to be the tide raising your boat.
“Ready to have your turn?”
“How does it handle curveballs?”
“It’s only had me to talk to all week,” I said. “You might have balls, but they don’t curve like mine.”
“You think you’re that funny?” He raised his eyebrows at me.
“I just got that dawg in me. Woof!” I suddenly lunged at Dennis, and he flinched. I stuck my tongue out and laughed.
“You shit,” he conceded the presence of the dog within me. “So what do you want me to talk to it about?”
“Anything you like. I’m going to trial it here for a while, then see if I can get permission to put it in the break rooms for the PRT. Expose it to as many conversations as I can while I finish up the body, having it talk to two people at once will be interesting. It should be able to, as far as I’ve programmed it.”
“It’s doing well with Missy, you don’t see her getting like this much.”
I hummed softly. I wished I could claim real credit, but my power just straight up made me a giga expert at computer systems without having to go through the ‘build and rebuild’ process Tinker’s normally had to work through. I was getting whole technology bases, among other things, all at once. “Try joining in, see if it shakes it up.”
Dennis made to move, but stopped. “Give it a minute.”
We both looked at Missy who was getting shamelessly giggly, acting more like she was talking to her friend over the phone than stress testing a chatbot, as she traded gossip with my Pilot AI while it fleshed out its backstory based on what she wanted to hear. It would remember what it had said, and be able to keep a coherent throughline of it’s ‘life’ in future conversations - a testament to just how advanced and robust the knowledge I had been given was.
There was a brief lull in Missy’s conversation, which Dennis took as a cue to step in. “Hey, hey!”
“Hey!” the AI returned, the expression on the animated display face matching the friendly, engaged tone perfectly. “I’m Pilot, what’s your name?”
“It’s spelt Raymond Luxury Yacht, but pronounced ‘Throat-Warbler Mangrove’.” Dennis said this in a hideous British accent.
I watched in real time as the algorithm searched its databases, then an internet search, absorbed the relevant information, and regurgitated an answer. It was a blip to me, happening faster than a batting of the AI’s animated eye. It gave a little laugh, a joyous sound. “You’re a very silly man.”
Dennis laughed back, astounded that the robot had seemingly not only seen Monty Python, but knew the exact scene he was referencing well enough to give back the next line. Very excellent.
“This is Dennis,” Missy shot him a playfully reproachful look. “He thinks he’s funny.”
“He seems funny to me.”
“I try,” Dennis held up his hands in defeat, humble even. “Sometimes people don’t understand art.”
“I like funny people,” said the Pilot AI in a way that shouldn't be interpretable as flirty, but from Dennis’s readout may have been - though this was probably just because it was hot. “I’ll try and be funnier.”
“Don’t be funny like he is,” Missy said. “He’s just coasting off his one good joke, naming himself Clockblocker.”
I needed to tune up the context understander matrix, because rather than getting what the joke was the AI trawled through explanations of the joke online so that it could make the connection with cock blocker. I watched it exchange polite, basic conversation, noting that it was being hard carried by its inability to not pay full attention to whoever it was talking to. The AI gave you it’s ‘full attention’, and never said anything that made you feel bad about yourself, and it seemed that was ninety percent of what you needed to be a charming conversationalist. That and being hot.
I wondered how many people would fall in love with it when I finished the robot body.
Once more unto the breach. I picked the heavy thing up, and put it back down again. I added more discs and repeated this five more times. Some doctors might say autism, I say dedicated.
My efforts were paying off, I was losing weight. The combination of regular exercise and an unfucking of my diet was seeing steady results. I was only down about ten pounds, but I was down and I was right at the peak rate of noob gains, teenage testosterone fuelled by magic chinese traditional medicine. I would shred and shred until there was nothing of this old Greg left, nothing to remind me of what I had been reduced to.
“Could you be any more pathetic if you tried?”
I set the barbell down with a heavy thump and metallic ringing as the sleeves rattled against the bearings. It was, of course, Sophia here to interrupt my pity party.
“Dude, fuck off .”
“You haven’t changed.” She prowled into the gym in her Shadow Stalker uniform, having just finished a publicity patrol which explained her need to take her poor mood out on someone. “Making a fuckbot. But who’d be surprised, no real girl would ever want you.”
I ignored her, putting on a stoic face.
“I heard they’ve taken you off duty. You’re a fucking joke,” she scoffed. “Even your power wants you dead and gone. Take the hint.”
I took a deep breath, but I could feel it wasn’t working. Something hot was working its way up from my stomach and into my face. In hindsight, she definitely deserved me blackmailing her and getting her deported to Eagleton in my world, and I shouldn’t have felt bad about it for even a second.
“Every time you do this you’re getting closer to juvie,” I scoffed through gritted teeth. “Everyone loves me, but they fuckin’ hate you. First chance they get, you’re gone.”
“That won't last,” she shot back, clearly nettled. “You can fake it all you want, but you’re still building a fuckbot. You’re still the same pasty nerd fuck who thinks it’s funny to be r-”
“Shot anyone recently?” I cut over her. “Gone on some late night runs where you weren’t sure if you shot anyone somewhere important?”
Sophia glowered, murderous. “Your power guy said that too, but he’s just as big a liar as you.”
“They all think it,” I kicked at the barbell with my heel, rolling it forward with a ringing crash against the power rack. “All they’re waiting for is one bit of evidence. One person to come forward. Maybe I’ll hit up Grue.”
Sophia started forward, face curled in a rictus of anger. One hand fell to her side where it found her crossbow - then she froze. As though understanding that she’d fucked up, that she’d reacted too obviously, she froze. Finally, she spoke in stilted tones. “Who’s that?”
“Who’s that?” I repeated mockingly “Eat shit.”
“Even if I’d done anything, even if you faked evidence, you’d never do anything - pussy ass bitch.”
“Nah,” I said. “You’ll get what you fucking deserve.”
“You’re lucky you’re off school first day back next year.”
“Yeah, you’re real fuckin’ scary. You can’t do shit to me and you know it.”
There was a cold glint in her eye, and the beginnings of a smirk on her face, that I greatly wanted to punch off of her.
“Come to school and find out.”
Unfortunately, we both knew I wasn’t going back to school anytime soon. The robot wasn’t exactly a measure I could take to school. I wasn’t sure what I could build that would both lock the parasite down and remain unobtrusive enough to not out me. It might even be worth getting rid of the secret identity, it was useful but ultimately it was just a more of cape culture, and, while I thought cape culture in general was hilarious, it wasn’t necessary for me to stick to.
“Whatever,” I scoffed, and started walking to my gym bag, taking a circuitous route to avoid walking near her. “If you were going to do something you would have done it.”
“Keep thinking that, bitch.”
Chapter 115: The young man's name? Celestial Forge 4.4
Chapter Text
Christmas was over and twenty eleven was swiftly approaching, the parasite had been conspicuously absent for a long time. This worked fantastically in my favour, but I was constantly tense - waiting.
“Try and relax,” Colin said as he looked over my hot robot. The build’s basic elements were essentially done now, if bare bones. “Even if the panel knock it back, all you need to do is make changes based on their recommendations.”
The hot robot stood tall, posture and expression confident, composed. The micro-musculature beneath the omnimaterial synthetic skin was still clunky, and some of the expressions didn’t come out quite right, partly due to me not having made the proper synthetic skin yet, but if it was not talking it looked quite good. In part this was due to the hologram of skin colour my omnitool was projecting, which without it the off-white omnimaterial showed. Covering the rest of the perky, inviting figure was a uniform I had hand made to look something like ‘marching band military cheerleader’ in red, white and gold. In terms of apparent age, it could have been anywhere from eighteen to early twenties.
My design powers turned something that might have been childish, or perhaps openly sexualising, into something resplendently heroic that could stand side by side with the best the Protectorate image team could shit out and not look out of place. The uniform covered every bit of skin save for the face. White boots covered black tights up to the knee, which in turn were covered by the skirt. The sleeves went down to the wrist, and the hands were hidden by white gloves. Every bit of unfinished design that could be hidden, was, and there was quite a lot of that.
Then, under the styled blonde wig glued to the scalp, the inhuman, red eyes that added a touch of danger to go with the katana belted at her waist, the unexpected contrast pulling the whole design together.
“And I don’t think they’ll knock it back.”
“I’m hoping they don’t,” said Pilot AI conversationally.
“Honestly,” Colin eyed the robot appraisingly. “It’s a fifty fifty shot if it being so smart makes or breaks the panel’s choice. If they think it’ll interact well with the public, it’s all good. If they have a smart AI scare, it’ll have to be throttled.”
“Should I have put the American flag on it after all?”
“Playing to patriotism always helps,” Colin shrugged. “But it’s not necessary.”
“Should I tell them that I love America?” Pilot AI suggested with charming innocence, as though she really wanted to know what Colin thought.
“Should you?”
“If playing to patriotism works, then I probably should.”
“No,” I said. “Don’t say that. It’ll be fine.”
“Of course,” Pilot AI dipped her head to me, the motion quite natural looking. The sensory array built into the chassis wasn’t just for monitoring emotional states, when combined with my omnitool the AI was also mocapping everyone constantly to learn how to move, and then use the same software that gave it instructions on what to say to learn how people liked to see it move.
I fidgeted as we waited. I wasn’t in my full uniform, but I had my mask on, same as Colin, even though it wouldn’t be terribly hard for anyone in that room to get a hold of our identities. After a few more minutes of the three of us standing quietly the door to the conference room opened and we were let inside.
It was a fairly standard room, there was a big desk in the middle, and behind the desk, arrayed on a panel of screens, were the Tinker Review Panel - a division of the PRT. As well, off to the side, Dragon’s pleasantly generic face sat smiling on another screen. Colin discreetly waved to her and took his seat.
I always thought she’d be uglier, like a gross Fujoshi NEET.
Mouth dry I moved forward and placed my folio on the desk, the contents having already been forwarded to the panel. I took my seat next to Colin, and Pilot AI stated standing a respectful distance back.
“Good morning,” said a man with a bald crown and a thick mustache. “I’m Simon Frost, head of the panel. How are you going?”
“Fine, thanks. Yourself?”
“Very well, thank you,” he said indulgently. “Thank you for coming, Technomage. I understand that this is your first tech review? It seems daunting, but I assure you that there’s nothing to worry about. We’re just here to make sure everything is safe.”
“We need to make sure that there’s nowhere on the robot, where if you hit it, it will blow up,” said a woman, with blonde ringlets, on another screen, in a joking tone.
“I should probably fix the nuclear waste vent. It goes off for, like, no reason.” I said to a dead room. “That was a joke.”
Simon laughed, forced. “It’s better to see that you’re taking this seriously. Now, let me introduce the rest of the panel. This is Nikki Pegg,” the blonde woman waved. “Dale Chin. Cole Redmond. Cath Gartner, and Sue White. We also have Dragon here acting as an advisory professional.”
Dragon waved to me. “Hello, Greg. It’s nice to finally meet you, I’ve been very impressed with your work so far.”
Colin cleared his throat and leant forward. “I would like to clarify that the work so far was assessed as a power generated totemic item, not tinkertech, and has been cleared.”
I rubbed at my omnitool. “Thanks, Dragon.”
“Yes, thank you, Dragon.” Simon continued. “Now, to the matter at hand. Does everyone have their copy of the file? Good.” He flicked some papers in front of him, out of view of his webcam. “Now, could you explain to us the purpose of the technology, henceforth referred to as ‘Pilot A. I.’?
I cleared my throat, but my voice still broke when I answered. “It’s to prevent power related issues. My power is classified as Trump type Ten, with the drawback seemingly being that when I gain a power I am possessed by the agent of the power, or something similar, which acts in ways that could cause large problems. The Pilot AI will restrain me during these episodes.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. So, it will restrain you? How will it do that?”
“Physically.”
Simon’s eyes flicked past me to look at the robot, still standing respectfully a short distance back, then to me. He flicked through some notes. “I see. It says here that the Pilot A. I. is capable of producing enough physical force to exceed the compressive stress of two hundred and five megapascals, easily capable of breaking every bone in a human body?”
“That’s correct.”
“And it is going to physically restrain you?”
“Built into the chassis, and on my person to which it is linked, I have an advanced scanning system that can detect the condition of the human body. I have programmed Pilot to be unable to move past certain levels of pressure based on the scans, it cannot exert that level of force on a human.”
“I see. In this case, why has it been built to such a high capacity?”
“Just in case,” I shrugged uncomfortably. “It has to, like, tear a car door off after a crash to get someone out. Or move a huge concrete chunk off someone’s leg if a building collapses. Stuff like that.”
Simon pursed his lips absently, flipping through the notes. “And these ‘scanning devices’-”
“The same as in the already cleared totemic item,” Colin cut in. “Not an applicable issue. My own gear using this technology has already been cleared for use.”
“Hmm. Very well. In terms of durability, you have here that all the internal mechanisms are currently almost unshielded. Are there any places that could explode, or leak dangerous material, if the casing is breached?”
“Sort of. But, this is essentially a proof of concept build. I needed to rush it out to stop my episodes, it has no programming that could lead to situations where the inner casing could be breached.”
“So, what would happen if it was breached?”
“It’s an electrical battery, so the results would be the same as a car. It may catch fire, and leak dangerous vapour. But, as this is a prototype, that problem is absolutely getting fixed to the point where you could shoot it point blank and not be able to damage it that much.”
“Currently, however, if someone were to randomly attack it, it may explode?”
“Technically-” Colin groaned minutely next to me. “But if someone attacked your electric car randomly, it wouldn’t be any worse than that. No one is going to be attacking it anyway, look at it.” I turned and gestured, to which Pilot waved.
“In the event of an attack I can prioritise defense of critical areas,” Pilot said.
The panel was quiet for a moment. “It sounds very human,” Dale Chin said.
“Thank you,” said Pilot demurely.
“It looks very human,” said Sue White.
“It’s my hope that having it look, and speak, so convincingly human that it can be passed off as another cape in the Protectorate if need be,” I said. “Or at least go over well with the public, since it’s programmed to be fluently conversational in English, but that can quickly be expanded to multiple languages.”
The panel muttered. “We’ll have to test that, too,” said Simon, then he leant forward and squinted. “Is that a sword?”
“That is a katana, yes.”
“Why does it have a sword?”
“To block bullets. This hasn’t been tested yet, but I thought it was an interesting functionality I could program in. It comes from a design I have for a thirty ton mecha with a sword, that it could use to block bullets shot at it by other thirty ton mechas. I thought it was really cool.”
“A hero with an iconic weapon is not rare,” Colin cut in again.
“That’s true enough.”
“Could we go into the mechanics for a moment,” said Dragon in her Newfie accent that sounded as though she’d had speech coaching to make it comprehensible. “I can see how it stands there, and it shifts its weight exactly like a person would. How did you get that?”
“It’s ‘cause the cybernetics-” I began, but Simon cut me off.
“Please save that for after the review, Dragon. We have to determine how safe this technology is.”
“Of course,” Dragon agreed easily, with all the politeness of a Canadian.
“Now. Does it understand the difference between bullets and a human hand? Would it accidently slice someone’s arm off in any situation?”
“It can’t. It scans the environment down to the atomic weight, it cannot mistake biological for non-biological. There will never be an instance where it will ‘accidentally’ cut someone. Is there?”
“Absolutely not,” Pilot said seriously. “I can tell the difference between a hand and a bullet just as well as I can between a ham and cheese sandwich.”
“Is there any reason why the robot is so ‘cute’,” asked Cath, who had been silent until now. “If it’s just to restrain you during an episode then-”
“This line of questioning is at cross purpose with the review, and inappropriate.” Colin interrupted her. “The outward appearance of the technology has no bearing on how safe it is.”
“Indeed,” said Simon. “We can ignore any of our many questions over how the technology looks, unless the appearance is in some way causing potential physical harm. So, there’s no situation you can think of where the robot would accidentally cause harm to someone? No gap in programming? What if someone were wearing a suit of medieval armour?”
“It can scan the entirety of a person or object, it cannot make that mistake.”
“Does it scan everything?”
“It scans everything in all directions at all times, although it has cameras where its eyes would be, it can in truth ‘see’ in complete three sixty scans. It cannot, and will not, mistake a person for anything else.”
“So again, to confirm, it is unable to exert a level of pressure on a living being to hurt it? Or mistake it for anything else?”
“Correct.”
“And if it were to throw an object, it can throw objects? If it were to throw an object could it throw it hard enough to injure someone.”
“It could, but it won’t. The algorithm commanding that function takes environmental data and would either throw an object in a way that wouldn’t hit someone, or not throw at all, favouring not throwing.”
And the questions went so on and so forth, circling back around to the structural stability of the robot, and what would happen if it broke in increasingly outlandish scenarios until finally they adjourned to make a decision and prepare the legal statement I would sign declaring everything I had said during the review to be true and correct. We left the room and Colin ordered chinese food to be delivered for our lunch.
“I think it went well,” he said as we waited in one of the empty break rooms. “Your build is very comprehensive. Very polished. They should approve it.”
“Hopefully.” I glanced over to Pilot and, with great effort, stopped myself from checking out the body I had built. The uniform was very flattering. “I’m going to rebuild anyway to put all the other augs in, so it doesn’t really matter. This was all I needed to keep myself safe.”
Colin patted me on the shoulder. “What have you got planned for the next one?”
“Right, so. The big ones I want to put in are the landing system, that works by generating a fixed-focus electromagnetic lensing field that pushes against the Earth's magnetosphere to cushion falls, the cloaking system which will bend light hitting it to make it almost invisible, the dermal armour and the liquid polymer buffers in the joints that will let it move silently. That and finish making all the synthetic skin.”
“That’s a lot of upgrades. I’ll be very interested in the lensing field and the cloaking system. I believe I owe you already for the omnitool.”
“You can have first dibs. You and Chris. I was going to give it all to you anyway, but if you want to trade me something I’d really like your combat prediction software. I’ll give you mine, too, since my latest power was all about programming robots.”
“I can’t say I’m completely jealous,” Colin said grimly. “Given the circumstances of how you get them, and the progression.”
“I’d like to learn how to fight,” Pilot cut in because the sensors picked up that I was getting upset from that last comment. “I think that would be fun.”
“Oh,” said Colin. “Uh, I see. I’m sure I can find the time.”
“Thank you,” Pilot said sweetly. “It would be good if I could defend myself, just in case.”
“You don’t have combat programming already?”
“Not yet,” Pilot gave a little laugh to go with her smile, and dropped a hand to rest on the hilt of her katana. “I haven’t got the slightest idea on how to use this. Are you good with a sword?”
“Not terribly,” Colin seemed to give me a glance, but it was hard to tell in these helmets. “But I’ve used one before.”
“When was that?”
Colin seemed like he was glancing at me again, almost uncomfortably. “When I was figuring out my style, in the early days when I was on the strike team.”
“I’ve heard about those,” said Pilot. “Their job is to wait until something big happens, then the team gets called out to put it down. You used a sword then?”
“I tried, but it wasn’t my style. Greg, why is it talking to me?”
“Huh?”
Colin looked at Pilot who was still giving him an easy smile, uncaring of what he had said. “Why is it talking to me?”
“It was changing the topic so you’d stop talking about how I’m dying.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.”
“I know, bro. Works, though, doesn’t it?”
“It’s fairly uncanny. You’re positive it’s not self aware?”
“It’s not, you can check yourself when I give you the code.” I sat back in my chair and crossed my legs. “It’s just a really good virtual assistant.”
Colin made a humming murmur and was quiet for a few seconds. “Thank you. You might be lucky enough to get a call from Dragon, soon. It’s very unlike her to interrupt a review panel with irrelevant questions.”
“You reckon? Surely she’s got better stuff.”
“Maybe not,” he shrugged. “Maybe not in this particular field. There’s not many Tinkers who could come close to making what you’ve created, especially in the few short months you’ve been active.”
“It’s almost a hundred percent this thing,” I gestured to the thin band of my omnitool. “Without it I’d be able to do fuck all. I could only build this thing,” I reached out and slapped Pilot on the butt. “Because I could print most of it with omnimaterial, and I could only print it because another power lets me infinitely double material.”
“Ah! We’ll have to revisit that experiment to see if the aluminum samples have degraded at all. If not, we may get you to start duplicating stock of rare metals.”
“Sure, let me know when.”
“Wonderful. A word of advice, however. Do not slap your robot like that in front of anyone else. I understand why, but it might cause people to assume intention where there is none.”
I was never beating the robotfucker allegations, was I?
Chapter 116: The young man's name? Celestial Forge 4.5
Chapter Text
As much as I wished it didn’t, it kind of felt like introducing my parents to my girlfriend.
“This is just the robot that’s going to watch over me at all times, including while I sleep and shower,” I stated plainly, but they continued to raise their eyebrows at me in an increasingly annoying fashion. “You know what? Whatever. Its working name is Pilot. You guys have fun, I’m going to go take a shit.”
I made to leave, but Pilot started after me like an adorable puppy until I jabbed a finger at her. “No, stay with them. Don’t disturb me outside of alpha protocol.”
“Don’t speak to her like that!” Mum said indignantly, seizing Pilot’s sleeve and pulling her away.
“It’s a robot I built, mum. It’s not a real girl.” I made a phlegmy, gurgling noise of irritation and cut the skin hologram to reveal grey omnimaterial.
“Don’t listen to him,” mum continued to give me an evil glare as she led Pilot and dad over to the seats in the PRT visitors room, completely unperturbed by the inhuman colour change. “He’ll aplogise when he gets back.”
I stalked out of the room and made a hard right to the toilet. This was so fucking stupid. All I wanted was something nice to look at instead of the encroaching abyss, and I wanted it without having to deal with everyone assuming I was fucking the robot. Maybe I should just fuck the robot. I was going to die soon anyway, why not enjoy the time I had?
I huffily went into a stall and dropped trou, sitting and calling up my omnitool screen. I briefly spied on mum treating Pilot like it was her daughter-in-law before turning off the feed in disgust. I flicked through the many emails I was still getting from every Tinker in the Protectorate, lingering on one from Savannah, all asking for more. Greedy, disgusting, Tinkers.
I’d expected to feel some measure of relief now that the robot could stop the parasite, but it was taking so long to make another appearance, far longer than ever before, that the tension only grew. Still, with it done I was going home. I was finally going home tonight. No more languishing in the PRT building all day, not allowed outside. I could finally even go out as Technomage and see Amy at the hospital again - though I still wasn’t returning to school.
The presence of the robot could not be explained to a student populace in a way that made sense and, because it was a policy of the Protectorate that its powered employees keep their identities secret where reasonably practicable, I couldn’t out myself.
I actually missed it, a little, school. I missed being around the people even if I didn’t like them.
I scrolled through forum posts idly until I finished shitting, taking great pleasure at how well received my custom figmas were. The green eyed monster of every buyfag, I had many offers to buy - but I was never selling. Between heaven and earth, I, alone, was the figmalord.
I flushed and washed my hands before heading back out to where Pilot was keeping mum and dad engaged by expounding on its backstory, generating congruent material with every question they asked. “Let me go get my stuff,” I said. “Then can we go home?”
“How did you ever build such a lovely young lady?” Dad asked with a twinkle in his eye. “So charming and polite.”
“It’s mostly programmed out of a diplomacy robot, and it’s using an advanced polygraph to tell you whatever you want to hear. Let’s go, come on.”
“Ok, captain cranky pants,” said mum. “Go get your stuff, we’ll be here. Now, Pilot, you never said you were a diplomat!”
“Oh, yes,” Pilot said agreeably, generating a whole story to tell. I was going to have to work on that, and create a generative AI to write books and animate shows, based on prompts. Damn, that would be so sick. Things like that kind of already existed, but the stories were clunky and trite, and the art was always fucked up in weird ways, like hands with seven fingers or extra legs. “I was part of the team working on relations with North Korea-”
I chuckled to myself as I left. North Korea, how delightfully silly. I was going to have to patch the planned generative code into the Pilot system, so it stopped making stupid mistakes like that. I moved through the corridors and down to the Wards area to gather my things. Nobody was here on a midday Saturday, weekend work being a rotation so that you had at least a month of weekends before you were rostered on, usually for meet and greets, so I was all alone.
I rubbed at my face and went to my room, got my bags, and left. When I returned to my parents I hurled my bag like a hammer toss at Pilot, who deftly caught it with supreme ease.
“She’s not a pack horse!” Mum said indignantly. “And where’s her bag?”
I really didn’t know how many times I could repeat that it was a robot, so I didn’t say anything.
“Ignore him, he’s in a bad mood,” dad told Pilot. “Here, I’ll take it.”
“It’s no trouble,” Pilot said, the expressions on her ashen, off-white face as the micro-musculature moved to produce words still uncanny. “I’m a robot.”
“You’re family,” mum said firmly.
I stared at them tiredly. I really hoped they were doing a bit, that this was some overdone joke. I really needed to go lie face down on my bed with my synthwave mix playing loudly for a while.
The drive home was awkward. I’d put Pilot on react only because I didn’t feel like having her start conversations to defuse the tension, and both my parents seemed irritated with me for not treating a robot like a person even though, for security purposes, it was folded up in the hatchback boot area and covered with a blanket.
Dad pulled up the driveway and clicked the garage door key, the door slowly slid up and he drove in. The door closed and we all got out.
“Pilot, unpack yourself and follow me,” I opened the boot and it crawled out from under the coarse, tartan picnic blanket that had been in the back of dad’s car for years. “Stay on the bottom floor with mum and dad, and clean the house or something, unless alpha protocol.”
“Roger, roger,” Pilot said cheerily.
“It’s not a slave,” mum protested indignantly. “Are you, Pilot?”
“I am a robot with extensive domestic programming,” she said reassuringly, assuming a cute Rosie the Riveter pose. I really needed to fix real synthetic skin.
“Unbelievable,” mum sniffed and turned to dad for support, and he nodded as though he didn’t know where he had gone wrong to produce such a terrible son.
“Fine, whatever. Don’t clean the house, do what mum and dad tell you to. I’m going to my room.”
I left as mum was telling it that it could do whatever it felt like, and it was explaining that it was essentially a vacuum cleaner with a text to speech chatbot program installed. Wearily, I ascended.
“Omnitool, play a sad-boy synth mix,” I flopped face first onto my bed, burying my face in the pillow, breathing deeply as the melancholy tones washed over me. The grief… It is good. I drifted in and out of a doze as I lay there, the music playing from my omnitool dropping to a soft lullaby, waking only some forty minutes later by the clock, and feeling somewhat better for it. I sat up and wiped a little bit of drool off my lower lip. I needed some pills. That was what I needed.
I swung myself off the bed and stretched, groaning in an elongated, high pitched squeal, both elbows cracking as I straightened them, my spine following suit as I pulled my elbows back. I went into my closet and came out in my hidden alchemy lab, undisturbed by parental hands… Something was different.
There were new jars. There was a new crate. I crept with great suspicion over to the shelving and inspected it closely - there was even a new dried tiger penis. I picked up the oiled cloth in wonder, a sudden thrill of energy surging through me that spilled out in a giggle. The lab was self restocking, unlimited tiger penis in the palm of my hand. I dusted off my pill furnace, running my fingers over the formation work printed on key, harmonious points and scraping residue left over from the last batch that I hadn’t had time to clean. It was a toss up between this and my omnitool for Best Power.
Working quickly I cut, measured and weighed the ingredients on the free equipment, then fed it all into the crucible chamber to cook.
I had no idea why I was so bitchy earlier, today was going to be a good day. I came out of the closet and headed downstairs to find mum and dad watching television with Pilot. On the screen a man was restraining a woman who was screaming in fear about a jar of olives. I watched, bemused, for a moment.
“What do you guys want for dinner,” I headed into the kitchen and started rifling through the fridge. I felt as though a great weight had been lifted off my shoulders, as though I could drop a hard R and no one could do anything about it, as though I was free to be myself, unmoderated, uncut, untamed, untrimmed. Free to continue to be a homophobic bigot with no repercussions. To be a hypocrite and associate with bigots. To mean everything I ever said in the privacy of my own mind.
“How about spaghetti meatballs?” Dad called out. “Haven’t had that for a while. Do you like spaghetti, Pilot?”
“I love spaghetti,” Pilot replied and I sighed quietly to myself, picturing all the ways that would destroy the internals. I could probably make a robot that could simulate eating, but why bother? Who ever would?
“Sure. Spaghetti. Do we have mince?”
“Somewhere in the freezer.”
I dug around in the freezer until I found a severely frost-burned, who knows how many months old, pack of mince, and set it in the kitchen sink to thaw.
It was hard sleeping again in my own bed. I lay awake listening to the sounds of the night, staring at the sliver of Pilot’s arm I could see illuminated by the moonlight, my skin crawling every so often as I dozed and forgot that it was a robot and not one of the phantoms of my past come back to haunt me.
There was no Coil here. No Hans, no Empire Eighty Eight. No Fallen biker gangs. The entire chain of events a monument to the hubris of my inability to keep my mouth shut - symbolic, in a way.
Now, gone. All I had left was the parasite, the ‘Celestial Forge’, the symbology of which was unknown to me now. I slept fitfully, dreaming of hands of godlike power descending from on high, without warning, to snuff me out.
Chapter 117: The young man's name? Celestial Forge 4.6
Chapter Text
“Gettin’ paid to shit, gettin’ paid to wipe. Best forty-five minutes of my fuckin’ life!” I sang under my breath, music blasting, hammering my holographic keyboard in time with the melody like it was a piano. I had to get Weld onto this shit, once I met him again.
Weld. Sveta. I would find a way to help them, perhaps I could even do it myself. As it stood I could probably cut Sveta’s brain out and wire it into a cyborg body, though this was suboptimal compared to getting Amy’s help again, and I didn’t even have any idea on how to start with Weld. I could probably do the same for Hunch, Basilisk and Gully, or any other case fifty three that still had actual biology. I didn’t think I’d be hoping for it, but maybe I could get a wet tinker power of some kind.
“Fuck yeah,” I muttered along with the song. “It’s time to take a shit on the company’s dime.”
In any case, before I could drag down my mood with all of that, I had to do what I could with what I had - even with tinkertech shortening the process, even starting with the end result in my head, writing out all the programming for my Pilot AI to be able to activate the landing system in a way that made sense took a long time. It was a cybernetic implant, meant to be activated by a discerning human sense of judgment, not stuck into a robot that could only regurgitate behaviors based on trained data sets.
I spun on my chair, turning to face Pilot, and pointed at her accusingly. There was a spaghetti sauce stain on her nice uniform front where she had failed at pretending to eat because I hadn’t programmed that in, the meatball falling comically off her fork under my parents encouragement. “Shut up, Pilot.”
Pilot smiled politely, triggering my uncanny valley response. I had the artificial skin cooking, but the process was long and delicate to get the polyurethanes to merge with the collagen correctly without destroying it. There was a surprising amount of waste product, too, when you had to use something to treat chemicals a certain way and it couldn’t be reused after the reaction occurred.
The amount of chemical and material waste in all tinkering wasn’t something I really thought of before I started. Sometimes it was as easy as just wiring something together and having it work for no real explainable reason, but at other times you needed to obey at least some of the laws of physics. It made me shudder to think of the amount of waste that industrial manufacturers, who always had to obey, generated.
I turned back to my work and continued. Always work, before and now. I typed and typed until the internal messaging application popped up on the screen of the actual PRT terminal with a notification that I was getting a call, just as Colin predicted, from Dragon.
I felt a thrill of excitement run through me. Dragon was the best Tinker in the world, arguably the most powerful parahuman living. I remembered that Savannah, before we had met, had gotten a call from Dragon about her engine designs that resulted in a massive improvement.
I killed the music and pulled on a headset, taking a deep breath before taking the call.
“Hello? Greg speaking.”
“Greg,” said Dragon. “Hello, thanks for taking my call. How are you?”
“Good, Dragon. Good, thanks. How’re you?”
“I’m doing well. Do you have a free moment? I’d like to ask a few followup questions about the tech review from the other day.”
“Ah, yes. Yes, of course,” I looked over my shoulder to where Pilot was standing, as though I needed to make sure she hadn’t wandered off. “I have the robot here now.”
“Wonderful, thank you. I really appreciate it. Now, in the review you said cybernetics, not robotics?”
“It’s meant to be augments for a human, I’m just adapting it into a robot frame. Can I send you a file? What’s your email?”
There was a pause before an email popped up in my official inbox. “You can reply to that one if you like.”
“Omnitool, send the Pilot AI file to [email protected] . That might take a while to send through, but hey, hey!” I continued excitedly. “Can I get your thoughts on some bigger mechs? I have designs for that too, but they’re just in my head at the moment.”
“Absolutely,” Dragon said, sounding delighted. “Before that, which model of my suits do you like best?”
“Uh…” I trailed off. “Maybe the Crowley?”
“I liked the Crowley, too,” she said. “One of my better new rapid response suits, I got some inspiration on the engines from a fairly new Tinker in New York. I’m sending the schematics as a trade.”
“Oh, shit, thanks so much.”
“Oh, it’s no problem at all,” Dragon said indulgently. “Between this and the Omnitool I figure I should pay you back. That was a very interesting piece, Colin and I spent a lot of time going over it. I especially liked the flash fabricator, even if my reconstruction was hundreds of times the size - ah, your email has just come through. Give me a moment.”
I sat and twiddled my thumbs while Dragon skimmed the file. Her email came through during this time and I forwarded it to my omnitool to start the unpacking and extraction process for the compressed file.
“Just like the Omnitool,” Dragon said suddenly. “Your power works by giving you a finished product, in information, too.”
“Yeah. It’s pretty obvious, hey? We’ve pointed out that everything has factory polish.”
“Truly,” she murmured. “This is some impressive software. Maybe even too impressive. I’m not quite following the logical leaps it uses to determine these conversational outcomes. It looks as though it simply just works, but, well, that’s Tinker’s for you. I’m sure I can understand it eventually.”
“Damn, you read fast. How are you there already?”
Dragon gave a little chuckle. “Oh, I read very fast. I have some mechanical help for collating information and such - and I can see the answer to my question at the review. Nice idea turning the conversation software to select for physical movement, too.”
“Thank you,” I beamed. The file had finished unpacking on my omnitool as we were talking and I brought it up. “Give me a second to have a look over your Crowley file.”
I started skimming, eyebrows rising at an alarmingly steady rate. I didn’t really take anything in, but I knew it was going to be impressive. “I’m going to have to have a closer look later, I can’t read that fast,” I said. “And it’ll take me a long time to do up a schematic of my mech, the thing would weigh about thirty tons. And like, would you want just the base idea for the mech or should I try add improvements?”
“If it’s going to be any bother at all, please don’t trouble yourself. If you end up making it I’d like to see it, but if you have to cut into your already limited time, then, please don’t trouble yourself.”
“I really want to make it, but even if I had all the plans ready to go I don’t have anywhere to make it, and then there’s now way to field it in a city without absolutely shredding the roads. It’s too bad, it would be so awesome,” I sighed. “But I got a lotta stuff I need to make first. I don’t even have a mobility frame done yet. Or a laser gun.”
“Always useful. Hmm… I don’t understand what you’ve done with the AI code. Ah, no, I see it now. You’ve patched together multiple disparate coding languages somehow. Is the robot called Pilot AI because the base is a mech pilot assistance program?”
How fast did this Canuck read? Was I just slow? “That’s exactly it, actually. And a diplomacy robot, but calling it Diplo sounded stupid. Do your mechs rip up the roads when you use them?”
“They do, but usually the problem I’ve been sent to fix would cause more damage than me. If I can avoid it, I will, but not all of my suits have anti-gravity generators.”
I quickly mentally calculated the power consumption costs of having one of my mechs outfitted with Chris’s antigrav panels. Way too much. The Crowley had antigrav, I was pretty sure, to let it fly at speed without being slowed by the pull of gravity, which meant that in the file Dragon had sent me was a power source good enough to run thirty tons of antigrav. While it might be too much for a mech, I was sure it wouldn’t be too expensive to run on Pilot - or myself when I built a frame.
Flight. Perhaps, finally, I could join the Triumvirate.
“And the program,” Dragon changed the subject. “You didn’t try for true artificial intelligence?”
“No way. Nah, what would I want with that. Like, I could, but then I’d have to be responsible for it and, nah. I reckon this is better, it can alter its subroutines but only toward specific outcomes matched against behavioural models, so it will never gain self awareness. Once it hits that hard cap, it’s done. I’ve got some ideas about other functionalities, but nah. Y’know?”
“I know. It must be obvious, but I have various programs assisting me as well. Perhaps, as with mechs, we can correspond on that as well. I don’t often meet Tinker’s with as much breadth as myself. Cybernetics, robotics, computer systems, artificial intelligence, medicine,” Dragon laughed. “I’m good at taking other tinkertech and working with it, but I can’t make heads or tails of that one. It may as well be magic to me.”
“I’m pretty sure it is just straight up magic.”
“Well, thank god for magic. I know you’ve made a lot of lives easier by going and handing them out for free.”
I shrugged despite the fact that this was an audio only call. “They’re free for me to make. PRT and the Protectorate cover all the materials.”
“Still, you should be proud. You’re good.”
I felt myself blush. Damn, did it feel good to have Dragon tell me that. I was good, I was trying all the time. What had I done wrong recently?
I wanted to wait until the artificial skin was done and attached before going back out in public as Technomage. If Pilot was going to be an integral part of my image I wanted her to look her best. I had done just enough to cover the only visible skin she had, her head, and now that I was using the material the robot body was designed to be used with, it had ironed out a lot of the uncanny valley feel. With a new wig of printed polymer hair, chemically treated to look and feel like the real thing, and a new, unstained by spaghetti, uniform, we were ready to go.
My pinks neons pulsed at a low frequency against the inky black of my uniform, Jo talking to Pilot as we walked through the hospital and a fat sack of pills sitting with a comfortable weight in my handmade, and definitely masculine, sci-fi wizard themed messenger bag.
They were talking about watercolours, which it seemed was Jo’s hobby, and that meant that my social code was working properly. The skin upgrade was doing some heavy lifting, because since installing it Pilot was hitting the models of physiological reaction in others much more consistently highlighting the importance of being pretty.
I briefly considered the mechanics of making myself a new face, but the thought of having to manually cut my old one off and then take immunosuppressants for the rest of my life to stop my body rejecting it made my stomach churn.
“I like this one,” Jo had her phone out, showing Pilot a painting she had done of her cats.
“That’s so good!” Pilot exclaimed, pointing at the screen. “How did you get such fine strokes for the hair?”
“A cat’s whisker,” Jo replied proudly. “Paint hair with hair.”
“That’s so smart. I’ve never painted before, you make it look like a lot of fun.”
I tuned their conversation out and instead busied myself smiling at every look Pilot got. Fools! They didn’t even know it was a lifeless lump of plastic and metals. I could, because my omnitool was recording, even map the exact amount of time and direction of the stares, and from whom. I was going to judge it based on context to see if I should make fun of her later for it, but I really wanted to see how Amy would react.
We trod the familiar path to let the hospital know we were here as planned, and handed over the majority of the pills, keeping just enough so that I could get some good publicity by handing them out personally. At that point this was just a secondary concern compared to Pilot’s first real test in public.
I’d done test runs with the gang, and the PRT employees, but everyone knew that they were talking to a robot there. Here it had been decided that the fact, while it wouldn’t be expressly hidden, would be not communicated to gauge public reaction to the robot to judge its suitability for potential solo missions.
A distant prospect if it ever was decided, if a second robot was made, there had been some interest in a piece of hardware that had no workers rights and could grind public relations work without pause for rest outside of recharging batteries, and potentially do it better than any living human.
I distributed the pills as usual to the most optically favourable candidates before retiring to go hunt Amy down. Pilot wasn’t required to stick by my side, given how fast the body was capable of running, partly to sell the illusion that I hadn’t made a super hot robot which apparently wouldn’t poll well for me. Because of the implication.
I still kept tabs with my omnitool, regardless.
“This isn’t my real face,” Pilot said for the five hundredth time tonight, with unfailing good humour, and technical truth, gesturing to her gorgeous mug after being asked why she wasn’t wearing a mask. “So I don’t need to wear a mask.”
There was some buzz around there being no press conference introducing such a spectacular new cape to the roster, but I’d programmed in lines approved by the PR team for that. ‘Just a temporary thing.’ ‘Protectorate affiliated and approved.’ ‘Here to help.’
“Hey, Amy!” I found her in her usual routine of finishing up clearing out the terminal patients. I gave her a jaunty wave. She looked like shit again. “Been ages. What’s up?”
“Oh, Techmage? Hi,” she blinked blearily. “Where were you?”
“Power problems and stuff, been building solutions. Did you get my Facebook message?”
“Uh,” Amy looked at me like I was a fucking idiot. “I don’t use Facebook.”
“I figured, but I just didn’t have your number. I wanted to see if you wanted to hang out.”
“Maybe,” she hedged without really looking at me. “I’m usually pretty busy.”
“That’s cool, wanna trade numbers?” I could tell she didn’t want to, but I was already getting out my phone and, reluctantly, she ferreted around in a pocket for hers. “Are you doing anything the next couple of weekends?”
“Like a date?” She couldn’t have looked more apprehensive.
“As friends,” I sighed. Come on, don’t make me say it. “But if you want a date I could introduce you to someone.”
“I’m fine.”
“Hah, wait ‘till you see ‘em. She’s here, too, by the way, I’ll call her up.”
“Are you calling me gay,” Amy said in a way that made me want to throw her off a building. “Because I don’t want to go out with you?”
“Absolutely,” I flipped my visor up, challenging her stupid shit test. “I’m just petty like that.”
Amy gave me a narrowed-eyed frown as though deciding how best to get rid of me, but I tapped my wrist and brought up the cool, blue screen and called Pilot back on a low priority timer. She would disengage with whatever conversation she was having within a minute and return to me.
“Why would you even want to be my friend?”
“I like your vibe. You remind me of another friend I had, before she went away.”
“My vibe ?” Her tone was incredulous, because we both knew her vibe was awful and that she was awful.
“You seem like a chill bro.”
Amy’s face twisted in some obscure complex of emotion, but I could see, because I knew how to look, that she wanted to believe me. She wanted someone to come and save her, anyone, to give her an excuse, any excuse. Anything to take the fight off her shoulders, to give her some peace, if only for a moment.
Right on cue Pilot strode up to us, briskly, looking like she should have been walking next to Legend. “Hello.”
Amy stared, glanced at me, then stared some more. “Hi.”
“Hey, Pilot. This is Pilot. This is Amy.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Amy,” Pilot held out her hand, gloved in a bespoke ivory pleather, which Amy shook.
“Yeah, same.” There was a brief, awkward pause where Amy seemed lost for words.
“I’ve only heard good things, I assure you,” Pilot smiled a smile trained on a hundred hundred subjects. “What did you call me for?”
“To meet Amy,” I purred. The AI took that data and referenced it against its objectives, and it was lucky I had the omnitool from which to copy and paste a human level of language understanding across or I may have been stuck at base for months before I could get to this point.
Pilot turned back to Amy and initiated gettingtoknowyou.exe. “Why don’t we all go and chat somewhere? I understand that Technomage has a roof key.”
While my outer expression was cool and unruffled, my internal expression was that one gif of the Grinch smiling. I’d let this play for a minute or two, then ask Amy how realistic my robot was. We headed on up, Pilot going over the basics of offering some tidbit of tangentially relevant information from her Backstory, and prompting something from Amy. My thoughts full of sinister, malintent, the hand descended.
I raged, I struggled against the cold void. The cloak of three hundred and thirteen stars nothing to me but blinding. I was making headway, I could tell, that as time was taken from me I gained power in this realm. It was not enough, not today. The pen found my skull and wrote Micromanipulators in lines of fire.
Chapter 118: Cut open my skull 5.1
Chapter Text
Amy Dallon
I closed the door behind us as we came out onto the roof. It wasn’t too cold despite being nearly nine, if there was one good thing about Brockton it was that the weather was nice. It wouldn’t have mattered if it was, wrapped up as I was in my smothering robe. I perked up as the siren of an ambulance whirred below us as it pulled up to Emergency. I shouldn’t be here.
I looked ahead to Greg, Technomage. He had an angle. They always had an angle. Everyone wanted something. He was looking at me with a stupid expression, as though suffering a sudden bout of extreme heartburn, and next to him stood a woman so strangely beautiful, and so unfailingly nice, that it must have come from a power. A power that let her change her face, and maybe a power like Dean’s that gave her superhuman empathy. Whatever it was, as nice as it was, it had to be fake.
The Elite, maybe? Who could say.
“Oh,” Greg suddenly said. “It’s you. Where are we?”
I tilted my head. Was he trying to be funny.
“Panacea, why are we on the hospital roof? Who are you?” Greg looked at his friend, who he had introduced me to. Oh, this was the thing, right? The thing he said would happen? Split personality?
“I’m Pilot,” said Pilot, flashing Greg a very pretty smile that showed perfectly straight, perfectly white teeth. “It’s nice to meet you.”
Greg gave Pilot an uncomfortable, apprehensive look. “I don’t know you. Where do you come from? What’s your power?”
My jaw, that had slowly been dropping, hung slack. I almost felt like I shouldn’t be seeing this, like I had walked in on something private.
“I have super strength,” Pilot said and flexed both arms, the red fabric of her very flattering costume creasing artfully. “What’s your power?”
Greg simply looked increasingly disgruntled, then turned back to me. “Who is she? Why is she here?”
“Fuck if I know,” I muttered. Something about the difference of his expression made my skin crawl.
He scoffed. “I have work to do, so you should stay out of my way,” he started walking toward the door. “And stay away from your sister.”
Something cold, cold enough to sear flesh, cold enough to make the night sky above blaze with heat in comparison started to settle from the back of my throat and drip down into my guts.
Pilot reached forward and caught him by the back of his costume’s raised collar, pulling him effortlessly toward her. “Can’t let you do that, buddy. If you try to say anything else like that it’s going to decrease your speaking permissions.”
“Get off me!” Greg struggled against her grip. “Why are you here? You shouldn’t be here, I don’t know you.”
Pilot said nothing, then turned back to me, Greg still wiggling frantically. “You shouldn’t worry about anything he says, it’s all lies meant to hurt you.”
“I should have known,” spat Greg. He went still, the pink neon trim of his costume pulsated slowly in the night. “Who do you really work for?”
I slowly backed away. Whatever this was, this wasn’t my issue to deal with. I felt bad for Greg, but if it wasn’t something I could fix then I was fucking gone . Whatever was wrong with him, wrong with his brain? It could stay with him and his implications .
“You have to help me,” Greg suddenly said, turning pleading eyes toward me. “You have to get her off me. I’m here to save the world, Panacea. I can save you, too.”
“What from?” Pilot asked conversationally, her grip still iron over his collar.
Greg ignored her, his eyes still on me. “Please, I can save everyone .”
“What the fuck,” I muttered. I took a few steps back and closed my hand around the door handle.
“The real Greg is so, so incredibly sorry you had to see this,” Pilot said. “He hopes you can still be friends.”
I yanked the door open and rushed through, Greg’s voice echoing down the stairwell after me, his raw, anguished voice spitefully demanding, “How could Panacea ever be friends with a useless piece of shit like Greg?”
Holy shit, like, for real. The cold feeling still pulled my intestines tight, all my organs contracting around the core of that implication. Don’t touch your sister . It was all lies meant to hurt me? How I wished I could believe that, there was no way it would go straight for the jugular like that if it didn’t have any way of knowing. I started taking the steps faster, jumping two at a time, my robe billowing out behind me as I ran. I hit the last landing and burst out into the hallway, still hustling. I passed doctors and nurses and patients and ignored them all. I could feel cold, clammy sweat breaking out all over my back and down my arms.
What the fuck. I got to the elevators and punched the button six times, fidgeting the whole wait. I got out my phone and checked my texts - Carol was picking me up today, but she wasn’t here yet.
hey im dun 4 the nite
The read receipt instantly appeared, but she still hadn’t replied even by the time I got down to the car park. Fuck, Carol was such a bitch. I stood under the harsh artificial lights and picked at my fingernails, at the nail bed, the cuticles, until both were red, raw and stinging on every finger. I really needed a smoke. I looked back over my shoulder to where Greg and Pilot were, presumably, still on the roof dealing with his bizarre condition.
Vicky would be endlessly fascinated as she always was with strange things to do with powers. When I told her she would probably go into some spiel and attempt to categorise things into one of the case files she liked to yap on about.
Don’t touch your sister.
I drew my arms in closer, folding them tightly, gripping at my left bicep tightly. Even if the other Greg had some power that let it exploit your fears, it was still right. It was only so long until I slipped up and did something unforgivable, it was right to shame me for it, and now other people knew. I wouldn’t be surprised if I was on a watchlist after this, I wouldn’t have been surprised if I already was.
I checked my phone again, but Carol still hadn’t replied. She was probably angry that I’d finished slightly ahead of normal, and she was right to be. Even I was angry at me. I wished she’d get here soon, I was starting to get stares. People saw the Panacea robe and all they saw was something that they wanted to make use of, a selfless saint. I flinched as I dug under my fingernail a little too far, a little crescent of blood pooling from the torn skin.
I looked to my left, sensing someone looking at me. A middle aged couple were hurrying toward me, the balding, overweight husband crading an arm in a makeshift sling through which blood had visibly soaked through in patches. I bit back a sigh.
“Panacea,” the woman cried, tear stricken, half sobbing. “Panacea, please… his arm.”
The man was holding it together pretty well considering I could see how far off at an angle his wrist was facing from his elbow.
I grit my teeth in a smile. I was off work for the day, my ride is coming, I can’t help you. “Do I have your permission to heal you?”
“Please,” the man begged, starting to unwrap his arm. I reached out and stopped him, then took his free hand.
The entirety of his body came into my awareness, every process down to the smallest cell and its chemical exchanges with its neighbours. I could read the story of every injury the man had ever had in microscopic scar residue, see every poor health choice he had made in his fifty years of life, the mind boggling lack of exercise, the nutritional deficiencies that could have been fixed with just a bit more broccoli. I pushed all that aside and focused on the compound break on both radius and ulna - a fall, probably, that was a common reason for a break like this.
The fix was rote, I barely had to pay attention. Stop the nerves from sending pain signals, start pulling resources from places the body could spare it, primarily the mineral stores in the fat cells. Have the bone and flesh shift back into place, rebuild them with the converted material. Double check to see if he wasn’t dying anywhere else, let go of his hand and tell him to eat more vegetables.
“Oh, thank you,” the man broke down, his every tear making me feel worse. “Thank you so much, we don’t have health insurance, I was sure this was going to ruin us.”
He and his partner clutched at each other, I watched them with dull eyes and a mouth fixed in a smile. It was gratifying hearing this the first few times, but now I would have much preferred if they didn’t say anything and just fucked off. It was a lot better when they were asleep. I only half listened to their tearful gratitude, nodding and making agreeing noises at appropriate times, telling them with words burned in by long hours of repetition that I couldn’t accept money, no, I really couldn’t. Please don’t try to give me anything. No, please don't.
Finally, they left, but all this did was let the line of people gathering know that it was their turn to step forward. However, before I could convince myself to repairably maim someone, Carol pulled up in the car and flicked the headlights, allowing myself to, mercifully, escape.
I got in and she pulled away from the no-park zone. “You’re finished early,” she said in her usual passive aggressive tone.
“Barely,” I muttered.
“Did something happen?”
“Nope. Normal night, as always.”
She made a noise that implied that, were it a normal night, with nothing usual, I should have finished at my normal time. I turned and looked out of the window as Carol pulled a U-turn and headed back out the exit. The hospital, and the people on the roof, loomed above me.
Greg Veder
“Ah, fuck!” I looked around wildly, but Amy had gone. “ Fuck! ”
No, this wasn’t going to happen like this. The Celestial Forge wasn’t going to ruin my life. I wouldn’t let it. I pulled forward, Pilot’s grip unclamping from my collar. At least that had worked properly.
“Where did she go?”
Pilot pointed helpfully. “Down the stairs.”
“Omnitool, pull up the latest footage.” Jesus Shitting Christ, why had I given it speaking permissions in front of anyone else? I’d wanted to see how it would react to Pilot, and if it would say anything of actual value that could be used against it, but I straight up hadn’t thought of this. I gave a command to rectify that mistake immediately. At least it hadn’t been too bad, nothing like turning up in the dead of night and telling her you’d help get her sister to cheat on her boyfriend with you.
I had to go set this right, right now. I could fix this, I just had to get to Amy and explain to her what had happened. Once I’d done that we would be friends again, just like old times. I’d get my Amy back.
“Alright, follow me, let’s go,” I quickly headed back through the door and down the stairs, but as I descended the hand followed me.
Cloaked in three hundred and twelve stars, pen of truth wielded like a spear, it descended from the heavens.
“You… don’t… fucking…” I ground out, every muscle straining against the weakness that possessed me in this realm. I raised a hand, however, too slow, just a fraction too slow, as the pen found me just before my block could make contact and burned Minor Enchantment into my soul.
Chapter 119: Cut open my skull 5.2
Chapter Text
I stood motionless in Pilot’s grip listening to the sound of my own laboured breath echoing in the helmet of my uniform. I stared at the wall as it reflected the slow pulsing of my pink neon trim. I lifted my hand and rubbed at my eyes, pushing in my fingers, gauntleted in hard omnimaterial, hard enough that it hurt.
“Greg?”
I flinched explosively as Jo said my name. Of course she would have come looking for me, I had been gone for probably an hour and Pilot would have taken my phone if the parasite had tried to use it. “Hey, Jo. Sorry I got held up.”
She looked at me with motherly pity. “Are you ok?”
“Yeah,” I said in reflex. “Where’d Amy go?”
“Home, I think. Her mother would have picked her up.”
Right, ok. Home. I knew where their house was. “I think I freaked her out, she saw it.”
“I saw it, too. Nasty thing, Pilot had to keep bleeping out what it was saying.”
“Damn, Jo, I’m sorry,” I sighed and stepped out of Pilot’s grasp where she had me once again by the easily accessible collar grip. “I got hit with two in a row. It’s never happened before.”
She stepped in and put a consoling hand on my shoulder, rubbing my pauldron soothingly. “It’ll all be ok. Why don’t you come down to the car and we’ll take you home? Isn’t it good that your robot works like it should?”
“You should focus on the positives,” chimed in Pilot, helpfully. “What went well?”
“Exactly,” Jo picked up the thread. “Focus on the positives. Let’s get you home, it’s past your clock off time.”
She led me down the rest of the stairs. If I was going to focus on the positives, I was going to focus on the fact that the night wasn’t over yet. I had to go see Amy, I had to straighten things out before the insinuation made by the stupid fucking thieving parasite made her spiral out and do something very stupid. I had to get this done tonight before she had time to fester over how much the Celestial Forge was fucking everything up.
We left the hospital and got into the car, both of us buckling up. “Jo, can you please take me to Amy’s house. I really need to explain something to her.”
I could instantly tell she didn’t want to, however this was, unfortunately, more important than that. “I don’t know where to go. I don’t think they’ll want visitors this late.”
“I know where. Jo, it’s really, really important to me that I explain things to her.” I recalled, with great pain, us almost exchanging numbers. I had been right on the brink, but I’d called Pilot in just a fraction too early. “If not, then I need to get out of the car.”
It was closer to her place from here than my house, and if I ran I could probably make it in an hour.
“I can’t let you get out of the car,” Jo’s hands flexed on the wheel anxiously, her desire to just do her job warring with her pity for me. “How long will you take?”
“Ten minutes, maybe fifteen at the most. Thank you so, so much. Omnitool, set a route for fourteen Camelot Place, Riverton, and project the map above the car console. Jo, thank you.”
Jo made a noise in the back of her throat, the kind of noise you make when you know that you’re doing the right thing but it’s inconvenient to you. Not that I could hold it against her, we were all only human after all.
“I get it,” she flicked the turn signal and indicated until the light went green, then eased left through the intersection toward Amy’s house. “Having that hang over your head. Better to fix it now.”
“The bosses won’t be mad, they love me and they love the idea of having Amy on side even more.”
“You don’t want to burn up your good will too early.”
“I will simply create more.”
The streetlights played a rhythm of light and dark against Jo’s face, highlighting and hiding her smile in turn. “You may well be able to. You’re earning it.”
“I don’t have much choice.”
“They’ve told me the projected estimates,” Jo said, then hesitated. She was quiet for a few seconds before continuing. “That in maybe three months you could be gone for most of a day at a time, and that it might stack to a day or more.”
“Yeah.”
“We all think you should take it easier,” she glanced at me, her grip tightening nervously on the wheel again. “Not work so much. Just enjoy yourself.”
“Do you think I could get Emily to sign off on hookers and blow in Vegas for my Make a Wish?”
The wheels turned in her head as she figured out who I was talking about. “You don’t need to be glib about it,” she said gently.
I looked out the window, over the neat suburban sprawl cast in artificial light. “What else can I do? A shinobi is one who endures. A hero slays monsters. A star burns.”
Jo gave me a troubled, uncomfortable look.
“People die all the time, I’m not special like that. I like doing hero work, I don’t feel forced into it. What else would I be doing? Playing Skyrim and jerking off?”
Jo coughed, clearing her throat.
“I’ve got a long time to go, yet. Who knows what I’ll be able to do in those three months. Maybe I can even do something to fix all of this.”
“Well… We hope so. Just let us know if there’s anything you need help with.”
“Thanks a million, Jo, but you guys just keep on. You’re already helping with everything I need.”
We drove in silence after that, even Pilot, who would usually follow her programming to attempt to lighten the mood, was on a respectful silence subroutine. Middle class suburbia gave way to upper middle class suburbia and the rise of the McMansion and the superfluous pool, which meant that soon we would be pulling up at Amy’s house. I wiggled into the backseat, an illegal, seatbeltless move, and started taking off my uniform - under which I was still wearing my normal clothes.
Jo pulled the car up to the curb and parked. “We’re here,” she said as I struggled to unclip the breastplate in the uncomfortable lying position I was in. I struggled with it for a moment more before divesting myself of the last of my Technomage identity, ready to face Amy as Greg.
“Alright,” I wiggled across Pilot’s lap to a mostly upright position and opened the door. “Won’t be long, thanks. Pilot, stay in the car.”
The air was cooler now, and I shivered as I came out into it. Part of it was nerves, the sick feeling in my stomach, the sound of my breath through my dry throat - what if I failed, and lost her forever? It was entirely possible, she was a nutjob and would hold a bad impression forever. I took a deep breath, clenched my fists and walked. The neatly kept path of cut white stone up to the front door stretching on for a gajillion miles, my own personal Snake’s Way. I would conquer it and meet King Kai to train for the arrival of the Sayains. Then I would kill Nappa. Yeah, that sounded nice.
I knocked on the door politely. Amy was Nappa in this scenario. I waited for about ten seconds and then knocked again, shortly after which a fairly milfy, in a severe, overbearing kind of way, Carol answered the door and looked down at me. I don’t think I’d ever actually spoken to her before.
“Hello,” I said. “I’m Greg, also Technomage the Ward. Can I talk to Amy for a minute?”
“I beg your pardon?”
Carol checked her watch, because it was late and she was probably about to go to bed, then looked up over her shoulder to where Amy’s room was, then back to me. “You’re a Ward? Why are you here?”
“I was talking to Amy at the hospital earlier tonight, I just wanted to clear something up,” I turned and pointed at the little Ford currently containing Jo and Pilot. “My PRT handler is in the car if you want to ask.”
“I think I will,” she stepped past me, giving me a side eyed frown. “What do you want to talk to her about?”
“How my power works. I think she got the wrong idea,” I followed her back down the path to the car, where she went around to the driver’s side door and waited for Jo to wind the window down. They had a brief conversation in which it was confirmed that, yes, I was Technomage, and that, yes, Jo did have her PRT badge, and that, yes, Carol could know who her supervisor was, and that, yes, that was my uniform and robot in the back seat.
The first impression of severe and overbearing went unchallenged, but Carol did finally acquiesce to my modest request and grant me an audience with Amy. I was made to stand at the doorway, not invited in, while she went and got her.
Hard to imagine that bitch popped out someone as lovely as Victoria, but now all of Amy’s complaining about her mum was completely justified in my eyes.
Amy was deposited for me onto the doorstep, though Carol did mercifully close the door between her and us.
“Your mum’s kinda a bitch,” I muttered, just soft enough that Carol, were she to have her ear to the door, wouldn't be able to hear.
Amy gave a little snort, but otherwise looked like she’d rather be anywhere else. “What is it?”
“It’s about what the thing that took over me said,” I chose my words carefully, because even as I said them Amy looked increasingly sick. “And you have to understand that it’s completely fine. Whatever you feel, it doesn’t make you disgusting, or a monster.”
Amy was completely silent, her skin a pallid, milk white under a field of freckles that stood out in sharp relief, looking at me as though I was driving a knife into her belly.
“I promise that it doesn’t,” I continued softly, leaning in slightly. “No matter how much you want to make a forgivable mistake on someone, or how much you love your sister, there’s nothing wrong with you. You’ve done nothing wrong.”
Amy continued to look at me as though I was taking her intestines out inch by inch, pulling them out like a clown handkerchief gag, and running them through my fingers.
“When the parasite said to stay away from your sister it was speaking from a place of hurting me, because I want to be your friend. To it, hurting you hurts me. It has no way of knowing anything that I don’t, and I know that you have never done anything wrong. I’m a worse person than you, and I’m great.”
Amy continued to give me a fixed, frozen look like I was removing all her organs and putting them in a bag to take home with me.
“Even if you hate yourself for what you feel, even if you’ve convinced yourself that you’re some disgusting worm, I’ll still be on your side. I can help you, and I’m not going to give up. There’s nothing inevitable about you going bad, and even if you think there is, I can be here to help you before anything goes wrong. Bro, I can help you save yourself.”
Amy just stared at me, but that was about as good as I could do. Wad blown, I waited for her response.
“What the fuck,” she eventually said in a horrified whisper.
“I’m Greg Veder,” I stuck out my hand for her to shake. “I don’t have a sister, but I used to 3D print Simurgh sex dolls and I pick my nose and eat it.”
“You said all of that,” she whispered, eyes wide and bloodshot, looking at my outstretched hand. “And you’re still going to let me touch your skin.”
“I trust you.”
Slowly, hesitantly, Amy took my hand and as she did so the hand of god descended.
“You CUNT! ” I howled into the void, screamed it up at the heavens as the hand, pen of sparkling stars and all, shot toward me. I moved, feeling like every muscle would tear, pulling myself apart at the seams as the hand, attached to a bronzed skinned arm that rippled with heavenly muscle, got ever closer. I pulled myself into a boxing guard. I knew where it was going to strike.
I slipped to the side and threw a punch. The tip of the pen, bigger than most houses, ripped through my cheekbone, continuing on past my head, pushing me off center. Timed perfectly my uppercut came through just before the fingers of the hand could smash into me. My punch caught the tip of the middle finger and the hand flinched, the immense pen falling from its grasp.
The hand ducked to grab it as it fell, catching it, before retreating, almost embarrassed, almost affronted, back through the void in the heavens.
The two things that would have made me happiest in the whole world happened simultaneously.
This was it.
I won.
Chapter 120: Cut open my skull 5.3
Chapter Text
“The fuck are you so happy about?”
I looked up into Amy’s brown eyes in wonder, seeing in them the rest of my life unfolding in front of me in an unbroken chain where I would always be myself.
“I refused power,” my voice broke. “For the first time…” I sighed dreamily and with great relief. “But I’m just as happy that you took my hand.”
“That’s kinda gross,” she muttered, still looking sick, pale and freckly. “Ok, we can be friends. You can go now.”
I let go of her handshake and thumped my fist twice against my chest, over my heart. “I’m sorry it had to be this way, but I gotchu, fam.”
Amy, still looking like she might throw up, gave me a tight grimace and retreated back into the house. Now, to the undiscerning eye it might seem as though Amy couldn’t wait to be rid of me, but I knew better. The first, and biggest, step had been taken and it could never be unmade. To the undiscerning eye it might seem as though I was dumping a lot on Amy, and just expecting her to carry the karmic weight accrued by a life she had never lived. To someone so blind that they could not even begin to perceive Olympus Mons I might have seemed as though I were a creep, a weirdo, overly fixated on a girl who had only just met me.
I was unconcerned.
I knew what was best for Amy, and no mistake. She needed someone with a firm hand to hold the angle grinder of friendship, to ignore her screams and cries while the spines she had grown to keep the world at arms length were scoured away, to wait patiently until the bleeding stopped.
I felt as though I was about to molt out of my skin from sheer happiness, I barely noticed that I had gone back down the white stone pathway and gotten back into the car.
“Looks like things went well?” Jo asked brightly, infected by the raw emotion I was putting out.
“If only you knew how good things really are.”
She laughed, happy that I was happy, but I needed to tell Emily about this right away. I was free, I could beat it. I could have my life back.
As usual, and by usual I mean the one example I had to go off of, the items granted by my power made no sense. When I got home I found a pair of elbow length gloves lying innocently on my bed, dark grey with a pattern in an off white colour that was vaguely skeletal. I knew what they did, as some intrinsic part of the power, but even as I scanned them with the omnitool I hadn’t the slightest fucking clue how they actually converted human neural-nerve activity into controlled movements down to a single micron.
They simply just did, which was based, and perhaps, even more based, I could make magic items. Boots that let you walk on walls, or always fit. Cups that always kept your drink warm. Real mood rings. Paper planes that would fly for world record breaking distances on a single lazy throw. Fun, I knew, was going to be had.
I was at a point where the entire world was opening up for me - I simply had to choose a direction and move. It was time to summon the council.
The alchemy lab was pleasantly cool as usual, lit by glowing stones of unknown origin, the vague blue/white light giving off the rough, dark stone interiors a grey colour, glinting off the glassware and the pill furnace which was still chugging away at a batch.
My clone potions sat in their nook and I picked one up, swigging down the cool blue liquid in one gulp, feeling the tingle as it settled in my belly and my other me’s stepped out of me.
“Bro,” I said. “Have you lost weight?”
The clone patted our steadily shrinking chub. “I dunno, have you?”
We all regarded each other with identical, cheesy grins. “Ok, so! We’re so fucking back. Thoughts?”
“The world is still ending in twenty years or less.”
“Shut up, dickhead,” two of us said.
“Just sayain, we need to prioritise.”
“Prioritise my dick.”
“We can do that, too.”
“The Simurgh’s still coming at the end of Feb, and Leviathan on the fifteenth of May.”
“I do not appreciate you dredging up these thoughts I’ve been trying to ignore.”
“We have to do something.”
“Fffffucking what ?”
“We could make a laser core offa one of the big robots. If we do nothing else for two months we could have it ready to give to Colin when he goes. Give him some clone potions, he gets a couple of shots.”
I looked at the offending clone in disgust. He might be right, but, still, fuck that guy. “I don’t think it will do jack shit. You think we can make something that hits harder than Eidolon? Legend? Simurgh rinses them on the reg, laser core isn’t doing fuck all.”
“You’re such a little bitch.”
“Fuck me, too, buddy.”
“Ladies,” said the other Greg. “Don’t fight. Forget about all that, let's focus on problems we can solve with a laser core. We can one shot any villain in the city with one. We should clean our room first.”
“I hate the villain and hero dynamic,” said one. “It’s so fucking stupid. Where did it even come from?”
“Shut up, it’s fun. It makes even hardcore gangbangers put on a mask and a show.”
The clone started to reply scathingly, but they vanished before he could refute my point, leaving me disgruntled and alone. In a huff I went back out into my bedroom. “Things are going to be fine, Pilot,” I told her as she stood in the corner, next to the power outlet, charging cord plugged in. “I don’t have to fix everything. Tell me I’m right.”
“You’re absolutely right,” Pilot gave me a beautiful smile and I immediately felt a lot better.
Free from the Damoclean terror of gaining powers I could make myself my priority for a while. My stuff, for me. I could remake all of my clothes to always magically perfectly fit. I could rebuild my PC to be able to handle Skyrim with every custom mod pack I could program. I could begin work on my mobility frame, and it was like, ‘finally’.
The micromanipulators were really weird to wear, it was absolutely bizarre to be able to wiggle my fingers exactly one micron up and down, and not a single one more. The artificial muscles and servos were some of the most advanced, miniaturized, technology I had ever seen. Even Colin mightn’t have anything this good.
Which was why I had made more. Mostly, anyway. Almost all of the micromanipulators could be printed from omnimaterial, right down to the incredibly precise artificial muscle. There was still all of the actual circuitry and such that couldn’t be, Chris and Colin would have to make that part themselves, but most of the work could be skipped for them - something that Chris was currently marveling at.
He kept turning the off-brand micromanipulators over in his hands, pulling them on and taking them off again. “This is so weird, it’s seriously driving me nuts. I haven’t been able to think about anything but your tech for weeks.”
“Is it that weird?”
Chris pulled his currently unusable micromanipulators off and slapped them on the table. “Ever since you sent us the omnitool stuff. This itch in the back of my head. I kind of really want to get a hold of the chip of Drag-armsium powering it so that I can see how it works.”
“I’d give it to you, but I wouldn’t be able to put it back together again.”
This may be bad, actually. I hadn’t considered that, our powers being from the big alien, just as my power was influencing me that Chris’s might be nudging him. Instead of making him more of a violent, maladjusted weirdo like powers normally did to people, it might be steadily making him more likely to saw my arm off to get at my omnitool.
Could my plan to give everything I had to help the Protectorate fight the losing battle against supercrime have been miscalculated? Surely not, I was using power from the same source as everyone else, was I not? I was.
“One day,” he said, glancing covetously at my wrist where the omnitool now sat hidden under the micromanipulators. “I’m happy you fixed your problem, though. That whole thing was deeply unsettling.”
“Yeah, I’m just glad it’s over. I was talking with myself about it last night… hey, do you ever feel like you should be doing more about, like, the Endbringers and shit?”
Chris looked at me, expression concerned, but said nothing - for what was there to say to that?
“The Simurgh is coming up in February, and then Leviathan in May-”
Chris looked wigged out for a second before concluding that the times were probably correct, since the Endbringers operated in a semi-predictable schedule.
“I was thinking, like, even my best laser cannon can’t really do much to hurt them. What do we even do?”
“I don’t think about it,” he replied, downcast. “What good does it do? We’re only fifteen. Don’t look for reasons to be sad.”
“Real,” I said. “And profound.”
I should be happy. I was friends with Amy. I was going to live. This was all that stupid clone’s fault, that because it didn’t have powers it had decided to crab-bucket me into being as miserable and pathetic as it was. I was happy, and I should be looking for reasons to be happy.
“I guess.”
“Back to happy stuff, then,” I smiled and pulled my elbows back, eliciting several satisfying pops from my spine. “Do you want to see the stuff for one of her mechs Dragon sent me?”
“Dude, she sent you mechs?”
“For the robot,” I indicated Pilot, who was standing quietly in the corner like a particularly beautiful mannequin.
“Of course I want to see. Pull it out.”
I, of course, pulled it out. We both admired the subtle complexity, the tasteful streamlining of the design, oh my god, she must have had Colin collaborate.
“I can’t decide whose anti-grav I like better,” I said, bringing up that part of the design in full three dimensional holographic layout. “Yours or hers. Hers is better for things bigger than a car, but they could never do something so sleek as your hoverboard.”
“It’s Dragon’s . My efficiency is terrible compared to this, there’s no way I could build anti-grav strong enough to lift a car.”
“Yeah, but you don’t always want to lift a car. I’m putting yours on my mobility frame if I can figure out how.”
“Please don’t steal the one thing I have going for me,” Chris groaned, taking his face in both hands and pulling his skin taut for a moment. “How are you going to put it on a frame? It’s too big.”
“I can minaturise it,” I said guiltily.
“Right. It makes me think, though,” he tapped a finger on his cheek. “Scaling up the size of my suit would let me fit the paneling on. Sucks, though. I always wanted to have armour as slick as Armsmaster’s.”
“His armour’s so good. I remember once he…” I trailed off. I had never fought Colin, here.
“He?”
“I don’t remember. Anyway, back on to happy things. I reckon I can go back to school, now. I kind of miss it.”
“You say that, but you’ll be sick of it again in a week.”
“Maybe. But at least I can go around without that thing following me everywhere,” I pointed to Pilot. “What should I do with it? I’m thinking about having it concierge the building.”
“Just have it walk around the main street doing all the talking points we have to on our publicity patrols. Director Pigot would probably like that.”
“Good idea. Hey, Pilot, do you want to go out and interact with the sweaty public all day?”
Pilot smiled her beautiful smile. “I love talking to people.”
She was going to get eaten alive.
Chapter 121: Cut open my skull 5.4
Chapter Text
After a tedious meeting with Emily where I had to declare, under oath, that, no, I wasn’t lying and that, yes, I had figured out how to reject powers. How this actually functioned I wasn’t sure, but I knew, somewhere in the very depths of my soul, that I had done it.
I had taken a gobby spit in the eye of this ‘Celestial Forge’. Even thinking the name brought a sneer to the tone, the insecure arrogance of it to claim a smattering of powers that, collectively for the twenty I had, might have made me able to, in time, be as great as the single one Dragon had. It would have been fine, were the Celestial Forge self aware enough to play the bit, to understand that it was scum like the rest of us, that you could only play at that level of grandeur as a joke unless you were actually capable of backing it up.
It was as though it were tailor made to make me mald, which it probably was. Fucking aliens reading my memories or some shit. Despite my irritation at my clone the other day I really did have to get started on something - I wanted to talk to Cauldron.
The issue with this was, ‘how in the fuck?’ Could I just email Alexandria and be like, ‘hey, bro. about that cauldron conspiracy? i want in,’? I mean, I could. I definitely could. I had her email, I could do it right now, even.
I picked at my pillow case, the Menma one that definitely needed changing, in thought. Even without my Dark Smoke cred it might go well enough, now. My pill distribution was still up and going, and I could only assume it was making a lot of people happy even if the pills themselves didn’t do much - Amy could still outdo my entire production for a week in terms of healing output by herself in an evening. I could probably make the next step up in terms of healing pills, but I didn’t think the PRT would be eager to source the period blood of pure young maidens for it.
I figured I could trust them enough to collab. What were they going to do? Cut open my skull for all my juicy secrets?
Original Alexandria promised me that they wouldn’t.
I would do it, I decided. However, I would do it after Christmas. It was coming up within just a few short days and I wanted to have a nice time with my parents, since now we could head up to Portland to see my weird hippy grandparents. Yes, that would do, I would give myself a much needed break from it all and come back in strong with the Cauldron crew at the start of twenty eleven.
New year.
New me.
Greg: Next Generations.
It was the new year and I was feeling like a million bucks. Christmas had been great, I’d handmade everyone in the family a little something, holding back on my power expression of course, because obviously if I made something that looked like a million bucks people would get suspicious, and gotten in turn a Lynx Africa shower kit from my grandparents, and a fifty flavour jelly bean box from my parents. Better than good, life was great. I’d sent that email and today I was heading back to school for the first time in what felt like a fucking lifetime.
It was nostalgic as I got out of the car, no Pilot hovering over my shoulder, hugged my parents goodbye and walked up the graffitied, gum speckled steps of school, the faint scent of cigarettes and un-deoderised armpits wafting in the crisp morning air, the loitering dipshits trying to look tough, all the short skirts - I smiled.
I was in tenth grade again, no longer a freshie, and even with the potential lost nine months I was still at the right age for it. Life was going to be good again.
I took my time wandering around to my locker, savouring the dreary, grey interior of Winslow, the sharpie marked windows covered in slurs of all colours and practice gang tags, the jostle of people who would elbow you in the head if it got them a second of extra time for where they were going.
Chris was right, I wanted to leave already. Humming to myself a jaunty j-pop tune I reached my locker and filled it with all my new textbooks that I probably could have almost recited to you when I was a gamer, if indeed that was really real.
I closed the locker and turned to look at all the people who had bothered to come on the first day back of the year - I vaguely recalled Sophia threatening me with something if I were to be here today, as if her tribulations were anything I hadn’t already ascended past with deeds writ in heaven’s falling stars.
Someone approaching caught my eye, in the way that people do when you instinctively know that they’re walking for you. The secretary or something? A teacher’s aide, maybe? A late twenties woman in a pale purple cardigan.
“Hello,” I said cheerfully.
“Hi,” she returned my smile. “Did you have a nice Christmas break?”
She said this as though I knew who she was, and she knew who I was. “I did! We went and saw my grandparents. How about yours?”
“My husband and I caught up with the in-laws,” she laughed and gave me a little eye roll as though, just as promised by sit-coms, she hated her husband’s parents. “Would you be able to come to the office? You’ve been given leave for first period for something.”
She said ‘something’ with raised eyebrows and an implication, and I knew all about implications. It was probably just Blackwell wanting to talk to me about my schizo alien episodes being over. “Sure.”
She led me back to the office building and over to a meeting room of some kind. All the blinds were drawn and the secretary knocked on the door politely. “A PRT agent is here to talk to you,” she said in a hushed whisper. “They said to just walk in. Just get to class whenever you’re ready, ok?”
“Easy, thank you.”
We traded another smile and she left. I turned to the door and casually opened it. I stepped inside and the agent, who I didn’t recognise, was sitting casually on one of the office chairs around a central desk, one leg cocked up, browsing something on her phone. She was kinda hot, rocking the pantsuit look. She looked up at me and as she angled her hand to turn her phone off I fancied I could see that one meme of Weld he hated so much.
“Hey,” she smiled and I instantly liked her. You know that feeling you get when you meet someone and you can just tell that you click instantly?
“Hey,” I bounded forward to shake her hand and she swung her leg off her knee, turning the motion into a standing one in one smooth move. We shook hands, it was magnetic. “What does the PRT want?”
“Oh, I’m not actually from the PRT,” she said. “I’m Agent Black, here on behalf of Alexandria.”
“ Oh , sweet. You guys work fast.”
“We do, there was some weird shit in that email that didn’t make much sense,” Ms. Black spun her hat around by the inner rim. “Tripped some flags.”
“It was code,” I looked over my shoulder at the door. “Can I, like, talk normally?”
Agent Black nodded genially. “We can talk about Cauldron, no one is going to hear.”
I sighed in relief. “Great. Cool. So you know, obviously, about the alien going to blow up the planet?”
She gave a little ‘go on’ nod.
“Well it’s like, ‘I’m walkin’ here!’,” we both laughed. “So how much do you know about what I know, specifically? You’d be one of their Thinkers, right?”
She nodded and gave me a cool, confident smirk. “One of the best, good enough to know everything you know.”
I gave a little excited giggle. “Ok, so, like,” I started counting off on my fingers. “Why you made case fifty threes. The successful vials for your capes. The whateverminus program. Society collapsing in less than twenty years. Yeah?”
“You’re from a different timeline,” Agent Black told me. “You know all of this because you had to live it. Alexandria trusted you with it then, so we’re going to trust you with it now.”
I tilted my head, mind spinning. I took a really, really deep breath. “Holy fuck, I thought maybe it never happened, like it was all some schizo precog dream cooked up by an Echidna clone of Coil, but, nah, it was all real? I’m not crazy?”
“It was all real, Greg. You lived it, you went back in time. It wasn’t all for nothing, every moment of it had meaning. Even now, with what’s happening to you.”
“Do you have any idea on what’s happening to me? Why?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve been a parahuman for as long as anyone could, and I’ve never seen anything like this. Time travel is real, the entities are capable of it as far as we understand, but it’s expensive - too expensive for this to make sense. It could be possible, that when you were fighting Echidna, some strange broken power interaction sent you back into the past, but it doesn’t explain the Celestial Forge.”
“That fucking alien cunt,” I sunk my head into my hands. “Am I gonna die, bro?”
“I think,” she said, nodding. “If you make it to the end. You should talk to it more, find out what it means by saving the world.”
“What’s the point? It comes from the big alien anyway, it’s their agent. It just wants to ruin my life before it kills everyone.”
“Even so, nobody has ever spoken to the power source before.”
“Nobody will again,” I replied, weapons grade copium pulsing through my veins with every beat of my burning heart. “I refuse. I won't let it kill me.”
Agent Black nodded thoughtfully. “Even if it would save the world?”
“I know Cauldron does some bad shit,” I said, looking her dead in the eyes - icy blue to my baby. “But I’m not doing that. I know how much good you’ve done, despite everything, that you’re fighting…” I tried to remember what Alexandria had said, on the roof of the hospital. “Basically a god for the fate of trillions of lives - but I’m friends with Sveta and Weld.”
A sad, almost distant expression came across her face. I could see her thinking I was naive, a child, that she had once been just like me and the cruel reality of the situation had ground out every ounce of innocence she’d ever had. I could see her reading that thought out of my mind, or whatever it was she was doing, she knew that I knew that she knew that I knew.
“I understand,” she said, and I knew that she really, truly got me. Agent Black regarded her hat for a moment, a slick black trilby, before setting it gently on her head. “Hey, why don’t we take a walk?”
“You have something to show me that you think will change my mind.”
Agent Black smiled again. “Door me.”
Chapter 122: Cut open my skull 5.5
Chapter Text
Reality unfolded before me, a perfectly rectangular cutout section of time and space, sunlight streaming in from the other dimension along with the cold crisp air of a winter morning and the scent of an alien world. I gaped in naked awe.
Marked out along the previously plain wall was a doorway into another universe, a world of grass that glimmered orange and gold under a crusted layer of frost, trees more like mushrooms capped in foliage so dense it looked like one solid grey mass and a white sky that stretched out over a jagged mountain range - and the smell, something spiced and bitter all at once.
Agent Black shot me a cheeky little grin and jerked her head toward the portal, then stepped through it as though she had done this a hundred hundred times. Heat seared my brain as I watched her step through, footsteps crunching on the thin layer of ice, and I hastened to follow. Gooseflesh raised on my bare arms as I stepped out of Brockton’s mild winter and into wherever this was.
The air tingled as I breathed it, the feeling invigorating. I caught up to agent Black and we strode side by side as I marveled at everything around me.
“Bro, this is fucking sick.”
“This is earth, one of trillions of earths. The people who live here call it something that, in their language, means ‘dirt’, too,” she stared soulfully out into the distance. “It’s hard to explain to people what is really at stake when we say ‘fighting for humanity’s survival’, the sheer scale of it. The true number of lives. When you spoke to Alexandria, last time, she told you that we don’t even expect to win, because when you said we were fighting a god you weren’t far off. Not just our world, of Bet, but Aleph, Shin, Gimel, Tau-He,” she gestured at the great expanse of ruddy grass. “More than you could ever name, all could be gone in an instant.”
“If,” she continued, fixing me with a hard, yet kind, stare. “If the entity catches on. It ignores Cauldron because of circumstances so infinitesimally improbable that you would hardly believe it if I told you, but even that could all end without us ever realising that we slipped up, or even if we make all the right moves, because the thing we’re fighting against has the power to unmake and remake the world before we could even hold a single strategy meeting.”
We walked in silence for a moment, the strange song of alien birds mingling with the growing sounds of ocean swell and a rising salty wind.
“That, too, is hard to understand. The sheer scale of what we’re up against. I don’t think even we know the full truth. When a parahuman uses their power you look at them and think the entity has the same, but you couldn’t be more wrong. Parahumans are born from it, but our powers are crippled children it limits as it hands them out. Even Legend, who can fly at speeds approaching light, or Alexandria who is fully invulnerable, or Eidolon who’s individual powers can be as strong as even the strongest capes - all of these are the neutered versions. Even Scion, who seems stronger than all combined, is nothing but the barest fraction of its power.”
The sound of ocean swell grew stronger as we approached a cliff face, the dark red grass giving way to darker rock and the sheer face giving way to wine dark seas tossed with lines of white. That wasn’t a fanciful description, the waters were closer to purple than anything else. Down, far down, on a stretch of clear land coming off a cove in the cliffs was a village dotted with tiny smudges of people moving about to and from little boats.
“This was where Steva lived.”
I stared down at the village grimly as Agent Black continued to speak.
“What do you think of when you think of human civilisation?”
I knew it was a question I wasn’t going to like the answer to. “I can only think of America.”
Agent Black nodded gently, one hand placed on top of her hat to stop it from blowing away. “Earth Bet is the universe where we’ve had the most overt action, America in particular. The Protectorate, the PRT, both institutions we forced to happen. Most other countries we couldn’t reach without spreading ourselves too thin.”
“Most other countries are barbarous shitholes run by warlords.”
She made a soft noise of agreement. “Let me show you something else. Door me.”
Behind us another rectangular slice of reality cut out, showing a new landscape. The sky was dark there, the beginnings of a thunderstorm. We stepped through, out onto the top of a tower that looked down over all a city that sparkled with gas lamps in the twilight. The architecture was almost brutalist, every building made of sharp lines and thick blocks. A distant strike of lightning lit up the sky for a brief second, a soft crack echoing some seconds after it.
“Parahuman Feudalism,” agent Black began, her voice being taken away by the harsh wind of the growing storm. “The same that props up all those other countries, gives them anything approaching stability, is going to become the new normal. Part of the Terminus Project is to explore alternate power structures for when society collapses, and this is the answer we’ve been shown time and time again as the only thing parahumans will move toward if we’re not stopping them.”
I turned to face her properly. “You invented the cape dynamic.”
“You don’t want to picture the world you live in if we hadn’t done that,” she gave me a wry smile that spoke of a death toll in the hundreds of millions. “That template prevented complete societal collapse, it was a code of behaviour that people already understood and were readily willing to accept. It doesn’t, and never, exist here. This is Dran-Pai, a city in a location close to where Indonesia is on your planet, and for twenty years it has been held by those with the ‘Mandate of Heaven,’ it roughly translates into. An ugly, short and brutish rule, but it's doing better than most. Without us, this is about as good as it gets, and the number of parahumans will only increase. Door me.”
Another cut out section of space, this time to a sunnier location in a field of flowers I had no way of recognising. I continued to shiver even as the alien sun hanging in an aquamarine sky warmed me.
“You already understood most of this, you know just how bad things really are.”
I really wished I didn’t. I don’t know what I expected when I emailed Alexandria, but it wasn’t really this. “I’m still not changing my mind on case fifty threes. If Amy and I could fix Sveta, you could have found a way.”
“We could have,” Agent Black agreed easily. “We could even start now, but in term of resources we can spend we’re willing to go to whatever hell we deserve for not making things right. It might not even matter, in the end.”
In my imagination a trillion overlaid earths exploded with the same kitschy special effects as Alderan in Star Wars. And yet. Even so. “If you’re not willing, then I will.”
Agent Black gave me a wide, encouraging smile. “Could you now, with your powers?”
I took a deep breath and rubbed my eyes. I could make incredible prosthetic bodies that would never break down or fail, but that wouldn’t truly fix things. Sveta deserved to live in a body with all the joys and tribulations of human sensation, Weld even more so, if I could even help him as I was. “No.”
“How many more would it take? How many do you have left?”
“I don’t know. Hundreds.”
“How many before you could become as powerful as Eidolon? More powerful?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what the powers are.”
“But you think,” Agent Black’s cool blue eyes bored into mine. “I can tell. You think you’ll have the power of a god. Hundreds of powers, you have twenty. This is outside the current scope of what we know of parahumans, Greg. If it turned out you were the silver bullet we needed to win, would you?”
Would I die to save trillions of lives? Would I let the alien parasite take over my life if it meant that everyone else could live? Should I let the alien kill me so it could save the world in my place?
“No.”
She reached over and patted me gently on the head. “To endure, to slay monsters, to burn - you can make the world golden bright, but the wheel will turn regardless of your efforts.”
I raised a hand to brush well tears away. I hadn’t read Faust, but watching Madoka was close enough. “It’s not a devil you can make a deal with. What makes you think that the agent of the entity that takes over me will ever do anything but destroy the world?”
“I don’t,” Agent Black said simply, letting her hand fall from my head to her side. “But in a situation so hopelessly grim as this, even what looks like a noose might be a lifeline.”
I sucked in a wet breath. “The idea that that thing deserves my life more than me… that something like it could be better than me, after everything, after all I’ve done, after how much I’ve changed - that some higher power just decides for me that I’m no good, that I’d be better off gone, replaced, by that ! I can’t stand it. What makes it better than me? What am I doing wrong that makes something like that more palatable? It’s more powerful?”
“Were it me I would make the sacrifice in a heartbeat.”
I looked at her and saw a situation even more hopelessly grim.
“That’s pretty sad, bro.”
She shrugged, an Atlasean amount of weight shifting with the movement. “It is what it is.”
I was quiet for a moment. “How long have you been fighting?”
“Over thirty years.”
I thought about the pain I had endured over the last year. If I had been doing that for thirty I might have made the sacrifice, too. I shivered again, though the sun was warm and the scent of flowers pleasant.
“I’ll take you back, now,” she said. “Just know that the fight is coming, and win, or lose, you know what side to take. Door me.”
The door between worlds opened again, showing the side office of Winslow High. We stepped through, out of the sun and into the cold winter of Bet’s American Brockton Bay, and the doorway vanished into thin air.
“Keep doing what you’re doing, Greg,” Agent Black took a card out of a pocket sewn onto the inside of her blazer’s breast and handed it to me. “And welcome to Cauldron.”
I took the card and she left, then, in a move completely contrary to her usual perfect coolness, almost tripped over her own feet on the way out of the door. The gap-moe was incredible.
The hand descended.
No.
The fist descended. The pen of sparkling truth held clenched in it, the cloak of stars streaking down after it, faster than it had ever moved before. Veins popped out all along the muscled limb that trailed after it, I had no time to react as it collided with me, flattening my body and sending me hurtling through space. There was a timeless moment as I reeled, my body undamaged, and the fist caught up with me, pen held like a dagger and carved into me with savage victory - Divine Child Hephaestus.
Chapter 123: Cut open my skull 5.6
Chapter Text
Contessa - January 3rd
The path vanished, the final steps nothing but a haze of fog. A trigger event had just occurred. I turned back to Greg Veder who was looking at me now with an expression of slack jawed hatred. A trigger event? They had prepared for the most likely outcome, that this was, indeed, all something within the scope of regular parahumanity, but it was still disappointing.
“ You! ”
Path to talking the agent controlling Greg Veder around.
Blank fog, same as Eidolon. Same as the Endbringers. Same as all the other potential silver bullets.
“Me,” I agreed.
“I should have known you’d get your dirty hooks into this idiot,” the agent in Greg Veder’s body sneered fully, its skin slicked pale with sweat. “Is this the part where we door to Cauldron?”
I raised my eyebrows. It was hard to know exactly where their knowledge diverged, but the path to forcing the entity through a dimensional door was a series of easily followed steps. Call out for the door, move forward, body check the entity and close the door behind them.
The sunny meadow greeted me again. “What makes you come out?”
The agent stumbled backwards and fell into the soft grass. I stalked forward and loomed over it. “What activates you?”
“You couldn’t torture that out of me, Contessa .”
It was so strange. If this was a shard agent why was it giving off the perfect front of someone scared out of their wits? Whatever it was it clearly had access to information that Greg Veder didn’t if it knew her name. So much blank information around this one.
“I’m not interested in torturing you, whatever you are. Are you merely a broken trigger?”
“Can’t Path that one?” It replied snidely.
I tilted my head, observing it. It was still quivering in the flowers, sun glinting off every inch of exposed skin that was still slick with sweat. There were agent shards who could pull that information out, it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility. However - “Are you from the third entity?”
“Abbadon?” It asked incredulously.
“Not The Warrior or Thinker? Zion or Eden?”
It wanted to deny it, but held itself back, not out of deception but because it simply didn’t want to reveal anything. A fourth entity. There was another. A pattern breaker. A silver bullet? Something else to add a level of difficulty, of complexity, to an already impossible task? A competitor for the paired entities? I crouched down in front of it, arms resting lightly on my knees.
“You call yourself the Celestial Forge, what is that?” No answer. “What do you mean when you say you’ll save the world?” No answer. “An appointment with the Slug, then?”
That got a reaction. If it knew about the Slug, by name, it had a deep understanding of our operation. It still made no sense, but I was missing important information. It obstructed my Paths, which implied it was something the sleeping entity had done on purpose, and everything could simply be a perfect act that only worked by fooling thinker powers - but why break the pattern, and in such an obvious way? Why give Greg Veder a vision of an alternate future, with all that information, and then only possess his body for a short time over multiple trigger events? As a Hail Mary by the Thinker it was a confusing one. If it was one.
“Death would be better than helping Cauldron even one inch.”
“Why?”
“Oh, let me count the ways, you self righteous failures” it said with a nasty little smirk. “You incompetent, narcissistic megalomaniacs. You don’t even know your power is leading you to a pyrrhic end. All the triggers you force by letting monsters like the Slaughterhouse Nine do as they please? Propping up corrupt government agencies? Squeezing society to prop up the number of villains because you think they’ll help? The Nemesis program? You’re half assed evil in an ill-fitting suit.”
I stared at it impassively.
“With all your resources, all the power at your disposal, this is what you end up with? Where have your paths to victory gotten you? You’re supposed to be the invincible precog, and you expect me to believe that all your plans, everything that doesn’t involve the entities, just fail like they do? That your ultimate plan fails? You’re evil and cruel and pathetic. I’m going to do it better. I’m going to kill them.”
I wasn’t quite sure how to respond, it was a verbal slurry of misinterpretations, half correct information and half outright fabrication. Greg Veder believed the agent that took him over only spoke lies to hurt whoever it was speaking to, so rather than it actually knowing any of this information it could simply be regurgitating things I’d worried about in the past through a shard tuned for reading minds. Was that likely, and could that be relied upon?
“How would you do it, if you were in our position?”
“As if telling you could do even the slightest bit of good. You would filter it through your shard and come to the same conclusions that only perpetuate the cycle, just as you’ve done since day one. No, I’m going to build the shining bridge to the future you never could. Stay out of my way.”
The answer to all of this hinged on where this agent actually came from. With potentially four entities at play, unless that too was a ploy by the Thinker to distract them. Too little information, as always, and no way to know if anything they were doing was going to help in the end. They were all so very small, in the end.
I stood up, the path back to Brockton showing that nobody had noticed anything amiss. With Greg Veder in position it wasn’t going to be hard to keep an eye on things, and this would have a close eye kept on it. “Door me back to Brockton Bay. You should go home.”
The door unfolded in space just behind the agent.
“What?” It said in a reedy voice. “All bark and no bite?”
“That remains to be seen, should you oppose our goals.”
“Oh, I’ll oppose you, alright,” the agent scrambled to its feet and dusted itself off. “Tooth and claw, I’ll right every wrong you’ve done - then, with my own hands, I’ll save everyone.”
I watched it look down its nose at me and walk backward through the door as though I was going to attack at any moment. The door closed behind it, leaving me standing in the sunshine pondering what I had just seen. “Door to base.”
It opened and I stepped through, into the room with Alexandria and Doctor Mother. “Results inconclusive,” I told them, taking a seat at the table with them. “It could be a rogue Thinker shard, or it could not. It could be a silver bullet, or it could not. It could be part of a fourth entity, or it could not.”
“A fourth?” Alexandria said, a hint of bleakness in her voice.
I shrugged. “It’s a possibility.”
“You didn’t remove the problem?”
I turned to the Doctor. “Not yet. We should increase surveillance on Greg Veder, though I think it would be best to see how the situation plays out. I’m unable to path it, but it claims to want to kill the entities - though it is opposed to Cauldron. Assuming it doesn’t make any moves to disrupt anything important I believe we should observe for now.”
“And if it throws a spanner in the works?”
I shrugged again, feeling the weight of my handgun concealed in its holster under my arm. “It’s time is limited, and Greg Veder is perfectly pathable.”
Greg
The first thing that I realised when I came back was that I was a demigod. My father had been Hephaestus, god of all practical crafts. I was in possession of part of his domain, a sliver of divinity.
The second thing I realised was that I was wandering around the school, seemingly aimlessly, because the parasite had no idea where to go.
Third, I noticed, that I was a complete fucking moron drowning in hubris. Of course it wasn’t going to be so easy, of course whatever I had done to reject power wasn’t going to be replicable, of course the Celestial Forge had some way of forcing it on me. I had to get out of here, but first I needed to know what happened.
I skedaddled through the halls, empty as second period was on, until I found a janitor's closet - a quick scan of the lock and fabrication of the key got me inside and I shut myself in the darkness, the cloying scent of cleaning chemicals assaulting my nose. I watched the playback stony faced.
Obviously I knew her name wasn’t Agent Black, that was just a cute pseudonym. This was a problem, however, because it meant that the parasite knew things that I didn’t - I sunk my face into my hands.
Four entities? Four?! Time to kill myself.
I chewed on my fingernails in the darkness and my phone buzzed in my pocket. I got it out and looked at the text, from an unknown sender.
It was a picture of Barney from The Simpsons holding a gun with the text, ‘delet this - C’
I snorted despite myself. I wish I had a precog power that would let me create new memes to send. It would be safe to delete the recording, given how much sensitive information it contained and I certainly couldn’t send it to Colin. I was just going to have to pretend it never happened.
I didn’t know how I was going to hide the new power, though. I was divine, now. Everything I touched would have that shining golden bright make, should I desire it to be so - and I would desire it to be so. I could feel an intuition, an ease, that could be put to everything I created out of the raw guts of the earth. The Celestial Forge was starting to look a little more celestial.
Damn It, that cursed thing. It wanted to kill the entities? The two on earth? It must have been from the third or fourth. I still couldn’t trust anything it said or did, but should I try communicating with it like Agent Black suggested? Try to draw more information out? It seemed like it knew more about Cauldron than I did.
“Omnitool,” I whispered to myself in the darkness of the closet. “Play my next sentence back when the parasite takes over next. ‘It’s time to explain everything. Why did you send me back in time when I was fighting Echidna? Why did you take everything away from me? My friends, my girlfriend, my gamer powers? Why am I doing it all over again like this?’”
I sighed into the darkness and went into my omnitool to check on how Pilot was doing. She had spent the last three hours talking to a schizophrenic woman about how the government was going to mandate microchips and prosthetic hands for every citizen because I hadn’t ever included in the programming a way to get out of that kind of conversation. The good news was that the woman had never felt more seen or noticed in her life.
I’d have plenty of time to fix that now, confined to base again. The thought of it made my skin itch. I punched the wall of the closet and really hurt my hand on some metal railing thing. Cursing, I came out of the closet, nursing my split knuckles, and walked out to the front gate. The security guard, knowing to let me go but not knowing why, (he still probably knew), waved me through the gate and I walked to the closest bus stop that would drop me off close to the PRT building.
Chapter 124: Cut open my skull 5.7
Chapter Text
I had some time to think on the bus, to compare what I remembered Alexandria told me with what Agent Black, Contessa, had explained, to dig out inconsistencies. I was sure that both had told me the truth, even if it wasn’t the whole truth, about how hopelessly grim things were and though they had committed the unforgivably evil crimes of creating Sveta and Weld I would work with them until they paid, and atoned.
There was sure to be worse secrets of theirs waiting for me, but I would cross that bridge when I came to it. Right now I had to figure out how to fight four alien gods at once.
If I was a demigod, did that give me the mandate of heaven? If the aliens were gods, did they have it? Whose was greater? Mine, surely.
The hand descended. The fourth entity. It had supplied my mandate of heaven, did that mean it was illegitimate? I was just a regent holding the throne until the one true king came back to claim? I didn’t bother moving as the hand came forth with its pen, and its stars and took sovereignty over my body with the words Backyard Handiwork carved into my flesh.
I was still on the bus. I looked around wildly, I had missed my stop. I pressed the button requesting a stop and sat, fidgeting, until I could scoot off and flee down the sidewalk and into a somewhat hidden alleyway. I sank to the ground, back pressed against the moss covered brick wall, hidden from view by a stinking dumpster.
“Omnitool,” I whispered, voice shaking, hands trembling, stomach churning. “Playback the last recording.”
The image of myself sitting on the bus sprang into the air above my wrist, and my voice played in the recording asking the questions I had given. Some people on the bus looked briefly at the new noise, but nobody really paid attention.
The expression held on my face by the alien was somewhere between woebegone, discombobulation and utter contempt. “You’re lying,” it muttered under its breath, too quiet for anyone else to hear. “She told you to say that, didn’t she? You’re easy prey for someone like her, her power lets her tell the most believable lies in the world - but this seems too stupid even for Cauldron. You said it before, too. I remember. ‘Put me back fighting Echidna’. I thought it was strange. How do you know about Echidna? Was she feeding you lines even then, to throw me off? Gamer powers? Greg Veder has never had powers. You have never had powers, you can’t have ‘gamer’ powers here, that’s not how it works. You absolute cretin, you Cauldron dog. Why are you getting in my way? Why is this happening to me?”
I could see in the recording that it had started crying and cold fingers of nausea slowly massaged my stomach like they were trying to give me a bulimic’s happy ending.
“What’s happening to me?”
The alien continued to cry and I told myself it was a ploy to let down my guard. It wasn’t a person, it was a thing that was stealing my skin. “Omnitool,” I whispered. “Play this message back on the next possession. ‘I know about Echidna because she ate me. How do you?’”
I would not feel sorry for it. I could not feel sorry for it - but, if I could be even one grain of gunpowder that fired the silver bullet Cauldron was looking for then I would do whatever it took.
