The FF version of Monster should now contain actual linebreaks, which will hopefully make several scenes considerably less confusing.

6.m

Mimi

Consequences.

Stupid. Of course she knew about consequences. Consequences was when someone else punished you for things you had NO CONTROL OVER.

... it struck her, suddenly, that she was losing. That made her mad, she was going to burn Shatterbird, cook her until she screamed she was so angry-

-but doubling down didn't help. It just made Shatterbird laugh at her.

Which meant her power was winning, she was going to die and she'd never see Elle again, never get to apologize and make up for the burns anD sHe's SO fuCkInG MaD hEr PoWEr doESn'T GET to WIN it DOEsn'T

With that cold, bitter, angry thought in her mind, Mimi dropped like a stone when Shatterbird hurled a wave of blades at her. As she fell she caught a glimpse, she was sure, of Shatterbird looking disconcerted through her glass helmet, which confirmed her suspicion: Shatterbird had still been playing with her, intending the glass shards to do superficial damage. It's what Shatterbird did, Mimi knew that after these weeks. Mimi took a cold satisfaction in tricking Shatterbird into thinking she'd failed to control her power properly; so much of Shattebird's identity was tied up in her power and using it Mimi couldn't imagine what would hurt her worse.

Inside a burning, slowly collapsing skyscraper, an office of some kind that smelled of burning human flesh, Mimi laid there, staring at the ceiling and angrily foRCinG herself to hoLd STiLL. Play dead. She's mad at Shatterbird, and playing dead hurts her worse than any fire will. Her power is AlWAys WINNing and she refuseS to let it keep winning.

It was hard. The cuts may have been minor, but she was covered in them. The fire didn't bother her, but the ashes still stung, the air movement still stung, the blood spreading and hardening was uncomfortable, she felt restless just sitting there doing nothing, and the whole thing reminded her of when the therapists tried putting her in a room full of fire and asking her to meditate of all things. That all irritated and angered her but then her thoughts would wrap back to her PoWer WinnnnnnING and she refused. She wouldn't give it the satisfaction, and she didn't care that it's irrational to treat her power like it's a person who is deliberately TorMenTing hEr, it doesn't get to wiN.

She wasn't sure how long she stayed still, listening dispassionately to the sounds of battle raging outside.

Eventually, the building's collapsing state was too much. The fighting was still ongoing, she could hear it, but it was more distant, and somewhere in between obsessively hating her power and refusing to play along because she'd die and that would mean she'd never get to apologize to Elle and that was unacceptable... it crossed her mind she should find the idiot again.

She was an idiot, but somehow what she said helped. Not a lot. It was so much effort to fight hate with harsher hate, to refuse to chase down Shatterbird because even though she was mad at Shatterbird she'd be even madder at the wORld and herself if she never made up with Elle because she stupidly got herself killed.

But it was working.

The therapists tried meditation. They asked her how she'd feel if someone died and it was her fault, and when fire burned her feelings away the answer was nothing no matter how much they asked. They tried drugs, and that just gave her headaches, or even worsened her mood, made it so she slipped all the more readily. One tried a shock collar, tried to train her with pain, but when she was on fire pain just made her mad, it didn't discourage her. They tried so many things, and none of them worked, and the idiot's words somehow, someway, got her thinking and it was working.

She needed more of that.

So she stepped to the edges of the building, remaining out of sight as best she could. It had been long enough it wasn't so hard to strangle her anger and hate with worse -Shatterbird being Shatterbird was fading back to memory, a distant background truth instead of something she felt an urge to act on. She didn't know how to be sneaky (The other Nine had handled most of that, and once she'd let Bonesaw temporarily alter her face so she could walk unrecognized in the open), but surely standing in shadows was a good idea?

She looked around, careful and watchful. How would she even find the idiot? The idiot didn't have powers, nothing distinctive to track. She didn't know where the idiot went. The idiot was distinctive-looking, a red streak on blonde hair and a beautiful face that would probably have left Mimi self-consciously touching her own if it weren't for all the fire. She didn't get mad about her looks. There was nothing to get mad about. She'd done it to herself, for her own reasons. There was only anger when people judged her over it. So thinking about how the other girl was so much prettier than her elicited nothing, not now. Later, almost certainly, but not now.

That line of thought was really a distraction, an attempt to avoid getting frustrated. To avoid even thinking about possibly getting frustrated, the whole thing a self-fulfilling cycle and it was failing now she that couldn't think of an answer for how to find the girl she wasn't a tracker-

-something zipped down below, eye-catching and baffling, and for just a moment Mimi saw a red stripe in blonde hair.

No, it can't be that easy.

The girl waved drunkenly in her direction before the bizarre shape vanished around a corner.

Following a trail proved surprisingly easy. She'd learned something from Jack's lessons on tracking, and honestly only an idiot wouldn't be able to track what she saw -a trail of marks in the concrete, like someone had tried to jam a knife through and given up just after making a bit of an indentation. Over and over, an uneven scattering down the streets.

The hard part was following the trail without being seen, particularly by Protectorate capes, mostly by jumping ahead into fires -mostly fires she didn't remember making.

Which became problematic as she got further out, into the less-effected parts of town.

Eventually, though, she caught up to them, standing up against a truck whose bed was loaded down, the contents hidden under a tarp. The idiot was standing awkwardly, like she wasn't sure what to do with herself and was tired and hurting but couldn't quite sit down.

Then she spotted Bonesaw, brown hair or no, and she saw WHITE and-

The idiot slammed into her. "Ohmygod you're alive I thought I'd gotten you killed! I- I thought I was hallucinating you! Have I mentioned I have a head injury?" the idiot babbled.

It took Mimi a moment to realize she was being hugged by a complete stranger.

An unfamiliar voice from an unfamiliar face asked entirely too calmly, "What is Burnscar doing here? Why are you hugging her, P- Ch- friend?"

The unnamed idiot sniffled against Mimi's neck, and it was only because there was no fire in the area Mimi hadn't already started torching the stranger. She hates her cape name, only put up with it from the Nine because she never accomplished anything when she attacked over it...

...consequences...

... but before she could explore that thought or say anything angry, the unnamed idiot pulled back in a drunken lurch and declared, "Boss, say hello to Mimi, who has problems quite a lot like yours. Mimi, say hello to Taylor."

Reflexive politeness ground into her by her parents and reinforced at the asylum drove Mimi to unthinkingly deliver a completely empty, "Hello."

Taylor didn't respond in kind, simply staring at her, one arm occupied with clutching at Bonesaw and why is she here? Did the idiot join the Nine? Instead, Taylor's outline distorted and stretched for a moment before rippling back to normal. "She doesn't turn into a monster. She's a pyrokinetic."

The idiot made a hiss of frustration, clutching protectively at Mimi's arm and Mimi was struck abruptly by the warmth. She can't remember the last time someone held her. The closest was hugging Elle, and that didn't last. It was so distracting she only half-heard the idiot's response. The warm, soft idiot. "No I mean the thing! With the feelings! Fucking hell, don't you remember me psych profiling the Nine?" What? The statement was so confusing Mimi couldn't even think of a starting point for defining her confusion. "She can't feel shit except anger when there's fire around! Like you and guilt and whatever!"

Taylor's gaze shifted slowly, eerily toward Mimi's. Mimi was sufficiently discombobulated, sufficiently far from fire, she shrank away from the gaze, struggling to remember why she wanted to be here -a warm touch. No, no, that wasn't it. Was it? Taylor spoke up, voice still flat, but with a tiny bit of doubt lingering in her voice now. "Do you regret your actions?"

Bonesaw made a dismissive noise while Mimi's own face crumpled now that she'd been forced to directly confront her recent memory. Yes. Yes, I regret it all. Fuck, she just attacked a city with the Nine. Again. She burned Elle before, by accident. Burned a lot of people, sometimes intentionally. Never looking back on it and feeling they deserved it, always regretting it, always so depressed and- the idiot whispered into her ear. "Actually say it, the boss is even loopier than you she won't get it from just your face, or well she won't believe it."

Mimi wiped at forming tears with the arm not held by the idiot, who she really needed to learn the name of, and choked out a sobbing confession. "Yes."

Through tears she could see Bonesaw rolling her eyes, which merited a glare from Taylor before she returned her attention to Mimi. "Do you intend to stop, if at all possible?"

Mimi nodded furiously, still rubbing at tears, still struggling to remember what chain of thought led her here. What was she even thinking when under the fire? It made so much sense at the time and now it was all just a white noise of hate and anger she could barely imagine someone else experiencing. Something about the idiot. Why was she calling her an idiot? Aside not knowing her actual name.

Taylor stared a moment before speaking again. "There's something wrong with me. It's wrong with you, too. Maybe we can fix-" Mimi wasn't quite sure what to make of the emphasis on the word fix, the breathy-manic fervor behind it, too much was happening too fast what was even going on who were these people? "-ourselves together while stopping Nilbog's plague."

Mimi blinked at that. Glanced at Bonesaw. Got that particular look back, the one Shatterbird and Bonesaw both used anytime they didn't feel like sharing with her because she was the newbie, bottom of the totem pole, worthless. Mimi took it to mean Bonesaw knew about this plague and just didn't tell her.

Which raised the question... "Who are you people and why are you working with Bonesaw?"

"Fixing my mistake."

You don't look like Nilbog to me.

And then she got distracted by the idiot squeezing her arm supportively, got further distracted by everyone piling into the truck, got further distracted by sitting in Taylor's lap, held tight and warm by someone she didn't know-

It wasn't until the next morning she remembered to ask the idiot -Cherie, her name turned out to be- about consequences.

Myrrdin

Myrrdin watched from his perch atop a roof as he fought to put out one of Burnscar's fires, Monster rushing down city streets with a teenage girl on her back and a young girl clinging to her front. "And you're sure she killed... that many of the Nine?"

"Sure as sure, dude," Haunt shot back.

Myrrdin gave her a Look. It had taken a lot of practice to convey that in costume, but he'd mastered that particular skill years ago.

Haunt folded up her arms in response, defensive. "You know I only lied that one time to protect a kid." Myrrdin pointedly did not look at the child Monster was carrying. Haunt rolled her eyes behind her bandanna-mask. "Girl wasn't there when I came by, I dunno who she is. Probably Monster is returning her to her mommy or something."

Woosh. One burning building handled, Myrrdin floated over to another rooftop and started on the next. This was where the majority of Burnscar and Shatterbird's infighting had occurred, and a surprising amount of glass had been left behind, buried up to the metaphorical hilt in cubicle walls and other relatively soft barriers. Myrrdin winced at seeing the damage the CNA Center's upper floors had suffered. Were still suffering as the fire caused further damage. When Haunt followed, he took a moment to gather his thoughts, not to mention make his preparations for putting out the fire. "Fine. I'll deal with the worst of the fires now that Burnscar is indisposed of, and then see if I can contribute against Crawler." Even though the sensible thing to do would be to chase down Monster. He had no reason to suspect he'd do anything significant to Crawler, and for the moment the monstrosity of a man was contained by Di Fu Ling's gang, as well as Tidal. And Black Bishop had indicated a willingness to test how her Trump effect interacted with his regeneration, which was far more likely to produce a decisive effect than anything he could do.

Monster, meanwhile, had caused tremendous havoc by killing Nilbog, and while the details remained murky even these months later she'd proven... dubiously cooperative with the authorities, possibly deliberately violated the rules, was partnered up with an individual the Thinkertank was returning 86% odds was an escaped Vasil kid -and the psych profiles on the captured ones made that a worrying prospect- and in general was at least reckless, if not outright a potential willing Nine recruit...

... but while Haunt was not Protectorate material, Myrrdin trusted her word.

... mostly...

... enough to unofficially let Monster off the hook for the moment.

Officially, he was making a judgment call that was well within his authority to make, prioritizing getting Crawler killed, contained, or driven out of his city.

I better not regret this, Haunt.

Mouse Protector

"So whose butts are still around to kick?" She asked the instant she was off the PRT plane, rubbing her hands together gleefully.

Myrrdin's costume didn't let you see his face, but she knew he was wincing under there. They only kinda-sorta-not-really knew each other from a couple Endbringer battles, but she'd rubbed him wrong right from the get-go. Serious dude trying to play off his powers as arcane sorcery, a learned and serious art used by blah blah blah? Of course she was gonna bug him.

Admittedly, the fact that she was doing it in the wake of a Slaughterhouse Nine attack was maybe part of his issue...

But hey, whatevs. If he was really that bothered, he would've rejected her when she volunteered to help stop-gap things. It's not like he didn't know what he was getting when he okayed the paperwork -so glad to be done with that, she would never stop being glad, being indie was best- and taking a pragmatic perspective for a moment humiliating local villains was probably a good way to get them to back off for a bit. And any grudges they bore would be unlikely to pay off when she went home! Win-win.

Myrrdin eventually answered. He was professional, she had to give him that: the only reason she could hear his dislike for her was because he was also clearly exhausted. Probably hadn't slept enough in days, poor thing. "The Folk, mostly. They're taking advantage of the crisis to spread out, establish new holdings outside their historic range. The other villains are licking their wounds." After a moment, one shoulder went up in a tired shrug. "We even had a couple turn new leaves. I'm glad something good came of this."

MP gave the thumbs-up while they both quietly ignored that a Ward had managed to die, Crawler had gotten away even though Black Bishop had proven able to meaningfully interfere with his regeneration -she was one of the new leaves, if MP was following the scuttlebutt right, gotten pardoned for her crimes and a shiny Protectorate position so long as she helped finally kill Crawler- and of course the whole 'city still stinks of fire and death and blah a week later' thing. Tons of buildings waiting on replacement windows or makeshift solutions before it was possible for people to use them without freezing to death. Burned-out hulks that would probably be demolished. Ever-present police sirens because people were looting, except some of those people were actually trying to get out of town with their own stuff, and then there were the looters pretending it was actually their stuff.

You know, the usual for a post-Nine attack.

"And hey, Jack's dead! Weirdly charismatic head of the Nine and all!" MP gave a wink. She'd very specifically gone for a mask that made it easy to see her eyes. Windows of the soul and all that jazz, right? Can't wink, roll your eyes, or otherwise express yo' self if people aren't going to see anything.

Myrrdin was studiously silent, which probably meant he was worried the 'Wild Hunt' (snrk) was possibly worse than Jack's Nine. Mouse Protector took the opportunity to roll her eyes at him before faux-overly-politely requesting a location to go handle.

MP decided Tidal was actually a pretty cool gal. They'd wrangled a couple of probable new triggers together, busted up a few looter groups, and most importantly Tidal had cracked jokes back.

From Myrrdin's description she'd been expecting a no-nonsense sort. She'd been prepping all her 'annoy the moody sorts' routines she normally used on the villains who took themselves waaaaay too seriously, and when she saw the girl it just reinforced the impression. She was wearing a kevlar vest with nothing adorning it, fer chrissakes! Like yeah that was over an actual costume with little waves etched into it and all, but the costume had that stiffness you only got when there was some armor to it too. This was a girl who was treating the fighting seriously.

Turned out the kevlar vest was an impromptu addition. Normally the girl caught bullets with water, but with how many looters were taking a 'shoot first, run second, ask questions never' approach she'd wanted protection that didn't require she be constantly on alert, and a fan had been kind enough to donate their own vest for the time being. (MP considered asking if she should get a vest, was Chicago really that shooty, and then decided it would hurt her image too much) Tidal totally had flair. She'd even done up her dreadlocks into looking like an anemone! It was amazing.

Of course, that was like two hours ago and MP kept conjuring up those memories because right now she was busy working with a couple of no-nonsense PRT grunts to dig through corpses in a mall. Whole thing was a 'parahuman crime scene' -like any part of the city wasn't, pfff- fer whatever reason, which is to say the cops hadn't been let in -god, she'd forgotten how annoying the jurisdiction jockeying was- and the non-PRT normies hadn't been let in and the PRT hadn't gotten around to it until just now. MP was here because of what she was half-suspecting was a bullshit regulation Myrrdin had totally made up so he could justify a punishment detail for her. All her times being mildly annoying catching up to her, apparently.

Not only was wading through corpses harshing her mood, which was probably exactly why he'd done it, but since she didn't have the relevant qualifications to do anything Sherlock Holmes-y she was bored. She'd been occupying herself mostly by sweeping the area for any looters dumb enough to ignore the PRT caution tape. You know, the caution tape warning that the PRT was not responsible if you got your dumb self killed on forgotten tinkertech or delayed power effects. So far, nobody had been that dumb. Every once in a while she'd be called in by the grunts to ferry something back to the nearer PRT HQ for whatever reason.

The only good part of the whole thing was getting to see Jack's corpse herself. Which was kinda a mixed blessing there. She'd tried asking why the PRT grunts were so convinced it was Jack's corpse rather than a completely unrelated gruesome cybernetic wreck, and they'd shrugged and said that's what they'd been told before going back to trying to ID bodies, figure out the basic shape of what happened here in particular, and otherwise tried very futilely to organize a very messy situation.

Learning some 'Lucky Lou' fellow was dead was outright a disappointment. He sounded like a fun villain to play off of! The grunts seemed to find it a relief, but whatever.

Ugh, so boring.

More interesting was doing villain outreach or whatever it's called. It'd been a few years, she'd been cleaning out her ears when Myrrdin was explaining it, whatevs, name didn't matter.

Whatever it was called, it was a largely-pointless thing of going and poking the hornet's nest, asking if any of the hornets had decided they'd like to stop being hornets, and getting out when they inevitably went to sting. You know, fun!

Though Di Fu Ling had actually been just a little bit creepy. Kept snapping her neck to teleport-follow MP until MP had had enough and just blipped right back to HQ. She really needed better material for somebody like Di Fu Ling. Repeating variations on 'wouldn't be caught dead' had gotten real old real fast, and it probably woulda even if Di Fu Ling had actually been reacting to any of it.

