Chapter Six: Talking Nonsense Solves No Problems

Although Brockton Bay is still partly standing after Leviathan's retreat and Echidna's death, the battle goes down as one of the great defeats alongside Newfoundland, Moscow, and Kyushu. The combination of Leviathan and an infestation of evil superpowered clones was simply too much for the combined defenses to handle well.

Scion arrived too late to contain Cauldron's secrets, and the Protectorate and PRT are still reeling from the blow. Worse—as far as Brockton Bay is concerned—Amy's death prevented several heroes from being healed, and many of the wounded died or became disabled. Shadow Stalker and Clockblocker joined Gallant in death, and Battery shot her husband twice in the head, under the mistaken impression he was a clone. In her defense, this is because he was behaving very badly.

Taylor does not care about the PRT's internal struggles, and neither do the eight members of the Slaughterhouse Nine who make their way into the city in two semi trucks (and, not far behind, a white van). She doesn't care because she believes all existing social structures are exploitative and unjust; the Nine don't care because they delight in the corruption and destruction of all existing social structures.

Indeed, our heroine (for she is a heroine, regardless of how the capitalist lackeys of the PRT see fit describe her) is just happy to put the whole affair behind her. She got overconfident—not normally one of her faults, as she is but the latest in a long line of successful intellectuals who set out to achieve realistic goals via sound and sensible means—and got snagged by Echidna.

By the time Taylor managed to escape, Noelle had already released a clone: a pantsuit-wearing, train-spawning Objectivist. Say what you will about Stalin, people at least take him seriously. This was not the case for the scraggly teenager unaccountably screaming at heroes about the virtues of art deco in the middle of a full-on battle for the survival of their community.

Objectivaylor, displaying a capacity for observation that far outstripped any found in a naturally occurring objectivist, noticed that nobody was paying her any heed. Instead of making her self-aware enough to ask why that might be, this fact made her angry. So she crushed Browbeat, stole his armband, and began to recite, using the priority message button, the entirety of John Galt's radio broadcast from the third part of Atlas Shrugged.

It took the assembled capes a moment to realize what they were listening to as nobody had ever actually read it. This included Taylor, which rendered the clone's source of knowledge an unsolved mystery and, in Taylor's opinion, pointed to a malicious intelligence behind all superpowers. Dragon, the only one present who had access to Google, was the first to figure it out and quickly shut her down, but by that point everyone else was so irritated that she became public enemy number one. Alexandria had to take time away from fighting Leviathan to dispatch her.

Taylor had to watch, mortified, as her childhood hero's first impression of her was set by a skyscraper fetishist. The disgusted curl of Alexandria's lip seems to sear into Taylor's mind as indelibly as if her memories were offloaded to her shard.

Thankfully, this embarrassment did not endure for long. Echidna outed Alexandria as Chief Director Costa-Brown, and so Taylor was spared from having to be self-conscious about any pains such a corrupt capitalist stooge undertook because of her. In the weeks between the incident and the moment that Crawler knocks on her father's door, Taylor has effectively airbrushed her humiliation from memory.

Danny Hebert is not particularly thrilled when he opens the door to see a gigantic monster waiting for him. Crawler's weight has splintered his front porch and the green acid dripping from his mouth is dissolving the foundation of the Heberts' home. This is a metaphor, but not one that's very well-drawn or relevant.

Danny is significantly more irritated about the property destruction than he is by the sudden appearance of the Slaughterhouse Nine on his literal, albeit shattered, doorstep. He bought a lot of cheap vodka this month instead of paying for his homeowner's insurance policy. (He didn't do this because he is an alcoholic; he did this because Taylor has lately refused to eat or drink anything that is not potato-derived, out of solidarity with the peasantry.)

"Good evening," Crawler says. "Is Comrade Taylor Hebert at home? I wish to do battle with her."

"And why do you want to do that?" Danny demands, his long-unused paternal instincts suddenly flaring to life. "You aren't one of the bullies, are you?"

Ned is utterly bemused by this; it's true that he changes regularly (and that he likes the change), but he feels that people should recognize him.

"Tell her I'm, uh . . ." He pauses to think about what Cherish had told him would set her off. "A capitalist stooge."

"You don't look like a capitalist stooge," Taylor interrupts from behind Danny. "Are you even a real landlord?"

"I'm in the Slaughterhouse Nine," he snaps.