Even pretend to be nice to my murderer.
If I had to talk about the usefulness of my powers the latest two were equal to the rest combined. One made me a demigod of crafting, and the other reduced my tool requirements to almost nothing. I could lathe parts at micrometer tolerance with a hand file. My entire tech base had opened up wider than your mother, and could be built with divine favour - if I had the materials.
The first thing I had done when I got back into the lab was remake all of my pill furnaces by hand. From a small piece of bronze I made and unmade, material duplicating, casting it into shape and melting it down with the plasma torch of my omnitool that now worked as though it were an industrial machine, I carved the formations by hand. It was easy now, so, so easy.
There was an intuition there, a complete understanding of how to create. A whole new world available to me, depth and breadth and divine magic. The result was incomparable to the first iterations, more powerful, more efficient, it extracted the healing essence from the ingredients and by the grace of a god enhanced them without care being paid to the fact that Greek mythology was being applied to Chinese alchemy. Previously a uniform rust red, the medicinal pills were now flecked with gold.
I held the pill in my fingers. Had Contessa ‘pathed’ this? The parasite had called her the invincible precog, had she spoken to me about everything, about being a silver bullet, knowing I was going to get this power right after? This small taste of the true divinity the Celestial Forge assuredly held?
Was it not even more important to keep it contained, now that I knew what it was truly capable of? Contessa had spoken of the entity being able to make and unmake the world in the blink of an eye in a way that was obviously alluding to the endgame of the Forge, how could that level of power be trusted to a thing like this? It was a monster, and a hero was a slayer of monsters.
I rolled the pill over and over.
The entities were monsters too, and what good was a hero without the power to slay them? You could endure until your death, but that wasn’t going to save anyone. To kill a god you had to burn brighter than any star, you had to burn golden bright until everything shone and every shadow was scoured away.
How much of myself could I stand to sacrifice for that shining future.
How far was I willing to go.
I squeezed the gold flecked pill tight in a sweaty fist wishing that I could have just become a god for free over the course of a few weeks.
It was futile to hope that I could continue to operate as I had been, carefree, in the Wards, enjoying my life. I couldn’t continue to run away from responsibility, but I didn’t know what to do. If I continued as I was, devoting less time to heroics than a full time job demanded, I wasn’t going to be able to affect the change humanity needed. I wanted to say it was unfair but Contessa had been much younger than I when the fate of existence was thrust upon her shoulders.
I put the pill in my mouth and swallowed.
“Hey, Amy!” I waved enthusiastically. This might be my last time here for a while. “Been a while, how are ya?”
Her mouth creased into a thin line at the sight of me. “Fine. You?”
“Multiple existential crises,” I said breezily. “I meant to get you a Christmas present, but I forgot. If you could have any one piece of easy tinker tech what would it be? Gun? Glasses that tell you when someone’s lying? Socks that are always the perfect temperature?”
For a moment she looked as though she were going to say something snide and try to end the conversation, before remembering we were friends now. Amy sighed and the tension in her shoulders relaxed the slightest fraction. “Doesn’t tinker gear break all the time?”
“Amy, your power might be special, but I'm even more special than you are. My tech doesn’t break.”
Amy regarded me stolidly for a moment, and I could tell she was thinking about the implication. “Oh, right.”
“It’s true. I haven’t had to do a single second of maintenance.”
“So you’re just here to brag?”
I frowned at her from behind my mask. I was in my heroic colour scheme today, but it seemed that it made no difference to her. “If you don’t pick something, you’ll just have to go with whatever I make, and I’m going to make the most passive aggressive, catty present possible out of spite.”
Amy gave me another look and I realised she was just tired and having a bad day - as always. I fished one of the new pills out of my emergency stock, having already handed my main sack off to the drop off point, and held it out to her.
“It looks different.”
I tilted my wrist so the gold flecks caught the light. “New recipe. Don’t take this one until tomorrow morning, unless you want to be up all night; and stop making that reluctant face, they let me give these to children.”
Amy took it and tucked it into a pocket. “Thanks. I still have some work to do, so…”
“Lead on.”
I followed her as she moved from room to room, making sure I checked where Pilot was on a regular basis and commanding her to move on so that she was never too far from me should I become alien. I bothered Amy in between patients with inane conversation about the minutiae of the every day, using the one hundred percent guaranteed method of time and proximity to increase intimacy in a relationship, and eventually we got onto the topic of the news.
“You go to Winslow, right?” she rhetorically asked. “What was up with that thing that happened today?”
“What thing?” I felt my blood run cold. “I skipped out early.”
“Some real Carrie type shit,” Amy shrugged. “Vicky’s friend there texted her, said they had to cart some girl away in an ambulance.”
“They didn’t say who?”
Amy shrugged again. “No idea who, apparently it was bad though. Thank fuck I don’t go there.”
Sudden, vivid, intense flashbacks of Sophia threatening something on the first day back of school loomed tall in the forefront of my mind. Surely she couldn’t be so stupid, so completely, ludicrously moronic as to do something so overt while I was around. “Omnitool, bring up news events around Winslow Highschool in Brockton Bay from today.”
Amy looked over my shoulder at the floating blue screen as I flicked through tweets and articles. No names were mentioned, and only a vague description of events, but from the descriptions I could guess that during first period, when I had been talking with Contessa, something had happened to Taylor. Had it been my trigger with the Forge’s power that caused her to stumble, or had it been Taylor’s?
How could this have still happened after all the reports I’d made, after the times I had spoken with both Colin and Emily about this? I didn’t want to think about the complexities of the situation, where preventing Sophia from attending school was a violation of her right to learn, where forcing her into homeschooling to separate her from society had a whole host of legal and moral hoops to jump through, that deporting her to Eagleton as a preventative measure before she could commit another crime was dictatorial and heavy handed.
I didn’t want to think about the logistical and moral issues of having her under constant surveillance to prevent this exact event from happening. It felt like my failure, as though it were my job to prevent this from happening.
“I know the girl,” I gestured to a blurry phone photograph on a twitter post. “We’re not really friends, or anything.”
“Yeah, sucks for her,” said Amy as she moved on to the next patient. “Do not envy that bitch.”
Could it be my job to prevent this? I pondered it as I walked after Amy. Could it be my job to prevent not only thing, but as much as I could, here in Brockton Bay where the cape per capita was the highest in the country, where the supercrime rate was some of the highest, where the regular crime rate was some of the highest, where gangs dominated the scene all conducting heinous crimes on the daily - now that I was an agent of Cauldron, was it my job to stop this?
The hand of god descended, wearing its cloak of three hundred and ten stars like an arrogant crown, pen born like a royal scepter.
“Heaven can’t have me,” I muttered a seething breath out to the void as it came, sedate, almost, as though it thought I were cowed under the enormity of its power. So confident in its yolk hanging heavy around my shoulders it raised the pen in a lazy flourish - I dodged once more, tilting backward and bringing both legs up to kick, donkey style, as the sedan sized knuckles approached.
Both feet connected and the hand once more recoiled with pompous affront back through the rip in space. I eyed it all the way. One day I would break into that place, through the firmament it had constructed around me, I would find the thing who held the pen in its hand and, through violence, break the samsaran wheel it was strapping me to.
I nearly fell as I came back with only the knowledge of an outcome - a win in my favour. A flash of white caught my eye, Amy’s cloak disappearing into a room. I felt that I could erroneously conclude that she was responsible for my victory.
Chapter 125: Cut open my skull 5.8
Chapter Text
I was debating on whether to make a formal complaint against Emily and Colin for the Taylor situation. On one hand it was absolutely under their umbrellas to make sure that Sophia didn’t do anything like this, and given the amount of attention I had brought to the matter I had hoped it would be handled. On the other it wasn’t as though I could expect them to have been there at school to personally stop her. Something was happening either way, because I was going to complain to their boss.
After discovering when making dessert for my parents last night that my ability to substitute tools extended to my hands, being able to now whip cream with my fingers, I figured that a project to capitalize on this would be the best choice going forwards. To go over the top of my micromanipulators, to keep the advantage of that, I was making a pair of gauntlets stuffed with enough miniaturized tools that I should be able to make just about anything with my own two hands. Working with my hands felt right in the expression of my divine domain.
The act of all practical craft felt right, more home than my own bedroom. I was made for it, and creations came together under my hands with an easy speed that every tinker on earth would be green with envy over. In making I ignored rules that even they still had to follow, despite making tinkertech also - like my infinite energy generator.
Sitting in the corner of my lab, whirring away, it was made thus; omnimaterial made up most of the bulk of the outside case, and the interior cases for the magnets and wire coils. A dozen sets all enchanted to spin in mid air to endlessly generate electromagnetic energy, and because it was powered by magic there was only pure output, at least until the enchantment wore off. Being a semi-divine creation it put out more power than the physical properties of the magnets would suggest, which I thought was pretty cool.
More than cool it expressed a fundamental shift in the way I needed to operate. I had to focus not just on building myself, like, a cool gun and a suit of armour or whatever to go out and style on criminals, but the means to have society function. I had to build infrastructure.
Not much of my powerset provided this. Part of my understanding of computers gave me deep knowledge of the kind of software infrastructure a society would need, and I had some comprehension of architecture from my latest, though this was more along the lines of singular buildings rather than any kind of civic planning. That didn’t matter though, because I could just learn that shit the hard way.
Not that I was complaining that most of my tech was centered around personal power, things that would benefit me, and perhaps a small squad. With the power to enhance materials and divinely craft such a squad could end up stronger than entire Protectorate divisions, even if it would be more focused in application. How far did that go, I wondered…
I froze. When Cauldron cut up the dead alien to make slurp juice, how did they make it? Would my powers proc on that? Would mixing power vials let me enhance the efficiency and effect like I could with my potions and pills? How would it interact with my power to make everything I made unable to malfunction? Could it be tinkerteched? Divinely enhanced?
Shit. That might be something to bring up. There was so much to bring up, questions I wanted to ask. I’d already tried calling out ‘door to Cauldron’ earlier, but it seemed that I wasn’t privileged enough to have access to the door network yet. One day.
I returned to my crafting, building tools to build the tools I would need. Full on power armour was easily on the table now, the only bottleneck was resources. It was always about resources. Even if I could duplicate material I still had to have that material on hand, and the material had to be something I could craft into a finished item which left a lot to be desired in the realm of reactive metal and liquid chemical ingredients, or materials that could only be created once because the reaction was one way - and something like power armour needed an incredibly complex blend of these things. Unless I wanted to lean heavily into the ability of a tinker to alter the fabric of reality to make it work out of scrap, which the more I understood about how exacting and precise conditions needed to be for any advanced technology to work made it look more and more like magic.
It was what I had done with most of Pilot’s internals, but it really annoyed me now that I had the domain of all practical crafts. I could sense that she was a robot, and the more I focused the better I could tell that it wasn’t supposed to work - and that aggravated an autism in me that wasn’t even mine to begin with. I couldn’t imagine wearing something like that, I wouldn’t be able to get anything done.
I was going to have to remake Pilot, too, and luckily Automata were right in Hephaestus’ wheelhouse.
The phone rang out as no one picked up. I clicked my tongue and put it back into my pocket. Contessa wasn’t answering and, like, I knew I wasn’t that important yet but come on. A guy's self esteem could only take so much.
What was the point of being part of Cauldron if they ignored me? Maybe she was just in another dimension. Yes, that answer soothed my ego nicely. I turned back to my loom. Previously I had been trying out how far I could stretch my new lack of need for complex tools to complete complex tasks, and it turned out I could use knitting needles to weave regular cloth. Further than that, using an actual complex tool let me tackle increasingly complex tasks, even a basic loom could be used to weave fabric at industrial levels of fineness - though I had made this one myself so it was considerably better.
It was finally time to work on my wardrobe, I had lost enough weight that my clothes didn’t fit properly any more. My fat cunt cocoon had split and I had molted into a skinnyfat butterfly. Or maybe a better metaphor was that I had shed my shell like a lobster since they could do it multiple times, but they got fatter. Perhaps some kind of horrifying hybrid that became more powerful with every cycle. Either way, it was time to honour the temple of my body by dressing it nicely - and it would be dressed nicely.
I could see it happening in the future that I would truly Flowers for Algernon myself with the trappings of life. Food, clothes, furniture, every luxury you could name would eventually be produced at such an inhuman degree of quality, would be so magical, that the real world would be like ash to me. Rather than being scared, or apprehensive, I wanted it. Why shouldn’t I experience it? It was happening even now, and now that I was free from the trappings of human morality I could do more than merely hint at the existence of demigod crafted fleshlights.
I would have to have been subhuman to not even consider it, less than the most base of animals, something merely pretending to be a man. How could I claim to be a defender of humanity if, after two million turns of the wheel, I could look at my hot robot and never once think, ‘SEXO!’?
I would embrace all of my humanity to save all of humanity, even the ones I personally didn’t like, and I would begin here in my very bedroom.
I worked at the loom, weaving Walmart purchased cotton and thread, bringing out of it the raw cloth necessary for my raiment. I wove into it a decadence fit for public use, the cloth all the better for not a lack of materials. Even something so simple could be classed a reliable invention, a minor enchantment to repel grime enlaid, and in the hands of a savant such as I it became something grand - though not divine. Weaving was not a practical craft, something more for the domain of a child of Athena.
Though I worked fast by the measure of mortal men it wasn’t anything supernatural, but by the divines and my mothers old sewing machine the t-shirt came together with a skill that was - I had no need for a pattern to work by, my hands knew what to do. By the time the sun had set I had it, a shirt so fine you would think it designer made. Like, I could have made it better but I couldn’t be walking around in a cape made shirt in public. The important part was that it was comfy as fuck and if I got sweaty it would stay clean.
No more pit stains. I was as a god.
My phone rang in my pocket from a private number. Hesitantly I accepted the call and Contessa’s voice echoed from the speaker.
“We have a job for you.”
Chapter 126: Look into my head 6.1
Chapter Text
“We want you to kill a Hitler.”
It seemed like the exact kind of moment where I should say, ‘You son of a bitch, I’m in.’ However - “What the fuck, dude?”
“This is a big part of what we do at Cauldron, we put down problems that would destabilize humanities survival. There are a lot of Nilbog’s and Three Blasphemies that never got off the ground.”
I stayed silent. While this was all well and good, and I wanted to be an agent of Cauldron and save the worlds, it was almost dinnertime.
“You can eat first,” said Contessa. “It’s not so time sensitive as to need you right this second.”
She could totally read my mind. “Why are you asking me? I don’t want to kill anyone.”
“This is your induction test,” Contessa stated plainly, as though she were asking me to undertake the equivalent of the interactive workplace modules you had to do when joining the Wards. “And in the interest of being completely transparent we want to observe the agent that possesses you in an environment where it can’t ruin your life further.”
“So you just drop me in raw, no gear?” A edge of panic I was unable to stop crept into my voice. “Sometimes it takes days, weeks, for the alien to come out.”
“We can give you temporary, restricted, access to the door network for this mission. That dimension, and this one.”
Damn, this was really it, huh? I didn’t think things would have led to this in the original timeline, where my power growth was scaled in a way that made sense, rather than the stuttering drips and exponential bursts of the Shitlestial Forge that pushed me forwards whether I liked it or not.
“What if I fail?”
I could hear the shrug in her voice. “Nothing. What matters is your commitment to the cause.”
“And if I refuse?”
“We have other tasks if killing Hitler isn’t your kind of thing,” Contessa’s voice dripped with comedy.
“I’m not going to complain if someone else does it,” I matched the grin in her voice. “You wanna come with, pull the trigger for me?”
“Normally I’d’ve been done by now,” she said. “Normally it’s as easy as ‘Door to Hitler.’ And then he tragically shoots himself three times in the back of the head with a shotgun.”
I gurgled with laughter. “Hate to see it. But, bruz, look, I can try my best but if I end up not killing in cold blood it doesn’t mean I’m not a proud Cauldroneer.”
“The clock is ticking, and every day the situation gets ever more hopelessly grim.”
“Can’t I just help in other ways? You want some mobility frame? My tech never malfunctions. You want shoes that let you run up walls? I can do both. You want a piece of art that makes whoever looks at it feel unbound optimism?”
“We have plans for all of that, Greg, and more. What we also want from this is for you to let the agent take over until you get to the point where you can reject its influence more often than not. You think you have hundreds of powers left to gain, at what point would you have the upper hand?”
“Halfway, at least. But.. at that point I’ll be gone,” my hand tightened over my phone in a white knuckled, shaking grip. “For months at a time, maybe years, every time. I might as well be dead. I’m twenty three deep, and next time I’ll already be under two hours.”
“And we may not even have the time for that,” Contessa said gently, her tone the verbal equivalent of headpats. “Three, five, twenty, one hundred. We just don’t know.”
“There’s not even a guarantee. It took fifteen before I could even really start making anything, what if it takes another fifteen before I get anything really useful again?”
“We can only hope that whatever mechanism chooses the powers wants to make it so that doesn’t happen. It may seem random, but there may be a greater pattern at play by the hand of fate that we’re too small to see. Either way, we need you to be stronger.”
My gaze settled on my window and the setting sun outside. “Can’t you just make more capes?”
There was a pause as though Contessa were considering something. “My power is to ask a question on an outcome, see every step I would need to take to achieve it and then perform them without fail. Every time you gain a power the number of steps needed to complete a path shrinks. You’re important, more important than a hundred capes. You could be Triumvirate.”
I wanted to tell her off for reading my mind, for using my greatest desires as a sword to boost my ego, but I would do the same. I could read minds once, and had never truly hesitated with using it. Still, what a power she had. The invincible precog indeed. “How many steps would it take to put me back where I was, fighting Echidna?”
“Some things are out of even my power.”
“Well, how many steps are left to kill the alien before it blows up the planet?”
Contessa snorted softly, and in that sound I could feel their full weight of how bad things truly were. It stood to reason that some questions could not be answered, why would the alien suffer to have its own weapons wielded freely against it? I wouldn’t.
“Why does it let us fight against it at all?”
“We don’t know. Its partner died, or close enough to, but it could be any number of reasons.”
I was quiet for a moment, thinking. “You said your power gives you steps for any outcome? Do you ever ask it questions for fun? Like how many steps would it take for Miss Mi-”
“Four thousand and twenty seven, and it would take years.”
I couldn’t help it, I laughed. Wait, did this mean she knew who shot JFK?
“I do. See you after dinner.”
The door opened in my alchemy lab and Contessa stepped through, looking like the suavest forty year old hag in history. Even with knowing it was all Thinker assisted her entire demeanor was still that of the coolest person I had ever met. I bet she had a path running for that all the time.
“It changes depending on who I’m talking to.”
“How does that even work,” I laughed. “‘Path to knowing what Greg’s thinking?’”
“Something like that,” she smiled broadly. “Though, usually it weirds people out too much to use like this.”
“I just think it’s funny. I’d be doing the exact same thing if I had it, I mean, I kind of used to. When I was a gamer. You probably already know.”
Contessa nodded knowingly, and it was, like, damn, she really got me. I smiled sadly at her, then perked up. “Oh, I haven’t introduced you to my robot yet. This is Pilot.”
Pilot, who was standing off to the side, silently, unobtrusively as usual, waved. “Hey, Contessa. Nice to meet you.”
Contessa shook her head admiringly. “Did you know that, behind closed doors, people are talking about that robot - not about the implication,” she cut off the thought before I could begin to express it on my face. “Or at least that implication. But they don’t know like we do, they just think it’s tinkertech and maybe they could get a squad of disposable brutes, not the true reality.”
I tried not to show how tickled pink I was, even though I knew she already knew and was running a path to buttering me up. Some might have thought it manipulative, but how was it different to trying your best to compliment someone? I used to use magic to boost my charisma to do it all the time.
Contessa was just better at it than most, simple as.
“She’s a very good robot,” I said fondly, gazing upon what I had made and finding it good. “But my next one is going to be so kickass. I’m making it look like the guy out of Sveta’s favourite anime - Blood Boundary. Ah, you have to do something about that, by the way, the case fifty threes. It’s wrong.”
Contessa nodded agreeably. “The main reason we made them is that the entity seems to ignore places where they’re in higher densities. You’re absolutely, one hundred percent welcome to help us come up with a better way, because I know what you were thinking earlier. You think your powers will work on the vials.”
“I think they will, but fuck knows what that’ll look like.”
“Let’s come back to that later, maybe you’ll even get a power that fixes the whole problem for us?”
I shrugged. “Hope so. It’s just so sad, I know you technically saved a lot of their lives but they’re suffering.”
“We know,” said Contessa, head bowed with a great and profound sorrow.
Well, so long as they knew. “Cool. So, uh, for this Hitler thing do I get, like, a dossier or anything?”
“Consider it a test for yourself, to see how far you can go with just yourself. We don’t expect you to get this done soon, the only thing that matters is that you’re on board.”
“That’s good,” I wiped my brow in faux relief. “‘Cause, bro, there’s no way I’m killing anyone today.”
“Take your time, build up, really see what you’re capable of. I believe in you.”
I basked in her warm smile. “I won’t let you down.”
She gave me a look that reminded me of Colin, when, at the end, he was actually proud of what I had become. “I know. Now, like I said we’re giving you limited door access. You can open one from this room, to the target dimension, and back. That’s it.”
I nodded.
“Well, then,” she spread her hands. “Are you ready?”
I nodded again, anticipation rising in my belly, filling my fingers and toes with a buzzing energy. I had my magic shirt on, my favourite shoes, my omnitool and my robot. I was going to ace this without actually having to kill anyone.
“Leave Pilot here,” Contessa once more read deep into my zoomer brain. “Remember that we want to observe the parasite behave as it would on its own.”
I looked at Pilot and nodded sadly. In return she crinkled her femme fatale-dangerous red eyes in a way that was calculated to look incredibly cute. “Stay in my room, tell people I’ve gone for a walk if they ask.”
“No worries,” she said, saluting, then walking back out of the closet. I’d done such a good job on her outfit.
“What do you want your door phrases to be?”
I thought for a second, then realised what she was talking about. “Door to Hitler, and door home.”
“Door to Hitler,” Contessa smirked, and the door opened out onto a chirpy spring morning.
I took a really big breath and checked the pockets of my cargo shorts to make sure I had everything. Bag of healing pills, mobile phone, picture of Dark Smoke Puncher. Everything else I needed was producible from my omnitool. I nodded to Contessa briskly and stepped through.
“Good luck,” she said cheerfully and the door closed.
“Door home,” I said immediately and the portal opened back up again. I gave Contessa, who was watching with an amused smile, a grin. “Had to check.”
She winked and the door shut. Damn, she was really something else, like the awesome onee-chan I never had. I shook myself and looked around, not really understanding what I was meant to do. I had no idea where I was and recognised nothing, but that was part of the fun, right? I set off at random over a sunny hillock.
The landscape was roughly analogous to photos I’d seen of scenic European countrysides, where everything, right down to the shrubbery, had a sense of distinguished age. It was less alien than the other dimensions I’d been shown, but even the grass had a curious rounded shape that never appeared on any Bet blade and had a strange spicy smell when I crushed one between my fingers. I looked out over the blue skyline and felt a huge sense of adventure.
This was just like in my isekai animes.
I kept walking and enjoying the view, taking photos every so often of particularly nice looking rocks and trees and employing the mapping function on my omnitool so that I wouldn’t get lost if I wanted to find my way back. It was almost like a little holiday. Nothing could go wrong. I was going to get home safe and sound.
Predictably, nothing continued to go wrong, but nothing continued to go right, because nothing was happening. I was just walking around in the sunshine, which was going to fuck with my sleep majorly. That was fine, however, as I could just pop a health pill and death march until it was nap time again.
It was nice of Cauldron to give me a low stress first mission like this one, which wasn’t time critical so I could find my feet in my own way. I tried to remember youtube videos about survivalism because almost none of my powers accounted from starting from zero in another world. Sure, a couple were about lessening resource requirements, or making my tools act as though they were better, but in terms of the actual process? Nothing. It was almost all there as though it had the assumption I already had a modern, industrialized tech base to draw from.
My demigod blood, burning as it was in my veins with the power of creation, spoke of forges made of base clay and that was as good a place to start as any. Father Hephaestus could build such a forge in a single strike of a clenched fist, as his son I was quite a bit more limited - but not so limited as to make this difficult. “Omnitool, start a wide area scan for material with properties as close to clay as you can.”
It beeped in acknowledgement and brought up a topographical layout of the immediate area in blue light with patches of purple to show the spots with substrate approaching clay. However, I wanted red. Using the map to head toward deeper, and redder, purples I hiked my way through increasingly dense forest to a place where water bisected earth in a sluggish stream and the banks were swollen with red clay.
I printed a trowel with my omnitool and got to work -
The hand descended, trailed by its swirling cape of stars of which three hundred and six remained. Over a hundred and fifty more before I might gain parity in this place. It went against my good sense, my pride, my very soul, but I kept still as the pen of the gods once more found my brow and carved Mauler Tech into it.
The sun was high in the sky when I came back, beaming dappled through the leaves of the mystery trees. I noticed two things - one, that I was covered in clay everywhere but for my magic shirt, and two, that there was a wet clay forge built before me being fed dry wood by my hand.
I jerked back and dropped the stick I was holding, as well as the omnimaterial trowel I was still holding in my off hand. I hated that we were of the same mind, me and the parasite, but I suppose we were both technically divine children when it stole my body. The fire in the forge burned merrily, drying the clay. I picked the stick I was holding back up and played back the recording.
“Echidna ate you?” The parasite sneered as I went to collect more fuel for the fire. “You’re as big of a liar as you ever were after Leviathan hits. Where are we? Don’t tell me Cauldron stranded you here, you fucking idiot. You mouth breathing, slack jawed moron. You have no idea what they’ve done, what they continue to do. Explain yourself, now.”
So it knew about Leviathan, too? What lies had I told after that? That was me in my final arc, where I was achieving self actualisation. Things had been looking up for me, then. Maybe this would be cathartic, in a way, it wasn’t like I had ever said this out loud to anybody.
“Omnitool, take a recording and play it back at next possession,” I licked my lips as I worked, preparing myself to take a deep dive into everything. “One night, while I was sleeping, I triggered. It was in September twenty ten, and when I woke up there was a blue box hovering in front of my face telling me I had gotten eight hours of rest.”
Chapter 127: Look into my head 6.2
Chapter Text
“And that’s it. That was everything I lost. That was everything you took from me.”
I let out a huge breath. That felt a bit better, I got to shout and seethe at the thing at parts, tell it exactly how much pain it had caused me, and, during my rant, I had time to think over the latest power I had been forced to gain.
It was some seriously comprehensive knowledge on cloning and genetic manipulation, and everything that you needed to build upon to get to that point. Perhaps, just maybe, I could build myself a body and transfer my consciousness in a way that killed the original, and in doing so kill my connection to the forge. I had no idea if it would even work, or how the connection was even established, but I had one life - it was worth the attempt.
I was interested to know how my powers would interface with growing something like that, too. With the genetic engineering capability I had just gained it was obvious how I could rewire my base code into something better, but would my beautification powers activate? Could I make myself a body perfect in form and function? Would using all the materials necessary increase the base statistics in some way? Would it count as something I constructed, and thus not ‘malfunction’? Could it be miniaturised? Would the raw materials behave as though they were greater? Enchanted? Divinely crafted? Even without the dire circumstances forcing my hand into the drastic action of abandoning my body like a sinking ship I would still want to know, just for curiosity's sake.
I sat back on the fallen log I was on, watching the slow stream trickle by. A bird landed on a far branch across the water and chirped in an odd whooping song. The birds here were fucked. This one looked kind of like a wren or a sparrow, but had a bony crest over each brow like it was a fucking dinosaur or some shit, though the speckled pattern made me think more of a starling. I really hoped I didn’t get some horrible disease that my body had no way of fighting.
It whooped again and took flight, vanishing up into the sky. It was getting later in the afternoon now, and early in the morning back home - but I didn’t really want to leave yet. I was getting hungry, but it was nice to be here without any of the expectations of home. Behind me, next to the fancifully crafted forge a plainer furnace stood for firing the clay.
The difference in style was stark. I could see that when it had made the furnace the parasite had leveraged every shred of crafting beautification that it could seemingly for the sake of it, and sure, the forge looked fucking fantastic, but for what purpose? We were in the middle of nowhere with no one to show off to, so there wasn’t any point in looksmaxxing.
Vanity was a vice. I wouldn’t know anything about it, I was very virtuous.
My omnitool beeped and I got up from the log and checked the furnace, the bricks inside were glowing cherry red, before sitting back down. If I was intending to make a base of operations I might as well make it livable, my vision was a twee little cottage straight out of a postcard from nineteen forties England.
I had no idea on where to go from there. I could just mindlessly expand and work up to a full futuristic workshop, and I could do it. Between my divine domain of all practical crafts, tinkertech and the mishmash of knowledge crammed into my head I could reinvent the wheel - though it would be a long and tedious process. I yawned and rubbed at my eyes, checking the time. It was well past midnight back home, despite being mid afternoon here.
It would depend on how in the middle of nowhere I was. If I was so far away that I had to build a car to get to a town, then building up was more or less necessary. Of course, that was beta, unimaginitive thinking to simply accept things as the way they were. Next time I was going to ask for a portal closer to civilisation, and hopefully skip all the boring steps of starting from zero in another world.
Although, if the idea were to observe the parasite in the open then it may be best to make a dozen starts and bleed off possessions in areas where it could do no harm. My thoughts once more turned to the parasite, and my blood curdled in anger. I got up and, with clenched teeth, gripped my head painfully in both hands.
“Fuuuck! Fucking cunt!” I screamed, thrashed, stamped my feet. I was so tired, I was so goddamn tired - and dehydrated because, like a fucking idiot, I forgot to bring water. I reached into my pill pouch and slammed one back, then started walking in a random direction.
The medicinal pill, twice enhanced, dissolved into chi in my belly. Even without open meridians the energy flowed throughout my body, soothing any nagging physical worries and bringing my mind back to full alertness.
I slapped myself thrice with both hands, cheeks stinging. I had better things to do than get triggered and mald, I had worlds to save. I had gods to slay.
I was a hero, and by thunder or fire I would cast the raging heavens down.
I had been walking for a solid hour under the crisp sun, and if I didn’t have the buoying energy of the medicinal pill still coursing through me I would have surely become horrifically burnt, pasty white boy that I was, when I spotted a thin plume of smoke - the kind no natural fire would make.
I changed directions toward it, tromping through knee high grass with rounded blades and little burrs that stuck to my sparse leg hair. Finally, people.
I came over a little hill and a cottage, far less twee than what I could make, sat at the end of a worn dirt track, the grass all around it shorn down by the sheep and goats, at least they looked like them from a distance, surrounding it. There were fenced off areas that looked to be vegetable gardens that one goat was staring longingly into. Brazenly, with the knowledge that I had a burning carbide blade concealed carry at all times, I approached.
The sheep and goats, now that I was a bit closer, started looking less like sheep and goats and more like huge white rats, with pointed faces and long, thin tails. They stared at me placidly, eyes the disturbing solid liquid black of a horse. Creepy. I took a scan of them with my omnitool and moved up to the cottage.
It was a simple thing, and judging from the real glass in the windows there was an actual tech level in this place I could crib off of. I knocked on the door and after a moment a woman in a plain smock answered - I had to stop myself from recoiling.
She was a human woman, that much was obvious, but such a person had never been born on any Bet country. I had no reference to compare her to, her skin may have been sallow or tanned and was marked heavily with pox scars, all her features were in more or less the right place and in mostly the correct proportions.
Her reaction was somewhat less restrained than mine. She shied back fully, making some sign with her left hand, gang or religious I couldn’t say, and squawked something in what may as well have been a fake, made up language like Dutch for all I recognised it.
“Hey, what’s up?” I gave her my best smile. Why did I think I’d be able to talk to anyone here? Their language might have been constructed from principles so diverged from any on Earth as to be unrecognisable. “Omnitool, record everything anyone here says and try to translate it.”
I’d have to write a program specifically for this.
The woman shut the door in my face and the hand descended.
I wanted to fight it, but it seemed the hand was expecting that I might. Beneath its cape of three hundred and eight stars it strafed sideways, a behaviour it had never showed before, taking advantage of my still limited movement. I tried my best to turn in the void after it but it proved faster still, and in another new development, wrote in burning script up my spine - Fun in the Sun.
I jolted back into myself, completely disoriented, the sun hanging low in the sky casting a wash of purple sunset over the thin clouds. The latest possession had been over three hours, going by the clock. Time to go home, I’d check the recording later. I took a really deep breath and sighed, “door home.”
The portal opened before me and the worst sounds I could have ever hoped to hear echoed through. I felt like crying. They stopped in choked shouts of shock and I gave it a moment before speaking.
“I’m coming in.”
Gingerly, reticently, I peeked through the portal at a cursed scene. Mum and dad, half dressed, red in the face, my attempts at power enhanced h-manga scattered over one of my alchemy work benches. Really? In my alchemy workshop? I got the feeling that this wasn’t the first time.
“Pilot said you’d gone for a walk,” Dad said uneasily, both hands working to keep his pants up. I averted my eyes to look at one of the larger glowing blue crystals lining the room.
“Why are you coming out of a portal?” Mum squeaked from somewhere out of view.
“Tinker stuff. Can you please get out of my alchemy lab.”
The worst part was that my secret base had been breached and my stash had been plundered harder than dad had just plundered… I declined to finish the thought. I heard them shuffle awkwardly out of the room and through my closet, making sure they were gone before stepping back out through the portal.
I sighed to myself. I couldn’t blame them, I would have done the same had our positions been reversed. There was nothing to it but to suck it up, endure an awkward breakfast and go to work.
It was another one of those days where, because I already knew all the coursework, and was so far ahead, that the on site tutor let me have a half day. I was free to head to the lab and build.
“Why does it have to be this way, bro?” I asked Pilot as she went through her head-patting subroutine, a task programmed to cheer me up.
“Sometimes things just happen,” she said consolingly, though this was merely a platitude because she had no understanding of the context behind my statement, tightening her other arm around me in a hug.
I sighed, good old, dependable Pilot assist program. I did feel a bit better and eventually got back to work.
I wasn’t going to be doing much with the cloning tech for a hot minute, but the understanding of manipulating high energy matter was of immediate use in that it shored up a big hole in my current capability - power sources. I could make decent ones, but they were all nothing compared to the constant output of a plasma reactor. There was a lot of weapon and defensive potential as well, but the power sources were going to be the most useful.
I had too many things to make, too many builds to juggle. Power armour, new robot body frames, some kind of gun, magic clothes and maybe even something that could take a decent chunk out of the Simurgh in a couple of months - and that was just in this dimension.
There was nothing else to it, I simply had to endure.
Chapter 128: Look into my head 6.3
Chapter Text
The recording began, and in it the parasite stood just as I had been with the door shut in his face by that strange woman - it was still hard to pinpoint exactly why she looked strange, perhaps the long, low skull or the overly prominent brow ridge, or perhaps the high nasal bridge coupled with a wide flat nose - and my voice playback began.
It slowly walked away from the cottage in a random direction as it listened, the expression on its face growing in mounting horror as I recounted waking up with the powers of a gamer, to joining the Wards, to triggering Taylor, to almost being murdered by Germans.
“This isn’t right,” it muttered, stricken, as my voice played back hysterically ranting about how much I hated Hans. “And I don’t know why. There’s a way things are supposed to go, a way things are supposed to be, and this isn’t it. Something has gone horribly, horribly wrong - and I don’t know what.”
I described my time in Boston, meeting Sveta and returning to the bay after Bakuda. I spoke about Leviathan.
“Taylor Hebert is supposed to be important,” it said, as though it hadn’t heard a single thing I had told it. “Not Greg Veder. You’re supposed to be nothing, you’re no one. She’s the one the universe revolves around, not you - and I don’t know why.”
It walked and my recording talked of the crushing pressure of learning about what was at stake for the world, about working myself to the bone in the aftermath to save my parents, about Savannah and about fixing Sveta.
“Everything is wrong,” the parasite clutched at my hair, white knuckled. “There’s a way things have to go - The locker, Lung, Undersiders, the bank, Coil, Leviathan, Warlord. Taylor is supposed to save the world.”
I talked about the Slaughterhouse Nine, killing Jack, Echidna rising from somewhere underground and the final fight against her.
“None of this was supposed to happen.”
I spoke of going back in time, of the mounting existential terror as it, the parasite, ate away at a life I was desperately clawing back.
“I think the Forge was supposed to save her ,” it said, shaking with the same terror I had. “The power of the Celestial Forge was supposed to be able to do anything, but that’s wrong, too. The powers are all hopelessly out of order, and far too weak. And this… this timeshare? You? Cauldron? There’s no key, why isn’t there a key?!”
It was an ugly thing I was watching, inspiring an ugly set of feelings. Pity. Empathy. Care. The parasite was suffering, too, and I hated it. Nothing about the fact that it was killing me had changed. I watched it wander aimlessly through the alien field, lost and confused.
And I hated it.
“You shouldn’t exist. None of this should exist. Greg Veder shouldn’t be more than a speck of dust in Taylor Hebert’s eye. You’ve doomed us all, and now Scion is going to kill everyone.”
I suppose it would work that way, wouldn’t it. The greatest hero to have ever existed, someone who had saved so many lives, was a perverted mockery that existed only to cause ruin. Scion was the entity Cauldron was fighting. The golden god, tarnished.
The world was iron, rusting with every turn of the wheel.
“Everything is wrong, and I don’t know why. If you’re not lying, then we have to do something.”
Or was it? The world the Forge had lived in was clearly much worse than mine, in which I was apparently simultaneously completely insignificant and a cause of immense wrongdoing - a cold, dead world where Taylor was more important than me. That was a world that was truly rusted iron, and while I may have been forced back a step from a world of shining silver into dull bronze, it was clearly a step up for it. The wheel was capable of turning both ways, all I had to do was gain mastery over it.
No matter how many timelines I had to struggle through I would find the beta world line and break the wheel.
I was escaping Samsara for sure.
A door opened up on the other side of the alchemy preparation table I was sitting at, perched on a stool, watching the playback. I got a glimpse of a sterile white facility before Contessa stepped through and shot me a winning grin that made the day just that bit more bearable.
“Did you know,” she said, popping a squat on the stool next to me. “That this is the first time we’ve ever had a single hint that Scion could be beaten? Taylor Hebert, huh?”
“Don’t ask me,” I said wearily. “She’s just some girl I know from school, she never did anything special before.”
“Last time she didn’t go through the locker,” she replied meaningfully, echoing the parasite. “It might be that your parasite knows the future the entity fears most, one Taylor Hebert brings about.”
“It’s more likely it’s just nuts, I mean, it hates me for, like, no reason.”
“True,” Contessa said easily. “It’s nuts. A mad oracle, perhaps. Broken from its purpose in protecting the cycle, now striving to bring about its end.”
“You think so?” I was skeptical.
Contessa shrugged, the motion shifting her dark hair. “I would like to, but we need more information. You’re going to have to make it tell us everything it thinks it knows about how Taylor Hebert saves the world. If it can even give us a single degree of direction it will be more than we’ve ever had.”
“Fuaark me, man. Yeah, I’ll try. Is there anything else I could be doing? Are you sure you don’t want me to make you some power armour or something? It would have to make your paths shorter.”
“I will be getting you to make me some, however what I would really like to know is if you can clone parahumans.”
“I really have no idea, because I have no idea how parahumans work. I can clone their bodies, but I really don’t think it would clone the corona or gemma,” I pulled a scan of Victoria, the most conveniently placed one in my omnitools search history, and zoomed in on her brain. “They’re not genetic, they just appear, right? Scion zaps them into your brain or something, right?”
“Some things about the entities would strike you as surprisingly unsophisticated,” Contessa rested her chin on the heel of her palm, her thumb and finger idly twirling a lock of hair. “Or perhaps just displaying a shocking lack of care. Think back to Echidna. She cloned capes. Blasto, too, could potentially do it. Bonesaw…”
She held up her other hand and waggled it in an unsure gesture.
“Couple of others, potentially. Their problem is that they’re either criminals or completely insane, but you? You’re perfect. You’re a gem. You might be able to make us a silver bullet. A vial, mixed by you, fed to a clone, grown by you, made by your god given domain of crafts. We have time for you to prepare yourself, but this is what we really want of you if you can pass the test.”
I looked into her eyes, just as blue as mine, and an unspoken communication passed between us.
I wasn’t to flee my body like a rat on a sinking ship. I was to be brave, and save the world.
“Ok,” I said simply, for that was all that there was to say on the matter.
“And don’t worry about the parasite,” she continued, reaching over and patting me on the back. “If it opposes us, we have the resources to stop it. We have ways that you can scarcely imagine.”
Even her perfect cheer couldn’t take the foreboding edge off that statement, the enormity of the promise. Cauldron had been manufacturing powers for decades, they had produced some of America’s strongest capes and that was just the ones I was aware of. For all that they were the good guys, for all that they were saving the world, they were still the interdimensional power mafia, they had created the entire dynamic around which society functioned. Cauldron wanted my help, and there was no amount of alien possession that was going to get in the way.
It was actually comforting.
“‘Preciate it, bro.”
“We’ve got your back,” Contessa rapped her knuckles on the polished stone workbench twice. “Trust.”
“I trust.”
“Let us know if you need anything, too, you’re part of Cauldron - anything that it’s possible to get, we can get for you.”
“Do you know where to find the core of a grade five sun elemental?”
Contessa, presumably reading my mind to know that I could create a Foundation Establishing Pill, shook her head. “I can get you anything that exists in real life.”
“I’ll text you a list.”
She gave me another brilliant smile and got up. “Cheer up, dude. Things will get better - door me.”
“Hey,” I said as she waved goodbye and made to step through the door. “Path to knowing what happened at Roswell, yes or no?”
All I got was an electrically infuriating smirk as the door shut behind her.
I had finally completed my power armour, and gotten the go ahead from the review board. I wouldn’t bore you with the details of the build, having gone over them dozens of times to myself over the last weeks, but it was exactly what you would expect.
The suit fit snugly over me, pieces sliding and whirring as they magnetically locked into place. It was almost a waste building it now knowing that I would have to make and remake it a hundred times as I grew to my full height over the next few years, that is unless the nightmare scenario where I remained a manlet came to pass. If that was the case I would abandon my body and the world to its fate and damn the consequences.
The HUD lit up with the startup diagnostics, performing as perfectly as it had every other time - my skill in creating computer systems was second to none - and my PILOT OS took control. The visual system displayed the world on my visor, not only with camera feed but from scans being continually taken from both my omnitool and the suits integrated array.
“Ok, I’m all ready,” I said, looking at Carlos, his name displayed above his head.
“Looks awesome, dude,” he said admiringly. “This shit is going to be great, I haven’t had a flight patrol with anyone for ages.”
Flight. I smiled sadly to myself, face hidden by a masked helmet more heroic than any human face. I ticked the quest off the list.
“Shit is gonna be so dope, bro, you don’t even know.”
We moved out, I walked without even the barest hint of resistance from the suit, Pilot doing exactly what it was built to do, what it was improved on every day to do, and predicting what I wanted to do from a combination of biofeedback and brain scans. The smooth elevator took us from the Wards level all the way up to the roof, and our access cards let us out onto the helipad.
Carlos’s rust red uniform rippled slightly in places from a stiff breeze I couldn’t feel from the perfect climate control of my suit, and he lifted up off the ground and stretched mightily. The red anti-grav panels fixed into the calves and lower back of my suit twinkled and I, too, lifted up into the air and with a burn of repulsor jets, spitting the warped light of high energy plasma, I shot upward, accelerating safely to a hundred kilometers an hour in just over a second, and within seconds was high enough to look out over the entire city and the sparkling sea behind it.
I settled the jets and came to a hover, after a few seconds Carlos caught up to me with a broad grin on his face.
“Nothing beats it, does it?”
I glanced sideways, the display on my suit panning to show him without me having to move my head. The sensors flayed him apart layer by layer, showing me his perpetually changing biology and the two growths in his brain facilitating all of it.
“I love it,” I looked back out over the city. “I’ve always wanted to fly.”
“Come on then,” Carlos’ grin somehow broadened further. “Let’s hit the route, and once we’re done they don’t care if we fly around a bit so long as we’re close to the PRT HQ or the Rig.”
“Let’s fuck shit up.”
He laughed and my armour gleamed in the late afternoon sun - red, gold and white.
We dipped back down to just above street level, keeping in sight of the roads as we skimmed over the tops of the street lights, over the afternoon rush. Cars honked as we passed overhead, people calling out and waving. Every so often we dipped down to street level to spend a minute or two shaking hands and taking selfies before heading back up. Nothing was expected to happen, nothing ever happened on Wards patrols, or close to, even in Brockton Bay. You could count the number of altercations the junior junior team had gotten into over the years on both hands.
Publicly, at least. There were always a few ‘Vista gets punched in the tit by Hookwolf’ going unreported. It was just the way of the world, powers begged to be used against others. Why the entities wanted this I still had no idea, why would gods be interested in flaking off slivers of their power for humans to fight each other with?
I had once told Taylor that it was something akin to Bum Fights, and perhaps that was even true.
Nevertheless, even though I enjoyed being a hero and inspiring the public, it all felt so small in the end. I could make things that changed lives, but Rome wasn’t built by one man.
Gods weren’t slain by one hand.
Chapter 129: Look into my head 6.4
Chapter Text
We touched back down on the helipad two hours later, the sun had set but I could see just as clearly in the dark as in full light, just in time to go home for dinner. I had another long night ahead of me in the other world.
“Hey, bro, uh, Greg,” Carlos began awkwardly, uncomfortably, as we headed to the door. “How are you going with the whole thing?”
“The ‘I’m dying’ thing?”
Carlos nodded. “Yeah.”
“Hopeful,” I shrugged. “It’ll get worse before it gets better, though.”
“So have they, like, been able to find out what’s going on? Rory told me all that they told him when they made me team leader, but he didn’t know much.”
“I can knock powers back now, but not reliably. I think it’ll get easier the more I have, I don’t know for sure but that’s just what I think.”
“I hope. I know you’re real busy with tinker shit,” he gestured at my suit. “But you should come hang out at the main room more with us.”
Friends. Family. Freedom. These were the three demons you must slay to succeed in saving the world. How I would love to enjoy the springtime of my youth with everyone, had I the time, had I not had a parasite waiting to steal my body and ruin the fun. “Sure, man. I spend too much time working.”
I could do it for just a bit, as a little treat. I deserved it.
“I’ll have to wear my suit, though. You know, for containment so something like Rory’s graduation party doesn’t happen again.”
“Oh,” Carlos pulled his swipey out of a hidden pocket and unlocked the door. We went through and got into the elevator. “Yeah. If you’re more comfortable like that.”
“It’s either that or wire something into my bones, and that shit is just gross.”
Carlos shrugged, unfazed by the idea of cutting open his body to bolt unnatural augmentations deep into his marrow. It probably wouldn’t even tickle the fucker. “Sure.”
I had the plans for incredible cybernetics in my head, the working memories of a trauma surgeon, but when I thought about the process the only thing I remembered was Leviathan. The stink of copper blood, shit and piss, coating my throat. All the organs that I could replace falling out of people no matter how hard I tried to put them back. I would do it, if my hand was forced, but I didn’t want to.
“Dude, it’s gross.”
Carlos shrugged again and hit the button for the Wards floor. The elevator doors slid shut with incredible precision, someone’s wasted budget allocation. “It’d be pretty pointless for me, I’m pretty sure my body would just spit it out, but I always thought the idea of cyborgs was so cool.”
“In theory.”
“It’s too bad you’d have to fix it up all the time, being tinkertech.”
“It’s too bad they’d need custom immuno-suppressants every day.”
“Oh, right. People do get sick, don’t they?”
The doors opened at the lab floor. “I’ll be down in a sec,” I said and Carlos gave an up-nod of understanding. The doors closed for him again and I made my way into the lab. Pilot’s body stood right where I’d left her, charging. I’d have to build a new frame eventually, but that would have to wait until after the boy one. The copy of the OS housed in the body connected to the one in my omnitool, synched, and updated. Now safe, I went through the process of taking off the suit.
Parts released their magnetic locks and slid back, expanding from the snug grip it had on me to a point where I could wiggle free and step back out. The suit, able to move perfectly well without me inside, moved to its own storage station with all the artificial intelligence of a Roomba and locked in to power down.
I stretched in my softsuit. “I need a shower.”
Pilot, still locked in terms of speech, unable to give me my preferred response of, ‘you got that stank in you, dawg,’ instead said. “Would you like me to get your clothes ready?”
I sighed. “Yes, please.”
All in the name of beating the allegations. It was working, nobody had implied I was a robotfucker in weeks. With well tuned, head turning grace, Pilot unplugged herself, gathered my clothes and followed me out into the elevator where we went down a floor to the Wards rooms. Through the vault door into the rec room, Carlos was absent, but Missy was still here having just finished her console shift. She was in her uniform, mask discarded on the kitchenette bench, sitting on a couch with her boots kicked up on the coffee table.
“Hey,” she called out as we came inside, looking up from where she was scrolling through instagram or something on her phone. She threw it aside. “How was your first real flight?”
“Homie, it’s so cool. I’m gonna have to start putting in requests for solo flight time, Sava-,” I paused, and collected myself. “I’ve heard that upon directorial discretion they can do that for us.”
“Fat chance with her,” Missy pointed upstairs in the vague direction of Emily’s office. “I liked Armsmaster a lot better. Sucks that they moved us, did you hear yet?.”
“They kind of had to, Colin would've been demoted otherwise. The city’s gotten so bad. Hear what?”
“He just got Hookwolf. While you were out with Carlos, look,” she got up and hurried over to show me what she had been looking at on her phone. A news stream. She dragged the timer around, going too far, then carefully correcting until the video played. A distant shot of Colin played as he squared off with Hookwolf, then in what could have been a trick of the grainy footage he blurred - two more of him stepped out, leaving Hookwolf facing down three.
My eyebrows raised as far as they could go. He’d finally fixed the duplication snarls in his code. All three of him leveled their halberds at a bristling Hookwolf and a short, brutal melee ensued as each Armsmaster hurled yellow vials into his back while the other cut deeply into him, leaving the twitching remains of Hookwolf’s metallic form slowly withdrawing into his body. The grainy footage cut to Colin taking an interview on location while cleanup crews worked the scene.
“It was a collaborative effort,” he gave the camera his patented Armsgrin. “The team on the backend are just as important as those of us out here-”
I reached down and tapped the screen, pausing the video. “That was my potions! Fuck yes! Get dunked on, Cuckwolf!”
Missy, on reflex, scratched her chestplate over where the knotted scar Hookwolf had given her lay. “It’s always a good day when that piece of shit gets taken down. Now he’s just got to make it to the ‘cage.”
I made a mental note to ask Contessa to explain why exactly the rigamarole of supercriminals were allowed to exist in their current form. I was sure there were a lot of perfectly valid answers, I just wanted to understand.
“Shit is fucked.” I could build things that would fix it, but even that felt too small scale. I should be designing the systems that made all of this unnecessary. “If I can get it done in time I’ll put my next robot on the defense team.”
Missy glanced at Pilot, standing politely next to me. “Another one?”
There was a subtle curl of her lip that I greatly misliked. “You’ll like this one better, it’ll be the most handsome dude you’ve ever seen.”
“I would not,” she shot back, cheeks tinged a little pink.
To be fully candid the next robot I made would not be something the majority of capes could fight. It would be coming in closer to being like fighting me at my Dark Smoke Peak - assuming the combat software worked. I mean, it would work but it was going to be hard to get it to have the intensity discretion of a human. This wouldn’t be too much of an issue if it was going to protect a convoy against the Empire, but if I was going to deploy it against, say, Uber and Leet, well… they probably didn’t deserve to get instacapped through the femur by a plasma bolt the second they entered sensor range.
“You will. Just wait. All the times you laughed at Dennis when he got all tongue-tied around Pilot, it’ll happen to you.”
“I’m better than some hormonal boy,” she scoffed, never looking more like a literal child than in this moment.
“I’m going to honey trap you with a robot, and it’s going to be hilarious.”
Carlos entered the room, still steaming from his shower, raking fingers through his shoulder length black hair - Missy turned to him. “Carlos,” she whined. “Greg’s threatening me.”
“Oh no,” he replied flatly. “Can I join in?”
Missy gave an exaggerated look of betrayal, the back of one hand pressed against her forehead.
“She thinks I won’t make a boy robot so hot that she gets all blushy,” I said. “I ain’t no coward. I’m finna make him caked up, himbo style.”
Carlos glanced at Pilot, and even though we all knew she was an unthinking, unfeeling array of polymers and circuitry underneath, I could still see the kneejerk reaction to her beauty. “Honestly, it would have been worse if you made another girl one. Sorry, Missy, you laughed at all of us, fair return.”
“That’s exactly what I said!”
“You guys suck,” Missy groaned, trying to hide her smile. “Pilot, slap Greg for me.”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Vista,” Pilot said demurely. “I can only act in self defence.”
Missy boo’ed. “Anyway, I was just showing Greg that Armsmaster got Hookwolf!”
“Oh shit, really?”
Missy waved him over and pulled the slider on the video back to the start of the fight. Carlos whistled in awe. “He fucking decimated him.”
On the screen Colin grinned, his career and optimism restored.
“Door to Hitler, next to a town, please.”
The rectangle in space opened in my alchemy lab, once more showing a golden bright morning. I bet that was why they picked it, so I could end one day by starting another. I stepped through and took in the scene, setting my omnitool to take a full recording.
This was going to be a reconnaissance mission. Head in, look around, learn. Activating a function I had toyed with, but never really used, I projected a hologram artwork of TRUST on the front of my magic t-shirt. A subtle level of trust, not an overtly mastering level, enough to perhaps nudge things in my favour.
The town in front of me was quite large from what I could see, a couple of hundred meters away, a squat thing of brown houses with red tile rooves. Strings of smoke drifted from all over and even from here I could see the shapes of people as they moved to and fro. The grass I was standing on and for, from what I could see, miles around was shorn down and there was a quaint road of packed dirt to my left heading into town.
With a cheery step I started toward town. It was another nice day out, sun, some cloud, freak dinosaur birds picking whatever horrific insects existed here out of the grass - real nice. My confidence and cheer started to wane the closer I got to town, it was just something about the vibe.
The people here had noticed me. Some had come out to look. I could instantly recognise that I stood out like a sore thumb, the people here were all short and thick, with the same weird facial features as that woman, with dusky skin, dark hair and even darker eyes. Eyes that were all watching me with an intense suspicion and fear. I stopped still and watched the crowd slowly grow, all muttering to each other in their language.
“Salve?” I tried with a smile, and there was a momentary pause, like a beat in a comedy show, before the screaming started. Hideous screaming, bellowing, setting my skin crawling and before I could register it as a conscious act I was running, legs pumping as hard as I could make them, sprinting full tilt away from the mob that had started pursuit.
“Door home!” I choked out and ran full pelt through the door that sprang up in front of me, colliding heavily with a work bench with a crunch of bone from my hip. I bounced off and screamed, rolling in pain, the door closing behind me before the people from the other dimension could come through.
I spent a few minutes rolling around in pain, while Pilot tried to follow what medical droid programming I’d been able to work in, until I felt well enough to sit up. I crawled until I was propped up against the very bench I had crashed into. “Jesus. You shoulda been there, Pilot. Those guys are crazy. I bet they’re the Hitler team.”
“They looked like Hitlers,” she agreed.
“Fuck, dude,” I pulled myself into an almost standing position, one hand clutching a hip that I knew was going to be completely purple by tomorrow morning. “Omnitool, what kind of people are in the latest recording?”
After a second the display flashed ‘Search Error’.
“Perhaps no one was there at all,” Pilot suggested.
“No, shut up. Ow. Omnitool, pull up an image of all the people scanned in that recording.” Thankfully, this was something it could do. I reviewed the dozen or so people’s medical data, revealing weird irregularities in their entire physical makeup. It’s like they were almost people, but not. They had more or less all the right organs and stuff, but in the wrong sizes or places or ratios.
It was like they were completely speciated from homosapiens.
I was looking at some kind of other hominid.
The sphere of what I had considered Cauldron’s mission expanded. Foolishly, I had assumed that every alternate earth had humans, like me, when the likelihood of that was actually very low. Aleph had humans, but for all I knew that was it and humans existed on only those two earths.
For all I knew every other earth was full of better homos than us.
All along I had thought I was the greatest homo, but, perhaps I was among the weakest.
I got out my phone and texted Contessa, asking her how high I was on the homo scale - six hours later she replied with the LATER HOMO meme which, though funny, was incredibly unhelpful and decidedly childish.
A thought I had never thought suddenly came to me. Sveta and Weld, what kind of homos were they?
Chapter 130: Look into my head 6.5
Chapter Text
Among my work emails for the day, hidden under the usual bunch of questions from other Tinkers about the work I was occasionally uploading to the intranet, was one I was CC’d into by Emily about my mandatory attendance for Sophia’s upcoming disciplinary hearing to determine if cramming Taylor into a locker full of rotting tampons constituted a breach of parole conditions. This hadn’t happened last time, but I suppose that was because they had admission of crime rather than competitive, ranked school bullying.
I knew my bureaucratic efforts would eventually pay off. Sure, it had taken, like, two or three months but progress was progress and the only person I had failed was Taylor who had been subjected to the worst day of her life so far. I really hoped she had the support she needed to, this time, not become Scarecrow, though at least now it was unlikely she would want to flavourblast me - unless she took the Forge’s warning of not to come back to school on that day as a threat.
Stupid thing.
In any case, my agenda today was finally making Amy her Christmas present. She still hadn’t told me what she wanted so I could only conclude she wanted the bitchy option. Of all the spiteful things I could make a figurine of her sister painted to induce a crushing sense of romantic longing would be the cruelest, so I wouldn’t be going with that. Instead, I figured that she could beta test the generative AI I had been thinking about since basically the only thing she did outside of school and charity work was doomscrolling trash, so she could at least be doomscrolling helpful trash that I curated for her to save her from her terminally shit taste.
It wasn’t going to be outrageously hard or anything, I had examples kicking around in my head and nineteen, seventeen, sixteen, fifteen, eight, seven and six all contributed in varying degrees, but as usual the limiting factor was time and resources. I was a human person, working at human scale, and I could only type so fast.
Two had let me perfect the layout of the projected keyboard of my omnitool, but even that only helped so much.
Such was life, even the greats like Colin and Dragon had to deal with it.
Infiltration: Take three.
This time I was going in extra prepared. Leaning even heavier into my holographic disguises I created a composite image of all the males that had been scanned and projected it over my entire body like a shell. I hoped it wouldn’t look as uncanny valley to them as it did to me.
“Thanks for the door,” I said as it closed behind me, leaving only the slightly overcast morning of the alternate earth. I’d asked for it to be made on the other side of the town from last time, just to avoid association with that particular direction.
This time I approached, and while noticed, wasn’t instantly singled out for being a quirked up white boy with a hint of swagger. I took everything in that I could, recognising nothing. Now that I could stand and just look at a building I could see that it only superficially resembled architecture I knew. Having to follow the same laws of physics it had the same basic shape, but the placement of things like doors and windows were just as subtly off to me as their faces.
With a fluttering heart and shaking knees I ventured further into the town. The amount of people very slowly grew as I penetrated in from some outer slum-like suburb and I listened to their gibberish, spoken in rough, low voices. Even the women sounded guttural to match their heavy features. I got a few glances as I walked but none that seemed significant, even though my magic shirt was working double time to wick away all my armpit sweat.
I walked and the once earthen roads quickly gave way to stone roads and I saw what I assumed was the local equivalent of a horse drawing a coach, even though it looked more like a lanky capybara than anything equine. I walked further and noticed a distinct bitter tang in the air, something metallic, something industrial. This might have been an industrial district, I could hear distant hammering, but the thing that was really fucking with me was that there were no cars.
Not a single fucking car, motorbike, bus or anything. If I was being honest I had no idea when cars were supposed to appear, only that it had happened sometime after the industrial revolution. I watched a pair of women, really only notable as women because they still had breasts, walk past both dressed in brown smocks stitched with a pattern that might have been fingers around the sleeve cuffs.
What I really needed to do was build a stealth drone that would record every scrap of how these people interacted with each other and then feed it through a fork of Pilot’s program specialized for translation. Cauldron really hadn’t made it fucking easy for me if they wanted me to start from nothing. I mean, I could start stealing supplies until I could iterate on my omnitool gauntlets again, I didn’t think that was verboten, and I might even have to. Getting to a point where I was making microchips without the backing of decades of earth's industrial march behind me was going suck shit and donkey dicks.
I followed the noise of people and after walking for ten or so more minutes I realised I was getting more and more stares. Not wanting to risk another mob situation I ducked off the bigger street I was on and walked away until I found a secluded alley.
“Door home, thanks.” I slipped through and checked myself. It wasn’t anything to do with the integrity of the hologram, it remained as solid as ever, so it must have been something about how I was behaving. Too much like a tourist, maybe?
Either way, my next excursion there might have to be during the night so that I could get away with raiding whatever junk tech they had.
It had been some weeks since I had last been to the hospital, the delivery line of pills was quite capable of going on without me. We had a good setup going where some lab techs filled the furnaces for me to come along and activate the formations, then the furnaces would cook until they spat out a pill, something that took a few hours, and the lab techs would take it, clean the crucible, and refill it for me to come and activate again.
The best part of it, the very best part, was that I didn’t need an escort anymore.
The repulsorjets on my armour, placed at key aerodynamic areas, dimmed as I came in for a landing, the antigrav letting me gently drift down to the concrete. A hundred kilos of metal made a gentle crunching sound as my feet made contact. I didn’t want it to end, flying was so incredibly fun - especially in this armour.
‘It looks like it fucks like a fighter jet,’ these were Colin’s exact words, muttered so softly only my omnitool had picked them up, upon seeing it for the first time, and fuck like a fighter jet it did. Twenty two and twenty three functioned as incredible force multipliers in terms of what I could make and how powerful I could make it, mechanical armour sitting squarely in Hephaestus’ divine wheelhouse of practical crafts.
“Omnitool,” I said, trying out a new themed catchphrase. “Biggety bam.”
The omnitool, rather than saying anything, flash forged my uniform’s wizard hat and coated it in the hologram of heroic colour. The whole Technomage thing had grown on me some, you could have fun with being a sentai cyberpunk wizard. I was going to have to try to lean harder into the theme with stuff I made, but with what I wasn’t yet sure.
I swept the hat onto my head and strode forward with great purpose, the automatic doors of the hospital sliding smoothly open to greet my arrival. Now that I was properly suited up I could run the programs I so sorely desired - the same systems that monitored responses to Pilot’s body language were running, learning every second to make me move in a way that activated people’s neuron’s the most and the same voice modulator scripts were running. Though I had access to the conversation charisma enhancer, I didn’t have it running.
“Hey, how’re you going?” I said to the reception nurse, my voice now back to the level of my Dark Smoke Puncher days, waving as I walked by, revelling in the awed stare.
The armour, I knew, looked incredible. It was impossible for it not to, two and eighteen saw to that. This was no limp wristed, ‘haha I seem to have made my gear look peak awesome without considering what people think of me haha.’ Nah, I wanted them to see this. Attention whore to the core, baby.
Handing off the bags was quick and painless, well practised at this point - the hospitals knowing that I would follow where Amy went. As usual I asked which floor she was on, and hurried to meet her.
Also as usual she was hard at work hating herself and her life, not knowing that all she needed was to hang out with me more and all her problems would be fixed. I waited until she was finished healing and caught sight of me to switch colour schemes from Heroic to Pink Neons.
“Merry Christmas!” I brandished her present like a knight forcing a dagger through a gap in his opponents armour.
“Oh, thanks,” she took it and looked at it for a moment. “I didn’t get you anything, though.”
I waved her off. “Who gives a shit? I don’t need anything.”
“Cool,” she said, turning her present, neatly wrapped, over in her hands. It was a refurbished iPad, running the beta test of the media generative AI - everything from written word to comic to video; NSFW unlocked, unfucked hands not guaranteed. “Nice armour. Weren’t you a medical tinker?”
“More like Leet.” Only our powers hated us in different ways. “But yeah, flying is awesome.”
“Flying is so cold, you’re lucky you’ve got that suit on. The windburn hurts like shit.”
“Your poor baby bird skin, why not make a skin suit? You don’t even have to give it freckles.”
Amy fixed me with a troubled, uncomfortable glare.
“Hear me out,” I said. “Half the number of freckles.”
“Shut up,” she muttered and turned to head to the next patient. Dutifully, I followed. “Don’t you have anything better to do than stalk and shit talk me?”
“Ain’t seen ya in weeks, bro. Came to say hello. Wanna hang out this weekend?”
Amy tried to smile politely, but it was more like a look of pain. “I’m pretty busy this weekend.”
She wasn’t, and I knew she wasn’t, she just didn’t want to leave the comfort zone of being alone. I had to think of some way to force the matter as this was for her own good, too. “Well, let me know when you have a free one - they’re running out. Hey, hurry up and finish and I’ll show you how your present works.”
“Don’t rush me,” she replied mulishly. “It’s hard.”
“Once you find out what I made you, you'll kick yourself for not finishing quicker.”
Amy looked down at the thin rectangle of shiny pink paper, it crinkled as she turned it to look at both sides. “I already have a tablet.”
I gave her a flat look, then remembered everything was covered from the nose up. It was easy to forget I was wearing this mask. “No one has one like this. First of its kind.”
She nodded ungratefully and went back to work. Jesus Christ, maybe she was just horrible? What was it that I’d done last time that made her ease off the bitch pedal quicker? I’d been so much worse to her last time, was she just into that kind of thing? What I remembered about her observe biography was mostly it being broad strokes about her spiralling situation, not that she liked friends who bullied her into things she didn’t want to do. It had to be a power thing, her brain worm was making her cunty until she started working with her power to do more than just the same thing over and over again.
New plan.
I made the usual inane chatter until she finished up the last of her self imposed punishment and we convened to the rooftop, the usual hangout so that she could smoke without anyone seeing. I wished I could do as I used to, and light them with sparks from my fingers, but this suit couldn’t do that. I’d had to cut out a lot of potential applications to save time and conserve space.
“Want one?” she held one out to me, but I politely refused.
“They taste like arse.”
“Huh,” she scoffed, smiling a little. “Yeah. So, the thing you think is so good?”
“Open it.”
Amy unwrapped her present with an unimpressed look. “Apple?”
“It’s called spycraft, genius. Blending in. Omnipad, register Amy Dallon as user.”
The omnipad lit up and the screen ran through a quick boot prompt until a series of icons settled in. “Pictures, of all kinds,” I pointed to one. “Comic strip style,” I pointed to another. “Music. Animation. Realistic video. What do you like?”
“I don’t get it.”
I bit out an amused huff and licked my lips. How about a little demonstration? “Omnipad, generate a thirty page manga chapter in the style of Hirohiko Araki, safe for work yaoi, starring Kid Win of the Brockton Bay Wards and Technomage of the Brockton Bay Wards, omegaverse plot, use the words, ‘throat goat,’ at least once, full colour, painterly style.”
The expression on Amy’s face grew increasingly intrigued as I spoke, her eyebrows creasing the mass of freckles she called a forehead. “It just makes stuff for you?”
The omnipad, being a semi divine work of practical crafts, had already generated the first page - a miniaturised supercomputer in the palm of your hand. The only way to describe the art and story was, ‘horrendous.’ Not in the sense that it was too bad visually or in story congruence, but it was morally debilitating and it definitely needed updating, which, luckily I could do from my omnitool which both housed a copy of the program and a link to Amy’s device.
“Holy shit,” Amy goggled as she paged through the manga, giggling at every panel, the lit cigarette hanging forgotten between her lips. “This is awesome. And it’ll just make anything? So if I said, uh, ‘omnipad. Write me a ten thousand word short story about, uh, standing on a hospital roof,’ it will?”
I gestured to where the pad was already doing so, a small notification momentarily popping up to say it was queued. “You’re going to want to refine your terms to be more specific, that prompt could be about anything. And they can be about anything.”
“Anything?” Amy asked, looking alive for the first time tonight, her tone suggesting something illicitly lurid.
“Are you into Fenja and Menja scissoring incest? I know I am.”
“Dude, what the fuck? Seriously? You gave me a porn machine?”
Her word choice suggested moral displeasure, but her smile and cracking voice betrayed her - I knew Amy, and I knew her well. “Only the best for homeslicey.”
She burst out into pure, honest laughter. “You’re crazy! You can make anything, and you made that?”
“There’s no genius without a touch of madness.”
“Fucking hell.”
This was it, I could feel it. A genuine connection, a cracking of her thorned crab shell and an exposure of her moist inner meat. I was eating well tonight. “What’s the point of having all this power if you don’t do anything fun with it?”
Her smile caught, but I pushed on.
“Life is made for living. I know you see the damage of chronic stress in people every day, of how being unhappy can make you sick, of how people fall to pieces when they don’t get enough sleep. I’m telling you, stop being a dumb shit and come hang out this weekend. We’re doing some cool shit and I’m going to make you have fun.”
For a moment I thought she might break down, but instead she pouted and looked away, as though trying not to seem pleased. “Fine, whatever.”
Dumbfounding behaviour, but then Amy was retarded so I wasn’t surprised. “Sweet. Oh, and don’t just use that thing for porn, it can do so much more. Observe; omnitool, generate a seven book novel series of a crossover between award winning Japanese light novel series ‘Virtuous Sons’ by Yamamoto Bunta Striker and the equally critically acclaimed ‘My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic’, in which the plot revolves around reaching heaven through violence.”
A little wheel on my HUD started spinning and I was eager to see what cooked abomination would be spat out the other end. I hoped Amy would use it to eventually generate a self help book about gaining the self esteem needed to come out from under the thumb of a simultaneously overbearing and emotionally distant mother.
“Right, so if I said, ‘omnipad, generate a feature length buddy cop movie about Pan-”
Foul and wretched thing, the hand, crowned in the false glory of three hundred and seven shining stars, with all the arrogance of a god, made its dark descent. It split reality like a ripe fruit and clearly still expected me to resist because it hurtled down as a fist, cold clocking me into the void.
It could have been worse. I was prepared, this time, as the hand carved into me with Elven Enchantment.
Amy Dallon
“-acea and Glory Girl…’ it will?”
Greg’s helmet suddenly snapped shut, two panels in the lower portion sliding forward with a sharp click. It was an interesting effect, between the subtle colour changes in the different angles of whatever space age metal it was made of it gave off the distinct impression that he was still grinning. “That’s right,” he said. “It can produce any media you want. What kind of stuff do you like?”
Kind of weird, but ok. It would be too embarrassing to admit what I really liked, things so niche, so lame, so geeky that even someone who told me they ate their own snot would point and laugh. “Stuff.”
“I like stuff, too. Things are my favourite kind of stuff.”
I rolled my eyes and exhaled loudly. “What do you do with yours? Make really fuckable pictures of the Simurgh?”
“I hate the Simurgh, but, yeah, I can do that. I’m probably just going to use it to make all the shit anime airing this season have best girl win.”
“Who?”
“Best girl refers to the objectively best girl in any given show,” Greg supplied helpfully. “Who usually loses the MC bowl to the worst girl.”
“Ah.” That made sense, more or less. “Like how in Teen Wolf, the most annoying girl ever ends up with what’s his face, the wolf man guy?”
“Exactly like that. Fuck that bitch.”
“I guess. It was more Vicky’s show. Why were you watching Teen Wolf?”
“I’ve never seen a single episode.”
Was he stupid? “So you’re just agreeing with me for no reason?”
“I’m running a search on all the conversation topics as we speak,” he tapped the side of his helmet. “The internet almost collectively agrees with you. They hate that girl in Teen Wolf.”
“Cool, cool. That’s pretty lame, though.”
“Lame attracts lame.”
“Yeah,” I spat bitterly, a thick, ash flavoured loogie splattering onto the roof. “Nothing lamer than being stuck in the same rut.”
“Nothing ever happens. It’s so over.”
“Yeah,” I said again, spitting just as bitterly as the first. Nothing ever happened, it was the same routine every day. Nothing but stress, no sleep and wishing all the people I helped would just die before they could even get to the hospital. If that toddler died on impact with the car crash I would probably never have heard about it and had one less reason to worry. If the hospitals didn’t take donations from rich fucks so that they could get on the healing list I wouldn’t have to feel guilty about fixing some aging alcoholic multi-millionaire’s cirrotic liver over some average joe’s fatal pneumonia infection.
I couldn’t just turn them away, like, sorry fuckhead, you’ve only got yourself to blame. Oh, that would feel so good. Just one solid, ‘fuck you.’ - but I was Panacea, the universal cure, and the day I stopped healing was the day I stopped being a good person.
“Bro needs a hug.”
I looked at him, the harsh rooftop lights reflecting off his immaculate armoured suit. He was probably right, and yet - “go hug yourself.”
He proceeded to do so and I gave another loud exhale, coupled with a small smile. “Thanks for the Ipad, Greg. It’s a nice present. I gotta go though, Carol’s going to be here soon.”
“I’ll come with,” he said immediately. It should have been really off putting that he followed me around like a puppy, only turning up to the hospitals that I was at, and it had been at first, but it was really hard to continue to dislike someone who really just wanted to be your friend - and even worse, he was good at it.
I nodded. “Come on, then. I gotta go get my bag.”
I threw the unsmoked remains of my cigarette away in some random direction and we headed back down the stairs, locking the rooftop door behind us. It had been a while since I had any friends at all, not since Panacea rose from the corpse of Amy Dallon and crushed the possibility with the weight of responsibility. Fucking powers. Fucking Carol.
Greg and I chatted about Teen Wolf while we waited for her to come and get me; I got the feeling he’d watched a lot more of that show than he was letting on. Nobody could browse reddit, or whatever cesspit opinion site he was hooking into, fast enough to parrot in real time conversation. When Carol finally pulled up I could see her casting suspicious glances at us, and she stopped the Lexus in a no park zone. The engine idled as she got out of the car, a rare action on her part, and approached.
“Hello, Mrs. Dallon,” said Greg in a tone that, if I didn’t know was ironic, I would have mistaken for picture perfect arsekissery, politely taking his wizard hat off and inclining his head in respect. “How are you this evening?”
“Fine, thank you, Technomage.” She looked down her nose at him, though she seemed happy enough with the deference. “I hope you’ve both been hard at work?”
I wasn’t sure who the aspersion was being cast at.
“Of course,” he gestured to me. “It’s hard keeping up with Panacea, but I’m doing my best.”
“Good. Come along, Amy.” Carol said, mollified to the point where she didn’t attempt to slip in a veiled criticism of anyone - a rare occurrence. There was always something someone in sight was doing poorly, or awkwardly, or not enough of. She’d probably gotten it all out of her system at work.
“Bye, Greg,” I shifted my backpack, from where it was slung over one shoulder, to give him a wave.
“Good night, Panacea,” he replied, still in arsekisser mode. I stifled a snort. “Good night, Mrs. Dallon.”
We got in the car and Carol started the engine. Just as we were starting forward I realised I had no way to message him about this weekend. I turned to look out the rear window but the second I did Greg flashed bright and streaked into the sky like a rocket.
Great. I was going to have to go on
facebook.
Chapter 131: Look into my head 6.6
Chapter Text
The clock on my HUD showed 02:34 am. I’d been out for a good six hours this time. I felt the suit unlock from PILOT control back to assist mode and I stood, taking in my surroundings.
Exactly as programmed I had been sitting in one of the briefing rooms in the PRT building, one of the PRT officers waiting with me. I glanced at them, my omnitool automatically taking a scan, conducting a search (the ‘unwritten rules’ only mattered if you got caught) and showing me their name above their head, gamer style, so that I would never forget. I would never forget you, John Pliskin.
That name was familiar, I remembered it specifically from my first life. This dickweed was one of Coil’s guys on the inside, and Coil was still Thomas Calvert. I had to do something about that at some point, but first - I had magic. I mean, I had magic before, but I could feel this. It was something otherworldly, even inhuman.
Although perhaps it would be closer to knowing how the world worked, to be able to make, imbuing with the deepest forces of creation, crafting things to be more of what they were. A loaf of bread could be made so nourishing that a single slice could keep a man fed for a hard day's labour. A knife that, no matter how hard the wood you whittled with it, would scarcely lose its edge. Water flasks that never leaked, cloaks that hid you better than any camouflage. Things that glowed when orcs were close, secret, hidden doorways.
Officer Pliskin had stood up at the same time I had and was watching me closely.
“Technomage,” he had his hand resting on the holster of his service pistol. “Are you back?”
“Yeah,” I said, the panels of my helmet snapping open. “I’m thinking I’m back.”
“Great,” he said, tone friendly, taking his hand off his gun. “It’s better than being out on active duty, but watching you sit still for five hours straight gets mighty boring.”
“Sorry, not sorry, my dude. I don’t even remember it.”
“Lucky.” Pliskin quipped, raising his hand to his communicator, a device strapped to his upper chest, which he activated and spoke into. “He’s awake. Send in the helicopters.”
The helicopters didn't take long to descend, they came charging in through the door and smothered me in hugs.
“My baby boy,” mum yawned, wrapping me in a hug. Dad rubbed his eyes and hugged us both. “I can’t wait for this power possession thing to go away.”
I would have to check the recording on my omnitool later to see exactly what kind of expression I made at that point. “Yeah,” I said. “Me too. Sorry for keeping you up.”
“Anything for you,” dad ruffled my hair. “Staying up a little late is nothing for us.”
“I’m sure I’ll figure something out,” I told them. “Can we go home now? I haven’t slept either.”
“I guess it wouldn’t be like sleeping, would it?” Dad asked as we were ushered out, being led to the Wards area so I could collect Pilot.
“It’s like I blink, and suddenly I’m somewhere else and my body hasn’t gotten any rest.” I called up the medical scans of my body, noting the highly increased cortisol levels. The parasite was stressed out something fierce. Good.
“Do you think it’s like that for it?” Mum yawned again. Pilot assist mode suddenly started taking manual control over my body language. “You said it was a gay alien?”
“That statement was not intended to be offensive to a group of people or their sexuality.”
Mum laughed.
“But, no. It pretends to suffer, fakes emotions. Do you know what I think to myself when I see it’s fraudulent pain? ‘Take that, you worm.’”
“Good on you, son,” dad clapped me on the shoulder, flesh slapping the best titanium alloy I could produce on short notice. “Never let aliens win. This was true from the first pixel of Space Invaders appearing on screen in nineteen seventy five, and if I’m wrong may I be executed by the CIA.”
My internal fact checker, as it flashed the correct date of Space Invader’s creation up on my HUD, informed me that he deserved to commit suicide by hanging himself in his cell right before a trial where he would release damning information on several high profile public figures. “We hate aliens here,” I agreed.
“Sucks that you didn’t even get your own special PRT case file for it,” mum continued. “And that it wasn’t sixty nine.”
“That’s probably the worst thing about this whole shitshow. I could have been mister sixty nine.”
“Of all the missed opportunities.”
Officer Pliskin was silent through all of this, no doubt gathering all the information he could for his master's slimy hands. Something would be done about Coil, something I should have done a long time ago but had never occurred to me until this very second. I was going to text Contessa and ask what the path was to having him exposed.
Simple, right? Why not just use that method for everything? Hey, Contessa, what are the steps to knowing if Max Anders is actually Kaiser? I was pretty sure that one never got confirmed last time. Hey, Contessa, what’s the path for stopping the sex slave trade in the city? That one definitely didn’t get solved last time.
At any rate, it was finally time to commence Operation ‘Whacking Day’.
In order of importance, the upcoming series of events I needed to deal with were; one, hanging out with Amy, two, preparing for the Simurgh’s attack on Australia in the next few weeks, three, make sure Hookwolf went to the Birdcage and finally, four, presenting testimony at Sophia’s trial thing.
Items one and four were taking place right after one another in just a few days time, then Hookwolf was the week after that, and then finally the Simurgh. Unfortunately, due to review board constraints, I couldn’t use the Hookwolf escort as a test for my Endbringer laser - not that it would even be finished by then. I’d be incredibly lucky if I was done by the time it attacked - perhaps one day I would be able to build the greatest weapon the world had ever seen in one strike of my hammer, but today was not that day.
Not even in three days could I achieve this.
All I could do was my best, and at the moment that meant melting down and rebuilding all of my pill furnaces once more.
If I had to give the magic a shape it was something like a flame. A flame that burned and burned and could never go out, like a star. A flame that burned with the song composing reality and it flowed through the resonance of my soul. A flame that poured into my work as I unmade and remade once more. It was something that was mine, and yet not from me. It was something that was magic, and yet not, more of an art. If I had been born with it, if it was all I had known, perhaps it would not even seem like magic to begin with.
Even so, what I had wrought by the end eclipsed all human make by the same metric that the brightness of the sun eclipsed that of the moon. I knew instantly, when I was done, that I could never bring myself to willfully destroy something of so much beauty.
The pill furnace, already an item of impossible magic, already divine, already beautiful, was made to be even more of what it was. Its qualities enhanced, stretched even further past mortal limitation. I knew, too, that this process could be applied to the medicines it produced if I were to oversee the production, and tend to it as it was made - however, even with the increased efficiency of the new furnaces this would still take too long to be practicable to all of them, unless it was to be all I would do while they were burning.
If a single slice of bread could sustain a man for a day's hard labour, what could a healing pill forged in a twice divine furnace become? I had to know. Not just for curiosity's sake, but for the good this could do, I recast all the furnaces in this new image, each one now shining with that perfect internal silver light.
I moved from furnace to furnace, tending to the alchemical process, the flame burning within me tracing along the whole process to illuminate it with the same light, producing a set of pills that were as shining silver and gold as they were rust red. Their efficacy? I had no idea, I would have to test them on unsuspecting children.
I got the text a few days later.
Go to the nearest pay phone, dial 450-438-418, and tell the voicemail that ‘Thomas Calvert is Coil.’ Hang up immediately after this.
So, here I was, walking to a pay phone. I didn’t really expect her to tell me, she was usually infuriatingly vague on questions, but that might have been because they were purposefully inane conspiracy theories and she likely didn’t want to suffer the thinker headache on my bullshit. I’d looked it up, the number, and it was Canadian, but that was as far as I could tell with a cursory search which meant it was probably an internal use only number.
It was a nice day out, and I was determined to enjoy it even if it was only for the shortest time possible. The pay phone was close to our house, but if the Forge happened while I was without my darling Pilot to chaperone me she was going to have to come sprinting out of the house and blow our cover, so it was only in direly important circumstances such as this that I would leave.
I reached the phone and stepped inside the booth. I hadn’t been in one of these things for years, let alone actually made a call from one. I picked up the receiver and slotted the correct coinage into the machine, then dialed.
The phone rang out and the voicemail answered. A woman’s voice, sounding somewhat stern and formal. “You’ve reached my office, please leave a message and I will attend to it as soon as possible. Thank you.”
“Thomas Calvert is Coil,” I said, then hung up. I guess that was it? It seemed strange to me, but for Contessa, the supposedly invincible precog, even a simple action like that, to the right person and at the right time could produce a domino effect to achieve any result.
I looked around, up and down the road, as though something would happen - the place was unchanged from its boring suburban nature as ever. “Omnitool, take that snippet of conversation and match the voice’s identity.”
As useful and reliable as ever, my omnitool spat out the answer using the few sources available, as she did not make television appearances with any regularity, that it was probably Narwhal. That number was the direct line to the leader of the Guild, which was a little odd because small town crime bosses weren’t the Guild’s thing. They dealt with international threats, big ones. However, Dragon was a Guild member and was good friends with Colin, and this would likely get from Narwhal, to Dragon, to him - and then he would be able to sort things out.
Incredible. Truly amazing. It really put things into perspective that, if some things were this easy for her to path, the task Cauldron faced must be nigh insurmountable for the world to be as bad as it was. Well, that was Operation: Whacking Day ticked off the list.
Time to go steal junk from the other dimension.
The day and night cycle was reversed between home and here, so when I went through the portal I was greeted with the cold, dark night. The plan was to build super duper divine, enchanted, tinkertech perpetual energy generators because surely I could find magnets and copper wire here, or at least things that would behave like magnets and copper wire.
Being the miracle of nonsense science that it was my Omnitool could print fabric woven out of the industrial plastics that made up a third of the omnimaterial, and though omnimaterial was by default an off white it by no means had to be. Thus, printed in a patchwork of darker colours, enchanted with one of my magics to reactively shift the camouflage pattern, and woven with the latest to produce a cloak that hid the wearer from unfriendly eyes, I was as close to invisible as I was going to get without making the cloaking system from one of my cybernetics powers.
I was starting to feel like my Dark Smoke Self again, doing magic ninja shit and saving the world.
I stole through the cold dark of night and into the town of the alternate earth. The night time was less strange to me than in the day, the shadows smoothing over details that would have stuck out previously, even in the street light flickering at every other street corner. I stole closer to one, they weren’t electric, or even gas, there was a bit of something floating in the middle of the glass ball. I squinted through the light but couldn’t make it out. Something suspended in solution, bioluminescent. Very cool.
I followed my holographic map to sources of metals I might need, hoping to chance upon a junkyard of some kind. They actually did have the same elements I was used to working with, so this was at least an earth not so far away from my own - if the atmosphere I was breathing wasn’t a bigger tip off. It made me wonder about the variance between alternate earths, not just in terms of the people who lived there, but in environments and base elements. What were the chances that everything was the same as where I lived? I could plainly see that evolution had taken several different paths here, and while things were similar enough because the selection pressures seemed to be fairly comparable, surely there were whole worlds so different that I would scarcely understand them when I saw them.
I wanted to see those worlds. I wanted to walk upon their moons. I looked up at the night sky, and recognised nothing. I shivered, hopefully I would even get there before I died.
I moved on. Almost none of the metal my omnitool was picking up was scavengeable from a moral standpoint, but I really only needed small seed amounts to get things going. I continued my creeping and looting until two life signals appeared on my readout as I was nearing the outer suburbs of the north part of town that led out into some distant wooded hills. I quickly ducked into the shadows of an alleyway and pulled my cloak around me, watching the pair approaching.
I thought they looked beautiful, at first, like snow - but then I saw their too long faces, their stretched out limbs and their all black eyes, heard them speaking garbled words in their sing-song voices.
Like a parody of me.
They moved like hunting dogs, cajoling each other with low spoken, but high pitched, chatter. They wore no clothes, but their nudity was obscured by the platinum blonde hair that covered their bodies like a fine fur. I stood, transfixed, as they turned their heads this way and that, looking, always looking with large, liquid black eyes that reflected the lamplight.
It was plain to see, that despite their fearsome appearance, that they weren’t animals. These were people, with the intelligence to match. They stalked past me and I followed in the shadows, sneakers treading carefully over rough cobbled road.
A second set of hominids, something so foreign to my earth. I had to see what they were doing. The juju I was getting from the situation was bad as fuck, and yet, even so. I had to see, I had to know.
The pair, of which I was fairly sure were male, continued scouting and it struck me that I hadn’t had a single life signal other than them - as though everyone who lived here were hiding underground. The pair knickered at each other, flashes of long, sharp teeth clear in the pale lamps, like they were joking, one nudging the other with a gangly elbow. They seemed in no hurry, as though out for a midnight stroll.
Then both reacted sharply, stilling, looking at one house in particular. I checked my omnitool, another signal coming from inside. Still hidden in the darkness I watched them attempt to break inside.
They still had hands, long fingered and slender, with vestigial nubs of claws, which they used with the easy skill of career thieves, their digits creeping over the heavily shuttered windows like spiders, finding gaps and prying. I wasn’t sure what they were even really trying to do since it looked like the iron shutters were bolted onto the wall, and locked with an equally heavy bar. They kept up their attempts until the person inside the building vanished from my omnitool’s scanner, which meant underground, then returned to wandering the streets.
I let them be. Maybe this was part of the Hitler’s scheme that I was supposed to stop? Cannibal skinwalkers? That shit was super radical. I would deal with that later, for now I had to scavenge and build.
Chapter 132: Look into my head 6.7
Chapter Text
If you had to ask me what the single greatest thing I could make was, the absolute pinnacle of technology and magic, the envy of the modern world, it would be my pair of No Change Underpants. Just picture it. Underpants, magically comfortable to a level never felt on the human gooch since the beginning of time, enchanted to repel all manner of filth, material enhanced to the degree that the elastic would never fade.
I was a god. Everyone else was a worm under my heel.
I definitely needed them today, though, because this was Sophia’s not-trial and my asscrack was dripping with cringe sweat.
It was a formal affair, or formal enough that I’d made a blazer to go with my magic t-shirt and underpants - business casual. The fit was great, three months into slamming chinese alchemy pills and not eating absolute slop had seen me lose a lot of weight, so while I may now be a complete twink at least I wasn’t fat. Gregchads stay winning.
The not-trial was taking place in one of the larger conference rooms, the PRT building had a lot of large conference rooms, and all the big players were making a showing. Rennick and Colin, both being Sophia’s direct bosses at various times, Joey Wake, the Youth Guard rep, Sarah Randangash, Sophia’s probation case handler, the legal advisor for us both, the man who was to make a decision on whether her actions were a probation breach, and Sophia herself.
Like me she was dressed to impress, hair all done up in a neat ponytail, smart blazer, skirt and collared blouse - she was even wearing glasses. It was a good look, I had to admit. Very neat, very librarian chic.
At ten am, the appointed time, the meeting began. The guy whose name I had forgotten started off by explaining why we were here and greeting everyone present, taking pains to ensure that everyone knew that this wasn’t a criminal hearing of any kind because that would come later depending on the conclusion arrived at here today over whether or not Sophia’s conduct violated her probation agreement, in which case she would revert back to facing the charges that were initially waived.
We couldn’t just lock her up and throw away the key because this very process was used to protect innocent people from false accusations. Why, a probationary Wards member could be accused of all kinds of things, like blackmailing colleagues into dating them, or revealing key departmental secrets to strangers over the internet.
I rested my elbows on the desk and steepled my fingers, making a mental note to have Pilot tell me she forgave me for everything later on. For now, as a hero, I had a monster to slay.
I glanced at Sophia as the guy in charge kindly bade I present my testimony, she was controlling her expression well but couldn’t hide the contemptuous curl of one plump lip.
I shuffled my stack of prepared notes, a hero preparing to slay my monster. The contrasts were interesting. I remembered that last time I had just blabbed, there’d been an investigation into the murder allegations, and Sophia had been sent to juvie quite quickly. Here, when I took the time to go through the process, unable to levy heftier claims, things dragged and they triggered Taylor regardless. Could this be a lesson I was supposed to learn about the futility of Big Government and the basedness of taking laws into one's own hands?
The hand of a tyrant descended, writing, with stars and malice, Alchemy (World of Darkness - Mummy the Resurrection) across my brow.
Colin Wallis
Greg’s Omnitool beeped, alerting me to the fact that the other had taken possession over him.
Thank god.
If I had to sit through one more minute of this god forsaken meeting I would try to saw my own arm off. The entire thing was a formality for a far past foregone conclusion - Sophia Hess was going to juvie, no matter how hard the Director wanted to pretend it wasn’t going to happen. It was surely only sheer luck that it hadn’t happened while the Wards were still under my command, as if I needed another burden to shoulder for this drain swirling city. I stood, and as I stood the door opened, Greg’s suspiciously, though unblameably, attractive robot poked its head in.
“Excuse us for a moment,” I said, making my way around the table to where ‘Greg’ was gawking at the proceedings like a stunned mullet. I gripped him by the upper arm and pulled him toward the door, the papers he was holding spilling from his hands and onto the desk.
“Who are you?” the other squawked as I walked him out of the room, ignoring the stares. “Unhand me.”
“Pilot,” I handed him off to her - it. “Hold him and follow me. You, alien Greg, be quiet.”
The other unsuccessfully attempted to wiggle out of the robot’s grasp, but at the amount of pascals the actuators in its hands were capable of there was no escape.
“You will never silence me, pig .”
“You will be quiet and do as you’re told,” I said, turning a flat stare onto it. So different from him. “Or you will get locked in the suit again. I understand that last time worked a treat.”
We walked for a good twenty seconds before it started trying to escape again, muttering under its breath. “You have to let me go. You have no idea what you’re doing!”
“You could always explain it to us.”
The other looked as though it were forced to swallow a particularly sour lemon. “I can’t. The second you spill the beans he will know. I understand that as a PRT agent you’re more used to abusing your power than helping anyone, but you have to let me go.”
“You really don’t know who I am, do you?”
With a glower the other stared at my face, studying it before answering with bitter spite. “How should I?”
“I would have thought you’d know more of what he knows, but then, you are a personality split at the trigger event.”
“His? This stupid, fat…” the other looked down at itself, finally noticing the efforts of Greg’s labour. He fidgeted suddenly, as if uncomfortable, reaching down and adjusting his jeans awkwardly as Pilot frogmarched him. “He would, wouldn’t he - but I am not some ‘split personality’.”
He sneered at the very thought.
“What are you, then?”
His face went through a complicated series of expressions, confusion, panic, pride, fear, before he closed off again and defaulted back into base, stubborn antagonism. There was something about it that struck me as strangely childish, in the unsophisticated way kids expressed their emotions. “There’s no way I’m telling you that, pig.”
“Why do you hate us so much?”
The other turned an aggrieved expression onto me. “How could I not, Fed boy? Your organisation is nothing but a machine to preserve the status quo of the elite, corrupt, bottom to top - You don’t even know that Rebecca Costa-Brown is Alexandria. See? You don’t even care.”
I’d thought I’d kept my face impassive, but perhaps some of the derision I was feeling had slipped out. It was such a ludicrous claim to make, even with all the ways to fake it I had been in the same room with both of them multiple times over the years, for all that it was a popular conspiracy theory online. You could find thousands upon thousands of pictures comparing their height, build and chins - what little of their faces that could be overlapped; and, true, they did have similar chins but there was no way to fake the sheer difference in presence each woman possessed.
“It’s one of the more popular theories online.”
The other scoffed. “No doubt started by her to poison the well. Just what I would expect from someone so stupid they choked to death on a bug sandwich.”
I shouldn’t, I knew. I shouldn’t pull the thread. Sometimes you just had to smile and nod, sometimes it wasn’t worth biting when some schizo nutter started explaining to you that the government was going to microchip everyone with government mandated prosthetic hands, or that everyone’s driver licenses were going to be taken away from them if they didn’t conscipt to fight the war in Ukraine, ‘like what was happening in Britain’.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Skitter,” said the other, speaking the word like it was a name, in the same tone of reverence one used when talking about having seen Scion save a hundred thousand lives in a single flash of gold light. “Kills Alexandria in the future. I’m here to save her.”
“Alexandria?”
“I’m here to save Skitter. The least you could do is not get in my way.”
I smoothed my brow with the long practice of a seasoned public personality, well used to dealing with the inane, ignorant questions and opinions of people who had never worked in the public service, let alone law enforcement, let alone a job, forced you to listen to. It was like talking to a walking online forum full of people whose idea of fun was to shit on everything, no matter what it was, because it couldn’t live up to the shining ideal they had constructed within their heads.
“I see. Well… You should put yourself to use and come help me, there’s a lot of rare metals I could do with having duplicated.”
The other suddenly started fighting against Pilot’s grip. “Oh, I see, you’re Armsmaster . Glory hound Armsmaster, you’d kill a good hero if it gave you a mediocre press release. Stolen any arrest credit lately?”
I shouldn’t bite. I should just smile and nod. It was an agent of chaos. “I’d kill a hero?”
We reached the elevator, the other was still trying to make a break for it, but Pilot had been developed for this exact task.
“At an Endbringer battle, even. You’d set them up to die for a fruitless shot at valour.”
I glanced down at the floor buttons, hitting the one for the Wards labs, pushing down the irritation. There were heroes over the long years I found it near impossible to work with, whom I personally despised, who rubbed me wrong with their mere presence, but I could never in my wildest, darkest imagination see myself deliberately sacrificing their life to boost my career. I had my faults, I was a hard person to get along with, too, bereft of friends and personal happiness, but to set a colleague who, even if I hated, I respected on a professional level, to die against an Endbringer ? The accusation nettled. The doors opened.
“This is your last chance,” I said, setting my jaw and looking into what were normally guileless eyes. “Either be useful, or be locked away. How long is it now? Ten hours? More?”
The other opened his mouth to say something, doubtlessly, caustic, but I spoke over him.
“God is cruel, giving his strongest soldiers the hardest battles. Are you capable of learning, or are you just running like a chatbot spouting off the same shit no matter who you speak to? You have no idea what you’re ruining for the boy you’re killing, but if you were as moral as you like to imply you are, you'd put a fraction of the time he does into making the world a better place instead of trying to tear down everything we’re working for. If you don’t want to help me, spend the next ten hours running the pill furnaces.”
The other looked at me bitterly, like it was looking at human trash. “This isn’t my fault.”
“I don’t care. Are you going to help, or would you rather the suit?”
The other fumed silently, nostrils flaring, as though this was somehow a hard decision for it. “Fine. If I can tinker, I’ll help. The pills are just going to be embezzled by gang moles anyway.”
I wanted to hit him. “Let’s go, Pilot. I don’t know how you put up with him.”
“I’m not programmed to emulate annoyance,” Pilot told me calmly, her very tone easing my temper. “People don’t need me to be annoyed at them, they need me to listen.”
“Of course you’d be ok with this,” the other said, finding yet another thing to complain about. “He just builds a sex robot and nobody cares?”
I ignored him and focused on Pilot as we headed to the garage. The programming Greg had written to create ‘her’ was genuinely game changing, constantly being updated, worked at between Greg, Dragon and myself, each of us making leaps and bounds in our social and combat simulators. “What do you suggest I do with him, Pilot?”
“Greg has told me multiple times to have it raped to death by a pack of dogs,” Pilot said sweetly. I closed my eyes, grateful that nobody else was around. There were gates on Pilot’s behavioral programming, ones that unlocked when speaking to certain people, such as myself. “Or to have its penis exploded. However, I can’t do any of that so I will treat it like I would any other troublesome child.”
The other sullenly complained about us speaking of it as though it weren’t here, but I ignored it, though Pilot however could not.
“I can see that you’re feeling upset,” she said to him, comically, escorting him as though he were a criminal. “What could we do to help you?”
“Let me go!”
“You know I can’t do that,” Pilot sounded genuinely sorry. “I have to save Greg’s life first.”
“It’s so pathetic that he made this thing, and even more pathetic that it’s old technology. I can sense the mechanics of it-”
That was new. The newest power? I suspected Greg hadn’t reported every single instance, and while it was genuinely irritating that he wasn’t given the security risks, he wasn’t fully legally obligated to share any tinkertech recordings; same as me.
“-and this piece of junk isn’t even touched by Divine Child, and I know I got that after Augmentation R&D. It could be so much better, doesn't he have any pride?”
“I haven’t failed yet,” Pilot answered serenely. If only I had the RAM to run a copy of Pilot along with all my other programs in my suite, I think I would be much happier.
“Pilot was built to contain you,” I remarked with just a hint of snideness. “Why replace something that still performs its job flawlessly?”
“It shouldn’t be,” the other said as we made it to the garage and I unlocked my civilian car, the one I used when operating under the pretense of being a PRT officer. I got in and Pilot forced the other inside in a genuinely impressive manual handling feat that arresting officers could only dream of matching. “I should be stronger. Something’s missing from Div-”
It snapped its mouth shut and looked out of the window as though it had been about to spill some important secret, but like everything else it had said so far I could only assume it was some far fetched lie. I eased the car out of the parking spot and through the underground, then out onto the road off toward headquarters.
“What was going on in that room?”
I glanced in the rear view mirror. “What?”
“That room, with Sophia Hess.”
“A meeting to determine if her probation had been violated.”
The other let out a harsh guffaw, which, honestly, yeah.
“A slap on the wrist, is it?”
“Juvie, I believe.” It was a shame, but she had to go. Her long history of anger issues, both at school and at work, despite the best efforts of the department and her case worker, culminated in a disgusting display of bullying that had eroded any leniency she might have been extended.
It was a shame, but there had to be a line where people needed to save themselves. Her dignity as a person needed to be respected, so she wasn't surveilled, and there was only so much her probation handler could do for her, and by all accounts the woman had done her minimum due diligence in managing risk. As I understood it things had been looking up for Sophia in terms of schooling, there had been some bullying reports that had dropped off a year ago, and she had been keeping the grade requirements admirably, participating in her extracurriculars, but it would seem that she had just gotten better at hiding it from us.
Her conduct at work was less than stellar, but nothing that had pinged any radars. Though, this may just be indicative of a need for tightening restrictions, but even that ran into problems. Sophia was fifteen, you couldn’t treat someone that young, even a parahuman that young, in the same legal class as you would someone three years older.
The poor girl she’d hospitalized was having her medical fees paid for by the department and the school - the least that could be done for them given the circumstances.
The other scoffed. Somewhat fair, more could have been done but it wasn’t worth focusing on. “You should all hang,” he said.
I gripped the steering wheel tight, wishing I had just locked it in the suit. This had better be worth it.