Bulgae had been amusing before Di Fu Ling had shown up, thankfully. She'd stuttered, stammered, blushed bright red, and tried to politely decline the very generous offer to turn herself in for a reduced sentence before going on to the glorious Protectorate without giving any offense. It brought a cackle up out of MP's throat to remember how the girl had reacted when MP had suggested she was very flattered but that this wasn't a good time for dates.

No surprise Watch hadn't bit. His rap sheet was long enough and horrible enough he'd be behind bars for probably the rest of his life with a reduced sentence.

Also, he was an asshole. Like, seriously, an asshole, not just a guy with superpowers doing crime.

Fun to poke at once she stopped doing the Bearer Of Good Protectorate News bit, at least. He was soooo wanting to be taken seriously, it was hilarious.

Getting the story about what specifically happened with Crawler was like pulling teeth, which sucked. Closest anyone had come in like a year to maybe-possibly killing him, and nobody involved wanted to talk about it! It had to have been amazing.

Or at least to her, admittedly. Di Fu Ling's little gang were all very reluctant to let her talk to them, with Di Fu Ling in particular being aggressively spooky. Though at least she'd managed to startle a laugh out of the lady this time with the bit about the corpse and the doctor!

Still, when she did manage to pull out some pieces, it turned out it was a pretty cool story of badassery, close calls, Black Bishop coughing up blood but powering on through, and Crawler beating a tactical retreat after sniffing the air. Also, he still regenerated, but he didn't regenerate anything that countered Black Bishop and his regeneration stopped locally for a few minutes after a hit from her teleport thing. Good news all-around, if not as good as it could be.

And then she got distracted by an enormous zeppelin bursting out of a cloud in slow motion, beelining straight for one of the Protectorate HQs. The one MP had been dropped off at.

Whu-oh.

She teleported back.

Disappointingly, it was not a supervillain here to try to conquer Chicago in the wake of the Nine's attack while twirling his evil mustache and stroking his evil goatee. Instead, it was some Boston newbie delivering supplies, food, clothes, blah blah blah, and MP had gotten roped into doing a meet'n'greet. Probably mostly because Myrrdin wanted to be left alone, really, though there were perfectly good security reasons to have a rapid response teleporter on-site to confirm the vehicle wasn't hijacked before any PRT personnel got up on the roof to start offloading the supplies. But really, mostly Myrrdin was a poor sport, typical of the snooty Protectorate leadership. Absolutely a factor in MP going indie, if less of one than the paperwork and red tape and blah blah blah.

Though really opting out of therapy was probably the big reason she'd gone indie, if MP was honest. Which she was. Always. Getting asked probing questions about whether she was 'deflecting' or 'repressing' or 'shemabilizing' (Look, MP didn't have a PHD in psych-crap) when she made jokes in life-or-death situations got soooo old soooo fast.

Though, again, getting to ignore regs was nice. If she were an actual Protectorate Hero still, she'd have to do some half-remembered rigmarole involving a salute and fancy words when the zeppelin's captain came stepping down the very large ramp and/or gangplank -seriously, it was large enough to drive two trucks side-by-side up it. Anyway, as-was, MP instead snapped off a lazy, ironic salute, and called out, "Yo."

Then she made a show of eyeing the other girl up and down, attention paid particularly to whatever seemed most likely to provoke a response. In this case, this mostly meant staring at the cleavage on display. As a proper Protectorate gal, it was no plunging neckline, but it was still fairly conspicuous, especially since the lady was otherwise dressed up somewhere between a military officer -no medals, of course, even obviously fake medals were a no-go, disrespectful of military history or somethin'- and a ye olde aviator with the heavy clothing for not freezing to death back when planes didn't have air conditioning or whatever WWII fighter pilots had to deal with. MP really dug the goggles, which were the kind of shiny red the Protectorate usually vetoed as overly-villainous but in this case managed to give the whole ensemble a little something extra, an indicator the girl was a tinker instead of a lowly non-parahuman captain in drab grays and browns.

The other girl did not in any obvious way react, possibly because her goggles were huge and hid a ton of her expression. If she was quirking an eyebrow or something under there, it was lost on MP. Instead, she put one hand out, said, "How do you do, Mouse Protector?" in an overly-casual tone MP knew like she knew the back of her hands -wait no better than that she wore gloves so actually she didn't see her hands much at all. The tone that meant she'd found someone who also didn't really enjoy the Protectorate's crock of rules an' yadda, and who enjoyed every opportunity to fight against them even if it meant looking like you were Part Of The Machine.

So MP shook hands, half-expecting a buzzer or, well, tinker so probably something a bit more exotic, but no she just got a firm handshake from a hand a wee bit bigger than her own. MP wondered briefly if that was inconvenient when tinkering, then remembered she didn't care. So maybe something a bit subtler?... MP mentally shrugged. "Enjoying myself except when I'm not. You, cape-I-don't-know?"

The other girl snorted to herself. "You mean they didn't tell you my name as part of Master/Stranger protocols or anything?"

MP shrugged with her body this time. "I may have been thinking about more important things at the time. Tacos, for example."

"Well, you can call me Major Zeppelins, then."

MP double-taked, then gave a very pointed look at the cleavage again. "Really."

The other girl laughed a little. "Really."

MP remained skeptical if a bit hopeful. "How did you get that past Branding?"

A shrug. "They were focused on rebranding me and I was already a quarter of the way through the baby behind me. I think they were focused on the military aspect of the name? They kept talking about emphasizing honor and duty and stuff."

MP grinned. "Well, a proper hello to you too then, Major Zeppelins."

Then she disappeared back inside the building with a teleport to let the PRT personnel on standby know that the security could go do other stuff and the non-combat personnel could go start offloading supplies, and promptly reappeared beside Major Zeppelins having tagged her when they shook hands. It was so lovely how people would just politely shake hands with her without a second thought.

Major Zeppelins made an unimpressed noise, but MP brightly asked her, "So why did you make an airborne dreadnought, anyway?" before MZ could get a word in edgewise.

This was a tinker. Getting them to talk about their work was easy, and a perfect distraction from any faux pas one committed. Deliberate or otherwise. MZ stepped aside as PRT personnel trooped out the building with trolleys 'n whatnot to get stuff from the blimp, and forced-casually (Like any Tinker trying to not let on how much they actually wanted to talk about their work) replied, "Oh, you know, I wanted to be able to work on projects inside it."

MP blinked at that non-answer. Tilted her head consideringly as the lightbulb went off over her head. (She still wanted a Mouse Protector cartoon. Biggest disappointment of going indie; cartoons were way harder to get started) "Ya gotta quirk to how you tinker, don't you." It was not a question.

MZ started cracking her knuckles and stretching. "Bigger projects are easier for me. If I double my scale, it takes maybe 50% longer and the result works better. So I needed a really big zeppelin if I wanted my comfortable lower end to be doable at all."

MP considered that. "Huh. I can see why the Protectorate would want you badly enough to put up with rebranding." Then she grinned mischievously. "So what were you before rebranding? And how long, anyway?"

MZ went quiet in a way that MP recognized as 'ya dun fucked up'. She didn't grimace, but it was a near thing -just 'cause she liked messing with people didn't mean she enjoyed pushing people to tears, and parahuman sore points tended to be... sore. MP was trying to pick out a good apology when MZ quietly murmured, "Villainous underling to a man I loved. He died. I didn't."

MP shuffled uncomfortably. "Sucks."

Then MZ caught her off guard by waving it off. "Naaaah. Hurts, but it doesn't suck. Hindsight is 20/20 and I've been talking to a therapist-" MP suppressed her grimace. Shrinks. "-and looking back he was kinda shit as boyfriend material goes. Liked me for my body and power, but me was only worthwhile if I was degrading myself. I miss the feelings, I kinda miss him sometimes, but I wouldn't go back."

MP took that in, eyeing MZ with new respect. "That's a really healthy attitude. Gotta hand it to Yamada, she does good work!"

"Who?" MZ replied blankly.

MP grimaced openly this time. "Never mind, never mind, just making dumb assumptions." Then she grinned. "Hey, you gonna be coming with to crack some skulls for great justice?"

MZ turned her head, apparently looking at the offloading process. MP was pretty sure she was seeing batteries in this batch. There was an awkward silence, and then- "I'd been planning on tinkering some more, but... it would be nice to do something a bit more... you know."

MP nodded sagaciously. Even tinkers liked getting into the fray. It was like some cosmic truism or something. Or maybe just human nature, MP had gotten into enough fights before she ever triggered and beating people up for fun wasn't exactly the exclusive domain of parahumans. Just look at Brockton Bay's infamous underground blood sports. Headed by parahumans, yeah, but audience and participants? Regular joes, not even all of them that local supremacist gang MP could never remember the name of. It sounded like a robot's ID, it was on the tip of her tongue...

Oh, never mind.

It took five minutes for MZ to obtain permission to do some patrols locally, which MP would've found alarming if this weren't a post-Nine disaster zone. Five minutes was crazy-fast, but in an actual emergency it was totally protocol that you sought forgiveness rather than permission. This gray zone encouraged speed.

Which, hey, was part of why MP had volunteered here.

MZ had ended up deploying in one of her smaller blimp-things. 'Smaller' in this case meant 'comparable to an eighteen-wheeler, but in the sky.' MP had figured she'd take the land route, but MZ had insisted on sharing the space with her. Once she saw inside, MP had an idea why -it wasn't nearly as cramped as she was expecting.

Maybe halfway through patrol she also had a Sensitive And Insightful Mouse Protector Moment: maaaaybe that dead villain boyfriend had been prone to riding with MZ, and having a ride-along was comfortable and familiar.

MP grimaced at the thought. Gawd, she was thinking like a therapist. Bad brain, stop that.

In any event they broke up some looting, MZ cleared some rubble from where the Crawler brawler had been especially violent (And like any good tinker kept it for herself -she explained the concrete was of little interest to her, but the rebar was nice. MP nodded along like she cared, and then made gagging motions behind MZ's back), and MZ had actually brought along some supplies, which the two of them distributed to some of the needier-looking families. MP was particularly glad to have helped the one family that was trapped on the top floor of their building. They'd refused to move, 'cause the collapsed stairs were protecting them from looters and whatnot, but they'd been running out of supplies and were worried. The kids had been cute and sweet. The kind of kids MP had gone indie for.

As was MP's wont, she'd filled the silence with chatter, and MZ had been totally chill. Not super-chatty herself, but not complaining either.

During one lull, MP had randomly picked at the latest local gossip, not really expecting MZ to be interested. She'd been wrong.

"Se the PRT called that new little gang the Wild Hunt, right? I hear they're behind a good chunk of the Nine deaths that happened this go-'round, but there's talk they're just the Nine continuing to Nine it up and a little birdy told me through the grapevine that rumor says the PRT only renamed them because the Nine running around for like two decades has been this PR nightmare."

MZ visibly perked up, attention pulled partially away from the overly-complicated array of controls in front of her. MP really, really wanted to pull the giant red lever labeled DO NOT PULL. It was probably a self-destruct or something cool like that... "You mean Monster's group?"

MP frowned at that. "Uuuuuuh maybe? It's not like I really dug into them. Main thing I recall is Burnscar has maybe been sighted with them, hence part of the Nine still Nineing thing?"

MZ made a vague hand motion. "Dresses in black, turns into a giant spider or something?"

Oh! Yes, MP knew that one. "Right, yeah."

...

Hold on. "Wait, is that their name for themselves or is it a Protectorate name?" 'cause seriously who calls themselves Monster? Actually, for that matter what kind of cape would get the Protectorate to call them Monster?

MZ shrugged. "I dunno. I only checked her file once, and she didn't tell me when we met."

MP started bouncing in her seat, only partially exaggerating her excitement. "Ooooh, you met this girl? How's she fight, anyway?" Because MP genuinely enjoyed hearing this stuff and because it was possible Monster might go kicking around in her territory at some point. Business and pleasure.

MZ shrugged again. "I didn't fight her. Or see her fight. She found me when I was dying and turned me in to the PRT."

MP stared at MZ. "Wait hold up, this girl some pundits are trying to say is just going to be the next Jack Slash... saved you from death?"

MZ nodded. "And from the villain lifestyle while she was at it, kinda. She's not a pleasant person, she had her buddy use her power to, I think, basically torture me? I honestly don't remember the encounter that well, I was bleeding out, I had the beginnings of a serious infection, and I was still mourning my guy so mostly I remember bitterness and anger. But she could've just finished me off with room to argue it was a mercy killing, and she didn't."

MP leaned back into her chair, pensive for the moment. "Huh." Then she promptly bounced back. "So what do you know about her?"

MZ fiddled with a doohickey for the fiftieth time, still with no apparent effect. MP was beginning to suspect that particular doohickey was so MZ had something to do with her hands, rather than for controlling anything. "Well, the Protectorate doesn't like her. She signed up as an indie hero, turned in a minor villain and supposedly accidentally killed the partner though now there's doubts it was actually accidental, stalked the local Wards school and freaked people out, killed an unknown parahuman when they were in plainclothes, and there's some redacted bits that I kinda suspect tie into the real reason the Protectorate doesn't like her. So far she's not even got three strikes on record, and I'd say she's at least trying to pass for someone trying to do good, which is more than I can say for a couple of the Protectorate capes I've met."

MP nodded solemnly at that. The bad apples the Protectorate helped cover up the misdeeds of was one more in her litany of reasons for going indie. She thought the Protectorate did good overall, but still...

MZ was still talking, though. "So from what I got trained in during rebranding, my gut tells me the Protectorate should be trying to emphasize that we don't know a lot about her motives and situation, try to present it like she might've been raised by wolves and it's our duty to determine that and straighten her out if it's true. Instead they're mostly letting the news stations pick the narrative, and that narrative is..."

MP finished for her. "... Jack Slash's heir, hooray for feminism."

MZ snorted at the second bit. "I haven't heard that spin on it."

MP gave an exaggerated shrug back. "Your loss." Then she went back to relatively serious. "So are you thinking redacted like 'she found out Armsmaster likes sniffing people's underwear, how scandalous' or redacted like 'we don't even want to admit there's aliens in Area 51 let alone explain that she ate them and announced her plans to conquer the world with their superior genetic material'?"

MZ was clearly struggling not to laugh, and not particularly winning. Eventually she calmed down enough to actually speak. "I really don't know. She didn't strike me as villainous when I briefly met her, but she didn't strike me as particularly heroic either. I try to imagine her threatening to reveal unpleasant heroic secrets because hiding them is wrong and I just can't picture it."

MP stroked her chin faux-thoughtfully. "So basically all we've got is empty gossip and newscaster opinions."

MZ actually grinned at that. "Just like back in high school."

That startled a laugh out of MP, and she decided that, yes, she liked MZ.

Of course, Major Zeppelins' patrol had to end eventually so she could go back to Boston. They actually bothered to exchange email addresses, with MZ (faux?)solemnly promising to help MP refine her 'drive the villain to a frothing rage while staying child-friendly' dialogue.

The rest of MP's time in Chicago was comparatively boring. Crawler didn't crawl back. Jack Slash didn't pop out of a grave and say, "What, you really thought I died so easily?" The Teeth did send a couple parahuman lieutenants with twenty or so normies to try to get a foothold but MP captured one and the other went screaming back home to Mommy Butcher, leaving the normies in the awkward position of either continuing to play at being Teeth and end up locked up for illegal possession of firearms, assault, robbery, squatting, yadda yadda, or give up on the whole thing before the cops came down on them with SWAT gear. So that was like a whole twenty minutes of excitement. Myrrdin continued to find excuses to put MP on dull-as-dishwater assignments.

In the end, MP found herself going home with not a single cool adventure to lord over Ravager when she got back.

So disappointing.

6.p

?

"Oh god." The voice has a faint Irish accent, as if perhaps the owner of it had been a boy of ten or so when his parents had immigrated to the US. Present enough to notice it, faint enough to wonder if you imagined it.

The camera is aimed at a bloody mess that used to be a dozen human beings, seemingly cut with a simple knife over and over and over. All of them are wearing some amount of black and blue -the gang colors of the Human Disciples in Chicago. Many of them are clutching at small pistols, obviously tinkertech, though some instead have a dusting of blue and green on one hand. The location seems to be a mall, one quite clearly ruined by Shatterbird's 'song'. It is a dim space, lit only by the sun streaming through the skylights, which are spaced too far apart, made still more difficult to understand by the fisheye lens the camera uses.

A calm, lazy male voice calls out from somewhere unseen. "You can't hide forever, Fab. We both know your tech degrades when used, and quite rapidly." There's the momentary sound of gunfire, echoing strangely, accompanied by blue blurs shooting from right to left. The man sounds amused now. "Non-lethal still? I know you work quick enough you could've outfitted these boys and girls with something with some actual kick to it by now." Screams, blood spattering onto the floor from somewhere to the right, unseen. "Come on then, I'm a busy man and you're just making this harder on yourself than it has to be. Not to mention getting so many poor, innocent gangers killed with your selfishness. Is that really the man you want to be, Fab?"

"oh god." The faintly Irish voice again. It's obvious now they can only be heard because they're extremely close to the camera, probably are in fact the person carrying it.

"Of course it's not. Now we're going to-" More gunfire cuts off the lazy voice, accompanied by a grunt of irritation. "Excuse me." Spatter of some kind of fluid, accompanied shortly by a scream. The scream cuts off abruptly. Then silence.

"oh god. Please no."

Footsteps, getting closer. Then the lazy voice again. "You know, hiding is a good plan. Can't run, can't win, so hide right? Right." A man steps into view, walking with lazy confidence, spinning a mid-sized butcher's knife in one hand. He's dressed casually, a brown leather jacket worn over a black-and-red plaid shirt, worn-out jeans completing the vaguely rustic picture, and his facial hair is the kind of unkempt a man who couldn't be bothered for the last week gets, stubble verging into something substantial. A face well-known to the public, an image ingrained in the mind's eye.