"So you don't own any property," Taylor says slowly.

Crawler senses he has misstepped. "Not as such, no."

"So you are not unjustly denying laborers control over the means of production."

"I don't know what 'the means of production' means, to be honest," Crawler says. "I just want to fight you."

Taylor isn't interested in doing battle with Crawler at all, and she doesn't understand his motivations. Her eyes narrow in suspicion. "Have you done anything to level the classes?"

Finally, a question he can answer in the affirmative! "Well, me and the Siberian leveled an entire elementary school three weeks ago."

Taylor does the math. Assuming a standard-sized K through 6 school with two groups of students per grade, Crawler and Siberian leveled a total of fourteen classes to the ground. "Was there a preschool?"

Crawler nods his Prius-sized head.

Taylor nods her teenage-girl sized head. Another two to four classes, with the extirpation of the toddlers being justified by the fact anyone who can afford to send their children to pre-school is ipso facto bougie. "Sixteen classes leveled, then. I find that you are a worthy ally, not an opponent."

"I don't understand. Why can't we just fight? It's so much simpler."

"Well," Taylor says, and yanks her copy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit out of her ginormous and convenient cargo pocket. "I'm so happy for the opportunity to explain politics to you."

"Ah, ah, ah," Jack Slash says, rolling up in a truck with Cherish in tow. "I did explain Miss Hebert's perspective to you, Ned, did I not? It's like I always say—"

Crawler yawns at the mere thought of listening to one of Jack's philosophical speeches. More acid slides out of his mouth, and since he is so tall, the acid all lands on Danny, dissolving him in goo. Unfortunately for Danny, he doesn't have a creepy brother to "save" him by turning him into a mind-controlled flesh monster and he dies unceremoniously, with a lot of screaming.

Taylor is unfazed by this grisly occurrence. Homicide is a common reaction to being introduced to Hegel, and resistance is only natural. It must, of course, be overcome, and she sets about explaining dialectics in increasingly convoluted ways.

Crawler waves four of his limbs in frustration. "I just killed your dad! Doesn't that make you mad enough to fight?"

"It is correct for the old to sacrifice themselves for the young," she said, echoing Mao's repudiation of feudalistic Confucian values. Before she can elaborate, a flying figure interrupts them.

"You shouldn't have given up your real name, Comrade. You're under arrest," crows Victoria Dallon, the onetime Glory Girl and current Lady Liberty. She deposits Miss Militia on the ground, and the heroine aims one shotgun at Crawler and one shotgun at Taylor.

"I won't say no to a bit of revolutionary terror," Taylor says, "but I don't understand why everyone wants to fight when I, like the people's spirit, am invincible."

"Aha!" shouts another voice from the heavens. "Prepare to be cleansed, untermenschen."

It's someone who looks like Victoria, only decked out in the black, red, and white of the Third Reich or/and the Empire Eighty-Eight. Her vocal chords were mangled while Victoria was in Noelle, and she's ended up with an accent like a movie villain from the 1980s, back from when Americans understood Nazis were bad.

"I," the escaped Echidna clone announces, "am Lebensraum Lass."

"Oh," Lady Liberty says. "Oh, no. Oh hell no."

"I just think we all need to calm down," another Victoria clone says. She's arrived in the wake of Lebensraum Lass and her robe is identical to that of the Nazi, but it has pink and gray to complement its white instead of red and black.

"Wait a second," Miss Militia says, looking from the Nazi to the centrist and back.

Sister Centrist's calming aura sweeps over them, and the Overton Window is shifted nearly imperceptibly to the right. "All points of view are equally valuable and all people are equally educated and capable of discerning truth and falsehood for themselves, so why we should we artificially stifle the free marketplace of ideas?"

This galvanizes Taylor's will to fight. "My point of view is that we should put ice picks in the heads of anyone who has her point of view," she announces.

"Finally," Crawler exclaims, happy to have understood something.

"Woah, woah, woah," Sister Centrist says, holding up a hand. "I really mean that everyone else's viewpoint is equally valuable. Yours is not. You sound like a fascist, and that's just terrible."

"I am literally a fascist," Lebensraum Lass says perkily.

"Yeah, but, like, you're okay." Sister Centrist frowns. "I don't know why, but that's just how things are."

Lady Liberty turns to Taylor. "Friends?"

"Comrades," Taylor confirms, and she transforms.