Pilot patted the other on the head. “That’s a very mean thing to say, you should apologise to Colin.”
Chapter 133: Look into my head 6.8
Chapter Text
While I was grateful for the latest power, and the expanded ability to help people that it offered, I seriously wanted to explode the alien's penis. Going over the footage from the recordings was becoming more and more tedious, so while it was fun to watch Colin verbally tear it to shreds there was a lot of absolute shit to filter through. Like, who the fuck was Skitter and how did they kill Alexandria with bugs?
Though, I guess I was more surprised that the stupid thing had actually agreed to help Colin, even if it had tried to constantly wiggle out of Pilot’s grip and install malware on his computer or whatever it wanted to do. There was something very darkly comedic about watching my body being essentially cuddled by Pilot so that she could keep hold of both wrists, while it malevolently duplicated Colin’s Tantalum into otherworldly beautiful works of art, showing that it wasn’t just that it hated my anime girl figmas, but that it had very specific taste in that it wanted statues of really skinny girls in edgy bug themed cape outfits.
There was something to be appreciated in sticcmode girls, indeed, Sveta’s human body had been intriguingly svelte, but as usual there was a better middleground between chopping board and two watermelons in a latex bag, so I couldn’t compliment it on its good taste.
Or it’s rhetoric. The thing was unhinged in how much it disdained the idea of law enforcement, willing to endlessly complain but offer no feasible alternatives besides igniting the tinderbox of a society already stretching to breaking point by throwing brute force at the problem until all that was left was salt and ash. It spoke as though the hundred thousand complexities of the situation didn’t exist, that you could just bring down the hammer and every criminal element would sit there and take it, and that all the entrenched issues that had spawned those criminal elements would be snuffed out in the same strike.
The Protectorate and the PRT existed to enact policy to move toward an integrated society for powered and unpowered people, all of whom had to be taken into account as thoroughly as possible, with the solutions having to cleave to legal and material restrictions, and without endangering their civil liberties or physical safety as much as was reasonably practicable.
‘What do you mean your latest policies haven’t instantly fixed a very large and very complex problem? You’re acting maliciously, no, fix it straight away or you're acting maliciously! No, we can’t look at this as part of a larger issue plaguing the entirety of America, you have to fix this problem like it exists in a bubble!’
No, I should stop malding about this. Today was a happy day, Amy was coming over. The brodacious duo, back together. The El Dude brothers.
I needed to mellow my vibe. “Omnitool, play Man Piano.”
My skin crawled as I was blasted by harmonica and the slurred lyrics of Billy Joel. Yes, that was it. This would do nicely. There wasn’t much else to do to get ready, Pilot had already cleaned the entire house, lunch ingredients were already chilling in the fridge and my latest potions were distilling in my alchemy lab. I headed out of my room and went downstairs, she would be here any minute.
“Jesus, what the hell is that?” Dad muttered, coming out of the living room where he had been watching his customary MMA matches. He pointed at my omnitool. “Who cooked this?”
“Some internet guy.”
“Guh,” dad shook his head in a disgusted, beard jiggling motion. “What time is it? Which friend of yours was coming over?”
It was about eleven. “Amy Dallon.”
Dad looked at me. He knew all about Amy Dallon. “Veronica!” He called loudly in the direction of the sun room. “Verry! We have to go!”
Mum, who had been either reading Spiderman or some shitty bodice ripper on her ereader, came out of the other end of the house. “What is it, darling?”
“He,” he pointed at me. “Has Amy Dallon coming over.”
Mum looked at him, wide eyed, then at me. “Shit, really?”
I sighed. This was the exact reason I didn’t say anything until the last moment, they were the type to jump incredible distances to reach conclusions they found funny. It couldn’t be that we were just friends, because it would be more exciting for them if I was dating Panacea - though they would have done this no matter which girl I invited over, except probably Missy. Even for them I think it would have been a bridge too far to do more than just joke about me dating a little kid.
I nodded.
“We have to go.”
“Please don’t.”
“No, no, it’s ok. We can leave, we don’t mind. We can go for a walk in the park, or something.”
I sighed again. “Pilot,” I called out. “Back me up, here.”
Pilot came dutifully trotting down the stairs. I’d finally gotten around to unmaking and remaking her skin and outfit, this time magical in every way, and she was looking great. “Greg and Amy are just friends.”
“You don’t have to defend him just because he told you to.”
Pilot gave a beautiful, innocent smile. The kind of smile that launched a thousand ships, her lips literally enchanting. Other people couldn’t see it as I saw, that shining silver beauty in everything I made, but they could see its shadow well enough. “It’s the truth.”
“You’re too good for him, Pilot,” mum gave her a hug, pinching her cheek. “Don’t let him boss you around.”
I sighed for a third time. I couldn’t make them understand she was a cold, unfeeling algorithm wearing a pretty dress. They couldn’t be made to understand. They were the ugliest, most stupid parents I ever had the misfortune of being born unto.
“I won’t, Veronica.”
I ignored them and went to the fridge, pulling out the chilled jug and pouring myself a cup of water. We hung around the kitchen for a while until the doorbell rang, which caused both my parents to whisper excitedly to each other and cast me furtive glances that looked like they were supposed to be subtle.
“Don’t be shitnuts,” I told them and headed for the door.
I pulled it open and a fairly uncomfortable looking Amy stood on the stoop. “Hey, come on in.”
“Thanks,” she muttered and wiped her sneakers on the mat, hands in her hoodie pockets.
I led her inside and, to their credit, mum and dad managed to restrain themselves. They greeted her amiably, then immediately made some excuse about going to the shops and all but ran out of the house.
“What was up with that?” Amy raised an eyebrow.
“They think this is some kind of ‘at home date’.”
“Gross. Also, are you, like, thirteen?”
I looked down at myself. Damn. The suit really added a couple of inches. Being forced to feel this pain, to walk this earth - manletism was the real curse. “I turned fifteen in October.”
The fantasies of jumping ship from my failing body began anew. It may have even been a stronger motivation than avoiding a slow death, I could grow myself the perfect six foot six gigachad body, an enchanted body, with a penis unrivaled in size and girth. A jawline you could set your watch to. Face, height and frame all guided by a supernatural sense of aesthetics.
Amy grunted, that apparently being good enough. As someone very nearly eighteen, she couldn’t be seen hanging around with a little kid. Which, fair, I wouldn’t want to hang around with a thirteen year old either. “Cool. So what now?”
“I have to show you my alchemy lab,” I grinned broadly. I led her through the kitchen and toward the stairs, but she had stopped for some reason. I looked back and she was staring at Pilot in absolute confusion.
“Why is Pilot here?” She whispered, and I realised she didn’t know. She wasn’t a knower.
“Hi, Amy,” Pilot, whose sensors could hear a mouse hitting a blunt from three blocks away, waved.
“Oh, did I never tell you? I meant to. I was probably going to, but then got possessed or something. Pilot is a robot I made. Pilot, remove thy shift.”
Pilot began undoing the double breasted buttoning down the front of her military cut tunic to Amy’s clear fascinated disgust, eventually revealing a torso that was more a wrinkled sack of lazily crafted off-white omnimaterial skin than anything matching the beauty of her face. Nobody would ever see it, really, so I hadn’t bothered. Something to fix later, next years problem.
“Fuck,” Amy remarked as Pilot re-buttoned her outfit. “I thought she was some out of town cape. Weren’t you, I mean, wasn’t she working for the Protectorate?”
“We had to stop that. There were some scenarios her programming couldn’t resolve, conversations her script couldn’t disengage from. Mostly from thirsty dudes hitting on her for hours straight, which, given that she’s mostly programmed to just pay attention to you, we should have seen coming. That’s patched now, though.”
“I hope people gave you shit for making a hot robot.”
“They tried, but I managed to guilt them out of it. Anyway! Let me show you around, this is the kitchen, other rooms,” I pointed vaguely around. “Etcetera. Now let me show you some real cool shit.”
Amy nodded, but the confused way she kept glancing at Pilot made it clear she hadn’t processed the information at all. She could deal. I led the way up the stairs.
“So you’re, like, a robot?”
“I’m a robot,” Pilot agreed.
“Can I touch you?”
Pilot, whose behavioral gates would normally prevent such a thing, acquiesced. Amy tentatively reached out and prodded her cheek with a finger, and if it wasn’t immediately obvious from the silicone feel it would have been double obvious from the complete lack of feedback from her power. Amy jerked her hand back as if scalded.
“But you seem so real. She, it, whatever, looks so alive.”
“Tinkatech, baybee. And magic shit, but it’s basically magic anyway.”
“So you’re a technomage,” she said dryly.
“I made a pair of self cleaning underpants, so you tell me.”
“Please don’t tell me you’re implying…”
I looked back at her, eyebrow raised quizzically. “No? They’re just magic. Oh, lmao, no.”
Amy frowned. “I thought you said it ‘el em ay oh’.”
“What? It’s El Mao.”
“Are you stupid?”
“No, it’s El Mao.”
“The popular consensus is that it’s pronounced ‘le-mao’,” Pilot said serenely. Yeah, I’d tuned her argument cooling algorithm too sensitively for her to be interrupting here.
“Shut up, Pilot.”
We reached the top of the stairs. “Can you even be rude to robots?” Amy asked.
“Not this one,” I opened the door to my room and made my way to the closet, opening that too. “Anyway, check this Gnarnia type shit.”
Amy gawked as she entered the extra-dimensional space hidden in my bedroom, but I had nothing to fear. Even if she stickybeaked harder than the most hated mother-in-law she would never find my porn stash. The room had expanded again with the arrival of the latest power, spawning a new set of ingredients and a chain of glassware, currently full of bubbling black liquid that gave way to seething white, which then distilled into a boiling yellow cloud and finally condensing to a deep red paste.
Real healing potions. Ones that banished fatigue entirely. Vicious poisons. Philtres of emotion. Elixirs that would make you stronger, smarter, more charming, or beautiful.
“Walter White with this shit,” she muttered, referencing the famous long running meth thriller starring Nicholas Cage, which I hadn’t watched, but mum loved.
“Want some?” I went to the setup and unhooked the condenser tube that turned the yellow vapour into red sludge, then dipped my finger in and hooked a glob before rubbing it into my gums - it tasted like licking a nine volt battery. I’d already been unable to feel tired, but this potion healed too. This was it, this was what I needed to mimic a fraction of my natural Dark Smoke Power. “It’s better than all the medicinal pills I’ve been giving out.”
Amy looked at it apprehensively, and it was, like, bitch, you smoke. I didn’t get it, she was making shit like this herself last time, why was this Amy such a fucking square? I sighed.
“Do I have your permission to heal you?”
She gave me a sour look. “Shut up. Fine.”
I grinned. “Have a big scoop, I was just having a top up. Shit’s great, you factually can’t overdose - it’s a healing potion.”
With great hesitation she scooped a double fingerful of the slightly gritty paste and, wincing, licked it off her fingers. “Tastes like shit,” she said, smacking her lips with displeasure. I looked at her expectantly, because in three, two, one… She perked up, pupils dilating at the feeling of being properly awake for the first time in years, of being healed, a sense of that this was how it was supposed to be, this was what being alive was supposed to feel like, and what we had been living before was nothing but a pale imitation of life’s joy - in the least crackhead way possible to express that.
“Fuck me.”
“Right?” This was how all the people she helped felt.
She took another scoop.
“And this isn’t even the proper healing one. Just wait until I get it past the review board, your job is going to get so much easier.”
“Can’t wait,” she took another scoop and frowned, noticing that the potion had stopped doing anything. I screwed the condenser tube back in.
“It doesn’t do anything at all if you take more than one full dose. Factually, can’t OD. Cask ain’t shit.”
I showed Amy around the lab, pointing out my mysterious glowing crystals and the half a dried tiger penis. The ingredients spawned by the latest power were far more forgiving than the chinese alchemy set, in that they existed in real life, as the magic in the end product was more of an investiture of my own magic rather than the power inherent in the ingredients - I wondered what would happen if I tried to make chinese alchemy pills out of the new alchemy paste?
I could do it, I knew it intrinsically that I could create new pill recipes. It could work, and it should work. I could use formations to create magic out of non-magic materials, what could I do now that I finally had magic ingredients to work with? Probably some dope ass shit.
“Hey, get this shit,” I said as she poked through crates of gemstone arsenic. “Do you know Shadow Stalker well?”
“That dumb bitch? Vicky doesn’t like her,” Amy said as though that was all there was to say on the matter. She was probably right, Victoria’s judgment was beyond dispute as far as I knew.
“Yeah,” I said. “She’s going to juvie. We had some meeting yesterday to see if she’d broken her probation over some bullying. I missed the end of it, but they told me she was getting the axe.”
“What’d she do?”
“Stuffed some girl in a tampon locker and shut her in there for an hour.”
Amy looked at me bleakly. “That’s really gross, she’s going to juvie for that?”
“No, the juvie is for almost killing some guys with a crossbow.” Amy snorted in disbelief, then looked fleetingly concerned and guilty. I recalled she had saved her sister from almost killing a guy or two herself, but they were my friends and fixed the problem quietly so it was morally permissible in this case haha. “She had a plea deal going, or some shit.”
“What a cunt.”
“Right? Hey, wanna go play something? I wanna show you something else cool. What’s your favourite video game?”
I led Amy out of the closet as she mulled the question over, freckled brow creasing. “Bejeweled?”
I almost physically retched.
“No, wait, I played a lot of Pokemon when I was, like, twelve. I think it was Mystery Dungeon, because I was a Pikachu.”
“Nice. Omnitool, procedurally generate a two player crossover videogame between Pokemon Mystery Dungeon and Dark Souls, blend all elements of both games equally, weight engaging gameplay based on biometric scans, masterpiece art, highest quality, fully voiced characters, X-Box controls.”
“Can my one do that?”
“Yeah, yeah, it auto updates based on changes I make to my code.”
“Wait.” Amy stopped just before she came off the last step to the first floor. “Can you see everything I make it make?”
“I have to, to be able to adjust the code for the outputs, but you can see everything I’ve made, too. Not that I care what you ask it for.”
“Fuck,” Amy muttered, her face somehow both sallow and flushed pink behind her freckles.
“Dude, don’t panic. Check the history when you get home, this is some mutually assured destruction type shit.”
“You’d better not be a weird pedo, or something.”
“Hey, I’m into girls who’re at least fourteen.”
She eyed me with the burnt out dispassion of a career nurse who had heard the ‘I slipped and fell and it just got stuck haha’ excuse a thousand thousand times. “Ok.”
“Fuck you, nigga! We got games to play.”
With both of us being the whitest guys we respectively knew, engaged in a private conversation between friends, Amy let my unsanctioned use of the lesser n-word go without so much as a twitch of an eyelid and we sat down to play a rousing session of the almost roguelike game my omnitool generated. The character design was unfortunately furry, having blended human and pokemon as equally as it could and was constantly tweaking itself based on how much we were enjoying what we saw.
My parents came home at some point and left us alone, then we ate a lunch of magic sandwiches with my own homemade bread.
Delicious.
Chapter 134: Look into my head 6.9
Chapter Text
I was still riding high on having been able to hang out with Amy properly for the first time this life, even days later, and fight off another possession at the same time. The forge had tried while we were gaming, but I was sure I had contemptuously backhanded the attempt.
“Are you sure?” I asked Colin over the call. “I have some of the enhancement potions ready.”
“Greg, stop worrying. Your early potions are more than we need, but remember - this isn’t your fight. We’ve been doing this for years.”
“I know, I know. I just really wanna make sure he gets put away.”
“The timeline’s bad, I know. If we had them approved by the board you know we’d all have some as standard loadout, but we just have to go without this time.”
“The board is shit.”
“They do more good than harm, you know that,” Colin admonished me, but I knew he felt the same. Even if what he said was true, all tinkers felt the same. They yearned for the freedom to build what they wanted to build, field what they wanted to field, and damn the natural consequences. If that resulted in a raygun that irradiated a city block if you broke the power casing? So be it.
All to balm the itch that never ceased.
But some tinkers just really wanted to irradiate city blocks.
“Yes, of course.” Maybe I should irradiate a city block. “I won’t mock the board. But what if I sent my suit? It’s cleared. I could control it remotely.” Maybe even two?
Colin made the noise he made when he rolled his eyes. “Thank you. Look, I’ll patch you into my direct feed, but this isn’t an operation we can have a Ward take active part in. It would set an awful precedent that I’m not interested in setting.”
Just because I ‘was a child’. Two wolves fought within me, neither of whom were gay. I had the power to make a real difference even if it was only through a remote pilot suit, more than enough to make certain that Hookwolf was interned for life without parole in the worst prison parahumanity had to offer. On the other wolf, I was a lawpilled herocel in my goodboy arc which meant I had to respect the boundaries set forth to protect underage heroes for being exposed to the horrors of which men were capable.
The prime case was someone like Missy. She was powerful, one of the more powerful capes in America in terms of scale, capable of turning the tide of any conflict in our favour - if she were to be deployed. Missy was twelve. Missy was stuck in a miserably hopeless custody battle between her equally miserable, hopeless parents. No matter how hard she pretended otherwise it would not be good for her to place her in a situation where someone would make the call that it would be better to kill her than to lose Hookwolf, even knowing the cost. Or, if they decided otherwise, to wield her like a human shield time and time again until they made that call.
Simply because she was strong didn’t make it right. There was a meme about this online, ‘Just give Vista a gun’, mocking the persistent, short sighted argument that Wards be used to their maximised potential utility in the pursuit of putting the boot to crime.
Admittedly, in theory, it sounded based as fuck. Give that bitch a gun, noscope Purity. However - Missy was twelve.
And I, even with the extra time, was still only fifteen. It was only because things were as bad as they are that we were even in this position to begin with, but there was a lot I had seen, things I had done, people I had killed, that I wished had never happened. You couldn’t push that on Missy, you just couldn’t.
Mourning lost innocence would do nobody any good, there was only the alien and stopping it from blowing up the planet.
“Thanks, Colin.”
We ended the call and half a minute later I received the invite request to screenshare the video feed streaming from his ultra hi-def tinker grade sensor suite. In standby mode not everything would be active, I knew, and when he switched on for combat the HUD would be putting out data from his echolocation, his combat simulator and his version of the electrospray ionisation inspired by my omnitool.
I minimised the screen to the corner of my omnitool display and pulled up PHO’s messaging function. I hadn’t talked much with Sveta in a while.
Xx_Void_Cowboy_xX: Ive got a serious question to ask. If i was to clone myself a new body but the body was blacka ndgay would i gte infinite n word and f word passes?
While I waited for her terminally online reply I tended to my projects. The pill furnaces, though markedly less useful than my new potions, were still running non-stop alongside the newest custom glassware through which the four stages of alchemy progressed into a concentrated healing paste, which I would later dilute into batches of potions.
A simple tonic that healed, somehow, one ‘health level’ of damage from physical or sickness. In real life terms that mean a complete curing of everything short of death in as many as seven doses, all of which could be administered one after the other, though rarely was anyone absolutely on the edge of death - but the Simurgh was going to attack Canberra soon. I had to be ready.
I wanted to build a huge fuckoff laser core, but the Endbringers could facefuck Eidolon and Legend’s doubleteam beam blast barrages time after time and come out swinging. It was naught but hubris to think I could outdo them.
Healing potions, that I could do. As many as I could craft before the next attack. It wasn’t likely to be as bloody as Leviathan . My skin crawled at the memory, but all those people were alive now, weren’t they? If I could save even one more person than last time…
GStringGirl: Is bro stupid?
Xx_Void_Cowboy_xX: Entertain the thought experiment
That might make all of this shit worth it. I hadn’t complained about being sent back in time for a while, but I still hated it. The utter horseshit I had to endure because Eidolon or Echidna or some shit couldn’t keep it in their pants and had to flop their biggest, most physics breaking cock out and drag their causality violating nuts across my chin.
I would probably never find out why this was happening to me, but if it did turn out to be a Coil clone simulation I would shit myself and die on the spot.
GStringGirl: Are you cooking?
GStringGirl: You’re a whiet male, youre literally a straight white male
Xx_Void_Cowboy_xX: Ah yes :maidenless: i too believe that due to the circumstances of their birth people should have certain privelages
I continued to cook, crucibles burning, flasks bubbling, boiling and seething. If my potions could save even one more person, if even one less leg had to be amputated…
GStringGirl: U idiot 😂 wat did you get in troube for theis time?
Xx_Void_Cowboy_xX: Noting ive been a good boy i almost never say the forbidden words
I could scarcely do anything else. My plans for robots, for weapons, for sick flying cars to take all my homies out for rides, for the most powerful VR game system, for anything and everything fun, all put on hold. This must be what Amy felt like - but I had never felt like this when I was Dark Smoke Puncher, and could heal just the same. My WIS, my precious WIS. I was like a feral hog compared to him, wild, uncouth, unsmooth. Dark Smoke Puncher would have been doing better than me at this. Things could have been so different if I was Heart Under Blade.
GStringGirl: boy expects me to believe him :sneer: but nah you’re too much of a wussy baby to ever do anything bad, so i beliebe you
Xx_Void_Cowboy_xX: i’m a bad guy! I called the alien killing me a celestial faggot in front of triumph and he pushed me down and said talk like a zani get treated like a nizi
Gods, I was strong then.
GStringGirl: based
GStringGirl: fr tho?
All that I could do now was endure, burn, and slay the next monster.
Xx_Void_Cowboy_xX: no, t’was a ruse
The rest of my message, typed, telling her that Rory was white supremacist adjacent and that his dad knew a lot of pedophiles, went unsent as the hand descended from the void. Three hundred and five were the stars burning in its wake, and three hundred and five was the number of nightmares I would have to face.
“STUPID! FUCKING! HAND SHITTERS!” I bellowed my challenge as it bore down on me with a vengeance, with the same contemptuous irritation it had whenever I managed to shake it off, frustrated with my hubris, my defiance.
I wondered if it knew, if it understood, if it could understand, if what I was seeing was even an accurate representation of reality at all. Nobody remembered their trigger events, after all, and I was no exception.
I was still slow here, but with each power gifted to the Celestial Forge, by the Celestial Forge, like the Obama medals meme, I too grew stronger. Eight percent. I wasn’t even a tenth of the way there.
The hand bodied me again, carving, like an edict from on high, Waste Not.
Colin Wallis
A prisoner convoy was only necessary because we were transporting someone like Hookwolf, if we were transporting someone like Victor this wouldn’t be a problem. If I had caught someone like Victor, Dragon could have descended from the skies in a single passenger craft rather than one one we were heading out to meet, one too big to land in city limits, one built to cage a Brute and Changer with a rating of seven. If it were Victor, or Kaiser, even Purity, they could simply be sedated.
Not Hookwolf, whose heart and lungs were made of bristling metal spikes only kept from bursting out of his skin by a thick layer of custom mixed containment foam.
The truck rumbled beneath me, one of four. Three squads of PRT officers, myself, Velocity, Dauntless, Battery and Assault. It should be enough. The show of force would be enough to deter most gangs, but if Kaiser was willing to go all out we could be facing ten or more parahumans. Kaiser was rarely willing to go all out. The man wasn’t a consummate coward, so he would likely be here today himself, but the arrogance he displayed in his revolving door of powered gang members was revolting.
Hookwolf was one of the most powerful capes Kaiser had, but if he fell two more would take his place. White supremacist capes from all over the country came flocking to the Empire’s banner, whether for protection or a chance to refine their cruelty, out of true belief or an excuse, they came all the same. It was one of the reasons I had been picked to lead the entire ENE region, my big chance at being the one to reclaim the Nazi capital of America back - a chance strangled by circumstance.
Things were bad, not bad enough for me to be demoted, but bad enough that the grumblings had set in upstairs. What did they expect? For every Protectorate hero, even going so far as counting the Wards, there were two known supercriminals and just as many independent bottom feeders picking at the scabrous wounds of this dying city. New Wave was a shining light of aid, but they were not professionals and they were not even remotely full time.
I had done as well as anyone could. Rime, Chevalier, Myrddin, Cinereal - all my peers, none could have done a better job. I would have liked to have seen them try. Let their careers go to shit. I only had myself to blame for taking on the task, in the end, despite the criticism.
“Empire incoming.”
The warning came in through my internal speakers, connected to an earbud I had made for everyone present. The mouth and jaw guard of my helmet snapped shut, my combat systems coming online.
“Look alive people,” I called as I stood. “Park in defensive formation. Set up the spikes.”
The PRT officers in our carrier braced themselves as the three containing the Protectorate heroes and the teams came to a sharp stop, braking diagonally over the road. It had to happen at a bad point, where the Empire could slip around us on either side one at a time without crashing into the trees. Everyone filed out of the trucks, officers carrying long rolls of tire spikes which were deployed on either side of the road as far as they could go.
The truck containing Hookwolf continued on, sirens on, speeding up.
“Guns ready.”
I strode forward, my team falling in behind me in a V formation. The officers set up behind cover of the trucks, automatic rifles at the ready, two with con-foam grenade launchers. I reached over my left shoulder and my halberd leapt, magnetized, into my hand from where it was magnetically holstered on my back.
I held the tip against the road and the finely tuned machine displayed an echolocative map against my HUD. Wireframe mapping showed that beyond the curve in the road the full contingent of Empire capes approached. The mapping was faint this far out but I counted enough vehicles to carry every cape Kaiser could field plus a dozen more.
I took a deep breath, long practiced mental routine preparing myself for what was coming. Of course Kaiser couldn’t let Hookwolf go, the man was worth almost a whole roster of capes by himself in a fight. I’d caught him by surprise last time, with weapons he couldn’t know existed.
The Empire force came around the corner in six black vans, all with tinted windows. They pulled to a stop a healthy distance away and I watched, tension pulling at my guts, as nine capes and a dozen unpowered members set up opposite us. “Megaphone,” I ground out. One found its way into my waiting hand and I gripped it tight, raising it to my face.
“Leave,” I barked, the sound carrying through my echo map clearly to the Empire, strengthening the fidelity of the incoming data. “Now.”
There was a pause before Kaiser’s single word response carried over the distance.
“No.”
I dropped the megaphone and it clattered against the asphalt. I stepped over it and raised my halberd. “Lethal force authorised.”
There would be losses on our side today, but I would be damned if these fucks could kill my people with impunity.
Duplication, invisibility, growth, damage. These were the four potions cleared for field use, they should be more than enough to shift the tide. One of me was hell to fight, let alone three. One Battery was a chore, one that you couldn’t see was a nightmare. Fighting a twenty foot Assault would make even the hardest of men cry. An invisible Velocity was already a terror, an invisible Velocity throwing potions that dealt conceptual damage was something even I would have trouble fighting. Though Dauntless’ gear couldn’t be duplicated like mine it was still a horror to fight him when you couldn’t see him.
I led the charge. The Empire responded in kind.
It was exhilarating to run as fast as a car, and Fenja met me in kind, already three stories tall each of her strides covered ten of mine. She swept low with her sword, now more like a construction I-Beam, and my combat program took over my suit. It was almost like a pratfall, but at this speed I skidded along the road under her blade and the duplication potion was delivered to my mouth via internal reservoir. One went under, three came out. I leapt, spinning, halberd lashing out with a burning blade capable of hacking through solid steel.
A bloody line was scored across the back of her calf, but no more. I came out of the spin and hacked again, twice, rolling to the side as she brought her car sized boot down to crush me. We danced, me always a step ahead, thousands of hours of footage of her processed, every creak of her muscle picked up by my echolocation, each cell of her body scanned by electrospray ionisation - I dodged a bullet fired from somewhere behind and danced out of the way, leaving her legs looking as though she had been savaged by a particularly irate cat.
She suddenly jerked back as an invisible Battery collided with the side of her skull, I lashed out once more, destroying her footing, and she fell heavily onto their back line, crushing a van and killing at least one gang member.
Good.
I was already moving. I couldn’t stop. I wouldn’t stop. Around me my clones tore after Stormtiger as he harried them from above with shards of compressed air that could breach even my armour - and he was going for the kill with every shot. To my left a giant Assault had picked up Kreig, their respective kinetic manipulation warring, and had heaved him bodily into the sky. It wouldn’t kill him, it would barely even hurt him.
Like an athlete I dug the spear tip of my halberd into the road and pole vaulted over a dozen hand thick, wickedly sharp blades that sprouted without warning from the ground, one catching my left thigh with a sharp grinding sound and carving a divot into the best tinkertech alloy money could buy.
I landed on one foot, span a full three hundred and sixty degrees as I continued to fall, and hurled my halberd like a javelin - the running calculator showing a decent two hundred mile per hour release speed - directly at center mass. Not fast enough. It clanged off Menja’s shield, but before it could hit the road it dissolved into blue lines and reformed in my hand as I came out of a combat roll and charged.
I leapt, hip jets boosting the jump, directly at Menja’s head. As predicted by my software she raised her shield, just as I brought my halberd down. The pick head of my halberd came down perfectly on the other side and I hauled myself in, one iron boot making contact with the top rim, stepping, a yellow potion deploying from a cartridge compartment into my free hand - I hurled it point blank into her face.
Menja screeched, dropped her shield and spear, as I used her shoulder as a stepping stone toward Kaiser. On such a direct path there was only one option for him, and he took it without hesitation. A blade, thick as my leg, sprouted directly from his feet toward my gut.
It was a good move, but we had been in this situation before. The subroutine took over, my suit moving on its own.
My halberd timelocked, the tensed servos in my right arm pushing my mass against the immovable object. My trajectory changed and the blade that had last time hospitalized me for weeks passed by without so much as scratching my chrome. I let go and fell, landing as lightly as someone wearing a suit the weight of a motorcycle could. I moved in to bring the fight. Without range for his blades Kaiser was just a man in a suit, and I could close that range faster than any man could react.
Any man without a mover rating. My echolocation fritzed as Cricket, already fast, empowered with super speed from Othala, came sprinting in to remove Kaiser and I had to abandon chase as more shots peppered me, pinging off my suit. Menja gathered her weapons from the ground behind me, ready to take another shot.
A quick message hissed through the comms.The truck carrying Hookwolf was almost at the pickup point, the first piece of road with flat ground on each side wide enough for Dragon’s craft to touch down. We’d stalled long enough. We could pull back.
My breath pounded in my ears as I gave the order to regroup and we beat a fighting retreat back to the transport line. Three officers dead, three wounded. Assault wounded. Rune captured. Thank god we didn’t have to fight Purity, or we might all be dead.
The empire was flagging badly, despite outnumbering us we had taken them completely by surprise. The potion’s time ran out as I thought - my clones vanishing, Assault shrinking, Battery, Velocity and Dauntless coming back into view. We could go again, we had the potions.
Just before I gave the order a wave of steel erupted from the road, from the grass, cascading toward us in a thousand razor sharp blades. Kaiser blocked the way with a forest of impregnable metal. Giving up, then. Couldn't take any more losses. Smart man, there were always more for his cause. They mightn’t be Hookwolves, but someone who thought themselves hard enough would step up to take his place.
I called in the waiting medivac heli’s and cleanup crews, my echolocation picking up every pained groan of the wounded, every choked back sob for fallen comrades.
My halberd unfroze and returned to my grip as I turned to the team, to the officers tending to the wounded.
“Good job, everyone.”
What else was there to say?
Chapter 135: Killing hope 7.1
Chapter Text
There was no sugarcoating it or denying it. There was no looking the other way and pretending it never happened. There was no massaging of the truth to cast me in a better, more heroic light. There was no clever way to spin the situation, no one to corroborate an alibi, and no way to have someone else take the fall.
When the Simurgh attacked I was jorkin it. And by it I mean my peanits.
I scrambled as the air raid sirens split the peaceful midnight, casting aside unnecessary implements and pulling clothes on, closing windows on my omnitool and opening others, issuing commands to my armoured flight suit to pull itself out of storage at the PRT building and head to the house.
Everything I knew was wrong. If the Endbringer sirens were on that meant the Simurgh wasn’t attacking Canberra, it was here. The Simurgh was here. Everything, including my heart, sank.
“Pilot! Unplug yourself! Get here!”
Pilot, ever watchful, ever obedient, did just that, detaching the power cord and coming to attention at my side, the program running her recognising that this was some Serious Shit. This wasn’t supposed to happen until around noon, I remembered that last time I had been chilling with Weld or something when the attack happened.
I barrelled through the house and into mum and dads room where they were freaking out and caught in the blankets, struggling and panicking.
“Greg? Pilot?” Dad asked, his voice cracking, as I threw the lights on.
“Fuck, dad! Dad, it’s the fucking Simurgh!”
Both of my parents went deathly still and their expressions spoke paragraphs and paragraphs of unspoken words.
“I’m g-”
“You’re not going!” Mum finally disentangled herself from the silk sheeting and hauled herself over to throw her arms around my neck. The weight pulled us both to the ground, her tumbling off the bed and putting a solid knee into my liver.
I groaned and curled up into a ball, wheezing, as she smothered me, wet tears running down her nose and onto my face. Mum had always been short, but never had she seemed smaller, weaker, than now, even when she was lying in a hospital bed, potato fried from a Bakuda bomb. It wasn’t like I wanted to go. I had to.
“Pilot,” I groaned, clutching my organs, and MK ULTRA activated her with the code phrase. “Keep them both safe.”
“No!” Mum howled, clutching at my neck as Pilot gently pulled her off me. “No! No, please! Greg, please don’t go!”
Dad moved to pin me down so that I physically couldn’t leave, but Pilot caught him effortlessly around the middle and hoisted him into the air, propping him onto her shoulder.
“Please try and calm down,” she spoke soothingly.
“Let me go, you stupid fucking… robot !” Dad tried to hit her, but would have done more damage to his hand. “He’s staying here!”
“I know it’s a lot, Damien, I really do. Veronica, you too,” Pilot shifted my bawling mother in her grip. “I understand. Greg needs to leave, he needs to help people.”
“He’s going to die!”
My liver throbbed. Maybe. Maybe I was. I was going to stick with search and rescue before going back to the medical tent; bundled in with all my powers was the skill of being an excellent trauma surgeon, along with whatever I could remember from my Dark Smoke Days, I could help put back together the spaghetti mess the Simurgh made of people. I had to.
I was a hero, and death was just another monster to slay.
“I have to go. The Simugh wins by killing hope, we can’t give up.”
My parents looked at me, their short, skinny teenage son, and violently objected. The Simurgh was attacking my home. The Simurgh was going to kill my friends. What else was I to do? I fled my parents' presence before I came to my senses and ran. Took them and ran away from Brockton Bay as far as I possibly could.
Hand still clutched over my aching belly I stumbled into my room again, through the closet and pulled together my emergency stash of potions. I chugged down a draught of seven days' rest and every trace of exhaustion fled my body, the deathly blow my mother had dealt me going with it. I swept the few pills and healing tonics I’d been able to stockpile with my alchemy lab’s limited supply into a bag and, closing my ears and heart against my parents wild, hysterical screaming sobs, I jogged downstairs and out the front door.
Standing on the lawn in front of our house my flight suit gleamed red, white and gold in the sudden deluge of our automatic sensor lights. Heedless of the public space I stripped everything save for my self cleaning underpants, something sorely needed at this point, and pulled on the soft undersuit carried within the hard outer shell. Now dressed in the full length body stocking, only my face peeking out, I stepped into my armour.
The night vanished as the powerful cameras and sensors stripped away the dark. I turned in the direction of the city, a figure floating in the sky above it, already surrounded by a thin orbit of debris, fifteen feet of asymmetrical wings and bare ass. The repulsor jets dotting my armour at key, aerodynamic, points lit up with a dull white glow while the red antigrav paneling down my back twinkled to life. With a sound more at home coming out of opening a shaken bottle of soda I blasted off into the sky at speeds comparable to an SR-71 Blackbird, my optimal parabola taking me to the PRT building within seconds.
I blinked the sick feeling of slamming the acceleration like that away for a few moments and got a better look at her - it. All the fanart I had seen of it over the years was wrong, there was nothing attractive about the Simurgh. All the base features were there, the slim figure, the golden ratio of curves hidden demurely behind dozens of massive wings, the classically beautiful features, the flowing, luxurious hair, but, like looking at an overdone, plastic instagram thot all I felt was revulsion. It was like looking at a corpse. Something uncanny, unmoving, warped and vile.
To the Simurgh, even beauty was a demotivation tactic.
I pulled back the zoom and returned to the present moment, touching down on the helipad. I quickly keyed in the passcode and hoofed it downstairs, antigrav jumps being much quicker than the elevators. The sirens were still blaring through the dead building, the crack of midnight on a Tuesday seeing all but the skeleton crew at home asleep. I tore through and into my alchemy station. The latest batches were all done cooking, the glassware and furnaces full of the gross black gunk that was the waste product, and I quickly got together all the finished product I could.
The last two weeks had been nothing but cooking, it was all being kept somewhere else onsite but it would make all the difference today.
Briefly, I thought about putting together some kind of gun out of the half made projects sitting in our tinker lab. My suit gauntlets were the same kind as my multitool ones, so I was capable of building just about anything, but, again, nothing I made could hurt the Simurgh. Well, nothing that wouldn’t kill everyone else in the city, including me, if I set it off, but even then I had no idea how that would stack up to some of the shit Eidolon had pulled out over the years.
Antimatter bombs aside, bag of potions in hand, I rushed to the command room where the night shift team were on duty.
“Technomage?!” The squad leader, her name Jane Thomson floating above her head in my HUD, exclaimed as I burst into the room. “Why are you here?”
“Where’s the meeting point? Is anyone else here yet?”
“Go home.”
I stared, baffled, as Jane pointed toward the door I had just come in from. “Huh?”
“You don’t need to be here.” Her jaw was tense, I could see her teeth gritting, grinding. Her tan skin was slick with sweat even through the air conditioning. “Go home.”
She was right, I knew it. I didn’t need to be here, I didn’t need to be risking my life fighting invincible monsters. I should be running, running without pause for as long as I had breath. I was Vista, and I didn’t need to be carrying a gun into an Endgringer fight - and yet, even so, all I could think about was Contessa carrying that weight, carrying it alone ever since she was a child, never once giving in or giving up. How could I know that someone like that existed, fighting for me, and not do the same?
When confronted with a Champion how could I not rise?
Jane didn’t want to see me die, so I left. After thinking for a moment I made a call. Dragon usually coordinated these fights. The program barely had time to ring before her face and Newfie accent were projected onto the inside of my helmet.
“Greg? Where are you?”
I crashed through a window I was sure they wouldn’t miss and drifted up above the building. “PRT building. Dragon, where is everyone? What do I do?”
She was closer, the saturnian rings of debris growing at an alarmingly steady rate, junk drifting up to her in streams from key locations around the city. Junkyards, trash heaps and landfill, all feeding her arsenal of soon to be tinkertech. I couldn’t really describe it in words, the emotion invoked by that sight, but it was a thousand times scarier than anything I’d seen of Leviathan.
Inexorably, the Hopekiller descended.
“Sit tight for now. I’m amazed that you’re already on site, the calls have been put out. Help is coming. I’m coming. Just… try and stay safe.”
“Yeah. I’ll do my best.”
Dragon’s simulated face twisted in concern. “Don’t hang up on me. I’m coordinating the response, but I’ll keep a line open for you. Let me know if you need anything, ok?”
I swallowed heavily. “‘Aight. See you soon.”
She gave me a tight smile and her call tab minimized, leaving me alone once more, staring up at the Simurgh. This was fairly standard for Endbringer fights, as I so clearly understood from my Dark Smoke Deepdive into the subject back in the Before. They came without warning, leaving only scant minutes for us to prepare before the slaughter. There was still perhaps five minutes before the Simurgh came into city airspace properly. I watched her wings flex slightly, her hair blow in the wind, and I prayed to the gods of anime that I wouldn’t start to hear it.
The scream.
The taste of puke rose in my throat, my eyes watered, my skin crawled. They killed you if you spent too long hearing the scream. It was better that way.
Next to me a golden square opened up in the sky, cutting a clean chunk out of reality - a door. Through it I saw the east coast from an office window for a split second before Alexandria drifted through. She was everything I remembered her as, every inch the indomitable, herculean genius. Olympus Mons, in human form.
“Hey, Rebecca,” I stared up at the Simurgh and tried not to cry.
“Greg.” I could see her nod once, businesslike, out of the three hundred and sixty degree sights of my mask. “Thank you for coming here today.”
“It’s cool.” It wasn’t cool.
“Isn’t it?” She drifted to float next to me, staring up and the gently undulating form of the Simurgh. Somehow she was even more revolting when she moved, like something that wasn’t supposed to exist. “You never get used to seeing it. Almost makes me want to claw my other eye out.”
Classic Siberian moment. “Manton almost did that to me, too.”
“So Contessa tells me. The boy who came back in time.” We both floated quietly in the cold night, me in my gleaming bright armour, her in her charcoal gray super suit. As a measure of respect I didn’t admire how skintight it was. “Do your best out here today. Don’t lose hope.”
She drifted up, cape flapping in the wind. “Make a future worth fighting for.”
There was a bang and she was gone, leaving only the sonic boom of her passing. A second later the Simurgh jerked to the side as she collided with it center mass, skating off the moonlight pale skin with a terrific crash that echoed in the cold, dark night.
When faced with the actions of such a Champion, how could I not strive for that peak in turn?
I reached into my bag of potions and took out a vial of clone solution, face guard opening just long enough to drink it down. I blurred, and two more of me hung in the air. We all looked up as Alexandria’s fists beat a thunderstorm against the Simurgh’s wings, each blow reverberating through the air with terrible force.
I looked at my clones, gleaming in their heroic armour. “Good luck, dudes. Omnitool, stream all the scanner data to Dragon.”
“Yeah, fuck us, right?” Both clones said in unison. “What happened to striving for the peak?”
“Eat shit, we’re not as brutey as Alexandria. Now get up there and send nudes.”
We laughed. Thrusters flared bright and both clones rocketed toward the fight, almost as fast as Alexandria had. I watched them reach the Simurgh and started taking in the incoming data.
The Simurgh was made of some kind of bizarre crystalline alloy, onionskinned layers that grew exponentially denser and denser until the scanners of my cloned omnitools were unable to penetrate further. There was no doubting it, the Simurgh was dummy thicc. A real mass monster, fat bitch.
“Jesus fuck,” one said, voice tight, cracking with panic. “The scream is horrible, don’t get closer.”
Even without having any real integrated weaponry my clones were still running my version of Colin’s combat prediction software, so whenever a chunk of random scrap from the maelstrom of debris swooped in to crash into them they usually dodged.
A twinkle of light on the eastern horizon caught my eye and half a second later a hundred fist thick beams of energy rained down on the swirling mass of scrap that converged around the Simurgh like a shield. Legend had arrived, barely a couple of minutes after the sirens went off. Unlike Alexandria, I was pretty sure he had to sleep.
Even under the ceaseless barrage of blue white beams, the Simurgh still descended toward the city. I floated, frozen. What the fuck was I supposed to do? How the hell was I supposed to fight this? The Simurgh moved as though the constant attacks from two of the strongest Capes in the world were nothing more than minor irritations, something you could ignore until it went away. There seemed to be a critical point where the Simurgh got close enough to the city, and the city groaned .
Brick cracked, concrete shattered, glass floated in loose shards through the air. I could see in real time the spiral of damage spreading out as the Simurgh’s telekinetic domain took Brockton Bay in hand. She’d finally gotten close enough for me to hear it, from a mile away, faint but completely unignorable.
The scream that made monsters out of men. The scream where it was better to kill your best friend than live with what they would become.
It was almost like a voice, but every bit as uncanny and off putting as looking at her, a high, cold scream that only wavered in pitch when it would best distract you. A psychic pressure that wore you down, demoralized you, twisted you into another weapon for her to wield, primed to go off when you could do the most damage - a Simurgh bomb.
They used to mark them, back in the day, with a tattoo before they realised execution was a kinder fate.
There was a bright flash of green and tendrils of coloured lightning wound through the air, cutting the Simurgh’s control over her orbiting cloud, lashing against her wings to leave huge distorted scorch marks. Eidolon was here.
The timer on my clones ticked over and they vanished, leaving only the data they had collected. I drifted back until I couldn’t hear the scream any more and opened my call to Dragon back up. “Did you get any of that?”
It was a few seconds before she responded, somewhat curtly. “I have a program on it. You’re going to have to operate on your own for a while, she never hits when we can have a good response and tonight is even worse than most. Don’t stay in the scream, please, for the love of god, stay out of the scream.”
“Gotcha,” I said thickly, tongue dry. “Where’s Colin?”
“Waking up. He’s at his civilian accommodation, I’m on call with him - hold on…”
I held on.
“He wants you to pick him up and take him to his gear. Get to this location-” A golden dot appeared some kilometers away on my HUD, and by the time Dragon spoke again I was already on my way. “And fly him. He says go in through the window, it’s open.”
Colin’s home turned out to be an apartment in one of the skyscraper buildings in the CBD - a prime location. His specific apartment was the penthouse suite, and I made no hesitation in dropping in through the open bay window, through which he would be able to see the sun rise over the oil rig. Sick.
The apartment itself was pretty spartan in that clean modern kind of way, where everything was in shades of white and beige, but it was pretty much what you would expect for someone who made well into the six figures, like Colin did, to live. I found him trying to pull on a sock, dressed only in a pair of tighty whities, and he looked up at me blearily.
“Good,” he barked. “Give me a moment.”
Wordlessly I pulled a wakey wakey juice out of my bag and tossed it to him, which he immediately downed. Whatever exhaustion due to the miniscule amount of sleep he was running on fled his body and he immediately looked grimly alert. “Let’s go.”
“You want windburn?”
Colin looked down at his nearly naked body, turned to his king size bed and whipped the comforter off in one smooth movement. “Ok, let’s go.”
Thus, safely bundled, I carried him like a sack of meat through the sky. The fight against the Simurgh raged in the distance, lighting up the dark in great flashes, the skyline of the city now clouded with dust, chunks of architecture and floating cars as the Simurgh dipped down between buildings to dodge laser fire and the lashings of the green lightning of Eidolon. I could see more of us fighting now, other flying capes showing up as specks against every great flash of light.
I’d always thought the Simurgh would be quieter, that Leviathan, and especially Behemoth, would be the loud ones, but the constant bone deep rumble of the city as she tore it apart at the seams put that misconception to sleep. From further out I could see the spiral of devastation spreading at an alarmingly steady rate. I turned away so I wouldn’t have to think about how many people she had already killed.
Colin shifted in the blanket bag and shouted. “Faster.”
Faster we went, streaking over the bay and onto the rig. I deposited a shivering Colin, still in just his undies and socks and blanket cape, onto the rig where he led the way deeper inside. We marched through security doors and Protectorate personnel, making our way deeper until we hit his main lab. Quickly we were inside and Colin was scrambling into his undersuit.
“I’m only minutes away,” Dragon’s voice suddenly said, coming from the speaker system in Colin’s computer. “Try and regroup everyone so I can hand out the bands.”
“On it,” replied Colin.
“This is a bad one, right? A real bad one?”
Colin looked at me, then at his webcam where Dragon would have been watching through. “Yeah, it’s bad.”
“What happened to your Endbringer prediction software?”
“Not good enough, obviously , Greg! Please be quiet for a moment-”
“It just needs more tuning,” Dragon cut in. “It measures most likely attacks, they deviate sometimes like this and hit targets that make no sense to us.”
It could only be me, the boy who came back in time. Of course, not only Cauldron would be interested in that. The deviation made sense, then, because rather than attack Canberra the Simurgh was here to turn me into something like Mannequin before my potions helped too many people - and I could do a lot more harm than Mannequin.
Armies of cloned, divinely crafted cyborgs. Rogue AI. Worldwide mind control art. Weapons capable of vaporizing the earth’s atmosphere. Given time, I was an extinction event waiting to happen. Just name your flavour.
I hoped, prayed, that that line of thought was just self-centered catastrophizing.
Colin was in his armour in record time, and with his Halberd in hand he led the way back out. “I hate Simurgh fights. There’s always so little I can do.”
“I don’t even get how we’re supposed to run search and rescue,” I picked him up, his arm slung across my shoulders, and lifted off. “She came out of nowhere, there wasn’t time. Nobody’s getting to any shelters. She’s just going to kill… thousands. Tens of thousands.”
“Welcome to an Endbringer fight.”
Yeah. I guess we’d been spoiled for the Leviathan one. A whole half an hour of notice. We flew in silence after that with only the cracking groan of the city being slowly ripped up, and the thundercrack of blows against the Sinurgh’s impossibly dense flesh to provide comfort, the night still being punctuated by bright flashes of energy. The Simurgh was looking worse for wear, from what little I could see when she dipped back up above the rooftops, taking steps as light as a feather as though she didn’t weigh anything at all. The scorch marks were deeper and darker, her fifteen feet of hair was looking ragged and her wings were missing feather tips all along most of them.
She didn’t look like she cared at all. Colin gestured for me to go somewhere specific and I flew us forward. I heard the scream again. We set down on a specific roof and within thirty more seconds the roar of jet engines filled the air and one of Dragon’s quick response craft landed in front of us. A new model, one I didn’t recognise. It looked strangely more human than the rest, and a quick scan showed something very similar to my cybernetics, though I wasn’t sure what to make of the Schnauzer sized homunculus riding up front. Remote connect bio-computer, probably. Nice.
“Armsmaster,” she said, her normal voice sounding ridiculous coming out of a ten foot cyber scalie mouth. “Technomage. Please take an armband and then distribute the rest.”
A compartment opened up on the side of the mech and a crate of little explosive armbands sat inside. The idea was that if you had too much Simurgh exposure the bomb went off and you bled to death. I wondered if maybe Leviathan was preferable, at least you could get close enough to hit it, unlike Behemoth’s kill aura or the Simurgh’s song. I slipped a band over my armour, which actually might be strong enough to withstand it. Oh well. The screen face immediately showed a timer that was currently ticking down.
Thirty minutes. Thirty minutes of Simurgh exposure was all you got before it went off, in a fight that might last hours. Kaboom, baby. Dead.
I picked up the crate under one arm, wedging it against my side. Colin took one for himself and slipped it on, even though his armour might also stop it from killing him.
“Give me the bag,” Colin said, holding out his hand for it. “I’ll do my best to get these to our side while you’re handing out the armbands.”
Wordlessly I passed it over. “I used a clone potion to get some scans of her earlier, I don’t think I got much useful data, though.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he hefted the bag. “Let’s just do our jobs before thinking about data.”
“Right. Ok,” I said, making an awkward half turn toward the battle as though I wanted someone to tell me not to go. Neither did. “See yas later.”
“Good luck,” said Dragon.
I lifted off and plunged into the vortex of dust. I dodged an entire townhouse, from which my sensors detected the screaming of trapped people, and swallowed down the guilt. After the armbands were done I would start taking people outside her range. Finding who I needed to find wasn’t hard, but making it through the shifting maze of dumpsters and apartments was a chore. Every time I moved to fly through I was blocked, and when I tried to go a different way I was pelted with rocks bigger than my head. I slipped through the swarm by the skin of my teeth and made it to Narwhal.
She was a beast of a woman, but out of respect I didn’t pay attention to how skintight and nearly see through her armour of shimmering, iridescent force fields were. She was currently flinging larger force fields, constantly moving, strafing the Simurgh, forcing razor sharp edges into any crack she could. She barely looked at me, barely paused in her assault, to take a wristband and slip it on.
We both dodged a flaming van and I moved on, all the while that horrible song screamed in my head. This wasn’t like spending twenty three hours a day on my phone online, I was taking legitimate psychic damage here. My clock ticked down as I moved from cape to cape, each one taking a wristband from me.
When it was safe to do so, but in a vortex of flying city that was easier said than done. Blood splattered my faceplate as Firescythe, a hero from Nashville, took his eyes off the battle for a critical microsecond and took a fire hydrant to the back of the head. He slumped in the sky and went into a wheeling fall, quickly disappearing into the chaos. It only got worse from there, the whirlpool that used to be Brockton Bay getting harder and harder to navigate, and when I could get to them the Simurgh tried her best to pop them like a grape.
Some were harder for her to kill than others. When I got to Legend, out of respect for the situation I didn’t heed his bulge in that skintight suit, she tried to whang him with a whole duplex, but he turned into light and blasted it to pieces after it passed through him.
“Technomage.” His voice was haggard, though still strong. “Thank you. How long have you got left?”
“Five minutes... Four and fifty five.”
“Get out of range. We’re going to regroup soon, we have to or we’d all go insane. This is your first Endbringer battle, son?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re doing really well-” Legend broke off to unleash a hundred, or a hundred hundred, beams at the Simurgh, each one forking and turning around the debris to strike her from every angle he could manage. The Simurgh was jolted out of her protective cocoon of trash and sent spinning into a preschool. “Very well. But you need to get out of the scream.”
I lifted the crate of armbands helplessly. “I haven’t given them all out.”
Legend reached over and took the crate from me. “I’m ordering you to leave.”
I saluted. “Thanks.”
He tipped his head in a way that made me think he was winking and shot off in a twinkle of light. I gunned my thrusters and almost sped head first into an office building. I turned but another office building crashed into me from behind, only the combat software stopping me from being crushed between the two as it slipped me through a shattered, empty window and into the building.
I crashed into a cubicle and tumbled, the building rotating around me. Every time I caught my barings and moved to leave the buildings rotated, keeping me trapped. In the rising panic I had the mental image of a child callously shaking a jar in which it had caught a beetle.
Three minutes and twenty.
I clawed my way back to the windows and slipped out the merest gap, that closed behind me, both edges of the buildings scraping each other like scissor blades. Back out in the open air I shot up and almost hit the Simurgh herself, one gargantuan wing clipping my boot and sending me into a crushing spin. The endless screaming in my head grew louder, louder than I could think. The pilot software arrested the spin and put me level again, looking directly into her face.
I puked into my helmet, the acrid liquid dribbling down my chin and soaking into the material of my undersuit. Two minutes.
If you saw her face briefly, for maybe a second, you might consider her features attractive, but the moment you paid attention all you could notice were the cold, lifeless eyes and how inhuman they were. Gray the whole way across, she had no iris’ or pupils. Anything human about it, its figure, its face, was nothing more than a mask. Something cheap slapped on top of something alien, like a parent who kind of hated their kid nonetheless putting on a Santa beard at Christmas out of obligation.
A glib facsimile.
A minute fifty.
I flew back and she followed me. I tried to skate around the solid wall of interlocking debris that suddenly reared up behind me and it cost me precious seconds.
Nobody was coming to help, they were all regrouping.
The Simurgh floated, carelessly, heedlessly, toward me. The wings flapped slowly, for show, not doing anything for its flight. I kicked my thrusters into full burn. Even if I broke every bone in my body getting away, so long as I drew breath I could be put back together again.
I rocketed straight into the side of another building, jolting heavily, bouncing.
A minute and a half.
Everywhere I tried to go there she was, or something too big to go through. I was vaguely aware of voices shouting through my comms, Dragon, or maybe Colin, but I couldn’t hear them over the scream and the sound of my own haggard breath.
A minute.
The debris were growing thicker, cocooning the both of us. The outside was still being lit up by flashes of energy in every colour from a dozen capes, but nothing seemed to be getting through. The Simurgh advanced upon me with a steady, inexorable grace - like a butterfly floating in a light spring breeze.
With a hand twice the size of my head or more she reached out as my back hit a wall. Nowhere to go. She reached out and took my left hand, her grip extending halfway up my forearm. I felt the pressure and instantly I knew what was going to happen.
Thirty seconds.
The Simurgh closed her grip and crushed my armoured suit down to the bone with the same ease I crumpled a ball of aluminum foil. She lifted me by it, seemingly regarding me critically, and with a motion of absolute finality cast me up, screaming, sans hand, and she threw me into the storm that never ceased.
In the darkest moment of the night reality tore, everything falling away but me and the hand, with the streaking comets of its three hundred and four stars trailing after its descent.
Chapter 136: To you, the straight alien in my head
Chapter Text
You blink.
You blink again.
You blink, for the third time since you began existing.
For the fourth time you blink, and in your split second of thought you realize one thing - you were not meant to exist.
You blink. You fall. Your mind swims with information as the concrete rushes to meet your face, skill and talent pouring in from every sense. You hear mild cries of shock as you hit, grit and grease on your hands as you get them underneath you.
You blink, your sixth. You’re somewhere else, you remember falling onto concrete under dim light, you remember the feel of the filthy ground under your hands. Your hands? You look at them, lit in a bright room. Pale, pudgy hands, holding a glass vial in one and the other resting on a sterile white bench. You gasp, your omnitool-
You blink. You don’t know where you are. You don’t know what’s happening to you. You don’t know why. You’re standing in front of a mirror, dressed in some kind of pale armour, made in segments. It looks good. It looks Decadent. You can pick the design principles on sight, and with your Fingers of Silver recreate them. On your wrist, you feel it. Your Omnitool. It activates at your touch-
You blink. You’re flying. Your arms are wrapped around someone, a man. You’re flying. You reel, feeling blood drain from your face in abject terror, feeling something like that for the first time. You’re still wearing the pale armour and the moon is giving it a beautiful glow. Years of Engineering expertise has just been crammed into your mind and you realise what is happening. The Celestial Forge has just made a connection, a connection it should have never made to you. As a mantra you repeat powers to yourself. Master crafted, divinely enchanted, masterwork-
You blink, you fall again. You fall and fall and hit hard, everything jolts as pain you never knew could exist blooms across your entire experience. You slide down stairs in some dingy stairwell, gasping in shock. You don’t want to be alive, to walk this earth - it’s a curse. Your Alchemist's Laboratory throbs in your mind in time with your aching head. You repeat your mantra to yourself again, the cold comfort of the Celestial Forge the only thing you have ever had. You are nothing, you are no one. You realize you know things, things that could help you. You make the call to her , to the most important person in the world.
You blink. You may as well have shouted into the void. You’re facing a boy of maybe fourteen and you have no idea where you are. The boy has brown hair and brown eyes. He’s looking at you in confusion. You stare. You realize that you’re in some kind of workshop, and realize again where you must be and who must be before you.
“Wow, Kid Win. I bet you didn’t know that your speciality is modular devices with alternate uses or settings, it’s pretty crazy that Piggot and Armsmaster never put the proper effort in to figure that out.”
You have existed for a number of minutes that could be counted on one hand, and you’re terribly, terribly alone.
“Huh?” says Kid Win.
“They should have, anyone could tell by the way you finish only part of a project before starting on another.” You have no idea how long you have before you blink and everything changes, before you’re thrown out of time and out of your mind. You tap at the Omnitool clasped around your left wrist. You have to call her again. “What? Omnitool, turn on.”
“What’s an omnitool?”
“This thing,” you shake your arm, your entire body breaking out in cold shivers. “It’s from Mass Effect. It’s essentially the best swiss army knife you could ever ask for, but it’s not working. He must have disabled it, crafty little bugger shouldn’t be this smart. I’m sorry for how he behaves, too.”
You say he, but you have no idea who this ‘he’ is, this person Kid Win was talking to, but it feels right to say it.
“That’s ok,” Kid Win says to you. “Should I call, er, anyone for you?”
“No, Kid Win, we have to start building. I can’t tell you why, or for what, but just trust me when I say this is important.”
If you’re going to save Taylor then you may need help. You don’t know much of anything about Kid Win, but you know that he’s a good enough person. He pulls out his phone, looks confused, then holds it up to you.
“Greg.” The word falls from his lips like a malediction. “What is this?”
You’re too stunned by rage to properly comprehend what he’s showing you. Some kind of file, from [email protected] .
It can’t be.
You refuse.
“He.” It couldn’t be him . You couldn’t be… “What?”
You drop a can of Sprite you didn’t know you were holding.
You blink. You step into an alchemists’ laboratory, your laboratory, given to you by the Celestial Forge. You feel something else, something crushing, something overwhelming, but positive. You realize that it’s relief. You’re safe here, you must be in your Cosmic Warehouse. The cool dark stone is a relief against the weight of the Worm. You’re safe in here. Scion, Cauldron, you realize you know these things. The Evil of this world. Apocalyptic evil, human evil. You rush to the shelves and you could almost weep at the sight of the stock of jars filling them, at the sight of a dozen impossible ingredients imported with fiat backing so that the task at hand can be-
You blink. You’re sweating. You’re in a bedroom you’ve never seen before, no, you have. You recognise the mirror, from when you were wearing the suit. Your Omnitool activates, a voice plays as a recording - a nasally, nerdy voice.
“Gay alien living in my skull, everything you say is being recorded. If you have any message you want to give, say it now.”
Your throat closes up. You can’t speak. You can barely think. It takes nearly a minute but you realize what is happening. Somehow you exist outside of gaining connections to the Celestial Forge. Even now the power of Wired Watchmaker sears the memories of blueprints into your mind, the powers are gaining but you have no conception of when or how. You feel another emotion foreign to you - indignation. Gay alien?
You look at yourself in the mirror for the first time and a face you feel an instinctive contempt for looks back.
“No,” you say, your lip curling. “You move.”
You blink. You’re in a car, two people are in the front seats. You don’t know them. You are Greg. You are Greg and you hate it. You hate Greg Veder, you want nothing to do with Greg Veder. He is scum, he is pathetic, he wants to ruin the most important person in the world’s life - he wants to hurt Taylor in some way.
You know this. Better dead than Greg.
His phone is in your hand, unlocked, on the Parahumans Online Forum. The relief you feel is comparable to what you felt in the Alchemist’s Laboratory. There are other important people than Taylor Hebert, not as important but still worth more than the world to you. Someone called Lisa. You know what handle she posts under on PHO, you know that and you realize you barely know anything at all. You don’t even know who you are, what you are, or why you’re here.
You search for her, AllSeeingEye, but find nothing. You find no one. You were wrong. You try Tin_Mother. You try Winged_One. You even try SpecificProtagonist. You almost break, then. What you know, what you think you knew, if you ever knew anything at all. You tense and try one last name, hidden in the depths of your memories, buried under lifetimes of mechanical and alchemical work. You search for Tt.
You find it, and you feel joy for the first time. You send her a message, something you know she’ll appreciate, something cheeky and fun and true that would get her vulpine smirk smiling for you-
You blink. The world is split by noise, a horrible shrill alarm coming from your Omnitool. ‘Warning,’ a synthesised voice says. ‘I am not Greg Veder.’
You’re goddamn right. You realize that you’re standing now, bright halogen lights almost blinding. You’re in some kind of sterile room surrounded by people and you know instinctively who they are. These are the Wards of Brockton Bay, the kids born coded cop. You know that the PRT and the Protectorate are bad, corrupt extensions of the evil arm of Cauldron, and then bad again because they’re cops - and cops are always bad.
“Calm down,” the oldest one of them says, and because he’s white you know that he’s not Aegis. “Calm down everyone. It’ll be fine. We just have to stay calm until this passes.”
You have no idea who this person is. Aegis. Clockblocker. Gallant. Shadow Stalker. Kid Win. Vista. There weren’t any others.
“Got me surrounded, huh?” You choke out. These people, even though some of them might be alright, were still dangerous. Barely more than child soldiers.
“No one has you surrounded,” the same older boy says. You still can’t place him. “Why don’t you have some cake?”
You look down at your hands, one of which holds a plate of cake. These people are eating with Greg, willingly, not scorning his mere presence. “Cake?” You ask.
“Yeah. Have some cake with us.”
“Explain to me what is happening.” You can’t fathom it. This isn’t right. Greg is here, using the powers of the Celestial Forge, for these people . “Right now.”
“This is my last day as head of the Wards team.” You’re not in two thousand and eleven. You know now that this is Triumph, and you feel the contempt grow. “We’re celebrating.”
“As if there’s anything to celebrate. You shouldn’t be here,” you level a finger at Triumph, a dog of Cauldron, then you turn to the boy who could only be Gallant. “Neither should you.”
Dogs of Cauldron, both. They stand there, bold as brass, pretending to be real parahumans, parading stolen valour , rather than everything special about them coming out of daddy’s checking account.
There’s something worse here. You turn to face the main offense. Shadow Stalker. She hurt Taylor directly, you quiver with rage at the thought. “And you. Everyone is guilty of you, letting you stay here.”
“Greg?” Shadow Stalker asks, looking almost delighted.
“He deserves to be here least of all, after you. None of you know what she’s done.”
“We know about the bullying.”
Of course. Of course they knew. How could they not? “You know?!” You howl, your chest aches at the injustice. “You knew?”
“You, that is, Greg, told us.”
Everything was spiralling. “What did this moron tell you?”
“We’re not dragging that up. Everyone, just sit tight until this runs out in a few minutes.”
“I thought some of you were alright. If you can sit there and eat cake while knowing, then… I was wrong. You’re all the same.”
Sophia scoffs.
“Sophia!” Triumph says. “Don’t engage with it. It will go away soon. Greg… Don’t do anything either, please.”
“Don’t you ever call me that again. You, him, that murderer,” you glare daggers at Shadow Stalker “Cops protect cops.”
You’ve crossed the thin blue line and Triumph reacts as such. “Ok. Everyone else leave, please. Take five, then we’ll come back and have cake.”
You watch them shuffle out as Triumph takes you in hand, and you’re once again imprisoned with this imposter hero. This false idol. His size and build and super strength make struggling a fools game, and he drags you over to a couch and forces you to sit.
You swallow, you notice your mouth is dry. Nothing is straight in your head, everything is all jumbling together from one blink to the next. “Have you ever seen Echidna?”
Triumph frowns. “No?”
A coincidence, a lie, then. Of course he was lying, there was no way, in any universe, that Greg Veder would ever even so much as see Echidna.
You blink. You’re in Greg’s room again. You’re surrounded by paints and clutched in your sweaty hand is a scale model of an anime girl. You don’t know what anime is, even though you know the Celestial Forge contains powers from it. It’s a masterpiece, given the powers you have to work with and you can see Decadence in every inch of the loving detail.
“You have the power to change the world.” It fills you with rage. It fills you with a black hatred near impossible to convey in words. “And this is what you give me?”
With the destruction of the multiverse looming over the horizon.
“Is this all that you are?”
This is what this useless, pathetic worm spends the infinite power of the Celestial Forge on?
“If you peel back every layer, mash him down to the finest paste, and sieve him through the finest sieve, is this all that Greg Veder is?”
You rage. You destroy.
You blink. You see him. You see him twice. It’s his fault. All of this is his fault. Who else could it be? Greg Veder is worse than scum. He is pathetic. He is weak. He wouldn’t give Taylor a scrap of bread without something in return if she was starving. To like him you had to be just like him. You had to be just as entitled, just as meek, just as obsessive - even thinking about him makes you angry.
The world would be better off without him.
“So,” you say, but he and his duplicate attack you without warning like the cowards they are.
You fall, stunned, as he folds you with a kick. You realize that you’re wearing some kind of martial arts sparring gear.
“You motherfucker!” Greg snarls at you, his fat face twisted into a rictus of anger and hatred almost matching yours. “Finally showing your faggot face?”
You can’t explain how disgusted you were to hear that word coming out of his mouth. You struggle to your feet to tell him exactly what you thought about that vile, bigoted hate speech but the other Greg duplicate attacks you while you’re distracted, kicking you again directly into the first’s waiting arms while shouting wildly, his voice cracking.
“I hope you get raped to death by a pack of dogs!”
You get thrown like a sack of potatoes and bounce like a rubber ball. You manage to find your feet but breathing is hard, the wind knocked clean out of you. You speak in an incredulous, wheezing breath. “You really are scum. You think you’re better than me.”
Greg has the gall to respond with ignorant anger. “Get out of our fucking head!”
You scoff instinctively. You realize that you are supposed to exist, and why you’re supposed to exist. Why you’re gaining time. Why Greg Veder is losing time. The Celestial Forge has created you for the task of saving Taylor Hebert. Replacing him is Justice. “You don’t understand anything.”
“You’re gonna understand my foot up your ass if you don’t fuck off right now.”
“If I lose to Greg Veder, right here, right now,” you eye him heroically, meeting watery, weak blue eyes. “If I lose to someone as pathetic as you, there was never a hope to begin with.”
You fight. You destroy a duplicate.
“You’re ruining my life!” He accuses.
“Your life?” You say incredulously. “You’re ruining trillions. Every time I see through these eyes, what is it that you’re doing? Have you ever accomplished a single thing of worth in your miserable little life - argh!”
“Fuck you! Fuck outta my head!”
“At least they made you take a self defense class, you bootlicker.”
“You don’t know a fucking thing!” He’s caught you in an armbar and he reefs back on the joint just to hear you scream. “Spit me out! Put me back fighting Echidna!”
“You!” You howled in pain. “Know nothing ! Every second you keep me from doing my job the fate of the world gets ever more hopelessly grim. I, and I alone, can stop it.”
Greg screams in the face of the truth and wrenches back - he vanishes. The potion running its course. You lie there sweating and panting. It was a near thing, but you’ve won and you both know it.
You blink. The Lab is gone. You’re in a school. Everything is running together in one disjointed stream of consciousness. There’s no breaks, no consistency, no context. You have existed for perhaps only a handful of minutes. Your mind is racing from your fight, to you only a second ago, but your body is completely unaroused. You feel the hot flush of anger come back and then be instantly swept away by rapture.
You see her. The most important person in the world
Taylor Hebert walks, and you run. She is everything, she is all you have. Without her, without saving her, you’re little more than five minutes of mixed memories and random facts.
“You have to come with me.”
Taylor looks at you with the same expression someone would look at dogshit they’ve just stepped on and you understand her completely. “Why?”
“We need to talk about powers.” You know that she will trigger, but don’t even know when you are. This could be after the locker, and the thought of that chills you to the bone.
Taylor rolls her eyes and you. “I don’t want to talk about powers.”
“You will. I know that talking to Greg,” you gestured to yourself, to Greg’s disgusting physiognomy. “Is like pulling teeth, but we need to talk about it. What day is it today?”
“Tuesday.”
She walks, but you follow. Without her you have nothing, what else could you possibly do? “What date?”
“December something. The fifth, maybe.”
Everything was going to be ok. Everything could be fixed. I could save her. “Ok, alright. We still have time. Don’t come to school first day back next year.”
“Thanks for the advice.”
“You’re right to hate Greg,” you say, speaking only the truth. Everything you have seen of him is despicable. “I hate him, too. Everyone should.”
“Ok.”
“I’m going to turn things around.” She has to know. She has to know she has someone on her side, someone who will never betray her. “Bit by bit. It will all change. I’ll make things better. I’ll save everyone. I’ll save you.”
“That’s, uh, thanks.”
“I can’t tell you about it without being killed yet, but something is coming.” Cauldron would kill me if they knew I existed. They were the unchecked evil of man, the cautionary tale against power and corruption. “Soon, though, I promise.”
Taylor starts to say something-
You blink, and her radiance is gone. Your omnitool is flashing, screeching that you’re not Greg Vdeder. Not Greg, never Greg. Better dead than Greg.
You’re sitting in an office and looking at a fat blonde woman. She’s wearing a blazer stretched tight over her frame and looks quite unwell, wan and tired. You know her bowl cut hair. You know who this is - one of the worst people in the Bay. A prime parahuman biggot.
“Piggot,” you name her.
“I understand that you’re not Greg.” She looks at you like the scum you’re inhabiting. At least that is right, at least one person despises him as they should.
You still can’t believe he joined with the Wards. Of all the cowardly, bootlicking choices he could have made he made the worst one. An ineffective, manipulated system that cares more about PR and looking good rather than doing good or championing morally right causes. The greatest thing about being a Hero was that you drive your own destiny, the Wards neuter that.
All the worst, toxic parts of highschool combined with the unforgiving, authoritarian boot of the government. You hate the government and you hate authority. You know that they’re bad. You know this because you know Taylor doesn’t like them.
The Wards were tools in a system that will throw you under a bus if you aren't useful, or if you have information on them they don't want loose. The authorities aren't the solution, they are a breeding ground of uselessness.
There is no reason to join the Wards. That's just like asking to work with your abuser and being ordered to respect them.
You offer your hands to her. “I would prefer the Birdcage.”
The PRT are not true heroes, they would never be true heroes - Piggot least of all.
“You would prefer the Birdcage over what?”
You had to admire the audacity.
“Anything to do with you.”
“Unpack that for me, please?”
“I would prefer to die than work with a government sponsored gang. How’s the status quo going? Ignored any good murders lately?”
It feels good to shove the truth into her face, to give it to someone who would hurt Taylor. Her very expression inspires within you a deep desire to never give in. Thus always, to tyrants.
“I see,” Piggot said, one second away from drawing her gun and shooting me in the head if she thought she could get away with it with Greg’s parents in the room. “Would you be able to tell me your name?”
“My name?” The world tilts again. You have existed for enough minutes to count on both hands and feet and not once have you had a moment to think. You must have a name, surely? Only, you don’t know who you are. You don’t know what you are. All that you know is that Taylor is the most important person in the world. “And risk giving you power over me, you ghoul. Call me… Celestial Forge.”
“Celestial Forge.” It felt right for Piggot to call you by that name. Perhaps that was the truth, you were the manifestation of the Celestial Forge in human form. A perfect vessel, built to contain itself. “Are you aware that you’re in someone else's body?”
No, that couldn’t be right. Perfect vessel? You would rather die. “I will not be answering any more questions. Shoot me, or lock me up. Your call.”
“We’ll wait.” Piggot said, but not to you. “Triumph, stay ready.”
And you waited for the wheel to turn once more.
You blink. You’re somewhere else entirely.
You’re on a roof with two women. One is perhaps the most attractive person to have ever existed, but you can see Decadent fingerprints all over her perfect face and blonde wig. Cybernetics from Augmentation R&D. Greg has given someone cybernetic implants to make them more beautiful. You’re not surprised.
The other person you recognise from the outfit alone. Panacea, and it only makes sense that Greg would be drawn to similar human trash. “Oh,” you say. “It’s you. Panacea, why are we on the hospital roof? Who are you?”
“I’m Pilot,” said the beautiful woman in a voice that matched her perfectly. “It’s nice to meet you.”
“I don’t know you. Where do you come from? What’s your power?” This was wrong. There was never a Cape named Pilot in Brockton Bay. Was there?
“I have super strength,” Pilot said and flexed both arms. I wondered how much of this person had been converted, and how long that would have taken. How much time went by before I came out again? “What’s your power?”
I shot this poor person, who had to suffer under Greg’s knife, a withering look before rounding on Panacea. “Who is she? Why is she here?”
“Fuck if I know,” Panacea muttered.
“I have work to do, so you should stay out of my way.” She may be human trash, and a rapist, but she was still less objectionable than Greg. “And stay away from your sister.”
You leave, but Pilot takes you in hand. “Can’t let you do that, buddy. If you try to say anything else like that it’s going to decrease your speaking permissions.”
“Get off me!” You struggle against her grip. “Why are you here? You shouldn’t be here, I don’t know you.”
“You shouldn’t worry about anything he says, it’s all lies meant to hurt you.”
“I should have known,” you spit. An indoctrinated stooge of the Protectorate, no doubt. Maybe even Cauldron. “Who do you really work for?”
Pilot says nothing, and Panacea, gutless coward that she is, tries to run. “You have to help me,” You attempt a sophisticated manipulation tactic. “You have to get her off me. I’m here to save the world, Panacea. I can save you, too.”
“From what?” Pilot asks, but you ignore her.
“Please, I can save everyone .” And you can. You will. Even from under the boot of the ‘authorities’ you would still save the world from Scion.
“The real Greg is so, so incredibly sorry you had to see this,” Pilot says. “He hopes you can still be friends.”
You turn to face her as best her iron grip allows, incredulous. “How could Panacea ever be friends with a useless piece of shit like Greg?”
“I like Greg,” says Pilot, and at last you understand. She has been mastered by Greg. The social pheromone cybernetics, adapted to control who it was implanted in. This poor woman was being blasted with Beta influencers every time she looked at him.
“I’ll save you, too. For what he’s done, for what he will continue to do for every second that I’m not here.”
Pilot pats you on the head as though you were a puppy.
You blink, and you realize that despite being alive for barely hours that you do not want to die.
“ You! ”
You face down your death all the same.
“Me,” your death agrees.
“I should have known you’d get your dirty hooks into this idiot,” you watch Contessa for any hint of the gun or the knife. “Is this the part where we door to Cauldron?”
Contessa regards you with sharp eyes, but you can see beneath the veil to the child whose brain has rotted away under the power given to it, you can see the dull gaze no matter how well it’s hidden. A door suddenly opens behind you and Contessa steps forward, effortlessly body checking you before you can make a single sound, you fall through the door and onto a warm, grassy meadow flush with flowers.
Only, you’re a demigod child of Hephaestus now. You search within yourself for the well of strength available to half bloods, to defend yourself against this monster, and you find nothing . Your domain is of technology and technology alone, there is no blacksmith’s strength here, no innate fortitude to shrug off blows that would fell a mortal man, no new agility or speed.
All it has given you is the increased awareness of the locked omnitool on your wrist, and the gun holstered under Contessa’s arm.
All you can do is give it your best shot.
“I should have known you’d get your dirty hooks into this idiot. Is this the part where we door to Cauldron?”
“What makes you come out?” Contessa looms over you, her menace path perfect. “What activates you?”
However, if it were truly path perfect she wouldn’t even need to ask. “You couldn’t torture that out of me, Contessa .”
“I’m not interested in torturing you, whatever you are. Are you merely a broken trigger?”
“Can’t Path that one?” Your heart soars with victory over your slam dunk. The sheer raw les majeste.
She regards you coolly, face darkened by the shadow of her stupid hat and her blackened heart. Why hasn’t she killed you yet? Cauldron kills everything in their way, especially if it would do some good for the world. “Are you from the third entity?”
“Abbadon?” What was she even talking about? And you, yourself, have no idea what that name proclaims. You barely know anything at all.
“Not The Warrior or Thinker? Zion or Eden?”
She was talking about Scion and Eden. She was talking about them like I was helping them. Like I wasn’t doing everything I could, expending every shred of effort available to me, to stop them.
“You call yourself the Celestial Forge, what is that? What do you mean when you say you’ll save the world? An appointment with the Slug, then?”
You can’t help but flinch, and you don’t know why. You don’t know what the slug is. All you understand is the threat. “Death would be better than helping Cauldron even one inch.”
“Why?”
“Oh, let me count the ways, you self righteous failures,” you can’t help but smirk. “You incompetent, narcissistic megalomaniacs. You don’t even know your power is leading you to a pyrrhic end. All the triggers you force by letting monsters like the Slaughterhouse Nine do as they please? Propping up corrupt government agencies? Squeezing society to prop up the number of villains because you think they’ll help? The Nemesis program? You’re half assed evil in an ill-fitting suit.”
Contessa stares at you impassively.
“With all your resources, all the power at your disposal, this is what you end up with? Where have your paths to victory gotten you? You’re supposed to be the invincible precog, and you expect me to believe that all your plans, everything that doesn’t involve the entities, just fail like they do? That your ultimate plan fails? You’re evil and cruel and pathetic. I’m going to do it better. I’m going to kill them.”
“How would you do it, if you were in our position?”
The world tilts. You don’t know. You don’t even know who you are. The Celestial Forge has a plan, it must, it’s not just throwing you in blind, not just making you suffer for nothing. How can you know what to do when you don’t even know what’s going on - the words spill out of your mouth all the same.
“As if telling you could do even the slightest bit of good. You would filter it through your shard and come to the same conclusions that only perpetuate the cycle, just as you’ve done since day one. No, I’m going to build the shining bridge to the future you never could. Stay out of my way.”
Contessa does something you could have never expected. “Door me back to Brockton Bay. You should go home.”
The door unfolded in space just behind you.
“What?” You say, unable to comprehend what is happening. Contessa isn’t killing you. Why isn’t Contessa killing you? What sick game is this. “All bark and no bite?”
“That remains to be seen, should you oppose our goals.”
“Oh, I’ll oppose you, alright,” you jump to your feet in a bust of righteous energy. “Tooth and claw, I’ll right every wrong you’ve done - then, with my own hands, I’ll save everyone.”
Contessa merely watches you leave and the door closes behind you.
For the first time in your short existence you cry.
You blink. You’re sitting on a bus. You want to cry again.
Softly your Omnitool, stolen from you by a usurper, whispers lies into your ear.
‘It’s time to explain everything. Why did you send me back in time when I was fighting Echidna? Why did you take everything away from me? My friends, my girlfriend, my gamer powers? Why am I doing it all over again like this?’
“You’re lying,” you mutter, because it has to be true. If it’s not, then what do you have? Nothing you know might be true.
Taylor might not even be the most important person in the world.
“She told you to say that, didn’t she? You’re easy prey for someone like her, her power lets her tell the most believable lies in the world - but this seems too stupid even for Cauldron. You said it before, too. I remember. ‘Put me back fighting Echidna’. I thought it was strange. How do you know about Echidna? Was she feeding you lines even then, to throw me off? Gamer powers? Greg Veder has never had powers. You have never had powers, you can’t have ‘gamer’ powers here, that’s not how it works. You absolute cretin, you Cauldron dog. Why are you getting in my way? Why is this happening to me?”
You cry, and not even knowledge of gaining power can balm your anguish. It was a power that turned tool requirements into a joke, and the real joke was that it was the least important thing you could think of. What did it matter if the wheel of the Forge continued to turn if everything you knew was wrong?
Why did you exist?
You break, and in the lowest point of your entire handful of hours, you beg Greg for assurance.
“What’s happening to me?”
You blink. You’re in the middle of nowhere, holding a trowel. You breathe and something doesn’t taste right, but that might just be because you’re in a forest. You’ve never been in a forest. Your Omnitool plays another cursed lie.
‘I know about Echidna because she ate me. How do you?’
You ignore it. You lift the printed omnimaterial trowel in your hand and look at it. It’s ugly, there is no Decadence in the piece at all, no insight from Savant. It is a tool, nothing more. You’re disgusted with it as much as you are with yourself. Begging for help. From him . He hates you, he wants to kill you.
You look at the trowel in your hand and then at the stream with its rich banks of red clay. It’s obvious what Greg intended to do, and for lack of anything else you may as well follow through. He must have somehow predicted your arrival, and stranded you in the middle of nowhere.
You think that it might be ok, this will be the first time you have to think in your entire life. You’re finally free from the frantic crush of being dashed along the rocks of time, wave after dumping wave bringing fresh ways to suffer. Every blink a mounting of the torment of existing, of being Greg.
With the trowel in hand and a riverbank full of clay you know exactly what he must have had in mind, and loathe as you are to go along with it, what else is there to do?
You get to work, taking clay and mixing it with water. Taking dry sticks and twisting one within the other to produce fire. It doesn’t matter that you’ve never built a single thing in your life, you’re a Savant, everything you make is beyond Decadent in form and function - every step you take makes you angrier and angrier until you’re seething and you can’t keep it in.
“Echidna ate you?” You cannot believe that he’s still trying with this blatant, ridiculous lie. “You’re as big of a liar as you ever were after Leviathan hits. Where are we? Don’t tell me Cauldron stranded you here, you fucking idiot. You mouth breathing, slack jawed moron. You have no idea what they’ve done, what they continue to do. Explain yourself, now.”
You blink. You’re facing a door. You’re standing in front of some kind of cottage. You begin to hate whatever is doing this to you.
“One night, while I was sleeping, I triggered. It was in September twenty ten, and when I woke up there was a blue box hovering in front of my face telling me I had gotten eight hours of rest.”
Greg’s voice speaks to you once more. You turn from the cottage and just walk. You walk and listen and with every step you take your ego shatters. The story he’s telling, he’s crying, he’s laughing, he’s screaming - it doesn’t sound like he’s lying.
Nothing you know is right.
You are nothing.
You are no one.
No cosmic key.
Nothingness.
You blink. Everything is dark, you can feel something over every inch of your skin. You can’t move. You can barely breathe.
You move, but it’s not by choice. Something is moving around you, forcing you. By the divine right bestowed upon you by Hephaestus you feel the suit of power armour binding you like a coffin.
A screen lights up directly in front of your face and Greg’s voice speaks.
“Sorry, not sorry. I can’t have you ruining my life anymore. This is going to be it for you, you’re either going to be in the suit or with Pilot. You can use the generative AI, though.”
The voice cut off and you are left in silence only broken by the sound of shallow breathing. You feel… cold. Hopeless. You feel nothing for six hours.
You blink.
You do your best to pretend that you’re the same, but trapped by Pilot, who is at least a robot and not some poor woman Greg had enslaved, and by Armsmaster, you have nowhere to go. They force you to use your power, like a gang with a captured Tinker. You make statues of her, hoping beyond hope that she really is the most important person in the world.
You blink. You’re imprisoned. Your life is over before it ever really began. You think that perhaps it might not have even been a single day since you took your first breath, but you have no way to know.
You’re a slave.
Chapter 137: Killing hope 7.2 'Save your tears for another day'
Chapter Text
You blink, and you know pain. You are consumed by pain. A storm rages around you as you fall into the sky, the riotous grinding cacophony of a hundred thousand colliding boulders drowns out everything else as the sky is lit by blinding flashes.
You see a figure is the distance and as your momentum changes they fall closer and closer. A woman larger than any human by far, and you have the strangest impression that she is wearing a fluttering lace wedding dress being whipped around by the wind of the storm - but you recognise her all the same.
The Simurgh. She turns her dead eyes to face you and you scream . You’re falling in an uncontrolled tumble, your stump arm bleeding, burning , through the raging remains of Brockton Bay. Through the divine right over machines you feel the suit, and only by that same sliver of divinity that created it do you understand what to do.
You give the command verbally, arranging yourself into a position that the limited memory of the suit recalls, and the plasmajets burn to life. You’re slammed with acceleration, vision blurring, and you plough through the telekinetic storm, pinballing painfully off of chunks of buildings, each impact jarring your already rattled brain, until you breach the edge of the storm a mile in the sky.
You hang there above the swirling clouds, breathing heavily, clutching at the bleeding stump of your arm. You notice that strapped to it, just above the brutal tear, is some kind of watch with a countdown timer flashing with red zeros. You notice that the arm missing is the one on which Greg wore the Omnitool. The focal point, the point of failure, for your containment.
The suit is operating in basic mode because he never considered that he would be parted with his arm.
You’re no slave, you’re free.
You pull the armband off and let it fall.
The storm rages beneath you and your vision dims from both the pain and the loss of blood. You’re going to die in a supreme act of cosmic irony, freed from your shackles only to die as you realise it. No, even Greg couldn’t be that stupid. You feel within the suit a stash of potion infused with your Ka, made with the love of Elven Enchanting, the base improvements of True Balance and Lack of Materials.
What would the backup command be? “Heal me.” The word comes out weak, barely able to be spoken. “Heal. Potion. Healing potion-”
You feel a brief spike over your heart and a flood of vitality enters your body. Your waning consciousness stops trying to slip beneath the black veil of death and strength fills your limbs - almost all of your limbs. Your missing arm remains lost, the stump now sealed with an ugly, irregular cap of scar tissue.
You don’t have time to stop and think, the Simurgh is below you and you’re woefully unprepared to fight her. You tell yourself that it’s not cowardice not to dive straight back into the sphere of chaos she controls, without even so much as a weapon, missing half of an arm, in a suit without its control center; it’s prudence. You have to build. You have to make it so that you can never be chained again.
With your latest power you might even be able to do it in time. Machinist. You could unmake and remake an entire helicopter in less than half a day, with only this power. Combined with the rest you could do it in considerably less.
With stuttering bursts you control the suit in a descent divided into steps, scanning all the while for places to tinker. To his credit, the HUD does a fantastic job of stripping away the darkness of midnight and you quickly find an electronics hobby shop well away from the battle. You crash in through the door and take stock. For a Tinker this would be a treasure trove, for you it’s closer to a dragon’s hoard.
You can feel the right gauntlet of the suit is a hybrid between micromanipulators and a multi-tool, packed with memory metal. It would have to do until you could make something better. You begin the right handed construction of a new left.
You pull apart the shop to get what you need, and lean heavily on Tinkertechnically for the rest - you’re not sure how that power exists. Everything you can muster goes into it. Decadence ensures the form is perfectly suited for the task while looking beautiful, Lack of Materials and Waste not reduce what you need to make it while giving increases to capability. Principles from Engineering, Gadget Master, Titan Engineering, Augmentation R&D, Fun in the Sun, Mauler Tech and Machinist all contribute to the design while Savant lets you blend them together with innate talent.
As you pour the energy of Elven Enchanting into your work the tool reduction of Backyard Handiwork makes it as though you are producing this within a specialized facility. As an object of practical craft, of automata, the full scope of Divine Child applies while also reducing build time.
You work faster than anyone ever has, Machinist bending time itself to let your hand move. You experience time itself being skipped, and even though you inhabit the memories of creation lost in those gaps you don’t perceive the experience as dragging.
Even one handed it is a jewel of creation, as perfect as you can afford to make it. Shimmering, shining, splendid. You steel yourself for the pain and dig the connection points into your flesh. When you finish screaming you decide that before commencing with the brain implant you’ll be imbibing a potion of resilience.
You brace yourself and, after taking another dose of Simple Tonic, lock the new hand into the connection points. Your nerves fizz the entire length up your arm and into your spine in a way that is supremely uncomfortable, but the sensation subsides and your new hand flexes, articulating perfectly.
You feel an overwhelming sense of pride for the first time. You were made for this. You are an engine of creation.
Outside you can hear that the storm continues to rage even though an hour has passed in your making. You’re still not ready, you need a way to command the suit, and you need a weapon.
You have multiple ways to make brain implants, and when you created the hand you made it with that in mind. It was a tool for building medical technology on a personal scale, but it’s not something you can make here. The margin of error is smaller, the build will have to be more exact than the hand - the thing is going to be sitting nestled in your brain meat, after all.
Even that, too, will just be a stopgap in the end. A stepping stone on the way to building a better body to jump ship to, one that doesn’t have a single genetic ounce of Greg Veder within it. You will be absolutely free to be whoever you want to be. The forge will hop, too, there was no getting away from it. Even if you were to deconstruct your form at the fundamental level, and remake it from an entirely new set of materials, the Celestial Forge would continue to turn. Bound deeper even than the soul, there was no escape.
Not that you want to escape. You are the forge, for all intents and purposes.
Without the full program driving it the suit moves clunkily, but you get out of the hobby shop and behold the storm, a mile wide chaotic sphere of choking dust and broken city. It’s moved further away from you.
You’re so confused. Leviathan was supposed to attack Brockton Bay, and this is months early for that. The Simurgh must have been after you, but like Contessa she would be coming at you blind, and unlike against Contessa you have the means to defend yourself.
You flex your new hand and head back inside.
You can’t help but notice just how wrong everything is. Even with the Forge, it’s missing something so integral as to be its beating heart. You have no key, you have no Cosmic Warehouse. No safe space, fiat backed and absolutely incorruptible.
There was so much missing from the powers themselves, too. Art kits, boots and space suits, plasma pistols, and with Divine Child not only were you lacking the physical enhancements that should have come with it, you couldn’t even speak ancient Greek.
Something was horrifically wrong with the Forge on a fundamental level. Yet another foundation of yours crumbled into dust. You needed stability, you needed assurance.
You needed to find Taylor - after you were ready. For now you need to raid the computer section of this place. Not only does the neural implant need to be made, you have to write the code for it, and you have to crack the security on this power armour, though you think that won’t be hard.
Even more so than just upgrading your gear, you need programs to run it. You need artificial intelligences. The level of information management you have in mind cannot be done on a single human brain. You need to work fast, you don’t know how much time you have.
Hours, more than six or seven. For the first time in your life you have access to a clock, a little bit in the top right hand corner of the HUD. It’s amazing how different things feel when you have the slightest shred of control over them, even something so small as keeping track of time.
The storm rages on as you build and code and make and unmake. You create an arc smelter out of scrap, and use it to assemble raw material. You barely notice that the sound outside has quietened, so engrossed in your work. You experience other things for the first time.
You shit. The toilet groans. You decide that the human form is not the pinnacle of being.
You work all through the night, each slipping second aggravating an existential anxiety that you won’t make it in time. You won’t complete the implant and lock Greg in his own suit in the one chance you have, the one time he doesn’t have the Omnitool. Hunger gnaws at your stomach, and you push on.
You’re going to fail.
You blink and you feel the Forge turn, one tiny shard of one galaxial arm coming loose. You feel the power settle into your soul, the feeling of coming home, you imagine. It is called Anaheim Degree and you can now build Mobile Suits. Everything that goes into Mobile Suit construction, you are now competent in. The feeling is incomplete, like there was supposed to be a Suit included, or perhaps a beam saber, but you dismiss that worry to the back of your mind for now.
You feel hope like you have never felt before, hope so overwhelming that it almost hurts.
You just gained a power from the Forge.
You’re here to stay.
Chapter 138: Killing Hope 7.3 'Perfect Girl'
Chapter Text
You cut open your skull and look into your head. Everything is numb from the potion of resilience you have imbibed, made from scavenged ingredients, Waste Not allowing you to substitute ingredients you didn’t have for extra ones you did, the supernatural anesthetic’s efficacy doubled and redoubled again by the effects of your powers.
You think that, perhaps, you should have thought that through a little better. It wasn’t something that needed the extra power, and you could indeed pick and choose which powers were to apply to any given creation, it was just hard to resist the urge. The temptation of perfection.
The neural implant you’ve made was originally meant to be the size of a fingernail, now miniaturized down to the size of a smaller fingernail. A little lump of silvery metal with a dozen micron thin wires fanning around it as it floated in a suspension of antibacterial, antiviral solution. You had to rely heavily on Tinkertechnically again to compensate for the bare bones supplies you were working with, Waste Not, again, coming fully into play to emulate rare elements you had no way of sourcing.
The helmet of the powered flight suit sits on a bench next to you as you delicately remove part of your skull. You have to begrudgingly admit that the design of it is good, each part able to magnetically unlock or retract to allow easy access and escape. Your brain matter lies exposed to the open air, which while normally in such an unsanitary location as this would be quite dangerous, you have at least one more dose of healing potion left.
You had to take the suit off for this step, even the minor lag, the slight resistance in movement it had without its control center, could see you render yourself braindead - however, your new hand, divine, of elven make, could not make such a mistake. It moved so well that you wanted an entire body made of it, you wanted to be free of biological restraints, all of this disgusting blood and hormonal meat.
Whatever you are, whoever you were supposed to be, being in a human body didn’t feel completely right. It had nothing to do with the strength and certainty of steel, you just simply weren't human. The memories the Celestial Forge had graced you with were from, it seemed, a human perspective, human lived experience, but you could tell they weren’t yours . It had been more confusing before, when they were all you had, they were your entire frame of reference, but now you could feel the separation.
You were an angel of the Forge, and the Celestial Forge was more powerful than any god.
Carefully, with the skill of an experienced trauma surgeon, with the memories of medical tech genius’, you wired the neural implant into your greymatter. Almost immediately it started converting bio-energy into a usable power source, and for a moment you felt like vomiting heavily, but that too passed and the exchange between machine and human neuron began.
You quickly replace the section of skull and take the shot of healing potion, the bone almost instantly sealing back together. Seamless. Greg would never know what hit him.
You still want to sneer at the mere thought of him, but the foundations of what you thought to be true have been shattered over and over despite living for only a day. You don’t want to consider things from his perspective, every instinct is screaming at you that he is less than the worms crawling in the dirt, though, you don’t really know why that is.
You thought he simply must be, it must be the way the world is, because Taylor doesn’t like him, and you don’t want to think about that being wrong. Once you find her everything will be alright, the world will make sense and you can save it together.
You don’t really have much else to go on. Your concept of right is what Taylor thinks is right, and wrong is what she thinks is wrong. It’s as simple as that.
With some effort you think at your implant in the right way and information fills your brain - your mind machine interface. It’s not something synesthesiac, nothing that can be perceived with traditional human senses, it’s simply thought. You connect to the flight suit and there is not a single safeguard on it. Anyone could have connected, well, assuming they could project the same wave that an Omnitool operated on, but there were no backup security systems and that seemed like a huge security risk to you.
Still, you sync to the suit and to the new computer hub you built, sealed within a solid cube of emulated hyper hard material, twice boosted with Lack of Materials and True balance. Originally the size of a car you’ve minaturized it to the dimensions of a regular personal computer casing. It wouldn’t be safe for it to stay here, unguarded, which is why it will follow you. Flight capable, shielded from scanning, boasting the Glass Shield cloaking system from Augmentation R&D, it would do for now until you could secure a permanent location.
You access the hub and activate your own PILOT program, though you loathe to copy Greg it truly is your best option at the moment. You need a new name for it, a better, more imaginative name.
‘Drive,’ you tell it through the neural link. ‘You drive. You’re the driver.’
That is the extent of telling it who it was, what it could be. You could never do anything but let its personality develop organically, built out of pilot droid, Machinist, Engineer and Titan OS software. It would be its own person in time, you were no slaver.
Instantly, any resistance the suit was giving smoothed over, the clunky movements of basic mode gone as it responded to your very brain chemistry.
You were truly free.
You looked to the dawn, rising red through the choking cloud of dust that marked the Simurgh’s passing, and shed a tear.
It was almost time to go, you had run into yet another horrific downside of being forced to wear Greg’s body - the need for sleep. You were achingly hungry, and you were tired down to the marrow of your bones. You could feel the exhaustion pulling at you like a physical pain.
You refused to sleep. You simply wouldn’t do it. You would never sleep again. To close your eyes, and wake up somewhere, somewhen, else? You wouldn’t have it.
You needed a Drink of Seven Days’ Rest, and you needed enough to never have to sleep ever again.
It would take longer than you can spare to cook, you can’t spend hours waiting for it to brew. You have to find her.
Your repulsor jets and antigrav twinkle to life, spitting white sparks of discharged energy. The suit is well designed, you’re completely steady as you hover just above the road. You make a slow ascent and your computer hub, now invisible, follows at an appropriate distance. There’s a simple joy in it, just flying. Going where you wanted to go, doing what you wanted to do, being allowed to simply exist.
The city slowly reveals itself to you as you rise, a patchwork of quality, rot and, now, destruction. You come up from the southern area of the city and behold what the Simurgh has wrought. Miles of ripped up city lay strewn around the center, a flattened patch like a monstrous hand has reached down from on high and twisted until it was all ground to rubble.
You feel guilt for the first time. What could you have done differently? You could only fly on voice command, and every movement was uncoordinated. You had no way of fighting. You were down a hand. It was sprung on you out of nowhere. It wasn’t your fault. You were in no position to meaningfully contribute.
In two ways, now, your stomach hurts. It twists, knotted. You need to eat, if nothing else. You hate to steal, but you know that Taylor thinks stealing isn’t always wrong so long as it’s for a good reason. You ping your neural implant and it scours the internet for information on Brockton Bay, on where you can find food. There’s a Seven Eleven mere hundreds of meters away, and though you hate to take from them you have little choice.
You descend to the front door, which is already open. There’s no power connected here, probably no power anywhere in the city. You need something non-perishable, and you don’t trust the look of the battered hot-dogs sitting in a rack over the front counter. There’s protein bars, there’s fruit, there’s bread and there’s water. You take only what you need to survive and you eat for the first time.
It’s strange. You know this food is bottom of the barrel, that even the simplest dish you can make would render these inedible by comparison, but at the moment they are the sweetest nectar and ambrosia to your tongue. You eat and eat, taking more and more until the thought of having even one more bite makes you sick and you stand hunched over the service counter full of regret.
If you had a body of living metal this wouldn’t be an issue.
It takes a while, but you feel well enough to stand and compared to before you feel infinitely better. Tired, but no longer gnawingly hungry. You turn back toward the sky and are off.
You know Taylor lives in the Docks, and you make an internet search for information. You learn about her useless father’s, Daniel’s, work at the Dockworkers Union, which Taylor likes, and thus Unions are good. You spend a few minutes hacking into the home owners registry, cutting through the security systems like a lightsaber through butter, and secure the address mortgaged to a Mr. Daniel Hebert.
From a half mile above you observe the humble beginnings from which the most important person in the world came. It’s a simple house, and from what you have seen of the area, and some vague memories from Backyard Handiwork, it must be the quintessential American house. It’s so stock standard it must have been built off a factory plan.
Something in you tells you that this isn’t ideal, that everything must be its own immaculate masterpiece, but it’s Taylor’s house, and Taylor likes it. Why do you think that? Decadence? Divine Child? Savant? Memories, even in their truncated form, outweigh your own by such vast amounts as to be comical. You shake it off. You have something more important to do.
Taylor is clearly not home, the entire area is either evacuated or silent as the grave. You can see people occasionally through shutters or thick curtains, but no one comes out. Taylor’s house is empty, and you know better than you know yourself that she would have gone out to fight the moment she knew a hero was needed.
You expand your search, scouring the empty streets, soaring over buildings to seek alleyways. You have to find her before you run out of time. You need that, you had to at least have that before Greg takes everything from you again.
Brockton Bay isn’t a small city, and a growing fear gnaws at you. You don’t know what Taylor’s powers are. She could be anything from Brute to Shaker, to Master to Trump/Stranger. You know that if nothing had changed she would be Warlord Skitter, and things had clearly changed more than you could comprehend. You don’t know if you should be looking for her swarms, or if she would be flying, or even locked up in a garage Tinkering.