Jack Slash.

The knife switches hands in a smooth, rolling motion, obviously much-practiced, the man's head turning slowly while his eyes dart about restlessly. "This is normally the part where I'd threaten to do terrible things to the people you care about for every minute you keep me waiting, but we both know there's no one you care about, not really."

A barely-audible whimper.

Jack Slash wanders semi-randomly, drifting ever closer to the camera. He doesn't appear to see anything, but the muted sounds of distress make it clear the possibly-Irish man is worried regardless. The knife flicks in a smooth motion to the camera's right, followed by a muted thump. Jack Slash makes an amused sound, and then flicks the knife again. "Playing dead never ceases to amuse me." Jack Slash is perhaps two feet in front of the camera when he stops, still looking somewhere to the camera's right. "The problem with hiding is-"

There's a skittering, scrabbling noise from the left, behind Jack Slash. The man makes an annoyed sound, briefly glances at one of the abandoned stores, and then spins on one heel, keeping his balance in spite of the blood running under his boots. The camera's view judders for a moment, and then slowly, carefully looks left, view partially obscured by a much-abused pillar. Jack Slash swaps which hand is holding the knife again, a quicker, smoother motion, while the newly-freed hand darts to a pocket. He makes a thoughtful noise, the hand remaining where it is, while the knife continues to dance.

The skittering stops, and footsteps start. A slow, steady rhythm, lacking weight behind the individual footfalls. Jack smiles. "Oh, hello there, monster. I don't suppose you know where Haunt has wandered off to? Silly girl, she hasn't stuck around long enough to hear out the rules of this game." The tone is light, casual, like speaking to a friend.

The Irish voice's owner seems to be trying to not hyperventilate.

A girl's voice responds indistinctly, distantly. Then a moment later it speaks in a carrying tone. "Are you willing to repent, Jack?" The girl's voice is calm, controlled, but the words themselves are delivered awkwardly, and with little conviction. She sounds young, if a bit ambiguously so. Late teens, early twenties.

Jack Slash cocks his head, one hand still in a pocket, the other hand bringing the knife up to eye level. "You know, I have rather a lot of respect for your work, monster." His voice remains casual, warm, friendly.

The Irish man begins to hyperventilate.

"I'm killing people like you to make the world a better place, Jack." The girl's voice is irritated more than angry, sounding vaguely insulted.

The hyperventilating stops, breath held.

Jack Slash raises an eyebrow, hand in the pocket coming out, a brief glint of metal, a switchblade palmed in it, to then wave back and forth a bit, thumb holding the switchblade in place while the other fingers are extended. "Funny. You seem like the rulebreaker from here, dear child. Unwritten rules? Ring a bell?"

The girl's response is only partially audible. "... damn question." There's no emotion in the voice, none of the irritation from before, no anger. The girl sounds almost bored, swearing aside.

"See, I was rather looking forward to seeing how you might perform as part of our art, as you? You cut to the heart of things." Jack Slash's face shifts a little, eyes still on the knife held obviously out, while the other hand very casually goes down and, resting just below Jack Slash's tailbone, flicks the switchblade out. "Ah, truth, justice, and the American way. A merry set of lies, no?" The tone is mocking now, clear and obvious, an adult belittling a child who thinks Santa is real. "When really it's all about power." He says this in a grandiose way, while the switchblade is swung in a short motion at something unseen, accompanied by barely-audible tearing. "Those who can, murder. Those who can't, talk. Right? Right, I think anyone can see that by looking at parahumans, let alone politicians, and it's such a delight to see one so young as yourself -darling teen that you are- recognizing this truth." That part sounds heartfelt and honest, disturbingly. "So many buy into the nonsense people like the Protectorate are sell-"

Jack Slash's more obvious blade is jerked forward as the man drops into a low crouch, and after a moment his legs uncoil like springs, launching him up and up and up. The camera -clearly without conscious thought- tracks him in a jerky, startled way to where he lands on a flagpole, legs promptly curling to hold him in place, and flicks the switchblade and the main knife three, maybe four times in rapid succession. The camera jerks down and to the left, where the swings appear to have been aimed, and there's a momentary glimpse of a roiling black object, a formless mass of limbs with a glimpse of blue. A moment later, the mass is gone, a black cape falling away, cut up, leaving only a tall teen or a scrawny adult in a rather edgy costume, all black aside the blood red maw for a face. The Irish voice makes an inarticulate noise of surprise.

Then Jack Slash lands on the girl, contriving to force her to the ground, his weight on her back, arms pinning her arms to her side while the kitchen knife is moved to her throat. He murmurs something to her, the words lost but the tone -mean, angry- carrying to the camera well enough. The Irish man whimpers, sounding frightened and disappointed.

There's a single frame, literally one frame, of something blue and monstrous looking, and then Jack Slash is in the air, heading toward an empty stretch of wall. The girl makes as if to follow, and then is replaced by the blur of blades, running Jack Slash down, slamming him into the wall, pinning him. From this angle, it's difficult to tell what is happening exactly, though knives can be seen being slapped away, and there's glimpses of some of the thing's limbs shoved into Jack Slash's flesh, pinning him gruesomely to the wall.

(There is a brief-lived meme, based on a cropped version of one particular frame, subtitling the image with HE DIED FOR YOUR SINS. It's rapidly supplanted by memes celebrating the man's death)

In a high, frightened voice, Jack Slash calls out. "Help! There's-" It's not clear what the creature does, but Jack is silenced, though somehow still not dead. There's surprisingly little blood, given the extent of his injuries.

After a moment, gruesome sounds and glimpses of awful visuals occur. There's a surprising amount of steel under Jack Slash's skin, and even once the camera turns away the squeal of metal and the nauseating, wet sounds continue for some time. The Irish man begins muttering, so quietly only pieces of words can be heard. He seems to be praying.

Partway through the horrible, horrible noises, a girl's voice comes along -a different one. "Dude's turned off his pain receptors, I think. He's weirdly calm about this, so he can still come back from what you've done, I'm guessing. Probably Bonesaw can fix him." A restrained, calm sort of excitement. The Irish man stops muttering, and the camera slowly tilts back toward the sickening action, to reveal an ordinary-looking girl, no costume, no mask. Just a blur over the face, clearly stock internet identity censorship, not a power at work. Even then, it's obvious the new girl is a leggy blonde, pale of skin.

The noises get worse, while the ordinary-looking girl hums to herself. A minute later, the blue body jerks. The girl speaks up, sounding pleased. "Now he's panicking proper. He still thinks he can be rescued, I suspect, but he's no longer thinking you're failing to actually kill him."

Five and a half minutes pass, most of them spent with the camera looking away, occasionally shuddering when a particularly gruesome sound is heard. "Aaaand there he goes." The happiness there is surprisingly low-key, sounding more like someone pleased to have found a pen in the color they like than someone who just confirmed Jack Slash is dead. The camera turns back-

there's an awkward, obvious jump cut

-and the Irish voice speaks up, the camera approaching the two girls standing near Jack Slash's body, wrapped up in conversation with each other. "Y-you actually killed him!" Shock, awe, and no small amount of horror. The camera is focused first and foremost on the grisly remains of Jack Slash's body. There's a lot more steel and a lot less blood than one might expect even given the prior portion of the video, mesh cages with holes punched in them and-

another badly done jump cut

-the camera is facing the girls now, the Irish voice speaking. "...d you girls would be?"

The view jerks as the costumed girl speaks, sounding irritated. "Monster."

Art Hogan -known by about twenty times as many people by his cape identity of Fab, which is to say twenty people knew who Fab was and his mother knew who Art was- dabbed at his sweaty forehead. This was scary to be doing, worrying the Monster girl would get mad and blame him, but the cold sweat he broke out at the idea of the Nine coming after him was worse. Better to get it out to the world that the girl had killed Jack Slash. Better her than him, ya know?

It was still hard to make himself push the button, and in the end the only reason he finally did it was that he noticed the camera was starting to flake. He had ten minutes, maybe twenty, before the option was taken away from him entirely, the camera disintegrating into a pile of colorful dust like all his creations did when used up, and the sense of urgency finally emboldened him.

Of course, it wasn't that simple. When he uploaded it to Youtube, it got taken down within five, maybe ten minutes, and he got an automatic warning about inappropriate content. Fifteen minutes after that, the dummy email he was using got a message from a staff member, informing him his account was suspended and what the fuck was wrong with him. That was okay, though, because he was busily uploading it to every other site that would let him. It didn't last long on any of them, either, but it didn't need to. In fact, by the end of the day it was being reuploaded on various sites -some of them personal sites, where no authority could readily pull them- by people who weren't him.

He didn't find that out until the next day, though, because around the thirtieth time he tried to upload the video to a site the laptop he was, er, 'borrowing' (It wasn't theft if the tenants had clearly left it behind while they fled the city, not really) made an unpleasant series of noises, displayed a skull and crossbones against a completely black screen, and then shut off and refused to boot no matter what he did.

Fuckin' computer tinkers, man.

When he did get to a clean computer and found that the video was already viral, he nearly collapsed in relief.

Then he began plotting how he was going to change his name, move out of the country, and figure out how to apply his power in a way that couldn't be connected to Fab, because pissing off someone who'd killed Jack Slash was almost as bad as pissing off the Nine. This took a lot of research, because honestly he didn't know much of anything about the cool parts of being a criminal. He just made tinker things for criminals, and they took care of the rest.

But eventually Paxton Dieter moved to Brazil, where he lived happily ever after.

... well, by Bet standards, anyway. Fuckin' Behemoth, man...

Piggot

Piggot suppressed a sigh of irritation.

She'd largely stopped thinking about Monster in the weeks the woman had been lying low. It was out of her jurisdiction, and once she'd passed off some files it largely fell under the head office's purview. The father was the only connection to Brockton Bay, and there was no evidence of contact between the two of them. She still had eyes and ears on him, of course, but nothing new had happened since she'd had him approached, informed of the situation, and agreeing to help. She'd been happy to have Monster fall into the back of her memory.

Then the damn video had been released and gone viral.

Then Monster had collected the Kill Order bounty on Jack.

And Shatterbird.

And Mannequin.

And Hatchet Face.

Oh, those last three had been delayed while the larger PRT corroborated information, but that was worse. When Monster retrieved Jack's bounty, it was just an obvious cape going into the Boston PRT HQ and having a chat and an hour later walking out with a debit card. Armstrong had even been on the ball enough to ensure a charming cape was on hand to start working on Monster. It could have been the start of salvaging the whole mess.

Unfortunately, someone (Armstrong) had failed to contain the information that she'd be back in three days for the other three bounties, and so her second trip had involved an entire media circus. While Monster was clearly not skilled at public speaking, her answers had still managed to be a PR nightmare. For starters, she'd been caught asking if there'd been a bounty on Heartbreaker -while the answer was 'not under PRT-approved bounties', the fact that she'd asked had all but confirmed what Brockton and Toronto's people had recently tentatively concluded; that the Vasil family scattering had been kicked off by Monster crossing state lines and killing the man. That would've been useful a couple months ago, but now it was redundant for the PRT's purposes and had given Monster a PR boost. Heartbreaker hadn't been at the level of Ash Beast, but he'd been plenty hated, and the question put Monster in that grey zone where they couldn't take it as a legal admission of guilt but plenty of people would informally cheer her on for the act unless evidence arose that she hadn't done it. Which wasn't going to happen for obvious reasons.

Monster had also insisted that Burnscar hated that name and was currently going by 'Trailblazer'. So far the media wasn't running with it, and even if they did it would only be a minor PR win for the Wild Hunt, but the insistence itself was the real problem, humanizing Monster. A woman who had friends and whose friends had feelings, pulling attention away from the fact that said friend was a member of the Nine and so had a Kill Order on her that was entirely deserved. Piggot caught herself scowling at the thought, then decided scowling was entirely appropriate. There'd been a psych analysis done on Monster not long after she'd vanished from the Bay again, and it had painted a compelling picture of a serial killer driven to get one over on the authorities. Piggot didn't like that this could either be taken as further proof of that particular analysis or as evidence her psych people were useless.

The main good news was that the bounty debit cards would throw up a red flag if they did anything illegal with them. Due to laws Piggot really did not approve of relating to the honoring of the 'bounty truce', they couldn't legally pull the data on where they were being used and for what if it didn't trigger a red flag unless the Chief Director herself signed off on it, which wasn't going to happen unless the Wild Hunt did something even more egregious than be possibly a continuation of the Nine, so it was a pretty bitter 'gain'. She didn't like that the most likely scenario was the Wild Hunt attacking a city, being reclassed as a continuation of the Nine, and then having it turn out the cards were already cashed out a week before the attack. She especially didn't like that someone at the head office had decided it was more important to embrace the PR advantage of being able to claim the Nine were gone for good than it was to ensure the PRT wasn't seen being overly-optimistic when it turned out that was wrong.

Eventually Piggot dragged herself from her dark mood. The Monster situation was bad, but it was also the case that it wasn't really her concern anymore. Her office having the initial files on Monster wasn't going to matter at all at some point in the near future. She needed to stay focused on her own city, and not on the headaches of the head office screwing up what used to be her business.

So. Her city.

One good thing that most likely had come out of this Monster mess; Empire Eighty Eight was posturing in a manner that internal analysis suggested was them covering for holes in their cape force. The Thinkertank had corroborated this with 87% accuracy, too, which had the benefit of letting Piggot move forward more aggressively without the head office breathing down her neck. While in the short term it was a problem that Hookwolf, Stormtiger, and Cricket had been especially persistent about getting into very public fights with the ABB, particularly given their penchant for attacking civilians, Piggot was increasingly confident they were going to slip up and she'd have them behind bars in short order. More importantly, Kaiser had been making a point of showing up in person to make speeches, and Armsmaster was confident his new tranquilizer would get Fenja and Menja out of the way smoothly. Piggot's gut told her that without Kaiser the Empire would fracture, and it would be relatively trivial to clean up afterward. Kaiser had never been as brazen as he was currently being, for all that he presented himself as having no fear of the Protectorate.

She didn't like how Lung was getting bolder. The Undersiders had stopped raiding ABB holdings for unclear reasons, and possibly-coincidentally but Piggot couldn't bring herself to believe it Lung had suddenly made a habit of going out in person in ABB operations, where he'd previously been more content to leave him and his powers out of things so long as no one pushed into his territory. There was also evidence the ABB was recruiting more aggressively from the high schools, though if so the why remained mysterious. That last point was something Piggot could work on reasonably directly, at least, and she made notes for plans to do some kind of event with troopers. Something to convince kids that they could become something better than a gang thug, while also giving an opportunity to get eyes on the ground. Possibly sniff out some existing gang members, scare off recruiting attempts for a week or so, or otherwise have opportunity present itself. Lung taking to the field wasn't anything she could really do anything about unless he did something to convince the head office Brockton Bay was acceptable collateral damage in pursuit of killing him, and she had doubts Lung was going to cross that line. Nor did she really want to pursue such measures. Better to hope she got lucky and a new cape gave new opportunity to bring him in. Not that she had much faith in luck, mind...

On a different note, she was beginning to really hate this 'Coil' person. He didn't make any damn sense. Even Calvert, snake in the grass he was who could usually be counted on to come up with something plausibly slimy going through peoples' heads when everyone else was utterly stumped, had shrugged apologetically and murmured that sometimes parahumans didn't make sense. He wasn't doing anything more illegal than having men run around with firearms that they might have been able to legally own if they didn't have tinkertech attachments, occasionally defending themselves when another gang opened fire, but Piggot didn't trust that for a second. Nobody came up with a parahuman name and poured money into running a gang so they could sit in their parents' basement doing nothing. And unlike the other gangs of the city, trying to get insider information was going nowhere. Infiltrating with a mole was a no-go when the gang's holdings were utterly unknown, and discrete attempts to pay for information had gone nowhere. It wasn't clear where Coil's men even lived.

The Archer's Bridge Merchants drying up pretty much entirely was one other clear good. There was a new cape, some kind of tinker, who was trying to hold the group together, but current intel indicated he was at best stemming the bleeding. The Merchants had never been much more than basic drug peddlers who happened to be held together by a thin rhetoric that hated anyone more successful than them (Which in practice basically meant everyone), and it had only held up as long as Skidmark had been around to promise people he could lead them to 'greatness'. He'd not been able to deliver on such promises when he was alive, and having died to Lung... well. It made any replacement's position rather tenuous. The tinker wasn't charismatic, and so far he wasn't a strong cape. Piggot was hoping Armsmaster would be willing to quietly talk with the man soon. Lone tinkers were vulnerable, and as yet the tinker didn't actually have a rap sheet. He was just a man who was trying to convince criminals to treat him as their boss... and failing. Get him into Protectorate hands, and that would be a pretty straightforward win.

And over with the Wards... the experiment with them operating out of PRT HQ under her command instead of under Armsmaster from Protectorate HQ still felt like an attempt by the man to shirk work, but working with the little monsters had made it harder for her to begrudge him the point. If nothing else, he was completely correct that PRT HQ was much more accessible to the Wards than Protectorate HQ was. They were patrolling 30% more than before, and it was entirely because they didn't spend as much time in transit. Especially since it was easier to sneak children into PRT HQ than onto the Rig. Given how vocal Shadow Stalker was about not getting enough patrol time as was, Piggot couldn't imagine how unbearable the girl must have been before. The occasional pointed remark from Vista also stood out, though the other Wards seemed happy with their current situation... aside perhaps Clockblocker, but she was never entirely certain when he was genuinely complaining as opposed to pretending to complain. He'd yet to shirk patrol, so she was leaving him alone. Complaining was fine so long as it didn't happen in the field. Better than actually failing to do his duty.

Overall, Piggot supposed things could be far worse.