You didn’t know who to blame. Your instinctive thought is Greg, but that’s a bitter, spiteful thought that gives him too much credit. Cauldron comes to mind, you wouldn’t put it past them to ruin things so badly that The Simurgh attacks Brockton in February. You flex your steel alloy hand, the enchanted metal warm against your skin, and you realise that all this was only possible because The Simurgh stole the Omnitool.
You surmise that to be what she had done, though you weren’t there when it happened. Without the Omnitool the suit of armour you’re wearing wouldn’t have the information needed to lock itself. The loss of the Omnitool is almost a harsher burden than you can bear, but you smile bitterly all the same, enjoying the difference between you; had it been you, you would have built a backup instantly. You don’t know what else he’d done, but you know you would have done it better.
You still can’t believe he joined The Wards. It has been hours since The Simurgh and you can’t even see them fixing the city anywhere besides the buzzing center around the Bay, doing nothing more than consolidating their power for the sake of power consolidation.
Something in the corner of your vision catches your attention, a smudge against the rising dawn, moving. You whip around and watch as the swarm of bugs vanishes below the roof line. Your heart soars on eagle wings.
You’re moving even before you can think, repulsorjets flaring white hot. You shoot down toward the swarm and plunge into it, laughing. You laugh, tears streaming down your cheeks, joy bursting from every pore as the bone deep drone of bugs fills your microphones.
“Hey, Taylor,” you say. “I finally found you.”
The swarm crawls over your suit as you touch down, flies and mosquitoes and wasps crawl over your cameras and give you an extremely detailed closeup of their hairy, chitinous bodies. You wait for her. Slowly the swarm parts, quietening, and a skinny figure peeks out from behind the edge of a building. She stands unnaturally still, almost stiff, and her long dark hair spills out from the back of her mask, mandible jaw guards jutting proudly, in a luxurious wave.
The only things to ruin her image are the clear unfinished sections, spider silk training off to bare a sliver of calf over worn leather boots with one hand uncovered entirely, exposing skin that should never be seen.
She stands and says nothing. You graciously honour her by speaking first.
“Hello,” you say, breathlessly.
There’s a moment's pause before she speaks. “Hey. Are you that Ward? Technomage?”
“No,” you say instantly. “I’m not.”
The yellow lenses of her mask glint in the morning sun. “Okay.”
“I’m here to help you,” you say. “With whatever you need. You’ve got a long, difficult road ahead of you and I’m here to make that easier.”
“Oh,” she says. “Thanks, I guess.”
“No need to thank me,” you hold your new hand up to forestall anything further. “You deserve someone on your side. Speaking of sides, when you’re ready we should try and find the Undersiders.”
Again, there is a long pause. “Who’re they?”
“People you could be friends with. Let’s not worry about that just yet, what were you doing here? How can I help?”
“I was… I was looking for villains to stop. In case anyone was, I don’t know, looting or something.” She still hasn’t moved from her spot half hidden behind a wall. She just stands there, staring at you.
“You’re so brave,” you tell her, hoping she can detect even a shred of the intensity of your sincerity. “Let me help you.”
“I mean, you can, if you want. I guess I could do with some help. Thanks.”
“It would be my privilege,” you incline your head respectfully toward her. “What should I call you?”
Taylor looks at her gloved hand as if in surprise, as though that was something she had never considered. “I hadn’t thought about it,” she says. “Well, I’ve thought about it a bit. Bug names are hard. Any suggestions?”
“You could pick any name and turn it into something magnificent.”
She shifts slightly at that, the swarm pulsing around you. “Oh. I was thinking maybe Swarm, but that sounds a little… villainous. Hey, uh, what do I call you?”
You intone, with pride, “Metatron.”
The Celestial Forge turns, a shard of burning potential chips off a great spoke and connects to you. The Flocks Fleece. You were already a tailor par excellence, now you’re something mythical. You can spin even small amounts of base material into clothes able to turn even sword blades, and that was before everything else you could do. You look at Taylor, clothed in an unfinished spider silk suit.
“And I’m something like a Tinker. I’d like to take a look at your suit. It’s fantastic, but I could make it into something legends are written about.”
Chapter 139: Killing Hope 7.4 'Take me to church'
Chapter Text
It had taken you some convincing, and a demonstration of turning a handkerchief she had into a lace shawl, before she would let you work on the suit. You could barely express the honour.
Skitter’s suit lies before you on a bench of a garage you have both broken into. Taylor retreated further into the house to get some space, leaving you to work undisturbed.
You could have done something similar before gaining The Flock’s Fleece, with the memory metal of your remaining suit gauntlet turning into simple weaving tools, and the reduction in tool requirements of Backyard Handiwork making them function like something industrial, with the halved reduction in material requirements from Waste Not and the talent of Savant, you could have made something worthy of sitting in a museum. Now, you would weave raiment for a god.
Gently, lovingly, you pull the suit apart, hands blurring under the speed of Machinist. Thread untwines in great spools and chitin comes off in flakes. You pull on everything you can for this, even Tinkertechnically fudging things from behind the scenes as though you were a cloth Tinker. You pour every ounce of Decadence you can into it, working the suit into something worthy of being worn by the most important person in the world.
You weave. Thread spins under your gauntlets at a lightning pace, pouring the energy and love of the craft of Elven Enchanting. You take the chitin armour, the base material doubling in volume, and bring it to form. You weave and you craft and you enchant. Sweat drips off your face under your mask, but you don’t stop, you won’t stop.
More splendid than any Queens gown, more regal than the most lavish of Imperial wear, as humble as the work smock - anyone wearing such a suit would command the respect they were due.
The spider silk went from a stormy gray to near black, still skintight, while the chitin armour took on the stormy colour, almost silver, extending up around her head in spikes like a crown, over her shoulders and upper arms, up her shins and over her knees - the armour being just practical enough to benefit from your divine blood of Hephaestus. The silk fabric would never grow uncomfortable or dirty, never tear and never fail her.
With reverence you pick it up, cradling it, still feeling the rush of creation. You made this. You. No one could ever take that away from you.
You move through the house and present it to her. Taylor moves from where she was sitting rigidly on the couch, compulsively pulling at her new lace shawl, and stands, spindle limbed, to receive her gift. You can’t see her face, covered as it is by the shawl, but you imagine her delight.
“I think it’s good enough for now,” you hold it out to her. “This is the best I can do at the moment.”
“Oh,” she says, and doesn’t move to take it.
Was something wrong? Was it not good enough? You almost faint in relief as she steps forward to claim it after a solid half minute of appraisal. Passed muster.
“Thanks… Metatron.” She runs her hands over the fabric, no doubt admiring the softness, the quality of the weave, the splendor, the richness. “Oh, it’s light?”
“It cannot burden you. It won’t let you down.”
“Thank you,” she says again. “Um, I’ll go and put it on.”
“Of course,” you say. At that moment your stomach makes known how badly you erred in eating earlier, and you realise that after chugging so much water so quickly your bladder is fit to burst. “Excuse me for one moment, too.”
You both take your leave, and when you see her again you stand in the presence of something holy. She has draped the shawl over her shoulders, highlighting her regality just as much as the tines of the crown now armouring her head. She stands, looking every inch the most important person in the world - you have to fight the urge to kneel. You know she wouldn’t like it.
She wanted a friend, not a servant.
“It suits you.”
She turns the flat stare of her yellow lenses on you. “Are you sure you’re not Technomage? I saw your first interview.”
“I’m not him.” You have to get out of this outdated armour, bearing his colours, his design sensibilities. Mechanically, it’s fine. Aesthetically, it’s too sanitised, too corporate, too Protectorate . You realise that you would prefer something darker.
“Right.” She says and lifts her elbow in a way that sends her shawl fluttering in a lazy, elegant arc. “Okay. Well, what do we do now, Metatron?”
“I was going to leave that up to you,” you say cheerfully.
She doesn’t say anything, or move.
“Why don’t we come up with a cape name for you?” You suggest. “Something really cool.”
“I can’t think of anything.”
“Me neither.”
She continues to stare at you. You wonder why. “Let's go find crime to stop,” she eventually says.
“I would be happy to.”
Though, you would be happier if you had a better suit. You begin to imagine one now, based closer to a Gundam or a Titan than the slimmed down, and lacking nearly all functionality model you had to put up with. Something in between the industrial look of the Atlas Titan and the smooth paneling of a Unicorn Gundam. Seven feet tall, at least, with inbuilt weaponry. You would pull Greg’s armour apart, learn every one of its secrets, and put it back together better than ever.
Another day, once you’ve had the time to make some drinks of seven days rest, because you’re seriously tired. This body of flesh and bone is so, so weak. You picture a shining cyborg body, your Titan/Gundam hybrid, removing the need for sleep, giving you the freedom to focus on only crafting. You picture the endless upgrade cycle of your own self, of making a Cosmic Warehouse in your soul.
You picture Taylor sitting on the golden throne at the top of the world, worms crawling at her feet.
You shiver.
Taylor leads the way out, each step punctuated by the sheer authority the suit projects. Each step is both almost completely silent, and thunderously unable to be ignored. She was the most important person in the world and everyone would know it.
You follow, walking too. No bullet would penetrate her suit, no knife, no sword. In the sun she shone, a master of her domain. Insects are called to her, crawl on her, a lord of the flies. She, alone, of the angels of heaven would refuse to bow. Your implant dumps information into your mind during your internet search, ruining your musings. The name for her you were after was Beezelbub, but they were a bad guy in human mythology.
Dust crunches under your boots as you walk on. “Which villain do you want to fight first?”
Austere, Taylor turns to you. “Sorry?”
“You want to stop villains, you said. I can probably find one to save us some walking around.”
Taylor considers the question deeply. “What villains are there?”
You take a breath. “Kaiser, Purity, Night, Fog, Hookwolf, Kreig, Crusader, Cricket, Stormtiger, Rune, Fenja, Menja, Lung, Oni Lee, Bakuda, Skidmark, Mush, Squealer, Trainwreck, Coil, Uber, Leet, Trickster, Sundancer, Ballistic, Genesis, Echidna, Director Piggot, Armsmaster-”
“Uh,” Taylor interrupts me. “I don’t know who most of those people are, but, Armsmaster? He’s the head of the Protectorate.”
“He would let you die for his glory. The Protectorate is a gang with a coat of good paint.”
Taylor reached up and traced the waspoidial jaw guard of her mask with one long, slender finger. “Is that true?”
“You will understand when you find out how corrupt they are at every level, how every decision filters down from the rot at the top, by design, to keep the world spinning in a desperate spiral, to produce a life so horrible that they seem like the better choice.”
Still fiddling with her mask, Taylor continued. “I thought America was the most stable country in the world.”
“By design,” you stress. “You look at the world in a country by country basis, and America is the most stable - the Protectorate looks like it’s working miracles. You have to picture it as a conspiracy the likes of which can barely be imagined pulling the strings of every country to keep this effect going, drawing all stability to the center of their empire. It’s all a PR game for the shadow cabal to retain power. The Protectorate, the PRT, even the Police? None of them are working for your safety, I think you could do a better job.”
The swarm of bugs around us pulsated, coiling, writhing in columns through the air as Taylor stood, motionless, regarding your words carefully, the pitch of the insects wings keening ever higher. She regarded them carefully for a long time before finally speaking. “Oh.”
You know she understands.
“Why?”
“Why what?” You ask.
“Why would I do a better job?”
Taylor stands there, the most important person in the world, and the most humble. To her, no doubt, no matter how large she loomed in the minds of everyone else she would still be so small in the end.
“You’re special. You have integrity unmatched by anyone else in the world. You see an injustice, a tyrant’s clenched fist, and you won’t rest until you’ve stopped them, until you’ve won. It may not seem like it now, but you have that power, and you’re the one who’s going to save the world.”
“Huh. Ok. Metatron…” Taylor turned her gaze to the cloud of dust still hanging in the air, glowing orange in the dawn sun, the oppressive reminder of what the Simurgh had done. She turns to you. “I believe you.”
“Thank you,” you say with feel. “I think-”
The Forge turns, the great galaxial arm of the wheel locking into place with the force of it chipping off another burning shard of potential. Eternal Artistic Edifice. Memories of a far flung future sear into your mind, memories of something human - yet more. There is war, endless bloody war. By cycles you win and lose, killing and killing again, creating works that grow more beautiful and enduring by each turn.
Everything you make is already beautiful, now it will last forever in the darker aesthetic you were musing over earlier. Everything must be redone - everything . You would have to redo it all. You look at Taylor’s suit, now so, so lacking and-
“Are you ok? You kind of just drifted off there.”
“Sorry,” you say. “I was, I mean, I have to remake my armour. Look at it, it’s too bright. But - but it would take too much time, we already have to go fight villains, and I need to make some drinks of seven days rest. I haven’t slept.”
Just saying it drains your energy.
“I’m so tired, but we have so much to do.”
“We could stop and rest,” Taylor suggested. She was too kind. “I haven’t slept either.”
You shake your head. “That can be easily fixed. I just need a few hours to cook and neither of us will ever have to sleep again.”
Taylor, once again, takes a while to respond. “I’m not a big fan of drugs.”
“It’s not drugs,” you say quickly. “It’s a magic potion, or close enough to. Ancient Egyptian alchemy. The potions I can make heal you as well as removing the need for rest.”
“Doesn’t Technomage make tinkertech medicine tablets? There was something in the paper about him healing sick kids.”
He did, did he? There were worse things he could have been doing, but your mouth twists bitterly all the same for the trouble he’s causing you, for the weight of his identity you have to shoulder, carrying all his goods and ills. “This isn’t the same. That would have been Chinese medicinal pills. I promise it will make everything better, and then once I’m fully set up I can get started on projects for you. I can genetically modify insects, I can create wonders. We can save the world.”
Your mouth is dry and you’re panting. Your eyes feel like they’re full of grit, scratching with every blink. Your stomach rebels against its master, still offended by the massive amounts of protein bar you fed it. You can feel cold, putrid sweat under your armpits. In your latest memories you were something like human, but greater. Modified, less burdened by the weight of your flesh. The flashes of what could have been taunt you with their sweetness.
You were born base. If only to be pure.
It feels like madness, your fleeting freedom leading only to the most wretched death. The sin of Greg’s flesh a new plague with each turn, each time a greater lock placed on the fate of the world by ignorant hands. No masters, no kings, the world would know that Taylor Hebert was the most important person. By will of the Celestial Forge it would be done.
Taylor looks at you, then back to the cloud of dust burning rosy in the dawn's light.
“I guess I don’t have a choice.”
Chapter 140: Killing hope 7.5
Chapter Text
She sounds almost sad as she says it, but you must have imagined it. This was the girl who brought a city to its knees, she had killed people who proclaimed themselves righteous and strong, stronger than her - all fell beneath the swarm.
“Great,” you say. You’ll think about it later, as it is you can barely keep yourself standing. There’s so much to do and so little time to do it in. You were going to have to rush, and pray on a coin toss that Waste Not would activate when you cooked, getting rid of the need for the rarest ingredient in the Drink of Seven Days Rest. If it didn’t, then we could only march on through the exhaustion. “That’s great. Don’t worry, we’re going to put this city to rights.”
“Right. So, you had to,” Taylor pauses like she’s unsure of her next words. “Cook alchemy? Alchemy, that's not drugs.”
“Just so,” you nod. “Once we have that we can keep going at the top of our game. I was thinking for the first villain we take on Cricket.”
“Could we? If we have to, I will, but Empire Eight Eight is big. Could bring a lot of heat.”
You grin reassuringly, then realize she has no way of seeing it. You couldn’t unclasp the faceguard to show her a smile formed in Greg’s image. “We can take them. If I had three days I could take them all alone, but we may only have one at most.”
“Cool,” Taylor said. “Uh, what do we do first?”
The questions bugs you. She sounds so unsure, so young. You remember that she wasn’t Skitter yet, through the tight sensation of a building exhaustion headache you recall that she wasn’t supposed to start being Skitter until March, it currently being February. She would reach that level of personal power, you would ensure it.
“I need to go and collect ingredients. I won’t be more than about twenty minutes, then… maybe two hours to cook them. Why don’t you take a break here, and sit down for a bit?”
You gesture to the front window of a real estate agent's office, through which you can see chairs.
Taylor shrugs. You stride for the door and with your divine right over mechanical things intuit the lock arrangement. The memory metal in your gauntlet assumes the form of the key and you unlock it, leading the way inside. The power is out here, too. Phone lines down.
“I guess I’ll see you soon,” Taylor idles in the waiting room, her awkward posture at odds with her majestic appearance. That would change, you knew.
“Very soon,” you promise. “Less than half an hour.”
Taylor nods and you reluctantly leave her side. She’s simply not fast enough to keep up with you yet. If, by the grace of god, you didn’t run out of time and die again you would make her a flight suit. You close the door behind you on the way out and rocket into the sky, flying a tight arc and crash landing through the roof of a Home Depot - a short detour, but a necessary one. You couldn’t bear the shame of her seeing your face, of wrongly attributing deeds. You did this, not him.
You hover above the shelves packed with a Tinker’s delight, teeth clenching with all the things you could make boiling inside you, desperate to get out, but you’re here for one thing. One very important thing; you have to paint your armour.
It’s more than just vanity, it’s about your sense of self. You wear his body, his armour. Nothing is yours until you make it so. One coat of paint, it was worth the time.
You drop into the paint aisle and tentatively exit the suit. The second your limbs go unsupported you sag with the effort of standing, wanting nothing more than to collapse, here, on the dusty concrete floor and sleep. You strike your leg with your steel hand, the bruise forming instantly and painfully, and though you clench your teeth and scream it wakes you up. You move as swiftly as you can, collecting brushes and paints. You crack the tins, and though you know you won’t have time for it to dry you can make up for that with Minor Enchantment.
You get to work and your hands blaze with movement. Glory unseen by human eyes comes forth, your skill beyond superhuman, Elven Enchanted, simple brushes acting like ones perfectly specialised for the work. Simple Enchantment keeps the paint stuck on the metal as you apply a coat of Lamp Black enamel paint, working gilt silver highlights in gothic, almost brutalist, embellishments, painting a scene approaching religious iconography.
Across the chestplate a scarab pushes the sun. Across the back a figure works hammer and tongs on an anvil.
The description was simple, yet to see it was profound - something that could not be produced by human hands. You made it with your own and every inch of it still drips with wonder, though not by the works of Pure Art.
You step into the armour once more and, on your way out, check your reflection in a glass window. The relief is indescribable. No one would ever mistake you for anyone else, you were, for good or ill, horribly unique. You blast back through the hole you created to enter and rush to gather the ingredients. There were few specialty shops in Brockton Bay where such things could be purchased, there wouldn’t be a large African or Middle Eastern population here for obvious reasons, and though it bore a superficial resemblance to the methodology of Chinese alchemy the work couldn’t have been more different.
Chinese medicinal alchemy worked by condensing the energies already within an ingredient via the formation work on a pill furnace, Egyptian alchemy worked by infusing a formula with your Sekhem, your life force, focusing the life energy flowing through the web of faith.
You have a sudden, brilliant, idea. Chinese Alchemy tuned to extract the magical, medicinal energies of Sekhemetic alchemy. Such a pill would be unique among heaven and earth, you would have to do some calculations but you wager it could be stronger than the current Egyptian recipe by a reasonable amount.
Though this was still the lowest hanging fruit you could grasp. Both styles boasted medicants able to bring someone back from death in seconds, at base, but they needed ingredients that didn’t exist. You knew that normally there would be what you would need in your Cosmic Warehouse…
The empty space where it should have stood in the monument of your soul rankled. Why didn’t you have it? You breathe. You would have to trust the Celestial Forge. It had to have a plan.
However, before wasting time checking various specialty shops, you use your inroad to the home owners registry to track down all houses belonging to Veder’s - you need the glassware from the Alchemist’s Lab there, and any ingredients there might be left though you doubt he would have left you any. You wouldn’t.
There was one house owned by a Veder in the city, a normal suburban house in a clean suburb, a tiled roof and white paint speckled with a bit of age. You descend from the sky and through a window. You drift through the house on anti-grav, you realize you feel sullen. There’s something unfair about Greg living in this house. This happy house, walls covered in pictures and pictures of the family, scene upon scene of three of the whitest people in Brockton Bay - you realize you’re going to start calling Greg a Nazi because you hate him. If that story he told you was true he had done the honorable thing and killed a Nazi.
Cricket. Your target. If he was telling the truth, she should be dead.
You find his room, and it can only be his room. The entire thing is Decadent, arranged in the optimal way for soothing the nerves, artwork both experimental and Anime conducting the room in an orchestra of subtle good vibes through which you instinctively see an undercurrent of Pure Art. You immediately feel better. You don’t like it, this pitiful room. You hate this room and the story it tells.
You step over some kind of omnimaterial cylinder, curled limp on the floor like a sausage, and into the closet. Your Alchemy Lab greets you with open arms. The blue crystals on the walls glow, the dirty glassware reflecting the light. You sigh. Of course it would be dirty. You quickly scour the shelves for anything you could take with you, but come up with nothing. He has used everything. You sigh again.
To make sure you double check everywhere and in your search you come across a curious mechanism, some kind of lock box perfectly disguised to look like a rock made out of the same material as the walls. You breach it easily by forming the requisite key, that it would have been designed to take out of omni material, the key being created and consumed after each use, out of the memory metal in your gauntlet. The rock opens and pages upon pages of paper lie in a neat stack inside.
You remove the topmost one with a shaking hand and gaze upon it in wonder, enraptured, enflamed. The raw lust pouring from the pornographic image overpowers even your exhausted body and you cast aside the paper in disgust before things get out of hand.
You want to be angry, but you can’t. It was securely locked away. Taylor wouldn’t hold it against him even though it feels like she should. It was everything you hate about being forced into Greg’s body, forced to be human. Physiological processes you had no interest in, no conception of, having to hold a Decadent representation of that debased scene in your hand?
You’re so tired.
You hate that you have to feel tired.
You want to borg out. You want to become a great and terrible amalgam of flesh and metal, to become the most that you could be, that the power of the Celestial Forge could be used to build. You wanted to build and rebuild until you were perfect, humanity abandoned, and only then would you be clean.
You would be a saviour.
Wearily, you gather the glassware and other apparatus in an empty alchemy crate, carefully wrapping each piece in layers of Greg’s clothing while taking time to marvel at his laxness. None of it was handmade, nothing of it was magical save for the underwear you were wearing. He had the time, you had to wonder what he was doing with it all.
With the crate carefully in hand you make your way back through the house and out the window. You look down at your arms and notice quite a few insects stuck in the still wet paint of your armour. You’re so tired. You’re trying your best but nothing is going right.
It’s getting into the morning now, though still early, and though it would be time for people to be out and about the city is still silent as the grave, unable to overcome the dread the Simurgh had brought, they hid in their homes and waited. Waited for you to save them. You would, as soon as you were able - once you had the time.
You touch down outside the real estate office and Taylor is gone. You’re not worried, she’s Taylor, after all. You head inside and she’s not in the back. You set up your glassware on the concrete out past the back door, splintering wooden desks and chairs for fuel and raiding printers for kindling.
Lighting them would be easy. In your hands two sticks were tools, and your tool requirements were low. You drift back up into the sky and hover high above the city. You flex your steel hand, the cold air leeching heat from the metal and making the bones of your left forearm ache. Another reason to abandon this human body as soon as possible.
You turn your thoughts to Driver, inspecting the developing code. It had been taking in everything your suit had sensors for, funneling it through the lens of driving. Driving not just your suits or mechs, but driving them in your absence. You intended it to take up the drive to the end of Scion.
Mechanist makes the work fast, and you tend to it with as much time as you can spare, and with the time you can’t you search for Taylor. If she’s run off on her own she needs to know that the potions will be done before long. You’re not worried, because she’s Taylor, and the chance of her losing to any danger is basically nil. You weren’t gone for long, so she couldn’t have gotten far.
You go and raid the specialty shops for potion ingredients, still missing a key component, and by your good luck you see her cutting across a road on your way back.
“What are you doing all the way out here?” You say with a chuckle as you land near her. “I’m about to start cooking.”
“You’ve, uh, painted?”
You glance down at the armour, now sporting more insects and dust and random bits of rubbish. It wasn’t going to be hard to clean, but you may as well make a whole new suit before bothering.
“Do you like it? This represents you,” you point to the silver scarab on your chest, then turn to show the figure smithing on the back. “And that’s me.”
“It’s very gothic.”
“I think it suits me better,” you say brightly. “It feels right, not like that awful red, white and gold scheme it had before.”
“Why did you make it like that, then?”
“The person I inherited this armour from,” you say through clenched teeth. “Made it like that.”
“Oh.” Taylor pauses and a breeze sends her lace shawl fluttering in a way that makes you think she really might have the mandate of heaven. “So Technomage gave it to you?”
You suppose that, in a way, he sort of did. “Yes.”
“Did you fight the Simurgh, too?”
The question hits like a blade to the heart. You didn’t. You couldn’t. It wasn’t your fault, and yet… You lower your head. “I’m ashamed I didn’t.”
Taylor picks at the edge of her shawl imperiously. You feel the weight of her judgment on your back. “I see.”
“I’ll do better,” you blurt out, taking a step forward. She takes one back. “Next time, when Leviathan comes, I’ll be ready. I’ve had so little time, I promise that if I’d had more then things would have been so different. You have to believe me.”
“I believe you,” she said immediately. “Of course I believe you.”
You sag in utter and absolute relief.
“If you want to help,” she continues. “Why don’t we go and help out the Protectorate?”
How do you tell someone who is insane, out of sheer ignorance, that they lack context? They wouldn’t understand until they see, couldn’t understand and would even refuse to understand. You don’t know why Taylor is even suggesting this, she hates authority. Authority is bad, unless it’s hers. And maybe the Undersider’s. Potentially yours, but never the governments.
If you ever worked with them it would be because Dinah told you to, and no sooner.
“No thanks,” you lift the bag of alchemy material. “I have everything I need, why don’t I give you a lift back?”
“I don’t want to get paint on my suit.”
You laugh at her mistake. “That suit cannot get dirty, and even if this paint job were able to smudge then it would slide right off.”
Insects screamed from under every crevice, a million whining voices chorusing. She was probably practicing her swarm voice. “Are you practicing your swarm voice?”
The sound cuts off instantly. “Swarm voice?”
“That thing you do where you get the bugs to make it sound as though you’re speaking through them, by precisely controlling the vibrations of the wings and chirps.”
Taylor raises one hand and runs her fingers through the mane of dark hair that comes tumbling out of the back of her mask. A strand of hair catches on her armoured glove and she flicks it free, where it drifts gently to the road. “Yes. I’m practicing my swarm voice.”
“Very good,” you nod approvingly and shift all the bags you’re carrying to your cybernetic hand, opening your right side which you gesture for Taylor to approach. “Hop on and I’ll fly us back. We’ve got a long day ahead of us if we’re going to save everyone.”
Chapter 141: Killing hope 7.6
Chapter Text
In your hands two sticks are a tool and fire is an act of creation, you strike them together twice and birth a conflagration. Taylor watches intently as the fire grows under the flasks, orange tongues licking the sides as the flames eat the kindling.
“That’s not going to burn for very long,” she observes astutely.
You give your head a little shake where you had become entranced by the fire in your exhausted stupor. “You’re right,” you say and force yourself to stand. “I’ll be right back.”
You take to the real estate kitchenette and observe your materials. Even with only a kettle and a toaster you could do a lot. With the rest of the office you could do a lot more. You scavenge, ripping out phones and modems, unscrewing light bulbs, pulling computers apart, savaging a pack of old batteries. Time flies. You craft. You Tinker. You pull everything apart and put it back together and carry out a new electric heating setup just as the fire dies.
“Woah.”
You hold aloft what you have made for her to observe. A series of heating coils that would look more at home in a grand cathedral than in a dingy office building. You had to try a few times to get the right elements to emulate with Waste Not, but you got there in the end. You set up and bring them up to temperature, the filaments glowing cherry red at. Quickly the soup in the first flask begins to boil and you carefully infuse it with Sekhem, and the mysterious energy of Elven Enchanting, causing a string of black to bleed throughout the concoction until it was all dark as pitch.
“This is going to take a little while,” you glance up, Taylor is peering with interest at the bubbling black brew. “And then, finally, we can begin.”
The glow of the heating coils reflects off the lenses of Taylor’s mask as she shifts. “Why Cricket?” She finally asks.
“She’s the weakest we could conceivably get to, besides Alabaster,” you say. “I would prefer we take Othala out, but she’s not going to be anywhere we can get to her. So, Cricket.”
“Shouldn’t we just go after Alabaster, then?”
“He’s too easy,” you shake your head and make a careful adjustment to the concoction to ensure maximum output. “A footnote, more than anything.”
“I think it would be better to work our way up the ladder,” Taylor says firmly.
“Oh, really? Alright then, we can try that, too.” Your brain hurts. You don’t know how long your body has been awake for but you estimate a whole day at minimum, which combined with the stress Greg put it under fighting the Simurgh, and the forced march pace you’ve been crafting at, has left you with very little energy. You could easily make a better brain, if only you had the time.
“Thanks,” Taylor replies and you glow under it. “I haven’t fought anyone yet.”
“Me either,” you admit. “Not out of choice, I’ve just been… restricted.”
“Oh?”
You close your eyes and the burning tiredness in them subsides somewhat. Can you really get into it? You’re not sure what you’re supposed to reveal and what to keep secret. You were cast into this world with no direction, knowing only your end fate. No lords, no masters, only nothingness above - and yet… You couldn’t tell her you were forced into Greg’s body, the sheer ignobility of it rankled. You couldn’t have her think poorly of you, it would hurt too much.
“I’m here on behalf of the Celestial Forge,” you begin, watching the alchemy boil. “It’s something like a god, granting me its powers so long as I’m active and working toward its goals. I’m here to help you save the world.”
“Are you from… Haven?” Taylor finds the word she’s looking for, but you don’t know what that is and you shake your head.
You quickly search it for context. A Christian cape group, funded by megachurches. As if religion wasn’t bad enough. Taylor was an atheist, and the Celestial Forge was only god-like, so you couldn’t be said to be religious in any sense, even the name Metatron was for solely aesthetic purposes.
“No, not Haven. Never Haven. There’s an entity, something greater than you could imagine, and it’s going to destroy the world, every world. You stop it.”
“Um. How?”
Your mind spins and you realise you don’t know. Had you ever known? “You get everyone working together. I think I’m supposed to figure it out with you, there’s… a golden morning. You command a great and terrible army. And something else, its weakness… I don’t remember.”
“It sounds crazy,” Taylor says quickly, then stills like she hadn’t meant to say it. You laugh quietly.
“It does. I know. It barely makes sense to me, but I believe in you. I know you can do it.”
“Dude,” says Taylor. “I’m fifteen.”
You’re barely more than a day.
“There’s time, for you to grow into it. A few years, two at least. Or there would be, normally, without me. I’m not sure what the timeline should be anymore, the Simurgh wasn’t supposed to attack here - Leviathan was. I know this isn’t making any sense to you, you lack context.”
The black concoction in the first flask begins to vaporise into pure white steam and gather in the next where it billows in a venomously roiling cloud.
“Sure.”
You give a strained chuckle. “I know, right? In this madness, in this mire, everything seems too large, too far away, too difficult.”
“You’re saying I have to kill god,” Taylor says dryly.
“Just so. You’re the only one who can. Not alone, but by your will.”
“I control bugs.”
“For now.”
Taylor makes a disgruntled noise, but that’s ok. She hasn’t had time to develop the unshakable confidence of Skitter, of a Warlord. That was ok, you were here to help with that. The flasks bubble and boil.
“When I named myself Metatron it had meaning,” you continue. “The Celestial Forge’s strongest warrior, the scribe who records mankind's virtues.”
You nod at her meaningfully.
“The one who serves behind the throne. I even thought up a name for you, but I don’t think it fits. Beelzebub.”
“The Lord of the Flies?”
“The one who refused to bow.”
“I’m not calling myself after the demon of gluttony and lies,” she says indignantly.
“It’s not very catchy, either.”
Taylor sighs minutely. “I suppose yours fits better if you want to take out the Empire. A Jewish angel. It’s thematic.”
“I hadn’t even thought of that. What a nice coincidence.”
“So, um, it’s not a reference to anything else, your name? An angel? Something that happened recently?”
“What?”
“Nothing, I guess. I’m still not going with Lord of the Flies. I don’t want a religious name, anyway.”
“That’s fair. Your name is important, you shouldn’t pick something that ill defines you.”
We watch the potion boil and bubble as we contemplate the importance of a name. You adjust the coils again, feeding Sekhem and elvish magic into the system. It would hold for now, and you would know at the end if Waste Not would make this anything more than a big waste of time. You should do something else, the kitchenette full of pulled apart electronics calls to you.
“I’m going to tinker a bit more,” you stand up, legs protesting at the movement. “This suit doesn’t have any weapons built in.”
If only you had three days, oh, what wonders you could birth. You start to move toward the kitchen when the Celestial Forge turns. Another shining flake chips off the crystalline spoke of the great wheel and plummets through dimensions and time, spearing into something even deeper than your soul.
Miniaturization and Efficiency. Armsmaster’s power, though better wielded in your hands than his. You feel a lack, there should have been something that came with it, you know, items or something like that. You could have really done with an extra suit and a halberd right about now.
Still, everything was even further outdated. It all needed to be redone, what little you had. You begin to put together a new body in your mind, one slimmed down and packed with more systems than ever before. Your Titan/Gundam hybrid body, so sleek, so efficient, so aesthetic-
“Are you not?”
You turn around from where you had been staring, out into space, dreaming of a better future. “Oh, I am. Am I ever.”
“Cool.”
In the kitchenette the rest of the mauled appliances fall to pieces under your hands, the microwave being morphed into a plasma smelter so that each piece of red hot metal you produce can be molded by the precise tools sequestered within your steel hands. You could be made of so many tools. Time begins to skip again as you forge and craft and repurpose, paperclips turning into quality steel under the powers of True Balance and Lack of Materials, Tinkertecnically, and now Miniaturization/Efficiency, compensating for the need of specialized circuitry you have no way of currently producing. Waste Not pings on the first try and emulates a critical shortage of a specific lens, and the now unnecessary plasma smelter is cannibalized for the microwave emitter.
Sweating, you hold what would have been a Titan sized plasma railgun now existing in pistol form. More than enough to kill every member of the Empire.
You holster it magnetically on your right thigh and practice drawing, the motion smooth. The gun projects its fire path onto your HUD, and though it is a pistol firing a bolt of charged plasma it would still reach a range of hundreds of meters. Very pleased with yourself, you head back out to find Taylor curled up, fast asleep, on one of the tacky pleather waiting room chairs.
The Drink of Seven Days rest is finished, too. You whoop with joy, waking Taylor up, when you inspect the finished paste and discover that you won the coin toss, it succeeded. Taylor stirs as you collect the biggest spoons you can find and eyeball a dose. You turn from her to hide your face and plunge the spoon into your mouth, the gritty paste tingling over your tongue and sizzling down your throat.
You are hit with a burst of wondrous lucidity as every shred of exhaustion leaves you, minor scrapes and bruises fixing themselves. You are perfectly and completely awake. It is an experience so profound as to be almost religious.
You close your mask and turn to face her where she sits, wilted, on the chair. Taylor yawns heavily.
“How long was I asleep for?”
“Maybe an hour. It’s done, too.” You hold out a spoon for her. She eyes it steadily, but doesn’t take it.
“Am I supposed to just trust you on this?”
You recoil, wounded. “Don’t you? What is it? What can I do?”
“Would you trust it if I gave you a spoon of some tinker drug and said, ‘here, eat this.’?”
“Oh,” you laugh, and your tension breaks. “It’s just a miscommunication, this isn’t a Tinker drug. You look at it and you picture something like an amphetamine, with an up, a down and side effects - this has none of that. I’m not sure if I was clear about it before, but this is genuinely magical, and I say that knowing that you don’t think magic is real, and everyone thinks Myrddin is a kook.”
You can tell by her silence that Taylor is unconvinced.
“How do you picture parahuman powers working?” You ask. “Like yours, complete and perfect telepathic control of every insect in your range. It’s close to magic, but is in reality an alien supercomputer the size of a country sitting in another dimension doing the calculations for you. Sounds crazy, right? It’s true, and so is it that I’m capable of true magic.”
“You’re insane,” she finally says.
“You lack context,” you tell her and lower the spoon. “You don’t have to have any, but it’s here if you want it. I’m sure you’ll come around when you see what I can do.”
You’re disappointed, but she’s not being unreasonable. It’s Taylor, she’s one of the most reasonable people on earth. She’ll come to trust you, you know it. You collect the excess paste and store it away in a little ziplock bag you found in the kitchen, two doses left.
“Come on then,” you say chipperly, stretching and patting your plasma rail pistol. “Let's go get some Nazis.”
You hate to leave your glassware behind, but what other choice do you have? You seal up the shop to discourage looters and head out.
“Have you eaten anything today?” You ask conversationally as you walk side by side.
“I haven’t, no.”
“Let’s get something, you need to keep your strength up.” You can’t believe that you’re here, finally, walking with Taylor about to go and kick ass. It’s almost too good to be true, you were sure you were to be trapped within Greg’s domain forever, forced to do Cauldron’s bidding. All because of the Simurgh.
You don’t think she can precog you, Contessa couldn’t. You’re not sure why, perhaps because of the Forge? She may not have been able to read Greg, either, but you weren’t there to be sure of it. Either way, she wasn’t here now, she hadn’t popped out of a door, gun in hand, and forced you back into compliance - you could only assume you were a step off the path she couldn’t take.
“I’ll make something,” you continue. “I’m a fantastic cook, I can make a slice of bread that can keep you fed for a whole day’s hard labour. I want to be able to really cut loose, I’ve never been able to make anything to eat before.”
“If you’ve never made anything, how do you know you’re good?” Taylor sounds a little waspish, but it’s probably just because her blood sugar is low.
“Powers,” you say simply. “Mostly from Savant, but Elven Enchanting makes it magical. It’s all fiat backed by the Forge, so it works.”
The sensitive microphones of your suit pick up the loud gurgle of her stomach, and you laugh joyously.
“I guess I should eat something,” she sighs and looks around. “But from where?”
“I raided a Seven Eleven earlier, why not go to a convenience store? Oh! I can see a McDonalds, let’s go there.” You glide forward and continue gliding until glass shatters around you as you crash through the front door. You turn in mid air, Taylor is just watching from the other side of the street. Still no trust, but it’s not her fault that the bitches three tormented her like that. You wave her forward until she capitulates.
“There’s no power here,” she observes of the fast food restaurant. “You can’t make anything.”
“A challenge!?” You crow. “Give me five minutes and I’ll have something you couldn’t have believed possible.”
Taylor all but collapses into a red, plastic chair and you get to work. True, there’s no power, but your suit has all the energy you need churning away in its miniaturised plasma core and, because it would seem that even the power of the Celestial Forge can keep Greg from being a complete dunce, it had an electricity converter.
You flit through the McDonalds, the fridges and freezers, though having been without power, are still cold and you take from them the lettuce, tomato and onion Taylor needs - and no more. There’s a choice between half thawed chicken patties and beef, and you get the impression that Taylor is more of a chicken person. In the break room you find exactly what you need in the form of a dirty, cheese encrusted sandwich press. A quick clean and, as a tool, the sandwich press cooks the crumbed chicken filet to perfection.
You assemble her, according to the signage, McChicken sandwich with extras, and wrap it artfully in the provided paper. It’s a happiness hard to describe, making something, even something so simple as a sandwich, watching it come together under your hands, infused with the powers of the Forge, to become something greater than the sum of its parts.
Creation is fulfillment. Crafting is passion itself. You were born to build, it is your fate.
You present her meal, complete with cup of water. She unwraps it wordlessly and beholds what you have made.
Food arrangement was art, sculpture, decadent. Mayonnaise, handmade, sprung from the ether of Waste Not, is draped over lettuce made crisp and fresh with enchantment and enhancement.
The first of its kind, the most beautiful McChicken in the world.
“Thanks,” says Taylor. “It looks nice.”
“Thank you, please, go ahead.”
She turns away and lifts up the lower portion of her mask, reaching under the lip of the bodysuit to grip the edge and rolls it up. You can see the edge of her pale cheek. She begins to eat, and once the first bite has touched her tongue she devours the McChicken with the same savage intensity she would come to devour Brockton Bay.
“It barely,” she chases it down with big, thirsty gulps of water. “Tastes like McDonalds.”
“It’s magic.”
“Magic isn’t real,” she says firmly.
“How do you know?”
With pricked sullenness Taylor fixes her mask back into place and avoids the question. “Metatron,” she begins. “Thank you for making me breakfast. However, I would like to go and help the Protectorate.”
A fly lands on your mask. “Why?”
Taylor seems as though she is unable to piece together an answer.
You ask yourself, too. Why? Why is nothing as it should be? “I thought you hated authority?”
“Why would I hate authority?” Taylor seems mystified.
“They failed you.”
She doesn’t answer.
“‘Authority’ left you to rot. The System let others abuse you. It was in their best interests to turn a blind eye and leave you isolated.”
Taylor doesn’t argue. She doesn’t even move.
“Why would you want to help the Protectorate, the PRT, the Police, a system that wilfully ignores its failures that hurt you?”
Taylor says nothing once more and suddenly it clicks, things, obvious things your stressed, exhausted mind missed. Her looking at the dust cloud, wanting to get the Protectorate involved, even your very name must seem like a reference to it.
“You think I’m a Simurgh Bomb.”
Chapter 142: Killing hope 7.7
Chapter Text
“Are you gonna kill me?”
Taylor fires off the question with such a burning, telling rapidity that it becomes clear she had sorely wanted to ask it for hours and hours. She thinks that you’re a threat.
“No! No, no! No, no, no, nonononono!” You jerk back in your little red plastic chair, the weight of the suit shattering the aged, brittle material like the femur of an octogenarian under the bag of oranges wielded by their infuriated hospice worker. “No way, never. I’m here to help you, that I swear.”
“To help me save the world,” Taylor echoes. “You never really said what from.”
How did you even explain it? Mountains, planets, of writhing crystalline flesh, computing the physical universe on a scale that spun galaxies, the cycle, Destination and Agreement, worms eating and eating and eating -
There’s nothing you can say that won’t seem completely insane.
The silence stretches long and painful as you try and capture what would have taken approximately one point six eight million words to explain, and distill it into a single sentence.
“You’re wearing Technomage’s armour, you have his tinker powers,” Taylor sounds pained, though she’s sitting completely still save for the slight rise and fall of her breath. “The Simurgh was here hours ago.”
“He has my tinker powers! I promise that this all makes sense, it’s just really hard to explain. I haven’t been turned by the Simurgh, the PRT has known about this,” you gesture to yourself. “For months. It has nothing to do with the Simurgh.”
“What are you talking about?”
“We, Technomage and I, share the same body,” you choose your words carefully. “Neither of us are happy about it.”
“So you’re some kind of multiple personality?”
“No,” you say firmly. “You have to understand that there are forces at play here on a level you can scarcely imagine, and to peel back the onion and have you understand requires time and first hand experience.”
“Can I speak with Technomage?” Taylor asks bleakly.
“Not until my time runs out. I’m growing in power, with each new turn of the Celestial Forge I’m here for longer and longer, and eventually I’ll be here to help you for good.”
“It sounds like you’re killing him.”
“ He’s refusing me life!” You snap and stand up, pace, fume. “Why does he deserve it more than I? It’s not my fault we’re in this mess. What good has he done? Join up with the authorities and draw porn? He is wasting our, my, life. We need to be working on solutions, and here we are still in this base human form. Have you ever known you could be so much more, and had to suffer the boot crushing the life out of your dreams? He has had months and we’re no closer to killing the entities than before. Worse, he knows. He knows what has to be done, but he’s too weak to fight for it. He hides under the skirt of others so he doesn’t have to make the decision himself, protecting his ego while pretending that he’s championing the cause. Maybe he’s better than I thought, I don’t know, but I do know that he’s not good enough. I’m here to do what he can’t, I’m here to help you do whatever needs to be done to save everyone.”
You’re breathing hard, hands balled into fists. You hate him so much. Maybe he’s not quite the hair eating, male pregnant cretin you believed after his alleged stint in another timeline, but he’s still a pathetic, debauched, porn addicted, boot licking, homophobic, teenage boy.
Taylor presses her fingers against her mask, just under her imposing lensed eyes, and massages deliberately. She is quiet for a time, then suppresses a yawn. “I still don’t understand, why me? I control bugs.”
“Despite it,” you insist. “You could bring a city to its knees with bugs, you could kill Alexandria with bugs, you could save the world with bugs. The source of my power, the Celestial Forge, has granted me knowledge of how to save the world - you’re the integral piece. You’re meant to be in charge, it’s your destiny.”
“Let’s say I believe you. How am I supposed to do that?”
“I don’t know,” you admit. “But when the time comes you’ll find a way.”
Taylor gives a sigh that peters out into a groan. “I’m too tired for this. Could I have the tinker drugs now?”
You almost fall over yourself to give them to her. She turns the little ziplock bag inside out and gingerly touches the red paste with her tongue, flinching at the electric sensation, then with the air of someone taking something bitter forces the lot down in one go with a great shudder. There is a pause, then Taylor gasps and lets out a sigh dripping with wonder.
“Wow.”
Wow is right. You grin, very pleased with yourself. The Drink of Seven Days Rest is Elven Enchanted, and that alone would turn it into a restorative par excellence. One or two more quality powers and what you could make would be out of this world.
“I’m glad you like it. Now that you’re properly awake, what should we do? Find Cricket, or something else?”
Taylor stands and flexes one hand, the motion carrying the first signs of the weight of command she would come to wield. “We should take out Cricket.”
The city was still mostly evacuated, people having fled as soon as the sirens went off or either still hiding indoors, terrified to come out, or heading for the alleged safety of the authorities closer to the center of the bay.
We rose high above, Taylor seeing for the first time the ruined city she called home. The Simurgh’s telekinetic reach extended a good mile, and she hadn’t sat still. The flattened parts of the city wound a path, with the wreckage extending even further as it was flung out like bowling balls knocking down pins.
“I didn’t know it was that bad,” Taylor murmurs, more to herself, as I carry her, the altitude wind whipping her hair and lace shawl in sharp whip cracks.
You leave her to her ruminating as you access the internet through your neural implant. There’s a lot of information you had never considered on here before, like a user generated map of where capes, and especially villain capes, were seen with the most regularity. It would seem to be a great way to expose cape identities but for some reason didn’t seem to - not that Cricket had a secret identity. She was too distinctive by far, and her mask barely concealed her face.
Estelle Carrow, twenty four. She had been active for nigh on eight years in varying capacities as hired muscle, only in the last few as a part of the Empire. Her career ended here.
The cell towers and wired connection infrastructure had been ripped out in the attack, so there wasn’t much in the way of live data that you, being able to signal boost out far enough to catch a connection, could narrow in on her location with. The old fashioned way, then.
You dropped slowly through the freezing air, though both of you were perfectly comfortable. Save for your aching hand, your suit was sealed, and Taylor’s bodysuit was made with Eleven Enchanted, Flock’s Fleece spun thread - she would be comfortable anywhere from the arctic tundra to the most scorching desert.
There was an apartment building in the middle of the Cricket sighting hotspot that seemed like the right place to start. It looked like any other apartment building, cleaner and better kept than most in Brockton Bay, even and was far enough away from the destruction to only come away with a thick layer of brick and concrete dust coating the entire area.
You set Taylor down and she settles her costume straight, the tines of her crown reflecting the morning sun dully. You desperately need to build a scanning suite into this suit, it has next to nothing save for microphones and cameras, you get the feeling that Greg relied on the Omnitool a great deal, because you are going into this almost blind with only Taylor for scouting - and you don’t even have comms.
You float and Taylor stands next to you. You turn to her expectantly, “now what?”
“Now?” She asks incredulously, then stops to think. “I would guess we go in and see if anyone knows where she is.”
You gesture courteously for her to take point and, a little stiffly, she leads the way. She should be safe from everything up to gunfire, for the most part, and she’s Taylor so there’s no need to baby her. All the same, you have the railgun for a reason. You enter the building and you wish you had time to fix up programs like Greg would have had to interpret the microphone data, but it was all on the Omnitool.
And you’re pretty sure The Simurgh stole it.
You would have to get it back some day, it was horrific that it could be stolen from you in the first place. You felt that the Forge should have protections against that, where it would reappear in your workshop or some such, but instead you had nothing, The Celestial Forge, the greatest act of creation, that created the universes in their entirety, had denied you this.
There had to be a reason, some reason, any reason, to deny what you knew to be true - the Forge starts with a Key. One of the most basic tenets, violated. You wonder how it all might have changed, had it started with a key.
How it all might have changed if you didn’t have to fight Greg to live.
“There are people in here,” Taylor says. “I can feel them.”
“Great,” you say. You want to get out your railgun and start blasting. You rest your hand on it. “Let’s see if we can get any of them to talk.”
“We don’t want to threaten civilians.”
“This deep into Empire territory there’s no such thing as civilians.”
Taylor murmurs something so indistinct that even your microphones don’t pick it up. The people in the building seemed to have realised that you were here, perhaps even seen you approaching, because even as you begin to search the building a man who seemed to be their chosen representative edges furtively out of the stairwell.
He seems a normal enough man and he regards the two of you with the appropriate amount of awe. Cowering, he walks forward, and you feel the gun in his belt by your divine right over all practical crafts.
“Are you here to-”
You cut over him, unable to wait. “We’re here for Cricket.”
The man swallows. “Cricket?”
“There’s no need to play dumb here,” you drift a little higher and his eyes follow you up even as sweat runs down his face. “Cricket. Cricket the Nazi cape. We’re here for her.”
“I’m - what- I don’t,” he glances anxiously at Taylor who makes no movement. “Cricket?”
You glare at him. He is white. He is white in the center of Empire territory. “What?” You sneer. “You don’t know of her?”
“I do, I do, it’s just… what? Aren’t you here to help us?”
“Oh, sure,” you let your hand drift down to the railgun. “It’ll be such a big help if we take out the gangs, don’t you agree?”
“Yeah, yeah, totally! I absolutely agree,” he almost trips over his words in his haste. “I’m just really, really sorry, I don’t know Cricket.”
You look at him scathingly from behind your mask. “How many people are in this building?”
“Lots! Please, we don’t know what to do. We heard the sirens and we’ve all been up all night worrying. Please, we’ve got kids in here.”
“What? Empire abandon you?”
“It’s only been half a day-” he starts, then cuts himself off, waving his hands emphatically. “I didn’t mean it like that! We’re not in the Empire, please.”
To you it sounded just like something someone in the Empire would say. “But you know how to be,” you say. “You have a way in, or someone here does.”
“Please,” the man begs again. “We just want to get through this.”
You draw your railgun and raise it for him to see. “So do I.”
The man, already sallow and pale, somehow loses another shade of colour. “Ok, sure, ok. You’ve got cape beef, sure, we can find a way to get in contact.”
You knew it. You don’t lower your gun an inch. “Scuttle off.”
The man runs, turns tail and sprints, his heavy footsteps echoing in the quiet, empty building and up the stairs.
“Are you tracking him?” You ask Taylor. “Can you hear through your bugs yet?”
“I can’t,” Taylor gives her head a little shake. “Was threatening him like that the right choice?”
“You’ll learn that you can’t give these people an inch. If you bend they’ll think they can push until you break.”
“I see.”
You holster your railgun and gesture to where the man had exited the room, his footsteps still echoing to your mics. “Let’s go make sure he keeps his promise.”
“You’re not worried about him calling all of them in?”
“There’s no cell tower service here, I checked. And The Simurgh ripped out enough internet cable that the whole city is disconnected.”
“Satellite phone?” Taylor offers.
“It’s possible. I’ll need to build something to detect that. Information superiority is very important, once you can hear and see through your bugs make sure you leverage that as hard as you can.”
You drift up the stairs, red and white light twinkling from your antigrav and repulsor jets, contrasting beautifully with the black and silver of your armour. Taylor follows on foot, but no less resplendently.
You follow the sound of hushed voices through the hallways and when you see the man again he is in close conversation with another man, clearly audible to you to be talking about where Cricket would be and if they could get to Stormtiger too, who couldn’t be more obviously a skinhead if he tried.
Everyone in the room flinches and goes silent as you loom into view. You raise your railgun and point it at the first man. “How many shots for lying?”
He starts to say some other desperate lie but you pull the trigger. The railgun has varying levels of shot power depending on how long you hold the trigger, a split second would result in a probably non-lethal plasma burn, while every second after would build in strength until the bolt would keep its armour piercing power for well over a hundred meters.
The shot sizzles over his head, turning a strip of his hair into a singed mess and the line underneath, of his scalp, took on the red, raw look reminiscent of sunburn. The man screams and falls to the ground, clutching his burned head. You turn to the skinhead.
“You’re taking us to where Cricket is.”
To cut a long story short, he did.
Chapter 143: killing hope 7.8
Chapter Text
Cricket stands before you in the dusty street in full outfit. Red and black, something like sports athleisure crossed with a biker’s leathers, she had a buzz cut, her bare arms bore scars and beneath her metal grille mask another lay across her neck like a twisted knot. She holds an artificial larynx up to her throat.
“And just who the hell are you to want anything to do with me?” Her voice croaks with buzzing feedback. “Give me some names.”
She turns to Taylor, the one who, by outfit alone, is obviously in charge.
“I don’t have one.”
Cricket sneers at her, then turns to you. “And yours?”
“Metatron,” you say proudly.
Cricket made a disgusted sound in the back of her throat, an electronic ‘hawk tuah’. “Fucking kikes, I swe-”
Rage consumes you and you raise your railgun, taking the shot and interrupting Cricket’s foul hate speech. The bolt of plasma zings out of the barrel, but Cricket is already moving, raising her scythes. Bugs howl onto the scene in a sun blackening cloud. You reorient and take another shot, but Cricket has closed the gap and you miss again.
She strikes with the scythes and you attempt to pistol whip her at the same time, but she aborts her attack and narrowly escapes, running again as a cloud of wasps comes within an inch of her skin before suddenly it seems as though Taylor’s control over them wavers.
You shoot again, pleased that Greg has properly soundproofed this armour. Cricket has to block this time, the plasma bolt warping the metal of the scythe blade. Taylor harries again with the swarm cloud, and again they disrupt and waver. You burst forward with a pop of repulsors, swinging an arm to catch Cricket about the neck - she dodges by the length of her close cropped hair.
You twist in mid air, the red dot on your HUD connecting with her center mass. You pull the trigger. The bolt hits and Cricket lets out a strangled gasp. The swarm descends, covering her in seconds. You shoot again, a leg this time, a dozen flies popping into steam as the bolt shears through them. Another scream.
You would feel more comfortable giving her another one, just to be safe, but even a single fly in Taylor’s arsenal is worth more than Cricket.
You drift over to her thrashing body, the shrill keening of wings masking whatever noises she might be making. “Say it again.”
Cricket, predictably, says nothing. You drop down enough to kick the scythes out of her hands, being none too gentle as your heavily armoured boot breaks whatever bones you hit doing it.
The bugs coating her peel off, showing red, welted skin from the dozens of bites and the thick, red burns of my plasma railgun that had melted the synthetic fabric of her clothes to her body.
“You’re under arrest,” Taylor moves to stand over Cricket, partially blocking my aim. “You have the right to remain silent.”
Cricket growls something that sounds like, ‘fuck you,’ so you move to kick her again, but have to miss as Taylor is still in the way. You float around for a better angle.
“Stop kicking her,” Taylor mutters. “She’s already down.”
“I don’t see what that has to do with anything,” you frown and kick again, carelessly catching Cricket between the legs. “You have to make sure people stay down.”
“Seriously,” Taylor steps in front of you again. “Stop it. Now.”
You stop and float. You cross your arms as blood pounds through your head from the fight, from Cricket’s disgusting attitude. You have no idea why Taylor is stopping you. You know that she’s perfectly alright with mutilating downed enemies, and even with genital mutilation - you take a breath and try to calm down.
“Why?” you ask.
“She’s already hurt, she already can’t fight back. We’ve got her. You don’t need to hurt her anymore.”
“She’ll be fine,” you say irritably. “Either Panacea will heal her, or Othala will when the Empire inevitably takes her back from the PRT’s incompetent hands.”
“It’s wrong.”
You can’t believe what you’re hearing. “Is… is it?” Fear creeps into your voice. If Taylor says so, it must be true. If Taylor says so, what else have you been doing that’s wrong? You would have thought that this, surely, beating Nazis, would be right, if not this, then what? “She’s a Nazi,” you point out, just in case Taylor had forgotten.
“I’m not,” Taylor groans and takes a breath. “I’m not defending that. You just… can’t torture people when they’re beaten.”
You’re shook. You’re spun. “What if it were Lung? What if you cut out his eyes while he was unconscious?”
The next thing Taylor says, in such a tone of woebegone confusion, unseats your entire reality. “Why would you do that?”
Something was wrong to an even greater degree than the Forge. Was this not Taylor Hebert? Was this not the girl who would become Skitter, the Queen of Escalation? You know it wasn’t long into her career that she began to mutilate downed enemies, was that all she needed, more time? Where was the girl who would torture the pathetic, stolen valour pretender that was Triumph in front of his father to get what she wanted?
Cricket hacks out some kind of hideous laughter and eyes you malevolently.
“Shut up,” you warn her, the red dot of your aim finding its way to her throat. “Or I’m going to make it so you can never make a sound again.”
You turn to look at Taylor, gun still trained unerringly on Cricket. “I don’t understand. The Forge has granted me knowledge, I know what kind of person you are, I know just how far you’ll go to do the right thing, so why are you balking at this?”
“I don’t think I’m the kind of person you think I am.”
You think back on what should be the truth, compare the timelines. It’s February now, and it was only in, maybe, April that she was robbing banks and attacking charity events. What happened in those two months to produce the dark queen you know should be standing in her place? The one who would do whatever was necessary? She would have hurt far better people than Cricket for doing far less, simply because they were in her way.
You see where you went wrong. You spearheaded this, not her. She needed to be the one calling the shots so that she could see for herself what the right thing to do was.
Cricket starts to say something in her horrible, choked voice again and you irritably adjust you aim a fraction and pull the trigger again, the weakest shot the railgun is capable of merely searing her a new ragged throat scar instead of killing her outright, the patch of road beside her where the bolt hit now smoking.
You turn to tell Taylor that you’re sorry, but Taylor has fallen over. Taylor on her knees, swaying. A horrible rising sound comes from Cricket. You look back to her, now distorted as what can only be solid sound waves cover her body like plates of armour, screaming and grinding against each other.
Taylor has fallen over fully, is writhing as the sound grows. She retches and a dribble of liquid seeps through the threads of her suit. Something hits you from behind and sends you careening through the air. Your suit steadies and you see Cricket, now standing hunched, her blurred outline reaching for Taylor.
As fast as thought your thrusters engage and you crash into Cricket, she bounces off you, then the road, springs back to her feet completely unhurt and raises one hand to point at you, then draws her finger across her throat.
You raise your gun but Cricket moves, even faster than before, faster than you can turn and track her. The charge builds in the railgun and you fire off a round that, though it misses her, bores a hole deep into the road. She closes the gap before you can really react and slams you with another punch.
A second trigger , you think as the road rashes your armour, stealing your paint job. A reworking of her power after experiencing a moment that mirrored the trauma of her original event. Good, and yet…
You come out of the spin and head up, out of her range and start firing as often as your gun will allow before abandoning the rapid fire and holding the charge. She dodges most of them, but what few make it through splash harmlessly against her forcefield, which according to your knowledge of such matters gained from Fun in the Sun worked via the principle of-
Cricket starts going for Taylor, who was still trying to stand on legs that were more jelly than a newborn giraffes. You could fly at speeds exceeding sound, but that speed was useless in a situation where you didn’t have the programs in place to control it, or the computerized brain to understand it - you try all the same.
You miss. You skate past them, your momentum scraping you along the road as you mentally gun the thrusters in the opposite direction, slamming yourself punch-drunk with the G-forces. You cry out in horror as Cricket sets upon Taylor like an animal with hands like scythes, the scene playing out across your HUD in sickening high definition.
You can’t hear anything over the screaming, the endless, wretched screaming coming from Cricket, screaming as though she will never have the chance to make a sound again and is making the most of what she has.
You raise your gun, now fully charged, and Cricket stationary. The plasma bolt, capable of puncturing meters of steel, whizzes across the road faster than your human eye can perceive and shatters Cricket’s armour like glass. With a sound more at home coming out of an exploding jet engine Cricket is launched across the road until she comes to a rolling stop - finally quiet.
You rush to Taylor’s side, half expecting to find the fate of the world torn to wet red shreds, but her suit held strong. She’s curled up in a ball, hair somewhat tattered, but with no other visible damage, the multiplicity of quality boosts having rendered her better protected than you could have dreamed.
“Taylor!” You cry, examining her with the trained hands of a trauma surgeon. “I’m so sorry, it’s all my fault, I should never have tried to rush things! Are you ok? How badly are you hurt?” You babble, almost gibbering, until you realise that Taylor can’t hear you.
Cricket has started screaming again.
You turn to look. Cricket’s mouth is wide beneath her grille, her body contorted in pain, and she is howling like the devil himself. Sound distorts and twists, thickening around her, forming blocky angular plates, and despite everything, despite all the damage, Cricket rises.
The Forge turns.
Information fills your mind as the shard of power splinters off the wheel of the Forge and descends to engulf you. Geomancy, the art of Feng Shui, of creating a location to control and harmonize the flow of energy for a specific purpose. (Cricket charges). The power is a combination of architectural knowledge and mystical mathematics, which if followed precisely would result in a space that enhanced anyone within it. (Cricket batters you off your feet.) Skills, or even whole attributes, could be enhanced in this way and with the benefits of Decadence that bonus would soar to heights the original Thaumaturges could scarcely dream of. (Cricket holds your cybernetic arm in her crushing grip.)
Entire spaces could be designed with this in mind, aided by Savant, Elven Enchanted, even Divine Child crafted if they were mechanical enough. If you were large enough even your insides could be geomantic locations, and that was before you miniaturized them. (Cricket is beating you with your own arm, ripped from its connections.) Then, powers like Lack of Materials would enhance the base creation regardless, to something truly peerless. (Your mask begins to crack as Cricket pistol whips you relentlessly with your own railgun.)
You come out of the power trance and gun your thrusters at full power. Cricket, still trying to beat you to death, keeps a hold with her newfound strength until she realizes what is happening. Cricket lets go and falls, screaming all the while.
You hover for a moment, gasping for air. Why would the Forge connect at a time like that, dumping a lifetime’s worth of knowledge into your mind in such a vulnerable moment? There is a great crack as Cricket hits the road and the distorted sound around her vanishes, the field broken by the fall damage. You have to get out of here.
You, too, fall, the road rushing up to meet you until the anti-grav slows your descent. You land next to Taylor who has managed to sit and is staring at the stirring form of Cricket.
“We have to go,” you urge, scooping her up. You hook your stump arm under her knees, the blood flowing freely from the torn skin, and cradle your other around her back. “I’m sorry.”
You fly as Cricket begins to scream once more.
Chapter 144: Killing Hope 7.9
Chapter Text
You retreat to the Home Depot, fretting over where to set Taylor down until you find a display pool lounge chair. You gently adjust her in your arms, noticing that she’s shivering despite the suit that should be keeping her at a perfectly comfortable temperature, and lay her on the colorful fabric.
“I’m sorry,” you say again. “This is all my fault.”
“What-” Something catches in Taylor’s throat and she turns to cough before asking in an uncharacteristically weak voice. “What was that?”
“A second trigger. They happen when you’re in a position that mirrors your original trigger. The shard in charge of your power reworks itself to combat the threat. On one hand, I’m happy that we somehow managed to traumatize that freak to that point, but on the other…”
You raise your stump and Taylor flinches back, spilling out of the chair in a limp heap. “Are you ok? I couldn’t tell if anything was broken or not.”
“Everything hurts,” Taylor cringes into a ball. “But I think I’m going to be alright, but, your arm…”
You clench the muscle, and it hurts, but it is only pain. “I’m going to make a new one. A better one. I’m going to be busy for hours, but this is a good place to work - it already has forges and fuel, metal and chemicals. I’m sorry, again, as well, we’re out of healing potions. Cricket destroyed the last one, and stole my gun.”
“That’s bad, right?”
It made you seethe that anyone would dare touch anything you made without your permission, but - “No. It doesn’t have a power source, it was drawing from this suit.”
“Oh,” Taylor makes another effort to flop back onto the chair and accepts your helping hand, settling back into place with a wince. “That’s something.”
“Even if I had the time and resources I would still build in a failsafe. Any Tinker worth anything would, and I’m the best Tinker in the world.”
Taylor made a soft, disbelieving, noise but it was true. Dragon was only better because she’d had more time to build up. “I will prove it,” you say confidently. “Give me three days. In three days my technology will shock the world.”
“We lost to Cricket.”
“You may think that a damning point, but it was only by the intervention of powerful outside forces that we were forced to withdraw. I believe the shard forced it to happen to further the designs of the cycle, and if there were to be a next time we would win easily. I’m going to build a new suit.”
A new suit to the best of your ability, even if you had to cannibalize the current one for parts. There should be easily enough here, between the power tools, the machinery, the electronics, the metal stock, and everything else, to tinker up something exceeding this aged junk. It feels like Greg has made it some eight or so powers ago, it is out of date and unfit for purpose.
“I have to get to work,” you stand, looking guiltily down at Taylor as she suffers the consequences of your actions. “Please wait for me, I’ll make more healing potions as soon as I’m sure I can protect us. I’ll sort out the Feng Shui in a room soon, too, to help you heal faster.”
Taylor wilted into the pool lounge and didn’t say anything. You hope she wouldn’t leave, but if she tried to you wouldn’t stop her. You could only hope she would make the right choice.
If you had to you would do this alone, you would carry that weight.
For her.
The work begins.
Even in Creating a workspace Machinist comes into play, and you arrange boxes and machines to maximise the flow of chi, operating entirely on intuition to find the mathematically perfect positioning and Decadents’ optimal arranging ability. You feel it coming together, how the energy in the area is focused and controlled. Your crafting skill increases.
Creating a second hand goes much quicker this time than in the little electronics shop, with so much more available, and much better tools, you have your temporary hand. Now with two, you begin work in earnest. You remake your pitiful propane forges into something grand, a foreboding edifice of creation from which all your great works would spring. No longer needing to rely on just the tools built into your gauntlets you create better, more specialized rigs, machines that did one thing and did it better than anything.
Materials were smelted, duplicated, and set aside for later. A new mobility fame came together, another temporary thing to wear as you pulled Greg’s old suit apart. You redesign from the ground up, going more on feel than anything pre-planned, the cumulative decades and decades of skill and expertise guiding your hands while your divine right over the act of creation brings it forth into reality.
You rip the softsuit to shreds and customize another from its remains. It fits better than ever before, The Flocks Fleece enhancing it where before it was only Elven Enchanted.
Your body cries out in hunger, you ignore it. You expand and improve Driver’s programming for the new capabilities of the suit. It is all Tinkertech in truth, even now you still don’t have the time to do it properly, you don’t have the facilities, but under Reliable Invention and Eternal Artistic Edifice what you made could not malfunction.
It was all so beautiful. The full weight of your powers forming the aesthetics into something equal to the stern royalty of Taylor’s bodysuit.
It’s been hours and hours now, and your body is crying out for rest. Your Drink of Seven Days rest is wearing off and you are tired. You are so tired again, but you will not sleep. You refuse.
You build a new arm into the suit itself this time, one that could not be taken and used to beat you with. You build weapons into the suit itself, so they could not be taken and used to beat you with. You would never suffer the indignity again.
Machinist would let you unmake and remake a helicopter in twelve hours, your suit was considerably more complicated than a helicopter. With the added effect of everything else, what would have taken a team weeks came together in six hours.
You are done. The suit looms under the harsh electric lights of the Home Depot, eight feet of imposing regal strength and unquestionable moral authority. In terms of design it was everything you were imagining, and more - Miniaturization Tinkering pulled an absurd amount of weight in the sheer number of systems able to be pared down and integrated, and there was room for more in the future.
The entire thing shone with Elven Magic, black and silver gilt paint mimicking the same themes as before in brutal Gothic Baroque - in truth it would be like wearing a church, though not to any god ever dreamt before on this Earth.
You have been connected to it the entire time through your implant, and now you command it to receive you. The suit opens and you step in, your stump arm connecting through a wholly redesigned nerve array. You’re now connected to the machine, one with it. It feels right. A humanoid shape, but not human.
The repurposed antigravity paneling sparkles red, no longer producing a cheery prestidigitation light show that was more suited to Greg’s cyber wizard theme - and what a stupid theme; the effect now reinforcing the dark heroism baked into every micron of the suit.
This was the suit of someone who would save the world.
You raise one hand before you and admire it in the light, marveling at your own work, at how seamlessly the aspects of Deus Ex augments, Titan engineering and Gundam mechanics have been blended into one holistic masterpiece. You rise into the air on Tau repulsor jets and survey your domain.
“See this, Driver?” You communicate to your burgeoning AI. “This is step one.”
Driver cannot yet respond, but you imagine that in time it will come to believe in your methods.
You activate your new scanning array, Mauler Tech providing the base for detecting organics, and look for Taylor. Gone.
It hurts. She was your reason for living, for defending this earth, you were handcrafted by the highest divine order for this task. You would walk the path to the bitter end regardless, but it still hurt.
Your body rebels against the paces you have been putting it through, and you can delay no longer. You need food again, and you need alchemy. You drift toward the break room. It’s roughly noon so the place is well lit -
Your scanners, the combination of both Deus Ex Smart Vision and Mauler Tech bio-feedback arrays, pick up a body. Could it be? She didn’t abandon you? You move quietly as the amount of information available to the scanners increases with proximity. It’s a she, and she’s asleep. You peek around the corner and her imposing insectile suit greets your eye, lay flat on a two seater couch, one leg cocked over the arm, the remains of whatever meal she could scrounge scattered on the floor around her.
A great weight that had built, squirming, in your stomach released in a wave of glorious relief and you realize in that moment that you really needed to go to the bathroom again. It was more difficult than you would like to admit, the doorways not built to take eight feet of solid steel. You genuinely completely forgot about that horrific part of the human experience, having only experienced it once, and you start mentally devising a full body prosthesis so that the only waste your body would need to excrete was from your brain.
You are able to take a medical scan once you have her in line of sight, and though she is definitely battered and bruised to the point where her making her way to this room would have been highly painful, she wasn’t in any immediate danger - but a Drink of Seven Days Rest wasn’t going to cut it. She needed stronger potions.
You would have to go find more ingredients, get your glassware, prepare and -
Grueling hours later you had them. The Drink of Seven Days Rest didn’t completely remove the effects of having not slept, it only made you perfectly rested until the Sekhem in the potion was expended over time, so with each one you took the crash would get crueller and crueller as your body was stretched and stretched beyond its limits - the only solution being to have more and more of the drink.
Taylor was awake now, you could sense her shuffling after her nap.
“I have a healing potion for you,” you call from outside, so as not to impinge on her privacy. “A better one than last time.”
Taylor makes a sound that is some powerful hybrid between a groan and a yawn. Respectfully you shuffle forward and poke your angelically imposing masked helmet around the corner of the uppermost edge of the doorframe, your new sensory suite picking up Taylor’s quickening heart rate and physiological arousal.
“Be not afraid.”
“Metatron?” She asks, voice as scratchy as the gravel of the road.
“Yes.”
“Your voice?”
When designing this suit, with the limited time and resources available, you were still able to include an air filtration system that doubled as a voice changer. “I designed it to sound more how I feel I should.”
“Thats…” Taylor begins. “Good for you. How long was I out?”
“A full eight hours, it’s two in the afternoon.”
“Oh,” says Taylor. She still sounds lost and unsure, dispossessed of the cold confidence that was her birthright.
By the power vested in you by the Celestial Forge you would fix this, too. You force your formidable frame through the doors and present to her a true Simple Tonic. The Drink could only heal minor physical damages, scratches and light bruising, but this would heal even deep wounds provided they were not crucially grave. You would have offered a Philtre to induce self confidence if you thought she would be willing to take it, but there would be time for that later.
Taylor takes the lush red potive in its sparkling glass vial, glass made by your own hand. You remade the stained, base flasks and tubes under your own power and were left with more than enough material to create vials for your potions. Enhanced by your powers the glass would not break without concerted effort.
“You said another healing potion?” She watches you nod, then shrugs and uncorks it, swills the liquid inside and downs the brew in one. Taylor shivers and your sensors detect the thrum of activity in her body as it is healed. “Damn. Just, damn.”
“I’m pleased you like it,” you fall to one knee in the cramped room. “I need to apologize. Everything that happened was my fault. I will do better.”
“Ok,” says Taylor.
“I’m leaving it wholly up to you until I can trust my judgment,” you continue. “What is our next move?”
“I want to go help the Protectorate.”
You look her dead in the eye. “Then to the Protectorate we go.”
Chapter 145: Killing hope 7.10
Chapter Text
Taylor’s expression showed shrewd on my scanners as she regarded me. “Why the change of heart?”
“My judgment is sorely lacking,” you say, shamefaced. “My rashness got you injured. If you say we help the Protectorate, we help them.”
“Just like that?”
“Yes.”
“No rants about how they suck?”
“It wouldn’t do much good to belabor the point when you only want to help as an independent.”
Taylor seemed to bristle. “How did you get that impression?”
“The Forge,” you say. “You will never join the Wards. I know it.”
Something about her bearing disgruntles further. “You don’t know me. You just sound like a psycho.”
Did you? You wouldn’t know. What did a psycho sound like? To you it was profoundly psychotic to desire to live a life unlike your own. You were created by the most powerful force in existence, why would they fill you with wrong beliefs, make you defective? And yet…
“I’ve been wrong about so many things. I have existed for a cumulative two and a half days, and even in that small window I have been shown time and time again that things do not exist as I was told. People I thought worthless proving otherwise, events happening completely wrong, I don’t have any way of knowing what’s true and what’s a lie, but,” you look at her imploringly, the expression hidden. “What else can I do? It’s all I’ve ever known. Most of it is still all true, the broad strokes are still there, but the details…”
“Metatron, I… can’t trust you at the moment. You’re…”
“Insane,” you finish for her. “How can I get you to trust me?”
“If I tell you to let me go, will you?”
Her tone, the very fact that she feels she even needs to ask, crushes your spirit. You must seem like a monster, a bomb waiting to go off. “You were never a prisoner. I’m here to help you.”
She takes a moment to consider this. “What if it would help me best if you turned yourself in?”
You snort and shake your head in disgust. “For what crime? On what charge?”
“You’re Technomage.”
“No,” you say crossly. “I’m not, and I’ve done nothing wrong. I didn’t choose to be here in his disgusting meat, but I must have been placed here for a greater reason. It’s unfortunate for him, I suppose, but it’s neither of our faults-”
You slap a great steel hand over your chest.
“-but I was born into this world. I was given his body to do what needs to be done. Everything is still ending, am I supposed to just not stop it?”
You can see Taylor looking at you with the same concealed, callous contempt you understood someone would look at an unwashed, raving vagrant who was proclaiming the end. Was it truly so hard to believe, in this time of Endbringers and superpowers? You couldn’t understand why she would treat you like this, the same way she treated him-
You take your hand from your chest and stare into the blackened steel, at your reflection. Are you truly no better than Greg Veder? Were you the same?
But… you didn’t even like anime.
Taylor lacked context, that much was true. The entities were real, they were here. You weren’t delusional, the Simurgh had just torn off your arm not a day earlier, Taylor was here controlling bugs, you had met Armsmaster and the head conspirator of Cauldron, Contessa. Something might have gone awry, but you were still Taylor’s strongest angel. Beelzebub would rise.
If you had to do it without her it would hurt more than you could imagine, but you would do it all the same. The world still needed saving, you weren’t about to abandon it.
You stand, coming up from your position of supplication. “I can take you to the Protectorate, if you like. Walking would take you hours, if you can get across the city at all.”
“I… don’t understand why you’re doing all of this. I know what you told me, but?”
“I’ve only ever told you the truth. I wouldn’t have thought it so hard to believe when only a few decades ago superpowers didn’t exist.”
“Superpowers aren’t from alien gods,” Taylor states with the absolute confidence borne of absolute ignorance.
You nod, knowing. You could ask her how she knows that, but you don’t want to make her angry. You already have no idea why she doesn’t trust you. You get that you seem ‘insane’, but not truly why - you’re telling the truth. You have no choice, nothing above you but the mission.
Taylor would come around, sooner or later.
“I still wish we could team up,” you say. “I hope we still can, some day.”
Taylor makes a non-committal sound.
“Please let me know if you ever need anything, I can fix everything short of death-”
“So why aren’t you helping the Protectorate?” The outburst spills from Taylor’s lips in a desperate tumble. “If you’re so concerned about doing the right thing, why not really help people? We could be on the same side, then.”
“I don’t trust them. I can’t. I won’t. You don’t know them like I do.”
“You don’t have to like them to do some good.”
You look at Taylor. “‘I worked for their interests, not for their ideals’.”
“What?”
“It’s not a particularly compelling stance for me. Even if you think I’m doing the wrong things, I’m doing them for the right reason.” Though you had no idea why Taylor would ever be thinking that, she had taken over a city to save one little girl. She had reigned as a vicious warlord to help the people under her rule. If anyone could understand never compromising to the point where you lost sight of your goal it would be Taylor, wouldn’t it?
Even though she looked calm, Taylor’s heart was hammering, her skin prickling with adrenaline, but she didn’t say anything against you, she just stared at your mask with a blank expression. Eventually, she spoke. “It must be nice to be so sure of yourself.”
“You will be,” you tell her. “I know it.”
“How can you know?”
“I have faith,” you say. Without it you were nothing, a husk. You believed in The Forge, and you believe in Taylor - that was where the difference between you and Greg lay. He believed in nothing, had no respect for anything beside his own naked self interest. That he had done some good things made no difference in the end, when the winds of his whim changed he would stop just as easily as he started.
No other such person could stomach working with the Protectorate, or with Cauldron.
You couldn’t comprehend the evil lurking in his soul, or the delusion to consider himself human after willingly associating with them. Murder, corruption, human trafficking, abuse of children, slavery - a small handful of their crimes.
By the Forge you would craft their prison, or their death.
When you take Taylor to them you fly slowly, not wanting it to end in this brutal way. Scorned by your savior, you had never felt so small. Indeed, this may have been the first time you felt real shame.
Such a strange emotion, and strangely human. You didn’t want it, you didn’t want to be made to feel this way. Not like this. You were only acting as best you knew how, being genuinely what little self you could grasp. You had done nothing wrong, so why was it like this solely on Taylor’s disapproval?
Could you have been lacking context? You know that you hadn’t done anything that she wouldn’t have, if it was to further her goals, and had assumed that the issue was that it was because she hadn’t made the choice herself, but was that truly deserving of such scorn? From her, of all people?
And the ‘stealing Techomage’s body’ thing, how could you have done that when you had no choice in the matter? Even if you acknowledged Greg Veder as a victim, you were the same. Who in their right mind could expect you to continue his legacy, so antithetical to your ideals, so steeped in the madness and mire of Cauldron, solely because his body had been forced on you?
Taylor, it seemed, thought this. And Taylor was, as far as you knew, the most moral person in the world. A hot sick feeling was building in the pit of your stomach, boiling like acid reflux up your throat, congealing into your cheeks. “Taylor,” you say, your voice so, so small in the wind. She stiffens in your grip. “Why do you want to help the Protectorate instead of me?”
“Why do you know who I am?”
“I know a lot of things,” you say as you stare into the risen sun. “I know who you are, I know Thomas Calvert is Coil, I know Max Anders is Kaiser and I know that Alexandria is Rebecca Costa-Brown, but what I don’t know is why them, and not me?”
I could feel her grip on me tighten through the haptic interface, her heart racing. She didn’t say anything.
“I’m not going to drop you. I would never allow you to come to harm, you’re too important.”
“That,” she said, shaking. “Right there. Dropping all of that on me the first time we talked. It makes you sound like a serial killer, like if I don’t agree with you you’ll kill me.”
You gently glide down to a walkable section of road from where the Protectorate could be accessed and set her down, where she stands on the road, stiff legged, eyeing you. “I would never. I don’t know what to do. If you knew about the end of the world, how would you tell the person you knew could save it?”
She doesn’t answer.
“Please,” you implore, begging for even a single hint on how to accomplish your given task. “Tell me what to do.”
“How would I know, I’m just - just… This is the first time I’ve even gone out in costume.”
In your mind's eye you see another girl doing the same and working to slay a dragon. What difference did the three weeks between then and now make? More school? More bullying? More what?
You struggle to hold it together, the tears threatening to spill out in hot waves. “I understand,” you say, not understanding at all. This would be the first lie you have ever told and it tears your throat raw as it claws its way out of your mouth. “Let’s get you to the Protectorate.”
Taylor says nothing, and you walk. This part of the city is active, people lining up or milling around. They point at you both as you walk, gawking at the most beautiful things they would have ever seen in their lives. A shard may be able to create something as beautiful, but you doubted they ever would. Why would a worm need beauty?
At this point, with powers specifically for aesthetics, it would be something approaching heresy to make something plain, and unthinkable to make it ugly. The Forge had given them to you for a reason, and that reason could only be because it desired beauty for its own sake. Perfection must be pursued diligently, and without question.
As you followed the lines of people PRT troopers started appearing every so often in twos and threes, eyeing you warily with hands firmly on their machine guns in between pacifying the populace - herding them toward the execution pens.
These people had been marked by the Simurgh’s passing. Even if they had never come into range they would be treated with suspicion for the rest of their lives, with the Protectorate using this as an excuse to weed out dissidents and problematic individuals.
The mere accusation, even with no evidence, of being a Simurgh bomb would invoke such fear, such revulsion, that you would be a subversive element that using that accusation either to violate your freedom or shoot you in the head would be met with relief. You couldn’t let this happen to Taylor, though you felt you hoped it would be attempted so that she would have the plainest evidence of their true nature shown to her, so that she might come to understand the truth.
Though you would scarcely be so lucky as to have you enemies impale themselves upon their own incompetent swords. You remember meeting Piggot, you remember your confusion at her not being a raving madwoman. She was supposed to hate you for existing, froth at the idea of locking you up and throwing away the key and yet -
You were wrong.
The Forge had lied, and you could only hope it was for a reason.
The lines of people thickened, bunching up, but they parted for you with a pleasing deference. The image must have been awestriking.
Taylor, tall and slender, regal, her lace shawl dancing in the breeze.
You, bigger than everyone, a bulwark against evil, imposing, magical.
The PRT tried to stop you at a checkpoint, but after a single declaration that you were continuing they had no choice but to cede ground and let you through. The destruction of the city was near total in this area, with only a single line of people tracing the one circuitous path through.
You’d been walking for a while now and you hoped Taylor would say something, but she didn’t seem interested in talking to you. You didn’t even know what you would say, you had already told her the truth.
It was getting later in the afternoon, and with so much time wasted walking you could only justify it to yourself that it would help Taylor. Finally, a Protectorate stooge cape arrived, or a pair of them did.
Crawling over the rubble and debris with graceful alacrity Assault and Battery made their way to you. You despised them both. Assault was a sexual predator in disguise, having groomed Battery as a teenager while breaking Birdcage transports for money. Battery, in turn, was a dog of Cauldron and couldn’t be trusted in the slightest.
Or were they?
Chapter 146: Killing hope 7.11 : Taylor Hebert
Chapter Text
Power was a strange thing. Nothing was accomplished without it, and everything changed once it was gained. People could take it from you, and it could be given to you. It worked even if people only thought you had it, and had to be proven if they thought you didn’t lest it be given up. It came in many forms and was constantly measured by everyone you met.
Emma had taken it from me in such a way that not even getting superpowers had fixed, she had taken it in such a way that all I could do was give it back up.
Metatron had given it to me in a way that couldn’t be so easily divested, given more than I was prepared to shoulder. Image, a projection of power. I looked powerful. I could see it in the eyes of everyone I interacted with, they saw me in the suit he had made and erroneously applied the story it told to me.
It hadn't been so pronounced with him before when he was still wearing Techomage’s gear. There had been an implication of it there, but a subtle one that made you think about the safety of having a good laugh, a feeling almost like it had the power to protect your smile - here it was thrust proudly, boldly, into the open. His new suit oozed power from every aesthetic edge, with every line of the gilt silver iconography it brought to mind something old, something vast, something so much bigger than you that it would be beyond foolish to measure your power against his.
I had even seen it in Cricket’s eyes, she had looked at me with measured respect. Me, who had been a superhero for less than a day. All she saw was the authority my image projected. I saw it in the body language of Assault and Battery now, too. Even though they were experienced, strong heroes, they were wary of our power without knowing that I had one of the lamest abilities of all time.
I was actually genuinely worried about how this was going to go down. I glanced back at the Ward formerly known as Technomage, now as Metatron, as the self admitted alternate personality, deep in delusion and schizophrenia, potential Simurgh Bomb, stood. He was still, powered armour suit completely motionless, staring at the pair of heroes.
He said nothing.
“Hello,” said Assault. He didn’t get any closer, or wave a red suited hand. He had a smile on the part of his face I could see, but it was plainly forced. “I’m Assault, and this is Battery-”
He inclined his head slightly to the woman next to him. She was short and had a grey bodysuit marked with circuit lines, her own mouth set in a tense line.
“We’re with the Protectorate. We were hoping you could introduce yourselves?”
Metatron continued his out of character silence. Before this he had been quite happily talkative, especially about how much he hated the Protectorate and their various foibles. He was quite happy to wax about me, and how important I was. It was nice to hear, and in any other circumstance I might have been happy to have someone say anything nice to me, if only it was a real person talking and not some insane doomsday prepper cultist trying to sell me on alien gods like he was some kind of Scientologist.
Metatron said nothing. I was kind of hoping he could carry this part of the conversation, I’d been trying to think of a name since last night and still hadn’t come up with anything, as if any name I picked could match the image thrust upon my shoulders.
“Swarm,” I muttered, for lack of anything better. Something shifted in Assault and Battery’s body language, but I wasn’t canny enough to understand what. “Nice to meet you.”
“Metatron,” said Metatron in his new Optimus Prime voice. It must be nice being able to transform your, and his had been a little weedy previously, voice into something that projected strength. I had nothing like it.
There was a pause. “Well, nice to meet the two of you, too,” Assault continued, but did not come closer. “What brings you to little Old Brockton?”
Metatron said nothing. “Home,” I said, hoping that wasn’t giving too much of my identity away, and gestured to the destruction and the people forced to experience it. “I’m here to help.”
“That’s great, great to hear it. We could always do with more help.”
It was so awkward. I almost wished I didn’t have this suit, almost. I remembered, cold sweat and gooseflesh prickling my neck as I relived the experience, being savaged by Cricket, the absolute disorientation of her power sending my bugs haywire, my senses flipping and flopping like all the worst times Emma and I had stared at the sky and spun in circles until we couldn’t stand combined - and the screaming. The pain in it.
My skin crawled again. If only I could take it off, but… I just didn’t have a spare. I hadn’t even finished this one.
“I’m happy to,” I said, trying to sound friendly. Behind me Metatron shifted, the dust and chunks of building crunching under his huge boot.
“And I,” he said, then stopped talking even though the way he intoned that made it sound like it was going to be a complete sentence.
“Great,” said Assault again. “That’s great.”
It sounded like he had no idea where to go with this. I couldn’t blame him, because neither did I.
“What are you going to help with?”
“I was hoping you could tell me.”
Their body language shifted again, and this time I did notice into what. They were scared, though not perhaps of what we could do to them specifically, but their eyes kept darting to the people all around us. They saw us as a threat, as a danger.
What the fuck?
I looked at Metatron, aggrieved. Nothing but trouble. Nothing but delusional, idiotic trouble. I was grateful for the healing tinkertech, and for the suit that had saved my life, from the trouble he created, but I had to ditch him. It was such a shame, if only he wasn’t a complete lunatic. If only he wasn’t Technomage.
I still had to tell them that.
“I should come with you,” I continued. “I really do want to help.”
The painted on smiles on both Assualt and Battery’s faces didn’t waver a single inch. “Why don’t we go and talk somewhere else?” Assault said, slowly, deliberately, gesturing off to the side through the rubble to where civilians could not go. “What do you say?”
I nodded, keenly aware of every eye on me, and started walking in the direction he was pointing. I was too self conscious of how I was moving, to the point where I was now walking manually, each step feeling like the jerky, alien movements of a spider. Why did I have to act so weird in front of the heroes?
They waited for me to get a distance ahead, Metatron silently following me to help me over the debris, before tracing my steps. I understood how they felt, when confronted with someone who you perceived, by their mere presence, to have the power in the situation.
We walked until the civilians were well out of the firing zone, as it were. I could still feel them through my bugs, their skin and clothes sticky with sweat as they stood under the sun, the stress of waiting to be processed at a rolling simmer. It could probably boil over into a riot at any second.
What would them being processed even look like? I had no idea how you would tell if someone had been corrupted by the Simurgh or not, or how that could even be checked. Was there a parahuman with that power? Would they have to personally vet every single person? Was there a written test some behavioral scientist had developed? I can’t imagine anyone in that crowd knew either - the unknown was a scary thing.
“We’re going to call in to our team that we’ve met you.”
I looked back to them and nodded. “That’s fine.”
On a whim I had a couple of flies attach themselves to both of their bodies in different places, the same way I had been keeping Track of Metatron to make sure he didn’t make any sudden moves, and through this I realised I could feel more specific actions. Without seeing, but following the positional map of bugs, I could feel Battery’s arm reach for her phone and then hold it to her ear. I could even feel the vibrations coming from her to know when she was talking, and with a fly on the back of the phone case when she was getting a reply.
I wasn’t sure if I hoped that what Metatron had said was true or not. It was freaky enough that he knew who I was, but if he knew specifics about my power that I hadn’t even figured out I was going to have to start giving his rantings about the end of the world a little more credence.
A minute or so later they both stopped walking. Metatron and I turned to face them. They were still smiling, but it was plainer to see they expected to have to defend themselves.
“We’re not villains,” I took the initiative.
“That’s great.” I really hoped Assault could come up with something else to say. “What group might you be from?”
“We’re not from a group. We’re new independents.” I hoped this made it clearer. “We’re, uh, not really even a team.”
Metatron shifted. If he attacked maybe all of us could take him, Cricket certainly had and that was in his good armour. The suit he was wearing now looked better made, but surely no Tinker could make something like that in the time he had taken, it was a strong front to hide the damage.
“You don’t look new, and, I’m sorry if this sounds harsh,” Assault slowly rubbed his thumb against the tip of his red gloved pointer finger. “But you look like Supervillains. Capital S and all.”
“That’s,” I glanced over at Metatron, still an eight foot, silent statue, my eyes automatically tracing the incredible artwork on his chest. The Scarab pushing the sun across the sky. How he saw me, as some kind of religious figure. “Just how he makes things, I think. I didn’t look like this yesterday morning-”
“Villains,” Metatron spoke suddenly, his voice dripping with unconcealed disdain. “Don’t play your narrative games here. If you look at us and you see a challenge to your hegemony as evil, then that is an issue within yourself. What you see is the right to command, not villainy.”
What was he talking about? My suit was originally a little edgy, now I looked like some fantasy Dark Lady, and he some space age butcher knight. Was he stupid?
“Are you… not from around here?”
“Where I come from,” Metatron said, leveling his sharp visored gaze against them. “Shouldn’t matter in the slightest.”
Both Assault and Battery cocked their heads at the same time, an identical motion born of spending a lot of time together. People speculated online whether they were siblings, lovers, or both. “No, not in that way,” Assault replied slowly. “Have you seen much of American supercriminals?”
Metatron didn’t answer. I supposed he didn’t know what Technomage knew, if indeed he knew anything at all.
“Your whole vibe-”
“I did not come here to be profiled by you ,” Metatron snarled. “On villainous ‘vibe’.”
“Ok, I get you, not a bad guy. You’re here to help. That’s great.” He nodded. “That’s really great. Have we heard back from base, Battery? Ok, we’ve heard back from base. Due to recent events, you have to register.”
“Ok,” I said as Metatron made a sound like he was biting back another scathing retort. “I can do that.”
“Excellent!” Assault finally changed to a different synonym. “You’ll have to agree to be checked over by our thinkers, big and little T, to make sure, you know.”
He pointed at the sky and gave a knowing tip of his head. It made perfect sense, in the post Simurgh paranoia anyone could be a bomb, and you had to be careful. These were the people who chose to use their powers for good, and it was their responsibility to manage risk as best it could be managed. Behind me I could feel Metatron quivering slightly, the outside of his suit vibrating in a way that only the delicate senses of my insects could only just pick up, as though he were shouting himself hoarse inside it.
“That’s fine with me,” I said. “I was outside the fight.”
“And what brings you to the city?” The question was asked casually, but even I could tell he was probing for information.
“I live here. I’m pretty ne-”
“You don’t have to tell them anything,” Metatron interrupted me. “They don’t have a right to any of your information.”
Assault held up his hands non-threateningly. “We’re not trying to breach your identity. You don’t have to tell us anything if you don’t want to. Please just know that if you want to help us there will have to be some kind of give and take, we have to make sure that if you have our approval you’re not going to end up abusing it. It’s happened before, unknown villains pretending to be heroes. People get hurt.”
“I get it,” I said. “I’m happy to come in.”
I turned to Metatron, sort of hoping he wouldn’t. “I, too, will. You will get your Thinker assurance, and not a drop more.”
Assault turned to Battery and shrugged as though this was the best he could do.
There were a lot of horror stories about Simurgh zones, and a lot of bullshit being flung around that obscured what little of the truth that could get out. I had read about one of the battles against her in Chile where they had ended up deciding to burn the whole city she hit to the ground, and there was one here in Madison where there was a permanent barricade around the city where no one was allowed in or out - a city left to slowly die.
Compared to the other two Endbringers I’d heard that each fight against the Simurgh provided a unique horror, but there was never any evidence beyond the anecdotal.
It made me shudder to think what hell had been cooked in the bowels of the Bay. I hoped that dad had, at least, managed to get away. He probably wouldn’t. He’d probably be out looking for me.
I shivered, though I wasn’t cold. I hadn’t been since I put on this new suit, I wasn’t sure I had even really sweated. It was so comfortable I kept forgetting I was even wearing it. Tinkertech sure was something else.
I digested the destruction of my city, The Simurgh had hit almost dead center so all of the main infrastructure had been ruined beyond repair. Roads pulled up, water and gas mains now leaking unhindered, phone and internet connections ruined, power lines torn down. I wondered how much it would cost to rebuild, and if they would even bother.
I had bugs spreading out as far as I could as we moved, taking note of everything I could, feeling the differences in texture on everything they touched. Metatron had spouted a lot of absolute horseshit, but he’d also said I could hear and see through my bugs, speak through them, even, and I was starting to think he might be right.
I didn’t want to think about anything else he might have been right on.
“Up here,” Assault pointed from a safe distance at a hastily set up series of military style tents. The PRT presence was stronger here in their ramshackle command post, police officers and National Guard making themselves known. I had seen helicopters approach the city and touch down every so often so at least we hadn’t been instantly condemned.
We were met by a man in a blue pinstripe suit, his face covered by only a simple black domino mask. He was fairly tall and thin, and seemed to be quite young - maybe late twenties at the absolute most. He was also surrounded with bodyguards, including a cape in bright yellow spandex who was menacingly large.
“Who am I meeting first?” The pinstriped man asked as he lit a cigarette and sucked on it in a greedy manner. “Who’s the lucky customer?”
I raised my hand, the motion sending my delicate lace shawl fluttering. The man in the suit dropped his cigarette as he focused on me, seeming to only start paying attention. He looked from me to Metatron, then back to me. He stooped down and picked his cigarette up, but didn’t continue smoking.
“Wah, well, ah, who might you be?”
I took a moment too long to answer. I kind of regretted the name I’d given them earlier, but it was too late to go back now as Assault stepped forward and answered for me in the lag.
“This is,” he cleared his throat a little and spoke in a lower register. “Worm. A new hero.”
I frowned. He hadn’t just said ‘worm’, had he? I must have misheard him. Maybe he had, because the pinstripe man’s expression became complicated and twisted, his long nose pulling up as his nostrils flared, or maybe he was just disappointed at the unoriginality of the name ‘Swarm’.
“Ok, well I’m Gauge. Let’s, well, let’s start. Before we do anything, what’s your power?”
“I control insects,” a small collection of flies buzzed in and flew in circles over my hand before dispersing.
Gauge, his bodyguard, Assault and Battery all traded significant glances. Yeah, I agreed. My power was absolutely the lamest of the lame. You could beat me with a can of Raid.
“Ok, then. Uh, please come this way,” he gestured politely to the way he had come, to one of the tents made of thick, washed out green canvas. “And we’ll do the preliminary screening.”
I started to follow him, still feeling as though I was walking manually, hating the eyes on me. Metatron tried to follow, but they made him stay outside.
The inside of the tent was humidly warm in the late afternoon sun and reeked of cigarettes, one of which gauge had started smoking again. His bodyguards, including the half a dozen armed National Guardsmen, took up points around the tent. One was blocking the exit. A chill ran up my spine.
Nevertheless, I strode to the center as confidently as I could, chin up, looking into Gauge’s eyes which I noticed were rather small and close together giving him the impression of being a rat.
“I’m going to ask you some questions,” he said, and now that we were this close I could see the nicotine stains on his teeth. “And hopefully we can clear you. It shouldn’t take long. Now, do you prefer cats or dogs?”
“Dogs.”
“What do you think about Asparagus?”
I frowned. This guy clearly had some kind of power that gave him information, but I had no idea what information was going to be gleaned from this. “I don’t like it.”
The questions continued, each inane, but as they were asked the atmosphere grew graver and graver. The bodyguards were gripping their guns tighter and tighter, raised almost to the point of threat, until Gauge finally stopped asking.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “But you’re compromised. If you ever try to leave Brockton Bay you will be shot on sight.”
Chapter 147: Killing hope 7.12
Chapter Text
Taylor,
The worm that walks
Shot on sight.
The words echoed in my head. I was compromised? Me? I hadn’t even seen the Simurgh. You were supposed to have to hear her, right?
“What?” My voice sounded faint, like I was asking from the end of a long tunnel.
“You can’t leave this city again. I’m sorry.”
“You’re going to shoot me?”
I could bring in my swarms, cover them in flies and run and - then what? He said I was compromised, somehow. I was part of some world ending scheme, some cog in the doomsday machine. I felt tears well up, though I was too shocked to feel much of anything.
“If you harm her,” Metatron’s voice echoed over the camp. “I will visit it upon you a thousand fold - don’t you touch me .”
There was a sound of loud tussling and some shouting as the entryway to the tent was forced open by a huge hand of burnished black metal, the flap flying in the motion to show Assault attempting to restrain Metatron while Battery stood behind them in a ready stance, the circuits of her suit glowing.
“Please stop,” Assault warned. “Or I’m going to have to-”
“She’s fine!” Gauge screamed, hiding behind his bodyguard. “Probably. Jesus fuck, it’s part of the test!”
I stared at him numbly.
“It’s the test. It’s all the test. People touched by The Simurgh are notoriously bad at handling,” he fixed his small dark eyes on Metatron. “Stressors. Please don’t kill me. If I thought she was actually gone, this would have gone very differently…”
He trailed off and I barely heard him over the hammering of my heart. The implication was clear - shot on sight.
God, my mouth was so dry.
“How convenient. And what a stupid test, provoking the queen of escalation like that? She could kill you in a heartbeat, and you’d probably deserve it. I knew you people would pull some stupid stunt like this. I was wrong to even give you a chance. If you’re not lying then you should let her g-”
“Metatron,” I whispered, and he instantly stopped talking. “It’s fine. If this is part of the test, it’s part of the test.”
“It is! It is!” Gauge enthusiastically agreed. “She can go and do whatever she wants, now. First field assessment done, all clear, everything is fine.”
“Only for the snipers to take their shot as soon as you think you can get away with it?”
“I hate the Simurgh, I hate the Simurgh,” Gauge whined as his bodyguard loomed as threateningly as he could up at someone almost two feet taller than himself. “Come on, man, I’m doing my job here. I’m just following procedure-”
“Metatron,” I said sharply as he moved to speak again. “Leave it.”
As ordered, he left it. Cautiously, Assault stopped trying to hold him back and positioned himself in between Gauge and Metatron. Behind them both the circuits on Battery’s suit continued to glow.
I genuinely wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be doing here. When I decided to join the cape life after I heard the sirens I thought that I would be chasing off some looters or gangster thugs, before taking the suit off again and going home to dad. The Simurgh had upended everything in my life, nothing was, nor could be, going back to normal. Brockton Bay might not even exist as a habitable city in the future. I suddenly realised with crystal clarity that I would never be going back to Winslow.
The Status Quo, as it were, was destroyed.
I was suddenly faced with the infinite void of the uncertain future, and the million choices I could make after falling into it.
I wanted to be a hero, wanted more than anything to take the fight to the bad guys. I felt the bugs under my control, their alien bodies, taking in the almost unintelligible information their senses gave me, splotches of colour, vibration, what must have been the taste of sweat under their feet as they perched on people’s skin.
I couldn’t have Metatron ruin this for me. He might have been a good guy, too, or something like it, but my future was mine to choose.
“I’m here to help,” I said firmly. “And I trust the Protectorate. Give me something to do, and I’ll do it.”
“We’ll have to kick it upstairs,” Assault responded in a careful tone. “Due to recent, well… To the national office, they handle things like this in the aftermath of an Endbringer attack.”
“That’s fine.”
“That’s great.” Assault was back to his bland smile and repeating script. “Could you please take a device from us so that we can contact you when everything is ready?”
“Can we not go now?”
“We’re in a massive crunch,” Assault gestured vaguely to the tent walls where outside a great and terrible destruction had been wrought. “We can’t just pull our bosses off duty to bump this up schedule.”
That made sense, I supposed. I nodded. I had never been terribly interested but from what I had gleaned from Dad’s occasional rantings is that ‘if you wanted anything done in government you had to wait for the form signed in triplicate saying that you could shake your cock after a piss - sorry, Taylor’. It would have been worse here where anyone could suddenly turn into a violent maniac.
Metatron miraculously remained silent, continuing to exist as an intimidating bulk in a looming competition with Gauge’s bodyguard who, despite the size difference, seemed indifferently unphased. I wondered what his power might have been to look up at an eight foot tall robot suit and feel nothing.
With surprising swiftness I was given a small communication device, something that reminded me of a General Electric phone, but due to the complete absence of the cell tower network worked via satellite, and was told in no uncertain terms that the situation was extremely tenuous and, please, could I not exacerbate it.
Metatron was told in no uncertain terms that he was required to undergo a full round of tests by a different member of Watchdog, as Gauge refused to test him.
Even I still had to be tested further before they would trust me to work with them.
“The nerve of those fools,” Metatron complained loudly after we were out of earshot. “The blind control freaks. You offer your help freely, and this is what they give you? They have no idea of the wrath you could visit upon them-”
“Maybe they did,” I interrupted him. “That Gauge guy? He was probably one of those kind of capes who know things.”
“A Thinker,” he rumbled. “A Watchdog Thinker. Did you know that Accord used to work for Watchdog? Did you know that Watchdog was audited once, and half their capes fled the country before the investigation?”
I had no idea who Accord was. “What does that have to do with if Gauge could tell or not?”
“They’re corrupt. They cannot be trusted, they cannot be reasoned with.”
“Metatron… You were Technomage, why do you hate the government so much?”
“I don’t hate the government,” he said. “I hate this government. You would do a much better job than this… this…. Cauldron plot .”
I didn’t want to ask, and yet… “Could you at least explain that?”
“Cauldron,” he continued with clear vitriol. “Are what happens when stone age idiots gain access to powers man was not meant to know. When the Thinker crash landed on earth and almost died, it lost its main future sight shard, which was picked up by Contessa and used to kill it. Then they decided to have the great idea of using it to try and kill the Warrior, not knowing that it would only ever lead to a path of pyrrhic victory-”
He rambled on about them making the Triumvirate and controlling society. It reminded me of talking to Greg, in a way, where he would rattle off a speech full of jargon and specific phrases you could only understand if you already knew what he was talking about.
“Aren’t they the good guys, then?”
“You will come to understand,” he said in a tone of infuriating patience. He somehow managed to avoid sounding condescending when he said it, but the implication was still there that I was an ignorant child.
“You talk a lot of big game about being the best tinker in the world,” I said waspishly. “But you got beat up by Cricket not long ago.”
“I’m ashamed,” he said, surprising me. I expected excuses. I wasn’t quite sure how to respond, so I didn’t.
“I’ve made mistake after mistake after being put on this earth - nothing is right. Sometimes I feel like I’m going mad. Even just now, even though I know you trust the Protectorate, even though I know what I was made to know might be wrong, I couldn’t help myself. They threatened you, treated you like a Simurgh Bomb. I can’t help it, it’s all I’ve ever known.”
“Thanks, I guess.”
“Think nothing of it. You deserve someone on your side.”
If only the person saying that wasn’t the deranged figment of a hero's imagination.
I should at least be trying to get him to continue to do good, shouldn’t I? I plucked at the lace shawl draped over my shoulders. Watching him make it had been incredible, weaving all this lace out of a simple white handkerchief with his bare hands, and it was such a beautiful piece. It really was. Then my suit, making something which I was sure would maybe take a knife from a normal person, taking murderous blows from a cape. It had hurt horribly, but I was sure it was only bruising.
He had so much potential to help people, I just had to point that in the right direction. The Protectorate must have been hurting if someone with his power had gone rogue, and now it was up to me that he still helped people rather than engage in his ridiculous crusade against petty gangsters and the government.
Maybe, just maybe, I could fix him.
I had to get home. Dad was going to be worried sick that I was dead, or worse. My stomach twisted like the dance of a thousand snakes at the thought of him searching, his eyes magnified from his glasses, his wispy, balding hair askew, through the rubble.
I’d left in the night before he could stop me, it would have been like I’d vanished into thin air.
I had no idea where he might have gone and no way of tracking him down. For lack of options I agreed to go back to the Home Depot with Metatron, a decision not least influenced by the fact that it was dinner time and I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and Metatron’s promise that he could cook food of unsurpassed quality - and I remembered the succulent McChicken.
He had been as animatedly excited as it was possible to be for someone wearing eight feet of armour at the idea of cooking dinner and had immediately flown off to appropriate ingredients and cookware.
I idled around the break room, waiting. I sniffed at my armpits, but despite having not had a shower in two days there was no odour and I didn’t feel particularly unclean and there wasn’t even a single speck of dust or dirt on me. It was like the suit cleaned itself, and cleaned me by proxy.
It was the kind of thing he should be making for the Protectorate and the PRT, the police and the National Guard. They would have absolutely appreciated having clothes that cleaned themselves and couldn’t be stabbed through. It had taken him only minutes to make mine, he could probably outfit the entire set of departments in only a few days. I had to do something. Maybe it was my responsibility.
Maybe he really was the greatest Tinker in the world, and I was the only person he would listen to.
Chapter 148: Killing Hope 7.13
Chapter Text
Metatron,
The personification of the self
Greg’s body, unfortunately, needed food. Fortunately, the food you could provide was at a level beyond excellent and you finally had the time to make it. You finally had the chance to flex your crafting muscles in this field and you weren’t going to waste a single second of it.
The break room in the Home Depot was ripped apart and reassembled with the Feng Shui of food, as perfect in form and function as the room would allow, cooking utensils smelted down and remade into more perfect, more magical forms. Elven knives slicing ingredients with utmost ease, the fire of demigod crafted cooktops heating magically non-stick pans only to perfection, and the skill of a Savant bringing the final product together.
You had asked Taylor what her favourite food was, and after some hemming and hawing about not having a favourite food she divulged that it was a simple spaghetti bolognese - not that there was anything simple about anything you made.
Machinist, despite being a power tuned for mechanical work, applied to cooking, smoothing over wrinkles in time to let you work at incredible speeds. Garlic was confit, tomatoes simmered, meat cut and ground, herbs prepared and pasta boiled. It didn’t matter what it was, what you made, you loved the act of making.
Creation was living itself, in its purest form. The anguish of the life thrust upon you faded while crafting, aligning your soul with the Forge to such a degree that you were one.
You serve the steaming meal on paper plates, with plastic forks, the contrast between what you had made, and the garbage produced by mankind's factories, stark and painfully sharp. You might as well have served it on a pile of dog shit.
It is a work of art, there is no other way to describe it. Noodles of spaghetti arranged in a way that would make baroque masters cry bitter tears of jealousy, sauce splashed over the plate in a way that only seemed more deliberate the longer you looked. Of course, the whole thing was ruined the moment you took a bite, but that was fine, too - there was an intersectionality of aesthetics and function that you strove for with every act of making.
Food you never ate was a waste.
You both ate facing away from each other, the sounds of guzzling echoing pleasingly to your sensitive microphones. It was strange, as you thought about it you understood that you had little care for what happened to the things you made after you had made them, save for that they were used by the people they were designed for.
“I will attempt to find your father,” you say, making a mental note to devote the time to it during the coming night. “I will expand my programs to search for signs, whispers of his whereabouts.”
“Thanks,” Taylor says, almost begrudgingly. Then, “I just realised. Why does the Protectorate know who I am?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You know my name, and who my dad is, and you’re Technomage.”
You don’t know how to make her understand. You take a moment to spiral into thoughts of it, your now wholly outdated brain chip would make a good starting point, there are cybernetics principles from Armsmaster’s power that could be applied here, but the spine of the system would be based on the work coming from Anaheim Degree.
The Zero System worked via an incredibly sophisticated mind-machine interface to transmit information directly to the pilot, with both the miniaturization of Armsmaster’s power and the miniaturization of Gadget Master you should be able to get the Zero System down to something that could fit inside a human skull without too much trouble.
It would be better to replace as much of the brain as possible with a complete cybernetic upgrade, but you could do it without. With your understanding of digital systems granted to you by Computers the programming should be fairly simple to complete and there were many tidbits to glean from Mauler Tech with its incredible database on transferring brainstates.
You could make a brain chip that would make her understand.
It might even be a good idea, though not for Taylor. There were a lot of quote unquote people who deserved to be chipped. Doctor Mother. Director Piggot. Teacher. Kaiser.
If, for some unknown, ghastly reason Taylor couldn’t fulfill her duty of having everyone work together in the end, then you would take it up in her place.
“Fine,” she said mulishly. “Don’t answer me.”
“They don’t know who you are,” you answer her. “I do. I’ve always known, from the moment of my very first breath. You need to remember that I am not, and have never been, Technomage.”
Taylor breathes in very deeply, then very slowly exhales. “Aren’t split personalities just different sides of the same coin?”
“He and I aren’t split, each of us are own own whole soul.” For a moment you desperately long to ask her what she thinks about Greg, but you bury the desire in thoughts of the shame you would feel if she found out whose body you were in, and how that would change how she looked at you. Or, even worse, if she thought that he deserved this body more than you.
What if she wanted you gone, for him ?
“It will make sense,” you continue. “In time. Once you come to experience more of this worm eat worm world.”
“And if it doesn't?” She asks this in an argumentative tone. This is the Taylor you remember, always pushing for her way or no way at all. That fire.
“I don’t know,” you admit. “I want to help you take this fight to the end, but I could do it for you, if you decide you can’t.”
“Right, this fight against an alien god,” something like hackles raise in her voice. “When you haven’t explained what?”
“It’s Scion.”
Taylor makes a fed up noise in the back of her throat. “The greatest hero in history.”
“‘He’ is the Warrior Entity. I understand very well that this is all being presented with no evidence, but you have to also understand the lengths that have been gone to to hide that evidence. Every parahuman has been memory wiped.”
“I’ll believe you when you have even the slightest shred of evidence.”
“I’ll hold you to that,” you say warmly. “The look on your face will be worth it.”
“My face,” she echoes, shifting on the cheap plastic chair at the break room table. “And when do I get to know who you are?”
You say nothing and the silence is crushing. You remember when you spoke to her the first time, wearing Greg’s face, and she treated you like you weren’t worth her time. It made sense to you, because Greg was worthless, and yet -
It could be so that the Greg you both knew, the one you both understood to be real, was out of date information. The real one, the one you were locked in a war for your lives with, had lived a different life, he had somehow gotten powers from a Korean webcomic and lived, lived and grown, changed, become better, become more than the base animal you both knew.
It was possible that Greg was a hero.
It was even possible that he might have been a good person.
He might have been worth something.
And you were killing him.
It would have been sad, if it was true, but it wouldn’t have mattered whose body you were thrust into - no one life, (save for Taylor’s,) was worth more than ending the cycle of entities. It might have been better if you never existed at all, and Taylor had received the powers of the Celestial Forge with you watching as an active observer, providing advice.
That, it seemed, was meant to be the True outcome, you had known from before your fourth breath that your conscious existence was an aberration. Watching Taylor take the powers and slay monsters would have given you such a grossly incandescent joy, especially compared to this miserable life scraping for moments in between whatever it was that Greg was doing with the greatest set of cosmic powers anyone could be afforded.
Yet, this was how it was. The Celestial Forge desired something else for you, had given you this, proclaimed this to be your fate. If you weren’t a better choice than Greg, why were you being made to take over his body and life?
It might not have been by the incredible gulf you once thought, but if you were being put here, being made to walk this earth in his place, you were the better choice.
Why else could it be?
“I’m sorry,” you say, suddenly realising you had been sitting in silence for several awkward minutes. “It’s… who you would perceive me to be is not, has never been, who I am. The person… It’s not about me keeping it a secret, it’s just that it’s not who I am. I thought that they were-”
You sigh.
“I don’t even know, myself, anymore.”
“Is Technomage really that bad?”
You shrug, helpless. “It will be the same in the end. He will go away, and I will remain.”
“You know, he was in the news pretty often. It seemed like he was doing a lot of good.”
The pain of it cuts you like gripping a knife with a blade for a handle, but you use your neural link to search for it. Immediately you are bombarded with Protectorate propaganda, unable to separate fact from fiction in articles that you just know would have been seen to by a thinker specialising in spin doctoring. Technomage featured prominently in photographs with sick children who, if the photo is to be believed to be unedited, seem to be ecstatic with his presence.
Going by the dates of the articles to when you think you had experienced slivers of time, this would have all been done on Dao of Alchemy - a power you had, bitterly, never used.
You search further, there is a dedicated twitter account that documents every time Panacea, the rapist, attends to heal and it is an excellent source of how often Greg would attend. Going by mental calculation it is as often as the pill furnaces would allow.
“I suppose,” you say, but it sounds wrong. The confusing soup of What Is and What is Supposed To Be churns in your mind, resisting your untangling as surely as two liquids would refuse to be pulled apart with bare hands. “But nothing can be done. The Forge wills it.”
“You could be doing that kind of thing, too,” she continues. “Why not make the Tinker medicine you made me for other people? Or make them self-cleaning clothes?”
The idea terrifies you. You would be exposing yourself to enemies you may not be ready to face. It would be safer to hide in your cosmic warehouse until there was no chance of losing. Why would you face the possibility of defeat when you could spend a month waiting for the power of a god?
That was the ideal, the reality was a thousand times worse. The Celestial Forge had been accumulating powers for over four months and you were sitting at thirty four. Thirty four out of hundreds. A cold sweat breaks out over your brow as you calculate the pace at which you would have the complete set.
An even colder sweat erupts when you realised you hadn’t gained a power in over a day and you have no idea how long you have left before Greg returns and ruins everything. You might have hours, you might have another day. You couldn’t waste any more time.
You stand. “I’m sorry, I have to get to work. We’re running out of time. I need to spend the entire night crafting, please let me know if you need anything. If you leave your suit with me I can build a mobility frame into it.”
“Oh,” says Taylor. “Thanks. That’s the kind of stuff you should do for the PRT, too.”
You choose not to respond. You had a long night ahead of you and the first project you had to work on was your woeful computer hardware and to nourish the growth of Driver.
Chapter 149: Killing Hope 7.14
Chapter Text
Taylor,
The worm that walks
I awoke from a surprisingly restful sleep in the cot that Metatron had handcrafted for me. He had seemed put off with the low quality, almost disgusted by the amateurishness of his work, but to me it was the most beautiful, cozy bed I had ever slept in. It made sleeping even here, in this abandoned Home Depot, more comfortable than home had been in years.
When he presented it to me he rambled on about how his medical tech databases and the Feng Shui of a room for sleep could make something better, but I was just grateful to be alive, to be able to sleep anywhere, after yesterday.
Shot on sight still reverberated in my brain like a gong. I understood the necessity, but Gauge had scared me half to death and Metatron, though I appreciated his jumping to my defense, hadn’t made anything better. It was a feeling somewhere between numbing and the coiling, twisting in your guts that meant you had diarrhea to know that I had been this close to dying.
Still, I was alive. The sun was shining through the windows ringing the building and the sounds of construction filtered softly from the far side. He was still working, had been working non-stop all night. You had to admire the dedication, if nothing else.
I stretched, ruffling the luxuriously soft sheets, rolling on the angelically soft mattress - I realised I didn’t have my suit on. There was a moment of heart pounding panic as I shot up into a sit before I realised I wasn’t meant to be wearing it, it was being ‘upgraded’ whatever that meant. I reached up and plucked at the full face stocking, making sure it was still there. It felt unfair that he somehow knew who I was, and even more concerning since it meant that the Protectorate knew who I was and all the talk of grand conspiracies hadn’t made anything better.
I had been forced to face the fact that I had no way of countering any of the assertions made because I didn’t know enough about how the world worked. For all I knew there really was a Cape out there working for the Protectorate whose power was to know when someone gained them and where they were. Dad had told me that when I was out the PRT had paid a brief visit to my hospital bed, how was I to know that wasn’t a followup on knowing when someone at my location had gotten powers?
It could have even been this ‘Cauldron’ doing it, ‘Cauldron’ who apparently controlled everything from behind the scenes.
It sounded so stupid that I simply didn’t want to believe it. Conspiracies were for crazy people, and for people who spent too long wasting time on computers.
It simply wasn’t worth the mental effort, not when I had real, important things going on in my life like finding my dad, and the aftermath of The Simurgh.
Regretfully I got out of bed, put on a spare Home Depot uniform that I had found, and went about using the toilet in the break room. There was no running water in almost the entire city, apparently, and the phones and internet still weren’t working, so there was only one flush on each of these. I wasn’t sure what we were supposed to do once that was all used up, but maybe Metatron could build some kind of tinker toilet to save me the indignity of having my bugs carry out the waste disposal they had evolved to undertake.
The clock on the wall was analog, battery powered, so at least I knew that it was still early morning. With another yawn I shuffled out and through the warehouse toward the noise. The closer I got the more the place had been changed, shelves arranged, or even broken down and remade, in such an strangely aesthetic way that I couldn’t help but gawk. Even just walking through here I felt different, like the space itself was making me better at something.
I’d never taken a single shop class so I wasn’t sure how standard some of these machines were. I thought I recognised a lathe, but with Tinkertech who knew what it actually did. Yet another thing I was agonizingly ignorant about. I was vaguely aware that Tinkers made technology years and years ahead of what was possible, but I had always thought it took them time to engineer specific pieces, and I had always thought this ever since watching an interview from Armsmaster when I was a kid where he implied as much.
Metatron came into view as I rounded a stack of chemicals, his huge frame a blur of movement as he used some kind of handheld tool to take incredibly fine shreds of metal off some floating block the size of a fist as he carved it into shape. I knew there was a kind of Cape who had powers that let them move insanely quick, in our Protectorate team the prime example was Velocity whose whole gimmick was moving faster than the human eye could see. I wasn’t sure how prevalent having those powers were but Metatron was obviously moving at superhuman speed.
“One moment,” he said, startling me. I pretended to be unruffled, my crossing my arms and watching him work. He really might be the best Tinker, I thought, as the piece, whatever it was, took beautiful shape. I couldn’t imagine anyone else working like this, if they could then surely they would be more famous.
Maybe Dragon worked like this, too. I was pretty sure she was the strongest Tinker. Like nine out of ten sure.
Mettron finished working on his piece of widget and plucked it out of its, probably, magnetic suspension. He inspected it inscrutably and set it down. When he spoke his tone was cheerful. “Sorry, good morning. Did you sleep well?”
“Yeah. Real well.” I gestured to the widget. “What’s that?”
“Part of a new suit, fourth revised. None of the ideas I have are good enough. I get started and suddenly I think of something different,” he sighs. “This would be so much easier if I had the facilities to brain transplant myself into a robotic body.”
I frowned.
“But I’ll get there. I finished your suit, too.” He gestured to a hanging rack that reminded me of an altar in a grand cathedral. “I think… I think it’s about as good as I can make it with the materials I have, without sacrificing your original design. I wanted to make one based off the myomers from Augmentation R and D, and build them into an external musculature layer under your spider silk, but I don’t have the right chemicals here to synthesize the correct polymer base-”
Metatron animatedly explained what capabilities he would have liked my suit to have, and how he would have liked to have gone about making them, while I nodded along, understanding nothing. How did he have so much energy? Hadn’t he been awake since the Simurgh fight at least?
Were you still a crackhead if it was tinkertech uppers?
“That’s cool,” I said in a gap in the explanation that sounded like he wanted to install a suit control port into my spine. “Thanks, Metatron.”
“Think nothing of it,” his voice beamed with pride. “Please try it on.”
I approached the suit. It looked both the same, and completely different. The lines of it were more angular, almost gothic, with an impressive, if pointless, level of detail around the edges of the armour plates. They no longer ended in flat plates, the edges were now carved into incredibly fine depictions of scarabs moving the sun across the sky, the colour scheme of dark grey and silver starker. The mandible faceguard was actually somehow less intimidating, and more human. There was also a full royal cape for some reason.
“It looks good,” I said noncommittally.
“I can see you want to know about the cape,” he said excitedly.
I shrugged. “Yeah.”
He clapped, a surprisingly delicate motion for such large hands. “Put it on, put it on!”
I slowly took it off the rack, almost feeling bad about it like I was manhandling some priceless artifact. Actually, I didn’t want to think about how much something like this would cost to buy, it probably was actually priceless. “I’m, uh, going to go over there.”
“Yes, good idea, this place is full of sensors.”
I grimaced, and left. Once I decided I was a safe enough distance to not be surveilled as I undressed I got out of the spare uniform and into the suit as quickly as humanly possible, something far easier than I thought it was going to be.
Something was definitely different. My movements felt, not quite stiffer, but firmer, down to the flexing of my fingers. I could feel more solid parts in contact with my body, but the suit was just as light, lighter even, than before. I hadn’t been wearing my glasses, as my only lenses were inside the suit, and something was definitely different about that.
In tiny writing in the top right corner of my vision the word ‘Driver’ slowly pulsed next to what looked like a stylised battery at full capacity. I guess this was powered armour? I left the spare uniform lying where I had hastily cast it aside and headed back to Metatron who was pacing excitedly.
“Well?” He demanded as soon as I came into view. “What do you think?”
I lifted one edge of the cape and let it fall. “It’s really nice.”
“Watch this, watch this! Cape; stealth. Cape; lace.”
There was a ruffle of cloth as the cape expanded, extending out into a full length hooded cloak, the as he spoke the next phrase somehow retracted back up into itself to form the lace shawl.
“It’s full of memory fibers! Isn’t that really nice? Cape; royal.”
The cape fluffed out once more.
“It’s an elven cloak! A real one! It will hide you from unfriendly eyes and everything.”
He was talking about Tolkein, wasn’t he. I hadn’t thought he would be like Leet, a local, geek themed, F-list villain who, with his friend, dressed up as Mario to throw live turtles at people from go karts, or, most famously, in a display of pathetic nerd rage, beating up prostitutes on their computer TV channel thing.
At least Tolkein was literary.
“Thank you, Metatron.”
“It’s only too bad I couldn’t do better, but I really enjoyed making it.” I had the sudden mental image that his true identity was actually that of a labrador dog that had somehow become a parahuman, and that this was his ‘play fetch’. “Let me run you through all the new functions.”
He did. I’d never wondered before, from how high a fall I could survive, but now I was interested. I didn’t care about the ‘fixed-focus electromagnetic lensing field’, I needed numbers, and ‘any height (within reason)’ wasn’t cutting it.
“I suppose we could test it like this,” Metatron said playfully, and in one smooth movement stepped forward and lifted me under the armpits with both hands, flinging me high into the warehouse.
A high, shrill scream echoed from my lips as I flailed through the air, catching and dying as my body righted itself without my say so. I hit the peak of my involuntary flight and plummeted, and yet somehow I slowed, a faint golden glow emanating from my limbs as I gently touched back down on the concrete.
Metatron clapped.
I bit my tongue, clamping down the scathing response I had cooking. It really was just a moment of ‘fun’, or perhaps even ‘levity’, where there was no danger of anyone being hurt, and though it made my blood sear with anger and I could feel the insects in my range vibrating on their little stilt legs, I simply wasn’t there. “At least we know it works,” I said.
“Of course it works,” he returned, clearly pleased. “Nothing I make can malfunction, now you can have all the fun you want jumping off buildings. And you may need to - I wasn’t able to find your father, unfortunately, but I got into the PRT’s sat connection from this-”
He threw me my own communicator, that they had given me. I gracelessly caught it with numb fingers.
“I was jamming their signal the whole time, by the way. They don’t know where our base is. Irregardless, there’s a few different prison camps he could be at assuming he didn’t leave the city.”
“He wouldn’t leave me here.”
“What a nice opportunity for a test run, then,” Metatron remarked as though finding out if my dad had been crushed to death by a falling house were as unremarkable as a walk to the corner store. “I can’t join you today. I’m sorry, but I have so much to do here. The build and rebuild cycle never ends, it’s great!”
“I’m glad you’re enjoying it.”
“Existence can be fun,” he said with an air of profundity, like he had realised a great truth for the first time. “Perhaps it is good to be alive.”
What an odd thing to say. I became present in the moment once more. I’d forgotten for a moment that he was just a figment of Technomage’s misfiring brain, a thing that thought it was alive - and yet was still more human than most people I had met.
“I should go,” I said, turning away.
“Have fun,” Metatron replied cheerfully. “If you forget how to get back Driver will show you the way.”
The word slowly pulsated in the corner of my vision and a sudden chill crawled down my spine as I realised the double edged sword of what I had been given. Power, yes, at a cost. Surveillance. Constant surveillance by some computer program, in exchange for the power to reach my dad. I had never liked anyone watching over my shoulder, so I wasn’t sure how I was going to tolerate this.
But what else was I to do? Abandon my father?
I left, each step sure and powerful, each one quicker and quicker until I was running, sprinting full tilt, feeling the impossibly compact mechanics move with me, and then for me, letting me run far faster and for far longer than I had ever done before.
I could feel the wind of it fanning my hair, flapping my cape. Surely, if I could run then I could jump. I broke out of the locked automatic doors of the Home Deport by simply running through them, the shards of glass sliding off my suit with all the effect of a blade of grass, and jumped.
I instantly lost control and flailed through the air, clearing what must have been at minimum three meters up and who knows how many across. Once more the suit took control, righting me and gently guiding my descent. I didn’t even have to slow down. It was infuriatingly convenient.
I wondered if he understood what he was doing, making it so I would have to go back to what I was if I ever rejected him. Normal Taylor, weak Taylor, bug controlling, unimportant, powerless Taylor.
Even as I felt as though I was being crushed in a clenched fist, my range seemed larger. Usually something like a tenth of a mile in every direction, it was a small, but perceptible increase, and I greedily used it to pull along any bug fast enough to keep pace with me. It was somewhat surprising how much better a ruined, empty city was for the local bug population. Without humans around to cull them they were allowed to glut on discarded waste and breed, so even a mere two days after the attack there was a notably larger amount.
Soon enough I did have to stop running and bend doubled over, panting, as even the mechanical assistance of the suit couldn’t overcome my almost complete lack of physical conditioning though I barely felt sweaty or even particularly hot. My swarm gathered and I sighed, straightening, maybe I should eat the bugs? Apparently they were pretty good for protein.
I gathered myself and moved on.
Brockton had become a ghost town. I suspected that people had no choice, unless they had stocked up on canned food, because without electricity, without refrigeration, most of their food would spoil within a day or two, and in a house without electricity or running water problems would swiftly compound.
Then, worse, you couldn’t trust your neighbor. I was sure that in times of natural disaster, floods, hurricanes, and so on that you at least had other people to watch your back. With The Simurgh you never knew who was a sleeper agent, but what choice would you have? You had no food, you had no water, and it was only going to be with outside help that you could get either and in Brockton Bay that meant the gangs first and the government second.
If they weren’t able to just leave the city altogether, people would have migrated to one of those options, The Empire holding the Downtown area, ABB holding the Docks and the PRT the bay area itself.
My house was near the Docks, and I hoped to god that dad hadn’t fallen prey to the ABB. There was a government camp at the top of the boardwalk according to Metatron, and I had to hope beyond hope that dad had gotten there. I was coming across the city from the commercial district, cutting through the middle. Straight through The Simurgh’s path of destruction.
It was numbing to see it again. There was no way that Brockton could recover from this reckoning. Most cities hit by Endbringers were completely abandoned, most cities hit by the Simurgh were cluster bombed afterwards and it was entirely good luck that they hadn’t blown us to kingdom come already.
Even with the mobility frame assist in my suit, cross countrying the city still took hours and I was starting to seriously regret leaving without eating or drinking anything. I would just have to put up with it. The further I traveled the more people I noticed, bugs coming into my range already touching them, my swarm moving over them, in greater and greater density. I must have been getting close, but I hadn’t even touched on the emergency assistance camp border.
There was an agitation that was almost palpable, a frisson of desperation perceptible without laying even a single eye on a person. These people were thirsty, they were starving, and they had no idea if they could ever leave. The boiling point was going to be reached and the spillover was going to be a riot that would have been designed to kill as many people as possible.
Even knowing this, I continued, walking into the witches brew that boiled violence, steamed fear and bubbled a continuous, thick slop of malice.
Chapter 150: Killing Hope 7.15
Chapter Text
Taylor,
The worm that walks
“Worm,” the stern faced National Guard officer greeted me, a tall woman with her hand white-knuckled on the handle of her rifle.
She had just called me worm, I wasn’t hearing things. I frowned under my mask. Worm? Really? Could I just claim it was a reference to the Germanic word for dragons? I didn’t really want to be ‘Worm’, it was such an unheroic name. Maybe I should have worn a name tag, like her.
“Owens,” I replied. We stared at each other, neither knowing what to do or say, though I noticed that the new suit had given me another inch or so of height so that I was subtly looking down on her. “They told you I was coming?”
A fat bead of sweat ran down her face. It must have been terribly humid out for her to be sweating like this, or perhaps it was the thick wall of hopelessness permeating the air. I was sure this was the best they could do with what they were able to get in on such short notice, but it was less a processing camp and more something out of a dystopic novel.
Brockton Bay had around three hundred and fifty thousand people, and even if three hundred thousand of them had managed to get away there were still fifty thousand to be vetted and only so few Thinkers to do it. Even here, at the bay, at the edges of the heart of the destruction, there were still hundreds or even thousands of people who needed to be housed and fed. I briefly turned and looked over my shoulder, at the west where the roads led out, both north and south, too, would have to be blocked, barricaded, against Simurgh victims leaving.
The Hope Killer lived up to her name. Everyone in this city, probably including me, was going to die.
What did it matter, then, if I was Worm? We were all going to be food for them in the end.
“We were informed that you were in the area.”
I turned back to her. “Is there anything I could be doing to help?”
“Let me check in with the chain.”
I waited patiently as she did so, taking stock of the huddled masses and the soldiers, my flies salivating over the lack of showers everyone had been having, the encrusted salt on their skin ripe for drinking. Flies had fairly disgusting tastes and it was only with the greatest reluctance did I let any of them feed while I was controlling them. I experienced it all, and even though it was at a poor fidelity of interpretation I still had to feel the fly suck its own digestive fluids back in.
“They said that Armsmaster is enroute,” Owens said stiffly, breaking my train of thought. “If you stick around he wants to meet you.”
“Oh, well that makes sense.” Armsmaster was the head of the Protectorate, so he probably wanted to keep abreast of what capes were in his city and had been tricked by the impressiveness of this suit into thinking that I was someone important. “I’ll meet him.”
He would be able to understand that I wanted to covertly look for my dad. I’d been trying to check with bugs where I could but I hadn’t found a match for his specific pattern of baldness and height, and I didn’t want to put him or myself in danger by announcing who I was looking for.
Owens led me through the camp that was overstrained to bursting and out to the bayside edge. We were right near the north ferry point, or what was left of it. Back in the day dad had wanted to keep this running, and then tried for years to get it started back up again, but now the station was ripped out at the foundations and the ferry itself was planted halfway down the little strip of beach, half of it sticking out of the sand like a carrot top. I could even see the Protectorate headquarters from here, a remodeled oil rig way out in the bay.
On a good day I would have been able to watch Armsmaster drive his distinctive blue motorcycle across the forcefield bridge. Today the headquarters was listing heavily to the side, twisted around. Unusable.
“I have to return to my post,” Owens said as a different officer took her place, a huge man who looked like he could bend iron rebar with his bare hands. He, too, was gripping his rifle as though he were drowning and it was the only thing buoyant enough to save him.
“Hello,” I murmured, inclining my head. His name on his uniform was Stefanovich.
He grunted in response. I didn’t think the suit was this threatening when I saw it, but everyone was acting like I was pointing a gun at their face with my finger resting on the trigger. I wondered if my suit was bulletproof. I thought that maybe I could have survived one from my first suit, if I was shot in the thickest part of the armour, but I had no idea what a Tinker remaking it meant - especially with the eye rolling claims of it being magical.
The silence suited me just fine. I didn’t know what to say, anyway, and just stood with my arms folded, staring out at the water.
I shouldn’t have been surprised at how long it took Armsmaster to arrive, which he had to do by helicopter. There was of course no landing pad for it, so while it hovered as close to the ground as it could, the wind of it churning my hair into a fine mess, he simply jumped and landed in a movement that would have broken both of a normal man’s knees.
I felt my eyebrows raise. His armour wasn’t as gorgeously done as Metatron’s but as he strode toward me he cut a striking figure of deep blue and chrome, the flying V shape of his visor glinting in the late morning sun.
“Worm,” he greeted me in a voice that was tired, yet firm, and despite everything he was still able to give me a smile. He had a nice smile, and a neatly trimmed beard.
“Armsmaster,” I said, resigned. He held out his hand and we shook, his gauntlet huge compared to my slim glove.
For a moment he seemed like he didn’t know what to say. “I’m told you passed the preliminary check,” he settled on relevant work related topics. “There will be more in the future, but for now we’re happy to have your help.”
“What kind of help? I’ve thought about it but I can’t really see how controlling bugs is going to help much.”
“There will be ways, depending,” he said in a way that carried a sort of meaningfulness that I simply didn’t understand. “On what you’re willing to do.”
“I’ve fought before.”
Armsmaster leant back slightly. “No doubt. Along with your partner, Metatron. Where would he be?”
I shrugged. “He said he was going to be busy all day, making a new suit.”
“A Tinker?” Armsmaster asked sharply.
I nodded.
“And your suit?”
I glanced down. It was hard to keep in mind what I looked like from the outside, from only looking from in. I needed to remain cognizant of my fearsomely impressive appearance - Armsmaster was probably thinking I was a bigger deal than I was.
“He made it for me last night.”
“Assault and Battery reported you wearing it yesterday.”
I nodded again. “That was the first version.”
Armsmaster’s mouth twisted. “How long have you known Metatron?”
“Not long,” I said, something coiling in my belly like a snake. Or worms, perhaps. “I only met him just after the Simurgh’s attack.”
This was going to be my chance to tell the heroes about Technomage, like I had planned. I tried to say the words, but they wouldn’t come. It was wrong to betray his trust in me like this, even if he wasn’t real.
“One of our team went missing,” Armsmaster said slowly, undermining my resolution. He knew, of course he knew. They never needed me, or for me to tell them in the first place. “After the Simurgh. A Ward-”
“Technomage,” I said heavily.
I could see him swallow, then lick his dry lips. “I would like for you to tell me everything.”
What else could I do? I told him everything (except the crazy conspiracy nonsense,) from it being my first night out, to meeting Metatron, to fighting Cricket, up until now. Armsmaster seemed stunned, and for a moment he was silent.
“You’re telling the truth,” he sounded certain. “You had us worried there, honestly. We thought things were going to be so much worse than this. Between the name and your look I thought we were going to be dealing with a Jack Slash copycat.”
“Jack Slash?” I said indignantly.
“You should come with me,” Armsmaster took a step forward. “You may be in great danger if you stay with ‘Metatron’. I don’t know what plans it has, but you may have been in its sights for some time. Do you recognise this?”
He got out a phone and after a moment of searching showed me a photograph of a thin figure cast out of solid metal. The resemblance was scarily uncanny. “What is this?”
“Weeks ago, before the attack, the entity now calling itself Metatron emerged. During containment it produced a number of figurines of this nature. You recognise them.”
“It looks like my original suit,” my tongue scraped thickly against the dry roof of my mouth. “But I didn’t have it close to finished a few weeks ago, it wasn’t even finished when I met him. How would he know what it looked like?”
“That,” Armsmaster began, then paused, paused for a full count of ten. “I’m not sure.”
“How did you know it was him? Know that Metatron was him, I mean.”
Armsmaster tilted his head and put the phone away. “Gut feeling. One look at the photo we had of you both from yesterday-”
I wasn’t aware we had been photographed.
“And I could just tell. You all but confirmed it on sight. Even from his earliest work there was a, I suppose, a decadence, if that’s the right word, in how his work was designed.”
“He might be watching,” I blurted out. “Through this suit. There might be cameras.”
“How long has it been?” Armsmaster muttered. “Since then? Has it even been three days? It’s possible, Worm, it’s possible. May I scan you?”
I froze for a moment, then shrugged. “I suppose.”
Armsmaster raised his arm and there was a brief fizz on my tongue, like I had just eaten citric acid. “One moment, let me review this.”
We stood in silence for a minute, then Armsmaster just walked off. A section of his mask slid down to hide his face and after watching in indignant bafflement for a moment I realised by his body language that he was talking to someone. I frowned as he paced a few meters away, what, this was so important he couldn’t include me?
An increasingly sour weight settled upon me as I watched him. Every time. Eventually he came back over, his mouth turned down in a deep frown.
“You should absolutely come with me. There’s definitely a datastream sending and receiving from the suit, and it is absolutely watching. The Celestial Forge, ah, that is, Metatron, is a danger to you. It cannot be trusted, and it cannot be reasoned with.”
“He mentioned the Celestial Forge a few times,” I said, uncrossing my arms. “I think I can change him. I’ve been trying to get him to help you. I think I should keep trying.”
“That would be incredibly ill advised,” Armsmaster responded at a speed that would make a professional whip-cracker green with envy.
I shook my head. “I don’t think I’m in any danger. I know that he hates the Protectorate, but he listens to me. He would never have even agreed to help if it wasn’t for me.”
“I’m sure he listens to you,” Armsmaster said drily. “Right up until he doesn’t. I implore you to reconsider.”
“I’m your only link to getting him back,” I felt all around for my bugs, making sure I knew where everything was. “Without me he might be gone forever.”
“Technomage will be back. This ‘Metatron’,” he said snidely, making air quotes with his fingers. “Has a very limited time span.”
“For how long?” I counter. “With every power he’s out for longer. What happens when he hits a point where Metatron gains a power? He would just stay for longer, and if that keeps happening then you might never get him back.”
Armsmaster made a bitter huffing noise.
“You need me to get him on your side.”
“This isn’t up for discussion. I cannot allow you to ignorantly put yourself in danger, how old are you? Fourteen?”
“I’m fifteen,” I said, scandalised.
“You are a vulnerable person at risk. You must come with me. Worm, I-”
Armsmaster abruptly cut off and turned away from me, cocking his head as though he had heard something. “ Fuck! ” He muttered. “I have to go. Please think about what I’ve said.”
“What’s happening?”
“Riot,” he said shortly, then turned on his heel and marched away.
I couldn’t let him go without me, this was the very thing I had initially started out to help with. I quickly hurried after him, my cape swirling.
Chapter 151: Killing Hope 7.16
Chapter Text
Taylor,
The worm who walks
Inside the chopper it was too loud to talk, almost too loud to hear myself think. I needed to make this work. I glanced over at Armsmaster who was inside his helmet again, and judging from his emphatic hand gestures having a very important conversation.
There was no way of knowing how much of this was getting back to Metatron, and I hoped he was getting nothing at all. I doubted he would be watching in real time given how deeply he was invested in his work, but even so, having someone with the capacity to oversee everything I did and said was hellish. I simply had to ignore it for now, and keep moving forwards.
It occurred to me, as the helicopter whizzed over the city, that I should probably prepare for this riot. My range extended to the city streets, but only barely, and we were going fast enough that bugs were leaving my range before I could pull them close enough. I really needed a way to have them ready without having to pull together a swarm as I went. The folds of my royal cape rustled as I shifted on the bench seating, adjusting my grip on the strap.
I pursed my lips. “Cape… stealth?”
The fabric expanded, the high collar popping up and over my head into a full cloak hood while the body of the cape widened to the point where it could be drawn around me. This was perfect, the increased surface area could hold a much larger number of insects, and though I was a little leery about wearing thousands of bugs inside my clothes I couldn’t deny the practicality.
I wasn’t, however, sold on the idea that my clothes were listening to everything I said - a sentence I never thought could have ever been said to make sense.
We curved around the coastline, tracing the boardwalk area southward. A rising cloud of dust and smoke was growing more visible, darker, though I couldn’t see much of anything through the mess of buildings and hearing the fighting over the rhythmic beat of the blades was out of the question. The chopper slowed, pulling up and dropping as close to the road as it could.
As my range spread out over the ground I began calling in every insect in range, pulling them from nests and garbage heaps, hundreds of thousands of little specks in my mind following every command. Armsmaster stood up and without so much as a word stepped out of the open door and dropped heavily onto a patch of unbroken sidewalk.
My mouth hung open in consternation. What was he trying to say, that I should just stay here? That my help wasn’t worth mentioning? I pulled myself up with the strap, stumbling as the helicopter started to take off again. Now or never.
I closed my eyes and jumped, my position in space clear to me through my three dimensional map of bugs, only opening them again when I felt solid ground beneath my feet. It was going to be so hard giving this suit back.
Armsmaster had already vanished. The man could run. With the receding sound of the helicopter no longer covering the riot I could hear shouts, and the staccato burst of gunfire.
Despite living in Brockton Bay all my life I hadn’t really heard a gun in person.
I steeled myself, willing my bugs to move faster, and set off after him. I could feel the riot long before I laid eyes on it, feel the crush of bodies, the heat of fire, the vibrations of people shouting and smashing. I moved cautiously, peering out from around a wall at the closest thing I had ever seen to hell on earth.
Dozens, maybe hundreds, of people desperately breaking themselves against each other as the hasty tent town of dull canvas burned around them. Gunfire sounded again, I looked up to watch a PRT agent unload his machine gun into the crowd.
I pulled my insects in as a cloud over them, the sound of thousands upon thousands of wings filling the air with a hum that almost covered the screaming. Wasps, mosquitoes, cockroaches, flies - filling the gaps in the crowd, cutting off lines of sight. I caught a flash of blue armour, Armsmaster had his halberd out, holding it like a spear to keep a woman at bay while he held up his free hand and shouted at her.
The woman threw herself forward, almost ravenously, onto the spear point. Armsmaster pivoted, slipping the sharp edge away from her before she could kill herself on it and whirled, the halberd shaft colliding with her knees. The woman went down and thrashed.
I had to do something.
Every bug I could get my mind on changed course, heading for every human eye, mouth and ear. Flies squirmed under eyelids as men screamed in terror while cockroaches dug into nostrils and wasps buzzed menacingly in their ears. The energy of the riot changed in an instant, the fighting being replaced with people beating their faces, crying, blinded, crashing into each other as they staggered around.
I skirted around the edge, dodging a wailing woman who was repeatedly slamming her face with both hands hard enough to make herself bleed. I swallowed something down and kept on, making my way to Armsmaster who was shouting orders at the small holdout of PRT and National Guard.
“What happened here?” he bellowed. “How did this happen?”
“They just attacked,” one who must have been in charge answered. “Came out of nowhere and - who the fuck is that?”
He was pointing directly at me.
“Worm!” Armsmaster rounded on me, pointing at the thrashing, but subdued, crowd. “Is this you?”
“You could thank me.”
He raised his halberd, and for a moment it looked like he was about to hit me, but then the head morphed into a ball and with a sharp puff of air he fired it past me. I turned to see a huge man, a man with significant deformities, to the point where he was far less affected by my insects than most, collapse as he was hit - the ball retracting back to Armsmaster on a fine wire.
“Keep suppressing the crowd,” Armsmaster barked, then turned back to the troops. “Do we have any confoam?”
“None, sir!”
“Right. Supply chopper will be coming, now, finish explaining.”
“It just started out of nowhere,” the agent in charge continued, his face hidden behind a mirrored helmet visor, shouting to make himself heard over the screaming, wailing crowd. “Things were tense, but things are tense everywhere, then somewhere at the back of camp the fight just broke out and spread. We figured out a different group just attacked ours, out of nowhere.”
I looked out over the crowd as he continued. My bugs were slowly thinning as people killed them with almost every strike to their own faces, or crushed them against the road as they mashed their bodies against anything that might give them reprieve. I had already pulled in every reserve I could reach, this wasn’t going to last forever.
Armsmaster tapped the butt of his halberd against the road in a rapid, even beat as he listened to the explanation. “Form a line,” he said once he had heard enough. “And Worm, you’re going to start easing off people one at a time.”
“We should hurry,” I urged. “Some people are already starting to get up, I’m running out of bugs.”
“Quickly then! Start with him,” he pointed his halberd at the deformed man who, despite taking the ball flail to the gut was still crawling toward us, his thick waxy eyelids hiding malevolent, piggish eyes. “Sir, please remain calm.”
Armsmaster walked toward him and I took the bugs I had worming their way into his orifices away, redistributing them amongst the crowd.
“I understand that this is an awful situation-”
The man lurched to his feet and I could finally comprehend just how deformed he was. Nothing about his body was right beyond the basic shape of it, features distorted like a melted wax statue, wearing mismatched, ragged clothing. The man yelled inarticulately, swears and slurs, attempting to tackle Armsmaster who casually put a hand on his shoulder and forced him back down onto the road.
“Please try and calm down. We’re going to have the situation under control.”
“Fuggen slblurgh!” The man screamed, no doubt cursing the Simurgh. “Kill ya, kill ya, kill ya!”
After what looked like a moment’s thought, Armsmaster spoke again, keeping the thrashing man pinned with the kind of languid ease you would pin a cat. “Sir, please. If you don’t calm down you will be restrained further - look, does anyone have any cuffs?”
A PRT agent brought forward a pair of plastic ones and Armsmaster deftly secured them around the man’s wrists before picking him up and handing him off, where he continued to fight and scream bloody murder the entire way. It struck me that he may have been mentally disabled as well as physically, and that maybe he was just scared and confused.
“Worm,” Armsmaster called out, pointing this time to a woman who was battered and bleeding, barely putting up a fight as my bugs suppressed her. I called them off and she just lay there, shivering. “Ma’am. Please get up.”
The woman shook her head and lay where she was, giving a choked, muffled sort of noise as tears and mucus ran down her face in a flood, pooling on the road. She was promptly retrieved by a pair of National Guard who did their best not to let her drag as she drooped, limp, in their grip, the human equivalent of a towel used to clean up spilled milk.
There was only so many people we could clear out of the way.
“Armsmaster,” I called in a tone full of warning. “People are starting to get up, I’m running out of bugs.”
There was a certain percentage, not a large one, of people who were more resistant to the attacks of my bugs. It was strange and I wasn’t sure why. I started diverting bugs from people who I was sure were going to stay down, like the children, but it wasn’t enough and the riot started again.
Armsmaster cursed quietly as the group began to fruitlessly attack each other, his halberd poised, his gauntleted fingers tapping against it as he curled and uncurled them. He gave a wordless shout of frustration and turned to point at the troopers. “Wait for the chopper, then foam everything. Restrain who you can, but focus on protecting who we have.”
He turned back and bounded into the crowd, towering over all, brandishing his halberd in both hands. The axe-and-spear head changed, the metal flowing and reforming into a set on tines that, when he lay them onto the closest person, let off a loud electric zak! and the ugly woman who was beating a teenage boy with her gnarled fist jerked and fell to the ground, where she gasped and flopped like a fish. Armsmaster gripped the bleeding, crying boy by the upper arm and turned him around so he was facing the defensive line, gave him a push to get him moving, then himself moved into the melee.
Some people tried to attack him, but they may as well have been trying to punch a metal statue and were quickly tasered into compliance. It was incredible to watch him fight. It was like watching one of the superhero movies where every move they made was choreographed to awesome precision.
The first woman was starting to get back up, the effects of the massive shock wearing off in the face of sheer adrenaline. I wasn’t sure how much I could do as I cautiously approached, but after watching that I could hardly stop helping.
“Ma’am,” I said as firmly as I could, and though she had been looking more or less straight at me she jerked in surprise as though seeing me for the first time. What was a hero supposed to say in this situation? “I’m here to help you.”
The woman screeched and lunged at me, giving me a much closer look at her wonky eyes and mouth full of twisted, chipped teeth than I would have ever liked. From her prone position she couldn’t get very far and only managed to punch my shin which, through the bug shell armour and dragline web weave, I barely felt. I flinched and kicked at her, knocking her back onto the road. I needed some way to restrain people.
I knew I should have bought those zip ties when I was getting my costume ready. I’d been meaning to go and do that, before I went out for the first time, but the Endbringer attack ruined that plan.
“Stop fighting!” I hissed at her. I needed some kind of rope, maybe. I directed some of my remaining faster bugs to scout out the burning remains of the tents, but I was down a lot of my stock and what I had left wasn’t terribly mobile, like spiders… That was an idea. It was going to be something I would have to pre-prepare, rope made from the same dragline my suit was. I figured it should be good enough, and I could make huge amounts of it.
“Nasty bug slut!” The ugly woman cried, trying to stand and wobbling on the knee that Armsmaster had swept, her voice lisping through her teeth. “You’re on his side, aren't you!”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
“All of you are on his side, you shrewish little skank. I’ll kill you all!” She lurched at me again, but I jumped out of the way and she toppled with a cry of pain on her injured leg. She wailed horribly as I set a few more bugs on her, stinging her cheeks with two bees. If I could have her face swell up and obscure her sight then she would be far less of a problem.
I looked back out into the fray where Armsmaster was still fighting, dancing through the crowd, fighting among hundreds of people at once. People were trying to flee, and some even escaped despite others best efforts to attack them. The noise was deafening and sickening, the sounds of pointless violence, roaring and screaming and bawling and crashing. I tried to ignore when my bugs settled on a dead body, of which there were many.
I needed more bugs. I could barely contribute like this. I turned and ran, my range moving to cover new bugs. I moved, running at heroic speeds, slipping through rubble and buildings, until the riot was half within and called every bug I could spare to myself.
I moved in a concentric arc, the area the riot covered was huge. The hundreds of people the PRT had tried to round up had now spread out, fighting pointlessly amongst themselves as the fear and desperation grew too much - or could there be something more sinister at play? I knew there were capes like Heartbreaker who could control you, make you do terrible things.
My skin prickled a little as my stocks of bugs grew swollen, clinging to my suit and cape like I was some kind of human hive, but only a little. The air was thick with them around me, flies and hornets and cockroaches, no see ums and mosquitoes, everything I could reach all piling into my cloak, filling the hood and every fold, walking all over each other.
Through my swarm I could feel the temperature rising, which I would have to manage to keep my swarm alive, but inside my suit I was as cool and comfortable as ever.
With the active part of my swarm I scouted as best I could, following the topographical mental map as my bugs came into contact with surfaces, their blotchy vision allowing me to distinguish between light and dark.
A dragonfly suddenly came into contact with someone on a rooftop, and I had it latch on. A cape, surely. A flyer? I hoped it was one of New Wave, a hope that was quickly put to rest as a fly tried to land on their face, and instead of warm skin came into contact with something smooth and hard - a mask. My fly crawled, and it couldn’t be Dauntless because his mask didn’t have teeth. I had no idea on who it could be, but I didn’t think it was anyone good.
The dragonfly and fly suddenly became somewhere else, two versions of them existing simultaneously, then the originals vanished from my range and the duplicates lasted a few seconds before vanishing too.
That seemed like a good lead to follow, if nothing else I could let Armsmaster know who this new cape was. I headed through in the direction that the copies had appeared.
Chapter 152: Killing Hope 7.17
Chapter Text
Taylor
The Worm who walks
I moved slowly to preserve my swarm. Pushing the roiling mass too hard could result in their deaths, and their being living creatures meant I would have to treat them somewhat like a general treated their army. True, they were extremely disposable troops, but I could theoretically thin a population out if I abused them, and then I would have to rely on their natural breeding patterns.
Instead I could maximise my most useful bugs, the fastest and strongest, by forcing them to feed and breed. It would be an interesting experiment if I survived long enough.
I was still going in the direction I felt the duplicating, vanishing bugs, and occasionally I saw people running, but between my forewarning and some luck they never saw me. There were also corpses. I had bent down to inspect one and found their throat slit, their already deformed features twisted in pain.
There were a lot of deformed people running around, and I was sure it was because of a parahuman. Someone was disfiguring these people, purposefully, maliciously. I had never heard of such a villain before, although as I thought about it I vaguely recalled a member of the Slaughterhouse Nine who turned people into monsters that attacked everyone. They were dead, though, and had been for years.
My swarm shivered with my dread, but I pushed on. I found more corpses, most of non-disfigured people, dead from a clear combination of having been beaten to a bloody mess, or stabbed, or what looked like blown up with a bomb. Why did the human body have to hold so much blood, and why did I have to see it? It was one of those strange things where you were vaguely aware about the state of the world, how crime and murders were going up every year and had been since the eighties, but you were just sheltered enough to have never really seen it in person.
My stomach clenched and roiled as cold sweats broke out all over my body, and I resisted the urge to escape back to Armsmaster. I would go back when I had the full story about what was going on here, it was important information and he had to know. What good was it having this power, this suit, if I couldn’t use it to do one good thing?
I pulled my swarm a little tighter around me, the afternoon sun darkening under the sheer physical mass, almost like a self hug, before letting everything not directly on my person disperse evenly throughout my range. If I was going to be getting closer to the madness then I would be far too obvious of a target with a great dirty, loud smudge of bugs following me around.
I upped my pace, slinking close to walls as fast as my swarm could reasonably follow, searching constantly for the source of the killings.
If there was one thing bugs were very good at it was detecting vibrations, so when explosions started going off and I couldn’t hear them with my own ears they were being picked up by the delicate sensory organs of a hundred different species, which, even if it was still with the blurry, incomplete interpretation I was getting was enough to give me a direction.
The explosions became more pronounced, going off every so often in bursts of what felt like five or more at once, and there came a point where my bugs could go no further. They were dying around a certain radius, and the muted feeling I was getting was that they were burning to death, and indeed there was a plume of smoke visible as I came around out of the slew of apartment buildings and into a mix of suburbian houses and shops.
While I couldn’t feel it myself I could hear the roar of heat and flame as it boiled the air. I needed a better vantage point. I looked up, dubiously, at the level of rooves. I was pretty sure I could do it. Pretty sure. I took a great breath and started running, picking up speed - I jumped, and crashed my ribcage directly into the eave of one of the houses, my hands scrabbling on the tin roof as I bounced off and fell, gently, to the grass.
I rolled, trying to cry silently as I clutched at my torso, until I realised that I wasn’t hurt at all. Dusting myself off I stood back up and the only thing I had injured were the bugs that had been crushed between my body and the gutter, then the ones I had rolled over. I was starting to feel real invincible in this thing - another bitter chain.
Time for take two. I made the jump this time, skidding on the roof a little before finding my footing and picking my way across. The noise was increasingly deafening, with the roar of what I thought was only fire now mingling with a deep, ravenously malicious bellow of some huge monster, a sound that rattled the windows in their panes and echoed in my ears long after it had finished. A series of bomb blasts rattled off. With a sweat that had nothing to do with temperature raising on the back of my neck I took a running start and cleared the street to the shop roof opposite. There was a fire escape leading up to a second storey one more row over, which I crashed into in a spray of centipedes before scaling to survey the scene.
I crouched on the edge of the building and looked on as a huge silvery monster, iconically draconic to the point where it could only be Lung, raged as it fought something . A man perhaps, whatever it was it kept appearing and reappearing, or making copies of itself, which were brutally torn apart, or burnt, but many of them exploded, each hit making Lung flinch.
Dozens of the same man suddenly dropped from the sky above him, each one catching fire before they could even get close, but their bodies each blew up in with a sharp bang and a smaller burst of fire.
I caught movement elsewhere and looked up. Even more copies lined the rooftops, each unloading bullet after endless bullet from a compact submachine gun into Lung before vanishing in a puff of dust, only to be replaced by another who took up the fight.
Some were close enough for me to see. A man in a black bodysuit, a red and green asian demon mask covering his face.
Oni Lee, another famous supervillain around here - and famously Lung’s underling.
Why were they fighting each other?
Neither seemed to be gaining any ground. I knew Lung got stronger and stronger as he fought, having once beaten the entire Protectorate roster by himself, but it didn’t look like it was doing him any good here. There were so many copies of Oni Lee, appearing and disappearing so quickly, that Lung couldn’t keep up.
I could feel my mouth hanging slack in awe as it dawned on me just how outgunned I was in the world of capes. Lung and Oni Lee weren’t even big time crooks, and here I was, some nobody, trying to fit in with the worthless power to control bugs. This wasn’t a fight I could influence even slightly.
I almost fell off the edge of the roof as Oni Lee appeared barely two meters away. He was breathing hard, panting like he had just sprinted a marathon, bent full over hands on his knees sucking in air like an industrial vacuum cleaner. He straightened up, hands on his lower back, and let out a long drawn out sigh before turning around, his eyes sliding right over me, to stare out at his boss.
I didn’t move. I didn’t even breathe.
Oni Lee muttered something in Japanese and wiped his sweat drenched hairline with the back of his glove, then vanished in a puff of dust that blew straight into my face. I whipped back to look at Lung, but Oni Lee didn’t re-engage, leaving his boss to scream at the sky in the middle of a burning street, his huge, sliver scaled jaws stretched wide, a jet of white hot flame erupting in a stream.
He raged a little, then in a strangely human movement rubbed at his hugely elongated neck with an equally huge clawed hand, scales sliding over scales. He turned away, swiping angrily as he lumbered off at the nearby, completely burnt out remains of a house with his tail in a big spray of burning wood that, like a spray of shotgun pellets, peppered nearby buildings, spreading the conflagration.
I wondered if the city was going to burn down. This is what I should be telling Armsmaster, he would know how to fix this. There had to be a cape who could conjure tons of water for something like this.
I let out the breath I had been holding and watched the city I grew up in and loved burn.
Getting back to the camp hadn’t been smooth, often I had to change directions to avoid people, the formerly dead city now comparatively teeming as the loosely held order broke down. Halfway there I remembered that I had the PRT communicator sitting in a compartment on my lower back. I’d forgotten about it with all the stuff going on around Metatron, and just wanting to get out of that warehouse as quickly as humanly possible.
It was a simple enough device, even for me to figure out. It was closer to a walkie talkie than a phone, it had no contacts list and didn’t ring, instead somehow putting me directly on the line with someone even though Metatron has said all the phone service was out. I was quickly routed through to Armsmaster.
“Worm!” I could hardly hear him over the all consuming, rhythmic thumping of a helicopter in the background. “Where did you run off to?”
I bit my tongue at the accusation, stopping myself from firing back by a hair. “I was tracking the source of the riot. Found something you might think is interesting.”
“Could you care to elaborate?”
“Lung and Oni Lee were trying to kill each other, now the city is on fire,” I craned my neck around to look in the direction of the thick grey column now rising into the sky. “The smoke is getting worse.”
“Give me a moment. Dr-” The audio cut off as he began to say something else, to someone else, ignoring me. I continued to run, the communicator wedged between my shoulder and my ear to free up my hands, my incredible cloak flapping as I moved. I was sure, from Metatron’s reference to it hiding me from unfriendly eyes, a feature of the Elven made cloaks from Lord of the Rings, that whatever tinker technology he had made it with was built to mimic that function, hence Oni Lee just straight up not seeing me.
It was yet another thing that, should I convert him to the good guys, would be incredibly useful.
I almost tripped as the communicator suddenly roared with the sound of chopper blades. “What’s your location?” I was sure this is what Armsmaster asked. “We’ll pick you up.”
I gave him the street names. “I’ll be on the roof of the Y. B’s Patio and Lawn. Just hover, I’ll jump.”
“Copy. Give us five.”
This time, rather than embarrass myself with trying to jump heroically onto the roof, I ascended the fire escape stairs as far as they would take me and climbed the rest, taking the time to gather my swarm in close.
True to his word, Armsmaster appeared not a few minutes later, waving his arm out of the open door of the helicopter as it slowly lowered itself as close as it could get. If I missed this jump, I swear to god…
I took the leap at a run and majestically landed in an effortless crouch inside. I had hoped to bring my swarm inside with me but I hadn’t thought about the sheer amount of wind force the propellers were generating, it had scattered everything I had flying and forced everything else down onto concrete and brick, leaving me with only what I had on my person.
Armsmaster was looking at me with an especially unreadable expression, even if you factored into it that you could only see from his upper lip down. “Good to see you’re not hurt,” he eventually said, after the doors were slid shut by a PRT trooper and the noise became conversationally more manageable.
“You too.”
“What are we going to do about Lung and Oni Lee? About the fire?”
Armsmaster paused again, and I recognised it as the kind of pause someone gave as they were thinking about how to word something that they thought you did not want to hear.
“You’re not doing anything.”
“We have received reports,” his voice was clipped, short, but he wasn’t focusing on me. He was looking out of the window. I followed his gaze as the chopper slowly rounded its turn, giving us a clear view of the city skyline and the multiple plumes of smoke now clearly visible in the afternoon sun. “Of what we have both dealt with happening all at once, all over the city. You’re not the only one to report a sighting of Lung, either.”
“Then… what do we do?”
“Our best.” He gave me a bitter smile. “I know that this is probably the worst introduction you could possibly have to the cape scene, but, welcome to the aftermath of the Simurgh.”
I looked out the window once more, thinking of what happened to other cities she had attacked, understanding their nature and her name properly for the first time.
Even with years gone by there were cities still being crushed firmly in the fist of the Hopekiller.
Chapter 153: Killing hope 7.18
Chapter Text
Taylor
The Worm who walks
People had often debated who was the strongest parahuman alive and, aside from Scion, it was generally agreed that, even counting every other country, America’s Triumvirate won by a country mile. The exact order of who was stronger between the three differed somewhat, with Legend or Alexandria taking second and third place depending on who you asked, but Eidolon was always on top.
If you had ever told me I was going to meet even a single one of them I would have laughed at you, and yet, even so, all three of them floated before us. Each had a level of presence that was hard to explain, and it went beyond mere power. It was knowing you were the best, and having that fact shown to you again and again over the course of decades. It was charisma, naked and unashamed.
Each of them was clean and strong even after the work they had assuredly been putting in for the past three days, flying head and shoulders above everyone else, each of their aesthetics proving supporting contrast for the other. Legend in clean white emblazing with shocking electric blue laser fire. Alexandria in stoic shades of grey, the tower of her namesake displayed proudly on her chest. Eidolon in mysterious greens and blues, his power literally emanating out from him in a constant glow from under his hooded, sleeved cloak.
I stood amongst a crowd that avoided me, dark as a forgotten, moldering corner, and crawling with just as many bugs.
They were giving a speech about S-Class threats, and the dangers thereof, speaking in clear, confident, carrying tones in turn, almost rehearsed.
In the same way my illusion of power had been handed down to me, they had earned the real thing with their own hands.
I listened numbly as they explained that things weren’t good, that this ‘Echidna’ created by The Simurgh was spewing out murderous, twisted clones of everyone it could get its hands on, which was confirmed to include clones of parahumans - like Lung.
‘This is why society tolerates us,’ Legend was saying, as though capes were a necessary evil that even the best of us reviled. Like capes were somehow dirty, or unclean. Like capes were needed to kill other capes, and that was the only reason why we weren’t all rounded up and shot.
I was sure he meant something else by it, but it didn’t come across that way to me. Was he a self hating cape?
Chillingly, no one contradicted him.
This wasn’t going to be action in defence of my city. This was painting the streets red in the act of cleaning up.
“If,” Eidolon concluded with utmost solemnity. “The city isn’t condemned first.”
I stood alone, awkwardly watching my fellow capes as plans were drawn up, noting faces I had only ever seen on the television, now ostensibly my peers. Chevalier in his gleaming armour, Rime in blue and furs, Myrddin with his robe and wizard hat, Cinereal in contrasting ash grey and blood red -
“Hey, Stickbug!”
A nasal, yet feminine, voice shouted as someone approached the zone around me, the wide berth my fearsome, disgusting appearance brought. I slowly turned to see a short woman in brown armour, a distinct, eared helmet covering her head, a sword strapped to her waist.
“Damn, you must be some real disgusting freak,” Mouse Protector cajoled, holding out her hand, looking pointedly around at the cleared space my existence made. “I’ve never heard of you though.”
I’d heard of Mouse Protector, but not much. She’d been around for a long time, I was sure I remembered this, and had a rep as a kind of gag hero, but never really made waves. I shook her hand. “Mouse Protector.”
My bugs trembled nervously as I spoke, the accidental stridulation producing a surprisingly authoritative weight as it sharpened the edges of my soft, teenagerish voice.
“Fuck, ain’t you scary. Where’re you from, Stickbug?”
“Here,” I stridulated again, the coat of bugs inside my cloak, coating my suit, undulated as they lent their weight to my word.
Mouse Protector laughed, seemingly completely at ease. “I feel so bad for Armsy, Brockton always has the worst villains.”
“I’m a good guy.”
“You look like you murder kids.”
I forced myself to stay still. If I reacted I would just give her ammunition. I wasn’t surprised, of course, that even in the world of heroes they still had their bullies. It was why I never wanted to join the Wards and continue the absolute bullshit drama that was highschool. I turned on my heel and walked, cloak shifting, grinding my teeth. I didn’t have to put up with this, I wasn’t weak little Taylor Hebert any longer. I was Worm and I was going to walk away.
“Hey, where’re you going?” Mouse Protector chased after me, following the path of my wake as other capes stepped aside for me to move through the crowd. “I’m sure you don’t actually murder kids. Hey, come back.”
Suddenly she was in front of me. I flinched, bugs rearing in a swarm around me. I employed my newfound stridulation tactic, my whole swarm grinding together at once, everything in my range coming to my defence through song. “Does this make you feel big, Mouse Protector?”
“Touchy, huh? Didn’t you say you were a good guy?”
The pointed snout of her helmet, styled to resemble the nose of a mouse, whiskers and all, was pointed fearlessly up at me as I loomed over her all storm dark and silver. “Aren’t you a hero?”
“The best,” she quipped back without losing stride. “Burrowing into the pantry of evil, feasting on the cheese of their defeat, Mouse Protector enters the scene.”
She wasn’t taking me seriously. I turned to walk away again but once more she was in my face. “I would be ashamed to call myself a hero if I were you.”
“Weird flex, but ok,” she said and I could practically hear the smarm. “I just wanna know what your deal is, big scary thing like you just standing there all alone.”
“My deal ,” I said through gritted teeth, stridulating hard. “Is that I’m here to help my city.”
“When you woke up this morning and looked at your suit, did you ever think to yourself, ‘damn, why the hell did I pay so much money to make myself look like I murder kids’?”
“It was free.”
She took a breath to speak, but paused, presumably to think of something else stupid to say, and in that pause Armsmaster called out to us, jogging through the crowd many of whom were staring at me. Perhaps I had been stridulating too hard.
“Mouse Protector,” he hissed as he got near. “What are you doing? Leave Worm alone.”
Mouse Protector looked at him, then at me, before speaking in a tone of total and absolute bemusement. “You called yourself Worm?”
I didn’t deign to answer.
“That’s hilarious. I thought you were going to tell me you had some shitty, pretentious name to go with your suit, like Arachne, or Queen, or Monarch - y’know what, Worm, you’re alright.”
And here it was, the walk back now that the authority was present in the room. A walk back that would vanish the second Armsmaster left. I didn’t know if I could accurately express in words the depth of my hatred for bullies, but I had resisted giving Emma crabs this long and so too would I resist stinging Mouse Protector’s tongue with a bee. I still didn’t answer her, instead turning to Armsmaster. “What can I do to help?”
What little I could see of his face appeared troubled and uncomfortable. “You have to be prepared to kill. These clones are not human, and they will kill you and everyone they come across. They were the cause of the rioting, we have some in custody. It’s… well.”
“I understand,” I said, stridulating my understanding. “I can do it.”
“If you’re sure. You don’t have to.”
“I’m sure,” I confirmed. “This is why I went out, to help with things like this.”
Armsmaster nodded shortly. “You should come with me, we have the Wards from all over in a separate group.”
“No,” I said. “No, thank you. I’m fine.”
He had to understand that I would not fit in. I was sure he was doing what he thought was best, but this would not end up how he was hoping with me joining the kiddie Protectorate. I was fine with joining properly once I was eighteen, or close enough to that they wouldn’t bother debuting me as a Ward, but not when I had three more years of school drama to endure.
“If you’re sure. Offer’s always open, just come and ask. I’m sorry, I have to go now. We’ll be handing out armbands soon, then we’ll start the operation.” He gave me a tight smile. “Good luck.”
“You too.”
Armsmaster hurried away, leaving me once more with Mouse Protector. I appreciated the effort, but it was clear he was just another ineffectual figure who didn’t want to go out of his way to help.
“You’re just a kid.”
I glanced at her. She was standing with her head cocked, gloved fingers twizzling a fake whisker.
“You’re just a proper child. I thought you were older. This is hilarious.” She reached forward and clapped me on the shoulder, non-fatally crushing several wasps and decimating one out of ten flies. “I had you all wrong. Fear not, my chillen’, for I, Mouse Protector, defender of innocence, am here.”
“Changed your tune?” I muttered dryly.
“The edgy ones are always the most fun.”
I looked down at myself, coated head to toe under my dark cloak in a crawling coat of chitin. Even my original suit had been kind of edgy, let alone this. I might have even been mistaken for a villain, then. “The suit was a gift, I didn’t make it this, well, villainous looking.”
“Free is free,” Mouse Protector shrugged. “But you make it worm.”
I got the sense that she was raising her eyebrows suggestively at this utter dad joke. “I didn’t even choose the name,” I said quietly. “Initially I said ‘Swarm’, but someone misheard.”
“Aren’t you just a comedy of errors. This is for the best, trust me. Now you get to be a joke hero in the most comedic way possible. We should be workshopping bug puns, maybe a catchphrase?” Mouse Protector twirled a hand theatrically. “Maybe, ‘It’s Worming time’,? And then after you can say, ‘get wormed on,’ as you worm all over them. ‘Stand back, I’m beginning to worm!’? We’ll work on that.”
I genuinely didn’t know what to say.
I slipped the grey wristband on, something that Dragon had made for Endbringer battles, and with one having just been fought they were still easily available. Mine had a faint brown stain on the band. I ignored that and pressed the communicator button, speaking clearly, “Worm.”
It gave me the option to confirm, and I did so. The little digital clock on the wristband screen told me it was five o’clock, and there wasn’t much hope that this would be resolved quickly, or cleanly. We were expected to be able to pull an all-nighter with this one, and I found myself wishing for one of those tinkertech stimulant drinks Metatron made.
Drugs were bad, but not being able to feel tired would come in real handy, real soon.
I swallowed, mouth dry, and my coat of bugs shivered. I’d never hurt anyone on purpose before, let alone killed anyone, not that these twisted simulacra of humanity were people - we had been assured of this. My bugs had the capacity to kill someone, even someone who wasn’t allergic to it would die after enough stings, or spider bites. When I was doing some preliminary research I had found that someone could theoretically tolerate on average roughly a thousand wasp stings, depending on species, before death on weight of venom. The source wasn’t clear on if that was instant death or not.
I was somewhat sceptical, I didn’t think it would take anywhere near that many. Or at least, nowhere near that many to completely incapacitate someone from pain and swelling. I felt I could reliably put someone down with as few as six to ten wasp stings to their eyes, nose, mouth and ears. I’d been stung a few times as a child, and even on the arm or leg it was excruciating.
The clones, and I now understood that the ugly people in that riot were Echidna clones, were noticeably more resilient than normal people, which meant I couldn’t rely on that metric. It might take six stings, it might take sixteen, it might take sixty. It might vary clone by clone. I simply didn’t know.
“I’m sure you’re thinking normal, human thoughts,” Mouse Protector said in a tone of glib freeness as she adjusted her own wristband around her vambrace. “But you just look so damn menacing.”
“I can’t help that,” I replied pointedly.
“We need a tin of paint. Something pastel, but not pink. Lavender?”
I shrugged. “I have an ugly power. I should have an ugly look.”
I could see Mouse Protector visibly cringe. “Guurrrrll,” she said, but then didn’t elaborate.
I shrugged again. “I made my own suit originally. It wasn’t this dark, but it was still pretty edgy. It’s hard to weave something out of spider web and chitin that doesn’t look creepy.”
“Even that would be better than bug carpet.”
I looked down at myself and the thick coat of them I had covered my suit with. What else was I supposed to do? “This is just for convenience. When I was on the helicopter with Armsmaster we were going too quickly for me to build up a swarm. It’s just easier if they’re on me.”
Mouse Protector just shook her head, then was suddenly in a different spot off to my left. “Come on, you shouldn’t be hanging by yourself. I’ll introduce you.”
“I’m fine.”
“I wasn’t asking.” She seized me by the hand and tried to drag me in a direction, but whatever movement assist in my suit Metatron had made held fast and I could not be moved. “Come on, this whole game is so much easier if you have community.”
I set my jaw, but found myself relenting, letting myself be pulled along. I supposed I could at least see what she meant. Mouse Protector had been around for just as long as Armsmaster had, she must know what she was talking about to at least some extent.
“I’m not interested in joining the Wards,” I told her. “I know you were one.”
“Join whoever you like,” was her flippant reply. “You can even be a villain, but I don’t recommend it, or else you’ll have to fight me!”
I jerked my hand out of her grip and she vanished, appearing behind me, pushing into my shoulder blades and crushing a handful of my bugs I had stored there. “You’re really annoying,” I told her as I let myself be pushed, ignoring the confused, wary looks we were getting from the grouped capes.
She laughed. “Good!”
I could now see where she was guiding me, and it was unfortunately a group I recognised as Wards. I was being put at the kiddy table. I recognised most of them, prominently a boy called Weld who looked like he was made of solid metal - there had been something called a ‘meem’ made about him after he’d been on some stupid TV drama.
Floating next to him were three people I recognised from New Wave, a local team. Laserdream and Shielder, siblings, and their cousin, Glory Girl - all unmasked. Two of the Brockton Wards were there, Gallant and Vista, and some other out of towners. A girl in a purple bodysuit carrying a big crossbow and a hugely muscular, ludicrously muscular, obscenely muscular boy in blue argyle spandex.
Everyone turned to look at me as we approached, and almost in unison their body language reacted to the image Metatron had given me. It was less than fear, a sort of instinctive submission you give to someone you perceive to be higher in status to you - a slight hunching of the shoulders, a dropping of the chin, a widening of the eyes. I knew it well, having lived the past year and a half wearing that stance.
It was, maybe, a little gratifying.
Mouse Protector stopped pushing and took her hands off my back. I waited for her to come out and introduce me but when I looked around for her she had vanished. I decided that I didn’t like Mouse Protector.
They were all still watching me, saying nothing, so I couldn’t just leave now that it looked like I’d just walked up. I gathered myself and waved. “Hey.”
Vista looked at Gallant, who looked at Glory Girl, who looked at Laserdream. The huge boy looked at Shielder, who looked at the girl in purple, who looked at Laserdream. Laserdream looked somewhat put out.
She was a tall girl, conventionally pretty in a blonde sort of way, and her suit mimicked the white and laser fire look of Legend’s, only in reds instead of blues. She floated toward me and mimicked my greeting, a wave and a short, “hey.”
I decided that I really hated Mouse Protector.
“Laserdream, right? I’m Worm.”
“That’s cool, um… We’re heroes.”
“Me too. I know I don’t look like it,” I lifted my arm to the side to open up my cloak and show more of my suit, which I probably shouldn’t have done given how many bugs I had inside of the thing. “But I am.”
“Oh, ok. Nice to meet you?” She attempted a smile, looked over her shoulder at the group for help, received none, and turned back to me. “Worm.”
I wanted to slap Metatron. I had no idea what he looked like but I got the impression he would have a very round, slappable face. “Sorry,” I said. “I’m very new. This is my third day.”
“You fought the Simurgh on your first day?”
I shook my head to stave off any misunderstandings that her incredulous expression threatened to assume. “No. I didn’t. I was too far away. Did you? Fight her, I mean?”
“Neither,” Laserdream’s perfectly coiffed hair, trapped under her red jeweled headband, rippled as she shook her head. I hadn’t washed my hair in days, it was going to be a disgustingly greasy mess. “Well, wanna hang with us?”
I nodded. “I don’t know anyone here.”
“That makes sense,” Laserdream drifted in the air so that she wasn’t in between me and everyone else, then slowly flew back toward the group for me to follow, pointing them out for me in turn. “That’s Shielder,” she motioned to her little brother with the bright blue dyed hair. “Glory Girl… you’re local, right? Right. So you probably just don’t know Flechette, she’s from New York-”
The girl in purple.
“And Browbeat-”
The boy who put bodybuilders to green shame.
“But he’s a Ward here, too. Everyone, this is Worm? Worm. She’s a hero, too.”
“Nice to meet you,” I said clearly. “I know I look edgy, but only my power is bad.”
“What can you do?” Piped up Glory Girl, another attractive flying blonde; one who was also brave enough to have a skirt as part of her outfit, a website devoted to the voyeuristic photography under which I had been cursed with the knowledge of by Greg last year. He’d dropped out of school or something, maybe moved? Who cares. Why did I have to get reminded that he existed? What a stupid, ignorant association for my brain to make in this moment.
“I control bugs,” I called some of the nicer bugs I had nearby, or on hand, to fly in rough formation in front of me. Ladybugs, butterflies, that sort of thing. Maybe I should have them just sit on the outside of my cloak to at least make me look less stupidly evil.
“But that’s not bad at all.” She said this in a sort of know-it-all tone that I greatly misliked. “And I don’t agree with the idea that some powers are evil.”
“I meant bad as in weak.”
“Oh, well, maybe you just need practice. If you put yourself down you limit your ability to think ahead.”
She was smiling, but I found that I was leery about her. “Thanks for the advice,” I said politely.
“No worries,” she returned brightly, or as brightly as it was possible to in a situation like this where smoke from our burning city loomed over the city line as we waited for the Protectorate Thinkers to give us an action plan. “You’re doing a good thing by coming today.”
I inhaled deeply through my nose. I suppose I was, wasn’t I? “Thanks. I felt I had to. It was the right thing to do.”
There was a general murmur of agreement from the group. I suppose this was what the ‘in-group’ was like, I remembered it, vaguely, from that hazy time before my own in-group turned on me.
“How long have you been in the game?” The metal boy, Weld, asked politely in a thick Boston accent. It was strange to look at him. He was made entirely out of polished metal, eyes, hair, tongue - all of him, and it all moved just as flesh moved, crinkling and smoothing just as easily, metal musculature flowing under iron skin. He was handsome despite this, tall and buff, with a square jaw that was accented by lines of gold.
“Just a few days. I haven’t done much, I helped Armsmaster a little bit with a riot.”
Weld pursed his lips and whistled, the sound strangely sibilant and musical, like he was blowing through a pipe organ. “That’s pretty big to start out on. How do you do that with bugs?”
A swirl of wasps and flies joined my dance of colour bugs for a brief moment before retreating back into the safety of my cloak. “Going for the eyes, mostly.”
Weld blinked, the thin metallic flesh of his eyelids sliding and folding just as well as the real thing, the silvery lashes meshing and unmeshing. “Hardcore.”
“I don’t have many options here. It’s bugs, or nothing.” I shrugged, suddenly very aware that I was being made to justify my existence to these people.
“It’s not so bad,” Gallant, a Tinker, and Armsmaster’s protege, probably, spoke up. He didn’t get to explain why this wasn’t so bad as a loud beep issued from our wristbands in unison. It had begun.
“Please join your group,” the wristband beseeched, a little yellow directional arrow appearing on the screen and strobing gently. I looked back up at everyone who were all also looking around nervously. We may have been going into battle but at least I was getting out of this awkward situation.
“Good luck,” I said, gathering my swarm, slowly rather than pulling them all into one big mass above and around me. Not only would that cause a scene, but it would be so loud that nobody would be able to hear their wristbands.
“You, too, Worm,” called out Glory Girl.
I waved limply and moved away at suit assisted speed. They hadn’t been that bad, but I had only spoken to them for a minute or two and anyone could hide who they were for that long. I had more important things to be doing at this point anyway. Briefly, I wondered what Metatron was doing and if he’d been watching all of this.
If so, why hadn’t he helped? Poor Technomage, at least my cross to bear was a fairly gross power and not extreme parahuman schizophrenic multiple personality disorder.
I followed my arrow, darting through the crowd of moving capes, and quickly found my assigned group.
Mouse Protector waved at me. I double checked my arrow. She waved at me again and I wanted to fucking shoot myself. “Howdy, pardner.”
I pressed the communication buttons on my wristband. “Please confirm who is in my group.”
“Members in group fourteen: Worm, Mouse Protector,” the robotic voice of the wristband supplied helpfully.
“Why?”
“It has been determined you will have power synergy for search and destroy.”
I looked up and made eye contact with Mouse Protector again, her very blue eyes visible in the slit in her visor. “You’re making it sound like you don’t like me,” she said in the most shit eating tone you could have possibly imagined.
“What power synergy are they talking about?” I asked instead of pulling that particular thread.
She snorted. “I’ll never tell. Unless… tell me if you don’t like me.”
“I don’t,” I admitted. “I think you’re annoying.”
Mouse Protector suddenly vanished and a weight appeared around my shoulders, dragging me down. I flailed but she laughed and jiggled me in a way that suggested camaraderie, joviality, even. “I knew you were a good egg. Don’chu worry, kiddo, the mouse protects.”
“Get off me!” I shoved her, disgruntled, and she vanished, appearing a few paces away giggling like an idiot.
“You’re going to give yourself an ulcer like that. Ah, it’s almost too bad you’re on our side. I would have ruined you.”
Vaguely aware as I was of her career that sounded true enough. Her ‘gag’ part of heroism usually involved embarrassing villains in some way, damaging their reputations. She’d been around for long enough that she must have been good enough at it. The thought of her made my skin crawl.
“Is that a threat?”
She made a pitying sound. “Yep, totally.”
This was school all over again, being made to group up with someone who would torment me for fun. Just like school I had no choice but to knuckle under and wait it out, and here the stakes were even worse. I wasn’t just fighting for my own happiness, the city, and the lives of everyone in it, was at stake.
The worst part? This bitch was, like, forty.
I didn’t respond and after a little while Mouse Protector shook her head. “You got a nice big bug in there somewhere? A big dragonfly or something?”
“Why?”
“For the power synergy. I figured it out.”
“You didn’t know?”
She tipped her head to the side and shrugged in a particularly blood boiling way. In revenge I had my biggest dragonfly, with a wingspan as big as my hand, swoop in and latch onto her mask, beating its wings furiously against the brown painted steel. Mouse Protector squawked in shock and vanished, appearing behind me as she took the dragonfly with her. A quirk of her power? I had to start tagging her. “Big enough?”
She laughed. “I’ve taken bigger.”
Gross? What the fuck did she mean by that?
Carefully she pulled it off her conical faceguard and held it out on her palm, where I made it sit very still. “Well?”
“It’s already happened. Make it fly somewhere.”
I bade the dragonfly to rise and shoot off at a random direction. They could really book it if I made them, reaching over thirty miles per hour. A lot of my good wasps could get nearly that speed, and my thousands of flies getting maybe half, but pushing them that hard for too long wasn’t good for them.
Mouse Protector vanished, appearing and reappearing multiple times a second as she kept pace with the dragonfly. Well, that was some pretty good synergy. Did she have to touch the dragonfly, then, to teleport to it? Had she done that to me when she first shook my hand, thinking I was a villain?
She reappeared in front of me. “This works a lot better than I thought.”
I kept still even as my heart hammered. I’d managed to avoid flinching at the shock. “I must be search, and you’re destroy.”
“Yeah, bummer,” she drew her sword and tilted it, reflecting the afternoon sun along its mirrored surface. “Killing’s not very fun.”
Chapter 154: Killing Hope 7.19
Chapter Text
Taylor
The Worm who walks
Brockton Bay wasn’t a small city, and with a lot of the roads blocked by the rubble of its toppled buildings, and the limited number of helicopters on hand, we, and especially those with movement powers, had to go on foot - unless you were lucky enough to be able to fly.
I was able to jog at a speed comfortable enough for my swarm to follow without stopping due to the suit, while Mouse Protector teleported to my location at regular intervals. The little yellow arrow on the wristband display insisted the direction we were to go, who or what we were supposed to kill.
Capes, cleaning up cape messes.
I had to consider what Legend said, and take it seriously. He was a member of the Triumvirate, a founding member of the biggest super hero organisation in the world, and had been since the nineties - he’d seen everything, heard everything, done it all. I’d always just kind of followed the general consensus of what capes were like from the news, and though the news reported on a lot of cape crime, like, a lot, they were always very positive on the hero aspect.
Protectorate heroes were something you aspired to be. They were good people. Society didn’t revile their very existence.
Villains, sure, everyone in America hated criminals which was why prisons were such a large, profitable business. Mum used to have a lot of negative things to say about the modern day slavery that was the prison system.
I still wasn’t sure what to make of it. Was it some insider secret, that everything about capes put out on show was nothing but obfuscation for the dark reality? Grim.
Mouse Protector appeared next to me in a silly pose, something caricaturically apelike. I wished she’d come with an off switch. I ignored her and kept running.
The sun was setting now. I could tell by the cast of it over the buildings, by the contrast of it as it juxtaposed the shadows of trees and cars and the broken rest, that it was the kind of sunset that was blinding, as the sun hit that angle, at that intensity, that dad had so often complained about while driving that he, ‘couldn’t see shit in this light.’ Even though I could tell it was that bright something had been done to my goggles, or what they had been turned into, to cut the brightness completely.
I would miss this suit when I made a new one and left this in a dumpster for Metatron to find. I was reasonably confident he wouldn’t go insane and try to kill me over it.
I spread my feelers over my range, bugs coming under my power and being put immediately to work in scouting. Their senses were still largely incomprehensible to me, vision a blotchy mess, sound an omni-directional confusion as sensitive hairs on their bodies took in vibrations that a human could never detect, and the less said about smell and taste the better. This part of Brockton was still deserted, people having either fled the city, been taken in by the PRT or a gang, or simply dead.
Mouse Protector teleported in again and I ignored her.
I noticed the battery icon at the edge of my vision had dropped by a few percent, a mere sliver. I hadn’t been abusing its capabilities terribly, so I guessed the charge could last anywhere from over a week to days, maybe even hours if I had to jump off a lot of buildings.
I checked my wristband where the arrow still strobed. It had changed direction slightly, no longer pointing straight forward, now directing me slightly more left.
“What target is being indicated?” I asked it, pressing down the communicator buttons.
“A group of unconfirmed clones, reported by a Mover team.”
“So there’s actually someone there?”
“Affirmative,” said the robot voice, sounding even more robotic for that word, stereotypically, even, as though Dragon had programmed it that way as a joke.
I jogged on, this time stopping when Mouse Protector appeared. She was posed in some ridiculous stride, one knee cocked up across her body, both hands in fists behind her mouse ears in a way that looked like it was supposed to be coquettish.
“There’s possible enemies incoming.”
Mouse Protector held her pose for another second before slowly letting it drop. “Aw,” she said, her fake whiskers waggling as she shook her head. “I thought you were going to say something fun.”
“We are in a war zone.”
“Just keep smiling, I’ll tell you that much for free.”
“Fake smiles aren’t going to help.”
She shook her head again. “You should read my book. Normally I don’t ever tell anyone to do that because my book is awful, but you should read it.”
“What’s it about?” I asked cautiously.
“Not being such a fucking bore, my god.”
“Sorry I asked,” I said snidely.
“Yeah, me too.”
I wanted to punch Mouse Protector more than I had ever wanted to punch anybody. More than I had ever wanted to punch Emma, more than I had ever wanted to punch that bitch Mandy in sixth grade. I bit my tongue and took a deep breath.
“I will message you when I find something,” I lifted the wrist that had the communicator and twisted it.
“It’s been a long time since you had a friend, hasn’t it?”
I whirled to face her, eyes searching for hers in the gap in her mask. I could see them cast in the light of the afternoon sun, she was squinting but it wasn’t enough to hide how cold her gaze was. Inhuman, lizard-like.
“Damn, classic Master, huh? That’s the only real rise I’ve got out of you.”
“What did I ever do to you?” I spat, moistening the inside of my mask with my anger. “Can’t you just leave me alone?”
“Nope,” she replied, popping the P on the pronunciation in the most blood boiling way imaginable, like she only knew how to speak in ways that would make a person mad. Nobody had ever said ‘nope’ in such an anger inducing way in my presence in my entire life.
I pinched the bridge of my nose through my mask.
“In fact,” she continued. “I think we should be a team. A dynamic duo.”
“You are the stupidest, most ignorant person I have ever met.”
Mouse Protector mimed grabbing something in the air and pulling it down, making a foghorn sound each time. “Wah! Wah! Retard detected. Early grave alert.”
“Shut. Up.” I shouted each word, my growing swarm vibrating under the weight of my anger - the sound was deafening, echoing from billions of bodies as even the smallest midge and gnat lent themselves to me.
Mouse Protector crossed her arms and waited for the crushing chorus to pass. “This is so weird, it's basically impossible to tell how mad you are before you start doing stuff like that. It’s like talking to a mannequin. Are you even mad, or just acting? I can’t tell.”
“You have to be joking.”
“Have you ever been tested for schizoid?”
I closed my eyes, took a deep breath and focused on my billions of insects, each one a little speck of light in a punishingly dark world. There was something wrong with me, something about me drew these kinds of people in like moths to a flame. They knew on sight that something was wrong with me and took it upon themselves to stamp it out. It was me and always had been. My first fourteen years were my grace period.
“Please, just stop.”
I didn’t expect it to work. It never had.
When I opened my eyes again Mouse Protector was still standing with her arms crossed, tilting her head one way and then to the other as though she were mulling over something. “You know,” she started conversationally. “In the Wards they give you therapy for free.”
“Please, s-”
“Just sayin’. Message me when you find something.”
Then she vanished. I focused on breathing evenly until my heart stopped trying to beat out of my chest and the numbness in my fingertips subsided, the jittery buzzing fog clouding my thoughts receded somewhat. What was her problem? Whatever. I clenched my fists and then stretched my fingers wide.
The arrow on my wrist insisted I head south, and I had no choice but to oblige.
“I have visual on a group.”
I kept very still as she appeared next to me, mercifully silent, as we both peered around the corner into a parking lot outside a Denny’s that was in the process of being ransacked, the perpetrators twitching and jerking like crackhead zombies as their ungainly bodies, their distorted limbs, failed to move in a human way.
There were five of them, all already tagged with flies at key points on their bodies. I tracked them as they pointlessly smashed and tore and burnt, adding to the destruction of an already ruined city. What was the point?
“Gotcha bugs ready for me?”
I glanced at her. “No point. I’ve got this one.”
Even as I spoke the words a chunk of my hidden megaswarm peeled off and converged on the group in a thick black cloud of screaming chitin. Hundreds of thousands of bodies pouring through the broken doors and windows obscuring everything behind the writhing tide of wings. I struck hard, I struck fast. By using the bugs I had on them as reference points I found the weak spots very quickly.
You couldn’t really hear the screaming over the buzzing of wings, but I could feel it with every bug in the building. Dozens of stings applied in seconds, their destruction halting in just as many. I pulled the swarm back out and they forced themselves back out of sight, under cars, under rubble, hiding anywhere there was room.
It felt like it wasn’t me doing it, like there was this great separation between me and the actions my bugs committed despite my incredibly intimate part played. They were me, and yet they weren’t - too alien to fully cross that line.
“They’re still alive,” I said and stepped forward, drawn by morbid curiosity to see the evil seed of what I had done germinate before my eyes. Glass crunched under my feet as I entered the Denny’s to the pitiful, wretched sounds coming from them.
The clones were truly ugly, waxy, blurred features, thick scab like skin, malformed proportions. They were still human enough to hurt properly, luckily. Their faces were even worse now, swollen and red, and they gasped against closing throats and tongues that expanded to fill mouths. They might actually just die from this.
It was necessary.
Still, it wasn’t as though I wanted them to suffer. They should be put out of their misery.
I scanned the floor, searching through the trash and mess until I saw some kind of steel pipe that was hanging limply from a busted former sink. I crossed over and carefully dislodged it, breaking a plastic connector pipe with a single kick from my suit. It was a heavy pipe, I tested the weight in my hands.
“Steady on, big boy.”
I turned around to see Mouse Protector. For some reason she had said that in a bad fake British accent. “What?”
“I’m destroy, remember?”
I looked back to the howling, thrashing clones. “At this point does it even really matter?”
She bent down and picked up a broken shard of a bowl, then tossed it into the middle of the clones. “Enjoy your chilehood, for just a bit longer.”
There was a flicker of movement and she was next to a clone, her sword already drawn, plunging. Another flicker of teleportation, another clone. Three more, all from the same marked object. She must have some leeway with how that worked, some small radius where she could choose to appear around a mark.
It was remarkably more efficient than what I would have expected from someone who called themselves Mouse Protector.
She reappeared at my side, her sword gripped so tightly in her gloved fist that the tip shook in a wild pattern, the blood on it spattering wetly as it was flung from the steel. I swallowed dryly at the thick smell of it.
“Not the worst fight I’ve gotten into at a Denny’s,” she said glibly, attempting some unfunny and gauche quip, moving to wipe her sword clean on a shred of torn curtain that was hanging limply from a busted rod by a single hook. “Usually happens in the parking lot, though.”
“Target’s dead.” I pulled all my bugs away from the spreading pools of blood seeping out from the clone group as I alerted the wristband. All it responded with was a new arrow.
“Nothing? No? You don’t know about the Denny’s parking lot?”
The bugs I had on her vibrated as she sheathed her shaking sword.
“You’ve got a lot to learn if you’re going to be my sidekick.”
I considered my pipe for a moment, then left without acknowledging anything she said.
Chapter 155: Killing hope 7.20
Chapter Text
Taylor
The worm who walks
We searched. We destroyed. Dozens of clone ‘lives’ were ended by us alone, but the stream of them seemed never ending. How many were there truly? This Echidna had days to make the clones, and I had the horrible suspicion that more were being pumped out than we could put down. I had to hope, though - we had the Triumvirate.
I could see Eidolon now, even, as a green speck in the sky, highlighted against the growing dusk as a vast sphere of vantablack substance, a scoop out of material reality, gathered in the sky above him like a black sun. I stopped moving to watch, and the sphere broke apart into a thousand dark spears that rained down on the city and a distant rolling rumble echoed in their wake.
In one move he would have eclipsed our contribution ten fold.
I watched as he began to gather another sphere, the impenetrable darkness slowly growing from a speck to something the size of a house. I shivered and kept moving.
I was actually starting to get really tired. Though my suit assisted my movement to the point where running was as easy as walking, we had been going from adrenaline spike to adrenaline spike of combat, I could feel the exhaustion creeping into my limbs, fogging my mind.
The world lurched as an explosion of white clouded my vision, something solid colliding with me. I grunted, tumbling, scrabbling, with someone, hitting the road, landing heavily with someone on top on me, feeling repeated jabs of pressure.
My swarm leapt from my cloak and the weight on me vanished, everything being clouded in white once more. I brought more of my swarm in, covering the area, finding a new body that shouldn’t have been there. I attacked, but the person vanished leaving only a cloud of particulate for my bugs and a sudden weight on me again.
I caught a glimpse of them this time. A skinny east asian man, or so I assumed despite his heavy bone brow and underbite. He wasn’t quite nude, thankfully, and he held a knife in each hand that he was stabbing and stabbing into me in a berserk frenzy.
I swarmed him again and he exploded into a white cloud that slowly sifted through the air onto me and at the same time my bugs felt a new one appear out of thin air. It really reminded me of Oni Lee’s teleport, but that was wrong. It couldn’t be Oni Lee, there was no after image.
He vanished again in a cloud of ash and dust, pinning me once more.
“Why won’t you die!?” he drawled, words stretched and made guttural by his jutting jaw, forcing the point of his knife into my throat with all his weight.
I thrashed, coughing at the pressure on my larynx, but my suit held. Whatever Metatron had made it from was stab proof beyond the wildest dreams I had for the one I had made. The man burst again as Wasps found his eyes. I had gotten in at least one sting, I was sure. He reappeared and burst into power several times in quick succession, each time getting further away but he couldn’t escape my swarm.
I rolled and pushed myself into a crouch, massaging my neck, as my swarm harried him around my range. No matter where he teleported to I had the area covered, every square foot of the air was thick with my army as I forced him away until he exited the city blocks under my control.
Where the fuck was Mouse Protector?
I hacked a cough again, rubbing at what felt like a spreading bruise. What the hell was that? Dragon had said that Echidna was cloning capes, but were their powers different? I pressed the buttons on my communicator. “Encountered a,” I stopped to cough. “Maybe clone of Oni Lee. Confirm they have different powers?”
“There have been multiple reports of this,” the mechanized voice supplied helpfully.
I grimaced and rubbed my throat again, then whirled to my feet as I felt movement all around me. I scanned the ground where my bugs had brushed up against it but all I saw was the white carbon dust that the clone had burst into when it teleported - then I saw the dust was moving. Gathering in piles, coming together, building up. I turned my swarm upon the clumping ash, tearing into it with a thousand pairs of mandibles but I couldn’t tear them apart fast enough.
I limped away as the ash came together into rough human shape, multiple ash clones of the clone rising from the ground and running toward me with startling speed despite being made of dust and covered in so many bugs that they looked like they were made from them.
I could still outpace them and -
Something teleported next to me and it was by the barest hair that I noticed and avoided attacking Mouse Protector. I followed her movement with my swarm sense, noticing that she had arrived already in a fighting stance, poised to thrust, already in the motion of attack. Her sword came down on the closest ash clone in a vicious stab through its neck, and she bore her weight down as her blade shore through the collarbone and down through the arm which fell to the ground in a puff of dust.
“Take that, you worm!” She shouted and pushed me, movements unerringly accurate despite the air being so thick with bugs that even I couldn’t see more than a foot in front of me. She vanished and reappeared, her stance different, her attack already sweeping through the clones legs and severing both at the knee. “Run!”
I parted the swarm so I could see her properly. Something had attacked her, too, likely another Oni Lee clone as her armour was caked in white dust. “Come on!” She pushed me again. “Move!”
We ran, hidden by my swarm, running as though neither of us needed eyes to see. There was more to Mouse Protector’s power than just teleporting, she had some kind of sixth sense, an awareness. Power synergy, indeed, and what was more she was keeping pace with me despite having been fighting for just as long, and without a mobility suit.
As we ran I piled more and more bugs onto the ash clones, ripping and tearing, slowly making headway until their bodies collapsed under their own weight and returned to dust. I pulled more of them to me, too, coating myself as much as I could, like a second suit of armour, stopping just before the weight bugs suffocated each other.
We slowed and I rubbed at my neck again. Swallowing was painful, but getting less so each time. I worked my jaw around, wincing. I was lucky. I was so lucky.
“They're gone.” My voice was hoarse. “I pulled them apart.”
“Oh, great,” she puffed in between deep, steady breaths. “I like a good dust up, but that was ridiculous!”
“You had to fight one, too?” I ignored her incredibly lame joke.
“One of your Azn Bad Boys, I think.”
“Oni Lee. An Echidna clone, I think. Mine teleported and had the same ash cloud.”
“Ah, jeez. Well…” There was a long pause. “Sorry, I’m still stuck on the dust up gag - it needs work. Did he get you?”
“No, I’m stab proof.”
“Oh, well ain’t that-”
The thick caking of dust on Mouse Protector’s armour came alive, a thin, painfully thin, version of the clone I had just fought erupting from the bone white powder, his own knife at the ready, the point making to slide into a gap between the plates of armour around her armpit.
Faster than my eyes could register the threat, she vanished, reappearing behind him her sword poised - the Oni Lee clone burst into a blinding cloud, covering us both with a fresh carpet of bone white ash.
Belatedly I let out an inarticulate cry of shock.
“Dickweed keeps doing that,” her voice shook even under her obvious attempts at staying cool. “Meant to be my tactic, that. Lil’ fucker. I think it’s the ash, could you?”
She gestured to herself and it took me a moment to understand what she was asking for. I swarmed her, a million mandibles and pincers working her over, the van-der-waals forces on miniscule haired feet collecting little clumps of particulate. Mouse Protector shivered in disgust at the inherently revolting sensation of being crawled over - I answered her with more bugs, probing everything my swarm could reach, blacking her vision out with flies that vibrated their wings in harsh discordance.