Monster could still be in her city, after all.

Pauline Vasil

Pauline had originally expected to stay with Aylia two, maybe three days. More than that and Daddy would be upset when she got back.

Then the next morning had come and the news had told her that her family was running rampant in the streets, being run down by the PRT and Protectorate, their house compromised.

Pauline had not been sure what to do then, and did not like it.

She was supposed to protect the house, but that wasn't possible. She was supposed to prevent her siblings from getting themselves into trouble, but they were already in trouble and she was also supposed to avoid being captured. Daddy had been quite explicit that if rescuing a sibling risked getting caught, she was to leave them to die if that's what it took to avoid being caught. So going out was unacceptable. She was supposed to meet up with Daddy if the house was compromised, but until he called her cell phone she wouldn't know where he was. Right now, she was somewhere the PRT wouldn't look, she was physically safe, and Aylia seemed perfectly happy with the situation.

So she waited.

Days faded into weeks. Daddy didn't call. Her siblings were almost all accounted for when she checked online. (Cherie, Jean-Paul, and herself became the only exceptions) She didn't think about the aunts until Aylia asked what her family would think of her being gone for so long. Pauline's old routine suffered, which was such a suffocating experience she did her best to tweak it. She patrolled Aylia's house at night, looking for intruders, as she'd done for Daddy. Anytime she found herself with a panic attack because she couldn't turn to Daddy and that was wrong, she turned to Aylia instead, initially reluctantly and later with increasing relief as it came to feel normal in its own right. It helped that Aylia made her strong like Daddy had done, if differently. She didn't even have to threaten Aylia to be strong. She just had to smile and tease.

Eventually stress died away. When there were problems, Aylia had answers. When there were problems Aylia didn't know how to deal with, Pauline had answers, such as when one of Aylia's workmates had tried to follow her home when she'd already said 'no'. That woman had ended up with a broken nose and, as far as Pauline knew, had never bothered Aylia again. It had been quite satisfying to see Aylia's shy smile afterward.

One day, Pauline's cell phone rang. This was normal. Aylia called Pauline for a variety of reasons these days, with no pattern to it. Initially that had bothered Pauline, but now it was a pleasant surprise when it happened, something she looked forward to interrupting her.

So she'd taken the call, and Cherie's voice had come through. "Hey, hey Pauline is that you?"

Pauline stilled, surprised. She liked Cherie well enough, but it had been months. Why was Cherie calling now? "Yes?"

Cherie moaned in a manner Pauline recognized as 'I'm frustrated and relieved and can't decide which one I'd rather be feeling'. "Okay, like, I'm supposed to be recruiting for the boss right now so-"

Pauline didn't care. "Where is Daddy?" Cherie always knew. Always. When she said she didn't know, it was a lie, and Pauline had to hit her.

Cherie moaned again, this time her 'I'm talking to Pauline' moan. Pauline had never figured out why Cherie had a moan specific for talking to her. "He's dead, okay? I know because I helped make it happen, boss did it, I don't regret it for a fucking second and I swear to god if you give me shit for it-"

Pauline tuned out the ensuing rant. Daddy is... dead? The thought felt less bad than she'd expected it to. It had been months, after all, and the rest of her siblings were still in PRT hands, aside two unpowered siblings that had been adopted. Daddy would never have stood for that, and he made things happen. If he hadn't even tried, which he hadn't since she'd seen no news on him for these months as well, then he must not have been able to. Death was a reasonable explanation. If she'd learned two months ago, she'd probably have taken it... poorly. Even a month ago, it would probably have been frightening.

As was, it was a dull, faint ache she couldn't put words to.

Cherie was still talking. "-abbed him myself if I coulda, he was a fucking waste of space and an asshole and I'm glad to be rid of him and you should be too given how often he punished you with fear."

Pauline tilted her head thoughtfully, a gesture she'd learned to do because Aylia found it 'adorable'. "I don't recall being punished."

Cherie made a choked, disbelieving gasp. "Wh-wha- what? He did it like three times a fucking month at minimum! You broke rules all the fucking time and he'd hit you so hard with fear you were foaming at the mouth on the ground!"

"Oh. That," Pauline remarked absent-mindedly. "Yes, Daddy did make me strong."

There was a long silence on the other side. "Are you telling me you are actually powered by fear, even your own?" Pauline didn't understand the question. "No wait never mind I'm supposed to be proposing you come out and join our mad crew doing awesome things. Don't wanna say too much in detail on the phone, but you probably already know who we are so-"

"No."

"-oh right it's Pauline of course well me and the boss and her friends are pulling together a team to, uh, go do awesome stuff. It involves violence, so I'm sure it's got your approval, so how about I-"

"No."

"-uuuugh. Look, I know how you were with Daddy, I've totally been there on the utter existential crisis level, and even though we've had our differences with you punching the shit out of me and all I'm willing to be the bigger girl -ha!- and extend this invitation anyway because I feel sympathetic to you now that I've had a few months to think back on how you probably were just as much a victim as anyone-"

Pauline decided she was bored of this conversation. "I am going to hang up, and then I am going to call my girlfriend. We will live happily ever after. Goodbye, Cherie."

"WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU ON AB-"

click

Pauline dialed the number. "Hello Aylia. What would you like for dinner tonight?"

"Oh, Polly!" Pauline used to mind the nickname. At some point she'd started to like it. Then she'd stopped thinking about it. "Whatever you like! It's your birthday, right? You've been saying today's your birthday for a week, I didn't misremember, right? So we'll do what you want! And happy birthday, hon!"

Pauline smiled warmly, emotion showing that hadn't been there when talking to Cherie. "Whatever makes you happy is what I want today."

And that's what they did.

Elsewhere, Cherie stared down at one of her cell phones in disbelief. "The bitch hung up on me! She never hangs up on anyone!" Then she slumped against the bathroom stall wall. "Fuck, okay, fine, plan Make The Boss Happy By Recruiting My Maybe-Powerful Sibling is a fucking bust. And I've already killed Jean-Paul 'cause I'm a fucking idiot. Fuck." She spitefully kicked at a stall door. "Seriously though, Pauline with a girlfriend? That Shylia chick couldn't have been that good, and Pauline would never have gone out to do it herself. What the fuck did I miss?"

Then she sighed and headed back out to the truck, muttering under her breath. "Fine. Live 'happily ever after'. See if I ever do you any favors ever again. Bitch."

6.r

Rune

Rune had thought she was firmly on the side of Empire Eighty-Eight.

Past tense.

She'd never liked Locust, of course, but she'd been able to be professional about it, back before Locust and Fog had died and it turned out Locust's bugs had been eating people. That tidbit had made being E88 hard, but she'd have been able to push past it if it had turned out it was a carefully-kept secret, something known only to a few sick fucks. But it hadn't. Rune had fished around quietly, and while the non-capes were hit-or-miss it had become increasingly obvious that pretty much every cape other than herself had known about it, and in fact most of them had helped supply Locust at one point or another. From the way Stormtiger had talked about it, she gathered it had been a bit of an initiation ritual before a cape could be inducted into some of the more important meetings, that she probably would've been expected to do it sometime in the next year.

The thought made her gorge rise.

It was fucking cannibalism.

Problem was, she'd gotten herself tied to things. She wasn't a new recruit anymore, eased into the life with hiding behind your mask being tolerated so long as you showed up and did the work. They knew what she looked like under the mask, what her name was, where she lived. Even if she were okay with going back to her parents, they wouldn't be able to do anything about it. She wasn't like Purity, who had drifted apart at some point and nobody had been willing to pressure her because even Alabaster would probably not get back up after one of her beams hit him. She wasn't like Hookwolf, who was strong enough and versatile enough and not chained to people enough that if he really wanted he could just wander off and the Empire would probably let him.

Sure, she could pick up a dump truck and crush someone under it, but Rune was still an ordinary squishy human when you got down to things. Slow, fragile, soft-hitting. Too young to readily get a gun by legal means, and too cape-y for the Empire to sneak her one without a damn good reason.

So she'd taken a slow, subtle route, however much she hated it.

Fishing around had eventually gotten Tattletale to approach her when neither of them were under their masks. (Rune had come up with capefiction spy scenarios in her mind, but the reality had ended up being she wandered around aimlessly until a girl with a smile curving just far enough to be unsettling had hailed her one day out of the blue) They'd exchanged assuredly-fake names, and it had become a habit of 'Susan' to have coffee with 'Elizabeth' once or twice a week and talk about the things teenage girls talked about. As a totally unrelated point, the Undersiders would sometimes hit an E88 business of the extralegal kind a few days after one of these discussions.

Spies had been suspected, of course, and information had gotten constricted. Rune had heard less, and probably been fed outright lies, but 'Elizabeth' had assured her they wouldn't trace it back to her regardless. 'Susan' had politely thanked the other girl and then casually remarked she didn't care. She wanted these people to hurt, and she wanted to get her brother out, in around that order. She already knew it was too late for herself. Elizabeth's smile had dimmed for a moment, and then they'd continued chatting about Susan's 'friends' as if that exchange had never happened.

You didn't escape from the Empire life as a cape unless you were strong enough to make it happen, and Rune wasn't strong enough. Retirement was a euphemism for being whacked.

Rune really, really regretted bringing her brother with her to her uncle's home. It had made sense at the time; their parents were assholes half the time, nuts a quarter of the time, and the remaining quarter was a nerves-filled experience that didn't make up for the rest of it. Their uncle had always been supportive, and had all but said he'd take them in if they needed to run away from home. So she'd left, and she'd brought her brother with her, and when her uncle had said things she tended to nod along and agree, since he was much more pleasant than her parents were. At some point she'd become dimly aware they were Empire things being said, but that was only after she'd triggered -thanks, parents, stuffing your own daughter bound and gagged and blindfolded in the trunk of your car after taking a baseball bat to her head was great parenting- and by then she was deep enough into the shit that even if she hadn't already had a lot of anger to work through it would've been difficult to back out.

But if she could go back and do it again...

... she might've still run away, but she wouldn't have brought her brother into this.

So that was her ball and chain, the number one reason she couldn't run or defect. The things the Empire did to 'traitors' were ugly and awful, and they tended to believe these things should be handled in a family way. Rune's crimes would be her brother's crimes. It wasn't like she could run away and take care of both of them; she doubted she could take care of herself. If she stayed, he might disentangle himself down the line and have a decent life. If she tried to leave, it was just dooming him.

One day, she stumbled home sloshy with drink foisted on her by Hookwolf ("Call me Brad," ew, no) because underage or not Jack Slash's death was reason to celebrate in his opinion, only to find the building empty of both brother and uncle. Being moderately drunk, it took a bit for this to filter through as something noteworthy, and even once her brain caught onto that point she shrugged it off as probably them having heard the good news and decided to go for a night out. Hopefully not to an E88 bar, but Rune wasn't getting her hopes up.

For lack of a better idea what to do, she got an ice pack under the vague idea it would somehow make her less drunk to put it to her forehead, sat at the couch, and began fumbling for the remote... only for her 'work' cell phone to start ringing. She blearily checked for caller ID, got an unknown number, frowned and then shrugged it off with some resignation -it was probably a random gangbanger who'd been assigned to phone her up, this happened all the time- while answering the phone with her 'cape voice' on. (A little deeper, a little older-sounding, a little more refined than she usually allowed herself to sound) "I'm here," she grunted out. Ugh, she was not looking forward to when she was over-age and Hookwolf got serious about the boozing.

The voice that came through the phone vaguely rang bells in Rune's head. It was female, and somehow alarming even though she couldn't place it. "Hey, I'm sorry." Rune frowned blearily, too confused to be worried. "This isn't how the plan was supposed to go, please don't check the downstairs bathroom-" Rune was standing before the word 'bathroom' had been finished. "-I'm serious you're going to be really unhappy if you do and this was honestly meant to be in your best interests I swear."

Rune ignored the voice, struggling against the alcohol to place it. This should be easy, why did alcohol have to make everything so hard? Why did E88 love its cheap, vaguely German-sounding beer so much? Not that it actually was German for the most part, Germany might be the 'fatherland' but America was still the home of the brave and Rune couldn't quite remember why she'd been thinking about this in the first place.

Then she pulled open the door to the bathroom, finding her uncle. What was left of him. Rune's eyes traversed across the space vaguely, noticing that this looked an awful lot like what Hookwolf liked to do to subordinates who'd pissed him off in a big way for the tenth or so time. And lethal. Very lethal.

Rune was no stranger to violence and gore, but between the surprise, the cheap beer rattling around in her veins, and the detail that however much she'd grown to dislike her uncle's part in what she'd become she still overall liked him, it wasn't terribly surprising when Rune was violently ill into the conveniently-placed toilet. She only had to step through a little bit of blood and a handful of entrails, too. (Said thought led to more puking)

"shitshitshit come on pick up"

Oh. Right.

Rune stumbled vaguely away, noticed her shoes were leaving bloody prints on the floor, and violently tore them away from her feet as fast as she could unlace them. Then she picked the phone up off the carpet just outside the bathroom, and with a ragged but noticeably less drunk voice demanded, "What the hell is this?"

"It's a rescue! That... would've gone off without a hitch if Jack Slash's death hadn't screwed with your routine."

Something popped somewhere inside Rune's head, or felt like it did at least, and an intuitive leap made its way to her mouth. "You fucking kidnapped-"

"Shhhhh shush! Not over the phone! Just... get laced up and I'll walk you through where you go next and this will be only a little bit of a disaster."

Rune's stubborn streak rose to the fore. "Not until you explain shit to me."

And was promptly deflated. "Please don't make me take this in the nasty direction. I swear this was supposed to be a good thing, but it does come with strings and you won't like it if the strings get pulled."

Rune cursed to herself, but went to retrieve her at-home stashed costume not to mention a pair of boots that she liked with the costume but was not actually a part of it, trying to ignore how the voice on the other end -who was it, come on brain- made a sigh of relief. Was Rune bugged? Or, no, cameras, hidden in... corners? Or better, a parahuman- fuck, that bitch!

'Elizabeth'. Tattletale. That was why the voice was nagging at her, she was talking differently but it was her. What the hell kind of repayment was this for weeks of help?

"Yes, I know, I'm a bitch, could you hurry up? If you're thinking of grabbing cash it's not worth it, just get started hopscotching to your right and we'll handle the rest. You can even turn off the phone, save ya precious minutes right?"

Hopsco-?

After a moment Rune figured out it was a reference to her power. Even though she'd never compared it to hopscotch anywhere but in her own head, and only once half a year ago.

The fuck?

Nonetheless, after a brief glare at her phone she went along. Tattletale was threatening her brother. (And had apparently killed her uncle? The timing made no sense for it to have actually been Hookwolf, she'd been with him...) Until she could figure out how to take that threat away, she'd go along. And if worst came to worst... she'd make Tattletale pay in blood.

Out a window, climb up toward the roof, find the junkpile of a car she'd stashed up here one night just in case, apply power, wait for it to stick, and... hop in, strap the seatbelt on, pointlessly put her hands on the steering wheel because she was still looking forward to her driver's licence, and go.

She wasn't sure which direction Tattletale had meant by 'your right', so Rune arbitrarily turned right in midair before picking up speed. She didn't even bother going a full 90 degrees. She wasn't sure it had even meant anything. Elizabeth would sometimes say things for how 'Susan' reacted to them, and for no other reason.

Some part of Rune was urging her to call this in, let the Empire know her brother had been kidnapped and that the Undersiders had done it, but she mentally cringed at the idea of her brother being rescued by the Empire, ingratiated to them, made to see them as heroes. Even if she could gloss over how she knew it was the Undersiders, which was a big if, no no no a thousand million times no. She wanted him to live, but she wanted him to live better than her. Though she hated to admit it to herself, if the choice was between a live E88 brother or a dead brother with his hands clean, she'd take the latter in a heartbeat and resign herself to a deeper level of Hell. Better that than bringing him down there with her.

Then, abruptly, a forbidden thought pushed its way into her mind: what about the Protectorate?

They wouldn't mind that she'd been selling out the Empire. It might even make them look on her with more sympathy, even if she'd been selling them out to the Undersiders rather than the government. It was their job to protect people from parahumans, and this certainly qualified. And if she did end up in jail... so long as her brother made it out okay...

Her personal cell phone was launched out of her hands when something thudded against the side of the car. She was pretty sure she heard one of the wheels -not the tire, the entire damn wheel- impact below, but she was kind of distracted by someone in dark colors looming over her. "Sorry," the girl said apologetically while Rune's brain connected the dots and once again came up Tattletale, "I gotta make this look good. No hard feelings!"

And then Tattletale broke her nose.

Eventually Rune's eyes cracked open, her head pounding and her nose pounding and actually now that she was thinking about it everything hurt.

Especially her upper right arm. Where she'd been bit by one of Bitch's evil zombie dogs.

But pretty much everything else, too.

She pushed herself up regardless, pushing through the pain. 'Manfully', Hookwolf might've said and then just kept smiling if someone else said that wasn't really correct when you were talking about a teenage girl. She took in her cell, because that's what it most certainly was. One cot. A toilet offering zero privacy. Not much else. A proper door rather than bars, at least, though the door had a little window with bars in it. No windows into the room. A closer look at the cot showed it was bolted to the floor, and the bolting looked recent, so it was probably done so she couldn't use her power on it.

Fucking hell, what kind of repayment was this? You help a girl for a solid two months and she breaks your nose and has her friends rough you up and puts you in a fucking cell? What had Tattletale done, handed her over to the PRT?

Fuck, that probably was it, wasn't it?

Then Tattletale's costumed face popped up behind the door's little window. Rune did her best to glare, wondering whether the swelling over her right eye made her look like an idiot or adequately thuggish. Whether it was a failure to be threatening or Tattletale being Tattletale, the other girl grinned her creepy curved grin, and cheerfully announced, "You'll be happy to know that aside that hiccup you personally experienced, everything went off without a hitch!"