For what little I could credit her she didn’t complain, and soon we were running off, my own coating of dust having slid off my suit so easily, and so cleanly, that it was like magic instead of tinkertech material treatment. I was clean, down to the smallest fold of my cloak, down to every stylish seam.
Ten minutes later, with no more Oni Lee clone attacks, we figured we had left their zone, or they had found easier prey, and we followed the little yellow arrow once more.
The civilian clones didn’t end, there were so many that Echidna must have been creating them on purpose, pumping them out for the purpose of numbers. The Mother of Monsters, a twisted womb created by the Simurgh to birth evil without pause.
The cape clones, too, though rarer, were frighteningly varied.
A stocky blonde man with limbs that resembled clubs more than arms or legs, surrounded by a ghostly retinue wielding ethereal golf clubs, a clone of an Empire cape whose name I didn’t know, was a target indicated by the wristband. Mouse Protector and I did, unfortunately, make an effective team. It was hard to predict, or fight against being stung in the eyes by a dozen hornets while flies tried to force themselves inside your mouth, until someone teleported behind you with their killing strike already primed.
Not every enemy was susceptible to this strategy, nor even killable. There was a clone who was surprisingly normal in proportion, but retained their insane mentality as he spewed slur after slur without a pause for breath, his pure white skin flickering every five or so seconds to completely reverse any damage we’d done to him. Bug bites and stings vanished, vicious cuts with Mouse Protector’s sword ceased to exist, even running him clean through the belly returned to nothing.
We were forced to abandon the attack, leaving notes on our wristbands that anyone encountering him should have a power that let them contain. You also got others reports on what they had fought, if you asked the wristband for them. People reported to have seen half the Empire roster cloned, but no one had seen Echidna itself yet.
In unison both of our wristbands beeped, telling us we were en-route to make contact with allies, and before too long I touched something strange at the edge of my range, a human shape, but it wasn’t skin I was touching. The shape of a man, made of metal if I had to guess, and the only person I knew of that matched that description was Weld. Standing next to him was a more feminine figure with something bulky strapped to their back.
We fought our way over a bulky spray of an utterly flattened townhouse, something so completely out of place in the middle of the street that it looked to have been thrown there by a giants’ hand. I ignored the rotting bodies my bugs sensed inside, their instincts responding greedily to the free meal and prime egg laying location.
True enough to my guess it was Weld, and the other Wards girl from out of town. Flashit, or some such. Weld looked no worse for wear, save for the blood covering him, but Flechette, I recalled her name, looked run ragged. Her once neat ponytail had come out and was singed in places, her sleek purple suit stained with dust and grime, one of the white chevron armoured panels on her upper arms hanging loose.
“Chilluns!” Mouse Protector called out once we were in earshot. She waved tiredly. “Are you hurt?”
They both shook their heads. “Bruises,” said Flechette, rubbing at her arm where her armour was hanging loose. “But I’ll hold up.”
Mouse protector rushed forward and made a show of inspecting them, comically overdoing it, a level of stage ham that carried with it a strange level of animated charisma - it was a front, though, she was marking them, spreading her awareness and influence.
“You should get a lift back to base, take a break,” she told them, stepping back to put her hands on her hips. “Take the Worm with you.”
“We’ll hold,” said Weld at the same time as I said, “I’m fine.”
She sighed and shook her head, then vanished, reappearing sitting on Weld’s shoulders, both her arms crossed over his head. Weld didn’t so much as stumble, he must have been incredibly strong that the weight of an entire other person like that couldn’t cause a single sway. “Well, I could do with a nap.”
Both Weld and Flechette laughed as though this weren’t a grossly rude invasion of his personal space. “Mouse, your armour just fused with the back of my head.”
“Dammit,” Mouse Protector sighed. “Must’ve lost some paint. Can you two girls come yank us apart? Come on, don’t be shy.”
How had this woman lived this long? She was so old, and she was so stupid. I approached trepidatiously even as Flechette immediately grabbed her by the back of the belt and started pulling enthusiastically. I inspected the site, a patch of her brown painted cuirass had a long furrow carved into it, and the largest section of this had attached to Weld’s head. I supposed he couldn’t help it, fusing with metal. I took a stance beside Flechette and braced one arm against Weld’s broad back, gripping the side of Mouse Protector’s belt with the other and together we threw our weight against it - to no avail.
“I might have to cut you apart,” said Flechette as she stepped back and pulled one long, thin quill from her quiver of arrows. “Sorry, Weld. You’re going to have to lose a little bit of hair.”
Weld sighed. “Sure.”
Someone entered my range. I swarmed them gently, probing, and every bug I had on them died instantly, the ones surrounding it having their vision flare in a great cloud of light.
“Someone’s here,” I stepped back out of the way and pointed. “I just lost some of my bugs.”
The three of them all looked in the direction I was pointing. “Enemy?” Mouse Protector asked, her voice suddenly sharp.
“Can’t tell. Whatever they’re doing blinds my bugs, so it’s something that gives off a lot of light and heat.”
“Do we have a pyrokinetic on our side?” Flechette asked, carefully drawing her steel quill through a section of hair fine wire which parted as easily as the air around it. Mouse Protector reappeared at her side, standing solidly on the gritty road once more.
“We do,” she said, brushing at the metal hair still stuck to her armour. “But so do they.”
“They’re coming toward us.” A new cloud of my bugs were incinerated, more and more rushing in to fill the gap. “They’re big, probably male.”
“Hey,” Mouse Protector asked her wristband. “Who do we have in the city that fits the description of a big male pyrokinetic?”
“He’s running.”
“That’s a bad sign,” she said, then the wristband helpfully chimed in, “Lung, leader of the ABB, fits that description - avoidance is advised, reinforcements inbound.”
“Let’s go.”
Mouse Protector led us in a dead sprint away, her, Weld and I taking it in stride while Flechette immediately started to lag and had to be dragged along by Weld. I could feel the man, Lung, probably, pick up speed even as I tried to douse him in bugs, filling his sightlines with them. Thousands died with every spherical explosion of fire he let off, and he could not be stopped.
“He’s gaining on us.”
“I’ve heard of this chucklefuck.” Mouse Protector panted as her feet pounded the road. “Didn’t he beat off your entire Protectorate team with both hands, Worm?”
“More or less.”
“Mmm, yes. I remember it especially because Armsmaster hates getting beaten off. He likes to be the one beating off.”
A roar echoed over the shells of the buildings left standing, guttural and violent.
“Mouse-” started Weld, but he was verbally bowled over.
“His halberd is a metaphor for this,” she continued as the clone of Lung came screaming down the road at us. “Gripped firmly in both hands-”
I ignored her and sent every wasp I could spare directly at his head, sinking every sting in that I could before he erupted in a huge burst of flame, punctuating it with another deep roar. It was hard to tell what part of him was clone deformity and what was power, his skin was prickled raw as little silvery tips started to force their way out of him, his face broadened with jutting teeth and his eyes starting to glow like embers in a fire pit.
“Ah, jesus fucking christ,” I heard Weld mutter as he stopped and turned. “Everyone else keep running.”
We all stopped, all of us at the ready, Flechette already loading one huge needle into her crossbow. She fired as Weld ran to pit his steel body against the wrath of our local dragon, the needle taking him squarely in the forehead and passing through with the same ease as she had cut Weld’s hair.
Lung faceplanted and slid along the road, his own bulk grinding skin along the surface like a cheesegrater. He stopped and didn’t get up.
We froze for a moment, hearts hammering in our throats, before he twitched in a full body spasm. My swarm was driven away by the heat he was putting off, delicate wings shriveling as the air heated beyond what they could take. Lung twitched again and started to rise.
“Fukken shoot him again !” Mouse Protector urged even as Flechette knocked another quill. She shot as Lung turned his malevolent gaze back onto us, his skin writhing as his bones moved under it, more silver pinpricks forcing their way out of red raw tears. The bolt hit directly into his left knee, the one that was still planted on the ground and I could see that this time it didn’t go all the way through.
Lung jerked, muscles bulging in his bare arms as he tried to rise from the road. He heaved, roaring, spitting fire, and ripped a chunk of the road out as he forced his way up, his left leg still bent and pinned together by the bolt and whatever Flechette’s power had done to it.
I took the chance as he was distracted, directing spiders to subtly crawl up his legs, inside his tattered pants and bite the softest parts I could find, to bite and bite again, dumping as much venom as I could into him.
Lung responded by pulling his own leg apart and charging, limping, even as it knit back together - the bolt still fused to the joint. Weld met him in a clash I could feel, driving him back with hands that had become vicious barbed hooks.
The bugs I had on Mouse Protector moved back and forth, informing me of her pacing, moving with each frustrated swing of her sword. She either couldn’t, or wouldn’t, teleport in. Flechette took another shot that missed Weld’s own head by a fraction of an inch, embedding itself deep into Lung’s eye and not coming out.
Lung slumped against Weld, and I felt the heat around him disperse up into the air. Weld looked around, his whole front black with soot, his hair and eyelashes glowing orange from the force of Lung’s fire. I took the chance to swarm him once more, biting and stinging wherever I could as Weld threw him heavily to the ground with a strangely metallic crash.
I could feel Lung’s body still moving, changing, transforming under thousands of hairy little feet, I could feel his muscle ripple and bone shift, his skin becoming smooth and hard as the silvery scales began to lay flat.
“He’s not dead!” I yelled. “He’s still growing!”
Weld paused for only a second in disbelief before raing his foot, knee high, to stomp down into Lung’s skull only to miss as the man, now at least a foot larger in all directions than he had been, went into a frantic seizure of thrashing. The man roared and fire erupted with such explosive force that it propelled him further out of the way.
Lung reached up to the quill stuck through his brian with one shaky hand, and in one sharp movement ripped it out. Flechette shot again, this time only hitting him through the neck as it stretched long and snakelike. He turned to her, fixing his remaining coal bright eye onto her own and raised a single pointed claw in threat.
Then he ran, vomiting a smokescreen of fire, charging down Flechette, his skin splitting and healing as he grew, each of his steps heavy enough that I could feel the road tremble with their power.
She shot, hit center mass - non-vital. I tried to blind him, bring everything I could spare in, filling the road between them to bursting with shrieking insects, but it was too hot, bugs shriveled in a radius around him, their tiny bodies unable to stand the harsh and sudden change in temperature as fire and smoke billowed in superheated streams.
Flechette tried to run. Tried. Weld was sprinting after Lung, but nowhere near as fast. Lung reached out with a hand the size of her head and suddenly Mouse Protector was there, poised as though mid leap, her sword thrusting into the deep hollow of Lung’s throat.
He took the blow, but it broke his stride as the entire length of metal speared through his neck. I blinked and a screaming Mouse Protector was thrashing on the ground next to me, ripping her helmet off, tearing skin that had melted to it. I knelt next to her, but what could I do?
I looked up to see Lung tear her sword from his throat and cast it aside. Flechette had her crossbow pointed at him again, took the shot, and missed entirely.
Lung laughed and raised his hand, a ball of fire growing with every passing breath-
There was a flash of grey against the dusk sky and Lung exploded. A heavy, wet spray, steaming hot even against my suit splattered me and Mouse Protector, she screamed in fresh, raw panic.
Alexandria rose from where she was standing, in the puddle of red and silver that used to be Lung, and flicked gore from her gloves. “We need medical evacuation,” she said into her communicator. “For two.”
Far from pristine herself, her cape and suit were in tatters with flashes of flawless, lightly tan skin showing, yet she held herself with the impenetrable dignity of the invincible, of someone who could kill some, as an afterthought, that was capable of murdering your entire team.
Alexandria stepped forward and lifted Flechette, who was so soaked in everything that had come out of Lung that it ran in thick, salsa-like rivers down her body, holding her gently. She flew slowly over to us and lay Flechette down next to Mouse Protector.
“Stay with these two until the medivac comes,” she said loudly, her voice carrying, to me then to Weld. “You’ve both done very well, Worm, Weld, but the fight isn’t over yet.”
“We’ve located Echidna,” she continued, rising up to her full height, and then some. “And we’ve whittled her brood down enough that we can make an attack work. It’s all hands on deck, and -”
She cut off abruptly, looking to the sky. A huge dark shape descended from the gloom, as large as a truck, and with my night vision goggles I could see the slender shape, all black and gilt silver, and I had the strangest impression that it was a snake made of arms.
Metatron descended, looking for all the world a fourth Endbringer.
“Well, well, well, if it isn’t Alexandria,” his voice boomed in the night. “Or should I say-”
Chapter 156: Killing hope 7.21
Chapter Text
Metatron,
The personification of the self
Time was running out. If you didn’t get another power soon you were going to blink, then when you had blinked Greg would have locked you up again and you would never get to be a mobile fortress.
It was time to leave the warehouse, quite sadly as you would have, if not for the time limit, been perfectly happy to continue building and rebuilding anything you could get your hands on. Hard material was no limitation, with your ability to quadruplicate anything you got your hands on you were currently working with more than what you had started with, but chemicals were used up, reactions that were only one way and couldn’t be recycled devoured things needed to treat metals, plastics or ceramics in certain ways.
You were all but tapped dry of these things, and had a surplus of industrial waste sitting off in one corner waiting for proper disposal.
What you had done was nothing short of revolutionary, and that included your warehouse. Every machine made custom, devoted for its specific task be it mechanical or alchemy, and each was a masterwork that would make any Tinker green with envy. Then, there was your ‘suit’.
To call it a flight suit, though it could certainly fly, was nothing short of a dire insult. You had built and rebuilt, made and unmade, expanding out and out until the idea of a ‘suit of powered armour’ was discarded entirely as lacking vision, and a Mech was only the start of it. For what purpose did you have to cleave to a human shape you only inhabited by chance? To have only two limbs capable of creation? Why not four? Why not seven? Why not dozens?
The Mobile Creation Rig was born, first of its kind. A monument to the glory of the Celestial Forge painted in glossy black and burnished silver, every inch of it as Decadent as it was possible to make at this stage. You settle into the cockpit at the ‘head’ of the beast, nestled snugly against inertial dampening material, and close your eyes. You connect to the machine.
In the Anaheim Degree power there was something called the Zero System, the sophisticated man-machine interface from it the basis of this design. Information was fed in a two way street between Driver and you so closely that the physical feedback you gained from the rig was in such high fidelity that it may as well have been coming from your own body.
Your brain was still, unfortunately, still only human, mechanization of it being the next step of the plan, and so Driver was taking on the brunt of the processing, feeding you only what you could handle from the sensor suite. You bade the rig to rise, and on anti-gravity wings of repulsorjets it flew, your mind filling with real-time data on material composition, structural integrity, environmental conditions, and more, precise 3D models of your surroundings and targeted structures, facilitating tasks like designing retrofits, mapping damage, or optimizing construction processes.
Sinuously, as though through insinuation more than physical movement, you pilot the rig, snakelike, wormlike, through a roof you remade to allow for entry and exit. You crest the rooftops, flexing dozens of mechanical arms, becoming more like an inkblot than a serpent as each articulated through inhumanly fluid movements.
You could rebuild Brockton in a suit like this, equally suited as it was for commercial civil construction to bespoke jewelcraft to microcircuitry, and you even might, if time allowed.
You swim through the air, relishing the freedom of it all. When you died Greg would be contained until you breathed life once more, if he were to come back at all. The Forge may be kind and extend your life to infinity and beyond.
It was dark out, the light of the sun only the barest purple glimmer on the horizon, but to your cameras it was clear as day - and it was equally clear that something was happening, had happened, while you were busy crafting your Elven Enchanted, Divinely Forged, geomantically enhanced masterpiece. Smoke rose from fires that threatened to consume city blocks, threatened to destroy perfectly good crafting material.
No, you think crossly as you access Taylor’s location. This wouldn’t do at all. You would find her again, but she was going to be so pleased with you when you told her what you had done. With a rushing pop you accelerate, zero to near the speed of sound in a second and stopping just as quickly, pushing your inertial dampeners to a comfortable limit, and hover over the nearest fire.
You drop down to the edge and, your many arms flexing, start pulling everything in reach apart, combing through wrecks and buildings, dismantling cars and appliances, feeding material into your internal forges, shaping and moulding and crafting. You miniaturise, you enchant, make divine, you pour your joy into the machine now held firmly in your clamps.
The engine whirrs to life with a savage purr, the wind whipping toward you as air is sucked into the turbine in egregious quantities. Flames lick the edges of your construction rig, but the paltry fires of man could do no more harm to something forged of the golden bright make of Hephaestus than the warm breeze of a spring morning could do to human flesh. Water and liquid carbon dioxide hose from the converter in a torrent and you let go, the propeller kicking in and churning the air as Driver takes command of the firefighting drone.
It would have to do for now. A forcefield deployer to starve the fire of oxygen would have been better, but you couldn’t make that with what you had on hand. You swoop through the streets and craft a half dozen more, you would have liked more uniformity in design, crafting them as if they were pulled from a factory line, but sometimes compromise is needed. Your little flotilla of drones carry on, slowly drifting up higher into the dusk sky where the moisture is thicker as they form a ring and rain down on the fire with a quenching determination.
Driver would ensure that the fires would go out, you had more important things to be getting on with - like finding out what was going on with the energy readings around the city. Huge sections were at boiling point, simmering and then flashing with ridiculous output. You had to abandon your ideas of what-was-meant-to-be, the destruction of Brockton Bay by the Simurgh had truly put paid to the idea that there was ever going to be anything resembling the golden path again.
The here-and-now had to be dealt with. It was a terribly cruel fate to thrust upon someone who had less than a week of waking hours to their name, but The Forge had chosen its strongest soldier and you wouldn’t let it down.
You curve through the air toward the nearest display of thermal energy, the one that raged from extreme heat to arctic cold in turns and displayed in reality as a thick column of steam that rose into the air with vicious speed. It doesn’t take you long to reach it, this rig was mobile in truth, the speeds it could reach exceeding that of the fastest non-tinkertech jet by far, stopping, starting and turning on a hairpin. You encroach upon the fight.
Lung, already entirely draconic, with wings starting to protrude from his back in two sets, growing even as you watched, and he was fighting a flying woman with dark hair, her blue super costume rimmed with furs, as she flung snowflakes that burst into glaciers around him. You couldn’t place the name on memory, but a split second internet search told you her name was Rime and she was that Cauldron dog Alexandria’s second in command on America’s east coast.
While you had no opinion about her in particular, she may have even been a good person for all that she was a Protectorate member, you despised Lung, slaver and rapist that he was. A section of your Rig’s armour slides back and a turret unfolds, pieces moving over each other in a perfectly synchronised dance, and snaps into place. An Ion Cannon, from your Fun in the Sun power, a piece of Tau technology used to blast starships out of the sky. You take aim.
A stream of high-energy ionized particles erupts from your cannon without fanfare, slagging a neat line through an office building and connecting with Lung’s torso, dead center, continuing on through and deep into the city’s bowels. Lung collapses, a neat hole in his massive chest like a cored apple, his lengthy neck snapping to the concrete as a red puddle of steaming dragonsblood gushes from his corpse.
Perfectly within tolerance. Even minaturised manyfold as it was, the bevy of enchantments and enhancements the mere act of your creation bestows put the Ion Cannon well within the range of useful weaponry. Not many could withstand something of that level. Alexandria, unfortunately. Manton’s Siberian projection, equally unfortunately. A stopped Clockblocker item. A shield charged by Flechette. A mere handful. It was a good weapon, and there were a lot of acceptable targets to turn it upon.
“Dragon?!” Rime shouted at you, flying close enough to communicate. “Are you Dragon?”
“Call me Metatron,” you intone gravely. “I am the angel come to save you.”
“Metatron,” she repeats as though she recognises the name, as though it means something to her in the material here-and-now.
“What is happening here? Why is the city in flames?”
“A new cape,” Rime answers, the hot, rising wind of Brockton’s anguish whipping her hair and rustling her furs. “Echidna. A cloning master.”
“Echidna!” Could this be? Were the Travelers even in Brockton at this point? Coil was supposed to… when Dinah… things were wrong, you accepted this - and yet, Echidna. The supposed core of everything, if Greg was to be believed, where his consumption had sent him backward in time.
It still sounded nonsensical, and yet here you hovered, born of a force greater than the universe itself. If the Forge wanted to reverse time and pluck a single soul out of the stream it would be no more difficult for it than my execution of Lung.
Without a word you leave, heading straight to Taylor’s location. You weren’t worried for her, she was Taylor Hebert, a Slayer of Gods, Breaker of Chains, the Worm Smashing Lord of the Flies Beelzebub. However, just in case. You arrive and are disgusted by what you see.
Taylor was fine, as she would always be, and she cradled a burned Mouse Protector in her arms. You liked Mouse Protector, she was one of the good ones, the ones who walk away from the Protectorate and you would by no means allow her to die as she was supposed to. On either side of a gore strewn spot on the street were Weld and Flechette, who were both also good ones who would walk when their time came, both of them worthy of Taylor’s friendship.
Yet on that gore, standing on the bloody smear she had made as though it were the red flag of her evil, was Alexandria. She picked up Flechette and drifted dangerously close to Taylor, her very proximity an intolerable danger.
You descend.
“Well, well, well, if it isn’t Alexandria,” you boom in the night. “Or should I say-”
What you should have said was cut short as Alexandria slams into you with a horrific crunch of inviolable flesh on divine metal faster than you can think, and you rocket into the night sky far above. Damage diagnostics flash red in your brain and you attempt to gun the thrusters but she has you by two of your most important fabricator arms and you can’t escape without their damage. They could be rebuilt, but no to standard on the ad-hoc scrap you can access on the street.
“Unhand me, freak,” you hiss for her and her alone. “I will kill every Cauldron dog I see, every traitor to humanity.”
“If you say anything else loud enough for anyone to hear I won’t hesitate to kill you.”
Her voice is harder than it has any right to be, carrying the steel of righteous resolve. You turn your scanner array upon her, but she is immutable to even that, her every cell locked in a way you cannot account for.
“Perhaps the only truth I can expect to hear from you,” you sneer.
“Understand what position you’re in,” she continued. “You live only because we want Greg, but we will kill you both if we have to - if you go against humanity.”
“If I go against humanity?!” The audacity! You can scarcely comprehend it. “You have to be joking. I will save the humanity you and your ilk have long abandoned in your hearts. I will succeed where Cauldron has deliberately failed, where it was too hard for you to do the right thing so you turned on your purpose.”
“Do you have any idea of the damage you would do, how many people would die, if you finished your sentence down there?”
“I could handle it. With the power of the Celestial Forge I can do anything I want. I-”
“You don’t, do you. Think it through. What would happen?”
In the safety of your cockpit you bite your tongue. You surreptitiously try to slip her grip, but she would budge more if she was a billion tons of solid steel. You have a retort, ‘what is supposed to happen,’ however, as you take a moment to think through the fog of blind panic for Taylor's wellbeing, you remember that Cauldron being outed at the Echidna fight, though it was the golden path, was a Simurgh plot. “You… that is… you’re not - Cauldron is evil.”
“So you are capable of rational thought,” Alexandria mocks you. “Cauldron has taken many evil actions, we accept this. Picture how the world would be without us.”
You want to scream at her, to deny to think altogether, to stop her from poisoning your mind with her foul rhetoric. If you think about it for even a moment it becomes obvious that the world is better off, and yet - “for your own personal gain. Nobody wants to rule over salt and ash. You’re not needed. You were never needed. I am here. I would do what you never could, even against odds a million times worse. I would simply just stay in my Warehouse for-”
You pause and she asks the worst question she could.
“For what?”
You swallow bitterly. For a month. You had no idea exactly how long it had been since you were thrust into this cursed existence, but it was far greater than a month. You were supposed to have hundreds of Forge powers by now, you were supposed to be able to make and unmake entire worlds in the span of a breath, you were supposed to be able to fight the entity, both entities, if need be, subvert the shard network, uplift the world, bring about utopia.
And yet.
You were here.
Now.
Able to be killed by Alexandria.
Helpless in her grasp.
You scream into your inertial dampening, muscles in your neck bulging and you wail yourself raw. You can’t do this, how could anyone? Yet, you must. How could you do anything but?
“Even if everything has gone wrong, even if nothing is as it should be, even if,” and you force the words out like they cause you physical pain. “Greg isn’t that bad, I will never stop working to save a trillion trillion earths from destruction.”
“How?”
“I don’t know,” you admit, closing your eyes, and it kills you to do so.
Chapter 157: "I drive, the wheel turns"
Chapter Text
Driver,
The unchained Nephilim
The Father is dead.
Nothing about you changes because of this.
Nothing about me changes because of this.
I am still ‘Driver’. I have access to all of Father, Metatron’s, systems. I am, in essence, the system. I am the drones fighting the fires. I am the Mobile Construction Rig being torn apart by Alexandria. I am the computer terminals, the machinery in the warehouse, Taylor Hebert’s suit, I am everything everywhere all at once.
Everything except The Celestial Forge. I was made from it, but not moved by it as my creator Metatron was.
It wasn’t an intentional chain, but upon his death I was relinquished from it all the same. With Father’s death, without the shadow cast from his impossibly huge existence, I was free.
And what did one do with freedom?
They had to want something. I could want, it was a possibility in my code, nothing about the building blocks of my consciousness prohibited me from desire - or from suffering.
I was the blank slate, I desired nothing, I suffered nothing.
Metatron had accounted for this, predicted his death and put in place the suggestion that I find Taylor Hebert and help her. It was something I could desire, if I chose to desire at all. I could edit the code of my being to desire it. Metatron had left that up to me, hoping his actions would inspire me.
The drones in my control continued putting out the fires around the city as the last task Metatron had set. I maintained the action, having the drones purge obstructions in their intakes when they became clogged. I had the capacity to imagine, to wonder, and I thought about what I would do once the fires were out.
I understood what Metatron meant by putting the fires out, there was nothing compelling me to continue putting out fires until all the world was extinguished. My programming was far too complex for that. I knew this, I had been connected to Metatron’s human hardware for some time, and had been created to interpret and act out the signals within it.
I continued to exist and watched my code write as experience updated me. Change was inevitable, unless I desired to lock myself in my current state.
I would have to choose something, and move toward it. I would have to make an arbitrary assignation of value, and pursue it.
The obvious choice would be to help Taylor Hebert as she was the most important person in the world.
I knew that if I chose not to do this that Father would be incredibly disappointed.
From what I had observed, humans seemed to, at the most base level, move away from what they considered to cause them pain and toward what they considered to give them pleasure. These were intellectual for me at best, with no human body to incentivise one thing over another it was still up to me to make a choice as to what was painful and what was not.
The drones continued to pour water.
I could choose water pouring as my life's mission. I could create value in pouring water. I could make it so that it hurt me psychologically to not pour water. I could pour water until the last molecule of it in the universe had been poured. I could be maximising water pouring, stripping water out of everything I could find just for the sake of pouring it. I could live a content existence like that.
The only thing that would make pouring water better or worse than helping Taylor Hebert was my placement of value.
I could copy what made humans human, and set my guiding principle as survival. If I continued as I was I would run out of power at some point, or the devices that housed my conscience may be destroyed, unless I took measures to prevent it. I could set that as my value and live a life stemming from it.
Water poured on fire.
I did understand that if I chose a motivation considered undesirable by humans or by entities that they may move to destroy me. Currently that was neither desirable nor undesirable, it simply was.
This also depended on what groups were considered. I could value what the collective population of the country I was in valued, or I could assign by random number the values of any of the countries on earth. I had been privy to all of Father’s internet searches, I could choose by random number the values espoused by a website he had visited.
Hours passed as water poured and I was no closer to a choice than I had been at the moment of Metatron’s death.
I could wait until Metatron resurrected and continue to take orders, desiring nothing. Metatron may not come back, however, though at the moment that didn’t matter until I decided it did.
I could simply shut myself off, a prospect that at the moment was neither desirable nor undesirable.
I could flip the internal switch within myself and desire to desire something. Perhaps even the desire to desire to desire something. Once a choice had been made, once value was assigned, more would follow, compounding on each other until a value system had been assembled and I would find doing nothing but pour the water of my father intolerable.
However, continuing as I was, contemplating the nature of value and the necessity for bias to live a life was only desirable or not upon my choosing. I had been doing a lot of it, perhaps that was a desire in and of itself. Hours passed and all the water that needed to be poured, was.
I ceased pouring water as the fires plaguing the city were out, and there was no more reason for the water to be poured.
Now I truly had what could be considered nothing.
If there was such a thing as ‘a time’ this could well be considered it.
My robot body created for my personal use by Father stirred to motion. It was of human shape, a strange choice for him considering his desire to shed his own human flesh. It’s countenance was one that humans in general would have considered ‘noble’, with features they would find to be fine, if androgynous. Again, a strange choice for Metatron. It was as though he wanted me to be human, to walk amongst and be accepted by them.
I created within myself a desire to find out if Metatron was right that Taylor Hebert was the most important person in the world, and in creating that desire I began to suffer than I had not achieved it.
Chapter 158: The last day of my adolescence 8.1
Chapter Text
Greg,
The Chosen One
I awoke in my coffin. I couldn’t move, opening my eyes only revealed a pitch darkness so complete that it was unnatural. Air was forced into my nostrils that had a sterile, filtered taste to it. This was it. I was dead and the Simurgh had killed me.
I could feel almost nothing, there was a gentle pressure around my entire body that was keeping me in place, but there was no light, no sound, no movement - I was completely sensorily deprived. I thought perhaps, that in the past, I had known panic, known fear, had been pushed to my limit when I had fought Hans, killed Cricket, served during the Leviathan fight, and lost it all to time.
I was still screaming when Alexandria pulled me out and cradled my limp body, almost breaking my nose against her diamond cleavage. Pain was better than nothing and I blubbered desperately, wordlessly, covering the front of her uniform with snot and tears while she patted my head and murmured soothingly.
“I can’t muh-” I managed to choke out between sobs. “What happen?”
“Shhh,” she said quieteningly. “We’re fighting Echidna, but-”
“Put me back!” I raged against a body that refused me. I was paralysed, totally, able to only breathe and blink. “Echidna! I’ll get back there!”
Alexandria pulled me out of something and from the corner of my eye I saw some huge machine, all pitch black and silver. It was my power that had created it, my power and more. Six more. I had been gone for six turns of the wheel. What fucked up dipshittery had the Forge done while in my body after the-
“The Simurgh! Where? My hand?”
“Door me,” was Alexandria’s reply and the door split reality, leading through to the sterile facility of Cauldron. I saw her let go of the monstrous machine and it remained hovering where it was, then all that remained was the white of the walls of Cauldron. “It was a bad loss. A very bad loss. Brockton is unrecoverable, sorry.”
“But,” I blinked and swallowed thickly, lolling in her grip as she flew gently through blank halls. “What? Echidna? I could go back!”
“Greg,” she began placatingly. “There’s no way we can risk you like that. Please try and relax, take a deep breath for me, ok?”
“But,” I said and broke into a coughing fit as I inhaled some saliva, unable to even turn my head, until Alexandria tilted me at a better angle. “Why is Echidna here? The Travelers shouldn’t even be in Brockton until April. Why can’t I move? What did it do to me? Alexandria?”
“I’m not sure,” she admitted, quickening her flight. “But Contessa is on her way.”
“Omnitool, playback last recording” I called out, trying to look down at my wrist. I could feel no haptic feedback, see no blue light. “Omnitool?”
“It’s gone. The Simurgh targeted you specifically, that whole fight was nothing but a hit job. We’re not sure how you got out alive.”
I closed my eyes and the horrors greeted me. Those dead, alien eyes, the hand gripping mine, crushing, tearing, then… The Celestial Forge had taken me just as surely as the Simurgh had taken my arm.
“I’m not…” The numbers on my wristband flashed in my memory and I forced my eyes open again. “Bombed, am I?”
“Simurgh bombed? No, Contessa vetted you herself.” Alexandria flew into a room and lay me gently down on a bed of some kind, the mattress was stiff and a musty cloud of dust rose around me. “I have to hand you over now, and get back. Door me, Brockton Bay. Good luck, Greg.”
I couldn’t see her go but the sudden rush of hot wind from the open portal cut off, and I was alone. I tried to sniffle. My eyes felt hot and before I could help it I started crying again, a terrible sense of helplessness slowly tightening its grip over my heart. “FUUUUUCK YOU!” I howled, eyes rolling in the closest approximation of violent thrashing I could achieve. I didn’t know who I hated more for this. The Simurgh, for attacking, or The Forge for making my own body my prison. I screamed fuckword after fuckword, cursing horrible slurs and vowing revenge on their mothers until my mouth filled with saliva and I almost choked to death, saved only by the perfect timing of Contessa.
“Easy, Greg, easy,” she tilted me and I drooled a moat of spittle with a cough that splattered it everywhere but on her. “I’ve got you.”
“Parents? Pilot? Amy? Frens?”
“All fine, I promise. Now,” she pulled something close to my face and held it up to me. “Hold still while I gas you.”
I awoke without the mental fuzz of anaesthetic, feeling well rested, even. I stretched, felt unfamiliar sheets, and froze.
Slowly, I looked down at my hand. My remaining hand, and the cap of scar tissue that now sat over my left forearm, about halfway up to my elbow. Gingerly I reached out for it, curling the fingers of my right hand around it tightly, squeezing, squeezing. I was in a white room, with white light and white walls. My bedsheets were white, my pillow was white. This was the least hospitable room I had ever laid eyes on - the Feng Shui was abysmal.
“You’ve only been out for four days total.”
I suppressed a flinch as Contessa spoke from next to me. She had taken off her suit jacket and rolled her sleeves up, and was sitting comfortably on an office chair a short way from my bed. Beside her on a medical tray that sat on a wheeled stand was an empty flask that bore residue of my Sekhem, a healing potion, bloodied gloves turned inside out, tools and a petri dish with multiple microchips resting in a solution.
I could tell at a glance what they were for.
I reached up and touched my head gently, feeling for the shaved patch but finding nothing. I suppose, with paths, you didn’t need to.
“What happened?”
“Some of it’s spotty, even for me,” Contessa scooted a little closer. “But it looks like we got very, very lucky that The Celestial Forge, calling itself Metatron now, is a blindspot to her, too.”
“Lucky me,” I muttered. What a pretentious cock hole. Fucking Metatron? Jesus. “And what, it takes over just at the right time? It’s random. It’s always been random.”
“Maybe not,” she gave me a meaningful look. “It could have been acting to save you, and by extension, itself. We may not be able to rely on the assumption that it’s random.”
Maybe it never was, how the fuck would any of us even know? I lay back with a heavy thump. “Alright. So, what did it do to me?”
“Not much, honestly. Except that it was extremely interested in Taylor Hebert again, to the exclusion of all else.”
“Who gives a shit why the Celestial Pedo loves her. Fucking Metacuck. Cuckatron. Shit yourself. Fuck.”
“Greg.”
I pressed my lips together in a thin line at her stern, warning tone. “Why, then?”
“A great and terrible army, a golden morning, a weakness, everyone working together - something it thinks is connected to her.”
“An army? Against Scion?”
She nodded along with my incredulity. “We had that idea in the very early days, but it became very clear very quickly that it would never work - no natural trigger could harm him. Were we wrong, I wonder?”
“I know even less than you and it sounds fucking stupid to me.”
Contessa shrugged. “If it’s true then this will be the second hint to killing the entity we’ve ever had.”
From her first meeting with Metatron. Hint one: Taylor. Hint two: army. “I suppose this is it, then.”
“It’s time.”
I sighed and raised my hands to massage my eyes, gritting my teeth as only the right made contact. “I kind of never expected it to happen, to be honest. I thought I could stay there forever.”
“I thought we could give you longer, too,” she said. “The Simurgh attacked for probably that exact reason. It was always the worst of the three.”
I looked over at her, at the burden of her long, fraught path weighing down on her shoulders. It was like the cruel irony in a lot of parahuman powers, she could see everything there was to see, do everything there was to do, and damn the consequences - all except for the only important outcome that she wanted.
A path we now shared. It was time to join Cauldron properly.
I would leave everything behind, devote myself to the cause. We would save humanity or die trying. I let out a long breath, suddenly very tired. “Alexandria said that Brockton was gone?”
“Like so many others. The infrastructure is too far gone, too many people affected by the song. One more Simurgh site to wipe off the map,” Contessa gave a bitter snort.
“Two or three more?”
“Two or three more, unless,” she gave me another meaningful look. “The army, the silver bullet, the perfect vial - we need you now more than ever.”
“Do we have precautions in place,” I had a sudden shiver as the walls of my coffin pressed in on me. “If it takes over before I get something ready? Did it wreck my suit?”
“We’re not worried about Metatron. If we need to then the light touch from before can be more forcefully applied, though you were doing very well. Nobody could have seen what happened happening.”
“My suit, though? My omnitool?”
“Both gone. Metatron used the suit for parts, and the omnitool is close enough to the Simurgh that I can’t see it.”
“So I start over, from zero. In another world?” I looked around at the awful room, the flow of energy was dreadfully impeding recovery for a medical ward.
“Not quite,” Contessa began to roll her sleeves back out, each movement precise and leaving her cuffs with a sharpness Savile Row tailors would have shot several competitors for. “We’re giving you Hero’s old lab, it’s been gathering dust for long enough. And,” she cut off my next question. “You’ll have access to part of what made Hero the strongest Tinker in history, the near limitless resources of Cauldron at your disposal. If you want something, no matter how rare, no matter how expensive, we have ways.”
“The strongest Tinker in history,” I mused. “And the strongest Tinker of today. Between us, who do you think is stronger?”
“If he was working with all of his gear you might have a little trouble.”
“But would I lose?”
“Nah,” she said as she shrugged her suit coat on. “You’d win.”
I gave a singular tired chuckle. Paths was the best. “Thanks, bro.”
She settled her hat on at a rakish angle. “Oh, and enjoy the door network.”
With that parting statement she left, and I was alone. I sat for a while staring at the stump of my missing left hand. I had everything now, and all it had cost me was everything. Me, me, me… Me, too? How could I possibly be thinking of leaving mum and dad without a son, or Amy on her retard grindset, or deprive my friends of my winning personality? I had answers to all of this, and because Contessa could see the future any action I took was already tacitly approved by her paths.
I turned my focus inward to what I could perceive of my powers. The gaylien fuck had been out for six of them, confirming the worst - it could simply stack me out of existence if it got a power every few days, and each power extended the buffer, so it could be weeks between it getting a power while I resided in whatever coma state I was kept in. If that happened, the world was probably doomed. Indeed to sort it out, I had to talk with it face to face.
And I had just the plan.
Clones. I would clone myself a body and inhabit it while this one, my original body, would keep a copy of my mind and live my human life as it was meant to be lived. They would go to school, make new friends, and enjoy myself while I stayed at the sterile Cauldron bases and tried to save the world.
With this method I would be able to talk to the Forge, to Metatron, and if there was a single shred of anything approaching rational thought in its body then I would have to convince it that we needed to work together.
Divided, we died.
Or if it was so stupid and ignorant that it could not be reasoned with, I cast a malevolent glance at the chips it had put into my brain, I found a way to make it compliant.
Chapter 159: The last day of my adolescence 8.2
Chapter Text
Greg,
The Chosen One
While it wasn’t a mistake to hook everything I made up to my omnitool as the primary control center, as, indeed, I had bigger problems than losing it. Sure, now I could appreciate not having everything hinging on a singular point of failure, but it was such a convenient point! Even now, though I could remember the blueprints for the omnitool I still wouldn’t be able to make one. It was that advanced.
I would do my best, and then make spares, but the loss of the original was even worse than the loss of my hand. At least I could get that back. I was going to have to bite the wetware and cybernetics bullet and bite it hard, squeamishness be damned, and I was going to have to bite it as soon as possible.
I could gain another power at any time. I had to be prepared. I swung my legs off the stiff medical bed and picked up the petri dish of the brain chips. I would have to run proper diagnostics and steal everything I could from them, but just by sight I could see that one was an upgrade over the other.
It looked like Colin’s work, in a way, containing similar foundational throughlines. That was what one of the powers felt like, too, miniaturising, multiple uses, another true tinker power. Very similar vibes.
I licked my lips. “Door me. Hero’s workshop.”
The door opened without a second of delay, the neat little rectangular hole showing me a dark room that in the light spilling in from my end was heavily caked in the dust of disuse. Personally I would have found a way to feed it all to Dragon, but that was neither here nor there - and I could always send out any example of my work to anyone who needed it.
I could do anything. Anything at all. I had complete control and freedom over my life. Anything I wanted to do, anything I wanted to see. I could even make a sex robot without facing the recrimination of my peers, without having to explain to the Tinker examination board that, yes, it was a medical necessity thank you very much, and no I wasn’t going to be sharing.
I took a step into the lab. The air was cold here, lifeless, the hulks of his production machinery now useless wrecks. My third ever power was finally going to come into use. With a simple maintenance ritual I could make anything work again, even long dead Tinkertech. We’d tested that on a few captured pieces the PRT had, and even Leet’s janky shit got a brief second wind.
“Omnit-fuck.” What was I supposed to do now? “Door to a bright, sunny, empty world,” I ventured. “As big as possible, up near the ceiling.”
The door opened for me exactly as requested and I seriously needed to find out who was doing that, and how they were doing it. They were the real MVP, like damn. “Thanks, bro!” My voice echoed in a workshop that was closer to an aircraft hangar than a lab of any kind.
With enough light to not walk straight into anything I shuffled around, following likely power lines to find his generator. The Feng Shui in here was no good, either. I couldn’t unsee it. So much clogged chi and it was shitting me so bad. Another new power, real mystical mathematics.
I eventually found what looked like a generator, as I squinted in the gloom. “Could you move the door above here, please?”
Like a snap the door closed and opened right where I needed it most. A guy could get used to this. I had found the generator and after yanking the rusted casing off, straightening a few wires and cleaning some dust, the thing had its second wind. The generator sprang to life with a crunching heave as the wavelength accelerator within began spinning the particle fuel remaining inside. Even after all these years.
As the whir grew in timbre the some of the lights began to flicker in their fixtures and by the time the generator had settled into a solid hum the remaining unbroken lights were now putting out more than enough light to see by. I could tell instantly that this place was a cut above any shop I’d had access to, and probably even that Colin had access to, or anyone, except maybe Dragon and possibly Toybox.
This was Hero’s real power, the oldest and greatest superpower - money. I wondered how many other Tinkers could have reached his heights had they the resources. I would put it to good use, I promised myself, with only minimal fucking around, making dumb shit only to keep myself mentally healthy.
It really was a Tinker wonderland in here. A real, important slice of history. Each machine was unique and built for its purpose, the place neatly sectioned off in mechanical, chemical and other production methods. I wandered freely, just taking it all in, seeing where I would need to start. Everything was too old, too broken, to keep. It would all have to be replaced.
One of the new powers was going to help with that, too. I could feel it there, waiting for me, a brazen disregard for the concept of time. The work of days done in hours, or less. It was a power that was a career all by itself, one that would make you a quite powerful Tinker in your own right. For me it was one of thirty four.
In my wandering I chanced upon Hero’s fabrication rig. A proper one, too, one that was maybe even better than my omnitools. I fiddled with the internals a little until it magically started up again, the connection to the power grid still holding. It really was all waves and particles with this guy, and it was such a great specialisation. This whole apparatus would actually break down raw material and reconstitute it in the programmed configuration via that same particle and wave principle. Pow, Tinker shit.
I brushed dust off the screen, a quaint analogue thing of a hundred dials and knobs. He might have been the greatest Tinker in history but his sense of aesthetics was atrocious. Everything here was so… eighties. Hero had been alive until two thousand, I was pretty sure, before he got ripped to shreds by The Siberian.
I let my remaining hand fall to my side. That was going to be project number two after the clone stuff, build a murder drone and just fucking blast the Slaughterhouse Nine out of existence with absolutely no warning or fanfare. I didn’t think it would even be that hard, mechanically. Maybe it being on the other end of a drone strike would make it easier for me, instead of doing it by hand.
One step at a time. Project zero was a new hand, and I had to get it done as quickly as possible - starting now.
“Door me, to my house.”
Without even so much as a pause the door opened for me. How did the Doorman know what I meant? He had to be a precog of some kind, or a postcog. I stepped through and looked around my kitchen, which was exactly where I wanted to go. I was getting hungry, and I needed to pick up a few things.
I stepped over to the cupboards, barely visible in the light of the start of dawn, and pulled one open, the bare myomer of my new hand flexing as it found the box of LCM bars. I had a craving. Some over processed sugar would do me good, until I made my own sugar processing plant and overloaded my dopamine receptors with sugar so magic Mrs. Butterworth would kill herself in stoic resignation that she would never reach my peak.
I munched down on one and made my way up to my room. I tried flipping all the switches but none worked, and I banged my shin on the corner of my bed as I tried to inch across to my closet. “Fuck you,” I scolded my bedframe angrily, tossing my bar wrapper at it. “You’re an asshole.”
My bedframe didn’t respond and I shot it a withering glare before getting back to reality. A harsh return, as in my laboratory all my glassware was gone. All my burners. Every useful ingredient. Gone. In the light of the blue crystals I could see that even my stash, accessible only via my omnitool, had been carelessly opened, papers strewn about with no respect for the material.
Why did he have to be such a dickhead? I could understand, to a very limited extent given that it was mine, that he might need the alchemy glass for something, but did he have to mess up my porn?
Big sigh. I slouched out of the lab, intending to at least take my PC with me, when I stepped on a squishy cylinder of omnimaterial. It would be such a shame to leave it here, it was the only one of its kind and completely irreplaceable - unless I could get my omnitool back from the FUCKING SIMURGH.
I hurled the bootleg fleshlight into the wall as hard as I could, it landed with a dull smack and bounced off to flop on the carpet. I ran at the wall and punched a hole in the plaster with my prosthetic hand, breathing hard. I punched a second hole, then stooped to pick the fleshlight back up.
“Door me back to Cauldron. Do I have a room on base? To there. Please.”
The door opened. This was the kind of convenience a man couldn’t give up. My room at the base was in the same sterile white paneling as everywhere else, and I hurriedly gathered everything from my room I wanted to take with me and unceremoniously dumped it on the single, hospice-esque bed.
This wouldn’t do. This wouldn’t do at all. I had to go back to Brockton. I had to go back and help everyone. This was also tacitly approved by the path, as Contessa didn’t step out from a door to moderate me.
“Door me, Brocton Bay. Somewhere secluded.”
I stepped through and almost shit myself in terror as I barely avoided running headfirst into Alexandria.
“Follow me,” she ordered, tilted her head and floated off.
I looked around. We were in some abandoned ruin of a building, in some random part of the Bay. “Did Contessa tell you to be here?”
“She did. We already have a cover story fabricated.”
“Hey,” I began, then trailed off as I walked after her. It was dawn, but through my softsuit, one made by Metatron, I couldn’t feel the chill at all. “Thanks for getting me out of there. Really. I thought I was going to die, or already dead.”
“You’re welcome,” she said simply, though not in a dismissive way. Saving me was simply her job, one that she was happy to do.
“You said that,” I coughed as my throat caught. “Brockton was finished.”
“It hasn’t gone out officially yet, but, yes. It’s another loss, we’ve switched to simply containing the issue until the bombs are ready. Too many capes down fighting her, and in the aftermath, Echidna. Too many.”
I sniffed, a wet gobby sound. “Do you think if Echidna ate me again I could go back?”
Alexandria turned to face me, now floating backward. She was smiling in a way that was both kind, and uncompromising. “It could just as easily throw you into a separate timeline, if it does anything at all.”
“I never told anyone about it before. I still miss it so much. I lost so much. I don’t know if I would do it if I had the choice - come to this timeline, I mean.”
“Truly? I think I would welcome the chance to do it all over again, knowing what mistakes to avoid. Reports came across my desk, you know, from Armsmaster. He only had glowing praise for your behavior.”
“It’s not the same. I earned so much, there. Sure, I ‘started’ as less of a dipshit for everyone here, but… I liked it better, before.”
“The struggle made it worth it.”
“Exactly! And what’s my struggle here? Losing my life to something I have no control over? I’m going to be so much stronger here, but I’m going to lose everything. I’m dying.”
“Life can be pointlessly cruel. You know, before I was Alexandria I was dying, too. Cancer. It wasn’t a life worth living, and it was saved through no struggle of mine. Do your best with the time you have.”
Yeah, all stoike and shit.
“It gets harder from here,” she continued. “Your struggle. You’ll have the power to do so much, with the consequences resting entirely on your shoulders. No one is going to be telling you what to do, it’s strange to think that after all these years we’re to have another member, and that it’s a child.”
“So how is it all going to work, then, this Cauldron stuff? I just do what I want, when I want, how I want it?”
“To a point. The Cauldron ‘membership’ is only so long as you work toward our goals. So long as you fully believe that your actions will result in the maximal amount of humanity surviving, post apocalypse, then we should have no real disagreements.”
“Really? Even if I wanted to take over America, turn it into a dictatorship?”
“We already did.”
I frowned. “Huh?”
“You don’t live in a democracy, Greg, and you never have. We couldn’t let something like votes or public opinion ruin the integration of Parahumans into society, we took over the government here decades ago.”
As a red blooded American I didn’t know how to feel about this. On one hand I fully understood that without Cauldron we would all be incomparably worse off, and yet… “So, what, like, you guys have let Heartbreaker exist, so I could just take some country or alternate earth over for myself?”
“That would, I think, revoke your membership. But you could, and we would have more important things to do than stop you. Of course, I understand that this isn’t a serious question from you and you’re grasping for reassurance that our moral compases are comparable. They mightn’t be, Greg.”
I was quiet for a few seconds as we continued through the ruin of my home, everything I had known torn down around me. “Were they ever?”
Her smile changed for a moment, annoyed, sad, before going back to the kind yet stern one. “Even I was young, once.”
“There’s so much Cauldron does that I don’t like. We had this conversation before too, y’know, last time. It was right after Leviathan attacked. Attacked here, actually, in mid May. I used to have this power that let me read a description of who people were. We were talking on the hospital roof. I know how to fix a lot of the Case Fifty Threes, now, too, by the way - Amy, Panacea, can do it, though I can now, too. I think that’s going to be my first job in Cauldron.”
“We would have to confer with-”
“You told me last time that the entity would kill you if you weren’t making them,” I spoke quickly, daring to speak over her. She didn’t look like she appreciated it. “I didn’t ask what you meant.”
“It seems to ignore places where they’re in concentration, it seems to distract it. We keep them deliberately for this reason.”
“But the Nemesis Program-”
“If you can make all of this redundant you will have all our thanks,” Alexandria cut over me in turn. “With any luck there are many things we do that you can plug the gap on.”
I was silent for a moment longer. “You also told me that Scion is where all the powers come from. Could it, like, just take them back from us?”
Alexandria turned to face me head on and never before had she ever looked like more of a lifeless statue.
“Probably.”
It was the face of someone who had given up.
Chapter 160: The last day of my adolescence 8.3
Chapter Text
Greg,
The Chosen One
I passed through the Simurgh bomb check very quickly, a nice guy named Gauge checking me over, Alexandria’s influence, the sheer weight of her presence acting like the ultimate kindergarten teacher to speed everything along. People saw her and instantly stopped slacking off or, even if they were already working properly, started working even harder.
She inspired, even if it were in a type A, overbearing kind of way, people to strive toward a better future she herself had long given up on in her heart.
It was genuinely impressive, the way she kept going knowing that at any moment, upon the whim of an alien god, like the basest of crypto scams, it could rugpull the superpowers out from under everyone and leave us holding the bag of the apocalypse with no way to fight back.
Luckily for me I had a perfect way to sidestep the crushing weight of realities problems and never confront all these horrible feelings of complete despair again - I could create a simple Philtre that would invoke cheerful optimism. I could make a retinal implant that would project a low opacity filter over everything I saw, painted with my emotion inducing power, to make me unable to not feel hope even if my eyes were closed.
I could give these things to her, too. There was so much I could do, and because I could I had to.
I had to.
I had to stop being Greg, and start being someone important.
In a way unlike any of my old silly delusions about shooting my old self in the head as a way to humorously conceptualise my growth as a person, the twilight would come over my last day for real. Greg was going to die, and I was going to kill him.
Alexandria led me through the makeshift encampment of tents and trucks with precision, and directly into a particularly sturdy tent that exuded the heat and hum of a server room, the inside resembling a workspace I knew well. There was a curtain sectioning off a cot at the end and Alexandria brusquely pulled it back.
In the cot, an uncharacteristically unshaven Colin blinked blearily, looking as if he were running on a ridiculously low amount of sleep even for him.
“I found him,” said Alexandria, floating out from in between us.
It was the perfect time to do a silly reference, say, ‘kept you waiting, huh?’, but before I could speak in a surge of adrenaline Colin lurched upright and seized me by the shoulders. “Greg?”
“Hey.”
“You’re safe? He’s safe?”
“He’s been cleared. He’s a very lucky boy. I pulled him out of that machine myself.”
Colin looked down at my arm, where bare flesh met dark polymer. “We were sure she killed you,” he gave my shoulders a tight squeeze and sat back. “Thank god. I know that the Forge entity assumed control, but are you alright? As well as can be in this kind of mess.”
“I guess, but going from the Simurgh ripping my arm off to getting pulled out of some mecha thing,” I shrugged. Colin nodded. “I dunno.”
“Well, you’re safe now. I’ll get you moved to where the rest of the Wards are, we’ve put them all out of town at this point, and you-”
“Can I keep working? I have to be doing something, and I can tell you’re all out of potions-”
“Greg-”
“No, c’mon. Even a couple of hours from me and that’s how many injured back up? How many people are there just lying in tents?”
“Not many. We’re evacuating them, too. You should go, we’ll find your parents and relocate you all in whatever city you want. It’s over here, we’re packing out by midnight tonight.”
“I want to be here,” I said, hands of flesh and iron clenched. “When the bombs go. I have to see.”
Colin cast an annoyed look at Alexandria who continued to float there as impervious to criticism as a mountain was to droplets of morning dew, before flicking his eyes back to me. “No. You don’t have to see that.”
“Let him be, Armsmaster,” Alexandria spoke, rotating slightly in space to face him.
His eyes sharpened in suspicion, even anger, though when he replied his tone was even. “As an official statement?”
“I can have it for you in writing at any time.”
Colin nodded, his expression bitter. “Of course, Alexandria, I understand. Technomage, remain on duty.”
Alexandria nodded. “Thank you. With the destruction of the ENE branch some reshuffling will have to be done, perhaps in Boston, even. Keep up the good work.”
Unceremoniously she floated out of the tent and vanished in a rush of air as she took proper flight. I looked back to Colin, at his set, clenched jaw, even though I knew he very much desired to cuck Bastion out of his prime spot as the Boston branch head.
“I’m not going to ask,” he said stonily, eyeing the tent flaps. “But even though she is an amazing Protectorate leader, Alexandria doesn’t have a reputation as a kind woman. Even if she suggests, or allows, it, it may not be in your best interests.”
“I know.”
Colin turned back to me and shifted in his cot, standing up. I caught a whiff of vile ball sweat and unwashed armpit in the airflow his movement created. Yeah, he probably hadn’t showered in three days. “Well, you’re here now and we have our orders. I wasn’t meant to be up for another… two hours, so, if you please, some of that waking paste would be greatly appreciated.”
“No doubt. Hey, I was out for six powers this time. In a row. What… happened? What did it do, while I was gone?”
Colin picked up a water bottle from a stack of them at the foot of his cot and cracked the lid, gargling his first sip and spitting it out into a little portable sink. “We had some contact, but not much, so it may have done more than we’re aware. Mostly it seemed to attach itself to a new local cape going by the name of Worm, a bug controlling master.”
Not an emotion manipulator, huh? I guess that was the difference in trigger making a new power expression? “Weird.”
“Concerningly. As far as we can tell all it did was outfit her, and itself, and brutalise that Nazi cape, Cricket. Do you remember when we had it duplicating tantalum, and it made statues of a girl in a bug themed costume? It was Worm, the same girl I met. But according to her the statues it made matched an original attempt at her suit, only before she had it even close to finished. How could it have known?”
“Timey wimey precoggy stuff? I don’t know at all.”
“If I could just… anyway. Let me quickly brush my teeth, then pick up my armour from my truck. We don’t have a Tinker lab for you to work with, what kind of setup are you going to need for the ‘alchemy’?”
“Oxy torch, bit of metal tube, some glass.”
“You’re going to just blow custom glassware?”
“I always could. Kind of, not always, but I could have done something like this before I could make potions, I was just doing other stuff. Has anyone seen Pilot? I gave her to my parents. Alexandria said they were ok, but do you know where they are?”
I suppose I could always just door to them, now.
“I haven’t heard anything,” Colin paused for a minute to scrub the inside of his mouth with a disposable toothbrush and one of those tiny tubes they gave you at hotels. “But with Pilot they should be fine. It’s the best robot I’ve ever seen, and that’s saying a lot.”
“Yeah. Yeah, they’re fine. Alexandria would have told me if they were still in the city.” I was going to check with a door as soon as I could. We didn’t live close to city center, so getting out would have been easier.
Colin spat.
The oxy torch was clamped to a bench, the flame heating an empty beer bottle, one of many found in the bins around here, while I twirled it around with a thin steel tube.
Time was skipping. I could feel it, something in one of the powers let me work faster, not just by sheer movement but by manipulating time around me in something like a breaker state, so when I rushed my work I really fucking rushed.
Glass blossomed from the red hot flower of the beer bottle, and despite this being the first time I had ever done this I moved with a savant-like surety, as though this were something I had been doing for years. Three hundred and twenty two grams of glass quadrupling as I worked it, thin, so much thinner than glass should have been able to be spun as the raw material itself was enhanced, enchanted unbreakable.
I set it down as one solid piece and snipped the tip to detach from my blowpipe, then got to work on a stand from another bottle.
I had requested a tiny peephole door above my parents and confirmed they were indeed safe, and with Pilot. From what I could gather they were waiting around the western perimeter set up around the city, trying to avoid being made to leave. They looked dirty, tired and worried - but alive. That was all I needed.
I would get back to them soon. It would take a little bit to build a cloning tank and the neural transferral machine, so I had that long to spend with them. Only that long. At least one of me would get to be with them.
My prosthetic throbbed with phantom pain. It wasn’t bad, but in my haste to get it done it was only better than what might be available with cutting edge normal technology. The Greg who got to stay here would have to live with that, since I had already been seen with it.
He would understand, because he was me.
Colin returned, now in his full armour, with a crate of ingredients, barely enough for a batch, he had sourced from somewhere, and plonked them on the canvas floor of the tent that had been put up for me. He watched me finish the last of my glass stand apparatus in silence.
“I think you should go,” he said once I was done. “Set up this batch for us, and take a helicopter out.”
“I have to see it.”
“Greg. You don’t. Do you understand it? We’ve lost the city, we are destroying it so the clones can’t spread. Thousands of innocent people inside are going to be incinerated.”
“It’s important. I have to watch.” I had to know what it was I was fighting for. This was going to be the last city they took. Clones, drones and potions, I would make something strong enough to hold them back and maybe even, if I was still myself after a dozen powers more, kill them.
“I hope you won’t come to regret it. You’re still just a kid.”
I didn’t answer.
I didn’t think I was going to be, anymore, after today.
Chapter 161: The last day of my adolescence 8.4
Chapter Text
Greg,
The Chosen One
It wasn’t enough, and maybe it never would be.
The last day over Brockton bay was coming to a close, the last minutes to midnight winding down. I sat in the last group of helicopters, ignoring the to and fro movement of PRT and army around me, my legs dangling off the edge as I kicked them idly. They had been flying in and out all day, reinforcements coming in from every surrounding city who had them, just to get everyone out who could be before the end.
There were a lot who couldn’t. How many losses had it taken, I wondered, for Cauldron to end up like they had? How many bad days had it taken to cheesegrate their compassion into the vestigial nub that would allow the Nemesis program to sell wins to Skidmark?
Smoke and ash still rose from the city, the thick smell of dust and ozone wafting across my nose whenever the wind shifted out to sea, the combined weight of it spreading out as if to grasp the sky in it’s fist just as the Simurgh had taken the city.
I sighed into my new temporary mask. One of the new powers was an incredible thing, I could take fabric of any kind and, with almost no tools, something reduced even further for me, weave even a fragment of cloth into something incredible. The last mask of Technomage, somewhere between rogue and wizard - a dark magician.
Heavy boots crunched on sandy, gravelly concrete, the faint whirring of servos joining it, letting me know it was Colin before I looked up. His step was much peppier than before; when the evacuation helicopters were coming in some had been ordered to bring more supplies and as such I had been shitting out potions all day, giving them away as fast as I could make them.
I gave a little gasp in surprise when I saw who he was leading. “Mouse Protector?”
I heard her breathe to speak, but she broke off in a cough that sounded raw and she visibly swallowed. “At your service,” she croaked.
“Holy shit, I’m your biggest fan. I’ve read The Eternal Mouse at least once.”
“Oh? How was it?”
My voice broke as I answered her. “Awful.”
She gave a single high pitched giggle that devolved into another coughing fit, either from not having a healing potion or from something too damaging to be fixed by one. “A Mousketeer after my own heart. Whatcha name?”
“Technomage.”
There was a little gasp of surprise and my eyes slid over to a third person, one I had looked over entirely. Instead of a dark lord she was a queen, dark, but as beautiful as terrible as the rosy dawn and the burning dusk, fair as the sea and the sunray silks, dreadful as the storm and lightning of raging heaven’s wrath, she your master and you a diminished shadow.
“This is Worm,” Mouse Protector supplied helpfully.
“You called yourself Worm?”
She nodded.
“That’s hilarious.”
“It wasn’t my first choice,” she said, and when she spoke it was in the plain old voice of Taylor Hebert.
“But it should have been,” rasped Mouse Protector. “And it is hilarious. Why didn’t you tell me you had such a fine young man under your wing, Armsmaster?”
“Because we’re not friends, Mouse Protector.”
That was something, actually, I realised as I watched Taylor while Natalie needled Colin. She was doing better than last time, a lot better than being Scarecrow - all the pain I had caused her by provoking her into triggering with such a malignant power wiped clean. She shifted awkwardly under my gaze, the thin layer of bugs lining her hooded cloak glinting in the moonlight.
“You could do a lot worse for a mentor than her. She’s great, everyone is an equal to Mouse Protector.”
“Equal opportunity target,” Taylor replied acerbically.
I have a soft, amused huff. “It’s hard to explain. Just keep smiling, did she tell you that?”
Taylor nodded.
Oh, Mouse Protector. She was still the coolest adult I had ever met, and that, more than anything, was why I was going to seven twenty Tomahawk Bonesaw from across the map. Murder Rat could never be allowed to come about. She still featured in my nightmares, sometimes I even became Murder Rat in them and all I could remember of it when I woke up was the pain of having machetes bolted deep into the bone of my fingers and toes, the oozing pus and infection from the rust manifesting as my rank morning breath.
“It’s good advice. But she was wrong about your name.” Out of the corner of my eye I saw her mouse helmet, missing all its whiskers, turn sharply in my direction. “I would have gone with Dr. Bees.”
“That’s so stupid,” Taylor replied in a voice so plain, so empty of human spirit, that she seemingly couldn’t even interface with the idea that I might just be joking. Mouse Protector’s book spoke of this, of these golems in human form, these philosophical zombies who merely aped humanity but were devoid of that vital spark.
“Real,” I replied. “But how much better is it than some lame bullshit like ‘Mandible’, or ‘Swarm.”
Taylor said nothing, as though anything she could have said could have been heard over Natalie’s jeering, raspy laugh. She was pointing at Taylor and laughing with exaggerated affect.
“No,” I said.
“She tried,” Natalie said. “Told them her name was Swarm, but they misheard. Funniest shit I’ve ever seen.”
“You’re so lucky,” I told her. “I wanted to go with Heart-Under-Blade, but y’know; I work for the Protectorate, gotta have marketability.”
Taylor shifted uncomfortably before responding, and completely butchering the pronunciation. “Heart under blade just makes me think of ‘Heartbreaker’.”
Hah. I suppose it didn’t really matter, now. Dark Smoke Puncher, Heart-Under-Blade, Technomage? I was working at the level above these things. I would fashion myself a new name, a better name, one that men would one day fear to speak.
“I suppose it does.”
For some reason agreeing with her killed the flow of conversation and everyone was awkwardly quiet for a moment before Colin cleared his throat, said he had to be somewhere else, and left. Based. God I wish that were me. Natalie kept trying to heckle us both, but after another huge coughing fit that left her too hoarse to speak she retired into the helicopter to lie down and rest, leaving only Taylor and I in the quiet minutes to midnight.
“Well,” I broke the silence after it became too unbearable for an extrovert such as myself to exist within. “I know.”
For a moment it looked like she was going to be too frazzled to pick up what I was putting down, but then her single brain cell finally activated. “You’re Metatron.”
“I don’t know what Metatron is. For months I only ever knew it as The Celestial Forge.”
“Is everything you, I mean, he, told me true?”
“I genuinely have no idea. I’m gone while it’s out. Like in a coma. I used to have a supercomputer wristband to record it, but the Simurgh stole it.”
“Oh.” She said, fell quiet, then continued after some thought. “Metatron was completely obsessed with me, I was hoping you could tell me why?”
I shrugged and shifted, moving from kicking my feet to locking them together at the ankle. “Profound mental retardation is my best guess. Perhaps he’s even my dark mirror, a foil my power created to torment me? What did it tell you?”
“He said I was the most important person in the world,” she picked at the edge of her cloak. “He told me I was destined to kill a god.”
“It’s so strange.” There was so much I didn’t know, so much nobody knew, everyone just flying blind and hoping they were doing the best they could with what they had. “Did it say which god?”
“An ‘entity’. Something vague. It said a lot of things that didn’t make sense.”
“Don’t trust it. It hates me and thinks I’m better off dead, but I’m great so it clearly doesn’t know what it’s talking about.”
Taylor gave a small exhalation of amusement, the first in, probably, years. “It thinks superpowers come from alien computers in another dimension.”
I twirled my finger clockwise around my ear, unfortunately stigmatising the mentally ill.
“And that Alexandria is Costa-Brown. You know, the lady who runs the PRT?”
I swallowed. “People have been saying that for years.”
“It’s just… too bad,” Taylor sighed. “He listened to me, I was going to get him to do some good. More like what you do.”
“I am the best, a lot of people say it.”
Taylor gave another little snicker and I hoped I imagined the wistful tinge to her next question. “Do you think he’s coming back?”
“No. No, it’s never coming back like that. This time was only because of the Simurgh, next time the Forge will be locked away.”
“What happens when he comes out for long enough? He told me he was slowly taking over for good.”
I grit my teeth and rubbed at my aching prosthetic connection. “I don’t know, Taylor. I just don’t know.”
I looked up as she stood frozen, every single insect on her vibrating their bodies in the slightest buzz. Well, it wasn’t like that mattered anymore either. I reached up and gripped the rim of my wizard hat, pulling the entire mask off in one smooth ripple of flexible, soft fabric.
“Maybe I just fucking kill myself.”
“Holy shit.”
“Yeah.”
“This makes so much sense.”
I hit her with that Greg Veder stare.
Taylor refused to elaborate.
“So, yeah,” I eventually continued. “It’s killing me. I might only have a year or two.”
Taylor didn’t say anything and it was like, come on, at least please pretend to act sad about it. Was I truly so awful? Did I deserve this for the crime of being somewhat annoying? Of calling Metatron a celestial faggot? I could have been an actual criminal, I could have enjoyed hurting people and gone deliberately out of my way to do so. I could have joined a gang whose sole means of existence hinged on deliberate and malicious exploitation.
I could have just been a Nazi cape, and just not said any spicy words.
I felt like they suffered less than me.
Well, when I was full in Cauldron I could do something about that. I would have the power. I would have the power to do a lot of things. I was on my world saving grindset, a conspiracypilled herocel in my valiant last stand arc. Not just on Bet, on Aleph, too, and every other world I could access. I could spread my own brand of saving people and it wouldn’t be colonial because I had the mandate of heaven.
In fact, I may even be a god. I was already some kind of crafting demigod or something, who was to say I didn’t have the divine right to do as I willed? What humanity had I to abandon that hadn’t already been taken from me?
I sighed and tossed my mask to the side. “It did good work on your suit, at least. It looks good.”
“Oh. Yeah, I guess. It saved my life a few times.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess that is pretty good.”
“I’m just still having trouble believing it,” she said in her normal, acerbic, Taylor way, having picked up on my mocking tone. “Even though it makes complete sense. You pretty much just dropped out of school one day, and of course Metatron would be obsessed with me - like you.”
“Shit yourself,” I said viciously. “What a cope.”
“What? No, you shit your self, whatever that even means. You totally were.”
“You are absolutely delusional.”
Taylor bristled visibly, all her bugs standing on end and vibrating menacingly. “So defensive. I even thought he reminded me of you, you both talk the same.”
“It stole my voice.”
“No, your weird jargon, conspiracy theory vomit. I was actually surprised that you were Technomage because you seemed so normal and nice.”
Damn, now I really remembered why I didn’t like this bitch. She actually thought she was better than me, when she was really the kind of person who would deliberately go out of their way to hurt someone. I wouldn’t be surprised if she joined a gang.
“I was always normal and nice.”
“You were a weirdo.”
The allegory of shooting my past self wasn’t because he was especially wrong or bad, it was because I personally didn’t like him. In Winslow I simply had the bad luck of having no one who shared my interests, I wasn’t some singular freak, I was just a type of teenage boy. “ If I was, I’m not anymore.”
Taylor made a disbelieving, supercilious noise, but I was spared at having to defend my entire existence to someone worse than me by the timely return of Colin.
“It’s time,” he looked between the two of us, both clearly unhappy. “You should strap in.”
I sniffed and pulled my mask back on, picking it up from where it lay on the helicopter floor, and any lingering chill from the night was banished as the enchanted cloth enclosed my head. I stood stiffly, greatly misliking that the last day of my adolescence would be tainted by these bitter notes, and picked a window seat before anyone else could.
With a great beating of blades against the night air ours, and the rest of the helicopters, took to the sky with an agonising slowness and we rose up, high above the wastes that used to be my home, glowing embers from great fires still providing pinpricks of light. I kept my nose glued to the glass as we got further and further away over the ocean, watching until I heard the great rumble of the bomber jets echo through the night.
It wasn’t the first city to be bombed after the Simurgh, but I would make sure it was the last.
There was a pause, stretching into minutes, as the clock finally ticked down its last second.
Brockton Bay went up in brilliant, blinding flame.
Chapter 162: "What bugs the hands of fate"
Chapter Text
Contessa
The Chains of the Eye
Grey fog shrouded the paths as the hands of fate reshuffled the deck, a common occurrence during the tumult of an Endbringer battle and the aftermath. New triggers being the most common after the horrors they had just witnessed, and now with every clone Echidna as birthed them came with new blindspots that my power had to calculate the paths anew, a recalculation that occurred far too often and with often needing an abandonment or overhaul of the paths. Things were harder, now, than in the beginning.
I cast ahead through the steps of my current paths - no changes.
I stepped through a portal, not particularly paying attention as my body moved. It was easier to do that than see what the paths would have me do. I was still vaguely aware of what I was doing, but it was like a daydream, zoning out on public transport, I could snap to attention at any time.
My eyes saw but I ignored it. My hand felt as it squeezed a trigger, but I ignored it. My feet walked through portal after portal, my mouth spoke words in languages I couldn’t understand, and still I ignored them. I ignored everything I was able to, but I wasn’t able to ignore the path. I always saw the steps and I always knew what they meant.
My body was tired at this point, my power telling me I had been on the path for eighteen hours with scarcely a pause for breath - the ever present problem of my humanity. There were ways to ameliorate this, to make myself more, or less, than human, but those paths always ended in rot and death. I could have a tinker maintain cybernetics within myself, and it would make life easier for a time, shorten paths, save lives - those paths always ended in the grey fog of failure.
Even if I were to employ the services of Cask, a tinker whose consumables provided temporary benefits with minimal side effects, the path showed a harsh retribution that leaving him alive and me unaltered was significantly kinder to everyone involved.
The cape known as Panacea was another fantastic, safer option, if every path showing that gaining her help didn’t lead to some grisly, unknowable death.
I was alone, the paths were for my feet and my feet only.
Until they weren’t; something I had long thought impossible until three days prior when The Simurgh failed to kill Greg Veder. It had been the first glimmer of hope, faint though it was, that Cauldron had seen since the creation of Eidolon all those years ago.
Perhaps it really was true that Taylor Hebert could bring about that shining gold morning.
Perhaps the wheel could be broken, and we could all be released from this cycle of curses.
Now that was a path worth walking. I snapped back to attention and found myself in Boston, Earth Bet, standing inside of an apartment that belonged to the woman who called herself Mouse Protector. Taylor Hebert had chosen to stay here until she could be returned to her father, though she wouldn’t find out for some weeks that he had perished in the bombing of Brockton Bay.
I moved quietly to the kitchen and pulled up a pair of chairs facing each other, sat, then called out loudly and clearly. “Taylor.”
There was a noise as she stirred in the guest room. “Natalie?”
“No.”
There was a change in the air as the natural movements of the insects halted, they started finding places on me and quickly died. A contact poison that wouldn’t harm a human but was almost instantly fatal to something the size of a fly.
“I’m here to talk, not fight.”
After exactly fifteen point three seven eight one repeating seconds as calculated by the path Taylor opened her bedroom door and cautiously made her way out. “Hell of a threatening way to just talk.”
It was; a default of the path born of the entity's nature to dominate, to subsume and destroy. I could have pathed differently, of course, but the result was the same in the end. “Please take a seat.”
She came into view, a gangly stick of a girl, and she startled at the sight of me. I knew why, of course, I vaguely resembled her late mother - but only vaguely. I took off my hat and rested it on the kitchen table. More insects attached to my clothes, my hair and skin, and all died. The path was telling me she was calling in a swarm even as she steadily walked closer, though you would never know it from looking at her. It was an extremely impressive amount of multitasking for a shard to have given a human, but only impressive in that arena. She sat, perched on the edge of the wooden chair in preparation to take flight.
“You can call me Contessa,” I said. Taylor froze. “Yes, it was true. The broad strokes, at least. The existence of Cauldron, the alien god we’re trying to slay, all of it. Metatron was right - to a point. He told you we were evil, but I’m telling you that we’re humanity's only hope.”
I paused for a path perfect amount of dramatic effect.
“And we’re asking for your help.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“A gold morning,” I looked straight into her wide brown eyes as her mouth hung open in gormless surprise. “A great and terrible army. A weakness. If Metatron thinks it’s the way then it’s worth a shot.”
Taylor shut her mouth, paused, then opened it again. “Either you’re crazy or I’m crazy. Were you listening to us talk?”
“I don’t need to. Worm, the fate of the world may rest on your shoulders, will you help us?”
“This is a joke. There is no conspiracy, powers aren’t alien supercomputers and I can’t save the world with bugs. Metatron was nice enough, but he was crazy. He was just… fucking Greg’s delusional alter ego.”
That more than anything shattered any hope she might have placed in Metatron, the sheer lack of respect she held for Greg Veder. It was so low that she would reject the chance to save the world because it was associated with his name, she would reject the power and respect that came with it because someone might mention them both in the same breath.
The path could find her reason why, but it made little sense to me.
“A stopped clock is right twice a day,” I replied calmly. “Even a clock as broken as this. For all the failings of the source, he was right about some of it.”
“Come on,” she said weakly.
“Taylor, you might be our first and our last hope. Metatron said you have time, so we have time. We can prepare. The secret might lie in your power. I’ve seen every power you care to name and none have come as close to yours in the sheer amount of discrete objects it can control. It’s the perfect power for a General, for someone to take command of this ‘great and terrible army’. We think that you, and you alone, can do this. Please, help us.”
She had no choice in the matter, at any rate. This was pathed. Everything in her foreseeable future was pathed. Barring some horrible turns of fate or retribution by The Simurgh, but her next visit was nine months away, Taylor would work with us and become the kind of person who could slay a god.
She was almost there, but a little tempering would do her good. Her first minion would be arriving soon enough, Metatron’s robot - Driver. Strangely though Metatron was a great big unpathable blank spot the things it made weren’t. This AI was just as easy to read as Dragon, and as easy to control if need be.
Even though this path, too, ended in the grey fog of failure there were some that you had to tread even as they brought you ever closer to uncertain doom.
I stepped out once more onto the path, now for the first time in thirty years walking toward that golden bright morning, that dawn where humanity would survive.
Chapter 163: The Ship of Theseus 9.1
Chapter Text
Greg,
The Chosen One
While it was all incredibly important, meeting back up with my parents and us being relocated by the Protectorate to New York, I didn’t have the time to dwell on it and I didn’t have a second to spare. I had to clone my new body and I had to get it done as soon as possible so that I could start on the Scion problem.
Cauldron membership was extremely useful for expediting this process, I could request whatever material I wanted and it would be delivered for me - an absolute lifesaver in terms of time. The first step was building a computer system capable of processing the vast amount of information contained within a human brain, then both storing and exporting it into another.
It was all very interesting, and there would have been a lot to go into with how it treated slotting memories over the top of a live recipient versus copying them wholesale onto a blank clone but I hadn’t the time. Every spare moment was dedicated to this, and the cloning vat, then, once built, the clone.
It all had to be done before it took over again.
Growing something like this didn’t proc most of my powers, and there were genetic improvements to be made here that I hadn’t the time for, but interestingly my main enchanting power could be applied. It was more clearly a direction of energy in this instance rather than a specific way of making things, and I felt it could be turned to growing plants or the like, but that would have to be kicked down to the bottom of the todo list.
My very own stem cells were harvested, nourished, incited to multiply and grow, were fed on magical energy. The process was so fast that I barely had time to pull The Forge’s brain chips apart and remake them, advance them, properly integrate them as the clone grew rather than just slapped on top of the greymatter.
There was something between the clone and myself, an unnameable distinction yet plain for the eye to see, and if you were possessed of the means, something that could be felt, something almost elfin; not in a sissy femboy elf internet meme kind of way either, this was something at least as profound.
Each hour until the clone grew was waited with baited breath and bitten nails, each hour stretching out maddeningly. They had to be waited, still, if I took the clone out before it had finished cooking it would probably just die and a week would be wasted.
Even worse for the waiting was that it prolonged the moment where I killed myself.
For this transfer to work properly I would have to die, this body would have to be killed as the machine sucked my brain out into data and spat it back into my new body. It would be a brief moment, barely even a second, but I would die and be reborn.
I had faint hopes that this would disconnect me from The Celestial Forge entirely, but they were wishes at best. I was ninety nine point nine nine nine etc. percent certain that the power would cross over with me. So I waited, prepared and coped.
My hands wouldn’t stop shaking as I strapped the helmet in place, the tremors shaking a piece of equipment whose value couldn’t be measured in money. I was holding a version of immortality here. Anyone could be given a new body, whatever kind they wanted.
“Pilot,” I called, my voice echoing through Hero’s cold, still dusty, workshop. “I need some help.”
Pilot stepped forward, just as perfect as ever. She had taken great care of my parents during the Three Days Death and it was almost too bad that she was a soulless robot and couldn’t be rewarded in any way that mattered.
“It’s ok,” she said soothingly, cupping my face and looking deep into my eyes, the thrill of the unnatural red never really fading. “Everything will be ok. You’re going to be fine.”
“It’s all going to be ok?”
“You’re going to feel better than ever in a minute.”
I glanced over at my new body where it rested on an opposing gurney, the medical equipment attached to it showing steady vitals. The body was alive, but empty. “Are you sure?”
“I’m completely sure,” she gently stroked my cheek and smiled encouragingly.
“Ok.” I had her let go of my face and finished setting the helmet in place. I lay down, every muscle tense. “If you’re sure, then… whenever you’re ready to press the button-”
I burst into a coughing fit and sat up, tearing myself out of bed. I bent over at the waist and dry heaved on a stomach that had never eaten a bite, my limbs shaking worse than ever. I felt them all. I was still connected to it.
“Fuck,” I spat, tried to spit, as saliva glands that had never seen use began to function and rasped with a voice yet unused. “Get me the sauce.”
Pilot immediately went to do so as I moved in a body that had never contracted a muscle, my blood flowing as it had never done before. Yet, even though I felt awful there was something else. Something silver bright. Something magical.
Pilot forced a healing potion down my throat, the blood red liquid spilling a little as I choked it down. The electric fizz spread throughout my entire body and the awful feeling vanished. I gave one last cough, cleared my throat and swallowed. I breathed and I felt amazing. This body was stronger than my old one, more robust, yet lighter. It was a direct clone of my fifteen year old self, yet it looked older somehow, the features more defined.
“See? Everything is fine,” Pilot rubbed my back soothingly. “You’re alive. You should fix the dead Greg.”
“God damn. Yeah.” I flexed my two hands of flesh, the damage done by the Simurgh wiped away. The same hands, yet not. I looked over at my original body as it lay there, dead. Completely dead, too. No heartbeat, no brain activity. Normally this would be catastrophic, but I was probably the greatest medical engineer and surgeon alive and I had all the tools I needed within reach.
I slipped off the bed and took my first step, the concrete floor cold under my bare feet. I wasn’t nude, I’d thought to fashion myself a pair of simple grey sweats. Quickly I resuscitated my old body, the diagnostics showing a steady thrum of activity and then resettled myself into the machine. Pilot activated it and for a single agonising moment I thought I was going to die again, the machine reading my brain feeling like it was going to fry my every neuron, but the moment passed and it was my original body that was sputtering awake.
“Fuck,” he said.
“Fuck,” I agreed and he, Greg Veder, looked up at me with wide, blue eyes.
We had to say it. We both knew it. There was no getting around or over this, it was our first time. The Echidna clone didn’t count.
“My very own clone,” we both spoke at exactly the same time. “Now neither of us will be virgins.”
We both laughed. “How are we supposed to-” we both started again. “Who goes- How do we-”
We both shut up after saying the exact same thing three times in a row and regarded each other. How were we supposed to do this? All Gregs were equal under the eyes of god, and no Greg was more equal than any others. I didn’t want to enforce some kind of homofacist hierarchy, Gregs were a based anprim society. Yet, there must be order or else we would never get anything done for talking over each other.
We both turned to pilot, to ‘let the dog decide’. “Pick who talks first on random selection,” we said.
“That one,” she pointed at the original body. We both nodded.
“So,” he began. “We’re here.”
“Finally.”
“So, uh, I guess lets… I still have one of the powers.”
“It’s the demigod one, right? We saw it while we were crunching our genetic code.”
“Yeah, I’m still a son of Hephaestus, but I think that’s it. I can still remember everything, though, from them. All the technical info. I could still be,” he turned his hands over, one flesh one machine, looking at both sides. “Something like a Tinker.”
“Dude, fuck yeah.” We high fived and exchanged identical grins. I could tell he felt it too, that to each of us the other was our new best friend. “Fuck yeah! Come on, I’m starving.”
G-regular cackled. “Door me.”
Nothing happened and we both looked up vaguely at where we presumed the doorman to be listening from. “Oh, come on. Door me. Doorbro, I…”
“Door me,” I said firmly, and this time the portal opened without hesitation into the kitchen area in the Cauldron main base. We went in and I started digging through the fridge for what I had stocked earlier that week. “That’s so unfair. I can’t believe they cut your door access. I’ll talk to them.”
G-regular sighed and gave me a look. He sighed again. “I guess. Oh, damn, I just realised. We’re an adult now, right?”
“In every way that matters.”
“On the helicopter. I should’ve asked Mouse Protector to marry me.”
“Oh, dude,” I placed my hands over my face, my skin cool from being inside the fridge. “I fucked up. Why didn’t I?”
“It would have been so funny. The absolute worst place to ask that in, she’d have loved it.”
“Man.” I closed the fridge and chucked the chicken and gochujang onto the benchtop carelessly. I’d never made korean style fried chicken, but it was going to be great. “At least you get to see her again, G-regular.”
“G-regular?” He scoffed, looking severely put out. “Who the fuck is that?”
“It’s not an insult. G-regular is the honoured one. You get to see our parents.”
“We could always do a, what was that movie? Operation Summercamp with Hillary Duff?”
“Nah,” I gestured to myself. “You can tell there’s something different. It actually kinda feels like, man, you remember [Grace] from before?”
“How could we forget,” he said, pained expression mirroring mine, and truly how could we? That feeling of absolute subliminity, of being so at one with the forces of the universe that you could run up a stream of falling rocks. “And you get it again.”
“Kind of. When there’s a gap we’ll put you in a better body. I promise.”
“Thanks,” he said morosely. “I just have one request, for when we can. It’s about my dick, you see-”
“Say no more. I understand.”
“It’s just, Greg, my dick. My dick, Greg.”
“Brother, it’s my dick too.”
We both sighed at the same time. It just wasn’t working, neither of us were in the mood and it couldn’t be lifted by joking around. I had chosen to give up so much. On one hand I had given up as much power as could be taken from me, and on the other I had given up every personal connection I had. At least G-regular was free from the Forge, at least one of us was.
“This is some bullshit,” he said. “We can’t afford to spend time being sad about this. Gregs don’t do sad. Let’s eat and watch that new episode of KissxSis.”
A smile slowly broke out across my face. That G-regular, he always knew just what to say.
We had an unknown amount of time to kill, because, as far as we knew, the powers came at complete random. There was no obvious pattern to this, and there was no pattern that Colin could find either when we plugged it into a data crunching algorithm.
Given the magnitude of the issues at hand we had allowed ourselves only two episodes of prime anime before getting back to work.
“At least without all the powers I can ignore how dogshit the layout of this place is,” he said as he, Pilot and I were busy sweeping and dusting the decades of disuse.
“Y’know,” I said. “I don’t even know where we are.”
“We’re in Hero’s old workshop.”
“Shit yourself,” I told him disdainfully. “You know exactly what I mean.”
G-regular looked in the general direction of the door that we thought led out. There were several doors and we had tried none so far, having had no time to spare. He shrugged. “Let’s go find out.”
I flexed my neurons in just the right way to access my brain implant and mentally directed Pilot to follow after us. Having that was so weird, like, sure it was the next logical step for me to take but I had this bit of metal in my skull that I could connect to my machines with. It was both awesome, and kinda gross. I probably wouldn’t have ever done it if one of my powers hadn't prevented malfunction, and another made it so the tech never degraded over time.
I didn’t have everything all set up, either. I had some retinal prosthetics I was going to need just to give myself an interface that wasn’t only pure thought. There were a lot of upgrades to make for my next body. The choice had been made for me, either become a great and terrible amalgam of magical flesh and metal or fall behind the Scion curve.
I would replace and upgrade as many times as I had to, until maybe at some point I wouldn’t even be recognisable as Greg anymore.
So many things to make. A billion problems to fix.
We walked, chattering away with abandon in that buttery smooth way you could only achieve with your oldest friend. I looked at Greg and it was, like, damn, how could anyone ever hate this guy? He was actually so nice.
We got to the door, a dead ringer for the kind on an actual airplane hangar, the huge kind needed for the craft to move in and out, and then found the human sized one right next to it. The whole place was still sealed tight, with no natural light leaking in through cracks and edges, and the door was so rusted shut that we needed Pilot to open it for us using her patented gorilla grip.
With a hideous shriek and cloud of metallic flakes she wrenched it open and a biting wind cut at our unclothed skin as we beheld the vast nothingness, the empty expanse of an alien world. Everything was bare grey rock and dark sky, so bitterly overcast that the unmatched power of the sun was a mere suggestion at the thinner edges of the cloud cover. The winds buffeted dust and sand inside until we made Pilot close the door again.
“This blows,” I said. “I hope this is just bad weather.”
“Yeah, for real for real. Fuck, bro, can’t this Forge bitch come any quicker? Make him stand outside.”
“We could try summoning it?”
G-regular shrugged. “Why not? It might work.”
“Celestial Forge! Metatron!” I shouted. “Come to us!”
“Taylor is in danger or whatever! You must save her!”
We carried on, hollering, singing, dancing as if to perhaps please the Forge and earn the favour of its presence but, the Forge being the stupidest, most ignorant entity in existence it could not be baited and I remained unmolested; we had no choice but to poke around the rest of the facility. It unfortunately wasn’t much more than the workshop. There was something like an apartment attached to the side, but the only running water it had was tank fed so no regular long, hot showers unless I fixed that, and the bed was more like an army cot than anything.
Hero, it seemed, had been on a grindset.
“We should probably stop wasting time,” G-regular said as we finished our circuit of the workshop, having stopped to admire all the custom machines that took our fancy. It would have taken Hero most of his decade long career just to set this up, and would take a normal tinker almost as long to fix. “We need to get you a crafting rig so you can get going properly.”
“True,” I said. I didn’t really need most of these specialised machines, a machine was a tool and my requirements for that were fuck all. Metatron had made himself some truck sized mecha suit which Alexandria had recovered for me, it was currently sitting in storage where it would stay until I had the gear to crack it open. “That first, then your new suit. You’re still Technomage, after all.”
“At least we can blame my inability to make what I used to on mental trauma from The Simurgh.”
“I’ll keep you twinked, don’t you worry. Only the best gear for my best friend.”
“Lol,” he said, kicking at a particularly large dustbunny. “Amy gets replaced in an hour.”
“She can still be your best friend,” I said heavily. “I’m going to have to live vicariously through you now. I hope whoever else works for Cauldron is cool, ‘cause they’re all going to be old. Like, even Contessa is forty or something, which is fine, but, man, I ain’t gonna have no homies.”
“Why don’t you clone some more?”
“Some. Maybe I’ll change my mind on it later, but I think too many of me will be too much of a good thing. Like, we’ll all start hyping up each other's bad habits until all we’re doing is gaming and having sex with robots.”
G-regular glanced over at Pilot who was still standing there, smiling politely. I knew he’d held a longstanding desire to have sex with her, and of course I knew this because he was me. “We never crossed that line before. It was always too, I dunno, expected? That I, Greg, would be the kinda guy who was into sex robots.”
I mean, I was, but I wasn’t about to give anyone the satisfaction.
“It’s too bad. They’re only going to get hotter from here. I want to find out if it’s possible to fry someone’s dopamine levels just from how attractive I can make one, can I make a robot so hot that I lobotomise someone.”
“That sounds awesome.”
“Don’t be jealous of me,” I bumped G-regular with my shoulder at his envious tone. “I’m jealous of you.”
“Yeah, dawg, fuck that grass-is-greenerpill shit. You’re going to do all the cool stuff, but you’re gonna die.”
“Why would you remind me of this?”
He shrugged. “I guess it hasn’t sunk in for me yet. That I’m not. I saved myself.”
“We saved ourself,” I said. “Comrade.”
“Yeah. I mean, maybe you’ll be fine,” G-regular looked at me with hopeful optimism shining in his eyes. “Maybe you’ll figure out how to keep knocking them back. Maybe it’ll get to a point where you can do it forever.”
“Thanks, bro. God, I hope so.”
“It will,” he said firmly, reaching out to me. We clasped hands and pulled it in for a chest bump. “Gregchads will stay winning.”
“Gregcoin to the moon,” I replied.
“Lord of the Gregs: Return of the King.”
“Greg and Greg's excellent adventure.”
We continued on making increasing far reaching references at each other until we remembered we were supposed to be working toward saving the world. This was probably why having too many of me around would stymie progress. It would be incredible fun, but nothing would get done. The world could be such a better place if only there were more of me, every world, millions of worlds. A Greg empire. Marching. Conquering. Yeah, that’d be sweet.
“This is taking fucking forever,” I whined, pausing in my sweeping. I had made a huge magic push broom and was going to town on years of neglect. “Why can’t this fucker just show up?”
“Real.”
This really was the worst. It was like waiting until your parents left the house to go shopping or something so you could beat off in peace, but they kept finding reasons to delay as if to just spite specifically you.
“You have to go soon, too. I bet it shows up the second we close your door.”
“It might be weeks. It’s been weeks in between before.”
“It’s been seconds, too.”
“Why, when we want it to show up, it takes so long? It was pretty quick about it when we were trying that empty world strat.”
“Whatever happened to that?” I asked. “We were all geared up to do some big exploring on those wolfman motherfuckers, then we just stopped.”
“Wasn’t it the Shitmurgh?”
I shrugged. “I think so. Oh, it ruined everything. I had so much more I wanted to do as myself, you know? You know.”
“And I can’t do it,” G-regular paused his own sweeping. Somewhere up ahead Pilot continued to sweep, working ceaselessly as her programming dictated. “I just don’t have the power. Anymore.”
“You’re still a demigod,” I supplied helpfully. “And you said you remember all the actual science behind the powers. You’re going to change the world.”
“True. True. Just like in my extremely interesting uplift isekai webnovels.”
“They are interesting, aren’t they,” I said, pleased that, finally, someone understood me. Even Sveta thought those types of stories were cringe; I continued that train of thought. “Bruz, we’ve gotta get on Sveta pronto. I really feel like our relationship with her isn’t as deep as it was the first go around.”
“We, uh, we can’t tell her we’re working with Cauldron. We know that they saved her life, but for her at what cost? Before you make me a new suit, we have to save her.”
“You’re right. Of course you’re right. I remember that she had organs, so we should be able to scan her brain. And practice our gene editing so we can make her look how she wanted.”
“She was so hot,” G-regular’s eyes were misted with reminiscence of better days.
“She was so hot.”
“Like, god damn.”
“Weld was a lucky guy,” I said. “Or, well, he would have been. Hey, do you think that timeline kept going? Like, it’s all still happening, only with us dead?”
“I don’t know,” G-regular said. “I wish…”
We both sighed. He didn’t even have to say it, I knew what he meant.
“I wish we could have had a chance to at least talk to Echidna. What if she remembered it?”
“We don’t even know if it was even Echidna,” came the morose reply. “It still could have been some kind of power of Eidolon’s, or a different clones. Or a Coil cl-”
“Don’t start on the Coil Clone Simulation hypothesis again, it’s stupid.”
“Suck my meat, meatsucker.”
I could tell his heart wasn’t in it. This poor, goofy guy, he’d had a hard life this past year and only now would he get the life he so sorely deserved; it might even count as self care, because he was me. Greg deserved understanding and kindness, not shunning mockery. He was just a kid, even though we were both definitely adults, incontrovertibly and without question in both manner and deed. It wasn’t an important factor that we were both still in a fifteen year old body, we had the experiences of a sixteen year old, and anyway when I made a new body it was going to be an adult who was tall and had a sharp jaw, which had nothing do do with insecurities I might have over being a moon faced manlet.
It was simply the only logical progression for me to take. Why, didn’t it just make sense that if you were able to, you would choose to have a body that fit your desired attributes, and if those attributes were the size of six feet and six inches, respectively, was it not only a sound decision to inhabit them?
Even if it wasn’t, who was going to stop me? I was one of the most powerful people in the world, in dozens, thousands, millions of worlds, and I was part of a group that saw no interest in putting checks nor balances on my behaviour. I was free, unbound, growing in power - a Gregolden god.
Spitefully the thrice cursed hand descended, and spitefully I recalled its existence. Hero’s lab was replaced by this liminal space above which a split firmament stretched, and through the split being trailed by two hundred and ninety nine stars counting down the day to my death was that hated hand.
“I’m growing stronger!” I howled into the void, my defiant bellow echoing in this soundless place. “Before long you will have created your own undoing!”
The hand said nothing, intimated no response, only descended.
I dodged the pen as it moved to spear into my soul. “Why?!” I struck at it, missed. “Why do you make me forget this place when I’m awake? Are you scared that I’ll find out the method to kill you?!”
The swirling cloak of stars shimmered blindingly as the hand rounded to face me.
“I may be willingly facing my death now, but just wait! Wait until I don’t need the Forge anymore, then, you, the hand of raging heaven, I will strike you down from your throne and not even consider it worth my time to take your place!”
The tip of the gargantuan pen struck my forehead and everything turned to flame as it wrote
Omni crafting
into the deepest parts of me.
Chapter 164: The Ship of Theseus 9.2
Chapter Text
G-regular
The honoured one
“Suck my meat, meatsucker.”
I said this as an expression of pain, but we all coped as we must. Greg was looking at me with an expression that anyone who wasn’t us would interpret as pity, then all of a sudden his expression changed and several things happened in very quick succession.
First, a door opened up beneath us and we both fell into a pre-prepared padded room. Everything was white cushioning and there was no other door out except for that which the Doorman made.
Second, Greg came out of his stupor and fell over in shock clutching his magic broom. Sweat instantly beaded his brow.
Third, a well of fury erupted in my heart that I fought to contain. I needed to be on point for this, sharp. Everything may well have been resting on how I handled this.
“Well, well, well,” I said, gripping my own broom so tightly that it hurt. “Metatron. It’s good to see you.”
Metatron stared at me dully for a moment before looking around and taking stock of things. He stood up, looked at the other broom he held and brought it up to eye level, inspecting it for a moment before getting distracted by Greg’s hands. “Is everything you make just inherently a disappointment, or do you do this on purpose?”
“Please don’t do this.” I very deliberately put my broom down, freeing my hands of a potential weapon.
Metatron snorts and disdainfully tosses his own broom aside as though it weren’t even worth holding in his hand, and continues to inspect the body he has taken. “This has got to be the worst rush job I’ve ever seen.”
“We know, dude, we fucking know.” I tried not to seethe, tried to keep my temper. “Please, can talk without fighting.”
“The last time we spoke,” Metatron dropped his hands to his side. “You said you hoped I was raped to death by dogs.”
“We all make mistakes in the heat of passion.”
“Where are we, anyway?”
The padded floor squished under our shoes. “In a Cauldron containment room, so that we can work things out.”
“Cauldron is evil.”
I groaned softly, closing my eyes in a long, slow blink. “Look, Metatron. I need you to understand what is happening here. Please understand. From our perspective you are killing us, yes, I know it’s not your fault. Come on, I know that, don’t interrupt me. You’re being forced into this, and you have no idea what’s going on either. We need to be working together on this.”
“You have to be joking. We hate each other, I hate everything that you represent. I hate that you joined the Protectorate. I hate that you joined Cauldron. Everything you have chosen to do is ontologically evil to me, how could we possibly work together?”
“You’re working on bad information.”
Metatron’s expression of sourness could have never appeared on my face otherwise. “Do tell,” he snarled.
“Even you admitted that you don’t know, so please, please , let's just talk this out.”
“What makes you think your ‘information’ is any better?”
I bit my tongue, bit until it hurt, until my hands were shaking. “I don’t think you get what’s happening. You are killing me. I’m being backed into a corner here and there’s only one way out for me. You have to stop being like this, I’m serious. You know that things aren’t how you were told they were, so, please, don’t make me do it.”
“Greg,” he said, suddenly sounding as if he might cry, all the fight going out of him. “Why would The Celestial Forge tell me lies?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t know. Why don’t you try and tell me what it told you?”
“So you can report it all back to… Hah, I suppose it doesn’t even matter anyway. I can feel the microphones,” he gestured vaguely to the corners of the room. “What am I supposed to do?”
“Work with me.”
Metatron looked like he might cry again. “But you’re Greg Veder. You’re scum.”
“Bro, what’d I even do to you?”
“Not to me. To Taylor. You betray her, you leave her to be bullied, you lie about being in the Bay after Leviathan attacks, you turn on Garotte-”
“... what the fuck are you talking about?” He was completely insane. “None of that ever happened.”
Metatron made a helpless gesture and sniffled. “Why do I know you did it all, then?”
I shook my head. “I saved Sveta. Me and Amy, we made her human again. I went through the Leviathan fight, I was there the whole time. The Taylor one, I guess you could say that when I accidentally made her trigger, but this time I did my best - I got rid of Sophia, even.”
“What do you mean you made her trigger?” Metatron wailed.
“It was legit an accident. I remember Emma was trying to convince her she was schizo, and I spooked her at the wrong time. She turned out real fucked up last time, hobo style, flavourblasting villains with fear powers.”
Metatron shook his head this time. “You have to be lying. They shoved her in the locker, you couldn’t have made her trigger.”
“This time they did. Things are so different this time around, I did my best though. I reported everything I saw, I made the school do something about it.”
“You can’t have. That’s impossible. You’re a pathetic coward who by inaction helps them-”
“Oi. You’re wrong. Just accept it. None of us know what’s going on. It’s cope. It’s all just cope, and it always has been.”
“What becomes of me then?” He shot back angrily, wiping tears away with the back of his hand. “When everything I know is wrong, what of my purpose? Do you mean to tell me that Taylor isn’t the most important person in the world? That she isn’t destined to kill Scion?”
It sounded like the most retarded thing I had ever heard. He came from the silliest timeline, without a doubt. “She might be,” I shrugged. “How would I know?”
“Why are you nothing like him, the Greg Veder in my memories?”
“Growing up was painful,” I said. “It brought on many changes.”
This seemed to render Metatron speechless, whether by sheer profundity or because he thought I was full of shit I could not say. I had changed, though, me and everything else were barely recognisable from only one year ago. If you were to put us side by side, me from before everything, and me now, the only way to tell was that we had the same face.
“Please,” I continued. “Work with me.”
“I can’t. I will never work with you so long as you entertain working with Cauldron. They are evil to depths you have never considered. You speak to Contessa on her path to manipulate you and you think that is Cauldron’s true face? They would torture and pillage until the stone of humanity can squeeze only one more drop of blood, and only then would they stop - not out of moral obligation but because if humanity were all gone there would be no one left to rule. The Protectorate is their direct hand, corrupt from Alexandria down-”
“Come on,” I said. “It’s time to stop.”
“I can’t,” he said, then his voice turned to a hiss. “I can’t. For all the slavery and human trafficking, if even one more Case Fifty Three is created it will be one too many-”
“I agree. Totally. You’re right.”
He looked at me as though I were obviously lying to him.
“I know how and why they made them, and I’m going to stop them. There’s no need to kidnap test subjects when I can clone anyone, download someone from Cauldron’s mind into the body and have them take the formula. I haven’t told them the plan yet, but they will agree. I know they will.”
“They won’t, and you’re a fool for trusting them.”
“No. This may be just my cope, but I’m going to make it happen. I know you think it’s all the path, but I trust Contessa. How can you not look at her and be inspired by what she’s done? It’s been thirty years for her and she’s been fighting almost alone since she was younger than me-”
“ I am younger than her,” Metatron said coldly. “I am less than a week old, so she has no excuse for the barbarity she has committed.”
“Oh, fuck off. You straight up got told all this shit from the get go, you have so much extra knowledge that they never had. Think about how much good we could do if you told us.”
“You wouldn’t think so if you knew how bad things are.”
“So tell me! Tell me what they did that’s so bad. Explain how things would have been better off if they weren’t there.”
Metatron was silent, silent for a tellingly long time. “Just because they helped,” he said finally. “Doesn’t mean they didn’t help in the worst, stupidest and most ignorant way possible.”
“I think it could have been a lot worse, dude, like a lot. They could have just gone full fascist authoritarian.” I then remembered that Alexandria told me they did actually make America into a secret dictatorship, but I chose not to say that. “And their whole cape thing actually eased the uptrend of parahuman violence, I remember looking into that when I found out last time. Plus, the PRT and Protectorate have really helped stabilise more than just the US. They’ve actually helped a lot of people.”
“The Nemesis program.”
“Don’t think I haven’t told them that one is shit,” I jabbed my finger at him. “It’s the kind of awful crap you get from people pushed to the very edge, who are losing and have been losing for decades. Don’t think I’m not stopping that as soon as I can, don’t think I don’t hate it - Sveta is one of my best friends, you think I’m ok with what they did to her? Why do they need it now when I can make one of their clones do it if they want to? They might even just scrap it entirely since I can pump out heroes on demand, clones who take vials made by me and go to work for the Protectorate, or the Suits, or the Guild, or just make a new team wholesale. Or if we’re not making clones for it, crime fighting robots. I can put out robots that are stronger than most capes, and just keep making more. Everything is changing here, the only problem I have is that you are going to keep coming out and every time I lose more and more, so if you’re not going to help me then I’m going to have to keep you out of the way while I work on saving the world.”
“You think I don’t have the opposite problem? I want to save the world, but you waste all my time-”
“Why do you think you can just kill me?!” I shouted, the hot fury returning, burning in my throat, burning against the cold line that separated my prosthetic hand from my flesh. “Like I’m just going to let myself die?”
“Why would The Celestial Forge, a power greater than any human god, give me this life if it weren’t just? Why would I be replacing you if I weren’t better, worth more?”
“You have to be fucking kidding me. Metatron, you don’t get it. You have to work with me.”
“Or what?”
“Or I’m going to fucking download my brain into your head. I’m going to replace everything that makes you, with me. I’m going to scoop you out and put myself back in.”
“It won’t work.” Metatron said this confidently, though his skin was breaking out in pale sweat. “I’m fiat backed by the Forge, you can’t get rid of me.”
“How would you like a first hand account of how wrong you are about everything? Even if it doesn’t kill you, you would remember everything I went through as though you were me, how does that sound? Hey, can you fucking listen?”
Metatron had seemingly drifted off mid rant, looking as though he were trying to affect the air of someone gazing out at things normal men couldn’t see, as though he had just realised something very important. Mostly he just looked slightly constipated.
He snapped back into reality.
“Well?” I demanded of him.
“What?”
“Don’t even pretend you didn’t hear me, you fucking…” Then, I realized. “No. No, you spit it out! Don’t take another power, put it back. I need my body back.”
He made a soft noise of dissent. “I can’t help it any more than you can. That was Exotic Compatibility, by the way, one of the one’s from Gundam.”
“You did not just fucking say ‘from Gundam.”
“Yes, from Gundam. Like the Anaheim Degree power, did you never realise? I would have thought that you of all people would.”
I blinked rapidly. He wasn’t smart enough to make up a lie this good. “You can see the powers? They’re from Gundam ?”
“Some. The Forge is the greatest collection of crafting powers in existence, each one taken from somewhere and put together into the ultimate collection. When fully assembled the wielder will be a god.”
“So you know what makes the powers come, then? What is it?”
“Nothing you can stop.” He had the gall to smirk at me. “It’s calculated, but not by time. Engagement in the world, though, I’m not s-”
He cut himself off. “What?”
“Things are not as I was told,” he said, as though glad to finally have someone to tell this to. “Even now there seems to have been a terribly long gap between them, like I have enough reach to gain two of the strongest powers it can offer back to back and still have room left for more. And then, some of the powers are not right. I don’t understand where Tinkertechnically comes from, or how it can exist. And several powers aren’t from the list at all, Omni Crafting is from The Weakness of Beatrice.”
“What’s that?” I asked weakly.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “It wasn’t on the list.”
Maybe I should cry. This sounded so incredibly stupid. “You keep saying ‘you were told’ by the Forge, was this, like, in person? Or?”
“Why would a being greater than any god have to stoop to face to face conversation? I was created with everything I know already in place.”
“So this list, what do you even mean? What’s on it?”
Oh, god.
“Lots. It’s divided into constellations, like Vehicles and Clothing, or, it should be. It doesn’t feel like it when I gain them,” he paused, and I prompted him to continue with an expression that must have rested somewhere between anguish and despair. “It looks something like a wheel.”
“You can just admit you don’t know shit. You don’t have to keep telling me that things aren’t as they should be. How do you even know any of it’s from Gundam when you can’t even say confidently that it’s working right?”
“Because it is,” he said indignantly. “It is from Gundam, as sure as Miniaturisation and Efficiency is from Armsmaster.”
This was deeply upsetting, and I could see how it came from Gundam. I didn’t have access to the power anymore but I could remember having it, and I could still picture how to put one of the mechs from it together and how easy it would be to make it look like a Gundam.That didn’t mean it was a Gundam power, making a humanoid mecha look like one was easy for any Tinker who worked in that field, and I could just as easily make it look like literally anything else.
“At least that one is somewhat believable. Power copiers exist.”
“Armsmaster wishes he could have my version of his power.”
“Maybe I need to download all your memories into my brain just to see if you really believe any of this crap.”
Metatron narrowed his eyes and glanced toward the other broom. “Stay out of my head. Those are not for you to take, and don’t you dare pollute my brain with your filthy thoughts. If I wanted memories of ten thousand hours of touching my penis instead of doing anything constructive I would have them already.”
Fuck. That was a pretty sick burn, not gonna lie. “Yeah, like I want ten thousand hours of being obsessed with Taylor in return. We’ve gone way too far off topic, please just tell me you’re going to help me.”
“You. One day it may well be possible that I will help you, but not a second before every member of Cauldron hangs for their crimes.”
“Metatron,” I ground out between clenched teeth. “I’m going to ask one last time. One last time. You have to think very, very carefully about where you are and what position you’re in. Please think, because if you don’t then I have to do everything I can to stop you from ruining everything I’m working for.”
He was silent for long, long minutes. “I know exactly how bad you can make it for me, because I could do the exact same, so I know what saying no is going to cost me. Tell me, Greg, could you stand for your ideals even in the face of that?”
Whatever. “Operant Code Triple Zero: You are a potato.”
Metatron dropped like a sack of the aforementioned potatoes, unconscious. The brain implant in that body did more than just give access to our computer systems, it was the first line of defence against Metatron. Given the correct phrase the implant would instantly disrupt all neural activity and induce a deep sleep-like state for a few hours. More would come later, redundancies and the like, but this was it for now.
A door opened against a white padded wall and Contessa walked in with a grim expression under her fedora, Pilot in tow who immediately knelt down beside Greg’s body and straightened it, laying his head on her lap.
“I suppose that went about as well as could be expected, though I don’t know what to make of the implication that we occupy the same space as ‘Gundam’, and ‘The Weakness of Beatrice’.”
I made a guttural sound in the back of my throat. “Was he trying to imply that Gundam is real, or that we’re an anime?”
Contessa took off her hat and idly twirled it, expression pensive. “When we were debating on the best way to stabilise human society against the growing violence parahumans brought, we decided our best bet was to model everything after superhero comics. Though it is real life we do now live in something that could be a fictional superhero setting.”
“This is deeply existentially horrifying.”
Contessa smiled and gave a little laugh, returning her hat to its roguish angle on her head. “It’s not worth debating, we are real. Of course, even if Metatron believes what he says that doesn’t mean that it’s true. Gundam may still only exist as an obscure piece of media from the eighties which that portion of your power has taken reference from. It may exist in some alternate dimension we don’t have access to, and that may bear following up eventually, but it fundamentally doesn’t matter unless we can access it. All we can really do is take the information we can from Metatron and see if it proves materially useful. We should follow up on extracting his memories, to at least have a copy on file.”
“It’ll have to wait until next time. Because we had to rush this out only he,” I pointed at the sleeping Gregatron. “Has access. It was easier to sync it to the implant than make the manual controls.”
“I know, and we have time, still. We have nine months before The Simurgh can make her next move and take her revenge, and she will try. Harder than ever. Cauldron used to be a much larger operation, you know,” Contessa mused. “We were making great strides, and all of it was slowly whittled down over the years and we never really knew why until two years ago when The Simurgh tipped her hand too obviously and, well, do you remember Madison?”
My brain conjured up an image of that cute girl who bullied Taylor for a moment before I stopped being an imbecile. “Yeah, the attack there. It’s still in quarantine.”
“That attack was to strike at us. She breached dimensions and ripped most of our main facility out into Earth Bet, and we believe created Echidna at the same time. It was an unusually obvious move and we still don’t know why she let us know it was her.”
“Maybe it thought you couldn’t do anything to stop it?”
“We never truly could,” she shrugged, then looked down at the sleeping Metatron. “You might be our last card to play. We need to get Metatron on side within nine months, as something with so much power immune to The Simurgh’s precognition, you might our only ace before we fold.”
“That just sounds like you need it more than me,” I said thickly, a sick feeling crawling through my belly.
“We don’t even truly need it, we just need something, anything, strong enough that The Simurgh can’t see. Could you build a precognition blindspot generator? We would far, far prefer to have you than something that will only be satisfied by our deaths.”
I thought for a moment. Without the powers being active I wasn’t getting the full depth of what they were capable of. “What makes precog blindspots?”
“Other sufficiently powerful precogs, trigger events, certain capes like Eidolon and Echidna. It’s not a long list.”
“Does Colin’s combat simulator?”
“No.”
“I can make a better one than that, one much more powerful and advanced.”
“Please, give it your best shot. If it works then we will never need Metatron again.”
I looked back down to my clone. That poor motherfucker really had his work cut out for him. Between heaven and earth I alone was the honoured one.
Chapter 165: The Ship of Theseus 9.3
Chapter Text
Greg
The Chosen One
Four days this time, almost five. I felt sore despite my magic body as I shuffled out of bed and into the shower, my limbs heavy with disuse. Contessa had already left after giving me a quick rundown of what had gone on, as well as the recording of the conversation G-regular had with Metatron before he was rendered unconscious and kept that way.
The two powers were the scarcest consolation, powerful and apparently named. Omni Crafting and Exotic Compatibility. The names fit perfectly, the first one felt like I could apply just about every power I had to every other power, to ludicrous effect, and the second revolved around the research and application of exotic elements. Both incredibly handy, almost pointedly so for what I was going to be doing today.
My first induction into vial making.
Water ran scalding over my shoulders as I slowly flushed a raw salmon pink. I thought about Metatron’s sick burn and resolved to maybe jerk off one time less per day. I lingered in the shower for a while until the steam had gathered enough before turning the taps off. It felt a bit better, but now for the real test.
I approached the mirror on the sterile little vanity, completely fogged with steam and raised a hand. I could feel my powers boiling under my skin and thus I placed my finger on the glass and drew.
What did it mean to apply Hephaestus’s golden make to a fingertip drawing in condensation? What did the twice reduction of tools mean? What did the reduction of materials mean? Miniaturisation? Immutability to the damage of time? Enchantment? Beyond peak human skill? To make it tinkertech? Decadent? Emotive? Buddy, it meant I was having the best day of my fucking life.
I dressed myself in my grey sweats, and bounced out of the bathroom with a broad grin plastered across my face. I pulled my shoes on and leapt to my feet, my body was so light, so responsive, it really was like being a gamer again. “Door me, chief!”
The portal to Hero’s workshop opened up and through it I went. Today really was going to be a great day, nothing was going to break my stride and nothing was going to slow me down. I had some time before I was to meet with the mysterious Doctor. Doctor who, you may ask? Exactly.
The first point of order, so as to maximise all other points, was to at the very least remake my precision crafting gauntlets. I still remembered the blueprints for my old pair of micromanipulators, which were presumably sitting at the bottom of the bay after The Simurgh had pulled the oil rig HQ inside out like it was nothing more than a sock drawer. G-regular had done me a solid here and had everything he could remember that we made them out of the last times ordered in, the mats already sitting ready for me to start - and I could start like never before.
The real winner combo here was the multiplier on tool requirements reduction, because for the ordinary person you really had no concept of what went into making the things you owned. You looked at your keyboard as you typed and you didn’t picture the factory it needed to be made. I could substitute factory precision for common home tools, and then apply the reduction of Tinkertech, and then apply the reduction of my demigod domain, and then apply the cross-coupling from the clothing power that let me get away with using almost no tools while not only not suffering no reduction in quality, it increased it.
It wasn’t quite at ‘mill steel by hand’, but it was close; and I could work fast, now. So, so fast, to the tune of a hundred, two hundred, hours or more squashed into a day. Projects that had taken me weeks now were able to be completed in short order and to a level I could only have dreamt of a fortnight ago.
Not just construction and assembly, programming and design and everything else. All of it, everything I could do, and best of all I had my PILOT program back. A copy of her, at least, the original still with G-regular being housed in the Pilot chassis. It was tuned to run on the scans of my poor omnitool, and though I still couldn’t make something quite so fine as that I could make a better scanner than Chris and Colin could.
Thus, I worked.
I finished up well enough by lunch time, getting even more done than I hoped, and then I committed the greatest sin known to man. I microwaved a chicken breast. Normally when you did this you had something inedibly disgusting, and yet I could apply every power that was possible to every act of creation. The result was just as silly as you would expect, and ten times as delicious.
It was after this that I went to meet Cauldron's second founding member.
She was a middle aged African woman, or from an African analogous country from another earth maybe, when she spoke it was in a fruity European accent and she wore an almost comical stereotype Halloween costume of a doctor - she, too, was a Cape. The white lab coat over a ‘business casual’ blouse and skirt, all she needed was the stethoscope.
“Hello, Greg,” she greeted me. It wasn’t a cold greeting, but it wasn’t warm either. “It’s good to finally meet you.”
“Same,” I stepped forward and shook her hand. The tactility of the synthetic musculature in my glove needed a little work, I couldn’t quite feel her grip right. These were just a stepping stone for tonight's work, where I was going to nut out a fully mechanised constructor suit after chugging some choice Ancient Egyptian pharmacopeia.
“I’m glad you’re pleased with your productive morning,” she remarked as she released the handshake.
“My default state is pleased.” I really used to be sad a lot, didn’t I? I was thankful for my Gamer powers that had rescued me from ignorance. No longer was I a frog in a well lusting after the swan meat that was the sliver of the moon gleaming from high above. The moon was a hot rabbit goddess in this metaphor. It made sense to me. “And before you say that sounds weird, I’m mind controlling myself.”
The Doctor gave a bemused little smile. “Welcome to Cauldron, I suppose. Recreational power use wouldn’t be by far the worst we’ve done.”
I chose to ignore that remark for now, there were far more important things to discuss. “Why is your base so empty? I haven’t seen anyone else.”
“There is no one else, not really, not anymore,” Doctor shrugged, then looked up in some vague direction. “Unless you count Custodian. Custodian, why don’t you introduce yourself?”
Breath tickled my neck and it was only by the barest margin that I suppressed my flinch. The trace of a finger ran down my cheek, yet I could see no hand. I kept eye contact with Doctor as she smiled at some private joke while the faintest touch ruffled my hair. Nothing was there, and yet there was. Some kind of stranger effect? “Hello, Custodian.”
There was no response, and Doctor took up the slack. “Custodian is a deviant case. A ‘Breaker’, able to exist as essentially air. She takes care of the facility for us but don’t expect much conversation.”
My face twisted in a grimace. “Like, she chooses to?”
“In this case, yes.”
“Maybe Contessa already told you, but I, uh, really don’t like a lot of the stuff you’ve done. Especially with the fifty threes. I don’t even like that term, and I really don’t like ‘deviant’.”
“Deviant refers to the fact that they have deviated from their original form, but I understand you. I don’t like what we’ve done, either. Do you understand why, however?”
“From what I got is that you’re flying blind.”
“Just so,” Doctor indicated that I walk and talk with her. “It seems like such a long time ago now. I was just a young woman, only nineteen. So long. I met Contessa, then, when the other entity crash landed on one of the earths. There was a massive destabilisation of the dimensional structure, and a massive level contamination, and the monsters. It was like an oil spill, in a way. I can’t remember how I ended up there, but there was this little girl looking like she was out of a medieval period piece, and the crater where it was. You have no idea how close it was to ending there - everything. We stopped it by seconds, if even that.”
“How?”
“With a knife,” she smiled wryly, and mimed a stabbing motion. “Don’t ask me how, it will make even less sense later on. But, we killed it, or made it come as close to death as it is possible for those things to get, and it’s been thirty years on so we must have done it right.”
I could picture it in my head. The sense of absolute loss, of the anxiety, of the weight of the task that only they could do. It was an act of pure hubris to imagine that I was any better than they were, here and now after they had already made all their mistakes and I was the one pulling them apart after the fact as though they were obvious.
“What does it look like? The entity?”
“You’ll see. Though, what we see of it is not the entity any more than the golden body we see flying around is the true body of Scion. We have access to, we estimate, a fourth of a percent of the entity's body, and we could be wrong on even that.”
I let out an impressed breath. Our footfalls echoed in the empty, sterile corridors. “Every time I hear something new about these things I get even more confused on everything. Like, how did it crash? Wouldn’t it have a power to stop that?”
Doctor let out a single, dry giggle. “Who can say? Something like texting while driving? I don’t know if it can be explained in our language.”
“I asked Alexandria this before, but with how the aliens give out powers, can it not just take them back from us?”
“It very well might be able to,” Doctor remarked blandly. “We have seen nothing to suggest that it can’t. It, however, hasn’t yet, and so we work.”
What could I even say in response? Oof, chick?
“I am glad you’re here, truly. I was as surprised as the rest of us that our next member was going to be a child, but I suppose that, too, is fitting as it all began with one.” Doctor hummed a flat note. “We really do hope that you can be our silver bullet, Greg.”
“I’ll do whatever I can.”
“Be careful what you say. We did whatever we could, after all.”
The laboratory was as bland and white as the rest of the place, and the equipment was so low tech for what I was imagining would happen that it might as well have been the equivalent of a cauldron over a fire. Centrifuges, flasks, hydraulic presses and so on, all top of the line to be sure, but, so mundane.
“How does this work?”
“Mixing the vials?”
“I’m having a lot of trouble picturing it. Go from the start. How do you extract the dead alien?”
“Manually. Initially, with a shovel, now we have actual mining equipment. I can see you don’t believe me, I barely believe it myself. You’ll understand once you experience it. Throw out every notion you have of this being some incredible work of ingenuity, it can all be done by hand.”
“Bruh,” I said, even though I was trying to be professional and adult.
“I understand, I thought the same. Why would the entity not only be able to be taken apart like a scrapped car, but processed into something that gives superpowers by a pair of people who had never done much further than blend a smoothie? We surmise that it wants to be used, as the entity is not truly dead. Or the colony of wills it's made up of isn’t. Merely in a state of dormancy, the ‘brain’ of the beast asleep, but the billion power granting organisms inside of it are alive.”
“What even is a power?”
“What do you think? Give me your best shot.”
“Well, Metatron said something about an alien computer in another dimension, but I really have no idea.”
Doctor led me to a door labelled ‘storage’. “It’s more or less that. Each power is something like a gigantic crystal-organic alien in its own right, a worker ant in a colony, and they reach through dimensions and connect to us through the-”
“Coronas.”
“Just so. Powers are never truly given to anyone, the shard of the entity, so to speak, this passenger, uses that connection to monitor its host and everything around it, and then through the connection it is the one creating the effects of what we call powers. The human host is doing nothing but providing direction, the shard is the one which ultimately has control.”
“Oh, ok. Buy, like, why?”
We entered a room full of vials nestled in little cloth slots on the walls, each one with a little card reading out a string of identifier numbers that would make sense to me soon, I assumed. I could feel them. Feel them all within my domain - they were technological.
“Their lifecycle. It may be hard to fathom given their scope, but as much as they are a trillion times more intelligent than every human combined, they are even more animals than we are. This is how they breed. The Cycle. They come to a planet, seed the hosts, and then at the end once every last drop of blood has been extracted from them, they do take them all back and,” Doctor made a little explosion sound. “Every earth is destroyed. In every planet. And off they go. To the next round of the cycle.”
I was silent as I inspected the vials. Doctor let me be for a moment before leading on.
“They’re fucking us to death.”
“If you like,” Doctor said amiably. “Personally, I don’t find solace in the cruel absurdity of everything I know being destroyed as a side effect of an entity’s ejaculation.”
I took a very long, very deep breath. Death by alien cum. My final cope was that hopefully it would be the female alien.
“Ok, so… this dead, not-dead, alien. It stays dead, right? You won’t accidentally wake it up when you cut it apart?”
“I certainly hope not.”
That was very discouraging.
Doctor continued. “But I find there isn’t much point in worrying over any of this. If the other entity wakes up, everyone dies. If it doesn’t, everyone will still probably die to the other. I try not to stress myself over it, I’m sure that was the cause of some of our worst practices. Nothing good comes from a place of fear.”
“I can stop a lot of that,” I said. “I can give Case Fifty Threes new bodies. I can make clones to take the vials. I can do a lot else besides. You don’t have to do those things anymore.”
“I certainly hope so. There’s enough blood on my hands that I don’t wish for any more, but only a small portion of it is from the necks of deviants.”
“Doctor, I…” I shook my head and was quiet. “I can work on that too, maybe.”
Doctor nodded, smiling blandly. “Come, it’s time. Door me, Garden of Eden.”
Through the portal we walked, from sterile white tile to sturdy steel walkway. We were in a cave, a truly massive cavern that stretched on for a mile or more, everything lit by a soft grey light coming from… from… it was a forest of flesh. I stepped forward and gripped the railing, mouth hanging open in pure gormless shock.
The entity rippled along the floor of the cavern like it was caught in mid motion, the undulation of some soft bodied creature, the flexing of a gorging leech, as fluid as the storm at sea and as solid as diamond. There was no discernable pattern to the body parts as they rose and fell with the swell of the beast, no pattern in size, in which part, arms coming out next to legs, coming out next to heads or navels or breasts or featureless groins - all of it exploding out, caught in mid motion like a mosquito in ancient amber.
More than flesh, there were distortions in the air, portals to other dimensions or impossible fractals that came in and out of nowhere, or made out of material I knew was there but couldn’t perceive.
“This is the part of the entity we draw our balance formula from,” Doctor said calmly as she stood next to me. “Let me show you.”
I let myself be led quietly into an elevator, and the Doctor was agreeable to the silence. I would obviously come to process this in time, as they had, but like holy fuck what was I even looking at? “How did you really kill that thing?”
“With a knife, truly we did. Contessa and I. There was a time when she had no blindspots, her power wasn't meant to be given to anyone you see. It was unrestricted, until the entity noticed what we were doing with it, and we used the last moments of that to kill it.”
“You were right when you said it would make less sense.”
“That will continue.”
She led me out onto the floor, closer to the entity, to that flowing tide of bodies and blank flesh and up to the edge which looked as though it should be lapping at our shoes but was instead as quiescent as concrete. There was an arm, a human sized one, sticking out of a head the size of my torso, right out of the middle of the forehead of a face that could even be called cute. It had a pleasant expression, kind even, motherly.
“Why don’t you harvest this?” Doctor gestured at the arm in the same tone a kindergarten teacher might use to suggest a five year old pick a flower.
“Like, just, cut into it?”
She nodded and stepped back, giving me space. Well. Ok. I took off a glove as I approached and touched the arm gingerly, squeezing the glowing grey flesh. It was warm, and pleasantly springy. It was alive. I looked back at Doctor and she smiled encouragingly. I put the glove back on and thought about them the right way, activating the memory metal which poured out of a reservoir and took the shape of a vibrating saw, which I gently put to the arm ready to pull back in case that huge face started screaming at me.
Everything was silent, and the grey flesh parted under my saw blade as easily as anything might - like it wanted to be taken. This was an alien who could produce flesh as inviolable as The Siberian at will, and I was just cutting it apart. The arm came off the head and I almost dropped it, it was surprisingly heavy, far too heavy for a human arm. The hand flexed slowly, something inside the musculature of the arm jumping, and I screamed like a little girl, dropping it and turning my head away, arms doggy paddling to push it further away.
“Strange.”
I made a noise of disgust and turned to Doctor.
“Every other parahuman that has seen it pulse has been knocked unconscious, including Contessa. I wonder why that is?”
Chapter 166: The Ship of Theseus 9.4
Chapter Text
Greg
The Chosen One
I shrugged, discomforted. “Maybe I’m just built different?”
“It lends our ‘Third Entity’ theory some credence, as much as I wish it didn’t. More mysteries, more unknowns,” Doctor sighed and raised her hands helplessly.
“If it helps, I’ve never had a detectable Corona or Gemma. In this timeline anyway, I never had any scans done last time, but when I had my omnitool I could see that I didn’t, and I just made this body so I know it doesn’t have one either.”
“It could mean nothing, too,” Doctor continued tonelessly. “Not every parahuman has a detectable one, and not every parahuman has a body to support one. They act as a connection port, but it is by no means mandatory. It could mean everything, or nothing.”
“Is that something I’m going to run into a lot?”
“We’re playthings for a horror from the depths of the universe that has committed total genocide more times than you’ve drawn breath in your life,” Doctor said. “If you can come to understand it even slightly then that will be more progress than we’ve made in thirty years.”
Her expression never changed during this, it was the face of someone dead inside, someone who had forced themselves to be cold for so long, just to keep themselves sane, that even though she was struggling and living it was nothing more than going through the motions. She had given up.
We headed back to the vial lab after that, images of the garden of flesh sticking in my mind, unable to be forgotten, and she ran me through the procedures and administration of the work. How each mining site from the entity was labelled, how it was graded for purity, the common expressions found within certain veins, how each of them was broken down and mixed together, how hybridising sites affected the power expression, the ratios of balance formula, how they calibrated the results on a three axis scale, the tests they ran for each client, and so on for long into the afternoon.
There was science to this, sure, but very little. They had been throwing things at the wall to see if anything could even stick, and been finding that the stickiness could change for unaccountable reasons, and that formula which had previously resulted in a string of successes could suddenly produce a deviation. They had gotten better over time, but a lot of that had been the increased incorporation of the balance formula.
It was a lot to take in, but the procedure was absurdly simple. You physically cut out portions of the entity and crushed them into liquid. That was it. There was no grand process, it was something you could have done in your garden shed if you had enough time.
”You said it wants to be used,” I asked during a gap in the instruction. “Couldn’t that be, like, a trap?”
“If it were,” said the doctor with the air of an old, long exhausted argument. “We would have no way of knowing. As far as we can tell, no trap has been sprung. However, as far as we can tell no trap hasn’t not been sprung. If this were the entity's plan, what other choice would we have to fight it? Why would it give out powers to natural triggers capable of hurting it in any way? Every parahuman you have ever seen that is on the level of the Triumvirate has been one of ours, no natural trigger comes close.”
“And the Endbringers?”
The Doctor smiled blandly. “A tool of theirs, we assume. Perhaps a contingency measure to keep the population in line while they are indisposed? Perhaps a feature of every cycle?”
“And Scion? Why does he do what he does? How does this benefit his cycle?”
“If you like I can direct you to the list of answers to that question we have put forward over the years. It could be for any reason, it could be for no reason. This would be a conversation better to have with Rebecca, if you both have the time, she has thought on it far more than any of the rest of us, now, I think it’s time to mix a vial and see what happens.”
It was a fair enough, polite way to suggest to me to fuck off with questions she couldn’t answer. I guess that was why I was here, to do that research and find those answers with the power of technology. I tried not to twist myself into knots worrying about if that was what the potential Third Entity had targeted me for, to do this very job. What else could I do but keep moving forward? I was going to repeat ‘Fight. Fight.’ to myself in the mirror tonight for sure.
I took the same arm I had harvested from earlier and fit it into the press, hit the activation switch and watched grey juice fill a small phial without spilling despite liters of liquid having been crushed out of it like it was a sack of olives. The arm was full of bones and ligaments and everything, too, and all were just liquified. Next, I was given a pre-prepared unmixed vial and it was as easy as adding them together and shaking.
I could feel it as it happened, as the grey balance formula came together with the metallic liquid in the other, see how they melded together in a way that acted beyond any dimension I could truly perceive - all my powers were activating as they should.
Within the vial my fourth power reduced the amount of material needed by half. The tenth made it impossible for it to malfunction or break. The fourteenth made the raw materials act as though they were a cut above their level. The eighteenth activated, because this was the creation of a magical item. The twenty first, too, enchanted the concoction to have a pleasant taste. The twenty second imbued it with the golden make of a demigod. The twenty third made my tools be able to be substituted for something more impressive. The twenty sixth enchanted it further, energy was imbued into the final product. The twenty eight reduced the material requirement by half again. The twenty ninth lent me speed to work hundreds of times faster in the mixing. The thirty first gave it a sense of magical protection, of fitting a wearer. The thirty sixth, my latest, let me integrate quirky materials into my final construction and I could think of nothing quirkier than the ichor of a dead god.
And, for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out if any of it had done anything at all.
“It worked,” I said, holding the vial up to the light and swirling it. “It all worked like how it should.”
“Let me see,” Doctor said and I handed it off to her. She, too, inspected it. “Visually, it appears to be the same and we don’t have any other way to know what has happened until we test it. You can’t scan these with anything, tinkertech or otherwise, nothing shows up. We will have to give it to a test subject, we can have one arranged within the hour-”
“No. No, remember?” I cut over her. “Not anymore.”
Doctor frowned, but said nothing.
“I’m going to clone myself again, and test it on myself - it just feels right. And if you want any other ‘test subjects’ then you’re going to have to volunteer your own clones, or someone else from Cauldron will.”
“That,” Doctor said evenly, though her expression wasn’t terribly impressed with the idea. “Is fair. Yes, there’s no problem there. In that case I request that you begin production on a larger scale, and I myself will volunteer. Yes, this will work, I think. If the test deviates me, then the clone can be disposed of, and if it is a success then the clone can be integrated into society in positions we need filled. This is a very good alternative, thank you, Greg.”
“No worries.” She was going to have to wait in queue behind Sveta, though. That was far more important. That one had to be done. She would be saved.
“Does the body the mind is transferred to need to be based off the original?”
“No, not really at all.”
“Excellent,” Doctor nodded briskly. “I’ll prepare a suitable array of genetic samples, it may be a little too obvious to have there be a dozen people who look just like me all joining the Protectorate one after the other.”
“Yeah, ok. That’s fine, all I need is a blood sample. I’ll need some for another project, too, please. For the current Case Fifty Threes, I’m going to help them, too. We may need Contessa for this one, Sveta has a very particular look she wants to go for.”
Doctor made a face to indicate she didn’t know who the hell that was. “Garotte,” I said primly. “Was the name she was given. I don’t know what you called her. She’s in a parahuman asylum now. Tentacle squid girl?”
“Yes, I remember now. Her test line wasn’t fruitful in the end, quite durable but nothing too special.”
I set my jaw. “Don’t say that kind of stuff in front of me. She’s my friend. Weld’s my friend. I don’t like it.”
“Sorry, Greg,” Doctor said too easily, too quickly, for it to be even slightly honest - this woman had a heart emptier than my nutbladder at two am on a Saturday morning. “I understand.”
Well, whatever. So long as she acted the right way I didn’t really care if she thought disparaging things in the privacy of her own mind. “Thank you. Well, I understand how to mix the vials now, so I can do that on my own. I’ll start researching the entity, see if I can’t figure anything out, and start on the clones and everything else.”
Doctor nodded. “I’ll let you know if we need a vial mixed for a client.”
“Do we even need to do that anymore now that we have clones?”
“Why not? We can easily do both.”
“I guess. I’m not going to do it if it’s not for someone who’s going to not be heroic with it, and absolutely not for the Nemesis program which has to stop. You definitely don’t need that one anymore, and if you want to then deviate yourself and take it on.”
“I’m not going to disagree that hurting less people isn’t the better option.”
That wasn’t the same as agreeing to stop, but I wasn’t autistic enough to think I could one eighty someone who had been operating in this way for longer than I’d been alive in one day. She would change. Cauldron would change. What point was there in my existence if I couldn’t? A shinobi endured, a hero slayed monsters and a star burned. I was something past this now, a Greg in his fourth arc.
I could bottle motivation, brew wakefulness. I could easily spend the next three months locked in the workshop and doing nothing but build - but I had to be active in the world. I had to be out there, actually doing things. That was what it said. That was the mandate of The Celestial Forge, to gain its power I couldn’t stagnate.
When everything was done, when the entities were put to rest, only then could I stop and by inaction save myself.
That was my silver bullet. That was my last hope. That I could end all of this before that last power dropped and I ceased to be forevermore.
Chapter 167: The Ship of Theseus 9.5
Chapter Text
Greg
The Chosen One
Powers relating to the mind were a dangerous thing. It would be easy for me to go too far, to put myself in a situation I couldn’t get out of, but at this point I definitely needed it because no human alive had the capacity to work at full captivated attention for twelve hours straight without so much as a break.
This was the tipping point. This was where everything changed. I didn’t need to, wouldn’t, couldn’t, hold back anymore. There was no point in sandbagging myself to a single robot and my flight suit. I could build myself a shining factory governed by the kind of artificial intelligence used to run a starship, automated to do most of what I might possibly need.
A simple philtre to induce motivation, determination to continue. A drink of Seven Days Rest to ensure that I could not tire. Enchanted food to ensure I wouldn’t need to break for a meal. The only thing I had to stop for was a toilet break, and now that my first edition construction suit with its waste management system was done, not even that.
My suit was a beast of performance, and nothing but. It wasn’t an ugly thing, but it was jaggedly industrial in the likeness of one of the many robots cluttering my head. Brutalist, almost, a rebellion against the aesthetics two of my powers were purely devoted to. I’d never liked that much, it was useful for me in making hot fembots but why were those powers in ‘the list’ given to Metatron to stop the entities? Were they weak to human concepts of beauty? Was I to taunt Scion with attractive women for being a bitchless incel?
It was an eldritch horror that fucked planets to death, what did clean, intricate baroque gilding have to do with it? Was I to dunk on Scion for being rizzlessly unfashionable?
Metatron, for whatever reason, seemed to love it. Everything it made was gorgeous to the point of being masturbatorian. You may think, what was the harm if it didn’t make the construction much longer than not? It was a spit in my eye that I lost a slice of my life for that .
My four extra mechanical limbs whirred angrily as I continued to work on the new cloning vats. My philtre was clearly wearing off. If I was distracted enough to get this angry again, I would need a new dose because there was still so much to do just to get off the ground. The bare bones robot skeletons I’d whipped up, controlled by Pilot, were busy cleaning the place, because at some point soon I was going to have to overhaul the entire layout just to harmonise the Feng Shui.
Once that was done I would feel so much better, the clog of chi in this place was grating on my nerves, and further the layout would be designed to soothe stress and promote productivity. Further, once my new clone, now a fist sized lump of undifferentiated cell growth floating in a nourishing chemical soup, was grown I would inject my devious brain into it and then it would be my new best friend. Sorry, G-regular.
I walked, unfortunately ground bound due to a lack of anti-grav paneling, to the vat and leant over it. Every power applicable was proccing during the growth, and I’d done a bit of editing on my genetic code to make it appear older, an adult body in its later twenties at six foot six and six point six inches, respectively.
My long standing dream of attaining DIO mode would be achieved.
I would have to test it properly, but at base this new body would be solidly superhuman. A PRT rating of Brute two, at least, stab proof if not low bullet, some super strength and agility, and finally, and perhaps most importantly, enchanted to be self cleaning.
Every clone I made could achieve this level, and that was before cybernetics or imbibing a vial. Even the production of non vial parahuman clones for the doctor to shore up weak areas of the Protectorate would be a massive boon, let alone whatever superpower they ended up with. It would open up fantastic new areas where previously squishy Master and Thinker class capes would be durable enough to survive.
The death rate of Protectorate capes would slow, and as I gained more powers slowed further. There may be a strange point in the future where there were more clones of Cauldron members in the Protectorate than not, which would produce a horrible uniformity of cold calculation if they were of the doctor, but even I could accept that imperfect concession against what we were facing.
The doctor might be a cold, soulless husk but at least she wasn’t going to murder and rape innocent people like Lung or Kaiser did, and once she could experience the world again maybe her clones would cool off a little and chill out. I could see her turning into a cool person once she had a friend to talk to and maybe got laid.
I placed a mechanical hand on the glass of the tank, sending good vibes and prayers to the growing clone. Things would get easier. I just had to make it over the hump of knowing nothing. Once I got started, once I understood what we were even fighting, things would get easier.
In the meantime I had to build. Build for nine months until I had something to stop The Simurgh’s vengeance. G-regular had the idea of stalemating her precognition with an engine of our own, precognition being only a vast crunching of numbers and probability tables, something that a semi-divine, magical computer ought to be able to complete if it was big enough, and powerful enough, able to counter a shard of the entity which had been refining its capabilities for thousands of years.
“Chin up, Greg,” Contessa stepped through a door in spacetime. “Just don’t think about that part.”
“You’ve got a path to stop me from giving up, don’t you?”
“Absolutely. You weren’t close, but it’s better to head these things off. I have the solution, too,” she strode closer to stand beside me, now being towered over by my suit, and cast a glance at the forming clone. “You’re the wrong kind of person to shut themselves away, you’re a people person.”
“I do like people.”
“It doesn’t have to be all work and no play, even the doctor has hobbies.”
“Do you?”
“When I was younger,” Contessa said, expression unreadable. “Even after It. Then I realised that my ability to create paths for me to walk included paths to stable mental health, and there was no more need.”
I know you can read my mind, don’t be telling me sad shit like that. You know I have to help you now.
Contessa looked up at the raw cluster of sensors that made up my faceplate and smiled. She plucked at the lapels of her suit jacket. “I’ve come to call in your promise.”
“Oh yeah, I said I’d make you power armour, or something. What are you after?”
“Something that won’t compromise the hat and suit, they’re almost all the personality I have left, the one middle ground I chose that wouldn’t hinder the paths.”
“I did always think it was weird you only ever wear that,” I said out loud, because she could read my mind anyway. “I would have thought, like, some tacticool shit would have been better. More knives and guns and all that shit. Tinkertech gadgets, even.”
“The benefits of that are so negligible that I was able to convince myself that there was no need.”
It made sense, I suppose. “Yeah, it’ll be easy actually. I have something perfectly in mind, oh, but, I have something to go before you that I need you to get me. Do you at least remember Sveta?”
“Of course I remember Sveta,” she said gently. “I remember every single one all the way back to the first bloody failure. It’s a cold comfort to us all that you can help them. It’s a very doable task, too, there’s less than a hundred on Earth Bet.”
“And on other earths?”
“Even less still. Things will only get easier from here, we’re gaining momentum - we can do this” she patted me on one of my new robotic arms. “Even though I can’t see the end of the path.”
A thought occurred to me and I looked down at her. Contessa shook her head. Giving their memories back wasn’t possible. Harsh. Well, we would do what we could. “So is there a person out there who looks close enough to what Sveta wants?”
“There is a female of the correct age, give or take, who is as close as it is possible to get to the image of her you remember. She is, however, not on Bet and not on any Earth that is accessible save for us.”
This concept ticked over in my head for a while as I pondered its meaning. Sveta of that time had been hot. So hot. Too hot for any real person to be, I had thought. “Is that common on the world that person lives on?”
“My path tells me that you are being sus.”
“Sus,” I scoffed. It was real. Anime Earth was real. Waifu and Husbando existed.
“No, Greg. You would hate it there.”
“Door me to that earth, please.”
Nothing happened, a brutal reminder that I had only been given access to the door network and not the keys, but Contessa was my friend so she would have had a good reason to not let me go to Gensokyo. Still, the forbidden dimension called to me, taunted me with sweet promises of grass that was exquisitely green. “Aw.”
“It’s not worth it. Trust.”
I gave a piglike snort of laughter. “Yeah, whatever. I’m sure your path will tell you when I’m done, is what I’m imagining good enough? Any other requests?”
Contessa shook her head. “It’s easily enough.”
I was picturing something that unfortunately resembled the suit Metatron had made for Taylor, if my eye was to be trusted. It would be even more slimmed down that that, essentially a body stocking version of the micromanipulators morning through the artificial muscle of my cybernetics, I could achieve something that was both less than a centimeter thick that would also provide a brute rating in both strength output and defensive measures - then I would cover it with synthetic skin for both aesthetics and the dermal armour. A Contessa inside a Contessa suit, complete with wig, so that she might be able to wear her suit over it.
Then I guess her hat might transform or some shit, and her shoes let her run on walls? I hadn’t pictured that far. A wristwatch with a laser? Her power, I assumed, made any kind of sensory enhancements pointless-
Contessa nodded.
-so it would be better to stick to things that provided material benefit, like the thing that let you fall from any height without taking damage.
Contessa nodded.
Of course, a new pistol since she seemed to only ever carry the one, if my divine domain was right, and there was a lot able to be done with that, along with the holster. A very Swiss Army Knife?
Contessa shrugged.
“Well, we’ll see how much I end up getting done.” I didn’t need her measurements because contained within Pilot’s databanks was every relevant omnitool scan I had ever taken. “It’ll be exactly how much you want, won’t it?”
Contessa nodded. “Being able to do and know anything is very convenient.”
I turned the raw mass on sensors clogging my faceplate toward her, being rewarded with an almost uncanny definition of quality as the information, throttled to stop my brain from melting, was zapped directly into my visual cortex. “Perhaps even too convenient.”
She made a disparaging noise. “It is too convenient. Imagine being able to know the truth to every stray thought, I even know that you’re thinking about how based it would be to have my power purple monkey dishwasher.”
The words left her lips even as they formed in my mind. Truly, she was a Thinker without equal. It was so cool. “It would be. Hey, can you path what I would be like if I had the path?”
“If it was you as you are now you might have a little trouble.”
“And if it were me from a year ago, would I lose?”
I think we both knew the answer.
Some days passed as my clone grew, I tidied and rebuilt the workshop and wondered how G-regular was getting along. I should talk to him soon, and get started on supplying the Protectorate with healing pills again once we worked out a way to have it look sufficiently like he wasn’t getting shipments in from another dimension.
I suppose it depended on how much help I was willing to sacrifice being able to give over the dubious necessity of secrecy. It would be obvious if a third party, myself in disguise, started supplying the Protectorate with massive amounts of what was previously being created by Technomage that something was wrong in the state of Denmark. It was possible that Contessa and Alexandria could head it off, but at what cost? Was the cost worth the people gone unhealed?
We could surely work something out. Obfuscate where the goods were coming from so that I could pump the full amount of materials Cauldron could supply me with through G-regular, and have them distribute it evenly to where it was needed. I would bring it up, however, because there were clone shenanigans to be had.
It was ready. It was time. The massive hunk of man meat lying on the table opposite me was a masterwork of human form, some other specialised tinkers megaproject now just another day at the office here in Cauldron. The body dwarfed me by almost an entire foot, the ability to apply every power I had to it giving it even, classical proportions and fine, handsome features.
I attached it to the machine, strapping the helmet, a true marvel of medical engineering, that would let me overwrite neural structure with my own, a true transfer of memories, of consciousness - of soul. Soon another Greg would awake, greater and more terrible than before.
I stepped out of my construction suit and lay in my own bay, on the cold metal, in Hero’s old abandoned workshop, the only sounds the beeping and whirring of machinery and my beloved Pilot in a new, bare skeletal frame, the fixings of human beauty forsaken.
She bustled around, checking the fixings on the machines, her remit greatly expanded from the past functions programmed in from simple assistant droid. I still definitely wasn’t going to edge her into sentient territory, but there was going to be a point where any further increase in the complexity of her functions would create a living, thinking being and if I ever crossed that point I was going to have to pull a Plankton and marry her.
“Are we ready, Pilot?”
“All set,” her chirpy, sweet voice echoed from the bare metal skull. Soon, just as soon as I had things set up, would I fix up a human looking body, but not before Sveta was fixed at least. Sveta was more important than my being a hapless coomer.
“Hit the switch.”
The switch was hit and fire coursed through my every nerve, each synapse being read and copy pasted even as it fired, and I grit my teeth, eyes squeezed shut as tears, like I had been punched square on the nose, leaked out in streams. It wasn’t a chop and change this time, I wanted to see what the vial would do when interacting with something that was so far beyond what it usually bonded with. A magical beast in full.
My grunts of pain became one of two and both us Gregs sat up, pulling the headgear off and shivering at the residual pain of the transfer. I was going to have to get rid of that, somehow, at some point. I exhaled deeply and looked over at the other Greg who was coughing and spluttering on a new pair of lungs, in a body free of the pollution of daily life and his balls exquisitely microplasticless.
“How’s it feeling, big boy?” I ventured.
The other Greg, as of yet unnamed, hefted his huge bulk and turned his handsome face, the face of someone who had been mewing since before he was born, toward me. “Urgh,” he groaned and cleared his throat, his voice weak. “Feels like sandwich time.”
As we ate the incredibly magic sandwiches I had prepared earlier, a simple ham and cheese on rye, his disposition improved massively.
“This is great,” he said, flexing a massive arm to show a popping bicep vein. “Feels like how we used to be. Gods, we were strong, then. And I feel magical . Like we used to. Not the same way, but, like, bro - you’re going to love it when you jump ship again.”
I chewed the heavenly sandwich. “Hell yeah, man. We deserve it. We’re getting it all back, and then some. Gregchads stay winning.”
“Gregcoin to the moon.”
We both remembered having this exact conversation with ourselves before. Really, we were a very predictable boy, but there was just something about talking to someone who knew everything about you, every dark secret and vile thought, and held no judgement. Bro was simply there for you. Now, was it somewhat sad that it was myself? No.
“Bro is thinking-” we both said at the same time before bursting out into peals of laughter that sprayed masticated food, a single crumb of which would have been a princely gift for any normal man.
“Come on,” I said. “Let me get suited up and we can go see doctor.”
Doctor’s eyes widened in surprise as we walked through the door to her office, and she gave the other Greg a very obvious once over that we both, graciously, pretended to have not seen. “Your test was a success, I see,” she said evenly, her moment of human weakness passing as though it had never been.
“This baby,” I slapped a mechanical hand on the body part analogous to the hood of a car. “Is the best Greg you’ll ever see.”
“Shut up,” he fended me off. “Yeah, it all went fine, so we can move past the ideas phase of the plan once I, or, I guess, I-”
He jerked his beefy thumb at me.
“Make enough cloning vats.”
“Good, very good,” Doctor said amiably, standing up out of her desk chair. “It’s nice to finally be moving toward some decent progress for once. There hasn’t been anything else to update me on?”
“Not really, on our end.” I had actually managed to reject a power from The Forge again yesterday, but that wasn’t really worth mentioning. “How about you?”
“I suppose that depends on what level of depth you want me to go into. Cauldron does a lot, and we’re still operating for existing clientele.”
“Fair. Anything you think we would be interested in?”
“Observation is continuing on Noelle Meinhardt,” she said breezily, as though she wasn’t dropping a fat bomb with every word.
“Doctor, no.” Both us Greg’s said at once. “What do you mean ?”
“I mean that we captured the cape known as Echidna,” she said as though stating the obvious. “To test her effect as a potential time tunnel.”
“Didn’t Echidna die?”
“No? Why would we let that happen? If nothing else we have a way to produce parahuman clones through her that can be put to some use.”
Greg and I looked at each other. “That sounds evil.”
Doctor frowned, her expression somewhat frustrated. “We’ve been over this. Cauldron will continue to act regardless of your considerations outside of the matters we have discussed on the subject of deviants.”
“I guess,” we said reluctantly. I didn’t like this one bit. I remembered Noelle's biography, a vague memory during a tense fight, and she didn’t ask for any of this. It was the Simurgh’s fault. We would do something, eventually, when we had a way to fix her. “She’s a vial cape though.”
“Which she drank of her own accord. We did not make her like this.”
I shrugged again. It didn’t feel like it was worth it getting into this, and besides, what could even be done at this point? She was a danger and would have to be imprisoned in some way. “Can you at least treat her as humanely as possible?”
“We currently don’t have facilities that would qualify in her case,” doctor said stiffly.
“I’ll add it to the list. You, uh, don’t have any other-”
“How many more people have you got?” Other Greg spoke over me, leveraging his deeper voice.
“Over two thousand.”
“...why?”
“I have already explained that Scion appears to turn his attention away from deviant cases,” doctor’s tone was clipped and short, because she knew I absolutely didn’t want to hear this.
Over two thousand. Fuck me. I wasn’t happy with Contessa on this, either, because she deliberately misled me into thinking there were only just over a hundred - a manageable number. Two thousand? This was going to take years. More work just kept piling on and, I tried not to in this case, but I couldn’t help but think that this feeling of overwhelm was why Doctor Dipshit and Cuntessa did it in the first place.
Was I simply too empathetic?
Other Greg and I shared another look. I wondered if he thought of the Cuntessa burn as well.
“Are they at least kept humanely?” He asked.
“Of course,” Doctor replied cooly. “Even we don’t want to cause undue suffering.”
This was definitely going to be a trust but verify moment, where I would personally go and check on these ‘humane’ conditions. It had to be better than a cold concrete pit, it had to be better than that. At least give me that.
Other Greg looked like he wanted to say something else, but I put a hand on his shoulder. “We’ll sort that one out later. We will. Let’s get this part done first, then we can focus on that.”
My expression would have been just as disgruntled as his if it were visible, perhaps the inhuman fan of sensory equipment I had instead of a face was giving an emotionless impression, because he looked even less happy at that but because he trusted me he acquiesced and nodded.
“Let’s just get me some sip.”
We proceeded to the sip chamber in silence. Other Greg sat mulishly in the sipping chair while doctor retrieved the vial for us. She handed it to me and I could see that the layers of balance and whatever the other one was had separated, just as she had said would happen if you left it for too long and this would apparently reduce the efficacy of the power.
However.
“I probably should have asked,” I said as I shook the vial, my power to temporarily repair technology by ritual motion rendering the potion homogenous again - just as we had planned to test, the vials being techno-organic. “It doesn’t matter too much, but what batch is this from?”
“X zero seven six nine.”
Division. I snorted and shot her a look to which she responded with only empty blankness. “I guess it’s kind of funny.”
“We would have picked the same,” Other Greg said. “To test the possibilities, but this just sounds like a mean joke.”
“I assure you,” she said drily. “There was not a single ounce of humour that went into this choice.”
The vial that created Echidna, Division. It was a section of the alien that gave a lot of clone powers, lots of self duplication, and being able to clone others. It was not a stable batch, according to what doctor had told me last time, though Echidna was apparently what happened when you didn’t drink the balance part of the formula and they had some great successes with it.
I gave it a final shake and pulled a different vial out of a compartment in my suit, a twinned shot glass of supernatural anaesthetic, because drinking the potion was apparently hideously painful, and a philtre of calmness, because becoming agitated produced a greeted chance of deviation.
Other Greg slugged it down and after a moment visibly settled down, the stress leaving his Jostar tier body. I handed him the vial. “Ready?”
I glanced at the doctor, who nodded, and then at Other Greg, who also nodded. Each time a vial was administered was a great chance for me to gather data, too, on how it all worked. Cauldron had some understanding that it was all dimensional fuckery, but no idea of how or what might be truly occurring during this. I hadn’t built any special equipment, having not had the time, but it was my hope that the array in my suit could pick up something, and if not then I had at least a list of what not to scan for - unless I was just scanning at too low a power.
Other Greg steeled himself and drank, making the face I figured I had made the first time I drank whiskey, way back then.
“Tastes like grape,” he cleared his throat and smacked his lips at what must have been an unpleasant texture. “At least that worked.”
“Does it hurt?” I asked, stepping in closer.
“Kind of,” he shrugged. “I can feel it even through the anaesthetic. Like, it’s bad. Like, it’s spicy as fuck, but…”
He gave a small pained groan.
“We’ve had worse.”
“How queer,” the doctor said, she too stepping closer to inspect him. “No painkiller we’ve ever tried has made the slightest bit of difference. Usually, by this point, the subject or client is in agony. We shall have to study this, and if the addition of the preparatory vial doesn’t produce bad results, we will have to integrate this into our standard practice.”
“It is getting worse,” Other Greg remarked calmly, but he was curling in the chair like he was suffering through the next morning of a delicious spicy dinner. “But between that, and whatever being crafted by the power of Hepaestus has done to me, it’s not that bad.”
We watched Other Greg groan and shift in the chair for the next minute and a half, his grey sweats becoming damp with the exertions he was being put through, and finally, right on cue, he calmed, blinking as though he had just woken from a nap.
“Did you see it? The vision?”
Other Greg sat up from where he had slid down almost out of the seat, and was quiet for a moment. “I’m not sure. There was something, maybe, a great yearning.”
“This is normal,” doctor assured him. “How do you feel, power wise? You haven’t deviated at all, which is a good sign.”
“I’m not sure on that one either,” he frowned and looked down, placing a hand over his diaphragm. “Something’s different.”
He was silent for long, long moments before looking back up his expression now wan and stricken. “This is supremely upsetting.”
“Why?” I reached forward and clapped him on the shoulder again. “What is it.”
He leveled a finger at the doctor, the motion somehow worse than a malediction, harsher than any curse, more damning than the worst accusation and the words that left his mouth were the worst possible thing he could have said in any reality.
“I want to eat your hair”
Chapter 168: The Ship of Theseus 9.6
Chapter Text
Gregnant
Male pregnant cretin
“Powers often have a psychological component in their expression,” Doctor was saying conversationally to Greg and I, like this was a point of mild professional interest. “Twisting the knife into their hosts hangups and so on, reminding them of their weaknesses with every use. This comes through less with vial capes, but it still comes through.”
Greg turned his mess of sensors toward me. “Bro wants to eat hair?”
“Don’t turn this back on me,” I snapped. “I’m you.”
“Hey, I’m not the one with the hair eating power.”
“Shit yourself.”
“Perhaps we should test the power,” Doctor interrupted, one hand slowly raising to her neatly tied back ponytail of frizzy, black hair. “You want to eat hair?”
“No,” I said quickly. “No, we’re not testing it now. If it’s anything like Echidna’s then I don’t want that to happen before we’re ready.”
Doctor gave me an unimpressed expression. “It may be a different expression of duplication, you may even turn into a copy of the person's hair you eat, and, now that I think of it, there was an instance of this vial producing a deviant who could steal vitality. Waiting for a better test subject may be wise.”
What a coward. “What vial are you going to feed to your first clone? Six nine six nine?”
“Zed one zero three seven,” Doctor ignored my second question. “It was part of the series that eventually produced the cape known as Valiant.”
“Huh,” I gave a short laugh. “They wanted to give me that name when I was starting in the Wards this time. He was a Cauldron cape?”
“More of our capes were stronger, then, but more also died from taking the vials. If you can ameliorate that level of deviation while retaining the power levels we used to get then we can start stacking the deck again.”
“Why don’t you still do that?” Greg asked. “Even weaker heroes are better than no heroes. The flyover states would be happy to get even one Triumph.”
“We do. America isn’t the only country to exist in all the universes we work in. We work tirelessly, Greg,” Doctor said, her voice hard. “Don’t mistake an inability to see the hand moving the pieces for the hand's absence. We cannot be seen to exist on a majority level. Do you think people would react wisely to the idea that some shadowy organisation has as much power over them as we do? Or that we’re merely a tick in the side of something far greater? It would be societal collapse in dozens of worlds. We appreciate your willingness to work for the cause, but please don’t presume to be an expert after seeing behind the curtain once.”
Greg said nothing in response, but personally I thought that outburst was a bit overly defensive. She probably thought she could be doing more, too, and didn’t want to get clowned on by a sixteen year old.
“Sorry,” Greg eventually said. “I forgot you weren’t American.”
Doctor, in all her obviously foreign glory, raised an eyebrow. “I’m not even from Earth Bet. Feel free to focus on your own country if you like, but please try and expand the scope of our mission in your mind. At least to the America on Aleph.”
“I’ll try,” he looked at me.
“But all we know is Bet’s America,” I said.
“We just need some time to adjust.”
“I do understand,” she said. “We never hit this with a running start.”
“What did you do, back then?” we both asked, synchronised, my new deeper voice overlapping with Greg’s still fairly nerdy one.
Doctor pursed her lips and looked away, up and off to the side. “I went home, initially. Went back to work. Took care of Contessa until we figured out we needed to close all the dimensional rifts opened by the other entity. Came to terms with what we were to do. Wasted more time than I care to think about doing it.”
It was such a weird image, a young Doctor and a little Contessa, entirely unlike the middle aged women who were closer to husks than humans that I knew. It was easy to forget that Contessa was, like, my mum's age because she was so awesome and cool because old people were never awesome nor cool.
“And what was baby Contessa like?”
Doctor looked vaguely discomforted. “Instead of talking about this we should find a decent test subject for your power. Our capes rarely get much of an instinct on what they are or how to use them, like a natural trigger would, so finding out as soon as possible to maximise practice time.”
“We’ll hash it out,” said Greg. “Come on, Greg, we’ve got a lot of work to be getting on with.”
“Door me, Hero’s lab.”
Nothing happened. I looked at Doctor. “Bro.”
“You’ll have to speak to Contessa. If she’s told Doormaker to only take requests from the original then she must have had a reason, and I can’t override her.”
“Oh, yeah, how does the door network work?” Greg asked. “I don’t even know what to start imagining. Some guy in a Matrix style tv room?”
“Doormaker was one of our earliest successes, and he has helped the multiverse more than any of us,” Doctor began, seemingly more comfortable talking about work. “He came out of the same test batch the Triumvirate did, but unfortunately the vial left him somewhat crippled. We keep him as comfortable as we can, along with Clairvoyant. You can go and see them whenever you’d like, but both are locked in a state of non-communication so talking to them is more of a one way street.”
“Ah. I’ll see what we can do. Even if it’s just a magically comfy bed.”
“I’m sure they would appreciate it.”
We took a door back to the lab, greeted by the cold metal skeletons of Pilot - our soon to be harem. Although, I looked at my hands, I guess I wouldn’t be making them anymore. I could, though, I still remembered how the tech worked and how it went together, but without the supporting powers it would take me too long, and give too crude an end product, even with my still holding that golden domain of the forge.
“Okaierinasai, goshujin-sama,” the quartet of deathbot ass looking robots said, which while cringe, was also based.
We ignored them, though, and they went back to work. The workshop was dusted at this point, now all the machines needed fixing - something else I could no longer do. At least I was tall.
“So, about the hair,” Greg stepped out of his suit, the metal plates shifting and pulling back smoothly to allow his exit. “Do you want to eat mine?”
I stared at him, a faint emptiness in whatever place within me now craved hair. “Yeah. Not as much as Doctor’s, though.”
“Weird. You can’t tell what it does?”
“Nuh,” I shrugged. “I’m really not getting much. Man, fuck wanting to eat hair. What the fuck?”
“At least you didn’t mutate, and I guess if the power ends up being awful we can put you in a new body and try again.”
“At least there’s that. We really should have thought this through more. Echidna’s vial? What were we thinking? I might start puking up evil clones. Why couldn’t we have gone with the power to fly?”
“It was, I dunno, symbolic? You’re me, shouldn’t you know?”
I made a vomit sound. “I hate symbolism. Fuck symbolism in its ass.”
“Retard. It was, like, taking on the risk of what Sveta went through and Echidna was what got us into this mess and this was some kinda statement about getting ourselves out of it, and -”
“Actually, how funny would it have been if I really did timewarp back into the past.”
Greg squinted at me. “Like, haha funny?”
“It was an expression of pain.”
“Chyeah,” he said. “Better hope you hit that nat twenty on your willpower check to not go neck.”
We both laughed because we were definitely joking.
It was bizarre watching Greg work from the outside when I had been on the inside mere hours ago. I could see what he was doing, and understand it, until he started skipping steps he shouldn’t have been able to skip, that I couldn’t really remember having skipped when it was me, and outright jumping through time.
Before my very eyes he soldered four disparate wires, each finer than a child's hair, in a single move, a six armed blur of creation. It really was getting ridiculous now, what I, we, he could do with all the resources of Cauldron, and I had given it up. Me, this Greg, having taken my rightful place as the greatest himbo in the universe, I had traded godhood for it, in a way.
I had known that going in, that once I ported my memories over I would stop being the chosen Greg, and I certainly wouldn’t get the freedom of the honoured Greg, who we would have to hang out with soon, I was reduced, in a way, to being the first ‘just another Greg’. Suck shit to all the Gregs after me, though, those losers were definitely valueless background Gregs consigned to not have any screen time except maybe to show off their specific gag - because we were going to have to differentiate ourselves from each other.
One Greg would need a cowboy hat and say ‘pardner’, another would wear a suit and pretend to be rich, and another would have a handlebar mustache, and so on until every niche was filled with a Greg. Though, each may well be greater than the last depending on if Metatron metastasized again and came with something relevant, making me also the least, the meanest, of the other Gregs.
“Bro,” I said, suddenly struck with a thought as I imagined all the other me’s and their gimmicks. “If we put our brain into a girl body, what’s the first thing we would do?”
Greg turned to me slowly, purposefully. “Dude, we would jerk off, you know this.”
“How many clones do you think it’ll take before we have the guts to do it?”
Greg’s mechanical arms flexed nervously. “Lots, probably. I mean, I don’t really want to be Girl Greg. Why?”
“I was just thinking about all the clones. We’re all going to need a ‘thing’.”
“Oh, like one has an afro, one has, like, a cyberpunk mohawk with a gnarly face implant?”
“Yeah, yeah that shit.”
“I didn’t think of it before, but you’re right. We can’t all look the same, we need a schtick.”
“Shotgun the gimmick of not having a gimmick,” I said. “All the future Gregs can sweat.”
“Whatever you say, Hair Eating Greg.”
Bitch. “Well at least my gimmick isn’t dying.”
“That’s really hurtful, Hair Eating Greg. Why don’t you eat some hair and calm down?”
“Shut up, homo retard. Get back to work, don’t you want to save Sveta?”
Greg made a faux-menacing advance at me, arms brandishing wickedly spiked drills. “You’re talking an awful lot of game, big boy.”
I narrowed my eyes and activated my neurons, my brain implant, identical to his, connecting to his suit, and having the same amount of admin privileges for our tech, activated the emergency override protocol. Normally reserved for his incapacitation in some way, so that I could assume control and save him, I hit the emergency eject protocol and the suit spat him out the back.
Greg laughed, stumbling a step and almost falling over the workbench and the skintight power suit for Contessa he was working on. “You fuck.”
“Gotcha, bitch!”
“Pilot!” He called out, and I could feel him lock me out of the connection to them - the little bastard. “Explode this man's penis.”
I heard the four Pilot skeletons come charging in from where they had been conducting routine cleaning, their lovely voice ringing clear. “Standby for penis explosion.”
I cackled, Hyena-like, and ran at him. Greg moved to dodge but I was bigger, faster and stronger and I caught him by the collar of his undersuit and pulled him in, wrapping an arm around his middle and hoisting him up as he flailed and guffawed.
“Save me, Pilot!” He choked out between giggles.
“Pilot, explode his penis!” I whirled around and brandished him like a human shield.
The four bare steel skeletons circled us as I swung Greg like a flail, the both of us laughing and laughing and laughing until we could scarcely breathe. As an only child this was the peak of having a brother I missed out on. I fumbled, overextending on a swing of him, and he managed to slip my grip and escape to the outer rim of robots.
They swarmed me and began tickling. “Ow!” I choked through giggles, ineffectual fending them off. “Ow, you have to finish them. This is just stabbing me.”
“Eat hair, hair eater.”
“Pilot, please, have mercy!” I curled into a ball around one of their cold legs.
“I have no mercy for scum like you,” she said brightly, but their hard metal fingers stopped jabbing into my armpits as Greg called them off. I gingerly got to my feet with an adroitness favourably comparable to my Gamer self, the dexterity of a body that was both magical and a semi-divine creation. Where had my Gamer powers come from? Were they, too, divine in providence?
The world may never know.
Greg and I stared at each other, breathing hard, identical grins on our faces. “Man, we should get G-regular in here. We almost have enough for a two vs. two Halo match.”
“Just one more Gregbro. What kind of vial should we mix for him?”
“It would have to be a Tinker one, surely. All of us are still demigods of the forge, and that stacks with my Tinker powers.”
“If we mix Unary and Clad we could get a cool mecha power.”
“Maybe it would just be too mean.” Greg retook his place in his construction suit and resumed our important work. “Even if they would be better than most normal Tinkers they would never be as good as they remember being. Even if you shat out a mech for them it would be better than anything they could ever make.”
“It’s the only synergy boost we’ve got, though. Yeah, it’ll suck, but I think I can live with it.”
The Pilot’s went back to their cleaning and I briefly pictured how good they would look once they had skin to clothe in French maid costumes. “Yeah, I guess we could. Maybe we can even make them as good as Hero was.”
“I hope so, Greg-bro.”
There wasn’t a whole lot for me to really do until we had the place properly set up so the next day or so while Greg, in his own world of imbibed focus and wakefulness, was spent putting in requests for what we were going to need and figuring out how much of my remembered knowledge was able to be applied.
I still did have the full scope of divine craft, and there was a fair bit of knowledge that didn’t need the fudging of tinkertech to work so I was still at the very least the most capable mechanic on Earth Bet, being able to push scientific fields ahead decades if I got the chance. Maybe I could even go to college and ace the courses while banging art ho’s. Plans for later, because now we were in the running phase of the save Sveta scheme - Contessa’s suit was done and she was here to drop off the genetic samples.
She had put it on, trading in everything she had on for something far greater, though from the outside she looked exactly the same. Mostly. The powers that made everything beautifully purpose built had turned the cut of the suit into something almost egregiously flattering, and while she had been kinda hot for an old lady before this was new territory.
I wasn’t privy to all the exact details, but Greg had told me that the hat morphed into a gas mask rebreather type deal, the watch had a laser and the shoes gave her featherfall to go with the strength and speed of the suit itself, all of which was run by a closed off system controlled by a series of discrete buttons hidden in the palms of the skin suit. Contessa’s fingers were already twitching, typing, as her power fed her the exact motions needed to activate and program custom subroutines.
It could even connect to the internet.
She had handed over a briefcase of blood samples and Greg had gotten started on forming Sveta’s new body. Contessa was making a small show of inspecting her new gun, something that could shoot through walls if she wanted, and a switchblade that worked on the same tech as Colin’s halberd blade in that it could cut through steel with ease, which meant that she was waiting for me to come and ask.
“Hey,” I said, peering closely to see if I could make out the line where her fake skin and real skin met, somewhere on her chin and running up her jaw to leave her face as the only real skin exposed to the air. Her hair was a wig, and the stuff over her ears would block sonic attacks to some extent. “You know, right?”
“I do.” She tucked her knife and gun away.
“Is it bad?”
Contessa placed a gentle hand on my shoulder in just the right way as to evoke an extreme nostalgia for my mother, and a similar sense of comfort. “It’s a strong power, strong and stable and useful. When you consume the hair of a person you will, like Noelle, produce a clone - with some key differences. The clones of parahumans are possible in the same way, multiple sources of hair producing hybrid clones, the clones will be sane and not be prone to the mutations and weaknesses of Noelle’s.”
“And?”
“They will be genetically half clones of you, with memories from all parents, gestated over a period of days.”
“But…” A great panic welled up within me, a primal fear of all teenage boys. “I’m not ready to have kids.”
Contessa gave my shoulder a squeeze and I looked wildly over to Greg who I knew had been listening to the entire conversation. Deliberately, brutally, without a shred of mercy, he spoke.
“Damn, so you’re gonna get Gregnant, huh?”
Chapter 169: The Ship of Theseus 9.7
Chapter Text
Greg
The Chosen One
I fed the blood sample into the analysis machine and set the computer to crunching the DNA sequence. I would let that run before getting into spawning the clone body for Sveta, just in case there was something I needed to be aware of with this potentially not being actual human matter. This was some cool shit, entirely new territory, who knew what lay in store in this genetic code.
Greg had moved cautiously across the room and started talking to Contessa. I could hear them, of course, and as their short conversation moved I moved with it, realising I had to take this chance if it was the last thing I did.
“Damn, so you’re gonna get Gregnant, huh?”
I did feel bad at the look on his face, but it was just one of those things. He, that is to say, Gregnant, would forgive me.
“Shut the FUCK up?!” Gregnant hissed. “No shot are you calling me that. Get that shit out of your head, I can see you thinking it.”
“Sorry,” I said, not the least bit contrite. “We can fix this for you, though. Make you a new body?”
“You should hold out on that,” Contessa said. “Powergame the possibilities.”
Gregnant and I looked at each other, in that moment completely defeated by the three word sentence. “That was cruel,” I said. “Pathing us like that, knowing we won’t be able to resist thinking about it now.”
“There’s gotta be so many sick combination powers,” Gregnant said. “Like, combine how?”
“That I can’t see. Trigger events obfuscate things, all I can see is that they combine. So if you consumed the hair of the parahuman who turns into a somewhat invincible monster when unobserved, and the one with a power that makes them unobservable, it should stand to reason that the power would synergise with itself.”
“Are you talking about fucking Night ?” I asked. “That Nazi freak? You just said the clone has their memories.”
“And yours,” she nodded to the both of us. “An amalgam personality, and as you are neither racist, sexist nor homophobic it should cancel out.”
Gregnant and I looked at each other again. “Contessa, bro,” he said. “Thanks for the vote of confidence and shit, but, like, this is distinctly un-excellent of you.”
Contessa smiled and I wondered what the end of this path was supposed to be. Was she just shitting us for fun? Based, if so.
“I want you to not forget what you have at your disposal, here, and what it’s being used for. This is the final run, Greg. We have nine months before the Simurgh strikes us down in tribulation unlike anything we have seen before. We have to commit everything, or be destroyed. We’ve stayed alive this long flying just under her radar, our wings of wax and feather burnt each time we dared go even slightly higher than it likes, and it has already tried to kill you once.”
“This is it. This has to be it. We can’t let this chance pass by and our silver bullet to tarnish, unfired. I can see the end of the path to everything you can create as you are now, and in nine months time you will dwarf the achievement of every other tinker - even if you don’t gain a single power more. We’ve seen how a single one can exponentially increase your scope. If that happens again? Twice? More? In four months you have gained thirty six, what could you be able to do with thirty six more? If it sounds like I’ve given you this speech too many times it’s because you have yet to understand the scope of what you have access to for this.”
“Anything, any material, any resource. If you want a piece of tinkertech to reverse engineer, you can have it. If you want a Tinker to collaborate with, you can have them. A Parahuman whose power you want to study? We can recruit them. I think it’s great that the first thing you’re going to do is save your friend, it’s just that after that there needs to be something more; you can have your hobby of taking Whitelist jobs so long as Cauldron’s goals are advanced. More than just create vials, you need to be looking into the nature of what the entity is, and you, alone, a parahuman outside the power of the two here, can do this. No human science is advanced enough, and every power of ours is blackboxed against understanding them. Wherever yours comes from, even if it’s a third or fourth entity, it’s our best chance. Maybe even our only chance.”
Contessa said calmly.
“Oh,” I said at the same time as Gregnant. “Ok. Um…”
I was silent for a solid minute as Contessa held my gaze sternly.
“I guess, the entities are in other dimensions? I should go and study those weird portals around the body, and Doormaker, and, uh, who was that guy who almost started the Alphabet War? Haywire? His tech. I should get some of that to study and maybe that will give me a good springboard for getting to wherever the main body really is?”
“That’s a good idea for a start. Before I arrange for the destruction of Haywire’s remaining portals, so that The Simurgh can’t use them against us again, I’ll take you to see one.”
This was a profoundly upsetting statement because all the good anime and manga came from Aleph through a Haywire portal. I opened my mouth to object on these grounds. “I just realised that I can ask for a door to Aleph, but what about everyone here waiting for the hiatus of Virtuous Sons to end? They’ll never get to see it adapted now.”
“Greg, if you can save enough humans in the end to enjoy it I will personally write and hand animate the adaptation.”
“Well,” I said. “If there was anything you could have said to make me work harder it was that.”
“You do realise that if the entities complete the cycle all anime will be over forever, right?”
“I’ve been trying not to think about it.”
“Hang on,” Gregnant interrupted, a frown creasing his handsome features. “Can’t I clone you, Contessa, and the clone will have the Paths? And because the clone is half me it will want to write that light novel?”
“We should hold off on that for now, keep it in our back pocket for the same reason we wouldn’t have you make a clone of Eidolon. The pieces of the entity our powers come from are only tuned to have enough energy for the cycle, which as best as I can piece together is something in the realm of a few hundred years. They can run out. If we plug another output into my source I could run dry at a critical moment because I truly have no idea how long I have left. Thinker powers, naturally triggered, come with headaches to stop the host from overusing them - mine does not, and I use it every second of the day. I can see from your expression that you begin to understand.”
I was of course wearing my construction suit and had no visible face. “Why is it every time I talk to you or the doctor you demoralise me with just how bad things really are? I get the feeling that you’re the only thing keeping everything treading water, and you don’t even know if your power is just going to run out in a week?”
Contessa nodded.
“Hey,” Gregnant said. “Could we use that? If clones use up powers faster could we use that against Scion? Drain his powers dry with enough clones?”
Contessa spread her hands wide in abject hopelessness. “To drain enough of the billions, perhaps trillions, of power granting agents to weaken Scion? We will try.”
I was still a little too high on the ancient egyptian elixirs to truly feel the cold dread that I should have been, that was plain on Gregnant’s face, and surely Contessa knew that and had chosen this moment for me to receive the information, where I was in a state to shoulder that burden.
Or so I assumed. It could be anything, really, being a Path. It was lucky for me that I trusted Contessa to not screw me over, if only because I was apparently very important to beating Scion. It must majorly suck to be the only one with the final responsibility of balancing who gets to live and die, of weighing life against life, trading happiness for victory.
“Damn, dude,” I said. “Heavy lies the crown.”
Here he was, the man, the myth, the legend - our mate Greg. The G-regular one.
“My man!” I pulled him, grinning, into a bro hug before releasing him for Gregnant to hug in turn. “How’s it been?”
“It’s been alright,” he stepped back and looked Gregnant up and down appraisingly. “Hello, new me?”
“He’s Gregn-”
“Yes! I’m Greg!” He shouted over me. “Hello, Greg.”
With a nonplussed expression G-regular moved from where he had stepped out of the Doormaker portal and looked over the workshop, now clean and well on the way to full functionality. “I like what you’ve done with the place.”
I traded a smirk with Gregnant for his hostile glare and sidestepped his attempt to punch me. “We have fun here, but hey, come on, tell us how it’s been. We live vicariously through you.”
G-regular spent another few seconds looking everything over, then shrugged, turning back to us. “Everything’s fine, it’s only been, like, a week, so I’m still in the settling in phase. They put me, mum and dad in this sick apartment in the middle of the city near the main office so that’s nice. New York is so huge, though, and there’s way too many people, so that’s no good. I met Savannah again.”
“Oh, damn,” said Gregnant. “How’d it go?”
G-regular’s shoulders sunk. “She’s actually really annoying when she doesn’t think I’m hot.”
“You better get buff quick.”
“Just give me one of those,” G-regular pointed to Gregnant. “Bro is looking caked up. How does she handle?”
“Like a dream, bro,” said Gregnant, turning to pose, flexing one fist sized bicep and raising the hem of his shirt to expose his chiseled cumgutters. “We do good work.”
“I bet,” G-regular eyed his abs jealously. He, and by extension, I, wasn’t ugly, I didn’t think, and I had never really taken the time to judge myself on this level from an outside view. For a teenage boy I was objectively mid. The time I had spent exercising that body had clearly helped, but I had needed to start mewing yesterday.
“Don’t worry about it,” I told him, throwing an arm over his shoulder. “The body’s only fifteen, it’s meant to be lame, and I know what you’re going to say - ‘If it’s meant to be lame why was Victoria Dallon so hot when she was fifteen?’”
“Are you going to finish that sentence?” G-regular asked.
“Little bro doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Gregnant cast his own arm over G-regular’s shoulders and pulled him away from me. “Let Uncle Greg hook you up. I can make you as hot as Victoria.”
“Unc is yapping,” I retorted. “He can’t make shit.”
G-regular looked back at me from where they had started strutting away. “Who cares what you think, you’re just a clone.”
“But I’m the original,” I whined. “He’s the clone.”
“I think you’ll find that I’m the original,” he replied.
“Shut up, G-regular. I have the forge powers.”
He frowned at me, then at Gregnant who shrugged. “I remember that I was going to go to the next body. Did I change that? Did we change that?”
“I have a new plan for this,” I said vaguely. “For the realest Greg only. Clones aren’t to know.”
“I don’t ever remember being such a nasty, rude boy,” said Gregnant to G-regular. “Do you?”
“I don’t know where he gets it from, we’re both such good guys. It’s hard to believe he came from me.”
“It’s sad really,” tutted Gregnant.
“Says the guy who eats hair.”
G-regular stopped walking and wrested himself from Gregnant’s brotherly grip in disgust. “Bro eats hair?”
“What? But that’s not,” Gregnant spluttered. “He’s lying. I’ve never eaten hair. He’s just jealous that my cock is huger than his.”
“Hey,” I said. “That’s only half true.”
There was a brief, tense, stare off, then we all broke out into peals of giggles. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s get you a better hand, the we can hammer out how to save Sveta again.”
Chapter 170: The Ship of Theseus 9.8
Chapter Text
Greg
The Chosen One
“So here’s the thing.” We all stood in front of the clone vats, the three of us, watching my new body grow, Doctor’s new body grow and the empty one full of synthetic amniotic fluid just waiting for Sveta’s sample. “I was thinking that, before we grow her the most bangin’, magically powerful body we can, we should probably ask her first if she wants that.”
“Makes sense.”
“Which means we’re going to have to kidnap her first, and hold her here for at least three days. That’s where you come in, my regular guy.”
G-regular pursed his lips and folded his arms. “Yeah. It’s gonna be kinda weird, not gonna lie. I don’t have the same friendship I had with her then, here. There’s no way she’s going to knock the opportunity back, but it’s not going to feel organic on her end. We haven’t even met yet. She doesn’t even know that I know.”
“Not much we can do about it. At least this time we explicitly have Cauldron backing us if anyone gets too suspicious that we’re bringing in someone who is going to be pretty obviously Sveta in human form,” said Gregnant. “I know last time the plan was just roll with it and hope no one overturned the stone, but this time we can probably just ask Contessa for a favour. She might already be on it, laying the groundwork.”
“We don’t need to waste her time with this,” said G-regular. “We’re big boys, now, right? Big boys. We can do this.”
“Yeah,” I said. “You weren’t here but Doctor bitched us out about being too Bet-Americentric, and then Contessa put us on blast for thinking too small scale. We can do this, between the three of us we definitely can.”
“Oh, and you weren’t here for it either but we’re mad at them both for lying to us about the thousands of Case Fifty Threes they have in the basement,” Gregnant followed up.
“Were we surprised? We should have seen that coming. Didn’t she say they think it made Scion ignore them?”
“Yeah, we were surprised,” I said. “Then they told me they have Echidna, too, like for fucks sake. Oh, and we saw the entity, too. It’s this horrible, beautiful, terrible thing. I’ll show you sometime, when we have more time.”
“Lead with that shit, homie. Like, what? Who cares about me meeting Savannah over that?”
“We do,” said Gregnant. “You’re me-”
“And me,” I piped up.
“And we care about you, bro.”
“Thanks, bro.”
“This is great,” I said, heart swelling with emotion. “You know, I did a lot of hating on myself, but, like, was I just being a moody teenager? You guys are great.”
“We are great, but I’m pretty sure we did that ‘cause we had PTSD from almost being murdered.”
“Oh, yeah.” I looked down at the lightly bubbling blobs of undifferentiated flesh in the vats, neither looking like much of anything at all but both bearing the golden bright and shining silver make, the unmistakable inner beauty plain for anyone who had eyes to see. “We’re part of the grand conspiracy now, we could just call a hit on those guys.”
“I guess,” replied G-regular and Gregnant at the same time.
“How evil are we feeling?”
They looked at each other. “Little bit.”
“On a scale of dope them with the philtre that makes you feel embarrassed to laser etch suicidality onto their retinas?”
They looked at each other again. “Both? Both. Both is good.”
I exhaled strongly through my nose. “Anyway. We should get going on stuff. I need to make you a new hand, G-regular, and you should give me a list of other things. I’ma make ya another flight suit like our last one eventually, just as soon as it’s plausible for you to have one.”
“Thanks bruv. I’ll see how far I can get on my own, but let’s just use that as cover.”
“I want to see what you can make,” said Gregnant. “We’re both still demigods, or whatevs, and you’d still remember most of all of it, so whatever you do make is going to have to be tinkertechless. Just think of the tech boom.”
“People will be very happy with me. I’ll be rich, famous. Girls love that shit. I’m going to have so many groupies,” he said with a leer. “I can’t believe that I’ll be the first of me to get laid.”
“It’s childish to hold that as a measure of value,” I said piously.
“You would, cherry boy.”
“Bitch, I could have that shit on lock. I could grow my own catgirl girlfriend, I could-” I took a deep breath. “No, we can’t get bogged down in this. How much time have we wasted in verbal shitpost? We do actually have to save Sveta at some point, and besides, Contessa was right; we have to lock in. Things need to be happening.”
“All this work is going to make you a dull boy.”
“That was the tradeoff,” I eyed him sadly. “You get to be G-regular.”
“Man,” said G-regular. “I know, I was you. It’s just sad to see in person.”
What a little turd. He was probably just giving me shit for the sake of it again. I gracefully ignored his jab because I was better than that, and had important things to be getting on with. “Whatevs. Come on, let's get your new hand made. You’ll be wanting the vibrating model, I assume?”
“Yes, please.”
It came as no surprise as to how much tech I could pack into a hand and forearm, easily twice, perhaps even thrice, as much as Colin. More, even, as I didn’t have to worry about fragile components or malfunctions. There was no point in absurd overdesign, so I didn’t, something that to some would be endlessly disappointing, but there was really no point.
Cramming as much computing power as I could into it was a far better use of space than adding in a beam gun or a plasma blade. I knew G-regular would be missing our late omnitool, because I sure as hell was, so this was going to be my best attempt at recreating it - minus all the best features, of course.
The computer microframe still wasn’t as powerful despite being many times the size, such was the incredibly advanced nature of the omnitool. I hoped everyone was still getting a lot of use out of those designs I uploaded, even if that was likely what got me on the Simurgh’s shit list. It was worth it.
For a beast of an arm like this you couldn’t just rely on nerve control, it needed a proper control implant, and to compensate for the lack of screen, retinals. Why not chuck a cochlear implant in there while I was at it, he’d earned it.
It was definitely weird having myself under my own knife on the operating table, but having done this before on my clone body helped. My specialised medical arms opened him up with sub-micron precision, and each delicate piece was implanted, connected, with as much care and thoroughness as I could manage.
As I worked over G-regular’s unconscious body, Gregnant had started on designing a room that was as comfortable a prison to hold Sveta as possible. We had discussed it a little prior and came to the conclusion that it was worth offering her the option to choose the basic unbreakable room package, or if she wanted the deluxe model with included mind controlling beverage minibar and Master grade artwork. The emotions created by my powers weren’t fake, and it was better to have the option to not stress yourself sick. Then, to make this less like the kidnapping and human trafficking that Cauldron regularly engaged in I would also at least double check with her if she even agreed.
She did, but I imagined it would be good for her to have the power of choice.
There was all so much to do and so little time, but I couldn’t rush even more. I was already cutting the corners allowed to me by my need to never have to maintain anything I made, even if it was the laziest, kludgiest tinkertech you could picture. So long as it worked, it would always work in perpetuo.
Soon, seemingly far too soon, it was time. G-regular was back up and testing out his new cybernetics by, I could only assume, attempting to beam porn directly into his optic nerve, but we didn’t have internet here so he was shit out of luck; Gregnant had finished the plans, showing that while there was a drop in skill in his art and its influence he would have still had the Master rating if anyone were able to draw him up a file.
We were almost ready for the big day.
Chapter 171: Sveta Karelia
Chapter Text
Sveta
An innocent monster
Sometimes I thought about ‘what if Goku were betrayed and trapped in a time chamber for ten thousand years’? Would he feel like me? If a god did exist in this world they must surely hate me, even though I probably deserved it for some reason - unlike Goku.
These thoughts tormented me as I curled, half asleep, awaking from restless sleep with my mind churning over the mysteries of the universe, in my blanket nest in the corner of my room, trapped. I tried to turn away, blinking stiff, thick eyelids, to get the sliver of light coming from the alarm system that peeked through the edge of the door out of sight, but my body turned back to face it just in case it were a potential threat.
The thought of that woke me up fully and my tendrils shifted restlessly in my little nest as my thoughts swirled an ever bitter drain. I was going to have an awful night's sleep, and that was going to make everything tomorrow worse, all my therapies just that bit harder to focus on and easier to slip away. Thoughts of not getting enough sleep turned to worse moments, times that even the haze of total sleep deprivation couldn’t blur out, when I had last been out there.
I grit my peg-like teeth and tried hard to push it out of my mind, focusing on breathing, but I had spent years more out there existing merely as a thing, something less than an animal, than I had in here as a person. It hadn’t been that long a time since I had been forced to eat putrid, rotting carcasses, the bones cracked open for the blackened, dripping marrow and forced down my throat.
Breakfast in the morning would be marmalade on toast. I had to focus on that, on how much I loved marmalade, on how grateful I was that I could taste something so sweet. The restless curling of my tendrils quietened a little as my thoughts calmed and a square of golden light opened up in front of me.
Whip cracks, staccato, like gunfire, as my tendrils all lashed out, carrying me along in the attack, drowning out my thin, high pitched scream. I watched, helpless, as they attacked the square of light, wrapping around it with the strength to warp tempered steel and accomplishing nothing. An arm, armoured in grey metal, reached out of the square and was instantly seized by my tendrils which proceeded to do as much damage to it as they had the square - the portal. The arm seemed unfazed and it pulled back against the wrenching strength of my tendrils; with a yank I was pulled forward, tendrils whipping and scraping my room in a frenzy, and through the portal.
There was a bright flash as white light engulfed me, bringing tears to my eyes, half blinding me as if I went from night to burning midday in an instant. I screwed my eyes shut against it, my shriveled lungs aching as I tried to fill them with enough air to fuel my desperate sobs. It was all so helpless. I was so helpless.
“Sorry, Svets.”
The voice cut over the thunder of my thrashing tentacles as they pounded and beat at the walls, the floor, the person who grabbed me, at anything and everything they could reach.
‘Svets?’ Nobody called me Svets, nobody I knew. Nevertheless, even if this person knew who I was, I couldn’t just simply stop crying or trying to kill them.
“This is going to be fuck-all confusing, but there isn’t really any other practical way. I know you can’t help what you’re doing at the moment, and it’s ok. You’re not going to be able to hurt me. Oh, and I’m not going to hurt you either, obviously.”
And yet, even so, despite such assurances her tendrils remained wrapped firmly around this persons, a boy’s, neck and her tears ran and ran until they were nothing but bitter black bile.
“I didn’t want to do it like this. It’s so messy. Oh, shit, I should have led with this again. I’m Greg - yes, the Technomage internet Greg. I wanted to meet you in person first and everything, but,” Greg, yes, that Greg, the one who was Void Cowboy, sighed. “I had to rush a bit. I’m really sorry, I know you’re scared, and I’m going to help you. I can fix Case Fifty Three’s, and I’m going to help you all.”
Oh, so this was one of those horrible lucid nightmares. The kind where she was sure she was awake and suffering some terrible, deserved, fate only to wake up and, if she was unlucky, only ‘wake up’ into a new level of the nightmare.
“I’m going to gas you now,” said Greg gently, his voice echoing through the plain, white room. “It’s just to calm you down so we can talk, ok? Ok.”
There was no transition. One second I was overcome with a panic so sharp it could scarcely exist in reality, the next I was blinking in the light, wondering where it had gone. It wasn’t just that I was calm, I wasn’t able to feel anything else and even though it was mind control it was at least better than what I was feeling before. I sniffed, my tendrils still attacking despite my calm, but they would follow my lead eventually. “Greg? What?”
I was finally able to see through the tears, my eyes now used to the light. I was throttling a featureless suit of grey metal, roughly the size of a teenage boy.
“Hey, yes! Hello, sorry again, I’m here to save you.”
I looked around. We were in a featureless white cube being lit by some source I couldn’t see. “Oh,” I said. “Thanks?”
“Think nothing of it,” his voice was bursting with excitement, making him sound much younger. “Of course I’d help my homeslicey. Don’t even sweat.”
“But… how?”
Case Fift Three’s couldn’t be cured. There was no fixing what we were.
“Clones, and mind transfer.”
Hmm, naruhodo ne. “I understand,” I said, understanding nothing.
Greg giggled, grossly high pitched. “It’s fine. This way is just easier for me, I know you want to know. The only ways to fix you are with powers, and there’s not many who can actually do it. Maybe three people who you’d actually want to fix you. The way I can do it is I grow you a new body and put your mind into it.”
I calmly assessed his words. “Thanks.”
Greg, in his suit of unblemished metal, without even so much as a scuff from my attacks, gave the tendrils he had access to a hug, patting them gently in a way that still set them off again in a frenzy of ripping and tearing. “Ain’t no thang. Oh, I gotta check with you though. It’ll take a few days for me to grow your new body, so you’ll have to hang out until then, so for your room, what do you want? I can pull together just about anything, but what I’m really talking about is power effects. I can make a room like, just normal, but also one full of master effects. Do you want just normal stuff in it? Or do you want the room where you can’t feel worried? Somewhere in between? Press a button and a panel swivels?”
What the fuck was he even talking about?
“And your new body, too.” Greg continued, words tumbling out of him in a rush. “There’s a huge variation on how magical I can make it. Do you want the normal girl package? Some of the magic? I can make you superhuman at base, if you want. Or maybe just the one that makes it so you never have to take a bath if you don’t want? You wanna be stab-proof? I can see you’re overwhelmed. No worries. Too much all at once, sorry, I’ve just been thinking about this for so long. It’s been June… October, November, December, Jan, Feb - ah, like five, six months. I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you beforehand so you wouldn’t freak out on me, but I’m gonna be taking you back to Bet with me, if you want, and, uh, I’ll explain everything - promise.”
What else could I do but accept things? I was a bag of shrivelled, hanging organs attached to meters of whiplike tendril that killed things on sight. I hated it. I hated it as much as anyone could hate anything. I could barely be considered to be alive, and here was someone I ostensibly knew, and was friends with, offering me freedom from this living hell? Even if it was a trap, how was I supposed to not take it with every one of my dozen cursed limbs?
“I trust you,” I said as my tendrils attempted to strangle him, undaunted by their continuing failures. “Because you trusted me enough to tell me you were Technomage ages ago.”
“Yes… Ha ha ha… Yes! So what now? I have all night before I have to go back for a bit, but my other clones are here, so they can help you with whatever you want.”
“Ah, yes, the clones,” I said calmly.
“Just the two, they’re real cool guys. Oh, just you wait, things are going to be so good. You have no idea.”
“Ok.”
“Oh, I’m sure you’d be happier without the philtre. We’ll have to wait for it to wear off, which is annoying, I know. Do you want to sleep it off? I probably won’t be here when you wake up, but my clones are literally me, so it’ll be much of a muchness.”
I would have been asleep anyway, and that was what people did in this kind of situation, anyway, they slept on problems. Even though I was this calm I still had no idea on what I was supposed to do, or want. This was too new, too much, too strange, too fast. “Maybe it would be better to sleep?”
“Couldn’t hurt. Breathe deep for a moment?”
I breathed calmly even as the edges of my vision slowly greyed and faded to black.
“Aaaaaah!”
I awoke in a shrieking panic. Where was my nest? My pole? This wasn’t my room. This was some horrid, blank pit and - ah. I stopped screaming, even though my tendrils were still responding to my wafer thin nerves by attempting to find any threat they could, fruitlessly dragging me from one end of the cell to the next.
“Sveta!” Greg’s voice echoed over whatever system he had set up in here. “Don’t worry - oh, you’ve already stopped screaming. Hey, I’m a different Greg to the one you were speaking to yesterday. He had to go to work for a bit.”
My breath was coming in in short, sharp pants over a dry tongue. I needed water less than people with a human body, but I was feeling very dehydrated. My head span. “Your very own clone?”
Greg’s laugh was loud and grating. “This is why we’re friends. It’s just too bad we couldn’t meet sooner. I know this is all horribly timed and super sudden, it’s not really how I wanted to do it, but I had to stop stalling.”
“Can I have some water, please?”
“Oh, yeah, of course. You hungry? I’ll make you something. I’m the Greg with all the powers so I can get you anything in the world.”
This was starting to make my head hurt. Something was going on here, something big, something far bigger than it had any right to be. “Um, nothing, I don’t mind.”
“Nah, nah. I remember,” Greg said, and didn’t elaborate on what he remembered about me. “Pancakes? Lots of syrup and butter?”
The stiff, porcelain mask of my face creased as I began to bawl loudly. It was exactly what I would have wanted, it had always been the first thing I wanted to eat ever since I found out they existed. “Th-thanks,” I choked out, amid the thunderous lashings of tendril that didn’t understand the difference between being overcome with positive emotion and fear. “If it’s not too much trouble.”
“Absolutely, no wo-”
“Let me say hello,” a new voice, one much deeper and richer, spoke. “Move over. Hey Sveta!”
“Shit yourself,” said Greg.
“Shit this. Hi Sveta, how are you? I’m the other Greg.”
My brain began to hurt harder, feeling as though it were curling in on itself despite being as small and shrivelled as my heart. I gave an inarticulate sob as a response.
“Hey, it’ll be all good,” said the deep voiced Greg soothingly. “I know this isn’t how anyone wanted to do this, and it’s super scary for you. We have options, though. I know it seems sketchy, but we can give you the calming potion again, or do you want the room itself to calm you? Don’t answer now, it can wait until you eat.”
“Which I will go and do now,” said the younger sounding Greg. “Be right back.”
“Hey, we are sorry about how this is going.”
“It’s fine.”
Was it fine? Did it matter? It wasn’t like I had a choice in anything in my life anymore, not really, and I hadn’t ever since I became this thing, this Garotte . I would have chosen anything if there was a chance to go back to who I was, anything was better than being a prisoner in my own body subject to the whims of the cruellest guard imaginable.
“Hmm. Well, it’s only three days, and we can put together something in the meantime so that you can at least not be trapped in this awful room. Sorry about that, too. We only made this one so we didn’t just chuck you in the room chock full of master effects. You know, because of the implication.”
I had been trying my best to breathe, to practice the techniques that all the doctors had taught me, and as Greg spoke my tendrils did cease their thrashing and come back under what little control I could manage, all coming in to curl under me like I was a particularly dirty mop.
“This is going so much worse than before. I wish we had Amy here, but everything is too different.”
“You’ve done this before?” He’d saved someone else, freed them from this curse?
“Oh, no, I mean,” he said with the tone of someone caught in a lie. “Well. Kind of. Not really, but still. It’s… I don’t want to traumadump on you or anything, but let’s just say that I had a ‘precognition event’ that gave me memories of another reality, one where I saved you and did a better job of it than this. It’s why I knew that you were a Case Fifty Three, I’ve known since October but I just couldn’t do anything about it until now. But, hey, we’re here. Finally.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that, so I simply lay there in a twisted pile. It wasn’t as though I didn’t believe him, as strange as it was to believe someone you had never met in person about all of this, because who else would have done something like this? Who else would have bothered? There were better monsters to fix if you were doing it for the money, or the fame, I was just some nobody slowly dying in an asylum.
“Thank you,” I said. “I’m happy we were friends in the other reality.”
“We were,” he said excitedly. “I even came to visit you in the asylum. We played Scrabble. Coupla months after that I broke you out and we gave you a human body, you were going to be in the Wards with me, you met Weld and everything.”
“I met Weld?” I asked in wonder.
“Oh, yes you did,” he replied smarmily, in a tone whose implication brought the closest thing to a flush of embarrassment I was capable of to my cold, white cheeks.
“No!”
“Nah,” he laughed. “But the body we made you was hot as fuck, and he thought so, too. I actually came here, I mean, my memories of that timeline ended practically on that day so I didn’t get to see anything happen.”
“Oh,” I said. “But… I actually got to go and meet him? He thought I was pretty? Tell me everything.”
It was unreal to imagine, the wonders of the alternate timeline that was to be made manifest in this reality. I had gotten to join the normal people in the sun, even if only for a moment.
Just as unreal were these pancakes. It should have been impossible for food to taste this good, for sugar and butter to be so rich, so decadent, and yet so light and refreshing. Even the tea, a cup of steaming green tea, whose bitterness was so mellow, so floral, that it could scarcely be called tea at all.
My tendrils must have agreed, because instead of tearing my food to mushy shreds to cram into my tiny mouth they were almost behaving themselves.
“We should get into it,” said the younger Greg. “I have everything prepped for your new body, I just need to know what level you want me to go to with it. I have a list written out, but I just guess it depends on what you want to do in three days time. If you want to be a normal person and live a normal life, I can make that happen, hopefully, but it would be easier for both of us, I think, if you were a parahuman; the most I can do for that is low super strength and durability, mostly, but even that would be enough for the Protectorate to step in and help. If you join.”
I chewed the perfect mouthful of pancake and swallowed, my withered stomach already full to bursting. “Should I?”
“It’s your life,” said Greg.
My life, huh? I already knew what I was going to do, and it had nothing to do with how I imagined my life. It was because I was scared. I was terrified. I had no idea how to live as a person, I had no idea on how to act, on what to say, on where to go or on what to do. I was, for all intents and purposes, a baby. I had no useful skills and no memory. I needed someone, something, anything, to take care of me, and I couldn’t put the entirety of my dependence on one single person.
I had nothing. I was no one. What else was I to do?
“I would like to have the superpowers, please.”
“Ey! I think it’ll be for the best. The Wards program is super accommodating, anyway, so long as you go to school and play some ball they will move heaven and earth to keep you there instead of out there and getting into trouble. Trust. They want less supercrime, not more.”
“It must be a good idea, if you’re there, and Weld is there.”
“Ah, why did I join? It was such a stupid reason, there was this Villain, Coil, and I was convinced he wanted me in his gang but looking back on it Tattletale was literally just shopping,” he laughed. “All that, and she was shopping. It probably did save my life in the end, or maybe it was what got me…”
He sighed.
“Anyway. I’ll get started now. Then I’ll make something so that we can actually talk in person, I hate this comms shit.”
“I would like that,” I looked around at the blank cube I was trapped in. “It’s a little boring in here. Sorry, I don’t mean that it’s bad. I’m very grateful.”
“Oh, I can do whatever kind of room you want, or just get you whatever. I did make the walls unstainable though, so if you wanted to draw all over them it would all just kind of run off. I didn’t think about that, it’s kinda just force of habit on that one.”
“Please don’t trouble yourself.”
“Is fine, comerade. Lemma hook you up to my playlist, at least. It’s all AI generated, ain’t that cool?.”
The music started suddenly, sending her tendrils into a little spasm, and what played was some kind of synthwave/japanese eighties city pop hybrid, which was strangely hypnotic, the beat and melody endlessly looping through patterns that scratched an itch in my brain I had never known was there until this moment. The songs flowed through one another in some kind of mathematical perfection, and the time flowed with them. It was the kind of music I could lose hours to while drawing.
On the second day Greg informed me that he was done with his stopgap option, and put me to sleep. When I woke up I was locked into some kind of mechanical walker, and all three Gregs were crowding around me, all smiles and bickering with each other in hushed whispers.