And then she opened the cell door, no sound of a lock being turned at all, and stepped in, leaving Rune to goggle. Tattletale made a show of looking behind her, and then seemed to catch herself and focus on Rune, making an effort to look more serious. "Okay, I already said I'm sorry but let's reiterate: I'm really sorry this wasn't how this was supposed to happen. Except the ways it was, but, okay, can you just, I dunno, sit there and glare angrily at me while I talk? That okay?"

Rune had never been one of the chatterbox villains who whittled foes down with cutting words, or distracted, or otherwise was good with words. Her thing was getting people to fuck off because they didn't want two tons of concrete to land on their face. Usually, she was fine with that. Here and now, she wanted a cutting retort to rise to her lips and make Tattletale feel exactly as awful as she deserved to feel.

No words obligingly unfurled from her tongue, and after a moment Tattletale clapped her hands together and declared, "Great! Super! Perfect." Then she leaned against one wall, obnoxiously casual and calm, like they were two friends in a normal girl's normal room. "Okay, the skinny is me and someone who shall not be named worked out that the Empire was starting to suspect you weren't all that committed to, uh, 'the cause', and there were plans rattling around to fix that. Iiiii left it alone for a while because hey, your life, but then one bright bulb known as your uncle got it in his head that they'd get your bro in on things to hook you in deeper and, well..."

There was ash in Rune's mouth. That was what she'd been trying to avoid, or at least delay.

Tattletale smiled sympathetically. "Yeah, my thoughts exactly." Then she went back to her creepy overly-curved smile. "Sooo I coordinated with someone, we came up with a plan, and, well, the plan ended up being making it look like the Empire made an example out of your uncle while we kidnapped your bro. The original idea was that we'd make it look like we kidnapped you too, but the Jack thing meant we had to improvise, so now the story is that you found your uncle dead and went looking for revenge and ran into us and it turned into a fight and you lost. Simple!"

Rune stared at Tattletale, trying to figure out what could be going on behind those idiotic eyes. Eventually, she cracked her mouth open and in a frustratingly shaky voice asked, "Where am I, where's my brother, and how is any of this supposed to make things better?"

Tattletale's smile dimmed a bit again before returning to the megawatt range of radiance. "I can't say, he's right around the corner but he's asleep and I figured you'd want to let him rest, and the idea is that you'll be gallantly rescued by the PRT and taken into protective custody and probably rebranded and Susan will remain friends with Elizabeth since neither of them have anything to do with this sordid business."

Rune scowled. "I coulda done that myself, and anyway they'll just send Donny to our parents."

This time the smile fell completely off of Tattletale's face, which was so bizarre for the girl Rune's adrenaline started pounding while she hauled herself to her feet -and then Tattletale gently shoved her back into the cot, a point she wasn't able to resist well thanks to how fucking much everything hurt. "Shush sshhhh it's not- I'm not sure what you're thinking but it's not that and I swear to god I can't even take credit for this but your parents are dead."

Rune blinked.

Tattletale's eyebrows climbed under her mask.

Rune blinked again.

Then Tattletale grimaced. "Oookaaay. Look, it was the Teeth, it happened four days ago or so the police are still trying to make sense of that mess and it would take some serious arm-twisting to get me out to Boston right now, so, uh, congrats? The PRT would have to find some other relatives to foist you off on, aaaaaand I take it from your reaction they're probably not going to find anyone."

Rune allowed herself to collapse more properly into the cot, and began rubbing at her eyes. "Fuck."

Tattletale's voice was sympathetic when she said, "Yeah."

Nobody paid much attention when Seattle gained a new Ward. Some of the tinfoil hats on Parahumans Online pointed out similarities to a known villain from Brockton Bay, but they were shouted down by the more reasonable portion of the site's denizens, the ones who got tired of pointing out how many capes had broadly similar powers that differed in details.

Tattletale paid attention, of course, and was more pleased than she'd been expecting the first time her Lisa Wilbourn phone got a ring from her new friend on the West Coast. She was tickled pink when the other girl introduced herself as Elizabeth.

On an unrelated note, Thomas Calvert was pleased that his 'insight' had proved key to extracting the girl and her brother from what had turned out to be an ABB attempt to strike back at the Empire with the Undersiders as unwitting cats-paws. Atypical of Lung, but PRT intelligence indicated a new parahuman had been recruited, so change was unsurprising, really.

Perfect.

Riley

It took a couple of days to get a few minutes alone with Taylor. It also took about that long for Bonesaw to stop expecting the other Nine to swoop in and retrieve her, as well as get a handle on what Taylor expected of her.

The answer seemed to be 'nearly nothing', which was sufficiently upsetting Bonesaw had shoved it to the back of her mind and focused on other things.

Finally, though, Miss Vasil had taken Burnscar outside one night they were holed up in a crappy motel (Really crappy, Bonesaw had an abundance of roaches to work with, it was convenient really), informing Taylor and Bonesaw that they'd be coming back in an hour or so. ("And remember: Pride is always watching," delivered with a cheery grin that, bizarrely, wasn't forced)

Taylor had stared at the closed door for a good thirty seconds, and then spun around and focused on the tinkertech computer.

(Which Bonesaw had yet to be allowed to touch. That was fine, as she could tell it barely constituted tinkertech at all. She'd get more out of raiding a Best Buy than out of cracking this thing open, she was sure. Even the hard plastic screen wasn't that interesting; she could make stronger and more flexible with some ordinary office supplies and a bamboo seed. Well, preferably a few since they were difficult to get to germinate)

Bonesaw resisted the temptation to see if Cuddle Bugs was on. Television had been a rare treat with the Nine, and given the previous two nights had involved camping in the woods Bonesaw suspected that until she got away from these people it'd be much the same. And given she had a Kill Order on her, it would probably always be true. She'd thought up a plan to leave the country once, but the thought filled her with such sick dread, one more thing the Nine (Jack) would've taken away from her... no.

This was, of course, Bonesaw procrastinating on actually talking to Taylor. She wasn't scared of the girl, not in any way that mattered given how long she'd been with the Nine, but... so far, she'd been essentially hauled around and given the occasional order, such as non-invasively determining if Miss Vasil's head injury was serious. (It hadn't been) Bonesaw had never really had the option of not being complicit with the Nine. She'd never sat on one side of a gap, looked at how wide it was, and made herself jump anyway. This was a new experience, strangely enough.

(This was, of course, even more procrastination)

Finally, she managed to ask, "So what kind of parameters are we talking, here?"

Taylor continued poking at the computer for nine seconds, and then tilted her head in a manner Bonesaw was leaning toward being possible due to her changer power. Bonesaw had worked on someone who could do it naturally, but power was more likely. "Parameters?"

Bonesaw nodded simply. She still didn't have a good handle on how Taylor would react to different emotions. With the Nine, if she was anything other than relentlessly cheerful...

Anyway. "For what constitutes a 'fix'. I can't say what kind of specific solutions I'll be able to come up with until we get me situated in a lab, and there's no way I'm letting you blame me for not telling me what you really want."

Taylor stared at her in silence for just a little too long, and then finally said, "That makes sense."

And then fell into silence and stared through Bonesaw.

Bonesaw had spent months with Mannequin, though. She was used to a blank face staring at nothing in complete immobility, even if normally the face was blank because it was his not-quite-ceramic outer layer with no adornment rather than because of... whatever was going on with Taylor. Bonesaw was strongly confident it had to do with the second trigger, but her attempts to obliquely question Taylor had so far gone nowhere in particular. Not that she'd made many in the brief time they'd been together, but Bonesaw had gotten pretty good at getting answers out of people quickly. Though usually this involved mortal terror...

"Speed is essential. The sooner the plague is resolved, the better." Bonesaw snapped out of her daydreaming, re-focusing on Taylor. Taylor was still staring blankly at nothing, but there was a bit of a tremor in her voice. In anyone else, Bonesaw would assume she was on the verge of tears, but Taylor had already proven fairly abnormal. "The second-most important thing is that people survive. Preferably with their minds intact, but if you quickly ensure their survival and the end of the plague's spreading and then later return them to their senses, that would be preferred to a slower solution that keeps everyone recognizable." One of Taylor's eyes twitched in that odd way that Bonesaw was already confident meant Taylor had partially transformed in a near-invisible way and then undone it. She still wasn't sure if it was a nervous tic or the passenger interfering and Taylor pushing it back. "Third most important is making it easier for them to reintegrate into regular human society. I would prefer that everyone affected simply return to the lives they had before the plague infected them, but I don't believe I will get what I want. I will also accept everyone surviving, having a human mind, and then dealing with the social fallout of looking like monsters by explaining the situation." Explanation apparently done, Taylor relaxed, stared at Bonesaw for a few more seconds, and then returned to the computer.

Speed first, casualty reduction second, human minds third, aesthetics last.

Bonesaw very deliberately kept the pleased smile off of her face as she went to turn the TV to Cuddle Bugs, tinker thoughts bubbling in the background.

Maybe this'll be good after all.

Later

Having had that conversation go well, Bonesaw was now confident enough to attempt small talk with Taylor, at least in theory.

The only issue was she'd yet to see Taylor express an interest in anything that wasn't immediately and obviously practical or centered around one of her major goals. Bonesaw had initially thought Taylor might be a bit of a cape geek, based on how she kept reading parahuman news, but listening to Miss Vasil and Taylor talk had made it clear that 'fixing' the plague was a break from routine: Taylor's default was to do what she'd done to the Nine, identifying 'bad' parahumans who the Protectorate had failed to capture or kill for a very long time and dealing with them.

So Bonesaw took a gamble.

"So what do you think your changer form was originally?"

Taylor took nearly a full minute to respond, at last twisting away from the computer and looking Bonesaw dead in the eye. (Something about this bothered Bonesaw, but aside making a note of it she'd pretended there was nothing worth paying attention to about it) "Clarify."

Bonesaw decided to take that as a good sign. Miss Vasil had intimated that Taylor was quick to violence, and that made perfect sense to Bonesaw. A one-word demand, however blunt and abrupt and toneless it might be, was still well ahead of the responses Bonesaw had expected. Especially since she knew that Taylor knew that Bonesaw could survive some fairly serious damage. So she shrugged in an overly-casual manner and let a note of only-slightly-faked excitement slip into her voice. "Well, it didn't just come from nowhere, did it? And it doesn't really look like anything from the Earth or mythology or pop culture, so I think it's some kind of alien you're turning into."

Taylor sat very still, even for her, and then put one hand to her chin in what was either a habitual thoughtful pose or a deliberate attempt to look like she was thinking hard. Bonesaw strongly suspected a lot of Taylor's body language was artificial, but she didn't have enough history to be sure. "I suppose that's a possibility." No inflection. No sound of interest. No engagement.

Nonetheless, Bonesaw noted that Taylor had not returned to the computer. So she pushed onward. "I'm thinking it must've been a prey animal in a really vicious ecosystem, probably living off of sunlight, or in a symbiotic relationship with fungus, or filter-feeding off of fluids."

Taylor's gaze sharpened all of a sudden, and it was only thanks to all her time with the Nine that Bonesaw gave no reaction to that at all. "And why do you think that?"

Still not giving her own opinion, but she seems pretty hostile to mine. Bonesaw gestured toward her own face. "No mouth.'

Taylor sat very still, strangely sharp gaze still centered on Bonesaw, and then her eyes un-focused quite obviously. She was still looking in Bonesaw's direction, but not at Bonesaw. "Multi-cellular organisms got by without mouths for ages. The earliest mouths weren't even designed to move. Lamprey mouths, little more than an opening surrounded by teeth, the whole body having to contort itself to cut up prey."

Bonesaw had already read that biology textbook, so this wasn't news to her, but it was the first time she'd seen evidence of Taylor having a hobby. She doubted an interest in biology, or animals, or whatever was behind this, had been related to hunting down 'bad' capes. Of course, there was a pretty big flaw in Taylor's point, so much so Bonesaw wasn't entirely sure why she was saying this. "Your changer form doesn't have a mouth at all, though."

Taylor tilted her head ever-so-slightly, an acknowledging nod so barely existent that if Bonesaw had blinked she might've missed it entirely. "It does, however, have a coating of fluid that retains blood and flesh."

Hmmmm. "So you're suggesting the coating is some kind of digestive fluid, the results absorbed directly through the skin? The immune system problems would be a nightmare, though."

Taylor shrugged. "Or the fluid is meant to contain a symbiotic population that handles digestion. The immune system problems might not have been relevant at the time, either. Who knows how alien life would've evolved?"

Bonesaw objected to that without thinking. "It would've started from the bottom up, of course, so there'd be a rich ecosystem of single-celled organisms ready to attack and infect at that level."

Taylor cocked an eyebrow, eyeing Bonesaw with skepticism, more genuine emotional content contained in that one expression than Bonesaw had seen from her since they'd left Chicago. "Imagine a world choked by deadly rain, a relentless scrubbing of the surface that single-celled organisms are rent asunder by. Imagine there are caves, pockets of safety where the deadly rains don't reach, in which simple life evolves. Underneath the surface, life evolves in a manner more or less familiar to Earth, aside that something takes the place of sunlight, but when larger organisms evolve some of them stumble into a coating that keeps out the deadly rainfall of the outside. Some of them range out routinely, evolution does its thing, and before you know it the surface is populated by a mixture of animals that duck in and out of the caves freely, with somewhat weak immune systems propped up by the cleansing death of the outside, and animals that avoid the caves because they've abandoned a functioning immune system entirely, relying solely on the cleansing death to protect them from microbial life. A world where large, multi-celled animals have evolved with nearly no influence from infection and sundry other effects of single-celled life for ages."

That sounds an awful lot like passenger bleedthrough to me. Makes sense, she's a changer, she second-triggered, and I'm pretty sure her passenger did something to her mind in particular during the second trigger. So her passenger either took this pattern from its own world or from some other world, and provided it to Taylor? Why offer this animal as a power? I've taken apart a couple dozen 'monster' capes, and they mostly weren't functional as independent animals, when they were even particularly animal-like. They relied on constant jury-rigging from their passenger just to survive on a daily basis, sometimes even hourly. There was the guy with no lungs where oxygen was just being forcibly injected into his blood every thirty-two seconds, and when I went poking around in his brain it just stopped at one point and he only survived because I'd hooked him up to pump oxygen into his blood directly myself beforehand. And even then I forgot to set up a way to dispose of the carbon dioxide so he didn't live very long.

Of course, I haven't dissected Taylor, either. Maybe her changer form wouldn't function at all, either. But would that even mean anything? If her changer form doesn't have an immune system... even considering that Earth's microbes aren't going to be adapted to target that body right away, there should still be infection. A virus might not be able to hook into her cells' machinery but there's any number of microbes that ought to be brute-force eating at her flesh if the animal she becomes really evolved with no protections from microbial assault. So maybe if I'd dissected her before I'd heard this story I'd find she shouldn't function either, and not think about the possibility that she could've functioned in an alien environment.

I wonder if any of the more inhuman parahumans I've studied were effectively aliens stranded on a distant planet and held together by the passenger version of spit and duct tape?

"... ley. Riley. Are we done, or is something wrong?"

Bonesaw snapped out of her thoughts, having forgotten Taylor was even in the room, and reflexively moved to deflect attention, smiling sunnily. "Oh no, nothing wrong, I was just impressed by how smart you are."

Taylor stared at her in a manner that reminded Bonesaw vividly of a time Shatterbird had looked just before slapping the taste out of Bonesaw's mouth-

-and then turned back to the computer, apparently content to end things that way.

Bonesaw stared at Taylor's back for a minute or so, wishing for a moment that she had the power to understand people by just thinking really hard (Instead of by cutting them open and seeing what made them tick), and then gasped in horror when she noticed she'd missed the first half of the Love Bug Song!

Taylor briefly glanced her way in response, but then Bonesaw started singing along and Taylor returned to looking at gory images and European headlines.

Another day

"... so can you answer my question now?" Bonesaw asked while putting on her best Innocent Child Guilelessly Begging A Favor They Believe Is Minor While The Adults Think It's Major But The Child Doesn't Know That face.

Miss Vasil didn't call her on it. Bonesaw noted that in her internal digital notepad, wondering why. She knew she was faking, and Miss Vasil seemed to enjoy calling her out on faking. Not every time, but a lot of the time, especially when it mattered to Bonesaw, and this mattered to Bonesaw.

With finely-honed skills at reading the atmosphere of deranged killers who might hurt, maim, or even kill because you happened to remind them of their abusive teacher by speaking in juuust the wrong way, Bonesaw took in what was around her.

Taylor looked calm, but that didn't mean anything with her. The fact that her fingers kept merging together into three points and then unmerging was much more telling, an odd habit of Taylor's that Bonesaw was pretty sure was a stress response.

Miss Vasil had turned to look at Bonesaw and goggle in horror before Taylor had snapped at her to pay attention to the road. Even focused on the road, she was tilted so Bonesaw was in the corner of one eye, and her hands were reflexively clutching at the wheel. She also had one foot tapping nervously against the floor.

Burnscar (Trailblazer was a loser name) was starting to hyperventilate, at least until Miss Vasil started murmuring something soothing to her -and probably using her power, but if Taylor wasn't going to notice and get mad about that then Bonesaw wasn't going to call her attention to it. It's not like Bonesaw was all that fond of Burnscar. She was pretty boring.

Bonesaw drew the obvious conclusion: passengers were not nearly as well-known as she'd assumed they were (They were obvious, you didn't need to be a tinker to see this!), and Miss Vasil and Burnscar at the least had not been ready to learn they had aliens plugged into their brains whose goals were unclear but who most certainly had goals, and one of those goals was keeping their rides unaware of the fact that the aliens existed and had goals for their rides.

Fiddlesticks.

(She'd stopped saying child-swears around Miss Vasil, as the other girl would not let up about it, but Bonesaw really didn't like using adult swears)

Taylor was the first to speak. "So my power... deliberately removed my guilt." She sounded deeply unhappy, which was the first Bonesaw had noticed Taylor evincing that particular range of feeling. Anger seemed more normal for her so far, when she wasn't carefully blank-faced. Bonesaw was coming to suspect Taylor habitually hid her real feelings long before the second trigger, possibly long before the first. (Long experience with the Nine had trained Bonesaw to not ask about trigger events, or lives before them, unless she had total power over the person she was speaking to. Too dangerous, otherwise)

Bonesaw frowned at Taylor's words. "That's a possibility, but I wouldn't want to assume it. I've got a lot of evidence the passengers don't understand us that well, and while powers are practically magic that doesn't mean the passengers fully understand what they're doing there, either." Bonesaw had plenty of experience with the accidents that could result when digging around in a person's insides, and she wasn't an alien at all!

Taylor seemed to be ignoring Bonesaw, focused on one hand that was partway to the tentacled state. Not far enough for the sheath of blue/grey-ish mostly-clear fluid to have appeared, but enough so she had only three fingers, all lined with sharp edges. "Take away the guilt so death does not dissuade her." Taylor sounded peevish, not quite angry but certainly unhappy. Then Taylor glanced at Burnscar. "Remove ambiguity so she doesn't reconsider." This statement was calmer, though still unhappy. The corner of her vision turned to Miss Vasil. "Give great power to someone who won't have qualms about using it." She sounded almost amused, reminding Bonesaw vividly of her mother rebuking her for painting the walls, a memory Bonesaw ruthlessly crushed out of long habit. And then finally she focused on Bonesaw. "I wonder what your power did to you, beyond surrounding you with the Nine?"

Bonesaw blinked at that, reflexive disagreement rising from her throat. Her power hadn't changed the way she thought-

except for the intrusive tinker thoughts, seeing how she could peel away someone's skin and put armor underneath, seeing a flower and thinking of what its petals contained and what she could synthesize out of it

-or felt-

except she'd been a normal little girl, hadn't she? Would Riley have been able to look upon a bloated body with delight? Would she have been horrified when a patient succumbed unexpectedly?

-or...

Bonesaw stayed quiet and told her uncooperative nervous system to shut the fudge up.

Miss Vasil, however, grinned after a minute. "Don't be a bunch of negative nellies. We already knew powers did shit to you, it's just now we have some context. Hell, maybe you guys can find your 'passengers' and punch them in the face until they patch your software the way you like it. Wouldn't even need to bother with 'consequences' lessons, Mimi. Knowledge is goddamn good. It's power."

Taylor spoke up. "Bonesaw." She turned to look Taylor in the face, keeping her own carefully blank, idly noting Taylor's hands were back to being fully human. She didn't say anything though, waiting for Taylor to continue. "What would it take to convince you to stay on board after the plague is fixed, and help us further investigate these... 'passengers'?"

Riley gave the question serious thought before she answered.

6.u

Uber

When Uber woke up in a nondescript cell with Leet nowhere to be found, he didn't worry. They'd been captured before, and it was innocent procedure: Leet was a tinker, so he went in a cell designed to limit his ability to gather and hide tools and materials. Uber was a known quantity who wasn't really outside peak human ability, so he got stuck in the regular cells meant for cape cronies. Plus, one of the PRT grunts had mentioned before that villain groups didn't get put together anyway if it was at all avoidable, so they couldn't collude.

No, Uber's thoughts were occupied primarily by the dark cape, trying to make sense of her and figure out how to avoid a repeat. He didn't believe for a second she'd run across them on accident, but it was a struggle to imagine why she'd sought them. They were kinda-sorta internet-famous, and Brockton Bay in particular alternated between pride and embarrassment at their antics, but he was pretty sure they hadn't done anything that would piss off a parahuman aside maybe stick-up-his-butt Armsmaster. Not recently, anyway. And he was pretty sure if someone had become a parahuman during the show he'd have noticed... though... he didn't really know what her power had been. Maybe it was something sneaky, and she'd not gone after them during the show because she hadn't figured it out herself?

He was also using his power to help him exercise better. He wasn't one for exercise normally, he was more the video games on the couch sort, but there wasn't exactly controllers and a TV in his cell. He didn't really have anything better to do, and when he didn't have something to occupy his hands and head he tended to fidget and pace anyway. Might as well turn that nervous energy to something productive, instead of driving himself crazy.

Think of it like grinding.

... he hated grinding...

... but he'd done it when he was sick. Basically the same thing, putting unproductive time to something productive he normally couldn't stand.

So yeah. Exercise, too.

But thinking, mostly, feeling like there had to be some obvious reason why a parahuman he didn't recognize at all had come after him and Leet in their hideout, running in mental circles because he could kinda come up with theories but they were all unhelpful and untestable.

Eventually he got tired of that topic and looped around to Leet. He'd had another one of his episodes, where he tried to tell Uber they should go separate ways because Uber wouldn't be held back by him and etc etc. Always left Uber feeling a bit helpless, truthfully. They were together because they were friends, Uber didn't care about 'not being held back', but Leet didn't listen to that when he was in these moods. He also didn't listen when Uber pointed out that Leet was the impressive parahuman here, able to do magic with the rusted contents of an abandoned workshop while Uber was just able to be a really good regular person. Like, yeah, when he cooked he was a six-out-of-five-stars restaurant all by himself, when he played the piano Beethoven would weep if he weren't deaf, and his mad parkour skillz looked like magic, but you could replace Uber with a regular schmo at anything you wanted. Leet was the irreplaceable one.

Lately, Uber had gotten wondering if his friend was, like, depressed, or schizophrenic, or something. One of those mood-related psych label things. He hadn't wanted to consider the idea before, Leet always got better, but in the last couple of months... Leet seemed fine when the camera was rolling, but off camera he always seemed to be excited and elated or moping. No middle ground where he was just happy, or hell Uber woulda taken unhappy. Unhappy would be a reasonable response to their show kinda holding steady when they were trying to make it big. Unhappy would be perfect in response to their show being labeled criminal activity and them villains by extension. Manically hoping his next invention would be the right one had stopped seeming like enthusiasm and started looking upsetting. Dourly convinced nothing would ever get better, only to burst into tears, apologize profusely, and after a couple minutes of (very manly) hugging switch back to manically plotting out his next device...

... well, to be honest Uber had always found that concerning. It was just that before he'd been able to convince himself it was something that would pass once Leet got back into his tinker groove. Not... so much at this point.

So a lot of Uber's thinking in the cell was about how he was going to broach the subject of... he wasn't even sure what. He really didn't want to suggest, like, mood stabilizing drugs. Leet was already convinced he was 'broken' or something, suggesting drugs to fix him was like the exact opposite of what Uber wanted to do. Therapy wasn't much better, and he wasn't sure how Leet would even be able to talk about his problems when so much of what he was stuck on was the show and his inventions. Maybe he could suggest they exercise more, frame it as being for the show, so they could skimp a little on escape tools in favor of other stuff? He was pretty sure he'd read somewhere that exercise made people happier, something or other about doppelmemes or whatever.

The first day passed like that.

The second day, Uber was antsier. He'd gotten bored of exercise and he was running out of ideas for 'does this count as a skill'? (Turns out that yes Morse Code counted as a 'skill'. Now Uber was wondering if he could become a brilliant translator and enjoy Final Fantasy in its original language, just add Uber and grab a rom)

He was also a little worried, because last time someone had talked to him within, like, a day. Same day? It'd been a while, they'd gotten better at escaping and he'd been really nervous at the time...

He ended up having nightmares when he slept, and he couldn't recall any of them and didn't want to see if 'techniques to remember your dreams' was a skill now.

The third day, Armsmaster and a woman in a suit who was probably a lawyer showed up. Armsmaster was sipping coffee and grimacing, his facial hair falling more toward 'I've been too busy to shave' than 'I like this look, thanks'. Uber tapped world-class skills for studying body language, and what he got made him uneasy, so much so he forgot to crack a joke. Which was a disgrace, he'd gotten one lined up for Armsmaster months ago and used his power to commit it to memory, and Uber personally always considered himself 'on' when dealing with parahumans.

Armsmaster moved his hand like he was intending to set the coffee cup down at a slightly-tall desk (When the cell obviously had no desk at all), stopped and tilted his head to look at the cup, then grimaced and quite obviously resolved to pretend that moment hadn't happened. "Uber. We're here to deliver some... bad news." Uber caught a tweak of muscle movement his currently-world-class ability to study body language told him most likely indicated Armsmaster had glanced at the lawyer lady.

Uber limited himself to cautiously saying, "Okay." Having a lawyer right here had Uber thinking this was a 'anything you say can be used against you' sort of situation. That was how it worked, right?

(Uber had tried tapping the skills of a world-class lawyer at one point, but it didn't actually tell him anything about how law worked. He just found himself really good at debating all of a sudden. Neat to call on when someone was being Wrong On The Internet, but not what he'd wanted)

Armsmaster did the probably-glancing-at-the-lawyer-lady thing again, sighed out through his nose so quietly Uber only knew he was doing it because of the body language thing being 'on', and clearly settled himself in. "Unless you have testimony to the contrary, your partner is probably dead. If he's not dead, he's not much better."

Uber's brows furrowed. Like, why the heck would someone kill Leet and leave Uber fine? That made so little sense Uber couldn't believe it. But also... "Whaddya mean 'testimony to the contrary'?"

The lawyer lady opened up her briefcase, took out a photo, and showed it to Uber. "Is this him?"

Uber looked closely, confused. The photo was of some kind of orange ball, seams placed so it looked a little bit like a wheel but with green glass where hubcaps would be and with a very conspicuous hole at an odd angle through the whole thing. Something red trickled down from the hole, and-

"Oh no, he didn't." Then Uber moaned to himself, hands coming up to his face. Yes, yes he did. Leet was big on authenticity, and with his mood issues getting worse it was harder to talk him out of trying the dangerous levels of authenticity. Uber hadn't had to talk Leet out of anything obviously crazy like cutting off a leg so he could replace it with an authentic cybernetic limb, but the morph ball? Yeah, Leet hadn't done more than flippantly promise to 'save it for emergencies'.

Armsmaster stayed all business, though Uber thought he heard a faint note of discomfort when he spoke. "That would be a yes, then. As you can see, he did not exit the device when it was compromised, and it... bleeds. It's fresh blood, preliminary testing is consistent with it being his own blood, and I've yet to find a way to disengage the device. I... intend to keep testing, and Dragon has promised to contribute as well, but I can't in good faith recommend you get your hopes up. I have an inconsistent track record with reverse-engineering his salvaged devices, and normally I don't have to worry that taking them apart might kill someone." There was a moment of silence while Uber tried not to cry and he suspected Armsmaster tried to not notice that he was in fact crying. "Miss Yamaguchi is here because I would prefer to be ready to contact you if his... situation... improves, but policy means there's a lot of paperwork to be done and you'll have to agree to disclose your civilian identity and stop villainous activity before I'm allowed to actually do so. So-"

Uber wiped away his tears, waving Armsmaster down. "I'll do it."

Uber didn't exist anymore. The website died without Leet around to bring it back with new techniques each time Protectorate Thinkers or Tinkers took it down. What little of his gear that hadn't been ransacked by the PRT sat on a shelf in an ordinary apartment, lived in by one newspaper delivery boy by the name of Ulric who desperately hoped Leon was going to be okay.

Once a week, he got a progress email from Protectorate HQ. It wasn't even hidden behind any kind of baffles, which Ulric would find funny if he wasn't so depressed. And he was staying depressed for the foreseeable future: each progress report was one or two sentences amounting to 'no progress'.

Occasionally Ulric would try to give himself some kind of ironic pep talk. He was just a newspaper delivery boy now instead of an internet-famous video games enthusiast spreading the word of the noble art of video games, but gosh darn it he was the best newspaper delivery boy they'd ever had! Probably the best newspaper delivery boy anyone had ever had, unless there was a newspaper that had managed to get a teleporter on their payroll or something ridiculous like that.

Mostly he watched television, trying to avoid the depressing stuff (Because it reminded him of how much this sucked) and also trying to avoid the happy stuff. (Because it reminded him of how much this sucked) Fill the time, wait each Monday for his email, and the occasional times suicidal thoughts got too intrusive tell them to fuck right the hell off because he was going to be there for Leon dammit.

Sunday, he couldn't stop himself imagining the direction him and Leon might go if -when- Leon is free. It made it hurt worse when Monday rolled around and disappointment hit anew, but he couldn't really stop himself. Ulric couldn't do anything even vaguely villainous without the PRT swinging by his home and packing him off to jail, not anymore, so he'd need to talk Leon into something that didn't push the boundaries of what was acceptable. (Which sucked, since that was basically the definition of art as far as the two of them were concerned) Every time he tried imagining that conversation, the yawning cavern of nothingness gaped in front of him and he quickly moved on to thinking about what things they could do without thinking too hard on how he'd get Leon to go along with it.

The one thing that Ulric occasionally genuinely found himself laughing over was the complete lack of nightmares. It really felt like he should be having nightmares. And sure, he had trouble getting to sleep, but once he was out it was peaceful nothing.

One Wednesday, two months-ish after The Event, Ulric came home, and started his normal routine. Shower, change clothes, consider doing laundry and blow it off for later. Microwave something vaguely edible. Get a glass of juice. Sit in front of the TV. Think to himself if I weren't bicycling every day, I'd be swelling up like a balloon for the fiftieth time. Eat. Drink. Barely pay attention to whatever show was on screen. Go to the bathroom. Consider going to bed early. Get antsy, go to check email again even though the emails always came on Monday-

-and that's when he saw that a Protectorate email that was eight hours old had arrived.

Ulric told himself he shouldn't pin his hopes on this. Probably Armsmaster had finally screwed up and killed Leon, and was emailing him to apologize and move on with his life while Ulric tried very hard to think of a reason to not kill himself. Better to go in pessimistic than to crash into the depths of disappointment.

The email was short, as always.

Subject is alive and free, but there have been complications.

Ulric skipped work in the morning to take the very first ferry out to Protectorate HQ.

"You're going to want to prepare yourself," Armsmaster said as Ulric seriously considered ditching him and running on ahead. Only reason he didn't do it was because he'd only been on the Rig once, and not in this part of it.

"I know." Ulric had been going for irritated, but it came out more plaintive than anything else. He kind of didn't care in the slightest, though.

Armsmaster shook his head in the corner of Ulric's eye. "I'm not talking about his physical condition. He's in much better shape than he should be. He was suffering from fairly serious dehydration and had moderate nutritional deficiencies, and he had a stab wound in his gut, but it didn't hit anything serious and by rights he should be long dead. It'll take time for him to recover from those, but the doctors tell me that if he's cared for properly in a year nobody will be able to tell this ever happened to him. He's very lucky... physically." So you mean he's got mental problems. I already know that. "No, what I'm trying to warn you of is that he had a second trigger event."

Ulric stopped in his tracks, only barely avoiding a collision with someone coming up behind him, thanks entirely to the other person's reflexes. They gave him a dirty look in passing, but he didn't care, turning to face Armsmaster instead. "That can happen?"

Armsmaster nodded, the visible portion of his face grim. Absently, Ulric noticed that his facial hair was still not being taken care of properly. "Data is limited, as it's very rare, but yes, it can happen. What we do know is that everyone on record with a second trigger has ended up with severe psychological issues. Depression is the most mild known so far."

Having spent the last two months seriously depressed, Ulric winced at the thought of Leon going through that as a minimum. But still, he was alive. "Okay, so I need to keep watch and keep him away from razors and stuff, right?"

Armsmaster grimaced again. "Not... exactly."

Then he resumed walking, and before Ulric could decide on what to say in response to that Armsmaster turned into a room, and Ulric followed him in.

The first thing Ulric focused on was Leon, of course. Leon laying in a hospital bed, clearly undernourished, but alive. Then Ulric noticed how Leon was strapped into the bed. He could move his hands, and in fact was busily writing or drawing on a pad of paper, but he quite clearly was not being let out of the bed. Then Ulric noticed two fully-suited PRT troopers on standby, staring directly at Leon, equipped with foam dispensers. Then Ulric had his foot slip briefly, and his attention was drawn to the floor.

It was covered in paper, which itself was covered in Leon's handwriting and scribbles.

Leon caught sight of Ulric, and grinned a disturbingly manic grin and threw an overly-energetic wave. "Hey, U!" Ulric cracked a tiny smile in spite of his growing concerns. "I know what I've been doing wrong, as soon as they let me out I'll be the best tinker you ever did see and we'll be the best ever and-"

He kept rambling in that vein, not waiting for a response from Ulric, and while Ulric kept the smile on his face, it became steadily more brittle.

If this was what Leon's manic phases were like now, what would he be like when he went into self-flagellation?...

Danny Hebert

Danny, you're an idiot.

It was natural for a teenage girl to drift away from her father. It was natural for grief to pull them apart further, and really, he was proud that his little girl had managed to gain some independence even while he was too distant to be a good parent to her, grieving. It was natural that two quiet people who'd always been pulled together by Annette would drift apart once she was no longer there. It was natural that Taylor stopped talking about school, because what teenager wanted their parents hovering, intruding on their private life?

These were what Danny had told himself.

A complete idiot.

Idiot, yes, but not entirely clueless.

He'd noticed when his daughter had started keeping strange hours and ducking in and out of the house at odder hours. He hadn't said anything because he genuinely thought Taylor's judgment was good and contrary to what he'd have expected she'd turned just about radiant. Whatever lucky boy -or girl! Taylor's business was her own!- Taylor was sneaking off to meet, it was clearly doing her a lot of good. He'd be happy to give the Scary Dad Talk if they hurt his baby girl, of course, and he hoped Taylor would feel comfortable letting him know soon, but he wasn't going to be a nosy dad when for all he knew it would shatter whatever was making her so lively.