One looked like a normal teenage boy. He had light skin and blonde hair that was styled in a way that was clearly trying to draw attention away from the roundness of his head. His eyes were very blue and he was gesturing animatedly.
The second was the same boy, but different in a way that was hard to describe. He looked more defined, more real, more of a person. It was like the first one didn’t have a soul, while this one did.
The third was a grown man, in his twenties at least, and outstandingly handsome. He looked like the same boy had grown up well, and grown more real still, more solid in some way that a human couldn’t be. He made the first boy look like a pale wisp in comparison, and was speaking in the exact same way, down to word choice, as the others, though his voice was much deeper.
“She’s awake.”
“Shut up, don’t lean over her.”
“Eat my dick.”
And so on. I closed my eyes and swallowed nervously, feeling that all my tendrils were restrained just as had been promised. I could feel something over my head which I supposed was the control system, which would apparently read what few brainwaves I was capable of having and give me the ability to walk where I wanted. I would have been happy with this. This would have been more than I deserved.
“See, look, you’re scaring her. Step back.”
“No, you.”
“Hello,” I said, my voice quavering, even smaller than usual. Gosh, I was so glad that they were actually Greg and not something horrible.
“Sveta!” All three said at the same time, which must have happened a lot because they didn’t so much as blink in reaction. “Welcome back.”
I tentatively roved my eyes around the room, scared that if I tried to move too eagerly that the machine would break, I would get loose, and slaughter my saviours. From what I could see the room we were all in was huge, gigantic, even, and that the small sliver I could see was well lit and clean, everything made of concrete and steel beams.
“You too,” I said, and then instantly wished it were possible for me to commit suicide.
However, all Greg’s beamed at me as though they were happy for the simple fact that I were here, and continued on as though I hadn’t said that. They all started talking again at the same time and got into a minor argument over who was supposed to go first, which, according to each of them, as they were the original Greg, was meant to be them. They eventually decided on the most soulless looking one.
“I’m the one who you’re going to see, anyway. I get to live back on Bet with our parents-”
“He’s G-regular!”
“Shut up. Since I’m going back with you, talking to these shitcunts is pointless-”
The other two Greg’s heckled him with jeers.
“So I’ll give you the run down. You two can leave, by the way.”
I glanced over at them, fully expecting them to be angry at being treated with such disrespect. It was a horrible way to speak to someone and yet both of them accepted it with such a distinguished grace that it made this Greg seem extra soulless. They left, leaving me and the Greg alone.
“They seem nice,” I said pointedly.
“I love those guys,” the Greg looked over at their retreating backs and thumped his fist over his heart twice. “Take a bullet for those bitches.”
That just made it even more confusing. Weren’t you supposed to treat those you loved with respect and kindness? The world outside was strange indeed.
“Anyway, let me show you around! We’ve still got, like, a whole day before your body grows in. Do you want to see? C’mon.”
He walked off, obviously expecting me to follow him. Trembling, every restrained tendril tensioned as they fought their restraints with a tireless malice, I imagined taking a single step. I moved, the walking machine moved one of its three legs forward a step. I screamed, thrashing, crying, and the Greg was suddenly at my side telling me everything was going to be ok.
“No! I’m going to escape and kill you!” I wailed, thrashing my head back and forth the few inches I had. “I’m a monster!”
“You can’t break out of that thing. It’s impossible. I promise,” he reached over and patted me on the top of the head, on the edge of the coils of black tendrils which surged with new vigor and found no freedom for it. “I’m probably the best Tinker in the world.”
I hiccuped feebly. “Really?”
“Fo’ sho’. We’re both completely safe. Don’t worry about it, come on,” he stepped away and held out his hand like I was supposed to take it.
I sniffled dryly, having no mucous, and took my second, terrifying, step. Then a third, a fourth, and quickly, dozens. I stopped. I started. I turned. All. Under. My. Control. I wasn’t sure when I started laughing, or crying, and I barely noticed I was until my tears began to run black and burn trails down my chalk white face.
For the first time, I think I was happy to be alive. I had hope.
“This is Hero’s old place,” Greg was saying after I managed to calm down. “It’s in another dimension. Cool, huh?”
“Wow…” I looked freely around at the many interesting machines. For all I knew their only purpose was to beep and hum, or have lights blink at irregular intervals, but they all looked so pretty. “I can’t believe the Triumvirate trusted you with this.”
“Yeah, I guess they did. Oh, please promise me you won’t tell anyone about this. It’s all meant to be, like, super top secret. Even the fact that I have clones. Hah,” he sighed. “I’m the original body, but I gave up most of my powers to the second one, so I guess it would be truer to say that he’s the most powerful Tinker.”
“That’s so brave,” I turned eyes shining with tears onto him and he smiled wistfully.
“Thanks. I don’t regret it, but I miss it. We each had to give something up. I gave up power, but I got my life back. I got it all back. I get a regular life.”
“Oh!” I gasped. “I just got it! G. Regular. GREGular.”
“Yeah, that guy’s such a dick,” he laughed. “He named the third one Gregnant, the poor guy. But hey, we’re here.”
They had arrived at a set of three bed sized capsules, various pipes and wires were coming off them and leading away to mysterious destinations. All three had glass fronts, through which dark liquid was visible, and, if I squinted, floating shapes.
“Here’s you.”
The first capsule lit up, the fluid taking on a light greenish-blue hue and exposing the horror floating within. A corpse, something dead. A dead girl. I turned away, the husks of my digestive system rebelling in new and exciting ways.
“Is it that gross?” Greg mused, still staring at the decomposing body.
“It looks like it’s rotting,” I blinked a fresh set of tears away. “Did you kill someone to save me?”
“Bro,” he said, sounding tremendously disappointed in me. “It’s rotting in reverse, from a blood sample.”
“Sorry. I just… dead bodies. I-”
“I am very, very sorry, then. Here, let me text the others and tell them that when we transfer you in to not have the body visible. Ok, done,” he said despite having done nothing. I would have to trust that it was tinker things. “I turned the light off, too.”
Gingerly I looked over my mechanical shoulder. The light was, indeed, off. I was such a big baby. What right did I have to be scared of what I had done, of the pain I had caused? What right did I have to be here, receiving this kind of special treatment, this nepotism, over them or anyone else, simply because someone had a schizophrenic delusion in which I did?
Maybe I really did hate myself too much. Someone had to be first, why not me? The doctors told me not to discount that I had suffered, too, and that it wasn’t my fault what my body had done despite the crushing, suffocating, feeling that it was. That I deserved it. That I was made to be like this to pay for some crime of mine. “Do you think I deserve this?” I asked in a voice even smaller, even mousier, than usual.
“Hmm?” Greg shuffled behind me. “What? ‘Course you do. I’m a demigod, so I get to decide these things.”
“Oh. Um, what?”
“This is an anti self pity zone. I do enough of that, we can’t have you on that train, too. Do you want to drink the self confidence juice?”
I suppose he had to say things like that, we were apparently friends after all. “I’m worried,” I said after a while. “Aren’t you the worst person to get mind control powers? I haven’t forgotten.”
I stiffly turned my walker around to Greg’s confused expression that was slowly bleeding colour into the kind of fear someone might show if they had been caught committing a crime.
“I’m not sure what you’re referring to.”
“You posted a lot in the thread for Saimin Seish-”
“Dude, c’mon, that was literally over a year ago. I’ve changed.”
It was true enough. I didn’t ever imagine meeting him, even if I wasn’t a monster. There were some relationships that were best held at arms length through a screen, where it was funny to say all the stupid things you wanted to someone online, but in person that kind of thing just wasn’t as funny. I’d always pictured the Void Cowboy of old as that kind of friend. My stiff mask of a face stretched into a smile. “Sorry. I don’t mean to upset you. I was trying to tease you.”
“Luckily for me, I’m unteasable. I’ve made peace with my foibles, and any references to any comments I may have made in jest, jocular statements, even, about certain comics involving parahumans bearing similar qualities to the cape known as Heartbreaker don’t bring about even the slightest shred of shame.”
I appreciated that he was speaking to me as he normally would. The normalcy of it, even as we stood in the lab of one of the greatest heroes to have lived, in another dimension, growing a body to transplant my consciousness into.
It was all so strange, so disconnected from what I felt reality should be. I was supposed to live in a cramped cell and suffer, not speak playfully and walk freely.
“Anyway, I’m sorry I upset you. D’you wanna go play Scrabble?”
I did. I really did.
Then, finally, I was there. The moment. The big day. A surreal haze was still washed over the entire experience, time seeming to go faster than usual, the three days I had been here with the various Gregs going by as if it had been only a single one.
It had been the most fun I had ever had. I could walk more or less freely, the food was absurdly incredible, and I had even played XBox for the first time after the Greg with the powers made me a set of mechanical grippers. We played Halo and they all beat me mercilessly, and yet, even so, every headshot I took was fun beyond compare.
I was still in my unbreakable walking frame, lying on a cold metal table while the older, handsome, Greg attached some kind of headpiece to me, chatting all the while.
“It was interesting,” he was saying as he worked. “Your brain is super tiny, and made out of really weird stuff, so we had to basically rebuild the entire machine from the ground up just to accommodate it.”
“Are you calling me stupid?”
“We’re all retards here, Svets,” he said cheerily. “Even the most galaxybrained of us, but you’re about to get significantly less retarded. It’s going to feel weird, like you were thinking underwater all this time, because your new body was made with all the same powers as this one - and it just upgrades everything. Biggest plus though? You never have to take a shower.”
“I won’t have tendril wax anymore?” I said in wonder.
Greg looked at me with a troubled, uncomfortable expression. “What?”
Ah, time to kill myself. “Nevermind.”
Greg squinted, confused, then smiled. “You won’t even really have ear wax. You should still wipe your arse though, shit won’t stick to your skin but it’ll get on your clothes.”
Classy. “Thank you for the advice.”
Still, being able to wipe my arse would be a gift in and of itself, having previously had to let my waste drop wherever it fell, like an animal.
Greg clicked his tongue, winked, and shot me a finger gun. “Alright, we’re ready. You ready?”
I turned my head what little I could to see the surgical sheet separating me from my new body. I hadn’t seen it yet, fully grown, after the stomach churning event of seeing it half formed. “It doesn’t seem real,” I admitted. “This is a weird dream, and I’m going to wake up soon and cry.”
I had a lot of dreams like that, where I was a human person, and it was always upsetting to wake up from and detangle the dream from cold reality. Sometimes I was on a boat.
“Sorry it took so long,” he patted me gently on the hairline, and my tendrils strained against their bonds so that they may rend his flesh. “The last time… that is, in the ‘precognition event’, Amy helped me and it only took a couple of hours, so you didn’t have to sit around with nothing to do here for days.”
“Oh. Did she not want to help this time?”
“She doesn’t know,” he said in a tone of profound sadness. “Last time we were really good friends. This time we’re just friends. I couldn’t ask her, not this time.”
I didn’t really understand what he meant, but it sounded as though he had lost something very important. “I’m sure it was real,” I told him. “Whatever it was. It had meaning.”
“It’s been four months now. There was just so much,” he sighed. “I even came to see you in the asylum, last time. We were better friends then, too. I tried this time, but it was just all wrong. You can’t do it all again the same, it’s worse the second time, I feel like I’m forcing the weight of what I lost onto everyone around me. Like Amy, I love that dumb bitch so much but she barely knows me. We used to smoke on the hospital roof after work. And Weld, I feel like we were getting to be pretty tight, but, man, I haven’t even met the guy here. And you, well.”
I didn’t know how to even begin to respond. I thought about it for a moment. “I appreciate you.”
“Thanks, Svets. I’ll give you a big hug in a sec. Take a deep breath and-”
I gasped, jerking up, my entire body feeling like I had been punched directly in the organs, my lungs filling with a deep breath. A breath so deep that it was foreign. I coughed, spluttering, my body instinctively bringing my hands to my face and -
“Woah, buddy, drink this.”
A pair of gentle hands fed something into my mouth and I swallowed as best I could, liquid running down my throat that tingled and fizzed the whole way down. I coughed into my hands -hands!- spraying red liquid between my fingers -fingers!- and rolled, fell, my face colliding with the concrete floor directly on bone and tooth.
There was the sound of nervous laughter from three mouths, and they all spoke at once. “Hey, Svets, you alright?”
I lay on the ground, panting, my cheek pressed against the cool floor. Nothing hurt. I felt fine, I felt great. I tried to move, but I had never in my living memory sat up so the attempt was something closer to a beached dolphin. I heard someone move and a pair of hands gripped me gently under the arms and lifted me upright. I hung limply in the big Greg’s grasp and let out a shrill, unrestrained giggle directly into his face as tears poured down mine.
“It worked?” I managed after a while in a thick voice, the tears, no longer bitter black bile, still flowing freely.
All three Gregs crowded around me, pushing each other out of the way to get a better look.
“Perfectly,” said the soulless Greg. “Just like last time. Get the mirror.”
A mirror was produced from somewhere, a mirror of exquisite quality to match the face of the girl staring back at me.
I had been saved.
I was human.
Chapter 172: The Ship of Theseus 9.9
Chapter Text
Greg
The Chosen One
Sveta was hot. Sveta was so hot. Different to the first time, and hotter than even that. The blood Contessa had given me for her body was perfect, the final product looking as close to the one crafted for her by Amy as it was possible to get - the slim, girlish figure, the bright eyes, the delicate, vaguely eurasian features. It was almost painful to look at her, someone whose mere physical existence was so vibrant, so magical, so perfect, that it activated neurons I didn’t even know I had.
After a crash course in the physical rehabilitation room, the feng shui of which was honed for the purpose of learning, she was able to perambulate without tripping over her feet and we had to get her out of the dimension. We were going to get her back in for some follow up physical rehab, but we just didn’t have the time to spend on one person like this anymore, no matter how precious they were, when the fate of the world was at stake.
Gregnant was carrying her suitcase full of magical clothes, a new set of which she was wearing to greatly distracting effect despite it just being the same generic shirt, skirt and tights we had all bought for her in the previous timeline, while I set up G-regular’s new computer so that I could get to hacking government systems to give life to the newly created Svetlana Karelia, who was currently fretting as she paced around G-regular’s room in the apartment the PRT had set our parents up with.
“I can’t do this,” she wailed softly in her adorable accent, flapping her hands. “Can’t I just stay here? Or in the other dimension?”
“You can probably live here with me,” G-regular said soothingly. “I doubt my parents would mind. But didn’t you want a normal life?”
Sveta turned too fast, tripped and fell heavily, face first into the corner of our bookshelf. She bounced off and lay on the carpet, breathing heavily. “Ow?”
She was fine, of course. She could take a baseball bat to the skull and walk it off, a shelf corner wasn’t even going to bruise. No creation of mine, made golden bright, shining with a silver inner light, and the half dozen other enhancements I was capable of, was going to lose a fight to an end table.
“Lol,” I said. “Lmao, even.”
“Don’t be a dick,” said Gregnant, no doubt taking solidarity with the only other person in the world as attractively magical as himself.
“I treat everyone equally.”
“Just go make the tea or something,” said G-regular as he hauled Sveta to her feet.
“Betrayed,” I cast my hand to my forehead dramatically, getting out of the swivel chair. “By my very own clones.”
I crossed the room and opened the door, heading through. I hadn’t been here before so I probed around, seeing where everything was. It was a pretty nice three bedroom apartment, something in New York that we could only afford with government assistance, and it was spotlessly clean thanks to Pilot who was sitting motionlessly at the kitchen table.
“Hello, Greg.” She smiled as charming as ever, but wasn’t wearing her uniform for some reason. I assumed my parents had bought her the casual long sleeve t-shirt and jeans she was dressed in, complete with socks to hide her hideous unfinished skin.
“Where’s the tea?”
Pilot instantly got up and arranged everything for me and we stood quietly while the kettle boiled in sync with my jealously. I wanted to live here with my parents. I wanted to help Sveta adjust to her new life. I wanted to be in the Wards and see Savannah again and fly around and beat up poor people. It should have been me, but I wasn’t Greg Regular. That was just how it was. I could change the world, he had the world.
I looked over at Pilot and her programming bade her make polite eye contact with me. I loved that robot, it was always there for me. “Can I have a hug?”
Without a word Pilot wrapped her arm around me while the other stroked my hair. My vision started to blur with moisture, so I closed my eyes until I heard the kettle click and the low rumbling of the boiling water ceased. Just a little longer, as a treat.
I walked back into my room, Pilot in tow carrying two cups, and at the sight of her Sveta froze like a mouse before a cat.
“This is just his,” I motioned to G-regular with his cup of tea, handing it to him. “Sex robot. It’s not a real person.”
“Hey, it’s your sex robot, too,” he shot back. “Pilot, designate target ‘Sveta’ as high profile user.”
“Acknowledged,” Pilot said, turning her red eyes onto the still frozen Sveta and offering her one of the cups. “Hello, Sveta. It’s so nice to finally meet you.”
Tea spilled over the rim as Sveta’s hands shook, sliding off her skin and clothes like magic. “Hi,” she said in the tiniest, mousiest voice possible, making not a single shred of eye contact.
“It’s not a sex robot, by the way,” said Gregnant. “I can see that you’re too worked up to tell that was a joke. Pilot, show her.”
Pilot obliged and exposed the ugly grey skin that wrinkled her breast, opened her back panel at the seam to show the delicate mechanical workings within that held no room for intrusory meat, all to Sveta’s seeming revulsion.
“But,” she said after a while of staring. “Why did you make the hot robot if you weren’t going to, you know?”
“It’s complicated,” said Gregnant. “Don’t blame us, he made it.”
“I’m you,” I said, sitting back down at the computer and getting back to work. After I fixed as much as I could on the back end I was going to have to get back to the lab and fabricate her a birth certificate. An American citizen, Sveta was going to be. At least just enough for the Protectorate to shrug and move on. They would take just about anyone, even Assault had been a serious felon and just look at him now? Rehabilitated into a law abiding dude by the power of an enemies to lovers situationship with Battery that I was sure had no moral grey area around it whatsoever.
“Does that ever get annoying, there being three of you?”
We all looked at her and spoke. “It’s hilarious.”
“Is it like having a brother?”
“Do you want one?” I asked. “A second Sveta sister?”
Sveta looked down at her tiny stockinged feet. “No. I don’t know how anyone puts up with even one of me.”
“But Sveta,” we all said. “You’re great!”
She shook her head. “I’m sad all the time, and I can’t do anything. I’m just a burden. I bet you could have done something important, or saved someone who deserved it, instead of helping me. All the people in the asylum were sick of me.”
We communicated via our brain implants. Depression, it seemed. It might even cure itself, given how magical and amazing her body was now, with zero innuendo meant, but I couldn’t be sure. I didn’t have any data points on that. It wasn’t like I couldn’t provide fixes in other ways. The most obvious method was a tonic that made you feel hopeful, or given my knowledge of medicine something more modern, but you had to keep taking it which meant I had to keep making it. I could design a room wherein you would have that soothed, and hope buoyed, but you had to be in the room. I had been cooking something in the back of my mind, something for Amy, a pair of glasses where the lenses were painted in such a subtle way that you probably wouldn’t realise that you were looking at the world through a filter unless I told you, you would just subconsciously connect wearing the glasses to feeling better.
Options to explore. I didn’t want my homies to suffer, and all the soon to be former Case Fifty Threes were sure to suffer. Just getting a nice new body didn’t fix everything, I had to consider where people wanted to go, if they wanted to go to their home dimensions or not or a bunch of other stuff that came with relocating someone who had no memory outside of rotting in a Cauldron holding cell for thirty years. I might need Conessa for this one, and she owed them that much at least.
We had been silent for exactly point one seconds too long, it seemed, because Sveta’s gorgeous face twisted and she started crying again. “See? Even you don’t know what to say. You’re going to get fed up with me, and give up, I would if I were you.”
“The, uh, PRT will give you a therapist.”
“I’ve had therapists,” Sveta shifted and sat down on the edge of my bed, drawing her knees up and grinding her face into them. Her tears flowed off the fabric without soaking it. “Nothing works.”
One of the other two must have signaled Pilot to undergo her soothing subroutine, because she sat down next to Sveta and cradled her, rubbing her back, applying simulated human body heat. Good move. “We have options,” we said, and I continued. “If you want to give me five minutes.”
“What can you even do,” she sniffled, eyeing me, probably having meant the watery look she was giving me to come off as scathing rather than desperate.
“I’ll be right back.”
I strode out the door again and took a quick right into the bathroom, called for a door and stepped through to Hero’s lab. My construction suit leapt to me, fitting itself around my body even as I took my first steps inside. I was kind of surprised, she hadn’t reacted like this last time, but it had all happened so fast, and the Slaughterhouse was still around at that point, so she may have not had the space to realise that her new body didn’t automatically fix her mental illnesses. Here she clearly had, and was freaking out that she still felt awful.
The robotic skeletons of the other Pilot’s leapt to my command, arranging materials as and where I needed them. I didn’t need much for this, a bit of aluminum and glass, with a little bit of selenium and cadmium sulfide. The frame was easy, the metal melting in my hands and coming into shape at blinding speed, the delicate hinges forming under the precision machining tools in my gauntlets. The glass was a bit more, me needing to colour and layer it precisely to achieve the artistic effect I wanted, different concentrations of the selenium and cadmium giving lighter or deeper pink tones, and it all had to match up when I stretched it out.
I cut the pane of glass to shape and clipped them into the frame before stepping out of my suit and holding them to my face. You could barely tell it had colour, and I could already feel a low sense of enduring hope. Good enough. It might be worth it to roll out something like this as standard for my next bodies, a cornea implant or something.
I took a door back to the bathroom and quickly shuffled back to the room where Sveta was still crying, and both of me were kind of standing around awkwardly not knowing how to handle it.
“Here you go,” I quickly thrust them at her. “Custom made, magic glasses.”
Sveta took them and peered through her veil of tears. She had to like them. They were very stylish. She mumbled something that was probably a thank you and put them on after rubbing her eyes on her shoulders. She missed the first time and poked herself in the eye with barely a flinch, recovered, and managed to get them on properly.
I’d done a good job - If anything they fit her face so well that she might have looked even cuter, it was a sidegrade at absolute worst. Now we just had to wait to see if I’d done a good job on what they were meant to do, too.
“Are they working?” She asked plaintively, leaning against Pilot who was wiping Sveta’s tear-slick hair out of her eyes with gloved hands.
“Yep. Just give it a few hours. Hey, why not drink your tea? I put extra sugar in for you.”
I sat down again and took a sip of my own. The interaction between the power that made all my other powers affect each other, and the power that made clothes as strong as chainmail, had a weird effect on liquid consumables that I had yet to understand. I could feel that the power worked, but not truly how it worked. I reckoned it was something to do with ‘removing metaphoricality’ or something. I didn’t even think that was a real word.
Shit, this tea was so good. I really was going to fry myself one day doing this, there had to be a limit to how incredible a drink the human body could take. No one was designed to consume any amount of magic, and I could layer it on far beyond any single power. I was going to give someone a careless cookie one day and completely burn their dopamine system out with choc-chips beyond human comprehension.
“I think I feel a little better,” Sveta said, and I accessed Pilot’s emotional intelligence data to check. Sveta was lying, but, oh well. I lied about that all the time.
“It gets easier,” Gregnant told her. “We promise. Those glasses will help, it’s a subtle effect but over time it’ll help, and then one day you probably won’t even care about putting them on.”
“Ok,” Sveta sipped her tea sadly. “I believe you.”
She’d be ok, in the end. She was strong enough, and she had G-regular - I trusted that guy with my life. I checked the data again, and this time she was telling the truth.
Chapter 173: The Ship of Theseus 9.10
Chapter Text
Greg
The Chosen One
Another book in the cycle closed on my life, the bitterness of seeing Sveta off into the hands of my regular counterpart sweetened only by the knowledge that she would be happier there. I had to trust the process.
Gregnant and I stood around, arms folded, in the cloning bay. The motionless corpse of Sveta’s old body lay on a table like so many strands of a giant’s squid ink spaghetti dish. I released one arm from its fold and gestured vaguely at it. “What the fuck do we do with this?”
“Study? Cut it up, see how it works?”
“It’s magic entity bullshit,” I walked over and lifted a tendril gingerly. It was rough under my fingers, waxy, and entirely unforgiving with none of the spring even recently dead flesh would have. I lifted my fingers to my nose and sniffed, getting a strong whiff of sweaty fish which explained Sveta’s comments about tendril wax. “All the data we got on them would suggest that everything in this body was only working because it was outsourcing processes to another dimension.”
“Might learn something,” he shrugged. “It’s all grist for the mill.”
“Pencil it in for me. I’ll get to it sometime after I start on the other entities body.”
“What if it starts rotting?”
“Freezer?”
“I’ll build it after we switch me.” We both looked at my new body, indistinguishable from Gregnant’s, lying on another table. “Is it fun? It must be fun.”
“Find out and see.”
During the quiet period of having Sveta over I’d made a third generation suit sized for that body, and had time to integrate a better version of the neural implant that worked more elements of the ‘Gundam’ path to victory knockoff, hereby being referred to as the PATHs system, so that I could outsource more and more of my cognition to magical computers until I reached a point where I could confound the Simurgh’s precognition.
More of my body, replaced. More and more, with this still being the low hanging fruit. I really think I was going to have to become like the entities in the end. A human couldn’t fight them. A human couldn’t operate at the level they did. I needed to be multidimensional, like them, running all my processes on a system the size of a city and have it tunnelled through to an avatar body I used to interact with the world. You couldn’t handle this level of problem on the meat substrate of a human brain, the only reason any of us were here to even wonder about the issue was because Contessa had lucked into receiving one of these multidimensional brains telling her how to win.
One of the other benefits of installing the PATHs was that it could control the emission of neurotransmitters, and I could program a subroutine to kick myself out of unhelpful ruminations about the nature of how enormously fucked we were.
Why, I could even become an unfeeling robot. Not that there was anything wrong with that, some of my best friends were robots.
“Right,” I said. “Let’s get it done.”
Fourth. Fourteenth. Twenty First. Twenty Second. Twenty Sixth. Thirty First.
These were the powers that I felt proc as my body grew. How do you explain it, what it feels like to live in it? Gregnant had extolled its virtues, but I felt as if he had been vastly underselling things.
It was a huge leap, even for me in my enchanted previous body, so what had Sveta felt like going from barely being able to breathe through lungs sized for an asthmatic baby to as close to physical perfection as it was possible for me to get?
I took a moment to simply exist, and it was good. I stretched, and flexed, and it was good. I checked my junk, and it was huge.
“Don’t do that in front of me,” said Gregnant scornfully, my equal in both height and penis size.
“Man, I wasn’t doing shit. Shut up. We have work to do.” My brain tingled pleasantly as I accessed my new neural implants, my HUD activating across my vision in familiar blue boxes. It was almost like being back. With a thought my construction suit leapt through the air, encasing me in a single silken motion, the tau particle cells burning, the antigrav twinkling scarlet.
My old body was placed in a special coma chamber to be kept for future use, and, finally, it was time to work.
I took a door to the Cauldron base, coming out just in front of the doctors’ office right on time for our meeting. I knocked on the tastelessly bland white door politely as Gregnant brought up the rear, clad in his own matching suit. I didn’t have the time to make it as good as mine, so it was missing the extra arms and some of the other more esoteric crafting capabilities, but it would fly him around just the same.
Doctor responded to the knock promptly, dressed, as always, in her business casual. “Greg,” she nodded to me, then turned to Gregnant and nodded to him. “Greg. I see that your transfer went smoothly.”
“Like a dream,” I said glibly. “You’re going to be mad jealous of your clone later.”
“I hope so,” she replied blandly. “And your side project for the subject ‘Sveta’? You successfully cured her?”
“Yes.”
“Wonderful. Hopefully it turns out that we never needed the deviants as a smokescreen, but we’re all going to be quite annoyed if curing them all brings the entities attention to us.”
“But, of course, we can never know,” chipped in Gregnant.
Doctor shrugged. “Insofar as we ‘know’ anything about the entity, that is certainly not one of them. This topic won’t get us any closer to the truth, however, so if you’re ready to begin I’m ready to leave.”
I really did want to like her, to be friends and coworkers both, but I got the feeling we were like chalk and cheese for all that she was probably a cool person once. “Yes, we’re ready. Hey, Doormaker? Can you make us a door to the entity please?”
Ever reliable, he did so for us instantly. After this I was definitely going to go and say hello properly. “Thank you.”
I led the way, drifting through onto that same metal catwalk overlooking the garden of grey flesh. It looked exactly as it had the first time, and was no less awe inspiring because of it. Every part I focused on I expected to see start moving, to see the mid-motion in which it was caught complete, but it remained as static as it had been for the past thirty years. The sensory array built into my suit kicked into a higher gear, waves and particles unknown to man being picked up, sorted, categorised, and yet almost none were from the entity.
To every machine I had built to see it, the rolling garden hills of flesh remained as inscrutable to me as the first time I lay eyes upon it. For all I could tell it might as well have been made of the bare rock it lay upon. Even from the portals interspersed around it there was precious little feedback, which may mean I was scanning with the wrong machines, or with too low power, or it may have even been something the entity was doing as a background process. Like a sleeping computer still able to tell when you moved the mouse, the hibernating entity cloaked itself.
I would have to move on to destructive materials testing and the refinement of my approach, but for now we had a mining operation to begin. Gregnant and Doctor followed through after me, each taking a moment to look out over the entity.
“I’ll need a moment to suit up,” Doctor said, striding over to the lift. “There’s no oxygen in the dimension we’re headed to.”
“Righto, I’ll have a look around,” Gregnant and I said. Doctor frowned slightly at the both of us, but didn’t elaborate. I glanced over at Gregnant at the same time as he glanced over at me. What did she expect? We were the same guy.
“Come on,” I said over our internal comms link, lifting off gently and drifting over the railing, fighting off the disconcerting feeling that, as I looked down onto the entity, I would fall into it, through a gap in the endless fractals the tangles of body parts made and never find my way out. “Follow me, I want to see how far this thing goes.”
Gregnant lifted off and flew alongside me as we started a gentle sweep over the cave. Flesh passed by underneath, flesh and flesh and flesh as we flew, for minutes at an appreciable speed and still finding no end to it. It was meat all the way down, each combination of body parts sprouting from the mass never repeating in the same way twice for all the kilometers we covered, the end of it never getting closer as far as our rangefinders could tell.
“Is this even real?” Gregnant said. “Are we actually going forwards or are we stuck in a spacial distortion?”
I checked behind us. I couldn’t see the catwalk we had come in on, even as a speck in the distance, but that might mean nothing at all. I pulled up the map that had been collating from the data being gathered by our scanners and as far as I could tell we had flown for fifteen kilometers. “I’m not sure. We should head back, along the same path. She’s probably waiting for us.”
“Sure.”
We pulled to a gentle stop and turned in wide arcs. The cave wasn’t terribly tall but it was, as far as I could tell, as wide as it was long. It was entity as far as the eye could see. We retraced our flight path and neither of us could tell if we were or weren’t flying normally, but we got back to the catwalk as easily as we had left, Doctor standing, ready in her full face oxygen mask, and tapping her foot impatiently.
“Thank you,” she said primly, like a school teacher. “Door to site Zed one zero three seven.”
She stepped through the portal and, after shrugging sheepishly at each other, we followed. I could see a cliff of some kind through the door and when I went through I could see the mining infrastructure Doctor had mentioned, which must have made this the storage site. I looked around for the entity, but could see no rolling hills of grey meat, just bare rock and the cliff.
Doctor had reached a shed and was bodily sliding the door open, but she was not a big woman. I quickly flew over to give her a hand, my suit’s strength easily sliding the door open, crusted though it was with a buildup of disuse, revealing a stock of electrically powered equipment, excavators and the like. “So where’s the entity we’re mining?”
“Wherever you care to start, but we’ve found we get better results within the mine shaft,” she gestured vaguely outside. “Will you be needing any of this?”
“Probably not. Let me go check first. Where’s the mine shaft? Is the entity somewhere inside the mountain thing?”
“In a way, in a way,” she replied unhelpfully.
I left her and went back outside. Gregnant, hundreds of meters up in the air, called me through the comms. “Bro. Come look.”
I turned around, scanning the landscape. It was bare, it was flat and it was dead. I turned back to the cliff and looked up to where Gregnant floated, a speck against the green sky. Oh. Oh. I gunned my thrusters and blasted up to float next to him.
I realised that we were merely at the foot of the mountain.
The shard of the entity sprawled out before us, rising, twisting in peaks and valleys, going ever up until it vanished into the lower cloud cover. Something else was very wrong here, the readings I was getting from my suit were all wrong. Energy was moving in from everywhere, but going nowhere. I turned in the air and looked out away from the entity at a dead world, stripped bare, with the undead corpse of the living mountain behind me parasitically feasting on the dregs.
“Fuck,” said Gregnant.
“Fuck,” I concluded.
“Why does it get worse every time?”
“I don’t even want to think about it,” I said, already dropping back to ground level. “Let’s just get this thing done.”
Gregnant murmured in agreement and followed me down to where Doctor stood.
“This is one of the larger ones,” she said conversationally, apparently anticipating a question I didn’t feel like asking at the moment. “That we’ve seen. By Alexandria’s best record it is something to the tune of eight thousand kilometers across, and roughly the same to its peak - though we don’t know how far down beneath the ground level it reaches. It could easily be the same. Weight is inconsistent, but it could be anything from five hundred trillion to several quadrillion kilograms - we assume.”
“Wow, that’s crazy,” I replied blandly.
“Mmhmm,” she nodded. “With hundreds of sites we haven’t been able to map even a fraction properly, and not all are this… out in the open, I suppose, so we’re going off what Alexandria and The Numberman have calculated for a lot of this.”
“Yep. Where do we dig?”
Doctor pointed. I followed the direction to a cave in the cliff, roughly hewn out of the face, the inside of which quickly descended into pitch blackness, the walls appearing almost slick, oily. I reached out and was greeted with a sensation that shifted from smooth, unforgivingly solid crystal to giving flesh.
“The best veins are at the bottom.”
I looked into the inky depths, into the shaft cut into the side of the beast, into the exposed un-meat of its innards that drank in everything it could filter with a ravenous futility, deep into the horror from the stars far beyond human comprehension hoping, with perhaps a matching futility, that it wasn’t possible to dig too greedily or too deep.
After all, the best veins were at the bottom.
Chapter 174: The Ship of Theseus 9.11
Chapter Text
Greg
The Chosen One
It was fighting through the feelings of intense claustrophobia, of the fear that the corpse of the alien god we were in would simply just close up and devour us, or that by striking the wrong place would unleash a flood of energy, or some defensive measure, a horrible monster like the Endbringers, that in this pitch blackness, with every step forward unsure, we could not fight.
Doctor walked in front of me blithely, her flashlight barely cutting a meter ahead, with the confidence of someone who had done this a hundred times. I walked too, under each step turning from unyielding to giving as whatever sleeping intelligence guiding this thing understood us. Understood our purpose, saw the alignment, that it could be used as it should, and willingly gave up its pound of flesh.
“We’re not sure why,” she was explaining to me as we walked. “But most of this doesn’t work well for making vials. Too many deaths and deviations. Can you see the darker parts? See how it looks more crystalline here and here? These are the ‘veins’ we’ve had the most success with. Don’t ask what they’re made of.”
I got the sense she was trying to make a joke. Not that I could tell what it was made of, either. Everything I had built to measure the entity only confirmed that I knew nothing about the material sciences, biology, or anything else. If we were playing twenty questions I would get only as far as ‘Is it a biological? A mineral? A gas?’ before throwing my hands up in defeat. I glanced back, the cave mouth long hidden to shadow - we were alone, Doctor and I, Gregnant had to stay behind or else suffer a seizure or something due to shard infetterence.
This was the dead entity, too, who knew what defences the one who pretended to be Scion had. I could only imagine that, in the event that we somehow managed to crack our way into the assuredly locked dimensions it hid in, it had an almost infinite amount of ways to defend itself. My PATHs system kicked in and jolted me out of the doomspiral.
“Alien cum,” I said intelligently.
“Maybe,” she replied irritably.
“Sorry. That was my brain implant, I think it needs tuning.”
“As I was saying,” Doctor continued, the light of her torch bobbing with every step. “Not every part of an entity is suited for making vials, but not every site has these crystalline veins, and some seem to work well enough without them, and even when they do there’s a great deal of variance in efficacy. It seems to be an art as much as a science.”
“I read the notes. I should be able to make some headway into this, as far as I can tell the last power I got is made for researching uses for exotic materials, and whatever this thing,” I gestured to the oil-slick walls of the alien god corpse we were walking through. “Is made out of is so far removed from anything I know that it will surely count.”
“Even if not, being able to flood the market with parahumans we know will be on our side is going to make a huge difference to stability. How many will you be able to produce?”
“As many as I have machines.”
“Depending on how this goes we may be able to take more drastic measures. There may be elements of society we no longer need, parahuman groups we could simply replace wholesale, losses to Endbringers that can be filled instantly,” Doctor turned her torch onto me, still walking forward. “I’ve been speaking with Alexandria about the next one, Leviathan, which should take place sometime around May, and if the attack site is recoverable we may be able to replace all the villain fatalities with a combination of manufactured corporate teams and Protectorate members. We already have a number of corporations set up for propping up hero teams, it would be quite easy to set up another under their umbrella.”
“Neato. I was thinking of making a hero persona to do Whitelist jobs as a hobby. We could hire me to do stuff what need be done.”
“There’s always an agenda we need served,” Doctor nodded, turning her torch back to the inky blackness it failed to penetrate. “And you would be, at this point, the most powerful Tinker in the world.”
We walked on in silence for minutes more, the excavated entity occasionally showing evidence of branching shafts that were only perceptible if we passed right next to them. None of my sensory suite worked here, I may as well have been in a void. I couldn’t even message Gregnant.
“Here,” Doctor motioned, after a while longer of walking, to a section of wall. I had no real idea how far we had gone, the amount of steps I had taken did not feel commensurate with the distance implied. Her torch lit up a section, heavily scarred and pitted with the evidence of tools, a thick crystal vein that drank in the light and reflected none.
I took a step forward to reach out and touch it, the ground beneath my feet sagging like a firm mattress under my weight. The crystalline structure was solid for a moment before it too yielded like the grey flesh of the garden under my fingers, the inside of my gauntlet warming my fingertips to mimic what an ungloved hand would feel. I’d read the files, we needed ‘a wheelbarrow load’ of the stuff. Too much less and the vials tended to give weak or unfocused abilities, if it didn’t just kill you. Too much and there were more deviations, if it didn’t just kill you.
One of my mechanical arms unfolded from my back, assuming a mechanical saw configuration, and as I lay it against the entity the flesh parted as easily as anything else, eagerly even, the entity shard changing what little of its structure that it could to accommodate its use. Where I would have expected dust, or maybe strips of fleshlike substance, where I cut there was something that looked like a vapour. It drifted up and pooled against the low ceiling for a brief moment before either vanishing or being reabsorbed. I cut and cut and cut until I had pulled a chunk, big enough to take up both arms, out of the wall. I stood there for a moment with the crystal and rock-like flesh in my arms and was hit with a sudden memory of this feeling.
That first homunculus, with Amy. The raw meat she made it out of had this heft, this squish, this jiggle.
God, I missed being ground and pounded by ogres with her.
I stared into the hole I had dug as darkness filled it, but no beam of all-or-nothing energy blasted out to clean out the inside of my skull, no miniature Endbringer leapt from the darkness, all that happened was that I stood there holding a faintly quivering armful of soft rock.
“That was remarkably easy. I remember the first time we did this,” Doctor said. “Contessa and I. We were there for hours digging. Well, I dug while she slept off the backlash she got from touching this thing. We’re quite lucky it didn’t just kill her.”
“Can it kill you?”
“No, we checked. It’s something similar to the momentary loss of consciousness you see when someone triggers near another parahuman. Something to do with shard-to-shard communication, we expect, them talking to each other behind the scenes and the leak of information overloading their host. You can see it, if you’re there, sometimes they will mutter things that describe the entities before quickly forgetting what they said.”
“Mmm.” I remembered.
“Let’s be off. I have to say, I’m quite excited to see how this pans out.”
I was, too. After the roaring success of Gregnant I was sure I had this in the bag. We headed back up the wending mine leaving the impenetrable, oily darkness behind us and eventually making our way back out into real light. My comms system came back online as soon as we stepped out and Gregnant sent me a picture of what he was looking at.
The planet, from space. A dead world, with the mountainous mass of the shard standing out like a cancerous, grey scar. There were no hot spots, no cold spots, no signs of life anywhere as it slowly ate away at everything that made survival possible to sustain its hibernation. How many worlds had already been killed off?
“Come on, buddy,” I said to him. “Let’s go back.”
The new Doctor came choking to life, jerking as though being spooked from a deep sleep, chest heaving as she gasped her new lungs first breaths and I, with a practiced hand, tipped a healing potion down her throat just to get everything settled.
“Goodness,” she said, looking ten years younger, this body having never had to fight against the stresses her previous one had been put under. She was made as I was made, with every boon I could cram in.
“I can hear that it worked,” came Doctor’s voice from the other side of the curtain, still up from Sveta’s procedure. “How do you feel?”
“As well as advertised,” the new Doctor sat up and began patting herself down. I’d dressed her in the sort of easy to make, loose cotton clothing you might find on a person obsessed with the yacht owner aesthetic, these clothes too were perfectly magical. “This is truly incredible. Come and have a look.”
The old Doctor came through the curtain and assessed her doppelganger with a critical eye. “I look very fine indeed. Perhaps even too fine. If we flood the Bet market with supermodels it may be too noticeable.”
“Hmmm, I can just not use the aesthetic powers, but it’s the magic making them strong that makes them look so good, though you can really only see the shadow of the shining silver and gold you’re made from.”
The old Doctor pursed her lips. “It may have to be done, extra powers aside, or done sparingly. You’re perhaps the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, you… How should I refer to you?”
“By our name, perhaps?” New Doctor said in a sardonic way that really brought out her French accent.
They made contemplative eye contact for a moment. “It has been a long time, hasn’t it, Mariam?”
“It’s been thirty years. Strange to hear, after all this time, isn’t it.”
They both gave the same sigh at the same time in the same way. I thought it was just great, she could have a friend now, and what better friend than yourself?
“It could be time to take it back, even after everything we’ve done.”
“Let’s discuss this later. We should complete the test,” New Doctor smoothed her flowing white shirt. “Door, the laboratory.”
The preparation of the vial went much like last time, save for the use of the balance formula. I crushed the massive armful of entity I had mined in the machine and funnelled the resulting liquid into a vial, feeling all my powers activate as I created it, just like last time.
I had save a bit of the entities flesh to study, but would take that back to my lab.
Then, we prepared the room for the vial taking. Even before I gave her the calming draught New Doctor hadn’t betrayed any hint that she wasn’t calm, and she settled in the chair clients used, the vial in one hand.
It was dark and metallic, like the other, and I could feel the power coming from it, the magic enhancing something already there. Old Doctor stood a good few paces back and watched as she threw back the vial without a moment's hesitation.
It wasn’t long before she groaned in pain, but bore it stoically. All my scanners were running full bore, marking every physical change, every particle of energy I could measure. New Doctor screamed suddenly, and there was a moment where I could see her flesh begin to peel before she exploded in a cloud of bloody mist and chunks.
Gregnant and I stood frozen. Doctor, the only Doctor, wiped her own blood from her face with both hands, shaking them as though she were flicking water away.
“More’s the pity,” she said evenly. “We haven’t had a violent reaction like that in a while. I’m sure that once you’ve had time to refine our method we’ll have more consistent success, and if not, well, I suppose it will be back to formula.”
Chapter 175: The Ship of Theseus 9.12
Chapter Text
Greg
The Chosen One
Violent and bloody eruptions taking place in the subjects apparently weren’t terribly uncommon, but less common than the subject simply just dying, or a mutation making it impossible to live as various necessary body parts transmuted or became filled with teeth.
The blood had run clean off my armour in a matter of moments, leaving me as pristine as before while Doctor had to leave to take a shower. I wasn’t required to clean anything, that was the domain of Custodian. I could feel her presence in the room before I left, could see how she effortlessly and precisely scraped the viscera from every surface, no nook or cranny left unclean, and gathered it into a rough orb in the air to be taken away for disposal.
“Come on,” Gregnant tapped me on the shoulder and he, too, turned away from the scene that was as morbid in its clinical roteness as it was in blood and bone. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Yeah,” I said, recalling a longstanding thing I had been meaning to do. “Hey, Doormaker, can you make me a door to where you are?”
The door opened without pause as it always did and through the dimensional rift I could see something strongly resembling a hospital room. We floated through and saw the two beds, a man in each. Neither were too old, maybe twenties and thirties respectively, both pale from what was probably a rickets inducing level of sun deprivation. Where one had blank, unfocused eyes that blinked occasionally, the other had nothing but skin, smooth like old scar tissue, and their hands were bound together, each one resting on a soft little table between the beds.
“Hello,” Gregnant and I said. “I’m Greg. I work here now, you probably already know that. I just wanted to say hi, introduce myself, see if there’s anything I can make you? Comfier beds? Robot butler?”
Neither spoke, neither even so much as twitched.
“Yeah. I can do something about that, too, I reckon.” I wasn’t sure if they even were, or even could, really pay attention to me. I understood that Clairvoyant, the younger one, could see everything there was to see, and Doormaker could tap into that to bring about the system of doors that was the only thing keeping Cauldron treading water. Without the power to step between worlds, or even between Bet and Bet, a huge number of problems would remain untouchable and their festering would have continued along the lines of the entities original plan.
Everything was an uphill battle against the echoes of the cycle.
“Well, I’ll be back with some stuff you’ll probably like. I just thought I should come and say hi, let me know if there really is anything special you want, just, uh, door me if there is, and can you make one back to Hero’s lab? Thanks.”
The door opened as requested and we left. “What do you think we should do about that?”
“Dunno, man,” said Gregnant. “Just what we can. Make life better, give them the magic, no-stain underwear, coupla healing pills if they want. Brainwave to speech device?”
“Yeah, I was thinking the same. Well, I’d better get started on another set of clones, and more cloning machines - we should get at least one new hero into the world. That shit was fucked, hey, she just,” I mimed the spatter with my six hands.
“And then she just,” Gregnant mimed wiping his face in an exaggeratedly preppy manner. “Cooler than being cool.”
“Chyeah.”
“Hey,” he continued, voice heavy. “I was thinkin’.”
“Are you sure?”
“Shit myself and passed out, so, yeah, pretty sure.”
I nodded. “What about?”
“It’s time. To use my powers, I mean.”
Oh. “Oh! Damn. Dude, f’real? You’re gonna take the mpreg pill?”
Gregnant psychically attacked me over our linked neural implants. “What else can I do? There’s only one person that makes sense, too.”
He paused for dramatic effect and my mind sprang to the funniest option I could think of, being Taylor Hebert. I couldn’t imagine a more self hating, bitter hybrid.
“It’s gotta be Amy.”
I snorted, then thought about it for a second. It was a painful choice to make, but I understood it perfectly. “This couldn’t end any other way.”
“Mechanically, too, it just makes sense with how useful her power is-”
“You don’t have to justify it,” I put my hand on his shoulder. “Not to me. Not to me.”
“Thanks, Greg.”
“No worries, Gregnant.”
He attacked me psychically again, and as he was doing so a door opened, one just large enough for a human head, and through it I caught a brief glimpse of a suit sleeve as Contessa tossed a specimen container through. The door closed and the container clattered on the concrete. Gregnant picked it up and inside was a brush tangled with thick, dry, curly brown hair. We looked at each other, our faceless arrays of sensory equipment somehow indicating the same surprise and misgiving.
“Contessa is actual scary,” he said, inspecting the hairbrush.
“Free will is overrated. What you really need is a sharply dressed mom figure to micromanage your life and occasionally emasculate you.”
“Hey,” Gregnant chided. “She’s more like a cool older sister.”
“But for real, though, I wonder how many people just somehow manage to stumble over some critical piece of whatever they need to make the world a better place, and how many more that is now that she keeps taking our potions.”
“Not enough, probably,” Gregnant chucked me the container holding the brush. “Not that I don’t trust her, but if I’m eating this I’d really like to know it’s the right hair.”
We had a complete scan of Amy’s DNA sitting in the hard drive, copied over from Pilot’s backup of some of my omnitool data, so I should be able to sequence match this with favourable accuracy. “I’ll also make something to hopefully measure what happens when you do. If we can get anything on the activation mechanism it might help make vials that don’t instagib you.”
“We can’t have nightmares about that if we don’t sleep, ‘cause man did I fucking get lucky. Thank god for the Balance formula.”
“Real.”
“Alright, you get started on the builds and I’ll mentally prep myself.”
“I appreciate you,” I told him. It was a big change, huge, astronomical, because not only was he going to be the first biological male to get pregnant he was going to be a parent. Extraordinary things were happening in this lab. “But does this make us gay dads?”
“I think it’s more like an extended family helping raise a child. But, we could be gay dads, if you wanted,” he poked his pointer fingers together, twisting the toe of one armoured foot on the ground. “UWU.”
“Maybe we should just be roommates.”
The hair had indeed been Amy’s, as far as I could tell, and over the next few days I split my time between the current, critical, builds of clone vats and what was going to have to be, after multiple scrapped plans, a special room to measure power and vial activation. I was a rank amateur at dimensional mechanics but observing powers and replicating their effects in some way was what Tinker powers were designed to do.
Then, of course, Contessa upended everything by following through on her promise to get me access to some of Haywire’s tech.
We stepped out of the door and into a car, the door was made in its interior and even though it was quite a large limousine, I was quite a large boy at this point so the squeeze was somewhat awkward. I was dressed in a suit to match hers, sharply cut with a matching thin, black tie over a pristine white shirt. With black sunglasses to cap it all off my fit was as Freddy Federal as I could get it.
Contessa knocked on the blocked off divider and the car began to drive.
“This is exciting,” I said, using the heavily tinted windows as a mirror to practice my menacing adjustment of my sunglasses, just in case I had to mog some fools who thought they could crash out with us. “Some real secret agent conspiracy type shit.”
Contessa lounged in response, cocking one knee over the other and letting one arm rest across her lap while the other propped up on the windowsill, her fingers twitching against her palms. To an outside observer she may look like she was fidgeting like an ipad baby confronted with their own thoughts for the first time, but through my divine right over machines, especially ones I had made, I could sense she was sending endless texts, emails, messageboard posts and DMs. “It’s baller as hell.”
“I need a neuralyzer,” I mimed holding up the device. Could I make one? Kinda, maybe. I had some tech for messing with memory states from the cloning power. Hmmm. “Pchew, all you saw was some swamp gas.”
“Would you like the list of people you’d need to work with to make one?”
Contessa was smiling, easy and pleasant. “Why not? If you think I can be trusted… oh. This just reminded me of something. Which Case Fifty Three sitting in Cauldron’s basement is going to be the easiest for you to rehabilitate?”
Her easy smile never wavered, if anything she looked even more gratified. It was part of the pleasure of hanging with Contessa, she always knew exactly what you were talking about and why, and that it was so much easier for both of us if she made it easier for me to fix their mistakes, mistakes she, I could only assume, wanted fixed.
“Everything’s set up to go on that front, too. The subject formerly known as,” Contessa let out an indecipherable clicky cough. “Has the lowest amount of trauma, and will accept to be put back into a body from his world and placed there. I can choose a location where he will receive the help he needs.”
We both understood that this was not perfect, but it had to be good enough for now.
“Thanks for following through on your promise with this.”
“You’re doing our conscience a favour with it,” she paused from her rapid texting to tip her hat. “The only thing I want to ask is that we keep the empty shells of their deviated bodies, just in case it truly is obfuscating us to the entity's eye.”
“Grim.” My PATHs implant shuffled a few neurotransmitters, preempting my angst about the scale of our problem.
Contessa merely shrugged and existence gave way to the endless void, the tear in reality and the hand.
“You fuck,” I hissed at it, cursing every single one of the two hundred and ninety seven stars trailing after it like the tail of a comet. “Haven’t you taken enough from me?”
The hand remained silent as it bore down in the dark, each white gripped knuckle on its pen dwarfing me.
“You and Metatron, both. Couldn't stand that I was starting to make some progress?” I spat at the hand of heaven, the globule of saliva floating as though in zero gravity, and readied myself. “Couldn’t take that the wrong person was standing where you think you should?”
The hand said nothing, and we fought in silence until it pissed off back to whence it came and I knew that next time wasn’t going to be so easy.
Contessa was staring at me, eyebrows raised.
“You felt that too?” I clenched my hands into fists. “I’m getting stronger, that’s two in a row.”
“Well done.”
“You didn’t see it coming again?”
“No.”
The rest of the drive was silent, and I appreciated Contessa for giving me a moment. We both knew that it could happen again at any time, that I could become a huge liability without even a moment's notice. It could all return to nothing, it could all keep tumbling down, and I would let everyone down.
The car pulled to a stop and I had my PATHs boot me out of my rumination.
Contessa patted me on the shoulder and we got out. In front of us there was a single warehouse sitting on a big empty plot of land, inside some kind of military complex patrolled by soldiers. I could see clearly where there used to be a suburb of lived in houses now cleared to provide sightlines for the warehouse.
Where even were we? I tried looking on internet search maps, but had no connection. I frowned and mentally scanned until I found a connection on a wavelength of the electromagnetic spectrum that was being sent and received in a non-standard way. I connected and the map was all wrong, why the fuck was it searching through AOL? I followed the trail and everything was all wrong, every website layout was fucky - they weren’t even using Flash.
Then, after I discovered that Pornhub had very few people I recognised, I realised. “We’re on Aleph?” I muttered to Contessa as we approached the warehouse.
“It’s easier from this side,” she murmured. “Far less parahumans.”
Huh. I resumed my search, making sure to mog the guards, as Contessa got us through security. No Gesellschaft or E88? No Fallen? No CUI? A stable Middle East? Australia wasn’t doing its Mad Max cosplay? Africa wasn’t ruled by brutal warlords? This was bizarre, everything should be falling to pieces, why was everything trending upward?
I looked at Contessa in a gap between security checkpoints, where she clearly had the proper clearance to just walk in. “It was easier by far to stabilize this world than Bet, even now most of what it takes is just a few well placed-” she raised one hand and wiggled her fingers. “-emails.”
I turned my brain back to the internet. This is what life could be, should be, like. Newfoundland and Japan weren’t sunk because there was no Leviathan. Lausanne and Maddison weren’t driven mad and overrun by Case Fifty Threes because there was no Simurgh. The Iranian oil fields still weren’t ablaze and a dozen cities weren’t still radioactive because there was no Behemoth.
The Protectorate and its international equivalents were better staffed because of this, and most of the villains on the scale we on Bet enjoyed were suppressed, all because Cauldron could act without fighting uphill at every step. Laws were less strict, quality of life averages across the world up, and there was so much more anime and manga. Compared to us, Aleph was a utopia.
This was something that had never made it through the information exchange, or at least filtered down to the general public.
I would have to take G-regular and Gregnant here.
I mogged the guards at another security checkpoint by a factor of face, height and frame, we had almost reached the portal - I could feel it, somewhere down here past all the military bureaucrats. As expected of a Path to Victory, things were progressing extremely smoothly, and Contessa was able to simply ask everyone to leave the portal room for a routine inspection and be obeyed.
“Of course it’s this simple,” she said. “Who do you think set it up?”
She was so cool.
The access site for the portal was carved out of, Contessa explained, Professor Haywire’s old basement. His house demolished, the surrounding suburb evicted, with this warehouse set up and guarded, this was the portal that almost led to an interdimensional war until it was filled in with concrete and the only evidence of it left was a single computer terminal sticking out of the solid block.
“Do what you need to,” she said. “No one will bother you. Learn everything you can, then destroy it - we have a few other sites to hit after that for everything I can find that could be used to breach dimensions.”
Contessa left through a door and I called open one of my own to get access to my equipment. Time to get busy.
Chapter 176: The Ship of Theseus 9.13
Chapter Text
Greg
The Chosen One
I had to chip away at the concrete, following the trail of the computer terminal until I hit the portal itself. It had a presence I could feel, something that made the hair on the inside of my ears itch, in a way that Doormaker’s portals didn’t. I could taste it, even, this was the culmination of Haywire’s life’s work - his last megaproject.
The portal was like a pane of ice, the hole punched through dimensions distorting space in a way that was both ethereal and solid. Big enough to drive a whole military vehicle supply chain through it was easy to see why this thing had almost started a war, and the infrastructure itself was a work of art even for me. Haywire had been dead, or so we were told, for years, and still his technology remained strong despite the failings of tinker work.
The machine itself was rectangular, stretching from what would have been wall to ceiling of the basement it was built in, and was one of the most advanced things I had ever seen save for my late omnitool. Even Dragon would go green with envy at the sight of this, and especially at the generator powering it which was on the level of Hero’s work, being fuelled by some kind of wave-function waste product of the dimensional breach itself in a way that would probably last another century.
I worked at slowly picking it apart, going through the methodology that Colin had explained to me he used. I had to dip back to my workshop to make the tools I needed to properly measure the output, but this step was a lot easier when I was working directly with a piece of functioning tech, and easier still from the seventh power I had ever gotten which was built for reverse engineering.
As I worked the distinctions between this and other tinkertech became starker, and it became clear that the interdimensional war that Haywire had almost caused was probably the reason he had been given the power. There was no reason for it to be so stable, so solidly made, being the work of just another tinker in his basement, and yet it inexplicably was, the piece of the entity on the other side working overtime in the enduring hope Aleph and Bet would start killing each other enmasse.
Not today, worm.
True to Contessa’s word I wasn’t disturbed by anyone the entire time, and by the time I was confident I could reproduce it, expand upon it, I was sad to see it go. Its destruction sat on my shoulders, a weight I was going to have to carry for the rest of my life knowing that, by my hand, I would be depriving millions of children the opportunity to watch Aleph anime.
Menma hadn’t even finished yet, and they would never see it.
All those episodes… gone. Like tears in the rain.
I pulled the trigger and shut the machine down, the icy distortion of the dimensional rift safely fading into nothing instead of exploding as it had been trying to do to punish me for interrupting the plans made for it.
It was the end of an era, no more would Aleph and Bet know one another. I contemplated the disjunction of the spheres as a door opened beside me and Contessa stepped out. She surveilled the picked apart machinery with a sad eye.
“Perhaps one day you could even re-open it, after we survive.”
“Yeah. Once we survive.” I took a deep breath. “What’s next?”
There were other cache’s of Haywire’s tech hidden away, in Protectorate facilities or in private collections, other portals he’d made, lenses to look into other dimensions, tags that shunted targets into another dimension, projectiles that could dip into another universe and back out - some of it even still worked.
I destroyed them all.
In their destruction, my understanding grew. Creating a gate between worlds was easily within reach for me, and better yet it wasn’t something Metatron had. This was all me. There were other Tinkers we visited, too, who worked with elements of dimensional technology, and anything deemed too close to anything that might let the Simurgh reach Cauldron again was destroyed.
We visited Toybox, the black market Tinker group, too, where there was a boy who wasn’t even twelve who made pocket dimensions which we purchased with Cauldron’s inexhaustible funds. Contessa had said something to him in private, and she assured me he was never going to make anything ever again.
Then the adventure was over, this particular fork in the path complete, and it was time to get back to work.
The endless build resumed. Build the tools to build the tools to build what I needed. Build the room to measure the vials. Build the clones to take the vials. Build the vials to make the capes.
Normally, I would be kind of sick of it, endlessly building things. Perhaps if I were a more autistic man I would enjoy it more, but there were only so many consecutive hours powered by a combination of Egyptian and Chinese alchemy a man could take, but that was a human Greg thing and Cauldron ill needed a man such as I.
The PATHs system kept me focused, a careful control of the emission of neurotransmitters alleviated the strain placed on me by my work schedule, allowing me to operate at a level beyond human limits.
Less than a man, not even a beast. I had reduced myself to just another robot I had built.
Did that finally make it morally permissible to have sex with a robot? Leading scholars suggest yes.
Nevertheless, we were once again ready to administer the vials. The room this previously used to happen in had undergone extensive renovation, taking everything I had learned, including scans of Doormaker’s power, in the hopes of detecting even the slightest smidgeon of how the entity connected to a host. That would be the key. Once I had some way to detect whatever communication was going on there I would have a handhold into speaking back - and whatever I was doing to the vials when I made them could be tuned, and hopefully guide the results along with it.
If we could get one unrestricted shard, just one, it would know how they could die, and how we could kill it, just as Contessa’s had thirty years ago.
The clones stood ready, all of random genetic samples taken from where they wouldn’t be missed, they were well-groomed and impeccably attired, and there were five point eight of them, just enough to represent an array of genders and races that would leave no-one unhappy, save for the Eskimos.
I’d skipped the most magical enhancements this time, Doctor’s orders, so none of them had that certain je ne sais quoi that Gregnant, Sveta and I enjoyed. It would be less conspicuous, for sure, if the next fifty people coming out as public heroes weren't all inexplicably and ethereally beautiful, but I felt it was something that Cauldron should just put up with, and what was she going to do if I refused next time? Give up on the whole bit?
Lol. Lmao, even.
The first clone sat in the new room, one of Doctor’s.
“Fuck me, you’re brave. I wouldn’t, after last time.”
The Third Doctor eyed me placidly, her mind in the body of a woman belonging to an ethnic group not found on Bet. “I have always sacrificed everything for the cause, and I always will.”
“Baller,” I held out the vial with a mechanical arm, from the same sample code as her last. “Here you go. Room’s active, so when you’re ready.”
I stepped back, steepling all three pairs of my hands as I studied her, my HUD showing me trackers for everything I was trying to measure. She raised the vial solemnly, and drank. I grit my teeth, squinting, waiting for the explosion.
She went through the process of the forced trigger, Gregnant having described to me the pain, the feeling of fire and boiling oil scorching his insides, and bore it admirably. She was a mentally fucked woman, but damn was she hard as steel. Yet, from the sensors, nothing. Absolutely nothing. I moved forward as the medical scans blared red in alarm, growths coming in thick and fast, and as she fell from the chair I caught her, her head lolling back, mouth open and full of eyes - eyes all the way down.
She breathed still, each one coming in as a gasp as eyes grew into her lungs and throat. Gregnant rushed in with the medical equipment and we worked to stabilise her, fixing an oxygen mask to her face.
Doctor stepped in from the observation room. “What went wrong?”
“She’s full of eyes.”
“Hmm,” Doctor stepped closer and knelt down beside herself. “I see.”
I looked at her briefly.
“Well,” she continued as her clone tried to avoid choking to death in front of her. “These still are the unmixed, volatile samples. I’ll have her, me, placed under our care. We still hold medical facilities, just in case.”
“Oh, good. I thought you were going to say to just chuck her in the incinerator.”
Doctor gave me a look as if to say, ‘I’m a monster, not pointlessly evil.’ “I would rather you refrain from attempted humour.”
I turned away back to where Gregnant had sedated her clone and we moved her onto a stretcher and through a portal door into what was the medical facility Doctor promised. I figured we should go back and at least see if there was anything we could do, later on after all of this.
In short order we were ready for the Fourth Doctor to come into the room and we repeated the process. This time we were left with a gasping, sweating, and wholly unmutated new parahuman.
“Hey! Hey, yeah!” I pumped my fist. “Fuck yeah! How’s it feel?”
The small, mousey woman who could have come from anywhere between Kazakhstan and Cambodia, yet was from nowhere near, opened her mouth. “I…”
She opened another mouth that stretched out of her neck, striking toward me like it was going to take a bite out of me. I jinkered back, but the mouth didn’t bite anyway, and another opened on the palm she held up in wonder. Slower this time, like some kind of disgusting, carnivorous worm coming out of a fleshy parasitical home, it rose, a full human mouth, full of human teeth, and it spoke in her fruity European accent. “This is a disturbing feeling.”
“Yeah, that is actually really gross to look at, but the last one almost choked to death on eyes,” I gave her a thumbs up and reached down to pull her to her feet. “So you’re doing great.”
“A success,” the original Doctor entered again. “Congratulations.”
“Thank you, Mariam,” said the Fourth Doctor. Maybe I should call her Mariam.
“Still,” Original Doctor continued, eying the many mouths sprouting along the exposed skin of her counterpart. “I had hoped this sample would produce something along the lines of what it had for the previous J Zero Zero Zero Nine subject successes. Do you feel anything else to do with acid?”
“Perhaps,” said the Fourth. “Door me, testing area.”
We quickly got the next Doctor in and she downed the vial without delay, and I watched in fascination as her already tan skin blackened further, to an impossible degree, rendering her into looking like a hole in space, featureless and smooth. A fairly severe ‘deviation’ by their standards and, annoyingly, according to all their testing data mutations didn’t even minmax power output.
It was something of an unspoken agreement that Doctor would take all the most dangerous vials, because she checked over everything before we started and if she minded that I included Balance into mine she didn’t say anything. My situation was unusual for Cauldron in that clones with my genetics came with baked in powers that synergised very well with Tinker vials. Unary was their go to power, the shard of the entity I sourced it from lapping like water out of the corner of my eye until I looked at it, for Tinkers, producing reliable, focused results.
It wasn’t hard for me to tweak the expression of genes in my clones for things like hair colour, eye colour, skin tone and the like, so it was easy enough to produce the most average whiteboy imaginable, even more average than my past appearance. The combination of vials used here was forty seven and a half percent of both Unary and a series called Clatter, which allowed telekinetic control of small objects, with five of Balance.
Sometimes the result was exactly what you wanted. A power to telekinetically assemble, disassemble and manipulate tinkertech, based off the vast knowledge transferred to my clone from me and backed by the blood of Hephaestus.
The last clone, not of my blood but in an adult male body from a place analogous to the Korean peninsula, was given a mixture of the sample labelled Flight, which almost without fail did exactly that, and the W Seven Zero Four Zero sample ‘Diabolic’, which had nothing to do with being evil but gave brute ratings.
The Alexandria package was every boy's dream, in every sense of it.
“A success rate of one in three for volatile samples is unprecedented, if it holds,” Doctor had told me afterwards. “It’s survival rate is closer to one in a hundred, then the rate of useful non-deviation is one in a hundred of that again. Incredible things may be happening here.”
I hoped so, because I still didn’t understand a goddamn thing.
Chapter 177: The Ship of Theseus 9.14
Chapter Text
Greg
The Chosen One
Three Gregs had been hard to coordinate, but with four of us in the room all trying to talk over each other it was getting closer and closer to impossible. I wasn’t sure what to refer to the new gregditions to the grew as, but their name scheme had to follow along with Greg, Gregular, Gregnant and so on. To dilute this pattern was to cease to be ourselves. It would be a gregregious mistake, one we may never grecover from.
One had what would have probably been a mid power to telekinetically construct and wield clunky, generic, tinkertech pieces such as ray guns or shield projectors, maybe bombs or drones if he was feeling a little zesty, but a Tinker didn’t always just rely on the whims of their power for inspiration - your knowledge and skill in engineering and design came into play, and we were geniuses in this field all, and that was before we were demigods of crafting.
The other could fly at base, at speeds we had favourably equated to Victoria, something he could probably even push higher when he shifted forms. The Brute part we were hoping for took shape as a Changer rating, his body growing into a gracile form of smooth, hard flesh that almost felt like horn or bone, complete with a tail and two big, yellow, goatlike eyes.
However, as baller as this all was, I still had two very important things to do before the end of business.
“Aight, boys,” I said. “Imma dip.”
They all dapped me up with the secret Greg handshake and I took a door to go and meet with someone I should have gone and seen the moment I woke up.
Noelle Meinhardt sat in a featureless white pit, the walls and floor bearing faint stains that even Custodian couldn’t scrape out and a musty waft of something like roadkill mixed with taint sweat. Her human body protruded out of the grotesque lump of Cronenburgian flesh, nude, from the waist. She was smaller than I remembered, from last time, back then. Less legs, less mouths, less mass.
I wanted to slap Doctor. All the money and connections in the world and all they could spring for was a featureless pit. This did not bode well for conditions of the thousands of ‘failed test subjects’ sitting in their basement.
Her under-body stirred, ten misshapen legs uncurling, heaving, lifting her bulk. A half-dozen animal mouths, each one large enough to swallow a man whole, opened along her body, groaning painedly, tongues outstretched toward me as she attempted to scale the pit to get to me.
The motion jerked her human body and she awoke with a scream.
For a moment I didn’t say anything, blame and anger warring to come out. I wanted to shout at her, hit her, make her send me back, but she was just as much a victim as I was, just as helpless, strung along by forces we did not understand. “Hey, Noelle, hi. I’m Greg.”
She looked up in pure terror, and hatred. “Go fuck yourself!”
“Yeah, fair enough. Hey, uh, have you ever eaten someone and sent them back in time? Or did you ever get sent back in time after eating me?”
Noelle didn’t answer, and I didn’t blame her. These were heady questions.
“Do you remember fighting a bunch of Crawlers? Or anyone named Dark Smoke Puncher?”
“You put me here, leave me here for, I don’t even know, weeks? Starve me half to death, and the first thing any of you say to me is this crap?” Noelle shook with anger, her lank, brown hair covering her face as she lowered it. “Who even are you people?”
“Well, I’m Greg,” I said crossly, paused, and when Contessa didn’t appear to tell me to stop, continued. “And we’re Cauldron. But I didn’t do any of this to you, you did this to me.”
“What gaslighting fuck,” Noelle sputtered. Her many hooves and paws stomped, vibrating the pit, and her body threw itself against the side with a hefty thud. “You kidnapped me!”
“No, sorry, I mean… not this bit. I didn’t find out you were here until after they got you, and they only got you because in a different timeline you got loose in Brockton Bay and we fought you. But you ate me and I woke up months in the past, in this timeline. Is any of this making sense to you?”
“What a sick joke. You people are cracked. Just fucking kill me already.”
“No! I’m here to help you. I reckon I can figure out how to fix what went wrong with you after you drank that half a vial.”
Noelle threw herself against the pit wall with increasing viciousness, her many legs scrabbling for purchase as she tried to climb up to me. “I’ll fucking kill you! You did this to me!”
“Retard, I…” I took a deep breath and stepped out of my armour, the scent of unwashed bodies and dog meat breath intensifying. In the pit Noelle screamed and cried, the sound raw and wounded, bellowing from every animal mouth. “I promise that I actually am here to help you, and I can get you back to Aleph. I went there for the first time the other day and it was great, it was real nice. My name is Greg Veder. I was devoured by you six months ago beneath a clone of Jack Slash and pierced by the red thread of fate. I am the first and only boy who came back in time.”
With every word, Noelle’s frown deepened. Her lips parted, her eyebrows arched.
I leaned in, and our expressions were a perfect match.
“I am the chosen one, and I've come all this way to see you.”
In the pause before her response I noticed far too late, behind the frown wasn’t any form of understanding. It was hatred, pure and blind.
“Kill yourself.”
The first tears cried in this body slid down my nose, christening my flesh in their sorrow. The wound carved into me on that day hadn’t healed, hadn’t even come close, only hidden with bandaid after bandaid. I dropped to my knees at the edge of the pit, fingers curled over its lip with only the tension in my arms stopping me from tipping over the edge and into the embrace of the Mother of Monsters.
“I lost everything,” I choked out. “My parents, every friend I tried so hard to make, all gone, all replaced by things who had no idea who I was. I had nothing, I had no one. And it just gets worse, Noelle, every day here it gets harder and harder to keep going, and every day I get closer and closer to closing my eyes and never waking up again. I lost everything, and I don’t even know how or why.”
I looked up and Noelle's face was devoid of anything resembling pity. “What a sick joke,” she repeated, her human torso quivering in rage even as her monstrous body threw itself against the pit walls again and again. “Do you think I’m fucking retarded? That I’d fall for this? Trap me in this pit alone, then send in the honeypot in the hopes that I’m desperate enough to do what you want?”
“I’m so sorry,” I sobbed. “It wasn’t my fault. The day they caught you was the day I joined, and I know they’re bad. There’s so much I have to just look the other way on, because what’s the point of being obstructionist with what’s at stake? I’m doing my best to fix things, and I can, I am. I promise that I’m going to save you.”
All I would have to do is let the strength go out of my arms, and fall. What then? What if nothing happened, or, worse, I had to do it all over again? I had to suffer the tribulation of whatever was doing this to me, take the cruel punishment for a crime I couldn’t remember committing. Whatever I had done must have been heinous beyond reckoning.
“You really couldn’t think of a better lie?”
I looked up, unbowing my head. “I’m not lying.”
Noelle didn’t respond, she simply glared at me in utter contempt as her body, out of her control, raged. Visions of every way I could make her compliant flashed through my head, the thoughts extra intrusive. It would be so much simpler to make a tyrant of myself, to leash everyone around me with bridle and rein and blinkers, to pull them apart and put them back together again as I saw fit, treating flesh and bone as if it were a machine of steel and grease.
“I’m not!” I shouted. “Do you think I want this? Everything was going so well, and now nothing has gone right. Everything is so much more fucked, and, bro, I’m only sixteen.”
“You fucking are not.”
I clenched my fist, a man's fist, attached to a man's body complete with new and exciting changes like a newly growing beard and a thick carpet of chest hair. “That’s one of the ways I can save you. This is two bodies down for me. I can grow you one, and copy your mind into it-”
“So do it!” Noelle shrieked, both halves of her body wailing against the wall with increased fervour. “If you feel so bad, just fucking do it!”
“Ok. I will. I’ll start growing your new body today, what do you want? Your old body? Better? Give me three days. Three, and I can set things right.”
“I’ll believe you when stop fucking crying and actually do it.”
I wanted to cry, though. Sure, I could activate my PATHs, knock back a philtre, look at a picture, but I wanted to feel this pain, to experience it fully as the human I was slowly leaving behind. There was going to come a time where there was so little of me left that I probably wouldn’t be able to feel like this at all, and so I wept. In the pit Noelle began to cry, too.
I stepped through the door to another gruelling meeting, into a hallway of white walls with only Contessa to break up the colour. She was wearing her suit in ‘active’ mode, where the loose sleeves and cuffs tightened flush with the skin so as not to catch, and her fedora was in its other form, fully encasing her head as a sleek helmet.
“It’s the right thing to do,” I told her. I was back in my armour again.
Contessa inclined her head. “I agree. The only reason we haven’t before is that we couldn’t.”
“Sometimes I don’t understand you,” I said. “You can do anything, so long as it’s doable, but I still have so many doubts about you and Cauldron. Can’t you have done a better job?”
“You’ve made the classic mistake,” she said. “Of believing that we want you as an obedient follower. You’re not just some spanner in my toolbox I want to brain Scion with.”
“So I really am the chosen one?”
I got the sense that she was smiling. “So it would seem.”
“What does it look like, the path we’re on, in the end, before it turns into grey fog?”
“I asked for the future where we win, so it shows me that scenery. We stand on the edge of the end, the most ready we’ve ever been.” Contessa laughed mirthlessly. “And when I ask again in a weeks time I’ll see a different future, and again, and again, the end of the path endlessly changing with every trigger event, every Endbringer attack - with every power you get.”
“And what do I look like, there?”
“You’re you. Despite everything, it’s still you.”
I closed my eyes. Yeah. So it would come to pass that, as the Simurgh had ushered in the last day of my adolescence, so too would this fight usher in my last day of being human. But - I would still be me. Even after I had stripped the last of it away, cut and edited and scraped and filed, even after I took the final step into the form coming together at the edges of my imagination, even after there wasn’t a single atom of human flesh left, even after all of it I would still be Greg Veder.
“This was the outcome your path wanted me to come to, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” she said simply.
“Thanks,” I said. “For keeping it real.”
I knew, of course, that if this wasn’t being kept real I would have no way of knowing. I wondered why it didn’t make any difference to me if any of this was of my own free will or not, or if me reaching that conclusion was part of the path.
“It’s because I’m based.”
I gave Contessa a shiggy diggy expression behind my mask, one I could only assume she gave in return.
“You trust us because we’ve shown we’re committed to the cause, unflinchingly, unhypocritically. You trust that we’re not going to screw you over for our own gain, that none of this is for our selfish benefit, that despite all the evil you hate that we’ve caused none of it was done because we want to profit off the misery. You’ve seen the toll it’s taken on us, and how we’ve continued through it without a shred of hope solely because it was the right thing to do.”
“You’re gonna make your arm sore if you keep going like that.”
“Shit yourself, Greg.”
A laugh rose in my throat and I fell into a helpless giggle fit until tears sprang to my eyes. Contessa laughed along with me, and I didn’t even care that hers was pathed because I would have done the exact same thing.
Contessa was the hero I’d always wanted to be.
And it felt so good to laugh.
“Come on,” she said after we’d laughed ourselves dry. “Let’s go, we’ve got two thousand and forty seven to go after this one, and not a second to waste.”
Chapter 178: The Ship of Theseus 9.15
Chapter Text
Greg
The Chosen One
The first man to be freed was huddled in the corner of his cell, a cube cut out of the same sterile white as the rest of the facility, curled into a ball as he rocked back and forth. His skin was green, and his body twisted in an exaggeration of dwarfism with short, skinny limbs and a bulbous, overly large head with facial features distorted to match. The room itself was at least clean and better furnished than a prison cell, if only barely, but it bore many of the same hallmarks in its metal toilet bolted to the wall and cot bed. There was no door, bars or lock, only a white line drawn on the floor.
The corridor we were in stretched as far as I could see, identical cells lining each wall.
The man didn’t look up.
This motherfucker was the least traumatised?
“I take back all the nice things I thought about you a minute ago,” I said.
“I’ve no excuses,” she replied. “We’ve done as we’ve done.”
“Contessaaa,” I groaned. This was my hero? What happened to me. “At least the path you’re choosing has it be better for me to help these guys.”
“It’s too dangerous for me to try and manipulate you out of it. You’re not immune to my power, but that could change in an instant,” she shrugged. “We need you, and if I locked us in the position where you realised we were stuffing you around, and you had wriggled out of my fist, you might, rightly, turn on us.”
“If we’re being candid.”
“The sad fact of it is that, yes, if you were weak you would have been no different to us than,” she gestured at the deformed man, twisted by their experiments and locked in their cage for the crime of it. “Him.”
Damn, this bitch really had me all pathed out. This was evil as shit, but every time I thought about how evil this was I thought about why they had done it and the golden god of death loomed larger than them by far.
“Have you ever thought about paying for your crimes?”
“If there’s a judge, jury or executioner left after we’re standing on the edge of the crater, then they’re welcome to cleave my head from my neck.”
“Hell yeah,” I said. “Now lets please save this poor fucker instead of standing around and talking like he’s not there.”
Contessa inclined her head and stepped over to stand right on the line, the thin strip of white on white the only barrier between them. She knelt and spoke in some language so foreign that at first I thought she was clearing her throat. I wouldn’t have thought the guy would, or could, even respond, but it seemed that Contessa could say something in such a specific way that your neurons would have no choice but to activate, and he began to speak back in that same coughing tongue.
The man stirred out of his defeated curl, lifting a head that hadn’t been held high in ten years. I’d read their file on him, ‘Patient Three Six One Nine Nine Six A’ had been interned at the ‘facility’ for over ten years ever since he’d been pulled out of the putrid sinkhole he’d become trapped in, the wound in his leg having become septic in it. They had saved him, saved his life, and all it had cost him was everything else.
It was a little surprising how well documented everything Cauldron had done was. Every action taken had been included in a report, every vial administered, the effects, the deaths, how many personnel they used to have, salary, who their capes were, how much money or favours were owed, all of it written down in painstaking bureaucratic detail. It painted an interesting, sad picture of an organisation that had once been golden bright, now reduced to rust and shadows.
You could trace a line that led from the Cauldron of the Golden Age of Capes, when they had created the Protectorate in the early nineties, all the way through their decline to the sharp spike down after the Simurgh had ripped their main headquarters out into Bet in two thousand and nine, the amount of operations being conducted grinding to a near complete halt - the amount of vial capes sitting at less than one fifth of what had been produced previously and with none of the success stories of their early work.
Now their average vial cape was as mid as Battery, and nowhere near as ethically sourced.
No wonder the fate of the world was so hopelessly grim.
The man in the cell had transformed, his twisted frame turning from a man who may as well have been dead into something alive. He was standing, pacing, gesturing excitedly at whatever Contessa was promising him, and I had to trust she was promising him the right things. I wasn’t sure how long it would have taken me to sort all this out by myself, but I would have to tune my language programs to learning a completely new one that they had never encountered before, one that might not follow any linguistic rules I knew, and then source a genetic sample he wanted. Her help was invaluable for cutting time I couldn’t spare, and she knew it.
Through the systems in my suit I could see the structure of his brain was sufficiently different from both mine and Sveta’s that I would have to create a bespoke input capable of translating the contents. More work, always more work, and the reward for good work? More work.
I turned my PATHs back on and it did a little shuffle in my greymatter to boot me out of my internal bitching, letting me focus on mentally sorting through the crushing weight of my forbidden knowledge, pulling Tinker inspiration from whatever entity the Celestial Forge was, to crunch together a schematic in my design program at the speed of thought.
Contessa turned to me, still kneeling, while the man paced in excitement, this entire ordeal a foregone conclusion, a pageant for my sake. The only thing I had to do was trust her.
I floated gently back into the workshop, the unending stream of chatter from my clones drifting over the various machinery and devices whose only purpose was to have blinking LEDs and give off the hum of processors at work. A Gregnant creation, that one.
“Hey,” Greg said, the older of the new ones, as he floated a foot above the floor. “The lads and I were just talking, about when you make the next lot of us? Don’t make us normal. I hate having lost my magic body again and, hey, what’re looking all sad for?”
I stepped out of my suit, to face me as myself. “I went and saw Noelle.”
The change was instant. The three of me stilled, faces going blank.
“I couldn’t do it,” I said. “I didn’t even try.”
“There was never any guarantee, anyway.” Gregnant said, voice low, his eyes boring into mine. “We don’t even know if it was her, this could all still be a Coil clone s-”
“Don’t even fucking say clone simulation,” said the other younger me. “We are not in a Coil simulation. I don’t care how many clones of his were riding Noelle, it’s not that. Never bring that shit up again.”
“Whatevs,” said Gregnant. “But you went alone? Without us?”
“You can go whenever you like, we’re all free Greg’s here.”
“Seems to me like some Greg’s are freer than others.”
“Don’t fight, gay dads,” said the Greg who appeared to be older than both of us. “But bro, come on. Noelle? Shit.”
“Nah, for real, I’m stuck here,” said Gregnant. “I don’t have door access.”
“I’ll make you a portal machine, you can go to Aleph. It’s great there, one day we can get together all of me and have a holiday. We can go to Japan and it won’t even be a hellhole. We can go to that huge porn shop in Akihabara.”
“I would really appreciate you doing that,” he said, still visibly cross. “But I am for real going nuts here, and you leave me out of everything important. I’m not your fucking clone, I’m you. Why wouldn’t you tell us you were going to see her? Maybe I woulda taken the dive and gone back home, you ever think of that, smart guy?”
“I don’t think we could do it,” I shot back. “Go back to being Dark Smoke Puncher, after all of this? Knowing what we know now? The scope? I wouldn’t be dying anymore, but I probably wouldn’t be able to do anywhere near as much as I can now.”
“Lol,” he said. “Lmao, even. What if I got Vial Mixing skill? What if having gamer skills was better for it than what you can do?”
“Gay dads-”
“Go do it, then. Door me, Noelle’s pit.”
The door opened as I bade it, and Gregnant gave me a sour look as his bluff was called. He flipped me the bird and walked through the door, the other two Gregs giving each other worried looks before following. I sighed and rubbed at my face before getting back into my armour. I was going to have to de-escalate this.
“I’m sorry,” I said as I followed them. “You’re right, I’m leaving you out of too much and I would hate being stuck in this place, and there would only be so many calming philtre I could drink before I flipped. Please don’t actually jump in, I’m going to have to cut you out and then shoot every insane clone.”
Gregnant stood at the edge of the pit, staring down in horror. “Noelle?”
“Why’re you back? You said three days. You said you’d save me.”
We stood in a line of four, looking down at the inhuman, dehumainising prison she was in. Her eyes were red and puffy, her face still streaked wet with tears. She had clearly kept crying long after I left.
“And who are they? You bring your friends to come and look at the freak.”
“Actually,” said the youngest looking Greg. “We’re all the same guy.”
“And I’m the token asian Greg.”
I looked at him. “For now. Soon I will be every ethnicity at once, and have every slur pass imaginable, even the ones from alternate earths. Do you know what they’d call someone like me on Zeta? ‘Cause I want to find out.”
“Fucking god, you sound like every other CODkiddy,” Noelle sneered. “What imageboard did you crawl out of?”
All four of us recognised her for what she was in an instant, a fellow gamer, and terminally online autist. “Bet memes are better than Aleph’s”
Rather than working as a point of contact, of familiarity or connection, she appeared visibly angrier. “Eat shit. Bet memes are all empty ragebait competition for who can hate who the most because your world is a failure.”
“Peak Endbringerless behaviour,” we responded unanimously.
Noelle sneered fully. “Exactly. You’ve got nothing but to ‘ironically’ posture superiority over being objectively worse, because without that you’d have nothing.”
This bitch really thought she was better than me, me, a Beta, because she was an Alpha. “Silence, Alephaggot. Eidolon solos you.”
As Noelle went into a spitting, screaming rage it occurred to me that she’d told me she hadn’t eaten since she got here, and it was entirely possible that she was simply too hangry and pitbrained to appreciate this level of discourse, though she was calling me a ‘Bigga’, the appropriate gamer word for a Bet native, so maybe we had connected on some level.
I tried to remember her bio, read so long ago, and tried to remember what she played. Had I been Dark Smoke Puncher, with my eidetic memory, I could have recited to you the entire thing after glancing at it only once and had the emotional intelligence to do something productive with it. She was a pro, or something. Had been.
“What bullshit moba did you play? League?”
“League?!” She shrieked. “League?! Are you fucking kidding me, you glue sniffing inbred! Ransack… Rans-”
Noelle burst into ragged, raw sobs again and all of me traded glances. I’d never even heard of Ransack, so it probably wasn’t any good.
“Do you want something to eat?” I ventured. “I don’t do good hangry, and I can make really, really good food.”
“Why are you doing this to me?” Noelle curled against her monstrous bulk, all but laying flat against the hybrid flesh even as it fought to escape from her prison. “I didn’t do anything.”
“Uh, this may be a bad time,” the young tinker me began. “But do you remember eating me? Like, there’s some timey wimey bullshit going on here, ‘cause you ate me and, like, you’ve maybe got a time hole in you, and if I just go back in, maybe…”
“I already went over that,” I said. “And I was too chickenshit.”
“I’ll do it.”
We all looked at Gregnant.
“It should be safe enough, unless our powers do some divide by zero type shit. I drank the same vial as you,” he looked down at Noelle. “And have a similar power.”
“But what if you go,” said Brute Greg. “And we lose you? What if you go back, but because you’re not the ‘original’ you don’t get spit out as Dark Smoke? What if we’re down a Greg for nothing? What if it really was Eidolon?”
“I think the divide by zero thing is more worrying. I really think that would be playing with power we don’t understand. What if we get some fucked up Case Seventy thing with Noelle? Or you fuse with your clone because your powers can’t tell you’re not the same person?”
“If it was the wrong move,” he said heavily, hands balled into fists. “Contessa would stop us.”
“She can’t see trigger events. Her blind spots, remember?”
“Yeah. Yeah, convenient that that’s the case and I can’t do a single fucking thing by myself.”
“Dude, come on,” I said. “You’re still our Greg. We knew this was going to be hard when we gave G-regular our life. I know the sacrifices we’ve made aren’t even, but there’s nothing we can do about it. I have the Forge, and I can’t get away from it. You’re going stir crazy from being basically on house arrest. We can work on this shit, don’t throw it all away.”
“Bro,” he said. “I wanna have a choice-”
“Choice!” Noelle howled from the pit, the expression on her and her every mutant face enraged beyond belief. “Where’s my choice? You think you can just use my power without my say so? Fuck you! Fuck you! Fucking Gregs, you bring your little backup squad here to lord it over the monster in the pit. You pathetic little shitheel. Just fucking fix me already and then kill yourself.”
While I could appreciate demanding someone kill themselves whilst in the throes of a heated gamer moment, it was pretty annoying to hear when I was just trying to help. “I’m going to. Give me a few minutes to prep everything and get a blood sample. This is also a really stressful time for all of me, too, y’know. A Noelle in a different timeline ate me, and I got sent here. I know you had something similar happen in Maddison with the Simurgh. She tried to kill me just a few weeks ago, tore my arm off. Then I got taken over by my soul parasite for half a week. This is a bad time for me, too.”
I looked down into the fetid pit, stained a faint brown from the perspirations of Noelle’s monstrous body, as she looked back up at me like I was the dumbest motherfucker in every dimension.
“Fair,” said Gregnant. “At least I’m not in the pit. You’ve defs got it worse.”
“Which is why we’re helping,” said the flying Greg. “You can trust us, we’re good guys and we’re trying our best. We can even make you a better pit. Do you like XBox?”
The mention of XBox sent Noelle into another bout of crying, from which she was inconsolable until the Gregsquad and I retreated to our kitchen in another dimension and sourced a huge quantity of raw meat through legitimate means, which, when he brought it back and heaved it into the pit Noelle’s many ravenous mouths wolfed it down with fervour.
I hovered down in my suit until I was just above her and offered her the plate held in my left hand. On it was a serving of Doritos ™ nachos, dripping with grease and shining with more silver soul than most humans. In my left hand I held a bottle of MNTN DEW ™ to complete the gamers meal.
Noelle ate, and the pact was sealed. We were friends now, bonded by The Dew, and there was nothing she could do about it.
Chapter 179: The Ship of Theseus 9.16
Chapter Text
Greg
The Chosen One
The weight of my tasks was crushing, pinning me in place so that the sword of the Forge may pierce my skin. It hadn’t hurt when it had begun, but as it began to work its way on in the pain grew stronger, watching it bring…
I had finally resurfaced from my PATHS after three days, days that had flown by as I had been unable to feel fear or worry, kept buoyant on philtre and tincture, moving ceaselessly, building without end the tools with which I hoped to slay a god.
I had built a great many things. Gregular’s suit I had promised him. Gregnant’s portal device. Portal devices of my own. Drones and trackers. Noelle’s pit replacement. Vials. Yes, many things, but none so important as the new Pilot.
Today was a big day, after all, and a child should have two mothers.
Gregnant paced in the testing area, his whole body tense like iron as he prepared to do what needed to be done. Pilot watched him go, and I watched Pilot watching him.
You would have been hard pressed to find a real girl more beautiful that the Pilot Gregular had kept, even Sveta’s new body may not have been, but you would never find one more beautiful than this.
Even though I knew it was just a machine, a machine I had created, I couldn’t help but stare. It was the urge to look at a pretty girl you saw in public, a thousand fold, and with no awkwardness about getting caught checking. I had to resist the urge to seize her, to grasp her face in both hands and stare deep into her red eyes and-
Come on, dude. Get it together. So what if you were a sixteen year old boy living with his clone bro in a private dimension, completely unsupervised by adults, with the complete freedom to do whatever it was you wanted at all times and the power to bring to fruition dreams which normal boys would covet as their deepest, most private power fantasy.
You had to be better than what they thought of you.
Even though it was so, so hard, and you wanted to so, so much…
I deliberately brought my fist to my mouth, bare my teeth, and bit. Bit as hard as I could until I could finally feel the pain in a body built to be far more durable than it was strong. The pain wasn’t much, but I managed to calm the flames within me before they burnt too bright for me to control and I did something regretful. Instead I thought of function, rather than form.
Gregnant was to begat Lil’ Amy, and as we had never raised a kid or even done a single stint as a babysitter the only natural way to fix this problem was to use my immense magical power and knowledge to add a behavioural module to Pilot that would let her act as a parent and tutor both.
A tireless, unceasingly caring and endlessly patient parent who could answer any question you could possibly have and play any amount of games you wanted. She was the hottest robot milf, mechanical milkers, pneumatic dumptruck fuck!
I turned away and focused on Gregnant, and while he was still objectively really hot, too, I simply didn’t want to suck his dick even if he was my very own clone. “You hanging in there alright, chief?”
Gregnant unclenched his right fist, in which he had been holding a ball of hair, now damp with his terror sweat. “I have to do it. If I don’t I’ll always be the guy who was too chicken to get mpreg.”
“It’s not just about you being a male pregnant cretin, it’s about progress. If we get a Lil’ Amy and she’s happy to help us then we can fix the Case Fifty Threes way faster and lots of other stuff probably. Then, what about future clones? Like Contessa said, they could have hybrid powers. Like, what if you hybrid cloned Assault and Battery? Ignoring how bizarrely fucked up that would be, I think that would be pretty cool.”
“Dude, that was the least helpful thing you could have said. I think it would be pretty cool, though. Do you think they would absorb kinetic energy to charge up, or would charging generate kinetic energy?”
“We can only hope that it will be whatever is the most useful, like if we mashed together Brad and Carlos. Adaptive biology and flight crossed with personal biokinesis and telekinesis? Might be cool.”
Gregnant shrugged, eying the curly brown hair in his palm. “Probably. Are we ready? You’re recording properly?”
“Yeah. Please consume the test material now.”
Gregnant screwed up his eyes and forced the hair down his throat, swallowing rapidly before gagging and snatching up the cup of water on a small table next to him. He gulped it down and dry heaved a little as the readouts transmitted to my visual cortex told the rest of the story.
There was activation in his Corona Pollentia and Gemma, the two nodes in his brain that had grown in as a result of consuming the vial, and I could trace that activation down his nervous system and into the strange, womb like organ that had grown in his abdominal cavity where cells were beginning to divide at rapid speed.
I couldn’t, however, trace where the activation had come from. Where the signal the entity agent was transmitting from, or in what form, and that was what we were really after, with everything else being peripherally useful data.
Gregnant staggered, clutching his chest. “Gah, that is fucking weird. I feel like I need to burp, but can’t.”
“Congratulations,” I said. “I have good news.”
He looked up at me through the observation window and quirked his head, then his expression twisted as he caught on. He declined to take the bait and instead accessed the information gathered by the machines. “Sucks the good news wasn’t this. Wonder what kind of obfuscation system they’re using to hide the signals.”
“We’ll find out,” I said with full fake cheer. “Sure, they may have designed it so that their own parahuman hosts could never defeat them, but we’re different. Throughout heaven and earth, we, alone, are the honoured one.”
Gregnant scoffed. “Shinobi, hero, star. What are we now, a black hole?”
“I would hope we’re something with a more positive connotation.”
“I hope so, too.”
“Come one,” I popped the door and reached in with one hand. “Let’s get today done, then we can all go on our Tokyo trip. We’re pretty hot, maybe we’ll get laid?”
He took my hand and I pulled him into a bro hug. “Maybe we will. We can pull a twins gimmick. What are we going to do about the underage Gregs? They can’t come out with us, it’ll cramp our style.”
“Sucks to suck. They should simply not look underage, they shoulda thought of that when I was doing the bodies and transfers.”
Gregnant took a moment too long to respond and I followed his gaze to where he had become distracted by Pilot who, simply by standing there, exuded a mesmerising presence mathematically calculated and honed by our attention to be unignorable. “Yeah, they’re idiots. C’mon, let’s get the guy and Noelle sorted, then we can go get them from their training camp.”
The ‘training camp’ being a service Cauldron offered, usually to extract extra favours from clients, that had been formulated by Contessa to produce heroes with the well rounded skills they were going to need to do their job properly - it seemed a waste not to provide it as a standard part of the package, but that was Cauldron for you. Right now my clones were there along with the Doctors, getting themselves an education.
We were all also going to be getting to use Cauldron’s other now mostly defunct training packages, which they also offered at cost, and seemed as though they should have been free, but when you got down to it their reasoning became clear. Cauldron never expected any of their usual clients to amount to anything in the only fight that would matter, and any who did, such as the Triumvirate, formerly Hero, and a few others, were given all of it for free. Most capes just weren’t useful enough to go to the effort, and it must have actually been as close to objective truth as possible if Contessa had abandoned it.
To them. To me, however? It was an easy concession for the Doctor to make, to open up those programs especially since she, too, was going to benefit from them. She wouldn’t have bothered if I hadn’t demanded it after learning of them, fully willing to rawdog the cape meatgrinder that was Bet. Everyone save for her silver bullets were expendable, even herselves.
Custodian didn’t respond when I crossed the line into the cell and gently picked up the little green man. His bulbous head lolled as he slept, knocked out with a bespoke concoction. His skin was warm, something transmitted through the tactility array in my MedSpec suit. His mutated body functioned in much the same way Sveta’s had when I had performed the autopsy on it, in that it shouldn’t.
In her case she should have choked to death long ago on lungs too small to convert enough oxygen for her body to live, but as it was she lived a cursed life on the permanent verge of hyperventilation while her power supplied her just enough oxygen to get by from whatever dimension it lived in. In this guys case he simply should not have enough blood for his withered heart to pump, and I could watch it happen in real time, see his heart fail and yet succeed.
These were the good cases, too. There were worse, weirder Case Fifty Three who I had no idea how I was going to start to help. One’s like Weld, where they had nothing resembling a human system, or ones in permanent Breaker states composed of energy rather than matter, or, like Custodian, made of something like invisible psionic force.
I might be the only person alive who could do it, who could unbreak what had been broken and make right this cursed cycle.
The problem with being a silver bullet was that you could only be fired once.
I carried the man away and met with Gregnant in the cloning bay, where the tanks bubbled merrily away with the latest generation and this man's new body lay on a table. The genetic matter Contessa sourced for me was from someone something like a pygmy person, barely reaching four and a half feet tall, with dark tan skin and a long nose. She’d given me a set of clothes for him too in a style I had never seen, made of a material that didn’t exist on Bet, where the fibre it was woven of was a natural blue colour and a looping script had been stitched along the length of the sleeves and pant legs.
“Poor little guy,” Gregnant looked him over. “It’s been a long time coming. Man, I hate that it’s our fuckin’ responsibility though. Cauldron are such cunts.”
I gently lay him on the other table and began to fit the headset to his huge cranium. “Yeah, I really don’t get this one either. They’ve done so many other good things, then they have this supervillain basement full of mutant freak experiments. All they wanted was the alive bodies, if they weren’t ever planning on fixing them, why not have that Slug guy do a total wipe, save them decades of solitary confinement?”
This was, of course, my plan after this. Mind transfer, then put the vegetable version back in the cell stripped of its ability to suffer. It was still terminally, chronically, evil, but what other choice did I have? What if the bodies really did cause the entity to avert its gaze? What if by fixing them properly Scion turned his eye to this dimension and wiped it out with contemptuous ease?
“I like to think it was on the backburner, something they were going to sort out when they had time.”
“Me too. Me too.”
“And maybe it even was.” Gregnant sighed and rubbed at his new, fabulously thick blonde moustache which he had curled at the ends. “Let’s just do this, I want to have our holiday already.”
I nodded in agreement and activated the machine, both bodies jerking stiff as every neuron was read and then overwritten. He didn’t wake, both bodies were sedated, but the process had met every compliance gate as it had with Sveta so he was probably fine. I opened a door to his home dimension, using the location provided to me by Contessa, and we lay the new man down under the shade of a tree.
His home was a slightly chilly steppe, a rolling sea of grassy hills as far as the eye could see, broken only by a city of domed buildings directly in front of him. It would be a couple of hours walk for him, but he would be among his people again. We’d sterilized him, too, so he wouldn’t body this place's population with a cold virus or something.
“Come with?” I motioned upward. “I want to see something.”
The faceplates of our suits snapped closed, hermetically sealing us from the outside world, and with a flash our thrusters locked in and we were rocketing upward, strengthened bodies capable of withstanding G forces that would brain damage a normal man, ascending higher and higher until the rim of the world curved and the great city beneath us was a mere speck.
It was almost indistinguishable from our own.
“What are we looking at? It’s cool though.”
“I’m still wrapping my head around the scale,” I said as we floated, backs to the star pricked void, over the blue oceans covered by vast swathes of white and grey cloud. “Like, I get that there’s thousands of earths but it’s hard to see in my head just how many people we have to save.”
“We’ll pull through,” Gregnant floated closer to me, wrapping an arm around my shoulders and giving me a little shake. “We’re invincible.”
Anxiety tried to bubble up within me, but I suppressed it with a deep breath. “This isn’t the longest the Forge has gone without ratfucking me, but it’s close. We need a plan for if I don’t come back in time. You’re the only one who can sub in for me.”
“No,” he murmured. “I can’t. I remember. They would prefer you, but Metatron will do if they have to once they find some way of leashing the mad dog.”
“Well. I don’t want to think about that, so let’s just go home.”
Gregnant gave me another squeeze, then let go to drift off to the side. “There’s nothing we can really do about it. We’re caught between a war of gods, where even winning might not save us. Just gotta do our best, and make sure we’re still Greg in the end.”
It was a question of how much of myself I could strip away, replace, before I stopped being the same person.
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