When Cherie had been introduced, he'd wondered if maybe this was the person making his daughter happy. He doubted it, personally, but what did he know? It was nice she had another friend, at least, and sweet to see she was helping others in their time of need if it hadn't been a lie. Made him a bit proud of his daughter, which caught him off guard and got him wondering when that had stopped happening that he didn't find it normal anymore. But that was fine, his daughter was growing apart into her own person, it was normal for him to know less to be proud of.

Though he did find himself wondering when she'd stopped being eager to share her accomplishments. He was pretty sure she'd been excited a few times after Annette's death...

He'd been concerned when Taylor was suspended over drugs, but she'd opened up to him for the first time in a while, admitted bullying was still ongoing and the drugs had been planted, and now she was going with Cherie to relax since she wasn't going to school anyway...

... and he'd returned to wondering if Cherie was Taylor's girlfriend but couldn't quite bring himself to ask...

... so overall he'd taken it as... a good thing? Or at least a thing with bad elements and good elements and he was more happy with the good elements than he was concerned about the bad elements.

He hadn't thought too much about what was going on with Taylor in the two weeks she was gone, in no small part because there'd been a series of minor emergencies at the Union and nearly all his time to himself was spent on the bare essentials. The absolute bare essentials. He'd had to skip showers twice to get enough time to keep up. By the time that had passed, Taylor was just a couple of days away and Danny was too busy sleeping to spare much thought to the whole thing.

When he did remember she was coming back soon, he'd been looking forward to seeing how she was feeling after a full two weeks of rest and relaxation with her maybe-a-girlfriend-and-definitely-a-friend.

Then his world had started crumbling.

It was normal for cape fights to break out in unexpected places. It had been years since one had come by his neighborhood, but like any sane person in this day and age Danny was prepared for the possibility of a parahuman fight breaking out anytime, anywhere.

But it still stood out that it had happened almost literally on his doorstep the same day Taylor was supposed to come back home.

Combine that with it being the PRT in a fight with a parahuman he didn't recognize...

Well.

Danny was an idiot, but even he could put two and two together to get four.

When tomorrow came, Danny's morning routine was interrupted by a knock at his door. Danny didn't think anything of it until he opened the door to a PRT trooper, a bored-looking woman in the lighter uniform used when, for example, talking to witnesses to a parahuman incident. It'd been long enough since the last time Danny had to make a witness statement that he'd managed to forget this was a normal thing after a parahuman incident... probably helped along by him being preoccupied with the disquieting realization about Taylor being a cape.

He did his best to rally himself into being a marginally decent host, asking the trooper if they'd like some coffee while they were in anyway, but the woman -a 'Mrs. Williams'- shook her head and went right to the questions.

This part was harder than it had ever been before. Danny could mostly answer perfectly truthfully, as he'd seen and heard barely anything of the actual incident, but... he suspected he knew one of the capes involved was his daughter, and was unsurprisingly conflicted. Should he deliberately withhold information to try to protect her from the PRT? When he didn't have an immediate gut response of 'yes', he felt like a bad father. When he noticed that feeling, he felt like a bad person for trying to interfere with the law. But then, he didn't know what kind of cape his daughter was (Which brought new guilt), did he? Maybe she wasn't a villain, and maybe if he outed her to the PRT he'd not only be betraying his baby girl but also condemning an innocent to... juvie? Danny wasn't entirely clear what happened to teenaged villains, normally. There were a couple who'd ended up in the Birdcage, but those had been extreme incidents. Danny wasn't worried about Taylor being Birdcaged, because if she'd gone far enough to deserve the Birdcage... well, he didn't believe she would, but Danny could be honest enough with himself to admit he'd be okay with being responsible for her being Birdcaged if she'd actually threatened to wipe out the West Coast. He loved his daughter, but he wouldn't love her if she was genocidal, and he was fine with that.

That whole chain of thought led to Danny interrupting officer Williams in her latest question. "My daughter's the parahuman you ambushed last night, isn't she." Because he'd rather be damned for getting his innocent daughter in a little trouble than damned for helping his sinister daughter get off scot-free.

There was a long moment of silent while officer Williams stared at Danny, face expressionless, before shrugging and noticeably relaxing. "That makes this much simpler." Danny felt immediately better about his decision. "Yes, your daughter is the cape known as 'Monster', previously classified as a Rogue but currently classed as a Villain on suspicions of several murders."

And now he didn't.

The blood drained from Danny's face, and he found himself slumping back into his chair. He couldn't even look at officer Williams. One hand went to his mouth, and he wasn't sure if it was the rising nausea or what. "Murder? Multiple murders?" The idea of Taylor as a murderer was unimaginable, but he couldn't imagine why officer Williams would lie about this.

Officer Williams nodded sharply at the edge of his vision. "I can't share all the details as some of these investigations are ongoing and in any event you're a civilian and there's no pressing need to let you know them, but yes." After a moment, in a slightly softer tone, she added, "It might help to know that we're fairly certain she's only targeted Villains, and she actually has saved at least one life. She also helped at Canberra-" If Danny hadn't been sitting down already, he would've hit the floor. His child had gone to an Endbringer defense. And he hadn't suspected it at all. How did that happen? "-where she performed as well as could be expected of anyone, and better than some did." Then she was back to the fully professional, almost-bored voice. "That doesn't undo her crimes, however, and at this point we're fairly certain she's made a run for it. Our analysts doubt she's going to go dark and put this behind her, and you're her only contact point."

Distantly, Danny found himself saying, "She hasn't called or anything." His daughter. The murderer. She'd seemed so much happier recently.

Officer Williams shrugged. "We didn't think she had, but she might've left behind a clue to her plans." Then a return of the gentler voice. "Mr. Hebert, your daughter has tangled with some dangerous people, and shows no signs of stopping. If you want her safe, the best thing to do is to help us catch her, before she bites off more than she can chew."

"I-" Danny stopped, rubbed at one eye. "You're right. I'll... we'll look in her room?"

Officer Williams relaxed a little bit more, though when she spoke it was the voice of a professional again. "Not just her room, if you can. Teenage capes often expect their parents to search their room for contraband, and hide things in parts of the home the parents don't think about as much. Attics, basements, or unobtrusive files on a family computer if their parents aren't savvy with computers."

Danny was still processing the layers of horror to what he'd just heard, but he could do this much. Even if he really, really didn't want to. "Right. Yes, we have a computer, neither of us uses it much since- since my wife died. And I can't recall the last time I've been to the basement, there's a couple of empty closets and it's been months since I looked in our shed out back..."

Suspicious Thing #1: a busted-up black motorcycle helmet.

Danny had never seen it before in his life, but officer Williams mentioned that the Monster costume had consistently incorporated a black helmet. The very fact that there was a motorcycle helmet hidden in the basement... it was possible Taylor hadn't been trying to hide it, but Danny couldn't imagine any other reason why it would be down there. Not helpful for helping the PRT find Taylor, but it grounded things, made it a bit more real for Danny. He could almost imagine his daughter looking at this helmet in a store, back before whatever had ruined it, and thinking to herself that it would be a practical way of hiding her identity and protecting her head all at once. His imagined version of Taylor even gave an impish grin and said, and it would look cool, too.

Suspicious Thing #2: a near-complete lack of hygiene products for Taylor.

Danny hadn't noticed this one, and even once officer Williams pointed it out the significance escaped him. She had to explain that his daughter had some kind of regeneration, and some parahumans with healing abilities stopped needing to deal with hygiene. They didn't get smelly because their power got rid of the microbes that caused such smells, they didn't need to brush their teeth because cavities were irrelevant, etc.

Danny found himself thinking back to Taylor seeming radiant in some indefinable way, and felt sick for a new reason.

Suspicious Thing #3: A school assignment for 'making the world a better place', tucked away in a folder for homework Danny would never have reason to click into.

The initial line was innocuous: if you could make ten changes to make the world a better place, what would you do?

Taylor's answer: kill a lot of Villains and the Endbringers.

There were two obvious ways of taking this, both of which were frankly frightening.

The first possibility was that this was a cover story, a way for Taylor to plan out her... hits in a manner that Danny wouldn't closely question if he stumbled onto it. He could imagine the conversation so easily, too. He'd click into the wrong folder, get curious about what his daughter was thinking for making Bet a better place, frown when he saw it was a long list of 'people to kill', and she'd roll her eyes and explain she was shooting for realistic goals. After all, if you take the changes as genie wishes, ten would be more than enough to make the world a perfect paradise. A single person with the right power, on the other hand, could potentially make this happen all on their own. Danny would relax, Taylor would act like he was ridiculous for ever questioning her, and they'd move on with their lives with Danny not thinking about it again.

That was the possibility where Taylor calculated the outcome, intending to play him like a fiddle and continue shutting him out of her life.

The second possibility was much simpler, and much worse.

That Taylor had been given such an assignment, and honestly never thought of a possibility that wasn't based on murder.

Officer Williams thanked him, used a smartphone-looking device to snap pictures of the clues, and briefly dropped into her friendlier voice to assure him that he'd done the right thing. Then she was the professional again, letting him know they'd contact him if anything changed and giving him a phone number to call if he had any insights to bring at any point, with an extra emphasis on immediately letting the PRT know if his daughter contacted him.

He nodded politely to that, finding himself doubting he had anything to offer, and doubting Taylor would contact him. He was starting to think he didn't know his daughter at all, and he wished he knew why.

Then officer Williams left out the door, and Danny was alone with his thoughts.

He didn't sleep that night.

Life fell into a bizarre routine of normalcy, and the depressing part was that Danny was surprised at how little impact his daughter's disappearance had. The school didn't call. He felt a little lonelier at breakfast and dinner, and he had to handle the cooking himself, when he could be bothered. A month later a truant officer showed up, but a neighbor Danny was vaguely familiar with but didn't know personally showed up, pulled the truant officer aside for a quiet chat, and that was that.

He barely even had to fend off Kurt and Lacey until they noticed him getting depressed about them not noticing anything wrong.

Danny paid more attention to national cape news now, though, half-expecting his daughter -'Monster', and why that name?- to show up as caught, or suspected of another murder, or something.

So when there was news filtering out from Chicago that Monster might be there engaging the Nine... he was there with his heart in his throat.

Nothing official, though. Just suspicions.

Until that video spread everywhere online.

Any other circumstance, Danny would've been thrilled to know Jack Slash was no longer part of this world.

Instead he drank himself into a stupor.

My daughter, the murderer.

6.l

Ned Smith

"Heeeeere's Crawly!"

Crawler had tracked the little group for days. He'd already found Jack, Shatterbird, and Hatchet Face dead, while Mannequin and the Siberian were scentless. That left following Burnscar and Bonesaw while assuming the Siberian and Mannequin would catch up like they always did. Or they were dead. It would be pretty disappointing if Sibby was dead, but he'd get over it. If Mannequin was dead, well, whatever. Aside the vague possibility of him tinkering up something that could hurt Crawler in a new way, he wasn't interesting.

(Calling her 'Sibby' was one of many ways Crawler tried to provoke her into attacking him. Mannequin, meanwhile, was boring and so Crawler didn't bother with annoying nicknames)

The two other scents mixed in with Burnscar and Bonesaw were... well, they were actually three scents, which Crawler had initially found confusing, but eventually he figured out one scent would fade when the other popped into prominence and vice-versa. A cape with two distinct modes, two distinct scents. Anyway, they were interesting scents mostly because Crawler was certain they were out-of-towners. Crawler had rampaged around a pretty decent chunk of Chicago and captured a variety of scents, but these scents went into the city, squiggled around some, probably killed Jack, Hatchet Face, Shatterbird, and some people Crawler didn't know or care about -the one scent going in and out of the camper had been curious, but Crawler had shrugged it off as unimportant- and then left the city. Probably simultaneous with Bonesaw. Burnscar was harder to track, being a teleporter and tending to have her scent literally burned away in combat, but she clearly joined up with the group and then stuck with them with a lot less burning than Crawler would've guessed.

Initially, Crawler had been waiting for Mannequin and Sibby to show up. Whoever these two capes were, they'd clearly beheaded the Nine and made off with some of its members. They needed to either be taught a lesson or made to go through a proper set of initiation tests, which in the Nine's case was basically the same thing so Crawler wasn't terribly concerned which of the two they'd be doing, but ideally there'd be some planning and agreement ahead of time, as per tradition. Plus, Crawler had really wanted to see their faces when Sibby popped in among them and probably exploded an arm off someone. Bonesaw would just put it back on if they elected to let the two aboard, after all. So he'd stalked the group slowly, patiently. An observer might even have said carefully, but really Crawler was just punch-drunk off his time in Chicago and didn't care. Di Fu Ling had revealed her trump card, and it had gotten him a new mutation, some sort of radar-emitting organ for finding invisible shit. Myrrdin had tried frying him with some kinda exotic green shit, and now a good chunk of his back had a glossy sleek finish in some kinda purple color that... well, Crawler didn't know what it did to be honest, but it looked damn cool. He'd gotten three random civilians to take pictures of him while waiting for Sibby and Mannequin to catch up and/or for Crawler to get bored of waiting, and they'd come out niiice.

A week had passed, though, and Sibby and Mannequin hadn't shown. Usually they showed inside of three days, and Crawler had gotten bored. So he'd mentally shrugged, then smiled brightly (Well, that's how it felt. Crawler kept meaning to get a picture of what he looked like when he smiled like that...) when it occurred to him that maybe making this decision on his own would be what finally pissed off Sibby enough to have a go at him.

A day or so later, he'd caught up to the group while they were stopped in a stretch of woods out of sight of the highway, probably getting ready to sleep for the night.

Which lead back to him appearing out of the shadows and trees, announcing himself with a probably barely-intelligible roar of an introduction.

The reception he got was pretty disappointing.

Bonesaw didn't bother looking up from the deer she was digging around in the guts of, doing something tinker-y to. Just said, "Heya Ned."

Burnscar's reaction was a bit better, stiff and unhappy-looking. No fire, but that was normal. It barely even tickled him, so she'd stopped bothering. Since he barely felt it, he didn't really care either. But it was pretty fun seeing her so clearly wanting to hurt him. Crawler had grown quite fond of that look from people. Call it Pavlovian conditioning.

More disappointing was the other blonde, the one whose scent didn't change, smiling at Crawler and waving cheerfully. "'sup, Crawler! We've been expecting you!" A boring reaction, both because Crawler had wanted to surprise and frighten the newbies, and also because the lack of fear was probably an indicator she had some kind of escape power. Nothing that might hurt him.

Slightly better was the last of the bunch, the one whose scent went back and forth. They were silent, staring at Crawler with dead insect eyes while their arms and legs split partway down into bladed tentacle-things. Still no fear or surprise, so still disappointing, but the scent-changing hadn't been cyclical so Crawler was inclined to think it was under their control, which would mean they actually thought they might be able to hurt Crawler. Plenty of capes who thought that were dead wrong, and then just dead, but most of the capes who thought they couldn't hurt him were dead to rights and then just dead.

So Crawler mentally shrugged off the disappointment of not getting to scare anyone with his entrance, focused a good selection of his eyes on the bug-eyed one, and charged while growling out, "Time for my test."

The bug-eyed one dodged to one side, and Crawler felt strikes of some kind skipping off his outer layer. One or two penetrations that healed over so fast Crawler might've imagined them. Crawler then rammed into a particularly sturdy tree that shook violently, tilted at an angle, but did not fall. He could've stopped of course, but the dull headache was a positive, so why would he?

The nameless blonde waited for the noise to die down some, and then while Crawler was re-orienting (Not strictly necessary, but a bit of a habit) called out, "We didn't join the Nine, bro!"

Around half of Crawler's eyes on one side aimed pointedly at Burnscar and the other half just as pointedly at Bonesaw. "Three out of five, majority rules."

The blonde burst into laughter and spoke in an aside to Bonesaw. "Oh god, I thought you were kidding when you said the Nine were a democracy!"

Burnscar, meanwhile, chimed in. "I'm not Nine anymore. I never wanted to be."

Crawler approximated a shrug with his multiple shoulders. "You don't leave until you die. So like I said: majority rules." He ignored the blatant lie that she'd 'never wanted to be'. Just 'cause she had the thing with the fire and the thinking she thought she could pretend she hadn't wanted it when she had. If Ned had been a different person, he might've thought it amusing or irritating. He was Crawler, though, so it was just A Thing He Knew Was True But Didn't Care Much About.

Then he charged, ignoring how Burnscar tried to say something about voting. Expecting the dodge, he spread his forelimbs wide to catch the bug-eyed cape, but this time they scrambled up and over his body, stabbing down as they scrabbled along. There were more penetrations this time, with a particularly significant pause above one of his brains where they stabbed especially hard, but in the end they ended up rolling off down his back and just barely dodging a swipe with one leg. Crawler allowed himself to be mildly disappointed. There was some hurt, yeah, but it was so minor it felt more like being taunted with the possibility of getting what he wanted, the actual thing held just out of his reach.

Crawler headbutted the next tree with particular viciousness. The headaches hurt more and for longer than this cape's attacks, and he'd already gone for more than a week without anything! Maybe he could talk Bonesaw into testing one of her bacteria on him. That one flesh-eating colony had hurt like a motherfucker for a whole hour or so, and surely she'd had new ideas since she'd have gotten samples from Nilbog's dead-man's switch by now? Ooooh, maybe he was already infected and was going to... turn into a double-monster? Bonesaw had been pretty vague on what it would do, focused mostly on how resilient it was and how effective it was at traveling over long distance through a variety of obstacles. Something to look forward to, then, assuming his body wasn't quietly killing it off before it could do anything. He hated when that happened.

Crawler was pulled from his thoughts and his fading headache by a new voice, presumably the bug-eyed cape. He was a little surprised to realize it was a woman's voice, and then shrugged it off. If Crawler had been born a girl, you wouldn't be able to tell by now, either. "The PRT has dubbed us the Wild Hunt. A bit apt, given we seek out the truly vicious to kill, but in any event they don't see us as the Nine being business as usual. Majority rules, right?" She didn't sound terribly confident at the end there, but whatever.

Crawler physically began turning around, but mentally stepped back and actually considered things. He'd been with the Nine for a few reasons, but honestly the main one had been ol' Sibby, and at this point he was suspecting she'd finally gotten herself offed. Maybe by that Black Bishop kid; Crawler hadn't grown new adaptions in response to them, flesh shorn away and refusing to regenerate for a full ten seconds. Maybe the Sibs had been popped like a bubble without him noticing? No scent, after all. Anyway, if she was gone... well, the Nine had been fun, but he'd been thinking for a year now of maybe swimming across the Atlantic to see what Ash Beast would do to him. The Nine were big on showmanship, but they were careful about their targets, aiming low, not high. Jack had made that rule about 'no outside help' to keep out the Triumvirate, Crawler was sure, and Crawler had been itching to see what those three could do to him ever since he'd gotten big enough the answer probably wasn't 'reduce him to a smear in an instant'.

So once he was fully turned around, he didn't charge again, which let him laugh at how bug-eyed girl was clearly tensed for a charge. Instead, he spoke. "So are we talking vicious like evil or vicious like dangerous."

The bug-eyed cape tilted her head back and forth, putting Crawler in mind of a very confused bird, and finally said, "Both," sounding eager to get to the action.

Crawler grinned with all his many mouths.

6.e

?

At first, it's easy. Hunt the thing that existed to be hunted. There's a number of non-trivial obstacles to the process, such as pursuing the huntable thing even as it flees through small holes and over high barriers, but the hunter is already suited to handle some of these, and for others it's changed as the problems arise. The hunter spreads, grows, devours, all very smoothly and easily. There's countless things other than the huntable thing that try to interfere, but they're almost beneath notice compared to the huntable thing.

As time goes on, things get a little harder. The huntable thing cottons on to the fact that it is being hunted, and shifts and changes. Some sections of the huntable thing change their patterns, attempting to convince the hunter that they're one of the trivial things. Sometimes they even succeed, though only ever temporarily as the hunter finds itself abruptly changing to understand that these too are the huntable thing. Other sections of the huntable thing become smaller or more careful, attempting to escape the hunter's notice by going places the hunter has difficulty pursuing, but the hunter is flexible enough to recognize these tactics and specialize pieces of itself into following into these hidey-holes. Still other sections of the huntable thing grow vicious, aggressive, hooking themselves into the hunter in an attempt to destroy it or hijack it, but change from outside invariable washes over the mass and denatures the huntable thing until it is simply a part of the hunter.

In response, the huntable thing gets creative, attacking from afar and combining attacking action with hiding away to create ambushes, a concept the hunter is not initially built to understand. Change washes over it, and it becomes wilier, aware that sometimes a retreat is a retreat, but sometimes it's bait to lure away parts of the hunter to where they can be destroyed without the omnipresent external force washing away the huntable thing's aggressors. The huntable thing also begins to aggressively recruit the things previously beneath the hunter's notice, altering them into things that can hamper or harm the hunter, sometimes so subtly that the external force misses them when making changes favorable to the hunter.

The hunter grows to meet this task, spreading into crevices and developing specialized parts for studying and understanding what the rest of the hunter knows. Ambushes are sprung deliberately, but in a way that favors the hunter, the things previously beneath its notice are destroyed, altered, or incorporated to serve its own ends, and sundry other changes occur.

Events continue in this general vein for a period of time external observers might characterize as 'a while'. The hunter itself has something of a sense of time, but not impatience or an awareness of exactly how long it's been at this. All it knows is that eventually it meets the things that are the real goal of the huntable thing, large and complicated things. The hunter has encountered large and complicated things like this before, but had no reason to delve into the mass, as the huntable thing never went inside them. This particular class of large and complicated thing, for whatever reason, is routinely targeted by the huntable thing, its processes hijacked and altered to produce results the hunter can't really comprehend. Change washes over the hunter, and now it's task becomes difficult: it is to undo the changes the huntable thing makes to these large and complicated things. In cases where the hunter arrives shortly after the huntable thing, this is reasonably straightforward: the hunter knows what things looked like before the huntable thing arrived, and can work to set them back to that state.

In cases where the hunter finds the huntable thing infiltrating a large and complicated thing long after the huntable thing has gotten its many hooks into the large and complicated thing, the hunter... well, it removes the huntable thing. After a change washes over it, it also looks for mechanics that produce more of the huntable thing and alters them so they don't anymore. After it builds up a general idea of what these large and complicated things are like when the huntable thing doesn't get at them, it also develops a series of categories of things that do not belong in these large and complicated things, and removes or alters them as encountered.

This still leaves enormous amounts of changes that the huntable thing has made, or possibly not made and they were a natural part of the large and complicated thing. The hunter doesn't know how to address those differences.

Initially, it elects to ignore these differences. As time passes, a notable fraction of the altered-and-ignored large and complicated things suffer cascading failures, until virtually every component of them ceases to function. A change washes over the hunter, which in human terms could be thought of as the hunter being told 'use your best judgment, but fix them'.

And so the hunter alters the altered in earnest.

Meanwhile, Panacea has it slowly dawn on her that she's made a mistake, and she's not sure whether her cure is worse than the problem or not.

Emma Barnes

A week ago, Emma had felt under the weather. A little fever, a lingering drowsiness, a realization that she couldn't quite remember emptying her plate, though there it sat bereft of more than crumbs.

She'd shrugged it off. She wasn't a weakling who would be kept from school by a cold.

Besides, she didn't want to miss Taylor coming back.

Two days passed, and Emma didn't feel better. If anything, she was ravenous, pulling down what must've been five solid meals a day and snacking in between, only occasionally pausing when she remembered she was supposed to avoid gaining weight if she wanted to do more modeling. Where normally that thought was enough to stay her hand, in the throes of this illness that didn't know when to quit it felt unimportant. She ended every meal still hungry, after all, and some dim memory insisted it was normal to eat more when battling sickness.

She'd probably puke it right back up given the way she felt, anyway.

Or so she thought.

The fourth day, Emma felt better. Then she went to school, and it smelled. She looked everywhere, trying to find the damn repellent smell, but it was everywhere or maybe nowhere and less than an hour in she figured out nobody else could smell it. Something to do with her lingering cold or flu or whatever the hell it was, obviously, and Emma did her best to hide her revulsion from everyone else. Wouldn't do to be seen... something. The thought wouldn't complete, and then Shmidt shoved his greasy face into her private conversation, ugh, and she forgot.

Whatever the smell was, it went away when she went home. Which was a relief, she'd been driven up the wall by it, so disgusting.

Why the hell hadn't she puked yet? She wasn't even nauseous, in spite of being sick and haunted by a smell that made her think of the ugliest, nastiest clothes she'd ever seen, the ones her mother had only been half-joking when she said they might need to burn them. The smell just made her want to get the bleach and start scrubbing, though she wasn't sure what.

The fifth day came and went, and the only reason Emma knew she'd missed school was her cell phone was covered in text messages from Sophia, crawling all over its surface and accusing her of skipping class in a voice like the buzzing of Locust talking. (Emma had shrieked and stomped the phone, ruining it utterly, before a moment of lucidity had intruded, reminding her Locust was dead and would likely have punished her horrifically if the phone had been Locust in the first place)

It was halfway through the sixth day it occurred to her that her parents should have let her know about school, whether by telling her she was staying home or frowning angrily at her while disappointment dripped in condescending lines from their ears. She spent an indeterminate period trying to remember if any such thing had happened, failed, and went searching for them. Somehow, the house was larger than it had any right to be, and she got hopelessly lost in the canyons before taking shelter in the pantry. Absently, she stuffed two boxes of cereal down her throat and collapsed into sleep, vaguely recalling that she would be easier to find she held still.

Some picky, irritating part of her complained that cardboard wasn't made for eating, but given how delicious the meal was Emma was disinclined to listen to that part.

That came to today, the seventh day. Probably. Assuming time hadn't turned fluid on her. Emma wasn't really confident of that.

She was still trying to decide between moving and staying. Staying meant food on hand, a wall at her back, and a greater possibility of rescue. Moving meant being able to find that goddamn stink so she could scrub it to its goddamn bones. Three reasons against one, but the one spoke to her soul. Or at least her poor, assaulted nose. Why had the stink come into her home? What had she done to it?

"Oh fuck."

Emma twisted to look at the voice, a sluggish part of her brain desperately cataloging features. Female, it said. Worried, it inferred, though Emma couldn't quite imagine how it drew that conclusion. Familiar, it noted, and Emma frowned at that because who knew her that would worry about her? Then her eyes got in on the action, and after a tremendous effort some other part of Emma's brain spat out an unintuitive answer.

"Sophia?"

6.s

Sophia Hess

Fucking hell.

"No, you dipshit, it's me, Shadow Stalker," I bit out while leaning into Emma's face. Fuck, her breath smelled like a dumpster had been lit on fire and then someone had used sewage to try to put out the fire. And failed. Dark circles under her eyes. No makeup to hide it, I noticed. Emma was fastidious about that shit. Which meant her cold was way fucking worse than she'd let on.

I eyeballed the stairwell. I hadn't gotten close enough to confirm her parents were dead, so even though they'd looked pretty fucking dead when I peeked in I was still tense, expecting them to interrupt. That'd be a problem. Bad enough to be showing up in Emma's house in costume at all. Didn't help that I had no idea where Emma's sister was. What the hell had happened?

"Oh." Emma waved one hand at a limp angle. "Nice to meet you, Shadow Stalker."

Way worse than she'd let on.

"Come on," I said while hauling her to her feet. "You need to get out of here." Before Bonesaw's surprise gets here and makes you really sick, I didn't say.

Emma frowned at, looking more lost than angry. "Are you taking me to school, Miss Shadow Stalker? I'm late and lost."

Non-plussed, I put one arm over my shoulder, making a mental note to hit up a clinic for antibiotics on our way out. Clearly, Emma's parents hadn't fucking bothered. Pantry was nearly empty, what the hell? I'd been planning on packing some food here, Emma's family always had piles, why not now of all times? They were fine two days ago, I fucking called them, what is this shit? Why are they dead in bed upstairs? Where is Emma's fucking sister, she's the nosiest asshole I know aside Piggot.

I was always going to leave them to rot, they're not worth the effort, but I'd thought I'd be giving a speech about how we couldn't afford to cart along weaklings. It'd be work, one more weakness pulled out of Emma like an abscess, but another step toward being someone no one would fucking mess with.

Instead I find the house is a mess, the food is basically all gone -whoop-de-dee, one half-empty box of fruit animals remained- parents look dead, Emma is out of her mind...

Eventually I shrug it off. At least it simplifies parts. Complicates other parts. Emma can't even stand on her own right now, leaning heavily on me. Fuck, I was always planning to jack a car, but I think-

"Emma, where do your parents keep the car keys."

Emma nods muzzily instead of responding. I repeat myself twice, louder and more irritated, at which point she suddenly snaps awake. Her free arm wobbles and wavers and eventually I realize she's pointing at a desk. While we shamble our way over, crossbow repeatedly wobbling into Emma's side without her reacting, she mumbles something about school again. Apparently she thinks I'm planning to drive her. Whatever. It's not even a school day, but there's no point in telling her that. It'd probably just confuse her.

I'm tense as hell once we're out in the open, but it's nearly midnight and the PRT clearly doesn't bug my shit so I'm not all that worried. It's not like Armsmaster is going to pass through any second now; he patrols more in the North and won't break from pattern without a really big reason. Where 'big' means that I'll spot Lung rampaging this way before I spot Armsmaster following him.

Getting the car open takes entirely too fucking long, with too many keys tied together and the stupid car alarm being stupidly ambiguous and Emma fucking hissing when the moon comes out the clouds long enough to get her in the eyes, but eventually Emma is slumped in the passenger seat and I'm in the driver's seat.

I seriously consider taking off the upper parts of my costume, but I'll have to put it right back on when I get supplies and the goggles have good night vision so fuck that.

Driving turns out to not actually be exactly like a video game, but the streets are quiet and who cares if some asshole's mailbox is leaning at a right angle now? I get it done and tune out Emma's incoherent moans about a smell. It's fine in here, the only thing wrong is your godawful breath. Your window is fucking open, too.

Parking is harder than expected, but whatever. I get antibiotics, food that doesn't require cooking, and juice bottles. 100% discount, courtesy of phasing through the glass doors.

I'm just pre-empting the looting that's going to be happening once word gets out about the bugs in the water. Better me than some criminal asshole.

Getting Emma to take the medicine is a giant pain in the ass, but she goes to sleep afterward -loudly snoring- so whatever. I snort to myself, wondering if her parents even noticed she was sick.

Thirty minutes later, she wakes up and pukes out the window.

Great. I eyeball the stain on the side of the road in the rear view mirror as it recedes, vaguely wondering why it's that shade of red. Kinda reminds me of the antibiotics. Then I shrug and pull over long enough to force Emma to drink more.

Twenty minutes pass this time before she hocks out the window, complaining vaguely of the taste. Fuck, what a giant pain in the ass. Why did you have to get sick now?

The fifth time she's woken up and puked is where I start wondering if maybe this isn't helping.

Fortunately, we're not quite out of Brockton yet, and I spot a closed pharmacy soon enough. One raid later, I have a whole range of possibilities for treatment.

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger, yeh?

So I start force-feeding Emma three kinds at a time.

Two days later, I can't misunderstand the situation any longer. Emma doesn't have a cold, it's that goddamn thing Bonesaw released in Chicago. Emma is growing spines. Two spinal columns out her lower back, off to the sides. No skin, just bone and nerves and what I think is muscle. The ends seem to be growing toward being spikes, too.

That's the most eye-catching change, but at some point her eyes turned dark like a deep well, her hair is sticking to her back and hardening, and there's some rasping noise every time she breathes out that reminds me of either an evil cricket or a knife being slid against wood. She's also increasingly incoherent, and the last time I tried to force-feed her some medicine the only reason I didn't get the wind knocked out of me was I reflexively phased when she threw the punch.

I spent a day trying to decide whether I should abandon her in the woods or put a bolt through her head myself.

Than I noticed I was sweating. Lost track of time and discovered the poptarts were all missing. Box and wrappers included.

Well, fuck.

I spend what feels like a few minutes trying to reframe the situation; okay, I was just considering putting a bolt through Emma's head to prevent her from becoming a monster. That means... I should be considering doing the same to myself. Right? That sounds plausible, but it feels wrong, and also my 'few minutes' of thinking turns out to have been much longer because I open my eyes after closing them for just a moment to focus and the sun has jumped to the other side of the sky.

I struggle with my thoughts. I can still remember considering putting a bolt into Emma, but the logic is slippery. I had a good reason for considering that. I must've, I wouldn't kill Emma on a whim. I don't kill people at all, really, just scare them, send them home packing some injuries so they'll think twice about trying their shit again. So seriously considering killing Emma has to have a really good reason. Right?

She'll turn into a monster.

Well, yes, apparently. It's still Emma, though. She's a survivor, she'll be fine. Hell, turning into a monster will make it easier. It's like the universe finally recognized she's a survivor and gave her what she'd so richly earned. It's not a parahuman ability, but still.

I spend a minute turning those thoughts over, feeling like something doesn't fit, but then I get distracted by the urge to clear out the cereal. Who knew cardboard could be so delicious?

At least nobody is going to stumble on us out here.

I frown at that thought. Why am I worried about being found?

Oh, right, Emma and I are turning into monsters. The Protectorate kills monsters. We're survivors, dying isn't on the table.

Or wait, wasn't it?

I get distracted by watching Emma struggle to all fours, stagger her way over to a tree, and start awkwardly climbing it. I don't think I've ever seen Emma climb a tree before. Weird.

She drops out of the tree a few minutes later, slamming into the ground with an oof and a crunch from the squirrel stuffed halfway into her gaping, fang-filled mouth. There's also some kind of bird with a red patch on its front clutched in one of her hands. Wait. The red patch isn't feathers. It's blood.

Man, I could go for some chicken myself-

Emma hisses at me and clutches protectively at her bird and I have a brief moment of lucidity, catching myself reaching out for the bird like I'm planning on eating it raw. Emma never was big on sharing food, really. No, shut up, infected brain! Get a bolt and stab yourself through the eye before it's too late!

I stagger my way back to the stolen car, search vaguely inside, then realize the bolts are kept on my person and I'm an idiot. I grab one, stare blankly at it for a while, trying to remember why I grabbed it, and then with a jolt of memory thrust the woundy end right into my right eye.

It skips off the surface.

I blink a few times, reach for my eyes, and- oh. The goggles. Right.

I spend a bit trying to get them off, but a process that used to be easy just isn't anymore. No idea why. Eventually I get frustrated and try to jab the bolt in my chest -only to be reminded my costume includes body armor.

When I do eventually manage a stab into bare skin, it turns out my skin is more a plastic that bends and squeals instead of breaking. No pain either, not even when I furiously stab at the same spot several times until it starts oozing something that looks like tree sap if it were an ugly white color with traces of red running through it.

I stare blankly at the spot. Part of me is saying mission accomplished, you stabbed yourself just as intended. Another part is insisting this isn't what was supposed to happen. But I can't visualize what was supposed to happen, and anyway I'm hungry.

I have one last moment of lucidity while tearing into a snake that tried and failed to penetrate my plastic skin with its fangs, Fuck. Completely fucked this up.

At least we'll be scarier than anybody is my last human thought before the haze of hunger rips reason from me again.

End of Monsters book one.

See you in book two: The Wild Hunt.